winter 2011-12 blake/an illustrated quarterly 103 i n there is a happiness that morning is, mickle maher has imagined a witty, amusing, and moving love story about two college professors, inspired by two of william blake’s poems. the first poem, “infant joy” from songs of innocence, is taught by the exuberant bernard (colm o’reilly). the second, “the sick rose” from songs of experience, is taught by the precise, severe ellen (diana slickman). the college dean, james (kirk anderson), serves as the worm in this garden of eden. the audience serves as the students in the classroom. william blake, eighteenth-century poet, is front, center stage. his poems, chalked with artistic flourish on a large blackboard which dominates the stage, are always in front of the mickle maher. there is a happiness that morning is. theater oobleck, dca storefront theater, chicago, 14 april–22 may 2011. <http:// theateroobleck.com/home>. reviewed by mary silverstein student–audience. they are referred to again and again by the characters, speaking in verse. so skilled are the actors that this seems natural, while it adds texture and increases the emotions of the plot. tension develops from the public lovemaking of these two teachers, witnessed by the dean. james, speaking in prose in contrast to bernard and ellen, insists that the two apologize publicly. an argument among the three ends with the dean being tossed to the floor in so realistic a manner that the audience is called upon for a doctor. when a doctor proves unnecessary, bernard and ellen return to making love, to everyone’s relief. to be convincing, this one-act play needs the best of actors, as it had in this production. the starkness of the set, a blackboard with two podiums, serves to focus the audience on the blake poems and the developing, multilayered, imaginative love story. editors’ note: photographs of the production are in the online version of this review. n e w s l e t t e r new members of blake’s advisory board those who keep a weather eye on the journal’s masthead will notice that we have two additions to the advisory board, tristanne connolly and tilar mazzeo. we are very pleased to have them on board. below are the notes that they have provided to introduce themselves: tristanne connolly is associate professor in the english department at st. jerome’s university in the university of waterloo. she is the author of william blake and the body (palgrave, 2002) and several essays on blake, romantic women poets, medicine, sexuality, and religion. her recent work includes queer blake, co-edited with helen p. bruder (palgrave, 2010), and blake 2.0: william blake in twentieth-century art, music and culture, co-edited with steve clark and jason whittaker (palgrave, 2012). tilar j. mazzeo is the clara c. piper professor of english at colby college and the author of plagiarism and literary property in the romantic period (university of pennsylvania press), the widow clicquot (harpercollins), the secret of chanel no. 5 (harpercollins), the forthcoming the ritz at war (harpercollins), and various essays on romanticism, william blake, and historical criticism. she is currently working on a study of material culture, fashion, economic history, and the production of european romanticism. blake exhibition in moscow the first major exhibition of blake’s works in russia, william blake and british visionary art, opened at the pushkin state museum of fine arts <http://www.arts-museum.ru> in late november and runs until mid-february. a collaboration between the museum and the tate, it includes works by other artists and from other british institutions. in conjunction with the exhibition, a russian translation of songs has been published. we hope to have a review of both in an upcoming issue. harpers and other drawings: the case for a unified composition see enlargement. photo courtesy of lowell libson ltd. and robert n. essick. harpers and other drawings: the case for a unified composition by martin butlin martin butlin is the former keeper of the historic british collection at the tate, london. he is the author of detailed catalogues of the paintings and drawings of william blake and, with evelyn joll, the paintings of j. m. w. turner. the recto of the newly discovered drawing from the album of drawings descending from charles augustus tulk, now in the possession of the london art dealer lowell libson, has received two contradictory descriptions. robert n. essick, in his “blake in the marketplace, 2012,” blake 46.4 (spring 2013): illus. 9, sees it as a “central drawing of a man and woman playing harps and perhaps singing” together with “several other sketches, apparently unrelated to the central drawing.” the anonymous entry in libson’s catalogue british paintings and works on paper, 2013, p. 50, illus., treats it as a single composition, an early stage in the evolution of the various series of watercolors, drawings, and engravings dealing with the biblical story of job. this is distinct from the drawings on the reverse of the paper, which in spite of the very basic landscape element linking the figures across the bottom and hints of clouds linking some of the figures above, are to all intents and purposes studies of individual figures or groups of figures, most of which later reappear in america or europe; both recto and verso are conveniently reproduced facing each other in libson’s catalogue. my first reaction on seeing the drawing, which i have done on a number of occasions, was that the recto is a single composition and one that certainly suggests associations with the book of job. further study of the fine illustrations in libson’s catalogue has confirmed me in my belief that the work is a single composition, though the question of its subject is more problematic. unlike the separate figures or groups on the verso, the figures on the recto are more or less contiguous and some elements overlap. the forms of the large harp, placed behind the young man on the left, are carefully drawn so as not to overlap that figure, suggesting that blake began with the young man and then went on to draw the two harp-playing figures. despite the male musician’s being rather more heavily drawn than his companion they are clearly a pair, the one overlapping the other. the conjunction with the girl holding a child seen in profile and taken from, or anticipating, the similar figures in the dream of thiralatha seems to be equally deliberate, the edge of the chair touching or just overlapping the girl’s heel (this can be seen particularly easily in the detail of the drawing in libson’s catalogue). both pairs of children are set slightly further away than the two musicians and indeed, unusually for blake perhaps, there is a distinct recession in depth in the placing of the figures, from the young man in the foreground on the left by way of the two seated musicians to the two children. this recession is emphasized by two parallel lines running across the paper. the further one is partly drawn, partly implied, and starts with the soles of the feet of the children, is continued with the bottom of the leg of the chair, and carries on to the left of the harp of the male musician, where it is more strongly drawn than the other horizontal lines on the background feature both above and below, an emphasis that seems to have little or no descriptive function. this continuity of line is surely not accidental. the other line runs across the foreground, starting perhaps as a shadow cast by the young man on the left but continuing right across to the right edge of the paper, neatly underlying and unifying what i see as a single composition. the two figures above direct what seem to be two somewhat different forms of evil force onto the female musician and the larger group of children, again with a slight recession in depth. incidentally, the further airborne figure would appear to be male, with a long beard that overlaps the arm of the accompanying female figure. both these figures emerge from clouds indicated by curving lines that extend across the paper from the left edge, above and to the left of the young man, to the right margin above the children. the clouds even seem to blot out the top of the upright element of the chair between the female musician and the largest child. the background on the left is difficult to make out but reinforces the impression that these figures are in a particular setting, not just randomly spread across the sheet of paper. the subject of the drawing is less clear. as essick points out, harps are not solely associated with job and his family (indeed, they hardly appear in the biblical account save, at job 21.12, as appurtenances of the wicked together with the timbrel and organ). however, the only other known pair of figures playing harps is har and heva in the lost fifth illustration to tiriel. nor does the head of the putative job resemble any of blake’s other depictions. in fact this baby-faced, slightly weak and epicene character does not seem to occur anywhere else in blake’s large repertory of facial types. nor does the number of children shown match the seven sons and three daughters of the biblical text. but it is difficult to find another match to the depiction of a group of figures, apparently related as in a family, being attacked by supernatural forces. it could be that blake had some more general idea as he made the drawing of an apparently happily settled family unexpectedly attacked. this could have later evolved into the series of illustrations to the book of job. review: уильям блейк, песни невинности и опыта: william blake, songs of innocence and of experience уильям блейк. песни невинности и опыта: william blake. songs of innocence and of experience. moscow: rudominо, 2010. 240 pp. 12.0 x 20.5 cm. 475 rubles. reviewed by vera serdechnaya vera serdechnaya (rintra@rambler.ru), krasnodar (russia), is editor at the publisher analitika rodis, chief editor of the peer-reviewed journal [language. literature. culture.], and head of the literary and dramatic unit at krasnodar academic drama theatre. she defended her thesis, “[the narrative strategies of short prophetic poems of william blake (the problems of typology and identity in historical and cultural context)]” in 2006. in addition, vera is the author of the book short epics of william blake: narrative, typology, context (2012). her research interests are european and american romanticism, literary theory, translation, and history of theatre. in 2009 one of the largest russian museums, the pushkin state museum of fine arts, joined with the tate and the british council to begin to organize a russian exhibition of blake’s works for the first time ever; it opened in november 2011 [see review]. the british council also suggested that a new translated edition of songs of innocence and of experience should be published on the occasion. the russian state library for foreign literature partnered with the council to organize the workshop of translators and publish the book. the publication is unusual for russia in that it is based on an earlier boxed small-format edition issued by the folio society (1992), later republished unboxed by tate publishing in 2006 and 2009. for the first time in russia, this edition reproduces the illuminated prints of the songs, and all translations are new, the result of a competition among members of the translation workshop. the translations judged most successful were included alongside the images, with introductions by richard holmes and gregory kruzhkov as well as critical commentary by sasha dugdale. the translations presented in the book represent a modern vision of blake and successfully compete with a number of classical translations of blake into russian, such as those by s. ya. marshak, s. stepanov, and others. in a general introduction, which is translated by s. lichacheva from the folio society edition, holmes declares: “blake uses the modality of children’s verses to create a wholly adult poetry”; this essay, though brief, provides a biographical sketch and points the way into the cycle of poems. kruzhkov’s preface introduces the reader to the history of russian translations of blake, in particular those of songs of innocence and of experience. the commentary by dugdale clearly describes in detail the metaphorical and symbolic patterns of blake’s poetry. previous russian editions of blake sorely lack such commentary. the color images, from the king’s college copy of songs, for the first time allow the russian reader to appreciate the originality of the syncretic nature of blake’s gift—not only as a poet but also as an original artist and engraver. although russia already has bilingual collections of blake’s poems, the originals have never before been reproduced graphically page by page. the translations in the book do not, of course, contain a complete systematic interpretation of the imagery and melodic poetry of blake, but they offer a sort of kaleidoscope of possible approaches to his poetry. and while every successful new translation is just a step in the direction of the original, the poems in this edition collectively represent much progress. it is also important that the format of the workshop allowed the translators to find multiple approaches to the same poems: the appendix to the edition gives interesting alternative translations not included in the main text. thus, the russian reader has the opportunity to consider disparate translations of poems, including three versions of “holy thursday,” “the fly,” “ah! sun-flower,” and “a little boy lost.” many of the new translations are clear successes that open for russian readers new incarnations of familiar paired works by blake, especially “the lamb” by a. kruglov and “the tyger” by m. lipkin, and “infant joy” by m. falikman and “infant sorrow” by m. kostionova. a general trend of these translations is to preserve the rhythmic spirit, as in the dance-like “the ecchoing green” (trans. m. falikman) and “laughing song” (trans. s. lichacheva), and the epic rhythm in “earth’s answer” (trans. a. kruglov) and “the voice of the ancient bard” (trans. m. kostionova). at the same time, striving to adhere to the original poetic form may lead to an inadequate interpretation of content. for example, in the “introduction” to innocence, translated by m. kostionova, the third stanza introduces an angel appearing to a baby in a cradle, neither of which exists in the original! examples can be multiplied, but we can say that the main purpose of publishing this translation—to let russian readers escape from the shackles of traditional translations of blake and bring their perception of songs of innocence and of experience to a new visual level—has been achieved. this is definitely the most visually attractive edition of blake in russian, and may inspire more new approaches to making his works accessible to russian speakers. review: christopher rowland, blake and the bible christopher rowland. blake and the bible. new haven: yale university press, 2010. xx + 290 pp. 25 color illus. $65.00/£30.00, hardcover. reviewed by linda freedman linda freedman (l.freedman@ucl.ac.uk) is a lecturer in british and american literature at university college london. she is a graduate of oxford and london and a former fellow of selwyn college, cambridge. she is the author of emily dickinson and the religious imagination (cambridge university press, 2011) and is currently writing a book about william blake and america. she has a particular interest in transatlantic connections and in the relationship between literature, religion, and the visual arts. christopher rowland’s deeply scholarly account of william blake’s relationship with the bible marks blake out as a theologian as well as a poet and artist. at the heart of the book is a fascination with biblical exegesis as an imaginative activity, and it is this that makes rowland’s work a truly valuable contribution to blake studies and to the growing body of critical literature that takes the relationship between literature and theology as its subject. notwithstanding a strong literary interest, rowland’s objectives are clearly theological. he writes, “engagement with [blake’s] work reshapes the way in which one reads the bible, views and experiences the world, and for that matter, god” (1). by developing and nuancing our understanding of blake’s sense of the way text participates in affective religion, he shows how reading blake might perform such immense tasks. rather than encouraging us to see text as simply the dead letter of urizenic law, rowland takes on one of the fundamental contraries in blake’s art and tackles the idea of text as a living body, born again in each imaginative interpretation, and effective insofar as it is affective for the individual reader. one of the most striking implications of rowland’s approach is that blake’s prowess as imaginative exegete provides a way into negotiating his own illustrated texts. in the final event, rowland acknowledges that blake makes little distinction between the bible and other great works of literature, claiming, for blake, the words of the bible were not those which somehow contained something peculiarly holy or special. blake’s focus on the effect of text, whether the bible, or his own allusive illuminated texts, suggests that texts are less an object to be explained than a stimulus to the exploration of the imaginative space that biblical texts may offer. … if [the bible] worked as a text, to enable humans to change, then its role spoke for itself. (242) rowland’s final leveling of the bible with other great texts seems a remarkably brave theological position. if the bible only “works” with an imaginative exegete such as blake (who makes the text as much as he is made by it), then it is fairly redundant in the hands of a less privileged reader. god is made by man, and not the other way round. in one sense, this is another way of affirming blake’s belief that imagination is the quintessential religious faculty. without imagination, no text can live, and the bible is a dead book. but it also means that rowland breaks new ground in considering what this religious faculty of “imagination” might mean in exegetical terms. it is not surprising that rowland places considerable emphasis on exegetical disposition. an inner openness and resistance to enlightenment thinking have long been recognized as definitive in blake’s exaltation of the imagination. rowland is broadly supportive of existing work on blake and religion and is extremely generous in his allusions to other blake scholars. like jon mee in dangerous enthusiasm (oxford: clarendon press, 1992), he emphasizes that blake’s religious radicalism should be seen as part of a radical eighteenth-century millenarianism that bears comparison with that of richard brothers and has antecedents in the work of jacob boehme. yet implicit in the detailed scholarly analysis that rowland undertakes is the idea that disposition without education and understanding will not make for imaginative exegesis. the real strength of rowland’s contribution lies in his profound knowledge of the biblical text and the years of theological study informing and directing his interpretations. in other words, it is evident on every page of this book that education forms part of imaginative exegesis.  rowland’s exegesis, like blake’s, rests on close reading and the ability to unpack densely allusive verbal and visual textures. in this way rowland makes a place for thought in the religion of the heart and in its enabling faculty of imagination. rowland takes blake’s set of engravings to the book of job as his only full commentary on a biblical text, and as the basis from which to draw out distinctive features of blake’s exegesis. this works well, as it gives the reader a way into the enormous body of blake’s work and allows rowland a focus for his analysis, which naturally spreads to blake’s other writings and illustrations. chapters explore the biblical hermeneutics of blake’s job engravings, divine contraries, the meaning and importance of prophecy, blake’s place in the history of radical biblical interpretation, blake’s relationship with jesus and paul, and his interpretation of the bible through images. the book is beautifully illustrated, and rowland takes a holistic approach, bringing words, images, and historical context to bear on our understanding of blake’s stature as biblical exegete. in the chapter on prophecy, for instance, he contextualizes blake with examples of the prophetic enthusiasm of late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century britain, as well as with examples of biblical prophets such as ezekiel. he argues that blake’s “distinctive contribution was brilliantly to encapsulate an aspect of biblical prophecy in his focus on the ‘minute particulars’ of contemporary life” (122). rowland emphasizes the creative impetus of blake’s obscure style, claiming that the problematic and often tenuous links between text and image mean that the pursuit of understanding needs to be creative (129). in other words, blake’s prophetic style requires participatory involvement from the reader, making interpretation an imaginative act as opposed to passive reception of meaning. style is therefore intrinsically connected to value, as the function of a prophetic text is to “rouze the faculties to act” (e 702, quoted on 130). there can be no doubt that rowland’s case for blake as a brilliant biblical exegete is persuasive and timely. the complexity of blake’s thought, the quality of his composite art, and the context in which he needs to be understood are all hugely enhanced by the wealth of theological learning and biblical knowledge that rowland brings to this book. yet one cannot help but feel that the theological and artistic conviction that motors the argument, and that finds itself reflected and shaped in numerous ways by blake’s own poetic magnitude, does not allow for any consideration of the limits that, blake felt, constrained his own craft. rowland identifies los as the spirit of the prophetic imagination in blake’s mythology. los is where we must put our faith. but blake revealed his dissatisfaction with the role of the prophet-artist as early as 1793. an early version of the preludium to america a prophecy ends: the stern bard ceas’d, asham’d of his own song; enrag’d he swung his harp aloft sounding, then dash’d its shining frame against a ruin’d pillar in glittring fragments; silent he turn’d away, and wander’d down the vales of kent in sick & drear lamentings. (e 52) in night 5 of vala, the prophetic los binds the revolutionary orc in the chains of urizenic repression, and by the end of vala the prophetic function is recognized as a distraction, a “delusive phantom” (e 407). blake was troublingly aware of the possibility that the sacred quality of imagination may not always be effective. the only lacuna in rowland’s book is the fact that, in celebrating blake’s triumph, it misses his sense of frustration. review: karen mulhallen, ed., blake in our time karen mulhallen, ed.  blake in our time: essays in honour of g. e. bentley jr.  toronto: university of toronto press, 2010. xvi + 300 pp.; 51 illus.  $65.00/£45.99, hardcover. reviewed by joseph wittreich joseph wittreich (jwittreich@gc.cuny.edu), emeritus distinguished professor of english from the cuny graduate center, is the author most recently of shifting contexts: reinterpreting samson agonistes (2002) and why milton matters (2006). blake in our time is a magnificent tribute to g. e. bentley, jr.—one of the titans in blake studies of the last, as well as current, century—whose work has “shifted the focus of blake criticism from formalism and symbolism to the ‘minute particulars’ of blake’s life and work,” with bentley thus launching what is here described as “now the most productive field of inquiry in blake studies” ([3]).  were the title not already in service, this anthology might better be called blake in his time inasmuch as its core chapters fix attention on blake’s friends, patrons, and fellow artists: stephen and harriet mathew, john flaxman, william hayley, thomas butts, george cumberland, and george richmond.  on the other hand, the title as we have it drives the idea that a principal activity of blake studies in our time is the re-situation of the poet in his own time and, with that, the rehabilitation of text and context.  even more, the title underscores the paradox that the preoccupation of blake studies in our time is with blake in his own time; that only after we return blake to his original cultural context does he emerge as a poet speaking powerfully to our own age from a frontier of religious speculation and through an ideology that has survived its own apparent demise.  among the many outstanding essays in this volume, those by robert n. essick, mary lynn johnson, martin butlin, and morton d. paley are especially illuminating, while the coda, by jerome mcgann, holds its own bright light in bentley’s sunshine. no one has made the case more compellingly (nor more dramatically) than essick for “the importance of preserving each original copy of blake’s writings” ([19]). by essick’s account, believing that it had six duplicate prints from there is no natural religion, the pierpont morgan library, deciding to hold on to several of the originals, sold off its duplicates. it was the luck of the buyers (one of whom was essick) that the duplicates were all originals, and the morgan’s embarrassment that what it held on to were all facsimiles.  this “gotcha” moment is a reminder that, among bibliophiles,  there has been a “mutual interchange” (28) between collecting and scholarship in which, in the instance of the celebrated and the celebrant, bentley no less than essick, the savvy of the collector combines with a heightened critical intelligence to produce scholarship of the first magnitude. among the other essays, three are of signal importance.  in her assiduous sorting through of online archives entitled “more on blake’s (and bentley’s) ‘white collar maecenas’:  thomas butts, his wife’s family of artisans, and the methodist withams of st. bartholomew the great,” mary lynn johnson takes as her subject thomas butts, about whom relatively little is known and some of what is known is manifestly untrue—for example, butts’s religious views, as well as his “take” on the bible.  the rich yield of this essay is a finely particularized, well-shaded portrait and “an enriched contextual understanding of blake’s friend, patron, and principal collector” (133).  in the renewed attention that martin butlin gives to the “ancients”—those young artists who eventually gathered around blake, including samuel palmer, edward calvert, john linnell, and george richmond—especially “the close interaction between these artists” (204), this eminent art historian crafts a credible argument for richmond as blake’s chief heir, even as he notes intriguingly that, with one possible exception, richmond avoids repeating biblical subjects painted by blake, yet also produces work that is both “a distillation of late blake” and indebted to his “visionary inspiration” (208). morton paley’s “william blake and chichester” is the most interesting and important essay in this collection.  arguing that “it is time to reconsider the role of chichester in blake’s life, both material and imaginative” ([215]), paley illuminates a series of relationships (each of them owing something to william hayley) with joseph seagrave, john marsh, richard dally, and john weller, as well as more tenuous relationships with john peachey, william brereton, and john quantock, all of whom “appear in jerusalem among the giant sons of albion” (218).  more strikingly, paley recaptures and credits thomas wright’s earlier apprehension that “the original model for blake’s city of the imagination, golgonooza …, the foundations of his four-gated city lay in chichester,” especially its structures of the marketplace, the cathedral, and the guildhall (219).  “what blake saw in chichester,” paley concludes, “became part of the major transition in [his] aesthetics …, of which the ogee arch and the idea of the gothic constituted important parts, along with the architectonics of golgonooza” (227). if these four essays are mountain peaks in blake in our time, while others from their hilltops transmit repeated flashes of insight, the collection as a whole reinforces bentley’s literalistic, yet always eloquent, documentation of the miltonic thundering that the poet is himself a true poem: “his life is more than an illumination of his own poetry …. it bears the shape of great art itself.”g. e. bentley, jr., speaking of blake, in the stranger from paradise: a biography of william blake (new haven: yale university press, 2001) xxvi.  to the extent that these essays replicate bentley’s own move from interpretation in his early years to the historical particularity of his later works, they should not be misconstrued as necessarily signaling a move beyond interpretation.  rather, they participate in a historicism into which interpretation is enfolded.  indeed, some would seem to signal a next move for blake studies in the attention they (at times) give to blake’s own writings on art (joyce h. townsend and bronwyn a. ormsby), to blake as an archetypal romantic poet (david bindman) and defining figure of romanticism, to his (and his age’s) experimental writings (keri davies), to their creation of new forms of literary illustration (mark crosby), to blake’s visionary imagination (butlin), to the uncaging of the human spirit and “drawing aside of the fleshly curtain” (butlin, quoting samuel palmer, [201]).  these essays, then, selectively gesture beyond poetry to poetics, indeed toward blake as the founder of a new poetics to which marjorie perloff has recently given stunning articulation.   in so many ways a harbinger of things to come, blake anticipates a poetics of “unoriginal genius” to which charles bernstein, in perloff’s account, gives more recent definition: “i love originality so much i keep copying it.”marjorie perloff (quoting bernstein) in unoriginal genius: poetry by other means in the new century (chicago: university of chicago press, 2010) 1.  long before, blake avers: “the difference between a bad artist & a good one is the bad artist seems to copy a great deal: the good one really does copy a great deal.”blake, “annotations to the works of sir joshua reynolds,” the complete poetry and prose of william blake, newly rev. ed., ed. david v. erdman (new york: anchor–random house, 1988) 645. blake then produces a poetry in which the thick clusterings of allusion collage into sequences and collide within contexts that, here invoked by picture and there by word, are themselves zones of contention. continually interacting with those (often shifting) contexts and in the process often modifying them, blake’s poetry, written at the borders of coherence and constantly testing its limits, time and again shatters into fragments and, defeating expectations, creates cognitive dissonance.  in the process, blake’s poems, interacting not only with external contexts but with one another, witness the transformation of their own content and the modification of their own myths. as their altering eye beholds the dissolution of usual structures of perception, the poet, gaining perspective on his own cultural moment, mounts a critique of it.  it would be a mistake, however, to infer from the aforementioned essays that blake studies, pendulum-like, has swerved from interpretation to history, from criticism to biography.  rather, blake studies has taken the form of an ascending spiral, with g. e. bentley, jr., overseeing one rotation and thus leaving an important phase signed with his honor.  it is in his “art”—“it is in the glories of sight and sound, in the divine vision preserved in time of trouble,” says bentley, “that blake lives for us most truly.”bentley, the stranger from paradise xxv, xxvi. winter 2011-12 blake/an illustrated quarterly 101 support that claim. it should be read for its clear explanation of the core of jerusalem and its compelling demonstration of the reasons why blake shaped his poem the way that he did. the book has some weaknesses: for experienced blake scholars, the long reprise of the “synchronic” school may be tedious and even argumentative, even though yoder is at pains to delineate critical differences (which may make it particularly useful for students). the third chapter could benefit from more examples of extended readings. in citing parts of the text that exemplify one or another point, he doesn’t offer expanded interpretations. but these are minor complaints in the context of the very important work that this book represents. after my first reading, i wished that yoder had gone on to write a comprehensive explication of the poem in sequence and in detail, as donald ault has done for the four zoas in narrative unbound. but on a second reading, i was well satisfied that yoder’s explanation of the poem’s unique enterprise, special techniques, and inspiring philosophy offers an indispensable introduction to jerusalem. i n blake and kierkegaard: creation and anxiety, james rovira explores historical synchronicities to mine the potential for like-mindedness between blake and kierkegaard. he introduces a compelling rationale for bringing the two writers together: “neither author is concerned with history as such but rather with the phenomenological profile that historical forces hold for the individual subject” (3). this distinction between “history as such” and the subject’s intersection with history as a “phenomenological” experience is an improvement over previous studies of these writers that separate history and subjectivity. just as this synthesis of history and subjectivity offers a rethinking of blake and of kierkegaard, rovira’s revision of derridean deconstruction from the hindsight of new historicism challenges the assumption of mutual exclusion between the two theoretical positions. more relevant for the study itself, this strategy has the potential to prevent the argument from being limited to mere synchronicity. yet it is more persuasive regarding kierkegaard than for blake: rovira negotiates the atemporality of deconstruction via the observation that “kierkegaardian anxiety is not a textual movement but an emotional one, an individual experience registered in literature but embedded within historical, cultural, social, and personal particularities,” which provides the basis for the study’s focus on kierkegaard’s “understand[ing] individuality to exist in a continual dialectic with history and society” (4). attributing the same impulse to blake’s texts is less convincing, however. applying deconstruction, even in tandem with new historicism, in reading blake’s texts or designs is problematic for reasons paul de man first articulated: blake’s “privileging of writing” makes it “less resistant” to deconstruction, a remark that seems truer to the more complex erasures and re-creations in blake’s cosmology; incorporating the historical dimension does not resolve but rather evades this fundamental problem.1 the potential for reductiveness is a danger for any comparison between writers, but it is more so between a philosopher and a writer-artist as multifaceted as blake. by premising the argument on the assumption that “their works are a record 1. the quotation is from an interview with w. j. t. mitchell in his essay “visible language: blake’s wond’rous art of writing,” romanticism and contemporary criticism, ed. morris eaves and michael fischer (ithaca: cornell university press, 1986) 91. james rovira. blake and kierkegaard: creation and anxiety. london: continuum, 2010. x + 184 pp. £60.00/$110.00, hardcover; £24.99/$44.95, paperback (2011). reviewed by kathryn freeman 102 blake/an illustrated quarterly winter 2011-12 of psychological development and struggle,” rovira’s study sacrifices the idiosyncrasies of blake’s cosmology, particularly its elasticity, in a rigid paradigm of abstract categories more suitable for analyzing systematic philosophy (3). more problematic than the claim that the binaries—science vs. religion, nature vs. artifice, and democracy vs. monarchy—exist within texts is rovira’s assertion that blake and kierkegaard represent, if not precisely two polarities, two sides of the study’s central binary, “creation and anxiety”: “blake’s mythology represents the ‘creation’ and kierkegaard’s philosophy the ‘anxiety’ of creation anxiety” (2). the organizational choice of shuttling between the writers via these binaries keeps the argument broad and shallow. thus, for instance, the second chapter studies blake and kierkegaard vis-à-vis the socratic tradition, as “both drew from a centuries-old classical model of personality,” a broad claim that prevents the possibility of exploring blake’s particularly complex relationship not only to the classical but the neoclassical (36). rovira asserts that blake condemns nature in “a vision of the last judgment” (48), but it is a text that works against dualities: its concluding remark, “i question not my corporeal or vegetative eye any more than i would question a window concerning a sight i look thro it & not with it” (e 566), subverts rovira’s implicit binary of commendation vs. condemnation. later in the chapter, he offers a far more nuanced reading of blake’s “ambivalence toward plato” that suggests the need not only to revise the earlier statement, but to consider the deeper implications of subject-object duality at the heart of the comparison between the two writers (49). when the study does move away from the “x vs. y” formula, it makes room for such complexities as the notion of inwardness at the end of the third chapter. that the book’s breadth jeopardizes depth is a problem not only based on the multiplicity of binaries, but on the choice to devote large sections of the study to background information, much of which could have been relegated to endnotes. similarly, the treatment of criticism in some cases is an undigested compilation; at other times it generalizes about critical approaches based on one or two studies. rovira connects creation anxiety to blake’s concept of generation and by extension to gender and sexuality. however, in his discussion of the book of thel and visions of the daughters of albion he collapses forty years of feminist criticism on blake to a single 1977 study (75). the treatment of gender and sexuality in these poems founders still more as rovira makes “a brief excursion” into “the tyger,” a pattern of digression repeated with loosely connected “excursions” into texts by other authors. at the beginning of chapter 4, for example, and at several other points, frankenstein is brought in to represent narratives of creation anxiety, yet the discussion is so fleeting that it raises many unaddressed questions about how creation anxiety in shelley’s novel compares to that in kierkegaard’s philosophical writings or blake’s poetry and designs. since addressing these questions would be tangential to the thesis, a better choice might have been to relegate such references to endnotes. besides the largely unassimilated quarry of historical information and critical perspectives, and the plethora of undeveloped topics, a need to control the unwieldiness of the book is evident even at the level of syntax, as exemplified by the sentence, “this dichotomy in blake’s artistic output encouraged in blake’s mind a dichotomy between blake the commercial engraver and blake the visionary artist, the former subject to the power of a spectrous fiend while the latter is emancipated and visionary” (54). in the case of a passage analyzing the two writers with regard to the classical model of personality, so many claims are made in a single sentence that few of them get developed or synthesized with each other: “the process of innocence collapsing into generation—or in other words, the transition from the aesthetic to the ethical, from innocence to experience—lays the groundwork for blake’s articulation of creation anxiety” (60). with a shift away from the stark contrasts that form its skeleton, rovira’s book offers a fresh possibility of viewing each writer through the lens of the other in a number of tantalizing suggestions, such as through the relationship between generation and creation. rovira’s observation that the creator figure in blake’s the four zoas is enion rather than urizen, for instance, has intriguing implications for the earlier section on thel and oothoon (113). in this regard, the book contributes to a rethinking of the boundaries of theory, particularly as they need to be addressed vis-à-vis the field of european and british romanticism. review: william blake and british visionary art, pushkin state museum of fine arts, moscow william blake and british visionary art. pushkin state museum of fine arts, moscow, 28 november 2011–19 february 2012. pushkin state museum of fine arts. уильям блейк и британские визионеры. каталог выставки [uil'yam bleik i britanskie vizionery. katalog vystavki] [william blake and the british visionaries. exhibition catalogue]. moscow: krasnaya ploshchad', 2011. 248 pp. 800 rubles (about $25.80), hardcover. reviewed by vera serdechnaya vera serdechnaya (rintra@rambler.ru), krasnodar (russia), is editor at the publisher analitika rodis, chief editor of the peer-reviewed journal [language. literature. culture.], and head of the literary and dramatic unit at krasnodar academic drama theatre. she defended her thesis, “[the narrative strategies of short prophetic poems of william blake (the problems of typology and identity in historical and cultural context)]” in 2006. in addition, vera is the author of the book short epics of william blake: narrative, typology, context (2012). her research interests are european and american romanticism, literary theory, translation, and history of theatre. and if the exhibition shares a little bit of the madness and radicalism of its artist, its goal is achieved: blake has raised many pressing questions about man’s place in the world—it seems like answers might be sought forever. v. d'yakonov, kommersant-vlast' [businessman-power] a surprising and unprecedented event happened in moscow at the end of 2011, when an exhibition of paintings by william blake opened. such a show of blake’s works is a great rarity, because there are no blake paintings in russian art collections. the exhibition presented about 150 works by blake and some of his “british visionary” counterparts from the collections of the eight largest museums in the uk. according to the web portal gazeta.ru, “only a few britons have been able to see so much of blake’s fine legacy.” for russia, the exhibition was very significant as a literary event because, in general, for the russian consciousness blake remains a lyric poet whose short works are known in some excellent translations, but both his epics and his paintings are not well known. in the pre-soviet era blake was identified in russian criticism as a forerunner of the symbolists. in soviet times, along with byron, he was considered a “revolutionary” romantic. but the years 2010-12 became a real renaissance for blake in russia, when he began to be perceived as both brilliant and eccentric. on the threshold of the exhibition several books on blake appeared in russian, including a new collection of translations of songs of innocence and of experience—a beautiful and expensive book, with original translations of the poems and color facsimiles of blake’s prints [see review]. in early 2011 a special issue of inostrannaya literatura [foreign literature] came out, dedicated to the legacy of blake. in early 2012 my monograph in russian on the shorter prophecies of blake appeared, containing a narrative analysis of his poems and tracing the perception of his work in twentieth-century culture. since the exhibition there has been a special blake issue of the journal [language. literature. culture.] (2013). the price of admission to the exhibition was very modest, just 300 rubles (about $10). when i arrived at half past ten in the morning there was no queue, but by the evening it stretched the length of two blocks. the museum was also selling a lavish catalogue of the exhibition, printed by krasnaya ploshchad' [red square], at 800 rubles (about $25). blake’s work has never been published in russia in such high printing quality. it is a pity that this catalogue had so little promotion. in the galleries blake’s paintings (together with works by rossetti, palmer, beardsley, bacon, and others) were presented side by side with works from the permanent exhibitions of the pushkin museum—replicas of ancient, medieval, and renaissance sculptures. at the same time the museum was hosting a show of works by a visionary of a very different kind, caravaggio, whose paintings were astonishingly lit in the darkness. blake’s paintings were hanging on maroon and gray backgrounds in the hallways, where high columns support the ceiling. in this environment blake appeared to be a grand and austere classical artist, and his connection with the highest literary tradition was confirmed by the illustrations to dante and milton. in the hall of the museum the organizers projected films about caravaggio and blake, and it was possible to rent an audio guide for a walk through the hallways. the exhibition halls, where they put the works of blake, were decorated with greatly enlarged images of prints from songs of innocence and of experience. unfortunately, i missed the musical evenings, masterclasses, and lectures attached to the exhibition. what can i say about the exhibition itself? for me, it was blake, with all his complexity and straightforwardness, intricate lines and symbolism. it was him. only later did i catch myself thinking that here were those very pieces of paper, wood, and copper he touched two hundred years ago. all i could do was look and try to grasp the message that, i now saw for the first time, was so obviously bursting out of the two-dimensional flatness of the works before me. the deville lifecast of blake’s head seemed to me to be a magical artifact, one that could not be touched, even photographed. the stern face, big eyes, pursed lips, and frowning forehead looked as if a man, closing his eyelids, went into fearless and detached thinking about the winepress of wrath, about judgment day and the roar of an angry rintrah. it was the face of an old testament prophet. this cast made me believe in the reality of blake’s existence, as if it embodied his creativity, tying london and the beginning of the nineteenth century to the present place and date. as reported in nezavisimaya gazeta, “one of the most successful exhibits accompanying blake’s visions of his restless heroes is the plaster head made in 1823 by james deville, where his closed eyes, that a plaster cast of course requires, emphasize the metaphor of the visionary eye.” my attention was also drawn by the statuette named newton, by eduardo paolozzi, who was inspired by blake’s color prints of the subject. there were quite a few people at the show, especially neatly dressed old women, students in groups, and middle-aged men and women. the audience apparently included those who came specifically for this exhibition and those who did not know anything about blake before. i was very interested: what did they see in his paintings, being familiar with his works only by hearsay? what about those who saw these paintings for the first time in their lives? i found some answers to my questions in the response book, filled with remarkable and candid comments. here are the most vivid excerpts, in the order that the lines were recorded: creator guardian manifested in you rain poured down grace moved into your brain and poured the grandeur of creation (dedicated to william blake, tatiana logunova, kiev) perhaps, it is the right time today to share w. blake’s point of perception, as the present world enters, apparently, in the most tragic phase of its existence. (unsigned) i really did not like blake. but thanks for the exhibition. (korea) the exhibition left me with a painful impression. it was evident that this man was a master of the letter, but the impression communicated to the audience was a kind of insanity. the soul can relax, warm up only at the caravaggio exhibition … but here? some worms, no good for the soul. (isayeva ye.yu., teacher, age 54) … boring monotonous schizophrenic. it would be better to ship more caravaggio than this abnormal old man, god rest his soul. (yasha) thanks to the art of w. blake, immediately, directly from today, i will start my reading of bible stories. this was a trial for some unprepared visitors and tortured my conscience …. (unsigned) for many years, i dreamt of seeing an exhibition of blake’s legacy. the atmosphere—something between the divine and dreadful. (unsigned) there were plenty of opinions, many greatly contrasting. some spoke of blake’s total incomprehensibility, while others advised the organizers not to prompt viewers to the idea of romantic madness, so deceptively simple. however, in blake’s own time, nobody would have stood in line for his show: he was simply not well known and generally the public didn’t need him. as written on the gazeta.ru web site, “for the average art lover getting a deep sense of blake’s stories is still entering a dark forest. there is just a little difference between us and his contemporaries, except that the overall appraisal has changed from negative to positive.” and yet, the queue half a kilometer long standing in front of the museum in the late afternoon showed that blake may have established himself in russia. his works have had a deep effect on some in the audience, and the press reviews testify to both the profound indifference and the bright impression made by the works of blake in russia. review: tate britain’s new blake room primary blake installation, tate britain, 2013: engravings and color prints. photograph courtesy of tate britain. tate britain’s new blake room reviewed by morton d. paley morton paley (mpaley@berkeley.edu) is co-editing the reception of william blake in europe, to be published by bloomsbury in 2016. he is continuing his research on the art of george romney. during my visits to what is now called tate britain over a period of many years, i have encountered the art of william blake presented in a number of ways.some of the tate’s blake installations over the years are illustrated in joyce h. townsend, robin hamlyn, and john anderson, “the presentation of blake’s paintings,” william blake: the painter at work, ed. joyce h. townsend (london: tate publishing, 2003) 170-74, figs. 139-43. at first, in 1966, i found it on the main floor. i knew that it had previously been displayed in an octagonal room with mosaic floor designs (derived from the marriage of heaven and hell) by boris anrep, but that was before my time. later, a selection of blake’s works was moved to a downstairs gallery that had been constructed for them. not everyone was happy with this. “they moved blake to the basement,” sir geoffrey keynes said. still later, a striking venue was constructed downstairs: a darkened, air-conditioned room with illuminated display cases. i thought of it as the aquarium, because the blakes seemed like tropical fish on display there. that lasted for about ten years. then blake was upstairs again until, on 14 may 2013, a new exhibition room was opened. its location is conceived as part of the overall rehang that tate britain has named the “walk through british art.” the new blake room or rooms, as there are two, can be hard to find, but if you enter through the turner gallery and go to room 17, you’ll see a sign pointing to the staircase that leads to them. once there, you are in a pleasantly lit space, which from may to october 2013 featured an exhibition on blake and landscape created by hayley flynn, a doctoral candidate at the university of nottingham. there were, as one would expect, few pure landscapes exhibited here, two in all, one being the unfinished landscape near felpham, which was evidently drawn from a boat, as it views hayley’s turret house and felpham’s old mill from the water. the other was the rather puzzling a garden path, eartham (british museum), which depicts a fairly regular arrangement of young trees. this drawing does not seem to be preparatory to something else, yet does not, remarkably for blake, generate interest in itself. the major landscapes here were visionary backgrounds for human-centered subjects. showing a group of blake’s works with this in mind makes us more aware of how he followed the practice of the italian renaissance painters he so admired. most of blake’s landscapes are the products of his own imagination, as those in the descent of man into the vale of death (british museum) and the third temptation (victoria and albert museum). the dante illustration the ascent of the mount of purgatory was hung beside turner’s the schöllenen gorge from the devil’s bridge, which flynn suggested as a source for it. turner’s painting dates from 1802, but another version, displaying a similar inverted corkscrew-like ascending path, was exhibited in 1815. whether blake was influenced by it, or even saw it, must remain a matter of speculation. other aspects of landscape were shown in the pastoral idealizations of virgil and the paysages moralisés of job. a section termed blake’s landscape legacy began with blake’s young followers samuel palmer, george richmond, and edward calvert, who were so affected by blake’s sense of visionary landscape. i was especially grateful for the seldom-seen palmer drawing the harvest moon, supplemented by a jotting from an 1824 sketchbook: “considering dulwich as the gate into the world of vision one must try behind the hills to bring up a mystic glimmer like that which lights our dreams. and those same hills, (hard task) should give us promise that the country behind them is paradise.” two etchings by graham sutherland and john craxton’s richly distorted revision of palmer, dreamer in landscape, continued this tradition. on the whole, the exhibition theme was an interesting one, prompting the viewer to reflect on how necessary background often was to blake, in contrast, say, to flaxman, who illustrated the divine comedy without any. the main presentation, devised by martin myrone, is not intended as a fixed entity; the tate’s online announcement says, “this room provides a showcase for a changing selection of blake works from tate’s collection.” some of the forty plus pictures on display could hardly have been omitted—the spiritual form of nelson, for example, and newton—and i will resist the reviewer’s fatal temptation to say what better choices he or she could have made. as tate britain counts 392 blake items in its possession, this would not be hard to do, but in fact the selection is a very representative one, including the early and the late, the commercial and the visionary, and examples of different media. in one respect it may strive too hard to be representative: as the tate does not own any original illuminated books, three plates from posthumous pulls are on display. as an idea of blake’s extraordinary combinations of text and image should surely be given, why not borrow a couple of prime examples from the british museum’s enormous collection? there would be little point in my naming the pictures displayed, as images of all of them are available at <http://​www.​tate.​org.​uk/​art/​artworks?ap=1​&wp=1​&wv=grid​&rid=8578>. primary blake installation, tate britain, 2013: color prints, watercolors, and temperas. photograph courtesy of tate britain. the particular blue shades chosen for the carpet and walls not only have a soothing effect but also appear to bring out some details in the pictures that i could not remember having noticed before—some of the figures under the right arm of the spiritual form of pitt, for example. i also sensed a finer perception of the textured reticulations of newton. there is something about the room itself that encourages peaceful contemplation; i heard little conversation there, and that was muted. it will be interesting to see what the next group of works chosen for exhibition will be like. note: here is a timeline of william blake at the tate, taken from <http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/display/william-blake-display/william-blake-william-blake-tate-timeline>. accessed 30 june 2013, slightly modified, and with some additions by alexander gourlay. 1897 what is now tate britain is founded as the national gallery of british art. 1911 blake’s works are on display in gallery 1 along with other early nineteenth-century artists. 1913 october–december a major loan exhibition of blake is held, the first at a public gallery. a reduced version tours to manchester, nottingham, and edinburgh. 1914 blake’s works are shown in a separate gallery together with work by the sculptor and painter alfred stevens (1817–75). (the spiritual form of nelson guiding leviathan is purchased.) 1920 blake and earlier watercolours is on display in [octagonal] gallery 2. this includes a loan of works from artist and collector w. graham robertson. robertson acquired many of the works in his collection from the family of thomas butts, blake’s friend and patron. 1923 a mosaic floor by boris anrep based on blake’s proverbs of hell from the marriage of heaven and hell is added to gallery 2. this can still be seen today. gallery 2 becomes dedicated to showing works by blake. blake’s works remain on display here until 1967. 1932 the national gallery of british art is renamed the tate gallery. 1939 nine of blake’s large color prints are presented to the tate by robertson. 1947 august–september william blake (1757–1827) is held at the tate. out of 66 works in the exhibition, 25 are tate owned and 45 are from the collection of robertson. the show also appears in paris, antwerp, and zurich. 1949 a tenth large color print and watercolors and temperas including the ghost of a flea are bequeathed by robertson’s estate. 1957 martin butlin’s william blake (1757–1827): a catalogue of the works of william blake in the tate gallery is published. revised editions are published in 1971, 1978, and 1990. 1967 gallery 2, with anrep’s blake mosaic floor, is used for displaying hogarth and his contemporaries. in the following years works by blake are displayed in other rooms in the main gallery. 1978 march–may william blake, a comprehensive loan exhibition, is held. 1979 blake and his followers display is shown in gallery 7 until 1990. 1998 a blake display returns to gallery 2 until 2000. 2000 the tate gallery is re-renamed tate britain. 2000 november–february 2001 a major exhibition, william blake, is held at tate britain, and tours to the metropolitan museum of art, new york. 2003–04 william blake: the painter at work, a display and accompanying book, present technical research into blake’s painting techniques. 2009 a display devoted to blake’s solo exhibition two hundred years earlier in may 1809 reunites nine of the surviving works. 2009 eight color relief etchings with handwritten inscriptions are purchased by the tate. 2011–12 the blake collection is on tour to moscow and madrid. 2013 a designated blake room opens once again at tate britain. review: roger whitson and jason whittaker, william blake and the digital humanities roger whitson and jason whittaker. william blake and the digital humanities: collaboration, participation, and social media. routledge interdisciplinary perspectives on literature. new york: routledge, 2013. xii + 212 pp. $145.00/£90.00, hardcover; $48.95/£28.00, paperback (also available as an e-book). reviewed by whitney anne trettien whitney trettien (trettien@email.unc.edu; http://whitneyannetrettien.com) is assistant professor in the department of english and comparative literature at unc chapel hill, where she teaches digital humanities and book history. william blake’s work has inspired a range of popular responses, from science fiction and comic books to films and popular anthems. “what,” ask roger whitson and jason whittaker, “do all of these references, adaptations, and transformations of blake’s work add up to?” taking this question seriously demands, in whitson and whittaker’s estimation, “a truly social and digital media approach to blake studies—one that can extend his influence beyond the literary approaches to his work and embrace the grassroots media ecosystem emerging in the early twenty-first century” (5). william blake and the digital humanities sketches the outline of just such an approach. drawing on trending topics in media studies and theory, whitson and whittaker chart new directions for the study and teaching of blake, not just as an author but as what they call a “virtuality,” following henri bergson, gilles deleuze, and levi bryant: the “condition under which different blakes are produced and reproduced” (28). thus “william blake” inheres not only in his verse but in the many “critical, editorial, and creative” manifestations that circulate in the participatory social network that signifies him as an authorial figure whose meaning is always coming into being. inspired by blake’s own prophecies, the authors dub these collective creative acts—the process of generating actual blakes from this plane of virtuality—“zoamorphosis” (5). the turn to virtuality as a theoretical touchstone signals whitson and whittaker’s broader shift away from reader-response approaches and toward an interest in fandom’s role in shaping literary history. the first chapter lays the groundwork by investigating the many “virtual blakes” reproduced in print culture through editions of his work. beginning with rossetti and his associates, the earliest editors of blake were amateurs and devoted fans for whom editing was a labor of love. as the authors point out, these editors had “few qualms in explicitly rearranging and organizing blake’s texts in line with their own systems and ideological conceits” (38), systems that continue to shape how we read his work today. by comparing the history of the maligned early print editions to the development of digital archives, including the william blake archive and the 2011 blake’s notebook app from the british library, whitson and whittaker consider the ongoing role of gatekeeping in blake editing and in doing so challenge the field of digital humanities to rethink the role of social media and collaboration in electronic archives. the second and third chapters take up adaptations of “the tyger” and the lyric extract from milton popularly known as “jerusalem,” respectively, to demonstrate zoamorphosis in action. as early as gilchrist’s life, readers have been actively “remixing” blake’s tyger, transforming it in their own image. rather than disparaging these revisions, whitson and whittaker point to them as examples of how blake’s often cryptic language inspires its audience’s refusal “passively to accept the fixed meaning of the poem as transmitted from expert readers,” as well as of the reader’s willingness to seek meaning in creation, rather than simply reception (53). the popular history of “jerusalem” presents a more political case study. taken up as a jingoistic hymn in the first world war, linked to the suffragettes, and adopted by political radicals on all sides, sir charles hubert hastings parry’s “jerusalem” hymn shows how audiences coproduce meaning through social, collective acts of reading and co-optation. the authors conclude that “zoamorphosis means treating all blakean objects seriously, not simply those produced by blake” (71), and caution critics against empty appeals to higher authority when choosing to engage certain objects rather than others. the fourth chapter applies these lessons to pedagogy. the difficulty of teaching blake’s notoriously obscure later prophecies, especially using a typical close-reading model, presents “an opportunity to rethink blake’s role in humanistic education” (91). digital tools are, the authors argue, uniquely positioned to respond to this need by offering instructors a suite of creative, collaborative, and “zoamorphic” platforms on which students may begin to form a critical relationship to blake’s work. drawing on examples from his own teaching, whitson demonstrates how creative digital assignments not only transform his students’ understanding but also have led him as the instructor to rethink literary history as a “dynamic ecology” (104). as instructors search for new ways to connect the literary past to our own moment of media in transition, this pedagogical intervention is timely. the last two chapters turn to the broader interpretive network in which “virtual blakes” are reproduced and circulated. today, this network is online. connecting quantitative methods to television and fandom studies, the authors show that blake is a “true mass media phenomenon” (24), indeed has become an industry, generating much-beloved and widely circulated quotes and images. whitson and whittaker argue that this “everyday blake” contrasts with the relative scarcity of the text assumed by traditional literary methods. the final chapter extends this observation to an examination of folksonomic engagement with blake on wikipedia and flickr. linking these readings to earlier chapters, the authors suggest that blake’s presence in new media challenges jerome mcgann’s social text theory, since the social text now constitutes a vast and rapidly evolving network of objects and relations (140). indeed, this network may be the longest-lasting archive of blake’s work. as whitson and whittaker conclude, authorial networks survive neither because of an innate genius that carries them through the ages nor because they are archived by academic critics who want to preserve the social text of the romantic period. blake is archived by billions of tiny acts of tagging, often by people and machines who don’t know blake and could care less about his work. most of these acts disappear or are drowned in the flood of information that circulates on the internet. in other words, blake survives because other actors invent new spaces for him by perceiving him differently. (159) as should be evident from this summary, students of blake will find much to admire in whitson and whittaker’s book. its readings are wide ranging and novel, drawing from examples as various as twitter quotes and world war i-era hymns to show the significance of blake’s “virtuality.” the diversity of its methods further demonstrates the value of collaborative authorship in action, as whitson and whittaker complement and synthesize each other’s knowledge. by linking new media to a deeper history of print editions and adaptations, they avoid hazardous claims about the novelty of new media while nonetheless delimiting differences across platforms. these differences demonstrate the manifold creativity of readers in the nearly two centuries since blake’s death, a creativity that, the authors argue, academics should take up in their criticism. this call for creativity, threaded throughout the book, points to perhaps its most significant statement: that a corpus as diverse and difficult as blake’s demands from its readers something different—different theories, different methods, different pedagogy. digital platforms are the space in which that difference can now be fully embraced. as whitson writes on teaching blake, through creative digital assignments “my students became more comfortable with provisional interpretations that did not give a final answer but rather played with a system that was already in the process of transformation” (104). this experience “suggests that in order to take full advantage of the networking possibilities in the digital humanities, literary studies should switch its focus from teaching a canon or a history to teaching a form of participatory engagement with literary culture” (114). by arguing for a creative approach, whitson and whittaker contribute to the growing numbers who advocate a more critical, qualitatively focused digital humanities that engages design and artistic fields. lurking behind this suggestion is much bigger question: what role can or should literary historians and critics play in the changing landscape of the humanities? creative response and critical engagement, though related, are not coterminous interpretive acts. it is not clear that those trained as literary critics are prepared to teach or evaluate the former, nor is the professional institution of literary criticism prepared to embrace it as the basis for tenure and promotion (although both of these facts may be slowly changing). what whitson and whittaker envision requires a ground-up retooling of “criticism” as such, and thus a more vigorous and thorough defense of it than they offer in this book. amid the descriptions of wikipedia edits and the history of the “jerusalem” hymn, one wishes that a deeper connection were made to blake’s work—to how all these “virtual blakes” transform blake’s ability to speak to the present. that audiences do something other with blake’s work than critics is not, ipso facto, an argument against traditional criticism and pedagogy as such. if anything, the proliferation of blake in digital spaces points to the ongoing need to teach audiences critical close-reading skills, so that readers can better discern the signal from the noise in the glut of text that floods the web. it is beginning to sound as if this reviewer values expertise over amateur engagement, which is not the case. whitson and whittaker passionately demonstrate why students of blake need to take more seriously fan studies, media studies, and the potential insight that these fields offer into the afterlife of blake’s work. at the same time, attending to these fields necessarily invites deeper questions than this broad, wide-ranging book is prepared to answer. whitson and whittaker begin to light the path toward a twenty-first-century model of humanities education; it remains up to others to step forward. “another, but far more amiable enthusiast”: references to catherine and william blake in the literary gazette and la belle assemblée (1830) “another, but far more amiable enthusiast”: references to catherine and william blake in the literary gazette and la belle assemblée (1830) by angus whitehead angus whitehead (whitehead65_99@yahoo.co.uk) is an assistant professor in literature in english at the national institute of education, nanyang technological university. he has published a number of papers on blake, most recently “‘an excellent saleswoman’: the last years of catherine blake” (blake) and is coeditor (with mark crosby and troy patenaude) of a collection of essays exploring a range of new critical approaches to william blake, re-envisioning blake (2012). angus is currently completing a book-length microbiographical study of william and catherine blake’s residence at 17 south molton street. he has also published a number of papers, reviews, and interviews related to writing in singapore, and is currently editing collections of short stories by arthur yap and local trade unionist and journalist gregory nalpon (1938-78), the latter to be published in august 2013. in blake records, g. e. bentley, jr., my thanks to keri davies for reading an earlier draft of this paper and for his suggestions concerning blake and women’s fashion.observes that “the publication of cunningham’s life of blake provoked a spate of comment upon blake in the spring of 1830.”g. e. bentley, jr., blake records, 2nd ed. (new haven: yale university press, 2004) [hereafter br(2)] 503. bentley records six traced reviews of allan cunningham’s the lives of the most eminent british painters, sculptors, and architects, vol. 2 (1830), that appeared in the first quarter of 1830.see br(2) 503-10. a quotation from cunningham’s life of blake about the poet-artist’s visions of william wallace and edward i appeared in the times on 27 jan. 1830 (see angus whitehead, “‘visions of blake, the artist’: an early reference to william blake in the times,” blake 41.1 [summer 2007]: 46-47). the same passage was printed in the rural repository; or, bower of literature (17 july 1830): 30-31. this note first discusses a reader’s query, in all probability written in response to one of these reviews, concerning the whereabouts of catherine blake, then goes on to record another review of volume 2 of cunningham’s lives, which makes several new references to william blake. i previously i have suggested that the numerous notices and reviews of cunningham’s work, besides bringing blake to a wider audience, may have alerted readers to the plight of his widow.mark crosby and angus whitehead, “georgian superwoman or ‘the maddest of the two’? recovering the historical catherine blake, 1762-1831,” re-envisioning blake, ed. mark crosby, troy patenaude, and angus whitehead (basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, 2012) 105. such publicity perhaps helped catherine blake to sell her husband’s works and thereby support herself independently. over a year earlier, shortly after publication of j. t. smith’s nollekens and his times, which features a biography of blake, the book illustrator, antiquary, and barrister william twopenny wrote to smith asking, “can you tell me where the widow of blake the artist lives?”letter of 19 nov. 1828, quoted in g. e. bentley, jr., “william blake and his circle: a checklist of publications and discoveries in 2006,” blake 41.1 (summer 2007): 40. by the early spring of 1830 the whereabouts of catherine appears to have become a more public concern. blake records reveals that on saturday, 6 february 1830, the london literary gazette; and journal of belles lettres featured a long anonymous review of the most recently published volume of cunningham’s lives, focusing exclusively upon the life of blake and reprinting four sustained excerpts.see br(2) 503-04. presumably to fit in more text, the literary gazette merges cunningham’s original paragraphs into considerably longer paragraphs. either the descriptions of catherine in the first and final excerpts, or perhaps the concluding passage in cunningham’s volume itself, describing catherine in widowhood, inspired a reader to contact the paper concerning the present residence of catherine blake. on saturday, 20 february 1830, in its “to correspondents” section, the literary gazette printed a reply: to clericus: we do not know the address of the widow of blake, the artist; but have no doubt she might obtain liberal sums for such remains of his productions as may be in her possession. we will make some inquiries.“to correspondents,” literary gazette 20 feb. 1830: 125. a year earlier, catherine had moved from the residence and employment of frederick tatham to independent lodgings in the vicinity of fitzroy square.see “‘an excellent saleswoman’: the last years of catherine blake,” blake 45.3 (winter 2011-12): 85-89. it is unknown whether the literary gazette was able to trace her address for “clericus,” presumably a potential customer or benefactor. however, the paper’s response would have informed its readership of catherine’s existence and need, as well as the perceived worth of blake’s “productions,” which, according to the literary gazette, might command “liberal sums.” ii in blake records, bentley records a “cursory review of cunningham” and two essays devoted to blake that appeared in march 1830.see br(2) 510-24. a further review of volume 2 of cunningham’s lives, not recorded in blake records, also appeared in march 1830, in that month’s issue of the society and women’s magazine la belle assemblée, or court and fashionable magazine, founded by john bell.anon., “monthly view of new publications, music, the english and foreign drama, the fine arts, literary and scientific intelligence, &c.,” la belle assemblée, or court and fashionable magazine ns no. 63 (march 1830): 120-23. after discussing cunningham’s lives of benjamin west and james barry, the anonymous reviewer notes, “the life of another, but far more amiable enthusiast, poor william blake, who could not only ‘call spirits from the vasty deep,’ but compel them to arise and appear before him, is, in its details, singularly striking.”la belle assemblée 121. the reviewer quotes glendower’s words to hotspur in the first part of shakespeare’s henry iv. blake had drawn visionary heads of both historical figures, which were acquired by john linnell (see martin butlin, the paintings and drawings of william blake [new haven: yale university press, 1981] #743, 744, 745). there follows a fairly lengthy quotation from cunningham, which discusses blake’s drawing of visionary heads.the passage quotes “to describe the conversation which blake held in prose with demons … the latter the aspect of a demon” (cunningham, the lives of the most eminent british painters, sculptors, and architects, 2nd ed., vol. 2 [london: john murray, 1830] 170-72). presumably for the sake of space, paragraphs are merged. the reviewer comments on the visionary heads of william wallace and edward i discussed in the quotation: many a time have we ourselves seen these portraits; and we may here add, that the “artist of some note,” alluded to by mr. cunningham, is almost as great an enthusiast as blake himself—a gifted enthusiast in his own beautiful art, and a yet greater enthusiast in the science, or pretended science, of judicial astrology. his portrait, sketched by the pen, not the pencil, of cunningham, is nearly as graphic as that of blake. some other capital stories of the worthy pair are given; but, for these, we must refer the reader to the work.la belle assemblée 122. in the final paragraphs of the review, the writer, while disappointed with cunningham’s lives of john opie and george morland, deems the life of fuseli the most important in the volume. the reviewer is of course referring to blake’s friend the artist and astrologer john varley, at whose behest a number of the visionary heads were drawn, c. 1819-25.see br(2) 346-66. the observation that “many a time have we ourselves seen these portraits” may suggest that s/he was acquainted with blake. the reviewer almost certainly knew varley and was acquainted with linnell, the probable owner of the visionary heads of william wallace and edward i by early 1830.butlin #734, 735. the letter of “clericus” to the literary gazette provides further evidence that customers and therefore potential means of income continued to seek out catherine blake in her last years. such customers must have assisted catherine’s ability to retain her independence in her resumed role as printer and seller of the paintings, drawings, and other works still in her possession, from the spring of 1829 until her death two and a half years later. la belle assemblée’s discussion of blake in its review of cunningham’s lives demonstrates that a significantly larger number of people were aware of blake and his work in the years following his death than has, until recently, been recognized in blake studies.see also keri davies, “blake in the times digital archive,” blake 41.1 (summer 2007): 45-46. that he is discussed so positively in la belle assemblée, the vogue of its day, adds to the developing sense that he had a distinct female audience.see keri davies, “mrs bliss: a blake collector of 1794,” blake in the nineties, ed. steve clark and david worrall (basingstoke: macmillan press, 1999) 212-30; angus whitehead, “‘mrs chetwynd & her brother’ and ‘mr. chetwynd,’” blake 42.2 (fall 2008): 75-78. blake had previously been employed by the magazine’s founder, john bell.bell had published several works featuring blake’s commercial engravings (see br[2] 813, 815, 818fn). further research may reveal whether he had any further connection to la belle assemblée.  it is possible that he knew engravers who worked for the magazine. a careful examination of its issues c. 1806-27 (from its founding to the end of blake’s life) might reveal fashion prints engraved by blake.see blake’s attention to fashion detail in his illuminated books, e.g., “the little boy found.” see charlotte davies, “blake and costume in the songs of innocence and of experience,” blake journal 9 (2005): 74-86. in this context it is interesting to note blake’s knowledge of fashionable women’s clothing, as evidenced in his references to “stormonts,” “balloon hats,” “robinsons,” and “the queen of frances puss colour” in an island in the moon,david v. erdman, ed., the complete poetry and prose of william blake, newly rev. ed. (new york: anchor–random house, 1988) 457. as well as his living above first a tailor, william enoch (c. 1803-04), then a staymaker, mark martin (c. 1805-21), and even alluding to stays in his annotations to joshua reynolds. see angus whitehead, “mark and eleanor martin, the blakes’ french fellow inhabitants at 17 south molton street, 1805-21,” blake 43.3 (winter 2009-10): 91-92. both varley and linnell, almost certainly sources used by the anonymous writer of the review, knew numerous upper-class fashionable women both socially and professionally, and may therefore have had something to do with the appearance of this review. la belle assemblée is an unexpected and apparently unlikely publication in which to find such an admiring reference to william blake. review: essick, ed., william blake, songs (e) robert n. essick, ed. william blake. songs of innocence and of experience. san marino: huntington library, 2008. [60 pp. of color pls.] + 185 pp. $24.95, hardcover. reviewed by alexander s. gourlay alexander s. gourlay (agourlay@risd.edu) teaches at the rhode island school of design. this book is an intellectual and critical gem that is also a great bargain. as an edition of a classic collection of challenging poems for use by serious but not necessarily expert readers, it is as successful as stephen booth’s classic facsimile and critical edition of shakespeare’s sonnets (yale, 1977). essick provides a foundation of perspicacious historicist/materialist contextual and critical analysis, drawing upon (without getting bogged down in) more than two centuries of blake scholarship; the critical apparatus as a whole promotes a sophisticated appreciation of the contrary states of the human soul while gently steering modern readers, innocent and experienced, around the accumulated obstacles to subtle understanding of these poems and their illuminations.   the edition begins with full-size color reproductions of all but one of the pages now present in the huntington library’s handsome copy e of songs, which blake assembled for thomas butts from leaves printed at various times in various colored printing inks, plus three additional pages: “the clod and the pebble,” from the huntington’s copy n (substituting for the crudely finished posthumous impression of this plate that was added to copy e), the uncolored “a divine image” (actually present only in copy bb), and the tailpiece from copy c, a page omitted from all but a few early copies of songs. the recto/verso printing of the pages blake had at hand when he assembled copy e entailed some further compromises on his part—“laughing song” appears in both innocence and experience, and the “nurses song” in experience is effectively salvaged from an accidental double impression in order to make use of the print on the opposite side. as facsimiles of blake’s pages the reproductions are not completely successful: the original pages of copy e are matte, for one thing, and these reproductions are all printed on glossy paper, with what appears to be a glossier finish on top (or perhaps just glossy ink). in a note of corrigenda (blake 42.3 [winter 2008-09]: 111), essick acknowledges that despite elaborate measures by the imaging and printing team, the reproductions do not accurately represent the tone of the paper on which blake’s images were printed—the background is “too brown, with a slight rosy hue,” with a result that is occasionally reminiscent of what used to be called flesh-colored bandages. the only page on which the tone of the paper is accurate, reports essick, is “the tyger,” which is unfortunate in another way, since in that case the original background has been sunned so badly that the paper tone in the glossy reproduction approximates a varnished stationer’s bag; i think it would have been forgivable in a non-archival facsimile like this one to have manipulated the image digitally to undo or at least minimize the sun damage, which has as little to do with blake’s intentions for copy e as the posthumous “clod and the pebble” leaf that essick judiciously replaced.  despite these problems, the colors of blake’s images appear to be considerably truer here than in most reproductions by offset lithography, and the details are very sharp; i have not seen these reproductions side by side with the originals, but they look right. copy e is a fine middle-period copy, despite its somewhat heterogeneous constituents, and its rough edges reveal things about blake’s publishing and printing that are obscured by more polished copies. further, it is good to have printed images of its pages to compare with those of better-known, more elaborate late copies such as z (library of congress; blake trust/orion/oxford) or w (king’s college; princeton/blake trust). the luminous, zoomable digital images of most copies in the william blake archive <http://www.blakearchive.org> are both magnificent and immensely useful, but there’s still a place for reading and comparing paper-based images of blake’s works. indeed, this facsimile is much more successful in one respect than most songs editions in color: blake’s careful reinforcement in ink of many of the original printed texts in this copy and the overall sharpness of the images in this edition make it possible to read almost all the poems in the facsimile pages with only a little strain, so that readers can experience text and image together, as essick recommends and blake intended. the general introduction efficiently and clearly covers the potentially controversial matter of blake’s unique publishing techniques without gratuitously venturing into the disputed territory that lies there, outlines the intellectual and historical contexts that are most relevant, and locates in blake’s biography the distinguishable but overlapping projects of writing, printing, and issuing the copies of the songs as finished works. a general account of the development of the innocence poems follows, once again placing them in broad cultural and historical contexts and then more immediate ones. essick outlines the rhetoric and ideology of innocence and then explains the complex binary of innocence and experience that emerged from the original project: "just as blake’s innocence is not heaven, or even eden, his state of experience is not hell. both are visions of our own world seen from fundamentally different yet interconnected perspectives. experience reverses or parodies (in a non-comic fashion) the core habits of mind and themes of its contrary state” (16). the commentaries upon the individual poems address both illustrations and text efficiently and fairly thoroughly, thoroughly enough that when this edition first appeared i was a little reluctant to use it with beginning readers of blake. i worried that such comprehensive and authoritative discussion of the major issues in each poem would leave little for students to discover for themselves. instead, the commentary usually has the opposite effect; far from being inhibited by essick’s impressively learned guidance, students respond to the lucidity and cogency of his readings with lucid, cogent insights of their own. the great david v. erdman’s the illuminated blake (anchor–doubleday, 1974), by contrast, is even more thorough in its own way, and even more open-ended in its analysis, but when students emulate it they tend to absorb its weaknesses rather than its strengths, confounding stray minutiae with minute particulars. frontispiece of aphorisms on man, 2nd ed. (author’s collection). in general this edition is more oriented toward literary than visual-arts interests. although essick’s knowledge of blake’s art-historical contexts rivals that of anyone in the business, he is more likely to adduce an extra-blakean text in his commentary than a picture by another artist. i teach blake to art and design students, who need to know about literary analogues as much as anyone, but they engage blake’s composite art most energetically when they see, for instance, the frontispiece to innocence (and consider its poetic “introduction”) in conjunction with blake’s 1788 engraving after fuseli for lavater’s aphorisms on man. it may be, however, that the critical apparatus that would be necessary to help less visually oriented readers to negotiate the pictorial languages of the songs would be so voluminous as to be impractical. as it is, reference to specific contextual material of all kinds is limited, and the literary analogues that are quoted tend to be texts that enlighten readers in relatively straightforward ways: thus wesley’s hymn for children “gentle jesus, meek and mild” is cited in the discussion of “the lamb,” but matthew prior’s “a true maid,” in which leering dick inquires about the health of a young woman named rose, is not mentioned in connection with “the sick rose,” though it is strongly (if rather obliquely) resonant with it and as surely known to both blake and much of his original audience as wesley’s hymn. the typographic texts that accompany each commentary are, at least theoretically, punctuated (and paginated) as in the pages reproduced. some might argue that rigorous adherence to the punctuational vagaries of this particular copy is inappropriate in an edition intended for general readers, since the marks that appear in this copy are so unconventional that they provide little help for those having trouble parsing blake’s poetic diction, and the unique punctuation of copy e does not appear to reflect concerted authorial intention. in this instance i believe that essick is correct in minimizing intervention. an editor of an illuminated blake text who supplies punctuation along conventional lines risks obscuring ambiguities that students can fruitfully explore, and in an edition of a particular copy of a particular illuminated book there is little point in concocting a super-text based on principled extrapolation from all copies, as erdman did in his editions of the poetry and prose. essick sensibly follows the practice of the blake archive, which aspires to reproduce and transcribe all copies of the illuminated books in all their individuated multifariousness.   if the textual principle here corresponds to that of the archive, the practice diverges—even not intervening, it turns out, can take different paths and present thorny difficulties. essick’s transcriptions differ in small ways from both those of the archive and, by my eyes, from the text as it appears in copy e. for instance, essick’s transcription of “infant joy” omits the clearly formed if textually ambiguous dash-oids that the archive includes at the end of lines 2 and 5, a decision unremarked in the textual notes. because the pen-and-ink reinforcement of the printed texts in songs e often goes beyond touching up to complete rewriting, it could be argued that the generally sparser punctuation in writing ink is more deliberate than the printed punctuation, which blake often left so faint, as in “the tyger,” that for reading purposes it isn’t there. but even blake’s very deliberate-looking repunctuation in ink isn’t consistently more conventional or helpful than what it replaces, as in line 17 of the “introduction” to innocence, where a clearly printed comma is overwritten with a clear, and clearly unconventional, period in ink. in the end, though, i’m not sure it would have been very edifying if essick had explained and adjudicated every punctuational crux that the text presents: his transcriptions are helpful and careful, and the reproductions of the pages are clear enough that readers can see for themselves how complex blake’s punctuation can be. if it should come to pass that the huntington library decides to offer a second edition of this fine book, i am not sure what i would recommend changing. the sturdy-seeming sewn hardcover costs only a few dollars more than the blurry paperback edition of copy z now offered by oxford, so a less expensive binding isn’t particularly pressing, even for classroom use (i am very taken with the double bookmark ribbons, one for innocence and one for experience, or one for image and one for commentary). i would like to see the imaging and printing experts take another stab at rendering the background color of most pages more correctly, and tweaking “the tyger” to lose its hollywood tan, but i suspect that changing to a less glossy paper would endanger the accuracy of the color and the clarity that make this edition so satisfactory for reading. let’s just hope it stays in print for a long time, in any form.  summer 2011 blake/an illustrated quarterly 37 the title of the 2009 petit palais exhibition and its accompanying catalogue offers an extraordinarily loaded and complex epithet: “the visionary genius of english romanticism.” both the show and the book, an illustrated collection of essays and other reactions written in or translated into french, were clearly shaped by the need to (re)introduce blake to a french audience. as is pointed out more than once in the book, there had been no major exhibition of blake’s art in the country since 1947. indeed, for the second half of the twentieth century blake’s reputation had rested largely on his writings, which were repeatedly translated, and were championed by a number of french cultural heroes, including pierre berger and andré gide. at the petit palais, by reuniting series of drawings, prints, and paintings, attention was focused instead upon the processes involved in blake’s image-making and his role as a visual artist, not to overturn but to augment the received perception of him as a writer. initially the text seems not only to support but to develop these aims. following daniel marchesseau’s overview of blake’s place in the french cultural consciousness—a necessary act of reflection that prepares the ground for further interrogation of his work—comes a piece of poetic prose by yves bonnefoy. when confronted with this dynamic personal response, we may suspect that the aim of the catalogue is to eulogize blake rather than to examine his works with any critical rigor, but this would be a false impression. coming directly after bonnefoy’s lyrical descriptions, michael phillips’s précis of blake’s career offers a revealing counterpoint in its clear and authoritative outline of the social, historical, and cultural conditions under which blake created his works. it soon becomes apparent that it was wise to insert this more conventional introductory essay after bonnefoy’s more subjective interpretative text. the two essays are delicately balanced, and illustrate nicely the difficulties involved in staging any exhibition of blake’s work. phillips’s intricate technical knowledge complements and enriches bonnefoy’s more emotive portrait of the artist, adding a sense of wonder at blake’s practical innovation to an admiration of his imagination. furthermore, by reminding the reader of the laborious process of mediation between the conception of the artist and the production of the work, phillips challenges the notion of a visionary experience directly recorded, without diminishing in any way the reputation of the artist. parallels between blake’s philosophies and his techniques are suggested, laying a constructive foundation for new viewers to reflect upon these correspondences in the diverse works on display. the correspondence between the act of cutting or biting into the plate and blake’s notion of man’s innate knowledge is used to illustrate the intimate connection between his practice and his attitude towards the rationalist theories of locke and newton. phillips deals with the allegorical nature of blake’s techniques most evocatively, however, in relation to songs of innocence and of experience. describing with great delicacy the process of printing these poems, he suggests that the transparent quality of the medium allowed reflected light to shine through from the paper beneath, recalling the notion of the divine image in man, and lending a new meaning to the phrase “illuminated printing.” occasionally phillips’s descriptions of blake’s radical innovations in printmaking are oversimplified, and succumb to the myth of the artist as an isolated genius, born before his time. but in general, by locating precedents for blake’s images, emphasizing the sheer industry involved in their construction, and outlining the pressures—artistic and financial—experienced by the artist, phillips provides the viewer with a contextual framework that is enabling rather than restrictive. this, though, is where the catalogue begins to lose its way as a means of introducing these works by blake to the french. the text might easily have been confined to something like these first three essays, within which much of the information in the later material might have been incorporated (céline mansanti’s useful survey of blake’s reception in france, for example, or david steel’s work on blake and andré gide). it would then have been sufficient simply to reproduce all the exhibited works, dividing these into smaller isolated series, tracing a broad overarching narrative of blake’s career as seen in the exhibition itself. this would have given a clearer shape and identity to the catalogue as a whole, by virtue of both a loose chronology and at least an element of visual and thematic structure. instead, there are twenty-six short essays, ranging from around 1500 to 3000 words, each focusing tightly on one issue—aesthetic, contextual, iconographic—relating to blake’s practice. with so great a range of authors and subjects some repetition is inevitable, but it is hard to excuse the large overlaps among several of the essays. most striking, and unfortunate, are the echoes between phillips’s introduction and the text by martin butlin that immediately succeeds it, but these are only the first of many. by the third description of blake’s visit to westminster abbey, the reader could be forgiven for skimming the remaining twenty or so entries. this is not to say that the texts are uninteresting. many of the themes are well selected and the writing is often illuminating, helping to contextualize blake’s work without simply inserting it into conventional histories. bethan stevens, for example, provides a sophisticated analysis of visions of the daughters r e v i e w s michael phillips, ed., with the assistance of catherine de bourgoing. william blake (1757-1827): le génie visionnaire du romantisme anglais. paris: paris-musées, 2009. 256 pp. €39, hardcover. reviewed by philippa simpson 38 blake/an illustrated quarterly summer 2011 of albion in relation to the writing of mary wollstonecraft and the analogies she draws between slavery and marriage. although alert to the points of disagreement between blake and wollstonecraft, who occupied quite distinct positions on the matter of sexual liberation, stevens provides a fascinating exploration of blake’s unorthodox belief that slavery caused suffering not only to those enslaved but to their masters. via a close reading of blake’s treatment of the body and the language employed by wollstonecraft, stevens constructs a forceful argument for reevaluating visions in light of lateeighteenth-century politics, both domestic and international. the complexity of blake’s political and cultural positioning is further drawn out in saree makdisi’s fascinating examination of the concepts of unity and difference and david fuller’s essay on the divine comedy images, while the intricate webbing of patronage, heritage, and homage is sensitively examined by andrew loukes in reference to blake’s portraits of poets. other authors offer evidence of blake’s engagement with cultural trends, in particular jared richman, who considers the wide popularity of milton’s poetry and blake’s peculiarly biographical interest in him. this approach is developed by martin myrone, who skillfully situates blake’s interest in the supernatural and the sublime in the context of a contemporary vogue for the gothic, while insisting upon the particularity of his practice. there is also a welcome passage on blake’s immediate predecessors by william pressly, in which the artist is seen as the legatee of a specifically british tradition. this theme of national heritage is also treated by robin simon in his discussion of songs of innocence and of experience. simon interprets blake’s engagement with familiar symbols of british identity as a means by which the artist introduced the quotidian or colloquial into a visionary language, by adopting the informal idiom of wordsworth, or through reference to the game of cricket. although the implication that a sense of national pride can be found in blake’s work is unconvincing, simon offers an interesting consideration of blake’s aesthetic choices and the way in which they embodied a rejection of reynolds’s theories of art. simon’s close reading of blake’s pictures, however, is an exception which points up one of the problems of the catalogue: the concentration upon blake’s writing. while simon and some others tackle blake’s symbolic visual imagery, a large number of the essays, among them some of the most engaging, are entirely dedicated to the poems, or gesture towards the images only as illustrations. naturally, a great deal of explanation and interpretation is needed in introducing a nonenglish-speaking audience to blake as an author. while it may be of great interest to consider the effect of translating blake’s work into french, or the prophetic nature (or otherwise) of europe and america, it is arguable, however, whether this is the place to do so. this is not to demand a strict separation of text from image, which would be contrary to the nature of the works themselves; when faced with so vast a subject it may perhaps have been more helpful to have limited discussion to the objects on display, of which there were more than enough to furnish a rich investigation of blake’s career. this in turn flags another, and perhaps more serious, flaw: the inadequate and incoherent use of illustrations. images are referred to throughout by catalogue number, which (as not all objects in the show are reproduced) leaves the reader searching through pictures that are not in numerical order, and are rarely positioned in clear relation to the text. this is compounded by inconsistency, when martin butlin (uniquely) decides to employ the numbering system from his catalogue the paintings and drawings of william blake in order to direct readers to relevant (but unexhibited) works. with so varied a selection of themes, and very little clear structure to their arrangement, this added confusion is particularly keenly felt. furthermore, the texts are too short to deal with their subjects adequately, and too often the writers seem to have been trapped into oversimplification, as in the case of david alexander, who discusses blake’s relationships with his patrons with no critical look at the artist’s investment in establishing a reputation as romantic outsider, or elizabeth c. denlinger, whose study of catherine blake reads as an unsatisfactorily token gesture towards a forgotten partner. in essence, while the questions raised by the catalogue are apposite, and many essays introduce themes that have not been dealt with in the french literature on blake, it might have been more productive to have limited the overall length of the text and included a fuller bibliography for those who wanted to explore further. this would then have provided the space for what would really have stimulated an enthusiasm for blake’s pictures: high quality reproductions of the works themselves, clearly arranged to allow for comparison and cross-referencing. without these, the catalogue can only help to reinforce the notion that blake’s true achievement was literary, and his images merely illustrative or incidental. this concise study of blake’s religion starts from the recent work done on blake’s moravian background and the possible overlaps between moravianism and swedenborgianism. in the process, it seeks to elucidate what is meant by blake’s radicalism, which, as the author points out, is a very slippery concept. the book starts with a rejection of e. p. thompson’s theory that blake’s mother was a mugglemagnus ankarsjö. william blake and religion: a new critical view. jefferson: mcfarland & company, 2009. viii + 163 pp. $39.95, paperback. reviewed by christopher rowland the blakes at their press the blakes at their press by robert n. essick and jenijoy la belle robert n. essick (professor emeritus, university of california, riverside) and jenijoy la belle (professor emerita, california institute of technology) co-authored their first publication on blake in 1975. 1. blake, dante in the empyrean, drinking at the river of light. pencil, pen and ink, and watercolor, 52.8 x 37.1 cm., datable to 1824–27. butlin #812.98. tate collection, reproduced by permission; digital image courtesy of the william blake archive. blake’s penultimate watercolor illustrating the divine comedy pictures dante drinking from the river of light in paradise (illus. 1). beatrice resides in glory right of the river. other figures in the design are not directly summoned by dante’s text, including a seated male center left holding a scroll and with eyes turned upward. roe identifies him as a “bearded poet” (190). below him, sketched in tentative pencil lines, is a figure standing left of an easel bearing a canvas (illus. 2). this painter, who wears a high-waisted gown, may be female; she is holding a palette in her left hand and a brush in her right. 2. detail of illus. 1, area shown approximately 9.7 x 11.6 cm. tate collection, reproduced by permission; digital image courtesy of the william blake archive. between these representatives of the arts is a loose sketch of what looks like a sturdy table with a figure standing at its left end. roe was the first to observe that these motifs show “an engraver’s press” as “a man bends over” it (190). variant descriptions are provided by klonsky (“a man working at an engraver’s bench,” 162), butlin (“a scene of painting and engraving,” 1: 587), and tinkler-villani (“an engraver,” 283). baine offers the most detailed description: “blake, like michelangelo in his last judgment and raphael in his disputa, has sketched himself, in flames of inspiration. he is working at his press; and at an easel, palette and brush in hand, his earthly emanation, catherine, looks modestly down, as in his portrait of her …, presumably tinting some of the sheets which he is working off” (128). this tiny and tentative vignette deserves further consideration, especially because it calls to mind blake’s own professional activities as etcher, engraver, and printer. several design elements support roe’s claim that the furniture is an etcher’s or engraver’s rolling press. the legs of the table are particularly substantial and hence unfashionable for the early nineteenth century, but supports of this type were necessary to keep a press stable during operation. the confused sketching at the right end of the table (or bed of a press) includes elongated and wavy forms that appear to radiate from an unpictured center. this may be the star wheel used to turn the upper roller of an engraver’s press. a rectangle within these spokes, more tall than wide, could be the beginnings of the large side verticals of a rolling press, although these would normally extend much higher.these large vertical members are variously called “posts,” “cheeks,” and “jumelles.” see faithorne 49-58 for an illustrated description of an eighteenth-century rolling press. a curved form resembling a crescent moon appears right and slightly above the vertical. this may be a partial end view of a roller, although out of normal position. further above and to the right, but partly obscured by the painter’s easel, are the head and shoulder of another human form, perhaps seen from behind. all these motifs are sketchy, tentative, and perhaps little more than placeholders for subsequent development with pen, ink, and watercolors. although the gender is far from certain, the figure at the left end of the press may be wearing a gown (hence female?) or a printer’s apron (thus either gender). in comparison to the willowy female painter below, this figure at the press looks heavier and stolid and thus is more probably a man. he leans to the right, arms extended and raised at roughly forty-five degrees, with a small rectangular object in one or both hands. this worker is placing either a copperplate on the bed of the press or a leaf of paper atop a plate already in position. it is difficult to believe that blake, when drawing such a scene, was not thinking about his many years operating a rolling press.for blake’s ownership of a rolling press, see bentley 33, 468, 610fn, 633. although we cannot read his mind, we can read our own and claim with confidence that we cannot look upon this vignette without thinking of blake, his wife, and their teamwork as printers.we know that catherine had become skilled at printing by 1800, and probably at a much earlier date. as blake writes in a letter to william hayley of 26 nov. 1800, “my wife’s illness not being quite gone off, she has not printed any more” impressions of little tom the sailor, a broadside etched in relief and white line (e 714). catherine also printed intaglio plates; see blake’s letter to his brother james of 30 jan. 1803: “my wife has undertaken to print the whole number of the plates for” hayley’s life, and posthumous writings, of william cowper (e 726). blake was very probably the “dirty hands” craftsman when the two were printing, managing the inking and placement of the plate on the bed of the press. thus, if the figure on the left is holding a copperplate, this is blake. the figure on the right may be catherine, the “clean hands” worker, preparing to turn the wheel.viscomi describes how blake would “ink” the plates and “bring them to the press bed,” while catherine would operate the star wheel to “pull the bed under the roller” (117). baine’s proposal that catherine is the figure at the easel merits consideration, although it is highly unlikely that she is “tinting some of the sheets” that blake is “working off” at the press (128). prints on paper would be placed on a table, not an easel, for coloring. if, however, the figure on the left is handling paper, then this is catherine, with blake on the right. we are unable to decipher with confidence the forms at the far right of the vignette. the way they suggest a figure seen in right profile with right arm bent upward may be accidental. if purposeful, this might be an alternative sketch for a person operating the press, his or her right hand reaching out for a spoke of the star wheel. we are not claiming that these are literal portraits of one or both blakes; rather, they are figures that evoke their presence, laboring at a task of great importance to their lives—and now to ours because of the products of their endeavors. some subsidiary motifs lead toward other associations. the jagged forms above the bed of the press suggest flames; the rounded forms, particularly those left of the printer on the left, may be clouds or smoke. this may be a scene of “printing in the infernal method,” to quote the famous characterization in the marriage of heaven and hell of how blake printed his illuminated books (e 39). the flames above the press are “the fires of hell,” associated not with “torment and insanity,” as the angels see them in the marriage, but with “the enjoyments of genius” when viewed from the perspective of the imaginative artist (e 35). the spokes of the star wheel also are flame-like, perhaps a visual pun on the heat and light emanating from a star. blake claimed, in a letter to william hayley of 1800, that “my fingers emit sparks of fire with expectation of my future labours” (e 709). here, one of the tools necessary for those labors emits spokes of fire. the hellish implications are complemented by the final member of the printing team, sketched lower left. this figure, more probably male than female, stands or sits while looking right and perhaps up at the printer on the left. his bat wings are characteristic of blake’s representations of a spectre or devil. in this context, the figure also reminds us of a “printer’s devil”—that is, an apprentice black with ink—and the “mighty devil folded in black clouds, hovering on the sides of the rock” in the marriage.e 35. scholars have associated the “mighty devil” with blake himself and the “rock,” like the “flat sided steep” in the same passage, with a copperplate—see erdman, the illuminated blake 103-04 and eaves, essick, and viscomi 125. because he is “folded in black clouds,” this may also be a mythologized printer’s devil. for pictures of bat-winged devils, see the job engravings of 1826, plate numbered 3, and several dante watercolors, including butlin #812.32, 34, 37, 38, 39, 41, 42. he may be “a good naturd devil,” helpful when printing infernally, or even one like the “angel, who is now become a devil,” and “is my particular friend” (letter to hayley of 7 october 1803, e 737; marriage, e 44).  these devilish characters and activities, particularly if situated in “a printing house in hell” (marriage, e 40), may seem an intrusion into, or even a criticism of, dante’s celestial vision in the passage illustrated from the thirtieth canto of the “paradiso.” although this perspective may have some merit, there are larger themes at play in both the poem and blake’s design that indicate compatibility more than critique. dante refers to how his “course” in life was “bounded” by “the limit of his skill,” “as each artist’s is” (dante 3: 268). these limits are surpassed when he drinks from the river of light, itself related typologically to arethusa, the river of poetic inspiration. dante’s “sight” is “kindled afresh”; he can now see “with ease” the “full dimensions” of heaven (dante 3: 270, 273). the expansion of vision beyond the material, the ways in which the arts promote that revelation, and the unity of art and true religion are all basic to blake’s own beliefs. as blake wrote on his laocoön engraving, “christianity is art” and “the divine body … manifests itself in his [man’s] works of art (in eternity all is vision).”e 274, 273. the laocoön inscriptions (but not the picture of the statue itself) are now datable to c. 1826–27, the period in which blake was working on his dante designs. according to john clark strange, blake gave samuel palmer an impression of laocoön and said to palmer, “you will find my creed there” (bentley 726). blake’s inclusion of scenes of artistic creation within his dante watercolor acknowledges and foregrounds their shared sense of visionary awakening. the inclusion of printing with poetry and painting in the dante designs elevates what was taken in blake’s day as a mere craft into the higher realm of the arts. blake implies a similar valorization when he names himself on the title pages of several illuminated books as the “author & printer” rather than the “author & artist” or “author & illustrator.”there is no natural religion, the book of thel, songs of innocence, songs of experience, and milton (e 2, 3, 7, 18, 95). other illuminated books of the 1790s and jerusalem name blake as only their printer. he reconfigures and thereby criticizes the ordering of the arts in his time, a restrictive hierarchy that contributed to his marginalized social position, as an engraver and printer, in early nineteenth-century london. such interweavings of the personal, the political, and the transcendent are a central feature of blake’s poetry and designs, as they are in dante’s divine comedy. works cited baine, rodney m. “blake’s dante in a different light.” dante studies 105 (1987): 113-36. bentley, g. e., jr. blake records. 2nd ed. new haven: yale up, 2004. blake, william. the complete poetry and prose of william blake. ed. david v. erdman. newly rev. ed. new york: anchor-random house, 1988. [abbreviated as “e”.] butlin, martin. the paintings and drawings of william blake. 2 vols. new haven: yale up, 1981. dante. the vision; or hell, purgatory, and paradise, of dante alighieri. trans. henry francis cary. 2nd ed. 3 vols. london: taylor and hessey, 1819. [henry crabb robinson states that blake consulted this translation while working on his dante designs (see bentley 426).] eaves, morris, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi, eds. william blake: the early illuminated books. london: william blake trust/tate gallery, 1993. erdman, david v. the illuminated blake. garden city, ny: anchor-doubleday, 1974. faithorne, william. the art of graving and etching. 2nd ed. london: a. roper, 1702. klonsky, milton. blake’s dante: the complete illustrations to the divine comedy. new york: harmony books, 1980. roe, albert s. blake’s illustrations to the divine comedy. princeton: princeton up, 1953. tinkler-villani, v. visions of dante in english poetry. amsterdam: rodopi, 1989. viscomi, joseph. blake and the idea of the book. princeton: princeton up, 1993. lord tennyson’s copy of blake’s illustrations of the book of job (1826) lord tennyson’s copy of blake’s illustrations of the book of job (1826) by sibylle erle sibylle erle (sibylle.erle@bishopg.ac.uk), frsa, is senior lecturer in english at bishop grosseteste university lincoln, author of blake, lavater and physiognomy (legenda, 2010), co-editor of science, technology and the senses (special issue for ravon, 2008), and volume editor of panoramas, 1787–1900: texts and contexts (5 vols., pickering & chatto, 2012). with morton d. paley she is now co-editing the reception of blake in europe (bloomsbury). she has co-curated the display blake and physiognomy (2010–11) at tate britain and devised an online exhibition of tennyson’s copy of blake’s job for the tennyson research centre (2013) <http://​www.​lincstothepast.​com/​exhibitions/​tennyson/​tennyson-​blake-​and-​the-​book-​of-​job>. apart from reception, she is working on “character” in the romantic period. we now know not only that alfred, lord tennyson, owned a copy of william blake’s illustrations of the book of job, but also that it had pride of place in his collection at farringford on the isle of wight in the early 1860s. according to a list kept at the tennyson research centre in lincoln, he displayed it on his drawing-room table well before he received alexander gilchrist’s life of blake (1863) and well before the general blake revival. his wife, emily, recorded in her journal that tennyson acquired blake’s job on 9 april 1856. it is one of the 215 published “proof” copies (65 on french paper and 150 on india paper) printed in 1826 by james lahee, since the word was erased after these copies had been printed. tennyson’s copy is on india paper.the watermark j whatman turkey mill 1825 appears on pls. 4, 7, 8, 13, 18, and 21 (see bentley, blake books p. 519, on the watermark). the copy was, in fact, a present from benjamin jowett (1817–93), the regius professor of greek at oxford and a long-term friend of the tennysons. jowett had been introduced in 1852 in twickenham, where tennyson was living at the time: “he [tennyson] came, and the poet and ‘philosopher’ were charmed with each other” (abbott and campbell 1: 198). after tennyson moved to farringford, he regularly invited jowett to stay with him and his family over christmas. jowett would visit during the year as well, but stay in lodgings nearby (abbott and campbell 1: 339). since he took an interest in the controversies about the bible, jowett had gone to germany in the 1840s and familiarized himself with higher criticism, which laid the foundation for his the epistles of st. paul (1855). he acquired his copy of job (possibly from john linnell) before february 1845, when he is known to have shown it in oxford to the poet and critic francis turner palgrave (1824–97), who summarized his impressions in a letter to his mother: “i have seen nothing so extraordinary for a long time. some [engravings], as of job in misery and of the morning stars singing for joy, are beautiful, some, as of a man tormented by dreams and the vision of the night, are most awful” (quoted in bryant 138). it was most likely this, his own copy, that jowett decided to give to tennyson. jowett was attacked and persecuted because his analysis in the epistles of st. paul’s use of the greek language and literary devices was considered to be heretical by his oxford colleagues. in the introduction to his reading of the first epistle to the thessalonians, he outlines his radically new approach: there is a growth in the epistles of st. paul, it is true; but it is the growth of christian life, not of intellectual progress,—the growth not of reflection, but of spiritual experience, enlarging as the world widens before the apostle’s eyes, … with the changes in the apostle’s own life, or the circumstances of his converts. (1: 3) to deny differences of thought and character in different persons, or in the same person at different times, or to deny the still greater differences of ages and states of society, renders the scripture unmeaning, and, by depriving us of all rule of interpretation, enables us to substitute for its historical and grammatical sense any other that we please. (1: 14) jowett may have identified with job, who was deserted and criticized by his friends, and may have presented blake’s job to tennyson as a gift of comfort because tennyson had many hostile reviews of maud (1855).jowett seems to have finished his “on the interpretation of scripture” (1860), in which he expounds higher criticism, during a visit to the isle of wight. charles laporte, in drawing attention to jowett’s astute comments elsewhere on tennyson’s idylls of the king, notes: “it is supremely unlikely that jowett could have missed the resemblance of the arthurian legends to the scriptures. … by the idylls’s practical inception in february of 1856, tennyson had already begun to theorize and even aestheticize textual fragmentation of the sort discussed by jowett as ‘the great historical aspect of religion’” (81). from 1863, the year in which gilchrist’s two-volume biography was published, interest in blake as well as his works was rekindled. in july anne gilchrist sent tennyson a copy of the life of blake, explaining in the accompanying letter that she was fulfilling a wish of her late husband’s:i was given permission to include this letter (letter 6802) by the tennyson research centre, lincolnshire county council. earls colne halstead, essex july 4th 1863 dear sir, it was an often expressed intention of my dear husband’s when engaged on the accompanying “life of blake” to send you a copy; both in token of his own feelings of earnest admiration & gratitude towards you and also not without a hope that his book might, were it only for the subject’s value, win some share of your interest & sympathy. and now that you see under what mournful circumstances the work at last issues forth perhaps this fact of its coming to you from a hand that can never again be stretched out with a gift, will deepen the interest with which you read & make you cherish a kindness for the memory of the beloved author. i am dear sir, yours very faithfully & reverently annie gilchrist both volumes of the life contain plates and illustrations from blake’s works, and there are small designs or sketches at the beginnings or ends of the chapters (especially in volume 1). volume 2 has a foldout leaf with a schematic sketch of “chaucers canterbury pilgrims” as well as the characters’ heads beneath. at the end are illustrations from job and songs. we can be certain that tennyson read the book—all the pages of the first volume are cut, and so are most of the second volume’s, which means that he at least skipped through william michael rossetti’s catalogue. all his life tennyson felt uneasy about the value attributed to illustrations, and his relationship with his publishers, especially edward moxon, was strained in the late 1850s because of disagreements about designs commissioned for his poetry. as lorraine janzen kooistra has argued, by the 1860s tennyson’s poetry was swept up in “the craze for christmas gift books” (9). his very successful two-volume poems (1842) had, by the time he received blake’s job, gone through ten editions; moxon published the first illustrated edition in 1857 on his own initiative. this edition, the moxon tennyson, did not meet with tennyson’s approval. there is no need to expand on why blake was able to integrate image and text as he wished. tennyson, however, was expected to accept whatever the illustrator added in terms of style and symbolism. from his point of view, the illustrations were an unnecessary distraction. i think that anne gilchrist’s gift showed tennyson how much the rossettis had put their stamp on the biography when helping her to complete it, since the extent of their help is credited by anne in her preface (1: v-vi). further evidence for tennyson’s interest in blake is his copy of poetical sketches (1868), edited by richard herne shepherd and published by basil montagu pickering, the first edition to be published since the original printing of 1783.poetical sketches was the companion piece to pickering’s songs of innocence and [of] experience (1866), also edited by shepherd; songs was first published in typescript by pickering’s father, william pickering, in 1839 with the swedenborgian james j. g. wilkinson as editor. shepherd’s two small volumes were later combined and published as the poems of william blake, comprising songs of innocence and of experience together with poetical sketches and some copyright poems not in any other edition (1874). shepherd compares blake to tennyson in footnotes to the poems and concludes the preface: “we need make no elaborate apology for the less happy efforts of a poet who in his best things has hardly fallen short of the large utterance of the elizabethan dramatists, the pastoral simplicity of wordsworth, the subtlety and fire of shelley, and the lyrical tenderness of tennyson” (xiii-xiv). tennyson’s copy contains little sketches and doodles on endpapers and one or two pages (see illus. 1). most importantly, tennyson added a design to the half-title that echoes blake’s design for the title page of job (see illus. 2). 1. sketch on p. 11 of poetical sketches (1868). this figure, bathed in light, seems typically blakean, recalling, for example, the figure at the top of the brothers seen by comus plucking grapes from the designs to milton’s comus (butlin #528.3). thomas butts owned this watercolor and j. c. strange bought it at auction in 1853. i am grateful to robert n. essick for pointing this out to me. i have no evidence that tennyson knew either butts or strange. there are numerous little figures in volume 1 of gilchrist, but there is no obvious one that tennyson may have used as a model. besides, tennyson’s figure is clothed, and most of the little figures in gilchrist are naked. the scene, too, is very untypical of the designs used in gilchrist. image courtesy of the tennyson research centre, lincolnshire county council. 2. half-title of poetical sketches (1868). below is the title page of tennyson’s copy of job. images courtesy of the tennyson research centre, lincolnshire county council. by tradition job has been listed under tennyson’s bibles and is shelved with oversized books. it has been counted toward his interest in commentary on the book of job, of which there are three works in his library: le livre de job traduit de l’hébreu par ernest renan (paris: michel lévy frères, 1859), a commentary on the book of job with a translation by samuel cox (london: kegan paul, 1880), and lectures on the book of job delivered in westminster abbey by george granville bradley (oxford: clarendon press, 1887). the copy of le livre de job has underlining throughout. is it by tennyson? lectures on the book of job has long as well as short vertical lines in the margins, and the half-title is inscribed in latin “alfredo tennyson / baroni / poeta laureato / viro nobili nobili poeta” (“to alfred tennyson / lord / poet laureate / great man great poet”). the book was presented by the author, bradley, who was dean of westminster and chaplain to queen victoria. in cox’s commentary tennyson made a small pencil mark beneath the word “goel” on page 232: “and the great truth he would fain have cut deep on a rock for ever is, that god is his goel ” (231-32). to better find this page he earmarked it. tennyson considered projects relating to the bible and thought about writing his own version of the book of job, but none of these ideas materialized (tennyson 2: 52). he, however, thought of blake’s job not as an exegesis of an old testament book but as an illustrated book. according to one of the notebooks that contain lists and locations of the books at farringford, he kept it on display with a number of other books. around 1855 tennyson seems to have started cataloguing his library. most of the lists bear dates, and they are in different hands, suggesting that tennyson not only returned to this project over a period of years (the last notebook dates from 1887), but also recruited members of his family and friends to help with the task. it appears that he was moving his books around, but the list of illustrated books on the drawing-room table is unique because it is the only example of books’ being displayed on a table. it is also the last list in tennyson’s hand, covering two pages and amended by emily tennyson (see illus. 3). 3. list of works “on round table in drawing room.” blake’s job appears as “book of job” in the first column (see enlargement). image courtesy of the tennyson research centre, lincolnshire county council. “book of job” is in tennyson’s hand. in fact, judging from the handwriting (tennyson’s is the smaller and emily’s the larger), it appears that even though he started the list, she took over and possibly made it her own project (it includes books gifted to her as well as to her children). some titles have been crossed out, suggesting that the list was revised once, if not several times, and that the books were carefully selected for their purpose, which was to entertain and inspire guests. emily’s inventory of the house indicates that the drawing room was large, with a deal of expensive furniture, ideally suited for receptions. the list is not dated, but the preceding and succeeding lists are, thereby dating it to 1860 and 1861. the original binding of tennyson’s copy of job is lost; the book is bound like an ordinary library copy in a dark-blue cloth cover. “illustrations of the book of job blake” is written in gold lettering on the spine. according to the binding repair records, it was rebound in 1979.i am grateful to grace timmins for finding this information for me. job must have been rebound in the nineteenth century, to judge from the different kinds of paper used, but the conservation notes mention nothing of the old binding except “retain inscription on front end paper.” the first and final leaves—the front and back endpapers—are new paper dating from the 1970s. then there are two older-looking leaves that date back to the nineteenth century; the first, the flyleaf, is marbled on the recto and has tennyson’s signature on the verso (see illus. 4). 4. tennyson’s signature on the flyleaf of his copy of job: “alfred tennyson / farringford / freshwater i. w. [isle of wight]” (see enlargement). in the top right-hand corner in another hand is “shelf r2,” which identifies the original shelf location in tennyson’s library, now held at the tennyson research centre. image courtesy of the tennyson research centre, lincolnshire county council. the leaf after the two older-looking leaves is blank. in 1979, stubs were added to the inner margins of the leaves with the plates in order to attach them to the new binding; this conservation work is visible in the spine area. in the nineteenth century, additional blank leaves were introduced to protect the plates. they have offsetting of the plates on their versos; these stains show through slightly on the rectos of the interleaves. the interleaved paper is thicker and less flexible than the leaves with the plates, which have a soft feel to them. most of the leaves have foxing, and there are stains on the leaves with the plates, though they appear a lot weaker on the interleaves. the biggest stain is at its most prominent on the bottom right-hand corner of the title page and the bottom left-hand corner of the facing leaf, becoming fainter as we leaf back to the flyleaf. it is on the recto of the leaf protecting plate 1 but not on the verso. there are also other smaller stains in numerous places, both on the leaves with the plates and the interleaved paper. the foxing does not generally appear in the same places on these two types of paper, suggesting that they aged at different speeds. the leaf with plate 15 has a tear in the lower right-hand corner. tennyson’s copy of job was only rediscovered; during my visit to the tennyson research centre with diane piccitto in the spring of 2012, grace timmins, the collections access officer, produced it when diane asked if tennyson owned any works by blake.about a year later the times literary supplement printed a short notice about tennyson’s copy (no. 5753 [5 july 2013]: 3). as mentioned above, it is catalogued with his bibles but shelved with oversized books.its reference number is trc/at/538. the rediscovery of job is important insofar as it constitutes further evidence for tennyson’s interest in blake and, in particular, blake’s designs. the real discovery is that tennyson chose to display it alongside other illustrated books in such a prominent place. this was news to scholars of both blake and tennyson, since little work has been done on tennyson’s use of his books. that he had job out for his visitors to see and touch suggests that he may have wanted to show it off and also to talk about blake. bibliography abbott, evelyn, and lewis campbell. the life and letters of benjamin jowett. 2 vols. london: john murray, 1897. bentley, g. e., jr. blake books. oxford: clarendon press, 1977. ---. blake records. 2nd ed. new haven: yale university press, 2004. ---. the stranger from paradise: a biography of william blake. new haven: yale university press, 2001. bryant, barbara, comp. “the job designs: a documentary and bibliographical record.” william blake’s illustrations of the book of job. ed. david bindman. london: william blake trust, 1987. 103-47. butlin, martin. the paintings and drawings of william blake. 2 vols. new haven: yale university press, 1981. cormack, malcolm, with an afterword by david bindman. william blake: illustrations of the book of job. richmond: virginia museum of fine arts, 1997. essick, robert n. william blake, printmaker. princeton: princeton university press, 1980. gilchrist, alexander. life of william blake, “pictor ignotus.” 2 vols. london: macmillan and co., 1863. hoge, james o., ed. lady tennyson’s journal. charlottesville: university press of virginia, 1981. janzen kooistra, lorraine. poetry, pictures, and popular publishing: the illustrated gift book and victorian visual culture, 1855–1875. athens, ohio: ohio university press, 2011. jowett, benjamin. the epistles of st. paul to the thessalonians, galatians, romans: with critical notes and dissertations. 2 vols. london: john murray, 1855. laporte, charles. victorian poets and the changing bible. charlottesville: university of virginia press, 2011. lindberg, bo. william blake’s illustrations to the book of job. åbo: åbo akademi, 1973. raine, kathleen. the human face of god: william blake and the book of job. london: thames and hudson, 1982. rowland, christopher. blake and the bible. new haven: yale university press, 2010. sung, mei-ying. william blake and the art of engraving. london: pickering & chatto, 2009. [tennyson, hallam.] alfred lord tennyson: a memoir. 2 vols. london: macmillan and co., 1897. wicksteed, joseph h. blake’s vision of the book of job, with reproductions of the illustrations: a study. 1910. new york: haskell house publishers, 1971. review: william blake, national gallery of victoria international, melbourne william blake. national gallery of victoria international, melbourne, 4 april–31 august 2014. cathy leahy. william blake. melbourne: national gallery of victoria, 2014. 112 pp. au $29.95. reviewed by claire knowles claire knowles (c.knowles@latrobe.edu.au) is a lecturer in literature at la trobe university, melbourne. she has published widely on female romantic writers, and her book sensibility and female poetic tradition, 1780–1860: the legacy of charlotte smith was published in 2009. this exhibition at the national gallery of victoria international features the world-class collection of blake works housed there, an impressive 124 individual items spanning the length of his career. most of the gallery’s blake holdings were acquired in 1918–20 through the felton bequest.a wealthy businessman, alfred felton died in 1904, leaving a will that dedicated £383,163 to art and charity, “with half of the interest earned to be used in perpetuity to buy works for the national gallery of victoria.” the felton bequest “transformed the ngv into one of the most lavishly endowed public galleries in the british empire with greater funds at its disposal than london’s national gallery and the tate combined” (john mangan, “the bequest of a century,” age 12 jan. 2004). much of the ngv’s impressive collection of australian and international art is a direct result of the generosity of the bequest. these include thirty-six of 102 watercolors illustrating the divine comedy, two watercolors illustrating milton’s paradise lost, the set of twenty-two engravings to the book of job, and three prints from blake’s prophetic books. copies of songs of innocence and night thoughts were added to the collection in the 1980s, and other works have been acquired from time to time. because of the sensitivity to light of the works in the collection, the ngv’s blake holdings are displayed very infrequently; the last exhibition was held fifteen years ago, and the next one will probably not take place for at least another decade. images of the installation are courtesy of the national gallery of victoria. as befits one of the gallery’s most prized collections, the blake exhibition takes pride of place in the front section of the entry level of the ngv international. the exhibition space is perhaps most notable for its dramatic use of black: black backgrounds and black shades feature throughout the display. this use of black is an important element of the gallery’s attempt to limit the collection’s light exposure to a bare minimum. however, it also functions very effectively to draw the viewer’s attention to the works on display, throwing into stark relief the gorgeously saturated colors of blake’s illuminated prints. for those of us who have come to blake through the medium of his illuminated poetry, one of the most interesting aspects of the collection is its focus on works in which blake was a collaborator in the creative process, rather than sole progenitor. for example, the front room of the exhibition is dominated by the artist’s commercial reproductive engravings and illuminated prints. perhaps the most striking and topical of the former is blake’s idealized portrait of an indigenous family in new south wales. this engraving, based upon a drawing attributed to philip gidley king, lieutenant governor of norfolk island, was produced for john hunter’s important early history of australia, an historical journal of the transactions at port jackson and norfolk island (1793). it, along with engravings from john stedman’s narrative, of a five years’ expedition, against the revolted negroes of surinam (1796), reflects the sensitivity with which blake represented those suffering under the forces of colonialism during this period. “a family of new south wales,” engraved by blake after king for hunter, an historical journal of the transactions at port jackson and norfolk island (1793). image 18.8 x 16.1 cm. on sheet 30.8 x 24.3 cm. image courtesy of the national gallery of victoria. p8-1984. opposite these images are plates from one of several copies of songs of innocence known to have been printed before the addition of songs of experience in 1794. the ngv’s copy (x) is a characteristically subdued printing of the volume, with the gallery’s three vibrant examples of blake’s illuminated printing, housed in the same section of the exhibition, providing a stark contrast to the almost monochromatic palette of songs of innocence. indeed, if there is anything to be lamented about the ngv’s blake collection, it is that it does not have more examples of his strikingly illustrated prophecies. the plates that it does own, in particular plate 21 from the first book of urizen, depicting los, enitharmon, and orc, are fine examples of his work, and leave the viewer pining for more. the first book of urizen pl. 21, part of large book of designs (b). image 16.6 x 10.2 cm. on sheet 31.4 x 25.1 cm. image courtesy of the national gallery of victoria. felton bequest, 1920. 1027-3. from this section of the exhibition, we move into the larger part of the collection, which focuses on blake’s illustrations for the works of other authors. the gallery has a beautiful colored copy of the incomplete edition of edward young’s night thoughts illustrated by blake and a copy of robert blair’s the grave, a book commissioned to be illustrated and engraved by blake, though eventually his designs were engraved by louis schiavonetti. the exhibition also includes a wonderful copy of the third state of blake’s large engraving of 1810, “chaucers canterbury pilgrims.” although this engraving was a commercial failure, its highly detailed work engages with the canterbury tales in ways that repay careful attention. the final part focuses on commissions secured for blake through john linnell. the first of these is a series of wood engravings designed to accompany dr. robert john thornton’s school text the pastorals of virgil. these tiny engravings exhibit an expressiveness that we have come to associate with the artist, but they are perhaps overshadowed by the gallery’s two beautiful examples of blake’s watercolors for milton’s paradise lost commissioned by linnell for his own collection. linnell also commissioned illustrations of the book of job in 1823, and the gallery’s very fine set of these engravings allows the viewer to see clearly the intricacies of blake’s interpretation of the story of job. his designs appear all the more striking when rendered in black and white. the jewels in the crown of the ngv’s collection are the thirty-six illustrations for dante’s divine comedy, commissioned by linnell in 1824 and unfinished at the time of blake’s death in 1827. the gallery contains beautiful examples of completed watercolors, such as the vestibule of hell and the souls mustering to cross the acheron, alongside evocative incomplete works, such as the goddess of fortune. the range of drawings is impressive in that it allows for a detailed comparison to be made between the saturated, deep colors in which blake depicted the underworld and the paler, more ethereal colors associated with the world of paradise. the vestibule of hell and the souls mustering to cross the acheron. 52.7 x 37.1 cm. image courtesy of the national gallery of victoria. felton bequest, 1920. 989-3. the goddess of fortune. 52.7 x 37.3 cm. image courtesy of the national gallery of victoria. felton bequest, 1920. 993-3. the catalogue accompanying the exhibition includes gorgeous and finely detailed reproductions of all of the works on display, and would be a welcome addition to any blakean’s library. review: burning bright: william blake and the art of the book, john rylands library, university of manchester what new is there to learn from old familiars? burning bright: william blake and the art of the book. john rylands library, university of manchester, 8 february–23 june 2013. reviewed by sibylle erle sibylle erle (sibylle.erle@bishopg.ac.uk), frsa, is senior lecturer in english at bishop grosseteste university lincoln, author of blake, lavater and physiognomy (legenda, 2010), co-editor of science, technology and the senses (special issue for ravon, 2008), and volume editor of panoramas, 1787-1900: texts and contexts (5 vols., pickering & chatto, 2012). with morton d. paley she is now co-editing the reception of william blake in europe (bloomsbury). she has co-curated the display blake and physiognomy (2010-11) at tate britain and devised an online exhibition of tennyson’s copy of blake’s job for the tennyson research centre (2013). apart from reception, she is working on “character” in the romantic period. the discovery of new etchings in manchester made international headlines in january 2013. in britain on monday the 21st the independent reported, “hundreds of lost william blake etchings discovered at a manchester library.” the article, written by nick clark, said, “researchers … stumbled upon a treasure trove” when they “found about 350 engraved plates designed by blake.” the treasure-hunt language can be traced back to the web pages of the john rylands library and therefore essentially the press office of the university of manchester. this publicity caused a few ripples but the excitement was short lived, as the “discovery” applied to the stacks of the library rather than the works known to have been created by blake. still, what happens to blake in the public sphere matters. all images reproduced by courtesy of the university librarian and director, john rylands library, university of manchester. the dark temporary exhibition space on the first floor of the late nineteenth-century gothic building of the library not only contained these recently rediscovered treasures—the exhibition booklet said “some exciting new finds from the library’s collections” and the display board “many of these works have previously lain undetected”—but also and more importantly showed a large collection of blake’s commercial art. in addition, the display contextualized the reception of blake’s craftsmanship by juxtaposing designs with images by the ancients, the pre-raphaelites, and the members of the arts and crafts movement, such as samuel palmer, william holman hunt, and walter crane, as well as a facsimile published by william muir and an example of a newly illustrated edition—a blake poem illustrated by jacynth parsons from the 1927 edition of songs of innocence published by the medici society. the mixture of books, sheets, designs, and images resonated with what this blake exhibition was about: the art of the book. burning bright occupied three rooms because it spilled into the adjacent spencer and crawford rooms. it was curated by the archives and visual materials manager, stella halkyard, and grew out of colin trodd’s visions of blake: william blake in the art world 1830-1930 (2012) as well as the efforts of his students, who, after receiving special training on prints, etchings, and engravings, found what was on display. was burning bright throwing new light on blake? how excited should we still be? the answer is—a bit. “burning bright” is, of course, a familiar expression, used twice in blake’s “the tyger” (1794): “tyger tyger, burning bright, / in the forests of the night; / what immortal hand or eye, / could frame thy fearful symmetry?” the last stanza repeats the first but changes the last line to “dare frame thy fearful symmetry?” (e 24-25). in the section on john gabriel stedman’s narrative, of a five years’ expedition, against the revolted negroes of surinam, in guiana, on the wild coast of south america; from the year 1772, to 1777 (1796), the exhibition booklet quoted stedman on the “tyger-cat” whose eyes sparked “flashes like lightning” (11). a sense of audacity, i think, was maintained and creatively constructed in the display. the story to be told in this review is how the display handled, or rather could be seen to resist, the discovery narrative imposed through the media, because burning bright made a statement about the legacy of blake’s art (it said “creative impact” on the board). the language of a supposed treasure hunt through the stacks of the library was countered directly by the image on the board at the entrance: we saw one of the explorers, equipped with a magnifying glass, poring over the pages of illustrations of the book of job. in view of the treasure narrative it was surprising that this explorer didn’t wear white gloves and that her pendant, hanging on a long necklace, was touching the pristine page. i couldn’t tell how excited she was, since she stared intently at the image in front of her. i had to admit grudgingly to myself that i envied her the access and proximity to the physical object. to remedy this lack or loss, the john rylands offered all visitors a session on a computer, where i could use—as she did—a magnifying tool to study this book, as well as blake’s night thoughts, page by page and close up. that the library digitized both illustrations of the book of job and the hand-colored copy of night thoughts and has made them available online may be a small solace to all of you who will want to examine these specific copies. at the entrance, opposite the board with that posed photograph, we were introduced to blake. on this particular board the emphasis was on blake the visionary poet, which is one of many blakes we could have had: it said, “by the age of eight blake was already showing signs of visionary spirituality,” and next to it a little pink boy, one of blake’s many images of children, served as a reminder that boys and not girls had to cope with wearing pink in the eighteenth century. burning bright showcased a selection of the blake collection at the john rylands, but it seemed that none of what was on display was actually new; that is, there was no work of art that had not previously been listed in g. e. bentley, jr.’s blake books (1977) and blake books supplement (1995) or robert n. essick’s william blake’s commercial book illustrations (1991), though the show included some newly discovered copies of works with his commercial engravings, most of which have since been included in bentley’s annual checklists in blake and the online compilation of those lists, “william blake and his circle.” there may be small adjustments to be made. bentley, for example, doesn’t say that stedman’s narrative at the john rylands is colored (see bbs p. 255). on the top shelf of the first vitrine there was a copy of william hayley’s ballads (1805), which was opened to show “the lion,” facing p. 100 and illustrating “the lion. ballad the nineth [sic].” next to it sat hayley’s triumphs of temper, which, according to its label, was illustrated with plates engraved by blake after maria denman. the label, in other words, contradicted the title page, which attributes the designs to maria flaxman, john flaxman’s half-sister. (maria denman was flaxman’s wife’s sister, who was known as maria flaxman after john and ann flaxman adopted her.) on display was the newly illustrated twelfth edition of the work, published in 1803. this edition, with six plates engraved by blake, is sufficiently rare to deserve some commentary. as mark crosby discusses, the work had previously been illustrated with seven engravings after thomas stothard, and blake’s plates were used in only two editions, 1803 and 1807, but not in any subsequent ones because of wear (123). he argues further that john flaxman and lady harriet hesketh were disappointed with the published plates, even though blake and hayley had “edited” the drawings together (111-12). crosby suggests that hayley must have liked the proofs that blake would have printed. he thinks that hayley sent the plates to london to be printed: “if blake or catherine had been responsible for printing the plates, it is highly likely that they would have spotted the imperfection [on pl. 6] and corrected it” (123). bentley lists this copy under “manchester” in the online “william blake and his circle.” robert blair’s the grave (1808), which was displayed on the bottom shelf, is known too, and bentley had previously found a copy of “unrecorded format” in the whitworth art gallery (see bb p. 526). the second vitrine had george cumberland’s thoughts on outline (1796) and mary wollstonecraft’s original stories (1796) at the top, and jacob bryant’s a new system, or an analysis of ancient mythology (1774-76) and stedman’s narrative below. the cumberland, not listed in bbs, is included in the online “william blake and his circle,” and the manchester bryant was already listed in bbs (p. 203). according to bbs (pp. 264-65), the john rylands owns copies of both the 1791 and 1796 editions of wollstonecraft’s original stories. here we could see what is special about the later edition: the frontispiece has been cut and pasted—not printed—onto the page facing the title page. bentley does not comment on this feature, which might suggest that it is an anomaly, though this should surely tell us something about the art of the book. but the label was silent. the second vitrine was the most thought provoking, i think, because of a plate from bryant’s new system (vol. 2, facing p. 410). the label indicated, as was to be expected, that blake probably engraved a small number of its plates when he was apprenticed to james basire in the 1770s. it also said that “bryant’s writing had a profound impact on blake and formed an important source and inspiration for the symbolic systems he developed in his own works.” this point is easy to support, because blake referred to bryant when he talked about antiquities in his description of the ancient britons in a descriptive catalogue (1809). it is impossible to know for sure which plates might have been engraved by blake (see essick 117 and bb p. 537). the plate depicts four figures, three of which have animal heads. what the impact on blake may have been i realized once i had moved on to the next vitrine, which contained robert thornton’s edition of virgil’s pastorals (1821) and erasmus darwin’s the botanic garden (1791), because the second figure in the bryant plate, identified as hermes and compared to osiris, was echoed by the dog-headed anubis figure from “fertilization of egypt” as engraved by blake after henry fuseli for darwin. the hermes/osiris figure in bryant has a human head with wavy hair and an elongated snout of a dog; the crocodile that he is holding down with his left foot has a beak with teeth. the crocodile is a sacred animal associated with the nile. it was tempting to indulge this visual parallel between the illustrations for bryant’s new system and darwin’s the botanic garden, but unfortunately the more we think about it the less it will stand up. this is because the anubis figure is in fuseli’s sketch of “fertilization of egypt.” the label involuntarily raised the question of blake’s input into his commercial engravings. while he would have followed the instructions and guidance of basire in the 1770s, it is more than likely that he followed fuseli’s when working on the plate for the botanic garden. there is more. essick (46-47), who examines “fertilization of egypt,” discusses the plate’s relationship with the text and documents that the winged floating figure originates in fuseli’s sketch. the exhibition label, however, asserted that “the bearded rain-god displayed here is entirely blake’s invention.” that fuseli gave blake a free hand when he was working up the sketch is probable, but this notion doesn’t reveal how close they were, how often they met, and indeed how fuseli treated his engravers (on their relationship, see todd). the exhibition label, in short, made a bold and unsubstantiated claim. what we know for sure is that the two drawings, fuseli’s and blake’s, show this rain god (see essick pls. 68 and 69). bentley lists the 1791 as well as the 1795 editions of the botanic garden, but the copy of virgil’s pastorals is not listed anywhere, which means that we are technically dealing with a discovery. the sense of disappointed excitement continued as i walked through to illustrations of the book of job (spencer room) and night thoughts (crawford), the highlights of burning bright. in their edition of the night thoughts designs, grant et al. have already documented the john rylands copy. they draw attention to the quality of the coloring and point out that this copy was most likely colored by blake as well as his wife, catherine (1: 53). the information in the crawford room was vague because label and board contradicted each other: one ascribed the coloring to blake, the other to the husband and wife team. the huge book and its wonderful designs stopped me in my tracks. the book was open at pages 72 and 73, revealing an image of christ on the right-hand side. the figure is walking with actual nails sticking out of red-rimmed wounds in his hands and feet (the wound in his right foot is obscured). he is wearing a crown of thorns and drops of blood are running down his forehead. christ is looking down and reaching out to someone on his left who is outside the image. grant et al. also note that the copy belonged to the second earl spencer, george john spencer (1758-1834), before it came to the john rylands (1: 66). when she decided to have a memorial library built for her husband, john rylands’s widow bought the spencer collection as part of its foundation. the bookplate dates the acquisition to 1894, which means that the acquisition of night thoughts preceded the official opening of the library by six years. as i walked into the spencer room, i encountered illustrations of the book of job. it is one of the one hundred copies printed on drawing paper in march 1826 by james lahee for john linnell. we could look at plate “14,” “when the morning stars”; the paper was in very good condition. according to the label, illustrations of the book of job was published by blake in 1825. this date, of course, originates from the imprint and is incorrect. the label also named the students who discovered the copy; it suggested that this was the main find of the blake project carried out at the library, and the display board spoke of “blake’s ‘[as] exquisitely engraved as grandly conceived’ masterpiece.” the story to be told here is about the previous owner. a lot of work has been done on blake collectors already, and this one deserves more attention. according to the bookplate (which could be accessed via the computer in the crawford room), this job was presented to the john rylands by richard hawkin, esq., of darwen in lancashire. hawkin, who became friends with edward carpenter (1844-1929), the social and gay rights campaigner, settled in york, where he stood as the labour candidate during the local municipal elections (having been nominated by the york labour representation committee) for monk ward on 2 november 1903. he campaigned for a housing reform to benefit workers, a municipal cemetery, and playgrounds. hawkin was present at the inauguration of the guild of freemen of the city of york on 9 september 1953 and published a history of the freemen of the city of york in 1955. judging from the bulletin of the john rylands library, by the time hawkin died in 1968, he had been a generous donor for many years; his collection included ninety-two volumes relating to blake—facsimiles of the works as well as biographies and literary studies—many materials about yorkshire, and also a “small selection of anarchist literature … and pamphlets relating to the anti-slavery movement” (2). in the “notes and news” section at the beginning of the bulletin the unidentified editors evidently wrongly assumed that the job was, like the other works by blake in hawkin’s possession, a facsimile (3). the remainder of the temporary exhibition space was filled with books about blake (gilchrist, swinburne, yeats and ellis), about ten books by artists and writers influenced by blake, and finally muir’s facsimile of songs of innocence and parsons’s illustration to blake’s “the little black boy.” fascinating materials: compelling visual parallels. it became clear, for example, that plate “14” (“when the morning stars”) from job inspired crane, who reproduced the angelic figures in line and form (1900), because in the margin of the book, open at pages 18 and 19, crane acknowledges his source. in her blog entry of 14 january 2013 (john rylands library special collections blog), halkyard wrote that the researchers “uncover[ed] a significant hoard of books containing designs and engravings,” which, “due to their dispersal across our collections … have previously lain undetected.” in the next sentence she talked about “‘finds.’” i appreciated the single quotation marks but want to stress that what was extraordinary about this display was the freshness of the ink and color of the images in the books. i looked at them with admiration: they hadn’t been opened in many years, and the golden upper-arm bands in “europe supported by africa & america” from stedman’s narrative burnt brightly in the dark and filled my eyes. halkyard, too, by the way, used such a metaphor when she described the impact blake has had on those who came after him. manchester was well worth a visit. references <http://www.library.manchester.ac.uk/searchresources/imagecollections>. [search for the digitized night thoughts and job.] <http://www.library.manchester.ac.uk/rylands/exhibitions/web/burningbright>. [exhibition site.] bentley, g. e., jr. blake books. oxford: clarendon press, 1977. [abbreviated as bb.] ---. blake books supplement. oxford: clarendon press, 1995. [abbreviated as bbs.] ---. blake records. 2nd ed. new haven: yale university press, 2004. [abbreviated as br(2).] ---. “william blake and his circle: publications and discoveries from 1992.” <http://library.vicu.utoronto.ca/collections/special_collections/bentley_blake_collection>. bulletin of the john rylands library 51.1 (1968): 2-3, 7. crosby, mark. “‘a ladys book’: blake’s engravings for hayley’s the triumphs of temper.” blake in our time: essays in honour of g. e. bentley jr. ed. karen mulhallen. toronto: university of toronto press, 2010. 105-30. essick, robert n. william blake’s commercial book illustrations: a catalogue and study of the plates engraved by blake after designs by other artists. oxford: clarendon press, 1991. grant, john e., edward j. rose, michael j. tolley, with david v. erdman, eds. william blake’s designs for edward young’s night thoughts. 2 vols. oxford: clarendon press, 1980. todd, ruthven. “two blake prints and two fuseli drawings.” blake 5.3 (winter 1971-72): 173-81. review: mark crosby and robert n. essick, eds., genesis: william blake’s last illuminated work mark crosby and robert n. essick, eds. genesis: william blake’s last illuminated work. san marino: huntington library, art collections, and botanical gardens, 2012. facsimile plus 58 pp. $80.00/£58.00, hardcover. reviewed by morton d. paley morton paley (mpaley@berkeley.edu) is co-editing the reception of william blake in europe, to be published by bloomsbury in 2016. he is continuing his work on the art of george romney. blake’s genesis is at the same time one of the best preserved and least known of his manuscripts. the reasons for both are closely related. before its accession by the huntington library, it had only two owners—john linnell and his family (genesis 28) and henry e. huntington, passing from the first to the second via christie’s sale of 15 march 1918, where it was bought for huntington by the dealer george d. smith. its existence has posed something of a conundrum: eleven leaves, containing the text of the first three and a half chapters of genesis in blake’s hand, accompanied for the most part by rather faint pencil drawings, with two unfinished and somewhat enigmatic title pages in watercolor. as it was in the possession of linnell when william michael rossetti saw it (genesis 28), it may have been commissioned by linnell. it is, however, odd that linnell would do this when the great dante series that blake was painting for him was in progress, and no account of it appears in the detailed blake-linnell financial records. scholarly attention to it has been sparse.perhaps that is why this volume does not include a bibliography. there is, however, a useful, detailed index. after rossetti’s brief remarks, it was touched on by damon in 1924 (william blake 218, 220-21). piloo nanavutty’s substantial article, limited in subject to the second title page, appeared in 1947. robert essick’s detailed description of the manuscript was published in his catalogue of the huntington blake collection in 1985. a few books, most recently my own traveller in the evening (260-66), discuss it briefly. an important essay, “blake’s illuminated manuscript of genesis,” by robert r. wark, intended for publication in 1974, appears here (17-22) for the first time, along with the editors’ own rich commentary and notes.one of the most respected scholars of his time in the field of british art, wark was head of the huntington art gallery from 1956 to 1990. the circumstances under which his essay came to exist only in two proof copies are recounted in genesis 16. all eleven leaves are reproduced photographically in martin butlin’s great catalogue raisonné of blake’s printings and drawings (#828.1-11), and they also appear on the huntington library’s web site, <http://​emuseum.​huntington.​org>, but this is the first facsimile ever to be published. the crosby-essick edition begins, appropriately, with the facsimile itself. this is a beautiful piece of work, bringing out even very faint pencil lines, faithfully reproducing the delicate watercolors of the first two pages, and presenting the reader with pages of the size and approximate texture of the original. the editors’ commentary and notes appear in the last part of the book (23-51), and i will discuss these along with the images themselves, starting with the two title pages, one of which is considered a substitute for the other. in the first title page we see a central male figure, legs apart, left arm reaching out to the side. he is naked, but the i of the title hides his genitals. there are faint vertical lines on the stem of the i, suggesting a grecian column. the man has a large halo behind him, and his right arm is reaching up as far as it can. above and to his right, a figure with a short beard extends his left arm out almost to the hand of the naked figure. he sits in a sphere, the arcing far end of which has been colored rose. at the top center, above the area between g and e, a being with his back to the viewer leaps athletically toward the right, arms and legs stretched out horizontally as if to emphasize his speed. at the three o’clock position is a white-bearded man, whose right arm reaches up like the central figure’s but whose hand is turned out flat, palm up, supporting what seems to be a wisp of cloud. his feet touch blue waves. wearing a pale-blue gown, he stands in an ovoid nimbus. near the bottom of the design are tongues of flame, and below these are four indistinctly sketched figures, of which three raise arms upward. blue water flows on the left, with a little of it on the right, and the surface of the earth is on its way to becoming the greensward of the title page to come. what is going on here? even one unfamiliar with blake would recognize the central figure as adam, standing on a curve of the newly created earth. the three others, going clockwise, are jesus, the holy ghost, and god the father. featuring the trinity is unusual for blake, as damon (william blake 220) observes; crosby and essick suggest this was the idea of linnell, a trinitarian baptist. god the father has separated the land from the sea, following gen. 1.9-10: “and god said, let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appeare: and it was so. and god called the drie land, earth, and the gathering together of the waters called hee, seas: and god saw that [it was] good.” blake’s rendition of the father, however, is of a weak old man, stiff as a post. (blake had trouble envisioning an admirable-looking father: “first god almighty comes with a thump on the head,” he wrote, “then jesus christ comes with a balm to heal it.”)“[a vision of the last judgment],” e 565. jesus in contrast is young and strong, so strong that his left arm bursts out of the sphere he inhabits. his close-fitting body stocking is blue, in contrast to the holy ghost’s above, which is red, the color of caritas. the latter’s giant wings have been penciled but not reinforced in ink or colored. he leaps across the top of the picture space, arms and legs extended in the air. his head is not visible; what looks like a doodle of a bird (the traditional dove?) appears in its place. all save the bottommost figures can thus be identified with adam and the trinity. this is, obviously, a scene of creation, in keeping with the gothic-lettered title “ge/ne/sis[.]” all four traditional elements are prominent: earth, air (emphasized by the holy ghost’s flight through space), water, and fire. man is newly created (without, as yet, eve), and jesus reaches out toward adam’s upraised hand, “in,” as the editors put it, “an act of physical and spiritual connection with adam” (37). the drawing is not, however, entirely positive in effect, with the flames and the indistinct creatures below them, and what may be a powerful storm, indicated in gray and black, falling diagonally from near the first e down behind and below n. it may be that this was not the effect desired by patron and/or artist, for blake produced a second title page. as wark astutely comments: the first is dynamic, awesome, and sublime (in the eighteenth-century sense of the word); the second is balanced, benign, and beautiful. the first suggests gloom, enlivened only by hell-like fires, as the setting for genesis; the second suggests something more akin to the traditional eden. (genesis 21) indeed, one’s first impression of the second title page is of lush greenery. adam now stands on a green earth, with two thick-trunked trees growing at the bottom of the design. the one at the left is presumably the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, with its invitingly rich fruit (although of course the tree of life was also fruited) (gen. 3.22). the letters of the title are green and gold, and from some of them sprout plants, such as wheat, a symbol of fertility, growing from the g, and a rose-colored lily from the middle horizontal of the second e. nanavutty 117 identifies the latter as the turk’s cap lily, and says it is known among herbal writers as the lily of calvary. the editors (39) accept her identifications, as they also do her suggestion that blake could have found some of his flower images and their significations in robert john thornton’s temple of flora (1799-1807). among other flower symbols identified are the sacred lotus with pods full of seed, and three roses signifying martyrdom. the genesis title is rich in vegetation, some suggesting fecundity and others prefiguring christ’s self-sacrifice. two persons of the trinity are represented much as in the first title page, except that the holy ghost is uncolored and his head turned away from the viewer, and above and below the father’s ovoid mandorla areas that previously were blue are now black. jesus, however, is shown much differently. he stands upright, arms cruciform, wearing a diaphanous garment. from his left hand a scroll (the text of genesis?) flows downward to the upreaching right hand of the still-haloed adam. below are the four figures we previously encountered, seated on the greensward between the two trees. their heads are now much more distinct, although their bodies, which are human, remain merely sketched in. the leftmost, wearing a crown and scaly armor, has a grotesque human head. he is the only one still shown as reaching upward (with his left arm). next is the stylized head of an eagle, also crowned. the third head is probably a (chinese?) lion’s. fourth comes an ox-headed being. these may be, as damon (william blake 220-21) suggests, “the four evangelists, represented … as four demons.” the ox traditionally represents luke, the lion mark, and the eagle john. according to the editors (40), “no beast is traditionally associated with st. matthew,” but they note that “typological parallels with the evangelical beasts may also lie behind blake’s design, including the vision of a man, lion, ox, and eagle in ezekiel 1:10.” these were the prototypes of widely diffused images of the four evangelists, with matthew being the man, or sometimes a winged man who could also be identified as an angel (see, for example, lefrançois). however, blake has made this crowned being as grotesque as, or even more grotesque than, the other ones, with his scaly (or mailed?) arms, goggle eye, and outthrust tongue. identifying these four does not explain their puzzling presence as caricatures, which no one has done to date. one other question about both title pages remains unresolved. why does the pillar-like i obscure adam’s loins? it is unlikely that this was blake’s choice. as lately as the inscription in yah and his two sons he had written, “art can never exist without naked beauty displayed” (e 275). was this linnell’s decision? linnell had no objection to accepting commissions that involved painting out or altering nude figures by the prime practitioner of the victorian nude, william etty,see “exhibition notes” to the john linnell exhibition at the fitzwilliam museum, cambridge, 17 july-4 november 2001, <http://​www.​fitzmuseum.​cam.​ac.​uk/​gallery/​linnell/​exhibitionnotes.​htm>. accessed 6 nov. 2012. and this could tie in with the possibility that it was linnell who expurgated and partially obliterated some of the four zoas drawings (see damon, william blake 399). that could, however, have been done by someone else in linnell’s household, and as linnell died in 1882 and genesis was auctioned in his estate sale in 1918, there was also a considerable interim during which someone else could have made these alterations. the remaining nine leaves bear pencil drawings (with occasional touches of watercolor) as well as text. 3 shows above its “chap: 1” heading god the father flanked by a winged angel on either side. he reaches down with his left hand in a gesture that the editors compare (41) to the so-called ancient of days of the europe frontispiece. (it also resembles the down-pointing arm of the central figure in plate 15 of the [first] book of urizen.) the emphasis on threesomes is continued in 4, with three winged angels below the first verse, and three soaring over the sea below the third. leaping out of the waves is a “frolicsome cetacean” (41). a pencil design at the bottom is indistinct. next, three figures, which crosby and essick identify as the trinity (42), stand gesturing in 5, facing the newly created adam, who holds his arms up in amazement. as the editors observe, this design is the tailpiece for chapter 1, as the first was the headpiece, and this arrangement, repeated for the following chapters, “conforms to eighteenth-century conventions for illustrated books” (35). the headpiece for chapter 2, 6, depicts the creation of eve, a subject, as the editors point out, that blake treated in a number of other paintings and drawings. this drawing is far from finished, so its details are subject to interpretation. eve appears to have just emerged from the side of the supine adam, with the father behind him. to the left is a figure who may be satan (42-43). satan is not, of course, present at the creation of eve in the bible, but that would not have deterred blake from representing him here, as a foreshadowing of things to come. crosby and essick remark: “all four beings complicit in the fall are represented” here (43). the tailpiece, 7, is another creation of eve, but in this rendering she floats in the air above the sleeping adam, and above her fly three winged figures in parallel formation, the one nearest us being the father. adam’s upper chest is wrapped in a band that may close the wound of eve’s delivery. the editors compare the color-printed drawing elohim creating adam (butlin #289), in which the deity blindly gropes the head of his anguished creation. here blake’s vision of an inhuman and dehumanizing god closely approaches robert lowell’s in “the quaker graveyard in nantucket”: … cast up the time when the lord god formed man from the sea’s slime and breathed into his face the breath of life, and blue-lung’d combers lumbered to the kill. the lord survives the rainbow of his will. by 8 the fall has already occurred, unpictured. adam and eve are now abjectly on their knees facing someone or something not clear enough to be identified. the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the fruit of which they have eaten (a partly bitten one lies before adam), stands before them, but eve, at least, is not facing it. at the base of its trunk lies what could be the enormous head of a serpent, with its body training around the trunk, although when blake draws serpents with out-of-scale heads, they are usually elongated rather than round as here. although they have not yet put on coats of skins, adam kneels so that his genitals are hidden, and eve is in a venus pudica position (as the editors point out [44]). since they already know good and evil, it cannot be that the couple is kneeling to the serpent; it is likely, as the editors conjecture (44), that the lines at the right are the beginnings of a sketch of god. the tailpiece, 9, is the most unfinished of the drawings, and so its subject is not immediately evident. crosby and essick, however, argue convincingly on the basis of some of blake’s other representations (44) that this sketch would have shown the expulsion from paradise. there can be little doubt about the subject of 10, in which a figure lies on the ground, another stands bowed over it, and a small-headed form flees at the right, with a giant being in the air pursuing him.damon (a blake dictionary 152) suggests it is abel’s ghost. eve may also be represented in lines suggesting someone kneeling at the body’s head. the first murder much occupied blake during his last years: it is the subject of his last illuminated book, the ghost of abel, and also of his 1826 tempera the body of abel found by adam and eve (butlin #806, tate britain, reproduced here as fig. 11). it may be, as he copied blake’s earlier drawing on this subject in 1821 (butlin 1: 481), that linnell had a particular interest in it as well. the theme of blake’s final drawing is forgiveness. he chose to eliminate the end of gen. 4.15, “lest any finding him, should kill him,” and his heading to chapter 4 concludes “& of the forgiveness of sins written upon the murderers forhead.” the ghost of abel cries “life for life!” but jehovah says “lo i have given you a lamb for an atonement instead / of the transgres[s]or, or no flesh or spirit could ever live” (1.14, 2.10-11, e 271-72). the mark the lord puts upon cain is a sign of god’s forgiveness, as is shown in blake’s endpiece drawing for 11, where the father bends over the kneeling youth and embraces him. several traditional prototypes have been put forward for this design; the editors suggest and reproduce rembrandt’s return of the prodigal son. this powerful etching is indeed similar in form to blake’s drawing, but blake introduces a detail that is consistent with his own purpose: god kisses cain’s forehead. either the mark is being set in this manner, or god is kissing the mark, but in either case the point is the forgiveness of sins. in writing out the text of genesis, blake created headings that cast the events of each chapter in the terms of his own myth. these headings give the late blake’s interpretation of what is really going on, not only in the text proper but also in the authorized version’s headings to each chapter. because the av is now often printed and read without its original chapter headings, the importance of these may not be realized. some earlier english bibles had been divisive among readers not only because of their translations but also because of their interpretive chapter headings, something the king james translators wanted to avoid. the av headings were both an integral part of the text and set off from it, being printed in roman above the gothic of the text proper (bobrick 237, 253). blake would of course have been familiar with them, and drew upon them parodically for his own. the holy bible (1611), showing the heading (“1 the creation of heaven and earth, 3 of the light, 6 of the firmament …”) for genesis chapter 1. image courtesy of the official king james bible online, <http://​www.​kingjamesbibleonline.​org>. for his first chapter heading, “chap: 1 / the creation of the natural man,” blake took, selectively, “[the creation] of man in the image of god” from the av heading.what edition(s) of the bible blake owned is unknown, but as to what translation there can be little doubt. on 30 january 1803 he wrote to his brother james: “i read greek as fluently as an oxford scholar & the testament is my chief master. astonishing indeed is the english translation it is almost word for word & if the hebrew bible is as well translated which i do not doubt it is we need not doubt of its having been translated as well as written by the holy ghost” (e 727). i am not, of course, suggesting that blake owned the first edition of the av. many subsequent editions retained the headings verbatim, as, for example, the holy bible, containing the old and new testaments; newly translated out of the original tongues, and with the former translations diligently compared and revised, by his majesty’s special command. appointed to be read in churches. cambridge: printed by john archdeacon printer to the university; and sold by john beecroft, john rivington, benjamin white, and edward dilly, in london; and t. & j. merrill, in cambridge, 1769. blake’s “natural man,” bound by his five senses, is created of the adamah, but not the spiritual man. this is a pauline distinction: “but the naturall man receiveth not the things of the spirit of god, for they are foolishnesse unto him: neither can he know [them], because they are spiritually discerned” (1 cor. 2.14). (compare blake’s annotation to wordsworth’s poems of 1815: “i see in wordsworth the natural man rising up against the spiritual man continually” [e 665].) this distinction, also analogous to swedenborg’s between the external and the internal man,swedenborg’s commentary on genesis had been republished in english as recently as 1802. of the creation of adam he writes: 94. verse 7. to form man the dust from the ground, is to form his external man, which before was not man; for it is said, verse 5, that there was no man to till the ground: to breathe into his nostrils the breath of lives, is to give him the life of faith and love: by man’s being made a living soul is signified, that his external man was also made alive. 95. the life of the external man is here treated of; the life of his faith or understanding in the two former verses, and the life of his love or will in this verse. heretofore the external man was unwilling to comply with and serve the internal, being engaged in a continual combat with him, wherefore at that time the external was not a man; but now, being made celestial, the external beginneth to comply with and serve the internal, and in this case becometh a man, being so rendered both by the life of faith and the life of love; the life of faith prepareth him, the life of love maketh him to be a man. (arcana cœlestia 1: 144)this is, of course, a much more optimistic view than that of blake’s genesis. is typical of only the later blake, in contrast to the devil’s monistic proverb in the marriage of heaven and hell (1790) that “man has no body distinct from his soul for that calld body is a portion of soul discernd by the five senses. the chief inlets of soul in this age” (e 34). blake’s heading for chapter 2 is “the natural man divided into male and female, & of the tree of life & of the tree of good and evil.” here he focuses on the av heading’s “17 the tree of knowledge onely forbidden … 21 the making of woman, and institution of mariage.” gen. 2.21 is the version in which woman is made out of adam’s rib, in contrast to gen. 1.27, where god creates them both together. blake chooses the version from chapter 2 because it is an account of division, and of something lost. the next loss is asserted in blake’s caption to “chap. 3: of the sexual nature & its fall into generation & death.” again, blake echoes the av heading selectively: “6 mans shamefull fall … 16 the punishment of mankind. 21 their first clothing. 22 their casting out of paradise.” it is worth noting that the word “fall” does not occur in the text of gen. 3, nor does it appear elsewhere in genesis with reference to adam and eve. generation will not occur until the next chapter, but the lord god does pronounce his death sentence upon humanity in 3.19. blake’s chapter 4 heading is “how generation & death took possession of the natural man & of the forgiveness of sins written upon the murderers forhead.”e, usually careful to follow blake’s orthography, has four capitalized words here that are lower case in blake’s text (e 688). this adds a significant detail to both the av heading and its text, which read, respectively: the birth, trade, and religion of cain and abel. 8 the murder of abel. 9 the curse of cain. and the lord set a marke upon cain, lest any finding him, should kill him. the mark completes the process begun by the murder itself, which leonard michaels (71), writing of byron’s cain, calls “identifying cain to himself and his community as none other than cain, the infamous biblical murderer.” however, blake has added an element of redemption for cain that is in accord not with the biblical text, but with his own beliefs as expressed, for example, in jerusalem 45.33-35, where los says: if i should dare to lay my finger on a grain of sand in way of vengeance; i punish the already punishd: o whom should i pity if i pity not the sinner who is gone astray! (e 194) as in other aspects of the manuscript, this is very much william blake’s genesis. the crosby-essick genesis is both a splendid facsimile and an indispensable work of reference for blake studies. it is also a beautiful book with clear, easily readable typography (something not to be underestimated in a folio-sized volume that necessarily had to be set two columns to the page). for blake scholars, becoming familiar with it will be both a pleasure and a duty. works cited anon. the holy bible, conteyning the old testament, and the new. london: robert barker, 1611. blake, william. the complete poetry and prose of william blake. ed. david v. erdman. newly rev. ed. new york: anchor–random house, 1988. bobrick, benson. wide as the waters: the story of the english bible and the revolution it inspired. new york: simon & schuster, 2001. butlin, martin. the paintings and drawings of william blake. 2 vols. new haven: yale university press, 1981. damon, s. foster. a blake dictionary: the ideas and symbols of william blake. index by morris eaves. hanover: university press of new england, 1988. ---. william blake: his philosophy and symbols. boston: houghton mifflin, 1924. essick, robert n. the works of william blake in the huntington collections: a complete catalogue. san marino: huntington library, 1985. lefrançois, j. a. “matthew, apostle, st.” new catholic encyclopedia. 2nd ed. vol. 9. detroit: gale, 2003. 353. gale virtual reference library. accessed 5 oct. 2014. lowell, robert. lord weary’s castle. new york: harcourt, brace, 1946. michaels, leonard. “byron’s cain.” pmla 84 (1969): 71-78. nanavutty, piloo. “a title-page in blake’s illustrated genesis manuscript.” journal of the warburg and courtauld institutes 10 (1947): 114-22. paley, morton d. the traveller in the evening: the last works of william blake. 2003. oxford: clarendon press, 2007. swedenborg, emanuel. arcana cœlestia: or heavenly mysteries contained in the sacred scriptures, or word of the lord, manifested and laid open; beginning with the book of genesis. vol. 1. london: j. hodson, 1802. review: tom dunne and william l. pressly, eds., james barry, 1741–1806: history painter tom dunne and william l. pressly, eds.  james barry, 1741–1806: history painter.  farnham: ashgate, 2010. xviii + 268 pp.  £65.00/$119.95, hardcover. reviewed by dennis m. read dennis m. read (read@denison.edu) teaches at denison university, granville, ohio. his book, r. h. cromek, engraver, editor, and entrepreneur, was published in 2011 by ashgate. william blake considered james barry a kindred spirit. in his annotations to the works of sir joshua reynolds, blake wrote, who will dare to say that polite art is encouraged, or either wished or tolerated in a nation where the society for the encouragement of art. sufferd barry to give them, his labour for nothing[.] a society … suffering an artist to starve while he supported really what they under pretence of encouraging were endeavouring to depress.—barry told me that while he did that work—he lived on bread & apples[.] (e 636) blake was referring to barry’s the progress of human culture, a project he began for the society for the encouragement of arts, manufactures and commerce in 1777 and finished seven years later. (or, perhaps, put aside for a time. like blake and his vision of the last judgment, he made alterations on the project for the rest of his life.) his six monumental paintings covering the walls of the great room of the royal society of arts commemorated the march of western civilization from classical times to his day, with the last two paintings concentrating on the leading figures of english art. blake is right in asserting that the society paid barry nothing during the years he painted the huge allegorical works, but he does not mention that the society later awarded barry 250 guineas and a gold medal. during his lifetime, barry experienced professional success and, more emphatically, a professional decline. extremely forthright in his opinions, he antagonized anyone who did not share them. because he shifted ground in his causes and beliefs, it was not easy to stay in his good graces. an irishman and a catholic, he hailed, like blake, the american and french revolutions as the dawn of a new age, but later found them to be different incarnations of the same tyrannical power. unlike blake, however, barry moved to promote his brand of catholicism as an apocalyptic cure-all, a version that strips the authority of the pope in all civil matters. a member of the royal academy, he lost his position as professor of painting to fuseli in 1798 after he published his vituperative letter to the society of dilettanti. in his last years he was virtually a recluse, working on his immense canvases and prints in his castle street home and studio, a place of mounting squalor and wreckage. in recent years barry has gained serious attention, with a major exhibition of his works in cork, ireland, in 2005, a monograph that year by david g. c. allan, and extensive discussion of his aims and contributions by martin myrone in bodybuilding: reforming masculinities in british art, 1750–1810 (2005) and daniel r. guernsey in the artist and the state, 1777–1855: the politics of universal history in british and french painting (2007). this growing interest began with the publication of william l. pressly’s the life and art of james barry in 1981, followed by a major exhibition of barry’s work at the tate in 1983 and john barrell’s numerous references to barry in his 1986 study, the political theory of painting from reynolds to hazlitt. in this volume, dunne and pressly have collected fourteen essays from various hands, including allan, myrone, guernsey, and barrell, addressing a wide range of topics and questions involving barry’s life and art. if the essays do not speak in one voice, they complement each other to a great extent. most relevant to students of blake is david bindman’s essay, “the politics of envy: blake and barry.” bindman argues that both blake and barry were victims of the envy of joshua reynolds and his cohorts, “who pretended to stand for painting in the great style” but actually wanted “to paint flattering and lucrative portraits of those in wealth and power, while the artists who stood for the ideals of high art that could lead society towards virtue were literally starved out” (121). bindman finds the most powerful expression of this quandary in both artists’ conceptions of the figure of milton’s satan, the ultimate envier and hypocrite. “for barry and blake,” he writes, “satan was not an abstraction, but a name for the force that bound together all the moral, political and artistic resistance to man’s true self-realization, made all the more threatening by the attractive face he presented to the world” (124). bindman exempts fuseli from the envious academicians. in her essay, “barry and fuseli: milton, exile and expulsion,” asia haut applies the figure of satan in quite another way. pointing out that “dispossession permeates paradise lost,” haut suggests that the great interest both barry and fuseli pay to milton’s epic can be attributed to their “self-exile” from their native countries, ireland for barry and switzerland for fuseli. “with the theme of satan, sin and death,” haut argues, “fuseli, barry and milton, in their different and yet similar ways, raise the issue that apparently revolutionary shifts in power might be little more than redistributions of hierarchy, rendering affiliations chaotic” (109). haut might well have included blake in this group. but however temperamentally similar the two artists may have been, they had strikingly different approaches to the execution of art. liam lenihan notes in his essay, “history painting and aesthetics: barry and the politics of friendship,” that “blake’s most famous criticism of reynolds and burke, ‘[t]o generalise is to be an idiot’, might surely be applied to barry, who found perfection in abstract and general nature” (150). both barry and blake believed in the power of art to transform social thought. john barrell writes in “reform and revolution: james barry’s writings in the 1790s” that barry “was convinced that high art, history painting … was the most effective means of teaching civic virtues and civil rights, and that the society that is most favourable for the production of high art will also be the most just society, the society that best safeguards the rights of its members” (130). barry’s vociferous republicanism necessarily brought about a rift between him and the prevailing powers. in the most provocative essay of the collection, “james barry’s ‘hairbreadth niceties’: risk, reward and the reform of culture around 1770,” martin myrone refers to j. j. winckelmann’s assertion in his reflections on the imitation of greek works in painting and sculpture that “the line by which nature divides completeness from superfluity is but a small one …. the greek artist … adjusted his contour, in every figure, to the breadth of a single hair.” (students of blake might well equate this with blake’s “bounding line.”) in his letter to his then-patrons edmund and william burke, barry invokes winckelmann’s distinction when he refers to the “hair-breadth niceties” in his art. barry, myrone asserts, steadfastly stuck to his conception of art while artistic taste in britain vacillated wildly in an unpredictable stock market of fashion. “barry’s originality,” myrone writes, “could also be eccentricity; his precision, mere sterility” (39). barry’s stalwart stance “was not simply self-destructive, deluded or willful; it was a form of position-taking within a game of culture whose rules were in the process of being radically overhauled” (37). myrone concludes, “barry’s ‘tragedy’—his tragic alienation from society, from the general taste, his material suffering—may be, rather than an obstruction to or distraction from the realization of his innate ‘greatness’, the necessary and socially predictable precondition for his art” (39). following myrone’s line of thought, barry’s subsequent expulsion from the royal academy was inevitable. the volume includes eleven color plates and fifty-five black-and-white illustrations. its scholarship is impressive, its writing stimulating, and its approaches engaging. blakeans will benefit from these lively discussions of another renegade artist. in his foreword to the collection, pressly states that barry “is britain’s greatest history painter.” the contributors certainly are intent on advancing barry’s reputation, if not to that supreme position, at least to a higher level. others may incline toward the judgment of henry crabb robinson, who wrote in his diary entry of 30 january 1815 that “excessive pride equally denoted blake & barry.” review: adams, william blake on his poetry and painting hazard adams. william blake on his poetry and painting: a study of a descriptive catalogue, other prose writings and jerusalem. jefferson: mcfarland, 2011. viii + 191 pp. $55.00, paperback. reviewed by r. paul yoder r. paul yoder (rpyoder@ualr.edu) is a professor of english at the university of arkansas at little rock. he is the author of articles on milton, alexander pope, samuel richardson, thomas gray, blake, and wordsworth. his book, the narrative structure of william blake’s poem jerusalem: a revisionist interpretation, was published by the edwin mellen press in 2010. he has also co-edited, with wallace jackson, two essay collections on pope. in the past decade, we have seen examinations of the more marginal works (sometimes literally so) in william blake’s oeuvre. for example, blake’s epic jerusalem has long been considered more or less his valedictory work, but in 2003’s the traveller in the evening: the last works of william blake (oxford), morton paley charted blake’s productions after that supposed farewell, and in the process created a valuable introduction for readers interested in examining those relatively neglected materials.  in 2009 hazard adams offered a similar overview of blake’s marginalia in blake’s margins: an interpretive study of the annotations (mcfarland).  in william blake on his poetry and painting: a study of a descriptive catalogue, other prose writings and jerusalem, adams “continues the study of william blake’s prose writings begun with blake’s margins” (1).  poetry and painting looks at blake’s prose works with a particular focus on his remarks on art and poetry. part i includes seven essays on, respectively, a descriptive catalogue, a vision of the last judgment, a public address, on homers poetry and on virgil, laocoön, blake’s letters, and “the early tractates.”  part ii comprises three essays, the first considering blake’s attitudes on poetry, on his own poetry, and on other poets, the second on his prose and jerusalem, and the third on his impact on william butler yeats and james joyce.  there is some repetition of information, especially among the essays in part i; adams acknowledges this, saying that “the book is designed so that readers, particularly students beginning study of blake and readers more casually interested in his thought, may conveniently consult a particular chapter on a particular work” (1).  the book’s introductory intent is obviously valuable, but the more than casually interested reader could have wished for adams to push a bit harder at these less commonly discussed works. most of the works on which adams focuses were written after blake’s return to london in late 1803 from his “three years slumber” at felpham.  that time in felpham was an important transitional period in blake’s life, and that experience and the years afterward were key to the developments in his thinking that shaped the four zoas, milton, and jerusalem.  much of this material has been covered elsewhere, as in the case of laocoön, for example, which has been admirably discussed recently by both paley in the traveller in the evening and julia wright in blake, nationalism, and the politics of alienation (ohio university press, 2004).  what adams brings to the table is his own slant based on decades of work on blake and on literary criticism, especially his emphasis on blake’s antithetical method and on the importance of synecdoche in blake’s thinking.  moreover, the second essay of part ii (“from the prose to jerusalem”) reproduces much of adams’s important but largely neglected 1993 essay from studies in romanticism, while the final essay in the book (“from jerusalem and the prose to yeats and joyce”) similarly revisits earlier essays on those later writers. given that adams intends only an introduction to these prose pieces, it is not surprising that there is no overarching thesis to the book. still, two themes run throughout the discussion: 1. synecdoche is a basic principle for blake.  adams references his own 1990 essay, “synecdoche and method,” from antithetical essays in literary criticism and liberal education (florida state university press) on this point, and in poetry and painting he says, “blake works almost always by synecdoche” (34) and indeed “thinks by synecdoche” (58).  he explains that “the principle of synecdoche expresses for blake the identity of particular and universal” (52), and he identifies this principle in blake’s handling of the characters of chaucer’s canterbury pilgrims, especially the franklin (“[composed] of all franklins” [26]), blake’s use of “britain as a microcosm of the world’s history” (40) in the painting of the ancient britons, and blake’s understanding of the last judgment (“the individual’s last judgment is a microcosm of the world’s” [51]). 2.  many of the ideas expressed in the prose works that adams considers are integrally related to ideas expressed in the four zoas, milton, and jerusalem.  he notes, for example, that “one thing is certain.  in painting the ancient britons and writing and etching jerusalem, blake was producing what he thought was patriotic art, a mythological history of britain … antithetical to that of reasoning historians and politicians” (40).  about the picture of the canterbury pilgrims, adams suggests that “blake secretly injects into his picture symbols from his long poems” (22), and he cites orphea jane allen’s chart aligning particular pilgrims with blake’s zoas as well as particular classical deities. given his comments on chaucer’s franklin, he could easily have added that blake’s understanding of the pilgrims provides much of the groundwork for the doctrine of “states” so important to milton and jerusalem. in his remarks on a descriptive catalogue, adams compares blake’s paintings of nelson guiding leviathan, pitt guiding behemoth, and the lost spiritual form of napoleon to jerusalem, in which “blake calls leviathan and behemoth respectively ‘the war by sea enormous & the war / by land astounding’” (19).  concerning a public address, adams connects blake’s criticism of dryden and pope as well as his declamatory approach in the address with the first preface in jerusalem, in which blake attacks the “‘modern bondage of rhyming’” and identifies “his own poetry with oratory” (64-65).  indeed, the connection between adams’s discussions of the prose works in part i and the three essays in part ii depends on the continuity and development of blake’s ideas about art from those prose works into his major later poetry.  adams stipulates that “in order to observe [blake’s] views of his own work and what he was attempting to do, a few ventures into milton and jerusalem will be necessary,” and then goes on to trace connections reaching from blake’s “first engraved work, where he identifies the ‘true man’ with the ‘poetic genius,’” through the marriage of heaven and hell and the various prose works, and into the later poems in which “blake identifies man with imagination and poetry with naming, implying language itself is in its nature poetic” (101). several discussions in poetry and painting are especially welcome.  adams devotes an essay to the two tractates printed together, on homers poetry and on virgil, which for some reason paley had neglected in the traveller in the evening.  he compares blake’s comments on unity in on homers poetry (“every poem must necessarily be a perfect unity, but why homers is peculiarly so, i cannot tell”) to aristotle’s discussion of unity of plot in poetics (67-70).  he also notes, “when blake speaks of homer, he speaks of the fault of his poetry: its glorification of war and empire,” adding that as the “greatest of the classical poets,” homer “stands, by synecdoche, for all ‘the poetry of the heathen stolen & perverted from the bible not by chance but by design’” (73).  of both tracts adams says, the mode of argument is enthymemic, that is, with parts left out, but implied by the fragment that remains.  it also appears that the two conclusions of the tractates are interchangeable.  i believe that both tractates have dramatic shapes and are deliberate efforts to go beyond the boundaries of abstract argumentation.  it is as if they have plot structures.  the form is one of search. (72) the discussion of the prose inscriptions on three of blake’s drawings for dante’s commedia is one of the strongest in the book.  adams quotes, for example, blake’s statement in the lower-right corner of dante design 101, “whatever book is for vengeance for sin & whatever book is against the forgiveness of sins is not of the father but of satan the accuser & father of hell [e690],” and then remarks, “the statement stands at the base of blake’s beliefs in his late years. nothing was more fundamental to his view of jesus’s gospel” (122). there are other gems scattered throughout the book. adams offers a concise formulation of blake’s critique of allegory: “the problem with allegory is, as we have seen, its false particularity” (57).  he calls blake’s discussion of the canterbury tales in a descriptive catalogue “arguably the most important criticism of chaucer between that of john dryden, who in his fables ancient and modern (1700) revived chaucer’s reputation, which had fallen in the seventeenth century, and matthew arnold’s essay in the study of poetry  (1880)” (21). on the “fundamental difference” between blake and yeats, he says, blake is radically humanistic and is totally devoted to a vision of this world as potentially apocalyptic through an improvement in mental power and cleansing of error.  yeats is also humanistic, and his antithetical man opts for such a vision.  but at the same time yeats concludes that a humanistic apocalypse is, if not impossible, at most only momentary and mysterious. … like blake’s, yeats’s view is cyclical, but for blake yeats’s vision is only of the fallen cycle. (171-72) concerning blake’s impact on joyce, adams observes, [robert] gleckner accurately observes that joyce finally departed from blake, thinking that blake’s work finally was blind to “the grubby realities of this world, [leading] to an ‘idealism’ so absolute that there was no room for the blooms and mollys, the finnegans and the earwickers” ….  i think, if gleckner is right, joyce was wrong about this, for blake was never that kind of idealist and his reality was not an elsewhere. (183) there are some problems with the book.  compared to adams’s other work, poetry and painting can be a bit dry.  sometimes the phrasing is not quite right.  for example, on the relationship between poetry and prophecy, adams says, “poetry is prophecy, not prediction.  it is insight into things; its role is to reshape the fallen world, which is a congeries of human error, into an image so clear that error will be seen for what it is and thus annihilated” (103).  the second sentence here is certainly correct, but the phrasing of the first sentence seems backward; better to say, “prophecy is poetry, not prediction.”  also, the documentation on the longer poems is a bit confusing; the references do not follow the standard format of plate and line number, but instead indicate only chapter and plate, without noting particular lines. these are small points, however.  the strength in this book lies in the gathering together of adams’s take on blake’s attitudes toward poetry and painting, and the relationship of those attitudes to the work of key figures before and after blake. 90 blake/an illustrated quarterly winter 2011-12 r e v i e w s w illiam blake on self and soul discusses fundamentally interesting topics: blake’s relation to empiricism and gnosticism, and his struggle with existential alienation. but the book applies a preconceived framework to his poetry, and this has an unfortunate steamroller effect: it flattens out the texts in its path and moves straight ahead, passing by much that would be helpful, and even necessary, to its purpose. to summarize the framework: “the essential uneasiness of consciousness” (85) is exacerbated by empiricism, a “science [of] despair” (milton 41.15, e 142) that renders the self “intangible” and the world “real” (12). the soul’s intuition of its “transcendental provenance” (xiii), discounted by empiricism, is experientially true, for blake and all human beings. for remedy, blake pursues neoplatonism and gnosticism, but with a twist, rejecting the individual immortal soul in favor of “the human imagination” and the afterlife in favor of “the eternal now” (21). he describes the problem in the early illuminated books, then develops his solution, which leads from personal agency in the four zoas to individual reformation in milton and ultimately to self-sacrifice in jerusalem. the emphasis on the value of experience as a touchstone for theory and interpretation is salutary, but i wish that quinney had explored ways to ground this principle methodologically. phenomenology would be an obvious resource. sensibility, with its connections to empiricism, would make an ideal context for both the prizing and the suspicion of the inner life and its pains as an index of authenticity and route to salvation. biography could be employed to consider blake’s own understanding of a basic and universal existential bewilderment. this last quinney nods to occasionally; for instance, she considers blake’s “indenturing himself to the dreadful poetaster hayley of felpham” as his own “delinquency of imagination,” making “blake’s critique of milton” also a “cryptic self-reproach” (134). such a judgmental view seems unfair to both hayley and blake in light of mark crosby’s work,1 and, less recently, the detailed and balanced picture of the relationship in g. e. bentley, jr.’s the stranger from paradise (2001) where, 1. such as jon mee and mark crosby, “‘this soldierlike danger’: the trial of william blake for sedition,” resisting napoleon: the british response to the threat of invasion, 1797-1815, ed. mark philp (aldershot: ashgate, 2006), which suggests a hayley who defends radicalism, both blake’s and milton’s. laura quinney. william blake on self and soul. cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 2009. 216 pp. $42.00/£31.95, hardcover. reviewed by tristanne connolly the reign of william iv. in this constant labor in old age, she perhaps followed her husband’s maxim of working through illness.139 such unremitting industry may account for her having neglected a bowel complaint that led to her death. this emerging picture seems consistent with essick’s suggestion that during blake’s lifetime catherine was “the more practical of the two,”140 and mark crosby and essick’s discussion of blake’s tribute to her in response to william hayley’s “klopstockian” compliment.141 contemporary and early accounts portray catherine as on occasion unstable, difficult, miserable, and ill. blake’s own reported behavior may lead us to suspect that their working and emotional partnership cannot have been uniformly efficient or idyllic. nevertheless, catherine must also have exhibited during her marriage to blake the resilience and financial acumen evident in her later widowhood—to the couple’s advantage. 139. see gilchrist 1: 246. 140. essick, “blake, catherine sophia,” odnb. 141. mark crosby and robert n. essick, “‘the fiends of commerce’: blake’s letter to william hayley, 7 august 1804,” blake 44.2 (fall 2010): 72. winter 2011-12 blake/an illustrated quarterly 91 though the tensions are evident, “hayley’s loyalty to blake persisted even in the most trying circumstances”—in his financial and moral support throughout blake’s prosecution for sedition—“and blake continued to serve hayley energetically long after he had left hayley’s direct patronage” (bentley 234). looking more closely at the complexities of the friendship would not only have been more accurate, but also might have helped to develop a parallel between imagination under patronage and consciousness under material constraints. without an explicit effort to locate the experience of “the actual subject” as opposed to the fabled unitary one (2), differentiating between authentic and pernicious representations becomes arbitrary, or generically prejudiced. locke “has no theory of the self and gives no representation of the inner life. but wordsworth, who put the empiricist metaphors into play, wrote the autobiography of lockean subject [sic] in his poems of the 1790s” (69). when wordsworth does it, it is pathos (and even blake, quinney argues, is sympathetic in his critique); when locke does it, it is not a moving description of the alienated soul but its cruel condemnation to a “dark box” (85). quinney’s brief discussion of locke’s theory of the self (which he does indeed have, coining the term “personal identity” in an essay concerning human understanding) dwells on the impossibility of complete self-knowledge and sees locke’s call for self-examination as self-objectification, rather than a view of the inner life, or an attempt to let some light into the existential darkness (44-45). strangely, she perceives no struggle in locke: personal identity is simply “continuity of memory” (169), regardless of all the puzzles and qualifications that lead him to this position, which remains problematic in the end (locke is not only anxious about forgetfulness, but also remarks that his theory would allow for multiple persons in one spirit or body, and vice versa; see, for instance, 2.27.2223). locke hardly “missed” the “subtlety” (78) that past and present selves are both linked and alienated. even if quinney sticks to the old frye line of blake against empiricism, she could strengthen her position by arguing with other scholarship beyond one footnote simply asking the reader to “compare” with an opposing view from steve clark (179). another footnote directs the reader to “recent” studies on wordsworth and empiricism from 1989 and 1991 (180); there are four pieces of post-2000 blake criticism in the bibliography. reference would be enriching, for instance, to matthew green’s visionary materialism in the early works of william blake: the intersection of enthusiasm and empiricism (2005), and, within the bibliography’s time zone, wayne glausser’s locke and blake: a conversation across the eighteenth century (1998) (which also sees a therapeutic motivation in blake’s work, and locke’s). kevin hutchings’s imagining nature: blake’s environmental poetics (2002) would be useful at moments like this: “everyone knows that blake is a species of platonic idealist, championing imagination over nature, and the transcendent realm over the world of matter” (99). quinney pronounces blake “an atheist and an unbeliever” and ironizes any contrary evidence: “he flaunted his secular religiousness deliberately by constantly writing of god and christ” (26). even martin priestman’s romantic atheism: poetry and freethought, 1780-1830 (1999) does not claim atheism for blake; his careful examination would be another profitable addition to the works cited. tracing blake’s response to gnosticism is challenging because his sources would have been largely secondary: histories of heresies with an orthodox or unorthodox axe to grind. quinney relies on hans jonas’s definitive work, but he has the benefit of material that long postdates blake, such as the nag hammadi library, unearthed in the mid-twentieth century. quinney states that she is not source-hunting; fair enough, but she does not find an alternative way to maintain precision. she appeals to e. p. thompson on the “gnostic lineage” of “popular religious movements” that influenced blake, and declares, “that is good enough for me,” with only a cursory acknowledgement of the moravian discoveries which displace thompson’s theories (55-56). she goes on to say, “i would simply like to name as ‘gnostic’ the kernel of religious humanism in all the religions in which he participated sympathetically” (56). clearly, this dilutes “gnostic” to near meaninglessness. she does qualify that “religious humanism” here indicates treating the human as the divine, but the following paragraphs show how blake “jettisons gnosticism’s proliferation of divine beings including the enigmatic unknown god” (57): that is, how gnosticism fails to treat the human as divine. blake’s own mythic beings are interpreted in anthology footnote style: for instance, ololon “represents” milton’s “emanation” and also his “actual wives and daughters” (166-67) and is assumed to be uncomplicatedly female. yet quinney’s comparison of oothoon to sophia (46) is a sharp point, and she builds upon it to argue for a strong role for emanations: they are the ones who “awak[e] from the stupor of materialism,” recognize “eternal life,” and feel pity for “the spectrous dead” (93). the “emanations represent the perception that their zoa refuses”; they fulfill a cassandra-like prophetic function (106). though this does not place the emanations in an enviable position—portions of other beings, their insights ignored, left to lament—it does endow them, particularly, with soul-saving perception, compassion, and resistance. one moment which captures blake’s own perceptive sympathy is a consideration of “the smile” as a microcosm of a “typically blakean … movement of affect.” though it is painting with too broad a brush to claim that “each of the epic prophecies as a whole moves this way,” the pattern that quinney describes is evocative: there is “a gripping … account of suffering,” then “the ray of light, when it comes, is invested with all the pathos of remission” (88). it is regrettable that quinney’s emphasis on authentic experience of the self leads her away from adequate research and precise reading, marring the potential to delineate blake’s compassion for the wandering soul and stir sympathetic echoes in readers. review: martha redbone roots project, the garden of love: songs of william blake martha redbone roots project. the garden of love: songs of william blake. blackfeet productions, 2012. cd/digital download (see <http://​www.​martharedbone.​com/​store>). reviewed by steve newman steve newman (snewman@temple.edu) is associate professor of english at temple university. he is the author of ballad collection, lyric, and the canon (penn) and articles on robert burns, allan ramsay, songs in shakespeare, and other topics. among his current projects are an article on blake and song, a digital humanities site on the beggar’s opera, and a monograph, time for the humanities: competing narratives of value from the scottish enlightenment in the 21st-century academy. like so many others, i have allen ginsberg to thank for introducing me to the idea that songs of innocence and of experience are poems meant to be sung. when i was a sophomore, he visited my university and, after performing many of his own poems, he launched into a rendition of “nurse’s song” (innocence). accompanying himself on the harmonium, he spoke-sung the nurse’s part, then climbed into a thready falsetto for the children’s voices, and concluded with a rousing “and all the hills ecchoéd” that he repeated for what must have been five minutes, drawing the crowd into chanting it, trailing off at the end into a near-silent prayer.for a rendition with a fuller orchestration than the one i was treated to, see <https://​www.​youtube.​com/​watch?v=-y81kfrhb08>. it includes peter orlovsky and greg corso on vocals and features some excellent yodeling. afterwards, i mustered the courage to ask him about singing blake, and he confirmed that blake had in fact sung the songs, though no record of the arrangements survives. over the years, i have heard many other takes on the songs, from benjamin britten’s intense art songs to the industrial calypso cockney (i think that accurately describes it) of jah wobble’s “tyger tyger.”for a useful compendium and guide to many musical takes on blake, see jason whittaker and roger whitson’s zoamorphosis, especially the blake jukebox <http://​zoamorphosis.​com/​category/​jukebox>. for a revealing history of the musical setting of “jerusalem” (the confusing title used for “and did those feet in ancient time” from the preface to milton), see michael ferber, “blake’s ‘jerusalem’ as a hymn,” blake 34.3 (winter 2000-01): 82-94. it includes a brief but useful discography. the breadth of styles attests to the vitality and accessibility of the verse and the vision behind it. given blake’s stress on the individual’s right to interpretation, it would seem un-blakean to insist that one style truly captures blake and to rule the others out of court. but i don’t think it’s invidious to say that i now have the martha redbone roots project’s deep and powerful the garden of love to thank for reintroducing me to blake’s lyrics as songs to be belted out, crooned, and ruminated upon. in the press release for the album, redbone identifies it as “appalachian folk and blues, what we would call music from the holler.” yet if the music is old timey, this is not a sepia-toned period piece. this is living music, transporting the incisive ethical and political critique at the heart of blake’s imaginative vision to an appalachian landscape “radically altered by strip-mining”; redbone, of native american and african-american ancestry, finds in blake a congenial voice for her own thoughts about “my ancestral home black mountain, kentucky, coal country and pre-contact shawnee/cherokee land.” given her rural commitments, it is not surprising that we do not get here the urban scenes of “the chimney sweeper” or “london.”for “london,” i’d recommend sparklehorse’s haunting rendition; like redbone, the late, lamented mark linkous had roots in coal-mining country. see the ep someday i will treat you good and <https://​www.​youtube.​com/​watch?v=zlwb1bv4qmw>. what she gives us instead is a vivid collection of songs from songs, the notebook, and poetical sketches. redbone herself wrote the music, along with aaron whitby and john mceuen (of the nitty gritty dirt band); mceuen is also a co-producer and a key musical presence, contributing virtuoso performances on string instruments from the banjo to the fiddle to the lap dulcimer. redbone and her team are not the first to adapt blake to a folk or roots idiom; for one example, greg brown’s songs of innocence and of experience (1986) will be known to some (reviewed in blake 23.2 [fall 1989]: 96-98). but while that album has its moments (“the little vagabond,” for instance), it comes nowhere near the force and inventiveness of the garden of love, which frequently makes the listener feel as if these lyrics were somehow written with this music and this singer in mind. the album opens with an unassuming figure on the keyboards, the shaking of a rattle, and a bluesy lick on the dobro—then comes redbone’s electrifying voice in full throat, a prophet demanding our attention: “i laid me down upon a bank / where love lay sleeping / i heard among the rushes dank / weeping weeping.” the music then assumes a regular melody and beat, laid down by byron house’s thrumming upright bass, and redbone moves to the next stanza from the notebook and on to “the garden of love” proper, which is punctuated by native american yips and chants. she gives eloquent voice to the speaker’s situation, articulating her bewildered pain as she searches for a place where she can realize her needs but finds only grim priests “binding with briars, my joys & desires.” the yearning in the last line is underscored by the backing vocals, and the closing, mournful repetition of “i went to the garden of love” recapitulates the tragedy while suggesting that this speaker has not given up. the title track is a highlight but hardly the only one. it is clear from her delicate rendering of “how sweet i roamed” that redbone can fully inhabit the tender and often wounded naïveté of innocent voices; the lilting melody matches well with the unsuspecting speaker who stumbles into the traps of “the prince of love,” the pathos heightened by the repetition of the last line, which is delivered without harmonizing voices: “and mocks my loss of liberty.” “the fly” showcases redbone’s vocal range, its simple and affecting melody punctuated by mceuen’s expert guitar picking (though the sample of children at play strikes me as gratuitous) and strumming on the autoharp. redbone’s take on this song of experience is a persuasive rendering of an innocent speaker’s becoming conscious of his own mortality and accepting it without losing his joy. she switches to a more prophetic voice in “i rose up at the dawn of day” from the notebook, successfully transforming it into a rollicking gospel number, complete with tambourine, clapping, and chorus, which comes in on “get thee away get thee away.” this seems just right for the bunyan-like strangeness of these verses, mixing their familiar addresses to “mr. devil” with blake’s preference for “mental joy & mental health / and mental friends & mental wealth” as the speaker rejects the temptations of monetary wealth in order to “pray … for other people.” that redbone is able to adapt these verses so effectively is a great gift to her audience, and they seem like a natural match with the emotive power often associated with roots music. but what are its limits? the powerful authenticity of this genre can also tip into an embarrassing earnestness and simplemindedness that in this case might have given us a familiar image of blake that often crosses into caricature—a goofy, big-hearted visionary who loved children and lambs and sex and who hated the man in all his forms. one of the many problems with this flattening of blake is that it cannot acknowledge the darker and more complex tones typically found in experience, which might seem to lend themselves to more ironic styles—say, those of brecht and weill or aimee mann. but redbone largely avoids this trap, and not just in “the garden of love.” in the spare setting of “i heard an angel singing,” another poem from the notebook, she gives equal time and weight to the angel who sings of “mercy pity peace” as “the worlds release” and to the devil who acridly notes that “mercy could be no more / if there was nobody poor.” more impressive still is “a poison tree,” which turns one of the best known of the songs into a sly and swinging country waltz. there is a satisfied ring in her voice as the speaker surveys her poisoned “foe outstretched beneath the tree,” and it shows that redbone is capable of giving expression to the deceitfulness (and self-deception) often found in experience. there are other tracks that don’t work quite so well, at least not for me. “a dream” features a powerful seminole chant by lonnie harrington, but there is something labored about the setting that is at odds with the reverie of the verse. “the ecchoing green” is sung completely without accompaniment; although redbone’s voice is always worth listening to, the starkness here cuts against the communal pastoral joy of the poem. finally, there is the recitation of “why should i care for the men of thames” by jonathan spottiswoode, the english leader of the band spottiswoode and his enemies, with redbone chanting and shaking a rattle in the background. i can see why verses that imagine the ohio offering a rebaptism to counter the enslaving waters of “the cheating banks of thames” would appeal to an artist who is looking to bridge the distance between britain and america and who is keenly alive to the history of slavery: “i was born a slave but i go to be free.” however, the execution is hokey; although i like spottiswoode’s other work, his delivery, both the bitterness of the first stanza and the hope in the second, is strained and compares unfavorably to the more richly modulated performances of the other tracks. but the challenges posed by performing blake are actually revealed more clearly by a track that succeeds on its own terms—“hear the voice of the bard,” the “introduction” to songs of experience. backed by a bluesy guitar and harmonica, redbone confidently voices the bard’s authoritative call, imploring the earth to return. but we might say that this song is too confident; what’s missing here is the perspective that gives rise to “earth’s answer.” the earth responds that the bard’s demand is unfair since she is bound by “starry jealousy”; indeed, it seems that she hears the bard’s would-be liberating voice as just another utterance from the oppressive “father of the ancient men.” perhaps blake sees her as excusing herself from any responsibility for her “mind-forg’d manacles”; the oothoon of visions of the daughters of albion, for instance, refuses to conform to the patriarchal image of her as despoiled by her rapist. yet even if this is true, it does not negate the fact that the bard seems much more interested in broadcasting his own authority and preaching repentance than in listening to whatever his audience might have to say. to be fair, ginsberg doesn’t include “earth’s answer” in his album either, though, like redbone, he is happy to adopt the bardic voice of “introduction.” but redbone’s willingness to recast the masculine bard in a powerful woman’s voice makes the absence of “earth’s answer” here feel like more of a missed opportunity. more broadly, “introduction” and “earth’s answer” point to the limits of any single album of the songs. no album could include them all, and this means that many of the complex interrelations among the songs will be excluded. that blake rearranged them so frequently suggests that he kept discovering new ways they sang to each other. and then there is the absence of the illustrations integral to “illuminated printing.” but we can, of course, look at the plates as we listen to these performances, and it would be churlish to dwell on what isn’t on the album, since so much is there. i have integrated the garden of love into my teaching of blake and encourage others to consider doing the same; my students immediately get how redbone’s adaptations illuminate the songs, make connections between blake’s moment and ours, and open up new horizons in thinking about what and how blake’s songs mean. i am grateful to her and to everyone involved in the album. i hope for a sequel. “ah! romney!”: blake’s “supernaculum” portrait engraving of george romney “ah! romney!”: blake’s “supernaculum” portrait engraving of george romney by mark crosby mark crosby (crosbym@k-state.edu) is an assistant professor in the department of english at kansas state university. he is currently working on a monograph examining blake’s various patronage relationships. how often have i said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth? (sherlock holmes to dr. watson in the sign of four) with his letter of 18 december 1804, blake sent two engravings to his sussex patron, william hayley. these were proof impressions of “the shipwreck,” after george romney’s now lost the shipwreck at the cape of good hope, and “the portrait,” a portrait engraving of romney.the complete poetry and prose of william blake, ed. david v. erdman, newly rev. ed. (new york: anchor–random house, 1988) [hereafter cited as e] 758. both were commissioned by hayley to illustrate his life of george romney (1809). only blake’s “sketch of a shipwreck after romney,” however, was included in the published biography.hayley’s life of romney includes twelve engravings, seven by caroline watson and the other five by blake, abraham raimbach, robert mitchell meadows, william haines, and robert cooper. for blake’s involvement with the biography, see morton d. paley, “william blake, george romney, and the life of george romney, esq.,” blake 45.2 (fall 2011): 50-65. untraced since the 1939 blake exhibition in philadelphia, the rejected portrait engraving derives from romney’s large, unfinished self-portrait executed in his forty-ninth year, which is now in the national portrait gallery, london.the evidence that blake’s engraving is based on this self-portrait by romney is set forth in mark crosby and robert n. essick, “‘the fiends of commerce’: blake’s letter to william hayley, 7 august 1804,” blake 44.2 (fall 2010): 61-63. the brief catalogue entry for the philadelphia exhibition describes blake’s “portrait of romney” as a “line engraving” that was “lent by lessing j. rosenwald.”william blake 1757–1827: a descriptive catalogue of an exhibition of the works of william blake selected from collections in the united states (philadelphia: philadelphia museum of art, 1939) 59, no. 104. unfortunately, no such print has been located in the rosenwald collection, which is now divided between the library of congress and the national gallery of art, washington.ruthven todd also refers to this print’s being in the rosenwald collection in his edition of alexander gilchrist’s biography of blake. see gilchrist, life of william blake, ed. todd (london: j. m. dent & sons; new york: e. p. dutton, 1942) 380. he repeats this information in his revised edition of 1945 (381). in a typescript catalogue of blake’s paintings and drawings, todd also claims that “a copy of this rejected plate” is “in the collection of mr. lessing j. rosenwald … shewn at philadelphia in 1939” (catalogue now in the rosenwald collection, library of congress). for the suggestion that todd’s statements are based on the entry in the philadelphia exhibition catalogue, see crosby and essick 63 and n30. an anonymous engraving of romney after his unfinished self-portrait has come to light.the print was purchased in 2011 from grosvenor prints, london, by the book dealer john windle acting for robert n. essick. in their online catalogue, grosvenor attributed the print to watson based on her frontispiece to hayley’s life of romney, which includes a stipple engraving of the portrait. watson’s version is very different from the anonymous print discussed here. this recently discovered print is before all letters, suggesting that it is a proof impression. 1. “george romney,” line and stipple engraving after romney’s self-portrait aged forty-nine (see enlargement). collection of robert n. essick. the print (illus. 1) is on wove paper that has been trimmed inside the platemark.there is no watermark. for full bibliographical information, see robert n. essick, “blake in the marketplace, 2011,” blake 45.4 (spring 2012): 141. the image has been heavily worked using a variety of etching/engraving techniques, including line and stipple. below the image is the pencil inscription “george romney, the portrait painter self-portrait” in an unknown but probably modern hand. the graphic syntax (the linear patterns, dots, and flicks used to represent objects, textures, and tonality) recalls engravings of the second half of the eighteenth century, which suggests that it was executed no later than c. 1820. indeed, the physical, technical, and aesthetic properties of the print are consistent with other eighteenthand early nineteenth-century reproductive engravings, including those by blake. significantly, the model for the print—romney’s unfinished self-portrait—was in hayley’s possession until it passed to romney’s son, john, around 1820.john romney claims that hayley “did not allow him [george romney] to finish it, but hurried it off to eartham without delay” (john romney, memoirs of the life and works of george romney [london: baldwin and cradock, 1830] 192). for john romney’s acquisition of the painting, see note 9, below. the only visual sources for this painting that were in public circulation prior to 1820 were blake’s portrait miniature of romney that hayley had given to william long (now untraced), an engraving by william ridley after blake’s miniature, published as the frontispiece to the april 1803 issue of the european magazine, and london review, and watson’s frontispiece to hayley’s life of romney, published in 1809.for blake’s miniature of romney given to long and ridley’s engraving, see blake to hayley, 16 march 1804 (e 744) and crosby and essick 62-63. alex kidson suggests that the self-portrait was presented to john romney by hayley “about 1820” (kidson, george romney 1734–1802 [london: national portrait gallery publications, 2002] 180). an undated stipple engraving by thomas wright after romney’s unfinished self-portrait is the frontispiece for john romney’s memoirs. for a list of romney’s self-portraits and engravings deriving from them, see humphry ward and w. roberts, romney: a biographical and critical essay with a catalogue raisonné of his works, vol. 2 (london: agnew & sons; new york: charles scribner’s sons, 1904) 134. a number of crucial differences between the ridley and watson engravings and the recently discovered print, particularly in the delineation of the background, clothing, and character of romney’s face, discount them as sources.for example, the anonymous print depicts a smile line extending vertically from the left side of the mouth, consistent with the original painting. the ridley and watson prints do not show this line. the lapel of romney’s coat also differs from ridley’s and watson’s prints. if the print was produced in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century, as suggested by the graphic syntax, then whoever was responsible for its execution had access to the original painting. apart from watson, before 1820 only one engraver had direct access to, and more importantly was commissioned to engrave, this painting. that engraver was william blake. in blake’s correspondence there are more references to a portrait engraving of romney than to any other reproductive engraving he executed. the epistolary evidence indicates that he began the engraving during the final months of his stay in felpham and continued to work on the plate until at least late 1804. in a letter to john flaxman of 7 august 1803, hayley reveals that blake had “made two excellent drawings of romney” after the unfinished self-portrait and thomas alphonso hayley’s medallion, and that he intends for both to be “engraved for a single quarto volume of [romney’s] life.”g. e. bentley, jr., blake records, 2nd ed. (new haven: yale up, 2004) [hereafter cited as br(2)] 157. an initial fee of thirty guineas was agreed for the engraving after the self-portrait before blake increased his fee to forty guineas.hayley relates his negotiations with blake to flaxman: “blake surprised me a little in saying (after we had settled the price of 30 guineas for the first [portrait engraving of romney] the price which he had for the cowper) that romneys head would require much labor & he must have 40 for it—startled as i was i replied i will not stint you in behalf of romney” (br[2] 157). because of this rise and the amount blake had asked for engraving the medallion, hayley did not finalize the medallion commission. shortly after he returned to london, blake wrote to hayley, “i lose no moment to complete romney to satisfaction” (7 october 1803, e 736). over the next few weeks he appears to have made significant progress: “i go on finishing romney with spirit” (26 october, e 738). in a letter of 13 december, he implies that the plate was sufficiently finished for proofs to be taken: “mr romney[s] portrait goes on with spirit. i do not send a proof because i cannot get one the printers [being] <having been this afternoon> unable or unwilling & my press not yet being put up” (e 739). on 16 march 1804, blake sent ridley’s engraving of romney to hayley, describing it as “a copy from that miniature; you kindly sufferd me to make, from the picture of romney which i am now engraving” (e 744). by the beginning of may, blake had either assembled his own press or convinced the previously unable/unwilling copperplate printer to pull a proof impression of the plate, which was shown to one of romney’s oldest friends, adam walker:for romney and walker, see paley, “william blake, george romney, and the life of george romney, esq.” 54-55. i have seen the elder mr. walker. he knew and admired without any preface my print of romney, and when his daughter came in he gave the print into her hand without a word, and she immediately said, “ah! romney! younger than i have known him, but very like indeed.” (e 748) despite these testimonials, blake did not send a proof to hayley for another two months. on 22 june he offered an update on his progress, citing his former business partner, james parker, to emphasize the quality of the engraving: “head of romney is in very great forwardness. parker commends it highly. flaxman has not yet seen it. but shall soon, & then you shall have a proof of it for your remarks also” (e 753). flaxman may have seen the print shortly afterward, for on 16 july blake sent a proof, “still [in] an unfinishd state” (e 753), to hayley. part of blake’s dilatoriness may be explained by other projects he was then working on for hayley, such as the two plates for the third volume of the life of cowper (1803–04), as well as other commercial work, including the frontispiece to prince hoare’s academic correspondence (1804).blake appears to have prioritized the two cowper plates over the romney portrait engraving, probably beginning work on them at the beginning of 1804; on 23 february, he informed hayley that the cowper plates “are both in great forwardness” (e 742). they were published on 25 march. in a letter to hoare of 25 december 1803 (br[2] 174-75), flaxman recommended blake for the academic correspondence engraving, which was evidently finished by the beginning of february 1804, for a review of the pamphlet in the literary journal opines that “the royal academy of england might have offered an engraving worthy of the subject, and of the country” (br[2] 190). for the cowper and hoare plates, see robert n. essick, william blake’s commercial book illustrations (oxford: clarendon p, 1991) 89-91. in addition, blake was acting as hayley’s representative in london, locating, inspecting, and, with flaxman’s help, compiling a list of paintings to be engraved as illustrations for the biography of romney. during this period, he also began relief-etching his two epic poems, milton and jerusalem, according to the 1804 dates on their title pages. almost a month before blake sent a proof, hayley had solicited flaxman’s advice on hiring other engravers to work on the prospective illustrations for the biography.in a letter to flaxman of 18 june 1804, hayley seeks advice on employing “your freand cromak” (br[2] 196). flaxman had earlier advised against employing watson for book illustrations (see br[2] 194). by august, blake was aware that hayley was considering watson, whose delicate stippling style appealed to fashionable tastes, to engrave thomas alphonso’s medallion of romney.on 23 february 1804, blake relates daniel braithwaite’s “wish that you [hayley] would give the public an engraving of that medallion by your sons matchless hand” (e 742). he may have been attempting to revive the medallion commission, which had been left unresolved in august 1803 owing to his increase in fees (see note 12, above). on 7 august, blake approves of watson, stating that “miss. w. would engrave your sons medallion of romney most delicately.”for a full transcription of this letter, see crosby and essick 53-54. while hayley’s decision to commission watson may have been informed by the criticisms that blake’s engravings for the life of cowper and his six plates for the triumphs of temper had received from lady hesketh and her circle (hesketh favored the softer aesthetic associated with watson’s style of stippling), there were also practical reasons for his employing other engravers on the romney biography.for a discussion of contemporary criticisms of blake’s plates for the triumphs of temper, see crosby, “‘a ladys book’: blake’s engravings for hayley’s the triumphs of temper,” blake in our time: essays in honour of g. e. bentley jr., ed. karen mulhallen (toronto: u of toronto p, 2010) 105-30 (especially 112). see also note 40, below. during 1804 hayley, flaxman, and blake discussed the logistics of selecting paintings for reproduction and also the style that would best replicate romney’s aesthetic. for example, on 2 january flaxman suggests to hayley that romney’s chalk drawings “are all well worth etching in a bold manner which i think blake is likely to do with great success” (br[2] 177). in a letter to hayley of 4 may, blake proposes altering his linear style for the romney commissions: “mr. flaxman agrees with me that somewhat more than outline is necessary to the execution of romney’s designs, because his merit is eminent in the art of massing his lights and shades” (e 749). he goes on to say that he can etch the designs in a stipple manner similar to his 1797 portrait engraving of leonard euler.blake’s engraving is the frontispiece to vol. 1 of euler’s elements of algebra (1797). see essick, commercial book illustrations 75. because of hayley’s initial deadline of november 1804, however, more engravers were needed to complete the illustrations. in his letter to hayley of 22 june, blake cites parker to suggest that even “eight different engravers” (e 752) would not be able to execute by november the eight designs listed. he revisits this point in his letter of 7 august: “it is certainly necessary that the best artists that can be engaged should be employd in the work of romneys life.” at the beginning of the next paragraph, he describes working on the plates of the shipwreck and “romneys head” with “spirit & neatness.”see crosby and essick 53. blake was still working on “the head of romney” at the end of september, promising to send a second proof to hayley: “you shall soon see a proof of him in a very advancd state  i have not yet proved it but shall soon when i will send you one” (28 september 1804, e 755). the following month, he claims that he will send proofs of “the head of r and the shipwreck, which you shall soon see in a much more perfect state” (23 october, e 756). later in the same letter, blake describes a transformative visit to the truchsessian gallery before connecting this experience to “the plates i am now engraving after romney”: dear sir, excuse my enthusiasm or rather madness, for i am really drunk with intellectual vision whenever i take a pencil or graver into my hand, even as i used to be in my youth, and as i have not been for twenty dark, but very profitable years. i thank god that i courageously pursued my course through darkness. in a short time i shall make my assertion good that i am become suddenly as i was at first, by producing the head of romney and the shipwreck quite another thing from what you or i ever expected them to be. (e 757)for blake’s experiences at the gallery, see paley, “the truchsessian gallery revisited,” studies in romanticism 16.2 (spring 1977): 165-77. in a letter to hayley of 4 december, he once more claims that the two romney plates exemplify the recuperated artistic vision of his youth: “hope in a few days to send proofs of plates which i must say are far beyond any thing i have ever done. … i have lost my confusion of thought while at work & am as much myself when i take the pencil or graver into my hand as i used to be in my youth” (e 758). blake finally sent a second proof of his portrait engraving on 18 december. it appears either that he harbored some concerns about his patron’s reaction or that hayley replied in an untraced letter shortly afterward, for on 28 december blake offers the following assurances: “i am very far from shewing the portrait of romney as a finishd proof. be assured that with our good flaxmans good help & with your remarks on it in addition i hope to make it a supernaculum” (e 760). he uses the mock latinate superlative “supernaculum” to anticipate the high quality of his finished print.“supernaculum” derives from the german phrase “auf den nagel” (on to the nail) to describe liquor drunk to the last drop. the oed cites blake’s letter to hayley for the use of supernaculum to mean an excellent example of its kind. in a postscript, he reiterates his claim that the engraving required more work: “i made a very high finishd drawing <of romney> as a companion to my <drawing of the> head of cowper (you remember) with which flaxman is very much satisfied & says that when my print is like that i need wish it no better. & i am determind to make it so at least” (e 760). hayley apparently responded positively to the print, or at least to blake’s commitment to producing a “supernaculum,” because on 19 january 1805 blake states: “i feel extremely happy that you think my prints will do me credit” (e 762). this is the final reference in the extant correspondence to his engraving romney’s unfinished self-portrait.in the penultimate sentence of the letter, blake refers to the projected engravings of romney’s paintings: “i feel it is necessary to be very circumspect how we advance with romney his best works only, ought to be engraved for your work” (e 762). on 11 december 1805, he mentions that the plate of the shipwreck requires work: “a very few touches will finish the shipwreck those few i have added upon a proof before i parted with the picture. it is a print that i feel proud of on a new inspection” (e 767). the epistolary evidence indicates that blake worked on this portrait engraving between 7 august 1803 and at least 28 december 1804. he sent two proof impressions to hayley: the first on 16 july 1804 and the second on 18 december. the second one was sent after he knew that hayley had watson in mind to work on at least one illustration for the romney biography, and also after his transformative experience at the truchsessian gallery. the evidence also suggests that the engraving was intended to be the frontispiece for the biography. in his letter to flaxman of 7 august 1803, hayley compares blake’s portrait engraving of romney to the frontispiece for the first volume of the life of cowper when discussing prices.see note 12, above. in addition, blake’s comparison of his “very high finishd drawing <of romney>”  (e 760) to the drawing of cowper after romney (the intermediary model for the cowper frontispiece) in his letter of 28 december 1804 suggests that the engraving of romney was intended to be the frontispiece. furthermore, the intended placement is supported by several inconsistencies in hayley’s biography of romney. in 1806 hayley invited watson to felpham to make preparatory drawings of the romney paintings he owned, including three self-portraits.hayley, memoirs of the life and writings of william hayley, esq., ed. john johnson, vol. 2 (london: henry colburn, 1823) 59. she engraved them on a single plate for the frontispiece to the life of romney.for a discussion of this frontispiece, see crosby and essick 60, 63-64, and paley, “william blake, george romney, and the life of george romney, esq.” 60. according to hayley’s preface, “the introduction and a considerable part of [the biography], were written in the year 1803.”hayley, the life of george romney, esq. (chichester: t. payne, 1809) n. pag. in his memoirs, hayley claims that he began the biography “about the middle of december, 1803” (2: 45). he did not, however, fully correct his text by the time the work was published to take account of watson’s tripartite frontispiece.according to his memoirs, hayley was “retouching the life of romney” and revising proofs during the first half of 1808 (2: 66). the directions to the binder, for example, describe the frontispiece as “portrait of romney at the age of forty-nine.”hayley, the life of george romney, esq. [421]. he also refers in the main text to a single image: “the portrait, that forms a frontispiece to this volume, represents him as he appeared in the most active season of his existence.”hayley, the life of george romney, esq. 254. in both instances, hayley appears to be referring to blake’s engraving, which was commissioned during the period that the majority of the biography was composed, rather than watson’s frontispiece. we know that he initially negotiated a price of thirty guineas for blake’s engraving—the same amount blake received for the cowper frontispiece—suggesting a similar size and amount of work for each plate. the image size of the cowper frontispiece is 185 x 144 mm. the image size of the recently discovered print is 184 x 145 mm. the almost identical dimensions indicate a correspondence in format. was the anonymous engraving designed to be the frontispiece for a quarto-sized volume on george romney? to help answer this question, we must turn our attention to its aesthetic qualities. there are significant challenges in attributing unsigned reproductive engravings to specific engravers. for booksellers and printsellers, accuracy of replication and uniformity of product were paramount. professional copy engravers, such as blake, possessed a standard armory of graphic syntax that facilitated the accurate reproduction of original images on copper, which were then printed as uniform objects: book illustrations and/or separate prints.for a detailed discussion, see essick, william blake printmaker (princeton: princeton up, 1980) 25-28. the emphasis on pictorial fidelity via a standardized graphic vocabulary drastically restricts individual artistic expression, making it extremely difficult to identify the authors of unsigned reproductive engravings based on graphic syntax alone. indeed, it would be very difficult to identify blake as the engraver of a number of his commercial reproductive engravings without a sculpsit inscription. for example, his portrait engravings of david hartley (1791), earl spencer (1813), and robert hawker (1820) are highly conventional, executed with the standard linear patterns common to all copy engravers of the period.another example is blake’s “beggar’s opera” plate (1790), which essick describes as “untouched by blake’s own personal imagery or graphic techniques” (printmaker 59). without blake’s signature on these prints, attribution would rely on circumstantial evidence, as is the case for his apprenticeship engravings.according to benjamin heath malkin, blake engraved “from those drawings” he made in westminster abbey during his apprenticeship (br[2] 563). these engravings, all signed by blake’s master, james basire, as was the conventional practice, include portraits of numerous english kings and queens. see also essick, commercial book illustrations 115-20. with this caveat in mind, there are visual clues in the recently discovered print that can help in identifying its author. unlike the ridley and watson engravings, which are pure stipple, the anonymous engraving evinces an unusual combination of the standard graphic syntax associated with reproductive engraving. the background is rendered with dense lines interspersed with heavy stippling, probably made with a mattoir, or mace-headed tool.for blake’s use of a mattoir in his commercial engravings, see essick, printmaker 56. similarly, romney’s coat is delineated with a bold mix of roulette (a fine-toothed wheel used to make dotted patterns) and mattoir work and combinations of heavy lines to achieve a rough texture. certain areas of the coat, such as above the right arm and both lapels, are exceedingly dense. under magnification, the interstices between the lines merge, dissolving the graphic syntax into rugged blocks. a combination of fine stipple and line is used to depict the hair, while sparse stippling provides form and texture to the necktie. the face is rendered with exceptionally delicate stippling, and demonstrates a sophisticated treatment of light and shadow on the forehead, nose, and around the mouth. this deployment of graphic techniques is striking, providing a particularly strong contrast between the soft face and the rougher clothing and background that is very different from the other engravings after romney’s self-portrait.blake uses a similar combination of delicate stippling to render facial features and dense linear strokes for clothing in his extant miniature portraits. see crosby, “a minute skirmish: blake, hayley and the art of miniature painting,” blake and conflict, ed. sarah haggarty and jon mee (basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, 2009) 164-84. the techniques discernible in the print were all within blake’s range of graphic styles. for example, he uses comparable combinations of line and fine stipple to delineate hair in his portrait engraving of edmund pitts (c. 1793-96) (illus. 2).for the pitts engraving, see essick, the separate plates of william blake (princeton: princeton up, 1983) 178-80. 2. detail of blake’s line and stipple engraving of edmund pitts compared with detail of the anonymous line and stipple engraving of romney. the pitts print is from an extra-illustrated copy of daniel lysons, historical account of the environs of london (1796), rb 272584 vol. 10, reproduced by permission of the huntington library, san marino, california. the romney print is from the collection of robert n. essick. in addition, as with the depiction of romney’s coat in the anonymous print, blake uses extensive roulette and mattoir work to give a rough texture to pitts’s coat that is juxtaposed to the subtle stippling on the face. the width of the roulette lines in the recently discovered print, approximately 0.9 mm., corresponds to the pitts portrait. when we examine blake’s early commercial engravings for roulette work, we find the same width of lines in, for example, the roundel borders of “robin hood & clorinda” (1783), “calisto” (1784), and “zephyrus and flora” (1784). these early commercial works also exhibit a notable contrast between bold patterns of lines and dots and delicate stippling.for a discussion of these early commercial engravings, see essick, printmaker 55-57. in “morning amusement” and “evening amusement” (both 1782) after watteau, blake deploys extremely dense linear patterns, with roulette and mattoir work in the foreground, while the facial features of the main group of figures, though showing less proficiency in the treatment of light and shadow than the anonymous portrait engraving, are rendered with fine stippling.for another example of extremely fine stippling, see “venus dissuades adonis from hunting” (1787). in this print, blake uses coarse stippling on background foliage and delicate stippling on the central figures. see also essick, separate plates 145-49. another such contrast is evident in “the idle laundress” (1788), where dense linear patterns with heavy roulette and mattoir work on the boy’s coat represent a rough texture that is juxtaposed to the stipple shading on the face. the technical and stylistic correspondences between the graphic syntax in the anonymous engraving and blake’s early commercial prints prompt us to recall his claim in october 1804 that his experiences at the truchsessian gallery had inspired him to return to his aesthetic of twenty years earlier. blake’s rhetoric in his letter of 23 october may seem hyperbolic, but for much of 1804 he was attempting to secure engraving commissions from hayley.see crosby and essick, especially 68-72. no doubt recalling hesketh’s criticism of his cowper frontispiece (she believed that it hinted at her cousin’s insanity) and the triumphs of temper plates, blake repeatedly informs hayley that he is capable of altering his linear style to better represent romney’s designs.hesketh requested that hayley not include an engraving of romney’s portrait of cowper in the life of cowper (br[2] 105). in his letter to flaxman of 7 august 1803, hayley refers to blake’s plates for the triumphs of temper, “i am sorry to say that the ladies (& it is a ladys book) find fault with the engravings,” before revealing that “the engravings of cowper have also been heavily censur’d” (br[2] 157). see note 18, above, and paley, “cowper as blake’s spectre,” eighteenth-century studies 1 (1968): 236-52. in the letter of 4 may 1804, for example, he begins by claiming that he is developing a more fashionable aesthetic: “i thank you sincerely for falconer, an admirable poet, and the admirable prints to it by fittler. whether you intended it or not, they have given me some excellent hints in engraving; his manner of working is what i shall endeavour to adopt in many points” (e 748).blake may have been referring to james fittler’s engraving of a shipwreck in falconer’s poem. see essick, printmaker 173. by 7 august, he knew that hayley was considering watson to engrave thomas alphonso’s medallion. as we have seen, hayley initially offered this commission to blake the previous year. it is possible that, despite approving of watson in his letter of 7 august, blake may have felt threatened, particularly as her delicate stippling style was popular with hayley’s circle.for a discussion of watson in the context of blake’s configuration of “female will,” see essick, “william blake’s ‘female will’ and its biographical context,” studies in english literature 1500–1900 31 (1991): 615-30. the similarly delicate and skillful stippling evident in the recently discovered print certainly evokes watson, although the clothing and background are very different from her work. there are a number of idiosyncrasies in the characterization of romney that are suggestive of blake’s hand. unlike the ridley and watson engravings, the print depicts him with a symmetrically bowed mouth.in both watson’s and ridley’s engravings, romney has a slightly asymmetrical bowed mouth. the same visual trope can be seen in many of blake’s paintings, including adam naming the beasts, eve naming the birds, and christ blessing.martin butlin, the paintings and drawings of william blake, 2 vols. (new haven: yale up, 1981) #667-68, 670, all datable to c. 1810. in the print, there are lines extending vertically from the left corner of the mouth, which, combined with the bowed mouth, hint at a playful smile that is absent from ridley and watson. another distinctive feature is the enlarged and slightly protruding eyes. these differ significantly from the ridley and watson plates, but are similar to the prominent eyes in blake’s own self-portrait of c. 1802.see essick, “a (self?) portrait of william blake,” blake 39.3 (winter 2005–06): 126-39. rather than the introspective, melancholic subject of the original painting and the ridley and watson engravings, the recently discovered engraving presents an artist who, if not “drunk with intellectual vision” (e 757), certainly possesses an outward-looking character. if this print is by blake, the slightly bulging eyes and bowed mouth may explain why hayley rejected it. the expressive character departs not only from romney’s original, but also from the tone of hayley’s biography, which portrays romney as melancholic.in his life of romney, hayley follows the same autobiographical metanarrative that he establishes in the biography of cowper, casting himself as curative for romney’s increasingly frequent bouts of depression. see, for example, life of romney 255. john romney addresses this characterization of his father in memoirs of the life and works of george romney: “mr. romney was naturally of a placid and easy disposition, and it was only in the decline of life, when his health was impaired by application, and his feelings ruffled by peculiar circumstances, that he manifested that morbidness of feeling, which mr. hayley has been so particular in noticing” (246). hayley may have found the engraving excessive in its depiction of the artist as genius, a personality seized with excited imagination rather than inward reflection.for hayley’s decision to choose watson’s frontispiece over blake’s, see also paley, “william blake, george romney, and the life of george romney, esq.” 58-59. without a sculpsit inscription, a definitive attribution of the recently discovered print is not possible, but it is certainly not improbable that the engraving is by blake. to summarize the evidence: the graphic style used to delineate the print, and particularly the rather old-fashioned treatments of the clothing and background, provide a terminus ante quem of no later than c. 1820. prior to 1820, the model for the print was available only via the following sources: romney’s original painting, which was in hayley’s possession, blake’s miniature, which was in long’s possession, and ridley’s and watson’s engravings. there are significant compositional and stylistic differences between the print and the ridley and watson engravings. these differences enable us to eliminate them as engravers and their respective engravings as models. therefore, whoever executed the portrait engraving must have had access to the original self-portrait. the correspondence shows that blake worked on a quarto-sized portrait engraving of romney after his own drawing of the painter’s self-portrait for at least sixteen months and sent hayley two proof impressions. the recently discovered print is before all letters, indicating that it is a proof impression. the image size is within 1 mm. of blake’s frontispiece for the first volume of hayley’s quarto edition of the life of cowper.watson engraved the frontispiece for the octavo edition of hayley’s life of cowper (1806). hayley consulted blake, because in a letter of march 1805 blake states that “the idea of seeing an engraving of cowper by the hand of caroline watson is i assure you a pleasing one to me” (e 764). at the time, blake was negotiating with the publisher richard phillips about an octavo edition of hayley’s animal ballads, illustrated with new engravings. the prospect of producing engravings after his own designs rather than a reduced version of a copy engraving that had already attracted significant criticism may have influenced blake’s generous reaction to watson’s gaining the cowper commission. until 1806, blake’s engraving of romney was intended to be the frontispiece for the life of romney, a quarto book. the graphic syntax of the print is within the range of blake’s techniques, including both the bold linear, roulette, and mattoir work on the clothing and the delicate stippling on the facial features. we know that during 1804 blake repeatedly offered to adapt his linear style to include stippling and provided an example—his portrait of euler—for how he could execute the romney plates. by 7 august, he was also aware that hayley was considering watson—one of the most fashionable stipple engravers of the period—for the romney biography, suggesting that if the print is by blake, it is almost certainly not the proof state sent in july 1804, but either the later state sent to hayley in december or an even more finished state executed in 1805. finally, after his visit to the truchsessian gallery in october 1804, blake informed hayley that he had reclaimed the “intellectual vision” of his youth, which he had not experienced “for twenty dark, but very profitable years,” and stated: “i shall make my assertion good that i am become suddenly as i was at first, by producing the head of romney … quite another thing from what you or i ever expected [it] to be” (e 757). the recently discovered print exhibits the same combination of rough linear patterns, with roulette and mattoir work, contrasted with fine stippling conspicuous in the commercial engravings that blake produced approximately twenty years before his visit to the gallery. considered together, both circumstantial and graphic evidence make it probable that the recently discovered print is a proof impression before all letters of blake’s portrait engraving of romney—a plate that was, in blake’s own words, “quite another thing from what” both patron and craftsman expected. unfortunately for blake, hayley appears to have had different expectations, as well as a different conception of “supernaculum.” translating blake’s “jerusalem” into polish translating blake’s jerusalem into polish by eliza borkowska eliza borkowska (eborkowska@swps.edu.pl) is assistant professor of english at the university of social sciences and humanities, warsaw. she is the author of but he talked of the temple of man’s body. blake’s revelation un-locked (cambridge scholars publishing, 2009) and is currently completing work on her second book, in the presence of the absence: wordsworth’s encounters with god. she also works as a translator and a scriptwriter. a notice in the online news section of blake in september 2011 informed about an in-progress translation of jerusalem into polish by rafał stankiewicz and me. going against the polish tradition (which has by now become a habit) of publishing jerusalem only in the form of selected fragments, we desire to present to the polish-speaking public the entire “golden string,” giving this string as blakean a gloss as possible and building a jerusalem that will be a faithful replica of the original. the purpose of this essay is to elaborate upon these metaphors. i would like to explain the motivation behind our project, speak about the obstacles, and share the encouragements, establishing a context for this testimony of a builder of a replica with some reflections concerning the history of polish blake translations. it will be fair to begin by stating that blake’s name sounds relatively familiar to polish ears and by acknowledging that popularizing blake in poland has been and remains his translators’ job.one may object that perhaps this modest popularity derives partly from the fact that, due to the political changes of the last decades, more and more poles know english. but most of them certainly do not know it well enough to cope with poetry, and those who do have invested their time and money in learning english for social and economic reasons, very often in order to obtain jobs that leave them no time for poetry. more often than not, genuine poetry readers begin with translations. it is acquaintance with a polish version, sometimes a variety of polish versions, that eventually provokes those readers who have some command of english to reach for the original text, to confront the challenge that faced the translators. over the decades, blake’s poetry has attracted many polish people of talent, including poets of the highest esteem, such as leopold staff, jan kasprowicz, czesław miłosz, zygmunt kubiak, and stanisław barańczak. their translations have been published in anthologies (of english poetry, or english and american poetry, or romantic poetry, or religious poetry) as well as in volumes dedicated to blake alone.for details, see references under krzeczkowski et al., miłosz, pietrkiewicz, kubiak (1991 and 1993), barańczak (1992 and 1993), puławski, and fostowicz (1998 and 2007). as a result, a great number of works have been given polish versions. in fact, some of blake’s works have received more than one version. this applies particularly to shorter pieces, including poetical sketches and songs of innocence and of experience, as well as several minor prophecies, such as the marriage of heaven and hell, the book of thel, and the first book of urizen. a similar profusion of translations has been generated by selected passages from blake’s major prophecies. the most notable example is the preface to milton (pl. 1).plate numbers and quotations from blake’s works follow erdman, unless otherwise indicated. in the anthology edited by puławski (1997), the preface, translated by jolanta kozak, is followed by her translations of pls. 2-4 (144-55), and, curiously enough, preceded by another version of “and did those feet …” (143), by puławski himself. in other words, in an anthology which gives no samples of the four zoas or jerusalem,the lack of any passage representing jerusalem is particularly striking in this anthology, as its introduction begins with a reference to the work: the first sentence states, “in his jerusalem, blake writes the words that could be regarded as a motto for his entire work: ‘i must create a system, or be enslav’d by another mans’” (5; my translation of the polish text). and only a very brief sample of milton, there are two translations of the preface’s famous lyric. the same is true of kubiak’s anthology (1991), which gives no passages from the four zoas or jerusalem and no extracts from milton, with the exception of “and did those feet …” (147). again, the lyric, along with the rest of the preface, is the only extract from milton included in a more recent selection from blake’s poems and writings, compiled and translated by polish artist and blake scholar michał fostowicz (87-88 [2007]).  the situation of milton changed radically in 2001, when wiesław juszczak, one of the most distinguished polish critics and blake scholars, published his translation of the whole prophecy. it is a brilliant work, though it has one questionable feature: juszczak seems to have attempted to render blake’s sublime and pathos by imitating the style of one of the leading polish romantic poets, juliusz słowacki. the result is that the polish milton sounds more like słowacki than blake, though this weak point may also be seen as a strong point: it refers the reader to the epoch when the original was created and, apart from that, it constitutes an integrated stylistic choice, whose greatest appeal is its beauty. however, no matter how one assesses the content and form of juszczak’s translation, the very fact that he decided to translate and publish the entire work cannot be overestimated. it has value in itself, because every post-juszczak translator of a fragment from milton is no longer involved in the fragmentation of the prophecy. after juszczak, a new translation of a fragment (such as fostowicz’s version of the preface from 2007) becomes simply a new example of how milton’s idiom can be rendered; it enriches the ways in which blake can be naturalized into polish without disintegrating his thought. the same applies to the four zoas, which was translated and published in its entirety in 2006 by one of the most respected polish translators, maciej słomczyński (who had earlier translated, among other things, all the theatrical works of shakespeare, milton’s paradise lost, and joyce’s ulysses). again, with the entire text available in polish, publication of fragments, such as the selection offered by fostowicz in 2007 (68-85), no longer means that the translator carries on the work of fragmentation. his work becomes a new instance of how individual phrases or paragraphs or pages could or should be understood. in brief, publication of a translation of the whole opens up a field for debate.  unfortunately, no such field has been opened up to now as far as jerusalem is concerned. no interpretative or artistic dialogue relating to what blake called his  “consolidated” work is possible, because it exists in polish only in the form of pathetically disheveled fragments. probably the first poet to publish a translation of a fragment was kubiak, whose version of pls. 34[38].7-35[39].3 was included in poeci języka angielskiego [poets of the english language] (krzeczkowski et al. 151-54 [1971]). miłosz, the first polish poet to receive the nobel prize for literature (1980), included a large part of “to the christians” in his volume of translations entitled mowa wiązana [poetic speech] (1986). the last decade was a little more favorable for jerusalem (though not as constructive as it was for blake’s other major prophecies), especially thanks to fostowicz, who included in his wiersze i pisma williama blake’a [poems and writings of william blake] (2007) the largest selection so far: pls. 1, 3, 10.7-15.20, 16.61-69, 27, 38[43].1-54, 42.19-46, 52, 70.1-71.9, 74.1-13, 77 (in its entirety), 84.29-85.13, 90.1-91.30, and 94.1-99.5 (90-136). apart from this, dozens or indeed hundreds of lines have been translated to illustrate books about blake written in or translated into polish. during the last, most fruitful decade, a great number of minute quotations from jerusalem were included in fostowicz’s latest (and last) book, boska analogia [divine analogy] (2008); more than fifty percent coincide with those selected for his wiersze i pisma williama blake’a, published a year earlier, while the rest are translations of other bits and pieces from the prophecy. more fragments, or sometimes other translations of the same fragments, can be found in a massive book published in 2001, u‑bywać. człowiek, świat, przyjaźń w twórczości williama blake’a [the man, the world, and friendship in the work of william blake],the main title, u‑bywać, is a pun suggesting contact with others (bywać u) as a means of the annihilation of the self (ubywać). by probably the most recognizable polish blake scholar, tadeusz sławek. another group appears in one of the very few translations of blake-related books into polish, peter ackroyd’s blake, which was translated by ewa kraskowska and published in 2001. to read these fragments is the most disheartening of experiences. in choosing extracts for his blake anthology, fostowicz could at least claim that he “tried to select key … fragments of bigger wholes [including jerusalem] and put them together in a way that will make it possible for the uninitiated to understand the basic ideas [of blake’s thought] and walk efficiently along his labyrinth” (foreword, p. 5 [2007]; translation mine). but, understandably, no such claims can be made in his boska analogia or any other critical book; the fragments are of course random, they follow the critic’s argument, not jerusalem’s, and they are, naturally, meant to guide the reader along fostowicz’s, or sławek’s, or ackroyd’s labyrinth, not blake’s.  one of the outcomes of this situation is that blake’s thought gets explained for the polish reader without the reader’s having any real chance to know blake himself. another is the false impression that the reader may derive from encountering jerusalem in the form of a disorganized mass. now and then, for example, the reader will find in this jumble of fragments quotations saying that “jerusalem lies in ruins,” and indeed there is nothing to counteract the impression that she/it really does. a third consequence is that no tradition of translating jerusalem into polish has a chance of taking root in such ground. a telling illustration is kraskowska’s translation of ackroyd. undertaking the rare job of translating rather than writing a blake-related book, she uses translations that existed at the time, quoting, for example, kubiak’s translations of fragments of “to the evening star” (68), an island in the moon (105), and the book of thel (134), as well as the entire “the chimney sweeper” of innocence (143) and all of “the tyger” (168),a curious detail is that kraskowska does not limit herself to one translation of the poem, quoted by ackroyd at the beginning of chapter 14, but provides as many as four (168-69): kubiak’s version is followed by barańczak’s, and then by two translations from puławski’s anthology, one by puławski and the other by kozak. available in kubiak’s anthologies of 1991 and 1993. as i said above, kubiak also translated pls. 34[38].7-35[39].3 of jerusalem, from which ackroyd quotes several times. yet this time the translator does not use kubiak but translates the lines she needs herself, probably because the passage, for some reason not included in kubiak’s anthologies from the 1990s, exists only in the form of a disconnected fragment in poeci języka angielskiego of 1971 (krzeczkowski et al. 151-54) and is too short for her to bother to recover the translation. if the translation of ackroyd’s book were made now, ten years later, the translator would be in a much more comfortable position; apart from the shorter pieces which were available in 2001, she would have the entire text of milton and the four zoas to take from. but as far as jerusalem is concerned, she would probably take the passages collected by fostowicz in his wiersze i pisma williama blake’a and translate all the other passages herself, rather than scan fostowicz’s critical boska analogia (which, by the way, provides translations of much higher quality than those in his anthology of 2007) or u‑bywać by sławek (a hugely competent blake scholar and a poet to boot) in the hope that, perhaps, there is some coincidence in the fragments that a polish critic and the english author needed to illustrate their arguments. all in all, putting together the fragments scattered in selections from blake and in blake criticism, well over a thousand lines of jerusalem have been translated into polish, about a quarter of the text (roughly the equivalent of one chapter). some lines have been translated more than once, and thousands have never been translated. having invested several years in the task of creating the first polish translation of the entire prophecy along with rafał stankiewicz—a polish poet and philologist, and a devoted blake student—i could provide a long catalogue of challenges, very often frustrations, on the translator’s way. but let me limit myself to a handful of examples.  polish words tend to be longer than english. for instance, life, love, good, hate, form, wheel, shell, void, space, earth, sun, moon, man, heart, womb, one, lamb, and hundreds of other one-syllable keywords of jerusalem are twoor three-syllable words in polish, and in certain grammatical cases or in the plural they often become three or even four syllables. this is, of course, bad for the rhythmicality of the text, and it is even worse for its length. as a result, though the translator must repeat after blake the assertions of “to the public” concerning the “cadences” and “number of syllables,” there is very little chance that there will be correspondence between the original and the translation in this respect. in a different text you might consider removing individual words for the sake of rhythm and brevity, but you dare not do this in a text that, in the same paragraph of “to the public,” asserts that “every word and every letter is studied and put into its fit place.” you can likewise experiment with synonyms, searching for a polish word whose rhythm and length will be nearer the english original. but it is exactly when you start doing this that you appreciate how direct blake is in his choice of vocabulary. he is not milton, he does not rely on latinate diction or rhetoric; his words cannot be translated with the use of less obvious synonyms, with something of foreign derivation, or something slightly more archaic. once this is done what gets affected is the most vital feature of the original: its directness, its fiery energy, its elemental power. even more crucially, the rhythm—the palpable beat of english, its play between the strong and the weak, the stressed and the unstressed—is an attribute that does not have an equivalent in polish. the polish language has stressed and unstressed syllables, but what is stressed is not that strong, what is unstressed not so weak and, as a result, even if the translator manages to recreate the rhythm, it will never attack the polish ear as much as the original attacks the english ear. of course these difficulties confront every translator of english verse into polish, but the specific difficulty of jerusalem is that the beat is part of the meaning. los is a blacksmith, his sense is the ear, his tool is the hammer (“the blow of his hammer is justice. the swing of his hammer: mercy. / the force of los’s hammer is eternal forgiveness,” 88.49-50). when a fragment is translated, it is not as obvious as when the whole is approached that one of the works of this hammer is jerusalem itself, and that its beat must be heard throughout. los would be as effective and efficient in polish as he is in english if his instrument were one of the harps to which he is singing in the song of los, or if he went on singing the cradle song, or the watch song, or if he limited himself to operating the plow and running the winepress, or if he were an engraver drawing lines “upon the walls of shining heaven.” as a smith, polish los must remain inferior to the english original, because there is less force in the swing and the blow of his hammer. moreover, blake’s punctuation causes immense difficulty. for example, erdman’s pl. 16.3-7 reads: in the forests the oak frowns terrible, the beech & ash & elm enroot  among the spiritual fires; loud the corn fields thunder along the soldiers fife; the harlots shriek; the virgins dismal groan the parents fear: the brothers jealousy: the sisters curse …. should these lines be interpreted like this, in the forests the oak frowns terrible, the beech & ash & elm enroot among the spiritual fires; loud the corn fields thunder along.  the soldiers fife, the harlots shriek, the virgins dismal groan, the parents fear the brother’s jealousy, the sister’s curse …. or, perhaps, in the following way? in the forests the oak frowns terrible, the beech & ash & elm enroot among the spiritual fires; loud the corn fields thunder along the soldier’s fife, the harlot’s shriek, the virgin’s dismal groan, the parent’s fear, the brother’s jealousy, the sister’s curse …. as a blake scholar, i have always found blake’s punctuation not really erratic, as it has so often been named (or, indeed, misnamed), but polyphonic. for this reason, as a critic, i rely on erdman’s edition, because only in this edition is it possible to get what blake’s original really offers: to see, for example, not only “the parents fear” but also “the parent’s fear” and “the parents’ fear.” but the critic’s exhilaration becomes the translator’s frustration. where the critic has the freedom to enjoy the activity and passivity, singularity and plurality combined into one brief phrase, the translator must constantly consult keynes, stevenson, paley, or solomon for their opinions and then reduce the original’s multitude and polyvocality, because certain reductions must be made: polish, being a flectional language, has cases, and its genitive sounds totally different from its plural; it has no coincidence of verb and noun, etc. the only thing the translator can do is make a decision and follow one line of interpretation, and then, perhaps, account for the reduction in poetry in the prose of a footnote. of course, this type of frustration is also the experience of blake’s editors. what remains the vexation of the translator alone is the need to make certain indeterminacies determinate. to provide another—the last—illustration: on pl. 14.16-20, blake writes: and los beheld his sons, and he beheld his daughters: every one a translucent wonder: a universe within, increasing inwards … … and they every one in their bright loins: have a beautiful golden gate …. does “every one” refer to the daughters and sons of los, or to the daughters alone? this interpretative decision must be made because all possible polish equivalents of “every one” will take one form when they refer to females alone, and another when they refer to a female-male group. blake’s editors are of no help in this case, because they do not need to decide. here, critics and commentators must become the translator’s guides, and the frustration comes when you need to weigh, for example, paley’s and doskow’s opinions (that the lines refer to the sons and daughters) versus stevenson’s and damon’s (that they refer to the daughters alone).see paley, william blake 152, doskow 56, stevenson 686 (note to 14.16-24), and damon 244. even more frustration comes when the only conclusion you can draw from reading and rereading damon, paley, wicksteed, dortort, curran and wittreich, otto, bloom, doskow, beer, and others is that nobody says anything about a given line or phrase or word. of course, there is nothing surprising about it; there are hundreds of lines that have never received an illuminating commentary because, quite understandably, scholars focus on what is vital for their arguments. the difference between a critic and a translator is that for the latter each word, every minute particular, is vital. nevertheless, despite these and hundreds of other difficulties, the frustration turns back to exhilaration when it transpires that, after all, blake’s thought does yield to the polish language. juszczak and słomczyński have demonstrated how effectively the type of difficulties enumerated above can be overcome and how vivid and suggestive, full of sublimity and pathos “polish blake” can be. though the language does not have certain features which constitute the english language’s specificity and appeal, it does have attractions of its own, in particular immense musicality, flexibility, and openness to syntactic and semantic experiment. perhaps the lines must remain slightly longer, but assonance, for example, by the vocal association of one word with another, will make them feel shorter. the modulation of polish does not resemble the modulation of english, yet it makes a music of its own. the hammer of los may need to become a slightly more musical hammer in the hand of a slightly more musical smith, yet it is capable of beating out a rhythm which pulsates powerfully enough to make the whole vibrant and energetic, fiery and passionate. still, despite this, jerusalem exists only in the form of fragments. poles have had no chance to wind the “golden string” into a ball, because the string is badly torn. symptomatically, when translating pl. 77 (“to the christians”), miłosz started from “i know of no other christianity”; in other words, he excluded the “golden string” motto, probably because it makes no sense when only a fragment is given. fostowicz, on the other hand, did translate the motto along with the rest of the plate, but he made what seems a deliberate mistake by changing the tense; in his translation (as well as in the first paragraph of his foreword, where he quotes the “golden string” piece again), the motto reads not “i give you the end of a golden string” but “i will give you the end of a golden string” (5, 118 [2007]). although fostowicz changed the original’s present tense into the future, it is quite doubtful, however, whether he really planned to give his audience the entire golden string sometime in the future. before his death in 2010, he had conducted extensive correspondence with my collaborator, rafał stankiewicz. fostowicz discussed every question and uncertainty with the fire of an artist and the patience of a scholar, yet never offered to join the project. of course, one of his reasons might have been his involvement with other projects, including writing his massive boska analogia. but another possible reason why he was not willing to engage in translating the entire text and why he chose to publish fragments rather than working on the whole may be recovered from a careful examination of the selection he offers in wiersze i pisma williama blake’a. he begins with the frontispiece, pl. 1, which is duly followed by pl. 3, “to the public.” pl. 3, however, is not followed by pls. 4 and 5, etc., but by pls. 10.7-15.20, which he puts together under the title “golgonooza.” as noted, fostowicz claims in the first paragraph of his foreword that he “tried to select key … fragments of bigger wholes and put them together in a way that will make it possible for the uninitiated to understand the basic ideas [of blake’s thought] and walk efficiently along his labyrinth” (5). the question that arises is why the translator who wanted to acquaint his reader with blake’s “basic ideas” excluded the theme of jerusalem, given in the opening of pl. 4. even more importantly, why did he exclude the statement of blake’s great task (“to open the eternal worlds, to open the immortal eyes / of man …”) in pl. 5, which explains everything that follows, including golgonooza? my guess is that fostowicz’s intuition told him that what qualifies as a fair selection, fit to be offered to the polish reader, are fragments which are not over-english. jerusalem’s theme is specified in pl. 4, which is quite heavily loaded with english and welsh place-names (“the malvern and the cheviot, the wolds plinlimmon & snowdon,” etc.). even more radically, blake’s great task is formulated in a paragraph that incorporates the list of the sons of albion (“while i write of the building of golgonooza, & of the terrors of entuthon: / of hand & hyle & coban, of kwantok, peachey, brereton, slayd & hutton”), which is followed by a list of four other sons (“scofield! kox, kotope and bowen”), and then by the catalogue of albion’s daughters (5.41-45). by contrast, in 10.7-15.20, the longest uninterrupted passage in fostowicz’s selection, there are only a handful of references to the individual sons and daughters (sabrina and ignoge in 11.19, ragan and scofield in 11.21, and hand, hyle, and skofeld in 15.1-2). what is more, in this passage of 276 lines, london is the only conspicuous english place-name; apart from london, there are just brief references to tyburn, paddington, and lambeth in the description of the building of golgonooza. to give a few more examples, this passage is followed by a pitifully brief extract (16.61-69), which the translator entitles “los’s halls.” significantly, what is omitted is the highly english remainder of pl. 16, which begins “hampstead highgate finchley hendon muswell hill” and then, after humber and trent, tweed and tyne, along with lincolnshire, derbyshire, nottinghamshire, leicestershire, oxfordshire, and norfolk, progresses to the enumeration of the counties of wales, england, and scotland. this elimination of the better part of the plate and the decision to give only its concluding paragraph as a fragment seem to be dictated by the same rationale that informs other choices and selections. thus, the preface “to the deists,” pl. 52, is followed by what fostowicz calls “plates 70-71.” the heading is misleading, however, as only the first nine lines of pl. 71 are given, and the thoroughly english remainder, beginning “and these the names of albions twelve sons, & of his twelve daughters / with their districts,” is not translated. pls. 94-99, on the other hand, are translated, and form the second-longest uninterrupted passage of jerusalem in fostowicz’s anthology. in this passage of 176 lines, there is just one line that has english place-names (“cornwall & derbyshire” in 94.8), and the sons and daughters of albion are referred to only as a group. preceding this relatively long extract is a passage entitled “los’s lament,” pls. 90.1-91.30. pl. 90, translated in its entirety, is more english than most of the other passages in this selection. among other things, line 40 contains a reference to four sons of albion: “while in selfhood hand & hyle & bowen & skofeld appropriate / the divine names.” in fostowicz’s translation, however, four become three, as he removes bowen—a faithful translator for no apparent reason omits one of the four: “samozapatrzenie w postaci handa, hyle’a i skofelda …” (“selfhood in the form of hand, hyle, and skofeld …”; translation mine). one last telling detail is that a blake dictionary that fostowicz provides at the end of his book (287-97), while explaining the important places and characters of blake’s myth—allamanda, beulah, cathedron, entuthon-benython, erin, luban, ahania, bromion, enion,  fuzon, leutha, oothoon, orc, palamabron, rintrah, theotormon, and many others—contains only albion, hand, scofield, and tyburn for english proper names. in other words, the selection from jerusalem has been made in such a way that there is no need to explain any other english names. in sum, a study of the most extensive collection of fragments from jerusalem translated into polish so far, particularly the logic behind what has been selected and what has been excluded, leads to the conclusion that jerusalem might have been considered too english to be translated as a whole. indeed, certain passages, such as the fixing of the counties in pl. 16, cannot be effectively naturalized into polish. the way that blake translates the map of the british isles into rhythmic verse will never have the same effect on the polish audience as it has on the british, because the names will remain largely unknown and because the ear of a polish person who does not know english will not catch the rhythm (reading, for example, “-shire” not as a one-syllable but as a two-syllable word). the eye of a polish reader, even one quite well acquainted with english, may spot the missing “w” in “glasgo” in 16.57, but will probably not grasp all the other abbreviations that give this incantation the feel of a dictation hastily put down in shorthand. this may be explained in a footnote, but too many footnotes usually lead to a situation where none is read, which means in effect that a polish person seeing the missing “w” in “glasgo” will regard it as an editorial mistake. on the other hand, similar catalogues are part of the biblical and of the epic conventions, which are as familiar to the educated polish reader as to anybody. the reader will probably not grasp the specificity of blake’s catalogue, but will understand enough to accept it as part of the entire prophecy. besides, the proportion of such lines is so tiny that the text does not deserve to be fragmented only to spare the reader the difficulty of coping with such passages. in fact, the key to jerusalem’s characters and places is largely to be found in jerusalem itself; damon’s a blake dictionary is, for the most part, a collection of quotations from blake himself, both when it explains purely blakean terms and when it defines blake’s use of the names “hand & hyle & bowen & skofeld,” etc. then again, the names cambel or gwinefred, when heard for the first time, probably sound as empty to the ear of an english reader as they do to the polish reader. gwiniverra, on the other hand, sounds familiar (hollywood productions know no national, cultural, or linguistic borders), and so do the names of cordella, gonorill, and ragan (fortunately, shakespeare knows no borders either). thus, the first encounter with those characters may not be as perplexing for the reader as one might fear, and with each and every subsequent appearance of the daughters of albion it becomes apparent that familiarity with the arthurian romance or with king lear does not offer much help in understanding their functions in jerusalem, because they assume a narrative life of their own, they become part of the myth, very much like ahania, enion, vala, or enitharmon, or like milton in milton.actually milton, which has been translated into polish, requires much more background. to understand what blake’s milton does and says presupposes acquaintance with john milton’s thought, attitude, and religious convictions, as well as with the style of paradise lost. but what blake’s daughters of albion say and do in jerusalem will be perfectly understood without any acquaintance with milton’s history of britain, one of the sources from which blake derived their names. as a matter of fact, it is only if jerusalem is offered as a whole that it can explain why it contains such a multitude of english references. it is only when it is allowed to tell its narrative that it can reveal that, on one level, the record of los’s fight for his friend albion is a record of blake’s artistic fight for the country and the culture in which he lived and worked. and only when jerusalem is allowed to unwind its story without interruption does it have a chance to disclose that, on another level, los’s fight is universal, blake’s albion, the sleeping giant, is an everyman, and, despite the multitude of english place-names, albion is an everywhere, very much like joyce’s apparently (and literally) thoroughly irish dublin. in brief, my conviction is that jerusalem seems much more confined within british culture, history, and geography when it is fragmented than when it is a “consolidated” work. a fragment that may be considered untranslatable becomes translatable when it stops being a fragment and has a chance to function as part of the whole. will polish people take up the challenge that blake’s jerusalem offers? of course i hope they will. however, hoping is a dubious thing in polish; we do have an equivalent of the english “while there’s life there’s hope,” but there is also a nasty polish proverb that says “hope is the mother of fools.” let me therefore conclude not on what i hope for but on what i know: it is impossible to determine whether poles will take up the challenge of jerusalem until the challenge of the entire text is offered. references in polish ackroyd, peter. blake. translated by ewa kraskowska. poznań: zysk i s-ka wydawnictwo, 2001. barańczak, stanisław. od chaucera do larkina. 400 nieśmiertelnych wierszy 125 poetów anglojęzycznych z 8 stuleci [from chaucer to larkin. four hundred poems by one hundred and twenty-five english-language poets from eight centuries, selected and translated by s. barańczak]. kraków: wydawnictwo znak, 1993. barańczak, stanisław. “z tobą, więc ze wszystkim.” 222 arcydzieła angielskiej i amerykańskiej liryki religijnej [“with you, therefore with everything.” two hundred and twenty-two masterpieces of english and american religious poetry, selected and translated by s. barańczak]. kraków: wydawnictwo znak, 1992. fostowicz, michał. boska analogia. william blake a sztuka starożytności [divine analogy. william blake and the art of antiquity]. gdańsk: słowo/obraz terytoria, 2008. fostowicz, michał. wieczna ewangelia. wybór pism [the everlasting gospel. a selection, blake’s works selected and translated by m. fostowicz]. wrocław: pracownia “borgis,” 1998. fostowicz, michał. wiersze i pisma williama blake’a [poems and writings of william blake, selected and translated by m. fostowicz]. kraków: miniatura, 2007. juszczak, wiesław. william blake: milton, zaślubniny nieba i piekła [william blake: milton and the marriage of heaven and hell, translated by w. juszczak]. kraków: universitas, 2001. krzeczkowski, henryk, jerzy s. sito, and juliusz żuławski, eds. poeci języka angielskiego [poets of the english language]. warszawa: piw, 1971. kubiak, zygmunt. blake. poezje wybrane [blake. selected poems, selected and translated by z. kubiak]. warszawa: ludowa spółdzielnia wydawnicza, 1991. kubiak, zygmunt. twarde dno snu. tradycja romantyczna w poezji języka angielskiego [the hard bottom of dreams. the romantic tradition in english-language poetry, selected and translated by z. kubiak]. kraków: oficyna literacka, 1993. miłosz, czesław. mowa wiązana [poetic speech]. warszawa: pojezierze, 1986. pietrkiewicz, jerzy. antologia liryki angielskiej 1300-1950 [anthology of english poetry, 1300-1950]. warszawa: instytut wydawniczy pax, 1987. puławski, krzysztof, ed. william blake. wiersze i poematy [william blake. poetic works]. izabelin: świat literacki, 1997. sławek, tadeusz. u‑bywać. człowiek, świat, przyjaźń w twórczości williama blake’a [the man, the world, and friendship in the work of william blake]. katowice: wydawnictwo uniwersytetu śląskiego, 2001. słomczyński, maciej. william blake, czterej zoa [william blake, the four zoas]. kraków: zielona sowa, 2006. in english beer, john. blake’s visionary universe. manchester: manchester university press, 1969. bloom, harold. blake’s apocalypse: a study in poetic argument. garden city: doubleday, 1963. curran, stuart, and joseph anthony wittreich, jr., eds. blake’s sublime allegory: essays on the four zoas, milton, jerusalem. madison: university of wisconsin press, 1973. damon, s. foster. a blake dictionary: the ideas and symbols of william blake. hanover: university press of new england, 1988. dortort, fred. the dialectic of vision: a contrary reading of william blake’s jerusalem. barrytown: station hill arts, 1998. doskow, minna. william blake’s jerusalem: structure and meaning in poetry and picture. rutherford: fairleigh dickinson university press, 1982. erdman, david v., ed. the complete poetry and prose of william blake. newly rev. ed. new york: anchor–random house, 1988. keynes, geoffrey, ed. blake: complete writings with variant readings. rpt. with corrections. oxford: oxford university press, 1979. otto, peter. constructive vision and visionary deconstruction: los, eternity, and the productions of time in the later poetry of william blake. oxford: clarendon press, 1991. paley, morton d. the continuing city: william blake’s jerusalem. oxford: clarendon press, 1983. paley, morton d., ed. william blake: jerusalem: the emanation of the giant albion. blake’s illuminated books, vol. 1. princeton: princeton university press for the william blake trust, 1991. solomon, andrew. william blake’s great task: the purpose of jerusalem. london: palamabron press, 2000. stevenson, w. h., ed. blake: the complete poems. 3rd ed. harlow: pearson education ltd., 2007. wicksteed, joseph h. william blake’s jerusalem. london: trianon press, 1954. the responses of william blake and joseph priestley to two swedenborgian ideas the responses of william blake and joseph priestley to two swedenborgian ideas by j. b. mertz j. b. mertz (jeffrey_mertz@hotmail.com) is an adjunct professor of english at lindenwood university. he is currently preparing an article about blake’s works of the mid-1790s and the publications of joseph johnson. as a “prerequisite to attendance”i am grateful to g. e. bentley, jr., bryonie carter, brendan fleming, and this journal’s anonymous reader for their comments on a draft of this article. at the general conference of the new jerusalem church in april 1789, william blake and his wife, catherine, signed a document stating the following: we whose names are hereunto subscribed, do each of us approve of the theological writings of emanuel swedenborg, believing that the doctrines contained therein are genuine truths, revealed from heaven, and that the new jerusalem church ought to be established, distinct and separate from the old church.g. e. bentley, jr., blake records, 2nd ed. (new haven: yale university press, 2004) 50. given the blakes’ association with the new jerusalem church in 1789, it is tempting to argue that the critique of emanuel swedenborg (1688-1772) in the marriage of heaven and hell (possibly completed as early as the final months of 1790)there is disagreement about the date of completion of the marriage. the traditional dating of 1790-93 derives mainly from david erdman’s argument regarding how blake formed the lowercase letter “g” in various works (whether with a conventional ear or an idiosyncratic leftward ear on the upper bowl of the letter). see david v. erdman, “dating blake’s script: the ‘g’ hypothesis,” blake 3.1 (1969): 8-13. as joseph viscomi observes, the marriage does not refer to literary works or historical events that can be dated later than 1790, and copy f contains blake’s handwritten reference to the year 1790 above the text on plate 3. see joseph viscomi, blake and the idea of the book (princeton: princeton university press, 1993) 233-34 and 237. further arguments for 1790 as the year of completion can be found in viscomi, “the evolution of the marriage of heaven and hell,” huntington library quarterly 58 (1997): 284-85; viscomi, “the lessons of swedenborg; or, the origin of william blake’s the marriage of heaven and hell,” lessons of romanticism: a critical companion, ed. thomas pfau and robert f. gleckner (durham: duke university press, 1998) 176-81; and william blake, the early illuminated books, ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi (princeton: princeton university press/william blake trust, 1993) 113-15. for a detailed argument that the marriage “made its first public appearance in 1793 rather than 1790,” see william blake, the marriage of heaven and hell, ed. with an introduction and commentary by michael phillips (oxford: bodleian library, 2011) 32-44 (quotation at 42). anticipates joseph priestley’s expostulation with the swedenborgians in his letters to the members of the new jerusalem church. (priestley’s letters were not published until the second half of 1791, delayed several weeks by the mob’s burning of his home in birmingham.)see joseph priestley, letters to the members of the new jerusalem church, formed by baron swedenborg (birmingham, 1791) iv-v. while jon mee has pointed out that priestley’s “rationalism is often presented as making [him] irrelevant to blake studies,”jon mee, dangerous enthusiasm: william blake and the culture of radicalism in the 1790s (oxford: clarendon press, 1992) 6. i should like to explore what seem to be meaningful similarities between the responses of blake and priestley to specific details of swedenborg’s writing. an important early juxtaposition of the marriage and priestley appears in john howard’s essay on blake and swedenborgianism: “the marriage was not the sole attack on the swedenborgians; blake was joined by other members of the [joseph] johnson circle, and by joseph priestl[e]y in particular.”john howard, “an audience for the marriage of heaven and hell,” blake studies 3 (1970): 23. however, it might be more accurate to view the marriage in the broader context of priestley’s long-standing campaign against corruptions and error in christianity, as marilyn butler proposes: “the satirical attack of the marriage draws strength from the political, intellectual leadership offered by the whole of priestley’s career, that thirty-year campaign in favour of individualism and against priestcraft, authority, and ‘corruptions.’”marilyn butler, romantics, rebels and reactionaries: english literature and its background, 1760-1830 (oxford: oxford university press, 1981) 47. blake’s language in the marriage does exhibit notable affinities with priestley’s earlier disquisitions relating to matter and spirit (1777), as morton paley and graham pechey have observed.paley suggests that “priestley’s denial of the dichotomy of soul and body” in disquisitions is a view “very close” to that expressed by blake’s “voice of the devil” (energy and the imagination: a study of the development of blake’s thought [oxford: clarendon press, 1970] 8-9). pechey traces blake’s polemic “against the dichotomies of metaphysics which inform [swedenborg’s] discourse” to disquisitions (“the marriage of heaven and hell: a text and its conjuncture,” oxford literary review 3 [1979]: 57). in disquisitions as well as an history of the corruptions of christianity (1782), priestley argues against an immaterial soul existing independent of the body. he maintains that “we have no reason to suppose that there are in man two substances so distinct from each other” as “matter” and “spirit,” and seeks to demonstrate that “the doctrine of a soul is altogether unphilosophical, and unscriptural.”priestley, disquisitions relating to matter and spirit. to which is added the history of the philosophical doctrine concerning the origin of the soul, and the nature of matter; with its influence on christianity, especially with respect to the doctrine of the pre-existence of christ, 2nd ed. (birmingham, 1782) 1: ii, 270 (emphasis in original). in both works, he suggests the derivative nature of the soul, i.e., he always speaks of the “soul distinct from the body,”priestley, disquisitions 1: 271-72, 278. see also an history of the corruptions of christianity (birmingham, 1782) 1: 330, 345. while in the marriage blake twice avers that man has no “body distinct from his soul,” as if partly affirming and partly amending priestley.the complete poetry and prose of william blake, ed. david v. erdman, newly rev. ed. (new york: anchor–random house, 1988) [hereafter “e”] 34, pl. 4, and 39, pl. 14. mee observes that “the proximity of [priestley’s] language [in corruptions of christianity] to blake’s on plate 4 of the marriage suggests that priestley may well have been a direct source in this instance.”mee 138. it should be emphasized, however, that blake may just as well have known these concepts from priestley’s disquisitions. see note 7, above. notwithstanding critical observations of affinities between blake’s and priestley’s language, two swedenborgian ideas to which blake and priestley both respond in the marriage and letters to the members of the new jerusalem church seem to have been overlooked: swedenborg’s contention that there is no space in the spiritual worldsee emanuel swedenborg, the wisdom of angels, concerning divine love and divine wisdom, [trans. nathaniel tucker] (london, 1788) nn. 7-10 and 69-72. blake’s annotations to these sections of divine love and divine wisdom do not indicate any immediate disagreement with swedenborg’s ideas of space. howard discusses blake’s criticism of swedenborg’s idea of space in connection with priestley’s letters, but solely in terms of swedenborg’s ignorance of georgium sidus (the planet uranus), which was discovered by william herschel in 1781 (howard 47-48). and his claim to have seen god.in an extract from true christian religion read at the opening of the general conference of the new jerusalem church, swedenborg defends his “memorable relations” against the charge “that they are the fictions of imagination” by claiming, “it hath pleased the lord to manifest himself to me, and to send me to teach the things relating to his new church” (anon., minutes of a general conference of the members of the new church, signified by the new jerusalem in the revelation: held in great east cheap, london, from the 13th to the 17th of april, 1789 [london, 1789] 16). see also proposition xl: “this second coming of the lord is effected by means of his servant emanuel swedenborg, before whom he hath manifested himself in person” (minutes 29). in the fourth “memorable fancy,” after blake’s narrating devil and his “friend the angel” have visited “the infinite abyss” and the mill at the end of a “church vault” (e 41-42, pls. 17-19), the devil proposes to show the angel his “eternal lot”: he laughd at my proposal: but i by force suddenly caught him in my arms, & flew westerly thro’ the night, till we were elevated above the earths shadow: then i flung myself with him directly into the body of the sun, here i clothed myself in white, & taking in my hand swedenborgs volumes sunk from the glorious clime, and passed all the planets till we came to saturn, here i staid to rest & then leap’d into the void, between saturn & the fixed stars. here said i! is your lot, in this space, if space it may be calld. (e 42, pl. 19) the angel dismisses the episode as a “phantasy” imposed upon him (e 42, pl. 20), but blake’s description of outer space, including “the earths shadow,” “the body of the sun,” “the planets,” “saturn,” and “the fixed stars,” together with his mocking reference to “space, if space it may be calld,” suggests the absurdity of swedenborg’s claim that “in the spiritual world there are not spaces, but appearances of spaces.”swedenborg, the delights of wisdom respecting conjugal love. after which follow the pleasures of insanity respecting scortatory love, [trans. henry servanté] (london, 1790) n. 50. priestley answers swedenborg’s claims respecting space by noting that “it is impossible for us to exclude the ideas of space, or duration”priestley, letters to the members of the new jerusalem church 49 (emphasis in original). from the idea of god, and also suggests that swedenborg has mistaken his dreams for visions: his idea of there being no space in the spiritual world, but only the appearance of it, was suggested to him by what was represented to his mind in those visions. for, continuing in the same place, he fancied himself to be transported to a great distance, and after conversing with the inhabitants of one world, he sometimes instantly found himself in another. all this passing in his own mind, he naturally concluded, that the objects which seemed to occupy real space, in what he calls the spiritual world … had no real bulk, but only the appearance of it.priestley, letters to the members of the new jerusalem church 52 (emphasis in original). while blake bluntly ridicules swedenborg and priestley attempts to account rationally for swedenborg’s claim, both nonetheless identify as problematic a specific idea in swedenborg’s writing. although the similarity with priestley is somewhat weaker in this instance, the discussion between blake’s devil and the prophets seems to answer the claim that god “hath manifested himself in person” to swedenborg.see note 13, above. in the marriage, blake’s narrator demands of ezekiel and isaiah how they dared so roundly to assert. that god spake to them; and whether they did not think at the time, that they would be misunderstood, & so be the cause of imposition. isaiah answer’d. i saw no god. nor heard any, in a finite organical perception; but my senses discover’d the infinite in every thing. (e 38, pl. 12) to assert that god “spake” to the prophets is obviously not the same thing as swedenborg’s claim, but in both cases god communicates personally and directly with man. in his letters, priestley reprints without comment an extract from a short account of the honourable emanuel swedenborg (1787) in which swedenborg says that “the lord himself … was graciously pleased to manifest himself to me.”priestley, letters to the members of the new jerusalem church xvi-xvii. elsewhere in the letters, priestley states the unitarian belief that god is “invisible and omnipresent” and “not the object of any of our senses.”priestley, letters to the members of the new jerusalem church 63, 61. blake’s manner of articulating his idea of god obviously differs from priestley’s more temperate expression, yet isaiah’s claim that god cannot be seen “in a finite organical perception” but rather as “the infinite in every thing” invites comparison with priestley’s “invisible and omnipresent” god. ultimately, however, it is important to bear in mind the essential difference between blake and priestley. it should be noted that priestley’s overall purpose in his letters is to emphasize what unitarianism and swedenborgianism have in commonsee priestley, letters to the members of the new jerusalem church 2: “we are even agreed with respect to many of the most important particulars of the corruptions of christian doctrine.” and to persuade swedenborgians to become unitarians. blake criticizes swedenborg as insufficiently visionary, while priestley finds fault with the irrational aspects of swedenborg’s writings and entreats swedenborgians to “re-examine these things, and believe no man in contradiction to your own reason.”priestley, letters to the members of the new jerusalem church 61. priestley would also have been uncomfortable with the visionary dimensions of the marriage.see michael scrivener, “a swedenborgian visionary and the marriage of heaven and hell,” blake 21.3 (winter 1987-88): 102: “the marriage runs counter in essential ways to the rational dissent of the johnson circle” and “positions itself against … priestley,” particularly on account of “rational dissent’s hostility to all varieties of ‘religious enthusiasm.’” butler is correct to point out that “blake’s quarrel with the swedenborgians is far less doctrinal than priestley’s.”butler 47. although blake and priestley do not agree exactly in their responses to swedenborg’s assertions, together they resist swedenborg as a potential “cause of imposition” (e 38, pl. 12) and source of further corruptions of christianity. it should come as no surprise that blake may have had priestley’s writings in mind while he worked on the marriage, given priestley’s stature and intellectual prestige among the authors published by joseph johnson (for whom blake produced eighty-three engravings during the period 1790-95).see bentley 817-19. i acknowledge patent differences in social standing between priestley (a prominent scientist, philosopher, biblical scholar, and theologian) and blake (an obscure engraver, printmaker, artist, and poet), but i suggest that the two men are not so far apart in ideas as modern scholarship would sometimes have us believe. that is not to say that priestley’s writings alone could have informed blake’s response to swedenborg in the marriage, but given their shared professional associations in the johnson circle, such similarities in their writings seem more than merely coincidental. 92 blake/an illustrated quarterly winter 2011-12 be the model for any future uses of immersive textuality in approaching blake” (par. 35). as for the “angles” and “something” of the new age, these appear to include “remediation,” “editioning,” and “delineation editing.” by far the most common is “remediation,” imported from jay david bolter and richard grusin’s 1999 book of that title and used to denote the changes in form, content, circulation, and meaning that accompany the translation of a work from one medium to another. the introduction, for instance, finds it “noteworthy” that the blake digital text project [bdtp] “made digitizing erdman’s complete poetry and prose of william blake an early priority, presumably for the purpose of improving the text through [its] remediation” (par. 7). what was posted in 1997 for the purpose of convenience was the source text for the project’s concordance—complete with the rather obviously added identification of each line and page for the primitive search program—and this is described, dramatically and anachronistically, as being “silent in how [its] remediation altered” the erdman text, with a screen shot to illustrate. these obvious changes in the bdtp version, plus others introduced in the blake archive instance of that source text, lead to the portentous suggestion that “although neither copy is a new edition, these significant differences mean that the standard edition of blake now exists in three versions. do these variations call into question the authority of the letterpress edition itself, and inasmuch as they mirror the variations found in the original prints, do they direct readers to print and digital facsimiles? or will a reader simply take the digitization at face value …?” (par. 8). to recycle the words of the santa cruz blake study group, twenty-eight years back, “would it be such apostasy to say that none of this matters …?” (blake 18.1 [summer 1984]: 14). nothing escapes remediation, it appears, but while “the exceptional influence of the [blake] archive demands a detailed understanding of how it remediates blake” (par. 22), we are told at the same time of a print edition that “remedies [its] remediation by referring readers to the princeton-blake trust series and the blake archive” (par. 31). proposer and co-editor of the collection, justin van kleeck foregrounds his angle with the first word of his prolix contribution, “editioning william blake’s vala/the four zoas.” while editing “represents a unique act of ‘interpretation,’” in his account, “so, too, does what i call ‘editioning,’ or the process of turning some original work into a distinct object and work” through editing it in an edition (par. 3). an edition (or “editioning”) “then, is an interpretation-in-print, not to mention a critical argument about how blake can (and should?) be edited” (par. 47). while we hear little of the actual interpretations inhering in its editions, we are assured that although “blake’s restless manuscript” is “safely stowed away in a british library safe,” “ambiguity abounds in the vala/four zoas manuscript resting peacefully in a library safe” (pars. 9, 18, 19). according to his co-editor ripley, van kleeck surveys the editionings of “keynes, margoliouth, erdman, bentley, and i remember being introduced to a senior scholar at a summer huntington library lawn party a generation ago and his inquiring politely, “well, what’s your angle?” stephen dedalus’s inner panic to “say something” flashed to steelyard the lawgiver’s island in the moon reassurance that “every person has a something” as i fumbled to come up with a dissertation abstract. those more than thirty years past rise again in contemplating the analogous age differences between the two sets of contributors to this romantic circles electronic collection, which presents the efforts of four “younger blake editors and scholars” and three “established” ones. the latter, mary lynn johnson, w. h. stevenson, and david fuller, are doubtless familiar to subscribers of this journal for their three different “successful print editions” of “texts designed to appeal to first-time readers of blake,” while the former, rachel lee, j. alexandra mcghee, and co-editors wayne c. ripley and justin van kleeck, “have all worked as project assistants to the blake archive and received their graduate training from its editors” (introduction, par. 4; johnson, par. 2). with the concise print elders accounting for less than a third of the volume (in my printout, anyway, and not counting the errata sheet for johnson and grant’s second edition, for which there is no editorially supplied print option), and the organizers’ point taken that “stevenson, johnson, and fuller all see their editions being used in connection with the blake archive” (introduction, par. 7), the juxtaposition carries the sense of staged generational baton-passing to celebrate the expanding empire of the blake archive. there is also a curious sense that the senior three serve as a stalking-horse for the dismissal of “immersive textuality.” the introduction, by ripley, notes that the collection (generally referred to as just “editing blake”) might in some respects be seen as a companion to ron broglio’s effort in the same series five years previous, digital designs on blake. but, he notes, “instead of employing the model of the archive common to electronic editions like the blake archive, broglio offers ‘immersive textuality’ as a model for engaging literary works from within” (par. 5). arguing that “most of the electronic heuristics explored by digital designs have had a very brief shelf life and limited popular appeal” and that “print media and the self-declared ‘conservative’ blake archive are the primary means by which almost all of blake’s readers engage his works” (par. 5), the introduction returns in its concluding paragraph to “stevenson, johnson, and fuller, whose integration of the general reader into their editorial vision should wayne c. ripley and justin van kleeck, eds. editing and reading blake. romantic circles praxis volume. september 2010. <http://www.rc.umd. edu/praxis/editing_blake/index.html>. reviewed by nelson hilton winter 2011-12 blake/an illustrated quarterly 93 stevenson in masterful detail, providing a valuable and lasting contribution to the editorial history of the work” (introduction, par. 24). for this reader, though, what abides is the focus on the “highly fragile and highly valuable manuscript as a ‘z-safe restricted’ work—which, translated from the argot, means that it stays in the safe almost without exception” (van kleeck, par. 80). fortunately for his essay, with the help of a recommendation that “literally ‘cracked the safe’” for him, van kleeck had “the truly unique chance” to study the manuscript and “engage it in brief intellectual battle” (note 36; par. 82). the experience left him with “newfound respect” for those editors who “tried their best to represent it in some way,” the realization of “just how inadequate any edition would be” (par. 82), and regret “that many scholars, and even general readers, likely will never get to see the stunning, intimidating, and tantalizing work” (par. 83). returning from his battle he “repaid” his recommender “with a two-day crash course on the manuscript, which i believe still has him woozy” (note 36). if this writing is a sample, he may be right. in any event, considerations of article editing aside, it is good to know that the blake archive editioning of vala/the four zoas is proceeding, and that “along with the fresh transcriptions will be fresh (and i must say spectacular) full-color digital images at unprecedented 300 dpi resolution” (par. 65). wayne c. ripley’s unillustrated “delineation editing of co-texts: william blake’s illustrations” identifies its subject as “a specifically blakean notion of social-text editing” (par. 7). ripley is concerned with blake’s many illustrations to the works of others and through delineation editing seeks “to expand the editorial frame beyond the illustrations themselves to encompass their material and social realities” (par. 7). his strong argument is that the “source texts” for the illustrations “be considered ‘co-texts’” that “function in their own sociohistorical network” (par. 11) and deserve full representation in the blake archive that at present “excludes much, if not all, of the original works that spurred the illustrations, omits the physical context in which the design exists, and leaves out paratextual features such as prefaces, epigraphs, and even blank leaves that blake may have considered as part of the field for constructing his meaning” (par. 12). in “‘the productions of time’: visions of blake in the digital age,” rachel lee and j. alexandra mcghee relate their “experiences editing blake’s manuscript, an island in the moon” for the blake archive (par. 7). while “forthcoming” at the time of their publication, its availability online was announced just in time for me to check whether steelyard the lawgiver’s assurance recalled above was that “every body” or “every person has a something.” it was “person,” but, to my surprise, here he or she has not “a something” but “as something.” and the 300 dpi enlargement certainly depicts what looks like a cursive “a” with a cursive “s” attached, with an editorial note in the transcription (object 8, line 12) asserting that “the last word of the line is ‘as’, though bentley (writings volume 2, page 885) and erdman (page 456) read ‘a’ without comment.” (while the authors state that “the archive includes variant readings from phillips, g. e. bentley, and david erdman within text notes” [note 12] and offer a detailed example of another transcription by michael phillips in note 11, his reading of “a something” goes unmentioned in the blake archive textual note. that any such omission is not an oversight of lee and mcghee is made clear by the archive’s “electronic edition information” “statement of responsibility,” which identifies as editors of the manuscript only morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi.) lee and mcghee do offer the collection’s only direct encounter with the current framework for electronic editing, extensible markup language or xml. an xml document consists of two parts, the document type definition or dtd that defines the mark-up tags to be used and their hierarchical order, and the tagged or marked-up content. the tag set is thus crucial, as it establishes the parameters of what can be marked up and processed for particular display (using a stylesheet language, xsl, and program, xslt, which can transform the xml markup into widely varying formats). unfortunately, while the authors direct us to “see ‘manuscript tag set’” (par. 19), it is nowhere on offer, though it would appear that it “integrat[es]” at least some of the current text encoding initiative guidelines (par. 28). other of their references, to “filling out an xml bad file” (par. 19), for example (bad here is evidently an acronym for blake archive description), appear to invoke inaccessible private sites. repeated claims for the importance of transparency (e.g., pars. 32, 33, 45) notwithstanding, the source code or markup version of the transcription does not appear to be available to readers of the blake archive, so it is impossible to consider fully the claim that “xml is a better archiving and editing tool” or that “previously published works in the blake archive … will benefit from the updated tag set” (pars. 15, 20). for example, the authors state that their “decisions about how to encode … sections of backwards text in island can be retroactively applied to the illuminated books that also contain mirror writing” (note 6). the transcription of the reversed text in object 18, line 10, however, is perfectly straightforward, with only a textual note to explain that “the letters ‘bl’ (followed by an uncertain letter ‘a’) are written in backwards lettering.” updated encoding that serves to trigger a textual note is surely an improvement over no notice at all. also on the same object, readers will note the transcription in line 8 which reads, in its entirety, “lamb [b in gray font] n [in blue font] n ▮”. setting aside accessibility concerns as to how sight-impaired readers will know, for instance, that gray font denotes “unclear or conjectural text,” it would be an interesting exercise for the reader to link to object 18 and find “lamb” in short order (hint: the “l” of “lamb” is below the initial stroke of the “n” and the word as a whole underneath that letter at about one-fifth its size) and to decide whether the transcription honors “the archive’s concern with blake’s revisions and the physicality of the page” (par. 22). 94 blake/an illustrated quarterly winter 2011-12 in their concluding paragraphs, lee and mcghee note that “increasingly, visions of future electronic editions put more of the editorial process in the hands of the reader.” they cite peter robinson’s conception of “‘fluid, co-operative and distributed editions’” as a “model of scholarly edition which opens itself to readerly interrogation and intervention” (par. 43). but the prospect is no sooner offered than replaced with thomas tanselle’s writing in 1996 to maintain “the necessity of historical expertise and the vital role specialists play in interpreting textual artifacts of the past.” after all, they finish with tanselle, readers “do retain the power of choosing how much of the critical apparatus and scholarly research to incorporate into their reading” (par. 44). (so much for the imposition of “editioning”!) attempting to split the difference between robinson and tanselle, lee and mcghee conclude that “regardless of whether readers actually encode and edit electronic editions, the future of scholarly digital projects still rests with its [sic] readers” (par. 45). but given that “the blake archive’s primary purpose is for studying blake rather than reading him” and that its “primary audience is a scholarly one” (note 8), one senses the predicament concerning audience underlying their disclosure that “uncertainty about the long-term future of the blake archive … motivates our goals and decisions today …” (par. 46). turning to the print editors, less needs to be said. in the collection’s shortest piece, “the ends of editing,” w. h. stevenson writes that “the first duty of an editor is to present an accurate and useful text” (par. 5). but, as a “modernizing” editor, he argues that “from time to time” and “in pursuit of clarity and ease of understanding,” an editor “has to take minor liberties with the minutiae of blake’s text” (par. 19). the “only justification” for such tampering is that “to do so brings us nearer to blake” (par. 26). most modern readers, however, will probably agree with the introduction’s characterization of stevenson’s (and fuller’s) changing of “the tyger” to “the tiger” as “wince-inducing” (introduction, par. 30). evoking the characterization of autolycus in the winter’s tale as “a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles,” stevenson offers the memorable observation that “blake’s autolycus mind snapped up all manner of fascinating wayside material in any kind of order” (par. 34). david fuller, in “modernizing blake’s text: syntax, rhythm, rhetoric,” draws very extensively and apparently without notice from the introduction to his 2000 william blake: selected poetry and prose (reprinted by pearson longman in 2008; see pp. 18-26 in either). the final eight paragraphs turn to a different kind of re-writing (“my re-writings here” [par. 23]) that re-spaces blake’s lines “to reveal features of the rhetorical structure of blake’s poetry that are concealed by the conventions of its formal structure” (par. 23). mary lynn johnson’s entertaining “contingencies, exigencies, and editorial praxis: the case of the 2008 norton blake” offers an “anecdotal case history” of the “fortuities and mundanities” leading up to the second edition—after twenty-nine years—of the norton critical edition she published with “coeditor john e. grant (husband jack)” (pars. 3, 1). in this behind-the-scenes report, we see her “proclaim by e-mail, a little pompously,” “wail” to her editor, and “wheedle sympathy” (pars. 4, 12, 13) in the “nitty-gritty trade-offs and editorial histrionics” (par. 23) that make up the long back-story of getting the book to press. in keeping with every other contributor, she does not provide data on actual number of copies printed or sold (or site hits), but she does candidly offer specifics on the permissions budget and other constraints. anyone who uses the new norton will find the account rewarding, just as readers of fuller’s and stevenson’s editions, or users of the blake archive, will gain from the inside stories of these respective versions of blake, forgiving what they do not approve and loving all for such energetic exertion of talent. m ost of the primary material in william blake’s conversations will be familiar to those who have studied gerald e. bentley’s two editions of blake records, blake records supplement, and his 2001 biography, the stranger from paradise, but the scholarly alchemy effected by distilling reports of blake’s spoken words into a compact volume and adding an array of related tools has created something rich, strange, and likely to prove enduringly useful. because many of the reports come to us from within a generation or two after blake’s death, they are strongly colored by the late georgian/early victorian conception of him: these blakeish words often seem to reflect the minds of the reporters as much as they reveal the mind of blake, and as the intervening years and layers of reportage multiply, the share of credible blake content diminishes. a snippet of blake’s conversation that was worth retelling or recording is likely to have been one that conformed to, or at least resonated with, the other stories about blake in circulation at the time. gathered together in largely unmediated form, these reports constitute a portrait of a fellow we might call anecdotal blake, a somewhat different being from the persona we moderns know through his works in ink and paint, autographic blake. ironically, autographic blake was not very well known to some of the origigerald e. bentley, jr., with a foreword by mary lynn johnson. william blake’s conversations: a compilation, concordance, and rhetorical analysis. lewiston: edwin mellen press, 2008. lii + 300 pp. [+ 8 pp. illustrations, 1 color]. $119.95/£74.95, hardcover. reviewed by alexander s. gourlay review: fernando castanedo, ed. and trans., william blake, una isla en la luna fernando castanedo, ed. and trans. william blake, una isla en la luna. madrid: ediciones cátedra, 2014. 240 pp. €16.30, paperback. reviewed by cristina flores cristina flores (cristina.flores@unirioja.es), lecturer in english literature and language, teaches at the university of la rioja, spain, where she is vice-dean of the faculty of letters and education. her main research interests include romantic literary theory and poetry and the connections between romanticism and twentieth-century literature. her phd dissertation was published by peter lang in 2008 (plastic intellectual breeze: the contribution of ralph cudworth to s. t. coleridge’s early poetics of the symbol ). since then she has been working on the reception of british romantic authors in spanish literature and has published her work in rodopi, comparative literary criticism, the coleridge bulletin, and estudios ingleses de la universidad complutense, among others. from 2011 to 2013 she directed the research project “la huella del romanticismo anglo-norteamericano en españa durante el siglo xx” (the legacy of anglo-american romanticism in spain during the twentieth century), funded by the university of la rioja and banco santander. fernando castanedo’s bilingual edition of william blake’s an island in the moon is an extraordinary and definitive contribution to the reception of the english author in spain. thanks to this volume, all of blake’s literary works are now available in spanish. moreover, castanedo’s insightful introduction constitutes the only scholarly work on blake’s satire to originate in spain. before that, an island had been almost entirely overlooked by spanish literary scholars and translators. it had never been mentioned or translated previously, with two minor exceptions. it is worth noting that the only critical reference to an island in spanish was utterly demolishing. it appeared in 1928 in the introduction by edmundo gonzález-blanco to la boda del cielo y el infierno: primeros libros proféticos (the marriage of heaven and hell: first prophetic books), the first volume in spanish entirely devoted to blake’s poetry: blake is not that good when he descends to the role of libeler and satirist, as in an island in the moon, miscellanea of prose and songs where, without success, he tries to perform that task of teaching with some humor, which the greeks considered divine, and in which he quite rudely mocks the respectable and affected group of people that attended the social gatherings organized by his friend and protector mistress mathew.my translation from the original: “no es tan feliz cuando desciende al papel de libelista y satírico, como en the island in the moon, miscelánea de prosa y canciones, donde, sin lograrlo, pretende realizar aquel arte de enseñar con gracia, que los griegos consideraban divino, y donde, de una manera harto grosera, se mofa de la sociedad tan respetable como afectada, que acudía a la tertulia de su amiga y protectora misstres [sic] mathew” (40). given gonzález-blanco’s opinion of an island, more likely inherited from his french critical sources rather than from direct reading of the original, it is not surprising that his volume does not include it. previous to castanedo’s work, there existed only a fragmentary rendering of blake’s satire in william blake: poesía completa, by pablo mañé, first published in 1980. mañé presents the spanish reader with a compilation of some of the verse interludes of an island translated from sampson’s text.“canciones de una isla en la luna,” william blake: poesía completa 61-80. in the absence of any contextualizing information, the reader of this volume acquires a highly distorted and limited view of an island. luckily, unlike mañé, castanedo offers a significant body of critical apparatus that allows the reader to peruse an island from a well-informed position. the translation is accompanied by useful paratexts: an enlightening, wide-ranging introduction, a complete and up-to-date bibliography, a wealth of pertinent explanatory footnotes, color reproductions of the first seventeen pages and the last page of the manuscript,from 1r to 9r, and 16v. and two appendices. the first appendix includes the poems that would later appear in songs of innocence and of experience, with the variations noted; the second is a table with the names of characters, a translation of the names into spanish, and the actual persons who may have inspired the dramatis personae. in an excellent, comprehensive introduction, the editor and translator draws upon seminal critical works on blake and an island to articulate further his own interpretation of the prose satire and to defend his hypothesis as regards the manuscript’s supposed missing leaf. on the first page, castanedo underlines the relevance of an island as a decisive text in elucidating some autobiographical aspects of blake’s youth, as well as the later development of his literary production. after a readable account of blake’s biography, in which the most relevant events, personal connections, and influences are explored, castanedo turns to pay full attention to an island. his general evaluation of this work sharply contrasts with that of gonzález-blanco: he asserts that “in addition to meeting a serious and mature poet, we observe a satirical mocking poet … one of the funniest writers in the english literature of his time” (39).my translation: “además de encontrarnos con un poeta serio y maduro, observamos a un escritor satírico y burlón … uno de los escritores más divertidos de la literatura inglesa de su tiempo.” he first offers a chapter-by-chapter summary of the plot, in which the characters appear linked to their supposed referents, those relatives and acquaintances whom blake met in mrs. mathew’s circle. he then explores the different theories about the date of its composition, eventually noting that most scholars agree that blake began writing it after the publication of poetical sketches in 1783 and completed it in the spring of 1786, before the death of his brother robert. the next section is devoted to an exhaustive account of the history and characteristics of the fitzwilliam manuscript. there, castanedo undertakes a careful analysis of the manuscript, paying special attention to the controversial issue of the two or more pages that could have been first included by the author and later expurgated, something that could explain the discontinuity between the content in pages 8v and 9r (the page designated “x” by erdman, e 465), and the diagonal penciled note on 9r: “a leaf is evidently missing before this one” (206).[editors’ note: an article by castanedo, “a blake riddle: the diagonal pencil inscription in an island in the moon,” is forthcoming in blake.] castanedo proposes that these missing pages may never have existed. to prove his hypothesis, he commissioned a handwriting expert to compare the penciled note with the manuscript in ink, with the purpose of showing that it was blake himself who wrote that note, thus challenging the opinion of eaves, essick, and viscomi, who had suggested the contrary in 2010. the graphological study, which is described in detail, accompanied by numerous images, indicated that the two manuscript passages had a common authorship. castanedo argues that blake could have announced that his manuscript was incomplete because he himself had expurgated it, or because he wanted the reader to believe in the existence of a gap for the sake of literary playfulness. the latter is the theory to which castanedo adheres and upon which he elaborates his interpretation of the work. he follows kirk in claiming that the deliberate inclusion of a gap is one of the characteristics that permit describing an island as a menippean satire. additionally, the author delves into the many echoes of laurence sterne’s tristram shandy he finds in an island, paying special attention to the numerous occasions in which sterne introduced fake lacunae in his masterpiece, which could well have served, he states, as a direct inspiration for blake. finally, the concluding section of the introduction offers an overview of the critical reception of an island, noting that it was not until the rest of blake’s oeuvre was securely canonized that this work was taken into scholarly consideration. only then, castanedo affirms, could the eschatological, sarcastic, acid, and much less respectable vein of blake be accepted (86). una isla en la luna is a bilingual volume in which the english text was first rigorously edited. castanedo meticulously transcribed the fitzwilliam manuscript, maintaining the duplications, omissions, errors, and deletions in the original. moreover, in the numerous footnotes he reflects the variations and conjectures in the previous editions by bentley (1978), phillips (1987), erdman (rev. ed., 1988), and eaves, essick, and viscomi (2010), thus providing a comprehensive and authoritative foundational text. as to the translation, castanedo announces that he tried to be more faithful to the spirit than to the letter, avoiding any literal translation that may sound unnatural to the spanish reader (89). in addition, the text in spanish is accompanied by copious footnotes in which the translator clarifies some of the difficulties he found in the translation process and provides the reader with plenty of historical, contextual, and bibliographical references. with this outstanding volume, castanedo certainly fulfills his ambitious goal of presenting blake’s work from an authoritative perspective to spanish readers, contributing eventually to recognition in spain of blake’s wide range. they will see not just the visionary, but also that “indomitable and irreverent poet that we can read in an island in the moon.”my translation: “poeta indómito e irreverente que podemos leer en una isla en la luna” (86). works cited bentley, g. e., jr., ed. william blake’s writings. 2 vols. oxford: clarendon press, 1978. eaves, morris, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi, eds. an island in the moon. william blake archive. 2010. <http://​www.​blakearchive.​org>. erdman, david v., ed. the complete poetry and prose of william blake. newly rev. ed. new york: anchor-random house, 1988. gonzález-blanco, edmundo, ed. and trans. la boda del cielo y el infierno: primeros libros proféticos. madrid: yagües, 1928. kirk, eugene. “blake’s menippean island.” philological quarterly 59 (1980): 194-215. mañé garzón, pablo, ed. and trans. william blake: poesía completa. 2 vols. barcelona: ediciones 29, 1980 [rpt. 1984, 1985, 1998, 2003]. phillips, michael, ed. william blake: an island in the moon. cambridge: cambridge university press, 1987. review: colin trodd, visions of blake: william blake in the art world 1830–1930 colin trodd. visions of blake: william blake in the art world 1830–1930. liverpool: liverpool university press, 2012. xvi + 520 pp. £75.00/​$120.00, hardcover. reviewed by sibylle erle sibylle erle (sibylle.erle@bishopg.ac.uk), frsa, is senior lecturer in english at bishop grosseteste university lincoln, author of blake, lavater and physiognomy (legenda, 2010), co-editor of science, technology and the senses (special issue for ravon, 2008), and volume editor of panoramas, 1787–1900: texts and contexts (5 vols., pickering & chatto, 2012). with morton d. paley she is now co-editing the reception of blake in europe (bloomsbury). she has co-curated the display blake and physiognomy (2010–11) at tate britain and devised an online exhibition of tennyson’s copy of blake’s job for the tennyson research centre (2013). apart from reception, she is working on “character” in the romantic period. why does william blake present such a “dazzling presence, perfect temperament and complete plenary subject” (3)? the answer, according to colin trodd, lies with the victorians and their efforts to explain blake’s place in british art. visions of blake: william blake in the art world 1830–1930 addresses the reception of blake’s art and the refashioning of his personality and artwork through victorian art criticism. although occasionally a little too densely detailed, this wonderful book is a long overdue addition; it not only fills a gap in the existing works on blake’s art, but is also an important milestone in the recent interest taken in blake’s literary reception. in visions of blake trodd discusses alexander gilchrist’s life of blake (1863), a. c. swinburne’s william blake (1868), and the burlington fine arts club exhibition (1876) in relation to the broader historical contexts of the arts and crafts and aestheticist movements and alongside the writing of blake’s nineteenth-century editors, curators, and collectors. through accounts of seeing or handling original blakes, reviews, critical studies, essays, and catalogues, as well as paintings, book illustrations, and poems written in response to blake, he traces many of the intellectual trends that shaped critical opinions. to start with, trodd analyzes the beginnings of blake criticism and investigates the nineteenth-century debates about blake’s visions, then argues that the main victorian ideas about true art crystallize around the models of blake put forward by both the blakeans and anti-blakeans (chapter 1). the blake of the former (“gilchrist, swinburne, [arthur] symons, dante gabriel rossetti, william michael rossetti, william bell scott, joseph comyns carr, james smetham, w. b. yeats, e. j. ellis, g. k. chesterton, darrell figgis and e. h. short”) was “a gladdening light of sensual enjoyment and living god of boundless growth” (4), while the latter (“h. g. hewlett, oswald crawfurd, j. b. atkinson and coventry patmore”) claim that “blake’s vision was flawed by its inability to overcome the war of instinctive life and thus failed to codify and govern the data of the senses” (4-5). trodd asserts that these parties reached no agreement on blake except that he was impossible to ignore, and claims that what could be used in defense of blake could also be used against him: “for blake’s enemies and admirers, the legibility of conventional art is replaced by the unpredictable motility of blakeland, the unbridled fluxional power of pure energy. moreover, the subject is no longer exact and measurable as a social self” (69). he also reflects on the cultural significance of blakean discourse: “i have tried to give equal space to blake’s admirers and enemies because i believe that their arguments moved in the same direction: that blake can be used as a kind of cultural petrie [sic] dish to discuss how artistic vision and value relate to modern experience” (10). trodd demonstrates throughout that even the anti-blakeans, who eyed the artist skeptically since he seemed to reject the moral values they shared, were captivated by his art. in the first instance, trodd is interested in the details of the arguments, not in the simple opposition between supporters and detractors, because these arguments reveal interesting information about the victorian mind-set. the reception of blake’s art, in short, was at the heart of victorian anxieties concerning the educational remit of public art and the changing relationship between the artist, his audience, and his critics (172). then and now, he writes, “blake is fantasised through competing ideas—aesthetic immediacy, creative freedom, dynamical expression; critical recklessness, cultural solipsism, psychic violence” (10). blake was little known during his lifetime, and already divided those who knew or met him. allan cunningham, in the lives of the most eminent british painters, sculptors, and architects (1830), cast him as a hardworking artist who failed to translate his visions into successful pictorial representations. the image of poor, honest, laboring blake, invariably emphasized by later commentators, inspired, for example, frederic shields’s blake’s work-room and death-room (c. 1880–90), which “attempts to picture blake’s world by making it a picture of his inner life” (151). on the whole, the determination to make sense of blake’s art was fueled by biographical narrative and especially the life of blake by gilchrist, who, like swinburne in william blake, intended to reorganize “blake” and improve on what cunningham or william hazlitt had written about him.though hazlitt seems especially relevant for arguments about the social class of the blakeans, the afterlife of hazlitt’s blake—that is, romantic blake—is never fully explored. the anecdotes about the visionary heads, for one, were difficult to accommodate. the diarist henry crabb robinson dismissed him as too eccentric on account of the visionary heads. edward calvert, a follower of blake and member of the ancients, told gilchrist that when he looked at blake he saw “nothing but sanity,” and john linnell was certain that blake was merely acting like a medium. the question for the nineteenth-century blakeans was, what kind of person could have produced a form of art that blocked the traditional routes of pictorial communication? later scott, who owned the tempera of the ghost of a flea (c. 1819, butlin #750, tate britain), “would refashion blake as the precursor of the ‘new spiritualism’” because many of his images were specimens from “the phantasmal world at the edge of human experience” (189). in the nineteenth century blake’s life, as well as the blakean canon, soon came to be treated as discursive fields: not only did opinions about blake differ, but gilchrist’s biography, because of his untimely death, was completed by the rossettis and edited by his wife, anne gilchrist. d. g. rossetti wrote an additional, “supplementary” chapter, which argues that blake was a “forerunner of the pre-raphaelites” (63); w. m. rossetti compiled an annotated catalogue that stood unrivaled, even by scott’s catalogue for the burlington fine arts club exhibition, until the early twentieth century (159). subsequent editions of gilchrist’s biography were to include essays by smetham, shields, and w. graham robertson. the first monumental victorian biography of blake, which had set out to revise and redefine blake’s artistic identity, was, in fact, a growing omnium gatherum of interconnecting ideas about his mental state and disturbingly über-creative art. in chapters 1 and 2 trodd analyzes the unresolved problems that blake’s art posed for his victorian commentators. what was the meaning of his art? some perceived blake as an outsider because he ignored the ideal of abstract beauty or central form, a goal recommended to aspiring young artists by joshua reynolds in his discourses (1798). others admired him as an innovator because of his uncompromising pursuit of personal vision. this vision, however, was rendered more often than not at the expense of balance and pictorial expression: “even those most sympathetic to his art, including gilchrist, the rossetti brothers, swinburne and symons, tended to trace in his work the uneasy relationship between aesthetic exuberance and compositional coherence” (21). blake was judged simultaneously as anti-academic, going against polite art and taste, and as excessive, creating new and spontaneous visual experiences with no recognizable patterns. with hewlett in mind, trodd explains this position as follows: “refusing to attend to objects in the real world, blake makes himself the origin of the identity of the artwork, the source of its action, the master of ‘mystery.’ in place of pictorial mastery he offers unresolved pictorial discord” (37). trodd calls this problem blake’s “‘bad’ individualism” (38-39). chapter 1 concludes with an interesting analysis of blake as a job-like figure, starting with cunningham’s portrayal but also referring to other texts (sonnets by bernard barton and d. g. rossetti) and drawing attention to smetham’s review of gilchrist: “blake is drained of critical force in becoming an icon of the critical quietism and submission favoured by the methodist smetham” (59). swinburne, on the other hand, attacked gilchrist for putting too much emphasis on blake’s personality and neglecting the “creative energy” of his art (64). chapter 2 digs deeper into the development of blake criticism by explaining why victorian critics perceived blake’s art as “invasive” rather than “invalid,” as his earlier romantic commentators had done (89). trodd’s metaphor “blakeland” captures the need (articulated by blake himself) to enter into blake’s art in order to understand blake, and links back to smetham’s “blakean chamber,” which is a space all viewers are invited to share with the artist (58). again, trodd approaches his topic through opinions voiced in reviews of gilchrist’s life of blake. the mid-victorian anti-blakeans, he stresses, focused on the physicality of blake’s designs because, when looking at them, they realized that they felt threatened (89). “a persistent theme in victorian discourses on blake is the way in which his images project themselves at spectators, how they suggest or enact certain conditions of experience” (92). he urges that “we need to look at blake’s art as a stimulus” and admits that he wants to “find out what kind of criticism blakean vision makes possible” (98, 99). beginning with an examination of the commentary of j. j. g. wilkinson, an anti-blakean despite his (image-free) edition of the songs, trodd explores the negative feelings caused by blake’s art, directing us to the writings of f. t. palgrave, atkinson, and john ruskin, as well as cunningham and robert hunt. he eventually turns to analyzing the composition, surface, and form of blake’s newton (124). moving between nineteenthand twentieth-century criticism, as well as in the footsteps of victorian aestheticists, trodd undertakes a commanding case study of the body of newton but sidesteps the visual effects produced by color printing. given the focus on physicality, it would be good to find out if w. m. rossetti or ruskin (190) or even edward burne-jones (237) knew about the different pulls or versions of the large color prints. nineteenth-century scholarship is responsible for establishing the blakean canon. ellis and yeats, in the works of william blake: poetic, symbolic, and critical (1893), for example, present the four zoas as “blake’s master text” (198). the broader question of which artworks victorian blakeans would have had access to remains, unfortunately, unanswered in the early chapters. in chapter 3 trodd outlines how, thanks to the exhibitions organized by the burlington fine arts club, the carfax gallery (1904 and 1906), the tate gallery (1913), and the whitworth institute in manchester (1914), blake’s art emerged “into the wider public world” (156). blake began to figure significantly in the art market around 1850, and by the end of the nineteenth century, trodd stresses, his art was part of the public discourse on national art and british book design. in view of the book’s subtitle it is surprising that early auction sales, such as visions, america, urizen, and two other works at christie’s in 1834,g. e. bentley, jr., blake books supplement (oxford: clarendon press, 1995) 285-86. go unmentioned. trodd moves through the proposal by bernard quaritch and ellis for a blake society, or “social bureau for the exchange of information and knowledge” (145); the acquisition of blake’s works by national institutions; private collectors and critics, such as richard garnett, isaac d’israeli, thomas f. dibdin, palgrave, and carr; and the role of victorian art journals, such as the century guild hobby horse, athenaeum, and art journal, in promoting blake’s designs, which were available as facsimiles by william muir. he makes a number of thought-provoking observations, noting, for example, that few of the “collections assembled by victorian industrialists included works by blake” and that the patrons of the pre-raphaelites showed little interest in blake (159). trodd’s analysis of an exchange between d’israeli and dibdin presents these two collectors as agreeing with gilchrist; for all of them, “blake is involved in a peculiar project to reawake our sense of human beingness by unearthing the origin of art in the obscure, enclosed and confused movement of the body” (188). with regard to the changes in the perception of blake’s art, trodd explores the view held by blakean aestheticists, which celebrated his art as “the embodiment of pure freedom” but was “rejected by anti-blakeans … [as] a form of collecting premised on the notion that the cherished artist carries and embodies a mysterious and desirable value” (192). he uses “collecting” here as a metaphor to describe the content of blake’s compositions. looking toward a descriptive catalogue, which he believes to be the central document of blake’s aesthetic theory, trodd argues that “blake, who believed he was equipped with an ur-connoisseurial vision that enabled him to strip classical objects of their conventional signs or names and return them to an original state of being, identified real artists with the power to see beyond traditional codifications of the meaning of art” (193). so, when it comes to art-making, blake is a collector of mental images, and he is also, to push trodd’s argument slightly, a creator of montages: “blake expresses the view that art is an expression of the desire to increase the quality, harmony and integrated force of the public imagination: images act to reconnect the individual artist with a visionary fellowship, critical audience or public of creator-collectors” (195). this chapter ends with an account of blake’s impact on the designs of ellis’s seen in three days, walter crane’s the sirens three, and j. t. nettleship’s “blake drawings.” in the second half of visions of blake, trodd delves deeply into blake-inspired criticism of victorian art, as he wants to move beyond studies of influence (233). concentrating on the model created by the rossettis and swinburne, he proposes that we use blake to explain and evaluate the technical radicalism of aubrey beardsley, burne-jones, and, most importantly, ford madox brown, because one’s position on blake came to define any stance of critical opposition: “blake becomes an available reference point for those artists and commentators who set out to challenge the academic assertion that pure individualism tends to erode the authority and integrity of art by weakening its technical and formal means of expression” (233). consequently, what drives trodd’s impressive readings in chapter 4 is the “shared attitude to the nature of the body as a vital component in the production of visual meaning” (232). for example, reminding us of blake’s newton and pointing toward his “chariot of inspiration” while analyzing beardsley’s the cave of spleen, trodd concludes that “beardsley assaults the insulating orderliness of composition to stress the directness of vision, but … the unified body mutates into the grotesque excrescences of biological life, and so he generates something similar to the kind of spectral field described by wilkinson, dibdin and d’israeli as they looked at and beyond the traumatised figures populating blake’s mysterious artworld” (240). next, trodd builds toward a new reading of brown’s style and works, in particular work, by explaining brown’s indebtedness to thomas carlyle’s writings and to the quality of blake’s images: “style becomes part of his method of seeing the world, which is to say, it becomes embedded in his way of representing people, objects and spaces” (247). brown, he argues, approaches representation as melding or rather “knitt[ing] together” (258, 273): “‘content’ and ‘style’ intermingle in images designed to complicate the processes of pictorial composition and critical exposition” (279). all this makes very interesting reading. trodd connects work with the text of blake’s “london,” but does not address the visual effects made possible through illuminated printing. (i should mention that it is not always immediately clear how we are meant to look at the wonderful color plates in the middle of the book. are we to observe as blakeans or as anti-blakeans?) in chapter 5, trodd discusses the paintings of g. f. watts. watts came to know blake’s work through the circle at little holland house; he viewed blake’s art through wilkinson’s lens rather than rossetti’s or swinburne’s (325). trodd moves from technical similarities to shared attitudes and responses to cultural change while revisiting and reevaluating the opinions of contemporary writers on art, such as lytton strachey, virginia woolf, chesterton, symons, r. e. d. sketchley, mary watts, and mrs. barrington (333-70). he concentrates on the body, the relationship between “subject and space” (316), and “archetypal beings in cosmic settings” in watts’s late paintings (322). the first case study is on watts’s hope and the body in blake’s “the ancient of days” and newton (321f., 344, 351f.); the second, related study is on evolution. keen to establish watts’s “blakean vision” (355), trodd draws a connection to swinburne’s model of blake (353) and examines the double identities articulated in evolution, which depicts a nude woman surrounded by active infants: “the mother-idol and the putti are designed to block the expectation that the subject of evolution should represent separate stages in the march from savagery to civilisation. life itself appears anomalous, resisting the homogeneity of the continuous interactive composition, hence the kinetic energy of the putti creates a strange lattice-like growth obscuring, as opposed to clarifying, the self-contained rectangularity of pictorial space” (352). this chapter on the post-gilchrist and post-pre-raphaelite reception of blake’s art (311) focuses on how the body comes to represent the tensions inherent in modern consciousness: “the body becomes at once unstoppable, incomplete and unresolved” (357). it is through blake that victorian critics frame and understand this phenomenon. chapter 6, the final chapter, is an almost panoramic survey of the “critical modelling” (372) happening during the edwardian period. trodd starts with the way that blake is remade through the thinking of james joyce and yeats, as well as in the writings of henry james and j. k. huysmans; he continues to identify critical alignments while considering the ever-growing and diversifying number of critical viewpoints. he returns, for example, to a. h. mackmurdo and the arts and crafts movement’s “celebration of the handmade artefact” (388), chesterton (423ff.)—who “wants to see blake battling to outflank decadence and theosophy, both of which he associates with a condition of formlessness” (424)—the blake society, and watts (451ff.). he spends additional time on symons, with ellis and yeats’s works of william blake in the background, and arrives at wicksteed, who subscribes to the idea that systems or codes are at work in blake’s art, but “stresses the evangelical-moral blake over the inspirational-ecstatic blake” (405). trodd ends this strand with a summary of wicksteed’s legacy: “wicksteed wanted to free blake from the fluxional world of aestheticism by finding works which demonstrated that he was a disciplined, well-organised and effective citizen in the republic art [sic]” (406). fifteen years later figgis, a good synthesizer of existing models of blake, would follow suit (456ff.). next, trodd sweeps across the “self-help” blake (407) and the “life-altering” blake (408) and, after briefly mentioning stanley spencer and paul nash (408), settles on discussing blake’s influence on wyndham lewis and edwardian book illustrators. he then turns to basil de selincourt and osbert burdett, who approached blake in the manner of anti-blakeans because for them blake was dangerous: they “declare that blake is more an entrepreneur of crisis than a connoisseur of artmaking processes” (416). short and alan clutton-brock, on the other hand, are more sympathetic; short’s approach, trodd points out, “anticipates the social and political reading” of jacob bronowski and a. l. morton (430). clutton-brock, however, falls into the category of psychoanalytical critics who, in the tradition of the anti-blakeans, attest to blake’s mental problems. in the remainder of the chapter trodd maps out the debate about blake’s position in british art in the wake of the foundation of the main national blake collections. he surveys how “well-placed professional figures” (433) responded to the existing critical writing while aiming to promote blake to allow his art to succeed in sales and exhibitions. for example, about the astute robert ross, “co-owner … of the carfax gallery … [and] taste-maker” (437), he writes, “he sets out to explain that although blake may have little to offer the great tradition of art, his designs play an important role in the creative evolution of self-expression” (438). “to invoke blake’s creative identity is to engage with a critical system that entrenches him in a wider story about artistic inventiveness” (439). trodd says nothing about a. g. b. russell’s essay “the visionary art of william blake” (1906), but comments that russell wrote the best catalogue since w. m. rossetti (444) and made blake “sound like a proto-modern primitive, the magical figure who looms large in modernist eschatology, where giotto and cézanne are confederates committed to the same pictorial and critical outcomes” (445). for laurence binyon, on the other hand, blake was singular and “unrepeatable” (449). william blake’s pervasive cultural presence and status as controversial and innovative painter in victorian and edwardian art criticism cannot be doubted. trodd’s beautiful and carefully researched book offers an amazing range of interconnected opinions about blake’s achievements and failures as a painter. blake was an outsider, and it is truly fascinating that his art has spawned so many responses by so many different commentators. this book highlights the varying perceptions of blake’s personality and artistic outputs—his going in and out of fashion—and encourages us to speculate about the reasons behind publishing his poetry with or without images, beyond what was technologically feasible. trodd’s exuberant and elegant prose guides us through a mass of material (books, catalogues, essays, journal articles, reviews, letters, artworks, initiatives), supplying long lists of names as well as compact footnotes; his work abounds with interesting detail and information about blake’s critical afterlife. review: steve clark, tristanne connolly, and jason whittaker, eds., blake 2.0: william blake in twentieth-century art, music and culture steve clark, tristanne connolly, and jason whittaker, eds. blake 2.0: william blake in twentieth-century art, music and culture. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, 2012. xiii + 309 pp. [8 illustrations]. £58.00/$90.00, hardcover. reviewed by grant f. scott grant f. scott (scott@muhlenberg.edu) is professor and chair of english at muhlenberg college in allentown, pennsylvania. he is the author of the sculpted word: keats, ekphrasis, and the visual arts (1994), editor of joseph severn: letters and memoirs (2005) and, most recently, co-editor with sue brown of new letters from charles brown to joseph severn (romantic circles electronic edition, rev. 2010). his scholarly edition of the illustrated letters of richard doyle to his father, 1842–1843 will be published next year. in 2003 i remember grumbling to a friend about being unable to find a publisher for a collection of letters i had worked on for some years. the university presses aren’t interested in editions of diaries or letters anymore, i complained; they want content with a broader appeal, more relevance. i looked dolefully at my muffin. my friend commiserated. but then his eyes shone as he thought of something: “why don’t you add ‘9/11’ to the title—you know, like arthur hugh clough and 9/11 or the politics of 9/11 in the early sonnets of felicia hemans? everybody’s doing it. you’ll have oxford banging down the door.” i never did find a way of slipping it in, but the cynical humor of the idea offered some comfort. now, of course, “2.0” has replaced “9/11” as the latest numerical talisman. take an old category with a massively general subject area, tack on “2.0,” and you’ve got an instant bestseller. hence, travel writing 2.0, literacy 2.0, fashion 2.0, and, naturally, me 2.0. at the prospect of revolution 2.0, blake would have clapped his hands in joy, though the wired church 2.0 would no doubt have given him pause, conjuring unpleasant images of priests in “the garden of love.” there’s no doubt that “web 2.0” has become the magic bullet, the formula du jour for success in the book industry, and it has now crept, inevitably, into the academy. the question is, what does it mean? although web 2.0 sounds like a technical upgrade of the world wide web, in actuality it refers to a fundamental change in the way people use the internet. as opposed to the original version, web 2.0 takes social networking sites as its model and constructs what tim o’reilly has called an “architecture of participation.” rather than serving as a platform for specific content that has been written and designed by a set of editors and that is updated periodically, web 2.0 uses the internet as a form of collective mind, focusing on the “authoring” function of the “user” and on dynamic content that is continually being created and amended. taking its cue from facebook, twitter, tumblr, blogs, and wikis, web 2.0 is genuinely interactive, positing a collaborative model of ongoing content creation and development. in web 2.0 the terms “user” and “participant” thus become interchangeable. users themselves generate and design the content by activities such as posting comments and reviews, creating folksonomies, video sharing, podcasting, tagging, and remixing. a useful scholarly paradigm for this brave new world is wikipedia, which relies for its information, and its very existence, on the collective knowledge (and goodwill) of web participants from around the world. the editors of blake 2.0 are keenly aware of the digital moment and the widespread reassessment of the humanities that is currently underway. they tap into the growing excitement over the digital humanities and attempt to reinvent blake studies by offering a collection of essays on blake’s “ongoing regeneration” in a new virtual world (1). the authors are engaged by the “broader possibilities of digitalization and web dissemination” and they set out to examine blake’s virtual selves as they appear in the “processes of translation, mutation, proliferation into other media” (2). another title for this collection might have been anxiety of influence 2.0, as many of the essays rethink harold bloom’s patrilineal model of literary competition for the twenty-first century. in place of his freudian “writer-on-writer” contest (3), they propose alternative theories of influence based on the new media. most of the reception studies assembled here focus on the transformation of blake’s work as it is appropriated in film, music, sculpture, graphic novels, and digital art, and they find that “agency can occur across a network” (4). indeed, one of the threads that recurs time and again is the role of the author, the problem of ownership and possession, the conundrum of “mineness,” as the editors state. what happens to the author function in the new digital surround? is there still a recognizable self, or has nineteenthand twentieth-century selfhood vanished into an evanescent cloud of virtual selves? where is blake 1.0 and does he still matter? or has he become like urizen, “unknown, unprolific! / self-closd,” an “all-repelling” book of brass? these questions cut to the quick of the collection. the editors divide the seventeen essays that constitute the book into four sections, “blakean circulations,” “blake and visual art,” “blake in film and graphic arts,” and “blake in music.” while the first section engages many of the topics mentioned above, the last three analyze blake in relation to various artistic movements, academic disciplines, and specific artworks. individual essays explore blake and surrealism, contemporary sculpture, and art therapy—plus music by everyone from benjamin britten to the fugs (bob dylan, jim morrison, and sir hubert parry feature prominently). on balance, though, most of the essays read like standard reception studies that explicate modern adaptations of blake’s works—the interventions, transmutations, “phagocytotic transformation” (22), or, more simply put, the robust mental fight between contemporary artist and canonical poet. at the same time, they refract reception theory through a variety of lenses, among them biography (angus whitehead), art history (colin trodd, mei-ying sung), art therapy (philippa simpson), film criticism (susan matthews, mark douglas), lacan (mark lussier), comics studies (matthew j. a. green), performance studies (tristanne connolly), and music criticism (david fallon). each essay pursues a number of creative readings and misreadings of the poet’s works in an effort to interrogate “the ‘second life’ of blake’s texts and art” (10). while many of the pieces are informative and open up new vistas on the influence of blake’s ideas in the twentieth century—peter otto on roszak and the counter culture, for instance, sung on surrealism, whitehead on the neglect of mona wilson—the majority remain tied to a standard version of blake 1.0; that is, with the exception of their non-canonical material, they read as straight reception history with a soupçon of intertextuality, and might as well have been written twenty or thirty years ago. they do not “present a radical challenge to reception studies,” as the editors claim (4), because their message is wed too closely to the medium they inhabit—the codex book—and to the academic disciplinary practices the authors have internalized. it’s a bit like reading a transcript of a performance by the rolling stones. the collection needs (bravely, riskily) to embrace and implement the web practices it describes. but more on this later. the two essays that come closest to donning the digital mantle are roger whitson’s “digital blake 2.0” and shirley dent’s “‘rob & plunder …’: blake and copyright today,” and that’s why they offer the most useful provocations in the volume. whitson’s essay contrasts the online blake archive with the new internet realm of what he calls “digital blake 2.0.” while he recognizes the enormous value and influence of the blake archive, he believes that its “obsessive archival focus” (42) and its emphasis on original materiality and hermeneutics limit its usefulness for the web. the archive, he argues, “has failed to inspire work that can truly take advantage of the network possibilities of online exchange” (41). nor has it mined the internet’s creative or performative capacity. its focus on storing data and translating blake’s work to the web reproduces a twentieth-century methodology that is now effectively outdated.  by contrast, digital blake 2.0 envisions a “transformative difference” in the relationship between literature and the media, rejecting “the theory of materiality that favours originality” and “appealing to the possibilities of networking and performativity” (42). whitson provides three examples of projects that illuminate the opportunities, challenges, and complications of digital blake 2.0. guilherme marcondes’s film short tyger (2006) questions the very concepts of materiality and agency and explores a new form of “network materiality” (46). an online environment called virtual crystal cabinet offers an interactive journey through blake’s poem and invites fundamental questions about adaptation. and the blake 2.0 cloud, a riposte to the blake archive, conceives a new way of thinking about the poet, the academy, and the public. it embraces “the performative network model” (50) in which the scholarly remit to “filter then publish” is reversed in favor of a more egalitarian charge to publish first and fast, then filter. rather than a “hybrid all-in-one edition” like the archive, it acts as a “hub” in collaboration with other sites and other users (50, 51). while his manifesto is refreshingly pugnacious, whitson stumbles over several key issues. like the editors and other contributors, he takes on “the seeming monumentality of the blake archive” (5), though, in fairness, he does credit many of its obvious strengths. at the same time, he sees the archive as a digital dinosaur that simply mimics traditional textual scholarship online. as he says, it succumbs to “archive fever” (41), the silicon rush to translate canonical material to the web. whitson complains that the blake archive is not interactive enough, fails to lend itself to collaboration or performance, and discourages public or popular participation. but the problem here is one of definition—as far as i know, the site was never intended for such purposes. it was conceived rather as a tool of accuracy and access, a scholarly edition to be sure, but one that for the first time honored blake’s multimedia aesthetic by marrying it to a new medium. in this sense, the blake archive perfectly harnesses the power of the web to animate the poet’s verbal-visual plates, his experiments in copper and color. and it does so in a way that at long last does justice to blake’s unique autographic and visual style. given this mission, it seems unfair to speak of the archive in the same breath as creative works like marcondes’s tyger or the virtual crystal cabinet, which primarily adapt and interpret rather than replicate blake’s artwork. i suppose, though, that the comparison of the blake archive with these more experimental reconfigurations of the poet’s work is symptomatic of the way that content functions on many internet sites in general, the blake 2.0 cloud being no exception. posts, blogs, discussion boards, and so on tend to entangle objective and subjective views of their material, disdaining the distinction between “highbrow” and “lowbrow” as well as popular and academic subjects, championing inclusiveness, endorsing the radically egalitarian, and muddling the issues of excellence and expertise (i can hear the editors shouting the “e” word at me). at its best, a site like the blake 2.0 cloud is a lively online seminar that announces and discusses exciting worldwide events related to blake; at its worst, it happily embraces the “publish then filter” mantra and becomes like a closet cluttered with old clothes. pile after pile of old posts drift into the digital abyss, no one to read, no one daring to purge them. dent is more circumspect about the role of the blake archive in her essay, “‘rob & plunder … translate & copy & buy & sell & criticise, but not make’: blake and copyright today” (her ellipsis). in the “cut-and-paste” culture of the web, she asks, how can we be sure that our encounter with blake’s work is “authentic”? whose version of blake are we experiencing? who controls or owns the blake we see and how does the issue of copyright affect our experience of his poetry? as dent rightly notes, “the question of authenticity becomes one of editorial authority” (57), and that’s why the blake archive again plays a crucial role in exploring these questions. should the individual’s “freedom to innovate” trump the academic community’s “conservation of a canon” (60)? to adjudicate this debate, dent introduces evidence from the pre-raphaelite revival of blake’s works prompted by gilchrist’s biography and swinburne’s essay. she summons two rather unlikely witnesses, the publisher john camden hotten and the literary editor richard herne shepherd, and they take the stand to offer opposing testimony. in his book literary copyright (1871), hotten makes the claim that the public rather than the author or the law should be the final arbiter of copyright, and argues for “a utilitarian, market-oriented approach to literary production” (blake 2.0 61). an extreme example of his argument materializes in the figure of swinburne, who in copying the final illegible lines of a scatological poem in blake’s notebook supplied his own verse in place of the poet’s. as dent puts it, swinburne “proactively changed blake’s text” (63). sir geoffrey keynes later discovered the joke and was horror struck. like his fellow pre-raphaelites, swinburne believed that textual transmission was “not about objective scholarship reaching after and bringing to light recondite manuscripts,” but rather “a question of genius calling to genius” and “recreating the text” (63). representing the old guard, shepherd demurred, excoriating the pre-raphaelites for “tampering” with blake’s texts and destroying “the historical value of the poems” (quoted on 64-65). in the preface to his edition of the poems of william blake (1874), shepherd wonders, “what protection has the reader against the caprice or vanity of an editor who does not adhere religiously to the author’s text?” (quoted on 65). dent notes the parallels with our own time in this debate and is admirably cautious about reaching any definitive conclusions. on the one hand, she agrees with the editors of the blake archive, who, like shepherd, see copyright as “an important defence in preserving the integrity of blake’s work in a digital and online environment” (64). on the other, she sympathizes with “the fast and loose attitude to copyright” that hotten defended and that defines our own digital moment (67) and concedes that there is “just too much of a momentum to stop blake being prey to cut-and-paste culture” (67), though the word “prey” may reveal her conservative bias here. she’s certain that “the real text still matters,” but also admits that “a serendipitous encounter” with digital or commercial blake “might well be more authentic, have more textual integrity for a popular audience, than anything the pre-raphaelites could have imagined” (67). and so she leaves us in a quandary. what’s an aspiring digital humanist to do—tweet, text, and tumbl in the electronic ether? embrace mash-ups and “performativity”? how will tenure committees judge this new brand of scholarship? will the dean smile this work to see? what becomes clear from dent’s essay, along with several of the others, is that the new digital environment necessarily changes the activity and aims of conventional scholarly editing. the medium is not completely the message, but it radically alters it. web editing cannot afford to mirror book editing for much longer. soon it will not be enough for the digital humanities simply to archive a writer’s work—tag, footnote, and make it searchable. they will have to find a way of uniting the rigor and standards of the academy with the aleatory wonder of the web. in this sense, the blake archive probably represents the first generation of online editions. subsequent ones may look more like the blake 2.0 cloud, but they will have to devise ways of navigating clutter and creating a manageable hierarchy of material if they are to maintain some degree of scholarly integrity.  the strange material fact of this book itself, optimistically titled blake 2.0, gives rise to yet more questions and only deepens the quandary. the volume appears before us, weighty and expensive, decidedly not meant for a lay audience (only eight illustrations!), and surrounded by a host of anachronisms. there is something fundamentally counterintuitive about its very existence. not copyright, as it turns out, but the academic tome in an age of digital reproduction ought to be the real subject of scrutiny here. what are we to make of a twenty-first century debate housed in the hoary tabernacle of the past? doesn’t the old gutenberg technology invalidate, or at least subvert, many of the arguments being made in the collection? why weren’t these essays published online with links to blake blogs, other online essay collections, and social networking sites? was it the whisper of permanence that still beckons from the codex form, the imprimatur of a worthy press, the satisfying comfort of a book on the shelf? these questions perforce lead to the most disturbing of all. when he proclaimed “the death of the author” many years ago now, roland barthes never imagined that it would happen quite so literally as it has. on the web, “network materiality” presupposes or portends, in ways that are still evolving, a concomitant “network immateriality” of the author, whose identity is not only masked behind pins and passwords but subsumed in a complex of “relations.” because of continual updating, new and multiple alliances, and the vexed status of copyright, the primary focus of the web has become the site rather than the author or authors behind it. thus the blake 2.0 cloud, like some relative of hal, will soon replace whittaker and whitson as the living digital progenitor. and that’s why these essays, with their identifiable authors, standard page lengths, and rumble of footnotes seem oddly reactionary, an atavistic cry of “mine.” they pledge allegiance to what l. o. sauerberg has suggestively called the “gutenberg parenthesis,” the five-hundred-year pause that interrupts a discernible continuum between the elizabethan world of performance and re-creation and our own digital culture, which is increasingly defined by oral and communal traditions as well as transmedial forms of communication. web 2.0 implies a sense of transience and flux that produces terrible anxiety in many academics. there is no inscription, no name on the title page, no sweet-savored legacy. everybody’s on the masthead and nobodaddy. and so the forces of the internet appear to foretell a much more disquieting “death of the author,” especially for those of us still chiseling away at the little monument of our name. blake’s priestly blessing: god blesses job—postscript blake’s priestly blessing: god blesses job—postscript by abraham samuel shiff abraham samuel shiff (abe.sam.shiff@gmail.com) studies at the graduate center, city university of new york, in the master of liberal arts program. he has also published on shakespeare. g. e. bentley, jr.’s reportg. e. bentley, jr., et al., “william blake and his circle: a checklist of publications and discoveries in 2015,” blake 50.1 (summer 2016): par. 9, “previously unknown copy of a book owned by blake.” of a newly discovered book owned by blake, the history of the present jews,leo modena, the history of the present jews throughout the world. being an ample tho succinct account of their customs, ceremonies, and manner of living, at this time. … (london: printed and sold by edm. powell in black-fryars near ludgate, 1707). eighteenth century collections online (ecco): two examples printed in 1707 (gale documents cw3318062586 and cw3318062895); one in 1711, published by w. bray at the east-end of the inner-walk of exeter-change (gale cw3323062380). prompts this postscript to my article “blake’s priestly blessing: god blesses job,”abraham samuel shiff, “blake’s priestly blessing: god blesses job,” blake 47.3 (winter 2013–14): 29 pars. where i argue that blake incorporated into his artwork the hand gesture that is integral to the jewish synagogue ritual of the priestly blessing. at the time i conducted research for the article there was only circumstantial evidence that blake knew about jewish religious practices.abraham samuel shiff, “blake’s hebrew calligraphy,” blake 46.2 (fall 2012): 34 pars. the book reported by bentley is direct evidence that he did study them, as the full title indicates: the history of the present jews throughout the world. being an ample tho succinct account of their customs, ceremonies, and manner of living, at this time. in “blake’s priestly blessing” i also argue that blake could not have learned about the hand gesture from reading. although the priestly blessing is commanded in the old testament, the gesture is not there described, nor is it detailed in books available to blake that were reviewed for the article. because the history of the present jews was not among those evaluated, it is necessary to determine if he could have learned about the gesture from this specific book. a review of all versions finds the blessing ceremony is barely mentioned: and they [the priests] bless the people on solemn festivals, with these words of chap. vi. of numbers, the lord bless thee and keep thee, &c.modena 52 (part 1, chapter 12, “of the priests and levites, and their oblations and tithes”). from these few words blake could not have deduced or inferred anything about a priestly blessing hand gesture. his knowledge must have come from elsewhere. the article’s conclusion stands unchanged. blake learned about the hand gesture from some person with knowledge of the priestly blessing ceremony as practiced by contemporary jews. review: steven goldsmith, blake’s agitation: criticism and the emotions steven goldsmith. blake’s agitation: criticism and the emotions. baltimore: johns hopkins university press, 2013. 406 pp. $65.00/£34.00, hardcover (also available as an e-book). reviewed by g. a. rosso g. a. rosso (rossoga1@gmail.com) has written and co-edited a number of books and essays on blake over the last twenty years. he has just completed a monograph on rahab symbolism in blake’s three epic poems. this is an imaginative, deeply learned, and passionately argued book. the thinking and writing are sustained throughout at exceptionally high levels. complex and difficult but readable and clear, the book makes an original and important contribution to blake studies, though its aims and interests are much broader and more ambitious. i will focus on goldsmith’s approach to and interpretation of blake, but since he uses blake to explore larger concerns in literary theory, the field of emotion/affect studies, and the relation of critical thought to political theory and action, i take these into view. the thread that ties these areas together is the centrality of reading in modern culture, about which goldsmith has innovative and insightful things to say. the book opens with a provocation to historicist readings of blake as antinomian radical and prophet against empire, asking “is our enthusiasm for blake to be trusted?” (1). the question turns on another directed at blake: why did he feel that his work had public importance when he had no audience to speak of? how did he maintain his “radical enthusiasm” in the face of obscurity? for goldsmith, belief in blake’s political radicalism rests on shaky evidence; it is supported by his alleged presence at the gordon riots in 1780 and his trial for sedition in 1804—in which he was acquitted of uttering antimonarchist sentiments—but these events are “striking exceptions” that stand out against a lifetime of “nonparticipation” (35). blake never broke the law, was not an activist, and had no file with the home office. goldsmith titles part 1 “devil’s party,” but he asks: “is it possible to believe oneself a revolutionary devil while remaining harmless and inconsequential?” (48). his question is not as harsh or negative as it sounds: the answer is yes if one’s faculties are agitated to the point of making intellectual arousal “feel like action.” in such agitation, suggests goldsmith, “the antinomian integrity of thinking for oneself is tantamount to a public good” (70-72). in this sense, questions concerning blake’s or blake scholarship’s enthusiasm open into a broader consideration of “critical agency” as practiced by intellectuals since the romantic period. a special value of the book is goldsmith’s extensive and perceptive reading in the field of affect studies as it has reshaped discussion in the humanities over the last decades, especially regarding the mind-body relation and the political dimension of human subjectivity. goldsmith shows that recent blake criticism participates in what he calls “a sustained, interdisciplinary ‘surge’ in the … study of emotion” (10), and the book is worth reading as a guide to this exciting work. an important feature of this field is its emphasis on the “anonymity” and “agency” of emotion, what thomas pfau refers to as the pre-discursive or “ontologically anterior” vitality of emotions said to “resist a subject’s ordinary means of self-identification” (17). affects in the new literature are “anonymous” because they are involuntary, taking place below the threshold of cognition, prior to or beyond the formation of the cartesian subject. in posing a challenge to “the self-protective fictions of identity,” functioning “as a source of estrangement rather than as a reassuring indication of familiar humanity,” they resemble blake’s concept of self-annihilation, the enthusiastic state that is “the primary aim of his late prophecies” (17-18). goldsmith joins these concepts to the issue of critical agency through what he calls his “sharpest insight into blake’s contradictions,” which derives from an “unexpected source”—immanuel kant’s the conflict of the faculties (1798). what interests goldsmith most about this work is kant’s evaluation of the french revolution and terror, particularly his concept of the “nonparticipant revolutionary spectator,” a figure who serves to displace the jacobins as the true agent of the revolution as “a world-transforming event” (35). in a single decisive move, kant transfers historical agency to a newly emergent public whose role is to keep watch and exercise critical judgment. from this point on, according to kant, only the genuine enthusiasm of the independent critical thinker, and not the agency of direct action, makes progressive historical change possible. (35) blake is goldsmith’s foremost example of this new figure “whose critical engagements take on such urgency as to feel like actions themselves,” a move that renders blake’s contradictions “more broadly representative of the modern progressive intellectual” (35). armed with this thesis, goldsmith explores the compensatory role of emotion in creating the sense of critical agency, though in an important methodological move he also argues that blake puts this theory of “reading” into question by subjecting emotion to critique in turn. if kant is the theorist and blake the exemplar, then milton is the precursor for the revolutionary spectator (36), and an outstanding feature of goldsmith’s book is its often brilliant treatment of the blake-milton relationship. blake’s emotional aesthetic is “directly related” to his sense of sharing with milton the task of sustaining hope in historical transformation in the face of “revolutionary disappointment.” “the urgent and anonymous emotions of critical engagement,” writes goldsmith, “come to occupy the place vacated by a discredited revolutionary agency” (26). goldsmith focuses on blake’s visual interpretations of samson agonistes, primarily through a stimulating account of the evolution of blake’s design “albion rose,” the versions of which, he says, culminate in the print’s final state (c. 1804). he compares the design with blake’s drawing of samson on the last page of his night thoughts illustrations (night ix, page 119), which depicts samson pulling down the pillars, one eye open directly across from young’s text: “virtue abounds in flatterers, and foes; / ’tis pride, to praise her; penance to perform” (9.2419-20). claiming that these lines echo milton’s samson agonistes—“with inward eyes illuminated / his fierie vertue rouz’d / from under ashes into sudden flame” (lines 1690-92)—goldsmith argues that young’s negative take on “virtue” deflects attention from samson’s act of violence in the same way as do blake’s additions to the print of “albion rose.” these include an inscription that alludes to samson’s laboring “at the mill with slaves” and a date (1780) that places samson in the context of the gordon riots and american revolution, bits of text that redirect our attention from the urgency of his act to “the lateral, slower motion of reading” (133). while the print may be more multivalent than goldsmith allows, it is especially important to him because from the time of david erdman’s “groundbreaking reading” in prophet against empire (1954) it has served as “an indispensable key to political readings of blake” (84). and though erdman does not associate “albion rose” with samson at the temple, goldsmith suggests that erdman and later historicists follow blake’s example in borrowing samson’s strength while “transferring” his “heroic labor to the urgent but hesitant agency” (117) involved in critical reading. in part 2, goldsmith locates the origins of his idea of critical reading in the age of sensibility, whose literature emphasizes emotional intelligence in an idiom blake both mobilizes and subjects to critique. building on recent work by james chandler, jon mee, and susan matthews, goldsmith analyzes “on anothers sorrow” to show how blake incorporates the discourses of sympathy and sentiment in order to unmask their social-cultural construction. on one hand, emotion cannot be subsumed by reason and so functions as “autocriticism” of the instrumental subject of enlightenment thought; on the other, emotions such as sympathy and pity “underwrite the norms of social and political life,” smoothing the exchanges of global commerce, and so must be “decomposed” by critical reading. in contrast to the “intelligent” emotions subject to self-control, blake’s jesus in the poem demands no accountability and performs no action but a “dilatory” and “immoderate” capacity to empathize, to sit and listen eternally, refusing to appropriate another’s sorrow for any agenda whatsoever—except perhaps for critical reading (199-209). how does this jesus comport with the antinomian radical who acts from impulse, not from rules, in the marriage of heaven and hell? they must be read together, each confounding the “ordinary distinctions between activity and passivity” (229) and so eluding narrative time altogether. goldsmith brings his view of this impulsive yet infinitely patient jesus to bear on the celebrated text on time near the end of the first book of milton, marshaling the major threads of his argument in an imaginative and sensitive reading of the “pulsation of an artery” passage (28.44-29.3, e 126-27). a review cannot do justice to the profound learning and energetic thinking goldsmith bestows on the passage. suffice it to say that the idea in the passage accords with the postmodern “disappearance of an identifiable human subject” (234) as the pulsations of life tend to render us “strangers in our own bodies” (235-36). goldsmith thus adds considerably to discussions about blake and the body and strengthens support for an immanent rather than transcendent blake. in the final chapter, “criticism and the work of emotion,” goldsmith puts into question his argument about the “intimacy between criticism and feeling,” asking as he did of blake’s enthusiasm how we know to trust “agitations irreducible to concepts” (272-73). he draws on jean-paul sartre’s the emotions: outline of a theory (1939)—which both affirms and distrusts the transformative potential of emotion—and on jacques derrida’s late work, especially specters of marx (1993) and the politics of friendship (1994), the latter recording derrida’s lone reference to blake. of particular importance is derrida’s “performative interpretation” of marx’s eleventh thesis on feuerbach, the injunction not just to interpret the world but to change it. a performative interpretation transforms or changes the text/​event that it engages, as when derrida reads the communist specter haunting europe as a “promise” that remains fundamentally indeterminate, that must “exceed and surprise every determinant anticipation” (specters 251). this “structure of experience” applies also to the promise of revolution or the coming of the messiah, both of which require “a waiting without expectation” (“marx & sons” 248-49). for goldsmith, the crucial point is that derrida “collapses any distinction between the formal action of marx’s writings and the reader’s affective, even somatic response, making it impossible to locate revolt in one or the other exclusively” (288). true to his self-reflective method, however, goldsmith warns that the transformative potential of affective reading may be an indulgent fantasy, “a product of specialized, professional labor” constrained by socio-economic conditions (302). he thus counterposes derrida’s messianic structure with sartre’s theory of emotion. as goldsmith explains, sartre identifies two main types of emotion, each performing a kind of “magic” that transforms the self: those “that emanate from us and others that happen to us, with the latter pointing to sources outside our own subjectivity” (306). the first type supplies immediate, embodied evidence that critical thinking can change the world, specifically when the critic or when history has reached an impasse: a failed revolution or discredited apocalypse. one’s enthusiasm in such a moment amounts to a kind of magic that sartre says is based totally on subjective life, not on the outside world that denies the desire for transformation. the second type of emotion comes from outside the self and “reveals itself to consciousness as magical instead of determined” (308), confronting the subject as something other than its own will or agency. this second emotion enables goldsmith to interrogate the “implicit claims of affective agency in order to decouple emotion from the promise of empowerment” (goldsmith, “william blake and the future of enthusiasm” 453). he offsets derrida’s messianic structure of experience with what sartre describes as “an existential structure of the world” (308). yet if he counters derrida with sartre, he also remains committed to the principle of indeterminacy: not the indeterminacy that critics impose on an intransigent and over-determined world in order to interpret and change it, but a “second indeterminacy—if it exi[s]ts at all”—that transcends human mentality and reveals itself through the object (308-09). the derridean phrase “if it exists” suggests that goldsmith reads sartre through derrida and that what may be at stake is not blake’s politics but the burden of the postmodern subject looking to escape the hegemony of the sign. the decentered subject gains an implicit authenticity through those affective agitations and intensities that open up an interiority “outside” the processes of subjection (or subjectification in postmodern parlance). as with any book, even one as self-aware and knowledgeable as this one, several limitations can be noted. for one, despite its historical range and theoretical sophistication, the book does not add much to readings of any of blake’s major poems. in this sense it recalls leo damrosch’s similarly provocative and challenging symbol and truth in blake’s myth (1980), a work also focused on the productive value of blake’s contradictions. for another, the book seems to generalize a point kant makes about the failure of the jacobin-led revolution to all revolution and perhaps to political action as well. one can practice the enthusiastic reading that goldsmith observes in erdman, mee, saree makdisi, and others without confining political participation to the groves of academe. in related terms, goldsmith says that blake’s jesus is modeled on the self-sacrificing passion of christ, but we get a jesus who does not risk provoking the violence of the state, as he does in the four zoas, jerusalem, and the everlasting gospel. finally, goldsmith’s questions about political agency in blake and tensions within his conceptions of revolutionary violence have been anticipated and addressed in christopher hobson’s the chained boy: orc and blake’s idea of revolution (1999), a book also indebted to the school of joseph wittreich, a pioneer of milton-blake studies whose engagement with milton’s revolutionary legacy deeply informs goldsmith’s argument. hobson offers a critical, historically nuanced account of blake’s revolutionary thinking that does not reject populist violence as an option in his work, a reading that goldsmith does not consider. blake’s agitation thus can be placed within a subfield inaugurated by wittreich nearly forty years ago with angel of apocalypse: blake’s idea of milton (1975), including works by leslie tannenbaum, jackie disalvo, stephen behrendt, hobson, and this reviewer among others that engage blake’s relationship to milton and to the revolutionary currents of his own age. yet goldsmith’s book stands out for its larger aims and concerns, even as it advances discussion of blake’s enthusiasm, fulfills an important need for studies of blake’s relation to sensibility, and goes further than any previous study in exploring contradictions in blake’s work. indeed, the book has the enviable potential to make blake available to a larger audience than most blake specialists can reach. in this sense, its focus on a limited number of passages in blake’s work may prove to its advantage. we might end by citing goldsmith’s own praise of a fellow romanticist’s book: “its monumental scope and complexity lie well beyond anything that can be treated justly in this brief engagement” (14). works cited derrida, jacques. “marx & sons.” ghostly demarcations: a symposium on jacques derrida’s “specters of marx.” ed. michael sprinker. new york: verso, 1999. 213-69. ---. specters of marx. trans. peggy kamuf. new york: routledge, 1994. goldsmith, steven. “william blake and the future of enthusiasm.” nineteenth-century literature 63 (march 2009): 439-60. inscriptions by blake for his designs: addenda inscriptions by blake for his designs: addenda in the summer 2014 issue (vol. 48, no. 1) we published g. e. bentley, jr.’s “inscriptions by blake for his designs.” the following inscriptions should be added after “the good old man dying.” they have been incorporated into the online version of the article. “death pursuing the soul through the avenues of life” first blair prospectus (1805) (drawing in the collection of robert n. essick) “friendship”some titles of the watercolors sold in 2006 that were not engraved appear to bear no authority from blake: “the grave personified” (price), “while surfeited upon thy damask cheek” (anon.), “a father and two children beside an open grave” (anon.), “heaven’s portals wide expand to let him in” (essick), and “our time is fixed” (anon.). first blair prospectus (1805) (drawing in the collection of alan parker) review: carl-johan malmberg, stjärnan i foten. dikt och bild, bok och tanke hos william blake carl-johan malmberg. stjärnan i foten. dikt och bild, bok och tanke hos william blake. stockholm: wahlström och widstrand, 2013. 458 pp. 255 kr, hardcover. reviewed by ossian lindberg ossian lindberg (bolindbe@abo.fi) is professor emeritus in the department of art history at åbo akademi university in turku, finland. carl-johan malmberg has written a large book of about 450 pages on blake generally, concentrating on what jean hagstrum called blake’s composite art, his unique illuminated printing from copperplates on which text, image, and decoration stand up in relief and can be printed like woodcuts. the writer thinks that the question whether blake was greatest as a poet or as a pictorial artist presupposes the idea that poetry is something distinct from painting, but blake seems to have looked upon both as one thing, which he called “art.” malmberg is up to date on recent blake scholarship, knows morton paley personally, and has corresponded with bob essick. the book is beautifully printed, proofread with reasonable accuracy, and richly illustrated. in a final chapter there is a short summary of blake’s life, but the book is mainly criticism, not biography. informative notes are in the margins, including the original wording of scholars quoted in translation. this is the first book on blake in swedish. there are, of course, articles, mostly general, and translations, some quite bad. i do not know of a single blake original in a swedish collection. blake’s works have never been exhibited in sweden, but in 2000 many blakes from the british museum were shown in finland, at the helsinki city art museum. finland is a bilingual country and helsinki a bilingual city, so david bindman’s catalogue was translated into finnish and swedish. otherwise swedes have been forced to go to britain or to america to see originals and required to read english if they wanted substantial information about blake. but why has malmberg chosen to publish his book in swedish? in english the writer would have reached a wide international audience, while swedes interested in blake can be assumed to be able to read a book written in english. maybe malmberg just wanted to introduce blake to his own people in their own language. malmberg understands the complexities of blake’s poetry and images, and quotes blake literature generously, recent and old. blake scholars are mostly quoted in swedish, blake himself in english. the present reviewer is particularly grateful for a quote before the text from northrop frye’s fearful symmetry, to the effect that blake’s poetical works may need interpretation, but not deciphering: “there can be no ‘key’ and no open-sesame formula and no patented system of translation.” when i read frye in the mid-fifties, i missed this warning. as a consequence, i lost several years trying to “make sense” of blake by translating his poetry into reasoned stories, a urizenic task i dutifully forced myself to perform. before i knew frye i had not so much worried about “understanding” blake, i just enjoyed reading him. afterwards i was suspicious of interpreting poetry and images for many years. it took me a long time to see that it is possible to interpret blake without trying to rewrite his poetry into pedantic prose. the swedish title means the star in the foot: poetry and image, book and thought in william blake. the first part of the title refers, of course, to plates 14, 29, and 33 of the poem milton, where john milton enters the feet of william blake and his brother robert, inspiring them and so helping blake’s illuminated poem into existence. the book is divided into several chapters. after a short introduction, “into the labyrinth,” follow sections on “albion rose,” “the ancient of days,” newton, the songs, jah and his two sons satan and adam, “a woman scaly & a man all hairy,” and jerusalem. at the end there is a short summary of blake’s life and times, a select bibliography, a list of illustrations, and an index of names. malmberg’s analysis of “albion rose,” which he calls an agonistic icon, is excellent. it is true that blake is agonistic, in the sense that he is prone to exceed his predecessors in a creative way. thus “albion rose” is the most typical blake you can find, and this is especially true of the uncolored line engraving. incidentally, i think that the date 1780 is a survivor from the first state, later almost completely reworked and obliterated. and lionardo’s vitruvian man is closer to blake than malmberg thinks. lionardo drew him in two positions, one spread eagled, circumscribed by a circle with its center in the navel. but the position with the arms stretched out horizontally is inscribed in a quadrate with its center at the base of the sexual organ, exactly as in “albion rose.” blake seems to have known lionardo’s drawing. in his discussion of “the ancient of days,” malmberg appropriately quotes detlef dörrbecker to the effect that the print shows not only the making of the universe in general, but more specifically the creation of measurable space. newton holds the same golden compasses as the ancient of days, and both use their left hand. malmberg has a good section on newton as god. the section on the songs is long (116 pages), sound, and ends with some interesting remarks on blake’s use of gold. the author knows that the songs of experience existed in blake’s mind and in his notebook already in 1789, when he etched the songs of innocence, although experience was not published until 1794. malmberg has chosen for commentary poems that interest him, such as “the chimney sweeper” from innocence and “london” from experience. today it is difficult to understand how nineteenth-century commentators could believe that blake was an uneducated person who was under the misapprehension that “chartered” meant something like “mapped out,” an interpretation that would make nonsense of the poem. one time in london in the mid-sixties i walked along a street and noticed the sign “chartered turf accountants,” and thought that i wandered through a “charter’d street.” i understood that blake must have had a similar experience, of a society in which businesses were protected by royal charters but people were left to suffer and die. malmberg understands that blake’s “london” is meant to be seen as well as heard, and subjects the minute particulars of the illuminated plate to close scrutiny. he also notices the corresponding illustration in plate 84 of jerusalem and mentions the church in the background. actually there are two churches: westminster abbey and saint paul’s cathedral. the illumination shows london, blind and age bent, led by a child through the streets of, not babylon, but london, a confirmation of malmberg’s idea that blake’s london was babylon born again. there are good sections on the print jah and his two sons satan and adam and on blake, sex, and homoeroticism, called “a woman scaly & a man all hairy,” and a very interesting one on “feet.” i noticed long ago that blake drew feet carefully, and in many special, sometimes idiosyncratic ways, but i noticed the fact without realizing its importance. other blake readers/beholders may have had a similar experience. malmberg has helped us understand the significance of feet in blake, or would have, if all blake enthusiasts could read swedish. the book would be well worth translating into english. the last chapter deals with jerusalem, in malmberg’s mind blake’s greatest work and the cause of his blake experience in a hotel in new york in november 1993. he had bought the blake trust facsimile of copy e of jerusalem and went to bed with it. the text was printed in a delicate brick red, the pages adorned with watercolor and gilding, blake was opened to him and he realized that he held in his hand the most beautiful book in the world. the facsimile is almost as good as the original, with one exception: there is no flash of metal in the gold. there are a few blemishes, and some of them have nothing directly to do with blake. malmberg seems to be under the impression that there existed, in the renaissance, an artist with the family name of da vinci. that vulgarity is understandable in a thriller writer such as dan brown, but a well-known and cultured essayist and art historian like malmberg should know better. leonardo was born out of wedlock; he had no family name and no father’s name. the normalized italian form leonardo would be acceptable, but to himself and to his first biographer, giorgio vasari, he was lionardo. the woodcut of his portrait in vasari’s lives of the artists is captioned “lionardo da vinci pitt. e scvltor fior.” because the artist was born in the tuscan village of vinci he was called lionardo da vinci to distinguish him from other lionardos, but that does not make da vinci his family name or surname. that there is a family with the name da vinci today is a different matter entirely. in fifteenth-century italy most people spent their lives, like lionardo, without a family name. in finland the law that every person should have a family name is as late as the early twentieth century. malmberg’s term “färgetsning” for the large color print of newton is misleading. the technique is not precisely known, but the print has nothing to do with “etsning” (etching); it should be called “färgtryck.” the color-printed illuminated books, done from etched copperplates, can of course be named etchings, but the large color prints have clearly been printed from something else, presumably millboard or cardboard. the strange brooding figure on plate 78 of jerusalem is unlikely to be an eagle-headed man. on his head is a fleshy crest, like that of a cock, and a humanized cock he is, soon to herald the rising sun at the beginning of the last chapter of the poem, which ends with a renewal of everything at the last judgment. in addition, i have doubts about the giant on plate 62. there is a tendency among blake scholars to identify and name every figure, whether it makes sense or not. in his illuminated blake erdman goes to extremes in this direction. malmberg is mostly careful, but his tentative identification of the giant with its feet aflame as jesus is farfetched, to say the least. why not agree that some of blake’s figures cannot be identified, since we have nothing to go on? some questions will always remain questions. rediscovering william hayley: a review article rediscovering william hayley: a review article paul foster, ed., with diana barsham. william hayley (1745–1820) poet, biographer, and libertarian: a reassessment. chichester: university of chichester, 2013. otter memorial paper no. 32. 208 pp. £16.00, paperback. paul foster, ed., with diana barsham. william hayley (1745–1820): selected poetry. chichester: university of chichester, 2013. otter memorial paper no. 33. 95 pp. £8.00, paperback. reviewed by joseph wittreich joseph wittreich (jwittreich@gc.cuny.edu), emeritus distinguished professor of english from the cuny graduate center, is the author most recently of shifting contexts: reinterpreting samson agonistes (2002) and why milton matters (2006). both of these volumes—the first an anthology of provocative essays (hereafter referred to as essays) and the second a selection of hayley’s mostly numbing poetry (hereafter referred to as selected poetry)—proceed from the understanding that hayley has been lost to both the history of poetry and the annals of literary history. individual essays reinforce the point, and from different perspectives reaffirm the overarching claim of both volumes: hayley, for too long “a missing person,” is now ripe for “reassessment” as “a writer equally at home in the centre or on the margins of the culture of his day” (barsham and foster, essays 5, 7). the poems themselves—notwithstanding their reported “elegance and lucidity of mind,” their “charm of manner” (barsham and foster, selected poetry 6)—constitute a weak appeal to would-be anthologists, and the botched printing of these volumes, even with their baskerville font, is no magnet for prospective readers. on page 6 of selected poetry, lines 3-7 of the introduction are a repetition of the previous five lines; the same is true of page 47, where lines 188-94 from canto 3 of the triumphs of temper repeat lines 181-87. the second selection from an essay on epic poetry is given a wrong caption, which should read “epistle i, ll. 81-106,” and the accompanying text needs mending: a period is missing at what should be line 82, and a comma at what should be line 95; here there is a stray dash at what should be line 89, and there a stray period at what should be line 91. selections (the first of them) from epistle 1 and from epistle 4 require similar emendations. such mistakes, proliferating, do not inspire confidence in the textual authority of hayley’s selected poetry. in the companion volume, printing problems appear in the form of irregular paragraph indentations and erratic spacing (essays 28, 83, 94, 120, 127, 147), and sometimes entire lines of words, crammed together as if in a vise, are an impediment to reading (essays 33, 42, 94, 176). what really matter, however, are the welcome promptings from some of these essays, especially those by diana barsham, mark crosby, janet carter and john wyatt, and susan matthews, that not only promise a revaluation of hayley but ensure its eventual accomplishment.see also an earlier essay by philip cox, “blake, hayley and milton: a reassessment,” english studies 75.5 (1994): 430-41, and later the parallel effort by steven goldsmith, blake’s agitation: criticism and the emotions (baltimore: johns hopkins university press, 2013), esp. 157-61. even if the collective force of hayley’s selected poetry is not likely to challenge robert southey’s judgment that “everything about that man is good except his poetry” (essays 123), one of the poems—[“swallows at felpham”]—is enough to give readers pause, even seduce them into admiration: ye gentle birds, that stand aloof, and smooth your pinions on my roof, preparing for departure hence, ere winter’s angry threats commence; like you, my soul would smooth her plume for longer flights beyond the tomb. may god, by whom is seen and heard departing man and wandering bird, in mercy mark us for his own, and guide us to the land unknown. (selected poetry 87) this poem was written in late summer of 1820. hayley died that autumn, on 12 november. another felpham poem (not included in selected poetry), this one entitled “felpham: an epistle to henrietta of lavant” (1814), depicts scenes available only to the mental eye from a place where “hovering spirits make this scene their own” and where, providentially, these “inmates” of the poet’s mind keep hayley “blind to futurity.”hayley, poems on serious and sacred subjects (chichester, 1818) 17, 16 (hereafter referred to as poems). these poems of raw but controlled emotion suggest that the introspective, meditative hayley of the nineteenth century is a marginally better poet than the other-directed, socially aspiring one of the previous century. through their thoughtful process of selection, foster and barsham allow us to revel in the generic diversity of hayley’s poetry: songs and sonnets, odes, epitaphs, ballads, verse epistles, occasional poems, lyric poems and elegies, plus a mock epic. experimentation, “the surest guide to truth,”hayley, an essay on epic poetry (london, 1782) 298 (hereafter referred to as epic poetry). says hayley, is not only the hallmark of these poems but also the abiding characteristic of the women’s writings his poems inspired and nurtured, as well as a driving force in the new epic tradition he hoped to establish. in the triumphs of temper, the poetry now echoes milton (“and makes a hell of love’s extatic heaven” [selected poetry 49]) and now dante (“‘all ye who enter, every hope forego!’” [selected poetry 42]), but never achieves the allure of either poet. yet like both dante and milton, hayley mingles the various genres, exalts epic, and lets the different arts stand in alliance. indeed, in this respect, hayley is blake’s harbinger, and so too in his understanding that poets must open themselves to irritations of the mind, yet remain (as he avers in epistle to a friend) “unvex’d by mental strife” and (as he urges in an essay on history) still dare, “unaw’d before a tyrant’s throne[,] / to make the sanctity of freedom known” (selected poetry 27, 35). furthermore, as crosby observes, the words “mental strife” become a “central conceit” describing serena’s experience in the triumphs of temper (essays 84), but they are also a deadening repetition there. only after they are transfused and transmuted in the preface to blake’s milton, here as “mental fight,”see blake’s poetry and designs, ed. mary lynn johnson and john e. grant, 2nd ed. (new york: w. w. norton, 2008) 148 (milton pl. i). all subsequent quotations of blake’s writings are from this edition. do these words become part of the unforgettable clamor of english literature. nevertheless, hayley’s phrase is a signature of his poetry, as is evident in epic poetry (23) as well as in an essay on sculpture.hayley, an essay on sculpture (london, 1800) 11 (hereafter referred to as sculpture). when all is said and done, though, in hayley’s poetry we never feel, as we are said to do in milton’s, “imparadis’d in song” (epic poetry 65). nor do we often feel the intensity of mental and spiritual strife. what gave hayley standing and earned him sympathy in his own time were not just his poems but the personal crises emanating from them: the illness and death of his first wife, eliza; the catastrophic death of his young son, thomas alphonso hayley; the madness of his beloved friend william cowper; the collapse of his fame and fortune followed by a blistering barrage of criticism from the romantic poets. especially important to him were the personal and cultural relationships on which he doted and that his own writings catalogued and helped sustain. those relationships are legion: with robert lowth, john howard, edward gibbon, william mason, george romney, joseph wright of derby, john flaxman, richard cumberland, cowper, and blake, as well as elizabeth carter, charlotte smith, amelia opie, anna seward, and jane austen, some of whom (especially among the women) exemplify what barsham calls “hayley’s transfusional poetics” (essays 36). many of these relationships are memorialized in hayley’s poetry, others in portraits; those with romney and cowper, in hayley biographies; and that with blake by designs this poet invented and engraved for designs to a series of ballads (1802), not to mention the three years the two men spent together at felpham. alongside blake’s caustic recollections of hayley are hayley’s telling silences, as in “felpham: an epistle to henrietta of lavant,” a poem about a poets’ paradise, where blake goes unmentioned among those (dead or living) who once inhabited the place and still converse with hayley. for the most part, blake is as forgotten by hayleyin a letter to lady hesketh dated 15 july 1802, hayley does remember blake, tellingly so, as possessing a “sensibility … dangerously acute,” as well as “perilous powers of … imagination,” as quoted by morchard bishop, blake’s hayley: the life, works, and friendships of william hayley (london: victor gollancz, 1951) 278. as hayley will be forgotten by history except, as vivienne painting explains, for his “extraordinary decision … to refuse the honour of becoming poet laureate” (essays 13)—a post for which he was nominated in 1785 but that was not offered to him until the death of thomas warton in 1790. whatever immediate puff that offer may have given to his reputation, it was (as crosby observes) soon deflated by the romantics, not only by southey’s barb but just as bruisingly by lord byron’s “for ever feeble and for ever tame” (essays 79). later in the nineteenth century, hayley’s reputation is further sullied (as barsham reports) by alexander gilchrist’s dismissive treatment of him as someone more interested in his friends’ achievements than in his own (essays 27). nevertheless, despite this slighting criticism, southey believed (interestingly but mistakenly) that, because of its popularity, hayley’s poetry was ensured a place in any anthology representing the final two decades of the eighteenth century. it is also noteworthy (as carter and wyatt remember) that, despite their sparring, hayley lent “his staunch support” to blake in time of trouble (essays 113)—a gesture blake may have remembered and reciprocated in the immediate aftermath of hayley’s death. the attitudes of blake and hayley toward one another were complex. thus, however tempting it is to mark their differences, it is worth remembering, with matthews, that both men welcomed political controversy and, if not ideologically mobile, were at times ideologically slippery; that whereas others would curtail debate, blake and hayley alike promoted it. sometimes their views collided, but again, as matthews notes, on such matters as voltaire and epic poetry their views often “chimed” (essays 178). moreover, both are eminences in dante studies: hayley as dante’s first english translator and, along with chaucer, thomas wyatt, and samuel daniel, as one of the earliest employers of terza rima in english poetry,as stuart curran informs me. and blake as a dante illustrator and interpreter of first importance. what emerges from the collective force of these essays is that, as barsham puts it, milton is not only “a unifying force in hayley’s friendship circle” (essays 41), but a newly burnished icon of british romanticism. what should give hayley increased stature in our time are his role as a combatant in the wars over epic poetry, then his achievements as both a literary historian and theorist and, of singular importance, his eminence as a miltonist whose claim for milton is that he recovered, revived, and revolutionized the tradition of epic poetry. we should also acknowledge that hayley’s isolation and consequent neglect are as much the doing of miltonists as of blakeans and romanticists: witness john leonard’s two-volume, 853-page reception history,john leonard, faithful labourers: a reception history of paradise lost, 1667-1970, 2 vols. (oxford: oxford university press, 2013). where hayley is a deafening silence. this book is of special interest inasmuch as it establishes the topics and terms (however restrictively) of milton criticism over the centuries and thus provides a means of gauging hayley’s contributions to milton’s reception. what barsham describes as hayley’s “avant-garde gender politics” (essays 28) must have been construed as an inconvenience within leonard’s argument that locates the emergence of misogyny in milton criticism in the last decades of the eighteenth century (leonard 2: [650], 666-67), specifically in the publication of samuel johnson’s life of milton (1779), against which hayley’s life of milton (1794, 1796)the censored version of hayley’s the life of milton was appended to vol. 1 of the lavishly illustrated boydell and nicol edition, the poetical works of john milton, 3 vols. (london, 1794-97). the unexpurgated edition, published by t. cadell, first appeared in 1796, then again in dublin and winterthur in 1797 and yet again in basel and strasbourg in 1799. the 1796 edition, hereafter referred to as the life, is cited here. levels a deflating blow. unfurling the politics embedded in johnson’s complaint concerning milton’s turkish contempt for women, hayley posits that johnson means “to prejudice” women against a poet who, “surpass[ing] his peers in delineating their charms, … represents their mental united to their personal graces, and exhibits in perfection all the[ir] loveliness” (the life 198; see also 197). tellingly, milton’s muse is said to find her finest resemblance in the poet’s “enchanting eve” (the life 229). having already located the appearance of a misogynist tradition of milton criticism in thomas newton’s variorum edition of samson agonistessee thomas newton, ed., paradise regain’d …. to which is added samson agonistes, 2 vols. (london, 1752) 1: 197, 246-47, 260-61. as he assails william warburton’s claim “that milton seems to have chosen the subject of this sublime drama for the sake of the satire on bad wives” (the life 167), hayley casts doubt on leonard’s claim that johnson introduces misogyny to milton criticism, even as leonard prompts us into questioning his own motives in excluding hayley from this (and other) aspects of milton’s reception history in which hayley is so fully engaged. if newton’s variorum editions and johnson’s life would establish misogyny as a still-enduring topic in milton criticism, hayley quickly moves for its repeal as he rushes to reassure hannah more, after her cœlebs names eve as milton’s hero in paradise lost, that woman is “never inferior to man’s lordly race” (poems 52). three other matters addressed in hayley’s the life, all of them cardinal concerns in leonard’s reception history, beg for studied attention. the first is leonard’s proposal that thomas newton shuts the doors of milton criticism for nearly two and a half centuries on copernicus, galileo, and sir isaac newton. whatever thomas newton’s role as doorkeeper may have been, hayley thinks that this is a door opened to milton by grotius, who, firing milton’s interest in galileo and perhaps implementing their meeting, may have made it possible for him to have “caught from galileo, or his disciples, some ideas approaching towards the newtonian philosophy” (the life 37).hayley is here following paolo rolli in his contention that milton must have captured, if not from galileo then from some of his disciples, some tenets of the scientific system that newton would develop; see rolli, “vita di giovanni milton,” in del paradiso perduto poema inglese, trans. rolli (london, 1729), sig. b. hayley also thinks this was a door slammed shut by dr. johnson, who opposed “‘the innovators,’” among whom johnson numbered milton, for “‘think[ing] that we are placed here to watch the growth of plants, or the motions of the stars’” rather than “‘to learn … how to do good and avoid evil’” (the life 56, quoting johnson). johnson, it appears, shares the blame with thomas newton for hiding milton’s commitment to the new science—blame that leonard places squarely on the shoulders of newton. correspondingly, hayley should be recognized as one of many exceptions to leonard’s surmise that after thomas newton—indeed, because of him—miltonists ceased aligning their poet with isaac newton and the new science. as it happens, hayley repeatedly couples milton and newton as among the first of the world’s toiling thinkers, specifically citing newton as england’s representative of “patient thought” (sculpture 15, 176). indeed, this pairing, often to milton’s advantage, is a distinctive feature of british romanticism. secondly, in the life, hayley participates in the advancement of what was emerging in the eighteenth century as a core concept of milton criticism: milton is, first and foremost, a biblical poet, with the bible serving him as “the prime director of his genius” (219). standing behind any consideration of milton’s use of the bible are the counterclaims of jonathan richardson, sr., that milton “ever was a dissenter” and thomas newton that he was “generally truly orthodox”—that milton transgresses the boundaries of scripture or stays within its confines.see jonathan richardson, sr.’s life of milton in explanatory notes and remarks on milton’s paradise lost (london, 1734), xxxix, and thomas newton, ed., paradise lost, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (london, 1750) 2: 62. more so than any other of milton’s eighteenthand early nineteenth-century commentators, hayley vastly complicates the topic of milton and the bible—indeed, modernizes it—by introducing the notion of rival hermeneutics as he praises the ingenuity with which milton “adopted the most opposite interpretations of scripture, as they happened to suit his poetical purposes.”hayley, a philosophical, historical, and moral essay on old maids, 3 vols. (london, 1785) 2: 11. he then goes on to explain that what produce and sanction rival hermeneutics in the first place are contradictions within scripture such as we find both within and between the pauline epistles.hayley, old maids 3: 135. third, in epic poetry better than in the life, hayley explains the accomplishment with which he later credits milton as the person to whom we are most “indebted … for having extended and ennobled the province of epic poetry” (the life 208). in the abridged arguments of the life, he posits that milton “accomplished a revolution in poetry” as he “purified and extended the empire of the epic muse,” so that by his “epic compositions … alone” england is able to “rival … antiquity in the highest province of literature” (see “conjectures on the origin of the paradise lost” [hereafter “conjectures”] appended to the life, 274, and then the life 230). part of the miltonic revolution in epic poetry involves a new inclusiveness in which the different art forms, not just genres, become an aspect of the “mental magnificence” of the epic poem so brilliantly realized by blake in both milton and jerusalem (see “conjectures,” the life 268-69). another feature of the miltonic revolution, as hayley understood early on, involves milton’s narrative experimentation, his fracturing his narrative, most obviously when he splits books 7 and 10 into two books each as part of a conversion process by which paradise lost is transformed from a teninto a twelve-book epic, with milton thereby creating “a pause in the long narration” (the life 179)hayley here echoes a phrase from elijah fenton’s “advertisement” (sometimes “postscript”) to his “life of milton,” which appears ubiquitously throughout the eighteenth century, as, for example, in paradise lost, 4 vols. (edinburgh: apollo press, 1776) 1: [25]. eventually hayley gives new weight to the idea that the modern epic displaces action with contemplation when, in epic poetry, he says that “milton … himself” is “proof that human action is not the largest sphere of the epic poem” (120).—what we might call still points. in epic poetry, these landing places for contemplation are behind hayley’s description of such poems as “dome[s] of mental pleasure wide expand[ing]” (106) and his envisioning of them as replacing a unity of action with one of design. characterized by poems that curtail action, corralling it within mental theaters where the mind continually recoils upon itself, the epics of romanticism repeatedly exhibit action plots yielding to what herbert tucker calls “plotted epiphanies.”herbert f. tucker, epic: britain’s heroic muse, 1790–1910 (oxford: oxford university press, 2008) 111. in epic poetry, hayley had already fashioned a view of epic consonant with the idea that milton presides over a third, religious phase of such poetry. he was also scornful of the idea, promoted by warburton’s note added to the second edition of thomas newton’s variorum commentary on paradise lost (1750), that “the grand scene is closed, and all farther improvements of the epic at an end.”for warburton’s words, which leonard 1: 284 wrongly attributes to newton and misdates as first appearing in 1754, see warburton, the divine legation of moses demonstrated, 2 vols. (london, 1742) 1: 199, and newton, ed., paradise lost (1750) 2: 127. hayley snaps back in epic poetry that “few critical remarks contain more absurdity”; he gives bold outline to his own position: “the epic province not yet exhausted” (120, [96]). not only are women poets welcomed to the rank of epic writers in their role as humanizers of mankind, but they are seen, along with epic poets themselves, as avatars of heroism (epic poetry 76, 207, 229), as is milton, who is described in hayley’s life as “his own biographer” and, astonishingly, as “a poet of the most powerful, and, perhaps, the most independent mind … ever given to a mere mortal” (2, xvii). in ways that deflect attention from, and deny credit to, hayley and blake, leonard would have us believe that denis saurat, in milton: man and thinker (1925), nominated milton as his own hero in paradise lost (leonard 2: 434), but saurat is simply taking his lead from hayley’s life and blake’s milton, hayley urging that poets be cast as epic heroes and blake then depicting milton as his own hero as this poet casts off the satan within. hayley, it appears, is the first commentator (after john dryden) to dwell on milton’s international stature and to speculate that milton is on his way to finding “in the western world, the amplest theatre of his glory” (the life 203, 40). hayley also has an imaginative stretch, allowing him to conceive milton’s place in times to come as a poet of global importance or, as he puts it in “conjectures,” as “the first poet of the world” (the life 273). on the other hand, as the romantic period’s best knower of milton, blake has a critical range and acuity in excess of hayley’s own that reach beyond satan to god, innocence, the fall before the fall, and sex and the sexes, all topics to which leonard devotes chapters (or portions of them), but with little or no attention to blake and none whatsoever to hayley. in epic poetry hayley, without knowing it, was imagining into being a whole parcel of epic poems, the produce of british romanticism, which, with milton as the transformative figure, would make not action but the human mind the main region of their song. in this sense, milton was his own hero and at the very least, hayley thinks, should be credited with refining and simultaneously enlarging our notions of epic heroism: “milton seems to have given a purer signification than we commonly give to the word hero, and to have thought it might be assigned to any person eminent and attractive enough to form a principal figure in a great picture,” as he writes in “conjectures” (the life 275-76). he concludes: milton “appears to have relinquished common heroes, that he might not cherish the too common characteristic of man—a sanguinary spirit” (277). importantly, for him the question is no longer who is milton’s hero, but how does milton portray heroism in his epics? for hayley, the pressure is to democratize heroism in epic poetry in order to include not only women but poets themselves, with arthur yielding to adam and england to eden and (in blake, we should add) jesus yielding to milton and albion to jerusalem. it was as theorists of epic, and historians of its traditions, and (in the case of blake) as a practitioner of the epic trade, that blake and hayley found in one another a mental match. whatever it had been, epic would now become an arena of strife—of “mental fight”—with hayley having already crafted in his “conjectures” a hedged critique of epic ideology as it arcs from homer and virgil to milton and with blake, then, doing the same, albeit more stridently, in his preface to milton (included in copies a and b only, c. 1811) and, then again, in his on homers poetry and on virgil (c. 1822). leonard will later confront the same issue, but with this difference. hayley and blake address the subject of epic warfare with milton directly, frontally. leonard addresses the same topic obliquely, with milton as provocateur and thomas newton and especially warburton as its mediators. with reference to milton, leonard also offers a less lofty and surely more starched opinion than either hayley or blake as he frets over the fact that some see in paradise lost a poem that demonizes “martial heroics”; he declares this to be “a dangerous line of argument, for milton clearly loved the epic” (1: [266]). milton’s love of epic is not in dispute, but his relationship to epic tradition is, with both hayley and blake discerning the complexity of that relationship (and through it perhaps the complexity of their own relationship both to it and to one another) and, simultaneously, comprehending that “critique” is an aspect of epic, a subversive element embedded within the tradition itself. all three poets share in hayley’s hope, expressed in “epistle to john sargent” (1814), that they will eventually witness “peace emerging from a sea of blood” (poems 40). at the heart of milton’s critique, as hayley understands it in “conjectures,” is the sense that homer displays “too great a tendency to nourish that sanguinary madness in mankind, which has continually made the earth a theatre of carnage”; the heroes of antiquity have “desolated the world” with their massacres (the life 276). yet hayley also remembers agamemnon’s reproach to achilles, “all thy pleasure is in strife and blood,” and thereupon remarks on the potentially subversive force of those words, inferring from them that homer, “so famous as the describer of battles, detested the objects of his description” (277). and he continues that milton, with his “purer religion,”the milton of paradise regained, apparently; see hayley, the life 220. has “contracted” an even greater “abhorrence for the atrocious absurdity of ordinary war” (277). already radiating from paradise lost is “the odious dinn of warr” (6.408): “heav’n the seat of bliss / brooks not the works of violence and warr” (6.273-74).quotations of milton’s poetry are from the complete poetry of john milton, ed. john t. shawcross, rev. ed. (garden city, ny: doubleday, 1971). from paradise regained comes this further chastisement: “they err who count it glorious to subdue / by conquest far and wide” and who have yet to learn that glory “by means far different [may] be attain’d, / without … war, or violence; / by deeds of peace” (3.71-72, 89-91). thus, homer may allow his readers to think they increase in physical stature as they read him, but milton (hayley suggests in “conjectures”) produces within his readers a dilation of the human spirit (the life 278). hayley never lets us forget that milton is a poet of “two poems on paradise” (the life 228; “conjectures,” the life 278), yet also a poet more interested in the recovery of paradise than in its loss. it may (or may not) be a coincidence that in the immediate aftermath of the felpham years, and using some of the same language, blake mounts a sterner critique by turning aspects of the critique hayley distills from milton back upon milton himself. blake’s critique commences in the preface to milton, where milton is said to have been “curbd by the general malady & infection from the silly greek & latin slaves of the sword,” but then, in his afterlife, to have morphed into a spiritual warrior who, through “mental fight,” will now join with his countrymen in building “jerusalem, / in england’s green & pleasant land” (blake’s poetry and designs 147-48, pl. i). years later, in the aftermath of hayley’s death apparently (1821-22), blake will hone his critique, and train it on homer and virgil. the following sentence is etched in such a way that it can be read as a coda to on homers poetry and as an epigraph to on virgil: “the classics, it is the classics! … that desolate europe with wars” (blake’s poetry and designs 348). blake here echoes hayley on the desolations of epic warfare. and again: “rome & greece swept art into their maw & destroyd it.”as cox observes, hayley sometimes conflates the poetical and the political with insights “very close to blake’s own thinking,” but is “rarely given credit” for doing so (“blake, hayley and milton” 432). he then interjects, as if in response to hayley’s caveat concerning homer, “the word of god … [is] the only light of antiquity that remains unperverted by war. virgil in the eneid book vi. line 848 says let others study art; rome has somewhat better to do, namely war & dominion” (blake’s poetry and designs 349). at least initially, milton is not spared in blake’s critique as he is in hayley’s, but in milton blake’s hero, associated with the time when “mathematic proportion was subdued by living proportion” (pl. 5), is redeemed as a poet-prophet. he casts off the rags of classical epic and trades mathematical for living form as he eventually embraces the mantle of the biblical prophets and, as the eighth eye of god, accepts the bible as the code of his art. hayley and blake, as theorists of epic and critics of milton, write on the same page but with different accents and in different registers. what leonard’s reception history teaches us about each of them is that ignoring hayley altogether is one side of the coin—and slighting blake the other side of the same coin. in tandem, hayley and blake, at different times and places, have been enablers of one another’s reputation, hayley as the theorist whose epic poetry, on the one hand, afforded blake a template for a revolutionized, newly interiorized epic with fractured narrative lines and, on the other hand, exalted milton as its model and as an exemplar, too, of biblical poetics. correspondingly, hayley was a literary historian and critic excavating the republican milton of richardson, the very milton whom thomas newton and johnson would eviscerate. according to richardson, “’tis certain he [milton] was a republican” and that such “principles,” evident early on, “were well known to continue … even in paradise lost”; that no “history of paradise lost” can ever be written without due attention to milton’s other writings on “the controversies of the times.”richardson’s life in explanatory notes and remarks on milton’s paradise lost, xviii, xxi, cvi, cvii. no history, and that goes for reception history as well. what we may learn from looking at the blake and hayley relationship anew is that, if in life hayley illustrated the blakean adage expressed in milton 4.26, “corporeal friends are spiritual enemies,” in the aftermath of his death a forgiving blake, also believing, as he says in jerusalem 91.1, “it is easier to forgive an enemy than to forgive a friend,” may have found in their erstwhile friendship grounds for accommodation. perhaps hayley was right in stressing milton’s dissociation from, not identity with, the classical epic tradition—milton’s biblical rather than his classical roots. perhaps blake had even admitted as much by withdrawing his chastising preface from copies c and d of milton. thus rediscovering hayley, blake jumps to the head of the line of those who would initiate a reassessment of hayley. whatever the case, there is no better place to resume hayley’s rehabilitation than an essay on epic poetry, then his scattered asides on milton, especially in his “conjectures on the origin of the paradise lost,” and, finally, the (unexpurgated) life of milton. it is just another irony of literary history that we find blake at the portal of this enterprise—“rediscovering william hayley”—holding the lantern and leading the way. the mathews as patrons the mathews as patrons by g. e. bentley, jr. g. e. bentley, jr. (gbentley@chass.utoronto.ca) has been publishing about william blake and his circle since 1954. harriet mathew and her husband,with thanks to angus whitehead for many favors. the reverend anthony stephen mathew, are well known as patrons of william blake and john flaxman.a stepn. mathew and harriot edwards were married at st. martin-in-the-fields on 31 january 1764, according to the st. martin’s registers. for details about the mathews, see j. t. smith, nollekens and his times (1828) (in g. e. bentley, jr., blake records, 2nd ed. [new haven: yale university press, 2004] [hereafter br(2)] 604-06); h. m. margoliouth, “blake’s mr. mathew,” notes and queries 196 (1951): 162-63; g. e. bentley, jr., “a. s. mathew, patron of blake and flaxman,” notes and queries 203 (1958): 168-78, and “john flaxman and the mathew clan,” bulletin of the new york public library 67 (1963): 443-54. their portraits by flaxman are in br(2), pls. 4-5. as j. t. smith wrote, about 1784 the house of “mrs. mathew, … no. 27, in rathbone-place, was then frequented by most of the literary and talented people of the day,”see br(2) 605. and flaxman’s sister-in-law maria denman wrote that a. s. mathew’s wife “was the intimate associate of mrs. montague, mrs. barbauld, mrs. chapone, mrs. brooke, &c.”john flaxman, lectures on sculpture (london, 1829), “a brief memoir of the author,” xiii; the rough draft of the work (british library add ms 39785, p. 4ff), apparently in the hand of maria denman, omits mrs. chapone, suggesting that the names were added more or less at random. allan cunningham quotes this passage in his life of flaxman but does not identify the source. however, a search over fifty years revealed no clear reference to a. s. mathew or to his wife in the records of anna letitia barbauld, james boswell, fanny burney, mrs. chapone, benjamin robert haydon, angelica kauffman, mrs. montagu, george romney, hester thrale, or horace walpole, many of them notorious gossips. at mrs. mathew’s most agreeable conversaziones … i [j. t. smith] have often heard him [blake] read and sing several of his poems. he was listened to by the company with profound silence, and allowed by most of the visitors to possess original and extraordinary merit. mrs. mathew was not only a great encourager of musical composers, … but truly kind to young artists.j. t. smith, a book for a rainy day (1845) 81-83, reprinted in br(2) 29-30. one of the singers at these “conversaziones” was almost certainly harriet, the talented seventeen-year-old daughter of a. s. and harriet mathew. her early decease was commemorated in the gentleman’s magazine:gentleman’s magazine 84 (1798, supplement): 1152 (under “deaths”): 1798. march 28. at the houſe of her father (the rev. mr. mathew) in rathbone-place, in her 32d year, of a pulmonic complaint, harriet baroneſs silverhelm, wife of baron s. a young lady of the moſt uncommon and brilliant talents and accompliſhments, amongſt which muſt ever be remembered with peculiar enthuſiaſm her vocal performances, unequalled, for ſcience and expreſſion, except by the firſt italian profeſſors, when muſick was in its glory. her elegant and various acquirements were rendered doubly attractive by the unaffected modeſty and innumerable graces of her manners, the exquiſite refinement and ſenſibility of her mind, the univerſal benevolence of her heart, and the active virtues of a life devoted, in an exemplary manner, to every ſocial, relative, and pious duty. according to joseph farington’s diary for 6 august 1798, “miss mathew daughr. of revd. mr. mathew, was it seems privately married abt. a year before her death to baron silverghem, who was secretary to baron noleken, & to mr. asp.”the diary of joseph farington, ed. kenneth garlick and angus macintyre, vol. 3 (new haven: yale university press, 1979) 1044. a reference of 7 aug. 1805 identifies her as the daughter of mr. “matthews” (vol. 7, ed. kathryn cave [1982] 2602). this is göran ulrik silfverhjelm of the swedish embassy in london. harriet would have been about sixteen and nineteen when, as “miss mathew,” she subscribed to letters of the late ignatius sancho (1782) and elizabeth blower, maria (1785). we have no evidence beyond j. t. smith’s about mrs. mathew’s patronage of the arts and her sponsorship of blake’s poetical sketches (1783). her familiarity with the fashionable world has not been confirmed in letters and diaries among the beau monde, and her only known patronage of literature has been her remarkable fostering of poetical sketches.neither she nor her husband is known to have owned any literary or artistic work by blake. but she was a patroness of literature, at least in the modest form of subscribing to books. she appears in the subscription lists of 1. part of the spiritual works of the celebrated francis fenelon, archbishop of cambrai, author of telemachus, &c, trans. richard houghton, 2 vols. (dublin: s. powell, 1771). 2. letters | of the late | ignatius sancho, | an african. | in two volumes. | to which are prefixed, | memoirs of his life. | — | vol. i[-ii]. | — | london: | printed by j. nichols: | and sold by j. dodsley, in pall-mall; j. | robson, in new bond street; j. walter, | charing-cross; r. baldwin, paternoster| row; and j. sewell, cornhill. | mdcclxxxii [1782]. the 1,200-some subscribers include “mr. mathew,” “mrs. mathew,” and “miss mathew,” plus many duchesses, countesses, dukes and lords, and william beckford, esq. (author and patron), henry bunbury, esq. (artist), mr. g. cumberland (dilettante, friend of blake), right honourable charles james fox (m.p.), edward gibbon, esq. (historian), samuel ireland, esq. (author and engraver), and mrs. jane matthews (probably flaxman’s aunt, the printseller). 3. [elizabeth blower],the dedication is signed “e. b.”, and the author is identified as miss eliza blower in [john watkins and frederick shoberl], a biographical dictionary of the living authors of great britain and ireland (1816). maria: | a novel. | in two volumes. | by the author of | george bateman. | vol. i[-ii]. | london: | printed for t. cadell, in the strand, | m.dcc.lxxxv [1785]. it includes an engraving by blake after stothard. the subscribers include mr. [richard] cosway (miniaturist), mrs. [maria] cosway (artist), mr. john flaxman (sculptor), william hayley, esq. (author and patron), mr. j[ohn] hawkins (patron of blake), mr. ozias humphrey (painter), mr. jeremiah meyer (miniaturist), “mrs. mathew | miss mathew | mr. f. mathew [unidentified],” sir joshua reynolds (painter), “mr. [?george] romney [artist], 6 copies,” r. b. sheridan, esq. (dramatist and politician), 6 copies, mr. [thomas] stothard (book illustrator), and josiah wedgwood, esq. (pottery manufacturer). 4. [a. gomersall],at the end is an advertisement for “the citizen, a novel; in letters, by mrs. gomersall, author of eleonora.” eleonora is available in eighteenth century collections online. eleonora, | a novel, | in a series of letters; | written by | a female inhabitant | of | leeds in yorkshire. | — | volume first [second]. | — | london: | printed for the authoress, | by the literary society at the logographic press, | and sold by | j. walter, no. 169, piccadilly; and w. rich| ardson, royal-exchange [1789]. among the 220 subscribers (including 21 “jamaica subscribers”) is “mrs. mathew, rathbone place.” 5. amelia bristow, the | maniac, | a tale; | or, | a view of bethlem hospital: | and | the merits of women, | a poem from the french: | with | poetical pieces on various subjects, | original and translated. | — | by a. bristow. | — | some good, more bad, some neither one nor t’other. | martial, epigram 17, book 1. | = | london: | printed for j. hatchard, | bookseller to her majesty, 190, opposite albany | house, piccadilly. | 1810. the 204 subscribers (for 277 copies) include rev. anthony stephen mathew, russel place, fitzroy square. mrs. mathew, ditto, 2 copies. william henry mathew, m. d. ditto. mrs. w. h. mathew, ditto, 4 copies. master henry albert mathew, ditto. dr. william henry mathew is harriet mathew’s son, his wife is dorothea, and master henry albert is their son. notice that they all seem to live together at russel[l] place, fitzroy square. so harriet mathew did patronize literature after the time of her salons in 1784 recorded by j. t. smith. three of the works to which she subscribed are by young women from the provinces, and most of them attracted subscribers of social and artistic significance. review: jonathan roberts, blake. wordsworth. religion. jonathan roberts. blake. wordsworth. religion. london: continuum, 2010. xiv + 127 pp. £50.00/$90.00, hardcover; £16.99/$27.95, paperback; £16.99/$26.99, e-book. reviewed by bruce graver bruce graver (beg@providence.edu) is professor of english at providence college. blake. wordsworth. religion. is the third title in the new directions in religion and literature series, published by continuum books. the earlier titles, the new atheist novel and do the gods wear capes?, give some sense of what these new directions might be. so it was comforting to see a stodgy title like blake. wordsworth. religion., even though the scant 100 pages of the book seem undersized for its subject. in fact, jonathan roberts has no intention of being comprehensive. rather, he focuses on blake’s verse letter to thomas butts, “to my friend butts i write,” and on the solitary’s vision of the heavenly jerusalem in book 2 of wordsworth’s the excursion, and uses them to demonstrate how poetry offers “a different type of engagement with religion: one that can enrich rather than narrow understanding, include rather than exclude, and creatively interrelate—rather than destructively set at odds—different approaches to religion” (1). in his introduction, roberts describes his approach in some detail, calling it experimental and “unusual”: chapter by chapter i present a range of different interpretive perspectives, many of which conflict with one another, and i do so without attempting to reconcile them systematically. … the conflict is not an analytical inadequacy that must be mastered …. rather, the insoluble diversity of critical approaches to these writers is a mark of their poetry’s rich internal dialogue and hermeneutical plenitude. (3) some of these “perspectives” “are recognizably academic,” he asserts, but others are not: i have also included non-scholarly voices, even when this inclusiveness means that some sections … are distinctly “unacademic”. my hope is that the different methodologies … will bring this diversity into focus without using any one approach to trump the others …. for this reason, i attempt to identify with each of these positions, but not exclusively with any single one of them. (3-4) so, according to the introduction, we are to expect a book that mixes the scholarly with the non-academic, one that does not develop a traditional argument, but instead explores the two poems from a variety of angles, without privileging any of them. and the aim is not so much to say something new about blake or wordsworth; rather, it is to use their poems as a way of exploring the nature of religious experience. the subsequent chapters make it even clearer that this is not a scholarly book, in spite of roberts’s occasional protestations to the contrary. chapter 2, for instance, consists mainly of the texts of the blake and wordsworth passages he will discuss, prefaced by introductions of the sort one might find in an undergraduate anthology. thus, in a book of about 100 pages of critical matter, fifteen percent of the text is devoted to introducing and supplying texts. when he proceeds to discuss them, he does so as promised, in a variety of ways. but is this, as roberts insists, a “hermeneutical plenitude,” or is it something else? chapter 4, for instance, “autobiography,” purports to give an autobiographical account of a mescaline trip that happened somewhere between windermere and hawkshead—perhaps across the street from beatrix potter’s home in near sawrey. roberts writes: ever since that experience … i have had a new, continuing visual appreciation of all art forms, an appreciation which i did not have before. moreover, i have realized that quite literally everything is self, everything in the whole field of experience …. since this realization, the mystical strand of blake’s and wordsworth’s poetry has a far clearer meaning to me than before. (46) this realization leads roberts to take up the relationship of “mysticism and psychedelics” (the title of chapter 5), including a catalogue of famous writers and their experiments with mind-altering drugs, and we learn, eventually, that the earlier account of his mescaline trip was in fact a pastiche of huxley, ginsberg, traherne, and one christopher mayhew, mp, and may not have been autobiographical at all (or maybe it was?). then, having extolled the ways in which psychedelic drugs lead to mystical insight, roberts abruptly changes tune in chapter 6 (“theology”), asserting that, of course, drugs are bad: they “cause and sustain wars, lead to violence,” and so on—as if these were things his readers didn’t know. and here he leaves the texts of blake and wordsworth almost entirely out of the discussion, except to argue that the two weren’t really mystics anyway (at least according to r. c. zaehner, and contra evelyn underhill, whom he cites extensively in chapter 5). ultimately, this kind of bait and switch is tiresome. roberts wants to have everything as many ways as possible, teasing the reader, without engaging himself seriously with his announced subject. which leads one to ask why the book was published at all, especially at such a prohibitively high price. i can imagine it as a pamphlet or chapbook, gracing the counter of a san francisco bookshop in the late 60s, and read by a handful of locals on their way to the next doors concert. but at $90 for the hardcover, about a dollar per page of critical prose, continuum books isn’t selling to that market: they are aiming at academic libraries and acquisitions librarians who see only a title. to my mind, this is deeply problematic. at least, advise your libraries not to order this book automatically, so that we do not become complicit in publishing ventures of this sort. newfound particulars of blake’s patrons, thomas and elizabeth butts, 1767–1806 newfound particulars of blake’s patrons, thomas and elizabeth butts, 1767–1806 by mary lynn johnson mary lynn johnson (mary-grant@uiowa.edu), a retired special assistant in the university of iowa president’s office, has written several essays on blake’s biblical watercolors for thomas butts. for help in working through her recent archival findings, she thanks g. e. bentley, jr., joseph viscomi, keri davies, morton paley, morris eaves, and sarah jones. as friendly benefactors of william and catherine blake, the clerk thomas butts (1759–1845) and his schoolmistress wife, née elizabeth mary cooper (1754–1825), merit an occasional spotlight in the background of blake studies.the pioneering discoveries of g. e. bentley, jr., “thomas butts, white collar maecenas,” pmla 71 (1956): 1052-66, updated in bentley, blake records, 2nd ed. (new haven: yale university press, 2004), and in annual addenda to blake records, were expanded by joseph viscomi, “william blake’s ‘the phoenix / to mrs butts’ redux,” blake 29.1 (summer 1995): 12-15, “blake in the marketplace 1852: thomas butts, jr. and other unknown nineteenth-century blake collectors,” blake 29.2 (fall 1995): 40-68, and “a ‘green house’ for butts? new information on thomas butts, his residences, and family,” blake 30.1 (summer 1996): 4-21. further information (see corrections in note 2) appears in mary lynn johnson, “more on blake’s (and bentley’s) ‘white collar maecenas’: thomas butts, his wife’s family of artisans, and the methodist withams of st. bartholomew the great,” blake in our time: essays in honour of g. e. bentley jr, ed. karen mulhallen (toronto: university of toronto press, 2010) 131-64, said to contain “the most exhaustive research yielding the slimmest conclusions” (clint stevens, “honoring g. e. bentley, jr.,” eighteenth century 53.4 [winter 2012]: 515). to published profiles of the couple may now be added details of their occupations, possessions, finances, and other circumstances from previously unexplored materials in the london metropolitan archives, the national archives, parish records, and miscellaneous publications of the time. corrections of earlier errors, along with additions to core facts about butts’s family history and methodist heritage, are noted here.elizabeth mary cooper butts’s dates should be 1754–1825, not 1753–1826 (see newfound records in note 3). regrettably, i mistyped thomas butts’s death year (1845) as 1844 and disassociated the identity of his father (of the same name) from that of john wesley’s “book steward,” “a compiler and publisher of hymnals” (johnson, “more …” 160n49). in fact, the patron’s father (son of “thomas butts of wap[ping] apothecary [d. 1727/28] & elizabeth” [née eads, married 1 apr. 1714])—that is, the baby who was baptized in st. dunstan’s, stepney (14 aug. 1719), who was left fatherless and impoverished at eight, and who grew up to marry hannah witham, 19 may 1746—is frequently mentioned in papers of john and charles wesley. he and william briggs were appointed to run wesley’s publishing enterprise in 1753, a date also proposed for the earliest edition of his influential compilation harmonia-sacra: or, a choice collection of psalm and hymn tunes … (john rylands library, methodist printed collections). in 1754 he joined other wesley associates who protected the controversial young kidnapping victim and convicted perjurer elizabeth canning in prison. under questioning, he identified himself as “one of his majesty’s landwaiters” at his ratcliffe row address (spelled variously), confirming a descendant’s note on his work in the “customs house” (viscomi, “a ‘green house’ for butts?” 5), where his official title was “deputy king’s waiter.” on 20 june 1766 he co-signed an appeal for funds to clear a debt of “upwards” of £1400 incurred by the reformation society. on 25 aug. 1767, now identified as a “watch-spring-maker” (although christ’s hospital school had apprenticed him, at almost fifteen, to a linen draper in 1734), butts reappears as a bankrupt. an auction (advertised 3 oct. 1767) “at his house, no. 14, in radcliff-row” featured “his fine collection of prints, and some valuable pictures; his large and well-chosen library of books,” and his organ, harpsichord, and music collection. in the same year, the father of blake’s eight-year-old future patron married ann cook (viscomi, “a ‘green house’ for butts?” 6) and moved to hackney. in 1769, in a payment of dividends to his creditors, he is again identified as “watch-spring maker, dealer and chapman” at his old address. but after his death, when his three life insurance policies were paid on 8 july 1779, he is listed as “exchange broker,” “heretofore of ratcliffe-row, near st. luke’s, old-street, but late of homerton”—another town in hackney. he was “struck off” the list of brokers by a court of aldermen on 2 oct. 1771 but “sworn broker” in the same court on 26 jan. 1773. as “t.b.,” he may also be the author of a letter from a private person to his pastor, concerning the people called methodists (c. 1743), gale doc. no. cw123344497, eighteenth century collections online [hereafter ecco]. an unrelated correction: in “‘catalogue of some of blake’s pictures at “the salterns”’: captain butts as exhibitor, litigator, and co-heir (with his sister blanche),” utq 80.4 (fall 2011): 893-917, i mistyped butts the patron’s 1759 birth date as 1739 (abstract and opening paragraph). particulars of elizabeth mary cooper (butts), 1767–1801 elizabeth mary cooper, having served a seven-year apprenticeship to a schoolmistress (1767–74), later supervised five apprentices for overlapping terms (1782–95) in her own school, beginning with her sister elyn, and among her pupils were at least two whose parents were not married. elizabeth’s carver-gilder father, joseph cooper, and her mother, elizabeth, née yardley (daughter of silversmith george yardley and winifred, née nash), who were married in the bride’s parish of st. olave, silver street (17 july 1750), baptized their two sons and four elder daughters in that parish (1751–64) and their two younger daughters in st. mary, islington (1768–70), almost two miles north.baptismal dates of the young coopers later mentioned in the will of their father, joseph cooper “of noble street foster lane” (probated 20 apr. 1801 [johnson, “more …” 146]) are george yardley, 10 june 1751; elizabeth mary, 23 jan. 1754; anne, 4 july 1755; joseph [jr.],  22 nov. 1756; frances, 4 aug. 1762; winifred nash, 27 july 1764 (all at st. olave, silver street); ellin [“elyn,” in her father’s will], 12 aug. 1768; sarah, 15 june 1770 (both at st. mary, islington); see london metropolitan archives [hereafter lma], p69/​ola3/​a/​001/​ms06534, london, england, baptisms, marriages and burials, 1538–1812 (provo: ancestry.com operations, inc., 2010 [hereafter ancestry.com]). elizabeth, born and christened on 23 jan. 1754, was a few months younger than had been derived from the age “72” recorded at her burial on 4 apr. 1825 in st. bartholomew the great, her husband’s ancestral parish (johnson, “more …” 161n55; see image 2 [of 6] for 1825 in lma, st. bartholomew the great, register of burials, 1813–1843, p69/​bat3/​a/​011/​ms06781, item 003, in london, england, deaths and burials, 1813–1980, ancestry.com). for the parish record of butts’s burial beside his wife on 1 may 1845 (d. 25 apr.), see this church’s register of burials, 1843–1853, p69/​bat3/​a/​011/​ms06781, item 004, in london, england, deaths and burials, 1813–1980, ancestry.com. on 3 october 1767, mary blackstone “of st mary islington middx school mistress” took thirteen-year-old “eliz. cooper” as her apprentice for a seven-year term that began on 7 september 1767, paying a stamp duty of 0/10/6 on a premium of £21, presumably supplied by elizabeth’s father.extracted from the commissioner of stamps’ register of duties paid for apprentices’ indentures, 1710–1811 (national archives, via ancestry.com), ir 1, piece 25, p. 105, images 490-91 of 1893, cited hereafter by piece, page, and image/set numbers. arranged by payment dates (regardless of location) in two-page spreads often lacking column headers, the registry shows names of masters and apprentices, occupations, addresses, number of indentures, term lengths, and premiums received by masters. as duties could be paid at any time from the beginning of an indenture until a year after its completion, dates of masters’ payments and apprentices’ terms may be at considerable variance. premiums received for indentures up to and including £50 were taxed at sixpence to the pound (2.5%), or £1/5/0 on £50; for any portion above £50, the rate was a shilling to the pound (5%), although in some ledgers the five-percent rate is applied to the entire amount, and in others the lower-tier portion is simply ignored. after completing her term in september 1774, elizabeth was qualified for employment in a school or a private home.probably in anticipation of elizabeth’s departure, schoolmistress blackstone took on sarah pennington for a premium of £31/10/0 for a seven-year apprenticeship beginning 20 oct. 1773, paying a duty of 0/15/9 on 19 nov. 1773 (piece 28, p. 3, images 701-02/1930). the location of blackstone’s school on “the upper street,” one of the two main streets in the hilltop village of islington, may be derived from her 1767 payment of land tax of £1/15/0 on rent of £15 at that address. in the same year, elizabeth’s father paid £1/12/8 on rent of £14 on “well’s ron,” another (unmapped?) street in islington. on 18 july 1782, in her own establishment, “elizth cooper[,] south moulton st co of middlesex school mistress” accepted her sister elyn, not quite fourteen, as her first apprentice for a premium of £70, on which she paid a £1 duty (only on the amount above £50; see note 4) at term’s end on “tues. 21 july 1789.” on 6 september 1784, establishing a pattern of two-year intervals, she accepted augusta johnson for a seven-year term under an indenture of £71, for which both “elizth & thos butts[,] south molton st. co. of middx” paid a £1/1/0 duty on 16 july 1789. on 28 september 1787, “eliz. butts[,] st george hanover square school mistress” paid 15s. on £30 for two indentures for elizabeth parker, whose seven-year apprenticeship had begun on 13 august 1786. running concurrently with elyn’s, augusta’s, and elizabeth’s terms was the three-year apprenticeship of margaret barker, 27 may 1784 to may 1787, for which elizabeth butts had paid £1/5/0 on £50 for two indentures (23 july 1785). and finally, on 9 june 1789, “elizth butts[,] st jame’s [sic] … school mistress,” in the parish of her post-1788 school and family home on great marlborough street, paid a duty of 15s. on £30 for lydia pitman’s two indentures for a seven-year term, 16 may 1788 to may 1795.for elyn’s apprenticeship, see piece 34, p. 83, images 1941-42/​2020. oddly, premiums for seven-year terms ranged from £30 (for elizabeth [33, 146-47, 1609-10/​2020] and lydia [32, 71, 1917-18/​2020]) to £71 (for augusta [34, 82, 1939-40/​2020]), while margaret’s three-year term fetched a premium of £50 (32, 181, 1224-25/​2020). the only two pupils in mrs. butts’s school presently identifiable by name, as recorded in their fathers’ wills, were acknowledged daughters of unmarried mothers. captain james denty’s “natural daughter elizabeth denty … about seven years of age now at mrs. butts boarding school in south molton street” (1790) was to receive £600 on her twenty-first birthday (johnson, “more …” 148, 164n64). and in an 1801 codicil to his 1796 will, the bachelor benjamin charles collins (d. 1808) named as sole beneficiary of the residue of his estate “maria castle (so called) at mrs butts ladies school, great marlbro [sic] street, carnaby market the said maria to be a ward of chancery.” maria’s mother was presumably mary elizabeth goodenge, “calling herself mary castle now residing with me at no. 40 new road in the parish of st mary le bone middlesex.”prob 11/1478/213, 6 may 1808; transcribed in christine y. ferdinand, benjamin collins and the provincial newspaper trade in the eighteenth century (oxford: oxford university press, 1997) 221-24. at thirty-four, elizabeth denty (b. 22 may 1782) married william carter on 23 may 1816 in islington, with her half-brother col. h[enry] f[rancis] denty as a witness (linley and jim hooper’s family history site). particulars of thomas butts, 1786–1806 in 1786, when thomas butts lost a “note of hand,” or promissory note, for the large sum of £150, his advertised address, complete with street number, was that of his wife’s school: lost, between south molton-street and cavendish-square, a note of hand for 150l, drawn by thos. butts, no. 63, south molton-street, payable to edward johns, on order, due 21st inst. and indorsed. as the note is paid, it will be of no use. whoever will bring it to messrs. hercy, b[irch], and hobbs, new bond-street, shall receive one guinea reward.morning post and daily advertiser 23 mar. 1786, issue 4087 (gale doc. no. z2000954796, 17th–18th century burney collection newspapers). this newly reported house number, with a rental value of £10 (reflected in butts’s payment of poor rates for 1784; see “ratebook_151-15109” at <http://​www.​londonlives.​org/​formref.​jsp>), places the buttses on the southeastern side of south molton street, near its diagonal intersection with brook street, toward new bond street. (when the blakes moved to no. 17 in 1803, they were on the northwestern side, nearer oxford street.) the pedestrian route from the buttses’ home to cavendish square, north of oxford street, zigzags in the opposite direction from the new bond street addresses of edward johns, “ironmonger, brazier, and hardwareman,” at 141, and the banking firm of hercy, birch, and hobbs (formerly chambers) at 152 (f. g. hilton price, a handbook of london bankers … [london: chatto and windus, 1876] 23). johns’s advertised boast (single-sheet flier) that the superiority of his tin-lined copper kitchen vessels had been proved in “the army & navy” invites speculation that the musters office authorized butts’s transaction (edward johns, ironmonger, brazier, and hardwareman, … / copper kitchen furniture / by his majesty’s royal letters patent [london, 1780?], gale doc. no. cw3305948953, ecco). ironmonger johns also sold the “new-invented salisbury portable kitchen,” in which “a joint may be roasted, and another boiled, with vegetables and puddings all at the same time, with less than two pennyworth of charcoal”; while still hot, it could bake “a loaf in one part, and pyes, tarts, cakes, rolls, or muffins in the other.” it was marketed “to those who have not proper convenience for cooking, and to gentlemen at their country and hunting seats; also to merchants’ ships, and officers in camp …” (morning post and daily advertiser 20 july 1780, issue 2414, gale doc. no. z2000943565, 17th–18th century burney collection newspapers). this address is in the parish of st. george, hanover square, where elizabeth had lived before her marriage and where the buttses’ first son, joseph edward, was baptized in 1784 (johnson, “more …” 146), before the family moved to great marlborough street. butts’s occupation before his marriage to elizabeth on 21 december 1782, while he was living across town in the parish of st. george the martyr (johnson, “more …” 145) and not yet employed by the chief clerk in the office of the commissary general of musters in 1783 (bentley, “thomas butts” 1053), remains unknown. perhaps he was a coal merchant. registers of the sun fire office, which record policy numbers and summarize the policies themselves, show that on 24 september 1792, “thomas butts no 9 great marlborough street coal merchant” insured his “now dwelling house only brick” for “fifteen hundred pounds,” and his “stable coachhouse & brewhouse adjoining in blenheim mews brick” for “two hundred pounds.” on “21 july 1796” this “coal merchant” paid 16s. to insure the family’s personal property for £750, itemized as “household goods” for £450, “printed books, plate, & pictures” for £150 at “fifty pounds on each,” “wearing apparel” for £100, and “prints drawings & needle work” for £50.lma, clc/​b/​192/​f/​001/​ms11936/​389/​605407 and clc/​b/​192​/f/​001/​ms11936/​407/​655896. see <http://​www.​history.​ac.​uk/​gh/​fire.​htm>; j. h. thomas, “fire insurance policy registers,” history 53 (oct. 1968): 381-84, no. 19 in “short guides to records,” ed. lionel m. munby (reprinted in short guides to records, ed. munby [1972]); h. a. l. cockerell and edwin green, the british insurance business: a guide to its history and records, 2nd ed. (sheffield: sheffield academic press, 1994); l. d. schwarz and l. j. jones, “wealth, occupations, and insurance in the late eighteenth century: the policy registers of the sun fire office,” economic history review 36.3 (aug. 1983):  365-73. the insured “needle work” brings to mind a piece attributed in part to blake, the “two hares” embroidery by william blake and mrs. butts (c. 1790–1800) (fitzwilliam museum). in a comprehensive investigation of the order in which blake signed and sold his large color prints, viscomi has proposed that butts’s insured “pictures” included three color prints by blake, “hecate, satan, and pity,” signed c. 1795–96, an acquisition leading up to his 1799 commission of the biblical tempera series.“signing large color prints: the significance of blake’s signatures,” huntington library quarterly (forthcoming 2014). in 1788, when butts and his associate william woodman were jointly promoted to chief clerk, each earned £91/5/0; by 1797, butts’s official salary had soared to a three-year average of £430/14/8 (bentley, “thomas butts” 1053-54), not counting the sideline coal business, which is confirmed also in the 1807 will of butts’s maternal uncle, thomas witham, and doubtless accounts for butts’s later payments to blake in coals (johnson, “more …” 138, 145).presumably butts belonged to the “class of middle-men who are called in the trade ‘brass-plate coal-merchants:’ … who have no wharfs, but merely give their orders to some true coal-merchant,” thereby increasing consumers’ costs (charles babbage, on the economy of machinery and manufactures [london: charles knight, 1832] 124). the “stable coachhouse” insured in 1792 is a mark of affluence; perhaps the adjoining “brewhouse” in blenheim mews, behind the school’s long back garden, brought in rent from a tenant. in 1799 butts’s estimated annual taxable income of about £468/13/0 from all sources gave him a foothold in the upper middle class.the adjusted income of “thos butts, esq., gt marlboro,” taxed at ten percent (ignoring the complicated allowances for children of various ages), is derived from his payment of £46/17/4 recorded in “individual tax payments, income more than 60 pounds” (uk data archive, london; history data service study no. 3785 by t. v. jackson, compiled from e182/630 in the public record office [now national archives]; see “additional datasets > income tax payments 1799–1802” at <http://​www.​londonlives.​org/​formpersname.​jsp>); see also jackson, “british incomes circa 1800,” economic history review 52.2 (may 1999): 257-83. for this first-ever income tax, imposed on 9 jan. 1799 under pitt the younger to pay for the oncoming napoleonic wars, incomes estimated below £60 were not taxed; between £60 and £200 the rates increased according to £5 increments in income; those in the highest bracket, above £200, were taxed at ten percent. among butts’s neighbors on the same street, only one, culpepper conant, paid less: £6/15/0, indicating an income of only £145-50 or so, according to “scale of ascent from £60 to £200” in tax on income. a correct abridgment of the act for imposing a tax on all income, 5th ed. (london, 1799), gale doc. no. cw3304852647, ecco. married women who owed taxes were listed separately (jackson, “british incomes” 272-73); the absence of an entry for schoolmistress butts suggests that her adjusted income fell below the £60 threshold. for a rough guide to butts’s purchasing power, see h. m. boot, “real incomes of the british middle class, 1760–1850: the experience of clerks at the east india company,” economic history review 52.4 (nov. 1999): 638-68, and, less technically, edward copeland, “money,” the cambridge companion to jane austen, ed. edward copeland and juliet mcmaster, rev. ed. (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2011) 127-43. the promotion of butts and woodman was retroactive to 2 june 1788, the date their employer, “george hesse, esq.,” returned from gambling at the phillimore club “about two o’clock in the morning,” went into the library of “his house in the adelphi,” wrote letters to his mother, his wife (née gunthorp[e], daughter of a wealthy west india merchant), and to “mr. agar, mr. crawford, and mr. woodman,” “charged very lightly one of his own travelling pistols,” and shot himself through the mouth. “his pecuniary affairs, from deep play” had “sustained a shock of the most momentous nature.”almost verbatim accounts appeared in such papers as the times (4 june 1788, with “further particulars” on 5 june), the morning post and daily advertiser (4 june 1788), and, quoted here, the june issue of gentleman’s magazine (58, pt. 1 [1788]: 563-64). hesse also kept company with the prince of wales and with political satirist caleb whitefoord, who corresponded with benjamin franklin’s grandson about extending hospitality to mrs. hesse on her 1783 visit to paris (the whitefoord papers … [oxford: clarendon press, 1898] 190-91; see also <http://​franklinpapers.org/​franklin/​framednames.​jsp>). for a searching analysis of the case, with further citations of insiders’ gossip in the english chronicle (3 june 1788), general evening post (5 and 7 june 1788), and elsewhere, see donna t. andrew, aristocratic vice: the attack on duelling, suicide, adultery, and gambling in eighteenth-century england (new haven: yale university press, 2013) 99-101. when the body was discovered six hours later, a “coroner’s inquisition” was quickly convened, with butts and woodman among the deponents. “thomas butt[s] late clerk to mr. hesse, the deced[ent],” appearing “before thomas prickard, gentleman, coroner of our said lord the king … on view of the body of george adam calcraft hesse esqr then and there lying dead,” “on his oath saith that he has lived with the deced / almost five years, deced being chief clerk to the / commissary general of musters.”all quotations from these depositions are transcribed, via <http://​www.​londonlives.​org>, from city of westminster coroners: coroners’ inquests into suspicious deaths, 5 jan. 1788–29 dec. 1788, wacwic652280332 [butts’s and woodman’s testimony, 2 june 1788] and wacwic652280323 [jurors’ names and verdict]. hesse’s name is inserted by hand into a printed form in which coroner prickard’s name appears in italics. butts’s oath that he “lived with” hesse for “almost five years” (1783–88), surely referring only to the workday, indicates that his clerkship had begun in the second half of 1783. hesse’s home at 1-2 adam street in “the adelphi,” designed by the adam brothers, was about a mile from the musters office at horse guards on whitehall. hesse was also “computer of off-reckonings,” at £80, in the office of paymaster general (london calendar [1788] 165), among several sinecures obtained through his well-connected father, john adam frederick hesse (1716–83). the younger hesse, “by his interest with the then paymasters-general of the forces, lord north and mr. cooke, in whose office the elder mr. h. held a situation of considerable emolument,” received £600 a year after sixteen years there, augmented by the musters appointment, “which, in time of war, has attached to it considerable advantages”; by 1788 his “official income amounted annually to the sum of 1500l,” not counting the “liberal fortune” of his wife (gentleman’s magazine; see note 13, above). butts swore that hesse “for about three weeks last past has been / dejected and very low spirited, and often in / dep[onen]t.[’s] hearing said that he did not know what / he was doing, and dept. saw him do things / that he did not intend to do …. and dept. says / that the deced was at times disordered in / his mind. says that he understood that / there were some [inserted above line] loose papers and letters / found in deced’s parlour this morning, but / none directed to this dept. to his knowledge.” after woodman’s corroborating testimony, the jury reached a verdict: hesse “being a lunatick shot himself with a pistol ball ….” at probate hearings on “26th january 1790,” thomas butts, “coal merchant,” and reuben smith, “wine merchant” (also one of fifteen jurors at the inquest), “having frequently seen the said deceased write and also subscribe his name,” authenticated hesse’s handwritten one-sentence will, dated “1 june 1788 london.” the will names woodman as an administrator of the depleted estate, “which if it were millions i bequeath to my most beloved and adorable wife all & every thing in my power to give & grant i trust she will have both real and personal.”national archives, prob 11/1188/88, 9 feb. 1790. butts’s purported signature on the probate document (apparently by a surrogate, as hesse’s signature is also part of the record) lacks the distinctive “b” discussed in viscomi, “a ‘green house’ for butts?” and visible on appointment papers of thomas higgins (29 dec. 1804 [johnson, “more …” 152n11]) and george collard (17 oct. 1805 [lot 20, bonhams auction 18847, 7 june 2011; <http://​www.​bonhams.​com/​auctions/​18847/​lot/​20>]). not seen: butts’s signature on evelyn p. dormer’s appointment to captain, 6 june 1811, dr225/115, shakespeare centre library and archive, stratford-upon-avon. at some point, perhaps as a way of managing and dividing perquisites and emoluments after their joint elevation to hesse’s vacated position, butts and woodman formed a private partnership. on 3 july 1802, as woodman’s retirement approached, they terminated the agreement: “notice is hereby given, that the copartnership between william woodman and thomas butts, of whitehall, westminster, army and half-pay agents, is this day dissolved by mutual consent. all debts owing to or from the said partnership concern will be received and paid by the said thomas butts only.”london gazette, issue 15494, p. 709. when the musters office was abolished on 25 sept. 1818, woodman received a pension of £200, on the basis of fourteen years’ service (1788–1802), while butts, having served thirty-five years (1783–1818), received £430, and his sons “1st senior clerk” joseph edward, appointed in 1799, and “3rd” clerk thomas, appointed in 1803, received £140 and £99 (estimates and accounts: army; navy; ordnance; civil list … &c. 11 [21 apr.–23 nov. 1820]: [203 (handwritten p. 195)]). and at last, under “monies paid by” in “an account of the income of the consolidated fund of great britain, for the year ended the 5th day / of january 1806,” “thomas butts, on account of the late george hesse, esq.,” discharged what must have been hesse’s final obligation of “£1,351/16/7.”h.m. stationery office, journals of the house of commons 61 (1806 [46 geo. iii]): 650, in appendix no. 16, under a header spreading to p. 651. as bentley and viscomi have shown, thomas and elizabeth butts’s residences, occupations, and expenditures have a bearing on the formation of their blake collection. the present collection of minutiae is offered in the hope that some oddly angled fact, spotted by a foraging scholar, will jibe with another fact at just the right point to nudge a worthy project forward, toward the general advancement of blake studies. 96 blake/an illustrated quarterly winter 2011-12 ter for british art) shows a churchyard occupied by three distinct classes of ghosts performing their “rounds” in their own ways: six “light-heeled” dancers circling the yew, another larger circle of violent quarrelers, victims, and victimizers, and an orderly right-to-left procession of the host composed of pious “visionary shades” bearing tapers, huge tomes, and bread and wine into the church. blake’s decision to expand the population of blair’s churchyard in this particular way may have been inspired in part by a thirty-year-old vision of a ghostly parade in westminster abbey. in addition to the snippets of conversation themselves, bentley includes several conversation-related scholarly tools. the most useful is probably the concordance of the words used in the reported conversations, but interesting as well are the speculative remarks in the introduction on blake’s pronunciation and the implications of rhymes (xxi-xxxv) and the supporting tables of perfect and imperfect rhymes in the appendices. throughout the volume bentley maintains a much lighter scholarly demeanor than one might expect from the author of those magisterial classics, blake books and blake records—this assemblage is hosted by conversational bentley, a manifestation of the generous and genial flesh and blood bentley that the lucky may meet in person. this bentley is much too polite and good-natured to acknowledge, say, that a plausible thirdhand anecdote might be unreliable—all tales are treasured here, and accorded pretty much the same respect as an entertaining raconteur at dinner. similarly, the evidence to be found in blake’s rhymes about the way he probably pronounced words is fascinating but so oblique that it would be difficult to use without extensive qualification. though there is a danger that some will treat this whole judicious assemblage of somewhat problematic facts as having the same kind of authority as blake’s own words, the lightheartedly learned tone that prevails should inhibit anyone from taking it all too literally. w ith blake and conflict palgrave macmillan extends its role as the academic press now most consistently showcasing new blake scholarship. the volume presents selected revised papers from a conference of the same title held in oxford in 2006. although it does not entirely surmount the miscellaneous quality that most conference anthologies have, synergies among several contributions provide a fairly strong thematic coherence. sarah haggarty and jon mee’s introduction outlines two kinds of conflict as salient for the volume, both involving the conversation of “visionary forms dramatic” that blake envisions in humanity’s future (jerusalem 98, e 257). the first centers on ideological or intellectual conflict as an aspect of pluralistic harmony: blake, the editors say, imagines “the kind sarah haggarty and jon mee, eds. blake and conflict. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, 2009. xiii + 235 pp. £55.00/$85.00, hardcover. reviewed by christopher z. hobson winter 2011-12 blake/an illustrated quarterly 97 in “blake, the female prophet and the american agent: the evidence of the 1789 swedenborg conference attendance list,” david worrall takes up the issue of complicity with emerging imperialism in one of blake’s milieus. his stated purpose is archival, to identify as many as possible of the conference participants (48), and his modest conclusion is that contacts with some of them may have influenced blake’s later choices of topics and approaches (61). for example, meeting dorothy gott, the prophet of worrall’s title, could have spurred blake’s adoption of prophetic speech modes. implicitly, worrall is also working to rescue the relative social radicalism of central swedenborgian figures from views that associate them with commercial penetration in africa and land speculation in the united states, as argued by deirdre coleman (see worrall’s note 18). he does this by distinguishing some participants who played such a role, such as the partners in us land dealings colborn barrell and henry servanté, from the leading swedenborgians carl wadström and augustus nordenskjöld, who worrall feels had more disinterested religious motives (52-57). particularly valuable is worrall’s recognition of the autonomy of religious motivation, its nonreducibility to material interests, and the consequent pluralism within dissenting traditions, a point relevant to blake, who, worrall speculates, could have known of the moravians’ work on the us frontier “with the native north americans imminently threatened by barrell and servanté” (60). this pluralism is mee’s topic in “‘a little less conversation, a little more action’: mutuality, converse and mental fight,” which responds to criticisms by david simpson of “conversation” as a model for social change (126). simpson doesn’t discuss blake, but mee takes on his ideas by using blake to exemplify a different idea of “conversation” from simpson’s. mee distinguishes between relatively distinct “conversations” in the 1780s and 90s, a polite kind that the salons of the mathew circle may have typified, and one stressing “candour” over politeness, favored by mary hays, godwin, and others sharing a “tradition of dissent apt to think ‘collision’ and conflict as part of any genuine conversational encounter” (127). mee thinks that this idea lies behind blake’s “visionary forms dramatic” passage and that blake “radicalizes the polite vision of conversation” to produce a “more conflictual model” in tune with radical ideas of change (127, 139). mee’s emphasis is not new for him—he has been excavating radical, plebeian forms of conversation since his first book, dangerous enthusiasm (1992). his polemical purpose here becomes clearer when one looks at the simpson essays in raritan and new left review that he criticizes. simpson’s idea is that polite models of conversation play into the hands of elites who decide what is acceptable subject matter. but additionally, i suspect mee is reacting to implications in some marxist and post-marxist political writing that downplay the need for open political debate as part of radical culture. simpson, for example, deprecates a current idea of conversation as “open, undecided, welcoming, antifoundational, and of community that arises from the communication between differences” (4). a second, more mundane, type of conflict involves blake’s contentious “relationships with his precursors and precursor texts,” and these too, for the editors, are relationships among “contraries,” so that conflict emerges as a “risk inherent in fully engaging with the other” (4, 5). this breakdown, however, only partly accounts for the volume’s contents; more than half the essays involve “conflict” with recent views of blake or blake-like ideas as complicit with imperialism and its ideological categories, with elite political domination, or with masculinist gender conceptions. these essays suggest a turn away from a “complicit” blake by at least some now working in the field. blake’s involvement with burgeoning nationalist or imperialist ideas has been argued by several recent interpreters, including julia m. wright (blake, nationalism, and the politics of alienation, 2004), edward larrissy (“blake’s orient,” romanticism, 2005), and steve clark (“jerusalem as imperial prophecy,” blake, nation and empire, ed. clark and worrall, 2006). the first two essays in the present volume, by saree makdisi and angus whitehead, address larrissy’s arguments, which themselves critiqued makdisi’s earlier work. larrissy argued, among other points, that blake’s reference to the qur’an as a “loose bible” in the song of los (3.29, e 67) incorporates orientalist notions of islamic licentiousness and that the descriptive catalogue’s discussion of art in “the ancient republics, monarchies, and patriarchates of asia” (e 531) typifies blake’s limited and euro centric knowledge of the east. makdisi counters that blake refused orientalism’s elevation of assumed western self-control over eastern license and that his references to asian art, if inexact, evince a plural conception of europe’s cultural heritage (14-16, 23-24). more broadly, he uses g. a. rosso’s “the religion of empire: blake’s rahab in its biblical contexts” (prophetic character, ed. gourlay, 2002) as a springboard to argue that blake’s late work remains oppositional toward empire (20-21, 25). though perhaps overly defensive in trying to clear blake of any involvement in orientalism, makdisi is right in my view to insist that blake’s thrust is against both the structures of empire and the psychic-moral formations that bolster them. whitehead’s “‘a wise tale of the mahometans’: blake and islam, 1819–26” uses three specifics—blake’s reference to a “wise tale of the mahometans” in conversation with crabb robinson, his “visionary head” of “mahomet,” and his illustration to the muhammad–ali meeting in inferno canto 28—as evidence that blake shows “a positive engagement with islam” in a period when “this religious faith was still regarded by many in britain as ‘the devil’s methodism’” (32, quoting an 1828 magazine reference). whitehead, like makdisi, positions his essay as a response to larrissy’s (29-30). despite some questionable interpretations, the overall point that these late portrayals avoid any sort of denigration of islam both extends makdisi’s argument and provides independently valuable insight into blake’s religious latitudinarianism. 98 blake/an illustrated quarterly winter 2011-12 minimally teleological” (“the cult of ‘conversation,’” raritan, 1997). this implies preference for discourse that is decided, foundational, teleological, and so on, terms that tend to exclude free-ranging debate. marxism classically, and to some extent still, assumes that oppositional consciousness derives univocally from its own assumedly scientific method and that all views except its own ultimately represent the ideas of opposing classes. (for a classic statement, see the essays in georg lukács’s 1923 history and class consciousness.) this is an issue of course with resonance in the history of twentiethcentury totalitarianism. it is one, too, with relevance for blake, since some interpreters, such as makdisi in his “blake and the communist tradition” (palgrave advances in william blake studies, ed. williams, 2006), have argued for blake’s continuity with marxism. reviewing that volume in these pages, jason whittaker argued that “alternative traditions of later communist thinking … espoused a view of anti-authoritarian communism that often appears closer to blake than marxism does” (blake 44.2 [fall 2010]: 74), and i urged a similar view in my own the chained boy: orc and blake’s idea of revolution (1999). mee’s historicizing of “conversation” as including vigorous debate and ideological confrontation seems, implicitly, also to argue for the multivoiced character of radical opposition and for placing blake, as whittaker does, in a more open tradition than that of marxism. besides these discussions of overall social ideology, essays by susan matthews and david fallon target anne mellor and others who assert blake’s entrapment in and replication of dominant gender paradigms. matthews’s “impurity of diction: the ‘harlots curse’ and dirty words,” while accepting that blake cannot totally escape these paradigms, argues for the “transformative power” of his writing in “london,” based “not on the ability of poetry to cleanse but to bring to the surface and to refigure meanings” (66). detailing eighteenthcentury debates about prostitution, matthews urges that the poem critiques “the evangelical account of prostitution” and prefigures later blake works that present women’s sexuality as socially transformative (74, 79-80). fallon’s “‘she cuts his heart out at his side’: blake, christianity and political virtue” examines blake’s relation to the “civic humanism” tradition, arguing that he gradually reworks its “republican masculinism.” fallon’s key texts, “the mental traveller,” the annotations to bacon, and “i saw a monk of charlemaine,” persuade him that for later blake, “male-oriented classical civic virtue is seriously flawed,” especially by militarism, and “women [are] essential to a liberatory renewal of the social body” (101). rather than critical conflicts about blake, sarah haggarty, sibylle erle, mark crosby, luisa calè, and morton d. paley all pursue blake’s own conflicts and alignments with contemporaries. haggarty’s “from donation to demand? almsgiving and the ‘annotations to thornton’” and erle’s “shadows in the cave: refocusing vision in blake’s creation myth” focus respectively on blake’s indignant response to robert thornton’s 1827 version of the lord’s prayer and on the book of urizen’s use of eighteenth-century optics and ophthalmology. haggarty valuably contextualizes thornton’s work among contemporary writings on charity and suggests that by insisting that bread is ours by right, blake in old age sustains the radicalism of his youth (107). erle reads the creation of the senses in urizen as influenced by then-current optic theory, including findings on the lens’s active role in vision. her further argument that urizen counters swedenborg’s account of distinct spiritual and material realms by “adapt[ing] optic theory to explain the visible existence of the spiritual world” (152) is weakened by failure to discuss the eternals’ “tent” erected to block vision between these realms (urizen 19.2-20.2, e 78-80). nonetheless, this essay resituates blake in a way that counters still-resonant ideas of his opposition to science. crosby, calè, and paley focus closely on blake and art. in “a minute skirmish: blake, hayley and the art of miniature painting,” crosby examines blake’s use of stippling in miniatures done for hayley, arguing that these works violate models that hayley recommended and so are a first step in blake’s rejection of his patron. calè’s “blake and the literary galleries” seeks parallels between urizen and night thoughts and fuseli’s milton illustrations, notably satan bursts from chaos. calè does demonstrate parallels (most convincingly with urizen), but her larger argument that both blake works show the sequential indeterminacy associated with gallery browsing is overstated. paley’s “blake’s poems on art and artists,” which ends the volume, opens new ground, given the lack of much previous analysis of these angry notebook poems (“to venetian artists,” “florentine ingratitude,” and others). paley proposes that the orléans sale of french, italian, and spanish art in 1798 was “a major impetus” for the poems (210); he doesn’t provide evidence but expertly decodes the works and shows their relevance to blake’s annotations of reynolds, long accepted as major statements of his ideas on art. one relevant sense of conflict not addressed in the volume, curiously, is blake’s representations of social conflicts, whether the european war—highlighted in the editors’ first sentence but not discussed by any contributor—or the war at home. issues still needing discussion, in my view, include blake’s possible sanctioning of social violence in both early and later work (europe 15, milton 42), his attention to poverty and growing rebellion during the regency (milton 18, jerusalem 60), and his sense that social war trumps international war— “the wine-press on the rhine groans loud, but all its central beams / act more terrific in the central cities of the nations / where human thought is crushd beneath the iron hand of power” (milton 25.3-5, e 121). but one essay collection can’t do everything, and this one does a great deal both to extend knowledge of blake’s intellectual and historical contexts and, in the polemical essays, to sustain an ongoing debate over his complicity with or defiance of ideologies of oppression. 44 blake/an illustrated quarterly fall 2011 a r t i c l e s seven white butterflies delicate in a hurry look how they bang the pages of their wings as they fly to the fields of mustard yellow and orange and plain gold all eternity is in the moment this is what blake said whitman said such wisdom in the agitated motions of the mind ….1 of all the modern and contemporary poets who have been influenced by blake, mary oliver might seem an unlikely heir. we think automatically of the visionary system of yeats, the pugnacious lyricism of roethke, the prophetic excess of ginsberg, or the erudite obscurity of geoffrey hill. we certainly don’t expect to find blake’s challenging and transcendent poetics echoed in simple verses that celebrate the “god of dirt,” 2 the messy world of vultures, skunks, and pond scum. on the other hand, oliver’s deliberate invocations of blake prod us to look again at his attitude toward nature and the physical body. even her most “naturalistic” poems, like the one above, are steeped in the language of art: the butterflies’ wings are “pages” like those of blake’s illuminated books, their energy the “agitated / motions of the mind.” for both poets, the human mind marks the border between the material and spiritual worlds, and the poet’s task is to awaken the reader’s imagination toward some purpose. that purpose generally is not made explicit but rather grows organically out of the visionary experience: an experience in which “ordinary” perception is suspended. unlike the notoriously difficult blake, oliver’s poetry seems accessible to the point of simplicity. winner of both a pulitzer prize and a national book award, she consistently ranks among america’s best-selling poets.3 not all critics share this 1. mary oliver, west wind (boston: houghton mifflin, 1997) [hereafter ww] 3. 2. oliver, new and selected poems (boston: beacon press, 1992) [hereafter ns] 120. 3. dwight garner, “inside the list,” new york times 18 feb. 2007: 26; see the list of contemporary best-selling books at the poetry foundation web site <http://www.poetryfoundation.org>. popular enthusiasm: one has accused her of “a peculiar lack of genuine engagement with the natural world,” 4 and others find her poems formulaic and predictable.5 renée loth cheerfully (if somewhat condescendingly) writes, “her ‘wild geese’ has become so popular it now graces posters in dorm rooms across the land. but don’t hold that against her.” 6 indeed, the mixed response to oliver turns upon a crux of romanticism, which often finds itself divided between the populism of wordsworth’s “man speaking to men” and the haughtiness of the misunderstood genius, which easily shades into contempt for poetry that succeeds in the marketplace. oliver has been characterized as a neo-romantic, but, her defenders hasten to add, her poetry is “not a flight into the transcendent.” 7 this defensive notion of transcendence as flight indicates how far we have come in our material pragmatism, but it also reveals some confusion as to the meaning of the word. in theological terms, transcendence (existing apart from the world) is often contrasted with immanence (inhering and abiding in it). the word “transcend,” however, literally means “to climb over or beyond,” and we may ask what one is to climb upon in order to reach those supernatural heights. it is one thing to argue that god exists beyond the created universe, but if poetry is to transcend the earth, it must take off from solid ground. blake represents the heavenly city, jerusalem, as a city built “in englands green & pleasant land”:8 this material earth is where the prophet must start, no matter how lofty the goal. just as blake warns against “single vision & newtons sleep” (e 722), oliver presents a world that is more than matter. in “what is it?” a white flower becomes a snowy egret, as the poet asks, “how could anyone believe / that anything in this world / is only what it appears to be[?]” 9 oliver shares with blake a commitment to seeing beyond the opaque surfaces of things to find “the white fire of a great mystery” (hl 59) even in a grain of sand, and eternity not in an hour (as in blake’s “auguries of innocence”) but, more intensely, “in the moment.” through such blakean images as sunflowers, moths, snakes, and roses, oliver’s adaptation and reinterpretation of blake help us to reevaluate both his “mysticism” and his view of nature, two crucial subjects that are often misunderstood. by communing with nature in a way that neither idealizes it nor accepts its absolute otherness, oliver joins blake in challenging and 4. gyorgyi voros, “exquisite environments [review of oliver, white pine (with others)],” parnassus: poetry in review 21.1-2 (1996): 231. 5. see, for instance, david barber’s review of new and selected poems (poetry 162.4 [july 1993]: 233-37). 6. renée loth, “our own seven wonders,” boston globe 2 sept. 2007: e9. 7. douglas burton-christie, “nature, spirit, and imagination in the poetry of mary oliver,” cross currents 46.1 (spring 1996): 84. 8. david v. erdman, ed., the complete poetry and prose of william blake, newly rev. ed. (new york: anchor–random house, 1988) [hereafter e] 96. 9. oliver, house of light (boston: beacon press, 1990) [hereafter hl] 27. eternity in the moment: william blake and mary oliver by jennifer davis michael fall 2011 blake/an illustrated quarterly 45 dismantling many of the binaries that have come to define romanticism: mind and nature, self and other, soul and body.10 allusions and appropriations before exploring oliver’s explicit allusions to blake, it is worth noting that many more of her poems show a general affinity with him, especially the blake of visions of the daughters of albion and the marriage of heaven and hell, for whom “every thing that lives is holy.” her “sand dabs”—a series of aphorisms named for “a small, bony, not very significant but well-put-together fish” 11—recall the proverbs of hell both in their pithy insight and in their celebration of nature’s variety and minutiae: “the fur behind the mouse’s ear stuns the finger with its softness” (ll 85). “if you think daylight is just daylight / then it is just daylight” (ww 24).12 another warns the aspiring poet, “don’t close the poem as you opened it, unless your name is blake and you have written a poem about a tyger.” 13 while oliver’s recent poems, such as those in thirst (2006), invoke a more explicitly christian idiom, she joins blake in rejecting a repressive moralism. one of her best-known poems, “wild geese,” begins: you do not have to be good. you do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. you only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.14 blake repeatedly divorces the gospel from morality, stating, for instance, “the gospel is forgiveness of sins & has no moral precepts” (e 619). on the other hand, oliver’s celebration of the “soft animal of your body” might seem, at least to the later blake, to be a denial of the spirit: a suggestion that we are only mammals. as her poem continues, however, it affirms a larger, more expansive incorporation: “the world offers itself to your imagination, / … / … announcing your place / in the family of things.” it is through the body (as blake would agree) that paradise is regained: “this will come to pass by an improvement of sensual enjoyment” (e 39). through the free play of energy, “the only life … from the body” (e 34), both blake and oliver conceive the reintegration of the universe, a “family of things” that is simultaneously material and spiritual.15 10. janet mcnew notes further that “all of these dichotomies have also been philosophically and mythically related to that most pervasive pair, masculine and feminine” (“mary oliver and the tradition of romantic nature poetry,” contemporary literature 30.1 [1989]: 60). 11. oliver, long life (cambridge, ma: da capo press, 2004) [hereafter ll] 81n. 12. also reminiscent of the end of “auguries of innocence” (e 493). 13. oliver, blue pastures (new york: harcourt brace, 1995) 89. 14. oliver, dream work (new york: atlantic monthly press, 1986) 14. 15. matthew j. a. green refers to this aspect of blake as “visionary materialism.” see his book visionary materialism in the early works of william blake (basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, 2005). even the presentation of oliver’s books suggests blake’s tutelary spirit. an early chapbook, the night traveler, features one of blake’s woodcut illustrations to virgil’s pastorals on its cover, suggesting a complicated relationship both to nature and to literary history.16 nature is first mediated through virgil, then through blake, and finally through oliver, who calls attention to the bookish ways we apprehend the “book” of nature. in “farm country,” she challenges the reader who may have derived sentimental notions of rural life from literature: “maybe you think life is chicken soup, served / in blue willow-pattern bowls.” 17 the rest of the poem describes the speaker sharpening knives, putting on apron and boots, and entering the henhouse. other poems in this chapbook include “the lamb,” a first-person tale of lost innocence in a dangerous natural world, and “winter in the country,” an experienced account of “prey and hawk together, / still flying, both exhausted, / in the blue sack of weather” (nt n. pag.). her sympathy for the predator, both here and in subsequent work, recalls blake’s celebration of the lion and the tiger. so far, oliver would seem to be in tune with blake’s nuanced approach to the natural world, and even to echo his understanding of the human role in constructing nature. other references, however, suggest a more limited and even sentimental impression of blake. the poem entitled “‘just a minute,’ said a voice …” 18 alludes to blake’s tale of witnessing a fairy’s funeral, reported in allan cunningham’s early biography.19 in another poem, “the swan,” mrs. blake misses her husband’s company: “he is so often / in paradise” (hl 16-17). west wind, the volume whose title alludes so strongly to shelley,20 nonetheless begins with an epigraph from alexander gilchrist’s biography in which blake claims to have touched the sky with his stick.21 each of these anecdotes seems to emphasize a blake quite different from oliver: a visionary (or simply airy) eccentric far more attuned to worlds beyond the world of dirt, blood, and bones that fills oliver’s poetry. the apparent incongruity demands closer scrutiny. several decades ago, northrop frye cautioned against referring to blake as a “mystic,” reserving the term “mysticism” for “a form of spiritual communion with god which is by its nature incommunicable to anyone else.” for the artist this experience could only be “a means to another end,” i.e., the poem. frye suggests replacing “mystic” with “visionary”: “a vision16. lisa steinman cites “oliver’s virgil [coming] by way of blake” as a marker of oliver’s disengagement from history, as though there could be an unmediated experience of the ancient past. see “dialogues between history and dream,” michigan quarterly review 26.2 (1987): 436. 17. oliver, the night traveler (n.p.: bits press, 1978) [hereafter nt] n. pag. 18. oliver, why i wake early (boston: beacon press, 2004) [hereafter wiwe] 45. 19. reprinted in g. e. bentley, jr., blake records, 2nd ed. (new haven: yale university press, 2004) 640-41. 20. a poet oliver clearly admires, to the point of naming a dog percy. 21. alexander gilchrist, life of william blake, “pictor ignotus,” vol. 1 (london: macmillan, 1863) 328. 46 blake/an illustrated quarterly fall 2011 ary creates, or dwells in, a higher spiritual world in which the objects of perception in this one have become transfigured and charged with a new intensity of symbolism.” 22 where i quarrel with frye is in his characterization of the visionary’s world as “higher” and “spiritual.” surely what blake and oliver create is our own world, only transformed. the objects of perception have not disappeared, but rather have become translucent media for divine light. oliver’s adoption of blake as mentor suggests a desire to look through, not merely at, the things of this world. looking through, however, comes only after looking at them with reverence, and resisting what douglas burton-christie calls “the impulse to domesticate.” 23 in “the swan,” the allusion to mrs. blake leads directly to the speaker’s epiphany that “paradise” is not a distant place: of course! the path to heaven doesn’t lie down in flat miles. it’s in the imagination with which you perceive this world, and the gestures with which you honor it. oh, what will i do, what will i say, when those white wings touch the shore? (hl 17) imagination, then, is not a means of transport to another world, but rather a way of opening the “doors” (as blake would say) of the senses with which we perceive this world: “how do you know but ev’ry bird that cuts the airy way, / is an immense world of delight, clos’d by your senses five?” (e 35). eternity moves toward the speaker in the shape of a swan, and she has only to stand still to receive it. one has only to recall the myth of leda to understand her panic at this approach and her urge to turn away from the divine. “this morning again it was in the dusty pines” (ns 23-24) describes another encounter with a bird, in the tradition of keats’s “nightingale,” hopkins’s “windhover,” and even plath’s “black rook.” unlike her predecessors, however, oliver has no conversation with the owl and receives no epiphany from it. instead, she emphasizes the impossibility of communication, her own “stony silence” and the owl’s turning away. like “god’s bark-colored thumb” (ns 24) or blake’s eagle, the owl is “a portion of genius” (e 37) at once revealed and elusive. for all her effusions over flowers, hummingbirds, dogs, and cats, oliver spends at least equal time on the wild, the ugly, the dangerous: bears, skunks, alligators. these, too, manifest aspects of the divine. 22. northrop frye, fearful symmetry: a study of william blake (princeton: princeton university press, 1947) 7-8. 23. burton-christie 80. “spring azures” is, at least on the surface, oliver’s most problematic appropriation of blake, as it seems to reinforce a false split between spirit and matter to produce an airy-fairy blake. first, the poem describes the butterflies “bow[ing] down / … / to drink the black rain water” before rising to “float away into the fields.” the speaker then expresses weariness with the “great bones” of life and wishes for wings to “rise / from the black rain water.” “and then,” she says, i think of blake, in the dirt and sweat of london—a boy staring through the window, when god came fluttering up. of course, he screamed, seeing the bobbin of god’s blue body leaning on the sill, and the thousand-faceted eyes. well, who knows. who knows what hung, fluttering, at the window between him and the darkness. anyway, blake the hosier’s son stood up and turned away from the sooty sill and the dark city— turned away forever from the factories, the personal strivings, to a life of the imagination. (ns 8-9) my first response on reading this poem (like that, i imagine, of many blakeans) was to say, “no, he didn’t turn away from the city ‘to’ imagination. the city is, and is made of, imagination, as we see in milton and jerusalem.” a second reading, however, led me to a much more subtle analogy. “god’s blue body” is a hybrid of nature and art, the “fluttering” blue azures and the “bobbin” of the weaver’s craft. god was “leaning on the sill,” the same “sooty sill” from which blake turns away. eternity is manifest in this dirty world, “in love with the productions of time” (e 36). in other words, blake’s imagination is fed by the city even if, and as, he turns from it. imagination does not so much rise above the earth but from it, as the butterflies from the rainwater. oliver’s repetition of the phrase “turned away” also echoes the final stanza of blake’s “introduction” to songs of experience: turn away no more: why wilt thou turn away the starry floor the watry shore is giv’n thee till the break of day. (e 18) these lines are addressed to the “lapsed soul” of earth, urging her to remain connected to eternity despite her temporarily bound condition. there is some irony in oliver’s application of similar language to the young blake, who (she claims) turns away from the earthly city to build his heavenly one. perhaps her apparent misreading is deliberate. the turning away that fall 2011 blake/an illustrated quarterly 47 oliver describes in blake mirrors her own struggle in the poem “singapore” (hl 8-9), where the speaker experiences “a darkness … ripped from my eyes” as she watches a woman cleaning ashtrays in the airport toilet. a poem should always have birds in it. kingfishers, say, with their bold eyes and gaudy wings. rivers are pleasant, and of course trees. a waterfall, or if that’s not possible, a fountain rising and falling. a person wants to stand in a happy place, in a poem. the poem moves back and forth between the speaker’s current surroundings (mundane, even disgusting) and her fantasy of the ideal poetic landscape, which she gently satirizes. the fulcrum on which her consciousness pivots is the wordless encounter with the cleaning woman, whose work oliver compares to “a river,” her dark hair to “the wing of a bird.” although she would like to transport the woman magically from the squalid restroom to the riverbank, she acknowledges that “this probably won’t happen.” the poem’s resolution resists fantasy even as it denies the dichotomy of the natural and man-made worlds: neither do i mean anything miraculous, but only the light that can shine out of a life. i mean the way she unfolded and refolded the blue cloth, the way her smile was only for my sake; i mean the way this poem is filled with trees, and birds. like the young blake whom oliver imagines at the windowsill, the speaker feels a visceral “disgust” at the woman’s labor and its environment (the placeless place of the airport). the apparent non sequitur about what a poem “should” contain seems intended to mock not only oliver’s other poems but also her reader’s post-romantic expectations. even the desire to free the woman from her servitude seems, in part, self-serving: another way to sanitize the poem, in keeping with the pastoral tradition that conceals human labor. on the other hand, as david baker says, “the poet’s own job is similar to the custodian’s, to serve as caretaker to the human and the natural, to try to make the world clean again; in essence, for oliver, not to ignore the world in the first place, since beauty and grace are characteristics of people as well as snowy owls.” 24 more than that, the conclusion of “singapore” brings nature into the airport restroom by means of that look that passes between the two women. the poem is “filled with trees, and birds” because the speaker is able to see the beauty in the other woman’s work and in her person; because she resists her own revulsion long enough to see into another’s life. similarly, in “spring azures,” the “sooty sill” of blake’s london is the same window in which god appears to him, and his turning to imagination is a turning toward the incarnation of that god. 24. david baker, “recent poetry [review of oliver, house of light (with others)],” kenyon review ns 13.1 (winter 1991): 197. thel, oliver, and the politics of mother nature perhaps oliver’s most sustained engagement with a blakean text appears in “have you ever tried to enter the long black branches,” which concludes the volume west wind. this poem may be read as an answer to blake’s book of thel. the “you” of the poem is trapped in the solipsistic selfhood that blake so often condemns, a urizenic state that, if it acknowledges the world outside it at all, sees it as “only an entertainment.” the great failure for oliver, as for blake, is the failure to pay attention: “never to enter the sea and notice how the water divides with perfect courtesy, to let you in! / never to lie down on the grass, as though you were the grass! / … // no wonder we hear, in your mournful voice, the complaint that something is missing from your life!” (ww 61). in this “complaint that something is missing” i hear the voice of thel, who struggles to find some purpose in the face of her mortality, complaining “who shall find my place” and “no one hears my voice” (e 4). other poems of oliver’s also suggest conversing with objects in nature, as thel does, in order to understand one’s place in the cosmos: last night the rain spoke to me slowly, saying, what joy to come falling out of the brisk cloud ….25 in “have you ever tried …” oliver speaks not in first but in second person, shifting at times into a prophetic, questioning mode: who can open the door who does not reach for the latch? …………………………………………………………… who will behold the inner chamber who has not observed with admiration, even with rapture, the outer stone? well, there is time left— fields everywhere invite you into them. …………………………………………………………… to put one’s foot into the door of the grass, which is the mystery, which is death as well as life, and not be afraid! to set one’s foot in the door of death, and be overcome with amazement! (ww 61-62) these exhortations seem to evoke and encourage thel’s sequence of conversations with the lilly, the cloud, and the clod of clay, in which she seeks to learn from them her place 25. oliver, “last night the rain spoke to me,” what do we know: poems and prose poems (cambridge, ma: da capo press, 2002) 36. 48 blake/an illustrated quarterly fall 2011 in the natural world but shrinks from identifying with them: “i am not like thee.” many of oliver’s exhortations are phrased as infinitives, “to put, to set,” but then these “to”s become prepositions, as “god the ten-fingered” (fully incarnate) nods “to the flowers … to the song … to the tiplets of the honeysuckle.” in other words, the act of placing oneself in a receptive position leads to relationships with all these objects. thel, of course, “[sets her] foot in the door of death,” as her catabasis brings her to “her own grave plot,” which yields no answers, but only a series of despairing questions about the horrors of the natural body. specifically, the questions protest the vulnerability of the senses: “why cannot the ear be closed to its own destruction? / or the glistning eye to the poison of a smile! /… / why a tongue impress’d with honey from every wind?” (e 6). when oliver’s poem shifts from second person to first, the speaker sits “among the thorns,” speaking “to the wild roses: / deny me not, / but suffer my devotion.” like thel, she hears a voice from the plants, though not the elaborate rhetoric of the lilly or cloud. the roses (apparently) speak to her in italics, countering “those dark shouters, / caution and prudence” 26 with the command “fall in! fall in! ” here, instead of falling into military rank, the implication is to fall into life: precisely the calamity that thel fears. like thel, oliver’s speaker seems to retreat at the end, with a similar ambiguity: “i climb. i backtrack. / i float. / i ramble my way home.” yet she does so without thel’s shriek, and with a distinct implication that to be “home” is to be at home in the natural world. more particularly, as vicki graham points out, oliver uses the physical senses to imagine herself “into the body of another”: a blurring of ego boundaries that “many theorists claim put[s] the woman writer at risk.” 27 many critics, of course, have debated the validity of thel’s “virgin fears”: frye, for example, reads her flight as a refusal to be born.28 more recently, some have defended her rejection of a patriarchal world that absorbs the woman into the cycle of nature.29 oliver’s poem obliquely takes part in that debate, while her role as both “woman poet” and “nature poet” has created similar challenges for her critics. janet mcnew has skillfully analyzed oliver’s romantic inheritance, pointing out her resistance to the “male” romantic tradition of “achieving an identity that transcends nature.” 30 with her “unpatrolled ego boundaries,” oliver “avoid[s] the anxious either/or questions which run through much male nature poetry.” 31 mcnew’s analysis, however, challenges some 26. another echo of blake: “prudence is a rich ugly old maid courted by incapacity” (e 35). 27. vicki graham, “‘into the body of another’: mary oliver and the poetics of becoming other,” papers on language and literature 30.4 (fall 1994): 353. 28. frye 232-33. 29. see, among others, helen p. bruder, william blake and the daughters of albion (basingstoke: macmillan; new york: st. martin’s press, 1997), chapter 2. 30. mcnew 75. 31. mcnew 67, 66. feminist critics, who are wary of the female poet’s identification with nature.32 to them, oliver may sound too much, not like thel, but like the cloud or the lilly or the clod of clay: too willing to lose herself in the natural cycle. indeed, her poem “october” celebrates the speaker’s disappearance into, or out of, the natural world. after a fox passes by, apparently without seeing her, she thinks: “so this is the world. / i’m not in it. / it is beautiful” (ns 62). we note immediately the contrast with blake’s proverb “where man is not nature is barren” (e 38).33 yet oliver does not say that the world is beautiful because she is not in it. rather, as burton-christie notes, “nature does not need us to be what it is.” he further points out the irony in which the speaker maintains her subjectivity in order to make that aesthetic judgment.34 graham has a slightly different view of the same paradox: “giving up human subjectivity would mean … giving up the ability to mime herself into the body of another. … oliver’s poems suggest that we need language and self-consciousness in order to experience stepping outside of language and the self.” 35 according to feminist critics, romanticism’s tension between the imagination of the self (usually male) and the “otherness” of nature (usually female) creates a special problem for women writers. as margaret homans puts it bluntly, “mother nature is not a helpful model for women aspiring to be poets.” 36 elsewhere she writes, “the feminine figure who becomes an object by merging with nature, dying as a result, represents the masculine appropriation of femininity.” 37 mcnew points out that according to this principle, the woman poet can claim voice and identity only through following the masculine model of transcendence. she also argues, however, that oliver negotiates a third way, neither an alienated transcendence of the earth nor a passive surrender to it: “oliver’s visionary goal … involves constructing a subjectivity that does not depend on separation from a world of objects. instead, she respectfully confers subjecthood on nature, thereby modeling a kind of identity that does not depend on opposition for definition.” 38 this strategy seems consonant with blake’s view of a humanized universe. 32. i have not been able to find a feminist critic who lays this charge against oliver directly, although mcnew, graham, and diane bonds all set out to defend her against “skepticism that identification with nature can empower women to speak or to write” (diane s. bonds, “the language of nature in the poetry of mary oliver,” women’s studies 21 [1992]: 1). 33. mark s. lussier challenges the usual reading of this proverb and further notes how the proverbs of hell invite readers “to adopt behavioral models from nature,” just as marriage challenges the prevalent dualisms of mind/body and spirit/matter. see romantic dynamics (basingstoke: macmillan; new york: st. martin’s press, 2000) 58-59. 34. burton-christie 81. 35. graham 367-68. 36. margaret homans, women writers and poetic identity (princeton: princeton university press, 1980) 13. 37. homans 221. 38. mcnew 72. fall 2011 blake/an illustrated quarterly 49 the subjectivity that mcnew finds in oliver appears likewise in blake’s milton: seest thou the little winged fly, smaller than a grain of sand? it has a heart like thee; a brain open to heaven & hell, withinside wondrous & expansive; its gates are not clos’d, i hope thine are not: hence it clothes itself in rich array; hence thou art cloth’d with human beauty o thou mortal man. seek not thy heavenly father then beyond the skies …. (20.27-32, e 114) oliver’s “how would you live then?” recalls milton in its celebration of a humanized nature, a landscape animated by the human imagination. she asks, “what if a hundred rosebreasted grosbeaks / flew in circles around your head? what if / the mockingbird came into the house with you and / became your advisor?” 39 the anaphoric “what if ” questions are repeated often enough to shift their effect from contrary-tofact to “what if this is the case?” what if the stars are shouting their names? by the end of the poem, the object of “what if ” is not the external event but “your” perception of it: “what if you suddenly saw …? what if you finally saw …?” though oliver seems much more invested than blake in the tangible reality of nature, she shares his understanding that perception is what makes it real for us. and in the final lines, as she affirms the “silver of water” and the yellow of sunflowers over money and gold, she concisely discriminates between the two possibilities for nature in blake: the negating materialism that closes the senses, and the visionary openness in which a grain of sand contains a world. looking again at blake, nature, and environmentalism what, then, of blake’s notorious hostility to nature? when, in jerusalem, luvah separates from vala and “the vast form of nature like a serpent rolld between” (e 193), what we call “nature” is created by the division of the “male” subject from the “female” object. when created things harden into opacity, into “single vision” (e 202), blake calls that “nature.” kevin hutchings has persuasively argued that blake’s suspicion of nature is directed not toward its material reality but rather toward the ways in which human beings have constructed, named, and exploited it.40 blake never denigrates the minute particulars of the clod, the pebble, or the fly, only “nature” as an abstraction. oliver, though often classified (even dismissed) as a “nature poet,” similarly avoids referring to nature in that abstract way. her poems are filled with minute particulars: in “the summer day,” she replaces the generic phrase “the grasshopper” with “this grasshopper” (hl 60, italics mine). at the same time, her encounters with vultures, skunks, roses, and turtles take her to the edge of anthropomorphism while recognizing the 39. oliver, blue iris (boston: beacon press, 2004) 57. 40. kevin hutchings, imagining nature: blake’s environmental poetics (montreal: mcgill-queen’s university press, 2002). limits of complete identification in a fallen universe. in “entering the kingdom,” the speaker wants to dissolve into the bare attention of the buddha, “to learn something by being nothing / a little while but the rich / lens of attention.” she is blocked, however, by her persistent human otherness: but the crows puff their feathers and cry between me and the sun, and i should go now. they know me for what i am. no dreamer, no eater of leaves.41 her dilemma places her exactly where blake finds humanity, avoiding both extremes of solipsism and dissolution of self. as hutchings says, “it is in the attainment of a balanced relationship between self and not-self that one may develop a healthy sympathy for the things of the earth without violating the integrity or minute particularity of one’s own determinate form or identity.” 42 in other words, the speaker of “entering the kingdom” does not fail in her quest, but the tables are turned on her. she goes into the forest to “learn something,” to know, but instead she is known. without the other, there could be no knowing. “where man is not nature is barren” because there is none to know it. oliver turns the tables on blake here as well: without nature, there is none to know the speaker, no reference point to define herself. as ryan cull points out, she avoids the dangers not only of romanticism but also of postmodern irony and solipsism: “navigating between such extremes, her high achievement is to approach nature through poetic discourse, but in a way that almost allows nature to talk back.” 43 almost, because she is aware, as we are, that what the crows “know” is a projection of her own mind, just as the speaker in blake’s “infant joy” projects a voice for the voiceless infant (e 16). the other remains ultimately unknowable: that is “the white fire of a great mystery” (hl 59). like blake, oliver rejects the easy (and sometimes dangerous) absorption of or by the other. ultimately, oliver’s appropriations of blake help us to understand both poets more effectively, seeing past the “apparent surfaces” (e 39) of their interactions with nature. the juxtaposition of blake’s more “mystical” moments with oliver’s earthy realism has the dual function of grounding blake’s visions and transfiguring oliver’s mundane encounters. we might view oliver as “translating” blake (at least a portion of blake) for the modern reader. she seizes blake’s ringing assertion that “every thing that lives is holy” and takes it off the il41. oliver, twelve moons (boston: little, brown, 1979) 21. 42. hutchings 34. 43. ryan cull on oliver’s “the lilies break open over the dark water,” modern american poetry, an online journal and multimedia companion to anthology of modern american poetry (new york: oxford university press, 2000), ed. cary nelson <http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/ poets/m_r/oliver/lilies.htm>. 50 blake/an illustrated quarterly fall 2011 luminated page and into the luminous world of the everyday: the woods, fields, and shores of her cape cod home. in other words, she offers one example of how a person might “live” blake’s vision in this world. as a poet who happens to be a woman, she also inherits a legacy from blake that differs from the prophetic and apocalyptic emphasis of ginsberg. oliver’s imagination is no less prophetic, no less radical, but it is radical in the sense of “root”: rooted in the life she sees around her and her effort to see what she calls “the untrimmable light // of the world” (wiwe 59) with visionary eyes. her dialogue with blake helps us not only to reevaluate the politics of nature and gender in blake’s work, but also to see that work as a living thing, subject to revision by both readers and writers in the eternal conversation he calls jerusalem. as fascinating as such dialogue is to a literary scholar, the stakes are far higher in the conversation about (and between) humanity and nature. as sylvia bowerbank puts it, “in our age of ecological crisis, an ideal of transcendence of nature … is no less problematic than the ideal of ‘harmony with nature.’” 44 in other words, both the spiritual estrangement from nature and the false ideal of absorption into it become obstacles to surmounting ecological challenges. bowerbank cites the writings of martin w. lewis and others in promoting a “promethean environmentalism,” 45 humanity’s active management of the planet, in order to slow or reverse the damages already done. without such management, in blake’s terms, nature will be barren. hence, the conversation between blake and oliver has ramifications far beyond the scholar’s study or the poet’s morning walk. oliver gracefully declines the suggestion that she is an environmentalist: “my work doesn’t document any of the sane and learned arguments for saving, healing, and protecting the earth for our existence. what i write begins and ends with the act of noticing and cherishing, and it neither begins nor ends with the human world.” in the same passage, she resists the common distinctions between human and inhuman, animate and inanimate. if she speaks of “rescu[ing] the world,” it is because, like blake, she sees nature not as an object of rescue, a damsel in distress, but as part of ourselves: “the man who does not know nature, who does not walk under the leaves as under his own roof, is partial and wounded.” 46 blake would have to agree: “‘all things begin & end in albions ancient druid rocky shore.’ / … / ‘but now the starry heavens are fled from the mighty limbs of albion’” (e 171). for both blake and oliver, in their different modes, the poet’s task is to make the reader aware both of our fallen estrangement from nature and of our integral connection to it. both present a world in which the choice between humanity and nature can only be a false one. 44. sylvia bowerbank, speaking for nature: women and ecologies of early modern england (baltimore: johns hopkins university press, 2004) 3. 45. bowerbank 10. 46. oliver, winter hours (boston: houghton mifflin, 1999) 99, 101. william and catherine blake returned to london in september 1803, after spending three years in the seaside village of felpham in sussex. during the two years that followed, one of william’s most important and time-consuming occupations was assisting william hayley with the illustrations to be engraved for hayley’s life of george romney. blake had commissions for two of these and hoped for more. these activities were no mere task for blake, who praised the gifts of “our admired sublime romney”1 and thought, unfairly, that romney’s talent had been diverted from history to portrait painting by hayley, asserting in a frank letter to his brother james that hayley “thinks to turn me into a portrait painter as he did poor romney” (30 january 1803, e 725). in the extraordinary letter that blake wrote to hayley about his renewal of vision “on the day after visiting the truchsessian gallery of pictures,” he stated: “i can, with confidence, promise you ocular demonstration of my altered state on the plates i am now engraving after romney, whose spiritual aid has not a little conduced to my restoration to the light of art.”2 blake’s esteem for romney was no doubt intensified by the facts that he had known the older artist in the 1790s and that there had been strong bonds between both their political beliefs and their art at that time. true, romney was not an easy man to know. his friend richard cumberland characterized him as “shy, private, studious and contemplative; conscious of all the disadvantages and privations of a very stinted education; of a habit naturally hypochondriac, with aspen nerves, that every breath could ruffle.”3 he had some very close friends, but it is significant that, as his old friend thomas greene observed, “he seemed always to avoid associating with gentlemen of his profession.”4 the exceptions were three artists in fields far from his own: the sculptor john flaxman and the miniaturists jeremiah meyer and (for a time) ozias humphry.5 after 1772, when romney showed a portrait of 1. letter to hayley, 22 june 1804. the complete poetry and prose of william blake, ed. david v. erdman, newly rev. ed. (new york: anchor– random house, 1988) [hereafter e] 753. 2. 23 oct. 1804, e 756. on this crucial experience of blake’s, see my “the truchsessian gallery revisited,” studies in romanticism 16.2 (1977): 165-77. 3. [richard cumberland], memoirs of richard cumberland, vol. 2 (london: lackington, allen, & co., 1807) 211. 4. letter dated 9 dec. 1802 to william long, another close friend of romney’s (quoted by david cross, “george romney: the earliest biography of 1802,” transactions of the romney society 9 [2004]: 13-17). 5. romney and humphry were in italy together in 1773-75, but they were not close in later years. meyer was a highly accomplished miniature william blake, george romney, and the life of george romney, esq. by morton d. paley w. s. blake: new facts and engravings w. s. blake: new facts and engravings by g. e. bentley, jr. g. e. bentley, jr., (gbentley@chass.utoronto.ca) hopes that his book on thomas macklin as printseller and patron will come out in 2016. williami should like to dedicate this note to john windle. i am also grateful for invaluable advice to robert n. essick and mary lynn johnson. staddenthere is considerable variation in the spelling of w. s. blake’s middle name: stadden on his own apprenticeship record and those of several of his apprentices, the trials of 1782 and 1805 at which he testified, and his will; stadder for his christening; staddon as a churchwarden. blake (1748–1814), engraver and printer of 16 ’change alley, has a claim upon our attention chiefly because he shares two of his names with william blake (1757–1827), engraver, printer, artist, and poet. when references of 1770–1827 to engravers named blake are found, it may be difficult to determine which blake is intended.for instance, “blake the engraver” whom joshua gilpin met on 14 april 1796 was taken to be the poet (g. e. bentley, jr., “the way of a papermaker with a poet: joshua gilpin, william blake, and the arts in 1796,” notes and queries 231 [ns 33.1] [1986]: 80-84) until the discovery of a letter to gilpin of 13 april 1796 referring to “blake engraver & printer of exchange alley, cornhill” made it clear that the engraver was w. s. blake (bentley, “the way of a papermaker with a poet … postscript,” notes and queries 231 [ns 33.4] [1986]: 525). for what was previously known about w. s. blake in addition to the gilpin references, see chiefly bentley, blake records, 2nd ed. (new haven: yale university press, 2004) [hereafter br(2)] 839-40. there are also bentley, “a collection of prosaic william blakes,” notes and queries 210 (ns 12.5) (1965): 172-78; bentley, “trade cards and the blake connection,” book collector 37 (1988): 127-33; geoffrey keynes, “engravers called blake,” times literary supplement 17 jan. 1942: 36, revised in his blake studies (1949) 50-55 and (1971) 46-49; keynes, “‘to the nightingale’: perhaps an unrecognized poem by william blake,” book collector 30 (1981): 335-45; keynes and peter davidson, eds., a watch of nightingales (london: stourton press, 1981); ruthven todd, “the two blakes,” times literary supplement 10 feb. 1945: 72; janet warner, “trade cards of w. s. blake,” book collector 32 (1983): 105-07 (two of them reproduced); and raymond watkinson, “‘white on black,’” times literary supplement 13 sept. 1974: 980. it is therefore useful to record newly discovered facts about w. s. blake and note differences between his career and that of the poet. william stadder blake, the son of william and fanny blake, was christened on 14 january 1748 in st. andrew’s church, holborn.international genealogical index (igi) of the church of jesus christ of latter-day saints <https://​familysearch.​org/​ark:/​61903/​1:1:j3mk-blq>. i cannot account for the fact that the father of w. s. blake is recorded as daniel blake in the apprenticeship indenture. his apprenticeship indenture, with two handsome seals and “this indenture” in gothic type, reads: this indenture witneſſeth, that [william stadden blake son of daniel blake late citizen and vintner of london deceased] doth put himſelf apprentice to [samuel carr harper] citizen and clothworker of london to learn his art, … to ſerve from the day of the date hereof, unto the full end and term of [seven] years …. and the ſaid maſter [in consideration of ten pounds] his ſaid apprentice in the ſame art which he uſeth, … ſhall teach and inſtruct, or cauſe to be taught and inſtructed …. in witneſs whereof the parties above named to theſe indentures interchangeably have put their hands and seals,the same document was printed twice on one piece of paper, which was then torn in half along an undulating line. the authenticity of the individual documents could be ascertained by fitting the two halves back together. of course such half-documents tend to survive separately and rarely. all the information here about clothworker apprenticeships derives from the extraordinary generosity of mary lynn johnson. the poet’s indenture is not known to have survived; it is hypothetically reconstructed in br(2) 12-14. the [second] day of [december] in the [second] year of the reign of our sovereign lord george the ii[i] … and in the year of our lord one thouſand seven hundred and [sixty one] …. [wm stadden blake] [har[?] pollard]london metropolitan archives, reference col/​chd/​fr/​02/​0955-0962. the portions in manuscript are given within square brackets. engraving was important for clothworkers, because engraved designs were extensively printed on cotton and silk. in 1795 and 1796 william staddon blake was one of two churchwardens in the splendid church of st. mary woolnoth.j. m. s. brooke and a. w. c. hallen, the transcript of the registers of the united parishes of s. mary woolnoth and s. mary woolchurch haw, in the city of london (london: bowles & sons, 1886) xli. he married a woman named sarah, and in his will of 2 november 1795 he left “all” his “worldly estate and effects” to his “beloved wife sarah blake.” “mr. w. s. blake” died “in ’change alley” in september 1814,monthly magazine 39, no. 260 (1 oct. 1814): 283. and the will was probated on 10 november “by the oath of sarah blake widow.”quoted from a reproduction of the will in the national archives, prob 11/1562/134. sarah blake was a prosperous woman: in her will, dated 10 june 1825 and probated 27 february 1826,national archives, prob 11/1708/416. she left £2000 to her niece elizabeth simpson (wife of william woolley simpson); £1000 to her nephew john wyatt lee; thirty acres of land in great totham, essex, to thomas lee (son of john wyatt lee); stock in the west middlesex waterworks company, london dock company, and waterloo or strand bridge company; messuages or dwellings at 29 and 30 queen’s row, walworth, surrey, to her friend samuel willett; and to her sister frances maria lee “my two leasehold messuages or dwellinghouses with the outbuildings and appurtenances thereto respectively belonging being numbers 16 and 18 in change alley cornhill in the city of london now in the occupations of john rowe and george turney.” through the courtesy and initiative of john windle, a number of new prints by the writing engraver w. s. blake of ’change alley have turned up, and clustering with them are some curious new facts related to him. newly recorded printsfor previously recorded prints and trade cards, see bentley, “a collection of prosaic william blakes” 175-76 and “trade cards and the blake connection” 130-32, and warner. “ichnographyground plan (oed). of charleston, | south-carolina, | at the request of adam tunno, esq. for the use of the | phœnix fire-company of london, | taken from actual survey, 2d auguſt 1788 by | edmund petrie.” “publish’d 1st jan.y 1790 by e petrie n.o 13 america square [london].” “blake ſc ’change alley.” 49 x 70 cm. see illus. 1. 1. “ichnography of charleston,” 1790 (see enlargement). 49 x 70 cm. library of congress, geography and map division. g3914.c3g475 1788.p4. “devonshire tooth tincture,” c. 1790. 26 x 21 cm. see illus. 2. sold here, | the | devonshire | tooth tincture; | which immediately relieves the most violent tooth-ache; it cures the scurvyoed says that scurvy is characterized by “tenderness of the gums.” | in the gums; fastens teeth that are loose; prevents those which are | decaying from becoming worse; restores them to their pristine colour, | and renders the most offensive breath in a short time | delicately sweet. | also, | the | devonshire | tooth-powder, | which speedily cleans, whitens, and beautifies the teeth, without | impairing the enamel. | blake ſc ’change alley.the “devonshire tooth tincture” was generously drawn to my attention on 31 jan. 2012 by john windle (through robert brandeis), who sent me a reproduction and sold it to the library of victoria university in the university of toronto. i subsequently discovered (1 feb. 2012) that it was offered and reproduced online by grosvenor prints, stock no. 9938, £280. 2. “devonshire tooth tincture,” c. 1790 (see enlargement). 26 x 21 cm. victoria university in the university of toronto. blake suppl. no. 344 (box 14). the advertisement is written in a variety of scripts in differing sizes; the most ornamental are the first “devonshire” and “tooth-powder.” the only other decorations are curlicues and a variety of flicks or tiny circles, which are pervasive. the whole is quite handsome.for moore & co.’s handsome advertisement for carpets (?1797) by the poet-engraver william blake, see robert n. essick, the separate plates of william blake: a catalogue (princeton: princeton university press, 1983) 47-49 and pl. 24. the date is probably in the early 1790s, when there was a flurry of advertisements for devonshire tooth tincture in terms very like those of the w. s. blake print.argus 12, 16, 18-19, 23, 27 nov., 4-5, 10, 15-18, 28 dec. 1789, 1-2, 7-8, 15, 25 jan., 5, 9, 12, 16 feb., 5 march, 19 oct., 1 dec. 1790, 11 march 1791, 7, 15 jan. 1793; morning post 27 april 1793; st. james’s chronicle 18 jan. 1791, 14 feb. 1792; star 19 jan. 1793; and world 21 oct. 1789. the short “s” in the text of the w. s. blake engraving suggests a date after 1800, while the archaic long “s” in “blake ſc” suggests a date before 1800. a bank note with a crest (perhaps “faw”) with, beneath it, “blake ſc change alley”.three examples of the form (cib.853-55) are in the online catalogue of the british museum, department of coins and medals, “modern reproduction using original printing plates.” they were acquired from the ifs school of finance, which perhaps owns the copperplate itself. “179 ” is the date that the bearer is to fill in. on 5 april 1797 “w. s. blake, (writing engraver)” signed a testimonial for alexander tilloch’s “specimen … to prevent the forgery of bank notes” (br[2] 78). see “curious new facts about w. s. blake,” below, for the trial of james rowe for having forged an order for payment of £30. 10.7 x 21.5 cm. the whole form reads: n.o   n.o   winborn bank 179 [crest] i promise to pay ………………………………………… or bearer on demand twenty pounds at sir rich.d carr glyn & c o’s bankers, london   for fryer, andrews & woolfryes twenty. ent.d the glynn bank was in birchin lane, around the corner from exchange alley. “general washington”, an engraving with a thirty-two-line dedication to washington (“died … upon the 15.th day of december 1799”), imprint “london, published by w. s. blake, 16, change alley friday, june 27, 1800.” 58.1 x 44.4 cm. see illus. 3. 3. “general washington,” 1800 (see enlargement). 58.1 x 44.4 cm. © fitzwilliam museum, cambridge. p.588-1985, from the keynes collection. the last three lines of the elegant calligraphy overlap the image of the heraldic eagle. the image at the top represents a storm-racked islet identified as “washington”. “portrait of jos.h capper esq.r of the horns kennington.” “publish’d as the act directs by w. s. blake oct. 1804”.the print also appeared in william granger, new, original and complete wonderful museum and magazine extraordinary 3 (1805), at p. 1693, where it is inscribed “republish’d by hogg & c o july 1 1805.” 7.7 x 7.5 cm. joseph capper (1726/7–1804) was a prosperous, eccentric, cantankerous retired grocer (he left £30,000) who lived at the horns tavern, kennington. “a favourite diversion of his was killing flies in the parlour with his cane.”anon., “the late joseph capper, esq.: an eccentric character,” sporting magazine 25 (jan. 1805): 179-80. “richmond [coat of arms] yorkshire. | this plate is humbly dedicated to the r.t hon.ble lord dundas [coat of arms] by his lordships most obedient & faithful humble servant. | g. e. towry | pub by w. s. blake ’change alley 27 jan.y 1809.” colored aquatint, not signed by designer or engraver (perhaps engraved by w. s. blake, who was a writing engraver). no watermark; paper size 37.5 x 46.5 cm.; copperplate size 29.7 x 43.5 cm. see illus. 4. 4. “richmond yorkshire,” 1809 (see enlargement). paper size 37.5 x 46.5 cm.; copperplate size 29.7 x 43.5 cm. g. e. bentley, jr., destined for victoria university in the university of toronto. a view of a broad city street with carriages, surrounded by an urn, an hourglass, a skull, a scythe, a fire-axe, and an ornamental vase with st. george spearing a very modest dragon and a label “albion” (probably for the albion insurance company). the engraving is signed richard “corbould del” and “blake ſc change alley” (c. 1814).robert n. essick has two w. s. blake prints designed by corbould for the albion insurance company (one the engraving described here). see his “blake in the marketplace, 1997,” blake 31.4 (spring 1998): 123, with a reproduction of this print at p. 129. 13.5 x 20.3 cm. a letter of 13 april 1796 from corbould to gilpin recommends “m.r blake engraver ^& printer^ of exchange alley, cornhill who being more immediately in that line of engraving that will suit for the larger drawing.”quoted from the manuscript in the historical society of pennsylvania (see bentley, “the way of a papermaker with a poet … postscript”). w. s. blake’s apprentices william blake the poet had only one apprentice, thomas owen in 1788–95, and this fact was reported only a few years ago.david alexander, “william blake, graveur d’interprétation,” william blake (1757–1827): le génie visionnaire du romantisme anglais (paris: petit palais/paris musées, [2009]) 79-81, 210-11. w. s. blake, on the other hand, had at least eleven apprentices from 1771 to 1806: apprentice fee dates of service powell, thomas [a]   5 feb. 1771–12 april 1774 kidgell, john [b]   6 april 1773–4 march 1777 holmes, samuel [c]   13 march 1783–march 1790 ottway, thomas £30 6 july 1786–july 1793 girtin, jno £45 5 july 1787–july 1794 bowler, robert ewen [d] £40 3 feb. 1788–feb. 1795 chaplain, benjamin [e] £  2 1 dec. 1790–nov. 1797 kirkham, majer £10 8 dec. 1796–dec. 1803 delaforce, joseph [f] £  2 1 nov. 1797–oct. 1804 delaforce, thomas £  2 1 dec. 1797–nov. 1804 rowe, jno [g] £10 4 july 1799–july 1806 a. thomas powell was bound (2 aug. 1768) to john banister and turned over first (5 feb. 1771) to w. s. blake and then (12 april 1774) to john powell, jackmaker, citizen, and farrier (stationers’ company apprentices 1701–1800, ed. d. f. mckenzie [oxford: oxford bibliographical society, 1978] 38). b. john kidgell was bound (6 feb. 1770) to charles rivington ii, turned over (5 march 1771) to john banister and then (6 april 1773) to w. s. blake; he was made free on 4 march 1777 (mckenzie 38). c. information about w. s. blake’s clothworker apprentices comes from the national archives, board of stamps, apprenticeship books, ir 1, piece 31 (holmes), 33 (girtin, ottway), 37 (kirkham), and 38 (rowe). d. the father of robert ewen bowler was “william bowler of fashion lane london vintner,” according to the indenture. e. the father of benjamin chaplain was “james chaplain of the parish of saint bridget of london tinplate worker.” w. s. blake undertook the apprenticeship “in consideration of two pounds as being perpetual charity money paid by the langbourn ward school in london,” according to the indenture. f. according to his apprenticeship indenture, “joseph delaforce son of thomas delaforce of mile end new town in the parish of saint dunstan stepney county of middlesex weaver … [was apprenticed] in consideration of the sum of two pounds being charity money paid by the trustees of langbourn ward charity school … the first day of november in the thirty eighth year of the reign of our sovereign lord george the third one thouſand seven hundred and ninety seven.” that for thomas delaforce differs only in date. g. after the death of w. s. blake in 1814, rowe’s style became “i. rowe engraver and printer change alley apprentice & successor to the late mr. blake.” in 1817 he printed james ackland, true patriotism! a poem of the nineteenth century (london: printed for the author, by john rowe, 16, ’change-alley, cornhill, 1817), 24pp. rowe was recorded at 16 change alley as an engraver and printer in 1819–24 and, as rowe, kentish & osborne, as a banknote engraver and printer in 1825–48 (william b. todd, a directory of printers and others in allied trades london and vicinity 1800–1840 [london: printing historical society, 1972] 165). of these apprentices, bowler, chaplain, joseph and thomas delaforce, girtin, holmes, kirkham, ottway, and rowe were apprenticed as clothworkers, while kidgell and powell were stationers turned over from masters in the stationers’ company. the forms of clothworker indenture in 1783–99 differed only in minor ways from that of 1761. it was customary in the book trades for boys to be apprenticed to members of the stationers’ company. however, exceptions were not rare. in 1792, for instance, nineteen engravers and printers were apprenticed to members of the guilds of barbers, cooks, frameworkers, knitters, girdlers, goldsmiths, haberdashers, leathersellers, loriners,a loriner or lorimer was a maker of small ironware, as in horse bridles, according to the oed. merchant tailors, and musicians.ian maxted, the london book trades 1775–1800: a preliminary checklist of members (folkestone: dawson, 1977) xxvii-xxviii (table 8: the livery companies and the london book trades in 1792). note that this list does not include apprentices in the clothworkers’ guild, to which w. s. blake and nine of his apprentices belonged. some boys were nominally apprenticed to a member of the stationers’ guild and a month later turned over to the real master (practicing in the book trades) such as a nominal grocer.cyprian blagden, “the stationers’ company in the eighteenth century,” guildhall miscellany no. 10 (sept. 1959): 40. w. s. blake’s addresses william staden blake, engraver, citizen, and clothworker of butcher hall, newgate street [horwood d2], took powell (1771) and kidgell (1773) as apprentices.mckenzie 38. he identified himself as an engraver of abchurch lane [horwood e2 (illus. 5)]for trade cards that he signed with this address, see bentley, “trade cards and the blake connection” 129-32. at the trial at which he testified in 1782.see “curious new facts about w. s. blake,” below, for the trial of of john hevey. his exchange (’change) alley addresshe is the “blake, wm”, engraver, at no. 16 exchange (or ’change) alley recorded in barclay’s british directory (1785); john pendred, the london and country printers, booksellers and stationers vade mecum (1785); andrews’s new london directory (1789: william stretton blake), (1790: william stratton blake); bailey’s london directory (1790); holden’s london directory (1790); wakefield’s merchant and tradesman’s general directory for london (1790); universal british directory 1 (1790); holden’s triennial directory (london, 1799, 1802–20); new annual directory for the year[s] 1801, 1803, 1806–16; boyle’s city & commercial companion to the court guide for the year 1803; kent’s directory for the year[s] 1806, 1810, 1814–16. is one street south of cornhill,cornhill is continuous with leadenhall street to the east and poultry and cheapside to the west. stretching two blocks between birchin lane to the east and a tiny unnamed lane to the west (see illus. 5). 5. the location of exchange alley (its length marked by red dots) (see enlargement). detail of r. horwood, plan of the cities of london and westminster, the borough of southwark, and parts adjoining shewing every house (london, 1792–99), sheet e2. victoria university in the university of toronto. blake no. 1160. the “post office” is just across lombard street to the south; on the north side of cornhill is the “royal exchange,” just north of this is the “bank of england,” and one street to the north of the east end of cornhill is threadneedle street. exchange alley was notorious as the site of the coffeehouses that evolved into the stock market. thomas mortimer, every man his own broker: or, a guide to exchange-alley. in which the nature of the several funds, vulgarly called the stocks, is clearly explained, 7th ed. (london: s. hooper, 1769) has a chapter “of the mystery and iniquity of stock-jobbing ….” the only member of the stationers’ company recorded in exchange alley in the eighteenth century is thomas smith in 1782,mckenzie 324. but “a list of the brokers of the city of london,” london chronicle (23-25 dec. 1762): 612, gives “hooker francis, at mr. henry gretton’s, engraver, in exchange alley.”gretton (1730–90) is recorded in maxted (96) at 14 fenchurch street (1772–77), 7 abchurch lane, lombard street (1778–84), fenchurch street (1792), and 40 fenchurch street (1794–1830 [sic]). curious new facts about w. s. blake he was the printer of (1) printed statement of a mechanical experiment for ascertaining the difference in strength between grimshaw, webster, and co.’s patent machine-laid-rope, and that made in the usual way, at durand’s wharf, rotherhithe, 29th. october 1802 (w. s. blake, change alley, cornhill, 1802), 2 pp. (2) “sir william curtis, bar.t alderman & representative of the city of london”, “thomas lawrence esq.r r.a. pinx.t”, “will.m sharp, member of the imperial & royal academy of vienna, sculpt.”, “publish’d by w. s. blake, change alley, london, march 1, 1814”.three copies are in the british museum (1838,0714.132, 1841,0313.123, 1841,0313.124). there is also a copy in the london metropolitan archives, reference sc/​gl/​por/​b/​008/​m0001735cl/a. 62.3 x 38.3 cm. sir william (1752–1829) was a rich banker, lord mayor (1795–96), and head of the city tories. (3) “st. mary magdalen’s taunton from an original drawing by the late alexander poole moore; pubd. by w. s. blake, change alley, 1 aug. 1809.”london metropolitan archives, reference sc/​gl/​pr/​dew/​la/​914/​som/​tau/​k1290477. at the trial at the old bailey of john hevey for forgery on 20 february 1782, “william stadden blake … engraver in abchurch-lane,” testified that “hevey applied to him to engrave the plate about the middle of july last, and printed about five hundred of them,” for which hevey paid him £3.3.0.the proceedings of the old bailey, london’s central criminal court, 1674 to 1913 <http://​www.​oldbaileyonline.​org>, reference t17820220-63. blake was not implicated in the forgery. joseph delaforce (age 22), the former apprentice of w. s. blake,delaforce said that he had “the copy of my freedom” in his pocketbook. called on sunday morning, 9 june 1805, at 16 ’change alley to see “my fellow-apprentice” john rowe. clearly he was expected and suspected, and his coming had been prepared for: blake said that “the time before he took four” guineas. therefore a hole was drilled through a panel from the countinghouse of mr. turnerwilliam turner, 16 change alley, presumably a clerk or accountant, gave £10.10.0 to the eye hospital for several years (see “w. s. blake and charity,” below). adjacent to the parlor, and turner’s clerk, william tagg, was set to keep watch. blake had scratched tiny numbers on sixteen guineas, and on saturday night he put them in a drawer, which he locked. delaforce asked to see rowe, and, while the servant went to fetch him, tagg saw delaforce come into the parlor, force open the drawer, and take something. the constable was summoned, five guineas were impounded, and the numbers on the coins were found to correspond to those missing from the drawer. delaforce was tried on 10 july 1805 at the old bailey for stealing them. he was convicted and sentenced to death, but he was recommended to mercy on account of his youth.the proceedings of the old bailey, reference t18050710-3. in january 1807 he was transported for life to new south wales, australia, on the ship duke of portland.convict records <http://​www.​convictrecords.​com.au>, under joseph delaforce. at the trial, blake testified that in his premises “the ground floor consists of the shop, the parlour, and an accompting-house.” “the parlour is in st. edmund the king [parish], and the other part is in st. mary woolnoth.” he said that he had no business partner. james rowe was indicted at the old bailey for having forged and counterfeited on 9 july 1805 an “order for payment of 30l. signed william stadden blake, with intent to defraud sir richard carr glyn, bart. [(1755–1838), the great banker, formerly lord mayor] charles mills, and thomas halifax” of birchin lane, which forms one terminus of exchange alley. w. s. blake was a witness; a bank clerk also testified that blake “had cash in our house” and had dealt with the bank for “some years.” at the trial on 18 september 1805 rowe was found not guilty.the proceedings of the old bailey, reference t18050918-33. perhaps he was a relative of blake’s apprentice john rowe. w. s. blake and charity w. s. blake was described in 1825 as “mr. blake, of ’change alley, a jocose and excellent man, now deceased, who employed much of his time and means in kind offices to others.”article on william sharp in the annual biography and obituary, for the year 1825 (london: longman, hurst, rees, orme, brown, and green, 1825) 246. “blake, w. s. 16, change-alley” gave £1.1.0 to the london infirmary for curing diseases of the eye in 1807, 1808, 1809, 1810, 1812, and 1813, and after his death “blake, mrs, change-alley” gave the same sum in 1814 and 1815.london infirmary for curing diseases of the eye (1808) 20, (1809) 23, (1810) 14, (1811) 17, (1813) 14, (1814) 14, (1815) 22, (1816) 15. notice the appropriateness of an eye hospital to an engraver. william stadden blake was also a trustee of mr. richard smith’s charity for the poor of the parish of st. mary woolnoth.accounts and papers, seven volumes. (3.) relating to charities and charitable donations, for the benefit of the poor and other persons in england and wales, vol. 20 (1829) 266. the examiner no. 171 (7 april 1811): 218 lists “mr. blake, engraver, change-alley” as taking subscriptions for the late joseph clarendon smith. all this information about the writing engraver w. s. blake helps to provide a context for the poet and engraver william blake. other interloping engravers named blake during the poet’s lifetime e. blake (fl. 1824–27) the six prints signed “blake del et sc.” or “blake sc” in the seaman’s recorder; or, authentic and interesting narratives of popular shipwrecks, and other calamities incident to a life of maratime [sic] enterprise, 3 vols. (1824–25)bentley, “byron, shelley, wordsworth, blake, and the seaman’s recorder,” studies in romanticism 9.1 (1970): 21-36, and blake books (oxford: clarendon press, 1977) 613-14. were probably engraved by the “e. blake” who signed plates (1825–27) for w. west’s theatrical characters.christopher heppner, “blake and the seaman’s recorder: the letter and the spirit in a problem of attribution,” blake 12.1 (summer 1978): 15-17. “interior of the sessions house, old bailey” (c. 1824), signed “blake del et sc.”, is also probably by e. blake. “kangkook” (the dandy major general sir henry frederick cooke [1784–1837]), a colored print signed “blake ſc.” on the ground at bottom right, inscribed “london, pub.d dec.r 17, 1824 by s. w. fores”, “41 piccadilly, corner of sackville street.” platemark 31.5 x 20.3 cm. the style of the engraving and the formation of the signature seem to be those of e. blake: in “blake ſc.” the leftward flourishes from the top and bottom of the “b” and the two-stroke looped “k” are very like those in “blake ſc” (“lord byron in a storm,” the seaman’s recorder vol. 2 [1825], at p. 1), “e blake ſc” (“m.r. huntley, as bagzed,” west’s theatrical characters [1825]), and “blake fect” (“m.r. h. kemble, as massaniello,” west’s theatrical characters [1825]).see heppner 16-17. the date of the print (“1824”) means that it cannot be by w. s. blake, who died in 1814. an earlier engravingthe differing plate sizes indicate that these are separate engravings. of “kangkook” is inscribed “drawn etchd & puba copy in the british museum has “pubd by t. mclean haymarket”. ^dec.r 1819^ by rich dighton” (on the grass at the bottom right), platemark 28.7 x 19.5 cm. (bentley copy). the two versions of “kangkook” exhibit minor design differences. t. j. blake (fl. ?1780s) t. j. blake signedsee also the rather crude trade card of w.m goodcheape “engraved by t. j. blake n.o 18 hosier lane, west smithfield”, recorded in bentley, “trade cards and the blake connection” 132. “an | accurate map | of | canaan, | divided into the | twelve tribes | of | israel”, “t. j. blake sculp”, no imprint (?1780), 22.3 x 16.4 cm. “a new and correct chart | of the | west-india-islands, | including | the gulf and windward passage; | regulated and ascertained by astronomical observations, | by john hamilton moore. | — | london, | printed for, and sold by john hamilton moore, n.o 104, minories, | and george robinson, pater-noster-row. | — | publish’d as the act directs. 14.th sept.r 1784. | t. j. blake sculp. n.o 12 great wild street. | drury lane.” “a bite”: the first published reference to blake’s ghost of a flea? “a bite”: the first published reference to blake’s ghost of a flea? by angus whitehead angus whitehead (whitehead65_99@yahoo.co.uk) is assistant professor of english literature at the national institute of education, singapore. the literary gazette was an innovative and widely read weekly literary review initiated by the publisher henry colburn in 1817 and edited by the scottish journalist and antiquary william jerdan.the firm of henry colburn published an impressive and eclectic range of books, including novels, poetry, travel literature, accounts of contemporary warfare, and antiquarian writings and drawings. colburn published major works such as samuel pepys’s diary and (with richard bentley) an edition of mary shelley’s frankenstein, as well as works by “silver fork” novelists lady caroline lamb and lady charlotte bury, both of whom blake met (see peter garside, “colburn, henry [1784/5–1855],” odnb; g. e. bentley, jr., blake records, 2nd ed. [new haven: yale university press, 2004] [hereafter br(2)] 333-34). other notable works published by colburn include chateaubriand’s recollections of italy, england and america, the poetry of thomas campbell, the plays of joanna baillie, and the writings of james hogg. blake’s acquaintance marguerite, countess of blessington, as well as the poetess and novelist “l. e. l.” (letitia elizabeth landon), appeared first in the pages of the literary gazette. the newspaper operated from 5 catherine street, just off the strand, not far from william blake’s studio-apartment at 3 fountain court. on 18 august 1827, just six days after blake’s death, the gazette published the first obituary of the poet-artist. while praising blake’s work highly, it condemns the poet-artist’s neglect by his contemporaries: blake [has] been allowed to exist in a penury which most artists,—beings necessarily of a sensitive temperament,—would deem intolerable. pent, with his affectionate wife, in a close back-room in one of the strand courts, his bed in one corner, his meagre dinner in another, a ricketty table holding his copper-plates in progress, his colours, books …, his large drawings, sketches and mss.;—his ancles frightfully swelled, his chest disordered, old age striding on, his wants increased, but not his miserable means and appliances: even yet was his eye undimmed, the fire of his imagination unquenched, and the preternatural, never-resting activity of his mind unflagging.literary gazette no. 552 (18 aug. 1827): 541. as bentley notes, it is likely that the obituary was written by the gazette’s chief contributor, the art critic william paulet carey, a blake enthusiast and former printmaker.br(2) 467fn; nicholas grindle, “carey, william paulet (1759–1839),” odnb. in a number of pamphlets and articles published between 1808 and 1819, carey had consistently lauded blake’s work as an artist, especially his designs for the grave.see br(2) 275 (1808), 302 (1810), 330 (1817), and 369 (1819). the pamphlet of dec. 1817 indicates that carey had not met blake by that time (see br[2] 332). in dec. 1820 a “william blake,” together with john varley and other artists, signed a testimonial as to carey’s experience and competence to become keeper of “a select and valuable collection of paintings, engravings and other works of art” (br[2] 374). the detailed obituary suggests that carey (or whoever the author was) had actually visited blake at fountain court. the earliest published reference recorded in blake records to blake’s encounter with the ghost of a flea is the obituary of september 1827 in the literary chronicle;literary chronicle (1 sept. 1827): 557-58. see br(2) 468-70. three months before the poet-artist’s death, however, the literary gazette had featured a fleeting reference to the flea. on saturday, 12 may 1827, below a short review of william raddon’s recent engraving of henry fuseli’s the nightmare, appeared a markedly less sympathetic review titled “mr. puff’s morning-guns!! k. [sic] [henry] heath delt. published by t. mclean.”literary gazette no. 538 (12 may 1827): 300. the title of the print refers to richard brinsley sheridan’s the critic, act 2, scene 2. mr. puff at tilbury fort exclaims, “what the plague! three morning guns! there never is but one! ay, this is always the way at the theatre. give these fellows a good thing, and they never know when to have done with it” (richard brinsley sheridan, the school for scandal and other plays, ed. michael cordner [oxford: oxford university press, 1998] 320). for a further reference to the subject of the print and mr. puff, see “twelfth night at almack’s,” london magazine (1 feb. 1827): 205. 1. “mr puff’s morning-gun’s!!” (see enlargement) from a. m. broadley, “annals of the haymarket,” vol. 1, p. 524. image and permission courtesy of westminster city archives. the review is severely critical of heath’s print (illus. 1), even though heath presumably intended it as satire and not advertising:little is known of the engraver and caricaturist henry heath. dorothy george describes him as “a competent and versatile but very imitative caricaturist” (quoted by simon heneage, “heath, henry [fl. 1822–1842],” under “heath, william [1794/5–1840],” odnb). this caricature represents a fellow in some sort of military uniform firing off a bottle of pseudo-champagne, mounted as a cannon, and marked 5s. 6d. we fancy, from the accessories, it is meant to satirise one of the many quacks with which this london hive of ours abounds. but in our opinion, mere self-sought notoriety is not a good ground for caricature: there ought to be a certain station in life, an influence however small, a character in society however slight and dubious, otherwise the caricaturist is playing the game of the charlatan. there are men of very paltry ambition, even where the base thirst of dishonest gains may not prompt them to seek, in being talked of, the chance of catching gulls: thus waterton the traveller is (not against his own wish, we are told, but solely for notoriety’s sake) figuring in the print-shops riding on a cayman or crocodile! thus too our walls are chalked, not only near london, but to remote parts of the country—for, as the fools are spread over the whole land, the knaves seek them as far and wide as they can with the means in their power. then, who would caricature dr. eady or the blacking manufacturers? such subjects as these are no better than noxious insects. the reviewer concludes, “c. varley and blake (the illustrator of ‘the grave’) caricatured a flea—though also a bite—a more respectable and much worthier creature than the puffing species alluded to.” the author of the review, almost certainly carey, writing in the spring of 1827 and still within blake’s lifetime, is clearly confident that his readers will recognize a reference to blake as “the illustrator of ‘the grave,’” thereby suggesting that blake remained a familiar name two decades on. the brief allusion to the caricature of a flea appears to assume that some of the readers were also familiar with blake’s encounter with the “spiritual apparition of a flea”john varley’s description in his zodiacal physiognomy (1828); see g. e. bentley, jr., the stranger from paradise: a biography of william blake (new haven: yale university press, 2001) 377-78. sometime between 1819 and 1825, the period in which blake and john varley’s midnight séances took place at blake’s residences at 17 south molton street and later fountain court.see br(2) 346-69. however, the reviewer wrongly identifies blake’s partner as “c. varley,” the inventor and painter cornelius, rather than his elder brother, the astrologer and landscape artist john. martin butlin has proposed that copies of the visionary heads may have been made using cornelius varley’s patented graphic telescope,see martin butlin, “blake, the varleys, and the patent graphic telescope,” william blake: essays in honour of sir geoffrey keynes, ed. morton d. paley and michael phillips (oxford: clarendon press, 1973) 294-304. but cornelius is not known to have had any other involvement with the project. either the gazette’s reviewer was poorly informed, or (less likely) it is a typo (c. for j.). in any case, the fleeting reference suggests that blake’s encounter with the ghost of a flea was already a story familiar among literary and artistic circles in the metropolis. the reviewer also mentions that varley and blake “caricatured a flea.” the idea that blake’s drawing, as much human in shape as flea, is somehow satirical in nature is a novel one, differing from john varley’s and allan cunningham’s later accounts. the suggestion is of interest, as eighteen months later blake’s representation of the ghost of a flea would enter print culture through john linnell’s engravings for varley’s zodiacal physiognomy (illus. 2). 2. linnell’s engravings of the “ghost of a flea” for varley’s treatise on zodiacal physiognomy. images and permission courtesy of robert n. essick. varley also promises a full-length engraving, which never appeared; the drawing of the flea in its entirety (below) is from the small blake-varley sketchbook, now dispersed. image and permission courtesy of a private collection, uk. in addition, the reviewer’s discussion of blake and varley is set in the context of criticism of heath’s choice of subject for his engraving, “a fellow in some sort of military uniform firing off a bottle of pseudo-champagne, mounted as a cannon, and marked 5s. 6d.” an examination of the print (illus. 1) reveals further details: hung outside a building labeled above its arches “opera cannonade” is a sign reading “sparkling / & creaming / champaigne / 5s_6d / per bottle.” the name of the building and the “champagne,” as well as the suspiciously cheap price of the beverage, enable us to identify the “quack” as charles wright, a prominent vintner selling champagne and other wines from his premises at the opera colonnade, haymarket, at the western end of the strand.see a descriptive account of the second royal gala festival, at stratford-upon-avon (1830) 43. in addition to this circumstantial evidence, his name appears on the building and under heath’s signature. wright appears to have enjoyed the enthusiastic patronage of george iv and numerous members of the nobility and gentry. as john strachan has observed, wright’s was “the most notable brand of champagne in the period.”john strachan, advertising and satirical culture in the romantic period (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2007) 39. he aggressively marketed his champagne and other drinks through advertisements featuring verse in journals such as leigh hunt’s examiner.see, for example, examiner no. 981 (19 nov. 1826): 751 (col. 2, section 6). wright used lines from lord byron and from thomas moore’s poetry, as well as copywritten epigrams and acrostics, to advertise his product in the times during the summer of 1826 (strachan 39-42). however, wright was also satirized in a number of magazines of the period; several allusions carry either implicit or overt suggestions that his champagne was sham.see literary gazette no. 515 (2 dec. 1826): 766. in his satirical poem the age reviewed (1827), robert montgomery paired wright with the gazette’s owner, colburn, who was notorious for his aggressive sales tactics.strachan 258. see also george daniel’s mockery of wright in his poem the conversazione (1835). wright’s advertising strategies are satirized in the popular comic song “because ’tis in the papers” (see thomas hudson, comic songs [london: gold and walton, 1828] 7). the literary gazette was clearly aware of the identity of the “quack” that heath was either satirizing or puffing in his print: the paper had recently been ordered to pay damages to wright for libelous remarks that it had made about his champagne.see note 14, above. in its attack on heath’s print and its subject, the review goes on to mention three other london “quacks,” or insistent self-publicists, of the period: “waterton the traveller” refers to naturalist charles waterton, who wrote, “i have attacked and slain a modern python, and rode on the back of a cayman [south american crocodile] close to the water’s edge; a very different situation from that of a hyde-park dandy on his sunday prancer before the ladies.”charles waterton, wanderings in south america, the north-west of the united states, and the antilles, in the years 1812, 1816, 1820, and 1824 (london: j. mawman, 1825) 242. “dr. eady” was a notorious and apparently mentally unstable medical swindler operating in london during the mid-1820s.see “annals of quackery. caution to the public. eady’s escape from st. luke’s!” medical adviser, and guide to health and long life (17 july 1824): 77-79. in his allusion to “the blacking manufacturers,” the reviewer is referring to robert warren’s blacking manufactory at 30 strand, several blocks west of the premises of the gazette. the author and journalist william frederick deacon, warren’s friend, produced a book of parodies of contemporary poets dedicated to the king, with each parody praising warren’s blacking.see warreniana (london: longman, hurst, rees, orme, brown, and green, 1824). t. a. b. corley notes that “warren was one of the first to market a nationally advertised household product in britain. his press publicity featured verses; one poet, alexander kemp, boasted of having written two hundred of these offerings. a popular theme, of a cat spitting at its reflection in a well-blacked hessian boot, was illustrated by george cruikshank.”t. a. b. corley, “warren, robert (1784/5–1849),” odnb. warren, then, pioneered advertising techniques, including verse and print culture, to promote and sell his product—techniques soon utilized by wright in the advertising of his champagne. as the reviewer recognizes, some of these “quacks,” notably waterton, were not averse to celebrating their eccentricities for notoriety, publicity, and self-gain. after discussing these four hoaxers or self-promoters, he makes the brief allusion to blake: “c. varley and blake … caricatured a flea … also a bite.” as the italics suggest, bite was contemporary slang or cant. the oed defines it in this context as “an imposition, a deception; what is now called a ‘sell’; passing from the notion of playful imposition or hoax, to that of swindle or fraud.”the oed notes that this term was used as early as 1711 by richard steele in spectator no. 156: “it was a common bite with him, to lay suspicions that he was favoured by a lady's enemy.” in describing blake’s drawing of the ghost of a flea as “a bite,” the reviewer appears to be making a series of puns, firstly on “bite” simultaneously referring to hoaxes and flea bites and secondly on “noxious insects” simultaneously referring to four celebrated quacks and the subject of blake’s “caricature.” in addition, he situates blake and varley and the ghost of a flea as a notorious contemporary phenomenon in the same category as the productions of the cayman-riding waterton, the medical quack eady, warren the blacking manufacturer, and wright the purveyor of sham champagne. cunningham and later blake biographers have represented blake’s flea encounter as evidence of the poet-artist’s eccentricity, madness, or visionary abilities.see, for example, allan cunningham, the lives of the most eminent british painters, sculptors, and architects (london: john murray, 1830) 2: 167-71; bentley, the stranger from paradise 368-82. however, james king has suggested that blake may have been humoring or playing a joke on his friend: blake’s resulting drawing owes more to the engraving of a flea under a microscope in robert hooke’s micrographia, where the proboscis of the insect is described as “slip[ping] in and out’, than to a visionary experience. although blake had a powerful eidetic imagination, the appearances of achilles, corinna, laïs, herod, edward i and william wallace smack more of tomfoolery on blake’s part than a serious interest in phantoms of the night.james king, william blake: his life (london: weidenfeld and nicolson, 1991) 214-15. see also robin hamlyn and michael phillips, william blake (london: tate, 2000) 190. the literary gazette review suggests that in the spring of 1827 blake’s vision and drawings of the ghost of a flea were not necessarily regarded as evidence of either his madness or visionary imagination, at least for the writer and some of his readers. instead, like king, some contemporaries may have interpreted the encounter as a knowing deception. for the reviewer, however, the ghost of a flea is not a case of blake’s humoring varley, but rather a hoax manufactured by the poet-artist and his friend. accurately or not, he appears to imply that they consciously concocted and encouraged the story for the sake of notoriety and publicity. for him, if the ghost of a flea is “a bite,” the joke is not on varley, but on contemporary (and perhaps future) “gulls” in london and “fools … spread over the whole land.” and yet blake and varley’s imagined flea is regarded by the reviewer as “more respectable and much worthier” than the “puffing species” of wright, warren, waterton, and eady. blake and stedman as costumiers blake and stedman as costumiers: curious copies of blake’s engravings in 1821 by g. e. bentley, jr. g. e. bentley, jr. (gbentley@chass.utoronto.ca) has been publishing about william blake and his circle since 1954. his william blake in the desolate market (mcgill-queen’s university press) is in the final stages of proof. the with thanks to robert brandeis, scholar, librarian, and friend.costume is correct according to authentic monumentsblake, descriptive catalogue (1809), ¶18, and “blake’s chaucer: an original engraving” (1810), ¶9 (william blake’s writings, ed. g. e. bentley, jr. [oxford: clarendon press, 1978] 2: 834, 866). blake’s quarto engravings of sensational scenes for his friend john gabriel stedman’s narrative, of a five years’ expedition, against the revolted negroes of surinam, 2 vols. (1796), were perhaps more widely seen by his contemporaries than any others he made.  not only did the first edition sell very well—i have traced 138 copies in public collections—but it was reprinted in the less common edition of 1806 (26 copies) and the rather uncommon edition of 1813 (11 copies). though the designer is stedman, an interesting amateur artist, it seems likely that some aspects of the engravings are due to the engravers.  as robert essick comments, stedman’s amateur drawing is not without charm, but his figures lack grace, and his sense of composition (although perhaps faithful to the scene portrayed) falls below contemporary standards of proportion and balance.  thus it seems fair to believe that the dignified postures and expressiveness of the features in blake’s plates were in part the work of the engraver.robert n. essick, william blake’s commercial book illustrations (oxford: clarendon press, 1991) 71. a stedman drawing not engraved for the narrative is in gordon n. ray, the illustrator and the book in england from 1790 to 1914 (new york: pierpont morgan library; london: oxford university press, 1976) 9. in his 1785 diary, stedman remarked that “my talents for drawing were so universally admired that my parents were advised … to encourage me since i would make a figure by proper cultivation not inferiour even to rubens or van dyk.”john gabriel stedman, narrative …, ed. richard price and sally price (baltimore: johns hopkins university press, 1988) xliii. an example of the changes made by engravers to his drawings is his sketch of the manner of sleeping &c. in the forest, showing heavy jungle and a fire built under the hammock to keep off mosquitoes; barlow’s engraving of it in 1791 for the first edition shows open savannah and the fire clearly to one side.stedman, narrative …, ed. price and price, xliii, xlvi, fig. 7. further, stedman’s narrative was repeatedly reprinted abroad, often with prints,according to bentley, blake books (oxford: clarendon press, 1977) 624, the stedman copperplates were apparently not reused in editions of halle (1797), paris (1799), leiden (1799), lausanne (1799), amsterdam (1800), stockholm (1800), london (?1809), milan (1818), and boston (1838). as 1. stedmans nachrichten von suriname, vols. 8-9 of m. c. sprengel, auswahl der besten ausländischen geographischen und statistischen nachrichten (halle, 1797), no engraving; 2. (hamburg, 1797), including stedman’s designs numbered 7, 19 (aboma snake), and 76 (graman quacy); 3. voyage à surinam et dans l’intérieur de la guiane …. avec une collection de 44 planches in-4º., trans. p. f. henry (paris: f. buisson, an vii [1798]), 3 vols., 8º, including stedman pls. 7, 11 (“a negro hung alive by the ribs”), 18-19, 35 (“flagellation of a female samboe slave”),the numbers on the stedman plates signed by or attributed to blake are 7, 11, 13, 18-19, 22, 25, 35, 42, 49, 52, 55, 68, 71, 76, 80.  they are centered beneath the imprint and are frequently trimmed off. 42, 49, 55, 68, and 76; 4. reize, trans. j. d. pasteur (leiden, 1799), 8º, with plates; 5. reize (amsterdam: johannes allart, 1799), 4 vols., almost the same plates as in the paris edition; 6. capitain johan stedmans dagbok öfwer sina fälttåg i surinam, jämte beskrifning om detta nybygges inwånare och öfriga märkwärdigheter, trans. samuel ödmann (stockholm: johan pfeiffer, 1800), 8º, taken from sprengel, stedman pl. 19; and 7. viaggio al surinam e nell’interno della guiana ossia relazione di cinque anni di corse e di osservazioni fatte in questo interessante e poco conosciuto paese …. versione dal francese del cav. [bartolomeo] borghi (milan: giambattista sonzogno, 1818), 4 vols., small 8º, including stedman pls. 7, 11, 19, 35, 49, 55, 68, 76, colored.the designs reproduced in these reprints are identified in stedman, narrative …, ed. price and price, lxxiii-lxxx. blake’s plates for stedman were also adapted in some surprising contexts. robert brandeis noticed this entry in the swann (new york) catalogue of printed and manuscript african-americana, 21 feb. 2008, and immediately brought it to my attention: almost surrealistic scene 77 (slavery and abolition.) [blake, william].  the skinning of the aboma snake shot by cap. stedman.  untitled hand-tinted version of one of william blake’s engravings for john gabriel stedman’s “narrative of a five year’s expedition against the revolted negroes of surinam.”  7 x 9 3/8 inches; small embossed stamp of bramati, “costume antico e moderno.” [milan, 1818] estimate $400-600 probably from the italian edition of stedman’s “narrative.”  this version of blake’s engraving has added to it a smiling black gentleman who appears to be standing in a poppy field.  according to stedman, the snake was 22 feet long. nothing like this plate has been recorded in connection with blake before, and there are a number of very puzzling features of the design reproduced (illus. 1) and of the description of it. 1. giulio ferrario, il costume antico e moderno, vol. 8 (milan, 1821), pl. 59: “graman quacy etc.”  note that the reproductions here are reduced in size (see enlargement). fisher rare book library, university of toronto. in the first place, the surrealistic scene combines two engravings by blake after stedman’s designs: “the skinning of the aboma snake, shot by cap. stedman” (illus. 2) and “the celebrated graman quacy” (illus. 3) in stedman’s narrative (1796), vol. 1, at p. 174 (18.3 x 13.7 cm.), and vol. 2, at p. 348 (18.5 x 13.4 cm.); the dimensions of the design (17.8 x 24.5 cm.)the dimensions of the print given in the swann catalogue (7 x 9 3/8″=17.8 x 24.5 cm.) are for the image only; the platemark is 19.7 x 26.0 cm. (in the toronto set). are slightly smaller than the combination of the designs of these two prints would give (18.5 x 27.1 cm.). 2. (left) “the skinning of the aboma snake, shot by cap. stedman,” from j. g. stedman’s narrative, of a five years’ expedition, against the revolted negroes of surinam (1796), pl. 19 (vol. 1, at p. 174). bentley collection, victoria university in the university of toronto. 3. (right) “the celebrated graman quacy,” stedman, narrative, pl. 76 (vol. 2, at p. 348). bentley collection, victoria university in the university of toronto. further, the layout has been altered from portrait (vertical) to landscape (horizontal), with a number, 59, above the top right corner of the framing line.  to be bound in a conventional volume, higher than it is wide, the print would have to be turned sideways. in the second place, the print comes not “from the italian edition of stedman’s ‘narrative’” of milan, 1818, with small octavo plates, but from an entirely separate work in folio, as brandeis brilliantly discovered. the crucial clue is “bramati,”there were three bramati brothers, all engravers: giuseppe (1795-1871), antonio (1799-1875), and luigi (1801-60) (dizionario biografico degli italiani, vol. 13 [1971]). giuseppe is the engraver of the ferrario plates. whose name appears below the right corner of the design and in the embossing.  the surrealistic scene comes from an enormous and enormously complicated compilation in seventeen folio volumes by giulio ferrario, which was published simultaneously in italian and french editions, sometimes mixed together, such as the sets in the british library and the fisher rare book library of the university of toronto.  the french version is called le costume ancien et moderne ou histoire du gouvernement, de la milice, de la religion, des arts, sciences et usages de tous les peuples anciens et modernes, d’après les monumens de l’antiquité et accompagné de dessins analogues au sujet par le docteur jules ferrario (milan: de l'imprimerie de l'éditeur, 1817-26). the italian version is entitled il costume antico e moderno, o, storia del governo, della milizia, della religione, delle arti, scienze ed usanze di tutti i popoli antichi e moderni provata coi monumenti dell’antichità e rappresentata cogli analoghi disegni dal dottor giulio ferrario. it was originally issued in 143 weekly installments, with over 1500 folio prints sold both plain and colored.  there were later editions in florence (26 8º vols., 1823-28), naples (20 vols., 17 cm., 1831-42), livorno (100 12º vols., 1830), and turin (26 vols., 22 cm., 1834). sometimes sets were sold, or at least survive, with only a single continent or even a single country.  the portions devoted to the americas are in vol. 7 (1820), with 87 prints (called america vol. 1), and vol. 8 (1821), with 80 prints (called america vol. 2, and on the half-title page costumes de tous les peuples de l’amérique seconde partie amérique méridionale). elaborate efforts were made by ferrario to ensure authenticity.  the half-titles are stamped with the signature of “giulio ferrario,” and each print is embossed with a very small circle labeled bramati, “costume antico e moderno,” presumably to frustrate forgers and imitators in the absence of international copyright.  after all, bramati was borrowing stedman’s images without notice.  when laurence sterne wanted to guarantee the authenticity of the authorized editions of tristram shandy, he signed each copy himself.  this was much more time-consuming than stamping and embossing, and it could not be delegated to a mechanic—but on the other hand, sterne was signing only one leaf per volume, whereas the bramati embossing appears eighty times in the second volume of ferrario’s america. the engraving and coloring of the bramati prints are professionally skillful.  most of the scenes are landscape dimensions and printed sideways. there are at least four plates derived from blake’s plates in stedman.the model for the ferrario prints cannot be “the italian edition [1818] of stedman’s ‘narrative,’” as the swann catalogue suggests, for the ferrario prints copy stedman pls. 7-8, 19, 32, 35, 49, 53, 68, 71, and 76, and of these only pls. 7, 19, 35, 49, 68, and 76 appear in the milan 1818 edition; pls. 8, 32, 53, and 71 echoed in ferrario are not in the milan edition.  indeed, most of the information in the section of ferrario’s text “de la guyanne” seems to be derived from stedman, “traduction italienne” (8: 406).  for instance, there is an account of “le fameux graman-quacy” “avec le bel habit et la médaille d’or dont le prince d’orange lui fit présent … avec sa tête chauve et son habillement écarlate et bleu, galonné en or, tel qu’on le voit ici à la planche 59” (8: 406).  and the young 22' boa snake, which was still alive when it was hung up, is described in the text: “voyez la planche ci dessus” (8: 409). the four ferrario plates derived from blake’s represent pl. 59 (see illus. 1): “graman quacy etc.,” signed “bramati f.” at bottom right, “bramati fec” at bottom left; pl. 62 (see illus. 4): “planteurs de surinam,” signed “g. bramati dis. e inc.” at bottom left, “d. k. bonatti l’a.t.” at bottom right; pl. 63 (see illus. 10): “nègres sous un bon maître,” “g. bramati dis”, “d. k. bonatti l’a.t.”; pl. 65 (see illus. 12): “chasseurs négres [sic] affranchis à la poursuite des rebelles,” signed as in pl. 63. the anomaly of the celebrated graman quacy calmly gazing at the viewer rather than watching the sensational scene behind him is explained by the fact that in the original he was not even in the same volume as the aboma snake—besides, the important feature in le costume ancien et moderne was not officially what they did but what they wore or, in the case of the slaves and the snake, what they didn’t wear. in fact, however, the text does not focus exclusively or even very extensively on costume, and some of the scenes depicted are merely landscapes.  ferrario might have appropriately adopted stedman’s subtitle, elucidating the history of that country, and describing its productions, viz. quadrupedes, birds, fishes, reptiles, trees, shrubs, fruits, & roots; with an account of the indians of guiana, & negroes of guinea … illustrated with … elegant engravings. there are significant differences between blake’s engravings of “the celebrated graman quacy” (illus. 3) and “the skinning of the aboma snake” (illus. 2) and bramati’s print of “graman quacy etc.” (illus. 1).  for one thing, bramati’s hunter, presumably stedman himself, has picked up his gun from where he had left it carelessly leaning against the tree, put shoes on (stedman customarily went barefoot), and turned round, so that we can see the powder horn slung across his chest.  he has also slung on his sword, which he may have been holding in his left hand in blake’s plate.  the two naked slaves at the foot of the tree have been joined rather awkwardly by a third heaving on the snake-line with his back to the tree.  the tree has gained a good deal of foliage, the little boat and the water on which it floats are gone, the serpent has lost his spots, and his tongue, so ominously flickering in blake’s version, is scarcely visible in bramati’s. the celebrated graman quacy has been altered even more.  his silver-headed walking stick has been moved from his left hand to his right, his extravagant hat is tucked under his right arm rather than flourished in his right hand, his metal shoe buckles are barely visible, and he is standing stolidly rather than walking with a fearful and ingratiating expression.  more strikingly, his background has lost its fortress at the right and the house and tree plantation at the left. the “poppy field” at which quacy points in ferrario (but not in stedman) is the quessia amara, whose therapeutic benefits he pointed out to europeans and which was therefore named after him. to unite the two quite disparate scenes, bramati has extended quacy’s foreground across that of stedman and his aboma snake. the sensational snake and blake’s busy background have been simplified by bramati to emphasize the costumes, or the lack of them.  bramati’s four slaves and the snake appear en déshabillé, stedman’s shirt and quacy’s nether garment and part of his extravagant hat are dark pink in the fisher copy, quacy’s coat is dark blue, the blossoms are touched with red, and the serpent is pale green. some copies of the first edition of stedman’s narrative (1796) were commercially colored, but it seems unlikely that the copy of stedman that bramati copied was colored—or that his colorists cared if it was. blake, of course, was a professional artist and stedman was only an enthusiastic amateur. stedman’s designs do not survive, but it is generally assumed that blake tidied them up and, probably inadvertently, europeanized them.  blake had never seen surinam or an aboma snake, and the poses and features of the individuals are likely to have been classicized, especially in the slaves struggling to hoist up the snake. blake and stedman would doubtless have been as astonished as bob brandeis and i were to see the sensational or naturalistic scenes of stedman’s narrative converted to costume fodder. graman (great man) quacy was a well-known figure in surinam who was crucially helpful to stedman in tracing the “revolted negroes” to their jungle fastnesses.  quacy’s right ear was cut off by an indian chief who was betrayed by him—and in stedman’s portrait his right ear is not visible. stedman wrote that quacy “came to shew me his fine coat, gold medal, &c. which he had received as a present from the prince of orange, in holland.”stedman, narrative … (london: j. johnson, 1796) 2: 346. presumably the elegant and odd european clothes and medal that quacy is wearing are from the prince of orange. in their edition of stedman, richard and sally price speculate that the prevalence today of the name quacy in surinam and the west indies may be due to the notoriety of graman quacy. however, this is probably not the case.  many years ago, when our daughter julia took us to a concert by the extraordinary west indian poet and singer linton quacy johnson, i sent him a note backstage remarking on the speculation of the prices.  six months later he very kindly replied, suggesting that perhaps the prices were unaware that in the part of africa from which his people had come, “quacy” means “sunday,” and that children born on sunday are likely to be named quacy.according to wikipedia (akan names), among the akan people of ghana and the ivory coast, children are frequently named after days of the week, such as “kwesi” for sunday. 4. “planteurs de surinam,” ferrario, il costume, vol. 8 (1821), pl. 62 (see enlargement). fisher rare book library, university of toronto. ferrario pl. 62, “planteurs de surinam” (illus. 4), has a particularly intricate iconographical background.  the woman at the left is stedman’s wife/mistress, the fifteen-year-old joanna, represented in stedman pl. 8 (illus. 5), reversed, with new decorations in her hair.  the stedman print is described merely as “a female mulatto”mulatto, from the spanish mulato, mule, is an individual with one black and one white parent. in the directions for placing the plates. the woman beside her with a hat is the “female quadroon slave of surinam,”a quadroon had one black grandparent, and an octoroon is the offspring of a white and a quadroon. engraved by perry for stedman pl. 32 (illus 6). clearly the stedman prints were to illustrate in part the distinction between mulatto and quadroon. in ferrario her position has been reversed. 5. (left) “joanna,” stedman, narrative, pl. 8 (vol. 1, at p. 88). bentley collection, victoria university in the university of toronto. 6. (right) “female quadroon slave of surinam,” stedman, narrative, pl. 32 (vol. 1, at p. 296). bentley collection, victoria university in the university of toronto. the almost-nude woman hanging from a tree is adapted from stedman’s pl. 35, “flagellation of a female samboe slave,”a sambo was an individual with mixed black, indian, and white blood.  later the term became intensely pejorative. engraved by blake (illus. 7).  in ferrario her breast is not in profile and the positions of the whippers have been altered. the slave being beaten may be adapted from stedman’s pl. 71, “the execution of breaking on the rack,” not signed but attributed to blake (illus. 8).  in ferrario, the victim is standing, not prone, and there are two executioners. the man smoking a pipe and the bare-breasted woman pouring his morning potation is stedman’s pl. 49, “a surinam planter in his morning dress,” engraved by blake (illus. 9).  he has been placed in an arcade that has no precedent in stedman but may be characteristic of milan, where ferrario’s plate was engraved. 7. (top left) “flagellation of a female samboe slave,” stedman, narrative, pl. 35 (vol. 1, at p. 326). bentley collection, victoria university in the university of toronto. 8. (top right) “the execution of breaking on the rack,” stedman, narrative, pl. 71 (vol. 2, at p. 296). bentley collection, victoria university in the university of toronto. 9. (bottom) “a surinam planter in his morning dress,” stedman, narrative, pl. 49 (vol. 2, at p. 56). bentley collection, victoria university in the university of toronto. ferrario pl. 63, “nègres sous un bon maître” (illus. 10), is copied from blake’s “family of negro slaves from loango” (illus. 11), reversed, with a reclining nude added in the background at left and a precipitous cliff at right in order to convert the portrait shape to landscape format.  the woman is more european in ferrario, her clothes are the same pattern in blake but the skirt is blue and the top white in ferrario, her pipe has much more smoke, the toddler is between the adults, and the ferrario man looks directly at the woman.  the scene is described in ferrario 8: 433.  ferrario says little of bad slave-masters and does not reproduce blake’s “a negro hung alive by the ribs to a gallows,” stedman pl. 11. 10. “nègres sous un bon maître,” ferrario, il costume, vol. 8 (1821), pl. 63 (see enlargement). fisher rare book library, university of toronto. 11. “family of negro slaves from loango,” stedman, narrative, pl. 68 (vol. 2, at p. 280). bentley collection, victoria university in the university of toronto. pl. 65, “chasseurs négres [sic] affranchis à la poursuite des rebelles” (illus. 12), adapts blake’s “a coromantyn free negro, or ranger, armed” (illus. 13), with a bayonet added, plus soldiers coming up the crest of a hill to the right and omitting the background. the rebarbative individual to the left is apparently adapted from “a rebel negro armed & on his guard” (illus. 14), his head and left arm lowered; the ax, at his left side in ferrario, is at his right side in stedman. the middle thug is closely related to the one at the left, but the third has no precedent in stedman.  the skull and bone are from “a negro hung alive by the ribs to a gallows.” the scene is described in ferrario 8: 437.  the single ranger is clad in a red bandanna and buff trousers in the fisher copy. 12. “chasseurs négres [sic] affranchis à la poursuite des rebelles,” ferrario, il costume, vol. 8 (1821), pl. 65 (see enlargement). fisher rare book library, university of toronto. 13. (left) “a coromantyn free negro, or ranger, armed,” stedman, narrative, pl. 7 (vol. 1, at p. 80). bentley collection, victoria university in the university of toronto. 14. (right) “a rebel negro armed & on his guard,” stedman, narrative, pl. 53 (vol. 2, at p. 88). bentley collection, victoria university in the university of toronto. other works of blake’s time contain reproductions of his stedman engravings: 1. john pinkerton, ed., a general collection of the best and most interesting voyages and travels in all parts of the world; many of which are now first translated into english. digested on a new plan. by john pinkerton … illustrated with plates, vol. 14 (london: longman, hurst, rees, orme, and brown, and cadell and davies, 1813); at p. 257 is “the skinning of the aboma snake”; 2. r. p. forster, a collection of the most celebrated voyages & travels, from the discovery of america to the present time … carefully selected from writers of different nations (newcastle upon tyne: printed and published by mackenzie and dent, 1816), 8º, 80 parts in 4 vols., with 35 plates including blake’s “execution of a negro in surinam” (called “a negro hung alive by the ribs to a gallows” in stedman) and “the skinning of the boa snake”; 3. gottlieb tobias wilhelm, unterhaltungen über den menschen, 3 vols., 196 folding plates (vienna, 1819), reproduces “a female negro slave, with a weight chained to her ancle,” engraved by bartolozzi, and the skinning of the aboma snake; 4. anon., travels in south america (dublin: john jones, 1824), woodcuts of “the mecoo & kishee kishee monkeys” and “the skinning of the aboma snake.” blake’s father and brother kept a hosiery and haberdashery shop over which he was born and where he lived for at least the first fourteen years of his life, and he would have been familiar with the ambitions and vagaries of sartorial fashion.  as a professional engraver, he made prints such as those for stedman that incidentally represented the costumes of australia, england, france, greece (ancient), the holy land, italy (roman and renaissance), the south pacific, spain, and surinam.  however, the only explicit fashion plates he made were the two that represented “the morning amusements of her royal highness the princess royal & her 4 sisters” and “a lady in the full dress, & another in the most fashionable undress now worn” for the ladies new and polite pocket memorandum book for 1783 (1782). the only other engravings by blake that are known to have been copied in blake’s time outside britain were in lavater, aphorisms (dublin, 1790) and the fourth edition (boston and worcester [massachusetts], 1790), william hayley, the life of william cowper (new york, 1803), copying blake’s plates in the london edition of that year, and marie vollstonecraft, marie et caroline (paris, 1799), copying blake’s engravings after his own designs for mary wollstonecraft’s original stories (1791, 1796). 144 blake/an illustrated quarterly spring 2012 goods, which were to have been sold the next day, had not this good lady saved him the trouble of doing so.4 “mr clay of hercules buildings” can be identified as the blakes’ predecessor as ratepayer and resident at 13 hercules buildings, william clay.5 the short article in the evening mail indicates that clay’s housekeeper and his furniture still occupied 13 hercules buildings during the last week of january 1791. if william and catherine blake were unable to move into the house until the end of january, their move from 28 poland street to 13 hercules buildings can be dated between 24 january 1791, the earliest date we can assume clay vacated the premises after being robbed by his housekeeper,6 and 9 march 1791, when blake is first recorded as ratepayer for the property.7 4. evening mail 26 jan. 1791: 2, col. b. the article was reprinted verbatim in the “news in brief ” section of the times on friday 28 jan. (3, col. c). 5. “wm clay” is recorded as ratepayer for 13 hercules buildings in rate book entries for the second, third, and fourth quarters of 1790 (see br[2] 744fn). no other clay is listed among the ratepayers for the twenty-three other residences in hercules buildings in 1790. 6. i.e., “a few days” before the report appeared in the evening mail. 7. the fact that, according to the evening mail, clay’s furniture was “to have been sold the next day” suggests that about 24 jan. clay was in the process of vacating 13 hercules buildings in anticipation of the blakes’ moving in. n e w s l e t t e r blake goes online only last year at this time we announced that our content would be online in order to optimize the many advantages of publishing on the web—illustrations in color and more of them, looser restrictions on the length of issues, searchability, and greater sustainability due to lower production and mailing costs. after one transitional year of publishing online and printed issues in parallel, we are now phasing out the printed version. thus this spring issue is the last that will appear in print. with the upcoming summer 2012 issue (vol. 46, no. 1) blake will be published online only. we are investigating the possibilities for print on demand, whereby copies of an issue or an article would be produced as needed by a third-party vendor, from whom you would order directly rather than as part of your subscription. if print on demand proves feasible, we’ll let you know. individual subscribers will receive renewal reminders for vol. 46 as usual. back issues of the quarterly beginning with the first issue (1967) will gradually appear as part of the william blake archive <http://www.blakearchive.org> and be freely available there. preparation is well under way for a first installment. the most recent volumes of the quarterly from the last five years, however, will continue to be available only to subscribers on the blake site <http://www.blakequarterly.org>. mr. wily blake you blue-eyed devil you knew all along that the tyger washes itself in the blood of the lamb by paul miner denouement review: read, r. h. cromek, engraver, editor, and entrepreneur dennis m. read. r. h. cromek, engraver, editor, and entrepreneur. farnham: ashgate, 2011. xii + 182 pp. £55.00/$99.95, hardcover. reviewed by alexander s. gourlay alexander s. gourlay (agourlay@risd.edu) teaches at the rhode island school of design. going back more than thirty years, dennis read has published articles large and small about the activities of blake’s associate robert hartley cromek (1770–1812); in the most important of these, “the rival canterbury pilgrims of blake and cromek: herculean figures in the carpet” (modern philology, 1988), he showed that contrary to the account assembled by gilchrist and echoed by most of blake’s subsequent biographers, who hold that cromek stole the idea from blake, blake’s chaucer picture and engraving were conceived and created in response to the painting by thomas stothard and the projected engraving after it. now read has gathered together much of what else he has found out about cromek in a more comprehensive biography that concentrates on the busy final decade of cromek’s life, arguing persuasively that cromek has been (somewhat) misunderstood. born in yorkshire, cromek studied at first to be a lawyer, and then at eighteen came to london to learn engraving from the italian-born painter/engraver francesco bartolozzi. a twelve-page chapter covers cromek’s professional career from 1788 to the beginnings of the grave project in 1805; it focuses mostly on wheeling and dealing rather than cromek’s practice as an engraver, identifying major engraving projects and outlining early disputes with publishers and collaborators. it ends with a report from one of cromek’s friends that although cromek was “nominally an engraver; … his tastes and sympathies lay in another direction.” the artistic and artisanal aspects of cromek’s early career are treated as incidental: “engraving,” writes read, “… served cromek mainly as a way of introducing him to the art world and, more importantly, to the prominent figures who moved in it” (18). cromek certainly did lose interest in actual burin work after about 1805, and read shows that he often farmed out portions of his projects to others, but by the time he retreated from practice as an engraver he had spent almost half his life working in the trade, much of it in the more artistically ambitious end of the illustration business, even if he was not a creator of original designs. this chapter would be stronger if it included a survey and some more examples of cromek’s chalcographic output so that we could see his strengths and weaknesses, judge the trajectory of his career, or consider other ways that his engraving could shed light on his later projects, and on blake’s. for instance, did cromek try harder than blake did to conform to publishing fashions? how do cromek’s book engravings after stothard in the 1790s compare to those that blake did in the early 1780s? how about the illustrations to shakespeare after fuseli that both cromek and blake did for chalmers (not “chambers”) around 1803? does cromek’s work as an engraver of stothard shed any light on the relationship between publisher, engraver(s), and artist in the case of stothard’s chaucer picture? shelley m. bennett’s thomas stothard: the mechanisms of art patronage in england circa 1800 (1988) includes very handy (but not complete) lists by date of stothard’s works and engravings after him—a similar appendix of cromek’s engravings might assist scholars to assess cromek’s career for themselves. but the information in this chapter that is most relevant to comprehending cromek’s later dealings with blake is the ample evidence that long before he and blake fell out, cromek often dealt with his business associates with sharp elbows. the less perfunctory chapter on the history of cromek’s illustrated edition of robert blair’s the grave shows cromek in a more positive light than blake’s party has usually been willing to grant him. read carefully follows the contemporary records of cromek’s transactions and representations as the project evolved, showing that although plans changed in ways that worked out to blake’s disadvantage, cromek’s primary motivation appears to have been to ensure that his artistically and commercially ambitious project was a success. cromek’s elbows were as sharp as ever, and there is plenty of ungallant trimming in his business arrangements and shameless puffing in his promotions, but read convincingly demonstrates that cromek was never the villain that gilchrist and most of his successors have made him out to be. once again, read’s focus as a biographer is on elucidating the tactical calculations behind cromek’s commercial and promotional efforts rather than exploring the artistic thoughts of the various parties to the project. although the book reflects the recent rediscovery of blake’s lost designs for blair (and an appendix details the steps in that rediscovery), very little is made of them or their implications for improved understanding of cromek or blake or the published edition of the grave. because cromek’s most important design contribution to the blair project may have been to select the images that were actually engraved and published, the renewed availability of many of the rejected designs could have afforded insights into his thinking as an editor and book designer. the collision between blake and cromek over the blair project reflects a fundamental difference in the way the two men approached the making of art and the making of money; the succeeding episode in their relationship, the creation of competing chaucer paintings and engravings, appears to have been the result of mutual recognition of that difference, and here, read argues, it is blake’s biographers who have misunderstood what was going on. read refines and updates the arguments in his 1988 article, showing that contemporary first-party evidence indicates that long before blake showed any interest in illustrating chaucer, cromek and stothard had undertaken to create and promote a painting of chaucer’s pilgrims that could be the basis of a profitable large-scale engraving. like the illustrated edition of the grave, this was calculated as a middlebrow cultural/commercial project that would be both lucrative and prestigious for artist, engraver, and entrepreneur. stothard executed his part with his usual technical brilliance and shrewdly sentimental superficiality. his painting was calculated for broad appeal, offering gently satirical stereotypes, sunny english nostalgia, unchallenging literary pretentions—who wouldn’t love such a picturesque parade? certainly stothard’s concoction was a cannier offering to the market than the pious sublimity of blake’s grave designs, and blake seems to have decided that the commercial mechanism embodied in the picture and cromek’s campaign to exploit it constituted a challenge to everything he believed in. when cromek, mystified by the intensity of blake’s detestation, challenged him to create his own version of the subject, blake took him up on it, creating a picture with a vast allegorical program and an exhibition, advertisements, and descriptive catalogue to match the promotions of cromek. unlike his rivals, blake delivered his engraving roughly as scheduled, but was humiliated in the aftermath. even though both cromek and his chosen engraver, schiavonetti, died before their project could be completed, the stothard chaucer eventually achieved much of the success that cromek dreamed for it, becoming stothard’s most famous work. another project of cromek’s that impinges on blake’s biography, though indirectly, was the chalcographic society, later the society for the encouragement of the arts of engraving. what sounds like a benign professional organization was actually another, even more ambitious, version of the entrepreneurial approach to art marketing that drove the blair and chaucer projects: cromek, operating as the “secretary to the chalcographic society,” attempted to bring together the foremost patrons of the day with the heavyweights of painting and engraving to promote subscriptions for a series of twenty huge engravings from new british paintings—the patrons would confer social prestige, the painters would offer cultural prestige, and the engravers would enable mass production of freshly minted elite works of art, generating vast profits that could be tapped to benefit engravers and engraving, as well as others. the engraver john landseer (father of edwin) responded to the chalcographic society’s promotions by publishing an extravagantly critical letter to a member of the society for encouraging the art of engraving (july 1810), followed by a second and a third letter … (apparently published together but dated august and october 1810). these letters take on the scheme from a variety of angles—economic, political, ethical, practical, logical, aesthetic; the second two (with addenda) counterattack the insulting response to the first by robert hunt, blake’s nemesis. it is too bad that read was unable to locate these serially paginated pamphlets (which are bound together in the rosenwald collection, now available digitally as a “page turner” at <http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.rbc/rosenwald.04580>), and had to reconstruct landseer’s elegantly devastating critiques from the attempts to refute them by hunt and cromek. blake also responded to the controversy, probably about the same time, by drafting his famous unpublished “public address,” in which he excoriates the chalcographic society’s efforts in terms much less diplomatic than landseer’s; it seems likely to me that blake and landseer were aware of each other’s feelings at some point, but i have yet to see evidence of influence in either direction. by 1811 cromek’s most ambitious attempt to harness mammon by means of the arts had collapsed, partly due to landseer’s criticisms, but also because of problems with its huge scale and other causes, including cromek’s failing health. the subscribers were repaid, and mammon, of course, moved on, unperturbed. the remainder of the book, outlining cromek’s projects related to robert burns, will be of less interest to blake scholars, though there is further evidence of cromek’s ethical shortcomings, his resourcefulness as a promoter, and his energy in the last years despite tuberculosis; an appendix on travel by coach makes clear the hardships involved in his innovations in marketing the arts to the provinces. this is a valuable book, and the new information in it is likely to lead eventually to revision of key points of blake’s biography. but it is also a bit slapdash, as if an old manuscript was hastily updated to reflect recent discoveries. there are dismaying clusters of petty errors. in the first few paragraphs of the second chapter, for instance, robert is referred to as thomas (his father’s name), the family is traced to “kidwick,” rather than (presumably) kildwick in yorkshire, and the cromeks are said to move south rather than west from hull to manchester. most of the page citations from erdman’s poetry and prose are from the first edition rather than the now standard 1982 edition listed in the bibliography, and are thus wrong by several pages. it is not likely that there will be another biography of cromek, so these minor shortcomings are regrettable, but this book brings us substantially closer to understanding blake’s contrary counterpart and the world they shared. review: sibylle erle, blake, lavater and physiognomy sibylle erle. blake, lavater and physiognomy. london: legenda–modern humanities research association/maney publishing, 2010. studies in comparative literature 21. xii + 232 pp. £45.00/$89.50, hardcover. reviewed by tristanne connolly tristanne connolly (tristanne.connolly@uwaterloo.ca) is associate professor in the english department of st. jerome’s university in the university of waterloo. she is the author of william blake and the body (2002) and co-editor of the essay collections queer blake (2010) and sexy blake (2013) with helen p. bruder and blake 2.0: william blake in twentieth-century art, music and culture (2012) with steve clark and jason whittaker. “surely gold-dust may be descried in these notes,” gilchrist wrote about blake’s annotations to lavater’s aphorisms on man. “to me they seem mentally physiognomic …. we, as through a casually open window, glance into the artist’s room, and see him meditating at his work, graver in hand” (1: 66-67, cited in erle 8). sibylle erle’s book explores how professional work on lavater’s publications may have inspired blake’s meditations as he, “graver in hand,” worked on the urizen books. what is most impressive about her study is the careful detail on the publication history of lavater’s work and the personal relationships involved. these practical aspects of the development of physiognomy inform erle’s theorizing as much as the concept itself does. she uses physiognomy as a framework for thinking through a range of metaphysical and textual relations: original and copy, body and soul, (divine) creator and creature, text and image, work and edition, writer and reader. this is very much a focused study in which lavater predominates (perhaps even slightly over blake) and discussion of blake’s works concentrates on the book of urizen. the book is less strong on placing these figures in a wider contemporary context, but it seems unfair to demand this when the restricted focus paradoxically brings blake out of his familiar geographical context, famously limited to london, except for his “three years slumber on the banks of the ocean” (e 145) and, of course, frequent forays into eternity. erle’s thorough knowledge of the german and british settings puts her in an exceptionally good position to elucidate a blake connected to international literary, philosophical, and artistic circles, participating in collective publication projects that circulate knowledge between britain and the continent. indeed, one of the most attractive features of the book is its attention to the intellectual exchanges and emotional bonds between men. in erle’s view of the annotations to lavater, we see a blake who is, perhaps surprisingly, as eager to please, heartily agree, and find affinities as he is to denounce error. as erle points out, the heart he draws around his name and lavater’s “is an unusual choice for blake” (99). we also see, in lavater’s and fuseli’s impossibly large-scale ambitions for their work, and their unashamed resentments, that blake is not the only one who can come across as a crank. the close concentration sometimes leads to exclusive claims, such as “lavater’s physiognomy prompted blake to explore the body’s relationship with the soul” (5) and “the publication history of essays on physiognomy would have introduced blake to the idea of a self-reflective author … as well as an open text to which he expects his readers to contribute” (164), as if these things would not have occurred to blake without lavater, or from any other source. however, the arguments themselves are more convincing and nuanced than such overstatements suggest. erle’s prose also has a pleasing directness, but there are abrupt shifts of topic that can be somewhat bewildering, and that leave many enticing suggestions for the reader to extrapolate. because erle is placing so much detail in multilevel juxtaposition, there is a sense that she has all the facts and parallels present in her mind, while the reader must gradually catch up as the book builds momentum. and from this there is an eagerness in her readings, a desire to get to the “gold-dust.” the first few chapters seem torn, having their own arguments to make while they must also serve introductory purposes and lay factual and theoretical groundwork. chapter 1 considers what is a good copy, in light of the problem of an elusive original. erle introduces parallels between god’s creation of adam and eve, lavater’s search for authentic physiognomical portraits, and blake’s claim to “copy imagination” (e 574, quoted in erle 27). chapter 2 looks at portraits in book illustration and takes on, with reference to reynolds, the aesthetic issue of the general versus the particular, clearly crucial to physiognomy, where features of individual faces typify shared character traits. it is in chapter 3 and its accompanying interlude that the book begins to take off. in physiognomische fragmente, lavater chooses to use silhouettes as a faithful and objective form of likeness. erle describes the “silhouette chair” often used to trace these images, and tracks lavater’s failed efforts to invent a “stirnmesser,” or forehead-measuring device, that could be employed by any learner of physiognomy (70). she then ingeniously applies this to the book of urizen, reading it as a satire of “lavater’s attempts at combining perfect likeness with perfect measuring devices” (78): the shadows and nets in the poem are analogous to the silhouettes and the measuring grids imposed upon them in lavater’s book. when the eternals look at the “shadow of horror,” name him “urizen,” and classify him as a “demon,” they form their estimation of his character based on examining urizen’s silhouette (79). when los shapes urizen with “nets & gins,” these tools do not serve him very well in making good likenesses; the body always resists (82). the implications are intriguing as they apply to orc’s birth. since the flaming child emits light, the tent imposed by the eternals becomes a screen for silhouettes (89). it comes out at the end of erle’s study that perhaps orc is not, after all, one of the very few in blake born in the ordinary way: she argues he is a case of “creation by shadow-casting” (195), with comparison to the incarnation. while lavater’s oeuvre moves from silhouette to portrait in a quest for good likeness, blake shows it is enitharmon’s body, not los’s machines, that can turn a shadow into flesh and blood (197). chapters 4 and 5 are dedicated to aphorisms on man, first examining fuseli’s role as translator and very hands-on editor, justified by his intimate knowledge of the author in this “labour of love” for lavater (99). it is interesting that the instructions for annotating aphorisms were an addition by fuseli (98), turning the text into an interactive exercise also based on fellowship: agreeing or disagreeing amiably with the personality who wrote the aphorisms, and showing the resulting textual physiognomic profile to friends. chapter 5 analyzes the layers of blake’s annotations, seeing him as more than merely responding, playing the role of friend and editor, noting not only “where he differs from lavater” but also “where lavater failed to understand himself” (121). one notable point made in this chapter is that nathaniel tucker, in his translation of swedenborg’s the wisdom of angels, concerning divine love and divine wisdom in 1788, refers in a footnote to aphorisms on man before fuseli’s translation was published, revealing an earlier awareness of the book in england, and among swedenborgians. this is particularly excellent textual history sleuthing, as the “footnote disappeared from the second edition” in 1816. another fine offering in this chapter is an extended and multifaceted explication of blake’s rather puzzling biblical reference to the ark of the covenant against aphorism number 533.  erle’s insights on “tensions between text and image” (146) are at their most incisive in chapter 6, tracing the publication project of henry hunter’s translation of essays on physiognomy. one curious detail is that, in the production of this multi-volume opus, “because the full-page designs were issued as soon as the engravers had finished them, and not necessarily in the same order that the printed text was published, they frequently appear in fascicles with unrelated text” (135), drawing attention to a way in which blake’s seemingly bizarre disjunctions have more in common with conventional printing than might be expected. hunter’s edition made much of the improvement of the illustrations from previous versions, but this emphasis, as erle’s analysis shows, only underscores how often lavater’s accompanying text criticizes the flaws in the designs. his text is a supplement to correct the image that fails to represent the elusive original. this, of course, is personal, since it affects the reputations of the artists involved (especially fuseli, as criticism of the previous french translation had targeted his illustrations). further, personal knowledge is appealed to: where lavater knows the person being represented, his physiognomical conclusions can be verified, and the inaccuracies of the portrait revealed, by reference to the actual person. comparisons with the original are invited also in a debate over heads engraved after raphael (143). in both cases, access is quite exclusive. blake, for one, was not in the position to test a raphael engraving against a raphael. chapter 7 brings out what is implied in lavater’s (and blake’s) taking on the task “to edit and illustrate the sixth day of creation” (173). like biblical editors such as alexander geddes, “physiognomists are obliged to identify and omit” what appears to be corrupt in the received versions of god’s works (182). the overview of geddes and lowth, paine and priestley seems somewhat obligatory, though the references to paine emphasize the idea of being able to agree and disagree with the bible as a text like aphorisms on man, and suggest that lavater’s books on physiognomy might function, in light of paine’s arguments, as “proof for revelations” or “evidence” that “god created man in his likeness” (173). this chapter adds anatomical illustration as another parallel attempt at accurate representation.  the figures erle discusses are william hunter as professor of anatomy at the royal academy when blake studied there, and lavater’s son johann heinrich lavater, who published an introduction to anatomy for artists in 1824. he visited the royal academy in 1789, so erle imagines blake might have encountered him then through fuseli. it is unfortunate that there doesn’t seem to be a definite connection between blake, or lavater, and the other figure erle considers on this topic, ebenezer sibly, because the material is intriguing. also, given her attention to the reputation of physiognomy as a pseudoscience, one would be curious to hear what erle makes of sibly’s preoccupation with the occult: the full title of his key to physic (given in the bibliography) is a key to physic, and the occult sciences, opening to mental view, the system and order of the interior and exterior heavens, which sounds as if it would have rather more affinity with swedenborg’s perspective than william hunter’s. erle is most interested in the formation of the bones in the foetus, because of blake’s foetal skeleton in urizen, and because of the physiognomical problem of accident and essence, related to the surface and depth structures of flesh and bone. the quotation from sibly’s medical mirror, or treatise on the impregnation of the human female (1796, frustratingly later than urizen’s title-page date of 1794) explaining how “the foetus loses its transparency”—“the nucleus of the bone … is … the centre from which ossification proceeds, till it reaches the circumference” (quoted in erle 179)—begs for a connection to the imagery of center and circumference, translucence and opacity, running through milton and jerusalem. for instance: every-thing in eternity is translucent: the circumference is within: without, is formed the selfish center and the circumference still expands going forward to eternity. (jerusalem 71.6-8, e 225) there is also much artistic imagery in the passages from sibly that could fruitfully be explicated, as the effect of the interior passions and even “material organs” of the body on its appearance is envisioned as a canvas being painted (sibly, cited in erle 180). most remarkably, there is engraving imagery in a quoted passage from lavater’s own essays on physiognomy: it is the pressure … of the muscles, and that of the parts adjoining to the bones, which engrave upon their surface, and even in their substance, all sorts of designs and furrows. on the surface of the scull chiefly are to be found distinct marks of the manner of life followed by the party to whom it belonged. (2: 149, quoted in erle 179) erle comments on essence, but there are interpretive possibilities lurking here: the pressure of blake’s own muscles as he works the metal, as well as blake’s plates as textual bodies, and the “scull” enclosing each “cavern’d man” in his own identity. that last sentence of lavater’s is like a description of the frontispiece to visions of the daughters of albion. the final interlude, along with the conclusion, brings together erle’s overall interpretation of the urizen books. the divine original is not perfect or stable; indeed, we do not know what urizen looked like to start with. back in the first interlude, erle points out that “many worried they might be included into physiognomische fragmente” as silhouette examples “against their will” (79), a kind of eighteenth-century identity theft that reflects on the intensely unwilling nature of urizen’s binding. physiognomy is a two-way street: “identity is confirmed by looking” (189), but as blake, and erle, insist, there is always somebody looking back. review: william blake (1757-1827): visiones en el arte británico, caixaforum madrid william blake (1757–1827): visiones en el arte británico. caixaforum madrid, 4 july–21 october 2012. reviewed by michelle ferreira michelle ferreira is a teacher, translator, and freelance writer currently living in madrid. she graduated with a master’s degree in literature in 2010 from ryerson university and also assisted with the blake in our time symposium held at the university of toronto in 2010. in the long, heat-filled days that compose a typical spanish summer, an exhibition of william blake’s work appeared in madrid, the first in spain since 1996. a collaboration between spain’s la caixa foundation—also the organizers of the nation’s first showing of blake in 1996—and tate britain, the exhibition presented blake as a leading icon of british art, a rebel artist who inspired subsequent generations of artists. the venue is an interesting starting point. la caixa is essentially a savings bank, its logo designed by joan miró, which operates as a nonprofit bank among dozens of such banks in spain, whose collective mission is to give back to communities by investing in public welfare projects including scientific, cultural, social, and research programs. the caixaforum, a four-story converted electrical building with a mass of reddish-orange oxidized iron as its crown, is juxtaposed nicely with the greenery of spain’s largest vertical garden, designed by french botanist patrick blanc, and is located in the center of madrid, steps away from the prado. the exhibition displayed works by blake ranging from engravings to watercolors to prints and temperas, covering the breadth of his artistic career. over eighty works, mostly from the tate’s collection, demonstrated his range in terms of size, method, and theme. according to the exhibition materials, the intent was to highlight blake as “one of the most influential figures” in british cultural history, a visionary who anticipated the artistic movements that followed, namely the pre-raphaelite, neoromantic, and postmodern movements. the annotated journey through the artist’s creative vision ended with a review of his artistic legacy. all photos courtesy of caixaforum madrid. for me, the journey began with a primarily visual sensation: the color of the walls, a striking aubergine emblazoned with red-toned text for headlines, seemed to have been chosen to set off the textured whites and yellows in nearly all of blake’s work exhibited. visitors were greeted at the entrance by thomas phillips’s 1807 portrait of blake hanging on the dark purple wall of the anteroom, and then moved through the exhibition’s twelve sections and subsections, labeled in both spanish and english, all of which served to impress upon the viewer that blake was a versatile artist who experimented widely with technique, medium, and theme. the exhibit was organized thematically rather than chronologically in order to articulate its premise that blake stood apart from other artists of his time. sections highlighted his various methods and thematic concentrations. the first, emphasizing his early artistic life as an apprentice, was disappointing in that it featured only two pieces that were not engravings. however, these pieces served as a starting point for the assertion that blake was, even in his early career after his time at the royal academy, unconventional in the production of ideas through his art. his age teaching youth (c. 1785-90), a small meditative work where the humanized figures of experience and innocence sit side by side, was juxtaposed with the more conventional oberon, titania, and puck with fairies dancing (c. 1786). to illustrate further his imaginative and metaphorical approach, there was a focus on his self-created mythologies, which the exhibit declared his “most complex and original works,” in an area dedicated to blake’s prophetic books. the human body, especially the body of urizen, was the centerpiece of these works, in which soft, contoured lines delineated tormented poses and expressed radical representations of terror. the viewer was prompted to glean blake’s political tendencies in this section. his visions of the daughters of albion (1793), where we see both men and women enslaved, chained to immovable rock, was presented as a commentary on sexual freedom, gender roles, and equality. in addition to introducing blakean themes, there was also an emphasis on technique. an area featured his innovative use of tempera by employing the technique of defining lines and contours in black ink after applying layers of gum-based color, highlighting blake’s belief that a work of art was all the more perfect “the more distinct, sharp, and wirey the bounding line.” works exemplifying the variety of materials used by blake, such as canvas atop cardboard, iron, or pine—the latter used for winter (c. 1820-25), which is nearly completely white—were displayed alongside the spiritual portraits of contemporaries william pitt and lord nelson. one of blake’s more delightful, imaginative works, the ghost of a flea (c. 1819-20), was featured prominently. crowds gathered around it, perhaps to read the lengthy label describing its origin as one of blake’s magical visions, or perhaps to glimpse its fine detail despite its diminutive size. in a slightly out-of-the-way area, next to a room of blake’s unfinished series for the divine comedy (from the 1820s), images of pages from a copy of songs of innocence and of experience were projected along with a digital “page turner” of his notebook, so one could turn its many pages by swiping a screen. each page included very detailed descriptions in both english and spanish. the space underscored the interrelationship between writing and image, the realm in which blake really shone, which was clear even in translation. to prompt the link between blake and artistic movements that followed, his tiny wood-block engravings for the pastorals of virgil (1821), featuring mainly pastoral scenes, were presented as antecedents to works of the group of acolytes who called themselves the ancients, displayed in the same room. it was difficult to miss the nearly identical shepherd figures of blake’s thenot in the frontispiece for the pastorals of virgil and george richmond’s “the shepherd” (1827). the ancients admired blake’s visionary genius; however, theirs was a more nostalgic worldview akin to late romanticism and lacking the social-critical inference of blake’s oeuvre. in contrast, blake and the pre-raphaelites shared similar visual and ideological interests. visualizing mythology was one such parallel. for the pre-raphaelites, of course, this often meant the depiction of arthurian myth. the more radical pre-raphaelites appreciated blake’s visionary approach and his belief in the role of the artist as prophet-philosopher. here, work by the movement’s great artist dante gabriel rossetti—a “complete” artist like blake—offered direct thematic ties to blake with a dante-inspired wood engraving, and also technical similarities of medium, the human form, and spatialization (how sir galahad, sir bors, and sir percival were fed with the sanc grael [1864]). also mentioned was rossetti’s involvement, along with alexander gilchrist, in blake’s biography, which helped to establish blake’s eminence in british art. radicalism being the link, pieces from the symbolists were shown to delineate again a more ideological connection with blake. they were advocates of the prophetic role of the artist and viewed blake as their ancestor. in the soft-colored, spiritually themed works of george frederic watts, the ink of aubrey beardsley, and a stark lithograph of charles shannon, among others, recurrent mythological themes and the prominence of lines were unmistakable. lastly, the exhibition pointed toward blake’s legacy with examples from the twentieth-century neoromantic movement. due to a lack of explanation, the connection to these artists was more tenuous, despite the display of a small-scale version of eduardo paolozzi’s sculpture newton (1988) and the thematic parallels and dramatic reds of cecil collins’s the fall of lucifer (1933), which appeared to be a direct reworking of blake’s work of the same name for the book of job. some of the works supplied here had closer connections to surrealism or expressionism than they did to blake; take, for example, collins’s the poet (1941), with its triangular figures set in a daliesque landscape. this was one of the weaknesses of the exhibit. the areas that stressed blake’s influence on these movements could have been more extensive, if not more fully explained through direct comparisons or commentary. i found the connections to be vague, especially in the case of the neoromantics, whereas there were such rich descriptions in other areas of the exhibition. in addition, the digitalized image area, including blake’s chronology, should have been located more prominently. late in the summer i corresponded with the exhibit’s coordinator, eduardo rostan robledo, who works at the caixaforum barcelona; he reported that interest had been very high. when i visited the exhibit in its first week (the first of many visits) it was full of people and the din of whispers and admiration. in spain, blake has often been referred to as “el goya inglés,” the english goya, comparing him to the nation’s most revered painter of the romantic era. the comparison, of course, refers to the artists’ singular styles and sometimes subversive approach to their subjects. spain already loves him. it verifies that, as the exhibition materials suggest, blake’s prestige and legacy only increase with time. blake, like goya, whose paintings hang across the street at the prado, deserves a prominent place in the realm of art. he endures, marking the canvases of later generations, much like the vermilion still glowing bright in his own work. “bad” queens, “good” queens, and george iii (as his satanic majesty) “bad” queens, “good” queens, and george iii (as his satanic majesty) by paul miner paul miner (paulminer@cableone.net) has written more than fifty studies on blake. william blake all citations of blake are from the complete poetry and prose of william blake, ed. david v. erdman, newly rev. ed. (new york: anchor–random house, 1988). references to the bible are to the authorized (king james) version; those to paradise lost are to the edition by merritt y. hughes (new york: odyssey press, 1935).resorted to the use of allusions with great frequency, for allusions as silent signifiers enabled him to say more than was overtly expressed. they provided the poet with an additional dimension of meaning (and counter-meaning), and my argument explores these protean factors as they relate to blake’s condemnation of royalty. during the intensely repressive english political climate of 1792 (and thereafter), it became dangerous to criticize the government and king george iii, a condition that culminated in prime minister william pitt’s own “reign of terror” in response to the revolutionary tumult in france. thus, in 1793 any person could be imprisoned without charge or trial, while in 1795 it became a crime to speak or write against government policy.the london times (6 march 1795) reported that the warrant used in the apprehension of the prophet richard brothers charged him with “‘unlawfully, maliciously, and wickedly writing, publishing, and printing various fantastical prophecies, with intent to cause dissentions and other disturbances within this realm, contrary to the statute.’” certainly the same claims of sedition could have been applied to the engraved prophecies of blake. for important additional details, see michael phillips, “blake and the terror, 1792-93,” library 16.4 (dec. 1994): 263-97. despite such severe restrictions, the libertarian blake repeatedly attacked the king with clandestine subtlety. such condemnations are primarily concealed within miltonic and biblical allusions.though scholars have universally recognized the influence of the bible and milton on blake’s graphics and poetry, unnoted allusions permeate the texts. for recent studies, see paul miner, “blake: milton inside milton,” studies in romanticism 51 (summer 2012): 233-76, and “william blake’s creative scripture,” literature and theology 27.1 (march 2013): 32-47. the annual register for 1793 (“chronicle,” p. 4) reported a remarkable incident that occurred on 19 january, when the sun made an “extraordinary appearance”: about noon “a fog arose, by which the sun, as is usual, appeared like a red globe.”the sun as a “red globe of fire [appears] in los’s hand / as he walks from furnace to furnace” in jerusalem (85.19-20, e 244). see also blake’s design for the frontispiece of jerusalem, portraying los holding a radiating sphere. “los” is engraved as “sol” (sun). the sphere enveloped by mist was unusual in that it had a pronounced “oblong opake body nearly on its centre,” and “even when the fog dispersed, and the sun became very luminous, the spot was still visible, although the power of light was so great upon the eye as to dazzle and weaken the sight.” the gentleman’s magazine (january 1793, p. 8) further observed that “those whose minds are affected by superstition may be led to believe it a sign of some tremendous event.” coincidentally, on 21 january louis xvi was beheaded, and in february france declared war on britain.except for short periods of “peace,” the french revolution extended into the napoleonic wars, which lasted until 1815. marie antoinette, the queen of france, was guillotined on 16 october 1793. the times (12 january 1793) had contrasted england’s secure queen charlotte, “surrounded by a numerous progeny, the pledges of connubial love, and the offspring of matrimonial chastity [monogamy],” with the unfortunate marie antoinette, confined by revolutionaries and “treated like the veriest street-walker that ever inhabited the walls of a prison.” in a private notebook poem (c. late 1792), blake satirically questioned the virtue of “the beautiful queen of france,” who demanded that “the brothels of paris be opened” (e 499-500), a disparagement not unusual for republicans.in 1790 the frontispiece of les bordels de paris, a french pornographic pamphlet attacking royalty, portrayed aristocratic women in an erotic embrace (see elizabeth colwill, “pass as a woman, act like a man: marie-antoinette as tribade in the pornography of the french revolution,” marie-antoinette: writings on the body of a queen, ed. dena goodman [new york: routledge, 2003] 155). a great deal of sexual slander was associated with the queen of france. she was accused of having lesbian propensities by the countess de la motte (of the affair of the necklace), who escaped to england, living only a few paces from blake’s residence at hercules buildings; the countess died on 23 aug. 1791. see paul miner, “blake’s london: times and spaces,” studies in romanticism 41 (summer 2002): 306-07. the author of the greatest of all the joys of the père duchesne, a scurrilous work that violently repudiated the french monarchy, recorded exhilaration as he witnessed the head of marie antoinette being separated from the “fucking tart’s neck.” this writer also denounced louis xvi as a “sham father” and a “fat cuckold.”quoted from philippe huisman and marguerite jallut, marie antoinette (new york: viking press, 1971) 238. a bawdy satire of the period alleged that cardinal de rohan was the real father of the queen’s second child. in further ridicule, a new die was smuggled by wags into the royal mint, which in 1785 unknowingly began to issue louis d’or with the king’s head on the obverse decorated with cuckold’s horns (see vincent cronin, louis and antoinette [london: harvill press, 1996] 257). it was said that a congenital defect of louis’s sexual organs prevented consummation of the royal marriage (his penis had grown into his thigh). after seven years, however, he presumably underwent a painful operation, thereby permitting marie antoinette to become the true queen of france. for the conjectural details, see dorothy moulton mayer, marie antoinette: the tragic queen (new york: coward-mccann, 1968) 50. jerusalem copy e, pl. 63. yale center for british art, paul mellon collection. b1992.8.1(63). blake’s continued rejection of royalty may be catalogued in his enigmatic design for jerusalem plate 63, which depicts a blasting crescent (presumably the beams of the morning star) above a polyp-enwrapped female with exposed breasts.following milton’s description in paradise lost, blake represents sin—breasts exposed—as serpentine below the waist, possessing polyp-like “feet” (see william blake archive, drawings and paintings, illustrations to milton’s paradise lost, butts set, 1808, satan, sin, and death). in 1792 james gillray portrayed queen charlotte as milton’s sin (displaying her breasts and serpentine feet), while pitt is caricatured as death, the incestuous offspring of satan and sin in paradise lost. on gillray’s influence on blake, see david v. erdman, blake: prophet against empire, 3rd ed. (princeton: princeton university press, 1977) 221-23. this puzzling iconography finds its parallel, in part, in a caricature of 2 november 1790.see m. dorothy george, catalogue of political and personal satires preserved in the department of prints and drawings in the british museum, vol. 6 (london: british museum, 1938) #7675. gleaming rays surround the head of marie antoinette, whom edmund burke idealized in reflections on the revolution in france (1790) as the morning star or venus, a planet that briefly presents its crescent near the earth at dawn.venus, which forms crescents, serves as both morning and evening star. burke embellished his memory of almost two decades before: “i saw the queen of france, then the dauphiness, at versailles; and surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. i saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in—glittering like the morning star.”edmund burke, reflections on the revolution in france, ed. thomas h. d. mahoney (indianapolis: bobbs-merrill, 1955) 85-86. burke’s veneration of the french queen became celebrated in its time—see erdman, prophet against empire 183-87. within a year, ten editions of reflections were printed in england. george iii (though disliking burke) highly commended the volume, and a french translation was made by louis xvi himself.his effusive rhetoric had foundation in fact. in a letter to the countess of ossory (1 dec. 1790), horace walpole commented that on one occasion he saw marie antoinette, when dauphiness, running after the king to chapel: “she … shot through the room like an aerial being, all brightness and grace, and without seeming to touch earth.” walpole concluded, “had i mr. burke’s powers, i would have described her in his words.” in ironic derision of burke’s text, blake responded with the following quatrain (e 500): “the queen of france [as venus, the goddess of love] just touchd this globe / and the [sexual] pestilence darted from her robe / but our good queen quite grows to the ground / and a great many suckers grow all around.” blake’s crescent of venus in jerusalem 63, warping the details of burke’s description, potentially signifies the genitals of the queen of france, venus disrobed,burke concluded that, in the revolutionary world, “all the decent drapery of life is … rudely torn off” (reflections 87). france’s virtuous queen is now left naked.for varying interpretations of the iconography in jerusalem 63, see david v. erdman, ed., the illuminated blake (garden city, ny: anchor–doubleday, 1974) and morton d. paley, ed., jerusalem (princeton: princeton university press/william blake trust, 1991). while the “great many suckers [that] grow all around” queen charlotte on earth suggest her extensive offspring. charlotte delivered fifteen infants in twenty-two years,did blake notice the “harlot” in c[harlot]te’s name? in swedenborg’s conjugial love (london: r. hindmarsh, 1794), an infernal male (having escaped the “prison” of monogamy) rhetorically asks “with an hissing, … what is a wife but an harlot?” (par. 79, p. 93), while in true christian religion (london: j. phillips, 1781) swedenborg’s satan observes, “what is a wife?” declaring “she is my harlot” (vol. 1, par. 80, p. 115). similarly, in jerusalem (57.8-9, e 207) blake asks, “what is a wife & what is a harlot? … / … are they two & not one? can they exist separate?” and a contemporary witticism concluded that she appeared as if she were bearing all of her children at one pregnancy.see christopher hibbert, the court at windsor: a domestic history (london: longmans, 1964) 134. blake’s polyp-female in jerusalem 63 finds her equivalent as a symbol of generation in his designs for thomas gray’s “ode on a distant prospect of eton college” (p. 8), where a crowned “queen” of death (gray’s phrase) possesses pronounced breasts for nursing suckers. dead bodies (described by gray as “the painful family of death,” “a grisly troop”) surround the queen, who is encompassed by a huge polyp-like worm. she has both feet placed on generative polyps (meaning “many feet”) and holds chastising birches (comparable to the symbol of austerity in night thoughts 375). see paul miner, “the polyp as a symbol in the poetry of william blake,” texas studies in literature and language 2 (1960): 198-205. blake’s context is also addressed in a vision of the last judgment (e 562), where the “good … queens [of england],” adorned with “crowns,” are “calld in the bible … nursing mothers.” these “queens” are the “nursing mothers” in isaiah 49.23, abject royalty who must “bow down … with their face toward the earth, and lick up the dust of thy feet.”in jerusalem (16.23-26, e 160), “england: nursing mothers / gives to the children of albion,” for “the whole creation … groans to be deliverd” in an apocalyptic childbirth. the imagery alludes to romans 8.21-22, in which newborn man is a “creature … delivered from the bondage of corruption,” for “the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now.” compare jerusalem 79.24-26 (e 235), “london … / … gave / his children to my [jerusalem’s] breasts, his sons & daughters to my knees,” which alludes to isaiah 66.10-12: believers “shall … suck” upon the breasts of jerusalem “and be dandled upon her knees.” blake excoriated queen charlotte as a polyp-like tree of genealogy that “quite grows to the ground,” for “just such a tree [is] at java found”—the deadly upas tree.erdman (e 861) notes that the line “and a great many suckers grow all around” replaced “there is just such a tree at java found.” erasmus darwin mentions the upas (which regrew from its enrooting branches) as a “hydra-tree of death” proliferating upon a “blasted heath” among “human skeletons” (the botanic garden [1791] 2.3.237-50). a description had appeared in the london magazine (dec. 1783): 512. see heather glen, vision and disenchantment: blake’s songs and wordsworth’s lyrical ballads (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1983) 193, 380n36. “london” (e 26-27) in songs of experience (1794) circumspectly denounces the tyrannical attitude of george iii. though blake investigates the trepidations of london’s earthly avenues, these thoroughfares also expand upon the heavens in what he later describes as “londons opening streets” (jerusalem 34[38].43, e 180).for further details, see miner, “blake’s london: times and spaces” 279-316. “london,” one of blake’s most challenging compositions,donald ault speaks of the reader-editor’s “urge to homogenize blake’s heterogeneous texts”; “blake’s wording clearly permits us to reconstruct a normalized version (by the substitution of punctuation), but that ‘version’ neutralizes or forestalls the reader’s awareness of being engaged in an act of revisionary reading—a reading of a poem that, unless revised, is unreadable, an awareness that requires at least a two-fold vision.” see “unreading ‘london,’” approaches to teaching blake’s songs of innocence and of experience, ed. robert f. gleckner and mark l. greenberg (new york: modern language association, 1989) 132-33. clearly functions at one level as an astronomical poem. in relating heaven to earth in the manuscript version (probably written in late 1792, as the notebook placement tentatively indicates), blake hearsscholars have called attention to the initial letters (hear) of the third stanza, which mentions the smoky cry and the bloody sigh of sweep and soldier, victims of state religion. the “german [hanoverian] forged links” (see e 796),in part 2 of the rights of man (1792), thomas paine determined that england’s current problems could be traced to “the hanoverians” (the complete writings of thomas paine, ed. philip s. foner [new york: citadel press, 1945] 1: 410). see paul miner, “blake, paine, and moses,” notes and queries 59.3 (sept. 2012): 355-61. the london corresponding society (which was sympathetic to the french revolution) cautioned in sept. 1792 that “the king of great britain will do well to remember that this country is not hanover.” see michael ferber, “‘london’ and its politics,” elh 48.2 (summer 1981): 321. because the laws initially were cried about the streets of the metropolis. he envisioned these proclamations as rotating laws of the universe, a starry chain of reasonings cast upon the mundane shell/brain. (compare the “prince of light bound in chains [stars] of intellect” in the four zoas [57.16, e 339].) in leviathan, thomas hobbes identified such mental chains as “artificiall chains, called civill lawes” (2.21).see nelson hilton, literal imagination (berkeley: university of california press, 1983) 269n20. possibly because of the oppressive political climate of the period, blake amended “german forged links” to “mind-forg’d manacles.” the thought remained in his imagination, however, for in a poem of september 1800 he speaks of “rending the manacles of londons dungeon dark”; london stands “ghastly pale,” a “city in fear.”see robert n. essick and morton d. paley, “‘dear generous cumberland’: a newly discovered letter and poem by william blake,” blake 32.1 (summer 1998): 4-13. “london” finds additional relevance in joel barlow’s advice to the privileged orders, an anti-monarchical work published by joseph johnson in early 1792.note also barlow’s the conspiracy of kings, a poem published in feb. 1792 by johnson. for additional information on blake and barlow, see erdman, blake: prophet against empire 23, 154. note also michael phillips, ed., the marriage of heaven and hell, by william blake (oxford: bodleian library, 2011) 13. recall that blake was a peripheral figure, operating on the fringes of johnson’s literary coterie. barlow remonstrates that in england “the people at large” are “ignorant of the acts of parliament,” for “they are printed by one man only, who is called the king’s printer,—in the old german character, which few men can read.”joel barlow, advice to the privileged orders, part 1, 2nd ed. (london: j. johnson, 1792) 124-26. the analytical review 12 (april 1792): 459 (also published by johnson) found this passage on the “old german character” sufficiently interesting to quote in its entirety. he refers to the fact that english law was traditionally printed in gothic typeface, known as german blackletter or old english script. (gothic typeface was used in germany until the beginning of the twentieth century.) barlow protests that if one wishes to have knowledge of english legalities one must “find out the king’s printer, pay a penny a page for the law, and learn the german alphabet.” he cynically concludes that the abstruse gothic/german “laws of the land” represent a “fathomless abyss,” and thus blake saw barlow’s laws of the abyss as a starry chain of words forged in the heavenly dungeon of the mind.in europe, issued in the same year as songs of experience, lord thurlow, formerly england’s chief parliamentarian, is described as “guardian of the secret codes” (12.15, e 64); in an island in the moon (c. 1784-85), “steelyard the lawgiver” stalks in “with an act of parliament in his hand,” objecting that “it was a shameful thing that acts of parliament should be [issued] in a free state” (e 451). these words of law, printed in gothic typeface, become in the allegory of blake’s “london” the “german forged” manacles of the mind. the monarch in “king edward the third” from poetical sketches (1783) observes that “the enemy fight in chains, invisible chains, but heavy,” for “their minds are fetter’d” (1.13-14, e 424), and blake’s laws of hanoverian oppression find their extension in america (1793), where “a heavy iron chain / descends link by link from albions cliffs” to bind the minds of the revolutionary “sons of america” (3.7-9, e 52).in “earth’s answer” (e 18-19) the earth, confined in night’s dark “den” (a dungeon kept by “starry jealousy”), implores, “break this heavy chain” surrounding “my bones” (compare the “heavy chains” of “hipocrisy” in the four zoas 123.31, e 393). blake alludes to lamentations 3.6-9, where god “set me in dark places, as they that be dead,” making “my chain heavy” and enclosing “my ways with hewn stone.” english “governors,” threatening the american colonists, “shak[e] their mental chains” (13.1-3, e 56), which relates to the stars as german-forged links encircling the heavens. (compare the caricature of 1 march 1776, the state blacksmiths forging fetters for the americans.)see george, catalogue of political and personal satires, vol. 5 (london: british museum, 1935) #5328. in blakean allegory the divine right of kings is of satanic origin. hence, the starry typography of god’s statutes, taken from the “brazen book” of the fallen prince of light (jehovah, who codified the ten commandments), is “copied on earth” (in gothic type) by hanoverian “kings & priests” (europe 11.3-5, e 64).on the laws of priests and kings, see paul miner, “francis quarles’s influence on europe 11,” blake 47.4 (spring 2014). this “lawful” deceit “forges fetters for the mind” (e 472), which is applicable to the “mind-forg’d manacles” in “london.” blake’s antinomian and heretical orc in america will “stamp to dust” god’s (that is, the devil’s) “stony [starry] law” of morality (which the poet equates with the decrees issued under george iii). in this passage (8.3-9, e 54), blake envisions the decalogue as starry words circulating upon the dark voids, the cyclical rote of god’s stony law, allegorically forming a repetitive mill of hell (see there is no natural religion, e 2). in the marriage of heaven and hell (1790) a revolutionary “wonder” (later identified as orc in america) rejects such restriction and “stamps the stony law to dust” (pls. 26-27, e 44-45). he eradicates the fallen heavens of morality by “loosing the eternal horses [of the sun] from the dens of night”; in this context, godly and kingly “empire is no more! and now the lion [leo] & wolf [lupus] shall cease,”compare “th’ infernal empire, … so near heav’n’s door” in paradise lost (10.389). blake’s phrasing also utilizes isaiah 11.6, a passage he illustrated in an island in the moon (see william blake archive, manuscripts and typographic works, an island in the moon, object 18), and 2 kings 23.11, 14-15, in which “the horses … given to the sun” are taken away, while “images” are broken and the “high place” is “stamped … small to powder” (compare jerusalem 55.58-59 [e 205] and the language in daniel 8.10). starry chains of the mind are stamped “furious to dust” by los in the book of los (3.47-48, 4.19-22, e 91-92). for blake’s interest in astronomy, see paul miner, “blake and the night sky: iii, visionary astronomy,” bulletin of research in the humanities 84 (1981): 305-36. translating earth to the heavens. early on, blake expressed anti-royal sympathies in poetical sketches: “o what have kings to answer for, / before that awful throne!” of god (“gwin, king of norway,” e 420). in his design “our end is come,” issued a decade later, he portrayed a crowned king with two nefarious ministers (holding spear and sword respectively); they are subjected to sublime terror and fear, reminiscent of the pitiful state of zion in lamentations—“our end is come” (4.18).matthew (24.14) also speaks of an apocalyptic “gospel … preached … unto all nations; and then shall the end come.” in a letter of 1806 blake deplores bad art: “but now, i say, now its end is come” (e 768); at the “last judgment … men of real art govern” (a vision of the last judgment, e 561). in “our end is come” no one can avoid divine judgment: “for the great day of his wrath is come; and who shall be able to stand?” (revelation 6.17). the question “who can stand?” appears four times in the prologue to “king edward the fourth” from poetical sketches (e 439), which speaks of god’s awful wrath to be visited on “the kings and nobles of the land.” in america, blake writes that “their [kings’ and nobles’] end should come, when france reciev’d the demons light” (16.15, e 57)—that of fiery orc, whose flames instigated the french revolution (engendered by the revolution in america).in “a song of liberty” blake speaks of the defeat of a “jealous king” with “his grey brow’d councellors, thunderous warriors … chariots horses … falling” through the heavens to perdition (the marriage pl. 26, e 44; see the horse, chariot, and sword-wielding warrior descending into the voids in the illustration to pl. 5). in the four zoas blake announces that “mystery [rahab the whore, who ironically symbolizes moral virtue in blakean symbolism] … thy end is come” (see revelation 17.1, 5, 16), for “kings & councellors & giant warriors / go down into the depths … / … with horse & chariots” (134.5, 7-9, e 402). a vision of the last judgment (e 558) also mentions “kings & councellors & warriors” associated with rahab and her fiery end. thus, in europe, “terrible orc, when he beheld the morning in the east,” descended with “the light of his fury” “in the vineyards of red france” (14.37, 15.2, e 66).the imagery finds a parallel in richard price, a discourse on the love of our country (london, 1789): “behold, the light you have struck out, after setting america free, reflected to france, and there kindled into a blaze that lays despotism in ashes, and warms and illuminates europe!” (50). paine also noted that liberty, beginning as a “small spark kindled in america,” expanded into a “flame … not to be extinguished” (rights of man, part 2 [the complete writings of thomas paine 1: 398]). appropriately, the new french calendar was initiated at the moment the sun entered the sign of libra, and the first month was known as vendemaire—the vintage month, a time of reaping the harvest (annual register for 1793, “chronicle,” pp. 41-42). the balances or scales of justice weigh the equatorial heavens in plate 5 of america, an equinox where kings presumably will meet their judgment. “albions angel,” first introduced in that plate, may be presumed to be analogous to george iii, cunningly converted by blake into the devil, his satanic majesty. star-soldiers “must’ring in the eastern sky” (america 13.13-16, 15.4-6, e 56-57) are envisioned as slaves of the king in vocabulary that emulates book 1 of paradise lost (657-66), where “millions” of “celestial spirits in bondage” (slaves to milton’s vengeful god) draw their “flaming swords” to illuminate the darkness of hell (an ironic simulation of morning). the “num’rous hosts” of the king (see the “numerous host” of devils that fled through the “deep” in paradise lost 2.993-94) number “forty millions”; as stars fading in the light of the rising sun, they throw off “their hammerd mail, / and cast their swords & spears to earth,” seeking liberation in the new dawn as a “naked multitude.” they are naked in part because those who “walk in the flesh … do not war after the flesh,” for the “weapons of our warfare are not carnal” but spiritual, and therefore result in “casting down imaginations [glossed as “reasonings”], and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of god” (2 corinthians 10.3-5). blake’s imagery also reflects romans 13.12-13: “the night is far spent, the day is at hand: let us therefore cast off the works of darkness, and let us put on the armour of light. let us walk honestly, as in the day; not in rioting …, not in chambering and wantonness.” in consequence, blake’s revolutionary edicts presume sexual satiety. blake’s phrasing also mocks burke’s political perspective. in his discourse, which commemorated the glorious revolution of 1688,a song in an island in the moon concerns “william the prince of orange” becoming king of england (e 465). james parker, blake’s former print-shop partner, engraved a plate (1790) after james northcote of the prince of orange’s being offered the crown. price empathized with the “nations panting for liberty” and noted that he had “lived to see thirty millions of people … spurning at slavery,” a number derided by burke in his reflections.burke stressed that the revolutionary tendencies of the times ultimately would reject true knowledge, at which point “learning will be cast into the mire, and trodden down under the hoofs of a swinish multitude,” an expression that became infamous (see, for example, the morning chronicle of 8 july 1796, p. 3). as noted, blake deliberately increased the number in question to “forty millions” and converted these panting slaves into a “naked multitude.” in america orc is the devilish spirit of the revolution, opposing devilish george iii: thus devil confronts devil. aptly, orc occupies a miltonic hell where “heat but not light” pervades the “murky atmosphere” (4.11, e 53); this alludes to the furnace-like “dungeon” in book 1 of paradise lost (61-63), in which “on all sides round / … flames / [emit] no light, but rather darkness visible.” (recall that in miltonic cosmology, hell is located in the southern hemisphere, abstractly represented on the title page of the marriage.) as an awful “wonder” of the revolution, orc arises in “red clouds” “o’er the atlantic sea,” and “the king of england looking westward trembles at the vision” (4.7-12, e 53). in the shifting layers of america, orc is described as a “devourer of thy parent” (the monarchy) (9.20, e 54), reflecting milton’s specter-like death, who “his parent [sin] would full soon devour” (paradise lost 2.804-05). (note also blake’s language in the four zoas, in which orc “concenterd into love of parent storgous appetite craving” [61.10, e 341].) blake’s genealogy additionally addresses the issue that royal tyranny gave birth to revolution; hence, george iii is envisioned as the metaphorical satanic father of fiery orc,emblem 8—“my son! my son!”—of both versions of the gates of paradise (1793 and c. 1825-26) alludes in part to the battle between death and satan in paradise lost book 2, where sin remonstrates with death: “what fury o son, / possesses thee to bend that mortal dart / against thy father’s head?” (728-30). satan twice refers to death as “my son” (2.743, 818). in one illustration to paradise lost blake explicitly follows milton’s “each at the head / levell’d his deadly aim” (2.711-12); in another version he depicts satan and death focusing their gaze and leveling their spears toward each other’s genitals (see william blake archive, drawings and paintings, illustrations to milton’s paradise lost, thomas set, 1807, satan, sin, and death, and butts set, 1808, satan, sin, and death). see diana hume george, blake and freud (ithaca: cornell university press, 1980) 164. who is associated with death, a creature born from milton’s sin. blake’s anti-government posture is further revealed in a cancelled plate for america (b, e 58), where “george the third holds council” with “his lords”; in view of the relentless severities of the period, blake possibly rejected this plate because of its implied derogation of the monarch. in the passage privileged lords sit on “angelic seats” in a “hall of counsel” in which albion’s angel comes “shut out from mortal sight.” unmistakably blake once more transforms the king into satan; in paradise lost milton speaks of the “council” of infernal “peers” (to blake the house of lords) on “golden seats” in a “spacious hall” of hell (1.755-62, 796), while satan “exalted sat” on a “throne of royal state” (2.1-5). in a later sequence (10.444-46) satan comes “invisible” to his “plutonian hall” and “ascended his high throne, which under state / [is] of richest texture spread.”recall that the english coronation chair is momentarily canopied during the ceremony. that blake was familiar with milton’s passage in book 10 is confirmed in america 16.2-7 (e 57), where urizen as “weeping” devil-god protrudes “his leprous head / from out his holy shrine”; in paradise lost satan sits “unseen” until “at last as from a cloud his fulgent head / … appear’d,” surrounded with “false glitter” (10.447-52). blake was obsessed with the “terrors” that appeared in heaven and hell when the “american war began” (lines to john flaxman, e 707-08), and (as the revolution was ending)the revolutionary war began in april 1775; though hostilities terminated in 1781, the war was not officially over until the treaty of paris was executed in sept. 1783. the end was celebrated in oct. 1783 in england; see the london magazine (oct. 1783): 364-65 and the european magazine (jan. 1784): 32. he approached the subject in “king edward the third,” where “war [shall] stain the blue heavens with bloody banners” (5.63, e 437), allegorically reflecting comets and meteors as omens streaming across the darkness. he converts these astronomical events into a declaration against royalty, with george iii in mind. in another cancelled plate for america (pl. a) a large interlinear design depicts a nude (miltonic?) warrior holding a spear-staff, from which flies a huge banner of war. as discussed above, these banners are, at one level of interpretation, comets or meteors, projectiles often portrayed as “flags” waving in the air. warlike “terrors” are also seen “at the flapping of the folding banners” in plate b (19-20, e 58). blake continues to explore the idea in the four zoas (91 [second portion].26, e 364), which mentions “the flappings of the folding banners” in the voids. later, tharmas speaks of hell’s belligerence, exclaiming, “lo darkness covers the long pomp of banners on the wind” (134.14, e 402). the phrasing once again alludes to paradise lost (1.531-37): a “mighty standard” from a “glittering staff [is] unfurl’d,” displaying an “imperial ensign” that “shone like a meteor streaming to the wind.” in america orc is described as a “terror like a comet, or more like the planet red [mars] / that once inclos’d the terrible wandering comets in its sphere” (5.2-3, e 53). the allegorical plague-sigh (11.13, e 55) is a royal sigh of blood running down the palace walls of heaven in the form of a comet, a pestilential product of state religion.compare “the hapless soldiers sigh / [that] runs in blood down palace walls” in “london” (e 27). blake’s satanic prince of light as urizen in night the fifth of the four zoas laments, “o did i close my treasuries with roofs of solid stone / and darken all my palace walls with envyings & hate” (64.15-16, e 344), presumably fiery comets (see the “envyings” that represent the fallen “works of the flesh” in galatians 5.19-21). the “voice of albions angel” causes “plagues” to fall upon america as a “blight” (14.3-6, e 56);a caricature of 1784 portrayed the king in the act of expulsing a blast from his buttocks (“r-y-l inflamable air”); see george, catalogue of political and personal satires, vol. 6, #6486. in deleted lines to “the little vagabond” blake speaks of “poor parsons” who “with wind like a blown bladder swell” (e 795). see also the “plague” in possession of inflammable gass in an island in the moon (e 451). “then rolld they back with fury / on albions angels” (14.20-15.1, e 56), reflecting milton’s comus, where “evil on itself shall back recoil” (line 593; see also paradise lost 7.56-58 and 4.15-18). in plate 15 (e 56-57), “plagues creep on the burning winds driven by flames of orc,” with “ensigns sick’ning in the sky” and “banners seard”—fiery comets/meteors as flags or ensigns are viewed as veins cauterized, to stanch the flow of blood.urizen and his flaming chariot in night the first of the four zoas reflect, in further irony, book 5 of paradise lost (588-96), where planetary “hierarchies” (god’s angels encompassed “orb within orb”) raise “ten thousand thousand ensigns … / [that] stream in the air,” “glittering tissues” that blake’s mental eye saw as shining veins of blood waving upon the winds. the flames, associated with comet-like plagues, are characterized by blake as leprosy (“spotted … plagues”). orcan fires of war inflict george iii with “pestilence,”in the american crisis no. 2 (1777), paine describes “the sword of war … ‘ultima ratio regum’” “cast[ing] a sickly languor over an insulted people” (the american colonists) (the complete writings of thomas paine 1: 58-59). thus, in america (3.1-2, e 52), “sullen fires” belong to the “prince of albion” and “glow to america’s shore.” in common sense (1776), paine remarks that “a thirst for absolute power is the natural disease of monarchy” (complete writings 1: 7); in his annotations to bacon’s essays blake says that “a tyrant is the worst disease” (e 625). (compare the reference to the “purple [royal] plague” in the french revolution [1791] [24, e 287].) paine describes george iii as a “sullen-tempered pharaoh of england” (complete writings 1: 25); in jerusalem (89.18-19, e 248) blake speaks of “pharoh [sic] in his iron court: / and the dragon of the river” (ezekiel 29.3 condemns the “pharaoh king of egypt, the great dragon that lieth in the midst of his rivers”). “in [comet] streaks of red / across the limbs of albions guardian.”compare shakespeare, henry vi, part 1 (1.1.2-5): “comets, importing change of times and states, / brandish your crystal tresses in the sky, / and with them scourge the bad revolting stars, / that have consented unto henry’s death!” blake alludes to shakespeare’s description in his spiritual conversation with hotspur, who denounces “prince hen[r]y,” blaming the malign “influence” of the “cursd stars” (e 686). fires of passion break out in the form of pestilence when nature (macrocosmic orc) is inhibited, so “over the hills, the vales, the cities” of albion “rage the red flames fierce” of the revolutionary fires of orc (america 16.1, e 57).on these plagues, see also miner, “blake’s london: times and spaces” 283-84. blake continues the idiom near the end of europe (14.37, 15.2-5, e 66), where orc appears amid “furious terrors,” among “golden chariots raging,” their “red wheels [as comets] dropping with blood.” (compare the four zoas [75.29-31, e 352], in which urizen’s “comets” “with wheel impetuous” are envisioned as orbs “gorgd with blood” surrounding “red orc.”) in europe “the voice of albions angel” is heard “howling in flames of orc” (12.12, e 64). the king was renowned for his ruddy complexion; peter pindar admonished that one of benjamin west’s portraits made the monarch “a very saracen” (pindar’s emphasis), so much so that he looked as if he had “a fire-ship in his belly.” pindar concluded that the populace was “anxious for his [george iii’s] life.”peter pindar, more lyric odes, to the royal academicians (london, 1783), ode 2. pindar’s sardonic observation is corroborated in a fashion note in the european magazine (jan. 1784) that criticized the “suit of marone velvet” worn by the king at the queen’s birthday celebration (her birthday, on 19 may, was celebrated in winter so as not to conflict with the festivities for the king’s birthday, 4 june, as explained in the times, 18 jan. 1785). the “colour was too high for a complexion so florid as his majesty’s”; those in attendance observed that he had never worn “so unbecoming” an attire. (note that blake speaks of “visages redd’ning with war” in the french revolution [111, e 291]; compare the four zoas 15.11-12, e 309.) in america (pl. 11, e 55) a colonial angel, aflame with the fires of orc, threatens the destruction of george iii (for militancy creates counter-militancy) and disingenuously inquires, “what pitying angel lusts for tears, and fans himself with sighs[?]” blake again covertly associates the king with milton’s weeping and sighing satan in paradise lost: “thus weptalthough george iii fathered numerous offspring, blake visualizes him as “an aged king in arms of gold” “who wept” over “his only son” (c.23-27, e 59). in paradise lost satan’s “only son” (2.728) is death, an ironic parallel to christ, god’s only begotten son (john 3.16). the angel voice & as he wept the terrible blasts [or sighs] / of trumpets, blew a loud alarm” (10.1-2, e 55).the trumpets echo the sounds of those who “blow an alarm with the trumpets” at the time of war in numbers (10.9). (see the design in america pl. 3, where the fiery blast from a heavenly trumpet assaults fleeing human forms.) in paradise lost, “thrice [satan] assay’d” to speak before his “peers,” but in vain; “tears such as angels weep, burst forth: at last / words interwove with sighs found out their way” (1.612-21).in samson agonistes dalila “thrice … assay’d with flattering prayers and sighs” (392) to learn the secret of samson’s strength; in blake’s “samson” from poetical sketches “dalila’s fair arts” are “tried in vain; in vain she wept in many a treacherous tear,” since “thrice” samson has “mocked” her (e 443-44). blake follows milton’s spelling, “dalila,” rather than the biblical “delilah.” blake’s miltonic phrasing also occurs in “an imitation of spencer [sic]” (poetical sketches), where pan “in vain might thee assay” in words of “sound without sense.” in the french revolution, the prisoners of the bastille “assay to shout” (52, e 288) while the french king’s “heart flam’d, and utter’d a / with’ring heat” as “words burst forth” (69, e 289). so tharmas, representing the bowels of compassion in the four zoas, “pitying back withdrew with many a sigh” as “his tears flowd down” (48.23-24, e 332). in further acknowledgment, when urizen, the degenerate prince of light, questions his beast-formed constellations, his words are “but an inarticulate thunder”;compare the “myriads of eternity” that “utter’d / words articulate, bursting in thunders” (the book of urizen 3.44, 4.3-4, e 71) and the last “trumpet thundering along from heaven to heaven” with a “sound articulate” (the four zoas 117.10-12, e 386). no “voice / of sweet response could he obtain tho [he] oft assayd with tears” (the four zoas 70 [first portion].39, 43-44, e 347).blake also has in mind milton’s fruit of the tree of knowledge, “whose taste … at first assay / gave elocution to the mute,” for the serpent of eden could speak (see paradise lost 9.745-49, 764-65). “in vain the voice / of urizen in vain the eloquent tongue” (71 [first portion].3-4, e 348), for he is afflicted like satan in paradise lost. (compare blake’s tiriel [c. 1789] [4.46, e 281], where “eloquent tongues were dumb.”) blake uses related imagery in europe—albion’s “red limb’d angel” attempts to blow “the trump of the last doom; but he could not blow the iron tube!” though “thrice he assay’d presumptuous to awake the dead to judgment” (13.1-3, e 65; compare 12.12-13, e 64).once more he alludes to paradise lost (11.72-77). in on the morning of christ’s nativity milton speaks of the “wakeful trump of doom [that] must thunder through the deep” (line 156). see also william blake: the continental prophecies, ed. d. w. dörrbecker (princeton: princeton university press/william blake trust, 1995) 276-77 (note on europe 15[16].2-3 [plate number in this edition; pl. 13 in erdman]). the guardian “angel” of england cannot awake those in their graves. such phrasing ironically relates to 2 peter 2.9-10: “the lord knoweth how … to reserve the unjust unto the day of judgment to be punished: but chiefly them that walk after the flesh in the lust of uncleanness, and despise government [state religion]. presumptuous are they, … they are not afraid to speak evil of dignities.”in jude 8 “filthy [prurient] dreamers defile the flesh, despise dominion, and speak evil of dignities.” similar irony is present in america plate 7 (e 53), where “albions angel wrathful burnt” in fires punctuating the heavens;recall 3.13-16 (e 52), where “a terrible blast” proceeds across the heavens, witnessed by “albions wrathful prince,” a “dragon form clashing his scales at midnight,” flaming “red meteors round the land of albion.” compare b.1 (e 58), where albion’s guardian angel reveals “the dragon thro’ the human; coursing swift as fire” through the heavens—a meteor, popularly referred to as a dragon. the kings of england took their lineage from cadwallader, symbolized by a red dragon. this legendary beast supports the tomb of henry vii and his queen (see b. lambert, the history and survey of london and its environs [london, 1806] 3: 429), as blake undoubtedly noticed as an apprentice assigned to sketch monuments in westminster abbey. additionally, blake did not miss the irony that satan is a great red dragon in revelation (12.3; compare the dragon king illustrated in america pl. 4). he denounces orc as a “blasphemous demon, antichrist, hater of dignities.” blake’s imagery establishes that both albion’s angel (george iii) and orc are warlike creatures, one as an angel-tyrant enforcing repression and the other as a revolutionary energy that rejects any curtailment of liberty. the matter is assessed in “a song of liberty” (the marriage pl. 27, e 45), where no longer will the curse of morality rule mankind, nor the “brethren” whom, erroneously, the tyrant “calls free,” reflecting galatians 4.31: “so then, brethren, we are not children of the bondwoman, but of the free.” the king’s sighs and tears of state religion allude, in further irony, to milton’s “upon the circumcision,” where “flaming powers, and winged warriors bright” are dejected soldiers whose “fiery essence can distill no tear.” (note also blake’s peace-loving grey monk, whose “eye was dry no tear could flow / a hollow groan first spoke his woe” [e 489].) milton’s angel kings (like his weeping satan) breathe forth upon the wind as they expansively “burn in [their] sighs, and borrow / seas wept from … deep sorrow.” these angels are an order of ethereal spirits associated with the planets of heaven, a celestial hierarchy mentioned by blake in his inscriptions to dante (e 689). in a constructive sense, blake deduced that “a tear is an intellectual thing” and “a sigh is the sword of an angel king” (jerusalem 52.25-28, e 202)in a variant stanza on the monk of charlemaine blake determines that “the tear shall melt the sword of steel” (e 811). the intellectual tear becomes “the tear of love & forgiveness sweet” that “every wound … shall heal.”—hence the ironic association with albion’s angel, the devil as george iii. such are blake’s disparate allusions attacking royalty, the “bad” queen of france (as a beaming crescent of the heavens), the “good” queen of england (quite growing to the ground), and red-flushed george iii, his satanic majesty. francis quarles’s influence on europe 11 francis quarles’s influence on europe 11 by paul miner paul miner (paulminer@cableone.net) has written more than fifty studies on blake. william blake frequently turned to francis quarles’s emblemes, 1635, for graphic and textual inspiration.all citations of blake are from the complete poetry and prose of william blake, ed. david v. erdman, newly rev. ed. (new york: anchor–random house, 1988). scholars have particularly called attention to blake’s evocative revision of quarles’s multiplex emblem xv (book 1, pp. 60-63),see mary lynn johnson, “emblem and symbol in blake,” huntington library quarterly 37 (1974): 156-60, and judith wardle, “‘for hatching ripe’: blake and the educational uses of emblem and illustrated literature,” bulletin of research in the humanities 81 (1978): 340-41. scholars such as piloo nanavutty (“blake and emblem literature” [1952]) and aquilino sánchez pérez (blake’s graphic work and the emblematic tradition [1982]) have also recognized that blake crucially was influenced by emblematic literature. see also joseph s. salemi, “emblematic tradition in blake’s the gates of paradise,” blake 15.3 (winter 1981-82): 108-24. a depiction—erroneously identified as part of book 2—that portrays fraud as a malevolent female (“double fraud” with “her divided face”).in “then she bore pale desire,” c. 1780-83(?), blake concludes that “guile & fraud” live “in the smoke of cities. on dusky wing,” where each man’s “face” of self love is “a mask unto his heart” (e 448); he has in mind the emblem of fraud in cesare ripa’s iconologia, 1603, where a two-faced human vulture holds two hearts and a mask. a similar emblem is in george richardson’s iconology (based upon ripa’s emblems), vol. 2 (london, 1779), fig. 386, text pp. 135-36, a work from which blake borrowed graphic themes. fraud therefore “does scourge and teare / astræas wounded sides, [which are] plough’d up [like furrows], and rent / with knotted cords.”flagellated astræa symbolizes justice; in classical mythology she perceives earth’s depravity and flees to the pristine heavens at the end of the iron age, becoming the constellation virgo. quarles inquires, “has justice now found wings?” (see winged virgo in john flamsteed’s atlas coelestis, 1729) and does “justice see?” (presumably because justice, from the fifteenth century, frequently was envisioned as blind). on the right side of the emblem, “faiths pineons [are] clipt” with scissors by sense (also personified as a female). blake, however, alters quarles’s theme in his emblem 11 for both versions of the gates of paradise, issued respectively as for children (1793) and for the sexes (c. 1825-26).blake changes the sexes; in for children a myopic ancient man as “aged ignorance” attempts to cut the wings of flamboyant sense, a youth greeting the joys of the dawn. when blake reissued this plate in for the sexes, he added genitals to the body of this winged youth, symbolic of fleshly desire, along with the legend “perceptive organs [related to sight] closed their objects close” (see jerusalem 30.55-56, e 177). “aged ignorance” (recall “aged ignorance” who cants moralities in europe 12.7-8, e 64) clips with a pair of scissors the wings of “all sublunary things” (“the keys of the gates” no. 11, e 268). in quarles’s emblem faith has “her wings … clipt [with scissors], and eyes [of perception] put out by sense”; once “quick-seeing” and “sense-conq’ring,” she has now “growne blind, and cold.” in “the keys of the gates,” blake describes “aged ignorance,” a figure he equates with satan (see “keys” no. 11, e 268, where the speaker clearly is satan), as “holy & cold.” hence, in blake’s realignment in for the sexes, satan as blind morality shears the wings of sense. the above particulars lead to the observation that blake made additional use of quarles’s emblem, namely the dominating vignette of an airborne, hoofed devil engulfed in flames. this blackened devil with widespread bat wings sits on a suspended throne in heaven, presiding over the earthly assaults on astræa and faith by fraud and sense. he is described by quarles as an “evill … corrupter of the world” (63), and the text quotes revelation 12.12: “the devill is come unto you, having great wrath, because he knoweth that he hath but a short time.” quarles’s agitated devil as a “usurper mounts the seat / of royall majestie” (61), wearing an imperial crown and holding a kingly forked scepter in his left hand, while his right hand holds a writhing serpent. in plate 11 of europe, 1794, politically oriented blake implements quarles’s iconography in a design in which a bat-winged pope wearing a papal crown as a high priest in the dark heavens sits on the chair of god, supervising the universe.see also the pope with bat wings in night thoughts 91 and the devil-hoofed pope wearing a conical mitre in night thoughts 396. in night thoughts 349 a swirling enraged “leviathan” (edward young’s word) with flaming carbuncle on his head (blake’s addition) is seen in the “foaming billow” devouring “high titles”; these high titles are envisioned by blake as a web-handed scaly priest wearing a papal tiara, with a profile suspiciously close to that of george iii (compare the caricature of george iii in “john bull humbugg’d,” 12 may 1794). blake’s devil-pope holds an open book, suggesting a book of judgment.compare the book of chaos held by satanic urizen, a figure possessing a crown-like halo in urizen pl. 5, and the open book of stars held by a supernal female in night thoughts 501. the laws of this “brazen book” in europe 11 are “copied on earth” by “kings & priests” (lines 3-4, e 64). 1. blake, europe copy a, pl. 11. yale center for british art, paul mellon collection. b1992.8.4(12). in europe 11 the winglike bat ears on the corpulent pope’s head form in double vision a winged cherub,compare the winged heads in blake’s watercolors of the death of st. joseph and the death of the virgin, dated 1803. and blake with purpose enhances such pictorial irony, as the chair in heaven is the english king’s coronation chair, housed in westminster abbey. as an apprentice blake spent five years extensively sketching the monuments in westminster abbey, and he undoubtedly knew that beneath the chair was secreted the sacred stone of destiny (known also as the coronation stone), associated with jacob’s pillow, a stone engendering a dream wherein a ladder reached to the biblical heavens.the coronation stone is also called the stone of scone, which was taken from scotland by edward i in 1296; it was returned in 1996, after 700 years. blake deviously moved the gothic panels on the sides of this famous throne to the back, in order to simulate the bat ears of the ungodly pontiff. (in copy g the pope’s bat ears are not flesh colored, and thus appear to be an integral part of the throne’s design.)see g. e. bentley, jr., blake books (oxford: clarendon press, 1977) 155. significantly, blake’s unholy divine potentially possesses the caricatured countenance of portly george iii, a topical reflection of quarles’s emblem that reveals “the seat / of royall majestie.” in a further irony, quarles’s fraud and sense find their blakean analogues in the two attending angelsthe crossed fleur-de-lis scepters with three leaves each held by these female angels may signify the english king’s “golden sceptre, with its cross” and top, which “rises into a fleur-de-lis, of six leaves” (b. lambert, the history and survey of london and its environs, vol. 4 [london, 1806] 117). to the left and right beneath the bat-winged pope.in his annotations to bacon’s essays, blake violently rejected bacon’s assertion that “a king is a mortal god on earth, unto whom the living god hath lent his own name” (e 624), and executed an obscene drawing in which a chain of excrement descends from the “devils arse,” ending in the inscription “a king” (e 624). see robert w. rix, “blake, bacon and ‘the devils arse,’” blake 37.4 (spring 2004): 137-44. thus, scatology becomes eschatology. rejecting “kingship <or allegoric godship>,” blake declared that god exists only in the extraneous “<effluvia>” of kings and priests (annotations to thornton, e 669). review: susan matthews, blake, sexuality and bourgeois politeness susan matthews. blake, sexuality and bourgeois politeness. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2011. x + 269 pp. £60.00/$98.00, hardcover; £19.99/$29.99, paperback (2014). reviewed by sibylle erle sibylle erle (sibylle.erle@bishopg.ac.uk), frsa, is senior lecturer in english at bishop grosseteste university lincoln, author of blake, lavater and physiognomy (legenda, 2010), co-editor of science, technology and the senses (special issue for ravon, 2008), and volume editor of panoramas, 1787-1900: texts and contexts (5 vols., pickering & chatto, 2012). with morton d. paley she is now co-editing the reception of william blake in europe (bloomsbury). she has co-curated the display blake and physiognomy (2010-11) at tate britain and devised an online exhibition of tennyson’s copy of blake’s job for the tennyson research centre (2013). apart from reception, she is working on “character” in the romantic period. matthews’s book, a must-read for anyone interested in blake and gender, reinvestigates blake’s attitude toward sexual freedom, especially female desire, while firmly identifying his approach to gendered sexuality as a response to the dictates of eighteenth-century bourgeois culture, politeness, and sensibility. matthews relocates blake by focusing on his commercial works and recontextualizes his poetic language via the public discourse on sexuality within the bourgeois world. the new blake emerges once the works normally associated with misogynistic views are more and better contextualized within the personal and textual networks surrounding them: “like oothoon, [nicholas rowe’s jane] shore is opened by suffering to a consciousness of others, losing a sense of her own separate self and of the separateness of sexuality from other categories” (198). here, the feminine self is presented as emotionally involved and engaging (sexually), which means that it inadvertently challenges its liminal position as passive other, fixed as a norm and constructed through eighteenth-century cultural discourse. female figures who are engaged, matthews argues, counterpoint the masculine self and adam smith’s model of the sympathetic spectator, which relies on the point of view of the masculine self as focalizer of emotion. blake, sexuality and bourgeois politeness discusses blake alongside william cowper, george cumberland, henry fuseli, william hayley, samuel richardson, hannah more, and mary wollstonecraft. and it does a lot more than introduce yet another blake; it addresses and tackles a fundamental paradox: how can the blake of the 1790s, hailed as a figurehead for sexual liberation, be so negative about female desire in his later epic works? much of the early writing on blake’s sexual politics (fox, mellor, ostriker), matthews points out, helped to create the now-familiar account of an ideal blakean world that excluded the physical body (which blake didn’t like or was at least ambivalent about), a world represented as positive because those populating it were happy anyway. more often than not, blake’s more mature and complicated myth, unfolding in milton and jerusalem, has been interpreted as steering toward a requirement that individual identity be transcended, neutralized in an androgynous-looking body. surely this is not what blake had in mind. the paradox, according to matthews, can only be solved by dismantling the categories blake is using, because what is now standard terminology among feminists clouds how unstable or slippery the language at blake’s disposal actually was: “the difference of beulah and eternity is perhaps better understood in terms of differing understandings of the word ‘sexuality’ or of differing sexual cultures. it is clearly inappropriate to assume that there is a single entity called ‘sex’ or ‘sexuality’” (106), since the two-sex model, as discussed in the work of thomas laqueur, was not yet fully developed. in blake’s time, “sexuality” designated what we now understand to be captured by “gender,” or rather the words “sex,” “sexual,” and “sexuality” define and convert “female” into “feminine.” matthews takes her lead from queer scholarship (bruder, elfenbein, hobson), which first identified and claimed positive treatments of same-sex desire, in order to reclaim “sexuality for feminism” (5). in blake, sexuality and bourgeois politeness she assembles and reconstructs literary and cultural contexts out of which the historically situated meaning of the word “sexuality” can be seen to emerge. with this approach, matthews adds but also rejects some of the scholarly work (makdisi, mee, thompson, worrall) that has associated blake’s opinions with radical and dissenting subcultures. she proposes that blake was always pro-sex, and that only the complexity of his thoughts, communicated through texts and images, increased: “the key to my argument lies in the newness of the word ‘sexuality’ in blake’s time” (3). matthews works on shifts in meaning taking place within the bourgeois world, arguing that blake commented critically on the increasing construction of gendered identity and the way it regulated sexual pleasure. the book is organized into eight chapters, which trace the changes in the language as they become manifest in literature and visual culture and historicize the discourse of identity. matthews is not interested in biographical connections, though she firmly roots her study in the felpham years and both the time and language shared with hayley, and perhaps overemphasizes the impact fuseli may have had on blake. the chapters, which intertwine late with early blake and weave together works by several of his contemporaries, contain an impressive amount of archival research. chapter 1 starts with the expression “happy copulation” from visions of the daughters of albion, and explains it as a visual and physically transformative or sexual experience, while pitching it against smith’s sympathetic spectator, who remains emotionally detached and never enjoys or merges with what “he” observes. the backdrops for this discussion are the publication of hogarth’s satiric prints in the 1790s and barry’s anti-european attitudes. this point about visual culture is taken up in chapter 2, where fuseli and public and private exhibition cultures existing independently of the royal academy move center stage. matthews illuminates the symbolism in fuseli’s titania and bottom and elaborates on his views of female sexuality as well as their european origins. all this resonates with blake’s gothic treatment of the perceived loss of sexual liberty and the sexual politics of europe, where by means of the dream device and a frame narrative blake associates sex with fairy power and healthy, unregulated passion. the next chapter pair begins with the cultural denotations of the word “soft” and the editions of and illustrations to hayley’s the triumphs of temper; it examines how words migrate from the “positive feminine sphere” (56) of hayley’s poem, as well as his “feminised world” (73), into blake’s poetry (an island in the moon), where they appear manipulated to counteract the objections made by cowper, more, and wollstonecraft. matthews then turns to hayley’s essay on old maids and its “precursor texts” (84) in hayley’s library, the main one being martin madan’s thelyphthora. the discussion is on the benefits of desire on (old and young) bodies as well as society as a whole. chapter 4, in other words, historicizes virginity and prostitution, as well as polygamy, to identify blake’s pro-sex attitude, implied in the sympathetic characters thel and ololon. in chapter 5, where matthews delineates blake’s revisionary reading of cowper (a cousin of madan), we see blake move away from hayley, since he undermines the feminized identity constructed in hayley’s biography of cowper by sexualizing it. thematic and pictorial connections are made between the task, the marriage of heaven and hell, the urizen books, milton, and illustrations to cowper’s poems. many of the passages that we have become accustomed to reading as descriptions of rape do not represent rape: “sex is not the end of the story, as it is for hayley and for richardson …, but the event which precipitates or allows the possibility of change” (150). so far, we have learnt that sex (consensual or non-consensual) is good because it unblocks the body and releases its energies. matthews now overlays earthquake imagery, which can symbolize a sexually excited female, with ideas of sexual liberation and artistic production. this allegorizing of violent acts is provocative rhetorically because it doesn’t face the fact that people have died from them. chapter 6, however, historicizes rape narratives by investigating textual relations between richardson’s clarissa and blake’s visions and cumberland’s annotations to europe (copy d), because it examines connections between these texts via edward bysshe’s art of english poetry and the owners of this book: richardson, blake, and cumberland. it looks into literary references and the use of quotations (in clarissa) while comparing blake’s annotations (to the books he owned) and cumberland’s (to europe) and exploring their impact on text. matthews teases out the polysemy of the newly opened-up gaps. the conclusion is that blake opted for an open and fragmented writing technique, a device that matthews (too narrowly) associates with alexander geddes and german higher criticism. the effect is that visions, because it doesn’t offer a coherent plot or the consciousness of a three-dimensional female character, exposes how the threat of rape is used to regulate female sexuality. to put this differently, with the multiple and competing voices suggesting female agency, blake is mimicking the debate about female sexuality taking place at the end of the eighteenth century, as well as giving women a voice. chapter 7 engages with blake’s illustrations to blair’s the grave and malkin’s a father’s memoirs of his child, which includes material from mrs. malkin’s journal, to explore expressions of mourning in the public sphere. it also treats the petworth vision of the last judgment (1808), a commission organized by ozias humphry and from lord egremont but for the countess of egremont, as well as blake’s description of the painting, which, matthews argues, was directed at female readers. this form of address makes the painting, like the whore of babylon (1809), an unambiguous and positive statement about liberated female sexuality (185). blake not only embodies souls in his pictures of the afterlife but also infuses the bodies with sexual undertones, which upset the reviewers because it suggested to them visionary enthusiasm as well as excessive grieving. blake’s art, according to matthews, creates a spiritual world that is sexualized to include representations of equality as well as female empowerment. this world, which matthews links to fuseli’s, has room for parody and differs substantially from the world envisaged in (the more private) jerusalem (184). the final chapter, which brings together writers and texts that blake engaged with, finds that blake was a consistent defender of female sexuality and rejected the regulative discourses of politeness, sensibility, enthusiasm, and evangelicalism. he was aware of the scandal caused by godwin’s memoirs and sympathetic toward wollstonecraft: “blake’s unqualified praise of cumberland’s 1798 captive, the year of the wollstonecraft scandal and malthus’s essay, makes the argument that around this time he develops a virulent hostility towards active female sexuality particularly improbable” (190). positioning blake’s utopian ideas of sexual union, which transcend the individual identity of a visually gendered body, around the debate about female desire, matthews rounds off her discussion of blake and sexuality by tracing his take on the issue of adultery right through to the exhibition of 1809, with its focus on naked bodies and the juxtaposition of the penance of jane shore and the goats with the spiritual form of nelson guiding leviathan. matthews’s book is a fierce, fascinating, and passionate response to the last thirty years in blake studies; it revisits the debates initiated by the feminists to claim that blake’s opinion of both gender and sexuality can only make sense if firmly placed into their historical linguistic context. matthews successfully carves out a new area of investigation and convincingly presents a new blake. because this blake blurs the boundaries of the very words and categories we (today) assess him with, he emerges from blake, sexuality and bourgeois politeness as an even more radical figure. review: leo damrosch, eternity’s sunrise: the imaginative world of william blake leo damrosch. eternity’s sunrise: the imaginative world of william blake. new haven: yale university press, 2015. ix + 332 pp. 40 color plates; 56 black-and-white illustrations. $30.00, hardcover; $22.00, paperback. reviewed by r. paul yoder r. paul yoder (rpyoder@ualr.edu) recently retired as a professor of english at the university of arkansas at little rock. he is the author of articles on milton, alexander pope, samuel richardson, thomas gray, blake, and wordsworth. his book, the narrative structure of william blake’s poem jerusalem: a revisionist interpretation, was published by the edwin mellen press in 2010. he has also co-edited, with wallace jackson, two essay collections on pope. he is a contributor and co-editor (with michelle levy and colette colligan) of study abroad in the lake district, recently published as part of the romantic circles pedagogy commons <http://​www.​rc.​umd.​edu/​pedagogies/​commons/​abroad>. his most recent work explores connections between british romanticism and bob dylan. if you are a regular reader of blake/an illustrated quarterly, there is a good chance that you have friends who are somewhat mystified by your interest in william blake. leo damrosch’s eternity’s sunrise: the imaginative world of william blake is a good way to explain that interest. as damrosch puts it, “this book draws constantly on their [blake specialists’] insights but is intended for everyone who is attracted to blake and would like to know more about his art and ideas” (2). his “goal is to help nonspecialists appreciate blake’s profoundly original vision and to open ‘the doors of perception’ to the symbols in which he conveyed it” (3). eternity’s sunrise is almost a coffee-table book, generously illustrated with forty color plates and fifty-six black-and-white images. there are also a brief chronology and a small black-and-white map of blake’s london. damrosch says that his book “has a strongly biographical focus, but it is not a systematic biography” (3); of the fifteen relatively brief chapters, the first eleven follow the progress of blake’s life and career in a way that introduces the nonspecialist to blake’s methods and themes, the following three address blake’s attitudes toward gender and religion, and the final chapter returns to biographical chronology and the end of blake’s life. damrosch’s style leads the relatively uninitiated reader gently through blake’s sometimes baffling world, but those working in blake studies might wish for something more challenging. the nonspecialist will find much to like in eternity’s sunrise. the book’s opening chapter presents introductory material on blake’s early life and training, his apprenticeship, the difference between engraving and etching, blake’s marriage to catherine boucher, and his discovery of relief etching (inspired by his dead brother robert). in the second chapter’s helpful discussion of “how should we understand blake’s symbols?” damrosch demonstrates blake’s use of symbolism by showing how he adds his own symbols to his illustrations of the work of other writers, including thomas gray’s eton college ode, shakespeare’s “pity” speech from macbeth, and the “sunshine holiday” episode in milton’s l’allegro. when damrosch turns to blake’s own poetry, his approach is both less systematic and more narrowly focused. chapters 3 and 4 look at innocence (mostly in the songs of innocence) and experience (mostly in the songs of experience), but without much sense of the breadth of those books or of how they interact in the combined songs. chapter 5 looks at “revolution” in the image “albion rose,” the marriage of heaven and hell, and america, with a brief glance at europe. chapter 6, “atoms and visionary insight,” describes blake’s response to the enlightenment, focusing on “mock on mock on” and blake’s color print of newton. chapter 7, “‘the gate is open,’” finds blake already in felpham (1800–03) and focuses on the work produced or at least begun during that period. in chapter 8 damrosch considers “understanding blake’s myth” before proceeding to discussions of the zoas (chapter 9, “the zoas and ourselves”), milton (chapter 10, “the prophetic call”), and jerusalem (chapter 11, “breakthrough to apocalypse”). chapter 12, “‘the torments of love and jealousy,’” backtracks twenty-seven years to visions of the daughters of albion of 1793, and damrosch recounts the well-known stories about the blakes—thomas butts catching them reading paradise lost naked and blake’s ill-tempered insistence that catherine apologize to robert—as a context for the sexual trauma of oothoon. however, there is no discussion of either the slave trade, which the poem openly criticizes, or john locke, whose essay concerning human understanding informs much of oothoon’s critique of sexual and moral standards. in chapter 13, “the female will,” damrosch switches from visions to for children: the gates of paradise and “to tirzah” (from experience) and traces the stages in blake’s attitude toward women and sexuality from oothoon’s vision of sexual liberation to vala’s cult of virginity, concluding that “even if [blake’s] fears and obsessions [about sexuality] did damage the integrity of his imaginative work, he could never have created [that work] without them” (224). after some brief remarks on all religions are one, chapter 14, “wrestling with god,” finally addresses urizen, relating it to “the ancient of days” picture; damrosch says much about what urizen represents, but almost nothing about what actually happens in the poem. chapter 15, “the traveler in the evening,” returns to chronology and considers blake’s late poverty, his growing ambivalence about his audience (suggested by the gouges in jerusalem plate 3), and the “ancients,” the circle of young artists who befriended blake late in his life. damrosch’s approach yields some very good summary statements about blake’s work: his “imagination was fundamentally visual and … by learning to ‘read’ the images that accompany his words, we can gain access to the heart of his vision” (39); “for blake personification was no mere rhetorical device; it expressed his belief that nature is fundamentally human” (41); “america: a prophecy is prophetic in the sense already explained, a commentary on the meaning of events, not a prediction of the future” (104). he cautions that “blake’s symbols are dynamic, not iconic. we learn what they mean by observing what they do” (114). on blake’s attitude toward nature, which differs greatly from wordsworth’s, damrosch notes that blake “had no use whatever for the sentimental ideal of mother nature” (213), but that “a case can be made that when blake seems to criticize nature, his real target is often mistaken human constructions of nature” (232). he also recognizes something that perhaps many readers see but notice not: “after the songs of innocence, jesus all but disappeared from blake’s poems for nearly a decade” (255). i, for one, would certainly like to hear more about what damrosch makes of this last fact. blake’s attitude toward religion is apt to give the nonspecialist the most trouble, and damrosch does not shy away from that aspect of blake’s work, nor from the relationship blake saw between religion and gender. he notes that “blake despised the theological doctrine that mary was a virgin, and liked to suggest that if joseph didn’t get her pregnant, somebody else must have” (56). he recognizes that “blake was just as fierce a critic of institutional religion as hume” (48), that “blake rejected the concept of original sin” (70), and that “institutional religion, blake thought, had a wicked commitment to promoting sexual repression” (73). even so, he adds, “it needs always to be emphasized that blake’s attack is not just on doctrine as abstract theology, but on doctrine as a mechanism for ratifying injustice” (245). much of blake’s attack on religious doctrine is related specifically to issues of sexuality and gender roles, and damrosch is correct to be cautious about blake’s approach to these issues late in his career. particularly in the late major prophecies, damrosch says, “blake is preoccupied with an alleged domination of the female principle over the male” (218), and “collectively, vala and tirzah represent a force that blake insists on calling the female will” (221). that phrase “insists on calling” voices the frustration many readers feel about blake’s handling of female characters, and damrosch correctly notes that “blake is not really a prophet of unconflicted sexuality, and his vision is closer to the tragic one that freud expresses: ‘something in the nature of the sexual instinct itself is unfavourable to the achievement of absolute gratification’” (211). he also weighs in on the question of blake’s mental health, saying at the outset, “it is important to recognize that blake was a troubled spirit, subject to deep psychic stresses, with what we would now call paranoid and schizoid tendencies that were sometimes overwhelming” (2), and reiterating later, “it is hard to doubt that deep psychic disturbances do indeed lie at the heart of [blake’s] work” (133). most of damrosch’s remarks come in the discussion of blake’s three-year stint under the patronage of william hayley in felpham, a time of particular emotional turmoil for blake, but he notes that “even before going to felpham, blake was afflicted with what was then called melancholy, and would now be called clinical depression” (133). in felpham, “whether or not there was an element of bipolar disorder, blake also experienced phenomena that would now be called schizoid” (134). of the apocalyptic scenes of the books that arose from the felpham period, damrosch notes as “worth pondering” remarks by ronald britton “that a dread of psychic fragmentation and of the void is characteristic of borderline personalities” and “that blake’s apocalyptic breakthrough can be seen as compensatory fantasy: ‘he unashamedly propounds as the route to salvation what in psychoanalysis has been called infantile megalomania’” (187-88). there is ample room for disagreement about blake’s mental health, but whatever one thinks about it, damrosch is certainly correct that blake’s “myth also contains profound insights into the divided self, a condition that many people experience to some extent and that blake experienced to a terrifying degree” (224). many of the things damrosch does to accommodate the uninitiated reader may be annoying to the specialist. for example, while his first eleven chapters lead the reader through the general contours of blake’s life and development, in chapters 7-11 we arrive at discussions of felpham and the great final prophecies having had little comment on europe, none whatever on visions, the song of los, the book of ahania, or the book of los, and only passing mention of the [first] book of urizen. the more important of these books are discussed in the concluding chapters that are more thematic than chronological in nature. i’m not sure what is gained by this arrangement, and one might argue that it obscures key elements in the development of blake’s work, while also tending to make his thought appear less dynamic over his lifetime. damrosch also “corrects” blake’s spelling and punctuation, a decision that some might argue removes a key component of the strangeness that makes blake blake. stylistically, perhaps in an attempt to make the book more accessible, damrosch has a tendency not to name critics in the text proper, so that if the reader wants to know, for example, who is the “modern expert on prints” who comments on the inverse relationship between the complexity of “the technique of a print” and the creativity of the engraver (32), one must turn to the endnotes, only to find “ivins, how prints look, 158” (282). since this is the second reference to ivins’s book, and there is no central bibliography, nor is ivins included in the index, the reader must then backtrack through the notes to find the publishing information. there is little discussion of the difference between illustration and illumination, or of the fact that many images in blake’s texts seem entirely unrelated to what the words are saying. the closest damrosch gets to those issues is to note, concerning “the blossom,” “it may seem surprising that neither bird [sparrow or robin] actually appears in the picture, but it is characteristic of blake to emphasize symbolic significance, not literal imagery” (58). it is perhaps inevitable that damrosch’s broad statements for the nonspecialist create a tendency to simplify explanations, gloss over real critical sticking points, and discuss characters as static entities. for example, concerning the songs of innocence, he writes, “since the poems express multiple facets of innocence, there is no correct order in which to read them” (57), but this statement ignores the complex history of the book’s production, its many different orderings, and the issues of “contexture” raised by critics like neil fraistat, not to mention blake’s own delineation of “the order in which the songs of innocence & of experience ought to be paged & placed” in his letter to butts of around 1818 (erdman 772). similarly, damrosch reiterates the standard line on the major prophecies without acknowledging critical alternatives: “blake’s long prophecies used to be called epics, but that makes no sense. an epic is a narrative based on strict chronology. … blake has no interest in conventional continuity, and in his poems multiple versions of the ‘same’ events occur over and over again” (143). in remarking on the final image of jerusalem, he suggests that “the divided selves of los are reunited at last, and fully cooperative. but how this has come to pass is never shown or explained” (192), effectively ignoring the awakening of albion in the closing plates of the poem. concerning visions he flattens the characters till they are hardly characters at all: “since these are not novelistic characters but symbolic ones, it makes sense to think of them as conflicting aspects of human consciousness” (203). if you know little about blake, these issues will pass relatively unnoticed, but if you are familiar with blake’s work and blake criticism, you may experience some frustration. in his discussion of milton, damrosch says, “since it is blake in felpham who has summoned milton back to earth, a crucial event in the poem is their direct encounter. it is described, however, in imagery of surpassing weirdness” (167). damrosch’s goal in eternity’s sunrise is to help make blake’s “surpassing weirdness” accessible to the reader who has little or no formal background in blake’s work. writers like blake, joyce, or faulkner can be intimidating and difficult to approach, but a little gentle guidance can go a long way to ease that first contact. for someone wondering what all the hubbub is about concerning blake, damrosch’s book may be just the thing. 76 blake/an illustrated quarterly winter 2011-12 a r t i c l e b iographical information concerning any period of the life of catherine sophia blake, née boucher (cover illus.), remains lamentably sparse. however, few twenty-firstcentury scholars would agree with mona wilson’s comment, made about 1927, that “there is little independent record of catherine blake, nor is it needed.”1 for the four years following blake’s death, catherine was the custodian and saleswoman of a varied and substantial collection of her husband’s works, as well as his drawing, painting, engraving, and printing materials. she was also a unique source for much information about his life and working practices communicated to frederick tatham, his fellow ancients, and other friends and visitors. for almost forty-five years she was the person who lived and worked most closely with blake, enabling him to realize numerous projects, impossible without her assistance. catherine was an artist and printer in her own right, with firsthand knowledge and experience of blake’s art practices.2 and yet in surviving contemporary records written during and after her marriage, she was principally commended for her domestic role.3 earlier versions of the paper were presented at the blake at 250 conference, university of york, 30 july-1 aug. 2007, the romantic biographies conference, university of keele, 8 may 2009, and the session on recovering the historical catherine blake, 1762-1831, mla convention, los angeles, 7 jan. 2011. much of the material derives from chapter 8 of my phd thesis, “new discoveries concerning william and catherine blake in nineteenth century london: residences, fellow inhabitants, neighbours, friends and milieux, 1803-1878,” university of york, 2006. for kind assistance and support during the research and writing of this paper i wish to thank the staff of new stratford library, new stratford, london, kate davies, david alexander, troy r. c. patenaude, my friend and fellow student at york, and especially my thesis supervisor, michael phillips. 1. mona wilson, the life of william blake (1927; ed. geoffrey keynes, oxford: oxford university press, 1971) 368. 2. in a letter to george richmond, samuel palmer recommends “mrs. blake’s white” as an effective art medium. see raymond lister, ed., the letters of samuel palmer, vol. 1 (oxford: clarendon press, 1974) 38. 3. in a letter to richard monckton milnes, first baron houghton, c. 1870, the painter, antiquary, and visionary seymour kirkup described catherine as “as good as a servant” (g. e. bentley, jr., blake records, 2nd ed. [new haven: yale university press, 2004] [hereafter br(2)] 294). she had probably been in service as a maidservant before marrying (see br[2] 71). there is an account of there being a servant at the blakes’ house in the early period of their residence at 13 hercules buildings, lambeth, in the in the last two decades interest in and recognition of catherine’s position in blake’s life and work have grown. in 1993 joseph viscomi asserted her integral role in all aspects of blake’s bookmaking projects.4 in 2004 she was given her own entry in the new edition of the oxford dictionary of national biography.5 eugenie r. freed, in her review of barbara lachman’s fictionalized life, voices for catherine blake: a gathering (2000), observed: like many of those interested in blake’s work, i do feel the need to know a great deal more about catherine blake, an unsung heroine who has yet to be acknowledged as the courageous woman of many parts that she had to be in real life.6 as this essay will demonstrate, scholars have yet to exhaust all avenues in reclaiming historical information concerning the life of blake’s wife. hitherto, the final four years of her life (1827-31) have received negligible attention from blake’s biographers. only g. e. bentley, jr., has attempted a detailed chronological reconstruction of where catherine lived during those years. in the second edition of blake records he suggests that after six months living and working at 6 cirencester place, john linnell’s town house and painting studio (sept. 1827-c. mar. 1828), the recently widowed catherine lived, briefly, alone in lodgings at 17 upper charlotte street, fitzroy square, before residing with tatham and his wife at 20 lisson grove north (apr. 1828-spring 1829). according to bentley, she then returned to her former residence in upper charlotte street.7 bentley’s reconstruction, based on contemporary data and informed guesswork, provides our most reliable picture of her last years to date. we can be certain that she lived at cirencester place for the first six months of her widowhood.8 however, reliable information about the remaining three and a half years of her life is meager. a close inspection of bentley’s chronology reveals that we really know little of catherine’s life or whereabouts after she left tatham in the early spring of 1829. moreover, the precise nature of tatham’s domestic 1790s. however, according to tatham, catherine soon took over those duties: “(as mrs. blake declared …) the more service the more inconvenience” (“life of blake,” quoted in br[2] 676). 4. see, for example, joseph viscomi, blake and the idea of the book (princeton: princeton university press, 1993) 102-03. 5. robert n. essick, “blake, catherine sophia,” oxford dictionary of national biography [hereafter odnb], oxford university press, 2004 <http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/64608>, accessed 19 apr. 2006. 6. eugenie r. freed, blake 36.4 (spring 2003): 151. 7. br(2) 754-55. under the heading for 17 upper charlotte or charlton street, bentley says that “she had returned to upper charlotte street by the spring of 1829”; under 20 lisson grove, he gives apr. 1828-early 1830 for her residence with the tathams, but he corrects 1830 to 1829 in addenda to br(2) in blake 40.1 (summer 2006): 39. 8. alexander gilchrist states that she left linnell during the summer of 1828; see life of william blake, “pictor ignotus,” vol. 1 (london: macmillan, 1863) 365. “an excellent saleswoman”: the last years of catherine blake by angus whitehead winter 2011-12 blake/an illustrated quarterly 77 arrangements is unknown. bentley’s assertion that catherine resided with and worked for tatham and his wife at lisson grove, although apparently widely accepted, is based on circumstantial evidence and has not been fully investigated. tatham’s wife, the “mrs. tatham” in whose arms catherine died,9 has not been identified, nor has any blake biographer recovered the precise location of the last residence of catherine blake. although it is clear that she resided at no. 17, it has not been established whether her final lodgings were in charlotte street, upper charlotte street, charlton street, or upper charlton street, fitzroy square. this essay presents and explores new information concerning the life, residences, and circle of catherine blake in the period immediately following her departure from linnell’s town house, c. march 1828, until her death in mid-october 1831. it revises a number of bentley’s assertions regarding the chronology and location of her residences. the essay will also explore her relationship with frederick tatham, the member of the ancients with whom she had most contact after blake’s death, and who—rightly or wrongly—inherited the blakes’ earthly possessions after catherine’s demise. 1. catherine blake in widowhood, 1827-31 when william blake died on the evening of 12 august 1827, catherine was left a considerable number of unsold works10 but little ready money, and she appears to have been unable to support herself. that day she was obliged to borrow five pounds from blake’s patron linnell.11 in a letter to linnell written two days later, john constable expressed the hope that the royal academy would “do something handsome for the widow” and gave him advice as to how to apply to the academy’s benevolent fund on catherine’s behalf.12 nevertheless, about a week after blake’s death catherine appeared intent on continuing to print from a rolling press, presumably in an effort to market her husband’s works and support herself. about 18 august james lahee, copperplate printer of castle street, oxford market, wrote in response to a query from linnell that he was willing to accept the blakes’ old press: “if it 9. according to gilchrist 1: 367. 10. including approximately 161 leaves of all religions are one (see g. e. bentley, jr., blake books [oxford: clarendon press, 1977] [hereafter bb] 82), at least one copy of the descriptive catalogue (bb 136), pl. 1 of the first book of urizen (bb 170), copies of for children and for the sexes (bb 192, 197), the manuscript of “for children the gates of hell” (bb 215-16), jerusalem copy e (bb 230), the manuscript notebook (bb 334), “pickering manuscript” (bb 342), poetical sketches copies a, g, h, i, k, l, m, n, p, r, t, u, x (bb 346), small book of designs copy b (bb 357), songs of innocence and of experience copy w (bb 423), all of blake’s surviving plates (bb 429), perhaps tiriel b1 (bb 449), and blake’s copies of the tragedies of aeschylus (1779) (bb 682) and swedenborg, the wisdom of angels (bb 696). 11. br(2) 459. 12. br(2) 460. happens not to be larger than grand eagle, and it is a good one in other respects i have one idle which would answer mrs b’s purpose.”13 however, the proposed project to swap presses appears not to have materialized, as four days later linnell arranged for blake’s star wheel rolling press to be moved from 3 fountain court to cirencester place.14 catherine followed two weeks after the press. during the period in which she lived with linnell and then with tatham, catherine’s principal means of support derived from her performance of the duties of a domestic housekeeper. while at cirencester place she was also responsible for accepting money from linnell’s customers when he was not at home.15 nevertheless, from the autumn of 1827 she began occasionally to sell her late husband’s works to visitors. with linnell’s assistance, she sold blake’s last commission, a name plate, as well as a copy of illustrations of the book of job, to his old friend george cumberland.16 catherine also attempted to encourage cumberland to try to sell further copies of job in bristol, despite the fact that he had been unable to sell the copy he had received from blake some months earlier.17 13. br(2) 467. 14. br(2) 468. 15. see br(2) 471. in a note to the artist and traveler edward thomas daniell written shortly after 11 sept. 1827, linnell states, “mrs blake … lives with me now here [i.e., cirencester place].” george cumberland addressed his letter dated 25 nov. to “mrs. blake at mr linells 6 cirencester place” (br[2] 477fn). however, linnell spent most of his time at hampstead with his family (see br[2] 475). no record of catherine’s having been invited to help mrs. linnell with the children at hampstead has been traced. 16. in nov. george cumberland, jr., called on catherine at cirencester place; linnell is not recorded as present. it appears that catherine was responsible for persuading george cumberland to buy the name plate and a copy of job (see br[2] 475, 479). after paying £5.15.6 for these works on 16 jan. 1828, george jr. reported to his father in bristol that “[catherine’s] late husbands works she intends to prin[t] with her own hands and trust to their sal[e] for a livelihood” (br[2] 482). 17. in his letter to catherine of 25 nov., cumberland explained that he could not sell the copy of job in his possession. he also suggested a way of marketing the remainder of blake’s works: that elaborate work, i have not only shewn to all our amateurs and artists here without success but am now pushing it through clifton, by means of mr lane the bookseller there, having previously placed it with mr tyson, mr trimlet, and another of our print sellers here without success—and as that is the case, and that even those who desired me to write to my friend for a list of his works and prices, (among whom were his great admirers from having seen what i possessed …) declined giving him any orders, on account, as they said, of the prices—i should not recommend you to send any more here—but rather to fix a place in london where all his works may be disposed of offering a complete set for sale to the bmpr, as that will make them best known.—better even than their independant author who for his many virtues most deserved to be so—a man who has stocked the english school with fine ideas,—above trick, fraud, or servility. (br[2] 476) 78 blake/an illustrated quarterly winter 2011-12 although on 8 december linnell loaned catherine a further five pounds,18 a month later she was clearly beginning to establish a customer base for her husband’s works. on 8 january 1828 she sold three copies of “chaucers canterbury pilgrims” to the judge and writer barron field and blake’s acquaintance henry crabb robinson (one of the copies was for charles lamb). on this occasion, catherine agreed to look out other engravings.19 on 17 march mrs. samuel smith and miss julia smith called on catherine and paid eight guineas for lear and cordelia in prison (1779) and a female figure crouching in a cave.20 alexander gilchrist describes catherine’s marketing skills as well as her finishing of blake’s works during this period: she was an excellent saleswoman, and never committed the mistake of showing too many things at one time. aided by mr. tatham she also filled in, within blake’s lines, the colour of the engraved books; and even finished some of the drawings—rather against mr. linnell’s judgment.21 about march 1828 catherine moved to live with and work for frederick tatham. the numerous obituaries of blake which appeared in the year following his death, followed by the publication of j. t. smith’s nollekens and his times (1828), which featured a biography, appear to have enhanced catherine’s chances of selling works. smith wrote that “[blake’s] beloved kate survives him clear of even a sixpenny debt; and in the fullest belief that the remainder of her days will be rendered tolerable by the sale of the few copies of her husband’s works, which she will dispose of at the original price of publication.”22 in early november he wrote to linnell, “what i have said of your worthy friend blake i am fully aware has been servisable [sic] to his widow.”23 later that month the barrister, antiquary, and art collector william twopenny contacted smith: 18. br(2) 477. 19. br(2) 480. in his 1852 “reminiscences” robinson added, “[catherine] informed us that she was going to live with linnell as his housekeeper—and we understood that she would live with him. and he, as it were, to farm her services and take all she had—” (br[2] 705). as bentley notes, “this sentence is not authorized by robinson’s diary or by the probable facts.” 20. br(2) 484. for a female figure crouching in a cave, see martin butlin, the paintings and drawings of william blake, 2 vols. (new haven: yale university press, 1981) [hereafter butlin] #134. 21. gilchrist 1: 366. he is probably citing interviews with tatham and possibly linnell. however, catherine’s manner of conducting business may sometimes have inhibited sales. discussing his disagreement with catherine and tatham over the ownership of the dante drawings and plates, linnell observed on 16 mar. 1831, “i cd. never obtain any definite account of what she expected or wished me to do” (br[2] 541). she also appears to have exasperated tatham (see br[2] 493-94). 22. br(2) 626. 23. br(2) 490. on 19 nov. richmond wrote to palmer, “be pleased when you see mrs b to present my best respects to her. i hope she is now settled” (br[2] 491). my dear sir, can you tell me where the widow of blake the artist lives. yours most truly wm. twopenny temple 19. nov. 182824 catherine’s business acumen, as well as her belief in vision and her husband’s continued presence, is perhaps apparent in her informing linnell on 27 january 1829 that “mr blake told her he thought i shd. pay 3gs. a piece for the plates of dante—.”25 by april 1829 catherine was able to live independently in her own lodgings. this was almost certainly facilitated by a bequest of twenty pounds, furniture, and apparel from her brother-in-law and former landlord, henry banes, who had died in january.26 customers continued to approach her in order to purchase blake’s works. on 11 april tatham informed a potential patron: in behalf of the widow of the late william blake, i have to inform you that her circumstances render her glad to embrace your kind offer for the purchase of some of the works of her departed husband. … this elevated widow is now seeking a support during the remainder of her exemplary course, through the medium of the enlightened and the generous …. should you, sir, be inclined to possess, for the embellishment of your own collection, and the benefit of the widow, any of the enumerated works, they shall be carefully sent to you upon your remitting the payment, and i will take proper care that your kindness shall be rewarded with the best impressions, and that you shall be used in a manner that shall not cause you to regret your absence from the scene of purchase. and communicating either with myself or mrs. blake, you will receive her ample thanks and the acknowledgements of your obedient and humble servant frederick tatham27 24. quoted by g. e. bentley, jr., “william blake and his circle: a checklist of publications and discoveries in 2007,” blake 42.1 (summer 2008): 44. 25. br(2) 493. 26. see angus whitehead, “‘i also beg mr blakes acceptance of my wearing apparel’: the will of henry banes, landlord of 3 fountain court, strand, the last residence of william and catherine blake,” blake 39.2 (fall 2005): 86-89. 27. br(2) 495-96. in br(2) the letter is dated 1 apr. 1829. however, in answer to my querying this point, bentley wrote, “the frederick tatham letter is clearly dated, in the ms copy (of which i have a reproduction), the only evidence of it, as 11 april 1829 (as in brs [blake records supplement (1988)]), not as 1 april (as in br(2)) …” (personal correspondence, 25 mar. 2005). for dennis read’s identification of tatham’s correspondent as the engraver john pye, see “‘an eminent but neglected genius’: an early frederick tatham letter about william blake,” english language notes 19 (sept. 1981): 30; for a problem associated with that identification, see whitehead, “‘i also beg mr blakes acceptance’” 88n60. winter 2011-12 blake/an illustrated quarterly 79 about this time catherine or tatham sent to james ferguson “a list of works by blake offered for sale by his widow.”28 in july 1829 catherine sold the characters of spenser’s “faerie queene” to the earl of egremont for eighty-four pounds, and on 1 august she left the work, together with a “descriptive paper,” at his town residence in grosvenor place.29 the sale provided further financial security. in early 1830 allan cunningham’s life of blake appeared in volume 2 of his lives of the most eminent british painters, sculptors, and architects, and the discussion provoked in newspapers and journals ensured that blake’s name, as well as catherine’s, reached an even wider audience.30 by the summer of 1831 she was probably too ill to print, color, or sell blake’s works. gilchrist describes the stock in catherine’s possession at her death as “still considerable.”31 in addition to selling blake’s works, catherine, an accomplished operator of a rolling press,32 printed from the large number of copperplates in her possession. according to j. t. smith, blake “allowed her, till the last moment of his practice, to take off his proof impressions and print his works, which she did most carefully, and ever delighted in the task.”33 around 1827 catherine, perhaps assisted by linnell, may have utilized blake’s old press at cirencester place to take proofs of 28. br(2) 497. these included copies (probably later pulls) of the 1795 color prints nebuchadnezzar, pity, newton, christ appearing to the apostles after the resurrection, god judging adam, and satan exulting over eve (see br[2] 871n39). according to gilchrist (1: 366), ferguson “took copies of three or four of the engraved books,” probably visions of the daughters of albion, america, and europe (see br[2] 481fn). 29. br(2) 497-98. 30. see br(2) 503-08. catherine is compared in one review to the german poet friedrich gottlieb klopstock’s wife, margareta (meeta) möller. on 27 apr. 1830, after reading cunningham’s life, the poet caroline bowles wrote to robert southey, “i hope she is not in indigence” (br[2] 530). in early mar. 1830 linnell conducted haviland burke to catherine’s residence to examine and purchase works for the bishop of limerick (br[2] 509). burke paid twenty guineas for “two drawings” (the untraced christ showing the print of nails to the disciples and the body of abel found by adam and eve [butlin #666], possibly a replica by linnell of blake’s painting of this name), prints of “job” and “ezekiel,” and a copy of songs. 31. gilchrist 1: 367. the copy of for the sexes: the gates of paradise that tatham gave mr. bird on the day of her funeral, 23 oct. 1831, was probably from this collection (br[2] 547). in his “life of blake” tatham mentions that at her death catherine had “writings, paintings, & a very great number of copper plates” (br[2] 688). 32. see br(2) 131, 151. 33. br(2) 608. smith also states that catherine “became a draughtswoman … and has produced drawings.” according to viscomi, “the significance of blake printing his own plates and working with his wife cannot be overestimated” (idea of the book 105). if catherine acted as blake’s “printer’s devil,” as viscomi suggests (idea of the book 117), or “clean hands,” as essick describes her role (“blake, catherine sophia,” odnb), she would have been well versed in printing as well as coloring, but may have had less experience in carefully inking relief-etched copperplates. for the difficulties involved, see michael phillips, “the printing of blake’s america a prophecy,” print quarterly 21.1 (2004): 18-38. on catherine as printmaker, see viscomi, idea of the book 393n4. the dante plates.34 bentley states that later “she and tatham printed blake’s copperplates of america, europe, jerusalem, and the songs ….”35 for the sexes copies e-i were probably printed by either catherine or tatham.36 she also appears to have colored and finished blake’s prints, drawings, and other works from stock. essick observes that “she may have completed several of blake’s projects, left unfinished at his death, including his watercolour illustrations to bunyan’s pilgrim’s progress.”37 in addition, while at tatham’s catherine produced at least one painting of her own, a watercolor of a head “taken from something she saw in the fire …” (illus. 1).38 according to gilchrist, “the poet and his wife did everything in making the book,—writing, designing, printing, engraving,—everything except manufacturing the paper: the very ink, or colour rather, they did make.”39 smith observes that both william and catherine colored “the marginal figures up by hand in imitation of drawings.”40 tatham records that catherine laboured upon [blake’s] works[,] those parts of them where powers of drawing & form were not necessary, which from her excellent idea of colouring, was of no small use in the completion of his labourious designs. this she did to a much greater extent than is usually credited.41 34. see br(2) 790 and fn. for evidence of catherine and linnell’s printing of the job plates on blake’s press at cirencester place 1827-28, see bb 519. catherine’s press work may have been inferior to blake’s; bentley notes “numerous minor defects” in her printing of little tom the sailor (bb 578). 35. g. e. bentley, jr., the stranger from paradise: a biography of william blake (new haven: yale university press, 2001) [hereafter stranger] 442. posthumous copies of plates of songs of innocence and of experience, poorly printed in light-blue ink, were on display at the tate exhibition of blake’s works at the graves art gallery, sheffield, may-oct. 2003. catherine may have printed plates of america (see bb 89), of jerusalem copies h, i, j (bb 226-27), and of songs of innocence and of experience copies a, b, c, d, f, g1, g2, i, j, k, l, o (bb 370-71). 36. viscomi, idea of the book 367. 37. “blake, catherine sophia,” odnb; see also br(2) 481fn and butlin #829. essick has raised the possibility that the colored copies of the night thoughts engravings may also have been colored by catherine, c. 1797. “they clearly were not colored after a model, they vary in color placement in ways similar to the illuminated books colored up (according to viscomi) in the same session, the palette slips and slides in tone but seems to be a matter of continuous color shifts rather than distinctly different palettes, the quality of the coloring varies greatly in the second half of many copies (she got tired?), and the colors are odd—the sort of things one sees in enamel decorations on british soft-paste porcelain of the eighteenthcentury rather than colored prints in books (e.g., the stedman, like the night thoughts published by a member of the edwards family)” (e-mail, 7 nov. 2005). it is possible that some of these copies could have been colored by catherine after blake’s death. 38. butlin #c2. 39. gilchrist 1: 70, quoted in viscomi, idea of the book 129. 40. br(2) 609. 41. br(2) 690. viscomi suggests that the following works were probably colored by catherine, perhaps following a model by blake: innocence 80 blake/an illustrated quarterly winter 2011-12 1. catherine blake, head “taken from something she saw in the fire.” 9.7 x 12.0 cm. butlin #c2. © fitzwilliam museum, cambridge. pd.158-1985. after the death of her husband she resided for some time with the author of this[,] whose domestic arrangements were entirely undertaken by her; until such changes took place that rendered it impossible for her strength to continue in this voluntary office of sincere affection & regard.43 however, her working and domestic relationship with tatham probably differed from that which she had experienced with linnell. while using cirencester place as a studio during the week, linnell spent the majority of his free time, weekends, and evenings with his wife and young family at their farm cottage at north end, hampstead.44 during these periods 43. quoted in br(2) 690. it is unclear what tatham is referring to by “such changes.” however, he is probably not alluding here to catherine’s becoming “decayed” (a word he uses to describe her later in the “life,” referred to by g. e. bentley, jr., blake records [oxford: clarendon press, 1969] [hereafter br] 567). catherine’s letter to lord egremont suggests that she had personally delivered the characters of spenser’s “faerie queene” to grosvenor place several months after moving to her lodgings (see br[2] 498). grosvenor place is some considerable distance southwest of fitzroy square. whether she walked or took a carriage with the large panel on which blake’s watercolor was mounted (butlin #811 gives the dimensions as 18 x 53½ inches), such an errand is likely to have been beyond the capabilities of a frail woman. 44. see david linnell, blake, palmer, linnell and co.: the life of john linnell (lewes, sussex: book guild, 1994) 86-87. his statement suggests that she had the experience and ability to color her husband’s works confidently and more than competently after his death. this evidence suggests that catherine could print, color, and finish her husband’s works and sell a respectable number to a growing customer base. however, the precise location of tatham’s residence where she lived and worked from 1828 to 1829 has received little attention. 2. catherine blake’s residence with frederick tatham, c. march 1828-april 1829 on linnell’s departure during the spring of 1828 from cirencester place to his new family home and studio at 26 porchester terrace, bayswater, catherine moved to the residence of her friend tatham.42 in his “life of blake,” completed c. 1832, tatham wrote: g and h, songs c, r, aa, experience r, america k, marriage c, europe a[?], visions c, h, i, j, k, l, m (see viscomi, idea of the book 133, 142). 42. at the same time, linnell’s family moved from collins’s farm, hampstead, to porchester terrace. linnell was evidently in a poor state of health during this period due to overwork. this may have been another reason for catherine’s move. winter 2011-12 blake/an illustrated quarterly 81 catherine blake was a house sitter, relaying messages concerning customers and other callers to linnell via nephews in his employment.45 she may have been similarly employed at tatham’s. however, whereas linnell appears to have paid her twenty pounds for her six-month employment at cirencester place,46 tatham describes her role as a “voluntary office.” she seems to have enjoyed a closer relationship with tatham than with linnell. while he does not mention remunerating catherine, he probably treated her in her “voluntary office” as a friend or guest rather than as a servant or dependent. he uses the phrase “maternal loveliness” to describe the nature of her role.47 catherine was in her sixties and childless with only two surviving relatives, while tatham was approximately twenty-three. a quarter of a century earlier, a former fellow resident and wife of the blakes’ first landlord at south molton street, “the young & very amiable mrs enoch. … gave [catherine] all the attention that a daughter could pay to a mother.”48 tatham may have found himself filling a similar role as surrogate son. catherine may have had another reason for her “maternal loveliness.” during this period tatham appears to have suffered from a debilitating mental and physical illness, causing his family and friends considerable concern. in a letter to george richmond dated 12 may 1827, samuel palmer wrote “pray sir bring a very particular account of mr tatham’s health.”49 tatham was still ill three months later when he traveled ninety miles to attend blake’s funeral on 17 august.50 in october 1828 palmer wrote to richmond, “i am rejoiced to 45. see, for example, br(2) 482. 46. it appears that linnell never actually paid catherine for her housekeeping. in a letter to tatham discussing their disagreement over the dante watercolors and plates, he stipulates that before giving up the drawings he expects to be remunerated for the money he gave the blakes but deducts twenty pounds for mrs. blake’s “taking care of house &c in cirencester place” (br[2] 539). however, as he never gave them up, it appears that catherine never received the benefit of the “discount.” 47. br(2) 690. 48. blake, letter to william hayley, 14 jan. 1804 (the complete poetry and prose of william blake, ed. david v. erdman [new york: anchor–random house, 1988] [hereafter e] 740). see also angus whitehead, “new information concerning mrs enoch, william and catherine blake’s ‘fellow inhabitant’ at 17 south molton street,” notes and queries 52.4 (2005): 460-63. 49. lister 1: 13. 50. gilchrist 1: 363. this detail originally appeared in smith’s nollekens and his times: “tatham, ill as he was, travelled ninety miles to attend the funeral of one for whom, next to his own family, he held the highest esteem” (quoted in br[2] 626). he may have traveled from shoreham. richmond recalled a visit to shoreham on 28 june 1827: “i asked my father’s permission to let me join my dear friends samuel palmer and harry waters and (i think) fredk. tatham, who were then in humble fashion lodging in the pretty village” (see a. m. w. stirling, ed., the richmond papers: from the correspondence and manuscripts of george richmond, r.a. and his son sir william richmond r.a., k.c.b. [london: william heinemann, 1926] 16). hear that mr tatham is much better.”51 a letter to linnell from tatham’s father, the architect charles heathcote tatham, in early 1828 seems to suggest that frederick was suffering from a long-term and recurrent illness: i hear you still consult that top-sawyer [eminent personage] thornton. he has been a thorn in my side; but i endeavour to forget his unsuccessful and expensive experiments upon my poor son.52 catherine blake may therefore have spent at least part of her time performing the duties of a sick nurse and carer, as she had for her husband less than a year earlier. catherine’s “voluntary” service for tatham may have derived in part from affection for a young man who, despite personal inconvenience both in distance and health, had attended blake’s funeral and shown care and concern for her in the first six months of her widowhood. tatham and his wife would later nurse and attend catherine at her deathbed, and she died in tatham’s wife’s arms. the couple organized, attended, and almost certainly paid for her funeral, which she requested should follow the form of her husband’s four years earlier.53 linnell, by contrast, appears not to have been present at either funeral, possibly because both were conducted according to the church of england’s service for the burial of the dead. as a strong-minded dissenter who had traveled to scotland in order to avoid a church of england marriage ceremony, he appears to have preferred to offer catherine financial assistance.54 in his “life of blake” tatham does not specify his address during the period of catherine blake’s residence with him, nor does he provide precise information concerning the length of her stay. he simply states that she lived with him “for some time.” until 1969, no blake biographer had discussed either the location or the duration. in the first edition of blake records, however, bentley asserted that from 1828 until 1831 catherine resided with tatham and his wife at 20 lisson grove north, northwest london.55 during the running dispute with linnell concerning ownership of the dante 51. lister 1: 42. after a trip to london, palmer wrote “now for good news … mr tatham seems well!” (1: 44). 52. see d. linnell 113-14. thornton is almost certainly the physician and writer on botany robert john thornton, whose edition of virgil’s pastorals (1821) blake illustrated with a series of woodcuts and whose lord’s prayer (1827) he annotated derisively (see br[2] 376-77, 486; e 667-70). 53. br(2) 690. 54. according to his grandson a. h. palmer, linnell’s favorite saying was “leave the dead to bury the dead” (geoffrey grigson, samuel palmer: the visionary years [london: kegan paul, 1947] 136). 55. br 567 (bentley gives the dates as “1828-1831?”); in stranger 444 the dates are the same but mrs. tatham is not mentioned; br(2) 754-55 refers to catherine’s living with the tathams from 1828 to spring 1829 (see note 7, above). 82 blake/an illustrated quarterly winter 2011-12 watercolors and plates, tatham corresponded from this address on 15 march 1831 and again, twice, on 1 march 1833.56 lisson grove north is also the address he gives at the end of his “life of blake,” written c. 1832.57 this, therefore, was certainly his residence during the period 1831-33. bentley appears to have concluded that tatham had resided there with catherine three years earlier. however, an examination of the marylebone poor rate book entries reveals that neither frederick tatham, mrs. tatham, nor catherine blake lived at this address in spring 1828. according to the rate book for 1828, the year catherine moved to tatham’s residence, the ratepayer for 20 lisson grove north was edward sewell.58 pigot’s directory for the same year reveals that sewell, a carpenter and builder, ran his business from the property, a house “and shops.”59 the following year, the address had no recorded ratepayer;60 it was almost certainly unoccupied. further evidence suggests that tatham did not move to lisson grove north before 1830. as discussed earlier, on 11 april 1829 he wrote from “34. alpha road. regent’s park. london” in reply to a potential patron who had expressed interest in purchasing copies of blake’s works from catherine.61 this was the residence of his father.62 it is also unlikely that tatham and catherine lived at 20 lisson grove during the first half of 1830. in clayton’s court guide for 1830, “f. tatham esq.” is listed as residing in alpha road, presumably with his father at no. 34.63 the marylebone rate books reveal that the ratepayer for 20 lisson grove north that year was “wm. eales”; robson’s directory for 1830 records 56. br(2) 540, 552-53. in a letter which bentley persuasively argues was written in 1833, tatham writes from another address in lisson grove, 3 grove terrace (br[2] 552). however, as i will demonstrate in a paper on tatham currently in preparation, it is unlikely that he ever resided there. 57. br(2) 691. 58. city of westminster archives centre (hereafter cowac), st. marylebone rate books, vol. 55, 1828, part 2. 59. pigot’s directory (london: j. pigot & co., 1828) 351. the fact that the residence included shops suggests that it was a large property, expensive and spacious enough for studios for an aspiring sculptor. see the a to z of regency london [reprint of richard horwood, map of london, 3rd ed., 1813], publication no. 131 (london: london topographical society, 1985) 1ac. 60. cowac, st. marylebone rate books, vol. 56, 1829, part 1. 61. br(2) 495-96. 62. the rate books for the period list tatham sr. as ratepayer for the property (see, for example, cowac, st. marylebone rate books, vol. 58, 1831). linnell relates that “when i first knew [c. h. tatham] he lived in a nice house that he had built one of the alpha cottages” (“autobiography,” fitzwilliam museum library, cambridge, f. 42). both c. h. tatham and linnell were members of the keppel street baptist congregation (see br[2] 68). blake visited alpha cottages in 1825 (br[2] 403). 63. clayton’s court guide to the environs of london, 1830 (london: clayton, 1830) 214. the catalogue for the royal academy exhibition of 1830 records his address as 20 lisson grove (see algernon graves, the royal academy of arts: a complete dictionary of contributors and their work from its foundation in 1769 to 1904, vol. 7 [london: henry graves and co. ltd. and george bell and sons, 1906] 325). “william eales, timber merchant” as conducting business there.64 tatham appears as ratepayer at 20 lisson grove north in 1831,65 the year that he is first recorded at this address in a trade directory: robson’s directory for 1831 includes “frederick tatham, statuary & marble works, 20 lisson grove.”66 it seems clear that he did not live and work there before mid to late 1830, so his residence c. march 1828, when catherine moved from linnell’s, must have been elsewhere. during the period 1829-30 tatham was spending a significant amount of time at 34 alpha road with his parents and numerous siblings. it could be argued that, as he was probably living there during the spring of 1828, catherine moved from cirencester place to stay with the entire family at this address. she could have acted as housekeeper and helped look after c. h. and harriet tatham’s younger children: 17-year-old julia, 15-year-old harriet, 14-year-old augusta, 11-year-old maria, 8-year-old georgiana, 6-year-old edmund, and 4-year-old robert bristow.67 however, this seems unlikely. in his “life of blake” tatham recalled that his “domestic arrangements were entirely undertaken” by catherine. gilchrist, who interviewed tatham about 1860, refers to his residence as “chambers,”68 a description which suggests a professional working environment, probably for a bachelor. tatham is perhaps recollecting a period in which he lived, at least part of the time, alone in his own residence. as we shall see, 34 alpha road was not tatham’s sole residence in 1828. tatham’s letter of 11 april 1829, discussed earlier, indicates the period in which he and mrs. blake shared the same address. heading his letter 34 alpha road, he describes catherine as living independently in lodgings near fitzroy square.69 this suggests that she and tatham shared an address from c. march 1828, when she left cirencester place, until no later 64. cowac, st. marylebone rate books, vol. 58, 1830, part 1; robson’s directory (london: william robson, 1830) n. pag. some directories refer to the residence as 20a lisson grove north. however, this appears to be the same address previously occupied by william eales: the rateable value, £45, is the same. 20 lisson grove itself, or the “lodge,” which appears to have been a more recently built adjoining property, must have been grander, with a rateable value of £120. the ratepayer was the rev. william cockburn, dean of york and brother-in-law of robert peel (cowac, st. marylebone rate books, vol. 60, 1830, part 1). 65. cowac, st. marylebone rate books, vol. 60, 1831, part 1. tatham is listed at “20a house & shops.” the 1831 census entry for 20 lisson grove records the presence of three males and two females (cowac). 66. robson’s directory (1831) n. pag. palmer bought a house nearby at 4 grove street, lisson grove, in 1832 (lister 1: 83n1). 67. linnell speaks of “many very interesting children all young at that time” (“autobiography” f. 42); palmer regularly refers to the tatham sisters in his correspondence (see, for example, grigson 42). whether the eldest sisters caroline (b. 1803) and lydia (b. 1807) were still living at home at this date is unclear. in the spring of 1828 frederick’s brother and fellow ancient, arthur, was approaching the end of his first year at magdalene college, cambridge. 68. gilchrist 1: 365. 69. see br(2) 495. winter 2011-12 blake/an illustrated quarterly 83 than the beginning of april 1829, barely a year. in the following paragraphs a more probable location for their residence will be suggested. in 1824 tatham was awarded a silver palette by the society of arts “for a [plaster] model of a figure from antique”;70 he exhibited a negro’s head and the angel gabriel—a sketch at the royal society of british artists in 1829.71 in both cases his address is given as “1 queen street, mayfair,”72 the location of his father’s practice as an architect, 1809-33.73 frederick almost certainly used rooms or “chambers” above his father’s practice as his painting and sculpture studio and residence. this upper-floor residence in queen street is probably the address to which catherine blake moved in the spring of 1828. in a letter to linnell written from 1 queen street on a friday towards the end of 1828, c. h. tatham refers to leaving home in alpha road that morning in order to travel to work at his offices in queen street: “had the weather been tolerable, i should have walked up to you; and hesitated some time this morning before i quitted alpha road.”74 another letter to linnell, written two years earlier, suggests that both c. h. and frederick tatham had slept at alpha road the previous night: queen street, mayfair, monday may 1 dear linnell, i am fully confident and very grateful to you for your friendship and kind offices to my dear frederick—the distance between my house and yours is great and much time is necessarily consumed in walking to and fro but as i was last night kept up till half past 11 o’ clock in anxious suspense for his return, for a good hour—will you assist me to persuade him in future in the way you can very kindly do, not to stay so 70. society of arts, transactions vol. 42 (1824-25) xlvi. information kindly supplied by nicola gray, archivist and records manager, royal society of arts. 71. see jane johnson, ed., works exhibited at the royal society of british artists, 1824-1893 (woodbridge: antique collectors’ club, 1975) 452, and “fine arts. suffolk street gallery. the sculpture room,” london literary gazette; and journal of belles lettres, arts, sciences (2 may 1829): 289. 72. frederick tatham, painter, of “1, queen street, mayfair,” exhibited two portraits at the royal academy of arts exhibition in 1825 (see graves 7: 325). 73. c. h. tatham gives queen street as his address in the royal academy exhibition catalogues for 1809 to 1831 (see graves 7: 324-25). 74. quoted in d. linnell 113. in the same letter, tatham states that “my poor afflicted son [frederick] is pulled back and back; the subject is worn out with me. i wish i could get him abroad; but my hands are tied and bound—my large family and my decreasing occupations threaten straitened circumstances. i am the milch cow to fifteen living souls— think of that, johnny!” (see alfred t. story, the life of john linnell, vol. 1 [london: richard bentley and son, 1892] 153). late—as i grow older i am not less nervous—you can consider this private. yours ever, c.h.t.75 just as linnell had used cirencester place as his studio and spent his free time with his family at hampstead until spring 1828, frederick tatham in all probability spent his working hours at his studio on an upper floor in queen street but stayed with his parents and siblings at alpha road at weekends and on occasion overnight during the week. if this was the case, catherine blake may have spent only a limited amount of time in tatham’s company. as c. h. tatham paid the rates, catherine would technically have been his lodger. it is therefore likely that tatham sr. played an instrumental role in sheltering and employing her.76 by the spring of 1828 catherine blake and c. h. tatham had known each other for over a quarter of a century. the frontispiece to america copy b is inscribed “from the author to c h tatham octr. 7 1799.”77 it also seems likely that blake was a subscriber to two of the elder tatham’s works, published in 1799 and 1802.78 in a letter to linnell of 1824, tatham sr. referred to his old friend as “michael angelo blake.”79 indeed, despite linnell’s claim that he introduced frederick tatham to blake,80 frederick’s acquaintance with william and catherine was more likely the result of the blakes’ long-standing friendship with his father. sometime after 1820, catherine attached a note in her own hand to a copy of blake’s engraving of the celebrated plymouth divine rev. robert hawker: mr c tatham the humble is formed to adore; the loving to associate with eternal love c blake81 it is unclear when she inscribed the note and when the print was presented. in the first edition of blake records bentley claimed that blake presented it in august 1824 because “aug. 4th, 1824 is the only time after 1820 when blake and c. h. 75. d. linnell 88. the first of may fell on a monday in 1820 and 1826; 1820 seems unlikely because frederick would have been about fourteen, slightly young for the independence his father describes. 76. it is unclear whether her duties were merely to attend to frederick and his chambers or to act as housekeeper for the whole premises, including the offices of c. h. tatham’s practice as an architect. 77. see br(2) 83-84. 78. g. e. bentley, jr., blake records supplement (oxford: clarendon press, 1988) [hereafter brs] 128. 79. br(2) 397. 80. linnell, “autobiography” f. 45. 81. br(2) 398. catherine’s letter to the earl of egremont (aug. 1829) is also signed “c blake” (br[2] 498). 84 blake/an illustrated quarterly winter 2011-12 tatham are known to have been together.”82 in fact they met on at least one subsequent occasion; according to blake’s letter to linnell of 15 march 1827, c. h. tatham visited 3 fountain court the previous day. blake writes: i saw mr tatham senr yesterday he sat with me above an hour & lookd over the dante he expressd himself very much pleasd with the designs as well as the engravings.83 catherine could therefore have given him the engraving during this visit. as bentley (more recently) and essick have observed, however, the fact that the note is signed by catherine suggests that the engraving was presented during the period of her widowhood.84 as c. h. tatham paid the rates at 1 queen street, frederick must have consulted his father before inviting catherine to live and work there. it seems probable that during the spring of 1828, approximately a year after his last recorded visit to fountain court, tatham sr. assisted his eldest son in providing a home for his old friend catherine blake.85 if this was the case, catherine could have presented him with the engraving during her residence there, c. march 1828-april 1829.86 if blake’s old press had been set up in frederick’s chambers, she may even have printed a fresh impression of the plate. 3. catherine blake: housekeeper to mr. and mrs. frederick tatham or to frederick tatham, bachelor? bentley states in the first edition of blake records that “catherine blake lived as housekeeper to frederick tatham and his wife.”87 in the final section of his “life of blake,” tatham mentions his wife’s relationship with catherine: 82. br 288-89n4. 83. e 782-83. c. h. tatham’s name features in linnell’s job accounts for 29 apr. 1826, which suggests that tatham and blake may have met in 1826 (see br[2] 800). 84. “an alternative date for the gift is 1827-31, when catherine blake was living as a widow with c. h. tatham’s son frederick” (br[2] 398fn); “it seems improbable … that a gift from blake to tatham would bear a note from mrs. blake; it is more probable that the impression was a gift from mrs. blake sometime between blake’s death on 12 august 1827 and her own death on 18 october 1831” (robert n. essick, the separate plates of william blake: a catalogue [princeton: princeton university press, 1983] 189). 85. as tatham sr. is recorded as residing at or working from 1 queen street from 1809 (see note 73, above), catherine may previously have had occasion to visit the premises. 86. this context may throw light upon the inscription, a quotation from lavater’s aphorisms which william blake underlined in his copy (see br[2] 398fn). 87. br 567. the entry in br(2) reads “catherine blake, according to tatham, ‘resided for some time’ … at 20 lisson grove with the tathams” (755). [catherine] was followed to her grave by 2 whom she dearly loved, nay almost idolized, whose welfare was interwoven with the chords of her life & whose well being was her only solace, her only motive for exertion & her only joy. the news of any success to them was a ray of sun in the dark twilight of her life. their cares were hers, their sorrows were her own. to them she was as the fondest mother, as the most affectionate sister & as the best of friends[;] these had the satisfaction of putting into her trembling hands the last cup of moisture she applied to her dying lips & to them she bequeathed her all.88 he refers to his wife more explicitly in a letter to linnell sent on the day of catherine’s death, 18 october 1831: “mrs tatham & myself have been with her during her suffering & have had the happiness of beholding the departure of a saint for the rest promised to those who die in the lord.”89 gilchrist states that catherine “died in mrs. tatham’s arms.”90 these accounts establish the tathams’ presence as regular visitors at her last residence, overnight attendants at her deathbed, and two of the six friends who attended her burial at bunhill fields on 23 october. however, they provide no evidence for bentley’s suggestion that upon leaving cirencester place catherine became housekeeper to mr. and mrs. frederick tatham. in july 1927 the biographer henry curtis asked in notes and queries, “can any reader supply the dates of marriage and death, as also the parentage and maiden name of the wife of frederick tatham, eldest son of chas. heathcote tatham, 1772-1842, a famous architect?”91 his query appears to have remained unanswered. in the index to the second edition of blake records, tatham’s wife is referred to as “tatham, mrs frederick.”92 however, recently discovered information establishes that mrs. tatham did not live at the same residence as frederick tatham and catherine blake, c. march 1828-april 1829. the register of st. mary stratford bow records that frederick married louisa keen viney on 25 april 1831, less than six months before catherine’s death.93 it is clear, therefore, that 88. quoted in br(2) 690. 89. br(2) 546. tatham’s language here was probably influenced by the preaching of his newman street catholic apostolic church minister, edward irving (see my paper on tatham, currently in preparation). 90. gilchrist 1: 367. 91. henry curtis, “frederick tatham’s wife,” notes and queries vol. 153 (2 july 1927): 9. 92. br(2) 936. 93. a transcription of the entry in the marriage register reads: “marriages solemnized in the parish of st mary stratford, bow, in the county of middlesex in the year 1831. frederick tatham, of this parish, bachelor, and louisa keen viney, of this parish, spinster, were married in this church by banns this twenty fifth day of april in the year one thousand eight hundred and thirty one by me john stock. this marriage was solemnized between us: frederick tatham, louisa keen viney. in the presence of: henry brooke marriott, james harris” (p. 179, no. 27). a scan can be accessed at the tatham family history web site, <http://www. saxonlodge.net/showmedia.php?mediaid=109&medialinkid=155>. winter 2011-12 blake/an illustrated quarterly 85 catherine’s relationship with louisa tatham did not involve acting as her housekeeper. 4. catherine blake’s move to her own lodgings as has been established, tatham wrote a letter from alpha road in april 1829 providing his correspondent with catherine’s new address, so she must have left by spring 1829 and possibly several months earlier. by c. february 1829 she had sufficient funds and furnishings to support a move to her own lodgings. according to the will of her brother-in-law and former landlord, henry banes, proved on 14 february, she was to receive “half my household goods consisting of bedsteads beds & pillows bolsters & sheets & pillow cases tables chairs & crockery & £20 in lawful money of great britain.”94 banes, who died on 20 january 1829, may have informed the blakes of his intention to leave them a portion of his money and goods when he wrote a new will on 9 december 1826.95 at that time, the blakes were lodgers in his house at 3 fountain court, strand. two years later, this bequest would have enabled, and may even have prompted, catherine’s move. it contributed to what bentley has described as her “new-found financial security.”96 moreover, in letters of august 1829 to george o’brien wyndham, third earl of egremont, she gave advice on the application of a third coat of varnish to the design from spenser’s faerie queene, which he had purchased in july for eighty-four pounds. as bentley has observed, this generous payment would have “kept catherine out of want for the rest of her life.”97 significantly, in january 1830 she requested that an application to the artists’ general benevolent institution be withdrawn.98 it seems likely, therefore, that catherine blake moved to her own lodgings near fitzroy square, her final earthly residence, by the spring of 1829. however, the length of time that she spent there means that the dating of some events must be less precise than has previously been suggested. one such incident is tatham’s difference of opinion with her which culminated in his burning blake’s “will” at her lodgings.99 bentley, following his chronology of her last residences in the first edition of blake records, claims that “the incident took place in 1831.”100 however, the revised dating suggests that the disagreement 94. pro prob 11/1751, quoted in whitehead, ‘“i also beg mr blakes acceptance’” 83. 95. sarah banes, catherine’s sister and banes’s wife, had been the sole executrix of his earlier will. however, she had died in mar. 1824 (see whitehead, ‘“i also beg mr blakes acceptance’” 83). 96. br(2) 501. 97. br(2) 499. 98. br(2) 501-02. 99. see joseph hogarth’s account, quoted in br(2) 493-94. 100. stranger 492n14. could have occurred at any time between early spring 1829 and october 1831.101 one significant problem relating to the chronology of catherine’s residences remains. tatham claims that, after leaving his residence, “[catherine] then returned to the lodging in which she had lived previously to this act of maternal loveliness [i.e., acting as housekeeper to tatham].” however, he mentions no place in which she lived after blake’s death other than his own: “after the death of her husband she resided for some time with the author of this.”102 tatham does not refer to either linnell or his town house and studio at 6 cirencester place, fitzroy square, where catherine lived until spring 1828.103 bentley appears to interpret his statement as suggesting that catherine lived in the same flat both before and after her stay with tatham.104 it is unlikely, however, that she would or could have returned to exactly the same lodgings. more significantly, the sequence of residences that i have outlined above makes it improbable that catherine could have spent any period of time living independently between leaving cirencester place and moving to queen street. rather, tatham’s confusing and inaccurate statement suggests an attempt to skate over uncomfortable facts.105 at the time that he wrote his manuscript biography of blake (c. 1832), he and linnell were no longer on speaking terms. their alienation was due firstly to a difference of opinion concerning ownership of blake’s dante watercolors and plates that surfaced in the first half of march 1831. secondly, tatham’s claiming the blakes’ entire estate on catherine’s death in october 1831 appears to have annoyed linnell, who supported the claim of blake’s sister.106 tatham may not have wished to revive recent memories of distasteful arguments or draw attention to his conduct in dealings with catherine and linnell. we must also consider the significance of a meeting between linnell and tatham recorded in linnell’s journal for 101. according to hogarth, tatham “left [catherine]. early the following morning she called upon [tatham] …” (br[2] 494). this suggests that they were living apart when the incident took place. however, for catherine to have called upon tatham during this period would have meant an early morning walk north from fitzroy square to lisson grove north or possibly alpha road. 102. “life of blake,” quoted in br(2) 690. 103. her stay with linnell is also not mentioned in tatham’s letter of 11 apr. 1829 (br[2] 495-96). this may suggest that disagreements between linnell and catherine and tatham had occurred as early as apr. 1829. however, he may merely have wished to avoid a detailed description of her movements since leaving fountain court. note that tatham also omits any reference in the letter to catherine’s period of residence with him. 104. br(2) 754-55; see also wilson 366. 105. in introductory remarks to his transcription of the “life of blake,” bentley says, “tatham is not very trustworthy, but it is probably best to trust him until we have cause not to” (br[2] 662). 106. see br(2) 551-60. tatham claimed, with no corroborating evidence, that catherine “bequeathed her all” to him and his wife (“life of blake,” quoted in br[2] 690). 86 blake/an illustrated quarterly winter 2011-12 29 march 1828: “mr f. tatham dined at hampstead.” david linnell interprets this as evidence that [linnell] asked frederick tatham to dine with him to discuss where mrs blake should live once he had let cirencester place. frederick tatham suggested that mrs blake should move into his house and this was then arranged.107 the date of the entry gives some plausibility to david linnell’s reading. as has been established, catherine probably lodged with tatham for a year or less. if she resided in her own lodgings between leaving linnell’s and moving to tatham’s, her stay must have been extremely brief. significantly, after living with tatham, catherine appears to have chosen to return to the environs of fitzroy square, to the street parallel to cirencester place. perhaps this is what tatham meant when he refers to her returning “to the lodging in which she had lived previously.” she may still have known friends and potential customers in the neighborhood whom she had met while living under linnell’s roof. the sculptor and book illustrator maria denman and her brother thomas, sisterand brother-in-law of john flaxman, lived at 7 buckingham street, fitzroy square.108 thomas butts, blake’s patron for many years and still a customer and visitor in blake’s last years, was at 17 grafton street, on the corner of fitzroy street and grafton street on the edge of fitzroy square, two blocks from catherine’s new lodgings.109 john constable, who had expressed great concern for catherine’s welfare at the time of blake’s death, lived at 35 charlotte street, fitzroy square.110 the sculptor joseph denham (or dinham), whom tatham describes as a friend of catherine’s and a mourner at her funeral,111 also lived nearby, at 7 cleveland street.112 another friend who was among the six who attended the funeral, according to tatham, was “mr. bird painter”: isaac f. bird, the 107. d. linnell 116. 108. robson’s directory (london: william robson, 1836) 434; e 783. maria denman and mary ann flaxman, flaxman’s sister, were co executrices and co-inheritors of his estate (see will of john flaxman, pro prob 11/1720 [proved 17 jan. 1827]). both appear to have lived at buckingham street. blake met them at the aders’s party on 10 dec. 1825 (br[2] 419). 109. see mary lynn johnson, “more on blake’s (and bentley’s) ‘white collar maecenas,’” blake in our time, ed. karen mulhallen (toronto: university of toronto press, 2010) 150. 110. see br(2) 460-61. 111. br(2) 691. 112. see graves 2: 333 (under dinham). at the 1830 royal academy exhibition, dinham exhibited a “bust of a daughter of c. h. tatham, esq.,” and in 1844 a “bust in marble of mrs. richmond.” grigson (144n3) states that dinham’s “bust of george richmond is in the national portrait gallery, and he exhibited a ‘colossal bust’ of frederick tatham at the society of british artists in 1830.” he suggests that dinham and bird, another artist who attended catherine’s funeral, were ancients: “they were on its fringe, at any rate.” exeter portrait painter who in 1831 lived at 37 london street, one block south of fitzroy square.113 for the majority of her widowhood (spring 1829-october 1831) catherine lived independently. with her financial security ensured by the bequest from banes and the gift purchase from lord egremont, she was able to support herself by printing, coloring, and selling her husband’s works, not merely for a few months but for approximately two and a half years. in the next section the precise address of her final residence will be established. 5. the location of catherine blake’s last residence and studio in the “life of blake” tatham does not provide the address of catherine’s last lodgings. gilchrist records that “finally, she removed into humble lodgings at no. 17, upper charlotte street, fitzroy square, in which she continued till her death; still under the wing, as it were, of this last-named friend [tatham].”114 in the numerous biographies of blake since gilchrist, the location of this final residence has not been conclusively identified. arthur symons, mona wilson, thomas wright, and most recently jack lindsay and james king have followed gilchrist.115 bentley, however, citing correspondence from tatham to linnell and the bunhill fields burying ground order book, asserts in the first edition of blake records that the lodgings were at “17 charlton street,”116 a claim repeated in blake records supplement and the stranger from paradise.117 peter ackroyd and robert essick have also located catherine’s last residence at this address.118 in the second edition of blake records, bentley states in the appendix of residences that catherine “lodge[d] with a baker at 17 upper charlotte street, south-east of fitzroy square,”119 but the title of the section reveals some uncertainty: “17 upper charlotte or charlton street.” in a footnote bentley observes that 113. graves 1: 200. tatham’s friendship with this devonshire artist may be associated with his brother arthur’s ordination as rector of boconnoc with bradoc (broadoak), cornwall, at exeter cathedral in 1832. 114. gilchrist 1: 365. the index to the a to z of regency london does not include an upper charlotte street. 115. see arthur symons, william blake (london: jonathan cape, 1940) 238; wilson 366; thomas wright, the life of william blake, vol. 2 (olney: thomas wright, 1929) 121; jack lindsay, william blake: his life and work (london: constable, 1978) 269; james king, william blake: his life (london: weidenfeld and nicolson, 1991) 229. 116. br 567. 117. brs xlviii; stranger 444. 118. peter ackroyd, blake (london: sinclair-stevenson, 1995) 368; essick, “blake, catherine sophia,” odnb. this address is also given by michael davis, william blake: a new kind of man (london: paul elek, 1977) 163. 119. br(2) 754. winter 2011-12 blake/an illustrated quarterly 87 there is some ambiguity about the name of the street; it is called “upper charlotte street” in tatham’s letter of 11 april 1831 [i.e., 1829] and in gilchrist … but “upper charlton street” in tatham’s letter of 18 oct 1831 and in the documents for catherine’s burial on 20 oct 1831.120 catherine’s final residence was in fact at 17 upper charlton street, a block southwest of fitzroy square. this is the address on the two letters sent by catherine to lord egremont in august 1829,121 and it is also cited in the record for her burial at bunhill fields.122 more recently, butlin refers to this address in his paintings and drawings of william blake.123 although the information seems widely known, the issue of catherine’s last address has not been laid to rest in any biography of blake. the substitution of charlotte for charlton in several of the documents cited above by bentley might be explained by the ease with which one can mistakenly be written for the other (an error i have made several times while researching this paper). the only contemporary reference to upper charlotte street appears in the transcription of tatham’s letter of 11 april 1829,124 where a mistranscription of the word charlton could easily have been made. more significantly, the omission of upper from upper charlton street in discussions of catherine’s last address and the suggestion that she lived at 17 charlton street have led to a small but important error in locating the residence. although, as one would expect, upper charlton street was directly north of and a continuation of charlton street, the two were individually numbered and were in effect separate streets (see illus. 2). however, catherine’s contemporaries and early biographers used the names charlton street and upper charlton street interchangeably, or transcribed charlton as charlotte, and in the process the precise location of her last residence was muddled. in 1830 cumberland wrote on his copy of for children: the gates of paradise, “mrs blake now lives at n 17 charlton st fitzroy square at a bakers.”125 when contemporary directories or rate books are consulted, the last three words of his note make no sense. bentley records a henry heather as ratepayer at this address,126 but in directories h. c. heather is listed as conducting business at 17 charlton street not as a baker 120. br(2) 754fn. 121. br(2) 498. 122. br(2) 546-47. 123. butlin p. 625. bentley gives the address correctly in a footnote in brs (92n2) but refers to “charlton street” elsewhere (xlviii). 124. the original letter has not been traced. it was transcribed by thomas hartley cromek, son of blake’s former employer robert cromek, in his manuscript “recollections of conversations with mr. john pye” (1865) 56-58 (see br[2] 871n37). 125. for children copy c; see bb 192. cumberland probably purchased this copy from catherine while she lived in these lodgings. 126. br(2) 755fn. bentley’s source at the st. marylebone public library appears to have checked only the rate book entries for charlton street and not those for upper charlton street. but as a bootmaker.127 but an examination of directories and rate books for 17 upper charlton street reveals that although cumberland erroneously recorded the address, he does appear to have been correct concerning the business: in 1829, thomas mason ran a bakery from, but was not ratepayer at, 17 upper charlton street.128 from 1830 onwards another baker, george miller, occupied 17 upper charlton street129 and, unlike his predecessor, was also ratepayer for the property. such evidence appears to confirm the identification of catherine’s last residence.130 two further points concerning her lodging at this address may be deduced. if, as the rate books suggest, the baker thomas mason and his landlord william barlter vacated 17 upper charlton street sometime before mid-1829, at least two living spaces were left free. the new landlord, george 127. pigot’s directory, 1829, n. pag. 128. rate book entry, 17 upper charlton street, fitzroy square, 1829 (cowac). 129. pigot’s directory, 1839, 70. 130. the house was at the northern end of the east side of the street, almost on the corner of carburton street. catherine appears to have resided between a tailor, e. griffiths, at no. 16 and a small public house, the lord nelson or nelson’s head, at no. 18, run by edward hughes 1828-30 and william james barnard from 1831. other businesspeople in the street included a cabinetmaker, painter, pianoforte maker, leather gilder, chairmaker, stonemason, furniture maker, and five tailors. 2. section of horwood’s map of london (london: w. faden, 1813), showing charlton street (running vertically from the bottom of the image) and upper charlton street. image courtesy of the city of westminster archives centre. 88 blake/an illustrated quarterly winter 2011-12 miller, may therefore have advertised for lodgers during the period in which catherine received her bequest from henry banes and began searching for new lodgings in anticipation of tatham’s move to lisson grove north. it could also be argued that a change in landlord throws additional doubt upon bentley’s suggestion that catherine occupied the same lodgings both before and after residing with tatham. it seems unlikely that she could have lived briefly at this address in the spring of 1828 and then have returned at a later date to the same house, which in the intervening period had been taken over by a new landlord. linnell would have been familiar with 17 upper charlton street: in his “autobiography” he recalls that the artist william mulready “was really my tutor in everything my companion playmate and guide … my character was formed by him.”131 he also indicates that in “1807—mullready lived in upper charlton street, fitzroy square,” and observes that “this is where i saw him often and spoke to him about being his pupil he making designs at this time for godwin.”132 the catalogue for the exhibition at the royal academy in 1807 reveals that mulready’s lodgings and studio were at no. 17, presumably on an upper floor.133 linnell spent one of his formative years learning his craft from a painter in a house that was later to become the lodgings of catherine blake. the connection with linnell may even suggest that blake’s patron played some role in locating a new residence for catherine in early 1829. the fact that mulready had previously occupied 17 upper charlton street for a year over two decades earlier may seem of little importance. however, his use of a room in this house as a painting studio suggests that catherine could have printed, colored, and sold blake’s work there. although gilchrist describes the lodgings as “humble,” the rateable value of the property was sixty pounds, the highest in the street134 131. linnell, “autobiography,” f. 33. elsewhere he writes, “indeed i feel bound to say that i owe more to [mulready] than anyone i ever knew” (f. 9). in the “autobiography” there are far more references to mulready than to blake or varley. it is clear that, at the time of writing, linnell regarded mulready as the greatest influence. 132. linnell, “autobiography,” ff. 31, 33. 133. graves 5: 323. 134. rate book entry for 17 upper charlton street, fitzroy square, 1830 (cowac). 3. upper charlton street in a detail of the ordnance survey map, 1872 (i have marked no. 17 with a black rectangle). image courtesy of the city of westminster archives centre. 4. front elevation of a house in upper charlton street (later renamed hanson street). image courtesy of the city of westminster archives centre. winter 2011-12 blake/an illustrated quarterly 89 and considerably more than twice the value of the blakes’ final residence together at 3 fountain court. i have been unable to find a floor plan or front elevation of no. 17, but an ordnance survey map of the area, published in 1872, reveals the footprint of the building (illus. 3). in addition, a sketch of the front elevation of one of the terrace houses on the east side of upper charlton street has been located at the city of westminster archives centre (illus. 4). from this evidence we may deduce that no. 17 was a georgian terrace with two rooms on each floor, a large front one and smaller back one. catherine may have organized her space, almost certainly an upper-floor apartment,135 along the lines of her and her husband’s rooms at 17 south molton street and 3 fountain court.136 she may have received visitors in the smaller living room at the back of the house; a larger front room may have been used to store her stock of blake’s paintings, engravings, and drawings. it is likely that she would also have had room for the furniture inherited from her brother-in-law. whether or not she moved into the rooms that mulready had utilized, the orientation and light would have been the same. as mulready probably chose the residence as suitable for a painting studio, in her front room catherine almost certainly had adequate light and space to set up her own studio for coloring works and perhaps even for printing on a rolling press.137 in the front room, with tatham’s assistance, she may have printed posthumous copies of blake’s illuminated books. the scaled representation of the footprint of no. 17 on the 1872 survey map reveals that the front rooms on the upper floors measured approximately 5.49 meters (18 135. it is unclear whether she lived above the baker’s establishment or at the back of the shop. in 1832 ann and edward maddle, ratepayers at 14 upper charlton street, had a female lodger, elizabeth tuckwell, staying in their back kitchen (see the proceedings of the old bailey, 1674-1913, <http://www.oldbaileyonline.org>, t18320906-361). however, in catherine’s case this seems unlikely. 136. see whitehead, “william blake’s last residence: no. 3 fountain court, strand. george richmond’s plan and an unrecorded letter to john linnell,” british art journal 6.1 (2005): 21-30, and “‘i write in south molton street, what i both see and hear’: reconstructing william and catherine blake’s residence and studio at 17 south molton street, oxford street,” british art journal 11.2 (2010): 62-75. 137. whether by early 1829 catherine still possessed her husband’s press, had replaced it with a smaller one (see br[2] 467-68), or had no press, has yet to be established conclusively. date residence ratepayer/fellow inhabitants september 1827-march 1828 6 cirencester place, fitzroy square john linnell, artist march 1828-spring 1829 1 queen street, mayfair c. h. tatham, architect frederick tatham, sculptor and artist spring 1829-october 1831 17 upper charlton street, fitzroy square george miller, baker feet) in width and 3.66 meters (12 feet) in depth. this means that for over two years, catherine, living independently, had space to color and sell her late husband’s works and could also resume her role in printing copies of his illuminated books.138 conclusion the material presented in this paper gives us cause to revise the chronology of the residences and microcultures that catherine blake lived in from 1828 to 1831 (see table). it has demonstrated that she did not spend the majority of her final years as housekeeper to frederick tatham and his wife at their house in lisson grove north. evidence suggests that she resided as housekeeper with frederick, a bachelor, in chambers above her old friend c. h. tatham’s practice as an architect at 1 queen street, mayfair, from march 1828 until the early spring of 1829. catherine’s close young female friend, the wife of frederick, has been identified as louisa keen viney tatham. evidence has also been provided to support the argument that catherine had the means to and almost certainly did move to her own lodgings in or shortly before the spring of 1829. finally, the precise location of her “humble lodgings,” 17 upper charlton street, fitzroy square, has been established. the residence and the duration of her stay provided her with the opportunity to sell blake’s works, finish and color others, and perhaps print posthumous copies of the illuminated books, and thereby live independently for the last two and a half years of her life. in the light of these findings, we can also revise our view of catherine. she was not a dependent blake relict, reliant upon his old friends and passed from ancient to ancient. upon inheriting banes’s bequest, she embarked at the age of sixtyseven on a period of independence, possibly for the first time in her life. on an upper floor at 17 upper charlton street, she appears to have continued her husband’s trade, printing, coloring, and selling works up until her death, over a year into 138. perhaps her great-nephews richard and thomas best assisted her (see whitehead, ‘“i also beg mr blakes acceptance’” 91n85). catherine would probably not have had continuous access to the space needed to operate a rolling press at her two former homes. however, during her years at 17 upper charlton street, the front room would have provided a permanent location for printing sessions. revised reconstruction of catherine blake’s residences, sept. 1827-oct. 1831 90 blake/an illustrated quarterly winter 2011-12 r e v i e w s w illiam blake on self and soul discusses fundamentally interesting topics: blake’s relation to empiricism and gnosticism, and his struggle with existential alienation. but the book applies a preconceived framework to his poetry, and this has an unfortunate steamroller effect: it flattens out the texts in its path and moves straight ahead, passing by much that would be helpful, and even necessary, to its purpose. to summarize the framework: “the essential uneasiness of consciousness” (85) is exacerbated by empiricism, a “science [of] despair” (milton 41.15, e 142) that renders the self “intangible” and the world “real” (12). the soul’s intuition of its “transcendental provenance” (xiii), discounted by empiricism, is experientially true, for blake and all human beings. for remedy, blake pursues neoplatonism and gnosticism, but with a twist, rejecting the individual immortal soul in favor of “the human imagination” and the afterlife in favor of “the eternal now” (21). he describes the problem in the early illuminated books, then develops his solution, which leads from personal agency in the four zoas to individual reformation in milton and ultimately to self-sacrifice in jerusalem. the emphasis on the value of experience as a touchstone for theory and interpretation is salutary, but i wish that quinney had explored ways to ground this principle methodologically. phenomenology would be an obvious resource. sensibility, with its connections to empiricism, would make an ideal context for both the prizing and the suspicion of the inner life and its pains as an index of authenticity and route to salvation. biography could be employed to consider blake’s own understanding of a basic and universal existential bewilderment. this last quinney nods to occasionally; for instance, she considers blake’s “indenturing himself to the dreadful poetaster hayley of felpham” as his own “delinquency of imagination,” making “blake’s critique of milton” also a “cryptic self-reproach” (134). such a judgmental view seems unfair to both hayley and blake in light of mark crosby’s work,1 and, less recently, the detailed and balanced picture of the relationship in g. e. bentley, jr.’s the stranger from paradise (2001) where, 1. such as jon mee and mark crosby, “‘this soldierlike danger’: the trial of william blake for sedition,” resisting napoleon: the british response to the threat of invasion, 1797-1815, ed. mark philp (aldershot: ashgate, 2006), which suggests a hayley who defends radicalism, both blake’s and milton’s. laura quinney. william blake on self and soul. cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 2009. 216 pp. $42.00/£31.95, hardcover. reviewed by tristanne connolly the reign of william iv. in this constant labor in old age, she perhaps followed her husband’s maxim of working through illness.139 such unremitting industry may account for her having neglected a bowel complaint that led to her death. this emerging picture seems consistent with essick’s suggestion that during blake’s lifetime catherine was “the more practical of the two,”140 and mark crosby and essick’s discussion of blake’s tribute to her in response to william hayley’s “klopstockian” compliment.141 contemporary and early accounts portray catherine as on occasion unstable, difficult, miserable, and ill. blake’s own reported behavior may lead us to suspect that their working and emotional partnership cannot have been uniformly efficient or idyllic. nevertheless, catherine must also have exhibited during her marriage to blake the resilience and financial acumen evident in her later widowhood—to the couple’s advantage. 139. see gilchrist 1: 246. 140. essick, “blake, catherine sophia,” odnb. 141. mark crosby and robert n. essick, “‘the fiends of commerce’: blake’s letter to william hayley, 7 august 1804,” blake 44.2 (fall 2010): 72. review: roderick tweedy, the god of the left hemisphere: blake, bolte taylor, and the myth of creation roderick tweedy. the god of the left hemisphere: blake, bolte taylor, and the myth of creation. london: karnac books ltd., 2012. xix + 332 pp. £24.74, paperback; £19.59, e-book; £26.74, paperback + e-book (at <http://​www.​karnacbooks.​com>). reviewed by james rovira james rovira (jamesrovira@gmail.com) is associate professor of english at tiffin university, where he teaches british literature, poetry, and literary theory. over the last four years he has presented at national conferences for the modern language association, the american society for eighteenth-century studies, the national society for the study of romanticism, and others. his book, blake and kierkegaard: creation and anxiety, was published by continuum in 2010. his most recent scholarship extends romanticism as a field to contemporary film and television in articles for edited anthologies forthcoming from the university of mississippi press and palgrave macmillan. roderick tweedy’s the god of the left hemisphere compares the attributes of blake’s urizen to the characteristics of left-brain-dominated minds, suggesting that blake’s mythology anticipates the claims of contemporary neurologists who study the lateralization of brain functions. tweedy’s work is based upon the premise that blake’s descriptions of urizen are in fact descriptions of the operations of the brain’s left hemisphere, a claim supported by his appendix, “the symbolism of left and right in blake’s work.” his study was inspired by a ted talk delivered by jill bolte taylor, a neuroanatomist currently affiliated with indiana university, who, during her time at harvard university, suffered a hemorrhage on the left side of her brain. taylor believes this experience gave her insights both into the human brain and into the possibilities for the transformation of human life and experience, insights that are the subject of her talk and of her 2008 book, my stroke of insight (viking). drawing from taylor, chris mcmanus’s right hand, left hand (weidenfeld & nicolson, 2002), and iain mcgilchrist’s the master and his emissary (yale up, 2009), tweedy paints a picture of left-brain psychology as dominating, hyperrational, moralistic, egocentric, and highly destructive (39), in comparison to right-brain psychology, which is “completely committed to the expression of peace, love, joy, and compassion in the world” (taylor, quoted in tweedy 41). the book is an engaging, journalistic treatment of its subject that would be most interesting to a general readership. after establishing this basic opposition between leftand right-brain thinking, tweedy proceeds to apply it first to blake’s mythology (part 1) and then to human history and to a variety of human conceptual structures (part 2) in very broad strokes. chapters 1 and 2, “the origins of urizen” and “urizen and the left hemisphere,” establish his comparison of urizenic psychology to left-brain psychology employed throughout the remainder of the book. chapter 1 identifies the rise of homo sapiens as the beginning of brain bilateralization, which is particularly associated with tool-making and then with language development. chapter 3, “the myth of genesis,” explains that blake identifies urizen with the god of the book of genesis, who is also equivalent to the demiurge of plato’s timaeus, the god of milton’s paradise lost, zeus, jupiter, odin, and “norse mythology, babylonian and sumerian creation texts, [and] vedic cosmogony” in general (36), all of which indicate the emergence of left-hemisphere thinking in their representations of creating deities. part 1 closes with chapter 4, “the marriage of heaven and hell,” which does not discuss blake’s work of that name, but rather restates tweedy’s presentation of leftand right-brain lateralization, using blake’s title as a trope for his discussion of how practice can help us recover an emphasis on right-brain psychology. part 2 begins with chapter 5, “the god of reason,” which restates and develops tweedy’s commentary on the nature of left-brain psychology. in this chapter, he identifies urizenic psychology with all of empirical science, assigning to the latter not only urizen’s linear thought but also urizen’s moral deficits, the product of which is thinking that is “without emotion, nuance, metaphor, inflection, personality, insight, or imagination” (77). thus, empirical science is dominated by “single vision” and “zero empathy” (81). chapter 6, “urizenic religion and urizenic reason: r1 and r2,” distinguishes between rationalized religion and rationalized science while still describing both as fundamentally urizenic in the terms already established. science in particular is guilty of an “elitist and self-admiring concept of intelligence” that remains with it to this day (100). chapter 7, “the left hemisphere agenda,” argues that left-hemisphere psychology is primarily concerned with dominance. tweedy includes a chart (116) that neatly provides a two-column list of the leftand right-hemisphere characteristics that are consistently affirmed throughout this study. chapter 8, a seventy-three-page section titled “twilight of the psychopaths,” first identifies urizenic reasoning with “clinical insanity” (129) and then provides an historical account of the rise of brain lateralization over the last 6000 years of human history, beginning with a discussion of the pyramids, the rise of priesthood, and militarism. depending heavily upon dave grossman’s on killing (back bay books, 1995), tweedy also considers the unwillingness of most soldiers to fire in battle, violence in the media and in video games, corporate malfeasance, thomas harris’s hannibal lecter novels, and simon baron-cohen’s concept of “empathy erosion” from zero degrees of empathy (penguin, 2011), illustrating how all of these cases match perfectly both his previous description of left-hemisphere psychology and the characteristics that blake ascribes to urizen. chapter 9, “more than man: the dragon urizen,” continues tweedy’s critique of urizenic religion and urizenic science, claiming that urizenic religion is the worship of an impersonal god and accusing urizenic science of committing the ideological mistake of believing “that the laws of nature are somehow fixed and absolute whilst everything else in the universe evolves” (208). this chapter also identifies urizenic reasoning with autism and begins a consideration of combined right-brain/left-brain psychology in the section “humanity and divinity.” chapter 10, “the selfhood and the fires of los,” focuses upon a critique of ego or selfhood and considers the possibility of the reintegration of right and left hemispheres, as well as the obstacles to that reintegration. the conclusion, “sweet science reigns,” imagines what an integrated psychology might look like. it is the book’s strongest chapter, as it finally moves beyond descriptions of fallen urizen to consider the redemptive outcome of blake’s myth. tweedy’s book, though very engaging, exhibits the faults of an extended journalistic treatment of a subject: overreliance on one source at a time and broad and incredible generalizations without significant consideration of specific detail. for example, ovid’s presentation of zeus in his metamorphoses is hardly that of a rational moralizer. tweedy attempts to argue too big a thesis, which leads inevitably to a lack of focus and too much repetition of the same point. in the same vein, he does not consider counterarguments or alternative positions except to dismiss them as examples of urizenic reasoning, inadvertently setting up neurologists studying brain lateralization, blake, and himself as the only right-thinking beings to exist since the rise of homo sapiens. in this way, he seems to address all possible counterarguments only with an accusation. because tweedy relies almost exclusively on s. foster damon’s dictionary for his interpretation of blake, with some use of frye late in the book, those who are familiar with blake studies will learn nothing new about blake from this book. not including reprints of older work, there are only five citations of blake scholarship later than 1980 in the bibliography, none of which appears to be quoted directly except for peter ackroyd’s biography. tweedy’s reliance on damon does keep him from making egregious mistakes, however, so his readings of blake will be familiar to blake critics despite his blanket dismissal of their work. in many ways, this work illustrates the dangers of relying upon superficially grasped science for literary interpretation: there is no serious discussion of the scientific literature on brain lateralization anywhere in the book. tweedy does not seem to distinguish between non-scientific claims made by a scientist for non-specialist audiences and scientific work itself. taylor’s ted talk and her book are not peer-reviewed research, and they make claims and arguments unacceptable in that context. the same is true of his reliance on mcmanus’s and mcgilchrist’s work. mcgilchrist develops a historiography based upon brain lateralization, but he does not provide peer-reviewed research supporting the existence or mechanism of the phenomenon, and historiography isn’t empirical science. finally, recent research is beginning to discredit the concept of brain lateralization altogether. dr. jeff anderson, director of the fmri neurosurgical mapping service at the university of utah, asserted in a livescience interview that, after a review of thousands of brain scans, “it is not the case that the left hemisphere is associated with logic or reasoning more than the right.” anderson also told livescience that “creativity is no more processed in the right hemisphere than the left.” if this is the case, what remains of tweedy’s study or taylor’s claims? overall, the book attempts three tasks: a comparison of blake’s urizen to left-brain thinking (a comparison that seems valid), a description of the effects of left-brain acts and ideas on world history (references to blake are irrelevant in this section, but without them tweedy would simply be replicating the work of mcgilchrist), and a description of the benefits of a reintegration of rightwith left-brain psychology. the book might have a place among the growing body of work that considers the relationship between romantic-era literature and contemporary psychology if tweedy had abandoned the second task and more fully developed the first and third, and if he had done so with a deeper knowledge of both the science of brain lateralization and the religious and philosophical traditions from which blake drew. considering these contexts more carefully might have led him to recognize how brain lateralization is perhaps too simplistic an explanation of what has been described in religious and philosophic discourse for centuries, using other terms. without such careful consideration, however, the book does not rise above repeating the same old insights using only slightly newer language. blake, duncan, and the politics of writing from myth blake, duncan, and the politics of writing from myth by linda freedman linda freedman (l.freedman@ucl.ac.uk) is a lecturer in british and american literature at university college london. she is a graduate of oxford and london and a former fellow of selwyn college, cambridge. she is the author of emily dickinson and the religious imagination (cambridge university press, 2011) and is currently writing a book about william blake and america. she has a particular interest in transatlantic connections and in the relationship between literature, religion, and the visual arts. duncan’s reading of blake william blake and the twentieth-century american poet robert duncan have a natural affinity.for other essays and books detailing this affinity, see robert j. bertholf, “robert duncan: blake’s contemporary voice,” william blake and the moderns, ed. robert j. bertholf and annette s. levitt (albany: state university of new york press, 1982) 92-110; david annwn, hear the voice of the bard! who present, past, & future sees—three cores of bardic attention: the early bards, william blake and robert duncan (hay-on-wye: west house books, 1995); edward larrissy, “two american disciples of blake: robert duncan and allen ginsberg,” blake and modern literature (basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, 2006) 108-24; and jerome mcgann, “art and error: with special reference to the poetry of robert duncan,” modern language studies 27.2 (spring 1997): 9-22. both were profoundly interested in the penetrative mobility between the temporal and the eternal. they also have an affinity as poets who used their mythopoeic forms to explore the ethical boundaries between self and other and to relate that exploration to the violent politics of their respective historical moments. for duncan and his coterie, blake was yoked with whitman; they were old male bards of the prophetic tradition, mingling visionary poetics with homosexual and homosocial freedoms.duncan’s coterie was, by his own admission, a boys’ club. see michael davidson, the san francisco renaissance: poetics and community at mid-century (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1989) 175-76. this article argues that if we look at the way duncan read blake and we read both poets alongside each other, we arrive at a better understanding of the involvement of politics with hermetic vision. influenced by yeats and ellis’s ground-breaking 1893 edition of blake’s work and conditioned by his own occultist upbringing, duncan read blake as a poet of hermetic vision.the works of william blake: poetic, symbolic, and critical, ed. with lithographs of the illustrated “prophetic books,” and a memoir and interpretation by edwin john ellis and william butler yeats, 3 vols. (london: bernard quaritch, 1893). for duncan, blake sees clearly into the essential truth of his own time, and this insight carries a deep social responsibility. in roots and branches and fictive certainties, duncan draws from his sense of an occult blake to deepen his own exploration of the poetic textures of personal experience. in bending the bow, he takes his reading of blake beyond the personal and poetic implications of occult mysticism toward an intensely ethical political engagement. this does not represent a rupture from the concerns expressed in roots and branches and fictive certainties, but a development. in both instances, duncan comes into his creative potential thinking about blake in terms of touch. the act of touching something, or someone, had a particular personal significance for him as a signifier of both intimacy and reality. at the age of three he was hurt in an accident in the snow and became cross-eyed so that he saw double. in roots and branches he spoke about the effects of his injury in metaphysical terms: “i had the double reminder always, the vertical and horizontal displacement in vision that later became separated, specialized into a near and a far sight. one image to the right and above the other. reach out and touch. point to the one that is really there.”robert duncan, “a sequence of poems for h.d.’s birthday, september 10, 1959. finishd october 24, 1959,” roots and branches (new york: new directions, 1964) 14. duncan implies that if we can touch something, we can verify its quiddity and its reality. it is reassuring to touch because it confirms a connection and dispels an illusion. touch therefore becomes a way of envisioning the world and confirming the relationships that exist within it. so, duncan started to think about the metaphysical significance of touch at a very early age. the ethical dimensions followed naturally from a sense of touch that had already become associated with vision. in his poetry, duncan uses the extended conceit of touch and the provocations offered by the extremes of violence and tenderness in order to explore the ethical relationship between self and other and the interface between the personal, political, and poetic implications of that relationship. the intimacy of touch also becomes a way of imagining poetic influence and blake’s impact on duncan’s own sense of poetic identity. the extended conceit is vital to duncan’s repeated return to the ethics of boundaries and boundary crossing. the metaphor works because it emphasizes boundary as a real and tangible distinction and because it offers ways of transgressing that distinction. duncan’s reading of blake therefore suggests the discovery of a relevant and restorative romanticism with which to address the modern world. kristin prevallet has written that, for duncan and his contemporaries in the san francisco bay area, romantic identification provided a utopia; it helped form an imaginary community where they could live free from the intolerances of mainstream america.kristin prevallet, “introduction,” a helen adam reader, ed. with notes and introduction by kristin prevallet (orono, maine: national poetry foundation, 2007) 19. in the early 1950s duncan started publishing in the black mountain review and in 1956 he taught at black mountain college. like blake, black mountain’s founder, john andrew rice, thought everyone was born an artist but some were oppressed by the public world. black mountain was established in order to provide an escape where people could reassert their artistic nature. the central challenge facing black mountain poets was arguably to reinvent romantic poetics for contemporary american existence. fed up with what he perceived as the narrowing of vision in the modern world to a “theater of the absurd,”duncan, “the truth and life of myth,” fictive certainties (new york: new directions, 1955) 5. a stage where atomic disaster and the end of humanity were the only stories seen by the reasonable anti-mythopoeic mind, duncan found hope in blake. duncan claimed that in england, the divine blake broke through the confines of seventeenthand eighteenth-century rationalist poetics with his marriage of heaven and hell, blasting that model of self-righteous and reasonable men, the deist, and howling against the first factories and machineries of his own day’s versions of what [rudolf] bultmann considers to be the modern scientific man for whom: “it is impossible to use electric light and the wireless and to avail ourselves of modern medical and surgical discoveries, and at the same time to believe in the new testament world of spirits and miracles.”duncan, “the truth and life of myth” 27-28. blake appealed to duncan because he seemed to be both of this world and another. recalling his introduction to blake by the poet helen adam, duncan commented: “i was already a convert to the romantic spirit, and myth in that spirit is not only a story that expresses the soul but a story that awakens the soul to the real persons of its romance, in which the actual and the spiritual are revealed, one in the other.”duncan, “the truth and life of myth” 31. as robert bertholf has argued, adam’s reading of blake in duncan’s poetry seminar proved an important turning point for duncan, at least partly because it came at a moment when he was thinking about charles olson’s essay on “projective verse.”bertholf 99. adam had brought the “introduction” to blake’s songs of experience as an example of great poetry to a class that duncan ran at black mountain. the poem begins: hear the voice of the bard! who present, past, & future sees whose ears have heard, the holy word, that walk’d among the ancient trees.william blake, “introduction,” pl. 30, songs of innocence and of experience, ed. with introduction and notes by andrew lincoln (princeton: princeton university press/william blake trust, 1991). it chimed remarkably well with olson’s statements about contemporary poetics. olson claimed: “verse now, 1950, if it is to go ahead, if it is to be of essential use, must, i take it, catch up and put into itself certain laws and possibilities of the breath, of the breathing of the man who writes as well as of his listenings.”charles olson, projective verse (new york: totem press, 1959) 3. duncan must have heard the echo of olson’s poetic definitions reverberating in blake’s call to hear the prophet-artist, whose particular quality of inspiration (“breath” or “breathing”) arises out of his privileged position as listener. and the awakening that duncan describes is also very much in tune with olson’s question: “what stance toward reality brings such [projective] verse into being[?]” olson argues that the degree to which the projective involves a stance toward the reality outside the poem as well as a new stance toward the reality of a poem itself is a matter of content. he writes: if the beginning and the end is breath, voice in its largest sense, then the material of verse shifts. it has to. it starts with the composer. the dimension of his line itself changes, not to speak of the change in his conceiving, of the matter he will turn to, of the scale in which he imagines that matter’s use. … what seems to me a more valid formulation for present use is “objectism,” a word to be taken to stand for the kind of relation of man to experience which a poet might state as the necessity of a line or a work to be as wood is, to be as clean as wood is as it issues from the hand of nature, to be as shaped as wood can be when a man has had his hand to it. objectism is the getting rid of the lyrical interference of the individual as ego, of the “subject” and his soul …. for a man is himself an object …. if he stays inside himself, if he is contained within his nature as he is participant in the larger force, he will be able to listen, and his hearing through himself will give him secrets objects share.olson 10-11. the two-way revelation between the “actual” and the “spiritual”duncan, “the truth and life of myth” 31. that duncan describes as pertinent to his appreciation of blake is present in olson’s conclusions about the poetic function. in the attention he pays to the reality outside the poem, the field of composition, olson blurs the distinction between spiritual and actual existence, imagining them, as duncan does, in dialogue with each other. the simile he uses to describe the relation of man to experience is drawn from the natural world and suggests an intimacy with the actual. but olson’s subsequent claim that “[man] is contained within his nature as he is participant in the larger force” imbues the natural or actual with a sense of the cosmic. in the end olson arrives at a poetic ideal that resonates deeply with blake’s prophet-artist: “his hearing through himself will give him secrets objects share.” it is important that duncan was thinking about olson’s essay when he was introduced to blake, not only because of the emphasis that olson places on the interplay between the aural and the oral, but also because of the attention he gives to the place of the actual in visionary poetics. if duncan’s response to blake was heavily conditioned by his reading of olson, it was also typically american in aligning blake with walt whitman. in 1868 algernon charles swinburne had claimed that “the points of contact and sides of likeness between william blake and walt whitman are so many and so grave, as to afford some ground of reason to those who preach the transition of souls or transfusion of spirits,” and the comparison was taken up enthusiastically by readers on both sides of the atlantic.algernon charles swinburne, william blake: a critical essay (1868; london: heinemann, 1925) 300-01. for more on the connection between blake and whitman, including whitman’s own ambivalent reaction to it, see linda freedman, “walt whitman and william blake: the prophet-artist and democratic thought,” transatlantic traffic and (mis)translations, ed. robin peel and daniel maudlin (durham, new hampshire: university of new hampshire press, 2013) 133-55. duncan continues the association between blake and whitman. in his essay on whitman, he writes: taking his self and his law, poetics and politics, not in the architecture of an other world, but in an identification with the creative forces working within masses and populations, the poet was to work toward the wedding of the ideal and the actual, even as blake had proposed a poetic marriage of heaven and hell in the actual. whitman saw within the actuality of these states the idea of an america latent and at work. not a poetry commemorative of an established order or a poetry striving to perfect an order out of chaos, but a poetry creative “in the region of imaginative, spinal and essential attributes, something equivalent to creation … imperatively demanded.”duncan, “changing perspectives in reading whitman,” fictive certainties 166-67. duncan presents whitman as the exemplary democratized prophetic voice, seeking an “identification with the creative forces working within masses and populations.” in doing so, he implicitly extends the principles of hermetic vision to the political sphere. as the eternal is realized within the temporal, the “creative forces” find their active and disruptive embodiment in the “masses and populations.” this passage shows the extent to which duncan’s sense of whitman was informed by his reading of blake, and vice versa. it is from blake, read through olson’s lens, that duncan derives his understanding of the poetics of the polis. he was clearly aware of how deeply resonant the word “states” is for a reader of blake. in the same essay he writes: once we read the united states as belonging to the greatest poem, the race of all races, and we hear whitman speaking of americans throughout the population of man—every place and any place and time of man—then, underlying these united states and this america, comes a mystery of “america” that belongs to dream and desire and the reawakening of earliest oneness with all peoples—at last, the nation of mankind at large. it is this that informs whitman’s enthusiasm for america. in the language of poetry, of “the greatest poem,” we rightly read him in the light of blake’s visions of america, direful as they are, the states are seen by the poet as states of man, and what is happening in the revolution happens, in blake’s world, not because the colonies are english but because they are colonies of man. the drama he reads in his figures of fire and outrage and imprisonment and volcanic release is a drama “of all nations at any time upon the earth.”duncan, “changing perspectives in reading whitman” 170-71. taking his cue from blake, duncan uses the word “states” to describe the political and poetic character of america. “states” refers to the governmental organization of america, the blakean contraries of “heaven” and “hell,” the whitmanesque “ideal” and “actual,” and the states of blake’s fourfold vision, which combines reason and imagination, sense and emotion. duncan would also have known of blake’s claim that “the imagination is not a state: it is the human existence itself.”william blake, milton pl. 32*, milton a poem and the final illuminated works, ed. with introductions and notes by robert n. essick and joseph viscomi (princeton: princeton university press/william blake trust, 1993). his reference to “the actuality of these states” therefore exploits the blakean resonance of changing vision. whitman’s “wedding,” like blake’s marriage, suggests tension and distance as well as mutual opening, exchange, and bond. duncan’s philosophic commitment to the blakean mantra “without contraries is no progression” gives an optimistic urgency to his reading of whitman. it is no accident that duncan returns insistently to the moment of touch. as for d. h. lawrence, who called for a whitmanesque “democracy of touch” in lady chatterley’s lover, the moment of touch was always charged with political and ethical meaning.d. h. lawrence, lady chatterley’s lover (1928; london: penguin, 1994) 75. lawrence’s “democracy of touch” echoes the ideas put forward in his essay on “democracy” (1919), where he argues for a restoration of whitman’s democratic vision, which he defines as “a struggle to liberate human beings from the fixed, arbitrary control of ideals, into free spontaneity” (“democracy,” reflections on the death of a porcupine and other essays, ed. michael herbert [cambridge: cambridge university press, 1988] 61-83 [quotation at 78]). touch defines influence; touch defines marriage; touch defines the poetic gesture implied in “something equivalent to creation”; and touch defines the imperative demand that will not leave you alone. duncan’s focus on touch provides a way of thinking about the relationship between hermetic vision and political engagement because it draws our attention to the permeable boundary between self and other. writing from myth: blake’s influence and the texture of experience if the binary of self and other seems too rigid and modish, i find my use of it redeemed somewhat by duncan’s own claim that the “fictional form operates to move the poet and the reader into an ‘other’ space in the reality of which actual space fades.”duncan, “the truth and life of myth” 29. otherness, for duncan, suggests a creative range of meaning and possibility and a textured density of experience. the binary therefore resists static interpretation. its terms are complex, but this complexity serves to intensify rather than unbind their structural opposition. the insistent touch of the other, or “poetry … ‘imperatively demanded,’” is described in “the truth and life of myth” as the basis for an understanding of poetry as an embodied medium: “the mythic content comes to us, commanding the design of the poem; it calls the poet into action, and with whatever lore and craft he has prepared himself for that call, he must answer to give body in the poem to the formative will.”duncan, “the truth and life of myth” 13. the bias that duncan places on this idea of the poet as a romantic prophet-artist, speaking the truth of myth, lies in his sense of what it means to “give body in the poem.” the first thing to understand is that poetics, for duncan, introduces an interface between the body as a poetic text and the poetic text as a body. in other words, the poetic text, summoned by the “formative will,” is inextricable from the texture of experience. before i elaborate on the way that this thinking conditions duncan’s reading of blake in roots and branches and fictive certainties, it is necessary to understand more about the terms on which he came to know of the english painter-poet—and to admire him as much as he did. nineteenthand early twentieth-century readings of blake frequently characterized him as an occult or mystic poet.see, for example, yeats and ellis, aleister crowley, theodore roethke, and h.d. raised by theosophists, duncan came naturally to a vocabulary of correspondences. his adoptive parents were followers of madame blavatsky, avid readers of swedenborg, and devotees of the occult. duncan explains their faith: for my parents, the truth of things was esoteric (locked inside) or occult (masked by the apparent), and one needed a “lost” key in order to piece out the cryptogram of who wrote shakespeare or who created the universe and what his real message was. from the theosophy of the 1890s my maternal grandmother had passed from spiritualism to become an elder in an hermetic brotherhood, similar to and contemporaneous with the order of the golden dawn to which yeats belonged. not only stories and books, but dreams and life itself, were to be read in terms of contained and revealed messages, even as in our time works of art, dreams and daily life are read by devotees of psychoanalysis, or as the people of the book—jews, christians and moslems—have always read god’s intent in the world, in history, and whatever written record. for theosophists, psychoanalysts, and the converts of revealed religions, it is not the story that is primary but the meaning behind the story.duncan, “the truth and life of myth” 3. for duncan, the problem with this approach arises out of the very nature of narrative appreciation, whereby the sensitive mind is opened to the nuances of human emotion and interaction: “the truth of a story is not rooted in wisdom but in the sense of the drama of life.”duncan, “the truth and life of myth” 4. here again, we see the way his thinking developed along lines compatible with, and influenced by, olson, who also claims: “[the stance of projective verse] may, the way things look, lead to a new poetics and to new concepts from which some sort of drama, say, or of epic, perhaps, may emerge.”olson 3. duncan explains: “as i continue to be involved with the reading of plato, not only myth but truth itself is disturbing, the actuality of time itself disturbed by the reality of what is happening.”duncan, “the truth and life of myth” 5. although duncan thought in terms of correspondence, he was well aware of the disruptive nature such correspondence could take, and the vocabulary of dramatic action was one way of expressing the human significance of that disruption. blake was a key player in duncan’s conscious exploration of derivation and poetic expression. duncan’s sense that events and individual poems happen as expressions of an ultimate poetry that disturbs the actuality of time with the reality of what is happening at its core bears close relation to his sense of blake’s inspirational quality. in “man’s fulfillment in order and strife,” duncan claims: “we must go beyond the sincere into the fiction whose authors, blake tells us, are in eternity. we must set up in the midst of the truth of what is, the truth of what we imagine.”duncan, “man’s fulfillment in order and strife,” fictive certainties 112. the particular implications of the reference to blake, itself the starting point for duncan’s “variations on two dicta of william blake,” will be discussed in more detail later in this section. but there is a general sense in which duncan’s claim illustrates the kind of visionary poet he thought blake was and the work that such poetry could do in the modern world. it is essential that “the truth of what we imagine” is to be set up “in the midst of the truth of what is.” as with blake, the place and purpose of duncan’s visionary poetics are always intrinsic to the world of events. duncan received from his occultist parents an education that encouraged him to read poetry as a sign system that enclosed, in however difficult a manner, spiritual truths. but he was equally concerned to sustain individual freedoms and the idiosyncracies of present identities in combination with a lasting sense of eternal truth or meaning. he put it brilliantly in “towards an open universe”: “our consciousness, and the poem as a supreme effort of consciousness, comes in a dancing organization between personal and cosmic identity.”duncan, “towards an open universe,” fictive certainties 78. duncan’s “variations on two dicta of william blake”duncan, “variations on two dicta of william blake,” roots and branches 48-53. works precisely because blake’s aphoristic style (as used in the marriage of heaven and hell, for example) has a deceptive simplicity and universal applicability that allow duncan to sustain the “dancing organization,” in this case expressed through the metaphor of musical variations, of his poem. one of the fundamental creative principles of musical variation is the plainness of the original tune. musical variations allow for the exploration of register. you can move from the sublime to the ridiculous by radical changes in musical accompaniment, but the melody will still be recognizable. similarly, the aphoristic (if not straightforward) quality of blake’s lines allows duncan to explore what they might mean in different moods, contexts, and modes of being. like a melody, the dicta provide the basis for an exploration of register. like a musical accompaniment, duncan’s tone is constantly shifting around them. duncan’s attraction to variation is that of hermes, god of poets and thieves. a good composer comes into his own creativity more completely in the presence of others. duncan draws his poetic power from the same activity. it is not just what blake says but the way he says it that stimulates duncan’s meditation on the texture of experience. in the claim they lay to the absolute, the dicta “mental things are alone real” (from a vision of the last judgment) and “the authors are in eternity” (from blake’s letter to thomas butts, 6 july 1803) also invite an interrogation of their status in the compromised conditions of living life. these conditions make up the drama that duncan finds lacking in a mythopoeic imagination that focuses only on wisdom and truth. it is here that the dialogue he has with blake starts to creep toward the ethical, as his poem engages with the actuality of human suffering as part of the poetic texture of experience. one of the most poignant moments in duncan’s poem occurs at the start of the second section. how long dare i withhold myself my lord withholds. i shy a glance that he too shies. the authors of the look write with our eyes broken phrases of their book. examining the shared emotional positions of devotion and desire, duncan explores the implication that blake’s dictum “the authors are in eternity” has for human beings. the scene pivots on an uneasy negotiation of authorial agency. the self-will, volition, and trembling energy of the first line both compromise and are compromised by cosmic writing. in “the truth and life of myth,” duncan not only implies admiration and support of blake’s dictum, he goes as far as to suggest it as a basis for understanding his poetic texture. here, duncan shows us the darker side of the mythopoeic vision. this is about disconnect and distance longing to be bridged. there is distance in the opening act of withholding and there is also distance between the authors and the actors, who are paradoxically striving for authorship of their actions. throughout the poem, touch is both the desired cohesive function—“touch, touch, / complete me such a world as i contain”—and something that true cohesion would inevitably transcend as otherness becomes an inescapable part of being. i recognized in you my own presence beyond touch, within being. what could i reach, reacht as i was? the authors are in eternity. duncan makes this tension the modus operandi of his poetic engagement. i am the author of the authors and i am here. i do not dare rescue myself in you or you in me. one could take from this poem a sense that authorship is both surrender and command. what i take from it is a sense that appreciation of the possibility of such poetics must also be combined with sensitivity to the human position. so, duncan oscillates between an attitude that connects blake with a whitmanesque delight in the natural and cosmic man (“such a world as i contain” surely evokes whitman’s celebratory “i contain multitudes”) and an attitude that acknowledges the tension and constraint inherent in dictation and the importance of existential variation. what is real, for duncan, is felt as real, returning us again to the significance of touch as we are then touched by the suffering, separated lovers. so, blake affects duncan’s meditation on the texture of experience not only because his aphorisms provide the textual basis for poetic variation but also because, as a vital figure in duncan’s conscious exploration of poetic derivation, he contributes to the problems that duncan perceives in his own poetic process of becoming. these problems center on the desire for touch and the paradoxical awareness that touch confirms the externality of the other and does not go far enough. “variations on two dicta of william blake” ends: we wait, two others, outside ever our eternal being that is here, in this sad tableau too, (for us, unwilling actors) rapture. the authors are in eternity that is in thought intensely between us, restraint that acknowledges the lover’s kiss. in the poem’s final scene, self is relegated to the position of other. duncan’s explorations of the meaning of blake’s dicta in different registers of experience—registers that include such polar extremes as “come, eyes, see more than you see! / for the world within and the outer world / rejoice as one” and “you talkd of ‘freedom’, / and i saw / how foreign i am from me”—finally arrive at an embrace that is conditioned by separation. moreover, the feeling of separation is derived from the paradoxical inaccessibility and direct imposition of myth “that is / in thought intensely between us.” duncan’s line breaks intensify the gulf through the suspension of breath while at the same time indicating a gasping desire for it to be bridged. the “restraint that acknowledges / the lover’s kiss” leads us to a further affinity in the attention that blake and duncan pay to formal boundaries. both delight in the poetic binding of their productions at the very moment that they explore notions of freedom and expression. both are simultaneously bound to form and bound to unlocking it. an example can be found in blake’s “the garden of love”: i went to the garden of love. and saw what i never had seen: a chapel was built in the midst, where i used to play on the green. and the gates of this chapel were shut, and thou shalt not, writ over the door; so i turn’d to the garden of love, that so many sweet flowers bore, and i saw it was filled with graves, and tomb-stones where flowers should be: and priests in black gowns, were walking their rounds, and binding with briars, my joys & desires.blake, “the garden of love,” pl. 44, songs of innocence and of experience, ed. lincoln. this poem gains its power from the pleasurable nature of the binding rhymes and rhythms, which deliberately conflict with the subject matter. as a poet, duncan, like blake, understood the vital possibility of constraint. blake cannot do without the “briars” in the last line. “the garden of love” wears this symbolic crown of thorns in its formal constraints. this poem makes a far more subtle point than the one frequently attributed to it. it is not simply about the evils of organized religion; it is also about blake’s poetic debt to organization. the choreography is unsettling because the verse mimics the encircling motion of the priests. while the narrative suggests condemnation of the church, the poetry participates in a necessary sacrifice of freedom to artistic form. blake knew that lineaments are necessary to produce good art. in the mature work of jerusalem, he aligns outline with “visions of imagination.”blake, jerusalem pl. 74, jerusalem, ed. with introduction and notes by morton d. paley (princeton: princeton university press/william blake trust, 1991). this is not to say that blake is writing in support of the church. clearly this would be absurd. it would also make the poem much weaker. but the poem does display the deep ambivalence that characterizes his attitude toward boundaries and the nature of the relationship he creates between freedom and form. of course such a relationship draws attention to different kinds of form. there is a difference between the oppressive form of the church of history and the enabling form of artistic imagination. but blake, like duncan, is not blind to the points of contact. the “briars” find their echo in the “desires” of the same line. on the one hand this encourages an interpretation of oppressive authority limiting the passions. but it also implies equivalence; it hints that “briars” are, in some way, “desires” or desired. blake sets up a carefully choreographed dance between freedom and form, the eternal world of spirit and the present world of bodies and facts. boundaries are about relationship, but they can also be about imposition and constraint. the trembling hands in duncan’s “variations on two dicta of william blake”see section 7, lines 5-7 (roots and branches 52). denote one such boundary; the stifling restrictions of party politics and organized religion denote the other. the point of contact can be summarized in the varied experience of touch, which ranges from caress to attack. duncan’s “my mother would be a falconress” deploys a rhythm that, like the bird it describes, reaches out toward the dangerous circumference of its being while retaining an anchor in the familiar. let’s take the opening stanza: my mother would be a falconress, and i, her gay falcon treading her wrist, would fly to bring back from the blue of the sky to her, bleeding, a prize, where i dream in my little hood with many bells jangling when i’d turn my head.duncan, “my mother would be a falconress,” bending the bow (new york: new directions, 1968) 52-54. the rhythm created by the repetition of “i” (echoed in “fly,” “sky,” and softened and modified in “i’d”), the alliterative “bring back … blue … bleeding … bells,” “would … where … when,” and the modification of sound in “falconress” and “wrist,” “hood” and “head,” bind the breath that is thrown forth in a projective reading of this verse with the memory and echo of sounds that have already been uttered. the echoing repetitions and variations create a strong incantatory rhythm rooted in the familiar that exists in vital conflict with the momentary bid for freedom represented in the falcon’s flight and rhythmically suggested by the poem’s push outwards. there is, of course, a beautiful symmetry with the subject matter. the falcon’s flight is dictated by the falconress. he not only flies at her bidding, he goes to do her murderous work. and he also draws blood from her. the boundaries of his flight are therefore defined by blood. the edges are dangerous, vicious; they are also a necessary condition for movement. duncan’s and blake’s shared preoccupation with boundary, with the tangible, bloody evidence of birds and briars, starts to map the common ground in their sense of vision. to “set up in the midst of the truth of what is, the truth of what we imagine” breeds conflict. the penetrative mobility between the present and the eternal and between form and freedom is a basis for understanding poetics as a hermeneutic of the world of relationships and binary oppositions. in the following section i will suggest that the concerns i have been talking about in roots and branches become overtly political in bending the bow. this is evident not only in the penetrative violence of “my mother would be a falconress,” which duncan wrote after nights reading blake’s bloody images of rape in visions of the daughters of albion,duncan, “a lammas tiding,” bending the bow 51. but also in duncan’s “up rising,” which is itself indebted to blake’s america, and in his more general introductory remarks on the grotesque state of american democracy. poetic lore and political engagement one way of understanding the interface that blake and duncan set up between personal, poetic, and political formation is through the idea of the grotesque, a form that embodies an uncomfortable otherness. for geoffrey harpham, the word “designates a condition of being just out of focus, just beyond the reach of language.”geoffrey galt harpham, on the grotesque: strategies of contradiction in art and literature (princeton: princeton university press, 1982) 3. the grotesque belongs to the liminal realm. the scene is one of metamorphosis or transition, the self’s process of becoming, its fight with an excess of self that it would like to name other. the grotesque form is consequently at odds with itself. harpham describes it as indicative of an idea too big for form, but it seems to me to be precisely the integral and constitutive relationship between form and idea that makes it such a useful concept to apply to the points of contact between duncan and blake. the grotesque form gives the appearance of struggle precisely because it is so difficult to combine two dissonant modes of being in a single formal expression. but, precisely because of its uncomfortable dissonance, it is a useful theory with which to read these poets’ conceptions of self (in dialogue or romance with the self’s own emanations, influences, and otherness), poetry (expressive of a greater poetics), and politics (as related to normative and deviant notions of individual and national behavior). in his introduction to bending the bow, duncan writes: we enter again and again the last days of our own history, for everywhere living productive forms in the evolution of forms fail, weaken, or grow monstrous, destroying the terms of their existence. we do not mean an empire; a war then, as if to hold all china or the ancient sea at bay, breaks out at a boundary we name ours. it is a boundary beyond our understanding. now, where other nations before us have flounderd, we flounder. to defend a form that our very defense corrupts. we cannot rid ourselves of the form to which we now belong. and in this drama of our own desperation we are drawn into a foreign desperation. for our defense has invaded an area of our selves that troubled us. cities laid waste, villages destroyd, men, women and children hunted down in their fields, forests poisond, herds of elephants screaming under our fire—it is all so distant from us we hear only what we imagine, making up what we surely are doing. when in moments of vision i see back of the photographt details and the daily body counts actual bodies in agony and hear—what i hear now is the desolate bellowing of some ox in a ditch—madness starts up in me. the pulse of this sentence beats before and beyond all proper bounds and we no longer inhabit what we thought properly our own.duncan, bending the bow i. in this rendering of the grotesque, or “monstrous,” contemporary condition, it is both impossible and undesirable to ignore the slipperiness with which duncan shifts between political, personal, and poetic positions, emphasizing their interdependence. for if this passage is a description of contemporary american democracy, which has compromised itself by its aggressive actions in vietnam, it is also a psychological exploration of this condition at an individual level (“our defense has invaded an area of our selves that troubled us”) and a meditation on the poetics of experience (“the pulse of this sentence beats before and beyond all proper bounds”). theorizing about the grotesque, margrit shildrick suggests that “we are always and everywhere vulnerable precisely because the monstrous is not only an exteriority. … what is at issue is the permeability of the boundaries that guarantee the normatively embodied self.”margrit shildrick, embodying the monster: encounters with the vulnerable self (london: sage, 2002) 1. as the otherness of the grotesque is poetically encoded or figuratively embodied in the normative self, the relation between self and other is such that “the encounter with the strange is not a discrete event but the constant condition of becoming.” “both are in play, then,” she argues, “on a plane where conceptual logics cannot be distinguished from the corporeality of becoming in the world.”shildrick 1. to make this less abstract we might consider the way that blake and duncan present the body, and particularly the differential body (gay, black, gendered), as intrinsic to the ontological and ethical processes of self and nation. as duncan’s opening to bending the bow illustrates, when the monstrous becomes a way of reflecting on the self, it is at once disturbing and progressive. america’s engorged body politic refutes the binary of self and other that duncan perceives to be driving its actions in vietnam. duncan’s presentation of america’s monstrous democracy therefore demands a reappraisal of normative identity and a reassessment of political activity. for shildrick, the grotesque draws attention to the discursive nature of embodiment and attests to the vulnerability and unpredictability at the heart of the process of becoming. it is this emphasis on indeterminacy and process that makes her theory of the grotesque body interesting in relation to blake and duncan. as we have seen, blake and duncan posit the body as a poetic field and poetry as an embodied medium. duncan claims: “this poetry, the ever forming of bodies in language in which breath moves, is a field of ensouling. each line, intensely, a soul thing, a contribution; a locality of the living.”duncan, bending the bow ii. blake’s characters are a testament to the discursive nature of embodiment, their forms created visually by his varied illustrations and linguistically by the politically charged ways of seeing exemplified in his skillful manipulations of genre. in visions of the daughters of albion, a poem that duncan read repeatedly, the body of oothoon becomes a locus for interrogating the sentimental and voyeuristic qualities of feminine antislavery writing, the association of prophetic utterance with masculine violence, and the place of the marginalized in poetic speech. blake’s and duncan’s shared sense of poetry as an embodied medium is evident in the former’s complex cast of mythological characters and the latter’s repeated emphasis on the poetics of lived (and necessarily embodied) experience. in blake’s visions, the body comes under attack; its integrity is compromised and its status overdetermined as individual figures are represented both visually and verbally in multiple and sometimes contrasting ways. oothoon, for example, appears as muddy-colored, light, pinkish, and brown as blake furthers his concern with modes of perception and representation.for example, she is brown in object 9 of copy f and pink in object 9 of copy i; dark in object 9 of copy p and light in object 5 of copy a (all in the william blake archive). our attention is drawn to the idea of threatened boundaries through forcible bodily penetration. there are multiple rapes. the first clear rape, carried out by the slaveholder bromion, deflowers the gentle oothoon, “the soft soul of america,” within the first twenty lines of the poem. the rape is noticeable for its suddenness. its violence lies in the breathtaking speed with which it occurs and the amputated nature of blake’s description. the verb is monosyllabic. the phrase is abrupt: “bromion rent her with his thunders.”william blake, visions of the daughters of albion pl. 4, the early illuminated books, ed. with introductions and notes by morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi (princeton: princeton university press/william blake trust, 1993). it stands in stark contrast to the undulating luscious feminine rhythms of the opening fifteen lines, which describe the chained sexual passions of england’s women as they “sigh” toward america. from the opening lines, which refer to the curvaceous “mountains” and “valleys” of the daughters of albion, to the “wander[ing]” of oothoon as she travels in loose fashion through the “vales” of leutha, to her journey over the rolling waves as she moves toward theotormon after symbolically plucking the flower from leutha’s valley, blake’s writing dwells on the soft curves and gentle motion associated with feminine seductive power. the rape by bromion forces itself on the poem, halting this flow of feminine allure. oothoon is left prostrate and still: “on his stormy bed / lay the faint maid.”blake, visions of the daughters of albion pl. 4, the early illuminated books, ed. eaves, essick, and viscomi. oothoon’s immobility heightens the contrast with the wandering movement of earlier lines. in one sense blake rehearses a rather familiar trope of rape as colonial domination and possession, aligning the female body with the land. he takes it further, however, by suggesting a gendering of poetic utterance. while oothoon wanders in leutha’s vale, the poetic movement is characterized by yearning desire. when she is raped, blake’s diction becomes violent and abbreviated. this rape is not the first suggestion of violence in the poem, nor is it the last. when oothoon “pluck[s]” the flower from the valley of leutha, her action invites comparison with bromion’s. this is more than understandable, given the way the loss of female virginity was described in contemporary literature. in some cases, the description closely mirrored that of rape. when fanny hill loses her virginity in john cleland’s memoirs of a woman of pleasure, for example, she is subject to “fierce tearing and rending.”quoted by caroline jackson-houlston, “‘the lineaments of … desire’: blake’s visions of the daughters of albion and romantic literary treatments of rape,” queer blake, ed. helen p. bruder and tristanne connolly (basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, 2010) 156. even as she plucks the flower, oothoon remains open to sensual experience. this paradoxical meaning is carried in the sexually suggestive act of deflowering that simultaneously signals the rejection of sexual experience. it is important to the voice that oothoon finds later in the poem that she retains this openness. virginity, here, is not false modesty but innocence and possibility. after bromion rapes her, oothoon figuratively calls a second rape upon herself as a means to redemption from the first: i call with holy voice! kings of the sounding air, rend away this defiled bosom that i may reflect, the image of theotormon on my pure transparent breast. the eagles at her call descend & rend their bleeding prey; theotormon severely smiles. her soul reflects the smile; as the clear spring mudded with feet of beasts grows pure & smiles.blake, visions of the daughters of albion pl. 5, the early illuminated books, ed. eaves, essick, and viscomi. the rape by bromion turns oothoon’s body into a cage. this is reflected in her inability to cry: “oothoon weeps not. she cannot weep!” her body encloses itself and it is only through violent and bloody penetration that she can unlock it. the following plate accentuates the suggestion of a second rape. oothoon lies upon her back, head and arms flung back, legs slightly splayed and chest lifted up toward the ravenous bird in a clear indication of sexual invitation. the eagle’s beak protrudes sharply as, wings splayed in downward flight, he plunges it into oothoon’s proffered flesh. oothoon’s summons, “i call with holy voice,” assumes the power of the bard, introduced in the opening to songs of experience as the prophet-artist who “present, past, & future sees.” oothoon presents herself as passive, but she has the decisive power of voice, while theotormon ineffectively weeps on the threshold. her voice occupies the space that theotormon refuses to fill with love for her. but without theotormon’s love and without sexual fulfillment oothoon’s words become repetitious: “i cry, love! love! love! happy happy love!”blake, visions of the daughters of albion pl. 10, the early illuminated books, ed. eaves, essick, and viscomi. her song is iterative, its generative potential frustrated by the bind of shame that keeps theotormon from fulfilling her desires. in blake’s illuminated book, the image of theotormon’s eagle penetrating oothoon appears under his only speech. the juxtaposition of theotormon’s passive bemoaning of his own sorrow and his eagle’s violent activity is striking. the eagle acts as he cannot. like the daughters of albion who can only “weep” and “eccho,” theotormon denies his own power for decisive action, existing in a position of liminality that oothoon powerfully rejects. oothoon’s bardic imagination offers another way of seeing, and one that has a direct bearing on blake’s own conception of the political importance of the prophet-artist. oothoon calls the eagles to rend her flesh in order that she may “reflect, / the image of theotormon.” while her self-inflicted rape is a potently aggressive act of self-harm, it makes her into a vehicle for truth. she is offering to tell the suppressed story of the poem and, in bringing the marginalized theotormon center stage, she hopes to recover his love. at this moment oothoon’s “holy voice” might redeem the status of narrative, which is under scrutiny in this poem. her violent act suggests both a reinscription of her “bleeding” virgin state of openness and possibility and a reconfiguration of form: the eagles at her call descend & rend their bleeding prey; theotormon severely smiles. her soul reflects the smile; as the clear spring mudded with feet of beasts grows pure & smiles. in this further degradation of her flesh, oothoon takes on a shifting color, which makes us think of dark and light skin. in one sense, this indeterminate color emphasizes the fluid condition of her soul which, like a “clear spring,” “reflects” theotormon’s smile. however, it also configures oothoon’s love in terms familiar from colonialist discourse. we see through the eyes of the daughters again as oothoon’s core appears white. introducing the prophetic mode in conjunction with tropes familiar from contemporary antislavery writing furthers blake’s concern with modes of seeing and the politics of representation. oothoon’s cry for freedom is an attack on received forms of perception: arise my theotormon i am pure. because the night is gone that clos’d me in its deadly black. they told me that the night & day were all that i could see; they told me that i had five senses to inclose me up. and they inclos’d my infinite brain into a narrow circle, and sunk my heart into the abyss, a red round globe hot burning till all from life i was obliterated and erased.blake, visions of the daughters of albion pl. 5, the early illuminated books, ed. eaves, essick, and viscomi. “they told me,” oothoon repeats, lamenting the mental chains that taught her to see nothing other than the time-bound world of sense experience, to live from day to day guided by physical want and fear. striking out against her oppressors, she stakes her claim to freedom in terms that emphasize her newfound ability to perceive a reality other than the temporal and locate meaning in figurative language. instead of morn arises a bright shadow, like an eye in the eastern cloud: instead of night a sickly charnel house.blake, visions of the daughters of albion pl. 5, the early illuminated books, ed. eaves, essick, and viscomi. theotormon, the cause of her present sorrow, remains caged. his ability to distinguish and find meaning is nullified by shame and grief. to him the night and morn are both alike: a night of sighs, a morning of fresh tears.blake, visions of the daughters of albion pl. 5, the early illuminated books, ed. eaves, essick, and viscomi. reading blake’s visions in order to find “the poetic lore of what america is” and writing “my mother would be a falconress” in a semi-automatic state, duncan claimed that he had constructed a poem about poets: and, searching out the poetic lore of what america is, i had been reading blake’s vision of the daughters of albion these last few nights just before going to sleep. “with what sense is it that the chicken shuns the ravenous hawk?” i had read, and i said to myself, yes, there are bloody men, and i am not one of them but of chicken-kind, for i would never draw blood. which goes to show one should be careful of vain self-delusions entertaind at bedtime. for now my dream would have me a hawk. and, hearing my account, jess comments: “especially since chickens do draw blood.” whereupon, i recall those horrible cannibalistic hens i tended at treesbank, that needed only the first sign of blood that might be left after egg-laying to tear at each other, bloody not from hunger but from malice, like so many poets furious in their pecking order. do i draw blood then chicken-wise and hide myself in a hawk’s disguise?duncan, “a lammas tiding,” bending the bow 51. the vocabulary of violence, which he derives from blake, relates to political, poetic, and sexual power. it is political because it is about the violence of domination and futile aggression, which provides a rather pointed reflection on america’s actions in vietnam. when duncan writes in “my mother would be a falconress” “it seemd my human soul went down in flames,” it is hard to ignore the image of the american fighter plane crashing into asian soil. it is poetic because it negotiates the difficulty of finding a place for individual voice free from the mother tongue and mothering or smothering forms of language: i would be a falcon and go free. i tread her wrist and wear the hood, talking to myself, and would draw blood. and it is sexual because of the unsettling evocation of rape where the gay poet-falcon’s “pierc[ing]” beak implies virginal deflowering as well as the daily plundering of life. duncan would have known that the egyptian sun-god, ra, creator of the world, had the head of a falcon, and that he symbolically died each evening, crossing the boundary to the underworld, and was brought back to life in the morning. he would have been familiar with the ancient superstition that animals cross between realms more easily. so, for duncan, with his defining interest in hermetic vision, choosing the falconress and falcon to represent the mother-son relationship is unlikely to have been accidental. like blake, he was more than able to relate cosmic and personal boundaries and boundary crossings on the same plane. in a clear echo of blake’s visions, the violence of duncan’s poem suggests rape: when will she let me bring down the little birds, pierced from their flight with their necks broken, their heads like flowers limp from the stem? the deliberate double meaning of “bring down” and “pierced,” together with the simile in the last line, elides the difference between murder and deflowering rape. in the next line the pent-up aggression of duncan’s poet-falcon turns on the mother, the origin of self, from which it cannot break free: “i tread my mother’s wrist and would draw blood.” duncan takes from blake the sense that rape can figure both as a symbol of oppression and as a source of controlling power. he also takes from blake a desire to bring violence and ugliness center stage and confront their meaning and relevance. i have suggested that blake’s poem opens our eyes to the possibility of poetic power sourced not in generic sentimental and sighing visions, but in the disruptive prophetic mode, vividly rendered in oothoon’s second, self-willed rape and gloriously upheld in her discovery of the revelatory and liberating capacity of figurative language. duncan is in dialogue with blake on the possibilities of freedom through violence and the concomitant notions of futile henpecking poets and colonial oppression. before i remark on “up rising,” i want to venture a few suggestions as to the connections a mind like duncan’s or blake’s, prone to repeated interfaces, analogies, and discursive ways of imagining, might have drawn between the penetrative quality of hermetic vision (in which one might find “the poetic lore of what america is”) and the violent penetration expressed in their images of rape. reading “my mother would be a falconress,” we are left with a strong sense that if duncan found a poetic lore governing the actuality of american society in blake’s visions, it was a lore of grotesque being. in the theoretical framework established at the start of this section, i suggested that the grotesque scene is one of metamorphosis or transition, the self’s process of becoming and its fight with an excess of self that it would like to name other. as blake and duncan posit a discursive interchange between the body as a poetic field and poetry as an embodied medium, the grotesque state of the raped body becomes a way of thinking about poetic utterance and the power of voice. oothoon claims the unwanted otherness of bromion as a part of herself and a source of poetic power when she calls upon theotormon’s eagles to rend her flesh. duncan makes a similarly uncomfortable move when he brings the falcon’s violence center stage in his poem. if we return for a moment to the binary of self and other and the profound awareness of boundary and boundary crossing that i have argued mattered both to duncan’s appreciation of blake and to the broader poetics of which this appreciation was a part, we can see that otherness is both an unwelcome and invited intruder on the notion of self and essential to its formation. here again, i think there is a very important sense in which duncan’s poetry interrogates and problematizes the claim for visionary poetics that he makes in “man’s fulfillment in order and strife.” that is, “we must go beyond the sincere into the fiction whose authors, blake tells us, are in eternity. we must set up in the midst of the truth of what is, the truth of what we imagine.”duncan, “man’s fulfillment in order and strife” 112. duncan makes us think differently about blake’s dictum because he never lets go of the tension it involves. the eagle is, of course, also a symbol for america. duncan consciously inherits blake’s dialectic between spirit and society, thinking about the way such penetrative violence might take on a particular significance in the context of contemporary american foreign policy. by this i do not mean to suggest that duncan simply reiterates the familiar trope of rape as colonial oppression, though to some extent this trope haunts his writing, as it haunts blake’s. the rape imagery in “my mother would be a falconress” is part of a more abstract poetic and political concern with threatened boundaries. at the beginning of this section i cited duncan’s opening to bending the bow, where he comments on the monstrous state of american democracy: “we enter again and again the last days of our own history, for everywhere living productive forms in the evolution of forms fail, weaken, or grow monstrous, destroying the terms of their existence.” this apocalyptic sense of an ending lacks the redemptive quality of light that will emerge out of darkness. duncan calls the quality of imagination into question by implicating it as a part of the problem in his opening to bending the bow: cities laid waste, villages destroyd, men, women and children hunted down in their fields, forests poisond, herds of elephants screaming under our fire—it is all so distant from us we hear only what we imagine, making up what we surely are doing. when in moments of vision i see back of the photographt details and the daily body counts actual bodies in agony and hear—what i hear now is the desolate bellowing of some ox in a ditch—madness starts up in me. the pulse of this sentence beats before and beyond all proper bounds and we no longer inhabit what we thought properly our own.duncan, bending the bow i. the monstrous state of america is reflected in a monstrous poetic that is blind to the narrative of murder and destruction, blind to a narrative it does not want to acknowledge. imagination, in this sense, is devoid of the penetrating prophetic function that duncan then ascribes to “moments of vision.” such moments, and the “madness” they generate, threaten the normative identity of the self and force an ecstatic embodying of the other. the poetic that governs duncan’s engagement with blake therefore has direct relevance to the nature of his political engagement. duncan castigates contemporary american democracy because it denies this poetic. he suggests that america’s actions in vietnam, which reflect the failing of american foreign policy to consider the way democracy might resist the violent perpetration of north american hegemony, pervert and destroy the democratic system that they are meant to protect. they are fighting “to defend a form that our very defense corrupts.” the impact of such defense is to close off evolution and destroy the very life and energy that are essential to the kind of redemptive, restorative, and ethical democratic vision that duncan finds in his reading of whitman, blake, and olson. the relationship between duncan’s poetic lore and political engagement is reciprocal. “up rising”duncan, “up rising,” passages 25, bending the bow 81-83. is one of a series of poems about war originally published as “passages” in a separate publication titled of the war. the war in vietnam provides a way of thinking about conflict, that is to say the binary principle that i have argued is fundamental to duncan’s poetic texture, just as the binary, the permeable boundary between self and other, provides a way of thinking about the war that is happening in vietnam and the meaning of america, which is under scrutiny as a result. in “up rising,” blake features as a writer of hermetic vision who offers a way of imagining the fundamental principles of america as they appeared at the moment of national inception, “in figures of fire and blood raging.” but the following line begins “… in what image?” as if blake’s “figures” can’t fully embody the violence and horror of an america grown so fat on its own despotic idea of democracy that its “ravening eagle” knows no bounds and cannot satiate its destructive hunger for human flesh. the horror that duncan perceives in contemporary foreign policy tests the principle of hermetic vision even as it contributes to his understanding of the texture and meaning of such vision through struggle and conflict. conclusions the lament that opens bending the bow mourns the destruction of form as evolutionary process and discursive embodiment. such form attests to the importance of permeable boundaries and an ethic rooted in the relationship between self and other. we have seen how and why blake mattered to duncan in this context, in terms of both poetic texture and political engagement, and how duncan makes us think differently about blake’s dicta and violence as a result. duncan comes into his creative potential thinking about blake in terms of touch. and touch defines the boundary of self both by reinscribing it as a real and tangible distinction and by offering a way of transgressing that distinction. in this way duncan takes our understanding of blake beyond the personal and poetic implications of myth toward an intensely ethical and political engagement. the dialogue that duncan has with blake is part of a larger pattern in blake’s american reception, where the english poet-painter both matters to a whitmanesque tradition of mythic self-definition and helps expose the tensions inherent in that tradition. for duncan, poetry, and particularly the romantic prophet-artist, needed to address and restore the meaning of american democracy. filtered through olson’s lens, blake becomes part of the restoration of a whitmanesque dream. contemporary democracy, with its troubling exclusion of the other and a perceived tendency toward individual stultification as opposed to liberation and expansion, seems monstrous by comparison. in his experiment in life-writing, titled the h.d. book, duncan claimed: “where a democracy is composed of a people in which the individual conscience and nature is not liberated, so that a common standard or consensus of the majority rules and not the union of each in free volition, the state is already totalitarian.”“from the h.d. book, part ii, chapter 5,” sagetrieb: robert duncan special issue 4.2-3 (fall and winter 1985): 42-43. duncan maintains the importance of the prophet-artist in the preservation of democratic individualism at a time when the very values of democracy and community seem hijacked by commercial and technocratic interest. he writes: the beauty of the poem, the poet’s sense of beauty, in itself, that cannot be bought and sold. beauty, in a society based upon commodity-profit is ambivalently praised and despised. the popular mistrust, the industrial and commercial mistrust, opposes and destroys where it can individual sensitivity, as out of place in the “democracy” of big party politics or in the “community” of the modern city as individualist architecture with its romantic and expressive form, even ornament, is in the plans of the new functionalism.“from the h.d. book, part ii, chapter 5” 49. duncan’s use of quotation marks around “democracy” and “community” indicates the corruption of the terms he holds in such high esteem. for it is in democracy and community realized in the intimacy and density of his poetry that duncan finds hope for society. and while it is fair to say that he participates in the making of an american myth of blake that is fundamentally optimistic in its desire to co-opt the english painter-poet into a restorative romantic vision, duncan is also sensitive to the limitations of that vision and, like blake and whitman, he has doubts as to the capability of the prophet-artist to work within society and effect social change.whitman’s concerns appear strongest in his 1871 work democratic vistas. blake’s anxieties surface throughout his canon but perhaps the best example is in vala, where the prophetic function is recognized as a “delusive phantom.” “… in what image?” he asks his admired blake, can we begin to embody and therefore address the grotesque state of our nation? after duncan published bending the bow he pledged to keep away from the world of publication for fifteen years. his friend and contemporary poet michael palmer explained the decision in the following way: the story is well-known in poetry circles: around 1968, disgusted by his difficulties with publishers and by what he perceived as the careerist strategies of many poets, duncan vowed not to publish a new collection for fifteen years. (there would be chapbooks along the way.) he felt that this decision would free him to listen to the demands of his (supremely demanding) poetics and would liberate the architecture of his work from all compromised considerations.michael palmer, “ground work: on robert duncan,” <http://​jacketmagazine.​com/​29/​palmer-duncan.​html> (last accessed 19 july 2011). this move reveals “my mother would be a falconress” to be as much about duncan’s frustrations at restrictions on his poetic freedom as it is homage to the revelatory power of the prophetic voice. perhaps in retreating from publication, and therefore implicitly from society, duncan felt he could better serve it in the end. but such a move also illustrates an inability to realize the dialectic between spirit and society that was fundamental to his sense of himself as a poet of hermetic vision, and also to his identification with blake. this anxiety haunts duncan’s reading of blake, as perhaps it haunts the whitmanesque myth of america that blake helps duncan reimagine, shadowing the visionary enterprise with the struggle and disillusionment felt by the very poets who most wanted to sustain it. review: martin priestman, the poetry of erasmus darwin: enlightened spaces, romantic times martin priestman. the poetry of erasmus darwin: enlightened spaces, romantic times. farnham, surrey: ashgate, 2013. xiv + 310 pp. £70.00/$124.95, hardcover (also available as an e-book). reviewed by alexander s. gourlay alexander s. gourlay (agourlay@risd.edu) teaches at the rhode island school of design. the life and career of the physician and poet erasmus darwin (grandfather of charles) and his relationships with contemporaries in science, business, and the arts have been extensively discussed over the last fifty years, but martin priestman’s book represents a major advance in elucidating darwin’s poetic and intellectual accomplishments and in exploring the ways in which he responded to and influenced a wide variety of poets, artists, and thinkers. even alongside the literary physicist desmond king-hele, darwin’s prolific biographer, priestman seems to be well prepared to deal with darwin’s polymathic polydextrousness, which encompassed interests in the entire range of eighteenth-century natural philosophy and technology, classical and modern poetry and fiction, economics, history, philosophy, visual art, linguistics, semiotics, radical politics, gender and sexuality, and much more. priestman’s own reading straddles disciplines, centuries, and borders, extending far beyond the literature surrounding darwin himself, and his critical approach reflects and sometimes seems to imitate the omnivorous intellectual habits of his subject: like darwin, he zooms from minutiae to patterns in the whole history of culture, and he alternates between offering engaging metaphors or easily grasped simplifications and explaining their limitations, often in expansive footnotes like those that crowd into the pages of darwin’s poetry. without ostentation, he deploys an eclectic assortment of critical and analytical approaches, a version of what he calls darwin’s “magpie intertextuality” (67). the machinerya term that priestman puts to good effect in chapter 5 in analyzing the connections among the mock-epic machinery in darwin’s poems, the mechanisms of nature (including evolution) that the poet was delineating, economic and political machines and machinations, and the technological machinery of the industrialists in darwin’s circle, all of which were evolving, often in concert. includes a surprisingly useful hybrid of big ideas from michel foucault (minus sneering) and martin bernal (minus black socrates and a lot more) to characterize the broad intellectual trends pivoting around darwin and leading into the theories of his famous grandson (basically a shift from emphasis on spatially organized knowledge to knowledge organized in time). even for readers of blake who have studied the loves of the plants, darwin’s epic poem on the sex lives of flowers based on the sexual classification system of linnaeus, and read one or another of king-hele’s books or the more focused studies of darwin’s poetry in relation to blake,erasmus darwin (1963), doctor of revolution: the life and genius of erasmus darwin (1977), erasmus darwin: a life of unequalled achievement (1999). see also jenny uglow, the lunar men: five friends whose curiosity changed the world (2002), patricia fara, erasmus darwin: sex, science, and serendipity (2012), and david worrall, “william blake and erasmus darwin’s botanic garden,” bulletin of the new york public library 78 (1974-75): 397-417. priestman’s accounts of darwin’s the botanic garden (1789-91)the loves of the plants is the flower-focused section of the botanic garden. in context will be edifying and at least occasionally inspirational: i was continually impressed by his ability to merge discussion of linnaean/darwinian botanizing and diverse cultural phenomena both inside and outside the poem. in the early chapters he brings together, for instance, darwin’s complex socio-psycho-poetic relationship with his collaborator emma crewe, the sexual politics of ovidian myth and its neoclassical counterparts, lucretius and eighteenth-century lucretianism, william smellie’s horrified reaction to linnaeus’s “obscenity” in the 1773 first edition of the encyclopaedia britannica, the discussions of otaheitean polygamy inspired by reports from captain cook’s voyages, mary wollstonecraft’s love life as lasciviously envisioned by richard polwhele, and more. priestman’s most distinctive talent among darwin’s modern interpreters is his subtlety as a reader of darwin’s sophisticated neo-popean verse. he acknowledges the deliberate absurdities that are so striking to modern readers but also shows what drew romantic-era readers to it and points out what else might be worth thinking about, especially things at the edges of both of these audiences’ attention. readers of this journal will probably find that he is less penetrating and original as a reader of blake, and although he notes several ways in which blake’s works respond in particular and in general to darwin, he does not explore potential ramifications of darwin’s ideas in the later prophecies or, for the most part, in blake’s visual art (though he does discuss the fuseli/blake illustrations for the botanic garden). but this is a book about darwin’s poetry and the contributions to and consequences of his thought, not an elucidation of blake’s oeuvre. if blakeans read darwin and consider his multivalent contexts in priestman’s congenial company, i expect that they will see many more connections, depending on their angle on blake. for instance, blake’s satirical “experiment picture” called the goats, a lost painting based upon an anecdote about naked native women in a south seas missionary narrative, has always seemed to me a peculiar subject for blake (even as a joke), but i realized when reading this book that the story and the picture resonate with a rich cluster of cultural tropes that are juxtaposed in and around darwin’s poems, especially exploration and cultural relativism, debates about sexual mores, sexual and political constructions around race, and the reception of sexual subject matter in art. priestman’s observations about blake’s specific debts to darwin’s loves and its even more ambitious companion, the economy of vegetation,although it is volume 2 of the combined work called the botanic garden, the loves of the plants was published first, in 1789, and volume 1, the economy of vegetation, in 1791. are persuasive and intellectually satisfying but not terribly surprising—blake had magpie tendencies of his own, and scholars poking around in contemporary publications of all kinds are used to finding both odd bits and big ideas that probably contributed directly or obliquely to his thinking and to his work. in assessing darwin’s possible influence it is often hard to tell when blake was picking up something that he expected readers to recognize, or overtly alluding to the same originals, or subtly mining the same esoteric sources; even when there are substantial convergences the two poets may be thinking completely differently about the shared matter, given that darwin was a devoutly committed materialist and atheist and blake was decidedly neither. the book of thel has darwin all over it, for instance, but the references there to darwin and his sources are partly satirical. similarly, the densely ironic layers of sympathetic cogitation that surround the passionate flowers (and flower observers) of songs of innocence and of experience can be seen as a critique of disengaged neoclassical poetic voices such as the one that dominates in the loves of the plants. blake was probably one of the first to read darwin’s poem, but everybody else in those days seems to have read the loves of the plants and later the rest of the botanic garden as well, many with a smitten attention that seems improbable now. for intellectuals of his era, darwin was novel but not particularly esoteric; even if, as anxious reactionaries continue to point out, the ideologies underlying his work were shatteringly radical, his audience appears to have responded mostly to the sly but polite surface. some of priestman’s speculations about literary influence on other poets are startling. at the end of the first canto of the loves of the plants, for instance, darwin describes the tough life of the fungus tremella, an unprepossessingit is, however, more prepossessing than its distant cousin, the alga tremella nostoc, which, darwin (erroneously) claims in his prose footnote, is not a plant at all but something that comes out of herons that have eaten frogs. try to make a gripping poem out of that. interestingly, darwin seems to have been the first to break with linnaeus in recognizing tremella as a fungus rather than an alga. life-form that grows near streams and degrades into “a transparent jelly” when it freezes. perhaps because the fungus reproduces by what darwin calls “secret” or “clandestine marriage” (spores), and therefore lacks a compelling sex-life to exploit, the poet spared no cliché in dramatizing its gelatinous demise: on dove’s green brink the fair tremella stood, and view’d her playful image in the flood; to each rude rock, lone dell, and echoing grove sung the sweet sorrows of her secret love. “oh, stay!—return!”—along the sounding shore cry’d the sad naiads,—she return’d no more!— now girt with clouds the sullen evening frown’d, and withering eurus swept along the ground; the misty moon withdrew her horned light, and sunk with hesper in the skirt of night; no dim electric streams, (the northern dawn,) with meek effulgence quiver’d o’er the lawn; no star benignant shot one transient ray to guide or light the wanderer on her way. round the dark craggs the murmuring whirlwinds blow, woods groan above, and waters roar below; as o’er the steeps with pausing foot she moves, the pitying dryads shriek amid their groves; she flys,—she stops,—she pants—she looks behind, and hears a demon howl in every wind. —as the bleak blast unfurls her fluttering vest, cold beats the snow upon her shuddering breast; through her numb’d limbs the chill sensations dart, and the keen ice-bolt trembles at her heart. “i sink, i fall! oh, help me, help!” she cries, her stiffening tongue the unfinish’d sound denies; tear after tear adown her cheek succeeds, and pearls of ice bestrew the glittering meads; congealing snows her lingering feet surround, arrest her flight, and root her to the ground; with suppliant arms she pours the silent prayer, her suppliant arms hang crystal in the air; pellucid films her shivering neck o’erspread, seal her mute lips, and silver o’er her head, veil her pale bosom, glaze her lifted hands, and shrined in ice the beauteous statue stands. —dove’s azure nymphs on each revolving year for fair tremella shed the tender tear; with rush-wove crowns in sad procession move, and sound the sorrowing shell to hapless love.loves (1789) 36-38. this passage appears to have had wider early circulation than any other section of the loves of the plants, perhaps in part because the episode is much less sexually suggestive than others. in addition to featuring prominently in darwin’s poem, it was printed in its entirety, including all or most of darwin’s prosaic scientific explication, as part of enthusiastic essays in at least two periodicals of 1789, the monthly review (80 [april 1789]: 340-41) and the english review (14 [july 1789]: 4-5).discovered using google books, which turns up several more reprintings of the passage over the next twenty years. ovidians will recognize in the tremella excerpt an allusion to narcissus as well as a version of the rape of orytheia by chilly boreas“withering eurus,” the east wind mentioned in line 8 of the passage, is usually warm, whereas the unnamed “bleak blast” that appears thirteen lines later is probably to be understood as the north wind boreas, or the “fiend of frost” who appears earlier in the poem. and related incidents, whereas those tuned to the blake channel will be reminded of the secret love of the sick rose and the sexual evaporation of the trembling dew of thel, as well as elements of the title page and other features of visions of the daughters of albion, including the mourning nymphs at the end.the stripping away of tremella’s vest by the “bleak blast” is also reminiscent of the aggressive gesture of the impetuous wind-blown male anemone-spirit on the title page of the book of thel, though this blakean image was more likely inspired by the passage earlier in canto 1 of the loves of the plants describing the violent sexual life of the anemone, whose beautiful virgin self is destroyed by the same wind that pollinates her. priestman suggests ingeniously that darwin’s story of tremella, who lives and loves obscurely “on dove’s green brink,” not only influenced the language and imagery of cowper’s “the castaway” but also “arguably” inspired wordsworth, whose “lucy gray” and “she dwelt among the untrodden ways / beside the springs of dove” duplicate aspects of darwin’s narrative and capture some of its pathos, with all traces of fungus and neoclassicism (and heron excreta)see note 5. removed. even if one dismisses as red herrings the traditional accounts of the wordsworth poems’ origins and accepts priestman’s theory whole, the idea that hapless lucy might have evolved from a fungus does not greatly affect one’s understanding of the poems … and yet i have a feeling they will never be the same for me. priestman devotes a chapter to darwin’s relationship with his naughty mental twin, the libertine richard payne knight, and two more to summing up darwin’s place in intellectual history vis-à-vis all the major pre-romantic and romantic poets, with emphasis on the way they fit individually and as a movement into the broad shift from space-based, panoramic knowledge exemplified by the linnaean taxonomy to the time-based, historical model of reality that was increasingly explicit in darwin’s poetry: here blake is treated broadly, as an early transitional figure. other chapters sketch the considerable influence of darwin’s technological, scientific, and historical insights and inventions, and describe his peculiarly inverted political effect, most of which seems to have consisted of horrified reaction to the implications of his materialism and atheism rather than emulation or admiration. (this is a phenomenon that continues to this day: priestman invites readers to survey, using google, the landscape of more or less paranoid accounts of a vast materialist conspiracy with erasmus and charles darwin at the heart. these are out there, all right, though there is also a lot of material extolling the elder darwin’s accomplishments.) this book is an important contribution to scholarship in several disciplines, and is especially recommended to blakeans of every kind i can think of, not so much for what we can learn about blake directly but for what we can learn about the broad intellectual milieu of the turn of that century. it is clearly written, energetic, witty, and carefully edited, though the arrangement of the discussion in broad, overlapping topics leads to a good deal of reiteration, backtracking, and retroactive refinement of arguments. the physical volume is well designed, with a few well-chosen and well-reproduced monochrome images, and in general it justifies the rather steep hardcover price. a sketch by robert blake revealed a sketch by robert blake revealed by robert n. essick and jenijoy la belle robert n. essick (professor emeritus, university of california, riverside) and jenijoy la belle (professor emerita, california institute of technology) have been collecting and writing about blake for fifty years. william blake instructed his beloved youngest brother, robert (1762–87), in drawing and engraving in the early and mid-1780s. according to gilchrist, who had “come across” a few of robert’s “tentative essays” as a draughtsman, “some are in pencil, some in pen and ink …. they unmistakably show the beginner—not to say the child—in art; are naïf and archaic-looking; rude, faltering, often puerile or absurd in drawing; but are characterized by blake-like feeling and intention, having in short a strong family likeness to his brother’s work” (1: 57). robert’s extant drawings are listed, and most are reproduced, in martin butlin’s catalogue of william blake’s paintings and drawings. these include blake’s notebook, first used by robert and containing six drawings attributable to him, robert’s sketchbook of sixty pages, and nine separate leaves of drawings and sketches.butlin nos. 201.1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 10 (william blake’s notebook, british library), r1 (robert’s sketchbook, huntington library), r2-4, 6-11 (separate leaves, various owners). butlin no. r5, the descent of the holy spirit (?), has been untraced since 1903 or 1914. since the publication of butlin’s catalogue in 1981, one further work has come to light, a pencil sketch of a deathbed scene on the verso of an invocation (?) (see illus. 2 for the recto).see essick, “blake in the marketplace, 1992” 151 (illus. 9). according to the william blake archive, some of the sketches on the last leaf (butlin no. 149) of blake’s island in the moon manuscript might be attributable to robert. see <http://​www.​blakearchive.​org/​exist/​blake/​archive/​editornotes.​xq?objectid=bb74.1.ms.18>. to this modest inventory we can now add one further sketch. at a 2013 sotheby’s auction, robert essick acquired joseph ordering simeon to be bound, a preliminary watercolor by william blake for the finished work he exhibited at the royal academy in 1785.butlin nos. 156 (finished watercolor, fitzwilliam museum), 158 (preliminary watercolor, essick collection). see essick, “blake in the marketplace, 2013,” illus. 8-9 and their captions. the drawing was firmly affixed along its margins to an acidic mat. mark watters, a skilled paper conservator, removed the work from its backing in the summer of 2014 and thereby revealed on its verso a barely visible pencil sketch of figures (illus. 1). 1. robert blake, figure studies (a supplication?) (see enlargement). pencil on leaf of laid paper, 33.8 x 48.3 cm., with a crown and fleur-de-lis watermark in the center of the leaf. the digital file has been enhanced in photoshop to make the light pencil lines visible, but nothing has been added or redrawn. verso of william blake’s joseph ordering simeon to be bound (butlin no. 158, recto only). essick collection. the lines may once have been much darker; mistreatment over the years, or even purposeful (but incomplete) erasure, may have contributed to the present condition of the drawing. although the sketch is probably a single composition, there are two groups of standing figures, apparently gowned males, at least two right of center and three or four left of center. the body of the major figure on the right faces forward, but his head is turned in left profile. only a few features are clearly visible, including his head, the left side of his body, and his left leg, extended back and to the right. the lines defining the left side of his body and his left leg are more darkly drawn than the right side of his body; the right leg is only suggested. both feet are visible, with a horizontal line between them defining the hem of his garment. a few lines right of his upper left thigh suggest that his left arm is lowered by his side. alternatively, both arms may be raised to hold the circular object barely visible above his head. the next figure to the left is represented by the vague outline of a face, apparently turned three-quarters to the left. his body, like his companion’s, may face forward, with a few lines indicating his lowered right arm at his right side, bent slightly at the elbow. this may be an alternative, but quickly abandoned, position for the figure to the right, whose face is at the same level within the composition. a few lines just left of the right edge of the leaf, particularly in the lower right corner, may be human limbs barely defined. with a little effort, it is possible to see (or imagine) a face in left profile just below and to the left of the top right corner. there may be an eye, a blunt nose, and a downward-curving mouth indicated by a single line. this face, if we are not simply assembling it ourselves from stains and a single pencil line, appears unrelated in size and position to the two heads to the left. the rightmost standing man in the group left of center faces up and to the right with his right arm slightly bent and extended vertically. a few lines suggest a raised left arm as well. his mouth may be open. a few lines above his head suggest a conical hat of some sort. the face of the next figure to the left is larger and more detailed, including an open mouth, a prominent nose, a right eye, and a full beard. he too faces up in right profile with both arms raised vertically. clusters of lines just below the top edge of the leaf may include his hands along with some undefined motif to the left. the leftmost figure in this group of three is smaller, possibly because he is standing in the distance. his posture is difficult to determine, but there are slight indications of a face, with eyes, nose, and mouth, facing in three-quarter view to the right. he too has a long beard and either long hair or a hood or helmet over his head. a few sketchy lines above and to the left, close to the left edge of the leaf, may be the bent and raised arm of yet a fourth figure in this group. between these more or less visible lines is the faint shadow of a head facing left. far below, just left of the puddled hems of the gowns worn by the first and second figures from the right in this group, a few curving lines indicate something on the ground, perhaps a stone or the lower reaches of the figure (if indeed there is one) furthest left. the attribution of the drawing to robert blake depends upon stylistic considerations, the expression of the figures’ postures, and the possible subject of the design. gilchrist’s general comments, quoted above, on robert’s achievements as an artist are all too readily confirmed by the newly uncovered work. the stiff and awkward strokes of his pencil are easily distinguished from his brother’s flowing, more assured lines, as demonstrated by the watercolor on the recto. a good touchstone for comparison is offered by robert blake’s an invocation (?) (illus. 2). 2. robert blake, an invocation (?) (see enlargement). pencil on leaf of laid paper, 22.6 x 30.8 cm., with a crown and fleur-de-lis watermark. butlin no. r10. essick collection. the raised arms of the bearded man on the right in this sketch, with what appear to be the raised arms of other figures standing behind him, are matched by the same gesture displayed by two figures in illus. 1. this man’s head in illus. 2 is also turned upward and, like the head furthest right in illus. 1, the outline of his profile is hardly more than a straight line with only the slightest projecting features, such as a nose. these two works may share a common subject centering on figures looking and reaching heavenward in supplication. if indeed the figure furthest right in the recently revealed drawing holds a circular object over his head, then he matches the frontmost figure on the left in an invocation (?). both drawings hint at a confrontation—or at least a difference in expression and gesture—between two groups of figures. the verso sketch (illus. 1) includes a pencil inscription upper left, upside down in relation to the sketch but properly oriented in accord with the recto watercolor. this reads “1 guinea for half”, with the last two words lined through.a few pencil lines below and to the left of “for half” might be the word “lot”, oriented the same way as the sketch, but these lines may be part of the sketch and only look like a word by accident. this is a price, with a fifty percent discount offered but deleted, written by a dealer in the nineteenth century. other drawings by blake bear similar verso inscriptions, including a good many acquired by the dealer joseph hogarth, probably from frederick tatham, no later than the 1850s. butlin’s provenance record for the preliminary watercolor of joseph ordering simeon to be bound begins with “alexander macmillan by 1876.” the work may have been in hogarth’s hands at an earlier date and possibly included among the seventy-eight drawings attributed to “w. blake” in the 1854 auction of hogarth’s stock.southgate and barrett, london, 7 june and seventeen following days, 1854. several of the “blake” lots contained multiple items, most not specified as to title or subject. the thirteen items in lot 1095 are described only as “w. blake historical subjects.” lot 5082 included “22” works attributed to blake, of which only ten have been identified by butlin. tatham had inherited blake’s stock of works that remained with his wife, catherine, until her death in 1831. we can confidently date the preliminary joseph watercolor, the recto of illus. 1, to 1784–85 because of the 1785 exhibition of the finished version. we suspect that robert drew both sketches illustrated here at around the same time: they are on the same laid paper with identical crown and fleur-de-lis watermarks. which was executed first, the newly discovered drawing or william’s watercolor on the other side of the leaf? we cannot answer that question with any certainty. a light pencil sketch, abandoned by his brother early in its development and with one side untouched, could provide william with a support for a preliminary watercolor. it is equally possible, however, that blake had no further use for the watercolor once he had produced the finished work for exhibition, and the leaf passed to robert for his own uses. in either case, this shared piece of paper serves as an apt symbol of the close relationship between the brother artists. works cited butlin, martin. the paintings and drawings of william blake. 2 vols. new haven: yale up, 1981. cited by catalogue entry number. essick, robert n. “blake in the marketplace, 1992.” blake 26.4 (spring 1993): 140-59. ———. “blake in the marketplace, 2013.” blake 47.4 (spring 2014). gilchrist, alexander. life of william blake, “pictor ignotus.” 2 vols. london: macmillan, 1863. blake’s priestly blessing: god blesses job blake’s priestly blessing: god blesses job by abraham samuel shiff abraham samuel shiff (abe.sam.shiff@gmail.com) studies at the graduate center, city university of new york, in the master of liberal arts program. he has also published on shakespeare. 1. blake, illustrations of the book of job ([1826]) plate 17.throughout the article plates are identified by the number engraved by blake in the upper right corner. illustrations of the book of job is reproduced in many print publications, and an online edition is in the william blake archive (separate prints and prints in series, designed and engraved by blake, illustrations of the book of job). pierpont morgan library, new york. pml 30214. gift of philip hofer, 1934. blake portrays the orthodox jewish ritual for the priestly blessing in plate 17 of illustrations of the book of job. this essay explains the ritual, analyzes blake’s iconography, and argues why he resorts to this jewish practice. 1. zeitgeist a history describing religion and culture in the england of 1815 observes that the period was “remarkable for its intense [christian] religious life.”halévy 1: 387. the study of hebrew and greek was encouraged to promote the reading of the old and new testaments in their original languages. a man of his time, blake studied hebrew and incorporated it into his art.see shiff. not appreciated today—and crucial to my argument—is that the protestant theologians also encouraged the study of jewish religious rituals to understand how the ancient israelites implemented biblical commandments. in the introduction to a book explaining judaism to christians, the methodist theologian and scholar adam clarke (c. 1762–1832) urged: i have now reason to hope that every serious christian, of whatever denomination, will find this volume a faithful and pleasant guide to a thorough understanding of all the customs and manners, civil and religious, of that people to whom god originally entrusted the sacred oracles. without a proper knowledge of these it is impossible to see the reasonableness and excellency of that worship, and of those ceremonies, which god himself originally established among the israelites ….clarke vi. the “volume” that clarke refers to is a french book on the jewish religion (based on johannes buxtorf’s juden schul) by abbé claude fleury (1640–1723, a member of the french academy), first translated into english in 1750. clarke brought out three subsequent editions, with the fourth edition of 1820 enhanced and expanded. from cromwell’s era there was a continuous immigration of religiously observant jews to england. succeeding generations separated from the orthodox jewish tradition into which they were born and educated, and assimilated into the predominant society—some converting to christianity, the ultimate assimilation.in 1943 abraham cohen, an english rabbi and scholar, posed the question, what did englishmen know about jews and judaism two or three centuries ago? from systematically assembled extracts from diaries, letters, and books of travel up to the victorian era, he demonstrates the interest in hebrew and jewish practice and the study of jewish religious literature by the clergy in oxford and cambridge, even before cromwell’s time, and the constant curiosity about jewish practice wherever englishmen encountered jews in foreign lands. he also gives examples of english jews assimilating and converting: “the majority of the jewish families which had settled in england under cromwell, and prospered, disappeared from the [jewish] community within a century …” (cohen, an anglo-jewish scrapbook 221). in cosmopolitan london, blake had ready access to knowledge about jewish religious rituals from assimilated or converted jews and from fellow protestants who studied judaism to understand the roots of christianity and to proselytize.see ruderman and also spector, especially her “introduction: the politics of religion,” 1-13, and schuchard’s “william blake and the jewish swedenborgians.” 2. ritual to make the iconography of the priestly blessing in plate 17 understandable, i begin by explaining the ritual. the priestly duty to bless the children of israel is a biblical command.numbers 6.22-27: “22. and the lord spoke unto moses, saying: 23. ‘speak unto aaron and unto his sons, saying: on this wise ye shall bless the children of israel; ye shall say unto them: 24. the lord bless thee, and keep thee; 25. the lord make his face to shine upon thee, and be gracious unto thee; 26. the lord lift up his countenance upon thee, and give thee peace. 27. so shall they put my name upon the children of israel, and i will bless them’” (cohen, the soncino chumash 825-26). in this ritual, the blessing is from god through the agency of priests. the hebrew word for priest is kohen (כהן‎). aaron, the brother of moses, was the first jewish kohen,in the orthodox tradition, a jewish male attains the title of rabbi after completing theological studies. a priest may study to become a rabbi. in contrast, the title of priest is a birthright, automatically conferred upon a male whose father is a priest. a rabbi who is not of patrilineal descent from aaron may not perform the priestly blessing or any other role a priest has in the religious life of an orthodox jewish community. a rabbi who happens to be a priest is obligated to observe the priestly duties. and the blessing mandated of him and his male descendants is a tradition that continues uninterrupted to this day by men who are priests by patrilineal descent.patrilineal genealogy is embedded in the convention for naming children. names in hebrew for ritual purposes follow the biblical formulation. first is the individual’s given name(s), then the relationship to the father, followed by the father’s given name(s), e.g., b the son of a, or c the daughter of a. the honorific title ha-kohen (the priest) is appended to the father’s name if he is a descendant of aaron. the father of moses and aaron was amram, who was not a priest. amram’s two sons were moses son of amram and aaron son of amram. after aaron was appointed priest, his son was eleazar son of aaron the priest. in turn, eleazar’s son was phinehas son of eleazar the priest. this convention maintains the tradition of priestly patrilineal genealogy. in the orthodox jewish tradition, the rite is performed only during certain prayer services to a congregation convened in a quorum.in the orthodox tradition, the minimum requirement for a quorum is ten males who are thirteen or greater. the blessing is given if the quorum contains one priest at least of age thirteen. at the appropriate point in the service, the priests gather in a group before the assembly and in unison chant words unchanged from biblical times.among the oldest biblical writings uncovered in israel by archaeologists are amulets with the priestly blessing. for details, see barkay et al., “the challenges of ketef hinnom” and “the amulets from ketef hinnom.” during the blessing, priests cover their heads and outstretched arms and hands with the talis (prayer shawl).the hebrew word for prayer shawl is four letters (טלית‎) pronounced in two syllables. in israel, where the sephardic dialect predominates, it is pronounced “tah-lit,” while in the ashkenazic dialect, whose origin is in eastern europe and which was spoken by jews in blake’s london (and in which the author is educated), the pronunciation is “tah-lis.” today the transliteration is usually spelled with a single “l” as talis or talit. the encyclopaedia judaica uses tallit: tallit, prayer shawl. originally the word meant “gown” or “cloak.” this was a rectangular mantle that looked like a blanket and was worn by men in ancient times. at the four corners … tassels were attached in fulfillment of the biblical commandment … (num. 15:38-41). … after the exile of the jews [after the romans destroyed the second temple] … and their dispersion, they came to adopt the fashions of their gentile neighbors …. the tallit was discarded as a daily habit and it became a religious garment for prayer; hence its later meaning of prayer shawl. the tallit is usually white and made either of wool, cotton, or silk …. strictly observant jews prefer [the tallit to be] made of coarse half-bleached lamb’s wool. the congregation stands and faces the priests, but does not gaze directly at their hands. the bible does not detail the technical methodology for performing the blessing. maimonides (1135–1204), in the mishneh torah, his code of jewish practice, describes the procedure: when the leader of the congregation [leader of the prayers] reaches the blessing … all the priests in the synagogue leave their places, proceed forward, and ascend the duchan [the platform at the front of the synagogue on which is the heichel (ark containing the torah scrolls)]. they stand there, facing the heichel, with their backs to the congregation …. [then] they turn their faces to the people [turn around to face the congregation], spread out their fingers, lift up their hands shoulder high, and begin reciting ….maimonides 2: 190-92. maimonides wrote the mishneh torah in classical hebrew. he is known as the rambam (pronounced in both hebrew and english as two syllables, “rahm-bahm”), which is the pronunciation of the four-letter acronym (rmbm: רמבם‎) of his hebrew name: rabbi moses ben [son of] maimon. “maimonides” is the latinized version of “the son of maimon.” his works translated into latin were available to christian theologians who were not hebraists. after maimonides there were other codes of jewish law by rabbis of different communities and traditions, none of which needs to be entered into for the purposes of this paper. the practice for extending arms, hands, and fingers has several variations, with each priest using the tradition taught to him by his father.gold explains that “there are more than a dozen customs on how the kohanim [priests] hold their hands. all are equally valid …,” but illustrates only two (41). rubenstein shows five positions (23-26). six are in katz (72-75), who advises that his “set of illustrations lists some of the hand and finger positions in use today.” in berg’s unpublished thesis three hand positions are described, but not illustrated (74-75). because of duplication, these works portray only six of the multiple traditional variations. the hands of the priests never touch the persons being blessed—there is no laying on of hands.ritual handwashing is required before priests may give the blessing. touching any person before completing the blessing renders a priest ritually impure and unfit to make the benediction, and rewashing is required. priests are a clan of the tribe of levy. in the days of the temple, the priests officiated, performing the sacrifices and blessings. the patrilineal male descendants of levy who were not of the priestly clan provided support services, including the purifying ablutions of the priests, and they are identified by the title levite. the children of levites are named b the son of a, the levite, or c the daughter of a, the levite. today, in the orthodox tradition, the obligation of washing the hands of priests preparatory to the benediction continues for male levites. a representation of one of the more common finger configurations is often engraved on the tombstones of priests. raised hands show fingers extended (see illus. 2).hands held for blessing is the traditional gravestone emblem for the priest; for the levite it is a water pitcher. 2. an inscription on a tombstone in a new york city cemetery (photo by the author). the three lines of hebrew read (hebrew is read from right to left): line 1: a two-letter abbreviation for the phrase “here is interred.” line 2: the deceased’s two given names, jacob chaim. line 3: a two-letter abbreviation for the phrase “the son of reb” (reb is a general honorific title), the deceased’s father’s single given name, mordechai, and the title “the priest.” the balance of the inscription (not shown) has the dates of birth and death, the given and family names in english, and a message appropriate to the memory of the deceased. because the monument’s surface is vertical, the observer perceives the hands as held in an absolute upright position, which is not the actual practice. in the synagogue, the priests hold their arms shoulder high, fully extended, (near) parallel and horizontal. the hands are fully open with fingers extended. the palms face down toward the ground. however, because the priests stand on a platform at some level (if only one step) above the congregation, the effect is for the palms to be presented obliquely toward the assembly. as shown by the tombstone, the symmetrically arranged hands are in contact at two points: thumb-tip to thumb-tip and index-finger tip to index-finger tip. of the fingers on each hand, some touch along their full lengths, while others are separated: the thumb is apart from the index finger; the index and middle fingers touch; the middle finger is apart from the ring finger; and the ring and little fingers touch. the religious significance is not in the touching, but in the gaps established by the symmetrical separations. the gaps represent the lattice fence in the song of songs,song of songs 2.9: “9. … behold, he standeth behind our wall, he looketh in through the windows, he peereth through the lattice” (cohen, the five megilloth). here metaphorically formed by the fingers at the ends of a priest’s outstretched arms, interposed between god and god’s agent—the priest—and the people receiving the blessing. to summarize, the five characteristics of the ritual are:for details of the ritual, its history in orthodox jewish practice, and the prayer services during which the priestly blessing is given, see gold. after the enlightenment, jews in england (and elsewhere) separated from the orthodox tradition and adopted reformed religious practices, including changes to the ritual of the priestly blessing. the orthodox practice is pertinent to this paper because the english reform liturgy is essentially post-blake. a: both arms are extended in parallel. b: both arms are held horizontal. c: fingers of both hands are held in a symmetrical pattern to create gaps. d: palms are toward the recipients of the blessing. e: recipients of the blessing do not gaze at the priest’s hands. god blesses job in plate 17. every one of the five characteristics of the priestly blessing is present. before i analyze the iconography, two points should be remembered. first, how easily the ritual is described, especially when accompanied by a demonstration of the hand position (see illus. 3). this is all the information blake would have needed to compose the blessing scene in plate 17. second, and more importantly, the technique is not described in the bible. blake could not have known of it from self-study of the plain text (the words in the bible without exegetical commentary). 3. iconography plate 17 (illus. 1) depicts two sentences from the last chapter in job. the plain text of job 42.5 tells of job’s gazing upon god.blake engraved job 42.5 beneath the image: “i have heard thee with the hearing of the ear but now my eye seeth thee.” the tableau shows job kneeling before blake’s typical depiction of god—a figure with a pensive expression and flowing hair and beard who radiates glory. seven sentences further on god blesses job (42.12).job 42.12 is engraved beneath the image on plate 21: “so the lord blessed the latter end of job more than the beginning.” job, restored to prosperity, is surrounded by his new family—the consequence of god’s blessing. blake conflates the two into a single composition to show god in the act of blessing. the five characteristics are present. a: both arms are extended in parallel. b: both arms are held horizontal. the first two are obvious in plate 17 and require no analysis. c: fingers of both hands are held in a symmetrical pattern to create gaps. what blake engraved requires close examination by magnification. the configuration of the left hand is obvious, even when not enlarged. perceivable only when magnified are the telltale details of the right hand. first, see illus. 3 for a diagrammatic comparison: the image from the tombstone is illus. 3a, while illus. 3b is what blake portrays in plate 17. 3. comparison of finger positions. now examine illus. 4. 4. enlargement of god’s hands from illustrations of the book of job plate 17. magnification with nikon smz-u zoom 1:10, thaw conservation center of the morgan library and museum. pierpont morgan library, new york. pml 30214. gift of philip hofer, 1934. the enlargement makes evident the finger positions of the right hand and the gaps created thereby: a mirror image of the left hand. in contrast, the hands in the watercolors for thomas butts and john linnell are not symmetrical (illus. 5-6). absent in both drawings is the symmetry of finger gaps, because blake drew the right hand to be seen on edge, and did not carefully detail that hand’s gaps (though the red arrow in illus. 6 indicates one gap). whatever his reason for not showing the gaps in the drawings, blake included this crucial feature in the engraving. 5. blake, the vision of christ, butts set (c. 1805–06 and c. 1821–27). pierpont morgan library, new york. 2001.79. 6. blake, the vision of christ, linnell set (1821). harvard art museums, fogg art museum, bequest of grenville l. winthrop, 1943.424. photo: allan macintyre. © president and fellows of harvard college. two differences between plate 17 and the tombstone require comment. the first is that blake shows the hands separated from one another. this is not a concern, as hands symmetrically positioned but not in contact is a traditional variation. the second difference is that blake’s version of the finger gaps is not one of the six portrayed in the references i cited.see note 14. two of the five positions in rubenstein and two of the six in katz show hands apart. in all instances, the configurations of hands and fingers are symmetrical. the simplest assumption to explain blake’s configuration of finger gaps is that he never personally observed the priestly blessing given in a synagogue, and that his source taught him the positions shown in illus. 3b. perhaps it is a variant tradition alluded to but not illustrated in the references, or it may be blake’s understanding of a description he read somewhere. information about the ritual was readily available in books. a 1656 translation of buxtorf’s juden schul gives this description: the priest, putting on his talles, which is a course hair cloth,for an explanation of a “talles” (talis) made from “course hair cloth,” see note 12. which was folded about his neck over his head, so as it may hide his eyes, blesses the people with the usuall benediction as was commanded numb. 6. which while he pronounces, the people put their hands before their faces, not daring to look upon his hands, because the spirit of god rests on them during the benediction, as ’tis written cant. 2.9. behold he standeth behind our wall, he looketh forth at the window, shewing himself through the lattesse. that is, god standeth behind the priest, and looketh through the distances of his fingers.ross 366. this translation is attributed to the clergyman and scholar alexander ross (1591–1654). buxtorf (1564–1629) was the preeminent protestant hebraist of his generation, professor of hebrew at basel university, author and publisher of hebrew lexicons and rabbinic literature, and the official censor of hebrew publishing at basel. he had extensive contact with jews at the frankfurt book fairs and with the jewish proofreaders at the basel press, and corresponded in hebrew with jewish booksellers throughout europe. for a biography of buxtorf and his son of the same name, an eminent hebraist in his own right, and an introduction to protestant christian hebraist scholarship, see burnett. buxtorf’s juden schul was published in nineteen editions, translated into dutch, french, latin, and english, and became the sourcebook for christian theologians about jewish religious practice. additional detail is in another translation, from 1663: then the priest wrapping a great hair-cloth about his neck, and drawing it over his head, so far untill it come to the threshold of his eyes: he blesseth the people according to the ordinary forme prescribed by moses, numbers the 6, the 24, 25, 26, and 27 verses. when he pronounceth the blessing, he stretcheth out his hands towards the people: they covering their faces with their own; for it is lawful for no man to look upon the hands of the priests: because the spirit of the lord rests upon them, while he blesseth the congregation. as it is written, he standeth behinde our wall looking forth at the windows, shewing himself through the grates, that is to say, god stands at the priests back, and looks through the windows and grates, that is to say, through his hands being stretched out, and his fingers being spread abroad severed one from another.a. b. 235. versions of buxtorf were published three times in london between 1734 and 1748.johann andreas eisenmenger’s entdecktes judentum was englished by john peter stehelin and published in london in three known editions with buxtorf as an accompanying volume: 1734 (copy in the new york public library); 1743 (eighteenth century collections online [ecco] part ii); and 1748 (ecco). for buxtorf’s description of the priestly blessing, see 2: 340. the title page of the 1734 edition, vol. 1, states that the accompanying work is “abridg’d from the latin of buxtorff.” however, none of the descriptions gives detailed information about how the hands and fingers are configured. perhaps blake adopted what he believed to be a christian religious equivalent. he favored albrecht dürer,“blake was a print-seller for a time, and he had an extensive print collection of his own, started in his boyhood and sold in 1821, when his poverty was most severe. nothing is known about what blake sold or collected except that his taste ran to dürer and to sixteenth-century italian engravers, out of fashion at the time” (johnson 154). whose apocalypse woodcuts have examples of the hand position of illus. 3b (see illus. 7 and 8). if not from dürer, then of course the model may have been from some other work. an exhaustive review of possible sources is beyond the scope of this paper.warner does not describe the hand and finger positions in plate 17, and she makes no comment about blake’s portraying the jewish ritual of the priestly blessing. she does suggest the possible influence on blake by john bulwer. in 1644, bulwer published a work describing the conventions of hand and arm configurations used to embellish vocal orations, with five charts of woodcuts depicting a subset of the many conventions discussed. warner reproduces three of the charts on pp. 50, 51, and 56 of her work. the chart on p. 50 has twenty-four images, of which image z, “benedictione dimittit,” is bulwer’s representation of the priestly blessing. in the section of his text entitled chironomia, bulwer explains image z in five pages (59-63): “canon xlix. both hands modestly extended and erected unto the shoulder points, is a proper forme of publicke benediction, for the hands of an ecclesiasticall oratour when hee would dismisse his auditours.” he then expounds on the significance of the gesture, drawing on the bible, jewish tradition (as he understands it), buxtorf’s juden schul, roman catholic tradition, and the gestures used by protestant preachers that he personally observed. although bulwer describes the significance of the finger positions, his visual representation (image z) fails to conform to the jewish ritual, as the arms are vertical and the four fingers of each hand are not symmetrically separated. the other two-handed configurations in the chart that superficially resemble what blake engraved in plate 17 are described by bulwer as other than benedictions or the offering of blessings. bulwer was not blake’s authority for plate 17. cleary’s 1974 edition of bulwer begins with a scholarly introduction, modernizes bulwer’s english, and translates his latin quotations. in the notes, cleary identifies and lists as fully as possible the source documents that are cryptic in bulwer’s marginal notes and the sources for the latin quotations, and he also defines obscure terms. he does not, however, comment on the images in the charts. bulwer (1644) and cleary’s edition of bulwer (1974) could not have been of any assistance to warner in recognizing what blake did in plate 17. 7. albrecht dürer, title page of the apocalypse (1511), and details of the infant’s and st. john’s hands. musée le vergeur, reims, france. photo: rené-gabriel ojéda. © rmn–grand palais / art resource, ny. 8. albrecht dürer, the battle of the angels from the apocalypse (1498), and hand detail. musée le vergeur, reims, france. photo: rené-gabriel ojéda. © rmn–grand palais / art resource, ny. immanentistic emblem had blake depicted in plate 17 the finger gaps portrayed in illus. 3a, this alone would make it certain that he emulates the jewish priestly blessing. had he depicted the configuration of illus. 3b in plate 17 and nowhere else, then it would unambiguously be associated with god’s delivering a blessing. nowhere, however, do i observe his using the positions of illus. 3a. instead, he uses those of illus. 3b in many compositions, most of which do not obviously show god in the act of blessing. four such examples are in illus. 9-12. a survey of butlin finds forty-two images with one or more instances of the positions of illus. 3b in a wide variety of settings and themes.butlin pls. 57-58, 102-03, 122, 125, 151, 177, 185, 201, 223, 288, 305-06, 417-18, 497, 506, 508, 511, 522, 535, 557, 560, 570, 588-89, 647, 684, 686-88, 696, 700, 890, 892, 920, 962-63, 965, 1017, and 1095. pl. 892, christ blessing (c. 1810), has the fingers of both hands configured as in illus. 3b, but without any of the other characteristics of the jewish priestly blessing. joseph h. wicksteed provides a solution in describing blake as an “immanentalist.”“but for an immanentalist like blake …” (wicksteed 27). i suggest that blake (who was steeped in the emblem tradition, as mary lynn johnson explains)see johnson. adopted the finger positions of illus. 3b as an emblem. francis quarles (1592–1644) defines the religious meaning of emblems in his emblemes, which pairs parables expressed in words with their equivalents in woodcut images: to the reader. an embleme is but a silent parable. let not the tender eye checke, to see the allusion to our blessed saviour figured, in these types. in holy scripture, he is sometimes called a sower; sometimes, a fisher; sometimes, a physitian: and why not presented so, as well to the eye, as to the eare? before the knowledge of letters, god was knowne by hierogliphicks; and, indeed, what are the heavens, the earth, nay every creature, but hierogliphicks and emblemes of his glory?quarles sig. a3. the hand with fingers configured as in illus. 3b is an immanentistic emblem that represents god’s ever-present blessing (see illus. 9-12). it is for this purpose, i suggest, that blake used it in many compositions, including plate 17 where it is certain that god is blessing job. 9. blake, mirth (c. 1816–20) and details of her hands. pierpont morgan library, new york. 1949.4:1. purchased with the assistance of the fellows with the special support of mrs. landon k. thorne and mr. paul mellon. 10. blake, frontispiece (“look what a fine morning it is”) to mary wollstonecraft, original stories from real life (1791). collection of robert n. essick. 11. “the reunion of the soul & the body,” designed by blake and engraved by luigi schiavonetti for robert blair’s the grave (1808). collection of robert n. essick. blake’s watercolor design shows the same hand and finger positions (see william blake archive, drawings and paintings, water color drawings, illustrations to robert blair’s “the grave,” object 15). image courtesy of the william blake archive <http://​www.​blakearchive.​org>. 12. “the soul hovering over the body reluctantly parting with life,” designed by blake and engraved by luigi schiavonetti for robert blair’s the grave (1808). collection of robert n. essick. blake’s watercolor design shows the same hand and finger positions (see william blake archive, drawings and paintings, water color drawings, illustrations to robert blair’s “the grave,” object 9). image courtesy of the william blake archive <http://​www.​blakearchive.​org>. theme in variation plate 17 is not alone in showing outstretched arms held parallel, as blake uses this configuration in three other plates in illustrations of the book of job. alexander gilchrist perceives the repetition to be an artistic flaw;“such defects as exist in these [job] designs are of the kind usual with blake …. the lifted arms and pointing arms in plates 7 and 10 are pieces of mannerism to be regretted, the latter even seeming a reminiscence of macbeth’s witches by fuseli …” (gilchrist 1: 289). i suggest that it is a theme in variation. in plate 7 (illus. 13) job’s friends raise parallel arms vertically with fingers splayed. this is not a blessing but a gesture of alarm and dismay. 13. blake, illustrations of the book of job plate 7. pierpont morgan library, new york. pml 30214. gift of philip hofer, 1934. in plate 8 (illus. 14) job, in profound grief, raises beseeching arms to heaven. the hands and fingers form symmetrical gaps, but the arms, though parallel, are vertical. this is job seeking benediction; he is not stretching out his arms to give a blessing. 14. blake, illustrations of the book of job plate 8. pierpont morgan library, new york. pml 30214. gift of philip hofer, 1934. in plate 10 (illus. 15) job’s three friends point directly at him with arms parallel and horizontal, jutting forward from the shoulders. 15. blake, illustrations of the book of job plate 10. pierpont morgan library, new york. pml 30214. gift of philip hofer, 1934. compare plate 10 to another emphatic double-arm pointing gesture, from night thoughts three decades earlier (illus. 16), where we see the expected convention for a pointing hand—closed fist and extended index finger. 16. edward young, the complaint, and the consolation; or, night thoughts (1797), “night the second,” p. 33 (detail). pierpont morgan library, new york. pml 63943. gift of mrs. landon k. thorne, 1973. in contrast, blake engraves plate 10 with the fingers splayed in different directions. extended fingers not held symmetrically to form the metaphorical lattice fence cannot be a configuration for a blessing, and in this plate the gesture is an accusatory condemnation. blake used the same expression of censorious judgment in a sketch for tiriel denouncing his sons and daughters (c. 1789).butlin pl. 224. jeanne moskal also recognizes the gesture in other works: “this motif [in plate 10] recalls other blakean portrayals of accusation ….”moskal 23. only in plate 17 does blake bring together arms, hands, and fingers properly configured for forming the metaphorical lattice fence necessary for the blessing ritual. d: palms are toward the recipients of the blessing. in plate 17, god’s palms face toward job—there is no laying on of hands.blake depicts god’s hands above job’s head. there is a custom (not a biblically ordained commandment) for parents to bless children at home on friday evenings at the start of the jewish sabbath by the laying on of hands. the father places his hands on the head of the oldest child and invokes a blessing (not necessarily using the words of the priestly blessing), then repeats the process with each child in age order. in some families the mother does the same. this is not the priestly blessing, which is restricted to priests in a congregation convened in a quorum for prayer, and does not utilize the laying on of hands. the composition places god and job in close proximity, so blake could easily have put the hands of god on job’s head, had he chosen to do so. see illus. 17 for an example of blake’s depicting the laying on of hands. in contrast, the blessing in plate 17 is from a distance. 17. blake, har blessing tiriel while mnetha comforts heva (c. 1789). 1913,0528.7. © trustees of the british museum. e: recipients of the blessing do not gaze at the priest’s hands. throughout the job plates, whenever blake portrays god and humans in the same tableau, the humans do not look at god’s radiating glory.plate 2 is composed of two separate tableaus, god in heaven and humans on earth. the humans are not in the presence of god’s glory. we see the same in plate 5. plate 9 depicts a dream discussed by one of job’s friends—god is not present, as he is recalled in the dream, which is shown in a “balloon” of clouds. in plate 13 blake has job’s wife and friends present when god appears (the friends hide their faces, but job’s wife does not). the compositional separation is the whirlwind. plate 14 shows two tableaus, humans beneath heaven, and god above. two tableaus are depicted in plates 15 and 16 also. in plate 17 job’s friends avert their faces (though one attempts to peek), but his wife does not. plate 18 has the smoke from the burnt offering on the altar ascending without turbulence; this is proof of acceptance by god. the human figures kneel with eyes averted, except for job, who looks upward toward the glorious radiance that blake associates with god. job does not look upon god, because god is not portrayed in the tableau. finally, in plate 20, god is depicted on a decorative panel behind job, with the humans in the panel bowed and not looking at god. god is not in the foreground with job, and the daughters have no need to hide their faces. in the biblical plain text, god blesses job, with no mention of the presence of job’s wife or friends. with artistic liberty, blake includes them in plate 17. job’s friends avert their eyes (though one attempts to peek). this is consistent with the practice that a congregation does not look at the priest’s hands during the ritual—the hands form the representation of the lattice fence, with god’s presence on the far side. job also does not look directly upon god (see illus. 18). 18. job’s line of sight in illustrations of the book of job plate 17. pierpont morgan library, new york. pml 30214. gift of philip hofer, 1934. andrew wright offers an interpretation for what he perceives as job’s incongruous behavior.“before job can be accepted [by god] he must be trained to see. the theme is insistent here, for the numerous texts which appear in the borders have as their common feature the injunction to look, and the principal motto—it appears in the lower border—is, ‘i have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye seeth thee’. and yet job is not looking at god, who stands directly above him and his wife; he stares away, into the middle distance. the vision which he has been taught, and which now at last he has learned, is inward …” (wright 43). i suggest that it is nothing other than blake’s representing the traditional synagogue practice of averting one’s gaze so as not to look at the priest’s hands during the blessing. a comparison of the butts and linnell drawings confirms that blake intended the plate to represent the synagogue ritual. job avoids gazing at god in the butts image (illus. 5), but looks directly at him in the linnell (illus. 6). why this difference? the linnell is in conformance with the biblical plain text of job 42.5 (see illus. 1): “i have heard thee with the hearing of the ear but now my eye seeth thee.” the butts conforms to the synagogue ritual of avoiding gaze. blake evaluates the two compositions. the quandary is that he cannot have it both ways and must choose one over the other for the engraving. he chooses to engrave the synagogue ritual.i offer no comments on the other differences: (1) in the butts, god is erect, whereas he is stooped in the linnell—the linnell version is chosen for the engraving; (2) the three friends kneel forward toward god in the butts, and away from him in the linnell—again blake chooses the linnell version. not pertinent to this analysis are the pencil sketch for the design and the new zealand set (see illustrations of the book of job by william blake fascicles iv and v and, for the sketch, the william blake archive [drawings and paintings, pencil sketches, sketchbook containing drawings for the engraved illustrations to the book of job, object 23]). avoiding gaze is a subtle feature in the watercolor god blessing the seventh day (c. 1803–05) (illus. 19).keynes dates the painting to “about 1803” (william blake’s illustrations to the bible xii); butlin (1: 336) suggests c. 1805. 19. blake, god blessing the seventh day (c. 1803–05). private collection. photo: art resource, ny. an observer sees a frontal view of god in the act of blessing. the recipient of the blessing, the seventh day, is not in the composition. at first impression, blake apparently places the viewer, who is outside the composition, in the position of the seventh day, as if god blesses the observer. this is blake’s typical depiction of god—pensive expression, flowing hair and beard, radiating glory. four of the ritual’s characteristics are obvious. palms are toward the observer. the hands are symmetrically held at shoulder height, with fingers arranged as in illus. 3b. the arms are parallel, but not extended horizontally. i explain the arms folded at the elbows by assuming artistic liberty—blake is avoiding the foreshortening effect that would occur if the arms were horizontal and fully outstretched, jutting forward at shoulder height into the observer’s space. the last characteristic, averting gaze, is present but deliberately not made obvious. w. graham robertson, an owner of this painting and an artist himself, offers this criticism: “the colour throughout is fine, and the design impressive, but the central figure [god] cannot be considered successful.”robertson 119. the editor quotes robertson’s and rossetti’s descriptions of god blessing the seventh day. rossetti described it as “very characteristic and fine”; robertson, however, criticized blake’s portrayal of god. did blake really err? the difficulty, i suggest, is not with blake’s execution, but with robertson’s comprehension. because he lived in a later zeitgeist, robertson more than likely lacked blake’s knowledge of jewish religious practice and was unable to recognize the subtle but critical feature of averted gaze in a painting whose theme is god in the act of blessing. the challenge of living in a different zeitgeist also applies to wright (see note 37), who did perceive the averted gaze in plate 17 but could not decipher blake’s intention. he does not explain what he finds disturbing—i surmise it is the direction of god’s gaze. god should be looking directly at the seventh day he is blessing, as in plate 17 where he looks directly at job. if the observer is standing in the position supposedly occupied by the seventh day, there should be eye-to-eye contact when the observer looks at god’s face. instead, god appears focused elsewhere. here blake introduces the synagogue practice that those who are receiving the blessing do not look directly upon god, who is beyond the metaphorical lattice fence formed by the priest’s fingers. blake has god focused on the seventh day, not on the observer. the painting is a depiction of god blessing the seventh day, just as the title indicates. it is the seventh day that should avert gaze, not the observer. thus, there is no eye-to-eye contact. finally, observe the six angelic figures flanking god, with all wings (but two) folded and in which god nestles, as if seated on a throne of angel feathers. each angel holds aloft one hand, palm side out, the fingers of which are in the position of illus. 3b, echoing the blessing theme. (why six angels? possibly the six days that precede the seventh day.) in both god blessing the seventh day and plate 17, blake depicts the characteristics of the orthodox jewish synagogue ritual for the priestly blessing. the feature he chooses to make subtly obscure differs, however. in god blessing the seventh day it is an averted gaze; in plate 17 the hidden feature is the finger gaps of the right hand. blake deliberately introduces subtleties. another example is in the watercolor job’s evil dreams (butts set), where three hebrew words intended to represent a portion of the ten commandments are not a commandment at all, but a hidden message. “blake precisely depicts the plain text of the bible …. he then adds imagery not in the bible …. blake deliberately made the slogan appear to be a commandment—a visual illusion.”shiff pars. 19-20. a future essay will argue why blake does this. unanswered is which came first, blake’s knowledge of the priestly blessing whence he developed the emblematic symbol (illus. 3b), or his adoption of an existing christian convention, later to be incorporated into the compositions where god blesses in plate 17 and god blessing the seventh day. the dating is instructive. god blessing the seventh day is c. 1803–05. “look what a fine morning it is” (illus. 10), clearly not the depiction of a priestly blessing and just the use of an immanentistic emblem,arms are not parallel. palms are not facing down. the figure is not a jewish priest. the setting is not a synagogue with a quorum in attendance. the full title indicates that the hand gesture is blake’s emblematic representation for god’s ever-present blessing: “look what a fine morning it is._insects, birds, & animals, are all enjoying existence.” not surveyed for this paper is the earliest occurrence in blake’s work of the gesture as a stand-alone emblematic symbol, or its use by other artists. is 1791. by the end of his stay in felpham (1800–03) or soon after, blake knew and used all of the features characteristic of the jewish priestly blessing. 4. verisimilitude blake painted biblical scenes for his patron butts, including zacharias and the angel (illus. 20). 20. blake, zacharias and the angel (c. 1799–1800). metropolitan museum of art, bequest of william church osborn, 1951 (51.30.1). image © metropolitan museum of art. reproduction of any kind is prohibited without express written permission in advance from the metropolitan museum of art. the painting depicts the new testament story (luke) where an angel appears before zacharias while he is performing priestly duties inside the temple. blake’s creative challenge is to draw upon his artistic imagination to represent convincingly the temple scene by portraying the high priest’s garb and the various implements used in the sacred rites, while faithfully adhering to the old testament’s description of the costume and objects.baetjer (“[item] 88. the angel appearing to zacharias,” 178-80) quotes the entry from the 1906 carfax gallery catalogue: “blake represents in minute detail the furniture and vestments ordained by the law.” the “law” refers to the old testament. verisimilitude, then, is the critical concept in understanding the iconography of the bible series and illustrations of the book of job. however, because there is no description in the bible as to how god goes about giving a blessing, or the technique by which the priests are to perform the rite, blake must rely on the synagogue practice of the jews for a model. the verisimilitude argument raises a problem that may not be ignored. in plate 17 god’s hands hover above either side of job’s head. clearly, the blessing is for job alone, and this depiction is consistent with the bible’s plain text. contrary to the biblical story is the presence of job’s wife, who is beside him as if also receiving the blessing, and who gazes directly at god. why blake gives her a prominence that is the antithesis of verisimilitude remains to be explored in a future essay. conclusion blake was a religious personality in a christian zeitgeist that promoted and encouraged the study of the israelite implementation of god’s revealed law. in cosmopolitan london knowledge about judaism was readily available. it should not be surprising that blake relied upon the orthodox jewish synagogue ritual of the priestly blessing as his model for depicting how god blesses job. acknowledgments graduate center of the city university of new york professor martin elsky: i especially wish to express my appreciation for a courtesy that facilitated the writing of this paper. i enjoyed being his student and have benefited from his erudition. to research blake while studying at the graduate center is to have the advantage of access to the research collections of the morgan library and museum and the new york public library. it is a pleasure to acknowledge staff at both institutions for their support: morgan library and museum anna lou ashby, retired andrew w. mellon curator: i am ever grateful to dr. ashby for introducing me to the study of blake. her encouragement is the reason why my papers on blake have come to be. inge dupont, retired head of reader services: she always brought yet another book to my attention that proved important for my research. reading room: john vincler, head of reader services (himself a blake enthusiast); maria isabel molestina triviño, librarian; sylvie merian, librarian; and sandy kopperman, attendant. thaw conservation center: frank trujillo, associate book conservator, for micrographic imaging. new york public library—research departments dorot jewish division: roberta saltzman, assistant chief librarian; and amanda seigel, librarian. manuscripts and archives division: thomas lannon, assistant curator; tal nadan, reference archivist; susan malsbury, manuscripts specialist; and nasima hasnat, assistant. pforzheimer collection: elizabeth campbell denlinger, curator. print collection: margaret glover, librarian; alvaro lazo, specialist; and david christie, specialist. rare book division: jessica pigza, assistant curator; kyle triplett, librarian; and ted teodoro, assistant. wertheim study room: jay barksdale, librarian, for granting me privileges to use this resource. it is a personal pleasure to acknowledge the assistance of my friend professor ari cohen, himself a kohen, for his review of the manuscript and for many valuable suggestions. my special thanks are proffered to sarah jones, managing editor of blake, whose meticulous editing and support in manifold ways brought the manuscript to a polished finish. lastly, any errors in this paper are solely the responsibility of the author. works cited b., a. the jewish synagogue, or an historical narration of the state of the jewes, at this day dispersed over the face of the whole earrh. in which their religion, education, manners, sects, death and burial are fully delivered, and that out of their own writers. translated out of the learned buxtorfius, professor of the hebrew in basil, and diligently compared with the talmud, and other writers, out of which it had its original. london: printed by t. roycroft for h. r. and t. young, 1663. baetjer, katharine. british paintings in the metropolitan museum of art, 1575–1875. new york: metropolitan museum of art; new haven: yale university press, 2009. barkay, gabriel, et al. “the amulets from ketef hinnom: a new edition and evaluation.” bulletin of the american schools of oriental research no. 334 (may 2004): 41-71. ---. “the challenges of ketef hinnom: using advanced technologies to reclaim the earliest biblical texts and their context.” near eastern archaeology 66.4 (dec. 2003): 162-71. berg, peter s. “the history, function, and ritualization of birkat kohanim.” thesis. hebrew union college, 1998. blake, william. illustrations of the book of job by william blake: being all the water-colour designs pencil drawings and engravings reproduced in facsimile. with an introduction by laurence binyon and geoffrey keynes. new york: pierpont morgan library, 1935. ---. illustrations of the book of job invented and engraved by william blake 1825. london: published as the act directs march 8:1825 by william blake no 3 fountain court strand, [1826]. ---. william blake’s illustrations to the bible. a catalogue compiled by geoffrey keynes. clairvaux [france]: trianon press for the william blake trust, 1957. bulwer, john. chirologia: or the natural language of the hand; and chironomia: or the art of manual rhetoric. ed. james w. cleary. carbondale: southern illinois university press, 1974. ---. chirologia: or the naturall language of the hand. composed of the speaking motions, and discoursing gestures thereof. whereunto is added chironomia: or, the art of manuall rhetoricke. consisting of the naturall expressions, digested by art in the hand as the chiefest instrument of eloquence, by historicall manifesto’s, exemplified out of the authentique registers of common life, and civill conversation. with types, or chyrograms: along-wish’d for illustration of this argument. london: printed by tho. harper, and are to be sold by r. whitaker, at his shop in pauls church-yard, 1644. burnett, stephen g. from christian hebraism to jewish studies: johannes buxtorf (1564–1629) and hebrew learning in the seventeenth century. leiden: e. j. brill, 1996. butlin, martin. the paintings and drawings of william blake. 2 vols. new haven: yale university press, 1981. clarke, adam. the manners of the antient israelites; containing an account of their peculiar customs, ceremonies, laws, polity, religion, sects, arts and trades …. the fourth edition, with many additions and improvements. london: printed for w. baynes and son, j. butterworth and son, and t. blanshard, 1820. cohen, abraham. an anglo-jewish scrapbook 1600–1840: the jew through english eyes. london: m. l. cailingold, 1943. ---, ed. the five megilloth: hebrew text and english translation with introductions and commentary. 1946. 5th impression. london: soncino press, 1965. ---, ed. the soncino chumash: the five books of moses with haphtaroth: hebrew text and english translation with an exposition based on the classical jewish commentaries. 1947. 5th impression. london: soncino press, 1964. eisenmenger, johann andreas. rabbinical literature: or, the traditions of the jews, contained in the talmud and other mystical writings. … with an appendix, comprizing buxtorf’s account of the religious customs and ceremonies of that nation …. by the revd mr. j. p. stehelin, f.r.s. 1734 [under the title the traditions of the jews]. 2 vols. london: sold by j. robinson, 1748. gilchrist, alexander. life of william blake, “pictor ignotus.” 2 vols. london: macmillan, 1863. gold, avie. bircas kohanim: the priestly blessings. background, translation, and commentary anthologized from talmudic, midrashic, and rabbinic sources. brooklyn: mesorah publications, ltd., 1981. halévy, élie. a history of the english people in the nineteenth century. trans. e. i. watkin [vol. 1, england in 1815, trans. e. i. watkin and d. a. barker]. 6 vols. 2nd rev. ed. london: ernest benn ltd., 1949–52. johnson, mary lynn. “emblem and symbol in blake.” huntington library quarterly 37.2 (feb. 1974): 151-70. katz, eli. va-ani avarkhem: a guide to birkat kohanim. [london]: ek productions, 2004. maimonides, moses (rambam). mishneh torah. trans. eliyahu touger. 31 vols. brooklyn: moznaim publishing co., 1986–2007. moskal, jeanne. “friendship and forgiveness in blake’s illustrations to job.” south atlantic review 55.2 (may 1990): 15-31. quarles, francis. emblemes. london: printed by g. m. and sold at iohn marriots shope, 1635. robertson, w. graham. the blake collection of w. graham robertson. described by the collector; ed. with an introduction by kerrison preston. london: published for the william blake trust by faber and faber, ltd., 1952. ross, alexander. a view of the jewish religion containing the manner of life, rites, ceremonies and customes of the iewish nation throughout the world at this present time; together with the articles of their faith, as now received. faithfully collected by a. r. london: printed by t. m. for e. brewster and s. miller, 1656. rubenstein, shmuel. the synagogue: an illustrated analysis of the aspects of the synagogue. bronx: s. rubenstein, [1972]. ruderman, david b. connecting the covenants: judaism and the search for christian identity in eighteenth-century england. philadelphia: university of philadelphia press, 2007. schuchard, marsha keith. “william blake and the jewish swedenborgians.” spector 61-86. shiff, abraham samuel. “blake’s hebrew calligraphy.” blake 46.2 (fall 2012): 34 pars. spector, sheila a., ed. the jews and british romanticism: politics, religion, culture. new york: palgrave macmillan, 2005. “tallit.” encyclopaedia judaica. 16 vols. jerusalem: keter publishing, 1971-72. 15 [sm–un]: cols. 743-45. warner, janet a. blake and the language of art. kingston: mcgill–queen’s university press, 1984. wicksteed, joseph h. blake’s vision of the book of job with reproductions of the illustrations: a study. 2nd ed., rev. and enlarged. london: j. m. dent & sons, ltd., 1924. wright, andrew. blake’s job: a commentary. oxford: clarendon press, 1972. william blake of the woolpack & peacock william blake of the woolpack & peacock by g. e. bentley, jr. g. e. bentley, jr., (gbentley@chass.utoronto.ca) published thomas macklin (1752–1800), picture-publisher and patron, creator of the macklin bible (mellen press, 2016), with a section on blake. williami should like to dedicate this note to keri davies, who tells me that the joseph banks invoice is dealt with on pp. 95-99 of david jenkins-handy, “visual culture and visionary satire: the bodies politic of william blake,” birmingham phd, 2005. blake was born in 1757 at the sign of the woolpack & peacock—or at least that was the name of his father’s haberdashery and hosiery shop at 28 broad street, golden square, in the year the poet was apprenticed, 1772. probably there was a shop sign with an emblem of a peacock above a woolpack. the shop title may be seen in the elegant engraved bill-head made out by james blake, the poet’s father, to the prodigious botanist joseph banks. this is the only known evidence of the name of the shop. 1. receipted bill from james blake of the woolpack & peacock hosiery and haberdashery shop to joseph banks, 9-10 july 1772 (see enlargement). this is the only known example of james blake’s handwriting and elegant bill-head. the original is among the papers of banks in the state library of new south wales, sydney, australia (section 3, series 06.029). the verso is endorsed “m.r blake” and, vertically, “blake”. cunningham ¶2 says that as a child blake “drew designs on the backs of all the shop bills,” but he did not do so on this one. the bill is mentioned in the indian and pacific correspondence of sir joseph banks, 1768–1820: letters 1768–1782, ed. neil chambers (london: pickering & chatto, 2009) 143, 354, but not in g. e. bentley, jr., “trade cards and the blake connection,” book collector 37 (1988): 127-133. sir joseph’s only sister, sarah sophia banks (1744–1818), collected over four thousand trade cards and shop bills, which were given after her death by her brother to the british museum, but james blake’s bill is not among them. the splendid rococo design seems a little old fashioned for 1772. [ribbons] [m.r banks] london [july 9. 1772] {emblem} bought of ja.s blake, hosier & haberdasher at the woolpack & peacock the upper end of broad street carnaby market ; who sells all kinds of baizes, flannels, &c. &c.   [3 pieces brod figd (a) ribn _ __ _ 22/6 3..7  ..6 26 yds ___ do ____________ 7½ __   0..16..3 16 colrd silk hfs (b)   _________ 4/3 __   3 . 8 ..0     7  ..11  ..9 3 cold silk hfs     _         __     ___ 4/3 _  12..9     £   8  .  4..6 rec’d july. 10. 1772 the contents in full of all demands james blake m.r banks new burlington street] notes to transcription: the portions in manuscript are given within square brackets. (a). “figd” is “figured.” (b). this hard-to-read word perhaps represents “handkerchiefs.” the woolpack & peacock was an uncommon name—at any rate i have found no other instance of its use—and it must have been memorable to the young poet. however, he did not make much use of the terms in his surviving writings. he does not use the word “woolpack” at all, and his references to peacocksthe marriage of heaven and hell pl. 8, l. 2, jerusalem pl. 98, l. 14, vala p. 94, l. 51 (night 7[b]), “vision of the last judgment” (notebook, p. 93). seem entirely conventional. presumably the name of the shop derives from the elegance and pride of the peacock and the woolsack upon which the lord chancellor sits in parliament. banks may have chosen the shop in broad street at least in part because it was nearby; new burlington street, the address on the receipt, is just three rather circuitous streets from broad street. the whole document is written in the same hand (note the formation of the capital letter “c”), though the additions to the bill of receipt and address are written a good deal more casually than the bill itself. the handwriting is the only surviving example of the handwriting of blake’s father. it is quite distinct from that of william blake. the social ambition of the bill-head is more than might have been associated with the firm that sold goods wholesale to the parish workhouse. on the other hand, it seems quite appropriate for a firm selling fancy “figd ribn” and silk handkerchiefs to the munificent banks. good evidence of the stock of an ambitious hosier and haberdasher is contained in an advertisement for the valuable ſtock in trade of mrs. frances jewson, ſole trader and millener, a bankrupt, at her houſe, no. 1, biſhopſgate-ſtreet, [in the city. the stock included] … 1000 yards of mecklin lace … 3000 yards of … laces; 7300 yards ditto edgings and joinings; 32,000 yards of plain and figured ribbons, … 1100 yards of ſattin luteſtring, gauze, muſlin, lawns, crape and iriſh; 1500 yards of modes, ſarſenets and perſians.gazetteer and new daily advertiser 22 sept. 1772, for the sale of her stock by thomas ridgeway and joseph merryman. the advertisement was pointed out by keri davies. the dimensions of a “piece” of cloth depend upon the material of which it is made. for muslin it was 14 ells (17.5 yards) long, for irish linen 25 yards, for calico 28 yards, for cotton cloth 24-47 yards long by 28″ to 40″ wide, and for hanoverian linen 128 yards.oxford english dictionary, “piece” sense 4a. at any rate, the quantity banks bought was enormous. i take it that he ordered three “pieces” of broad figured ribbon the size in which it was manufactured, perhaps 36 yards, and 26 yards of tailored ribbon. the sum was enormous, the equivalent of six weeks of goods sold by james blake, father and son, to the st. james parish workhouse and schoolhouse in 1782–84 (£8.3.19).bentley, blake records, 2nd ed. (new haven: yale university press, 2004) 36. the receipts are known only from the parish records. no other example of this bill-head, or indeed any james blake bill-head, is known. perhaps william blake was in the shop when the purchase was made—his own apprenticeship indentures were dated four weeks later, 4 august 1772. if banks himself came, william probably did not himself wait upon such a distinguished gentleman unless his father happened not to be in the shop. if william was the salesman, he probably remembered banks as vividly as he did oliver goldsmith, who may have been in basire’s shop the same year.bentley, blake records 16. the dates of the bill (9 july 1772) and of the receipt (10 july) and banks’s address suggest that the goods were delivered and paid for the day after they were ordered. this quantity of cloth could scarcely be carried by one man. it would have required a cart. delivery of the goods was a heavy responsibility, requiring both strength to handle them and firmness of character to receive such a large sum of money. james blake had four eligible sons: james (age 19), william (14), john (12), and robert (9). james was serving his apprenticeship as a needlemaker in southwark, and john and robert were surely too young for such a responsibility. it seems likely that william delivered the goods and collected the money, perhaps supported by his younger brothers. banks had planned to accompany captain cook on his second circumnavigation of the world, and these fancy goods would have been appropriate as gifts to the friendly women of the south pacific. the erotic possibilities of south pacific voyaging were of course known to blake. his picture of the goats (?1799) depicts an incident in the voyage of the ship duff to the marquesas. seven girls clad only in vine leaves swam out to the ship, where “some goats on board the missionary ship stripped them [the vines] off presently.”blake, descriptive catalogue (1809) p. 52. cook wrote to banks on 2 june 1772, i understand “i am not to have your company” because there was not room enough for banks’s entourage of fifteen persons.historical records of new south wales, vol. 1, part 1, cook, 1762–1780, [ed. f. m. bladen] (sydney: charles potter, 1893) 357. it is puzzling that banks was buying figured ribbons as late as 9 july. instead of sailing to the south pacific, banks sailed to iceland. one wonders what became of those twenty-six yards of figured ribbon. they were scarcely appropriate for the ice storms of mount hecla.winter “is driv’n yelling to his caves beneath mount hecla” in “to winter” from poetical sketches (1783). blake’s “introduction” and hesiod’s theogony blake’s “introduction” and hesiod’s theogony by kurt fosso kurt fosso (fosso@lclark.edu) is an associate professor of english at lewis & clark college, where he teaches courses on british romanticism, literary theory, and classical studies. he is the author of buried communities: wordsworth and the bonds of mourning (suny press, 2004) and, recently, “oedipus crux: reasonable doubt in oedipus the king” (college literature, summer 2012). his current research examines romantic-era depictions of animals and human animality. piper sit thee down and write in a book that all may read …. (“introduction” to songs of innocence, e 7)all quotations from blake’s songs of innocence and other works are from the complete poetry and prose of william blake, ed. david v. erdman, newly rev. ed. (new york: anchor–random house, 1988), abbreviated as “e”. my reading of the “introduction” to songs of innocence has also benefited from consulting the william blake archive’s <http://​www.​blakearchive.​org> reproductions of the copy b and u plates (1789). songs of innocence copy b (1789), frontispiece. lessing j. rosenwald collection, library of congress. image © the william blake archive. northrop frye was, so far as i can find, the first critic to shine a light on the greek poet hesiod’s influence upon william blake. specifically, frye judged the divine characters tharmas and enion from the four zoas (c. 1796) to be “probably the thaumas and eione of hesiod’s theogony.”northrop frye, fearful symmetry: a study of william blake (princeton: princeton university press, 1947) 284. kathleen raine, following upon frye, in turn detected the theogony’s presence in blake’s the book of urizen (1794),kathleen raine, blake and tradition, 2 vols. (princeton: princeton university press, 1968) 1: 415n28; see also 2: 90. and recently paul miner has uncovered significant hesiodic allusions in the book of ahania (1795).paul miner, “the influence of hesiod’s theogony on blake’s the book of ahania,” notes and queries 56 (2009): 361-64. the theogony’s influence can similarly be traced in the divine struggles described in the continental prophecies america and europe (1793, 1794). blake would likely have read hesiod’s eighth-century genealogy of the gods in thomas cooke’s english translation (1728),thomas cooke, trans., the works of hesiod (1728), 2nd ed. (london: printed by john wilson for john wood and ch. woodward, 1740; t. longman et al., 1743). on cooke’s achievement, see stuart gillespie, “hesiod goes augustan: an early english translation of the theogony,” translation and literature 17 (2008): 197-209. see also sir charles a. elton’s criticisms of cooke in his remains of hesiod the ascraean including “the shield of hercules” (1809), 2nd ed. (london: baldwin, cradock, and joy, 1815) iii-xiv. in addition to cooke’s english rendering, thomas robinson’s greek/latin edition, hēsiodou tou askraiou ta heuriskomena; hesiodi ascraei quae supersunt, cum notis variorum (oxford, 1737), would also have been available to blake, but beyond his abilities at the time as a reader in either language. on blake’s later mastering of greek and latin, see his letter of 30 january 1803 (e 727). the first, and have found there a useful source not only for the names and attributes of those greek deities but also for conceptualizing their generational struggles. joseph wittreich, jr., argues that the theogony in fact “provides the best introduction to the large design of blake’s own mythology.”joseph a. wittreich, jr., angel of apocalypse: blake’s idea of milton (madison: university of wisconsin press, 1975) 246. to read hesiod alongside blake is indeed to witness the resemblances between their theogonies of differentiation, desire, patriarchy, and revolt,see norman o. brown, trans. and introd., hesiod, theogony (new york: prentice hall, 1953) 15. with blake’s orc cycle of “regicide and revolution”frank m. parisi, “emblems of melancholy: for children: the gates of paradise,” interpreting blake, ed. michael phillips (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1978) 86. see also julia m. wright, blake, nationalism, and the politics of alienation (athens: ohio university press, 2004) 44. distinctly mirroring the theogony’s lineage of repression and revenge between uranos and his son kronos and then between kronos and zeus. “urizen,” the punning name of blake’s tyrannical creator god, aptly recoins the appellation of hesiod’s uranos as well as the similar-sounding ourizein (greek “to bound”) and perhaps even offers up a patrilineal portmanteau of uranos and zeus. yet, although critics have exposed hesiod’s impact upon blake’s prophetic works of the early to mid-1790s, no one to my knowledge has noted the theogony’s influence several years prior, particularly in the “introduction” to songs of innocence (1789), with its figure of the muse-struck “piping” poet (line 1). this overlooked intertextual link has led to numerous misappraisals of that introductory poem’s pastoralism and depiction of poetic investiture, and contributed to a long-standing tendency to give this first of the songs relatively short shrift in favor of the later, more explicitly prophetic and mythic proem to the songs of experience from songs of innocence and of experience (1794).see, for example, maureen mclane, “ballads and bards: british romantic orality,” modern philology 98 (2001): 427-32. other diminished appraisals include robert f. gleckner, the piper and the bard (detroit: wayne state university press, 1959) 84; c. m. bowra, the romantic imagination (new york: oxford university press, 1961) 27; harold bloom, blake’s apocalypse: a study in poetic argument (new york: anchor–doubleday, 1963) 32; hazard adams, william blake: a reading of the shorter poems (seattle: university of washington press, 1963) 16-21; d. g. gillham, blake’s contrary states: the “songs of innocence and of experience” as dramatic poems (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1966) 149; nick shrimpton, “hell’s hymnbook: blake’s songs of innocence and of experience and their models,” literature of the romantic period, 1750-1850, ed. r. t. davies and b. g. beatty (new york: barnes & noble, 1976) 19-35; w. j. t. mitchell, blake’s composite art: a study of the illuminated poetry (princeton: princeton university press, 1978) 4-9; zachary leader, reading blake’s “songs” (boston: routledge & kegan paul, 1981) 70; heather glen, vision and disenchantment: blake’s “songs” and wordsworth’s “lyrical ballads” (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1983) 65-66; stanley gardner, blake’s “innocence” and “experience” retraced (new york: palgrave macmillan, 1986) 18-19; andrew lincoln, ed., songs of innocence and of experience (princeton: princeton university press, 1991) 143-44; nicholas m. williams, ideology and utopia in the poetry of william blake (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1998) 56-58; and robert n. essick, ed., songs of innocence and of experience (san marino: huntington library, 2008) 29-32. the evidence within the “introduction” to songs of innocence in fact strongly suggests hesiod’s (likely recent) influence upon blake in or before the revolutionary year of 1789. before composing the songs’ leadoff poem and quasi-exordium, blake may have paused over cooke’s translation of these lines from the theogony’s prooimion, describing hesiod’s poetic ordinationsee milton, paradise lost 4.674-78; theocritus, idylls 1, 7; callimachus, aetia 1: 1, 2; virgil, eclogues 1, 4, 6; petrarch, eclogues 3. only hesiod’s original account provides the specific details of investiture and vocation. see also blake’s engravings for john flaxman’s compositions from the works days and theogony of hesiod (c. 1817), including “theogony” and “hesiod and the muses” (william blake archive, commercial book illustrations, flaxman, compositions, objects 21 and 22). by the muses of mount helicon: so spoke the maids of jove, the sacred nine, and pluck’d a scepter from the tree divine, to me the branch they gave, with look serene, the laurel ensign, never fading green: i took the gift with holy raptures fir’d, my words flow sweeter, and my soul’s inspir’d …. (47-52)all quotations from the theogony follow cooke’s english translation in the 2nd edition (see note 5, above). my readings have also been informed by hugh g. evelyn-white’s greek/english edition, hesiod, the homeric hymns and homerica (1914; cambridge: harvard university press, 1982), as well as by m. l. west’s translation in “theogony” and “works and days” (oxford: oxford university press, 1988). in words that may resonate in the introductory poem of songs of experience, whose bard the “present, past, & future sees” (line 2, e 18), hesiod proceeds to relate how, upon his investiture, before my eyes appears the various scene of all that is to come, and what has been. me have the muses chose, their bard to grace, to celebrate the bless’d immortal race; to them the honours of my verse belong; to them i first and last devote the song: but where, o where, inchanted do i rove, or o’er the rocks, or thro the vocal grove! (53-60) the “introduction” to songs of innocence specifically echoes this narrative of receiving from the immortal muses a freshly “pluck’d” laurel branch turned “scepter” (greek skeptron, “staff”) and bardic “ensign.” blake also writes of “piping songs” in “valleys wild”—a possible nod both to hesiod’s boeotian wilds and to the valleys below helicon—and of thereupon having been inspired by a divine muse-like presence envisioned as a godlike child atop “a cloud” (lines 1-3). the child first commands him, “pipe a song about a lamb,” but then bids the pastoralist, who in the songs’ frontispiece stands before a contented flock, to “drop thy pipe” and sing words to that tune (5, 9-10). finally, the cloud-child requests the singer to “write” the song “in a book that all may read” (13-14). (appropriately, one of the songs is of course entitled “the lamb.”) as in the theogony, this introductory scene of divine investiture thereby presents the “story of an inspired origin,”angela esterhammer, creating states: studies in the performative language of john milton and william blake (toronto: university of toronto press, 1994) 130. which is to say an etiological account both of the proem itself and of the verse to come. the more obvious allusion to hesiod’s prooimion follows upon the child’s sudden disappearance: so he vanish’d from my sight. and i pluck’d a hollow reed. and i made a rural pen, and i stain’d the water clear, and i wrote my happy songs every child may joy to hear. (15-20) like hesiod, blake’s wandering speaker figures himself as a poet with this “pluck’d” piece of flora, and although there are evident differences (the piper makes of his reed not a staff but a pen, self-picked rather than bestowed), the ceremonial act likewise invests the piper with the powers of poetic composition and with the authority to sing. in short, like hesiod, blake’s piper is confronted by a figure of inspirationsee john h. jones, blake on language, power, and self-annihilation (new york: palgrave macmillan, 2010) 23: the cloud-child functions “as a muse figure, a voice external to the piper’s own that aids in the production of the poem,” the latter thus being “dialogically inspired.” jones grants the “introduction” considerable discursive importance, as does esterhammer (124-32). and transformed into a poet by that experience, gaining a new poetic, pointedly prophetic vocation and the accompanying material insignia of this art. what these various allusions to the theogony arguably most illuminate is the songs’ own emphasis upon the divine: being hailed by an inspiring muse to sing of what hesiod devotedly calls the “bless’d … race.” suitably, blake’s child floats aloft angelically, and the commanded song “the lamb” itself turns upon the theogony of christ made human child and sacrificial lamb. for all their irony and pathos, other of the songs—“the little black boy,” “the chimney sweeper,” “the little boy found,” “night,” “a cradle song”—similarly point toward the divine and its relationship to the human. so, for example, one adult speaker “trace[s]” the “holy image” in his sleeping child’s face, and recalls that “thy maker” once “wept for me for thee for all, / when he was an infant small. / thou his image ever see, / heavenly face that smiles on thee” (“a cradle song,” lines 22-28, e 12). blake’s poet writes songs for children, as divinely bidden, but in doing so he praises “the human form divine” (“the divine image,” line 15, e 13). and although his printed book will itself do hesiod’s itinerant traveling, a muse has authorized its production, and it is to the muses that blake’s book of songs implicitly is dedicated, answering the child-muse’s special request of “a book that all may read.”see w. j. t. mitchell, “visible language: blake’s wond’rous art of writing,” romanticism and contemporary criticism, ed. morris eaves and michael fischer (ithaca: cornell university press, 1986) 46-86, esp. 55. by taking stock of blake’s allusions to hesiodic investiture, readers are thus less likely to misjudge the “introduction” as merely presenting a piper who “has no duty.”gillham 149. instead, they find a poet who traverses the world of experience in his divinely ordained vocation of prophetic duty and poetic labor, both of which can and should be distinguished from the pastoral otium of theocritus, moschus, and even virgil.see david wagenknecht, blake’s night: william blake and the idea of pastoral (cambridge, ma: belknap press, 1973) 13-14, 69, and joseph wicksteed, blake’s innocence and experience: a study of the songs and manuscripts (new york: e. p. dutton, 1928) 81. as in the theogony, the songs’ muse prompts in the wanderer a newfound talent for singing as well as a prophet’s duty to perform and communicate,see brown 35. see also claude calame, masks of authority: fiction and pragmatics in ancient greek poetics, trans. peter m. burk (ithaca: cornell university press, 2005) 92, and kathryn a. morgan, myth and philosophy from the pre-socratics to plato (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2000) 74: “the inspiring power endows the poet with the ability that he then uses to create songs in his own voice.” to clarify the cosmos of the human-divine: “stain[ing] the water clear” for all who’ll “hear.”for an early glossing of the “stain” as that of materialization via art, from “ideal song” to written book, see howard justin, “blake’s ‘introduction’ to songs of innocence,” explicator 11 (1952): item 1. see also william r. bowden, “blake’s ‘introduction’ to songs of innocence,” explicator 11 (1953): item 41; glen 65-66; edward larrissy, william blake (oxford: blackwell, 1985) 27; mitchell, “visible language” 55-56; jones 51; and esterhammer 129-30. when he wrote the songs of innocence, blake might have believed, as he proclaimed some years later, that the ancient muses were only “daughters of mnemosyne, or memory, and not of inspiration or imagination” (a descriptive catalogue [1809], e 531; see also milton a poem [c. 1804-11], pl. 1, e 95). but, as robert lamberton points out, although homer and other early greek poets invoke the muses solely to recollect the past, the theogony’s daughters of memory “are more ambitious and in a sense are on the way to becoming the daughters of inspiration blake invoked to replace them.”robert lamberton, hesiod (new haven: yale university press, 1988) 65. blake’s poet-singer, like hesiod’s poet persona, sings of and for his muses, and in doing so recounts and affirms his bequeathed aspiration.e. d. hirsch, jr.’s innocence and experience: an introduction to blake (new haven: yale university press, 1964) thus rightly contends that the piper’s “panlike occupation … presents a contrast with his serious and dedicated occupation at the [poem’s] end,” that “of making poetry out of such inspiration” (173). for his poetic “inspiration” blake looked back not only to the bible’s prophets but also to a classical lineage extending directly from hesiod’s theogony. that visionary line leads us to blake’s mythological prophecies of the 1790s and also, to judge from the “introduction,” to the earlier songs of innocence and its piper made bard. two newly discovered advertisements posted by william blake’s father two newly discovered advertisements posted by william blake’s father by wayne c. ripley wayne c. ripley (wripley@winona.edu) is a professor of english at winona state university in minnesota. he is working on a project regarding blake’s broad street family, friends, and neighbors. on 23 and 24 april 1773, the following advertisement appeared in the daily advertiser : wanted for a small family, within a few miles of london, a maid-servant for a place of all work, that can get up linnen [sic] well, milk a cow, and make butter. apply at mr. blake’s, haberdasher, the end of broad-street, next carnaby-market.daily advertiser 23 april 1773. image © british library board, from 17th–18th century burney collection newspapers. this mr. blake was assuredly the father of william blake, james blake, sr. (1722–84), whose hosiery and haberdashery shop was located at 28 broad street. not quite a year earlier, a printed receipt that james blake had provided joseph banks described the shop as “at … the upper end of broad street carnaby market.”the indian and pacific correspondence of sir joseph banks, 1768–1820, ed. neil chambers, vol. 1: letters 1768–1782 (london: pickering & chatto, 2008) 143. see also g. e. bentley, jr., “william blake of the woolpack & peacock,” blake 50.2 (fall 2016). this four-story building had the shop on the first floor and three residential floors above. it had been the shop of thomas armitage, the first husband of catherine blake, née wright (1725–92), william blake’s mother, and was outside the square mile of the city of london. in the spring of 1773, the blake family was indeed smaller than it had been, with two of james and catherine blake’s five surviving children apprenticed. james blake, jr. (1753–1827) had been apprenticed to the needlemaker gideon boitoult on 19 october 1768, and william had entered his apprenticeship with the engraver james basire the previous summer, on 4 august 1772.g. e. bentley, jr., blake records, 2nd ed. (new haven: yale university press, 2004) [hereafter cited as br(2)] 11, 12. three children remained at home. john (1760–?), whom william would call “the evil one,”the complete poetry and prose of william blake, ed. david v. erdman, newly rev. ed. (new york: anchor-random house, 1988) 721. was thirteen; robert (1762–87), william’s beloved brother who would die with william at his bedside, was ten; and their sister, catherine elizabeth (1764–1841), who would live with william and his wife, catherine sophia (1762–1831), in felpham, was nine. the need for a maid at this moment is unknown. james blake was presumably doing well in his business. he had sold banks ribbons in july 1772,chambers 1: 143 and bentley, “william blake of the woolpack & peacock.” and he had been able to pay the apprentice fee for william, which had been more than fifty pounds.michael phillips, william blake: apprentice and master (oxford: ashmolean museum, 2014) fig. 10. see also br(2) 12-14. it is possible that the blake family had previously had a maid, whom they were now simply replacing. george richmond reported william blake’s speaking of “an old nurse.”br(2) 11. if this old nurse ever existed, she may have performed some of the duties mentioned in the advertisement, and the age of the children may have removed the need for a nurse after her death. if the death of the nurse coincided roughly with blake’s entering his apprenticeship, it may have contributed to his mythological contrasting of young male adulthood with death, old age, women, and children. the advertisement provides evidence that the blakes owned a cow, which they or a servant milked. the phrase “a place of all work” was common in the late eighteenth century. in 1771, catherine jemmat’s miscellanies describes a “poor girl” saying, “as i had a good share of health and spirits, i did very well in my place, and got so much the good-will of my mistress, that she told me, it was a pity i should be in a place of all work, and that she would endeavour to recommend me into some genteel family.”catherine jemmat, miscellanies, in prose and verse (london, 1771) 67. the phrase indicates, then, a clear marker of class that james blake, at least, was comfortable using. presumably, given the lack of subsequent advertisements, the position was filled, but by whom and for how long are unknown. if this maid remained with the family until the end of william’s apprenticeship in august 1779, they would have occupied the house together. she may have been doing the domestic work during blake’s early career as an artist and engraver. less than two years later, another murky glimpse into the lives of the blakes is found when james blake posted a new advertisement: a middle aged person is desirous to wait on a young lady as governess, understanding french and english, or to be with a lady of quality as milliner, who is not inferior to any in that talent, and whose character can be as well recommended as her abilities, by persons of quality. if this suits any lady please to direct a line to a. z. at mr. james blake’s, hosier, in broad-street, golden-square.public advertiser 31 january 1775. image © british library board, from 17th–18th century burney collection newspapers. this advertisement ran in two papers: the gazetteer and new daily advertiser on 18 january 1775 and the public advertiser on 31 january. the identity of this woman is unknown. there is no one with those initials known to be associated with blake’s family, and “a. z.” sounds like an obvious pseudonym. given that there is no record of the shop’s receiving correspondence for other people, it is likely that the woman was either a close acquaintance or a member of the blake family. i was able to find evidence of two female milliners working on broad street in the 1760s, but none in the early 1770s. one was mrs. dixon of “broad-street, carnaby-market,” and the other was mrs. ogilvey, who lived “at the star, in broad street, golden-square.”thomas mortimer, the universal director; or, the nobleman and gentleman’s true guide to the masters and professors of the liberal and polite arts and sciences (london, 1763) 121. reference to ogilvey is found in the description of lucius barber’s portrait in the 1765 catalogue of the society of artists of great britain (london, 1765) 3. according to the list of subscribers to the military medley (dublin, 1767), barber was a lieutenant in the royal artillery (n. pag.). neither woman has any known connection to the blakes other than their addresses. another possibility is a milliner and haberdasher named mary blake. in the bankruptcy notices of december 1764, she is listed as “of winchester.”st. james’s chronicle or the british evening post 8-11 dec. 1764. by the end of the month, her creditors were working toward the appointment of a person in winchester “to sell and dispose of the bankrupt’s stock and effects there.”london gazette 25-29 dec. 1764. by march 1765, she had met the terms and was granted an allowance under the bankruptcy act,london gazette 9-12 mar. 1765. and in march 1771 she was listed as paying her final dividends to creditors at guildhall.craftsman or say’s weekly journal 2 mar. 1771. interestingly, in june 1769, a “mrs. blake” of tooley street, southwark, also auctioned her haberdashery and millinery goods and the lease of her house and shop because of bankruptcy.gazetteer and new daily advertiser 14 june 1769. she was either the same mary blake of winchester, who had moved to london, or another female blake with haberdashery and millinery skills who entered bankruptcy during the same period as mary. this mrs. blake’s connection to southwark may make her a relative of james blake. his parents had married at st. olave, southwark; his mother had been christened in southwark and his father in rotherhithe.br(2) xxx-xxxii, 2. in addition to this mrs. blake, other blakes lived on tooley street as well.in 1751, leonard blake, who had been “an eminent merchant in tooley street, southwark,” died (penny london post or the morning advertiser 27-29 mar. 1751). browne’s general law-list lists an attorney, richard blake, at 11 tooley street in the 1782 and 1787 editions. perhaps the most noteworthy was richard blake, another haberdasher, who was coincidentally listed as bankrupt just a month before the june 1769 auction of mrs. blake’s goods.lloyd’s evening post 12-15 may 1769. bentley lists three sets of richard and mary blakes who had sons named william christened in st. olave between 22 may 1768 and 29 august 1779.br(2) 831. but the advertisement for the auction of “mrs.” blake’s lease does not mention her husband, if she had one, or his profession, and i could find no further details on richard blake’s business or bankruptcy. whether mary blake and mrs. blake were the same woman or different women, their activities between 1771 and 1775 and their relationship to james blake, if any, are unknown. but would bankrupt status necessitate the pseudonym? one last possibility for the middle-aged woman in blake’s immediate family is his mother, then forty-nine. with her daughter having just turned eleven on 7 january, would catherine want to work as a governess or a milliner for a lady? william had entered henry pars’s drawing school at ten, presumably to begin training for his profession. james and william had entered their apprenticeships around fifteen, which would be john’s age in two months as well. if the advertisement does refer to catherine blake, it would give some clue as to her own talents and aspirations. the advertisement would also indicate that she knew french. bentley suggests that there may have been some relationship between the blakes and the french huguenot butchers (or bouchers) from whom william’s wife, catherine, descended. james blake shared his first haberdashery shop and house with a butcher, and william himself resided with a “boutcher” in battersea in 1781.br(2) 1, 6-7. catherine could have picked up french from these relatives of her husband. a governess position would also suggest that she enjoyed teaching and working with children, and perhaps she desired to continue to do so if she understood her own children as grown. while all this is speculative, can anything of james and catherine’s relationship be read into the two advertisements together? if there was no “old nurse” or maid before 1773, had catherine, who described herself as “a pore crature and full of wants”keri davies and marsha keith schuchard, “recovering the lost moravian history of william blake’s family,” blake 38.1 (summer 2004): 40. as a woman of twenty-seven applying to the moravian church in 1750, been doing the work of a maid for most of her second marriage? and did she now desire to do her own work apart from her husband? or was this an effort to drum up further connections and business not only for catherine but for the family shop as well? we know that catherine had a prominent role in the shop after her husband’s death, since james blake, jr., signed an april 1785 business letter to the parish of st. james “for mother & self.”br(2) 38. perhaps the strongest argument against blake’s mother being the middle-aged woman is the lack of evidence documenting her skill as a milliner. but as the recent research into blake’s wife, catherine, has suggested, blake trained and encouraged her to develop skills in order to work alongside him and, significantly, on her own.angus whitehead, “‘an excellent saleswoman’: the last years of catherine blake,” blake 45.3 (winter 2011–12): 76-90; mark crosby and angus whitehead, “georgian superwoman or ‘the maddest of the two’? recovering the historical catherine blake, 1762–1831,” re-envisioning blake, ed. mark crosby, troy patenaude, and angus whitehead (basingstoke: palgrave, 2012) 83-107; helen p. bruder and tristanne connolly, “introduction: ‘bring me my arrows of desire’: sexy blake in the twenty-first century,” sexy blake, ed. helen p. bruder and tristanne connolly (basingstoke: palgrave, 2013) 7; angus whitehead and joel gwynne, “the sexual life of catherine b.: women novelists, blake scholars and contemporary fabulations of catherine blake,” sexy blake 193-210; morton d. paley and mark crosby, “catherine blake and her marriage: two notes,” huntington library quarterly 78.3 (2015): 479-91; ashley reed, “craft and care: the maker movement, catherine blake, and the digital humanities,” essays in romanticism 23.1 (2016): 23-38. did blake have a model of this type of relationship in his own parents? if not in his parents, we know, at the very least, that his father promoted the career of one talented middle-aged woman, whoever she may have been. the blake memorial window the blake memorial window in st. mary’s church, felpham by mark crosby mark crosby (crosbym@k-state.edu) is an assistant professor in the department of english at kansas state university. he is currently working on a monograph examining blake’s various patronage relationships, and a catalogue of blake’s apprenticeship work. designed by meg lawrence; photography by david lawrence; © lawrence & co. in 2011 a stained-glass window commemorating blake’s three-year residence on the sussex coast was consecrated in the parish church of st. mary’s, felpham. a norman building dating to c. 1100, st. mary’s is a short walk from the thatched cottage that blake and catherine occupied between 1800 and 1803. the blake memorial window was commissioned by st. mary’s parish council in 2007 and was funded by the generous contributions of felpham parishioners and blake enthusiasts and by donations raised through local charitable events celebrating the 250th anniversary of blake’s birth. the window was designed by the artist meg lawrence, whose work also includes painting with an egg-based tempera medium on wood panels, a medium similar to the one that blake used, with animal glue and gum arabic as the binding agents instead of egg, for some of his 1799 illustrations of the bible.for more information on lawrence’s painting techniques, see <http://www.​radnorshire.​com/​introduction.​html>. for blake’s tempera, see william blake: the painter at work, ed. joyce h. townsend (london: tate publishing, 2003) 113-14. an experienced stained-glass artist and conservator, lawrence has designed many windows for parish churches throughout england and ireland. they are made using entirely traditional materials and techniques of painting and manufacture. of crucial importance is the use of mouth-blown glass of the highest possible quality, made at a small factory in bavaria. much of the glass that she works with is blown to her own specification, giving exactly the colors and graduated tones required. she also employs flashed glass, which adds a very thin layer of colored glass over a thicker layer, thereby giving the opportunity to manipulate the colors further by the use of acid etching. colored glass, cut for the window, is painted and fired in the kiln up to three times to build up layers of drawing, shading, pattern, and texture. the windows are assembled using lead cames. one of her painting techniques is the use of linear brush-strokes, a method of draftsmanship that blake famously champions in his descriptive catalogue: “the great and golden rule of art, as well as of life, is this: that the more distinct, sharp, and wirey the bounding line, the more perfect the work of art” (e 550). lawrence’s overall design combines figurative christian iconography with recognizable blakean motifs and centers on two male figures with halo-like auras and feathered wings. these are angels of creation rising from the sea to the heavens (illus. 1 and 2). designed by meg lawrence; photography by david lawrence; © lawrence & co. above and below the angels is a scroll containing text from verses 1 and 24 of psalm 104. each angel holds a sphere, a familiar device in blake’s visual language, within which are various smaller designs. the sphere held by the angel decorating the right panel contains images of the sea and the beasts of the forest, including a blakean tiger. the sphere held by the angel on the left panel contains images of birds, fish, the sea and sand or earth, and a male and female wearing long, flowing robes tied at the waist with golden bands. these figures are postlapsarian adam and eve, facing each other in poses that compositionally recall blake’s watercolor the judgment of adam and eve: “so judged he man” (c. 1807-08; butlin 529.10 and 536.10) from the two series of designs illustrating milton’s paradise lost. either side of adam and eve are two circles that represent the sun (to the left of adam) and the moon (to the right of eve). within the circle to the right of eve is a crescent shape that recalls blake’s depiction of a crescent moon as a darkened circle with an illuminated crescent in satan watching the endearments of adam and eve (c. 1807-08; butlin 529.5 and 536.4) and the crescent moon in the sixth woodcut from the illustrations to robert thornton’s the pastorals of virgil (1821). beneath the angels are self-contained pictures, known as predellas (illus. 3 and 4). designed by meg lawrence; photography by david lawrence; © lawrence & co. the upper predellas are surrounded by decorative borders incorporating the first four lines of auguries of innocence and passionflowers, and contain designs representing the minute particulars of life: a pasqueflower, various insects, and assorted marine life. the lower predellas form the base of the window and depict the sixth woodcut from blake’s illustrations to thornton’s pastorals and “blake’s cottage at felpham” from plate 36 of milton. either side of the lower predellas are decorative panels containing twisting vines and blooming flowers that evoke the interlinear designs of blake’s illuminated books. the panel next to the image of blake’s cottage includes the following verse from catherine blake’s letter to ann flaxman of 14 september 1800: “away to sweet felpham for heaven is there / the ladder of angels descends thro the air” (e 709). the panel buttressing the image of blake’s virgil woodcut bears the legend: “the visionary, poet and painter, william blake (1757-1827) lived in the village of felpham from 1800 to 1803.” it is not known if the blakes attended st. mary’s during their residence on the south coast, although blake did include the church tower in his unfinished watercolor landscape near felpham (c. 1800; butlin 368). the window is located in the south chancel wall, overlooking the area where couples exchange marriage vows. it was installed in late 2010 and dedicated by the dean of chichester in may 2011. acknowledgments i am indebted to mrs. heather howell, current resident of blake’s cottage in felpham, and meg lawrence for help in preparing this minute particular. deciphering blake’s “the angel that presided o’er my birth” deciphering blake’s “the angel that presided o’er my birth” by david w. ullrich david w. ullrich (dullrich@bsc.edu) is professor of literature at birmingham-southern college. he divides his research interests between british romanticism and twentieth-century american literature. his recent (2012) publications include an article on f. scott fitzgerald’s this side of paradise in the f. scott fitzgerald review and a note on kurt vonnegut’s use of “oubliette” in cat’s cradle in the explicator. he is also a sculptor, specializing in stainless steel. with angels planted in hawthorn bowers and god himself in the passing hours . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . with my father hovering upon the wind and my brother robert just behind (letter to thomas butts, 22 november 1802) the stimulus for this investigation of manuscript variants in one of blake’s notebook poems arises from an unlikely quarter: kurt vonnegut’s god bless you, mr. rosewater (1965). vonnegut’s use of blake is purposeful. in slaughterhouse-five the narrator states (by way of kilgore trout) that “william blake” was “[eliot] rosewater’s favorite poet” (99), and in a 1977 interview in the paris review vonnegut specifically notes, “i was thirty-five before i went crazy about blake.”vonnegut comments, “i couldn’t play games with my literary ancestors, since i had never studied them systematically. my education was as a chemist at cornell and then an anthropologist at the university of chicago. christ—i was thirty-five before i went crazy about blake …” (hayman et al. 72). vonnegut was born in 1922. “thirty-five” years later, 1957, keynes’s nonesuch edition of blake’s complete writings was published. in rosewater, eliot rosewater, traumatized by his experience in world war ii, dedicates his life and extraordinary wealth to a compensatory form of philanthropy for the population of rosewater, indiana. eliot has written his personal manifesto on the step risers leading up to his office to remind himself and his clients of his life’s purpose and personal vision. his manifesto is identified in vonnegut’s text only as “a poem by william blake” (65).eliot’s father offers a rebuttal to his son’s manifesto by quoting “another poem by blake” (65), stanza 3 of “the clod & the pebble.” the poem is traditionally referred to by its first line, “the angel that presided o’er my birth,” as rendered in keynes’s nonesuch edition, almost certainly vonnegut’s source. sacrificing blake’s rhyme scheme, vonnegut separates the three-line poem into twelve sections, one for each riser: the angel that presided o’er my birth said, “little creature, form’d of joy & mirth, go love without the help of any thing on earth.” restored to its original stanzaic form, blake’s poem, a triplet in fairly regular iambic meter and monosyllabic rhymes, reads as follows: the angel that presided o’er my birth said, “little creature, form’d of joy & mirth, “go love without the help of any thing on earth.” (keynes, complete writings 541) in tracking down “the angel that presided” in blake’s canon, i have identified three transcriptions of the poem. keynes (1957), erdman (1965, rev. 1988), and bentley (1978) each record a different transcription of blake’s revisions.this essay does not address the different editorial policies regarding the punctuation or modernization of blake’s poem. the variant readings are not trivial; each version significantly alters the poem’s meaning. moreover, the editors disagree on interpreting blake’s handwriting in a crucial word. as an orientation point, erdman’s facsimile edition, the notebook of william blake (1977), identifies the poem as “poem 98,” found on page 32 of blake’s notebook (notebook n32 and n32 transcript). erdman estimates the date of composition as “after oct. 1807” but “before pa” (public address) or “before may 1809” (notebook 56). cross-referencing key words of “the angel that presided” in a concordance to the writings of william blake indicates that no other version of this poem exists; in other words, blake never incorporated it into another, larger poem. illus. 1 reproduces the poem; illus. 2, 3, and 4 reproduce the transcriptions from keynes, erdman, and bentley, complete with their editorial annotations. however, even the reproduction of the original does not provide a definitive answer as to which version is most likely correct, as blake’s informal handwriting is very difficult to transcribe, especially in inked-over layers. 1. blake, “the angel that presided,” notebook, p. 32. © british library board, add ms 49460. image courtesy of the william blake archive. see enlargement. 2. geoffrey keynes, ed., the complete writings of william blake: with all the variant readings (london: nonesuch; new york: random house, 1957) 541. 3. david v. erdman, ed., the complete poetry and prose of william blake, newly rev. ed. (new york: anchor–random house, 1988) 502, 864. 4. g. e. bentley, jr., ed., william blake’s writings, 2 vols. (oxford: clarendon p, 1978) 2: 942-43. substantial differences occur in the concluding line of the poem. keynes transcribes the last line as “go love without the help of any thing on earth.” in his editorial annotations, he records blake’s revisions, which, as shown in illus. 2, consist of deleting “thou art formd for mirth” and replacing it with “formd of joy & mirth.”i have omitted keynes’s apostrophe in “form’d” because it is not present in blake’s text. however, keynes makes no comment on blake’s hypothetical revision of “thing” to “king,” which both erdman and bentley later append (illus. 3 and 4). moreover, he evidently sees no reason to replace “love” with “live,” as bentley is compelled to do later (illus. 4). in the facsimile edition, erdman scrupulously documents any differences between his editorial decisions and keynes’s previous transcription. following the general editorial practices outlined in “explanation of the transcript” (notebook [65]), one can infer that, in erdman’s opinion, blake wrote “king” over “thing” in his revision of the poem (illus. 5). 5. david v. erdman, ed., with the assistance of donald k. moore, the notebook of william blake: a photographic and typographic facsimile, rev. ed. (n.p.: readex books, 1977) n32 transcript. erdman notes that “poem 98” was “begun and revised in grey ink … then further revised and completed in black” (n32 transcript, note). this implies that blake’s hypothetical revision of “thing” to “king” was sufficiently persuasive to erdman’s eye—perhaps even color coded, so to speak—to warrant an alternative reading to keynes’s transcription. his choice of “king” over “thing” seems compelling. in fact, erdman selects “king” in his first (1965) edition of blake’s work (493), which precedes the notebook facsimile, and he retains “king” in his revised (1988) edition (see illus. 3). in each edition, he provides the textual note “king]  mended from thing (but not very clear)” (781, 864). (bentley’s editorial choice concurs with erdman’s in this respect.) to complicate matters further, other editions of blake’s work vary in their choice of “thing” or “king,” even when relying on the same source. for example, stevenson’s blake: the complete poems (2007), which “tak[es] account of erdman’s work on the notebook” (xiii), selects (a modernized, lowercase) “king” while noting “altered probably from thing” (626). however, johnson and grant’s blake’s poetry and designs (2008) chooses “thing” (385), even as they, too, state that their “selections [from the notebook] are based on erdman’s edition, compared with the erdman-moore facsimile” (379n).in reference to their selection, johnson and grant explain that they “attempt to present each work at an optimum stage of realization by eliminating early drafts and, occasionally, what we consider to be uninspired afterthoughts” (379n). presumably they suppress “king” because they judge it to be an “uninspired afterthought.” ostriker’s william blake: the complete poems (1977) uses editorial brackets—“[thing] king”—to indicate “a word … emended in the manuscript” (10); hence, she favors “king” (626). of course, erdman’s selection of “king” over “thing” changes the poem dramatically, and these implications will be explored shortly. however, one more editorial issue must be addressed. while keynes and erdman both record without comment “go love,” bentley substitutes “live” for “love,” also without comment, noting only “[thing [altered to] king[?] on earth⎣.⎦” (see illus. 4). bentley’s question mark after “king” suggests that he, like erdman, is not completely certain of the alteration. however, by the same logic, his lack of editorial comment with respect to “live” suggests that he is absolutely certain that “live” (not “love”) is the only viable choice, since he does not feel compelled to editorialize. (stevenson, johnson and grant, and ostriker all select “love” over “live,” probably following keynes and erdman.) bentley’s decision is singular and demands scrutiny. although i am not an expert in manuscript interpretation or in blake’s handwriting, i offer a few observations. the choice between “live” and “love” comes down to deciding whether blake uses an “i” or an “o” (illus. 6). 6. “the angel that presided,” enlargement of “live/love” in line 3. © british library board, add ms 49460. image courtesy of the william blake archive. there does not appear to be a superscript dot over the vowel, as one would expect with an “i,” which might favor “o” and keynes’s and erdman’s “love.” however, blake’s punctuation is, as one might expect, inconclusive. for example, although a dot appears over the “i” in “birth” and “king/thing,” there is no dot in “presided,” “said,” “little,” “mirth,” and “without” (see illus. 1). on the other hand, supporting bentley’s choice of “live,” the vowel does not appear to be a closed loop or even a semi-closed loop, whereas “o” is written in either a completely or mostly closed loop in almost all other words in the poem, including “oer,” “formd,” “of” (written over “for”), “joy,” “go,” “of” (again), and “on.” the lone exception, “without” (illus. 1), is potentially crucial for two reasons. first, the descending stroke of the undotted “i” resembles the cursive shape of the descending stroke of the vowel in question in “live/love,” supporting bentley. second, however, the “o” is more open than any other “o” in the poem, supporting keynes and erdman. this may be especially relevant, as the cursive shape of the “ou” in “without” could approximate the “ov” in “love,” although the “o” is less open and more fully articulated than the “i/o” in “live/love.” moreover, other instances of “without” in the notebook vary from the fairly open example in “you dont believe …” (erdman, notebook n21: poem 143, line 9; e 501)—which resembles the “without” of “the angel that presided”—to an unambiguously close-looped “without” in a vision of the last judgment (erdman, notebook n83: 24, line 4; e 560), whose “o” does not resemble the “o” in “the angel that presided.” thus, “without” does not provide conclusive comparative evidence as to the issue of “live” versus “love.” in addition, and trying to be both fair-minded and comprehensive, i note that of the approximately fifty-seven instances of a decipherable word containing an “o” on page 32 of the notebook, the vast majority—as many as fifty-three—have a closed or mostly closed “o.”i say “approximately fifty-seven” instances for the following reasons. blake crossed out many words on this manuscript page, and others are illegible; some of these contain the letter “o.” i do not include any of these words; thus, there is some noise in the data. nevertheless, the tally does suggest that, at least on p. 32, when blake writes an “o” he commonly does so in a closed or mostly closed shape. however, the “o” in “to” from poem 158 (“these verses,” line 2: “to michael angelo”; e 512) presents an important exception; it resembles the “o” of the word in question in “the angel that presided” and shares the same “v”or “u”-shaped quality, although this “o” is not followed by another stroke/letter (illus. 7).the “to” in poem 99 (“florentine ingratitude,” line 1; e 511) and the initial “o” in “fool” (line 3) are open, although less obviously so than the “to” in poem 158 (“these verses”). 7. “these verses,” enlargement of “to michael angelo” in line 2. © british library board, add ms 49460. image courtesy of the william blake archive. more broadly, in the eleven instances throughout the notebook where blake uses “live,” the specific formation of the letter “i” and the overall cursive shape of the word more closely resemble the letter and word in question in “the angel that presided” than do the thirty-eight instances of “o” in “love” and the overall cursive shape of the word.my methodology was to generate a list for “live” and “love” from nelson hilton’s concordance to erdman’s complete poetry and prose at the blake digital text project and then locate and examine each example in erdman’s facsimile edition of the notebook. there may be some minor discrepancies in the total number generated for each word (especially for “love”) because of the complexities of the notebook and my own imprecision. nevertheless, one can conclude that “live” is a viable alternative to “love.” on occasion, unambiguous examples of “live” include the extra ascender/descender that produces the “u” or “v” effect, as in “my spectre” (erdman, notebook n13[3]: poem 71, stanza 8, line 3; e 475-77) (illus 8).see the following relevant examples of “live” from erdman’s facsimile: n4(10) and transcript: msc 6, lines 1 and 2; n22 and transcript: poem 78, line 40; n111 and transcript: poem 18, a, line 4. 8. “my spectre,” enlargement of “live” in stanza 8, line 3. © british library board, add ms 49460. image courtesy of the william blake archive. finally, as is the case with the “o”s on page 32, the majority of the thirty-eight instances of “love” contain an “o” that is completely or mostly closed. thus, it appears that bentley’s “live” has as much legitimacy as keynes’s and erdman’s “love.” of course, readers are encouraged to examine the illustrations—as well as the relevant examples throughout the notebook—and draw their own conclusions. before i risk any interpretive analysis, some cautionary observations are in order. the poem’s brevity, its seemingly ambiguous placement on the manuscript page with respect to either the central drawing and/or the surrounding poems, even the problem of its genre—all these factors warrant caution rather than hasty speculation.for a discussion of the composition of the page, see bentley’s footnote “page 32: order of composition” (writings 2: 942). he notes that “‘the angel …’ and ‘sir joshua …’ [i.e., “florentine ingratitude”] … were written in the same large hand and brownish ink respectively above and below the central pencil sketch” and that “these verses” was inserted later, “in the last clearly free space above the design and below ‘the angel ….’” this pencil sketch is almost exactly the same (in reverse) as the pl. 6 illustration from visions of the daughters of albion. while the discussion is beyond the scope of this essay, based on the two mirrored drawings, i suggest that a connection exists between “the angel that presided” and visions in terms of the struggle for individual self-expression (exemplified in the “little creature” and oothoon) in the face of repressive opposition (as seen in the forces of “thing/king,” the rapacious violence of bromion, and consuming jealousy of theotormon). for example, erdman catalogues the poem under “satiric verses and epigrams,” and “the angel that presided” certainly seems epigrammatic. but is it satiric? should it be regarded as one of blake’s “angry epigrams” (johnson and grant 379n)? finally, erdman dates the poem between october 1807 and may 1809, which places it years later than its most logical companion poems, songs of innocence and of experience. can “the angel that presided” (c. 1807-09) shed light on songs of innocence (1789) and songs of experience (1794) or provide a context by which to appreciate more fully blake’s complex relationship with his deceased brother robert, as suggested below? blake’s revisions, both those agreed upon and in question, imply an authorial indecision as to the poem’s meaning, most dramatically evidenced in blake’s interrogation of the original “thing” and probable decision that “king” is more appropriate. the consequences of his contemplating such a change produce internal reverberations throughout the poem. hence, the competing drafts reconstruct the evolution of blake’s decision-making process in articulating to himself the poem’s meaning and record his conflicting assessments as to where to locate the poem within his poetic vision. specific, non-controversial aspects of blake’s first draft bear commentary. his only use of “presided” (or its cognate) occurs in this poem (erdman, concordance 2: 1474). literally meaning “to sit before,” “preside” suggests that the angel serves as witness, guardian, and authority (i.e., “president”) (see oed, “preside,” etymology and def. 1). thus, although blake begins the poem with the guardian-angel motif, “a familiar image in eighteenth-century hymns” that he satirizes in the songs (lincoln 186), he is probably not being satirical in this instance. in addition, the “little creature” of the original draft resists an explicitly anthropomorphic interpretation and could equally refer to the two-day-old infant of “infant joy” or to the “little lamb.” the undifferentiated “any thing on earth” also supports a more generalized interpretation of “little creature.” these factors suggest that blake had in mind the more nascent and integrated state of innocence when initially composing the poem. to focus now on revisions that editors have not questioned, blake’s replacement of “thou art formd for mirth” with “formd of joy & mirth” signals a shift in thinking away from defining and limiting the little creature’s purpose in life in favor of elaborating upon its genesis, which logically refers back to its “birth.” blake’s first revision, read metaphorically, identifies the little creature’s parents—its two ontological essences—as “joy” and “mirth.” born of such a lineage, the creature should, naturally as it were, “go love/live” and not need (or actively resist) the “help” of “any thing on earth,” since a higher authority has already been established at its birth. these initial revisions suggest that blake originally conceived of “the angel that presided” as a rather static descriptive sketch representing a “little creature” in a state of innocence, but subsequently revised the poem to emphasize the interconnections among the creature’s symbolic parentage, the moment of its entry into the world, and its lifelong moral imperative to “go love/live.” more broadly, the revised poem establishes a binary opposition between “the angel” and “any thing on earth,” the two forces vying to shape the little creature’s life. in this initially revised version, however, “any thing on earth” risks becoming an empty signifier, abstracted into a limitless number of possible vague and amorphous referents. as a consequence, “thing” and “earth” almost elide into a single entity, and earth is portrayed as in conflict with both the angel and the little creature, and hence is restricted to relatively sinister connotations. within this textual fabric, “help” is in danger of losing its ironic force. thus the poem breaks down. the little creature cannot fulfill the angel’s mandate to “go love [live] without the help of any thing on earth,” since the poem’s rhetoric unintentionally prohibits the creature’s interaction with the world at large, which the mandate “go love/live” requires. for example, thel’s exploratory dialogues with the lilly, the cloud, and the clod of clay run counter to the angel’s caution. blake’s sensitivity to these complications may have prompted his further revision of the poem. the hypothetical final revision of “thing” to “king” (endorsed by erdman and bentley) resolves these textual conflicts and provides coherence within the poem’s fabric. no longer an indeterminate “any thing on earth,” the revised “king” suggests, even anticipates, that political and, by extension, social constructs of authority and power will challenge the little creature in fulfilling both the angel’s directive and its ethical birthright. receiving “help” from such sources is now unambiguously and forcefully ironic. in this version, the cautionary nature of the angel’s directive is clear, not confused, as we recognize that the little creature will need to be vigilant in resisting all forms of such “help” in its efforts to fulfill its life’s purpose. furthermore, blake’s initial revision distinguishing between “formd for mirth” and “formd of joy & mirth” now becomes crucial and clarifies that the little creature will participate (love/live) in the world in a mutually reciprocal manner. born of “joy & mirth,” it will “go love/live” and the recipients of its affections will respond in kind. finally, “king” suggests that blake now conceives of the little creature as anthropomorphic, but still retaining its universal qualities as an every-child. now, “earth” is represented positively, as an environment promoting regenerative love and as a fecund world ready to facilitate the angel’s imperative; it is clearly distinguished from “king” and his social corruptions. “the angel that presided” juxtaposes “angel” and “king” in what is, for blake, a surprisingly adversarial manner. “king” suggests a political reading that takes readers close to the world of “london,” its “blood down palace walls,” and even blake’s celebrated caricature of george iii in europe a prophecy. the orthodoxy, repression, and requisite satire associated with “king” remain, but “angel” carries none of blake’s typical associations of conventional religion and pious morality, as satirized in the marriage of heaven and hell. rather, as hazard adams suggests, this angel is “a reprobate angel who reminds the child that all responsibility and power reside in him [i.e., the child]” (436); hence, the angel is purposefully unconventional. thus, the angel of the final version of the poem comes very close to blake’s personal and complex understanding of angels, either guardian or guiding, as recorded, for example, in his letters to william hayley (6 may 1800) and thomas butts (22 november 1802) (e 705, 720-23). blake’s letter to hayley is especially relevant, as he responds to the death of hayley’s only son, thomas alphonso, and reminisces about the death of his brother robert in february 1787: “thirteen years ago. i lost a brother & with his spirit i converse daily & hourly …. i hear his advice & even now write from his dictate” (e 705). blake wrote “the angel that presided” in the notebook that he inherited from his brother and, significantly, he “kept the notebook near at hand all his life, filling it over the years …” (erdman, notebook 1). hence, the angel does indeed provide a lifelong dictum, if not a literal dictation, by which the little creature is instructed to “go love/live,” and by which william is inspired to write (and draw). thus, blake fulfills the angel’s directive within (and beyond) the memorialized space of the notebook. such speculation has legitimacy, since “william thought of robert as a fellow spirit and even as a spiritual guide” (bentley, stranger 6) and as an “‘affectionate companion’ who shared his interests and enthusiasms” (ackroyd 84). it would be too reductive a critical interpretation—and one antithetical to blake’s synthetic imagination—to suggest that the angel represents the guiding voice of robert exclusively directing william, the little creature. rather, the angel and the little creature enjoy a symbiotic and inspirational relationship within blake’s imaginary landscape. they can be considered “fellow spirit[s]” or “reciprocal” images of each other, similar to the “mirror” images that blake produces in milton (1804-c. 1811) of “william” and “robert” receiving “inspiration” from milton (bentley, stranger 6, 98),see milton a poem pls. 29 (“william”) and 33 (“robert”) (objects 31 and 36 in copy c in the william blake archive). or the “profiles of william and robert blake” that are “jestingly and competitively drawn” and appear “in the last page of an island in the moon (1784)” (erdman, notebook 9). further support for this hypothesis can be found in hayley’s october 1801 poem, identified as “william hayley to the spirit of his son” (“my angel artist in the skies”) (keynes, letters 36). the first stanza serves as an instructive gloss to both “the angel that presided” and blake’s continued belief that his dead brother robert served as an inspirational guide for his artistic productions. (the stanza could easily apply to the sometimes “eccentric” blake and robert’s “inspir[ing]” and “controul[ing]” influence.) my angel artist in the skies, thou mayst inspirit & controul a failing brother’s hand & eyes or temper his eccentric soul. blake was probably acquainted with this poem, given the close relationship between blake and hayley at this time. the second stanza specifically links blake’s artistic productions to hayley’s own dead son: now to the feeling blake attend, his copies of dear cowper view and make his portraits of our friend perfect in truth as thou art true. these biographical, textual, and material contexts shed light on the revisions of “the angel that presided” from its original, more sentimental version to its final, more political version. moreover, the editorial choice between “love” and “live” accentuates these differences and becomes the deciding factor, tipping the scale in favor of either a sentimental or political interpretation. for example, “go love” draws attention to the trace elements of biography in “the angel that presided.” thus, while the angel’s imperative “go love” presupposes the shared communitarian values and holistic relationships found in the idyllic world of innocence, these values themselves are based upon the kind of close-knit, non-eroticized love exemplified by “favourite” brothers (bentley, stranger 6) and upon the symbiotic and highly integrated relationship of a literal brotherly love. “go love” also emphasizes serving “the other” and not empowering “the self.” brotherly love, either real or idealized, provides a rationale for restraining, or domesticating, the fiercely independent vision and exacting moral code commonly associated with blake’s character and writings, since “man liveth not by self alone but in his brothers face” (the four zoas p. 133, line 25; e 402). limiting one’s will to power out of respect or compassion for another must inevitably occur for one to participate, imaginatively, in the prelapsarian world of the little creature or in the landscape of innocence. from another perspective, “go love” stresses that the nurturing, even regenerative responsibilities implied in the angel’s charge are born of the little creature’s symbolic parents, “joy & mirth,” and not imposed by “any king,” which certainly squares well with blake’s dissenter upbringing (bentley, stranger 7; ackroyd 17, 18). “go love” also suggests that the “help” offered by “any king” be understood more as an interpersonal betrayal by the civic father-figure than as a political offense against the corporate body politic. in this version, the celestial angel may have difficulty moving beyond merely presiding over the little creature’s moment of birth as it moves into the world to fulfill the angel’s mandate, and the baptismal-like power of “go love” may diminish as the creature develops into adulthood. on the other hand, the imperative “go live” compels the little creature into the experiential world of action, consequence, and personal development, and away from the secure, but ultimately static, worlds of innocence and brotherly love. for blake, the directive “go live” implies an unwavering commitment to one’s personal vision and acting accordingly, regardless of the consequences. under such conditions, “go live” inevitably conflicts with either the initial “any thing” or the revised “any king.” in the first version, “any thing” may refer, obliquely, to the kind of well-intended, if misguided, physical punishment that blake experienced as a child (as a little creature) when he confided to his “affectionate” and “sympathetic” but “concerned” parents about his recurring visions of angels (bentley, stranger 3, 5, 19-21). these “thrashing[s]” appear to have been infrequent, although one source notes that “his father … severely whipped him several times” on account of his visions (samuel palmer, quoted in bentley, blake records 10). whatever their duration or intensity, for blake they “became a source of perpetual discontent” (ackroyd 21). blake may have felt uncomfortable expressing these ambivalences directly in a poem that champions a “reprobate” angel and his directive, and therefore used the generic “thing” to oppose the visionary angel, only to revise (and suppress) “thing” for “king” later. thus, he transforms a painful reminiscence linking his honest accounts of his visions of angels with a rare instance of parental censorship into a metaphoric, public statement about “any king.” under these pressures, “any king” broadens to include any repressive governing, legislative, or moral authority—any oppressor, kingly or otherwise. the political implications of “go live” and “any king” are clarified by reference to blake’s similar phrase, “so spoke an angel at my birth,” from the unfinished notebook poem “now art has lost its mental charms” (erdman, notebook n79; e 479). “now art has lost” creates a decidedly real-world context in which the angel fears that “france shall subdue the world in arms.” this angel’s mandate compels the persona (who, in “descend[ing] … upon earth,” presumably matures into an adult) to “renew the arts on britains shore” so that “works of art” will “meet” (that is, conquer) “armies” and “war.” significantly, however, and with a typical blakean twist, if “thy nation” (i.e., britain) refuses the “arts,” then “france shall the arts of peace restore” and “save thee from the ungrateful shore” of britain. thus, artistic production transcends political allegiances, national boundaries, and military might. the similarity of the two phrases creates a symbolic, perhaps even evolutionary, relationship between the little creature and his angel’s mandate to “go live without the help of any king on earth” and the unnamed adult figure in “now art has lost,” who fulfills the implied trajectory of the first angel’s directive to “go live” by realizing the second angel’s imperative to “descend … upon earth” and become an artist opposing political strife, war, and “any king” through artistic production. finally, “the angel that presided” and “now art has lost” stress the importance of the explicit audience’s commitment to realize the angel’s otherworldly directive through the real-world action of embracing one’s independent vision and corresponding call to artistic production. within the specific context of vision and vocation, blake’s letter to hayley suggests that his memory of robert and robert’s “dictate” continually guide him in his past and future artistic creations. in fact, robert continues to inform blake’s artistic consciousness as late as the 1811 and 1818 printings of milton. thus, “the angel that presided” can perhaps best be understood as a timeless metatextual promise that blake makes to himself through the reciprocal, mirrored image of a guiding angel-brother and his “dictate.” in this context, the angel’s spoken imperative to “go love/live” serves not only as an example of blake’s commitment to memorialize robert, but also as a self-confirming validation of his previous creative work and his dedication to a personal vision. importantly, the angel’s directive also functions as blake’s pledge to remain vigilant in fulfilling these promises through future artistic efforts and in spite of the intrusions of kingly authorities, thus placing blake in much the same position as the little creature. in conclusion, “the angel that presided” illustrates in a succinct, and therefore manageable, way the difficult issues confronting editors in transcribing blake’s manuscripts and in making informed, but sometimes conflicting, decisions. these decisions, in turn, define and shape the interpretive possibilities open to a given text, as demonstrated in the alternative readings produced by “thing” versus “king” and especially “love” and “live.” within this more interpretive perspective, “the angel that presided” serves as a concise personal manifesto for blake, providing him with a lifelong directive to “go love/live” by opposing “any king” through artistic production; it also attests to the importance of guiding angels and their spoken “dictate” in blake’s imaginative landscape. moreover, the poem highlights the importance of the notebook as a talismanic metonym for robert and as a memorialized space providing continual inspiration for blake’s various creative experiments. the poem illustrates how his artistic creations can be understood as ongoing collaborations between “fellow spirit[s]” with, at times, william transcribing, as it were, robert’s guiding “dictate,” almost literalizing blake’s claim that “even in this world by it i am the companion of angels” (letter to hayley, 6 may 1800; e 705). the nuances implied in “the angel that presided o’er my birth” extend our knowledge of blake’s complex, idiosyncratic, and visionary understanding of angels and their influence on his imaginative world. finally, it is a testament to the power of this short poem that, so many years later, it helped inspire vonnegut to transform his own personal tragedy and loss into a lifelong credo opposing “any thing” (or “any king”) through artistic production—a vision that is both profoundly sacred and profoundly secular. acknowledgments the author would like to thank morris eaves, morton paley, and mary lynn johnson for their helpful suggestions in the revision of the essay. special thanks to sarah jones for procuring the necessary permissions. this essay is for jo, dana, and jack: beyond 072210. works cited ackroyd, peter. blake. new york: knopf, 1996. adams, hazard. “the dizziness of freedom; or, why i read william blake.” college english 48.5 (1986): 431-43. bentley, g. e., jr. blake records: documents (1714-1841) concerning the life of william blake (1757-1827) and his family. 2nd ed. new haven: yale up, 2004. ---. the stranger from paradise: a biography of william blake. new haven: yale up, 2001. ---, ed. william blake’s writings. 2 vols. oxford: clarendon p, 1978. blake, william. milton a poem, copy c, c. 1811 (new york public library), objects 31 and 36. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert essick, and joseph viscomi. 1998. accessed 10 june 2011 <http://www.blakearchive.org>. erdman, david v., ed. the complete poetry and prose of william blake. commentary by harold bloom. newly rev. ed. new york: anchor–random house, 1988. [designated “e”.] ---, ed. the poetry and prose of william blake. commentary by harold bloom. garden city, ny: doubleday, 1965. erdman, david v., ed., with the assistance of donald k. moore. the notebook of william blake: a photographic and typographic facsimile. 1973. rev. ed. n.p.: readex books, 1977. erdman, david v., ed., with the assistance of john e. thiesmeyer et al. a concordance to the writings of william blake. 2 vols. ithaca: cornell up, 1967. hayman, david, david michaelis, george plimpton, and richard l. rhodes. “interview: kurt vonnegut: the art of fiction lxiv.” paris review 18.69 (1977): 56-103. hilton, nelson. ee on-line blake concordance. blake digital text project. accessed 5 may 2011 <http://www.english.uga.edu/~nhilton/ee/home.html>. johnson, mary lynn, and john e. grant, eds. blake’s poetry and designs. 1979. 2nd ed. new york: w. w. norton, 2008. norton critical edition. keynes, geoffrey, ed. the complete writings of william blake: with all the variant readings. london: nonesuch; new york: random house, 1957. ---, ed. the letters of william blake with related documents. 3rd ed. oxford: clarendon p, 1980. lincoln, andrew, ed. william blake: songs of innocence and of experience. princeton: princeton up/william blake trust, 1991. blake’s illuminated books, vol. 2. ostriker, alicia, ed. william blake: the complete poems. new york: penguin, 1977. penguin english poets. “preside.” oxford english dictionary. 1933. oxford: clarendon p, 1978. stevenson, w. h., ed. blake: the complete poems. 1971. 3rd ed. harlow: pearson education ltd., 2007. longman annotated english poets. vonnegut, kurt, jr. god bless you, mr. rosewater, or pearls before swine. 1965. new york: dial, 2006. ---. slaughterhouse-five, or the children’s crusade. 1969. new york: delacorte p, 1994. “life exhal’d in milky fondness”—becoming a mother in william blake’s the book of thel “life exhal’d in milky fondness”—becoming a mother in william blake’s the book of thel by małgorzata łuczyńska-hołdys małgorzata łuczyńska-hołdys (m.holdys@uw.edu.pl) works as an assistant professor at the institute of english studies, warsaw university. her research interests include romantic and victorian poetry, images of femininity in literature and art, and pre-raphaelite painting. she has published articles on blake, keats, tennyson, and swinburne. her book soft-shed kisses: re-visioning the femme fatale in english poetry of the nineteenth century awaits publication. blake critics most often see the book of thel as a thwarted attempt to pass from the state of innocence to experience.see bloom 49, raine 52, frye 232-33, damon 52, 401, gleckner 163-64, ankarsjö 62. blake’s heroine is usually perceived as a somewhat naive, indecisive young female afraid to “be born” into the world of adulthood and maturity, or as a soul that refuses to enter the material world. hence, there has been a tendency to pass judgment on thel’s decision, to attribute it to weakness, immaturity, or fear, and to see it in pejorative terms.for example, gleckner concludes that thel is self-centered and sternly pronounces that she has to learn the life of self-sacrifice (163), while behrendt asserts that, for blake, thel must have been an example of what he calls “the dead-end nature of narcissistic behavior” (27). for matthews, thel’s flight means conforming to stereotypes of femininity (100). my claim is that thel’s refusal to enter the world of generation has nothing to do with relapsing into childhood, or with weakness and indecisiveness. instead, i see it as proof of her maturity and independent spirit. my article is concerned with two problems. firstly, i want to demonstrate how text and design in the book of thel enter a mutual semantic relationship of contradiction and/or redundancy rather than complementarity.for the various types of image-text relations, see a. kibédi varga, “criteria for describing word-image relations,” poetics today 10 (1989): 31-53. naturally, this claim is not new; w. j. t. mitchell recognized this quality as early as 1978, writing that “the ‘unity’ of an illuminated book is a dynamic one, built upon the interaction of text and design as independent or contrary elements” (xviii). what i would like to examine, however, is how this dynamic interaction reinforces a feminist reading of blake’s text. secondly, although there are critical texts that deal with blake’s attitude to women, the majority of blake scholarship on the book of thel does not seem sufficiently feminist. while he did not manifest an unwaveringly feminist stance throughout his poetry, in texts such as thel or visions of the daughters of albion he dealt with women’s issues in a way that may be deemed progressive. consequently, i intend to focus on the problems of motherhood and childcare as rendered by blake in his poem, since i perceive these notions to be essential for our understanding of thel’s decision. also, part of my argument is that, contrary to a number of critical readings, the message delivered by thel’s three interlocutors (the lilly, the cloud, and the clod of clay) should not be seen as a positive statement that blake wanted thel to accept. finally, if we comprehend thel’s dilemma—whether to become a mother—this can shed light on some actions taken by other female characters in blake’s later texts, oothoon and enitharmon in particular. generally it has been agreed that the issues of gender and sexuality provide a valid interpretative context for the book of thel, as “the consequence of the expression of sexual desire is the great theme of blake’s prophetic poems” (hayes 144). thus, david worrall suggests that the book of thel is blake’s correction to swedenborg’s ideas of sexuality: thel’s escape “with a shriek” is “a specific refusal of swedenborg’s doctrine of conjugal love, a subject topical to contemporary swedenborgians who were proposing to establish an african colony based on its principles” (17).other important texts that discuss blake’s connections to swedenborg’s thought are schuchard’s why mrs. blake cried, viscomi’s 1997, 1998, and 1999 essays on the marriage of heaven and hell, and magnus ankarsjö, william blake and religion (jefferson: mcfarland, 2009). also, in their introduction to the book of thel in the early illuminated books, eaves, essick, and viscomi note echoes of swedenborgian thought (particularly with reference to his doctrine of use) in blake’s poem (78). however, as susan matthews notices, the vales of har (the place that worrall sees as the realm of swedenborgian sexual union) are the world to which, and not from which, thel flees (100). matthews, in turn, sees the flight of thel at the end of the poem as an escape from conflict rather than from sexuality, and interprets the vales of har as a world where “benefit to the other is benefit to the self” and where, consequently, the self does not exist (99). also, for her, the flight back is not the assertion of the self but a surrender of the self: “at the end of the poem, thel flees to a female dream like that of the triumphs of temper which makes sexual desire safe but demands as the price the taking on of a female identity” (100). in a similar vein, magnus ankarsjö, in blake and gender, notices that “although sometimes executing successful representations of the female, blake in the early poems is at pains to find an appropriate expression of the positive interactivity of man and woman” (3). he locates thel within the circle of “childlike innocent characters” (5) and concludes that she “utterly fails and relapses back to childhood” (62). in the course of this paper, i hope to demonstrate that it is possible to see thel’s decision not as a failure or a surrender of the self, but as an act of self-assertion, a conscious decision to reject the perspective (however attractive at times) of both sexual relationship and childbearing. such a decision is not a product of an immature, wavering, childlike mind but testifies to the opposite. last but not least, it also denotes readiness to face the conflict that ensues from acting against the expectations of others.  modern critical readings recognize the importance of dialogical structure in the book of thel.see levinson and linkin. most of the poem is structured by question-answer exchanges, often summarized by thel’s rephrasing of what she has heard. the common denominator of these conversations is thel’s inquiry, which is followed by reassuring statements from other beings already familiar with the world that she contemplates entering. the chief question, then, is what it would mean for thel to enter this world, blake’s realm of generation, or experience. entering it may be understood as a conscious decision to grow up and to assume the social roles prescribed for a woman in the adult world—primarily the role of mother. crucially, however, pregnancy and motherhood are preceded by courtship and marriage. this point has been noted and discussed from various perspectives by modern critics. thus, harriet kramer linkin identifies what frightens thel off as the sexual nature of human relationships in the world of generation. she suggests that thel’s “horror at being food for worms actually displaces her deeper fear of the phallus” and that thel wilfully chooses to ignore the sexual implications of the cloud’s speech, instead focusing on the nurturing function voiced by the clod of clay (69). in the wake of feminist criticism, helen bruder, in an interpretation to which i am deeply indebted, sees thel as a poem in which “the sceptical enquiries of a determined young woman thoroughly unmask patriarchal ideology, an ideology which promised women that heterosexual romantic and maternal roles equalled heavenly fulfilment, but which thel discovers amount to nothing less than death” (44). reading the key passage in which the clod of clay appears as mother of the worm, she concludes that “anyone who ‘her life exhal’d / in milky fondness’ (thel, 4:8-9; e.5) has been severely gulled if she believes that this amounts to having ‘a crown that none can take away’ (thel, 5:4; e.5)” (51). my discussion coincides with the above interpretations in that i also think the ideology of self-sacrifice, as promoted by the clod of clay and the lilly, to be the key to understanding blake’s poem. in addition, i propose that thel is actually attracted both to the idea of sexual union and to the idea of becoming a mother, but she cannot reconcile her desires with what such fulfillment would mean in a world where the female is generally given one role, that of a humble servant with no voice of her own. what frightens thel off is the philosophy of utilitarianism and self-denial embodied in the clod of clay and, to a lesser extent, in the lilly and the cloud. the cloud’s conviction that becoming “the food of worms” (3.25, e 5)all quotations of blake’s poems are from erdman, complete poetry and prose. might be enough to sing the song of self-fulfillment is another successful deterrent. thel is an adolescent. generally, her name has been interpreted as signifying “wish” or “desire,” but another meaning has also been suggested—“woman.”linkin 67n7, relating the suggestion of e. b. murray. thus, thel contemplates what it means to be a woman, and whether it is what she really desires. her interest in these questions, as well as her essential ambivalence, is mirrored in the title-page design (illus. 1), where she observes intently but with apprehension the passionate embrace of two tiny creatures emerging from a flowering plant, one male and one female.the plates that i discuss are from the book of thel copy h (library of congress), william blake archive <http://www.blakearchive.org>. plates are numbered according to erdman’s illuminated blake.  1. the book of thel copy h (c. 1789), pl. ii (title page). library of congress. image courtesy of the william blake archive. kathleen raine claims that the designs for thel “express, even more than those of songs of innocence, the easy grace, freedom and expressive sweetness characteristic of blake’s vision of ‘innocence’” (52).in a similar vein, mitchell, in his blake’s composite art, writes that “the title page depicts the courting dance of the cloud and dew as a whirling vortex of pleasure” (105). is that really so? unquestionably, we see the characteristic weightlessness of blake’s figures and delicate, almost fragile lines, but the apparent sweetness of the plates is deceptive. careful observation reveals darker, more troubling echoes. thel seems unsure how to understand the scene she is witnessing: the passionate embrace of the couple could be an externalization of their erotic love, but it could also be a scene of entrapment, against which the female seems to be striving.eaves, essick, and viscomi note the ambiguity of the scene in the early illuminated books (82). could the raised arms of the female figure perhaps express her fear of the union? she is clearly moving away from the naked, plunging body of her partner. david erdman, in his illuminated blake, gives an account of erasmus darwin’s the loves of the plants as a possible source of blake’s illustrations of plants in the book of thel. the loves of the plants appeared in 1789 as part of the botanic garden, “a poetic guide, in the idiom of ‘the rape of the lock,’ to the sexual behavior of the male and female parts of garden flowers” (33). the plant that blake makes the focal point of the title page to thel is anemone pulsatilla, a flower that needs the wind to open its petals. as erdman recounts, darwin’s imagery is straightforwardly erotic: the flower yearns for the wind’s “cherub-lips,” which are then to rend its “gauzy veil” (34). ecstasy mixes with aggression and submission. thel, standing aside, looks at the scene carefully but with uncertainty. on the one hand, she is fascinated by the promise of an adult, sexual relationship; on the other hand, she senses both violence and the power struggle inherent in such a relationship in the world of generation. thus, her fascination mingles with fear, but the questioning stance very well reflects her inquisitive attitude toward reality, her inner compulsion to ask unsettling questions. in the marriage of heaven and hell and in his annotations to lavater, blake expresses his conviction that human life should mean an active search for fulfillment. he claims that it is better to “murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires” (marriage 10.67, e 38) and that “all act [<from individual propensity>] is virtue” (annotations to lavater p. 226, e 601). staying passive, one becomes like poisonous standing water with “reptiles of the mind” (marriage 19, e 42), since “he who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence” (marriage 7.5, e 35). although it is possible to see thel as a passive, indecisive figure, since her search is inconclusive,some earlier critics seem to ignore thel’s inquisitiveness, or to attribute it to a whiny, self-centered attitude; see, for example, damon 401, bloom 53, and frye 233. this interpretation overlooks the fact that, unlike all the other characters in the poem, she exhibits a pondering, questioning attitude. the lilly and the clod exult in their productive, selfless lives. thel’s sisters have also become characterized by the duties that they fulfill: as shepherdesses, they obediently “led round their sunny flocks” (1.1, e 3), even if, as bruder suggests, they run in circles (44-45). if they have desires, they do their best to suppress them. in contrast, thel actively searches for fulfillment and ponders what this fulfillment implies and whether it would cost her dear. her resistance is much more active than her compliance could ever be. thel, as the reader meets her for the first time, is deeply worried, and she feels alienated in her anxieties, brooding over them “in paleness” and in secrecy (1.2, e 3). in this way blake stresses her position as an outsider, which she occupies at the beginning and retains to the end of the book. although she inhabits the vales of har, which have been traditionally interpreted as a paradise-like world (blake’s beulah or preexistence), and thus is not subject to death, thel in her first lamentation is concerned with mutability. she compares herself to all beautiful but transient phenomena in the material world, such as “a watry bow,” “a parting cloud,” “a reflection in a glass,” “dreams of infants,” “shadows in the water,” “music in the air” (1.8-11, e 3). the lilly of the valley, the first of thel’s interlocutors, is puzzled by her worries, and asks “then why should thel complain, / why should the mistress of the vales of har, utter a sigh” (1.25, 2.1, e 4)? despite being a daughter of the seraphim, thel stubbornly refuses to see herself as immortal. while this point may be explained by noting that transience is the chief feature of the world that thel contemplates entering—the cause of her fears—such an interpretation soon proves elusive: all the creatures that she talks to proclaim the existence of an afterlife, and the clod of clay, inviting thel into her kingdom, assures her that “’tis given thee to enter, / and to return” (5.16-17, e 6). though thel need not fear disintegration in death, she is not comforted by any of the speeches and continues to cast herself as a transient, mutable being, different from those she meets on her way. as james swearingen perceptively notes, “her unity with the life of the fabulous setting is already disrupted. that unity does not belong to the time of the poem; it is a narrative memory, a hypothetical condition ‘before’ her differentiation from other things living alongside her in the vales of har” (128). gradually, however, she turns to contemplating a purpose rather than the transience of her existence. very quickly she concludes that there is no aim, no use in her life. she claims that she wants to leave a trace of her existence instead of disappearing without a mark. thus, it may be suggested that death for thel is nothing but insignificance. the main problem, however, around which the rest of the text is structured, is how to signify without having one’s identity totally obliterated.  the lilly of the valley is thel’s opposite. she describes herself in terms of modesty, humility, hard work, and cheerfulness. she is “very small” and dwells in “lowly vales” (1.17, e 4); she is a weak and gentle maid who does not talk too much, only bows “her modest head” (2.17, e 4) and resides in “modest brooks” and “silent valleys” (1.22, e 4), where she goes to “mind her numerous charge among the verdant grass” (2.18, e 4). her description adheres to the doctrine of self-sacrifice that underlies thel. morris eaves, robert essick, and joseph viscomi attribute this ideology to “contemporary handbooks for young ladies that taught the docile acceptance of servitude to masculine desires and expectations” (the early illuminated books 80), and this seems to be the case with the lilly. she believes that her behavior is bound to be rewarded: she will be “clothed in light” and “fed with morning manna” (1.23, e 4). she feels gratefulness toward him “that smiles on all” (1.19, e 4) (critics still debate whether he is god from eden or just a male cloud). regardless of the ambiguity, this presence is unquestionably male and his behavior, as well as the lilly’s humble and grateful response from her position of dependency, defines her world as patriarchal. since, in the lilly’s perception, her existence amounts to a happy and fulfilled life, she cannot understand thel’s doubts and worries. why should thel complain, if, upon entering the adult social world, she will be rewarded in exactly the same way for exactly the same behavior? she previews dante gabriel rossetti’s  “an angel-watered lily” (the ideal female) from the sonnets written to accompany the painting the girlhood of mary virgin,rossetti wrote two sonnets to accompany his painting; their collective title is “mary’s girlhood (for a picture),” and they are numbered i and ii. the quotations come from the first sonnet (see the poem in the rossetti archive <http://​www.​rossettiarchive.​org>). a lily that “near god / grows and is quiet” (lines 10-11). rossetti characterizes mary (the lily) by “simplicity of intellect, / and supreme patience” (lines 5-6), while her virtues correspond to the books that she studies: hope, faith, and charity. the lilly, as her name suggests, signifies purity, virginity, and innocence, but it is interesting to remember that lilies have another primary symbolic association: death. this makes blake’s symbolism extraordinarily consistent, and links the lilly to other elements in the text associated with death and mourning: the clod of clay, tombs, worms, withering of the body, and elegiac overtones. would existence akin to that of the lilly mean death for thel? strikingly, though,  thel sees the lilly as the essence of motherhood and maternal care.  we may recall here an interesting biographical speculation offered by s. foster damon, who suggests that the book of thel might have been an elegy written by blake on the death of his daughter, lost through miscarriage (401), though no biographers support this conjecture. certainly, the theme of motherhood is one of the chief concerns in blake’s poem. what is the vision of motherhood endorsed by the text, then, and how does it clash with what thel would like it to be? the answer is partly revealed in the first dialogic exchange, with the lilly of the valley, and implicated in all subsequent interactions that thel initiates. when thel rephrases the lilly’s answer, she arrives at her own interpretation of the lilly’s life. she describes her in terms of servitude and meekness, which become synonymous with nursing and mothering: the lilly, thel says, nourishes the innocent lamb, feeds him, cleans him, cherishes him. what is more, the lilly is characterized by her “milky garments” (2.5, e 4), which straightforwardly figure breastfeeding and foreshadow the clod’s “milky fondness” (4.9, e 5). finally, she calmly accepts the prospect of her sacrifice: while the lamb devours her flowers she sits “smiling in his face” (2.6, e 4). the lilly also attends to other living creatures: her perfume “revives the milked cow” and “tames the fire-breathing steed” (2.10, e 4). the question implied in this passage, therefore, concerns the extent to which selfless giving may be reconciled with one’s own needs. what is left of the lilly when her flowers are cropped, her leaves become the bed for worms, and her perfume is scattered all over the grass? at the end of this encounter, thel reasserts her difference from the lilly, but it seems that her emotional response to the lilly’s speech is not negative at all. as she contemplates the possibility of becoming a mother, she looks at the lilly with interest and only slight apprehension. thel’s own vision of nursing and care appears to have diverted her attention from the real meaning of the lilly’s speech, which represents an essentially submissive position of humble dependence. her positive attitude toward the lilly (or her refashioning of the lilly’s function) can be detected when she contrasts her own futility with the lilly’s existence. thel imagines herself now as a “faint cloud” (2.11, e 4) that experiences mutability and does not leave a trace when it vanishes from its “pearly throne” (2.12, e 4).  as if by the touch of a magic wand, the personified—distinctly male—cloud appears. while the cloud seems to answer thel’s worries connected with mutability, stressing the life cycles in nature, he primarily embodies the principle of sexual love. the fact that thel sees him as attractive is figured in her description of him as a “bright form” with a “golden head” (3.5, e 4), shiny and glittering. erdman notes the tones of “sexual encounter and aggressive masculinity” in the book of thel, which he attributes to darwin’s the botanic garden (the illuminated blake 33). similarly, bruder concludes that the cloud’s speech is suggestive of violent appropriation: he, the only male in the text, violates the fair-eyed dew, who cries and trembles, afraid of their union (48). such a reading, however, is not wholly convincing: after all, the cloud is said to court the dew (courtship connotes gentle and tender behavior), which results in his being invited to the dew’s shining tent. thus, the sexual union that ensues is both feared and wanted by the “fair eyed dew” (3.13, e 5), and it happens with, rather than without, her consent. the dew, in her virginity, simultaneously desires and is afraid of sexual fulfillment. hence, the cloud is undeniably masculine and decisive, but not necessarily violent and aggressively appropriative. thel’s attraction to the idea of partnership and sexual union is clearly spelled out in the illustration accompanying plate 4 (illus. 2). 2. the book of thel copy h (c. 1789), pl. 4. library of congress. image courtesy of the william blake archive. the design serves as a visual bridge between plates 3 and 4. while the text of plate 3 consists of the cloud’s speech, there is no visual equivalent of this scene on the plate. as i suggested earlier, i believe that some designs to the book of thel contradict, rather than complement, the text, and i see plates 3 and 4 as examples of this contradiction. there is nothing in the text of plate 3 to suggest that thel has been convinced by the cloud’s speech, which explains how a female can find meaning in the world of generation. the text depicts the moment that thel finds hard to accept when the cloud defines the proper place and significance for her in such terms: then if thou art the food of worms. o virgin of the skies, how great thy use. how great thy blessing; every thing that lives, lives not alone, nor for itself. (3.25-27, e 5) laura quinney notices the contradiction between thel’s expectations and the ultimate message communicated to her by the cloud, and reads this statement as ironic: it would be a mistake to think that blake endorses this idea. the cloud goes on to explain, “everything that lives, / lives not alone, nor for itself” (thel 3:26-27, e5), but this assertion is not to be confused with blake’s “everything that lives is holy” (mhh 25, e45; my italics). in the cloud’s absurd suggestion, blake is mocking the attempt to redeem strictly natural existence. consciousness cannot be content with its fate because the body nurtures worms. (32) the conflict between thel’s aspirations and the cloud’s ideology is straightforwardly indicated when she complains in the previous lines and all shall say, without a use this shining woman liv’d, or did she only live. to be at death the food of worms. (3.22-23, e 5) this exchange testifies to the crucial misunderstanding: for thel, feeding the worms is the ultimate sign of nothingness and insignificance, while her interlocutor understands it as the essence of both use and significance. despite the obvious conflict of attitudes and expectations, blake chooses to portray thel with open, outstretched arms prior to the moment in the text where this openness is indicated. her verbal acceptance is delayed until after her conversation with the clod of clay in plate 5. yet, in the design to plate 4, thel is open and inviting; the apprehension signaled by her wary, cautious position as an outsider in the title plate has vanished. the explanation of this contradiction must be seen in her response to the appearance of the cloud and the account of his sexual, impregnating function, rather than to his words about feeding the worms after death, which, as we have seen, clash acutely with thel’s expectations. as yet, thel overlooks the connection between motherhood and such a sacrifice: after all, she herself described the lilly of the valley as being devoured by the lamb, but at that moment she seemed to praise the lilly for her nurturing stance. blake depicts the cloud in the design to plate 4, later than his appearance in the text, on the plate that simultaneously shows thel’s encounter with the worm. this device can be seen as an example of what mitchell calls “the technique of syncopation” and defines as placing designs “at a physical and metaphoric distance from their best textual reference” (193). a naked male figure flies with his arms outstretched in the upper part of the design, while in the lower part we see thel standing above a little worm-like infant “wrapped in the lillys leaf” (4.3, e 5). blake’s decision to depict both encounters within one design suggests that the intention was to stress the inevitable relationship between sexuality and birth. if thel decides to be a mother, first she has to accept her role as a sexual partner. thel looks at the worm with arms ready to embrace. strikingly, plate 4 shows one of the few moments in the designs to thel where she stands as if inviting, or actively wanting to embrace, the new experience.  in blake’s designs, human postures are always suggestive of mental or spiritual conditions, and, as a number of critics have demonstrated, leaping, open, dancing figures with outstretched arms are often contrasted with bound, bent, constricted and confined, closed postures.for discussion of similar human figures and their postures, see warner. raine states straightforwardly: “there are, for blake’s human figures, essentially two conditions—the unconfined freedom of unimpeded energy; and the constricted, fettered, weighted and cramped state of the prisoners of urizen’s universe of mechanized nature” (111). thel’s gesture is an exact parallel of the cloud’s outstretched arms. wanting to hold the baby, she accepts her sexuality as well and, like “fair eyed dew,” invites erotic union. thus, my reading contradicts the view that thel “is especially unresponsive to potentialities that she is unwilling to acknowledge in herself, most obviously her sexuality. her interest assumes the form of a safe maternal superiority and attends to the worm only as mediated by the clod of clay” (swearingen 133). i believe that thel consciously seeks the articulation of her feminine desire (as suggested by the possibilities of meaning inherent in her name), which embraces both sexual partnership and maternal love. however, she becomes discouraged and frightened by the implications accompanying this prospect mediated to her by other presences in the text (most crucially, the clod of clay) and seen during her thwarted attempt to enter generation. this discouragement is represented in the design to plate 5 (illus. 3), where thel is sitting under a threatening plant, her posture the reverse of what it was in plate 4. 3. the book of thel copy h (c. 1789), pl. 5. library of congress. image courtesy of the william blake archive. erdman identifies this plant as meadia or dodecatheon, which “extends one blushing blossom above her [thel’s] head, still closed (compare the bud thrusting near in plate ii) but beginning to put forth long stamens (a strongly phallic assertion in the darwinian context)” (the illuminated blake 39). thel’s whole body communicates defensiveness. embracing herself, she wants only to be left alone. this gesture is a frequent indicator of despair and dejection in blake’s designs.compare the design for the first book of urizen pl. 7, where los “howld in a dismal stupor” (7.1, e 74), as well as the figure of theotormon embracing himself in visions of the daughters of albion pl. i. at thel’s feet blake depicts a mother playing with a child (a personified vision of the clod and the worm), but now thel rejects even the experience that so far was attractive to her. her bowed head obscures her face and suggests that she does not want to observe the joyful play. the flowers and plants in this plate are either predatory (on the right) or withered (on the left) and powerfully communicate thel’s inner state: threatened, she mourns her withered hopes. behind her we see a gloomy, dark cloud. the price to pay for fulfillment as a lover and a mother, after all, turned out to be too high. plate 5 is another example of the contradiction between design and text. blake devotes two plates of text to thel’s encounter with the worm and the clod of clay, but while plate 4 describes thel’s essentially positive vision of the worm as a child and the emergence of the mother figure, the clod of clay, plate 5 stresses aspects of feminine roles in the world of generation that thel rejects. the decision to separate, through the division between plates, these two verbal exchanges supports the claim that it is not the experience of motherhood that thel rejects as such, but the way in which this experience is mediated to her through the figure of the clod, who is a sum of the attitudes of female servitude and submissiveness and who, even more importantly, harbors the opinion of her own unworthiness and insignificance as a person outside her role as a mother. thus, in plate 4, the meeting with the worm results in a spontaneous overflow of maternal feelings on thel’s part: she sees the worm as helpless, naked, weak, and crying, and pities it for its loneliness. in a way testifying to her lack of practice, she tries to comfort it, urging it not to weep (4.4, e 5). at this moment the clod of clay materializes and appears to thel as pitying, humble, and caring. blake connects her to thel’s earlier perception of the lilly’s milky garments: the image of the clod’s nursing the worm results in “her life exhal’d / in milky fondness” (4.8-9, e 5). this striking image communicates the essence of motherhood: on the one hand, selflessness on the verge of self-sacrifice when, breastfeeding a baby, the woman gives the best part of herself to her child; on the other hand, “milky fondness,” which suggests love and willingness to do so. it is not a grudging, calculating, resentful giving, but a true gift of the heart as well as of the body. this is the vision to which thel is drawn, as we see her in plate 4, where she is standing with open arms full of love and tenderness. toward the end of plate 4, however, complications emerge. the clod of clay proceeds to inform thel of her own unworthiness: thou seest me the meanest thing, and so i am indeed; my bosom of itself is cold. and of itself is dark. (4.11-12, e 5) in short, alone and by herself, she believes that she is nothing. she needs a man (god?) to give her significance and a function to uplift her status through marriage and childbirth, and this is how plate 5 starts: but he that loves the lowly, pours his oil upon my head. and kisses me, and binds his nuptial bands around my breast. and says; thou mother of my children, i have loved thee. and i have given thee a crown that none can take away. (5.1-4, e 5-6) although she finds erotic and maternal love alluring, thel has no inclination to accept it as her only purpose of existence and her duty. she wants to see it as her active choice that would be appreciated and met with thankfulness, not as something that she needs to be thankful for. her maternal instincts to cherish and hold are alive and well, which is also true of her desire for partnership and marital union. nevertheless, thel’s intellect rebels at the clod’s message asserting her meaninglessness, her internal conviction that she of herself is dark, mean, and cold and is given meaning only by being impregnated. she does not want to accept the attitude indicated in the clod’s humble “i ponder, and i cannot ponder; yet i live and love” (5.6, e 6). this is the probable reason for thel’s unresponsiveness, shown in the design. interestingly, this is a moment where the design and the text evidently clash again. in the text, thel’s response to the words of the clod suggests welcoming and willing reception: she wipes her tears and proclaims her readiness to enter generation after all. the explanation of the shift in her stance, nevertheless, is peculiar: thel rephrases the clod’s speech but, as happened earlier in the conversation with the lilly, it seems that she has heard a message different from the one understood by the reader. has she even been listening to what the clod said? thel states: alas! i knew not this, and therefore did i weep: that god would love a worm i knew, and punish the evil foot that wilful, bruis’d its helpless form: but that he cherish’d it with milk and oil, i never knew; and therefore did i weep. (5.8-11, e 6) when thel was listening to the lilly, she screened out the meaning of her words: instead of the lilly’s proclamation of her smallness, humbleness, modesty, humility, and insignificance, thel noticed only her nurturing, giving, open attitude. now, summarizing what the clod said, she concentrates on the notion that god cherishes every living creature (the clod never said that!) and, consequently, she convinces herself to seek fulfillment in the world of adulthood and maturity. she does not, at that point, consciously notice the ideology endorsed by the clod because the clod talks about what thel desires: love, marital union, and childbearing. the vision of partnership and maternity is so tempting that thel overlooks graver implications in her words. it is as if the thel of the text is more naive and more easily deluded than the thel of the designs. no wonder that when she finally enters generation and sees with her own eyes the world whose patriarchal rules the lilly, the cloud, and the clod of clay described, she turns from it in revulsion, and, shrieking, flies back into the vales of har. the design accompanying the last plate of the book of thel (illus. 4) is an example of a verbal-visual relationship known as redundancy. while so far we have encountered one-to-one correspondence, by which every design has its equivalent in a passage of the text, the last design stands apart.the tendency to accompany text with designs that seem not to illustrate it is prominent in other prophetic books, and the designs for the first book of urizen may serve as an example (see pls. 15 and 27). within the book of thel pl. 1 is similar to a certain extent, but in comparison with the last plate it is still easier to find parallels with the text; erdman suggests that “both the eagle man and the armed man adumbrate the ‘fighting men in ambush’ that haunt thel in plate 6” (the illuminated blake 35). eaves, essick, and viscomi call this plate “less an illustration to the text than a visual commentary on it or a final vision providing an alternative ending to thel” (the early illuminated books 85). 4. the book of thel copy h (c. 1789), pl. 6. library of congress. image courtesy of the william blake archive. blake presents a striking image of two young children and an adolescent girl riding a snake in a way suggestive of both joy inherent in the activity and control exerted over the creature. the children play on the loops of the serpent; the girl, in a red dress in this copy, firmly holds the reins in her hand. some critics do not identify the girl with thel.neither erdman nor damon identifies the girl with thel. damon sees “a girl, with a light bridle” guiding “the serpent of nature” (52), while erdman decisively states that the girl is not thel and contrasts her “easy riding of the phallic serpent” with thel’s shriek (the illuminated blake 40). others, like anne mellor, see the design as a triumphant symbol of thel’s overcoming her fears,  suggesting that it is “an emblem of the ability of innocence to bridle or control the evils of the land of death, … and to reaffirm the wisdom of innocence” (36), which will enable thel later to “joyfully lead round her ‘sunny flocks,’ secure and lovingly productive in the mutable but holy world of innocence” (37). the second part of mellor’s statement is problematic. in my view, thel is present in the design and she is triumphant, but her rite of passage has been precisely to recognize the fact that she does not want to be “lovingly productive” and to “joyfully lead … her ‘sunny flocks,’” at least not round and round, as her sisters do in plate 1. i think, rather, that this design is indicative of thel’s inner transformation: instead of female malleability and perfect compliance with the roles that have been written for her, she takes the reins of control into her own hands and writes her role herself. i see this design as the most optimistic, as it implies maturity and decisiveness on thel’s part, but does not exclude joy and fulfillment (as suggested by the presence of the playing children). it appears that thel has finally found a way out of her dilemma and a life in which her worth does not entirely depend on how good she is at serving and self-denial, a life of which we see only a glimpse and which is not narrated in her book. the change of color of her dress in this copy, from white to dark pink, signifies that the rite of passage has been completed. two poems from songs of innocence and of experience that also deal with maternal love and childbearing throw additional light on thel’s dilemma concerning fulfillment. the connections occur both on the visual and on the textual level in ways too striking to ignore. “infant joy” and “infant sorrow” delineate contrasting visions of childhood and of parenthood. since the parents’ attitude to their parenthood—happiness or dejection—defines and determines the joy or sorrow of their children, the poems speak as much about the emotions of the children as of the adults. 5. “infant joy,” songs of innocence and of experience copy c (1789, 1794). library of congress. image courtesy of the william blake archive. “infant joy” (illus. 5) is visually linked to the book of thel through the plant image that forms the center of the design. the same flower (anemone pulsatilla), although with different leaves, is used in the title page of the book of thel (illus. 1). erdman discerns this similarity and goes on to ask: “and we might wonder how thel would regard the bud (which gets in her way in thel ii) if she could see the present scene in the open blossom?” (the illuminated blake 66). the anemone in the design has leaves and a stem strongly reminiscent of flames, and its blossom is also flame-like. inside the flower blake depicts three human figures: a mother with a child on her knees and a winged female angel. the poem enacts happiness and unity both verbally and visually: the stems and the leaves enclose the text and culminate in the cupor womb-like blossom in the upper part of the design, which delicately and safely shelters the nativity scene inside. the position of the mother, tenderly bent over her child, as well as the presence of an angel, recalls representations of the madonna and christ, in accordance with one of the main motifs of songs of innocence, where jesus is said to be identical with every living being, a child in particular.this motif recurs in songs of innocence: it can be found in “the lamb,” “the divine image,” “on anothers sorrow,” and “a cradle song.” the dialogue that governs the poem testifies to the harmonious interaction between the mother and the child. the mother’s question “what shall i call thee?” (line 3, e 16) signals receptivity and respect toward her newborn child. as a result, sweet joy befalls both of them, becoming the child’s name and the mother’s inner state. the womb-like shape of the flower and the flame and color symbolism (the flower in copy c is dark pink, almost purple) suggest the possibility that the scene inside the flower imaginatively renders the situation prior to the birth, and that the two-day-old child has only just been conceived. in this reading, more than ever before, the notion of a passionate erotic relationship stands in the background. the child is the mother’s joy because it is the fruit of her erotic union with a man she loves. she may shelter her baby inside her womb and sing joyful lullabies because she herself feels happy and protected inside her relationship. although no masculine element is literally present in the poem or in the picture, the presence of the father/partner figure is indicated both through the conception of the child and through the unity and happiness enacted in the design.  6. “infant sorrow,” songs of innocence and of experience copy c (1789, 1794). library of congress. image courtesy of the william blake archive. in contrast, “infant sorrow” projects a diametrically different scene. the loving dialogue between the mother and the child of “infant joy” is replaced by the woeful monologue of the newborn, who “leap[s]” (e 28) into the dangerous world, where nobody is happy about its birth: the parents, crying and groaning, give in to dejection and depression. the child becomes a devil (a “fiend”), not a joy; it enters a world defined by struggle, aggression, and limitation; it struggles in the father’s hands and against the swaddling bands, which constrain it and make any free movement impossible. exhausted by the conflict, the child gives up and agrees to suck its mother’s milk, but there is no “milky fondness,” no happy giving and taking: instead, the breastfed child is said to “sulk” upon the mother’s breast. clearly, there is no joy in their mutual relationship, only the baby’s needy hunger and the mother’s sense of duty and resignation. as john bender and anne mellor suggest, here, the child of innocent energy at first struggles against the chains of society and authority. but finally it capitulates, persuaded by developing reason that survival lies in accommodating oneself to the powers that be—even though such capitulation can only produce a life of frustration. the child is fed, but at the price of being swaddled and of “sulking.” (301) their reading of “infant sorrow” is primarily aimed at showing that there is a visual/verbal discrepancy between the design and the text, undermining the governing concept of the “sister arts” (298). the main disjunction, as this interpretation suggests, is between the newborn baby in the poem, swaddled and oppressed, and the one-and-a-half-year-old child in the design (304-05). another divergence can be detected in the mother figure, who “leans forward in a pliant arc” with a “soft, tenderly beckoning … gesture” toward her child (304). while the absence of the swaddling bands and the different age of the child are unmistakable, the gesture code that blake uses in this design seems to echo the title page of the book of thel, where the couple emerging from the flower are presented in a similar way—one of the lovers with hands uplifted in a gesture of alarm, the other struggling to grasp and embrace her. it may be concluded, then, that the design for “infant sorrow” retains ambiguity similar to that in the title page for thel. the child reaches away from the mother, communicating an ambivalent attitude toward her embrace, which may be perceived as tender or as restricting. feeling helpless and naked, “piping loud” as in the poem, the child finally has no choice, however, but to succumb to the mother’s grasp. it is worth remembering that thel, upon meeting the infant-worm, describes the baby in almost identical terms: “helpless,” “naked,” and “weeping.” her dilemma can be summarized in the clashing visions of motherhood depicted in “infant joy” and “infant sorrow.” thel yearns for fulfillment as a mother and as a partner similar to that indicated in “infant joy,” but does not think that such a vision is plausible in the world described by her interlocutors. convinced that in the world of generation motherhood would realize itself as metaphorically presented in “infant sorrow,” she visualizes herself as an oppressed and unhappy mother, who would impose the same pattern of oppression on her baby. since she does not want to become the groaning, grasping figure of “infant sorrow,” thel rejects the prospect of erotic love and motherhood outright, at least for the time being. her choice is deeply embedded in the question of gender difference in a patriarchal world, presided over by a male god who legitimizes the purpose of one’s existence by giving meaning to that which “of itself is cold. and of itself is dark” (thel 4.12, e 5), where a female has no right to assert her worth if she does not fulfill her biological function of childbearing. instead, thel desires existence in a world where being a mother does not mean solely becoming food for worms, where she is allowed to think and ask questions, making her own free choices, and where she may expect gratitude for all that she has to offer. considering the fate of female figures in blake’s later texts, one may feel that thel’s decision is quite appropriate. blake presents no vision of happy motherhood, and any prospect of a successful relationship comes at a high price. if we look at the book of thel from a feminist viewpoint, this can put other female characters in blake’s poetry into a new perspective. thus, we have brave, adventurous oothoon in visions of the daughters of albion, who is first cruelly mistreated and then severely punished for both her openness and her loving nature. not only is she branded a whore, but she is also made to abort her own child as a result of social pressure. why does she decide to perform the abortion? her urge to “purify” herself in order to “deserve” theotormon is one of her motives, but it is equally likely that she cannot face the possibility of becoming an outcast, unwed, single mother, nor does she want to be “stampt with my [bromion’s] signet” (visions 1.21, e 46). in other prophetic books we have enitharmon, who in the first book of urizen flees from los’s embrace but is probably forced into sexual union with him, which results in her (unwanted?) pregnancy. the outcome is a lifelong struggle for domination, since enitharmon is not a docile character either, but consequently her life is far from happy. she is another unfortunate mother in blake’s poems—together with her child she becomes a victim of los’s (the father’s) jealousy. orc is just as unhappy as the child from “infant sorrow”: he is born howling and his birth is accompanied by shrieks from all eternity. finally, he is bound to the rock at the top of the mountain and left there without any protection (urizen 19-20, e 79-80). both oothoon and enitharmon enact thel’s dilemma regarding the acceptance of the position of a woman in a patriarchal world. they plausibly present what might have happened to thel had she decided to enter generation after all. oothoon rebels, but succeeds only in verbally asserting her position, as the poem ends in stagnation. enitharmon, in turn, is a very ambivalent figure. married to los in “discontent & scorn” (the four zoas 13.19, e 308), she lives out her stormy relationship with her partner and generally fights for independence but ends up with what we may call militant feminism: she establishes the “womans world” till her creative capacities become perverted and she weaves the “triple female tabernacle for moral law,” “that he who loves jesus may loathe terrified female love / till god himself become a male subservient to the female” (jerusalem 88.16-21, e 247). instead of harmonious, mutually supportive relationships and love we mostly have power struggles. sadly, it seems that there are no positive patterns in blake’s later poetry to follow regarding female fulfillment either as an independent woman or in relation to others. the best that can happen to females such as ololon and jerusalem is their total absorption into their male counterpart, even if the outcome of this process is deemed glorious and ultimately positive. no wonder that this has provoked various statements about blake’s anti-feminist stance; diane hoeveler claims that “blake clearly depicts androgyny as a male-centered ideal that exists only through the predatory usurpation of the female. unless the female willingly sacrifices her existence to the male, he remains a spectre, a shadow of his unfallen potential,” and that there is in blake’s poetry “a persistent womb-envy of women as creators, life-givers, mothers” (42-43).however, this comment relates to what hoeveler terms an “early notion of the female as an unequal principle”; according to hoeveler, later blake turned to viewing women “as equals in recapturing the androgynous ideal” (43). yet it would be a mistake to reduce blake’s thought to everyday categories of gender only. ultimately, “male” and “female” are for him cosmic categories, the forces constituting the essence of humanity and the divine poetic genius, and this goes way beyond any domestic relevance of masculinity and femininity. since blake believes that the division into sexes is in fact one of the stages of the fall from the ideal order prior to the creation of the natural world, he also points out that “the sexual is threefold: the human is fourfold” (milton 4.5, e 97). when, at the end of milton, he speaks of those who pretend to poetry that they may destroy imagination; by imitation of natures images drawn from remembrance these are the sexual garments, the abomination of desolation hiding the human lineaments as with an ark & curtains which jesus rent: & now shall wholly purge away with fire till generation is swallowd up in regeneration (milton 41[48].23-28, e 142-43) he figures the sexual garments (it’s irrelevant whether they are male or female) as hiding the true essence that lies within. ultimately, “humanity is far above / sexual organization” (jerusalem 79.73-74, e 236). bearing in mind the clearly positive and sympathetic attitudes to what we can term female dissent in both the book of thel and visions of the daughters of albion, we can conclude that some of blake’s texts openly voice feminist concerns and yield well to feminist readings. blake displays acute sensitivity to and awareness of women’s issues, unprecedented among other so-called canonical romantic poets. first and foremost, he gives his female characters the right of choice—whether to enter a sexual relationship and to give birth to a child (thel), whether openly to display her readiness for erotic union and to deny ideology that condemns her to ostracism (oothoon)—even if he does not present constructive alternatives to the most socially expected choices. this is undoubtedly progressive when we realistically consider the situation of women at the end of the eighteenth century. secondly, and crucially, blake always finds a way to speak from the inside rather than from the outside of a dramatic situation that he constructs, which results in a non-judgmental stance and multiplies possible interpretations. this strategy makes him more akin to keats’s “chameleon poet” or even rossetti’s “inner standing point” than to wordsworth’s egotistical sublime or byron’s very personal manner of narration. in the book of thel and visions of the daughters of albion, the “inner standing point” that blake assumes is the perspective of the oppressed, internally conflicted, and pained woman. his sympathetic attitude is a result of his extraordinary psychological insights into the human psyche and human relationships, which pervade his poetry from the very early texts. his interest in the individual mind and its internal conflicts and contradictions finds its crowning manifestation in his major conception of the four zoas, which is as psychological as it is mythopoeic, but already in such texts as the book of thel, visions of the daughters of albion, and songs of innocence and of experience blake shows how perceptive and progressive his awareness of “mind-forg’d manacles” is.it is hardly surprising, therefore, that there are a number of studies tracing parallels between blake’s thought and ground-breaking psychological theories. see jerry caris godard, mental forms creating: william blake anticipates freud, jung, and rank (lanham: university press of america, 1985), diana hume george, blake and freud (ithaca: cornell university press, 1980), and dóra janzer csikós, “four mighty ones are in every man”: the development of the fourfold in blake (budapest: akadémiai kiadó, 2003). bibliography ankarsjö, magnus. blake and gender. jefferson: mcfarland, 2006. behrendt, stephen c. the moment of explosion: blake and the illustration of milton. lincoln: university of nebraska press, 1983. bender, john, and anne mellor. “liberating the sister arts: the revolution of blake’s ‘infant sorrow.’” elh 50.2 (summer 1983): 297-319. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/2872818>. accessed 14 march 2011. bloom, harold. the visionary company. 1961. ithaca: cornell university press, 1971. bruder, helen p. william blake and the daughters of albion. basingstoke: macmillan press ltd., 1997. damon, s. foster. a blake dictionary: the ideas and symbols of william blake. 1965. rev. ed. hanover: university press of new england, 1988. eaves, morris, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi, eds. william blake archive. <http://​www.​blakearchive.​org>. accessed 5 april 2011. ---, eds. william blake: the early illuminated books. princeton: princeton university press/william blake trust, 1993. the illuminated books, vol. 3. erdman, david, ed. the complete poetry and prose of william blake. 1965. newly rev. ed. new york: anchor–random house, 1988. ---. the illuminated blake: william blake’s complete illuminated works with a plate-by-plate commentary. 1974. mineola, ny: dover publications, 1992. frye, northrop. fearful symmetry. princeton: princeton university press, 1947. gleckner, robert f. the piper and the bard. detroit: wayne state university press, 1959. hayes, tom. “william blake’s androgynous ego-ideal.” elh 71.1 (spring 2004): 141-65. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/30029925>. accessed 17 december 2010. hoeveler, diane long. romantic androgyny: the women within. university park: pennsylvania state university press, 1990. levinson, majorie. “‘the book of thel’ by william blake: a critical reading.” elh 47.2 (summer 1980): 287-303. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/2872747>. accessed 14 march 2011. linkin, harriet kramer. “the function of dialogue in the book of thel.” colby quarterly 23.2 (june 1987): 66-76. matthews, susan. blake, sexuality and bourgeois politeness. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2011. mellor, anne kostelanetz. blake’s human form divine. berkeley: university of california press, 1974. mitchell, w. j. t. blake’s composite art. princeton: princeton university press, 1978. quinney, laura. william blake on self and soul. cambridge: harvard university press, 2009. raine, kathleen. william blake. 1970. london: thames and hudson ltd., 1993. schuchard, marsha keith. why mrs. blake cried: william blake and the sexual basis of spiritual vision. london: century, 2006. swearingen, james e. “will and desire in blake’s thel.” eighteenth-century studies 23.2 (winter 1989-90): 123-39. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/2738734>. accessed 26 march 2011. viscomi, joseph. “the evolution of the marriage of heaven and hell [part 1].” huntington library quarterly 58.3-4 (1997): 281-344. ---. “in the caves of heaven and hell: swedenborg and printmaking in blake’s marriage [part 3 of ‘the evolution of the marriage of heaven and hell’].” blake in the nineties. ed. steve clark and david worrall. basingstoke: macmillan, 1999. 27-60. ---. “the lessons of swedenborg; or, the origin of william blake’s the marriage of heaven and hell [part 2 of ‘the evolution of the marriage of heaven and hell’].” lessons of romanticism. ed. thomas pfau and robert f. gleckner. durham: duke university press, 1998. 173-212. warner, janet. “blake’s figures of despair: man in his spectre’s power.” william blake: essays in honour of sir geoffrey keynes. ed. morton d. paley and michael phillips. oxford: clarendon press, 1973. 208-24. worrall, david. “thel in africa: william blake and the post-colonial, post-swedenborgian female subject.” the reception of blake in the orient. ed. steve clark and masashi suzuki. london: continuum, 2006. 17-28. vol. 52, no. 3 winter 2018–19 angela esterhammer, victoria college, university of toronto nelson hilton, university of georgia tilar j. mazzeo, colby college robert w. rix, university of copenhagen joseph viscomi, university of north carolina at chapel hill david worrall, the nottingham trent university martin butlin, tate gallery, london, retired tristanne j. connolly, university of waterloo detlef w. dörrbecker, university of trier sibylle erle, bishop grosseteste university robert n. essick, university of california, riverside a d v i s o r y b o a r d a n i l l u s t r a t e d q u a r t e r l y volume 52 number 3 winter 2018–19 c o n t e n t s www.blakequarterly.org articles blake, paul, and sexual antinomianism by christopher z. hobson paper and watermarks in blake’s an island in the moon by fernando castanedo reviews christopher m. bundock, romantic prophecy and the resistance to historicism reviewed by john patrick james tracey emin and william blake in focus, tate liverpool, 16 september 2016–3 september 2017 reviewed by sibylle erle william blake and the age of aquarius, northwestern university, 23 september 2017–11 march 2018; stephen f. eisenman, ed., william blake and the age of aquarius reviewed by jennifer davis michael © 2019 copyright morris eaves and morton d. paley cover: blake, st. paul preaching in athens, 1803. 45.7 x 31.1 cm. rhode island school of design museum, 31.280. gift of the estate of mrs. gustav radeke. image courtesy of the william blake archive. e d i t o r s editors: morris eaves and morton d. paley review editor: alexander s. gourlay exhibitions editor: luisa calè bibliographer (criticism): wayne c. ripley bibliographer (music): jason whittaker managing editor: sarah jones sarah.jones@rochester.edu production office: department of english, university of rochester, rochester ny 14627-0451 38 blake/an illustrated quarterly summer 2011 of albion in relation to the writing of mary wollstonecraft and the analogies she draws between slavery and marriage. although alert to the points of disagreement between blake and wollstonecraft, who occupied quite distinct positions on the matter of sexual liberation, stevens provides a fascinating exploration of blake’s unorthodox belief that slavery caused suffering not only to those enslaved but to their masters. via a close reading of blake’s treatment of the body and the language employed by wollstonecraft, stevens constructs a forceful argument for reevaluating visions in light of lateeighteenth-century politics, both domestic and international. the complexity of blake’s political and cultural positioning is further drawn out in saree makdisi’s fascinating examination of the concepts of unity and difference and david fuller’s essay on the divine comedy images, while the intricate webbing of patronage, heritage, and homage is sensitively examined by andrew loukes in reference to blake’s portraits of poets. other authors offer evidence of blake’s engagement with cultural trends, in particular jared richman, who considers the wide popularity of milton’s poetry and blake’s peculiarly biographical interest in him. this approach is developed by martin myrone, who skillfully situates blake’s interest in the supernatural and the sublime in the context of a contemporary vogue for the gothic, while insisting upon the particularity of his practice. there is also a welcome passage on blake’s immediate predecessors by william pressly, in which the artist is seen as the legatee of a specifically british tradition. this theme of national heritage is also treated by robin simon in his discussion of songs of innocence and of experience. simon interprets blake’s engagement with familiar symbols of british identity as a means by which the artist introduced the quotidian or colloquial into a visionary language, by adopting the informal idiom of wordsworth, or through reference to the game of cricket. although the implication that a sense of national pride can be found in blake’s work is unconvincing, simon offers an interesting consideration of blake’s aesthetic choices and the way in which they embodied a rejection of reynolds’s theories of art. simon’s close reading of blake’s pictures, however, is an exception which points up one of the problems of the catalogue: the concentration upon blake’s writing. while simon and some others tackle blake’s symbolic visual imagery, a large number of the essays, among them some of the most engaging, are entirely dedicated to the poems, or gesture towards the images only as illustrations. naturally, a great deal of explanation and interpretation is needed in introducing a nonenglish-speaking audience to blake as an author. while it may be of great interest to consider the effect of translating blake’s work into french, or the prophetic nature (or otherwise) of europe and america, it is arguable, however, whether this is the place to do so. this is not to demand a strict separation of text from image, which would be contrary to the nature of the works themselves; when faced with so vast a subject it may perhaps have been more helpful to have limited discussion to the objects on display, of which there were more than enough to furnish a rich investigation of blake’s career. this in turn flags another, and perhaps more serious, flaw: the inadequate and incoherent use of illustrations. images are referred to throughout by catalogue number, which (as not all objects in the show are reproduced) leaves the reader searching through pictures that are not in numerical order, and are rarely positioned in clear relation to the text. this is compounded by inconsistency, when martin butlin (uniquely) decides to employ the numbering system from his catalogue the paintings and drawings of william blake in order to direct readers to relevant (but unexhibited) works. with so varied a selection of themes, and very little clear structure to their arrangement, this added confusion is particularly keenly felt. furthermore, the texts are too short to deal with their subjects adequately, and too often the writers seem to have been trapped into oversimplification, as in the case of david alexander, who discusses blake’s relationships with his patrons with no critical look at the artist’s investment in establishing a reputation as romantic outsider, or elizabeth c. denlinger, whose study of catherine blake reads as an unsatisfactorily token gesture towards a forgotten partner. in essence, while the questions raised by the catalogue are apposite, and many essays introduce themes that have not been dealt with in the french literature on blake, it might have been more productive to have limited the overall length of the text and included a fuller bibliography for those who wanted to explore further. this would then have provided the space for what would really have stimulated an enthusiasm for blake’s pictures: high quality reproductions of the works themselves, clearly arranged to allow for comparison and cross-referencing. without these, the catalogue can only help to reinforce the notion that blake’s true achievement was literary, and his images merely illustrative or incidental. this concise study of blake’s religion starts from the recent work done on blake’s moravian background and the possible overlaps between moravianism and swedenborgianism. in the process, it seeks to elucidate what is meant by blake’s radicalism, which, as the author points out, is a very slippery concept. the book starts with a rejection of e. p. thompson’s theory that blake’s mother was a mugglemagnus ankarsjö. william blake and religion: a new critical view. jefferson: mcfarland & company, 2009. viii + 163 pp. $39.95, paperback. reviewed by christopher rowland summer 2011 blake/an illustrated quarterly 39 been brought out more, rather than being confined to the final chapter on utopianism. the book’s title seems to promise a broad review of blake and religion, but in effect what we get is a rather narrowly focused discussion that omits key aspects of blake’s concerns (the bible, for example, and his understanding of the person of christ). of course, the treatment of sexual matters itself points to blake’s radicalism as far as religion is concerned. the maintenance of taboos about sex and gender is one of the key features of any religion, not least the mainstream christianity against which blake reacted. in affirming the importance of the discovery of blake’s moravian antecedents and exploring the implications for his religion, ankarsjö makes some pertinent points and offers a useful digest of the state of play of neglected elements in the study of blake’s religious background. students will find the summary chapter on unitarianism, swedenborgianism, and moravianism helpful. ankarsjö reminds us of the often mysterious and complex religious world from which blake emerged and to which he reacted, much of which remained in his theological bloodstream. tonian and a consideration of the links with unitarianism, swedenborgianism, and moravianism, but these last two loom largest, as they do throughout the rest of the book. the following chapter considers blake’s religion, moving from a treatment of some of the poems in blake’s notebook via the apocalyptic passages in the four zoas to milton and jerusalem. there are interesting comments on the powerfully effective juxtaposition of sex and religion, which gives some of blake’s lines such a radical feel. ankarsjö explores blake’s use of apocalyptic religion, especially the sense of climactic unity as male and female are united in the entry into paradise. the chapter ends with a suggestion that the emphasis on the forgiveness of sins might be explained by blake’s temptation to have an amorous affair with nancy flaxman, leading to his very personal interest in forgiveness. ankarsjö explores the intertwining of sex and religion more thoroughly in the central chapter on blake’s sexuality, which considers sexual elements throughout the blake corpus. here the supposed moravian influence is especially brought out, with some interesting comments made about familiar poems, not least the “challenging and daring” “i saw a chapel all of gold” (75-76), as well as the preoccupation with the blood of christ (john 19.34), found particularly in “the grey monk.” echoes of moravian and swedenborgian material are traced in visions of the daughters of albion. as already noted, eschatological union is a feature of blake’s later major works, echoing the kind of climax that we find in the book of revelation in the new testament. in some ways the material here retraces issues that the author has already enunciated in considering blake’s religion. the final chapter, entitled “blake’s utopian ‘colony,’” looks at plans to set up a swedenborgian utopian community in sierra leone, with a mix of sexual and utopian idealism, reflected in the book of thel, though with blake’s rejection of the patriarchal overtones. throughout the book, the swedenborgian elements that ankarsjö identifies in the later works are less compelling than those found in the early ones. despite its somewhat discursive style, this book is an interesting read, not least in exploring neglected areas of the blake corpus to show how swedenborgianism and moravianism may have influenced blake’s mental world. the definition of radicalism emerges from the content of the book and is focused on the attitude towards sexual issues. this may be a component of blake’s religion, but it does not by any means represent its entirety, and it would have been helpful to see whether the various strands of antinomian biblical interpretation support the views taken in the book. we know from the history of apocalypticism that for centuries thinkers have appropriated apocalyptic images in order to understand individual psychological development. in early christian interpretation of revelation we find interpreters like methodius and tyconius relating the images either to the religious life of the individual or the struggle of the ecclesial community. such elements have their echoes in blake’s work. the impact of this kind of understanding in terms of wider society could have the illuminated books of william blake re-created www.williamblakeprints.co.uk review: stranger from paradise (opera omaha) kevin lawler (libretto), nevada jones (music), hal france (conductor). stranger from paradise. 26-27 may 2017. opera omaha and the great plains theatre conference. reviewed by kristin m. girten kristin m. girten is an associate professor of english at the university of nebraska at omaha. her current book manuscript explores the enduring influence of epicurean materialism on british literature and science of the long eighteenth century. she has published articles on ann radcliffe’s gothic sublime, the poetry of charlotte smith, eliza haywood’s female spectator, and jonathan swift’s gulliver’s travels. omaha, nebraska, was in bloom with blake this past may. what is william blake doing in the land of willa cather? opera omaha, nebraska’s only professional opera company, had commissioned the locally based playwright kevin lawler to write and direct an opera focused on blake, with the goal of premiering the production at the 2017 great plains theatre conference. the conference is an annual regional festival hosted by omaha’s metropolitan community college and designed to nurture the talents of a wide array of local and national theatre artists. however unlikely, it proved to be an apt site for an operatic portrayal of blake’s life and work. not just a flyover city, omaha holds its share of somewhat secret (at least, nationally speaking) treasures. opera omaha is one of them. the great plains theatre conference, lawler, nevada jones, and hal france are others. stranger from paradise was a venture that joined all of their energies, along with those of a stellar cast and orchestra. the result was a highly engaging multisensory and multifaceted production. it is a shame that no future productions of the opera are currently planned, as national as well as international audiences would no doubt respond with as much enthusiasm as omaha audiences did. the three performances were sold out, and if the highly spirited buzz among the crowd following the closing-night performance i attended is any indication, the audience felt profoundly invigorated by their night with blake. the experimental features of the libretto, score, and set lent a provocative air to the work. moreover, while highly trained vocalists and musicians were required to meet the technical demands of the production, its contemporary style, use of a thrust stage in an urban black-box setting, and subtle theatricality created a casual and inviting atmosphere, which counterbalanced its operatic features. one did not have to be an aficionado of traditional opera to be enamored of the performance. given the location of the premiere, one might reasonably assume that, for many in the audience, stranger from paradise marked a first extended encounter with blake. as a “companion of angels” (blake’s letter of 6 may 1800), the author can present special challenges of accessibility for a general audience. popularizations of blake tend to focus on his more approachable works, such as songs of innocence and of experience, and/or to portray the visionary elements of his works in contemporary and too-familiar terms. while both approaches have ensured blake’s enduring appeal to twentiethand twenty-first-century audiences, they have also skewed modern audiences’ sense of the author. rarely do adaptations of his work engage in a resolute way with the intricacies of his mystical cosmology, radical philosophy, religious passion, or political critique. in stranger from paradise, lawler and jones seem to have been determined to explore blakean heights and depths that most contemporary treatments tend to avoid. while they emphasize songs, they honor the complexity of the work through a provocative libretto, swirling instrumentation, highly expressive vocal performance, dramatic staging, and an immersive set design. lawler and jones recognize that the simplicity of songs belies the powerful and regularly mind-bending insights of the poems. “the tyger,” for instance, is depicted as part allegory of artistic creation and part elegiac critique of a fallen world. moreover, they do not restrict their attention to songs. they weave elements of blake’s cosmological cast into stranger throughout: enitharmon, urizen, los, and albion are each given time on stage. the portrayals of these figures, in conjunction with the visually arresting set and emotionally moving score, conjure an otherworldly dimension and mythical significance for the production. placed just before the gorgeous culminating aria by “old catherine,” which leads into the scene of william’s death, “the song of los” is one of the most transporting pieces in the opera. its final lines, “i have forged a ball of fire / to light this wretched darkness,” have a lasting impact, preparing the audience not only for blake’s death but also for a profound sense of his immortality. mary carrick as old catherine and terry hodges as old william. thomas grady photography. image courtesy of opera omaha. focusing heavily on the biographical details of william’s relationships with his wife, catherine, and his brother robert, stranger from paradise concerns itself at least as much with blake’s life as it does with his works. organized around a series of flashbacks witnessed by blake from his deathbed, it is firmly rooted in his concrete lived experience. however, in the spirit of blake, lawler and jones resist an easy separation between experience and visionary transcendence. in fact, a major theme of the production is the difficulties the author himself faced in straddling the two domains. stranger reinforces the relatively common view that catherine was instrumental in helping blake to maintain a balance between both poles. when he soars too high, she brings him back to earth. however, she is also shown to foster his visionary flights by taking care of domestic responsibilities and supporting his poetic passion with loving care. in its portrayal of catherine and william’s relationship, the production periodically verges on sentimentality and, at points, would have benefited from a slightly lighter touch. moreover, it is disappointing that stranger neglects to feature blake’s innovative printmaking techniques—preferring to portray him writing in his notebook rather than engaged in engraving, printing, or coloring—especially because the libretto otherwise foregrounds the complex dynamic between materiality and transcendence in the author’s life and works. nevertheless, stranger inspires an appreciation of catherine and william’s creative partnership as well as the deep affection that seems to have accompanied it. it also effectively invites a nuanced consideration of the benefits of the relationship to both, recognizing that, while their love may have been shared, the gains they achieved as a result of it were not likely the same. the opera acknowledges that particular historical realities contextualized and informed their dynamic while at the same time holding their relationship up as a timeless model of reciprocal love and marriage. this approach invites audiences to admire william and catherine as historical figures and to reflect on how the issues of love, marriage, education, and creative expression resonate with our present moment. amanda deboer as young catherine, matthew clegg as young william, and terry hodges as old william. thomas grady photography. image courtesy of opera omaha. we are told in the marriage of heaven and hell that “without contraries is no progression.” contraries provide a striking underlying structure and theme throughout stranger from paradise, much as they do in blake’s works. perhaps the opera’s most affecting expression of them is in its music. jones juxtaposes major and minor keys throughout the score, and the result is moving, providing emotional depth and complexity to the production. with blake’s deathbed scene as the frame and backdrop, stranger maintains a melancholy tone. however, heaviness and darkness are frequently accompanied by lightness and color. in fact, the negative often leads to the positive, the minor to the major. in the words of blake, “joy & woe are woven fine / a clothing for the soul divine / under every grief & pine / runs a joy with silken twine” (“auguries of innocence”). thus, when blake dies at the end, though the audience is left in mourning with catherine, we are also simultaneously invited to marvel at the creative spark that surely must have transported blake, if not to a higher sphere, then certainly to a more complete union than pale divisive earth could possibly have afforded him. moreover, we are left hoping that catherine may ultimately have a similar transport; though she may not have possessed the philosophical genius or poetic prowess of blake, the opera encourages us to believe that, in many respects, she too subsisted on “the milk of paradise” (samuel taylor coleridge, “kubla khan”). finally, we are encouraged to consider how we might ourselves “hold … eternity” in the brief “hour” that is our life, much as william and catherine did (“auguries of innocence”). when i had the opportunity to meet with lawler after the production, i asked him to describe what had inspired him to create stranger from paradise. he informed me that he was a longtime admirer of blake. as a poet-artist himself who publishes poetry and often pairs it with his own photography <http://​windingroadtravel.​blogspot.​com>, he identifies with blake’s commitment to radical forms of creative expression. lawler seems particularly influenced by the visual and visionary qualities of blake’s writings. in our conversation, he quoted the opening of “auguries of innocence,” explaining that one of his hopes for stranger was that it would invite others to celebrate the experience of “see[ing] a world in a grain of sand / and a heaven in a wild flower.” speaking with lawler while reflecting on stranger, i was reminded of the profound transformative effects of such vision. not only does it manifest everyday wonders, making divine pleasure readily accessible, but it also affords hope while conferring great significance to quotidian (including domestic) existence. as a result, it is broadly and deeply empowering. to recognize, along with blake, that such vision is available to all of humanity is to recognize that all of humanity—women as well as men, the poor as well as the rich, children as well as adults—is imbued with dignity and deserving of respect. stranger pays homage to these philosophical and political underpinnings of blake’s visionary poetics, and, in doing so, it presents subtle lessons for our time even as the story it tells is of another time. in a political climate such as ours, where serious threats are being posed to inclusive access to education and opportunity, it is important to be reminded that the greatest insights and most significant inspirations often come from the humblest of places. it is also good to honor the value and power of individual acts of quiet rebellion. that lawler and jones conveyed these sentiments in nebraska, a red state, only accentuates the significance of their collaboration. the omaha premiere of stranger from paradise was a provocative and riveting production. depicting blake’s rebellious visionary spirit presents unique challenges. through their inspired and dynamic partnership, jones and lawler met these challenges, transforming them into unique opportunities. the opera’s cast and orchestra supported their inspiration, realizing its conceptual, aesthetic, and emotional power with grace and impressive musical artistry. kevin lawler and his collaborators are currently considering opportunities for mounting productions of stranger from paradise outside omaha (nationally and internationally). to explore the possibility of bringing the opera to your community, you may reach lawler at kmlawler@mccneb.edu. inscriptions by blake for his designs first published july 2014 updated october 2014 (list of additions) inscriptions by blake for his designs by g. e. bentley, jr. g. e. bentley, jr. (gbentley@chass.utoronto.ca) published william blake in the desolate market (mcgill–queen’s university press, 2014) and added 550 pages to the online “sale catalogues of blake’s works, 1791-2014.” editors’ note: wherever possible we have included a link to the design. in some cases the inscription is not visible on the image, e.g., if the writing is on the verso or the image has been cropped to the design. blake often wrote inscriptions on his designs, but only the most important have been recorded in comprehensive editions of his writings.geoffrey keynes, ed., the writings of william blake (london: nonesuch press, 1925 ff.), david v. erdman, ed., the poetry and prose of william blake (garden city: doubleday, 1965 ff.), and g. e. bentley, jr., ed., william blake’s writings (oxford: clarendon press, 1978) 1323-45 (notes on 1735-42). many are also recorded in bentley, blake books (oxford: clarendon press, 1977) 210-21. note that this essay does not include marginalia in books, which are quite fully recorded (e.g., william blake’s writings 1349-518), or blake’s descriptions of designs in his letters (e.g., the account of “the last judgment” in his letter of 18 jan. 1808 [copied twice]). a good many seem never to have been recorded in editions of blake’s writings or in concordances of them. some are brief titles, such as “pestilence” and “nimrod.” some are part of the design, such as “mene tek,” “πapis,” and “elizabeth rex.” often they identify the scene illustrated, as in the separate descriptions of the designs for the poems of gray and milton. a few are in greek, hebrew, italian, or latin. occasionally, what is not written is as interesting as what is written. thus in blake’s transcription of genesis, he twice omitted “and god saw that it was good” (1.18, 25), and in “the lord set a mark upon cain, lest any finding him should kill him” (4.15), he omitted “lest any finding him should kill him.” because these inscriptions are little known, it seems worthwhile to record here as many of them as possible. the information derives chiefly from martin butlin, the paintings and drawings of william blake (1981). for inscriptions within the drawing, the source is butlin vol. 2: plates; for inscriptions outside the picture, the source is butlin vol. 1: text. the numbers within angle brackets and the dates derive from butlin. the visionary heads were drawn chiefly in the folio blake-varley sketchbook, the large blake-varley sketchbook, and the small blake-varley sketchbook.until the rediscovery of the large blake-varley sketchbook, the small blake-varley sketchbook was known merely as the blake-varley sketchbook. the first and third have been broken up, but the drawings are recorded in butlin. the large blake-varley sketchbook survives pretty much intact, but it was rediscovered only in 1989, too late for butlin.the inscriptions in the large blake-varley sketchbook are recorded in the christie’s (london) catalogue of 21 march 1989 and in bentley, blake books supplement (oxford: clarendon press, 1995) 179-180. blake’s transcriptions of milton for his six designs for on the morning of christ’s nativity (butts set, 1815) and “the artist’s descriptions” of the butts series of designs for comus (1815) have not been traced since their sales at sotheby’s, 26 march 1852, lot 147, and foster’s, 29 june 1853, lot 98. the “descriptive paper” which, according to her letter of 4 august 1829, catherine blake delivered to lord egremont with blake’s “picture of spenser’s fairy queen,” has also disappeared. indirect inscriptions the titles of the works that blake exhibited at the royal academy in 1780 <#60>, 1784 <#187-88>, 1785 <#155-57, 160>, 1799 <#424>, 1800 <#416>, and 1808 <#438, 500, 642>, at his own exhibition in 1809-10 <#69, 438, 456, 495, 500, 649, 651, 653, 655, 657-61, 663-64>, and at the exhibition of the associated painters in water-colours in 1812 <#649, 651, 653> were clearly supplied by blake (those for his own exhibition in his descriptive catalogue [1809]). blake’s biblical watercolors for butts often had extensive inscriptions on the mounts in a copperplate hand. however, they cannot have been written by the blakes, for the inscriptions are on cards of a type not produced before 1846.joyce h. townsend, robin hamlyn, and john anderson, “the presentation of blake’s paintings,” william blake: the painter at work, ed. joyce h. townsend (london: tate publishing, 2003) 168. the extensive inscriptions on blake’s engravings for illustrations of the book of job (1826) are included, though most of them are quotations from the bible. the titles of the designs (1805) for robert blair, the grave (1808),see bentley, blake records, 2nd ed. (new haven: yale university press, 2004) 217-18. are likely to have derived at least in part from blake. john varley’s inscriptions on the visionary heads that he watched blake draw in 1819 almost certainly derived from what blake told him at the time and are listed here as if blake had made them.i except “these are heads he used to see of deceased worthies in vision” (five visionary heads of women [1819-20] <#765>) because it does not seem to quote blake. note that a fiend <#762>, herod <#706>, pindar as he stood a conqueror in the olympic games <#710>, and the task-master whom moses slew in egypt are known chiefly or entirely from descriptions of them by varley to cunningham ¶38. see, for instance, varley’s tracing of the egyptian taskmaster killed by moses <#696a>: seen in a vision by wm blake & drawn while the same remained before him. my self j. varley being present. in his front room first floor no. 3 fountain court near exeter change. the authority of the inscriptions by john linnell apparently derives from varley, for linnell was not present when the drawings were made. however, he seems to have copied varley very carefully. for instance, his long inscription on the replica of wat tyler <#738> is exactly like that of varley <#737>. i have therefore included the linnell inscriptions almost as if they were blake’s. blake’s hebrew 1. detail of blake’s letter to his brother, 30 jan. 1803. lessing j. rosenwald collection, library of congress. in his letter to his brother james of 30 january 1803, blake wrote “am now learning my hebrew אבג‎,”in a concordance to the writings of william blake, ed. david v. erdman et al. (ithaca: cornell university press, 1967) 1: 903, this is given as “am now learning my hebrew (aleph beth gimmel).” and he wrote hebrew inscriptions on a dozen of his surviving pictures. however, he never learned the hebrew script very well, and his formation of letters was sometimes “scrambled,” with the letters erratically formed, creating ambiguity in their interpretation.abraham samuel shiff, “blake’s hebrew calligraphy,” blake 46.2 (fall 2012): 34 pars. the hebrew on blake’s “laocoön” and milton pl. 15 is not recorded in my essay because it is regularly given in editions of blake’s writings. for other essays about blake’s hebrew, see arnold cheskin, “the echoing greenhorn: blake as hebraist,” blake 12.3 (winter 1978-79): 178-83; sheila a. spector, “blake as an eighteenth-century hebraist,” blake and his bibles, ed. david v. erdman (west cornwall, ct: locust hill press, 1990) 179-229; spector, “blake’s graphic use of hebrew,” blake 37.2 (fall 2003): 63-79; spector, “hebraic etymologies of proper names in blake’s myth,” philological quarterly 67 (1988): 345-63 (“it seems likely that blake used parkhurst’s hebrew and english lexicon” [1762; 4th ed. 1799]); menachem wecker, “did william blake know hebrew?” jewish daily forward 11 dec. 2009 (“blake had not even mastered the letter alef”). words in blake’s design inscriptions not in blake concordancesmany of the arcane words newly recorded here, such as balder, cynthea, hampton, hoders, mona, rinda, and sigtryg, derive from blake’s quotations of the authors he is illustrating, such as gray and milton. the list omits words in hebrew. these inscriptions add a significant number of words to blake’s known vocabulary.blake’s writings are recorded in erdman, a concordance (2 vols.), and his conversations in bentley, william blake’s conversations: a compilation, concordance, and rhetorical analysis (lewiston: edwin mellen press, 2008). neither records words in hebrew. acts [book of the bible] affrightest agnes agrippa [cornelius] amor animae arthur [prince] assasinator baffled balder bertand de gourdon bewitched blandy [miss] blood [colonel] bothwell brownrigg [mother] bruce [robert, king of scotland] buckingham [duke of] cassibelane cato centry [for “sentry”] chastening che churchway coeur de lion [richard i] conqueror continueth cornelius agrippa cozens cumea cynthea cythereas daniel darkeneth day [family name] decyph[ers] despitefully edward 2d eloise empress maud endor endureth eschewed essex [countess of] exalteth falconberg faulconberg the bastard fleeth games [olympic] gatherer [tax] girt givest glendower [owen] γνωθι [σ]εαυτον [greek for “know thyself”] gorgon gourdon [bertand de] hammerer [donald the] hampton haply harold [king] hastings [battle of] hayes [catherine] heeds henry 2d [king of england] henry the 5th hoders homeward hood [robin] hotspur hyperions inentrate inri isabella [queen] joan [pope] killeth kindred lago del cor lais [courtesan of corinth] lasciate laureate lieth lifteth listlessness lubbers lucy [sir robert] lxii [62] margaret mary queen of scots matthew maud [empress] mene tek mew’d mindful mona [son of] the monk [novel by lewis] monmouth [geoffrey of] narcissa nicholas nixion [tom] observeth oftentimes ogni olympia omni[a] opposeth orien overbury πapis [greek for paris] penury percieveth perkin warbeck persecutor pisistratus pleiades pliable [in pilgrim’s progress] plods provideth purr’d putteth rex rinda robin hood rowena rubbers [in cards] sabeans st nicholas church saith savage [richard] scarest scattereth sceptre scots [mary queen of] selima sendeth sheppard [jack] sigtryg sinnest slumberings speranza spied spreadings tabby task [cowper’s poem] triumphing [noun] unveil upstairs uz vanity fair [in pilgrim’s progress] vici [conquered] vincit voi vortigern wallace [william]wallace appears elsewhere only in blake’s conversations. warbeck [perkin] watering wearieth withstood worketh xantippe wife of socrates xtian for hebrew words and characters,early examples of faux hebrew may be seen in enoch walked with god (1780-85) (#146)—on a scroll are four indecipherable lines, which are a little like hebrew but are “only meaningless squiggles” (dena taylor, “emanations of the divine: kabbalistic elements in the poetry and designs of william blake,” toronto phd [1983] 191)—and the children of israel receiving the ten commandments from moses (1780-85) (#114)—on the scroll(?) are meaningless squiggles in place of the commandments (taylor 191). see the following inscriptions: watercolor for young, night thoughts, night ix, p. 17 (1795-96) engraving for young, night thoughts (1797), p. 63 sealing the stone and setting a watch (1800-03) christ nailed to the cross: the third hour (1800-03) hebrew characters using the human form (1803) job’s evil dreams (1805-06) “enoch” (1807) job (1826) pl. 1 job (1826) pl. 3 “laocoön” (?1826) omissions blake’s signatures on drawings and engravings, such as “blake sc”, “fresco w blake inv” (variants in <#299, 317, 326, 667, 669, 673-74, 750, 806>), “hell [or ‘hell’] canto [number]”,“hell canto [number]” appears on dante designs <#812 1-10, 12-13, 15-41, 43-53, 55-67, 69>. variants are “p-g canto [number]” <#812 70-89>, “par [or ‘par’] canto [number]” <#812 92, 98>, and “canto [number]” <#812 68, 96>. “type by w blake 1812”,“the chaining of orc,” separate plate <essick xvii*>. “wb”, “w blake”, “w. blake fecit” <#807>, “w blake inven [or ‘inventor’]” <#119, 126, 803>, “w blake pinx” <#377-78>, “wṃ blake” <#758>, “william blake”, monogram “wb inv”, and numbers (including solitary dates). inscriptions on his apprentice drawings <#1-47> are probably not by blake. some (e.g., <#6>) were certainly added after the drawings were made. manuscript annotations of “engraved” or “engraved reversed” on the drawings (e.g., <#330 151, 153>) for young’s night thoughts, because they do not seem to be by blake. meaningless squiggles of writing on a young woman reclining on a couch, writing in a book (1780-85) <#147>, on the tombstone in the watercolor for young’s night thoughts, night iii, p. 21 (1795-96) <#330 96>, in the palm-sized book held in the angel’s left hand in “and the angel which i saw lifted up his hand to heaven” (1805) <#518>, and elsewhere. engraved text on blake’s commercial prints, which was presumably supplied by the publisher and sometimes transcribed by a professional writing engraver, as in “moore & cọ’s manufactory & warehouse” advertisement (1797-98).for the full inscription, including identification of “common carpet loom,” “persia & turkey carpet loom,” and “stocking frame,” see essick xii and fig. 23. the longman accounts for “blake’s hesiod” record “jeffreys writing” (br[2] 772-73) to blake’s thirty-seven plates. blake almost certainly inscribed the writing on the plates for george cumberland’s thoughts on outline (1796), including both imprints and titles (some in greek), but presumably he was merely following cumberland’s directions or designs. blake etched the whole text of hayley’s little tom the sailor (1800). inscriptions on designs in blake’s notebook (1785-1805), vala or the four zoas (?1796-?1807), and upcott’s autograph album (1826), as well as those printed in his works in illuminated printing, which are recorded in bentley, william blake’s writings. corrigenda to poetical sketches (1783)poetical sketches corrigenda are given in notes to wbw 750, 752-53, 755, 757-59, 761, 763, 766-68, 770-71, 782-83, 787. and descriptive catalogue (1809).corrigenda to the descriptive catalogue are given in wbw 826n, 861n. abbreviations br(2) g. e. bentley, jr., blake records, 2nd ed. (new haven: yale university press, 2004) essick robert n. essick, the separate plates of william blake: a catalogue (princeton: princeton university press, 1983) wbw william blake’s writings, ed. g. e. bentley, jr., 2 vols. (oxford: clarendon press, 1978) symbols # martin butlin, the paintings and drawings of william blake (new haven: yale university press, 1981), vol. 1, drawing number * transcription based on the source indicated, usually butlin vol. 2 inscriptions on blake’s designs in chronological order “magna charta” “charta” the making of magna charta (1779) (robert n. essick) <#62*> “lord have mer on us”“lord [h]ave merc[y] on us” appears on the door of europe pl. 10. “the plague” pestilence, probably the great plague of london (1779-80) (private collection) <#184*> “death of earl goodwin” royal academy catalogue (1780) (picture in the collection of the british museum) <#60*, wbw 1741> “the spirit of a just man newly departed appearing to his mourning family” the spirit of a just man newly departed appearing to his mourning family (1780-85) (royal collection, windsor castle) <#135*> “hell beneath is moved for thee to meet thee at thy coming—isaiah”blake’s later design of the same subject is described in the butts-blake debtor-creditor account as “hell beneath is moved for thee &c from isaiah” (br[2] 764). the king of babylon in hell (1780-85) (royal collection, windsor castle) <#145*> “behold your king” samuel presenting saul to the people (1780-85) (british museum) <#117*, wbw 1323> “my sister thinks that this is the one that will do. i can’t be a judge, because i never saw the children cozens. i intend the girl to be putting on the boy’s hat, it seems they think the boy looks handsomest when he has his hat on. the hat shou’d be dispos’d in a careless manner & as near to the boy’s manner of wearing it as possible” “recd of mr. cousins one half of a subscription, june 11, 1783”the attribution of the drawing to blake and the inscription derive from the sotheby’s catalogue of 1-2 july 1915, lot 371. if the author is blake, “my sister” is catherine elizabeth blake (1764–1841), who would have been nineteen in 1783, and the subscription could be to stothard’s “zephyrus and flora” or “calisto,” engraved by blake and published by parker & blake, 17 dec. 1784. the date suggests that the children are not those of “mr. cosens, owner of the mill at felpham,” mentioned in blake’s “memorandum” (1803) of his quarrel with scolfield (br[2] 162). the children cozens (or cousins) (1783) (untraced since 1915) <#143*> “the witch of endor raising the spirit of samuel” the witch of endor raising the spirit of samuel (1783) (new york public library) <#144*> “war unchained by an angel, fire, pestilence, and famine following” royal academy catalogue (1784) (picture untraced since 1784) <#187, wbw 1741> “a breach in a city, the morning after a battle” royal academy catalogue (1784) (picture untraced since 1784) <#188,joseph viscomi, “a breach in a city the morning after the battle: lost or found?” blake 28.2 (fall 1994): 44-61, argues that butlin #188 is the same as butlin #191 (ackland art museum, university of north carolina at chapel hill). wbw 1741> “joseph’s brethren bowing before him” royal academy catalogue (1785) (picture in the collection of the fitzwilliam museum) <#155, wbw 1741> “joseph ordering simeon to be bound” royal academy catalogue (1785) (picture in the collection of the fitzwilliam museum) <#156, wbw 1741> “joseph making himself known to his brethren” royal academy catalogue (1785) (picture in the collection of the fitzwilliam museum) <#157, wbw 1741> “the bard, from gray” royal academy catalogue (1785) (picture untraced since 1785) <#160, wbw 1741> “daniel” daniel (1785) (british museum) <#167*> “the reposing traveller” aminadab, called “the reposing traveller” (1785) (british museum) <#170v*> “γνωθι [σ]εαυτον”greek for “know thyself,” which appears in blake’s engraving but not on fuseli’s preliminary drawing (reproduced in robert n. essick, william blake’s commercial book illustrations [oxford: clarendon press, 1991] pl. 60). frontispiece engraved by blake after fuseli for j. c. lavater, aphorisms on man (1788) “is all joy forbidden” is all joy forbidden (1790-93) (british museum) <#222*, wbw 1323> “the bible of hell, in nocturnal visions collected. vol. i. lambeth.” layout for title page, “the bible of hell” (1790-93) (untraced since 1876) <#221v*, wbw 1323> “pestilence” pestilence (1790-95) (private collection) <#190r*> “every prospect smiled” drawn but not engraved for mary wollstonecraft, original stories (1791) (library of congress) <#244 1*> “god sent for him” drawn but not engraved for mary wollstonecraft, original stories (1791) (library of congress) <#244 2*> “how delighted the old bird will be” drawn but not engraved for mary wollstonecraft, original stories (1791) (library of congress) <#244 3*> “she turned her eyes on her cruel master”only drawings that were not engraved bear titles by blake; the others <#244 4, 6-10> (<#244 10> not engraved) have no inscription by blake. drawn but not engraved for mary wollstonecraft, original stories (1791) (library of congress) <#244 5*> “cumea” copy (c. 1793) of michelangelo’s design on the ceiling of the sistine chapel (not in butlin); reproduced in sotheby’s catalogue of 28 nov. 2002, lot 236. “the american war” “angels to be very small as small as the letters that they may not interfere with the subject at bottom—which is to be in a stormy sky & rain separated from the angels by clouds” sketch for a title page, probably first idea for “america” (1793) (british museum) <#223ar*> “father & mother i return from flames of fire tried[?] & pure & white” “father and mother, i return,” perhaps for “the gates of paradise” (1793) (library of congress) <#202v*, wbw 1323> “how i pity” “how i pity,” perhaps for “the gates of paradise” (1793) (british museum) <#204*, wbw 1323> “for children the gates of hell” “for children: the gates of hell”: design for an unpublished title page (1793) (fitzwilliam museum) <#205r*, wbw 1323> “edward & elenor” “edward & elenor,” separate plate (1793) (british library; british museum) <essick iv*, wbw 1741> “our end is come” “the accusers of theft adultery murder,” separate plate, first state (1793) (bodleian) <essick viii*, wbw 162> “birth of a daisy” visions (b) pl. 3 (1793) (british museum) <wbw 102n> “evening clouds” visions (b) pl. 10 (1793) (british museum) <wbw 115n> “pity”, “doubt”, “dissipation”, “weariness”, “luxury”, “idleness”, “suicide[?]”, “indolence”, “rage”, “despair”, “reason[?]”, “deceit”, “discontent”, “joy” | “avarice”, “listlessness”, “study”, “cruelty”, “distress”, “severity”, “oppression”, “misery”, “mischief”, “protection” various personifications, a death bed and other drawings (1793-94) (houghton library, harvard) <#214r-v*> “when the senses are shaken and the soul is driven to madness”the inscriptions (recorded in an 1891 exhibition catalogue) are on an impression printed in intaglio (now untraced); they are not visible on the color-printed impressions in the british museum and the us national gallery of art. “page 56” “the accusers of theft adultery murder,” separate plate, second state (1793-96) (british museum; national gallery of art, washington, dc) <essick viii*, wbw 162> “the dead … do …” the dead bad-doers (1794-96) (robert n. essick) <#232r*> “elohim creating adam” elohim creating adam, color print (1795) (tate) <#289*, wbw 1741> “god speaking to adam” god judging adam, color print (1795) (tate) <#294*, wbw 1741> “the good and evil angels” the good and evil angels struggling for possession of a child, color print (1795) (tate) <#323*> “the house of death milton” the house of death, color print (1795) (tate) <#320*, wbw 1741> “lamech and his two wives” lamech and his two wives, color print (1795) (tate) <#297*, wbw 1741> “nebuchadnezzar” nebuchadnezzar, color print (1795) (tate) <#301*, wbw 1741> “newton” newton, color print (1795) (tate; lutheran church of america, philadelphia) <#306-07*, wbw 1741> “pity from shakespeare’s macbeth” pity, color print (1795) (metropolitan museum of art, new york) <#311*> “nimrod” nimrod or “let loose the dogs of war” (1795) (nelson-atkins museum of art, kansas city) <#331*> “the christian triumph” watercolor for young, night thoughts, night iv, title page (1795-96) (british museum) <#330 1r-v>, originally intended as the frontispiece for all the designs. it was engraved (1797) as “the | christian | triumph.” “mene tek”“mene mene tekel upharsin” was the mysterious inscription on the wall at belshazzar’s feast (daniel 5.25). watercolor for young, night thoughts, night ii, p. 27 (1795-96) (british museum) <#330 60>, engraving (1797), p. 33, representing the writing on the wall at belshazzar’s feast; note that the inscription is in roman characters, not hebrew. “plato de animae immortale-tate — —” “cicero de nat: deor” “aristot: respub:” “plutarchi chaer: op” “lock[e] on human under[standing]” watercolor for young, night thoughts, night v, p. 44 (1795-96) (british museum) <#330 199>; the inscriptions are on spines of books. “immortality decyph[ers] man” watercolor for young, night thoughts, night vii, p. 26 (1795-96) (british museum) <#330 298>; the inscription is on a tablet held by a winged figure. “x commandtṣ” watercolor for young, night thoughts, night vii, p. 61 (1795-96) (british museum) <#330 333>; the inscription is on moses’s tablets of the law. “mystery” watercolor for young, night thoughts, night viii, title page (1795-96) (british museum) <#330 345>; the inscription is on the forehead of the whore of babylon. “vici” watercolor for young, night thoughts, night viii, p. 57 (1795-96) (british museum) <#330 403>; the line illustrates “and when he falls, writes vici on his shield.” “night” “thoughts” watercolor for young, night thoughts, night viii, p. 69 (1795-96) (british museum) <#330 415>; the words are on a book being torn in half, “night” on one, “thoughts” on the other, with fingers obscuring the letters. “here lieth thomas day aged 100 year” watercolor for young, night thoughts, night ix, p. 6 (1795-96) (british museum) <#330 424, wbw 1742>; the inscription is on a tombstone. hebrew for “as time, after strife” watercolor for young, night thoughts, night ix, p. 17 (1795-96) (british museum) <#330 435>, translated here by abraham samuel shiff, “blake’s hebrew calligraphy,” blake 46.2 (fall 2012): pars. 4-6; the words are on a book. the line starred is “awful eternity! offended queen!” “end of the night thoughts” watercolor for young, night thoughts, night ix, p. 119 (1795-96) (british museum) <#330 537> “a breach in a city the morning after the battle” a breach in a city, the morning after the battle (1795-1800) (ackland art museum, university of north carolina at chapel hill) <#191>see note 21, above. “‘the book of my remembrance’” urizen pl. 5 in small book of designs (b) (1796) (beinecke library, yale) <wbw 247n> “‘death & hell’” | “‘teem with life’” marriage pl. 11 in small book of designs (b) (1796) (princeton university library) <wbw 85n> “‘does the soul labour thus’” | “‘in caverns of the grave’” urizen pl. 10 in small book of designs (b) (1796) (beinecke library, yale) <wbw 253n> “‘doth god take care of these’”the inscriptions on the newly discovered prints for small book of designs (b) are given in martin butlin and robin hamlyn, “tate britain reveals nine new blakes and thirteen new lines of verse,” blake 42.2 (fall 2008): 52-72. thel pl. 7 in small book of designs (b) (1796) (tate) “‘eternally i labour on’” urizen pl. 9 in small book of designs (b) (1796) (princeton university library) <wbw 253n> “‘every thing is an attempt’” | “‘to be human’” urizen pl. 11 in small book of designs (b) (1796) (tate) “‘fearless tho in pain’” | “‘i travel on’” urizen pl. 23 in small book of designs (b) (1796) (tate) “‘a flaming sword’” | “‘revolving every way’” marriage pl. 14 in small book of designs (b) (1796) (national gallery of art, washington, dc) <wbw 88n> “the floods overwhelmed me” urizen pl. 12 in small book of designs (b) (1796) (tate) “i labour upwards into | futurity” urizen pl. 12for discussion of which impression of urizen pl. 12 was part of small book (b), see butlin and hamlyn 55 and bentley, “william blake and his circle, 2008,” blake 43.1 (summer 2009): 12n22. in small book of designs (b) (1796) (morgan library) <wbw 244n> “‘frozen doors to mock’” | “‘the world: while they within torments up lock.’” urizen pl. 22 in small book of designs (b) (1796) (robert n. essick) <wbw 271n> “‘i sought pleasure & found pain’” | “‘unutterable’” urizen pl. 7 in small book of designs (b) (1796) (tate) “‘is the female death’” | “‘become new life’” urizen pl. 19 in small book of designs (b) (1796) (tate) “o flames of furious desire”the pencil inscription on the verso is not in blake’s hand, but it may have been transcribed from a blake inscription. urizen pl. 3 in small book of designs (b) (1796) (keynes family trust) <wbw 241n> “‘o revolving serpent’” | “‘o the ocean of time & space’” marriage pl. 20 in small book of designs (b) (1796) (robert n. essick) “‘teach these souls to fly’” urizen pl. 2 in small book of designs (b) (1796) (tate) <wbw 240n> “‘vegetating in fibres of blood’” urizen pl. 17 in small book of designs (b) (1796) (tate) “‘wait sisters’” | “‘tho all is lost’” visions pl. 10 in small book of designs (b) (1796) (keynes family trust) “‘which is the way’” | “‘the right or the left’” urizen pl. 1 in small book of designs (b) (1796) (keynes family trust) <wbw 239n> “‘who shall set’” | “‘the prisoners free’” marriage pl. 16 in small book of designs (b) (1796) (tate) “night the first | — | on life | … | death | and | immortality | ——” young, night thoughts (1797), night i, title page proof (houghton library, harvard) <#330a 1>; engraved as “night the first, | on | life, | death | and | immortality.” “time | — | death | —— friendsh | ——” young, night thoughts (1797), night ii, title page proof (houghton library, harvard) <#330a 2>; engraved as “night the second | on | time, | death | and | friendship.” “night | the | third, | narcissa.” young, night thoughts (1797), night iii, title page 2. young, night thoughts (1797), colored copy q, p. 63 (see enlargement of the hebrew). yale center for british art, paul mellon collection. b1978.43.1405. hebrew characters on a scroll (see illus. 2) young, night thoughts (1797), p. 63, illustrating “this king of terrors is the prince of peace”; some of the hebrew characters are reversed, others are “scrambled” or a “graffiti-like emulation of hebrew” (abraham samuel shiff, “blake’s hebrew calligraphy,” blake 46.2 [fall 2012]: par. 3). on the corresponding drawing <#330 108> the lines on the scroll are meaningless. according to shiff (par. 8), probably blake was “not in command of the hebrew alphabet in 1797.” “ode on the spring design 1 the pindaric genius recieving his lyre 2 gray writing his poems 3 the purple year awaking from the roots of nature & the hours suckling their flowery infants 4 ‘with me the muse shall sit & think at ease reclind in rustic state’ 5 ‘brush’d by the hand of rough mischance or chilld by age’ 6 summer flies reproaching the poet around the springs of gray my wild root weaves traveller repose & dream among my leaves.   —will. blake” watercolor (1797) for poems by mr. gray, a new edition (london: j. murray, 1790) (yale center for british art) <#335 2*, wbw 1324>. the words within single quotation marks are quoted from gray’s poem. “ode on the death of a favourite cat design. 1 ‘midst the tide two angel forms were seen to glide’ 2. ‘demurest of the tabby kind’ 3 ‘the pensive selima her ears of jet & emrald eyes she saw & purr’d applause’ 4. ‘still had she gazd but midst the tide two angel forms were seen to glide. the hapless nymph with wonder saw a whisker first & then a claw &c’ 5. ‘malignant fate sat by & smild the slippery verge her feet beguild she tumbled headlong in’ 6. ‘nine times emerging from the flood ‘she mew’d to every watry god’” watercolor (1797) for poems by mr. gray (1790) (yale center for british art) <#335 8*, wbw 1324-25> “ode on a distant prospect of eton college design 1 windsor terrace, a boy contemplating a distant view of eton college. 2. a boy flying a kite 3 two boys wandering in the woods by eton college. the shade of henry the sixth is seen among the trees. ‘henrys holy shade.’ line 4 4. ‘say father thames for thou hast seen full many a sprightly race who foremost &c’ 5. ‘the captive linnet’ ‘the rolling circle’ ‘murmuring labours’ &c 6. ‘yet see how all around them wait the vultures of the mind’ 7. ‘ambition this shall tempt to rise then whirl the wretch from high’ &c design 8. ‘lo in the vale of years beneath the painful family of death’ 9. ‘where ignorance is bliss tis folly to be wise’ 10 boys playing at top.” watercolor (1797) for poems by mr. gray (1790) (yale center for british art) <#335 14*, wbw 1325-26> “a long story design 1. a circular dance 2. fairies riding on flies 3. ‘an ancient pile of bui[l]ding which employd the power of fairy hands’ 4. ‘the seals & maces dancd before him’ 5. ‘a brace of warriors’ 6. ‘bewitchd the children of the peasants’ 7. ‘upstairs in a whirlwind rattle’ 8. ‘out of the window whisk they flew’ 9. ‘at the chapel door stand centry’ 10. ‘a sudden fit of ague shook him’ 11. ‘my lady rose & with a grace she smild & bid him come to dinner’ 12. ‘guard us from long winded lubbers that to eternity would sing and keep my lady from her rubbers’” watercolor (1797) for poems by mr. gray (1790) (yale center for british art) <#335 22*, wbw 1326> “elizabeth rex” watercolor (1797) for poems by mr. gray (1790) (yale center for british art) <#335 26*>; the inscription is on a seal. “ode to adversity design 1. a widower & children 2. grief among the roots of trees 3. ‘purple tyrant vainly groans’ 4. ‘stern rugged nurse’ virtue nursd in the lap of adversity 5. ‘in thy gorgon terrors clad screaming horrors funeral cry despair & fell disease & ghastly poverty’ 6. ‘oh gently on thy suppliants head dread goddess lay thy chastening hand’” watercolor (1797) for poems by mr. gray (1790) (yale center for british art) <#335 36*, wbw 1326-27> “the progress of poesy 1. the beginning of poesy. the blind begging bard 2. study 3. ‘the laughing flowers that round them blow’ ‘drink life & fragrance as they flow’ 4. ‘perching on the scepterd hand of jove, thy magic lulls the featherd king’ 5. ‘cythereas day.’ 6. ‘hyperions march they spy & glittering shafts of war’ 7. ‘shaggy forms oer ice built mountains roam’ 8. ‘alike they scorn the pomp of tyrant power and coward vice that revels in her chains’ 9. ‘to him the mighty mother did unveil her awful face’ 10. ‘dryden ‘bright eyd fancy hovering o’er’ 11. ‘oft before his infant eyes would run such forms as glitter in the muses ray’ 12. a muse.” watercolor (1797) for poems by mr. gray (1790) (yale center for british art) <#335 42*, wbw 1327> “the bard 1. a welch bard. 2. the slaughterd bards, taken from the line ‘the famishd eagle screams & passes by’ page 98. 3. the bard weaving edwards fate 4. edward & his queen & nobles astonishd at the bards song 5. ‘hark how each giant oak & desart cave sigh to the torrents awful voice beneath’ 6. ‘on yonder cliffs.’ ‘i see them sit’ 7. ‘oer thy country hangs the scourge of heaven’ 8. the whirlwind. ‘hushd in grim repose’ 9. ‘fell thirst & famine scowl a baleful smile upon their baffled guest’ 10. the death of edwards queen eleanor from this line ‘half of thy heart we consecrate’ 11. elizabeth. ‘girt with many a baron bold’ 12. spenser creating his fairies. 13. ‘headlong from the mountains height deep in the roaring tide he plungd to endless night’ 14. a poor goatherd in wales.—” watercolor (1797) for poems by mr. gray (1790) (yale center for british art) <#335 52*, wbw 1327-28> “the fatal sisters 1. the three fatal sisters 2. a muse 3. ‘sigtryg with the silken beard’ 4. ‘persons of horseback riding full speed toward a hill & seeming to enter into it’ 5. ‘iron sleet of arrowy shower hurtles in the darkend air’ 6. ‘shafts for shuttle dyed in gore shoot the trembling cords along’ 7. ‘we the reins to slaughter give’ 8. the fatal sisters riding thro the battle. they are calld in some northern poems ‘choosers of the slain’ 9. ‘hurry hurry to the field’ 10. a battle.” watercolor (1797) for poems by mr. gray (1790) (yale center for british art) <#335 66*, wbw 1328-29> “the descent of odin. 1. the serpent who girds the earth 2. spectres 3. ‘him the dog of darkness spied’ 4. ‘right against the eastern gate by the moss grown pile he sat.’ 5. the prophetess rising from her grave 6. ‘tis the drink of balder bold’ 7. ‘a wondrous boy shall rinda bear who neer shall comb his raven hair nor wash his visage in the stream till he on hoders corse shall smile’ 8. ‘ha! no traveller art thou king of men i know thee now’ 9. ‘hie thee hence’ 10. the serpent & the wolvish dog—two terrors in the northern mythology” watercolor (1797) for poems by mr. gray (1790) (yale center for british art) <#335 78*, wbw 1329> “the triumphs of owen 1. a standard bearer fainting in the routed battle 2. a festal board. 3. the bard singing owens praise 4. ‘dauntless on his native sands the dragon son of mona stands’ 5. ‘fear to stop & shame to fly’ 6. ‘the liberal man inviting the traveller into his house’” watercolor (1797) for poems by mr. gray (1790) (yale center for british art) <#335 86*, wbw 1329> “ode for music. 1. fame. 2. a bird singing 3. a genius driving away ‘comus & his midnight crew’ 4. ‘milton struck the corded shell newtons self bends from his state sublime’ 5. ‘i wood the gleam of cynthia silver bright’ ‘where willowy comus lingers with delight’ 6. ‘great edward with the lillies on his brow to hail the festal morning come’ 7. ‘leaning from her golden cloud the venerable margaret’ 8. ‘the laureate wreathe’ 9. ‘nor fear the rocks nor seek the shore’ 10. fame.” watercolor (1797) for poems by mr. gray (1790) (yale center for british art) <#335 94*, wbw 1330> “epitaph 1. the mourner at the tomb 2. her infant image here below sits smiling on a fathers woe” watercolor (1797) for poems by mr. gray (1790) (yale center for british art) <#335 102*, wbw 1330> “elegy 1. the author writing 2. contemplation among tombs 3. ‘the plowman homeward plods his weary way and leaves the world to darkness & to me’ 4. ‘for him no more the blazing hearth shall burn nor children run to lisp their sires return’ 5. ‘oft did the harvest to their sickle yield’ 6. ‘chill penury repressd their noble rage’ 7. ‘some village hampden that with dauntless breast the little tyrant of his fields withstood’ 8. ‘many a holy text around she strews’ 9. ‘some kindred spirit shall enquire thy fate haply some hoary headed swain may say oft &c’ 10. ‘slow thro the churchway path we saw him borne’ 11. a shepherd reading the epitaph 12 a spirit conducted to paradise” watercolor (1797) for poems by mr. gray (1790) (yale center for british art) <#335 106*, wbw 1330-31> “dust thou art. here lieth wm blake aged 10[ ]” watercolor (1797) for poems by mr. gray (1790) (yale center for british art) <#335 112*> “the last supper: ‘verily i say unto you, that one of you shall betray me.’—matt. chap. 26, ver. 21” royal academy catalogue (1799) (picture in the collection of the national gallery of art, washington, dc) <#424, wbw 1741> “the loaves and fishes” royal academy catalogue (1800) (picture in the collection of robert n. essick) <#416, wbw 1741> “epistles | to | john flaxman | sculptor”an allusion to william hayley (tom’s father), an essay on sculpture: in a series of epistles to john flaxman, esq. r.a. (1800). thomas alphonso hayley (1800) (yale center for british art) <#345*>; it is the title on a scroll. “1sṭ samuel 28tḥ ch: 12tḥ to 21” the ghost of samuel appearing to saul (1800) (national gallery of art, washington, dc) <#458*> “john xix c. 23 & 24 v” the soldiers casting lots for christ’s garment (1800) (fitzwilliam museum) <#495*> “acts ix c. 6 v” the conversion of saul (1800) (huntington library and art collections) <#506*> “agnes from the novel of the monk designed & painted by catherine blake & presented by her in gratitude & friendship to mrṣ butts” catherine blake, agnes (1800) (fitzwilliam museum) <#c1*> “judg ch. 16 v. 19” samson subdued (1800-03) (philadelphia museum of art) <#455*> “ii samuel. xiv. c. 33 v.” david pardoning absalom (1800-03) (higgins museum, bedford) <#459*> 3. sealing the stone and setting a watch (1800-03) (see enlargement). yale center for british art, everett v. meeks, b.a. 1901 fund. b1979.12.703. “matthew xxvii c 66v” hebrew on the headband of the priest beside the ladder and on the bottom of the robe of the man speaking to the priestsee the textual transcription and editors’ notes for this watercolor in the william blake archive. (see illus. 3) sealing the stone and setting a watch (1800-03) (yale center for british art) <#499*>; the inscription in copperplate “sealing the stone & setting a watch” is not by blake (see note 4). “mark ch: 16th: v. 6th:” the three maries at the sepulchre (1800-03) (fitzwilliam museum) <#503*> “inri” “luke xxiii c. 42 v” christ crucified between the two thieves (1800-03) (fogg museum, harvard) <#494*>; “inri” (on the wood above christ’s head) stands for “iesus nazarenus rex iudaeorum” (“jesus of nazareth king of the jews”). “inri”for its meaning, see christ crucified between the two thieves (1800-03), above. hebrew for “i [am] the lord” christ nailed to the cross: the third hour (1800-03) (morgan library) <#496*>; hebrew on the headband of the priest above christ and on the hem of the priest’s robe over his left wrist. according to abraham samuel shiff (“blake’s hebrew calligraphy,” blake 46.2 [fall 2012]: par. 12), the letters on the robe have no biblical authority. “acts xxviii c 4 v” st. paul shaking off the viper (1800-03) (private collection) <#509*> “holy | bible” (on book spine) “the | task” (on book spine) “william cowper | &c” hayley’s first idea for cowper’s monument (1802) (houghton library, harvard; fitzwilliam museum) <#355*, 356*> “the | task” (on book spine) “holy | bible” (on book spine) “william cowper | &c” hayley’s second idea for cowper’s monument, inscribed below “the monument of cowper | in the church of east dereham | designed by wm hayley” (1802) (princeton university library) <#357*> “in st nicholas church dereham” “cowper’s monument in dereham church” hayley’s second idea for cowper’s monument, replica (1802) (beinecke library, yale) <#358*> “gen: ch: 3rd: v. 21st:” the angel of the divine presence clothing adam and eve with coats of skins (1803) (fitzwilliam museum) <#436*> hebrew alphabet figures hebrew characters using the human form (1803) (whitworth art gallery, university of manchester) <#199v> “judges xi c 35 v” jephthah met by his daughter (1803) (philadelphia museum of art) <#450*> “psalm lxxxv. 10. v” mercy and truth are met together, righteousness and peace have kissed each other (1803) (victoria & albert museum) <#463*> “gen: ch: 39tḥ v 17tḥ & 18” joseph and potiphar’s wife (1803-05) (yale center for british art) <#439*> “job xl. c 1 to 4 v.” job confessing his presumption to god who answers from the whirlwind (1803-05) (national gallery of scotland) <#461*> “mattw: ch: 4tḥ v. 11th:” the third temptation (1803-05) (victoria & albert museum) <#476*> “luke 10 ch: v 41st: & 42”according to butlin, the inscription is on a mount that has been removed. christ in the house of martha and mary (1803-05) (victoria & albert museum) <#489*> “acts i c. 9 & 10 v” the ascension (1803-05) (fitzwilliam museum) <#505*> “acts xviii c. 6 v” st. paul and the viper (1803-05) (britten–pears foundation) <#510*> “revns: ch: 12th: v 4th:” the great red dragon and the woman clothed with the sun (1803-05) (brooklyn museum) <#519*> “ezekiel” “i take away from thee the desire of thine eyes, ezekiel xxiv c 16” “ezekiel,” separate plate, second state (1804) (british museum; fitzwilliam museum) <essick vi*, wbw 1741> “albion rose from where he labourd at the mill with slaves giving himself for the nations he danc’d the dance of eternal death” “albion rose,” separate plate, second state (1804 or later) (british museum; national gallery of art, washington, dc) <essick vii*, wbw 314n> “journey of life” the journey of life (1804-07) (british museum) <#572*, wbw 634n> “genesis iiḍ c. 3d v—” god blessing the seventh day (1805) (private collection) <#434*> “genesis xxviii c. 12v” jacob’s dream (1805) (british museum) <#438*> “exod: ch: 2nd v. 7tḥ & 8tḥ” the finding of moses (1805) (victoria & albert museum) <#440*> “visions of eternity” visions of eternity (1805) (british museum) <#444v*, wbw 1323> “matt. 25 ch. v. 9” the parable of the wise and foolish virgins (1805) (metropolitan museum of art, new york) <#478*> “mark xiv c 26 v” the hymn of christ and the apostles (1805) (private collection) <#490*> “luke ch: 23rd v. 53rd” the entombment (1805) (tate) <#498*> “exod: c xxv. v 20” christ in the sepulchre, guarded by angels (1805) (victoria & albert museum) <#500*> “matw: ch: 28th: v. 2nḍ” the angel rolling the stone away from the sepulchre (1805) (victoria & albert museum) <#501*> “rev: c xxii v 1 & 2” the river of life (1805) (tate) <#525*> “inri”for its meaning, see christ crucified between the two thieves (1800-03), above. the crucifixion: “behold thy mother” (1805) (tate) <#497*>; the inscription is on the wood above christ’s head. “prone on the lowly grave—she drops— clings yet more closely to the senseless turf. nor heeds the passenger who looks that way” the widow embracing her husband’s grave for blair’s grave (1805) (yale center for british art) <#633>; the inscription is on a mount. at least three tombstones in the design have illegible inscriptions, which may be mere squiggles. “deaths door” “deaths door,” separate plate (1805) (robert n. essick) <essick xiii*> “the skeleton re-animated [on the sound of the archangel’s trumpet]” or “a skeleton discovering the first symptoms of re-animation” blair prospectus in burns, reliques (1808); “of the designs” in blair’s grave (1808); the design appears on the engraved title page in blair’s grave (1808) “christ descending into the grave [with the keys of death and hell]” or “the descent of christ into the grave” first blair prospectus (1805); blair prospectus in burns, reliques (1808); “of the designs” in blair’s grave (1808); engraved plate in blair’s grave (1808) “the [a] meeting of a family in heaven” or “a family meeting in heaven” first blair prospectus (1805); blair prospectus in burns, reliques (1808); “of the designs” in blair’s grave (1808); engraved plate in blair’s grave (1808) “the counsellor, king, warrior, mother & child in the tomb” first blair prospectus (1805); blair prospectus in burns, reliques (1808); “of the designs” in blair’s grave (1808); engraved plate in blair’s grave (1808) “the strong and wicked man dying” or “death of the strong wicked man” first blair prospectus (1805); blair prospectus in burns, reliques (1808); “of the designs” in blair’s grave (1808); engraved plate in blair’s grave (1808) “the soul suspended over the body, unwilling to part with life” or “the soul reluctantly parting with the body” or “the soul hovering over the body [reluctantly parting with life]” first blair prospectus (1805); blair prospectus in burns, reliques (1808); “of the designs” in blair’s grave (1808); engraved plate in blair’s grave (1808) “the valley of death” or “the descent of man into the vale of death” first blair prospectus (1805); blair prospectus in burns, reliques (1808); “of the designs” in blair’s grave (1808); engraved plate in blair’s grave (1808) “death’s door” first blair prospectus (1805); blair prospectus in burns, reliques (1808); “of the designs” in blair’s grave (1808); engraved plate in blair’s grave (1808) “the re-union of soul with the body at the last day” or “the reunion of the soul & the body” first blair prospectus (1805); blair prospectus in burns, reliques (1808); “of the designs” in blair’s grave (1808); engraved plate in blair’s grave (1808) “the last judgment” or “the day of judgment” first blair prospectus (1805); blair prospectus in burns, reliques (1808); “of the designs” in blair’s grave (1808); engraved plate in blair’s grave (1808) “the soul exploring the caverns of death” or “the soul exploring the recesses of the grave” first blair prospectus (1805); blair prospectus in burns, reliques (1808); “of the designs” in blair’s grave (1808); engraved plate in blair’s grave (1808) “the good old man dying” or “the death of the good old man” first blair prospectus (1805); blair prospectus in burns, reliques (1808); “of the designs” in blair’s grave (1808); engraved plate in blair’s grave (1808) “death pursuing the soul through the avenues of life” first blair prospectus (1805) (drawing in the collection of robert n. essick) “friendship”some titles of the watercolors sold in 2006 that were not engraved appear to bear no authority from blake: “the grave personified” (price), “while surfeited upon thy damask cheek” (anon.), “a father and two children beside an open grave” (anon.), “heaven’s portals wide expand to let him in” (essick), and “our time is fixed” (anon.). first blair prospectus (1805) (drawing in the collection of alan parker) “the new testament” on the open book under the hand of the good old man, both in blake’s sketch (1805) and in the engraved plate in blair’s grave (1808) “our father which art in heavn hallowed be thy name thy will be” job and his family (1805-06) (morgan library) <#550 1*> hebrew on the tablets of the ten commandments job’s evil dreams (1805-06) (morgan library) <#550 11*>; hebrew inscriptions on the tablets of the law from exodus 20.13: thou shalt not “kill,” “commit adultery,” or “steal.” according to abraham samuel shiff (“blake’s hebrew calligraphy,” blake 46.2 [fall 2012]: pars. 13-21), the hebrew has many errors. in the engraved version, in job (1826) pl. “11,” there is no writing on the tablets. “the spirit of nelson guiding lev[i]athan in whose folds are entangled the nations of the ear[th]” sketch for “the spiritual form of nelson guiding leviathan” (1805-09) (british museum) <#650*> “theotormon woven” theotormon woven (1805-10) (victoria & albert museum) <#575*> “the accusers of theft adultery murder” “a scene in the last judgment satans’ holy trinity the accuser the judge & the executioner” “the accusers of theft adultery murder,” separate plate, third state (1805-10) (multiple impressions) <essick viii*, wbw 162> “adam & eve” sketch for “satan watching the endearments of adam and eve” (1806) (fitzwilliam museum) <#532*, wbw 1741> “as y[ou] like i[t]” jacques and the wounded stag for shakespeare, second folio (1806) (british museum) <#547 1*> “richard 3d” richard iii and the ghosts for shakespeare, second folio (1806) (british museum) <#547 2*> “julius c” brutus and caesar’s ghost for shakespeare, second folio (1806) (british museum) <#547 4*> “the grave | a poem | by robert blair | illustrated with 12 engravings | by louis schiavonetti | from the original inventions | of | william blake. | 1806” first reproduced among the watercolors for blair’s grave rediscovered in 2001 and offered at sotheby’s (new york), 2 may 2006, lot 1; not in butlin. “a series of designs: illustrative of the grave, a poem by robert blair. invented & drawn by william blake 1806” second alternative design for title page: a spirit rising from the tomb (1806) (huntington library and art collections) <#616*, wbw 1331> “to the queen”, plus, too faint now to read, blake’s dedicatory poem to blair’s grave (1808) design for the dedication to blair’s “grave” (1807) (british museum) <#620*> hebrew for “enoch” hebrew for “and enoch walked with god” [genesis 5.24] “enoch,” separate lithograph (1807) (four copies known) <essick xv*, wbw 1741>;copy b has an inscription by george cumberland about making lithographs, which he had “of blake” (see essick xv and br[2] 246-47). on the book on enoch’s lap and on the page held by the man to his left. “inri”for its meaning, see christ crucified between the two thieves (1800-03), above. michael foretells the crucifixion (1807) (huntington library and art collections) <#529 11*>; the inscription is on the wood above christ’s head. “the father indignant at the fall—the saviour. while the evil angels are driven, gently conducts our first parents out of eden through a guard of weeping angels—satan now awakes sin, death, & hell, to celebrate with him the birth of war & misery, while the lion seizes the bull, the tyger the horse, the vulture and the eagle contend for the lamb” the fall of man (1807) (victoria & albert museum) <#641*, wbw 1332> “jacob’s dream: vide genesis, chap. xxviii, ver. 12” royal academy catalogue (1808) (picture in the collection of the british museum) <#438, wbw 1741> “christ in the sepulchre, guarded by angels” royal academy catalogue (1808) (picture in the collection of the victoria & albert museum) <#500, wbw 1741> “the last judgment” royal academy catalogue (1808) (picture in the collection of the national trust, petworth house) <#642> “the spiritual form of nelson guiding leviathan, in whose wreathings are infolded the nations of the earth” descriptive catalogue (1809) (picture in the collection of the tate) <#649> “the spiritual form of pitt, guiding behemoth …” descriptive catalogue (1809) (picture in the collection of the tate) <#651>; the description was slightly altered in the exhibition of the associated painters in water-colours (1812) (wbw 829n). “sir jeffery chaucer and the nine and twenty pilgrims on their journey to canterbury” descriptive catalogue (1809) (picture in the collection of pollok house, glasgow) <#653> “the bard, from gray” descriptive catalogue (1809) (picture in the collection of the tate) <#655> “grays bard” sketches for “the bard” (1809) (philadelphia museum of art) <#656*> “the ancient britons” descriptive catalogue (1809) (picture untraced since 1809) <#657> “a spirit vaulting from a cloud to turn and wind a fiery pegasus—shakspeare” descriptive catalogue (1809) (picture untraced since 1809) <#658> “the goats, an experiment picture” descriptive catalogue (1809) (picture untraced since 1809) <#659> “the spiritual preceptor, an experiment picture” descriptive catalogue (1809) (picture untraced since 1809) <#660> “satan calling up his legions, from milton’s paradise lost” descriptive catalogue (1809) (picture in the collection of the victoria & albert museum) <#661> “the bramins” descriptive catalogue (1809) (picture untraced since 1809) <#663> “the body of abel found by adam and eve; cain, who was about to bury it, fleeing from the face of his parents” descriptive catalogue (1809) (picture in the collection of the fogg museum, harvard) <#664> “the soldiers casting lots for christ’s garment” descriptive catalogue (1809) (picture in the collection of the fitzwilliam museum) <#495> “jacob’s ladder” descriptive catalogue (1809) (picture in the collection of the british museum) <#438> “the angels hovering over the body of jesus in the sepulchre” descriptive catalogue (1809) (1805) (picture in the collection of the victoria & albert museum) <#500> “ruth” descriptive catalogue (1809) (picture in the collection of the southampton city art gallery) <#456> “the penance of jane shore in saint paul’s church” descriptive catalogue (1809) (picture in the collection of the tate) <#69> “chaucers canterbury pilgrims”, “reeve”, “chaucer”, “clerk of oxenford”, “cook”, “miller”, “wife of bath”, “merchant”, “parson”, “man of law”, “plowman”, “physician”, “franklin”, “2 citizens”, “shipman”, “the host”, “sompnour”, “manciple”, “pardoner”, “monk”, “friar”, “a citizen”, “lady abbeſs”, “nun”, “3 priests”, “squires yeoman”, “knight”, “squire”, “amor | vincit | omni[a]”“amor | vincit | omni[a]” (love conquers all) appears on the plaque or medallion on the rosary of the lady abbess in all states. it does not seem to be recorded in essick, separate plates 60-89. it does not appear in the preliminary drawing in the british museum. the words are quoted from chaucer’s prologue, as essick reminds me. “chaucers canterbury pilgrims,” separate plate, first state (1810) (national gallery of art, washington, dc) <essick xvi>. note (illus. 4) the medallion reading “amor | vincit | omni[a]” (the last letter of each word somewhat uncertain) on the rosary of the lady abbess, not previously recorded. 4. detail of “chaucers canterbury pilgrims” showing the “amor vincit omni[a]” inscription. this image is from an impression of the fourth state. collection of robert n. essick. “job” “what is man that thou shouldest try him every moment? job vii c 17 & 18v” “job,” separate plate, second state (1810) (british museum; fitzwilliam museum) <essick v*, wbw 1741> “engraved when i was a beginner at basires from a drawing by salviati after michael angelo” “joseph of arimathea among the rocks of albion,” manuscript (?1810) on separate plate, first state (1773) (fitzwilliam museum) <essick i*> “joseph of arimathea among the rocks of albion” “engraved by w blake 1773 from an old italian drawing this is one of the gothic artists who built the cathedrals in what we call the dark ages wandering about in sheep skins & goat skins of whom the world was not worthy such were the christians in all ages michael angelo pinxit” “joseph of arimathea among the rocks of albion,” separate plate, second state (1810-20) (multiple impressions) <essick i*, wbw 642> “πapis”, i.e., “paris” the judgment of paris (1811) (british museum) <#675*>; the inscription is in greek, on the collar of paris’s dog. “chaining of orc” the chaining of orc (1812) (british museum) <#584*> “sir jeoffrey chaucer and twenty-seven pilgrims leaving the tabarde inn, in the borough, on their way to canterbury, morning” associated painters in water-colours catalogue (1812) (picture in the collection of pollok house, glasgow) <#653> “the spiritual form of pitt” associated painters in water-colours catalogue (1812) (picture in the collection of the tate) <#651> “the spiritual form of nelson” associated painters in water-colours catalogue (1812) (picture in the collection of the tate) <#649> “mirth. allegro” “heart easing mirth …”lacunae in the inscriptions from l’allegro and il penseroso represent blake’s extensive transcriptions from the poems, which may be found in, inter alia, wbw. “these personifications are all brought together in the first design. surrounding the principal figure which is mirth herself” description of mirth for l’allegro (1816-20) (morgan library) <#543 1*, wbw 1332-33> “… the lark is an angel on the wing dull night starts from his watch tower on a cloud. the dawn with her dappled horses arises above the earth the earth beneath awakes at the larks voice” description of night startled by the lark for l’allegro (1816-20) (morgan library) <#543 2*, wbw 1333> “… the great sun is represented clothed in flames surrounded by the clouds in their liveries, in their various offices at the eastern gate. beneath in small figures milton walking by elms on hillocks green the plowman. the milkmaid the mower whetting his scythe. & the shepherd & his lass under a hawthorne in the dale” description of the sun at his eastern gate for l’allegro (1816-20) (morgan library) <#543 3*, wbw 1333-34> “… in this design is introduced mountains on whose barren breast the labring clouds do often rest mountains clouds rivers trees appear humanized on the sunshine holiday. the church steeple with its merry bells the clouds arise from the bosoms of mountains while two angels sound their trumpets in the heavens to announce the sunshine holiday” description of a sunshine holiday for l’allegro (1816-20) (morgan library) <#543 4*, wbw 1334> “… the goblin crop full flings out of doors from his laborious task dropping his flail & cream bowl yawning & stretching vanishes into the sky. in which is seen queen mab eating the junkets. the sports of the fairies are seen thro the cottage where ‘she’ lays in bed ‘pinchd & pulld’ by fairies as they dance on the bed the cieling & the floor & a ghost pulls the bed clothes at her feet. ‘he’ is seen following the friars lantern towards the convent” description of the goblin for l’allegro (1816-20) (morgan library) <#543 5*, wbw 1334-35> “… the youthful poet sleeping on a bank by the haunted stream by sun set sees in his dream the more bright sun of imagination. under the auspices of shakespeare & johnson. in which is hymen at a marriage & the antique pageantry attending it” description of the youthful poet’s dream for l’allegro (1816-20) (morgan library) <#543 6*, wbw 1335> “melancholy. pensieroso … these personifications are all brought together in this design surrounding the principal figure of who is melancholy herself” description of melancholy for il penseroso (1816-20) (morgan library) <#543 7*, wbw 1335-36> “… milton in his character of a student at cambridge sees the moon terrified as one led astray in the midst of her path thro heaven. the distant steeple seen across a wide water indicates the sound of the curfew bell” description of the wandering moon for il penseroso (1816-20) (morgan library) <#543 8*, wbw 1336-37> “… the spirit of plato unfolds his worlds to milton in contemplation. the three destinies sit on the circles of platos heavens weaving the thread of mortal life these heavens are venus jupiter & mars hermes flies before as attending on the heaven of jupiter the great bear is seen in the sky beneath hermes & the spirits of fire air water & earth surround miltons chair” description of the spirit of plato for il penseroso (1816-20) (morgan library) <#543 9*, wbw 1337> “… milton led by melancholy into the groves away from the suns flaring beams who is seen in the heavens throwing his darts & flames of fire the spirits of the trees on each side are seen under the domination of insects raised by the suns heat” description of the sun in his wrath for il penseroso (1816-20) (morgan library) <#543 10*, wbw 1337> “… milton sleeping on a bank. sleep descending with a strange mysterious dream upon his wings of scrolls & nets & webs unfolded by spirits in the air & in the brook around milton are six spirits or fairies hovering on the air with instruments of music” description of milton’s mysterious dream for il penseroso (1816-20) (morgan library) <#543 11*, wbw 1337-38> “… milton in his old age sitting in his mossy cell contemplating the constellations. surrounded by the spirits of the herbs & flowers. bursts forth into a rapturous prophetic strain” description of milton in his old age for il penseroso (1816-20) (morgan library) <#543 12*, wbw 1338> “cornelius agrippa” large blake-varley sketchbook (1819) (alan parker) “alexander the great” large blake-varley sketchbook (1819) (alan parker) “thomas a becket preaching” large blake-varley sketchbook (1819) (alan parker) “miss blandy who poisoned her father” large blake-varley sketchbook (1819) (alan parker) “colonel blood who attempted to steal the crown” large blake-varley sketchbook (1819) (alan parker) “bothwell” large blake-varley sketchbook (1819) (alan parker) “mother brownrigg” large blake-varley sketchbook (1819) (alan parker) “robert bruce king of scotland” large blake-varley sketchbook (1819) (alan parker) “canute” “dark hair & eyes” large blake-varley sketchbook (1819) (national gallery of art, washington, dc) <#721*>; repeated on the replica (huntington library and art collections) <#722*, wbw 1741>. “cassibelane” “cassibelane the british chief” “by blake octr. 27 1819 11 p m” large blake-varley sketchbook (1819) (alan parker) “charlemagne” large blake-varley sketchbook (1819) (alan parker) “eloise” large blake-varley sketchbook (1819) (alan parker); eloise was the mistress of abelard. “countess of essex who poisoned overbury” large blake-varley sketchbook (1819) (alan parker) “the bastard faulconberg” large blake-varley sketchbook (1819) (alan parker) “felton the assasinator of the duke of buckingham” large blake-varley sketchbook (1819) (alan parker) “geofrey of monmouth” large blake-varley sketchbook (1819) (alan parker) “owen glendower” large blake-varley sketchbook (1819) (alan parker) “bertand de gourdon who wounded richard cœur de lion with an arrow” large blake-varley sketchbook (1819) (alan parker) “the captain to richard the first who flayd bertand de gourdon alive” large blake-varley sketchbook (1819) (alan parker) “catherine hayes burnt for the murder of her husband” large blake-varley sketchbook (1819) (alan parker) “the black prince” large blake-varley sketchbook (1819) (alan parker) “henry the 5th” large blake-varley sketchbook (1819) (alan parker) “robin hood” large blake-varley sketchbook (1819) (alan parker) “hotspur” large blake-varley sketchbook (1819) (alan parker) “queen isabella wife of edward 2d and mother to edward the 3rd” large blake-varley sketchbook (1819) (alan parker) “pope joan” large blake-varley sketchbook (1819) (alan parker) “king. john.” large blake-varley sketchbook (1819) (robert n. essick) <#731>; a counterproof is inscribed “king john” by varley (private collection) <#732*>. “josephs mistress” large blake-varley sketchbook (1819) (alan parker); joseph’s mistress is potiphar’s wife. “sir robert lucy, shakespeares persecutor” large blake-varley sketchbook (1819) (alan parker) “mary queen of scots” large blake-varley sketchbook (1819) (alan parker) “empress maud” large blake-varley sketchbook (1819) (alan parker) “merlin” large blake-varley sketchbook (1819) (alan parker) “milton when young” large blake-varley sketchbook (1819) (alan parker) “milton when a boy” large blake-varley sketchbook (1819) (alan parker) “miltons elder daughter” large blake-varley sketchbook (1819) (alan parker) “miltons youngest daughter” large blake-varley sketchbook (1819) (alan parker) “tom nixion the idiot author of the prophecies” large blake-varley sketchbook (1819) (alan parker) “olympia” large blake-varley sketchbook (1819) (alan parker); olympia is probably mother of alexander the great. “ossian” large blake-varley sketchbook (1819) (alan parker) “pisistratus” large blake-varley sketchbook (1819) (alan parker) “pharoah who knew joseph” large blake-varley sketchbook (1819) (alan parker) “[richard] savage the poet” large blake-varley sketchbook (1819) (alan parker) “rowena” large blake-varley sketchbook (1819) (alan parker) “shakespeare’s wife” large blake-varley sketchbook (1819) (alan parker) “a daughter of shakespeare” large blake-varley sketchbook (1819) (alan parker) “jack sheppard under the gallows” large blake-varley sketchbook (1819) (alan parker) “wat tyler in the act of striking the tax gatherer” large blake-varley sketchbook (1819) (alan parker) “wat tyler’s daughter striving to get loose from the tax gatherer” large blake-varley sketchbook (1819) (alan parker) “vortigern” large blake-varley sketchbook (1819) (alan parker) “perkin warbeck” large blake-varley sketchbook (1819) (alan parker) “the great earl of warwick brother to edward the 4th drawn by wm blake” large blake-varley sketchbook (1819) (alan parker) “xantippe wife of socrates” large blake-varley sketchbook (1819) (alan parker) “can you think i can endure to be considered as a vapour arising from your food i will leave you if you doubt i am of no more greater importance than a butterfly” “empress maud not very tall” small blake-varley sketchbook (1819), written by john varley; “spiritual communication to mr blake” (untraced since 1971) <#692 5*> “pl[um]” “m” “l[igh]t blue” “crimson” detailed drawings for p. 23 of the small blake-varley sketchbook (1819), written by john varley (tate) <#692 22*>; the notes are for the colors in a stained-glass window. “the empress maud said rose water was in the vessel under the table octr. 29 friday 11 pm. 1819. & said there were closets which contained all the conveniences for the bedchamber” detailed drawings for p. 25 of the small blake-varley sketchbook (1819), written by john varley (tate) <#692 24*> “empress maud” “gold & silver & precious stones” “o” “g o d[ark] green” the empress maud, small blake-varley sketchbook (1819), written by john varley (private collection) <#692 27*>; the notes for precious stones are on maud’s headdress, the dark green on her skirt. “caractacus” caractacus, small blake-varley sketchbook (1819), written by john linnell (fitzwilliam museum) <#692 36>; counterproof, written by john varley (huntington library and art collections) <719*>. “hotspur …” “it is allways to keep yourself collected” two visionary figures, mountains behind, small blake-varley sketchbook (1819), written by john varley (victoria university in the university of toronto) <#692 53*, 54*>; the inscriptions are now illegible. “falconberg taking leave of king john and his mother queen eleanor” falconberg taking leave of king john and queen eleanor, small blake-varley sketchbook (1819), written by john varley (private collection) <#692 57*> “crimson” “green” a seated monarch with an agonized expression, small blake-varley sketchbook (1819), written by john varley (private collection) <#692 64*>; the notes are for the colors of the monarch’s clothes. “prince arthur” “lt pink” prince arthur, small blake-varley sketchbook (1819), written by john varley (university of liverpool library) <#692 66*> “lt. pl” [for “light plum”?] “gold” “w” [for “white”?] a standing king holding a sceptre, a fortified town behind, small blake-varley sketchbook (1819), written by john varley (private collection) <#692 74*>; “lt. pl” is on the figure’s robe, “gold” on the hem of his cloak, and “w” on his sleeve and skirt. “harrold killd at the battle of hastings” harold killed at the battle of hastings, small blake-varley sketchbook (1819), written by john varley (robert n. essick) <#692 76*> “milton’s first wife” “gn [green] velvet” “b[lac]k” “b[row]n eyes” milton’s first wife, small blake-varley sketchbook (1819), written by john varley (private collection) <#692 96*>; colors repeated in #692 97* (tate). “gn velvet” is for her coif, “bk” for the ribbon round her neck. “red” “blue” (or “black”) sketches of the devil (?) and a man in armour, small blake-varley sketchbook (1819), written by john varley (private collection) <#692 99*>; “red” is by the right-hand figure’s shield and “blue” is below this. “hotspur said    any[?] & we should have had the battle had it not been for those cursd stars hotspur said he was indignant to have been killd by through the stars influence by ^such^ a person as prince henry who was so much his inferior” varley: counting for geomancy, small blake-varley sketchbook (1819), written by john varley (untraced since 1971) <#692 131*> “rḍ coeur de lion” richard coeur de lion, small blake-varley sketchbook (1819), written by john varley (robert n. essick) <#692 a*> “born 1156. died april 6. 1199 ♓ ♑ [astrological symbols for pisces and capricorn] 10. h ♎ [astrological symbol for libra] at birth” “rḍ coeur de lion. drawn from his spectre” “w blake fecit octṛ 14 1819 at 14 past 12-midnight” richard coeur de lion, visionary head (1819), written by john varley (private collection) <#729*> “cancer” cancer, small blake-varley sketchbook (1819), written by john varley (robert n. essick) <#692 c*> “william wallace” “edward. ist” edward i, and william wallace, visionary head (1819), written by john linnell (robert n. essick) <#734*> “wat tyler by wm blake. from his spectre. as in the act of striking the tax gatherer on the head. drawn octr 30. 1819. 1h am” wat tyler, visionary head (1819), written by john varley (private collection) <#737*> “wat. tyler by. wm blake. from his spectre. as in the act of striking the tax gatherer on the head. drawn octr 30. 1819. 1h am” wat tyler, replica, visionary head (1819), written by john linnell (private collection) <#738*> “corrinna the rival of pindar” “corrinna the grecian poetess” folio blake-varley sketchbook (1819-20), written by john linnell (university of kansas museum of art) <#708*, wbw 1742> “a fiend” folio blake-varley sketchbook (1819-20) (untraced since 1830), title from cunningham ¶38 <#762> “herod” folio blake-varley sketchbook (1819-20) (untraced since 1830), title from cunningham ¶38 <#706> “pindar as he stood a conqueror in the olympic games” folio blake-varley sketchbook (1819-20) (untraced since 1942), title from cunningham ¶38 <#710> “pindar drawn by. blake septr 18. 1820” “lais the courtesan” folio blake-varley sketchbook (1819-20), written by john linnell (harris museum and art gallery, preston, lancashire) <#711*> “the task-master whom moses slew in egypt” folio blake-varley sketchbook (1819-20) (untraced since 1830), title from cunningham ¶38 “david” david, visionary head (1819-20), written by john linnell (robert n. essick) <#698*> “uriah the husband of bathsheba” “bathsheba” uriah and bathsheba, visionary head (1819-20), written by john varley (huntington library and art collections) <#699*> “solomon” solomon, visionary head (1819-20), written by john linnell (courtauld institute; private collection; huntington library and art collections) <#700-02*> “nebuchadnezzar coin” nebuchadnezzar coin, visionary head (1819-20), written by john varley or john linnell “as seen in a vision by mr. blake” (untraced since 1939) <#704*> “joseph & mary & the room they were seen in” joseph and mary, and the room they were seen in, visionary heads (1819-20), written by john linnell (huntington library and art collections) <#705*> “lais” lais of corinth, visionary head (1819-20), written by john varley (private collection) <#712*> “socrates” socrates, visionary head (1819-20), written by john varley (huntington library and art collections) <#713*> “cassibelane the british cheif” [sic] cassibelane, visionary head (1819-20), written by john linnell (robert n. essick) <#716*> “boadica” [sic] boadicea, visionary head (1819-20), written by john linnell (private collection) <#717*> “mahomet” mahomet, visionary head (1819-20), written by john linnell (santa barbara museum of art) <#720*> “the empress maud mother to henry. 2ḍ” the empress maud, visionary head (1819-20), written by john linnell (robert n. essick) <#725*> “the assassin laying dead at the feet of edwḍ 1st in the holy land” “saladin” saladin, and the assassin, visionary head (1819-20), written by john linnell (huntington library and art collections) <#728*> “faulconberg the bastard” faulconberg the bastard, visionary head (1819-20), written by john linnell (robert n. essick) <#730*> “king edward the first as he now exists in the other world, according to his appearance to mr blake. he here has his scull enlarged like a crown” edward i (or iii), visionary head (1819-20), written by john linnell (national gallery of art, washington, dc) <#735*> “owen glendower” owen glendower, visionary head (1819-20), written by john varley (national gallery of canada) <#743>; replica (with inscription “owen glendower”), written by john linnell (private collection) <#744*> “hotspur” hotspur, visionary head (1819-20), written by john linnell (robert n. essick) <#745*> “gray the poet” “friar bacon” friar bacon and gray, the poet, visionary heads (1819-20), written by john linnell (pembroke college, cambridge) <#746*> “octṛ 18. 1819. 15 degrees of ♋ [astrological symbol] cancer ascending” “the man who built the pyramids drawn by william blake” the man who built the pyramids, replica, visionary head (1819-20), written by john linnell (tate) <#752*> “the portrait of a man who instructed mṛ blake in painting &c. in his dreams” “imagination of a man whoṃ mr blake has recḍ instruction in painting &c from” the man who taught blake painting in his dreams, replica, visionary head (1819-20), written by john linnell (tate) <#755*> “wat tylers daughter” wat tyler’s daughter, visionary head (1819-20), written by john varley (national gallery of art, washington, dc) <#741*> “the taxgatherer killed by wat tyler, from a spectral vision seen by blake” the tax-gatherer killed by wat tyler, visionary head (1819-20), written by john varley or john linnell (untraced since 1885) <#742*> “the spirit of voltaire by blake” the spirit of voltaire, visionary head (1819-20), written by john varley (private collection) <#749*> “all genius varies thus devils are various angels are all alike” nine grotesque or demoniac heads (?1819-20) (robert n. essick) <#767*, wbw 1339> “old parr when young viz 40” “aug 1820 w. blake. fect.” old parr when young, visionary head (1820), written by john varley (huntington library and art collections) <#748*> “the egyptian task master who was killd & buried by moses” “saul king of israel somewhat influenced by the evil spirit” the egyptian taskmaster killed by moses (a smaller version of the task-master whom moses slew in egypt [1819-20]), written by john varley (?1820) (private collection) <#696*, wbw 1741-42>; the taskmaster and saul were traced (by varley?) and inscribed “the egyptian task master slain by moses” and “saul” (queen’s university, kingston, ontario) <#696a*, #696b*>. “widow”, “father”, “babe”, “baptism”, “hervey”, “angel of death”, “virgin”, “wife”, “infancy”, “old age”, “husband”, “angel of providence”, “guardian angel”, “child”, “angel of death”, “mother”, “where is your father”, “the lost child”, “orphans”, “sophronia died in childbed”, “she died on the wedding day”, “orphan”, “moses”, “elias”, “jesus”, “david”, “solomon”, “protecting angel”, “aaron”, “abraham believed god”, “these died for love”, “ministering angels”, “mother of leah & rachel”, “mother of rebecca”, “recording angels”, “protecting angel”, “noah”, “enoch”, “cain”, “serpent”, “abel”, “eve”, “adam”, “god out of christ is a consuming fire”, “mercy”, “wrath” epitome of james hervey’s “meditations among the tombs” (1820) (tate) <#770*, wbw 1332> “lxii | miles | to london” colinet passing a milestone (1820), drawn (and subsequently engraved) for thornton’s virgil (houghton library, harvard) <#769 9*>; the distance is on a mile-post. “the three tabernacles” “the lamb of god” the three tabernacles (1820-25) (fitzwilliam museum) < #792*, wbw 1742> “the church yard” the churchyard (1820-25) (fitzwilliam museum) <#793*, wbw 1742> “death” death (1820-25) (fitzwilliam museum) <#794*, wbw 1742> “mirth” mirth (1820-25) (fitzwilliam museum) <#795*, wbw 1742> “hope” hope (1820-25) (fitzwilliam museum) <#796*, wbw 1742> “affection & love” affection and love (1820-25) (beinecke library, yale) <#797*> “sport that wrinkled care derides laughter holding both his sides” “solomon says vanity of vanities all is vanity & what can be foolisher than this” “mirth,” separate plate, second state (1820-27) (fitzwilliam museum) <essick xviii*, wbw 662>; the identifications of the individuals do not appear in the first state. “vala” “hyle” “skofeld” jerusalem pl. 51 (1821) (fitzwilliam museum) <#578*> “our father which art in he[aven] h[allowed] … name” job and his family (1821) (fogg museum, harvard) <#551 1*> “great & marvellous are thy works lord” job and his family restored to prosperity (1821) (national gallery of art, washington, dc) <#551 21*> “1 peter p”, “2 andrew a”, “3 james j”, “4 john j”, “5 philip p”, “6 bartholomew b”, “7 thomas m”, “8 matthew t[?]”, “9 james j[?]”, “taddeus s[?]”, “11 judas”, “12 simon” detailed study for plate 18, back view of job’s head (1823) (fitzwilliam museum) <#557 ii*, wbw 1339> “painted in fresco by william blake & by him engraved & published october 8. 1810. ye gon to canterbury god mote you spede”in the first state (1810) this imprint reads “painted in fresco by william blake & by him engraved & published october 8. 1810, at no 28. corner of broad street golden square”. “a morrow when the day began to spring | up rose our host and was our alder cocke | the use of money | & its wars” “an allegory of idolatry or politics | and gadird us together on a flock— | let see now: who shall tell the first tale”much of the “lightly scratched” text here is taken from the reproduction in robert n. essick, “blake in the marketplace, 2010,” blake 44.4 (spring 2011): 118. “chaucers canterbury pilgrims,” separate engraving, fourth state (1823-26) <essick xvi*> “illustrations of | the | book | of | job” sketch for the title page of the engraved illustrations to the book of job (1823-26) (national gallery of art, washington, dc) <#558*> “i only am escaped” proof for job pl. 4 (1823-26) (national gallery of art, washington, dc) <#559 3*> “then a spirit passed before my face and the hair of my flesh stood up” proof for job pl. 9 (1823-26) (national gallery of art, washington, dc) <#559 4*> “when i laid the foundations of the earth—and all the morning stars sang together for joy” proof for job pl. 14 (1823-26) (national gallery of art, washington, dc) <#559 6*> “prayer to god is the study of imaginative art” proof for job pl. 2 (?1824) (beinecke library, yale) “praise to god is the exercise of imaginative art” proof for job pl. 22 (?1824) (beinecke library, yale) “lago del cor” dante running from the three beasts (1824-27) (national gallery of victoria, melbourne, australia) <#812 1*> “the angry god of this world & his throne[?] in purgatory” “the thunder of[?] egypt” “caesar” the mission of virgil for dante (1824-27) (birmingham museums and art gallery) <#812 3*, wbw 1339> “lasciate ogni speranza voi che inentrate leave every hope you who in enter” inscription over hell-gate for dante (1824-27) (tate) <#812 4*, wbw 1339> “homer”, “satan”, “1st circle”, “2d circle”, “3d circle”, “4th circle”, “5”, “6”, “7”, “8”, “limbo of weak shadows”, “vacuum”, “starry heaven”, “saturn”, “jupiter”, “mars”, “sun”, “venus”, “mercury”, “moon”, “terrestrial paradise”, “purgatory”, “it is an island in limbo”, “every thing in dantes comedia shews that for tyrannical purposes he has made this world the foundation of all the goddess memory ^nature^ ^is his inspirer^ & not ^imagination^ the holy ghost as poor churchill said nature thou art my goddess”, “round purgatory is paradise & round paradise is vacuum or limbo so that homer is the center of all i mean the poetry of the heathen stolen & perverted from the bible not by chance but by design by the kings of persia & their generals the greek heroes & lastly by the romans”, “swedenborg does the same in saying that in this world is the ultimate of heaven this is the most damnable fals[e]hood of satan and his antichrist” homer bearing the sword, and his companions for dante (1824-27) (fogg museum, harvard) <#812 7*, wbw 1340-41> “enoch” a soaring figure amid stars, probably for “enoch” (1824-27) (fogg museum, harvard) <#812 11v> “money” plutus for dante (1824-27) (tate) <#812 14*, wbw 1341>; the inscription is on a bag. “the stygian lake” the stygian lake, with ireful sinners fighting for dante (1824-27) (national gallery of victoria, melbourne, australia) <#812 15*, wbw 1341> “celestial globe” “terrestrial globe” “the hole of a shit house the goddess fortune is the devils servant ready to kiss any ones arse” the goddess of fortune for dante (1824-27) (national gallery of victoria, melbourne, australia) <#812 16*, wbw 1341> “stygian lake” dante and virgil about to pass the stygian lake (1824-27) (fogg museum, harvard) <#812 17*, wbw 1341> “the italian” the symbolic figure of the course of human history described by virgil for dante (1824-27) (national gallery of victoria, melbourne, australia) <#812 28r*> “venus[?]” virgil abashing the devils for dante (1824-27) (british museum) <#812 38*> “one of the whirlwinds of love” “paolo & francesca” slight sketch, perhaps for “the whirlwind of lovers” (1824-27) (national gallery of victoria, melbourne, australia) <#812 56v, wbw 1342> “nimrod” the complaint of the giant nimrod for dante (1824-27) (fogg museum, harvard) <#812 61r*> “virgil” “dante” the circle of traitors: the alberti brothers for dante (1824-27) (fogg museum, harvard) <#812 64> “ugolino” dante tugging at bocca’s hair (1824-27) (fogg museum, harvard) <#812 66r*> “mercury” (or “memory”) ugolino and his sons in prison for dante (1824-27) (british museum) <#812 68*> “cato” dante, virgil, and cato (1824-27) (fogg museum, harvard) <#812 71*> “cato” the angel in the boat departing after wafting over the souls for purgation for dante (1824-27) (british museum) <#812 72*> “dantes dream” “leah and rachel[?]” dante and statius sleeping, virgil watching (1824-27) (ashmolean museum) <#812 86*, wbw 1342> “mary” holding “sceptr[e]” and “looking glass[?]” “sun” “thrones[?]” “corded round” “dominion” “bible chaind round” “homer” “aristotle” the queen of heaven in glory for dante (1824-27) (national gallery of victoria, melbourne, australia) <#812 99*, wbw 1342-43>; a book is inscribed “corded round” and others are inscribed “bible chaind round”, “homer”, and “aristotle”. “this is upside down when viewed from hells gate which ought to be at top” “but right when viewed from purgatory after they have passed the center  in equivocal worlds up & down are equivocal” the circles of hell: “1 limbo charon” “2 minos” “3 cerebus” “4 plutus & phlegyas” “5 city of dis furies & … queen of endless woe lesser circle point of the universe[?] canto eleventh line 68” “6 minotaur the city of dis seems to occupy the space between the fifth & sixth circles or perhaps it occupies both circles with its environs” “7 centaurs most likely dante describes the 7 8 & 9 circles in canto xi v 18 3 compartments dante calls them cerchietti” “[8] geryon malebolge containing 10 gulphs[?]” “[9] lucifer containing 9 round[?]” “it seems as if dantes supreme good was something superior to the father or jesus as for if he gives his rain to the evil & the good & his sun to the just & the unjust he could never have built dantes hell nor the hell of the bible neither in the way our parsons explain it it must have been originally formed by the devil himself & so i understand it to have been” “whatever book is for vengeance for sin & whatever book is against the forgiveness of sins is not of the father but of satan the accuser & father of hell” the circles of hell for dante (1824-27) (british museum) <#812 101*, wbw 1343-44> “from the book of enoch” illustrations to the book of enoch (1824-27) (national gallery of art, washington, dc) <#827 1*> “from the book of enoch” illustrations to the book of enoch (1824-27) (national gallery of art, washington, dc) <#827 2*> “b of enoch” “no 26 27 next at p 43” “hell canto 16” “102” illustrations to the book of enoch (1824-27) (national gallery of art, washington, dc) <#827 3*> “book of enoch” illustrations to the book of enoch (1824-27) (national gallery of art, washington, dc) <#827 4*> “book of enoch” illustrations to the book of enoch (1824-27) (national gallery of art, washington, dc) <#827 5*> “john bunyan dreams a dream pilgrims progress”bentley, “the inscriptions on blake’s designs to pilgrim’s progress,” blake 6.3 (winter 1972-73): 70 and n13, concludes that most of “the numbers and inscriptions” are by frederick tatham, who owned and sold them, though “‘pilgrim’s progress’ on no. 1, ‘christian returning home’ on no. 11, and perhaps ‘apollyon’ at the top of no. 20 appear to me to be by blake.” john bunyan dreams a dream for pilgrim’s progress (1824-27) (private collection) <#829 1*> “11 good will opens the wicket gate to xtian christian returning home” the gate is opened by goodwill for pilgrim’s progress (1824-27) (private collection) <#829 11*, wbw 1742> “apollyon” christian beaten down by apollyon for pilgrim’s progress (1824-27) (private collection) <#829 21*> “the laocoon” free version of the laocoön (1825) (fitzwilliam museum) <#681*> “head of achilles” achilles, visionary head (1825), written by john varley “drawn by willm blake at my request 1825” (untraced since 1942) <#707*> “donald the hammerer” donald the hammerer (1825) (university of california, los angeles) <#782*> “los walking on the mountains of albion …” los walking on the mountains of albion (1825) (private collection) <#784*> “timon” timon (1825), written by john linnell (beinecke library, yale) <#785*> “return alpheus” return alpheus for milton, lycidas (1825-27) (british museum) <#800*, wbw 1338> “ספר איוב‎ illustrations of the book of job invented & engraved by william blake 1825” job (1826) pl. 1 “1” “our father which art in heaven hallowed be thy name” [matthew 6.9] “thus did job continually” [job 1.5] “there was a man in the land of uz whose name was job. & that man was perfect & upright & one that feared god & eschewed evil & there was born unto him seven sons & three daughters” [job 1.1, 2] “the letter killeth | the spirit giveth life” [2 corinthians 3.6] “it is spiritually discerned”1 corinthians 2.14: “they are spiritually discerned.” job (1826) pl. 2 “2” “i beheld the ancient of days”daniel 7.9: “i beheld till the thrones were cast down, and the ancient of days did sit.” “hast thou considered my servant job” [job 1.8] “the angel of the divine presence | מלך יהוה‎”isaiah 63.9: “the angel of his presence.” blake’s hebrew inscription omits the aleph, so that the meaning is “yahweh is king” or “yahweh is moloch.” the hebrew is given correctly in “laocoön”: מלאך יהוה‎ (see sheila a. spector, “blake as an eighteenth-century hebraist,” blake and his bibles, ed. david v. erdman [west cornwall, ct: locust hill press, 1990] 202, christopher rowland, blake and the bible [new haven: yale university press, 2010] 26-27, and abraham samuel shiff, “blake’s hebrew calligraphy,” blake 46.2 [fall 2012]: pars. 23-33). “i shall see god”job 19.26: “in my flesh shall i see god.” “thou art our father” [isaiah 63.16] “we shall awake up in thy likeness”psalm 17.15: “i shall be satisfied, when i awake, with thy likeness.” “when the almighty was yet with me, when my children were about me” [job 29.5] “there was a day when the sons of god came to present themselves before the lord & satan came also among them to present himself before the lord” [job 2.1] job (1826) pl. 3 (see illus. 5) 5. job (1826) pl. 3 (see enlargement). collection of robert n. essick. image courtesy of the william blake archive. “3” “the fire of god is fallen from heaven” [job 1.16] “and the lord said unto satan behold all that he hath is in thy power” [job 1.12] “thy sons & thy daughters were eating & drinking wine in their eldest brothers house & behold there came a great wind from the wilderness & smote upon the four faces of the house & it fell upon the young men & they are dead”job 1.18-19: “and smote the four corners.” job (1826) pl. 4 “4” “and there came a messenger unto job & said the oxen were plowing & the sabeans came down & they have slain the young men with the sword”job 1.14-15: “… the oxen were plowing, and the asses feeding beside them: and the sabeans fell upon them, and took them away; yea, they have slain the servants with the edge of the sword.” satan “going to & fro in the earth & walking up & down in it” [job 2.2] “and i only am escaped alone to tell thee” [job 1.15] “while he was yet speaking there came also another & said the fire of god is fallen from heaven & hath burned up the flocks & the young men & consumed them & i only am escaped alone to tell thee”job 1.16: “burned up the sheep, and the servants, and consumed them.” job (1826) pl. 5 “5” “did i not weep for him who was in trouble[?] was not my soul afflicted for the poor” “behold he is in thy hand: but save his life” “then went satan forth from the presence of the lord”job 1.12: “so satan went forth from the presence of the lord.” “and it grieved him at his heart” [genesis 6.6] | “who maketh his angels spirits & his ministers a flaming fire” job (1826) pl. 6 “6” “naked came i out of my mothers womb & naked shall i return thither | the lord gave & the lord hath taken away. blessed be the name of the lord” [job 1.21] “and smote job with sore boils from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head”job 2.7: “from the sole of his foot unto his crown.” job (1826) pl. 7 “7” “what! shall we recieve good at the hand of god & shall we not also recieve evil”job 2.10: “… shall we not receive evil.” “and when they lifted up their eyes afar off & knew him not they lifted up their voice & wept. & they rent every man his mantle & sprinkled dust upon their heads towards heaven”job 2.12: “and they rent every one.” “ye have heard of the patience of job and have seen the end of the lord” [james 5.11] job (1826) pl. 8 “8” “lo let that night be solitary & let no joyful voice come therein” [job 3.7] “let the day perish wherein i was born” [job 3.3] “and they sat down with him upon the ground seven days & seven nights & none spake a word unto him for they saw that his grief was very great” [job 2.13] job (1826) pl. 9 “9” “shall mortal man be more just than god? shall a man be more pure than his maker? behold he putteth no trust in his saints & his angels he chargeth with folly”job 4.18 reads “servants” for “saints.” “then a spirit passed before my face | the hair of my flesh stood up” [job 4.15]  job (1826) pl. 10 “10” “but he knoweth the way that i take | when he hath tried me i shall come forth like gold | have pity upon me! have pity upon me! o ye my friends | for the hand of god hath touched me | though he slay me yet will i trust in him” “the just upright man is laughed to scorn” [job 12.4] “man that is born of woman is of few days & full of trouble | he cometh up like a flower & is cut down[;] he fleeth also as a shadow | & continueth not and dost thou open thine eyes upon such a one | & bringest me into judgment with thee” [job 14.1-3] job (1826) pl. 11 “11” “my bones are pierced in me in the night season & my sinews take no rest” [job 30.17] “my skin is black upon me & my bones are burned with heat” [job 30.30] “the triumphing of the wicked is short, the joy of the hypocrite is but for a moment” [job 20.5] “satan himself is transformed into an angel of light [2 corinthians 11.14] & his ministers into ministers of righteousness”2 corinthians 11.15: “therefore it is no great thing if his ministers also be transformed as the ministers of righteousness.” “with dreams upon my bed thou scarest me & affrightest me with visions”job 7.14: “thou scarest me with dreams, and terrifiest me through visions.” “why do you persecute me as god & are not satisfied with my flesh? oh, that my words were printed in a book, that they were graven with an iron pen & lead in the rock for ever for i know that my redeemer liveth & that he shall stand in the latter days upon the earth & after my skin destroy thou this body yet in my flesh shall i see god whom i shall see for myself and mine eyes shall behold & not another tho consumed be my wrought image”job 19.22-27 gives “do ye,” “my words were now written! oh that they were printed in a book,” “latter day,” “though after my skin worms destroy this body,” “though my reins be consumed within me” for “consumed be my wrought image.” “who opposeth & exalteth himself above all that is called god or is worshipped”2 thessalonians 2.4: “… or that is worshipped.” job (1826) pl. 12 “12” “for god speaketh once yea twice & man percieveth it not” [job 33.14] “in a dream in a vision of the night in deep slumberings upon the bed then he openeth the ears of men & sealeth their instruction”job 33.15-16: “in a dream, in a vision of the night, when deep sleep falleth upon men, in slumberings upon the bed ….” “that he may withdraw man from his purpose & hide pride from man [job 33.17] if there be with him an interpreter, one among a thousand | then he is gracious unto him | & saith deliver him from going down to the pit | i have found a ransom” [job 33.24] “for his eyes are upon the ways of man & he observeth all his goings” [job 34.21] “i am young & ye are very old wherefore i was afraid” [job 32.6] “lo all these things worketh god oftentimes with man to bring back his soul from the pit to be enlightened with the light of the living” “look upon the heavens & behold the clouds which are higher than man”job 35.5: “look unto the heavens, and see; and behold the clouds which are higher than thou.” “if thou sinnest what dost thou against him [job 35.6] or if thou be righteous what givest thou unto him [job 35.7]” job (1826) pl. 13 “13” “who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge” [job 38.2] “then the lord answered job out of the whirlwind” [job 38.1] “who maketh the clouds his chariot & walked on the wings of the wind” [psalm 104.3] “hath the rain a father & who hath begotten the drops of the dew”job 38.28: “or who.” job (1826) pl. 14 “14” “canst thou bind the sweet influences of pleiades or loose the bands of orien” [job 38.31] “let there be | light” [genesis 1.3] “let there be a | firmament” [genesis 1.6] “let the waters be gathered together into one place & let the dry land appear”genesis 1.9: “let the waters under the heaven ….” “and god made two great lights [genesis 1.16] | sun | moon” “let the waters bring forth abundantly” [genesis 1.20] “let the earth bring forth cattle & creeping thing & beast”genesis 1.24: “bring forth the living creature after his kind ….” “when the morning stars sang together, & all the sons of god shouted for joy” [job 38.7] job (1826) pl. 15 “15” “can any understand the spreadings of the clouds | the noise of his tabernacle” [job 36.29] “also by watering he wearieth the thick cloud | he scattereth the bright cloud also, it is turned about by his counsels”job 37.11-12: “his bright cloud,” “turned round about.” “of behemoth he saith. he is the chief of the ways of godjob 40.19 (“of behemoth he saith” added by blake). | of leviathan he saith, he is king over all the children of pride”job 41.34 (“of leviathan he saith” added by blake): “he is a king.” “behold now behemoth which i made with thee” [job 40.15] job (1826) pl. 16 “16” “hell is naked before him & destruction has no covering” [job 26.6] “canst thou by searching find out god[?] canst thou find out the almighty to perfection”job 11.7: “unto perfection.” “the accuser of our brethren is cast down | which accused them before our god day & night” [revelation 12.10] “it is higher than heaven what canst thou do[?] it is deeper than hell what canst thou know | the prince of this world shall be cast out”john 12.31: “now shall the prince of this world be cast out.” “thou hast fulfilled the judgment of the wicked” [job 36.17] “even the devils are subject to us thro thy name[.]luke 10.17: “subject unto us through thy name.” jesus said unto them i saw satan as lightning fall from heaven”luke 10.18: “and he said unto them,” “i beheld.” “god hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise and god hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things that are mighty” [1 corinthians 1.27] job (1826) pl. 17 “17” “he bringeth down to the grave & bringeth up” “we know that when he shall appear we shall be like him for we shall see him as he is” “when i behold the heavens the work of his hands[,] the moon & stars which thou hast ordained. then i say what is man that thou art mindful of him? & the son of man that thou visitest him”psalm 8.3-4: “when i consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; what is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him.” “i have heard thee with the hearing of the ear but now my eye seeth thee”job 42.5: “by the hearing.” “he that hath seen me hath seen my father alsojohn 14.9: the “also” is blake’s. | i & my father are one” [john 10.30] “if you had known me ye would have known my father also and from henceforth ye know him & have seen himjohn 14.7: “if ye had known me, ye should have known my father also.” | believe me that i am in the father & the father in me [john 14.11] he that loveth me shall be loved of my father [john 14.21] for he dwelleth in you & shall be with you”john 14.17: “he dwelleth with you,” “shall be in you.” “at that day, ye shall know that i am in my father & you in me & i in you [john 14.20] if ye loved me ye would rejoice because i said i go unto the father” [john 14.28] “he that loveth me shall be loved of my father & i will love him & manifest myself unto himjohn 14.21: “will manifest.” and my father will love him & we will come unto him & make our abode with him [john 14.23] | and the father shall give you another comforter that he may abide with you for ever even the spiritual truth which the world cannot recieve”john 14.16-17: “and i will pray the father, and he shall give,” “spirit of truth; whom.” job (1826) pl. 18 “18” “also the lord accepted job”job 42.9: “the lord also accepted job.” “and my servant job shall pray for you” [job 42.8] “and the lord turned the captivity of job when he prayed for his friends” [job 42.10] “i say unto you love your enemies[,] bless them that curse you[,] do good to them that hate you & pray for them that despitefully use you & persecute you | that you may be the children of your father which is in heaven, for he maketh his sun to shine on the evil & the good & sendeth rain on the just & the unjust[.]matthew 5.44-45: “which despitefully,” “that ye,” “his sun to rise,” “and on the good,” “on the unjust.” be ye therefore perfect as your father which is in heaven is perfect” [matthew 5.48] job (1826) pl. 19 “19” “the lord maketh poor & maketh rich” [1 samuel 2.7] “he bringeth low & lifteth up” “who provideth for the raven his food when his young ones cry unto god” [job 38.41] “every one also gave him a piece of money”job 42.11: “every man.” “who remembered us in our low estate for his mercy endureth for ever” job (1826) pl. 20 “20” “how precious are thy thoughts unto me o god | how great is the sum of them”psalm 139.17: “how precious also.” “there were not found women fair as the daughters of job in all the land & their father gave them inheritance among their brethren”job 42.15: “were no women found so fair.” “if i ascend up into heaven thou art there | if i make my bed in hell behold thou art there” [psalm 139.8] job (1826) pl. 21 “21” “great & marvellous are thy works lord god almighty | just & true are thy ways o thou king of saints” [revelation 15.3] “so the lord blessed the latter end of job more than the beginning” [job 42.12] “after this job lived an hundred & forty years & saw his sons & his sons sons even four generations[.] so job died being old & full of days” [job 42.16-17] “in burnt offerings for sin thou hast had no pleasure”hebrews 10.6: “in burnt offerings and sacrifices for sin thou hast had no pleasure.” job (1826) pl. 22 “יה‎ & his two sons satan & adam as they were copied from the cherubim of solomons temple by three rhodians & applied to natural fact or history of illium” “laocoön,” separate plate (with much additional text) (?1826) (fitzwilliam museum, robert n. essick) (essick xix*, wbw 663-66) “genesis”see genesis: william blake’s last illuminated work, ed. mark crosby and robert n. essick (san marino: huntington library, 2012). first title page and second title page of illustrated manuscript copy of genesis (1826-27) (huntington library and art collections) <#828 1-2*> “chap: i the creation of the natural man.” illustrated manuscript copy of genesis (1826-27) (huntington library and art collections) <#828 3*, wbw 1344> “ch. 2 the natural man divided into male & female & of the tree of life & of the tree of good & evil” illustrated manuscript copy of genesis (1826-27) (huntington library and art collections) <#828 6*, wbw 1344> “adam” lllustrated manuscript copy of genesis (1826-27) (huntington library and art collections) <#828 6*>; added to or substituted for “man” or “the man” in genesis 2.7, 15; 3.12, 22, 24. “adamah” illustrated manuscript copy of genesis (1826-27) (huntington library and art collections) <#828 6*>; inserted after “the ground” in genesis 2.7, 9, 19; 3.19, 23; 4.10, 11, 12. “ch 3 of the sexual nature & its fall into generation & death” illustrated manuscript copy of genesis (1826-27) (huntington library and art collections) <#828 8*, wbw 1344> “gods (elohim)” illustrated manuscript copy of genesis (1826-27) (huntington library and art collections) <#828 8*>; “gods (elohim)” is given as “gods” in genesis 3.5. “chap iv how generation & death took possession of the natural man & of the forgiveness of sins written upon the murderers forehead” illustrated manuscript copy of genesis (1826-27) (huntington library and art collections) <#828 10*, wbw 1345> “jehovah” illustrated manuscript copy of genesis (1826-27) (huntington library and art collections) <#828 10*>; the name is given as “the lord” in genesis 4.1. “the lord set a mark upon cains forehead” illustrated manuscript copy of genesis (1826-27) (huntington library and art collections) <#828 11*>; the inscription is for “the lord set a mark upon cain,in blake’s design, the lord’s “mark upon cains forehead” is a kiss. lest any finding him should kill him,” genesis 4.15. text of genesis 1.1-4.15in his transcription of the king james translation, blake makes a number of apparently insubstantial or accidental changes, such as “surely surely” (2.17) and “eat eat” (2.17). some changes may be more significant but yet trifling, such as “heavens” for “heaven” (1.1) and “cleave to” for “cleave unto” (2.24), and these i have omitted. and of course blake includes some rather unusual words, such as “bdellium” (2.12), just as they are in the king james translation. illustrated manuscript copy of genesis (1826-27) (huntington library and art collections) <#828*> “mṛ cumberland.” “w blake inv & sc:” “a æ 70 1827” “george cumberland’s card,” separate plate (1827) (multiple impressions) <essick xxi*> “egypt” egypt (untraced since 1863) <#849*> updates october 2014: “death pursuing the soul through the avenues of life”; “friendship” winter 2011-12 blake/an illustrated quarterly 99 w hether you are a first-time reader who has opened jerusalem intrigued by its design and visionary promise only to close it in bafflement, or you are an expert blake scholar, you owe it to yourself to read this book. yoder begins by identifying a dominant trend in studies of the poem since paley’s monumental the continuing city : he argues that the majority of the poem’s explicators have come to the conclusion that jerusalem has no overarching narrative structure. in his book, he demonstrates precisely how the poem’s narrative has been neglected or trivialized and what the crucial consequences of taking the narrative into account would be. the book has four main chapters. in his introduction and in the first chapter, yoder reviews the evidence for the nonnarrative or “synchrony” argument and traces the history of that scholarship. a large section of this chapter attends closely to de luca’s characterization of the poem as a “wall of words” that provokes the reader to experience the sublime. yoder provides abundant counterevidence to de luca’s assertions. for example, de luca bases his notion of the “wall of words” on the “notorious” (de luca’s term) plate 16, crammed as it is with sixty-nine lines of verse that run virtually from one edge of the copperplate to the other …. the text presents itself, in short, as a solid wall of words over which the eye slips, unable to find fastening. a second glance discriminates bristling ranks of capital letters, verse without syntax, nouns without predication, names without context. (de luca, “a wall of words” 232, qtd. in yoder 39) yoder points out, however, that this plate forms the conclusion to the five plates describing the building of golgonooza, beginning with 12.25, and that the action of the plate is the “uniting of biblical and british geography by means of the labors of los and his workers” (41). granting that lines like “levi. middlesex kent surrey. judah somerset glouster wiltshire. / dan. cornwal devon dorset, napthali, warwick leicester worcester” (16.45-46) may look as though they are asyntactical, yoder reminds us that the two preceding lines provide the context and the missing syntactical elements: “and the forty counties of england are thus divided in the gates / of reuben norfolk, suffolk, essex. simeon lincoln, york lancashire”. (this blakean tactic of providing the syntax and context of difficult lines elsewhere in the poem should be familiar to any reader of “london,” which gives the secondperson command “hear” in the initial letters of the first r. paul yoder, with a foreword by nelson hilton. the narrative structure of william blake’s poem jerusalem: a revisionist interpretation. lewiston: edwin mellen press, 2010. v + 182 pp. 3 color illustrations. $109.95/£69.95, hardcover. reviewed by molly anne rothenberg word of each line in the third stanza to complete its syntax.) he analyzes all of the plates that might count as “walls of words,” thirty in all, to argue against de luca and then focuses on the first, plate 10, which looks even denser than plate 16, to show that the meanings of individual words—which de luca believes to be of little importance—have extraordinary significance: this is the plate in which appears one of blake’s most famous lines, los’s statement that “i must create a system, or be enslav’d by another mans” (10.20). as yoder says, “if the poem is read as de luca suggests, it is small wonder that it appears to have no narrative” (45). as he makes his case for a narrative approach, yoder fully acknowledges the impediments to discerning the narrative, but then goes on to show that those impediments are deliberate and functional. the conclusion of the first chapter makes the useful point that all texts force readers to become active to some degree. yoder takes his cue from richard lanham and julia wright to articulate the ways in which blake’s unusually opaque style demands that readers oscillate between looking at the style and looking through the style. yoder thinks that de luca is so captivated by the style that he cannot see through it to the narrative it traces. by contrast, we should read both with our “intellectual powers” and our “corporeal understanding.” the second chapter begins the work of tracing the narrative itself. criticizing de luca’s claim that the poem’s sequences have “no necessary order,” yoder also argues against the prevailing opinion that the characters in the poem are simply mouthpieces for ideas rather than players in a drama or story (de luca, words of eternity 138, qtd. in yoder 55). the static structure posited by the adherents of synchrony leads to this mischaracterization. by analyzing scene sequences in terms of the characters who interact within them, he identifies four “basic threads” of narrative associated with a main actor: albion, los, the narrator, and characters from the “anterior myth” (paley’s phrase) presented in the four zoas (57). for yoder, the most important story concerns albion, jerusalem, albion’s spectre, and vala. although the poem begins in medias res, it tells the story of albion’s choice between competing discourses of divinity and the consequences of his decisions, including his fall, his paranoia, and the divisions among his children. in his narrative, los reacts to albion’s actions as well as to his own spectre and emanation in order to consolidate error and to keep the divine vision by building golgonooza and the mundane shell. the narrator’s story of attempting to write the poem parallels los’s story: like los, he feels alone and helpless as he labors to grasp and represent the consequences of albion’s disease manifested in the narrator’s (and the reader’s) world and time. the fourth thread tells the obscure “anterior myth” of tharmas’s murder, luvah’s trial, and albion’s seduction by vala. pointing out that the saviour has access to all four threads, providing their point of unification into a single story, yoder begins the work of interpreting the poem’s portrayal of the relationship between the human and the divine. 100 blake/an illustrated quarterly winter 2011-12 in this chapter, yoder does scholars a genuine service by detailing the scenes that belong to each thread and by telling the stories as they unfold within each of the poem’s four chapters, explaining conflicts, errors, deceptions, and resolutions. part of his discussion is a tour de force demonstration of the narrative order of the sequence of two four-plate blocks within plates 28-50, chapter 2, rearranged by blake in two copies. his discussion is both revelatory for its impact on how we should understand blake’s purposes and a discrete warrant for his claims about the narrative structure of the poem. the difference that the new contexts of the rearranged plates make for the narrative requires an extensively detailed discussion, too complex for recapitulation here. suffice it to say that i am persuaded through this explication that yoder has truly understood the purport of the poem’s form. he asks: “why the trouble with chapter 2? in chapter 2 albion’s fall is not yet irrevocable. … chapter 2 is about the possibility of saving albion from himself. … the role of chapter 2 in the narrative of jerusalem is to hold open the moment of albion’s fall, in the possibility that it might be understood and prevented” (9495). agreeing with both paley and de luca that chapter 2 is the key to the poem, yoder stakes his argument for the critical function of narrative, in a counter to these scholars, on this successful and fascinating demonstration. the third chapter articulates some of the difficulties that readers encounter when trying to follow the poem’s narrative threads. referring to these difficulties as a function of blake’s “rhetoric of discontinuity,” yoder regards blake’s delay of speech attribution, his use of characters who “divide and reunite,” his spatial reorientation, and the problems of knowing when a scene opens or closes as the key strategies for disrupting our expectations about narrative structure. but identifying characters, attributing speech, distinguishing the parameters of a dialogic space, and recognizing scenic shifts are fundamental readerly functions. why, then, does blake obscure them at some times and not at others? yoder closely reads a large number of plates both to demonstrate the presence of an oscillation between clarity and obscurity of the narrative and to indicate how blake is seeking actively to transform his reader to learn what albion must learn about the unity of mankind and individuality of minute particulars. yoder does far more than simply repeat in other words what blake and his many explicators have said about the variation in “perceptive organs” and their “objects of perception” or about the expansion and contraction of the senses. he actually demonstrates how this happens in specific and abundant detail. i cannot do justice to his exposition, but perhaps an extended example will indicate the usefulness of his method: in the first part of chapter 3, the scene changes are often punctuated with plate shifts, while in the second part of the chapter such correspondences are repeatedly undermined. … i divided jerusalem’s chapter 3 into eight scenes; of the seven transition points between scenes, the first four occur at plate shifts (55.1, 56.1, 60.1, 63.1). however, the end of the scene that begins at 63.1 violates that pattern in a way that emphasizes the change. the scene is a long depiction of the blood orgy, and it ends with a vision of the aggregate male, hand, and the aggregate female, rahab, whose “brain enlabyrinths the whole heaven of her bosom & loins” (70.29). at the bottom of plate 70, separated from the verse paragraph immediately above is the single line, “the starry heavens all were fled from the mighty limbs of albion” (70.32). this line, marking the end of the plate, makes a fitting end to the violence of the blood orgy and the eerie calm of the closing vision of the aggregate male and female. but when plate 71 opens, “and above albions land was seen the heavenly canaan” (71.1), that closing line must be reread as the opening line of the spatial reorientation that introduces the “exploration of states.” this use of the single opening line to straddle the change of plates is mirrored later when the final line of the exploration scene appears as the first line of text on plate 73. the very minuteness of the violation of the expected pattern—the use of a single line to create a tension between the expected reading and the necessary rereading— emphasizes the danger of passive reading …. instead, lines of continuity overlay points of demarcation, creating a narrative characterized by bright spots of drama that expand and contract according to the reader’s perceptions. (122-23) this level of detail is a hallmark of yoder’s discussion, and even though this is a short book, it has ample close readings, each of which not only makes yoder’s larger point about the narrative structure of the poem but also adds to the reader’s appreciation of the poem’s artistry and philosophy. in this chapter, yoder is concerned to help the reader understand why narrative is critical to blake’s purposes, for without the impulse to follow the narrative (an impulse blocked by the synchronic approach), the reader will not have a reason to engage in the recalibrations of identity, spatiality, and organization that form the very intellectual exercise the poem is designed to foster. narrative is necessary to change the reader’s mind. the final chapter takes up the more daunting challenge of articulating the poem’s staging of “the conflict between the competing claims of divine authority that drive the plot of jerusalem” (125). arguing against some scholars (my younger self included) who despair of finding a textual basis for choosing between the saviour’s and the spectre’s claims to divinity—because the claims mirror each other and because both are predicated on rhetorical constructions of authority—yoder advances the plausible notion that blake does give the reader grounds for making a decision, even in the face of such uncertainty: “the basis for deciding between the divine discourse of the saviour and that of the spectre lies in the difference between their responses to the problem of sin, and in jerusalem the saviour offers a system of forgiveness so radical that it shocks even los and the poem’s narrator” (126). this chapter is a virtuoso synthesis of blake’s corpus and its attendant scholarship as well as a sensitive reading of the poem to winter 2011-12 blake/an illustrated quarterly 101 support that claim. it should be read for its clear explanation of the core of jerusalem and its compelling demonstration of the reasons why blake shaped his poem the way that he did. the book has some weaknesses: for experienced blake scholars, the long reprise of the “synchronic” school may be tedious and even argumentative, even though yoder is at pains to delineate critical differences (which may make it particularly useful for students). the third chapter could benefit from more examples of extended readings. in citing parts of the text that exemplify one or another point, he doesn’t offer expanded interpretations. but these are minor complaints in the context of the very important work that this book represents. after my first reading, i wished that yoder had gone on to write a comprehensive explication of the poem in sequence and in detail, as donald ault has done for the four zoas in narrative unbound. but on a second reading, i was well satisfied that yoder’s explanation of the poem’s unique enterprise, special techniques, and inspiring philosophy offers an indispensable introduction to jerusalem. i n blake and kierkegaard: creation and anxiety, james rovira explores historical synchronicities to mine the potential for like-mindedness between blake and kierkegaard. he introduces a compelling rationale for bringing the two writers together: “neither author is concerned with history as such but rather with the phenomenological profile that historical forces hold for the individual subject” (3). this distinction between “history as such” and the subject’s intersection with history as a “phenomenological” experience is an improvement over previous studies of these writers that separate history and subjectivity. just as this synthesis of history and subjectivity offers a rethinking of blake and of kierkegaard, rovira’s revision of derridean deconstruction from the hindsight of new historicism challenges the assumption of mutual exclusion between the two theoretical positions. more relevant for the study itself, this strategy has the potential to prevent the argument from being limited to mere synchronicity. yet it is more persuasive regarding kierkegaard than for blake: rovira negotiates the atemporality of deconstruction via the observation that “kierkegaardian anxiety is not a textual movement but an emotional one, an individual experience registered in literature but embedded within historical, cultural, social, and personal particularities,” which provides the basis for the study’s focus on kierkegaard’s “understand[ing] individuality to exist in a continual dialectic with history and society” (4). attributing the same impulse to blake’s texts is less convincing, however. applying deconstruction, even in tandem with new historicism, in reading blake’s texts or designs is problematic for reasons paul de man first articulated: blake’s “privileging of writing” makes it “less resistant” to deconstruction, a remark that seems truer to the more complex erasures and re-creations in blake’s cosmology; incorporating the historical dimension does not resolve but rather evades this fundamental problem.1 the potential for reductiveness is a danger for any comparison between writers, but it is more so between a philosopher and a writer-artist as multifaceted as blake. by premising the argument on the assumption that “their works are a record 1. the quotation is from an interview with w. j. t. mitchell in his essay “visible language: blake’s wond’rous art of writing,” romanticism and contemporary criticism, ed. morris eaves and michael fischer (ithaca: cornell university press, 1986) 91. james rovira. blake and kierkegaard: creation and anxiety. london: continuum, 2010. x + 184 pp. £60.00/$110.00, hardcover; £24.99/$44.95, paperback (2011). reviewed by kathryn freeman review: helen p. bruder and tristanne connolly, eds., sexy blake helen p. bruder and tristanne connolly, eds. sexy blake. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, 2013. xii + 260 pp. £58.00/$100.00, hardcover; £55.00/$95.00, softcover; £45.99/$79.99, e-book. reviewed by g. a. rosso g. a. rosso (rossoga1@gmail.com) has written and coedited a number of books and essays on blake, including most recently the religion of empire: political theology in blake’s prophetic symbolism (2016), a study of blake’s three long poems, the four zoas, milton, and jerusalem. with this volume, helen bruder and tristanne connolly now rival the dynamic duo of steve clark and david worrall in collaborative contributions to blake studies, having previously coedited queer blake (2010) and blake, gender and culture (2012), the latter being the first of two collections of papers from the “sexy blake” conference held in oxford in 2010. while this second volume has the miscellaneous and uneven quality of most conference anthologies, several thematic groupings and strong individual essays justify the hope expressed on the back cover that it will “re-animate the lively sexual debates which once characterized blake studies.” the editors provide an incisive, polemical introduction to the book’s treatment of sex and gender in blake’s work and its reception history. they present the volume as uninhibited by “the restraint of historicism” that marks blake, gender and culture, though they ask, “is it beneath formal critical discourse to notice that rigour can be quite pleasurable?” (12). the question speaks to the twofold aim of the book “to combine the scholar’s and enthusiast’s perspectives,” an aim based on their sense that the “real sexy blake has always been popular blake,” the transgressive figure celebrated by “proud reprobates like allen ginsberg, jim morrison and patti smith.” in terms of scholarship, the editors laud the work of susan matthews, whose blake, sexuality and bourgeois politeness (2011) celebrates a pro-sex blake in the context of “‘reclaiming sexuality for feminism,’” and christopher z. hobson, whose book blake and homosexuality (2000) earned him pride of place at the sexy blake conference and who serves as “an apt presiding spirit” over the volume (2 [quoting matthews], 17). but they do not hold back in calling a bevy of recent scholars to task for work in which “pertinent and related sexy questions are repeatedly dissipated or ducked” (4). the editors disclaim having a politically correct agenda, reserving this term for their polemical target, the “post-feminist ideologies” that regard the pressing questions and problems of sex and gender as largely surmounted in our time (5). they further decry the “creeping depoliticization of historicist methodologies” in recent blake anthologies and call for a balance between historical and interpretive approaches, a balance that must retain a sense of the oddity and otherness in the sexual thinking of blake and his contemporaries (6-8). the essays in the collection largely accomplish this important goal. the book is organized into three main sections, with a “coda” comprising two texts by hobson. part 1 presents “the darker side” of blake and sexuality, with essays “re-interrogating” the prevalence of violence and domination in his work. section 2 offers more positive readings of blake’s sexual images and themes, focusing on the contraries of desire and chastity and their relation to his goals of visionary redemption. section 3 offers a heady mix of topics and methods—a fictional response to blake’s “a poison tree,” an essay relating blake to the modern conceptual artist stelarc, and two standout essays, one by angus whitehead and joel gwynne on catherine blake’s sexual life and the other by philippa simpson on blake and pornography. section 1 opens with lucy cogan’s insightful paper “subjectivity, mutuality and masochism: ahania in the book of ahania and the four zoas,” which works well in the leadoff spot as it serves the editors’ goal of combating asexual feminist approaches to blake. the essay presents a complex psychosexual reading of the character ahania that allows cogan to trace the development of blake’s sexual thought from the urizen books to the four zoas. in the book of ahania, the titular heroine is blake’s vehicle for exposing and parodying urizen’s repression of sexuality in an effort to contain the unruly male desire of orc/fuzon. her memory of a lost paradise of sexual mutuality is complicated, however, by a lack of awareness that her own “compliant femininity” is correlated with urizen’s “hyper-masculine behaviour” (26). this strategy of “rhetorical mirroring” is repeated in night iii of the four zoas, where ahania undergoes a significant process of individuation, but only via awareness of urizen’s “fragile sense of maleness,” which renders her the “masochistic other” to urizen’s sadism (30-33). cogan praises blake for seeing that while ahania grasps the fundamentally “intersubjective” nature of existence, she is unable to individuate fully because of her belief that “submission is the only route to subjection” (34). the three essays that follow also explore the sexual complexities of the four zoas and trace connections to blake’s earlier work, visions of the daughters of albion in particular. ayako wada offers an insightful analysis of the “love triangle” of los, enitharmon, and orc in the four zoas, relating it to the bound figures in visions and, more compellingly, to the joseph-mary-jesus story in jerusalem. yoko ima-izumi echoes both cogan’s and wada’s critique of urizen’s sadism and misogyny, but unlike wada she criticizes los for dominating enitharmon. ima-izumi contrasts enitharmon’s “sexual” birth as a “globe of blood” with eve’s birth from adam’s rib in genesis and paradise lost, drawing intriguing parallels between blake’s “sexualized blood” imagery and similar motifs in japanese films by yukio mishima and hayao miyazaki. the section ends with michelle leigh gompf’s “ripped from complacency: violence and feminist moments in blake,” which includes a challenging reading of oothoon’s rape and self-immolation in visions of the daughters of albion. gompf redirects focus from sexual issues to the more prevalent theme of violence, arguing that its corrosive effects may lead not to trauma or victimhood but to an expanded vision of the interlocking networks that constrain and oppress women. though she underplays the experience of trauma in oothoon’s prophetic response to her rape, gompf contends that “violence and physical transformation” function as a “political chemotherapy” (in tracy bealer’s phrase) for the patriarchal ideology to which oothoon initially succumbs. such a view clearly is debatable, but readers might contrast the more traditional feminist reading by ima-izumi to get a sense of the volume’s range, with tensions and contradictions not unlike those in blake’s own works. section 2, “chastity, redemption and feminine desire,” contains the most thematically coherent set of essays in the volume, each dealing in some fashion with blake’s presentation of female desire and its relation to his idea of redemption. however, since chastity is a topic with extensive treatment in blake scholarship, the lack of engagement with this rich critical history exposes a weakness in the volume, one partly but not entirely attributable to the conference-paper format. magnus ankarsjö’s piece on blake’s notebook poems is perhaps excusable in this respect because he deals with a group of relatively neglected lyrics, and he takes an unusual approach in arguing that blake defends chastity (or abstinence) as a necessary contrary to affirmations of free love in these texts. sean david nelson’s essay on lesbianism and chastity in jerusalem also affirms the value of chastity, particularly by contrasting blake and mary wollstonecraft on the subject, though he recognizes that blake’s treatment of “sapphism … as a means of critiquing chastity is unique in its depth of thought” (83). nelson praises blake for challenging patriarchy in ways that neither wollstonecraft nor other contemporary writers expressed, especially for opposing the view that chastity can aid women’s educational advancement and enable them to render men more virtuous. however, he makes the astute point that blake fails to appreciate wollstonecraft’s argument that chastity can enable women to avoid the “biological burden” (94) of unwanted pregnancies and the problems of neglected children. for nelson, wollstonecraft’s pragmatic defense of chastity exposes the impracticality of blake’s political approach to sex-gender relations. he attributes this flaw to blake’s “inability to bring about utopia without recourse to the apocalyptic mode,” a mode he defines as inherently ahistorical (94-95). this reductive view of blake’s apocalypse, and of the genre itself, undercuts nelson’s otherwise insightful and well-argued essay. a similarly engaged and intelligent piece by david shakespeare on the relation of sexuality and vision in milton also suffers from an insufficient understanding of blake’s treatment of apocalypse. against the grain of the volume’s explicit agenda, his essay also leans on older feminist approaches that critique the limited, subordinate role of blake’s female characters, citing brenda webster’s comment that in blake “the female should cease even to exist independently” (115), a view no longer held by many feminist scholars. but shakespeare affirms the value of blake’s androgynous ideal, in which “the feminine remains subordinate, but makes a tangible contribution” (113), “tangible” referring not only to the empirical world identified with the female body but also to the incarnation of vision in the human body, where the imaginative and empirical aspects of vision converge and interact. he is most insightful in discussing ololon as the unique expression of this convergence; she is able to “see” the final confrontation between milton and satan because she contains both male and female elements. if he neglects the momentous identification of ololon with jesus, especially as she/they embody his apocalyptic return on the clouds of the son of man—here given inclusive gender characteristics—shakespeare articulates succinctly ololon’s merger of transcendent and immanent or immediate vision in milton. unlike the more critical treatments by nelson and shakespeare, the succeeding essays by susanne sklar and kathryn sullivan kruger offer positive readings of blake’s feminine characters, though they tend to underestimate tensions and ambiguities in blake’s sexual attitudes. building on recent studies of blake’s affinity with the “erotic spirituality” of swedenborgian and moravian thought, sklar opposes both non-sexual readings and steven goldsmith’s “pornographic” interpretation of blake’s last judgment (petworth house, 1808). with goldsmith, she sees the shape of a vulva in the central space of the design: the enthroned christ above and the babylon harlot below are “positioned at two ends of a vulva” (125, quoting goldsmith). but she reads the image as redemptive rather than sexist, arguing that if viewers “befriend” the harlot and reject the accusatory impulse, “judgement need not entail condemnation” (125). this reading is based on sklar’s insight that the harlot serves as “a fulcrum” in the design, for the figures on her left side move downward while those on her right ascend, spiritually transformed (131). this befriending approach can be pushed too far, as when sklar claims that the angel on the harlot’s right is “setting her free” and “about to caress her,” against blake’s own comment that she is “siezed & bound” (134). also questionable is sklar’s comparison of the harlot with the figure of vala/rahab in jerusalem, for she asserts that both are redeemed because blake’s doctrine of forgiveness is available to all “and ultimately irresistible” (131). this assertion, however, underplays vala’s accountability for much of the suffering and violence (especially sexual violence) in jerusalem, and it too easily assumes that all is harmonized in the apocalyptic finale—despite enitharmon’s refusal to reconcile with los in their final exchange, showing that she remains under vala/rahab’s power. similarly problematic is kruger’s otherwise stimulating essay “blake’s bowers of bliss: the gitagovinda, the four zoas, and two illustrations for l’allegro,” which situates blake’s erotic spirituality within the context of indian art revealed by william jones’s asiatic researches (established 1788) and edward moor’s hindu pantheon (1810). kruger insightfully compares the central myth in the four zoas with jones’s translation of the gitagovinda, which narrates the separation and reunion of the soul with god, figuring unity in the act of sexual love and duality as jealousy and division (143-44). she also finds analogues in indian statuary to blake’s l’allegro illustrations, comparing mirth and a sunshine holiday with the “sensuously curved” female forms associated with prosperity and fertility. this comparison is questionable, however, insofar as it ignores blake’s vehement critique of fertility religion in his long poems, a critique related to the antinomian political theology described in david weir’s brahma in the west (2003), a text that kruger’s analysis would benefit from engaging. the final section is the least thematically coherent of the volume, gathered under the loose rubric “conceptual sex, conceptual art.” the closest essays in theme are “the sexual life of catherine b.” by whitehead and gwynne and “blake and porn” by simpson, former blake curator at tate britain. both essays make signal contributions to the field and present clearly organized, well-written arguments. whitehead and gwynne build on the recent upsurge of biographical and fictional interest in catherine blake, showing that she was a “lifelong, proactive partner and collaborator” in blake’s life and art (194). they draw on “extant historical evidence” to assess catherine “as both desired object and desiring subject,” arguing that her sexuality may have been “marginalized in the past due to a resistance among blake scholars in locating catherine’s possible complicity in her husband’s transgressive, and often violent, sexual imagination” (196). along with simpson, whitehead and gwynne develop recent “sex-positive” or “third-wave” feminist arguments that assert the potential value of pornography, sadomasochism, and other non-conventional practices for women’s sexual agency and expression. focusing on pornographic images in blake’s art, simpson acknowledges that he struggles with the power of violence both to liberate and to oppress; but, she argues, he challenges the standard views of pornography as “inherently violent” and as “produced with a fixed male spectator in mind” (213). in the libidinous drawing on page 41 of the four zoas, which depicts a truncated torso and penis being stimulated by a supine woman with semen dropping on her face, simpson does not find degradation but female agency and pleasure alongside “sexy amputation” (214-15). in such scenes, she concludes, we see the political potential of blake’s porn, which does not derive from a sade-like desire to shock and assault the viewer but from “a negation of conventional viewing structures, a refusal to conform to accepted visual frameworks” (216). in tandem, these two essays most fully achieve the volume’s aim to broaden debate beyond previous approaches to blakean sexuality. the final essay, by chris hobson, “normalizing perversity: blake and homosexuality in 2013,” matches the quality of these two essays but has a different purpose, which is to assess the state of queer studies in blake scholarship since the appearance of his blake and homosexuality in 2000. much has been accomplished: connolly’s william blake and the body (2002), essays in bruder’s anthology women reading william blake (2007), richard sha’s perverse romanticism (2009), matthews’s blake, sexuality and bourgeois politeness (2011), and essays in queer blake (2010) and blake, gender and culture (2012). all of these texts deal with the transgressive nature of blake’s sexual vision. despite this acceptance, hobson argues that work remains to be done to move beyond the heteronormal assumptions of most blake scholars, who ignore or downplay “same-sex images and scenes in blake.” he thus calls on those who see a queer blake “to establish the range of questions associated with homosexuality in blake as inescapable in critical discussion” (224). hobson suggests two ways to further this aim: “by incorporating now readily available archival material on eighteenth century homosexual life” into readings of blake and by dealing openly with “blake’s presentation of the multiform perverseness of human sexuality” (221). both strategies can help “normalize perversity” as a “broadly human category” (231, 233), a view based on the mutualistic ethic that blake’s later work espouses. hobson is aware that blake expresses homophobic and sexist views but counters that such contradictions do not negate the value of his positive depictions and explorations of same-sex experience. emphasizing the prominence of forgiveness and the collective body of jesus in blake’s mature vision, hobson concludes: “we are all in this boat together” (229). this inclusive perspective is evident throughout the volume, though several limitations should be noted. while the editors and several authors say that earlier feminist critiques lack nuance or fail to grasp blake’s complexity, these critiques might be more dialectically engaged. also, the charge that recent scholarly works avoid or neglect sexual issues in blake might be reconsidered in light of the inclusive agenda articulated by the divine body: “for whoever is not against you is for you.” a related and more important issue is the contextual narrowness of the many essays here that focus exclusively on sexual issues, often at the expense of relevant political, theological, and artistic themes. and especially in respect to blake’s long poems, many essays do not adequately relate their specific interests to the larger narrative or structural designs of the poems or images in which they engage particulars. nonetheless, the book remains essential reading for those interested in blake’s representations of women and gender in his poetry and art. it shows in a definitive way that blake’s value for sexual theory and practice both in his day and ours depends ultimately on the intellect and outlook that readers bring to his work. adam and eve asleep: a dissent adam and eve asleep: a dissent by david bindman david bindman is emeritus professor of the history of art, university college london, and visiting fellow, hutchins center, harvard university. in a minute particular in the last blake, “blake’s unfinished series of illustrations to paradise lost for john linnell: an addition,” martin butlin published a new blake milton watercolor, adam and eve asleep, and i would like to comment on it briefly. i should say that martin butlin was my phd advisor, or doktorvater, and remains a dear friend. he is, as everyone knows, a great blake scholar who has sorted out blake’s artistic oeuvre in a magnificent two-volume work, the paintings and drawings of william blake. all this is to say that it pains me greatly to dissent from his conclusions about the watercolor, which i do not believe to be in blake’s hand. why it might not be by blake it is close in drawing if not in coloring to the boston watercolor of adam and eve asleep, but so close in handling that it suggests that it was meticulously copied from an original work. the color is considerably brighter and fresher than the boston version, which is much faded by light, but in my view the coloring is not compatible with blake’s new free technique of the 1820s, which shows a remarkable sensitivity to light, both divine and natural. then there is the drawing of the archangel’s head, which is disturbingly elongated and lacking expression. this is not due to carelessness, to which blake was occasionally prone; it is more than just loose drawing, for it loses the archangel’s sympathy for the earthly couple, which is so important to the meaning of the work, and it is not comparable to the drawing in the three 1820s paradise lost watercolors. i am also disturbed by the complete lack of any trace of a provenance—it evidently turned up in a country sale. there is no prior history before its appearance in the sale or any connection to the linnell family. this is in itself unusual; thanks to the list by the rossetti brothers in gilchrist’s life, a high proportion of blake’s drawings—even small scraps—are recorded by the middle of victoria’s reign. what might it be? one hypothesis that would help to answer my objections is that john linnell decided to add to the three watercolors that blake made for the series and copied the boston watercolor when it belonged to thomas butts, or alternatively worked up in watercolor an outline of the composition that blake had made himself, though there are no traces of such an underdrawing. but there is not a jot of evidence that anything like that happened; in any case, it is unlikely that linnell would have copied blake’s original so meticulously, though one of his children might have. who did it? at the moment we can only speculate that it is by an unknown victorian, just possibly a member of the linnell family, or by a later artist. there is also the possibility that it is a deliberate fake by a very clever forger who decided to produce something that might have existed, knew the story of the three milton watercolors, and found some paper of the period. this might seem far fetched, but elaborately calculated fakes do exist, as in the case of the recent galileo scam, when a forger replicated a whole seventeenth-century illustrated book and fooled the great expert in the field. spring 2012 blake/an illustrated quarterly 143 pp. 41-42, lavater, essays on physiognomy. in the original issue of the work in parts, blake’s pl. 1 was included in part 5, dated july 1788 on the printed back wrapper. the pl. is listed on the front wrapper as “7. aged figures, gardening.” blake’s pl. 2 was issued in part 3, dated may 1788, and is listed on the front wrapper as “7. democritus, finished.” pp. 45-49, darwin, botanic garden, 1st ed. of part 1, 1791. for a copy that includes blake’s pl. 6 of 1795, see the final entry on darwin under letterpress books with engravings by and after blake, above. p. 101, flaxman, compositions from the works days and theogony of hesiod, 1817. the complete set of prepublication proofs at the bodleian library, unseen at the time of writing, has now been listed on the bodleian’s online cat. (<http:// solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk>, accessed 1 nov. 2011). these are described as “37 proofs, of which 27 are before letters,” call number arch. aa b.15, aleph system number 013996444. corrigendum in my 2010 review i noted “a small etching” attributed to blake, “representing sampson destroying the lion,” offered by a. e. evans and son in an 1845 cat. (blake 44.4 [spring 2011]: 129). this is almost certainly the impression of “samson and the lion,” an etching by welby sherman, inscribed “ws / 1827” and acquired by the british museum in 1847, accession no. 1847,0318.122. according to campbell dodgson, “the engravings of george richmond, r.a., and welby sherman,” print collector’s quarterly 17.4 (oct. 1930): 361, the museum’s impression was “bought as ‘an etching by blake.’” dodgson was keeper of prints and drawings at the british museum, 1912-32. m i n u t e p a r t i c u l a r in his manuscript “life of blake” (c. 1832), frederick tatham writes that during the 1790s william and catherine blake resided in hercules buildings in a pretty clean house of 8 or 10 rooms & at first kept a servant, but finding (as m.rs blake declared & as every one else knows) the more service the more inconvenience, she like all sensible women, who are possessed of industry & health & only moderate means, relinquished this incessant tax upon domestic comfort, did all the work herself, kept the house clean, & herself tidy, besides printing all blakes numerous engravings, which was a task alone sufficient for any industrious woman, but however as there is no state, or scheme, or plan, without its accompanying evil blake had reason to regret his having left no one in possession of his house during his & m.rs blakes absense for one day paying some friendly visit, some thieves entered it & carried away plate to the value of 60 pounds & clothes to the amount of 40 more.1 however, as this note will demonstrate, by the end of january 1791 william and catherine may have been all too aware that leaving a servant in charge of 13 hercules buildings was no sure security against burglary. rate book entries for 13 hercules buildings, lambeth, reveal that by early march 1791 the blakes had moved from their former residence at 28 poland street, soho, to their new house.2 in the second edition of blake records (2004), g. e. bentley, jr., suggests that the blakes may have moved to 13 hercules buildings as early as “the autumn of 1790” or at least “before the end of 1790.”3 a short paragraph that appeared in the evening mail on wednesday 26 january 1791 suggests a slightly later date for the move. the evening mail reports: a few days since the house of mr clay of hercules buildings, lambeth, was stripped of every article of furniture in it during his absence. his house-keeper who had lived with him three years is the thief and had hired a cart to remove the 1. quoted in g. e. bentley, jr., blake records, 2nd ed. (new haven: yale university press, 2004) [hereafter br(2)] 676. bentley suggests a date of sept. 1795 for the robbery (676fn). on the night of 7 june 1793 blake’s neighbor philip astley “of the royal saloon, in hercules buildings” was burgled and robbed of “cash, plate, watches, &c. &c. to the amount of 800 l.” (world 2 sept. 1793: 3, col. c). 2. blake is first recorded as payer of the poor rates for 13 hercules buildings on 9 mar. 1791 (see br[2] 744fn). 3. br(2) 744 and fn (see also 742-43fn). “mr clay of hercules buildings” by angus whitehead 144 blake/an illustrated quarterly spring 2012 goods, which were to have been sold the next day, had not this good lady saved him the trouble of doing so.4 “mr clay of hercules buildings” can be identified as the blakes’ predecessor as ratepayer and resident at 13 hercules buildings, william clay.5 the short article in the evening mail indicates that clay’s housekeeper and his furniture still occupied 13 hercules buildings during the last week of january 1791. if william and catherine blake were unable to move into the house until the end of january, their move from 28 poland street to 13 hercules buildings can be dated between 24 january 1791, the earliest date we can assume clay vacated the premises after being robbed by his housekeeper,6 and 9 march 1791, when blake is first recorded as ratepayer for the property.7 4. evening mail 26 jan. 1791: 2, col. b. the article was reprinted verbatim in the “news in brief ” section of the times on friday 28 jan. (3, col. c). 5. “wm clay” is recorded as ratepayer for 13 hercules buildings in rate book entries for the second, third, and fourth quarters of 1790 (see br[2] 744fn). no other clay is listed among the ratepayers for the twenty-three other residences in hercules buildings in 1790. 6. i.e., “a few days” before the report appeared in the evening mail. 7. the fact that, according to the evening mail, clay’s furniture was “to have been sold the next day” suggests that about 24 jan. clay was in the process of vacating 13 hercules buildings in anticipation of the blakes’ moving in. n e w s l e t t e r blake goes online only last year at this time we announced that our content would be online in order to optimize the many advantages of publishing on the web—illustrations in color and more of them, looser restrictions on the length of issues, searchability, and greater sustainability due to lower production and mailing costs. after one transitional year of publishing online and printed issues in parallel, we are now phasing out the printed version. thus this spring issue is the last that will appear in print. with the upcoming summer 2012 issue (vol. 46, no. 1) blake will be published online only. we are investigating the possibilities for print on demand, whereby copies of an issue or an article would be produced as needed by a third-party vendor, from whom you would order directly rather than as part of your subscription. if print on demand proves feasible, we’ll let you know. individual subscribers will receive renewal reminders for vol. 46 as usual. back issues of the quarterly beginning with the first issue (1967) will gradually appear as part of the william blake archive <http://www.blakearchive.org> and be freely available there. preparation is well under way for a first installment. the most recent volumes of the quarterly from the last five years, however, will continue to be available only to subscribers on the blake site <http://www.blakequarterly.org>. mr. wily blake you blue-eyed devil you knew all along that the tyger washes itself in the blood of the lamb by paul miner denouement review: g. e. bentley, jr., thomas macklin (1752-1800), picture-publisher and patron g. e. bentley, jr., with a foreword by mark crosby. thomas macklin (1752–1800), picture-publisher and patron: creator of the macklin bible (1791–1800). lewiston: edwin mellen press, 2016. x + 260 pp. $219.95, hardcover. reviewed by alexander s. gourlay alexander s. gourlay (agourlay@risd.edu) teaches at the rhode island school of design. no one who knows the quality and quantity of his work will be surprised to hear that g. e. bentley, jr., published one more meticulous, thoughtful, and eminently readable book before his death in 2017. this one is an account of the publishing career of thomas macklin, patron of william blake (and most of his colleagues in art), proprietor of the poets’ gallery (the name of a printshop, a gallery, and a series of publications), and the publisher of the largest and most opulent illustrated letterpress king james bible ever produced.the unique copy of the half-ton waynai bible of 1930 is not illustrated and was printed one large letter at a time with a rubber stamp wheel. see <https://​www.​youtube.​com/​watch?v=scxm4suzjde> (turn down the sound). little is known about macklin beyond the public facts of his commercial activities—even the year of his birth is expressed by a span of nearly a decade—but in his day he was second in importance only to john boydell among english publishers of prints and illustrated books. boydell began building his publishing empire in the early 1750s, cannily introducing vertical integration into the prevailing model of printselling, in which independent engravers sold their prints and sometimes their plates to printsellers, who retailed them to the public. except for hogarth’s works, the english print market in the first half of the eighteenth century was dominated by portraits, landscapes, and genre subjects with only modest aesthetic pretensions, using merely functional graphic techniques. hoping to raise the dignity of the english print, boydell began to hire the best painters in england to create grand images of historical (that is, narrative) subjects from myth and ancient and modern history, then hired the best engravers to create large, highly polished prints, often on the scale of small paintings, using elegant graphic techniques that had been the specialty of european engravers. “history painting” was the most exalted, among critics, at least, of the pictorial modes, but had been largely avoided in the early english print market, whether because of vestigial protestant iconoclasm, objections to the “roman” associations of traditional religious subjects, or aversion to classical paganism. boydell’s new english prints often appealed to patriotism (as in the large engraving of benjamin west’s death of wolfe) and were marketed as fine art for those who could not afford oil paintings but could manage a few fancy prints, framed and glazed, perhaps hand colored, for their parlors. this phenomenon expanded and exalted the english print market for a while, but bourgeois parlors had limited space on the walls, and only wealthy collectors could afford to buy and store, much less display, large numbers of prints. a 1774 change in the understanding of copyright law pertaining to texts, which had previously held that rights were eternal, made it practical for boydell and a little later macklin (and bowyer and bell and others) to publish literary classics, mostly english, in illustrated editions that were similarly aimed at the middle class. many of these were published in serial form, which minimized the publishers’ outlay and maximized the affordability of even huge deluxe editions that combined prestigious national texts and fine engravings of narrative subjects. beyond the patriotic appeal of the titles, the bound volumes simultaneously diminished the idolatrous implications of hanging pictures and provided a practical means of storing dozens of large-scale engravings, although the books were so huge that no one could comfortably read them. the editions were aristocratic in pretense, even if their primary audience was bourgeois, and their scale ensured that they provided as much cultural ostentation as a large framed engraving. boydell’s most important single project was an edition of the works of shakespeare, for which he commissioned huge canvases by the most important artists in england, established a shakespeare gallery to display them, and paid unprecedented sums to have them engraved on a smaller but still grand scale. macklin also published some illustrated shakespeare and many other british authors, including volumes of literary prints without texts, but his most important venture was macklin’s bible, an “english” text that added a gloss of safely protestant piety to the other appealing characteristics of deluxe illustrated editions. at the beginning of his career blake had worked on more modest illustrated bibles and related works, including the protestants family bible, the royal universal family bible, and the genuine and complete works of flavius josephus, all of which were first published as large quartos in serial format, issued in installments of a few pages and an engraving each. macklin’s bible, proposed in 1789 and completed in 1800, was much more ambitious than these: seven elephant folio volumes with hundreds of engravings, many of them full page, and large engraved allegorical vignettes printed in conjunction with letterpress (a tricky procedure that involved coordinating intaglio and relief printing on the same piece of paper, one after the other). heavy wove paper and large elegant type were created especially for this project. full-page engravings using the most sophisticated graphic techniques were made from huge oil paintings that were displayed in macklin’s gallery. most of the originals had been especially commissioned from twenty-four of the most eminent painters of the day (some pictures, such as the holy family by joshua reynolds, may have been repurposed); the engraved illustrations were signed (though not necessarily executed in entirety) by the most distinguished engravers. the projects of boydell and macklin began in grandeur and extravagance, and they both succeeded in selling many large high-quality prints to a new audience, in part by promoting the local artists and engravers as national heroes. in the 1790s the spirit surrounding these mega-editions must have inspired great optimism in an ambitious english artist/engraver like blake, even if, as it turned out, both projects foundered as they reached the port, and there were no more such giants. perhaps in part because his name had no promotional value, blake was not one of the artists or engravers employed in any aspect of the macklin bible, though he had done exemplary and very lucrative engraving work for macklin in the early 1780s. he later attributed this neglect to calumny, claiming in his public address that macklin told him that flaxman had blasted his character, but bentley suggests that for some reason macklin was dissatisfied with the quality of blake’s work (29). i do not think this is likely: blake’s stipple engraving after stothard “the fall of rosamond,” for which macklin paid blake the glorious sum of £80, is a very fine, commercially attractive piece, and the other three prints that blake executed for macklin are close to the same standard. we don’t know what macklin’s political or religious views were, but if he was strongly conservative, he might have learned enough from flaxman or another mutual acquaintance, such as stothard, to conclude that blake was too wicked to hire again. bentley’s book is important to blake scholars in many ways, despite the limited contact between macklin and our man after 1783. one cannot fully grasp the significance of such a heroic undertaking as blake’s single-handed illustrated night thoughts edition of 1797 without considering it in the context provided by macklin’s bible and boydell’s shakespeare; the same is true of almost all blake’s major illustration projects from the chaucer picture and print to the book of job engravings.the combined intaglio/letterpress pages of the 1797 night thoughts were even more challenging to print than those of the macklin bible. cromek’s grave edition of 1808, by contrast, used large-scale engravings but all were on a few separate pages. also critical is the scuttlebutt about the bible project that bentley carefully extracts from farington’s diary and other contemporary sources, tracing reactions to the hyperbolic puffery of the early years, illuminating private quarrels and resentments as the project developed, and describing what is known about the rather desperate machinations through which it was completed just a few days before macklin died. like many of bentley’s other books, this one is long on facts and shorter, though not short, on analysis; he exploits his sources thoroughly and stitches his material together with great care and judgment, but expects readers to think further about the implications of that material for understanding macklin or blake. there are twenty glossy but not very impressive images of engravings, and tables, appendices, and lists galore, as well as an index that is more thorough than many but not comprehensive enough to locate a given fact easily in a densely factual volume. this is an expensive book, listed for $219.95 (and at 304 pages) on the mellen website, but it is definitely important and, importantly, likely to be definitive. a less expensive softcover edition may be available from the publisher. review: bentley, william blake in the desolate market g. e. bentley, jr. william blake in the desolate market. montreal: mcgill-queen’s university press, 2014. xx + 244 pp. $49.95, hardcover (also available as an e-book). reviewed by mark crosby mark crosby (crosbym@ksu.edu) is assistant professor of english at kansas state university. as an artist, engraver, poet, printmaker, and occasional publisher, blake navigated a complex nexus of patronage relationships during his working life. these relationships included the various booksellers, such as joseph johnson, who employed blake’s burin; harriet mathew’s salon, which financed the printing of blake’s early poetry; and friends, such as john flaxman, george cumberland, and henry fuseli, who provided economic assistance through engraving commissions and initiated connections with other patrons. ozias humphry and rebekah bliss were early buyers of the illuminated books and thomas butts, richard edwards, joseph thomas, and lady elizabeth wyndham, wife of george o’brien wyndham, the third earl of egremont, commissioned paintings and watercolor drawings. there was also the patronage of william hayley and john linnell, whose various commissions sought, in different ways, to establish a commercial platform for blake’s creative output. in his latest study of blake’s life and work, g. e. bentley, jr., draws on nearly all of these patronage relationships to set out in a concise and accessible manner how exactly “blake earned his living” (3). based on blake’s own pejorative comments about the marketplace and money—“where any view of money exists art cannot be carried on” (e 275)—and anecdotes such as catherine’s placing an empty platter before her husband to prompt him back to remunerative work, the perception of blake as an otherworldly figure, unconcerned about and far detached from the economic realities of his time, has long permeated blake studies. while such a view is restated at the beginning of william blake in the desolate market with bentley’s claim that blake was “most comfortable living in his imagination” rather than in “the world of pence and penury” (3), the information that bentley has marshaled, particularly the amount of money earned over the first twenty-five years or so of blake’s professional career, suggests a rather different william blake: a highly skilled engraver frequently attuned to a developing marketplace, who explored numerous commercial opportunities with varying degrees of economic success. william blake in the desolate market opens by identifying six chief sources for blake’s income, much of which derived from commercial engraving work. bentley lists blake’s other income streams as his work as a printseller; printing engravings for booksellers; his work as designer and painter; a teacher of painting and engraving; and poet/prophet, which generally refers to the sale of illuminated books. six of the short chapters focus on one of the above, with two others briefly discussing the support from the mathew salon for the publication of poetical sketches and blake as a publisher of works in conventional typography. there is also a short conclusion summarizing the amounts bentley calculates that blake earned during his career and an eighty-seven-page appendix containing an alphabetized register of all patrons, by which bentley means all the individuals who paid blake directly or indirectly for work, including the subscribers that r. h. cromek assembled for blair’s the grave (1808). in most chapters bentley also includes helpful and minutely footnoted tables detailing works, publication dates, and estimated prices. from the outset, bentley is clear that much of the information presented in william blake in the desolate market is drawn from his earlier work on blake, specifically blake records (2nd ed., 2004), blake books (1977), blake books supplement (1995), and “william blake and his circle,” published annually in blake. he also relies heavily on robert n. essick’s william blake’s commercial book illustrations (1991) and the separate plates of william blake: a catalogue (1983) and martin butlin’s catalogue raisonné (1981); he effectively synthesizes the financial and bibliographical information from these standard reference works, although payments and measurements are rounded up rather than given exactly. bentley sets the scene for each income source with contextual descriptions that offer occasional insights into blake’s milieu, as in chapter 3, where we learn that the three older blake brothers, james, john, and william, were close neighbors in broad street in 1784–85 (34). but there seems little new here; perhaps the area of most interest to blake scholars, because it has yet to be explored adequately, is the brief chapter on blake’s role as a teacher. bentley does offer some speculative discussion of blake’s taking thomas owen as an apprentice on 23 june 1788 for seven years, according to the apprenticeship books, city registers february 1786–august 1788, in the national archives, kew (ref. ir1/33 [pp. 218-19]). yet, other than this piece of documentary evidence, nothing certain is currently known of owen’s apprenticeship under blake. all we know at present is that for taking owen as an apprentice, blake was paid £52.10.0 or fifty guineas, of which he paid £2.12.6 in duty. bentley includes the first, larger sum in the table of blake’s earnings for this chapter, but not the tax duties, calling into question the accuracy of the calculations for blake’s earnings. this oversight points to some broader concerns about the financial information given in the tables and in the final chapter. as bentley notes, we have documentary evidence for the monies blake was paid for only a handful of commissions, and we know blake’s own asking prices for his illuminated works, but for the majority of his earnings we have only circumstantial evidence. accordingly, most of the figures given for blake’s earnings in william blake in the desolate market, as bentley acknowledges, “are estimates” that have been “rounded” (18). in many instances, it isn’t immediately clear how these rounded estimates have been calculated. the lack of transparency is particularly worrying given all the variants in, to take one example, blake’s engravings. the fees he received for engraving commissions depended on some of the following factors: the sizes of copperplates, the degree of finish, the amount of detail, the proportion of the work assigned to other craftsmen, and the rise and fall of his reputation as a copy engraver over the years. similarly, the amount of money blake charged for illuminated books also depended on the amount of finish and detail, and, in some cases, the use of gold leaf. furthermore, a number of bentley’s estimates don’t seem entirely representative of the commission. for instance, table 6.1 lists the estimated fees blake received for his painting commissions, such as £18.18.0 (59)—the total sum for the eighteen portrait heads executed for hayley’s upper library at turret house, felpham, at an estimated price of one guinea per portrait. a few entries later, we learn that blake also received one guinea for each of the miniature portraits he produced on card in felpham. was he paid the same amount per painting for the much larger portraits decorating hayley’s library, which measure between 40 and 43 cm. high and 50.3 and 106.6 cm. wide (butlin #343), as the portrait miniatures on card, which measure between 7.2 and 9 cm. high and 6 and 7.8 cm. wide (butlin #347, 353, 354)? bentley’s figure of one guinea per painting is presumably based on the amount butts paid blake for each of the biblical temperas and watercolors, according to blake’s letter to cumberland of 26 august 1799, but did blake, or hayley for that matter, use the same one guinea figure for the library portraits and the portrait miniatures? as a volume of reference, william blake in the desolate market collates and recontextualizes much of the economic and bibliographical information relating to blake’s life and work already published by bentley, including his two important articles “blake’s heavy metal: the history, weight, uses, cost, and makers of his copper plates” and “‘what is the price of experience?’: william blake and the economics of illuminated painting.” while caution should be exercised regarding the use of bentley’s estimates of blake’s fees, if these amounts are anywhere close to the actual money blake received during his working life, then the information presented in william blake in the desolate market suggests that during certain periods, particularly the two decades after his apprenticeship under basire, the market wasn’t as desolate as bentley’s title implies. 94 blake/an illustrated quarterly winter 2011-12 in their concluding paragraphs, lee and mcghee note that “increasingly, visions of future electronic editions put more of the editorial process in the hands of the reader.” they cite peter robinson’s conception of “‘fluid, co-operative and distributed editions’” as a “model of scholarly edition which opens itself to readerly interrogation and intervention” (par. 43). but the prospect is no sooner offered than replaced with thomas tanselle’s writing in 1996 to maintain “the necessity of historical expertise and the vital role specialists play in interpreting textual artifacts of the past.” after all, they finish with tanselle, readers “do retain the power of choosing how much of the critical apparatus and scholarly research to incorporate into their reading” (par. 44). (so much for the imposition of “editioning”!) attempting to split the difference between robinson and tanselle, lee and mcghee conclude that “regardless of whether readers actually encode and edit electronic editions, the future of scholarly digital projects still rests with its [sic] readers” (par. 45). but given that “the blake archive’s primary purpose is for studying blake rather than reading him” and that its “primary audience is a scholarly one” (note 8), one senses the predicament concerning audience underlying their disclosure that “uncertainty about the long-term future of the blake archive … motivates our goals and decisions today …” (par. 46). turning to the print editors, less needs to be said. in the collection’s shortest piece, “the ends of editing,” w. h. stevenson writes that “the first duty of an editor is to present an accurate and useful text” (par. 5). but, as a “modernizing” editor, he argues that “from time to time” and “in pursuit of clarity and ease of understanding,” an editor “has to take minor liberties with the minutiae of blake’s text” (par. 19). the “only justification” for such tampering is that “to do so brings us nearer to blake” (par. 26). most modern readers, however, will probably agree with the introduction’s characterization of stevenson’s (and fuller’s) changing of “the tyger” to “the tiger” as “wince-inducing” (introduction, par. 30). evoking the characterization of autolycus in the winter’s tale as “a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles,” stevenson offers the memorable observation that “blake’s autolycus mind snapped up all manner of fascinating wayside material in any kind of order” (par. 34). david fuller, in “modernizing blake’s text: syntax, rhythm, rhetoric,” draws very extensively and apparently without notice from the introduction to his 2000 william blake: selected poetry and prose (reprinted by pearson longman in 2008; see pp. 18-26 in either). the final eight paragraphs turn to a different kind of re-writing (“my re-writings here” [par. 23]) that re-spaces blake’s lines “to reveal features of the rhetorical structure of blake’s poetry that are concealed by the conventions of its formal structure” (par. 23). mary lynn johnson’s entertaining “contingencies, exigencies, and editorial praxis: the case of the 2008 norton blake” offers an “anecdotal case history” of the “fortuities and mundanities” leading up to the second edition—after twenty-nine years—of the norton critical edition she published with “coeditor john e. grant (husband jack)” (pars. 3, 1). in this behind-the-scenes report, we see her “proclaim by e-mail, a little pompously,” “wail” to her editor, and “wheedle sympathy” (pars. 4, 12, 13) in the “nitty-gritty trade-offs and editorial histrionics” (par. 23) that make up the long back-story of getting the book to press. in keeping with every other contributor, she does not provide data on actual number of copies printed or sold (or site hits), but she does candidly offer specifics on the permissions budget and other constraints. anyone who uses the new norton will find the account rewarding, just as readers of fuller’s and stevenson’s editions, or users of the blake archive, will gain from the inside stories of these respective versions of blake, forgiving what they do not approve and loving all for such energetic exertion of talent. m ost of the primary material in william blake’s conversations will be familiar to those who have studied gerald e. bentley’s two editions of blake records, blake records supplement, and his 2001 biography, the stranger from paradise, but the scholarly alchemy effected by distilling reports of blake’s spoken words into a compact volume and adding an array of related tools has created something rich, strange, and likely to prove enduringly useful. because many of the reports come to us from within a generation or two after blake’s death, they are strongly colored by the late georgian/early victorian conception of him: these blakeish words often seem to reflect the minds of the reporters as much as they reveal the mind of blake, and as the intervening years and layers of reportage multiply, the share of credible blake content diminishes. a snippet of blake’s conversation that was worth retelling or recording is likely to have been one that conformed to, or at least resonated with, the other stories about blake in circulation at the time. gathered together in largely unmediated form, these reports constitute a portrait of a fellow we might call anecdotal blake, a somewhat different being from the persona we moderns know through his works in ink and paint, autographic blake. ironically, autographic blake was not very well known to some of the origigerald e. bentley, jr., with a foreword by mary lynn johnson. william blake’s conversations: a compilation, concordance, and rhetorical analysis. lewiston: edwin mellen press, 2008. lii + 300 pp. [+ 8 pp. illustrations, 1 color]. $119.95/£74.95, hardcover. reviewed by alexander s. gourlay winter 2011-12 blake/an illustrated quarterly 95 as she called out “continually to her william, as if he were only in the next room” (81). they are minimally annotated as to source, but most are not otherwise contextualized or qualified. bentley’s commodious criteria make sense: why omit a potentially illuminating bit of second-order information merely because it was not really a conversation, or because it didn’t actually involve blake’s saying anything (as in the urizen story above, which usefully indicates that blake didn’t talk to catherine about what some of his works meant), and why clutter the book with inevitably inconclusive assessments of the veracity of the reports? bentley’s broad definition of “conversation” has payoffs: if he had been more exclusionary he might, for instance, have omitted the anecdote reported at second or third hand by oswald crawfurd about a vision blake supposedly had (and supposedly “afterwards records” somewhere) during his apprenticeship at basire’s, “when he was one day … secluded in … westminster abbey.” crawfurd says that blake reported (apparently in a lost letter to butts, not in an actual conversation) that he saw “one of his visions”: “the aisles and galleries of the old building (or sanctuary) suddenly filled with a great procession of monks and priests, choristers and censer-bearers” (3). this sounds at first like one more of those early accounts that focus on blake as a man who saw spirits, and the language is utterly unlike blake’s, so one might discount it. but in this case there may be a nonverbal echo of such a vision “afterwards record[ed]” by blake in later life, though it is unlikely that crawfurd would have known about it. among the recently discovered designs to blair’s grave is an unengraved picture that flaxman called “the gambols of ghosts according with their affections previous to the final judgment,” representing the nocturnal activities of phantoms in a churchyard. blake’s scene elaborates upon a passage early in blair’s poem that describes “light-heeled ghosts and visionary shades” that “perform their mystic rounds” around a “trusty yew” beneath “the wan cold moon.” the rediscovered watercolor design (which is clearly developed from a sketch that is now in the yale cennal constructors of anecdotal blake—even to ones who knew flesh and blood blake himself. those modern readers who are thoroughly acquainted with autographic blake may find the shimmery anecdotal blake who rises in these pages to be an uncanny and alien creature, but it is intriguing to hear his voice, and like any chatty ghost he may have things to tell us beyond the grave. the book begins with an insightful foreword by mary lynn johnson, followed by an engaging set of introductory gestures and prolegomena, most of them a few paragraphs long, by bentley, then the collected “conversations” themselves. this is a very mixed bag that includes any text that plausibly but indirectly records a blake statement or something like a blake statement, even words that he probably did not say, such as the seditious utterings reported in the testimony of the soldier who invaded blake’s garden in felpham. presumably the rationale for including this report is that the confrontation definitely did occur and all agree that blake said something. by contrast, the famous story of naked blake saying, “come in, it’s only adam and eve, you know!” to thomas butts in the summer-house is not here (except at least two mentions as an example of what did not make the cut). though it is only a little less likely on its face than many of the other anecdotes from the same period, the adam and eve story is probably apocryphal from top to bottom, and its omission is well deserved. yet bentley casts the net for blakean “conversations” very broadly, including, for instance, at least one unspoken report of a vision reportedly found in a lost letter from blake to butts (see below), a fictive conversation between a blakean persona and isaiah and ezekiel from the marriage of heaven and hell (10), and an assertion that blake’s wife said she didn’t know what blake meant by the book of urizen (13). the entries are arranged in rough chronological order, when possible by year of purported utterance, extending from a retrospective account of blake’s telling his mother of angels on peckham rye in 1767, to 1831, with the last imagined echoes of blake’s voice, audible at most to catherine on her deathbed, 96 blake/an illustrated quarterly winter 2011-12 ter for british art) shows a churchyard occupied by three distinct classes of ghosts performing their “rounds” in their own ways: six “light-heeled” dancers circling the yew, another larger circle of violent quarrelers, victims, and victimizers, and an orderly right-to-left procession of the host composed of pious “visionary shades” bearing tapers, huge tomes, and bread and wine into the church. blake’s decision to expand the population of blair’s churchyard in this particular way may have been inspired in part by a thirty-year-old vision of a ghostly parade in westminster abbey. in addition to the snippets of conversation themselves, bentley includes several conversation-related scholarly tools. the most useful is probably the concordance of the words used in the reported conversations, but interesting as well are the speculative remarks in the introduction on blake’s pronunciation and the implications of rhymes (xxi-xxxv) and the supporting tables of perfect and imperfect rhymes in the appendices. throughout the volume bentley maintains a much lighter scholarly demeanor than one might expect from the author of those magisterial classics, blake books and blake records—this assemblage is hosted by conversational bentley, a manifestation of the generous and genial flesh and blood bentley that the lucky may meet in person. this bentley is much too polite and good-natured to acknowledge, say, that a plausible thirdhand anecdote might be unreliable—all tales are treasured here, and accorded pretty much the same respect as an entertaining raconteur at dinner. similarly, the evidence to be found in blake’s rhymes about the way he probably pronounced words is fascinating but so oblique that it would be difficult to use without extensive qualification. though there is a danger that some will treat this whole judicious assemblage of somewhat problematic facts as having the same kind of authority as blake’s own words, the lightheartedly learned tone that prevails should inhibit anyone from taking it all too literally. w ith blake and conflict palgrave macmillan extends its role as the academic press now most consistently showcasing new blake scholarship. the volume presents selected revised papers from a conference of the same title held in oxford in 2006. although it does not entirely surmount the miscellaneous quality that most conference anthologies have, synergies among several contributions provide a fairly strong thematic coherence. sarah haggarty and jon mee’s introduction outlines two kinds of conflict as salient for the volume, both involving the conversation of “visionary forms dramatic” that blake envisions in humanity’s future (jerusalem 98, e 257). the first centers on ideological or intellectual conflict as an aspect of pluralistic harmony: blake, the editors say, imagines “the kind sarah haggarty and jon mee, eds. blake and conflict. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, 2009. xiii + 235 pp. £55.00/$85.00, hardcover. reviewed by christopher z. hobson review: kate horgan, the politics of songs in eighteenth-century britain, 1723-1795 kate horgan. the politics of songs in eighteenth-century britain, 1723–1795. poetry and song in the age of revolution number 4. london: pickering & chatto, 2014. x + 262 pp. £95.00/$150.00, hardcover (also available as an e-book). reviewed by stephen r. millar stephen r. millar (smillar25@qub.ac.uk) is a phd candidate in ethnomusicology at queen’s university belfast whose research focuses on political song and popular culture, stretching from broadside ballads in the age of revolution to contemporary football chants and the contestation of public space. he has published articles in echo, music and politics, and scottish affairs. the politics of songs combines the perspectives of literary studies and political history to tackle a broad area of inquiry. it employs the “princely song,” from the well-known story of richard the lionheart’s rescue by his minstrel blondel, as a unifying theme through which to explore the politics of song in romantic culture. horgan uses plato’s warnings over the mixing of music and politics “potentially leading to the breakdown of the law and constitution” as a frame to view the interpretation of political songs during the age of revolution (18). she explains the establishment’s fear of such music, which rose during the eighteenth century and culminated in songs’ being used as evidence of high treason—later reduced to conspiracy—at the trial of henry yorke, and in the transportation of thomas muir in 1794 and imprisonment of yorke and james montgomery in 1795. horgan makes an interesting connection between the history of the psalms and callistratus’s “harmodium melos,” a frequently performed classical song that served to remind the athenians of their rights and liberties. through the fusion of music and politics, eighteenth-century political song helped citizens articulate their plight and disseminate a—crude—political message. drawing on the work of maureen mclane, horgan contends that ballads functioned in a similar fashion, defining them as a subcategory of song in opposition to the dominant narrative in which ballads are seen as being “constitutive of the poetry of the romantic era” (23, quoting mclane), and shows how political songs often used the melodies of psalms. in eighteenth-century britain, psalms served as national songs and anthems. their ubiquity facilitated their easy co-option, and the borrowing of the psalm melodies, with their religious connotations, imbued the political songs with a certain authority. the cross-connections between psalm, song, and ballad were often mirrored by those between political activists, songwriters, and printers. horgan recounts how joseph gales, a sheffield printer of thomas paine’s political tracts, came to symbolize paine himself through the zeal with which he carried out his evangelizing; gales “sold ‘hundreds’ of paine’s works in the shop and printed ‘thousands’ by order of the constitutional society” (139). when he was called upon to speak at a local meeting that ended in a dispute, his supporters carried him out while singing joseph mather’s “god save great thomas paine,” in another example of the conflation of politics and song whereby a secondary individual—gales being neither author nor composer—is substituted for both, owing to his role in the mediafication of the message that mather and paine sought to disseminate. the third chapter deals with edmund burke’s changing, and seemingly contradictory, politics. although the subject is well known to scholars of eighteenth-century britain, horgan delivers a refreshing treatment of burke’s attacks on richard price, placing particular emphasis on his use of metaphors of song. however, her attempt to draw together the “philippizing” of price with that of the oracle of delphi comes across as rather forced, particularly when burke viewed the well-meaning price as being duped by france, as opposed to demosthenes’s charging the oracle with deliberate deception. horgan recounts burke’s opposition to the french revolution and to the “new whigs” via a wonderful metaphor on the relationship between printer, song, and public in the production of cheap songbooks. these songbooks represent a challenge to aristocratic orthodoxy wherein the public’s driving production through a printer overturns “authorial authority,” reduces “the beauty and elegance of the type,” and consigns the awarding of merit to the public “rather than through a system of patronage” (123). the book could have benefited from more analysis of the melodies of political songs; horgan identifies a chasm between the fields of literary studies and music, making such analysis all the more conspicuous by its absence. while deconstruction of the technical aspects of music is somewhat specialized—one of the principal reasons for the disconnect between music and other disciplines—an examination of the music accompanying these political songs would have made for a more complete and cross-disciplinary study. this caveat aside, horgan’s contribution to the scant scholarship on political songs in late eighteenth-century britain is to be welcomed. although the life and work of andrew fletcher fall outside the timeframe indicated by the book’s title, his 1704 comment that “if a man were permitted to make all the ballads, he need not care who should make the laws of a nation” is strikingly prescient.andrew fletcher, the political works of andrew fletcher, esq (london: a. bettesworth and c. hitch, 1732) 372. such sentiment is central to horgan’s argument that songs were an important and ubiquitous part of political, literary, and print culture in eighteenth-century britain and were feared for their ability to spread dissent among the “lower orders” of society. her use of songs as historical documents follows an approach similar to that of james donnelly and maura cronin, who employ eighteenth-century ballads to counter claims that the 1798 irish rebellion was free from sectarianism,see maura cronin, “memory, story and balladry: 1798 and its place in popular memory in pre-famine ireland,” and james s. donnelly, jr., “sectarianism in 1798 and in catholic nationalist memory,” rebellion and remembrance in modern ireland, ed. laurence m. geary (dublin: four courts press, 2001) 112-34 and 15-37. and chimes with mcgann’s assertion—via nietzsche—that poetical works are “more ‘historical’ than history … because the ‘history’ that poems touch and re-present encompasses a far greater scale of possible, and therefore real, human times and events than the most careful and scholarly historical text.”jerome mcgann, “the third world of criticism,” rethinking historicism: critical readings in romantic history, by marjorie levinson, marilyn butler, jerome mcgann, and paul hamilton (oxford: blackwell, 1989) 105. while students of blake will perhaps be disappointed by his absence, the book makes reference to thomas gray’s “the bard,” which was illustrated by blake, as exemplary of the power of political song. more importantly, horgan offers much on the context in which blake operated and sets out a compelling narrative on the interconnectedness between songs, psalms, and ballads, demonstrating the role of political songs in shaping political, literary, and print culture in eighteenth-century britain. 66 blake/an illustrated quarterly fall 2011 asplendid publication by the william blake trust features reproductions of blake’s nineteen watercolors illustrating robert blair’s the grave, rediscovered in 2001, and texts by martin butlin and morton d. paley.1 these drawings, plus prone on the lonely grave—she drops, which was once part of the group, were executed by blake in the fall of 1805 on commission from robert hartley cromek, whose edition of the poem with blake’s illustrations, engraved by louis schiavonetti, appeared in 1808. butlin’s contributions to the volume extend to a consideration of related drawings, including death pursuing the soul through the avenues of life (illus. 1). he states that this work “stands out from the finished watercolours in that it is a monochrome drawing, finished in sepia washes over pencil on card in a rather heavy manner uncharacteristic of blake’s own hand; although the invention seems to be by the artist [blake], the work is perhaps a pencil drawing gone over by someone else to make it more saleable in the later 19th century.” a long footnote includes the following comments: when this drawing was first brought to my attention in 1965 i accepted it on the basis of a reproduction but suggested, in a letter to sir geoffrey keynes of 13 december 1965, that it had perhaps been gone over in parts by someone else. by the time it was acquired by essick in 1971 i had been able to see it and was satisfied that it was a perfectly good work by blake and it was included without qualification in my catalogue in 1981. however, constant brooding over reproductions of this work has led me to my present doubts. not surprisingly, these statements immediately caught my attention. in 1965 butlin apparently believed that death pursuing had been “gone over” only “in parts by someone else,” but his statement in 2009 that it is “a pencil drawing” from blake’s hand suggests that he now believes that all the washes were added by “someone else.” while i am tempted to do some teary-eyed “brooding” myself over butlin’s partial deattribution of what i had long considered one of the more delicious examples of neo-gothic horror in my collection, his comments raise more general issues about how drawings are 1. william blake’s watercolour inventions in illustration of the grave by robert blair, edited with essays and commentary by martin butlin and an essay on the poem by morton d. paley (lavenham, suffolk: william blake trust, 2009). the quotations below are from p. 24. titles for the watercolors in this essay follow those used by butlin in this blake trust publication. attribution and reproduction: death pursuing the soul through the avenues of life by robert n. essick 1. death pursuing the soul through the avenues of life. watercolor, 24.6 x 11.3 cm., datable to the fall of 1805 as part of blake’s commission from r. h. cromek to illustrate robert blair’s the grave. essick collection. see also the color images of the work in the online version of the article at the blake web site. fall 2011 blake/an illustrated quarterly 67 attributed, how the scholar/connoisseur converts subjective responses into convincing propositions, and how reproductions can play a role in those endeavors. the basis for butlin’s change of mind would have confounded an earlier generation of art historians. for purposes of attribution, confrontation with the original work of art was not only essential but definitive. the use of reproductions of any sort was eschewed; as late as the 1960s, many art historians still refused to use color reproductions because they were thought inevitably to be misleading. such attitudes require revision in light of recent developments in high-resolution digital imaging. i believe that digital reproductions of sufficient quality can indeed be the basis for the attribution (or deattribution) of two-dimensional works of art, even after studying the original, in just the manner that butlin describes. but what sorts of “reproductions” was he brooding over? i first saw death pursuing at charles sessler, inc., a famous bookshop in philadelphia, in the summer of 1971. mabel zahn, sessler’s employee of many years who oversaw prints and drawings, told me that she had been corresponding with ruthven todd about the work, and that todd had in turn told butlin about it. in a letter to me of 19 august 1971, zahn stated that she had sent todd a “photostatic copy” of death pursuing. this was apparently in the previous year, for in a letter of 1 december 1970 from todd to zahn, he indicates that he had seen some sort of reproduction but also remarks “if you have the drawing photographed, i’d really appreciate a copy.” todd’s letter begins with the forceful statement that “i find that martin butlin agrees with me that mrs. holmes’s blake [death pursuing was then in her collection] is indeed a genuine, if perfectly horrible and disgusting, piece of his work.”2 apparently these opinions were based on the “photostatic” copy, a term that could refer to any number of photographic or electrostatic reproductions.3 this apparently was not a conventional photograph, given todd’s request for one “if you have the drawing photographed.” the later history of reproductions of death pursuing is equally unprepossessing. i know of only a few prior to the blake trust volume of 2009, all in black and white except for a much reduced color illustration on page 16 in sotheby’s new york catalogue of 2 may 2006 offering the nineteen grave watercolors for sale. unfortunately, sotheby’s illustration shifts the lighter tones toward a muddy brown. to create a far better reproduction, i asked john sullivan, head of imaging services at the huntington library, to produce a series of high-resolution images, including details of selected features. he used 2. chacun à son goût. zahn included a photocopy of todd’s letter with her letter to me of 19 aug. 1971. 3. see thomas landau, encyclopaedia of librarianship, 2nd ed. (london: bowes & bowes, 1961) 121: “the ‘photostat’ has after many years become a household word among librarians and readers, and is indiscriminately used in describing any photographic reproduction of a document. it is in fact a trade name, and a ‘photostat’ copy of a document is one produced by the ‘photostat’ apparatus.” the term has also been used to refer to electrostatic reproductions, such as a copy by xerox technology. a phase one p 45+ imaging back mounted on a hasselblad camera. the digital file for the complete design is a 72.2 mb tiff with dimensions of 6527 x 3853 pixels. at true size (that is, the size of the original) this yields a 645ppi image. the file of the complete image permits areas as small as 25 x 16 mm. in the original to be enlarged to a monitor image of 46.5 x 27.5 cm. without pixelation. detail shots of the steps, the winged figure’s torso and face, and the female’s neck and hair allow for magnification approximately four times greater than enlargements based on the digital file of the full image. in early 2009, i sent a dvd of the file of the complete design to john commander, executive director of the blake trust, for reproduction in the trust’s grave publication. i believe that this digital image is the basis for the reduced (16.5 x 7.7 cm.) color illustration on page 24. a few guidelines can now be drawn. basing attributions on reproductions is a dicey game. it is always helpful to know which have been consulted. among the several reproductions of death pursuing, only the digital images described above are in my view sufficient for questioning an attribution previously made upon viewing the original work. i hope that butlin was shown the digital file i sent to the blake trust and that his opinions are based, at least in part, upon it rather than the inferior reproductions available between 1970 and 2008. the reproduction accompanying the printed version of this essay must also be classified as inadequate for attribution studies. accordingly, i hope that interested readers will consult this journal’s web site and view this article and its six color images available there.4 although the online reproductions do not have the resolution of the tiffs, they should be capable of confirming (or questioning) the observations about many of the details in death pursuing presented here. the 300ppi enlargements of the twenty grave watercolors available in the william blake archive <http://www.blakearchive. org> permit close study of those related works. the high-resolution tiffs greatly assist investigation of death pursuing. in several respects, they are superior to using a magnifying glass to look at the original. the field of vision is much larger, particularly compared to lens magnifications above the power of five. zooming in and out and panning across the entire work are smoother and easier. although i have been looking at the original drawing on and off for forty years, i did not notice several salient features until i studied the tiffs side by side with the original.5 what i found leads me to some perceptions that differ from butlin’s. in the blake trust volume, butlin calls death pursuing a “monochrome drawing” in “sepia” washes “on card”; these are among the reasons that it “stands out from the finished watercolours.” sepia means a brown tone, although i find that art historians sometimes use it in reference to the sort of gray and black washes that dominate death pursuing. there are, how4. the images in the online version are 300ppi jpegs. 5. i was greatly assisted in this endeavor by the sharp eyes of joseph viscomi, the first to notice the red lines described below. 68 blake/an illustrated quarterly fall 2011 ever, at least two other colors in the drawing. the most easily perceived is a patch of blue on the right lower chest of the winged figure (death), just above and to the right of his right lower thigh. other, thinner blue washes also highlight his right knee, his right upper arm, his beard and hair (note particularly the area just right of his mouth), a triangular section of the wing just above his left shoulder, wing segments right of his left arm, two small ovoid patches above and to the right of the flames (presumably of a torch) covering death’s left hand, two dark areas below his lower left leg that lie between the shafts of light emanating from the flames, and (very thinly applied) the three step risers below death and the step left of and below the right foot of the female figure (the soul). some of these blue areas have a slightly greenish appearance and may be either a diluted version of the blue on death’s chest or a different color. the two brown spots on death’s face, one on his beard below his mouth and one above his right eye, are stains unrelated to the purposeful coloring. the most interesting color touches are the (six?) fine red lines, each only about 1 mm. long, on the back of the soul’s neck. these suggest that death had grasped his victim around her neck, leaving bloody marks behind, and has just thrown her into the abyss with his extended right hand. both the blue and red hues have probably faded over the years. death pursuing was not executed directly on a card but on paper, 0.2 mm. thick, mounted on a dark ivory, pebble-grain paper 0.23 mm. thick.6 the two layers, neither with any visible watermark, are slightly separated along their lower left edges. the back of the mount shows that it was at one time glued to yet a third backing; removal skinned the mount and exposed the back of the leaf on which the drawing was executed. although the positioning of the twenty grave watercolors on their mounts does not permit easy measurement, the 0.2 mm. paper of death pursuing, when placed upside down next to two of the twenty, appears to be of about the same thickness.7 the 0.23 mm. backing paper does not match the mounts of the twenty watercolors, although one cannot completely rule out the possibility that this watercolor was once attached to the same type of mount. butlin states that the washes in death pursuing are “over pencil.” this seems likely, although there are very few lines i have been able to identify as pencil. one such line curves slightly above the arched upper reaches of the portal above death. the colorist changed the position of the arch, particularly on the left, and thus the pencil line was covered by only a light gray wash rather than the dark wash within the arch. another line possibly in pencil wraps around the wing strut just above the torch. the colorist did not follow the line below 6. the measurements were taken with a brown & sharpe blade micrometer calibrated to 0.01 mm. 7. the watercolors available for comparison were the death of the good old man and heaven’s portals wide expand to let him in, nos. 10 and 19 in the blake trust volume and both in my collection. the strut. there may of course be a good many other pencil lines, now covered by the watercolors. the attribution of a work of art cannot be made in complete isolation from the possible contexts of its production. in this instance, we have two contexts to consider: blake’s execution of the illustrations in 1805, and the coloring of death pursuing “in the later 19th century” proposed by butlin. both need careful consideration. no one has questioned the belief (i am tempted to call it a fact) that blake designed death pursuing in response to cromek’s commission to illustrate the grave.8 r. h. cromek’s son, thomas hartley cromek, wrote the following on the back of the mount: illustration to “urizen” – a poem by william blake – who also made this drawing– it belonged to my father. thomas h. cromek the error in associating the design with blake’s book of urizen may have been based on similarities between death and some of the more horrific figures in that illuminated book. allan cunningham, in his 1830 biography of blake, describes several designs in urizen and claims that one of the “exploits” of an “evil spirit” pictured in them is “to chase a female soul through a narrow gate and hurl her headlong down into a darksome pit.”9 cunningham, who lived with the cromek family from april to the fall of 1810,10 was very probably describing death pursuing. the drawing may have become dissociated from other grave designs and identified with urizen as early as 1810, and almost certainly by 1830. death pursuing probably remained in t. h. cromek’s possession until at least 1863, for he appears to be referring to it when he notes in his journal that the copy of urizen in the british museum “does not contain the subject which i have by him and which i was told by mr. frost a.r.a. formed one of the illustrations.”11 8. for the first consideration of the work in the context of the grave project and identification of the passage illustrated, see essick, “a preliminary design for blake’s grave,” blake studies 4.2 (spring 1972): 9-13 and cover illus. death pursuing is also reproduced and discussed in essick and morton d. paley, robert blair’s the grave illustrated by william blake (london: scolar press, 1982) 75-76 and illus. 25. 9. allan cunningham, lives of the most eminent british painters, sculptors, and architects, reprinted in g. e. bentley, jr., blake records, 2nd ed. (new haven: yale university press, 2004) 638. 10. biographical introduction in allan cunningham, poems and songs, ed. peter cunningham (london: john murray, 1847) xxv-xxvi. 11. quoted from the partial transcription of the manuscript journal by the book dealers john hart and chris johnson in a typescript titled “robert hartley cromek and thomas hartley cromek with records of blake and turner and other contemporary artists” (2008) [43-44]. the cromek papers are now in princeton university library. it is unlikely that frost, born in 1810, was the origin of the erroneous association with the book of urizen. as bentley (638fn) points out, “it is difficult to determine whether the mistaken association with urizen originated with cunningham or with t. h. cromek.” in his catalogue of blake’s drawings and paintings, william michael rossetti places a work probably identififall 2011 blake/an illustrated quarterly 69 as butlin notes, death pursuing the soul through the avenues of life is listed under that title as number “11” of fifteen designs in cromek’s first prospectus, dated “nov. 1805,” for his edition of the grave.12 this, i believe, is a key document for considering the issue of attribution. all the other fourteen designs listed, with the possible exception of an untraced drawing for “a characteristic frontispiece,” are known as colored drawings, or at the very least as a monochrome wash drawing.13 if death pursuing came into cromek’s hands as nothing more than a pencil drawing, it would have been the only design selected on the basis of a work in that medium alone. in spite of the outré (and for some tastes even “disgusting”) features of the image, cromek may have chosen the design for inclusion in his first prospectus because it might appeal to the public taste for the gothic, but for him to have done so on the basis of a pencil drawing alone is surprising. it would also have been a little odd for cunningham so readily to describe death pursuing as part of (rather than a preliminary for) the book of urizen if the drawing had existed only as a pencil sketch rather than a more finished design, like those in all copies of urizen. as i mentioned earlier, it is difficult to see much pencil drawing underlying the washes in death pursuing. fortunately, blake’s preliminary sketches for his grave designs, and the under-drawing in pencil noted (but not described in any detail) by butlin for seventeen of the twenty watercolors, offer some clues about death pursuing when it existed only as a pencil drawing. the visible under-drawing in the seventeen watercolors is not extensive, although here again we can assume that some lines are covered with watercolors or pen-and-ink work.14 as in death pursuing, pencil work is most visible where the overlying pen-and-ink lines or washes stray from the under-drawing. the sides of the background doorway in christ descending into the grave and a few lines of radiance above christ’s head seem to be in pencil. two of the latter were ignored by blake when he drew over most of these lines in pen and ink. some lines defining the ruffled hem of christ’s garment, also not followed by the pen, are able as death pursuing in the possession of the london dealer francis harvey by 1863; see alexander gilchrist, life of william blake, “pictor ignotus” (london: macmillan, 1863) 2: 241, no. 15. perhaps cromek lent the drawing to harvey, or placed it on consignment with him, in the same year in which he described it as a “subject which i have.” 12. the complete prospectus is reproduced in bentley 210-12. death pursuing was excluded when cromek reduced the number of illustrations to the twelve published in his 1808 edition. 13. i can find only monochrome washes in the counseller, king, warrior, mother and child in the tomb, described by butlin as “pen, ink and watercolour over pencil” (no. 4 in the blake trust volume). it is quite possible that the “characteristic frontispiece” is the design used on the title page of cromek’s edition (butlin’s no. 1) or, less probably, the grave personified (no. 13) or our time is fix’d and all our days are number’d! (no. 18). these three are among the nineteen grave watercolors discovered in 2001; none is listed in the first prospectus. 14. my comments on pencil lines are based principally on the enlargements in the william blake archive. pencil. one or two pencil strokes right of the man’s waist and left hip in prone on the lonely grave—she drops show that blake moved these motifs slightly to the left when he drew them in pen and ink. there are a few sketchy pencil lines defining cloud outlines, and some odd pencil strokes on the man’s upper left chest, in whilst surfeited upon thy damask cheek. other designs in the group of seventeen show similar odd bits of pencil work, including the bottom edge of the cloth covering the bed in the soul hovering over the body reluctantly parting with life, cloud outlines and the decorations at the top of the columns in heaven’s portals wide expand to let him in, and lines of radiance and shading on the base of the doorway and its posts and lintel in death’s door. all in all, the under-drawing that can be seen in these watercolors is sparse and sketchy. most of the extant preliminary pencil drawings for the grave watercolors are little more than quick sketches, first thoughts on paper.15 significantly, none of these sketches, unlike death pursuing, has a provenance leading back to either r. h. or t. h. cromek. many are traceable to frederick tatham, who very probably acquired them from catherine blake, who inherited them from her husband. apparently blake supplied the elder cromek only with the washed or colored drawings and retained the preliminaries; this would have been standard procedure for commissioned work. only the sketch for the soul hovering over the body reluctantly parting with life includes indications of the figures’ facial features, but varies in several major respects (e.g., the position, configuration, and costuming of the man’s body) from the watercolor. even if the pencil drawing lying beneath the washes of death pursuing had been developed as fully as the sketch for the soul hovering, the colorist (whether blake or someone else) created most of what we now see. death’s face is carefully detailed with very small brushstrokes; it is highly unlikely that the colorist was merely following pencil lines. the freely drawn lines defining the soul’s dangling hair and flames covering death’s left hand appear to have been executed with pen and ink alone. the act of coloring was also an act of composition. apparently another reason for butlin’s sense that death pursuing “stands out” from the grave watercolors is the “rather heavy manner” of the “washes,” a manner “uncharacteristic of blake’s own hand.” i suspect that any such labored handling is most apparent in death’s face and body; the rest of the composition, including the personified soul, does not seem at all heavy to me. the grave watercolors, all referred to as “finished” by butlin, exhibit a wide range of styles, techniques, and levels of finish. indeed, one could claim that several of the watercolors stand out from their companions on stylistic 15. these are nos. 614, 615, 619, 621, 623, 624 recto and verso, 625, 629, 632, 634, and 636 in martin butlin, the paintings and drawings of william blake, 2 vols. (new haven: yale university press, 1981), pls. 851, 852, 854, 856, 857, 859-65. some of these preliminary sketches are not known to have been developed further. eight of the preliminary drawings for the watercolors are reproduced in the blake trust publication. 70 blake/an illustrated quarterly fall 2011 or technical grounds. death of the strong wicked man and the grave personified are quite richly colored with considerable attention to flesh tones created through the application of very small brushstrokes in blue, brown, and rose. in contrast, parts of prone on the lonely grave—she drops are left uncolored or shaded only with broad washes. the day of judgment exhibits a wide range of coloring techniques. an area of dark sky above the dome in the lower right quadrant, probably applied with a relatively dry brush, shows the sort of fine reticulations we can also see on death’s face, right arm, right thigh, and torso in death pursuing—and in the same or a very similar color. the detailed brushwork in death pursuing also recalls blake’s work as a portrait miniaturist begun in 1801 under william hayley’s tutelage.16 butlin has interestingly associated a destroying deity, a drawing in the philadelphia museum of art, with the grave designs and has even identified a passage in the poem it may illustrate (blake trust publication, p. 54). this deity’s bat-like wings are strikingly similar to death’s and, to my eye, executed in a similar manner with washes and pen-and-ink outlining. butlin’s proposal that someone had “gone over” death pursuing “to make it more saleable in the later 19th century” prompts several questions. the history of the drawing after t. h. cromek, who died in 1873, is somewhat speculative until it entered the collection of mrs. artemas holmes, philadelphia, no earlier than the 1930s. it may have been the drawing sold at christie’s in 1880 for £1.15s.17 thus, the work had very little market value in the second half of the nineteenth century. the tinting of death’s face and parts of his body is minutely articulated with small brushstrokes; the blue and red touches are hardly visible to the naked eye. why would anyone go to all the trouble to execute such detailed work, principally in monochrome washes, when a few splashes of rich color (perhaps yellows and fiery reds, pink flesh for the soul, prominent blood on her neck) would have added much more to the drawing’s saleability? it is possible that a colorist may have believed that the labor required for detailed development of the drawing would be adequately compensated in the marketplace, but if prompted by a profit motive such a colorist must have been badly informed about the commercial value of blake’s art and sorely disappointed. no amount of argument or theorizing can overcome the primacy of the vision and intuitions of the connoisseur’s eye. i have no vain hope of changing anyone’s opinion of death pursuing, least of all butlin’s. rather, my purpose has been 16. see the miniatures of john johnson, william cowper, thomas butts, mrs. butts, and thomas butts, jr., nos. 347, 353, 354, 376-78 and pls. 455, 459, 460, 476-78 in butlin, the paintings and drawings of william blake. for a discussion of this technique in the context of another attribution problem, see essick, “a (self?) portrait of william blake,” blake 39.3 (winter 2005-06): 126-39. 17. for this part of the provenance record, see butlin, the paintings and drawings of william blake, no. 635. at the time he wrote his catalogue, butlin did not know that death pursuing probably remained in t. h. cromek’s possession until at least 1863. to exemplify some ways of using reproductions and historical contexts in cases of attribution, particularly when a leading expert has vacillated between attribution and deattribution. although i believe that death pursuing is entirely blake’s work, i must confess to some slight misgivings. if someone else fiddled with the drawing, i suspect that it was fairly early in its history and confined to death’s face.18 the most likely candidate for any such intervention is t. h. cromek, a skilled watercolorist, although i find little similarity between the techniques used in death pursuing and cromek’s renderings of landscapes and buildings. whatever the truth, however, cromek, butlin, and i would appear to share a common fate, spending part of our lives brooding over death pursuing. 18. david bindman has expressed doubts similar to mine in conversation in apr. 2009. r e v i e w hazard adams modestly introduces blake’s margins by describing it as “less for scholars … than for people who want to know more about blake’s thought … and for students in the early stages of study of his work” (3). beginners will find most of this eminently sensible and learned book edifying, but in fact there are very few blake scholars anywhere who would not benefit from reading it straight through. in some ways, blake’s annotations are among the least ironic of his writings, but every blakean marginalium is a tail that wags a very substantial dog: we can’t really understand a given one without attending to the interplay with the full annotated text and with the broader contexts that contributed to blake’s response. since even the best blake editions inevitably misrepresent the marginalia by supplementing them with (at most) snippets of the annotated texts, many of which are unfamiliar and/or out of print, it would be a good thing if blakists were in the habit of reviewing the relevant chapter in adams before quoting anything written in a margin. of course it would be even better if we all reread, say, the last third of berkeley’s siris with care before repeating “god is not a mathematical diagram,” but if that is not to happen, hazard adams. blake’s margins: an interpretive study of the annotations. jefferson: mcfarland, 2009. viii + 212 pp. $39.95, paperback. reviewed by alexander s. gourlay “the daughters weave their work in loud cries”: blake, slavery, and cotton jerusalem copy e, pl. 59 “the daughters weave their work in loud cries”: blake, slavery, and cotton by james f. moyer james f. moyer (jmoyer@moore.edu) is a visiting scholar/assistant professor of liberal arts at moore college of art and design in philadelphia. at the height of abolitionist outrage,all quotations from blake are from the complete poetry and prose of william blake, ed. erdman. i thank morris eaves, morton paley, the anonymous third reader, and sarah jones for their comments and suggestions. william blake used the signifier slavery to denote more than a catastrophe of african slave torture: a hemispheric system of plantation and textile workers. his comparison of “black” chimney sweeps to african slaves will be more familiar to readers, and anticipates his strategies to reframe slavery to include child labor in mills. in “the chimney sweeper” from songs of innocence (1789), the boy speaker says, “my father sold me” (line 2). this is no twist on the imagery of african slavery; orphans and pauper children were sometimes sold by guardians into dire apprenticeships of perennial terms. the speaker tells of a fellow sweep, tom, who has an anxious dream of deliverance from the misery: and the angel told tom if he’d be a good boy, he’d have god for his father & never want joy. and so tom awoke and we rose in the dark and got with our bags & our brushes to work. tho’ the morning was cold, tom was happy & warm, so if all do their duty, they need not fear harm. (“the chimney sweeper” 19-24) salvational teaching enforces cheap labor in london (as on benevolent plantations abroad): tom has absorbed homilies about duty, work, and obedience, of which the last line is an example. the phrase “we rose in the dark” is a bitter echo of the resurrection that the angel promises (and delivers for the dead sweeps in tom’s dream), that otherworldly reunion of boy with father. in blake’s expression, the young worker’s nightmare disturbs the great organizing principle of christian abolitionism: slave martyrdom. “that thousands of sweepers dick, joe, ned & jack / were all of them lock’d up in coffins of black” (lines 11-12) imagines small bodies—really a subpopulation—consumed by hard and poisonous work. these de facto slaves do not allegorically rise from the horrors of a slave ship, which this crowded image refracts, nor from the persecution of chains, whips, and hangings, to judge and damn their abusers. their african counterparts in scenes of popular abolitionism suggest martyrs—such as the kneeling supplicant in wedgwood’s famous medallion—imitating christ in their torture, but soot-blackened sweeps are victims of work.for a study that shows the prevalence and power of christian martyr imagery and its obscuring of labor in the discourse of popular abolitionism, see moyer. hence, their fantastical resurrection frees them from a life doomed to labor. in subsequent works, blake develops a post-abolitionist critique of intertwined economies of forced labor, of new and old world sites; he frames such works to link conditions of colonial and metropolitan slaves. that such slaves are part of a system is blake’s point. to say that “slave” covers a type of british worker is not, for blake, simply to compare white misery with black. such comparisons were not unheard of coming from labor advocates, who resented sympathy for distant “negroes,” and from pro-slavery lobbyists, who cynically cited england’s squalor to say that negroes had it pretty good.for an overview of efforts to juxtapose slavery with harsh conditions of labor (which intensified during the british debates on the slave trade), see, for example, tise (95-96). blake critically saw african slaves and some british workers as enmeshed in the atlantic economy’s division of labor. by contrast, british anti-slavery had the paradoxical tendency of supporting the social order, as david brion davis explains: “abolitionists could contemplate a revolutionary change in status precisely because they were not considering the upward mobility of workers, but rather the rise of distant negroes to the level of humanity” (467). to advocate the “upward mobility of workers” in the 1790s, while france experimented with upending its social order, was to risk the mark of jacobinism and repressive crackdowns by the monarchy. pre-revolutionary abolitionism in britain was already inclined to focus on the seemingly unique horrors of african slavery and to separate them from a larger problem of labor exploitation. thomas clarkson titled his 1786 treatise an essay on the slavery and commerce of the human species, particularly the african; note the modifying “particularly the african,” which admits of multiracial slavery even while underscoring especially sinful treatment of one kind of slave. eric williams sums up the reality that blake contemplates and begins in a repressive time to articulate: “unfree labor in the new world was brown, white, black, and yellow; catholic, protestant and pagan” (7). blake’s frequent “weaving” image of entrapment is elaborated out of his sense of conditions across, especially, the hemispheric textile industry, which requires plantation and mill.paley (“the figure of the garment”) and hilton have studied blake’s weaving imagery. paley nicely observes a distinction between blake’s symbols of weaving—the web and the net—and the garment. the former convey “only negative implications … of entrapment,” while the latter is “ambiguous”—a symbol of mediation between redemption and imprisonment (126-27). hilton sees blake’s invocations of “fibre” as suggestive of a diseased organism, symbolic perhaps of imperialistic economic relations (96). he comments sharply on the association of women and spinning, and “their depersonalization into engines” (277). he insists, though often obscurely, upon a solidarity between african and english slaves that would further radicalize anti-slavery. commentators have noted blake’s focus on spinning and weaving as images of labor in a new industrial situation, yet the persistence with which he compares female and child workers with african slaves—his critique of systemic slavery in cotton—also deserves careful treatment. for instance, visions of the daughters of albion (1793) is the first of blake’s attempts at an analysis, one sensitive to female vulnerability to labor exploitation.erdman briefly suggests an interpretation of the daughters’ slave identity, and hence the poem’s indictment of english factory labor (“blake’s vision of slavery” 243). makdisi also follows this line of thought: “what is happening here, then, is not that the harlots or the spinning daughters—the spinsters—of england are being compared with slaves in america … but rather the reverse” (93). discussing later works, paley suggests why, in jerusalem, blake links manchester and liverpool—“the former because of its new urban squalor and human dislocation, the latter because of its role as the principal port of the slave-trade” (the continuing city 198). this considerably predates the works (for example, the four zoas, jerusalem) in which critics see his deepest commentaries on industrialization, if not on a system with colonial slavery. reading visions in the context of the cotton industry helps reveal blake’s critique of multi-site slavery and of conventional abolitionism, as does reading afresh the later works. note first that both visions and america a prophecy (also 1793) seem demonstrations of the same comparative mapping or “spanning” device. visions and america are bridge-like. in both poems, england (“albion”) and america stand facing each other; the atlantic ocean represents a transformative medium between these sites of slavery. the atlantic’s symbolic power to unify arises from its literal status as a hemispheric trade route. moreover, the protagonists and “prophetic” action of both poems traverse the ocean to introduce or connect mirroring slaves. (blake’s seers generally, not just oothoon and orc, are frequent flyers who relate human conditions from above.) the recurring figure of visions, like an ostinato in music, is one of desperate communion across the expanse: “the daughters of albion hear her woes, & eccho back her sighs” (2.20, 5.2, 8.13). both poems feature a multi-dimensional hero who suggests an african-american and an english slave, fusing or refracting them in a composite persona. near the peak of publicity of the slave trade and efforts to end it, blake twice refuses to treat slavery in terms of african servitude only; he uses the moment to reframe the term around labor in an industrial empire. in visions and america this mapping of multi-site slavery remains somewhat opaque, but in the four zoas (c. 1796-1807) blake expresses it clearly: first trades & commerce ships & armed vessels he builded laborious to swim the deep & on the land children are sold to trades of dire necessity still laboring day & night till all their life extinct they took the spectre form in dark despair and slaves in myriads in ship loads burden the hoarse sounding deep rattling with clanking chains the universal empire groans. (the four zoas [95].25-30) the breathless speed of this report reflects the bird’s-eye view: two types of slaves are oblivious to the commercial system that herds and works them. blake’s punning repetitions join sites of the hemisphere’s most constrained workers. “trades” and “trades” link britain’s global interests (including the slave trade) with local (for example, textile) trades into which children “are sold.” the echoing pairs “ships” and “deep” and “ship loads” and “deep” also associate britain’s commerce with the gruesome trade in human cargo. this concatenation of words and sounds performs textually what it exposes ideologically: the “clanking chains” of two kinds of slaves upon which the empire depends. blake’s phrasing in the last two lines exploits the ambiguity of enjambment to make it sound as if “slaves in myriads in ship loads” are the ones “rattling” their chains, whereas the “universal empire” itself turns out (also) to be rattling and groaning. the result suspends grammar, compressing “slaves” and “empire” into a distressed entity. “universal empire” (mock inflated, in blake’s capitals) represents the mass of people at labor. “empire groans” performs no simple personification; it is a metonym that demystifies, by the sounds of people at toil or in chains, the imperial veneer. the passage is noteworthy for plotting a new kind of imperial dominance: 1) securing materials and markets abroad; 2) industrializing the metropole; 3) accelerating the slave trade to meet industrial demand. the commercial and enforcement ships are “builded laborious,” a reminder of anonymous labor; their builder, “he,” “urizen,” personifies technocratic ownership. in a blakean inversion of figures, ships “swim the deep” while humans become lifeless; the ocean and its “deep” in blake allude at times to the slave trade.  on “free” english soil, laborers must, because of hunger and inadequate wages (“dire necessity”), work nonstop in mills that induce, then supply, new markets. characteristically, blake suggests that mill workers are susceptible to jejune religious instruction; he figures the child workers in the form of specters, not only because they are thin, but also because their grim lives seek consolation (“they took the spectre form in … despair” [italics mine]). in blake’s witness, an accelerating trade in slaves is now the consequence of factory demand for raw materials (“and slaves in myriads in ship loads” [italics mine]). breathless “stories” such as this set blakean voices against imperial myth: the speaker perceives, and deconstructs, a terrible complex.for a different analysis of blake’s storytelling as deconstructive—as undoing or “consuming” its own narrativity through temporal instability—see cooper. blake’s personification of a groaning empire animates a similarly clear-eyed (and open-eared) figure later in the same poem, again to bridge african and english laborers. an angry “demon of the waters,” a personification of english history, recounts his wounds, factory and plantation slavery chief among them: and what i loved best was divided among my enemies my little daughters were made captives & i saw them beaten with whips along the sultry sands. i heard those whom i lovd crying in secret tents at night & in the morn compelld to labour & behold my heart sunk down beneath in sighs & sobbings all dividing till i was divided in twain …. (the four zoas 89 [97].5-11) here blake employs a different figure to effect his mapping of slavery: a diseased and divided english heart recalls that the empire’s scattered slaves once belonged to the same family. the demon’s beloved “daughters” (in the four zoas the term often suggests young women of the textile trades) now stand for captives in cotton mills (“secret tents”) and slaves in the tropics (“sultry sands”). their recent slave histories bear the traces of a shared filial origin, really a common imperial source of cruelty and exploitation. as with “groans” (the four zoas [95].30), the figure of hearing people’s pain at labor is blake’s signature way of marking such toil and its social invisibility. note that the children cry not at laboring, but in the nightly interstice—a picture of their oblivion and their awareness of it. the end-line markers “beaten” and “compelld” subtly distinguish two kinds of slaves in cotton—those facing the brutal enforcements of the plantation, and those the coercions of the mill system. the demon can see (“i saw”) the scandalous violence (“whips”) of african slavery, while, paradoxically, those closer to home must be heard because they lack attention from abolitionist campaigns. but “little daughters” functions as an equating and humanizing signifier, naming african slaves and english paupers and orphans. unheard voices of toil link slaves and child workers in this analogous, earlier passage from visions: at entrance theotormon sits wearing the threshold hard with secret tears; beneath him sound like waves on a desart shore the voice of slaves beneath the sun, and children bought with money. that shiver in religious caves beneath the burning fires of lust …. (visions 2.6-10) this prototypical example places african slaves and child workers in conceptual proximity. but as befits the bleak and desperate visions, no moment of liberating recognition overcomes a spiritually enlightened wanderer, as happens at a similar moment in jerusalem (20.12-18). blake’s repressed, sanctimonious, and craven theotormon is a satiric stand-in for some britons, complicit in domestic textile enslavement, reluctant to take a stand on the african slave trade and plantation slavery.in “blake’s vision of slavery,” erdman relates theotormon to wilberforce and to the abolition society as a whole: the latter, inoculating itself from the taint of radicalism, stated in february 1792 that it did not seek “the emancipation of the negroes in the british colonies” but only an end to “the trade for slaves” (246) (quotations and italics are from erdman). erdman does not say that the incremental approach was a necessity, and a radical step. blake is on the alert for backsliding, for the rationalizing to which such incremental politics are susceptible. (his tears of self-pity and guilt abrade a stone threshold, an image of paralyzed inaction.) as in blake’s work generally, the voices of slaves and children have no social status: they sound like “waves on a desart shore,” incessant, loud, and desolate. as in the four zoas, african slaves and english children are of one voice—there groaning, here waves breaking. in the four zoas, shiploads of slaves “burden the hoarse sounding deep,” as if even the ocean could never absorb the crime’s enormity; similarly, in visions, the atlantic’s roar transmits the immeasurable pain of slaves and children across the same sea. for blake, the atlantic’s waves cannot break on any shore without calling to mind both plantation slaves and their counterparts, caught in the same commercial nexus. the daughters of albion in the cotton nexus 1. visions of the daughters of albion copy i, pl. 1 (erdman numbering). yale center for british art, paul mellon collection. b1978.43.1582. the opening line of visions proclaims in magnified letters that the “daughters of albion” are “enslav’d.” “the eye sees more than the heart knows,” the poem’s headline and epigraph, is an elliptical way of saying the same thing: we britons can see what is happening to women and girls, for instance in the textile trades, but we lack the heart to call it what it is. visions has been read with interest since the 1980s for its provocative handling of gender and sexual politics alongside a dark fable of african-american slavery. critical discussions of blake’s views on women and gender attend closely to this poem.for such readings and critiques, see bruder, sturrock, and goslee. discussions of blake’s views on african slavery, though scantier, similarly begin with the poem or arrive at it.for such discussions, see erdman, “blake’s vision of slavery,” as well as mellor and bindman. for a recent analysis of visions that treats both its gender and racial signifiers and argues that they dramatize the ambiguous power of essentializing to denigrate or liberate, see welch. some critics read the poem as drawing an analogy between english gender oppression and american chattel slavery, bringing into the open the legal oblivion and violence that eighteenth-century women endured by comparing them with slaves. others see it as going still further in its gender politics by exposing the way phallic power—male sexual desire and rivalry—plays a role in all kinds of abuse, even white efforts to dominate blacks. the poem allies both readings. it also allies two sites of slavery, america and england: they are slave colony and industrial metropole, a linkage that commiserating workers in cotton can appreciate. the daughters of albion want to communicate with oothoon, the african-american slave who stands as their counterpart across the atlantic, because they share with her a condition of economic, as well as gender, enslavement. this economic critique is one that wartime british interests, using cotton to expand economically (and politically and militarily) cannot well abide—one a wary radical poet will insinuate through symbol and subtext. by force of the tacit equation of the plantation with cotton—the new king displacing sugar since the revolution in textile manufacture—oothoon is a cotton slave. her english counterparts, the “enslav’d” daughters of albion who “eccho back her sighs,” include female spinners and weavers exhausting their eligibility, if not their lives, in england’s mills. in visions, even the overt themes of male sexual insecurity and violence and of female sexual liberation are not far afield from the subtext of oppressed labor. since the spinners’ work consumes their eligible years and sexual lives—and middle-class culture wants them chaste and industrious—their vision of sexual freedom is the more urgent. though plantation bound, oothoon is mentally free enough in the spinners’ projection of her to express ideals of love and sexual freedom. to reinforce the notion that these daughters are dreaming the poem, blake reprints the lone word “visions” above its opening. while the poem addresses women’s status generally, it contemplates women at the extreme socioeconomic margin. “daughter” refers partly to a new type of textile worker: paupers as young as six were carted “in wagon-loads” from london workhouses to lancashire mills by middlemen, or sold by their desperate parents into factories (inglis 124). mill owners made it a policy to hire children before adults, and females before males—a practice they colluded to defend in the face of parliamentary inquiries into child labor after 1800 (inglis 121). in text and image blake invokes young textile workers throughout his career—for the first time, here in visions. oothoon’s summary speech sympathizes with weavers and spinners: “she who burns with youth. and knows no fixed lot” is nevertheless “bound to hold a rod / over her shrinking shoulders all the day; & all the night / to turn the wheel of false desire …” (5.21, 25-27). eaves, essick, and viscomi (the early illuminated books) note that the image of the rod condenses multiple enslavements: “a yoke for bearing burdens over her ‘shoulders’ … but also the rod or whip of the slave owner or cruel husband” (277, note on 8.25). to these meanings of rod can be added more specifically the picking stick and perhaps beater of the loom apparatus, which a weaver must hold, and most of all the bar of the spinning jenny. this oothoon appears at times more a phantasm, the daughters’ alter ego as they dream her; she reverts to their problems, which include deforming labor in the spinning mills. “daughters” of the poem’s title and epistrophes comes into sharper focus in light of its use in subsequent works. the four zoas describes “the daughters of albion girded around their garments of needlework / stripping jerusalems curtains from mild demons of the hills” (25.25-26)—a startling image of textile mills denuding sheep and displacing local wool economies. this launches a passage suggestive of industrial slavery (25.34-39). later still, there is this story of england’s origins in divided labor (weaving daughters, hammering sons): enitharmon wove in tears singing songs of lamentations and pitying comfort as she sighd forth on the wind the spectres and wove them bodies calling them her belovd sons & daughters employing the daughters in her looms & los employd the sons in golgonoozas furnaces among the anvils of time & space thus forming a vast family wondrous in beauty & love. (the four zoas 103.32-37) the creator-employer’s emoting seems self-indulgent and hypocritical. her “calling” the workers “belovd” runs without pause into “employing” them. the bodies are stuck “in,” not merely “at,” the looms. the climactic ending to the first book of milton has this nightmarish allusion to inventor john kay’s flying shuttle (1733), which revolutionized cotton weaving by exponentially speeding up the process:for a discussion of kay’s flying shuttle (which increased demand for yarn and stimulated the search for faster spinning), see de l. mann. see also mantoux 206-09. the stamping feet of zelophehads daughters are coverd with human gore upon the treddles of the loom, they sing to the winged shuttle. (milton 29.58-59) unable in the din (underscored by the consonance of t’s and d’s of “feet,” “treddles,” and “shuttle”) to communicate with each other, they sing to their looms. similarly, in blake’s jerusalem (1804-20), “daughters” habituated to industry tragically serve to spread a dehumanizing imperial economy: the daughters weave their work in loud cries over the rock of horeb! still eyeing albions cliffs eagerly siezing & twisting the threads of vala & jerusalem running from mountain to mountain over the whole earth. (jerusalem 67.26-29) as with “sing to the winged shuttle” in milton, the image derives its power from the compression of signifiers of a conflicted psychology, so that the “daughters” are both eager and desperate, laboring while hopeful. blake enlivens this proto-marxian collapse of worker into her commodity, dramatizing the thin line between resistance and fetishization in the verbal contrast between work (“siezing & twisting”) and the reach of the product (“threads … running … over the whole earth”). the organizing image—“the daughters weave their work in loud cries”—cuts to workers’ anguish of complicity in their own exploitation, as their going to work reinforces (weaves) such work, such conditions. their “loud cries” leak their guilt, or compensate for it in ever shriller eagerness in allegiance to england (“albions cliffs”). jerusalem deepens the theme of a spreading industrialism: the daughters of albion weave the web of ages & generations, folding & unfolding it, like a veil of cherubim and sometimes it touches the earths summits, & sometimes spreads abroad into the indefinite spectre, who is the rational power. (jerusalem 64.2-5) along with “rational power,” of which the technocratic way of organizing human labor is a version, blake wants to expose the role of religious morality in controlling labor. (the deft “like a veil of cherubim” conjures the charm of any soft-twilled product that people like and worship, and that makes it so easy not to see [“veil”] the labor behind it.) hence, he creates this image of textile workers subject to shame-inducing ideas for chaste industry: “the daughters of albion clothed in garments of needle work / strip them off from their shoulders and bosoms, they lay aside / their garments; they sit naked upon the stone of trial” (jerusalem 66.17-19). early in jerusalem, blake frames the new conditions of industrial labor in terms of a british “family”: “scotland pours out his sons to labour at the furnaces / wales gives his daughters to the looms” (16.22-23). the prevalence of girls and women in the mechanized textile factories was impressive, as records in the industrial phase demonstrate (though records before 1800 are spotty). among a major group of lancashire cotton mills around 1830, girls and women made up over half of the work force of 7600. “young women” and girls (those twenty-one and under) composed one third of the total. women and children of both sexes made up 79 percent of the work force; adult males composed less than a quarter (inglis 303). parliamentary returns of 1816 indicate that 17.7 percent of the work force in the cotton industry were adult males (pollard, “factory discipline” 103). in 1789 at richard arkwright’s mammoth cromford mills, there were only 150 men out of 1150 workers—13 percent of the total (may 72-73). (the starting ages for children in the cotton industry were low enough, at nine or ten years; in the silk industry, which employed them almost exclusively, children started at six or seven years [pollard, “factory discipline” 103].) as one historian glosses females’ predicament of low wages and dismal working conditions: “it could in fact be argued that in the process of proletarianisation, women were often proletarianised first, increasing their vulnerability and their dependence on men” (hudson 23).for more on women’s importance to the textile industry, see bythell. for a literary-critical perspective on women’s association with textile production, especially in the proto-industrial context, see callaghan. blake’s attention to young female textile workers and to their conditions both materially and sexually makes sense then as part of an alarmed response to a changing england. blake spent his childhood in his family’s hosiery shop at 28 broad street; he knew the traditional textile business.bentley notes that blake’s father and brother ran the shop from 1752 to 1812 (12-15, pl. 7). in his pioneering chapter on blake and weaving, hilton also mentions blake’s family background (107). he was alert to the industry’s transformation, which happened in the two decades between his youth and adulthood. “transformation” does not convey the impact of the revolution in textile manufacture, which was primarily a british phenomenon, penetrating and altering most aspects of british life and culture, and a key reason for britain’s long dominance in both textiles and industry generally. so swift was the transition to mass production, so large were the profits accumulated by owners of textile mills, and so purely exploitative were the terms of employment that economic historians debate the usefulness of cotton as a representative case for generalizing about the early phases of britain’s industrial revolution.for a discussion of this debate, see mccloskey 243-48. blake’s commercial work brought him (probably inevitably, given the reach and size of the cotton industry) into the domain of a textile producer, moore & co., which hired him c. 1797 to engrave its advertisement (see illus. 2). taking or needing this work was probably humiliating to blake; it may account for some of the bitterness he hurls at the textile industry. the image deserves closer reading; to interpret it helps us situate blake within imperial capitalist discourse, and helps us see the extent of his critique of industrial practices. 2. an advertisement (c. 1797) by william blake for moore & co. manufactory (see enlargement). belying the grim conditions of women and children in textile mills—against which blake the poet rails—the engraving is a sumptuous idealization, replete with symbols of national greatness and vignettes of happy industry. the latin epigraph speaks of “the british quill succeeding now the needle of babylon.” © trustees of the british museum. 1868,0711.439. the advertisement depicts a tripartite temple of british textile greatness. following the compositional rule of thirds, the image is vertically ordered from a pedestal of “revealed” and “realistic” factory production to an intermediate proscenium of eager child labor to a symbolic pediment of british imperial strength. between two great columns moore & co. makes an elaborately etched sales pitch touting its carpets and hosiery. the scene is one of happy industry. two adult male workers—one a handloom weaver, the other at a knitting machine—flank the image at the bottom, as if anchoring imperial pillars. of the nine workers, at least four are children; three others—the male apprentice to the weaver’s right, and the two nearly synchronized women weaving a carpet—appear to be in their teens. above ground, as it were, as if to represent and normalize the industry below, three well-fed, handsomely dressed children go to their tasks. two small boys attend to huge carpets; a girl sits at a training-sized spinning wheel. sumptuous carpets cloak the twin columns, rising with them to support an imperial nimbus, where carpets, steam clouds, royal devices, and rays of the sun combine in a herald of industrial and geopolitical might. the insignia of the prince of wales (with his orwellian motto, the ancestral german “ich dien”—“i serve”) hover left and right, and the royal arms topmost. the carpets wrap the structure, subsuming the busy labor under glory. appeals to class-conscious consumption pervade the copy: private families may be supplied with silk, cotton, worsted, and thread stockings of all kinds & qualities, on the most reasonable terms. colours & patterns of carpeting may be changed to suit the taste of the purchaser, & patterns of hosiery made to any size. in the foreground are the proprietor and a lady client taking in the industry. (they are the only figures communicating with each other, a mini-drama that also serves to fix the eye, while their pointing initiates a succession of focuses counterclockwise through scenes of work, then upward to empire.)  the image encourages the viewer to identify with the purchaser. words and image both are pitched to women of means; “stockings” stokes a desire for visible luxury. meanwhile, the two female bodies send a comforting message about their work and about disciplined conduct for women of a certain class. (twinned women reinforce the class/group subtext in a way a single figure would not.) this advertisement is a revealing matrix. first, child and female labor in the mills was a common practice, and common knowledge; the advertisement trumpets what nationalistic discourse always claimed—that children and women were properly and happily enrolled in the industry. the engraving produces a rather strained argument for their labor in a percolating debate over the same, in which blake’s dissenting commentaries are the angriest (if also obscure). the two almost mechanically synchronized women (the heart of the picture), ironically focused by the pointing owner and leisurely client, counter anxiety regarding female labor in the textile mills (not quite synchronized says “still free”). anxiety on the religious right is concerned with women’s conduct in the mills, their sexual vulnerability and comportment; anxiety on the left is concerned with their working conditions. this parlor or drawing room is designed to ease both. the two rugged young males assisting the handloom weaver—himself a symbolic denial of dislocations in formerly male-dominated, craft-conscious weaving—represent legitimate apprenticeship. parliament would soon address, if ceremoniously, a crisis in textile apprenticing, which saw boys (and perhaps some girls) bonded into sham agreements, with no real hope of learning a profession that they could ply independently.on such apprentices, see inglis 104: “in the factories they were employed in their own right, as machine-minders, learning no trade—being effectively prevented from learning one ….” on the debate surrounding the health and morals of apprentices act of 1802, see inglis 78-80, 121. later, in jerusalem, blake writes the dark parody of this iconography in its demystified reverse image: and one daughter of los sat at the fiery reel & another sat at the shining loom with her sisters attending round terrible their distress & their sorrow cannot be utterd and another daughter of los sat at the spinning wheel endless their labour, with bitter food. void of sleep, tho hungry they labour: they rouze themselves anxious hour after hour labouring at the whirling wheel many wheels & as many lovely daughters sit weeping. (jerusalem 59.26-33) what stands out here is the concern for a vulnerable group of english females whose situation, for almost a half century starting in the 1780s, is so marginal that it “cannot be utterd.” the moore advertisement’s imperial display, typical of the discourse of national interest during the 1790s, suggests the bravery required to “utter” on behalf of these women; blake’s complicit engraving is a most personal instance of non-utterance. of blake’s concern for female textile workers, which is detailed through his non-commercial work, there is no parallel in literature of the period. “and one daughter … & another … and another daughter … & as many lovely daughters sit weeping” typifies blake’s anaphoric insistence on activating hearing, on making the socially invisible audible through alliterative names and signifiers (“wheels … weeping”). moreover, the passage is accurate. “endless their labour, with bitter food. void of sleep, / tho hungry they labour” reads like a prescient transcription of real children’s oral testimony on the long shifts and difficulty in taking meals while at the machines. to cite three examples: i have worked till twelve at night last summer. we began at six in the morning [an eighteen-hour shift]. i told the book keeper i did not like to work so late, and he said i must. we only get a penny an hour for overtime. the engine never stopping excepting about ten minutes to be oiled …. never stop to take our meals except at dinner; has gone on so this six years and more ….these quotations are from the minutes of mp michael sadler’s 1832 commission on child labor, quoted by inglis 306-07. “they rouze themselves anxious / hour after hour labouring” reveals a child psychology of profound intimidation, the human animal in its residual recoil from miserable conditions. the machines are grimly mesmerizing: “fiery reel,” “shining loom,” “spinning wheel,” “whirling wheel.” monstrous toys, they dwarf young minds and proliferate to defeat them one by one: “hour after hour labouring at the whirling wheel / many wheels & as many lovely daughters sit weeping.” blake targets this strange way of arranging human beings: industrialization, the operation of machines in round-the-clock mills.the literature on the transformation of labor—from independent to wage labor—during the industrial revolution is considerable. see, for example, hill 214-15 and hobsbawm 48-51. for an overview of the modern factory system as distinct from older systems of manufacture, see mantoux 25-44. see also pollard, “factory discipline,” on the rise of disciplinary techniques to enforce the new form of labor, and may (64) on the distinction between “standard of living” and “way of life,” and the profound changes to the latter. parliament’s combination acts of 1799 and 1800 established that there would be no state interference in the labor market, only official acquiescence to the trends blake observes (inglis 82). blake’s critique targets not just machine technology, but also the coercive techniques that enable its deployment: a combination of machines, labor management techniques, and ideology called the factory. the advertisement that blake engraves for moore is an almost parodically optimistic display of this system, while his critique of it in jerusalem aims to expose it piece by piece—and perhaps to resist his own capture by the cotton nexus. if the advertisement reinforces class and gender roles in the textile industry, and in britain at large, jerusalem forms the critique: other daughters weave on the cushion & pillow, network fine that rahab & tirzah may exist & live & breathe & love ah, that it could be as the daughters of beulah wish! (jerusalem 59.42-44) the labor of some english daughters (here, those who do “fine” work—that is, finishers) supports the leisure and luxury of other women, a fact moore’s advertisement does not so much deny as try to naturalize through images of contented labor and national greatness. the passage shows different classes of spinners laboring to satisfy other english classes, a satire of national harmony. blake’s ambiguous and suggestive “weave on the cushion” brings out the theme of sexual depletion: the textile workers neither sleep nor love, but weave “on” the amorous cushions and pillows they produce, which other women have for their bedchambers. a diction of casual excess—“may exist & live & breathe & love”—conveys leisure’s dependence on the labor of others, and so freedom from necessity. “breathe” and “love” connote physical passion while expanding the general sense, in contrast to the alienated daughters, of life at its freest. the lines convey women’s alienation from the fruits of their labor and from their bodies, given over and sublimated to the pleasure of others. more darkly, this sublimation turns out to be the daughters’ reason for existing; others’ leisure and love is the daughters’ compensatory devotion, and their pleasure is believing that they bring it about: “ah, that it could be as the daughters of beulah wish!” the sarcastic shift from albion to beulah (the idyllic land at life’s end in bunyan’s pilgrim’s progress) layers the psychology of fruitless labor with nationalist and christian myths of purpose. while the daughters of jerusalem “sit weeping” at the machines, blake cares to explain how self-regulated their mental framework is: yet the intoxicating delight that they take in their work obliterates every other evil; none pities their tears yet they regard not pity & they expect no one to pity for they labour for life & love, regardless of any one but the poor spectres that they work for, always incessantly …. (jerusalem 59.34-38) the daughters work for “spectres”—that is, big, hollow ideas (like “ich dien”), phantasms that bear little relation to their well-being. similarly, the “spectres” are “poor,” not only empty in meaning but also materially impoverishing, no matter how hard the daughters work “for” them. the word “intoxicating” stresses what is unnatural and wildly overcompensating about the daughters’ self-sacrifice and desire for such labor. the choice of “intoxicating” in jerusalem echoes “to turn the wheel of false desire” in visions. both point to the theme of fruitless desire and sexual depletion; blake sees harnessing women’s libidos as the main psychological method of subjugating female labor in factories. reforming female desire for purposes of work is a policy blake critiques time and again, starting with visions at the height of the abolition debates. one way people can be made to work as hard and fast as the girls do at wheels and looms, suggests blake, is for their libidinous energy to go into work—for them to sacrifice their shameful sexuality for productivity. blake dwells on the “daughters” with regard to this theme of sexual sacrifice and sublimated desire because he sees girls and women as particularly susceptible to a moral lesson of chaste industry. similarly, the plight of factory women, whatever their attitudes at work, becomes easier to rationalize within a culture-wide discourse that construes their labor as good for them morally. a story of sexual freedom and constraint fills up the daughters’ visions, not because visions is about only sexual politics (and not labor), but because “the pleasures of this free born joy” (visions 7.2), denied to england’s spinning women, are at stake. blake the sexual liberationist provokes divergent responses: some critics praise his willingness to affirm women’s sexuality in shame-free terms; others warn that he inscribes a fantasy of free love geared to men’s pleasure and insensitive to the risks to women (such as pregnancy); others read his figures as self-reflexively, if ambiguously, testing notions of sexual agency.wolfson succinctly summarizes these critical responses, contextualizing them historically and giving each its due (especially the last), in her reading. alongside these responses, all legitimate, there is another point: blake stresses that england’s poor females are subject not to ideology about sex all by itself, but also to ideology about work; the two are inextricable and mutually reinforcing.mcclenahan observes this linkage (145). she also observes, interestingly, “a contrast” in blake between some of his images of women’s work and “real-world occupations”—a contrast blake uses “to honour the labour of women by suggesting its difficulty while representing it as sublimely significant” (137). in most references to spinners and weavers, blake interrelates work and sexual imagery. readers sometimes misconstrue the references to labor as idiosyncratic metaphors for women’s psychosexual repression. but blake mixes material and sexual imagery to argue that a disciplined workplace and disciplined desire go hand in hand to keep female workers at task. david punter makes the same point, in more general terms: readings of the prophetic books which … see labor as a metaphor for psychological and cosmic conflict have tended to compound the rationalist world-view against which blake so bitterly protests; and … such readings cannot take account of the principle of the paramountcy of energy, of that energy which pertains not to the mind but to the body. (553-54) the constraining discourse of work parallels that of benevolent christian slavery, which claims that negroes similarly attain civilization through the regimens of plantation life. visions recognizes the parallel with a suggestion of oothoon’s rape by bromion, a corrective to the myth of benevolent masters and an image of male domination of (free-spirited) female sexuality in a context of forced labor. to clinch the point that blake sees sexual constraint as a deprivation of factory toil and as a woman’s way of sublimating such toil, consider this memorable instance of mixing material and sexual imagery in the four zoas: the daughters of enitharmon weave the ovarium & the integument in soft silk drawn from their own bowels in lascivious delight with songs of sweetest cadence to the turning spindle & reel lulling the weeping spectres of the dead. (the four zoas 113.9-12) nelson hilton glosses this caricature as “perpetrating the whole system of generation” (113), akin to the “vegetative” in blake’s metaphysics—that is, prolific but spiritually dead. this graphic metaphor is also a figure of sexual constraint because of endless work. the ovarium is the uterus, the integument the hymen; by spending year after year “turning spindle & reel,” young women “weave” their sex organs shut, in blake’s remarkable image of lost sexual lives. “bowels” and “lascivious delight” mean that the daughters’—that is, spinsters’—devotion to their labor must finally be libidinous. keeping them devoted to work must mean turning their libidos against themselves, must require a sustaining desire equal to, indeed converted from, sexual need. blake’s critique is keyed to the anxiety of the consumer public, especially conservative christians, about the factory as a new and morally treacherous space for women.this is an issue requiring more study. for instance, how connected is on-site religious schooling in the factory villages to the more general discourse of “morality” for women? for a discussion of the disciplinary role of sunday schools and “evening” schools in the factory village, see pollard, “the factory village” 123: “sunday schools had a far more important part to play [than day and evening schools], being largely designed to inculcate current middle-class morals and obedience ….” note that sunday was the one day off for workers; hence, their leisure time was appropriated and managed to the extent that the sunday school movement succeeded. he targets the “conduct” discourse that calls for chaste industry on the part of poor women.sturrock essentially supports this point, albeit in language that obscures the material facts motivating blake’s critique, such as textile factory work: “i argue that blake’s association of feminine power and chastity with oppression when placed in context should be understood as part of what jackie di salvo calls his ‘assertion of plebeian values against those of middle-class england’—his rejection not just of an ancient and repressive moral code but of a new and revitalized manifestation of this code, which threatens to perpetuate in a new form a divisive and oppressive social structure” (339). “prior to the 1770s,” writes helen bruder, “most advice literature was directed towards providing guidance and information for young men, but in the later decades of the eighteenth century the behaviour of young women became a subject of more pressing concern, and brought into print a large band of markedly directive and moralistic writers” (40). bruder does not speculate on what caused this “flood of didactic books for ladies.” one cause was the upsurge in women wage-workers, leaving the domestic space behind for the crowded, rootless one of the mill, factory, and weaving village. women going out into spaces in which their discipline, obedience, and industry were a capitalist imperative and national interest is one concern of the conduct writing. a protective anxiety about the migration of women from the domestic to the worldly sphere inflects the widely read work of conduct writer hannah more: that bold, independent, enterprising spirit, which is so much admired in boys, should not, when it … discover[s] itself in the other sex, be encouraged, but suppressed. girls should be taught to give up opinions betimes, and not pertinaciously carry on a dispute, even if they should know themselves to be in the right …. it is of the greatest importance to their happiness, that they should acquire a submissive temper, and a forbearing spirit, for it is a lesson which the world will not fail to make them frequently practise, when they come abroad into it, and they will not practise it the worse for having learnt it sooner. (145-46)partially quoted by bruder (42). to “come abroad into” the world means going off to marry or to work. young women could do one or the other (or stay home); outwork in a mill meant little prospect for working as a wife. while sincere, more’s advice is at odds with blake’s disparagement of restrictive codes of conduct in a context of factory labor. at every point—visions, the four zoas, jerusalem—when blake invokes england’s “daughters” he joins grim manufacture to moral regulation in his view of the plight of women. by the time of jerusalem, blake’s depiction of the world of textile labor and conduct conditioning has achieved the compression that comes with practiced bitterness: “that the deep wound of sin might be clos’d up with the needle, / and with the loom: to cover gwendolen & ragan with costly robes / of natural virtue” (jerusalem 21.13-15). the lines expose several social facts and an elaborate psychosocial process. they indicate that propertied classes use shame to enforce poor women’s “redeeming” work ethic; that women of conspicuous means reap the fruits of others’ anonymous labor; that beautifying such women is supposed to become for poor women a purpose for living; that “robes” are “costly” because high both in price and human toll; and that “natural virtue,” as blake sneeringly calls the chaste industry expected of poor women, is neither natural (because ideological) nor virtuous (because morally perverse). blake sees, somewhat unfairly, the work of conservative moralists as enforcing slavery in england.“unfair” in that wilberforce and other conservative evangelicals formed in 1796 the society for bettering the condition and increasing the comforts of the poor, which played a role in defending the apprentice reform bill from efforts of owners to block it. however, wilberforce and other conservatives, including many leaders of christian abolitionism, attacked trade-unionizing efforts as against the national interest and resisted other domestic reforms. in addition, they tried to inculcate obedience through religion. on this political activity, see inglis 79-82. visions is really where blake begins to work out this critique of conditioned female labor: a story of female sexuality provides an alternative to the spiritual politics of middle-class christians and of christian abolitionists (like more). visions is a fairly direct critique of christian abolitionism and its focus on african slaves alone, as those magnified letters suggest: “enslav’d, the daughters of albion weep: a trembling lamentation / upon their mountains; in their valleys. sighs toward america” (1.1-2). these lines waste no time linking england (“albion”) with america, and linking the laboring women of each. blake argues that england’s spinners should be heard in any conversation about slavery that abolitionists are rightly provoking. moreover, the following line figures oothoon as “the soft soul of america.” hence, england’s spinning daughters have more in common with african-american slaves than soul-saving abolitionists do, which is why they echo back oothoon’s lamentations with their sighs and which is why they should be informing british conversation about forced labor and sexual morality. (blake’s framing terms—“enslav’d” and “soul”—and their respective sites—albion and america—invert the imperial view and christian assumptions: england is home to slavery, while american slaves have “soft”—already good—souls.) oothoon plucks flowers as she moves from field to field, shirking, we might suppose, plantation work, and doing so in a subversively suggestive form, flowers marking sexual freedom. this vivid blend of sexual autonomy and work avoidance puts her master, bromion, into a rage. (in what may function as a reminder that this is the english daughters’ self-commiserating vision, oothoon “turn[s] [her] face” after plucking, and in short-lived bliss mentally flies “over the waves” to where her “whole soul seeks.”) though gender politics and sexual mores saturate the poem, it shows the brutal facts of new world slavery, as in bromion’s sexually sadistic reaction to oothoon’s truancy. he rapes her “on his stormy bed,” then speaks in words parodic of an overlord, with allusions to plantation tortures (and enforcements) of rape, branding, and whipping: behold this harlot here on bromions bed, and let the jealous dolphins sport around the lovely maid; thy soft american plains are mine, and mine thy north & south: stampt with my signet are the swarthy children of the sun: they are obedient, they resist not, they obey the scourge: their daughters worship terrors and obey the violent. (visions 1.18-23) this announcement of african-american slavery is rife with rhetorical figures of swaggering dominance (the chiasmus of geographic reach; the sibilant humiliation of branding; the parataxis of others’ submission). the passage grounds the attempt to see slavery systemically without diminishing the brutality faced by black slaves. note that “daughters” refers here to black female slaves, chiming openly with the “daughters” of england. blake’s vision repeatedly connects modes of terror and violence, worship and obedience, that compel disparate people to labor in the same system. works cited bentley, g. e., jr. the stranger from paradise: a biography of william blake. new haven: yale university press, 2001. bindman, david. “blake’s vision of slavery revisited.” william blake: images and texts. san marino: huntington library, 1997. 97-106. blake, william. the complete poetry and prose of william blake. ed. david v. erdman, with commentary by harold bloom. new york: anchor–random house, 1988. ---. the early illuminated books. ed. with introductions and notes by morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. blake’s illuminated books vol. 3. gen. ed. david bindman. london: william blake trust/tate gallery, 1993. bruder, helen. william blake and the daughters of albion. new york: st. martin’s press, 1997. bythell, duncan. “women in the workforce.” the industrial revolution and british society. ed. patrick o’brien and roland quinault. cambridge: cambridge university press, 1993. 31-53. callaghan, dympna. “looking well to linens: women and cultural production in othello and shakespeare’s england.” marxist shakespeares. ed. jean e. howard and scott cutler shershow. london: routledge, 2001. 53-81. clarkson, thomas. an essay on the slavery and commerce of the human species, particularly the african. london, 1786. cooper, andrew m. “freedom from blake’s book of urizen.” studies in romanticism 48.2 (2009): 187-218. davis, david brion. the problem of slavery in the age of revolution. ithaca: cornell university press, 1975. de l. mann, julia. “the textile industry: machinery for cotton, flax, wool, 1760-1850.” a history of technology. ed. charles singer et al. vol. 4. oxford: oxford university press, 1958. 277-308. erdman, david. “blake’s vision of slavery.” journal of the warburg and courtauld institutes 15 (1952): 242-52. ferber, michael. the social vision of william blake. princeton: princeton university press, 1985. goslee, nancy moore. “slavery and sexual character: questioning the master trope in blake’s visions of the daughters of albion.” elh 57 (1990): 101-28. hill, christopher. reformation to industrial revolution: a social and economic history of britain 1530-1780. london: weidenfeld and nicolson, 1967. hilton, nelson. literal imagination: blake’s vision of words. berkeley: university of california press, 1983. hobsbawm, e. j. industry and empire: the making of modern english society. vol. 2. new york: pantheon, 1968. hudson, pat. the industrial revolution. london: edward arnold, 1992. inglis, brian. poverty and the industrial revolution. london: hodder & stoughton, 1971. makdisi, saree. william blake and the impossible history of the 1790s. chicago: university of chicago press, 2003. mantoux, paul. the industrial revolution in the eighteenth century: an outline of the beginnings of the modern factory system in england. new york: macmillan, 1961. may, trevor. an economic and social history of britain 1760-1990. harlow: longman, 1996. mcclenahan, catherine l. “‘endless their labour’: women in blake’s illuminated works and in the british workforce.” women reading william blake. ed. helen bruder. new york: palgrave macmillan, 2007. 137-47. mccloskey, deirdre. “1780-1860: a survey.” the economic history of britain since 1700. ed. roderick floud and deirdre mccloskey. 2nd ed. vol. 1: 1700-1860. cambridge: cambridge university press, 1994. 242-70. mellor, anne k. “sex, violence, and slavery: blake and wollstonecraft.” william blake: images and texts. san marino: huntington library, 1997. 69-94. more, hannah. “thoughts on the cultivation of the heart and temper in the education of daughters.” essays on various subjects, principally designed for young ladies. london: printed for j. wilkie, in st. paul’s church-yard; and t. cadell, in the strand, 1777. 123-57. moyer, james f. “the passion of abolitionism: how slave martyrdom obscures slave labor.” diss. princeton university, 2010. ann arbor: umi, 2010. paley, morton d. the continuing city: william blake’s jerusalem. oxford: clarendon, 1983. ---. “the figure of the garment in the four zoas, milton, and jerusalem.” blake’s sublime allegory: essays on the four zoas, milton, jerusalem. ed. stuart curran and joseph anthony wittreich, jr. madison: university of wisconsin press, 1973. 119-39. pollard, sydney. “factory discipline in the industrial revolution.” essays on the industrial revolution. aldershot: ashgate, 2000. 98-115. ---. “the factory village in the industrial revolution.” essays on the industrial revolution. aldershot: ashgate, 2000. 117-35. punter, david. “blake: creative and uncreative labour.” studies in romanticism 16.4 (1977): 535-61. sturrock, jane. “maenads, young ladies, and the lovely daughters of albion.” blake, politics, and history. ed. jackie di salvo, g. a. rosso, and christopher z. hobson. new york: garland publishing, 1998. 339-49. tise, larry e. proslavery: a history of the defense of slavery in america, 1701-1890. athens: university of georgia press, 1987. welch, dennis m. “essence, gender, race: william blake’s visions of the daughters of albion.” studies in romanticism 49.1 (2010): 105-32. williams, eric. capitalism and slavery. chapel hill: university of north carolina press, 1944. wolfson, susan j. “the strange difference of female ‘experience.’” women reading william blake. ed. helen bruder. new york: palgrave macmillan, 2007. 261-69. “jerusalem” set to music: a selected discography “jerusalem” set to music: a selected discography by jason whittaker jason whittaker (jwhittaker@lincoln.ac.uk) is head of the school of english and journalism at the university of lincoln. he is the author of several works on william blake, including william blake and the myths of britain (palgrave, 1999), radical blake: influence and afterlife from 1827 (with shirley dent, palgrave, 2002), and blake 2.0: william blake in twentieth-​century art, music and culture (with steve clark and tristanne connolly, palgrave, 2012). his main research interests in blake deal with the reception of the poet and artist. he is currently completing a book on the first hundred years of the hymn “jerusalem” and writing divine images: the life and works of william blake (reaktion books). milton a poem copy b, plate 2. huntington library, art collections, and botanical gardens. rare books, call number 54041. image courtesy of the william blake archive. blake’s stanzas from the preface to milton a poem, better known as the hymn “jerusalem,” are by far the most popular of his poems to have been set to music. while researching versions for a book on “jerusalem,” i discovered references to some 406 audio recordings and scores (a total that i suspect may still be expanded upon). these date from 1908—when henry walford davies published the first in england’s pleasant land, a set of three-part songs—to the reinterpretation of hubert parry’s hymn by tokio myers and jazmin sawyers for the 2018 commonwealth games. donald fitch’s cataloguedonald fitch, blake set to music: a bibliography of musical settings of the poems and prose of william blake (berkeley: university of california press, 1990). was published in 1990 and thus misses the vast majority of recordings that appeared following the introduction of the cd in the late 1980s; he also omits more or less completely popular music versions, which had already begun to appear in the postwar period. the fame of “jerusalem” stems, of course, from parry’s composition in 1916, when he was persuaded by davies and the poet laureate, robert bridges, to set blake’s words to music in the service of fight for right, a group that sought to rouse the morale of the nation in the depths of the first world war.see keri davies, “blake set to music,” steve clark, tristanne connolly, and jason whittaker, eds., blake 2.0: william blake in twentieth-century art, music and culture (basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, 2012) 189-208. over the ensuing century, parry’s hymn would be sung and heard again and again, whether performed by church choirs or in women’s institutes, or listened to on shellac 78s, vinyl albums and singles, cds, or, in more recent times, via audio streaming. of the many hundreds of releases, this list has been deliberately restricted to a selected discography of fifty recordings. while that top 50 is necessarily somewhat arbitrary, it does prevent some of the monotony that comes from the succession of compilation discs in particular. easily half of the versions i have discovered in recent years are repackaged earlier recordings, such as the great british street party 2012 (“120 classic songs and anthems to celebrate the jubilee!”) or the version by the liverpool cathedral choir on the 2004 compilation perfect wedding classics. the list therefore tends to focus on versions of “jerusalem” that are unusual in some way. a few cases (marked with an asterisk) are original settings that owe nothing to parry’s composition. most are arrangements that differ from parry’s original unison choral setting or his and edward elgar’s later orchestral arrangements. one consequence of this is that the list frequently privileges popular music versions, simply because a variant for guitars or synthesizers is immediately recognizable compared to classical recordings. this is by no means a comment on the quality of those recordings or my own preferences: some of the popular versions here are included because they offer a notably different version of a familiar song and, novelty aside, are otherwise better forgotten. alongside popular releases, i have tended to include early records that are often significant as the first publicly available choral or orchestral recording. as it is a discography, this list deliberately omits scores—most notably parry’s own versions for unison choir and then for orchestra, as well as davies’s soprano, alto, tenor, and bass (satb) setting from 1908 or later arrangements of parry, such as g. t. thalben-ball or the popular military brass-band version by charles hoby. also omitted are versions that only sample the hymn or use it as a starting point (such as nobody’s 2009 rap song “jerusalem” and the justified ancients of mu mu’s 1991 “it’s grim up north”), as well as albums and songs that simply allude to parts of the poem or to its themes (including tim blake’s 1978 blake’s new jerusalem, the verve’s 2008 “love is noise,” and marc almond’s 2014 the tyburn tree). sort by artist sort by date arte atomica — canada from hymn (ali3n mix); for synthesizers, drum machine. t2 digital releases, © 2015a. electronic/dance. streaming. contents: 1. hymn (ali3n mix). notes: this is an extended, instrumental-only, electronic dance mix of parry’s hymn. links: amazon, apple, spotify. baccini, sophya — italy from big red dragon; for voices, keyboard, strings. black widow records, © 2013a. rock/pop. cd. contents: 13. jerusalem. notes: this is a prog rock concept album with a series of original compositions by baccini, all of them inspired by blake’s paintings and engravings other than the final track, a variation on parry’s “jerusalem.” links: allmusic, amazon, apple, spotify, youtube. barthel, dennis — uk from o little town of bethlehem/jerusalem; for voice, organ. his master’s voice, © 1932. choral. shellac (78). contents: b. jerusalem. notes: barthel was a boy soprano who performed this version of “jerusalem” alongside davies’s “o little town of bethlehem.” link: youtube. blake — uk from blake; for voices with orchestral accompaniment. universal, © 2007. classical. cd. contents: 13. jerusalem. notes: debut album by four school friends in the style of mid-twentieth-century popular arrangements. links: allmusic, amazon, apple, spotify. bragg, billy — uk from the internationale; for voice, piano. utility, © 1990. folk. vinyl. contents: 4. blake’s jerusalem. notes: comprising mainly cover versions of political songs, including “jerusalem,” it was released at the time of protests against the poll tax in the uk. links: allmusic, amazon, apple, spotify. burnett, matt — usa from wildflower; for piano. walnut tree music, © 2005. new age. cd. contents: 3. jerusalem (william blake and h. h. parry). notes: an instrumental-only version of the hymn. links: amazon, spotify. castellsthe castells — uk from two lovers/jerusalem; for voices, organ. united artists records, © 1967. rock/pop. vinyl. contents: a2. jerusalem. notes: a psychedelic double a-side from this female duo, which appears not to have released any further records (not to be confused with the male doo-wop quartet of the same name). choir of the city temple — uk from jerusalem/land of hope and glory; for voices, organ. broadcast twelve records, © 1930. choral. shellac (78). contents: a. jerusalem. notes: a-side of disc with elgar’s “land of hope and glory” on the b-side. classical renaissance — uk from jerusalem; for synthesizers. classical renaissance limited, © 2000a. electronic/dance. vinyl. contents: a1. jerusalem (original extended); a2. jerusalem (ubiq); b. jerusalem (gat decor). notes: electronic remixes of the parry hymn. link: youtube. collier, jacob — uk from jerusalem; for voices. qwest records, © 2015b. rock/pop. streaming. contents: 1. jerusalem. notes: an a cappella version sung by collier with backing quartet and released as a standalone single. links: amazon, apple, spotify. coren, finn — norway* from the blake project: spring; for voice, guitars, keyboard, drums. bard records, © 1997. rock/pop. cd. contents: 19. jerusalem. notes: all tracks on this album are original compositions by coren, including one of the few versions of “jerusalem” not to be based on parry’s setting. links: allmusic, amazon, apple, spotify. davenport, bob, and chumbawamba — uk* from the common stone; for voices. topic records, © 2004. folk. cd. contents: 4. jerusalem. notes: an original setting of blake’s words by davenport, a leading voice in the english folk music revival, accompanied by the post-punk group chumbawamba. links: allmusic, amazon, apple, spotify. davis, colin, and bbc symphony orchestra — uk from the last night of the proms; for voices with orchestral accompaniment. bbc enterprises, © 1969. classical. vinyl. contents: b2. jerusalem. notes: the first release of recordings from the last night of the proms by bbc enterprises, which began to release music and spoken-word recordings in 1969. dickinson, bruce — uk from the chemical wedding; for voice, guitars, keyboard, drums. sanctuary records, © 1998. rock/pop. vinyl. contents: 7. jerusalem. notes: the fifth solo album by dickinson includes three tracks inspired by blake, one of which is a rock arrangement of “jerusalem” loosely based on parry’s hymn. links: allmusic, amazon, apple, spotify. emerson, lake, and palmer — uk from brain salad surgery; for voice, keyboard, guitars, drums. manticore records, © 1973. rock/pop. vinyl. contents: 1. jerusalem. notes: the opening track, “jerusalem,” was also released as a 7″ single in the same year but was banned from airplay in the uk because of concerns around potential blasphemy. links: allmusic, amazon, apple, spotify. faces — uk from long player; for solo guitar. warner bros., © 1971a. rock/pop. vinyl. contents: b4. jerusalem. notes: “jerusalem” is erroneously credited on the album-sleeve notes as “traditional,” with no mention of parry. this is an innovative instrumental arrangement by ronnie wood for slide guitar. links: allmusic, amazon, apple, spotify. fallthe fall — uk from i am kurious oranj; for voice, guitars, drums, keyboard. beggars banquet records, © 1988. rock/pop. vinyl. contents: a3. dog is life/jerusalem. notes: intended as a soundtrack for the ballet i am curious, orange, by michael clark, the title ostensibly takes its inspiration from the 300th anniversary of william of orange’s ascension to the english throne. “dog is life/jerusalem” was also released as a double a-side single with “new big prinz.” links: allmusic, amazon, apple, spotify. fat les 2000, london community gospel choir, london gay male chorus, and new london children’s choir — uk from jerusalem; for voices, variously accompanied. parlophone, © 2000b. rock/pop. cd. contents: 1. jerusalem (master); 2. jerusalem (pet shop boys mix); 3. jerusalem (two bobs mix); 4. jerusalem (instrumental); 5. jerusalem (posh mix). notes: an ep of various remixes of the blake-parry hymn released by alex james, keith allen, and damien hirst as the official song for euro 2000. links: allmusic, amazon, apple, spotify, youtube. flagstad, kirsten, adrian boult, and london philharmonic orchestra — norway, uk from great sacred songs; for voice with orchestral accompaniment. decca, © 1957. classical. vinyl. contents: 5. jerusalem, op. 208. link: youtube. giltrap, gordon — uk from o jerusalem; for pan pipes, guitar, keyboards. electric record company, © 1979. new age. vinyl. contents: 1. o jerusalem. notes: an instrumental version arranged by giltrap and released as the a-side of a 7″ single. link: youtube. hamill, claire — uk from domesday; for voice, keyboards, drum machine. coda records, © 1986a. new age. vinyl. contents: a1. glastonbury (jerusalem). notes: a four-track ep by singer-songwriter claire hamill; the label, coda records, was a subsidiary of beggars banquet, which attempted to capitalize on new-age music (hence the addition of “glastonbury” to the title). links: spotify, youtube. harmoniesthe harmonies — uk from voices of the wi; for voice, guitars, percussion. bright & loud records, © 2010. country and western. cd. contents: 1. jerusalem. notes: this one-off album by five-piece girlband the harmonies, formed out of a competition run by the women’s institute, includes a country version of parry’s hymn. links: allmusic, spotify. jaärvi, neeme, amanda roocroft, bbc national orchestra of wales, and bbc national chorus of wales — estonia/usa, uk from hubert parry: orchestral and choral works; for voice with orchestral accompaniment. chandos, © 2012a. classical. cd. contents: 13. jerusalem. notes: this constitutes one of the most important recordings of a collection of parry’s works, almost a century after his death, including his original orchestration of “jerusalem.” links: allmusic, apple, spotify. jones, paul — uk from privilege; for voice, guitar, bass, drums. his master’s voice, © 1967. rock/pop. vinyl. contents: b5. jerusalem. notes: one of the tracks from the soundtrack to peter watkins’s film privilege, performed by paul jones (formerly of manfred mann) as the george bean group. kielland, marianne beate, and jan gunnar hoff — norway from terra nova; for voice, piano. lawo classics, © 2017. classical. cd. contents: 11. jerusalem. notes: arrangement for piano and mezzo-soprano. links: allmusic, amazon, apple, spotify. komuro, tetsuya — japan from edm tokyo; for voice, guitars, keyboards, percussion. avex trax, © 2014a. electronic/dance. cd. contents: 10. jerusalem. notes: a rather strange electronica version by one of the most successful producers in japanese music, with vocals by ashton moore. links: apple, spotify. kopasz, paul (paul k.) — usa from blues for charlie lucky; for voice, guitar. silenz records, © 1993. jazz/blues. cd. contents: 8. jerusalem. notes: a distinctive acoustic folk/blues version of the hymn. links: allmusic, spotify. lloyd, david, and hm welsh guards — uk from england/jerusalem; for voice with orchestral accompaniment. columbia, © 1940. classical. shellac (78). contents: b1. jerusalem. notes: an early recording by the welsh tenor david george lloyd. link: youtube. lucas, gary, and dean bowman — usa from chase the devil; for voice, guitar. knitting factory records, © 2009a. jazz/blues. cd. contents: 10. jerusalem. notes: a jazz version of parry’s hymn. links: allmusic, amazon, apple, spotify. mark stewart and the mafia — uk from jerusalem; for voice with samples. on-u sound, © 1982a. rock/pop. vinyl. contents: a1. jerusalem. notes: the first release by mark stewart after leaving the pop group, this highly experimental version of the parry hymn makes heavy use of sampling as an early example of dub music. link: youtube. mccormack, john — ireland from john mccormack; for voice, piano. world records, © 1980. classical. vinyl. contents: e10. jerusalem. notes: released as part of a four-disc compilation of recordings by the operatic tenor john mccormack, the original (unreleased) recording of the blake-parry hymn is 1941. link: youtube. mike westbrook orchestra — uk from the cortège; for voice, tuba. original records, © 1982b. jazz/blues. vinyl. contents: b3. santarcangelo: free as a bird/evening/jerusalem/dawn/piped music/dirge/didn’t he ramble/cadenza. notes: a jazz arrangement by mike westbrook based on parry’s composition as part of a medley of various settings of poems to music. links: allmusic, amazon, apple, spotify. monstergod — poland* from resurrected; for voices, synthesizers. ek product, © 2012b. electronic/dance. cd. contents: 6. jerusalem; 13. jerusalem (single edit); 15. jerusalem (controlled collapse remix); 16. jerusalem (egoist remix). notes: an electro-industrial version of blake’s poem that begins with a sample of parry’s hymn before segueing into an original composition. links: amazon, apple, spotify, youtube. myers, tokio, and jazmin sawyers — uk from jerusalem (the official anthem of commonwealth games, team england, 2018); for voices with orchestral accompaniment. simco limited, © 2018. rock/pop. streaming. contents: 1. jerusalem. notes: a new arrangement of parry’s hymn for the gold coast 2018 commonwealth games. links: amazon, apple, spotify, youtube. otway, john — uk from the new jerusalem; for voices, guitar, percussion. wea, © 1986b. rock/pop. vinyl. contents: a. the new jerusalem. notes: 7″ single of parry’s setting with an original composition of “the tyger” on the b-side. link: youtube. papadatos, dimitris (ku) — greece* from feathers; for voice, synthesizers. inner ear records, © 2013b. electronic/dance. vinyl. contents: 2. jerusalem. notes: an original setting of blake’s text to music. links: amazon, apple, spotify. partridge, don — uk from the kerbside entertainers; for voice, guitar. jay boy, © 1971b. folk. vinyl. contents: b6. jerusalem. notes: originally made in 1965 on a hard-to-find, self-published ep, it is the first folk version of “jerusalem” to be recorded. pinns, suzi — uk from rule britannia/jerusalem; for voice, guitars, drums. polydor, © 1978. rock/pop. vinyl. contents: b. jerusalem. notes: a punk version of the hymn, originally sung in derek jarman’s film jubilee and later released as a single. link: youtube. pryce-jones, colin — uk from guitar heaven; for guitars, drums. fury records, © 1999. rock/pop. cd. contents: 1. jerusalem. notes: a compilation of rockabilly tracks by pryce-jones, including an instrumental version of “jerusalem.” link: youtube. robeson, paul — usa from jerusalem/the blind ploughman; for voice with orchestral accompaniment. victor records, © 1939. classical. shellac (78). contents: a. jerusalem. notes: originally included with a b-side, “the blind ploughman” (lyrics by marguerite radclyffe-hall, set to music by robert coningsby clarke), this has been reissued several times, including the following year with an alternative b-side, “she is far from the land,” and on subsequent compilations of robeson’s music. links: allmusic, amazon, apple, spotify, youtube. robinson, stanford, w. g. webber, and bbc choir — uk from jerusalem/jesus shall reign; for voices, organ. columbia, © 1927. choral. shellac (78). contents: a. jerusalem. notes: a-side with isaac watts’s “jesus shall reign” on the b-side. roper, stanley, and choir of hm chapels royal — uk from jerusalem/there shall a star; for voices, organ. his master’s voice, © 1926. choral. shellac (78). contents: jerusalem. notes: double a-side with mendelssohn. sargent, malcolm, philharmonia orchestra, and royal choral society — uk from jerusalem/rule britannia; for voices with orchestral accompaniment. his master’s voice, © 1953. choral. shellac (78). contents: a. jerusalem. notes: recorded in 1952 at abbey road studios, this was the first of several recordings by sargent. sidwell, martindale, and st. clement danes choir — uk from hymn singing in st. clement danes royal air force church; for voices, organ. decca, © 1959. choral. vinyl. contents: b2. jerusalem. notes: four-track ep including “praise my soul the king of heaven,” “the god of love my shepherd is,” and “jesu, joy of man’s desiring.” all profits went to the st. clement danes church fund. silver servants — uk from silver servants; for voice, keyboards, guitar, bass guitar, trumpet, drum machine. second language, © 2014b. rock/pop. cd. contents: 4. jerusalem. notes: an arrangement of the parry hymn from the eponymous debut experimental/​folk-rock album. links: allmusic, amazon, apple, spotify, youtube. simple minds — uk from the amsterdam ep; for guitars, drums, keyboard. virgin records, © 1989. rock/pop. vinyl. contents: 4. jerusalem. notes: an instrumental-only version from the glaswegian rock group that was immensely successful during the 1980s. links: amazon, apple, spotify. stahlwerk 9 — germany* from retromekanik; for voice, synthesizers. steinklang industries, © 2009b. electronic/dance. streaming. contents: 11. jerusalem. notes: an industrial noise version of blake’s poem. link: bandcamp. test dept., scottish chamber orchestra, and schola cantorum — uk from pax britannica; for voices with orchestral accompaniment and percussion. ministry of power, © 1991. classical. vinyl. contents: a2. jerusalem. notes: recorded during the poll-tax protests, this version of “jerusalem” follows elgar’s arrangement until the midpoint, where it breaks into a speech by margaret thatcher. links: allmusic, amazon, apple, spotify, youtube. wakeman, rick — uk from morning has broken; for piano. kevin mayhew, © 2000c. classical. cd. contents: 6. jerusalem. notes: instrumental version for piano with expansive variations by the former keyboardist with yes. links: allmusic, youtube. wood, chris — uk* from none the wiser; for voice, electric guitar, double bass, keyboard. r.u.f. records, © 2013c. folk. cd. contents: 2. jerusalem. notes: an original folk setting of blake’s stanzas. links: allmusic, amazon, spotify. review: g. e. bentley, jr., the edwardses of halifax g. e. bentley, jr. the edwardses of halifax: the making and selling of beautiful books in london and halifax, 1749–1826. toronto: university of toronto press, 2015. $65.00, hardcover. xxiii + 283 pp. online supplement: <http://​www.​utppublishing.​com/​pdf/​bentley_​edwardses​of​halifax​vol2.​pdf>. reviewed by james rovira james rovira (jamesrovira@gmail.com) is associate professor and department chair of english at mississippi college, where he teaches british literature, poetry, and literary theory. over the last four years he has presented at national conferences for the modern language association, the american society for eighteenth-century studies, the national society for the study of romanticism, and others. his monograph, blake and kierkegaard: creation and anxiety, was published by continuum in 2010. he is currently at work on the edited anthologies interpretation: theory: history and rock and romanticism. p. j. m. marks said in 1998 that “the story of the edwards family of halifax is the stuff of a victorian three volume novel.”p. j. m. marks, “the edwards of halifax bindery,” british library journal 24.2 (autumn 1998): 184. g. e. bentley, jr., tells that story in the edwardses of halifax: the making and selling of beautiful books in london and halifax, 1749–1826, though not in three volumes and not quite as dramatically as a novel might. bentley divides his monograph about this bookselling and book-producing family into four sections: part 1 is about william edwards, and parts 2-4 are about his sons james, richard, and thomas, respectively. of these four figures, james is the most significant: the chapter devoted to william takes up twenty-four pages and the two sections on richard and thomas take up forty-seven pages combined, while bentley spends over one hundred pages on james’s career. the edwardses as a bookselling family came to an end with the retirement and then death of thomas. as explained in part 1, william’s books were originally noted for their fore-edge painting and for their use of painted transparent vellum bindings, which together have attracted most of the published scholarship on the edwards family. william rendered the vellum used for his book covers transparent by soaking it in water mixed with potassium carbonate and then subjecting it to great pressure. images were then painted on the inside of the cover, often by one or more of william’s sons; the transparent vellum protected the image and allowed owners to clean the cover without worrying about defacing it.for examples of transparent vellum bindings from edwards of halifax, see all but the last two binding images at <https://​www.​bl.​uk/​catalogues/​bookbindings/​results.​aspx?​searchtype=​alphabeticsearch​&listtype=​covermaterial​&value=​124>. james, william’s third child and second son, was by far the most successful at the family business. in 1784 he expanded his father’s trade to london, setting up a shop in pall mall with his brother john, who passed away “of a decline” in paris in may of 1793. james published a catalogue of books for sale in 1785, which immediately established him as a prominent seller of antiquarian books, and additional catalogues in 1787, 1789, 1790, 1794, and 1796. bentley describes the first few catalogues as “not so much notices of what he had in his shop as they were advertisements of his acquisition of whole libraries” (49). his catalogues were often divided into two categories, “ancient” (illuminated manuscripts, caxton’s letterpress publications, books printed on vellum, etc.) and “modern” (“illustrated books on birds, insects, shells, vegetables, vases, … and fine art”) (49). james’s catalogues of 1789 and 1790 expanded to include books acquired in italy, listing “the rarest and most esteemed articles collected in various parts of europe” (50). bentley conjectures that the turmoil created by the french revolution contributed to the ease with which james could acquire libraries in continental europe. he associates james’s shop with george cumberland, hester thrale (as an enthusiastic customer), and joseph johnson, as well as a number of other london booksellers and figures, such as henry fuseli and horace walpole. james ordered hundreds of copies of the castle of otranto from the printer bodoni to bind and sell in his shop. he did extensive business with bodoni, with some disputes about money that were eventually resolved, but by 1795 he complained that “present events in europe are not very favourable to literature & the considerable enterprises in which i find myself engaged do not permit me to enter into new speculations” (70). james registered real problems with the book trade in europe while also using those problems to leverage better prices for bodoni’s printing work. by april 1797, he started talking “more and more firmly of retirement” (85). bentley then records that james as a publisher sold 167 books in 307 volumes that took up over 5700 sheets and 2370 plates (88). he published books in french, italian, german, latin, and in translation. about twenty-five percent of his published books were reprints. james first started publishing jointly with his brother richard in 1794, and was listed as a seller on a prospectus for richard’s edition of night thoughts, illustrated by william blake. because english goods were being seized at french-controlled ports, trading across the channel became increasingly difficult, so he essentially retired from business in 1800. however, his activities on the continent put him in touch with french officials and allowed him to travel in france. after returning from his first trip to paris of 1800, he reported extensively on conditions there to lord grenville in a letter dated 12 august. his second trip, bentley records, was intended to conduct further business but was also carried out with “more than one political purpose” (132). he was asked by lord spencer to collect information of interest while abroad and report it to the british government. james died 2 january 1816, distributing his estate among his wife and children, with some gifts to his surviving brothers, richard and thomas, and his sisters, sarah and mary. bentley estimates from annuities paid out of his estate that james amassed a fortune of £30,000 during his fifteen years conducting independent business (148). richard arrived in london in 1789. bentley speculates that he initially began working with his brother james to learn how to conduct himself in london and to become acquainted with the london book market. richard’s first catalogue was “printed integrally with the first edition of de coetlogon’s human reason (1792)” and included “foreign books of prints, and antiquities, and books of history, science, &c. in all languages” (154). bentley observes that “almost all richard edwards’s publications advertise their church and king fervour, many of them using history to support the status quo” (162). richard’s most ambitious projects, however, were editions of merigot’s views and ruins in rome (1796–98) and edward young’s night thoughts (1797). it should be noted that richard was taking on his most ambitious projects just as james started thinking about retirement. richard very likely knew of blake—an odd choice of illustrator for a church and king publisher—through fuseli and johnson; having acquired “a set of first and early editions of the nine parts of night thoughts … with ‘the author’s signature’ on ‘the blank leaf,’” richard may have initially intended to “make an elaborately extra-illustrated copy” (173). blake spent over two years on his drawings for night thoughts, averaging five designs a week for that period. he asked richard for £105 but was paid £21 for his work. bentley suspects that blake worked far beyond his initial commission while “richard edwards stuck to his original bargain for payment” (174), largely because blake continued to work for richard and did not grumble about him as he did about some other patrons. thomas edwards said of blake’s designs that “a more extraordinary, original, and sublime production of art has seldom, if ever, been witnessed since the days of the celebrated mich. agnolo, whose grandeur and elevation of style it greatly resembles” (174). however, richard’s ambitious project was ill timed and did not come to a good end. when this edition of night thoughts was published in the autumn of 1797, “there was no review of any kind, and the work may scarcely have been published” (186). henry crabb robinson reported thirteen years later that it “is no longer to be bought, so excessively rare has it become” (186). by 1798, richard was out of business, and his brother james, who would have taken up his trade, was contemplating retirement and experiencing his own difficulties. richard’s brother thomas attempted to sell the drawings in 1821 for £300 but found no buyers, and there were no buyers in auctions of 1826 or 1828, even when the price was reduced to £52.10.0. thomas edwards’s career was carried out in his father’s shop in halifax, which he took over after his father’s death in 1808, continuing the production of books bound “in etruscan calf, in transparent vellum, and with painted fore-edges” (195). starting in 1812, thomas published a number of catalogues. the last shop catalogue was issued in 1821 and listed over 3000 works. (this catalogue is the one that listed blake’s night thoughts drawings for sale for £300.) the last of thomas’s stock was sold in london in 1828, and the drawings remained in the edwards family for some time after thomas’s death in southport in 1834. bentley carries out his account of the edwardses of halifax with his usual scrupulous attention to detail and care to document his sources.a small addition to the earliest history of the firm is the recently discovered transaction between william edwards and the fledgling print business of john boydell: boydell’s account book shows a cash payment of £2.18.0 from “edwards of hallifax” on 17 march 1752, shortly after boydell established his shop in cheapside. see alexander gourlay and robin simon, “not william hogarth but john boydell: attributing and elucidating two leaves from an eighteenth-century account book,” british art journal 15.1 (autumn 2014): 35-46. the study is accompanied by a 405-page second volume, freely available in pdf on the publisher’s website (see above), which lists publications by william and his sons james, richard, and thomas, as well as lists of publications by a james, richard, and john edwards who were not members of the edwards of halifax family, concluding with a 27-page bibliography of works about the edwardses of halifax and sample illustrations. all kindred spirits will recognize the edwardses of halifax as fellow bibliophiles rather than just merchants engaged in the business of making and selling books, and there is much in bentley’s work to gratify the sensibilities of lovers of eighteenth-century books. he does discuss blake where appropriate, as expected, contributing to our knowledge of blake’s work on night thoughts and the conceptual and visual background of the four zoas, but he does not allow his discussion of blake to overshadow this book. he is focused instead on a more comprehensive and equally significant contribution to our understanding of eighteenthand early nineteenth-century book history, extending our knowledge not only of the industry but of books as material objects and the way the economy of books was affected by events of the 1790s and early 1800s. the only addition to this work that i would have liked to see is a reception history of the edwardses of halifax—some kind of afterlife of their work as booksellers and publishers. p. j. m. marks records both praise for the edwardses’ work and some criticism of it in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth,marks 211. while at the same time noting their extensive influence on the work of other first-class binderies in both london and paris. review: daniela picón, visiones de william blake: itinerarios de su recepción en los siglos xix y xx daniela picón. visiones de william blake: itinerarios de su recepción en los siglos xix y xx. barcelona: calambur editorial, 2017. 272 pp. €35.00, paperback. reviewed by andrés ferrada aguilar andrés ferrada aguilar (ferrada2010@gmail.com) teaches english, american, and comparative literatures at the university of playa ancha, valparaíso, chile, and the university of chile. his main objects of study are romanticism, modernism, and literary representations of urban landscapes. he is currently conducting a research project on the chronicles of josé donoso, funded by the national fund for scientific and technological development in chile. in his undergraduate and graduate seminars he explores ways in which william blake’s visionary perspective finds expression in the new england transcendentalist poetics of r. w. emerson, walt whitman, and emily dickinson. in the four chapters of visiones de william blake, daniela picón explores three fundamental artistic zones of western modernity: romanticism, symbolism, and the avant-garde. in this sense, the book follows a comparative methodology that valorizes and, at the same time, problematizes arguments offered by literary critic rené wellek in discriminations: further concepts of criticism (1970). in the prologue, picón introduces her interest in setting out “communicating vessels,” as andré breton said, between these zones in the light of blake’s work. under the luminous halo of the poet we can discern not only movements tied to a specific artistic or cultural field (bourdieu 334), but also sensibilities that, beyond critical and aesthetic distinctions, suggest compelling affinities—among others, the bonding between the creator and his work, the conception of art as a vital experience where the actual and the transcendental meet, and the hermeneutical process led by readers/​spectators. in the opening chapter, titled with a translated quotation from robert southey, “ese pintor de un genio grandioso pero demente, william blake” (that painter of great but insane genius, william blake), picón lays out critical perspectives on the artist’s work in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. his illuminated and prophetic books were regarded with mixed feelings, as revealed, for example, in southey’s response to jerusalem, which he described as “a perfectly mad poem” (“un poema desquiciadamente perfecto,” picón 21). artistic groups such as “the ancients,” in turn, gained an appreciation of blake as an interpreter who revalued premodern techniques and recognized the visionary dimension in artworks. blake’s interpretation advances two intertwined notions that would become central in walter benjamin’s critique of modern art forms: authenticity and irreproducibility (24). shorter than the rest, the first chapter is a vantage point that unfolds the itineraries of blake’s visions through the nineteenth century. “simbolista” (symbolist), the second chapter, explores the reception of the artist’s work in the nineteenth century, yet bears important references to its impact in the twentieth. consequently, picón’s study undertakes not only a reading of blake, but also deploys a strategy that contextualizes him in a space of production that goes beyond his own time and place. this route enables her to visualize a poet who trespasses romantic boundaries, treading upon symbolist territories and avant-garde experimentation. a key figure who places blake under the lens of french symbolism is odilon redon (1840–1916), who, like his predecessor, rebelled against “the academicist aesthetics of art” (53)“la estética academicista del arte.” all translations from spanish are mine. to embrace a commitment to imagination. blake’s artistic vision, misunderstood and even neglected in his own time, found fertile ground in france through redon’s work, which was animated by the belief that creation arises from “the docile acceptance of the unconscious” (quoted in picón 65).“una dócil sumisión a la llegada del inconsciente.” according to picón, the plates of blake’s illuminated prophetic books and the lithographies in redon’s portfolios alter “the sequential ordering of their works, which rarely show a logical succession” (78).“la ordenación secuencial de sus obras, las que raramente manifiestan una sucesión lógica.” both artists cultivated formats in which the visual logic served as a threshold for the invisible. this particular aspect reminds us of a main idea in the author’s argument: the compositions by blake and redon act as tangible proofs of the way that the artists conceived of their work, their relation to the transcendental, and, of course, the unfolding of poetic imagination. this imaginative landscape does not conform to any predictable sequence, but provides a continuous and continual expanse that enlarges the poet’s vision and, most certainly, the reader/​spectator’s expectations. an understanding of blake’s work would be partial without considering its reception by other poets and critics. accordingly, picón cites documents and pictorial compositions that interpret the poet not necessarily under the sign of his times, but in a trajectory by which historicity gives way to transcendental concerns. hence, the study examines incursions into the blakean world by artists associated with the arts and crafts movement, pre-raphaelites, such as dante gabriel rossetti, and, later on, the poets edwin john ellis and william butler yeats, whose critical essays in the works of william blake (1893) accentuate mythic and symbolic elements.picón also discusses works by other artists and groups that interpreted the imaginative and symbolic relevance of blake’s compositions. among them are life of william blake, “pictor ignotus” (1863) by alexander gilchrist and william blake: a critical essay (1868) by algernon charles swinburne. for these creators blake grew as an integral artist who, clearly dissenting from modern anxieties that led toward fragmentation, imagined a unitary conception of experience, thereby anticipating a growing emphasis on visionary perspectives in the late-nineteenth to the early twentieth century. according to picón, an issue that problematizes the discussion at this point is the way this imagination, fluent and ever expanding, embraces a readership that is not exempted from the joys of a transformative visionary experience. from this perspective, as visiones de william blake delves into the composition of illuminated texts, it convincingly suggests that this composition not only requires an unprecedented kind of reader, but also constructs him/​her. thus, spaces of production and reception in the works of blake and his successors reveal a kinship in which the reading pact is sealed with the sign of indeterminacy. blake’s suggestive art, in picón’s words, “intends to ‘illuminate,’ ‘exalt,’ ‘stir up thought,’ intensifying, through suggestive clues, the participation that this art demands from readers/​spectators” (72).“pretende ‘iluminar,’ ‘exaltar,’ ‘incitar el pensamiento,’ intensificando, gracias a la sugestión, el compromiso participativo que este demanda a sus receptores.” what matters here is that this art, which implies compositional techniques as well as artistry, foresees theories dealing with readers’ involvement in the realization of literary texts. this phenomenon is theoretically discussed in the works of wolfgang iser and roman ingarden, two critics who provide picón with a vantage point from which to observe how blake’s work incites readers’ creative energies. consequently, the poet’s illuminations anticipate a reader/​interpreter who grants the hermeneutical process not only cognitive articulation, but also imaginative force. at the beginning of the twentieth century, the transcendental character of blake’s work acquired unexpected vigor alongside avant-garde aesthetics and the probing of the unconscious as keys to perceptual innovation. these relations, or itineraries, as the book designates them, counter modern rationalist bases. indeed, the correspondences between the visible and the invisible, bridges of an imaginative intuition that precedes empirical thought, open the way for glimpsing an ineffable and portentous universe. this is the region that blake himself called beulah, described by picón as “the realm of dreams and the unconscious in his personal mythology” (65).“el reino de los sueños y el inconsciente en su mitología personal.” thus the figure of a modern visionary arises. in this light, chapter 3, “visionario” (visionary), focuses on a twentieth-century critical turn that emphasizes blake’s creativity as tightly connected to mysticism. indispensable studies that follow this course are evelyn underhill’s mysticism: a study in the nature and development of man’s spiritual consciousness (1911) and s. foster damon’s william blake: his philosophy and symbols (1924). from this perspective, blake emerges as a mediator who shares the bounty of knowledge and illumination with his fellow beings. closely bound to this visionary repertoire, a surge of spontaneously developing images begins to nurture the poet’s imagination, at times even against his will. for picón, creativity and artistic authorship are likewise essential to understanding blake’s aesthetics. the eranos circle, founded in 1933 in ascona, switzerland, was intellectually shaped by critics such as henry corbin, joseph campbell, and kathleen raine. led at one point by carl jung, it centered its debates on the significance of religious, primeval, and archetypal images in blake’s work. in her discussion of the contributions of the circle, picón proposes an approach that enables a comparative reading of the prophetic illuminated texts by blake and jung’s the red book (138). she argues that the work that best represents the complexity of blake’s visionary project is the marriage of heaven and hell (composed 1790–93). the creative urge finds primordial vitality in hell, whose subterranean depths have been symbolically related to the psyche. moreover, in this work blake advances the convergence of dynamic oppositions (159) that reflect the desire to rehabilitate the unitary, prelapsarian condition of humankind, prior to the fall. in sum, both blake and jung saw creativity as inseparable from mystic experience, so much so that their manuscripts and codices served as material support for their illuminated visions. in this context, raine plays a major role in the interpretation of blake’s artistic goals. finding support in the development of modern psychology, she holds that the twentieth century is, in some respects, better equipped to appreciate the nuances of blake’s vision. for her, the poet grows as “a prophet of twentieth-century england” (raine, quoted in picón 124).“un profeta de la inglaterra del siglo xx.” corbin’s insights enable raine to discuss persian mythic traditions as lying at the core of a mundus imaginalis. platonic symmetries appear evident between this “world” and the blakean sphere. the vision gains momentum insofar as the imagination becomes not merely representative of an existing reality, but arises itself as the most genuine form of reality. the edition, illumination, and printing of his own prophetic creations evince how blake, working at the very core of domestic habitation, embraces a traditional culture of the book that had been interrupted by the industrial division of labor. picón sees in blake’s engraving and printing techniques an alchemical metaphor that suggests the dissipation of sensitive distractions in order to commune with the invisible. when the copperplates are subjected to acid, a series of perennial images appear, animating and inspiring the work of art. the effect of acid on plates reminds blake of the purifying bath of fire in the last judgment. indeed, these flames not only purify, but also reveal what has been concealed from human understanding. in this way, picón stresses the import of illuminated texts in blake’s imagination: their aesthetic form is but a preliminary spark that ignites a richly textured and complex spiritual dimension. in the last chapter of the book, “surrealista” (surrealist), the author extends blake’s itinerary into surrealist expressions in spain, france, and the united states, specifically new york. already discernible in blake’s creative imagination, contradiction and automatism became significant conditions that prompted an array of surrealist manifestos. as to the dialectical force of contradictory spheres, the essays la imagen surrealista (1953) and diccionario de símbolos tradicionales (1958) by juan eduardo cirlot (1916–73) provide interpretive avenues to ambivalence in blake’s poetics, specially marked in the marriage of heaven and hell. picón’s study takes us back again to this fundamental work, cornerstone of a “ruptured ontology” (cirlot, quoted in picón 201)“una ontología desgarrada.” that confers upon surrealism a distinctive contradictory ethics. by examining the solidarity between blakean and surrealist visions, picón points out the confluence of elements that the course of modern history has blurred or made irreconcilable. the enlightenment, for instance, sought to conquer reality by means of expedient forms of positivism and synthesis. these epistemic strategies, and others, were intended to shun paradoxical twists and unpremeditated eccentricities. conversely, under the path initiated by blake and followed by later surrealists, antagonistic energies move productively in a space of communion where the tyger and the lamb enjoy, in a prophetic and symbolic epiphany, their most lasting brotherhood. in france, artists such as joan miró and andré masson created works that interpreted blake’s formidable visionary heads. in order to establish a more emphatic connection with the english artist, picón usually avoids analyses of particular works; rather, she focuses on the modes in which they were conceived and crafted. in this sense, their genealogy can be traced back to what breton identifies as “pure psychic automatism” (quoted in picón 208)“automatismo psíquico puro.” in his surrealist manifesto (1924). instead of resulting from a preconceived plan, surrealist creations evolve spontaneously from seemingly inconsequential imaginative crises. these inflections, in turn, challenge compositional codes that govern literary and pictorial expressions. picón’s examination, therefore, draws readers’ attention not only to blake’s techniques, but also to their translation into automatism by the surrealist idiom. in the context of an avant-garde and transatlantic migration, surrealism found a stimulating atmosphere in new york in the 1940s. artists and critics such as s. w. hayter, jackson pollock, marc chagall, le corbusier, salvador dalí, and max ernst led transgressive experimentation at atelier 17. the concluding part of picón’s study discusses ties between blake and ernst (1891–1976) that confirm the free unfolding of imagination through automatist activity. in a variety of tones, both artists concurred in their mistrust of the pressures of a purely materialist and retinal emergence of reality. ernst’s collages and frottages, which sought to diffuse apparent surfaces, are analogous with blake’s relief-etching techniques in their attempt to “conceal the visible and expose the invisible” (werner spies, quoted in picón 245).“ocultar lo visible para mostrar lo oculto.” in this respect, the visual design of visiones de william blake not only invites reading, but also evokes the artist’s own visionary world. all chapters are complemented with illustrations of engravings, prophetic passages, and illuminated texts, some of them culled from the william blake archive. carefully placed at key intervals, these reproductions never obtrude into the reader’s exploration of the itineraries that the book offers. finally, visiones de william blake offers an approach to the artist in perspective, augmenting the field of his creations in two ways. firstly, the study determines how the blakean work, starting from an english threshold, connects with major artistic developments in continental europe and america. secondly, the romanticism that invigorates the artist’s work acquires new aesthetic connotations in its resonances with other artistic movements, such as symbolism and the avant-garde. picón’s book clearly traces the itineraries of a legacy that, from its romantic inception to its further surrealist interpretations, celebrates a visionary art “seeing from the other side, trespassing the visible” (arthur symons, quoted in picón 54).“ver del otro lado, atravesando lo visible.” bibliography benjamin, walter. “la obra de arte en la época de su reproductibilidad técnica.” discursos interrumpidos i. filosofía del arte y de la historia. trans. jesús aguirre. madrid: taurus, 1989. 15-57. bourdieu, pierre. las reglas del arte. génesis y estructura del campo literario. trans. thomas kauf. barcelona: anagrama, 1995. william blake and his circle: a checklist of publications and discoveries in 2014 william blake and his circle: a checklist of publications and discoveries in 2014 by g. e. bentley, jr. with the assistance of hikari sato for japanese publications, of li-ping geng 耿力平 for chinese publications, and of fernando castanedo for spanish publications g. e. bentley, jr., (gbentley@chass.utoronto.ca) has a book forthcoming from university of toronto press and articles upcoming in language. philology. culture (in russian) and blake. editors’ notes: the invaluable bentley checklist has grown to the point where we are unable to publish it in its entirety. all the material will be incorporated into the cumulative “william blake and his circle” and “sale catalogues of william blake’s works” on the bentley blake collection site, victoria university in the university of toronto. the article below includes previously unrecorded copy, binding, and history information for the works of blake and his circle, catalogues and editions from the last ten years (2005 on), and criticism from the last ten years and prior to the publication of gilchrist’s life (1863). a number of entries below have a link to an online article or catalogue. some such items are freely accessible, and others may be behind a subscription barrier, depending on your or your institution’s access. all are included on the ground that even those with restricted access often provide a freely available abstract or excerpt. addenda and corrigenda to blake records, 2nd ed. (2004), now appear online. they are updated yearly in conjunction with the publication of the checklist. table of contents: introductory essay symbols abbreviations division i: william blake part i: blake’s writings section a: original editions, facsimiles, reprints, and translations section b: collections and selections appendix: writings improbably alleged to be by blake part ii: reproductions of drawings and paintings section a: illustrations of individual authors section b: collections and selections part iii: commercial engravings section a: illustrations of individual authors appendix: books improbably alleged to have blake engravings part iv: catalogues and bibliographies section a: individual catalogues section b: collections and selections part v: books owned by william blake the poet part vi: criticism, biography, and scholarly studies division ii: blake’s circle barry, james butts, thomas cumberland, george flaxman, john frost, william edward fuseli, john henry hayley, william johnson, joseph linnell, john stedman, john gabriel tatham, frederick watson, caroline blake publications and discoveries in 2014 the checklist of blake publications in 2014 includes works in chinese, french, german, japanese, portuguese, romanian, russian, serbian, spanish, and swedish, and there are newly recorded doctoral dissertations from cornell, glasgow, kragujevac, ochanomizu, pompeu fabra [barcelona], and salford. an electronic resource new to me is ethos (electronic theses online service) <http://​ethos.​bl.​uk>, mounted by the british library. it records 380,000 british theses, including a number on william blake—but not that of geb (1956). in some cases the details given are pretty minimal, but in others the full text is available. a curious series of electronic books was published by e-artnow in 2013–14. it includes milton, das verlorene paradies (paradise lost) mit illustrationen von william blake, many illuminated books (as listed in part i, section a, below), and the complete illuminated books of william blake.the series also includes job, blair’s grave, and flaxman’s odyssey, but not the book of los and on homers poetry [and] on virgil. it contains such classics as brunette striptease and the kama sutra. each work is said to be an “illuminated manuscript [sic] with the original illustrations of william blake,” and each copy is said to be a “carefully crafted ebook.” the coloring in all blake’s works reproduced seems dubious. the series appears to omit all blake’s “illuminated manuscripts” such as tiriel and vala or the four zoas. an association william blake <http://​www.​williamblake.​fr> was formed in france in august 2013 and an exhibition was held in nérac (aquitaine) 27 may–6 july 2014. there was a flurry of newspaper articles on the sale of blake’s cottage in felpham,see, for example, chainey, cripps, holledge, luyssen, and mackintosh in part vi. most of them highly derivative. the exhibition of blake at the ashmolean museum (oxford) in 2014 stimulated a cataract of responses, the focus of which was often on the mock-up of blake’s printing studio in hercules buildings, where he lived 1790–1800. only a few of these responses are reported here, their frequently derivative character and vapidness discouraging further exploration. most are exclamatory and a few dismissive. the valuable catalogue is profusely illustrated, including numerous manuscript documents about blake. it does not, however, provide photographs of blake’s studio, which created such a stir in the press. a proof of a newly recorded engraving by blake for the two title pages of stedman’s surinam (1796) was acquired in 2014 by victoria university in the university of toronto. before that, the last blake plates newly recorded were for rees’s cyclopaedia, pl. 3a (1819) <see bbs p. 246> and a relief etching for virgil, pastorals (1821).see robert n. essick, “a relief etching of blake’s virgil illustrations,” blake 25.3 (winter 1991-92): 117-27.the print of “a lady embracing a bust” (stothard–blake) was recorded in essick, the separate plates of william blake: a catalogue (1983) 242-43, but the work in which it appeared, [elizabeth blower], maria: a novel (1785), was identified first in <blake (2001)>, pp. 138-40. songs of innocence and of experience (i), a posthumous copy watermarked with fragments of j whatman | 1831, lacking ten of fifty-four prints, was also acquired by victoria university in the university of toronto. a curious feature of copy i is that one print (pl. 23) is watercolored (see illus. 1a),songs (i) pls. 1, 3, and 23 are reproduced in robert n. essick, “blake in the marketplace, 2014,” blake 48.4 (spring 2015), illus. 1-3. essick describes the coloring of pl. 23 as “better, and more blake-like, than one usually finds in tinted examples of posthumous copies of the songs” (caption to illus. 3). perhaps by catherine blake (d. 18 october 1831 [br(2) 546]) or frederick tatham, who printed the posthumous copies of blake’s works in illuminated printing. the coloring is distinct from the color-printed copy of the same etching in victoria university in the university of toronto (see illus 1b). the public appearance of songs (i), which was previously in private hands, has permitted the correction of minor errors in the account of it in blake books. * * * * * * * * * the annual checklist of scholarship and discoveries concerning william blake and his circle records publications and discoveries for the current year (say, 2014) and those for previous years that are not recorded in blake books, blake books supplement, and “william blake and his circle.” installments of “william blake and his circle” are continuations of blake books and blake books supplement, with similar principles and conventions. i have made no systematic attempt to record audio books and magazines, blogs, broadcasts on radio and television, broadsides,for instance, a wood-engraved broadside of “jerusalem” “from william blake’s ‘milton,’” signed “h. c. whaite,” reproduced in robert n. essick, “blake in the marketplace, 2014,” blake 48.4 (spring 2015), illus. 11. calendars,for example, tate william blake wall calendar 2015 (flame tree publishing, 2014); isbn: 9781783610303. cards,for instance, a card (6.5 x 3.5 cm.) in the “where nature ends” series depicting artists, with a colored reproduction of the phillips portrait of blake and a palette below it, “topps 2014 | allen & ginter’s,” the verso with a description of blake (copy in victoria university in the university of toronto). the firm of allen & ginter usually produces baseball cards. cd-roms, chinaware, coffee mugs, comic books, computer printouts (unpublished), conferences,for example, blake, the flaxmans, and romantic sociability, birkbeck college, university of london, 18-19 july 2014. dvds, e-mails, festivals and lecture series, flash cards, furniture, interactive multimedia, jewelry, lectures on audiocassettes, lipstick, manuscripts about blake, microforms, mosaics, movies, murals, music, notebooks (blank), novels merely tangentially about blake, pageants, performances, pillows, places named after blake, playing cards, plays, podcasts, poems about blake, portraits, postcards, posters and individual pictures, recorded readings and singings, refrigerator magnets, stained-glass windows, stamps (postage and rubber), stickers, sweatshirts, tapestries, t-shirts, tattoos (temporary and permanent), tiles, typescripts (unpublished), video recordings, and web sites. research for this checklist was carried out particularly in the libraries of the university of toronto and victoria university in the university of toronto, as well as with the electronic resources of copac, google, google books, google scholar, and worldcat. works published in japan were found in cinii (national institute of informatics scholarly and academic information navigator), the national diet library online catalogue, komaba library and general library of the university of tokyo, and the national diet library. information for works published in china derives from the national library of china (beijing). research for works in spanish was carried out in the biblioteca nacional de españa. i am grateful for assistance from jeff mertz (for reproductions of obscure essays), robert n. essick (particularly for an early sight of his “blake in the marketplace, 2014” for blake), sarah jones (for superlative editing), and morton d. paley, as well as from my collaborators, hikari sato, li-ping geng, and fernando castanedo. symbols * works prefixed by an asterisk include one or more illustrations by blake or depicting him. if there are more than 19, the number is specified. if the illustrations include all those for a work by blake, say thel or his illustrations to l’ allegro, the work is identified. § works preceded by a section mark are reported on second-hand authority. abbreviations bb g. e. bentley, jr., blake books (1977) bbs g. e. bentley, jr., blake books supplement (1995) blake blake/an illustrated quarterly <blake ([year])> the installment of “william blake and his circle” published in blake in the year specified br(2) g. e. bentley, jr., blake records, 2nd ed. (2004) butlin martin butlin, the paintings and drawings of william blake (1981) isbn international standard book number note that characters in works in chinese, japanese, and russian have been transliterated to roman script. english translations of the titles of articles, books, and journals in other languages are often contained in either parentheses or brackets. parentheses indicate that the title is also included in english in the work; brackets that it is not. division i: william blake part i: blake’s writings section a: original editions, facsimiles, reprints, and translations editors’ note: please consult bentley, “sale catalogues of william blake’s works,” for further particulars of catalogues mentioned in this section. table of collections addenda robert n. essick for children: the gates of paradise pl. 15 fitzwilliam museum letter 4 nov. 1826 (denny to blake via linnell); letter 25 nov. 1827 (cumberland to catherine blake) harvard letter 7 oct. 1803 (blake to hayley) victoria university in the university of toronto songs (i) yale letter autumn 1800? (blake to butts?) <see bbs pp. 93-94> private owners and public institutions that have disposed of original blakes addenda joan linnell ivimy burton letter 4 nov. 1826; letter 25 nov. 1827 lord cunliffe songs (i) mary hyde letter 7 oct. 1803 table of watermarks addendum j whatman | 1831 songs of innocence and of experience (i) all religions are one (1788?) it is reproduced, presumably chiefly from the prints in the huntington, in the e-artnow edition (2013) (see all religions are one & there is no natural religion in part i, section b) and in todas las religiones son una, no hay religión natural, trans. david francisco (2014) (see todas las religiones son una in part i, section b). america (1793) copy e it is probably reproduced in the e-artnow edition (2013), below. copy m it is reproduced in libros proféticos, trans. bernardo santano, vol. 1 (2013) (see <blake [2014]>). editions *america a prophecy (illuminated manuscript [sic] with the original illustrations of william blake). e-artnow, 2013. isbn: 9788074844119. probably america (e)—see the complete illuminated books of william blake in part i, section b. §america: a prophecy. charleston: bibliolife, 2014. 44 pp.; isbn: 9781293813065. the book of ahania (1795) copy a it is probably reproduced in the e-artnow edition (2013), below. edition *the book of ahania (illuminated manuscript [sic] with the original illustrations of william blake). e-artnow, 2013. isbn: 9788074844157. probably the book of ahania (a)—see the complete illuminated books of william blake in part i, section b. the book of thel (1789) copy n it is reproduced in the william blake archive edition (2014), below. editions *the book of thel (illuminated manuscript [sic] with the original illustrations of william blake). e-artnow, 2013. isbn: 9788074844058. probably thel (f, h, or o)—see the complete illuminated books of william blake in part i, section b. *the book of thel [n]. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2014. europe (1794) copy b it is reproduced in various sizes in the 2014-15 ashmolean catalogue (see 2014 4 december–2015 1 march in part iv, section a). copy e it is probably reproduced in the e-artnow edition (2013), below. edition *europe a prophecy (illuminated manuscript [sic] with the original illustrations of william blake). e-artnow, 2013. isbn: 9788074844102. probably europe (e)—see the complete illuminated books of william blake in part i, section b. “exhibition of paintings in fresco” (1809) copy a history: sold with blake’s letter to ozias humphry of may 1809 at sotheby’s, 3-4 june 1907, lot 385 [for £10.15.0 to b. f. stevens]. “a fairy leapt” (1793) history: acquired by dante gabriel rossetti, from whom it passed to his brother william michael rossetti, who apparently gave it to his physician; james rimell & son, no. 288 illustrated catalogue of rare books (london, 1933), lot 64, offered at £225 “a fairy leapt upon my knee,” “1 page, small 4to.,” reproduced, the first two lines quoted, with, on the verso, a pencil sketch of the infant hercules throttling the serpents <butlin #253>, plus another leaf with a pencil sketch for “‘los in his rage’” <butlin #561 verso>, engraved as a decoration for the lower half of page 6 of “jerusalem,” 1804 (8 x 6¼ inches); on reverse:-pencil sketch, also with ruled scale lines for engraving, his interpretation of fuseli’s design for shakespeare’s henry viii, act iv, scene ii, “queen katherine awakening from her dream” [<butlin #561 recto>], which blake engraved for chalmers’ shakespeare, 1805 (vol. 7, p. 235). the two leaves were “‘given by william rossetti, taken from the collection of blake manuscripts which had been in possession of dante gabriel rossetti,’ in return for professional services rendered to william rossetti’s daughter when she dislocated her arm. a written declaration of authenticity by the late owner-recipient to this effect will be passed to the purchaser.”these leaves are now at the us national gallery. the first book of urizen (1794) copy a it is reproduced in libros proféticos, trans. bernardo santano, vol. 1 (2013) (see <blake [2014]>). copy g it is probably reproduced in the e-artnow edition (2013), below. plate 9 history: given by dorothy braude edinburg in 2012 to the art institute of chicago (inventory number 2012.74), where it is reproduced online. edition *the [first] book of urizen (illuminated manuscript [sic] with the original illustrations of william blake). e-artnow, 2013. isbn: 9788074844096. probably urizen (g)—see the complete illuminated books of william blake in part i, section b. for children: the gates of paradise (1793) edition *for children: the gates of paradise (illuminated manuscript [sic] with the original illustrations of william blake). e-artnow, 2013. isbn: 9788074844133. probably for children (a or d)—see the complete illuminated books of william blake in part i, section b. for the sexes: the gates of paradise ([1826?]) copy k it is probably reproduced in the e-artnow edition (2013), below. edition *for the sexes: the gates of paradise (illuminated manuscript [sic] with the original illustrations of william blake). e-artnow, 2013. isbn: 9788074844188. probably for the sexes (k)—see the complete illuminated books of william blake in part i, section b. the ghost of abel (1822) copy a it is probably reproduced in the e-artnow edition (2013), below. edition *the ghost of abel: a revelation in the visions of jehovah seen by william blake (illuminated manuscript [sic] with the original illustrations of william blake). e-artnow, 2013. isbn: 9788074844195. probably the ghost of abel (a)—see the complete illuminated books of william blake in part i, section b. an island in the moon (1784?) edition *una isla en la luna. edición bilingüe de fernando castanedo. traducción de fernando castanedo. madrid: cátedra, 2014. colección letras universales. 8º, 239 pp., 88 illustrations, including all of an island in the moon and the formation of letters and words in it; isbn: 9788437633343. english and spanish on facing pages. “introducción” “vida de william blake.” 9-37. “una isla en la luna [description of the text].” 38-41. “fecha de composición.” 41-48. “historia y características del manuscrito.” 48-54. “la inscripción a lápiz del folio 9 recto.” 54-66. “género literario.” 66-71. “la laguna fingida.” 71-79. *“una isla en la luna: lo ordinario y lo respetable.” 79-86. “esta edición.” 87-89. “bibliografía.” 91-99. text of an island. 100-209. “manuscrito de una isla en la luna” [reduced-size color reproductions of the manuscript, 8.3 x 14.0 cm. vs. 18.3 x 30.8 cm. in the original]. 211-30. he argues for 1786 as the date of composition and attributes to blake the diagonal pencil inscription on f. 9r. “apéndice 1” [texts of “holy thursday,” “nurse’s song,” and “the little boy lost” from songs of innocence]. 233-35. “apéndice 2” [names of persons in an island and of those they represent: “quid the cynic quid el cínico william blake”]. 237-38. a sophisticated and meticulous edition. jerusalem (1804[–20]) copy i it is probably reproduced in the e-artnow edition (2013), below. plate 6 see “a fairy leapt,” above. editions jerusalem. ed. e. r. d. maclagan and a. g. b. russell. 1904. <bb #77> review [john bailey], times literary supplement 6 may 1904. b. partially reprinted, with the author’s name, in times literary supplement 17 jan. 2014: 16. *jerusalem (illuminated manuscript [sic] with the original illustrations of william blake). e-artnow, 2013. isbn: 9788074844171. probably jerusalem (i)—see the complete illuminated books of william blake in part i, section b. letters 1800 1 april history: offered in quaritch rough list 201 (oct. 1900), lot 1077, for £5.5.0. 1800 14 september history: sold at sotheby’s, 3-4 june 1907, lot 384 (partly quoted) [£15.10.0 to pearson]. 1801 19 october history: according to the rosenbach acquisition card, it was bought at the sale of william harris arnold at anderson galleries, 10-11 november 1924, lot 53, for “hksns” [$190.00],another price on the card is “hrsns” [$150.00]. kathy haas of the rosenbach library tells me that the rosenbach price code was h o v e r z a c k s [1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0]. in addition, “ns” means “.00,” “x” stands for a repeat of the previous non-zero digit, and “n” is used as an alternate “0.” the cards are typed, with ms. additions, particularly of customers to whom the work was offered. occasionally they are clippings from sale catalogues. and offered for $350. 1804 22 june history: sold at sotheby’s, 3-4 june 1907, lot 383 (partly quoted) [£12.10.0 to pearson]. 1809 may history: see “exhibition of paintings in fresco,” above. 1826 31 march history: offered in charles boesen, rare books, manuscripts, autograph, first editions, letters from the estate of the late gabriel wells catalogue 1 (new york, 1948), lot 28, for $350, bought by rosenbach (according to his acquisition card), and offered for $575.i am puzzled by the card notes “12/26/50 | g. wells estate | oears” [$24,750]. editions the letters of william blake, together with a life by frederick tatham. ed. a. g. b. russell. 1906. <bb #88> c. §“volume 1.” charleston: bibliolife, 2014. 312 pp.; isbn: 9781295534098. i have no record of a second volume for 2014. for letters published in 2014 by the william blake archive, see william blake archive in part i, section b. the marriage of heaven and hell ([1790–93?]) copy d it is probably reproduced in the e-artnow edition (2013), below. editions *the marriage of heaven and hell [b]. ed. michael phillips. 2011. <blake (2012)> review julianne simpson, library 7th ser., 15.3 (sept. 2014): 363 (one paragraph description). *the marriage of heaven and hell (illuminated manuscript [sic] with the original illustrations of william blake). e-artnow, 2013. isbn: 9788074844065. probably marriage (d)—see the complete illuminated books of william blake in part i, section b. §the marriage of heaven and hell. charleston: bibliolife, 2014. 60 pp.; isbn: 9781293809099. §*the marriage of heaven and hell. ed. will jonson. san bernardino [california]: createspace independent publishing platform, 2014. 24 pp.; isbn: 9781495923869. milton (1804[–11?]) copy d it is probably reproduced in the e-artnow edition (2013), below. editions milton. ed. e. r. d. maclagan and a. g. b. russell. 1907, 1973. <bb #119, bbs p. 102> c. §2010. <§blake (2011)> d. §charleston: bibliolife, 2014. 90 pp.; isbn: 9781294798804. *milton a poem (illuminated manuscript [sic] with the original illustrations of william blake). e-artnow, 2013. isbn: 9788074844164. probably milton (d)—see the complete illuminated books of william blake in part i, section b. notebook blake’s notebook seems to be reproduced entire in the british library’s online discovering literature: romantics and victorians (see british library under part i, section b, below). poetical sketches (1783) edition poetical sketches. now first reprinted from the original edition of 1783. ed. richard herne shepherd. 1868. <bb #129> b. §2009. <§blake (2011)> c. §charleston: nabu press, 2014. 116 pp.; isbn: 9781295725236. the song of los (1795) copy b it is probably reproduced in the e-artnow edition (2013), below. edition *the song of los (illuminated manuscript [sic] with the original illustrations of william blake). e-artnow, 2013. isbn: 9788074844140. probably the song of los (b)—see the complete illuminated books of william blake in part i, section b. songs of experience (1794) edition *songs of experience (illuminated manuscript [sic] with the original illustrations of william blake). e-artnow, 2013. isbn: 9788074844089. probably from songs (c or z)—see the complete illuminated books of william blake in part i, section b. songs of innocence (1789) copy b it is probably reproduced in the e-artnow edition (2013), below. history: w. e. moss sold it at sotheby’s, 2 march 1937, lot 143, for £750 to rosenbach <bb p. 405>.according to the rosenbach acquisition card, it was bought for stock, not on commission from rosenwald. the card says: “full red levant morocco,” “hzar” [$1675], “?sold mrs isaac hieste[?] | [words illeg.] d[?] cat[?] 7/37.” however, innocence (b) is in brown blind-stamped russia. copy l it is reproduced in the william blake archive edition (2014), below. editions *songs of innocence. with illustrations by geraldine morris. 1902. <bb #149> b. §charleston: bibliolife, 2014. 68 pp.; isbn: 9781293456392. *songs of innocence (illuminated manuscript [sic] with the original illustrations of william blake). e-artnow, 2013. isbn: 9788074844027. probably songs of innocence (b)—see the complete illuminated books of william blake in part i, section b. *songs of innocence [l, “never before reproduced”]. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2014. songs of innocence and of experience (1794[–1831]) table copy plates missing or added leaves watermarks blake nos. leaf size in cm. printing color i victoria university in the university of toronto -12, 15, 30-32, 44-45, 47, 50-51 44 whatman | 1831 (pl. 39); [a] j wh | 18 (pls. 6, 13, 28); j wh | 1 (pls. 19, 29); j wh (pl. 14); j w (pls. 11, 20); hatman | 1831 (pls. 16-17); atman | 831 (pls. 8, 10, 22, 27, 33); tman | 831 (pl. 42) — 19.8 x 24.1 [b] gray [c] a. bb p. 371 says that the watermark is an undifferentiated j whatman | 1831 on pls. 6, 8, 10-11, 14, 16-17, 19-20, 22, 24, 27-29, 33, 39, 42. b. all the edges are a trifle ragged, and therefore the dimensions are not quite uniform. bb p. 374, note 47, says that pl. 48 is on thinner paper than the other leaves, but this does not seem to be the case. the paper is quite thick. c. the color is often very faint, though the text is exceptionally clear. a few plates shade to black. there is heavy embossing, especially on the title pages. order of the plates in songs of innocence and of experience innocence copy ithe prints are loose, but the pencil numeration at the top right corner gives the order. pls. 13 and 37 have a pencil note at the top right: “qy[?]? does this not belong to songs of experience” (no, yes). bb gives erroneous pencil pagination for both innocence and experience. 1-11, 37, 13-14, 16-25, 48, 26-27 experience copy ithe prints are loose, but the pencil numeration at the top right corner gives the order. pl. 34 is numbered “50 31,” pl. 39 is numbered “39 35,” and pl. 54 “43 last 44.” bb gives erroneous pencil pagination for both innocence and experience. 28, 33, 29, 34-36, 38-43, 46, 49, 52-54 copy i binding: loose, never sewn, printed on one side only. the uncut prints regularly show the irrelevant borders. the last verso (pl. 54) is somewhat browned. the prints are uncolored except for pl. 23 (“spring,” second print), where the text is watercolored faintly pink, yellow, and gray, the vines green, the orange-haired child is strongly pink, his sky blue, his ground green (see illus. 1a). compare the color-printed copy of the design only in victoria university in the university of toronto, in which the child’s hair is brown and the sky pale blue (see illus 1b). the copperplate-maker’s mark (“london”) is clearly visible at the top left of pl. 28 (the frontispiece to experience). this is not visible in copies printed by the blakes. history: it was sold for a descendant of henry cunliffe (1826-94) on 18 june 2014 at bonhams (london), lot 73 [to victoria university in the university of toronto] (see 2014 18 june in part iv, section a). 1a. “spring” (songs of innocence and of experience [i], pl. 23), unwatermarked but among prints watermarked 1831 (see enlargement). 7.7 x 10.5 cm. on leaf approximately 19.8 x 24.1 cm. the somewhat simplistic coloring could therefore have been added before 1831 by catherine blake (d. 18 october 1831), or by an anonymous hand before or after 1831 (victoria university in the university of toronto). 1b. “spring” (songs pl. 23), color printed about 1796 (victoria university in the university of toronto) (see <blake [2009]>). editions *facsimile of the original outlines before colouring of the songs of innocence and of experience [u]. 1893. <bb #173> b. §facsimile of what is believed to be the last replica of the songs of innocence and of experience. 2012. <blake (2014)> c. charleston: bibliolife, 2014. 146 pp.; isbn: 9781294573968. §songs of innocence and of experience. ed. ramji lall. new delhi: rama brothers, 2006. §songs of innocence and [of] experience. trans. iana maravis. bilingual ed. bucharest: rao publishing, 2006. in english and romanian. william blake’s songs of innocence and [of] experience illustrated by robert crayola “shewing the two contrary states of the human soul.” 2011. <§blake (2013)> robert crayola. “epilogue.” 99. (“william blake was referred to by other romantic poets as ‘the cool, old man’ of the group. … had he escaped the assassin’s bullet that prematurely took his life, william blake would turn 254 this year.”) rachel yee. “afterword.” 101. robert crayola. “note on the afterword.” 103-04. rachel yee. “a commentary on the illustrations: for elucidation and pleasure.” 105-13. robert crayola. “postscript to the commentary.” 115. anon. “an interview with robert crayola.” 117-19. robert crayola. “an interview with william blake (via ouija board).” 121-22. anon. “about the author [i.e., william blake].” 123. anon. “about the artist.” 125-26. *songs of innocence and of experience showing [sic] the two contrary states of the human soul (illuminated manuscript [sic] with the original illustrations of william blake). e-artnow, 2013. isbn: 9788074844041. probably songs of innocence and of experience (c or z)—see the complete illuminated books of william blake in part i, section b. §songs of innocence and songs of experience by william blake. [san bernardino (california): createspace independent publishing platform, 2013]. [43 pp.]; isbn: 9781483929538. §*songs of innocence and of experience. london: urban romantics, 2014. isbn: 9781910150528. the only reproduction, from oberon, titania, and puck with fairies dancing <butlin #161>, is on the cover. there is no natural religion (1788?) it is reproduced in the e-artnow edition (2013) (see all religions are one & there is no natural religion in part i, section b) and in todas las religiones son una, no hay religión natural, trans. david francisco (2014) (see todas las religiones son una in part i, section b). visions of the daughters of albion (1793) copy j it is reproduced in libros proféticos, trans. bernardo santano, vol. 1 (2013) (see <blake [2014]>), and it is probably reproduced in the e-artnow edition (2013), below. edition *visions of the daughters of albion (illuminated manuscript [sic] with the original illustrations of william blake). e-artnow, 2013. isbn: 9788074844072. probably visions (j)—see the complete illuminated books of william blake in part i, section b. section b: collections and selections blake’s works reprinted in conventional typography before 1863 addendum 1831 “to the muses” (see below). * * * * * * * * * *all religions are one & there is no natural religion (illuminated manuscript [sic] with the original illustrations of william blake). e-artnow, 2013. isbn: 9788074844126. all religions are one must be from the unique copy in the huntington library (a), and there is no natural religion is probably from copy c or f—see the complete illuminated books of william blake, below. blake: poems. selected by peter washington. 1994. <blake (1995)> b. §new york: knopf–random house, 2014. isbn: 9780375712555. british library online discovering literature: romantics and victorians under blake, the collection is very miscellaneous, many items having nothing to do with him. it includes songs of innocence and of experience (1923 liverpool facsimile—the library does not have an original colored copy of the songs); malkin, a father’s memoirs (1806), only pp. xxviii-xxx with “holy thursday” from innocence; letters of 6 dec. 1795, 23 dec. 1796, and 19 dec. 1808; blake’s notebook (seems to be entire); and vala (seems not to be entire). there are associated essays: *linda freedman. “blake’s two chimney sweepers.” *linda freedman. “looking at the manuscript of william blake’s ‘london.’” *andrew lincoln. “william blake’s radical politics.” *george norton. “an introduction to ‘the tyger.’” *george norton. “william blake’s chimney sweeper poems: a close reading.” *michael phillips. “the title page of william blake’s songs of innocence (1789).” *julian walker. “the music of william blake’s poetry.” *julian walker. “william blake and eighteenth-century children’s literature.” there are also accompanying lessons. *the complete illuminated books of william blake (unabridged—with all the original illustrations). e-artnow, 2013. isbn: 9788074844034. “images are taken from books in the lessing j. rosenwald collection of the library of congress.” the library of congress collection includes america (e), the book of ahania (a*), the book of thel (f*, h*, o*), europe (e*), the first book of urizen (g*), for children: the gates of paradise (a, d), for the sexes: the gates of paradise (k), the ghost of abel (a), jerusalem (i), the marriage of heaven and hell (d*), milton (d*), the song of los (b*), songs of innocence (b*), songs of innocence and of experience (c*, z*), there is no natural religion (c*, f*),copy f consists of nineteenth-century reproductions, except for pl. a7, which is genuine. visions of the daughters of albion (j*) (* = colored). the e-artnow series also includes all religions are one, the only copy of which is in the huntington library, blake’s illustrations for paradise lost, the only complete set of which in one location is in the huntington library <butlin #529>, and the engravings for job (1826) and blair’s grave, copies of both of which are in the library of congress. the complete illuminated books omits the book of los, the only copy of which is in the british museum. §el demonio es parco: aforismos. selected and trans. heriberto yépez. mexico city: editorial verdehalago, 2006. 69 pp.; isbn: 9789689103103. in spanish. yépez. “introducción.” 7-15. todas las religiones son una. 19-21. no hay ninguna religión natural. 23-26. “de las bodas del cielo y el infierno.” 27-34. augurios de la inocencia. 35-40. laocoonte. 41-46. “los comentarios proféticos de w. blake.” 47-56. sobre la poesía de homero. 57-58. sobre virgilio. 59. the everlasting gospel & other poems. ed. sasha newborn. santa barbara: bandanna books, 2011. 8º, 68 pp.; isbn: 9780942208078. the “other poems” are there is no natural religion (35-37), all religions are one (38-39), and the marriage of heaven and hell (40-68) [which of course are not “poems”]. according to the preface ([i-ii]), “this text has been modernized where practicable, replacing antiquated usages such as thee and thine with you and your. more problematic in editing for modern readers is blake’s use of ‘man’ and ‘men’ to describe humanity. in his visual art, blake portrays men and women with a clear eye, but, fair warning: his language is not as equitable.” *libros proféticos i [-ii]. trans. bernardo santano. vilaür [girona]: atalanta, 2013 [2014, vol. 2]. colección imaginatio vera 80 [84, vol. 2]. 4º, 704 pp. [618 pp., vol. 2]; isbn: 9788494094156 [9788494227622, vol. 2]. 127 color reproductions in vol. 1 and 72 in vol. 2. for volume 1, see <blake (2014)>. volume 2 contains *milton: poema en dos libros (9-162), with 22 (of 50) reproductions from copy d; jerusalén: la emanación del gigante albion (163-517), with 50 (of 100) reproductions from copy i; bernardo santano, “glosario” (519-616) (largely from damon, a blake dictionary). review (of vol. 1) *adriana díaz enciso, “el método de profecía de william blake,” milenio [mexico city] 7 dec. 2013 (in spanish), reprinted as “william blake’s method of prophecy” on the blake society web site (a “vast and outstanding … feat”; “all the illustrations are neatly and faithfully reproduced”; “this edition of william blake’s prophetic books in spanish is one of the most important publishing events in that language for decades.”) reviews (of vol. 2) *maica rivera, “cómo ser william blake,” leer no. 249 (feb. 2014): 76-77 (in spanish). *antonio lucas, “los delirios de un visionario,” el mundo [madrid] 22 april 2014: 39-41 (in spanish). §poemas y prosas. símbolos y fuentes. selected and trans. cristóbal serra. palma de mallorca: edicions cort, 2010. in spanish. *the poems of william blake. ed. w. h. stevenson. 1971, 1972. <bb #296a-b> c. blake: the complete poems. 2nd ed. 1989. <bbs p. 161> d. 3rd ed. 2007. <blake (2008)> e. 2014. §poems of william blake. [san bernardino (california): createspace independent publishing platform, 2013]. 65 pp.; isbn: 9781482717655. §poesía completa. trans. andrés maldonado. buenos aires: editorial cygnus, 2012. 256 pp.; isbn: 9789872398446. in spanish. *the poetical works of william blake, lyrical and miscellaneous. ed. william michael rossetti. 1874 …. <bb #299, bbs p. 162, blake (2009)> §[whitefish (montana)]: literary licensing llc, 2014. 372 pp.; isbn: 9781498054133. §proverbs of hell. images by james putnam abbott. n.p.: blurb, 2014. isbn: 9781320905183. §selected poems by william blake. [san bernardino (california): createspace independent publishing platform, 2013]. 40 pp.; isbn: 9781483928876. §songs of life. illus. mark sheeky. n.p.: pentangel books, 2014. isbn: 9780957194724. §tiger, tiger burning bright journal: famous manuscripts, the tyger. cover art by cheryl casey. n.p.: createspace independent publishing platform, 2014. 6 x 9″, 200 pp.; isbn: 9781500839703. blake’s poem is followed by “lined pages … for creative writing, personal reflection, song writing, wherever the imagination leads.” *todas las religiones son una, no hay religión natural. trans. david francisco. zaragoza: pregunta ediciones, 2014. 12º, 80 pp.; isbn: 9788494304422. english text with spanish translation on versos facing reproductions. todas las religiones son una. 7-27. no hay religión natural. 29-69. david francisco. “nota a la edición.” 71-73. “to the muses.” cameos | from the antique; | or, the | cabinet of mythology: | selections illustrative | of the | mythology of greece and italy, | for the use of children, | and intended as | a sequel to the poetical primer. | = | by mrs. lawrence. | — | “the task is a humble one, but not mean; for to lay the first stone of | a noble building is no disgrace to any hand.” | — | liverpool: | evans, chegwin and hall,colophon (p. 175): “printed by evans, chegwin & hall.” castle-street; | and | longman, rees and co., london. | — | 1831. <bodleian, harvard, robert n. essick>the work was generously called to my attention by robert n. essick in july 2014. b. … for the use of young persons …. 2nd ed., rev. liverpool: deighton and laughton; london: whittaker and co., 1849. <blake (2010)> in 1831, “to the muses” is retitled “the poet complains to the muses | of the decline of poetry,” and the author is identified only on contents p. xii: “the poet’s complaint to the muses …… blake 75.” according to the preface ([v]), rose lawrence had to “alter and modify them [the poems] as might best suit their peculiar purpose.” all her modifications seem to be merely stylistic (“ancient” for “antient,” “crystal” for “chryſtal,” “heaven” for “heav’n,” “poesie” for “poetry!”) except “now” for “do” (line 15) and “bottom” for “boſom” (line 10). the last alteration was presumably made from motives of delicacy, though even “bottom” could be the subject of risible adolescent fancy. she also added a footnote to “ida’s”: “a mountain of crete.” the only previous reprint of “to the muses” was in [h. c. robinson], vaterländisches museum (1811) (br[2] 585), but there the even-numbered lines are not indented as they are in poetical sketches (1783) and cameos. the evidence is not clear, but the obscurity of vaterländisches museum and the fact that lawrence indents even-numbered lines, as blake did but robinson did not, suggest to me that she is quoting directly from poetical sketches. william blake archive <http://​www.​blakearchive.​org> the book of thel (n), songs of innocence (l), a selection of letters for 1800 to 1805, enoch walked with god, preliminary pencil sketches, monochrome wash drawings, and watercolor drawings for blair’s grave, the blake collection list of the cincinnati art museum, and back issues of blake from 2000 to 2009 were added to the archive in 2014. *the works of william blake, poetic, symbolic, and critical. ed. e. j. ellis and w. b. yeats. 3 vols. 1893 …. <bb #369, bbs p. 169> d. §charleston: bibliobazaar, 2014. vol. 1 [?], 452 pp.; isbn: 9781295800438; vol. 2, 454 pp.; isbn: 9781294642190 [vol. 3 with the lithographs is not listed]. appendix: writings improbably alleged to be by blake manuscript newly attributed to blake inscription for hogarth’s beggar’s opera (1790) description: a print of blake’s engraving for hogarth’s beggar’s opera is enclosed in a heavy frame with a “secret” compartment in which is a manuscript description of the actors, actresses, and spectators seated on the stage as they appear in hogarth’s painting (they are described as clad “in scarlet,” “in brown,” and “in blue”).all my information about the print, its frame, and the manuscript derives from the 2014 exhibition and from a. furlan in correspondence with me. the same text is printed with published versions of hogarth’s prints. the finished versions of blake’s print bear the imprint “publish’d july 1.st 1790, by j. & j. boydell ….” the imprint cannot be seen because the frame covers it. the manuscript does not appear to me to be “in blake’s own hand” (see history, below). note, for instance, that the “c” for the hogarth print goes below the line (“clark,” “collection,” “charles,” “cock,” “cooke,” “conyers” [2]), while blake’s “c” of the same date does not go below the line (“come” [2] and “curse,” tiriel [1789?], p. 1). the “f” for the hogarth print has a downward flourish at the right end of the cross bar (“filch,” “fenton,” “from”), while in blake there is no such flourish (“for” in tiriel, p. 1). history: this may be the copy in philip c. duschnes catalogue number 140 (new york, november 1959), lot 57, beggar’s opera, “state one,” “inscribed in blake’s own hand, ‘beggar’s opera,’” “the wolpeperhaps the owner was stefan wolpe (1902–72), a german composer who lived in new york from 1938. copy,” $750; the print with its frame and manuscript were acquired at butterfield auctions (san francisco), 23 june 1969, by adrian furlan (as he told me), who lent it to the exhibition at the château de nérac (see 2014 27 may–6 july in part iv, section a), where it was the only work exhibited. letter of ozias humphry to “dr william,” 15 june 1806 for details, see br(2) xxvii, under “seven red herrings.” sophocles manuscript for details, see <blake (1996)> (“the sophocles enigma” in part i, section a), and the articles by michael phillips and g. e. bentley, jr., in blake 31.2 (fall 1997). part ii: reproductions of drawings and paintings section a: illustrations of individual authors bible genesis (1826–27) edition *genesis: william blake’s last illuminated work. ed. mark crosby and robert n. essick. 2012. <blake (2013)> review morton d. paley (see blake 48.2 in part vi). blair, robert, the grave (1805) for preliminary drawings added to the william blake archive in 2014, see william blake archive in part i, section b. a rosenbach acquisition card records:the card is a continuation of another, and it is not certain that the host work was blair’s grave. “inserted are two original sketches by blake drawn on both sides of a sheet of paper. the more complete one is in ink and the one on the verso is in pencil. this one has a small part cut off and lacking. it is probably a tentative drawing of plate vi [“the soul hovering”] in the book as the idea differs very slightly. also inserted is an engraving by blake extracted from another book. an extremely fine copy. 12/29 oxrns [$225.00].” these drawings are apparently not in butlin. dante, divine comedy (1826–27) all the dante watercolors are reproduced in los dibujos para la divina comedia de dante, ed. sebastian schütze and maria antonietta terzoli (see below). edition *los dibujos para la divina comedia de dante. ed. sebastian schütze and maria antonietta terzoli. cologne: taschen, 2014. folio (29.5 x 40.5 cm.), 324 pp.; isbn: 9783836555166. reproduces all 102 watercolors and all 7 prints. in spanish. also available in german, english, french, and italian. maria antonietta terzoli. “el más allá de dante: entre mitología clásica y teología cristiana.” 6-31. sebastian schütze. “dos maestros del ‘visibile parlare’: dante y blake.” 32-51. sebastian schütze. “william blake. catálogo de los grabados.” 310-17. gray, thomas, poems (1797–98) blake’s watercolors, first added to the william blake archive in april 2005, were made fully searchable in september 2014. edition *[poems of thomas gray with watercolour illustrations by william blake. london: folio society, 2013.] <blake (2014)> review *g. e. bentley, jr. (see blake 48.3 in part vi). milton, john, paradise lost edition §*das verlorene paradies (paradise lost) mit illustrationen von william blake. trans. adolf böttger. e-artnow, 2014. 448 pp.; isbn: 9788026808794. in german. perhaps a silent translation of the edition of 1906 <bb #390>. the only complete set of blake’s illustrations to paradise lost in one location is in the huntington library—see the complete illuminated books of william blake in part i, section b. virgil, pastorals (1821) a cumulative listthe list of virgil drawings is provided courtesy of robert n. essick. thenot remonstrates with colinet <butlin #769 1> fitzwilliam museum (keynes collection) thenot and colinet converse seated beneath two trees <#769 2> robert n. essick colinet and thenot, with shepherds’ crooks, leaning against trees <#769 3> robert n. essick colinet and thenot stand together conversing, their sheep behind, unused design <#769 4> morgan library and museum thenot, with colinet swaying his arms in sorrow <#769 5> untraced since 1924 the blighted corn <#769 6> fitzwilliam museum (keynes collection) “nor fox, nor wolf, nor rat among our sheep” <#769 7> beinecke library, yale sabrina’s silvery flood <#769 8> houghton library, harvard colinet passing a milestone <#769 9> houghton library, harvard “a rolling stone is ever bare of moss” <#769 10> morgan library and museum colinet resting by a stream by night <#769 11> untraced since 1927 colinet with his shepherd’s pipe <#769 12> untraced since 1924 “for him our yearly wakes and feasts we hold” <#769 13> robert n. essick first comparison, birds flying over a cornfield <#769 14> untraced since 1939 second comparison, “the briny ocean turns to pastures dry” <#769 15> morgan library and museum third comparison, a winding river <#769 16> untraced since 1927 thenot and colinet leading their flocks home together at sunset <#769 17> untraced since 1927 thenot and colinet at supper <#769 18> untraced since 1924 “with songs the jovial hinds return from plow” <#769 19> maurice sendak estate “and unyok’d heifers, loitering homewards, low” <#769 20> princeton university art museum young, edward, night thoughts (1794–96) benedict, the bookbinder of the night thoughts watercolors, is one of the family of london bookbinders: francis (fl. 1807–23), his sons francis (fl. 1824–28) and charles (fl. 1815–30) (ellic howe, a list of london bookbinders 1648–1815 [london: bibliographical society, 1950] 10). section b: collections and selections folio blake-varley sketchbook (1819–25) the visionary head of a man wearing a tall hat (not in butlin), offered in agnew’s 130th annual exhibition of watercolours & drawings, 5-28 march 2003, lot 18, 36 x 27.7 cm. (trimmed on right and left), may have come from the folio blake-varley sketchbook, whose leaves were c. 27 x 42 cm. *binyon, laurence. the drawings and engravings of william blake. ed. geoffrey holme. 1922 …. <bb #404, §blake (2011, 2013)> e. §charleston: nabu press, 2014. 290 pp.; isbn: 9781295752362. part iii: commercial engravingsfrom 2010 i record pre-1863 references to separately issued prints by blake. section a: illustrations of individual authors editors’ note: please consult bentley, “sale catalogues of william blake’s works,” for further particulars of catalogues mentioned in this section. bible ספר איוב‎ illustrations of the book of job (1826, 1874) 1826 new locations: cincinnati art museum (india paper plus another plus pre-publication proofs of plates numbered 6-7 plus “plates 3, 8, 17 [numbered ‘2,’ ‘7,’ and ‘16’]”), duke university, trinity college (oxford, given in 1899; see downing in part vi). according to rosenbach’s acquisition card, a copy in “original boards, with label, having on it an ms. note: ‘---’s copy of proofs presented to g. wyther, esqr. by john linnell, dec. 2 1863,” “horns” [$125.00], sale price “260.00,” was “sold to mrs landon k thorne 2|25|63.” another copy was recorded on the rosenbach acquisition card as “21 plates. folio, green morocco. inscribed on fly ‘milton riviere. this book came to me at my father’s death in 1876.david valentine riviere, drawing master, subscribed to job on 30 sept. 1825 (£1.0.0), paying the balance (£1.12.6) on 29 april 1826 (br[2] 784, 787). he had it from blake, having subscribed for it on its publication,’” “[fr. p. hofer, on exchg.].” proofs: “illustrations to the book of job; 22 plates, artist’s proofs on india paper, large paper, with ms. draft of the binder’s label in the autograph of john linnell, senr. (the friend of blake), with a note to the effect that ‘these plates are engraved by mr. blake with the graver only (that is without the aid of aqua fortis),’ bds. from the collection of the late john linnell, junr. fol. published by the author, 1825,” were sold by hodgson & co., 28-30 april 1908, lot 574 [£11.5.0].sets of job pre-publication proofs with 22 plates are in the fitzwilliam museum (ex riches), national gallery (washington, dc, ex white), university of texas (el dieff set), and yale. the title page in the el dieff and yale sets is not in the pre-publication state. the hofer set of pre-publication proofs at the houghton library, harvard university, lacks only the title page. the same quotation about aqua fortis appears in linnell’s draft description (collection of robert n. essick). “illustrations of the book of job; 22 plates, a set of artist’s proofs before the imprint, showing several interesting points of difference when compared with the finished proofs in the preceding, cut down lot to sm. 4to. size, hf. russ. from the collection of j. linnell, senr. 1825” were sold in the same hodgson catalogue, lot 575 [£2.0.0]. editions *william blake’s illustrations of the book of job. e-artnow, 2013. isbn: 9788074844225. probably from a copy in the library of congress—see the complete illuminated books of william blake in part i, section b. *ilustraciones al libro de job. trans. raquel duato. madrid: la felguera editores, 2014. colección artefactos. 8º, 128 pp.; isbn: 9788494218736, with reproductions of all the prints. spanish translations of inscriptions facing each print. “nota de los editores.” 11-12. javier calvo. “prólogo: satanás contra la imaginación.” 13-27 (mostly paraphrasing kathleen raine). “nota de la traductora.” 31-32. §*illustrations of the book of job. n.p.: bookpubber, 2014. 64 pp., with reproductions of 22 engravings. [no edition identified, no isbn given.] blair, robert, the grave (1808, 1813) 1808 quarto new location: cincinnati art museum. working proof a working proof of “death’s door” (pl. 11) etched by schiavonetti was acquired in 2014 through sotheran’s by victoria university in the university of toronto. leaf size: 21.5 x 32 cm. wartermark: none plate size: 17.3 x 29.2 cm. (as in 1808) inscriptions: “drawn by w. blake,” “etched by l. schiavonetti,” “london published may 1.st 1806 by cadell & davies strand” (the version in 1808 adds at the top right “p. 32” and below the title “’tis but a night, a long and moonleſs night, | we make the grave our bed, and then are gone!,” and the year is changed to “1808”) <bbs p. 200 reports other proofs of “death’s door” in the fitzwilliam, morgan, and trinity college (hartford, connecticut)>. the frontispiece portrait of blake (t. phillips–l. schiavonetti) exists in a recently discovered “pre-publication proof lacking all letters and before considerable finishing work in the design, india paper laid on heavy wove without watermark, leaf trimmed inside the platemark to 33.6 x 24.3 cm.” (collection of robert n. essick). “the blake portrait is in the same early st. as the proof, on heavy laid paper” in the fitzwilliam museum. perhaps these are the two “unfinished” proofs of the portrait of blake for blair’s grave offered at christie’s, 22-23 july 1814, lot 250.robert n. essick, “blake in the marketplace, 2014,” blake 48.4 (spring 2015). editions *the grave (illuminated manuscript [sic] with the original illustrations of william blake to robert blair’s the grave). e-artnow, 2013. isbn: 9788074844218. probably reproduced from a copy in the library of congress—see the complete illuminated books of william blake in part i, section b. the cover reproduces one of blake’s watercolors. §the grave: a poem illustrated by twelve etchings [1808]. [whitefish (montana)]: literary licensing llc, 2014. 24 pp.; isbn: 9781497911321. brown, john, the elements of medicine (1795) the copy with coleridge’s initials on the half-title of vol. 1 was sold with the h. b. forman collection at anderson galleries, 15-17 march 1920, lot 39 [$80 to rosenbach], and offered by him at $150 (according to his acquisition card). “carfax conduit, oxford” (1810) the earliest reproduction of the carfax conduit i have found is in the gentleman’s magazine (1771): 553. essick suggests that “the style of engraving indicates that [blake’s] pl. was engraved in the 1780s.”robert n. essick, “blake in the marketplace, 2014,” blake 48.4 (spring 2015). perhaps the date was 1787, when the carfax conduit was moved out of oxford. a copy was offered in the online catalogue of sanders of oxford (aug. 2014). reviews, puffs, notices (see also <blake [2010]>) monthly repertory of english literature 13 (paris, 1811): 381, at 1s. 6d. “chaucers canterbury pilgrims” (1810) newly recorded copy: cincinnati art museum. cumberland, george, card (1827) newly recorded copy: cincinnati art museum. dante, blake’s illustrations of dante (1838) all the prints are reproduced in *los dibujos para la divina comedia de dante (see part ii, section a, under dante). earle, james, practical observations on the operation for the stone (1793, 1796, 1803) 1793 new locations: collection of robert n. essick (2), one with the appendix (j. johnson, 1796). 1803 new location: collection of robert n. essick. plate 3, marked “to face p. 8, appendix”: “the inscriptions bottom center and lower right, added in [the] 2nd st., are in blake’s hand. the letter forms, particularly the ‘g,’ are characteristic of his engraved lettering—compare his inscriptions in george cumberland, thoughts on outline, 1796.”robert n. essick, “blake in the marketplace, 2014,” blake 48.4 (spring 2015), illus. 5. bb p. 550 dismissed the attribution to blake as “far from conclusive,” and bbs p. 211 concluded, “i am now willing to include the plate as blake’s, though balking at their [keynes’s and essick’s] certainty.” newly recorded edition fenning, d., and j. collyer, a new system of geography (2 vols., j. johnson, 1785-86, 1787) john payne, universal geography formed into a new and entire system (london: j. johnson and c. stalker, 1791) payne locations: british library, university of edinburgh. the payne edition includes a third state of plate 2; for details, see robert n. essick, “blake in the marketplace, 2014,” blake 48.4 (spring 2015), “appendix: new information on blake’s engravings.” flaxman, john, the iliad of homer (1805) edition compositions of john flaxman, sculptor: being designs in illustration of the iliad of homer. charleston: nabu press, 2014. 380 pp.; isbn: 9781294911548. hayley, william, ballads (1805) edition william hayley. ballads. n.p.: createspace independent publishing platform, 2014. 56 pp.; isbn: 9781499539301. hayley, william, designs to a series of ballads (1802) a copy of parts 1-2 “in i vol., 4to., old paper boards, backed with vellum at a later date …. entirely uncut, some edges browned with age, and a little frayed in places” (“winchester” [i.e., chichester], 1802) was offered in james rimell & son, no. 288 illustrated catalogue of rare books (london, 1933), lot 63, for £21. hogarth, william, the original works of william hogarth (1790) a copy of the original and genuine works of william hogarth (1795) was offered at §sotheby’s (london), 15 july 2014, lot 518, with an 1809 watermark. a previously unrecorded copy of the etched “proof” (probably published)it is inscribed at bottom left “painted by will.m hogarth 1729,” at bottom right “etch’d by willm blake 1788,” and, in the center, “publishd october 29: 1788: by aldm boydel & co cheapside.” ten other copies are known. with the two kneeling actresses and some other individuals left largely blank was acquired from john windle in june 2014 by victoria university in the university of toronto.in the gloom at the top, much clearer in the proof than in the greatly darkened published version, are the royal arms in an oval inscribed “honi soit qui mal y pense”; below it is “dieu et mon droit”; on either side is a floating ribbon with “veluti in speculum” and “utile dulci”. these are not recorded in robert n. essick, william blake’s commercial book illustrations (oxford: clarendon press, 1991) 42-45. lavater, john caspar, essays on physiognomy (1789-98; 1792 [perhaps 1810]; 1810 [perhaps 1817]) new location (“1792”): victoria university in the university of toronto. the newly recorded copy in victoria university is dated “1792” on all three title pages, though it includes “the english translator’s preface” dated “december 24, 1798.” this is plainly a fraudulent edition,some sets of the “1792” lavater bear watermarks as late as 1817. in a very cursory search, i found no watermark in the victoria copy. though the prints are genuine and the text is very handsome. “t. bensley, printer, | bolt court, fleet street, london” is named in the colophon to vol. 2, part 2.t. bensley is named on the title page of lavater, physiognomy (“1810,” i.e., 1817?). in vol. 1, the contents leaf has a printed note—“type i. wayland”—that seems to appear nowhere else in this copy or any other which has been recorded. levi wayland finished his apprenticeship as a printer in 1789 and is known only for works in 1789-93. this set is bound in handsome, uniform, contemporary black morocco gilt and blind stamped. the paste-down of each volume bears the armorial bookplate of “l. e. holden” (beneath paste-marks suggesting that a previous bookplate has been removed) and each volume is inscribed “gift of mrs l. e. holden. june. 1914.” each title page has a small embossed stamp, “western reserve historical society,” “1857 | cleveland | 1897,” and each fly-leaf verso is inscribed “plates are not to be embossed.” “the man sweeping the interpreter’s parlour” (c. 1822) newly recorded copy (second state): cincinnati art museum. salzmann, c. g., elements of morality (1791, 1792, 1799, 1805, 1815?) edition §*christian gotthilf salzmann. elements of morality, for the use of children: with an introductory address to parents. vol. 3. charleston: bibliolife, 2014. 248 pp.; isbn: 9781295470846. [vols. 1-2 are not listed.] shakespeare, william, the plays, ed. george steevens, with engravings after henry fuseli (1805, 1811, [1812]) plate 1: blake’s pencil sketch of the design, “with ruled scale lines for engraving,” was offered in 1933 (see “a fairy leapt” in part i, section a). stedman, j. g., narrative, of a five years’ expedition (1796, 1806, 1813) new locations: robert n. essick (colored), john rylands library (university of manchester) (colored), royal ontario museum (toronto), south carolina (2). newly recorded engraving a previously unknown unwatermarked proof of the oval vignette of five ships at sea on both title pages, signed “blake,” was offered by bonhams (london) (see 2014 18 june, lot 71, in part iv, section a) and acquired by victoria university in the university of toronto (see illus. 2a). the proof image is 7.5 x 5.6 cm. on a sheet 19.8 x 25 cm.the top of the leaf seems to be cut off. on the verso (which is dirty) are three words in pencil, only the first of which, “the,” is legible to me. on the recto is written “blake” in pencil. “on the flag draped over the top of the oval vignette,” “executed in drypoint by blake, not by a writing engraver,” is “cuncta mea mecum” (“my all is with me”), “the stedman family motto.”robert n. essick, “blake in the marketplace, 2014,” blake 48.4 (spring 2015), caption to illus. 6, the reproduction of the proof. 2a. previously unrecorded proof of the vignette of five ships (see enlargement) on the two title pages of stedman’s narrative, signed “blake” (just above the muzzle of the cannon at lower left). image 7.5 x 5.6 cm. on leaf 19.8 x 25 cm. (victoria university in the university of toronto). the published version was slightly modified: “an additional flag has been added to the mast of each ship, the clouds have been amended and blake’s signature has been removed” (bonhams catalogue). the pennants (not flags) on the five ships are unidentifiable and are unchanged in the final version (see illus. 2b). however, flags, like the one just above the oval, have been added at the stern of the first ship at the left and the second ship from the right. the flags consist of three horizontal stripes; in colored copies of stedman (1796) (collection of robert n. essick, huntington library, victoria university in the university of toronto) they are, from top to bottom, red, white, and blue, the colors of the dutch flag. stedman was a soldier of fortune with the dutch. the states of the title-page vignette are described in robert n. essick, “blake in the marketplace, 2014,” blake 48.4 (spring 2015), illus. 10. 2b. vignette (see enlargement) in a colored copy of stedman’s narrative (1796), vol. 2 (victoria university in the university of toronto). blake’s name is only barely visible (and not previously recorded) in vol. 1 and invisible in vol. 2. the clouds are altered, and dutch flags have been added at the stern of the first ship at the left and the second ship from the right (not on “the mast of each ship,” as described in the bonhams catalogue). edition narrative of joanna, an emancipated slave of surinam: from stedman’s narrative of a five years’ expedition against the revolted negroes of surinam. charleston: bibliolife, 2014. 92 pp.; isbn: 9781293527399. stuart, james, and nicholas revett, the antiquities of athens, vol. 3 (1796) according to the library description of the set in northwestern university (5 vols., 1762-1830): substantial sections of v. 1 and 3 were reprinted, with the type reset, using paper with countermarks reading j whatman 1808. they are: (v. 1) t.p.; dedic.; p. i-x, 1-4, 9-12, 15-end; and errata leaf; (v. 3) preface; p. xxi-[xxvi]; and errata leaf. the v. 1 errata may not have a corresponding original printing; the other reprintings do. the following parts of v. 1 and 2 are known in two settings of type, neither of which use 1808 paper: (v. 1) dedication, and list of subscribers; (v. 2) t.p.the description was brought to my attention by robert n. essick. to this may be added the fact that blake’s prints in the collection of d. w. dörrbecker are on paper watermarked j whatman 1806. virgil, pastorals (1821) new location: john rylands library (university of manchester). wollstonecraft, mary, original stories from real life (1791, 1796) 1796 new location: john rylands library (university of manchester) (frontispiece cut out and pasted to the page facing the title page). edition §*mary wollstonecraft. original stories from real life: with conversations calculated to regulate the affections and form the mind to truth and goodness [with five illustrations by william blake with an introduction by e. v. lucas (1906)]. [whitefish (montana)]: literary licensing llc, 2014. 124 pp.; isbn: 9781498181822. young, edward, night thoughts (1797) new location: duke university (with the bookplate of “bernard, lord coleridge”). colored copies copy q history: sold with the late c. d. halford’s library, and other properties by puttick & simpson, 15-16 january 1908, lot 643 [£52] “col. by the artist himself, inscription on fly-leaf: ‘this copy was coloured for me by mr. blake, w. e.,’ orig. bds.” appendix: books improbably alleged to have blake engravings mylius, william frederick, the junior class-book (1809 ff.) title page: william frederick mylius, the junior class-book; or, reading lessons for every day in the year: selected from the most approved authors. for the use of schools (london: printed for m. j. godwin, at the juvenile library, no. 41, skinner street, and to be had of all booksellers, 1809). format: 12mo., 18 cm. illustrations: the “6 plates engraved by blake” (according to the rosenbach acquisition card) are untitled and unsigned.according to the anderson galleries sale catalogue of h. buxton forman, 26 april 1920, lot 53, the book is “illustrated with six plates by blake.” location: bodleian, vet. a6 e.2927.the bodleian copy is bound after john hornsey, the child’s monitor, 2nd ed. (1809).in a list of works published by baldwin, cradock, and joy [1826] is “the seventh edition, price 5s. boards.” i have neither seen nor located a copy of the 7th ed. and do not know whether it is illustrated. the junior class-book is said to include bits of lamb’s poetry for children. the six unsigned and untitled prints have no significant resemblance to those associated with blake’s commercial engravings. the attribution to blake seems to be somewhere between casual and wanton. part iv: catalogues and bibliographies section a: individual catalogues editors’ note: please consult bentley, “sale catalogues of william blake’s works,” for pre-2013 catalogues. 2013 8 february–23 june *stella halkyard. burning bright: william blake and the art of the book. [2013]. <blake (2014)> review *sibylle erle (see blake 48.3 in part vi). 2013 14 may–6 october §landscape in blake. [exhibition at tate britain devised by hayley flynn.] apparently there was no catalogue. 2014 4 april–31 august *cathy leahy. william blake. [exhibition at the] national gallery of victoria. melbourne: national gallery of victoria, 2014. 28 cm., 112 pp.; isbn: 9780724103805. 104 reproductions,the reproductions vary in size by the whim of the layout person, not by the size of the originals. some of them double page, including all 14 prints from innocence (x), all 22 job engravings, and all their dante watercolors. tony ellwood. “foreword.” 4. (“this publication, which presents the ngv’s blake holdings, accompanies the exhibition of william blake.”) reviews, etc. *rachael kohn, “william blake’s erotic spirituality,” the spirit of things 30 march 2014 (a broadcast interview with marsha keith schuchard and catherine leahy). *sandra kerbent, “william blake exhibition @ the ngv,” weekend notes [melbourne] [2014]. 2014 5 april–3 may sapientia ubi invenitur. espacio valverde, madrid. curated by antonio betancor. in spanish. all the reproductions are of job “proof” plates numbered “1,” “8,” “11,” “13,” “18,” “20,” and “21,” which show how blake served as inspiration for eight young spanish artists. 2014 27 may–6 july “une oeuvre … un secret.” exhibition at the château de nérac [aquitaine, france] sponsored by l’association william blake, whose president is andré furlan. the account of it suggests that the only work exhibited was blake’s engraving after hogarth for the beggar’s opera, with manuscript additions attributed to blake (see part i, appendix). 2014 18 june *bonhams. books, maps, manuscripts and historical photographs. london, 2014. 71 “unpublished proof of an engraved vignette [1791], oval device enclosing ships at sea, surround with anchor, cannon, flags and banner with motto ‘cuncta mea mecum’, signed in the plate lower left ‘blake’ ” above the muzzle of a cannon, image 7.5 x 5.6 cm., sheet size 25.0 x 19.0 cm., designed for the “title-pages” of john gabriel stedman, narrative, of a five years’ expedition, against the revolted negroes of surinam (1796), presumably one of “above 40 engravings from london, some well some very ill” that stedman received in december 1791; “i wrote to the engraver blake to thank him twice for his excellent work” (br[2] 62). “this vignette … as it appears in the book varies in a number of ways: an additional flag has been added to the mast of each ship, the clouds have been amended and blake's signature has been removed.” estimate: £1000-£1500 [sold for £5625 (including the buyer’s premium) to victoria university in the university of toronto (see illus. 2a and 2b)]. 72 job (1826), wove paper, watermark j. whatman turkey mill 1825, 37.0 x 25.0 cm., “fine and richly printed impressions,” “one of 100 copies issued shortly after the initial 215 ‘proof’ copies,” “bound into slightly earlier [sic] crushed red morocco,” “provenance: henry cunliffe (1826-1894), bookplate; thence by descent to the present owner.” estimate £25,000-£35,000 [sold for £27,500 (including the buyer’s premium)]. 73 songs of innocence and of experience [i], “44 relief etchings, including 3 decorated titles, 2 pictorial frontispieces, and 39 plates … printed in grey ink on wove paper, several sheets watermarked j. whatman 1831, plate 23 hand-coloured, plate 48 on a slightly smaller sheet of thinner paper (240 x 185mm.), pencilled numbers at upper right corners, occasional light dust-soiling at edges, a handful of spots, plates 6-7 and 13 with notch at one edge, plates 12-13 with nineteenth century pencil notes in margin, final plate bumped at fore-edge, preserved in red morocco pull-off box.” “a substantially complete copy,” with “plates 1-14, 16-29, 33-36, 38-43, 46, 48-49, 52-54. (bentley erroneously records this copy having plate 30 instead of plate 29.)” “acquired by henry cunliffe (1826-1894); thence by descent to the present owner.”bb p. 428 reports that at the death of lord cunliffe in 1963 the prints “passed to his son … the present lord cunliffe.” reproductions of pls. 1 (combined title page), 3 (innocence title page), 23 (“spring,” second plate), and 42 (“the tyger”). estimate: £50,000-£70,000 [sold for £62,500 (including the buyer’s premium) to victoria university in the university of toronto]. 2014 17 october–7 november *henry sotheran limited [and john windle]. william blake. london: henry sotheran limited, 2014. 4º, [ii], 42 pp., 93 lots; no isbn. an exhibition and sale, consisting chiefly of prints taken from contemporary books (including two prints by samuel palmer) (lots 1-49), facsimiles and editions illustrated by others (lots 53-62), contemporary books with blake engravings (lots 63-72), and facsimiles (lots 75-86). the most important are: 51 job (“1825”), with the bookplate of henry cunliffe, £57,000. 52 george cumberland’s card, £12,750. 64 young, night thoughts (1797), with the bookplate of bernard, lord coleridge, and signatures of “j.t., mary, and jane coleridge,” £11,150. 67 hayley, the triumphs of temper (1803), with the signature of w. m. rossetti, 1868, £625. 2014 november sophie schneideman rare books. william blake and his followers. it includes job, “proof” printing on “french” wove paper (£65,000). 2014 4 december–2015 1 march *michael phillips [with martin butlin and colin harrison (senior curator of european art, ashmolean museum)]. william blake: apprentice & master. oxford: ashmolean museum, 2014. 23.2 x 30 cm., [i-vi], 7-272 pp., 341 illustrations! (many not by blake, rarely true size, often trimmed, including europe [b] in various sizes); isbn: 9781854442888. alexander sturgis. “director’s foreword.” 7. [michael phillips]. “author’s acknowledgements.” 9. “william blake: apprentice & master: introduction.” [10]-15. part one: education i. “childhood and pars’s drawing school: 1757-1772.” [18]-25. ii. “apprentice engraver: 1772-1779.” [26]-[37]. iii. “westminster abbey.” [38]-47. iv. “the royal academy schools.” [48]-59. v. “out into the world: 1779-1785.” [60]-[65]. vi. “first poems.” [66]-69. vii. “the manuscripts of an island in the moon and tiriel.” [70]-[79]. viii. “master of his trade: 1785-1791.” [80]-85. part two: innovation ix. “‘a method of printing which combines the painter and poet.’” [88]-101. x. “‘illuminated printing.’” [102]-[07]. xi. “songs of innocence, 1789.” [108]-11. xii. “no. 13 hercules buildings, lambeth: 1791-1800.” [112]-21. xiii. “the marriage of heaven and hell: 1790-1793.” [122]-29. xiv. “the manuscript notebook and the creation of songs of experience.” [130]-[43]. xv. “colour printing before blake.” [144]-[51]. xvi. “the large colour prints of 1795.” [152]-63. xvii. “‘fit audience find tho’ few.’” [164]-79. xviii. “blake’s last residence: no. 3 fountain court, the strand: c. 1820-1827.” [180]-85. xix. “‘a correct and finished line manner of engraving.’” [186]-205. xx. “illustrations to dante.” [206]-[15]. part three: inspiration xxi. martin butlin. “the interpreter and the ancients.” [218]-23. xxii. colin harrison. “samuel palmer 1805-1881.” [224]-[31]. xxiii. colin harrison. “edward calvert 1799-1873 [sic].” [232]-[35]. xxiv. colin harrison. “george richmond 1809-1896.” [236]-[39]. xxv. “the last furrow.” [240]-47. reviews, notices, etc. (a selection) *anon., “stationers’ register goes to ashmolean exhibition,” stationer’s company 4 nov. 2014 (blake’s apprenticeship record). *maev kennedy, “william blake’s lambeth studio recreated for ashmolean exhibition: victorian floor plans and descriptions by contemporaries help curators envisage work space from home demolished in 1918,” guardian [london] 7 nov. 2014 (digest from a press release). *jonathan jones, “how william blake keeps our eye on ‘the tyger,’” guardian [london] 18 nov. 2014. *andrew ffrench, “oxford’s ashmolean museum prepares to celebrate work of artist william blake in new exhibition,” oxford mail 20 nov. 2014. *philip pullman, “william blake and me: as an exhibition of blake’s paintings opens in oxford, philip pullman reflects on how his poetry has influenced and intoxicated him for more than 50 years,” guardian 28 nov. 2014 (long and eloquent). *anon., “inspired by blake festival,” broad conversation: events, news and opinion from blackwell’s, broad street, oxford ” 1 dec. 2014 (“we’ll be posting on tuesdays and fridays, all the way up to and through the festival,” 18-31 january 2015). *zoe pilger, “william blake’s printing and engraving: new show does not do his vision justice,” independent [london] 1 dec. 2014 (“i was underwhelmed”; “there is too much technical detail about engraving”). *fleur macdonald, “william blake: the ghostly brother who inspired a revolution: william blake emerges, not as a mad visionary, but as a fan of progressive christianity in a new show at the ashmolean,” catholic herald magazine 4 dec. 2014. *laura cumming, “william blake: apprentice and master review—the most erratic exhibition in recent history: this frustrating show places more emphasis on william blake’s technique than his revolutionary vision,” observer [london] 6 dec. 2014. *martin gayford, “exhibition review: william blake at the ashmolean, oxford: martin gayford argues that blake’s visions and his homemade philosophy can be a barrier to appreciation of his art,” country life 7 dec. 2014 (gayford’s conclusion is, as he acknowledges, merely an echo of that of sir kenneth clark). *anon., “blake’s vision brings big crowds to ashmolean exhibition,” oxford mail 8 dec. 2014. ben stevens, “oxford: inspired by blake festival: january 18, 2015 at blackwell’s bookshop oxford in oxford [sic],” england events 9 dec. 2014. *rupert toovey, “william blake exhibition unites sussex and oxford,” worthing herald 11 dec. 2014. 2015 21 january <christie’s (new york) sale of maurice sendak> in the autumn of 2014 there were a number of highly derivative newspaper articles about the sale, though none names blake in the title. among them was peter dobrin, “rosenbach sues sendak foundation over rare books,” inquirer [philadelphia] 9 nov. 2014: the [sendak] estate also claims two illuminated books by william blake, songs of experience [songs (h)] and songs of innocence [j], are not rare books because one lacks a binding and the other has pages that do not correspond to another copy of the same title. [the rosenbach says that] “the executors have advised the rosenbach that they intend to sell the blakes.” by december 2014 the sale had been postponed sine die because of legal actions. for a list of works by blake that sendak owned, see the introduction to <blake (2013)>. section b: collections and selections g. e. bentley, jr. “sale catalogues of blake’s works.” <http://​library.​vicu.​utoronto.​ca/​collections/​special_collections/​bentley_​blake_​collection>. <blake (2014)> the document was updated in may 2014 (550 pages added) and march 2015. part v: books owned by william blake the poet editors’ note: please consult bentley, “sale catalogues of william blake’s works,” for further particulars of catalogues mentioned in this section. chatterton, thomas, poems, supposed to have been written … by thomas rowley (1778) history: sold by hodgson & co., 28-30 april 1908, lot 581, “blake’s copy with his autograph on title, bds., uncut. 8vo.” [£2.18.0]. spectaclesfor an account of blake’s use of his spectacles, see br(2) 290. history: sold by hodgson & co., 28-30 april 1908, lot 582 (“william blake’s spectacles, in old case, … ‘much valued by … samuel palmer’”) [£6]; as in <blake (1996)>, under part i, section a. part vi: criticism, biography, and scholarly studies a   b   c   d   e   f   g   h   i   j   k   l   m   n   p   r   s   t   u   w   x   y   z a *adams, hazard. thinking through blake. jefferson [north carolina]: mcfarland & company, 2014. 4º, viii, 195 pp.; isbn: 9780786479580. it consists of “blake, jerusalem, and symbolic form (1975).” 17-39. “contemporary ideas of literature: terrible beauty or rough beast? (1977).” 40-64. “essay on frye (1991).” 65-69. “reynolds, vico, blackwell, blake: the fate of allegory (1993).” 70-85. [from enlightening allegory, ed. kevin cope (1993).] “the world-view of william blake in relation to cultural policy (1993).” 86-97. [from cultural policy, past, present, and future, ed. harold coward (1990), critical essays on william blake, ed. adams (1991), and reflections on cultural policy: past, present and future, ed. evan alderson et al. (1993).] “conference 2: chinese and japanese-american literary relations (1995).” 98-107. “is (was) there no tradition of defense of poetry in chinese culture? why has there had to be one in the west? (1995).” 108-21. “four problems (among many) for humanistic thought (1995).” 122-26. “‘literature’ and the visionary tradition (1995).” 127-30. “‘literature’ into ‘ecriture’? (1995).” 131-33. “‘an antithetical turn’ (1996).” 134-47. “ekphrasis revisited, or antitheticality reconstructed (2000).” 148-60. “quest and cycle (2005).” 161-64. “origin(ality) (2007).” 165-70. “the marriage of imagination and intellect (2013).” 171-82. chapter notes. 183-90. most of the essays are not explicitly related to blake. §allingham, william. manuscript copies of poems from songs of innocence, poetical sketches, notebook, etc. (1857). british library department of manuscripts: add ms 49460. see d. f. mckenzie, “william allingham’s notebook of poems by blake” <bb #2203>, allingham, “some chat about william blake” <bb #803>, and nightingale valley, ed. giraldus [allingham] <bb #264>. §anon. “parnassian pastimes.” baltimore literary monument 2.1 (may 1839): 17. it reprints blake’s “tyger” to show its “singular beauty, originality, and strength.” §antonielli, arianna. “william butler yeats’s ‘the symbolic system’ of william blake.” estudios irlandeses 3 (2008): 10-28. §antonielli, arianna, and mark nixon. “towards an edition of edwin john ellis and william butler yeats’s the works of william blake: poetic, symbolic and critical.” variants 10 (2013): 271-84. §*arnaldo, javier. “behemot y leviatán (1825), de william blake.” revista de la fundación juan march no. 428 (2014): 2-8. in spanish. §*arvelo ramos, alberto. deus inversus: los universos religiosos, políticos, ontológicos y poéticos de william blake. mérida [venezuela]: universidad de los andes, dirección general de cultura y extensión, ediciones actual, 2010. in spanish. review §mauricio navia, “libro de alberto arvelo ramos: los elementos religiosos, políticos, ontológicos y poéticos de william blake,” actual divulgación 72 (2012) (in spanish). §attar, samar. “poetic intuition and mystic vision: william blake’s quest for equality and freedom.” borrowed imagination: the british romantic poets and their arabic-islamic sources. lanham [maryland]: lexington books, 2014. 99-118 (chapter 4). §[author given only in chinese]. “[the comparative analysis on william wordsworth and william blake on the art of naturalism and realism].” [blooming season] 6 (2014). in chinese. b *bančević pejović, ivana. “odbrana kreativnosti: vilijam blejk u savremenoj književnoj kritici, pedagogiji i umetnosti [a defense of creativity: william blake in contemporary criticism, pedagogy, and art].” university of kragujevac [serbia] phd, 2014. in serbian, with a summary in english. *bentley, g. e., jr. william blake in the desolate market. montreal and kingston: mcgill–queen’s university press, 2014. 4º, xx, 244 pp., 34 reproductions; isbn: 9780773543065. “issued in print and electronic formats.” review *gregory dart, “to colour and to sell,” times literary supplement 21 nov. 2014: 12 (bentley “reorganize[s] and re-present[s] everything that is currently known about blake’s commercial activities in a new and highly compelling form …,” “desolate market will prove an indispensable resource for blake scholars, but it may also, because of its fascinating appendix, have something to say to more general enthusiasts of the period”). billington, michael. “in lambeth [play by jack shepherd] review—blake v. paine in lively imaginary encounter.” guardian [london] 15 july 2014. blake/an illustrated quarterly for the inclusion of some back issues of the journal in the william blake archive in 2014, see william blake archive in part i, section b. blake/an illustrated quarterly volume 47, number 4 (spring 2014) article *robert n. essick. “blake in the marketplace, 2013.” 15 invaluable reproductions. (a stupendous labor admirably accomplished.) minute particulars mary lynn johnson. “newfound particulars of blake’s patrons, thomas and elizabeth butts, 1767–1806.” 12 pars. (wonderful details of elizabeth mary cooper [butts] as a school mistress [1767-1801] and of thomas butts [1786-1806], particularly his residences and work in the office of the commissary general of musters.) *paul miner. “francis quarles’s influence on europe 11.” 5 pars. reviews *grant f. scott. steve clark, tristanne connolly, and jason whittaker, eds., blake 2.0: william blake in twentieth-century art, music and culture. 15 pars. (“most of the essays read like standard reception studies,” pace the editors.) *tristanne connolly. sibylle erle, blake, lavater and physiognomy. 9 pars. (“what is most impressive about her study is the careful detail on the publication history of lavater’s work and the personal relationships involved.”) blake/an illustrated quarterly volume 48, number 1 (summer 2014) articles *g. e. bentley, jr. “inscriptions by blake for his designs.” 5 reproductions. *g. e. bentley, jr., with the assistance of hikari sato for japanese publications and of fernando castanedo for spanish publications. “william blake and his circle: a checklist of publications and discoveries in 2013.” 7 reproductions. blake/an illustrated quarterly volume 48, number 2 (fall 2014) article *eliza borkowska. “‘did he who made the lamb make the… tyger’?” 25 pars. (the question in “the tyger” “expresses the most fundamental guideline of his philosophy ….”) reviews g. a. rosso. steven goldsmith, blake’s agitation: criticism and the emotions. 11 pars. (“an imaginative, deeply learned, and passionately argued book,” though it “does not add much to readings of any of blake’s major poems.”) *sibylle erle. susan matthews, blake, sexuality and bourgeois politeness. 8 pars. (“a must-read,” “fierce, fascinating, and passionate.”) morton d. paley. mark crosby and robert n. essick, eds., genesis: william blake’s last illuminated work. 16 pars. (primarily an analysis of blake’s manuscript.) addenda [g. e. bentley, jr.]. “inscriptions by blake for his designs.” blake/an illustrated quarterly volume 48, number 3 (winter 2014–15) article *james f. moyer. “‘the daughters weave their work in loud cries’: blake, slavery, and cotton.” 33 pars. (“it [visions] shows the brutal facts of new world slavery.”) reviews *ossian lindberg. carl-johan malmberg, stjärnan i foten. dikt och bild, bok och tanke hos william blake [the star in the foot: poetry and image, book and thought in william blake]. 14 pars. (“the first book on blake in swedish”; “the book would be well worth translating into english.”) *g. e. bentley, jr. “shades of gray.” [poems of thomas gray with watercolour illustrations by william blake. folio society, 2013.] 10 pars. (compares the different reproductions of blake’s designs for gray, concluding that “none of these printed works is a facsimile,” but “the folio society edition seems to me distinctly the most reliable.” there is a record and reproduction of the four fingerprints on p. [158], probably those of william or catherine blake.) *sibylle erle. “what new is there to learn from old familiars?” burning bright: william blake and the art of the book, john rylands library, university of manchester, 8 february–23 june 2013. 11 pars. (“none of what was on display was actually new”; she felt a “sense of disappointed excitement.”) *morton d. paley. “tate britain’s new blake room.” 6 pars. (it was opened on 14 may 2013; “there is something about the room itself that encourages peaceful contemplation.” he gives a “timeline of william blake at the tate,” 1897–2013; the institution was “re-renamed tate britain” in 2000.) *blake society. calendar of events for 2014. london, [may] 2014. small quarto [i.e., square], 20 pp., no isbn. *bonnefoy, yves, ed. william blake. n.p.: éditions hazan, 2013. 224 pp., 34 reproductions; isbn: 9782754106030. in french. 1. yves bonnefoy. “blake aujourd’hui.” 1-13. [2]. roland recht. “entre moyen age et avènement d’un art nouveau: william blake et la ligne prophétique.” 14-51. [3]. patrizia lombardo. “la netteté du trait.” 52-77. [4]. michael phillips. “parodie et jeu dans l’art composite de william blake.” trans. jean-françois allain. 78-120. [5]. e. p. thompson. “‘london’ (‘londres’).” trans. jean-françois allain. first published in interpreting blake, ed. michael phillips (1978). 121-62. [6]. pascal griener. “יה‎ and his two sons satan & adam: la planche du laocoon, un testament artistique de william blake.” 163-85. [7]. michael edwards. “voir: blake et dante.” 186-209. [8]. michael phillips. “recréer les plaques des livres enluminés de william blake (ill. 31 à 34).” trans. jean-françois allain. 210-17. botero, manuel josé. “física y metafísica: notas sobre el espíritu poético de blake y whitman.” estudios ingleses de la universidad complutense 21 (2013): 107-25. in spanish. *boutilier, emily gold. “showstopper.” amherst 64.2 (winter 2012): 26-29. <§blake (2014)> about the acquisition of the raising of jairus’s daughter <butlin #417> by amherst college from henry deforest webster, who received it as a gift from his mother, “who’d inherited it from her second husband, webster’s stepfather, who’d received it from his own father, william augustus white.” *bray, mrs. [a. e.] life of thomas stothard, r. a. 1851. <bb #1273> b. §[whitefish (montana)]: literary licensing llc, 2014. 272 pp.; isbn: 9781497909267. §*broeke, isabelle van den. “visions of death: robertson’s phantasmagoria as a visual paradigm for goya and blake.” journal of the lucas graduate conference [leiden] no. 2 (2014): 60-81. §broeke, isabelle van den. “visual anti-tales: the phantasmagoric prints of francisco goya and william blake.” anti-tales: the uses of disenchantment. ed. catriona mcara and david calvin. newcastle upon tyne: cambridge scholars, 2011. 142-51. *brooks, richard. “bring me my buyers: blake homes for sale.” sunday times [london] 16 march 2014. “the public relations guru sir alan parker is weighing up plans to buy the former london home of the poet [17 south molton street] … and preserve it for the nation.” he “would need to raise £7m.” bryan, michael. a biographical and critical dictionary of painters and engravers. 2 vols. london, 1816. b. 1849. <bb #1305> c. §1865. <bbs p. 427> in an appendix to vol. 2 of 1816 (p. 717) is a list of the “principal works” of luigi schiavonetti, including “a set of etchings, illustrative of blair’s grave; after the designs of blake.” a biographical account of blake was added to the 1849 edition (see <bb #1305>). byrne, joseph. “blake, joseph johnson, and the gates of paradise.” wordsworth circle 44.2-3 (spring-summer 2013): 131-36. johnson did not publish the gates of paradise. c cao, liang-cheng. “qing ai de xian zhuang shi jian he li xiang—bu lai ke ai qing shi lun li fen xi: the reality, practice, and ideal of love—ethical analysis of william blake’s love poems.” changchun gong cheng xue yuan xue bao: journal of changchun institute of technology (social science edition) 14.2 (2013): 76-78. in chinese, with an abstract in english. “blake’s love ideal involves the love morals of the ideal human society.” §cárcano, enzo. “el cuerpo como ‘via mystica’ en algunos textos de blake y de viel temperley.” palabra no. 25 (2014): 81-92. abstract in spanish and english. héctor viel temperley is a prestigious argentine poet. §carnevale, susana. fotos tan íntimas: emily dickinson, william blake, jacques lacan. buenos aires: vinciguerra, 2010. 23 cm., 118 pp.; isbn: 9789508437969. in spanish. *carpenter, caroline. “blake society urges support for ‘jerusalem’ cottage [in felpham] buy.” the bookseller 26 nov. 2014. *chainey, graham. “a site of literary pilgrimage that deserves to be saved.” brighton & hove independent 9 oct. 2014. on the proposed sale of blake’s cottage in felpham. chatto, william andrew. a treatise on wood engraving historical and practical with upwards of five hundred illustrations engraved on wood by john jackson. a new edition with an additional chapter by henry g. bohn. london: chatto and windus, n.d. [1840?]. 4º. the frontispiece represents “death’s door” (william blake-w. j. linton). see john jackson [and william a. chatto], a treatise on wood engraving (1839, 1861) <bb #1932>, in which the 1839 edition has “upwards of three hundred illustrations” and that of 1861 has “145 additional wood engravings.” chen, jing, and li zhang. “wei lian bu lai ke shi ge de yi xiang te se [analysis of characteristic images in william blake’s poems].” qing nian wen xue jia [young writers of literature] 27 (2012): 11. in chinese. *chesterton, g. k. william blake. 1910 …. <bb #1381, bbs p. 436, blake (2003, 2013)> o. william blake y otros temperamentos. trans. juan antonio montiel and natalia babarovic. santiago: universidad diego portales, 2012. 8º, 208 pp.; isbn: 9789563141801. in spanish. life of blake on pp. 17-137. p. §charleston: bibliolife, 2014. 224 pp.; isbn: 9781294784616. review (of 2012) camilo marks, “brillante, heterodoxo, inclasificable,” el mercurio 11 aug. 2013: e14 (in spanish). §*chevrier, jean-françois. l’hallucination artistique: de william blake à sigmar polke. paris: l'arachnéen, 2012. 23 x 18 cm., 683 pp.; isbn: 9782952930291. in french. review §tristan trémeau, critique d’art (2013). in french. *clark, steve, tristanne connolly, and jason whittaker, eds. blake 2.0: william blake in twentieth-century art, music and culture. 2012. <blake (2013)> reviews *grant f. scott (see blake 47.4, above). masashi suzuki, igirisu romanha kenkyu (essays in english romanticism) 38 (2014): 85-88 (in japanese). §*clayton, ellie. divine economy. with illustrations by william blake. [2014]. a free e-book. cooper, andrew m. william blake and the productions of time. 2013. <blake (2014)> review mark crosby, review of english studies 66, no. 273 (feb. 2015 [review first published online june 2014]): 182-83 (“intriguing readings of blake’s particular formulation of time as an eternally recurring moment”). *crespo martín, bibiana. “el libro de artista de ayer a hoy: seis ancestros del libro de artista contemporáneo. primeras aproximaciones y precedentes inmediatos.” arte, individuo y sociedad 26.2 (2014): 311-28. in spanish. pp. 317-19 are about blake’s printing method and songs of innocence as precursors of the artist’s book. *cripps, charlotte. “william blake’s [felpham] cottage for sale.” independent [london] 18 july 2014. crocco, francesco. “conclusion: william blake’s prophecies and the limits of nationalism.” literature and the growth of british nationalism: the influence of romantic poetry and bardic criticism. jefferson [north carolina]: mcfarland & company, 2014. 182-91. d *damon, s. foster. a blake dictionary: the ideas and symbols of william blake. 1965 …. <bb #1445, bbs p. 447> g. hanover [new hampshire]: dartmouth college press, 2013. 4º, xxviii, 532 pp.; isbn: 9781611684438. <blake (2014)> 2013 is an “updated edition with a new foreword and annotated bibliography by morris eaves.” review *shirley dent, times literary supplement 8 aug 2014: 25 (eaves’s “excellent” foreword is appropriate to damon’s book, which succeeds “brilliantly but peculiarly”). §[daniel, john moncure]. “edgar allan poe [book review].” southern literary messenger 16.3 (march 1850): 172-87. like “the mad artist blake,” poe “is a painter of ideas, not of men and things” (182). he cites cunningham’s lives. §davidson, ryan j. “affinities of influence: exploring the relationship between walt whitman and william blake.” glasgow phd, 2014. *de luca, vincent. words of eternity: blake and the poetics of the sublime. 1991. <bbs p. 450> b. §princeton: princeton legacy library, 2014. ding, xiao-xia. “qian xi bu lai ke lao hu de xiang zheng yi yi [analysis of the symbolic meaning of blake’s ‘tyger’].” qing nian wen xue jia [young writers of literature] 27 (2012): 13-15. in chinese. ding, yan. “hu dan ying xiong q—‘lao hu’ yu ‘tie lan yu huo’ zhi bi jiao [as brave as a tyger—a comparative study of ‘the tyger’ and ‘metal railing and fire’].” zuo jia [writers] 16 (2013): 114-15. in chinese. dixon, jeffrey john. the glory of arthur: the legendary king in epic poems of layamon, spenser and blake. jefferson [north carolina]: mcfarland & company, 2014. 4º, viii, 204 pp.; isbn: 9780786494569. especially pp. 1-23, 26-32, 35-41, 73-80, 171-82. “i explore some of the ways in which blake was himself inspired by … edmund spenser” (1). *downing, jonathan. “how i discovered a priceless set of william blake engravings: jonathan downing, a theology dphil student at trinity, agreed to feature in our latest video feature to share his big discovery.” oxford today 26.2 (2014): 6. the discovery is of blake’s job, one of “100 [copies] which blake [recte lahee] had printed in 1826,” in trinity college. the video is at <http://​www.​oxfordtoday.​ox.​ac.​uk/​culture/​videos-​podcasts-​galleries/​serendipity-​library>. dumitrana, magdalena. “the christian poetry and the formation of an intercultural attitude: ‘the little black boy’ by william blake.” euromentor journal 3.2 (june 2012) [9 pp.]. <§blake (2014)> “william blake’s small poem [“the little black boy”], romantic poet and painter, could serve, we think, to reaching our goal—the inducing of the feeling of intercultural understanding” [5]. e el younssi, anouar. “the sufis and william blake: when islamic mysticism and english romanticism intersect.” morocco world news 17 aug. 2012. a learned essay arguing that blake’s views “echo the views of a number of muslim sufis.” erle, sibylle. blake, lavater and physiognomy. 2010. <§blake (2011)> review *tristanne connolly (see blake 47.4, above). f §fallon, david. “the sensational mind of william blake.” réfléchir (sur) la sensation. vol. 2: littérature et création dans le monde britannique. ed. m. poisson. paris: éditions des archives contemporaines, 2014. 103-22. “his narration of the mind’s development has a much closer and more nuanced relationship to the enlightenment than has previously been recognised.” *farrell, michael. blake and the methodists. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, 2014. 21.4 cm. high, x, 259 pp.; isbn: 9781137455499. a survey of blake’s religious sources, including chapter 2 (30-50) on “the moravians.” “there was … a methodist influence on blake’s works, but it was combined with a number of other religious sympathies” (193). ferber, michael. the social vision of william blake. 1985. <bbs p. 471> b. §princeton: princeton legacy library, 2014. isbn: 9780691611464. *flood, alison. “crowdfunding campaign hopes to save william blake’s cottage for nation: fundraisers looking to raise £520,000 to buy the house where he wrote, ‘heaven opens here on all sides her golden gates.’” guardian [london] 11 sept. 2014. §fosso, kurt. “‘feet of beasts’: tracking the animal in blake.” european romantic review 25.2 (2014): 113-38. *freed, eugenie r. “‘by wondrous birth’: the nativity of william blake’s ‘the tyger.’” english studies in africa 57.2 (oct. 2014): 13-32. a persuasive argument that “the ‘notebook’ sketches [illustrating paradise lost] have a direct bearing on the drafts of ‘the tyger’ that blake subsequently inscribed near” them (19). g *garcia, humberto. “blake, swedenborg, and muhammad: the prophetic tradition, revisited.” religion & literature 44.2 (summer 2012): 35-65. *gardner, charles. william blake the man. 1919 …. <bb #1662, §blake (2010)> d. §[whitefish (montana)]: literary licensing llc, 2014. 224 pp.; isbn: 9781497901568. §*ghiţă, cătălin. demiurgul din londra: introducere în poetica lui william blake. iaşi: institutul european, 2014. 264 pp., 14 x 19 cm.; isbn: 9786062400569. in romanian. *gilchrist, alexander. life of william blake, “pictor ignotus.” 1863, 1880, 1907 …. <bb #1680, bbs p. 484, blake (1999, 2002, 2007, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014)> t. the life of william blake, “pictor ignotus”. [whitefish (montana)]: literary licensing llc, 2014. vol. 1, 426 pp.; isbn: 9781498077286; vol. 2, 352 pp.; isbn: 9781498045704. u. the life of william blake. ed. walford graham robertson [1907]. charleston: bibliolife, 2014. 660 pp.; isbn: 9781293815274. 1863 copies annotated by early owners (see <blake [2014]> for others)see also thomas carlyle’s letter [to the publishers chapman & hall] (1859) relating to gilchrist’s life of william blake (british library department of manuscripts: rp 6421). edwin j. ellis, with his annotations (collection of robert n. essick) frederick locker-lampson, with a few annotations (collection of robert n. essick) dante gabriel rossetti, a volume labeled dante | gabriel | rossetti | letters to | ann | gilchrist and | manuscript notes | for life of blake, with 44 loose letters and notes of 1860–80 (collection of mrs. landon k. thorne [d. 1974], presumably now in the morgan library) dante gabriel rossetti, a collection with a printed title page: dante g. rossetti. | — | original | autograph letters | (1862-3 and 1880) | written by dante gabriel rossetti to mrs. gilchrist | (widow of | alexander gilchrist the biographer of william blake) | concerning blake and his works. | included also is a letter from rossetti to | alexander gilchrist in 1861 on the same subject, with 21 letters (collection of mrs. landon k. thorne [d. 1974], presumably now in the morgan library) dante gabriel rossetti, page proofs for gilchrist (1863) vol. 2 for the sections of songs of innocence and songs of experience with ms. corrections by d. g. rossetti and perhaps w. m. rossetti, with two leaves of ms. notes “by rossetti” (mark samuels lasner, on loan to the university of delaware) william michael rossetti, with his annotations (harvard)martin butlin, “william rossetti’s annotations to gilchrist’s life of william blake,” blake 2.3 (1968): 39-40. james smetham,smetham’s review of gilchrist in the london quarterly review <bb #2716> was revised and printed in gilchrist (1880) 2: 311-51. with his pictorial annotationsfrances a. carey, “james smetham (1821–1889) and gilchrist’s life of blake,” blake 8.1-2 (summer-fall 1974): 17-25, about marginal sketches in a copy of gilchrist (1863). (collection of robert n. essick) extra-illustrated with over 200 blake prints, especially those from for the sexes (n), sold by “a gentleman” at sotheby’s (london), 9 may 1991, lot 8, to anon. extra-illustrated with there is no natural religion (j), sold with the library of ogden goelet at american art association/anderson galleries, 3 jan. 1935, lot 26,goelet’s copy of night thoughts (1797), colored (z), was lot 25 in the 1935 sale. to anon. 1880 copy annotated by early owner william michael rossetti, presentation inscription by mrs. gilchrist, with his annotations (collection of robert n. essick) §*gizzo, luciana del. “temporalidades encontradas en the marriage of heaven and hell de william blake.” v congreso internacional de lettras (2012). abstract in spanish and english. *goldsmith, steven. blake’s agitation: criticism and the emotions. 2013. <blake (2014)> reviews *simon jarvis, “eternal great humanity divine-ist,” times literary supplement 17 jan. 2014: 7-8 (goldsmith’s book is “subtle, complicated and counterintuitive” but with “a certain arbitrariness”). g. a. rosso (see blake 48.2, above). §gonçalves, davi silva, and ricardo heffel farias. “‘the voice of the devil’: a reconstrução do mito cristão por josé saramago e william blake.” falas breves no. 1 (feb. 2014). abstract in portuguese and english. h *haggarty, sarah. blake’s gifts: poetry and the politics of exchange. 2010. <blake (§2011, 2012, 2013, 2014)> b. §cambridge: cambridge university press, 2014. 254 pp.; isbn: 9781107449152. review §jennifer davis michael, “drawn dry with thanks and compliments: blake and the gift,” eighteenth century 55.2-3 (summer-fall 2014): 295-99. haggarty, sarah, and jon mee, eds.; consultant ed. nicolas tredell. william blake: songs of innocence and of experience. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, 2013. readers’ guides to essential criticism series. ix, 200 pp., no reproduction; isbn: 9780230220096. han, fang, and wei-jing yan. “jie du lao hu de ge ming xiang zheng yi yi: interpretations of the revolutionary symbol in ‘the tyger.’” wai yu jiao yu jiao xue [journal of language and literature studies] 8 (2013): 64-66. in english. §hanson, lenora. “allégorie des multitudes, ou william blake comme économe défaillant.” multitudes no. 55 (2014): 94-100. abstract in french and english. hao, xiang-li. “shi hua gong sheng de bu lai ke shi ge [the coexistence of painting and poem in blake’s poetry].” zuo jia [writers] 12 (2012): 95-96. in chinese. a discussion of how blake’s poems are illustrated by his paintings. *hargraves, matthew. “william blake and paul mellon: the life of the mind.” openglam 7 oct. 2014. a valuable summary. hayes, kevin j. “poe’s knowledge of william blake.” notes and queries, n.s., 61.1 (march 2014): 83-84. though “nowhere in his collected works does poe mention him [blake],” john moncure daniel wrote in 1850 that, like “the mad artist blake,” poe “is a painter of ideas, not of men and things” (see daniel, above). the “fearful symmetry” of blake’s “tyger” is like “the fearful scimitar” moving “with the stealthy pace of the tiger” in poe’s “the pit and the pendulum.” he, lin. “tan tao wei lian bu lai ke shi zhong fu mu yu hai zi yi xiang de mao dun xing [exploring contradictoriness of parents and children in blake’s poems].” kao shi zhou kan [examination weekly] 57 (2013): 13-15. in chinese. §*holden, harry. william blake 44 success facts—everything you need to know about william blake. n.p.: emereo publishing, 2014. 44 pp.; isbn: 9781488551482. there are both print-on-demand and kindle versions. holledge, richard. “society hopes to buy william blake cottage [at felpham].” new york times 20 nov 2014. huo, yue-hong, and xiao-hong li. “tian zhen de yu yan zhong fan za yi xiang de yuan xing jie du [an interpretation of images in ‘auguries of innocence’].” duan pian xiao shuo [short fiction] 13 (2013): 49-50. in chinese. hutton, ronald. “interlude: a pair of williams.” blood and mistletoe: the history of the druids in britain. new haven: yale university press, 2009. 183-209. the two williams are blake and wordsworth. i *ikegame, naoko. igirisu geijutsu kyoiku shiso niokeru dokusosei to kokyosei: reynolds, blake to romanshugi no kodomokan [the originality and publicness of the thoughts on arts education in britain: reynolds, blake, and views on children in romanticism]. tokyo: kazama shobo, 2014. 220 pp.; isbn: 9784759920383. in japanese. based on her thesis, below. §ikegame, naoko. “igirisu geijutsu kyoiku shiso niokeru dokusosei to kokyosei: reynolds, blake to romanshugi no kodomokan [the originality and publicness of the thoughts on arts education in britain: reynolds, blake, and views on children in romanticism].” ochanomizu university phd, 2011. in japanese. the basis of her book with the same title, above. ikezawa, natsuki. “shi no nagusame (25): blake no rhythm to shiso [comfort in poetry (25): the rhythm and thoughts of blake].” tosho [book] 782 (2014): 30-33. in japanese. j jiang, jian-jun. “wei lian bu lai ke de zong jiao xiang xiang li [the religious imagination of william blake].” wen xue jie [field of literature] 3 (2012): 124-25. in chinese. an analysis in terms of falling and being saved. §jordis, christine. “vision prophétique de william blake.” études (april 2014): 77-86. in french. *jordis, christine. william blake ou l’infini. paris: éditions albin michel, 2014. 20.5 x 14.0 cm., 287 pp.; isbn: 9782226254672. in french. described on the back cover as an “essai biographique passionné et passionnant.” k kang, li-ying. “cong wen ti jiao du fen xi wei lian bu lai ke shi ge lao hu yin yu yi yi de ti xian: the analysis of metaphorical meaning of poetry—take from stylistic point of view the tyger by william blake as an example].” xin zhou shi fan xue yuan xue bao: journal of xinzhou teachers university 28.6 (dec. 2012): 68-70. in chinese, with an abstract in english. analyzes “the metaphorical meaning of the tyger” in terms of its “rhythm and meter, written forms, and lexical semantics.” §keshavarzian, ramin, and pyeaam abbasi. “visions of the daughters of albion: the influence of mary wollstonecraft’s life and career on william blake.” international letters of social and humanistic sciences 29 (2014): 48-63. kingston, beryl. gates of paradise. 2006. <§blake (2007)> b. §2007. <§blake (2008)> c. §london: bloomsbury reader, 2014 [e-book]. isbn: 9781448213931. a fictional work in which she “reimagines the historical events which led to william blake’s trial for sedition in 1803.” §kostova, ludmilla. “(re-)gaining prophetic authority through the poetic genius: william blake and eighteenth-century religious enthusiasm.” peregrinations of the text: reading, translation, rewriting: essays in honour of alexander shurbanov. ed. evgenia pancheva, christo stamenov, maria pipeva, and georgi niagolov. sofia [bulgaria]: sofia university press “st. kliment ohridski,” 2013. 189-200. koyama, keita. “kagaku tsurezuregusa (3): william blake no shi to kenbikyo [an essay on science (3): the poetry of william blake and microscope].” gakuto [academic lamp] 110 (2013): 50-53. in japanese. kumar, r. ashok. “perception of syntactic deviations in poetry—a study of william blake’s songs of innocence.” language in india 12.10 (oct. 2012): 83-97. <§blake (2014)> “the pp ‘down the valleyi.e., “valleys,” from the “introduction” to innocence. wild’ contains a dp ‘the valley wild’. within the dp we have an np ‘valley wild’. the words ‘valley’ and ‘wild’ belong respectively to n and a categories” (83). l langridge, irene. william blake: a study of his life and art work. 1904. <bb #2098> b. §2010. <§blake (2011)> c. §charleston: bibliolife, 2014. 282 pp.; isbn: 9781293766460. language. philology. culture язык. словесность. культура nos. 1-2 ([december] 2014) 1. *andrew solomon. “divine vision: blake’s job, plate 14.” 9-11 (in english), 12-15 (in russian, trans. vera serdechnaya). 2. daniel gustafsson. “blake and orthodoxy.” 16-34 (in russian, trans. evgeniy serdechniy and vera serdechnaya), “abstract” and “references” (35-36) in english. translated from issue no. 1 of 2013. 3. daniel gustafsson. “blake and orthodoxy. part 2: fourfold and trinitarian personality.” 37-63 (in english), abstract (64) in russian. part 1 (in english) is in the issue for 2013. “the theme of this paper is the ecstatic nature of personality and the understanding of human personhood as trinitarian, in the image of the trinity” (37); “what he [blake] calls a ‘fourfold’ vision …, we may read this in terms of a trinitarian model” (41). “orthodoxy” is apparently that of the russian orthodox church rather than that of, say, the greek orthodox church or the roman catholic church. 4. *gerald eades bentley, jr. “blake’s loose canons.” 65-90 (in russian, trans. vera serdechnaya), “abstract” and “references” (91-92) in english. translated from issue no. 1 of 2013. 5. galina al'bertovna tokareva. “the northern and the southern bars, or the courage to live in w. blake’s ‘the book of thel.’” 93-104 (in russian), “abstract” and “references” (104-06) in english. “the book of thel is analyzed from the viewpoint of its genre affiliation” (105). 6. *tat'yana eduardovna koksharova. “‘ear,’ ‘auricle,’ ‘vortex’ as an isomorph shaped models [sic] of the world in the works of william blake.” 107-17 (trans. into english by the author). 7. *dmitri smirnov-sadovsky. “‘the mental traveller’ by william blake.” 118-42 (in russian, including his translation of “the mental traveller”), “abstract” and “references” (142-43) in english. announcements and events 8. *“blake in nerac: in the town of nerac (france), an artistic treasure of william blake (re)discovered by andré furlan.” 144-45 (in english), 146-47 (in russian). “furlan has discovered a secret drawer with a key, which contains a manuscript on which blake noted the signatures and the description of the audience and actors who were present at the time chosen by hogarth.”for more on this manuscript, see part i, appendix. §lenihan, liam. “wollstonecraft’s reading of milton and the sublime of barry, fuseli and blake.” the writings of james barry and the genre of history painting, 1775-1809. farnham: ashgate, 2014. 127-52. li, jing-jing. “bu lai ke ‘fei mang’ de yu yi jie du [the interpretation of implied meaning of blake’s poem ‘the fly’].” wen jiao zi liao [high school years] 24 (2012): 103-04. in chinese. an interpretation of the implied meaning of the fly, with a consideration of blake’s personal experience and artistic creation. li, jing-jing. “bu lai ke san bu shi ji de yi xiang jie xi [analysis of images of three blake books of poetry].” hu bei han shou da xue xue bao: journal of hubei correspondence university 25.12 (dec. 2012): 169-70. in chinese. interprets the images in poetical sketches, songs of innocence, and songs of experience and analyzes their connections. li, jing-jing. “bu lai ke shi ge zhong de ‘ye’ yi xiang jie xi [an analysis of the images in blake’s ‘night’].” qing nian wen xue jia [young writers of literature] 27 (2012): 78. in chinese. li, jing-jing. “bu lai ke shi ge zhong duo yang mei gui de yu yi jie du [an interpretation of the imagery of the rose in blake’s poems].” jin tian [jin tian] 11 (2012): 63. in chinese. li, jing-jing. “cong tian zhen zhi ge dao tian zhen zhi zhao de tian zhen zhi lu—bu lai ke shi ge zhong de tian zhen qing jie: the journey of innocence from songs of innocence to auguries of innocence—on deciphering the code of innocence in blake’s poems.” ji lin hua gong xue yuan xue bao: journal of jilin institute of chemical technology 30.10 (oct. 2013): 61-63. in chinese, with an abstract in english. the code of innocence begins in songs of innocence, where it “expresses true feelings,” continues in “auguries of innocence,” where it “reveals the true reality,” and may also be found in jerusalem. li, jing-jing. “sao yan cong hai zi de shang di—bu lai ke ‘sao yan cong de hai zi’ shang xi [on god in ‘the chimney sweeper’: an appreciation of blake’s ‘the chimney sweeper’].” ke ji zi xun [science and technology information] 35 (2012): 244. in chinese. analyzes the roles of children and god in “the chimney sweeper.” li, jing-jing. “shi shui rang hai zi men mi lu—tan bu lai ke ‘mi shi hai zi’ gu shi de yu yi [who leads children to get lost—talking about the implied meaning of blake’s story of lost children].” ke ji shi jie [the world of science and technology] 31 (2012): 172. in chinese. presumably about “the little boy lost” from songs of innocence and “the little girl lost,” “a little boy lost,” and “a little girl lost” from songs of experience, which are said to explore the poet’s personal experience. li, jing-jing. “yi hua yi tian tang—bu lai ke shi ge zhong de hua yi xiang jie du [one flower one heaven: an interpretation of the flower imagery in blake’s poems].” tong hua shi fan xue yuan xue bao: journal of tonghua normal university 34.6 (nov. 2013): 66-69. in chinese. a discussion of the flower imagery in blake’s poems, such as poetical sketches, songs of innocence, and songs of experience. lin, fang. “ren xing fa zhan de liang zhong dui li zhuang tai—dui bu lai ke de ‘lao hu’ de jian gou xing jie du: on the two opposing states in the development of human nature—the constructive interpretation of william blake’s ‘the lamb’ and ‘the tyger.’” hu nan gong ye zhi ye ji shu xue yuan xue bao: journal of hunan industry polytechnic 13.6 (dec. 2013): 33-34. in chinese, with an abstract in english. “the lamb symbolizes the purity of the initial state of human nature, while the tyger represents the secular life in the world of experience.” lin, xiaoxiao. “wei lian bu lai ke zai xi fang de jing dian hua guo cheng: the canonization of william blake in the west.” guo wai wen xue [foreign literatures] 3 (2013): 50-56. in chinese. describes “four major phases” in the canonization of blake. liu, jun-chi. “jue xing, xian shi yu xu wu—bu lai ke ‘a xiang ri kui’ zhi xiang zheng xing chan shi [awakening, reality, and nihilism: the symbolic meaning in blake’s ‘sunflower’].” xin xiang xue yuan xue bao: journal of xinxiang university (social science edition) 28.2 (april 2013): 73-76. in chinese. liu, yun-yan, and hong wu. “wei lian bu lai ke shi ge de fan shen zhu yi qing xiang: the pantheistic interpretation of flora and fauna images in william blake’s poems.” hu nan da xue xue bao: journal of hunan university (social sciences) 26.1 (jan. 2012): 111-14. in chinese, with an abstract in english. blake advocated a subversive return from monotheism to polytheism. “the animal and plant images in his poetry could be interpreted according to his unique pantheistic doctrine.” lu, jiande. “shi ren yu she hui—lue tan da jiang jian san lang yu wei lian bu lai ke: the poet and society—a comparative study of kenzaburō ōe and william blake.” shang hai shi fan da xue xue bao: journal of shanghai normal university (philosophy and social sciences edition) 41.2 (march 2012): 106-09. in chinese, with an abstract in english. “kenzaburō ōe was attracted by blake’s prophecy poems,” but “he stayed at a respectful distance from the mysticism of blake’s prophecy poems.” §*lüdeke, roger. zur schreibkunst von william blake: ästhetische souveränität und politische imagination. 2013. <blake (2014)> review gerold sedlmayr, zeitschrift für anglistik und amerikanistik 62.1 (april 2014): 79-82. in english. luyssen, johanna. “le crowdfunding au secours du [felpham] cottage de william blake.” le monde [paris] 16 sept. 2014. in french. m *mackintosh, paul st. john. “step up now to save blake’s [felpham] cottage.” teleread 25 july 2014. *maddocks, fiona. “the ten best works by william blake: on the eve of a major exhibition [at the ashmolean] on the printmaker, painter and poet, fiona maddocks chooses her 10 favourite [visual] works.” guardian 21 nov. 2014. *malmberg, carl-johan. stjärnan i foten. dikt och bild, bok och tanke hos william blake [the star in the foot: poetry and image, book and thought in william blake]. [stockholm]: wahlström och widstrand, 2013. 4º, 458 pp., 101 reproductions; isbn: 9789146220763. in swedish. there are chapters on “albion rose,” “the ancient of days,” newton, songs of innocence and of experience, laocoön, and jerusalem. review *ossian lindberg (see blake 48.3, above). marguet, ita. “william blake: forerunner of romanticism.” diva international oct. 2009. prompted by a performance in geneva on 18 september 2009 of a “condensed version” of william blake’s divine humanity by the theatre of eternal values. marsh, john. the john marsh journals: the life and times of a gentleman composer (1752 .. 1828). ed. brian robins. vol. 1. 1998. <§blake (2008)> b. rev. ed. 2011. the sociology and social history of music no. 9a. vol. 2. hillsdale [new york]: pendragon press, 2013. the sociology and social history of music no. 10. there are references to blake in vol. 1 (edition of 2011), pp. 721 (october 1800), 734 (may 1801), and 750 (5 april 1802, kitten given to blake), and vol. 2, p. 37 (1804, blake’s trial). *matthews, susan. blake, sexuality and bourgeois politeness. 2011. <§blake (2012)> review sibylle erle (see blake 48.2, above). mcsmith, andy. “blake’s heaven: a man ahead of his time.” independent [london] 26 nov. 2007. on blake’s 250th anniversary. melloni, javier. “el rincón de la mística: william blake.” el ciervo: revista mensual de pensamiento y cultura no. 671 (2007): 13. in spanish. §miner, paul. “agape and morality: blake’s caterpillar-man.” notes and queries, n.s., 60.2 (june 2013): 210-14. §miner, paul. “blake: a hope-fostered visionary.” notes and queries, n.s., 60.2 (june 2013): 214-17. miner, paul. “blake and burke: the dread majesty of the foetus.” notes and queries, n.s., 61.1 (march 2014): 22-27. about burke’s a philosophical enquiry into the origin of our ideas of the sublime and beautiful. §miner, paul. “blake: re-visioning book six of paradise lost.” notes and queries, n.s., 61.4 (dec. 2014): 486-94. miner, paul. “blake: the metaphors of generation.” notes and queries, n.s., 61.1 (march 2014): 33-38. miner, paul. “blake: thoughts on night thoughts.” notes and queries, n.s., 61.1 (march 2014): 27-33. in blake’s watercolors for young’s night thoughts, “submerged borrowings” “create a new mythology.” miyamachi, seiichi. “honyaku [translation] nicholas marsh, william blake: the poems.” sapporo gakuin daigaku jimbun gakkai kiyo (journal of the society of humanities, sapporo gakuin university) 94 (2013): 155-202. in japanese. a translation of chapter 3 of marsh’s elementary book for students about blake <blake (2003)>. his translation of chapter 2 appeared in the same journal in 2012; see <blake (2014)>. n newbury, richard. “british library puts william blake and oscar wilde treasures online.” la stampa 16 june 2014. the online version does not mention blake in the body of the text. p paley, morton d. “james barry as rintrah in william blake’s milton.” notes and queries, n.s., 61.4 (dec. 2014): 494-97. the “great solemn assembly” at which “judgment … fell on rintrah and his rage” (milton 6.46, 7.10) may represent the meeting of the royal academy (1799) at which barry was expelled from the academy. §park, david. the poets’ wives. london: bloomsbury publishing, 2014. novellas about three women; the one about catherine blake is factually challenged. reviews *alexandra harris, guardian [london] 8 march 2014 (the lives “leave the reader feeling somewhat puzzled”). hephzibah anderson, mailonline [london] 20 march 2014 (written in “classy prose”). holly williams, independent [london] 23 march 2014 (“catherine is an impossibly wet blanket”). *piccitto, diane. blake’s drama: theatre, performance, and identity in the illuminated books. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, 2014. narrow 4º, viii, 254 pp.; isbn: 9781137378002. she is concerned with “the theatricalization of inspiration” (206), especially with the first book of urizen, but not much with theatres or performances. §picón bruno, daniela. “recepción de william blake : desde su público contemporáneo hasta el surrealismo.” universitat pompeu fabra [barcelona] phd, 2014. in spanish. §*picón, daniela. “beulah: intermundo, surrealidad. el territorio del subconsciente y los sueños en el mundo visionario de william blake.” revista chilena de literatura no. 86 (2014): 177-97. in spanish. *popova, maria. “william blake’s mesmerizing illustrations for john milton’s paradise lost: aesthetic rapture between heaven and hell.” brain pickings (2014). *pyle, eric. william blake’s illustrations for dante’s divine comedy: a study of the engravings, pencil sketches and watercolors. jefferson [north carolina]: mcfarland & company, 2015. 25.2 x 17 cm., vi, 283 pp., 93 illustrations (including all blake’s dante engravings); isbn: 9780786494880. apparently derived silently from his hiroshima phd (2012) <§blake (2014)>. “unlike dante, he [blake] believes that he can show us everything; he can make the text incarnate, in the visual medium, in a way that dante could not” (268). r §richards, ernie. blake’s jerusalem: the story of the women’s institute song. n.p.: createspace independent publishing platform, 2014. 24 pp.; isbn: 9781501019227. rix, robert. william blake and the cultures of radical christianity. 2007. <blake (2008)> review §david dunér, sjuttonhundratal (2008): 127-28. in swedish. rosenwald, lessing j. (1891–1979) major blake collector the manuscript division of the library of congress holds about 28,000 items of the papers of rosenwald, mostly of 1932–79. these include about 500 pp. of correspondence concerning the rosenbach foundation (1946–79), of which rosenwald was president. very few of the letters are between rosenwald and rosenbach, from whom rosenwald bought most of his blakes. s *samaranayake, sajeeva. “william blake, buddhism and human rights—value of praxis over ideology.” groundviews: journalism for citizens 25 sept. 2014. the author is from sri lanka. §santos, andrio j. r. dos, and enéias farias tavares. “‘energia é eterno deleite’: a figura satânica em matrimônio de céu e inferno, de william blake.” estação literária 12 (2014): 123-42. in portuguese. sato, hikari. “laurence binyon to yanagi muneyoshi: blake kenkyusha niyoru hikaku bunka kenkyu (laurence binyon and yanagi muneyoshi: comparative cultural studies by blake scholars).” choiki bunka kagaku kiyo (interdisciplinary cultural studies) 19 (2014): 5-26. in japanese. a discussion of the reception of blake by yanagi and binyon. schuchard, marsha keith. *william blake’s sexual path to spiritual vision. 2008. <blake (2009)> review *andrei burke, “the secret world, and sexual rebellion, of william blake,” ultraculture journal: essays on magick, tantra and the deconditioning of consciousness 26 sept. 2014 (a credulous summary). shi, chun-xia. “bu lai ke ‘lao hu’ zhi xin pi ping jie du [the critical interpretation of blake’s ‘the tyger’].” xian dai yu wen [modern chinese] 5 (2012): 50-51. in chinese. an interpretation from the perspective of anglo-american new criticism. simmons, robert e. a new interpretation of four of william blake’s minor prophecies: his use of the “four zoas” as an organizing principle. with a foreword by g. e. bentley [jr.]. lewiston: edwin mellen press, 2014. 8º, [10], vii, 276 pp.; isbn: 9780773442696. g. e. bentley [jr.]. “foreword.” iii-iv. the book focuses especially on the book of thel (“fall, a christian reading”) (chapter 5, 127-60), the book of urizen (“creation”) (chapter 6, 161-96), “the mental traveller” (“redemption”) (chapter 7, 197-225), and illustrations of the book of job (“judgment”) (chapter 8, 227-59). *sklar, susanne m. blake’s jerusalem as visionary theatre: entering the divine body. 2011. <blake (2012)> review §luisa calè, european romantic review 24.4 (june 2013): 469-76 (with another). *stein, sarah b. “the laocoön and the book of job as micrography: the influence of miniature hebrew illumination on the work of william blake.” european romantic review 24.6 (oct. 2013): 623-44. stein uses avrin’s definition of “micrography as ‘minute script … written into either geometric or abstract forms or woven into the shapes of objects” (624). however, we may note that blake does not make designs composed entirely of letters, either hebrew or roman. in practice, what she seems to be talking about is marginalia on designs; “blake embraced the use of a marginal, miniature script at the end of his career” (632). this is scarcely micrography. stock, r. d. “religious love and fear in late eighteenth century poetry: smart, wesley, cowper, blake.” the holy and the daemonic from sir thomas browne to william blake. 1982. <bbs p. 647> b. §princeton: princeton legacy library, 2014. sun, li. “zhou zuo ren ling rou yi zhi si xiang yu ying guo shi ren bu lai ke zhi jian de guan lian: union of spirit and flesh: relation between blake and chou tso-jen.” chu xiong shi fan xue yuan xue bao: journal of chuxiong normal university 28.10 (oct. 2013): 61-67. in chinese. an analysis of blake and chou tso-jen, who “played an important role in modern chinese literature …. chou accepted blake’s thoughts selectively by eliminating mysterious meaning and adding enlightenment of it.” suzuki, masashi. “kenbikyo teki sozoryoku no keifu (3): kenbikyogaku teki hakubutsugaku to baikaisei [the genealogy of microscopic imagination (3): microscopic natural history as intermediator].” eibun gakkaishi [journal of the english literary society] 42 (2014): 21-43. in japanese. it includes an argument about “auguries of innocence.” symons, arthur. william blake. 1907 …. <bb #2804, blake (2011)> g. §[whitefish (montana)]: literary licensing llc, 2014. 450 pp.; isbn: 9781498085762. t tang, mei-xiu, and rong zhou. “bu lai ke yu qu yuan de lang man zhu yi jing shen tan xun: a comparative study of the romantic spirit in william blake and qu yuan.” xi nan ke ji da xue xue bao: journal of southwest university of science and technology (philosophy and social sciences edition) 30.4 (aug. 2013): 50-53. in chinese. the content of this essay is very similar to the next article. tang, mei-xiu, and rong zhou. “huo yi jue shen chen huo qi miao xiao yao—bu lai ke yu qu yuan lang man zhu yi jing shen de yi tong bi jiao: gorgeous profound or miraculous unfettered—a comparative study of the romantic spirit between william blake and qu yuan.” xi hua da xue xue bao: journal of xihua university (philosophy and social sciences) 32.5 (sept. 2013): 18-22. in chinese, with an abstract in english. qu yuan and william blake use similar poetic styles. despite different influences of the times, aesthetics, and cultural backgrounds, and despite their respective life experiences, individual temperament, and mode of thinking, the two poets display strikingly heterogeneous features of romanticism in their works. this essay offers a comparative study of four aspects in their poems: purposes of writing, aesthetic principles, archetypal images, and innovative poetic forms. tatham, frederick. manuscript “life of blake” (br[2] 661-91), once bound with jerusalem (e), now with it in the yale center for british art. a manuscript copy belongs to gill tatham, widow of george tatham (1929–86) of ladysmith, south africa.information from tathamfamilyhistory, <http://​www.​saxonlodge.​net​/index.​php>. §tavares, enéias farias, and leandro cardoso de oliveira. “‘the little girl lost’ e ‘the little girl found,’ de william blake: canções de inocência ou de experiência?” crítica cultural 9.1 (jan.-june 2014): 105-17. in portuguese. *tayler, irene. blake’s illustrations to the poems of gray. 1971. <bb #2824> b. published to accompany the folio society facsimile (2013). <blake (2014)> review *g. e. bentley, jr. (see blake 48.3, above). *thompson, michael. “william blake and the illustrations for blair’s grave. part ii.” the fellowship of american bibliophilic societies 18.1 (winter 2014): 9-21. “there’s little evidence to suggest that his work on the grave had any motivation that was not commercial,” and, because of the dispersal of the drawings for blair’s grave, “important blake material in the long run may well be more readily available, and available in more places” than if the drawings had been sold en bloc (19). part 1 was in the fall 2013 issue; see <blake (2014)>. §todd, ruthven. calligraphic list of books in his library, many about william blake (c. 1941). british library department of manuscripts: egerton ms 3865. §todd, ruthven. correspondence (1970-73) with david bindman, especially about william blake and alexander gilchrist. most of todd’s letters are from spain. british library department of manuscripts: add ms 74783, presented by bindman 10 aug. 1998. §*trodd, colin. “ford madox brown and the william blake brotherhood.” visual culture in britain 15.3 (2014): 277-98. u upcott, william a “catalogue of the art collection of ozias humphry (d. 1810), the portrait painter, compiled by his natural son, william upcott (d. 1845), the antiquary, to whom he bequeathed it” was presented to the department of manuscripts of the british museum (now british library) in 1958 (add ms 49682). it includes f. 26, “pen-and-ink drawing of man’s head, in style of w. blake: late 18th cent.” the connection with humphry, who owned several blake works, is plausible; the drawing, however, is not by blake in the opinions of robert n. essick, david bindman (e-mails of june 2014), and geb. w wang, hong. “fen xi bu lai ke de gao yang ji qi pei shi lao hu [an analysis of blake’s ‘lamb’ and ‘tyger’ poems].” ke wai yu wen [extracurricular chinese studies] 16 (2013): 138. in chinese. wang, ying-ying. “tan suo wei lian bu lai ke de ‘lun dun’ [a reading of william blake’s ‘london’].” chang chun li gong da xue xue bao: journal of changchun university of science and technology 8.1 (jan. 2013): 86-87. in chinese. on images and sounds in “london.” *warner, janet. other sorrows, other joys: the marriage of catherine sophia boucher and william blake. 2003. <blake (2004)> b. 2014 (e-book). *watson, ben. blake in cambridge: or “the opposite of david willetts”: how blake’s vortex anticipates so much we might call his books “prophetic”. 2012. <§blake (2014)> “preface.” v-x. “e. p. thompson’s blake.” 1-23. “blake’s vortex.” 25-29. “blake as a head of his time.” 31-34. “art verses [sic] hirelings.” 37-39. “thirteen-minute introduction.” 41-83. “a mixed cheer for kazoo dreamboats.” 85-132. (“blake in cambridge? it’s an oxymoron, comrades and fellow ammers [association of musical marxists]” [132].) david willetts was minister of state for universities and science. §*welling, lloyd c. eternity’s sunrise: william blake’s vision of christ. pittsburgh: river of life press, 2014. 356 pp.; 43 reproductions, including 21 of the job engravings. isbn: 9780615924731. review virginia ramey mollenkott, christian feminism today (2014) (“full of brilliant insight”). white, william augustus (1843–1927) who collected more blakes than anyone else ever has white’s extraordinarily detailed acquisition notes are in the houghton library, harvard university (ms am 2087), in six volumes.white’s acquisition books are not recorded in the catalogue of manuscripts in the houghton library, harvard university, 8 vols. (alexandria: chadwyck-healey, 1986–87). see geb, “white on blake,” harvard library bulletin, in the press. each volume has been digitized and is available online. whitson, roger, and jason whittaker. william blake and the digital humanities: collaboration, participation, and social media. 2013. <§blake (2014)> review §laura mandell, studies in romanticism 53.1 (spring 2014): 133-44 (“an excellent job”). wu, hai-xia. “bu lai ke shi ge zhong de sheng tai si xiang [ecological thought in william blake’s poems].” chang zhou gong xue yuan xue bao: journal of changzhou institute of technology (social sciences edition) 30.2 (april 2012): 33-35. in chinese. x xiao, dan. “xin ling de qing yin yue yu zhong yin yue—wei lian bu lai ke shi ge ‘ying er de huan le’ yu ‘ying er de you shang’ zhi sheng xiao dui bi: light and heavy music upon souls: a contrastive analysis of sound effects in ‘infant joy’ and ‘infant sorrow.’” hu bei di er shi fan xue yuan xue bao: journal of hubei university of education 29.10 (oct. 2012): 27-29. in chinese, with an abstract in english. “a contrastive analysis of how different sound effects brought about by different rhyme schemes, phonemes distribution, word’s syllable length … affect the feeling the poet intended to express and the themes these two poems were designed to emphasize.” xie, qi-yuan. “sheng tai pi ping shi jiao xia de ‘sai er shu’: the book of thel from the perspective of ecocriticism.” hai wai ying yu: overseas english 9 (2013): 211-13. in chinese, with an abstract in english. “blake … was for the value of nature while against anthropocentrism. in spite of some limitations, his attitude towards nature is still worth admiring.” xu, jie. “er sho shi ji dui bu lai ke shi ge ‘hei pi fu de xiao nan hai’ de yan jiu [a study of blake’s poem ‘the little black boy’].” jin tian [jin tian] 12 (2012): 50-52. in chinese. xu, jie, and zhao xu han. “qian xi wei lian bu lai ke shi zhong de dui bi shou fa ji yi shu te se [an analysis of artistic methods in william blake’s poems].” duan pian xiao shuo [short story] 2 (2012): 77-78. in chinese.  xue, dong-yan. “bu lai ke shi ge zhong yan se yi xiang yu yi tan xi [an interpretation of the allegorical images of color in blake’s poems].” duan pian xiao shuo [short fiction] 15 (2013): 31-32. in chinese. y yang, zhang-hui. “hei an zhi lin zhong de dou shi—bu lai ke de ji qi shi ge zhu ti yan jiu [the fighter of darkness—a study of blake’s themes].” an hui wen xue [an hui literature] 6 (2012): 20-26. in chinese. yano, atsushi. “uchi ni arishi tenkai tono kizuna, soshite reality no eiensei (the inner connection with the eternal realities in dante gabriel rossetti’s sonnets).” nishinippon kogyo daigaku kiyo [bulletin of nishinippon institute of technology] 44 (2014): 171-78. in japanese. blake and eternity are discussed in the latter half of the paper. §yates, mark. “illuminated instruction: a paratextual, intertextual, and iconotextual study of william blake.” university of salford [manchester] phd, 2014. *yeats, william butler. “william blake and his illustrations to the divine comedy.” savoy nos. 3-5 (1896), subtitled “his opinions upon art” (no. 3, pp. 41-57), “his opinions on dante” (no. 4, pp. 25-41), and “the illustrations of dante” (no. 5, pp. 31-36). <bb #3051, bbs p. 692, blake (2004, 2010)> t. william blake and his illustrations to the divine comedy, part 2. charleston: bibliolife, 2014. 228 pp. [sic]; isbn: 9781294745976. [part 1 is not listed. i cannot account for 228 pp. or “part 2.”] yu, fang, and juan yu. “ke shi yu yan: wei lian bu lai ke de kua mei jie xu shi yi shu: visual language: art of cross-media narrative in william blake’s poetry.” ji ning xue yuan xue bao: journal of jining university 34.5 (2013): 22-26. in chinese, with an abstract in english. with his illuminated printing, “blake uses word and image in his songs of innocence and [of] experience and marriage of heaven and hell to construct the cross-media narrative, reflecting human psychology and imagery consciousness. his sensual letters and italic writing visualize the picturesque principles and indicate the combination of the two forms of art.” yuan, li-li. “xiao yi bu lai ke de ‘lun don’ [discussing blake’s ‘london’].” jian nan wen xue [jian nan literature] 10 (2012): 66. in chinese. discusses “london” in terms of its rhyme and other techniques. *yue, hui. “qian tan wei lian bu lai ke ‘lun dun’ de kong jian jie gou [on the spatial structure of ‘london’ by william blake].” ke jiao wen hui [essays on science and education] 11 (2013): 53-55. in chinese. the structure of “london” is based on the two concepts of space—“the thematic space” and “the static space,” where the location changes are matched by the thematic changes. as a result, this poem could be taken as a union of poetry and painting. z zhang, jin, and jing wang. “bu lai ke zao qi shi ge zhong nv xing xing yi shi de dui li xing [the contradiction in gender consciousness in william blake’s early poems].” wai guo yu wen: foreign language and literature 29.1 (feb. 2013): 51-55. in chinese, with an abstract in english. in william blake’s poetry, female sexuality is presented as in a state of struggle between two contrary forces: liberation and submission. women strive to liberate themselves from sexual repression; however, the liberating force comes up against the resistance of the submissive in this process. women are forced to submit to male sexual aggression, and they are even subtly influenced by the doctrines of sexual oppression and introject submission. submission results in the loss of female subjectivity, even self destruction of women. meanwhile, the feminine wish for dominance is latent in both liberation and submission when they run to an extreme. negation of the contrary forces is destructive because it is through the struggle between liberation and submission that female sexuality remains in a state of dynamic harmony. zhang, xiao-ning. “wei lian bu lai ke shi ge de she hui pi pan xing tan xi [a comment on the social criticism in william blake’s poetry].” shan hua [mountain flowers] 10 (2013): 135-36. in chinese. *zhao, hui. “wei lian bu lai ke chuang zuo wan qi de ‘shi hua xi ju’ [william blake’s poetic drama in his late work].” mei shu [art] 1 (2013): 124-28. in chinese. an analysis of the dramatic quality in blake’s late poems. *zheng, ya-hong. “li tian zhen you duo yuan, li jing yan you duo jin?—du wei lian bu lai ke shi ji tian zhen yu jing yan zhi ge [how far is it from innocence and how close is it to experience?—a reading of william blake’s songs of innocence and of experience].” shu cheng [book city] 4 (2013): 88-90. in chinese. §ziolkowski, eric. “great code or great codex? northrop frye, william blake, and construals of the bible.” journal of the bible and its reception 1.1 (june 2014): 3-28. §zukovic, brad. “reflexive figurality in the poetry of blake, wordsworth, ashbery and a. r. ammons.” cornell phd, 2014. division ii: blake’s circle note that robert n. essick’s “blake in the marketplace” regularly lists sales of pictures, etc., by barry, basire, calvert, flaxman, fuseli, linnell, mortimer, palmer, richmond, romney, and stothard. barry, james (1741–1806) history painter §lenihan, liam. the writings of james barry and the genre of history painting, 1775-1809. farnham: ashgate, 2014. 202 pp.; isbn: 9781409467526. butts, thomas (1759–1845) clerk and patron a good deal of new information about butts and his first wife, née elizabeth mary cooper, has been revealed by mary lynn johnson, “newfound particulars of blake’s patrons, thomas and elizabeth butts, 1767-1806,” blake 47.4 (spring 2014). cumberland, george (1754–1848) polymath, artist, friend of blake bentley, g. e., jr. “george cumberland sketchbook discovered.” notes and queries, n.s., 61.1 (march 2014): 39-43. the sketchbook was recently acquired by victoria university in the university of toronto (see <blake [2013]>). yerburgh, david s. an attempt to depict hafod in cardiganshire the seat of thomas johnes, esq. m.p. from 1783-1813. a pictorial journey around the estate of hafod illustrated with a variety of artistic skills. n.p.: n.p., [preface dated 2000]. 8º, iv, 80 pp.; isbn: 9780953563517. the book is “based upon george cumberland’s book entitled ‘an attempt to describe hafod’” and is designed as a “complement” to it (5). the images are enchanting, including johnes’s pictorial chinaware. flaxman, john (1755–1826) sculptor, friend of blake eight letters, 1783-1805, 21 pp., to william hayley, with “numerous references to blake, romney, the engraving of cowper’s portrait, &c.,” were sold at sotheby’s, 3-4 june 1907, lot 387 [£5.5.0 to pearson].these might be the letters of flaxman to hayley in the morgan library. in 2014 victoria university in the university of toronto acquired an undated card of flaxman’s lecture at the royal academy. monday day of 18 admit to the lecture this evening [red seal of “royal academy london”] [rev.d m.r agutter] [john flaxman] r.a. the lecture will begin at 8 o’clock william agutter (1758-1835) was chaplain and secretary of the asylum for female orphans (london, 1797) and fellow of magdalen college (oxford). popular | english specimens | of the | greek dramatic poets; | with | introductory essays, | and | explanatory notes. [trans. robert potter (1721-1804)] | — | æschylus. | — | london: | john murray, albemarle street. | mdcccxxxi. [1831]. 291 pp., 6″ tall. prints [by flaxman] facing pp. play 78, 103 agamemnon 142, 144 the choephoræ 147, 154, 173 eumenides 178, 202 the seven chiefs against thebes 230 prometheus chained 244, 249 the persians 270 the suppliants the thirteen flaxman designs, printed sideways, are the same as those first printed (1795) by flaxman’s aunt jane matthews and reprinted (15 april 1831) by [his half-sister] miss [mary ann] flaxman and [his sister-in-law] miss [maria] denman. john murray is not known to have had any other connection with publishing flaxman’s classical designs.g. e. bentley, jr., the early engravings of flaxman’s classical designs: a bibliographical study (new york: new york public library, 1964), which does not mention popular english specimens of the greek dramatic poets. homer, ilias und odyssee: die zeichnungen von john flaxman. ed. elke austermühl. darmstadt: wissenschaftliche buchgesellschaft, 2013. 160 pp.; isbn: 9783650251343. in german. also available as an e-book (isbn: 9783650729613). homero, odisea con ilustraciones de john flaxman. e-artnow, 2013. isbn: 9788074840296. in spanish. probably reproduced from a copy in the library of congress. (for e-artnow’s use of copies from the library of congress, see the complete illuminated books of william blake in part i, section b.) frost, william edward (1810–77) painter, collector of stothard and blake frost’s peculiar importance for blake studies is that he provides the only evidence for blake’s “to the public” (1793).according to alexander gilchrist, life of william blake, “pictor ignotus” (1863) 2: 263, “mr. frost” helped to obtain “at the last moment” a copy of “to the public.” william edward frost of 8 southampton street, fitzroy square, wrote to edward b. jupp, 17 may 1861, to say: i am exceedingly gratified by your kind offer of the “calisto” [stothard–blake]—and shall be happy if i can supply you with a bartollozzi or any other master that will afford you half the gratification tha[t] possession of the “calisto” will give me—i am endeavouring to make as complete a collection of the engraved works of stothard ^as possible^ and hope and intend to print a list of his works—my collection is not arranged at present but my bookbinder is now making ten folio volumes in which to insert them. i have a volume containing a few drawings and a number of slight sketches, i do not propose to collect his drawings.victoria university in the university of toronto, watermark towgoods | extra square. frost wrote from the same address to f. s. ellis (bookseller), 9 november 1861, saying, “i had much pleasure in looking through your catalogue. i regret the names of stothard and blake do not occur more frequently—i beg to enclose a list of a few works i am seeking and shall feel greatly obliged if by any means you could procure them for me.”victoria university in the university of toronto. the list is not with the letter. the twelve-volume collection in the royal academy entitled engravings, from the works of thomas stothard, r. a. … collected by w. e. frost, a.r. a., … (london, 1861) contains the very rare stothard–blake prints of “four classical figures” ([1779?]), “the morning amusements of her royal highness …” and “a lady in the full dress …” (on one plate, 1782 [for the ladies new and polite pocket memorandum-book, for … 1783]), “the fall of rosamond” (1783), “zephyrus and flora” (1784), “calisto” (1784), and “a lady embracing a bust” [for (elizabeth blower), maria: a novel (1785)]—see robert n. essick, the separate plates of william blake (princeton: princeton university press, 1983) 135, 140, 143, 233, 240, 242. fuseli, john henry (1741–1825) swiss-born painter, friend of blake henry fuseli: 80 drawings. ed. narim bender. osmora inc., 2014. 85 pp.; isbn: 9782897284756. hayley, william (1745–1820) man of letters and patron william hayley, the life of milton …. charleston: bibliolife, 2014. 360 pp.; isbn: 9781293597590. johnson, joseph (1738–1809) liberal bookseller, patron of blake barfoot, c. c. “in the churchyard and under the full moon: the radical publisher and his clients and guests.” the literary utopias of cultural communities, 1790-1910. ed. marguérite corporaal and evert jan van leeuwen. amsterdam: rodopi, 2010. 9-22. at the end of the analytical review (printed for j. johnson) 28 (oct. 1798) is an added list of “books printed for j. johnson, in st. paul’s church-yard,” including the ladies new and polite pocket memorandum-book for 1799, 1s. linnell, john (1792–1882) painter, blake’s patron linnell’s letter to bernard barton of 3 april 1830 about blake (br[2] 526-28) sold at sotheby’s, 3-4 june 1907, lot 386 [£2.18.0 to pearson]. stedman, john gabriel (1744–97) soldier of fortune, friend of blake bohls, elizabeth a. “stedman’s tropics: the mercenary as naturalist.” slavery and the politics of place: representing the colonial caribbean, 1770-1833. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2014. 54-81 (chapter 2). tatham, frederick (1805–78) sculptor and painter, blake’s disciple a remarkably detailed and excellent web site, tathamfamilyhistory, “the tathams of county durham” <http://​www.​saxonlodge.​net> [conducted by robert collingwood], gives a great deal of information about frederick tatham and his family. the record for frederick <http://​www.​saxonlodge.​net/​getperson.​php?personid=i0840​&tree=tatham> has information and documents pertaining to his marriage, children, and residences. of note is a transcription of a letter he wrote in 1877 to his much younger brother robert bristow tatham (1824–81) in south africa: <http://​www.​saxonlodge.​net/​showmedia.​php?​mediaid=1062​&medialinkid=1352​&tngpage=1>. watson, caroline (1761?–1814) engraver 2014 23 september–2015 4 january david alexander. caroline watson and female printmaking in late georgian england. cambridge: fitzwilliam museum, 2014. 126 pp.; isbn: 9780957443464. it includes a catalogue of over 100 prints by watson and sixteen letters from her to william hayley. blake and exhibitions, 2017 blake and exhibitions, 2017 by luisa calè luisa calè (l.cale@bbk.ac.uk), birkbeck, university of london, works on practices of reading, viewing, and collecting in the romantic period. her publications include fuseli’s milton gallery: “turning readers into spectators”; co-edited volumes on dante on view: the reception of dante in the visual and performing arts and illustrations, optics and objects in nineteenth-century literary and visual cultures; and special issues on “the disorder of things” (eighteenth-century studies, 2011), “the nineteenth-century digital archive” (19: interdisciplinary studies in the long nineteenth century, 2015), and “literature and sculpture at the fin de siècle” (word and image, 2018). her current project, entitled the book unbound, explores practices of collecting and dismantling the book, with chapters on walpole, blake, and dickens. every morn & every night some are born to sweet delight . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  some are born to endless night (“auguries of innocence,” e 492, quoted in william blake and the age of aquarius) the works by blake on display in 2017 span his trajectory from early modern esoteric traditions to his role as a critic of technology and power in late twentieth-century countercultures. an exhibition on the mystical philosophy of jacob böhme in dresden featured some of blake’s watercolor illustrations to edward young’s night thoughts among works tracing the reception of böhme from the corpus hermeticum to itten, marc, kandinsky, arp, and the bauhaus in the early twentieth century. the blakes displayed in dresden illustrated the planetary iconography of the late nights of young’s poem, the tension between light and darkness, and the earthly and heavenly possibilities of the human form. seen in the context of the visual apparatus of the corpus hermeticum, they showed how blake draws on early modern traditions that understand human beings as children of the planets, while also participating in the artisanal visual culture of hermeticism. by contrast, william blake and the age of aquarius showed a selection from all periods of blake’s work to illustrate his influence on postwar american artists, from experiments in printmaking to robert smithson, maurice sendak’s where the wild things are (1963), allen ginsberg and the beat generation, the vietnam protests, and rock culture. the reception of blake in music and popular culture was key to his inclusion in the final room of the victoria and albert museum’s exhibition you say you want a revolution? records and rebels, 1966–1970: blake’s “jerusalem” demonstrated how “dissent inspires protest across the centuries.” the information panel carefully tracked the legacy of the hymn as it was adopted by movements and parties across the political spectrum, from the suffragettes to labour, liberals, liberal democrats, and conservatives. it also represented british identity in the 2012 london olympics. 10 september 2016–26 february 2017 victoria and albert museum, london you say you want a revolution? records and rebels, 1966–1970 the text of “jerusalem,” displayed next to the lyrics of john lennon’s “imagine,” was the last object in the exhibition, celebrating its influence on the beat generation for its “evocation of the right to imagine, desire and fight for an idealised vision of society.” milton: a poem in two books, copy a, plate 2, “preface” (composed c. 1804–11, printed c. 1811). british museum registration number: 1859,0625.2. 1 april–1 october 2017 birmingham museum and art gallery, birmingham i want! i want! art and technology for the sexes: the gates of paradise, copy l, plate 9 [bentley plate 11], “i want! i want!” (composed 1793 and revised c. 1820, printed c. 1825). fitzwilliam museum, university of cambridge, accession number: p.444-1985. 8 april–3 september 2017 salisbury museum, salisbury british art: ancient landscapes jerusalem: the emanation of the giant albion, copy a, plate 100, final full-plate illustration (composed c. 1804–20, printed c. 1820). british museum registration number: 1847,0318.93.100. 26 august–19 november 2017 staatliche kunstsammlungen, dresden alles in allem: die gedankenwelt des mystischen philosophen jacob böhme exhibition catalogues: alles in allem: die gedankenwelt des mystischen philosophen jacob böhme: denken, kontext, wirkung. ed. claudia brink and lucinda martin. dresden: sandstein verlag für staatliche kunstsammlungen dresden, 2017. grund und ungrund: der kosmos des mystischen philosophen jacob böhme. ed. claudia brink and lucinda martin. dresden: sandstein verlag für staatliche kunstsammlungen dresden, 2017. the blakes are reproduced in the first volume and discussed in an essay by luisa calè, “william blakes nachtgedanken: zwischen buch, körper und kosmos” (151-65) (translated into german by helen jung). this exhibition situated blake’s night thoughts watercolors in the context of the paper culture of early modern mystical and esoteric publishing. in particular, handcrafted unique copies of dionysius andreas freher’s illustrations from the bibliotheca philosophica hermetica in amsterdam include layers that can be lifted to reveal different stages in the transformations of man. such material artifacts offer a counterpart to the layered pages of blake’s night thoughts and to his envisioning one zoa in the bosom of another in the late prophetic writings. evidence of the circulation of böhme and freher manuscripts owned by the royal academician richard cosway and documented by henry crabb robinson opens up paths for new research that could connect blake and other artists to the paper arts and artisanal culture of hermeticism. courtesy staatliche kunstsammlungen dresden. photo: dirk weber. illustration to edward young’s night thoughts, “the christian triumph,” frontispiece (c. 1795–97). butlin #330.1. british museum registration number: 1929,0713.1 recto. illustration to edward young’s night thoughts, night vi, page 15 (c. 1795–97). butlin #330.236. british museum registration number: 1929,0713.119 recto. illustration to edward young’s night thoughts, night vii, page 15 (c. 1795–97). butlin #330.287. british museum registration number: 1929,0713.145 recto. illustration to edward young’s night thoughts, night viii, page 69 (c. 1795–97). butlin #330.415. british museum registration number: 1929,0713.209 recto. illustration to edward young’s night thoughts, night ix, page 29 (c. 1795–97). butlin #330.447. british museum registration number: 1929,0713.225 recto. illustration to edward young’s night thoughts, night ix, page 77 (c. 1795–97). butlin #330.495. british museum registration number: 1929,0713.249 recto. illustration to edward young’s night thoughts, night ix, page 83 (c. 1795–97). butlin #330.501. british museum registration number: 1929,0713.252 recto. illustration to edward young’s night thoughts, night ix, page 103 (c. 1795–97). butlin #330.521. british museum registration number: 1929,0713.262 recto. milton: a poem in two books, copy a, plate 4 (composed c. 1804–11, printed c. 1811). british museum registration number: 1859,0625.4. 21 september 2017–28 january 2018 british museum, london the business of prints a print from blake’s illustrations of the book of job and the relevant copperplate illustrated a technical discussion of materials, practices, and techniques. the blakes are reproduced in antony griffiths, the print before photography (london: british museum, 2016) 29, which was the basis of the exhibition. illustrations of the book of job, plate 4, numbered “3”, in reverse, on the plate. copperplate. british museum registration number: 1919,0528.16. illustrations of the book of job, plate 4, numbered “3” on the plate (composed 1823–26, printed 1826). british museum registration number: 1868,0822.3950. 23 september 2017–11 march 2018 block museum of art, northwestern university, evanston, il william blake and the age of aquarius courtesy block museum of art, northwestern university. © clare britt photography. exhibition catalogue: william blake and the age of aquarius. ed. stephen f. eisenman. princeton: princeton university press and the block museum of art, 2017. this exhibition situated blake’s work in the context of postwar printing experiments by stanley william hayter and atelier 17, such as 21 etchings and poems (1960) with willem de kooning, franz kline, irene rice pereira, helen phillips, and attilio salemme, and “fifteen poems, a collaboration using the printing methods of william blake,” involving alexander calder and helen phillips. a section on the doors of perception featured richard anuszkiewicz’s inward eye serigraph series, as well as posters and other materials documenting the work of bob dylan, the doors, and jimi hendrix. courtesy block museum of art, northwestern university. © clare britt photography. america a prophecy, copy m, plate 8 (composed 1793, printed c. 1807). yale center for british art, paul mellon collection, b1992.8.2(8). america a prophecy, copy m, plate 9 (composed 1793, printed c. 1807). yale center for british art, paul mellon collection, b1992.8.2(9). america a prophecy, copy m, plate 12 (composed 1793, printed c. 1807). yale center for british art, paul mellon collection, b1992.8.2(12). america a prophecy, plate 1, frontispiece (composed 1793). the rosenbach, philadelphia, 1954.0657. robert blair, the grave (london: r. h. cromek, 1808). quarto edition. charles deering mccormick library of special collections, northwestern university. dante engravings (composed 1826–27, printed 1838 or 1892). charles deering mccormick library of special collections, northwestern university. europe a prophecy, plate 1, frontispiece (composed 1794, printed c. 1831–32 by frederick tatham). the rosenbach, philadelphia, 1954.0658. the first book of urizen, copy c, plate 6 [bentley plate 5] (composed and printed 1794). yale center for british art, paul mellon collection, b1978.43.1425. the first book of urizen, copy c, plate 12 [bentley plate 22] (composed and printed 1794). yale center for british art, paul mellon collection, b1978.43.1431. the first book of urizen, plate 1, title page (composed and printed 1794). the rosenbach, philadelphia, 1954.0659. illustrations of the book of job, plates 1-22 (composed 1823–26, printed 1874). stephen f. eisenman collection. the number of the beast is 666 (c. 1805). butlin #522. the rosenbach, philadelphia, 1954.0011-d 1/6. songs of innocence, copy g, plate 2 [bentley plate 3], title page (composed and printed 1789). yale center for british art, paul mellon collection, b1992.8.12(2). songs of innocence, copy g, plate 14 [bentley plate 25], “infant joy” (composed and printed 1789). yale center for british art, paul mellon collection, b1992.8.12(9). songs of innocence, copy g, plate 20 [bentley plate 13], “the little boy lost” (composed and printed 1789). yale center for british art, paul mellon collection, b1992.8.12(12). songs of innocence, copy g, plate 29 [bentley plate 9], “the little black boy” (composed and printed 1789). yale center for british art, paul mellon collection, b1992.8.12(16). songs of innocence, copy w, plate 8 [bentley plate 12], “the chimney sweeper” (composed and printed 1789). charles deering mccormick library of special collections, northwestern university. songs of innocence, copy w, plate 13 [bentley plate 20], “night” (composed and printed 1789). charles deering mccormick library of special collections, northwestern university. songs of innocence, copy w, plate 14 [bentley plate 21], “night” (composed and printed 1789). charles deering mccormick library of special collections, northwestern university. songs of innocence, copy y, plate 5 [bentley plate 6], “the ecchoing green” (composed 1789, printed c. 1802). charles deering mccormick library of special collections, northwestern university [see an image in blake]. songs of innocence, copy y, plate 6 [bentley plate 7], “the ecchoing green” (composed 1789, printed c. 1802). charles deering mccormick library of special collections, northwestern university [see an image in blake]. songs of innocence and of experience, copy f, plate 39 [bentley plate 46], “london” (composed and printed 1789, 1794). yale center for british art, paul mellon collection, b1978.43.1570. songs of innocence and of experience, copy f, plate 42, “the tyger” (composed and printed 1789, 1794). yale center for british art, paul mellon collection, b1978.43.1573. john gabriel stedman, narrative, of a five years’ expedition (london: j. johnson, 1796). charles deering mccormick library of special collections, northwestern university. visions of the daughters of albion, copy h, plate 1, frontispiece (composed and printed 1793). the rosenbach, philadelphia [see an image in the william blake archive]. visions of the daughters of albion, copy h, plate 2, title page (composed and printed 1793). the rosenbach, philadelphia [see an image in the william blake archive]. visions of the daughters of albion, copy h, plate 4 (composed and printed 1793). the rosenbach, philadelphia [see an image in the william blake archive]. visions of the daughters of albion, copy h, plate 6 (composed and printed 1793). the rosenbach, philadelphia [see an image in the william blake archive]. visions of the daughters of albion, copy h, plate 9 (composed and printed 1793). the rosenbach, philadelphia [see an image in the william blake archive]. edward young, the complaint, and the consolation; or, night thoughts (london: r. edwards, 1797). charles deering mccormick library of special collections, northwestern university. courtesy block museum of art, northwestern university. © clare britt photography. review: william blake: the drawings for dante’s divine comedy (taschen edition) sebastian schütze and maria antonietta terzoli. william blake: the drawings for dante’s divine comedy. köln: taschen, 2014. 324 pp. €99.99/​£99.99/​$150.00, hardcover. reviewed by luisa calè luisa calè (l.cale@bbk.ac.uk), birkbeck, university of london, works on practices of reading, viewing, and collecting in the romantic period. her publications include fuseli’s milton gallery: “turning readers into spectators”; co-edited volumes on dante on view: the reception of dante in the visual and performing arts and illustrations, optics and objects in nineteenth-century literary and visual cultures; and special issues on “the disorder of things” (eighteenth-century studies, 2011), “the nineteenth-century digital archive” (19: interdisciplinary studies in the long nineteenth century, 2015), and “literature and sculpture at the fin de siècle” (word and image, forthcoming 2018). her current project, entitled the book unbound, explores practices of collecting and dismantling the book, with chapters on walpole, blake, and dickens. “whatever book is for / vengeance for sin & / whatever book is against the / forgiveness of sins / is not of the father but / of satan the accuser / & father of hell”: blake entered this comment on a sketch in which he visualized the architecture of retribution in dante’s circles of hell. his critique of dante’s inferno is an expanded denunciation of “the religion of the enemy & avenger” in plate 52 of jerusalem. a bas-relief that was once erroneously attributed to michelangelo presents ugolino as the most striking figure in dante’s hell, the greatest example of the violent conditions and punishments of the damned. a sensational instance of survival cannibalism, featuring a parent starved to death and reduced to eating the dead bodies of his children, the case of ugolino exceeds the power of verbal articulation, marks the limits of form, and thus provides a testing ground for sculpture and painting in jonathan richardson’s account of the science of a connoisseur (1719).the bas-relief, which is now attributed to pierino da vinci, is discussed as michelangelo’s by jonathan richardson, a discourse on the dignity, certainty, pleasure and advantage, of the science of a connoisseur (london: churchill, 1719) 32-35, who saw it “in the hands of mr. trench, a modest, ingenious painter, lately arriv’d from his long studies in italy” (32); on its purchase by richard boyle, third earl of burlington, and its acquisition by the devonshire collection in 1764, see charles avery, studies in italian sculpture (london: pindar press, 2001) 167-90, and <http://​www.​artscouncil.​org.​uk/​sites/​default/​files/​download-file/​pierino_expert.​pdf>, accessed 8 january 2018. sir joshua reynolds’s ugolino was exhibited at the royal academy in 1773 and engraved in mezzotint the following year. blake chose ugolino as his first subject from dante in the 1780s; he returned to him in an emblem in for children: the gates of paradise (1793). later, blake (perhaps influenced by william hayley) singled ugolino out as the iconic image for dante’s power of invention in the profile portrait he painted as part of the series of heads of the poets for hayley’s library (c. 1800–03).on blake’s illustrations to dante and the visual reception of ugolino in the eighteenth century, see ralph pite, the circle of our vision: dante’s presence in english romantic poetry (oxford: clarendon press, 1994) 39-67; morton d. paley, the traveller in the evening (oxford: oxford university press, 2003) 101-07, 145-46; antonella braida, dante and the romantics (basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, 2004) 12-26, 151-78. scenes from hell occupy 72 out of the 102 designs blake dedicated to dante’s commedia between 1824 and 1827. alexander gilchrist mentions that at the age of sixty blake started to learn italian in order to read dante, which makes sense given blake’s claim, in his marginalia to henry boyd’s translation of the inferno, that “men are hired to run down men of genius under the mask of translators” (e 634). however, when henry crabb robinson visited him in 1825, “he was making designs, or engraving …. cary’s dante was before him.”alexander gilchrist, life of william blake, “pictor ignotus,” 2 vols. (london: macmillan, 1863) 1: 342. these were blake’s last works, commissioned by john linnell and left unfinished when he died. when linnell’s collection was sold in 1918, the national art-collections fund had the drawings photographed and reproduced in collotype on hand-laid paper before they were dispersed among seven collections: the ashmolean museum, the birmingham museum and art gallery, the british museum, the fogg art museum at harvard, the national gallery of victoria in melbourne, the royal institution of cornwall, and the tate. reproductions of the dante watercolors were published by albert roe in 1953, milton klonsky in 1980, corrado gizzi in 1983, and david bindman in 2000. building on their work, a clothbound edition published by taschen to mark the 750th anniversary of dante’s birth reproduces and catalogues the drawings in codex format, with fourteen foldouts the size of the originals. the catalogue presents each plate by identifying, quoting, and translating three lines from the relevant canto and providing a generic title to sum up the subject matter, followed by indications of medium, size, and location, and a paragraph that summarizes the relevant moment in dante’s plot, opposite a full-page or double-page-spread illustration.william blake, illustrations to the divine comedy of dante (london: national art-collections fund, 1922) follows the titles and order established in gilchrist’s life of blake while correcting some discrepancies in the sale catalogue of linnell’s collection (christie’s, 15 march 1918). the national art-collections fund sequence was followed by albert s. roe, blake’s illustrations to the divine comedy (princeton: princeton university press, 1953) and martin butlin, the paintings and drawings of william blake, 2 vols. (new haven: yale university press, 1981) 1: 555. milton klonsky’s blake’s dante: the complete illustrations to the divine comedy (new york: harmony books, 1980) rearranges the plates that were not assigned to cantos in the 1922 portfolio and places plate 100 (male figure reclining) between cantos 13 and 14, plate 101 (diagram of hell-circles) between cantos 10 and 12, and plate 102 (erroneously titled female figures attacked by serpents) second among the thieves sequence in canto 24. this is the sequence adopted by corrado gizzi in blake e dante (milan: g. mazzotta, 1983), catalogue of the exhibition held at torre de’ passeri, 10 september–31 october 1983. in william blake, la divina commedia, ed. david bindman (paris: bibliothèque de l’image, 2000), the thieves illustration appears in the same sequence as in klonsky’s and gizzi’s volumes, but bindman does not include the plates numbered 100 and 101 in the 1922 portfolio. klonsky reproduces relevant excerpts from j. a. carlyle, thomas okey, and p. h. wicksteed’s 1899–1901 translation, occasionally corrected with dorothy l. sayers’s 1949 translation; gizzi and bindman provide short explanations of the scenes, as does the taschen catalogue. the volume includes preliminary essays by the italianist maria antonietta terzoli on “dante’s afterworld between classical myth and christian theology” and the art historian sebastian schütze on dante and blake as masters of “visibile parlare.” the visual reception of dante in a range of media is documented by reproductions of miniatures, initial letters, and other illustrations from fifteenth-century illuminated manuscripts, portraits of dante from the duomo in florence and in orvieto, and the topology of hell and other illustrations by sandro botticelli, john flaxman, eugène delacroix, and gustave doré. from federico zuccari’s dante historiato (1585–88) the volume reproduces dante and virgil looking at scenes of humility carved in “quaintest sculpture”henry francis cary, the vision; or hell, purgatory, and paradise, 2nd ed. (london: taylor and hessey, 1819) 2: 86 (canto 10, line 29). in purgatorio 10. zuccari’s drawing translates the “stor[ies] graven on the rock” from marble bas-relief to a bidimensional composition that recalls cycles of frescoes in renaissance palaces. these examples of “visible speaking” precede dante’s reflections on pride, fame, and his grasp of a medieval genealogy of art, in which miniaturists are being obscured by the coming of giotto (purgatorio 11.73-108). reproducing zuccari’s representation of these scenes invites the reader to think about how the power of dante’s invention can be translated across media for different aesthetic cultures and how these transformations are captured on paper, though no connection is made to blake’s own illustration of the same passage. the iconography of the commedia is also documented with sculptures, such as j.-b. carpeaux’s ugolino and his children (1857–61) and auguste rodin’s the gates of hell (1880–1917); the latter elegantly marks the transition between the critical apparatus and the catalogue of blake’s illustrations. schütze’s discussion of blake’s sculptural prototypes—“refigurations and archetypes”—is the most interesting critical contribution the volume makes to blake studies. to translate dante’s demons from words into images, blake draws on sculptural prototypes, which substantiate the underground, demonic survival of classical forms. just as michelangelo had found in dante the shapes of the damned, in blake’s illustrations their compressed, contorted forms take on mannerist inflections through michelangelo’s interpretation of classical sculptures. in the blasphemer capaneus “writhen in proud scorn” (inferno 14.47; taschen plate 29; butlin 812.27), schütze identifies the dying gladiator. while this celebrated classical specimen could explain the contortion of capaneus’s torso, the identification does not work for the arms and head of the demon. morton paley suggests “the reclining position of a greek or roman river god.”paley, the traveller in the evening 133. indeed, the headless fragment of the river god ilissos from the elgin marbles offers a more immediate model for capaneus’s torso, while the orientation of his head and limbs is closer to a monumental figure of the river nile. given that the annual flooding of the nile was associated with the origin of religion, a theory that henry fuseli and blake had illustrated for erasmus darwin’s the botanic garden, repurposing the form of the river god to embody the character of the blasphemous capaneus is a powerful dialectical move. trapping the giant into a form associated with an incipient “net of religion” is containment fit for a titanic energy that challenges hierarchies associated with imposing boundaries on the forces of nature. in the posture of the devil barbariccia in the eighth circle (inferno 21.120; taschen plate 41; butlin 812.39), schütze sees the torchbearer ludovisi, an antique torso endowed with head and limbs by alessandro algardi in the early seventeenth century. this association heightens the grotesque dimension of the scene. in dante’s demon blake emphasizes bodily discontinuity: by exaggerating the muscular tone of the torso he declares the alterity of the arms. the classical building block fails to integrate the restored or reinvented limbs; the faulty suture disjoins the ancient from the modern in a degraded re-membering at a time when attention was focused on comparing classical copies and dissecting their restorations. how the sculptural imagination shaped attempts to read and visualize dante’s commedia is a fascinating question. seeing sculpture in the literary text is a practice that blake encouraged, as alexander gourlay has observed.alexander s. gourlay, “‘idolatry or politics’: blake’s chaucer, the gods of priam, and the powers of 1809,” prophetic character: essays on william blake in honor of john e. grant, ed. gourlay (west cornwall, ct: locust hill press, 2002) 97-147. writing about his painting sir jeffery chaucer and the nine and twenty pilgrims on their journey to canterbury in a descriptive catalogue (1809), blake invites his readers to “observe, that chaucer makes every one of his characters perfect in his kind, every one is an antique statue; the image of a class, and not of an imperfect individual” (e 536). however, “these eternal principles or characters of human life” run the risk of alienation and idolatry, especially since the greeks “have neglected to subdue the gods of priam”: “when separated from man or humanity, who is jesus the saviour, the vine of eternity, they are thieves and rebels, they are destroyers.” dante’s inferno is the place to bring that denunciation full circle: what better way to illustrate what happens to the “human form divine” when it is separated from humanity and embodied in idols than “to incarnate and imbrute” its bright essence in the bestial forms of dante’s demons, just as milton’s satan chose to take on animal forms? scholarship on the reception of dante offers ways of thinking about practices of reading and viewing in the long eighteenth century, indicating how the sculptural imagination acquired on the grand tour might have shaped attempts to read and visualize the commedia. nick havely has pointed out that dante was common grand tour reading for members of the society of dilettanti.nick havely, dante’s british public: readers and texts, from the fourteenth century to the present (oxford: oxford university press, 2014) 114-27. among them was charles townley, whose collection in park street included the discobolus, a statue that is mentioned in hayley’s essay on sculpture (1800), which blake illustrated with an engraved head of pericles “from a bust in the possession of charles townley.” this textual evidence explains the demonic version of the discobolus in the serpent attacking vanni fucci (inferno 24.97-126; taschen plate 51; butlin 812.48). a cast of the dying gladiator was on view in the antique room of the royal academy, the ilissos at the british museum. since blake did not go on the grand tour, arguing for such sculptural allusions opens up questions about reproduction and dissemination. through what material mediations did such sculptures come home to british readers? how did reproductive engravings and casts shape intermedial practices? schütze does not trace the specific routes that might have brought classical sculpture to blake’s attention. the historical trajectories, mediations, and inflections of classical sculpture offer lines of inquiry for blake specialists to pursue. comparison with the original illustrations reveals the limits of the photographic reproductions. the difference is palpable in the case of the upside-down body of nicholas iii, the simoniac pope punished in canto 19 of the inferno, one of the most spectacular instances of blake’s watercolor designs. in the taschen edition the sculptural form of the pope can be detected from the strong boundary lines and some dark touches that bring into relief the musculature of the nude, whose texture would otherwise be dissolved in the color of the background (taschen plate 36; butlin 812.35). blake’s evocation of forms half perceived among trees and rocks in other illustrations could encourage us to think that this scene also experiments with the disappearance of the sculptural body as a form that is half perceived and half imagined through the medium of hell. yet this is not what happens to the simoniac pope in the watercolor original in the tate collection: his body is pitch dark. blake’s choice of a vibrant, almost-fluorescent orange for the flames of hell responds to dante’s focus on the heightened intensity of the flames to mark out a heightened punishment for the sinner placed in the highest position, the pope (inferno 19.33). yet the extraordinarily vibrant oranges and blues of the watercolor are muted in the photographic reproduction; they lose their pigment, as if the photography was overexposed. at the other end of the spectrum, in the rarefied atmosphere of the eighth sphere of paradise, dante represents the blessed as flaming spheres; the pen can hardly keep up with the imagination, so vibrant is the image (paradiso 24.11-12, 25-27). blake opts for a very delicate blue wash for dante’s sphere, pink for beatrice’s, and violet for their intersection (taschen plate 96; butlin 812.93). in this case, too, the loss of pigmentation occurring in photographic reproduction could have been detected by collating the photograph with the original in the ashmolean museum, and amended through color correction. in a letter to linnell in july 1826, blake refers to “my book of drawings from dante” (e 778). gilchrist also reports that blake sketched his dante illustrations “in a folio volume of a hundred pages, which mr. linnell had given him for the purpose.”gilchrist 1: 332. collecting specimens dispersed across the continents is, of course, one of the missions of the blake archive, which tries to reproduce the experience of size and scale. the taschen edition has chosen to follow the original size for only a portion of the illustrations, which means emphasizing some at the expense of others. the compositions that have a vertical orientation are restricted to the format of the page, whereas those with a horizontal layout extend over a whole spread or open up as foldouts to the size of blake’s originals. as a result, readers do not need to change the orientation of the book to look at compositions that have different layouts. the volume privileges alternate acts of reading and viewing by placing the textual apparatus against each illustration, whereas placing it at the back or in a separate volume would enhance the visual narrative of the series, encouraging a practice of seeing one image after the other without textual interruptions. the key virtue of the taschen edition is to emphasize the book aesthetic of the illustrations through the format of the codex. the reader can peruse blake’s dante as an object to leaf through rather than as a series of individual drawings encountered in their isolation in the study room of an archive, as specimens hanging on a gallery wall, or as a digital gallery to scroll through. properly cowed: an answer to keri davies properly cowed: an answer to keri davies by wayne c. ripley wayne c. ripley (wripley@winona.edu) is a professor of english at winona state university in minnesota. he is working on a project regarding blake’s broad street family, friends, and neighbors. “like cream from london cows translated”george huddesford, bubble and squeak, a galli-maufry of british beef (london, 1799) 8. i first would like to thank keri davies for his detailed response to my note. i admit to considering neither the importance of eighteenth-century privacy nor the conventions of advertisements and their typical reliance on third parties to preserve anonymity. i think these and other points are important caveats to my too eager claim that the advertisements provided a direct and clear window into the family life of the blakes. acknowledging this, i still believe that many of my assumptions were less wrongheaded than as characterized by davies, and i hope to provide sufficient evidence of that below. i certainly agree with davies that it is most probable that the “middle aged person” aspiring “to be with a lady of quality as milliner” would have been apprenticed. indeed, this is why i referred to professional milliners whose locale or last name suggests some possibility of a connection to james blake. i am persuaded by davies’s argument regarding the importance of privacy, but, at the same time, there must have been a reason the blake shop was chosen. that reason need not have been proximity or kinship, but as both are more traceable than other forms of human connection, i thought it worthwhile to consider those specific milliners, since they might have had a reason to approach james blake. i did not claim that any of the women was definitively the milliner in question, and it is just as likely that she was recommended to james blake by a professional colleague, friend, or customer. accepting that these latter possibilities may be even more likely given davies’s arguments regarding custom and privacy, i still think it justifiable to have considered milliners neighboring james blake or those possibly related to the family in the event that subsequent research uncovers something about these women and their relationship to the blake family. when i considered catherine blake as a possible candidate, i did not mean to dismiss millinery as mere “froufrou” (davies par. 13). millinery was not among the great or minor livery companies of the eighteenth century. amy louise erickson defines millinery as “an entrepreneurial trade which had no company of its own.”amy louise erickson, “eleanor mosley and other milliners in the city of london companies 1700–1750,” history workshop journal 71 (spring 2011): 150. the implications of this are made clear by leonore davidoff and catherine hall: millinery “lacked a monopoly; apprenticeship might be an advantage but was by no means compulsory. rather ‘judgement of changing fashions, a genteel manner and a network of local contacts and credit’ was more significant.”leonore davidoff and catherine hall, family fortunes: men and women of the english middle class, 1780–1850, rev. ed. (london: routledge, 2002) 303. they cite s. d’cruze’s unpublished paper “‘… to acquaint the ladies’: women proprietors in the female clothing trades, colchester c. 1750–1800.” given this, it was not outlandish to have at least considered blake’s mother as a possible candidate, especially given her age when the advertisement was posted. while she was “a country girl from the little village of walkeringham” (davies par. 13), she had spent nearly thirty years at this point of her life as a london haberdasher’s wife, and her place in the business was established enough that james blake, jr., wrote his letter to the board of st. james’s parish workhouse and school of industry “for mother & self.”g. e. bentley, jr., blake records, 2nd ed. (new haven: yale university press, 2004) 38. by terming my discussion a “possibility” (ripley par. 7), my intention was to distance myself from the idea that i was making a definitive, proven assertion of fact. still, at the forefront of my mind was the important feminist work (ripley note 23) regarding catherine sophia boucher blake, which, when confronted with the lack of concrete evidence, has sometimes been forced to be speculative and even consciously fictitious in its most constructive sense.see also barbara lachman, voices for catherine blake: a gathering (lexington: schola antiqua press, 2000); janet warner, other sorrows, other joys: the marriage of catherine sophia boucher and william blake (new york: st. martin’s press, 2003); and david park, the poets’ wives: a novel (new york: bloomsbury, 2014). i also never claimed that blake’s mother picked up french from the moravians; i instead pointed to the idea that james blake had some relations who may have been french. i realized at the time they were speculations, and, as i state directly, the strongest argument against associating catherine with the unknown woman is “the lack of evidence documenting [catherine’s] skill as a milliner” (ripley par. 8). finally, i close the note by saying that the identity of the woman is ultimately unknown other than her relationship (however tenuous) to james blake, as demonstrated in the advertisement. regarding the advertisement for a maid, i think davies’s strongest point is his reading of the phrase “within a few miles of london.” i concede, then, that this may have been simply a third-party advertisement for a suburban or country home whose residents and their relationship to the blakes we will never know. where davies does not convince me is in his argument regarding the presence of cows and other animals in the blake neighborhood. i agree completely with davies that the blakes did not live in a slum, but his sense of what constitutes a slum has been conditioned, i think, by modern practices of health and hygiene that simply did not exist in blake’s london. in this, i believe that he was misled by atkins’s work, which is skewed toward the nineteenth century; davies may not appreciate enough the role that blake’s broad street neighborhood and its relationship to cows ultimately played in this urban revolution. while suburban farms, like thomas willan’s, were crucial to the dairy market of london, i want to show that they were far from blake’s only experience with cattle or the only possible source of milk available to residents of broad street. despite the claim of the preamble to a letter published in 1794 that “keeping cows in the house is more profitable husbandry than pasturing them in the fields,”whitehall evening post 19 july 1794. i had not assumed that the blakes kept the cow at or in 28 broad street, though there is evidence suggesting that livestock animals were indeed kept at, and probably in, nearby residences, which i will provide below. instead, my sense was that the blakes either owned, or at least had access to, a cow located nearby, and i admit that i should have qualified my bald assertion that they had a cow and addressed more explicitly where a cow could have been kept. in contrast to davies’s picture of blake’s neighborhood, i had in mind the words of stanley gardner: “round the corner from blake’s house was carnaby market, ‘built on a piece of ground called the pest-field.’ the market included a slaughter-house, with women among its butchers, and the voice of the cattle he heard brought in for slaughter stayed with blake all his life.”stanley gardner, blake (new york: arco, 1969) 20, partially quoted in david v. erdman, blake: prophet against empire, 3rd ed. (1977; new york: dover, 1991) 4. gardner’s phrase “round the corner” is somewhat misleading, since the blakes lived practically kitty-corner to the slaughterhouse. according to william rhodes’s 1770 map, a correct plan of the parish of st. james’s, westminster, it was located about halfway down the west side of marshall street and, according to this map and the parish rate books, it occupied the bottom half of this side of the street down to silver street.rhodes’s map is available online from the british library at <http://​www.​bl.​uk/​onlinegallery/​onlineex/​crace/​a/​zoomify88706.​html>. in 1773, richard holmes paid the rates for the slaughterhouse.westminster rate books 1634–1900, at <https://​www.​findmypast.​co.​uk>. parish rate books often recorded the blakes’ house as being on marshall street into the nineteenth century, despite the tendency of the blake family to describe their shop and home as being on broad street. the practical upshot of this is that the blake family lived between a major west-end market known for selling meat and the slaughterhouse necessary for it. as i hope to show, this slaughterhouse and the market required cowsheds and other buildings and practices that davies’s portrait of the neighborhood does not incorporate. since carnaby market has received relatively little attention, its place in the neighborhood deserves to be underscored. in the 1730s, carnaby, or (as it was sometimes known through much of the eighteenth century) marlborough market, was still new. its position among the streets of the area was described by thomas salmon in 1732: these streets in a manner surround the pest-house-fields, and before they were built might be reckon’d a part of them: in these fields has lately been erected a handsome market-house, where the nobility and gentry in this part of the town are furnish’d with all manner of provisions.thomas salmon, modern history, vol. 15 (london, 1732) 133. while i have not been able to date precisely when the slaughterhouse mentioned by gardner was erected, it was likely in place by the early 1730s. as gardner indicates, the market had many butchers, and the st. james’s parish vestry was quite aware of their activities. in 1735, thirty-five of the butchers were called before justices of the peace at the vestry itself “for exercising their trades on the lord’s day.”read’s weekly journal 6 sept. 1735. this number alone emphasizes how active the market was and how many animals it must have housed and processed. by the 1748 edition of defoe’s a tour thro’ the whole island of great britain, carnaby market was added to its list of other “flesh-markets.”daniel defoe, a tour, vol. 2 (london, 1748) 139. carnaby market was not listed in the 1742 edition. the market was still considered new through the early 1760s, and its focus on “flesh” was emphasized: “carnaby, or marlborough market, by carnaby street, has marlborough street on the north, and broad street on the south west. this is lately become a very plentiful market for flesh and other provisions.”london and its environs described, vol. 2 (london, 1761) 68. one can glean something of the workings of the market’s slaughterhouse in newspaper accounts and other sources, usually when accidents occurred. in 1747 “a man belonging to mr. phillips, a butcher, in carnaby market, had the misfortune to fall down in the slaughter house with a large knife in his hand, which run into his belly and ripp’d it up.”general evening post 14 may 1747. in 1770 “as the wife of a butcher in carnaby-market was coming down a ladder into the slaughter-house-yard, she fell, and a hook catching hold of her thigh, tore away a large piece of flesh, and she now lies in a dangerous condition.”public advertiser 1 sept. 1770. note that this provides evidence of not only a slaughterhouse but also a “yard.” the slaughterhouse supported related enterprises, such as the removal of tripe and other animal-based products that had commercial value, as evidenced when a tripeman committed suicide: “yesterday morning edward hicks, a tripeman in marlborough-row [which paralleled marshall street], was found hanging in his bed-chamber.”general evening post 1 jan. 1751. while it may not accord with our modern sense of urbanity, this slaughterhouse coexisted alongside what would be considered more refined commercial practices. in the 1750s, for example, an auction was held in a house right across the street from the slaughterhouse: “to be sold by auction, / by miles nightingall / … at a large house opposite the slaughter-house in marshall-street, near carnaby market, by order of the assignees of mr. george green ….”public advertiser 29 nov. 1755. not surprisingly, many of the cows coming to carnaby market came from smithfield market. this trade is evidenced in a notice of robbery in the 1780s: “yesterday morning, a little after six o’clock, as mr. gurney, butcher in carnaby-market, was going to smithfield market, a fellow seized him by the collar in little windmill-street ….”whitehall evening post 1 jan. 1785. lest one think such butchers were simply going to buy pre-slaughtered cows, another news notice, from 1797, offers evidence that cattle were driven from smithfield to carnaby market: “thomas mumford, a drover, said, he was employed yesterday to drive several cattle from smithfield to carnaby-market ….”morning herald 25 july 1797. another account specifies the number of cattle driven by mumford at “25, or 26,” though some of these would have been delivered to other markets along the way.true briton 23 sept. 1797. regardless, this traffic between smithfield and carnaby market was well enough established that by 1809 it was regulated, along with other cattle routes emanating from smithfield: the routes by which the cattle are now driven from smithfield to the markets westward, are as follows: all the cattle going westward (except a few trifling droves) are first driven from smithfield into hatton garden, being a wide, quiet street, where they are divided; and those going … to carnaby market, they pass up holborn, through st. giles’s, and compton street.david hughson, london; being an accurate history, vol. 6 (london, 1809) 598-99. compton street was to the southwest of broad street. to avoid passing 28 broad street, the drovers would have had to have taken a very circuitous route. it must have been, then, a common sight to see many cows being driven onto marshall street, even during blake’s exhibition, and these cows must have been housed somewhere before their slaughter. cows must have been a common sight south of piccadilly as well, where a few blocks to the east of st. james’s church was another active slaughterhouse at st. james’s market, which had its own accidents: “yesterday morning as one of the slaughter-men belonging to st. james’s market, was attempting to knock down an ox, he missed the blow, and the ox suddenly raising his head, catched [sic] the hatchet with his horns ….”morning post 13 aug. 1776. cows and other animals continued to graze at green park, hyde park, and st. james’s park well into the nineteenth century.sheep were grazing in hyde park through at least 1830: morning chronicle 16 june 1830. in july 1771, the middlesex journal reported an increase in grazing fees for cattle: “the earl of orford, as ranger of st. james’s and hyde-park, have given orders to the deputy rangers and park-keepers, that persons keeping cows at grazing in the parks, are to pay an additional sixpence a week, which makes it three shillings, it being before but half a crown.”middlesex journal 16 july 1771. these cows were sometimes lost or stolen, and advertisements directed those who found missing animals where to return them. many of these advertisements reveal that small cowkeepers of st. james’s parish lived on park lane, near hyde park, or on hyde corner, where they would have had easy access to the grazing land of the nearby parks. at least one of the cowkeepers was closer: “strayed out of st. james’s park, a black cow, with a white streak down her back, wide horns, and a long tail. whoever has found her, and will bring her to mr. john shortland, the old dairy in little jermyn-street, shall receive five shillings reward, and all expences [sic]. she has been missing about eleven days.”gazetteer 24 jan. 1767. connected to jermyn street, little jermyn street ran parallel to piccadilly, as jermyn street does today. while i could not find further references to the “old dairy,” it shows evidence of the existence of urban cows and a dairy just down the road from st. james’s church, and when the milk of these cows ran dry, it is likely that shortland or his drover took them to st. james’s market to be butchered, going right past the church itself. there were accusations that many smaller london cowkeepers were slowly being driven out of business by the increase in grazing fees and the enclosure of land bought up by suburban cowkeepers. in 1767, someone complained: mention having been lately made, that milk was soon to increase in price, as well as the other necessaries of life, to the great hardship of the poorer sort, we are told one reason given for this advance is the engrossing of grass fields and inclosures, about this metropolis, by some of the most eminent cow-feeders, one of whom has leased and taken no less than twenty of these fields within these twelve months, from two guineas and a half to three guineas the acre ….st. james’s chronicle 16 april 1767. this tension between larger and smaller cowkeepers continued, and when the price of milk rose again at the end of the century, a letter writer in 1800 argued that the suburban cowkeepers were forming a monopoly against the smaller cowkeepers: what opinion must be entertained of [the large cowkeepers’] audacity, when it is known that three of the smaller cow keepers, satisfied with their present profits, have agreed to sell their milk at the usual rate, and are threatened by the more opulent of their fraternity, for having yielded to the dictates of their conscience and the voice of public opinion? … the great monopolists are very well aware that all the milk these two or three persons could furnish would go but a very little way indeed in the supply of the metropolis; and they also know that it is in their power to crush the small fair dealers.oracle 24 oct. 1800. the larger dealers, then, overshadowed accounts of the trade. in 1794, peter foot described how cows from outlying counties were brought to london cowkeepers, not even mentioning the interior london cattle trade that brought cattle from smithfield to smaller markets: the cows kept for the purpose of furnishing the metropolis with milk, are, in general, bred in yorkshire, lancashire, and staffordshire. the london dealers buy them of the country breeders when they are three years old, and in calf. the prices given for them are from eight guineas to fourteen pounds a cow. the different fairs and markets, which are held at barnet, islington, and other places around the metropolis, furnish the london cow-keepers with the means of keeping up their several stocks. many cows likewise are bought in yorkshire in small lots, from ten to twenty, by private commission, and forwarded to the cow-keepers in and about london.peter foot, general view of the agriculture of the county of middlesex (london, 1794) 82. even foot recognized the presence of cow-keepers “in … london,” and, as i’ll show, they continued to exist through the middle of the nineteenth century. certainly not all agreed that london was a proper place to conduct such activities. john gwynn’s 1766 call for reform, london and westminster improved, exclaimed, “the intolerable practice of holding a market for the sale of live cattle in the center of the metropolis has been loudly and justly complained of for many years past.”john gwynn, london and westminster improved (london, 1766) 18. a letter from 1775 made similar complaints, and also provides evidence of how cows and other animals from the marylebone area made it down to both the oxford market and carnaby market: notwithstanding the numberless complaints of the cruel treatment of cattle about this metropolis, by drovers and their infamous, brutal attendants, scarce a day passes but these savages exhibit their barbarity to public view with impunity, in open defiance of all law, authority and good order, to the shameful disgrace of our police. … in my morning wlak [sic] to paddington (in the purlieus of which i am an inhabitant) i am frequently shocked by the barbarous usage of cattle penned up in a place in marybone-fields, the bottom of portland-street for or after sale. here you will see wretches with large sticks, terminating with a great knob pointed with iron, with which they strike the bullocks on the joints of their legs till they lame them, putting them to the most excruciating torture; and upon these occasions there are generally about half a dozen blackguard, vagrant boys who assist; and the unfeeling monster exults most, and does the greatest feat, who with the fewest blows can make a bullock go upon three legs, or knock off the horn of an inoffensive sheep. from this theatre of detestable cruelty, the poor creatures are dragged by the merciless banditti, bleeding and half dead, to oxford and carnaby markets for slaughter.public advertiser 1 dec. 1775. despite such calls, it would not be until the nineteenth century that these practices were finally changed. this letter reveals that cattle were brought south from marylebone as well as from smithfield in the east. these cattle would have the company of many other animals, some of which were to be slaughtered and others of which were beasts of burden. in september 1751, the whitehall evening post reported an ox goring near both carnaby market and golden square.whitehall evening post 26 sept. 1751. in 1754, “an ox broke loose from a butcher’s in carnaby-market, which (by cruel usage) was drove mad, and did considerable damage about st. james’s.”whitehall evening post 27 june 1754. in 1757, an ox goring occurred on broad street while catherine was pregnant with blake: “on monday an ox toss’d a woman in broad-street, golden-square, and one, [sic] of his horns running into one of her eyes, pushed both out of their sockets, and she is since dead. a man was also gored, near the same place, in such a manner that ’tis thought he cannot live.”british spy 23 april 1757. in 1769, a record-breaking ox was slaughtered: “a few days ago, a butcher in carnaby-market killed an ox, which, exclusive of the hide, head, and other offal, weighed 209 stone, and was reckoned the largest ox ever killed in england.”lloyd’s evening post 26 april 1769. in 1774, another goring occurred near golden square: “an overdrove ox forced his way twice into st. james’s park, where he tossed one man, and threw the loiterers into the utmost confusion. before he could be got out, an irish rapparee saying, the same ox has tossed a man on horseback near golden square ….”morning chronicle 30 april 1774. sheep were probably also a common sight on marshall street: “thomas bath, a poor boy, was thrown down near carnaby market by a butcher’s dog running after some sheep, whereby he was dangerously wounded in the head ….”public advertiser 30 sept. 1761. there were also pork shops at carnaby market, suggesting the presence of pigs: “a woman was detected stealing pork from a shop in carnaby market: the woman’s mother kept a shop in the same business, which makes it appear it was not done through necessity.”morning chronicle 11 jan. 1779. this is confirmed by an account in the morning post from 18 november 1783: a few days since a man in the neighbourhood of broad-street, carnaby market, had a sow with pigs; the sow a few days after pigging, had every appearance of madness, which induced the man to shoot her, and destroy all her young ones, and afterwards gave a porter, near to the place, a gratuity to bury the dam and her young ones; the scoundrel took the money, but instead of burying the sow and her pigs, brought them to carnaby market, where she was bought by as great a rascal, dressed in full form, and carried to leadenhall market for sale. the report suggests that there was nothing remarkable about raising a sow with piglets on broad street itself and that the problem was what was ultimately done with the diseased meat. the impact of these supposedly rural activities on the neighborhood is also seen in the active hay market in the area, which was beginning to be questioned by urban reformers. as gwynn wrote, “if the proposal of windmill-street, &c. should take place, the market for hay, now a nuisance to the neighbourhood, should be removed to some more convenient spot for the purpose, as it would become a much greater thoroughfare than it is at present.”gwynn 132. all of this is to demonstrate the vast number of cattle and other animals populating the blake family neighborhood and st. james’s parish in general. in the middle of the nineteenth century, the slaughterhouse on marshall street, as well as others in the parish, received a lot of attention from urban reformers, including, famously, john snow in his investigation of the broad street or golden square cholera outbreak.see, for example, pamela k. gilbert’s discussion in mapping the victorian social body (albany: state university of new york press, 2004) 55-79. many of these detailed accounts also describe cowsheds, which were used not only to store cattle until they were slaughtered but also to house them for milking. (it is important to remember on this point that the modern distinction between beef and dairy cows was still emerging.)“there was as yet no clear-cut distinction between milch and beef stock, although some types were recognized as being more suitable for the butcher” (robert trow-smith, a history of british livestock husbandry, 1700–1900 [london: routledge, 1959] 19). while i accept that the socioeconomic status of the area had declined since the late eighteenth century, i believe the descriptions of how slaughterhouses and cowsheds existed alongside residential housing and businesses accord with eighteenth-century norms and document residual practices. it should also be noted that these practices surrounding cattle and other livestock continued even after 1820–21, “when carnaby market was closed and its buildings demolished” to make way for the craven chapel.survey of london, vol. 31, the parish of st. james westminster: part two: north of piccadilly, general ed. f. h. w. sheppard (london: athlone press, 1963) 198. if, as davies maintains (relying on atkins), the parish of st. james “was one of the first areas of london ‘to rid itself of the unpleasant environmental consequences of urban cowkeeping’” (davies par. 7), there would have been no reason for a detailed report issued in 1847 by a retired churchwarden that addresses “certain nuisances existing in the parish.” among these nuisances are “14 cowsheds” and “2 slaughter-houses.” the cowsheds around marshall and broad streets are described in detail, and i think the report is worth citing at length. it also documents how milking and butchering coexisted (i have emphasized the references to milk and dairy): cowsheds.—the following particulars gleaned from the report of mr. aulsebrook, a competent medical gentleman, will convince every one that these cowsheds are highly injurious to the health of those who dwell in their vicinity. the condition of the animals, as there shewn, and the effect of it on the quality of the milk drawn from them, are also matters which merit the gravest consideration. “two of these sheds are situated at the angle of hopkins and new streets, golden square, and range one above the other, within a yard of the back of the houses in new street. forty cows are kept in them, two in each seven feet of space. there is no ventilation, save by the unceiled [sic] tile roof, through which the ammoniacal vapours escape into the houses, to the destruction of the health of the inmates. besides the animals, there is at one end a large tank for grains, a storeplace [sic] for turnips and hay, and between them a receptacle into which the liquid manure drains, and the solid is heaped. at the other end is a capacious vault, with a brick partition, one division of which contains mangel-wurzel, turnips, and potatoes, and the other, a dirty, yellow, sour-smelling liquid, called brewers’ wash; a portion of which is pumped up, and mixed with the food of the cows. the neighbours are subject also to the annoyance of manure carts which frequently stand some time in front of their houses …. “at the opposite side of the houses in the same street is another shed, ‘with even less possibility of ventilation than in those just described.’ thirty-two cows stand side by side, two in each space of seven feet, as above. in marshall street there is a third establishment, containing 28 cows. in a wall on one side, overlooking a yard in which is a slaughter-house, are several grated openings, but they are carefully covered with pieces of sacking, as if to prevent all possible admission of air. in this shed are receptacles for vegetables and grains, as before; the manure tank holds 12 tons; and that for brewers’ wash, 600 gallons.” … in this atmosphere, reeking with all these pestiferous effluvia, the poor creatures are kept close shut up, night and day, till, their milk failing, they are consigned to the butcher. … “it is obvious, that much of the milk sold at the west end of the metropolis, is elaborated in the udders of animals unnaturally treated ….” slaughter-houses.—a century hence, perhaps, the fact will almost be doubted, that a people so eminently practical as the english, so alive to all questions of public decency and public utility,—should have tolerated the existence of slaughter-houses with all the disgusting accompaniments, in the crowded streets of their metropolis. surely the time cannot be far distant, when, following the laudable example of the continental states, abattoirs, will be established in proper places, and regulations enforced by which cleanliness and order shall take the place of disorder and filth, and the minimum of suffering be substituted for the maximum of cruelty. the slaughter-houses alluded to are in the vicinity of the cow sheds; and there is in this contiguity a most striking propriety! … in jermyn street, and within a few doors of the haymarket, animals may be seen in the area of one of the houses, waiting to be killed, amidst blood and offal and a most sickening fever-engendering stench. when st. james’s market was destroyed, to make way for certain improvements, the commissioners of woods and forests pretty well neutralized any good effected by the strange oversight of allowing the offensive nuisance of the slaughter-house to continue, by re-leasing the ground to a pork butcher. pigs were at one time actually fed upon the offal. every source of disgust usually attending such scenes, [sic] is in this case aggravated by the slaughtering-place being not less than ten steps below the level of the street: a circumstance which further gives occasion to one of the most cruel and brutalizing exhibitions conceivable. the sheep are forced to descend the stairs, and the recoiling cattle are dragged down into this den of blood and pollution, by means of a windlass and a rope attached to their horns.a retired churchwarden, an address to the inhabitants of st. james’s westminster (london: james ridgway, 1847) 7-12. the exclamation regarding how people in the future would doubt the existence of these activities in “practical” london is important to note, since it frames how these cultural practices were excavated from history and are only now being slowly recovered.see, for example, peter atkins, ed., animal cities: beastly urban histories (farnham: ashgate, 2012), and hannah velten, beastly london: a history of animals in the city (london: reaktion books, 2013). the report describes only three of the fourteen cowsheds in the parish, and in these alone there were one hundred cows. moreover, these cowsheds surrounded what was once the blake family home—besides the one on marshall street, the others mentioned were on hopkins street and new street, which intersect with broad street from the south to the immediate east of poland street. as the report indicates, the cows in all of these cowsheds were there to be milked “till, their milk failing, they are consigned to the butcher.” the shed on marshall street must have existed in the eighteenth century, and even if one argues that those on hopkins and new streets were built later, they and the other cowsheds that existed in 1847 must have been an extension of eighteenth-century practices and customs. keeping in mind the existence of shortland’s “old dairy” at the west end of jermyn street in 1767, we see clear continuities in supposedly rural activities in the urban parish of st. james. in 1855, the sessional papers for the house of lords published a detailed report on the marshall street slaughterhouse and the practices of livestock slaughter by smaller-scale butchers. the report illustrates how the practices endured in private homes into the nineteenth century: there is one wholesale slaughter-house in the district, of which great complaints are made in the neighbourhood; it is situated at the back of marshall street, and belongs to mr. holmes, a butcher, in silver street. here, on an average, five oxen and seven sheep are slaughtered daily. … the whole of the blood, entrails, &c. are bought by contractors, who remove them daily …. notwithstanding the apparent cleanliness of this slaughter-house, great complaints are made in the neighbourhood of the smells which come from it, and especially the smell of sour grains, on which the beasts in an adjoining cow-shed are fed, and which is represented as being worse than that created by the removal of the refuse. we have taken this slaughter-house as a favorable example of such places, but for an average specimen of the smaller slaughter-houses, we mention one at 19, silver street, much complained of by the neighbours; for detailed information as to which, we beg to refer you to the special report upon it made to the board of health by one of us, from which it will be seen that in this as in most of the other small slaughter-houses, part of the basement, commonly the kitchen, dark and ill ventilated, is the place in which they kill. we think that this, and consequently all other slaughter-houses in the district, must exercise a serious influence on the health of their respective neighbourhoods, and ought not to be allowed to exist in so crowded a part of london. the smaller butchers, particularly those in berwick street, who kill only a few sheep weekly, almost invariably allow the whole of the blood and part of the offal to run into the sewer, as it is not worth contractors' while to take such small quantities.the sessional papers printed by order of the house of lords, vol. 37 (london: george e. eyre, 1855) 140-41. by describing the marshall street slaughterhouse as having “an adjoining cow-shed,” the report echoes the churchwarden’s account of how the cowshed and slaughterhouse coexisted. according with the evidence of the tripeman on marlborough row (see par. 7 above), the “contractors” removing “blood, entrails, &c.” represent, once again, a continuity with eighteenth-century practices. as the last two paragraphs suggest, in addition to slaughterhouses, like the one on marshall street, butchers in the neighborhood would slaughter their animals in their homes. this again implies that they had to have a place to store them. there is also evidence that the more genteel kept dairy cows in stables. a 1788 advertisement for a dairy cow that directs customers to a carnaby market butcher even documents that such practices were performed in the blake neighborhood: to be sold, a very good alderney cow, calved last sunday; the price twelve guineas, with her calf, or ten without; the cow has been used to a stable, is very gentle, and would supply a family in town with milk and very fine cream; the reason of her being parted with is, the owner having at present too many of the same kind. enquire of mr. siney, butcher, carnaby market.world 13 march 1788. while the location of the stable is not indicated, marshall street itself had at least one stable, as evidenced in an advertisement from 1737: “some back buildings behind the said houses in marshall-street aforesaid, consisting of a stable and warehouse.”london gazette 15 jan. 1737. in addition, in the area south of oxford street and north of golden square alone, there were multiple stables near the blakes that were either shown on rocque’s 1746 map or recorded in newspapers: three off marlborough mews, one off blenheim street, one off silver street,daily advertiser 27 sept. 1743; public advertiser 13 april 1775. a large stableyard off queen street,daily advertiser 7 jan. 1777. two off leicester street,daily advertiser 20 aug. 1778. a livery stable at nailer’s yard,public advertiser 7 june 1765. one on king street,daily advertiser 3 june 1776. and several near golden square at locations sometimes not specified.daily advertiser 8 july 1772, 27 jan. 1773, 7 jan. 1794; world 25 aug. 1788. the stableyard off queen street even leased stables in the mid-1770s: “to be lett, in one of the most commodious stable-yards, at st. james’s end of the town, some very good stables and coach-houses, with every other convenience that can be required.”daily advertiser 9 dec. 1774. cows and horses can easily coexist in the same stables, especially if the cow is, as emphasized by the 13 march 1788 advertisement, “gentle.” the prevalence—and, indeed, ordinariness—of cows and other livestock kept and slaughtered in blake’s neighborhood do not prove that the advertisement for the maid was for blake’s family, but both add a fundamental layer to our understanding of blake’s and his family’s material existence. to close with another dangerous speculation, if there was anyone in the family who would have wanted a cow, it probably would have been that “country girl from the little village of walkeringham” (davies par. 13). colored copies of blair’s grave (1808, 1813): a census colored copies of blair’s grave (1808, 1813): a census by g. e. bentley, jr. g. e. bentley, jr., (gbentley@chass.utoronto.ca) published thomas macklin (1752–1800), picture-publisher and patron, creator of the macklin bible (mellen press, 2016), with a section on blake. the information in this census derives from auction catalogues and from the copies themselves when traced. they are not described at all in martin butlin, the paintings and drawings of william blake (1981), or in blake books (1977), blake books supplement (1995), and “william blake and his circle” in blake (1994–), except incidentally. according to sale catalogues of blake’s works 1791–2015: a catalogue somewhat raisonné <http://​uoft.​me/​blake-​collection>, 644 copies of blair’s grave (“1808,” “1813”)of course some of these were offered more than once; william bateson’s copy appears in seven sales. were offered by 2015. of these, only six sales offered colored copies, some of them more than once. robert n. essick has provided crucial help in compiling this catalogue of colored copies of blair’s grave. he believes that none of the coloring is by blake or his wife. copy a (see illus. 1 and 2) location: huntington librarycall number 54049. robert n. essick, “blake in the marketplace, 2013,” blake 47.4 (spring 2014), says that “its tinting is more skillful, restrained, and convincing than the vershbow copy. … but i hesitate to ascribe the tinting to blake or his wife, catherine.” binding: inscribed “edward aubrey | 1809”aubrey is not in the blair subscription list and is not otherwise known to blake scholarship. perhaps he is the edward aubrey who was born in london in 1754 and died in 1827 in canada. description: 1808 quarto 1. “the descent of man into the vale of death. | ........’ tis here all meet!” (plate size 27.9 x 17.0 cm.) (see enlargement). huntington library, san marino, california. call number 54049. image courtesy of the william blake archive. in the coloring, the rocks at the cave mouth are dark gray, the other rocks shades of brown and gray, and the sky pale gray. the clothing is pink for the woman at the top, the woman behind the man on crutches, the woman with a baby at the bottom, and the child at bottom left. it is green for the woman with a child behind the man on crutches and the child before the bottom woman, and blue for the boy in front of the woman with a child and the shirt of the man with clasped hands near the bottom. the clothing is yellow for the running boy behind the man on crutches and the trouser tights of the man with clasped hands. in blake’s watercolor for “the descent of man” (23.4 x 13.5 cm.) the sky is blue, the rocks are brown and gray, and the figures are touched with pale brown or very pale blue (man on crutches and the woman and man ahead of him), but most are uncolored. there is of course no reason why an artist should not make changes in the coloring of different copies of the same design, but the colors in the huntington copy seem meticulous but not blake-like. 2. “the day of judgment” (plate size 32.0 x 25.3 cm.) (see enlargement). huntington library, san marino, california. call number 54049. image courtesy of the william blake archive. in the coloring, the marginal sky is dark blue, the clouds in christ’s background and the wings of the zoas pale blue, the radiance beyond christ’s surrounding angels mustard yellow, the flames pale red, the background of the falling souls at right gray, and there are touches of pale pink on the flesh. christ is pale purple, there are touches of blue on some humans on each side of him, including those holding the great book at left and the woman at bottom left, and the book holders at right are pale purple. copy b location: huntington librarycall number 112823. description: the holy bible, 6th ed. (dublin: james reilly, 1794) with title pages saying it was “extra-illustrated with over eight thousand prints, etchings, drawings, etc. collected by augustin daly, and arranged and placed by henry blackwell, and extended from one to forty-two volumes. … easter 1892.” the extra illustrations include pls. 8-9, colored, from blair’s grave. history: (1) collected by augustin daly, arranged and placed by henry blackwell in 1892; (2) bought in 1918 by henry huntington and bequeathed to the huntington library. copy c location: untraced binding: “mediæval morocco, joints, vellum linings, gilt edges, the sides embossed with two of blake’s designs, symbolising life and death, with emblematic borders. (miss moore)” description: 1808 quarto history: (1) offered in sotheby, wilkinson, & hodge, catalogue of bindings by the guild of women-binders, 10 december 1900 (london, 1900), lot 1, “blair (r.) the grave, a poem, large paper, portrait and 12 plates by william blake, hand-coloured proofs, mediæval morocco, joints, vellum linings, gilt edges, the sides embossed with two of blake’s designs, symbolising life and death, with emblematic borders. (miss moore)   imp. 4to. 1808   *** coloured impressions of these plates were never issued, and miss cardew was commissioned to colour this set. the experiment is thought to be highly successful.” copy d location: alan parker description: title page only for the 1808 folio history: (1) offered in john windle, catalogue forty-two (2006), no. 5, “colored, clearly by a contemporary hand … [with] a very strong connection to blake’s and mrs. blake’s palette,”according to essick, “blake in the marketplace, 2006,” blake 40.4 (spring 2007): 131, “the hand coloring shows some skill on the descending figure, but amateurish carelessness in the coloring of the flames. this colorist would not seem to be the same as the artist who colored all the blake pls. in a copy of the 1808 quarto issue now in the huntington library.” and sold to (2) alan parker. copy e location: untraced binding: “gilt, blue straight-grain morocco, gilt edges, by [c.] hering with his ticket, one cover partly loose, with the bookplate of thomas adam,” “there are a few offsets; without the stothard prospectus; … one cover partly loose,” “plates washed, bleached and re-sized, slightly browned, some slight spotting (chiefly to margins) of some plates, occasional offsetting to text,” “inner dentelles gilt, unobtrusive repairs to boards, rebacked, collector’s quarter blue morocco box,” 34.4 x 27.5 cm. description: 1813. coloring mostly or entirely after 1840. history: (1) offered at parke-bernet galleries, the renowned library formed by the late william h. woodin:william hartman woodin (1868–1934), railroad freight-car builder, secretary of the treasury in 1933. first editions, original drawings, paintings, caricatures: the work of the great english illustrators and authors of the xvii-xix centuries: alken, the three cruikshanks, rowlandson, gillray and others … now the property of the estate of his wife, the late annie jessup woodin, sold by order of the executor, part two, 6-8 january 1942 (new york, 1942), lot 60, blair, the grave (1813), with the hand coloring of the prints “probably done by mrs. blake”; (2) offered at parke-bernet galleries, catalogue of mrs. david gage joyce of chicago, “a maryland lady,” a midwestern collector, and others, 23-24 november 1943 (new york, 1943), first day, property of “a maryland lady,”the maryland lady was christine alexander graham, whose bookplate appears in songs of innocence (a) (lot 48). lot 51, blair, the grave (1808) [sic], quarto, all plates but the frontispiece [portrait of blake by phillips] “finely colored by hand,” “probably colored at the time of publication”; there are a few offsets; without the stothard prospectus; gilt, blue straight-grain morocco, gilt edges, by hering with his ticket, one cover partly loose, with the bookplate of thomas adam [$4000]; (3) offered by sotheby’s, 13-14 may 1999 (london, 1999), lot 122, blair, the grave (1813), folio, “coloured in [sic] hand throughout, portrait frontispiece of blake by shiavonetti [sic] after phillips, plates washed, bleached and re-sized, slightly browned, some slight spotting (chiefly to margins) of some plates, occasional offsetting to text, later blue straight-grained morocco gilt by c. hering, inner dentelles gilt, unobtrusive repairs to boards, rebacked, collector’s quarter blue morocco box, bookplate of thomas adam (sold in the woodin sale, parke bernet, 6 jan 1942, lot 60), [keynes 82], 344 by 275mm, folio”; “the colouring of the first plate (engraved additional title) is probably contemporary, and there are possibly some traces of original colouring in the subsequent plates. however, at least two of the colours in these plates (pink and verdigris) are post-1840, and the plates appear to have been extensively re-coloured at some time after this date.” (estimate £3000-5000) [sold for £3680]. copy f location: untraced description: 1813 quarto history: (1) offered by christie’s, the collection of arthur & charlotte vershbow, part four: the neoclassical, romantic, symbolist and modern periods, 29 october 2013 (new york, 2013), lot 789, blair, the grave (1813), “text watermarked ‘edmeads & pine 1802’ or ‘edmeads & co 1811’,” “all finely hand colored,” “possibly the master copy, colored by blake,” acquired from the san francisco dealer john “scopazzi, 1971.”according to john windle, scopazzi (1910–87) “specialized in acquiring uncolored maps and prints and having them professionally colored in period styles” (essick, “blake in the marketplace, 2013,” blake 47.4 [spring 2014]). essick continues: “i doubt that this copy of the grave was colored by scopazzi.” “according to martin butlin, the present copy appears to have been colored by blake himself”;essick and windle are dubious about this claim: “john windle and i suspect that the hand coloring is c. 1850 or later. the heavy coloring of flames and the tinting of angels’ wings in multiple pastel hues seem particularly uncharacteristic of blake” (essick, “blake in the marketplace, 2013”). “butlin proposes that the coloring of this copy is consistent with blake’s coloring scheme, and two plates show ‘heavy areas’ typical of his coloring.” “death of the strong wicked man” and “the reunion of the soul & the body” are reproduced, showing very blake-like coloring, especially in the red flames. (estimate: [september $60,000-$80,000, reduced by 2 october to $40,000-$60,000, restored by 4 october to $60,000-$80,000]) [sold for $93,750]. review: eric pyle, william blake’s illustrations for dante’s divine comedy eric pyle. william blake’s illustrations for dante’s divine comedy: a study of the engravings, pencil sketches and watercolors. jefferson, nc: mcfarland, 2015. vi + 283 pp. 8 pp. of color plates. $65.00, softcover. reviewed by mark a. sherman mark a. sherman (msherman@risd.edu) is professor of literary arts and studies at rhode island school of design in providence, ri. the divine comedy of dante alighieri is a poem thematically concerned with all possible modes of vision—physical as well as metaphorical—and some parts are so richly imagistic that it has been the object of illustrators’ work from its earliest distribution in manuscript to the present day. recent visual artists inspired by the poem include robert rauschenberg and salvador dalí. few of its illustrators, however, have been visionary poets themselves, so there is something intrinsically unique and engaging about blake’s project, undertaken at the very end of his life, to illustrate the comedy. before eric pyle’s book, the only full-length, comprehensive consideration of blake’s dante had been albert s. roe’s blake’s illustrations to the divine comedy (princeton university press, 1953).morton paley devoted a substantial chapter to the subject in the traveller in the evening (2003). less ambitious books than pyle’s about the designs include ursula hoff, william blake’s illustrations to dante’s divine comedy (1961); milton klonsky, blake’s dante (1980); david bindman, william blake: the divine comedy (2000); and the huge new taschen edition, william blake: the drawings for dante’s divine comedy (2014), with text by sebastian schütze and maria antonietta terzoli. the date of that study alone suggests a reassessment of the subject is in order, and pyle makes it his primary objective to refute many points of roe’s analysis, which saw blake vigorously negating dante’s imputed theology at every turn. pyle, for his part, advocates a complex, nuanced relationship toward the work in which blake undertook the more congenial enterprise of “correcting” dante, a poet whom he admired but whose religious views were at odds with his own antinomianism. pyle’s method throughout this book is to identify in blake’s drawings the expression of theological differences between the two poets that drove blake to “complete” the florentine’s visionary narrative. as pyle describes it, blake saw the relationship as “a partnership” (14), “a respectful engagement, full of loving corrections, the development of opportunities missed in the original poem, and the fulfillment of those parts where dante, through his more restricted view of god, fell short” (267-68). one consequence of this approach, however, is that by operating in a primarily negative mode focused on blake’s disagreements with dante, pyle largely fails to explore the remainder of blake’s admiring relationship to the comedy. the book is organized in four parts: “blake, his masters and rivals,” “english dante,” “blake’s criticism of dante,” and “the illustrations.” however, it might be better understood as divided into two major portions, nearly equal in page allocation: the first discursive, in which pyle offers via survey the historical and philosophical contexts for blake’s work, and the second ekphrastic, wherein he describes blake’s images and corresponding episodes from the comedy, with occasional importation of the salient philosophical points explicated in the book’s first half. pyle clearly has an intimate knowledge of the philosophical movements contributing to blake’s romanticism, as he does with the intricacies of blake’s own mythological system and the whole of his poetic oeuvre. indeed, the readings he offers of various works in blake’s canon are on a par with the most insightful comments he has to offer regarding blake and dante. the most significant division pyle sees between dante and blake is marked by the historical shift in cosmology and metaphysics initiated by thinkers such as nicholas of cusa (1401–64) and jacob boehme (1575–1624). that transition left dante on one side, within the aristotelian-ptolemaic cosmos, and blake on the other, amid general acceptance of post-cusan infinity. but the point of greatest difference between the two poets is dante’s isolation of transcendent divinity from the created universe, whereas blake adhered to a philosophy of divine immanence (67-68). for blake, one’s inability to perceive the presence of god was the result of faulty perception, and it was the revolutionary purpose of his art—both poetic and visual—to render the imagination capable of such perception. furthermore, blake couldn’t endorse the notion that god would condemn anyone to perpetual damnation, so the very premise of dante’s inferno is flawed (80). and finally, a related point: the infernal condition, such as it might be, could exist for blake only as a state and not as an intrinsic characteristic of an individual. this position puts blake and dante, in pyle’s estimation, on opposite sides regarding the dynamics of fall and redemption. appropriately, then, the distribution of blake’s drawings relative to dante’s three canticles is proportionate to the areas of his concern. while the butlin catalogue inventories 102 images for blake’s dante project, pyle counts 100. there are seventy-two illustrations for the inferno, compared to the twenty for purgatorio, where dante and blake were most in agreement—especially regarding the terrestrial paradise. and blake devoted only eight illustrations to paradiso because “blake’s main theme as an artist is the fall and redemption of mankind, not what mankind does after it is redeemed” (247). among the targets that remain are dante’s interest in empire and monarchy, his advocacy of an aristotelian mean (against blake’s enthusiasm for spiritual extremes), his emphasis on reason and law (consistently an instrument of oppression in blake’s eyes), and his opinion that art is inadequate to express divinity, evident mostly through his use of ineffability topoi in paradiso. the artistic magnitude of the comedy, as well as its own extravagant imagery, compels most illustrators toward a literal rendering of what dante describes of his otherworld. blake is among the few to innovate freely with the narrative, and for pyle this means that any novelty in the illustrations is attributable solely to blake’s impulse to correct the comedy. however, the degree to which blake’s innovations might not actually be departures from the dantean text or in opposition to it, but rather readings of it, might be worth more attention than pyle affords. this shortcoming in the book arises most often in the latter section, where the illustrations are discussed in the mode of a descriptive catalogue rather than a critical investigation. few texts come to the reader with a critical tradition and apparatus quite so formidable as does the comedy. among the perils facing its readers is the tendency to reify its poetic fiction into an expository theological treatise closed off to substantial critical engagement because it has already been thought through. moreover, a work like the comedy is particularly susceptible to a kind of ossification for the way in which it seems to embody the spirit of its time, even though it might have been written in resistance to many of the assumptions of its own age. yet, for a poet like blake, the radical element in the work of a dante or milton would seem to be what’s most attractive—the core of its visionary potential that needs to be emphasized. dante’s poem forthrightly addresses theological topics, but it does so by way of a fantastic, highly metaphorical poetic fiction. therefore, to read the comedy as an exposition of orthodox theological discourse poses a particularly complex hermeneutic challenge. pyle at one point acknowledges that blake recognized dante as a fellow writer of poetic fiction, but throughout his discussion the comedy’s fantastic otherworld is assumed to posit an invariably orthodox theology. its imposing structure might invite this sort of reading, but there are enough anomalies to indicate that dante was thinking around the very structures he represented. (for example, what is the trojan ripheus doing in paradiso? what do readers have to question about the poem’s theological assertions in order to normalize such an exception to its own rules?) at a certain point the reader has to ask whether blake was indeed rescuing the comedy from itself or offering an interpretation of the work that was at least potentially and radically heterodox. for example, blake’s first image depicts the moment in inferno 1 when the pilgrim, fleeing the three allegorical beasts in the woods, encounters an angelic, levitated virgil. this is where pyle establishes his fundamental opposition to roe, because roe sees the watercolor as consistent with dante’s description of the opening scene. pyle is right to note that the leafy setting, the cuddly countenances of the beasts, and the androgynous depictions of dante and virgil strike a very different register from that of the inferno’s “selva oscura.” but a point at which he finds greatest fault in roe (see p. 14) is in respect to the conspicuous presence of an ocean in the background. pyle insists that there is no ocean in the opening of canto 1, and this is true if one restricts the scene to a reified place where the action occurs. however, the comedy rarely supports such readings, and dante is never averse to fostering an ambiguous relationship between the poem’s own rhetoric and the thing it describes. if one pays attention to the poetry, however, it is quite clear that there is an ocean, or its equivalent, in the epic’s very first simile: and as a man, with difficult short breath, forespent with toiling, ’scap’d from sea to shore, turns to the perilous wide waste, and stands at gaze; e’en so my spirit, that yet fail’d struggling with terror, turn’d to view the straits, that none hath pass’d and liv’d. (inferno 1.21-26, trans. cary [1814]) here dante introduces a motif that the poet will return to often, as he does, for example, in the initial appearance of geryon as a swimmer coming up from the deep (16.128); both of these images suggest an analogy to certain of blake’s metaphorical waters, such as the “sea of time & space” in the letter to butts dated 10 january 1802, or the element in which isaac newton is immersed in blake’s color print. in pyle’s reading, blake’s evident sympathy for certain individuals among the damned marks a distinct departure from dante, as in his illustrations of capaneus (canto 14) and the thief vanni fucci (canto 25). yet dante, too, exhibits compassion for and sympathy with some of the shades he encounters. in certain cases the nature of his relationship is left ambiguous. (why does he swoon at the end of francesca’s story? the debate on that topic continues.) but elsewhere his admiration is quite clear, as in his evident respect for farinata among the epicureans of canto 10. there is no doubt, though, that he finds the three florentine sodomites to be so attractive that he is compelled to jump in among them (16.47-52), and even virgil advises the pilgrim to treat them with courtesy (16.13-15). regarding blake’s depiction of the three florentines, pyle notes blake’s free thought on sexuality and his refusal to moralize sexual behavior. granted, the superstructure of the inferno can qualify dante’s enthusiasm here—the three are incontrovertibly among the damned—but the genuine affection and admiration on display, despite the force of place, here affords a moment for the reader to question facile assumptions about the nature of sin and punishment. nor should we ignore the fact that this encounter in canto 16 is immediately preceded by the very affectionate reunion the pilgrim has with brunetto latini. the point is that blake might actually have read dante’s fiction in a way that doesn’t require quite the degree of redemptive assistance pyle imagines. blake might be foregrounding aspects of the comedy he finds appealing and that dante requires his readers to rethink. pyle’s descriptions of blake’s illustrations would be enhanced if they were integrated with engaged readings of the comedy. this is equally the case with the drawings for paradiso, the canticle that supposedly held the least interest for blake, and which many artists deemphasize. a notable exception is giovanni di paolo (british library yates thompson ms 36), who created for it an ambitious program of illustrations. most distinctive about di paolo’s approach is the way that he frequently renders rhetorical elements of the poem, such as similes and metaphors, in the same pictorial space as the narrative events, suggesting his recognition that the significance of the comedy exceeds that of the mere adventure recounted. blake would seem capable of a similarly adventurous approach, and indeed it is in his drawings of dante’s heaven that he departs from the narrative most conspicuously, when he includes his recording angel as a substitute for the sphere of jupiter and its imperial eagle. blake was a forthright opponent of imperial power, and pyle presents a convincing reason why dante’s spectacular eagle might be rendered as a comparatively doltish, earthbound scribe: blake had no use for the idea of divine justice relative to the power of a direct vision of god (251). but his explanation here sidesteps consideration of the most prominent thematic feature in this episode in the comedy, which is among the most visually stunning of dante’s imagining; namely, the conspicuous role of writing, an activity that the eagle, the recording angel, dante, and blake all have in common. in dante, the sphere of jupiter presents an episode with metapoetic resonance. could blake have noticed that? might his illustration, even in the way that it displaces jupiter’s eagle, foreground concerns both poets had about the nature of their craft? to conclude his reading of paradiso, pyle offers a final refutation of roe when he considers blake’s image of a chained bible in the queen of heaven in glory (paradiso 31-33) against the canticle’s concluding image of the “one volume” of the universe “clasp’d of love” (33.81). roe interprets the chained bible as evidence that for blake the souls there depicted had rejected true religion (chains being blake’s visual metaphor for newtonian mechanics and rationalism generally). pyle holds blake’s sketch to be far less oppositional and directly related to the transcendent, unifying codex that concludes the canto. where blake does see a problem with dante’s conclusion, he says, is in dante’s irremediable estrangement of the human and the divine. blake’s god, as noted above, is absolutely immanent, whereas dante’s is always separate from man (260). however, if pyle were to continue his reading beyond the image of a single volume bound by love, which appears early in the final canto, he would find a concluding vision (immediately before the ultimate ineffability topos of the squared circle) of a human face precisely where one would expect the ultimate vision of the divine: thou smiledst; on that circling, which in thee seem’d as reflected splendour, while i mus’d; for i therein, methought, in its own hue beheld our image painted: steadfastly i therefore por’d upon the view. (paradiso 33.118-22, trans. cary) “pinta de la nostra effige” (line 121)—painted with our image—that is, the shared image of god and humanity. upon reaching this quasi-blakean vision that fuses the human and the divine through art, the vision of the poet-narrator dante fails, in part as a practical narrative device to conclude the poem but also as a gesture of thematic conclusion, which is to say dante’s visionary progress goes no further not because of inability alone, but perhaps in acknowledgment, at least in blake’s reading, that there might in fact be nothing more to be seen. pyle’s treatment of these illustrations lays some important critical groundwork and offers an overdue reassessment of blake’s dante. an approach to the comedy as poetry that addresses theological problems rather than as a theological treatise in verse might reveal more areas in which blake found commonality with his visionary predecessor and yield a different sense of what the illustrations reflect. with this book, pyle has opened the door to further reassessment of blakean intertextuality. the book’s prose is stylistically accessible to undergraduate readers, generally well edited, and adequately illustrated with ninety-six mostly small images (twelve of which are in color).pyle provides no images for seven illustrations that he discusses: fortune (p. 162), cacus (198), ulysses (206), nimrod (211), cato (221), the envious (235), and the first image of paradiso (246). my blake (part 2: in england) my blake by dmitri nikolaevich smirnovalso known by the pen names dmitri n. smirnov and d. smirnov-sadovsky. dmitri nikolaevich smirnov (dmitrismirnov@hotmail.co.uk) is a russian and british composer, born in minsk into a family of opera singers and now living in st. albans, hertfordshire. he studied at the moscow conservatory 1967–72 and in 1979 was blacklisted as one of “khrennikov’s seven” at the sixth congress of the union of soviet composers for unapproved participation in some festivals of soviet music in the west. he was one of the founders of russia’s new acm (association for contemporary music), established in moscow in 1990. smirnov has resided in england since 1991 and has taught at goldsmiths, university of london, since 2003. many of his works reflect his fascination with the poetry and art of william blake. he has translated into russian all the literary works of blake except the poem vala, or the four zoas, which he is now working on. part 2: in englandpart 1: in russia appeared in blake 51.4 (spring 2018). england welcomed us cordially in 1991. our concert was a success: my jacob’s ladder, a musical depiction of william blake’s magnificent jacob’s dream of almost two hundred years before, came from moscow to london to be played by the london sinfonietta under the baton of a russian conductor. it seemed to me that londoners appreciated this. the horn concerto by my wife, elena, was equally well received. after the concert we were invited to the garrick club, and together with our small children had a joyful dinner until late at night. the next morning we moved from kensington’s tara hotel; our friends took great care of us and took turns in kindly offering us temporary shelter. the newspaper reviews were positive: “its spiralling motifs and sun-lit instrumental colours [made] a dreamlike counterpart to the visionary william blake picture which inspired it”; “inspired by william blake’s drawing of the biblical story, this beautifully crafted piece is sectional, with contrasted instrumental groupings marking the boundaries. it is also refined, revealing sensitivity for instrumental characteristics and a predilection for lyrical phrases. the ending, when the first violin emerges from a lovely texture of celesta, vibraphone, bells and the higher stringed instruments is a moment of transcendent magic. it also exemplifies the economy of smirnov’s writing: not a note was inessential.”geoffrey norris, “russian roulette,” daily telegraph 20 april 1991; stephen pettitt, “concert ls/rozhdestvensky qeh,” times 20 april 1991. our publishers were pleased and decided to print both our scores. soon kathleen raine invited all of us for a cup of tea. the tea party lasted more than three hours, and we had a long and wonderful talk about blake. i told her about my two operas based on blake’s early prophetic poems and asked for advice about what to choose for my next blake project. with no hesitation she showed me blake’s illustrations for the book of job, which decorated the walls above her staircase, and said that they would be wonderful subjects for a dramatic musical work. as a present she gave me a few of her books about blake, as well as her own selected poems and autobiographies. she also gave us an excellent referral to her friend john lane, an artist and head of the dartington hall trust. she added, “he is crazy about william blake exactly like we are, and he will definitely help you.” my first composition written in england was a song cycle: short poems, op. 60, setting five lyrical miniatures by raine, in every line of which i found echoes of blake: this little house no smaller than the world nor i lonely dwelling in all that is. i completed the work on 10 may and presented a copy of my manuscript to the poet during our next meeting in her little house in chelsea. she was delighted and asked me to send her a recording when it was performed. 1. with kathleen raine in november 1991. at the beginning of june i received a commission from the composers ensemble to write a piece for soprano and five instruments (two clarinets, viola, cello, and double bass). i decided that it was a good opportunity to set to music blake’s “silent, silent night,” which was described by thomas mann in his doctor faustus, the story of the fictitious composer adrian leverkühn: at the time when i [serenus zeitblom] moved to freising, adrian was busy with the composition of some songs and lieder, german and foreign, or rather, english. in the first place he had gone back to william blake and set to music a very strange poem of this favourite author of his. “silent, silent night,” in four stanzas of three lines each, the last stanza of which dismayingly enough runs:   but an honest joy does itself destroy for a harlot coy.   these darkly shocking verses the composer had set to very simple harmonies, which in relation to the tone-language of the whole had a “falser,” more heart-rent, uncanny effect than the most daring harmonic tensions, and made one actually experience the common chord growing monstrous.thomas mann, doctor faustus, trans. h. t. lowe-porter (1949; bombay: oxford university press, 1959) 263-64. when i finished this work and reread the episode above i felt as if mann had been writing this about me and my new composition. 2. the beginning of “silent, silent night,” op. 61, no. 1. after the beautiful performance of this song by the soprano mary wiegold and the ensemble conducted by john woolrich on 20 july 1991 at the cheltenham festival, i added two more songs—“the tyger” (songs of experience) and “to see a world in a grain of sand” (“auguries of innocence,” pickering manuscript)—and entitled the work three blake songs for voice and chamber ensemble, op. 61. nine years later i created a new version of the cycle, four blake songs for soprano and string quartet, op. 61a, by adding one more song, “a divine image” (songs of experience), borrowed from my opera tiriel. almost every week my family and i moved from one friend’s house to another; we had already changed places in london ten times before barry gavin, a tv film director, suggested we stay at his cottage in the village of cwm in shropshire, where we happily spent the whole of july. i thought about kathleen raine’s suggestion that i follow blake’s illustrations for the book of job to create some dramatic musical work. after looking at blake’s engravings i chose four of them, using the captions above or below each of the designs as the texts for narration: 1. “there was a man in the land of uz” (job 1.1-2), 2. “the fire of god is fallen from heaven” (1.16), 3. “let the day perish wherein i was born” (3.3), 4. “then the lord answered job out of the whirlwind” (38.1-2). i decided to limit myself to a solo instrument, the clarinet, using the player as also a narrator; the player/narrator reads the text, then plays the melodic phrases representing the same words, translated into notes by a coding system where each letter corresponds to a certain note: 3. four studies after the book of job (job’s studies), op. 62, no. 1, code of letter=note. when turned into music it looks like this: 4. the beginning of four studies after the book of job (job’s studies), op. 62, no. 1. this quite unusual and experimental opus, four studies after the book of job (job’s studies), op. 62, premiered on 25 october 1991 at ohio state university. it was magnificently delivered by the clarinetist bruce curlette and sounded akin to a strange mysterious ritual, a sort of sermon in music. for other movements, see <https://​www.​youtube.​com/​results?​search_query=​dmitri​+n.​+smirnov​+job%27s​+studies>. meanwhile i received a message from devon: john lane invited us to dartington hall on 8 august to discuss how he could help us. this coincided with the second performance of my “silent, silent night,” which took place at the dartington summer music festival. before our meeting my family and i walked around the beautiful garden and suddenly found a big stone tablet with a carved, gold-plated inscription: to see a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wild flower hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour. it made me feel that this place would be hospitable to us. 5. in the dartington garden. i told john about our discovery, and he answered that he was responsible for this tablet and the inscription. he asked his secretary to take our children for a long walk, then, after two hours of exciting conversation mainly focused on our mutual interest in blake, declared that he had decided to provide us with a spacious six-room house for one year, beginning the next april—we had only to cover our gas and electricity bills. he drove us to our future house and around all the attractions in the neighborhood. all this seemed miraculous and we felt on top of the world. later, when we told our friends about this, they exclaimed, “this is blake smiling on you.” this was followed by other news: on 19 august in moscow there was a coup d’état, which made our return there precarious. our british visas were already drawing to a close, however, and something had to be done. our new friend chris tew wrote to parliament, to the chief secretary to the treasury david mellor, with a request to extend our visas, and in early september there came the answer that we were allowed to stay indefinitely. at the same time, we received visas for a trip to music festivals in the usa and germany, where our works were to be performed. we rented a house at 4 geraldine road, chiswick, and there our children first went to school. i received new commissions from the london sinfonietta and from the chameleon ensemble, both of which were directly related to blake. one day in october we had a visit from a newspaper correspondent, who asked us a few questions. a couple of days later on the front page of the independent a large picture of our family with an article by norman lebrecht appeared: “russia’s top two composers flee to uk. the smirnovs: economic migrants—or a brilliant musical catch?” lebrecht didn’t write exclusively about us but about all our colleagues who had fled russia, an exodus that he described as “the most devastating musical migration since hitler purged german culture in the 1930s.” on 12 october, together with our children, we flew to america. we spent a week in indianapolis, indiana, and then moved to columbus, ohio, where four works from my blake list were being performed: job’s studies, the moonlight story, the seasons for soprano and ensemble, and the first symphony, which was played by the columbus symphony orchestra under the baton of gunther schuller. at the same time the symphony was also performed by the bbc symphony orchestra conducted by oliver knussen at the royal festival hall in london, and it was a pity that i was unable to be in two places at once to attend both the ohio and british premieres. from the usa we flew to the festival in heidelberg, germany, and on 4 november we returned to london. deciding to continue my visionary ballet blake pictures, i focused now on blake’s ink and tempera painting the body of abel found by adam and eve, which made a great impression on me when i saw it at the tate. on 4 december i completed my new score: abel for clarinet, violin, cello, and piano, op. 65. the four figures in the picture correspond to the four instruments: abel the clarinet, eve the violin, adam the cello, and cain the piano. in this work i used the musical alphabet (see illus. 9 in part 1 of the article) that i had invented in 1988. each of the characters was given a unique motif, enabling me to attempt to grasp the spirit of the picture in musical sounds and shapes: 6. abel, op. 65. four main motifs: abel, cain, adam, and eve [eva]. the first performance took place on 24 june 1992 at st. magnus cathedral in kirkwall, orkney, played by the chameleon ensemble. the next work was completed on 2 february 1992 in cambridge, where we had received a fellowship and three months’ living allowance at st. john’s college. this was the river of life for a chamber ensemble of sixteen players, op. 66. it was inspired by the beautiful watercolor of the same title, which i had enjoyed viewing at the tate; blake illustrated the opening passage of chapter 22 of revelation, enriching it with some additional details. once he is known to have said, “the last judgment is one of these stupendous visions. i have represented it as i saw it.” now i could say similarly that i had represented it as i heard it. the river of life was first performed on 8 november 1992 at queen elizabeth hall, london, by the london sinfonietta conducted by oliver knussen. this became the fourth and last part of my imaginary ballet blake pictures. i call it “imaginary” because the ballet exists only in my own imagination. although each of its four parts has been performed as a chamber ensemble work on numerous occasions, they have never been played together or staged as a ballet. 7. the beginning of the river of life, op. 66. after three wonderful months in cambridge and a short visit to moscow, on 14 april 1992 we moved into our new house on the dartington hall estate. we spent the happiest nine months in that beautiful place, which looked like a paradise garden. among six compositions that i wrote in that period, two had a blake connection. i was reading the poem vala, or the four zoas when the german organ player friedemann herz asked me to compose a short piece for solo organ. i immediately thought about los and enitharmon, two key characters in the immense cosmos of blake’s mythology: los, the prophet of eternity, symbol of poetry and creative imagination, and enitharmon, the spiritual beauty, his consort and inspiration, whom blake identified with himself and his wife, catherine. in some respects i also began to identify them with myself and elena. i composed diptych, op. 70, in two movements—los and enitharmon—based on the melodic forms extracted from the letters of their names. herz premiered it on 25 september 1992 at riga dome cathedral, latvia. 8. left: flyer for blake pictures, a visionary ballet in four scenes. right: diptych (los and enitharmon) (st. albans: meladina press, 2002). another work written at dartington was a piano quintet for piano, violin, viola, cello, and double bass, op. 72, dedicated to the memory of my teacher, the composer nikolai sidelnikov. a special principle of pitch organization that i found for the second movement, which was influenced by blake’s poem “the crystal cabinet” (see also op. 27g in part 1 of the article), became the basis for the whole cycle, unifying all three movements. the first performance took place on 23 january 1993 at the royal northern college of music, manchester, played by the music group of manchester. the quintet was also recorded on cd on the meridian label (cde84586) by the primrose piano quartet and leon bosch, double bass. very soon, rather unexpectedly, elena and i received a five-year contract as visiting professors of composition at the university of keele in staffordshire. in january 1993 we moved to the campus, where we had a free house and a spacious room in the university building where i taught and composed music. in the first year, the staff and students of the music department presented me with a magnificent gift: secretly they prepared a production of my chamber opera the lamentations of thel and told me about it when everything was ready. the performance, with costumes and even scenery, was on 29 may. it was conducted by rahmil fishman, and the role of thel was sung by jane w. davidson, the same singer who participated in the premiere of the opera in 1989. this time she was also the stage director. these five years were an incredibly productive period, during which i wrote more than forty compositions. the most ambitious was the guardians of space, an almost half-hour orchestral suite in eight movements, op. 79, 1994. it was an expanded orchestral version of my piano cycle the seven angels of william blake, op. 50. another piece was the lamb for countertenor and six viols, op. 83, a setting of blake’s poem from songs of innocence, which was first performed on 2 may 1995 at the purcell room in london by michael chance, countertenor, and the ensemble fretwork. 9. the beginning of the lamb, op. 83. one more piece, miss gittipin’s talk for soprano solo, op. 98, was the setting of a prose fragment from an island in the moon. it has been performed only once, by the wonderful singer jane manning in a workshop in front of the students of the music department. i was very much attracted to blake’s witty satiric burlesque and even thought of writing a comic opera on the subject, but, because the author left it unfinished, i couldn’t manage to produce a good libretto with a convincing conclusion. 10. the beginning of miss gittipin’s talk, op. 98. in autumn 1998 our university contract came to an end and we moved to st. albans, nearer to london, where we live now. here i have written more than eighty compositions, more than ten of which are associated with blake. the first was a cradle song, from songs of innocence, for soprano and piano, op. 126, 2001. it was followed by the electro-acoustic work innocence of experience for tape, op. 132, 2001, quite a long cycle, lasting 27 minutes. it includes six innocence songs—“introduction,” “the lamb,” “laughing song,” “infant joy,” “a dream,” “the divine image”—and four from experience—“the clod & the pebble,” “the sick rose,” “the fly,” “the tyger.” five of these poems i had already set to music previously, and now i returned to the musical material of those settings, but presented it here in a quite different manner. first i asked my daughter to read the poems and worked on the recording of her voice in my home studio, editing it and adding to it some sounds of nature, musical instruments, and so on. for “the sick rose” (no. 8), for example, i found a completely new musical idea, representing the rose with a three-part contrapuntal chorus played by the electronic synthesizer, which imitated string instruments, and the worm with a single snake-like voice using the same notes dispersed by wide intervals in the very low register: 11. the beginning of “the sick rose” from innocence of experience, op. 132, no. 8. for other pieces from the work, see <https://​www.​youtube.​com/​results?​search_query=​smirnov​%3a​+innocence​+of​+experience>. the next work on a blakean subject was the inferno (eighth string quartet) in seventeen episodes, for two violins, viola, and cello, op. 152, 2008, the first part of our family project, a cycle of three string quartets after dante’s divine comedy. it was commissioned by the rodewald concert society in partnership with the royal liverpool philharmonic. the second part, purgatorio, was written by elena, and the third, paradiso, by our daughter, alissa firsova; our son, philip firsov, created three large ink drawings and later three engravings on the same subjects, which accompanied many performances of our quartets. while composing the inferno i looked through the set of blake’s dante illustrations, and my music was greatly inspired by them, so i added to the score as a subtitle, “after blake’s illustrations of dante’s divine comedy.” philip was also very familiar with these illustrations and in his work deliberately echoed some of blake’s images, as can clearly be seen, for example, on the following detail of his drawing: 12. detail of philip firsov’s drawing for inferno, 2015. i can explain how the text of dante’s poem and blake’s images were reflected in my music. in inferno canto 13 there is an impressive episode when the travelers, after having crossed the phlegethon, enter the wood of the suicides (in the seventh circle, second ring). there is a loud groan from everywhere, as if whole crowds surround them, but no one is visible; when dante, at the instigation of virgil, breaks a branch, the tree cries, “perché mi scerpi?” (why do you scratch me?) (canto 13, line 36). it’s become clear: the suicides were turned into trees. blake remarkably reflected this in his illustration, where in the trunks you can see the features of human bodies. in a certain sense, this idea is reflected in the very structure of the music: the listener hears separate sounds, melodic phrases, and chords, but in them are hidden real people, or rather their names, which are encrypted in the music. for this i used a simple musical alphabet that i had invented in 1997: 13. musical alphabet, letter=note, © dmitri n. smirnov, keele, uk, 1997. such a technique is now commonly called music cryptography (or cryptophony). for example, the fifth episode of my inferno quartet corresponds to canto 4, limbo, where dante speaks about those who lived before the christian era. in eight chords in bars 68-70 it is possible to see that each of the chords is made up of the letters of the name (in italian) of one of these characters: homer, horace, ovid, lucan, elektra, hector, aeneas, and caesar (read vertically). 14. inferno (eighth string quartet), op. 152, episode no. 5, “the pagans,” with dotted lines and arrows added to show how the names were put into the score (see enlargement). the first performance of the divine comedy cycle took place on 4 november 2008 at st. george’s concert hall, lime street, liverpool; the performers were the members of the dante quartet. a similar principle was used in my blake-sonata (sixth piano sonata) in two movements, op. 157, 2008, where i wanted to create a spiritual portrait of blake by musical means. the first, slow movement is a set of variations on a theme based on the letters of blake’s name transformed into music. the opening theme is also repeated at the very end of the sonata. 15. the beginning of blake-sonata (sixth piano sonata), op. 157. the second, fast movement has the features of rondo-sonata form, and is a musical depiction of the poem “the tyger”: its mirror symmetrical patterns represent the “fearful symmetry” of the beast. the sonata is dedicated to alissa, who first performed it on 20 november 2008 at deptford town hall of goldsmiths, university of london. she also recorded it on her debut cd, russian émigrés (vivat 109). the score was printed in the meladina music series. 16. left: blake-sonata (sixth piano sonata) on the russian émigrés cd. right: blake-sonata (sixth piano sonata) (meladina music, createspace for amazon.com, 2017). my next blake project was devoted to his so-called visionary heads, a series of black chalk and pencil drawings that he produced after 1818 for the astrologer john varley. i got very much involved in the pre-compositional research and created an extensive article on the subject for english and russian wikipedia.see <https://​en.​wikipedia.​org/​wiki/​visionary_heads> and <https://​ru.​wikipedia.​org/​wiki/​головы_призраков>. then i chose five of the drawings and composed a piano cycle, visionary heads, op. 172, 2013, where i used the same technique as in the two previous blake works. the cycle consists of five movements: 1. “blake’s instructor,” 2. “the man who built the pyramids,” 3. “corinna,” 4. “cancer constellation,” and 5. “owen glendower.” it was first publicly played by my daughter on 29 march 2014 at st. saviour’s church in st. albans. for other pieces from the work, see <https://​www.​youtube.​com/​results?​search_query=​dmitri​+n.​+smirnov%3a​+visionary​+heads>. in 2006 i began to compose a series of vocal miniatures after the proverbs of hell from blake’s the marriage of heaven and hell. as of december 2017 i have completed twenty of them, which form all together four notebooks with a solo piano introduction to each: first notebook, op. 151 (2006–07) “introduction” 1. “a little flower” (56. to create a little flower is the labour of ages.) 2. “the busy bee” (11. the busy bee has no time for sorrow.) 3. “an eagle” (54. when thou seest an eagle, thou seest a portion of genius. lift up thy head!) 4. “the clock” (12. the hours of folly are measur’d by the clock, but of wisdom: no clock can measure.) 5. “pestilence” (5. he who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence.) 6. “black and white” (63. the crow wish’d every thing was black, the owl, that every thing was white.) 7. “eternity” (10. eternity is in love with the productions of time.) second notebook, op. 185 (2015–16) “introduction” 8. “learn, teach, enjoy” (1. in seed time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy.) 9. “the cart and the plough” (2. drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead.) 10. “the palace of wisdom” (3. the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.) 11. “prudence and incapacity” (4. prudence is a rich ugly old maid courted by incapacity.) 12. “the worm and the plough” (6. the cut worm forgives the plow.) third notebook, op. 186 (2016) “introduction” 13. “dip him in the river” (7. dip him in the river who loves water.) 14. “a fool sees not” (8. a fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees.) 15. “he whose face” (9. he whose face gives no light, shall never become a star.) 16. “no bird soars too high” (15. no bird soars too high, if he soars with his own wings.) fourth notebook, op. 191 (2017) “introduction” 17. “all wholsome food” (13. all wholsom[e] food is caught without a net or a trap.)  18. “in a year of dearth” (14. bring out number weight & measure in a year of dearth.) 19. “revenges not injuries” (16. a dead body revenges not injuries.) 20. “the most sublime act” (17. the most sublime act is to set another before you.) the score is available on amazon. 17. proverbs of hell for voice and piano (meladina music, createspace for amazon.com, 2017). in november 2017 i received quite an unusual request from the ensemble of the soloists of the georgian symphony orchestra to write a piece that could be played instead of the adagio of j. s. bach’s brandenburg concerto no. 3. in fact that adagio consists of two short chords and only provides a link between two fast movements. i was happy to make it possible to connect in one performance two great b’s—bach and blake—and composed blake intermezzo for string septet on the theme based on the letters of blake’s name that i had already explored in my blake-sonata. i dedicated the piece to blake’s 260th anniversary, and the premiere took place in tbilisi on 28 november, exactly on blake’s birthday. later i made another version, for double bass and piano, op. 190a, 2017, at the request of javad javadzade, a double bass player from the same ensemble. the scores of both pieces were published by smp press. so far my list of blake set to music contains forty-four compositions written over a period of thirty-eight years (between 1979 and 2017). in parallel with this i devote all my spare time to studying blake and translating his works into russian. when publishing my work, i use pen names—dmitri n. smirnov for music and d. smirnov-sadovsky for literary writings. in 2016 i completed a book called blake, his first full-length russian biography. the book was published in the usa, and in 2017 it was also published in russia, by magreb.org publishers. 18. d. smirnov-sadovsky, blake: biography (meladina book series, createspace for amazon.com, 2016) <https://​www.​amazon.​com/​blake-​mr-​dmitri-​nikolaevich-​smirnov-​sadovsky/​dp/​1532931891>. 19. with the front and back covers of the biography, 2nd ed. (moscow: magreb.org, 2017) <http://​magreb.​org/​2017/​10/​blake-bio>. i also began publication of blake’s complete works in twelve volumes in a bilingual format with my own russian translations, and have already issued the first four volumes. 20. complete blake works (bilingual) vol. 1, poetical sketches <https://​www.​amazon.​com/​poetical-​sketches-​bilingual-​english-​russian-​bilingual/​dp/​1533607095> and vol. 2, an island in the moon and early prophecies <https://​www.​amazon.​com/​island-​moon-​early-​prophecies-​bilingual/​dp/​153512363x>. 21. complete blake works (bilingual) vol. 3, songs of innocence and of experience <https://​www.​amazon.​com/​songs-​innocence-​experience-​english-​russian-​bilingual/​dp/​1539988406> and vol. 4, poems and ballads <https://​www.​amazon.​com/​poems-​ballads-​complete-​english-​russian-​bilingual/​dp/​1541375882>. i am working now on the fifth volume, with eight minor prophecies, including some poems that have never been translated into russian before, such as the [first] book of urizen, the book of ahania, and the book of los. another project, the first russian translation of jerusalem, is already completed and is going to be printed soon by magreb.org. i have been asked on many occasions, “why are you fascinated by blake? why he is so important for you? what do you like about his work?” i can say that his works and ideas give me the strongest stimulus for composing music. his creative imagination and energy were so great that even now they are able to inspire more than the works of any other poet, writer, thinker, or artist. some say that his works are too simple and even naïve; if so, together with this they contain incredible power, depth, and a multitude of meanings. others regard his works as too puzzling and incomprehensible; this is what makes them so attractive, however, forcing us to think and submerge into them to realize their deep meaning. he was and remains unique and original in everything he did, and i’m interested equally in his poetry and prose, visual art and philosophy. blake became one of my main spiritual teachers, along with many others, such as dante and basho, hölderlin and coleridge, pushkin and mandelstam, bach and beethoven, mahler and webern, leonardo and chagall. all of them have seriously influenced my music and even my life, but blake more so than anybody else. blake set to music by dmitri n. smirnov works written in englandnos. 1-22 (op. 27g to op. 59), works written in russia, are in part 1 of the article. 23. three blake songs, for voice and chamber ensemble of five players (two clarinets, viola, cello, and double bass), op. 61, 1991–92, 14 mins. 1. “silent, silent night” (notebook), 2. “the tyger” (songs of experience), 3. “to see a world in a grain of sand” (“auguries of innocence,” pickering manuscript). the texts include parallel russian translations by the composer. first performance (no. 1): 20 july 1991, cheltenham festival. mary wiegold, soprano, composers ensemble, john woolrich, conductor; (nos. 2-3): 13 may 1992, dartington hall. mary wiegold, soprano, composers ensemble, charles peebles, conductor. published: meladina press, st. albans. 24. four blake songs, for soprano and string quartet, op. 61a, 1991–92/2010, 16 mins. 1. “to see a world in a grain of sand” (“auguries of innocence,” pickering manuscript), 2. “a divine image” (songs of experience), 3. “silent, silent night” (notebook), 4. “the tyger” (songs of experience). the texts include parallel russian translations by the composer. first performance: 29 november 2011, pushkin museum, moscow. joan rogers, soprano, doric quartet. published: meladina press, st. albans. recording: <https://​www.​youtube.​com/​watch?​v=_qlyco_ttpm>. 25. four studies after the book of job (job’s studies), for solo clarinet/​narrator, op. 62, 1991, 13 mins. after blake’s illustrations to the book of job. texts from the bible: 1. “there was a man in the land of uz” (job 1.1-2), 2. “the fire of god is fallen from heaven” (1.16), 3. “let the day perish wherein i was born” (3.3), 4. “then the lord answered job out of the whirlwind” (38.1-2). first performance: 25 october 1991, ohio state university. bruce curlette, clarinet/​narrator. published: meladina press, st. albans. recording: <https://​www.​youtube.​com/​results?​search_query=​dmitri​+n.​+smirnov​+job%27s​+studies>. 26. abel (blake pictures iii—the third part of an imaginary ballet), for clarinet, violin, cello, and piano, op. 65, 1991, 14 mins. after blake’s picture the body of abel found by adam and eve. first performance: 24 june 1992, st. magnus cathedral, orkney. chameleon ensemble. published: boosey & hawkes, london; meladina press, st. albans. recording: <https://​www.​youtube.​com/​watch?​v=15lsimhx8gw>. 27. the river of life (blake pictures iv—the fourth part of an imaginary ballet), for chamber ensemble of sixteen players, op. 66, 1992, 13 mins. after blake’s picture the river of life. first performance: 8 november 1992, queen elizabeth hall, london. london sinfonietta, oliver knussen, conductor. published: boosey & hawkes, london; meladina press, st. albans. 28. blake pictures, an imaginary ballet in four scenes, opp. 51, 58, 65, and 66, 1988–92, 60 mins. 1. “the moonlight story,” 2. “jacob’s ladder,” 3. “abel,” 4. “the river of life.” published: boosey & hawkes, london; meladina press, st. albans. 29. diptych (los and enitharmon), for solo organ, op. 70, 1992/2002, 12 mins. inspired by blake’s poem vala, or the four zoas. first performance: 25 september 1992, dome cathedral, riga. friedemann herz, organ. published: meladina press, st. albans. 30. piano quintet, in three movements, for piano, violin, viola, cello, and double bass, op. 72, 1992, 20 mins. the second movement is influenced by blake’s poem “the crystal cabinet” (see op. 27g). first performance: 23 january 1993, royal northern college of music, manchester. music group of manchester. cd: <https://​www.​amazon.​co.​uk/​maxwell-​davies-​quartet-​dmitry-​smirnov​/dp/​b003yci224>. recording: <https://​www.​youtube.​com/​watch?​v=x3znmzqtcti> (first movement). 31. the guardians of space (the seven angels of william blake), for large orchestra, op. 79, 1994, 30 mins. inspired by blake’s poem vala, or the four zoas. orchestral version of the seven angels of william blake, op. 50. 1. “prelude (angel),” 2. “lucifer, the morning star,” 3. “molech, the executioner,” 4. “elohim creating adam, adam creating elohim,” 5. “shaddai’s anger,” 6. “pachad’s fear,” 7. “jehovah appealing to eternity,” 8. “jesus, the lamb.” published: meladina press, st. albans. 32. the lamb, for countertenor and six viols, op. 83, 1995, 6 mins. a setting of blake’s “the lamb” (songs of innocence). the text includes a parallel russian translation by the composer. first performance: 2 may 1995, purcell room, london. michael chance, countertenor, fretwork. published: boosey & hawkes, london; meladina press, st. albans. 33. miss gittipin’s talk, for solo soprano, op. 98, 1997, 4 mins. a setting of an episode from blake’s an island in the moon. published: meladina press, st. albans. 34. a cradle song, for soprano and piano, op. 126, 2001, 7 mins. a setting of “a cradle song” (songs of innocence). published: meladina press, st. albans. 35. innocence of experience, for tape, op. 132, 2001, 27 mins. a setting of ten blake poems from songs of innocence and of experience: 1. “introduction,” 2. “the lamb,” 3. “laughing song,” 4. “infant joy,” 5. “a dream,” 6. “the divine image,” 7. “the clod & the pebble,” 8. “the sick rose,” 9. “the fly,” 10. “the tyger.” reading by alissa firsova (english). published: meladina press, st. albans. recording: <https://​www.​youtube.​com/​results?​search_query=​smirnov%3a​+innocence​+of​+experience>. 36. proverbs of hell, first notebook, seven short songs for voice and piano, op. 151, 2006–07, 10 mins. a setting of the proverbs of hell from blake’s the marriage of heaven and hell: “introduction,” 1. “a little flower,” 2. “the busy bee,” 3. “an eagle,” 4. “the clock,” 5. “pestilence,” 6. “black and white,” 7. “eternity.” first performance (nos. 3 and 7): 29 november 2011, pushkin museum, moscow. joan rogers, soprano, andrew west, piano. published: meladina music, createspace for amazon.com <https://​www.​amazon.​com/​proverbs-​hell-​notebooks-​middle-​meladina/​dp/​1981483144>. recording (in part): <https://​www.​youtube.​com/​watch?​v=el3qy9nrsz4>. 37. inferno (eighth string quartet), in seventeen episodes, for two violins, viola, and cello, op. 152, 2008, 15 mins. after blake’s illustrations of dante’s divine comedy. first performance: 4 november 2008, st. george’s concert hall, lime street, liverpool. rodewald concert society, in partnership with the royal liverpool philharmonic, dante quartet. recording: <https://​www.​youtube.​com/​results?​search_query=​dmitri​+n.​+smirnov%3a​+inferno>. 38. blake-sonata (sixth piano sonata), in two movements, op. 157, 2008, 17 mins. first performance: 20 november 2008, deptford town hall, london. alissa firsova, piano. published: meladina music, createspace for amazon.com <https://​www.​amazon.​co.​uk/​blake-​sonata-​piano-​sonata-​meladina-​x/​dp/​1543034438>. cd: russian émigrés (vivat 109) <https://​www.​amazon.​co.​uk/​d/​digital-​music/​russian-​émigrés-​alissa-​firsova/​b012p0o9gi>. recording: <https://​www.​youtube.​com/​results?​search_query=​dmitri​+n.​+smirnov%3a​+blake-sonata>. 39. visionary heads, five pieces for piano, op. 172, 2013, 12 mins. after blake’s pencil drawings: 1. “blake’s instructor,” 2. “the man who built the pyramids,” 3. “corinna,” 4. “cancer constellation,” 5. “owen glendower.” first performance: 29 march 2014, st. saviour’s church, st. albans. alissa firsova, piano. published: meladina press, st. albans. recording: <https://​www.​youtube.​com/​results?​search_query=​dmitri​+n.​+smirnov%3a​+visionary​+heads>. 40. proverbs of hell, second notebook, five short songs for voice and piano, op. 185, 2015–16, 6 mins. a setting of the proverbs of hell from blake’s the marriage of heaven and hell: “introduction,” 1. “learn, teach, enjoy,” 2. “the cart and the plough,” 3. “the palace of wisdom,” 4. “prudence and incapacity,” 5. “the worm and the plough.” published: meladina music, createspace for amazon.com <https://​www.​amazon.​com/​proverbs-​hell-​notebooks-​middle-​meladina/​dp/​1981483144>. 41. proverbs of hell, third notebook, four short songs for voice and piano, op. 186, 2016, 5 mins. a setting of the proverbs of hell from blake’s the marriage of heaven and hell: “introduction,” 1. “dip him in the river,” 2. “a fool sees not,” 3. “he whose face,” 4. “no bird soars too high.” published: meladina music, createspace for amazon.com <https://​www.​amazon.​com/​proverbs-​hell-​notebooks-​middle-​meladina/​dp/​1981483144>. 42. blake intermezzo, for string septet, op. 190, 2017, 4 mins. first performance (played as the second movement of bach’s brandenburg concerto no. 3): 28 november 2017, akhundov house, tbilisi. soloists of the georgian symphony orchestra. published: smp press <https://​www.​sheetmusicplus.​com/​title/​blake-​intermezzo-​for-​strings-​digital-​sheet-​music/​20697390>. recording: <https://​www.​youtube.​com/​watch?​v=v3dt0w3zw64>. 43. blake intermezzo, for double bass and piano, op. 190a, 2017, 4 mins. published: smp press <https://​www.​sheetmusicplus.​com/​title/​blake-​intermezzo-​for-​double-​bass-​and-​piano-​digital-​sheet-​music/​20697393>. recording: <https://​www.​youtube.​com/​watch?​v=m7asecegfgi>. 44. proverbs of hell, fourth notebook, four short songs for voice and piano, op. 191, 2017, 5 mins. a setting of the proverbs of hell from blake’s the marriage of heaven and hell: “introduction,” 1. “all wholsome food,” 2. “in a year of dearth,” 3. “revenges not injuries,” 4. “the most sublime act.” published: meladina music, createspace for amazon.com <https://​www.​amazon.​com/​proverbs-​hell-​notebooks-​middle-​meladina/​dp/​1981483144>. 108 blake/an illustrated quarterly spring 2012 a r t i c l e over the last two decades, scholars and collectors have been blessed with a remarkable series of discoveries of unrecorded or long-lost works by blake. the list is worth reviewing:1 1990: songs of innocence copy h, untraced since c. 1953. 1991: for the sexes: the gates of paradise, ten plates, previously unrecorded. lady macbeth and the sleeping duncan, wash drawing, untraced since 1863. two recto/verso preliminary drawings, previously unrecorded or at least untraced since 1913, for blake’s cover design for thomas commins, an elegy set to music (1786). an encounter in heaven, wash drawing, previously unrecorded. “the chaining of orc,” only the second known impression, previously unrecorded. 1992: the marriage of heaven and hell, design only on pl. 20 from small book of designs copy b, previously unrecorded. with songs the jovial hinds return from plow, a preliminary drawing for one of the virgil wood engravings, untraced since 1939. 1993: the first book of urizen, design only on pl. 3, probably from small book of designs copy b, previously unrecorded. commins, an elegy set to music, a previously unrecorded copy. 1994: a harper and other figure studies, previously unknown pencil sketches on the verso of a pastoral figure and other sketches. study for “pestilence: the death of the first-born,” recto/verso pencil sketches, untraced since 1949. two types of insanity, pencil sketch, untraced since 1949. 1995: head of a man, pencil sketch, previously unrecorded. 1996: study for a destroying deity, pencil sketch, acquired by the yale center for british art in 1977 but not identified as by blake until 1996. 1997: the marriage of heaven and hell copy m (pls. 25-27, “a song of liberty”), untraced since 1918. “lucifer and the pope in hell,” a previously unrecorded first 1. this list is selective and based mainly on the annual installments of “blake in the marketplace” published in blake. posthumous impressions of blake’s relief etchings and impressions of his more common separate plates, such as “chaucers canterbury pilgrims,” are not included. only the rarest books with blake’s commercial engravings are listed. in most cases, discoveries are recorded for the year they were published or became generally known. state of the separate plate, this impression with pencil additions for the second state. blake’s letter to george cumberland, 1 sept. 1800, previously unrecorded. thenot and colinet seated beneath two trees and for him our yearly wakes and feasts we hold, two preliminary drawings for the virgil wood engravings, untraced since 1939. 1998: previously unrecorded copies of blake’s prospectus for “chaucers canterbury pilgrims” and r. h. cromek’s first prospectus of nov. 1805 for his edition of robert blair, the grave, listing blake as the engraver of his designs. a complete copy of designs to a series of ballads, written by william hayley (1802), untraced since 1944. 1999: the first book of urizen copy e, untraced since 1942. young, night thoughts (1797), a previously unrecorded hand-colored copy. 2000: resurrection of the dead, wash drawing, untraced since 1922, with previously unrecorded pencil sketches for designs to a series of ballads on the verso. 2001: previously unrecorded impressions of the first book of urizen pl. 3, color printed, and europe pls. 13-14 printed recto/verso, hand colored. nineteen watercolors illustrating blair’s the grave, untraced since 1836. cumea, a watercolor copy after michelangelo, and the judgment of solomon, a watercolor copy after raphael, both probably by blake and previously unrecorded. 2002: fate, pencil sketch, untraced since 1968. 2003: visionary head: a man wearing a tall hat, pencil sketch, previously unrecorded. 2004: visions of the daughters of albion copy n, untraced since 1942. 2005: “the ancient of days” copy d, untraced since 1938. satan going to and fro in the earth, and another figure, pencil sketch, previously unrecorded. 2006: the first book of urizen pl. 9, probably from small book of designs copy b, untraced since 1967. 2007: eight color prints from small book of designs copy b, previously unrecorded. an impression of the first state of blake’s “job” separate plate, previously unrecorded. 2009: blake’s letter to william hayley, 7 aug. 1804, untraced since 1885. previously unrecorded pencil sketches, some related to designs to a series of ballads, on the verso of the pencil drawing of resurrection of the dead. poetical sketches copy m, untraced since 1920.2 2010: blake’s annotated copy, previously unrecorded, of thomas taylor’s the mystical initiations (1787). if this record has led us to expect new treasures almost every year, 2011 did not disappoint. by early february i learned that bonhams in london would offer an unrecorded copy of 2. the ownership of copy m remains unknown, but its existence in a private collection was reported by ursus rare books, new york, in april 2009; see blake 43.4 (spring 2010): 120. blake in the marketplace, 2011 by robert n. essick spring 2012 blake/an illustrated quarterly 109 blake’s poetical sketches (1783) in its 22 march auction. this adds one more copy to the twenty-three previously traced and is only the third remaining in private hands.3 john windle, bidding on my behalf, was successful at a hammer price of £60,000 (£72,000 including the buyer’s premium). he appears to have been the only bidder against a reserve of £58,000; the estimate was £60,000-80,000. see the second entry under first editions of blake’s writings, below, and illus. 4-5. a person representing a descendant of charles augustus tulk (1786-1849), the swedenborgian friend of blake and john flaxman, contacted me in march about an album of drawings owned, and probably assembled, by tulk’s daughter louisa susanna in the first half of the nineteenth century. several british blake scholars inspected the album and found in it a watercolor and a pencil drawing definitely attributable to blake and a pen and ink drawing probably from his hand. the watercolor and pencil drawing bear sketches by blake on their versos. the collection also includes several drawings by flaxman. on the basis of digital images supplied by the tulk family’s representative, i’m confident that these attributions are correct. none of these materials has been previously recorded. the disposition of this important discovery is still pending as of january 2012. grosvenor prints of london offered two works with blakean connections early in 2011. in march i found on its web site, <http://www.grosvenorprints.com>, what is probably the earliest reproduction, previously unrecorded, of louis schiavonetti’s engraving of blake’s “death’s door” design for blair’s the grave (see illus. 7). while perusing the site in late april, i came upon a proof before letters of a portrait engraving of george romney. might this possibly be the print on which blake was working in 1803-04, of which no other impression is presently known?4 an essay by mark crosby on this intriguing object is forthcoming in blake. a few days before christmas, nicholas lott of larkhall fine art (bath, england) informed me that he had just acquired a previously unrecorded impression of pl. 15 from for children: the gates of paradise; see the single entry under illuminated books, below. i hope to be able to say more about this print in next year’s report. 3. see bb #128. copy e, located by bbs 107 in the possession of “a private american collector,” has been in the collection of alan parker, london, since jan. 2007; see blake 41.4 (spring 2008): 147. for copy m, listed as untraced in bb, see note 2, above. g. e. bentley, jr., “william blake and his circle: a checklist of publications and discoveries in 2003,” blake 38.1 (summer 2004): 11, suspects that “copy q?” might be the copy evaluated by ursus books, new york, in 2003. that is very probably copy m; copy q has been in the preston blake collection, city of westminster archives centre (formerly westminster public library), since 1966 (as recorded in bb 352). geoffrey keynes speculates that about fifty copies of poetical sketches may have been printed; see keynes, blake studies, 2nd ed. (oxford: clarendon p, 1971) 34. 4. see the references to blake’s execution of this plate in letters by hayley and blake, br(2) 157 and e 736, 739, 744, 753, 757, 760. the portrait was intended as an illustration for hayley’s life of george romney, but was not included in the book when published in 1809. the auction season began auspiciously with the sale of works of art and furnishings from the collection of the late charles ryskamp at sotheby’s new york on 25 january, “for the primary benefit of princeton university” (auction catalogue). two leaves of drawings by blake in the collection were included. interest in a woman enthroned rests principally on an attempt to determine its subject and the way it serves as a test for telling the difference between a very early work by william blake and one by his brother robert. the pencil drawing the lion lying down with the ox (catalogued as a verso in butlin) is more impressive. the sketches on the other side (the recto in butlin) include preliminary details for motifs appearing in america a prophecy of 1793. these not only help in dating both recto and verso but also offer evidence about how blake developed images for his illuminated books. see the listings under drawings and paintings, below, and illus. 1-3. the ryskamp auction included nine lots of works by blake’s circle and followers, also listed below. several lots that failed to find purchasers at sotheby’s were offered in june by stair auctions of hudson, new york, as recorded below. john windle, the san francisco book and print dealer, issued in early december another of his splendid catalogues devoted to blake. this most recent version, entitled “pictorial blake,” features a number of engravings and etchings, as well as a good many facsimiles of the illuminated books. although some items in windle’s catalogue have been offered previously, all materials within the usual purview of “blake in the marketplace” are listed below. this may be the first catalogue to offer individual plates from blake’s illustrations to edward young’s night thoughts. in 2000 i began to include blake’s fellow engraver and onetime business partner, james parker (1750-1805), in these annual sales reviews. this installment contains a survey of all books known to contain parker’s engravings on the market at the beginning of 2011—a rather daunting list. i will not offer such thorough coverage every year. the year of all sales and catalogues in the following lists is 2011 unless indicated otherwise. most reports about auction catalogues are based on the online versions. coverage of regional auctions is selective. dates for dealers’ online catalogues are the dates accessed, not the dates of publication. works offered online by dealers and previously listed in either of the last two sales reviews are not repeated here. most of the auction houses add their purchaser’s surcharge to the hammer price in their price lists. these net amounts are given here, following the official price lists. the value-added tax levied against the buyer’s surcharge in britain is not included. late 2011 sales will be covered in the 2012 review. i am grateful for help in compiling this review to elizabeth barker, g. e. bentley, jr., mark crosby (particularly for assistance with women holding shields), harriet drummond, allison galea, ted hofmann, tim linnell, nicholas lott, constance mcphee, luana j. nandan, morton paley, steven vest, joseph viscomi, angus whitehead, and john windle. my special thanks go to alexander gourlay for help with poetical sketches and landseer 110 blake/an illustrated quarterly spring 2012 prints, as well as his usual generosity in keeping me abreast of ebay auctions. once again, sarah jones’s editorial expertise and john sullivan’s electronic imaging have been invaluable. abbreviations bb g. e. bentley, jr., blake books (oxford: clarendon p, 1977). plate numbers and copy designations for blake’s illuminated books and commercial book illustrations follow bb. bbs g. e. bentley, jr., blake books supplement (oxford: clarendon p, 1995) bennett shelley m. bennett, thomas stothard: the mechanisms of art patronage in england circa 1800 (columbia: u of missouri p, 1988) bg bloomsbury auctions, godalming bhl bonhams auctions, london bhny bonhams auctions, new york bho bonhams auctions, oxford bhsf bonhams auctions, san francisco bl bloomsbury auctions, london br(2) g. e. bentley, jr., blake records, 2nd ed. (new haven: yale up, 2004) butlin martin butlin, the paintings and drawings of william blake, 2 vols. (new haven: yale up, 1981) cat(s). catalogue(s) or sales list(s) cb robert n. essick, william blake’s commercial book illustrations (oxford: clarendon p, 1991) cl christie’s auctions, london cny christie’s auctions, new york coxhead a. c. coxhead, thomas stothard, r.a. (london: bullen, 1906) csk christie’s auctions, south kensington dw dominic winter auctions, south cerney, gloucestershire e the complete poetry and prose of william blake, ed. david v. erdman, newly rev. ed. (new york: anchor–random house, 1988) eb ebay online auctions illus. illustration(s), illustrated pl(s). plate(s) sh stair auctions, hudson, new york sl sotheby’s auctions, london sny sotheby’s auctions, new york st(s). state(s) of an engraving, etching, or lithograph weinglass d. h. weinglass, prints and engraved illustrations by and after henry fuseli (aldershot: scolar p, 1994) # auction lot or catalogue item number illuminated books for children: the gates of paradise pl. 15 (inscribed “13” lower left). larkhall fine art, dec. private offer, 2nd st., datable to 1793 (price on application). a previously unrecorded impression. drawings and paintings christ raising jairus’s daughter. tempera painting on stretcher 26.4 x 39.1 cm., datable to c. 1799-1800. butlin #417. given dec. to the mead art museum, amherst college, amherst, massachusetts, by henry deforest webster. accession no. 2011.54. the lion lying down with the ox. see the verso of sketches for “america” and other books, below. owen glendower. pencil, 23.2 x 18.1 cm., possibly a replica of blake’s visionary head of c. 1819-20. butlin #744. given at an unrecorded time, probably between 1980 and 1993, by mrs. gerard b. lambert (grace lansing lambert) to charles ryskamp. bequeathed by ryskamp to the frick collection, new york, in 2010, accession no. 2010.3.08. the resurrection or the last trumpet (recto), with studies of eyes, the head of an eagle, a human face, and a lion (verso). pen and gray ink, gray wash over pencil (recto), pencil (verso), recto image and leaf 20.5 x 21.2 cm. recto datable to c. 1780-85; some of the verso sketches are related to blake’s designs to a series of ballads, written by william hayley, and thus are datable to c. 1802. butlin #617 (listed as untraced since 1922). w.s fine art/andrew wyld, june cat., #13, illus. (£225,000). acquired oct. by the metropolitan museum of art, new york, accession no. 2011.448. for earlier sales and offers for sale, see blake 43.4 (spring 2010): 119. for illus. of recto and verso and comments, see martin butlin, “a blake drawing rediscovered and redated,” blake 34.1 (summer 2000): cover, 22-24. for a preliminary study, see the resurrection of the dead, next entry below. the resurrection of the dead (recto); studies of a leg, 2 heads, a standing figure, and the head of an eagle (verso). both pencil on laid paper, leaf 18.4 x 24.3 cm. recto drawing datable to c. 1780-85, inscribed in ink “drawn by william blake / vouched by fred.k tatham.” some of the verso sketches are related to blake’s designs to a series of ballads, written by william hayley, and thus are datable to c. 1802. butlin #79 (recto only). acquired jan. by essick from windle. for earlier sales, descriptions, and illus., see blake 26.4 (spring 1993): 141, illus. 2 (recto), 42.4 (spring 2009): 122, and 43.4 (spring 2010): 11819, illus. 1 (verso). spring 2012 blake/an illustrated quarterly 111 sketches for “america” and other books (recto), the lion lying down with the ox (verso). pencil, leaf 20.5 x 26.7 cm. butlin #226, the recto dated to c. 1793 and the verso to c. 1790-95. sny, 25 jan., #209, from the collection of charles ryskamp, recto and verso illus. ($56,250 to windle acting for essick). see illus. 1-2. a woman enthroned, two figures on each side. pen and ink, leaf 17.8 x 26.0 cm. butlin #99, dated to c. 1775-80. sny, 25 jan., #149, from the collection of charles ryskamp, illus. ($5313 to windle acting for essick). see illus. 3. 1. sketches for “america” and other books. pencil on wove paper, leaf 20.5 x 26.7 cm. butlin #226 recto. the pencil numbers (“c – 2” on the arm center right, the same top right corner, and “2” in a circle top left corner) are not by blake. essick collection. for the verso of this leaf, see illus. 2. as butlin indicates, several of these sketches relate to america a prophecy and thus can be dated to 1793, the year that illuminated book is dated on its title page, or to late 1792. in the drawings that probably served as direct preliminaries, right and left are the reverse of the etched motifs in impressions of america pls. and thus these drawings have the same orientation as the images on the copperplates. this is what we generally find with preliminary sketches for blake’s relief etchings, whereas the drawings for his white-line etchings, such as sketch for “jerusalem,” plate 26: hand appearing to jerusalem (butlin #566), were transferred face down onto the copperplates and thus have the same right/left orientation as impressions. the rising male with short chains dangling from him is clearly the preliminary drawing for the figure upper left in america pl. 5. the running female with right arm raised (top left corner in the drawing) appears lower left on the same pl. light pencil lines indicate that blake (first?) drew this figure’s head further to the right, her raised right arm further to the left, and her right leg in a slightly lower position. the hand and arm near the center of the sheet are very close to the right hand and arm of urizen on america pl. 10 and to the left arm and hand of orc on pl. 12. butlin relates the slight sketch of the figure top right to the soaring female upper right on the america title page, but the association is rather loose because of differences in leg position. in the drawing, the figure appears to have 3 legs, probably 112 blake/an illustrated quarterly spring 2012 because blake is experimenting with different positions for her limbs. the pencil lines delineating this figure and the 2 long vertical lines to the left, possibly the trunk of a tree with a limb arching downwards on its left side (the limb curves downwards above the highest leg and foot, terminating just left of the foot), are much lighter than other lines on this side of the leaf—and less carefully executed. it is tempting to suspect that these lightline motifs were created with a different pencil, perhaps at an earlier date. the 2 studies of bent legs, lower left, are similar to the legs of the seated youth on america pl. 8, in turn a repetition of the man on the marriage of heaven and hell pl. 21. as butlin points out, these have the same right/left directions as in impressions. for that reason, i suspect that they were not direct preliminaries for either of the relief etchings. if the legs predate the marriage of 1790, then they were very probably executed before the america sketch of the rising figure with chains. their position on the leaf, however, suggests that they were drawn after (although perhaps immediately after) motifs closer to the center of the paper. a sketch of a lower right leg and foot, above and to the right of the lower of the 2 drawings of bent legs, may be related to this group of leg studies. butlin associates the 3 studies of arms with fists, lower right, with the man clenching his head lower right on america pl. 6, but here again the drawings are not direct preliminaries. the pair of feet extending below the hem of a gown, carefully drawn just right of the base of the tree, may be a precursor to the single visible foot of the gowned man in europe pl. 11. the other studies of feet are similar to a good many in the illuminated books of 1790-94, but these relationships are probably generic. taken together, the drawings on this leaf suggest that they may not have been executed with a particular image in america (or any other illuminated book) in mind. rather, all were executed as first thoughts on paper and as a way of assembling a pictorial vocabulary of anatomical and gestural forms for future use, whenever and wherever such use became appropriate in blake’s estimation. when he borrowed from this image bank, he sometimes repeated a motif with little alteration, executing it with acid-resistant varnish on a copperplate much as he had done earlier with pencil on paper. in other instances, he modified the image considerably, its repetition thereby evolving into a reinvention. perhaps neither procedure necessitated a literal return to these sketches, the stock of motifs they represent having been internalized. spring 2012 blake/an illustrated quarterly 113 2. (facing page) the lion lying down with the ox. pencil on wove paper, leaf 20.5 x 26.7 cm. butlin #226 verso. essick collection. for the recto drawings, see illus. 1. geoffrey keynes offers an interesting reading of this vigorous, and evidently symbolic, sketch in drawings of william blake: 92 pencil studies (new york: dover, 1970), caption to illus. 5. he associates the drawing with a line from blake’s tiriel, “why is one law given to the lion & the patient ox” (e 285), and states that “it is clearly a tentative idea for an illustration” to that poem of c. 1789. although the object held by the hunched-over old man in the background is probably a shepherd’s crook, keynes describes it as a whip, the instrument by which this urizenic figure enforces “one law” for all. butlin modifies this interpretation in several important respects. he dates the drawing to c. 1790-95, largely for stylistic reasons, notes the similarities, in sensibility and possibly in iconography, to america pl. 9 of 1793, and points out that blake used a revised version of the line from tiriel in the marriage of heaven and hell of 1790: “one law for the lion & ox is oppression” (e 44). as keynes suggests, the youthful male lying on the lion may be holding and reading a book; the standing (prepubescent?) female holds a lyre in her extended right hand. the foreground creatures may be the inhabitants of a peaceable kingdom where harmony resides between the lion and the ox, humans and animals, male and female, music and the written word. the design thus accords with isaiah 11:6-7, a millenarian vision of a time when “the wolf also shall dwell with the lamb … and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.” given this perspective, the old man can be viewed as a threat emerging into this edenic state rather than a sign of its present condition. he may be a priest, the shepherd of a human flock. his blankly staring eyes may be blind, or at least incapable of imaginative visions such as the one in front of him. the lightly sketched rectilinear forms around him, perhaps representing a portal through which this figure has entered the scene, reinforce his contracted posture and contrast with the curving lineaments of life. even if he holds a crook rather than a whip, the rod still suggests imposed control in the hand of a menacing counterpart to the benign shepherds in blake’s art and poetry. another textual analogue for the drawing’s major motifs, probably composed at about the same time as this drawing and its recto sketches, can be found among bromion’s questions in visions of the daughters of albion (1793): and are there other joys, beside the joys of riches and ease? and is there not one law for both the lion and the ox? and is there not eternal fire, and eternal chains? to bind the phantoms of existence from eternal life? (e 48) the foreground in the drawing offers a positive contrary to bromion’s negative rhetoric and perspective: there are “joys” other than “riches and ease,” the lion and ox need not be harnessed to the same law to reside in peace, and such visions are not mere “phantoms.” unfortunately, the old man may soon “bind” the varieties of “eternal life” and art with the mind-forged “chains” of “one law.” like bromion and like the bespectacled and purblind personification of “aged ignorance” with his giant scissors on pl. 13 of for children: the gates of paradise (1793), the ominous shepherd will destroy what he can neither perceive nor understand. blake began by drawing the head of the boy atop the lion further to the right and his left leg a bit higher on the leaf. a circle in light pencil above the shepherd’s head suggests that blake first drew the figure in a slightly higher position. other sketchy lines above him may be alternative positions for a smaller portal. two sets of very light lines right of the doorway might be background trees. for an interpretation of the design as picturing a “false paradise” already under the dominion of one law, see david bindman, blake as an artist (oxford: phaidon, 1977) 47. he notes the similarities among this drawing, blake’s a pastoral scene of the early 1780s (butlin #142), and the sketches (perhaps in part by robert blake) on the back of the island in the moon manuscript of c. 1784 (butlin #149). bindman’s interpretation gains credibility if we view the languid postures of both youths and the fact that the girl is not playing the lyre as indications of an enervated state. 3. (following page) a woman enthroned, two figures on each side. pen and ink on laid paper, leaf 17.8 x 26.0 cm. butlin #99, dated to c. 1775-80. essick collection. a watermark, a large and decorative “w” within a circle, appears in the middle of the leaf. this is similar to several examples of whatman countermarks illustrated, and said to have been used “till about 1760,” in thomas balston, james whatman father and son (london: methuen, 1957) 158. the central figure may be a queen, gesturing to 2 men on the left. the scene would appear to be set outdoors with a tree behind the seated woman, its downward-curving branches forming a canopy behind or above her. the small, enclosed shapes on the center right and left margins may be plants; the verticals behind the backs of both pairs of standing figures hint at more tree trunks. perhaps the 2 horizontal lines upper right, immediately above the figures’ heads and with diagonals extending down and to the right, may be the horizon (lower line) and a cloud band (upper line) with beams of light from a rising or setting sun. the horizontal line top right may be another cloud. the ovoid form below the seated figure’s left hand may be a shield. if so, she might be britannia, often represented with a shield, or boadicea, the 1st century a.d. warrior queen of the iceni in east anglia. john flaxman’s proposed monumental statue of britannia, engraved by blake for his friend’s letter to the committee for raising the naval pillar (1799), includes a large round shield between the woman’s lowered left hand and the pedestal below. most accounts of boadicea, beginning with the annals of tacitus, feature how she rallied her people against the romans and rode a chariot into battle. one notable exception is boadicea, a play by richard glover first performed and published in 1753 and popular enough to be included by john bell in his british theatre series in 1791. the drama begins with a roman ambassador addressing “the icenian queen” and proffering “friendship.” boadicea interrupts him to announce 114 blake/an illustrated quarterly spring 2012 her anger and desire for “revenge.” dumnorix, one of boadicea’s allies, speaks next; he too rejects the ambassador’s offer. blake’s drawing would be a fitting illustration of this scene, with the queen raising an accusatory hand toward the romans on the left and dumnorix and a companion standing on the right. even the plants on the margins match boadicea’s rhetoric when she promises to reduce roman “bulwarks” to the level “of the meanest shrub.” a setting sun is an appropriate background emblem both for the queen’s threat to destroy her enemies and for her own impending defeat. if, however, the man far left is bearded (and thus unlikely to be a roman) and if any one of the standing figures is female, then the composition does not fit glover’s opening scene. blake included “boadicea inspiring the britons against the romans” in a list of english history subjects he wrote in his notebook before 1793 (e 672); this might be the subject of a drawing usually titled frolic (butlin #211, dated to c. 1793). blake mentions both britannia and boadicea several times in jerusalem and the latter is the subject of one of his visionary heads datable to c. 1819-20 (butlin #717, now in a private san francisco collection). if this pen and ink sketch indeed pictures an event in english history, it may be a precursor to blake’s watercolors of c. 1779 on that subject (butlin #51-53, 57, 60, 62, 64, 65, 67) and to “the history of england, a small book of engravings” he lists in his advertisement to the public of 1793 (e 693). as butlin astutely observes, this drawing is on “the borderline between william and robert blake; the profiles of the two figures on the left, drawn as straight vertical lines with horizontal lines to suggest eyes and mouths, are close to works attributed to robert. however, the rest of the drawing is looser and the figures less rigid than is usual for robert.” the triangular shape suggesting the head of the figure farthest right is also typical of robert’s work, following the first step in manuals on how to draw. it seems unlikely, however, that both brothers worked on the drawing; the composition appears to have been executed rapidly with the same pen and ink by the same hand. if the basic design is by william, this may be one of the earliest extant drawings of his own invention and datable to the lower end of butlin’s date range. an early date might explain the similarities between this drawing and robert’s work. when giving robert drawing lessons in the mid-1780s (br[2] 33), william may have guided his younger brother along the same steps that he had followed in his youth. procession of monks, met by three women (butlin #100, dated to c. 1775-80) shows similar stylistic features typical of robert’s work but is probably another very early pen and ink drawing by william. spring 2012 blake/an illustrated quarterly 115 manuscripts letter of 18 jan. 1808 to ozias humphry, 4 pp. describing blake’s last judgment design. bhl, 29 march, #264, from the stock of the dealer roy davids, illus. (not sold; estimate £50,000-60,000). probably the 2nd of 3 versions of this document. for earlier sales and attempts to sell, see blake 42.4 (spring 2009): 122-23. first editions of blake’s writings first published in letterpress in blake’s lifetime monthly magazine, vol. 20, 1 jan. 1806 issue only, and vol. 21, 1 feb. through 1 july 1806 issues. keogh’s books, oct. online cat., uncut in contemporary boards worn, 7 distinct sets of 3 stabholes from prior pamphlet-style binding of each monthly issue, loss of spine at foot, printed spine label damaged, “21” printed (from a stamp rather than in a press?) on the spine (£50). the 1 july 1806 issue, pp. 520-21, contains blake’s letter to the editor defending fuseli’s painting of count ugolino (e 768-69). the original manuscript letter is untraced. this copy of the magazine suggests that either the publisher or another bookseller disbound unsold copies of individual issues and rebound them as roughly half-year volumes in cheap papercovered boards. poetical sketches, 1783. bhl, 22 march, #24, a previously unrecorded copy, binding, title page, and pp. 14-15 illus. online (£72,000 to windle acting for essick). lacking the final blank leaf (k4), as in all but 7 copies, but otherwise collated complete.5 most leaves approx. 21.7 x 13.0 cm., leaf b1 narrower and leaves b4, d1, d4, e1, f1-2, g2, i2-3, and k1 shorter. the shortness of 2 pairs of leaves, d1,4 and i2-3, can be explained by imprecise placement of the paper during printing, but i am not able to explain the other short leaves based on the printing format. laid paper without watermark, chain lines 2.8 cm. apart, all leaves between 0.11 and 0.12 mm. thick.6 some leaves appear to be uncut along their fore-edges, with evidence of deckle along the fore-edges of the 1st and 2nd leaves of some gatherings, although bb 345 records a larger leaf size 5. bb 343 describes the book as “4o (half sheet imposition): [a1-2], b-k4 (j omitted); signed on first two leaves of each quire except in quire a.” the leaves are signed and gathered in 4s, but the printing format is more properly described as an octavo (8o) in 4s, half-sheet imposition. for this format, see philip gaskell, a new introduction to bibliography (oxford: clarendon p, 1972) figs. 52 (half sheets of octavo worked together) and 53 (half sheet of octavo imposed for work and turn). in a quarto (4o) in half sheets (gaskell figs. 48 and 49), the chain lines run horizontally; in an octavo in half sheets they run vertically, as in poetical sketches. 6. the leaves of copy c are the same thickness; those in copy s range between 0.09 and 0.11 mm. (both huntington library). these slight variations—at most 3 hundredths of a millimeter—within and among copies are to be expected in handmade paper. of 22.3 x 13.9 cm.7 leaf b4 pasted to a stub, g1 and i4 each with a round hole, 3.0 mm. and 4.0 mm. in diameter, touching letters (described in the auction cat. as “paperflaw[s]” rather than later damage). upper corner of the fore-edge of b1 and lower corner of the fore-edge of f1 torn off, the latter possibly during printing because of a paper flaw, neither affecting text. some scattered foxing and spotting, particularly on the 1st 2 leaves. dust and damp staining on the title page (leaf [a1r]) suggest that it was exposed without a cover for some years. perhaps the final leaf, blank k4, was similarly soiled on its verso; this may have been a reason for its removal. bound, probably in the 1st 3 decades of the 20th century, in dark-blue crushed morocco, blue cloth place-mark ribbon, marbled endpapers, 2 added flyleaves of off-white machine-made paper at the front and 2 at the back, gilt-stamped ruled frame lines front, back, and spine, the spine gilt stamped “poetical / sketches / w. b. / 1783,” the inside front cover gilt stamped lower right “bound by wood, london.” the stub for leaf b4, 1.0 mm. (head) to 5.0 mm. (tail) wide, was made from the inner margin of the conjugate leaf, b1. this procedure explains why b1 is narrower at the tail than at the head, which corresponds inversely to the stub, wider at the tail than the head. b4 is not a cancellans or facsimile; it may have required pasting to a stub because it became detached when a prior binding was removed and the spine slightly shaved for rebinding. bb 345 notes the presence of “facsimile pages,” some showing a “michallet” watermark, in 5 copies of poetical sketches, including whole gatherings h, i, and k (there is no j) in copies k, l, and u, gatherings i and k in copy p, and the “advertisement” (leaf [a2]) in copy q. bbs 107 states that the “advertisement” in copy p is also “in facsimile.” bb points out that “the clearest indication of the facsimile [gatherings] is in the last words on p. 59, where the penultimate ‘prepare’ is under the ‘w’ of ‘welcome’ in genuine copies and under the ‘c’ in the facsimile” (345n1). the absence of the facsimile watermark and the position of “prepare” in this copy indicate that all gatherings are genuine. bentley describes other features distinguishing original leaves from facsimiles in blake 45.1 (summer 2011): 10. all leaves in this copy meet these criteria for an original, including the presence of the catchword (“the”) on p. 59, the correct spelling of “honest-seeming” on p. 65, and the absence of any significant differences in paper thickness or the boldness of chain lines among leaves. three leaves (i2, i4, k3) show 3 stabholes just outside the gutter from a prior, pamphlet-style binding. these are 7.0 cm. from the top margin and 4.4 cm. and 3.0 cm. apart. leaves d3 7. geoffrey keynes, a bibliography of william blake (new york: grolier club, 1921) 77, notes an even larger leaf size, “23 x 14 cm., uncut.” a completely uncut copy of a book printed as an octavo in half sheets will show deckle along the fore-edges of the 1st and 2nd leaves of each gathering in 4s and along the foot of every leaf. this copy of poetical sketches appears to have been trimmed slightly along the foot; only d2 shows evidence of deckle at its foot. 116 blake/an illustrated quarterly spring 2012 and e2 show only the top and bottom holes; c1-2, d2, d4, and f2 show only the top hole; h1 shows only the bottom hole. it is unusual for an octavo in half sheets to have been bound in this fashion, since the gatherings can be sewn through their inner folds. blake’s wife, catherine, apparently bound her husband’s illuminated books pamphlet-style, stabbed through the leaves within the left margin rather than sewn through the folds.8 thus, the stabholes may be remnants of the book’s original binding produced by catherine. the absence of any evidence of this stabbing on most leaves is probably due to the rebinding of the holes into the book’s gutter. the present binding may have been produced by harry wood, active in london in the 1890s, or (more probably) by the successor firm continued by henry thomas wood that operated under the name h. t. wood from 1900 to the early 1930s. see maurice packer, bookbinders of victorian london (london: british library, 1991) 166, and mirjam m. foot, studies in the history of bookbinding (aldershot: scolar p, 1993) 74. for the title page, its inscriptions, and the book’s provenance, see illus. 4 and its caption. for blake’s pen and ink annotations of the texts, see illus. 5 and its caption. 8. see bb 54-56 for a list of blake’s books stabbed in this manner. the illuminated books were “done up [that is, bound] … by mrs. blake’s hand,” according to alexander gilchrist, life of william blake, vol. 1 (london: macmillan, 1863) 70. many of the illuminated books were printed on single leaves, and thus there were no folds through which to sew. 4. poetical sketches, title page, leaf 21.8 x 12.7 cm. with a ragged fore-edge and other evidence of flaws in the paper upper right. essick collection, acquired at bhl, 22 march, #24. with the following pen and brown ink inscriptions: “lake” added following blake’s initials printed on the title page to spell out his last name, “at mr taylors / green st. leicester fields” below the ruled line following “by w. b.,” and “paulum sepulta distat inertiæ / celata virtus” in the lower margin. the dot of the “i” is so far displaced to the right in “leicester” and “fields” that they appear to be misspellings, “leicister” (with no dot over the first “i”) and “feilds.” copy s of poetical sketches (huntington library) also has “lake” added, but in pencil. the online auction cat. initially attributed “lake” and “at mr taylors …” to blake, but this was met with less than universal assent. on the basis of digital images, g. e. bentley, jr., alexander gourlay, and joseph viscomi rejected the attribution by bonhams. ted hofmann, senior specialist in english books at quaritch, the venerable antiquarian bookshop, inspected the original. he did not believe that “lake” was written by blake and found that “the very round ‘k’ seems quite impossible” (e-mail, 9 march 2011). when informed of these views, bonhams added the following “lot notice” to its online cat. on 11 march: “the consensus of several scholarly oppinions [sic] is that the inscriptions on the title are not in the hand of william blake.” cataloguers at bonhams may have been led to their attribution by similarities between the “at mr taylors …” inscription and blake’s hand in the manuscript of an island in the moon, generally dated to c. 1784-85. the stroking—that is, the sequence of directions in which the pen was moved to write the letters—is the same. the enlarged form of a lowercase “g,” used as a capital in “green,” is the same in its upper elements as we see in the island manuscript, including “gimblet” and “gass” on the first leaf (see the william blake archive <http://www. blakearchive.org>, object 1, lines 11 and 19). gourlay, however, finds that the loop to the left of the descender of the “g” on the title page is a significant difference from examples in the island manuscript, all of which show that blake lifted his pen when drawing it back from the termination of the descender (e-mail, 8 march 2011). the paucity of looping verticals in examples of blake’s handwriting, both formal and informal, is also crucial for viscomi. the bonhams cat. claims that the latin was inscribed by a hand different from the one that wrote the other inscriptions on the title page. gourlay, viscomi, and i believe that all 3 inscriptions are by the same hand, possibly writing at different times (e-mails, 12 may 2011). the ink color is the same, although “lake” may have been written with a wider nib. the auction cat. points out that the latin is a quotation from “horace’s odes.” the passage appears in book 4, ode 9, lines 29-30, which can be roughly translated as “when courage lies hidden, it is little better than shame hushed up in the grave.” in lines just before those quoted, horace states that brave men remain unknown unless their deeds are sung by poets. the relevance of the quotation to blake and his poetry may be multiple. several of the poetical sketches, including “a war song to englishmen” and “samson” (e 440, 443-45), praise brave men. at least until the publication of alexander gilchrist’s biography in 1863, blake could be characterized as a “hidden” artist and poet, brave in the realms of imagination. blake and his wife, catherine, lived at 23 green street (now called irving street), leicester fields, from aug. 1782 until they moved to 27 broad street late in 1784. thus, the inscription on the title page records blake’s residence when poetical sketches was printed. the blakes evidently rented their lodging from thomas taylor (not the platonist); he paid the rates on the property for these years (see br[2] 740-41). the auction cat. claims that this copy was “clearly given by blake” and that the inscribed address “gives dating to the presentation.” the inscription, “at mr taylors …,” indicates blake’s location, not a presentation or gift to taylor or anyone else. paul miner discovered that the aptly named taylor was a tailor, as reported in [david v. erdman], “blake’s landlord,” bulletin of the new york public library 63 (feb. 1959): 61. perhaps taylor had a shop on the ground floor with a sign that included his name. if so, then “at mr taylors …” would be a convenient way of locating a tenant renting spring 2012 blake/an illustrated quarterly 117 118 blake/an illustrated quarterly spring 2012 rooms in the same building. william hayley used this means of providing his wife with his london address in a letter of 16 april 1789, stating that she “will easily find the house [where he was residing] by the name basire on the door” (br[2] 740). blake’s green street address is recorded in the royal academy exhibition cat. of 1784 (br[2] 850n21), but the name of his landlord was not discovered and published until 1958—see miner, “william blake’s london residences,” bulletin of the new york public library 62 (nov. 1958): 539-40. bentley, gourlay, viscomi, windle, and i believe that the handwriting on the title page is certainly earlier than the mid-20th century. indeed, the similarities between blake’s hand and the title-page inscriptions suggest that the writer of the latter also learned penmanship in the 18th century. it seems probable that the inscriber of “at mr taylors …” had personal knowledge of blake’s whereabouts or learned it from someone who knew blake between the time the book was printed in 1783 and late 1784. the address would serve little purpose if not written during that same period, for only then would the information be of any use to the writer or others who might wish to know where to find the book’s author. if blake acted as a distributor of his book, this would also be the address where copies of poetical sketches could be obtained. in his 1828 biography of blake, john thomas smith states that “the whole copy” (apparently meaning the entire print run) of poetical sketches “was given to blake to sell to friends, or publish, as he might think proper” (br[2] 606). who among blake’s circle of acquaintances and patrons might be a likely candidate for the author of the title-page inscriptions? bentley has suggested, in a letter to me of 19 may 2011, that the first owner of this copy was the antiquarian, collector, and geologist john hawkins (1761-1841; see the biography by h. s. torrens in the odnb). in a letter of 18 june 1783 to his wife nancy, john flaxman states that “mr. hawkins paid me a visit & at my desire has employed blake to make him a capital drawing …” (br[2] 28). in a letter to hayley datable to 26 april of the next year, flaxman indicates that hawkins had commissioned “several drawings” from blake and that hawkins “is so convinced of his [blake’s] uncommon talents that he is now endeavouring to raise a subscription to send him to finish [his] studies in rome ….” nothing came of this scheme, perhaps in part because, as flaxman reports in this same letter, “mr. hawkins is going out of england” before “the 10th of may,” 1784 (br[2] 31). this epistolary evidence indicates that hawkins knew blake (or at least knew his work) between june 1783 and may 1784, may have visited him “at mr taylors” or could have learned blake’s address from flaxman, and had a serious interest in acquiring blake’s designs. comparisons between the title-page inscriptions and examples of hawkins’s handwriting confirm bentley’s insight. hawkins’s hand is much like blake’s in its stroking, but is rounder and loopier—the very characteristics that distinguish the inscriptions from blake’s own hand. gourlay has nicely summarized some of the more telling similarities between hawkins’s writing and the inscriptions: “the g is a good match, the habit of starting looped ascenders about a third of the way up the height, the looped uncial d, the variants of e, the tiny hairlines connecting apparently discrete letters all look right to me” (e-mail, 26 may 2011). every letter in the title-page inscriptions has good matches in hawkins’s letters of 29 may 1814 and 23 aug. 1816 to samuel lysons, including combinations of letters such as “mr” (second letter a superscript) and “ke.” hawkins’s education at helston school, winchester college (1775-77), and trinity college, cambridge (1778-82), would have provided sufficient instruction in latin literature for him to have encountered the lines from horace quoted on the title page. hawkins probably acquired this copy of poetical sketches sometime between its printing in 1783 and early may 1784 and inscribed the title page shortly after it came into his possession. it may have been a gift from blake to this significant patron. the book may have passed to hawkins’s elder son, john heywood hawkins (1802-77), who was bequeathed his father’s residence at bignor park, sussex, or (less probably) to the younger son, christopher hawkins (1820-1903), who inherited his uncle’s cornish properties, including trewithen house and its library. either line of descent probably led—either directly or through a subsequent generation—to the dealer, also residing in the south of england, named as the book’s former owner in the auction cat.: “descendent [sic] of frederick r. jones, of ‘eastbury’, thames ditton, surrey, bookseller and antiques dealer, later of adwell house, torre, near torquay.” bonhams has no further ownership information. hawkins’s “very fine mineral collection” was dispersed at “public auctions in 1905” (odnb); perhaps poetical sketches left his library at about the same time. bentley tells me (letter of 18 aug. 2011) that there are no works by blake in the auction of books from hawkins’s bignor park library at hodgson’s rooms, london, 16-17 dec. 1926. the comments here on hawkins’s handwriting are based on the 2 letters cited above (west sussex record office, chichester, add ms 7542 folios 22, 39) and samples reproduced in the letters of john hawkins and samuel lysons 1812-1830, ed. francis w. steer (chichester: west sussex county council, 1966) 10, 17, 21, 23, 40, 44. a victorian watercolor drawing of hawkins’s extensive library at bignor park is reproduced in i am, my dear sir … a selection of letters written mainly to and by john hawkins, ed. francis w. steer (chichester: n.p. [privately printed?], 1959), facing 33. spring 2012 blake/an illustrated quarterly 119 separate plates and plates in series “chaucers canterbury pilgrims.” campbell fine art, feb. online cat., 3rd st., “a particularly brilliant impression,” illus. (“£30,000—sold.” a record price for any st. unless sold at a large discount. the auction record for any st. is £14,400.). doyle auction, new york, 7 nov., #296, “fourth state of four” (actually 5th st. of 5) on laid india, very probably a colnaghi impression, some staining and foxing, illus. ($13,750 to a bidder on the telephone; estimate $2000-3000). windle, dec. “pictorial blake” cat., #45, 5th sts. on laid india, colnaghi impressions, illus. ($15,000); #46, another colnaghi impression, “trimmed fairly close to the image” ($9500). windle’s #45 is probably the same impression offered windle/sotheran, june 2008 cat., #1 (£15,500). dante engravings. windle, dec. “pictorial blake” cat., #52-55, pls. 2, 4-6 only, offered individually, laid india, printing date uncertain but probably the restrikes of c. 1892, pls. 2 and 6 foxed, illus. ($10,000 for pl. 2, $15,000 for pl. 4, $8500 for pl. 5, $7500 for pl. 6); #176, 1968 printing of 1 pl. not otherwise identified, included in the deluxe issue of the blake trust/ trianon p illustrations of dante (1978), half morocco folding case ($5500). for previous offers for sale of pls. 2, 4-6, see blake 37.4 (spring 2004): 120, 39.4 (spring 2006): 156, 40.4 (spring 2007): 127, 42.4 (spring 2009): 123, and 43.4 (spring 2010): 121. “the fall of rosamond,” after stothard, 1783. campbell fine art, aug. online cat., trimmed to the circular image but 5. poetical sketches, p. 15, detail of “mad song,” 1st stanza, 3.9 x 5.3 cm. essick collection. this stanza has been emended in pen and black ink as follows: line 4. the left vertical and curving horizontal of the “u” in “unfold” have been rubbed out and a dot written over the right vertical to change the word to “infold,” as in 7 other copies. the ghostly presence of the left vertical is still visible. line 7. in “the rustling beds of dawn,” the third word has been deleted with 3 horizontal lines and “birds” written in cursive letters (except for a space between “r” and “d”) above. this emendation appears in 11 other copies. the horizontal lines and lettering above them are almost identical to those in copies e (collection of alan parker, london), f (turnbull library, wellington, new zealand; see the reproduction in william blake’s works in conventional typography, ed. g. e. bentley, jr. [delmar, new york: scholars’ facsimiles & reprints, 1984]), and q (preston blake collection, city of westminster archives centre; see the reproduction in blake, poetical sketches, intro. by robin hamlyn [london: tate publishing, 2007]). this copy also contains the following pen and black ink emendations: p. 4, “to winter,” 3rd line of the 3rd quatrain. the word “in” (“… and in his hand”) deleted with short pen and ink lines, as in 10 other copies. p. 7, title of “fair elenor.” an ink droplet appears over the lower horizontal of the initial “f.” this element of the letter was clearly printed, and thus the oval ink spot would not seem to be an intentional addition to compensate for poor presswork. it is difficult to tell whether this is printing ink or ink from a pen; in either case, this feature is probably accidental. p. 7, “fair elenor,” 2nd line of the 2nd quatrain. the “s” in “cheeks” has been rubbed out. this letter has been deleted, either by rubbing out or lining through in black ink, in 5 other copies. p. 9, “fair elenor,” 1st line of the 15th quatrain. there appears to be a short horizontal line crossing the upper vertical of the “h” of “the” in “the bloody cloth unfolds.” this line does not have any verbal or typographic purpose and may not be intentional. p. 9, “fair elenor,” 1st line of the 16th quatrain. the words “i am” have been rubbed out and “behold” in uncial letters written in their place, as in 8 other copies. the pen and ink letters are remarkably similar to those in copies s (huntington library) and q. p. 15, “mad song,” final line. a short vertical line appears between the 2nd and 3rd letters of “pain.” the purpose of this line is unclear; it may have been made accidently by blake when he was writing the 2 annotations higher on this page. p. 29. in the stage direction for scene 1 of “king edward the third,” “before / it.” is deleted with smudged horizontal lines. in copy s, the only other copy recorded as containing this deletion, the lines are less smudged. i am confident that all these emendations in pen and black ink were made by blake. the same intentional annotations—and no others—also appear in copy s, which john flaxman left with william long for delivery to william hayley, as flaxman states in a letter to hayley of 26 april 1784 (br[2] 31). i suspect that copy s and the newly discovered copy were annotated by blake at about the same time. for a record of blake’s handwritten additions in previously recorded copies, see william blake’s writings, ed. g. e. bentley, jr. (oxford: clarendon p, 1978) 2: 750-95. 120 blake/an illustrated quarterly spring 2012 retaining the signatures, described as 1st st., color printed (brown and pink) and hand colored, “with a companion piece in matching frame” not further identified, illus. (£2500; previously offered at the same price in march 2003 cat. 10, #17). “george cumberland’s card.” windle, feb. cat. 48, #29, printed in brown, leaf 10.2 x 12.8 cm., illus. ($17,500); same impression, dec. “pictorial blake” cat., #47, illus. (same price; previously offered at the same price in oct. 2009 cat. 46, #21). “the idle laundress,” after morland, 1788. see “industrious cottager,” below. “industrious cottager,” after morland, 1788. campbell fine art, feb. online cat., 3rd st. printed in brown, laid paper, lower margin below signatures trimmed off but retained and with the title “pasted onto the backboard of the original frame,” illus. (£480). wellers auction, guildford, surrey, 24 june, #758, with “the idle laundress,” titles and imprints trimmed off, probably final sts., color printed and “hand coloured,” both framed (not sold; estimate £50-80); same pair, 9 july, #2445, both illus. (£156). the 2 wellers auctions show the importance of online illus. for attracting bidders. job engravings. windle, feb. cat. 48, #28, complete set of published “proof ” impressions on laid india, leaves 32.0 x 25.4 cm., modern half morocco, illus. ($82,500; previously offered at the same price in windle’s oct. 2009 cat. 46, #8, and by simon finch, july and nov. 1997 cats. 31, #19, and 32, #18, for £26,000); june private offer, complete set of published “proof ” impressions on laid india, “j whatman / turkey mill / 1825” watermark on 7 leaves, backing leaves 48.0 x 39.0 cm. and thus larger than untrimmed copies previously recorded at 43.5 x 33.7 cm., possibly a (unique?) large-paper copy, “early” cloth with spine and hinges worn, internally “fresh and clean” ($125,000; sold through maggs to a private collector); dec. “pictorial blake” cat., #2-23, complete set of pls. offered individually, published “proof ” impressions on laid india, scattered foxing, all pls. illus. ($2950-5950 each); #24-29, title page and pls. numbered 3, 6-8, 17 only from the 1874 printing on laid india, illus. ($2000-2500 each); #119, complete set on “french” paper, 1826 printing, “original blue paper boards as issued, rebacked to match” ($89,500; for previous offers for sale, see blake 40.4 [spring 2007]: 127 and 43.4 [spring 2010]: 121). maggs, march cat. 1446, #96, pl. numbered 3 only, apparently a published st. (not further identified) on paper with a “j whatman / turkey mill / 1825” watermark, from the collection of douglas cleverdon (£1800). r. e. lewis & daughter, may online cat., pl. numbered 13 only, published “proof ” impression on laid india, illus. ($3500—“sold”). heritage book shop, dec. private offer, 1874 printing on laid india, letterpress title page possibly printed for this copy when bound, 20th-century quarter calf ($32,500). for leaf sizes, see essick, “blake’s engravings to the book of job: an essay on their graphic form with a catalogue of their states and printings,” william blake’s illustrations of the book of job, ed. david bindman (london: william blake trust, 1987) 98. for a manuscript advertisement for the job engravings, see illus. 6. 6. john linnell. manuscript draft of an advertisement for blake’s job engravings, datable to 1825-26. pen and ink on wove paper, 22.7 x 18.4 cm. with a john hall watermark just within the left edge. acquired sept. by essick from john windle. transcription: “blake’s illustrations / of the / book of job . / consisting of 22 plates engraved by himself upon / copper from his own designs / price to subscribers 3 . 3 / proofs on india paper 5 5 / subscriptions— 1 . / received by the author wm blake .3 fountain court / strand / or m.r j. linnell 6. cirencester place fitzroy sq[uare]/ these plates are engraved entirely by mr blake with the / graver only (that is without the aid of aqua fortis).” these prices accord with most of those listed in linnell’s job accounts; see br(2) 799-807. the concluding statement is very similar to a note by linnell among the ivimy manuscripts, now in the fitzwilliam museum, that the job pls. were “cut with the graver entirely on copper without the aid of aqua fortis” (br[2] 318fn). i am confident that linnell, a skilled printmaker who commissioned the job engravings and was intimately involved in their production and distribution, is correct on this matter except for preliminary drypoint sketching of the border designs and inscriptions. for a contrary opinion, see mei-ying sung, william blake and the art of engraving (london: pickering & chatto, 2009) 112. the draft advertisement is pasted to a backing leaf of wove paper, 38.4 x 26.4 cm., formerly bound into a complete copy of the job engravings. a copy of the printed job label is pasted to the same leaf above linnell’s manuscript. the pencil inscription just above the lower edge of the latter, “preserve this,” also appears on the label. neither was written by linnell. also previously bound into the same copy of blake’s engravings was a darkbrown wove paper wrapper, 38.0 x 24.5 cm., cut into 3 pieces— front cover, back cover, spine—now also in essick’s collection. the front cover is inscribed in ink, “blake’s / illustrations of the / book of job / [rule] / unfinished proofs.” the final line is in linnell’s hand; he probably also wrote the block letters of the first 3 lines. since the job pls. with which these materials were bound are published “proof ” impressions, not “unfinished” proofs, the wrapper was apparently designed for, and possibly once bound with, a different copy. the “john hall” watermark is identical to the 1st line of a mark appearing in jane austen’s letter of 2 dec. 1815 to her sister cassandra (morgan library and museum, new york, accession no. 977.40). a 2nd line of the letter’s watermark is “1814”; any such second line would have been trimmed off the leaf bearing linnell’s manuscript. hall produced paper at cotton mill, ringstead, northamptonshire; see <http://www. themorgan.org/collections/conservation/austen/watermarks. asp>, accessed 3 sept. 2011. spring 2012 blake/an illustrated quarterly 121 122 blake/an illustrated quarterly spring 2012 letterpress books with engravings by and after blake, including prints extracted from such books allen, roman history, 1798. campbell fine art, aug. online cat., blake’s 4 pls. only, illus. (£1000; previously offered at the same price in june 2004 cat. 11, #9). windle, dec. “pictorial blake” cat., #1, blake’s 4 pls. only, illus. ($1250; previously offered at the same price in oct. 2009 cat. 46, #60). ariosto, orlando furioso. eb, jan., 1783 ed., vol. 3 (with blake’s pl.) only, contemporary calf worn, marginal foxing on the pl., illus. (£63.20); march-april, 1799 ed., 5 vols., foxed, contemporary calf very worn, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $250). unsworth’s booksellers, jan. cat. 24, #333, 1791 ed., 2 vols., contemporary calf worn (£90). booksborough, sept. online cat., 1785 ed., 5 vols., contemporary calf worn, binding illus. ($749). bible. royal universal family bible, 1780-81. keogh’s books, march online cat., 2 vols., “leather much worn” (£424.23). blair, the grave. eb, jan., 1813 “folio” (but actually the quarto), later blind-embossed cloth similar but not identical to the 1870 publisher’s cloth, possibly rebacked, extensively illus. ($970); 1813 quarto, lacking 4 pls., heavy foxing, quarter calf very worn, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $299.99); feb., same copy ($249.99); june, 1813 quarto, later quarter roan worn, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £680); dec., 1808 quarto, imprint at foot of blake’s pl. 1 trimmed off, contemporary half calf with a new spine, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $2750). bho, 22 feb., #161a, 1808 “folio” (probably the quarto), spotting and damp staining “largely marginal,” later cloth soiled, illus. (£408). csk, 13 june, #125, 1808 quarto, engraved title page cropped along foot, some soiling and spotting, contemporary half russia very worn, front cover detached, illus. (£813). grosvenor prints, june online cat., 1808 quarto, damp staining and foxing, later cloth, illus. (£650); blake’s pls. 3, 5, 10-12 offered individually, 1808 impressions, illus. (£95 to £140 each). cox & budge, july online cat., 1870 folio, foxed, quarter roan very worn, illus. (£690). campbell fine art, aug. online cat., blake’s pl. 2 only, 1813 imprint, illus. (£75—“sold”). bauman rare books, oct. cat., #92, 1808 “folio” (but actually the quarto), “soiled,” original boards rebacked, illus. ($7500). windle, dec. “pictorial blake” cat., #30-31, blake’s pls. 10, 11 only from the 1808 folio ed., both illus. ($675 each; previously offered at the same price in oct. 2009 cat. 46, #50-51); #32-44, complete pls. (including the frontispiece portrait of blake) from the 1813 quarto ed., all pls. illus. ($395 each); #120, 1808 quarto, “early waterstaining not intruding into the text or plates,” contemporary calf rebacked ($3750). boydell’s graphic illustrations … of shakspeare, c. 1803. dw, 15 june, #483, contemporary calf repaired, illus. (not sold; estimate £1000-1500). charles agvent, sept. online cat., contemporary half calf worn, covers detached ($3500); another copy, contemporary morocco worn, front cover detached ($4000). eb, oct.-nov., scattered foxing, contemporary calf rebacked, illus. ($1334). bryant, new system … of ancient mythology. unsworth’s booksellers, jan. cat. 24, #73, 1774-76, 3 vols., contemporary calf very worn, 1 cover detached (£360). windows booksellers, aug. online cat., 1774-76, 3 vols., some stains and foxing, “full leather” very worn, some covers detached ($600). mcdowell books, aug. online cat., 1774-76, 3 vols., minor foxing, modern half calf ($1500). bho, 29 nov., #636, 1775-76, 3 vols., contemporary calf worn, illus. (£125). windle, dec. “pictorial blake” cat., #121, 1775-76, 3 vols., contemporary calf worn ($1500; previously offered at the same price in oct. 2009 cat. 46, #62). cumberland, outlines from the antients, 1829. windle, dec. “pictorial blake” cat., #122, foxed, 19th-century quarter morocco ($975). for previous offers for sale, see blake 42.4 (spring 2009): 125 and 43.4 (spring 2010): 123. cumberland, thoughts on outline, 1796. windle, dec. “pictorial blake” cat., #48-51, blake’s pls. 4, 5, 7, 8 only, offered individually, illus. ($350-500 each). for previous offers for sale, see blake 40.4 (spring 2007): 131, 42.4 (spring 2009): 125, and 43.4 (spring 2010): 123. darwin, botanic garden. eb, jan., 2nd ed. of part 1, 3rd ed. of part 2, both 1791, 2 vols., scattered foxing, contemporary calf very worn, covers detached, illus. ($596); march, 1799 ed., 2 vols. in 1, scattered foxing, contemporary half calf, illus. ($431.88); may, 1799 ed., 2 vols., some pls. foxed, later three-quarter calf, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £497.75); 2nd ed. of part 1, 3rd ed. of part 2, both 1791, 2 vols. in 1, scattered light foxing, contemporary calf, illus. ($720); july, 3rd ed. of part 1 (1795), 4th ed. of part 2 (1794), 2 vols., lacking the frontispiece to part 1 but apparently with all of blake’s pls., some browning mostly in margins, contemporary calf rebacked, illus. (£880). unsworth’s booksellers, jan. cat. 24, #183, 1799 ed., vol. 1 only, pls. foxed, contemporary calf worn (£75). dw, 11 may, #313, 1799 ed., 2 vols., some spotting, 20th-century half calf worn (£120). bauman rare books, june online cat., 1st eds. of both parts (1791, 1789), 2 vols. in 1, contemporary calf rebacked ($4800). fine editions, june online cat., 2nd ed. of part 1, 3rd ed. of part 2, both 1791, 2 vols. in 1, later calf ($2850). natural history books, june online cat., 1799 ed., 2 vols., “mild foxing” to pls., half calf ($1200). antiquités duvert martial, june online cat., 3rd eds. of both parts (1795, 1791), 2 vols. in 1, some browning and tears in pls., “leather” worn (€500). richard sylvanus williams, june online cat., 1799 ed., 2 vols. in 1, “hardback” very worn, frontispiece and title page loose, spine missing (£99). quaritch, july cat. 2011/13, #15, 1st eds. of both parts (1791, 1789), 2 vols., some spotting, imprint on blake’s pl. 1 (and others?) spring 2012 blake/an illustrated quarterly 123 trimmed off, contemporary calf rebacked, illus. (£2800; previously offered dec. 2009 cat. 2009/19, #50, for £2500, perhaps before rebacking). bow windows, oct. online cat., 1799 ed., 2 vols., light foxing, modern calf, binding illus. (£600). windle, dec. “pictorial blake” cat., #123, 1st ed. of part 1, 3rd ed. of part 2, both 1791, 2 vols., foxed and stained, contemporary calf ($1250). dw, 14 dec., #387, 1st ed. of part 1 (1791), 2nd ed. of part 2 (1790), 2 vols. in 1, blake’s pl. 6 from the 3rd ed. of part 1 (1795) bound in, slight spotting, contemporary calf very worn, covers detached, illus. (£260). the copy sold at dw may be a reissue of the 1st ed. of part 1 when blake’s pl. 6, “tornado” after fuseli with an aug. 1795 imprint, was available for inclusion. enfield, the speaker, 1795. stuart bennett, oct. online cat., contemporary sheep rebacked ($225). fenning and collyer, new system of geography, 1785-86. rulon-miller, march online cat., 2 vols., blake’s pl. 1 in a previously unrecorded 2nd st. of 3, blake’s pl. 2 in the 2nd st. of 2, pls. and text leaves slightly water stained and wrinkled, crude 20th-century half calf ($2500; acquired by windle for essick). the only copy i have seen on the market in the last 43 years. for further information on this and other copies, see william blake’s commercial book illustrations in the appendix, below. flaxman, hesiod designs, 1817. meiwes, jan. online cat., foxed, some pls. loose, publisher’s boards worn (€300). the lark, april online cat., bound with flaxman’s aeschylus designs, n.d. (c. 1818?), foxed throughout, “leather … repaired” ($900). mclean arts & books, april online cat., “no foxing, no stains,” recent three-quarter calf ($1200). maggs, june online cat., “internally very clean,” original boards worn (£300). bookworks, oct. online cat., scattered slight foxing, later half morocco worn ($900). windle, dec. “pictorial blake” cat., #124, with flaxman’s iliad (1805), odyssey (1805), and aeschylus (1831) designs, 4 vols., “original quarter green cloth” ($2750). rosebery’s auction, west norwood, south london, 13 dec., #556, “leather” binding, illus. (not sold; estimate £200-300). as i reported in blake 43.4 (spring 2010): 123, the windle set was sold in 2009 to the morgan library and museum, but they returned it after several months. flaxman, iliad designs, 1805. meiwes, jan. online cat., foxed and water stained, most pls. loose, publisher’s boards worn (€320). eb, dec., later half calf worn, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of £220). see also the hesiod designs, above. fuseli, lectures on painting, 1801. isseido booksellers, march online cat., slightly spotted, contemporary calf ($731). sanctuary books, march online cat., modern quarter morocco ($1000). lawrences auction, crewkerne, somerset, 21 july, #3010, stains, contemporary morocco worn, upper cover detached (£60). gay, fables. eb, dec. 2010, blake’s pl. 11 only, full leaf with lower margin trimmed off and a strip of paper, approx. 5 cm., attached, light foxing, illus. (£73.50); jan.-feb., blake’s pl. 7 only, full leaf, illus. (£48); feb., blake’s pl. 2 only, full leaf, illus. (£82.99); oct., [1811] ed., 2 vols., modern cloth (offered at the “buy it now” price of £177.50); nov.-dec., blake’s pl. 9 only, full leaf, illus. (£109); dec., 1793 ed., 2 vols., some pls. foxed, contemporary calf worn, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $375). unsworth’s booksellers, jan. cat. 24, #394, [1811] ed., 2 vols. in 1, light foxing, contemporary calf very worn (£95); march online cat., 1793 ed., 2 vols., contemporary morocco (£500). bl, 27 jan., #148, 1793 ed., 2 vols., lacking 1 unidentified pl., contemporary calf rebacked and worn, illus. (£180). bhsf, 13 feb., #2062, 1793 ed., 2 vols., with aesop, fables (1793), 2 vols., uniformly bound in later calf, bindings illus. ($1098). windle, feb. cat. 48, #31, 1793 ed., 2 vols., 19th-century half morocco, illus. ($1500); another copy, dec. “pictorial blake” cat., #125, 2 vols., contemporary calf worn ($1500; previously offered at the same price in oct. 2009 cat. 46, #75). rulon-miller, march online cat., 1793 ed., 2 vols. in 1, contemporary calf rubbed ($1125). james cummins, dec. cat. 110, #20, 1793 ed., 2 vols., 20th-century calf, illus. ($1250). dw, 14 dec., #401, 1793 ed., 2 vols., scattered foxing, contemporary morocco worn, binding illus. (£250). some of these “1793” copies may be the [1811] issue. hayley, ballads, 1805. peter bowen, belfast, dec. 2010 private offer, 2nd st. of pls. 1-3, uncut, quarter roan over marbled paper boards (£3400). windle, feb. cat. 48, #32, 1st st. of pls. 1-3, early boards with a roan backstrip, illus. ($6750); same copy, dec. “pictorial blake” cat., #126 (same price; previously offered at the same price in oct. 2009 cat. 46, #35). bho, 22 feb., #471, 1st st. of pls. 1-3, modern half calf, with hayley, triumphs of temper (1803), hayley, life of romney (1809), and a group of books about blake, title page to the ballads illus. (£816). pride and prejudice books, oct. online cat., 2nd st. of pls. 1-3, “elegant blue morocco” by tout and sons ($5200). hayley, essay on sculpture, 1800. windle, dec. “pictorial blake” cat., #56-58, blake’s 3 pls. sold individually, pls. 1-2 foxed, illus. ($375, $495, $595 respectively; previously offered at the same prices in oct. 2009 cat. 46, #76-78). hayley, life of cowper, 1803-04. unsworth’s booksellers, jan. cat. 24, #409, apparently 1st ed., with cowper, poems (1806), 4 vols. in all, contemporary calf very worn (£180). art of the print, feb. online cat., blake’s pls. 1 and 2 only, offered individually, illus. ($795 each). windle, dec. “pictorial blake” cat., #127, 1st ed., “including supplementary pages” not otherwise described, 4 vols. in all, some foxing, contemporary calf worn ($1250); another copy, #128, 2nd ed., 3 vols., calf rebacked ($975; previously offered at the same price in oct. 2009 cat. 46, #37). 124 blake/an illustrated quarterly spring 2012 hayley, life of romney, 1809. eb, sept., probably small-paper issue, signature and imprint on blake’s pl. either bound into the gutter or trimmed off, scattered foxing, contemporary calf very worn, illus. (£159). bg, 6 oct., #22, later half calf (£110). sny, 19 oct., #418, “cosway” style binding by rivière & son inset with 11 miniature portraits, probably by c. b. currie, based on romney’s paintings, illus. (not sold; estimate $25,000-35,000). see also hayley, ballads, above. for a pl. possibly connected with this book, see the discussion in the introductory essay to this sales review and the “portrait of romney” under romney, below. hayley, triumphs of temper, 1803. paul grinke, april cat. 4, #41, large-paper issue untrimmed, “occasional very light foxing,” half morocco (£850). james fenning, may online cat., contemporary calf, “small portion of calf on both boards eaten” (£450); same copy and price, july cat. 255, #90. eb, june, small-paper issue, scattered foxing, contemporary calf, illus. ($610.99). windle, dec. “pictorial blake” cat., #129, large-paper issue untrimmed, later half morocco ($2750). jarndyce, dec. online cat., “few spots,” later calf (£750). see also hayley, ballads, above. hoare, inquiry, 1806. windle, dec. “pictorial blake” cat., #59, blake’s pl. only, illus. ($875; previously offered at the same price in oct. 2009 cat. 46, #82). hogarth, the beggar’s opera by hogarth and blake, 1965. windle, dec. “pictorial blake” cat., #60, publisher’s folding box slightly worn, illus. ($975; the same or similar copies offered at the same price in nov. 2006 cat. 42, #28, and oct. 2009 cat. 46, #85). hogarth, works. bl, 20 jan., #434, 1822 ed., 156 pls. on 116 leaves, contemporary half morocco worn, blake’s pl. (4th st.) illus. (£2400; estimate £700-1000). isseido booksellers, march online cat., 1822 ed., “half leather” ($6095). d & e lake, march online cat., undated baldwin and cradock ed., contemporary half morocco worn ($4555.80). grosvenor prints, march online cat., blake’s pl. only, good impression probably of st. 2, 3, or 4, illus. (£490). hunter, historical journal, 1793. maggs, dec. 2010 cat. 1444, #142, quarto issue, large-paper copy on “super fine, wove royal” paper, contemporary morocco, binding illus. (£15,000—a record asking price). best buy books, march online cat., quarto issue, recent buckram (£2950). banfield house, march online cat., octavo issue, half “leather” ($4000 australian). eb, june, octavo issue, scattered foxing, modern half calf, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $1950 australian). josephus, works. eb, dec. 2010, blake’s pl. 1 only, brown stain lower left in image, the impression previously offered on eb in nov. 2010, illus. (no bids once again on a required minimum bid of $125); jan., bb issue a, stains and other defects, contemporary calf, spine very worn, covers missing, illus. (£57); march, blake’s pl. 2 only, 3rd st., illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $125); same impression, april, illus. (same required minimum bid and result); july, bb issue d, lacking 1 pl. not by blake, stained and foxed, contemporary calf very worn, illus. ($91); blake’s pl. 3 only, marginal stains, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of €149, reduced the next week to €69, in aug. to €59, and in nov. to €45.90). flora books, march online cat., bb issue a or between a and b, contemporary calf rebacked (£320). lavater, aphorisms, 1788. paul grinke, april cat. 4, #47, 1st st. of the pl., small engraved oval portrait of lavater pasted to the front flyleaf, contemporary sheep, illus. (£450). the oval portrait is probably the engraving by william holl published in james harrison, the biographical cabinet, vol. 1 of 1823. lavater, essays on physiognomy. eb, jan., 15 pls. only including blake’s pls. 3-4, illus. (£24). bhsf, 13 feb., #2088, 1810 ed., 3 vols. in 5, scattered foxing, later russia worn, illus. ($976). thomas joyce, march online cat., 1789-98 ed., 3 vols. in 5, something of a wreck with serious staining and “warped boards” ($500). ian marr, nov. boston book fair, parts 3, 5, 7, 12, 21, 22, and 36 as originally issued in printed wrappers, including blake’s pls. 1 and 2 in parts 5 (dated july 1788) and 3 (may 1788) respectively, front wrappers of parts 3 and 5 torn and stained with loss of text, front wrappers of parts 7, 21, 22 signed by the 3rd earl of pomfret (george fermor, 17681830), housed in a paper folder with the printed label of the “easton neston library” pasted to the front cover, inside front cover of the folder inscribed “augusta holmes” in large letters, with an engraved receipt for part 22 in the amount of 12s., dated 27 feb. 1792, issued to lord pomfret and signed by henry hunter, the translator of the work (£140 for the lot; acquired by windle for essick). ursus rare books, dec. cat. 300, #44, 1810 ed., 3 vols. in 5, later three-quarter morocco, illus. ($3500; previously offered at the same price, april 2009 online cat.). malkin, father’s memoirs of his child, 1806. windle, feb. cat. 48, #33, uncut, contemporary half morocco, illus. ($1875; previously offered at the same price in oct. 2009 cat. 46, #57); another copy, dec. “pictorial blake” cat., #130, “virtually untrimmed,” full morocco worn (same price). novelist’s magazine, vol. 10, sir charles grandison, 1783. windle, dec. “pictorial blake” cat., #61-63, blake’s 3 pls. offered individually, pl. 1 trimmed to the image, illus. ($75 for pl. 1, $50 each for the other 2). for previous offers for sale, see blake 42.4 (spring 2009): 127 and 43.4 (spring 2010): 127. olivier, fencing familiarized, 1780. eb, dec. 2010, minor scattered foxing, contemporary boards with later calf spine, illus. (€371). spring 2012 blake/an illustrated quarterly 125 rees, cyclopædia, 1820. best buy books, march online cat., pls. vol. 1 only (presumably containing blake’s pl. 1), “original cloth” rebacked ($1450—a record asking price for a single vol. of pls.). francis edwards, march online cat., 39 text vols. and pls. vols. 1-4, 6 (presumably containing all 7 blake pls.), contemporary calf very worn, covers detached (£1200). eb, april, blake’s pls. 4-6 only offered individually, illus. (£12 for pl. 4, £15 each for pls. 5-6). windle, dec. “pictorial blake” cat., #131, pls. vol. 4 only with blake’s pls. 4-7, blake’s pl. 3 from vol. 3 loosely inserted, foxed, half calf ($750). remember me!, 1825. bhsf, 13 feb., #2048, pale marginal damp stain on blake’s single pl., “publisher’s printed boards with old rebacking in red muslin, custom clamshell box,” illus. ($6710 to windle acting for northwestern university; estimate $1500-2000). eb, april, blake’s pl. only, light marginal staining, the impression from the collection of frank rinder sold cl, 30 nov. 1993, #10 (£1955 to ed buryn, the vendor on eb), illus. (reserve claimed by buryn to be $5000 not met; highest bid $1810). ritson, select collection of english songs, 1783. ximenes, jan. cat. m19, #153, 3 vols., recent half calf (£300). windle, dec. “pictorial blake” cat., #132, 3 vols., presentation inscription by ritson, contemporary calf worn ($1250). salzmann, elements of morality. second life books, march cat. 176, #117, 1799 ed., 3 vols., lacking half titles, 1 pl. “amateurishly hand-coloured,” soiled and with some marginal tears, later 19th-century half roan worn ($3000). chapter house books, march online cat., 1792 ed., vols. 1-2 of 3 only, 12 pls. in vol. 2 hand colored, browned and soiled, “full leather” very worn ($175). seally and lyons, complete geographical dictionary. hollypetal books, oct. online cat. on amazon uk, vol. 2 of 2 only but with all 3 of blake’s pls., 1st sts., dated to “1787” by the vendor but actually the undated 1st ed. published by john fielding and tentatively dated to “?1784” in bb #495a, contemporary suede worn, illus. (£300; acquired by essick). the only copy of this ed. listed in bb is at “yale” (sterling memorial library, yale university). the only copy of any ed. of seally and lyons with blake’s pls. i have seen on the market in the last 43 years. shakespeare, dramatic works, 1802. johanson books, sept. online cat., 9 vols., binding not described ($7500). shakespeare, plays. eb, aug., 1805 ed., small-paper issue in 9 vols., lacking 1 pl. not by blake, scattered foxing, contemporary half calf very worn, spines damaged, illus. ($95); 1811 ed., 9 vols., scattered foxing, contemporary calf rebacked, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $1000); 1805 ed., large-paper issue in 10 vols. lacking vol. 10 and thus lacking blake’s pl. 2, pls. foxed, 19th-century half calf very worn, parts of spines missing, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of £24.99). windle, dec. “pictorial blake” cat., #133, largepaper issue in 10 vols., some browning, “old calf restored” ($4750; previously offered at the same price in oct. 2009 cat. 46, #95). stedman, narrative, 1796, colored copy. windle, feb. cat. 48, #34, 2 vols., 3 pls. heightened with gold, contemporary boards rebacked with modern calf, illus. ($29,750; acquired march by victoria university library, toronto. previously offered at the same price online in oct. 2010.). stedman, narrative, uncolored copies. eb, jan., blake’s pl. 8 only, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $49.99); same impression(?), feb.-march, illus. ($56.55); may, 1796 ed., vol. 2 only, light foxing and marginal water stains on pls., early cloth-backed boards badly stained, illus. (£256). bl, 24 feb., #47, 1796 ed., 2 vols., foxed, contemporary half russia very worn, illus. (£1300). arader galleries, “spring” cat., no item #, 1813 ed., 2 vols., 19th-century half morocco “scuffed,” illus. ($6400). tennants auction, leyburn, north yorkshire, 13 april, #94, 1796 ed., 2 vols., lacking 3 blake pls., contemporary half calf very worn, illus. (£550). dw, 11 may, #184, 1796 ed., 2 vols., light foxing, contemporary calf rebacked, worn, illus. (£1600). campbell fine art, aug. online cat., blake’s pls. 6, 8, and 10 only, offered individually, illus. (£175, £275, and £225 respectively). bauman rare books, sept. private offer, 1796 ed., 2 vols., contemporary calf rebacked ($8500). windle, dec. “pictorial blake” cat., #64-78, blake’s pls. 1, 3-16 offered individually, pls. 4, 9, 11 from the 1813 ed., all others from the 1796 ed., pls. 3, 5 with stains, 12 pls. illus. ($100-500 each; pls. 4, 9, and 11 previously offered at the same prices in nov. 2006 cat. 42, #81-83). virgil, pastorals, 1821. stuart bennett, jan. cat. 55, #28, 2 vols., 19th-century calf rebacked, blake’s wood engravings bound very close to (but not into) the gutter, illus. ($32,500). larkhall fine art, june online cat., blake’s pl. 5 (his 1st wood engraving) only, full sheet with letterpress text, with “folds and other imperfections” not affecting the engraving, illus. (£2400). windle, dec. “pictorial blake” cat., #134, 2 vols., early 19th-century calf ($47,500; sold to a british private collector. previously offered at the same price in oct. 2009 cat. 46, #40.). virgil, later impressions of blake’s wood engravings printed by or for the linnell family. larkhall fine art, aug. private offer, 21 impressions of bb #504.8 (blake’s 4th wood engraving), 14 impressions of bb #504.13 (blake’s 9th wood engraving), all printed on thin paper laid onto wove paper backing leaves, with an envelope inscribed in pencil by john linnell, jr.: “pastorals / 5 impressions—of the blocks / as samples for average strength [printing pressure?] / j. linnell may 1892 / to be returned” (£650 each). according to nicholas lott of larkhall, these impressions are “well printed and show some considerable detail compared to many rather heavy over-inked linnell printings.” john linnell, sr., acquired the blocks in 1825. 126 blake/an illustrated quarterly spring 2012 according to john linnell, jr., some impressions were printed for his father by edward calvert (i suspect shortly after acquiring the blocks) and “j. l. jun. & brother printed a few of the blocks, but did not finish the set” (bb 630, quoting from a manuscript “list of john linnell senior’s letters and papers” in the ivimy archive now in the fitzwilliam museum). the larkhall impressions are apparently from that later printing (or series of printings), no later than 1892, by j. l., jr., and one of his brothers. windle, dec. “pictorial blake” cat., #79, “fifth cut” (actually blake’s 6th wood engraving), linnell impression, accompanying a copy of essick and windle, a troubled paradise (1999), no. 4 of 13 copies thus, publisher’s wrappers and folding cloth box, illus. ($3500; sold to a british private collector. for previous offers for sale, see blake 39.4 [spring 2006]: 170, 40.4 [spring 2007]: 134, and 42.4 [spring 2009]: 132.). virgil, wood engravings of william blake, 1977. buddenbrooks, march cat. for the new york book fair, #16, no description of the binding but apparently in the publisher’s folding box, prospectus inserted ($14,500—a record asking price). wit’s magazine, 1784. eb, april-may, blake’s pl. 4 only, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $495; for earlier offerings of this impression, see blake 44.4 [spring 2011]: 125). windle, dec. “pictorial blake” cat., #80, “plate 4” (actually blake’s pl. 5) only, “little soiled,” illus. ($400; for previous offers for sale, see blake 37.4 [spring 2004]: 126, 40.4 [spring 2007]: 134, and 42.4 [spring 2009]: 128); #135, complete vol. 1 bound with vol. 2 (1785), with the 2nd of 2 pls. of “the temple of mirth” after stothard (bb pl. 2, cb pl. 1b), repaired tears in some pls., later half calf ($5750). wollstonecraft, original stories, 1791. swann auction, new york, 7 april, #134, 2nd st. of pl. 1, sts. of other pls. not recorded, modern calf, pl. 1, title page, and binding illus. ($4320); same or very similar copy, bromer booksellers, aug. online cat. ($8500). windle, dec. “pictorial blake” cat., #136, 2nd sts., light staining on 2 pls., later morocco ($6750; previously offered at the same price in oct. 2009 cat. 46, #44). young, night thoughts, 1797, uncolored copies. cl, 8 june, #41, with the “explanation” leaf, some pls. slightly trimmed, “occasional light browning and spotting,” contemporary morocco worn, illus. (£4750). cny, 23 june, #104, with the “explanation” leaf, minor spotting, modern morocco, illus. ($10,000; estimate $3000-4000). windle, dec. “pictorial blake” cat., #81-118, all 38 leaves of 43 pls. (some printed recto/verso) offered individually, all pls. illus. ($495-1250 each); #137, complete vol., 2 pls. before imprints, with the “explanation” leaf, later full morocco ($15,000; previously offered oct. 2009 cat. 46, #45, for $25,000). heritage book shop, dec. private offer, with the “explanation” leaf, leaves trimmed, a few small stains, contemporary calf rebacked ($12,500). interesting blakeana t. taylor, the mystical initiations, 1787. jeffrey marks, jan. online cat., quarter cloth over boards, title page detached and inner margin stained, other slight defects ($750). john price, jan. online cat., contemporary sheep rebacked, corners restored (£660). for the bodleian library copy with blake’s annotations, see philip j. cardinale and joseph r. cardinale, “a newly discovered blake book: william blake’s copy of thomas taylor’s the mystical initiations; or, hymns of orpheus (1787),” blake 44.3 (winter 2010-11): 84-102. e. swedenborg, wisdom of angels, concerning divine love and divine wisdom, 1788. antiquaria bok, july online cat., contemporary half calf worn ($806). the final 3 lines of text on the title page are “printed and sold by w. chalklen, grocers court, / poultry. / m.dcc.lxxxviii.” the transcription in bb #742 omits “and sold” and the line break before “poultry.” blake’s copy in the british library is available in eighteenth century collections online <http:// find.galegroup.com/ecco>, but his annotations are mostly illegible. t. butts, signature. bhl, 7 june, #20, commissions issued by george iii and george iv to george collard of the royal east india company volunteers, 1798-1820, including a document of 17 oct. 1805 countersigned by blake’s patron thomas butts “in his capacity as joint chief clerk in the office of the commissary general of musters,” illus. (not sold; estimate £400-600); same group of documents, bho, 27 sept., #15, illus. (£400). according to the auction cats., the signature reads “entered with the commissary general of musters / tho: butts.” t. butts, “man on a drinking horse.” etched by butts (father and/or son), 1806, possibly with blake’s assistance. eb, march-april, c. 1942 printing, illus. ($50). for illus. and information about this print, see alexander s. gourlay, “‘man on a drinking horse’: a print by thomas butts, jr.,” blake 37.1 (summer 2003): 35-36. l. schiavonetti, a letter mentioning his engraving of blake’s portrait for blair’s grave, 1808. bhl, 29 march, #326, 3 undated letters, 1 stating “i wish to know whether it would make any material difference was i to execute it [a portrait of lord grey] in a free line manner similar to blake’s portrait for mr cromek …,” 5 pp. in all, postmarked 1803-10 (£180). apparently not the same as the letter by schiavonetti, also referring to the engraving of blake’s portrait, dated 30 jan. 1810 to messrs. cadell and davies, offered by nicholas lott, may 2003 (£300). blake, “death’s door,” an etched copy, dated 1820, of schiavonetti’s pl. for blair’s grave (1808), showing only the old man entering the tomb. grosvenor prints, march online cat., illus. (£140). see illus. 7. spring 2012 blake/an illustrated quarterly 127 “interior of the sessions house, old bailey,” etching/engraving so inscribed and signed lower right “blake del et sc.” in the pl., image 10.6 x 16.3 cm. grosvenor prints, sept. online cat., dated to “c. 1820” but possibly earlier given the graphic style and costumes of the figures, illus. (£95). i very much doubt that this awkward and amateurish print was executed by blake the artist and poet. j. linnell, children of. an album of drawings and watercolors, probably dating from the 1830s, by the children of blake’s patron john linnell. the collection includes charmingly juvenile watercolor copies of pls. from blake’s songs of innocence, the marriage of heaven and hell, and for the sexes: the gates of paradise, the coloring of the children’s own invention. acquired aug. by a british private collector. the child’s gem. a holiday gift. ed. mrs. s. colman. boston: t. h. carter and company, “1844” (actually 1843, the copyright date). eb, nov., scattered foxing and browning, publisher’s cloth worn, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $50). includes, pp. 85-88, blake’s “the chimney sweeper” from songs of innocence, with blake’s long lines changed to 2 lines each, with a tailpiece of a child playing a tambourine. not in bb or bbs. for other publications by colman containing blake’s poems, see raymond h. deck, jr., “an american original: mrs. colman’s illustrated printings of blake’s poems, 1843-44,” blake 11.1 (summer 1977): 4-18. nightingale valley, ed. “giraldus” (william allingham), 1860 (bb #264). jarndyce, dec. 2010 online “christmas” cat., no entry #, publisher’s cloth (£180). includes 4 poems from blake’s songs of innocence and of experience. in a note, allingham explains that “it remains to add that for the version of ‘the tiger,’ here presented [95-96], differing somewhat from those hitherto published, use has been made of a ms. book of blake’s, belonging to a friend of the editor, full of the oddest chaos of verses, drawings, and memoranda” (275-76). the “friend” was dante gabriel rossetti and the “ms. book” was blake’s notebook. allingham’s version is based loosely on drafts on pp. 108-09 of the notebook, with punctuation added, spelling changed, and lines 15-18, 21-24 of the etched version omitted. he also made 2 substantive but unauthorized revisions, “ardour” for “fire” in the 2nd stanza (“burnt the fire of thine eyes?” e 24) and “god” for “he” in the 4th (“did he smile his work to see?” e 25). allingham’s final line in the 3rd stanza (“what dread hand form’d thy dread feet?”) follows blake’s manuscript revision in copy p of songs of innocence and of experience (see e 794). the ownership of copy p (now getty collection, wormsley library, buckinghamshire) between 1855 and 1931 is unknown. allingham’s notebook with transcriptions of poems from blake’s notebook is in the turnbull library, wellington, new zealand; see d. f. mckenzie, “william allingham’s notebook of poems by blake,” turnbull library record 1.3 (march 1968): 9-11. my comments here correct and supplement my statements in blake 34.4 (spring 2001): 110. correspondence concerning attempts to sell blake’s the spiritual form of pitt guiding behemoth to the national gallery, london, 1870. see palmer, six letters, below. w. blake, songs of innocence and songs of experience, muir facsimiles, 1884, 1885. bhny, 10 oct., #1070, 2 vols., original wrappers for experience bound in, copy 9 of innocence, copy 40 of experience, vols. uniformly bound in vellum ($3750). w. blake, little tom the sailor, muir facsimile, 1886. eb, jan., the leaf showing part of the countermark of the laid paper with a “dickinson” watermark used for impressions published in century guild hobby horse 1.4 (oct. 1886), illus. (£205). all copies i have seen that were issued in the journal were folded at least twice. this example, with a single central fold, may not have been published in the hobby horse. the vendor provided an image of the countermark in response to my inquiry but did not indicate in his eb description that this is a lithographic reproduction. some bidders may have believed it to be an original impression even though the vendor did not explicitly make that claim. windle, feb. cat. 48, #30, leaf 55.9 x 22.9 cm. “folded thrice, with stab holes in the margin,” from the hobby horse, illus. ($750). w. blake, there is no natural religion, pickering facsimile, 1886. windle, dec. “pictorial blake” cat., #200, large-paper issue, later morocco ($2500). w. blake, america, muir facsimile, 1887. windle, dec. private offer, uncolored issue, copy no. 13, later buckram with the original wrappers bound in ($7500). w. blake, poetical sketches, ballantyne press ed. with decorations by charles ricketts, 1899. sotheran’s, sept. “private press” cat., #330, 1 of 8 copies printed on and bound in vellum, illus. (£8500). “mrs q,” blake after villiers, the lithographic facsimile of 1906. eb, oct., version on laid paper with color printing in green on the foliage right of the figure, illus. (£52). this very convincing facsimile, offered on eb as an original, was printed on wove paper when published in mrs. q—and “windsor castle” with a note on the plates by joseph grego (london: kegan paul, 1906). all original impressions i have seen are on wove paper. a collection of blakean ephemera formed by thomas wright of olney, c. 1912-27. john hart, march cat. 91, #75, most materials in damp-stained albums, including programs for meetings of the blake society, 1912-27, correspondence with frederick hollyer and a copy of hollyer’s advertisement for his blake reproductions, a typed list of blake’s works in the 128 blake/an illustrated quarterly spring 2012 spring 2012 blake/an illustrated quarterly 129 collection of sydney morse, newspaper and magazine clippings, the autograph manuscript of a speech by wright, letters with several correspondents about blake, and a typed catalogue of the 1927 blake exhibition at the free library, lambeth (£950). blake, songs of innocence and of experience: sixteen designs printed from electrotypes of the original plates for ruthven todd and geoffrey keynes, 1941. maggs, march cat. 1446, #99, loose in paper folder as issued, 1 of 20 sets, inscribed by keynes to douglas cleverdon (£80 to windle for stock; acquired april by victoria university library, toronto). the only copy i’ve seen on the market since 1972. blake, gerusalemme: l’ emanazione del gigante albione. trans. giuseppe ungaretti. milan: fratelli bocca editori, 1943 (bbs 88). eb, march, publisher’s wrappers, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of €19.90). it is remarkable that a complete translation of blake’s epic would be published in italy in 1943, a year in which the country fell into chaos as it was being invaded from the south by the british and americans and from the north by the germans. ungaretti (1888-1970) was an important figure in 20th-century italian literature and a supporter of mussolini. perhaps the translator’s connections with the fascist government, before its fall in july 1943, gave him special access to publishers and printers. blake, auguries of innocence, illus. by leonard baskin, 1959. eb, nov., no. 121 of 250 copies, signed by baskin, publisher’s wrappers, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $495). poems from william blake’s songs of innocence, illus. by maurice sendak, 1967. argosy book store, nov. online cat., “inscribed on the flyleaf with an original ink sketch of a youthful piper with his horn,” signed by sendak, original wrappers ($8500). apparently the copy offered at the same price, justin schiller, march 2002 cat. 50, #196, illus. 7. “death’s door,” an etched copy of blake’s design. inscribed in drypoint below the design, “e .. l .. sculp .. july 18th 1820” (the dot under the “t” of “th” is a paper stain, not a period). image (including inscription) 14.1 x 10.7 cm., platemark 15.0 x 11.9 cm., on india paper laid onto a leaf of wove paper, 23.0 x 18.7 cm., without watermark. essick collection. this skilled etching is based on louis schiavonetti’s etching/ engraving of “death’s door,” first published in r. h. cromek’s 1808 ed. of robert blair’s the grave and reprinted in r. ackermann’s 1813 ed. of the poem. much of the image follows schiavonetti’s work line for line; only the shading below the threshold lower left is configured differently. the motifs in this etching are the same size as those in schiavonetti’s pl., but the pl. reproduced here excludes the youth rising above the tomb, the rugged rocks surrounding its sides and top, and the plants lower right. a tracing of schiavonetti’s pl. may have been transferred face down onto the etching ground for this close copy. there are several reasons for believing that “e .. l ..” is the great victorian animal painter sir edwin henry landseer (1802-73). he was a child prodigy in the arts, producing his first etching at age 7, exhibiting at the royal academy in 1815, and entering the r. a. schools a year later. in 1824, landseer signed 2 of his etchings of animals, titled “the beggar” and “the common in winter,” with his initials. in both, the 2 letters are connected, but the rounded shapes of the letters and their beginning and ending flourishes are similar to the initials in this “death’s door” etching. in his 1825 etching “deerhounds’ heads,” the initials are separate and close to the letter forms we see in “death’s door.” the etching style in the animal prints is freer and more expressive than in “death’s door,” but that is to be expected in compositions of an artist’s own invention rather than a reproductive work. landseer very probably learned to etch from his father, john george landseer (1763/9-1852), a professional printmaker “who was extremely ambitious for his children” (odnb) and instructed them in the arts. his lectures on the art of engraving (1807) treats some of the same topics as blake’s writings on that subject (see essick, william blake printmaker [princeton: princeton up, 1980] 198-99). edwin was probably introduced to blake’s grave designs by his father. the “list of subscribers” printed in the 1808 grave includes “john landseer, esq. f. a. s. engraver to the king” (2nd p. of the list, unpaginated). thus, a copy of the book may well have been in the landseer family home in 1820. john landseer praises schiavonetti in his 1807 lectures (304-05) and, in his descriptive, explanatory, and critical, catalogue of fifty of the earliest pictures contained in the national gallery of great britain (1834), alludes to blake’s title-page design for the grave (see blake 44.4 [spring 2011]: 125). perhaps copying “death’s door” was assigned to the son by the father as part of the young man’s training as an etcher. another possible source for edwin landseer’s knowledge about blake is henry fuseli, keeper at the r. a. when edwin attended its schools. he “attracted fuseli’s attention by his talents and gentle manner” and was called “my little dog boy” by fuseli; see charles robert leslie, autobiographical recollections, ed. tom taylor (london: john murray, 1860) 1: 39. according to richard ormond, sir edwin landseer (london: thames & hudson, 1982) 43, landseer “admired henry fuseli and william blake.” information about landseer given here is based on the biography in the odnb by judith bronkhurst and richard ormond and on frederick g. stephens, sir edwin landseer (london: sampson low, 1880). the latter includes reproductions of a few of landseer’s early etchings. he is the only etcher/engraver with the initials e. l. and active c. 1820 listed in raymond lister, prints and printmaking: a dictionary and handbook of the art in nineteenth-century britain (london: methuen, 1984). i am grateful to alexander gourlay for suggesting that this print may be by landseer. 130 blake/an illustrated quarterly spring 2012 l. baskin, portrait of william blake. watercolor, 20.0 x 17.0 cm., inscribed “blake for roy from leonard and lisa … baskin” and dated 1981. bhl, 29 march, #265, framed, from the stock of the dealer roy davids, illus. (£3600; estimate £1000-1500). e. paolozzi, newton. bronze, 58.4 cm. long, signed and dated “eduardo paolozzi 1993,” based on blake’s color print of newton. cl, 17 nov., #123, illus. (£85,250). the monumental version of paolozzi’s newton stands in the forecourt of the british library. blake’s circle and followers works are listed under artists’ names in the following order: paintings and drawings sold in groups, single paintings and drawings, letters and manuscripts, separate pls., books by (or with pls. by or after) the artist. barry, james “the distribution of premiums at the society of arts,” etching, 1792. eb, sept., 3rd st. of 4, leaf 43.0 x 52.8 cm., framed, illus. (offered at the aggressive “buy it now” price of $8900). “elysium or the state of final retribution,” outline engraving by james mitan after barry’s painting, n.d. (c. 1815?). eb, nov.-dec., foxed, illus. (£45). “jupiter and juno on mount ida,” etching. campbell fine art, aug. online cat., only the 3rd recorded impression of the 1st st. with aquatint, 1777, printed in brown ink, trimmed to the platemark, 2 repaired tears, illus. (“sold”). bl, 13 oct., #297, 2nd st., c. 1790, with 19 other prints by various artists, illus. (£420). self-portrait engraved by j. heath, 1783. grosvenor prints, april online cat., illus. (£130). basire, james “the departure of henry viii from calais,” outline engraving after s. h. grimm, 1788. grosvenor prints, april online cat., illus. (£360). “the distribution of his majesty’s maundy,” engraving after s. h. grimm, 1789. grosvenor prints, april online cat., illus. (£280). “the encampment of king henry viii at marquison,” outline engraving after s. h. grimm, 1788. grosvenor prints, april online cat., illus. (£160). “the siege of boulogne by king henry viii,” outline engraving after s. h. grimm, 1788. grosvenor prints, april online cat., illus. (£360). rogers, a collection of prints in imitation of drawings, 1778, individual pls. from or probably intended for. eb, jan., 3 figures mourning over a dead woman(?) based on a drawing by guercino, illus. ($42); a landscape based on a drawing by guercino, marginal foxing, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $40); april, “assumption of the virgin” after domenichino, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of €70); “moses placed in the ark of bulrushes” after eustache le sueur, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of €60); nov., “assumption of the virgin” after carlo maratti, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of €150); “the vestals” after polidoro da caravaggio, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of €90). calvert, edward “the bacchante,” wood engraving in part by welby sherman. larkhall fine art, june online cat., 1 of 30 impressions from the carfax printing of 1904, illus. (£575). “the cyder feast,” wood engraving. campbell fine art, aug. online cat., from the memoir (1893), illus. (“sold”). flaxman, john online listings of flaxman’s classical compositions with insufficient information to identify the ed. have been excluded. individual prints of flaxman’s classical designs offered on eb and 19th-century reengravings of flaxman’s designs, such as those on a reduced scale by henry moses, are not included. see also flaxman under letterpress books with engravings by and after blake, above. thirty-seven pencil and gray ink drawings of the hesiod designs, a set created by flaxman independent of the production of blake’s pls. published in 1817 and showing differences in details from the pls. 22.7 x 30.5 cm., mounted on card and bound in a morocco album of the mid-1860s. maggs, jan. online cat. (£35,000; sold summer 2011 to an undisclosed collector or institution). for further information on this album and earlier attempted sales at higher prices, see blake 43.4 (spring 2010): 135-36. the misses harrison, sharpe, and rogers and mrs. sharpe at samuel rogers’s party, 1800. pen and brown ink, 22.7 x 18.6 cm., inscribed with the names of the figures and dated 10 june 1800. w.s fine art/andrew wyld, june cat., #22, illus. (£3750; previously offered june 2005 cat., #23, illus., for £7500). spring 2012 blake/an illustrated quarterly 131 orestes and his friend pylades, attributed to flaxman. pencil, leaf 19.1 x 24.1 cm., with all but the tops of the letters of an ink inscription trimmed from the bottom margin, inscribed in pencil on the verso “john flaxman” followed by a description of the scene. eb, dec. 2010, illus. (£81). probably a competent copy of pl. 23 in the 1831 ed. of flaxman’s aeschylus designs, but with a few very minor variants. a pair of botanical studies. pen and brown ink, 17.1 x 15.2 cm. and 17.8 x 15.2 cm., both signed. sny, 25 jan., #115, from the collection of charles ryskamp, both illus. (not sold; estimate a startling $10,000-15,000). sh, 25 june, #330, illus. ($2500). portrait of delvalle elizabeth rebecca lowry. pencil on wove paper, 17.3 x 13.4 cm., inscribed on the original mount “flaxman” and the name of the sitter. sny, 25 jan., #121, from the collection of charles ryskamp, illus. (not sold; estimate $10,000-15,000). sh, 25 june, #338, illus. ($2750). an inscription on the back of the mat notes that the child portrayed was the daughter of the engraver wilson lowry and later the 2nd wife of john varley. see essick, the separate plates of william blake: a catalogue (princeton: princeton up, 1983) 20108 for blake’s engraving of john linnell’s portrait of wilson lowry. portrait of john flaxman. pencil, 18.5 x 19.0 cm., inscribed “flaxman” in ink. clevedon auction, bristol, 10 march, #213, attributed to george dance (1741-1825), illus. (£110). possibly the preliminary drawing for the soft-ground etching by william daniell after dance, published 1 feb. 1809. study of a seated male nude. pencil, 28.6 x 22.3 cm., signed “john flaxman” and inscribed in another hand, “academy” and “i sat behind flaxman, at the r. a. / and saw him draw this / c h s—.” csk, 10 nov., #136, illus. (£1000). previously offered bhl, 11 march 2008, #25, illus. (withdrawn for unstated reasons; estimate £1500-2000). “antigone forced from her father,” lithograph by maria denman, 1827. eb, jan., illus. (£50). see illus. 8. centerpiece candelabrum designed by flaxman, stem and base by paul storr, 1816, branches by philip rundell and storr, 1819. silver gilt, 103.0 cm. high. cny, 21 oct., #173, illus. (not sold; estimate $600,000-900,000). the sculpted stem portrays mercury delivering the infant bacchus to the nymphs of nysa with panthers below. the event is related in lucian’s dialogi deorum; ovid’s brief reference in book 3 of the metamorphoses does not mention mercury. acts of mercy, etchings with aquatint by f. c. lewis, 1831. eb, jan., title page and 7 of 8 pls. (lacking “feed the hungry”), pl. 1 partly hand colored, scattered foxing, contemporary half calf worn, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £660). grosvenor prints, april online cat., 3 pls. only, “comfort the afflicted,” “comfort the fatherless and the widow,” and “feed the hungry,” offered individually, illus. (£120, £130, and £120 respectively). aeschylus designs, 1831. meiwes, jan. online cat., foxed, original boards worn (€150). toby english, jan. online cat., severe foxing, half morocco worn (£200). see also iliad designs, below. dante designs. zentralantiquariat leipzig, jan. online cat., carlsruhe, 1833-35, contemporary boards (€90). librairie chapitre, jan. online cat., 1867 ed., modern boards, illus. (€150). unsworth’s booksellers, jan. cat. 24, #297, 1807 ed., contemporary calf worn (£200). j. hunter books, jan. online cat., engraved by réveil, n.d., “some spotting … hardcover” (£80). eb, aug., milan, 1822, scattered foxing, covers missing, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of €160); 1807 ed., foxed, contemporary quarter calf very worn, illus. (£113.66); sept., milan, 1822, scattered light foxing, contemporary vellum very worn and stained, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of €180); nov., 1807 ed., scattered foxing, half morocco, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £190 or “best offer”); nov.-dec., del vecchio ed., n.d. (c. 1820?), scattered foxing, no description of binding other than “copertina morbida” (soft cover), illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of €249). hesiod designs. see iliad designs, below. iliad designs. eb, jan., 1793 ed., bound with the odyssey and aeschylus designs, the latter 2 with title pages in french and without imprints, n.d. (c. 1818?), scattered light foxing, contemporary half calf worn, illus. ($160.27); florence, 1826, bound with the aeschylus, hesiod, and odyssey designs of the same date, scattered foxing, contemporary quarter vellum, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of €350); same copy, feb., illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of €250); april, del vecchio ed., c. 1820?, 16 pls. only, contemporary wrappers, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of €25); aug., 1793 ed., contemporary half calf worn, illus. (£99.99). antiquariat jean-claude enay, jan. online cat., engraved by riepenhausen, berlin, c. 1817 or later reissue, some stains, early boards (€620); another copy, antiquariat lutz-peter kreussel, jan. online cat., with the odyssey designs engraved by riepenhausen, both later reissues, foxed and with water stains, boards very worn (€220); the same or a very similar copy of both titles, resource books, jan. online cat., later reissues, badly damp stained, contemporary boards very worn, covers detached ($325). unsworth’s booksellers, jan. cat. 24, #295, “1796” ed. (an error for 1795?), with the aeschylus (1795) and odyssey (1805) designs, some foxing, half russia very worn, spine lacking (£375). 132 blake/an illustrated quarterly spring 2012 fuseli, henry a fallen horseman attacked by a monstrous serpent (recto), satan looming over job and a seated old man (verso). pen and brown ink, black chalk, leaf 38.1 x 29.8 cm. bequeathed by charles ryskamp to the frick collection, new york, in 2010, accession no. 2010.3.07. huon encounters sherasmin in the cave on mount lebanon. oil, 61.0 x 45.0 cm., datable to 1804-05. daniel katz gallery, advertised in the british art journal 11.2 (2010-11), detail illus. back cover (price on request). previously offered by richard l. feigen & co. at the european art fair, maastricht, 12-21 march 2010, for $525,000. the design was engraved by james heath and published as an illus. to canto 1, verses 18-19, of christoph wieland, oberon, trans. william sotheby, 1805 (imprint dated 1 march 1806). huon rescuing angela from the giant angulaffer. oil, 61.0 x 45.0 cm., datable to 1804-05. sl, 8 dec., #291, illus. (£385,250; odyssey designs. unsworth’s booksellers, jan. cat. 24, #297, 1805 ed., some foxing and spotting, early 19th-century russia worn (£200). meiwes, jan. online cat., 1805 ed., foxed, pls. coming loose, publisher’s boards worn (€130). keogh’s books, jan. online cat., 1870 ed., publisher’s boards worn (£150). eb, april, engraved by réveil, 1835, publisher’s wrappers worn, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $195); aug., 1805 ed., foxed, original boards worn with cover label, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of £99.99); same copy, aug.-sept., illus. (£79.99); dec., 1793 ed., modern half calf, original front wrapper bound in, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of £180); same copy, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £200 or “best offer”). see also iliad designs, above. oeuvres de flaxman, engraved by réveil, 1836. antiquariaat van coevorden, jan. online cat., 2 vols. only, the dante designs and sujets divers, “contemp. leather bindings” (€1000). librairie ancienne cambon, jan. online cat., apparently complete in 2 vols., full calf (€420). spring 2012 blake/an illustrated quarterly 133 estimate £60,000-80,000). the design was engraved by francis engelheart and published as an illus. to canto 3, verses 2729, of christoph wieland, oberon, trans. william sotheby, 1805 (imprint dated 1 march 1806). lady constance, arthur, and the earl of salisbury (from shakespeare, king john, iii, i). oil, 189.0 x 143.0 cm., datable to 1825. cl, 5 july, #30, illus. (not sold; estimate £200,000300,000). portrait of harriot mellon. pencil, 17.8 x 11.3 cm., signed and dated 1815 in ink and with an inscription in greek just below the top margin. lowell libson, jan. cat., pp. 86-87, illus. (price on request). the greek inscription is from euripides, hippolytus: “but a clever woman—that i loathe! may there never be in my house a woman with more intelligence than befits a woman!” a sibyl. pencil, leaf 11.6 x 13.7 cm. sny, 25 jan., #112, from the collection of charles ryskamp, with 2 impressions of an engraving of the design by charles grignion, both proofs before signatures, all 3 works illus. ($30,000). grignion’s engraving was published in lavater, essays on physiognomy, part 27 of 1793. “beatrice eavesdropping on hero and ursula,” mezzotint by john jones, 1791. cheffins auction, cambridge, 14 july, #13, with 5 prints not by fuseli, illus. (£220). “milton when a boy, instructed by his mother,” steel engraving by henry dawe, 1830. grosvenor prints, april online cat., illus. (£95). balmanno, pen and pencil, 1858. eb, sept.-oct., lacking the frontispiece but presumably with the 2 wood engravings after fuseli, publisher’s cloth very worn, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $25 or “best offer”). bible, published by macklin, 1800. eb, may, 7 vols., scattered foxing, contemporary calf worn, illus. ($3950). bonnycastle, introduction to astronomy, 1796. barnaby rudge, aug. online cat., contemporary calf rebacked, illus. ($425). boothby, sorrows, sacred to the memory of penelope, 1796. unsworth’s booksellers, jan. cat. 24, #336, contemporary half morocco worn (£500). eb, jan., large-paper copy, “mild discoloration throughout,” contemporary boards, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $279); jan.-feb., same copy and results on required minimum bids of $249 and $179. boydell, collection of prints … illustrating … shakspeare, c. 1803. clars auction, oakland, california, 6 feb., #2078, 2 vols., contemporary morocco worn, illus. (not sold; estimate $4000-6000); same copy, 13 march, #6049, illus. ($2500). individual pls. in published sts. are not listed. cooke’s illustrations to the british theatre. bg, 6 oct., #164, light foxing, contemporary half calf worn (£40). apparently published in the 1820s; see weinglass 164. cowper, poems. thornton’s bookshop, jan. online cat., 1806 ed., 2 vols., foxed, contemporary calf very worn and “crudely repaired” (£60). darwin, temple of nature, 1803. eb, jan., contemporary half calf worn, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $699). gray, poems, du roveray ed., 1800. unsworth’s booksellers, jan. cat. 24, #405, contemporary morocco (£150). eb, aug., margins of pls. foxed, contemporary calf, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $375; previously offered at the same price, jan. 2010); another copy, nov., contemporary calf worn, illus. (£22.67). homer, iliad. grosvenor prints, april online cat., 4 pls. only offered individually, 2nd sts. of the pls. 1st published in 1805 with the imprints removed and inscriptions above the designs added, illus. (£60-70 each). eb, oct., 1813 ed., 6 vols., pls. foxed, contemporary calf very worn, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $179.99). the pls. offered by grosvenor are weinglass #227, 228, 230, and 232 as reissued in a series of engravings illustrative of pope’s translation of homer’s iliad and odyssey, dated by weinglass to c. 1819-36. 8. john flaxman. “antigone forced from her father,” an illus. to sophocles, oedipus at colonus. lithograph by maria denman, signed lower left “drawn on stone by maria denman, from a sketch by john flaxman esq.r r.a.” and dated may 1827 in the imprint. design within framing lines 9.5 x 16.0 cm., image including inscriptions 11.2 x 16.0 cm., leaf of wove paper 19.0 x 28.3 cm. showing part of a j wha[tman] / 18[?] watermark. essick collection. oedipus clings to his daughter as 2 of creon’s guards drag her away. flaxman’s wash drawing of the design, 9.1 x 15.8 cm., is in the british museum, accession no. 1888,0503.34. the only other impression of denman’s print that i’ve been able to locate is also in the british museum and is inscribed in pencil “the original drawing was bought by me at the denman sale in 1862.” denman was flaxman’s sister-in-law and the copublisher of his aeschylus and acts of mercy designs in 1831. her drawing of thomas hayley’s portrait medallion of romney was engraved by caroline watson and published in william hayley’s life of george romney (1809). 134 blake/an illustrated quarterly spring 2012 lavater, essays on physiognomy. eb, dec. 2010, 1810 ed., 3 pls. only, “brutus,” “st. john,” and the portrait of fuseli, margins browned, illus. (£29.95). milton, paradise lost, du roveray ed., 1802. eb, jan.-feb., 2 vols., small-paper issue with the 2nd st. of the pls., scattered foxing, contemporary calf with damage to spines, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of £165); same copy, feb., offered at the “buy it now” price of £165 (not sold; offered twice again at the same price in march-april and april-may). milton, poetical works, with fuseli’s “silence” engraved by john rogers. rulon-miller, march cat. 142, #650, chidley ed., 1844, publisher’s morocco ($250). eb, oct., churton ed., 1836 (the 1st to include the pl. after fuseli), foxed, contemporary calf worn, front cover detached (offered at the “buy it now” price of $54). penny magazine of the society for the diffusion of useful knowledge, vol. 1, 14 july 1832 issue. eb, jan., disbound, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £3.50). includes john jackson’s wood engraving of “lycidas” after fuseli. sartain’s union magazine of literature and art, vol. 5, 1849. eb, aug., pl. after fuseli only, “the nightmare,” mezzotint by samuel sartain, illus. ($33.26). a series of engravings to illustrate the works of shakspeare, 1817. grosvenor prints, april online cat., 2 pls. only offered individually, “oberon squeezing the flower on titania’s eyelids” engraved by richard rhodes and “the witches appear to banquo and macbeth” engraved by william bromley, illus. (£180 each). shakespeare, plays, published by stockdale, 1807. classic bindings, march online cat., 6 vols., contemporary morocco rebacked, bindings illus. (£4500). antiquariat markus wolter, march online cat., 6 vols., contemporary half calf worn, bindings illus. (€2500). eb, aug., 6 vols., contemporary calf very worn, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of £399.99); same copy, aug.-sept., illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of £199.99); same copy, sept., illus. (£369). young, catalogue of the celebrated collection of … angerstein, 1823. eb, aug., contemporary calf elaborately gilt, worn with some nasty stains, illus. ($229); half calf very worn, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of £79.99). jefferys, james 9 heroic classical figure group. monochrome wash, 36.0 x 56.5 cm. bl, 13 oct., #206, framed, illus. (£44,000; estimate £10,000-15,000). linnell, john six sketches and letters, including a pictorial letter dated 1828, another to thomas palmer (linnell’s father-in-law) dated 1832, another dated 1863, and 3 small pen and ink sketches. lawrences auction, bletchingley, surrey, 11 may, #1610a, the sketches described as “‘seville’ [so inscribed], ‘a cat and a monkey,’ and a bat in flight with a nude female,” illus. (no price information; estimate £500-800). two chalk drawings, studies of a shepherd, leaf 26.9 x 35.0 cm., signed and dated 1820, and portrait of the reverend thomas thomas, leaf 18.4 x 13.7 cm., signed. sny, 25 jan., #71, from the collection of charles ryskamp, both illus. ($12,500). an angler by a river at sunset. watercolor, 11.4 x 19.3 cm., signed. csk, 8 dec., #396, illus. (£4750). captain sutherland. pastel portrait, 55.9 x 38.1 cm. abbott and holder, nov. online cat. 412, #67 (£1100). the cattle pond. oil, 70.0 x 98.0 cm., signed and dated 1874. lowell libson, may online cat., illus. (not priced). previously offered sl, 24 nov. 2005, #6, illus. (not sold; estimate £800012,000). the cowper madonna, after raphael. pencil with touches of watercolor, 19.0 x 14.0 cm., datable to 1822. eb, may, framed, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of £595); offered again with a required minimum bid of £495, same result. a preliminary drawing for linnell’s miniature on ivory, painted between 22 april and 3 may 1822 and copying raphael’s painting then in the possession of lord cowper. for the miniature, see katharine crouan, john linnell: a centennial exhibition (cambridge: fitzwilliam museum, 1982), #79 and illus. the farmer’s boy. watercolor, 43.8 x 27.7 cm., datable to 1829, inscribed “j. linnell shoreham.” sl, 8 july, #341, illus. (£85,250; estimate £30,000-50,000. probably an auction record for a drawing by linnell.). a preliminary drawing for linnell’s oil painting of 1830, last offered for sale by the fine art society and lowell libson, april 2008 cat., power and poetry: the art of john linnell, #4, illus. (price on request). the same figure appears in the shepherd boy piping (see below). 9. jefferys was much influenced by mortimer, barry, and fuseli. see martin butlin, “the rediscovery of an artist: james jefferys 1751-1784,” blake 10.4 (spring 1977): 123-24. spring 2012 blake/an illustrated quarterly 135 a felled oak, windsor great park. black and white chalk, 32.4 x 44.4 cm., signed and dated 1815. cl, 5 july, #117, illus. (not sold; estimate £4000-6000); csk, 8 dec., #376, illus. (£3500). previously sold sl, 30 nov. 1978, #8, with 7 other tree studies by linnell, illus. (£660). hampstead. watercolor, 10.0 x 14.6 cm., signed. csk, 8 dec., #398, illus. (£5250). very probably an early work, datable to c. 1815-20. harvest dinner. oil, 101.6 x 139.7 cm., signed and dated 1860. cl, 15 dec., #69, illus. (not sold; estimate £120,000-180,000). harvest time. oil, 71.0 x 100.0 cm., signed and dated 1869. halls auction, shrewsbury, 26 oct., #311, illus. (£5500). landscape with figures and sheep at sunset. oil, 29.2 x 45.1 cm., signed and inscribed on verso, “retouched may 11/75 for mr mclean. john linnell sen.” mallams auction, oxford, 13 july, #154, damaged upper right, illus. (not sold; estimate £800-1200). rather crude; the attribution would be suspect without the verso inscription. landscape with windmill, attributed to linnell. oil, 17.3 x 33.5 cm., inscribed “j. linnell.” eb, dec. 2010, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $990). old cottage, probably hampstead heath. pencil heightened with white on buff paper, 32.0 x 42.0 cm., inscribed on verso “j. linnell.” eb, nov., illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of £155). on the road from harlech to barmouth. watercolor, 7.5 x 27.5 cm., title inscribed lower left. bho, 16 march, #203, illus. (£384). path through a wood, attributed to linnell. oil, 41.0 x 51.0 cm. woolley & wallis auction, salisbury, 28 sept., #148, illus. (not sold; estimate £400-600). piping down the valleys wild. oil, 66.9 x 68.6 cm., signed “j. linnell.” csk, 10 nov., #83, illus. (not sold; estimate £30005000). previously sold csk, 12 march 1998, #176, illus. (£3220), and 12 march 2008, #24, illus. (£5250). the title, not known to be linnell’s own, is taken from blake’s “introduction” to songs of innocence. this painting bears no clear relationship to any design by blake known to me. portrait of a gentleman wearing a black stock. oil, 38.1 x 31.4 cm. eb, july, illus. (not sold at the “buy it now” price of $3500); nov., illus. (same “buy it now” price). previously offered freeman’s auction, philadelphia, 7 dec. 2008, #15, illus. online (not sold; estimate $1000-1500), and eb, may-june 2009, illus. (reserve not met; highest bid $1777). portrait of a young gentleman. pencil and wash, 34.0 x 27.0 cm., signed and dated 1847. eb, jan., framed, illus. (£199). the refuge—storm. watercolor, 20.4 x 34.6 cm., signed and dated “[18]53.” lowell libson, may online cat., illus. (not priced). returning home. oil, 31.0 x 43.0 cm., signed “linnell.” bhl, 18 jan., #36, illus. (£1320). although attributed to john linnell by bonhams, i suspect that this may be a work by his son william—if by a family member at all. the sheep drove. oil, 71.1 x 98.4 cm., signed and dated 1868. cl, 15 dec., #46, illus. (not sold; estimate £15,000-25,000). the shepherd boy piping. watercolor, 26.4 x 21.6 cm., inscribed “j. linnell shoreham,” datable to 1829. lowell libson, may online cat., illus. (not priced; sold to a “private collection, usa”). see also the farmer’s boy, above. a summer landscape. watercolor, 10.5 x 14.6 cm., inscribed “j.l. / [18]16.” csk, 8 dec., #399, illus. (£1188). the supper at emmaus. oil, 117.0 x 150.5 cm., signed and dated 1843. sl, 27 oct., #141, illus. (£5000). three studies of a young girl. charcoal, leaf 33.0 x 50.8 cm., signed and dated 1862. bhny, 26 oct., #82, illus. ($1875). trees, kensington gardens. watercolor, 14.2 x 13.1 cm., signed, datable to c. 1811. lowell libson, may online cat., illus. (not priced; previously offered sept. 2006 cat., #33, illus., for $28,000). view of lymington, the isle of wight beyond. watercolor, 15.5 x 19.3 cm., signed and dated 1815. csk, 8 dec., #397, illus. (£2000). view over redhill, surrey. watercolor, 17.8 x 25.4 cm., inscribed lower left “linnell redhill.” john nicholson auction, haslemere, 7 april, #2053, illus. (“£170”—but probably not sold); 2 june, #2072, illus. (not sold; estimate £150-250); 27 july, #2033, illus. (no price information; estimate £100-150). possibly by one of linnell’s children. autograph letter signed to richard e. tagart, 2 pp., july 1846. bhl, 29 march, #297, concerning payment for a portrait (not sold; estimate £300-400). previously offered eb, oct. 2008, at the “buy it now” price of £150. manuscript draft of an advertisement for blake’s job engravings. see illus. 6. “sheep at noon,” etching. rosebery’s auction, west norwood, south london, 5 nov., #531, signed in the pl. and dated 1818, with 2 prints not by linnell, illus. (£420; estimate £100-150). 136 blake/an illustrated quarterly spring 2012 mortimer, john hamilton a battle in the precincts of a temple. pen and ink, traces of black chalk, 23.5 x 37.2 cm. cny, 26 jan., #304, illus. ($8750). fishermen drawing in their nets. pencil, pen and ink, 36.2 x 41.9 cm. cl, 5 july, #112, illus. (£8750). the etching of this design by robert blyth is inscribed “drawn by j. mortimer, 1774” and “publish’d … nov.r 9th 1780.” fishermen netting a drowned man. pen and ink, 12.7 x 17.8 cm., signed. abbott and holder, may online cat. 408, #59, “original wash mount” (£125). two women watching a parrot in a cage. pen and ink, 25.6 x 25.0 cm., top corners trimmed diagonally. cny, 26 jan., #303, illus. ($13,750; estimate $3000-4000). “banditti going out” and “banditti returning,” etched by robert blyth, 1780. grosvenor prints, oct. online cat., illus. (£260). “bardolph,” etched by mortimer, 1775. grosvenor prints, oct. online cat., illus. (£160). “battle of agincourt,” engraved by thomas burke, 1783. grosvenor prints, oct. online cat., on paper with an 1820 watermark, illus. (£280). “bearded man with turban and young woman,” etched by robert blyth, 1782. grosvenor prints, april online cat., later printing, illus. (£160). “boat in a storm at sea,” etched by blyth, n.d. grosvenor prints, april online cat., later st. published 1805, illus. (£180). fifteen etchings dedicated to sir joshua reynolds, etchings by mortimer, 1778. grosvenor prints, april online cat., title pl. only, illus. (£140); “tragedy” only, illus. (£90); nov. online cat., “tragedy” and “comedy,” a pair, illus. (£260). “the frere and thomas,” an illus. to the canterbury tales engraved by james hogg, 1787. eb, dec. 2010, water stained, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $32.10). “man carrying his stomach in a wheelbarrow,” soft-ground etching by samuel ireland, n.d. grosvenor prints, april online cat., illus. (£180). “man struggling with monster,” etched by blyth, n.d. grosvenor prints, april online cat., proof before letters printed in brown, illus. (£220). “marcus curius dentatus rejecting the bribes of the samnites,” engraved by anthony walker, 1763. grosvenor prints, april online cat., illus. (£240); another impression, marginal tear, illus. (£230). “nebuchadnezzar recovering his reason,” etched by blyth, 1781. grosvenor prints, april online cat., c. 1810 printing, trimmed to the platemark, illus. (£220). “packhorse with soldiers,” etched by blyth, 1783. eb, oct., illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $130). “silenus,” etched by blyth, 1779. grosvenor prints, april online cat., illus. (£130). “le singe,” illustrating frances burney’s evelina, engraving by francesco bartolozzi, 1779. grosvenor prints, oct. online cat., proof before letters, illus. (£110). “soldier’s death,” etched by blyth, 1781. eb, nov.-dec., tear in upper margin, old creases, illus. (£50). “three oriental heads,” etched by blyth, 1780. art of the print, feb. online cat., titled “the gypsies” by the vendor, trimmed close to the image on the sides, illus. ($495). twelve characters from shakespeare, etched by mortimer, 1775-76. grosvenor prints, april online cat., 6 pls. only offered individually, “bardolph,” “beatrice,” “cassandra,” “falstaff,” “ophelia,” and “shylock,” later printing by palser, illus. (£160, £160, £180, £180, £230, £180 respectively). “two male oriental heads,” etched by blyth, 1782. grosvenor prints, april online cat., later printing, illus. (£140). palmer, samuel donnington, berkshire. watercolor, 29.5 x 52.8 cm., datable to 1843, signed “s. palmer.” sl, 8 july, #339, illus. (not sold; estimate £30,000-50,000). the evening star: a landscape study. watercolor, 9.7 x 15.3 cm., datable to c. 1848-50. lowell libson, may online cat., illus. (not priced; sold to a “private collection, uk”). the golden hour. watercolor, 25.7 x 35.6 cm., signed, datable to 1865. acquired c. 2010 by the cleveland museum of art through lowell libson. head of christ, attributed to palmer and sometimes described as a self-portrait. oil, 35.0 x 23.5 cm. lyon & turnbull auction, edinburgh, 1 nov., #248, from the forbes collection, illus. (not sold; estimate £10,000-15,000). previously offered cl, 20 feb. 2003, #219, illus. (not sold; estimate £20,00030,000). the attribution of this painting to palmer has not been generally accepted. spring 2012 blake/an illustrated quarterly 137 in the chequered shade (a title taken from milton’s “l’ allegro”). watercolor and body color, 20.2 x 43.2 cm., signed and dated 1861. guy peppiatt, may cat., #46, illus. (£35,000). in vintage time. watercolor and body color, 19.6 x 42.9 cm., signed and dated 1861. guy peppiatt, may cat., #45, illus. (£35,000). llyn gwynant, north wales. pencil, leaf 18.0 x 22.5 cm., inscribed by palmer with notes about the sky. sny, 25 jan., #100, from the collection of charles ryskamp, illus. ($10,625). porta di posillipo and the bay of baiae, italy, with ischia and misenum beyond. watercolor and body color, 19.7 x 41.9 cm. cl, 5 july, #180, illus. (not sold; estimate £7000-10,000). the simplest rustic cap. pencil and chalk on wove paper, leaf 18.0 x 11.1 cm., inscribed “carrying wood” on the recto and the title on the verso. sny, 25 jan., #89, from the collection of charles ryskamp, illus. (not sold; estimate $7500-10,000). sh, 25 june, #345, illus. ($1500). view of a lake, attributed to palmer. monochrome wash, 9.0 x 12.5 cm. bl, 13 oct., #98, “indistinctly inscribed lower left, ‘parkhurst’?,” illus. (£1100). six letters and notes by palmer and george richmond. bhl, 29 march, #310, comprising an autograph letter signed by palmer, “an autograph note [2 pp.] by him” about the “failed negotiations for a sale of william blake’s picture the spiritual form of pitt guiding behemoth to the national gallery,” and 4 letters by richmond, all to william boxall, director of the national gallery, “one letter each by palmer and richmond dated 7 july 1870” (£1440). some of these letters may be among those sold sl, 24 feb. 2000, #359 (£27,600). autograph letters signed. bhl, 29 march, #308, to thomas oldham barlow, 3 pp., sept. 1873, concerning etching acids, “unpublished” (£504); #309, to mrs. george, 4 pp., march 1872, “unpublished” (£420); #311, 44 letters of which 16 are “unpublished,” 1866-81 (£8400). the letter to barlow was offered at bl, 9 june 1994, #218 (not sold). the letter to mrs. george was offered bhl, 24 march 2009, #117 (not sold), and was probably among those offered by roy davids, sept. 2003 online cat.—see blake 37.4 (spring 2004): 132. autograph letter signed. bhl, 22 nov., #141, to the picture dealer henry mogford, 23 oct. 1854, 1 p., illus. (not sold; estimate £300-400). “the bellman,” etching. sl, 16 june, #110, 7th st., 1926 printing, illus. (£3500; estimate £800-1200). “christmas or folding the last sheep,” etching. see “the sleeping shepherd,” below. “the early ploughman,” etching. eb, dec. 2010, 5th st., illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $799.99 or “best offer”); same impression?, may, illus. ($450); july, 5th st., illus. ($510); sept., probably 5th st., illus. ($320). csk, 19 april, #31, 4th st., trimmed inside the platemark on 3 sides, minor staining and foxing, with “the willow,” 2nd st., and “the herdsman’s cottage,” 2nd st., all 3 framed, “early ploughman” illus. (£2000). sl, 16 june, #109, probably 5th st., illus. (£1125). larkhall fine art, june online cat., 8th st., c. 1879-80 printing by a. h. palmer, pencil signature, illus. (£7500). dw, 21 july, #271, 5th st., pencil signature, “some overall toning,” framed, illus. (not sold; estimate £1000-1500). bhl, 21 sept., #95, 8th st., trimmed within the platemark, illus. (£475). “the herdsman’s cottage,” etching. art of the print, feb. online cat., 2nd st., illus. (“sold”). eb, march, 2nd st., full leaf from the portfolio (1872), illus. ($406). see also “the early ploughman,” above, and “the sleeping shepherd,” below. “the morning of life,” etching. duke’s auction, dorchester, 29 sept., #7, 5th st., illus. (£1500). “the skylark,” etching. hartleys auction, ilkley, yorkshire, 22 june, #510, 7th st., illus. (£1100; estimate £400-500). “the sleeping shepherd,” etching. bhl, 12 july, #71, 3rd st., with “the herdsman’s cottage,” 2nd st., and “christmas or folding the last sheep,” 3rd st., “herdsman’s cottage” illus. (£7800; estimate £1000-1500). “the willow,” etching. dw, 3 march, #682, 2nd st., illus. (£320). bl, 13 oct., #352, apparently 2nd st., illus. (£440). see also “the early ploughman,” above. dickens, pictures from italy, 1846. eb, may, 1st ed., contemporary half morocco, illus. (£99.95); june, 2nd ed., publisher’s cloth, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $250); july, same copy of the 2nd ed.?, illus. ($64.87); aug.-sept., 1st ed., later morocco with publisher’s cloth bound at the end, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $300); nov., 1st ed., publisher’s cloth, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $875). bhny, 18 oct., #59, 1st ed., publisher’s cloth, morocco clamshell case, illus. ($875). s. palmer, english version of the eclogues of virgil. gallagher books, sept. online cat., 1883 large-paper issue, publisher’s vellum worn ($2400). dw, 6 oct., #581, 2nd ed., 1884, with palmer, shorter poems of john milton (1889), both with scattered spotting, both with publisher’s cloth very worn (£450); 14 dec., #495, eclogues only, 1st ed., small-paper issue, publisher’s cloth very worn (£480). 138 blake/an illustrated quarterly spring 2012 parker, james “fainasollis, borbar & fingal,” engraving after john j. barralet, 1809. grosvenor prints, april online cat., whatman paper with an 1808 watermark, illus. (£180). reissue of a pl. 1st published in 1783. “the revolution, 1688,” engraving after james northcote, 1790. grosvenor prints, april online cat., illus. (£140). akenside, pleasures of imagination. ely books, jan. online cat., n.d. (1795?), foxed, “full leather,” illus. (£62). andrew johnson, jan. online cat., 1806 ed., pls. foxed, contemporary “leather” very worn, covers detached (£15). mw books, jan. online cat., 1806 ed., full calf, illus. ($146.63). john turton, jan. online cat., 1810 ed., contemporary calf rebacked, worn (£16). arabian nights, published by miller, 1802. richard sylvanus williams, jan. online cat., 5 vols., spotting and browning, full “leather” very worn (£199). vashon island books, jan. online cat., 5 vols., “large paper format,” some foxing, later morocco ($1225). quaker hill books, jan. online cat., 5 vols., contemporary morocco ($1375). armstrong, art of preserving health. mw books, jan. online cat., 1795 ed., contemporary calf rebacked, illus. (€195); 1796 ed., modern cloth (€185). classic bindings, jan. online cat., 1806 ed., contemporary morocco, binding illus. (£150). book of common prayer, 1794. neil summersgill, jan. online cat., contemporary morocco worn (£68). peter harrington, jan. online cat., contemporary morocco worn and repaired, binding illus. (£175). jarndyce, jan. online cat., later morocco (£437). collins, poetical works, published by cadell and davies. brick row, jan. online cat., 1797 ed., contemporary calf ($150). a. r. heath, jan. online cat., 1797 ed., early calf (£100). northwood books, jan. online cat., 1797 ed., foxed, full calf ($200). astley book farm, jan. online cat., 1802 ed., “full leather” (£34). castle bookshop, jan. online cat., 1802 ed., full calf (£40). sterling books, jan. online cat., 1802 ed., contemporary morocco, hinges repaired (£65). macloubooks, jan. online cat., 1802 ed., some spotting, no description of binding other than very worn (£90). collins, poetical works, published by sharpe, 1804. ziernhanon galleries, jan. online cat., contemporary calf with “modest wear” ($245). [combe], history of the river thames, 1794-96. natural history books, jan. online cat., 2 vols., “large format copy,” scattered foxing, later three-quarter morocco, cloth slipcases ($8500). cowper, poems. bohemian bookworm, jan. online cat., 1798 ed., 2 vols., “leather” binding ($250). librairie picard, jan. online cat., 1798 ed., 2 vols., sheepskin binding (€200). david brass, jan. online cat., 1798 ed., 2 vols., contemporary morocco, illus. ($450). best buy books, jan. online cat., 1798 ed., 2 vols., contemporary calf worn ($110). zarak books, jan. online cat., 1800 ed., 2 vols., some spotting, full calf (£55). falconer, the shipwreck. mw books, jan. online cat., 1800 ed., modern half calf (€85). rooke books, jan. online cat., 1802 ed., “leather” worn, binding illus. (£118.44). librería de bilbao, jan. online cat., 1802 ed., contemporary calf (€150). a. d. constance, jan. online cat., 1806 ed., contemporary calf (£40). clevedon books, jan. online cat., 1811 ed., some foxing on pls., half calf (£35). hollett & son, jan. online cat., 1811 ed., slightly later morocco worn (£65). fénelon, adventures of telemachus, 1795. crow and weasel, jan. online cat., 2 vols., “spotting throughout,” no description of binding other than very worn and falling apart ($200). haunted bookshop, jan. online cat., 2 vols. in 1, no description of binding ($287.50). better book getter, jan. online cat., apparently 2 vols. in 1, “leather” rebacked and worn ($350). sanctuary books, jan. online cat., apparently 2 vols. in 1, pls. hand colored and foxed, contemporary calf rebacked ($1000). flaxman, iliad and odyssey designs, 1805. see flaxman, iliad designs, under letterpress books with engravings by and after blake, and odyssey designs, under flaxman, above. goldsmith, vicar of wakefield, 1792. silvertwigs, jan. online cat., 2 vols. in 1, pls. slightly foxed, calf with cloth spine worn (£92.55). classic bindings, jan. online cat., 2 vols., contemporary calf, binding illus. (£300). green, the spleen, and other poems, 1796. wyseby house, jan. online cat., “decorated boards worn” (£30). b & l rootenberg, jan. online cat., some spotting, calf rebacked ($150). rambler rare books, jan. online cat., contemporary calf ($175). james cummins, jan. online cat., contemporary calf ($200). d & e lake, jan. online cat., contemporary calf ($205). hamilton, memoirs of count grammont, n.d. (c. 1794). william dailey, jan. online cat., marginal foxing, modern morocco ($300). shoemaker booksellers, jan. online cat., “leather” binding ($410). minster gate bookshop, jan. online cat., light foxing, later morocco (£275). brick row book shop, jan. online cat., moderate foxing, contemporary morocco ($425). royoung bookseller, jan. online cat., light foxing, contemporary morocco rebacked ($550). phillip pirages, jan. online cat., large-paper issue, later morocco ($1700). hayley, essays on old maids, 1793. rothwell & dunworth, jan. online cat., vol. 2 only with parker’s only pl., half calf very worn (£20). spring 2012 blake/an illustrated quarterly 139 hume, history of england, bowyer ed., 1806. classic bindings, jan. online cat., “6” vols. (an error for 5?) in 10, “large paper edition,” contemporary half calf, binding illus. (£3500). staniland, jan. online cat., 5 vols. in 10, contemporary morocco (£4750). kitrenwick books, jan. online cat., 5 vols. in 10, some damp staining, contemporary morocco worn, 1 cover detached (£3000). johnson, rasselas, 1796. dust jacket, jan. online cat., “full leather” ($195). archer’s books, jan. online cat., “leather” ($198.48). windle, jan. online cat., early calf repaired, worn ($375). lodge, portraits of illustrious personages of great britain. bauman rare books, jan. online cat., 1823-34 ed., complete in 12 vols., marginal foxing, contemporary morocco ($4000). cornell books, jan. online cat., 1823-28 ed., vols. 1-6 (parts 1-24), presumably containing parker’s 4 pls., later cloth worn (£100). fine books co., jan. online cat., 1826 ed., vol. 5 only, presumably with 3 of parker’s 4 pls., half “leather” worn ($62.70). hollett & son, jan. online cat., 1834 ed., 12 vols., contemporary morocco, bindings illus. (£1437.50). james cummins, jan. online cat., 1835 ed., 12 vols. in 6, contemporary morocco ($2500). k books, jan. online cat., 1835 ed., 12 vols., slight foxing, 19th-century morocco (£1500). tony hutchinson, jan. online cat., 1835 ed., vols. 5 and 6 offered individually, presumably containing parker’s 4 pls., foxed, contemporary calf worn, binding illus. (£12.50 each). better world books, jan. online cat., 1835 ed., 12 vols., foxed, later cloth very worn ($33.01). zubal books, jan. online cat., 1835 ed., 12 vols. in 6, stained, no description of binding other than “most joints severed” ($85.44). macneill, poetical works, 1801. barter books, jan. online cat., 2 vols., “leather” binding (£110). old hall bookshop, jan. online cat., 2 vols., contemporary calf (£60). marmontel, belisarius, 1794. better world books, jan. online cat., light foxing, “leather” very worn ($65.45). rockland bookman, jan. online cat., pls. foxed, contemporary morocco ($375). pope, essay on man, 1796. martin’s books, jan. online cat., stains, “full leather” very worn (£30). oxfam broomhill, jan. online cat., “leather” worn, illus. (£150). robertson, history of scotland during the reigns of queen mary and of king james vi, 1797. graham york books, jan. online cat., 3 vols., contemporary calf (£125). rogers, pleasures of memory. nigel sustins, jan. online cat., 1801 ed., half “leather” very worn (£30). barter books, jan. online cat., 1801 ed., some browning, later cloth (£57.80). krown & spellman, jan. online cat., 1801 ed., some foxing, later morocco ($100). hollett & son, jan. online cat., 1802 ed., contemporary calf very worn (£30). barry mckay, jan. online cat., 1802 ed., contemporary morocco (£35). ken spelman, jan. online cat., 1802 ed., contemporary half calf (£49.50). san francisco book co. (paris), jan. online cat., 1803 ed., “leather” binding (€45.50). cornelius muhilly, jan. online cat., 1806 ed., spotting, “leather” very worn ($250). shakespeare, plays, 1807. antiquariat aurora, jan. online cat., 12 vols. complete, contemporary calf worn, binding illus. (€680). shakespeare illustrated, by an assemblage of portraits, 1793. w. hornby, jan. online cat., 2 vols., 156 of 158 pls. (parker engraved 5), contemporary calf very worn, covers of vol. 1 missing, covers of vol. 2 detached (£95). dublin bookbrowsers, jan. online cat., c. 130 pls. in 1 vol., light foxing, half calf (€175). somerville, the chase, 1800. britobooks, jan. online cat., “minimal foxing, … leather boards” worn (£59.99). llibreria antiquària farré, jan. online cat., recent half calf (€210). thomson, the seasons, 1793. john turton, jan. online cat., later calf worn (£38). book shop (iowa city), jan. online cat., “leather” worn ($59.95). james fenning, jan. online cat., light foxing, contemporary morocco (£185). richmond, george a folio of drawings and prints, including a sheet of head studies. bhl, 21 june, #278, quantity not stated, head studies illus. (not sold; estimate £600-800). five studies, including 2 pencil sketches of oaks, 17.7 x 10.7 cm. and 12.0 x 17.3 cm., and 3 watercolor landscapes in 1 frame. bhl, 21 june, #280, illus. (£1020). three drawings of otford castle and scenes near panton, norfolk. pencil, 12.0 x 19.6 cm., 8.8 x 19.7 cm., and 12.4 x 19.6 cm., each signed with initials, 1 dated 1848 and 1 dated 1849. bhl, 21 june, #275, illus. (not sold; estimate £600-800). three drawings, study of a man’s right leg, pen and ink on wove paper, leaf 17.5 x 7.0 cm.; studies of a reaper sharpening a scythe, watercolor, 12.1 x 17.2 cm.; otford, kent, wash, 14.6 x 22.2 cm. sny, 25 jan., #153, from the collection of charles ryskamp, all 3 illus. online ($8125). dawn. oil on panel, 35.0 x 40.7 cm. csk, 16 march, #152, illus. (£2125). see illus. 9. the entombment. oil, 40.0 x 55.0 cm. bhl, 21 june, #276, verso label inscribed “painted in florence, 1840,” illus. (not 140 blake/an illustrated quarterly spring 2012 sold; estimate £2000-3000). abbott and holder, aug. cat. 410, #14 (£4000). head of a man. pen and ink, 24.5 x 17.5 cm. bhl, 21 june, #277, illus. (£600). portrait of a lady holding a rosary. charcoal and oil, 54.0 x 34.5 cm. bhl, 21 june, #281, illus. (£1560). the figure’s diaphanous gown suggests an early date, c. 1830-40. the sower. pencil, pen and ink, gray wash, 35.3 x 18.4 cm., signed and dated feb. 1830. cl, 5 july, #111, illus. (£34,850; estimate £7000-10,000). previously sold cl, 20 nov. 1984, #117, illus. (£7020). study of a dancing nude. pencil, 40.5 x 24.0 cm., possibly dating from the 1830s. bhl, 21 june, #279, “indistinctly inscribed,” illus. (not sold; estimate £400600). study of a man, attributed to richmond. pen and ink, 9.0 x 8.0 cm. with a rounded top. eb, jan.-feb., illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £200 or “best offer”). awkward and unpleasant, but the attribution is probably correct. previously offered eb, dec. 2010, at the same price. study of a man looking down. pen and ink, 18.2 x 14.0 cm. w.s fine art/andrew wyld, june cat., #46, illus. (£2500). view across a wooded valley. watercolor, 19.2 x 39.4 cm. w.s fine art/andrew wyld, june cat., #45, illus. (£7500; previously offered at the same price, july 2008 cat., #40, illus.). letters by richmond. see palmer, six letters, above. romney, george three drawings on 2 leaves, studies of a seated lady, pen and ink (recto), pencil (verso), leaf 31.2 x 24.1 cm., and seated woman, pen and ink, size not recorded. sny, 25 jan., #242, from the collection of charles ryskamp, all 3 illus. ($12,500). descent from the cross. pencil, 16.4 x 19.6 cm., datable to c. 1792-93. guy peppiatt/stephen ongpin, nov. “winter” cat., #6, illus. (£1800). king lear, edgar, and the fool. pencil, 45.0 x 41.0 cm. bhl, 13 july, #1, illus. (£30,000; estimate £4000-6000). miss ann parry, seated. pencil, 23.5 x 17.6 cm. w.s fine art/andrew wyld, june cat., #11, illus. (£7500). previously offered agnew’s, june 2002 cat., #7, illus. (£15,000). portrait of mr. william hayley. oil, 77.5 x 63.5 cm., datable to c. 1778. sny, 27 jan., #354, illus. (not sold; estimate $90,000-120,000). previously sold cl, 28 nov. 1969, #198 (price not recorded), and sny, 23 jan. 2003, #8, illus. ($90,000). the rev. william atkinson (1724-1764) wearing a broadbrimmed hat. pencil, 15.2 x 18.4 cm., inscribed on the back 9. george richmond. dawn. oil on panel, 35.0 x 40.7 cm., inscribed on the back “the moon is up. i have not / heard the clock. and she / goes down at twelve. / g. richmond.” the absence of human figures and the loose, painterly, and atmospheric style are unusual for richmond; the work would probably not be attributable to him without the verso inscription. possibly datable to the late 1820s or early 1830s when richmond, palmer, and others among blake’s youthful followers were interested in moonlit scenes. “their motto was ‘poetry and sentiment’, and at night they rambled over the nearby countryside by moonlight or in thunderstorms, or sat on campstools in the open air, reciting poetry to one another, and sometimes acting scenes from macbeth” (raymond lister, george richmond: a critical biography [london: robin garton, 1982] 15). the inscription on the painting, quoted here from the csk cat. of 16 march, is from the beginning of act 2, scene 1, of macbeth, with “the moon is down” changed to “the moon is up.” the 1st 10 words are spoken by fleance, the remainder by banquo. richmond’s engraving of 1827, “the fatal bellman,” includes an inscription from macbeth, act 2, scene 2: “it was the owl that shriek’d, the fatal bell-man.” lister mentions “a drawing” by richmond “of lady macbeth of about 1825” (124). dawn previously sold sl, 31 march 1976, #96. digital image courtesy of christie’s london. spring 2012 blake/an illustrated quarterly 141 “g romney.” w.s fine art/andrew wyld, june cat., #10, illus. (£15,000). sketch of a lady. pencil, 11.0 x 8.5 cm. bho, 16 nov., #216, illus. (£125). studies of figures arranged in friezes. pen and ink with wash, 10.6 x 18.7 cm., datable to c. 1776-77. lowell libson, may online cat., illus. (not priced). study of a female figure. pen and ink, black wash, 25.4 x 19.7 cm. csk, 8 dec., #363, illus. (£5000). study of a muse. pen and ink, 10.2 x 7.6 cm. waddington’s auction, toronto, 13 dec., #46, illus. ($1020 canadian). study of emma, lady hamilton, as miranda. oil, 46.0 x 41.5 cm. bhl, 7 dec., #5, illus. (not sold; estimate £25,00030,000). probably 1 of romney’s preparatory studies for his boydell shakespeare painting of the tempest, act 1, scene 1. study of the warren family. pencil, 13.5 x 23.0 cm. sl, 8 july, #301, with romney, study of a death-bed composition, traditionally identified as the death of cordelia, and 3 drawings by other artists, illus. (not sold; estimate £3000-5000). titania and her attendants. oil, 119.4 x 149.9 cm.; datable to c. 1792. lowell libson, may cat. devoted to this single work, illus. (not priced). libson’s online cat. of late may states that this work was sold to a “private collection, uk.” previously sold sl, 23 nov. 2006, #68, titled titania’s attendants chasing bats, illus. (£38,400); offered in libson’s april 2007 cat., #9, illus. (not priced), and jan. 2009 cat., pp. 54-57, illus. (price on request). two figures in a lazaretto. pen and brown ink, 11.4 x 19.0 cm. csk, 8 dec., #364, illus. (£1250). “il penseroso l’ allegro,” mezzotint by george keating, 1799. grosvenor prints, april online cat., 2nd st., light staining, illus. (£360). the 1st st. is dated 1798 in the imprint. portrait of romney, etching/engraving of his self-portrait now in the national portrait gallery, london. grosvenor prints, april online cat., proof before all letters, inscribed in pencil in the lower margin, “george romney the portrait painter self portrait,” image 18.4 x 14.5 cm., leaf of wove paper without watermark trimmed within the platemark to 23.8 x 18.2 cm., “slightly soiled, glued to card,” illus. (£230; acquired by windle for essick). for discussion, see the introductory essay to this sales review and mark crosby’s essay forthcoming in blake. hayley, life of romney, 1809. grosvenor prints, april online cat., 1 pl. only, “newton with the prism,” engraved by robert meadows, illus. (£90). see also hayley, life of romney, under letterpress books with engravings by and after blake, above. hayley, memoirs, 1823. grosvenor prints, april online cat., frontispiece to vol. 2 only, romney’s portrait of hayley with his son thomas, engraved by caroline watson, illus. (£140). stothard, thomas books with illus. by stothard are listed only for eds. not recorded in the standard reference works, coxhead and bennett. four drawings for the novelist’s magazine. monochrome wash, each about 11.5 x 7.0 cm., datable to 1784-85. bl, 27 oct., #520, 2 for arabian nights; #521, 1 for the history of betsy thoughtless and 1 for the history of jemmy and jenny jessamy, all illus. (£1300 for lot 520, £1200 for lot 521). two drawings, christian making his escape with hopeful from the dungeon of doubting castle and giant despair, wash, 9.0 x 9.9 cm., signed, and design for a monument to mariamne [sic] johnes, wash, 14.2 x 11.6 cm. sny, 25 jan., #101, from the collection of charles ryskamp, with a drawing by richard westall, all illus. (not sold; estimate $6000-9000). sh, 25 june, #336, design for a monument, illus. ($1200); #337, christian making his escape, illus. ($2300). cartouche enclosing a young couple at harvest time. pen and ink, gray washes, 8.9 x 6.4 cm. abbott and holder, nov. online cat. 412, #114 (£225). don quixote at the ball, attributed to stothard. oil, 15.0 x 20.0 cm. bho, 7 sept., #194, illus. (not sold; estimate £500800). an elegant assembly studying a scroll. pen and ink, 7.6 x 5.1 cm. abbott and holder, nov. online cat. 412, #115 (£125). emily davies. watercolor, 10.2 x 7.6 cm. abbott and holder, may online cat. 408, #85, “a sweet little girl sitting for her portrait” (£225). helen of whitby. oil, 91.4 x 63.5 cm. csk, 13 dec., #389, illus. (£1000). the attribution to stothard is questionable. henry and emma. gray wash, 10.2 x 7.6 cm. abbott and holder, may online cat. 408, #84 (£325). an illus. to matthew prior’s poem, “henry and emma,” engraved by john walker and published in lady’s poetical magazine, 1781. the rival brothers. monochrome wash, no size given but probably about 12.0 x 7.0 cm. eb, feb., with “gift inscription” signed by stothard and dated 16 sept. 1829, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $2500); july (same minimum bid and result); oct. (no bids on a required minimum bid of £1250). this illus. to mary leapor’s poem, “the rival broth142 blake/an illustrated quarterly spring 2012 ers,” was engraved by william angus and published in lady’s poetical magazine, 1782. previously offered eb, march-april 2010, the date recorded as “15 sept. 1829” and offered at the “buy it now” price of $8500 (not sold). simon, attributed to stothard. watercolor, 7.2 x 12.8 cm., datable to 1790-91. eb, april, titled “saint barnabas,” framed, illus. (£295). possibly a skillful copy after louis schiavonetti’s engraving of the design, published by w. n. gardiner and j. good in 1791 as part of a group of “sacred subjects “ (coxhead 180). this watercolor is the same size as the engraving and its coloring is almost identical to the hand-tinted issue of the pl. a snake charmer. watercolor, 22.0 x 17.0 cm., signed “t stothard del.” bhl, 7 dec., #71, illus. (not sold; estimate £400600). “caroline de lichtfield,” a pair of pls. illustrating isabelle de montolieu’s novel, engraved by john ogborne and joseph strutt. keys auction, aylsham, norfolk, 6 may, #55, titled “caroline & lindorf ” and “caroline & walstien,” imprints (and hence dates) trimmed off, illus. (£110). r. collins, trade card for, engraved by john neagle, n.d. grosvenor prints, april online cat., laid india, illus. (£220). “the innocent stratagem” and “the power of innocence,” 2 pls. from a suite of 4 illustrating frances burney, cecilia, engraved by joseph strutt, 1792. grosvenor prints, sept. online cat., marginal “damage,” illus. (£350). see also “the power of innocence,” below. “the lost apple,” lithograph. campbell fine art, nov. online cat., 1st printing on original mount with aquatint border, illus. (£1450). this or a very similar impression offered by campbell fine art, spring 2000 cat. 8, #74 (£1450), and nov. 2001 cat. 9, #9 (£1100). “pilgrimage to canterbury,” engraved by schiavonetti and heath, 1817. js auctions, oxfordshire, 26 march, #396, illus. (£115). “the power of innocence,” engraved by antonio suntach, 1794. eb, jan., illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of €250). probably copied from strutt’s engraving of 1792 (see “the innocent stratagem,” above). “princess catherine of france presented to henry v of england,” mezzotint by anthony cardon, 1797. keys auction, aylsham, 9 sept., #36, illus. (£30). “the sorrows of lady alice,” engraved by henry richter, 1797. grosvenor prints, april online cat., color printed, foxed, illus. (£240). “the wellington shield,” etched by stothard after his own design. campbell fine art, aug. online cat., “complete set of 6 original etchings” (but apparently lacking the outline etching of the entire shield), “uncut sheets with wide margins,” illus. (“sold”). probably the set sold cheffins auction, cambridge, 22 march 2007, #247 (£4400; estimate £100-200). t. bowen, historical account of … bethlem hospital, 1783. eb, july-aug., frontispiece only, a drawing by stothard, engraved by william sharp, of caius cibber’s statues over the main gate to bedlam, slight marginal stains, illus. (£14.95). not in bennett or coxhead. for a discussion of the possible influence of these statues on blake and an illus. of this print, see jenijoy la belle, “blake’s bald nudes,” blake 24.2 (fall 1990): 52-58. appendix: new information on blake’s engravings listed below are substantive additions or corrections to essick, william blake’s commercial book illustrations (1991). pp. 39-40, fenning and collyer, a new system of geography, 1785-86, 1787. copies of the 1785-86 issue in the essick collection and in the morris miller library, university of tasmania, hobart, include a previously unrecorded 2nd st. of pl. 1 in which the imprint is dated “july 16.th 1785” followed by a semi-colon.10 in the 1st st. (british library), the date is “june 6.th 1784” followed by a semi-colon. in the 3rd (previously 2nd) and final st., the imprint is dated “july 16.th 1787” followed by a comma. the attribution of this unsigned pl. to blake as the engraver and stothard as the designer is based only on a pencil inscription (by robert balmanno?) on a proof of the central design in the british museum. pl. 2 in the essick copy of the 1785-86 issue is in the 2nd st., with a 1787 imprint, previously recorded only in copies of the 1787 issue. bb #455a lists only the british library (designated “bm”) copy of the 1785-86 issue; copies of the 1787 issue are in the explorers club, new york (bb #455b), and in the university of reading library (bbs 213). as cb fig. 57 shows, blake’s pl. 1 in the british library copy is torn and abraded lower left. the copy of the 1785-86 issue in the morris miller library is badly damaged by water; many leaves are stuck together and only part of blake’s pl. 2 is visible. the university of minnesota online library cat. does not list the 1787 issue located there by bbs 213. according to its online cat., a copy of the 1787 issue is in the hennepin county library, minnetonka, minnesota. for an illus. of and comments on blake’s pl. 2, see blake 36.4 (spring 2003): 124. a complete reproduction of the british library copy of the 1785-86 issue is available on eighteenth century collections online <http://find.galegroup. com/ecco>. 10. i am grateful to luana j. nandan of the morris miller library for all information about the copy in that collection (e-mail, 16 march 2011). spring 2012 blake/an illustrated quarterly 143 pp. 41-42, lavater, essays on physiognomy. in the original issue of the work in parts, blake’s pl. 1 was included in part 5, dated july 1788 on the printed back wrapper. the pl. is listed on the front wrapper as “7. aged figures, gardening.” blake’s pl. 2 was issued in part 3, dated may 1788, and is listed on the front wrapper as “7. democritus, finished.” pp. 45-49, darwin, botanic garden, 1st ed. of part 1, 1791. for a copy that includes blake’s pl. 6 of 1795, see the final entry on darwin under letterpress books with engravings by and after blake, above. p. 101, flaxman, compositions from the works days and theogony of hesiod, 1817. the complete set of prepublication proofs at the bodleian library, unseen at the time of writing, has now been listed on the bodleian’s online cat. (<http:// solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk>, accessed 1 nov. 2011). these are described as “37 proofs, of which 27 are before letters,” call number arch. aa b.15, aleph system number 013996444. corrigendum in my 2010 review i noted “a small etching” attributed to blake, “representing sampson destroying the lion,” offered by a. e. evans and son in an 1845 cat. (blake 44.4 [spring 2011]: 129). this is almost certainly the impression of “samson and the lion,” an etching by welby sherman, inscribed “ws / 1827” and acquired by the british museum in 1847, accession no. 1847,0318.122. according to campbell dodgson, “the engravings of george richmond, r.a., and welby sherman,” print collector’s quarterly 17.4 (oct. 1930): 361, the museum’s impression was “bought as ‘an etching by blake.’” dodgson was keeper of prints and drawings at the british museum, 1912-32. m i n u t e p a r t i c u l a r in his manuscript “life of blake” (c. 1832), frederick tatham writes that during the 1790s william and catherine blake resided in hercules buildings in a pretty clean house of 8 or 10 rooms & at first kept a servant, but finding (as m.rs blake declared & as every one else knows) the more service the more inconvenience, she like all sensible women, who are possessed of industry & health & only moderate means, relinquished this incessant tax upon domestic comfort, did all the work herself, kept the house clean, & herself tidy, besides printing all blakes numerous engravings, which was a task alone sufficient for any industrious woman, but however as there is no state, or scheme, or plan, without its accompanying evil blake had reason to regret his having left no one in possession of his house during his & m.rs blakes absense for one day paying some friendly visit, some thieves entered it & carried away plate to the value of 60 pounds & clothes to the amount of 40 more.1 however, as this note will demonstrate, by the end of january 1791 william and catherine may have been all too aware that leaving a servant in charge of 13 hercules buildings was no sure security against burglary. rate book entries for 13 hercules buildings, lambeth, reveal that by early march 1791 the blakes had moved from their former residence at 28 poland street, soho, to their new house.2 in the second edition of blake records (2004), g. e. bentley, jr., suggests that the blakes may have moved to 13 hercules buildings as early as “the autumn of 1790” or at least “before the end of 1790.”3 a short paragraph that appeared in the evening mail on wednesday 26 january 1791 suggests a slightly later date for the move. the evening mail reports: a few days since the house of mr clay of hercules buildings, lambeth, was stripped of every article of furniture in it during his absence. his house-keeper who had lived with him three years is the thief and had hired a cart to remove the 1. quoted in g. e. bentley, jr., blake records, 2nd ed. (new haven: yale university press, 2004) [hereafter br(2)] 676. bentley suggests a date of sept. 1795 for the robbery (676fn). on the night of 7 june 1793 blake’s neighbor philip astley “of the royal saloon, in hercules buildings” was burgled and robbed of “cash, plate, watches, &c. &c. to the amount of 800 l.” (world 2 sept. 1793: 3, col. c). 2. blake is first recorded as payer of the poor rates for 13 hercules buildings on 9 mar. 1791 (see br[2] 744fn). 3. br(2) 744 and fn (see also 742-43fn). “mr clay of hercules buildings” by angus whitehead blake in the marketplace, 2014 blake in the marketplace, 2014 by robert n. essick robert n. essick has been collecting and writing about blake for over forty-five years. table of contents: introductory essay abbreviations blake: illuminated books drawings and paintings separate plates and plates in series letterpress books with engravings by and after blake, including prints extracted from such books interesting blakeana blake’s circle and followers: barry, james basire, james calvert, edward flaxman, john fuseli, henry linnell, john mortimer, john hamilton palmer, samuel parker, james richmond, george romney, george sherman, welby stothard, thomas appendix: new information on blake’s engravings the 2014 blake market began slowly. through april, there were no rumors in the trade of anything substantial coming to market, much less actual sales of blake’s drawings, paintings, or illuminated books. the calm persisted until 7 may, when i learned from john windle that bonhams london auction scheduled for 18 june would include posthumous copy i of songs of innocence and of experience (illus. 1-3).for the recent sale of posthumous copy p, see blake 47.4 (spring 2014): pars. 2-3 and illus. 3-5. estimated at £50,000-70,000, the forty-four unbound plates were quickly knocked down at the low estimate (£62,500 with the 25% buyer’s premium) to the e. j. pratt library, victoria university, toronto, now the most active institutional collector of blake and his circle. the draft of bonhams catalogue entries sent to windle included an “unpublished proof,” with a previously unrecorded “blake” signature, of the title-page vignette for both volumes of john gabriel stedman’s narrative, of a five years’ expedition, against the revolted negroes of surinam, a work for which blake has long been known to have engraved sixteen full-page plates. this sent me scurrying to copies of the book. with the aid of a magnifying glass, i quickly found that the first published state of the vignette on the engraved title page to vol. 1 of the 1796 edition is clearly signed by blake. impressions of the second published state used for the vol. 2 title page also show a ghostly, barely visible signature. this is a remarkable instance of an engraving by blake hidden in plain sight for over 150 years.the presence of engravings by blake in stedman’s book was first recorded by william michael rossetti in his list of “works engraved but not designed by blake” in alexander gilchrist, life of william blake (london: macmillan, 1863) 2: 260. rossetti does not list the engravings individually but only states that there are “fourteen plates” by blake. thirteen full-page plates are signed by blake; three unsigned plates have been attributed to him by 20th-century scholars. if rossetti counted only plates signed by blake, he may have noticed the “blake” signature on the title-page vignette and included it among his “fourteen.” the proof was acquired by the pratt library for a hammer price of £4500 (£5625 with the buyer’s premium). see illus. 6-10 and their captions for further information on this new attribution. on 9 july sotheby’s london offered several lots of interest to collectors of blake and his circle: two drawings by fuseli, a drawing by flaxman and two by romney, two watercolors by palmer, an oil painting by calvert, and two watercolors by blake, two studies of a baby’s head and pestilence, probably the great plague of london (illus. 4). the last, blake’s earliest known version of this subject, had major condition issues. it had failed to sell at auction in 1982, but this time the drawing managed to fetch a hammer price at the low estimate of £20,000 (£25,000 including the buyer’s premium). sotheran’s, the venerable london book dealer, issued a “william blake” catalogue in october that includes blake’s job and dante engravings, a selection of his commercial book illustrations, two etchings by palmer, and a run of william muir facsimiles of the illuminated books. like sotheran’s june 2008 catalogue of the same title, this sale was organized in partnership with john windle. although most of the original materials had been previously offered by windle, their appearance in this important 2014 catalogue is recorded here. in early november windle informed me that works by blake from the collection of maurice sendak (1928–2012) would be coming to auction at christie’s new york on 21 january 2015. christie’s briefly listed the sale in its online auction calendar, but had taken it down by 19 november, apparently in response to a lawsuit filed by the rosenbach museum and library against sendak’s estate.a news story about the lawsuit appeared in the philadelphia inquirer on 9 nov.; see <http://​www.​philly.​com/​philly/​entertainment/​20141110_​rosenbach_​sues_​sendak_​foundation_​over_​rare_​books.​html>, accessed 11 nov. his will stipulates that his rare books should be given to the museum, but the executors of the estate define that category in a very narrow way. disbound works, such as sendak’s copy h of songs of innocence and of experience, are not “books” in the estate’s opinion. their even odder argument is that children’s books, presumably including songs of innocence copy j, are not “rare books.” on 2 december i learned from richard lloyd of christie’s that the auction had been postponed until the parties to the suit settle or the court renders a decision. at least one work by blake from sendak’s collection, a copy of william hayley’s 1805 ballads with the plates hand colored, had been given to the rosenbach before disagreement blossomed into litigation.according to peter dobrin, “bulk of sendak collection leaving rosenbach,” posted 15 sept. 2014 by the philadelphia inquirer, <http://​articles.​philly.​com/​2014-09-15/​news/​53908526_​1_​rosenbach-​museum-​the-​rosenbach-​maurice-​sendak-​collection>, accessed 16 sept. dobrin’s headline refers to works by sendak on deposit at the rosenbach but now being returned to his estate. the rosenbach museum and library sometimes uses a different name, “the rosenbach of the free library of philadelphia.” more information about the estate, its executors, and their plans for a sendak museum is reported in randy kennedy, “sendak’s estate: debating where the things go,” new york times 1 dec., <http://​www.​nytimes.​com/​2014/​12/​02/​books/​maurice-​sendaks-​estate-​debating-​where-​the-​things-​go.​html?emc=eta1&_r=0>, accessed 2 dec. for sendak’s blake holdings, see blake 46.4 (spring 2013): par. 5, 47.1 (summer 2013): par. 9, and 47.4 (spring 2014): par. 7. fifty mickey mouse items from sendak’s holdings went to auction on 15 july at hake’s americana & collectibles, springettsbury township, pennsylvania. a “mickey mouse rare double slate dancers german crank toy” sold for $20,221.28. i continue to list plates by blake’s engraving master, james basire, appearing in two publications, eighty-two prints … from the original drawings of guercino, in the collection of his majesty, published by boydell c. 1764(?), and charles rogers’s collection of prints in imitation of drawings, 1778. all the plates in the former, and most of those in the latter, were executed in basire’s shop before blake entered apprenticeship in august 1772, but these reproductions of drawings may have influenced blake’s development of relief etching. he takes his master’s activities a step further. relief etching permits the printing of images, drawn or painted directly on copperplates, to create what we might call “printed drawings”—along with the equally oxymoronic “printed manuscripts”—rather than prints “in imitation of drawings,” facsimiles, or reproductions.for similar thoughts on the relationship between drawing and relief etching, see joseph viscomi, blake and the idea of the book (princeton: princeton up, 1993) 369-71. lithography, invented in 1796 by alois senefelder and called “polyautography” when brought to england early in the nineteenth century, offers a similar means of producing multiple copies of autographic compositions executed on the printing matrix. beginning with the 2013 sales review, i no longer list separate plates and book illustrations for blake’s circle and followers unless executed by the original artist. exceptions are made for particularly important or rare works, such as large separate plates designed by fuseli, discoveries, and plates by artists, such as basire, of interest principally for their copy engravings. the coverage of blake and interesting blakeana remains unchanged. the year of all sales and catalogues in the following lists is 2014 unless indicated otherwise. most reports about auction catalogues are based on the online versions. coverage of regional auctions is selective. dates for dealers’ online catalogues are the dates accessed, not the dates of publication. works offered online by dealers and previously listed in any one of the last four sales reviews are not repeated here. most of the auction houses add their purchaser’s surcharge to the hammer price in their price lists. these net amounts are given here, following the official price lists. the value-added tax levied against the buyer’s surcharge in britain is not included. late 2014 sales will be covered in the 2015 review. i am grateful for help in compiling this review to g. e. bentley, jr., nancy bialler, david bindman, mark crosby, william dailey, andrea everett, judith guston, donald heald, scott krafft, richard lloyd, nick lott, morton paley, miranda rhys-williams, simon roberts, kevin salatino, annette smith, carmen socknat, joseph viscomi, patrick williams, and john windle. my special thanks go to jenijoy la belle, for assistance in all matters, and to alexander gourlay for his generosity in keeping me abreast of ebay auctions and for help with blake’s handwriting. once again, sarah jones’s editorial expertise and john sullivan’s digital imaging have been invaluable. abbreviations ah abbott and holder, london bb g. e. bentley, jr., blake books (oxford: clarendon p, 1977). plate numbers and copy designations for blake’s illuminated books and commercial book illustrations follow bb. bbs g. e. bentley, jr., blake books supplement (oxford: clarendon p, 1995) bennett shelley m. bennett, thomas stothard: the mechanisms of art patronage in england circa 1800 (columbia: u of missouri p, 1988) bg bloomsbury auctions, godalming bhl bonhams auctions, london bhny bonhams auctions, new york bho bonhams auctions, oxford bl bloomsbury auctions, london br(2) g. e. bentley, jr., blake records, 2nd ed. (new haven: yale up, 2004) butlin martin butlin, the paintings and drawings of william blake, 2 vols. (new haven: yale up, 1981) cat(s). catalogue(s) cb robert n. essick, william blake’s commercial book illustrations (oxford: clarendon p, 1991) cf cheffins auctions, cambridge, england cl christie’s auctions, london cny christie’s auctions, new york coxhead a. c. coxhead, thomas stothard, r.a. (london: bullen, 1906) csk christie’s auctions, south kensington dw dominic winter auctions, south cerney, gloucestershire e the complete poetry and prose of william blake, ed. david v. erdman, newly rev. ed. (new york: anchor–random house, 1988) eb ebay online auctions gilchrist alexander gilchrist, life of william blake, 2 vols. (london: macmillan, 1863) go gorringes auctions, lewes, east sussex gp grosvenor prints, london illus. illustration(s), illustrated ll lowell libson, london pba pba galleries auctions, san francisco pl(s). plate(s) sl sotheby’s auctions, london sny sotheby’s auctions, new york sp robert n. essick, the separate plates of william blake: a catalogue (princeton: princeton up, 1983) st(s). state(s) of an engraving, etching, or lithograph swann swann auctions, new york tj tajan auctions, paris weinglass d. h. weinglass, prints and engraved illustrations by and after henry fuseli (aldershot: scolar p, 1994) # auction lot or catalogue item number illuminated books songs of innocence and of experience, posthumous copy i. forty-four pls. (bb pls. 1-14, 16-29, 33-36, 38-43, 46, 48, 49, 52-54) on 44 unbound leaves, 43 leaves approximately 24.1 x 19.8 cm., 17 leaves showing a j whatman / 1831 watermark, last recorded in the collection of lord cunliffe. bhl, 18 june, #73, “plate 23 hand-coloured, plate 48 on a slightly smaller sheet of thinner paper (240 x 185mm.), pencilled numbers at upper right corners, occasional light dust-soiling at edges, a handful of spots, plates 6-7 and 13 with notch at one edge, plates 12-13 with nineteenth century pencil notes in margin, final plate bumped at fore-edge, preserved in red morocco pull-off box,” pls. 1, 3, 23, 42 illus. (£62,500 to the e. j. pratt library, victoria university, toronto). bb pp. 371, 380 exclude pl. 29, the title page to experience, and include pl. 30, the “introduction” to experience, in the list of pls. in copy i, but bb p. 371 includes pl. 29 in the record of pls. with the watermark. matthew haley of bonhams has assured john windle that pl. 29 is present and pl. 30 is absent. bbs 129 states that copy i is in the keynes collection, fitzwilliam museum, but this is an error for copy l (lowercase l). both the auction cat. and bb p. 371 describe the ink color as “grey,” but i suspect that this is black ink thinly applied. see illus. 1-3. 1. title page to songs of innocence and of experience, posthumous copy i, bb pl. 1 (see enlargement). relief and white-line etching in black ink, 2nd st., image and platemark 11.5 x 7.1 cm., leaf of wove paper approximately 24.1 x 19.8 cm. printed c. 1831 or later by frederick tatham. e. j. pratt library, victoria university, toronto; photo courtesy of bonhams london. for a description of this 2nd (posthumous) st., see blake 47.4 (spring 2014), caption to illus. 3. 2. title page to songs of innocence in songs of innocence and of experience, posthumous copy i, bb pl. 3 (see enlargement). relief and white-line etching in black ink, image and platemark 12.0 x 7.4 cm., leaf of wove paper approximately 24.1 x 19.8 cm. printed c. 1831 or later by frederick tatham. inscribed “3” top right in pencil in an unidentified hand. e. j. pratt library, victoria university, toronto; photo courtesy of bonhams london. 3. “spring,” 2nd pl., in songs of innocence and of experience, posthumous copy i, bb pl. 23 (see enlargement). relief and white-line etching in black ink with hand coloring in watercolors, image and platemark 10.5 x 7.7 cm., leaf of wove paper approximately 24.1 x 19.8 cm. printed c. 1831 or later by frederick tatham. like pl. 23 in posthumous copy h, the etching border was not inked or was wiped clean of ink. inscribed “22” top right in pencil in an unidentified hand. e. j. pratt library, victoria university, toronto; photo courtesy of bonhams london. click to show more. the coloring of this impression is better, and more blake-like, than one usually finds in tinted examples of posthumous copies of the songs. the hand is distinct from the two coloring styles present in posthumous copy h. the thin, transparent washes in rose, blue, and yellow extending over the text and around the design are particularly unusual, perhaps unique, for a posthumous print and recall the presence of such tinting in lifetime impressions. might blake’s wife, catherine, have been the colorist? joseph viscomi and i have speculated along those lines, but we have come to no firm conclusions. this leaf would appear to be the same whatman 1831 paper used for all but pl. 48 in copy i. mrs. blake did not die until 18 oct. 1831 (br[2] 546), and thus it is possible for her to have worked on paper of that year. as william michael rossetti was the 1st to point out, she was probably responsible for much of the coloring in blake’s illus. to john bunyan’s pilgrim’s progress of 1824-27 (gilchrist 2: 235, butlin #829). there are some similarities between the darker, thicker coloring on those designs and this impression of pl. 23. for example, the mottled green of the grassy ground below the child and sheep is similar to the handling of the same (or very similar) color in the background foliage in christian knocks at the wicket gate (butlin #829.10). click to show less. drawings and paintings pestilence, probably the great plague of london. watercolor, 13.9 x 18.7 cm., datable to c. 1779-80. butlin #184. sl, 9 july, #185, illus. (£25,000; estimate £20,000-30,000). previously offered sl, 8 july 1982, #102 (not sold; estimate £3000-5000). see illus. 4. 4. pestilence, probably the great plague of london (see enlargement). watercolor, 13.9 x 18.7 cm., datable to c. 1779-80. inscribed in pen and ink “wb,” bottom right, and on the door upper left, “lord have / mer on us” (the 2nd line crudely written). a few pencil lines below this inscription may be fragments of 2 illegible words; below this is a pen and ink squiggle that might be the beginnings of a further inscription or simply a decorative flourish. the coloring has been rubbed off the surface of the work in numerous spots, with a particularly disturbing cluster upper left and a large patch on the prone figure’s arm, bottom center. the area just left of the bellman, extending from his face to his left hand, is also abraded. provenance: as in butlin #184 to c. 1980; “a. stein” according to the sl cat. of 9 july, #185; sold to a private collector at the sl auction. photo courtesy of sotheby’s london. click to show more. this 1st recorded version of blake’s pestilence design may have been part of a series of watercolors illustrating english history, including butlin #51, 52, 53, 57, 60, 62, 64, and 67, all of about the same size. blake listed the subjects of 7 of these works in his notebook, among a group of 20 designs based on english history (e 672). in turn, he may have engraved (or intended to engrave) some of these subjects for “the history of england, a small book of engravings,” known only from its listing in his 1793 advertisement “to the public” (e 692-93). blake developed his pestilence design in a slightly larger watercolor datable to c. 1780-84 (butlin #185). this second version lacks the inscription on the door upper left but would still seem to take its subject and setting from the great plague of london in 1665. blake used the couple lower left, a version of the bellman, and the inscription on the door for the full-page design on pl. 10 of europe a prophecy, 1794. for discussions of the pestilence subject in blake’s works, including later versions, see shelley m. bennett, “a newly discovered blake at the huntington,” blake 18.3 (winter 1984-85): 132-39; joseph viscomi, “a breach in a city the morning after the battle: lost or found?” blake 28.2 (fall 1994): 44-61; and stephen c. behrendt, “the evolution of blake’s pestilence,” prophetic character: essays on william blake in honor of john e. grant, ed. alexander s. gourlay (west cornwall, ct: locust hill p, 2002) 3-26. click to show less. sketch for newton. pencil drawing, 20.4 x 26.3 cm., datable to c. 1795. butlin #308. bequeathed by quentin keynes to the fitzwilliam museum in 2005. accession no. pd.35-2005. two studies of a baby’s head, possibly hannah or elizabeth ann linnell. pencil and watercolor, 37.0 x 26.0 cm., inscribed “portrait of some / infant by william blake / vouched by fred.k tatham.” butlin #788, dating the drawing to “c. 1820 (?).” sl, 9 july, #186, illus. (£11,250; estimate £4000-6000). previously sold cl, 22 july 1949, #66 (£47.5s. to mrs. alastair winterbottom); offered bhl, 6 feb. 2007, #91, illus. (withdrawn; estimate £10,000-15,000); sold bhl, 11 march 2008, #27, illus. (£10,800 to the welsh tenor and conductor robert tear). tear died in 2011; the sl vendor may be an heir. for illus. and comments, see blake 41.4 (spring 2008): 149. the virgin hushing the young baptist, who approaches the sleeping infant jesus. tempera, 27.0 x 38.2 cm., inscribed “wb inv [in monogram] 1799.” butlin #406. ll, sept. private offer ($2,400,000); dec., online cat., illus. (not priced). previously offered by john windle, dec. 2002 cat., no entry #, illus. on the cover (not priced, “full details upon request”), sept. 2003 cat. 36, #1, illus. (“price on application”), and artemis fine arts, jan. 2003 “review 2002,” pp. 31-33, no entry #, with an essay on the painting by david bindman, illus. (not priced). according to martin bailey, “from £1,000 to £10 million in two years,” art newspaper no. 136 (may 2003): 42, the asking price in 2002 was $3,800,000. for illus., see blake 37.4 (spring 2004): 119 and the william blake archive (drawings and paintings, paintings, illustrations to the bible [c. 1799-1803], the virgin hushing the young baptist). wat tyler. pencil, 24.2 x 19.2 cm., inscribed “octr 30. 1819,” probably p. 66 from the larger blake-varley sketchbook. butlin #737, then in the collection of edwin wolf 2nd. described by butlin as the original, but the discovery of the larger blake-varley sketchbook revealed the original drawing, p. 65, of which this version is a counterproof. bauman rare books, nov. boston book fair, marginal stains, framed ($65,000). previously sold from wolf’s collection, cl, 13 july 1993, #7, illus. (£4830 to a british dealer, probably acting for bauman). previously offered by bauman, april 1994 “blake” cat., unnumbered item on inside back cover ($38,000). separate plates and plates in series “carfax conduit, oxford.” signed “blake sc.,” designer unknown, possibly intended as a book illus. sanders of oxford, aug. online cat., no item #, “some surface dirt with crease to top right corner,” illus. (£310). for the attribution to william blake, see robert n. essick, “a ‘new’ william blake engraving,” print quarterly 2 (1985): 42-47. “a view of carfax conduits, oxford, drawn and engraved by blake. 1s. 6d.” is listed under “new publications” in the quarterly review 3 (may 1810): 518; see also the edinburgh review 16 (april-aug. 1810): 253, and edinburgh annual register for 1810 3 part 2 (1812): cviii. the style of engraving indicates that the pl. was engraved in the 1780s; “new publications” probably means “new impressions” in 1810. “chaucers canterbury pilgrims.” sotheran’s, april “spring miscellany” cat., #27, 5th st., 1st colnaghi printing on thin laid “japan” paper, the same impression offered by john windle, march 2013 online cat., for $20,000, illus. (£15,000); oct. “william blake” cat., #92, sp impression 5zz, a colnaghi printing on laid india, illus. (£9000); #93, another colnaghi impression on laid india, “lightly cleaned and mounted,” illus. (£8500). larkhall fine art, may private offer, 3rd st., wove leaf trimmed on or just within the platemark, 10 cm. tear in left margin, apparently not the impression (sp 3w) available from larkhall in 2007 for £17,500 (£22,000). “christ trampling on satan,” butts after blake. dw, 5 feb., #69, laid paper, described as a “20th century printing,” framed, illus. (£130 to donald heald books for stock). csk, 4 dec., #57, “on stiff wove paper, … some foxing,” illus. (£750). dante engravings. sotheran’s, oct. “william blake” cat., #40-43, pls. 4, 5, 6, and 2 offered individually, probably the 1892 printing, pl. 2 foxed, all illus. (£9555, £6695, £4975, and £6505 respectively). “evening amusement.” see “morning amusement,” below. “george cumberland’s card.” sotheran’s, oct. “william blake” cat., #52, black ink printed “on thick card,” illus. (£12,750). for information on this impression, see the 2013 sales review in blake 47.4 (spring 2014). job engravings. mallams auction, oxford, 12 march, #49, pl. numbered 15 only, 1874 printing on laid india, illus. (£360). 19th century shop, march online cat., complete set, 1826 “proof” printing on laid india, scattered light foxing, printed label laid in loose, unbound but with “the original annotated paper wrapper noting the … linnell family sale, christie’s, 15 march 1918,” illus. ($135,000—a record asking price). rulon-miller, may online cat., complete set, 1826 printing on whatman paper after removal of the “proof” inscription but with slight indications of the word on a few pls., 19th-century half morocco a little worn ($35,000). bhl, 18 june, #72, complete set, 1826 printing on whatman paper after removal of the “proof” inscription, from the collection of “henry cunliffe (1826-1894) …; thence by descent,” late 19th-century morocco, illus. (£27,500 to john windle for stock); same copy, sotheran’s, oct. “william blake” cat., #51, illus. (£57,000; sold to duke university).for materials removed from this copy after the auction and before the sotheran’s cat., see l. schiavonetti after t. phillips, engraved portrait of blake published in robert blair, the grave, 1808, under interesting blakeana. cl, 16 july, #333, complete set, 1826 “proof” printing on so-called “french” wove paper, “marginal spotting throughout, … original green cloth-backed drab card wrappers, printed paper label on the upper cover,” illus. (£17,500); same copy, sims reed, oct. cat., #21, illus. (£57,500). eb, sept., complete set, 1874 printing on laid india, foxed, india paper yellowed, later half morocco by sangorski & sutcliffe, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $15,000 or “best offer”); same copy, certain books, oct. online cat., illus. ($15,000). swann, 23 sept., #1, pl. numbered 10 only, 1874 printing on laid india, illus. ($3000); 29 oct., #241, pl. numbered 16 only, 1874 printing on laid india, illus. ($2750), #242, pl. numbered 7 only, 1826 “proof” printing on laid india, illus. ($1750), #243, pl. numbered 8 only, 1826 “proof” printing on laid india, illus. ($1950). duke’s auction, dorchester, 25 sept., #16, pl. numbered 5 only, 1826 “proof” printing on laid india, illus. (£600). cottone auction, geneseo, new york, 27 sept., #647, pl. numbered 9 only, probably 1826 printing on whatman paper, illus. ($1600). sotheran’s, oct. “william blake” cat., #32-39, pls. numbered 8, 13, 10, 17, 12, 5, 15, and 7 offered individually, 1826 “proof” printing on laid india, all illus. (ranging between £2105 and £3025); #44-47, pls. numbered 8, 6, 7, and the title page offered individually, 1874 printing on laid india, all illus. (£1385, £1345, £1155, and £1345 respectively). sophie schneideman rare books, nov. online “william blake & his followers” cat., no entry #, complete set, 1826 “proof” printing on so-called “french” wove paper, some foxing, “in book mounts[?] and housed in a … clamshell box,” illus. (£65,000). cl, 3 dec., #117, complete set, 1826 “proof” printing on laid india, “probably the full sheets, some pale foxing in the margins,” unbound in a modern cloth portfolio, illus. (£62,500). sl, 9 dec., #55, complete set, 1826 “proof” printing on so-called “french” wove paper, from the collection of “general archibald stirling of keir,” late 19th-century morocco by zaehnsdorf, worn, illus. (£37,500). bhl, 9 dec., 1826 “proof” printing on laid india in the following lots, each illus. and estimated at £2500-3500: #14, title page and pl. numbered 2 (£2875), #15, pls. numbered 4 and 12 (£3125), #16, pls. numbered 7 and 8 (not sold), #17, pls. numbered 9 and 17 (not sold), #18, pls. numbered 18 and 19 (not sold). “morning amusement” and “evening amusement,” the pair after watteau. bamfords auction, rowsley, derbyshire, 16 april, #1121, black ink, “24.5cm x 29cm,” no description of condition, illus. (£200; estimate £40-60). both the illus. and the measurements indicate that the pls. are trimmed slightly into the designs, particularly right and left. it is not possible to determine the sts. of these pls. when the inscriptions are trimmed off. letterpress books with engravings by and after blake, including prints extracted from such books adams, new royal geographical magazine, c. 1793? september books, march online cat., “bound” (£1000). for blake’s pls. in this work, 1st published c. 1784 in seally and lyons, complete geographical dictionary, see bbs 251-53 and cb 35-36. allen, roman history, 1798. sotheran’s, oct. “william blake” cat., #1, pls. only, illus. (£965). vintagepaperstore, nov. online cat., pls. badly stained, contemporary calf very worn, spine missing, illus. ($370).  ariosto, orlando furioso. eb, dec. 2013, 1785 ed., 5 vols., contemporary calf worn, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $35); oct., 1799 ed., 5 vols., contemporary calf worn, illus. (£191.56); dec., 1799 ed., 5 vols., contemporary calf, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $1200). argosy book store, march online cat., 1785 ed., 5 vols., contemporary calf repaired ($450). bl, 17 april, #170, 1799 ed., 5 vols., contemporary calf worn, with tasso, jerusalem delivered, 1797, 2 vols. (£124). john windle, nov. online cat., 1799 ed., 5 vols., contemporary calf worn, probably the copy sold eb in oct.—see above ($500). blackwell’s, dec. cat. b181, #3, 1785 ed., 5 vols., pls. browned, vol. 1 water stained, contemporary half calf (£450). blair, the grave, 1808 folio. sims reed, april new york book fair, 2 pls. supplied from the 1808 quarto and thus in their 2nd published sts., elaborate victorian calf binding ($30,000—a record asking price). see also l. schiavonetti, portrait of blake published as the frontispiece to blair’s grave, 1808, under interesting blakeana. blair, the grave, 1808 quarto. carl blomgren books, feb. pasadena international book fair, uncut in modern half calf over older cloth-covered boards ($2000). john windle, march online cat., #4, “later half calf over contemporary marbled boards, marbled edges,” illus. ($4750); same copy, sotheran’s, oct. “william blake” cat., #72, illus. (£3000). bl, 17 april, #226, engraved title page cropped top and bottom, “some spotting,” contemporary half calf very worn, “lacking backstrip, covers detached,” illus. (£348). white fox books, july online cat., inscription by james neagle (probably the engraver, 1765-1822), some marginal damp stains, uncut in original boards worn and rebacked with cloth tape, paper label on upper cover, quarter morocco slipcase, the copy offered bhny, 25 june 2013, #3217, not sold ($2950). bauman rare books, aug. online cat., later morocco rebacked, illus. ($7500). sotheran’s, oct. “william blake” cat., #26, pl. 11 only, illus. (£525). caliban book shop, nov. online cat., marginal foxing, later half calf ($2750).  blair, the grave, 1813 quarto. great modern pictures, aug. online cat., pl. 10 only, “platemark intact,” illus. ($475). cobbs auction, peterborough, new hampshire, 11 oct., #243, scattered foxing, later quarter calf very worn, part of spine missing, illus. ($425). sotheran’s, oct. “william blake” cat., #27-31, pls. 6, 11, 7, 2, and 10 offered individually, all illus. (£385 for pl. 11, £305 each for the others). bg, 6 nov., #174, stained, modern half morocco, illus. (£380). staniland books, nov. online cat., later quarter calf “with original wrappers laid down … the publisher’s printed label on upper board” (£850). blair, the grave, “1813” [actually 1870] folio. brick row book shop, nov. online cat., rebound in half calf ($900). jarndyce, dec. online cat., publisher’s cloth with replacement spine (£250). blair, the grave, [1870] portfolio of pls. only. eb, nov., stains at edges of the leaves, publisher’s portfolio (no bids on a required minimum bid of $795); same copy, dec., same result. dw, 12 nov., #551, marginal stains, publisher’s portfolio worn (not sold; estimate £150-250). blair, the grave, 1926 phoenix press restrikes of the pls. only (bb #435j). eb, july, original folder worn, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $550). boydell’s graphic illustrations … of shakspeare, c. 1803. eveleigh books, march online cat., “heavy [foxing] on some plates,” last few pls. damp stained, contemporary calf rebacked ($2250). bho, 25 june, #414, some pls. damp stained, contemporary calf very worn, illus. (£812). literary lion, nov. online cat., contemporary (publisher’s?) morocco slightly worn, illus. ($6500). subun-so book store, nov. online cat., contemporary half calf “slightly worn” ($2247). cumberland, thoughts on outline, 1796. jarndyce, march online cat., unbound text gatherings and 23 (of 24) unbound pls., lacking blake’s pl. 6, “one of the 94 copies which remained unbound and probably unsold (most likely it was given away) following complications with the booksellers” (£690). the statement about unbound copies is based on the “94” remainder copies in “sheets” sent to the bookseller longman between jan. 1804 and june 1807 (bb p. 543). darwin, botanic garden. eb, march, 1st ed. of part 1, 1791, 2nd ed. of part 2, 1790, large-paper issue, leaves uncut, scattered light foxing, modern half calf, illus. (£480); july, 3rd ed. of part 1, 1795, 4th ed. of part 2, 1794, scattered foxing, contemporary calf rebacked, illus. (£265); oct., 1st ed. of part 1, 3rd ed. of part 2, both 1791, large-paper issue, leaves trimmed, contemporary calf worn, illus. (£215.91); another copy, same eds., small paper, boards very worn, front cover loose, illus. (£565.55); oct.-nov., 1799 ed., 2 vols., foxed and stained, contemporary calf very worn, illus. ($179.99). chiswick auction, london, 26 march, #44, 3rd ed. of part 1, 1795, 4th ed. of part 2, 1794, occasional light spotting, 19th-century calf rebacked and worn, the copy reportedly sold for £270, 27 nov. 2013, #74, with darwin, phytologia, 1800, blake’s pl. 6 in botanic garden illus. (£190); same copy(?) of botanic garden, 25 june, #37 (not sold; estimate £100-150). bow windows bookshop, may cat. 195, #28, 1st ed. of part 1, 3rd ed. of part 2, both 1791, “occasional light spotting,” 19th-century half vellum, illus. (£800). tj, 11 june, #149, 3rd ed. of part 1, 1795, 4th ed. of part 2, 1794, later “anglaise” binding (€746). bho, 16 sept., #264, 1st ed. of part 1, 3rd ed. of part 2, both 1791, 2 vols., later cloth, with another botanical book unrelated to blake, illus. (£600). sotheran’s, oct. “william blake” cat., #66, 3rd ed. of part 1, 1795, 4th ed. of part 2, 1794, “occasional light spotting as usual,” modern calf (£2395). earle, practical observations on the operation for the stone, 1803 reissue of the 2nd ed. william dailey books, feb. pasadena international book fair, with the appendix 1st published in 1796, lacking the title page to the appendix (as issued?), 2nd st. of the pl. in the appendix (cb pl. 3), 20th-century cloth ($1500 to essick). the only copy of the 1803 issue i’ve ever seen on the market. see my appendix, below, and illus. 5. 5. unsigned folding pl. in james earle, an appendix to a treatise on the operation for the stone (london: j. johnson, 1796) (see enlargement). this impression from the appendix included with the 1803 reissue of earle’s treatise, essick collection. etching/engraving, 2nd st. of 2, platemark 16.1 x 29.9 cm., leaf of wove paper without watermark 21.3 x 32.8 cm. the inscription top left, present in both sts. of the pl., is by an anonymous writing engraver; the inscriptions bottom center and lower right, added in this 2nd st., are in blake’s hand. the letter forms, particularly the “g,” are characteristic of his engraved lettering—compare his inscriptions in george cumberland, thoughts on outline, 1796. the barely visible blurred form top center is a weak impression of the collection stamp of the birmingham medical institute, a former owner of the volume. i am grateful to alexander gourlay for his assistance in attributing the 2nd st. inscriptions to blake. for another copy of the appendix and comments on this pl., see “blake in the marketplace, 2013,” blake 47.4 (spring 2014). flaxman, hesiod designs, 1817. bg, 23 jan., #132, 2 copies, “occasional spotting,” original boards with label, worn, with flaxman’s iliad designs, 1805, 34 (of 39) pls. only, foxed and damp stained, many pls. “loose,” the same 3 vols. unsold at bg, 14 nov. 2013, #51 (£20). eb, jan., bound with the iliad, 1805, odyssey, 1805, and aeschylus, 1831, designs, some pls. loose, 19th-century morocco, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $2000); same copy, jan.-feb., illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $1800); same copy, feb., illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $800); same copy, feb., illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $500). peter keisogloff, march online cat., bound with the iliad, 1805, odyssey, 1805, and aeschylus, 1831, designs, 19th-century morocco by j. wright, binding illus. ($2500); the same or a very similar copy also bound by j. wright, dw, 9 april, #362 (not sold; estimate £250-350); same copy, dw, 14 may, #427 (£140). pba, 5 june, #381, with the iliad, 1805, and odyssey, 1805, designs, many pls. badly stained and foxed, 3 vols. in publisher’s boards with title labels, illus. (not sold; estimate $700-1000). pls. offered individually are not listed. for the misattribution of the hesiod pls. to “blake (john),” see le blanc, 1854-90, under interesting blakeana. flaxman, iliad designs. eb, dec. 2013, 1805 ed., scattered light foxing and a few stains, contemporary half calf very worn, illus. (£102). john windle, march online cat., 1870 ed., most pls. loose, publisher’s printed boards with stains ($175). pls. offered individually are not listed. see also hesiod designs, above. gay, fables. eb, dec. 2013-jan., 1793 ed., 2 vols., scattered foxing, some leaves damp stained, contemporary vellum, illus. (£180); jan., 1793 ed., 2 vols., later vellum, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $2500 or “best offer”); feb., [1811] ed., 2 vols., uncut in 20th-century morocco, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $2500 or “best offer”); july, 1793 ed., 2 vols., 6 unidentified pls. partly hand colored, foxed, three-quarter calf, illus. ($350); aug.-sept., 1793 ed., 2 vols., contemporary calf rebacked, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $1600 or “best offer”). a book by its cover, march online cat., 1793 ed., 2 vols. in 1, scattered light foxing, “leather” rebacked ($1200). wittenborn art books, march online cat., 1793 ed., 2 vols., some foxing, “contemporary leather” very worn, illus. ($1100). st. mary’s books, march online cat., 1793 ed., 2 vols. in 1, some foxing, “original full leather” worn, illus. (£395). bearnes hampton & littlewood auction, exeter, 19 march, #229, 1793 ed., 2 vols., later calf, binding illus., probably the same copy offered 21 aug. 2013, #147, reportedly sold for £310 but perhaps not sold (£260). sotheran’s, oct. “william blake” cat., #63, 1793 ed., 2 vols., “a very tall copy, possibly large-paper,” some “browning and offsetting,” contemporary calf, bindings illus. (£965). mcconnell books, nov. online cat., [1811] ed., 2 vols., later morocco, illus. (£2000). john taylor books, nov. online cat., 1793 ed., 2 vols., later calf, bindings illus. (£800). james cummins, nov. online cat., [1811] ed., 2 vols., later calf ($1250). by the way books, nov. online cat., 1793 ed., 2 vols. in 1, 6 unidentified pls. hand colored, scattered foxing, three-quarter buckram, probably the copy sold eb in july (see above) rebound, illus. ($1161.16). pls. offered individually are not listed. some of the 1793 eds. may be the [1811] issue. hartley, observations on man, quarto issue, 1791. bl, 19 may, #91, blake’s pl. spotted, modern half calf over very worn contemporary boards, illus. (£806). hayley, ballads, 1805. tj, 11 june, #151, contemporary calf, illus. (€1243). sotheran’s, oct. “william blake” cat., #70, 1st sts. of the pls., original boards rebacked, earlier (original?) spine label preserved, illus. (£6595). skinner auction, boston, 16 nov., #145, sts. of pls. not recorded, contemporary calf very worn, with lavater, aphorisms, 1789, contemporary calf rebacked, and hayley, triumphs of temper, 1803, contemporary boards rebacked, bindings illus. ($1476).  hayley, life of cowper, 1803-04. second life books, jan. online cat., 1st ed., 3 vols., scattered foxing, contemporary calf rebacked ($694.40). eb, jan., 2nd ed., vols. 1-2 only, contemporary calf worn, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £200); same copy, feb., illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £145). sotheran’s, oct. “william blake” cat., #69, 2nd ed., 3 vols., some foxing, contemporary half calf, illus. (£800). hayley, life of romney, 1809. roe and moore, march online cat., scattered foxing, pl. margins stained, 20th-century buckram (£120). le-livre, march online cat., “intérieur acceptable,” half leather, illus. (€105). bg, 19 june, #321, contemporary half calf worn (£156). eb, aug., imprint on blake’s pl. trimmed in half, modern half calf over contemporary boards, illus. ($305). westfield books, nov. online cat., lacking 1 pl., “sensibility” engraved by watson, foxed, later half calf (£60).  hayley, triumphs of temper, small-paper issue unless noted otherwise, 1803. dw, 29 jan., #547, contemporary calf worn, illus. (£250). go, 26 march, #1022, contemporary calf rebacked, illus. (£100). tj, 11 june, #150, contemporary morocco, illus. (€746). eb, sept.-oct., marginal stains, contemporary calf very worn, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $395 or “best offer”); same copy, oct.-nov., illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $395). sotheran’s, oct. “william blake” cat., #67, 19th-century calf rebacked, modern slipcase, illus. (£625); #68, large-paper issue, modern half morocco, illus. (£1750). see also hayley, ballads, above. hogarth, works. barnes auction, london, 8 feb., #95, blake’s pl. only, probably 2nd published st. from the 1790 ed., light stains in the lower margin, framed, illus. (£100). emanuel von baeyer, march cat., #31, blake’s pl. only, 1st proof st. with the scratched imprint present, leaf 45.7 x 58.6 cm., illus. (price on request). john windle was informed by baeyer on 5 may that the price was £18,500—a record asking price for any commercial copy engraving by blake and possibly a record for a copy engraving by a british artist. acquired may by windle for the e. j. pratt library, victoria university, toronto. eb, may-june, blake’s pl. only, probably 5th published st., lower margin partly torn off but with the imprint intact, illus. (€51). sl, 15 july, #518, the original and genuine works of william hogarth, usually dated to c. 1795 but this copy on paper with an 1809 watermark, 108 pls. on 89 leaves, presumably including the 3rd published st. of blake’s pl., creases and stains, contemporary half calf very worn, illus. (£3000). swann, 4 dec., #220, undated baldwin and cradock issue, lacking text pages 23-24, 97 pls., tears and foxing, half morocco worn, illus. ($2080). hunter, historical journal, 1793, quarto issue. bho, 25 june, #254, “some spotting,” imprint on title page trimmed off, modern half calf, illus. (£1250). sl, 30 sept., #657, contemporary calf, illus. (£6875). josephus, works, c. 1787-88. eb, oct., issue between bb issues a and b (apparently issue “ab” in bbs 228), blake’s pls. 2 and 3 illus. and his pl. 1 presumably present (2nd sts.), marginal tears, contemporary calf very worn, covers detached ($134.50); dec., bb issue c, scattered foxing and stains, contemporary morocco worn, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £475).  lavater, aphorisms. eb, july, 1789 ed., 1st st. of blake’s pl., water stained lower left, apparently disbound, illus. with a youtube video (£51). e. m. lawson, july cat. 340, #8, 1788 ed., 1st st. of blake’s pl., with douglas cleverdon’s book label designed by eric gill, contemporary calf, previously offered at the same price in lawson cat. 329 of june 2010, #19 (£320). see also hayley, ballads, above. lavater, essays on physiognomy. eb, feb., vol. 1 only, 1789, with all 4 blake pls., scattered foxing, contemporary calf very worn, illus. ($227.87); may-june, a mixed set, vols. 1-2 dated “1792” (actually c. 1818), vol. 3 dated 1798, 3 vols. in 5, scattered foxing, contemporary morocco worn and repaired, illus. ($2245); sept., pl. 3 only, full leaf with letterpress text, illus. (£29.99). bhny, 22 oct., 1789-98 ed., 3 vols. in 5, contemporary half morocco worn, illus. (not sold; estimate $1000-1500). heritage book shop, nov. online cat., 1789-98 ed., 3 vols. in 5, contemporary calf rebacked ($2750). malkin, father’s memoirs, 1806. sotheran’s, oct. “william blake” cat., #71, modern half morocco, illus. (£1200). rees, cyclopædia, 1820. eb, oct.-nov., blake’s pl. 4 only, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of €2).  salzmann, elements of morality. eb, jan.-feb., 1791 ed., vol. 2 (of 3) only, scattered foxing and marginal stains, contemporary calf very worn, illus. (£24). round table books, feb. online cat., 1792 ed., vol. 1 (of 3) only, lacking 1 unspecified pl., foxed, contemporary calf worn and rebacked, binding illus. ($400). shakespeare, plays, 1805. eb, dec. 2013, blake’s pl. 1 only, illus. with a video and surprisingly insightful spoken commentary (£25.99); march, 9 vol. issue lacking vol. 1 but with blake’s 2 pls. in vols. 6 and 9, contemporary calf worn, illus. (£92). thornton’s bookshop, march online cat., vols. 1-8 only of the 9 vol. issue and thus lacking blake’s pl. 2, contemporary calf very worn (£300). auction gallery of the palm beaches, florida, 1 april, #490, 10 vol. issue, foxed, contemporary morocco worn, bindings illus. ($650). stedman, narrative. eb, dec. 2013-jan. and again in aug. and nov., 1796 ed., 2 vols., lacking blake’s pl. 14, scattered foxing, contemporary calf rebacked, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $5500); dec. 2013-jan., 1813 ed., 2 vols., scattered light foxing, modern quarter calf, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £1950 or “best offer”); may, 1796 ed., vol. 1 only, some pls. damp stained and foxed, contemporary calf worn, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $1000); same copy, june, illus. ($535). swann, 27 march, #37, 1796 ed., 2 vols., scattered light foxing, contemporary calf worn and rebacked, illus. ($3750). heritage book shop, april online cat., 1796 ed., 2 vols., contemporary calf, vol. 2 rebacked, illus. ($6500); same copy and price, aug. cat., #178, illus. bhl, 18 june, #71, the title-page vignette for both vols., an unrecorded proof, illus. (£5625 to the e. j. pratt library, victoria university, toronto; estimate £1000-1500). sotheran’s, oct. “william blake” cat., #2, blake’s pl. 15 only, illus. (£385); #3, blake’s pl. 10 only, illus. (£295). for the title-page vignette, now attributable to blake, see the prefatory essay and illus. 6-10. 6. etched and engraved title-page vignette for john gabriel stedman, narrative, of a five years’ expedition, against the revolted negroes of surinam, 1796 (see enlargement). pre-publication proof impression, signed in scratched drypoint letters lower left, just above the cannon barrel, “blake” (as the engraver); inscribed “cuncta mea mecum” on the flag draped over the top of the oval vignette. design 5.6 x 7.5 cm. on leaf of wove paper trimmed within the platemark to 25.0 x 19.0 cm. the copperplate, at 26.9 x 19.9 cm., had to be large enough to contain the text of the title page, subsequently executed by a writing engraver (see illus. 7). inscribed in pencil lower right, “blake,” in an unidentified hand. e. j. pratt library, victoria university, toronto, call no. blake suppl. no. 566; photo courtesy of the pratt library. click to show more. the newly discovered signature makes it certain that blake engraved this vignette. his signature appears on 13 other pls. in stedman’s book; 3 unsigned pls. have also been attributed to blake’s hand (see bb #499 and cb 71-75). for records concerning blake’s contacts with stedman, see br(2) 61-62, 66-70. blake’s involvement with stedman and his publication makes it highly unlikely that some other engraver named “blake” executed this vignette. the latin inscription (the stedman family motto, “my all is with me”) was executed in drypoint by blake, not by a writing engraver. like the other pls. in the book, this vignette was probably based on a drawing by stedman. in comparison to the 1st published st. (illus. 7-9), this proof lacks the large flags attached to poles or aft masts on the sterns of the ships 1st and 4th from the left. oddly, in the published st. the anchor lower right and the cannon barrel lower left have been recut to eliminate the crosshatching appearing in this proof. a small patch of crosshatching has also been deleted from the right extension of the flag dangling lower left. according to anon., the book of family crests, 13th ed. (london: reeves and turner, 1882) 2: 442, “an anchor and cable,” traditional emblems of steadfastness, are part of the stedman family crest. for a version of this crest, see <http://​www.​myfamilysilver.​com/​pages/​crestfinder-​crest.​aspx?id=176165&name=stedman>. click to show less. 7. etched and engraved title page for john gabriel stedman, narrative, of a five years’ expedition, against the revolted negroes of surinam, small-paper copy, vol. 1, 1796 (see enlargement). first published st., image (including all lettering) 24.1 x 17.5 cm., platemark 26.9 x 19.9 cm., leaf of wove paper 28.0 x 22.1 cm. essick collection. the lettering (except for the inscriptions within the vignette) is by an unidentified writing engraver, but the oval vignette can now be attributed to blake (see the caption to illus. 6). see also illus. 8 (vignette, 1st published st.), 9 (detail of signature), and 10 (vignette, 2nd published st.). 8. title-page vignette for stedman’s narrative, small-paper copy, vol. 1, 1796 (see enlargement). etching/engraving, 1st published st., image 5.6 x 7.5 cm. essick collection. signed in scratched drypoint letters lower left, just above the cannon barrel, “blake”; see also illus. 6. the clouds above the ships were etched very lightly and are poorly printed in this impression. g. e. bentley, jr., has kindly pointed out to me that the flags on the sterns of 2 ships, added in this 1st published st., are those of holland, the horizontal stripes properly tinted red, white, and blue (top to bottom) in hand-colored copies of stedman’s book. the large dutch flag upper left is also appropriately tinted in colored copies. see also illus. 7 (complete title page, vol. 1), 9 (detail of signature), and 10 (vignette, 2nd published st.). 9. detail showing the drypoint “blake” signature lower left on the title-page vignette for stedman’s narrative, small-paper copy, vol. 1, 1796. etching/engraving, 1st published st. area shown approximately 5 x 7 mm. essick collection. in comparison to the proof (illus. 6), the signature is worn but still visible under magnification. this image has been cleaned in photoshop to eliminate patches of foul inking around the signature. see also illus. 7 (complete title page, vol. 1), 8 (vignette, 1st published st.), and 10 (vignette, 2nd published st.). 10. title-page vignette for stedman’s narrative, small-paper copy, vol. 2, 1796 (see enlargement). etching/engraving, 2nd published st., image 5.6 x 7.5 cm. essick collection. in this 2nd st., the rope dangling on the right has been extended upward beyond the lower tip of the flag to touch the outer frame of the vignette. a few crossing strokes have been added to the rope on the left where it hangs above the cannon. the clouds above the ships have been recut in a very different pattern. diagonal hatching, apparently representing a cloud, has been cut into the space between the frame of the vignette and the flag upper left, just above and to the left of “mea” in the inscription. many lines have been cut more deeply in the ocean, the ring fastening upper left, the lower tip of the anchor, and the latin inscription. blake’s signature, lower left, shows considerable wear, but fragments are still visible under magnification. click to show more. identical letter forms, sizes, and positions indicate that the same copperplate was used for both title pages. the hand-colored, large-paper copy of the 1796 ed. in the huntington library has the same combination of sts.—vol. 1, 1st st., vol. 2, 2nd st.—found in all small-paper copies examined. in a hand-colored, large-paper copy in my collection, the title page to vol. 1 has the vignette in its 2nd st. apparently the vignette was revised prior to the change in vol. number and at least this 1 impression pulled. it would not be surprising, however, to find this st. of the vol. 1 title in other copies, large and small paper. next, a 2nd “i” was squeezed into the space between the first “i” in the vol. number and the following ruled line to create the title page for vol. 2 present in both largeand small-paper copies. this procedure is more efficient and cost effective than creating two distinct copperplates with only minor differences between them. the publishers of the 1796 ed. were probably not sufficiently prescient to know that there would be 2 further printings of the book and thus they anticipated only 1 required alteration in the title-page pl., from vol. 1 to vol. 2. for the 1806 ed., the date was changed, “j. edwards” was replaced with “th. payne” as one of the publishers named in the imprint, and “second edition corrected.” was added below the volume designation. impressions for the 1806 vol. 2 may have been pulled 1st, since the pl. presumably bore the “vol. ii” inscription remaining from the 1796 printing, and then the 2nd “i” in the volume number was deleted before printing the title page for vol. 1. the vignette is still in its 2nd st., but the clouds above the ships are worn and blake’s lightly scratched signature has completely worn away. the reverse procedure probably occurred for the production of the 1813 title pages, with the pl. for vol. 1, only the date having been changed, printed first and then converted to its vol. 2 st. technically, these are all different sts. of the copperplate on which blake etched and engraved his vignette, but only the early, 2-step change in the vignette itself—from the proof to the 1st published st., and from the 1st published st. to the 2nd—involved his work. see also illus. 6 (proof of the vignette), 7 (complete title page, vol. 1), 8 (vignette, 1st published st.), and 9 (detail of signature). click to show less. tuer, follies and fashions of our grandfathers, 1886-87. bl, 11 june, #466, large-paper copy, publisher’s boards, and another book, victorian illustrated, not dated (£100). michael thompson, nov. online cat., large-paper copy, publisher’s boards, illus. ($650). missing books, nov. online cat., large-paper copy, publisher’s boards (£250). antiquarianbooksellers gemilang, nov. online cat., small-paper copy, publisher’s boards damaged but repaired (€1850). knickerbocker books, nov. online cat., small-paper copy, publisher’s boards, illus. ($450). g. j. askins, small-paper copy, publisher’s boards ($200). includes a restrike of blake’s pl. 3 from hayley’s essay on sculpture, 1800. vetusta monumenta, vol. 2, c. 1789. andersens antikvariat, march online cat., vols. 1-5, 1747-c. 1827, modern half calf ($11,534). virgil, pastorals, 1821. sophie schneideman rare books, online cat. for the july melbourne book fair, no entry #, 2 vols., “original contemporary sheep, skilfully [sic] rebacked, great copy,” illus. (£24,000); same copy, nov. online “william blake & his followers” cat., no entry #, illus. (£25,000). wit’s magazine, 1784. davidson auction, annandale, australia, 2 aug., #1168, jan. 1784 through may 1785 issues, with the 1st version of blake’s frontispiece (bb pl. 1, cb pl. 1a), half morocco, illus. ($800 australian). sotheran’s, oct. “william blake” cat., #65, 1784-85, with the 2nd version of blake’s frontispiece (bb pl. 2, cb pl. 1b), contemporary boards rebacked with calf, illus. (£3665).  wollstonecraft, original stories, 1791. fine editions, aug. online cat., modern vellum, pls. 2 and 5 in their 2nd sts., sts. of other pls. not indicated but probably 2nd, illus. ($4865). young, night thoughts, 1797. sophie schneideman rare books, online cat. for the july melbourne book fair, no entry #, no mention of the “explanation” leaf, “generously-margined copy in 20th century brown half morocco by riviere” (£12,500); same copy and price, nov. online “william blake & his followers” cat., no entry #, illus. sotheran’s, oct. “william blake” cat., #5-25, a selection of 21 pls. offered individually, illus. (ranging between £385 and £965 each); #64, modern morocco, no mention of the “explanation” leaf, with the bookplate of “bernard, lord coleridge,” illus. (£11,150; sold to duke university). there has been some uncertainty about which matrix was printed first in this ed., the letterpress texts or the engravings. moss states that the “engravings were printed off first”; easson and essick claim that the letterpress came first.w. e. moss, “the coloured copies of blake’s ‘night thoughts,’” blake 2.2 (sept. 1968): 19. roger r. easson and robert n. essick, william blake: book illustrator, vol. 1 (normal, il: american blake foundation, 1972) 13. although it makes no mention of blake or young, gaskell’s 2004 essay on the coordination between letterpress and copperplate printing offers important information on standard 17thand 18th-century practices. he states unequivocally that, “whatever method was used to register the engravings in the text, the key bibliographical point is that the letterpress was printed first, and printed sheets with blank spaces would be delivered to the rolling press printer.”roger gaskell, “printing house and engraving shop,” book collector 53.2 (summer 2004): 231 (complete essay 213-51). gaskell supports his conclusion with a reference to martin dominique fertel, la science pratique de l’imprimerie (saint-omer: fertel, 1723). the relevant passage, not quoted by gaskell, is probably the following: “quand on veut mettre quelques vignettes, fleurons, ou armoiries en taille douce dans l’impression d’un livre, on doit observer de prendre leur juste grandeur, pour ne pas laisser moins de blanc, aux endroits où elles doivent être placées, qu’elles en contiendroient, afin que le tailledoucier puisse imprimer ces planches avec plus de facilité” (54-55). rough literal translation: “when one wishes to place some vignettes, rosettes, or escutcheons on an impression of a book, one must keep their proper size by not leaving less blank space [than necessary] where they must be placed, which will contain them, so that the engraver [plate printer] is able to print those plates with the most facility.” gaskell’s discussion pertains to the printing of vignettes, headpieces, and other relatively small pls., not to the format of the 1797 night thoughts with the engravings surrounding the letterpress texts, but it seems likely that the customary sequence would nonetheless have been followed for this ed. plate printers, according to gaskell 230-31, habitually placed the leaf or leaves bearing letterpress face up on the bed of the rolling press to facilitate registration of engraved pls. face down on top of the paper. this procedure would not help to align blake’s night thoughts pls. since they are about the same size as the leaves to be printed and thus the text would not be visible in the final stages of bringing copper and paper together. a plate printer’s normal method, with the pl. face up on the bed of the press and the paper placed over it, was probably followed for night thoughts. given these unusual circumstances, it is not surprising that a line of the text sometimes appears above or below the outlined box meant to contain it. interesting blakeana horse puzzle sketch attributed to blake. pen and ink, leaf 16.8 x 18.8 cm., inscribed “wb.” eb, april, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £70,000 or “best offer”); relisted in the same month, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of £10,000); twice in aug., illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of £1000); twice in sept. and once in oct., illus. (same minimum and result); oct., illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of £499.99). not by blake, but the vendor deserves credit for persistence. w. cowper, the negro’s complaint. broadside, no place or publisher, c. 1788. blackwell’s, sept. cat. b180, #9, approximately 37.5 x 9.5 cm., “woodcut” headpiece of “‘am i not a man and a brother,’ … laid down on a card, … a little browned,” 1 of several broadside versions, illus. (£4000). the success of cowper’s poem, commissioned in 1788 by the committee for the abolition of the slave trade, may have influenced william hayley’s decision to have blake etch the broadside of little tom the sailor in 1800. w. blake, europe, title page, 1794. a cartoonish watercolor copy of a touched proof now in the morgan library and museum (butlin #274a). laid paper, leaf approximately 9.0 x 6.0 cm. eb, dec. 2013, stains and surface dirt, illus. ($135). the design is blake’s, but the style reminds me of robert crumb. john payne, universal geography formed into a new and entire system, vol. 1, printed by zachariah jackson, dublin, 1794. eb, aug., 1 pl. only, a re-engraving, with right and left reversed, of blake’s pl. 2 in fenning and collyer, a new system of geography, 1785-86, inscribed “p. maguire sculp.” lower left and “engraved for jackson’s editions of payne’s new system of universal geography” bottom center, design 20.3 x 16.9 cm., platemark 23.2 x 19.2 cm., leaf of wove paper 26.5 x 20.3 cm., stained, illus. ($20 australian to essick). the irish engraver patrick maguire was active in dublin c. 1790-1820. he also re-engraved blake’s frontispiece pl. for lavater’s aphorisms on man for the dublin 1790 ed. for a previously unrecorded 3rd st. of blake’s fenning and collyer pl. 2, published in payne’s universal geography, london, 1791, see the 1st entry under william blake’s commercial book illustrations in the appendix. see also cook, a voyage to the pacific ocean, under basire, james, below. w. owen, the cambrian biography: or historical notices of celebrated men among the ancient britons, 1803. madoc books, sept. online cat., contemporary calf worn, illus. (£200). three geese in flight celtic books, sept. online cat., “hardcover” ($284.63). castle hill books, sept. online cat., later cloth worn (£120). william owen (or william owen pugh) commissioned blake’s untraced painting the ancient britons (butlin #657; see br[2] 308 for the commission). this book may have influenced blake’s comments on the painting in his 1809 descriptive catalogue. owen states that “arthur is the great bear, as the epithet literally implies: and perhaps, this constellation, being so near the pole, and visibly describing a circle in a small space, is the origin of the famous round table” (15). in a similar vein, but also mistaking a star for a constellation, blake writes that “arthur was a name for the constellation arcturus, or bootes, the keeper of the north pole” (descriptive catalogue, e 542). the constellation boötes (sometimes confused with ursa major—owen’s “great bear”) includes the star arcturus, its name derived from a greek word meaning guard of the bear. l. schiavonetti after t. phillips, engraved portrait of blake published in robert blair, the grave, 1808. a pre-publication proof lacking all letters and before considerable finishing work in the design, india paper laid on heavy wove without watermark, leaf trimmed inside the platemark to 33.6 x 24.3 cm. john windle, july private offer (acquired by essick). formerly bound with a set of blake’s job engravings sold bhl, 18 june, #72, from the collection of “henry cunliffe (1826-1894) …; thence by descent,” illus. (see job under separate plates and plates in series, above). the blake portrait is in the same early st. as the proof, on heavy laid paper, in the keynes collection, fitzwilliam museum, reproduced in geoffrey keynes, the complete portraiture of william and catherine blake (london: trianon press for the william blake trust, 1977), pl. 8a. these 2 proofs may be those sold cl, 22-23 july 1814, “works of those very distinguished engravers, messrs. louis and nicholas schiavonetti,” #250, “two ditto [a reference to #249, “portrait of blake”] unfinished.”known to me only from the transcription of this cat. in g. e. bentley, jr., “sale catalogues of blake’s works: 1791–2013,” <http://​library.​vicu.​utoronto.​ca/​collections/​special_​collections/​bentley_​blake_​collection/​sale_​catalogue/​1800.​html>, accessed 17 aug. the impression in my collection may be the “unfinished proof” before all letters on “india paper” sold from the collection of james anderson rose, sl, 27 june 1876 and 10 following days, #1810 on the 10th day, with a finished impression on laid india (£1.1s.). the flat appearance of this impression, with no sense of relief to the printed lines when touched, suggests that it was subject to heavy pressure, possibly after having been cleaned by soaking in water, or that it is a true-size lithographic reproduction. i think it unlikely that someone would make such a convincing lithographic facsimile of this proof st., one that captures even the smallest scratches visible in impressions on laid india published in the 1808 folio issue of the grave. like the keynes proof, however, this print does not contain some pitting of the copperplate, right of blake’s upper left arm, that apparently occurred between the proof and published sts. the preponderance of the visual evidence, combined with the record of sales of unfinished proofs noted above, indicates that this is an impression from schiavonetti’s copperplate. windle also removed the following materials, now in my collection, from the cunliffe set of job engravings: an advertisement for gilchrist’s life of blake from the quarterly literary advertiser, jan. 1865; clipping of a brief announcement (from the same journal?) of the 2nd ed. of gilchrist’s biography, 1880; 3-pp. manuscript (by cunliffe?) about blake’s life and gilchrist’s biography; 2 wood-engraved portraits of john linnell and an obituary of linnell from the athenæum no. 2831 (28 jan. 1882). cameos from the antique; or, the cabinet of mythology … intended as a sequel to the poetical primer by mrs. [rose] lawrence. liverpool: evans, chegwin and hall; london: longman, rees and co., 1831. malcolm books, july online cat., publisher’s quarter calf detached, spine missing and replaced with plastic tape, “contents otherwise fair” (£52 to essick). includes blake’s “to the muses” from poetical sketches, retitled “the poet complains to the muses of the decline of poetry,” pp. 75-76. “blake” is given as the author on p. xii of the table of contents. not in bb or bbs; the “second edition, revised” of 1849 is recorded in g. e. bentley, jr., “william blake and his circle: a checklist of publications and discoveries in 2009,” blake 44.1 (summer 2010): 12. lawrence’s poetical primer; consisting of short extracts from ancient and modern authors was 1st published in 1808. the 1849 ed. of cameos appears to have been printed as a supplement to the 5th ed. of poetical primer, also 1849. the british library online cat. includes an 1834 issue of cameos and worldcat lists an 1842 issue, but i have not seen these. how did lawrence, or anyone else involved in the production of cameos, come upon a copy of “to the muses” no later than 1831? perhaps lawrence knew henry crabb robinson or his 1811 essay on blake published in vaterländisches museum in which “to the muses” is reprinted (bb #2538; see also br[2] 585). in the 5th line of the poem, blake’s “heav’n” (e 417) is replaced by “heaven” in both cameos and robinson’s essay. blake’s “chrystal,” line 9, is printed as “christal” by robinson and “crystal” by lawrence. the reprints substitute a comma and a period, respectively, for blake’s exclamation marks as the terminal punctuation in the final 2 lines. lawrence adds 2 unique variants, “bottom” for “bosom” (line 10) and “poesie” for “poetry” (line 12). based on these rather random variants, it is difficult to conclude that lawrence’s version was based on the text in vaterländisches museum. g. e. bentley, jr., has pointed out to me that both poetical sketches and cameos indent every other line of “to the muses,” beginning with the 2nd, whereas robinson does not. this is the best evidence that lawrence had access to blake’s book, possibly one of crabb robinson’s copies (see copies a and o, bb pp. 347, 351). there are no references to “mrs. lawrence” or “rose lawrence” in robinson’s published diaries and correspondence, but he does refer to “miss lawrence” in 1821 and 1839; see henry crabb robinson on books and their writers, ed. edith j. morley, 3 vols. (london: dent, 1938) 1: 265, 2: 572. lawrence reprinted blake’s “the tiger [sic],” stripped of its final stanza and with several odd changes in wording (for example, “favour” for “fire,” line 6), in another edited collection, pictures, scriptural and historical, or, the cabinet of history, 1831. w. blake, songs of innocence and of experience, pickering ed., 1839. paul foster, jan. online cat., issue without “the little vagabond,” publisher’s cloth a little worn (£8500). bl, 19 may, #99, issue without “the little vagabond,” presentation inscription from w. m. wilkinson to elizabeth r. wilkinson (apparently relatives of the editor, james garth wilkinson) dated 4 jan. 1839 (6 months earlier than the printed date of the preface), publisher’s cloth rebacked (not sold; estimate £1000-1500); same copy, bg, 10 july, #452 (£1054). blackwell’s, aug. short list 26, #1, issue without “the little vagabond,” some “light browning and finger-soiling,” publisher’s cloth worn, illus. (£5500); same copy and price, sept. cat. b180, #5 (acquired by john windle for stock). job’s sacrifice, watercolor copy of blake’s design, 1840s? see under linnell, john, below. ch. le blanc, manuel de l’amateur d’estampes. 4 vols. paris: p. jannet [vols. 1-3], vieweg and bouillon [vol. 4], 1854-90. daniel thierstein, 4 vols. in 3, feb. online cat., half morocco ($1593). bojara & bojara-kellinghaus, feb. online cat., contemporary half calf (€450). poor man’s books, feb. online cat., three-quarter morocco, illus. ($550). oak knoll books, feb. online cat., quarter “leather” worn, illus. ($540). the blake entry is in vol. 1 (1854), p. 354 (bb #2107). it is surprising to find a continental publication of the 1850s listing blake’s songs of innocence and of experience, america, and europe. le blanc also includes an entry for “blake (john),” the “frère de w. blake” who engraved pls. for “la théogonie d’hésiode: john flaxmann. 1817” (1: 354). blake had 2 brothers named john, but neither was an engraver (br[2] xxx). le blanc indicates that his source for this misinformation is “nagler, i, 522”—see bb #2267a, g. k. nagler, neues allgemeines künstler-lexicon (1835) 1: 522, “blake, john, bruder williams.” the misattribution of the hesiod pls. to john is probably based on mistaken announcements that flaxman’s designs were to be engraved by “j. blake”—see the new monthly magazine 2 (1 jan. 1815): 537 and 7 (1 april 1817): 246, the edinburgh review 28 (march 1817): 261 (latter 2 listed in bb p. 560), and the feb. 1817 prospectus, new works preparing for publication, by longman, rees, orme, and brown, p. 2. the “j. blake” error is repeated, without his identification as william’s brother, in friedrich adolf ebert, allgemeines bibliographisches lexikon (1821) 1: 605, and ebert, a general bibliographical dictionary (1837) 1: 579 (bb #535a-b), entries on “flaxman, j.” le blanc, 1: 354, misattributes blake’s portrait engraving of david hartley, published in hartley’s observations on man (1791), to “blake (c. j.). grav[eur]., amateur.” the entry on this “blake” notes that it is based on “heineken, iii, 2”—see bb #1823, [karl heinrich von heinecken], dictionnaire des artistes, dont nous avons des estampes, 4 vols. (leipzig: jean gottlob immanuel breitkopf, 1778-90). vol. 3 of heinecken, published in 1789, does not of course make any mention of the portrait of hartley, but it includes the following entry: “c. j. blake. dame de distinction, qui a gravé en 1775 le portrait de son oncle, sir francis blake delaval” (p. 2). i have not found any later ed. of heinecken; perhaps le blanc, who also lists the portrait of “laval (sir francis de)” in the entry on c. j. blake, is the origin of this erroneous attribution of the hartley portrait. a. gilchrist, life of blake, 1863, extra-illus. copies only. sotheran’s, oct. “william blake” cat., #87, 2 vols., with an additional 34 pls. by or after blake, 19th-century calf rebacked, illus. (£2235). for a list of the added pls., see the 2012 sales review, blake 46.4 (spring 2013). the 2012 review is wrong in stating that all 13 pls. from mora’s meditaciones poeticas are present; the title page is not included. [john keble], the christian year. boston: lee and shepard; new york: lee, shepard, and dillingham, 1875. eb, aug., 2 pls. damp stained, publisher’s cloth, illus. (acquired by essick at the “buy it now” price of $29.95). includes an unsigned wood engraving, 14.0 x 8.5 cm., of blake’s “death’s door,” 1st engraved by schiavonetti and published in blair’s grave, 1808. facing p. 353 and captioned “burial of the dead”; no mention of blake. this illus. may appear in other eds. of this immensely popular work, 1st published without illus. in 1827. “death’s door” remained blake’s best-known pictorial image until the mid-20th century, when “the ancient of days” (the frontispiece to europe) captured the top spot. see also the essay by kitton, 1891, below. w. muir facsimiles of blake’s illuminated books, 1885-86. bauman rare books, aug. online cat., songs of innocence, 1885, “copy numbered ‘0’ and one of only five reserved for review,” inscribed “to the academy with compliments of the editor,” with a letter by muir “describing his labor of love in producing this facsimile,” the copy offered privately by carpe diem books, april 2013, for $8500, original wrappers, later slipcase, illus. ($12,000). sotheran’s, oct. “william blake” cat., #55, the book of thel, 1885, copy number 21, original wrappers, cloth slipcase, illus. (£2895); #56, songs of experience, 1885, copy number 32, original wrappers worn, illus. (£6500); #57, the marriage of heaven and hell, 1885, copy number 35, original wrappers worn, illus. (£2875); #58, songs of innocence, 1885, copy number 35, with songs of experience, 1885, copy number 50, 2 vols., 20th-century half morocco with original wrappers bound in, illus. (£6850); #59, visions of the daughters of albion, 1885, copy number 34, 20th-century half morocco with original wrappers bound in, illus. (£2875); #60, there is no natural religion, 1886, copy number 34, original wrappers worn, illus. (£1750). w. blake, the poems, prefatory notice by joseph skipsey, 1885. eb, april, publisher’s faux-vellum boards, with a printed label pasted to the inside front cover reading “from the library of / edward burne-jones / the grange north / end road fulham,” illus. (£54.53). the victorian artist edward coley burne-jones (1833-98) knew the coal miner and poet skipsey (1832-1903) and sponsored his selection in 1889 as custodian of shakespeare’s house in stratford-upon-avon—see john langton’s biography of skipsey in odnb. fred. g. kitton, “william james linton, engraver, poet, and political writer,” extracted from the english illustrated magazine 8, no. 91 (april 1891): 491-500. eb, nov., illus. (acquired by essick at the “buy it now” price of £5.99). includes an impression of linton’s wood engraving of blake’s “death’s door,” version with square top 1st published in thirty pictures by deceased british artists engraved expressly for the art-union of london by w. j. linton, 1860. see also the book by keble, 1875, above. e. cobham brewer, character sketches of romance, fiction and the drama, ed. marion harland, 4 vols., 1892. heldfond book gallery, sept. online cat., half calf worn, bindings illus. ($525). mullen books, sept. online cat., half calf worn ($250). northshire bookstore, sept. online cat., vol. 1 only, half calf very worn ($24 to essick). vol. 1 contains a “typogravure” reproduction of blake’s engraving “chaucers canterbury pilgrims,” 3rd st., accompanied by stothard’s version. w. blake, songs of innocence, frederick hollyer facsimile, 1923. lawrences auction, crewkerne, 31 jan., #2149, no. 7 of 50 copies, publisher’s “full seal-skin,” illus. (£250); same copy, justin schiller books, april new york antiquarian book fair ($3500); same copy and price, battledore books (schiller’s firm), sept. online cat., illus. strand magazine, vol. 82, july-dec. 1931. m. g. manwaring, april online cat., “hardcover” (£50). joe mckernan, april online cat., cloth ($284). the dec. issue, pp. 549-58, includes winston churchill, “fifty years hence.” in the penultimate paragraph of the essay, he states that “the busy hands of the scientists are already fumbling with the keys of all the chambers hitherto forbidden to mankind. without an equal growth of mercy, pity, peace and love, science herself may destroy all that makes human life majestic and tolerable” (558). churchill is borrowing from the opening lines of blake’s “the divine image” in songs of innocence: “to mercy pity peace and love, / all pray in their distress” (e 12). james rimell & son, 1933 cat. 288, illustrated catalogue of rare books. eb, aug., replacement wrappers, illus. (acquired by essick at the “buy it now” price of $26.25). includes hayley’s designs to a series of ballads, 1802, ballads 1-2 only (#63, £21), the manuscript of blake’s “a fairy leapt upon my knee” (bb #37, transcribed as “a fairy skipd upon my knee” in e 481-82), with the pencil sketch of the infant hercules throttling the serpents (butlin #253) on the verso, and with, on another leaf, the pencil sketch of queen katharine, awakening from her dream, after fuseli (butlin #561), with sketch for jerusalem plate 6: los and his spectre on the verso. the manuscript and the queen katharine drawing are offered together as #64 for £225; the manuscript and the sketch for jerusalem pl. 6 are illus. both leaves are now in the national gallery of art, washington. h. c. whaite, wood engraving of blake’s “jerusalem” lyric from milton, 1963(?). eb, feb., illus. (£40 to essick). see illus. 11. 11. blake’s “jerusalem” lyric “from william blake’s ‘milton.’” wood-engraved broadside, the text in white line, signed “h. c. whaite” in the block lower right, signed “henry clarence whaite” (british artist, 1895-1978) in pencil just above the bottom edge of the leaf (not shown) and dated “1963”(?). image 18.4 x 11.9 cm., leaf of laid paper 30.7 x 24.4 cm. essick collection. in the 2nd line, “mountains” in blake’s text has been changed (inadvertently?) to “mountain.” whaite’s landscape may be a response to the last line in the poem and the command “o clouds unfold!” (e 95), transformed into a performative utterance in the design. the broken forms on the horizon recall the cromlechs pictured in milton, pl. a. the vegetation leans sharply left, as though blown by a wind coming from the right. might this be a meteorological metaphor for “mental fight”? allen ginsberg, autograph letter signed, 1 p., to “mr. simmons,” dated 7 feb. [1970?], concerning ginsberg’s recording of blake’s songs of innocence and of experience. rr online auction, 16 july, #719, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $200). blake’s circle and followers works are listed under artists’ names in the following order: paintings and drawings sold in groups, single paintings and drawings, letters and manuscripts, separate pls., books by (or with pls. by) the artist. barry, james the education of achilles. pen and ink over pencil, 35.0 x 27.0 cm., datable to 1772 and signed “j barry inv.” ll, jan. cat., pp. 12-14, illus. (not priced; sold by oct. to a “private collection, usa”). previously sold, with another drawing by barry, sl, 5 july 2013, #354, illus. (£27,500). a study for the painting of the same title now in the yale center for british art, accession no. b1978.6. “eastern patriarch,” lithograph, 1803. see fuseli, “evening thou bringest all.” “elysium & tartarus,” etching/engraving, 1792. galerie bassenge auction, berlin, 29 may, #5275, 5th st., illus. (€5000). “mercury inventing the lyre,” mezzotint by john raphael smith, 1775. emanuel von baeyer, march cat., #30, 2nd st., leaf 32.5 x 38.2 cm., illus. (price on request). upon inquiry, john windle was told that the price is £7500. “orpheus,” etching/engraving, 1792. galerie bassenge auction, berlin, 29 may, #5274, 2nd st., illus. (€16,000; estimate €4500). basire, james “le champ de drap d’or,” imprint dated 10 nov. 1774, engraved by basire after a watercolor by edward edwards of 1771, in turn based on the anonymous original painting now in the royal collection, hampton court. grand online auction, folkestone, 11 june, #323, “1988 edition,” illus. (no price information; estimate £400-700). apparently a restrike by alecto historical editions. “sir george savile bart,” engraved by benjamin wilson and basire after wilson’s portrait, 1770. eb, jan.-feb., imprint trimmed off and trimmed close to the image on sides and top, wormhole lower right in the image, illus. (£8). “sir james burrow,” engraved by basire after arthur devis, 1780. gp, sept. online cat., illus. (£260). “south west view of the steeple & church of louth,” 1774. john taylors auction, louth, lincolnshire, 14 oct., #582, badly stained, margins damaged, illus. (£65). carter, a journey from gibraltar to malaga, 3 vols., 1777. gp, sept. online cat., 1 pl. only, “west view of the mole of malaga,” engraved by basire after francis carter, illus. (£260). cook, a voyage to the pacific ocean, 1784 or 1785 ed. gp, oct. online cat., 2 pls. by basire after john webber offered individually, “a man of prince william’s sound” (£120) and “a woman of prince william’s sound” (£220). both portraits are repeated, much reduced, in blake’s pl. 2 for fenning and collyer, a new system of geography, 1785-86. cook, a voyage towards the south pole, and round the world, 1777. eb, jan., 1 pl. only, “the landing at mallicolo,” engraved by basire after william hodges, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $725 or “best offer”); same impression, july, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $575).  eighty-two prints, engraved by f. bartolozzi, &c., from the original drawings of guercino, in the collection of his majesty, published by boydell, n.d. (c. 1764?). eb, jan., 1 pl. only, an untitled landscape, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £47); feb., 1 pl. only, another untitled landscape, badly foxed, frame damaged, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $449.99); june, 1 pl. only, “an allegory of time,” full leaf, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of €189.90). gp, sept. online cat., 2 pls. only, described as a “landscape with two figures conversing” (£190) and “landscape with man on right drawing a ruin” (£160), both illus. monro, the works of alexander monro, 1781. gp, sept. online cat., 1 pl. only, “alexander monro sen.r m.d.,” engraved by basire after allan ramsay, dated 1776 in the imprint, illus. (£120). rogers, collection of prints in imitation of drawings, 1778. eb, jan., 1 pl. only, “scilurus recommending concord to his sons” after pietro da cortona, pl. dated 1768, illus. (£52.13); another impression, april-may, framed, illus. ($105); june, 1 pl. only, “the immaculate virgin” after carlo maratti, pl. dated 1762, illus. (€380); june-july, 1 pl. only, “moses exposed” after eustache le sueur, pl. dated 1765, water stained, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $30); same impression, aug., illus. ($19); dec., 1 pl. only, “cupid with the sword of mars” after agostino carracci, pl. dated 1769, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $75); same impression, dec., illus. ($75). bhl, 18 june, #31, 2 vols., 103 of 112 pls., some pls. loose, contemporary quarter morocco worn, 1 cover detached, illus. (£3750). watson, memoirs of the ancient earls of warren and surrey, 1782. eb, feb., 2 vols., contemporary calf, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £450 or “best offer”). includes 31 pls. signed by basire. all bear imprints dated 1785, but the portrait frontispiece in vol. 1 is inscribed “1780” following basire’s name. one or 2 of the unsigned full-page pls., as well as the many small engraved vignettes printed on text pages, may also have been produced in basire’s shop. calvert, edward the old arcadian, teaching the mysteries of demeter. oil, 15.0 x 24.1 cm. sl, 9 july, #196, illus. (£6875; estimate £3000-5000). previously sold sl, 21 nov. 1985, #71, illus. (£3960), cl, 11 nov. 1997, #51, illus. (£4025), and cl, 10 july 2012, #148, illus. (£3500). rural idyll. oil, 21.5 x 39.8 cm., datable to c. 1872. sophie schneideman rare books, nov. online “william blake & his followers” cat., no entry #, illus. (£15,000). previously offered fine art society, may-june 2012 “samuel palmer [and] his friends and his followers” cat., #18, illus. (“sold”). “the bacchante,” wood engraving, probably by welby sherman after calvert. sl, 5 march, #265, illus. (£563). s. calvert, memoir of edward calvert, 1893. cny, 19 june, #144, no. 73 of 350 copies, publisher’s cloth, from the collection of arthur and charlotte vershbow, illus. ($10,000; estimate $4000-6000). includes original impressions of 2 intaglio engravings and 6 wood engravings by e. calvert. flaxman, john see also flaxman under letterpress books with engravings by and after blake, above. thirty-five pen and ink drawings, based on flaxman’s dante designs, attributed to thomas piroli and thus possibly part of the production of flaxman’s dante engraved by piroli in 1793 and on different copperplates in 1802. all approximately 15.0 x 19.0 cm. with inscriptions in italian. csk, 4 sept., framed, offered in 4 lots, illus.: #18, 8 drawings (not sold; estimate £800-1000); #19, 8 drawings (not sold; estimate £800-1000); #20, 9 drawings (not sold; estimate £800-1200); #21, 10 drawings (£750). three drawings for the acts of mercy: instruct the ignorant (22.0 x 32.5 cm.), visit the sick (19.5 x 37.2 cm.), and comfort the fatherless and widow (22.0 x 38.5 cm.). pen and ink, wash, over pencil. bhl, 29 oct., #291, “with a small preliminary sketch for instruct the ignorant; and three etchings with aquatint of the acts of mercy by f. c. lewis, proofs before titles,” all 3 wash drawings illus. (£9000). previously sold sl, 16 jan. 1958, #212 (£20 to irwin). the lewis aquatints were published in 1831. two pen and ink drawings for the odyssey, attributed to flaxman, each approximately 16.5 x 50.8 cm. go, 27 march, #1415, with inscriptions on the mounts for each drawing and “with a letter of provenance and promissory note from the proprietors of covent garden theatre for payment of £105 as the balance due for the statue of thalia in front of the theatre dated 1812 and signed by the architect, robert smirke,” illus. (£300). the drawings are variants of the published engravings titled “ulysses at the table of circe” and “mercury conducting the souls of the suitors to the infernal regions” in the 1805 ed., pls. 16 and 33 (untitled pls. 12 and 28 in the 1793 ed.). david bindman and i are not convinced by the attribution of the drawings to flaxman. the additional motifs in both drawings, not present in the engravings, seem awkward and uncharacteristic of his work. the statue of thalia, the muse of comedy, is now lost; see david irwin, john flaxman 1755-1826 (london: studio vista, 1979) 172, 230n6. the adoration of the magi. marble relief plaque, 33.8 x 43.0 cm., datable to c. 1792-94. ll, jan. cat., pp. 38-45, illus. (not priced). for information on this important work, see david bindman, “john flaxman’s ‘adoration of the magi’ rediscovered,” apollo 162 (dec. 2005): 40-44. amphion and zethus delivering their mother antiope from the fury of dirce and lycus. pencil, pen and ink, wash, 16.1 x 29.2 cm., signed “flaxman, roma, 1789.” ll, oct. online cat., illus. (not priced; sold to the chicago art institute). previously offered by ll, jan. 2013 cat. of “british paintings & works on paper,” pp. 41-[43], illus. (not priced). man wrapped in thought. pencil, 19.7 x 13.3 cm., datable to c. 1790. ah, feb. online cat. 433, #19, illus. (£2500); dec. pictures for christmas online cat., illus., same price. not unobserv’d they pass’d the god of light. pen and ink over pencil on leaf 22.5 x 31.5 cm. watermarked j whatman / 1794 and inscribed “ulysses diomed apollo 14 / not unobserv’d they pass’d the god of light / had watch’d his troy,_____ / b: 10: p: 602: pope’s iliad.” sl, 9 july, #181, illus. (£4000). previously sold bhl, 28 april 2009, #13, illus. (£6600). for a brief discussion, see blake 43.4 (spring 2010): 136. study for the shield of achilles. pencil, pen and ink, 10.5 x 17.8 cm., datable to c. 1810. given jan. 2014 by tomasso brothers, the british art dealer, to the huntington library, art collections, and botanical gardens, san marino, california, accession no. 2014.3. autograph manuscript signed. 2 pp. on a single leaf, apparently part of a lecture on church art and architecture. eb, april, illus. (£180.09). j. britton, ed., the fine arts of the english school (london: longman, hurst, rees, orme, and brown, 1812). eb, may, 3 pls. only, “deliver us from evil,” “thy kingdom come,” and “thy will be done,” sculptures by flaxman engraved by william bond on the basis of drawings by henry corbould, imprints dated 1810, marginal foxing, illus. (offered individually at the “buy it now” price of $49.95 each for the 1st 2 and $39.95 for the 3rd). for the engraver william bond and blake’s poem “william bond” (e 496-98), see blake 43.4 (spring 2010): 130-31. fuseli, henry double-sided sheet depicting studies of a male nude. pen and ink over pencil, 22.2 x 17.5 cm., datable to c. 1777-79. sl, 5 march, #259, illus. (£12,500; estimate £3000-5000). previously sold cl, 24 march 1981, #30, illus. (£4500); previously offered sl, 6 june 2007, #186, illus. (not sold; estimate £7000-10,000). the fireplace. pencil and wash, 36.8 x 23.2 cm., inscribed “oct [17]98.” cl, 10 july, #186, from the brinsley ford collection, illus. (not sold; highest bid £42,000 on an estimate of £50,000-80,000). medea. pencil, 13.1 x 18.6 cm., inscribed “infanticide” in greek and “june 4 [18]21. p.h. [putney hill].” bhl, 9 july, #1, illus. (£23,750; estimate £6000-8000). portrait of the artist’s wife. watercolor, 17.2 x 17.4 cm. cl, 10 july, #185, from the brinsley ford collection, illus. (£122,500; estimate £30,000-50,000). previously sold sl, 2 aug. 1944, #26 (£40.10s.). salome with the head of saint john the baptist. oil, 127.0 x 102.4 cm. cl, 3 dec., #155, illus. (£176,500; estimate £8000-12,000). apparently repaired in recent years, but still showing considerable surface cracking. standing figure of a man in profile. pen and ink, wash over pencil, 26.8 x 19.4 cm. sl, 9 july, #180, illus. (£98,500). previously sold cl, 6 march 1973, #19 (£4333.4s. to william darby); offered sl, 10 march 1988, #32, illus. (not sold; estimate £20,000-30,000). for illus., see blake 23.1 (summer 1989): 15. study of a woman in chains, with a phantom descending from above, recto and verso. pen and brown ink, pencil (recto), pencil only (verso), 48.2 x 28.2 cm. sl, 9 july, #214, recto and verso illus. (not sold; highest bid £20,000 on an estimate of £25,000-40,000). previously sold cl, 19 nov. 1985, #32a, recto illus. (£16,200). study of the head of a woman, possibly magdalena hess, wearing a head-dress. pencil and red chalk, 34.2 x 22.8 cm., datable to 1802. sny, 30 jan., #58, illus. (not sold; estimate $15,000-20,000). the three witches, or the weird sisters. oil, 60.3 x 75.5 cm., datable to c. 1783-85. jean-luc baroni, spring cat., #15, illus. (not priced; acquired june by the huntington library, art collections, and botanical gardens, san marino, california). previously sold sl, 14 july 1976, #120 (no price information), cl, 4 may 1995, #51, illus. (£221,500), and cny, 24 jan. 2003, #135, illus. ($361,500). see illus. 12. 12. henry fuseli. the three witches, or the weird sisters (see enlargement). oil, 60.3 x 75.5 cm., datable to c. 1783-85. huntington library, art collections, and botanical gardens, san marino, california, accession no. 2014.15; reproduced by permission. this is probably the earliest version of this famous design. the more finished oil in the kunsthaus, zurich, was the basis for john raphael smith’s mezzotint, published march 1785, and the 1786 stipple pl. by peltro william tomkins. the painting at the royal shakespeare company, stratford-upon-avon, and another formerly in the kirchheimer-bollag gallery, zurich, have generally been attributed to fuseli; the versions in the north carolina museum of art, raleigh, and the auckland art gallery, new zealand, may be copies by other hands. click to show more. the subject is taken from the exchange among banquo, macbeth, and the witches in shakespeare’s macbeth, act 1, scene 3. fuseli captures banquo’s description of the witches, each with her “choppy finger laying / upon her skinny lips.” the arrangement of the “withered” hags, each of the first 2 on the right partly superimposed over her companion to the left, has classical and renaissance precedents, but fuseli’s use of this format may have influenced the way blake represents job’s three friends in his illus. to the book of job, beginning with the wash drawing of c. 1785 (butlin #162 recto) and continuing through the engraved series published in 1826. or might the influence be in the other direction? fuseli famously declared that “blake is d[amne]d good to steal from” (br[2] 55). when blake etched the three accusers of socrates on jerusalem pl. 93, he overlapped them and configured their pointing hands and fingers in a manner similar to fuseli’s witches. according to the 2014 jean-luc baroni cat. offering the huntington three witches for sale, p. 54, the painting is “inscribed in greek on the reverse of the relining canvas, probably a transcription of a now hidden text on the back of the original support: these are women but i call them gorgons (translation from aeschylus’s eumenides).” this inscription is repeated on the early, perhaps original, frame shown here. if indeed the canvas on which the painting was executed contained the same lettering, it may have been written by fuseli as a classical antecedent to another of banquo’s descriptions of the witches: “you should be women, / and yet your beards forbid me to interpret / that you are so.” there are no clear indications of facial hair in the huntington painting, but tufts of hair on the chins, and at least slight indications of mustaches, are displayed by all three witches in the kunsthaus example and smith’s mezzotint. both include a death’s-head hawkmoth, also absent from the huntington version, left of the witches. tomkins’s pl. includes the moth, but chin whiskers are given only to the witch furthest left. click to show less. “beatrice listening to hero & ursula” (inscribed title), mezzotint by john jones, 1791 (weinglass #113, titled “beatrice eavesdropping on hero and ursula”). border auction, hawick, scottish borders, 8 feb., #278, framed, illus. (a bargain at £10). “the dream,” stipple engraving by robert william sievier of a miniature by moses haughton based on a painting by fuseli, 1820 (weinglass #297). eb, july, color-printed proof before signatures and imprint but with the title and quoted verses in english and french, foxed, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of €350). “evening thou bringest all,” lithograph, 1802 (weinglass #171). cl, 3 dec., #113, 1st st., with 11 other prints from specimens of polyautography (london: andré, 1803) including barry, “eastern patriarch,” 1803, and stothard, “the lost apple,” 1803, on original mounts with aquatint borders, illus. (£52,500); #114, fuseli’s “evening …” only, 2nd st., brown ink, published by vollweiler, 1806-07, lacking the original mount, illus. (not sold; highest bid £2200 on an estimate of £3000-5000). linnell, john (excluding most portraits) apple gatherers, attributed to linnell. oil, 76.2 x 101.6 cm. duke’s auction, dorchester, 10 april, #171, illus. (£1400). possibly by one of linnell’s sons. barges on the thames. pencil, 33.0 x 23.5 cm., inscribed “thames somerset h. in distance,” signed and dated 1807. eb, jan., illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $1850); feb., illus., same price; march-april, illus. (price lowered to $1650); july and again in sept., illus. (price lowered to $1450). a boatyard by the thames, london. black and white chalk on blue paper, 16.2 x 24.1 cm., datable to c. 1805-09, signed. guy peppiatt fine art/stephen ongpin fine art, one hundred drawings and watercolours, winter 2013-14, #20b, illus. (£1500). drover and cattle. oil, 35.6 x 45.7 cm., signed. eb, may-june, illus. (£920). the evening light. oil, 73.7 x 99.1 cm., signed with initials. new orleans auction galleries, 11 oct., #630, illus. ($4674). possibly by john linnell, jr. farmyard scene. oil, 36.0 x 46.0 cm., signed indistinctly “j linnell / 18 ….” bhl, 9 sept., #28, illus. (not sold; highest bid £1100 on an estimate of £1200-1800). bho, 3 dec., #362, illus. (£875). harvesters, north wales. watercolor, 23.7 x 36.5 cm., signed and dated 1813. ll, oct. cat. of british watercolours, #37, illus. (£6000). job’s sacrifice. watercolor copy, 12.5 x 9.3 cm., of the pl. numbered 18 from blake’s job engravings. crow’s auction, dorking, 5 june, #943, illus. (£1100; estimate £120-180). the auction house, as well as a label by the martyn gregory gallery on the back of the frame, attributes this work to john linnell. the label also states that it is from the collection of “james linnell, by descent to mrs. bollard, great grand-daughter of the artist.” given the crudity of the drawing, i suspect that it is by james linnell when young. included in martyn gregory exhibition cat. #31, john linnell: truth to nature (a centennial exhibition), 8-20 nov. 1982, #106, the illus. with right and left reversed. the entry in this cat. states that “it is possible that this drawing was worked on by one of the linnell sons in 1842 though the refined quality of the outline also suggests the hand of john linnell (senior).” differences between blake’s design in the linnell set of job watercolors (butlin #551.18) and the engraving indicate that this copy was based on the latter. milking time. oil, 36.0 x 46.0 cm., signed and dated 1852. chiswick auction, london, 9 dec., #546, illus. (no price information; estimate £2500-3500). the piper. oil, 72.4 x 174.0 cm., signed with initials and dated 1872. cowan’s auction, cincinnati, 11 oct., #924, illus. ($960). compositionally similar to, but larger than, linnell’s piping down the valleys wild, last sold csk, 20 march 2012, #591, illus. (£1500). portrait of a gentleman—believed to be a self-portrait. watercolor, 21.0 x 16.0 cm., signed and dated 1832. bho, 12 aug., #322, with studies of cows, chalk, 15.0 x 26.0 cm., studies of cows illus. (£275). the shepherd at dusk. oil, 40.6 x 50.8 cm., signed and datable to c. 1855. ah, march online cat. 434, #17, illus. (£3750). previously sold as figure by a stream at dusk, woolley & wallis auction, salisbury, 4 dec. 2013, #82, illus. (£1400). sir william charles ross. two pencil portrait studies on 1 leaf, 21.0 x 11.5 cm., signed and inscribed “wm ross when student at r.a / c. 1810.” ah, feb. online cat. of heads: selected portraits 1500-2010, #46, illus. (£775). study for the flight into egypt. oil on paper, 27.0 x 40.7 cm. ll, oct. cat. of british watercolours, #38, illus. (£4200). linnell exhibited a finished painting of the design at the british institution in 1841; he painted another version in 1849. this oil sketch may be preparatory for either. study of a wherry on the thames, london. black and white chalk on blue paper, 14.8 x 21.6 cm., datable to c. 1805-09, signed. guy peppiatt fine art/stephen ongpin fine art, one hundred drawings and watercolours, winter 2013-14, #20a, illus. (£1500). sunset at southampton. watercolor, 17.0 x 28.0 cm., signed and dated 1819. sl, 22 may, #103, illus. (£3375). previously offered ll, fall 2004 exhibition, illus. online (price on request). trees in a landscape. watercolor, 10.2 x 14.3 cm., signed with initials and dated “[18]16.” guy peppiatt, may cat., #21, illus. (£3950). view at hampstead. watercolor, 16.0 x 23.5 cm., signed, datable to the 1820s. ll, oct. cat. of british watercolours, #36, illus. (£6000). view of a country house, attributed to linnell. watercolor, 10.0 x 17.0 cm. cf, 18 sept., #581, illus. (not sold; highest bid £240 on an estimate of £300-500). a very early work, if indeed by linnell. view of rooks hill, near shoreham, kent. pen and ink, pencil, 17.0 x 12.0 cm., inscribed by linnell “kent j linnell / [18]28.” sl, 22 may, #104, illus. (£1750). previously sold sl, 9 april 1992, #53 (£880 to the leger gallery, london). the wynd cliff on the river wye with bristol channel in the distance, attributed to linnell. oil, 30.5 x 38.1 cm., signed indistinctly. biddle & webb auction, birmingham, 12 sept., #1170, illus. (not sold; estimate £550-650). eb, sept., illus. (£765). previously sold cl, 8 june 1973, #137 (£210 to fine art society); previously offered eb, july and again in aug.-sept. 2013, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £5950 or “best offer”); sold eb, oct. 2013, illus. (£740). possibly by william linnell. “robert gooch, m.d.,” painted and engraved by linnell, 1831. eb, sept.-oct., illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of £9.99); same impression, nov., same minimum bid and result. mortimer, john hamilton continental soldiers, tentatively attributed to mortimer. watercolor, 33.0 x 38.1 cm. burstow & hewett auction, battle, east sussex, 25 june, #182, stained and framed, illus. (£130). fishermen drawing in their nets. pencil, pen and black ink, 36.2 x 41.9 cm., datable to 1774. ll, oct. online cat., illus. (not priced; sold to the chicago art institute). previously offered by ll, jan. 2012 cat., p. 54, illus. (price on request). previously sold cl, 5 july 2011, #112, illus. (£8750). the etching by robert blyth is inscribed “drawn by j. mortimer, 1774” and “publish’d … nov.r 9th 1780.” sketch for three soldiers in armor sitting on stone blocks. pen and brown ink, leaf 17.5 x 13.0 cm. william j. jenack auction, chester, new york, 16 feb., #35, illus. (not sold; estimate $300-500). a variant of the figure on the right in the pen and ink drawing three soldiers in armour sitting on stone blocks in the yale center for british art, accession no. b1977.14.5703, and in an undated engraving by samuel ireland of the yale center drawing. study of a recumbent child. pen and ink, wash, 10.5 x 17.3 cm., signed and dated march 1768. pro auction, bath, 22 april, #45, illus. (£210). previously offered pro auction, online auction closing 14 june 2013, #79d, illus. (not sold; no estimate), and eb, oct. 2007, titled sleeping baby, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $450).  “jealous monster,” etching, 1778. r. g. watkins, dec. 2013 cat. 68, #107 (£150). “lear,” etching, 1776. john nicholson auction, haslemere, 9 july, #25, with 7 other shakespeare character heads, illus. (£100). “salvator rosa,” etching, 1778. eb, dec. 2013, laid paper, imprint trimmed off, top left corner of margin damaged, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $65).  “successful monster,” etching, 1778. r. g. watkins, dec. 2013 cat. 68, #106, illus. (£150). palmer, samuel elements of form; together with an outline, and, indirectly, on the picturesque. a pair in pencil extensively inscribed, each leaf 19.3 x 30.0 cm., datable to c. 1863. sl, 6 march, #769, housed in a modern box with the bookplate of raymond lister, illus. (£1625). previously sold sl, 26 feb. 1976, #108 (£40 to lister). the end of the day. watercolor and body color, 19.1 x 41.8 cm., datable to c. 1880. sl, 9 july, #198, illus. (£10,625). previously sold cl, 4 nov. 1975, #82, illus. (£1365). illustration to milton’s “lycidas.” watercolor and body color, 10.4 x 15.1 cm., datable to c. 1873, signed. sl, 9 july, #199, illus. (£25,000). previously sold cl, 9 nov. 1976, #131, titled the evening ploughman (£1700). landscape—twilight. oil and tempera, 26.5 x 38.0 cm., probably the work exhibited at the royal academy in 1834. ll, sept. private offer (£3,200,000); dec., online cat., illus. (not priced). previously offered sl, 12 nov. 1997, #102, illus. (not sold; estimate £300,000-400,000). for illus., see blake 31.4 (spring 1998): 133 and illus. 17. a rocky shore with distant sailing boats. watercolor and gouache, 28.6 x 40.6 cm., datable to c. 1849. ll, jan. cat., pp. 76-77, illus. (not priced; sold by oct. to a “private collection, usa”). sheep in a wooded grove. black chalk, 16.5 x 28.6 cm., signed with monogram and dated “[18]56.” duke’s auction, dorchester, 25 sept., #61, illus. (£2400). previously sold sl, 14 dec. 1972, #80, illus. (£500 to b. l. garry). the sleeping shepherd. tempera and oil, 39.4 x 51.8 cm., datable to 1833-34. cl, 8 july, #65, illus. (not sold; estimate £800,000-1,200,000). previously offered cny, 27 jan. 2010, #57, illus. (not sold; estimate $2,500,000-3,500,000). an important work, painted near the end of palmer’s shoreham period. its failure to find a new owner at 2 recent auctions may be due to the absence of the intensity and primitivism central to palmer’s greatest shoreham works. the view that the sleeping shepherd is a more controlled and accomplished work, from a conventional 19th-century perspective, lessens its marketability. view on the devon coast. watercolor, body color, and black chalk, 18.7 x 26.9 cm., datable to c. 1849. guy peppiatt, may cat., #20, illus. (£65,000). previously sold as the north devon coast, sl, 3 july 2013, #205, illus. (£23,750). the waterfall at pistil mawddach, near dolgetty, north wales. watercolor, 47.0 x 37.2 cm., datable to 1835. sny, 29 jan., #132, illus. (not sold; estimate $50,000-70,000). previously sold from the collection of bryan westwood, sl, 12 july 1967, #228 (£1300 to agnew’s). “the bellman,” etching. roseberys auction, west norwood, london, 9 dec., #692, 6th st., pencil signature, illus. (£1400). “the early ploughman,” etching. rome & associates auction, millsboro, delaware, 27 dec. 2013, #601372, 5th st., light marginal stains and wrinkles, illus. (not sold; estimate $975-1300); same impression, 13 feb., #600412, illus. (not sold; same estimate); same impression, 20 march, #600082, illus. (not sold; same estimate). eb, jan., probably 5th st., margins discolored, framed, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $2750 or “best offer”). bhl, 15 july, #8, 5th st., pencil signature, illus. (£2250). great dane auction, philadelphia, 12 aug., #150, 5th st., illus. (not sold; estimate $750-1100); same impression and estimate, 12 sept., #1150, illus. (not sold). swann, 23 sept., #5, 9th st., illus. ($1625); #6, st. not indicated, with “the willow” (2nd st.) and “the herdsman’s cottage” (2nd st.), illus. ($1500). sotheran’s, oct. “william blake” cat., #49, 4th st., illus. (£505). csk, 4 dec., #101, 6th st., pencil signature, some stains, illus. (not sold; estimate £2000-3000). woolley & wallis auction, salisbury, 10 dec., #244, 5th st., illus. (£550). “the herdsman’s cottage,” etching. eb, jan., 2nd st., evenly browned, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $600 or “best offer”); dec., 2nd st., illus. ($186.50). lyon & turnbull auction, edinburgh, 23 july, #12, 2nd st., illus. (not sold; estimate £500-700). sotheran’s, oct. “william blake” cat., #48, 2nd st., illus. (£505). dreweatts auction, newbury, berkshire, 21 oct., #453, 2nd st., pencil signature, illus. (£1700; estimate £400-600). go, 23 oct., #1369, 2nd st., illus. (£280). see also “the early ploughman,” above. “the lonely tower,” etching. bg, 13 feb., #330, 7th st., “on wove paper, pen and black ink inscription in lower margin, re-worked by henry macbeth-raeburn, inscribed as printed by m.r.l. canney (?), 1 of 8 impressions … some spotting and browning … 20th century impression” (£160). according to raymond lister, catalogue raisonné of the works of samuel palmer (cambridge: cambridge up, 1988) 247, the pl. was “restored by macbeth raeburn during the 1920s.” lister records printings of this st. by mary sholten, c. h. welch, and arnold fawcus, but not “canney.” a 7th-st. impression is included in the complete etchings of samuel palmer and his illustrations for virgil and milton [london: william blake trust, 1990]. “the morning of life,” etching. see etchings for the art-union of london, below. “opening the fold,” etching. eb, oct., 8th st., illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of £495). see also s. palmer, english version of the eclogues of virgil, below. “the rising moon,” etching. see “the weary ploughman,” below. “the skylark,” etching. cf, 16 oct., #208, 7th st. on laid india, illus. (£600). “the sleeping shepherd,” etching. roseberys auction, west norwood, london, 18 march, #1684, st. not indicated but probably 3rd, after the pl. was cut down but before signature and number, illus. (£6500; estimate £500-700). cf, 16 oct., #209, 4th st. on laid india, illus. (£2000; estimate £400-600). “the weary ploughman,” etching. lyon & turnbull auction, edinburgh, 23 july, #13, 8th st., illus. (not sold; estimate £400-600). csk, 4 dec., #100, 6th st., pencil signature, with “the rising moon,” 7th st. on laid india, “rising moon” illus. (£3000). “the willow,” etching. eb, feb., 2nd st., elaborately framed, illus. (£321). see also “the early ploughman,” above, and a. h. palmer, life and letters of samuel palmer, below. w. adams, sacred allegories, “new edition,” 1869. eb, dec., with 9 wood engravings after palmer, publisher’s cloth, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £34.99). literary cat books, dec. online cat., scattered light foxing, publisher’s cloth worn (£40). this issue not in raymond lister, catalogue raisonné of the works of samuel palmer (cambridge: cambridge up, 1988); see pp. 255-57 for the 1856, 1873, and 1876 issues. the final 2 issues contain only 7 engravings after palmer. the 1858, 1859, and 1870 issues, not in lister, include all 9 palmer illus. etchings for the art-union of london, 1872. bl, 24 july, #284, some spotting and browning, original cloth very worn, some pls. loose, illus. (not sold; estimate £500-700). includes palmer’s etching “the morning of life,” 7th st. a. h. palmer, life and letters of samuel palmer, 1892. sophie schneideman rare books, nov. online “william blake & his followers” cat., no entry #, small-paper copy, “occasional browning to edges of plates,” publisher’s cloth slightly worn, illus. (£575). includes palmer’s etching “the willow,” 2nd st. s. palmer, english version of the eclogues of virgil. eb, march, 2nd ed., 1884, publisher’s cloth, illus. (£280). bho, 16 sept., #92, 1st ed., 1883, large-paper copy, publisher’s faux vellum, with the shorter poems of john milton with twelve illustrations by samuel palmer, 1889, large-paper copy, publisher’s faux vellum, illus. (£875). bl, 2 oct., 1st ed., 1883, large-paper copy, “scattered spotting,” publisher’s faux vellum, “a.l.s by palmer regarding the retouching of drawings mounted on paper and loosely inserted,” illus. (£794). cf, 16 oct., #446, 1st ed., 1883, small-paper copy, publisher’s cloth worn, illus. (£600). sophie schneideman rare books, nov. online “william blake & his followers” cat., no entry #, 1st ed., 1883, large-paper copy, publisher’s faux vellum slightly worn, illus. (£1100). the virgil includes palmer’s etching “opening the fold,” 7th (large-paper copies) or 8th (small-paper copies) st. parker, james see “fair fatima” under stothard, below. richmond, george (excluding most portraits) a sketchbook, dated 1881-84. bl, 24 july, #37, “numerous single-page and a few double-page sketches in pencil,” mostly landscapes, contemporary cloth, modern box, from the collection of raymond lister, illus. (£682). classical head study. pen and brown ink, 8.5 x 7.5 cm. bl, 24 july, #35, illus. (£149). figure studies. pencil, pen and ink, 17.8 x 25.4 cm. ah, dec. pictures for christmas no. 2 online cat., #62, illus. (£125). girl bathing. black, white, and red chalk, verso sketch of a female torso, 41.0 x 28.9 cm., initialed and dated 1879. eb, dec. 2013, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £2000). the drawing may be earlier than the inscribed date. study of a cedar tree. watercolor, 30.5 x 24.5 cm. sl, 22 may, #117, illus. (£6250; estimate £2000-3000). study of a female nude for comus. black and white chalk, 54.0 x 38.0 cm., datable to c. 1837. 25 blythe road auction, london, 10 dec. 2013, #30, illus. (£520). study of a nude male figure. watercolor, 19.0 x 10.2 cm., signed with initials and inscribed “septr / 16th / 1829.” guy peppiatt, may cat., #19, illus. (£1800). previously offered agnew’s, oct.-nov. 2001 cat., missing pages: george richmond, #12, illus. (£1500). study of comus carrying his cup (recto), falling figures (verso). pen and ink, 33.0 x 21.2 cm., inscribed in pencil “comus” and “paris 1829 a 30”; inscribed on verso “1828.” bhny, 5 nov., #63, illus. ($2500). previously sold sl, 18 nov. 1976, #176 (£360). richmond’s pencil inscriptions are later, but the drawing on the recto was very probably executed c. 1828-30. study of the artist’s infant son, t. r. richmond. pencil, 13.5 x 8.5 cm., datable to c. 1834. bl, 24 july, #36, from the collection of raymond lister, illus. (£186). romney, george (excluding most portraits) cupid and psyche. pen and ink, brown wash, 37.7 x 27.7 cm. guy peppiatt, may cat., #2, illus. (£8000). four studies of a woman. pen and ink, 11.1 x 18.3 cm. guy peppiatt, may cat., #3, possibly studies for miranda in romney’s painting of the tempest, illus. (£3500). previously sold duke’s auction, dorchester, 11 april 2013, #50, framed, illus. (£750). study of a figure tied to a tree. pencil, 35.8 x 23.0 cm. bho, 10 sept., #257, illus. (£562). ah, nov. online cat. 442, #45, titled study, possibly of marsyas, illus. (£1100). study of a mother and child. pencil and brown wash, 18.4 x 13.0 cm., datable to the 1770s. sl, 9 july, #183, illus. (£9375). previously sold cl, 9 nov. 1993, #13 (£690). study of a woman holding scales. pen and ink, 11.9 x 7.1 cm. bhl, 29 oct., #269, illus. (£1250). previously offered bhl, 30 oct. 2013, #308, illus. (not sold; estimate £2000-3000).  study of figures arranged in friezes. pen and brown ink and wash, faint black chalk sketches on the verso, 10.6 x 18.7 cm., datable to c. 1776-77. acquired in 2012 by the carnegie museum of art, pittsburgh, from ll. study of mrs. james harris, later countess of malmesbury. pen and brown ink, 8.7 x 7.6 cm. sl, 9 july, #182, illus. (£2750; estimate £600-800). two reclining figures. pen and ink, 19.0 x 16.0 cm. cf, 15 may, #409, illus. (£200). odd title; there are 4 figures and only 1 reclines. sherman, welby see “the bacchante” under calvert, above. stothard, thomas an album of 14 designs for the monuments of the duke of wellington, sir william myers, and others. pencil, pen and ink, brown washes. sworders auction, stansted mountfitchet, essex, 3 june, #251, “various sizes … foxing and staining throughout,” illus. (£800). amazons rescuing their queen(?). sepia wash drawing, 10.2 x 15.2 cm. ah, dec. online cat. 443, #46, illus. (£400). designs for thomas townshend, poems, 1796. two monochrome wash drawings, both 9.0 x 9.0 cm. bl, 24 july, #22, with a drawing attributed to henry tresham, illus. (£211). only 1 of the stothard drawings was published in the book, p. 67, engraved by andrew birrell. the other design may be a variant for the illus. on p. [65]. farm dog chasing a wolf. monochrome wash, 9.5 x 9.0 cm. bl, 24 july, #23, with resting lion with a pony, monochrome wash, 9.5 x 9.0 cm., both drawings illus. (not sold; estimate £200-300). dreweatts auction, bristol, 11 dec., #76, both drawings offered, both illus. (£45). in the forest of arden, from as you like it. oil, 38.1 x 30.5 cm. ah, july online cat. 438, #18, fine gilt frame, illus. (£3000).  on the way to market, an illustration to oliver goldsmith’s the deserted village. watercolor, 13.0 x 9.0 cm. holloway’s auction, banbury, 2 dec., #358, illus. (£190). see blake 47.4 (spring 2014) for further information and earlier attempts to sell. othello and desdemona, attributed to stothard. oil, 25.2 x 35.3 cm. bho, 3 dec., #467, illus. (not sold; estimate £1000-1500). the pilgrimage to canterbury. watercolor, 9.9 x 34.4 cm. ll, jan. cat., pp. 86-87, same design as stothard’s oil painting of 1806-07, with an impression on laid india of the pl. etched and engraved by louis schiavonetti and james heath, 1817, both illus. (not priced). the watercolor previously sold cl, 18 june 1980, #108, illus. in black and white (£950), csk, 9 july 2009, #630, illus. (£5000), and csk, 21 feb. 2012, #248, illus. (£4000); previously offered by justin croft, oct. 2012 cat. 7, #12, illus. (£8000). the ll cat. claims that “blake’s plate [“chaucers canterbury pilgrims”] was in fact a blatant plagiarism of thomas stothard’s work” (86). see illus. 13. 13. thomas stothard. the pilgrimage to canterbury (see enlargement). watercolor on whatman paper with an 1833 watermark, 9.9 x 34.4 cm. the date of the paper, only 1 year before stothard’s death, makes one suspicious that this is a very skilled copy of the much larger pl. of the same design published in 1817 or the small pl. (4.9 x 17.4 cm.) engraved by w. h. worthington in 1822. the differences between the engravings and the watercolor are very slight—for example, a variant arrangement of the clouds, particularly on the right, and the diminution of the shadows cast by the horses on the right. there is, however, nothing in the execution of this watercolor to indicate any hand other than stothard’s. its unfinished coloring might be explained by stothard’s being hit by a carriage and incapacitated in fall 1833 (see m. g. sullivan’s biography of stothard in odnb). photo courtesy of lowell libson. portrait of mrs. stothard, attributed to stothard. pencil, 17.5 x 20.5 cm. humbert auction, towcester, northamptonshire, 23 oct., #1183, illus. (not sold; estimate £100-150); 20 nov., #1131, illus. (no price information; estimate £100-120). well done; the attribution may indeed be correct. three figures at a cottage door. pen and ink and gray wash, 8.0 x 5.5 cm. holloway’s auction, banbury, 2 dec., #293, with 2 other monochrome wash drawings attributed to stothard and an unattributed watercolor, illus. (£180). venus and cupid. pencil, pen and ink, wash, 8.9 x 8.3 cm. ah, june online cat. 437, #47, illus. (£375). “fair fatima” (presumed title). a circular pl. engraved by james parker after stothard illustrating a passage in one of lady mary wortley montagu’s published letters. eb, oct.-nov., proof with signatures but before title and imprint, printed in sanguine on a leaf of wove paper 30.5 x 24.8 cm., illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of £9.99). i have never seen an impression with title and/or imprint. the british museum example (registration no. 1896,0511.417) is printed in black. see also “jolie fatime,” zancon after stothard, 2012 sales review, blake 46.4 (spring 2013). not in coxhead or bennett.  “the landlord’s family” and “the tenant’s family,” a pair engraved by charles knight, 1792. eb, july, color printed and framed, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $1500); same impressions, july, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $1000). not in coxhead or bennett. “the lost apple,” lithograph, 1803. gp, dec. online cat., with the original aquatint border, illus. (£520). see also fuseli, “evening thou bringest all.” “sailors in a storm,” mezzotint by william ward, 58.0 x 47.0 cm., 1798. eb, april-may, “clean burning[?] in 1990 which explains its clarity,” illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of €150); same impression, june, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of €50). not in coxhead or bennett. illustrations of shakspeare, being a selection of scenes … from designs by stothard & smirke. london: c. taylor, n.d. pba, 10 april, #638, scattered foxing, publisher’s(?) cloth, illus. (no bids on an estimate of $500-800). the only copy i have ever encountered; not in coxhead or bennett. worldcat lists only the copy at the yale center for british art. apparently another, possibly later, issue of the pls. 1st published in c. taylor, picturesque beauties of shakspeare (see below). some of the lettering on some pls. has been strengthened in this issue.  select collection of original scottish airs. 7 vols., 1795-1841. eb, march, vols. 1 and 3 only, london and edinburgh, n.d., title page signed by the edinburgh publisher, george thomson, contemporary calf very worn, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $99.99); same vols., march, illus. ($29). toovey’s auction, washington, west sussex, 20 may, #3160, 1811 issue, 4 vols., contemporary half morocco (vols. 1-3) and modern cloth (vol. 4) very worn, bindings illus. (£40). the eb vols. contain 2 different pls. of the same title-page vignette designed by stothard and engraved by james thomson (vol. 1) and paton thomson (vol. 3). not in coxhead or bennett.  a selection of irish melodies, with symphonies and accompaniments by sir john stevenson … and characteristic words by thomas moore. seventh number. dublin: w. power, n.d. (c. 1820?). eb, jan.-feb., publisher’s printed boards, top of spine damaged, illus. ($35). the title-page vignette, engraved by john martyn after stothard, is listed in coxhead 165 as published in a selection of popular traditional [sic] airs, 1818-26 (the correct title is a selection of popular national airs, as in bennett 81). c. taylor, picturesque beauties of shakspeare, n.d. (pls. dated 1783-87 in their imprints). pba, 13 march, #331, complete with 40 pls. including 7 after stothard, 32 after robert smirke, and 1 after charles reuben ryley, scattered foxing, modern calf, illus. ($270). originally issued in 10 parts, each with 4 pp. of letterpress text of selected passages from a single play and 4 engraved illus. apparently rare; only the 2nd copy i have ever seen on the market. see also illustrations of shakspeare, above. coxhead 95, bennett 67. appendix: new information on blake’s engravings listed below are substantive additions or corrections to robert n. essick, the separate plates of william blake: a catalogue (1983), and essick, william blake’s commercial book illustrations (1991). newly discovered impressions of previously recorded published sts. of blake’s engravings are listed for only the rarer pls. the separate plates of william blake: a catalogue p. 6, “joseph of arimathea among the rocks of albion,” impression 2j. acquired at auction in 1949 by brandon meredith rhys-williams (1927-88), agnew’s acting as agent; inherited by his son in 1988. p. 67, “chaucers canterbury pilgrims,” impression 3y. acquired at auction in 1949 by brandon meredith rhys-williams (1927-88), agnew’s acting as agent; inherited by a member of his family, present whereabouts unknown. p. 107, “the man sweeping the interpreter’s parlour,” impression 2o. acquired c. 1949 by brandon meredith rhys-williams (1927-88); inherited by his daughter, miranda rhys-williams, in 1988. pp. 125-29, “morning amusement,” and pp. 130-31, “evening amusement,” both after watteau. for previously unrecorded impressions, trimmed to ovals slightly within the images, see under separate plates and plates in series, above. pp. 150-57, “rev. john caspar lavater.” an impression of the 3rd st. was acquired by the national portrait gallery, london, in 1951, accession no. npg d37198. wove paper, leaf 41.6 x 28.6 cm., trimmed within the platemark right and left. pp. 170-72, “head of a damned soul in dante’s inferno,” after fuseli. blake’s engraving is probably based, either directly or through an intermediate drawing, on fuseli’s oil painting now in the art institute of chicago. see the detailed entry and illus. in french and british paintings from 1600 to 1800 in the art institute of chicago, french entries by susan wise, british entries by malcolm warner (chicago: art institute of chicago, 1996) 226-32. the oil painting of the head offered at sotheby’s parke bernet, london, 4 oct. 1978, #304 (not sold and now untraced) may be a copy after blake’s print. pp. 189-90, “rev.d robert hawker,” after ponsford. an impression in the only known st. was acquired by the national portrait gallery, london, in 1966, accession no. npg d35614. wove paper trimmed within the platemark to 42.4 x 30.1 cm. william blake’s commercial book illustrations pp. 39-40, daniel fenning and joseph collyer, a new system of geography, 2 vols., 1785-86, 1787, pl. 2. a previously unrecorded 3rd st. of this pl. appears in john payne, universal geography formed into a new and entire system, 2 vols. (london: j. johnson and c. stalker, 1791), vol. 1 facing p. 583. the volume and page references top right, present in both earlier sts., have been retained since payne’s text is simply a reprint of the fenning and collyer text with identical pagination. the inscription top center has been replaced with “engraved for payne’s universal geography.” the number bottom right has been erased; the imprint has been replaced with “publish’d march 1st. 1791 by c. stalker. stationers court.” the design, the inscriptions within it, and blake’s signature lower right remain unaltered. copies of payne’s universal geography are in the university of edinburgh library and the british library; the latter is reproduced, complete, in eighteenth century collections online. an impression of the pl. in the 3rd st. is in the national gallery of australia; see <http://​artsearch.​nga.​gov.​au/​detail.​cfm?​irn=213916​&pictaus=​true>. for a re-engraving of the design, see payne, universal geography, 1794, under interesting blakeana, above. see also cook, a voyage to the pacific ocean, under basire, james, above. pp. 42-45, the original works of william hogarth, 1790. an impression of blake’s pl. in the 1st proof st. with the imprint present was acquired in may by the e. j. pratt library, victoria university, toronto. see hogarth under letterpress books with engravings by and after blake, above. another impression of the 1st proof st., also with the imprint, is in the collection of andrew edmunds, london—see the ashmolean museum exhibition cat., william blake apprentice & master, 4 dec. 2014–1 march 2015, #86, illus. p. 61, james earle, practical observations on the operation for the stone, 1793, 1796, 1803. i claim that the attribution to blake of pl. 3, included in an appendix 1st published in 1796, depends in large measure on the inscriptions added to the 2nd st. unfortunately, i was able to obtain an adequate photograph only of the 1st st., reproduced as fig. 124. the crucial 2nd st. is reproduced here, illus. 5. pp. 71-75, john gabriel stedman, narrative, of a five years’ expedition, against the revolted negroes of surinam, 2 vols., 1796, 1806, 1813. the vignette on the copperplate used for both title pages can be attributed to blake on the basis of a heretofore unnoticed signature. for illus. and information on sts. and printings, see illus. 6-10 and their captions. p. 89, william hayley, the life, and posthumous writings, of william cowper, 1803-04, pl. 4, 3rd st. “the horizontal hatching right of the man’s shoulder …” should read “the horizontal hatching right of the man’s hat ….” for an illus. of the impression of this st. in the keynes collection, fitzwilliam museum, see <http://​data.​fitzmuseum.​cam.​ac.​uk/​id/​object/​31455>. 4 blake/an illustrated quarterly summer 2011 a r t i c l e blake publications and discoveries in 2010 voting william blake’s father, james, voted in 1774, 1780, and 1784, his brother john voted in 1784 and 1788, and his partner, james parker, voted in 1788 and 1790,1 but apparently “the poet himself never voted,”2 though he was eligible to do so. this negative evidence has been used to reinforce the argument that blake was aloof from practical politics, despite the fiery political strain in his writings and drawings. however, blake did vote, in 1790.3 perhaps his political activism should be reappraised. thomas owen thomas owen, the boy whom blake took as an apprentice in june 1788,4 was probably born in 1775. his possible work under blake’s direction on the plates for salzmann’s elements of morality (1790-91) is examined by robert n. essick (see salzmann in part iii). the non-english languages recorded for blake studies in 2010 are croatian, danish, estonian, french, german, greek, italian, japanese, macedonian, norwegian, polish, portuguese, romanian, serbian, slovenian, spanish, and swedish. in addition, note the number of works published abroad in english: in denmark, germany, india, and japan. 1. br(2) 736, 742. 2. br(2) 736, i am sorry to say. 3. see the addendum to br(2) 59, online. 4. see the addendum to br(2) 48, online. william blake and his circle: a checklist of publications and discoveries in 2010 by g. e. bentley, jr. with the assistance of hikari sato for japanese publications editors’ notes: illustrations to the checklist are available in the online version of the article, which is also fully searchable <http://www.blakequarterly.org>. addenda and corrigenda to blake records, 2nd ed. (2004), now appear online. they are updated yearly in conjunction with the publication of the checklist. numbers of works about blake recorded in blake books (1977), blake books supplement (1995), and blake/an illustrated quarterly for 1992-2010 567 record for books,5 including editions and catalogues essays, including reviews bb 1,406 573 254 3,218 5956 bbs 1,010 354 123 4,069 177 misc.7 1,951 1992-93 54 21 15 279 62 1994 50 16 5 234 84 1995 56 22 12 239 74 1996 37 14 10 160 136 1997 75 29 11 135 178 1998 69 32 6 233 59 1999 46 21 3 235 71 2000 73 13 12 152 56 2001 57 23 13 181 175 2002 52 26 6 208 45 2003 50 17 8 205 47 2004 31 8 6 153 81 2005 43 9 6 139 79 2006 110 48 11 237 41 2007 118 70 17 336 100 2008 193 68 54 330 107 2009 122 32 30 621 239 2010 180 78 13 313 78 totals 3,832 1,474 615 11,677 4,435 reprints there is a flourishing industry of republishing works related to blake whose chief virtue is that they are (deservedly) out of print. the chief practitioners seem to be kessinger publishing, nabu press, and general books.8 note that the kessinger editions are mere digital reprints, with, as they admit, frequent defects. i have seen none of these reprints and confess my initial incredulity about some, such as the four separate publications of 18-44 pages into which emily hamblen’s on the minor prophecies of william blake (1930) has been divided. however, as each has an isbn assigned, i take it that they were not only advertised but published. 5. the books include reprints. 6. one hundred reviews in bb were published before 1863. 7. the miscellaneous sources include the essick collection, the online versions of the times [london] and the new york times, reviews in philological quarterly (1925-69), and reviews in blake before 1992, when i began reporting reviews in this checklist. 8. the author is often given as “william blake, jr. phd,” but it is not clear whether the oddity originates with the publisher or with the agency such as google books which is reporting it. summer 2011 blake/an illustrated quarterly 5 blake’s writings the most exciting discovery was the copy of the mystical initiations; or, hymns of orpheus, translated by thomas taylor (1787), with annotations newly identified as blake’s by philip and joseph cardinale.9 this provides a short but fascinating marginalium by blake and extensive markings of the text, chiefly underlining. the learned and tendentious platonist thomas taylor has been fairly reliably associated with blake in anecdotes10 and more speculatively as a major source for his ideas.11 the discovery of blake’s annotations to the hymns of orpheus, the only direct evidence that he had read taylor, will justify a new investigation of the association and connection of taylor and blake. blake’s long-lost letter of 7 august 1804, known previously only through catalogue snippets, was acquired in 2009 by robert n. essick and masterfully published in full in 2010 by mark crosby and essick in blake. it is an important letter, and the essay about it records a number of significant discoveries related only rather distantly to the text. the perennial popularity of songs of innocence and of experience is demonstrated by newly recorded editions of 1988 (in macedonian), 2009 (in spanish), and 2010. and blake’s reviving reputation in the years before gilchrist’s epoch-marking biography is indicated by newly recorded printings of poems in 1839, 1845, 1861, and 1862. blake’s art/commercial engravings one of blake’s largest paintings, an inn sign made in 1812 for chaucer’s tabard or talbot inn in southwark, was for the first time identified and reproduced in 2010.12 alas, under outdoor exposure for two-thirds of a century the picture deteriorated so extensively that at the end of its lifetime its features were virtually indistinguishable, and when the building ceased to be an inn the sign was probably abandoned. the inn sign, as recorded in contemporary engravings, is disconcertingly different from blake’s familiar heroic art, and most blake students are likely to be made uneasy by it if not incredulous of its connection with blake. beginning about 1800, blake made a number of miniatures for hayley and his friends, but some have been lost.13 mark 9. “a newly discovered blake book” (see part v and blake 44.3 in part vi). the taylor volume has been in the bodleian library since 1928. 10. br(2) 414, 500, 530. 11. see especially george mills harper, the neoplatonism of william blake (chapel hill: university of north carolina press, 1961) and kathleen raine, blake and tradition (princeton: princeton university press, 1968). 12. see bentley, “pictura ignota,” in part vi. 13. blake’s known miniatures are: mrs. hayley (1801) <butlin #346> untraced and unreproduced johnny johnson (1802) <butlin #347> mary barham johnson george romney (self-portrait) (1801) <butlin #348> untraced crosby and robert n. essick identified for the first time prints of blake’s lost miniatures of romney in the european magazine (1803) and hayley’s life of romney (1809).14 the evidence is so plain that it is difficult to understand why they were not identified long ago. this increases by a third the number of blake’s miniatures which have been reproduced. catalogues and bibliographies newly recorded here are dealers’ catalogues of 1843, 1864, 1878, 1879, and 1883 (2), which help to establish the provenances of numbers of blake’s works. there were modest exhibitions in 2010 of blake’s works at the e. j. pratt library of victoria university in the university of toronto and at the morgan library and museum. the morgan’s formidable publicity machine secured numerous reviews and notices. criticism, biography, and scholarly studies two of the workhorses of blake scholarship are worthily represented here in robert n. essick, “blake in the marketplace, 2009,” and g. e. bentley, jr., “william blake and his circle: a checklist of publications and discoveries in 2009” (see blake 43.4 and 44.1 in part vi). a surprising number of papers on blake were published in collections of essays: in blake; queer blake, ed. helen p. bruder and tristanne connolly; interfaces; blake in our time, ed. karen mulhallen; romanticism and its legacies, ed. ralla guha niyogi; editing and reading blake, ed. wayne c. ripley and justin van kleeck; and tate papers. among the more permanently valuable of these essays are angus whitehead’s “mark and eleanor martin, the blakes’ french fellow inhabitants at 17 south molton street, 180521” (see blake 43.3 in part vi) and his “‘went to see blake— also to surgeons college’: blake and george cumberland’s pocketbooks” (see blake in our time, under mulhallen in part vi). whitehead is making wonderful discoveries about blake’s biographical context. two other essays in blake in our time are particularly valuable. in 1983, joseph viscomi and thomas v. lange first reported that two prints in america (b) were not blake’s origigeorge romney (self-portrait) (1801) <butlin #348> untraced william hayley (1801) not in butlin (see br[2] 107); untraced and unreproduced william cowper (after romney) (1801) <butlin #353> misses cowper william cowper (after romney) (1801-04) <butlin #354> ashmolean thomas butts (1801?) <butlin #376> british museum mrs. butts (1809) <butlin #377> british museum thomas butts, jr. (1809) <butlin #378> british museum 14. “‘the fiends of commerce’” (see blake 44.2 in part vi). 6 blake/an illustrated quarterly summer 2011 nals but imitations15 so skillful that they had been taken as genuine by generations of blake scholars. in his festschrift essay, “two fake blakes revisited; one dew-smith revealed,” viscomi demonstrates with his customary brilliance that the inserted plates are photolithographic facsimiles (not fakes) made between 1874 and 1878 by a. g. dew-smith (18481903) to perfect his copy. this is a fascinating conclusion to a bizarre story. in “william blake and chichester,” morton paley, following thomas wright (1929), argues plausibly that “the foundations of his [blake’s] four-gated city [of golgonooza] lay in chichester.” red herring according to a “thought du jour” in the globe and mail [toronto] 13 jan. 2010: l6, “‘there is no mistake so great as the mistake of not going on.’—william blake.” this phrase is not used in blake’s writings or conversations, and i do not know why it should be foisted on blake. * * * * * * * * * the annual checklist of scholarship and discoveries concerning william blake and his circle records publications and discoveries for the current year (say, 2010) and those for previous years which are not recorded in blake books, blake books supplement, and “william blake and his circle.” installments of “william blake and his circle” are continuations of blake books and blake books supplement, with similar principles and conventions. many of the entries below come from searches in december 2010 for “william blake” and “2009-2010” in google (7,470 works), google books, copac (99 works), and worldcat (684 works). i have made no systematic attempt to record audio books16 and magazines, blogs,17 broadcasts on radio and television, calendars,18 cd-roms, chinaware, coffee mugs,19 comic books, computer printouts (unpublished), conferences, emails, festivals and lecture series, furniture, jewelry,20 lectures on audiocassettes, lipstick, manuscripts, microforms, mosaics, movies, murals, music, notebooks (blank), pageants, perfor15. lange, “two forged plates in america copy b,” and viscomi, “facsimile or forgery? an examination of america, plates 4 and 9, copy b,” blake 16.4 (spring 1983): 212-18, 219-23. 16. such as ross woodman, jung and blake (carpinteria [california]: pacifica graduate institute, 2009); stephen critchlow, robert glenister, and michael maloney [readers], the great poets: william blake (naxos audiobooks, 2007). 17. see zoamorphosis: the blake 2.0 blog, ed. jason whittaker and roger whitson <http://zoamorphosis.com>. 18. such as §art of imagination: william blake 2010 calendar (n.p.: amber lotus, 2009). 19. see william blake: comus with his revellers coffee mugs, zazzle <http://www.zazzle.com>. 20. at artfire <http://www.artfire.com>, seller funcky love offered in 2010 barrettes, earrings, pendants or pins, and tie-pins. mances, pillows, playing cards, podcasts,21 poems about blake, portraits, postcards, posters and pictures,22 recorded readings and singings,23 refrigerator magnets, stained-glass windows, stamps (postage and rubber), stickers, sweatshirts, t-shirts,24 tattoos, tiles, typescripts (unpublished), video recordings, and web sites. i take blake books and blake books supplement, faute de mieux, to be the standard bibliographical books on blake,25 and have noted significant differences from them. the organization of division i of the checklist is as in blake books: division i: william blake part i: editions, translations, and facsimiles of blake’s writings section a: original editions, facsimiles, reprints, and translations section b: collections and selections appendix: writings improbably alleged to be by blake part ii: reproductions of drawings and paintings section a: illustrations of individual authors section b: collections and selections part iii: commercial book engravings section a: illustrations of individual authors section b: collections and selections appendix: books improbably alleged to have blake engravings part iv: catalogues and bibliographies part v: books owned by william blake the poet appendix: books owned by the wrong william blake in the years 1770-1827 part vi: criticism, biography, and scholarly studies note: collections of essays on blake are listed under the names of the editors, and issues of periodicals devoted extensively to him are listed under the titles. 21. see the exhibition remember me!, under 2010 in part iv. 22. such as from funcky love (see note 20, above). 23. for instance, *fernand péna, ode to william blake <http://www. myspace.com/fernandpna>. 24. several t-shirts were available in 2010 at zazzle <http://www. zazzle.com>. 25. except for the states of the prints for blake’s commercial book engravings, where the standard authority is robert n. essick, william blake’s commercial book illustrations (oxford: clarendon press, 1991). significant further details, especially about collations, are given in roger r. easson and essick, william blake book illustrator: a bibliography and catalogue of the commercial engravings, vol. 1: plates designed and engraved by blake (normal: american blake foundation, 1972); vol. 2: plates designed or engraved by blake 1774-1796 (memphis: american blake foundation, 1979); vol. 3 never appeared. the standard authority for prints issued separately is essick, the separate plates of william blake: a catalogue (princeton: princeton university press, 1983). summer 2011 blake/an illustrated quarterly 7 division ii: blake’s circle26 this division is organized by individual (say, william hayley or john flaxman), with works by and about blake’s friends and patrons, living individuals with whom he had significant direct and demonstrable contact. it does not include important contemporaries with whom blake’s contact was negligible or nonexistent, such as john constable and william wordsworth and edmund burke. reviews, listed here under the book reviewed, are only for works which are chiefly about blake, not for those with only, say, a chapter on blake. note that blake books and blake books supplement normally do not include reviews. research for this checklist was carried out particularly in the libraries of the university of toronto and victoria university in the university of toronto, google books, worldcat, and copac, and, for works published in japan, cinii (national institute of informatics scholarly and academic information navigator), the national diet library online catalogue, komaba library and the general library of the university of tokyo, and the national diet library. i should be most grateful to anyone who can help me to better information about the unseen (§) items reported here, and i undertake to thank them prettily in person and in print. for many kinds of favors i thank noriaki abe (subun-so book store, tokyo), sandra burgess (collections manager, harriet beecher stowe center), professor robert n. essick,27 professor alexander gourlay, sandra ho (media relations manager, morgan library), mary lynn johnson (for funky blake jewelry), sarah jones (for superb fact-checking and editing), stephen massil, dr. jeffrey barclay mertz, professor morton paley, ivana bancevic pejovic (for a surprising number of works in serbian), and tom simpson (rare book cataloguer, e. j. pratt library, victoria university in the university of toronto). symbols * works prefixed by an asterisk include one or more illustrations by blake or depicting him. if there are more than 19 illustrations, the number is specified. if the illustrations include all those for a work by blake, say thel or his illustrations to l’ allegro, the work is identified. § works preceded by a section mark are reported on secondhand authority. abbreviations bb g. e. bentley, jr., blake books (1977) bbs g. e. bentley, jr., blake books supplement (1995) 26. there is nothing in blake books and blake books supplement corresponding to division ii. 27. especially for his “blake in the marketplace, 2010” typescript, despite its distressing entries for “not in bb or bbs.” essick’s discoveries were communicated to me in dec. 2010 and printed in blake 44.4 (spring 2011): 116-42. blake blake/an illustrated quarterly br(2) g. e. bentley, jr., blake records, 2nd ed. (2004) butlin martin butlin, the paintings and drawings of william blake (1981) dai dissertation abstracts international; note that now dai online offers access to the entire thesis isbn international standard book number works in japanese in books printed in the traditional japanese format, the japanese characters are printed in vertical columns, the columns are read from top to bottom and from the righthand column to those on the left. the pages are numbered from the righthand end of the book. text in european characters in such books is of course printed and read horizontally from left to right, but the pagination, following the japanese format, seems to be backward (see kobayashi in part vi). works in serbian note that the poet’s names are given variously (e.g., blejk, blejka, blejku, blejkova, blejkovom) because of the seven different cases in serbian. division i: william blake part i: blake’s writings section a: original editions, facsimiles, reprints, and translations table of collections addenda bodleian library, oxford marginalia: the mystical initiations; or, hymns of orpheus, trans. thomas taylor (1787) essick, robert n. ms: letter, 7 aug. 1804 table of watermarks addenda jw letter, 7 aug. 1804 (see letters, below). america (1793) copy b binding: america (b, printed 1795), probably then lacking pls. 4 and 9, was stabbed through three holes 6.5 and 7.7 cm. apart apparently with europe (c, printed 1794); america (b) was separated from europe (c) by 1799 (when it was inscribed to c. h. tatham) and probably sewn through three new stabholes 10.7, 12.9 cm. apart; it was presumably in this state, or possibly unstitched, when sold “unbound” in 1874; by 1878 it was “bound by f. bedford” in citron morocco and, after being bound thus, excellent photolithographic facsimiles of 8 blake/an illustrated quarterly summer 2011 pls. 4 and 928 (probably copied by its owner, a. g. dew-smith, from copy f in the british museum), marked “f” (?for “facsimile”), were tipped in at the appropriate places to perfect the copy.29 copy r history: “almost certainly”30 this is the copy of edward vernon utterson with 18 pls. “printed in tints” (like america [r] in blue and green) in the sotheby sale of 5 july 1852, lot 251 [sold for £2.7.0 (?to james holmes)]; quaritch offered it in oct. 1883 for £36 (see part iv) and in his general catalogue (1886), lot 29489 (printed in blue, bound in half morocco, gilt edges), for £42. the book of thel (1789) copy j binding: thel (j) and visions (g) were bound by c. lewis according to the 1864 quaritch catalogue but by hering according to the 1880 christie catalogue and the quaritch catalogues of aug. and oct. 1883 (see part iv) and 1896. history: offered with visions (g) by quaritch in 1864 for £15.15.0 (see part iv); … offered in his catalogues of aug. and oct. 1883 for £85 (see part iv). a descriptive catalogue (1809) copy f history: offered by quaritch in oct. 1883 for £10.10.0 (see part iv). europe (1794) edition §europa: en profetia. trans. peter glas. lund: bakhåll, 1994. in swedish. the first book of urizen (1794) edition §the first book of urizen. [whitefish]: kessinger publishing, 2010. 28 pp.; isbn: 9781161463293. for children: the gates of paradise (1793) copy f <see blake (2010)> history: perhaps “blake’s engravings” for which flaxman 28. while pls. 4 and 9 were missing, the prints were numbered 2-16 in pencil by an unknown hand on pls. 2-3, 5-8, 10-18 below the bottom-left platemark. (bbs p. 54n23 erroneously describes the first numeration as “blake’s page-numbers.”) pls. 1-18 (including the facsimile pls. 4 and 9) were later correctly numbered 1-18 at the top-right corner of the leaf by a quaritch assistant. 29. the new information here about numeration and facsimiles derives from joseph viscomi, “two fake blakes revisited” (see blake in our time, under mulhallen in part vi). bbs p. 54 suggests erroneously that pls. 4 and 9 were added after 1878. 30. viscomi, “two fake blakes revisited” (see blake in our time, under mulhallen in part vi) 43. it is probably not copy b as in bbs. paid 4s. in oct. 179531 were for children plus an extra print. in “to the public” (1793), for children is priced at 3s. for the sexes: the gates of paradise (?1826) copy g history: offered by quaritch in 1864 for £6.15.0 (see part iv). an island in the moon (?1784) it was reproduced in the william blake archive in 2010. edition *an island in the moon. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2010. <http:// www.blakearchive.org>. jerusalem (1804[-20]) edition jerusalem. ed. e. r. d. maclagan and a. g. b. russell. 1904. <bb #77> b. §the prophetic books of william blake: jerusalem. ed. e. r. d. maclagan. [whitefish]: kessinger publishing, 2010. legacy reprint series. 152 pp.; isbn: 9781163448021. c. §jerusalem the emanation of the giant albion. [whitefish]: kessinger publishing, 2010. 72 pp.; isbn: 9781161437607. “joseph of arimathea among the rocks of albion” (1773) copy l history: offered by quaritch in aug. and oct. 1883 for £4 (see part iv). letters table symbols (ph) transcribed from a photograph † a wax seal is on the letter. wax seals are recorded only on blake’s letters of 1 apr., 6 may, 22 sept. 1800, 7, 19 oct. 1801, 25 apr., 16 aug., 13 dec. 1803, 27 jan., 31 mar., 22 june, 7 aug., 4 dec. 1804, 22 mar., 11 dec. 1805, [?may 1809]. the only seals which are fairly clear are on 19 oct. 1801 (an owl), and 27 jan., 7 aug. 1804 (a classical head, perhaps jupiter). date postmark watermark collection 1804 7 aug. †au [1]804 jw[hatman]32 robert n. essick (ph) 32 31. br(2) 758. flaxman was in italy 1787-94 when for children was published. 32. according to mark crosby and robert n. essick, “‘the fiends of commerce’” (see blake 44.2 in part vi) 54, “a large watermark in the center of the full sheet shows a shield with a horn within, the shield surmounted by a crown and with a finial at its lower termination. below these motifs is an elaborate jw cipher that identifies the paper as whatman …. the chain lines are 2.4 cm. apart.” summer 2011 blake/an illustrated quarterly 9 1800 12 september history: acquired by 1885 by b. b. macgeorge.33 1800 26 november history: letters of 26 nov. 1800, 26 oct. 1803, 4, 28 may, 9 aug., 23 oct., 18 dec. 1804, 22 jan., 17 may, 4 june 1805 were offered by quaritch in 1879 for £52.10.0 (see part iv). the marriage of heaven and hell (?1790) copies b and e they were reproduced in the william blake archive in 2010. copy d it was reproduced in black and white in 2010. copy m it was reproduced in the catalogue of the exhibition at victoria university, university of toronto (see under 2010 in part iv). editions *the marriage of heaven and hell [f]. 1868. <bb #99> in “very important new books” (added to works published by john camden hotten, 1868 ff.) is an advertisement for “original edition of blake’s works.” notice.—mr. hotten has in preparation a few facsimile copies (exact as to paper, printing—the water-colour drawings being filled in by an artist) of the original editions of the books written and illustrated by william blake. as it is only intended to produce—with utmost care—a few examples of each work, mr. hotten will be glad to hear from any gentleman who may desire to secure copies of these wonderful books. the first volume, “marriage of heaven and hell,” 4to, is now being issued, price 30s., half morocco. [quotation from charles lamb] no other facsimile was issued in this series. in quaritch’s new catalogue of miscellaneous works (1876), lot [16078], the [camden hotten] facsimile is dated “(1871) only 100 copies of this facsimile were printed, and of these only 25 copies were coloured.” review anon., north american review 108, no. 223 (apr. 1869): 641-46 (with two others) (the camden hotten facsimile was “made from a fine copy in the possession of lord houghton” [f]; “the artist by whom the hand-work in the fac-simile was executed has lately died”). “le mariage du ciel et de l’enfer.” trans. andré gide. la nouvelle revue française ns no. 107 (1 aug. 1922): 129-47. b. le mariage du ciel et de l’enfer. paris,34 1922. c. paris: chez 33. it was first(?) printed in the account of “the collection of blake’s works in mr. macgeorge’s possession,” thomas mason, public and private libraries of glasgow (glasgow: thomas d. morison, 1885) 291-93. 34. not “charlot” (a publisher, not a place) as in bb #111b. claude aveline, 1923.35 <bb #111a-c> §himlens och helvetets äktenskap. trans. johan hammarström. umeå: h:ström, 2000. isbn: 918944700x. in swedish. §*the marriage of heaven and hell (text and facsimiles). n.p.: benediction books, 2010. 60 pp.; isbn: 9781849026864. a murky black-and-white reproduction of copy d with facing transcriptions and no other added text besides the 2010 title page. *the marriage of heaven and hell, copy b. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2010. <http://www.blakearchive.org>. *the marriage of heaven and hell, copy e. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2010. <http://www.blakearchive.org>. milton (1804[-11]) copy d it was reproduced in the william blake archive in 2010. editions milton. ed. e. r. d. maclagan and a. g. b. russell. 1907, 1973. <bb #119, bbs p. 102> c. §milton: the prophetic books of william blake. ed. e. r. d. maclagan. [whitefish]: kessinger publishing, 2010. legacy reprint series. 82 pp. *milton, copy d. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2010. <http://www. blakearchive.org>. “the order in which the songs of innocence and experience ought to be paged” (?after 1818) history: sold by §puttick and simpson, 3-4 july 1863 (“blakiana, the life of william blake in ms., extracted from allan cunningham, with curious plates, drawings, and scraps”) for £15.15.0;36 offered by quaritch in 1864, lot 6521 (see part iv), including “14 portraits of the artist; his friends, and contem35. the title page is dated “mcmxxiii,” but the colophon (p. 65) says it was printed “a abbeville, le xxx novembre mcmxxii.” 36. anon., “fine arts record,” fine arts quarterly review 1 (oct. 1863): 434-35. geoffrey keynes, engravings by william blake: the separate plates: a catalogue raisonné (dublin: emery walker, 1956) 6, says george a. smith (who sold the collection in 1880) collected the contents of the volume “about 1853,” and keynes, a bibliography of william blake (new york: grolier club, 1921) 319, cites “a prefatory note signed ‘g. a. s. 1855’” (which is not now with the collection). however, the references in puttick and simpson (1863) and quaritch (1864) contradict this history for the 1850s. note also that the sketch of thomas hayley (no. 99 among the “order” materials, bb p. 339) is probably the “portrait of hayley the sculptor” (butlin #345, now in the yale center for british art) sold at sotheby’s, 29 apr. 1862, lot 178 (with 7 others, including the portrait of romney, butlin #349). 10 blake/an illustrated quarterly summer 2011 poraries” (among which is “thomas hayley, an original drawing, by w. blake”) and the huge “canterbury pilgrims” print; … offered by quaritch in oct. 1883 for £80 (see part iv). “pickering [ballads] manuscript” (?after 1807) edition §the pickering manuscript. [whitefish]: kessinger publishing, 2010. 24 pp.; isbn: 9781161473339. poetical sketches (1783) facsimile pages <see bb p. 345> the clearest type differences between the original and the type-facsimile are the omission of the catchword (“the” for “the | couch of death”) at the foot of p. 59 and the misprint “honſte-ſeeming” for “honeſt-ſeeming” on p. 65 (“samson”) of the facsimile. in the facsimile leaves is a watermark “michallet” (not present in copy k), and the vertical chain lines are 2.8 cm. apart, as in the original paper. however, the chain lines are much fainter in the facsimile than in the original, and the facsimile paper seems to be a trifle thicker. in copy k, the same thicker paper is used for the blank leaves adjacent to the text. copy q history: perhaps this is the copy sold at sotheby’s on 21 feb. 1843, lot 336, to the dealer rodd (see part iv). editions poetical sketches. ed. richard herne shepherd. 1868. <bb #129> b. §n.p.: bibliobazaar, 2009. 5.8" x 8.8", 110 pp.; isbn: 9781117078304. review anon., north american review 108, no. 223 (apr. 1869): 64146 (with two others). songs of innocence (1789) copy b history: acquired by “r h clarke,”37 who signed the first flyleaf. editions songs of innocence. preface by thomas seccombe. [1911]. <bb #153> b. §[charleston]: nabu press, 2010. 126 pp.; isbn: 9781176728851. 37. bb p. 405, silently following geoffrey keynes and edwin wolf, 2nd, william blake’s illuminated books: a census (new york: grolier club, 1953), identifies r. h. clarke as “the son of hayley’s friend j. s. clarke [1765?-1834].” however, stephen massil of the garrick club library (london) tells me that r. h. clarke does not appear in the will of james stanier clarke or in that of his widow. the identification of the blake collector as the son of j. s. clarke therefore seems implausible. he is probably robert henry clarke (1818-1906), son of henry and margaret clarke, baptized mar. 1818 at manchester square wesleyan church, st. marylebone, recorded as “clerk in stationers” in the 1881 census, and buried jan. 1906 at camberwell old cemetery. §songs of innocence. [charleston]: nabu press, 2010. 86 pp.; isbn: 9781176997844. songs of innocence and of experience (1794[-1831]) copy g history: copies g and n were listed in quaritch’s catalogue of books, in all classes of literature (1860), lot 5400, “2 vols. in 1, 4to. 40 most remarkable engravings, half red morocco, uncut, £8.10s,” bound up with the world turned upside down (1822); after the leaves of copy n were separated, copy g was offered by quaritch in a new catalogue of english books (1875), lot 9426 (small octavo, “15 plates of 17 poems … printed in colours on thick paper, on one side only, hf. calf,” with a list of the poems, £25). copy u history: offered by quaritch in oct. 1883 for £170 (see part iv). pls. 2 (frontispiece to innocence) and 4 (“introduction” to innocence) description: three drawings on 3 leaves: “original designs” for songs pls. 2 and 4, plus “an ideal hell” (butlin #217) (see quaritch’s catalogue of 1879, lot 12894, in part iv). no other drawing for songs of innocence is known, and “an ideal hell” has not been further identified. history: “from the collection of a friend of blake’s”; offered at £10 in quaritch catalogues no. 322 (mar. 1879) (see part iv), lot 12894; (1880), lot 12894; no. 346 (15 nov. 1882), lot 12894; (oct. 1883) (see part iv), lot 10249; (1887), lot 10249; untraced. editions §songs of innocence, songs of experience. new york and london: g. p. putnam’s sons, knickerbocker press, [c. 1903]. ariel booklets no. 150. 9.5 x 13.9 cm., 86 pp. (plus 6-pp. list of ariel booklets).38 includes “a cradle song” from blake’s notebook. §pesni na nevinosta i na iskustvoto: što pokažuvaat dve sprotivni sostojbi na čovečkata duša. trans. ivan džeparosci. skopje: misla, 1988. 21 cm., 120 pp.; isbn: 8615000085. in macedonian. §*songs of innocence and songs of experience. “first published 1789 [sic],” “republished 2008 by forgotten books” <http:// www.forgottenbooks.org>, “original title page” is unrelated to the one reproduced here. §canciones de inocencia y de experiencia. trans. nicolás suescún. caracas: ministerio del poder popular para la cultura, fundación editorial el perro y la rana, 2009. colección 38. the information is from essick, “blake in the marketplace, 2010,” blake 44.4 (spring 2011): 131. summer 2011 blake/an illustrated quarterly 11 poesía del mundo, serie clásicos. 21 cm., 141 pp.; isbn: 9789801405368. in spanish. §songs of innocence and [of ] experience. [whitefish]: kessinger publishing, 2010. 43 pp.; isbn: 9781161453386. visions of the daughters of albion (1793) copies e and i they were reproduced in the william blake archive in 2010. copy g for the binding and history, see thel (j), above. editions *visions of the daughters of albion, copy e. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2010. <http://www.blakearchive.org>. *visions of the daughters of albion, copy i. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2010. <http://www.blakearchive.org>. section b: collections and selections blake’s works reprinted in conventional typography before 1863 addenda 1839 “introduction” to innocence, “laughing song,” “nurse’s song” (innocence), “the lamb,” “the little black boy,” “a cradle song,” “the school boy,” “on anothers sorrow,” plus a passage from thel. anon. “blake’s poetry.” monthly magazine (1839) <bbs pp. 342-43> 1845 §“the lamb.” the churchman’s companion in the closet; or, a complete manual of private devotions. ed. francis edward paget. new york: d. appleton and co., 1845. b. §new york: stanford & swords, 1853. c. §stanford and delisser, 1858. d. §new york: h. b. durand, 1862. 1861 §“the lamb.” light for early days. london: s. m. haughton; wertheim & co.; book society, 1861. 6-7. b. §london: darton & hodge, [1866]. 1862 §“the lamb.” a poetical reading-book. ed. w. m‘gavin. glasgow, 1862. 7. * * * * * * * * * §blake. trans. miha avanzo. ljubljana: mladinska knjiga, 1978. 21 cm., 113 pp. in slovenian. *blake’s poetry and designs. ed. mary lynn johnson and john e. grant. 1979, 2008. <bbs pp. 149-50, blake (2008)> review james rovira, college literature 36.4 (2009) <blake (2010)§> (“by all standards this is the best edition of blake available on the market today” [i.e., in print]). §*chants d’innocence; le mariage du ciel et de l’enfer; chants d’expérience. trans. bernard pautrat. paris: rivages, 2010. rivages poche/petite bibliothèque no. 676. 224 pp.; isbn: 9782743620790. in french. “the edition of the works of wm. blake” by “the blake press at edmonton” (1884-90) <bb #249> a unique, very blakean watercolor “title page by wm muir” (see illus. 1 online) was commissioned and paid for (£1.5.0, june 1889), presumably by “henry martin gibbs | of barrow court flax bourton | co. somerset”, whose bookplate appears in the volume, to accompany muir’s facsimiles of innocence, experience, visions, thel, marriage, milton, there is no natural religion, gates of paradise, and urizen, bound by zaehnsdorf (1890, £7.10.0).39 it omits america, europe, the song of los, on homer, and “little tom.” europe a prophecy. facsimilied by w. muir …. 1887. <bb #249k1) review anon., athenæum no. 3153 (31 mar. 1888): 410 (europe “has been facsimiled in an admirable manner” by muir; “blake could not possibly have understood what he wrote, and probably did not intend to mean anything”). the first book of urizen [b]. facsimilied by wm. muir …. 1888. <bb #249l> review anon., athenæum no. 3170 (28 july 1888): 137. §*eldfängd glädje. trans. jonas ellerström. lund: bakhåll, 2007. 22 cm., 78 pp.; isbn: 9789177422709. in swedish. §*the fly: poem. ed. yuri m. skovorodnikov. n.p.: skovorodnikov books, 1997. 13 cm., 18 pp.; no isbn. §the four zoas. [whitefish]: kessinger publishing, 2010. 38 pp. [sic]; isbn: 9781169191105. §helvedets proverber [proverbs of hell]. copenhagen, 1950. 26 pp. in danish. “holy thursday” (innocence). [jane and ann taylor]. city scenes. 1818, 1823, 1828 …. <bb #260, bbs pp. 156-57> the anonymous print in 1818 and 1823 (image 7.3 x 5.5 cm.), described in bb merely as “crude,” differs from that in 39. the complete set of muir facsimiles was offered by john windle, mar. 2010; the prices and dates here derive from an inventory, presumably by gibbs, which accompanies the volume. 12 blake/an illustrated quarterly summer 2011 1828 (image 7.1 x 4.4 cm.); in 1818, 1823 the girls follow the boys, while in 1828 the boys follow the girls.40 §infant joy and the blossom. n.p.: cherub press, 1981. miniature book 5.2 x 6 cm., 4 pp., 240 copies.41 §innocenza e crudeltà: liriche. trans. angelo zanon dal bo. milan: edizioni accademia, 1976. 21 cm., 306 pp. in italian. §izabrana dela [selected works]. trans. dragan purešić. belgrade: plato, 2007. in serbian. §izabrana poezija i proza [selected poetry and prose]. trans. dragan purešić. belgrade: itaka, 1998. 21 cm., 119 pp.; isbn: 8681635158. in serbian. §izabrane pesme [selected poems]. trans. vesna egerić. vrbas: slovo, 1997. 17 cm., 110 pp. in serbian. §a memorable fancy: the marriage of heaven and hell / une vision mémorable: le mariage du ciel et de l’enfer. [trans. marie-christine natta, illus. josé san martin, christine tacq]. thame: p’s & q’s press, 2007. 28 x 21 cm., 24 pp., 60 copies; no isbn. in english and french. §*poeme şi gravuri: poems and gravas [sic]. ed. cicerone theodorescu. bucharest: crater, 1999. 22 cm., 127 pp.; isbn: 9739029647. in romanian. §*poems. selected by james fenton. london: faber and faber, 2010. xxiv, 95 pp.; isbn: 9780571236039. poems by william blake. ed. alice meynell. 1911, [1927]. <bb #289> c. §[whitefish]: kessinger publishing, 2010. legacy reprint series. 244 pp.; isbn: 9781163898765. c is a digital reproduction of the 1911 edition. the poems of william blake. ed. w. b. yeats. 1893 …. <bb #293, bbs p. 161, blake (2003, 2009, 2010)> l. §[whitefish]: kessinger publishing, 2010. legacy reprint series. 324 pp.; isbn: 9781163393420. m. §[memphis]: general books, 2010. 292 pp. the poems, with specimens of the prose writings, of william blake. prefatory notice by joseph skipsey. 1885 …. <bb #298, blake (2003, 2009)> f. §n.p.: bibliobazaar, 2010. 296 pp.; isbn: 9781141086689. g. §[memphis]: general books, 2010. 304 pp.; isbn: 9781154815450. 40. details of the prints were first reported in essick, “blake in the marketplace, 2010,” blake 44.4 (spring 2011): 126-27. 41. essick, “blake in the marketplace, 2010,” blake 44.4 (spring 2011): 131. §poesie. introduzione di sergio perosa, cura e traduzione di giacomo conserva. 1976, 1991. <bbs p. 162, blake (1999, 2007)> c. 3rd ed. rome: newton, 2003. grandi tascabili economici. 22 cm., 198 pp. in italian. §poesie. novara: de agostini, [2005]. i tesori della poesia in miniatura. 9 cm., 344 pp. in italian. the poetical works of william blake. ed. john sampson. 1905 …. <bb #300, bbs p. 162> g. §[charleston]: nabu press, 2010. 7.4" x 9.7", 432 pp.; isbn: 9781177688857. *the poetical works of william blake. ed. john sampson. 1913 …. <bb #302> o. §[no editor named]. [memphis]: general books, 2010. 6" x 9", 270 pp.; isbn: 9781153250368. §poetry of william blake. ed. p. k. roy. jaipur: abd publishers, 2010. 353 pp.; isbn: 9788183760508. selections from the symbolical poems of william blake. ed. frederick e. pierce. 1915. <bb #323> b. §[whitefish]: kessinger publishing, 2010. legacy reprint series. c. §[charleston]: nabu press, 2010. 102 pp.; isbn: 9781176971240. §selections from the writings of william blake. ed. laurence housman. 1893. <bb #325> b. §[memphis]: general books, 2010. 308 pp.; isbn: 9781152598218. *songs of innocence and of experience. a portfolio of eighteen facsimile impressions. 2009. <blake (2010)§> two octavosize paper-covered “volumes” (13.9 x 19.4 cm.) within a huge hinged double-clamshell box (132.5 x 37 cm.). the text volume, *william blake: songs of innocence and of experience (1794): a note on production, consists of anon., [introduction] in the third person (5-8) and michael phillips, “a note on production” (9-34), with sections on “relief etching” (18-22), “printing the facsimile” (23-24), “ink” (25-26), “paper” (27-30), and “wrappers” (31), most of it “abstracted” (33) from his “the printing of blake’s america a prophecy,” print quarterly 21 (2004) <blake (2005)>. the plates were printed by “dennis hearne at flying horse editions.” the facsimile “volume” consists of a folded unmarked leaf with string through three stabholes plus 18 unsewn reproductions. review robert n. essick (see blake 44.3 in part vi). songs of innocence and [of ] experience with other poems. [ed. r. h. shepherd]. 1866, 1868, 2009. <bb #335, blake (2010)> review anon., north american review 108, no. 223 (apr. 1869): 64146 (with two others). §tygře, tygře, žhavě žhneš. trans. zdeněk hron. illus. vojtěch domlátil. prague: dokořán, 2010. mocca. 15 cm., 75 pp.; isbn: 9788073633066. in czech. summer 2011 blake/an illustrated quarterly 13 §*udvalgte skrifter. copenhagen: thaning & appel, 1970. 166 pp. in danish. §vizije. trans. marko grčić. zagreb: centar za društvene nauke, 1972. biblioteka centra, edicija pjesnici. 179 pp. in croatian? §vječno evanđelje. trans. marko grčić. zagreb: grafički zavod hrvatske, 1980. biblioteka zora 2. 20 cm., 196 pp. in croatian? “komentar” (172-89). william blake archive <http://www.blakearchive.org> in 2010 the archive added 39 illustrations to the bible (20 watercolors and 19 temperas), an island in the moon, milton (d) (all four copies are now reproduced in the archive), visions (e, i), and marriage (b, e). works by william blake. 1876. <bb #368, bbs p. 169> “a list of books published by chatto & windus” (london, dec. 1874)42 advertises blake’s works. messrs. chatto & windus have in preparation a series of reproductions in facsimile of the works of william blake, including the “songs of innocence and [of] experience,” “the book of thel,” “america,” “the vision[s] of the daughters of albion,”43 “the marriage of heaven and hell,” “europe, a prophecy,” “jerusalem,” “milton,” “urizen,” “the song of los,” &c. these works will be issued both coloured and plain. (36) the same works were named and a quotation from charles lamb added in “a list of books published by chatto and windus” (n.d.)44 and in the chatto & windus “list of books” (oct. 1876),45 omitting the lamb quotation. this seems to be the works by william blake, reproduced from copies of blake’s poems in the british museum. however, there are important differences. works by william blake omits milton, jerusalem, the marriage of heaven and hell, and “&c,” it was not colored, and the individual poems were not separately issued in “a series.” marriage was probably omitted because it had been reproduced in 1868 by john camden 42. it is bound at the end of charles wareing bardsley, english surnames: their sources and significations, 2nd ed. (london: chatto & windus, 1875) <virginia> and more puniana; or, thoughts wise and otherwhy’s, ed. hon. hugh rowley (london: chatto & windus, 1875). 43. note that the erroneous singular “vision” is found in both the chatto & windus list and in works by william blake. 44. it is bound with edward lee childe, the life and campaigns of general lee (london: chatto & windus, 1875) <michigan> and with other chatto & windus publications of 1875 and 1876. 45. bound with [william hurrell mallock], the new republic (london: chatto & windus, 1877) <harvard> and other chatto & windus publications. it does not appear in “a list of books published by chatto & windus” (may 1874) bound with [john camden hotten], the slang dictionary (london: chatto & windus, 1874) <michigan> or in chatto & windus lists after 1877. hotten, whose stock was taken over by chatto & windus.46 further, the chatto & windus lists do not suggest that the work was “for private circulation.” and after 1876 “blake’s works” no longer appeared in chatto & windus lists, though swinburne’s william blake: a critical essay (london: chatto & windus, 1868) was advertised in all these lists. chatto & windus had 100 sets of “blake reproductions” printed on 17 nov. 1877 and bound on 26 jan. 1878 <bbs p. 169>. plainly the works by william blake dated 1876 was not ready for distribution until 1878. jerusalem was probably omitted because an uncolored facsimile was published by john pearson in 1877 <bbs p. 88>. §works of william blake. boston: mobilereference, 2007. mobi collected works. isbn: 9781605011783. an e-book. *the works of william blake, poetic, symbolic, and critical. ed. edwin john ellis and william butler yeats. 1893 …. <bb #369, bbs pp. 169-70, blake (2008, 2009)> note the *prospectus for the poetic books of william blake, collected, and their myth and meaning explained by edwin john ellis and william butler yeats (london: quaritch, 1891) <national library of ireland>. §works: opere. trans. mihai stroe. 2 vols. iaşi: institutul european, 2006. in romanian and english. vol. 1: the prophetic books: vala, or the four zoas/cărţile profetice: vala sau cei patru zoa; vol. 2: the illuminated prophetic books: milton/cărţile profetice iluminate: milton. part ii: reproductions of drawings and paintings section a: illustrations of individual authors bible in 2010, 39 illustrations to the bible (20 watercolors and 19 temperas) were reproduced in the william blake archive. blair, robert, the grave (1805) edition *william blake’s watercolour inventions in illustration of the grave by robert blair. ed. martin butlin. 2009. <blake (2010)> review robert n. essick (see blake 44.3 in part vi). section b: collections and selections *binyon, laurence. the drawings and engravings of william blake. ed. geoffrey holme. 1922, 1967. <bb #404> 46. morton d. paley, “john camden hotten, a. c. swinburne, and the blake facsimiles of 1868,” bulletin of the new york public library 79 (1976) <bbs p. 598>. chatto & windus published a transcription of marriage with an introduction by francis griffin stokes in 1911. 14 blake/an illustrated quarterly summer 2011 c. §[charleston]: nabu press, 2010. 292 pp.; isbn: 9781177680431. part iii: commercial engravings47 section a: illustrations of individual authors bible illustrations of the book of job (1826 …) editions coutts, francis. the heresy of job: with the inventions of william blake. 1907. <bb #427> b. §[whitefish]: kessinger publishing, 2010. 196 pp.; isbn: 9781120888532. §*the book of job translated in rhyme by j. h. schwarz with william blake’s illustrations. peoria: rev. j. h. schwarz, 1974. it includes reproductions of “proof ” impressions of all blake’s prints save the title page.48 §*william blake’s illustrations of the book of job. with a commentary by dr. udo szekulics. vienna: udo szekulics, 2010. 64 pp.; isbn: 9783200017382. includes full-size reproductions of the 22 engravings. §illustrations of the book of job. [charleston]: nabu press, 2010. 52 pp.; isbn: 9781176714991. blair, robert, the grave (1808, 1813, [1870], 1926) the grave, a poem. [c. 1879]. <bbs p. 201> new location: victoria university in the university of toronto. editions §the grave: a poem illustrated by twelve etchings. [whitefish]: kessinger publishing, 2010. 26 pp.; isbn: 9781161364095. §the grave, a poem. illustrated by twelve etchings executed by l. schiavonetti, from the original inventions of william blake. [charleston]: nabu press, 2010. 86 pp.; isbn: 9781176652071. sales, etc., 1808-1830s49 1808 anon., “new works published in edinburgh,” scots magazine, and edinburgh literary miscellany 70 (sept. 1808): 683. 47. from 2010 i record pre-1863 references to separately issued prints. 48. the information derives from essick, “blake in the marketplace, 2010,” blake 44.4 (spring 2011): 131. 49. the sales records specify blake, 12 or 13 engravings or etchings, schiavonetti, quarto, and £2.12.6 for both 1808 and 1813 editions, unless otherwise noted. the quarto is sometimes qualified as “royal” (eclectic review, edinburgh review), “atlas” (ackermann ?1813, 1815, 1816, 1818, 1824, 1828), “elephant” (ackermann 1815, 1816, eastburn 1818, carey 1818, ackermann 1821-22, eastburn 1822, ackermann 1824), or “large elephant” (ackermann ?1813, 1818). anon., “list of works recently published,” eclectic review 4, part 2 (oct. 1808): 950 (under “poetry”). <harvard> anon., “quarterly list of new publications, from october 1808 to january 1809,” edinburgh review 13, no. 26 (jan. 1809): 500 (under “arts, fine”), 508 (under “poetry”). a catalogue of the … library of john leigh philips, esq. deceased … sold by auction, by messrs. winstanley & taylor, 17 oct. 1814 and 8 days (manchester, 1814) (lot 1400: 1808, £1.18.0 to brook). <harvard> a catalogue of a miscellaneous collection of books, new and second hand, on sale, at the prices affixed, by john and arthur arch, no. 61, cornhill, london. 1815. <bodleian> thomas edwards’s catalogue (1815) (lots 218, 527 [1808]). “mr. ackermann begs leave to solicit the attention ….” list of publications added to william warden, letters written on board his majesty’s ship the northumberland, and at saint helena; in which the conduct and conversations of napoleon buonaparte, and his suite, during the voyage, and the first months of his residence in that island, are faithfully described and related, 3rd ed. (london: published for the author, by r. ackermann, 1816) (“first edition, with proof impressions of the plates. atlas 4to. boards, 3l. 13s. 6d. n. b. a few copies only left of this edition”). <michigan>50 a general catalogue of books, now on sale, by lackington, hughes, harding, mavor, and jones, part 2 (1817) (lot 9916 [1808]). <british library> a catalogue of old books (london: longman, hurst, rees, orme, and brown, 1817) (lot 4902 [1808, £1.10.0]). lackington, hughes, harding, mavor, and jones’s general catalogue of books … for the year 1819 (lot 183 [1808, “gilt leaves”]). <bodleian, british library, harvard> catalogue of books for 1821 (r. ackermann, 1821) (as in his 1815 catalogue, below). [thomas] edwards’s catalogue (halifax, 1821) (lot 314 [1808, £3.3.0]). <bbs p. 284> <bodleian> catalogue of the valuable library of benjamin heath malkin, esq. ll.d. … sold … by mr. evans, 22 mar. 1828 and 6 days (lot 237 [1808 sold for 7s. 6d.]). <british library> catalogue of the library of david constable … which will be sold by auction, by d. speare … on wednesday, nov. 19. and twenty-one following lawful days (edinburgh, 1828) 75 (lot 1370). <michigan> 1813 ackermann prospectus (?1813) (“large elephant quarto” £2.12.6, “quarto atlas” £3.13.6).51 50. biographie universelle, ancienne et moderne, vol. 41 (paris: l. g. michaud, 1825) 124, lists blair’s grave (1813) in the entry on schiavonetti. ideen zur kunst-mythologie, ed. julius sillig, vol. 2 (dresden: in der arnoldischen buchhandlung, 1836) 506n (in german), also refers to the 1813 edition (“der geistvolle zeichner blake in seinen kupfern zu blairs grave …”) and describes three scenes. <michigan> note that ackermann had plainly purchased not only the copperplates and copyright but the remainder of the copies of the 1808 edition. 51. see bb p. 533. summer 2011 blake/an illustrated quarterly 15 a catalogue of books … property of john leigh philips, 11 nov. 1814 (lot 709 is 3 prints including “wm. blake, engraver, by schiavonetti, india paper, proof ”52 [ford, 15s.]). <harvard> catalogue of books, for 1815 (r. ackermann, 1815) (1808 “proof impressions of the plates, atlas 4to, £3.13.6—a few copies only left of this edition”; 2nd ed. (1813), elephant quarto, £2.12.6).53 “books published by r. ackermann.” list of publications added to frederic shoberl, a historical account … of the house of saxony … (london: r. ackermann, 1816). <michigan> a catalogue of a very extensive and valuable miscellaneous collection of books from the north of england [edwards of halifax] … sold by auction, by mr. saunders, 30 mar. 1818 and 15 days (lots 949-50 [£1.5.0 and £1.6.0]). <harvard> a catalogue of books for 1818 … on sale by james eastburn & co. (new york, may 1818) 10 (“with proof impressions of the plates,” $15). <new york public library> “works of art, published by r. ackermann.” list of publications added to fredrick accum, a practical treatise on gaslight, 4th ed. (london: r. ackermann, 1818) (“printed on large elephant quarto. 2l. 12s. 6d. extra boards.—a few copies on quarto atlas, 3l. 13s. 6d.”). catalogue of an extensive collection of books in every department of ancient and modern literature, for sale by m. carey and son (philadelphia, 1818) (“elephant 4to. with proofs. $15”). <new york public library> london catalogue (1818, 1831) lists murray as publisher. <bb p. 533> friedrich adolf ebert, allgemeines bibliographisches lexikon, vol. 1 (1821) (in german) (no. 2454). <bb #535> <taylor institution, oxford> “ackermann’s list of works.” added to the edinburgh review 36 (oct. 1821-feb. 1822). <stanford> a catalogue of books, … now on sale, for cash, … by james eastburn (new york, may 1822) (lot 17, “with proof impressions of the plates, elephant, boards, $15”). <harvard> “books, &c. published by r. ackermann.” added to dr. f. a. krummacher, parables, trans. from the german by frederic shoberl (london: r. ackermann, 1824) and to william combe, letters between amelia in london and her mother in the country (london: r. ackermann, 1824). <princeton> a catalogue of books … by rivingtons and cochran (1824) (lots 292, 11795). <bb #536> christie sale of william sharp, 18-19 feb. 1825 (lot 16, with portraits of british poets no. 1, £1.13.0). <british museum> a catalogue of the … library of the late henry fuseli, sotheby, 52. a copy with “proofs on india paper, russia” was listed in the catalogue of the splendid, choice, and curious library of p. a. hanrott, esq. part the first … sold by auction, by mr. evans, 16 july 1833 and 11 days, lot 630 (to “anh[?]” for £2.6.0). <british library> 53. the title given in the ackermann list (1815) for the “first edition” (1808)—“with biographical accounts of blair, schiavonetti, and cromek”—is in fact that of the 1813 second edition (“to which is added a life of the author”), and bb p. 533 mistakenly associates the advertisement with the second edition. 22-25 july 1825 (lot 123 [“rare, proofs,” 9s. 6d.]). <british library, british museum, royal academy> “new works published by r. ackermann.” added to asiatic costumes; a series of forty-four coloured engravings, from designs taken from life (london: r. ackermann, 1828) (£2.2.0). <bodleian> chaucer, geoffrey, the prologue and characters of chaucer’s pilgrims (1812) notice anon., “monthly list of publications,” british critic 39 (feb. 1812): 211 (“the prologue and characters of chaucer’s pilgrims, with a frontispiece, representing part of the group setting out from the talbot inn, southwark. by mr. william bake [sic]. 2s. 6d.”). <harvard> newly recorded title §european magazine, and london review 43 (apr. 1803) the oval frontispiece of “george romney, esq.r ” engraved by william ridley of romney’s self-portrait probably derives from blake’s miniature copied from the self-portrait for hayley, not from romney’s original (then belonging to hayley, now in the national portrait gallery, london). the evidence is persuasively laid out by mark crosby and robert n. essick, “‘the fiends of commerce’” (see blake 44.2 in part vi). flaxman, john, compositions from … hesiod (1817, 1870) new location: morgan library and museum. notice54 anon., “literary intelligence,” scots magazine and edinburgh literary miscellany 78 (may 1816): 373-74. flaxman, john, the iliad of homer (1805, 1870) new location: morgan library and museum. hayley, william, ballads (1805) new location: national library of denmark. hayley, william, designs to a series of ballads (1802) sales of all four ballads55 evans, sale of hayley’s library, 13 feb. 1821 and 12 following days, lot 1636, “hayley’s ballads, with blake’s designs, 4 numbers, 1802” (4s. 6d. to “smith”), and lot 1637, 3 numbers (“rivington,” 3s. 6d.), perhaps the copy in the national library of wales, “the only traced copy with 3 ballads.” sotheby, 29 nov.-9 dec. 1843, “second portion” of the library of archdeacon francis wrangham, lot 557 (30 nov.), “blake (w.) designs to a series of ballads written by w. hayley, plates, 4 parts chichester, 1802” (“evans,” 13s.). sotheby, 29-30 jan. 1878, sale of the library of albert george 54. advertisements and notices are included only when they specify “engraved by j. blake.” 55. the information derives from essick, “blake in the marketplace, 2010,” blake 44.4 (spring 2011): 142. 16 blake/an illustrated quarterly summer 2011 dew-smith (collector and photographer, 1848-1903), lot 197 (29 jan.), “blake (w.) designs to a series of ballads written by w. hayley, with the ballads annexed, fine impressions of the plates, green morocco extra, g. e. chichester, 1802” (£9 to “jones”); perhaps this is the essick copy in green morocco, all edges gilt. hayley, william, the life of george romney (1809) ordinary copies of hayley’s romney have a printed spine label reading “life | of | g. romney | — | hayley” <essick>, but that on large-paper copies reads “hayley’s | life | of | romney. | illustrated | with | twelve plates | by | caroline watson ” <essick>, though she engraved only 7 of them. newly recorded engraving after blake in caroline watson’s frontispiece of three self-portraits of romney, the small oval one at bottom representing romney wearing a hat is probably copied from blake’s lost miniature (mark crosby and robert n. essick, “‘the fiends of commerce’” [see blake 44.2 in part vi] 64). hayley, william, the triumphs of temper (1803, 1807) the two versions of the triumphs of temper dated 1807, each called the “thirteenth edition,” are typographically identical except for the title pages.56 the one without the blake prints is the second state of the thirteenth edition, not a new edition. malkin, benjamin heath, a father’s memoirs of his child (1806) edition §a father’s memoirs of his child. [charleston]: nabu press, 2010. 246 pp.; isbn: 9781178413212. rees, abraham, the cyclopædia (1802-20) pl. 3, “gem engraving” “engraved by w. blake & w. lowry” and “drawn by farey,” representing jupiter serapis, was “copied after pl. 2 in lorenz natter, a treatise on the ancient method of engraving on precious stones (london: for the author, 1754).”57 remember me! (1824, 1825) see the cumulative table on p. 17. reviews anon., mirror of literature, amusement, and instruction 4, supplementary no. 116 ([4 dec. 1824]): 413 (“this is another of those annual volumes to which mr. ackermann’s work has given rise. … remember me does not rest its claims to support on its superior graphic embellishments or good poetry, but to its botanical embellishments, which to say the truth, are very prettily coloured”). <new york public library> 56. mark crosby, “‘a ladys book’: blake’s engravings for hayley’s the triumphs of temper” (see blake in our time, under mulhallen in part vi). 57. essick, “blake in the marketplace, 2010,” blake 44.4 (spring 2011): 142. a. what i have called “diary” is headed “kalendar and album 1825.” all after p. 336 (the diary) is missing from cambridge copy 3, morgan, national library of wales copies 2-3, and new york public library, as in the issue of 1825. in addition, the date has been erased from the title page in cambridge copy 3 and national library of wales copies 2-3, and the engraved title page with the date is missing from the morgan copy. all these were presumably issued in 1825. b. cambridge copy 1 is bound in light-green grained morocco with black tooling round the edges of the boards, gilt tooling on the spine, and a brown title label on the spine with gilt lettering. for the copies now in cambridge, see bb #490 and bbs p. 247. c. in cambridge copy 6, the boards and spine are decorated in gilt with a red title label on the spine. d. essick copy 1, acquired from douglas cleverdon, is described in geoffrey keynes, blake studies, 2nd ed. (oxford: clarendon press, 1971) 144. e. the essick copy is bound in dark-red morocco, with gilt and blind decorations and “remember | me” on the spine; essick is fairly certain that it is a publisher’s binding. f. the harvard (houghton) copy, reproduced online <http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.fig:003640386>, shows the cover of dark-red pebble-grain cloth. g. the huntington copy lacks pp. 153-60. h. the morgan copy is inscribed “w. m. rossetti from swinburne 1878.” i. with extraordinary generosity, timothy cutts of the national library of wales rare book unit wrote me that the copy is sewn on three recessed cords laced into boards with a tight back, covered in full embossed purple skiver [soft thin sheepskin]. the headbands are sewn in blue and white thread. the spine is lettered in gold with four gilded panels, and the borders of the boards are tooled with an ornamental gold fillet line. j. national library of wales copy 2 has the date rubbed off the title page, and it has been rebound in a dark-green case binding with “1831” tooled in gold on the spine. there are no diary pages, and the copy ends at p. 336. the name w. h. davey has been scratched on the upper cover. k. national library of wales copy 3 comes from the library of francis william bourdillon (1852-1921), poet, literary scholar, and bibliographer, of midhurst, sussex. l. in the copy in the berg collection of the new york public library, beneath the green cover of the sleevecase is red paper. m. victoria university copy 1 (formerly essick’s) lacks pp. 73-74 (f. e1). summer 2011 blake/an illustrated quarterly 17 location cover color of edges color of endpapers inscription for gift or diarya color of sleevecase boston public library (1824) rebound gilt no endpaper none no sleevecase cambridge 1 (1824) green straight-grain moroccob gilt marbled blue and brown none no sleevecase cambridge 2 (1824) pink gilt slate gray yes pink cambridge 3 (1825?) cream yellow pink none bright green cambridge 4 (1824) cream gilt brown 1 in diary no sleevecase cambridge 5 (1824) brown gilt slate gray slate gray cambridge 6 (1824)c bright green gilt brown red essick 1 (1824)d pale green gilt orange red essick 2 (1825) <bbs p. 247> dark-red moroccoe gilt marbled harvard (1825) <bbs p. 247> reboundf white s. p. warren huntington (1824)g james madison university (1825) morgan library (1825?)h green straight-grain morocco gilt plain no sleevecase national library of wales 1 (1824) purplei sprinkled in red marbled gray with blue, pink, and orange francis fortuny no sleevecase national library of wales 2 (1825?)j rebound gilt plain none no sleevecase national library of wales 3 (1825?)k yellow front green, back white none orange new york public library (1825) <bb #490> cream front yellow brown, back cream bright greenl princeton (1824) <bb #490> rebound pink none harriet beecher stowe center (1824) rebound, leather spine gilt marbled gray and cream none no sleevecase victoria university in the university of toronto 1 (1824)m green straight-grain morocco gilt marbled victoria university in the university of toronto 2 (1824) paper white gilt green present university of virginia (1824) <bbs p. 247> remember me! (1824, 1825) a cumulative table 18 blake/an illustrated quarterly summer 2011 anon., monthly critical gazette 2, no. 8 (1 jan. 1825): 187 (“‘remember me’ differs very considerably from any of its rival cotemporaries [but it doesn’t say how]. its engravings, principally of flowers, are very beautiful”). <bodleian> salzmann, c. g., elements of morality (1791, 1792, 1799, 1805, ?1815) robert n. essick, “blake in the marketplace, 2010,” blake 44.4 (spring 2011): 141, suggests that the hand of blake’s apprentice thomas owen may be found in the anonymous salzmann prints dated oct. 1790 to mar. 1791: “they are technically quite simple, in comparison with blake’s other etchings/ engravings of the period, and contain awkward patches ….” stedman, john gabriel, narrative, of a five years’ expedition … (1796, 1806, 1813) 1796 new location: national library of sweden. blake’s engraving of “the skinning of the aboma snake” was copied in a general collection of the best and most interesting voyages and travels in all parts of the world; many of which are now first translated into english. digested on a new plan, by john pinkerton … illustrated with plates, vol. 14 (london: longman, hurst, rees, orme, and brown, and cadell and davies, 1813) at p. 257 <victoria university in the university of toronto> (see cover illus.; illus. 2 online). virgil, pastorals (1821) reviews, notices anon., “new books published in february,” monthly magazine 51, no. 351 (1 mar. 1821): 167 (“highly pleasing and instructive”). anon., “literary and scientific intelligence,” edinburgh magazine 8 (apr. 1821): 378. <bodleian> anon., “quarterly list of new publications, from march to july 1821,” edinburgh review 35, no. 71 (july 1821): 519. wollstonecraft, mary, original stories from real life (1791, 1796) edition mary wollstonecraft’s original stories with five illustrations by william blake with an introduction by e. v. lucas. 1906, 1977. <bb #514c, bbs p. 269> c. §original stories. with five illustrations by william blake with an introduction by e. v. lucas. [memphis]: general books, 2010. 132 pp.; isbn: 9781152567252. young, edward, night thoughts (1797) new location: national library of denmark. sales and collection records, 1798-184058 a catalogue of rare, splendid, and valuable books, in every 58. records marked † are also reported in wayne c. ripley, “printed references to and known prices of blake’s night thoughts, 1796-1826,” blake 43.2 (fall 2009): 72-75. the unseen (§) entries derive from him. branch of polite literature; including the entire libraries of the rev. harvey spragg … also of the rev. henry putman …. the sale will begin on february 19, 1798, by john white, bookseller, at horace’s head, in fleet-street, london (1798) (lot “1217 young’s night thoughts, a magnificent edition, with engravings from drawings by blake, 5l 5s to subscribers, when completed, boards — — — 1797”). <bodleian> † anon., “a correct list of new publications,” monthly magazine 5, no. 32 (june 1798): 455 (“young’s night thoughts, decorated with appropriate designs, by mr. blake, part 1. 1l. 1s. robson”). §englische blätter [english leaves], ed. l[udwig] schubart (erlangen, in der waltherschen kunstund buchhandlung, 1798) (the catalogue entries are in english, the commentaries in german: “young’s night thoughts, decorated with appropriate designs, by mr. blake, part. i.”). † a catalogue of valuable books, in various languages, and in every class of literature: which are to be sold, at the prices affixed to each article, by thomas payne, bookseller (london, 1799) (lot “777 young’s night thoughts, with engravings round each page from the designs of blake, 2 numbers, boards, — 1797 & 98”). <bodleian> † a catalogue of books, in every department of literature … now on sale by john white (london, mar. 1801) 50 (lot “1227 young’s night thoughts, a magnificent edition, with engravings from drawings by blake, boards, 5l 5s — 1797,” listed under folio). † a list of books, for sale at w[illiam nelson] gardiner’s, 48, pall-mall, at the ready money prices affixed (london: printed by j. barker, 1808) 40 (lot “860 young’s night thoughts, curious cuts, by blake, boards, 1l 5s 1797”). <bodleian> † §a catalogue of books, in english, greek, latin, french and italian literature, with a few articles in the spanish, portuguese, german, russian, and dutch languages for sale at w. gardiner’s, 48, pall-mall, at the ready money prices affixed (london: printed by j. barker, 1809) (all details as in 1808, above). † 1810. a catalogue of a small collection of ancient and modern books, selected with the greatest care, and containing many curious and rare articles, for sale at w. gardiner’s, 48, pallmall, at the ready money prices affixed (london: printed by j. barker, 1810) 47, 80 (lot “691 young’s night thoughts, curious cuts, by blake, boards, £1 5s — — 1796”; lot “1213 young’s night thoughts, with engravings by mr. blake, fol. boards, £1 5s — — 1797 this is one of the most singular and eccentric works that ever appeared”). <bodleian> † §a catalogue (part the first for 1810) of a curious and valuable collection of books, in various languages and classes of literature and including also a small but select collection of oriental manuscripts: which are now selling for ready money at the prices affixed by w[illiam] ford (manchester: printed by c. wheeler and son, 1810) (“night thoughts on life, death and immortality, with the singular designs round the margins by blake, calf cleg. ib. …”). <bodleian> † a catalogue (part the second for 1810-11) of a curious and summer 2011 blake/an illustrated quarterly 19 valuable collection of books, in various languages and classes of literature … which are now selling, for ready money, at the prices affixed to each article by w. ford, bookseller (manchester: printed by c. wheeler and son, 1811) (lot “15431 young’s complaint, and the consolation; or night thoughts with blake’s singular designs round the text. ib. [london] 1797.—blair’s grave, with engravings from the designs of blake. large paper. eleg. bd. in blue mor. &c. 8l 8s. ib. 1808”). <bodleian> † temple of the muses, finsbury square. lackington, allen, & co’s general catalogue, for the year 1811 (lot “264 young’s night thoughts, finely printed, with curious plates, designed and etched by blake, first 4 books, bds. 2l. 10s. 1797”; “6569 young’s night thoughts, (first four nights of) finely printed, with marginal plates, from designs by blake, bds. 2l. 10s.”). <bodleian> † lackington, allen, and co’s general catalogue of books, for the year 1815 (1815) (lot 119, “finely printed, with curious plates, designed and etched by blake,” £2.2.0). <huntington> librorum impressorum, qui in museo britannico adservantur, catalogus, vol. 7 (london, 1819) n. pag. (“young (edw.) d.d. … the complaint and the consolation or night thoughts, with marginal designs by mr. blake. fol. lond. 1797”). <new york public library> † §e. and a. evans, bookseller’s and printseller’s catalogue (london, 1820) (lot “421 blake (wm.) illustrations of young’s night thoughts, 4to. bds. 30s. — 1797”; “566 young’s night thoughts, with numerous fine plates by william blake, fol. bds. 1l. 1s. — — 1797”). † friedrich adolf ebert, allgemeines bibliographisches lexikon, vol. 1 (1821) (in german). <bb #535> <taylor institution, oxford> [thomas] edwards’s catalogue (halifax, 1821) (lot 16 [“many fine plates by blake,” gilt edges, £2.2.0]). <bbs p. 284> a catalogue of … books, (selected from the stock in trade) of mr. thomas edwards … auction, by messrs. thomas winstanley & co. … manchester (may 1826) (lots 1076 [blake’s night thoughts drawings] and 1224 [half bound, blue russia]). <bb #538> <bodleian> the english portion of the library of the ven. francis wrangham (1826) 626 (“young’s night thoughts i-iv [i.e., part 1] with marginal engravings by w. blake 1797,” listed under quartos). <bbs p. 284> <new york public library> a catalogue of the … library of the late george edward griffiths, esq. …. together with … the property of a well known amateur of the fine arts [thomas griffiths wainewright] (aug. 1831) (lot 1746). <blake (2002)> catalogue of the fifth and concluding portion of the valuable and extensive library of p. a. hanrott, esq. …which will be sold by auction, by mr. evans (mar. 1834) (lot “1245 young’s night thoughts, plates by blake,—1797”). <harvard> william thomas lowndes, the bibliographer’s manual of english literature …, vol. 2 (london: william pickering, 1834) 1999 (edward young, “the complaint or night thoughts. … with marginal designs by blake. london, 1797. fol. some copies have coloured plates”). <harvard> no. xix. london, 1836. a select catalogue of books, forming part of the stock of francis macpherson, 4 middle row, holborn (“young’s night thoughts; with marginal designs by blake. folio, boards, 1l. 11s. 6d.—1797”). catalog von kunstsachen und büchern welche in der anstalt für kunst und literatur (r. weigel) in leipzig vorräthig oder durch dieselbe besorgt werden, part 7 (leipzig, 1838) 23 (in german) (lists young’s night thoughts by blake). <fogg art museum> section b: collections and selections *butterworth, adeline m. william blake, mystic. 1911. <bb #516> b. §[charleston]: nabu press, 2010. 98 pp.; isbn: 9781171519058. appendix: books improbably alleged to have blake engravings hume, david, the history of england (london: robert bowyer, 1793-1806) <bbs p. 278> an advertisement for a prospectus (dated 2 jan. 1792) for bowyer’s edition of hume’s history of england appeared in the oracle for 30 jan. 1792. the work was to appear “in numbers,” “superbly ornamented,” but there is no indication of how many numbers or engravings. the “gentlemen … actually engaged” include “w. blake” among engravers.59 part iv: catalogues and bibliographies 1843 21 february [sotheby] catalogue of the second portion of the extensive singularly curious and valuable library of thomas jolley, esq. f.s.a. containing the first division of … the early english poets …. 1843. <huntington> lot 336 is “blake (william) poetical sketches privately printed, 1783 * * * contains king edward the third, a drama” [6d. to the dealer rodd]. this may be copy q, though it could equally well be k, m, or v-y.60 the catalogue was discovered by robert n. essick in 2010 while he was browsing in the huntington stacks. 1864 bernard quaritch. a catalogue of books …. 1864. <harvard> 6521 “blakiana.” ms. life of blake “extracted from cunningham’s lives … illustrated with numerous specimens of his works … including portions of his ‘songs of innocence and experience;’ ‘book of ahania;’ ‘europe, a prophecy;’ ‘books of thel and urizen;’ ‘[for the sexes: the] gates of paradise;’ ‘the elements’ [?for the sexes pls. 4-7 (“water,” 59. the advertisement was pointed out to me by mark crosby. advertisements in the oracle for 13-14 jan. and 6 feb. were already recorded. 60. copy y is the newly recorded copy owned by robert n. essick. 20 blake/an illustrated quarterly summer 2011 “earth,” “air,” “fire”)]; ‘canterbury pilgrimage,’ the large and scarce print, etc. in all 114 plates, some duplicates in different states and tinted by the artist: also 14 portraits of the artist; his friends, and contemporaries, including a portrait of thomas hayley, an original drawing, by w. blake: a manuscript index to the songs of innocence, believed to be in the autograph of the artist: list of original drawings and sketches sold by auction in 1862 [perhaps the sotheby sale of 29 apr. 1862, blake lots 158-202 <bb #565>], with the prices realised, etc. in 1 vol. impl. 4to. hf. bound, crimson morocco. … £21.” 6522 thel [j], motto, title, and 6 designs; visions [g], 11 designs; “in one volume, roy. 4to. olive morocco, gilt edges, by c. lewis, £15. 15s,” “the cuts in both pieces coloured in the artist’s peculiar style.” 6523 dante, 7 prints. 9032 “blake (william) [for the sexes:] the gates of paradise [g], impl. 4to. large paper, hf. morocco, gilt top, uncut, £6. 15s. consisting of twenty engraved leaves, the first being the title with an etching headed ‘for the sexes,’ …. the second is the frontispiece …,” “2 leaves containing an epilogue … ‘to the accuser ….’” 1878 29 january sotheby sale of a. g. dew-smith, 29-30 jan. 1878. the sale included america (b), visions (n), and blake’s copy of swedenborg’s divine love and divine wisdom (1788). review §academy (9 feb. 1878) (visions [n] sold for £30 and america [b] for £16.5.0). 1879 march bernard quaritch. no. 322. catalogue of english literature. mar. 1879. <bodleian> (see illus. 3 online) 12893 eleven letters from blake to hayley, 26 nov. 1800-4 june 1805, £52.10.0. 12894 “a projected work: original design (considerably different from the published engraving): ‘piping down the valleys wild, piping songs of pleasant glee, on a cloud i saw a child, and he laughing said to me:’— 5 verses of 4 lines each, on 1 leaf [songs pl. 4] the shepherd, a frontispiece 1 ” [songs pl. 2] an ideal hell 1 ” [butlin #217] —the three drawings in blake’s usual rich style of colouring, executed circa 1820, £10 from the collection of a friend of blake’s.” 1883 10 august bernard quaritch. no. 350. catalogue of some more works on the fine arts; painting, sculpture, architecture, miniatures and fine specimens of bookbinding chiefly obtained from private sources. 10 aug. 1883. <bodleian> (see illus. 4 online) 13842 blake drawings, “the butts collection,” 26 paintings, 3 vols. (2 folio, 1 royal octavo), “red morocco extra, with flaps like portfolios,” £1,200. it consists of comus, 8 designs “mounted to the size of 11 in. by 8½ in.” [butlin #528]. paradise lost, 9 designs “mounted to the size of 28 in. by 20 in.” [butlin #536 3-9, 11-12]. biblical designs, “mounted to the size of 22 in. by 17½ in.,” viz. “famine” [butlin #196]; “plague” [butlin #193]; “pestilence” [butlin #442]; “moses and the bronze serpent” [butlin #447]; “golia[t]h and david meeting” [butlin #457]; “the king of babylon moving to hell” [butlin #467]; “the whirlwind, ezekiel’s vision” [butlin #468]; “the woman caught in adultery” [butlin #486]; “abraham about to sacrifice isaac” [butlin #109] with, around the margins, heads of [various] [butlin #84]. 13843 forty sketches from “the tatham collection,” “in pencil or chalk (two or three of them washed in colour) with ms. inscriptions by frederic[k] tatham; mounted on 23 leaves of cardboard, and enclosed in a portfolio, hf. red morocco” [butlin #79, 81, 96-97, 103, 150, 177, 205, 211, 218, 228, 339, 369-73, 592, 598-99, 622, 643, 678, 756, 759, 788-89, 792-96, 816, 819, 824, 830-32, 834, r10] plus mrs. blake, “a face in the fire” [butlin #c2], and 4 wedgwood proofs, £36. 13844 “joseph of arimathea among the rocks of albion” [l] (1773), “this is one of the gothick artists …,” 10" x 5½", £4. 13845 thel [j] and visions [g] bound together, colored, “olive morocco extra, gilt edges, by hering,” £85, “fetched, 1881, [a]t christies £85 and was priced by the dealer who bought it £105.” 13846 “chaucers canterbury pilgrims,” £7.10.0. 13847 forty-five engravings “from the flaxman collection,” “including some early pieces of 1800 [perhaps hayley’s “little tom” (1800) or his essay on sculpture (1800)], the portraits of mr. and mrs. william cowper [presumably blake’s engravings for hayley’s cowper (1803), frontispiece of cowper after romney in vol. 1 or the frontispiece after lawrence in vol. 2, plus “mrs cowper | mother of the poet” in vol. 1, at p. 4],”61 £3.16.0. 1883 october bernard quaritch. catalogue of works on the fine arts …. oct. 1883. <harvard> 10249 three drawings for songs: “introduction” to innocence, “the shepherd” (frontispiece to innocence), and “an ideal hell” [butlin #217], “from the collection of a friend of blake’s,” £10. 10250 songs [u] from the beckford collection, £170. 10251 america [r], £36. 10252 the manuscript of cunningham’s life of blake with 103 engravings, with a manuscript index to the songs, £80. 10253 young’s night thoughts (1797), £12. 61. the other prints might have included some from flaxman’s naval pillar (1799), 3 pls., homer, iliad (1805), 3 pls., and hesiod (1817), 37 pls. summer 2011 blake/an illustrated quarterly 21 10254 blair, the grave (1808), £5.5.0. 10255 dante proofs with “2 portraits of dante and ms. descriptions added,” £10.10.0 [i have no other record of this]. 10256 job (1825), £16.16.0. 10257 works (1876), £4.4.0. 10258 “a collection of [11] books illustrated with blake’s plates,” £28. 10259 gilchrist (1880), 35s. 12295 descriptive catalogue [f], “green morocco extra, from beckford’s library, £10.10s.” 13842 drawings from the butts collection: comus, paradise lost, the bible, £1,200. 13843 tatham collection, 40 drawings on 23 leaves, £36. 13844 “joseph of arimathea” [l], £4. 13845 thel [j] bound with visions [g], £85. 13846 “chaucers canterbury pilgrims” (1810), 37" x 22", £7.10.0. 13847 forty-five engravings “from the flaxman collection,” £3.16.0. 13848 gilchrist (1880), 35s. 1890 23 april–1 may [sotheby] catalogue of a portion of the important library of thomas gaisford, esq. <bb #585> the thomas gaisford whose bookplate is in america (b), thel (c), europe (e), urizen (c), poetical sketches (n), innocence (h), songs (m), visions (i), and young’s night thoughts (1797) (colored copy g) is not the greek scholar (1779-1855), as in the bb index, but his son with the same name (b. 1816).62 1983 *robert n. essick. the separate plates of william blake: a catalogue. 1983. <bbs p. 301> for addenda, see blake 43.4 in part vi. 1991 *robert n. essick. william blake’s commercial book illustrations. 1991. <bbs p. 310> for addenda, see blake 43.4 in part vi. 2009 20 april–4 october *martin myrone, ed. seen in my visions: a descriptive catalogue of pictures. 2009. <blake (2010)> reviews robin blake, “william blake at tate britain,” financial times 25 apr. 2009 <blake (2010)§> (“the tate’s tribute to the most lovable of all english artists … is rather melancholy, and very touching”). *tom lubbock, “william blake: the art of a ‘lunatic’?” independent [london] 27 apr. 2009 <blake (2010)§> (largely about robert hunt’s review). 62. joseph viscomi, “two fake blakes revisited” (see blake in our time, under mulhallen in part vi) 70n11. *alexander gourlay (see blake 43.3 in part vi). §*andrew lambirth, art book 17.2 (2010): 73-74. 2009 11 september–2010 3 january william blake’s world: “a new heaven is begun.” morgan library and museum, new york. <blake (2010)> reviews63 *evan mantyk, “blake’s anti-atheism on display at morgan library,” epoch times 10 sept. 2009 <http://www.theepochtimes. com>. *lance esplund, “artist as oracle: the morgan’s exhibition of the work of william blake reminds us of the artist’s many gifts,” city arts 15 sept. 2009 <http://cityarts.info>. *jill krementz, “photo journal: william blake’s world,” new york social diary 15 sept. 2009 <http://www.newyorksocial diary.com> (32 reproductions). *anon., ao art observed 17 sept. 2009 <http://artobserved. com>. *beatrice v. thornton, “william blake at the morgan library,” magazine antiques 17 sept. 2009 <http://www.themagazine antiques.com>. arielle concilio, “william blake and the imagination at the morgan library and museum,” columbia daily spectator 22 sept. 2009 <http://blogs.columbiaspectator.com/spectacle> [arts blog]. *drew toal, “william blake’s world: ‘a new heaven is begun,’” time out new york 24-30 sept. 2009 <http://newyork. timeout.com>. *anon., “william blake’s world: ‘a new heaven is begun’ at the morgan library,” artrepublic.com sept. 2009 <http://www. artrepublic.com>. anon., “blake illuminations at morgan,” northport journal 8 oct. 2009. *anon., week 16 oct. 2009 <http://theweek.com>. *graham fuller, “extreme blake,” arts desk 18 oct. 2009 <http://www.theartsdesk.com>. *world journal 24 oct. 2009 <http://www.worldjournal.com> (in japanese). *thomas micchelli, “william blake’s world: ‘a new heaven is begun,’” brooklyn rail oct. 2009 <http://www.brooklynrail. org>. *marjorie welish, “extreme art: the creative talent of william blake and eighteenth-century french drawings are at the morgan library,” new york observer 9 nov. 2009. *chloe malle, “william blake’s heavenly imagination,” daily beast 12 nov. 2009 <http://www.thedailybeast.com>. *anon., “william blake @ the morgan: tyger, tyger!” ecognoscente [new york] nov. 2009 <http://www.ecognoscente. com>. *greta berman, “william blake: praise the lord with stringed instruments,” juilliard journal 25.3 (nov. 2009). 63. reviews of the exhibition only (there was no catalogue), omitting mere notices. 22 blake/an illustrated quarterly summer 2011 *peggy roalf, “william blake: sympathy for the devil,” design arts daily 8 dec. 2009 <http://www.ai-ap.com/dart>. *menachem wecker, “did william blake know hebrew?” jewish daily forward 11 dec. 2009 <blake (2010), under wecker in part vi) (also at <http://www.forward.com>). *michaelanthony mitchell, “william blake at the morgan,” mapcidy 18 dec. 2009 <http://www.mapcidy.com>. *morton d. paley (see blake 43.4 in part vi). *anon., artmagick (date unknown) <http://www.artmagick. com>. richard goodman, fine books and collections (date unknown), 5 pp. 2009 12 september–2010 3 january michael phillips and the infernal method of william blake. cornell fine arts museum, rollins college. review james rovira (see blake 44.3 in part vi). 2010 19 june–10 july *william blake: engravings for the book of job and other prints. larkhall fine art ltd. (bath). exhibition with only an invitation card. 2010 3 august–2 october *[karen mulhallen]. remember me! blake in our time: a keepsake book in celebration of an exhibition and symposium on the life and art of william blake (1757-1827) [at] victoria university, toronto. [toronto: victoria university, 2010]. horizontal 8o, 64 pp., 38 reproductions, 61 exhibits; isbn: 9780986707100 (see illus. 5 online). the exhibition focuses particularly on works acquired since the gift (2005) of the bentley collection of blake and his contemporaries (see the victoria university exhibition of 30 oct.15 dec. 2006 <blake (2007)>), including the extra-illustrated bray, life of thomas stothard (1851) (see pp. 13, 22, 24-25), diario de los niños (1839-40) (pp. 16-17), varley, zodiacal physiognomy (1828) (pp. 18-19), stothard, “the fall of rosamond” (1783) (pp. 22-23), watteau, “morning [and] evening amusement” (1782) (pp. 26-28), morland, “the idle laundress” and “the industrious cottager” (pp. 29-31), “chaucers canterbury pilgrims” (1810) (pp. 34, 36-37), “spring” (pp. 46-47), and remember me! (1824, two copies, one with the rare color-printed slipcase) (pp. 52-55). marriage (m) is reproduced entire. the undated draft letter by william hayley addressed to “dear poet & philosopher” (laid into a copy of hayley’s triumphs of temper [1803]) was almost certainly sent to erasmus darwin, not “to william blake” (p. 21). the letter recommends “my excellent friend flaxman who is just returned [in 1794] from rome” as a sculptor for a monument to wedgwood (flaxman’s monument to wedgwood is in stoke-ontrent church). the exhibition and catalogue were associated with blake in our time: a symposium celebrating the future of blake studies and the legacy of g. e. bentley jr (28 aug. 2010), organized by karen mulhallen, and the launch of blake in our time: essays in honour of g. e. bentley jr, ed. karen mulhallen (see part vi). podcasts in video and audio of the symposium and still photos of the exhibition are available online <http:// library.vicu.utoronto.ca/blake_in_our_time/podcasts.html>. the symposium part consists of: karen mulhallen. “welcome and introductions.” robert n. essick. “collecting blake.” (about great collectors of the past, not about his own major collection.) joseph viscomi. “recovering the earliest versions of blake’s oddest book.” (about the song of los.) mary lynn johnson. “blake’s pictures at ‘the salterns’ and how captain butts challenged his sister’s inheritance.” angus whitehead. “blake and george cumberland’s ‘pocketbooks.’” john e. grant. “songs for thomas butts: visions of the ‘title page,’ ‘earth’s answer’ and ‘the tyger.’” dennis read. “disputing the sins of his father: thomas cromek contra gilchrist.” garry leonard. “without contraries is no progression: did blake invent modernist cinema?” stephen nachmanovitch. “job returns—a music and multimedia meditation on blake’s illustrations of the book of job.” (introduced by brian corman.) mark crosby. “blake’s seal[s].” (the images with which he sealed his letters.) keri davies. “brother blake and sister blake and the lost moravian history of william blake’s family.” susanne sklar. “the mouth of a true orator: jerusalem’s operating instructions.” part v: books owned by william blake the poet newly recorded title title page: the | mystical initiations; | or, | hymns | of | orpheus | translated from the original | greek: | with a preliminary dissertation | on the | life and theology of orpheus; | by | thomas taylor. | [greek motto] | london, | printed for the author, | and ſold by t. payne and son, at the mews-gate; l. | davis, holborn; b. white and son, fleet-ſtreet; and | g. nichol, strand. 1787.64 location: bodleian library, arch. h e.181. history: offered “newly bound in calf ” at £2.2.0 in bernard quaritch’s catalogue (no. 414) (london, feb. 1928);65 “bt. 64. my transcription derives from the copy in the rylands library, university of manchester, via eighteenth century collections online, not from the copy in the bodleian. 65. it does not appear in quaritch’s catalogue (no. 410) (oct. 1927), which lists many other books by taylor, suggesting that it was newly acquired by quaritch in 1928. the quaritch catalogue does not mention the annotations. summer 2011 blake/an illustrated quarterly 23 from quaritch” (according to an inscription on the front pastedown) by the bodleian library, where it was stamped 29 sept. 1928. its blake associations were first noticed by philip cardinale in 2001 and recorded by philip and joseph cardinale in blake 44.3 (winter 2010-11): 84-102, the source of almost all the information here. binding: bound, probably in 1928, in brown calf. annotations and underlinings: there are annotations on pp. vii-viii and 69, corrections of printer’s errors on pp. 89 and 225, and underscoring and sidebars on pp. iv-v, vii-viii, 1-3, 5-6, 9-10, 14-15, 19-22, 26-28, 30, 44-47, 68, 70-72, 75-76, 7879, 84, and 97. “all the handwriting and most of the underlining … appear in orange-brown ink; some underlining and markings are in a darker, brown-black shade of ink. pencil marks appear on pages 14, 30, 44, 68, 70, and 97” (cardinale and cardinale 85). the only extensive note says: there is no instance of a poet writing good eng. blank verse who has not also written good rhyme: but many have written good rhyme who have shewn no capability of writing. good blank verse — handwriting: minute comparison with an island in the moon (?1784-85) strongly suggests that the hand which wrote the annotations in taylor’s book is that of william blake, and the two inks used in underlining are much like those blake used. the identification of blake as the creator of the pencil marks is much more speculative but still plausible. there were reviews in critical review 63 (june 1787): 40106; town and country magazine 19 (july 1787): 293; european magazine, and london review 12 (july 1787): 18-19 (5s.; “mr. taylor hath displayed no common erudition”; “we warmly recommend the ‘dissertation’”; “though mr. taylor may not be ranked very high as a poetical translator, he may be placed in no inferior station among the proficients in abstruser literature”); monthly review 79 (aug. 1788): 133-42. appendix: books owned by the wrong william blake bible §the bible in miniature, or a concise history of the old and new testaments. london: e. newbery, 1780. a copy is inscribed in ink in “the same juvenile hand” on the front and rear pastedowns “a a blake” and “w blake.” robert n. essick, to whom the work was offered in nov. 2010 by maggs, concludes that it is “very unlikely that these inscriptions … are by the poet and artist.”66 let us assume charitably that they are by one of the host of contemporary individuals named “william blake” or “w. blake.”67 66. essick, “blake in the marketplace, 2010,” blake 44.4 (spring 2011): 125. 67. see “‘my name is legion: for we are many’: ‘william blake’ in london 1740-1830,” br(2) 829-45. part vi: criticism, biography, and scholarly studies adams, hazard. antithetical essays in literary criticism and liberal education. 1990. <bbs p. 330> for a revised version of chapter 4, see blake’s margins, below. *adams, hazard. blake’s margins: an interpretive study of the annotations. 2009. 4o, 204 pp.; isbn: 9780786445363. <blake (2010)§> it consists of chapters on blake’s annotations to (1) lavater, aphorisms (7-27); (2) swedenborg, heaven and hell, divine love, and divine providence (28-60); (3) watson, apology (61-80); (4) bacon, essays (81-96); (5) dante, inferno, trans. boyd (97-108); (6) reynolds, discourses (109-38); (7) spurzheim, insanity (139-49); (8) berkeley, siris (150-59); (9) wordsworth, poems and preface to the excursion (160-76); (10) thornton, lord’s prayer (177-92); plus (11) “addendum” (193-94) and (12) “a note on blake’s reading” (195-97). earlier versions of chapter 6 appeared as “revisiting reynold[s]’s discourses and blake’s annotations,” blake in his time, ed. robert n. essick and donald pearce (1978) <bbs pp. 466-68> and in his antithetical essays in literary criticism and liberal education (1990) <bbs p. 330>. reviews jason whittaker, zoamorphosis: the blake 2.0 blog <http:// zoamorphosis.com> 16 feb. 2010 (“there is little that is specifically new or innovative,” but it is useful on the context). §morton d. paley, new books on literature 19 <http://www. nbol-19.org> 22 may 2010. shirley dent, times literary supplement 2 july 2010: 26-27 (with another) (it is his “close and unswerving attention to what blake has to say” that makes the book “so rewarding”). §*adams, hazard. william blake on his poetry and painting: a study of a descriptive catalogue, other prose writings and jerusalem. jefferson: mcfarland & company, 2010 (copyright 2011). 199 pp.; isbn: 9780786449866. §alves, andrea lima. “a interação entre texto e ilustrações nos illuminated books de william blake pelo prisma da obra america, a prophecy [the interaction between text and illustration in the illuminated books of william blake through his work america, a prophecy].” universidade estadual de campinas phd, 2007. in portuguese. anon. [under blake (1758-1828)]. pierer’s universal-lexikon der vergangenheit und gegenwart. vol. 2. altenburg: verlagsbuchhandlung von h. a. pierer, 1857. 841. in german. §anon. art by william blake. [memphis]: general books, 2010. 107 pp.; isbn: 9781155319315. not illustrated. anon. “attack and defence of swedenborg in the cheltenham examiner.” intellectual repository and new jerusalem magazine 5, no. 60 (nov. 1839): 663. <bodleian> 24 blake/an illustrated quarterly summer 2011 the attack in the cheltenham examiner, 4 sept. 1839, assumes that the new edition of blake’s songs is “a fair specimen of what ‘swedenborgianism’ truly is.” a reply by “a swedenborgian” is in the issue for 18 sept., but it does not point out “that swedenborg and his doctrines are in no degree answerable for the phantasies and absurdities of blake,” whose “childish” poems should be called “songs of silliness and diseased perception.” anon. “blake, katharine.” sarah josepha hale. woman’s record; or, sketches of all distinguished women, from “the beginning” till a.d. 1850. 1853. <blake (2010), under hale> b. … from the creation to a.d. 1854. new york: harper & brothers, 1855. c. … a.d. 1868. new york: harper & brothers, 1870. d. biography of distinguished women; or, woman’s record, from the creation to a.d. 1869. new york: harper & brothers, 1876. e. 1970. mostly quotation from “a writer, who knew them intimately” [cunningham ¶10]; blake died in 1828 and “she died a few years afterwards.” anon. “britain’s tate unveils mislaid blake etchings.” yahoo! news canada 11 jan. 2010 [afp news agency]. <http:// ca.news.yahoo.com>. the tate “unveiled monday eight ‘powerful’ etchings by … william blake, which lay undiscovered for decades before turning up at a second-hand book sale” “tucked inside a railway timetable in a box of books.” they were bought by the tate for £441,000 with the help of the art fund. the vendor “has asked to remain anonymous.” they “will go on public display” at the tate in july and will then “travel to the pushkin state museum of fine art in moscow in november 2011 for the exhibition william blake and british visionary art.” anon. [miss flaxman]. “john flaxman, esq. p.s. r.a.” gentleman’s magazine 97.1 (mar. 1827): 273-76; (may 1827): 472. an obituary consisting mostly of a list of monuments. “his illustrations of hesiod were made after his return to england. the original drawings remain in the possession of his sisters; and engravings from them, by w. blake, were published in 1816 [i.e., 1817]” (273). §anon. poetry by william blake. [memphis]: general books, 2010. 165 pp.; isbn: 9781155789132. a collection of notes about blake’s poems from wikipedia. *anon. “william blake etchings secured for the nation: eight etchings by william blake have been acquired for the nation after the tate gallery raised £441,000.” bbc news 11 jan. 2010. <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news>. they are from the small book of designs (b). §anon. william blake le mariage du ciel et de l’enfer, and did those feet in ancient time, urizen, grand dragon rouge, mythologie de william blake. [memphis]: general books, 2010. 30 pp.; isbn: 9781153608565. in french. it consists of entries from wikipedia. anon. “william blake: the illustrator of the grave, &c.” literary gazette (1827) <bb #1071a> this appeared, seemingly word for word, in the standard [london] 18 aug. 1827. §anon. works inspired by william blake. [memphis]: general books, 2010. 40 pp.; isbn: 9781156203736. it consists of entries from wikipedia. §basan, f. dictionnaire des graveurs anciens et modernes. 2nd ed. paris: chez l’ auteur, cuchet, et prault, 1789. 1: 70. b. f. basan. supplément au dictionnaire des graveurs anciens et modernes. 1791. <bb #a1129> c. p. f. and h. l. basan. dictionnaire des graveurs anciens et modernes. 2nd ed. 1809. <bb #1129> the first edition of the dictionnaire (1767) had no blake entry. the entry in the 1789 edition is the same as those in 1791 and 1809, “except for minor differences in punctuation and spelling,” according to robert n. essick, “blake in the marketplace, 2010,” blake 44.4 (spring 2011): 125. §beer, john. “blake’s poetry and prophecies.” the cambridge history of english poetry. ed. michael o’neill. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2010. *bentley, g. e., jr. “pictura ignota: blake’s most seen, least known painting.” descant 41.4 (winter 2010): 73-103. the *painting (1812) is the inn sign, perhaps 6' x 8', for the courtyard of the talbot (formerly tabard) inn in southwark representing “chaucer and his merry company setting out [from the inn] on their journey” to canterbury (see illus. 6 online). the sign, visible for 60 years, was repeatedly described and ascribed to blake in the nineteenth century, but has been forgotten since then. another painting hung “over the gateway” representing chaucer may also have been by blake. bentley, g. e., jr. william blake’s conversations. 2008. <blake (2009)> review mark lussier, university of toronto quarterly 79.1 (winter 2010): 427-28 (with its “superb introduction,” written in an “engaging style,” “bentley’s william blake’s conversations will join his other foundational works in exerting an enabling influence on future research”). §bjelogrlić, aleksandar. “blejk na pragu novog doba [blake at the threshold of the new age].” nevidljivi arhipelag. belgrade: praizvorni zivot, 1994. 15-29. in serbian. summer 2011 blake/an illustrated quarterly 25 blake/an illustrated quarterly volume 43, number 3 (winter 2009-10) angus whitehead. “mark and eleanor martin, the blakes’ french fellow inhabitants at 17 south molton street, 180521.” 84-95. (wonderfully rich “new information concerning martin, his wife, his nationality, and his trade” [84].) reviews *alexander gourlay. william blake’s 1809 exhibition, tate britain, 20 apr.-4 oct. 2009; martin myrone, ed., seen in my visions: a descriptive catalogue of pictures. 96-100. (the exhibition “is no more successful than the original … in communicating blake’s ideas” [96].) nancy m. goslee. matthew j. a. green, visionary materialism in the early works of william blake (2005). 100-04. (“the struggle to understand his study is well worth the time” [104].) minute particulars morton d. paley. “‘and the sun dial by blake’ (butlin #374a).” 105-06. (about a lost drawing by blake.) g. e. bentley, jr. “blake copperplates in the thomas ross archive.” 107-08. (the copperplates in the archive of the printpublishing firm of thomas ross are almost certainly copies of blake’s plates, not the originals.) wayne c. ripley. “the early marketing of the grave in london and boston.” 109-10. (about puffs by cromek in universal magazine [july 1806], monthly magazine [aug. 1806], and monthly anthology [oct. 1806].) nelson hilton. “waxed in blake.” 110-11. (the first stanza of bob dylan’s “gates of eden” strongly recalls marriage pls. 17-18.) blake/an illustrated quarterly volume 43, number 4 (spring 2010) *robert n. essick. “blake in the marketplace, 2009.” 11648. (enormously impressive, comprehensive, and detailed. it includes an “appendix: new information on blake’s engravings” for his the separate plates of william blake [1983] and william blake’s commercial book illustrations [1991] [148].) review *morton d. paley. william blake’s world: “a new heaven is begun,” morgan library and museum, 11 sept. 2009-3 jan. 2010. 149-51. (a “major exhibition”; “although there is no catalogue, the entire exhibition is posted on the morgan web site” [151].) remembrance “karl kroeber, 1926-2009.” 151. (reprinted from philip petrov, “karl kroeber, or living and dying in the present,” columbia spectator 12 nov. 2009: 4.) newsletter anon. “conference in oxford … and in toronto.” 151. (blake, gender, and sexuality in the twenty-first century is organized by helen bruder and tristanne connolly, 15-16 july 2010, at st. aldate’s church, oxford, and blake in our time, organized by karen mulhallen, “will celebrate the future of blake studies and the legacy of g. e. bentley, jr., on 28 august 2010 at victoria university in the university of toronto.”) blake/an illustrated quarterly volume 44, number 1 (summer 2010) g. e. bentley, jr., with the assistance of hikari sato for japanese publications. “william blake and his circle: a checklist of publications and discoveries in 2009.” 4-48. (the 269 previously unrecorded references to blake before 1863 helped swell the checklist to fill the whole issue, and even so the introduction was severely curtailed, some entries were conflated or postponed, and the customary “addenda and corrigenda to blake records, 2nd ed. (2004), … now appear on the journal’s web site …. they will be updated yearly” [4]. the most remarkable discovery [by david alexander] is the apprenticeship record [1788] of thomas owen to william blake [5].) blake/an illustrated quarterly volume 44, number 2 (fall 2010) *mark crosby and robert n. essick. “‘the fiends of commerce’: blake’s letter to william hayley, 7 august 1804.” 52-72. (blake’s newly discovered letter is reproduced, transcribed, and most impressively annotated.) review jason whittaker. nicholas m. williams, ed., palgrave advances in william blake studies (2006). 73-75. (it “offers a fairly comprehensive view of critical approaches to blake in the early twenty-first century” [73].) minute particular *paul miner. “blake’s design of nebuchadnezzar.” 75-78. (one source of marriage pl. 24, first suggested by frederick york powell, “blake’s etchings,” academy 7 [16 jan. 1875]: 66, but later ignored, is probably in le sieur de royaumont [nicolas fontaine], the history of the old and new testament [1691, 1701, 1703, 1705, etc., in english, 1670 in french].) blake/an illustrated quarterly volume 44, number 3 (winter 2010-11) *philip j. cardinale and joseph r. cardinale. “a newly discovered blake book: william blake’s copy of thomas taylor’s the mystical initiations; or, hymns of orpheus (1787).” 84102. (an admirably argued demonstration that the annotations in a copy of taylor’s book in the bodleian are in a hand “strikingly similar” to that in an island in the moon [?178485], and the extensive underlinings and sidebars in similar inks are probably also by blake. color versions of pp. vii-viii are reproduced at <http://www.blakequarterly.org>.) reviews *robert n. essick. martin butlin, ed., william blake’s watercolour inventions in illustration of the grave by robert blair (2009); michael phillips, ed., songs of innocence and of experience: a portfolio of eighteen facsimile impressions (2009). 103-10. (“the reproductions of the twenty grave watercolors are excellent” [104], and the flying horse edition “is certainly a handsome object” [106].) james rovira. michael phillips and the infernal method of william blake, cornell fine arts museum, rollins college, 26 blake/an illustrated quarterly summer 2011 12 sept. 2009-3 jan. 2010. 110-11. (the exhibition included phillips’s reproductions of copperplates and prints from them of songs [18 plates and prints], america pl. 1, europe [5], and “inking daubers, historical pigments …”; “illustrations of the exhibition and of some of the phillips copperplates and impressions are online at … <http://www.blakequarterly.org>.”) §blake, david, and elliott gruner. “redeeming captivity: the negative revolution of blake’s visions of the daughters of albion.” symbiosis: a journal of anglo-american literary relations 1.1 (1997): 21-34. §bogoeva, ljiljana. “blejk i nadolazece vreme [blake and the future].” student no. 6 (mar. 1973). in serbian. §bogoeva, ljiljana. “u traganju za identitetom: primer vilijama blejka i vilijama butlera jejtsa [in search of identity: examples of william blake and william butler yeats].” gradina 9 (1980): 44-53. in serbian. boldina, alla. “androgynous imagination in romantic and modernist literature: from william blake and elizabeth barrett browning to d. h. lawrence and h. d.” state university of new york (binghamton) phd, 2007. <blake (2008)> it was published in her book (see below). §boldina, alla. androgynous imagination of difference: from william blake and elizabeth barrett browning to d. h. lawrence and h. d. saarbrücken: vdm verlag dr. müller, 2007. isbn: 9783836461788. apparently derived from her thesis (see above). borkowska, eliza. but he talked of the temple of man’s body: blake’s revelation un-locked. 2009. <blake (2010)§> a philosophical consideration of blake and john locke. §brown, mark. “tate britain makes room for william blake art found in railway timetable: curator [philippa simpson] says of eight tiny, hand-coloured works tackling big themes: ‘it’s probably best not to get into too much detail.’” guardian [london] 12 aug. 2010. <http://www.guardian.co.uk> the prints are from the small book of designs (b). *bruder, helen p., and tristanne connolly, eds. queer blake. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, 2010. isbn: 9780230218369. there are some queer uses of “queer” here. helen p. bruder and tristanne connolly. “introduction: ‘what is now proved was once, only imagin’d.’” 1-20. (“blake’s queer themes are striking and abundant” [12].) helen kidd. “pansexuality (regained).” 21-22. (a poem.) 1. christopher z. hobson. “blake and the evolution of samesex subjectivity.” 23-39. (about “ideas of same-sex subjectivity” [23].) 2. richard c. sha. “blake and the queering of jouissance.” 40-49. (about “jouissance, meaning enjoyment” [40], i.e., masturbation.) 3. *peter otto. “drawing lines: bodies, sexualities and performance in the four zoas.” 50-62. (about swedenborg and the illustrations on four zoas pp. 40, 112.) 4. elizabeth c. effinger. “anal blake: bringing up the rear in blakean criticism.” 63-73. 5. *martin myrone. “the body of the blasphemer.” 74-86. (about blake’s picture of the stoning of the blasphemer.) 6. jason whittaker. “trannies,68 amputees and disco queens: blake and contemporary queer art.” 87-96. 7. helen p. bruder. “‘real acting’: ‘felpham billy’ and grayson perry try it on.” 97-115. (about the “pickering manuscript” and felpham; perry is a “peerless transvestite” [97].) 8. tristanne connolly. “‘fear not / to unfold your dark visions of torment’: blake and emin’s bad sex aesthetic.” 11639. (tracey emin is an artist and poet.) 9. bethan stevens. “‘woes & … sighs’: fantasies of slavery in visions of the daughters of albion.” 140-52. 10. caroline jackson-houlston. “‘the lineaments of … desire’: blake’s visions of the daughters of albion and romantic literary treatments of rape.” 153-62. 11. *steve clark. “‘yet i am an identity / i wish & feel & weep & groan’: blake’s sentimentalism as (peri)performative.” 16385. 12. david fallon. “‘by a false wife brought to the gates of death’: blake, politics and transgendered performances.” 186-98. 13. mark crosby. “‘no boys work’: blake, hayley and the triumphs of (intellectual) paiderastia.” 199-208. (about hayley’s teaching boys such as the sons of the earl of egremont and e. g. marsh, as well as blake.) 14. susan matthews. “‘hayley on his toilette’: blake, hayley and homophobia.” 209-20. (about “blake’s use of the satirical figure of the effeminate man in post-1800 references to william hayley” [209].) 15. keri davies. “‘my little cane sofa and the bust of sappho’: elizabeth iremonger and the female world of book-collecting.” 221-35. review max fincher, times literary supplement 6 aug. 2010: 26 (blake as “a queer icon”). *brus, günter. brus’s + blake’s jobs: bild-dichtung, werke auf papier, nachwort, transkription, impressum, vorzugsausgaben. klagenfurt: ritter verlag, 2008. 4o (30 cm.), 162 + 22 pp.; isbn: 9783854154327. in german. the work consists of notes, doodles, and echoes of blake’s designs from “the ancient of days” to dante. it originated in a symposium on his seventieth birthday, 18 oct. 2008, and an exhibition 17 oct. 2008-25 jan. 2009 at neue galerie graz, austria. 68. a “tranny” is apparently a transvestite. summer 2011 blake/an illustrated quarterly 27 §burdett, osbert. william blake’s poland street and the early prophecies. [whitefish]: kessinger publishing, 2010. 17.8 x 25.4 cm., 26 pp.; isbn: 9781161538748. an extract from burdett’s william blake (1926) <bb #1316>. *bürger, m. w. [i.e., j. thoré]. “william blake.” histoire des peintres de toutes les écoles: école anglaise. 1863. <bb #1317> the wood engraving of “death’s door” (11.3 x 17.4 cm.), signed “l. chapon” (i.e., léon louis chapon [1836-1918]), is not noted in bb.69 the work seems to consist of individually paginated chapters first issued separately. *buryn, ed. the william blake tarot of the creative imagination. 1995. <blake (1996)> b. §2010. mary k. greer’s tarot blog <http://marygreer.wordpress. com>, 9 sept. 2010, announces the “revised edition of the william blake tarot.” the 2010 edition is said to have better colors, etc. ed buryn, “my ex-husband,” created it, but mary greer had a lot to do with the original. *cary, elisabeth luther. the art of william blake: his sketchbook, his water-colours, his painted books. 1907. <bb #1349> b. §[charleston]: nabu press, 2010. 25 cm., xi, 56 pp., xlix leaves of pls.; isbn: 9781146920360. §chapman, wayne k. “blake, swedenborg, and a vision: a case for recombinate influence.” yeats’s poetry in the making: sing whatever is well made. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, 2010. 154-85 (chapter 7). *cheney, sheldon. “a mystic in the age of enlightened scepticism: william blake.” men who have walked with god. 1945. <bb #1378> b. §william blake: a mystic in the age of enlightened skepticism. [whitefish]: kessinger publishing, 2010. 8.5" x 11", 88 pp.; isbn: 9781161595062. *chesterton, g. k. william blake. 1910 …. <bb #1381, bbs p. 436, blake (2003)> j. §[charleston]: nabu press, 2010. 226 pp. chevalier, tracy. burning bright. 2007. <blake (2008, 2009, 2010)> the german translation §die lieder des mr. blake, trans. ursula wulfekamp (berlin: list, 2008) <blake (2010)>, has also appeared under the title §das mädchen mit den funkelnden augen (berlin: list, 2010). §crnjanski, milos. “viljem blejk [william blake].” srpski književni glasnik 22.2 (16 sept. 1927): 157-58. in serbian. *crosby, mark. “william blake in westminster abbey, 17741777.” bodleian library record 22.2 (oct. 2009): 162-80. “this article situates his [blake’s] time in the abbey in the 69. essick, “blake in the marketplace, 2010,” blake 44.4 (spring 2011): 130. context of his apprenticeship before offering a few examples of how the gothic aesthetic resonates in his later works” (162). it is part of an issue “in celebration of richard gough (17351809)” (118-224). *damon, s. foster. william blake, his philosophy and symbols. 1924 …. <bb #1455, bbs p. 447, blake (2010)> g. §[whitefish]: kessinger publishing, 2010. 510 pp.; isbn: 9781161609417. (hardcover version of the kessinger paperback of 2006 <blake (2010)>.) §deangelis, michael. “gender and other transcendences: william blake as johnny depp [in dead man].” ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls: gender in film at the end of the twentieth century. ed. murray pomerance. albany: state university of new york press, 2001. cultural studies in cinema/video. 283-99. §dent, shirley. “iniquitous symmetries: aestheticism and secularism in the reception of william blake’s works in books and periodicals during the 1860s, 1870s, and 1880s.” university of warwick phd, 2000. xi, 308 leaves. <http:// wrap.warwick.ac.uk/2904>. *de selincourt, basil. william blake. 1909 …. <bb #1480, blake (2002, 2006)> e. §[charleston]: nabu press, 2010. 400 pp.; isbn: 9781178354799. §*dołowska, ewa, ed. wielcy malarze—ich życie, inspiracje i dzieło. cz. 155, william blake. warsaw: p. o. polska, 2005. 29 cm., 31 pp.; isbn: 838978565x. in polish. a biography. §drennan, william. “blake and gnosis.” university of liverpool phd, 1999. *edmundson, mark. “william blake’s america, 2010.” chronicle of higher education 24 oct. 2010. <http://chronicle.com/ article/william-blakes-america-2010/125024>. blake’s “london,” which today he might call “new york,” “reveals us to ourselves” as “mentally imprisoned.” (by 2 nov. 2010 there had been 11 online responses—to the politics, not to blake.) eliot, t. s. “the naked man.” athenæum (1920) <bb #1544, bbs p. 461, blake (2009)> … “william blake.” valitud esseesid. trans. jaak rähesoo. [tallinn]: hortus litterarum, 1997. in estonian. elliott, clare. “‘a backward glance o’er’ the (dis)united states: william blake, ralph waldo emerson and the ‘authentic american religion.’” european journal of american culture (2009) <blake (2010)§> “emersonian self-reliance, when read through this blakean lens, needs serious consideration …” (91). 28 blake/an illustrated quarterly summer 2011 §elliott, clare. “william blake and america: freedom and violence in the atlantic world.” comparative american studies 7.3 (2009): 209-24. §elliott, clare frances. “william blake’s american legacy: transcendentalism and visionary poetics in ralph waldo emerson and walt whitman.” university of glasgow phd, 2008. 277 pp. *erdman, david v. “blake’s vision of slavery.” journal of the warburg and courtauld institute (1952) <bb #1569> b. reprinted in enslavement and emancipation. ed. blake hobby. new york: bloom’s literary criticism, 2010. bloom’s literary themes. 229-44. §erle, sibylle. blake, lavater and physiognomy. london: legenda, 2010. studies in comparative literature 21. xii, 232 pp.; isbn: 9781906540692. *erle, sibylle. “leaving their mark: lavater, fuseli and blake’s imprint on aphorisms on man.” comparative critical studies (2006) <blake (2010)§> particularly concerned with “the early history of physiognomy in england, lavater’s reception and his english connections” (348). *essick, robert n., and donald pearce, eds. blake in his time. 1978. <bbs pp. 466-68> for a revised version of hazard adams, “revisiting reynold[s]’s discourses and blake’s annotations,” see adams, blake’s margins, above. §*farrell, michael. “blake and the methodists.” university of oxford dphil, 2010. vii, 356 pp. §*fostowicz, michał. boska analogia: william blake a sztuka starożytności. gdansk: wydawnictwo słowo/obraz terytoria, 2008. 23 cm., 563 pp.; isbn: 9788374538121. in polish. §*furman-adams, wendy. “visual arts.” milton in context. ed. stephen b. dobranski. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2010. 180-209 (chapter 16; 189, 193-95 on blake). gannon, thomas c. skylark meets meadowlark: reimagining the bird in british romantic and contemporary native american literature. lincoln: university of nebraska press, 2009. 67-71. garnett, richard. william blake, painter and poet. 1895, 1971, 1972. <bb #1669, bbs p. 482> d. §[whitefish]: kessinger publishing, 2010. legacy reprint series. 98 pp. §*garrett, yanis. songs of innocence and [of ] experience: william blake. study notes for standard english: module c 2009-2012 hsc. seven hills [australia]: five senses education, 2009. top notes. 21 cm., 169 pp.; isbn: 9781741300789. *gilchrist, alexander. life of william blake, “pictor ignotus.” 1863 …. <bb #1680, bbs p. 484, blake (1999, 2002, 2007, 2010)> q. §[1863 ed.]. vol. 1. [whitefish]: kessinger publishing, 2010. 432 pp.; isbn: 9781163442982. r. [1880 ed.]. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2010. 992 pp. [both vols.]; isbn: 9781108013697. reviews, announcements, etc. (1863 ed.) anon., london review of politics, society, literature, art, and science 7, no. 176 (14 nov. 1863): 519-20 (“really first-rate”). anon., “miscellanea,” american literary gazette and publishers’ circular [philadelphia] 2, no. 3 (1 dec. 1863): 83 (under “novelties in english literature” is “the late alexander gilchrist’s ‘life of william blake,’ which has been ready for some months, and deferred until the reading season set in, has appeared at last”). anon., “william blake the artist,” bookseller: a handbook of british and foreign literature (10 dec. 1863): 709-10. <michigan> anon., “reviews and notices of books,” lancet no. 2103 (19 dec. 1863): 705-07 (“some of the productions of william blake were in their sublimity of conception almost superhuman … we are of the bewitched …,” but “he really was insane” [706]). anon., westminster review 81, no. 159 (jan. 1864): 46-54 (quotes “my silks,” “the voice of the devil,” and “the little boy lost”). anon., “pictor ignotus,” illustrated magazine ns 24 (1867): 1928 (mostly paraphrase). <bodleian> gillham, d. g. blake’s contrary states: the “songs of innocence and of experience” as dramatic poems. 1966. <bb #1688> b. §cambridge: cambridge university press, 2010. manufactured on demand. 268 pp.; isbn: 9780521129862. gilroy, john. “revolution, reaction and the natural world: wordsworth and coleridge, john clare and william blake” and “extended commentary: blake, ‘the tyger’ from songs of experience (1793).” romantic literature. harlow: longman, 2010. york notes companions. isbn: 9781408204795. §goldman, william david. “‘prophetic history’: blake, browning and the visionary tradition.” university of london phd, 2005. goldsmith, steven. “william blake and the future of enthusiasm.” nineteenth-century literature (2009) <blake (2010)§> “sartre’s the emotions provides a useful framework for understanding” blake’s modern critics (460 [abstract]). §gordon, robert c. “apocalypse improvised: the prophecies of william blake.” arms and the imagination: essays on war, politics, and anglophone culture. lanham: hamilton books, 2009. chapter 12. summer 2011 blake/an illustrated quarterly 29 §grabnar, andrej. william blake: literarni portret. šmarješke toplice: stella, 2010. klasiki in duhovnost. 22 cm., 124 pp.; isbn: 9789612462017. in slovenian. §grčić, marko. “uz vizije williama blakea [with visions of william blake].” provincia deserta. zagreb: kolo matice hrvatske, 1970. 73-81. in croatian. see also his vizije (part i, section b). §grčić, marko. “william blake.” forum 14.9-10 (sept.-oct. 1967): 7-52. green, matthew j. a. visionary materialism in the early works of william blake: the intersection of enthusiasm and empiricism. 2005. <blake (2006, 2008, 2009)> review nancy m. goslee (see blake 43.3, above). §*haggarty, sarah. blake’s gifts: poetry and the politics of exchange. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2010. cambridge studies in romanticism no. 84. 256 pp.; isbn: 9780521117289. parts of chapter 3, “charity” (84-110), are revised from “from donation to demand?” blake and conflict, ed. haggarty and jon mee (2009) <blake (2010)>. *haggarty, sarah, and jon mee, eds. blake and conflict. 2009. <blake (2010)> for a revised version of chapter 6, “from donation to demand? almsgiving and the ‘annotations to thornton,’” see haggarty, blake’s gifts, above. hamblen, emily s. on the minor prophecies of william blake. 1930. <bb #1780> it was published in separate chapters as §william blake and his return to illumination. [whitefish]: kessinger publishing, 2010. 18 pp.; isbn: 9781161503111. §william blake and the book of urizen. [whitefish]: kessinger publishing, 2010. 44 pp.; isbn: 9781161571745. §william blake and the psychology of his symbols. [whitefish]: kessinger publishing, 2010. 24 pp.; isbn: 9781161520477. §william blake and the song of los. [whitefish]: kessinger publishing, 2010. 28 pp.; isbn: 9781161536058. §hartman, geoffrey. “notes toward a supreme addiction: the theology fiction of william blake and philip k. dick.” religion, literature and the imagination: sacred worlds. ed. mark knight and louise lee. london: continuum, 2009. continuum literary studies. chapter 2. *higgins, charlotte. “tate buys … blakes.” guardian [london] 12 jan. 2010. <http://www.guardian.co.uk>. they were bought for £441,000 with the aid of the art fund. §hobby, blake. “urizen and the fragmentary experience of the sublime in the four zoas.” the sublime. ed. blake hobby. new york: bloom’s literary criticism, 2010. bloom’s literary themes. §hoffmann, deborah lee. “the spirit of sound: prosodic method in the poetry of william blake, w. b. yeats, and t. s. eliot.” mcgill university phd, 2010. §hoyle, ben. “rare etchings by william blake discovered in railway timetable.” times [london] 11 jan. 2010. about prints from the small book of designs (b). §*hutchings, kevin. “gender, environment, and imperialism in william blake’s visions of the daughters of albion.” romantic ecologies and colonial cultures in the british atlantic world, 1770-1850. montreal: mcgill-queen’s university press, 2009. §ibata, hélène. “william blake’s visual sublime: the ‘eternal labours.’” european romantic review 21 (2010): 29-48. §*interfaces number 30 (spring 2010): blake intempestif/unruly blake ed. jean-marie fournier and maurice géracht jean-marie fournier. “presentation.” martin myrone. “blake’s unruly art history: the case of the 1809 exhibition.” 7-20. michael phillips. “‘printing in the infernal method.’” 21-34. andrew lincoln. “blake’s innocence reconsidered.” 35-46. pierre-yves courdert [i.e., coudert]. “enclosure and expansion: blake, science, and the body.” 47-56. laurent châtel. “w. b. & w. b.: ‘a long story’—sublime congruences between gray, beckford and blake.” 57-74. christian la cassagnère. “the sublimity of the tyger.” 75-84. b. eugene mccarthy. “reading blake: a case for memorization.” 85-90. steve shepherd. “songs of innocence and of experience: blake into rock.” 91-104. michael phillips. “a note on the facsimile of william blake’s songs of innocence and of experience.” 105-10. martin postle. “‘sir joshua and his gang’: blake, reynolds and the royal academy.” 111ff. only 150 copies of the issue were printed, each with an impression from michael phillips’s facsimiles [2009] of blake’s copperplates of songs pls. 1, 3-4, 8, 12, 18-19, 24, 27, 29-30, 33, 37-38, 42, 46. §james, nicholas philip. “william blake.” eduardo paolozzi: newton figures. london: cv publications, 2005. cv/visual arts research. a recorded conversation (1990) with paolozzi (1924-2005). §jaynes, julian. “the ghost of a flea: visions of william blake.” “voices of the mind,” part 2 of reflections on the dawn of con30 blake/an illustrated quarterly summer 2011 sciousness: julian jaynes’s bicameral mind theory revisited. ed. marcel kuijsten. henderson: julian jaynes society, 2006. §johanson, paula. “william blake (1757-1827).” early british poetry: “words that burn.” berkeley heights: enslow publishers, 2009. poetry rocks! short biographies for a juvenile audience. *jones, john h. blake on language, power, and self-annihilation. new york: palgrave macmillan, 2010. 8o, xiii, 235 pp.; isbn: 9780230622357. “whereas milton concerns itself with the annihilation of authorial selfhood, jerusalem … [focuses] on the self-annihilation of the reader” (175). portions of the “introduction” (1-20), “the marriage of heaven and hell: dialogue and ‘imposition’” (chapter 2, 59-95), “the [first] book of urizen: the problem of authorial selfhood” (chapter 3, 97-133), “milton: the annihilation of authorial selfhood” (chapter 4, 135-73), and “jerusalem: the reader and self-annihilation” (chapter 5, 175-211) are revised from his “‘self-annihilation’ and dialogue in blake’s creative process: urizen, milton, jerusalem” (1994) (see below). chapter 3 is revised from his “printed performance and reading the book[s] of urizen” (1999) <blake (2003)>. *jones, john h. “printed performance and reading the book[s] of urizen: blake’s bookmaking process and the transformation of late eighteenth-century print culture.” colby quarterly (1999) <blake (2003)> for “a revised version,” see his blake on language, power, and self-annihilation, above. jones, john h. “‘self-annihilation’ and dialogue in blake’s creative process: urizen, milton, jerusalem.” modern language studies 24.2 (spring 1994): 3-10. “through self-annihilation, blake attempts to undo the oppression of monologism” (9). revised portions appear in several chapters of his blake on language, power, and self-annihilation, above. §kallerud, mauritz royce. “the genre of conjectural history: jean-jacques rousseau, mary shelley, and william blake in the new world.” state university of new york (buffalo) phd, 1998. 242 pp. §kamčevski, danko. “paradoks u poeziji viljema blejka [paradox in the poetry of william blake].” koraci [journal of literature, art, and culture] 44.5-6 (june 2010): 157-64. in serbian. on the relationship between the language of paradox and the language of poetry, especially in “the tyger” and the marriage of heaven and hell. §kamperidēs, lampros. hoi gamoi tou ouranou kai tēs gēs: mia anagnōsē tou [ezra] pound kai tou blake me hodēgo ton [zēsimos] lorentzato. athens: gephyres, 2003. 21 cm., 81 pp.; isbn: 9605272539. in greek. keeble, brian. “william blake: art as divine vision.” temenos academy review (2006) <blake (2007)> b. god and work: aspects of art and tradition. foreword by wendell berry. 2009. 85-98 (chapter 7). <blake (2010)§> “the urgency of his polemic all but defies us to feel the impress of his exaltation” (2009, p. 86). *kennedy, maev. “tate to show hidden blakes. consumed by flames, contorted in ecstasy … william blake’s lost depictions of the torments of hell have been acquired by the tate.” guardian [london] 11 jan. 2010. <http://www.guardian. co.uk>. the prints [from the small book of designs (b)] were found in “an edwardian international train timetable”; “a book lover bought them at a sale in north london in 1978.” kobayashi, keiko. “blake and kenzaburo oe.” ritsumeikan bungaku [journal of cultural science] no. 615 (2010): 562-56 [sic]. “this is a revised version of the oral report … to the international conference ‘blake in the orient’ [2003 <blake (2004)>] ….” §koljević, nikola. “aktuelna rec u blejkovom delu [the word actual (contemporary) in blake’s work].” književne novine 57 (dec. 1957): 5. in serbian. §kovel, joel. “dark satanic mills: william blake and the critique of war.” capitalism nature socialism 21.2 (june 2010): 4-19. §kuić, ranka. “blejk, pesnik covekove duse [blake, a poet of man’s soul].” antologija engleske romantičarske poezije. belgrade: naučna knjiga, 1974. 7-13. in serbian. §*lamennais, félicité robert de. en troendes tale. trans. truls winther. [illustrations by william blake]. oslo: tanum-norli, 1978. 113 pp.; isbn: 8251807182. in norwegian. langridge, irene. william blake: a study of his life and art work. 1904. <bb #2098> b. §[charleston]: nabu press, 2010. 318 pp.; isbn: 9781178018172. §[lewis, david, ed.]. blake book. leipzig: lubok, 2010. 11 x 16 cm., 112 pp.; isbn: 9783941601352. in english. artistic exercises in response to blake by 14 artists. §linkin, harriet kramer. “lucy hooper, william blake, and ‘the fairy’s funeral.’” romanticism and victorianism on the net no. 54 (may 2009). <http://id.erudit.org/ iderudit/038760ar>. on the context of lucy hooper’s poem. summer 2011 blake/an illustrated quarterly 31 *linnell, david. blake, palmer, linnell and co.: the life of john linnell. 1994. <blake (1995)> b. §brighton: book guild, 2010. isbn: 9780863329173. §lučić, milka. “blejk i pohvala imaginaciji [blake and a tribute to imagination].” politika 13 mar. 1999. in serbian. §macphee, chantelle l. ‘“all the world’s a stage’: william blake and william shakespeare.” university of glasgow phd, 2002. *makdisi, saree. william blake and the impossible history of the 1790s. 2003. <blake (2004)> review jackie disalvo, science and society 73.1 (2009): 144-46 <blake (2010)§> (“his study sounds a cautionary note for radicalism based on a politics of individual rights”). *malmberg, carl-johan. “william blakes guld. reflektioner kring ett måleriskt element [william blake’s gold. reflections on a painterly element].” biblis [a publication of kungliga biblioteket (national library of sweden)] no. 49 (spring 2010): 2-14. in swedish. malmberg, one of sweden’s foremost art critics, argues that gold in the illuminated books is, in m. h. abrams’s sense, both mirror and lamp. contrasting the use of gold in a medieval illumination on the one hand and in an early painting by ingres on the other, malmberg shows that gold often does not have symbolic meaning in blake’s works (he adduces the gold in the jerusalem pl. 59 design, where the daughters labor at wheels, “terrible their distress”), but is there for its own sake, its own existence, and that, while it may have symbolic meaning at times, there are important places where gold=gold. *matsushima, shoichi. blake ron-shu: pickering kohon milton sonota [essays on blake: the pickering manuscript, milton, and others]. tokyo: eikosha, 2010. 19 cm., 280 pp.; isbn: 9784870971288. in japanese. §mauger, matthew peter. “prophetic legislation: william blake and the visionary poetry of the law.” university of london phd, 2005. §menneteau, patrick. “william blake and the dark side of the enlightenment: toward a reassessment of the jungian contribution.” the enlightenment by night: essays on afterdark culture in the long eighteenth century. ed. serge soupel, kevin l. cope, and alexander pettit. new york: ams, 2010. ams studies in the eighteenth century, no. 59. *mertz, jeffrey barclay. “a visionary among the radicals: william blake and the circle of joseph johnson, 1790-95.” university of oxford dphil, 2010. 322 pp., 10 illustrations. well informed, cautious, and judicious. §milanović, ljubomir. “hermeneutika u delu viljema blejka [hermeneutics in the work of william blake].” 3+4 4 (199899): 44-47. <http://www.komunikacija.org.rs/komunikacija/ casopisi/3_4/4/index_html?stdlang=ser_lat>. in serbian. §morgan, paige. “the minute particular in the immensity of the internet: what coleridge, hartley and blake can teach us about digital editing.” romanticism 15.3 (oct. 2009): 265-75. morimatsu, kensuke. “ima hitotsu no romanha shizen bigaku—blake wo ta no shijin gun to hikaku koryo [another aesthetics of romantic nature—comparing blake with other poets].” taikai proceedings [proceedings of the 81st general meeting of the english literary society of japan] no. 81 (2009): 59-61. in japanese. *mulhallen, karen, ed. blake in our time: essays in honour of g. e. bentley jr. toronto: university of toronto press, 2010. 4o, xvi, 300 pp., 51 reproductions; isbn: 9781442641518. karen mulhallen. “introduction.” 3-15. (“g. e. bentley jr almost single-handedly shifted the focus of blake criticism from formalism and symbolism to the ‘minute particulars’ of blake’s life and work” [3].) part one: “every minute particular is holy”: materials 1. robert n. essick. “collecting blake.” 19-34. (a masterful survey of the “symbiotic relationship” between blake collecting and blake scholarship.) 2. *joseph viscomi. “two fake blakes revisited; one dewsmith revealed.” 35-78. (a brilliant demonstration that america [b] pls. 4, 9 are photolithographic facsimiles [not fakes] made between 1874 and 1878 by a. g. dew-smith [1848-1903], an admirable photographer and commercial lithographer, and each marked by him “f” [?for “facsimile”] to perfect his copy.) 3. *joyce h. townsend and bronwyn a. ormsby. “blake’s painting materials, technical art history, and the legacy of g. e. bentley jr.” 79-92. (“this paper discusses the motives that inspired our research into … blake’s output, the way it developed, and its findings in the context of other technical studies on blake” [80].) part two: “for friendship’s sake”: friends and patrons 4. david bindman. “new light on the mathews: flaxman and blake’s early gothicism.” 95-104. (inscriptions by a. s. mathew on early flaxman drawings of gothic subjects, especially for chatterton, “strongly suggest that mathew was directly involved in flaxman’s early attempts at illustrating chatterton” [96].) 5. *mark crosby. “‘a ladys book’: blake’s engravings for hayley’s the triumphs of temper.” 105-30. (“blake’s six plates were not reprinted in the second thirteenth edition” [i.e., the second state of the thirteenth edition], partly because the copperplates had become very worn [106].) 6. mary lynn johnson. “more on blake’s (and bentley’s) ‘white collar maecenas’: thomas butts, his wife’s family of artisans, and the methodist withams of st. bartholomew the 32 blake/an illustrated quarterly summer 2011 great.” 131-64. (a densely factual and original essay only occasionally related to blake. the parents of thomas butts were married by john wesley.) 7. angus whitehead. “‘went to see blake—also to surgeons college’: blake and george cumberland’s pocketbooks.” 165200. (on 3 june 1820 george cumberland “went to see blake” and perhaps took him “to introduce [him?] to mr [william] clift,” the distinguished curator of the hunterian museum in the royal college of surgeons, and to discuss with clift the purchase of a fossil.) 8. *martin butlin. “george richmond, blake’s true heir?” 201-12. (richmond is blake’s artistic heir, especially in his creation of light [1826].) part three: “what i both see and hear”: architecture and industry 9. *morton d. paley. “william blake and chichester.” 215-32. (“the foundations of his [blake’s] four-gated city [of golgonooza] lay in chichester” [219].) 10. keri davies. “william blake and the straw paper manufactory at millbank.” 233-61. (the first european straw paper mill was built at millbank in 1801 by matthias koops [who had been declared bankrupt in 1790] and was declared bankrupt in 1803, which ruined richard twiss [d. 1821], who owned blake’s for children.) jerome mcgann. “epilogue: a memorable fancy.” 262-64. (the prolific giant in marriage pls. 16-17 is geb, or rather “all those books and essays turned out from his printing house in hell: clearing away rubbish, building and decorating immense bibliographical palaces …” [263].) *robert brandeis. “appendix: william blake in toronto: the bentley collection at victoria university library.” 265-72. (the essay “outline[s] the extent of the [bentleys’ bibliophilic] infection and its ultimate successful ‘comforting cure’” in giving the collection to the victoria university library [265].) for the associated exhibition and symposium, see remember me! under 2010 in part iv. *nicoll, allardyce. william blake and his poetry. 1922, 1969, 1977. <bb #2285, bbs p. 587> d. §[memphis]: general books, 2010. 160 pp.; isbn: 9781152118560. niimi, hatsuko. “milton no joka ni tsuite—blake juyo no ichi danmen [preface to milton: a case study in the historical reception of william blake].” nihon joshi daigaku eibei bungaku kenkyu [japan women’s university, studies in english and american literature] no. 45 (2010): 1-17. in japanese. §niyogi, ralla guha, ed. romanticism and its legacies. kolkata: fine prints in collaboration with basanti devi college, 2009. isbn: 9788190688949. it includes: subir dhar. “blake’s london and the metaphysics of closure.” malobika sarkar. “william blake: a composer of melodies as well.” abhishek sarkar. “blake’s thel: the feminine mystique.” gwee li sui. “who won the battle of ideas between newton and blake?” §norvig, gerda s. “on creativity and psychological boundaries in the life and work of william blake.” fielding graduate university [santa barbara] phd, 2008. *otto, peter. “politics, aesthetics, and blake’s ‘bounding line.’” word and image 26.2 (apr.-june 2010): 172-85. on blake’s “prophetic politics” as seen in america, the book of los, and jerusalem (174-75). §pavlović, miodrag. “proročke knjige vilijama blejka [the prophetic books of william blake].” čitanje zamišljenog [reading of the imagined]. novi sad: bratstvo-jedinstvo, 1990. 135-40. in serbian. §pavlović, miodrag. “visionar vilijam blejk [visionary william blake].” politika (“kultura-umetnost”) 13 oct. 1957: 3. in serbian. pearsall, derek. william langland, william blake, and the poetry of hope. 2003. <blake (2004)> b. reprinted in §the morton w. bloomfield lectures, 1989-2005. ed. daniel donoghue, james simpson, and nicholas watson. kalamazoo: medieval institute publications, western michigan university, 2010. *phillips, michael. “the printing of blake’s america a prophecy.” print quarterly (2004) <blake (2005)> most of phillips’s “a note on production” in *songs of innocence and of experience: a portfolio of eighteen facsimile impressions (2009) (see part i, section b) is “abstracted” from his 2004 essay. §popović, vladeta. “vilijam blejk [william blake].” kroz englesku književnost [through english literature]. belgrade: izdavacka knjizarnica rajkovica i cukovica, 1929. 51-59. in serbian. §popović, vladeta. “vilijam blejk [william blake].” strani pregled 2 (dec. 1927): 219-25. in serbian. §powys, john cowper. “william blake.” essays on de maupassant, anatole france, william blake. 1916. <bb #2447> b. §[whitefish]: kessinger publishing, 2010. 70 pp.; isbn: 9781161607444. §pullman, philip. “freedom: the award-winning novelist shares much of his philosophy of liberty with visionary artist william blake.” resurgence no. 258 (2010): 25-27. quinney, laura. william blake on self and soul. 2009. <blake (2010)§> “blake’s psychology of subjectivity is astute, innovative, and complex” (xi). “a portion” of chapter 2, “wordsworth, plato, summer 2011 blake/an illustrated quarterly 33 and blake,” had appeared as “wordsworth’s ghosts and the model of the mind,” european romantic review 9.2 (spring 1998): 293-301, and another portion, revised here, had been printed as “swerving neo-platonists,” wordsworth circle 37.1 (winter 2006): 31-38. review shirley dent, times literary supplement 2 july 2010: 26-27 (with another) (“the acuity of these readings is undermined by the jarring addition of twentieth-century theorists”). *ripley, wayne c., and justin van kleeck, eds. editing and reading blake. [college park]: university of maryland, sept. 2010. a romantic circles praxis volume. <http://www. rc.umd.edu/praxis/editing_blake/index.html>. wayne c. ripley. “introduction: editing blake.” 35 paragraphs. (“the first task of every editor has been to remediate” blake’s work. many of the contributors to the volume “have … worked as project assistants to the blake archive and received their graduate training from its editors.”) david fuller. “modernizing blake’s text: syntax, rhythm, rhetoric.” 25 paragraphs. (a sound and responsible essay.) *mary lynn johnson. “contingencies, exigencies, and editorial praxis: the case of the 2008 norton blake.” 23 paragraphs. (an “anecdotal case history” of the fundamentally redesigned norton edition of blake, which “is the product of trade-offs” [¶3, 1].) justin van kleeck. “editioning william blake’s vala/the four zoas.” 83 paragraphs. (a responsible, reliable, and judicious summary of the problems in editing vala.) w. h. stevenson. “the ends of editing.” 48 paragraphs. (“in all this, the editor must keep head above water” [¶48].) *rachel lee and j. alexandra mcghee. “‘the productions of time’: visions of blake in the digital age.” 46 paragraphs. (the essay, about blake’s “hybridity,” “documents our experiences editing blake’s … island in the moon … in the william blake archive” [¶11, 7].) *wayne c. ripley. “delineation editing of co-texts: william blake’s illustrations.” 35 paragraphs. (“social-text editing provides the most appropriate editorial model for blake’s illustrations of other authors.” with examples from young’s night thoughts [1797] and blair’s grave [1808], he wants to show “the social realities of these works” [¶5, 35].) §rix, robert. “magnetic cure in william blake’s the french revolution.” explicator 68.3 (2010): 167-71. rix, robert. william blake and the cultures of radical christianity. 2007. <blake (2008)> reviews ariel hessayon, english historical review 124, no. 506 (2009): 195-96 <blake (2010)§> (“a careful and balanced reconstruction of an important aspect of blake’s world”). jeremy tambling, journal for eighteenth-century studies 32.1 (2009): 123-24 <blake (2010)§> (a “useful book”). §john ruff, christianity and literature 59.2 (2010): 347-51. §rix, robert w. “william blake og lidenskabens uønskede engle.” engleskrift. ed. annegret friedrichsen and charlotte cappi grunnet. copenhagen, 2006. 44-60. in danish. §roberts, jonathan. blake. wordsworth. religion. london: continuum, 2010. new directions in religion and literature. xiii, 127 pp.; isbn: 9780826422330. roberts, jonathan. william blake’s poetry: a reader’s guide. 2007. <blake (2008)> review §christopher burdon, literature and theology 23.4 (2009): 481-82. robinson, henry crabb. diary, reminiscences, and correspondence of henry crabb robinson, barrister-at-law, f.s.a. 1869. b. 1869. c. 1869. <bb #2535a-c> d. §boston: james r. osgood and company, 1871.70 e. 1872. <bb #2535d> §rovira, james. blake and kierkegaard: creation and anxiety. london: continuum, 2010. continuum literary studies. 25 cm., viii, 184 pp.; isbn: 9781441135599. §rowland, christopher. “‘would to god that all the lord’s people were prophets’: prophetic voices.” glass 19 (spring 2007): 30-40. <http://www.clsg.org/glass_19_web.pdf>. on the nature of christian prophecy, beginning with william blake, joanna southcott, and richard brothers. §rupert, jane. “reasoning and knowing in science and poetry: erasmus darwin, charles darwin, and william blake.” uneasy relations: reason in literature and science from aristotle to darwin and blake. milwaukee: marquette university press, 2010. marquette studies in philosophy, no. 69. §sabin, stefana. die wahrheit der literatur: von william blake bis samuel beckett. marburg: verlag literaturwissenschaft.de, 2010. isbn: 9783936134223. in german. §sahm, danielle. “contrary to expectations: exploring blake’s contraries in david almond’s skellig.” children’s literature 38 (2010): 115-32. §saklofske, jon. “between history and hope: the urban centre of william blake and william wordsworth.” city limits: perspectives on the historical european city. ed. glenn clark, judith owens, and greg t. smith. montreal: mcgill-queen’s university press, 2010. saklofske, jon. “conscripting imagination: the national ‘duty’ of william blake’s art.” romanticism on the net (2007) <blake (2010)§> 70. first reported in essick, “blake in the marketplace, 2010,” blake 44.4 (spring 2011): 130. 34 blake/an illustrated quarterly summer 2011 concerns “william blake’s creative and commercial positioning relative to late-eighteenth-century galleries, exhibition culture and artistic spectacle.” §saklofske, jon a. h. “‘enough! or too much’: the functions of media interaction in william blake’s composite designs.” mcgill university phd, 2003. sato, hikari. “erasmus darwin to william blake saiko [erasmus darwin and william blake reconsidered].” choiki bunka kagaku kiyo [interdisciplinary cultural studies (issued by the graduate school of arts and sciences, university of tokyo)] 14 (2009): 5-18. in japanese. §sekulić, isidora. “vilijem blejk: vencanje neba i pakla [william blake: the marriage of heaven and hell].” srpski književni glasnik 23.6 (16 mar. 1928): 473-74. in serbian. §shete, michelle. “the perceptive poets: a comparative study of jal lu’-din rín rúmi, sant kabír, matsuo bashó and william blake.” university of wollongong [australia] phd, 2008. the poets represent islam, hinduism, buddhism, and christianity. §slavinski, živorad mihajlović. “otkrovenje po vilijamu blejku [the apocalypse according to william blake].” njihov onostrani život. belgrade: [self-published], 1981. 99-106. in serbian. smith, john thomas. “william blake.” nollekens and his times. 1828, 1829. <bb #2723a-b> c. 1917. <blake (2000)> d. 1920. <bb #2723c> e. §n.p.: reitell press, 2010. 496 pp.; isbn: 9781445574295. §stevanović, svetislav. “o mistici i misticarima engleske poezije [on mysticism and mystics of english poetry].” letopis matice srpske 3 (june 1929): 376-98. in serbian. §stevens, clint. “blake’s buildings: poetry and the reshaping of epistemology.” university of illinois at urbana-champaign phd, 2009. 261 pp. see dai–a 70 (2009). story, alfred t. william blake: his life character and genius. 1893, 1970. <bb #2772> c. §[whitefish]: kessinger publishing, 2010. legacy reprint series. 168 pp.; isbn: 9781164059639. §suica, nikola. “‘knjiga o jovu’ viljema blejka [‘the book of job’ by william blake].” gradac 18.95-97 (1990): 170. in serbian. *suzuki, masashi. “‘in felpham i heard and saw the visions of albion’—blake ni okeru vision to ‘shomotsu senso’ [‘in felpham i heard and saw the visions of albion’: vision and ‘the battle of the books’ in william blake].” 19 seikigaku kenkyu [study of nineteenth-century scholarship (issued by the institute for the study of nineteenth-century scholarship, niigata university)] no. 2 (2009): 19-38. in japanese. §swann, karen. “blake’s jerusalem: friendship with albion.” a companion to romantic poetry. ed. charles mahoney. chichester: wiley-blackwell, 2011. blackwell companions to literature and culture. 538-53 (chapter 31). symons, arthur. william blake. 1907 …. <bb #2804> f. §[whitefish]: kessinger publishing, 2007. 23 cm., xviii, 433 pp.; isbn: 9780548280980. tate papers [tate’s online research journal] number 14 (autumn 2010) <http://www.tate.org.uk/research/tateresearch/ tatepapers/10autumn> it includes: blake’s 1809 exhibition *david blayney brown and martin myrone. “william blake’s 1809 exhibition.” 12 paragraphs. (mostly a herald for the prophets who follow.) *susan matthews. “an alternative national gallery: blake’s 1809 exhibition and the attack on evangelical culture.” 28 paragraphs. (blake in the context of james barry, an account of a series of pictures in the great room of the society of arts, manufactures, and commerce, at the adelphi [1783] and barry’s support for mary wollstonecraft; she deals especially with blake’s the penance of jane shore.) *philippa simpson. “lost in the crowd: blake and london in 1809.” 30 paragraphs. (some of blake’s ideas about the “rubbish of the continent brought here by ignorant picture dealers” [“public address,” notebook p. 24] were shared by other artists.) *konstantinos stefanis. “reasoned exhibitions: blake in 1809 and reynolds in 1813.” 26 paragraphs. (about retrospective catalogues such as blake’s descriptive catalogue and the british institution’s catalogue of pictures by the late sir joshua reynolds exhibited by the permission of the proprietors in honour of the memory of that distinguished artist, and for the improvement of british art [london, 1813]. “descriptive catalogue” was the current term for what the french called catalogue raisonné or reasoned catalogue.) all the papers were given at the symposium appealing to the public: william blake in 1809, tate britain, sept. 2009. §thanhouser, ed. urizen wept: william blake and the sublime in milton a poem. saarbrücken: vdm verlag dr. müller, 2008. isbn: 9783639049824. *thompson, jennifer. “top 20 political songs: jerusalem | william blake | 1916: poem transformed into unofficial national anthem.” new statesman 25 mar. 2010. <http://www. newstatesman.com/music/2010/03/blake-jerusalem-hymnpolitical>. summer 2011 blake/an illustrated quarterly 35 [todd, ruthven]. “illuminated poems.” the tiger’s eye on arts and letters [westport, connecticut] no. 1 (oct. 1947): 72-76. “illuminated poems” consists of reproductions on glossy paper of (1) blake’s america copperplate fragment71 with one sentence of text saying that “now, in 1947, an experimenting poet [todd] and two artists [s. w. hayter72 and joan miró] have rediscovered blake’s antique printing method and are making illuminated poems” (72); (2) “the engraver for bill hayter,” with decorations which look like aboriginal designs (73); (3) “the glass tower,” undecorated (74); (4) “an alien world for dolores miró,” with curious unsigned pasted-on colored designs [by her father, joan miró] (75). according to “the tale of the contents” (56), from which the title derives, todd “is preparing a new book william blake, the mental prince.73 he has written a full account of blake’s method that will be printed in a technical magazine.”74 trilling, daniel. “perspectives: jah wobble, musician, on william blake.” new statesman (2009) <blake (2010)§, under wobble> an interview: “if blake had been my age in the 1970s, he would have been on the punk scene, without a doubt.” tsuchiya, shigeko. “seisei suru vision—blake no milton [vision and revision: blake’s milton].” jimbunken kiyo [journal of the institute of cultural science, chuo university] no. 67 (2010): 191-213. in japanese. §vehlmann, fabien. green manor no. 3: fantaisies meurtrières. illus. denis bodart. marcinelle [belgium]: dupuis, 2005. in french. b. §“in the head of william blake.” green manor: the inconvenience of being dead/murderous fancies. [trans. luke spear.] canterbury: cinebook, 2008. a comic book or “graphic novel.” §vidaković, aleksandar. “blejkova stogodisnjica [blake’s centenary].” srpski književni glasnik 22.2 (16 sept. 1927): 457-60. in serbian. vine, steve. william blake. 2007. <blake (2008)> b. §n.p.: atlantic publishers and distributors, 2010. 144 pp.; isbn: 9788126913206. 71. the contents page says that the america copperplate “etched in 1893 [i.e., 1793]” is in “the rosenwald collection in the library of congress.” note america, foreword by ruthven todd (1947) <bb #8>. 72. s. w. hayter, new ways of gravure (1949) <bb #1815> is partly about todd and miró. 73. the galley proofs of todd’s never-published “william blake: a mental prince” (london: phoenix house, 1947) are with his papers in the brotherton library of leeds university <bbs p. 661>. 74. “the techniques of william blake’s illuminated painting,” print (1948) and print collector’s quarterly (1948) <bb #2853, blake (2009)>. §*viscomi, joseph. “blake’s illuminated word.” art, word and image: two thousand years of visual/textual interaction. ed. john dixon hunt, david lomas, and michael corris. london: reaktion books ltd., 2010. 87-109. w., r. g. [richard grant white]. “william blake.” galaxy 5, no. 5 (may 1868): 652-56. a biographical account, partly a review of swinburne; “blake was crazy.” welch, dennis m. “essence, gender, race: william blake’s visions of the daughters of albion.” studies in romanticism 49.1 (spring 2010): 105-31. §wells, michael. william blake ;): freewilly. hebburn: artisanine, 2009. 30 cm., 70 leaves, “plastic laminated covers and spiral binding”; isbn: 9780956284853. white, helen c. the mysticism of william blake. 1927, 1964. <bb #2950> c. §[whitefish]: kessinger publishing, 2008. 6.2" x 9", 276 pp.; isbn: 9781436680523. §williams, john. “the place of william blake in the relationship of romanticism to the growth of eighteenth century radical thought in england.” university of york dphil, 1975. williams, nicholas m. “blake dead or alive.” nineteenthcentury literature (2009) <blake (2010)§> about “how blake points to the problem of perceiving motion” (498 [abstract]). williams, nicholas m. “‘the sciences of life’: living form in william blake and aldous huxley.” romanticism (2009) <blake (2010)§> “huxley steers a surprising course back to blake as a catalysing figure” (43). §woolford, john. “christina rossetti and the ‘rossetti manuscript’ of william blake.” journal of pre-raphaelite studies ns 18 (fall 2009): 72-84. *wright, thomas. the life of william blake. 1929, 1969, 1972. <bb #3017> d. §[whitefish]: kessinger publishing, 2003. 8.2" x 11", 468 pp.; isbn: 9780766128521. e. §[whitefish]: kessinger publishing, 2010. 8.5" x 11", 468 pp.; isbn: 9781161362381. §*yoder, r. paul. the narrative structure of william blake’s poem jerusalem: a revisionist interpretation. lewiston: edwin mellen press, 2010. 24 cm., v, 179 pp.; isbn: 9780773436404. foreword by nelson hilton. §zakai, avihu. “religion and the newtonian universe.” jonathan edwards’s philosophy of nature: the re-enchantment of 36 blake/an illustrated quarterly summer 2011 the world in the age of scientific reasoning. london: t. & t. clark, 2010. chapter 5. includes a section on “blake’s ‘contempt & abhorrence’ of bacon, locke, and newton.” division ii: blake’s circle barry, james (1741–1806) *dunne, tom, and william l. pressly, eds. james barry, 17411806: history painter. farnham: ashgate, 2010. xix, 268 pp.; isbn: 9780754666349. william l. pressly. “foreword: barry studies from a bicentennial perspective.” tom dunne. “introduction: james barry’s ‘moral art’ and the fate of history painting in britain.” david h. solkin. “from oddity to odd man out: contesting james barry’s critical legacy, 1806-66.” martin myrone. “james barry’s ‘hairbreadth niceties’: risk, reward and the reform of culture around 1770.” fionnuala mcmanamon. “james barry: a history painter in paris in the 1760s.” margaret w. lind. “‘glowing thoughts on glowing canvas’: james barry’s venus rising from the sea.” martin postle. “barry, reynolds and the british school.” asia haut. “barry and fuseli: milton, exile and expulsion.” *david bindman. “the politics of envy: blake and barry.” john barrell. “reform and revolution: james barry’s writings in the 1790s.” liam lenihan. “history painting and aesthetics: barry and the politics of friendship.” michael phillips. “no. 36 castle street east: a reconstruction of james barry’s house, painting and printmaking studio, and the making of the birth of pandora.” william l. pressly. “crowning the victors at olympia: the great room’s primary focus.” daniel r. guernsey. “barry’s bossuet in elysium: catholicism and counter-revolution in the 1790s.” david g. c. allan. “‘a monument to perpetuate his memory’: james barry’s adelphi cycle revisited.” cumberland, george (1754–1848) lewina the maid of snowdon. a tale (1793) a poem on the landscapes of great-britain (1793) review anon., “domestic literature. for the year 1793,” new annual register … for the year 1793 (1794): 194-277. <harvard> “lewina, the maid of snowdon, a tale, and a poem on the landscapes of great britain, by george cumberland,” are productions of very different merits. the former is simple, and occasionally pathetic and interesting, but frequently insipid and unpoetical. the latter, which is far from being faultless in point of diction and rhyme, discovers considerable powers of description, and liveliness of fancy; and shews that the author possesses a sensible, cultivated mind. with greater attention to correctness, and to avoid too familiar and prosaic phraseology, the author may rise to eminence in descriptive poetry. these poems are elegantly printed, and are accompanied with etchings by the author, from his own original drawings. (271-72) palmer, samuel (1805–81) §shaw-miller, simon, and sam smiles, eds. samuel palmer revisited. farnham: ashgate, 2010. xv, 167 pp.; isbn: 9780754667476. sam smiles and simon shaw-miller. “preface.” william vaughan. “introduction.” william vaughan. “samuel palmer’s houndsditch days.” greg smith. “ancients and moderns: samuel palmer and the ‘progress of water colours,’ 1822-1833.” martin postle. “‘this very unstudent-like student’: palmer and the education of the artist.” christiana payne. “‘dreaming of the marriage of the land and sea’: samuel palmer and the coast.” paul goldman. “samuel palmer: poetry, printmaking and illustration.” sam smiles. “from the valley of vision to the m25: samuel palmer and modern culture.” simon shaw-miller. “palmer and the dark pastoral in english music of the twentieth century.” stedman, john gabriel (1744-97) §senior, emily. “‘perfectly whole’: skin and text in john gabriel stedman’s narrative of a five years expedition against the revolted negroes of surinam.” eighteenth-century studies 44.1 (2010): 39-56. index blake’s works: america 5-6, 7-8, 11, 12, 13, 20, 21, 23, 26, 31, 32, 35; annotations 5, 7, 22-23, 25, 28; book of los 32; book of thel 8, 11, 13, 19, 20, 21, 32; copperplates 35; descriptive catalogue 8, 21, 23, 25, 34; europe 7, 8, 11, 13, 19, 21; first book of urizen 8, 11, 13, 19, 21, 24, 29, 30; for children 8, 11, 32; for the sexes 8, 11, 19-20; french revolution 33; island in the moon 8, 13, 23, 25, 33; jerusalem 8, 13, 22, 23, 30, 31, 32, 34, 35; letters 5, 7, 8-9, 20, 22, 25; marriage 9, 11, 12, 13, 22, 24, 25, 28, 30, 32, 34; milton 9, 11, 13, 30, 31, 32, 34, 35; notebook 10, 34, 35; on homer 11; “order” of the songs 9-10, 20; “pickering manuscript” 10, 26, 31; poetical sketches 10, 19, 21, 28; small book of designs 24, 26, 29, 30; song of los 11, 13, 22, 29; songs 5, 9, 10-11, 12, 13, 19, 20, 21, 22, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 32; “to the public” 8; vala/four zoas 11, 13, 26, 29, 33; visions 8, 11, 13, 20, 21, 26, 29; watermarks 7, 8 illustrations/engravings of/for: bible 13, 14, 20, 21, 22, 34; blair 13, 14-15, 19, 21, 24, 25, 33; chaucer 5, 10, 15, 20, 21, 22, 24; dante 20, 21, 26; flaxman 15, 20, 24; hayley 5, 15-16, 20, 31; malkin 16; milton 20, 21; rees 16; remember me! 16-18, 22; salzmann 4, 18; stedman 18; varley 22; virgil 18; wollstonecraft 18; young 18-19, 20, 21, 33 apprentice (thomas owen) 4, 18, 25 catherine blake 20, 24 residences 5, 25 voting 4 review: roger lüdeke, zur schreibkunst von william blake roger lüdeke. zur schreibkunst von william blake: ästhetische souveränität und politische imagination. munich: wilhelm fink, 2013. 296 pp., 15 color plates. €41.90, paperback; €31.99, e-book. reviewed by sibylle erle sibylle erle (sibylle.erle@bishopg.ac.uk), frsa, is senior lecturer in english at bishop grosseteste university lincoln, author of blake, lavater and physiognomy (legenda, 2010), co-editor of science, technology and the senses (special issue for ravon, 2008), and volume editor of panoramas, 1787–1900: texts and contexts (5 vols., pickering & chatto, 2012). with morton d. paley she is now co-editing the reception of blake in europe (bloomsbury). she has co-curated the display blake and physiognomy (2010–11) at tate britain and devised an online exhibition of tennyson’s copy of blake’s job for the tennyson research centre (2013). apart from reception, she is working on “character” in the romantic period. in contrast to william blake’s popular twentieth-century reception, which was dominated by his fans’ fascination with his visionary art and lyrical poetry, a substantial proportion of his recent academic audience has carved a poet-persona whose religious diction is closely linked to his opinions about the american and french revolutions, as well as the 1790s, the decade of political repression in britain. the main achievements of these academic interpretations, based on archival work and derived from historical contextualization, lüdeke finds to be summarized in jackie disalvo’s introduction to blake, politics, and history (1998). in his own nearly fifty-page introduction lüdeke frequently returns to jon mee’s chapter in that collection. what starts off as a narrowly focused assessment of blake studies and historicism soon expands into a complex discussion of the “defining tension between the religious and the political” (“konstitutive spannungsverhältnis zwischen religiösem und politischem”) (9). taking his starting points from eric j. hobsbawm and jürgen habermas, as well as mee and saree makdisi, lüdeke summarizes the outcomes of the research on the public sphere and its self-declared prophets, enthusiasts, antinomians, millenarians, and dissenters. critics, he asserts, now perceive religion as a mode of compensation, affecting, in turn, the interiorization and aestheticization of art (12-13). lüdeke wants to reconsider certain investigative leads and to reexamine the relationship between the political and the religious by focusing on radical and protestant discursive practices and textual strategies (14). his critique of the critical studies that position blake as a member of the “public in opposition” (“gegenöffentlichkeit”) (10) identifies two weaknesses: one, that there has been too much emphasis on external criticism of the political, as a result of which the “internal political” (“innerweltlich politische”) (15) got pushed to one side. quotations from blake’s early prophetic books have been uncoupled from their discursive contexts; once they have been used to illustrate political opinion, they are reduced to their “mimetic functions” (18). two, that there is not enough work on blake’s discourse, not enough on the dialogues and stylistic or formal affinities to eighteenth-century philosophical or political foundation narratives, such as hobbes’s leviathan (1651), burke’s reflections on the revolution in france (1790), and paine’s common sense (1776) and age of reason (1794). there need to be more “further-reaching functional explanations of blake’s stylistic and thematic borrowings” (“weitergehenden funktionalen erklärungen für blakes stilistische und inhaltliche anleihen”) (17) to appreciate fully what lüdeke calls the “aesthetic difference” (“ästhetischer differenz”) (18) or “claim of aesthetic sovereignty” (26) of blake’s works. in short, his approach, which targets the “interior of politics and religion” (18), aims to investigate that area of the realm of political engagement marked out by the blurry boundaries between law and arbitrariness as well as law and violence, a region in which a “discourse of the human” (19) is possible. it is called the “indifferenzzone” (“in-between zone”), a term that denotes and comprises the willingness of individuals to prioritize organizational matters over personal needs, and is borrowed from niklas luhmann, the german sociologist whose social systems theory lüdeke wants to bring to blake studies.lüdeke is not the first. discussing sex and the discursive junctions between blake, fuseli, hrdlicka, and eighteenth-century culture, peter gorsen draws attention to the relevance of luhmann’s liebe als passion: zur codierung von intimität (1982) in his introduction to the catalogue alfred hrdlicka: “blake and füssli”: 47 zeichnungen (frankfurt: timm gierig, 1983) 9. lüdeke also aligns blake’s prophetic poetry with political discourse and revisits angela esterhammer’s work on performative language (24), but only to point out that esterhammer’s analysis, though useful, did not go far enough. with systems theory the attention is on social communication in which individuals partake, and the abstract, recursive structural rules according to which this communication is organized independently of individual participation. his intention is to ask important questions about general social relationships rather than psychological relationships or those between individuals. in the second part of his introduction lüdeke addresses the paradigmatic shifts in blake studies: the attention paid to editions and versions of the early prophetic books as well as their practical-technical dimensions (27). here his goal is to theorize the relationship between relief printing and handwriting, and the interrelationship between media-technology and blake’s thinking. moving on from socioeconomic arguments, he engages with louis hjelmslev’s theory of language to describe the levels of structures conditioning expression and content in blake (28). he then summarizes the experimental activities of, and disagreements between, robert n. essick and joseph viscomi on the one hand and michael phillips and martin butlin on the other hand, ultimately siding with the former. lüdeke’s interest in the materiality of text and its relation to semiotic statements is eventually framed by poststructuralist approaches to language. he refers to carr (“illuminated printing: toward a logic of difference,” 1986), mann (“the book of urizen and the horizon of the book,” 1986), and pierce (the wond’rous art, 2003) to argue that blake’s prophetic poetry makes visible what political discourse tries to hide. for lüdeke’s book, this means that both levels (the structures conditioning expression and content) are to be analyzed outside their historical contexts and as part of the dynamics between signs and media-process (35) as well as the early prophetic books’ potential for performativity and foucault’s analysis of repetition, which is characteristic of political foundation narratives (37ff.). he ultimately intends to investigate the contemporary discourse on writing and the physicality of the very act of writing (42). lüdeke then returns to “the discourse of the human” (43) while explaining that any bodily activity related to writing falls into the “indifferenzzone.” writing is a form of performance mediated by a trained and culturally refined body. he concludes by explaining why giorgio agamben’s concept of nuda vita (“bare life”) is relevant to his reading of the book of urizen, which, he says, interweaves mystification and political legitimization with aesthetic perception and the experience of the transience of life. the meaning of all (texts and images), he states, is balanced inside the “in-between zone” of biology and culture. in the first chapter lüdeke introduces the concepts “religious politics” and “political religion” from hans maier’s totalitarismus und politische religionen (2003). he positions these concepts, after first embedding them into a historical overview of their changing meanings, starting with ancient greece and the bible, to define the original unity of the religious, the political, and other private and social factors that drive the processes authorizing and justifying political sovereignty (52). moving between hobbes, paine, and burke, he discusses paradigmatic shifts: how since the seventeenth century the transcendent god has been replaced by the state and how state power sustains itself through “internal authority” (“innerweltliche legitimation”) (53). the scope of power remains the same, but as the religious is being secularized, its rules and beliefs are transferred onto the political. luhmann’s social systems theory is helpful here, because latency, one of its key terms, captures that which exists and actively contributes to the social systems humans live by. invisible shaping forces, which can be noticed but cannot be communicated due to their transcendent status, remain nameless and are inside the “indifferenzzone.” the question luhmann raises is, how the divine or, more generally, abstract power is experienced by those whose lives are affected by it (57). it is this question that lüdeke discusses against the backdrop of the late eighteenth-century debate about human, civil, and natural rights, the rise of the individual and wish for self-determination, and the belief in humanity’s capacity and striving for happiness. his discussion is supported by foucault’s metaphysics of finitude, which, of course, deals with tendencies for latency in political thinking as well (“metaphysik der endlichkeit”) (63). the “discourse of the human,” lüdeke stresses, is the “indifferenzzone” (66), and it interferes with the symbolic order (71), which is rather delicate. political writers such as hobbes, burke, and paine not only fight against literal application of prophetic discourse (75), but they take advantage of system-based proclivity when they write about their preferred forms of government and political representation (71-72). lüdeke explains further that in narratives pertaining to revealed religion, political founding acts are normally shown to prophets (that is, witnesses), and that burke attacked richard price’s famous sermon on the love of our country (1789) on the grounds that it mixed the religious with the political. paine later confronted burke’s claim for universal, timeless rights and argued instead for the natural rights of each generation. lüdeke brings the discussion back to blake once he starts comparing prophetic discourse with prophetic writing; the latter is understood to be a repeatable and material “reflection” of a singular, divine verbal utterance: “at that very moment, when it appears in its material form, the divine message enters the political and social arena of different interests, ranges of applications, and strategies” (“in dem moment, in dem sie in ihrer materialität auftaucht, tritt die göttliche wahrheit in ein politisches und gesellschaftliches feld unterschiedlicher interessenslagen, anwendungsbereiche und strategien”) (83). he then contextualizes blake’s thinking with the writings of robert lowth, edward young, thomas howes, and richard watson (85ff.) and analyzes relief printing and blake’s use of the prophetic mode in the meeting between the narrator and the prophets isaiah and ezekiel in “a memorable fancy” in the marriage of heaven and hell (87). lüdeke agrees with the historicist and broadly familiar critical position that blake’s response to his contemporaries’ investigations of “religious politics” revolved around questions of social consolidation, but points out that blake’s response is also and perhaps more importantly aesthetic (87) and satirical (93). the first chapter concludes with a summary and survey of blake’s concept of imagination and relevant writings on the imagination by kant, böhme, plato, and augustinus. lüdeke outlines how blake uses the imagination, in luhmann’s sense, to provide an experience of “true existence” as a whole and beyond all divisions (102). concluding with a close reading of the title page of all religions are one, he writes about the optical effect created by the framing lines. to lüdeke this image, which provokes the illusion of a change in form created through a “picture puzzle” (“vexierperspektivischen verfahren”) (104), embodies a moment of aesthetic sovereignty; it is also the visual equivalent of the “indifferenzzone.” at this point, he revisits an argument from the 1930s that proposed to read and represent blake’s “logically constructed world system” as picture puzzles.irene seligo, “der prophet in seinem vaterlande: william blake,” zwischen traum und tat: englische profile (frankfurt: societäts-verlag, 1938) 232-74 (see 271). originally, this approach was linked to questions about blake’s state of mind, but in lüdeke it is not. in the second chapter, which like the other chapters is divided into several subchapters, lüdeke turns to blake’s the book of thel, visions of the daughters of albion, america, europe, and the book of urizen, and, therefore, to a more literature-oriented analysis. he argues that blake’s early prophetic books follow two narrative models. on the one hand, these models interlock, like the political foundation narratives that blake’s texts are responding to, but, on the other hand, each exaggerates certain paradoxes and thereby reveals what is hidden. lüdeke now applies yuri lotman’s semantic plot analysis (“sujetmodell”), which deals with “events” and focuses on space rather than time as the major structuring component of action. he uses it to account for “narrative movements,” which invert beginnings and endings in blake’s early prophetic books (110-15, 119). by lotman’s definition each “sujet” consists of two connected but separate themes. lüdeke’s example is thel’s response to the life-death dichotomy and her wavering between spiritual and material existences. as protagonist she tentatively crosses the boundary between the two, but then decides to withdraw. this means, in lotman’s terms, that because the symbolic and cultural order of thel stays in place unchallenged, we are dealing with a “restitution sujet” (“restitutionssujet”) (111). similarly, visions of the daughters of albion introduces the theme of the political division between america and england, but whereas topographical boundaries are only suspended in visions, the defining structure of america and “albion” in america and europe is separation (114). what marks the difference between the two narrative models is that blake inverts elements of the narrative so that we end up with a “restitution sujet” or, put simply, an unresolved situation. one of lüdeke’s examples is bromion’s rape and marriage offer (of oothoon) to theotormon, which leads to a precarious “threshold situation” or “zone of transition” (“schwellensituation,” “übergangszone”). if read against the context of slavery, bromion’s proposal can be construed as an attempt to overcome national and political separation (113). moving on to america, lüdeke enlists elena esposito, who studied under eco in bologna and did her phd with luhmann in bielefeld in the late 1980s (116). esposito’s book on social memory and forgetfulness, soziales vergessen: formen und medien des gedächtnisses der gesellschaft (2002), helps lüdeke think about the “doubling of reality” of blake’s early prophecies: the changeover between the realm of the gods and the world of history inhabited by man as well as the resulting interpenetration of semantic and syntactic “surface and depth” in america in particular. his example is the cultural memory of atlantis, which blake exploits to evoke the idea of a forgotten but shared origin as well as an actual but invisible (geographical) connection. brought into line with systems theory, this unity defines the nature of the political conflict between america and england (117-23). lüdeke’s point is to highlight the strategies that “detemporalize and dehistoricize” america (118). just as in the book of thel and visions of the daughters of albion, blake does not allow for the “narrative movement” or, indeed, the represented political conflict to reach a conclusion (120). interestingly, lüdeke, who says he has established the “conditions for reception” (134), never questions readers’ ability to navigate safely between the semantically and syntactically constructed meanings of the narrated. blake’s early prophetic books have similar themes, but europe’s treatment of them is special, since it “increasingly reflects on the difference between the agency of the sign and the constitution of reality” (“zunehmende reflexion auf die differenz zwischen zeichenhandlung und wirklichkeitskonstitution”) (128). as a result, the narrative movement in europe is a lot more chronological, though no less complex, than that of america. its structure suggests the simultaneity of several beginnings and endings. this section of the book is bolstered with a general discussion of divine origins, magic, and prophecy (ernst cassirer, gerhard von rad)—that is, with how other narratives parallel and “dissolve” the main narrative movement. such narratives, in esposito’s words, destabilize the boundaries between past, present, and future (127ff.)elena esposito, soziales vergessen: formen und medien des gedächtnisses der gesellschaft, trans. from the italian by alessandra corti (frankfurt: suhrkamp, 2002) 31. and turn the transition from “before” and “after” into a “line of division without duration” (“scheidewand ohne zeitdauer”) (129, quoting esposito). blake, lüdeke says, achieves this effect in europe when he quickly moves between events and styles associated with either the french revolution or archaic celtic traditions. blake thus “doubles” a story about the divine origin of civilization with that of a social, political, and historical rupture caused by a revolution, propelled by its salvation narratives (131). when explaining how, in esposito’s sense, past and future collapse into the present once the reader’s imagination has been mobilized, lüdeke falls back onto the term “horizon” (136). in contrast to burke and paine, he concludes, blake “sharpens” the difference between immanence and transcendence because he uses the divine as an external perspective; although it is no longer accessible, it in effect doubles the narrated political events and becomes, in luhmann’s sense, an underlying but invisible reference point (136-37). the final subchapters of the second chapter are on the book of urizen. here lüdeke turns to leslie tannenbaum’s biblical tradition in blake’s early prophecies (1982), but not to mee or makdisi; instead, he builds his interpretation on bernadette malinowski’s “das heilige sei mein wort”: paradigmen prophetischer dichtung von klopstock bis whitman (2002). malinowski, who responds to mee’s dangerous enthusiasm (1992) as well as frye’s fearful symmetry (1947), discusses (human) imagination in relation to (divine) inspiration while investigating the prophetic-pragmatic potential of language in klopstock, hölderlin, novalis, shelley, blake, wordsworth, and whitman. the bottom line for lüdeke is that david worrall’s reading of religion in the book of urizen “does not go far enough” (138), nor does tristanne connolly’s discussion of pity or compassion (149): for lüdeke urizen is the first legislator. of urizen’s abstract creation, he notes, “the interworldliness created by urizen’s splitting off is to be understood as an expression of that ‘indifferenzzone’ that begins to exist with the institution of political and legal systems” (“die durch urizens abspaltung erzeugte zwischenweltlichkeit ist als ausprägung jener indifferenzzone zu verstehen, die mit der institution politisch-rechtlicher systeme entsteht”) (142). moving on to the issues of mortality, pity, and compassion, he quotes agamben and corrects connolly’s medical interpretations. the last subchapter touches on los’s relationship with urizen and blake; it ends with a close reading of the title page. lüdeke focuses on urizen’s writing tools and the writing in urizen in order to talk of ambiguous text-image relationships, printing techniques (158), and changes in print media. he theorizes blake’s artistic decisions in relation to the interrelated material conditions for their technical recording (159-60). the third chapter is on outline and handwriting; it summarizes the technical aspects of relief printing, including makdisi’s marxist reading of illuminated book production (162), and condenses essick’s and viscomi’s research on blake’s engraving and printing methods—phillips gets a brief mention on p. 165—as well as morris eaves’s and detlef dörrbecker’s readings of blake’s aesthetics. dörrbecker’s analysis of blake’s production process falls victim, i think, to the ambition to include all these perspectives. writing about blake’s notebook, lüdeke quotes dörrbecker, who argued in konvention und innovation (1992) that blake used his notebook like a “quarry” (“steinbruch”) and there is evidence that he continually and for many years returned to his notes. lüdeke’s comment is revealing: “this implies the availability of prestructured forms—that is, forms organized according to certain principles of classification, which as it were are available for a differentiating processing due to their being coded and repeatable at any time” (“dies impliziert die verfügbarkeit von prästrukturierten, nach bestimmten ordnungsprinzipien gewonnenen gestaltungsformen, die quasi kodiert und jederzeit wiederholbar für differenzierende verarbeitung zur verfügung stehen”) (179). the comment seems an attempt to shift the “quarry” metaphor and make it mean “system.” for his argument about the visibly determined and imagined codifications of marks and lines, lüdeke draws inspiration from viscomi’s work on handwriting (163). handwriting survives, if preserved through relief printing; it infuses printed text with the sketchiness normally associated with the physical act of writing (165). the existing debate about blake’s practices and their effects is expanded once lüdeke starts to consider gerhart von graevenitz’s das ornament des blicks (1994) and ernst rebel’s druckgrafik: geschichte—fachbegriffe (2003). graevenitz’s discussion of the “typographeum” (168), an ideal comprising all aspects of text and image cooperation, helps to explain how the layout of a page discloses as well as alludes to information due to underlying formatting and printing conventions. this is important because lüdeke’s discussion moves from technical to theoretical matters and to contemporary debates about perception and epistemology. his argument, for example, touches on locke’s explanations of the visual nature of concrete ideas (166); it moves to reynolds’s rejection of ornament, deemed by him artisanal rather than artistic (169-70), as well as hogarth’s interest in the tension between the pictoral and the lineal, as discussed by ronald paulson (171-72). what holds these topics together is a “model of transparency” (167), which, lüdeke says, determines that a sign is more than its material referent on the printed page. as examples he mentions george cumberland’s writing on perfect drawing (168) and william gilpin’s on perfect etching (176). he explains that whereas a line creates an object, a perfect line embodies and projects the represented figure out of its drawn boundary. outline, to put this differently, becomes invisible because it is no longer noticed, and blake’s own writing on outline echoes this idea (173). finally bringing the research and strands of argument together, lüdeke proposes: compared with the classicist-informed ideal of the transparency of the pictoral and the verbal medium, blake’s relief printing seems to emphasize the material, bodily, and non-sign aspects of writing and drawing—that is, those “opaque” characteristics, which within the printed ideal of transparency are programmatically excluded in favor of a standardized codification. (gegenüber dem klassizistisch geprägten transparenzideal des piktoralen und verbalen mediums scheint blakes relief printing also die materiellen, körperlichen und nicht-zeichenhaften aspekte des schreibens und zeichnens zu betonen, jene “opaken” merkmale von schrift und bild also, die im rahmen des druckschriftlichen transparenzideals zugunsten standardisierter kodifizierung programmatisch ausgegrenzt werden.) (173) lüdeke agrees with the marxist position that relief printing subverted the going modes of reproduction (179); it enabled blake to make a printed page look like a handwritten page. this in-betweenness, brought about by a specially invented medium, he explains, created the “condition” of all of blake’s “poetry of vision,” as well as the potential of the “religiously informed imagination of the unobserved” (“religiös geprägten imagination des unbeobachtbaren”) (179). the following two subchapters contain close readings of the “introduction” of songs of experience and plates from america and europe. lüdeke opens with that famous passage from the marriage of heaven and hell about “printing in the infernal method” (e 39) and elucidates blake’s “poetological approach to printmaking” (182): blake’s aim is to activate the reader’s imagination so that he or she observes what cannot normally be observed. by this lüdeke means performative speech acts and the creation of two opposite worlds, which he quickly associates with the figure of the bard. he clarifies how blake—through this figure—juxtaposes and eventually synthesizes divine with prophetic speech (185). he notices, for example, that the “o”s of “o earth o earth” (e 18) look different on the printed page, even though they share the same meaning; he mentions nelson hilton’s description of the many downward-moving “l”s in the second stanza of the poem (187) and concludes that blake’s writing on copperplates overproduces meaning (189). the next section is on america and europe. it quotes dörrbecker (“schriftbilder und bildzeichen: william blakes experimente,” 2005) to support ideas about vertical structuring of texts and images on plates (189ff.), but strangely does not refer to dörrbecker’s the continental prophecies (1995). from america, lüdeke chooses the combination of “the king of england” and the image of a winged dragon (plate 4) to talk about “semantic indefiniteness” (191), and afterwards he compares the figures of the angel of albion and orc on plates 8 and 10 to discuss “syntactic coherence” (192).lüdeke explains in a footnote (190n184) that he is working with copy a in the morgan library in new york and that, when quoting, he is following the numbering used in the blake archive. his labeling, however, is imprecise; he gets the plates mixed up. the images at the back of the book do not match the references on pp. 192-93. lüdeke, for example, quotes from plate 9, and the blake archive identifies the figure on plate 8 as probably urizen. i am following the erdman edition. the conclusion is that all of these combinations “realize a divinatory attitude of reception” (194). probably because he is interested in the discursive dynamic of the religious and the political, lüdeke does not move much beyond his examples or beyond america. accordingly, he stresses that it would be wrong to speculate about whether blake sympathized with the american revolution, suggesting that blake chose to withhold his opinion for a reason. instead, he says, blake “suspends” his comments by transporting political claims for liberty into the realm of “the mythic-divine mode of the religious political” (196). in the section on europe, lüdeke teases out the differences between america and europe. he explains how blake has moved on and how the main purpose of text-image combinations is no longer to create an “overall context for a hidden level of meaning” but to “evidence their fundamental difference” (196-97). in europe, text and image work together to create an awareness of the “limits of human, symbolic conversation,” characteristic of mankind’s fallen condition (197). this time lüdeke focuses on europe plate 10, with the crowned serpent in the lefthand margin, to draw connections between the effect of the enjambments, the curled body of the snake, and the downward movements they impose on the reader/viewer (198-99). writing of reader expectation, he determines: the world-intrinsic final horizon of human finitude within the positive boundaries of and opportunities for language and symbolic representation will be so fully radicalized that the imagistic-linguistic sign context will give priority to the physiological conditions of perception, and make noticeable the limits of human experience of reality via the act of aesthetic reception (in the sense of the observed unobservedness of observation). (der weltimmanente letzthorizont menschlicher endlichkeit innerhalb der positiven grenzen und möglichkeitsbedingungen von sprache und symbolischer repräsentation wird hier dadurch radikalisiert, daß der bild-sprachliche zeichenzusammenhang die physiologischen bedingungen der wahrnehmung in den vordergrund spielt und die grenzen der menschlichen wirklichkeitserfahrung über den akt der ästhetischen rezeption [im sinne einer beobachtbaren unbeobachtbarkeit von beobachtung] spürbar macht.) (201) lüdeke also relates this phenomenon to the political; he maintains that blake differs from burke and paine in that he “confronts the assertive claims of a metaphysics of finitude with the radically unavailable transcendent final horizon” (202). the reading subject, in other words, can never be sure that whatever he or she has gained during an aesthetic experience is valid. the last four subchapters are on urizen and the book of urizen. these are—maybe because of the long buildup—the most interesting sections of the book. returning to the argument about ornament, lüdeke turns to the “pictoral overmoulding of writing” (“piktorale überformung von schriftlichem”) (204) and the ways in which the boundaries between letter and image blur in urizen. he identifies this phenomenon in several plates, including the “preludium” (206-07) and the one where los, between two eternals, is leaning forward, pointing downward and drawing urizen’s “death-image” (207-08). on account of the “in-betweenness” created by this image and the lines of poetry it illustrates, blake achieves a “doublesightedness” (209): is los writing or drawing? has he just started or is he about to finish? from the “death-image” of urizen lüdeke returns to the question of the political, because urizen can be interpreted as representing the new status of the human as well as agamben’s nuda vita (210). urizen, by comparison, stands for a specific physical practice (writing embodied in relief printing), which, lüdeke reminds us, is typical of the functioning of the political (212-13). what follows is a short history of books on learning how to write (213-25). the section starts with guidebooks from the seventeenth century and ends with contemporary theory on writing (derrida). again, lüdeke focuses on the function of the ornament in writing and its increasing importance in the perception and creation of individuality (217). he returns to his discussion about the role of the imagination—in imagining the invisible—when he describes john jenkins’s writing system in terms of an “indifferenzzone” (220).lüdeke discusses english handwriting and john jenkins, the art of writing, reduced to a plain and easy system on a plan entirely new (boston: thomas and andrews, 1791), an american publication. during training all individuals’ handwriting is mediated through the body and is, at the same time, set against an ideal, which it only ever aspires to but never meets (222). next, lüdeke returns to urizen and the title page of urizen to discuss “the turning-into-images of writing contexts” as well as the relationship between “the law and mortality” (226). he engages with the existing critical writing on blake and the body (john barrell, makdisi, connolly), but rejects most of the research on anatomical issues; he then goes on to discuss the representation of corporality in urizen and urizen, and finally identifies more cases of “doublesightedness” (232, 234). where does all this leave us? lüdeke concludes: the scene of writing, represented by urizen, acquires its specific aesthetic sovereignty on the level of its typographically marked materiality. this is where its specific power is embedded in an in-between zone equivalent to that of the political. it is a virtual area existing between statement and utterance, which the politically discursive systems owe their assertive claim to. … urizen’s law, therefore, marks in its overdetermined indefiniteness the inner connection between the performative dimension of blake’s prophecies and the specific structuring rules of their replication. (ihre spezifisch ästhetische souveränität erhält die durch urizen repräsentierte schreibszene damit auf der ebene ihrer druckgraphisch markierten materialität, denn hier ist ihre spezifische macht in einer dem politischen äquivalenten indifferenzzone verankert, jenem virtuellen bereich zwischen aussage und äußerung, der sich auch der geltungsanspruch der politischen diskurssysteme verdankt. … in ihrer überdeterminierten unbestimmtheit markiert urizens gesetzesschrift so den inneren zusammenhang zwischen der performativen dimension von blakes prophezeiungen und den spezifischen strukturregeln ihrer replikation.) (242) different rules of communication attend the transition from the oral tradition to letterpress printing. this means that any kind of communication technology that exists independently of any speakers or actual speaking contexts is interrelated with the beliefs and virtues of a developing, industrialized society. blake’s invention of relief printing, in other words, is as much part of blake’s works as are the text-image relationships of his illuminated books. while offering many thought-provoking suggestions about the theoretical implications of blake’s choices and attempts to control and manipulate his media, lüdeke mentions but makes nothing of the fact that blake shared his labor with his wife, catherine. he thus misses an opportunity to show that writing as well as printmaking ought to be associated with male and female agency. for example, the blurring of gender, another important social boundary, can be noticed in the generously ornamented designs of blake’s early prophetic books. in addition, in the books lüdeke discusses there are characters who opt for oral transmission, against writing. oothoon breaks into song in order to air her pain and disappointment, but also to give expression to her hope for a better future. another example of female agency can be found in america, where a tumultuous narrative (text) is offset by a peaceful scene (image) placed in the middle of the plate. the design shows an old woman lecturing a youth who is leaning on a pile of closed books (plate 14). the description of the american war of independence is interrupted by a voice we cannot hear. the listener in the scene, however, has abandoned his books and appears to be completely absorbed. what are we missing? nothing is fixed or can be fixed in blake’s early prophetic books. the reader can never be sure if what he or she is imagining is valid. lüdeke’s theory-driven book suggests some new ways theory can be applied to blake’s methods of production and to understanding the physical acts of writing of both blake and urizen. the book, based on lüdeke’s habilitation submitted at ludwig-maximilians-universität in munich in 2006, is thoroughly researched and extensively referenced; one footnote is almost a page long. because lüdeke prefers to quote in the original language and also trace concepts sideways through different disciplines while invoking the writing of several theorists at once, reading zur schreibkunst von william blake can be a little taxing (exacerbating the problem, the german translations of the quotations are inconveniently located toward the end of the book, after the fifteen color plates). nevertheless, this book is a rare success in reading blake against continental european theory, and it illuminates blake’s significance for modern thought. “two newly discovered advertisements”: a response to wayne c. ripley “two newly discovered advertisements”: a response to wayne c. ripley by keri davies keri davies (keri_davies@btinternet.com) is an independent scholar whose first contribution to blake was in vol. 27, no. 1 (summer 1993). he has written on william blake’s parents (particularly his mother’s links to the moravian church) and on the social and intellectual milieu of early blake collectors and other friends and acquaintances of the painter-poet. i have made the quotations, not to prove things well known, to be true; … as if aristotle, must be brought to prove a man hath ten toes. but partly, to be my warrant, in matters less credible. partly, to give the authors, that which is their due: not at all liking the malignant-way of some, who never mention any, but to confute him. yet withall, to rectifie his mistakes where i found them. and to mind the reader, not to peruse the most honest, or learned author, without some caution.—nehemiah grewmusæum regalis societatis. or a catalogue and description of the natural and artificial rarities belonging to the royal society and preserved at gresham colledge. made by nehemiah grew …. whereunto is subjoyned the comparative anatomy of stomachs and guts. by the same author (london: printed for hugh newman at the grashopper in the poultrey, 1694), “the preface,” n. pag.i have omitted the reference to ulisse aldrovandi (1522–1605) and the latin quotation. in a “minute particular” in a recent blake, wayne ripley published two examples of newspaper classified advertising from which he derived new biographical data relating to the blake family.wayne c. ripley, “two newly discovered advertisements posted by william blake’s father,” blake 51.1 (summer 2017). of course, i accept that the two advertisements that he has discovered are of genuine interest, and he has my congratulations for finding them. but the house of cards he has chosen to erect on these slight foundations is entirely mistaken. it distresses me to say so, because i think ripley and i are working on very similar projects. to begin with the title, “two newly discovered advertisements posted by william blake’s father”; these advertisements are clearly not posted by james blake (1722–84) but placed with newspapers by third parties for whom james blake is providing a mailbox service. the “other” william blake, the specialist writing engraver william staden blake (c. 1748–1814), supplied a postal address for half a dozen clients or more, mainly selling or renting property. a quick search of historic newspapers online yields, for example, “annuities. wanted, two annuities,”times (tuesday, 24 november 1789, and thursday, 26 november 1789). “to be let, a first floor,”times (wednesday, 8 august 1798). “lodgings—wanted,”times (saturday, 22 march 1800). and “apartments, unfurnished | to be lett,”morning post (thursday, 30 october 1800). all with the contact address blake, ’change alley. the common use of private names and addresses as quasi-postes restantes is obvious to anyone who carries out such a search. coincidentally, in the 1990s the last remaining blake residence in london, 17 south molton street, supplied a mailbox service from its basement, with an entrance in south molton lane. advertisers in the london daily newspapers of the day fall into two major groups: first, corporate advertisers—auctioneers, booksellers, theatres, and such—who advertise frequently and from their own premises; second, private advertisers, who use coffeehouses, inns, private houses, and shops as mailing addresses. most of these mailing addresses, in my experience, turn up just once or twice. that there are only two known instances of james blake advertisements is normal for this market. a third, very small, group is represented by w. s. blake, for whom providing a mailing address seems to have been a significant part of his business. a typical example of one-off advertising is provided by yet another william blake (fl. 1774–90), living just around the corner from james blake and family: h a n t s. to be sold by auction, by mr. russell, in october next, if not disposed of by private contract, the valuable manours of swanwick and fairthorne … containing together 1700 acres, of the yearly value of eight hundred pounds, most desirably and advantageously situate, adjoining the turnpike road from portsmouth to southampton, and also to the rivers of bursledon and kirbridge, affording easy conveyance for the annual fall of timber and wood, and of which the estate is plentifully stocked, well preserved, and in a regular succession. mr. peter barfoot, of cardige common, near botley, and adjoining the premisses, will show the same, and particulars may be had of william blake, esq. berwicke-street, soho; and of mr. russell, at reigate, surrey.st. james’s chronicle: or, british evening-post (4-6 september 1787). the manors being sold were part of the estate of the third duke of portland (1738–1809), a leading whig politician and twice prime minister, in 1783 and again from 1807 to 1809. this presumably is the “blake, wm. berwick st. gentleman” who voted in the 1774 westminster election.a correct copy of the poll, for electing two representatives in parliament, for the city and liberty of westminster. taken oct. 11, 1774, and the fifteen following days (london: printed and sold by cox and bigg, 1774) 68. on 12 october 1774 the poet’s father, “james blake broad st carnaby markt hosier & haberdasher,” voted for earl percy, son of the duke of northumberland, and lord clinton.for details of the blake family’s voting, see g. e. bentley, jr., william blake and his circle: publications and discoveries from 1992 <http://​library.​vicu.​utoronto.​ca/​collections/​special_​collections/​bentley_​blake_​collection/​blake_​circle/​2017/​william_​blake_​and_​his_​circle.​pdf> 2816. mr. blake of berwick street shared the blake family’s whiggish politics, and also voted for percy and clinton (and not for lord mountmorres, lord mahon, or humphry cotes).g. e. bentley, jr., blake records, 2nd ed. (new haven: yale university press, 2004) 841, lists “william blake, gentleman of berwick street,” as voting for the whig candidates in 1774, 1784, 1788, and 1790. no biographical data can be determined from the advertisement other than some connection between blake of berwick street and the vendor or auctioneer. ripley first cites an advertisement in the daily advertiser of 23 and 24 april 1773: wanted for a small family, within a few miles of london, a maid-servant for a place of all work, that can get up linnen well, milk a cow, and make butter. apply at mr. blake’s, haberdasher, the end of broad-street, next carnaby-market. i do not dispute that “mr. blake” was james blake, the father of william blake, whose shop was located at 28 broad street, but i entirely disagree with ripley, who seems to think that broad street fits the description of being “within a few miles of london.” broad street is shown as well within the built-up area of the metropolis even on john rocque’s map of london of 1746.on the development of broad street and environs, see “marshall street area,” survey of london, vols. 31 and 32, st. james westminster, part 2, ed. f. h. w. sheppard (london: london county council, 1963) 196-208, or british history online <http://​www.​british-​history.​ac.​uk/​survey-​london/​vols31-2/​pt2/​pp196-208>. it was within what was already termed the west end of london. ripley stresses that the blakes lived “outside the square mile of the city of london,” but broad street was no more than a mile and a quarter from temple bar, the western entrance to the city on fleet street. the advertisement makes no mention of the city, and there is no justification to narrow down in this way what is just “london” in the advertisement. the classified ad was placed by someone “within a few miles” of london. to my mind this means somewhere like hounslow, say, or twickenham. it’s unlikely that broad street, just over a mile from the city, would have been described as within a few miles of london. this first advertisement cannot possibly refer to the blake family’s personal circumstances. what i find even more unacceptable is ripley’s further assertion that “the advertisement provides evidence that the blakes owned a cow, which they or a servant milked.” there was no common land nearby to graze cattle—the only open space was the parish burying-ground—so where did the blakes keep their cow? in the backyard? the yard usually led to the privy and was where the washing hung to dry; it would with difficulty accommodate a cow. or did the blakes keep a cow in the cellar? the architectural historian anthony quiney describes the basement or cellar as originally “the main workrooms for the servants. there were usually at least two rooms, a kitchen and a scullery, and perhaps a number of smaller rooms for storing food, drink, crockery, cutlery and cooking implements.”anthony quiney, house and home: a history of the small english house (london: british broadcasting corporation, 1986) 82. it was also often where a servant would sleep—the very servant that ripley thinks the blakes are advertising for. (the same applied later, at william blake’s lambeth home.)see michael phillips, “reconstructing william blake’s lost studio: no. 13 hercules buildings, lambeth,” british art journal 2.1 (summer 2000): 43-48; phillips, “no. 13 hercules buildings, lambeth: william blake’s printmaking workshop and etching-painting studio recovered,” british art journal 5.1 (spring/summer 2004): 13-21. indeed, if horwood’s plan of london (1792–99) is to be trusted, and it purports to show every individual dwelling, then 28 broad street, the corner house on the junction with marshall street, did not even have a backyard.access to horwood’s map at high magnification is provided by <http://​www.​romanticlondon.​org/​explore-​horwoods-​plan>. it’s highly unlikely that cows would be kept in a prosperous built-up area like st. james’s parish; the parish was one of the first areas of london “to rid itself of the unpleasant environmental consequences of urban cowkeeping.”p. j. atkins, “the retail milk trade in london, c. 1790–1914,” economic history review ns 33.4 (november 1980): 522-37 (537). cows were kept in backyards or cellars in slum districts, where former family homes were now in overcrowded multiple occupation. the blakes did not live in a slum. one should also note that james blake had a contract with st. james’s for the supply of haberdashery and hosiery to the workhouse and school.stanley gardner, blake’s innocence and experience retraced (london: athlone press; new york: st. martin’s press, 1986) 11. the parish overseers would not have taken kindly to cowkeeping by one of their contractors. and if the blakes or one of their neighbors had kept a cow in cruel confinement in a cellar or yard, then surely there would have been a denunciatory couplet in “auguries of innocence.” “although there had been urban cowkeepers in london from an early date, their output was not significant in the late eighteenth century.” the milk supply came from “those producers who used the rich suburban pastures and meadows for grazing their cattle.”p. j. atkins, “london’s intra-urban milk supply, circa 1790–1914,” “change in the town,” special issue, transactions of the institute of british geographers 2.3 (1977): 383-99 (383). when blake refers in jerusalem to “the fields of cows by willans farm,” he is recalling a memorable sight from his childhood.the complete poetry and prose of william blake, ed. david v. erdman, newly rev. ed. (new york: anchor-random house, 1988) 172. the willan family, ending with thomas (1755–1828), were among the farmers who supplied the metropolis with milk; thomas’s numerous herds of cattle comprised nearly one thousand cows.m. brown, “‘the fields of cows by willan’s farm’: thomas willan of marylebone, 1755–1828,” westminster history review 4 (2001): 1-5.see also gordon e. bannerman, merchants and the military in eighteenth-century britain: british army contracts and domestic supply, 1739–1763 (london: routledge, 2016). bannerman’s chapter 6, “a domestic contractor: john willan” (89-102), traces the complicated and confusing history of the willan family as farmers and military contractors. the surveyor and agriculturist john middleton (1751–1833) notes, “mr. willan’s farm, at mary-le-bonne-park, containing upwards of 500 acres, is probably the largest in this county [middlesex].”john middleton, view of the agriculture of middlesex (london: printed by b. macmillan, 1798) 48. willan’s lease expired in 1811 and the property reverted to the crown, which used the land to create regent’s park. “milk was less of a convenience food [in the late eighteenth century] than it is today, and contributed little to the average diet. its purchase was either casual, in quantities small enough to prevent wastage caused by souring, or occasional, as part of the cream teas enjoyed by the frequenters of the pleasure gardens and resorts of peripheral london.”atkins, “the retail milk trade in london” 522. milk was retailed round the streets of london by milkwomen, each carrying a pair of tubs holding 8 or 10 gallons (36 to 45 litres) altogether.e. h. whetham, “the london milk trade, 1860–1900,” economic history review ns 17.2 (1964): 369-80 (369). it “was usually ladled by a measured dipper from a wide-mouthed churn into whatever containers the housewives provided.”whetham 371. each milkwoman had her own “walk,” a sequence of neighboring streets served by a particular person, which was “sometimes disposed of by advertisement, and often for a considerable premium.”modern london; being the history and present state of the british metropolis (london: richard phillips, 1804), text facing plate [43]: “milk below!—cavendish square.” the trade plates and their accompanying texts from this work also exist in digital form at <http://​www.​romanticlondon.​org/​ml1804-trades-map/​#14/​51.5114/​-0.1156>. for example, from 1774: a milk walk to be sold. enquire at the fir tree, in church-lane, whitechapel; or at the king’s arms cellar, southampton-street, strand.daily advertiser (tuesday, 1 february 1774). modern london; being the history and present state of the british metropolis (london: richard phillips, 1804), plate [43]: “milk below!—cavendish square” (see enlargement). image courtesy of keri davies, from a copy of the work in the london library. middleton tells us that there were “about 8500 milch cows kept for the purpose of supplying the metropolis and its environs with milk,” each cow, on average, providing 9 quarts (more than 10 litres) a day.middleton 333. a dairy cow thus produced much more milk than a family could have reasonably consumed. small children were fed sops, bread soaked in milk. for everyone else milk was just a dash to color one’s tea. and how could the blakes or any family keeping a cow dispose of the considerable surplus in the face of an entrenched street trade? looking again at that 1773 advertisement from the daily advertiser, there’s a very similar small ad in 1796 employing william staden blake’s address: wanted, as house-keeper and superintendant in a large family, a middle-aged widow woman. she must have acquired, from her former situation in life, experience to conduct, with ability and address, every part of domestic arrangements; and her manners must be sufficiently polished to know how to receive and wait upon persons of the first distinction. the situation offered will be of the greatest respectability and most extensive confidence; of course very considerable talents will be looked for, and liberal terms given. application to be made to mr. blake, engraver, ’change alley, cornhill.morning post (monday, 29 february 1796). this may be what newspapers today would call a personal ad, but it’s in no way personal to w. s. blake, nor was the advertisement quoted by ripley personal to james blake. ripley also cites an advertisement that appeared early in 1775 in two papers, the gazetteer and new daily advertiser on 18 january and the public advertiser on 31 january: a middle aged person is desirous to wait on a young lady as governess, understanding french and english, or to be with a lady of quality as milliner, who is not inferior to any in that talent, and whose character can be as well recommended as her abilities, by persons of quality. if this suits any lady please to direct a line to a. z. at mr. james blake’s, hosier, in broad-street, golden-square. as with the first advertisement, there is no reason to assume that it shines any light on the private life or circumstances of the blake family. indeed, the words “please to direct a line to a. z. at mr. james blake’s” tell us quite clearly that james blake is offering a mailbox service. (curiously, ripley gives as his justification for assuming a blake family connection with respect to this second advertisement that “there is no record of the shop’s receiving correspondence for other people,” thus ignoring the precedent set by the first advertisement he cites.) ripley provides us with a list of possible blake relatives involved in the millinery or haberdashery trades. this may well prove useful some day, but is of no relevance here. he builds up a fantasy of blake’s mother as a french-speaking milliner. as m. k. schuchard and i have established, catherine wright armitage blake (1725–92) was a country girl from the little village of walkeringham, nottinghamshire.keri davies and marsha keith schuchard, “recovering the lost moravian history of william blake’s family,” blake 38.1 (summer 2004): 36-43. i very much doubt if she had much opportunity to learn french there. and if not in her childhood, when? she came to london, married thomas armitage, and joined the moravian congregation. after moving to london, catherine was wife, mother, nurse (of a dying husband), active churchgoer, and shopkeeper. how would she have found the time to learn french, and to the level of fluency implied by the advertisement? actually, the moravians did hold language classes for their membership, but for them to learn german: there shd be always somebody among us to learn german. br gottshalk will give the brn every day an hour at 7 in ye morning after ye bible-hour. in general an encouragement was giv’n to ye brn and srs to learn german.moravian church archive and library, london, c/36/11/3: daily helpers conference minute book (14 february 1743–12 september 1743), n. pag. (“monday jul. 4th 1743”). catherine armitage joined the moravian congregation in 1750. between armitage’s death and her marriage to james blake, she had sole responsibility for the shop. millinery may be just froufrou to some, but it takes an apprenticeship to learn it. there are many small newspaper ads of this sort: m i l l i n e r y. wanted an apprentice to a milliner, in a pleasant and airy part of the town. a premium is expected. further information may be had of mr. edwards, linendraper, near the pantheon, oxford street.public advertiser (thursday, 9 april 1772). philippe ariès famously called england “the birthplace of privacy.”roger chartier, ed., a history of private life, vol. 3, “passions of the renaissance,” trans. arthur goldhammer (philippe ariès and georges duby, general eds.) (cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 1989), “introduction,” p. 5. the eighteenth century had a great urge to privacy. for instance, william hayley (1745–1820) was outraged that the posthumous letters (1811) of anna seward (1742–1809) made mention of elizabeth, his first wife.national library of scotland, department of manuscripts, ms 3880, fol. 190 (letter from hayley to sir walter scott, “july 16 1811”), and ms 5317, fol. 51 (letter from scott to hayley, “edinr 12 decr [1811]”). the private letter-books of sir walter scott, ed. wilfred partington (london: hodder and stoughton, 1930), reprints hayley’s letter with some cuts. in richard gough’s decades-long correspondence with george paton (1721–1807), gough advises paton of his change of address but does not think it appropriate to mention the occasion—his getting married.national library of scotland, department of manuscripts, adv. ms 29.5.6(i), fol. 55 (12 august 1774, gough to paton). when francis douce’s wife, isabella, died in 1830, douce (1757–1834) was not well enough to attend her burial. not one of his friends at the interment knew the deceased’s christian name. isabella’s female friends, by custom, did not attend funerals. she had to be buried as simply “douce.”the douce legacy: an exhibition to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the bequest of francis douce (1757–1834) (oxford: bodleian library, 1984) 10, citing the burial register of st. pancras churchyard, 1830, no. 950 (london metropolitan archives). these are just a few examples establishing that eighteenth-century obsession with privacy, which would also apply to personal ads. classified advertisements such as those cited are always concerned to retain privacy, never giving the advertiser’s private address. we also see this obsession with family privacy constantly at work in eighteenth-century marriages. blake’s mother was twice married clandestinely at the rev. alexander keith’s notorious mayfair chapel (to thomas armitage in 1746 and to james blake in 1752). james gillray’s parents and the grandparents of percy bysshe shelley were wed there too.gillray carefully preserved his parents’ marriage certificate. see british library, department of manuscripts, add. ms 27337 (gillray family papers, 1751–1830). fol. 2, dated “december 22d. 1751,” is the certificate, complete with five-shilling stamp. the term “clandestine marriage” bore a specific meaning in the eighteenth century, denoting a marriage celebrated before an ordained clergyman of the church of england but without banns or license or held outside canonical hours.rebecca probert, marriage law and practice in the long eighteenth century: a reassessment (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2009) 166. it doesn’t mean that such marriages were in any way hugger-mugger or clandestine in any wider sense, but they did offer complete privacy. a french visitor to england in the late seventeenth century, henri misson, claimed confidently that “to proclaim ban[n]s is a thing no body now cares to have done; very few are willing to have their affairs declar’d to all the world in a publick place, when for a guinea they may do it snug, and without noise.”henri misson de valbourg, m. misson’s memoirs and observations in his travels over england. with some account of scotland and ireland. dispos’d in alphabetical order. written originally in french, and translated by mr. ozell (london: printed for d. browne et al., 1719) 183. ozell’s translation is of mémoires et observations faites par un voyageur en angleterre, published in 1698. misson qualifies his generalization, adding, “what i shall say here therefore is ordinarily practis’d only among those of the church of england, and among people of a middle condition: to which we may add, that live in or near london.”misson 349. by the mid-eighteenth century, the practice had become widespread. according to the churchwardens of battersea, “the reason why our marriages are so few is because of the evil practice of marrying at the fleet in a clandestine and scandalous manner.”quoted by probert 192. clandestine marriages within the environs (the “rules”) of the fleet prison were even more frequent than those at the mayfair chapel. lawrence stone offers the “reasonable guess” that clandestine marriages accounted for fifteen to twenty percent of marriages, albeit based solely on marriages in london.lawrence stone, road to divorce: england, 1530–1987 (oxford: oxford university press, 1990) 115. r. b. outhwaite, using a slightly different definition, suggests that around a quarter of marriages were clandestine.r. b. outhwaite, clandestine marriage in england, 1500–1850 (london: hambledon press, 1995) 49. it is worth making the point that a clandestine marriage was not necessarily a cheap option. keith’s mayfair chapel charged one guinea until four p.m., and more thereafter. the way to mr. keith’s chapel is thro’ piccadilly, by the end of st. james’s street, and down clarges street, and turn on the left hand. the marriages (together with a licence on a five shilling stamp, and certificate) are carried on for a guinea, as usual, any time till four in the afternoon by another regular clergyman, at mr. keith’s little chapel in may-fair, near hyde-park-corner, opposite the great chapel, and within ten yards of it. there is a porch at the door like a country church porch.penny london post, or, the morning advertiser (19-22 august 1748). these same words recur as part of a repeated news item throughout august that year. such marriages were rendered illegal by lord hardwicke’s marriage act of 1753 (“an act for the better preventing of clandestine marriage,” 26 geo. ii. c. 33), which put a stop to the marriages at mayfair; on 24 march 1754, the day before the hardwicke act came into force, sixty-one couples were married there. outhwaite notes that horace walpole, outraged by hardwicke’s act, … [wrote] to seymour conway: “it is well that you are married. how would my lady a. have liked to be asked in a parish-church for three sundays running? i really believe she would have worn her weeds forever, rather than have passed through so impudent a ceremony.” it is very reminiscent of lydia languish’s despair, at the collapse of her plans for elopement and a “scotch parson,” that she might “perhaps be cried three times in a country-church and have an unmannerly fat clerk ask the consent of every butcher in the parish to join john absolute and lydia languish, spinster!”r. b. outhwaite, “age at marriage in england from the late seventeenth to the nineteenth century,” transactions of the royal historical society 23 (1973): 55-70 (65). the lydia languish reference is to r. b. sheridan, the rivals, act 5, scene 1. in the longer run the hardwicke act may have boosted the tendency to marry by license.outhwaite, clandestine marriage in england 48. william blake and catherine sophia boucher (1762–1831) got married by bishop’s license in battersea on 18 august 1782. like other couples in eighteenth-century marriages, they wanted no publicity from the calling of banns. that would have made what was a private family matter into something the neighbors could gossip about (and expect a cask of bridal ale to drink the health of the married couple). to return to ripley’s basic misunderstanding, i have already pointed out the large number of third-party advertisements involving w. s. blake, and another, one off, for blake of berwick street. why should james blake be the exception? generally, advertisers avoided using their own names and addresses in personal ads, in part to avoid a queue of applicants outside their front doors, hence the innovation of the box number in the daily telegraph’s classified advertising in the latter half of the nineteenth century.martin conboy, journalism: a critical history (london: sage, 2004) 121. ripley’s error stems from disregarding the high value that the eighteenth century placed on privacy, as i have shown through examples both with the blake family and within the blake circle. if james blake had wanted to place an advertisement relating to his own domestic circumstances, he would have placed it with another shop to maintain his family’s privacy. from a wider view, this means that there must be much that william blake didn’t tell john linnell and that linnell didn’t tell alexander gilchrist. there is need for deeper delving into william blake’s life and times, and, yes, that can mean careful searching of historic newspaper files. adding to blake set to music illustrations of the book of job, detail of pl. numbered 21. collection of robert n. essick. image courtesy of the william blake archive. adding to blake set to music by ashanka kumari ashanka kumari (ashanka.kumari@louisville.edu; http://ashankakumari.com) is a doctoral fellow at the university of louisville. her research interests include multimodal composition and pedagogy, digital humanities, and the intersections among identity studies, social media, and popular culture. in 1990, the university of california press published blake set to music: a bibliography of musical settings of the poems and prose of william blake, compiled by donald fitch. this bibliography lists 1412 pieces up to 1988. “blake set to music: supplement 2001” by fitch appeared in blake 35.2 (fall 2001): 40-61. the following list contains pieces of music written after fitch’s bibliographies were published or, in a few cases, compositions written before their publication that were not mentioned therein.my research for this project was aided by keri davies, “blake set to music,” blake 2.0: william blake in twentieth-century art, music and culture, ed. steve clark, tristanne connolly, and jason whittaker (basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, 2012) 189-208. the works below are primarily set to or based on blake’s poems; songs that mention blake, such as “you don’t pull no punches, but you don’t push the river” from van morrison’s veedon fleece (1974) (see amazon, allmusic, and youtube), are generally not included. the entries below are organized by the last name of the composer, using fitch’s work as a model. they list the nationality of the composer, though in a few instances this position has been left blank because the information was not readily available at the time the project was conducted. each entry provides either the name of a single composition or an album in which compositions have been collectively published. the duration refers to the complete length in minutes and seconds of the individual composition or album. where possible, entries contain details of instrumentation, copyright dates, composition dates, publisher names, and genres. finally, entries that begin with an album title end with a list of the works on that album that are based on works by blake, numbered as they are on the album. the source list contains at least one link to a full score of the piece, or a youtube video, or a sound recording via spotify, or another web site. ashcroft, richarduk from forth; performed by rock band the verve; songs for voice, guitar, keyboards, bass, percussion. duration: 64:18. mri associated, © 2008. rock. contents: 2. love is noise (based on blake’s “and did those feet in ancient time”). sources: amazon, allmusic, youtube, spotify. ayton, willusa from a reliquary for william blake; song cycle for voice and viols. duration: 73:46. msr classics, © 2007. classical. contents: 1. the tyger. 2. the principle, application & therefore. 3. the garden of love. 4. the remembrance of sin. 5. meditation. 6. come hither. 7. the little vagabond. 8. the look of love. 9. the clod & the pebble. 10. grown old. 11. why was cupid a boy? 12. dance—prayer—dance. 13. principle—argument—fancy. 14. piping down the valleys wild. sources: amazon, allmusic, spotify. beglarian, eveusa the marriage of heaven and hell; songs for voice, flute, soprano saxophone, oboe, bassoon, percussion, electric guitar, bass, piano. duration: 13:24. evbvd music, © 1994. contemporary. movements: 1. opposition is true friendship. 2. energy is eternal delight. 3. enough. sources: evbvd music, full score, spotify. berends, billusa from mastermind iii: tragic symphony; performed by progressive rock band mastermind; songs for voice, guitar, bass, percussion. duration: 48:11. zero/toshiba-emi, © 1994. progressive rock. contents: 1. tiger! tiger! sources: allmusic, mastermind, youtube. bolcom, williamusa songs of innocence and of experience; songs for voice, orchestra, harmonica, fiddle. duration: 136:47. naxos, © 2004. classical. contents: (disc 1, songs of innocence) 1. part 1. introduction. 2. part 1. the ecchoing green. 3. part 1. the lamb. 4. part 1. the shepherd. 5. part 1. infant joy. 6. part 1. the little black boy. 7. part 2. laughing song. 8. part 2. spring. 9. part 2. a cradle song. 10. part 2. nurse’s song. 11. part 2. holy thursday. 12. part 2. the blossom. 13. part 2. interlude. 14. part 2. the chimney sweeper. 15. part 2. the divine image. 16. part 3. nocturne. 17. part 3. night. 18. part 3. a dream. 19. part 3. on another’s sorrow. 20. part 3. the little boy lost. 21. part 3. the little boy found. 22. part 3. coda. (disc 2, songs of experience, volume 1) 1. part 1. introduction. 2. part 1. hear the voice of the bard. 3. part 1. interlude. 4. part 1. earth’s answer. 5. part 2. nurse’s song. 6. part 2. the fly. 7. part 2. the tyger. 8. part 2. the little girl lost. 9. part 2. in the southern clime. 10. part 2. the little girl found. 11. part 2. the clod and the pebble. 12. part 3. the little vagabond. 13. part 3. holy thursday. 14. part 3. a poison tree. 15. part 3. the angel. 16. part 3. the sick rose. 17. part 3. to tirzah. (disc 3, songs of experience, volume 2) 1. part 4. the voice of the ancient bard. 2. part 4. my pretty rose tree. 3. part 4. ah! sun-flower. 4. part 4. the lilly. 5. part 5. introduction. 6. part 5. the garden of love. 7. part 5. a little boy lost. 8. part 5. a little girl lost. 9. part 5. infant sorrow. 10. part 5. vocalise. 11. part 6. london. 12. part 6. the school-boy. 13. part 6. the chimney sweeper. 14. part 6. the human abstract. 15. part 6. interlude: voces clamandae. 16. part 6. a divine image. sources: amazon, allmusic, naxos, youtube, spotify.editors’ note: see also jackie di salvo’s review of the new york premiere of the work in jan. 1987, blake 21.4 (spring 1988): 152-57. carr, danielusa three blake songs; songs for voice, piano. duration: 07:00. composed 2005. classical. movements: 1. nurse’s song. 2. a poison tree. 3. the blossom. sources: daniel carr: composer, youscribe, box. clack, jo, and paul howarduk blake songs; songs for voice, guitar, mandolin, fiddle. average song duration: 03:00. christian fallon, © 2007. folk. contents: 1. introduction. 2. poison tree. 3. on another’s sorrow. 4. the echoing green. 5. a little boy lost, a little boy found. 6. the fly. 7. the garden of love. 8. the little vagabond. 9. the sick rose. 10. london. 11. the tyger. 12. ah, sunflower. sources: howard and clack, youtube, facebook. coates, stephenuk from the london book of the dead; performed by the band the real tuesday weld; songs featuring bass, guitar, voice, clarinet, violin, spoken word, percussion. duration: 48:49. six degrees, © 2007. indie pop. contents: 9. song for william. sources: amazon, allmusic, pitchfork, spotify. coren, finnnorway the blake project: the ecchoing green; songs composed and performed by finn coren. duration: 07:39. bard records, © 1997. pop. contents: 1. the ecchoing green. 2. the wild flower’s song. 3. a poison tree. sources: amazon, allmusic, spotify.editors’ note: in his 2001 supplement fitch lists the blake project album and mentions some singles, but not this release. for a review of the album, see thomas dillingham, blake 32.2 (fall 1998): 49-50. davenport, bobuk from the common stone; songs for voice, guitar. duration: 52:43. topic records, © 2005. folk. contents: 4. jerusalem. sources: allmusic, mainly norfolk, spotify. dyson, peterrussia/uk infant joy; song for voice, piano. duration: 01:22. peter dyson, © 1978. classical. sources: international music score library project, allmusic, full score. ellingsen, sivert the lamb; song for voice. sivert ellingsen, © 2012. classical. source: international music score library project. emmanuel, michaelusa songs of innocence and of experience; songs for voice, guitar, violin, viola, cello, flute. duration: 60:00. released 2012. classical. contents: 1. ecchoing green. 2. the blossom. 3. the lamb. 4. the tyger. 5. the chimney sweeper (innocence). 6. the divine image. 7. the human abstract. 8. a dream. 9. little boy lost/little boy found. 10. spring. 11. a cradle song. 12. the clod & the pebble. 13. holy thursday. 14. the little girl lost. 15. the little girl found. 16. the little vagabond. 17. the chimney sweeper (experience). 18. the sick rose. 19. the fly. 20. my pretty rose tree/ah! sunflower/the lily. sources: amazon, michael emmanuel, youtube. ferreri, ernesto songs of innocence and of experience; songs for voice, orchestra. duration: 24:00. ferreri publications, ltd., composed 1995. modern. movements: 1. laughing song. 2. the shepherd. 3. the ecchoing green. 4. a dream. 5. songs of experience (the fly, the school-boy, the voice of the ancient bard). source: international music score library project. gillett, jeffuk william blake’s songs of innocence and of experience; songs for voice, guitar, concertina, mandolin, dulcimer, whistle. duration: 100:00. j&e music, © 2009. contents: 1. the voice of the ancient bard. 2. introduction (innocence). 3. the shepherd. 4. laughing song. 5. the little boy lost/the little boy found. 6. spring. 7. the lamb. 8. the tyger. 9. the little black boy. 10. holy thursday (innocence and experience). 11. to tirzah. 12. infant joy and infant sorrow. 13. the school boy. 14. a little boy lost. 15. the chimney sweeper (innocence). 16. on another’s sorrow. 17. the chimney sweeper (experience). 18. the ecchoing green. 19. a cradle song. 20. introduction (experience) and earth’s answer. 21. the clod & the pebble. 22. the sick rose. 23. nurse’s song (innocence and experience). 24. the blossom. 25. a little girl lost. 26. the garden of love. 27. the angel. 28. my pretty rose tree/ah! sunflower/the lilly. 29. the little vagabond. 30. london. 31. the divine image. 32. the human abstract. 33. a divine image. 34. a poison tree. 35. a dream. 36. the fly. 37. the little girl lost and the little girl found. 38. night. sources: william blake’s songs of innocence and of experience, amazon, wild goose studios, so glos, zoamorphosis, youtube. giltrap, gordonuk from visionary; songs for voice, guitars, keyboards, bass, drums, trumpet, trombone, saxophone, percussion. duration: 52:57. released 1976. la cooka ratcha, © 2000. folk. contents: 6. the price of experience. 7. the dance of albion. 8. the tyger. 9. the ecchoing green. 10. london. 11. night. 13. jerusalem. sources: amazon, allmusic, youtube. grant, jamesuk (scotland) from i shot the albatross; songs for voice, guitar. duration: 40:36. vertical, © 2002. contents: 2. long john brown & little mary bell. sources: amazon, allmusic, youtube. griffin, michaeluk “london”; song for voice, guitar. duration: 02:45. standard youtube license, © 2011. source: youtube. haas, ericusa the lamb; song for voice. eric haas, © 1989. classical. sources: international music score library project, cpdl [choral public domain library]. hill, amy a divine image; song for voice. composed 2005. classical. sources: international music score library project, youscribe. hutchings, kevincanada songs of william blake; songs for voice, violin, celtic harp, tin whistle, low whistle, guitar, keyboards, accordion, double bass, percussion. duration: 44:52. independent, © 2007. folk. contents: 1. introduction (experience). 2. the ecchoing green. 3. the garden of love. 4. the sick rose. 5. the fly. 6. a poison tree. 7. laughing song. 8. introduction (innocence). 9. the tyger. 10. the voice of the ancient bard. 11. spring. 12. ah! sun-flower. 13. the chimney sweeper (experience). 14. night. sources: amazon, kevin hutchings, youtube, spotify.editors’ note: see also the review by brent e. kinser, blake 43.2 (fall 2009): 65-66. knox, danielusa from a poison tree; songs for voice, keyboards. duration: 29:07. h. p. johnson, © 2006. contents: 2. a poison tree. 4. infant sorrow. 6. a poison tree. 9. infant sorrow. sources: bandcamp, last.fm, youtube. mccabe, nickuk from a northern soul; performed by rock band the verve; songs for voice, guitar, keyboards, bass, percussion. duration: 63:59. virgin, © 1995. rock. contents: 8. history (based on blake’s “london”). sources: amazon, allmusic, youtube, spotify. mcgarrigle, katecanada from la vache qui pleure; performed by folk duo kate and anna mcgarrigle; songs for voice, guitar, percussion, contrabass, accordion, flute, omnichord, synthesizer, tambourine, vibraphone, harmonica, organ, vielle, violone. duration: 40:31. la tribu, © 2003. folk. contents: 2. ah tournesol. 11. sunflower (version anglaise de ah tournesol). sources: amazon, allmusic. mephisto walzusa from immersion; songs for voice, drums, guitar, synthesizer. duration: 47:10. cleopatra, © 1998. darkwave. contents: 5. the tyger. sources: amazon, allmusic, youtube. parry-jones, janenew zealand songs of innocence and of experience; songs for voice, strings, percussion. duration: 47:43. jane parry-jones, © 2013. folk, jazz. contents: 1. introduction. 2. the shepherd. 3. the echoing green. 4. the lamb. 5. the little black boy. 6. the blossom. 7. the chimney sweeper. 8. the little boy lost/the little boy found. 9. laughing song. 10. a cradle song. 11. the divine image. 12. holy thursday. 13. night. 14. spring. 15. nurse’s song. 16. infant joy. 17. a dream. 18. on another’s sorrow. 19. introduction (to experience). 20. the clod & pebble. 21. the chimney sweep. 22. nurse’s song (experience). 23. the sick rose. 24. the fly. 25. the angel. 26. the tyger. 27. my pretty rose tree. 28. ah, sunflower. 29. the lily. 30. the garden of love. 31. the little vagabond. 32. infant sorrow. 33. a poison tree. 34. to tirzah. 35. the voice of the ancient bard. sources: amazon, cduniverse, spotify. posman, lucienbelgium the book of thel; song for voice, flute, clarinet, cello, piano, percussion, violin, viola. composed 2001. classical. sources: living composers project, ann de renais. (posman) five songs of experience; songs for voice, clarinet, piano. duration: 11:20. composed 1988. classical. movements: 1. a little boy lost. 2. my pretty rose tree. 3. the lilly. 4. the garden of love. 5. a little girl lost. sources: amazon, living composers project, russiandvd. (posman) the mental traveller; song for voice, bass clarinet, marimba, piccolo, violin, cello (or voice and recorders). composed 2002. classical. sources: living composers project, ann de renais. (posman) some blake works; songs for voice, flute, piano. duration: 57:46. cypres, © 2003. classical. contents: 1. the book of los for soprano, flute, piano, and mixed choir: chapter 1. 2. the book of los: chapter 2. 3. the book of los: chapter 3. 4. the book of los: chapter 4. 5. ten songs of experience for mixed choir a cappella: the clod & the pebble. 6. ten songs of experience: holy thursday. 7. ten songs of experience: the little girl lost. 8. ten songs of experience: the little girl found. 9. ten songs of experience: the chimney sweeper. 10. ten songs of experience: the little vagabond. 11. ten songs of experience: infant sorrow. 12. ten songs of experience: a poison tree. 13. ten songs of experience: to tirzah. 14. ten songs of experience: the school-boy. 15. to the evening star for female choir a cappella. 16. to morning for mixed choir a cappella. sources: amazon, living composers project, spotify. (posman) songs of experience; songs for voice, piano. duration: 08:15. composed 1986. classical. movements: 1. introduction. 2. earth’s answer. 3. the fly. 4. nurse’s song. 5. ah! sun-flower. sources: amazon, living composers project, russiandvd. (posman) from welcome stranger; songs for voice, violin, piano four hands, cembalo, flute, oboe, bassoon, timpani. phaedra, © 2012. classical. contents: 1. welcome stranger to this place. 6. to spring. 7. to summer. 8. to autumn. 9. to winter. 11. the tyger. sources: amazon, living composers project, mdt, phaedra. redbone, martha, john mceuen, and aaron whitbyusa the garden of love—songs of william blake; songs for voice, banjo, guitar, dobro, fiddle, mandolin, percussion, upright bass, pump organ, accordion, tack piano, autoharp, lap dulcimer. duration: 33:01. blackfeet productions, © 2012. folk. contents: 1. the garden of love. 2. hear the voice of the bard. 3. how sweet i roamed. 4. on anothers sorrow. 5. a dream. 6. i heard an angel singing. 7. i rose up at the dawn of day. 8. a poison tree. 9. the echoing green. 10. the fly. 11. why should i care for the men of thames. 12. sleep sleep beauty bright. sources: amazon, martha redbone, allmusic, martha redbone roots project, npr, youtube, spotify.editors’ note: see also the review by steve newman, blake 49.1 (summer 2015): 9 pars. spalding, esperanzausa from chamber music society; songs for voice, percussion, cello, piano, melodica, viola, violin, guitar, bass. duration: 56:15. heads up, © 2010. orchestral jazz. contents: 1. little fly. sources: amazon, allmusic, youtube. st. clair, richardusa two songs of innocence; songs for voice. duration: 07:30. richard st. clair, composed 1997. classical. movements: 1. the ecchoing green. 2. night. sources: international music score library project, full score. ulver, and vegard sverre tveitan (ihsahn)norway themes from william blake’s the marriage of heaven and hell; songs for spoken word, electronic music. duration: 101:09. jester, © 1998. black metal. contents: (disc 1) 1. the argument, plate 2. 2. plate 3. 3. plate 3, following. 4. the voice of the devil, plate 4. 5. plates 5-6. 6. a memorable fancy, plates 6-7. 7. proverbs of hell, plates 7-10. 8. plate 11. 9. intro. 10. a memorable fancy, plates 12-13. 11. plate 14. 12. a memorable fancy, plate 15. 13. plates 16-17. (disc 2) 1. a memorable fancy, plates 17-20. 2. intro. 3. plates 21-22. 4. a memorable fancy, plates 22-24. 5. intro. 6. a song of liberty, plates 25-27. sources: amazon, allmusic, youtube. unger, davidsweden night songs, op. 24; songs for voice, piano. david unger, composed 2012. classical. movements: 1. night. 2. a cradle song. 3. a dream. 4. the little boy lost. 5. the little boy found. sources: international music score library project, full score. veldhuis, jacob ternetherlands the garden of love; song for spoken word, soprano saxophone, soundtrack. duration: 07:17. boombox, © 2002. classical. sources: allmusic, jacobtv, youtube. vertunni, victoritaly/uk songs of innocence and of experience; songs for voice, strings, guitar, percussion. duration: 40:58. victor vertunni, © 2011. folk jazz. contents: 1. the lamb. 2. nurse’s song (songs of innocence). 3. a little boy lost. 4. the chimney sweeper (songs of innocence). 5. holy thursday (songs of experience). 6. i prophetic see (from the little girl lost). 7. my pretty rose tree. 8. a poison tree. 9. the chimney sweeper (songs of experience). 10. the fly. 11. the tyger. 12. ah! sun-flower. 13. the voice of the ancient bard. sources: amazon, allmusic, youtube, spotify. yost, daniel the lamb; song for voice. duration: 03:50. daniel yost, composed 2005. classical. sources: international music score library project, youtube. blake in the marketplace, 2017 blake in the marketplace, 2017 by robert n. essick robert n. essick has been collecting and writing about blake for fifty years. table of contents: introductory essay abbreviations blake: illuminated books drawings and paintings first editions of blake’s writings first published in letterpress in blake’s lifetime separate plates and plates in series letterpress books with engravings by and after blake, including prints extracted from such books interesting blakeana blake’s circle and followers: barry, james basire, james calvert, edward flaxman, john fuseli, henry linnell, john palmer, samuel richmond, george romney, george stothard, thomas tatham, frederick corrigendum appendix: new information on blake’s engravings the 2017 market for significant works by blake began with two of his watercolor illustrations for robert blair’s the grave at sotheby’s new york auction on 25 january (illus. 2 and 4). the vendor was probably libby howie acting for marburg ltd., as in the 2006 sotheby’s auction offering nineteen grave watercolors.for information about these watercolors, their discovery in 2001, and their appearance at auction in 2006, see martin butlin, “new risen from the grave: nineteen unknown watercolors by william blake,” blake 35.3 (winter 2002): 68-73; sotheby’s new york, 2 may 2006 catalogue, william blake: designs for blair’s grave; e. b. bentley, “grave indignities: greed, hucksterism, and oblivion: blake’s watercolors for blair’s grave,” blake 40.2 (fall 2006): 66-71; and essick, “blake in the marketplace, 2006,” blake 40.4 (spring 2007): 116-26. two grave watercolors were sold at auction in recent years: the gambols of ghosts according with their affections previous to the final judgement, sotheby’s new york, 30 jan. 2013, #285, illustrated ($722,500), and the descent of man into the vale of death, sotheby’s new york, 28 jan. 2016, #184, illustrated ($225,000)—see the sales reviews for those years in blake 47.4 (spring 2014): illus. 7, and 50.4 (spring 2017): illus. 5. for all 20 grave watercolors, see the william blake archive. these two failed to find buyers in 2006. once again, whilst surfeited upon thy damask cheek was bought in. john windle, acting on my behalf, was the only bidder for the counseller, king, warrior, mother & child, in the tomb, knocked down at the low estimate of $100,000 ($125,000 including the buyer’s premium). except for whilst surfeited, howie has now disposed of the grave designs once in marburg’s possession through a combination of auctions and private sales. some may of course come back on the market in future. windle exhibited twenty-four blake items, including “holy thursday” from songs of innocence copy w and six plates from for the sexes: the gates of paradise copy n, at the new york international antiquarian book fair, 9-12 march. the handlist of works for sale is unillustrated and gives no details such as copy designations or descriptions of bindings. this bare-bones account is not surveyed below because all the blake materials displayed in new york appear in windle’s extensively illustrated catalogue 65, william blake: always in paradise, also published in march. most of the original works in this 150-page volume were offered by windle in earlier publications, but all are included here for the record.the catalogue is divided into five sections. unless noted otherwise, all materials listed below are in the first two parts, containing items numbered 1 through 239. the remaining three parts have separate number sequences, each beginning with item 1. the catalogue offers many reproductions, editions, and works of biography and criticism not listed in this sales review. part 3, pages 81-106, is devoted to blake trust/trianon press facsimiles, including deluxe issues, proofs, and other production materials. many individual leaves of trianon reproductions were presented in an exhibition, william blake in color, in windle’s william blake gallery, san francisco, originally scheduled for 22 april-28 july. a power outage on 22 april forced a delay in the opening until 12 may. the show was accompanied by a fully illustrated and priced online catalogue of 135 pages. prices for most individual leaves range from $100 to $200. by early june, windle had received on consignment from the collector alan parker several important works by blake, including the two plates of “a cradle song” from songs of innocence copy y (illus. 1), one of three copies of poetical sketches remaining in private hands, and a pencil sketch, head of jonathan (illus. 3). the first and third of these works were featured in windle’s 8 september-22 december exhibit in his blake gallery. all items in the accompanying online sales catalogue, william blake: dreams and visions, are listed below. “a cradle song” is the second item in windle’s handlist for the boston antiquarian book fair, 10-12 november. all original blake materials in that list, plus william muir facsimiles of the illuminated books, are recorded below. william blake in youth and age, usually attributed to frederick tatham, is one of the better-known portraits of the artist and poet. tatham included an inscribed version (illus. 9) of the drawing in his manuscript biography of blake, now in the yale center for british art, but there is also a larger example, more freely drawn and uninscribed (illus. 8). this too has generally been ascribed to tatham. the provenance of the large drawing indicates that it was probably acquired by blake’s great patron thomas butts or his son, thomas butts, jr.; it was owned by the latter’s grandson until he sold it at auction in 1932. the work resided unnoticed in the denver art museum from 1969 until it was brought to the attention of blake scholars by raymond e. thompson’s 1979 essay in this journal.thompson, “the ‘double’ of the double portrait of blake: a description of tatham’s replica portrait,” blake 13.1 (summer 1979): 29-32, both versions illus. in black and white. late in 2016 the museum decided to deaccession the drawing and placed it for sale with leslie hindman auctioneers, chicago. the portrait was offered in their online auction on 20 october 2017, described as “after” (rather than “by”) tatham and grouped with two unrelated items in a lot estimated at $20-40. hoping for the bargain of the decade but fearing stiff competition, i commissioned windle to bid considerably above the high estimate and even more than a dealer’s c. 1933 asking price of $500. fortune smiled on us as the lot fell to windle for $40 ($50.40 including the 26% buyer’s premium). see the entry under tatham and illus. 8-9. the 2017 marketplace produced several discoveries of blakean interest. in april i learned about an unrecorded impression of blake’s broadside of william hayley’s little tom the sailor, beautifully hand colored by blake—see hayley under letterpress books with engravings by and after blake, and illus. 7. in may i acquired an uncatalogued prepublication proof state of his 1787 engraving of johann caspar lavater (illus. 5). like his 1788–90 plate of william hogarth’s “beggar’s opera,” the lavater portrait demonstrates blake’s mastery of the intaglio etching and engraving conventions of his time. later in may an unrecorded proof of blake’s portrait of william cowper after george romney, published in hayley’s life of cowper (1803), appeared on the web site of grosvenor prints (illus. 6). at the london antiquarian book fair, 1-3 june, windle turned up a previously unknown reproduction of songs of experience by william muir’s circle of facsimilists—see under interesting blakeana. the july sale at auction of an impression with the title in open letters of “industrious cottager,” blake’s engraving after george morland, confirms the existence of the second state of the plate, previously known only through two auction catalogues and analogy with its companion print, “the idle laundress.” misattributions and false identifications continue to infest the blake marketplace. recent examples include two copies of motifs from blake’s the meeting of a family in heaven described as his own work (see under interesting blakeana), a monochrome poster print of blake’s free version of the laocoön (fitzwilliam museum, butlin #681) presented to windle as a drawing, and various reproductions of blake’s job engravings offered as original impressions. i will list such works under interesting blakeana only when they might be convincing. sales of books with blake’s commercial engravings, even those for which he both designed and engraved the plates, have slowed noticeably. some copies have languished on the market for five years or more. several dealers have reduced their prices, as recorded below for works by ariosto, boydell, catullus, darwin, gay, hartley, lavater, salzmann, scott, stedman, and varley. two types of blake collectors, those who are active at the top of the market and those who concentrate on facsimiles of the illuminated books, tend not to indulge in his commercial work. the year of all sales and catalogues in the following lists is 2017, unless indicated otherwise. most reports about auction catalogues are based on the online versions. illustrations are in color, unless noted otherwise. coverage of regional auctions is selective. dates for dealers’ online catalogues are the dates accessed, not the dates of publication. works offered online by dealers and previously listed in any one of the last four sales reviews are not repeated here. most of the auction houses add their purchaser’s surcharge to the hammer price in their price lists. these net amounts are given here, following the official price lists. estimates in auction catalogues are usually for hammer prices. i am grateful for help in compiling this review to nicolas bell, david bindman, mark crosby, rachel enright, alexander gourlay, mary lynn grant, annika green, mark griffith-jones, malcolm manwaring, patrick noon, morton d. paley, joseph viscomi, scott wilcox, emily willkom, and john windle. my special thanks go to jenijoy la belle for assistance in all matters. once again, sarah jones’s editorial expertise and john sullivan’s digital imaging have been invaluable. abbreviations ah abbott and holder, london bb g. e. bentley, jr., blake books (oxford: clarendon p, 1977). plate numbers and copy designations for blake’s illuminated books and commercial book illustrations follow bb. bbs g. e. bentley, jr., blake books supplement (oxford: clarendon p, 1995) br(2) g. e. bentley, jr., blake records, 2nd ed. (new haven: yale up, 2004) butlin martin butlin, the paintings and drawings of william blake, 2 vols. (new haven: yale up, 1981) cat(s). catalogue(s) cb robert n. essick, william blake’s commercial book illustrations (oxford: clarendon p, 1991) cl christie’s auctions, london coxhead a. c. coxhead, thomas stothard, r.a. (london: bullen, 1906) dw dominic winter auctions, south cerney, gloucestershire dy doyle auctions, new york e the complete poetry and prose of william blake, ed. david v. erdman, newly rev. ed. (new york: anchor-random house, 1988) eb ebay online auctions fm forum auctions, london gp grosvenor prints, london illus. illustration(s), illustrated jl joseph lebovic gallery, kensington, australia lfa larkhall fine art, bath ll lowell libson, london pl(s). plate(s) sf sulis fine art, bradford-on-avon, wiltshire sl sotheby’s auctions, london sny sotheby’s auctions, new york sp robert n. essick, the separate plates of william blake: a catalogue (princeton: princeton up, 1983) st(s). state(s) of an engraving, etching, or lithograph sw swann auctions, new york windle john windle antiquarian bookseller, san francisco # auction lot or catalogue item number illuminated books “the ancient of days” (europe pl. 1). relief and white-line etching with hand coloring, 2nd st., 1794. designated as copy d of “the ancient of days” in bb pp. 109, 339 (#100), 340 (#f1). windle, march cat. 65, #3, illus. (“sold”). sold april 2016 to alan parker, london; see the 2016 sales review, blake 50.4 (spring 2017): par. 4, entry under illuminated books, and illus. 1. for the sexes: the gates of paradise copy n (see bbs pp. 78-80). windle, march cat. 65, #5-10, pls. 4-6, 8, 13, 14 only, all except pl. 8 illus. ($40,000 each); same group, aug. online cat., all illus. ($30,000 each); the group acquired by essick in oct. for discussion about copy n and earlier sales of pls. from it, see the 2016 sales review, blake 50.4 (spring 2017): entry under illuminated books and illus. 2-3. the 10 pls. constituting copy n are now divided between the e. j. pratt library, victoria university, toronto (pl. 3) and essick (pls. 4-8, 13-15, 17). songs of innocence copy w. windle, march cat. 65, #4, pl. 19 (“holy thursday”) only, illus. (price on request); sept. dreams and visions cat., #13, illus. (price on request). priced at $150,000 in windle’s handlist for the new york book fair, 9-12 march, #3, and in his handlist for the boston antiquarian book fair, 10-12 nov., #1. for information about copy w and sales of other pls. from it, see the 2015 sales review, blake 49.4 (spring 2016): par. 3-7 and illus. 1-3. for illus. of pl. 19, see the 2016 sales review, blake 50.4 (spring 2017): illus. 4. songs of innocence copy y. windle, sept. dreams and visions cat., #12, pls. 16-17 (“a cradle song”) only, both pls. illus. (price on request). priced at $250,000 in windle’s handlist for the boston antiquarian book fair, 10-12 nov., #2. for earlier sale at auction for $115,000, see the 2007 sales review, blake 41.4 (spring 2008): 140, 146, and illus. 5 (pl. 16 in black and white). for the rediscovery of copy y, see detlef w. dörrbecker, “innocence lost & found: an untraced copy traced,” blake 15.3 (winter 1981–82): 125-30. see illus. 1. 1. “a cradle song,” 2nd pl. of 2, from songs of innocence copy y, bb pl. 17 (see enlargement of design). relief etching in light-brown ink, hand colored with some motifs outlined in pen and black ink, numbered “16” top right by blake in pen and black ink, on wove paper with a “butta[nshaw]” watermark. probably printed c. 1802, with some coloring added at that time but possibly touched up and numbered c. 1811. image 11.3 x 7.1 cm. on leaf 20.9 x 14.4 cm. photo courtesy of john windle. drawings and paintings the complaint of job (recto); standing figure (verso). wash drawing, 32.5 x 46.0 cm. butlin #163, then untraced. windle, march cat. 65, #2, on loan from a “private collection, san francisco” (collection of robert bransten), illus. (“n.f.s.”—not for sale). the counseller, king, warrior, mother & child, in the tomb, an illus. to robert blair’s the grave. pencil, pen and ink, brown wash, 15.0 x 23.4 cm. sny, 25 jan., #110, illus. ($125,000 to windle acting for essick; estimate $100,000-150,000). previously offered sny, 2 may 2006, #13, illus. (not sold; highest bid $500,000 on an estimate of $700,000-$1,000,000). see illus. 2. 2. the counseller, king, warrior, mother & child, in the tomb (see enlargement). pencil, pen and ink, brown wash, 15.0 x 23.4 cm., datable to 1805. essick collection. one of blake’s illus. for robert blair’s the grave commissioned by robert h. cromek in oct. 1805. the washes on the figures show blake’s subtle skill at shading and modeling. the arrangement of figures follows the counsellor, king, warrior, mother and child (butlin #136), blake’s monochrome wash drawing of a battlefield scene datable to c. 1780–85, offered cl, 7 july 2015, #93, unsold at the auction but later sold by private treaty—see the 2015 sales review, blake 49.4 (spring 2016): illus. 4. the framing lines shown here are on the original mount, possibly dating from 1805–06, not the leaf bearing blake’s drawing. except for some minor variations in the small reclining figures in the sculpted base of the tomb, louis schiavonetti’s engraving, published in cromek’s 1808 ed. of the poem, reproduces this grave design faithfully. for a prepublication proof of the pl., see the 2013 sales review, blake 47.4 (spring 2014): illus. 15. head of jonathan. pencil, 25.4 x 18.4 cm. windle, sept. dreams and visions cat., #15, illus. (“sold”). acquired july by elaine klemen, chicago. see illus. 3. 3. head of jonathan (see enlargement). visionary head, pencil, 25.4 x 18.4 cm., inscribed top left in pencil (by john varley?) “[jona]than the / [trimmed off] of david.” datable to c. 1819–20. leaf of wove paper, 26.1 x 18.4 cm., with a “jh / 1818” watermark. collection of elaine klemen, chicago; photo courtesy of john windle. not in butlin because not discovered until 1985, but see butlin #693 and 699, both visionary heads dated to c. 1819–20, for the same watermark. the lightness of the pencil lines and their slightly smudged appearance under magnification suggest that this is either a counterproof or the original from which a counterproof was taken. no other version of the drawing has been recorded. provenance: possibly acquired by john linnell and one of the untitled visionary heads sold from his collection, 15 march 1918, in lots 162, 163, and 165 (all 3 sold to the dealer e. parsons, £16.16s., £44.2s., and £46.4s. respectively); apparently in a private collection or series of private collections until sold cl, 9 july 1985, #110, no illus. (£4428 to the dealer colnaghi, probably acting for ian woodner); woodner family collection, which had the drawing restored; cl, 9 july 1991, #85, black-and-white illus. after restoration (£2420 to alan parker); on consignment from parker’s collection with windle, june 2017, label of the “ian woodner family collection” on the back of the frame removed (according to windle’s sept. dreams and visions cat., #15); sold to elaine klemen, chicago, july 2017 ($29,500). for a black-and-white illus. of this drawing before restoration, see the 1985 sales review, blake 20.1 (summer 1986): 16, illus. 3. when sold in 1985, this drawing was in very poor condition, with tears and stains in the right and bottom margins, a large tear in the center of the left margin, a disfiguring stain over the figure’s mouth, and various small stains throughout. as the present illus. shows, the restoration executed between 1985 and 1991 was only partly successful. the areas of whiter paper at the margins, particularly evident on the left, were once covered by a mat and thus not exposed to light. the most disturbing remaining damage is the brown stain over jonathan’s mouth. the virgin hushing the young baptist, who approaches the sleeping infant jesus. tempera, 1799. butlin #406. windle, march cat. 65, #1, illus. (not priced). sold dec. 2016 to alan parker, london; see the 2016 sales review, blake 50.4 (spring 2017). for illus. and discussion, see the 2015 sales review, blake 49.4 (spring 2016): illus. 7 and its caption. whilst surfeited upon thy damask cheek, an illus. to robert blair’s the grave. watercolor, 19.6 x 13.3 cm. sny, 25 jan., #108, illus. (not sold; highest bid $160,000 on an estimate of $180,000-240,000). previously offered sny, 2 may 2006, #5, illus. (not sold; highest bid $520,000 on an estimate of $700,000-$1,000,000). see illus. 4. 4. whilst surfeited upon thy damask cheek, an illus. to robert blair’s the grave (see enlargement). watercolor, 19.6 x 13.3 cm., datable to 1805. one of blake’s illus. for blair’s grave commissioned by robert h. cromek in oct. 1805 but not engraved for the 1808 ed. for a brief discussion, see the caption to illus. 3 in the 2006 sales review, blake 40.4 (spring 2007): 122. photo courtesy of sotheby’s new york. first editions of blake’s writings first published in letterpress in blake’s lifetime poetical sketches, 1783, bb and bbs copy e. windle, june private offer, on consignment from the collection of alan parker (price on request). for earlier sales, see the 2007 sales review, blake 41.4 (spring 2008): 147. for a black-and-white illus. of the title page, including john flaxman’s presentation inscription, see blake 40.4 (spring 2007): back cover. separate plates and plates in series “chaucers canterbury pilgrims,” hand-colored impression. kaminski auction, beverly, massachusetts, 20 aug., #1385, 5th (final) st., evenly stained light brown and with serious mat burn, illus. ($1500; estimate $200-400). the auctioneer reported to windle on 16 aug. that the leaf size is 43.8 x 101.6 cm. and that the paper shows a “france” watermark. the watermark makes it certain that this is an impression printed by the philadelphia book dealer charles sessler in 1941 (see sp p. 86). the hand coloring imitates (with a few exceptions) the coloring of blake’s tempera painting of the design, butlin #653. “chaucers canterbury pilgrims,” uncolored impressions. windle, march cat. 65, #12, 5th (final) st., colnaghi printing on laid india, “recently cleaned and matted,” illus. (“sold” fall 2016 to a private collector, vancouver, british columbia); another impression, same st. and paper, “recently cleaned,” sept. dreams and visions cat., #11, illus. ($25,000). david lay auction, penzance, 26 oct., #676, 3rd st., inscriptions below title trimmed off, vertical center crease, illus. (£259.60; estimate £30-60). dante engravings. r. e. lewis & daughter, feb. online cat., #31, pl. 3 only, laid india, probably the 1892 printing, “a few fox marks,” illus. ($8500). windle, march cat. 65, #27, complete set, early printing on laid paper, illus. ($350,000); #28-31, 1892 printing on laid india, pls. 2, 4-6 only, all illus. ($6500-$12,500 each); #32, 1953/54 printing, pl. 1 only, illus. ($7500); part 3, p. 85, #9, pl. 1 only, 1968 printing, included in the deluxe issue of blake’s illustrations of dante, trianon press for the blake trust, 1978, illus. ($7500); part 3, p. 85, #10, pl. 6 only, 1968 printing, included in the deluxe issue of the blake trust vol. as above, illus. ($5500). sw, 2 may, #249, pl. 3 only, laid india, illus. ($7500). sl, 27 sept., #116, complete set on laid india, “with varying degrees of foxing and pale staining” and “with light-staining throughout, each framed,” from the family of w. b. yeats, illus. (£15,000). for information on the windle set on laid paper, see essick, “the printings of blake’s dante engravings,” blake 24.3 (winter 1990–91): 84-85, and the entry on the dante engravings in the 2016 sales review, blake 50.4 (spring 2017). “george cumberland’s card.” windle, march cat. 65, #11, “printed in black ink on thick card … trimmed very close to the image,” illus. ($20,000). “industrious cottager,” after george morland. chiswick auction, london, 18 july, #30, brown ink, laid paper with an oddly shaped, undecipherable watermark, leaf trimmed inside the platemark to 25.5 x 29.8 cm. and thus with the imprint cut off, 2nd st. with the title in open letters, the only traced impression in this st., illus. (£234 to windle acting for essick). job engravings. windle, march cat. 65, #13, complete set, published “proof” printing on laid india, “matted, a brilliant set, with the original printed label preserved,” illus. ($125,000); #14-20 and an unnumbered entry for pl. numbered 2 following #14, published “proof” printing on laid india, title page and pls. numbered 2, 4, 6, 9, 16, 18, 19 only, all illus. (pl. 2 “sold,” others $1450-3250 each); #21, complete set on laid india, the 1874 printing, “enclosed in a blue morocco box,” illus. ($47,500); #22-26, 1874 printing on laid india, title page and pls. numbered 6-8, 17 only, all illus. ($1500-1800 each). fm, 30 march, #450, pl. numbered 11 only, apparently a published “proof” impression on french paper, leaf 38.0 x 26.0 cm., illus. (£1625); #451, pl. numbered 13 only, same printing as previous lot, leaf 37.5 x 26.0 cm., illus. (£2125); 10 july, #413, pl. numbered 9 only, 1874 printing on laid india, leaf 45.0 x 34.0 cm., illus. (not sold; estimate £800-1200); same impression of pl. numbered 9, 26 sept., #44, illus. (£812.50). freeman’s auction, philadelphia, 6 april, #25, pl. numbered 5 only, 1826 printing on wove after removal of the “proof” inscription, leaf 36.0 x 26.0 cm., illus. ($1560). rachel davis fine arts auction, cleveland, 10 june, #3, pl. numbered 18 only, published “proof” st., described as a “posthumous impression” but possibly the 1826 printing on french paper, illus. ($1149.50). veilinghuis bernaerts auction, antwerp, 21 june, #1043, pl. numbered 21 only, published “proof” on laid india, illus. (€1225.50). sl, 11 july, #85, complete set, published “proof” printing on french paper, leaves 41.5 x 27.4 cm., “minor loss to fore-edge of sheet of plate 11 (not affecting image), some light spotting,” full morocco with the arms of harrow school on upper cover, illus. (£25,000); same copy, sims reed, dec. cat., #16, illus. (£60,000); sl, 27 sept., #113, complete set, published “proof” printing on laid india, badly foxed, framed, from the family of w. b. yeats, illus. (£10,000). sw, 19 sept., #4, pl. numbered 18 only, published “proof” on laid india, illus. ($4500). jl, sept. online cat., pl. numbered 6 only, apparently the 1826 printing on wove after removal of the “proof” inscription, “minor foxing to lower portion of image and stains to margins,” illus. ($7700 australian). lfa, dec. online cat., pls. numbered 5 and 16 only, 1826 printing on wove after removal of the “proof” inscription, both illus. (£2750 each). “rev.d robert hawker,” after john ponsford. roseberys auction, london, 28 june, #1130, size given as “46.6 x 34 cm” and thus trimmed on the platemark, image only without inscriptions illus. (£541.20). possibly the impression offered cl, 13 may 1986, #53, black-and-white illus. (not sold; estimate £700-900). “rev. john caspar lavater,” after johann heinrich lips. may private offer from a british dealer who wishes to remain anonymous, a previously unrecorded proof st., trimmed to the image at top and on both sides, stain left of the figure’s nose, other small marks and stains (acquired by essick). see illus. 5. 5. “rev. john caspar lavater,” etching/engraving by blake based on a portrait by johann heinrich lips (see enlargement). a previously unrecorded early st., very probably a working proof before the 1st st. recorded in sp p. 150, a proof before most letters dated dec. 1787. design 27.5 x 23.7 cm. in the proof reproduced here on a leaf of laid paper 27.8 x 23.7 cm., trimmed to the image at the top and on both sides but with a narrow margin below the image of 3.0 mm. inscribed in pen and ink “lavater” (lower left) and “blake” (lower right), possibly by blake. essick collection. this proof lacks many subtle but consequential additions found in the previously recorded 1st st. the most readily apparent are on lavater’s stock where it curves outward below his chin and jaw. in this proof, the cloth is shaded with hatching strokes; crossing lines were added to several areas of the next st. to create crosshatching. the shading on the long and narrow cloth below this curving stock, possibly lavater’s shirt, was also converted from hatching to crosshatching. the wisps of hair that form the outer reaches of the curl over his ear have been lengthened slightly and augmented in the previously recorded 1st st. similarly, a single strand of hair has been added to the curl behind his neck, upper right side of the curl. many areas have been darkened considerably, noticeably on the figure’s cheek, the lower right portion of the iris of lavater’s eye, the central part of the ear, the neck and jaw below his ear, on his coat just below the curl over his neck and on its seam over his shoulder, the eye socket and upper part of the nose left of the eye, and on his upper lip just below and to the right of his nose. the long, shallow folds or ripples in the coat over lavater’s upper chest have been darkened; two shorter folds have been added right and left. although some of these darker passages may result from differences in inking, their consistent appearance in 2ndand 3rd-st. impressions suggests that blake has deepened and widened the dense lines in these areas. the only difference in the portrait itself between the 1st st. recorded in sp and the later 2 is the addition of a thin border line, touching the rectangular frame on 3 sides and about 0.5 mm. from the frame on the right, and possibly a bit more lightening of the white of lavater’s eye (see comments on burnishing, below). an impression of the 3rd st. is in the yale center for british art, accession no. b1970.3.484; see <http://​collections.​britishart.​yale.​edu/​vufind/​record/​3623105>. more striking than the additions evident in sp 1st st. are the subtractions. blake used his burnisher to lighten several areas. the most important is the elimination of some of the hatching lines in the white of lavater’s eye immediately right of his iris (hatching further to the right remains). a dull eye is brightened; lavater now appears to be looking intently. his eyebrow is darker in the proof shown here than in the 1st st.; blake trimmed it by deleting several strands of hair. other work with the burnisher includes the addition of highlights to lavater’s forehead just above the eyebrow, along the bridge of his nose, and to his cheek right of his nose and below and to the right of his eye. blake has converted a relatively flat profile into a face with volume and modeling through an increase in the differences between dark and light passages—a harbinger, within a commercial context, of the dramatic interplay of darkness and illumination that characterizes the original intaglio graphics of his final years. my lamentable limitations at identifying handwriting prompted me to send 1200 ppi details of the pen and ink inscriptions on this proof to alexander gourlay, an expert at sorting out the probable, the possible, and the improbable in chirographic forensics. in an e-mail to me of 9 may, gourlay responded: the inscriptions are too blurred and brief to ascribe to blake on the basis of the script, but both are within the very wide range of his hand. both appear to have been dampened or even washed, and there may be graphite under the name ‘blake.’ the strongest evidence that this is blake’s work rather than that of an early collector or dealer is the manner and layout of the two names, which are written in tiny letters as close to the image as an engraver’s inscriptions, an unlikely format for anyone other than the engraver. although the small size of the writing might suggest that the names were squeezed into a narrow space, the bottom edge appears to have been trimmed after the inscriptions were written. the “blake” inscription is located in the conventional position for the engraver’s name; the name of the artist who created the original drawing or painting would normally be placed lower left. it is unusual to find the name of the person represented in the latter position. perhaps whoever wrote “lavater” knew only the subject of the portrait and not its inventor. lips is not named in any recorded st. of blake’s pl. the version of lips’s portrait on which blake based his engraving in uncertain. an engraving by adam ludwig wirsing, also dated 1787 and with lips named as the artist who drew (“gezeichnet”) the portrait in 1786, shows lavater in right profile with his features more harshly emphasized than in blake’s version but wearing the same costume and framed within an oval. an impression of wirsing’s pl. was acquired by the british museum in 1818, registration no. bb,2.179. joan k. stemmler, in her detailed study of portraits of lavater, suggests that an unsigned drawing in the princeton university library (see sp illus. 67), apparently a copy of a drawing by lips now in the collections of the klassik stiftung weimar, germany, might be blake’s model. see stemmler, “the physiognomical portraits of johann caspar lavater,” art bulletin 75.1 (march 1993): 151-68. the only known impression of the 1st st. of blake’s pl. listed in sp, then in the collection of the art historian leo steinberg (1920–2011), was given by him to the blanton museum of art, university of texas, austin, in july 2002, accession no. 2002.1222—see <http://​collection.​blantonmuseum.​org/​obj3695?sid=13037464&x=4171997>. letterpress books with engravings by and after blake, including prints extracted from such books adams, new royal geographical magazine, c. 1793 (bbs pp. 251-53, issue c). keogh’s books, march online cat., scattered foxing, contemporary calf with “textured leather rebinding” (£1000). contains blake’s 3 pls. 1st published in seally and lyons, a complete geographical dictionary, c. 1784—see the copy of seally and lyons below. allen, roman history, 1798. windle, march cat. 65, #63, blake’s 4 pls. only, all illus. ($1250). ariosto, orlando furioso. windle, march cat. 65, #64, 1799 ed., 5 vols., contemporary calf worn, illus. ($500; acquired by stanford university library); #65, blake’s pl. only, “undeterminable state but likely the second,” inscriptions top right and left rubbed off, illus. ($200). am here books, april online cat., 1783 ed., 5 vols., contemporary calf worn, 1 cover detached ($1080, previously listed at $1350). poor man’s books, april online cat., 1785 ed., 5 vols., modern cloth, illus. ($147). see also bray under stothard, below. bible. royal universal family bible, 1780–81. eb, march, contemporary calf very worn with “significant loss of material,” illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £253.81); same copy, april, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £228.81); another copy, dec., vol. 1 only, some pls. crudely hand colored but not the single blake pl. in this vol., contemporary calf worn, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $349.99). blair, the grave. eb, jan., 1813 quarto, lacking blake’s pls. 6, 10-12, original cover label pasted to “later paper-covered boards” worn, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $695 or “best offer”); dec., blake’s pl. 11 only, 1st published st. from the 1808 folio, trimmed to the image on both sides and at top, imprint trimmed off, illus. (£31). windle, march cat. 65, #98, 1808 quarto, uncut in original boards with cover label, cloth box worn, illus. ($9750); #99, 1808 folio, frontispiece portrait slightly foxed, half morocco worn, illus. ($8950); #100, 1808 quarto, uncut, modern half calf, binding illus. ($5750); #101-14, blake’s pls. only from the 1808 quarto offered individually, plus the frontispiece portrait of blake, pl. 4 trimmed to the image, 1 of 2 impressions of pl. 6 trimmed close to the image, all illus. ($275-875 each); sept. dreams and visions cat., #1-9, blake’s pls. 1, 3-8, 10, 12 from the 1808 quarto offered individually, all illus. ($575-875 each). kagerou bunko books, april online cat., 1808 quarto, scattered foxing, “faint water stain to lower outer corner of some pages,” uncut in original boards with cover label, “front hinge of binding cracked but holding,” illus. ($4050). chanticleer books, april online cat., new york 1858 ed. with the pls. engraved by a. l. dick, foxed, modern half calf, illus. ($300). nicholson’s auction, haslemere, surrey, 11 july, #207, 1813 quarto, trimmed and with stains, half morocco repaired, with another vol. not described, illus. (not sold; estimate £200-300). dw, 19 july, #408, 1808 quarto, “some light spotting and minor marginal soiling,” contemporary half calf rebacked and worn, illus. (£621.40). manhattan rare book company, july online cat., 1808 quarto, scattered foxing, uncut in original boards worn and rebacked, label on front cover, illus. ($4500). sl, 24 oct., #434, blake’s pl. 5 only, 2nd st. from the 1808 quarto, from the collection of the artist howard hodgkin (1932–2017), illus. (£213). fm, 9 nov., #85, [1870] quarto, marginal soiling, publisher’s cloth rebacked and repaired, illus. (£400). christian hesse auction, hamburg, 18 nov., #255, 1808 quarto, scattered foxing, modern half calf, illus. (€2048). sims reed, dec. cat., #12, 1808 folio, contemporary morocco, the copy acquired by sims reed at sl, 14 july 2015, #66, for £2500, illus. (£9500). bonnycastle, introduction to mensuration. see bray under stothard, below. boydell’s graphic illustrations … of shakspeare, c. 1803. bauman rare books, nov. online cat., “with an engraver’s etched working proof for nearly every plate,” later three-quarter morocco, probably the copy previously offered at $9000, illus. ($7500). bryant, new system … of ancient mythology, 1774–76. francis edwards, nov. online cat., 1st ed., 3 vols., “old calf” worn (£495). bürger, leonora, 1796. windle, sept. dreams and visions cat., #17, pl. 1 (frontispiece) only, inscriptions below the design trimmed off but retaining the signatures of blake and perry, illus. ($1750). catullus, poems, 1795. eb, march, 2 vols., pls. foxed, contemporary calf very worn, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $850 or “best offer”). santiam bookseller, april online cat., 2 vols. in 1, scattered foxing, calf worn, covers detached ($749.97, previously listed at $949.97). companion books, nov. online cat., 2 vols., contemporary calf ($600). darwin, botanic garden. windle, march cat. 65, #66 in the inserted “errata” slip, 3rd ed. of part 1, 1795, 4th ed. of part 2, 1794, 2 vols. in 1, “light spotting and soiling,” modern calf “a bit rubbed” ($3750); another copy, #67 in the cat., p. 35, 2 vols. in 1, 19th-century calf rebacked and “a bit rubbed,” binding illus. ($3000). hordern house, april online cat., 1st ed. of part 1, 3rd ed. of part 2, both 1791, 2 vols. in 1, scattered light foxing, contemporary calf, illus. ($5250 australian, previously listed at $6500 australian). jeremy norman, april online cat., 1st ed. of part 1, 3rd ed. of part 2, both 1791, 2 vols. in 1, “minor foxing,” later half calf, illus. ($3750). books on high/tri-village book co., april online cat., 2nd ed. of part 1, 3rd ed. of part 2, both 1791, 2 vols. in 1, pls. foxed, contemporary half calf very worn, covers detached ($630, previously listed at $945). peachtree & bennett auction, atlanta, 8 april, #181, blake’s pl. 1 only, stains in margins, illus. ($160). eb, may, 2nd ed. of part 1, 3rd ed. of part 2, both 1791, 2 vols. in 1, scattered light foxing, modern calf, illus. (£343); oct., 1st ed. of part 1, 3rd ed. of part 2, both 1791, 2 vols. in 1, blake’s pl. 1 with diagonal (ink?) lines marring the image, contemporary calf worn and rebacked, illus. (£686.88); dec., 1799 ed., 2 vols., pls. foxed and some damp stained, contemporary calf worn, illus. ($322.11). sl, 11 july, #316, 3rd ed. of part 1, 1795, ed. of part 2 not indicated but probably the 4th, 1794, 2 vols., “very occasional spotting or stains,” 19th-century calf rebacked, with darwin, zoonomia, 1794–96, 2 vols., contemporary calf, 4 vols. in all, bindings illus. (£3000); #319, 1st ed. of part 1, 3rd ed. of part 2, both 1791, 2 vols. in 1, “modern cloth-backed boards,” with darwin, temple of nature, 1803, contemporary calf rebacked, “and one other” vol. not described, 4 vols. in all, illus. (not sold; estimate £500-800). psychobabel & skoob books, nov. online cat., 1799 ed., apparently vol. 1 only, contemporary calf worn, binding illus. (£500). flaxman, hesiod designs. windle, march cat. 65, #83, 1870 ed., pls. loose in binding, publisher’s printed boards, illus. ($375; acquired by stanford university library). eb, april, 1817 ed., pls. cleaned in the 1970s but still with some minor foxing, original boards with cover label, rebacked with morocco, modern morocco clamshell box, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $1250); same copy, may, offered at the “buy it now” price of $1250. freeman’s auction, philadelphia, 16 june, #130, 1817 ed., bound with the iliad and odyssey designs, 1805, and the aeschylus designs, 1831, later morocco, with l’iliade d’homère (paris, 1809), 34 pls. of flaxman’s iliad designs, in a separate vol., illus. ($531.25). see also hayley, ballads, 1805, below. flaxman, iliad designs, 1805. eb, jan., foxed, with the odyssey designs, 1805, 2 vols., later half calf, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $390); another copy, march, apparently bound with other sets of flaxman’s designs not described, later half calf, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $500 or “best offer”); another copy, may, foxed, later half calf stained, illus. (£74). windle, march cat. 65, #84, publisher’s boards very worn, with cover label, illus. ($575; acquired by stanford university library); #85, half morocco very worn, “title page creased,” illus. ($375). poor man’s books, april online cat., badly foxed, with the odyssey designs, 1805, 2 vols., half calf ($382.20). see also hesiod designs, above. gay, fables. lawrences auction, bletchingley, surrey, 31 jan., #679, “1793” ed. but possibly the [1811] ed., 2 vols. in 1, later half calf, illus. (£246). windle, march cat. 65, #71, 1793 ed., “possibly large-paper,” 2 vols., contemporary calf “a bit scuffed and untidy,” illus. ($1500); #72, blake’s pls. 1, 2, 10 only, “hand-colored (not by blake),” all illus. ($400); #73, blake’s pls. 3-9, 11, 12 only, all illus. ($750). argosy book store, april online cat., 1793 ed., 2 vols., contemporary morocco ($900); another copy, 1793 ed., 2 vols., damp stains to bottom of leaves, contemporary calf ($850, previously listed at $1200). book gallery/mike riley, april online cat., 1793 ed., 2 vols., “leather” rebacked, illus. ($1950, previously listed at $2250). ronald purmort, april online cat., 1793 ed., 2 vols., “leather” worn ($1000, previously listed at $2000). eb, april, 1793 ed., 2 vols. in 1, scattered foxing and other stains, contemporary half calf very worn, illus. (£108); june, [1811] ed., 2 vols., later morocco, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $1850 or “best offer”); another copy, june, 2 vols., marginal stains, 19th-century calf, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $895 or “best offer”); another copy, oct., 2 vols. in 1, contemporary calf worn, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $1095 or “best offer”). sw, 13 june, #175, 1793 ed., 2 vols., later calf, illus. ($875). sl, 11 july, #53, 1793 ed., 2 vols. in 1, early 20th-century morocco, illus. (£625). fm, 27 sept., #40, 1793 ed., 2 vols. in 1, contemporary calf worn and rebacked, illus. (£500). hartley, observations on man, 1791. windle, march cat. 65, #68, blake’s pl. (frontispiece portrait of hartley) only, horizontal creases, removed from an extra-illus. copy of blair’s grave, illus. ($750). arroyo seco books, april online cat., contemporary calf ($2500, previously listed at $3500). hayley, ballads, 1805. windle, march cat. 65, #35, 1st sts. of the pls., early 20th-century calf, binding illus. ($5750); #36-39, pls. 1, 3-5 only, 1st sts., all illus. ($975 each). eb, may, pls. 2 (2nd st.) and 4 (only st.) only, offered individually, margins stained, illus. (£100 each); dec., complete copy, 2nd sts. of pls. 1-3, “light foxing/spotting,” blue paper wrappers, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $3000 or “best offer”). dw, 19 july, #409, lacking pl. 1, “light spotting,” contemporary quarter calf very worn, covers detached, with hayley, triumphs of temper, 1803, “minor spotting,” 19th-century morocco worn, lavater, aphorisms on man, 1788, contemporary calf very worn, flaxman, hesiod designs, 1817, no description of binding, gilchrist, life of blake, 1880, 2 vols., and 3 20th-century works related to blake, 9 vols. in all, illus. (£239). hayley, designs to a series of ballads, 1802. windle, march cat. 65, #34, pl. 1 only, “recently cleaned,” illus. ($49,500). hayley, essay on sculpture, 1800. windle, march cat. 65, #74, blake’s pl. 1 only, illus. ($375); #75, blake’s pl. 2 only, foxed, illus. ($495); #76, blake’s pl. 3 only, illus. ($595). hayley, life of cowper, 1803–04. windle, march cat. 65, #40, 1st ed., 3 vols., with the supplementary pages of 1806 bound in vol. 3, 2nd st. of pl. 4, contemporary calf worn, binding illus. ($1250); #41, 2nd ed., 3 vols., scattered foxing, contemporary half calf, binding illus. ($1250); #42, 2nd ed., 3 vols., with the supplementary pages of 1806 bound in vol. 3, contemporary calf worn, binding illus. ($975); #43, 2nd ed., 3 vols., calf rebacked, binding illus. ($975); #44, pl. 4 only, final st. from the 2nd ed., illus. ($250). dw, 19 july, #410, 1st ed., 3 vols., “large paper copy,” contemporary half calf worn, illus. (£406.30). hayley, life of cowper, pl. 1 only, portrait of william cowper after george romney, dated 1802 in the imprint. gp, may online cat., #44450, an unrecorded prepublication proof st. (£240 to essick). see illus. 6. 6. “william cowper,” etching/engraving by blake after george romney (see enlargement). a previously unrecorded early st., very probably a working proof, of bb pl. 1 published as the frontispiece to william hayley, the life, and posthumous writings, of william cowper, vol. 1 (chichester: j. seagrave for j. johnson, 1803). published sts. are dated 5 nov. 1802 in the imprints. this proof impression is on laid paper, leaf 21.3 x 12.8 cm., right and left sides trimmed into the image approximately 8 mm. lacking the inscription with blake’s signature immediately below the design but with the lower part of the margin trimmed off above the area where the title inscription and imprint appear in published sts. i suspect that the copperplate lacked all letters when this proof was pulled. inscribed in pencil in the lower margin in an unidentified hand “portrait of mr cowper”. all impressions published in copies of the book i have seen are printed on wove paper. essick collection. in comparison to the 1st published st. (of 2), this proof lacks considerable finishing work in the design. the most prominent differences are in the man’s costume. his day cap is darkened in the published sts. with more hatching strokes, particularly just above his forehead, and small areas of crosshatching. the stock where it wraps around his neck and the large bow have been darkened with hatching. diagonal hatching lines further darken the lapels of cowper’s coat in the published sts. the changes in his face are subtler. blake cut more (and probably deeper) lines to darken the irises of both eyes and thereby give cowper a more intense gaze. most of the highlight to the left of and under his left eye is darkened with stipple in the published sts. similarly, the light patches above his left eye, below his left nostril, on his chin just below his lower lip, and on the right side of the philtrum were reduced or eliminated. the differences between the 1st and 2nd published sts. are very slight—see cb pp. 86-87. an impression of the 2nd published st. is available online in the william blake archive. hayley sent an “unfinish’d” proof of this pl., or possibly bb pl. 3 (a portrait of cowper after thomas lawrence), to john flaxman with a letter of 18 jan. 1802. in his reply of 25 jan., flaxman comments: “in the engraving of cowper i think my friend blake has kept the spirit of the likeness most perfectly[;] the eyes are exceedingly well, & in the finishing i presume the extremities of the nose & mouth will be softened which at present appear rather harsh …” (br[2] 117-18). lady hesketh, the attentive guardian of cowper’s posthumous reputation, apparently also saw a “harsh” proof of the pl. copying the portrait by romney, for in a letter to hayley of 29 dec. 1802 she praised the improvements in the published print: “i must tell you that i admire romneys head of all things! now it is softened[;] of the engraving i pretend not to judge, but i like it” (br[2] 147). hesketh explicitly references the portrait after romney and uses the word “softened” in the same way as flaxman. thus, it seems probable that flaxman is indeed commenting on the engraving after romney, not the one after lawrence. the proof(s) seen by flaxman and hesketh must have been in an earlier st. than the one shown here because there are no significant differences between the “nose & mouth” in it and the published sts. the highlights on cowper’s nose in this proof and the published sts.—long and thin along the bridge with a small, independent spot near the tip of the nose—are almost identical to the highlights on romney’s nose in the engraving of his self-portrait attributed to blake in mark crosby, “‘ah! romney!’: blake’s ‘supernaculum’ portrait engraving of george romney,” blake 47.3 (winter 2013–14). this similarity provides additional evidence supporting crosby’s attribution. both pls. were sold by grosvenor prints, london; their pencil inscriptions appear to be by the same hand. perhaps these proofs were acquired by grosvenor from the same collection. inquiries about the dealer’s source have been fruitless, but could the provenance lead back to hayley? the engraving of romney’s self-portrait is available online in the william blake archive. hayley, life of romney, 1809. dy, 11 jan., #101, large paper copy, inscribed “from the author,” most pls. stained in margins, later morocco, binding illus. (not sold; estimate $300-500); same copy, 8 march, #445a, title page illus. ($156.25). windle, march cat. 65, #77, blake’s pl. only, illus. ($450). hayley, little tom the sailor, broadside, 1800. previously unrecorded copy printed in black ink with the headpiece and tailpiece hand colored by blake. from the estate of the duchess of roxburghe and deposited in the wren library, trinity college, cambridge. application, dated 24 oct. 2016, by the executors of the estate to the british government as an in-lieu gift to mitigate taxes. see illus. 7. 7. hayley, little tom the sailor, broadside, 1800 (see enlargement). previously unrecorded copy printed in black ink with the headpiece and tailpiece hand colored by blake, leaf of wove paper without watermark 55.0 x 18.7 cm., horizontal center crease. inscribed on the verso “r. m. milnes from f. t. p. july 1859. / this probably unique broadside came from mr. butt’s collection, whose father / obtained it from w. blake—”. from the estate of the duchess of roxburghe and deposited in the wren library, trinity college, cambridge. reproduced by permission of the master and fellows of trinity college, cambridge. provenance: acquired from blake by thomas butts; thomas butts, jr., probably by inheritance in 1845; acquired from t. butts, jr., by francis turner palgrave at an unknown time and thence by richard monckton milnes, later 1st baron houghton, in july 1859 (all the above according to the verso inscription); milnes’s son, the earl of crewe, probably by inheritance in 1885; his daughter, the duchess of roxburghe (1915–2014), probably by inheritance in 1945; her estate by 2014 with a bequest to bamber gascoigne but apparently with legal title retained within the estate; on deposit in the wren library, trinity college, cambridge, probably no later than 2014. there is a slight possibility that this is the copy of little tom sold anonymously (but possibly from the butts collection), sl, 26 march 1852, #56, “little tom the sailor,” no mention of coloring, with a copy of hayley’s 1802 designs to a series of ballads (£2.7s. to the dealer toovey). both palgrave and milnes bought other blake lots at that auction. in his letter of 26 nov. 1800 to hayley, blake states that “little tom has been of late unattended to, and my wife’s illness not being quite gone off, she has not printed any more since you went to london. but we can muster a few in colours and some in black which i hope will be no less favour’d tho’ they are rough like rough sailors. we mean to begin printing again to-morrow” (e 714). there are 3 other recorded copies of little tom with hand coloring attributable to blake and/or his wife, catherine: american private collection, british museum, maurice sendak foundation. hayley, triumphs of temper, 1803. eb, jan., small paper issue, pls. lightly browned, extra illus. with 7 pls. of stothard’s designs for triumphs 1st published in 1788, half calf rebacked, boards very worn, illus. (£210); oct., small paper issue, lacking pls. 1 and 4, pls. 2, 3, 5, and 6 with hand coloring not by blake, contemporary calf worn, illus. (£125). windle, march cat. 65, #78, large paper issue, later half morocco, illus. ($2750); #79, small paper issue, foxed, inscribed “w. m. rossetti / 1868,” contemporary calf, later quarter morocco slipcase, illus. ($975); #80, small paper issue, foxed, contemporary calf rebacked, illus. ($675). james cummins, nov. online cat., marginal browning, contemporary calf worn, binding illus. ($500). see also hayley, ballads, 1805, above. hoare, inquiry, 1806. windle, march cat. 65, #82, blake’s pl. only, illus. ($875). eb, oct., blake’s signature on the pl. either poorly printed or abraded, scattered foxing on pl., contemporary quarter calf worn, illus. ($546). hogarth, the beggar’s opera by hogarth and blake, 1965. eb, jan., restrike of blake’s worn pl. only, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $120); july, blake’s pl. badly stained, damage to other leaves, publisher’s folding box damaged, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $216.53 or “best offer”). windle, march cat. 65, #70, publisher’s folding cloth box, illus. ($975). hogarth, works. sanders of oxford, feb. online cat., blake’s pl. only, good impression of the 3rd st. with all inscriptions, “discolouration and creasing to margins, and hole repair to lower left corner of sheet, outside of image,” not the impression trimmed to the image offered in sanders’s jan. 2015 online william blake, printmaker cat., #1, for £400, illus. (£900). dw, 2 march, #253, 1790 ed., 88 leaves, “damp-staining … throughout,” contemporary calf worn, rebacked, illus. (£4410; estimate £1800-2200). windle, march cat. 65, #69, blake’s pl. only, good impression of the 3rd st., “wide margins untrimmed,” illus. ($3500). belvoir bookmonger, april online cat., undated baldwin and cradock issue, “156 fine engravings,” minor foxing, contemporary half calf worn (£2650). staniland booksellers, april online cat., 1822 ed., contemporary half morocco worn (£2450). blackwell’s, may online cat. b189, #9, blake’s pl. only, described as “second state” but actually 3rd, “laid down on japanese tissue,” illus. (£1500). sf, oct. online cat., blake’s pl. only, good impression of the 2nd st. but torn well into the image at top and right margins, bad marginal stains, illus. (“sold”). eb, oct., blake’s pl. only, good impression of the 4th st., slight marginal foxing, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of £145). hunter, historical journal, 1793. michael treloar auction, malvern, australia, 5 april, #110, octavo issue, blake’s pl. stained, modern half calf, illus. ($525 australian); #111, quarto issue, marginal browning of blake’s pl., contemporary calf worn and rebacked, illus. (not sold; estimate $3000-4000 australian); 6 april, #163, quarto issue, scattered foxing, later half calf worn, illus. ($2750 australian). jl, sept. online cat., blake’s pl. only, “slight foxing, tears and missing portions to margins and edges,” illus. ($1100 australian). maggs, nov. online cat., quarto issue, original boards and spine label very worn, binding illus. (£4500). lavater, aphorisms. fm, 23 nov. 2016, #187, 1788 ed., bookplate of sir william stirling-maxwell, contemporary calf worn and rebacked, with another vol. unrelated to blake, illus. (£125). windle, march cat. 65, #87, 1789 ed., half calf rebacked, illus. ($595). louis88books, april online cat., 1788 ed., contemporary calf worn and rebacked, illus. (£395). eb, oct., 1788 ed., contemporary calf worn, illus. (£69); another copy, nov., contemporary calf, illus. (£188). flora books, nov. online cat., 1788 ed., later calf (£220). see also hayley, ballads, 1805, above. lavater, essays on physiognomy. eb, feb., 1810 ed., 3 vols. in 5, scattered light foxing, contemporary calf, hinges worn, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $825); “1792” (c. 1818) ed., 2½ vols. in 4, lacking the 1st half of vol. 3, contemporary calf, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $1250); june, blake’s pl. 4 only, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of £25); sept., blake’s pl. 2 only, illus. ($12.99). windle, march cat. 65, #88, blake’s pl. 2 only, illus. ($400). bookworks, april online cat., “1792” (c. 1818) ed., 3 vols. in 5, stains and pencil marginalia, calf very worn, covers detached ($750, previously listed at $1000). abbey antiquarian books, april online cat., 1789–98 ed., 3 vols. in 5, lacking 2 pls. not by blake, scattered foxing, contemporary calf worn and rebacked, illus. (£550). manfred nosbuesch, nov. online cat., “1792” (c. 1818) ed., 3 vols. in 5, contemporary calf (€3800). malkin, father’s memoirs, 1806. windle, march cat. 65, #115, uncut in modern half morocco, binding illus. ($1875); #116, contemporary morocco, binding illus. ($1875); #117, blake’s pl. only, “trimmed to the image, recently cleaned,” illus. ($200); “addendum” to #117, uncut in original boards, printed spine label, binding illus. ($3000). alkahest books, nov. online cat., later morocco ($995). mora, meditaciones poéticas, 1826. jeffrey stern, april online cat., pl. 9 (“la caverna”) only, leaf 26.5 x 33.0 cm. (£100). novelist’s magazine. eb, feb., vol. 8 only, 1782, scattered foxing, contemporary half calf worn, illus. (£151.53). oldbooks, feb. online cat., sterne’s sentimental journey only from vol. 9, 1785, half calf very worn, blake’s pl. terribly foxed, illus., probably the copy offered at the “buy it now” price of $2500 on eb, jan. 2015 ($850). antiquariat düwal, dec. online cat., vols. 10-11 only, 1783, contemporary half calf worn, bindings illus. (€264). see also bray under stothard, below. olivier, fencing familiarized, 1780. windle, april online cat., uncut in original boards worn, modern clamshell box, illus. ($975). rees, cyclopædia, london, 1820. windle, march cat. 65, #86-91 on p. 42, blake’s pls. 4-7, 3 (cb pl. 3a), and 1, all illus. ($35-45 each). smarty pants, april online cat., pls. vol. 1 only, presumably with blake’s pl. 1, “small stamps from belfast free public library on nearly every page,” quarter calf worn ($650). west of denver books, april online cat., pls. vols. 2 (presumably with blake’s pl. 2) and 5 (no blake pls.) only, covers detached with only 2 retained, illus. ($99). remember me!, for 1825. eb, feb., title inscription on blake’s pl. bound into the gutter, marginal soiling, contemporary calf very worn, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of £8000); same copy, feb., illus. (£5500 required minimum bid; “listing was ended by the seller because the item is no longer available”). windle, march cat. 65, #33, full calf by the parisian binder purgold, illus. ($30,000). ritson, select collection of english songs, 1783. henry pordes books, nov. online cat., 3 vols., contemporary calf, bindings illus. (£350). see also bray under stothard, below. salzmann, elements of morality, 1791. wonder books, april online cat., 3 vols. in 1, lacking title pages to vols. 1-2 and the pls. numbered 1, 5, 12, 21, 30-33, 44, early 19th-century half calf worn ($690.41, previously listed at $850). except for the pl. numbered 1, the missing pls. are attributed to blake in cb pp. 51-59. scott, poetical works, 1782. a squared books, april online cat., foxed and stained, later cloth worn, repaired with tape, binding illus. ($125, previously listed at $266.80). dreweatts & bloomsbury auction, newbury, berkshire, 27 april, #158, “most plates offset,” contemporary calf rebacked, illus. (not sold; estimate £180-220). bow windows bookshop, nov. online cat., contemporary calf rebacked, binding illus. (£131). forest books, nov. online cat., contemporary calf very worn, front cover detached (£85). see also bray under stothard, below. seally and lyons, complete geographical dictionary, c. 1784. attic books, nov. online cat., 2 vols., “occasional spots and tears,” contemporary calf worn and repaired, illus. ($1000). the only copy with both vols. i have ever seen on the market. a copy of vol. 2 only, with all 3 of blake’s pls., was sold in oct. 2011 by hollypetal books for £300. see also adams, new royal geographical magazine, above. shakespeare, dramatic works, 1802. bauman rare books, feb. online cat., 9 vols., scattered light foxing, 19th-century morocco “elaborately gilt-decorated” ($17,500). sw, 14 nov., #248, 9 vols., modern quarter calf, “intermittent tanning and foxing,” illus. ($3750). the copies of the rare 1832 ed. offered by d & e lake, april online cat., and by black swan books, nov. online cat., both priced at $3000, do not contain blake’s pl. shakespeare, plays, 1805. windle, march cat. 65, #86, blake’s pl. 1 only, stained, illus. ($500). belvoir bookmonger, nov. online cat., 10 vol. issue, most pls. with marginal foxing, contemporary calf repaired, illus. (£1350); same copy and “buy it now” price, eb, dec., illus. eb, nov., 9 vol. issue lacking vol. 2, contemporary calf worn, illus. (£37). stedman, narrative, pls. hand colored. eureka books, april online cat., 1813 ed., 2 vols., later half calf, illus. ($6500, previously listed at $10,000); same copy, eb, sept., illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $3900 or “best offer”). ketterer kunst auction, hamburg, 22 may, #41, 1806 ed., 2 vols., later calf repaired, illus. (not sold; estimate €8000). windle, handlist for the boston antiquarian book fair, 10-12 nov., #12, 1796 ed., vol. 1 only, no description of binding ($12,500). stedman, narrative, uncolored copies. eb, jan.-feb., blake’s pl. 5 only, light foxing, illus. ($46); april-may, 1796 ed., 2 vols., lacking blake’s pl. 14, scattered foxing, contemporary calf rebacked, copy offered at the same price in 2013–14, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $5500); july, 1796 ed., 2 vols., most pls. foxed and/or stained, early 19th-century half calf, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £1490, lowered to £1450 or “best offer” in nov.). windle, march cat. 65, #92-94, blake’s pls. 10, 13, 14 only, illus. ($300 each); #95, 1813 ed., 2 vols. in 1, early boards rebacked with calf, binding illus. ($6750); handlist for the boston antiquarian book fair, 10-12 nov., #11, 1796 ed., 2 vols., no description of binding ($7500). sequitur books, april online cat., 1796 ed., 2 vols., contemporary calf ($3724). van stockum’s auction, the hague, netherlands, 23 may, #438, 1806 ed., 2 vols., foxed, contemporary calf worn, illus. (no bids on an estimate of €1500-2500). pba galleries auction, san francisco, 29 june, #390, 1806 ed., 2 vols. in 1, pls. foxed, modern quarter calf, illus. ($3600). charles agvent, july online cat., 1813 ed., 2 vols., 19th-century half calf, illus. ($4687.50). phillip pirages, nov. online cat., 1806 ed., 2 vols., modern calf, illus. ($9500). varley, zodiacal physiognomy, 1828. windle, april online cat., blake’s 3 pls. only, his pls. 2-3 in their 1st sts., recently cleaned ($1500 each). odyssey books, aug. online cat., blake’s pls. 2-3 in their 2nd sts., some pls. stained, later cloth, illus. ($6375, previously listed at $10,500). virgil, pastorals, 1821. james cummins, jan. online cat., 2 vols., later half morocco worn, the copy with the “juvenile library” label on the title page of vol. 1 sold for £8500 to windle in jan. 2009 by christian white of modernfirsteditions ($20,000; reacquired by windle for stock). windle, march cat. 65, #45 on p. 25, 2 vols., inscribed by thornton to his daughter, publisher’s sheep slightly worn, inscription, binding, and selected pls. illus. ($67,500); “addendum” to #45, 2 vols., copy with the “juvenile library” label (see above), binding illus. ($35,000); sept. dreams and visions cat., #16, the 6th wood engraving only (stormy night with blasted tree and crescent moon), a linnell impression on india paper printed 1825 or later, illus. ($1275); handlist for the boston antiquarian book fair, 10-12 nov., #13, 2 vols., copy with the “juvenile library” label (see above), no description of binding ($45,000). pba galleries auction, san francisco, 15 june, #34, 2 vols., inner edges of some of blake’s wood engravings bound into the gutter, late 19th-century morocco, illus. ($12,000; estimate $20,000-30,000). sims reed, dec. cat., #15, 2 vols., later morocco by sangorski & sutcliffe, illus. (£22,500). virgil, the wood engravings of william blake for thornton’s virgil, 1977. windle, march cat. 65, #45 on p. 26, with the prospectus, publisher’s folding box, illus. ($12,500). lfa, dec. online cat., blake’s 1st wood engraving only, leaf 10.4 x 13.4 cm., inscribed in lower margin “trial impression 7/76” (july 1976), described as a “trial proof prior to the edition of 150 printed … in 1977,” illus. (£650). sworders auction, stansted mountfitchet, essex, 13 dec., #666, 3 engravings only, framed, illus. (not sold; estimate £250-350). wit’s magazine, 1784. windle, march cat. 65, #96, 2 vols., 1784–85, with the 2nd version of the frontispiece to the jan. 1784 issue (cb pl. 1b), contemporary calf worn, illus. ($5750); #97, 2 vols. in 1, 1784–85, with cb pl. 1b, contemporary boards with modern calf spine, illus. ($5750). chiswick auction, london, 22 nov., #221, blake’s pl. 3 only, 2 vertical folds, marginal stains, illus. (£159.90). affiliated auctions & realty auction, tallahassee, florida, 14 dec., #4035, cb pl. 1b only, 2 vertical folds, in a group of 4 miscellaneous engravings “with christmas, family and merriment theme[s],” illus. (no bids on an estimate of $200-400). wollstonecraft, original stories, 1791. windle, march cat. 65, #62, blake’s 6 pls. only, 2nd sts., imprints trimmed off, removed from an extra-illus. copy of blair’s grave, all illus. ($3000). young, night thoughts, 1797. carl blomgren, feb. pasadena book fair, 1st st. of pl. 11 (fly-title to night the second), with the “explanation” leaf, contemporary calf rebacked ($12,000). eb, feb., lacking “some of the preliminary pages” apparently including the letterpress title page and the “explanation” leaf, 1st st. of pl. 11, leaves cockled from water damage, marginal stains, “very early boards, worn and mostly disbound,” illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $7500 or “best offer”); same copy, feb., illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $3750); same copy, march, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $3750 or “best offer”). windle, march cat. 65, #46, with the “explanation” leaf, 2nd st. of pl. 11, half morocco worn, illus. ($15,000); #47-61, leaves bearing pls. 6, 9/10, 13/14, 17, 22, 28, 29, 30, 32, 35, 37, 38/39, 40, 42, 43 offered individually, all illus. ($1250 each for leaves with 2 pls., $495 each for leaves with 1 pl.); sept. dreams and visions cat., #18, pl. 43 only ($995), #19, pl. 32 only ($595), both illus. keys auction, aylsham, norwich, 23 march, #1679, lacking pls. 8 and 19, 1st st. of pl. 11, leaves 31.3 cm. in height, “the ‘explanations of the engravings’ supplied in manuscript (not recent),” contemporary quarter calf very worn, illus. (£1537.50). christian hesse auction, hamburg, 18 nov., #254, later half calf, illus. (€4608). the 1st st. of pl. 11 is thought to be rare, but the appearance of 3 copies in feb. and march with the 1st st. makes that belief questionable. interesting blakeana john quincy, pharmacopœia officinalis & extemporanea; or, a complete english dispensatory, london, 1733. windle, june online cat., inscribed on the title page in brown ink, “william blake / his book”, on consignment from the collection of alan parker ($49,500); same copy and price, sept. dreams and visions cat., #14, illus. possibly a copy owned by blake. for discussion and illus., see blake 34.4 (spring 2001): 109, illus. 2 and its caption. royal academy exhibition cats., 1784–1861. marlborough rare books, jan. private offer, 79 cats. including those of 1784, 1785, 1799, 1800, and 1808 that list works by blake, 4 buckram vols. (£2500). male figure, attributed to blake. pencil, 18.4 x 11.4 cm. on leaf of wove paper 36.8 x 30.5 cm. igavel online auction, new york, 5 dec., #4838331, illus. (no bids on an estimate of $10,000-15,000). probably of the period but not by blake. “the novel,” a separate pl. engraved by james parker after james northcote, 1787. eb, march, hand colored and possibly color printed, title rubbed off but with inscribed quotation from william hayley’s poem the triumphs of temper, canto 2, lines 47-58, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $347.50 or “best offer”). parker (1750–1805) was blake’s fellow apprentice under james basire and partner with blake in a print-publishing business in the early 1780s. for another engraving by parker, see r. g. watkins, april online cat. 74, #62, “rasselas prince of abissinia,” an illus. to samuel johnson’s rasselas designed by stothard, separate pl. with imprint dated 1791, illus. (£150). t. butts, jr., “man on a drinking horse,” etching, 1806. eb, july, c. 1942 printing, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $49). blake probably helped butts with this etching. for the discovery of this print, see alexander s. gourlay, “‘man on a drinking horse’: a print by thomas butts, jr.,” blake 37.1 (summer 2003): 35-36. the meeting of a family in heaven, 2 leaves of light-blue paper, 28.3 x 18.4 cm. and 24.1 x 20.6 cm., with copies of figures from blair, the grave, blake’s pl. 3 in the 1808 ed. pen and ink, black and gray wash over red chalk, red chalk figure study on verso of 1 leaf. cobbs auction, peterborough, new hampshire, 14 jan., #49, attributed to blake, verso of 1 drawing inscribed in pencil “said to be by william blake / came from camden hotten — t. h. mayhew[?] 1876,” and inscribed on the back of the frame “drawing by w.m. blake bought 1873 from boughton,” extensively illus. including inscriptions ($2600; estimate $8000-12,000). one drawing shows the embracing adults, the hovering angel on the right, and the embracing children right and left but not the running boy on the right or the hovering angel on the left. the background clouds in this drawing do not correspond to blake’s design engraved by louis schiavonetti for the 1808 ed. the other drawing is of the angel hovering on the right with additional clouds not in the original pl. “boughton” in the inscription on the frame is probably an error for “bouton.” these copies of blake’s design are a product of the blake facsimile projects begun by the london publisher john camden hotten. many of these works, most based on images in blake’s illuminated books, were acquired by the new york dealer j. w. bouton and sold as originals to american collectors; see his cats. of 1875 (bb #570), 1887, and 1889. seventeen copies of motifs from the grave designs were exhibited at the boston museum of fine arts in 1891, nos. 79-95 in the cat. this group included 1 based on the meeting of a family in heaven (no. 93), picturing the embracing adults and the running boy, but not the 2 drawings offered in the cobbs auction. all grave copies were presumably executed prior to hotten’s acquisition of schiavonetti’s copperplates of the designs, reprinted and published by hotten in 1870 (see bb p. 526, issue e, and pp. 528-29). the publisher would have had no reason to commission reproductions of blake’s grave illus. once he owned the original pls. for information on hotten’s facsimiles, see morton d. paley, “john camden hotten, a. c. swinburne, and the blake facsimiles of 1868,” bulletin of the new york public library 79.3 (spring 1976): 259-96. paley identifies henry j. bellars as the artist who copied blake’s designs for hotten. r. blair, the grave with blake’s illus., an unrecorded reproduction. michael manwaring, may private offer, modern half morocco (acquired by essick). an almost full-size (electrostatic?) reproduction of the 1808 quarto issue, complete text and illus., on modern thick paper with a watermark of a goat and the words “goat-skin / parchment paper” on every leaf. no indication of publisher, place of publication, or date (second half of the 20th century?). with imitation platemarks around the engravings; heavy offsetting of text on some leaves. probably a one-off production never published. examiner, vol. 1, jan.-dec. 1808. dave’s books, july online cat., “crude loose binding” ($900). the 7 aug. 1808 issue contains robert hunt’s review of cromek’s ed. of blair’s grave with blake’s designs (bb #1912, “an important mocking review”). repository of arts, vol. 4, july-dec. 1810. n1 books, july online cat., contemporary half calf very worn, illus. (£200). the sept. 1810 issue includes an essay “on splendour of colours, &c.” by “juninus” that praises 2 of blake’s engravings, “the fall of rosamond” and “beggar’s opera, act iii” (bbs p. 529). blake, songs of innocence and of experience, pub. w. pickering, ed. wilkinson, 1839. windle, march cat. 65, #119, issue without “the little vagabond,” variant publisher’s cloth, illus. ($17,500); #120, issue apparently without “the little vagabond,” publisher’s cloth, binding illus. ($15,000); copy with variant binding (#119, above), june “short list 8 (new series),” #3, illus. ($15,000), priced at $17,500 in windle’s handlist for the boston antiquarian book fair, 10-12 nov., #3. dw, 19 july, #407, issue not indicated, publisher’s cloth, “spine not present and upper cover detached,” binding illus. (£740.90). eb, sept., issue without “the little vagabond,” publisher’s cloth rebacked, illus. ($1975). s. colman, ed., the little keepsake for 1844, boston, 1843. a squared books, feb. online cat., publisher’s cloth ($22). includes “a dream” and “a cradle song” from songs of innocence, both with unsigned wood-engraved illus. unrelated to blake’s designs. bb #242 (listing only “a cradle song”), bbs pp. 151-52 (both poems listed). for information about colman’s publications containing blake’s poems, see raymond h. deck, jr., “an american original: mrs. colman’s illustrated printings of blake’s poems, 1843–44,” blake 11.1 (summer 1977): 4-18. [j. and a. taylor], city scenes; or, a peep into london, london: harvey and darton, n.d. illus. by john gilbert, engraved on wood by william a. folkard. lilian modlock, july online cat., publisher’s cloth “with gilt illustration of the royal exchange on the front” (£85). eb, july, “light to moderate foxing,” modern half calf, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £125). includes a considerably altered version of blake’s “holy thursday” from songs of innocence without indication of title or author. dated to “c. 1845” in bb p. 954, #260f. a. gilchrist, life of william blake, 1863, extra-illus. copies only. windle, march cat. 65, #194, 2 vols., 34 added pls., 19th-century calf, illus. ($3500). see the 2012 and 2014 sales reviews in blake 46.4 (spring 2013) and 48.4 (spring 2015) for details. songs of experience, attributable to the muir circle of facsimilists, possibly e. druitt, c. 1884–85. alexandre antique prints, london antiquarian book fair, 1-3 june (£2950, acquired by windle); windle, june private offer (acquired by essick). a previously unrecorded facsimile of the “experience” section of songs of innocence and of experience copy t in the british museum since 1856, but lacking blake’s framing lines and numbers upper right on 15 pls. in the original. completely executed by hand without any printed base. muir’s published lithographic facsimile of experience, 1885, has hand coloring in imitation of copy u. this facsimile of copy t on rectos only of laid paper with an “antique note” watermark. date uncertain, but perhaps a one-off production of c. 1884–85. additional materials not in copy t: “a divine image,” hand-drawn copy in yellow ochre ink, bound and numbered as leaf “16,” and a manuscript “index” of the poems in orange ink bound as the last leaf. except for blake’s frontispiece and the “index,” recto of each leaf numbered in pen and ink 1-27, far upper right (these numbers not corresponding to blake’s numbers in the original). gray-blue wrappers, as in muir’s published facsimiles, but no printed or manuscript statements about the work on the wrappers or bound in the vol. leaves 23.5 x 18.4 cm., whereas muir’s published reproductions measure approximately 28.0 x 22.0 cm. interleaved with tissue guards. the attribution of this facsimile to muir or a member of his circle is based on copies of his 1885 facsimile of visions of the daughters of albion on the same paper. very fine facsimiles in my collection of the frontispiece and the design only of pl. 3 in visions, based respectively on impressions in the large and small book of designs in the british museum, are inscribed in pen and ink “e. druitt 1884.” both are completely executed by hand, without a printed base, and are on “antique note” paper. druitt worked with muir on some of his facsimiles; see the lists of contributors printed on the front wrappers of muir’s there is no natural religion, 1886, america, 1887, and the song of los, 1890. w. muir, facsimiles of blake’s illuminated books, 1884–87. windle, march cat. 65, #137, “a complete set,” 2 vols., folio and quarto, full morocco with the original wrappers bound in, bindings illus. (“sold”); #138, the marriage of heaven and hell, 1885, copy no. 31, full calf, original wrappers bound in, illus. ($5750). the complete set was previously offered in windle’s online cat., april 2016, for $102,500, and sold in that month to a private collector. for a list of contents, see the 2010 sales review, blake 44.4 (spring 2011): 130. windle, handlist for the boston antiquarian book fair, 10-12 nov., #4, songs of innocence and songs of experience, dated “1885,” 2 vols. in 1, both copy no. 20 ($14,500); #9, america, 1887, copy no. 3 ($12,500); #10, europe, 1887, copy no. 11 ($12,500). bauman rare books, june online cat., songs of innocence, 1885, copy “0” with a presentation inscription by muir to the editor of the academy, letter by muir to the editor laid in loose, publisher’s wrappers, later slipcase, the copy offered by carpe diem books in april 2013 for $8500, illus. ($12,000). e. walker and w. muir, facsimile of blake’s little tom the sailor, 1886. dw, 2 march, #237, described as from the century guild hobby horse 1.4 (oct. 1886) but actually a separate issue on a leaf of laid paper, 54.3 x 22.5 cm., with a “[p] le bas” watermark, stained at mat edges, framed, illus. (£306.25 to windle for stock); same copy, windle, april online cat. ($2000); same copy and price, sept. dreams and visions cat., #10, illus. blake, songs of innocence, n.d. (c. 1911–12). calligraphic manuscript with illus., 25 pp. phillip pirages, nov. online cat., colophon reading “this copy of the songs of innocence by william blake has been written out and illuminated by f. sangorski and g. sutcliffe for the grolier society and will not be duplicated,” jeweled morocco binding by sangorski & sutcliffe, illus. ($110,000). minutes of the william blake trust, 1948–69. windle, march cat. 65, part 3, p. 82, #1, typescript and manuscript, 240 pp., “all the reports signed by geoffrey keynes in his distinctive brown ink, and the text is annotated and otherwise added to by arnold fawcus in his distinctive green ink,” half roan worn, illus. ($6500). l. baskin, portrait of william blake, 1955 cast bronze sculpture, approximately 18 cm. high. windle, june online cat., “based on the life mask taken in 1823 by james s. deville,” illus. ($12,500). blake, songs of innocence and of experience, manchester etching workshop, 1983. windle, march cat. 65, #149, 2 vols., large and small quartos with the pls. both colored and plain, each with a copy of joseph viscomi, the art of william blake’s illuminated prints, 1983, publisher’s bindings and folding boxes, illus. ($16,500); same copy and price, handlist for the boston antiquarian book fair, 10-12 nov., #8. blake’s circle and followers works are listed under artists’ names in the following order: paintings and drawings sold in groups, single paintings and drawings, letters and manuscripts, separate pls., book illus. barry, james drawings, paintings, and original graphics “crowning the victors at olympia,” etching and engraving, 1792. eb, july-aug., 4th st., probably the 1808 printing, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $500); same impression, aug., illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $4000 or “best offer”). “detail of the diagorides victors,” etching and engraving, 1795. roseberys auction, london, 5 sept., #730, 4th st., probably the 1808 printing, illus. (not sold; estimate £1000-1500); same impression, 13 sept. online only auction, #730, illus. (not sold; estimate £1000-1500). “elysium and tartarus or the state of final retribution,” etching and engraving, 1792. galerie bassenge auction, berlin, 25 may, #5242, 6th st., probably the 1808 printing, illus. (€9840). “lord baltimore and the group of legislators,” etching and engraving, 1793. dw, 2 march, #235, here titled “religious & civil liberty established in maryland in 1649,” 2nd st., leaf of wove paper 94.0 x 60.0 cm., probably the 1808 printing, illus. (£122.50). basire, james engravings during blake’s apprenticeship, 1772–79 cook, a voyage towards the south pole, 1777. eb, april-may, 3 pls. only offered individually, basire after william hodges, “woman of the island of tanna,” “man of the island of tanna,” and “man in christmas sound,” the 1st 2 with marginal stains, illus. (£22, £15, and no bids respectively); nov., 1 pl. only, frontispiece portrait of cook, basire after hodges, imprint partly trimmed off, water stain lower right corner, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $475). monro, works of alexander monro, 1781. gp, may online cat., 1 pl. only, the frontispiece portrait of monro, basire after allan ramsay, dated “1776” following basire’s signature, imprint trimmed off, illus. (£120). for illus. of the serpent motif in the framing design and comments, see the 2015 sales review, blake 49.4 (spring 2016): illus. 9. calvert, edward early drawings, paintings, and original graphics engravings on copper and wood from the memoir, 1893. lawrences auction, crewkerne, somerset, 14 july, all illus., offered individually as follows: #1639, “the ploughman” (not sold; estimate £500-800), #1640, “the cyder feast” (£878.40), #1641, “the bride” (£1647), #1642, “the sheep of his pasture” (£561.20), #1645, “the brook” (not sold; estimate £350-450), #1646, “the lady with the rooks” (not sold; estimate £350-450), #1647, “the return home” (£414.80), #1648, “the chamber idyll” (£3294). “the cyder feast,” wood engraving, 3rd st. from the memoir, 1893. lfa, dec. online cat., illus. (£1500). “the ploughman,” wood engraving, 3rd st. from the memoir, 1893. campbell fine art, jan. online cat., illus. (£975). david lay auction, penzance, 27 july, #583, illus. (£531). flaxman, john drawings and sculpture see also flaxman under letterpress books with engravings by and after blake, above. thirty-seven pencil and pen and ink drawings illustrating hesiod, the same designs as the 1817 engravings by blake but probably created as an independent work rather than preliminaries for the engravings. leaves 22.3 x 30.3 cm., 5 leaves with 1809 and 1815 watermarks, bound in a 19th-century morocco album. acquired by the british museum in 2016. according to the online british museum cat., registration no. 2016,7051.1.1, the album was “presented” to “hm government” by “daniel katz ltd through the cultural gifts scheme in honour of ian jenkins, senior curator of ancient greece, and allocated to the british museum, 2016.” for earlier offers to sell and discussion, see the 2009 sales review, blake 43.4 (spring 2010): 135-36. cloaked figure. pencil, 19.7 x 12.7 cm. ah, june online cat. 470, #33, “possibly drawn in rome, circa 1790,” illus. (£1500). defense against pain. pen and ink, 12.2 x 12.2 cm. sf, oct. online cat., “drawing of a sculpture” with buttanshaw 1799 watermark, small sketch on verso, illus. (“sold”). design for a monument. pencil, 17.7 x 13.2 cm. ll, july online cat., “the studies relate to the monument to the children of sir thomas franklin in the church of all saints, great thirkleby, yorkshire … commissioned … in 1800,” illus. (not priced). design for an urn (recto), study of a mother and child (verso). pencil, 19.0 x 13.5 cm., verso signed “j. flaxman.” ll, july online cat., illus. (not priced). design for the pediment of the temple of liberty at woburn abbey. pencil, 19.7 x 69.0 cm. ll, july online cat., work dated to 1803, illus. (not priced). drawing of a statue of pericles. pencil, pen and ink, brown wash, 27.0 x 18.0 cm. ll, july online cat., work dated to “about 1800,” illus. (not priced). maria denman, profile portrait of. pencil, 18.0 x 14.5 cm. ll, july online cat., “relates to a finished drawing now in the sir john soane’s museum, london, which is dated 1817,” illus. (not priced). denman was flaxman’s sister-in-law. sketch for apollo and marpessa. pencil, 10.1 x 12.1 cm. ll, july online cat., “an early design for flaxman’s marble relief … presented to the royal academy as his diploma work in 1800,” illus. (not priced). “the apotheosis of homer” and “the apotheosis of virgil,” 2 wedgwood plaques based on flaxman’s designs, each 20.0 x 41.0 cm. byrne’s fine art auction, chester, 29 nov., #51, “early 19th century, … sky blue jasper ground,” both illus. (£3025; estimate £200-300). the virgil plaque is rare. fuseli, henry drawings, paintings, separate plates, and an inscribed book a captive woman. black chalk, 45.9 x 31.5 cm., datable to c. 1781. ll, feb. online cat., illus. (not priced). previously sold sl, 6 july 2016, #334, illus. (£13,750). as i commented in the 2016 sales review, “the figure looks less like a captive than a hag with a profile similar to fuseli’s pictures of the witches from macbeth.” see also the figure in “the witch and the mandrake,” fuseli’s soft-ground etching of 1812. design for erasmus darwin’s the temple of nature: the power of fancy in dreams. watercolor, with a pencil study of embracing lovers on the verso, leaf 37.8 x 26.7 cm., recto datable to c. 1803. cl, 5 july, #85, illus. (not sold; estimate £80,000-120,000). this design varies considerably from the version engraved by moses haughton and published as the frontispiece in darwin, the temple of nature (london: j. johnson, 1803). face of johann kaspar lavater. pencil on laid paper, 12.0 x 8.5 cm. eb, oct., from the collection of marcia allentuck, illus. ($709). probably another leaf of the same sheet of paper as study of a man, below. david bindman and i are suspicious of the attribution. king amycus of bebryces. pen and brown ink over pencil, 44.0 x 28.1 cm., inscribed in greek lower left. sl, 5 july, #165, illus. (£175,000; estimate £30,000-50,000). lysander with helena and hermia, from a midsummer night’s dream. oil, 90.5 x 69.8 cm., datable to c. 1780–85. sl, 7 dec., #216, illus. (not sold; highest bid £38,000 on an estimate of £40,000-60,000). previously sold sl, 14 march 1990, #106, illus. (£41,800). a male nude in a contemplative pose (recto), study of a man (verso). pencil, pen and brown ink, washes (recto), pencil (verso), leaf 27.9 x 20.3 cm., datable to 1770–78. christie’s auction, new york, 24 jan., #90, illus. ($125,000). previously sold cl, 6 march 1973, #19, titled a standing male figure, illus. (£4333.4s. to william darby); offered sl, 10 march 1988, #32, titled standing figure, illus. (not sold; estimate £20,000-30,000); sold sl, 9 july 2014, #180, titled standing figure of a man in profile, illus. (£98,500). for a black-and-white illus., see the 1988 sales review, blake 23.1 (summer 1989): 15 (illus. 10). the meeting of sir hüon of bordeaux and scherasmin in the libanon cave, from wieland’s oberon. oil, 61.0 x 45.0 cm., datable to c. 1804–05. sl, 5 july, #62, illus. (£187,500). the design was engraved by james heath and published in oberon, a poem. from the german of [christoph martin] wieland by william sotheby (london: t. cadell and w. davies, 1805), vol. 1, frontispiece. melancholical scene, school of fuseli. pen and ink, wash, 28.0 x 21.0 cm. deutsch auction, vienna, 31 jan., #116, oddly misattributed to flaxman even though the drawing looks nothing like his work, illegible pen and ink inscription, possibly a signature, on verso, illus. (€101.60). clearly in the style of fuseli, with the left-handed hatching strokes characteristic of his work, but this drawing is at best attributable to an anonymous artist strongly influenced by fuseli. study of a man, attributed to fuseli. pencil on laid paper, 14.5 x 10.0 cm., inscribed in pen and ink “zurich nov 18th 1778 fuzzeli.” eb, oct., from the collection of marcia allentuck, illus. ($873). probably a leaf from the same sheet of paper as face of johann kaspar lavater, above. possibly related to the portrait of bodmer in fuseli’s oil painting of c. 1778–81, the artist in conversation with johann jacob bodmer, but david bindman and i are suspicious of the attribution. tekemessa and eurysakes. unicorn antique auction, secaucus, new jersey, 1 oct., #362, illus. (not sold; estimate $1800-2400). offered as an “oil painting by henry fuseli” but actually a photographic reproduction of the original in the yale center for british art with right and left reversed. another copy of the same reproduction was offered in sept.-oct. on eb at the “buy it now” price of $6.49. “ezzelin musing over the body of his wife meduna,” mezzotint by john raphael smith, 1781, issue published by birchall. verkäufer historic art, feb. online cat., leaf 56.0 x 65.0 cm., marginal browning, illus. (€490). “heavenly ganymede” or “the rape of ganymede,” crayon lithograph by fuseli, 1804. campbell fine art, jan. online cat., “early proof printed in 1804, prior to the only published edition,” but in the published st., wove leaf 33.9 x 28.5 cm., illus. (£8500). “prince arthur’s vision,” engraved by peltro william tomkins, 1788. jl, march online cat., #14, leaf trimmed to 48.9 x 35.9 cm., “slight stains and paper loss to upper and lower centre,” illus. ($1650 australian). eb, march, leaf 53.5 x 40.5 cm., margins browned, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £550 or “best offer”). “titania embracing bottom,” engraved by richard rhodes, imprint dated 1794. eb, sept., title in open letters, leaf of wove paper 41.1 x 31.2 cm., illus. (€89). later st., with closed letters and additional inscriptions, published in seventeen engravings, to illustrate shakspeare (london: a. woodmason, 1817), but this open letter st. perhaps published as a separate pl. in 1794. j. j. winckelmann, reflections on the painting and sculpture of the greeks, trans. fuseli, 1765. eb, march, “inscribed by fuseli to ‘his friend [william?] vyse,’ and bearing a number of corrections in text in fuseli’s own hand,” illus. ($885). linnell, john early drawings, paintings, and original graphics fred. tatham & brother arthur. pencil, leaf 19.4 x 11.4 cm., inscribed by linnell in ink with the title recorded here and signed in ink “j. linnell f”. donald a. heald, oct. online cat., #29275, “the boys would appear to be about five [frederick] and two in the drawing,” illus. ($2800). if heald is right about the age of frederick, the drawing dates from c. 1810. portrait of thomas cadby. oil, 29.0 x 22.5 cm., signed and dated 1820. dreweatts & bloomsbury auction, newbury, berkshire, 27 june, #16, illus. (£2728). previously sold cl, 26 april 1985, #103, illus. (£2808); previously offered sl, 10 july 1996, #60, illus. (not sold; estimate £4000-6000), and sl, 26 oct. 2016, #1169, mistakenly dated “1821,” illus. (not sold; estimate £3000-5000). the potato field—isle of wight. oil, 28.0 x 35.7 cm., signed and dated 1829. cl, 11 july, #52, illus. (£50,000). very fine. saint john the baptist preaching in the wilderness. oil, 99.5 x 138.0 cm., datable to 1818, signed indistinctly “j linnell 18[…].” sl, 3 may, #299, “hanging in the artist’s studio from 1818, where retouched and finished, 1838,” described as “linnell’s very first religious painting,” illus. (£20,000; estimate £6000-8000). blake almost certainly saw this painting. it may have influenced his execution of joseph of arimathea preaching to the inhabitants of britain, dated by butlin #780 to c. 1820–25. the design of this pencil sketch, 34.5 x 49.0 cm., is a variant of blake’s earlier and much smaller color print of the same title (butlin #262.6, sp xi). perhaps the impressive size of linnell’s painting prompted blake to convert his own picture of a biblical figure preaching into a larger work for which this preliminary drawing is the only known record. palmer, samuel drawings, paintings, letters, and rare states of etchings mountainous landscape, wales. watercolor, 12.5 x 17.0 cm., datable to c. 1834. ll, feb. online cat., illus. (not priced; sold to a “private collection, usa” by june). previously sold sl, 6 july 2016, #352, illus. (£9375). on the river machwy, wales. watercolor, 29.0 x 22.5 cm., inscribed “5 july 1837.” sny, 25 jan., #100, illus. ($11,875). previously sold sl, 8 april 1998, #45, illus. (£13,225). sabrina. watercolor and body color, 54.0 x 75.5 cm., datable to 1856. sold july by andrew clayton-payne to the metropolitan museum of art, new york. previously offered sl, 15 july 1993, #161, illus. (not sold; estimate £30,000-50,000); previously sold sl, 3 april 1996, #168, illus. (£47,700). woman and child in a landscape, attributed to palmer. pen and ink heightened with white, 29.0 x 22.0 cm. cheffins auction, cambridge, 15 june, #618, illus. (not sold; estimate £700-1000); 14 sept., #461, now titled woman and her child in a cornfield, illus. (£444.50). a wooded landscape. watercolor, black chalk on buff paper, 36.0 x 52.7 cm., datable to c. 1849. ll, feb. online cat., illus. (not priced; sold to a “private collection, usa” by june). letters to george richmond, 5 in all, dated 1867, 1880, and 1881. dw, 5 oct., #259, 3 letters commenting on the death of palmer’s cousin john giles (1810–80), “the only letter published from this group is the last one [dated 27 jan. 1881],” illus. (£2629). richmond, george early drawings, paintings, and original graphics the arcadian shepherd, attributed to william blake richmond (george richmond’s son, 1842–1921). pen and brown ink, 14.5 x 18.5 cm., signed “wr” on a tree trunk and dated “1858.” fm, 30 march, #452, illus. (£7500; estimate £800-1200). apparently purchased by maas gallery, london, and sold by them no later than march 2018. previously offered as abel the shepherd resting in a landscape with his flock, fm, 15 nov. 2016, #134, illus. (withdrawn). for illus. and discussion of why this drawing may be based on a lost work by george richmond, see the 2016 sales review, blake 50.4 (spring 2017): illus. 9 and its caption. a convolvulus at shoreham. watercolor, 18.3 x 12.1 cm., inscribed in pencil “shoreham 1827 gr.” sl, 5 july, #196, illus. (£5000). portrait of charles heathcote tatham. watercolor and gouache on ivory, 8.7 x 6.9 cm., datable to c. 1830. dw, 5 oct., #255, “after the portrait by thomas kearsley exhibited at the royal academy in 1799,” illus. (£693.10). tatham was richmond’s father-in-law. portrait of the artist’s wife, julia richmond. gouache on ivory, oval miniature 3.8 x 3.2 cm., datable to c. 1830. dw, 5 oct., #256, illus. (£812.60). a sheet of studies. pencil, pen and ink, 18.0 x 26.5 cm. chiswick auction, london, 13 june, #356, “including two pencil figure studies and a pen and ink study of the head of raphael with a pencil study of a landscape verso,” illus. (£231.80). study from michelangelo of david’s right arm. pencil, pen and ink, 27.3 x 9.5 cm., signed with initials and dated 1828, further inscribed “from m angelo”. andrew clayton-payne, july private offer (price on request). study of a seated man wearing a helmet. pencil, pen and ink, gray wash, 24.0 x 20.0 cm. on leaf 33.2 x 21.5 cm., inscribed “the attitude of this figure / is a recollection from nature,” datable to c. 1830. guy peppiatt fine art/stephen ongpin fine art, dec. cat. of one hundred drawings and watercolours, #41, illus. (£5500). a warrior. pencil, 21.0 x 9.0 cm. bearnes hampton & littlewood auction, exeter, 11 april, illus. (£125.20). letters to richmond. see palmer, letters, above. romney, george drawings and paintings excluding portraits five pencil sketches, 1 pen and brown ink drawing. sny, 25 jan., #93, “including a study for the temptation of christ, circa 1795–6; a seated female nude, perhaps bathsheba or susannah bathing, circa 1770; two studies of men fighting on a boat, circa 1790–5; a reclining nude, possibly connected with portrait of a lady, called mrs elizabeth hartley, circa 1785–90; and a study of a boy, by another hand,” no sizes given, illus. (not sold; highest bid $3200 on an estimate of $5000-7000). the dream of atossa. pencil, pen and brown ink, brown wash, 27.9 x 41.6 cm. cl, 5 july, #93, illus. (£81,250; estimate £20,000-30,000). a preliminary study for the large chalk drawing atossa’s dream, 101.5 x 127.0 cm., in the walker art gallery, liverpool. fall of the rebel angels. pencil, 13.5 x 16.5 cm. ll, july online cat., illus. (not priced). previously offered sl, 19 march 2003, #127, illus. (not sold; estimate £2500-3500). figurative sketch, attributed to romney. pencil, 31.5 x 39.7 cm. british bespoke auction, winchcombe, gloucestershire, 28 sept., #474, illus. (£547.40). the attribution is convincing; the subject is probably john howard visiting a lazaretto. figure studies in a lazaretto. pencil, 11.5 x 18.5 cm. adam’s auction, drogheda, ireland, 10 oct., #627, illus. (€1080). jupiter seated on his globe, his foot resting on an eagle (recto), three annotated costume studies (verso). pen and brown ink, leaf 19.0 x 32.0 cm. bloomsbury auction, london, 27 july, #165, the recto with “a goddess, possibly thetis or juno, standing before” jupiter, “minerva, mars, venus and cupid to the right,” illus. (£2108). prometheus bound. pencil, pen and brown ink, brown wash, 27.9 x 41.0 cm. cl, 5 july, #92, illus. (£62,500; estimate £20,000-30,000). stothard, thomas drawings, paintings, a pair of dishes, and a few engravings apollo charming the animals. watercolor and body color, 8.5 x 6.5 cm. chorley’s auction, prinknash abbey park, gloucestershire, 29 march, #812, illus. (£228). as you like it act 1, scene 2. monochrome wash drawing, oval, 14.5 x 11.0 cm. mellors & kirk auction, nottingham, 23 march, #651, illus. (£344.40). the preliminary drawing for the engraving by charles taylor titled “rosalind giving her chain to orlando,” dated 1783 in the imprint and published in the picturesque beauties of shakspeare (london: c. taylor, n.d.). children, holy man, and crucifix. watercolor, 15.5 x 12.5 cm., inscribed “stothard.” eb, jan., illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £75, quickly reduced to £49). court scene. pen and ink, gray wash, oval, 9.5 x 7.5 cm. sf, oct. online cat., illus. (£116); eb, oct., illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £121). the death of dido. monochrome wash drawing, 2.6 x 6.0 cm. sworders auction, stansted mountfitchet, essex, 27 june, #302, with another, similar wash drawing of the same size and possibly of a related subject, both illus. (£224.84). the size and shape of these drawings, both uneven hexagons, indicate that they are preliminaries for engravings in the royal engagement pocket atlas. i have not been able to determine the text illus. or, if engraved for the atlas, the year issued. stothard designed many illus. for this publication, 1790–1826, but none recorded for virgil’s aeneid. the fates crowning a victor. pen and ink, wash, 10.2 x 10.2 cm. ah, sept. online cat. 473, #88, illus. (£275). figure study. watercolor, 9.5 x 4.5 cm. bellmans auction, billingshurst, sussex, 6 dec., #1505, illus. (£97.60). native american indian smoking a pipe. monochrome wash, 9.0 x 6.8 cm. eb, may, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £560 or “best offer”). a preliminary drawing for the engraving by john saunders with an 1801 imprint and published as the frontispiece to vol. 1 of william robertson, the history of america, 3 vols. (london: t. cadell, w. davies, and e. balfour, 1800). owl and sleeping fairy. pencil, pen and ink, wash, 7.6 x 10.2 cm. ah, feb. online cat. 466, #72, illus. (£275). the ah cat. suggests that this may be an illus. to fable iv in john langhorne’s the fables of flora (1794), but the design does not appear among the engravings after stothard for that work. see pansy, below. pansy. monochrome wash, 7.6 x 8.9 cm. ah, april online cat. 468, #74, illus. (£225). engraved by andrew birrell and published as the headpiece to “fable v. the violet and the pansy” in john langhorne, the fables of flora (london: e. and s. harding, 1794) 33. scene with a couple. pen and ink, gray wash, size not recorded (but probably small). eb, oct., inscribed “stothard,” stained, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of €450). solicitude. pen and ink, gray wash, 11.0 x 12.5 cm. swan fine art, tetsworth, oxfordshire, online auction, 6 july, #235a, illus. (£216); eb, sept., illus. (£257.32); london auctions, chiswick, 13 nov., #287, illus. (no bids on an estimate of £200-300). i suspect that the drawing did not sell in july and sept. and that the reported prices are fabrications. a more finished version of the design is illus. in iolo a. williams, early english watercolours (london: connoisseur, 1952) pl. 212. spleen, attributed to stothard. watercolor, oval, 9.0 x 7.0 cm., inscribed “from the ‘spleen’” and “stothard” (not a signature). eb, jan., illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £49, quickly reduced to £35). not one of the 3 stothard designs published in matthew green, the spleen, and other poems (london: cadell and davies, 1796). standing girl. watercolor, 8.9 x 3.8 cm. ah, july online cat. 471, #67, illus. (£375). statesman attended by the graces. pen and ink, brown wash, 20.3 x 17.8 cm. ah, oct. online cat. 474, #75, illus. (£275). studies of hector, andromache, and other figures. pen and ink, leaf 19.7 x 15.9 cm. dy, 25 jan., #47, illus. ($625). the vicar of wakefield. oil, 31.0 x 41.0 cm. byrne’s auction, chester, 20 sept., #297, illus. (£338.80). not one of stothard’s designs illustrating the novel published as engravings. “bacchus and ariadne,” a pair of silver-gilt sideboard dishes, each 77.5 cm. in diameter, after a design by stothard, executed by paul storr for rundell, bridge, and rundell, london, 1813. sl, 5 july, #36, illus. (£668,750). bray, life of thomas stothard, 1851. bonhams auction, new york, 7 june, #23, expanded to 10 vols., extra illus. with “approximately 1,344 additional items,” including “8 original pen, ink and wash drawings by stothard, 6 original watercolor drawings by stothard,” and engravings by blake for ariosto, orlando furioso, 1791, bonnycastle, introduction to mensuration, ed. not indicated, novelist’s magazine, vol. 8, both pls., vol. 9, pls. 2 and 3, and vol. 10, all 3 pls., eds. not indicated, ritson, select collection of english songs, 1783, pl. 7, and scott, poetical works, all 4 pls., ed. not indicated, 19th-century morocco, illus. (no bids on an estimate of $12,000-18,000). previously offered bloomsbury auction, new york, 24 oct. 2007, #118, bindings illus. (not sold; estimate $20,000-30,000), and donald heald, oct. 2008 online cat., #6120, bindings illus. ($28,500). illustrations of moore’s melodies, from drawings by t. stothard, r.a. (london: robt. jennings, 1824 [actually 1825?]). eb, april, engraved title page and 6 pls. engraved on steel by charles heath with 1825 jennings imprints, designs approximately 9.5 x 6.9 cm., platemarks 21.3 x 14.9 cm., leaves of laid paper 27.8 x 22.3 cm., no letterpress text, disbound but with stabholes in the left margin, illus. (£50 to essick). coxhead 166 lists the 6 pls. and comments that they were “designed” for an “edition of [thomas] moore’s ‘irish melodies,’ published by robinson” in “1824.” shelley m. bennett, thomas stothard: the mechanisms of art patronage in england circa 1800 (columbia: u of missouri p, 1988) 85, quotes a pencil note accompanying the 6 pls. in the balmanno collection, british museum, stating that they were “never published.” the existence of jennings’s publication, not recorded by either coxhead or bennett, indicates that at least the pls. were published. the framing motifs of garlands and putti surrounding a portrait of moore in the unsigned title-page vignette, 6.0 x 6.4 cm., were probably designed by stothard. if coxhead is correct in stating that the pls. were commissioned by robinson, perhaps his ed. of moore never came to be and the pls. were acquired by jennings, who published them separately with his own imprints and a new title page. tatham, frederick drawings and paintings portraits of a husband and wife. watercolors, each 58.0 x 41.0 cm., signed. penrith farmers’ & kidd’s auction, skirsgill, penrith, cumbria, 12 april, #26, both illus. (not sold; estimate £200-300). three family portraits … of the newman family. pencil and pastel on buff drawing paper, each approximately 62.0 x 49.0 cm. special auction services auction, newbury, berkshire, 5 dec., #410, illus. (£57.50). william blake in youth and age, attributed to tatham and dated to c. 1830. brown chalk and possibly wash with some highlights in white. leslie hindman online auction, chicago, 20 oct., #683, described as “after frederick tatham,” medium and size not stated, with 2 unrelated works, “plate 3—the sportsman’s reverie by robert hopkin” and “a drawing in red chalk by an unknown artist,” sold “to benefit the acquisitions fund of the denver art museum,” all 3 illus. ($50.40 to windle acting for essick). see illus. 8-9. 8. william blake in youth and age (see enlargement). traditionally attributed to frederick tatham and dated to c. 1830. brown chalk in 3 shades (very dark, medium, reddish), possibly brown wash, and some highlights in white. image 42.2 x 38.6 cm., leaf of buff drawing paper with a rough surface 65.2 x 52.6 cm., pasted to a wood backing board.tatham’s three family portraits (see under tatham, above) would appear to be on the same or similar buff drawing paper. framing lines lightly drawn in pencil on all four sides form a rectangle 60.7 x 51.6 cm. the profile of the youthful blake is copied from a drawing attributed to his wife, catherine, now in the fitzwilliam museum. the “age” portrait, approximately life size, is presumably tatham’s own recollection of blake’s appearance, although blake’s life mask of 1823 may have served as an aide-mémoire. essick collection. provenance: possibly acquired from tatham in the 1830s by thomas butts (1759–1845) or his son thomas butts, jr. (1788–1862); possibly the latter’s son captain frederick john butts, by inheritance upon his father’s death in 1862; possibly his widow, by inheritance upon her husband’s death in 1905, or directly to his son anthony bacon drury butts; sold sl, 19 dec. 1932, #117, “a replica of the small double portrait by frederick tatham,” offered from “the property of anthony bacon drury butts, esq.” (£5 to the ulysses bookshop, new york); offered in the ulysses bookshop catalogue of rare books, pictures, manuscripts & letters of c. 1933, #3, “a portrait of blake by frederick tatham, … purchased by me [jacob schwartz, the owner of the bookshop] from the great-grandson of thomas butts” ($500);the murky black-and-white illus. of the portrait on the cover of the ulysses cat. is based on the yale center version (illus. 9) rather than the larger version on offer. it is difficult to explain how this came about; perhaps schwartz found it more convenient to photograph one of several reproductions of the yale version published in books than to photograph the work in his possession. windle suggests in an e-mail to me of 18 oct. 2017 that schwartz may have already sold the larger portrait before including it in his catalogue and thus did not have it available for photography. acquired no later than 1939 by t. edward hanley;thompson (see my note 3) 29 states that the ulysses bookshop cat. was issued “in early 1933” and that hanley acquired the drawing “in that year.” he offers no documentary evidence for this; however, he was in contact with hanley’s widow, tullah hanley (1924–92). she may have been the source of this information. his widow, tullah innes hanley, by inheritance upon her husband’s death in 1969; on deposit at the denver art museum by 1969; given by tullah hanley to the denver art museum in 1974, accession no. 1974.398; deaccessioned by the museum late 2016 and sold by leslie hindman auctioneers, chicago, online auction, 20 oct. 2017, #683, with 2 unrelated works ($50.40 to windle acting for essick). exhibited at the philadelphia museum of art, william blake 1757–1827: a descriptive catalogue of an exhibition of the works of william blake selected from collections in the united states, 1939, #216, “portrait of william blake, by frederick tatham … from the collection of thomas butts. lent by t. e. hanley,” and in several later exhibitions devoted to the hanley collection (see thompson’s essay [his note 7] for a list). the portrait’s history of ownership, leading back at least to thomas butts’s great-grandson, is documented by the 1932 auction cat. and is important in establishing the authenticity of the work. although this provenance record is solid, the attribution to tatham and the drawing’s history of production are open to question. in his catalogue of portraits of blake, geoffrey keynes mentions this larger drawing only in his entry on the smaller version, now in the yale center for british art (illus. 9): “tatham also made an enlarged replica of the drawing for the butts family, which is not reproduced.”keynes, the complete portraiture of william and catherine blake (london: trianon p for the blake trust, 1977) 144. the small version was for many years bound with tatham’s manuscript biography of blake, in turn bound with jerusalem copy e. the statement in the 1932 auction cat., repeated by keynes, that the larger portrait is a “replica” of the smaller means that the latter was executed first. the larger work is less carefully executed, and less detailed in its rendering of facial surfaces, than the smaller. the background profile is only lightly sketched, as though youth were little more than a fading memory. thompson (32) correctly indicates that blake’s youthful nose is misrepresented. if indeed the large portrait is a “replica” of the yale center version, then the usual assumption about a chronology of composition, in which less finished versions of a work are taken to be preliminaries for more finished versions, is reversed. but if the customary sequence applies in this instance, then we cannot completely ignore the possibility that the large portrait is primary. see the caption to illus. 9 for further comments on the relationship between the larger and smaller versions of the double portrait. keynes’s statement that this large portrait was made by tatham “for the butts family” suggests that thomas butts or his son saw the small version and commissioned a copy from tatham. other narratives of composition and acquisition can be imagined, including one in which the large version was the first executed, that it was purchased by butts or his son, and that tatham made a copy (illus. 9) sized for insertion in his biography of blake before delivery of the larger drawing. it is also possible that someone other than tatham executed the large version if it is a “replica” of the smaller portrait. it may be significant that the 1932 auction cat. does not state who executed the large portrait; an explicit attribution to tatham is first proposed in the ulysses bookshop cat. of c. 1933 and repeated in the 1939 philadelphia museum exhibition cat. if not by tatham, then an attribution to thomas butts, jr., would be consistent with a butts family provenance. in 1806 blake began to give lessons in etching and engraving to the younger butts, who apparently had some artistic interests and abilities (br[2] 222-23). there is, however, no evidence that the younger butts continued work as an artist later in life or that he ever developed an expertise in chalk drawing consistent with the quality of the “age” profile in this portrait. given the stylistic similarities between portraits by tatham and george richmond, and the latter’s preparation of a portrait of blake’s wife, catherine, for tatham’s biography of her husband (see the caption to illus. 9), an attribution of this large version of the double portrait to richmond is worth considering. it is possible that richmond copied tatham’s smaller portrait to produce the larger. on balance, however, the traditional ascription of the large drawing to tatham carries the most weight.david bindman comments that the large portrait “could be [by] richmond but also it could be [by] tatham, who also did portrait drawings. i lean towards the latter for the moment” (e-mail, 8 nov. 2017). for richmond’s watercolor drawing of blake’s life mask, see the 2016 sales review, blake 50.4 (spring 2017): illus. 10. the yale portrait was first reproduced as the frontispiece to vol. 1 of the works of william blake, ed. edwin john ellis and william butler yeats (london: bernard quaritch, 1893). could this large version be a copy based on the ellis and yeats illus.? that would require an artist with consummate skill at imitating tatham’s (or richmond’s) style, even while not copying the model line for line, and the ability to sell the work to thomas butts’s grandson, his grandson’s widow, or his great-grandson, all of whom were active in disposing of blake’s works and are not known to have acquired any except by inheritance. such a scenario is highly improbable. 9. william blake in youth and age (see enlargement). traditionally attributed to frederick tatham and dated to c. 1830, but possibly by george richmond after a drawing by tatham. pencil, pen and ink, wash, leaf of wove paper 34.3 x 26.7 cm. yale center for british art, accession no. b1992.8.1(101). inscribed in pen and ink, probably over pencil, in a formal, calligraphic hand: “portraits of / willm blake / at the ages of 28 & 69 years. / born november 20th. 1757. died august 12. 1827 / aetat: 69.” illegible fragments of the pencil inscription, probably a preliminary mock-up for the pen and ink version, lie beneath the 2nd and 3rd lines. formerly bound with tatham’s manuscript biography of blake and jerusalem copy e. the drawing may have been executed specifically for inclusion in the biography with a leaf size of approximately 34.3 x 27.9 cm. (see br[2] 662). see the caption to illus. 8 for the models for both portraits. in his cat. of portraits of blake, keynes comments that this work was “made posthumously by frederick tatham.”see note 7. this yale center portrait was first attributed to tatham in the entry on the larger version in the 1932 auction cat., #117 (see the caption to illus. 8). the basis for this statement is not explained, but the long association of the portrait with tatham’s biography of blake may have been for keynes sufficient evidence for the attribution to tatham. patrick noon, in his cat. for the 1997 blake exhibition at the yale center, attributes the double portrait to “george richmond (1809–1896), after frederick tatham (1805–1878)” without explanation.noon, the human form divine: william blake from the paul mellon collection (new haven: yale up, 1997) 86. the same attribution is given in the yale center’s online collection cat. noon does not recall why he attributed the portrait to richmond (e-mail of 22 oct. 2017). scott wilcox, deputy director of collections at the yale center, tells me that the center has no documents concerning the attribution of its double portrait of blake to richmond (e-mail of 15 nov. 2017). the word “after” indicates that, in noon’s opinion, richmond copied a work by tatham. is he suggesting that the only other known version of this double portrait, reproduced here as illus. 8, was richmond’s model? noon’s alternative attribution may be based on analogy with the portrait of catherine blake also in the yale center, a companion to this smaller version of the portrait of her husband. this is inscribed in pen and ink “from a drawing made by the author”—tatham, author of the biography of blake—and lightly signed in pencil “george richmond.” for this portrait richmond copied a pencil drawing of catherine signed by tatham, dated sept. 1828, now in the british museum. the modeling with fine lines in the portraits of husband and wife is very similar, although stylistic parallels between the two works do not necessarily prove an attribution of the smaller portrait of william blake to richmond. he married julia tatham, frederick’s sister, in jan. 1831.raymond lister, george richmond: a critical biography (london: robin garton, 1981) 22. both men were developing their skills as portraitists in the 1830s and may have worked together or at least shown their drawings and paintings to each other. perhaps influence flowed in both directions. tatham’s portraits of william williams and his wife (yale center for british art) and the portraits of a husband and wife (see under tatham, above) exhibit brushwork remarkably close to richmond’s. absent an inscribed reference on the yale portrait of william blake as being “from” a work by tatham, much less richmond’s signature, stylistic similarities are an insufficient basis for an unqualified acceptance of noon’s reattribution. nevertheless, the attribution of the yale portrait of william blake to richmond is certainly possible. the speculation that richmond executed the smaller version of the double portrait by copying tatham’s larger one, thereby following the same production trajectory as the portrait of catherine blake, cannot be dismissed. the yale center also holds 2 impressions of a lithograph, 14.6 x 11.4 cm., of this double portrait of blake. each is described as a “print made by george richmond … after frederick tatham” in the center’s online cat. the attribution is not explained. corrigendum in the 2016 sales review i reproduced and briefly commented on blake’s watercolor the hymn of christ and the apostles (butlin #490)—see blake 50.4 (spring 2017): illus. 6. i failed to mention mary lynn johnson’s important discussion of this work in her essay “blake’s mary and martha on the mount of olives: questions on the watercolour illustrations of the gospels,” women reading william blake, ed. helen p. bruder (basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, 2007) 100-08. johnson suggests the following identifications of the apostles and women surrounding christ: john (far left, as in my caption), james (2nd from left), andrew (3rd from left), mary of luke 10.38-42 (left of christ), her sister martha (right of christ), peter (far right). appendix: new information on blake’s engravings listed below are substantive additions or corrections to robert n. essick, the separate plates of william blake: a catalogue (1983), and essick, william blake’s commercial book illustrations (1991). newly discovered impressions of previously recorded published sts. of blake’s engravings are listed for only the rarer pls. the separate plates of william blake: a catalogue p. 150, “rev. john caspar lavater.” for a newly discovered proof st., see illus. 5 and its caption. the description of the differences in the portrait between the 1st and later states listed in sp fails to mention a possible lightening of the white of lavater’s eye just right of the iris. p. 165, “industrious cottager.” an impression now in essick’s collection is in the heretofore untraced 2nd st. with the title in open letters—see under separate plates and plates in series, above. unfortunately, the imprint has been trimmed off this impression. the design and signatures of morland and blake are as in the 3rd st. william blake’s commercial book illustrations pp. 86-87, hayley, life of cowper, pl. 1, portrait of william cowper after george romney. for a previously unrecorded proof st., see illus. 6. reasons for believing that john flaxman’s comments were a response to an early proof of pl. 1 and not to a proof of pl. 3, a portrait of cowper after thomas lawrence, are set forth in the caption to illus. 6. 50 blake/an illustrated quarterly fall 2011 luminated page and into the luminous world of the everyday: the woods, fields, and shores of her cape cod home. in other words, she offers one example of how a person might “live” blake’s vision in this world. as a poet who happens to be a woman, she also inherits a legacy from blake that differs from the prophetic and apocalyptic emphasis of ginsberg. oliver’s imagination is no less prophetic, no less radical, but it is radical in the sense of “root”: rooted in the life she sees around her and her effort to see what she calls “the untrimmable light // of the world” (wiwe 59) with visionary eyes. her dialogue with blake helps us not only to reevaluate the politics of nature and gender in blake’s work, but also to see that work as a living thing, subject to revision by both readers and writers in the eternal conversation he calls jerusalem. as fascinating as such dialogue is to a literary scholar, the stakes are far higher in the conversation about (and between) humanity and nature. as sylvia bowerbank puts it, “in our age of ecological crisis, an ideal of transcendence of nature … is no less problematic than the ideal of ‘harmony with nature.’” 44 in other words, both the spiritual estrangement from nature and the false ideal of absorption into it become obstacles to surmounting ecological challenges. bowerbank cites the writings of martin w. lewis and others in promoting a “promethean environmentalism,” 45 humanity’s active management of the planet, in order to slow or reverse the damages already done. without such management, in blake’s terms, nature will be barren. hence, the conversation between blake and oliver has ramifications far beyond the scholar’s study or the poet’s morning walk. oliver gracefully declines the suggestion that she is an environmentalist: “my work doesn’t document any of the sane and learned arguments for saving, healing, and protecting the earth for our existence. what i write begins and ends with the act of noticing and cherishing, and it neither begins nor ends with the human world.” in the same passage, she resists the common distinctions between human and inhuman, animate and inanimate. if she speaks of “rescu[ing] the world,” it is because, like blake, she sees nature not as an object of rescue, a damsel in distress, but as part of ourselves: “the man who does not know nature, who does not walk under the leaves as under his own roof, is partial and wounded.” 46 blake would have to agree: “‘all things begin & end in albions ancient druid rocky shore.’ / … / ‘but now the starry heavens are fled from the mighty limbs of albion’” (e 171). for both blake and oliver, in their different modes, the poet’s task is to make the reader aware both of our fallen estrangement from nature and of our integral connection to it. both present a world in which the choice between humanity and nature can only be a false one. 44. sylvia bowerbank, speaking for nature: women and ecologies of early modern england (baltimore: johns hopkins university press, 2004) 3. 45. bowerbank 10. 46. oliver, winter hours (boston: houghton mifflin, 1999) 99, 101. william and catherine blake returned to london in september 1803, after spending three years in the seaside village of felpham in sussex. during the two years that followed, one of william’s most important and time-consuming occupations was assisting william hayley with the illustrations to be engraved for hayley’s life of george romney. blake had commissions for two of these and hoped for more. these activities were no mere task for blake, who praised the gifts of “our admired sublime romney”1 and thought, unfairly, that romney’s talent had been diverted from history to portrait painting by hayley, asserting in a frank letter to his brother james that hayley “thinks to turn me into a portrait painter as he did poor romney” (30 january 1803, e 725). in the extraordinary letter that blake wrote to hayley about his renewal of vision “on the day after visiting the truchsessian gallery of pictures,” he stated: “i can, with confidence, promise you ocular demonstration of my altered state on the plates i am now engraving after romney, whose spiritual aid has not a little conduced to my restoration to the light of art.”2 blake’s esteem for romney was no doubt intensified by the facts that he had known the older artist in the 1790s and that there had been strong bonds between both their political beliefs and their art at that time. true, romney was not an easy man to know. his friend richard cumberland characterized him as “shy, private, studious and contemplative; conscious of all the disadvantages and privations of a very stinted education; of a habit naturally hypochondriac, with aspen nerves, that every breath could ruffle.”3 he had some very close friends, but it is significant that, as his old friend thomas greene observed, “he seemed always to avoid associating with gentlemen of his profession.”4 the exceptions were three artists in fields far from his own: the sculptor john flaxman and the miniaturists jeremiah meyer and (for a time) ozias humphry.5 after 1772, when romney showed a portrait of 1. letter to hayley, 22 june 1804. the complete poetry and prose of william blake, ed. david v. erdman, newly rev. ed. (new york: anchor– random house, 1988) [hereafter e] 753. 2. 23 oct. 1804, e 756. on this crucial experience of blake’s, see my “the truchsessian gallery revisited,” studies in romanticism 16.2 (1977): 165-77. 3. [richard cumberland], memoirs of richard cumberland, vol. 2 (london: lackington, allen, & co., 1807) 211. 4. letter dated 9 dec. 1802 to william long, another close friend of romney’s (quoted by david cross, “george romney: the earliest biography of 1802,” transactions of the romney society 9 [2004]: 13-17). 5. romney and humphry were in italy together in 1773-75, but they were not close in later years. meyer was a highly accomplished miniature william blake, george romney, and the life of george romney, esq. by morton d. paley fall 2011 blake/an illustrated quarterly 51 fontainbleau.”8 jackson is a frequently unreliable narrator,9 and his account can be only supplementary to the hard evidence about romney’s relationship with blake. however, a few aspects of his statement lend it support, some by omission. romney had indeed visited versailles, in 1764, in the company of the great painter of seascapes claude-joseph vernet,10 although there is no mention of his taking a cutting from a grapevine there. jackson introduces humphry, whose name he misspells, because he was “his [blake’s] other friend.” blake had considerably more than two friends, but humphry is no doubt linked with him here because he too purchased works by blake in the mid-1790s.11 whatever its ultimate origin, jackson supposes that the vine came from “some place in the country which romney had, and had given up at or about the time of blake becoming resident at lambeth.” his guess is half right. the “place in the country” would have been pine apple place in kilburn, “in a new garden ground,” as romney wrote to hayley in june 1793, “where i work two hours in advancing my designs (for my series of large pictures).”12 romney had not vacated it but had, rather, just rented it, and a vine, as jackson says, “might have come from romney’s country home.” jackson is hard put to account for how a vine under which blake could sit could have grown to that size in so short a time, but that is because he assumes there could be only one vine in blake’s garden. alexander gilchrist had written of the “fine vine” that “blake would on no account prune”;13 jackson pictures blake as “rejoicing … not only to sit beneath its shade, but beneath his own fig tree also—both vine and fig tree coming from romney’s garden.” again, it is less likely that this fig tree had an abnormal growth rate than that romney gave blake a cutting. (gilchrist, however, says nothing about a fig tree.) furthermore, the fact that jackson seems unaware of the political symbolism of romney’s gift may again suggest that there is some truth behind the story.14 8. “william blake: an unlooked for discovery,” south london observer 22, 29 june 1912. for helping me obtain a photocopy of this article i am grateful to g. e. bentley, jr., and to chris sheppard and kasia drozdziak of the brotherton library, university of leeds. 9. see g. e. bentley, jr., “richard c. jackson, collector of treasures and wishes: walter pater, charles lamb, william blake,” blake 36.3 (winter 2002-03): 92-105. 10. see arthur b. chamberlain, george romney (new york: charles scribner’s sons, 1910) 50, and cross, “george romney” 16. versailles may also have been one of the “variety of scenes” outside paris to which mme. de genlis took romney and hayley in 1790 (william hayley, the life of george romney, esq. [chichester: printed for t. payne, 1809] 147). 11. humphry purchased from blake copy h of america, copy d of europe, copy h of songs of innocence and of experience, copy a of the small book of designs, and copy a of the large book of designs. see g. e. bentley, jr., blake books (oxford: clarendon press, 1977) 91, 158, 170, 356, and 384. 12. hayley, life of romney 199. 13. alexander gilchrist, life of william blake, “pictor ignotus,” vol. 1 (london: macmillan, 1863) 100. 14. alfred g. hopkins, who came to see the condemned hercules buildings in 1916, shortly before it was pulled down, found “a tangled garden, all overgrown with vine and fig tree.” see michael phillips, “no. humphry at the society of artists, he did not participate in any further annual exhibitions, and he never showed his work at the royal academy. none of these factors, however, would have precluded friendship with blake, who, like romney, was not a university man, was self-educated, and came from a middle-class family. that romney admired blake’s work as early as 1784 is shown by his telling flaxman that blake’s historical drawings “rank with those of ml. angelo.”6 romney did not confine his regard to words, but paid blake an artist’s ultimate compliment: as joseph viscomi has shown in a seminal article, in the 1790s romney was the original purchaser of four of blake’s illuminated books: america copy a, the [first] book of urizen copy b, visions of the daughters of albion copy f, and songs of innocence and of experience copy a.7 it is unlikely that romney could have admired blake’s drawings and purchased his illuminated books without ever seeing blake himself, but further proof that they conversed is blake’s later statement that “in this [“canterbury pilgrims”] plate mr b has resumed the style with which he set out in life of which heath & stothard were the awkward imitators at that time it is the style of alb durers histries & the old engravers which cannot be imitated by any one who does not understand drawing & which according to heath & stothard flaxman & even romney. spoils an engraver for each of these men have repeatedly asserted this absurdity to me [emphasis mine] in condemnation of my work” (“public address,” e 572). in this context blake, at a difficult point in his life, angrily condemns his fellow artists in a verbal shotgun blast that confounds friend and foe alike. “even romney,” however, suggests that of all people romney should have known better. (romney may perhaps with the best intentions have urged an artist whose drawings ranked with michelangelo’s to pursue painting rather than engraving.) these facts give some credibility to an interesting but otherwise undocumented account concerning the two artists. richard c. jackson, who claimed that his father had known blake, asserted that romney had presented blake with a vine and a fig tree from his own garden. “my father,” jackson wrote, “told me that the dear blake, while resident at hercules buildings, lambeth, that he should say the one joyaunce of blake’s life was when he had a garden of his own and could bask in the sunshine ’neath his own vine—a vine which had been presented to him by the artist romney (he died on the 15th november, 1802 even as his other friend, ozias humphries [sic], r.a., died eight years later). this vine, i was given to understand, was grafted from the great vine at versailles or painter and a friend of hayley’s. both humphry and flaxman were, of course, friends of blake’s. 6. letter from flaxman to hayley, 26 apr. 1784. see g. e. bentley, jr., blake records, 2nd ed. (new haven: yale university press, 2004) [hereafter br(2)] 31. 7. joseph viscomi, “the myth of commissioned illuminated books: george romney, isaac d’israeli, and ‘one hundred and sixty designs … of blake’s,’” blake 23.2 (fall 1989): 48-74. 52 blake/an illustrated quarterly fall 2011 the fruits of the earth furnished abundant imagery to advocates of revolution in the late eighteenth century, not least to blake, as near the end of america, where, after the victory of fiery orc, the females “feel the nerves of youth renew, and desires of ancient times, / over their pale limbs as a vine when the tender grape appears” (15.25-26, e 57). the yoking of vine and fig tree is especially important, signifying the peace and freedom of a millennial society. its source is of course the old testament, as in micah 4.4: “but they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree; and none shall make [them] afraid: for the mouth of the lord of hosts hath spoken [it].”15 such biblical texts became part of millennialist and pro revolutionary discourse even before the american and french revolutions. as early as 1769, the novelist henry brooke speculated how, under the reign of liberty, “would industry be encouraged to plant and multiply the vine and the fig-tree! how would benignity rejoice to call neighbours and strangers to come and fearlessly partake of the fruits thereof!”16 george washington wrote to the congregation of the newport, rhode island, synagogue that in the new republic, “every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and figtree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.”17 appropriating the figure for his own purposes, napoleon told his army of italy in 1796: “when france gives peace to the world … each of you at his own hearthstone, under his own vine and fig tree, will be enjoying the prosperity won by your valor ….”18 conversely, in the fallen world that blake describes in jerusalem, members of the community can no longer meet “beneath the vine and fig-tree” (18.19, e 163). romney and hayley visited france as admirers of the revolution in 1790, and hayley wrote of that time in language that may remind us of the famous passage beginning “o pleasant exercise of hope and joy!” in wordsworth’s prelude : “it was a time when that scene of astonishing vicissitudes presented to the friends of peace, of freedom, and of the arts, a spectacle of chearful curiosity, and of hope so magnificent in promises of good to mankind, that philanthropy could not fail to 13 hercules buildings, lambeth: william blake’s printmaking workshop and etching-painting studio recovered,” british art journal 5 (2004): 14, citing hopkins’s letter in the spectator no. 4584 (6 may 1916): 571-72. hopkins can now be identified as a master pottery maker who was in charge of the pottery workshop at the camberwell school of arts and crafts (see w. t. whitley, “london schools,” arts and crafts: a review of the work executed by students in the leading art schools of great britain and ireland, ed. charles holme [london: “the studio” ltd., 1916] 6). hopkins’s wish to save blake’s one-time home, which was the motive for his letter, is an indication of the interest in blake among some participants in the arts and crafts movement. 15. the biblical text cited is from the authorized version as published in the blue letter bible <http://www.blueletterbible.org>. 16. henry brooke, the fool of quality; or, the history of henry earl of moreland, vol. 4 (london: w. johnston, 1769) 109. 17. 17 aug. 1790. see the papers of george washington, <http:// gwpapers.virginia.edu/documents/hebrew/reply.html>, accessed 20 feb. 2010. 18. see charles f. warwick, napoleon and the end of the french revolution (philadelphia: g. w. jacobs, 1910) 103. exult in the recent prospect, unconscious that the splendid vision was destined to sink in the most execrable horrors of barbarity and blood.”19 romney too felt great enthusiasm for the early republic but was appalled by the september massacres, writing to hayley on 8 september 1792: “the accounts to day from france are dreadful: all the priests that were confined are murdered, perhaps the city of paris is at this time in flames. i am so agitated with the tremendous situation of that poor country, i am not able to do any thing.”20 nevertheless, romney retained his radical sympathies at home, as was well known to his friends, and to some extent to the public as well.21 he was a friend of thomas paine, who sometimes lay low at romney’s house, and who was indicted for sedition on 21 may 1792.22 a few weeks after that the morning chronicle reported that romney was painting paine’s portrait, “but whether for an individual likeness or as the hero of paradise lost is not stated. those, however, who have seen the sketch say it’s ‘devilish like.’”23 (it appears that the chronicle, like blake in the marriage of heaven and hell, regarded satan as the hero of paradise lost, although for different reasons.) in 1793 this painting (now untraced) was reproduced in a fine engraving by william sharp (illus. 1), showing a smiling paine beside the manuscript of rights of man.24 for his part, blake names paine four times among the defenders of freedom in america, published in the same year as sharp’s engraving, and was to defend him vehemently in marginalia written some five years later.25 whether or not blake walked the streets of london wearing the red cap of liberty,26 he gave expression to his revolutionary sympathies in the figure of orc, who defeats the british army in america, and then appears “in the vineyards of red france” in europe (1794; 15.2, e 66). both romney and blake would have been conscious that 19. hayley, life of romney 143; see william wordsworth, the prelude: 1799, 1805, 1850, ed. jonathan wordsworth, m. h. abrams, and stephen gill (new york: w. w. norton, 1979) 396. 20. hayley, life of romney 184. 21. on 29 oct. 1797 joseph farington was told that “romney … is a convert from democracy, and now says he believes monarchy is best after all,” which suggests that he was known for his radical views at least until then. see the diary of joseph farington, ed. kenneth garlick, angus macintyre, and kathryn cave (new haven: yale university press, 197884) 3: 910. farington’s informant was the gem-engraver nathaniel marchant, whom romney had known since his time in rome (1773-75). 22. see michael scrivener, seditious allegories: john thelwall and jacobin writing (university park: pennsylvania state university press, 2001) 54. 23. morning chronicle 28 june 1792. see suzanne e. may, “‘tuching the times too nearly’: george romney in 1793,” transactions of the romney society 10 (2005): 14. 24. a smaller version of the engraving, issued by sharp, is dated 1 feb. 1794. see david alexander, “chronological list of singly issued plates after george romney to 1806,” those delightful regions of imagination: essays on george romney, ed. alex kidson (new haven: yale university press, 2002) 284. 25. annotations to an apology for the bible by r. watson, e 611-20. 26. gilchrist 1: 94. fall 2011 blake/an illustrated quarterly 53 the gift of vine and fig tree was a symbolic act, affirming their common adherence to a great popular cause. aside from their politics, it may at first surprise us that blake had such respect for romney’s art. romney was of course one of the leading portrait artists of his time. many of his paintings have true elegance and grace, and sometimes, as alex kidson says of the leigh family (1768, national gallery of victoria), “an almost disturbing intensity of vision.”27 his success, both artistic and financial, was enormous. nevertheless, romney was strongly attracted to another kind of art. in february 1787 he wrote to hayley: “this cursed portraitpainting! how i am shackled with it! i am determined to live frugally, that i may enable myself to cut it short, as soon as i am tolerably independent, and then give my mind up to those delightful regions of imagination.”28 by that closing phrase, which has become famous in romney studies, he meant what was in his time called “history painting”—a term that could include, in addition to strictly historical subjects, scenes from milton, the bible, shakespeare, and mythology. indeed, he had visited those regions from the beginning of his career, as in lear in the tempest tearing off his robes (c. 1761, abbot 27. alex kidson, george romney: 1734-1802 (princeton: princeton university press, 2002) 66. 28. hayley, life of romney 123. hall art gallery, kendal). although romney was a dedicated and highly successful portrait artist, having received 593 sittings in 1783 alone,29 he was nevertheless conflicted about his artistic vocation. money alone was not the reason, although it certainly was a factor. in 1795 the diarist joseph farington wrote that romney was reportedly worth the very considerable sum of £50,000.30 he would have earned this almost entirely through portraiture, for it was notoriously difficult to sell history paintings. romney knew himself to be a great portrait artist, and he was a perfectionist, said seldom to allow any other hand to touch his work at a time when it was common for artists to employ specialists in landscape backgrounds or draperies. he would rather lose an important commission, as he did mrs. siddons’s, than finish a picture in haste.31 when blake accused hayley of turning romney into a portrait painter, he was simplifying a complex situation. what would have been most important to blake about romney’s art? flaxman, who contributed a “sketch of romney’s professional character” to hayley’s life, points the direction. “his cartoons,” flaxman wrote, “some of which have unfortunately perished, were examples of the sublime and terrible, at that time perfectly new in english art. the dream of atossa, from the persians of æschylus, contrasted the deathlike sleep of the queen, with the bacchanalian fury of the genius of greece. the composition was conducted with the fire and severity of a greek bas-relief: the ghost of darius, with the persians prostrated before him, awed the spectator by grandeur and mystery” (cover illus.; illus. 2 online).32 the picture flaxman mentions is one of a group of large, finished drawings in black chalk or graphite, begun by romney not long after his return from italy in 1775 and continued over a period of perhaps a decade.33 “his compositions,” flaxman continued, “like those of the ancient pictures, and basso relievos, told their story by a single group of figures in the front, whilst the back ground is made the simplest possible, rejecting all unnecessary episode, and trivial ornament, either of secondary groups or architectural subdivision.” these were also blake’s artistic concerns early in his career (and at times afterwards), and blake also shared with romney, flaxman, and others both a strongly neoclassical style and techniques of pen and wash draftsmanship. as jean h. hagstrum, one 29. see marcia pointon, hanging the head: portraiture and social formation in eighteenth-century england (new haven: yale university press, 1993) 36. 30. diary of joseph farington 2: 432 (8 dec. 1795). farington’s informant was “mr. sharpe,” presumably romney’s friend the west india merchant richard (“conversation”) sharp. in the same conversation farington was told that “romney did, for many years, wish for independance; that he might be able to exercise the powers of his mind in his profession. he still looks forward to a time when he shall have that indulgence ….” 31. kidson, george romney 177-78. in his search for romney’s paintings, blake saw an unfinished half-length of mrs. siddons; see below. 32. hayley, life of romney 309-10. 33. see kidson, george romney 118-39. eighteen of these drawings (now in the walker art gallery, liverpool) were given by john romney to the liverpool royal institution in 1823. 1. william sharp, engraving after george romney, a portrait of the author of rights of man, 1793. 10.3 x 8.4 in. © trustees of the british museum. 54 blake/an illustrated quarterly fall 2011 of the few to have taken up this subject, argues, “a linear and thematic stamp from romney is visible on blake’s works from the early tiriel to the very late dante illustrations.”34 at the time that blake began looking for romney pictures to be engraved, the state of romney’s oeuvre was almost chaotic. even while the artist was alive, some of it had been subjected to terrible treatment in romney’s move to hampstead on christmas 1798. in the words of one biographer, “for want of adequate room, the pictures were crammed into all vacant places, or arranged along the arcade, where, being exposed in the open air to the alternate action of moisture and frost, they were almost entirely destroyed in the course of the winter; several, also, were stolen.”35 the chaos of romney’s studio was no doubt related to, and in a sense mirrored, the bipolar disorder that increasingly afflicted him. we can only imagine what happened after he left hampstead not long afterward and then died in kendal in november 1802. benjamin west was so horrified by the state of romney’s paintings that he began cleaning and arranging his own, he told farington, so that “in case he should drop, his house may not be found like those of romney & opie full of rubbish that it was disgraceful to them to have brought forward to a sale.”36 in undertaking to search for romney’s originals, blake took on what would be a difficult and time-consuming task. he began with william saunders, who had physical custody of most of romney’s unsold paintings. (saunders was romney’s framemaker from 1782 on, and the two had enjoyed a close business relationship.)37 blake mentions calling on saunders on hayley’s behalf in letters to hayley of 26 october and 13 december 1803, 21 march 1804, and 11 december 1805. after his first visit, blake reported: i have been with mr. saunders who has now in his possession all mr. romney’s pictures that remained after the sale at hampstead; i saw milton and his daughters, and ’twas where the seas were roaring, and a beautiful female head. he has promised to write a list of all that he has in his possession, and of all that he remembers of mr. romney’s paintings, with notices where they now are, as far as his recollection will serve. the picture of christ in the desert he supposes to be 34. jean h. hagstrum, “romney and blake: gifts of grace and terror,” blake in his time, ed. robert n. essick and donald pearce (bloomington: indiana university press, 1978) 208. william pressly suggests that “when seen as a whole,” the liverpool drawings “may have influenced blake when composing his series of large colour prints executed in 1795 which similarly cover a wide range of textual sources including ones of the artist’s own creation” (“romney’s ‘peculiar powers for historical and ideal painting,’” those delightful regions of imagination, ed. kidson, 107). 35. john romney, memoirs of the life and works of george romney (london: baldwin and cradock, 1830) 251. 36. diary of joseph farington 9: 3208 (26 jan. 1808). 37. on the close business association of romney and saunders, see jacob simon, “a note on george romney and picture framing,” <http:// www.npg.org.uk/research/programmes/the-art-of-the-picture-frame/ artist-romney.php>, accessed 27 feb. 2010. saunders’s premises were on great castle street, a few hundred yards from cavendish square, the site of romney’s studio from 1775 to 1796. one of those which he has rolled on large rollers. he will take them down and unroll them, but cannot do it easily, as they are so large as to occupy the whole length of his workshop, and are laid across beams at the top. (e 737) three of these paintings can be identified (as romney executed numerous beautiful female heads, it is impossible to say which blake saw). milton and his daughters (private collection), depicting the blind milton being read to, would have made for an excellent engraving because of its dramatic lights and darks, but it was not chosen, perhaps because it had already been engraved by benjamin smith in 1795. ’twas where [sic] the seas were roaring was no. 117 in the 1807 sale of romney’s paintings, described as “a despondent female, seated upon a rock, overpowered with grief; a gleam of light is thrown upon the breast and arms of the female with richest effect.”38 a detail of the large, rolled-up picture of christ in the desert, known under the title of the temptation in the wilderness, was later engraved, though not by blake, for hayley’s biography; it will be discussed below with the other illustrations for the book. saunders was as good as his word, though not until 5 january 1804, when he wrote to hayley that at blake’s request he had made a list of romney’s “most capital paintings” with their owners.39 the first whom blake had called on was the astronomer and lecturer adam walker, a member of the unincreasable club, an informal group including romney who dined and went to the theater together from time to time.40 one of romney’s oldest friends, walker had been with the artist in lancaster and had posed for some of his pictures there. the closeness of their relationship is epitomized by two paintings and the span of time between them. walker was the subject of what may have been romney’s earliest portrait,41 while the walker family (national portrait gallery, london), showing walker and his wife and daughter poring over an astronomical chart while walker’s sons discuss what they have seen through a telescope pointed toward the night sky, is among romney’s very last works. on 27 january 1804 blake reported to hayley that he had called on walker, but that 38. select and reserved collection of paintings of that eminent and very celebrated artist, george romney, esq. r.a., london, 27 apr. 1807. the title is that of a well-known ballad, “ ’twas when the seas were roaring.” 39. for saunders’s letter, see br(2) 178. the list itself is in the e. j. pratt library at victoria university in the university of toronto. i thank g. e. bentley, jr., for helping me locate it, and robert c. brandeis and roma kail for providing me with a photocopy. it will be cited as saunders’s list. 40. see michael phillips, “william blake and the ‘unincreasable club’: the printing of poetical sketches,” bulletin of the new york public library 80 (1976): 6-18. 41. it is said that a portrait of walker in the collection of lord wavertree (a well-known breeder of horses in the early twentieth century) may have been cut down from full length. see a biographical dictionary of actors: tibbett to m. west, ed. philip h. highfill, kalman a. burnim, and edward a. langhans, vol. 15 (carbondale: southern illinois university press, 1993) 212. fall 2011 blake/an illustrated quarterly 55 walker was away on an extended trip to birmingham (e 740). after one more unsuccessful attempt, blake could at last write to hayley on 4 may 1804: i have seen the elder mr. walker. … mr. walker showed me romney’s first attempt at oil painting; it is a copy from a dutch picture—dutch boor smoking; on the back is written, “this was the first attempt at oil painting by g. romney.” he shew’d me also the last performance of romney. it is of mr. walker and family, the draperies put in by somebody else. it is a very excellent picture, but unfinished. the figures as large as life, half length, mr. w., three sons, and, i believe, two daughters, with maps, instruments, &c. mr. walker also shew’d me a portrait of himself (w.), whole length, on a canvas about two feet by one and a half; it is the first portrait romney ever painted. but above all, a picture of lear and cordelia, when he awakes and knows her,—an incomparable production, which mr. w. bought for five shillings at a broker’s shop; it is about five feet by four, and exquisite for expression; indeed, it is most pathetic; the heads of lear and cordelia can never be surpassed, and kent and the other attendant are admirable; the picture is very highly finished. (e 748) lear and cordelia (location unknown) was one of the early pictures that romney sold by lottery in kendal in 1762. it had been won by a mr. richardson in cartmel, and by coincidence was bought by adam walker’s son in a shop in kensington many years later.42 william pressly remarks that a sketch on a related subject, the death of cordelia (1775-77, folger shakespeare library), “exhibits a stately, classicizing elegance, whose languid curves and slow rhythms exerted such a strong influence on william blake.”43 one might well think of blake’s early watercolor lear and cordelia in prison (c. 1779) in this regard. on 28 may 1804 blake informed hayley that walker “says that i shall have lear and cordelia to copy if you desire it should be done” (e 750). despite the availability of the painting and blake’s admiration of it, it was not to be included among the designs engraved for hayley’s life. daniel braithwaite, another unincreasable and one of romney’s first patrons, was an official in the post office when romney met him shortly after moving to london in march 1762. hayley was to dedicate his life of romney to him. blake visited him by 23 february 1804, when he informed hayley: “he gives a very spirited assurance of mr john romneys interesting himself in the great object of his fathers fame & thinks that he must be proud of such a work & in such hands. the picture from sterne which you desired him to procure for you; he has not yet found where it is. supposes that it may be in the north & that he may learn from mr romney who will be in town soon—” (e 741). “mr romney” is the painter’s son, john, and “in the north” refers to john’s residence in kendal, where he kept some of his father’s art. more must be said 42. john romney, memoirs 25-26. 43. see pressly, “romney’s ‘peculiar powers for historical and ideal painting,’” those delightful regions of imagination, ed. kidson, 105, 106 (fig. 35). about john romney shortly. braithwaite showed blake “a very fine portrait of mrs siddons (by romney) as the tragic muse half length. that is the head & hands. & in his best style” (e 741-42).44 this beautiful, though unfinished, painting might have been engraved splendidly, but evidently hayley was not interested. a suggestion from braithwaite did, however, catch his attention. “he also desires me,” wrote blake, “to express to you his wish that you would give the public an engraving of that medallion by your sons matchless hand which is placd over his chimney piece.” hayley had already decided to include this, writing to flaxman as early as 7 august 1803 that he had blake in mind as the engraver of both the medallion and of romney’s self-portrait, but was “astonished” by blake’s asking thirty guineas for the former and forty guineas for the latter.45 it appears that blake continued to hope to engrave the medallion, but he accepted the inevitable by 7 august 1804, writing to hayley that “miss. w[atson]. would engrave your sons medallion of romney most delicately.”46 how did hayley go about choosing what pictures should be engraved for his life of romney? he evidently asked early on for advice from flaxman, whose reply, had hayley followed his recommendations, might have resulted in a beautiful book. flaxman wrote on 2 january 1804 to remind hayley that hayley had once considered a group of romney’s cartoons “the noblest of his studies,” and went on to indicate some of their subjects: “a lapland witch raising a storm—charity & her children—pliny & his mother flying from the eruption of vesuvius—the following from æschylus—raising the ghost of darius—atossa’s dream—the furies” (br[2] 177). he then recommended blake for the engraving job: “they are all well worth etching in a bold manner which i think blake is likely to do with great success & perhaps at an expence that will not be burthensome—but at any rate give him one to do first for a tryal ….” hayley at first tried to follow flaxman’s advice. on 16 january he drafted a letter to john romney. he assured him that, although the artist had promised hayley “half a dozen” of these pictures, he did not wish them for himself but merely as a loan for which he would pay carriage, specifying two from flaxman’s list. “i wish you would allow mr blake to copy two of them if they are still in london—particularly the lapland witch raising a storm a design that our friend meyer used to call equal to any figure of michael angelos—& pliny the younger with his mother in the scene of the earthquake.”47 44. sarah siddons (private collection); see kidson, george romney 177-78. 45. br(2) 157. this must have contributed to hayley’s loss of confidence in blake, especially as, hayley says, they had agreed on a price of thirty guineas for the self-portrait. 46. from the recently rediscovered letter from blake to hayley in the collection of robert n. essick, whom i thank for sending me a copy even before he received the original. see mark crosby and robert n. essick, “‘the fiends of commerce’: blake’s letter to william hayley, 7 august 1804,” blake 44.2 (fall 2010): 53. 47. br(2) 188. it was an uncharacteristic diplomatic blunder for hayley to say that he had a claim on six pictures that were in john romney’s 56 blake/an illustrated quarterly fall 2011 the “lapland witch,” hayley explains in the life of romney, could not be found. “i have mentioned this design in the poetical epistles addrest to romney,48 and had hoped to decorate this volume with a good engraving from the cartoon, which the son of my departed friend had kindly intended to present to me, but after a diligent search for it in a mass of many large works, that were huddled together in the haste of the retiring painter to clear his london house, we had the mortification to perceive, that some mischance had annihilated this favorite design.”49 however, that was not true of most of the other drawings that flaxman recommended, and that he continued to recommend. on 22 june 1804 blake wrote to hayley (e 752-53): mr flaxman named the following eight as proper subjects for prints 1 the vision of atossa from eschylus 2 apparition of darius 3 black eyd susan—a figure on the sea shore embracing a corse 4 the shipwreck with the man on horseback &c which i have 5 hecate. a very fine thing indeed, which i have 6 pliny very fine but very unfinishd. which i have 7 lear & cordelia. belonging to mr walker 8 one other which i omitted to write down & have forgot but think that it was a figure with children which he calld a charity what were these pictures, and how suitable were they for engraved illustrations? numbers 1 and 2 are illustrations from the persae of aeschylus, first published in an english translation by robert potter in 1777. (flaxman’s own compositions from the tragedies of aeschylus,50 which included four illustrations of the persae based on potter’s translation, was to appear eighteen years later.) potter sat to romney for his portrait in 1778, and the two got on so well that romney made him a present of the finished portrait in august 1779.51 their conversations led romney, who often got his ideas for imaginative subjects from friends, to make two finished drawings on subjects from the persae. potter wrote in a note in his second edition, “the excellent mr. romney gave a strong instance of his good sense and fine taste, when he called æschylus ‘the painter’s poet:’ the public may expect to see this scene, and possession, especially as john, we now know from his memoirs (124), thought that hayley had stolen some of his father’s works. 48. hayley refers to his poetical epistle to an eminent painter (london: t. payne et al., 1778), which he reprints in the life. the lines are: round fancy’s circle when thy pencil flies, with what terrific pomp thy spectres rise! what lust of mischief marks thy witch’s form, while on the lapland rock she swells the storm! (life 374) 49. hayley, life of romney 84. sketches for this picture are in the louvre and in the fitzwilliam museum. 50. engraved by thomas piroli (london: j. matthews, 1795). 51. the portrait was sold at sotheby’s, 12 july 1995, lot 57, in the sale british paintings 1500-1850. some others, designed by him in the genuine spirit of æschylus; so that the translator will have this merit, if he has no other, to have given rise to some paintings that will do honour to our country.”52 romney must have been buoyed by this encouragement, as he later was by “the fervent praise” of joseph warton, who had seen atossa’s dream in london in 1794.53 at this time, aeschylus was valued for his “primitive” qualities,54 and so romney here was at the cutting edge of contemporary taste. this picture and its companion also show something of what romney and blake had in common: atossa’s dream is strikingly blake-like, as is the ghost of darius appearing to atossa. in the latter the crowned head of darius and his woeful expression foreshadow blake’s renderings of nebuchadnezzar, and his white beard, outstretched arms, and mantle, seen through the smoke of the altar, anticipate urizen.55 the three elders, bent over on their knees to our left, anticipate job’s slouched-over comforters in the illustrations of the book of job: “let the day perish wherein i was born” (illus. 3) and “then the lord answered job out of the whirlwind” (note the visible hands, which are also a detail in romney’s drawing). number 3, a picture at saunders’s according to his list, appears to refer to john gay’s popular lyric “sweet william’s farewell to black-eyed susan,” published in his poems on several occasions (1720). there is a puzzle about this title. the poem is about a woman who boards her sailor sweetheart’s warship and takes a tearful farewell before he sails.56 it does not feature “a figure on the sea shore embracing a corse” or anything like it. according to john romney, in about 1793 his father “painted … the death of ophelia, and susan, from the ballad of ‘when the seas were roaring;’ neither of which was in a finished state.”57 he also says, confusingly, that among the drawings he presented to the fitzwilliam museum in 1817 52. the tragedies of æschylus, trans. r. potter, 2nd ed., vol. 2 (london: w. strahan and t. cadell, 1779) 354n. suzanne e. may suggests that this note was added after potter’s book was in proof (“george romney, robert potter, and ‘the painter’s poet,’” transactions of the romney society 7 [2002]: 18). potter seems to have lost confidence in romney (and, it appears, all other artists) by 1788, when he wrote to the poet edward jerningham on 15 june: “i know nothing of macklin or his exhibitions, unless you mean the room of vile pictures from the english poets near temple bar. the best picture scene in aeschylus is the ghost of darius rising from his tomb; but the painter would probably make damn’d work of it” (huntington library ms. je 704: 061588). 53. hayley, life of romney 224-25. this drawing and its companion, the ghost of darius appearing to atossa, are in the walker art gallery, liverpool. 54. “a taste for aeschylus was in itself symptomatic of the primitivist currents of the late eighteenth century,” according to robert rosenblum, transformations in late eighteenth century art (princeton: princeton university press, 1974) 18n50 and 161. 55. in comparing romney’s darius with blake’s urizen, i have been anticipated by hagstrum, “romney and blake: gifts of grace and terror” 203. 56. john gay, poetry and prose, ed. vinton a. dearing with the assistance of charles e. beckwith, vol. 1 (oxford: clarendon press, 1974) 249-51. 57. john romney, memoirs 234. fall 2011 blake/an illustrated quarterly 57 were “v. 3rd. the damsel; from the ballad, ‘ ’twas when the seas were roaring,’ &c. or perhaps a personification of sorrow” and “xiii. 3rd. from the ballad, ‘ ’twas when the seas were roaring.’”58 gay does include a well-known ballad beginning “’twas when the seas were roaring,” sung by a character named susan,59 in his farce the what d’ye call it (1715). it is about a woman who imagines the death of her lover at sea and then sees his corpse in the water (although the corpse remains there and she does not embrace it). evidently either flaxman or blake made a slip, conflating the titles of two wellknown poems.60 romney’s ’twas when the seas were roaring was not selected for engraving, and its location is unknown. “the shipwreck,” the only engraving by blake to appear in the life, will be discussed with the other published illustrations. blake had mentioned number 5 on the list, hecate, to hayley earlier: “mr. flaxman advises that the drawing of mr. romney’s which shall be chosen instead of the witch (if that cannot be recovered) be hecate, the figure with the torch and snake, which he thinks one of the finest drawings” (2 april 1804, e 745). blake urged hayley to choose it over the pliny: “the two cartoons which i have of hecate & pliny are very unequal in point of finishing the pliny in [is] a sketch tho 58. john romney, memoirs 258, 259. 59. john gay, the what d’ye call it: a tragi-comi-pastoral farce, 3rd ed. (london, 1716) 32. 60. i am grateful to alex kidson (private communication) for this suggestion. admirably contrived for an effect equal to rembrandt. but the hecate is a finishd production which will call for all the engravers nicest attention” (28 december 1804, e 760). blake continued in a way that suggests that, after having been commissioned to engrave the shipwreck as well as the book’s frontispiece, he was now lobbying for a chance to do hecate: “indeed it is more finishd than the shipwreck it is every body[s] favourite who have seen it & they regularly prefer it to the shipwreck as a work of genius as to the [plates] price of the plates flaxman declares to me that he will not pretend to set a price upon engraving. i think it can only be done by some engraver. i consulted mr parker on the subject before i decided on the shipwreck & it was his opinion & he says it still is so that a print of that size cannot be done under 30 guineas if finishd, & if a sketch. 15 guineas as therefore hecate must be a finishd plate i consider 30 guineas as its price & the pliny 15 guineas” (e 760). (note that “can only be done by some engraver” refers only to getting a price estimate from blake’s one-time partner, james parker.) these prices are considerably lower than those that had astonished hayley in august 1803. in any event, hecate was never engraved and its present location is unknown. blake’s numbers 3, 4, 5, and 7 are additions to flaxman’s original list, and “a lapland witch” and “the furies” have been omitted. as we see, blake had succeeded in obtaining the pliny drawing and another that flaxman had recommended: hecate. romney’s old friend adam walker, having offered to let blake borrow lear and cordelia, would presumably have permitted him to engrave it. furthermore, it might have been possible for hayley to borrow numbers 1 and 2, as these were in the possession of john romney,61 who, according to hayley, had been willing to allow the engraving of the lost lapland 61. john romney’s hostile attitude toward hayley is frequently expressed in the memoirs of 1830. however, there had been unpleasantness between them as early as 1799, when the painter’s son demanded that hayley redeem £1500 worth of stocks. see victor chan, “pictorial image and social reality: george romney’s late drawings of john howard visiting prisoners,” diss., stanford university, 1983, 26. i thank ted andersson for providing me with a photocopy of the relevant pages of this dissertation. on 22 aug. 1803 john romney wrote to thomas greene about the £15 allowed to hayley by george romney’s executors. “mr. hayley insults my father’s memory by saying it is no more than a just return for his signal services. what signal services? for leading him by his bad example and evil counsels into those fatal errors which marked with misfortune and calamity the latter period of his life. happy would he have been had he never known mr. hayley.” see hilda gamlin, george romney and his art (london: swan sonnenschein, 1894) 312-14. in 1804 blake thought that some misunderstanding between the two had been ironed out, as shown in his letter to hayley of 16 mar. (e 743-44), and john romney did help hayley to the extent of permitting him to reproduce newton with the prism and the shipwreck, and giving him the shipwreck as a present. 3. william blake, engraving, illustrations of the book of job pl. 8, “let the day perish wherein i was born,” 1823-26. leaf size 16.6 x 12.8 in. image courtesy of robert n. essick. 58 blake/an illustrated quarterly fall 2011 closest and finest texture … and suffers from the excess of its quality, while her design lacks grip and robustness. … she engraved one plate for the shakespeare gallery, but subjects on this scale were too large for her delicate talent.”66 although of course watson was merely practicing her trade, in blake’s eyes her supplanting him as hayley’s chief engraver would have been a terrible slight; robert essick has suggested that for blake she became an aspect of the principle of domination that he called the female will.67 the first indication that blake had of being superseded by watson was learning that in the octavo edition of hayley’s life of william cowper (published 1806) watson’s portrait engraving of cowper would replace his own. one of blake’s miniatures after romney’s portrait of the poet had disturbed lady hesketh, cowper’s cousin and hayley’s friend, because she had seen in the image a suggestion of cowper’s insanity, which she would not allow to be mentioned in the life.68 although she later relented about blake’s portrait engraving of the poet, finding the published engraving “softened,” she was unequivocal in her support of watson (br[2] 147, 197). blake tried to put a good face on it, writing to hayley on 22 march 1805: “the idea of seeing an engraving of cowper by the hand of caroline watson is i assure you a pleasing one to me it will be highly gratifying to see another copy by another hand & not only gratifying but improving. which is better” (e 764). these can hardly have been blake’s real feelings in this matter. in addition to feeling professionally injured, he must have resented losing the fee he would have earned for a reduced engraving.69 the fact that flaxman, who in 1804 had urged hayley not to employ watson as an engraver (br[2] 194-95), nevertheless advised her on this engraving70 may have appeared to blake another betrayal. flaxman had been candid to hayley about his view of watson. he had seen two of her engravings after children’s heads by william beechey that were “so miserably executed that similar engraving instead of being a decoration, would be a blemish in your book” (16 june 1804, br[2] 195). indeed, flaxman continued, “if … you still continue in the same resolution as at first i will deliver your commission but there my interference must cease & all further communication must be between the engraver & yourself, because i foresee that the 66. a. m. hind, a short history of engraving and etching (london: constable, 1908) 295. 67. robert n. essick, “william blake’s ‘female will’ and its biographical context,” studies in english literature, 1500-1900 31.4 (autumn 1991): 615-30. this conviction on blake’s part would have been intensified if, as crosby and essick suggest (71), he saw a large-paper copy of hayley’s life that had printed on its spine “hayley’s / life / of / romney / illustrated / with / twelve plates / by / caroline watson.” 68. see my “cowper as blake’s spectre,” eighteenth-century studies 1 (1968): 236-52. 69. essick (“william blake’s ‘female will’” 623) points out that blake might also have expected to be the engraver of “cowper’s oak” that appeared in hayley’s supplementary pages to the life of cowper (chichester, 1806). this, too, was engraved by watson. 70. letter to hayley dated 14 nov. 1805, morgan library, record id. 106235. witch. the only picture from either list to appear in hayley’s life was blake’s fine engraving of the shipwreck, which was among the pictures held by saunders. hayley’s failure to include any of the others made a considerable difference in the pictorial aspect of his book—an important consideration for a biography of an artist—as did his change in priorities regarding engravers. all this time blake had been confident of having a major role in engraving the designs for the life of romney. his connection with the project had begun while he was still living in felpham and had executed two miniatures of romney for hayley, copied from self-portraits in hayley’s possession.62 from one of these he no doubt made a drawing as the basis for a portrait engraving to serve as the book’s frontispiece. he showed a proof of this engraving to romney’s friends from time to time, and at every opportunity he let hayley know how they considered his rendering of romney exact.63 in the newly rediscovered letter of 7 august 1804 he wrote: “the plate [of the shipwreck] goes on with spirit & neatness as does romneys head.”64 after his artistic epiphany connected with visiting the truchsessian gallery, blake declared “i am become suddenly as i was at first,” and that he would demonstrate this “by producing the head of romney and the shipwreck quite another thing from what you or i ever expected them to be” (23 october 1804, e 757). as late as 28 december 1804 he still expected to be the engraver of the frontispiece. “i am very far,” he wrote to hayley on that date, “from shewing the portrait of romney as a finishd proof. be assured that with our good flaxmans good help & with your remarks on it in addition i hope to make it a supernaculum.”65 however, despite blake’s efforts, when the book was at last published in 1809, the frontispiece was an engraving by caroline watson (illus. 4, online only), showing romney at three different ages, and six other engravings were by watson as well, with only one, “the shipwreck” (illus. 5, online only), by blake. watson, who succeeded blake in several of hayley’s projects during these early years of the nineteenth century, was a highly capable graphic artist, especially of portraits. she had been made engraver to the queen in 1785, the year in which she executed individual portraits of two daughters of queen charlotte after john hoppner. among her best-known works is her fine engraving of sir joshua reynolds’s bespectacled self-portrait, which appeared as the frontispiece to the edition of reynolds’s works that blake owned and savagely annotated. arthur m. hind does justice to watson’s strengths and weaknesses in writing that “caroline watson … is the miniaturist in style among the stipple engravers. her surface is of the 62. for details, see crosby and essick 61-62. 63. see, for example, blake’s letter of 23 feb. 1804 (e 742). a print that is probably blake’s frontispiece has been acquired by robert n. essick and will be the subject of a paper by mark crosby, forthcoming in this journal. 64. crosby and essick 53. 65. e 760. the oed defines “supernaculum” as “a liquor to be drunk to the last drop; a wine of the highest quality; hence, anything excellent of its kind.” fall 2011 blake/an illustrated quarterly 59 conclusion of such an engagement must be unsatisfactory to all parties concerned.” hayley was, clearly, determined not to take flaxman’s advice on this matter, and in 1806 he invited watson to felpham to copy some of romney’s originals for the purpose of engraving them in london. it is disappointing to find young edward garrard marsh, whom blake had praised as “my much admired & respected edward the bard of oxford,”71 later congratulating hayley on his choice: “caroline watson’s engravings are beautiful in the extreme; and you never made a happier exchange than when you employed her instead of blake” (br[2] 295). (hayley’s friends had a marked tendency to agree with him, unless they were in positions of independent power as were lady hesketh and flaxman.) according to hayley, he had been drawn to watson by “a peculiar tenderness of admiration, with which romney contemplated an exquisite engraving [by watson] of sir joshua’s portrait, prefixed to the quarto edition of his works, in 1797.”72 hayley may have also had another motive in inviting watson to stay for “some weeks.”73 his estranged wife, eliza, had died in 1797, and evidently he had no inclination to remain “the hermit,” as he liked to sign himself, literally. in 1801 he was thought to be about to marry penelope carleton chetwynd, an attractive widow (born c. 1762) temporarily resident in felpham.74 this did not happen, but in october 1808 he met and courted mary welford, whom he married on 28 march of the following year.75 perhaps, although she may well have been unaware of it, hayley had earlier entertained the idea of the unmarried caroline watson, who was about forty-five at the time, as a candidate. if blake suspected this, it would further strengthen essick’s argument that blake identified watson with the female will. blake pursued romney-related errands for hayley throughout 1804, which he is unlikely to have done had he not anticipated a major role in the engraving of illustrations for the life. he worked on two plates for it during that year. one was after romney’s self-portrait for the frontispiece, the other “the shipwreck,” after romney’s painting of a rescue at the cape of good hope. on 16 july 1804 he sent hayley a progress proof of the former and a sketch for the latter (illus. 6, online only), along with the newly published correspondence of samuel richardson,76 which after several attempts he had succeeded in getting from its publisher, richard phillips. evidently blake 71. letter to hayley, 27 jan. 1804, e 741. 72. hayley, life of romney 195. 73. see gilchrist 1: 182; [william hayley], memoirs of the life and writings of william hayley, esq., ed. john johnson, vol. 2 (london: henry colburn, and simpkin and marshall, 1823) 59. 74. angus whitehead, “‘mrs chetwynd & her brother’ and ‘mr. chetwynd,’” blake 42.2 (fall 2008): 75-78. whitehead cites two letters by charlotte smith to this effect. 75. see morchard bishop, blake’s hayley: the life, works, and friendships of william hayley (london: victor gollancz, 1951) 320-21. hayley’s second wife left him in 1812. 76. the correspondence of samuel richardson … selected from the original manuscripts, bequeathed by him to his family. to which are prefixed, a biographical account of that author, and observations on his had previously disagreed with hayley about richardson, for he now declared that “richardson has won my heart i will again read clarissa &c they [richardson’s novels] must be admirable i was too hasty in my perusal of them to percieve all their beauty” (e 754). it is hard to believe that this profession can be entirely sincere, coming from a man who had written just a few years earlier (of henry boyd’s moralistic view of the odyssey), “if homers merit was only in these historical combinations & moral sentiments he would be no better than clarissa” (e 633). of the book’s frontispiece to volume one, engraved after joseph highmore by watson, blake declared: “i admire miss watsons head of richardson it is truly delicate ‘the patient touches of unwearid art’” (e 754). delicacy could be watson’s specialty, but this is a very ordinary stipple engraving; in quoting pope’s description of a monument to virgil in the temple of fame, blake, who disliked pope and abominated virgil,77 was no doubt engaging in a private joke while humoring hayley, who was still a potential source of engraving commissions. hayley’s life of romney contains twelve engraved illustrations, ten of them after romney. the only blake engraving to be included was “the shipwreck,” dated 14 april 1809,78 though finished no later than 1805. the original oil sketch (location unknown) is called “animated tho’ unfinished” by hayley, who says that the subject was suggested to romney by the rev. james stanier clarke.79 the story comes from a book by the swedish botanist and travel writer carl peter thunberg, travels in europe, africa, and asia, made between the years 1770 and 1779.80 thunberg presents the story of a shipwreck off the cape of good hope as involving “action that does great honour to humanity.” seeing the victims offshore, “an old man, of the name of woltemad, by birth an european, … borrowed a horse, and … resolved to ride … to the wreck, with a view of saving some of them.” woltemad’s heroism ended tragically. “he repeated this dangerous trip six times more, bringing each time two men alive on shore, and thus saved in all fourteen persons. the horse was by this time so much fatigued, that he did not think it prudent to venture out again; but the cries and intreaties of the poor wretches on the writings, ed. anna laetitia barbauld, 6 vols. (london: richard phillips, 1804). 77. see blake’s “imitation of pope” (e 506) and on virgil (e 270). 78. this is of course the date of the engraving’s publication. blake’s preliminary drawing (martin butlin, the paintings and drawings of william blake, vol. 1 [new haven: yale university press, 1981] #350) is in the british museum. for information about it i am grateful to kim sloan of the department of prints and drawings, british museum. 79. hayley, life of romney 84-85. 80. 2nd ed., vol. 1 (london, 1795) 273-74. hayley owned this book, which is no. 2083 in the sale catalogue of his collection: see sale catalogues of libraries of eminent persons, vol. 2: poets and men of letters, ed. a. n. l. munby (london: mansell, 1971) 153. sarah jones informs me that this was preceded by an account by anders sparrman, who accompanied captain cook, in a voyage to the cape of good hope, published in london in 1785 in translation from the swedish edition of 1783. there woltemad is called voltemad. 60 blake/an illustrated quarterly fall 2011 wreck increasing, he ventured to take one trip more, which proved so unfortunate, that he lost his own life ….” romney would have been interested in this story for its humanitarian content—victor chan links it to his many drawings connected with the prison reformer john howard. james stanier clarke was certainly aware of the story, for he commissioned the first published illustration of the scene in his capacity as an editor of the naval chronicle. a copy of romney’s picture by his student, isaac pocock, jr., was used as the basis for an aquatint, “shipwreck at the cape of good hope” by thomas medland, which appeared in the naval chronicle in 1800.81 according to the accompanying text, pocock’s drawing was taken “from the large painting by george romney, esq. in his gallery at hampstead.” thus blake’s was not the first print after romney’s shipwreck. it is, however, both clearer and more spirited than medland’s, showing a swirl of motion among the victims of the wreck and the heroic horseman who has ridden into the waves to help them. a striking difference between thunberg’s account and romney’s representation is the age of the hero. thunberg stresses the advanced age of woltemad, calling him a “worthy veteran” and a “hoary sire.” however, blake’s print (like medland’s) shows a powerful, muscular young man fighting the waves. romney probably thought this a more dramatic visual concept. it may also be, as chan interestingly speculates, that romney thought of woltemad as a christ figure rescuing souls.82 “the shipwreck” was the only engraving blake contributed to hayley’s biography. seven of the remaining eleven were by watson. despite his early and prolonged involvement with the romney project, blake had been superseded by a highly successful stipple engraver and placed among other contemporaries who were competent at best. this appears to mark a more general cooling of hayley toward blake’s work after blake left felpham. it may be that hayley was happy to cut his ties with the vates irritabilis and found relief in working with an engraver who had no claims to inspiration. another instance of hayley’s withdrawal from blake may be seen in the thirteenth edition of his perennial best-seller the triumphs of temper. for the twelfth edition (1803) blake had executed new engravings after six engaging designs by maria flaxman. these replaced the thomas stothard illustrations that had been engraved by william sharp, james heath, and james neagle and used in the six previous editions. in 1807 triumphs appeared in a thirteenth edition, one (very rare) printing of which features the flaxman-blake images, another the engravings after stothard previously published.83 it appears that hayley changed horses in midstream, eliminating blake’s engravings after maria flaxman’s decidedly superior drawings and going back to their banal predecessors for the rest of the 81. naval chronicle 3 (jan.-july 1800): pl. 32, facing 296, where thunberg’s text is reprinted. medland was best known for his aquatints of topographical scenes. 82. chan 80. 83. bentley, blake books 578-79. thirteenth edition.84 the reason for this unusual procedure appears to be that blake’s copperplates showed unexpected signs of early wear. essick remarks that “the plates are quite worn in the 1807 edition” and specifies that in plate 6 “the 4 cm. horizontal scratch, running 2.5 cm. above the lower margin of the design, wore off the plate in the course of the 1803 printing and thus appears as only a faint shadow line in the 1807 edition.”85 the problem with blake’s plates for the triumphs of temper is likely to have influenced hayley at a time when he was deciding on the engravers for his life of romney, especially if he was already disposed to be so influenced. hayley even stated to flaxman (through what bentley calls “a semi-literate amanuensis”) “i should like to employ your freand cromak on the ship wreck you mention,” and was deterred only by the fact that blake had already taken the picture home from saunders’s: “i should be sorry to risque wounding the feelings of our quick-spirited freand by sending the oil sketch from his possassion to the house of any other engraver.”86 had it not been for blake’s assiduity in carrying out hayley’s requests, the book might have appeared with none of his engravings! when we turn to the book itself, we find the engravings of surprisingly varying quality, considering the time and trouble it had taken to locate some of the originals. watson’s frontispiece that displaced the portrait engraving on which blake had been working, and for which he had even been paid,87 is an excellent piece of work, showing three heads of romney, all from self-portraits in hayley’s possession, at different ages. the largest of the originals (1784, national portrait gallery, london), which conveys a fine sense of the artist’s high-strung and vulnerable nature, has justly been called “one of the greatest self-portraits of the eighteenth century.”88 the other two are identified by john ingamells as a watercolor (untraced) drawn at eartham in 1778 of romney wearing a bicorne or tricorne hat, and a crayon drawing of a bespectacled romney (also untraced) of 1799.89 all three heads are sensitively rendered as to both contour and expression. watson also engraved the infant shakespeare, a picture that has less to do with shakespeare than with thomas gray’s progress of poesy, in which “far from the sun and summer84. i have benefited from discussions on this subject with robert n. essick and mark crosby. for an illuminating discussion of the thirteenth edition, see mark crosby, “‘a ladys book’: blake’s engravings for hayley’s the triumphs of temper,” blake in our time: essays in honour of g. e. bentley jr, ed. karen mulhallen (toronto: university of toronto press, 2010) 105-30. 85. robert n. essick, william blake’s commercial book illustrations (oxford: clarendon press, 1991) no. xliii, 84-85. 86. 18 june 1804, br(2) 195-96. “cromak” is r. h. cromek, who in 1805 commissioned blake to illustrate robert blair’s the grave. 87. letter to hayley, 28 sept. 1804: “the head of romney for which i am already paid” (e 755). 88. kidson, george romney 180-81. 89. john ingamells, “portraits of george romney: an iconography,” <http://www.npg.org.uk/whatson/exhibitions/2002/george-romney/ iconography.php>, accessed 21 june 2009. fall 2011 blake/an illustrated quarterly 61 gale, / in thy [albion’s] green lap was nature’s darling laid.”90 it shows two females, comedy (based on emma hart) and tragedy, trying to teach a baby to play a flageolet, supplying, as richard altick puts it, “the element of allegory that was, at that time, indispensable to any celebration of shakespeare.”91 the original (purchased by lord egremont and now at petworth) was exhibited in boydell’s shakespeare gallery and engraved by benjamin smith (1803). the version watson engraved belonged to francis newbery, whom hayley thanks.92 much admired in its time—hayley pronounced it his favorite romney93—the infant shakespeare is more difficult to appreciate in our own, hovering as it does between charm and silliness. watson’s placing her subject in an oval frame is perhaps an attempt to emphasize the former and ward off the latter by underlining the consciously fictive nature of the scene. watson also produced a very competent engraving, from maria denman’s drawing, of thomas alphonso hayley’s portrait medallion. unfortunately, her other engravings for the book are in some ways problematic. the fault was not entirely hers, for hayley must have had the deciding voice in choosing her subjects.94 among the pictures watson copied during her visit to felpham was madame de genlis (fine arts museums of san francisco), the subject of which romney and hayley had met in paris in 1790, and whom romney painted in london in 1792. the author of lessons of a governess to her pupils (london, 1792) is depicted dramatically and somewhat exotically, wearing a large scarf on her head and a shawl over her shoulders. watson failed to find a graphic equivalent for the delicate, pastel-like coloring of the original, and her portrayal seems vulgar by comparison. three other engravings are after works owned by hayley for which hart alone had served as a model: “miranda,” “cassandra,” and “sensibility.” the head of miranda95 is similar to that in romney’s large tempest painting for the shakespeare gallery, now existing only 90. the poems of thomas gray, william collins, oliver goldsmith, ed. roger lonsdale (london: longman group ltd., 1969) 172. 91. richard d. altick, paintings from books: art and literature in britain, 1760-1900 (columbus: ohio state university press, 1985) 143. 92. kidson, george romney 214n1; hayley, life of romney 304. see c. h. collins baker, catalogue of the petworth collection of pictures in the possession of lord leconfield (london: medici society, 1920) 110-11. the petworth painting is reproduced facing p. 110. this picture is not listed in subsequent petworth (national trust) catalogues because it remains the property of lord egremont (information from alex kidson, private communication). 93. hayley, life of romney 304: “charms of expression not inferior to the finest greek gems.” 94. crosby and essick (70n55) point out that hayley instructed the publisher of the third edition (1793) of his essay on old maids to alter its illustrations in specific ways. 95. see [thomas] humphry ward and w. roberts, romney: a biographical and critical essay with a catalogue raisonné of his works, vol. 2 (london: thos. agnew & sons; new york: charles scribner’s sons, 1904) 184. in fragmentary form.96 watson’s engraving suffers especially from having no equivalent to the lushly contrasting reds of miranda’s hair, gown, and lips. cassandra too was modeled by hart for exhibition in boydell’s shakespeare gallery (though begun earlier),97 this time ostensibly illustrating troilus and cressida. another version was sold in the 1807 romney sale; both are untraced, and the full-length picture is known only through francis legat’s line engraving, dated 1 january 1795. in this instance romney produced at least three heads of his subject,98 one of which was owned by hayley. watson no doubt took the opportunity to copy it in 1806.99 cassandra’s hair in watson’s engraving is considerably wilder than it is in the boydell painting (as known through legat’s engraving), as it also is in the surviving small painting (tate britain), and the engraving is more melodramatic than dramatic. sensibility (jay i. kislak foundation),100 painted in 1786, began as a beautiful head; hayley claims credit for encouraging romney to transform it to full length: “you have only to enlarge your canvas,” he told romney, “introduce the shrub mimosa, growing in a vase, with a hand of this figure approaching its leaves, and you may call your picture a personification of sensibility.” hayley says that he then hastened to “an eminent nurseryman at hammersmith” and returned with the mimosa that the artist painted in the lower right.101 watson in her engraving brought the picture back to a head alone, but retained its botanical element by moving the mimosa close in (possibly as a wall painting). hayley afterwards acquired the original as part of a real-estate transaction.102 it may seem surprising that of the ten plates after romney in hayley’s life, three were heads of emma hart. it is true that hayley genuinely admired romney’s famous (by the time he wrote the life) model, writing that “her features, like the language of shakespeare, could exhibit all the feelings of nature, and all the gradations of every passion, with a most fascinating truth, and felicity of expression,”103 but he may also have 96. the fragment, one of four in the bolton museum and art gallery, is reproduced in those delightful regions of imagination, ed. kidson, fig. vi. the whole design is known from an oil sketch (national gallery of modern art, rome) and from benjamin smith’s somewhat different engraving (1797) for the boydell shakespeare gallery. these are reproduced in those delightful regions of imagination, figs. 39-40. 97. see stuart sillars, painting shakespeare: the artist as critic 17201820 (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2006) 136-38. the engraving by legat is reproduced as fig. 41. according to saunders’s list, the painting was still at the shakespeare gallery in jan. 1804. 98. see ward and roberts 2: 181. 99. the picture that watson copied is not the one in the tate collection, which has a different provenance. i have been unable to trace hayley’s version beyond 1910, when it was owned by the london collector e. l. raphael (see chamberlain 317-18). 100. i am grateful to arthur dunkelman for provenance information. it was engraved by richard earlom in 1789. 101. hayley, life of romney 121. 102. hayley, life of romney 121-22. 103. hayley, life of romney 119. for her part, emma hamilton regarded hayley as a trusted friend: “if i had never read your triumphs of temper,” she wrote to him on 29 jan. 1806, “i shou’d never have been 62 blake/an illustrated quarterly fall 2011 thought that the inclusion of several heads of her in various roles would increase the public’s interest in his book. although hart was known only to a small circle when romney painted her,104 by the time hayley chose the subjects for his book she was lady hamilton, who had become famous for her “attitudes” and for having been the mistress of admiral horatio nelson. her original poses for romney anticipated the attitudes, and for readers of the life of romney these prints would look back to them evocatively. the remaining engravings were by william haines, abraham raimbach, robert mitchell meadows, and robert cooper. the earliest romney painting reproduced in the book was the introduction of dr. slop into the parlour of mr. shandy (location unknown). the engraver was haines, who had been abroad for several years and had returned to england from philadelphia as late as 1805. blake evidently knew haines, who was probably the subject of his epigram the sussex men are noted fools and weak is their brain pan i wonder if h the painter is not a sussex man105 haines, who had grown up in chichester, began as an engraver and also became successful as a portrait artist, often in miniatures, the art to which hayley had attempted to recruit blake. he painted hayley’s portrait (engraved by h. r. cook) and also engraved portraits after numerous other artists. he frequently exhibited at the royal academy from 1808 on, and in 1811 his address is given in the exhibition catalogue as 10 south molton street.106 as blake lived at 17 south molton street, his animosity toward haines may perhaps be linked to a local quarrel rather than to art. dr. slop could be, as geoffrey keynes suggests, “the picture from sterne” that blake told the wife of sir william hamilton not shou’d i have had an opertunity [sic] of cultivating those talents which made the great & immortal nelson think me worthy of his confidence” (english literature, history, children’s books and illustrations, catalogue of sale at sotheby’s london, 17 dec. 2009, lot 10). 104. she is mentioned once in blake’s letters to hayley: “tho i have calld on mr edwards twice for lady hamiltons direction was so unfortunate as to find him out both times i will repeat my call on him tomorrow morning” (27 jan. 1804, e 741). mr. edwards was probably edward edwards, who in 1808 published anecdotes of painters who have resided or been born in england. 105. e 506. the identification of h the painter as william haines was first suggested by john sampson, and later agreed to by keynes and provisionally by erdman. see the poetical works of william blake, ed. john sampson (london: oxford university press, 1913) 214; the complete writings of william blake, ed. geoffrey keynes (london: oxford university press, 1966) 911n; and e 866. william blake’s writings, ed. g. e. bentley, jr., vol. 2 (oxford: clarendon press, 1978) 938n, says h “may be william haines.” 106. see algernon graves, the royal academy of arts: a complete dictionary of contributors and their work from its foundation in 1769 to 1904, vol. 3 (london: henry graves and co. ltd. and george bell and sons, 1905) 349-50. hayley he was searching for in his letter of 23 february 1804 (e 741),107 and blake may already have been on the track of it when he informed hayley that “mr flaxman is not at all acquainted with sr allan chambre [sic]” (27 january 1804, e 741). as it turned out, chambré did own the picture, having received it from the person who won it in romney’s kendal lottery in 1762.108 “the picture from sterne” that blake sought may, alternatively, have been one of two other early paintings of shandean subjects that hayley mentions. one represented the death of lieutenant le fever and, as adam walker told hayley, “was much admired.” walker continued: the figures were about eighteen inches long, and wonderfully expressive. the dying lieutenant was looking at uncle toby (who sat mute at the foot of the bed) and by the motion of his hand was recommending his son to his care: the boy was kneeling by the bedside, and with eyes that expressed his anguish of heart was, as it were, turning from a dying to a living father, begging protection, a most pathetic figure. trim was standing at a distance in his usual attitude, and with a face full of inward grief. what became of this admirable picture i cannot tell.109 hayley adds that romney’s friends regarded this work as “a master piece of pathetic expression … mr. braithwaite … thought it the most affecting picture he ever beheld.” but despite all efforts, the picture could not be found. neither could what hayley declared was romney’s own favorite comic picture showing “obadiah making his bow to dr. slop as the doctor is falling in the dirty lane.”110 however, hayley declared chambré ’s painting “a work of great comic power.” romney, who, while apprenticed to christopher steele, had probably heard sterne read passages from his novel in steele’s studio,111 accurately depicts dr. slop as described in chapters nine and ten of volume two: “a little, squat, uncourtly figure … of about four feet and a half perpendicular height, with a breadth of back, and a sesquipedality of belly, which might have done honour to a serjeant in the horse-guards. … his hinder parts, upon which he had received his fall, totally besmear’d,—and in every other part of him, blotched over ….”112 working in this comic vein was to become unusual for romney. haines’s engraving is one of the few records of it. 107. keynes, complete writings 835n. 108. hayley, life of romney 31; chamberlain 30. 109. hayley, life of romney 33. 110. hayley, life of romney 31. 111. see t. c. duncan eaves, “george romney: his tristram shandy paintings and trip to lancaster,” huntington library quarterly 7 (1944): 321-26. steele had studied for a year with carl van loo in paris, and dressed so fashionably after returning that he was known as “count” steele. romney was apprenticed to him in 1755, but the indentures were canceled after little more than two years when steele decided to relocate. see four kendal portrait painters (kendal: abbot hall art gallery, 1973) 4-7. 112. laurence sterne, the life and opinions of tristram shandy, gentleman, ed. james aiken work (new york: odyssey press, 1940) 104, 107. fall 2011 blake/an illustrated quarterly 63 raimbach engraved a detail from a painting that blake had looked for at saunders’s: romney’s large, unfinished paradise regained picture, the temptation in the wilderness. hayley does not shrink from giving himself credit for the original concept. “in the year 1794, a passage in the paradise regained of milton, so forcibly struck me as full of sentiment and picture, that i desired my son to transcribe it for romney. it was the sublime description of our saviour in the wilderness.”113 he then quotes four lines (4.422-25) of the poem: infernal ghosts, and hellish furies, round environ’d thee; some howl’d, some yell’d, some shriek’d, some bent at thee their fiery darts, while thou satst unappall’d in calm and sinless peace. hayley had suggested to flaxman that “if the figure of christ in the wilderness … begun upon an immense canvas is sufficiently advanced to form a good engraving i should wish your friend [cromek] to shew his powers in that ….”114 either the painting was not sufficiently advanced or raimbach lacked the skill to render it adequately, for he shows only christ’s head and shoulders in what gilchrist justly called “a poor head of christ.”115 (raimbach generously credited blake as the better engraver of outlines, but received the commission nevertheless.)116 we do not know what the rest of the picture looked like, which is especially unfortunate because romney painted so few religious subjects. “the picture of christ in the desert he [saunders] supposes to be one of those which he has rolled on large rollers,” wrote blake, and according to john romney, it was taken to christie’s auction rooms with his father’s other pictures, but was never unrolled and not located afterwards.117 newton with the prism (private collection) was strikingly engraved by meadows, who had previously executed engravings after henry william bunbury for macklin’s poet’s gallery (another venture from which blake felt excluded).118 john romney gives a concise description of the painting: it represented that contemplative philosopher seated on the right of the picture, attentively observing a prism, which he holds with his right hand in a sun-beam, and two female attendants placed opposite; one of whom with a silly kind of laugh is expressing her astonishment at the phenomenon of the prismatic colours projected on the wall; while the other is in the act of carefully bringing in a caraff of water. the com113. hayley, life of romney 229-30. 114. 18 june 1804; the letters of william blake with related documents, ed. geoffrey keynes, 3rd ed. (oxford: clarendon press, 1980) 95. 115. gilchrist 1: 178. 116. according to flaxman; see br(2) 251 and n. 117. letter to hayley, 26 oct. 1803, e 737; john romney, memoirs 245-46. 118. “i was alive & in health & with the same talents i now have all the time of boydells macklins bowyers & other great works. i was known by them & was look’d upon by them as incapable of employment in those works” (letter to hayley, 11 dec. 1805, e 766-67). position is simple, according with the sobriety of the subject; and the effect beautiful: the countenance of one female is in shadow, and that of the other (the laughing girl) in a reflected light, or demi-shade. this latter gives a fascinating charm to the picture.119 meadows’s engraving (illus. 7) is striking for its contrast of light and dark, which gives something of the effect of a mezzotint, but of course the main point of newton’s demonstration, the diffraction of white light into spectral colors—hayley refers to the painting as “newton, displaying the prismatic colours”—cannot be conveyed in black and white.120 obviously, meadows cannot be blamed for not having done the impossible; the question is why hayley did not choose the picture that romney regarded as a companion to newton, milton and his daughters, then (according to saunders’s list) in the collection of the brewer and radical samuel whitbread, which would have been more appropriate for monochrome.121 perhaps, as suggested above, hayley avoided the milton painting because it had already been engraved (by benjamin smith) for hayley’s life of milton.122 the last picture in the book is neither of nor after romney, but an entirely conventional portrait of the budding poet123 and future astronomer romney robinson. it was painted by the subject’s father, romney’s friend and former pupil thomas robinson of windermere, and engraved by cooper, a copious engraver of portraits (114 in the national portrait gallery alone). why hayley wanted to include this rather than another print after romney is one of the puzzling aspects of his book. the life of george romney was long in the making. hayley advertised for materials for it as early as 28 august 1803.124 he says he began it “about the middle of december, 1803” and finished it, after several interruptions, in october 1807.125 however, he had to wait for engravings to be completed and so, self-consciously using an artist’s term, he continued to “retouch” it. he was still “retouching the life of romney” early in 1808. he and the printer, joseph seagrave, “revised” the first proof sheet on 27 march 1808, and this process continued for several months. seagrave died on 9 july 1808, and his suc119. john romney, memoirs 235-36. romney is said to have painted newton’s head after john michael rysbrack’s statue in westminster abbey; see elizabeth johnston, george romney (london: london county council, 1961) 38. 120. hayley, life of romney 186. hayley acknowledges the permission of john romney, who then owned the picture. 121. as blake says that he saw milton and his daughters at saunders’s in 1803, what he saw was probably an oil sketch (see kidson, george romney 223n12). 122. the poetical works of john milton. with a life of the author, by william hayley, 3 vols. (london: john and josiah boydell, and george nicol, 1794-97). 123. his “elegy on the death of george romney, esq.,” written at the age of ten years and eight months, appears on 335-38 of hayley’s life. 124. diary of joseph farington 6: 2117. 125. hayley, memoirs 2: 45, 62. 64 blake/an illustrated quarterly fall 2011 cessor, mason, printed the book, which was published by t. payne, london, in the late spring of 1809. hayley sadly remarks that it met with “surprising ill success.”126 the reviews were mixed. the quarterly review savaged the book in a review by the painter john hoppner, revised by the editor, william gifford.127 the verdict: “as a literary composition, it is far below mediocrity; and as a critique on art, flimsy and injudicious.” romney himself was condemned as an artist capable of only minor subjects; his figures had “more the appearance of coloured statues, than representations of animated nature,” and “in his manner of treating the higher walks of history … extravagance has been mistaken for sublimity, and praised accordingly.” “romney’s pallet may readily be traced back to the colour-shop.” this sheer overkill suggests 126. hayley, memoirs 2: 66, 72, 74-75. he says that it appeared a few months after his wedding, which took place on 28 mar. 1809. 127. quarterly review 2, no. 4 (1809): 433-44. see quarterly review archive, ed. jonathan cutmore, <http://www.rc.umd.edu/reference/qr/ index.html>, accessed 4 july 2009. that hoppner was jealously taking revenge on his deceased, more successful rival. as for the reactionary gifford, whom william hazlitt was to call “the invisible link, that connects literature with the police,”128 he was well aware that hayley was a political liberal and that romney had been a friend of paine. whatever changes gifford made in revising were not likely to have been in the book’s favor. the critical review129 attempted to be more evenhanded, saying of hayley: “his want of compression, and his tedious habit of introducing vapid phrases, are faults so well known, that they need not our emblazoning. on the other hand, his good qualities, his truth, the general correctness of his judgment, his experience of the world, and just feeling, his candour and liberality, have not been duly appretiated [sic] by our contemporaries.” (this last point may suggest what the public reception of the book was.) the reviewer devoted more space 128. the complete works of william hazlitt, ed. p. p. howe, vol. 19 (london: j. m. dent and sons, 1933) 210. 129. critical review: or, annals of literature 18, no. 4 (1809): 390-99. 7. robert mitchell meadows, engraving after george romney, newton with the prism, 1809. 8.25 x 11 in. image courtesy of the huntington library, call number rb 135333. fall 2011 blake/an illustrated quarterly 65 than most to the reproductions of romney’s paintings, finding them “well chosen specimens to exhibit the gradations of his improvement, and the peculiar qualities of his style.” “the miranda,” he wrote, “has exquisite expression,” but “sensibility is too pretty, and cassandra too like a bacchante of the lowest order.” he found “the introduction of dr. slop into the parlour of mr. shandy … too just and natural to be sufficiently humorous.” of “the shipwreck” he says (not mentioning blake) that “the sentiment, as observed by mr. flaxman, is caught at a glance, the light is happily spread upon the gloom, and the confused horrors of the scene represented with great clearness and simplicity.”130 “the piece entitled newton with the prism … concentrates the excellencies of romney’s manner, namely, character, expression, strength, delicacy, grace, simplicity, and the dexterous management of light and shadow,” but “the head of our saviour in the wilderness” was “not quite equal to milton’s description.” “the infant shakespeare” was “above our praise.” the monthly review took a sterner line, condemning hayley’s repetition “almost ad nauseam” of expressions like “‘the tender artist,’—‘the tender and apprehensive artist,’ (the latter is a favourite and frequent adjunct,)—‘the sensitive—the timorous,’—‘our beloved and dejected artist,’—‘the interesting invalid,’ &c.”131 this reviewer also made an important point in observing that the expectations of those young artists should have been considered, who will open the volume with sanguine hopes of discovering the recorded opinions of one of his most distinguished countrymen on the works of foreign art, which he frequently explored; and they will close it with the greater disappointment, from being informed that the professional discussions of romney, of which no trace is here preserved, were eloquent, original, judicious, and so full of vehemence and enthusiasm that they frequently betrayed him into tears. indeed, as romney gave no lectures and wrote no art criticism, a biographer who had known him for twenty-five years had an unusual opportunity to convey both his views about art and the qualities that made his conversation on that subject so fascinating, but evidently hayley did not think this part of his responsibility. the reviewer mentioned the book’s twelve illustrations in his last paragraph, but his only critical judgment was that watson’s were “charmingly engraved.” in the gentleman’s magazine a favorable notice mostly comprised, as did many reviews of the time, a summary of the book with extracts from it.132 it said that the volume was “elegantly printed,” and that the engravings were “executed principally by caroline watson, in a peculiarly-elegant and highly-finished style,” listing all the illustrations but not nam130. the reviewer appears to be paraphrasing a sentence flaxman wrote of romney’s art in general (hayley, life of romney 310-11), rather than quoting any specific statement about this picture. 131. monthly review 60 (1809): 337-46. 132. gentleman’s magazine 79, part 2 (1809): 1140-47. ing any other engravers, and concluding with a remark that is unlikely to have pleased any of them: “these engravings, we cannot help adding, render this book one of the cheapest purchases ever offered to the publick.” the british critic, in a mildly positive review, closed, curiously enough, on the same note: “the engravings by caroline watson, are highly spirited and beautiful, and would, if there were a deficiency of interest and merit in the book itself, which there is not, render it a very cheap purchase.”133 as we can see, the critical reception was far from entirely negative, although even the favorable critics showed little knowledge of or interest in art. what made the book, in the words of hayley’s sympathetic biographer morchard bishop, “a disastrous failure,”134 was not the reviewers, but the reading public. two other works that hayley said met with “surprising ill success” (memoirs 2: 74-75) were his four-volume edition of cowper’s milton (1810) and his three plays (1811). recognizing the likelihood that “i have lost my popularity,” hayley published no new works after 1811, although he lived until 1820.135 the literary euphemisms and affectations that had charmed previous generations of readers no longer had such an effect. as late as 1803, hayley’s biography of cowper had achieved both critical and commercial success, but cowper’s letters had a major role in this, and romney, as bishop observes, was an indifferent letter writer. romney’s language was pictorial, and hayley scarcely did him justice in his selection of both pictures and engravers. as we have seen, some of his choices appear arbitrary and even haphazard with respect to both. as for blake, he had labored for over two years on behalf of the illustrations to hayley’s book only to find himself represented in it by a single engraving. ironically, the life of george romney, esq. is valued today chiefly for blake’s print of the shipwreck. 133. british critic 34 (1809): 341-45. 134. bishop 323. 135. other editions of the triumphs of temper, which seems to have had a life of its own, appeared in 1812 and 1817. blake in the marketplace, 2016 blake in the marketplace, 2016 by robert n. essick robert n. essick has been collecting and writing about blake for fifty years. table of contents: introductory essay abbreviations blake: illuminated books drawings and paintings separate plates and plates in series letterpress books with engravings by and after blake, including prints extracted from such books interesting blakeana blake’s circle and followers: barry, james basire, james calvert, edward flaxman, john fuseli, henry linnell, john palmer, samuel richmond, george romney, george sherman, welby stothard, thomas appendix: new information on blake’s engravings among blake’s least studied major works are his watercolor illustrations to the bible painted for his patron thomas butts. more than eighty are extant or have been recorded. the hymn of christ and the apostles, one of only six remaining in private hands, was offered at sotheby’s 28 january auction in new york (illus. 6). unfortunately, this beautiful design is faded and the paper yellowed, no doubt due to overexposure to light over many years. at the conclusion of less than a minute of bidding, the work was knocked down to john windle, acting for me, at $260,000 ($322,000 including the buyer’s premium). the same auction included the descent of man into the vale of death, one of blake’s watercolor illustrations for robert blair’s the grave (illus. 5). the winning bid of $180,000 was less than the low estimate of $200,000 but above that figure when the substantial buyer’s premium is added. windle published two catalogues in february, an unillustrated list of books available at the california international antiquarian book fair, held in pasadena on 12-14 february, and fully illustrated catalogue 64. the latter announces the forthcoming installation of the “william blake gallery,” a “space” at his headquarters in san francisco “dedicated to both blake’s artwork and his writings, offering over a thousand books, original prints, drawings, reference material, and ephemera relating to blake and his circle and followers.” windle issued two further catalogues in the first half of the year, online for the london international antiquarian book fair, 26-28 may, and a printed short list 3 (new series) in june. many of the original blake materials in these four catalogues have been included in earlier sales reviews, but all are listed below for the record. windle is recognized in the trade and among collectors as the most active and knowledgeable dealer in blake and his circle. indeed, he dominates the field. george richmond’s “the shepherd,” an engraving datable to 1827, is one of the more important early works by the “ancients,” the group of young artists who gathered around blake in his final years. the original copperplate appeared without fanfare at a regional auction in britain on 16 march—see the final entry under richmond, below. the auctioneer did not know what he had, estimating a lot of five copperplates of richmond’s designs at £200-300, but two bidders thought more highly of at least the plate of “the shepherd” and drove the winning hammer bid to £11,000 (£13,200 with the buyer’s premium). in early april windle received on consignment a small but significant collection of blake’s works from an american foundation. the highlights include for the sexes: the gates of paradise copy n, containing ten of twenty-one plates (illus. 2-3), and an early printing of blake’s dante engravings on laid paper. all the materials from this collection are listed below. in the same month, an american private collector consigned to windle an impression of “the ancient of days” (europe plate 1), one of only two owned privately—see under illuminated books, below, and illus. 1. windle offered all these works at the new york antiquarian book fair, 7-10 april, and quickly sold “the ancient of days” to sir alan parker. the price of $375,000 is, i believe, a new record for a single etching or engraving by blake and possibly a record for a work in those media by a british artist. with his acquisition of blake’s tempera painting the virgin hushing the young baptist, parker has now assembled one of the three or four most important blake collections remaining in private hands. unable to find a buyer for copy n of for the sexes, windle began to offer its plates individually in late april. on 27 september christie’s in london sold the collection of drawings formed by the acerbic art critic brian sewell (1931–2015). the lots included a drawing by george romney, four by henry fuseli, and three by james barry. the prices fetched by barry’s drawings—as much as five times high estimate—show that these are now valued by the market more than comparable works by blake or fuseli. sales of barry’s prints over the last few years also indicate their sudden and spectacular rise in price. the much anticipated opening of windle’s william blake gallery began on 7 october with a reception for the press. morton paley and i attended and made brief presentations about blake’s life, art, and earlier exhibitions of his works in the san francisco bay area. the original works on display included a tempera painting, the virgin hushing the young baptist, a wash drawing, the complaint of job (butlin #163), on loan from robert bransten’s collection and not for sale, and six plates from for the sexes: the gates of paradise copy n. a handsome eight-page exhibition guide, titled always in paradise: a william blake chrestomathy, also served as a sales catalogue. most of the works have appeared in earlier windle catalogues or have been offered at book fairs, but all are listed below for the record. the gallery opened to the public on 14 october. in my 2014 sales review i reported on the lawsuit filed by the rosenbach of the free library of philadelphia, then called the rosenbach museum and library, against the estate of maurice sendak; see blake 48.4 (spring 2015): par. 5. his will stipulated that his “rare edition books” should be given to the rosenbach. the estate and the maurice sendak foundation claimed that songs of innocence copy j and songs of innocence and of experience copy h in their possession should not go to the rosenbach because the former lacked some plates and the latter was not bound and thus neither was a book. the case was adjudicated before judge joseph a. egan, jr., at the northern fairfield county probate court, connecticut, on 10-11 and 13-14 october. expert testimony was crucial as the parties argued over the definitions of “rare,” “edition,” and “books.” the judge rendered his decision on 25 october, finding in favor of the estate and foundation in regard to most of the objects at issue, including blake’s two illuminated (non?)books. jeffrey t. golenbock, a lawyer for the sendak foundation, stated “that the foundation had no intention of selling the works it had retained but planned ‘to keep them as part of the [foundation’s] collection’ as a way ‘to honor mr. sendak.’”randy kennedy, “maurice sendak’s estate is awarded most of a book collection,” new york times 1 nov. 2016 <http://​www.​nytimes.​com/​2016/​11/​02/​arts/​design/​maurice-​sendaks-​estate-​is-​awarded-​most-​of-​a-​book-​collection.​html?_r=0>, accessed 4 nov. 2016. see also peter dobrin, “a conclusion to rosenbach vs. sendak estate lawsuit—or just a pause?” philadelphia inquirer 2 nov. 2016 <http://​www.​philly.​com/​philly/​blogs/​the-arts/​a-​conclusion-​to-​rosenbach-​vs-​sendak-​estate-​lawsuit---​or-​just-​a-​pause.​html>, accessed 4 nov. 2016. all original works by blake in sendak’s estate presumably have been, or will be, transferred to the sendak foundation; for a complete list, see g. e. bentley, jr., “william blake and his circle: a checklist of publications and discoveries in 2012,” blake 47.1 (summer 2013): par. 9. the 2016 market included the second known impression of one of blake’s separate plates, “moore & co.’s advertisement” (illus. 7) and three minor discoveries about blake’s commercial book illustrations. even if originally printed in substantial numbers, most impressions of ephemera such as the moore advertisement are destroyed or discarded and thus become scarce after a few decades and exceedingly rare after two centuries. an impression of plate 5 in blair’s grave, “death of the strong wicked man” engraved by louis schiavonetti, is a so-called “touched” proof—that is, it includes pencil lines indicating further work to be executed on the copperplate. a previously unrecorded state of the frontispiece to benjamin heath malkin’s a father’s memoirs of his child includes “page” inscribed upper right in the copperplate. copies by american engravers of blake’s seven plates illustrating rees’s cyclopædia were published in the philadelphia edition of the book. for details, see the entry on malkin and the second entries for blair and rees under letterpress books with engravings by and after blake, below. several works of uncertain attribution or subject, including the first four listed below under interesting blakeana, appeared on the market in 2016. the hand coloring (but not the printing) of “the ancient of days” now in alan parker’s collection is suspect—see illus. 1 and its caption. the identity of the sitter in john linnell’s profile of a woman, eyes turned upward is not recorded, but might this be blake’s wife, catherine (illus. 8)? a drawing listed below under george richmond, abel the shepherd resting in a landscape with his flock (illus. 9), challenges the expertise of anyone assigning works to one or more of blake’s youthful followers. scholars, connoisseurs, curators, and dealers can legitimately disagree about attributions; my assessments here are far from definitive. it was a banner year for william muir’s facsimiles of blake’s works, principally the illuminated books. the rarest, but also the most damaged, is a variant coloring of his 1885 reproduction of the marriage of heaven and hell—see the entry for that title and date under interesting blakeana. sanders of oxford published an online catalogue titled william blake, printmaker in january 2015 that includes dante, job, and virgil engravings. all works in this catalogue are listed below. i did not learn about this sale until feb. 2016 and thus must once again apologize for tardy reporting. the year of all sales and catalogues in the following lists is 2016, unless indicated otherwise. most reports about auction catalogues are based on the online versions. illustrations are in color, unless noted otherwise. coverage of regional auctions is selective. dates for dealers’ online catalogues are the dates accessed, not the dates of publication. works offered online by dealers and previously listed in any one of the last four sales reviews are not repeated here. most of the auction houses add their purchaser’s surcharge to the hammer price in their price lists. these net amounts are given here, following the official price lists. estimates in auction catalogues are usually for hammer prices. i am grateful for help in compiling this review to g. e. bentley, jr., sheelagh bevan, david bindman, martin butlin, mark crosby, d. w. dörrbecker, morris eaves, stephen eisenman, alexander gourlay, annika green, mark griffith-jones, jolyon hudson, tim linnell, nicholas lott, edward mendelson, martin myrone, morton paley, gregory rubinstein, justin schiller, stephen tabor, joseph viscomi, and john windle. my special thanks go to jenijoy la belle for assistance in all matters. once again, sarah jones’s editorial expertise and john sullivan's digital imaging have been invaluable. abbreviations ah abbott and holder, london bb g. e. bentley, jr., blake books (oxford: clarendon p, 1977). plate numbers and copy designations for blake’s illuminated books and commercial book illustrations follow bb. bbs g. e. bentley, jr., blake books supplement (oxford: clarendon p, 1995) bhl bonhams auctions, london bl bloomsbury auctions, london br(2) g. e. bentley, jr., blake records, 2nd ed. (new haven: yale up, 2004) butlin martin butlin, the paintings and drawings of william blake, 2 vols. (new haven: yale up, 1981) cat(s). catalogue(s) cl christie’s auctions, london cny christie’s auctions, new york csk christie’s auctions, south kensington dw dominic winter auctions, south cerney, gloucestershire e the complete poetry and prose of william blake, ed. david v. erdman, newly rev. ed. (new york: anchor-random house, 1988) eb ebay online auctions fm forum auctions, london gp grosvenor prints, london illus. illustration(s), illustrated lk larkhall fine art, bath ll lowell libson, london pl(s). plate(s) sa sanders of oxford sl sotheby’s auctions, london sny sotheby’s auctions, new york sp robert n. essick, the separate plates of william blake: a catalogue (princeton: princeton up, 1983) st(s). state(s) of an engraving, etching, or lithograph swann swann auctions, new york weinglass d. h. weinglass, prints and engraved illustrations by and after henry fuseli (aldershot: scolar p, 1994) windle john windle antiquarian bookseller, san francisco # auction lot or catalogue item number illuminated books “the ancient of days” (europe pl. 1). relief and white-line etching with hand coloring, 2nd st., 1794. designated as copy d of “the ancient of days” in bb pp. 109, 339 (#100), 340 (#f1). windle, on consignment from an american private collector, offered at the new york antiquarian book fair, 7-10 april ($375,000; acquired by alan parker, london). illus. 1; see the caption for comments on the printing and hand coloring. provenance: probably inherited from blake by his wife, catherine, in 1827; probably acquired by frederick tatham upon catherine blake’s death in 1831; acquired by george a. smith and bound by him in “about 1853 in half red morocco” (bb p. 337) with other works by blake, including the manuscript “order” of the songs of innocence and of experience;smith probably acquired all this material from tatham as a collection, possibly already mounted and assembled as a vol. or portfolio even if bb is correct that the morocco binding was produced for smith “about 1853.” the vol. offered, presumably by smith, at a puttick and simpson auction, london, 3-4 july 1863 (£15.15s., possibly bought in by smith given the reappearance of the vol. in the smith auction of 1880);this auction is known to me only because of its listing in g. e. bentley, jr., sale catalogues of blake’s works <http://​library.​vicu.​utoronto.​ca/​collections/​special_collections/​bentley_​blake_​collection/​sale_​catalogue/​1800.​html>, accessed 20 july 2016. bentley gives the price but no lot number; the speculation that the vol. was bought in is mine, not bentley’s. the vol. offered by bernard quaritch, 1864 catalogue of books, #6521, possibly on consignment from, or in partnership with, smith (£21); the vol. sold by smith, christie’s, 1 april 1880, #168 (£66 to quaritch); the vol. apparently lent by quaritch to william muir, who used some works as the basis for his facsimiles;for a list of the works from this vol. reproduced by muir, see bb p. 339. bentley states that quaritch “evidently sold” the vol. to muir, but i suspect that the dealer only lent it to muir no later than 1885 in order to produce facsimiles that quaritch subsequently distributed. muir may have had physical possession (but not ownership) of the vol. until its sale to macgeorge between 1892 and 1906. this would not have been the only time that quaritch lent a work to muir for reproduction. according to the dealer’s miscellaneous catalogue no. 62 of june 1893, p. 34: “mr. quaritch generously lent to mr. muir to copy” the marriage of heaven and hell copy a. muir’s facsimile is dated 1885. the vol. offered by quaritch, oct. 1883 catalogue of works on the fine arts, #10,252 (£80), may 1885 cat., william blake’s original drawings, p. 2, no entry # (£80), and 1887 general catalogue of books, vol. 2, #10,252 (£80); the vol. acquired by bernard buchanan macgeorge between 1892 and 1906;the vol. is not listed in the cat. of the macgeorge collection of 1892 but is recorded in catalogue of the library of bernard b. macgeorge (glasgow: james maclehose and sons, 1906) 17 (bb #589a-b). the vol. sold from the macgeorge collection, sotheby’s, 1 july 1924, #133 (£345 to the dealer e. parsons & sons); the vol., possibly with some leaves removed, offered by maggs bros., 1924 cat. 456, #53 (£630), this print described as an “original impression in colours”; the vol. acquired no later than 1927 by george c. smith, who broke it up and rebound “the ancient of days” with 18 other pls. from europe, this impression of “the ancient of days” wrongly described as printed in “black” in the cat. of smith’s collection, william blake: the description of a small collection of his works in the library of a new york collector (new york: privately printed, 1927), #12; “the ancient of days” disbound and sold from smith’s collection, parke-bernet, new york, 2 nov. 1938, #28, “inlaid to size” and again wrongly described as printed in “black” ($300 to a “private buyer,” according to bb p. 340); a. e. newton, probably the private buyer at the 1938 auction, and sold from his collection, parke-bernet, new york, 16 april 1941, #130, “inlaid to 4to size,” no description of ink color ($175—possibly bought in rather than sold at that price);this record from the newton sale of 1941 to 2016 was supplied in part by the american private collector who owned the print from c. 2000 to april 2016 and was 1st published in blake 31.4 (spring 1998): 113, caption to illus. 3. this provenance record updates and corrects the one published in 1998. bb p. 109 indicates that the impression sold from the newton collection in 1941 is copy b, owned by george goyder until his death in 1997 (present whereabouts unknown, possibly retained by the goyder family). that, however, is a muir facsimile, printed in golden yellow rather than blue or “black” ink and hand colored in imitation of the frontispiece to europe copy d. the description of the impression in the 1941 auction cat. of newton’s collection as “inlaid to 4to size” associates it with “the ancient of days” copy d, not b. a pencil inscription in the dealer a. s. w. rosenbach’s copy of the auction cat. notes that #130 is “very red”—a fitting description of the tinting surrounding the figure in “the ancient of days” copy d. a. e. newton’s daughter, caroline newton; given by caroline newton to the poet w. h. auden no later than 1954;see humphrey carpenter, w. h. auden: a biography (boston: houghton mifflin, 1981) 376: “he [auden] and chester [kallman] moved in [to a new york city apartment] during february 1954 …. among the pictures that he and chester hung on the walls was an original blake watercolour, ‘the act of creation’, which had been a gift from caroline newton ….” auden’s friend, chester kallman, upon auden’s death in 1973; edward kallman, chester kallman’s father, by gift or bequest no later than 1975 upon his son’s death; dorothy farnan, edward kallman’s wife, by bequest upon her husband’s death in 1986; given by farnan c. 2000 to an american private collector, who placed the work on consignment with windle in april 2016; sold in the same month for $375,000 to alan parker, london. 1. “the ancient of days” (europe pl. 1), copy d (see enlargement). relief and white-line etching, 1794, 2nd st., printed in blue ink, image and platemark 23.2 x 16.9 cm. on a leaf of wove paper 23.9 x 17.5 cm. mounted in a window cut into a backing leaf of wove paper, 30.7 x 23.5 cm., pen and ink framing lines on the mount, inscribed in pencil in the lower margin of the mount by an unidentified hand, “from europe, frontispiece.” the only known impression of the 1st st. is in proof copy a in the british museum. collection of alan parker, london; photo courtesy of john windle. the size of this print and the reticulations in the ink indicate that it is a lifetime impression, probably printed by blake and his wife, catherine, in 1794. blake dampened his papers before printing; they would shrink slightly as they dried. frederick tatham printed on dry paper and consequently his posthumous impressions are a little larger than blake’s own. the surface of the ink in tatham’s prints is much flatter and less reticulated than the intaglio ink of lifetime prints. neither catherine, after blake’s death, nor tatham is known to have printed in blue ink. the watercolors on the figure and the orange red within the disc of the sun were probably added by an unidentified hand some years after printing, although i cannot rule out the possibility that this tinting was executed by william or catherine blake. the tones on the figure are similar to what we see in the frontispieces in europe copies d, f, and g, although applied with less skill. the blotchy appearance of the washes on the figure’s right upper leg may be the result of later staining or pigment decay. the haphazard coloring in dark rosy red on the rays of light and clouds surrounding the sun is certainly not by either blake; indeed, it obscures and disrupts part of blake’s most famous design. for the relationship between this impression and william muir’s 1887 facsimile of europe, see blake 31.4 (spring 1998): 112-13, captions to illus. 2-3. this “ancient of days” may have been printed by blake as a separate pl. rather than as part of a press-run of copies of europe. four other impressions, printed in 3 different colors of ink and without hand coloring by blake, fit the same production scenario: blue green (essick), dark blue (keynes family trust, on deposit at the fitzwilliam museum), and 2 in reddish brown (yale center for british art and the rosenbach of the free library of philadelphia, the latter with hand tinting not by blake). an example with questionable hand coloring in the library of congress, printed in blue green, brick red, and black, may be an early experiment in printing a single copperplate in multiple colors (butlin #270). the 2 impressions in the national gallery of australia, canberra, 1 with the upper 3rd of the image trimmed off and 1 with the upper half trimmed off, may also be early printings, c. 1794. their versos, like the verso of the yale center example, were later used by blake to print individual designs from jerusalem. the impression in the whitworth art gallery, manchester, may be from a 1794 printing but was elaborately hand colored by blake near the end of his life (butlin #271). butlin #268-69 are muir facsimiles (see sp 258-60). for the sexes: the gates of paradise copy n (see bbs pp. 78-80). ten pls. (3-8, 13-15, 17) on 10 leaves of wove paper without watermark, 5th (final) sts. windle, on consignment from an american foundation, offered at the new york antiquarian book fair, 7-10 april ($350,000); late april, the pls. offered individually at $40,000 each. pls. 7, 15, and 17 acquired late april by essick; pl. 3 acquired early may by the e. j. pratt library, victoria university, toronto. windle, may online cat. for the london book fair, #3-8, pls. 4-6, 8, 13, and 14 offered individually ($40,000 each); same 6 pls. and prices, oct. exhibition and sales cat., no item #, all illus. see illus. 2-3. all 10 pls. previously sold sny, 9 may 1991, #8, with blake’s pl. for ariosto, orlando furioso, pl. 7 of for the sexes illus. in black and white ($115,500). exhibited at the university of virginia art museum, 26 jan.-31 march 2002, images only of pls. 3, 13, and 15 illus. in the cat., prints by william blake: “portions of the eternal world,” pp. 15-16. for comments on the 1991 auction, see blake 25.4 (spring 1992): 144-46. the skillfully inked and printed impressions in copy n may have been produced in the final lifetime printing of the work. the wove paper without watermark ranges in thickness between 0.21 and 0.25 mm. the j whatman / 1826 wove paper of copies f-i, all probably posthumous, is a little thinner at 0.17 to 0.18 mm. and has a much smoother texture than the paper of copy n.all measurements of paper thickness were made by me with a blade micrometer calibrated to 0.01 mm. the thickness of the 1826 whatman paper is based on copy f at the huntington library, art collections, and botanical gardens, san marino, california. copies f-i are recorded as posthumous in joseph viscomi, blake and the idea of the book (princeton: princeton up, 1993) 381. in e-mails to me of 8 and 23 may, viscomi stated that he now believes that copies j (morgan library and museum) and k (library of congress) are also posthumous and that all posthumous impressions were probably printed c. 1827-28 by blake’s widow, catherine, perhaps with john linnell’s assistance. sheelagh bevan, andrew w. mellon assistant curator, printed books and bindings, at the morgan library compared the impressions in copy n with those in copy j. in an e-mail of 11 april to windle and me, she reported that the impressions of pl. 8 in these 2 copies are of comparable quality, but all other prints in copy n are “superior” in inking and printing to those in copy j. stephen tabor, curator of early printed books at the huntington, and i came to the same conclusion after comparing all copy n impressions with those in copy f. posthumous impressions are generally more heavily inked than those in copy n and other lifetime printings. some posthumous prints show plate tone printed (intentionally or not) from their surfaces; some have gray washes added by hand to create tonal effects.for examples of both plate tone and gray wash, see copy f, pls. 4, 7, 9, 10, and 13 in the huntington digital library at <http://​hdl.​huntington.​org/​cdm/​compoundobject/​collection/​p15150coll3/​id/5133/​rec/​1>, accessed 3 aug. 2016. the 1991 auction cat. states that the “prints” in copy n are “in good condition apart from a little foxing and minor discoloration.” there are presently 2 spots of foxing in the margin of pl. 4 and a small light-brown stain lower right on pl. 15 just within the platemark. the absence of any other “foxing” or “discoloration” and the whiteness of the paper indicate that the leaves of copy n were cleaned at some time after the 1991 auction. the illus. of pl. 7 in the 1991 auction cat. shows slight dust stains or foxing in the top left corner of the platemark; these are no longer present. the paper apparently shrunk a little when dried after immersion in water and a non-chlorine bleach. this explains why the platemark sizes of copy n are about 1 mm. smaller than those recorded in bb p. 67. 2. for the sexes: the gates of paradise copy n, pl. 7, titled “fire” (see enlargement of design). etching/engraving, design 8.0 x 6.5 cm., platemark 8.9 x 7.1 cm., leaf of wove paper 12.0 x 9.8 cm. fifth (final) st. the pl. 1st executed in 1793, this st. probably c. 1825-26. essick collection. the preliminary drawing in blake’s notebook associates the figure with milton’s satan because of the passage from paradise lost, book 1, lines 221-22, inscribed as a caption: “forthwith upright he [satan] rears from off the pool / his mighty stature / milton” (see the notebook of william blake, ed. david v. erdman, rev. ed. [n.p.: readex books, 1977] n91). in the 1st and 2nd sts. of the pl., appearing in copies of for children: the gates of paradise (1793), there are no scales on the figure’s lower torso or in the flames. see for children copy d in the william blake archive for the 2nd st. in the 3rd st. (copy b of for the sexes in the british museum), blake has closed the figure’s eyes and eliminated the outline of genitalia in the 2 earlier sts. large scales have been added to the flames right, left, and above the figure; clusters of short lines on his lower torso may hint at, but do not clearly represent, small scales. two loops suggesting horns now appear on the top of his head. these changes accord with the description of fire in “the keys of the gates,” added to the work as pls. 19-20 when blake converted for children into for the sexes: blind in fire with shield & spear two horn’d reasoning cloven fiction in doubt which is self contradiction a dark hermaphrodite we stood rational truth root of evil & good (e 268) in the 4th st. (see for the sexes copy d in the blake archive), scales are clearly pictured on the figure’s lower stomach. here in the 5th st., they have been extended to the figure’s navel. blake has also added long hatching lines to the lower right leg of this personification of fire in its final st. the scales and the figure’s triumphant stance associate him with blake’s portrayal of satan in satan smiting job with boils in the butts series of job watercolors, c. 1805-06 (butlin #550.6); see also pl. numbered 6 among the job engravings and satan, sin, and death: satan comes to the gates of hell among the butts series of watercolor illus. to paradise lost of 1808 (butlin #536.2, this design possibly c. 1806). 3. for the sexes: the gates of paradise copy n, pl. 15, titled “fear & hope are __ vision” (see enlargement of design). etching/engraving, design 7.1 x 6.5 cm., platemark 8.0 x 7.1 cm., leaf of wove paper 22.4 x 14.5 cm. fifth (final) st. the pl. 1st executed in 1793, this st. probably c. 1825-26. essick collection. each of the 5 sts. of the pl. shows increasing definition and expression in the faces. there is no halo or light rays around the hovering figure in the 1st and 2nd sts., published in for children: the gates of paradise, 1793. in the 3rd st. (for the sexes copy b in the british museum), blake burnished an aura of light around the head and upper body of “the immortal man that cannot die” (“the keys of the gates,” e 269). the aura is intensified and diffused over a larger area in the next st. (see copy d in the william blake archive), with many slender beams of light added along its left and right edges. the surrounding background and the outer reaches of the illumination above and right of the figure have been darkened in this 5th st. to create stronger contrasts with the light closer to him, particularly the halo around his head. this “immortal man” enveloped in light is similar to blake’s representation of god in pl. numbered 9 in his job engravings. in both pls., the interplay of light and darkness becomes a major actor in the drama of fear and vision, death and life. for an illus. of the 2nd st. and further discussion of the development of the pl. and its iconography, see the 2012 sales review in blake 46.4 (spring 2013): illus. 1 and its caption. songs of innocence copy j. in the possession of the estate of maurice sendak upon his death in may 2012. legal title to the work granted to the maurice sendak foundation by court order, oct. 2016. see comments in the prefatory essay. songs of innocence copy w. pl. 19 (“holy thursday”) only, offered by windle at the new york antiquarian book fair, 7-10 april ($150,000); same impression and price, may online cat. for the london book fair, #20; same impression, oct. exhibition and sales cat., no item #, illus. (price on request). still with windle, march 2017. see illus. 4. for information about copy w and sales of other pls. from it, see the 2015 sales review, blake 49.4 (spring 2016): pars. 3-7 and illus. 1-3. 4. “holy thursday” from songs of innocence copy w (see enlargement of design). relief etching printed in black ink, 1789. bb pl. 19, 11.4 x 7.7 cm., leaf of wove paper 20.1 x 11.7 cm. numbered “9” in pencil upper right in an unidentified hand. the weak inking of much of the text on the left suggests that blake used a relatively large inking ball, like those employed by letterpress printers, insufficiently charged with ink over a roughly triangular area on one side. if blake had used small inking balls, like the “dolls” used in color printing intaglio pls. à la poupée, the patterns of adequate and inadequate inking would be much smaller. blake and his wife, catherine, were already familiar with intaglio inking and printing techniques by 1789, but relief printing was probably new to them. photo courtesy of john windle, taken before the vol. was disbound in oct. 2015. songs of innocence and of experience copy h. in the possession of the estate of maurice sendak upon his death in may 2012. legal title to the work granted to the maurice sendak foundation by court order, oct. 2016. see comments in the prefatory essay. drawings and paintings the descent of man into the vale of death, an illus. to robert blair’s the grave. watercolor, 23.4 x 13.5 cm., datable to 1805. not in butlin because not discovered until 2001. sny, 28 jan., #184, illus. ($225,000 to an anonymous bidder on the telephone; estimate $200,000-300,000). previously offered sny, 2 may 2006, #8, illus. (not sold; highest bid $480,000 on an estimate of $700,000-$1,000,000). the vendor may have been libby howie acting for marburg ltd., as in the 2006 auction. see illus. 5. 5. the descent of man into the vale of death (see enlargement). watercolor, 23.4 x 13.5 cm., datable to 1805. one of blake’s watercolor illus. for robert blair’s the grave commissioned by robert h. cromek in oct. 1805. louis schiavonetti’s engraving, published in cromek’s 1808 ed. of the poem, is very faithful to this watercolor. photo courtesy of sotheby’s new york. for information about 19 of the grave watercolors, their discovery in 2001, and their appearance at auction in 2006, see martin butlin, “new risen from the grave: nineteen unknown watercolors by william blake,” blake 35.3 (winter 2002): 68-73; sny, 2 may 2006 cat., william blake: designs for blair’s grave; e. b. bentley, “grave indignities: greed, hucksterism, and oblivion: blake’s watercolors for blair’s grave,” blake 40.2 (fall 2006): 66-71; and essick, “blake in the marketplace, 2006,” blake 40.4 (spring 2007): 116-26. the gambols of ghosts according with their affections previous to the final judgement was sold at sny, 30 jan. 2013, #285 ($722,500)—see the 2013 sales review in blake 47.4 (spring 2014): illus. 7. for all 20 grave watercolors, see the william blake archive. a girl in profile, perhaps corinna. pencil, leaf 15.5 x 20.5 cm., from the smaller blake-varley sketchbook, c. 1819. butlin #692.80. dw, 6 oct., #349, illus. (£15,312.50 to an anonymous bidder on the telephone; estimate £5000-8000). previously offered cl, 15 june 1971, #146, illus. black and white (“b[ought]t. in” at £441 by “spurling” according to butlin), and cl, 20 march 1990, #152, illus. black and white (not sold; estimate £1500-2000). the hymn of christ and the apostles. watercolor, 37.7 x 32.2 cm. butlin #490. sny, 28 jan., #176, illus. ($322,000 to windle for essick; estimate $200,000-300,000). according to the auction cat., the vendor was a descendant of dorothy braude edinburg of brookline, massachusetts (1921–2015). edinburg’s collection is probably the “private collection, u.s.a.” listed by butlin. for the 1986 court case involving the ownership of this and 18 drawings by other artists owned by edinburg, see <http://​masscases.​com/​cases/​app/​22/​22massappct199.​html>, accessed 21 july 2016. see illus. 6. 6. the hymn of christ and the apostles (see enlargement). watercolor, 37.7 x 32.2 cm. on a leaf of wove paper 39.8 x 34.7 cm. butlin #490, dating the work to c. 1805 on stylistic grounds. inscribed by blake lower right “inv / wb” in monogram and “mark .xiv c 26 v”. essick collection. in feb. 2017 the conservator mark watters determined that some of the watercolors would become unstable if immersed in water. thus, the paper could not be cleaned. the passage illus. describes the activities of christ and his apostles at and immediately following the last supper: “and when they had sung an hymn, they went out into the mount of olives” (mark 14.26; see also matthew 26.30). this statement implies that the group sang in the “house” (matthew 26.18) or “large upper room” (luke 22.12) where the meal was held and before going to the mount of olives, but the background trees and their ovoid fruit in blake’s design indicate that he has placed the singing in the garden of gethsemane at the foot of the mount. as butlin points out, this “composition was developed in the last of the illustrations to the book of job.” christ’s lowered right hand may point toward the tomb, while his raised left hand and eyes direct us toward heaven. both destinations will soon be his. the knitted brows and slightly saddened expressions of at least two of the apostles, far right and third from left, may be their reaction to what christ has told them during the last supper. the figures with lute and lyre on either side of christ appear to have feminine breasts and coiffures. they are strikingly similar to the portrayals of job’s daughters right and left of their father in the final job design—see particularly the watercolor in the butts series of c. 1805–06, butlin #550.21. has blake introduced female musicians into the scene, unwarranted by the biblical text? a “woman” anoints christ in mark 14.3, but this would seem to be an event at least 1 day earlier than the “evening” of the “passover” feast (mark 14.16-17). gender in blake’s designs is sometimes ambiguous; perhaps these are youthful (androgynous? transgendered?) apostles. the beardless male at the left margin may be john, traditionally believed to be the youngest of christ’s followers. the letters on the scroll he holds are illegible squiggles, but would nicely suit this scene if they are meant to evoke the words referring to the incarnation in the opening chapter of the gospel of st. john: “and the word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the father,) full of grace and truth” (1.14). in his letter of 1 sept. 1800 to george cumberland, blake claims that by moving to felpham he “can be poet painter & musician as the inspiration comes.”for transcriptions of this letter, see blake 32.1 (summer 1998): 4-5 and the william blake archive at <http://​www.​blakearchive.​org/​copy/​letters?descid=lt1sept1800.1.ltr.02>. all three arts are either literally present or represented in the hymn of christ and the apostles. standing king holding a sceptre, a fortified town behind. pencil, leaf 20.5 x 15.5 cm., from the smaller blake-varley sketchbook, c. 1819. butlin #692.74. dw, 6 oct., #350, illus. (£8330 to an anonymous bidder on the telephone; estimate £5000-8000). previously sold cl, 15 june 1971, #159, illus. black and white (£210 to “marks,” probably the book dealer marks & co., london); previously offered cl, 20 march 1990, #150, illus. black and white (not sold; estimate £1500-2000). st. matthew. tempera, 37.2 x 25.7 cm., datable to 1799. butlin #396. offered at the biennale des antiquaires, paris, 10-18 sept. (€840,000), according to a notice posted 17 sept. on the listserv of the north american society for the study of romanticism. i have not been able to discover the dealer who had this painting at the paris show. acquired march 2017 by the cleveland museum of art, cleveland, ohio. for earlier offers and illus., see the 2015 sales review, blake 49.4 (spring 2016). the virgin hushing the young baptist, who approaches the sleeping infant jesus. tempera, 27.0 x 38.2 cm., 1799. butlin #406. windle, oct. exhibition and sales cat., no item #, illus. (price on request). sold dec. to alan parker, london. for previous offers to sell, see the 2014 and 2015 sales reviews, blake 48.4 (spring 2015), and blake 49.4 (spring 2016). for illus. and discussion, see the 2015 review, illus. 7 and its caption. wat tyler. pencil, 24.2 x 19.2 cm., inscribed “octr 30. 1819,” probably p. 66 from the larger blake-varley sketchbook. butlin #737, then in the collection of edwin wolf 2nd. described by butlin as the original, but the discovery of the larger blake-varley sketchbook revealed the original drawing, p. 65, of which this version is a counterproof. bauman rare books, dec. online cat., marginal stains, framed, illus. (sept. 2015 price of $65,000 reduced to $42,500). for earlier sales and attempts to sell, see the 2014 sales review, blake 48.4 (spring 2015). separate plates and plates in series “chaucers canterbury pilgrims.” windle, feb. cat. 64, #iv, 5th st., colnaghi printing on laid india, “recently cleaned and matted,” illus. ($12,500); same impression, oct. exhibition and sales cat., no item #, illus. (“sold” to a private collector in vancouver, british columbia). an impression of the pl. in the 5th st. was acquired by tate britain in 2016, reference no. p14339, the gift of a descendant of john giles, samuel palmer’s cousin, who owned the copperplate from the 1860s or 1870s until its sale at auction to colnaghi in feb. 1881 (see sp 76, 85). dante engravings. sa, jan. 2015 online william blake, printmaker cat., #18-22, pls. 2, 3, 5-7 only, 1968 printing, all illus. (pls. 2 and 5 £2650 each, pls. 3, 6, 7 £2300 each). windle, feb. cat. 64, #v, pl. 4 only on laid india, probably the 1892 printing, illus. ($12,500); same impression and price, june short list 3 (new series), #1, illus.; complete set on consignment from an american foundation, offered at the new york antiquarian book fair, 7-10 april, laid paper, chain lines 3.7 cm. apart, pl. 3 with an “a & d” watermark or countermark ($300,000); same set, oct. exhibition and sales cat., no item #, illus. ($350,000). fm, 14 july, #374, complete set on laid india, pl. 1 with a partial “n” watermark, probably the 1892 printing, all 7 pls. illus. (not sold; highest bid £19,000 on an estimate of £30,000-50,000). the set on laid paper on consignment with windle was previously sold from the doheny library, 21 feb. 1989, #1712, pl. 2 illus. ($60,500 to the dealer donald heald; acquired by the foundation in 1990). for a discussion of this set as an early printing, see essick, “the printings of blake’s dante engravings,” blake 24.3 (winter 1990-91): 84-85 (lot # in the 1989 auction incorrectly given as 1713). this set was badly foxed when sold in 1989 but was subsequently cleaned. windle tells me that the pls. offered at fm are the same set offered by libreria antiquaria pregliasco at the april 2015 new york book fair for $82,500. “george cumberland’s card.” windle, feb. cat. 64, #iii, printed in black ink “on thick card … trimmed close to the image,” illus. ($20,000); same impression and price, oct. exhibition and sales cat., no item #, illus. job engravings. sa, jan. 2015 online william blake, printmaker cat., #7-17, pls. numbered 1, 3-6, 8, 11, 16-19 only, 1826 printing on whatman paper after removal of the “proof” inscription, all illus. (£2850 each). windle, feb. cat. 64, #ii, complete set, 1874 printing on laid india, loose in a morocco box slightly worn, illus. ($47,500); same copy and price, feb. list for the california antiquarian book fair, #7; complete set, on consignment from an american foundation, offered at the new york antiquarian book fair, 7-10 april, published “proof” impressions on laid india, loose in portfolio ($125,000); same copy and price, oct. exhibition and sales cat., no item #, illus.; may online cat. for the london book fair, #14-19, pls. numbered 2, 4, 6, 16, 19, 20 offered individually, “proof” impressions on laid india ($2750-3250 each); june short list 3 (new series), #2, pl. numbered 16 only, published “proof” impression on laid india, illus. ($3250). cottone auction, geneseo, new york, 19 march, #350, pl. numbered 4 only, with the “proof” inscription, possibly an impression on so-called “french” paper, from the estate of prof. m. h. abrams, illus. ($2415). de baecque auction, paris, 20 april, #55, the holy bible, notes by john kitto (london: charles knight, 1847), greatly expanded with extra-illus. to at least 8 vols., vol. 8 only with pp. 469-534, with prints by blake bound in, including the job engravings, lacking pls. numbered 9, 11, and 13, 1826 printing on whatman paper after removal of the “proof” inscription, oval pieces of paper pasted over the face of god on pls. numbered 2, 5, 16, and 17, 19th-century morocco, title page to job illus. (€3000 to an american private collector); the vol. on consignment with windle, may ($39,500).whoever covered god’s face on 4 pls., probably because of religious objections to representing the deity, overlooked the images of god on pls. numbered 14 and 15. perhaps the pls. numbered 9, 11, and 13 were omitted because they picture god. the other blake materials in this vol. are pl. 1 (frontispiece) to hayley, designs to a series of ballads, 1802; the frontispiece to malkin, father’s memoirs of his child, 1806, imprint trimmed off and mounted on a larger leaf; schiavonetti’s engravings after blake for blair, the grave, 1808 or 1813, pls. 4, 6, 7, 9, and 11, imprints trimmed off or bound into the gutter; blake’s pl. in hayley, life of romney, 1809, imprint trimmed off; and blake’s pl. 10 (the 6th wood engraving) in virgil, pastorals, 1821, a linnell impression on india paper, trimmed close and mounted on a larger leaf. windle removed these pls. from the vol. in sept. and offered the pl. from the 1802 ballads in his oct. cat.; see hayley, designs to a series of ballads, below. swann, 28 april, #337, pl. numbered 18 only, 1874 printing on laid india, illus. ($3250). sny, 14 june, #187, complete set, 1874 printing on laid india, “light foxing on a few plates,” housed in a “hinged wooden box with glazed viewing panel,” the same set offered bl, 30 may 2013, #108 (not sold) and 11 july 2013, #215 (not sold), illus. ($18,750). “moore & co.’s advertisement.” marlborough rare books, feb. private offer, foxed in the top margin, pinhole right of the right leg of the boy next to the column lower left (acquired by essick). see illus. 7. 7. “moore & co.’s advertisement” (see enlargement). etching/engraving by blake, in part after his own design. wove paper without watermark, leaf trimmed within the platemark to 31.8 x 28.4 cm., uneven at the top. datable to c. 1797–98 (see sp 47-48). the inscription between the columns and the latin quotation from martial below the design were probably executed by an anonymous writing engraver; the references to the “loom[s]” and “frame” and the signature (“blake. d. & sc:”) immediately below the design were scratched in drypoint by blake. the st. is probably the same as the only previously recorded impression, british museum registration no. 1868,0711.439. differences between these impressions in the clouds upper right are probably the result of inking variations. the drypoint inscriptions are more clearly printed in this impression than in the british museum example. discovered early 2016 by jolyon hudson of marlborough rare books, london, in a pile of miscellaneous prints; earlier history unknown. essick collection. a preliminary pencil sketch in the fondazione horne, florence (butlin #340 verso) shows that blake designed all the motifs below the clouds at the top. the upper margin of the drawing is defined by curving lines that suggest drapery rather than clouds. above in the center are slight pencil indications of the royal arms clearly pictured in the engraving. this motif and the feathers (left) and coat of arms (right) of the prince of wales are of course not of blake’s own design. blake may have been known to moore & co. through his family’s hosiery and haberdashery business, continued by his brother james until about 1812 (see br[2] 7-8). the spinning wheel and its table-like base in pl. 7 of blake’s designs to a series of ballads, written by william hayley (1802) are basically similar to those pictured here, left of the base of the column on the right. see also the spinning wheels in the night thoughts watercolors, butlin #330.294 and 330.353. the fiery spinning wheels in jerusalem pl. 59 are much larger in relation to the figures. the carpet rollers lower left and center may have reminded blake of his own rolling press, a machine that in turn influenced images in his later poetry such as “a wheel to turn the cogs of the adverse wheel” (milton, e 124). the interwoven etymologies of “textile” and “text” offer another context for investigation. for blake’s use of weaving and clothmaking imagery in his poetry, see morton d. paley, “the figure of the garment in the four zoas, milton, and jerusalem,” blake’s sublime allegory, ed. stuart curran and joseph anthony wittreich, jr. (madison: u of wisconsin p, 1973) 119-39, and nelson hilton, literal imagination: blake’s vision of words (berkeley: u of california p, 1983) 102-26, “spinning and weaving [the text, 1].” for blake’s engravings that picture carpets with patterns similar to those represented in this advertisement, see essick, “the figure in the carpet: blake’s engravings in salzmann’s elements of morality,” blake 12.1 (summer 1978): 10-14. “mrs q.” ian marr, may cat. 14, #4, “small holes in the sky, … acid burning along the edges,” illus. (£300). probably an original impression rather than the convincing, but slightly smaller, lithographic facsimile (see sp 199-200). the print was sold to a private collector before i could obtain measurements from the dealer. “rev. john caspar lavater.” dw, 3 march, #278, 3rd st., trimmed to the image on both sides and at top, in a bundle of approx. 130 engravings by others, illus. (£1254.75; estimate £300-500). windle, april private offer, 3rd st., removed from an extra-illus. copy of blair’s grave ($1250, sold to an american private collector). letterpress books with engravings by and after blake, including prints extracted from such books ariosto, orlando furioso. gp, april online cat., blake’s pl. only, 1st st., illus. (£130); another impression, trimmed close, 1st st., inscriptions top right and left rubbed off, illus. (£95). windle, may online cat., on consignment from an american foundation, blake’s pl. only, 1st or 2nd st., inscriptions top right and left rubbed off, illus. ($200). eb, aug., 1799 ed., 5 vols., modern half calf, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $750); same copy and price, sept. and again in oct., illus. plain tales books, oct. online cat., 1799 ed., 5 vols., three-quarter “leather,” possibly the same as the eb copy ($750). brimstones, oct. online cat., 1799 ed., 5 vols., raymond lister’s copy with his bookplate in each vol., contemporary calf worn, front cover to vol. 2 detached, bindings illus. (£200). the pl. on consignment with windle was sold at auction in 1991 in the same lot as for the sexes: the gates of paradise copy n—see above under illuminated books. blair, the grave. eb, jan., 1870 camden hotten issue of pls. only loose in publisher’s portfolio, scattered marginal foxing, possibly the same copy offered on eb twice in 2014, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of £700); feb., 1808 quarto, scattered foxing, contemporary boards rebacked with calf, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $2750); july, 1858 new york ed. with the pls. engraved by a. l. dick, foxed and stained, publisher’s cloth rebacked, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $135 or “best offer,” reduced in several stages to $69); july, pls. 5 and 12 only, 1870 printing with 1813 imprints, leaves 36.0 x 26.0 cm., illus. (£4); nov., pls. 5 and 10 only from the 1808 quarto, framed, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $350). bhl, 8 march, #148, 1808 “folio” (actually the quarto), “additional 21 illustrations (11 [actually 9] engraved by blake) pasted-in on endpapers, blank versos of plates and in some margins, … contemporary calf-backed boards” worn, illus. (£600 to windle for stock).the other blake materials in this copy are as follows: blake’s pl. 2 (“democritus”) from lavater, essays on physiognomy, 1789; the 6 pls. from mary wollstonecraft, original stories from real life, 1791, 2nd sts.; the portrait frontispiece for david hartley, observations on man, 1791; and “rev. john caspar lavater,” the separate pl., 3rd st., 1801. windle removed these pls. from the book and began offering them in april; see the entries for each. james cummins, april online cat. for the new york antiquarian book fair, no item #, 1808 quarto, “original drab boards, printed paper label on upper cover, untrimmed” ($5500). gp, april online cat., frontispiece portrait of blake only, schiavonetti after phillips, laid india paper impression from the 1808 folio, marginal foxing, illus. (£420). blue sage books, may online cat., 1808 quarto, 2 pls. water damaged, binding not described other than badly worn with front cover detached ($995). bl, 25 may, #62, 1808 quarto, “occasional light spotting and minor finger soiling,” later morocco worn, illus. (£1054). swann, 14 june, #20, “1813” (actually 1870) folio, scattered foxing, modern quarter morocco, cloth slipcase, illus. ($1063); 1 dec., #13, 1808 quarto, scattered foxing, “original paper label from publisher’s binding preserved and bound in rear,” later three-quarter morocco, illus. ($1187.50). potomack company auction, alexandria, virginia, 25 sept., #570, pls. 5 and 10 only, 1808 imprints, framed, illus. (not sold; highest bid $225 on an estimate of $400-600). david killen gallery auction, new york, 25 sept., #126, pl. 6 only, 1813 imprint, minor foxing, framed, illus. ($525; estimate $100-200). windle, oct. list for the boston international antiquarian book fair, #6, 1808 quarto uncut in original boards ($9750). nick bikoff, oct. online cat., 1808 quarto, “library markings on reverse side of illustrations,” uncut in later cloth, illus. ($1200). blue sage books, oct. online cat., 1808 quarto, 2 pls. water stained, “light smudging to pages,” no description of binding other than “front cover is deteriorated and detached” ($995). cny, 14 dec., #110, 1808 quarto, portrait of schiavonetti engraved by anthony cardon after henry edridge laid in, original boards with printed label on upper cover, rebacked and with “a few leaves disbound,” quarter morocco slipcase, illus. ($1625; estimate $800-1200). see also note 11 and, for a pen and ink copy of pl. 8, the 1st entry under interesting blakeana. blair, the grave, 1808, prepublication proof of pl. 5, “death of the strong wicked man.” nicholas lott, june private offer, before all letters on laid paper trimmed on or just within the platemark to 23.8 x 28.0 cm., lacking some lines and stipple in the image, with pencil lines (most smudged) to indicate work to be added to the copperplate, “old pin-holes at the corners indicating perhaps that it may have been in front of the engraver as he continued his labours” (lott’s e-mail of 2 june), inscribed in pen and ink on the verso “rul” or “bul” (acquired by essick). this proof lacks engraved lines or stipple in the flames between the soaring male’s right leg and the woman on the far right, on the soaring male’s eyebrow, on the left leg of the woman hovering over the dying male, on his left hand and upper left arm, on the mountains seen through the window, and on the windowsill. pencil lines indicate the work to be added on the sill, in the flames in the area noted above, and on the dying man’s left arm just below and above his bicep. there are also pencil lines on the bicep, but nothing was added in that area in the published st. as a result, the bicep is surrounded by darker areas and thus highlighted to emphasize the musculature of this “strong wicked man.” the paper of this proof, 0.21 to 0.25 mm. thick, appears to be the same as that used for the prepublication proof of pl. 4 in my collection; see essick, “blake in the marketplace, 2013,” blake 47.4 (spring 2014): caption to illus. 15. in both examples, the wire lines are clearly evident but the chain lines are so faint that i have not been able to measure the distance between them. boydell’s graphic illustrations of … shakspeare, 1803. windle, feb. cat. 64, #ix, publisher’s morocco, illus. ($7500; sold feb. to the stanford university library, stanford, california). eb, may, blake’s pl. only, marginal light foxing, water stain along bottom edge, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $2500 or “best offer”). royoung bookseller, aug. online cat., publisher’s morocco, illus. ($4500). blake’s pl. also appears in shakespeare, dramatic works, 1802—see below. bryant, new system … of ancient mythology, 2nd ed., 1775. xerxes books, oct. online cat., vol. 1 only, “full leather” worn and repaired ($190). catullus, poems, 1795. eb, oct., 2 vols. in 1, imprints trimmed off pls., contemporary calf rebacked, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $250 or “best offer”). darwin, botanic garden. sa, jan. 2015 online william blake, printmaker cat., #2 and 3, blake’s pls. 1 (from a quarto ed.) and 6 (from the 3rd ed. of part 1, 1795) only, imprints trimmed off, light marginal stains, both illus. (£580 each). eb, feb., 4th ed., 1799, vol. 1 only, stained, contemporary boards with later calf spine, illus. (£126). rodger friedman, may online cat., 4th ed., 1799, 2 vols., contemporary calf worn ($400). anah dunsheath, oct. online cat., 1st ed. of part 1, 3rd ed. of part 2, both 1791, 2 vols. in 1, 4 pls. (none by blake) hand colored, contemporary half calf “recased” ($2656). richard smith, oct. online cat., 3rd ed. of part 1, 1795, 4th ed. of part 2, 1794, 2 vols. in 1, some pls. foxed in margins, contemporary calf rebacked, illus. (£1400). west grove books, oct. online cat., 2nd ed. of part 1, 1791, 4th ed. of part 2, 1794, 2 vols. in 1, contemporary calf rebacked, illus. (£800). tintagel books, oct. online cat., 4th ed., 1799, 2 vols., “minor foxing,” quarter buckram over boards dated 1935 ($800). peachtree & bennett auction, atlanta, 12 nov., #284, blake’s pl. 1 only, light foxing, illus. ($102.40). enfield, the speaker, 1781. eb, nov., large margins, contemporary calf, illus. (sold to essick at the “buy it now” price of $50). flaxman, classical compositions, 1870. better world books, may online cat., “some moisture staining,” half calf (£135). includes blake’s pls. for hesiod and the iliad. flaxman, hesiod designs, 1817. swann, 14 june, #50, “scattered foxing, 4 plates damaged,” modern half morocco, with flaxman’s iliad and odyssey designs, 1805, foxed, bound together in three-quarter morocco, illus. ($228). fonsie mealy auction, dublin, 13 dec., #256, bound with flaxman’s aeschylus designs, 1831, with the iliad and odyssey designs, 1805, in a 2nd vol., scattered foxing, fancy 19th-century morocco, offered mainly “as a binding,” previously reported to be sold for €200 by the same auctioneer, 15 dec. 2015, #316, illus. (€221.40). flaxman, iliad designs, 1805. pba galleries auction, san francisco, 24 march, #212, with flaxman’s odyssey designs, 1805, both in original boards with cover labels, spines damaged, illus. ($300). eb, june, foxed, 19th-century half calf very worn, front cover detached, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of £100); same copy, june, illus. (£41.13). a squared books, oct. online cat., with flaxman’s odyssey, 1805, and aeschylus, 1831, designs, “light foxing throughout,” bound together in “leather” worn ($590). national book auction, freeville, new york, 20 nov., #3022, with flaxman’s odyssey designs, 1805, 2 vols., both badly foxed, matching half calf, illus. ($137.50). fuseli, lectures on painting, 1801. roe and moore, oct. online cat., uncut and unopened in “contemporary” (original?) boards, water stains in the margin of blake’s pl. and elsewhere (£280). gay, fables. heritage auction, new york, 6 april, #45282, 1793 ed., 2 vols., with aesop, fables, 1793, 2 vols., uniformly bound in half morocco, illus. ($875). strand book store, may online cat., [1811] ed., 2 vols. in 1, “mild foxing throughout,” full calf worn ($250). eb, may, [1811] ed., 2 vols., scattered marginal foxing, contemporary calf worn and rebacked, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $450); oct.-nov., 1793 ed., 2 vols., later 19th-century calf, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of £499.95); dec., [1811] ed., 2 vols., later morocco, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $1850 or “best offer”). swann, 14 june, #114, 1793 ed., 2 vols., calf rebacked, slipcase, with 4 vols. unrelated to blake, illus. ($875). sanctuary books, oct. online cat., 1793 ed., 2 vols., contemporary morocco worn ($1250). johnnycake books, oct. online cat., 1793 ed., 2 vols., foxed, later calf, illus. ($975). antiquariat heiner henke, oct. online cat., 1793 ed., 2 vols. in 1, contemporary calf (€750). eclectic tastes books, oct. online cat., [1811] ed., 2 vols., “leather” worn ($650). gough, sepulchral monuments, 1786. rickaro books, oct. online cat., 2 vols. in 5, water stains and foxing, half “leather” worn, some covers detached ($504.68, but now “out of stock”); same copy, c. w. harrison & son auction, ossett, west yorkshire, 9 nov., #378a, bindings illus. (£731.25; estimate £150-250). hartley, observations on man, 1791. windle, april private offer, blake’s pl. (frontispiece portrait of hartley) only, horizontal creases, removed from an extra-illus. copy of blair’s grave ($750). hayley, ballads, 1805. windle, feb. cat. 64, #viii, 1st sts. of the pls., “original drab gray boards, printed paper label,” illus. ($10,500); same copy and price, feb. list for the california antiquarian book fair, #6; same copy, may online cat. for the london book fair, #9 ($6500); #10-13, pls. 1, 3-5 offered individually, 1st sts. ($975 each); same 4 pls. and prices offered individually, oct. exhibition and sales cat., no item #, illus. lk, nov. online cat., pls. 1-3 only, 1st sts., marginal dust stains, all illus. (£325 for pl. 1, £295 each for pls. 2 and 3). see also hayley, triumphs of temper, below. hayley, designs to a series of ballads, 1802. bl, 21 april, #175, pl. 1 only, the frontispiece, published st., lightly foxed throughout and with a brown stain within the image just above the eagle’s left wing, “framed and glazed with gallery label of p. & d. colnaghi & co. on backboard,” illus. (£9920 to nicholas lott of lk; estimate £1000-1500); same impression, lk, dec. online cat., leaf 25.3 x 20.9 cm., now said to be from douglas cleverdon’s collection, illus. (price on request). windle, oct. exhibition and sales cat., no item #, pl. 1 only, published st., leaf 25.0 x 17.4 cm., impression removed from an 1847 extra-illus. bible (see under job engravings, above), illus. ($49,500). hayley, life of cowper, 1803-04. windle, april private offer, pl. 4 only, 4th st. from the 2nd ed. ($250). eb, aug., pls. 1-2 only, 1st sts., imprint on pl. 1 trimmed off, illus. (£3). george jeffery, oct. online cat., 2nd ed., vols. 1-2 only bound in 1, later quarter calf, illus. (£120). peachtree & bennett auction, atlanta, 12 nov., #282, pl. 1 only, 1st st., illus. ($32); #371, pl. 2 only, 1st st., illus. ($12.80); #373, pl. 4 only, 2nd st., stained, illus. ($1.28). hayley, life of romney, 1809. thomson roddick & medcalf auction, carlisle, cumbria, 14 jan., #232, with “another [vol.] re. romney,” later calf, illus. (£152.75). biddle & webb auction, birmingham, 9 july, #27, contemporary half calf worn, with 2 unrelated vols., illus. (£24.30). dw, 14 sept., #269, contemporary calf worn, with an unrelated vol. of matthew prior’s poems (£122.50). see also note 11 and, for preliminary sketches for the design engraved by blake, the 1st entry under romney, below. hayley, triumphs of temper, 1803. libreria malavasi, oct. online cat., bound with thomas campbell, the pleasures of hope, 1800, contemporary calf (€250). cny, 14 dec., #111, large-paper copy, lacking the half-title, “occasional light spotting,” contemporary calf, with hayley, ballads, 1805, lacking pls. 1, 3, and 5, contemporary calf rebacked, and malkin, father’s memoirs of his child, 1806, some marginal soiling, uncut in original boards worn and rebacked, illus. ($1625 to windle for stock; estimate $600-800). hoare, inquiry, 1806. fm, 8 dec., #64, blake’s pl. stained, original boards uncut, with 3 unrelated vols., illus. (not sold; estimate £300-400). hogarth, the beggar’s opera by hogarth and blake, 1965. j. hood, feb. online cat., publisher’s portfolio worn ($900). swann, 14 june, #166, title page foxed, publisher’s portfolio worn, illus. (not sold; estimate $350-500). hogarth, works. sa, jan. 2015 online william blake, printmaker cat., #1, blake’s pl. only trimmed to the image, probably 3rd st., illus. (£400). storey’s, jan. online cat., blake’s pl. only, st. uncertain but possibly 4th, illus. (£83). alan wofsy fine arts, feb. online cat., blake’s pl. only from a “baldwin and cradock” ed. of “circa 1838” (thus 5th or 6th st.?), “some foxing,” illus. ($500). eb, march-april, blake’s pl. only, 6th st., illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of €57.49); may-june, blake’s pl. only, a late st. (6th or 7th?) very worn, leaf badly cockled, illus. ($25); aug., blake’s pl. only, 3rd st., illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $199.99 or “best offer”; acquired by windle for stock); sept., blake’s pl. only, st. uncertain but probably 5th or later, marginal foxing, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $599). david brass, may online cat., issue with the pls. restored by heath, n.d., 116 leaves of pls., contemporary calf rebacked ($2500). windle, oct. exhibition and sales cat., no item #, 3rd st., the impression acquired on eb (see above), illus. ($3500). charles russell, oct. online cat., 1822 ed., 119 pls., scattered foxing, “binding worn with boards detached,” illus. (£2250). sophie schneideman, oct. online cat., undated baldwin and cradock issue, 116 leaves of pls., 19th-century half morocco worn, illus. (£2600). sequitur books, oct. online cat., undated baldwin and cradock issue, 116 leaves of pls., foxed, contemporary half morocco very worn, front cover detached, illus. ($1960). taylor’s auction, montrose, scotland, 10 dec., #1035, blake’s pl. only, a late st. showing wear, illus. (£6.25). hunter, historical journal, 1793. dw, 27 jan., #135, quarto issue, “a few tears and repairs,” contemporary half calf rebacked, apparently not the same copy sold dw, 10 june 2015, #11, for £920, blake’s pl. illus. (£1147.20). hordern house, may online cat., quarto issue, “period-style calf,” illus. ($7850 australian). berkelouw, may online cat., quarto issue, some foxing, contemporary calf ($7500 australian). mcilreavy.buderim rare books, may online cat., octavo issue, some margins foxed, modern “leather” ($2090 australian). mossgreen auction, armadale, australia, 18 june, #58, quarto issue, few stains, modern calf, illus. ($3810 australian). roger middleton, oct. online cat., quarto issue, blake’s pl. badly foxed in margins, modern half calf, illus. (£1750). josephus, works. eb, may, bb issue e, dated to “?1792-3” in bbs p. 228, 2 vols., contemporary calf very worn, front cover of vol. 1 detached, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $200); june, same copy, starting bid, and result; sept., blake’s 3 pls. only, 2nd sts., illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £27.99 each); nov., another copy of bb issue e, contemporary calf very worn, front cover detached, illus. (£156). kimpton, history of the holy bible, c. 1781. infinitebooks, oct. online cat., leaves soiled, “plates are belived [sic] to be present but may miss one or two,” contemporary calf very worn, title page illus. (£143.24); same copy, boundlessbookstore, oct. online cat., title page illus. (£90). lavater, essays on physiognomy. eb, jan., blake’s pl. 2 only, tear in lower margin, illus. ($152.50); blake’s pl. 3 only, illus. ($122.50); feb., “1792” (c. 1818) ed., 3 vols. in 5, blake’s pl. 2 foxed, contemporary calf worn, illus. ($305); march, 1810 ed., 3 vols. in 5, contemporary calf worn, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $1650); april, 1789-98 ed., 3 vols. in 5, contemporary calf worn, 2 covers detached, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £745 quickly reduced to £590); same copy, may, illus. (£292); sept.-oct., 1810 ed., 3 vols. in 5, contemporary calf, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $500); same copy, oct.-nov., illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $300); dec., 1789-98 ed., vol. 1 only, scattered foxing on most pls., contemporary calf rebacked, illus. (£122). windle, april private offer, blake’s pl. 2 (“democritus”) only, removed from an extra-illus. copy of blair’s grave ($400). bl, 28 april, #233, 1789-98 ed., 3 vols. in 5, contemporary russia rebacked, illus. (“withdrawn”; estimate £400-500). swann, 14 june, #75, apparently only vols. 1-2, 1789-92, of the 3-vol. 1789-98 ed., “scattered infrequent soiling,” contemporary half vellum, illus. ($1063). sam gatteño, nov. online cat., 1789-98 ed., 3 vols. in 5, contemporary russia ($2500). whitmore rare books, nov. online cat., 1789-98 ed., 3 vols. in 5, contemporary russia repaired ($950). blake’s 4 pls. are in vol. 1. malkin, father’s memoirs of his child, 1806. vashon island books, nov. online cat., “a second frontis sheet [i.e., the pl. based in part on blake’s design] is laid-in,” inscribed in pen and ink on the half-title “m. & l. ellis/ from a. t. malkin” (the author’s third son, arthur thomas malkin, 1803-88), scattered foxing, uncut in original boards rebacked with paper ($1000 to windle acting for essick). windle, nov. online cat., uncut in modern half morocco, illus. ($1875). see also hayley, triumphs of temper, above, and note 11 for an impression of blake’s pl. one of the 2 impressions of the pl. of blake’s design in the vashon island/essick copy is bound following the title page, rather than in its usual position as a frontispiece facing the title page, and is inscribed “page” top right in the copperplate with any following number, if present, cut off by the right edge of the leaf. apparently the engraver, robert h. cromek, believed that this pl. was meant to be bound internally in the vol. facing a numbered page. two unsigned pls. in the book include similar “page” inscriptions top right, each followed by a number. when blake’s pl. was converted to a frontispiece, the “page” inscription was scraped and burnished off the copper. this is the only impression known to me of the pl. with the “page” inscription. it may not have been published in the book but inserted into this copy when it was rebacked. the leaf measures 22.9 x 14.1 cm., whereas the text leaves in this and other uncut copies of the book are 24.9 x 15.0 cm. the other impression, on a leaf 23.2 x 14.0 cm., is in the usual published state, without “page.” it was formerly bound following the title page but had become detached when i acquired the vol. both impressions are on the wove paper used in other copies. novelist’s magazine, 1782. gp, april online cat., blake’s pls. 1-2 from vol. 8, 1st sts., imprints trimmed off, illus. (£95 each); blake’s pl. 3 from vol. 9, probably 1st st., trimmed to the image, only the cartouche below the design retained from the framing motifs, illus. (£75). olivier, fencing familiarized, 1780. c. m. garrido, may online cat., later half morocco, illus. (€1125). clarendon books, may online cat., “boards detached” (£395). collinge & clark, may online cat., lacking 3 pls. but with blake’s, contemporary morocco (£1850). libreria antiquaria pregliasco, nov. online cat., modern quarter calf, illus. (€1350). rees, cyclopædia, london, 1820. gp, april online cat., 2 impressions of blake’s pl. 2, 1 with imprint trimmed off, both illus. (£110 each); another impression of blake’s pl. 2, imprint trimmed off, illus. (£45). rees, cyclopædia, published in philadelphia by samuel f. bradford and murray, fairman and co., n.d. (c. 1811-22). eb, june, “sculpture. plate i ” only, same design as blake’s pl. 4 in the london ed., image including inscriptions 24.7 x 17.6 cm. on a leaf of wove paper 29.4 x 22.5 cm., water stain lower right, illus. ($29.99 to essick). eat my words books, aug. online cat., complete in 47 vols., contemporary calf very worn, some covers detached, illus. ($9000). sequitur books, aug. online cat., complete in 47 vols., contemporary quarter calf worn, most covers detached, illus. ($6860, reduced to $4900 in dec.). copies of blake’s 7 pls. for the london ed. appear without imprints in this “first american edition” (title pages). the pls. are signed by their engravers as follows: “c. g. childs, sct” (bottom center, copy of blake’s pl. 1), “g. m.” (lower right, copies of blake’s pls. 2, 3, 5-7), and “g m” (lower right, copy of blake’s pl. 4). these are the philadelphia engravers cephas g. childs, 1793-1871, and george murray, active from 1800 until his death in 1822. murray joined with fairman and co. in 1810-11 to create a partnership that copublished the american ed. of rees. the dates of the partnership, dissolved upon murray’s death, provide the date range given above for the publication of this undated ed.information about these engravers is taken from david mcneely stauffer, american engravers upon copper and steel, 2 vols. (new york: grolier club, 1907) 1: 47-48, 186-87. the american pls. are close copies of blake’s, but there are differences in facial expressions, shading, the distances between motifs, and letter formation and spacing. in the copy of blake’s pl. 4, “statues” is on the 1st line of the inscription below “jupiter olympius,” bottom center; in blake’s pl., the word appears in the 2nd line of text.   remember me!, 1825. windle, feb. list for the california antiquarian book fair, #8, no description of the binding ($30,000); same copy and price, oct. list for the boston international antiquarian book fair, #3. this is the copy in full calf by the parisian binder purgold listed in the 2015 sales review; see blake 49.4 (spring 2016). ritson, select collection of english songs, 1783. librairie pottier, may online cat., 3 vols., contemporary morocco (€900). salzmann, elements of morality, 1799. auctionata auction, new york, 28 april, #17, 3 vols., some pls. lightly stained, contemporary calf, illus. (no bids on an estimate of $1700-2210); same copy, 17 may, #21, illus. ($562.50). scott, poetical works, 1782. gp, april online cat., blake’s pl. 4 only, illus. (£160). w. hornby, nov. online cat., 19th-century calf, newer spine (£150). shakespeare, dramatic works, 1802. erasmushaus, may online cat., 9 vols., with boydell’s collection of prints … illustrating the dramatic works of shakspeare, 1803, contemporary morocco ($37,792). daniel crouch, may cat., no item #, 9 vols., contemporary morocco, illus. (not priced). swann, 14 june, #78, 9 vols., scattered foxing, 19th-century half morocco, illus. ($7500). dw, 15 june, #349, 9 vols. in “18 original parts of text, … untrimmed, original plain turquoise blue boards, with original printed label to upper cover of each volume,” the pls. “all loose (presumably as issued) … loosely contained in original calf-backed boards, worn,” illus. (not sold; estimate £2000-3000). sl, 12 july, #49, 9 vols., pls. foxed, contemporary morocco worn, illus. (apparently withdrawn; estimate £1500-2000); same copy, 13 dec., #121, illus. (not sold; highest bid £1400 on the same estimate); another copy, 13 dec., #55, 9 vols., contemporary morocco, “some light spotting and browning,” illus. (£5250). some of these copies may not contain blake’s pl., which also appears in boydell’s graphic illustrations of … shakspeare, 1803—see above. shakespeare, plays. henry adams auction, chichester, 13 jan., #444, 1811 ed., 9 vols., contemporary calf very worn, with douce, illustrations of shakespeare, 2 vols., 1807, illus. (£24.40). schoolhouse books, may online cat., 1805 ed., 9 vol. issue, “leather” worn (£400). eb, may, 1805 ed., 9 vol. issue, some stains on pls., contemporary calf rebacked, illus. ($475). swann, 14 june, #80, 1805 ed., 9 vol. issue extended to 12 vols. with the addition of “over 700” extra illus., 19th-century three-quarter morocco, illus. ($1625). spiegel-bestseller via amazon.de, nov. online cat., 1811 ed., 9 vols., scattered foxing, contemporary calf worn, illus. (€1724.25); same copy, mw books, nov. online cat. ($1719.25). charles russell, nov. online cat., 1805 ed., 10 vol. issue, “some spotting,” contemporary calf worn, illus. (£375). keogh’s books, nov. online cat., 1805 ed., 9 vol. issue, contemporary calf worn, illus. (£150). gp, nov. online cat., blake’s pls. only, imprints trimmed off, marginal stains on pl. 1, illus. (£260 for pl. 1, £360 for pl. 2). stedman, narrative, colored copies. eureka books on eb, jan., 1813 ed., 2 vols., later half calf, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $9374.95 or “best offer”); same copy and price, feb.; same copy, march, priced at $12,499.95; same copy and price, april; same copy, eureka books, nov. online cat. ($10,000). pennymead books, nov. online cat., 1806 ed., 2 vols., contemporary calf rebacked, illus. (£15,120). stedman, narrative, uncolored copies. argosy book store, may online cat., 1796 ed., 2 vols., foxed, imprints “partially cropped” on some pls., blake’s pl. 8 “amateurishly colored,” modern calf ($4000). eb, june, blake’s pl. 1 only, stained, illus. ($102.50); july, blake’s pl. 3 only, stained and creased, illus. ($22.50); july-aug., blake’s pl. 6 only, stained, illus. ($125); aug., blake’s pl. 8 only, badly stained, illus. ($103.50); sept., blake’s pl. 2 only, stained, illus. ($213.01); sept.-oct., blake’s pl. 8 only, most of imprint trimmed off, minor foxing, illus. ($152.50). windle, july “short list 4 (new series),” #20, 1813 ed., 2 vols. in 1, early marbled boards rebacked with calf, the copy sold at a bonham’s auction, oxford, 24 march 2015, #291, for £937, illus. ($6750). bow windows bookshop, aug. online cat., 1806 ed., 2 vols. in 1, many imprints trimmed off the pls., foxed, some damp stains, contemporary calf worn and rebacked, illus. (£2950). sny, 26 oct., #283, 1796 ed., 2 vols., pls. foxed, contemporary calf worn and rebacked, illus. (not sold; highest bid $2400 on an estimate of $3500-4500). antiquariat düwal, nov. online cat., 1796 ed., 2 vols., 19th-century half calf, badly foxed, illus. (€5280). sue lowell books, nov. online cat., 1796 ed., 2 vols., foxed and stained, recent half calf, previously listed at £7500 (£3500). elaine beardsell, nov. online cat., 1796 ed., 2 vols., lacking blake’s pl. 16 and 2 others not by blake, scattered foxing, contemporary calf rebacked, binding illus. (£1950). doyle auction, new york, 22 nov., #70, 1796 ed., 2 vols., lacking blake’s pl. 16, most imprints trimmed off, scattered foxing on pls., contemporary calf very worn, front cover of vol. 1 detached, illus. ($687.50). bauman rare books, dec. online cat., 1796 ed., 2 vols., later calf, previously offered at $8500, illus. ($5500). stuart and revett, antiquities of athens. cl, 9 march, #377, 1762-94, 3 vols., some stains and tears, contemporary russia worn, illus. (£6875). sotheran’s, march highlights cat., #5, 1762-1816, 4 vols., early 19th-century morocco rebacked, illus. (£18,000); same copy and price, july cat., two hundred years of bookselling in london, #1, illus. sl, 15 nov., #185, 1762-1830, 5 vols., scattered foxing, 19th-century half morocco worn, illus. (£15,000). blake’s 4 pls. are in vol. 3 of 1794. varley, zodiacal physiognomy, 1828. odyssey books, jan. online cat., blake’s pls. 2-3 in their 2nd sts., some pls. stained, later cloth, illus., previously offered june 2013 online cat. for $10,500 ($6800, reduced to $6375 in dec.). windle, feb. cat. 64, #vii, blake’s pls. 2-3 in their 1st sts. before the addition of page references, presentation inscription from varley to martin archer shee, “original boards, covers re-attached, plates cleaned,” folding box, illus. ($10,950); same copy and price, feb. list for the california antiquarian book fair, #12 (acquired by essick). dw, 14 sept., #282, lacking blake’s pl. 1, his pl. 3 in 1st st., several torn leaves with repairs, stained, “page block becoming loose in near contemporary half cloth over marbled boards, soiled and worn,” blake’s pl. 3 illus. (£2511.25 to windle for stock on an estimate of £500-800). for further information about the windle/essick copy, see the 2015 sales review in blake 49.4 (spring 2016). vetusta monumenta, vol. 2, c. 1789. eb, june, the ayloffe essay with the basire/blake pls. along with “twenty engraved plates and twenty leaves (40 pp.) of letterpress from vols. i-iii of the society of antiquaries’ vetusta monumenta,” some marginal tears and scattered foxing, contemporary quarter calf worn, illus. ($455). virgil, pastorals, 1821. sa, jan. 2015 online william blake, printmaker cat., #4-5, blake’s pls. 13 and 8 (the 9th and 4th wood engravings) only, linnell impressions on laid india, printed “circa may 1892” according to this cat., “believed to have been formerly in the possession of john linnell’s great grandson,” both illus. (£1250 each). windle, feb. cat. 64, #i, 2 vols., “presentation copy inscribed by thornton to his daughter,” publisher’s sheep slightly worn, illus. ($67,500); same copy and price, feb. list for the california antiquarian book fair, #11; same copy and price, may online cat. for the london book fair, #21; same copy and price, oct. list for the boston international antiquarian book fair, #7. lk, june online cat., no entry #, blake’s 4th wood engraving on laid india, “one of a small number of impressions printed for john linnell jnr in or around may 1892,” leaf 8.7 x 12.6 cm., illus. (£950). the inscription in pen and ink in windle’s copy reads “presented to mrs goldsworthy / as a mark of his regard & / esteem to her his eldest daughter / r.t john thornton m. d.” for more information on the lk print, see the 2011 sales review, blake 45.4 (spring 2012). see also note 11. virgil, the wood engravings of william blake for thornton’s virgil, 1977. sa, jan. 2015 online william blake, printmaker cat., #6, with the prospectus, publisher’s box (£3750). windle, dec. online cat., with the prospectus, publisher’s box, illus. ($12,500). wit’s magazine, 1784. gp, april online cat., blake’s pl. 4 only, imprint trimmed off, illus. (£180). wollstonecraft, original stories, 1791. windle, may online cat. for the london book fair, #22, blake’s 6 pls. only, 2nd sts., imprints trimmed off, removed from an extra-illus. copy of blair’s grave ($3000). young, night thoughts, 1797. james cummins, april online cat. for the new york antiquarian book fair, no item #, lacking the “explanation” leaf, full morocco ($12,000); same copy, may online cat. ($12,500). windle, on consignment from an american foundation, offered at the new york antiquarian book fair, 7-10 april, with the “explanation” leaf, contemporary quarter calf ($15,000); pls. 17, 22, 29, and 43 offered individually, may online cat. for the london book fair, #23-26 ($495 each for pls. 17, 22, and 29, $995 for pl. 43). swann, 14 june, #19, leaves trimmed to 42.0 x 31.8 cm., “explanation” leaf “supplied in facsimile and laid in,” 19th-century morocco, cloth slipcase, illus. ($7500); 1 dec., #14, with the “explanation” leaf and the rare 1st st. of pl. 11 (fly-title to night the second), leaves trimmed to 41.0 x 31.8 cm., “contents dampstained but professionally restored,” some soiling, contemporary calf rebacked, illus. ($4000). dw, 20 july, #277, leaves trimmed to 40.8 x 32.0 cm., light spotting and small tears in 3 leaves, lacking the “explanation” leaf, contemporary morocco worn with covers detached, illus. (£2572.50). neal auction, new orleans, 24 sept., #143, with the “explanation” leaf, “gilt-tooled leather,” possibly the copy sold for $2600 at a neal auction, 4 dec. 2004, #92, offered with the 1960 blake trust/trianon press facsimile of the marriage of heaven and hell and the 1875 reproduction of blake’s job engravings ed. charles eliot norton, illus. ($6400). heritage book shop, nov. online cat., with the “explanation” leaf “supplied in facsimile,” scattered light foxing, with “tissue guards between nearly every leaf,” 19th-century morocco with “all edges gilt,” slipcase, probably the copy sold swann, 14 june, noted above ($15,000). cl, 30 nov., #281, lacking the “explanation” leaf, letterpress “title [page] printed on laid paper watermarked with a fleur-de-lys” rather than the usual wove paper, leaves 42.4 x 32.7 cm. “with deckle edges,” some soiling, the herschel v. jones copy previously sold from the doheny library, cny, 21 feb. 1989, #1707, for $4950, later morocco worn, illus. (£3750). cny, 14 dec., #109, with the “explanation” leaf, uncut in original boards worn, upper cover detached, cloth folding case, illus. ($21,250; estimate $8000-12,000). interesting blakeana the day of judgment. unattributed pen and ink copy, 29.2 x 22.9 cm., of blake’s pl. 8 in blair, the grave, 1808. ah, april online cat. 457, #23, “on tracing paper,” dating the work to “circa 1810,” illus. (£375, acquired by a private collector). the cat. gives no reason for the early dating. if a tracing, why are the dimensions given by ah, apparently of the design rather than the leaf, larger than schiavonetti’s 27.7 x 22.3 cm. engraving? possibly a portrait of blake’s wife, catherine, attributed to john linnell, c. 1820. see profile of a woman, eyes turned upward, under linnell, below, and illus. 8. a destroying deity: a winged figure grasping thunderbolts, butlin #778, dating the work to c. 1820-25. an unattributed pencil copy, 20.0 x 28.0 cm. on laid paper with an 1801 watermark, of blake’s wash drawing in the philadelphia museum of art. eb, april, drawing and watermark illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $175); again in april, illus. ($95). blake’s own pencil sketch of the same figure, with variants, is in the yale center for british art, new haven, connecticut, accession no. b1977.14.6079 (not in butlin because not attributed to blake until 1997). archangel michael and lucifer arguing over the body of moses. monochrome wash, 24.8 x 21.6 cm., inscribed lower left in pen and ink “wblake. / 1824.” nye & company auction, bloomfield, new jersey, 18 may, #266, illus. (not sold; estimate $40,000-60,000). probably by a professional artist of the period, but not by blake. a loop over the first 3 letters of the inscription suggests an attempt to imitate a characteristic feature of blake’s wb monogram. w. blake, songs of innocence and of experience, pickering ed., 1839. windle, feb. cat. 64, #x, issue lacking “the little vagabond,” dante gabriel rossetti’s copy, publisher’s cloth worn, illus. ($27,500); same copy and price, feb. list for the california antiquarian book fair, #10 (sold feb. to the charles deering mccormick library of special collections, northwestern university, evanston, illinois); another copy, oct. list for the boston international antiquarian book fair, #4, apparently lacking “the little vagabond,” 1st publisher’s binding ($17,500). sny, 14 june, #7, issue with “the little vagabond,” robert browning’s copy, title page inscribed in ink “w a dow to / his friend browning / augt 3, 1839,” publisher’s cloth, “spine faded, … cloth case,” from the collection of gerald n. wachs, title page illus. ($9375 to jerry kelly, new york). for details about the rossetti copy, see the 2015 sales review, blake 49.4 (spring 2016). browning’s friendship with the lawyer william alexander dow began “after 1835”; see the poems of browning, ed. john woolford and daniel karlin (abingdon: routledge, 2014) 1: 339. c. varley, a treatise on optical drawing instruments, 1845. ken spelman, aug. cat. 91, #40, publisher’s cloth bit worn, binding illus. (£650). describes (pp. 33-54) and illustrates (pls. viii-x) the graphic telescope, cornelius varley’s invention that his brother john varley and john linnell may have used to copy some of blake’s visionary heads. for discussion, see martin butlin, “blake, the varleys, and the patent graphic telescope,” william blake: essays in honour of sir geoffrey keynes, ed. morton d. paley and michael phillips (oxford: clarendon p, 1973) 294-304. butlin quotes c. varley’s 1811 patent for the graphic telescope, but he does not cite this treatise, now available on google books. a. gilchrist, life of william blake, 1863, extra-illus. copies only. windle, june “short list 3 (new series),” #4, 2 vols., 34 added pls., 19th-century calf, illus. ($3500). see the 2012 and 2014 sales reviews in blake 46.4 (spring 2013) and blake 48.4 (spring 2015) for details. blake, poetical sketches, pickering ed., 1868. peter harrington, jan. online cat., publisher’s cloth and spine label, illus. (£750); another copy, rebound in morocco by sangorski & sutcliffe, illus. (£850). the 2nd printing of the work, preceded only by the privately printed ed. of 1783. walt whitman, autograph letter signed to “my dear swinton” (john swinton, managing editor of the new york times), dated 31 march 1868, 1 p. cny, 16 june, #143, illus. ($3750). the body of the letter reads as follows: “could you send me two or three copies of the sunday edition, times, march 29—containing swinburne’s william blake—or any other edition—(weekly or semi weekly) containy [sic] that article? —or, if plenty, send me half a dozen copies. direct.” whitman is referring to an unsigned article, titled “swinburne’s william blake,” published in the 29 march 1868 issue of the times. this essay quotes a passage in a. c. swinburne, william blake. a critical essay (london: john camden hotten, 1868), pp. 300-03, comparing blake and whitman. for discussions of blake, whitman, and swinton, see gary schmidgall, containing multitudes: walt whitman and the british literary tradition (new york: oxford up, 2014) 162-63, and sarah ferguson-wagstaffe, “‘points of contact’: blake and whitman,” <https://​www.​rc.​umd.​edu/​praxis/​sullenfires/​sfw​/sfw_essay.​html>, par. 5 (accessed 17 may 2016). century guild hobby horse, 1884, 1886-94. sims reed, oct. cat., #14, complete with all issues, vols. 1-3, 5-6 in “publisher’s vellum backed boards,” all others in original wrappers, illus. (£7500). includes the first letterpress printings of the marriage of heaven and hell and the book of los, muir’s facsimile of little tom the sailor (see below under muir facsimiles), and reproductions of on homers poetry [and] on virgil and three of blake’s wood engravings for virgil’s pastorals. w. muir facsimiles of blake’s works, 1884-88, 1927. james cummins, jan. private offer, a large collection of muir facsimiles, including all titles of the 1880s (see bb pp. 488-89) with some duplicates, some rebound, some bound together (prices on request). many of these copies were offered in windle’s oct. 2009 william blake cat. 46, #233 ($245,000 for the collection; acquired by a private american collector). see the 2009 sales review in blake 43.4 (spring 2010): 133, for the vols. offered in windle’s cat. a selection of these facsimiles was acquired from cummins in feb. by the university of north carolina at chapel hill library. cummins offered 9 remaining titles in his online cat. for the new york antiquarian book fair, 7-10 april, each with 1 pl. illus., copy nos. not indicated unless noted here: #8, america, 1887, colored copy, modern boards with original wrappers retained ($9000); #9, europe, 1887, copy no. 38, original wrappers ($11,000); #10, milton, 1886, “in a special binding by roger de coverly” ($12,500); #11, songs of innocence, copy no. 47, and songs of experience, 1884-85, bound together in vellum ($12,500); #12, the book of thel, bound with the marriage of heaven and hell, visions of the daughters of albion, and there is no natural religion, 1885-86, vellum ($12,500). another cummins online cat. for the april new york fair includes the following additional muir facsimiles, no item #: the gates of paradise, 1888, original wrappers, illus. ($6000); century guild hobby horse, vol. 1, 1886, with muir’s facsimile of little tom the sailor, contemporary quarter morocco, illus. ($1750); songs of innocence with songs of experience, both 1927, 2 vols., original wrappers with cloth slipcase, illus. ($9000); there is no natural religion, 1886, copy no. 40, original wrappers, folding case, illus. ($2750); visions of the daughters of albion, 1885, copy no. 49, original wrappers, folding case, illus. ($3500). cummins, june cat. 132, #14, 15, 17, 18, 20, and 23, the copies of america, the book of thel bound with three other facsimiles, europe, the gates of paradise, milton, and songs of innocence with songs of experience, both 1927, as listed above for the cummins april cats., all illus. (same prices), plus #16, the book of thel, copy no. 38, full morocco with the wrappers retained, illus. ($3750); #19, the marriage of heaven and hell, inscribed “for the times,” later cloth with the wrappers retained, illus. ($3500); #21, songs of experience, 1927, copy no. 25, original wrappers, illus. ($2500); #22, songs of innocence, 1927, copy no. 47, with songs of experience, 1927, bound together in vellum, wrappers not retained, illus. ($12,500); and #24, visions of the daughters of albion, 1884, full morocco, wrappers not retained, illus. ($4000). windle, feb. cat. 64, #vi, songs of innocence, 1884, copy no. 49, original wrappers, with songs of experience, 1885, copy no. 32, original wrappers, illus. ($15,000); same 2 copies, honey & wax booksellers, dec. online cat., now “housed together in custom chemises and half-morocco slipcase,” illus. ($14,500). windle, april online cat., “a complete set of the muir facsimiles … 1884-87,” bound in 2 vols., folio and quarto, full morocco with original wrappers bound in, illus. ($102,500; sold in april to a private collector). previously offered privately by windle at the same price, march 2010; see blake 44.4 (spring 2011): 130 for a list of contents. in addition to the works recorded in 2011, the collection sold by windle in april includes muir’s facsimile of “the ancient of days,” hand-colored lithograph printed in golden yellow, copy no. 29, illus. online in april. windle, may private offer, “the ancient of days,” hand-colored lithograph printed in golden yellow, inscribed in ink top left “no 49 wm muir,” acquired by windle at the london book fair from a private british collector and sold at the fair to another private collector (£3000). wilkens auction, toronto, 18 oct., #232, songs of experience, on “antique note” paper, no mention of muir but apparently the 1885 issue in original wrappers, with wright, ed., heads of the poets, 1925, illus. (not sold; estimate $800-1200 canadian). the marriage of heaven and hell, muir facsimile, a variant issue colored after copy i (rather than a), dated 1885 but possibly colored at a later date, lacking the framing lines and pl. nos. of copy i. addison & sarova auction, macon, georgia, 5 nov., #195, statement about the copy reproduced on the printed “preface” page lined through and the following written below by muir in pen and ink, “this copy is coloured after the original in the fitzwilliam museum at cambridge  w muir,” with an “appendix” containing a reproduction of the manuscript “order in which the songs of innocence and experience ought to be paged” (bb #125) and the relief etching of “a divine image” for songs of experience (bb #139 pl. b), margins badly “water-stained throughout” with the stains intruding into the images on 4 leaves, lacking the original wrappers and hence any copy no., modern half calf, illus. ($522.75 to windle acting for essick). the only previous records of muir’s marriage facsimile with coloring based on copy i are in 5 quaritch cats. beginning with no. 261 of jan. 1908, #266, “one of 9 copies coloured from the copy in the fitzwilliam museum” (£4.4s.), and ending with cat. 765 of 1957, #49, “50 copies were printed, only a very small number being coloured from the fitzwilliam museum copy” (£20). j. t. herbert baily, emma, lady hamilton: a biographical essay with a catalogue of her published portraits, 1905, extra illus. sl, 13 dec., #31, the extra illus. including “an autograph letter signed by william hayley, to john flaxman, describing his new library in detail and requesting twelve busts” (not sold; highest bid £3200 on an estimate of £4000-6000). blake executed his series of 18 “heads of poets” c. 1800-03 for hayley’s library (butlin #343) and refers to it in a letter to thomas butts of 11 sept. 1801: “i must express my wishes to see you at felpham & to shew you mr hayleys library. which is still unfinishd but is in a finishing way & looks well” (e 716). l. binyon, drawings and engravings of william blake, 1922. bauman rare books, jan. online cat., inscribed “ottoline, from s.s. xmas. 1922,” publisher’s half vellum, minor repairs to spine ($4200). presented by the poet siegfried sassoon (1886–1967) to the literary hostess lady ottoline morrell (1873–1938). portrait of blake by john flaxman. eb, twice in march, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $2500); same copy, march-april, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $2250); same copy, april, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $1995); same copy, april, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $1495). offered as an original drawing in pencil but actually the convincing lithographic facsimile removed from william blake’s designs for gray’s poems, introduction by h. j. c. grierson (london: oxford up, 1922). the original is in the yale center for british art, new haven, connecticut, accession no. b1992.8.11(59). this is the 3rd time in the last 2 years that someone has mistaken this lithograph for the original. j. wicksteed, blake’s vision of the book of job, 2nd ed., 1924. windle, july private offer, wicksteed’s copy with his extensive annotations, mostly in pencil and possibly written in anticipation of a 3rd ed. never published, presentation note to “arnold” (arnold fawcus of the trianon press) from “eileen” (probably a relative of wicksteed’s) dated july 1970, publisher’s cloth worn ($150, acquired by essick). minutes of the william blake trust, 1948-69. windle, dec. online cat., typescript and manuscript, 240 pp., “all reports signed by geoffrey keynes in his distinctive brown ink, and the text is annotated and otherwise added to by arnold fawcus,” half roan worn, illus. ($6500). blake’s circle and followers works are listed under artists’ names in the following order: paintings and drawings sold in groups, single paintings and drawings, letters and manuscripts, separate pls., books by (or with pls. by) the artist. barry, james drawings, paintings, and original graphics drawing after raphael. pen and brown ink, 27.4 x 21.2 cm., inscribed “james barry, rome: a study in the ghigi villa.” c. g. boerner, jan. online cat., “copies one of the lunettes showing cupid and the three graces in raphael’s loggia of psyche in the villa farnesina in rome,” illus. (not priced). madonna and child. pen and brown ink, brown wash, 25.8 x 19.7 cm., signed. cl, 27 sept., #79, illus. (£15,000; estimate £2000-3000). milo of croton (recto), study of a left leg for one of the figures of the angelic guards in elysium and tartarus or the state of final retribution in the society of arts (verso). brown wash (recto), pen and brown ink (verso), leaf 26.3 x 21.0 cm., both sides signed. cl, 27 sept., #80, illus. (£16,250; estimate £2000-3000). seated male nude. pencil, pen and ink, chalk, 42.5 x 24.7 cm., inscribed “js barry.” cl, 27 sept., #78, illus. (£87,500; estimate £20,000-30,000). “the distribution of premiums at the society of arts,” etching/engraving, 1792. eb, may, possibly the rare 1st st. of 4, small dark-brown stain in top margin, light browning elsewhere, framed, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $550). “saint sebastian,” soft-ground etching, c. 1776. plate 27.6 x 18.5 cm., leaf 28.3 x 19.3 cm. cl, 27 sept., #81, illus. (£27,500). the only impression i’ve ever seen on the market. basire, james engravings during blake’s apprenticeship, 1772–79 many of the books with pls. engraved by basire listed in the 2015 sales review remain on the market; see blake 49.4 (spring 2016). “ann de laval, lady stanhope, wife of sir william stanhope,” engraved by basire after benjamin wilson, 1772. dw, 29 june, #431, margins foxed, with “the entombment,” engraving by james faed after annibale carracci (no bids on an estimate of £70-100). “le champ de drap d’or,” engraved by basire, 1774. grand auction, folkestone, 11 july, #304, 1988 reprinting of c. 50 impressions, illus. (not sold; estimate £300-500). van de wiele auction, brugge, 8 oct., #651, 3 folds, stains at top, illus. (€120). “the embarkation of king henry viii at dover,” engraved by basire, 1781. grand auction, folkestone, 11 july, #305, 1988 reprinting of c. 50 impressions, illus. (not sold; estimate £300-500). litchfield county auctions, litchfield, connecticut, 12 oct., #382, modern restrike hand colored, illus. ($406.25). basire probably began work on this enormous pl., 68.0 x 124.6 cm., while blake was still an apprentice. cook, a voyage towards the south pole, and round the world, 1777. eb, april-may, 1 pl. only, “the landing at mallicolo,” engraved by basire after william hodges, imprint trimmed off, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $79.99; reduced to a minimum bid of $59.99 in june, no bids); april-may, another impression, imprint present, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $525). calvert, edward early drawings, paintings, and original graphics “the bride,” engraving. lk, june online cat., 3rd st. from the memoir, 1893, leaf 21.4 x 26.0 cm., illus. (£3500). “the lady with the rooks,” wood engraving. lk, nov. online cat., from the memoir, 1893, leaf 16.8 x 23.0 cm., illus. (£525). flaxman, john drawings and proof engravings see also flaxman under letterpress books with engravings by and after blake, above. the death of caesar, attributed to flaxman. pen and ink, 22.2 x 35.6 cm. duke’s auction, dorchester, dorset, 15 sept., #340, illus. (£650). probably dating from the 1780s, if indeed by flaxman. david bindman and i are suspicious of the attribution. man wrapped in thought. pencil, 19.7 x 13.3 cm., datable to c. 1790. ah, july online cat. 460, #32, illus. (£1750). previously offered ah, feb. 2014 online cat. 433, #19, illus. (£2500), and dec. 2014 pictures for christmas online cat., illus. (£2500). mother and child. pencil, 8.5 x 8.5 cm. andrew smith & son auction, winchester, hampshire, 2 feb., #425a, badly stained, illus. (not sold; estimate £400-500). very slight. priam begging for the body of hector. pen and ink, 16.5 x 24.1 cm., inscribed in pen and ink “achilles  priam / these words soft pity in the chief inspire / touch’d with the dear remembrance of his sire. b:24, l:634: pope’s iliad”; inscribed “25” in pencil lower right. rachel davis fine art auction, cleveland, 19 march, #8, illus. ($2706). not one of the engraved designs for the iliad. letter to flaxman from hayley. see baily, emma, lady hamilton, 1905, under interesting blakeana, above. dante designs. antiquariat peter kiefer auction, pforzheim, germany, 20 feb., #6378, apparently a complete set of the 1807 engravings in various proof sts., at least 1 lacking the framing lines, all(?) lacking the inscriptions below the designs but with roman numerals (i, ii, iii) upper left not included in the published pls., inscriptions below the designs supplied in pen and brown ink with other inscriptions above and below the designs not in the published pls., unbound, 2 pls. illus. (not sold; estimate €300). fuseli, henry drawings, paintings, and separate plates a captive woman. black chalk, 45.9 x 31.5 cm. sl, 6 july, #334, illus. (£13,750). the figure looks less like a captive than a hag with a profile similar to fuseli’s pictures of the witches from macbeth. leonore discovering the dagger left by alonzo. oil, circle, 61.0 cm. diameter, datable to 1792-93. sny, 28 jan., #53, illus. ($310,000). the design, based on edward young’s play of 1721, the revenge, was engraved by william leney and published in 1793 in bell’s british theatre, vol. 8 (weinglass #130, titled “leonora discovers the dagger alonzo has dropped”). the engraved version is an irregular octagon rather than a circle. q.e. sept. 3. ii (so inscribed). pencil, pen and ink, black chalk, body color, 9.7 x 18.2 cm. cl, 5 july, #74, “subsidiary figure study in chalk (verso),” inscription in latin on recto, illus. (£6250). a kneeling male and soaring female in a landscape setting. studies of a woman in a bonnet, and two nude figures, a male seen from behind, and a female looking over her shoulder (recto), study of a kneeling nude female figure and another female figure surprised (verso). pencil, pen and brown ink, leaf 35.8 x 27.2 cm. cl, 27 sept., #75, illus. (not sold; highest bid £15,000 on an estimate of £20,000-30,000). studies of figures after michelangelo’s sistine ceiling. pencil, pen and brown ink, 7.1 x 18.5 cm. cl, 27 sept., #76, “extensively inscribed,” illus. (£6875). the online cat. shows 2 different drawings but does not make it clear if these are recto/verso works or separate leaves. study of a lady, wearing a choker and an elaborate head-dress. pencil, 22.2 x 14.9 cm. sl, 6 july, #333, illus. (not sold; highest bid £1900 on an estimate of £3000-5000). previously sold sl, 13 march 1986, #106, illus. (£3520). study of a leg with latin inscription. pen and ink. bl, 18 march, #2, in a “large collection of letters, photographs, notes, drawings and sketches” by various hands, no size given but apparently small, illus. (£2480). study of daniel, after michelangelo. pen and brown ink, 19.4 x 13.4 cm. cl, 27 sept., #77, “drawn on the back of a letter from joseph johnson,” illus. (not sold; highest bid £3800 on an estimate of £5000-8000). young girl leaning over. black crayon, 9.1 x 11.5 cm. artcurial auction, paris, 31 march, #56, illus. (€8000). previously sold cl, 14 march 1992, #6, illus. (£4950). “beatrice listening to hero, & ursula” (inscribed title), mezzotint by john jones, 1791. weinglass #113, titled “beatrice eavesdropping on hero and ursula.” gp, april online cat., “fine impression but damaged,” illus. (£480, “sold or reserved”). “fairy mab,” engraving, probably on steel, by william raddon, 1834. eb, june, margins damaged, small tear at top of image, illus. (£87.89). the only impression of this illus. to milton’s l’allegro i’ve ever seen on the market. for fuseli’s oil painting, the basis for this print, see the 2012 sales review, blake 46.4 (spring 2013): illus. 18. “the night mare,” engraving by laurede, n.d. eb, nov-dec., thread margins at top and on both sides, imprint present, illus. (€427.66). dated by weinglass #67a to 1782, which would make it the 1st engraving of fuseli’s painting (exhibited at the royal academy in that year), but possibly later. also dated to 1782 and described as a “pirated” (unauthorized) pl. in nicolas powell, fuseli: the nightmare (london: allen lane, 1973) 98. i can find no information about “laurede,” possibly a pseudonym. “prince arthur’s vision,” engraving by peltro w. tomkins, 1788. dw, 29 june, #445, brown ink, leaf of laid paper 53.2 x 40.3 cm. (£61.25). eb, nov., leaf 57.5 x 45.5 cm., brown stains in margins, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £750 or “best offer,” lowered to £550 in dec.). “titania embracing bottom,” engraving by richard rhodes, 1794. eb, april, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $85). included in seventeen engravings, to illustrate shakspeare, published by alfred woodmason in 1817, but possibly issued as a separate pl. in 1794. “the weird sisters,” mezzotint by j. r. smith, 1785. lawrences auction, crewkerne, somerset, 22 jan., #1402, trimmed to the image at top and on both sides, “worn and damaged in the margins and in the upper left corner,” illus. (no bids on an estimate of £100-150); the same impression or another similarly damaged, rowley’s auction, newmarket, suffolk, 9 nov., #869, illus. (£174.30). linnell, john early drawings, paintings, and original graphics eleven pencil drawings, 2 heightened with white chalk, largest 14.9 x 26.7 cm., each initialed “j.l.,” 3 dated 1806-07. freeman’s auction, philadelphia, 25 jan., #98, illus. (no bids on an estimate of $1500-2000). the 3 illus. works picture plants in a landscape setting. two pencil drawings, a slate bridge and by the riverside. each 12.1 x 17.1 cm., a slate bridge signed and dated 1813. philip serrell auction, malvern, worcestershire, 5 may, #165, illus. (£229.90). at battersea (so inscribed). pencil on blue paper, 19.0 x 25.5 cm., signed. cuttlestones auction, penkridge, staffordshire, 2 dec., #502, illus. (£277.15). probably an early work. evening landscape. watercolor, 12.0 x 19.0 cm., signed. chiswick auction, london, 13 sept., #13, illus. (£393.60). probably an early work datable to the 1820s or early 1830s. figures and sheep in hilly landscape. pen and ink, 18.0 x 25.5 cm. biddle & webb auction, birmingham, 14 may, #361, illus. (£364.50). dated to “c. 1860” by the auction house, but possibly much earlier. landscape with trees and farm buildings, north wales. pencil heightened with white, 23.0 x 29.0 cm., inscribed “j. linnell, north wales 1813.” cheffins auction, cambridge, 11 feb., #369, “with another landscape to the reverse,” illus. (£220.50). near hampstead. pen and ink, 10.2 x 21.0 cm., signed with initials and dated 1809. gardiner houlgate auction, bath, 24 june, #1009, illus. (£196.80). workers raking hay in a field. portrait of a girl, attributed to linnell. right profile, pencil on blue paper, 17.8 x 19.1 cm. burstow & hewett auction, battle, east sussex, 25 may, #241, illus. (no bids on an estimate of £80-120). the attribution is convincing. possibly a portrait of 1 of linnell’s 5 daughters. portrait of thomas cadby. oil, 29.0 x 22.5 cm., signed and dated 1821. sl, 26 oct., #1169, illus. (not sold; estimate £3000-5000). previously sold cl, 26 april 1985, #103, illus. (£2808). profile of a woman, eyes turned upward, attributed to linnell. pencil, 14.1 x 10.2 cm. eb, july-aug., illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £420 or “best offer”); same offer price, oct.-nov. (acquired by essick). see illus. 8. 8. profile of a woman, eyes turned upward, attributed to john linnell (see enlargement). pencil, 14.1 x 10.2 cm. on a leaf of wove paper 18.3 x 10.9 cm. the back of the mount is inscribed in pen and ink in a modern hand “john linnell / 1792-1882 / (fully attributed sothebys).” the backing board for the former frame is inscribed in pen and ink in a (different?) modern hand “original drawing by john linnell c. 1830.” the drawing could date from an earlier period, c. 1820. i have not been able to learn anything about the provenance of the drawing. essick collection. the attribution of this delicate sketch to linnell is solid. less certain is the identity of the sitter. the informality of the woman’s costume suggests that it portrays someone in linnell’s family or circle of friends rather than the subject of a commissioned portrait. might this be blake’s wife, catherine? pictures of her in profile or three-quarter view show that she had a prominent, but rounded and almost bulbous chin very similar to what we see in this drawing.see the portraits attributed to george cumberland (c. 1785) and by blake in his notebook (c. 1793). all but 1 of the traced portraits of catherine are illus. and described in geoffrey keynes, the complete portraiture of william and catherine blake (london: trianon p for the william blake trust, 1977) 149-54 and illus. i-ix. the exception is a wash drawing attributed to cumberland and datable to the mid-1780s; see blake 39.4 (spring 2006): 164-65 and illus. 6. the woman’s nose is compatible with catherine’s very straight nose that apparently became less sharply pointed with age. catherine had curly hair, as in this drawing. two ringlets dangle down her forehead in a drawing by blake datable to c. 1803; curls frame her head in frederick tatham’s 1828 portrait. geoffrey keynes described catherine’s hair in a now untraced portrait: “curls hang over the forehead and down the neck” (butlin #684; note the suggestion of curls behind the neck in this sketch). several drawings show catherine wearing a bonnet, day cap, or scarf over her hair. the headgear in this profile may be a turban-like day cap or a folded scarf similar to the one shown in tatham’s portrait of catherine. his drawing of 1828 shows a much older woman, but this sketch by linnell could have been executed not long after he met blake in 1818 (br[2] 341). the most striking feature in the drawing illus. here is the upturned left eye. this indication of a heightened state of imaginative consciousness or contemplation of the divine might seem more appropriate for the husband than for the wife, but gilchrist tells us that “she, too, learned to have visions.”alexander gilchrist, life of william blake (london: macmillan, 1863) 1:316. he also notes “‘her gleaming black eyes’” described by “one who knew her” (1: 317). the darkness of the woman’s pupil is emphasized in this drawing. identifying the sitter is made difficult by our having no portraits of catherine blake executed between c. 1803 and 1828 with which to compare the present drawing. in 1818 she was 56 years old. the woman pictured here looks younger, although linnell may have been idealizing his subject by omitting details such as wrinkles. could her appearance have changed in 10 years to that of the much older woman portrayed by tatham? i sent a digital image of this drawing to several friends. here are their basic responses to my question, “is this mrs. blake?” g. e. bentley, jr. probably not, given her age in 1818. david bindman. 50/50 chance. martin butlin. 75% chance that this is mrs. blake. d. w. dörrbecker. 50/50. morris eaves. 50/50. alexander gourlay. a little less than 50/50. sarah jones. doubtful. jenijoy la belle (based on viewing the original, but perhaps unduly influenced by the drawing’s owner). very probably. tim linnell. one possibility among many. “not an obvious [linnell] family member.” morton paley. an interesting possibility. joseph viscomi. at least 50/50. john windle. very doubtful. study of a man. colored chalk on gray paper, 25.5 x 17.0 cm. dw, 6 oct., #304, “torn and repaired to upper right,” illus. (£539). possibly an early work, very fine. woodland landscape with workers. oil, 78.0 x 104.0 cm., signed and dated 1817. golding young & mawer auction, lincoln, 23 nov., #7, illus. (£26,950; estimate £2000-3000). similar in subject and setting to linnell’s etching of 1818 “woodcutters’ repast.” “samuel palmer.” etched portrait, platemark 25.5 x 20.0 cm., signed lower left in the pl. “j. linnell / 1843.” gp, feb. online cat., laid india, from the “collection of the late hon. c. lennox-boyd,” illus. (£650, “sold or reserved”). i can find no prior record of this portrait. is the identity of the sitter certain? the face is reasonably similar to henry walter’s watercolor portrait of palmer usually dated to c. 1835-36 (british museum registration no. 1896,1215.1). palmer, samuel drawings, paintings, and rare states of etchings box hill, surrey. oil on paper, 24.0 x 40.1 cm., datable to 1848. ll, jan. cat., pp. 98-101, illus. (not priced). for earlier sales, see the 2015 sales review, blake 49.4 (spring 2016). mountainous landscape, wales. watercolor, 12.5 x 17.0 cm. sl, 6 july, #352, illus. (£9375). the street of tombs, pompeii. watercolor, 32.7 x 41.6 cm., datable to 1838. cny, 27 jan., #91, illus. ($60,000). previously offered cl, 30 march 1993, #77, illus. (not sold; estimate £15,000-20,000). the vintage: an illustration to charles dickens’s pictures from italy. pencil, pen and brown ink, gray wash, heightened with white on tracing paper laid down on card, 13.5 x 7.5 cm., datable to 1846. cny, 27 jan., #90, “the property of a new york private collection,” illus. ($25,000). a wood engraving of this design was published in dickens, pictures from italy, 1846, p. [270], with letterpress text filling the blank area defined by trees growing up the side margins, their branches intertwining at the top. this format may have been influenced by “the lamb” in songs of innocence. raymond lister suggests that “the figure at the right standing on a ladder and picking fruit is comparable with a figure in songs of innocence, ‘the ecchoing green’, pl. 2, with one in ‘the school-boy’ in songs of experience, and with another in ‘the argument’, the marriage of heaven and hell, pl. 2.”lister, catalogue raisonné of the works of samuel palmer (cambridge: cambridge up, 1988) 151. john linnell, palmer’s father-in-law and mentor, owned copies of songs of innocence, songs of innocence and of experience, and the marriage of heaven and hell (see bb pp. 289, 384). “samuel palmer,” etched portrait of. see under linnell, above. s. palmer, the shorter poems of john milton, 1889. tennants auction, leyburn, north yorkshire, 21 sept., #77, “illustrations of milton’s minor poems, handwritten list and ten pencil numbered and inscribed engravings, in titled quarter cloth folio with marbled boards,” binding and manuscript list illus. (£607.50). the list of pls. concludes with a note signed “p. &[?] h.” this note states in part that “the impressions are amongst the earliest proofs taken from the plates.” richmond, george early drawings, paintings, and prints abel the shepherd resting in a landscape with his flock. pen and brown ink, 14.5 x 18.5 cm. fm, 15 nov., #134, attributed to a “follower of” george richmond, illus. (estimate £200-300; withdrawn on 9 nov.). see illus. 9. 9. abel the shepherd resting in a landscape with his flock (see enlargement). pen and brown ink, leaf of wove paper 14.5 x 18.5 cm. signed with a monogram, an interlinked “wr” dated “1858,” on the trunk of the tree. this drawing is attributed to a “follower of” george richmond in the online fm cat. of 15 nov., #134 (withdrawn). the cat. also claims that the monogram may be “later” and attributes it to the artist sir william blake richmond, george richmond’s son. in his detailed study of the son, simon reynolds discusses the influence of edward calvert on the young wbr’s work (reynolds, william blake richmond: an artist’s life 1842–1921 [norwich: michael russell, 1995] 14). in a footnote, reynolds refers to this drawing and attributes it to wbr: “an arcadian ink drawing by [wb] richmond of a naked shepherd amongst sheep; dated 1858 (abbott and holder, london), it clearly emulates calvert” (364n15). one could also point to early works by samuel palmer as a strong influence on the style of this drawing. the subject and motifs, however, are much closer to george richmond’s work than to either of these other followers of blake, particularly if one accepts the very plausible subject of abel proposed in the fm cat. the drawing is similar in several respects to the elder richmond’s tempera painting of 1825, abel the shepherd, now in the tate collection. in both compositions, abel reclines beneath a tree with eyes closed and with a long shepherd’s crook extending along the ground below him. although the right side of his head and body are pictured in the painting and he is twisting toward the viewer in the drawing, his legs are almost identically positioned in relation to his torso and to the ground; the right calf is similarly delineated and emphasized. the sheep are close cousins to those in g. richmond’s engraving “the shepherd” of 1827. thus, i think it possible that this work by the son is a copy of an unrecorded drawing by the father. photo courtesy of forum auctions, london. autumn sunset (sunset seen from hyde park). oil, 34.9 x 43.8 cm., inscribed on the verso “geo. richmond / autumn sunset.” heritage auction, dallas, 27 june, #65149, illus. ($625). possibly dating from the 1830s. marsyas. oil on panel, 14.0 x 12.7 cm., inscribed “by george richmond r.a.” on verso. duke’s auction, dorchester, dorset, 14 april, #316, illus. (£425). possibly dating from the 1830s. portrait of arthur tatham. pastel drawing(?), size unknown. criterion auction, islington, london, 25 april, #105, no indication of medium or size other than “portrait study on paper,” illus. (£381 to david bindman). arthur tatham (1808–74) was richmond’s brother-in-law and the younger brother of blake’s friend frederick tatham. arthur tatham, who later became a clergyman, attended blake’s funeral; see br(2) 626, 683. see also the next entry below. portrait of charles heathcote tatham. pastel drawing(?), size unknown. criterion auction, islington, london, 14 march, #115, no indication of medium or size other than “portrait study on paper,” illus. (£682). apparently returned by the buyer, the sitter having been wrongly identified as the father rather than the brother of blake’s friend frederick tatham, and sold again by the same auctioneer as a portrait of arthur tatham—see the entry immediately above. a recollection of william blake. watercolor, leaf 27.5 x 18.5 cm. sl, 6 july, #338, illus. (£11,250; estimate £4000-6000). previously sold sl, 8 april 1998, #105, “the property of a descendant of the artist,” illus. in black and white (£4140; estimate £400-600). see illus. 10. 10. george richmond. a recollection of william blake (see enlargement). watercolor, leaf of wove paper 27.5 x 18.5 cm., inscribed top left in ink “prepared side” and bottom right in pencil “william blake—”. with a “[j wh]atman / [turkey] mill / [18]36” watermark according to the auction cat., sl, 6 july, #338. the pencil inscription is probably by richmond; the pen and ink inscription would appear to be in a different hand. as i pointed out in my 1998 sales review, “this drawing is not so much a ‘recollection’ of blake as a copy of blake’s left profile as represented in his life mask—note the closed eye (odd in a portrait, but necessary when making a plaster cast of someone’s head), the slight flattening of the nose, the way the corner of the mouth is drawn down (caused by drying plaster), and the way the hair is (literally) plastered against the head. richmond owned the life mask now in the fitzwilliam museum, cambridge” (blake 32.4 [spring 1999]: caption to illus. 8). for the provenance of the fitzwilliam life mask of 1823, see william blake: catalogue of the collection in the fitzwilliam museum cambridge, ed. david bindman (cambridge: heffer and sons, 1970) 58. photo courtesy of sotheby’s london. study of a nude male figure. pen and ink, pencil, watercolor, 19.0 x 10.2 cm., signed with initials and dated 16 sept. 1829. guy peppiatt, sept. cat. of british portrait and figure drawings, #30, illus. (£1600). for earlier offers to sell, see the 2014 sales review, blake 48.4 (spring 2015). study of comus carrying his cup (recto), falling figures (verso). pen and ink, pencil, 33.0 x 21.2 cm., inscribed in pencil “paris 1829 a 30” and “comus.” ll, jan. cat., pp. 77-79, illus. (not priced). for earlier sales, see the 2014 sales review, blake 48.4 (spring 2015). study of eve(?). pencil, 11.4 x 8.9 cm., signed with initials. ah, april online cat. 457, #83, illus. (£250). date uncertain. “portrait of masaccio,” etching after filippino lippi, 1844. fine printed inc., oct. online cat., illus. (£45); same impression, eb, nov., proof before title inscription, platemark 25.4 x 20.2 cm., india paper laid onto wove leaf 34.5 x 26.0 cm., inscribed by richmond in pencil “masaccio” below the image and, just above the lower platemark, “drawn by geo. richmond. and engraved by him. assisted by james binder[?],” illus. ($50 to essick). only the “b” of the final word in the inscription above the platemark is clearly legible. this is the only record of richmond receiving assistance with the execution of this work. the only other recorded impression, also before title on laid india and probably from the same printing, is in the british museum, registration no. 1936,1022.2. a pencil inscription by richmond on the british museum impression, “19 decr. 1844,” is the basis for the dating of the print. for illus. and description, see raymond lister, george richmond: a critical biography (london: robin garton, 1981) 176. see the next entry below for the copperplate. “the shepherd,” original copperplate, 17.5 x 11.2 cm., datable to 1827. halls auction, shrewsbury, 16 march, #290, with the copperplate of richmond’s “portrait of masaccio,” 25.4 x 20.1 cm., “inscribed masaccio,” apparently in the pl. (see the entry above), the steel plate of a portrait of “mrs richmond, inscribed mrs ann richmond, born 1st aug 1772, died 30th dec 1860,” a “steel plate inscribed faraday, 27 mar 1852,” and a copperplate of a “portrait of a gentleman,” with old, worn envelopes for the pls., each envelope with inscriptions naming their contents, all illus. (£13,200 to a consortium of 2 british print dealers on an estimate of £200-300).the new owners have asked me not to reveal their names. they have no immediate plans to print from the pls. the “faraday” pl. is very probably the engraving by william holl after richmond’s portrait of the scientist michael faraday (1791–1867). ann richmond (née oram) was george richmond’s mother. the inscription on 1 envelope is signed “tr / 1886”; this was probably written by george richmond’s eldest son, thomas knyvett richmond (1833–1901). romney, george drawings and paintings excluding portraits thirty-eight pencil drawings offered individually, each leaf 14.0 x 23.0 cm., datable to c. 1792-94. ah, “george romney” section of feb. online cat. 455, #1-38, all illus. (£650-1750 each). these drawings come from the 3 sketchbooks that failed to sell at bhl, 8 july 2015, #3, illus. (highest bid £15,000 on an estimate of £20,000-30,000). the group comprises 5 illus. for macbeth and 15 for paradise lost, 9 sketches titled john howard visiting a lazaretto, 3 titled the effects of envy and pride and 3 titled entrust thy care to truth alone, and 3 preliminary drawings for the shipwreck painting engraved by blake and published in hayley’s life of romney, 1809. the illus. to macbeth, paradise lost, and 1 drawing titled the effects of envy and pride, all from the same sketchbook, were acquired in feb. by the folger shakespeare library, washington, dc. four pencil drawings: titiana’s [sic] chariot in midsummer night’s dream, opening the ark, a deathbed scene, and a group scene. 22.0 x 22.0 cm. and smaller, some with condition issues. woolley & wallis auction, salisbury, 7 sept., #54, all illus. (£450). three pencil drawings: study of a woman in profile, study of a nude woman, and study of a woman and children. pencil, each 19.0 x 12.0 cm. or slightly smaller. guy peppiatt, sept. cat. of british portrait and figure drawings, #8-10, illus. (£1500 each). two pencil drawings, both figure studies, 1 titled flood on a label on the back of the frame, each 12.7 x 22.9 cm. campbells auction, worthing, west sussex, 13 sept., #640, both illus. (£1446; estimate £150-200). dancing figures. pencil, leaf 9.5 x 12.1 cm. locati auction, maple glen, pennsylvania, 17 oct., #1016140, large but lightly colored stain, illus. ($1508). erminia and vafrino ministering to the wounded tancred. pen, brown ink and wash, recto and verso, 31.5 x 48.0 cm. sny, 28 jan., #185, recto and verso illus. ($32,500). figure studies, possibly a scene from shakespeare’s tempest, act v, scene i: miranda and ferdinand playing chess in prospero’s cell. pen and brown ink, brown wash, 11.1 x 18.7 cm. csk, 7 dec., #174, illus. (not sold; highest bid £2400 on an estimate of £4000-6000). the indian woman, from a midsummer night’s dream. oil, 118.5 x 148.5 cm., datable to 1793 and sold to william beckford in 1797. sl, 8 dec., #197, “with five preparatory pencil sketches on paper by romney relating to the composition, … with a facsimile of two further related sketches,” illus. (not sold; highest bid £35,000 on an estimate of £50,000-70,000). previously sold cl, 22 may 1964, #160 (£252). in a letter to john flaxman of 18 june 1804, william hayley refers to plans (never realized) to have this painting engraved by robert cromek; see geoffrey keynes, ed., the letters of william blake with related documents, 3rd ed. (oxford: clarendon p, 1980) 95. the infant shakespeare, attributed to romney. pen and ink, 11.1 x 18.0 cm. roseberys auction, london, 7 sept., #706, illus. (no bids on an estimate of £600-1000). john howard visiting the lazaretto. pencil, 15.7 x 19.1 cm. guy peppiatt, sept. cat. of british portrait and figure drawings, #20, datable to the early 1790s, illus. (£950). previously offered by peppiatt, may 2013 cat., #1, illus. (£1800). mary stuart going to the scaffold. pen and ink, brown wash, oval 21.0 x 25.5 cm. lyon & turnbull auction, edinburgh, 24 nov., #15, dated to “c. 1775,” illus. (£3328). previously offered sl, 26 march 1975, #203, illus. black and white (not sold; no estimate given in the cat.). sketch of a seated woman. pen and ink, 10.8 x 15.3 cm. skinner auction, marlborough, massachusetts, 15 july, #691, “small tear to center left,” edges stained, illus. ($1599). sketch of figures and an angel. pen and ink, 18.4 x 12.7 cm. gorringes auction, lewes, east sussex, 1 dec., #1572, illus. (£154.80). study for a girl with her dead fawn. pencil and gray wash, 36.9 x 54.7 cm. cl, 27 sept., #74, illus. (£15,000). study of a man, bust-length, in a plumed hat, traditionally called macbeth. pen and brown ink, 19.7 x 15.9 cm. csk, 7 dec., #171, illus. (£2375). study of two figures. pencil, 14.0 x 12.1 cm. martyn gregory, may online cat., “verso extensively inscribed,” illus. (not priced). titania’s chariot. pencil, 15.2 x 19.1 cm., datable to c. 1792. ah, dec. online cat. 465, #61, illus. (£375). sherman, welby “the shepherd,” etching/engraving probably based on a design by palmer. c. g. boerner, 2015 miscellanea cat. 134, #59, laid india backed with wove, illus. (not priced, but quoted at £9500 to windle). stothard, thomas drawings, paintings, and one engraving thirteen pen and ink drawings attributed to stothard of characters from chaucer’s canterbury tales. no sizes given, bound in vellum with 1 p. of manuscript. bromer booksellers, aug. online cat., “according to the text, these drawings were ‘sketched’ by stothard ‘from old wood engravings meant to illustrate the characters of chaucer,’” illus. ($5500). the cat. entry further states that “the handwriting in the front of this volume may indeed be [robert] cromek’s, as his initials can be made out below; this hypothesis is further strengthened by the presence of the signature of cromek’s son, thomas harley [i.e., hartley] cromek.” the manuscript, initialed “r h. c.,” illus.; the handwriting appears to be robert cromek’s. the 6 drawings illus. are inscribed with the names of the characters: wife of bath, man of law, prioress, cook, “reves” (i.e., reeve), and “doctour of physyk.” these are copied from the woodcuts in william caxton’s 2nd ed. of the canterbury tales, 1483. stothard’s painting of chaucer’s pilgrims and the engraving based on it show no clear influence of these woodcuts. six drawings of figures, pen and ink, 1 with watercolors, 1 with gray wash, largest 11.4 x 12.7 cm., all but the watercolor inscribed “stothard.” heritage auction, new york, 6 april, #45318, described as “five original drawings” but 6 in 5 mats are illus. (not sold; estimate $1200-1800). four drawings, including studies for a fireplace design and floral studies. pencil, pen and ink, fireplace with wash, 12.1 x 18.4 cm. and smaller. duke’s auction, dorchester, dorset, 15 sept., #341, all illus. (£137.50). the canterbury pilgrims. oil on panel, 37.5 x 141.0 cm. cl, 14 dec., #35, illus. (£10,000). the auction cat. gives no information on date or provenance. this version is larger than the oil on panel in the tate collection, dated to 1806-07 and measuring 31.8 x 95.2 cm., but the design and coloring are almost identical. classical scene. pencil, leaf 13.9 x 14.3 cm. eb, march, illus. ($35). very slight. hermione (the winter’s tale), attributed to stothard. watercolor, 7.0 x 4.0 cm. ramsay cornish auction, edinburgh, 12 march, #157, illus. (£58.50). ladies quarreling over a game of cards at bath. oil, 38.7 x 30.6 cm. bhl, 18 oct., #128, illus. (£1250). previously sold cl, 8 june 1995, #118, illus. (£2530). measure for measure. oil, 9.0 x 8.3 cm., datable to c. 1803. biddle & webb auction, birmingham, 14 may, #74, illus. (not sold; estimate £100-150). an illus. to act 2, scene 1, previously sold csk, 11 nov. 2008, #534, illus. (£138); previously offered ah, jan. 2009 online cat. 393, #16 (£375). possibly by stothard, but this might be a copy to size of the engraving of the design by charles warren, published in the plays of william shakspeare, ed. manley wood (london: g. kearsley, 1806) 2: facing 293. nymphs bathing in a pool. watercolor, 8.9 x 15.9 cm., inscribed “t. stothard.” duke’s auction, dorchester, dorset, 10 june, #911, illus. (£275). universal magazine of knowledge and pleasure, vol. 73, july-dec. 1783. eb, march, contemporary quarter calf worn, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $125 or “best offer”; acquired by essick for $100). for the frontispiece engraved by cook after stothard, see illus. 11. 11. frontispiece to the universal magazine of knowledge and pleasure, vol. 73, july-dec. 1783 (see enlargement). etching/engraving by thomas cook after thomas stothard, 13.9 x 9.1 cm. (design only), 17.0 x 9.2 cm. (including inscriptions). a pyramid in the background is inscribed with the names of battles in the american revolution, including “lexington,” “bunkers hill,” “saratoga,” and “brandywi[ne].” i have not been able to find a source for the verses inscribed in the lower margin. this pl., signed “stothard del.” lower left, is not included in the list of stothard’s contributions to the universal magazine in a. c. coxhead, thomas stothard, r.a. (london: bullen, 1906) 41-42. essick collection. pages 1-2 of the july issue include a detailed “explanation of the frontispiece.” a “fiend of discord” (the dark figure with snaky hair on the left) points to the battle monument in an attempt to convince an american youth to “perpetuate … animosities,” but a personification of peace (center) instructs the boy not to harbor ill-will toward britain and instead to turn his attention to the three adult figures representing “religion, liberty, and commerce” on the right. a phrygian liberty cap sits atop a pole above their heads. two children study the peaceful arts of “grammar,” “astronomy,” and “husbandry” lower right. might stothard’s friends, such as blake and george cumberland, have held similar opinions about british-american relations in the early 1780s? the pl. includes several odd features. the left arm of peace seems amputated, yet a single finger projects from her short sleeve. perhaps cook failed to replicate the foreshortening of an arm projecting toward us—if indeed that gesture was present in stothard’s untraced drawing. the frontmost figure on the right looks as though she is grasping the pole above her head with her right hand, but no pole is represented between her hand and head. this is probably liberty, with religion, her hands together in prayer, the next figure behind, leaving commerce as the most distant personification, her face visible between the hands and head of religion. the lengthy twisted object on which liberty rests her left arm may be a cornucopia or intertwined tree trunks or limbs with 2 or 3 leaves on their left side. is this an emblem of how commerce and religion support liberty? what are the 3 ovoid objects below liberty’s left forearm? could the large one be a beehive, a symbol of industry and community? liberty’s left foot rests on what appears to be a box or package bound with crossing strings or ropes. the package may represent commerce, which, according to the “explanation” of the design, “came” from “fair liberty’s celestial flame” (p. 2). the relationships between stothard’s rather mechanical reinvention of emblematic imagery and blake’s far more sophisticated and recondite uses of pictorial symbolism deserve investigation. appendix: new information on blake’s engravings listed below are substantive additions or corrections to robert n. essick, the separate plates of william blake: a catalogue (1983), and essick, william blake’s commercial book illustrations (1991). newly discovered impressions of previously recorded published sts. of blake’s engravings are listed for only the rarer pls. the separate plates of william blake: a catalogue pp. 47-48, “moore & co.’s advertisement.” for a recently discovered impression, see under separate plates and plates in series, above, and illus. 7. the transcription of lettering on this pl. in sp p. 47 wrongly includes a period after the ampersand in blake’s signature, lower right. p. 63, “chaucers canterbury pilgrims,” impression 3g. according to the online british museum cat., this impression (registration no. 1856,0209.326) was acquired from a. e. evans in 1856, not from r. h. evans in 1846. thus, my speculation that the print may have come from william upcott’s collection is no longer tenable. william blake’s commercial book illustrations pp. 108-12, rees, cyclopædia. for engraved copies of blake’s pls., see the second entry for rees under letterpress books with engravings by and after blake, above. blake in the marketplace, 2012 blake in the marketplace, 2012 by robert n. essick robert n. essick has been collecting and writing about blake for over forty years. table of contents: introductory essay abbreviations blake: illuminated books drawings and paintings separate plates and plates in series letterpress books with engravings by and after blake, including prints extracted from such books interesting blakeana blake’s circle and followers: barry, james basire, james calvert, edward cumberland, george flaxman, john fuseli, henry linnell, john mortimer, john hamilton palmer, samuel parker, james richmond, george romney, george sherman, welby stothard, thomas appendix: new information on blake’s engravings the 2012 marketplace offered some notable blake sales and discoveries. in my last report i briefly mentioned a previously unrecorded impression of pl. 15 from for children: the gates of paradise (blake 45.4 [spring 2012]: 109, 110). i am now able to provide further information about this uncommon print; see the first entry under illuminated books, below, and illus. 1 and its caption. copy y of songs of innocence has had a difficult life. it was once part of a (presumably) complete copy hand colored by blake, but after a fire in the 1890s the salvageable plates were divided into copies r (9 pls., now keynes collection, fitzwilliam museum) and y (15 pls.).neither copy includes the title page (bb pl. 3). the sequence of pen and ink numbers in copy r/y indicates that 3 other pls. are missing, probably bb pls. 21, 53, and 54. fire damage to copy r (and hence to y) was first reported in geoffrey keynes, a bibliography of william blake (new york: grolier club, 1921) 101 (copy r identified as copy m). the 1890s date of the fire is recorded in keynes, bibliotheca bibliographici (london: trianon p, 1964) 55, no. 508. evidence for the fire is provided by one “scorched” leaf in copy r (bibliotheca 55) and the darkened (probably singed) edges of other leaves in both copies. i do not know the basis for keynes’s dating of the fire. the latter, acquired in 1962 by walter neuerburg, was on deposit at the wallraf-richartz-museum in cologne from 1978 until the early years of this century. the owner, apparently walter neuerburg’s heir or heirs, reclaimed the prints in 2004 or 2005 and sold 8 in 6 lots at sotheby’s new york on 1 november 2007.for information on copy y, see detlef w. dörrbecker, “innocence lost and found: an untraced copy traced,” blake 15.3 (winter 1981-82): 125-31. for copy r/y, see joseph viscomi, blake and the idea of the book (princeton: princeton up, 1993) 305-06, 308-09, 311-12, and bbs 119-20. for a report on the 2007 auction, see blake 41.4 (spring 2008): 140, 142, 145, 146, and illus. 1-5. in late february 2012, i learned from john windle that the same auction house would offer the remaining 7 plates of copy y in 6 lots at its 26 april sale. several characteristics, including different ink colors and the overwriting of poorly printed letters, indicate that blake’s creation of songs of innocence copy r/y was a reclamation project, similar in that respect to songs of innocence and of experience copy e in the huntington library. such copies largely comprise impressions that had originally been put aside because of weak printing of their texts. thus, the dates of printing are not necessarily the same as the dates when the pages were selected, collated, numbered in pen and ink, and probably bound by blake’s wife, catherine. some plates may have been colored, in whole or in part, shortly after printing; many plates were colored, or at least had their coloring augmented and many letters overwritten, when they were gathered into copies. blake evidently assembled prints from several press runs in four ink colors—light brown, dark reddish brown, blue, gray-black—to create copy r/y in about 1811. he strengthened poorly printed letters by hand, added a few gold highlights, and probably touched up the coloring of some of the designs. “laughing song,” however, stands out from the group because of its very different watercolor palette in the design. it was probably printed and hand tinted at an earlier date than its companions. the auctioneer’s estimates for the plates of copy y sold in 2007 were tantalizingly low, but the extraordinary prices they fetched—the result of two crazed blake enthusiasts bidding against each other—prompted sotheby’s to publish much higher estimates for the 2012 auction. “the little boy lost,” however, was given an estimate lower than its companions because of the questionable authorship of the opaque white pigment applied to the text area—see the caption to illus. 7 for details. i did not attend the auction, but watched it live on sotheby’s webcam. prices were strong, with only one lot selling for a hammer price (the winning bid, exclusive of the buyer’s premium) below the estimate range, two lots selling within their ranges, and three lots attracting bids above their high estimates. john windle, who attended the auction, purchased three lots for two clients. see the entry below under illuminated books and illus. 2-8 for further information. arthur vershbow of newton centre, massachusetts, died on 16 april 2012. his collection included posthumous copy p of songs of innocence and of experience and two drawings by blake, the waking of leonora, design for the tailpiece of bürger’s “leonora” (butlin #338), and colinet and thenot, with shepherds’ crooks, leaning against trees (butlin # 769.3), one of the preliminary drawings for blake’s virgil wood engravings. in october i learned that the vershbow collection will go to auction at one of the major new york houses in april 2013. maurice sendak died on 8 may 2012. renowned for his children’s books and illustrations, sendak was also a major collector of blake. i do not know the full extent of his holdings, but record below important works owned by sendak that i have listed in earlier sales reviews: illuminated books the first book of urizen pl. 3, design only color printed songs of innocence copy j songs of innocence and of experience copy h drawings the bed of death, pen and gray wash, butlin #139 oberon and titania on a lily, watercolor, butlin #245 paolo and francesca (?), pencil, butlin #816 with songs the jovial hinds return from plow, wash preliminary for the virgil wood engravings, butlin #769.19 separate plates “chaucers canterbury pilgrims,” 3rd st. “the man sweeping the interpreter’s parlour,” 2nd st. letterpress books with engravings by blake william hayley, ballads, 1805. the pls. hand colored. william hayley, little tom the sailor, 1800. hand colored by blake and/or his wife, catherine. virgil, pastorals, 1821. blake’s wood engraving, cuts 2-5, 1st proof st. before the individual designs were separated into 4 blocks and trimmed on their margins. sendak had a close relationship with the rosenbach museum and library in philadelphia, but as of january 2013 that institution is not in a position to confirm that his blakes will be coming to them. grosvenor prints, london, continues to turn up blake rarities, although sometimes they do not know exactly what they have. in may i found on their web site a pre-publication proof of blake’s “death’s door” engraved by schiavonetti—see the entry under blair, the grave, under letterpress books with engravings by and after blake, below. in my 2011 sales review i briefly noted the discovery of several pictorial works by blake: a watercolor with a verso drawing, a recto/verso pencil sketch, and a pen and ink drawing possibly by blake, all in an album owned by a descendant of charles augustus tulk—see blake 45.4 (spring 2012): 109. the executors of the estate of james richard ley, who had inherited the album many years ago, considered giving it to the tate in lieu of taxes. their proposal was rejected by h. m. revenue and customs for technical reasons, and the executors sold the album in spring 2012 to the london dealer lowell libson.in an e-mail to john windle, 7 june 2012, libson stated that he had acquired the entire album. he has not answered my inquiries about the album. one work by blake emerged onto the market by june and another in october—see harpers and other drawings (a nonce title of my own devising) and parental affection (libson’s title) under drawings and paintings, below, and illus. 9-12, 14. the verso of harpers, bearing sketches for america and europe (illus. 10-11), offers fascinating information about how blake developed images for his illuminated books. i have not been able to acquire a high-resolution image, sufficient for reproduction in this journal, of bearded man and a youth, my provisional title for the pen and ink drawing perhaps by blake. the fine art society of london held a selling exhibition entitled “samuel palmer [and] his friends and his followers,” 30 may to 22 june. the handsome catalogue includes most of palmer’s prints and also works by george richmond and welby sherman. these are all listed under their respective artists in the section on blake’s circle and followers, below. the distinguished london art dealer andrew wyld died on 14 november 2011, aged only 62. christie’s london auctioned most of his remaining stock on 10 july 2012. wyld had sold his one blake drawing to the metropolitan museum of art shortly before his death,see the resurrection or the last trumpet, blake 45.4 (spring 2012): 110. for illus. of recto and verso and comments, see martin butlin, “a blake drawing rediscovered and redated,” blake 34.1 (summer 2000): cover, 22-24. but the auction included numerous works by blake’s circle and followers. these are listed below under each artist’s name. the auction market for important works by blake concluded in december with the “enoch” lithograph (illus. 15) formerly in the collection of edward croft-murray (1907-80), keeper of the department of prints and drawings in the british museum from 1954 to 1973. this is one of four known impressions and one of only two remaining in private hands at the time of this auction. the verso bears an important inscription by george cumberland describing the way blake modified the lithographic process. unfortunately, cumberland used a very wet ink that soaked through to the recto and stained the area above the central figure’s head. given this show-through and the other condition issues described in the caption to illus. 15, i thought the print was overestimated at £100,000-150,000. my prophetic powers failed once again; “enoch” fetched a hammer price of £170,000 (£205,250 including the buyer’s premium) to a dealer on the telephone representing an american institution. i believe that this is the second highest price for any single print by blake, exceeded only by the $3.9 million achieved by the large color print of the good and evil angels struggling for possession of a child (butlin #324) sold at auction in 2004. i suspect that this is also a record price for a lithograph by a british artist. the year of all sales and catalogues in the following lists is 2012 unless indicated otherwise. most reports about auction catalogues are based on the online versions. coverage of regional auctions is selective. dates for dealers’ online catalogues are the dates accessed, not the dates of publication. works offered online by dealers and previously listed in any one of the last three sales reviews are not repeated here. most of the auction houses add their purchaser’s surcharge to the hammer price in their price lists. these net amounts are given here, following the official price lists. the value-added tax levied against the buyer’s surcharge in britain is not included. late 2012 sales will be covered in the 2013 review. i am grateful for help in compiling this review to g. e. bentley, jr., nancy bialler, david bindman, calvin d. brown, mark crosby, stephen eisenman, louis girling, jr., judith guston, erin jue, richard lloyd, nicholas lott, hope mayo, patrick murphy, alan parker, max reed, ann vershbow, joseph viscomi, and john windle. my special thanks go to alexander gourlay for his generosity in keeping me abreast of ebay auctions. once again, sarah jones’s editorial expertise and john sullivan’s electronic imaging have been invaluable. abbreviations ah abbott and holder, london bb g. e. bentley, jr., blake books (oxford: clarendon p, 1977). plate numbers and copy designations for blake’s illuminated books and commercial book illustrations follow bb. bbs g. e. bentley, jr., blake books supplement (oxford: clarendon p, 1995) bennett shelley m. bennett, thomas stothard: the mechanisms of art patronage in england circa 1800 (columbia: u of missouri p, 1988) bg bloomsbury auctions, godalming bhl bonhams auctions, london bhny bonhams auctions, new york bho bonhams auctions, oxford bl bloomsbury auctions, london br(2) g. e. bentley, jr., blake records, 2nd ed. (new haven: yale up, 2004) butlin martin butlin, the paintings and drawings of william blake, 2 vols. (new haven: yale up, 1981) cat(s). catalogue(s) cb robert n. essick, william blake’s commercial book illustrations (oxford: clarendon p, 1991) cl christie’s auctions, london cny christie’s auctions, new york coxhead a. c. coxhead, thomas stothard, r.a. (london: bullen, 1906) csk christie’s auctions, south kensington dl david lay auctions, penzance dw dominic winter auctions, south cerney, gloucestershire dy doyle auctions, new york e the complete poetry and prose of william blake, ed. david v. erdman, newly rev. ed. (new york: anchor–random house, 1988) eb ebay online auctions gb galerie bassenge auctions, berlin go gorringes auctions, lewes, east sussex gp grosvenor prints, london illus. illustration(s), illustrated pl(s). plate(s) sk skinner auctions, boston sl sotheby’s auctions, london sny sotheby’s auctions, new york sp robert n. essick, the separate plates of william blake: a catalogue (princeton: princeton up, 1983) st(s). state(s) of an engraving, etching, or lithograph swann swann auctions, new york wd whyte’s auctions, dublin weinglass d. h. weinglass, prints and engraved illustrations by and after henry fuseli (aldershot: scolar p, 1994) # auction lot or catalogue item number illuminated books for children: the gates of paradise, bb pl. 15 (inscribed “13” lower left). larkhall fine art, dec. 2011 private offer (acquired by essick). see illus. 1. 1. for children: the gates of paradise, pl. 15.  inscribed “13” lower left and “fear & hope are __ vision” centered below the design.  etching, possibly with a few touches of engraving, pictorial image 7.3 x 6.6 cm., platemark 8.1 x 7.2 cm., 2nd st., datable to 1793.  laid paper without watermark, leaf 8.5 x 7.4 cm., chain lines running vertically 2.75 cm. apart.  provenance: private collection, england; sold in a mixed lot at a rosebery’s auction, london, fall 2011, to the print dealer nicholas lott of larkhall fine art, bath; acquired by essick 30 dec. 2011.  lott has not been able to obtain any further information about the history of ownership. click to show more. in the 1st st. of the pl., the background behind the hovering figure is hatched with lines rising from right to left.  this area has been changed into dense crosshatching in this 2nd st.  the inscription reads “fear or hope are __ vision” in the 1st st.; “or” is replaced with an ampersand in the 2nd st.  the area where the number “13” is printed lower left in the 2nd st. shows only fragments of printing, and may have been abraded, in the only known impression of the 1st st., present in copy a of for children.  blake added the number in pen and ink further to the left in copy a.  the 2nd sts. of all other pls. in for children include a 1793 imprint, but the space between the inscription and the lower edge of the copperplate was insufficient to contain the imprint on pl. 15.  the 2nd st. is present in for children copies b, d, e, and probably c (not seen; last recorded in the collection of lucinda collins, new york).  copies a, b, d, and e of for children are on wove paper.  the laid paper of the print reproduced here suggests that it may be a one-off impression pulled by blake in 1793 to check his 2nd st. revisions, since he is not known to have used such paper to print complete copies of the work.   when blake converted for children into for the sexes: the gates of paradise, he extensively revised this pl. in 3 stages, c. 1818-26, in accord with his new sense of adding contrasting effects of illumination and darkness to etchings and engravings executed years earlier.  in the 3rd st. of pl. 15, the 1st for the sexes st., present in copy b, blake burnished an aura of light around the head and torso of the hovering figure.  other areas have been darkened with additional lines, including the beard and body of the corpse, the clothing of the woman behind the bed and the child on the right, and the back of the man in the foreground lower left.  oddly, the right hand and cuff at the wrist of the corpse have vanished, replaced by long horizontal lines defining his gown.  the facial features of the child furthest right have been more clearly defined in ways that hint at surprise or wonder; the woman’s features, particularly her eyebrows, have been augmented.  bold vertical lines added to the background now suggest a curtain rather than an unadorned wall.  some of the letters in the caption, particularly the left vertical of “h,” may have been cut more deeply.   illumination around the hovering figure has been extended in the 4th st. (copies c and d of for the sexes) and now includes lines of radiance right and left.  burnishing has created 2 other highlights, right and left of the foreground man’s right leg.  further hatching strokes now darken the background, the floor lower right, the legs of the bed, the back and left leg of the foreground man, and a patch on the floor above and to the right of his right foot.  a stippled line now extends down his lower right leg.  a few short lines have been added to the hovering spirit’s hair where it falls along the back of his head.  the beard of the corpse is more distinctly defined and rudimentary outlines of his right hand and the cuff at the wrist, both present in the 1st and 2nd sts., have been returned to the pl.  the face of the child immediately right of the woman has been turned from right profile to forward.  his mouth is open in wonder.  all 5 faces are augmented with short lines and stipple to increase their expressiveness.   blake continued to supplement the 4th st. revisions in the 5th (final) st., found in copies e-i, k, and n of for the sexes, and in a separate impression of pl. 15 in the british museum, accession no. 1894,0612.29.  the letters of the caption have been further strengthened and printed more darkly.  this additional work is most evident on the right vertical of “h.”  the hovering figure’s aura has been reduced in extent, particularly on the right, but intensified around his head, under his left upper arm, and left of his right elbow.  the background upper left, the floor lower right, the back and right leg of the foreground man, the side of the bed right of his right knee and the right end of the bed, the feet of the corpse, and the legs of the hovering spirit have been darkened with hatching and crosshatching.  two lines now define the hem or cuff of breeches or tights just above the foreground man’s right knee.  the faces of the woman and children are more detailed; the former now has a wrinkled brow and the latter have larger, more open mouths with clearly defined lips.   the 5 sts. of pl. 15 accord with the 5 print runs of the gates of paradise, 2 of for children and 3 of for the sexes.  these printings are assigned approximate dates in bb 187, 197: early spring 1793, late spring 1793, 1818, 1825, and 1827-28, the last including some posthumous impressions.  each time blake printed the work, he altered at least some of the pls.  bb 197 places copy e of for the sexes in the second (1825) printing of that work, but it should probably be included in the third (1827-28) printing with other copies containing the 5th st. of pl. 15.  for the sexes copy a is untraced.  bb 197 groups it with the 1818 watermark and printing date of copy b.  if that is indeed accurate, then pl. 15 in copy a is probably in the 3rd st.  copies j and l of for the sexes lack pl. 15. nicholas lott tells me that copy m of for the sexes, dispersed in the late 1960s by the london print dealer christopher mendez (bbs 79), is a group of muir facsimiles.  a complete and detailed cat. of all sts. of all pls. in the gates of paradise has yet to be written. pl. 15 addresses the difference between material and spiritual vision, a theme central to the entire series of emblem-like designs.  chauncey brewster tinker identifies the hovering figure as god and compares the design to the vision of god in the whirlwind in the pl. numbered 13 among the job engravings—see tinker, painter and poet (cambridge: harvard up, 1938) 113.  most interpreters, however, describe this figure as the ghost or spirit of the dead man lying stiffly supine on the bed.  this majority view is substantiated by the insubstantial nature of the bearded apparition.  the line defining his left shin extends across the right foot of the corpse, yet we can see the toes of that foot and the upper portion of the corpse’s left foot.  these appendages would be obscured if we could not see through the spirit’s left leg.  further, we can see the upper edge of the board on the right end of the bed that would be invisible if we could not see through the spirit’s left ankle.  the hovering figure is “the immortal man that cannot die” in blake’s reference to the pl. numbered “13” in “the keys of the gates,” the explanatory verses he added to the series in for the sexes (e 268-69).  analogues for pl. 15 more apt than the job engraving are “to tirzah,” in which “whate’er is born of mortal birth” is “raised a spiritual body” (e 30), and “the death of the good old man” among blake’s illus. to robert blair’s the grave, another design picturing both the mortal and the immortal body. the man half-kneeling in the foreground reacts to the vision with amazement and perhaps fear.  the fingers of his right hand separate and radiate outward; the toes of his right foot may be curled.  the woman behind the bed looks up in wonder.  the faces of the 2 children right of the woman express a similar emotion only in later sts. of the pl.  this would appear to be a family group, but their individual identities are uncertain.  archibald g. b. russell refers to the kneeling man as the woman’s “husband” (russell, the engravings of william blake [london: grant richards, 1912] 64).  russell, however, fails to see the body on the bed, stating that “a young [sic?] woman sits up upon a bed of sickness,” and he may be wrong about the kneeling man as well.  he looks a good deal younger than the woman, particularly in the last 2 sts., and may be the dead man’s “eldest son” (david v. erdman, the illuminated blake [garden city: anchor p—doubleday, 1974] 275).  geoffrey keynes describes the group as “a man and his wife and two children seated beside the deathbed of a father or a friend” (keynes, commentary in blake, the gates of paradise [london: trianon p, 1968] 1: 18).   the hovering spirit points upward to heaven with a finger on his left hand and down and to the right with his right hand, probably to direct the family toward a burial plot for the man’s corpse.  taken together, these gestures indicate the different destinies of spiritual and material bodies.  the right-hand gesture also leads the reader of the gates of paradise to the next 2 engravings in the series, “the traveller” who “hasteth in the evening” of life in pl. 16 toward “death’s door” in pl. 17 (e 266-67). the caption refers to the “fear” of death and “hope” for an afterlife; the former may be part of the family’s understandable but mistaken response to a vision proving that the latter is not in vain.  “vision” in blake’s writings is closely associated with imagination: “vision or imagination is a representation of what eternally exists” (a vision of the last judgment, e 554).  the caption links together universal human emotions and the creative activities of the artist that reveal spiritual realities beyond the material veil.  yet the operative verb, “are,” indicates more than “leads to” or “causes.”  the internal emotions are one with the external vision; both are products of mental acts.  this is not the only passage in blake’s writings in which process becomes identity: “… he became what he beheld / he became what he was doing …” (the four zoas, e 338). the preliminary pencil sketch for the design on p. 61 of blake’s notebook (butlin #201.61) appears above a related inscription, “what we hope we see” (e 801).  this caption, like the engraved version, also underscores the unity of inner (“hope”) and outer (“what we … see”) realities, but may also play upon another reading of these 5 words: this vision of the immortal man is what we hope to see at the death of the mortal body.  glue spots indicate that blake very probably affixed thin paper to the drawing and traced it for transfer to a copperplate for the gates of paradise.  he did not, however, reverse the design onto the copper, since right and left in impressions are the reverse of the drawing.  the same basic composition also appears in a large wash drawing datable to c. 1780-85 and inscribed “the spirit of a just man newly departed appearing to his mourning family” (butlin #135).  this title would appear to be in blake’s hand and supports the identification of the hovering figure as the dead man’s spirit.  the woman’s right hand (left in the print) is pictured in both drawings; her fingers are spread apart in a gesture similar to the foreground man’s in all 3 versions.  the dead man’s face is clearly pictured only in the wash drawing. click to show less. songs of innocence copy y.  sny, 26 april, #42-47, 7 pls. only (of 15) on 7 leaves of wove paper, each leaf bearing the blind-stamped collection mark of heinrich neuerburg (walter neuerburg’s father) lower right.  relief etchings, at least 3 pls. with white-line etching, hand colored and with pen and black ink border lines contiguous with the edges of the images.  each pl. numbered by blake in pen and black ink top right, selected motifs outlined in pen and black ink, some letters and pictorial motifs highlighted in shell gold. three stabholes from a prior binding in the left margin, 2.7 cm. from the top hole to the middle hole and 3.3 cm. from the middle hole to the bottom hole.bb 410 records the stabhole distances for songs of innocence copy r at 2.6 and 3.5 cm. apart. i suspect that the small differences between these measurements and those recorded here for copy y are the result of different perceptions, different rulers, and perhaps different treatment of the paper over the years. the holes in both copies were probably stabbed when copies r and y were one; they may have been created by blake’s wife, catherine, for a pamphlet-style binding of the book in wrappers.  see illus. 2-8 and their captions for further details on each pl.  offered in the following lots, each illus.: #42.  “the blossom,” bb pl. 11, numbered “10” top right.  $74,500 to adam fuss, new york; estimate $40,000-60,000. 2. “the blossom” (bb pl. 11), songs of innocence copy y. collection of adam fuss, new york.  relief and white-line etching with pen and ink outlining and hand coloring, numbered “10” top right in pen and ink.  image 10.7 x 7.2 cm. (see enlargement), leaf of wove paper 20.9 x 14.6 cm.  marginal stains from an earlier mat and browning at the edges of the leaf, particularly the top.  printed in gray-black ink and hand colored, probably c. 1811 when blake printed songs of innocence copy s, the innocence pls. of combined songs copy s, and milton copies a-c in that color (see the caption to illus. 3 for more on this printing).  several letters, including all those in the title, have been overwritten in pen and brown ink.  blake used a similar pink wash to color the giant plant in copy f of songs of innocence and of experience and a purple-pink hue in copies a and l, all datable to the mid-1790s.  the plant is colored gray-blue in songs of innocence copy g (1789), pink and gray in songs of innocence copy o (c. 1802), highlighted in blue in copy t of the combined songs (1818), and tinted pink and blue in copy v of songs of innocence and of experience (1821).  the adult angel’s right wing is also blue in copy v.  blake colored the plant green in most early copies, but emphasized its flame-like characteristics with yellow, orange, and red tinting in late copies (for example, w, y, z, and aa of the combined songs, all datable to 1825-26).  the auction cat. (sny, 26 april) states that the coloring includes “shell gold” (that is, powdered gold suspended in water and a gum or glue binder, applied by hand) and “gouache.”  the presence of the latter medium is indicated by the chalky appearance of the colors in the leaf extending below the text and the base of the main stem, lower right. photo courtesy of sotheby’s new york. #43.  “the lamb,” bb pl. 8, numbered “7” top right.  $40,625 to john windle acting for the victoria university library, toronto; estimate $35,000-45,000.  e. j. pratt library, victoria university, blake suppl. no. 363. 3. “the lamb” (bb pl. 8), songs of innocence copy y.  victoria university library, toronto.  relief etching with pen and ink outlining and hand coloring, numbered “7” top right in pen and ink.  image 11.6 x 7.6 cm. (see enlargement), leaf of wove paper 20.7 x 14.6 cm.  light marginal stains from an earlier mat and browning at the edges of the leaf, particularly at the top.  printed in gray-black ink and hand colored, probably c. 1811 when blake printed songs of innocence copy s, the innocence pls. of combined songs copy s, and milton copies a-c in that color.  much of the text has been overwritten in pen and brown ink, very probably to compensate for weak printing of the letters.  blake extended the grassy ground and shadows slightly below the lower edge of the pl. and extended the thatched roof of the cottage to the right edge of the pl. with washes and 2 horizontal lines.  the cottage does not reach beyond the sapling in the etched image.  the auction cat. (sny, 26 april) states that the coloring includes “shell gold.” blake may have printed “the lamb” and “the blossom” (illus. 2) c. 1811 specifically to augment his stock of innocence impressions and thereby have a supply sufficient to create a complete copy—presumably the original condition of copy r/y.  because he already had his press ready for printing and ink available for producing the other illuminated books in gray-black ink noted above, it would have taken very little additional effort to print these two pls. photo courtesy of sotheby’s new york. #44.  “laughing song,” bb pl. 15, numbered “14” top right.  $80,500 to an anonymous private collector on the telephone; estimate $40,000-50,000. 4. “laughing song” (bb pl. 15), songs of innocence copy y.  anonymous private collection.  relief etching with hand coloring, numbered “14” top right in pen and ink.  image 11.2 x 6.6 cm. (see enlargement), leaf of wove paper 20.7 x 15.0 cm.  light marginal stains from an earlier mat, browning at the edges of the leaf, particularly at the top, and stains around the top and bottom stabholes.  printed in dark reddish-brown ink, possibly in 1795 when blake printed songs of innocence and of experience copy o in a similarly heavy and wet ink of that color.  the ink in all other pls. in copy r/y was drier, more reticulated, and applied with a lighter touch.  the tinting in the text area accords with what we see throughout copy r/y, but the coloring of the design above the text is distinctly different.  the colors are deeper, bolder, less translucent, and closer to primary tints than the pastel tones on other pls.  the design was probably colored c. 1795, but the transparent washes in the text area could have been added c. 1811 when the pl. was numbered and included in copy r/y.  the highlighting in gold on the figures’ hair, the title letters, and the bird to the left of the title was probably applied c. 1811.  the auction cat. (sny, 26 april) states that the coloring includes “gouache.”   the upper curve of the letter “s,” 2nd word in the final line of text, shows a small patch of opaque white; see the caption to illus. 7 for discussion. photo courtesy of sotheby’s new york. #45.  “the ecchoing green,” bb pls. 6-7, numbered “5” and “6” top right.  $116,500 to the dealer james cummins acting for the charles deering mccormick library of special collections, northwestern university library, evanston, illinois; estimate $70,000-100,000. 5. “the ecchoing green,” 1st pl. (bb pl. 6), songs of innocence copy y.  charles deering mccormick library of special collections, northwestern university library, evanston, illinois.  relief etching with pen and ink outlining and hand coloring, numbered “5” top right in pen and ink.  image 11.0 x 7.0 cm. (see enlargement), leaf of wove paper 20.0 x 14.2 cm.  light marginal stains from an earlier mat and browning at the edges of the leaf.  printed in light brown ink, probably c. 1802, and probably colored (at least in part) at that time.  copy o of songs of innocence (university of texas, austin) was printed in the same session using the same paper and ink.  hand coloring and numbering not finished until c. 1811.  blake has drawn short horizontal lines below and within the hoop right of the 1st stanza to indicate the ground on which the boy plays.  he has also added a vine lower right; it loops over a poorly printed part of the vine above and extends over the catchword, “they.”  the title letters have been overwritten in dark brown ink.  the auction cat. (sny, 26 april) states that the coloring includes “shell gold.” photo courtesy of sotheby’s new york. 6. “the ecchoing green,” 2nd pl. (bb pl. 7), songs of innocence copy y.  charles deering mccormick library of special collections, northwestern university library, evanston, illinois.  relief etching, possibly with touches of white-line etching, and with pen and ink outlining and hand coloring, numbered “6” top right in pen and ink.  image 11.0 x 7.0 cm. (see enlargement), leaf of wove paper 20.9 x 14.8 cm. with a butta[nshaw] (probably buttanshaw 1802) watermark along the lower edge of the leaf.  light marginal stains from an earlier mat and browning at the edges of the leaf.  printed in light brown ink, probably c. 1802, and probably colored (at least in part) at that time.  hand coloring and numbering not finished until c. 1811.  in the etched image, the chin of the boy in the vine on the right, who is handing a bunch of grapes to a girl below, is behind his hunched shoulder.  in this impression, blake has drawn the boy’s full face in front of his shoulder.  the auction cat. (sny, 26 april) states that the coloring includes “shell gold.” photo courtesy of sotheby’s new york. #46.  “the little boy lost,” bb pl. 13, numbered “12” top right.  $59,375 to john windle acting for essick; estimate $10,000-20,000.  see the caption to illus. 7 for the reasons the auctioneer placed an estimate on this lot lower than the others. 7. “the little boy lost” (bb pl. 13), songs of innocence copy y.  essick collection. relief and white-line etching with pen and ink outlining and hand coloring, numbered “12” top right in pen and ink.  image 11.2 x 7.3 cm. (see enlargement), leaf of wove paper 20.7 x 14.6 cm.  printed in light brown ink, probably c. 1802, and probably colored (at least in part) at that time.  hand coloring and numbering not finished until c. 1811.  blake overwrote all but a few letters in dark and light brown inks.  the boy’s hat, simply etched in the copperplate, has been emphasized with black pen and ink lines.  blake gave similar attention to the tree’s roots, only suggested in the etched image.  a thin black pen and ink line below the child’s feet indicates a shadow cast by the illumination on the left.  the face of the angel right of the 2nd stanza is in profile facing right in the etched image, but has been drawn in three-quarters view in this impression.  the general coloring of the design above the text, including the long but weak beams of light radiating from the illuminated “vapour” on the left, is similar to the impressions in copy o of songs of innocence (c. 1802) and in copy v of songs of innocence and of experience (1821).  there are no beams or rays of light in the etched image.  the duck, etched on the copperplate above the “y” of “boy” in the title, has almost disappeared in this copy y impression due to light inking.  the boy’s hair and the tree trunk show minute touches of shell gold.  erin jue, paper conservator at the huntington library, suggests that these few grains of gold may have been transferred to this impression from residue left on the brush after a more generous, and hence visually significant, application of gold on other pls. click to show more. a condition report, not published in the printed auction cat. of 26 april but available on sotheby’s web site, includes the following caveat: “there are corrections in the text which are not entirely consistent with the hand-retouchings characteristic of blake’s own work.  it is difficult to be certain whether this portion of the plate was damaged and touched up by a later hand, or whether it was indeed by blake himself.”  sotheby’s cautious statement was motivated by the unusual presence of opaque white pigment, possibly lead white, surrounding letters in the text.  this material is most evident around the 1st 2 letters of the 2nd and 3rd words in line 1 and in an area below “you” in the same line and between it and the next word, extending toward the bird flying above the 1st letter of “going.”  dabs of white are also visible throughout the 1st half of each line in the 2nd stanza.  in 2 areas—the left side of the vertical of the “h” of “child” and the right side of the “e” of “wet,” both in the 2nd line of the 2nd stanza—the opaque white intrudes upon the letters, partly covering their edges.  there are as well 4 droplets of white over part of the lower reaches of the 1st “g” in “going” in the 1st line of the text.  thus, the white pigment must have been applied after the letters were overwritten in pen and ink. the opaque white was added with considerable skill and attention to detail.  for example, the terminal letter of “the,” 1st word of the 2nd stanza, was touched with white to create the space within the upper loop.  most of this work becomes clearly discernable only under magnification.  blake may have added the white to increase the contrast between the letters and their surrounding areas.  it is of course possible that the opaque pigment was applied by someone else after the print left blake’s hands, perhaps even following the fire that reportedly injured songs of innocence copy r/y in the 1890s.  the reason for such intervention, however, is far from clear.  there is no evidence of staining or any other damage to the paper underlying the opaque white when the leaf is viewed through a strong backing light.  there are several light brown stains on the verso, but these do not correlate with the white patches on the recto.  see also illus. 4 and 8 and their captions for more applications of opaque white.  both “the little boy lost” and “the little boy found” were inspected under a meiji binocular microscope with a magnification range of 7x to 45x.  an enlargement of approximately 15x proved to be the most useful for locating and studying the white areas. click to show less. #47.  “the little boy found,” bb pl. 14, numbered “13” top right.  $68,500 to john windle acting for essick; estimate $35,000-45,000. 8. “the little boy found” (bb pl. 14), songs of innocence copy y.  essick collection.  relief and white-line etching with pen and ink outlining and hand coloring, numbered “13” top right in pen and ink.  image 11.7 x 7.2 cm. (see enlargement), leaf of wove paper 20.8 x 14.6 cm.  printed in light brown ink, probably c. 1802, and probably colored (at least in part) at that time.  hand coloring and numbering not finished until c. 1811.  although there is far less opaque white pigment than in “the little boy lost,” the space between the 1st 2 letters of the title and the area within the looping lower element of the 2nd letter bear streaks of that color, possibly intended to mask a flaw of some sort (see the caption to illus. 7).  two droplets also appear above and within the 1st letter (“h”) in line 5 of the poem, although these could be accidental spills.  tinting with light brown wash in the space between the design and the edges of the copperplate forms a frame on 3 sides of the design.  brown stains slightly mar the lower abdomen of christ, the adult figure in the design above the text.  blake has given an unusual amount of attention to the outlining of christ’s left thumb and fingers where they grasp the boy’s right elbow.  the adult’s hand is apparently under the child’s arm, for the fingers extend upwards with the thumb looping around from above and extending downwards.  christ’s hand, fingers pointing down, holds the boy’s arm from above in copy y of the combined songs, datable to 1825; the hand position is uncertain in most copies.   the roots of the tree on the right have been emphasized with wash and pen and ink outlines.  the background landscape is more open and more illuminated than in any other impression known to me.  although still crepuscular in overall tone, this impression and the one in songs of innocence copy o (c. 1802) are less distinctly night scenes than others.  the leafy canopy of a dense forest rises behind the boy; 2 tree trunks are visible below his left arm.  the sky above the boy’s head includes 2 arching bands of light between clouds.  the figure hovering right of the text lacks a nose in the etched image, supplied in this impression with pen and ink outlining.  this figure’s billowing gown, all 3 large tree trunks, and the boy’s hair are tinted with shell gold, either mixed with other colors or applied thinly on top of them. drawings and paintings bearded man and a youth, possibly by blake.  pen and ink drawing, size unknown but less than the leaves of the tulk family album, 27.0 x 22.0 cm., into which the drawing was mounted.  probably dating from the 1780s.  not in butlin because not discovered until 2010.  acquired spring 2012 by lowell libson, ltd., london. a male wearing breeches, a shirt, and a sandal on his right foot (left not shown) sits facing forward on a stone (?) step or plinth.  his thick hair, prominent arched eyebrows, moustache, and short beard are darkly inked; his expression is solemn.  his right hand rests, palm down and fingers spread, on the step.  he points with his left index finger at a tablet or piece of paper, lower right, bearing a few squiggles indicating writing.  a round object at its left (presumably lower) edge may be a wax seal.  a nude, or partly nude, youth of uncertain gender, possibly a long-haired male, kneels on the floor between the bearded man’s legs.  he faces right, with eyes partly closed or perhaps looking down at the writing, but his shoulders are twisted away from the viewer and his raised hands rest upon the bearded man’s shoulders.  the combination of motifs, particularly the tablet or paper, suggests a specific subject, but i have not been able to determine it.  any suggestions? the attribution to blake is far from certain.  at first glance, the drawing, particularly the head of the bearded man, does not shout “blake.”  the same can be said for a somewhat similar pen and ink drawing, charon, copy from the antique (butlin #178 recto, dated to c. 1779-80?).  without tatham’s inscription vouching that the work is by blake, i would be a bit dubious about charon; see also a male nude with an urn, copy from the antique (butlin #179a).  several characteristics, however, associate the drawing from the tulk album with blake’s stylistic habits.  if we “attend to the hands & feet” (a vision of the last judgment, e 560) and the musculature of the youth, blake’s own hand begins to emerge.  indeed, attribution would be more certain if one simply ignores the bearded head. death’s door.  see the soul hovering over the body reluctantly parting with life, below. harpers and other drawings (recto), preliminary sketches for america and europe (verso).  pencil, leaf 20.4 x 24.6 cm.  not in butlin because not discovered until 2010.  lowell libson, oct. online cat., titled a double-sided sheet of drawings: job and his wife playing instruments, recto and verso illus. (price on request).a price of £300,000 was quoted to me in oct. on the telephone. this is a record asking price for a pencil drawing by blake.  see illus. 9-11. 9. harpers and other drawings.  pencil, leaf 20.4 x 24.6 cm. (see enlargement).   datable to 1792-93.  for the verso, see illus. 10.  see the caption to illus. 12 for information on the album from which this leaf was removed. the main, central drawing of a man and woman playing harps and perhaps singing might be job and his wife after their restoration to prosperity, as in the final pl. of blake’s job engravings, but there are reasons to question this identification.  even in the earliest job designs, such as job, his wife and his friends: the complaint of job (butlin #162, dated to c. 1785), job has long hair, an exceptionally long beard, and is clearly old.  the man in this drawing is middle-aged, has short and tightly curled hair, and a short beard.  playing harps does not necessarily indicate a job subject; see, for example, a harper and other sketches (the verso of butlin #81, dated to c. 1785; for illus. and discussion, see blake 39.1 [summer 2005]: 44-47).  a tiriel wash drawing untraced since 1863, har and heva playing harps (butlin #198.5, dated to c. 1789), might be related, although the age of har and heva in other tiriel designs matches job and his wife rather than the couple in this pencil drawing. click to show more. the recto bears several other sketches, apparently unrelated to the central drawing: • far left, a youthful male nude with curly hair, facing forward but looking down and to the right.  he stands in front of a stone wall(?) and leans with his right elbow on a shovel.  his lower right arm extends behind his back.  an almost identical figure, except for slight differences in the angle of the head, appears on the general title page in blake’s watercolor illus. to edward young’s night thoughts (butlin #330.2, dated to c. 1795-97).  as in the night thoughts design, this may be a grave-digger in an elegant pose reminiscent of classical sculpture.  blake probably referred back to this pencil drawing when executing the watercolor. • above the central drawing, a pair of overlapping figures, probably female, hovering horizontally or flying to the right.  the front figure extends her right arm in front of her; small objects or the droplets of a liquid descend diagonally from her right hand.  the similar motif of a sky-borne figure pouring down a liquid appears in visions of the daughters of albion pl. 4.  in the pencil sketch, the figure in back extends her left arm; cloud outlines appear above and to the right.  the pair is generally similar to (but not a direct preliminary for) the angels at the top of blake’s design for the title page to night the first among his night thoughts watercolors (butlin #330.6), pl. 1 among the engravings (bb #515).  unlike this pencil drawing, the night thoughts angels are winged and nothing drops from their hands. • to the right of the central harpists, a standing female(?) seen in right profile, leaning back slightly with her right arm extended upward to touch or hold a descending child or putto in left profile, his left hand touching the adult’s right shoulder.  the figures appear to be kissing.  this drawing is probably the direct preliminary for the same motif in blake’s relief-etched color print “a dream of thiralatha” (sp ix), first executed as a pl. for america, 1793, but not used in the illuminated book.  in this sketch, the putto’s legs are together, with the right calf and foot just peeking out from behind the left leg.  in the print, his right leg is bent at the knee and his left leg extended.  right and left in this sketch are the reverse of impressions of the color print and thus the figures have the same orientation as the design on the copperplate. • far right, a standing child seen from behind, reaching upward with both arms to touch or hold a descending child, also seen from behind.  they may be kissing.  a few sketchy lines above and right of the figures hint at clouds.  this may be a rejected variant for the “thiralatha” design. photo courtesy of lowell libson ltd. click to show less. 10. preliminary sketches for america and europe, the verso of harpers and other drawings (illus. 9).  pencil, leaf 20.4 x 24.6 cm. (see enlargement).  datable to 1792-93.  see the caption to illus. 12 for information on the album from which this leaf was removed. click to show more. the leaf bears small sketches of 15 figures.  most, possibly all, are preliminary sketches for motifs in america and europe, as follows: • lower right, two figures, likely a male (right) and woman (left—note the indications of female breasts) fleeing to the right over the outline of a hilly landscape, probably a variant design for the man and woman lower left in america pl. 5.  in this sketch, the figure on the left has her arms bent at the elbows and raised over her head; her companion has his arms raised at roughly 135 degrees.  in the relief etching, the male has his arms down, with his right hand apparently holding the hand of a child; the female raises her left arm vertically and her right forearm and hand are visible left of her lower torso. • top and center, a male holding a contracted figure on his shoulders, a female (note the carefully delineated vagina) with a sword, a male holding scales with the outlines of clouds extending above and below him, and an upside-down male within the upper loop of a spiraling serpent, all for america pl. 7.  in the etching, the figure holding a sword may be male, prominent flames have been added to the weapon, the cloud is differently configured, and the serpent’s head is in a slightly altered position.  the placement of the figures in relationship to each other is retained, but with right and left reversed in impressions. • center right, a male facing down and clutching his head, for america pl. 7.  the sketched and etched versions are almost identical. • upper right quadrant, another sketch of the man clutching his head, for america pl. 7, accompanied by two other figures, or variants of the same figure, also clutching their heads.  these may all be blake’s experiments with various postures in preparation for the relief etching. • lower left quadrant, an upside-down, descending male with a large weight attached to him, for europe pl. 4.  in the sketch, the man’s legs are bent sharply at the knees and his genitals are clearly pictured.  in the illuminated book, his legs are turned to the left with his right thigh covering his lower torso. • lower left, a falling female.  see illus. 11. • lower margin, a series of three figures above the outline of a rocky landscape.  from left to right, these are a female with long hair, lunging and reaching dramatically to the left; an upside-down male seen from behind, arms extended downward with hands resting on a boulder or small hill, right leg extended upward and left leg bent at the knee, basically similar to the book of urizen pl. 14; a female figure facing forward with prominent breasts and a large belly, arms horizontal and legs bent at the knees and spread apart.  this last figure may be pregnant; compare to the woman giving birth in the marriage of heaven and hell pl. 3.  none of these figures is present in america or europe, but they were probably executed in preparation for those books. for each figure used in america and europe, right and left are the reverse of impressions of the illuminated books and thus the motifs in this drawing have the same orientation as the designs on the copperplates.  these drawings reinforce the interrelatedness of america and europe, compositionally and thematically.  for a leaf of pencil drawings for america of similar size and date, see sketches for “america” and other books (butlin #226), illus. and discussed in blake 45.4 (spring 2012): 111-12. photo courtesy of lowell libson ltd. click to show less. 11. preliminary sketches for america and europe (illus. 10), detail of pencil sketch lower left, approximately 3.7 x 3.2 cm.  a falling female, seen from behind, with legs spread apart and bent sharply at the knees.  the creature above her rump is exceedingly odd and thus invites speculation.  joseph viscomi has suggested in correspondence that this is a goat, facing forward, left front hoof delineated, with symmetrically curving horns, a bifurcated forelock, floppy ears, bulging eyes, and a prominent muzzle.  is this a scene of interspecies coitus or rape?  “the lust of the goat” (the marriage of heaven and hell, e 36) has been the animal’s main emblematic characteristic since antiquity.  as a symbol of the zodiacal sign of capricorn, the goat is sometimes given a fish-like body with 2 twisting tails (see, for example, the impresa of cosimo de’ medici reproduced in james hall, dictionary of subjects and symbols in art, rev. ed. [new york: icon editions, 1974] 139).  this tradition may account for the 2 tails in this drawing, 1 possibly wrapped around the woman’s left thigh and clearly visible right of her left knee, and another extending around her face and head and trailing along her back.  viscomi further suggests that blake first drew a phallus penetrating the woman, then transformed it into a goat.  this may account for the columnar shape of the animal’s body.  the sexual implications of the design anticipate some of blake’s drawings in the four zoas manuscript, begun c. 1796.  the ovoid form above and to the left of the descending figure’s head remains mysterious.  not used in america or europe, but probably executed in preparation for those books. photo courtesy of lowell libson ltd. parental affection, or the meeting of a family in heaven (recto), sisyphus rolling the stone up a hill (verso).  recto watercolor, verso pencil, leaf 14.3 x 9.2 cm.  not in butlin because not discovered until 2010.  lowell libson, june online cat., recto and verso illus. (price on request).i received a report from a prominent blake collector that the watercolor was offered to him for £550,000. i have not been able to confirm this extraordinary price.  see illus. 12-14.  12. parental affection, or the meeting of a family in heaven.  watercolor on laid paper, 14.3 x 9.2 cm.  the title is apparently a recent invention, probably by the dealer lowell libson or one of his unnamed consultants.  see illus. 14 for the verso.  when mounted in an album (see provenance below), the leaf to which the watercolor was attached was inscribed in pencil “parents meeting.”  blake based the design on an emblem drawing in his notebook, p. 41 (illus. 13).  the major differences between the two versions are the addition of more background trees and the elaboration of the gothic architecture in the watercolor.  the date of the notebook emblems is not certain, but they have generally been dated to c. 1790-92; some were engraved and published in for children: the gates of paradise of 1793. click to show more. this watercolor is similar in style and mood to the wash drawings illustrating mary wollstonecraft’s original stories from real life (butlin #244, dated c. 1791).  a date of c. 1790-92 seems reasonable for this watercolor, although far from certain.  the work shows some similarities to, but is more carefully executed than, a few drawings dated by butlin to the late 1780s, including an enthroned old man offering two children to heaven (butlin #88) and age teaching youth (butlin #91).  parental affection was advertised by libson and reproduced in art newspaper no. 236 (june 2012); see also brief comments and illus. in anon., “forthcoming events,” british art journal 13.1 (spring 2012): 96, huon mallalieu, “drawn to success,” country life 206.26 (27 june 2012): 112-13, richard green, “master drawings,” burlington magazine 154 (sept. 2012): 651, and mallalieu, “from the zoo to the big apple,” country life 206.40 (2 oct. 2012): 114-15.  the work is in a remarkably fine state of preservation, the colors fresh and unfaded. the reference in the title to “the meeting of a family in heaven” implies a connection with blake’s illus. to robert blair’s the grave and perhaps a source for the subject in the writings of emanuel swedenborg.  the latter would be appropriate for a work given or sold to c. a. tulk, a swedenborgian.  the naturalistic landscape background, however, makes a heavenly setting unlikely.  for an illus. of blake’s “meeting of a family in heaven” in the 1808 ed. of blair’s poem and a discussion of its relationship to swedenborg’s writings, see blake 43.4 (spring 2010): 124-25. provenance: probably acquired directly from blake by charles augustus tulk (1786-1849), although blake’s wife, catherine (after her husband’s death in 1827), or tulk’s friend john flaxman are possible sources; tulk’s daughter louisa susanna tulk (1819-48?), who mounted this watercolor in an album; by inheritance to her husband, james peard ley (1807-85); by inheritance to his son, james verchild ley; by inheritance to his son, james richard ley, who died in feb. 2010; the estate of james richard ley (sole heir his daughter, judith penelope ley, executors john paul hindle and judith penelope ley); the entire album sold by the estate spring or early summer 2012 to the london dealer lowell libson ltd. for an undisclosed price.  this watercolor, or the leaf of recto/verso drawings reproduced here as illus. 9-10, might be the “drawing” which nancy flaxman, in a letter to her husband, john flaxman, of july 1816, states was “bought … of him” (i.e., bought from blake) by “our friend,” possibly c. a. tulk (br[2] 326). the tulk family album from which this watercolor was removed in 2012 contains 90 pp. of whatman paper, leaves 22.0 x 27.0 cm., bound in calf, according to a representative of the tulk estate.  it included other works by blake (see illus. 9-10, 14), flaxman, and a good many drawings by other, probably continental, artists. photo courtesy of lowell libson ltd. click to show less. 13. blake’s notebook, p. 41.  detail of the pencil emblem drawing, approximately 8.2 x 5.9 cm.  butlin #201.41.  see the caption to illus. 12 for discussion. photo courtesy of the british library. 14. sisyphus rolling the stone up a hill.  pencil on leaf 14.3 x 9.2 cm., the verso of parental affection (illus. 12).  although it seems unlikely that blake would execute a rough sketch on the verso of a finished watercolor probably intended for sale or presentation, the vigorous style of this drawing suggests a slightly later date than the recto, possibly in the mid-1790s.  see the caption to illus. 12 for information on the album from which this leaf was removed. photo courtesy of lowell libson ltd. st. paul and the viper.  watercolor, 39.0 x 30.0 cm., datable to c. 1803-05.  butlin #510.  bequeathed in 1986 by peter pears to the britten-pears foundation, the red house, aldeburgh, suffolk. the soul hovering over the body reluctantly parting with life and death’s door.  two watercolors illustrating robert blair’s the grave, 16.0 x 22.7 cm. and 23.9 x 13.8 cm., datable to 1805.  the anonymous owner placed these 2 works on consignment with david benrimon fine art, new york, early in 2012 (prices on request).  previously offered sny, 2 may 2006, #7, soul hovering (not sold; highest bid $520,000 on an estimate of $700,000-1,000,000), and #10, death’s door (not sold; highest bid $750,000 on an estimate of $1,000,000-1,500,000).  for information on the 2006 auction, see blake 40.4 (spring 2007): 116-17, 120-26. separate plates and plates in series “chaucers canterbury pilgrims,” 5th st.  roger genser/the prints and the pauper, oct. private offer, on laid india, colnaghi impression, sp impression 5zz, with “pilgrimage to canterbury,” schiavonetti and heath after stothard, etching/engraving, 1817 ($10,000).  swann, 31 oct. rescheduled to 6 nov., #282, on laid india, very probably a colnaghi impression, illus. ($3600). dante engravings.  sl, 29 march, #2, pl. 3 only, “the circle of the corrupt officials,” first described in the online cat. as “possibly an early proof before the 1838 edition, a fine impression printing with burr,” but changed by 23 march to “a very early, fine impression from linnell’s 1838 edition,” india paper laid onto heavy wove and thus probably an impression on thick colombier backing paper (see the plate-printer’s records, bb 545), illus. (not sold; highest bid £3800 on an estimate of £5000-7000).  sny, 20 april, #32, complete set on laid india with a “letterpress cover label,” pl. 6 “lightly stained,” india paper of 2 pls. evenly browned, unbound in a half morocco folding case, illus. ($62,500; estimate $20,000-30,000). “enoch,” modified lithograph.  cl, 6 dec., #96, sp impression 1b, recto and verso inscription illus. (£205,250; estimate £100,000-150,000).  according to richard lloyd of christie’s, the purchaser was a “us institution” (e-mail to john windle, 8 dec. 2012).  see comments in the introductory essay to this sales review and illus. 15. 15. “enoch.” modified lithograph, 21.7 x 31.0 cm., sp impression 1b.  wove paper without watermark, leaf 23.8 x 33.1 cm.  the pen and ink inscription by george cumberland on the verso has bled through to the recto above the central figure’s head, on the hovering figures right and left, and in the top margin.  light damp staining top right corner, marginal tears extending into the image right top margin and upper left margin.  the oval blemish, 1.2 x 0.8 cm., just below the center of the top framing line, is described in the auction cat. (cl, 6 dec., #96) as “a made up paper loss”—that is, a hole in the printed leaf filled with another piece of paper.  for discussion and illus. of the verso inscription, see essick, “blake’s ‘enoch’ lithograph,” blake 14.4 (spring 1981): 180-84.  the inscription is also transcribed and discussed in sp 55-59. photo courtesy of christie’s london. “george cumberland’s card.”  csk, 5 dec., #192, “on card,” leaf 4.1 x 8.1 cm., illus. (not sold; estimate £3000-4000).  apparently an unrecorded impression, acquired after the auction by john windle for stock. “the idle laundress,” after morland, 1788.  larkhall fine art, dec. 2011 private offer, imprint trimmed off but probably 2nd st., color printed with hand coloring (£750).  see illus. 16. 16. “the idle laundress,” engraved by blake after george morland.  pictorial image including the framing lines 21.2 x 26.0 cm.  leaf of wove paper without watermark trimmed within the platemark to 24.5 x 28.9 cm. and with the imprint cut off.  color printed in black, brown, and blue inks and hand colored.  essick collection. the only clear distinctions in the pl. itself between the 2nd st., published by j. r. smith in 1788, and the 3rd st., published by h. macklin in 1803, are the imprint and the amount of wear in the fine stipple.  i suspect that this impression is in the 2nd st.  the single impression of the 1st st. known to me, recorded in 1983 in the collection of john demarco, saratoga, new york, is colored like this 2nd st.  the quality and extent of the color printing and hand coloring in the 3rd st. are similar, but with several changes in palette.  in 3rd-st. impressions i’ve seen, the laundress’s skirt is pale brown, the young thief’s jacket is dark brown, and his waistcoat is blue. job engravings.  sk, 3 feb., #20, pl. numbered 20 only, “final state” but no description of the paper, illus. ($2963).  eb, feb., pl. numbered 18 only, published “proof” on laid india, minor foxing, framed, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $1750); same impression and minimum required bid, march (no bids); nov.-dec., pl. numbered 17 only, whatman paper after removal of the “proof” inscription, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $3000).  swann, 8 march, 3 pls. on whatman paper after removal of the “proof” inscriptions, offered individually, all illus.: #170, pl. numbered 4 ($3360), #171, pl. numbered 8 (not sold; estimate $2000-3000), #172, pl. numbered 10 ($3600); 25 april, #213-16, pls. numbered 1, 4, 7, and 21 only, whatman paper after removal of the “proof” inscriptions, offered individually, all illus. (none sold; estimates $2000-3500 each); 31 oct. rescheduled to 6 nov., 2 pls. after removal of the “proof” inscriptions, offered individually, both illus.: #283, pl. numbered 17 (not sold; estimate $2500-3500), #284, pl. numbered 21 on laid india, very probably the 1874 printing ($2160).  brunk auction, asheville, north carolina, 10 march, #17, pls. numbered 1, 4, and 7 only, whatman paper after removal of the “proof” inscriptions, framed, illus. ($2800).  r. e. lewis & daughter, oct. online cat., complete set, 1874 printing on laid india, with the letterpress label, the copy previously offered by peter nahum, may 2003 cat., #6, for £17,000, each pl. matted, illus. ($32,500).  bhl, 27 nov., #20, pl. numbered 5 only, whatman paper after removal of the “proof” inscription, illus. (£1500); #21, pl. numbered 6 only, same printing as prior lot, illus. (£1250). letterpress books with engravings by and after blake, including prints extracted from such books allen, history of england, 1798.  eb, feb., marginal stains on the pls., contemporary calf very worn and crudely repaired with tape, “binding loose” (no bids on a required minimum bid of £950); blake’s 4 pls. only, probably extracted from this copy and offered individually, march, illus. (no bids on required minimum bids of £125 each); same group offered again in march, illus. (£62 for pl. 1, £40.99 for pl. 2, £82.51 each for pls. 3 and 4); another copy of the book, march-april, contemporary calf very worn, illus. (£172). ariosto, orlando furioso.  internationalbooks via amazon, april online cat., 1783 ed., 5 vols., “leather bound” ($536.41).  hava books, april online cat., 1783 ed., 5 vols., some browning, contemporary calf worn (£350).  libreria antiquaria pregliasco, april online cat., 1785 ed., 5 vols. with fore-edge paintings, later morocco, illus. (€5500). calendula horticultural books, april online cat., 1785 ed., 5 vols., minor foxing, “full calf” very worn, covers loose ($99.95).  eb, june, 1799 ed., 5 vols., scattered foxing, contemporary calf worn, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of €199). bible.  royal universal family bible, 1780-81.  eastleach books, april online cat., 2 vols. in 1, some browning and tears, contemporary sheep very worn, illus. (£200). blair, the grave.  quaker hill books, april online cat., 1808 quarto, frontispiece described as being on “india paper” (usually true only of the folio issue), light foxing, recent half morocco ($3100).  hermitage bookshop, april online cat., 1808 quarto, light browning and foxing, calf rebacked ($3000).  d & d galleries, april online cat., 1808 quarto, slight browning, early quarter calf rebacked ($2750).  krown & spellman, april online cat., “1813” (actually 1870) folio, “almost no foxing,” publisher’s cloth, spine restored ($1850).  peter l. stern, april online cat., 1813 quarto, heavy foxing on the frontispiece and engraved title page, contemporary half morocco ($1750).  gp, may online cat., blake’s pl. 11, “death’s door,” only, pre-publication proof st. described as dated “feby. 1.st 1805” (actually “feby 1st 1806”) in the imprint, title in open letters, leaf of laid paper 30.6 x 20.4 cm. with a fragment of a watermark along the left margin, illus. (£220; acquired by john windle for stock and sold immediately to victoria university library, toronto, accession no. blake suppl. no. 389).the only other traced impression of this st. is in my collection; see bb 531 and robert n. essick and morton d. paley, robert blair’s the grave illustrated by william blake (london: scolar press, 1982) 219. only the inscribed texts, not the design itself, were altered (or at least recut with the graver) in later sts. and printings. schiavonetti and his journeymen must have worked very quickly to produce this print between nov. 1805, the date of the prospectus naming blake as the engraver of his designs in r. h. cromek’s forthcoming ed. of the grave, and feb. 1806. it was probably the 1st pl. to be produced by schiavonetti, possibly intended for advertising purposes and as an immediate substitute for blake’s own white-line etching of the design, rejected by cromek. the copperplate was trimmed from 35.7 x 20.3 cm. to 30.0 x 17.5 cm. before publication in cromek’s 1808 folio 1st ed. of the grave. the impression in my collection is on laid paper, leaf 39.2 x 24.8 cm., not the wove paper recorded in essick and paley. an impression of this proof st. with a “j. whatman, 1806” watermark, probably a wove paper, is recorded in a. g. b. russell, the engravings of william blake (london: grant richards, 1912) 130, then in the collection of f. w. bourdillon but now untraced.  eb, june, 1808 quarto, scattered soiling and foxing, contemporary boards rebacked with calf, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $2750); probably the same copy, oct., illus. (offered at the same “buy it now” price); nov.-dec., 1870 portfolio of pls. only as issued, publisher’s cloth folder worn, illus. ($830, probably a record auction price for this issue); pls. 2, 4, and 9 only offered individually, 1813 imprints, illus. (no bids on required minimum bids of $149 each).  james cummins, july online cat., 1808 quarto, lacking pls. 4 and 5 and text pp. 9-12, contemporary morocco, bookplates of helen hay whitney and joan whitney payson ($2500); dec. cat. 115, #4, 1808 quarto, “minor foxing,” contemporary quarter sheep rebacked in calf, illus. ($1750).  bl, 1 nov., #173, 1813 quarto, “original cloth” and thus possibly the [1870] issue (£120).  john goodwin auction, malvern, 14 nov., #1, [1870] ed., pls. loose in publisher’s portfolio as issued, pl. 1 damaged, illus. (no price information; estimate £50-100).  fine editions, dec. private offer, 1808 quarto, scattered light foxing, 19th-century three-quarter morocco ($3250). bonnycastle, introduction to mensuration, 1791.  blackwell’s, may online cat., with the 2nd st. of the title-page vignette by blake after stothard, lacking the half-title, scattered staining, contemporary sheep worn and rebacked, “bonnycastle’s / introduction / to / mensuration / & / geometry” written in an early hand in pen and ink on a vellum label on the front cover, illus. (£180).  the only copy of the 3rd ed. i have ever seen on the market.  my only sales record of a copy of the 1st ed. (1782) with the 1st st. of blake’s pl. is in may 1969. boydell’s graphic illustrations … of shakspeare, c. 1803.  john windle, feb. los angeles book fair and feb. occasional list 1, #12, publisher’s morocco, illus. ($7500).  eb, feb., marginal stains, contemporary calf very worn, illus. (€445). bryant, new system … of ancient mythology, 1774-76.  eb, march, 1st ed., 3 vols., 1 leaf in vol. 2 missing and some leaves reattached with tape, stained, contemporary calf very worn, covers loose and spines badly damaged, illus. ($162.50); another copy, aug., 1st ed., 3 vols., “extra illustrated with two full page cipriani plates,” contemporary calf rebacked, worn, illus. ($599).  dw, 19 sept., #505, 2nd ed., 3 vols., contemporary calf worn, rebacked, illus. (£400). catullus, poems, 1795.  john price, april online cat., 2 vols., contemporary calf (£220).  wd, 20 oct., #649, 2 vols., contemporary calf (€420). darwin, botanic garden.  eb, jan., 1st ed. of part 1, 3rd ed. of part 2, both 1791, 2 vols., original boards, vol. 1 rebacked in cloth, very worn with covers of vol. 2 detached, illus. (£223.88); 1799 ed., 2 vols. in 1, contemporary calf worn, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £250 or “best offer”); feb., 1st ed. of part 1, 1791, 2nd ed. of part 2, 1790, 2 vols. in 1, with blake’s pl. 6 (“tornado”), published in the 3rd ed. of part 1, 1795, bound in, the copy sold at dw, 14 dec. 2011, #387 (£260), contemporary calf, illus. ($748); june, 1799 ed., part 1 only (which contains all pls. by blake), contemporary calf worn (£108.76); 3rd ed. of part 1, 1795, 4th ed. of part 2, 1794, 2 vols. in 1, contemporary calf worn, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £600); july, blake’s pl. 1 (“fertilization of egypt”) only, scattered foxing, framed, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $600); same impression, july-aug., same result on a required minimum bid of $500; sept., 1st ed. of part 1, 1791, 2nd ed. of part 2, 1790, 2 vols. in 1, some pls. trimmed, scattered light foxing, recent half calf, illus. (£510); nov., 1799 ed., 2 vols., calf very worn, spines damaged, illus. (£101).  quaritch, jan. cat. 2012/1, #52, 1st ed. of part 1, 3rd ed. of part 2, both 1791, 2 vols., from the collection of jonathan wordsworth, contemporary calf worn and rebacked, illus. (£1500).  kenneth karmiole, feb. private offer, 1st ed. of part 1, 1791, 4th ed. of part 2, 1794, 2 vols. in 1, preliminary leaves soiled, later calf worn ($1000).  john windle, feb. occasional list 1, #9, 3rd ed. of part 1, 1795, 4th ed. of part 2, 1794, 2 vols. in 1, modern calf, illus. ($3750).  subun-so, march cat., #100, 3rd ed. of part 1, 1795, 4th ed. of part 2, 1794, 2 vols. in 1, contemporary calf, illus. ($1454).  bhl, 27 march, #99, 1st ed. of part 1, 3rd ed. of part 2, both 1791, 2 vols. in 1, possibly a large-paper copy, occasional spotting, contemporary morocco (£1500; estimate £200-400).  bl, 4 april, #258, 3rd ed. of part 1, 1795, 4th ed. of part 2, 1794, 2 vols. in 1, scattered foxing, contemporary russia, illus. (£350).  russell rare books, april online cat., apparently 1st ed. of part 1, 3rd ed. of part 2, both 1791, 2 vols. in 1, some spotting, calf very worn, covers loose (£375).  dw, 20 sept., #138, 1st ed. of part 1, 3rd ed. of part 2, both 1791, 2 vols. in 1, scattered foxing, contemporary calf worn, illus. (£380). enfield, speaker, 1785.  james cummins, april online cat., light browning, contemporary calf rebacked ($750).  available since 2008. euler, elements of algebra, 1797.  librairie crespin, april online cat., 2 vols., contemporary calf, illus. (€1300). flaxman, hesiod designs, 1817.  dw, 25 jan., #669, bound with the iliad (1805), odyssey (1805), and aeschylus (1831) designs, scattered foxing, contemporary morocco (£320).  quinn’s auction, falls church, virginia, 1 march, #146, not dated but apparently 1817, bound with the iliad, odyssey, and aeschylus designs, dates not indicated but apparently 1805, 1805, and 1831 respectively, some staining, half calf worn, illus. ($450).  gb, 29 nov., #5909, “paper bound,” illus. (€500).  mealy’s auction, dublin, 5 dec., #963, bound with flaxman’s aeschylus designs, 1831, with his iliad and odyssey designs, both 1805, bound in another vol., both contemporary morocco, binding illus. (€200).  flaxman, iliad designs.  eb, jan., 1805 ed., later half morocco worn, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £220); 1870 ed., with flaxman’s odyssey designs, 1870, scattered foxing, contemporary half calf worn, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of £395); april, blake’s pl. 3 only, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $199); june, 1805 ed., foxed, original boards with cover label, worn with covers detached, illus. ($17.16); 1805 ed., title page and blake’s 3 pls. only, lower right corner of each torn off, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $700); same group, july, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $500); same group, aug., (offered at the “buy it now” price of $350); nov., 1805 ed., with flaxman’s odyssey designs, 1805, foxed, original boards, rebacked with leather, and cover labels, illus. (€72).  rooke books, april online cat., 1805 ed., half  “leather” worn (£220).  gb, 29 nov., #5908, 1805 ed., scattered foxing, bound with flaxman’s odyssey designs, 1805, later morocco, illus. (€400).  see also hesiod designs, above. gay, fables.  eb, dec. 2011, 1793 ed., 2 vols., foxed, contemporary calf worn, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $349.99); same copy, jan., illus. ($142.50); jan., 1793 ed., 2 vols., contemporary morocco worn, illus. (£336.90); march, blake’s pls. 5 and 12 only, offered individually, each elaborately framed, illus. (offered at the ridiculous “buy it now” prices of $2495 and $2299 or “best offer”); nov., 2 vols. in 1, foxed, contemporary calf very worn, covers and many leaves loose, illus. (£105.50).  chiswick auction, london, 20 march, #3, 1793 ed., 2 vols. in 1, 14 pls. (including 3 by blake) hand colored, later morocco rebacked, blake’s hand-colored pl. 1 illus. (£200).  subun-so, april online cat., 1793 ed., 2 vols., light foxing, with aesop, fables, 1793, 2 vols., full calf ($4415).  ronald purmort, april online cat., 1793 ed., 2 vols., “leather” worn ($2000).  weybridge books, april online cat., 1793 ed., 2 vols., full calf (£950).  le scriptorium d’albi, april online cat., 1793 ed., 2 vols. in 1, full calf worn, illus. (€600).  keogh’s books, april online cat., [1811] ed., 2 vols., modern cloth, illus. (£175).  go, 9 may, #945, 1793 ed., 2 vols., later quarter calf (not sold; estimate £100-150).  gb, 19 oct., #2015, 1793 ed., 2 vols. in 1, “leather” binding, illus. (€200).  bl, 1 nov., #178, 1793 ed., 2 vols., light foxing, later half morocco worn, illus. (£220).  dy, 5 nov., #489, 1793 ed., 2 vols., foxed, contemporary calf worn and rebacked, illus. ($375).  some of these “1793” copies may be the [1811] issue. gough, sepulchral monuments, 1786.  john windle, april private offer, with the variant title page recorded in bbs 217-18, contemporary calf worn ($3750). hartley, observations on man, 1791.  gp, nov. online cat., blake’s pl. only, “tatty extremities, … uncut sheet” (£190). hayley, life of cowper, 1803-04.  quaritch, jan. cat. 2012/1, #73, 1st ed., 3 vols., with a presentation inscription from hayley to “penelope chetwynd,” an additional inscription “from the author,” and a note reading “this copy of cowper’s life is presented to mrs william chetwynd by the author as a memorial of friendship. 1803,” some “spotting,” early half calf rebacked, presentation inscription illus. (£1250);penelope chetwynd was a friend of blake as well as of hayley; both men may have given art lessons (or at least advice) to her son, john. see e 727, 755; br(2) 108-09, 153, 759, 765fn, 809; and angus whitehead, “‘mrs chetwynd & her brother’ and ‘mr. chetwynd,’” blake 42.2 (fall 2008): 75-79. another copy, june online cat., 1st ed., 4 vols. including the supplement of 1806, contemporary calf worn, illus. (£500); same copy, sept. cat. b172, #70, illus. (£450).  am here books, april online cat., 1st ed., 3 vols., contemporary calf rebacked, worn ($950).  peter goodden, april online cat., 1st ed., 3 vols., contemporary boards (vols. 1-2) and calf (vol. 3), rebacked with modern buckram, worn (£260).  barter books, april online cat., 2nd ed., 3 vols., some browning, half “leather” worn (£130).  eb, june, vol. 3 only, 1804, text incomplete but with blake’s pls. 5-6, lacking the title page but bound with a title page reading desultory remarks on the letters of eminent persons, particularly those of pope and cowper, 19th-century quarter calf worn, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of £1000); june-july, 1st ed., 4 vols. including the supplement of 1806, uncut in original boards worn with later cloth spines, printed spine labels, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of £275); pl. 3 only, 1st st., imprint trimmed off, foxed, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $299); oct., 1st ed., vols. 1-2 only, vol. 1 contemporary calf very worn, vol. 2 modern cloth, illus. ($64.90).  rooke books, july online cat., apparently 1st ed., 4 vols. including the supplement of 1806, scattered foxing, original boards very worn, some leaves loose (£280). hayley, life of romney, 1809.  spring street books, april online cat., “leather” very worn ($350).  mallams auction, oxford, 28 june, #141, possibly a large-paper copy, 19th-century morocco, illus. (£160).  ken spelman, aug. cat. 70, #17, contemporary morocco worn (£320).  wd, 19 oct., #387, light foxing, later half morocco (€60). hayley, triumphs of temper, 1803.  christopher edwards, june cat. 51, #11, large-paper issue, leaves trimmed to 21.3 x 13.4 cm., 20th-century half morocco repaired, illus. (£1500); #12, small-paper issue, 20th-century quarter morocco (£650).  caliban books, oct. online cat., small-paper issue, “minor foxing,” contemporary calf, illus. ($625).  wd, 19 oct., #212, small-paper issue, contemporary calf worn, illus. (€60).  the leaves measure 24.5 x 14.8 cm. in uncut copies of the large-paper issue, 17.3 x 10.5 cm. in uncut copies of the small-paper issue. henry, memoirs of haller, 1783.  eb, aug.-sept., blake’s pl. water stained, modern boards and cloth spine, illus. ($217.99).   hoare, inquiry, 1806.  bow windows bookshop, april online cat., “rather foxed,” later cloth rebacked, illus. (£210).  henry sotheran, july online cat., contemporary half calf, illus. (£198). hogarth, works.  eb, dec. 2011, blake’s pl. only, a late st., probably 6th, water stains in margins, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $99.95 or “best offer”); same impression and price, jan.; same impression, feb. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $94.95 or “best offer”); another impression, june, 6th st., light brown stains, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $300); another impression, june-july, an early published st., possibly 3rd, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $300); another impression, july, a late st., possibly 5th, foxed, with hogarth, “southwark fair,” both illus. ($250); another impression, nov., a late st., possibly 6th, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $150).  shapes auction, edinburgh, 7 april, #780, st. not identified but possibly 7th, framed, illus. (£50).  michael finney, may online cat., blake’s pl. only from the 1822 ed., 4th st., illus. (£240); another impression, from an undated baldwin, cradock, and joy ed., 5th st. or later, apparently not the same impression offered in nov. 2009, illus. (£240).  up-country letters, oct. online cat., #6, blake’s pl. only, 6th st., framed, illus. ($650).  sk, 18 nov., #170, blake’s pl. in an early st., possibly 3rd, illus., with 3 other pls. not by blake ($390). hunter, historical journal, 1793.  joseph j. felcone, april online cat., quarto issue, modern half calf ($5500).  somerset house books, april online cat., octavo issue, losses to “side margin,” modern “half leather” ($3281).  tradewinds books, april online cat., octavo issue, contemporary calf, illus. ($2500).  read’s rare book shop, april online cat., octavo issue, scattered foxing, modern half calf, illus. ($2070).  eb, june, quarto issue, contemporary calf very worn, covers detached and backstrip missing, illus. ($1413.88).  william reese, july online cat., octavo issue, scattered foxing, recent three-quarter calf ($2000). josephus, works.  eb, feb., issue not indicated but dated to “c1792” by the vendor, contemporary boards very worn, covers loose, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $499.99); same copy offered at the “buy it now” price of $549.99 or “best offer”; another copy, july, bb issue c, scattered foxing, near contemporary morocco worn, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £675).  krown & spellman, april online cat., bb issue d or e, some tears and stains, “old cloth” ($850).  eric chaim kline, april online cat., bb issue b or c, foxed, morocco worn ($750). kimpton, history of the bible, c. 1781.  eb, nov., marginal stains, worn binding not described but front cover detached, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £199 or “best offer”). lavater, aphorisms, 1794.  john robertshaw, nov. cat. 126, #30, 3rd st. of the pl., contemporary calf, illus. (£165). lavater, essays on physiognomy.  jeremy norman, april online cat., 1789-98 ed., 3 vols. in 5, minor foxing, 19th-century quarter morocco worn, the same copy offered july 2008 at the same price ($2750).  finecopy, april online cat., 1789-98 ed., 3 vols. in 5, scattered foxing, contemporary calf rebacked, illus. (£1400).  krown & spellman, april online cat., “1792” (c. 1818) ed., scattered foxing, 3 vols. in 5, 18th-century russia rebacked, the same copy offered july 2008 at the same price ($1300).  bookworks, april online cat., “1792” (c. 1818) ed., 3 vols. in 5, stains and pencil marginalia, calf very worn, covers detached ($1000).  wittenborn art books, april online cat., 1789-98 ed., vols. 1 (presumably with blake’s 4 pls.) and 3 only in 3 vols., contemporary calf ($950).  eb, may-june, 1789-98 ed., 3 vols. in 5, half calf worn, illus. (£255); another copy, aug., contemporary calf rebacked, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £1300); same copy, sept., illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £1200 or “best offer”); aug., 1810 ed., 3 vols. in 5, scattered foxing, later half calf worn, illus. ($114); nov., 1789-98 ed., 3 vols. in 5 but lacking vol. 4, apparently with all blake’s pls., some pls. foxed, contemporary calf very worn, illus. ($96); dec., 1810 ed., 3 vols. in 5, later half calf very worn (vols. 1, 3-5) or buckram (vol. 2), illus. ($542—but possibly unsold or returned to the vendor); same copy, illus. ($152.50).  bg, 8 june, #89, 1789-98 ed., 3 vols. in 5, foxed, contemporary half morocco worn (£420).  heritage auction, beverly hills, california, 5 oct., #36113, a mixed set, 1789-1810, 3 vols. in 5, contemporary russia rebacked, illus. ($750).  gb, 29 nov., #5890, 1789-98 ed., 3 vols. in 5, quarter “leather” binding, illus. (€1000). malkin, father’s memoirs of his child, 1806.  a proof before all letters of blake’s single pl., with blake’s design completed but the oval portrait unfinished, leaf of wove paper without watermark 29.6 x 22.1 cm., slight marginal dust staining (acquired jan. by essick from david bindman).  this proof st., first mentioned in blake 40.4 (spring 2007): 133, is intermediate between the 2 proof sts. recorded and reproduced in blake 34.4 (spring 2001): 120, 126-27.  james cummins, march online cat., uncut in original boards rebacked, “endpapers renewed” ($1500).  chicago rare book center, march online cat., “handsomely rebound” ($995). nicholson, introduction to natural philosophy, 1787.  staniland books, april online cat., 2 vols., scattered foxing, contemporary calf rebacked (£350).  abécédaire, april online cat., 2 vols., contemporary boards (€250).  harlow mcmillen, april online cat., 2 vols., “leather” worn ($325). novelist’s magazine.  antiquariat a. makrocki, april online cat., 1780-89, 23 vols. apparently including all those with pls. by blake, contemporary “leather” (€3450).  best buy books, april online cat., don quixote, apparently vol. 8 of the novelist’s magazine without the general title page, dated “1795” by the vendor, later morocco (£350). rees, cyclopædia, 1820.  peter harrington, april online cat., 31 vols. (but apparently complete with blake’s pls.), pls. foxed, contemporary half calf (£2500).  russell rare books, 6 vols. of pls. only, some spotting, half calf very worn, covers loose (£1500). remember me!, 1825.  blake’s pl. only, the impression offered on eb, april 2011, sold aug. 2011 by ed buryn to louis girling, jr., san francisco ($6000).  for further information on this impression, see blake 45.4 (spring 2012): 125. richardson, the history of sir charles grandison, n.d. (imprints in the pls. dated 1811).  harris & harris, jan. online cat., 2 vols., later half calf worn, illus. (£98, acquired by essick).  vol. 1 contains 3 pls. engraved by blake after stothard first published in the novelist’s magazine, vol. 10 (1783).  it is reasonable to date the publication to c. 1811 because of the imprints in the pls.  in this copy, however, the badly stained frontispiece in vol. 1, a portrait of richardson not by blake, shows an 1814 watermark.  the copy in the bentley collection, victoria university library, toronto, contains the 3rd sts. of blake’s pls., but this copy has 4th sts., as in the 1818 reissue of vol. 1.  for further information, see christopher heppner, “notes on some items in the blake collection at mcgill with a few speculations around william roscoe,” blake 10.4 (spring 1977): 100-08, cb 30-33, and bbs 242-44 (incorrectly placing blake’s pls. 2-3 in vol. 2).  g. e. bentley, jr., acquired the copy now at victoria university from sanders of oxford in 1985,according to p. 89 in a typescript cat. of his collection kindly given to me by jerry bentley in 2004. but the present copy is the only one i’ve ever seen on the market. salzmann, elements of morality.  john gach, april online cat., 1791 ed., 3 vols. in 1, lacking pls. numbered 1, 4, 12, 21, 30-33, 44 (all but the 1st attributed to blake) and the title pages to vols. 1-2, “moderate staining,” near contemporary half calf ($850).  e c books, nov. online cat., 1791 (vols. 1-2), 1792 (vol. 3), vol. 1 lacking the frontispiece (not attributed to blake) and title page, some pages and pls. with tears, spotted and browned, contemporary half “leather” very worn, front cover to vol. 1 detached, illus. (£325). scott, poetical works, 1782.  ed buryn, april online cat., “marbled leather boards,” covers detached ($395).  a squared books, april online cat., foxed and stained, later cloth worn, repaired with tape ($266.80).  eb, june, pamela lister’s copy with her bookplate, contemporary half calf rebacked, illus. ($305). shakespeare, dramatic works, 1802.  peter harrington, april online cat., 9 vols., scattered foxing, contemporary calf repaired (£7500). shakespeare, plays, 1805.  eb, march, 10-vol. issue, contemporary calf worn, illus. ($799.99); sept.-oct., 9-vol. issue, each vol. offered separately, with blake’s 2 pls. in vols. 6 and 9, pls. foxed, contemporary half calf very worn, illus. (£9.99 each, apparently all to the same bidder reassembling a complete copy).  bl, 14 june, #426, 9-vol. issue, contemporary calf worn, illus. (£400). stedman, narrative, 1796, colored copy.  bhny, 16 april, #5130, 2 vols., minor marginal stains, contemporary calf rebacked, illus. ($13,750). stedman, narrative, uncolored copies.  shapero books, late 2011 “travel” cat., “part ii,” #190, 1796 ed., 2 vols., light foxing, contemporary half calf rebacked, illus. (£3500).  antiquariat daniel thierstein, april online cat., 1813 ed., 2 vols., new half calf, illus. ($5942).  bg, 27 april, #41, 1806 ed., 2 vols., lacking 6 pls., foxed and browned, margins damaged, half cloth very worn, illus. (£320).  gp, june online cat., blake’s pls. 3-5 and 9 only, illus. (£90 each for pls. 3 and 5, £70 each for pls. 4 and 9).  cromer books, june online cat., 1813 ed., 2 vols., half morocco (£2650).  eb, aug., blake’s pl. 4 only, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $245).  sue lowell books, sept. online cat., 1796 ed., 2 vols., foxed and stained, recent half calf (£7500).  bhl, 13 nov., #168, 1796 ed., 2 vols., “some spotting,” contemporary calf worn, illus. (£2750).  bl, 29 nov., #357, 1813 ed., 2 vols., “some spotting,” modern morocco, illus. (£1000).  see also stedman, 1799, under interesting blakeana, below. stuart and revett, antiquities of athens, 1762-1830.  sims reed, feb. cat. of “antiquarian books,” #72, complete in 5 vols., contemporary calf rebacked with newer calf spines (vols. 1-4) and publisher’s buckram rebacked (vol. 5), illus. (£30,000).  gp, sept. online cat., blake’s 4 pls. only, illus. (£680).  blake’s 4 pls. are in vol. 3 (1794). vetusta monumenta, vol. 2, c. 1789.  marlborough rare books, jan. cat. 218, #145, 4 vols. in 2, apparently including vol. 2 dated “1789” by marlborough, 227 engraved pls., scattered foxing, early 19th-century calf, illus. (£2500).  george robert minkoff, sept. cat. 2012-d, #8, 6 vols., 1718-1842,  330 engraved pls., scattered foxing, “imitation leather-backed boards” ($9500). virgil, pastorals, 1821.  bho, 31 jan., #254, vol. 1 only, st. paul’s school prize binding of contemporary calf very worn and rebacked with a new calf spine, illus. (£11,875 to the london dealer sims reed for stock; estimate £300-500); same copy, feb. los angeles book fair, offered by sims reed for $38,000 (sold march to a british private collector).  blake’s wood engravings are all in vol. 1.  at least 2 other copies of both vols., essick collection and a set sold cny, 10 dec. 1999, #110 ($18,400 to the dealer simon finch), are in the same st. paul’s prize binding.  eb, aug., 4 intaglio engravings (not the wood engravings) only, bb pls. 1-4, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $195).  dl, 1 nov., #402, blake’s 5th and 6th wood engravings (bb pls. 9, 10) only, probably linnell impressions, framed together, illus. (£400). virgil, the wood engravings of william blake for thornton’s virgil, 1977.  sims reed, nov. online cat., publisher’s folding box (£3500).  bhl, 27 nov., #33, publisher’s folding box, illus. (not sold; estimate £3000-5000). wit’s magazine, 1784-85.  david spode, april online cat., with bb pl. 2 (cb pl. 1b) bound as the frontispiece, later half morocco ($3246).  john windle, nov. cat. 50, #7, contemporary boards, modern calf backstrip, illus. ($5750). young, night thoughts, 1797.  subun-so, march cat., #14, leaves 42.0 x 33.5 cm., no mention of the “explanation” leaf, half morocco, illus. ($14,540).  donald heald, march online cat., with the “explanation” leaf, “a tall copy, untrimmed at the fore and lower edges,” later three-quarter morocco ($15,000).  peter harrington, april online cat., with the “explanation” leaf, ownership inscription of george kelly dated 1823, contemporary morocco worn and repaired, cloth folding case, illus. (£12,500); same copy, battersea books, july private offer (£7500).  sims reed, may cat. for the london book fair, #11, with the “explanation” leaf, “contemporary(?) ownership signature ‘caroline scott’ in black ink to title,” 19th-century half morocco, later slipcase (£12,500).  gb, 29 nov., #5916, pls. trimmed close with some imprints trimmed off, later shagreen, modern slipcase, illus. (€8500). interesting blakeana the judgment of solomon after raphael, attributed to blake.  oil, 36.2 x 41.3 cm.  leslie hindman auction, chicago, 2 may, #403, illus. ($527).  not by blake, and not to be confused with the watercolor judgment of solomon after raphael that may well be by blake.  for the watercolor, see blake 36.4 (spring 2003): 116-19, illus. 3. j. g. stedman, voyage à surinam, paris, 1798.  eb, july, “collection de planches” (title page) only, a quarto vol. of 44 pls. to accompany a french translation of stedman’s narrative, contemporary (publisher’s?) quarter calf, illus. ($1524.99).  librairie b. guilbert, july online cat., 3 vols. of text and 1 vol. of pls., half calf  (€4550).  la poussière du temps, july online cat., 3 vols. of text and 1 vol. of pls., contemporary sheep (€3500).  gemilang, july online cat., pls. vol. only, half calf (€2950).  hs rare books, july online cat., 3 vols. of text and 1 vol. of pls., foxed, 19th-century calf worn (text vols.), later boards (pls. vol.), illus. ($3500).  these french pls. were almost certainly copied after the pls. in the 1st ed. (1796) of stedman’s book, including blake’s pls. 1, 2, 4, 5, 8-10, 12, 13, and 15.  the french engraver signed each pl. “tardieu l’ainé.”there were at least 11 engravers named tardieu active from the early 18th to the mid-19th century. the date of this publication and the death dates of various members of the family suggest that the engraver of the pls. for stedman’s work was probably jean baptiste pierre tardieu (1746-1816), who specialized in geographical subjects. he may have added “l’ainé” (the elder) to his name to distinguish his work from engravings by his two younger brothers, antoine françois (1757-1822) and jean baptiste tardieu (1768-1837). antijacobin review and magazine, 1799-1820.  james burmester, july cat. 85, #58, vols. 1-23, 25-27, 29-58, early 19th-century half calf worn (£2500).  vol. 31, nov. 1808 issue, includes a long review of cromek’s ed. of blair’s grave with blake’s illus.  the anonymous reviewer characterizes blake’s designs as “absurd effusions” (bb #952). j. thomas, religious emblems, 1809.  stuart bennett, nov. private offer, uncut in original boards rebacked with roan, covers and spine worn ($600).  “william blake, esq.” appears in the list of subscribers—see bb #746.  the possibility that this is the poet and artist is increased by the fact that thomas commissioned some of blake’s watercolors illustrating milton’s poetry—see butlin #527, 529, 538.  for a discussion of this book, see karl josef höltgen, “religious emblems (1809) by john thurston and joseph thomas and its links with francis quarles and william blake,” emblematica 10.1 (summer 1996): 107-43. lady’s monthly museum, vol. 12, jan.-june 1812.  panoply books, jan. online cat., contemporary (publisher’s?) half calf worn ($175).  the june issue includes an anonymous review of the 5th annual exhibition of the associated painters in water colors (1812) with brief references to works blake exhibited.  the reviewer describes “no. 254” in the show, blake’s tempera painting of sir jeffery chaucer and the nine and twenty pilgrims on their journey to canterbury (butlin #653), as a picture of mongrel excellence; yet has such a repulsive appearance, that we doubt most of our fair readers will scarcely view it with pleasure, unless they should be well acquainted with aunciente tapestrye, to enter into its merits.  that it is the work of genius, no one will deny; it possesses all the truth, the costume, and manners of the times; and the artist is perhaps worthy of the highest commendation for his industry, research, and correctness; but for our parts, we feel ourselves so perfectly satisfied with the same subject, as treated by stothard, that we wish not to possess a picture whose greatest merit seems to be an imitation of the arts in their degraded state. (344) these comments indicate that the reviewer understood that blake had integrated into his work features of style and format recalling (or reinventing) the pictorial arts of chaucer’s time, yet the reviewer cannot accept such historical references because “the arts” were then in a “degraded state,” mockingly intimated by the faux-archaic spelling of “aunciente tapestrye.”  the reviewer apparently found the painting disturbingly old fashioned, but blake was ahead of his time in his attempt at historical accuracy and in the appreciation of medieval (or at least pre-raphaelite) painting and tapestry.  the reviewer “declines giving any criticism” of “pictures 323 and 324, by the same artist [blake],” because they are “too sublime for our comprehension,” but labels them as “fuselian” and “angelesque” (344).  the works displayed as 324 were “detached specimens of an original illuminated poem, entitled ‘jerusalem the emanation of the giant albion’ ” (associated painters 1812 cat., 24).  the reference to “323” is apparently an error; that work was a view of “avo on the alva, in the siera estrulla, portugal” by “j. shetky” (1812 cat., 24).  as bbs 350 suggests, the reviewer may have intended to reference 279 and/or 280, blake’s the spiritual form of pitt guiding behemoth and the spiritual form of nelson guiding leviathan (1812 cat., 21; butlin #651, 649). a. and j. taylor, city scenes, 1818.  ian marr, sept. cat. 5, #86, roan-backed boards worn (£275).  the 1st ed. of city scenes to contain blake’s “holy thursday” from songs of innocence.  the accompanying wood engraving shows boys being led out of church by two beadles.  for an illus. of this print, see blake 44.4 (spring 2011): 127, illus. 4.  bb #260a (see also p. 954, #260a). w. blake, for the sexes: the gates of paradise, pl. 10, printed c. 1825.  sk, 7 sept., #30, misidentified as a pl. from for children: the gates of paradise, “plate size” (platemark) 12.0 x 8.8 cm., framed, illus. (not sold or possibly withdrawn; estimate $1200-1800).  although the print was offered as an original, the size of the platemark indicates that this is the w. a. white facsimile of c. 1913 (bb #46, bbs 80), probably based on copy d of for the sexes.  the platemark of original impressions is 9.3 x 6.3 cm.  boys’ and girls’ magazine.  ed. mrs. s. colman. vol. 2, 1843.  centerbridge books, jan. online cat., may-aug. issues, publisher’s quarter calf ($60).  the july issue includes blake’s “introduction” to songs of innocence (with an illus. and a note about blake); the aug. issue includes “the blossom” from songs of innocence.  bbs 147, 150, 157.  for a discussion of blake’s poems printed in works edited by colman, see raymond h. deck, jr., “an american original: mrs. colman’s illustrated printings of blake’s poems, 1843-44,” blake 11.1 (summer 1977): 4-18.  new church magazine for children, vol. 6, 1848.  canterbury tales books, jan. online cat., scattered foxing, publisher’s boards worn ($12).  the jan. issue, pp. 17-18, includes “night” from songs of innocence, but with lines 33-48 omitted (bbs 148, 158). a. gilchrist, life of william blake, 1863.  john windle, nov. cat. 50, #9, 2 vols., extra-illustrated with 35 pls., including all 13 pls. from mora, meditaciones poeticas (1826), blake’s pl. 1 (title page) from blair, the grave (1808 quarto), all 6 pls. from hayley, triumphs of temper (1803), blake’s pl. from lavater, aphorisms on man (1788), pls. 1-3 and 5 from hayley, life of cowper (1803-04), blake’s pl. 1 from darwin, botanic garden (1791), and blake’s pls. 1-9 from gay, fables (1793), “occasional spotting or foxing,” 19th-century calf rebacked ($3500). w. blake, the marriage of heaven and hell, camden hotten facsimile, 1868.  heritage auction, beverly hills, california, 5 oct., #36822, later morocco, slipcase, illus. ($1500).  bl, 29 nov., #177, foxed, publisher’s boards, with 10 other vols. related to blake (£220). w. b. scott, etched portrait of blake, 1881.  gp, april online cat., published st. with the 15 oct. 1881 imprint and after removal of the etched remarque (a detail from blake’s tempera the nativity) lower left, 1 of 75 impressions thus, no description of the paper, illus. (£240).  maggs, may private offer, 4 impressions of the published st. after removal of the remarque, platemark 31.7 x 25.1 cm., image 21.1 x 16.0 cm., laid india paper on very large backing leaves of wove paper 69.3 x 50.1 cm. (not priced); same 4, john windle, may private offer ($375 each).  eb, june, published st. with the remarque, platemark and image as above, laid india paper on backing leaf of wove paper 69.3 x 50.0 cm., 1 of 25 impressions thus, illus. (£41).  kelmscott bookshop, oct. cat. 8, #59, literary anecdotes of the nineteenth century, ed. w. robertson nicoll and thomas j. wise, 1895-96, 2 vols., including scott’s portrait of blake as the frontispiece to vol. 1, pl. trimmed to 19.1 x 13.5 cm. and image to 18.9 x 13.3 cm. (presumably to fit the size of the book), limited to 1000 copies, publisher’s cloth worn, bindings illus. ($175).  copied after an oil painting by an unknown artist that in turn was based either on the oil portrait of blake by thomas phillips (1807) or on schiavonetti’s engraving after phillips published in r. h. cromek’s 1808 ed. of blair, the grave.  see geoffrey keynes, the complete portraiture of william and catherine blake (london: trianon p for the blake trust, 1977) 124-25. w. blake, the book of thel, william muir facsimile, 1885.  bl, 29 nov., #180, copy no. 21, marginal stains on 1 leaf, original wrappers, cloth folder and slipcase, illus. (£550).  w. blake, songs of innocence, william muir facsimile, 1885.  phillip pirages, nov. cat. 63, #72, copy no. 49, original wrappers worn, modern clamshell box, illus. ($5000).  bl, 29 nov., #181, copy no. 35, bound with muir’s facsimile of songs of experience, 1885, copy no. 50, slight marginal soiling, half morocco, original wrappers bound in, illus. (£2000). w. blake, visions of the daughters of albion, william muir facsimile, 1885.  bl, 29 nov., #179, copy no. 34, light soiling, later half morocco, original wrappers bound in, illus. (£1100). w. blake, little tom the sailor, william muir facsimile, 1886.  eb, oct.-nov., the headpiece and tailpiece hand colored, illus. ($1302).  see illus. 17.  17. w. blake, little tom the sailor, lithographic facsimile by william muir, 1886.  detail of the headpiece printed in black ink, 11.2 x 16.2 cm., and the top margin.  inscribed in pen and brown ink “no 3 wm muir” upper left, this headpiece and the tailpiece hand colored in imitation of the british museum copy of the original, full leaf of wove paper without watermark 60.3 x 23.0 cm.  essick collection.  the only signed and numbered copy, and the only hand-colored copy, i have ever seen.  according to the printed front wrapper of his 1887 facsimile of europe, muir states that his little tom is “from mr. gilchrist’s copy,” now untraced.  the london book dealer bernard quaritch, distributor of muir’s facsimiles, records the delivery from muir of a “coloured” copy of little tom on 11 may 1925; see g. e. bentley, jr., “‘blake … had no quaritch’: the sale of william muir’s blake facsimiles,” blake 27.1 (summer 1993): 10.  quaritch’s cat. 401 of may 1926 offers as item 243 a muir facsimile of little tom with “two illustrations coloured by hand from the copy in the british museum” for £1.1s.  this cat. dates the work to “1925,” apparently the date of coloring, possibly of printing, but not of original execution as a lithograph.  the same entry appears in quaritch’s dec. 1926 cat. 405, item 256, 1929 cat. 427, item 248, and 1930 cat. 434, item 2065. w. blake, illustrations of milton’s comus, 8 chromolithographs by w. griggs, published by quaritch, 1890.  phillip pirages, nov. cat. 63, #71, loose in original wrappers, “blake’s eight drawings to illustrate milton’s comus” printed on a label affixed to the front wrapper, illus. ($950). night by william blake, illus. by roberta f. c. waudby.  london: medici society, n.d.  eb, nov., publisher’s printed wrappers a little browned, illus. (£63.10).  blake’s poem from songs of innocence printed as a pamphlet of 4 leaves (including the wrappers).  datable to the 1930s when waudby was active.  not in bb or bbs. j. miró, relief etching in imitation of blake’s method, 1947.  bl, 28 june, #175, poem by ruthven todd with illus. by miró, “soft-ground etching (the william blake method)” but probably a relief etching, printed in 3 colors, 1 of 8 impressions printed by stanley william hayter, wove paper 17.6 x 13.7 cm., illus. (not sold; estimate £8000-10,000).  lots 173-74 (not sold; estimates £4000-6000 each) may be similar experiments by miró, todd, and hayter in blake’s relief-etching techniques.  see ruthven todd, “william blake’s illuminated printing,” print: a quarterly journal of the graphic arts 6.1 (1948): 53-64, also published as “william blake’s illuminated painting [sic],” print collector’s quarterly 29.3 (nov. 1948): 25-[37].  both publications of todd’s essay include a reproduction of a monochrome impression of the same work sold by bl as #175. a. ginsberg, your reason and blake’s system, 1988.  william reese, may cat. 293, #114, presentation inscription and drawing by ginsberg to lucien carr dated “2/11/89,” 1 of 100 copies of “the very uncommon clothbound issue,” presentation illus. ($950). e. paolozzi (british sculptor, 1924-2005), sculptures based on blake’s newton color print.  sl, 6 nov., #8, titled after blake’s newton, bronze, 44.5 cm. high, “signed, dated 1994, numbered a/c and inscribed for george daniels,” with 2 plaster reliefs of the same design, dated 1987 and 1993, illus. (£73,250).  bhl, 13 nov., #278, titled newton after blake, plaster relief plaque, 15.5 x 21.5 cm., signed and dated 1992, illus. (£1250); 14 nov., #109, titled master of the universe, bronze, 40.5 cm. long, signed and dated 1999, illus. (not sold; estimate £40,000-60,000).  eb, nov.-dec., plaster relief plaque attributed to paolozzi, 19.1 x 24.1 cm., with several cracks in the plaster and a bit crude but closer to blake’s representation of newton’s body than paolozzi’s monumental version in the forecourt of the british library, illus. (£78.89). blake’s circle and followers works are listed under artists’ names in the following order: paintings and drawings sold in groups, single paintings and drawings, letters and manuscripts, separate pls., books by (or with pls. by or after) the artist. barry, james compositional study.  pen and ink, 24.8 x 31.8 cm.  cl, 10 july, #9, illus. (£1063). “the distribution of premiums at the society of arts,” etching, imprint dated 1791.  eb, sept., possibly 1st or 2nd st., leaf 43.0 x 52.8 cm., stain upper left margin, framed, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $4850 or “best offer”). “job reproved by his friends,” etching and aquatint, 1st st., 1777.  gb, 29 nov., #5857, printed in brown, thread margins on sides and at top, with barry’s etching “a grecian harvest home,” 1791, st. not recorded, “job” illus. (€37,000 to the rijksmuseum, amsterdam; estimate €3000).  this must be a record price for any print or group of prints by barry.  his “job reproved” influenced blake’s “job” drawings of the 1780s (butlin #162-64) and the separate pl. of 1793 (sp v) based on those drawings.  early sts. of barry’s pls. are exceptionally rare. “jupiter and juno on mount ida,” etching/engraving, 2nd st., c. 1790.  hill-stone, nov. new york print fair, with residual aquatint from the 1st st. of 1777 (price on request).  illus. in burlington magazine 154 (oct. 2012): [xiv].  “venus anadyomene,” mezzotint by valentine green, 1772.  gp, may online cat., apparently not the same impression offered in 2009 for £520, illus. (£980). basire, james “the encampment of the english forces near portsmouth, together with a view of the english and french fleets at the commencement of the action between them on the xixth. of july mdxlv,” engraving after a painting at cowdray, sussex, 1778.  eb, june, wrinkled with water stain lower left, illus. (withdrawn). “landscape,” etching after guercino.  eb, dec. 2011, reddish-brown ink, foxed, framed, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $499.99 or “best offer”); same impression, aug., illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $334.99).  possibly a pl. published by boydell in eighty-two prints, engraved by f. bartolozzi, &c., from the original drawings by guercino, in the collection of his majesty, n.d. (1764?).  “the procession of king edward vi from the tower of london to westminster, february 1547,” engraving after s. h. grimm, 1787.  bhl, 22 feb., #55, hand colored, illus. (not sold; estimate £600-800); same impression, 2 may, #30, illus. (£62). “sir george savile bart,” engraved by benjamin wilson and basire after wilson’s painting, 1770.  gp, aug. online cat., illus. (£190). garrick, the farmer’s return from london, 1762.  eb, sept., frontispiece only after hogarth, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of €14.99); another impression, illus. (£7.50). rogers, collection of prints in imitation of drawings, 1778.  eb, dec. 2011, 1 pl. only, “scilurus recommending concord to his sons” after pietro da cortona, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of €120); 1 pl. only, “a subject unknown from michel angelo” after giovanni battista franco, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of €70); probably the same impression, dec., illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of €40); may, 1 pl. only, “the discovery of achilles” after domenico maria canuti, stained, illus. (£9.99); july, 1 pl. only, “the birth of jupiter” after caravaggio, light foxing, framed, illus. (£56); sept., 1 pl. only, “hinc terræ tremor, hinc motus” after raphael, illus. (£0.99); 1 pl. only, “time” after pieter rysbrack, illus. (£4.99).  for illus. and discussion of the pl. after raphael, see blake 38.4 (spring 2005): cover and 134-35. stuart and revett, antiquities of athens, 1762.  csk, 21 march, #103, vol. 1 only, stained, some pls. loose, uncut in contemporary half sheep worn, illus. (£3750).  see also under letterpress books with engravings by and after blake, above. thomson, works, 1762.  eb, may, frontispiece to vol. 2 only, engraved by basire after “t(?) paton,” illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £30). calvert, edward iasius, the old arcadian, teaching the mysteries of demeter.  oil, 14.0 x 24.8 cm., signed.  cl, 10 july, #148, illus. (£3500).  previously sold cl, 11 nov. 1997, #51, illus. (£4025). a rural idyll.  oil, 21.5 x 39.8 cm., inscribed on a verso label “e. calvert bought of the artist 1872.”  fine art society, may-june “samuel palmer [and] his friends and his followers” cat., #18, illus. (“sold”). “the bride,” engraving, 3rd st.  fine art society, may-june “samuel palmer [and] his friends and his followers” cat., #21, from the memoir, 1893, illus. (£5000). “the chamber idyll,” wood engraving, 3rd st.  fine art society, may-june “samuel palmer [and] his friends and his followers” cat., #24, from the memoir, 1893, illus. (£7500).  dl, 1 nov., #400, probably from the memoir, 1893, framed, illus. (£2200). “the flood,” lithograph, only st.  fine art society, may-june “samuel palmer [and] his friends and his followers” cat., #22, 1904 printing, illus. (£3750). “ideal pastoral life,” lithograph, only st.  fine art society, may-june “samuel palmer [and] his friends and his followers” cat., #23, 1904 printing, illus. (£8500). “the ploughman,” wood engraving, 3rd st.  fine art society, may-june “samuel palmer [and] his friends and his followers” cat., #19, illus. (“sold”). “the return home,” wood engraving.  see “the sheep of his pasture,” below. “the sheep of his pasture,” engraving, 2nd st.  fine art society, may-june “samuel palmer [and] his friends and his followers” cat., #20, from the memoir, 1893, illus. (“sold”).  dl, 1 nov., #399, with “the return home,” 2nd st., framed together, illus. (£480). cumberland, george an oblong quarto album of drawings and prints by cumberland.  larkhall fine art, oct. private offer (£4500; acquired by victoria university library, toronto).  a full description will be published in g. e. bentley, jr., “william blake and his circle: a checklist of publications and discoveries in 2012,” blake 47.1 (summer 2013). flaxman, john online listings of flaxman’s classical compositions with insufficient information to identify the ed. have been excluded.  individual prints of flaxman’s classical designs offered on eb and 19th-century re-engravings of flaxman’s designs, such as those on a reduced scale by henry moses, are not included.  see also flaxman under letterpress books with engravings by and after blake, above. two pencil drawings, 1 of rising and falling figures including a study for pl. 33 (“the brethren of saturn delivered”) of flaxman’s hesiod designs engraved by blake, 1 a preliminary sketch for pl. 37 (“the judgment of paris”) among flaxman’s iliad designs.  eb, may, both on laid paper, no sizes given, framed, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $2500).  designs for a classical relief.  pencil, pen and gray ink, gray wash, 16.1 x 29.2 cm., inscribed “flaxman, roma 1789.”  cny, 26 jan., #41, illus. ($21,250; estimate $4000-6000). girl at a table.  pencil, 17.1 x 13.3 cm.  ah, dec. online cat. 422, #29, illus. (£775). a man with a boy on his lap.  pen and ink, 7.0 x 7.0 cm.  go, 10 may, #1421, foxed, illus. (not sold; estimate £400-600); 28 june, #1246, illus. (not sold; estimate £200-300). the misses harrison, sharpe, and rogers and mrs. sharpe at samuel rogers’s party.  pen and ink, 20.3 x 16.5 cm., inscribed with the names and dated june 1800.  csk, 18 july, #789, with “a study of a group of young people” and “a study of a girl” by flaxman, illus. (£2250).  ah, nov. online cat., no item #, illus. (£4500); dec. online cat. 422, no item #, illus. (same price).  previously offered w/s fine art and andrew wyld, june 2005 cat., #23, illus. (£7500), and june 2011 cat., #22, illus. (£3750). seated girl.  pencil, 17.1 x 11.4 cm.  ah, dec. online cat. 422, #28, illus. (£675).   study of a leg.  pencil, 23.0 x 18.0 cm.  cheffins auction, cambridge, 14 june, #677, illus.  (£600). study of a statue of a figure holding a ewer.  monochrome washes over pencil, 73.5 x 38.0 cm., partial inscription “7th[?] chapel st. john” upper left verso.  bl, 14 nov., #608, illus. (£1200).  previously offered sl, 13 nov. 1997, #33, titled study of st. john the evangelist holding a chalice, illus. (not sold; estimate £4000-6000), and sl, 26 nov. 1998, #27, illus. (not sold; estimate £2000-3000). study of figures, possibly rome.  pencil, pen and ink, 6.4 x 7.6 cm.  ah, aug. online cat. 419, #25, framed, illus. (£400).   acts of mercy, 1831.  dw, 11 april, #452, presentation inscription “from the publisher miss maria denman, dated january 1st 1856,” water stains, contemporary cloth very worn and “crudely rebacked,” illus. (not sold; estimate £200-300).  eb, sept.-oct., with 2 duplicate pls., foxed, loose in contemporary boards, calf spine damaged, illus. ($122.22). aeschylus designs.  see iliad, below. dante designs.  eb, jan., carlsruhe ed., c. 1835, 25 inferno pls. only, scattered foxing, contemporary half calf worn, bookplate of woburn abbey on inside front cover, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £98); may, 1807 ed., foxed, wrinkled, and water stained, 19th-century calf very worn, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of €160); same copy, june (offered at the “buy it now” price of €150); june, milan ed., 1822, contemporary calf worn, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of €550); oct., del vecchio ed., c. 1820, marginal foxing, contemporary vellum worn and stained, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £320 or “best offer”); nov., réveil ed., 1847, early boards worn, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $750 or “best offer”).  dy, 5 nov., #368, 1802 ed., “spotting,” later morocco worn, illus. ($469).  gb, 29 nov., #5910, 1802 ed., modern paper binding, illus. (€500). hancarville, antiquités etrusques, grecques et romaines … tirées du cabinet de m. hamilton, 1766-c. [1776].  bhl, 12 june, #85, vols. 1-3 and part of 4 bound in 3, “ownership signatures of john flaxman on front paste-downs,” light spotting and damp staining, contemporary half calf worn, covers detached, illus. (not sold; estimate £15,000-20,000). iliad designs.  eb, jan.-feb., 1795 ed., bound with the aeschylus (1795) and odyssey (1805) designs, foxed, contemporary half calf very worn, covers detached, illus. (£88); april, lithographs by feillet and laqueson, paris, n.d. (c. 1823), with the odyssey designs by the same, scattered foxing, contemporary quarter morocco worn, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of €248). odyssey designs.  eb, feb., 1870 ed., foxed, publisher’s boards worn, rebacked, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $9.99).  see also iliad, above. fuseli, henry fairy mab.  oil, 70.0 x 91.0 cm., datable to 1793.  richard l. feigen & co., frieze art fair, london, 9-14 oct. (price on request).  see illus. 18. 18. henry fuseli. fairy mab. oil, 70.0 x 91.0 cm., datable to 1793. the design is based on a single line in milton’s “l’allegro”: “how faery mab the junkets eat.” she seems to be enjoying her “junkets”—that is, sweet delicacies. the crescent in her elaborate coiffure associates her with moon goddesses, or at least with the nighttime setting of milton’s description. weinglass 350 (following schiff—see below) describes the figure in the shadows upper right as mab’s “dwarfish companion the brownie.” no brownie, a benevolent spirit or goblin in scottish folklore (see oed), appears in milton’s poem, although such a creature may have been suggested by the “spicy nut-brown ale” consumed by those telling tales about mab in “l’allegro.” alternatively, the figure may be a personification of the ale that inspires faery visions. perhaps mercutio’s powerfully imaginative description of “queen mab” in shakespeare’s romeo and juliet, act 1, scene 4, influenced fuseli’s choice of subject. an engraving of the design by william raddon was published by ackermann & co. in 1834 (weinglass #305). fuseli executed the painting for inclusion as no. 30 in his milton gallery. for studies of this project, see gert schiff, johann heinrich füsslis milton-galerie (zurich: fretz & wasmuth, 1963), this painting discussed p. 94, and luisa calè, fuseli’s milton gallery: “turning readers into spectators” (oxford: clarendon p, 2006), this painting not discussed. photo courtesy of richard l. feigen & co. king priam begging achilles for the body of hector.  pen and ink, brown wash, 26.4 x 36.6 cm., datable to c. 1770-71, inscribed “villa borghese” lower right.  sl, 4 july, #177, illus. (£133,250; estimate £40,000-60,000). a male nude figure, seated (recto), studies of lovers, a kneeling female figure, and a chequerboard (verso).  pen and brown ink, 21.6 x 17.8 cm.  martyn gregory, may online cat., illus. (price on request).  previously sold sl, 6 june 2007, #187, recto illus. (£3600). a male nude figure, seated on a step.  pencil, 19.1 x 19.1 cm., inscribed “108,” datable to 1777.  martyn gregory, may online cat., illus. (price on request).  prophet after michelangelo.  pen and ink and wash, 12.7 x 12.7 cm.  go, 10 may, #1422, illus. (£1500). sketches of figures.  pencil, pen and brown ink, black and red wash on the recto and verso of a letter to fuseli from prince hoare, leaf 19.8 x 25.0 cm. with an 1804 watermark.  cny, 26 jan., #43, illus. (not sold; estimate an overly optimistic $20,000-30,000). “caractacus at the tribunal,” engraved by a. birrell, 1792.  keys auction, aylsham, norfolk, 11 may, #213, with an engraving after james northcote, illus. (£35). “evening thou bringest all,” lithograph, 1803.  campbell fine art, jan. online cat., 1st st. on original backing leaf with aquatint border, illus. (£7500). “the night mare,” engraving by thomas burke, 1802 reissue of the 1783 pl.  gp, nov. online cat., hand colored, “damaged,” illus. (£320). “prince arthur’s vision,” engraving by peltro william tomkins, 1788.  eb, june, imprint trimmed off, marginal abrasion lower right, framed, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $65); same impression, aug.-sept., illus. ($25). “sleeping woman with a cupid,” drypoint, c. 1780-90.  gb, 29 nov., #5240, imprint trimmed off, dust stained, minor spotting, illus. (€2000). “les sorcières,” engraving signed “barathier” (mathieu barathier, french engraver active c. 1810-40), 23.0 x 29.0 cm., published paris, 1813.  gp, april online cat., wide margins damaged at top, presentation inscription in pencil by barathier to “monsieur viennet,” illus. (£1450).  probably a copy, reversed, of j. r. smith’s mezzotint “the weird sisters” (1785) or p. w. tomkins’s engraving “the witches” (1786).  not in weinglass. bell’s british theatre, 1791-93.  eb, may, vol. 3 only, 1791, with “mathew complains to bobadill” engraved by charles grignion, contemporary calf very worn, illus. (£20.10); vol. 14 only, 1792, with “dying osmond stabs sigismunda” engraved by francis legat, contemporary calf very worn, part of the spine missing, illus. (£6.99); vol. 15 only, 1792, with “oedipus implores the gods” engraved by thomas holloway, contemporary calf very worn, illus. (£14.50). bible, macklin ed., 1800.  eb, june, 6 vols. in 7, contemporary morocco, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $15,750).  james cummins, june cat. 112, #24, 7 vols. including the apocrypha (1816), scattered foxing, richly gilt contemporary morocco, binding illus. ($18,000). bible, a practical family bible, notes by willoughby, 1773.  eb, july, 2 vols., contemporary calf worn, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £200 or “best offer”); same copy, aug., illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £225).  for comments on the pls. after fuseli in this bible, see blake 43.4 (spring 2010): 138. boothby, sorrows sacred to the memory of penelope, 1796.  eb, june, large-paper copy, 1st st. of the frontispiece after fuseli, modern half calf, illus. ($512).  boydell, collection of prints … illustrating … shakspeare, c. 1803.  sims reed, feb. cat. of “antiquarian books,” #13, 2 vols. in 1, later morocco, illus. (£7500).  gb, 29 nov., #5917, 2 vols. in 1, marginal water stains, half “leather,” illus. (€1800).  individual pls. in published sts. are not listed. boydell’s graphic illustrations … of shakspeare, c. 1803.  see under letterpress books with engravings by and after blake, above. cooke’s illustrations to the british theatre, c. 1821.  eb, jan., scattered foxing, contemporary calf worn, illus. (offered at the hefty “buy it now” price of £355). darwin, temple of nature, 1803.  subun-so, march cat., #167, final leaf repaired, modern quarter calf, illus. ($1818). fuseli, remarks on the writings and conduct of j. j. rousseau, 1767.  eb, dec., “no binding,” illus. ($51). gray, poems, du roveray ed., 1801.  eb, sept., some pages “coming loose,” original boards and linen spine very worn, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of £39.99). hamerton, ed., portfolio, 1873.  eb, jan., 1 pl. only, “the three witches,” lithograph by e. h. mitchell, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $48). homer, odyssey, 1810.  eb, nov., vol. 2 only, contemporary calf very worn, front cover loose, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $88). lavater, aphorisms, new york, 1790.  cobnar books, march private offer, contemporary sheepskin rebacked (£145).  see also under letterpress books with engravings by and after blake, above. lavater, essays on physiognomy, 1797.  eb, april, 1 pl. only, “satan” engraved by john barlow, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $99.95).  see weinglass #89a, variant 1.  see also under letterpress books with engravings by and after blake, above. linton, thirty pictures by deceased british artists, 1860.  eb, aug., 1 pl. only, “the witches in ‘macbeth,’” wood engraving by linton after fuseli, illus. (£10.50). milton, poetical works, published by john sharpe, london, 1805.  eb, april, 2 vols., 19th-century calf, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £60).  this issue not in weinglass, but the 2 pls. after fuseli are identical to weinglass #180-81 published in sharpe’s ed. of milton, paradise lost, 1805.  except for their title pages, the letterpress texts of these 2 works are the same. milton, poetical works, 1836.  eb, dec. 2011, “leather” worn, front cover detached (offered at the “buy it now” price of $54); same copy and price, jan.-feb. and may. penny magazine of the society for the diffusion of useful knowledge, vol. 1, issue of 14 july 1832.  eb, aug., disbound, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £3.50).  includes john jackson’s wood engraving of “lycidas” after fuseli. a series of engravings to illustrate the works of shakespeare, 1822.  gb, 29 nov., #5918, half “leather,” illus. (€250). shakespeare, plays, 1805.  see under letterpress books with engravings by and after blake, above. winckelmann, reflections on the painting and sculpture of the greeks, 1765.  bl, 19 july, #296, contemporary vellum soiled, illus. (£250). linnell, john the barley cart, attributed to linnell.  oil, 17.8 x 22.8 cm., signed.  eb, march, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $3500).  previously offered as study for “the barley cart,” eb, feb. and march-april 2009.  a bit crude; possibly a pastiche of linnell’s typical motifs by another artist.  similar to the painting by linnell of the same title sold sl, 26 june 2001, #381, illus. (£80,500), but with the addition of a windmill upper left. the brook.  oil, 20.5 x 31.0 cm., signed.  bellmans auction, billingshurst, sussex, 2 aug., #550, elaborately framed, illus. (£550). a cottage in a wooded landscape.  black and white chalks on blue paper, 19.7 x 25.7 cm.  csk, 18 june, #821, illus. (£1063).  previously offered agnew’s, march 2000 cat., #26 (price on application). country landscape.  oil, 64.1 x 97.8 cm., signed and dated 1859.  go, 6 dec., #1260, illus. (£2200; estimate £300-500).  although offered as “circle of john linnell,” there is a good chance that this painting is by linnell, as the price realized suggests. dover, the beach and cliffs.  pencil and white chalk on buff paper, 11.4 x 15.9 cm., signed and inscribed with the title.  mallams auction, oxford, 18 july, #174, illus. (not sold; estimate £600-800); 3 oct., #312, illus. (£180). end of the day, attributed to linnell.  oil, 45.7 x 61.0 cm., signed.  john moran auction, altadena, california, 17 april, #16, illus. ($1320).  possibly an early work in the style of george morland. harvesters in an evening landscape, attributed to linnell.  oil, 35.6 x 50.8 cm.  john nicholson auction, haslemere, surrey, 27 sept., #259, illus. (£1400). infant in a bonnet.  pencil heightened with white, 27.9 x 20.3 cm., signed “j. l.— / septr 30/ 1819.”  john nicholson auction, haslemere, surrey, 28 feb., #83, “wrapped in a later paper sheet, roughly inscribed ‘k. read’s portrait by linnell,’” illus. (no price information, possibly not sold or withdrawn; estimate £300-500).  the infant may have been related to linnell’s friend, the artist david charles read (1790-1851).  he never married (see odnb); i can find no record of read’s having children.  according to linnell’s journal, “mr blake & mr read [were] with me all day” on 8 sept. 1821 (br[2] 379).  read and blake shared an uncommon means of production: both etched their own designs and printed them on their own rolling presses. landscape.  oil, 25.4 x 40.6 cm.  eb, oct.-nov., “signed with monogram lower right,” framed, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $3500). north wales mountains.  pencil, 11.0 x 17.0 cm., signed.  dl, 1 nov., #362, framed, illus. (£380). path through a wood, attributed to linnell.  oil, 41.0 x 51.0 cm.  woolley & wallis auction, salisbury, 19 sept., #94, illus. (£250).  previously offered woolley & wallis, 28 sept. 2011, #148, illus. (not sold; estimate £400-600). piping down the valleys wild.  oil, 55.9 x 68.6 cm., signed.  csk, 20 march, #591, illus. (£1500).  the design bears no relationship to the frontispiece or “introduction” to songs of innocence, the basis for the title given this painting by dealers.  previously sold csk, 12 march 1998, #176, illus. (£3220), and 12 march 2008, #24, illus. (£5250); offered csk, 10 nov. 2011, #83, illus. (not sold; estimate £3000-5000). portrait of a gentleman.  watercolor, 37.5 x 29.8 cm., signed and dated 1824.  csk, 6 dec., #297, illus. (not sold; estimate £2000-3000). portrait of henry stephen fox-strangways, 3rd earl of ilchester.  oil, 53.5 x 44.5 cm., signed and dated 1848.  bhl, 27 nov., #114, illus. (not sold; estimate £1200-1800). portrait of mrs. nasmyth.  pencil, colored chalks, brown wash, 59.4 x 43.2 cm., signed and dated 1836.  cl, 10 july, #153, illus. (not sold; estimate £2500-3500).  csk, 6 dec., #298, illus. (not sold; estimate £1600-2000).  previously offered w/s fine art, july 2008 cat., #38, illus. (£10,000), and summer 2009 cat., #55, illus. (£10,000). the purchased flock.  oil, 45.1 x 60.6 cm., signed and dated 1850.  csk, 15 nov., #122, illus. (£18,750). a river landscape with a windmill and cattle.  oil, 27.7 x 42.6 cm., signed “j linnell.”  csk, 12 july, #230, illus. (not sold; highest bid £1900 on an estimate of £3000-5000).  i suspect that this may be by john linnell, jr. saint john the baptist.  oil, 72.5 x 92.0 cm., signed and dated 1867.  bhl, 17 april, #72, illus. (not sold; estimate £4000-6000); 3 oct., #67, illus. (not sold; estimate £2000-3000). sarah sophia child villiers, countess of jersey, attributed to linnell.  portrait miniature, medium not recorded, 10.2 cm. high (width not recorded).  bho, 5 sept., #212, elaborate ormolu frame, illus. (£475). shepherd and sheep in a landscape.  oil, 31.0 x 46.0 cm.  bho, 22 aug., #51 (£875; estimate £100-200).  see illus. 19. 19. attributed to john linnell. shepherd and sheep in a landscape. oil, 31.0 x 46.0 cm., inscribed on the verso “retouched may 11/77 … john linnell snr.” this dark, rather overworked painting is not characteristic of linnell’s style. might this possibly be a rough oil sketch by samuel palmer “retouched” years later by linnell? there are at least some slight similarities between this work and palmer’s oil and tempera paintings of the mid-1830s. such speculations could account for the price of £875, on an estimate of £100-200, fetched at bho on 22 aug., #51. some of the white dots in this reproduction, particularly upper left, are probably reflections from the varnish. photo courtesy of bonhams london. study of trees at bayswater, london.  watercolor, 14.6 x 10.2 cm., inscribed lower right “j.l. 1811 12 — bayswater.”  sl, 4 july, #185, illus. (£3125). surrey landscape.  oil, 43.2 x 53.3 cm., signed.  eb, feb., illus. (£1295). tatham: charles heathcote tatham with subsidiary sketches of julia tatham.  pen and brown ink, 33.5 x 21.6 cm., inscribed “c. tatham” and signed “j. linnell 1812.”  lowell libson, jan. cat., p. 102, illus. (price on request).  george richmond married julia tatham in 1831. the windmill.  oil, 35.6 x 48.2 cm., signed.  csk, 15 nov., #158, illus. (£6250). autograph letter signed to richard e. tagart, july 1846.  bl, 14 june, #157, 2 pp., browned (£50). previously offered bhl, 29 march 2011, #297 (not sold; estimate £300-400), and eb, oct. 2008, at the “buy it now” price of £250. autograph letter signed to mrs. edward tagart, 13 feb. 1855.  eb, may, number of leaves and contents not described, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $99); aug., illus. ($75). “right honorable sir robert peel,” mezzotint by james scott, 1840.  eb, jan., hand colored, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £149 or “best offer”).  apparently a copy of linnell’s own mezzotint of 1838. “thomas norris,” mezzotint by linnell, 1837.  eb, jan., hand colored, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £149 or “best offer”). mortimer, john hamilton a bandit taking up his post. oil, 41.2 x 30.4 cm., datable to the mid-1770s. cny, 6 june, #58, illus. ($21,250). another oil painting by mortimer of the same design is in the detroit institute of arts. a pen and ink drawing was sold cl, 17 nov. 1992, #19, illus. (£1045). mortimer’s etching of the design, titled “banditti taking his post,” is dated 1778. banditti, attributed to mortimer.  watercolor, 30.0 x 21.3 cm.  rosebery’s auction, london, 13 march, #656, illus. (£300).  not a copy of any print by or after mortimer known to me. banditti fishing.  oil, 76.8 x 64.1 cm., datable to c. 1777.  cny, 26 jan., #270, illus. ($116,500; estimate $30,000-50,000). a classical subject, possibly the aftermath of battle.  pen and ink, 23.5 x 37.5 cm.  cl, 10 july, #1, illus. (£8125).  previously sold cny, 26 jan. 2011, #304, titled a battle in the precincts of a temple, illus. ($8750); offered w.s fine art, june 2011 cat., #12, illus. (£16,000). cupid.  pen and black ink, pink wash, 16.5 x 15.0 cm.  csk, 6 dec., #194, illus. (£2375). edward, the black prince at the battle of poitiers, and the black prince receiving john, king of france, prisoner after the battle of poitiers, a pair attributed to mortimer.  oil, ovals 36.3 x 49.5 cm., formerly attributed to benjamin west.  bhny, 25 april, #23, elaborate gilt frames, illus. (not sold; estimate $12,000-18,000). fishermen drawing in their nets.  pencil, pen and black ink, 36.2 x 41.9 cm., datable to 1774.  lowell libson, jan. cat., p. 54, illus. (price on request).  previously sold cl, 5 july 2011, #112, illus. (£8750). the etching of this design by robert blyth is inscribed “drawn by j. mortimer, 1774” and “publish’d … nov.r 9th 1780.” head of a man.  pen and ink, 21.6 x 19.1 cm.  dickins auction, middle claydon, buckinghamshire, 15 june, #5, illus. (no price information; estimate £250-350). the holy family, attributed to mortimer.  pen and ink, 29.1 x 25.0 cm.  bho, 25 jan., #223, illus. (£338). lovers in a pastoral landscape, attributed to mortimer.  pen and ink, wash, 27.3 x 18.0 cm.  dy, 24 oct., #66, badly stained at top, illus. ($1375).  probably a copy of mortimer’s engraving, inscribed “pastoral” and dated 1778.  the preliminary drawing, reversed, is in the british museum. nude studies, recto and verso, attributed to mortimer.  chalk, 50.8 x 35.6 cm.  go, 10 may, #1418, illus. (not sold; estimate £1000-1500); 28 june, #1245, illus. (not sold; estimate £500-800). a satyr embracing a woman.  pen and ink, oval, 17.0 x 13.6 cm.  cny, 26 jan., #31, illus. ($3750).  the design was engraved in 1780 by charles reuben ryley. sextus pompeius consulting erichtho before the battle of pharsalia.  oil, 58.4 x 46.4 cm., datable to 1771.  cny, 26 jan., #269, illus. ($30,000).  robert dunkarton’s mezzotint of the painting is dated 1776. “banditti at market,” etching by joseph haynes, 1780.  eb, nov., water stain lower right margin, illus. (£4.99). “banditti returning,” mezzotint by john raphael smith, 1780.  christopher mendez, jan. online cat., illus. (£300). “bust of a warrior in armour,” etching signed “mortimer invenit et fecit,” n.d.  christopher mendez, jan. online cat., illus. (£250).  a previously unrecorded work. “group of seven caricature heads,” etching by samuel ireland, n.d.  christopher mendez, jan. online cat., illus. (£150). “miller of trompington and two scholars,” engraving by william sharp, 1787.  gp, sept. online cat., illus. (£75). “revengeful monsters,” etching by mortimer, 1780.  eb, may, stains upper left, illus. (£36.74). “salvator rosa,” etching by mortimer, 1778.  eb, may, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of £20). “two shipwrecked mariners on a rocky shore,” etching, unsigned, possibly by thomas rowlandson, n.d.  christopher mendez, jan. online cat., illus. (£240). palmer, samuel the bay of baiae from monte nuovo, italy.  watercolor, 14.6 x 39.7 cm., verso label signed, datable to 1841.  cl, 3 july, #167, illus. (£22,500).  previously sold sl, 16 march 1978, #132 (£3200), and 17 nov. 1988, #172 (£19,800); offered agnew’s, march 1993 cat., #38, illus. (£37,500). coastal sketch with rocks, attributed to palmer.  pencil, 12.3 x 17.5 cm.  rosebery’s auction, london, 18 sept., #808, pencil inscription upper right not transcribed, verso of mount inscribed “samuel palmer, c. 1835, (ex lady epstein),” illus. (£400).  possibly executed by palmer during his tours in the west of england and wales, 1835-36. the shearers.  oil and tempera, 51.4 x 71.1 cm., generally dated to c. 1833.  richard l. feigen & co., advertisement in burlington magazine 154 (may 2012): ii, dating the work to c. 1827-29, illus. (price on request).  previously offered privately by richard nathanson, april 2006 (price on request). sunset, the campagna and aquaducts, rome.  watercolor and gouache, heightened with touches of gold, 14.5 x 40.5 cm., datable to 1843.  bl, 14 nov., #661, illus. (£3500). la vocatella near corpo di cava, italy.  watercolor and body color, 26.7 x 37.8 cm., datable to 1838.  cl, 10 july, #147, illus. (£13,750).  previously offered agnew’s, feb-march 2002 cat., #53, illus. (£30,000), and sl, 23 nov. 2006, #245, illus. (not sold; estimate £20,000-30,000). autograph letter signed by charles dickens to palmer, 2 pp., 13 may 1846, concerning palmer’s illus. to dickens’s pictures from italy.  jarndyce, feb. cat. 197, #66, illus. (£3000). “the bellman,” etching, 5th st.  fine art society, may-june “samuel palmer [and] his friends and his followers” cat., #15, inscribed “samuel palmer” in pencil, illus. (“sold”). “christmas,” etching.  bhl, 16 may, #18, 4th st., illus. (£937).  fine art society, may-june “samuel palmer [and] his friends and his followers” cat., #4, 2nd st., an “early proof … before the reduction of the plate,” illus. (“sold”); #5, 3rd st., “before the lettering,” illus. (“sold”); #6, 4th st., illus. (£5750); #7, 5th st., 1926 printing, illus. (£3500). “the early ploughman,” etching.  dw, 8 feb., #213, 5th st., slight marginal staining, with palmer, “the cypress grove,” etching, and a vision recaptured (trianon p, 1978), illus. (£760).  swann, 8 march, #174, st. not indicated but probably 5th, illus. ($900); another impression, 20 sept., #7, 9th (final) st., 1926 printing, illus. ($2280).  leslie hindman auction, chicago, 3 may, #1171, st. not indicated but probably 5th, illus. (not sold; estimate $500-700).  bhl, 16 may, #19, 8th st., illus. (£812).  fine art society, may-june “samuel palmer [and] his friends and his followers” cat., #12, 7th st., inscribed “s. palmer” in pencil, illus. (£8750).  gp, june online cat., 5th st. from p. g. hamerton, etching and etchers, 1868, illus. (£360).  ah, aug. online cat. 419, #98, 7th st., illus. (£1500).  eb, sept., 5th st. from p. g. hamerton, etching and etchers, 1868, illus. ($225).  dy, 5 nov., #706, 5th st., with “the herdsman’s cottage,” 2nd st., minor foxing, illus. ($500).  bhl, 27 nov., #24, 5th st., pencil signature, illus. (£2750).  csk, 5 dec., #193, 5th st., framed, illus. (£2250). “the herdsman’s cottage,” etching, 2nd st.  dw, 8 feb., #212, illus. (£780).  bhl, 16 may, #21, illus. (£1000).  fine art society, may-june “samuel palmer [and] his friends and his followers” cat., #3, an impression “before publication,” illus. (“sold”).  eb, sept., full leaf from p. g. hamerton, etching and etchers, 1880, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of £195.01).  bhl, 27 nov., #23, from the portfolio, 1872, illus. (£1125).  see also “the early ploughman,” above.  “the lonely tower,” etching, 5th st.  fine art society, may-june “samuel palmer [and] his friends and his followers” cat., #16, inscribed “trial proof” and “s. palmer” in pencil, illus. (“sold”). “the morning of life,” etching.  eb, feb., 7th st., trimmed close, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of £500); another impression, aug., illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of £850).  fine art society, may-june “samuel palmer [and] his friends and his followers” cat., #13, 4th st., backing leaf inscribed “samuel palmer” in pencil, illus. (£8750); #14, 6th st., illus. (“sold”). “opening the fold,” etching.  fine art society, may-june “samuel palmer [and] his friends and his followers” cat., #17, 5th st., inscribed “s. palmer” in pencil, illus. (“sold”).  gp, nov. online cat., 8th st., illus. (£2000).  eb, nov., 8th st., illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of £500). “the rising moon,” etching, 7th st.  fine art society, may-june “samuel palmer [and] his friends and his followers” cat., #9, illus. (“sold”). “the skylark,” etching, 7th st.  dw, 8 feb., #211, illus. (£800).  bhl, 16 may, #20, illus. (£2000; estimate £400-600).  fine art society, may-june “samuel palmer [and] his friends and his followers” cat., #2, illus. (£4000).  dl, 1 nov., #333, framed, illus. (£650). “the sleeping shepherd,” etching, 3rd st.  fine art society, may-june “samuel palmer [and] his friends and his followers” cat., #8, “early proof … before publication in 1857,” illus. (“sold”). “the weary ploughman,” etching.  bhl, 22 feb., #59, 8th st., 1865 printing on laid india, illus. (£812.50).  fine art society, may-june “samuel palmer [and] his friends and his followers” cat., #10, probably 6th st., inscribed “samuel palmer” in pencil, illus. (£5500); #11, 8th st., illus. (£2500). “the willow,” etching, 2nd st.  dl, 1 nov., #332, framed, illus. (£320).  addisons auction, barnard castle, durham, 8 dec., #365, illus. (£280). dickens, pictures from italy, 1st ed., 1846.  maggs, dec. 2011 cat. 1452, #38, “primary (fine-diaper cloth) binding” (£850).  eb, jan., publisher’s cloth, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £295 or “best offer”); same copy, march, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £245 or “best offer”); another copy, april, publisher’s cloth, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $450); another copy, oct., publisher’s cloth worn, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $350 or “best offer”).  jarndyce, feb. cat. 197, #65, publisher’s cloth, later slipcase, illus. (£1500).  john windle, feb. occasional list 1, #20, 1st issue, publisher’s cloth “restored,” illus. ($1000). hamerton, etching and etchers, 1868.  bl, 5 july, #93, with palmer’s etching “the early ploughman,” 5th st., with pencil annotations, publisher’s roan-backed cloth rubbed, illus. (£700). milton, shorter poems, 1889.  john robertshaw, jan. cat. 123, #162, small-paper issue, marginal spotting, publisher’s cloth (£85). palmer, english version of the eclogues of virgil.  john robertshaw, jan. cat. 123, #163, 1884 ed., publisher’s cloth very worn (£760).  bho, 31 jan., #98, 1883 ed., small-paper issue, foxed, publisher’s cloth worn, illus. (£750); another copy, 26 june, #392, small-paper issue, publisher’s cloth, illus. (estimate £750).  bellmans auction, billingshurst, 20 april, #3404, 1883 ed., large-paper issue, “some marginal marks & spotting,” rebound in half morocco worn (£420).  chiswick auction, london, 4 sept., #73, 1884 ed., rebound in vellum, illus. (£230).  brightwells auction, leominster, 19 sept., #122, 1883 ed., small-paper issue, publisher’s cloth worn (£180).  individual pls. are not listed. parker, james “commemoration of the xivth. february mdccxcvii,” engraved by parker and worthington after robert smirke, 1803.  gp, feb. online cat., “proof,” minor stains and foxing, illus. (£450). “fair fatima” (provisional title), engraving.  see “jolie fatime” under stothard, below. richmond, george (excluding most portraits) comus—the measure.  black chalk, 24.4 x 29.3 cm., with figure studies on the verso.  csk, 18 july, #845, with another, related drawing of a male nude observed from behind, recto and verso, recto black chalk, verso pencil, leaf 29.2 x 22.4 cm., main drawing illus. (£2000).  both drawings previously offered agnew’s, oct. 2001 cat., #76 (£3500) and #77, main drawing, illus. (£6500); the main drawing in this group previously offered w/s fine art, july 2008 cat., #39, titled a composition study for “comus—the measure,” illus. (£6000). the crucifixion.  pen and brown ink, brown wash, 22.9 x 14.0 cm.  csk, 6 dec., #289, with 4 other drawings by richmond on the life of christ, crucifixion illus. (£750).  previously offered agnew’s, oct. 2001 cat., all illus.: #3, the virgin and child with saint anne, after leonardo (£1250), #32, crucifixion (£5000), #33, two studies of a figure of christ (£6000), #40, the three maries at the sepulchre (£650), and #75, studies for the hands of christ and the angel in the “agony in the garden” (£3750). a dancing, contrapposto figure.  chalk drawing, 40.6 x 22.9 cm., dated by the vendor to c. 1830.  ah, jan. online cat. 413, #58 (£2250). elijah at the mouth of the cave.  pen and ink, 19.4 x 14.0 cm., inscribed with a quotation from 1 kings 19.12-13 and dated 1827.  cl, 10 july, #133, illus. (£3750; estimate £1200-1800).  previously offered agnew’s, oct. 2001 cat., #2, illus. (£16,000), and w/s fine art, june 2006 cat., #47, illus. (£7500), and june 2010 cat., #23, illus. (£5500). a gathering at fulham palace.  pen and ink, 22.9 x 19.0 cm.  cl, 10 july, #141, illus. (£6250).  previously offered agnew’s, oct. 2001 cat., #44, illus. (£16,000). heathland with a wood beyond.  watercolor and body color, 18.2 x 27.3 cm.  cl, 10 july, #145, illus. (£275; estimate £800-1200).  previously offered agnew’s, oct. 2001 cat., #62, illus. (£3500). isaac going forth to meditate.  oil, 53.3 x 33.0 cm., datable to c. 1828.  fine art society, may-june “samuel palmer [and] his friends and his followers” cat., #26, illus. (£45,000).  for earlier sales, see blake 42.4 (spring 2009): 139. jocund day stands tip toe on the misty mountain tops.  pencil, 40.6 x 25.4 cm.  ah, dec. online “archive 2012” backlist, no entry #, illus. (£1750). a male nude figure in a rocky landscape.  watercolor with gold highlights on blue paper, 19.0 x 10.3 cm., signed with initials and dated 1829.  cl, 10 july, #137, illus. (not sold; highest bid £950 on an estimate of £1500-2000).  csk, 6 dec., #286, illus. (£500). previously offered agnew’s, oct. 2001 cat., #12, illus. (£1500).  portrait of henry richmond.  pencil, 43.0 x 31.0 cm., signed “g. r. nov 1823” and inscribed “this drawing of / henry richmond aged 6 years my / brother, was made by me / novr 8. 1823. and restored / and touched upon in parts jany 21 / 1861 / geo richmond” (lower left) and “g richmond born 28 march 1809 / henry richmond. br 17 oct.r 1817 / died. 27 jan.y 1825” (lower right).  csk, 17 jan., #174, illus. (£625). a profile of a sculptural head, probably from a “figure of jupiter” or “the nile.”  pencil, pen and ink, 28.0 x 21.5 cm.  csk, 18 july, #848, with “study of a woman’s left hand” and “study of a man’s right leg,” illus. (£750).  previously offered agnew’s, oct. 2001 cat., #21, illus. (£1500).  ruth and naomi.  black chalk heightened with white on buff paper, 29.8 x 40.0 cm., datable to c. 1837-40, inscribed in pencil (possibly at a much later date) “ruth & naomi / rome.”  cl, 10 july, #132, illus. (£2500). a sheet of studies after the antique including a sculpture of antinous, and study of a standing male nude.  two leaves, pencil and pen and ink, 26.7 x 19.0 cm. and 32.8 x 21.9 cm.  cl, 10 july, #139, antique studies illus. (not sold; highest bid £1100 on an estimate of £2000-3000).  csk, 6 dec., #287, illus. (not sold; estimate £1500-2000).  previously offered agnew’s, oct. 2001 cat., #31, antique studies (£3750) and #22, standing nude (£3000). a sheet of studies including a head study of samuel palmer, an angel, and other figures.  pencil, 20.4 x 15.9 cm. on paper with an 1838 watermark.  cl, 10 july, #136, illus. (not sold; highest bid £950 on an estimate of £1500-2000).  csk, 6 dec., #290, illus. (not sold; estimate £700-1000).   previously offered agnew’s, oct. 2001 cat., #41, illus. (£5000). a shepherd waking.  pencil and pen and ink, 21.0 x 33.0 cm., title inscribed in pencil.  cl, 10 july, #135, illus. (not sold; highest bid £950 on an estimate of £1500-2000).  csk, 6 dec., #288, illus. (£500).  previously offered agnew’s, oct. 2001 cat., #8, illus. (£3500). study of a classical bust of a young man (recto), study of a kneeling figure (verso).  recto pen and ink, verso pencil, 27.0 x 19.4 cm.  cl, 10 july, #138, illus. (£1000).  previously offered agnew’s, oct. 2001 cat., #20, recto illus. (£1500). study of a female nude.  red and black chalk, 21.5 x 28.5 cm.  cl, 10 july, #134, illus. (£2250).  previously offered agnew’s, oct. 2001 cat., #89, illus. (£5500). study of a tree.  watercolor, 22.5 x 18.5 cm.  csk, 18 june, #847, with 4 other drawings by richmond, illus. (£1250).  previously offered agnew’s, oct. 2001 cat., #66, illus. (£3500).  study of soldiers.  watercolor and gouache, 24.0 x 16.0 cm., signed with initials and dated 1838.  fine art society, may-june “samuel palmer [and] his friends and his followers” cat., #28, illus. (£12,000). view across a wooded valley.  watercolor, 20.0 x 39.0 cm.  cl, 10 july, #144, illus. (£3750).  previously offered sl, 8 dec. 2005, #182, illus. (not sold; estimate £1000-1500), and w/s fine art, july 2008 cat., #40, illus., and june 2011 cat., #45, illus. (£7500 both times). a woman with two children in a hilly landscape.  oil, 41.0 x 30.5 cm., signed with initials and dated 1834.  fine art society, may-june “samuel palmer [and] his friends and his followers” cat., #27, illus. (£38,000). a young man in a cornfield.  pencil and black chalk, 18.7 x 22.3 cm. on paper with an 1827 watermark.  cl, 10 july, #146, illus. (not sold; highest bid £900 on an estimate of £1200-1800).  csk, 6 dec., #291, illus. (not sold; estimate £700-1000).  previously offered agnew’s, oct. 2001 cat., #61, illus. (£3000). “the fatal bellman,” engraving.  fine art society, may-june “samuel palmer [and] his friends and his followers” cat., #25, only st., this impression on laid india, illus. (“sold”). romney, george (excluding most portraits) a sketchbook with 45 drawings, 15 in pen and ink, the remainder in pencil, leaves 9.0 x 19.2 cm., bound in calf.  sl, 4 july, #170, illus. (£10,625; estimate £3000-5000). three pencil sketches, all scenes of john howard visiting prisoners, each about 16.0 x 28.0 cm.  chorley’s auction, cheltenham, 10 oct., #448, illus. (£900). classical figures (recto), another sketch (verso), attributed to romney.  pencil, 34.0 x 20.0 cm.  golding young & mawer auction, grantham, lincolnshire, 5 sept., #410, recto and verso illus. (£100).  the attribution to romney seems correct to me. emma hamilton as a wood nymph.  pencil, 44.8 x 27.3 cm.  csk, 6 dec., #196, illus. (£3500). figures grieving.  pen and ink, 11.1 x 18.4 cm.  cl, 10 july, #33, illus. (not sold; estimate £2000-3000).  previously offered agnew’s, june 2002 cat., #19, illus. (£12,000). a group of standing figures.  brown wash over pencil, 27.0 x 21.0 cm., datable to the 1770s.  sny, 25 jan., #18, illus. ($22,500).  previously sold sl, 19 feb. 1987, #92, titled waiting souls, illus. (£4400). the infant shakespeare nursed by comedy and tragedy.  pen and ink, 11.4 x 18.5 cm.  cl, 10 july, #30, illus. (£5625; estimate £700-1000).  previously sold cl, 22 feb. 1966, #24, as part of an album, and sl, 18 june 1970, #89 (no price records); offered w/s fine art, “master drawings” exhibit at dickinson, new york, 14-26 jan. 2008, #21, illus. (price on request). jason and the argonauts, attributed to romney.  2 wash drawings, the larger 23.5 x 18.5 cm.  dreweatts auction, donnington, berkshire, 15 feb., both with the collector’s stamp of alfred de pass, illus. (not sold; estimate £700-1000).  in spite of the convincing provenance (de pass had a large romney collection), i am slightly suspicious of the attribution.  if indeed by romney, i suspect that these are very early drawings. john howard visiting a lazaretto.  pencil, 14.0 x 22.9 cm.  cl, 10 july, #34, illus. (£1250).  previously offered w/s fine art, july 2008 cat., #8, illus. (price on request). john howard visiting a lazaretto, recto and verso.  pencil, 14.0 x 26.0 cm.  csk, 18 july, #788, recto illus. (apparently withdrawn; estimate £1500-2000); 6 dec., #198, illus. (£625).  previously offered agnew’s, june 2002 cat., #11, illus. (£5000), and sl, 26 march 2004, #94, illus. (not sold; estimate £2000-3000). john howard visiting the lazaretto.  pencil, 14.0 x 23.5 cm. tennants auction, leyburn, yorkshire, 27 jan., #124, illus. (a bargain at £250, apparently to ah).  ah, july online cat. 418, #36, illus. (£1250).  similar to, and possibly removed from the same sketchbook as, the drawing listed immediately above and those offered sl, 11 nov. 1993, #23 (not sold), sl, 3 april 1996, #36, with 3 others (£402), ah, june 2006 online cat. 375, #54 (£950), and w/s fine art, “master drawings” exhibit at dickinson, new york, 14-26 jan. 2008, #8, illus. (price on request). macbeth confronts banquo’s ghost.  pencil, pen, and wash, 32.7 x 49.2 cm.  cl, 10 july, #37, illus. (£11,875).  previously offered agnew’s, june 2002 cat., #12, illus. (£20,000), and sl, 5 june 2008, #159, illus. (not sold; estimate £3000-4000). portrait of william hayley.  oil, framed as an oval, 76.0 x 63.5 cm., datable to 1778.  sl, 6 dec., #128, illus. (not sold; estimate £30,000-50,000).  for previous sales and attempted sales, see blake 45.4 (spring 2012): 140. an engraving by h. robinson of this portrait was published in the works of william cowper, ed. robert southey, 1837, vol. 10, facing p. 56.  portrait study of the rev. william atkinson, wearing a broad-brimmed hat.  pencil, 15.2 x 18.4 cm.  cl, 10 july, #28, illus. (£15,000; estimate £5000-8000).  previously sold cl, 7 july 2010, #385, illus. (£6875); offered w.s fine art, june 2011 cat., #10, illus. (£15,000).    the procession.  pencil, 10.0 x 18.0 cm.  tennants auction, leyburn, yorkshire, 27 jan., #125, illus. (a bargain at £200, apparently to ah).  ah, march online cat. 414, #32, framed, illus. (£875).  possibly the same drawing offered by ah, may 2005 online cat. 367, #57 (£1400). a seated woman and other studies.  pencil and wash, 34.3 x 24.8 cm.  cl, 3 july, #114, illus. (£16,250). study for elizabeth warren as hebe.  pen and brown ink and wash over pencil, 17.7 x 9.6 cm., datable to 1776.  lowell libson, jan. cat., p. 36, illus. (price on request).  previously sold sl, 5 june 2008, #161, illus. (£10,000). study for “initiation of a rustic nymph” (recto), 2 studies, 1 possibly for the recto and the other possibly for cymon and iphigenia (verso).  pencil, leaf 36.8 x 54.6 cm.  ah, oct. online cat. 420, #40, illus. (£4500). study of ann parry, seated, with study for a portrait of joannah law.  two leaves, pencil, 23.5 x 17.8 cm. and 9.0 x 9.5 cm.  cl, 10 july, #26, ann parry illus. (£1250).  both previously offered agnew’s, june 2002 cat., #7, ann parry (£15,000), and #8, joannah law (£25,000). study of captives in a lazaretto.  pencil, pen and ink, wash, 35.0 x 49.5 cm.  cl, 10 july, #35, illus. (£13,750). study of the destruction of niobe’s children.  pencil, lightly squared, 48.5 x 69.0 cm.  cl, 10 july, #38, illus. (not sold; highest bid £3800 on an estimate of £6000-10,000).  previously offered agnew’s, june 2002 cat., #22, illus. (£20,000). study of the figure of charon.  pen and ink, black chalk, 34.6 x 27.2 cm.  hill-stone, london master drawings fair, 27 june-5 july (price on request).  advertised and illus. in burlington magazine 154 (june 2012): [10]. study of figures arranged in friezes.  pen and brown ink and wash, faint black chalk sketches on the verso, 10.6 x 18.7 cm., datable to c. 1776-77.  lowell libson, jan. cat., p. 37, illus. (price on request).  previously offered libson, may 2011 online cat., illus. (not priced). study of a gentleman, standing.  pencil and brown ink, 41.6 x 28.0 cm.  cl, 10 july, #27, illus. (£12,500; estimate £4000-6000). study of lady macbeth.  pencil, 15.2 x 10.9 cm., inscribed “romney” on the verso.  cl, 10 july, #31, illus. (£5625; estimate £600-800).  previously sold cl, 6 june 2002, #17, with romney, study of a lady sewing (£956); offered agnew’s, march 2003 cat., #15, illus. (£2250). study of a mother and child (recto), the same, squared (verso). recto pen and ink, verso pencil, 24.8 x 20.3 cm.  cl, 3 july, #115, illus. (£2250).  previously sold cl, 22 feb. 1966, #28, with 5 others (no price record). study of a mother and child with a doll (recto), study of a lady standing by a column (verso).  recto pen and ink, verso pencil, 15.5 x 20.0 cm.  cl, 10 july, #36, illus. (£1000). study of women and children in an interior.  pencil and wash, 29.2 x 46.3 cm.  cl, 10 july, #32, illus. (£12,500). two figures.  pen and ink, 3.2 x 4.5 cm.  lawrences auction, crewkerne, somerset, 12 oct., #1684, illus. (£180).  very slight. sherman, welby “the shepherd,” engraving after a design by samuel palmer.  fine art society, may-june “samuel palmer [and] his friends and his followers” cat., #1, “one of only five impressions recorded,” illus. (£12,000). stothard, thomas books with illus. by stothard are listed only for eds. not recorded in the standard reference works, coxhead and bennett. four panoramic seascapes and a study of rocks.  pencil, pen and ink, and wash, 16.2 x 17.8 cm. and smaller.  cl, 3 july, #134, illus. (£500). “a mixed group of drawings and watercolours,” including “several by thomas stothard.”  bl, 16 feb., #215, “c. 65” works in all, a frieze-like wash drawing of dancing women by stothard illus. (£850, apparently to ah).  stothard’s frieze design only, ah, may online cat. 416, #48, described as “possibly for the unrealized decorations at buckingham palace,” illus. (£575). the canterbury pilgrims.  watercolor, 9.9 x 34.4 cm. on paper with a whatman 1833 watermark.  csk, 21 feb., #248, illus. (£4000).  justin croft, oct. cat. 7, #12, illus. (£8000).  previously sold cl, 18 june 1980, #108 (£950), and csk, 9 july 2009, #630 (£5000).  for comments, see blake 43.4 (spring 2010): 146. charles ii discovering himself to a family who had given him shelter, attributed to stothard.  oil, 29.2 x 38.1 cm.  duke’s auction, dorchester, 12 april, #187, illus. (£160).  eb, may-june, illus. (£446.89).  the attribution to stothard seems reasonable; the titular subject is uncertain. composition studies.  pen and ink, 20.3 x 27.9 cm.  ah, dec. online cat. 422, #48, illus. (£125). herms and feet.  pen and ink, 5.1 x 20.3 cm.  ah, dec. online cat. 422, #47, illus. (£125). portrait of the artist thomas stothard in his studio, attributed to “english school.”  oil, 91.0 x 71.0 cm.  bl, 19 june, #190, claimed in the cat. to be “the earliest depiction of the studio of an english artist,” datable to c. 1800, illus. (£2500).  for earlier sales and discussion, see blake 31.4 (spring 1998): 134, 34.4 (spring 2001): 118, and 39.4 (spring 2006): 177.  for illus. and brief discussion, see huon mallalieu, “personalities in paint,” country life 206.33 (15 aug. 2012): 107. roman soldiers, probably related to stothard’s illus. for bunyan’s pilgrim’s progress.  pen and ink, 11.0 x 10.0 cm.  bigwood auction, tiddington, warwickshire, 24 feb., #360, framed, illus. (£32).  eb, march, illus. (£133).  previously offered privately by ah, june 1996 (£70). three caryatids.  pen and ink, brown wash, 10.2 x 10.2 cm.  ah, june online cat. 417, #42, illus. (£275). “boadicea the british queen animating the britons to defend their country against the romans,” engraved by william sharp, 1812.  eb, sept., british museum duplicate stamp on verso, illus. (€12.09). “the canterbury pilgrimage,” etching/engraving published by r. h. cromek, 1810.  gp, sept. online cat., with the later st. titled “pilgrimage to canterbury,” published by worthington, 1817, earlier st. illus. (£1600).  justin croft, oct. cat. 7, #11, 1817 st., contemporary gilt frame, illus. (£2000).  see also “chaucers canterbury pilgrims” under blake’s separate plates and plates in series, above. “caroline de lichtfield,” a pair of pls. illustrating isabelle de montolieu’s novel, engraved by charles knight, 1788.  gp, sept. online cat., illus. (£520). “danse grecque,” engraved by pietro zancon, c. 1795?  gp, june online cat., hand colored, illus. (£240).  for a companion print, also based on the letters of mary wortley montagu, see “jolie fatime,” below. “the death of captain faulknor,” etching/engraving, 61.4 x 45.7 cm., inscribed lower right “bromley aqua fortis fecit, blackberd sculpt,” published by robert bowyer as part of his “historic gallery,” 1801.  eb, sept., wove paper, leaf 67.7 x 50.7 cm., a good impression in poor condition with creases, stains, and tears, illus. (£49).  burstow & hewett auction, battle, east sussex, 26 sept., #340, framed, illus. (not sold; estimate £60-80).  ivey-selkirk auction, st. louis, 1 dec., #244, illus. ($190).  not in coxhead.  the “aqua fortis” inscription indicates that the pl. was etched by william bromley (1769-1842), one of london’s leading engravers.  “sculpt” indicates that blackberd added the engraved finishing lines.  little is known about c. blackberd, active c. 1784-1810.  he engraved in stipple the 7 pls. after stothard in salomon gessner, the death of abel [and] new idyls, published by t. heptinstall in 1797. “the fifth of november,” engraved by charles knight.  gp, march online cat., illus. (£260).  one from a set of 5 oval pls., each about 17.5 x 20.5 cm., picturing children at play or in the classroom, published by j. f. tomkins in jan. 1790 (see coxhead 180).  “jolie fatime,” engraved by pietro zancon, inscribed in the pl. with 2 lines in french, beginning “elle se mit debout …,” quoted from “lettres de lady m-y w-y m-es[sic?],” the pl. published “a venise chez joseph remondini & fils,” c. 1795?  eb, jan., leaf of laid paper 40.6 x 30.5 cm., water stain top right corner, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $29.99).  gp, may online cat., hand colored, illus. (£180).  an illus. to a french translation of the letters of lady mary wortley montagu (or “montague”).  i have not been able to find the ed. quoted in the pl.  for the passage illus., see lettres de milady wortley montague (london and paris: duchesne, 1764) 2: 9-10, and the complete letters of lady mary wortley montagu, ed. robert halsband (oxford: clarendon p, 1965-67) 1: 349-50, letter about life in turkey “to lady mar,” 18 april [1717]: “on a sofa … sat the kahya’s lady, … and at her feet sat 2 young girls ….  but they were hardly seen near the fair fatima (for that was her name), so much her beauty effac’d every thing ….  she stood up to receive me [lady montagu], saluteing me after their fashion, putting her hand upon her heart ….”  many 18th-century eds. of montagu’s letters, first published in 1763, give the author’s name as “m-y w-y m-e.”  the same design, reversed, was also engraved by james parker, whose pl. is known to me only through a proof with signatures but before all other letters.  zancon’s engraving may have been copied from parker’s, the latter incorrectly described as “british ladies in india” in blake 41.4 (spring 2008): 162.  for a companion print, see “danse grecque,” above. “morning lesson” and “evening prayer,” a pair engraved by william nutter, 1792.  eb, jan., framed, illus. (£67.10). “pilgrimage to canterbury.”  see “the canterbury pilgrimage,” above. “procession of the flitch of bacon,” engraving by james henry watt, 1833.  design 31.4 x 77.4 cm., platemark 43.5 x 86.7 cm.  eb, nov.-dec., tear into the image on the right, other marginal tears, brown stains in margins, water stain lower left margin, framed, illus. ($9.99).  this large panorama pl. is described by coxhead as “designed [by stothard] as a companion to the ‘canterbury pilgrims’” (16). the arabian nights’ entertainments.  dove’s english classics.  3 vols.  london: printed by j. f. dove “for the proprietors of the english classics,” 1826.  eb, oct., contemporary half calf worn, illus. (£222.78).  includes 3 frontispieces and 3 title-page vignettes engraved by john romney after stothard.  not the same designs as those published in the novelist’s magazine, 1785.  coxhead 211-12 mentions only the 2 pls. in vol. 3 and does not identify the publication; bennett 86 records “2-3(?)” pls.  bray, life of stothard, 1851, extra-illus. copies only.  bg, 27 april, #133, 125 pls. after stothard added, contemporary morocco worn (£220). william dodd, the beauties of history or pictures of virtue and vice, 2nd ed., 1796.  bl, 19 april, #138, “engraved frontispiece by e. thompson after stothard,” browned, contemporary calf rebacked (not sold; estimate £150-200).  not in coxhead or bennett. bryan edwards, the history, civil and commercial, of the british colonies in the west indies, 2nd ed., 2 vols., 1794.  kodnor galleries auction, dania beach, florida, 18 jan., #383, the only pl. after stothard, “the voyage of the sable venus from angola to the west indies” engraved by william grainger, framed, illus. ($500; estimate $50-100).  coxhead 169 (the pl. but not the book); bennett 71.  for illus. and discussion see alexander s. gourlay, “‘art delivered’: stothard’s the sable venus and blake’s visions of the daughters of albion,” journal for eighteenth-century studies 31.4 (2008): 529-50, and regulus allen, “‘the sable venus’ and desire for the undesirable,” sel 51.3 (summer 2011): 667-91. john milton, paradise lost, pls. by bartolozzi after stothard published by jeffryes, 1792-95.  gp, march online cat., 1 pl. only, “adam, eve and raphael” mistitled “adam, eve and the archangel gabriel,” before all letters, illus. (£220).  eb, oct., “eve,” before title, marginal stains, framed, illus. (£82.63); “his [satan’s] oblique way amongst innumerable stars,” before title, framed, illus. (£42.98); nov., “the morning hymn,” marginal stains, framed, illus. (£49.98); “pandemonium,” marginal stains, framed, illus. (£31.99).  holloway’s auction, banbury, oxfordshire, 4 dec., #197, “adam and eve” and “adam, eve and raphael,” hand colored and trimmed close to the images, illus. (not sold; estimate £60-80).  “adam, eve and raphael” is without letters in all copies i’ve seen of the jeffryes publication and later reissues.  the presence of fragmentary letterpress texts on some impressions indicates that they were printed as part of an (unpublished?) ed. of paradise lost. samuel richardson, the history of sir charles grandison, n.d. (imprints in the pls. dated 1811).  with 15 pls. after stothard first published in the novelist’s magazine, vol. 10 (1783).  not in coxhead or bennett.  see under letterpress books with engravings by and after blake, above. george ruggle, ignoramus, comoedia.  london: t. paine, 1787.  frontispiece engraved by grignion after stothard.  eb, sept., pl. foxed, contemporary calf worn, illus. ($217.50).  coxhead 175 describes the pl. but does not identify the book in which it was published.  bennett 68. appendix: new information on blake’s engravings listed below are substantive additions or corrections to robert n. essick, the separate plates of william blake: a catalogue (1983), and essick, william blake’s commercial book illustrations (1991).  newly discovered impressions of previously recorded published sts. of blake’s engravings are listed for only the rarer pls. the separate plates of william blake: a catalogue pp. 4-5, “joseph of arimathea among the rocks of albion,” impression 2e.  this is probably the impression offered in quaritch’s cat. of nov. 1893, a miscellaneous catalogue of valuable, rare, and curious books, p. 4, no item number (£2.2s). pp. 55-56, “enoch,” impression 1b.  for the sale of this impression, see under separate plates and plates in series, above, and the introductory essay to this sales review.  for the correct leaf dimensions and details about condition not recorded in sp, see the caption to illus. 15. p. 71, “chaucers canterbury pilgrims,” impression 5ii.  given in 1990 by henry e. gerstley to princeton university art museum, accession no. 1990-22. pp. 111-22, “george cumberland’s card.”  for a previously unrecorded impression printed on a card, see under separate plates and plates in series, above. p. 116, “george cumberland’s card,” impression 1z.  bequeathed in 2010 by charles ryskamp to princeton university art museum, accession no. 2010-139. pp. 158-64, “the idle laundress,” blake after george morland.  the prints of this work available from the thomas ross collection, binfield, berkshire <http://www.thomasross.co.uk>, are reproductions, not impressions from the original copperplate.  the ross pl., probably a photo-etching or zincograph, reproduces the 1st st. of the pl. with the j. r. smith 1788 imprint.  the design, including the framing lines, in original impressions measures 21.1 x 26.1 cm.; the design in the ross pl. measures 16.4 x 20.4 cm. william blake’s commercial book illustrations pp. 27-28, john bonnycastle, introduction to mensuration, 1787, 1791, 1794 eds.  in the 2nd st. of the title-page vignette, engraved by blake after stothard, 2 small stones have been added just above the lower edge of the image, approximately 2.3 cm. right of the bottom left corner.  these remain in the 3rd st. pp. 30-33, novelist’s magazine and samuel richardson, the history of sir charles grandison, c. 1811 and 1818.  at least 1 copy (essick collection) of the c. 1811 grandison contains the 4th sts. of blake’s 3 pls. rather than the 3rd sts. found in other copies.   review: william blake: apprentice and master, ashmolean museum, oxford william blake: apprentice and master. ashmolean museum, oxford, 4 december 2014–1 march 2015. michael phillips. william blake: apprentice and master. oxford: ashmolean museum, 2014. 272 pp. £30.00, softcover. reviewed by susan matthews susan matthews (susan.matthews@roehampton.ac.uk) is reader in english literature at university of roehampton, and author of blake, sexuality and bourgeois politeness (2011). we have come to expect a recognizably edited version of blake—a blake of bright colors and identifiable political beliefs. the designers at the ashmolean did a good job of providing this, choosing as poster for the exhibition the stunning image of “los howld” from copy a, small book of designs. on paper this image is tiny: 119 x 105 mm. scaled up to form a poster, this small image both grabs the attention of the visitor arriving at oxford railway station and dominates the screen <http://​www.​ashmolean.​org/​exhibitions/​williamblake/​events>: in this design, the red of eyes and mouth and flames become the red of the word “blake.” are the “final weeks” a warning of apocalypse? but it also offers a puzzle, for this naked figure in torment looks like neither apprentice nor master. the exhibition (and michael phillips’s scholarly catalogue) tell a story quite different from that which a visitor drawn in by the exhibition image might have expected. if blake’s varied incarnations in major uk exhibitions since 2000 are anything to go by, millennial blake is taking on new meanings. the major tate exhibition of 2000 (the work of robin hamlyn and phillips) offered a gothic blake: a first section titled “one of the gothic artists” led to “the furnace in lambeth’s vale” and “chambers of the imagination.” the final section displayed all 100 plates of copy e of jerusalem: a forbidding wall of words spread unreadably out across a wall, the work of some outsider artist. gothic again provided the explanatory framework for tate’s 2006 gothic nightmares: fuseli, blake and the romantic imagination, curated by martin myrone. in a paper for a conference to complement the ashmolean exhibition, myrone presented gothic as a slippery term that nevertheless locates blake’s work within the profane materials of his culture’s imaginary. as a gothic artist, blake uncovers tensions and contradictions in the culture of his time. this blake is an artist who can fail technically, but whose failure is interesting. in 2009, tate britain’s restaging of blake’s 1809 one-man exhibition presented an artist struggling with paint that had a will of its own, experimenting recklessly with materials that would themselves darken and thicken with age. according to myrone’s edition of a descriptive catalogue, blake’s decision to include a number of paintings that he viewed as failures “serves to dramatise the creative process in terms of spiritual struggle and exorcism.”martin myrone, ed., seen in my visions: a descriptive catalogue of pictures (london: tate publishing, 2009) 30. this small exhibit was described in a one-star review by richard dorment as “a failure—but such a strange, touching, interesting failure that i can’t help but admire the gallery for mounting it.”<http://​www.​telegraph.​co.​uk/​journalists/​richard-dorment/​5189154/​william-blake-exhibition-tate-britain-review.html>. a small but significant improvement on hunt’s “farrago of nonsense, unintelligibleness, and egregious vanity.”robert hunt, quoted in myrone 32. but in 2014–15, william blake: apprentice and master presented an artisan who labored to master difficult processes—bearing no small resemblance to the curator, whose life work it has been to understand and to master the techniques used by blake. phillips is himself the producer of beautiful artisanal editions of blake’s illuminated books, printed from reproductions of the plates. his prints eschew color to reveal the delicate linearity of the plates. the atmospheric exhibition design included a re-creation of blake’s printmaking studio (painted in tasteful farrow and ball colors) and labels that looked like copperplates. the visitor was offered a journey into blake’s private world via a total immersion in the world of the eighteenth-century print trade, a context that appeals to today’s fascination with the craft of the artisan. this re-creation was clean and elegant, a workplace without clutter or dirt, the rubbish cleared away “from a caves mouth.” all images © ashmolean museum, university of oxford. physical versus virtual “nothing can tell us more about a work of art than the discovery of how it was made,” claims the catalogue, and this exhibition proved this to be true. in the process, it announced the superiority of the physical to the virtual object, whilst making movingly obvious its fragility: phillips spoke at the accompanying day conference of the strict rules that limit movement and exhibition of blake’s work and of the periods of rest required between outings. telling how blake made his extraordinary works of art, and how blake’s life made him, exhibition and catalogue establish a narrative through material objects, documents, places, spaces, techniques. this was not so much a story of ideas but of things, and as such it shows just how much cannot be conveyed through the virtual reality of the internet. the size of the objects, the texture of the monoprints, the effort of engraving, the size of blake’s studio are all things that have to be seen in the flesh. the exhibition space offered an encounter with objects in a way that the internet cannot emulate: walking past the plates of europe copy b laid out on a wall enforces a sequence and meaning that can be changed simply by walking the exhibition room anticlockwise rather than clockwise. the ability to bring together variant versions of a single print—here the three versions of the house of death (newly powerful at the time of ebola) from the british museum, tate, and cambridge—focused interpretation on minute differences, whilst tripling the force of an extraordinary image. apprentice and master on one level, the subtitle “apprentice and master” is simply descriptive, explaining a focus on three main periods of blake’s career: the apprenticeship to basire; the 1790s, when he was a “master artist-printmaker and technical innovator”; and the last years of his life, when he “inspired a group of young artists and artist-printmakers known as the ancients” (11). it creates a focus on learning, tradition, even deference to authority. phillips repeatedly draws on malkin’s 1806 testimony to present a blake who learns to “collect and copy” engravings, is “given plaster casts to copy” (11). but malkin’s blake may be subtly aligned to the expectations of a bourgeois educationalist, even if one deeply sympathetic to blake. the blake familiar to much of the twentieth century believed that “the tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction.” it’s a revelation, then, to discover that blake does indeed use the word “master” in an unexpected range of contexts. he repeatedly refers to basire as his master (e 573-74) when he is writing about “chaucers canterbury pilgrims,” and also insists that learning to draw is the only way to master engraving: “i defy any man to cut cleaner strokes than i do or rougher when i please & assert that he who thinks he can engrave or paint either without being a master of drawing is a fool” (e 582). blake does have a concept of the good master—whether basire, or “our divine master” (e 728) in a letter to butts. los announces that he is master to urizen in jerusalem. it is clearly not the case that blake thinks only of a urizenic master, the “great work master” (e 314) of the four zoas. in demonstrating this in apprentice and master (although he would not labor so obvious a point), phillips rejects the implicitly freudian or bloomian model familiar to twentieth-century readers. this exhibition and catalogue (implicitly) reject the idea of blake’s lack of facility, touted for instance by mei-ying sung’s william blake and the art of engraving (2009), which took evidence of repoussage to tell a story of trial and error, of modification and struggle. phillips instead establishes blake’s skill, whether in mirror writing, engraving, or monoprints, skill won by hard study and determination. emphasizing success rather than failure, phillips presents blake as “master of his trade”—at the least from 1785 to 1791, his achievement evidenced by boydell’s 1787 commission for engraving hogarth’s painting of the beggar’s opera. whereas the apprentice blake learns by copying, the adult blake attains technical mastery through tireless repetition: “over time, as he became more accomplished, such mock-ups would have been needed less” (94). “by 1789, when he etched the plates of songs of innocence and the book of thel, imperfections are still to be found, but the mirror writing technique has been all but mastered” (96). reengraving his 1773 plate of joseph of arimathea in the last decade of his life, he demonstrates this mastery: “when set against the image printed from the same plate after blake had reworked it 45 or more years later, the difference between an apprentice piece and the work of a master is unmistakable” (35). the concept of “master” is here internalized: mastery is realized alone. minute particulars the substantial catalogue by phillips (with chapters on the ancients by martin butlin and on palmer, calvert, and richmond by colin harrison) is a major contribution to blake scholarship, built up from laborious archival research. similarly, the exhibition was very strong on context, full of the kind of works that blake saw and knew. but for this reason, the significance of objects was not always obvious at first glance. documents such as the record of an apprenticeship to blake for thomas owen in 1788 (84) released their meanings only through commentary. rejecting the tendency of tate britain’s current hang to offer the visual without contextualizing words, the exhibition offered visual proof of discoveries explained in labels and catalogue. small details and differences reveal a lot. phillips shows how the young blake’s work for basire recording monuments of the kings and queens in westminster abbey led to six additional drawings in which “small but significant adjustments” allowed blake to imagine the dead figures alive, turning monument into portrait (45). often the exhibition achieved just this miracle, allowing old documents to come alive. just occasionally, this focus can be misleading. phillips imagines that blake would have seen dr. william hunter address “the minute particulars of the human anatomy” at his lectures (49). but as he notes later on (105), blake’s beliefs were fundamentally opposed to empiricism. for blake, “minute particulars” probably represented something quite different from the “partly dissected corpses of criminals executed at tyburn” that hunter used (55). john barrell suggested that we misread blake’s concept of individuality: “for blake as for barry, the sublimity of art is the result of the representation of generic character, and if ‘all sublimity is founded on minute discrimination’, that is because, for both men, the representation of different classes or characters, finely organised and so finely discriminated from each other, is the representation of the ‘sublime.’”john barrell, the political theory of painting from reynolds to hazlitt (new haven: yale university press, 1986) 238. blake’s minute particulars may be closer to the “minute discrimination” (e 643, 653) that mark out eternal character in his annotations to reynolds’s discourses. the methodology so brilliantly embodied in catalogue and exhibition is empirical, but the occasional downside is the inability to resist the lure of a possible source: “it is just possible that he may have seen examples of castiglione’s monotypes in the sagrado sale, if they were included” (150). if everything is learnt (rather than imagined as by tate’s blake), then all innovation must have a source. in the end, linnell becomes master to blake: “the experience of seeing fine impressions of the old master engravers, together with working with linnell on his plates, probably also inspired blake to rework other examples of his earlier separate plates engraved on copper in intaglio” (190). every change must come from someone. houses and spaces one of the most satisfying features of the ashmolean exhibition is necessarily lost in the catalogue (though this contains marvellous material on blake’s lambeth home and his final apartment at fountain court). the layout took the visitor through spaces of very different dimensions—from a tunnel and bridge through a long, dark gallery, to a high central room with a re-creation at one end of blake’s studio to the dimensions and in the layout that phillips has recovered. in doing so, it made the visitor newly aware of the space of the exhibition room and its difference from blake’s places of making and exhibition, such as the room upstairs in the house he grew up in. (the tate version of the 1809 exhibition did not re-create the dimensions of the upstairs room at his brother’s hosiery shop, though blank spaces marked out missing works, including the lost painting the ancient britons as a huge ghost image on one wall.) although it was not unusual in blake’s time to show work in a private home (gainsborough, romney, and turner all used the first floor of their houses to exhibit their work), the ashmolean show was surprising in its ability to convey a sense of rooms, spaces, and documentary contexts in a way that was moving and intimate. the final chapter of the catalogue tells how blake’s artist friends recall the image of dürer’s “melencolia 1” in work they produced around the time of blake’s death. these images, phillips shows, are recollections of blake at his engraving table, for “on the occasion of their visits to fountain court, the ancients had each seen blake at work at his engraving table, and ‘close by’, as palmer remembered, dürer’s melencolia i ” (246). the achievement of this exhibition and catalogue is to show how the labor of engraving gave birth to images like “los howld,” images that can no more be forgotten than the figure of their creator bent over his work table. frye’s mistreatment of the archetype frye’s mistreatment of the archetype by sheila a. spector sheila spector (sheilaspector@verizon.net) is an independent scholar who has devoted her career to exploring the intersection between romanticism and judaica in general, and blake and kabbalism in particular. in preparation for her work on blake, she compiled jewish mysticism: an annotated bibliography on the kabbalah in english (garland). she then published “glorious incomprehensible”: the development of blake’s kabbalistic language and “wonders divine”: the development of blake’s kabbalistic myth (both bucknell up). currently, she is working on a book-length study of blake’s evolution from an exoteric to an esoteric thinker and artist. few would deny that northrop frye was the most influential blake critic in the second half of the twentieth century. in “blake on frye and frye on blake,” g. e. bentley, jr., labeled the period between 1947 (the date when fearful symmetry was first published) and 1992 “the age of frye”: the influence of fearful symmetry upon blake studies has been massive and pervasive: every serious critical book on blake since 1947 has referred to fearful symmetry, and many have been, in effect, based upon it. … among blake critics, frye has attracted a whole school of followers, a host sometimes referred to as small frye, though in any other pond they might seem very big fish indeed. his name is writ large with honour throughout the literature concerned with blake for the last forty-five years, from 1947 through 1992. (182) as bentley concludes: “in sum, frye’s work has transformed our understanding of william lake [sic]. in blake studies, this is the age of northrop frye” (183).a paper presented at the legacy of northrop frye, a 1992 conference held at victoria university in the university of toronto, then published in a collection of the same name. bentley does acknowledge that the positive response to frye was not universal (183). for a survey of critical reception, see nicholas halmi, “northrop frye’s fearful symmetry.” without in any way disputing bentley’s assessment of frye’s influence, this paper will explore some of the ways that the impact of frye damaged the reception of blake. specifically, i argue that in his zeal to use blake as the focal point for a new science of criticism, frye interpreted, distorted, and sometimes even went so far as to revise blake in such a way that the poet would conform with the preconceptions of the critic. then, because frye’s influence has been so “massive and pervasive,” the critic’s version, in many instances, has actually supplanted the poet’s original. in order to expose the magnitude of the problem, i want first to establish the esoteric context, demonstrating how blake actually conforms to an alternative mythic system, one that frye rejects out of hand. finally, i will explore some of the ways that frye forced blake to fit within his critical enterprise, yielding (to amend the title of one of his more frequently cited essays on blake) frye’s mistreatment of the archetype.the essay, of course, is “blake’s treatment of the archetype,” a paper first presented in 1950 at the english institute and subsequently published in the english institute essays, 1950. i. the esoteric context concurrent with the history of western religion there has existed an esoteric tradition, one concerned with “the deeper, ‘inner mysteries of religion’ as opposed to its merely external or ‘exoteric’ dimensions.”hanegraaff, “esotericism” 1: 337. it is important at the outset to acknowledge, if not clarify, the inevitable confusion over terminology inherent in the subject matter of this paper. first of all, historically, the concept of esotericism has overlapped with that of mysticism, there being no universally accepted distinction between the two, as jérôme rousse-lacordaire explains in his essay “mysticism.” even more complicated is the concept of kabbalism. though popularly defined as “jewish mysticism,” the concept is so complex that hanegraaff has no comprehensive entry on kabbalah in the dictionary of gnosis and western esotericism, referring readers instead to “jewish influences,” a series of five entries: reimund leicht, “jewish influences i: antiquity” and “jewish influences ii: middle ages”; joseph dan, “jewish influences iii: ‘christian kabbalah’ in the renaissance”; andreas b. kilcher, “jewish influences iv: enlightenment/romanticism”; and hanegraaff, “jewish influences v: occultist kabbalah.” in this paper, i limit the discussion of kabbalism to the version i believe influenced blake: van helmont’s christianization of the lurianic myth. to generalize grossly, people turn to esotericism when the exoteric religion and its institutions fail to satisfy their needs. of particular significance to blake is the outbreak of kabbalism that occurred in the jewish community after the late fifteenth-century expulsion from spain, which destroyed a culture that had flourished for centuries.for sources through the early 1980s, see my jewish mysticism: an annotated bibliography on the kabbalah in english; for blake’s sources in particular, see “kabbalistic sources: blake’s and his critics’.” in that essay, i differentiate between the sources available to blake and those most likely used by later critics. viewing the catastrophe as, among other things, a failure of hermeneutics, esoteric jews sought to explain how their interpretation of the bible, purportedly god’s word, could have been so wrong. like all readers, they had two choices: they could either impugn the integrity of their text, in this case, its divine origins, or they could fault the interpretive structure they had previously employed for the sake of understanding that text. preferring the latter, kabbalists, under the leadership of isaac luria (1534–72), generated a completely different myth to use as the basis for reading the hebrew bible. in a radical inversion, luria’s myth shifted the onus for the primordial fault—to be differentiated from adam’s disobedience—away from man and onto the godhead himself. luria then projected restoration through the efforts of man, who, in effect, is to assist the godhead in correcting his original fault. as a result of the next century’s thirty years’ war (1618–48), post-reformation christians faced the same kind of spiritual dislocation that had confronted iberian jews. in response, a group of christians under the leadership of christian knorr von rosenroth (1636–89) christianized luria’s myth in order, they hoped, to unify all christians, as well as the jews, into a single universal religion. to that end, in adumbratio kabbalæ christianæ (sketch of christian kabbalism), francis mercury van helmont (1614–98) expanded luria’s myth to accommodate a christian perspective, ultimately to generate an alternative hermeneutical system, one that could be used to interpret the new testament as well as the hebrew bible. van helmont’s recension in turn became the archetypal basis for blake’s myth in the major prophecies.adumbratio kabbalæ christianæ was appended to the second volume of von rosenroth’s kabbala denudata (sulzbach, 1677–84). more detailed explanations for the origin and transmission of the esoteric myth can be found in my “wonders divine”: the development of blake’s kabbalistic myth: see especially “the esoteric tradition,” 27-29, and “the christian kabbalah,” 29-32. also, see the introduction to my bilingual edition of van helmont’s sketch (3-25). in the sketch, van helmont contextualizes our world within the larger creation process governed by the godhead, known as einsoph, the “endless one.” the godhead, being by nature a creator, has initiated a series of seven-thousand-year cycles, each to take six thousand years to play itself out, then reverting to the primordial chaos in the last thousand, in preparation for the next cycle. our cycle in particular is dominated by din, the divine hypostasis of “harsh judgments.” the initial fault, which precedes adam’s disobedience,the primordial fault is said to have occurred during the creation process; then, after the creation of man, adam’s sin is said to have prolonged the cycle of existence, which would have ended immediately, had he not sinned. after adam’s sin, man’s obligation was to assist in cosmic restoration. occurred in the godhead’s first move, when, in order to produce a space that was not he, einsoph withdrew into himself, thereby providing the opportunity for the forces of negation (identified as remnants from previous cycles) to enter. not ex nihilo, creation was effected through the process of emanation, in which the godhead produced in succession ten divine lights or hypostases, which do the actual work of creation. the first completed entity was adam kadmon, primordial man, who was initially intended to serve as the passive model for adam rishon, created man, to emulate. to christian kabbalists, adam kadmon is the saviour. as the result of an error in the creative process, a cosmic crisis occurred. because the divine lights tend to expand indefinitely, the godhead placed them into vessels of dross to contain their natural effulgence. however, the fifth emanation, din, overestimating its power, drew all of the other lights into its own vessel. proving too weak, the container broke, releasing its shards into the cosmos. while some of the lights, remaining uncontaminated, were able to return to their original locations, others mixed with the shards and were drawn down to lower levels. the cosmos comprises four planes. the highest, the world of emanations, containing the divine hypostases, corresponds to the divine idea to create. next, the world of prototypical creation, home of the divine presence, the shekhinah, is the site where the idea was to be actualized on the spiritual plane. the third level, the world of archetypal formation, site of angels, genii, and souls, is where the idea was to be given its archetypal formulation so that finally it could be implemented in the world of fact, our world. according to the original intention, all four planes were to be purely spiritual. however, as a result of the initial fault, while the highest world remained unaffected, the three others were separated, each being lowered a degree, so that the bottom plane, our world of fact, became corporeal. at that point, the entire tenor of creation was altered. no longer a passive model, adam kadmon was forced to assume an active role in the process of restoration. to that end, he was fragmented into a series of physiognomies, the most important being the “son,” whom christians easily associated with their son. for his part, adam rishon, created man, was correspondingly altered. although originally of gigantic stature, spanning the entire cosmos and containing all souls, he was reduced in size and many of the souls broke away from him, themselves being contaminated by the shards. therefore, adam kadmon’s goal in what van helmont labels the “modern constitution” is to “separate the shards,” that is, to purify all lights so that, when the task is complete, the cosmos can be restored to its originally intended state. to assist adam kadmon in his labor, adam rishon is to couple with his wife, each sexual act being said to promote the reunification of adam kadmon with his female counterpart, the shekhinah, the divine presence. in the jewish version, each soul must be purified by fulfilling the 613 commandments of the bible. because no single soul can complete the entire complement in a lifetime, each is to undergo a series of revolutions through which it can be successively purified. when the souls have all been purified, the cycle of existence will be complete: the three lower planes will again reunite with the highest, and adam kadmon will be reunited with the shekhinah. in christianizing the myth, van helmont added a fourth phase, in which the christian saviour/adam kadmon defeats the forces of negation personified by satan. ii. blake’s adaptation of the kabbalistic myth in its final form, blake’s myth conforms quite closely to the model sketched out by van helmont.the following outline is limited to the particulars discussed later in this essay; for a comprehensive explanation of blake’s use of the kabbalistic myth, see “wonders divine.” both occur within the context of a seven-thousand-year cycle, as blake says in night the first of the four zoas: “then eno, a daughter of beulah, took a moment of time / and drew it out to [twenty years del.] seven thousand years” (night the first, ll. 222-23, k 270; p. 9.9-10, e 304).frye’s blake was edited by geoffrey keynes—likely either the three-volume 1925 the writings of william blake or else the one-volume 1927 poetry and prose of william blake. in later editions, keynes did not change the text substantively, but only added line numbers, which had been omitted from the more comprehensive 1925 edition; he also changed the order of some of the plates. therefore, all blake citations will be from the more accessible blake: complete writings with variant readings (1966), abbreviated k. each keynes citation is followed by a reference to david v. erdman, the complete poetry and prose of william blake (1988), abbreviated e. one cannot help but speculate whether frye’s response to blake would have been different had he not been introduced to the poet by an edition that regularizes blake’s eccentric spelling, capitalization, and punctuation. the cycle plays itself out in the first six thousand years, as los says: “‘i am that shadowy prophet who six thousand years ago / fell from my station in the eternal bosom’” (night the eighth, ll. 351-52, k 350; p. 105 [113].48-49, e 380). blake’s cosmos, like the kabbalistic prototype, consists primarily of four planes. at the top, eden, site of the divine lights, remains uncontaminated by the initial fault: then those in great eternity met in the council of god as one man, for contracting their exalted senses they behold multitude, or expanding they behold as one, as one man all the universal family; & that one man they call jesus the christ, & they in him & he in them live in perfect harmony, in eden the land of life. (night the first, ll. 469-74, k 277; p. 21.1-6, e 310-11) beneath eden, beulah, blake’s world of prototypical creation, is where the idea is actualized on the spiritual plane: there is from great eternity a mild & pleasant rest nam’d beulah, a soft moony universe, feminine, lovely, pure, mild & gentle, given in mercy to those who sleep, eternally created by the lamb of god around, on all sides, within & without the universal man. (night the first, ll. 94-98, k 266; p. 5.29-33, e 303) this is the location of jerusalem, blake’s shekhinah (see below): the daughters of beulah silent in the porches spread her a couch unknown to enitharmon; here repos’d jerusalem in slumbers soft, lull’d into silent rest. (night the first, ll. 568-70, k 280; p. 22 [20].9-11, e 313) the next level down is the world of archetypal formation, blake’s ulro: “in ulro, beneath beulah” (night the second, l. 71, k 282; p. 25.39, e 317). in blake’s myth, the primordial fault is associated with myth itself, that is, with the malformation of the archetypes that would be implemented in the world of fact. these are “the unreal forms of ulro’s night” (night the second, l. 112, k 283; p. 28.2, e 318), later described as “dreams of ulro, [sweet del.] dark delusive” (night the seventh, l. 331, k 328; p. 85.21, e 360). finally, generation corresponds to our world of fact, the now-corporeal plane where the labor of restoration is to occur. after the bard finishes his song in milton, “then there was murmuring in the heavens of albion / concerning generation & the vegetative power & concerning / the lamb the saviour” (14.4-6, k 495; 14 [15].4-6, e 108). in the kabbalistic myth, the primordial fault resulted in a cosmic dislocation, with the highest, the world of emanations, being separated from the lower three planes. at that point, an eleventh divine light, da’at (knowledge or science), was said to form a bridge that would enable them to reunite. this is the function of blake’s golgonooza: los perform’d wonders of labour— they builded golgonooza, los labouring [word del.] builded pillars high and domes terrific in the nether heavens, for beneath was open’d new heavens & a new earth beneath & within, threefold, within the brain, within the heart, within the loins: a threefold atmosphere sublime, continuous from urthona’s world, but yet having a limit twofold named satan & adam. (night the seventh, ll. 376-83, k 329; p. 87.5-11, e 368) in blake’s system, the major figures correspond to those of the kabbalistic myth. los is blake’s version of adam kadmon, primordial man, associated by christians with their saviour. los labors at his furnace—“the force of los’s hammer is eternal forgiveness” (jerusalem 88.50, k 734; e 247)—yet, as he says, “‘i act with benevolence & virtue & get murder’d time after time’” (91.26, k 738; 91.25, e 251). at the end of jerusalem, “the divine appearance was the likeness & similitude of los” (96.7, k 743; e 255). the second major figure, albion, corresponds to the kabbalistic adam rishon, described by van helmont as “protoplastic man.” this is the biblical adam who, at creation, was of enormous stature and contained all souls. however, as a result of the primordial fault, adam was reduced in size, the souls broke away from him, and he became mortal. thus, blake’s albion is introduced at the beginning of the four zoas as “rising upon his couch of death” (night the second, l. 1, k 280; p. 23.1, e 313), and the bard begins his song in milton “when albion was slain upon his mountains / and in his tent, thro’ envy of living form, even of the divine vision” (3.1-2, k 482; e 96). blake refers to the esoteric view of man in “to the jews” when he says, “you have a tradition, that man anciently contain’d in his mighty limbs all things in heaven & earth: this you recieved from the druids. ‘but now the starry heavens are fled from the mighty limbs of albion’” (jerusalem 27, k 649; e 171). finally, jerusalem is blake’s shekhinah, the symbol of the divine presence, said to have gone into exile at the initial fault; her return signifies cosmic restoration. thus, at the beginning of jerusalem, when the saviour asks, “‘where hast thou hidden thy emanation, lovely jerusalem’” (4.16, k 622; e 146), albion responds, “‘jerusalem is not! her daughters are indefinite’” (4.27, k 622; e 147). then, at the end of jerusalem, albion calls for her return: “‘awake, awake, jerusalem! o lovely emanation of albion, / awake and overspread all nations as in ancient time’” (97.1-2, k 744; e 256). iii. frye’s enterprise blake’s relationship with the western esoteric tradition posed a fundamental challenge to frye, whose primary goal was to establish a universal science of literary criticism. reacting to imputations that the humanities entailed little more than subjective responses, frye sought to formulate criteria through which the “literariness” of a text could be objectively evaluated. unfortunately, he predicated his purported science on logical fallacies that, ultimately, undermine his stated goal. frye delineates his theory in the anatomy of criticism, published in 1957.this is a decade after fearful symmetry was published, and seven years after “blake’s treatment of the archetype” was presented at the english institute. in order to avoid the inevitable distortions inherent in paraphrasing, i include what in other contexts might be considered overly long quotations. in the “polemical introduction,” he establishes the parameters of what he identifies as a canon of literature. toward that end, his methodology is predicated on what he calls the “inductive leap.” building on the scientific analogy, he explains: sciences normally begin in a state of naive induction: they tend first of all to take the phenomena they are supposed to interpret as data. … each modern science has had to take what bacon calls (though in another context) an inductive leap, occupying a new vantage ground from which it can see its former data as new things to be explained. (15)frye’s approach to what he calls the inductive leap is generally associated not with bacon, but with william whewell (1794–1866), who asserted that inductive reasoning begins with the process of generalizing. as charlotte sleigh explains in literature and science: “to arrive at the correct conclusion, one needed something more than just the evidence. one needed to make the correct mental leap, or to have the right idea in one’s head to begin with. … when it came to science, that leap was, for whewell—an ordained clergyman—a leap into the very mind of god” (84). as for validating the leap, she continues: “underlying whewell’s shaky logic was a confidence born of assumed cultural right. by sketching in a theological basis for science—that leap into the mind of god—whewell implied that the set of people with the right kind of scientific abilities were not political radicals and atheists. oxford and cambridge, with their anglican foundations, were automatically included as acceptable origins for scientific knowledge” (85). the inductive leap has always been controversial. in anticipation of whewell, david hume had problems with induction in general (marc lange, “hume and the problem of induction,” culminates with a section entitled “the inductive leap as mythical,” 86-88). on contemporary opposition to whewell’s theory, see malcolm forster, “the debate between whewell and mill on the nature of scientific induction.” after dismissing in a parenthetical remark “another context”—the conventional interpretation of the inductive leap as the logical fallacy of overgeneralizing, leaping from some to all—frye advocates his version of an inductive leap for literary criticism: it occurs to me that literary criticism is now in such a state of naive induction as we find in a primitive science. its materials, the masterpieces of literature, are not yet regarded as phenomena to be explained in terms of a conceptual framework which criticism alone possesses. they are still regarded as somehow constituting the framework or structure of criticism as well. i suggest that it is time for criticism to leap to a new ground from which it can discover what the organizing or containing forms of its conceptual framework are. criticism seems to be badly in need of a coordinating principle, a central hypothesis which, like the theory of evolution in biology, will see the phenomena it deals with as parts of a whole. the first postulate of this inductive leap is the same as that of any science: the assumption of total coherence. (15-16) having thus endorsed the practice of overgeneralizing, frye exploits the fallacy of begging the question—assuming that which is to be proven—as the means of establishing his canon. in his first move, he brackets off what he calls “meaningless criticism,” that is, anything that might not fit within the rules he is about to establish: “the first step in developing a genuine poetics is to recognize and get rid of meaningless criticism, or talking about literature in a way that cannot help to build up a systematic structure of knowledge” (18). as a corollary, he advocates including that which he decides fits within his predetermined parameters. as he acknowledges, “criticism has a great variety of neighbors”; therefore, he advises, “the critic must enter into relations with them in any way that guarantees his own independence” (19). in other words, the critic is free to include that which can be used to validate his preconceptions, while excluding anything that could conceivably undermine his intention. outliers, by definition, would be excluded from consideration. after circumscribing his canon, frye establishes two basic axioms. first, in order to universalize myth criticism, he removes literature from its chronological contexts. as he explains in the introduction to the third essay of the anatomy of criticism, “archetypal criticism: theory of myths”: we begin our study of archetypes, then, with a world of myth, an abstract or purely literary world of fictional and thematic design, unaffected by canons of plausible adaptation to familiar experience. in terms of narrative, myth is the imitation of actions near or at the conceivable limits of desire. … in terms of meaning or dianoia, myth is the same world looked at as an area or field of activity, bearing in mind our principle that the meaning or pattern of poetry is a structure of imagery with conceptual implications. … … myth is an art of implicit metaphorical identity. … in myth we see the structural principles of literature isolated. (136)robert a. segal’s aptly titled myth: a very short introduction provides an overview of various approaches to myth. segal discusses frye in the fifth chapter, “myth and literature”; see especially 81-83. second, he identifies the component parts of myth as the archetypes, those “element[s] in a work of literature, whether a character, an image, a narrative formula, or an idea, which can be assimilated to a larger unifying category” (“blake’s treatment of the archetype” 191). on this theoretical base, he then constructs an apparently coherent critical edifice, culminating in the great code: the bible and literature, where he posits exoteric christianity as the “larger unifying category” around which western culture developed. to frye, kabbalism was just another system to be incorporated into his universal theory. it should be noted that accurate information about kabbalism was not introduced into the english-speaking world until 1941, when gershom g. scholem’s groundbreaking major trends in jewish mysticism was first published; leo schaya’s the universal meaning of the kabbalah was not translated into english until 1971. as for christian kabbalism, frances a. yates’s giordano bruno and the hermetic tradition was published in 1964. this means that most of the historically valid information was not available until after frye had consolidated his ideas about myth. as a result, in his post-anatomy of criticism thinking frye approached kabbalism analogically, like any other mythology, removing from their cultural and historical contexts those elements he found amenable to his system while ignoring inconvenient facts that did not support his theory.see robert d. denham, northrop frye: religious visionary and architect of the spiritual world, “the kabbalah: from yates to yeats” (188-93), where he argues that “kabbalism for frye was one of the four occult arts, the other three being magic, alchemy, and astrology” (188). in his discussion, denham merges all of frye’s sources together, ranging from the scholarly accurate books by scholem, schaya, and yates, specifically named as having been owned by frye, to the purely occult. iv. frye’s mistreatment of the blakean archetype what most readers of fearful symmetry forget is that frye’s primary concern was not blake but, rather, his own system. as ian balfour points out: “frye seeks through this work not so much to make a contribution to blake studies as to revolutionize our understanding of poetry as such, with blake singled out as the exemplary poet” (2). frye explains his role in a letter to his future wife helen kemp (3 may 1935): only the blake—i know blake as no man has ever known him—of that i’m quite sure. but i lack so woefully in the way of subtlety. i haven’t got a subtle mind—only a pounding, driving bourgeois intellect. i don’t insinuate myself between two factors of a distinction—i push them aside: if i meet a recalcitrant fact, i knock it down; which doesn’t get rid of it, but puts it in a different position. consequently i’m damnably lonesome, intellectually. i resent criticism, because i don’t know, in most cases, what the hell i mean myself, so how should anyone else pretend to do so? besides, in conversations i take up most of my positions through intellectual arrogance rather than reasoned conviction, and consequently won’t back out of them. … but the real trouble is that all this work is basically critical, and purely critical work doesn’t satisfy me. because if i am to rest content with criticism i have to pay attention to all these stupid distinctions made by facts: my criticisms are not, properly speaking, criticisms at all, but synthetic recreations. professor [herbert j.] davis was kind enough, or ignorant enough, to remark that what he had seen of my theoretical re-construction of blake was a damned sight more interesting than the original, as far as the prophecies are concerned at all events. … i’m a critical capitalist. the english conquered india, the largest, richest, most complicated empire in the world, with a handful of soldiers. i can sail into blake or shakespeare or st. augustine or the christian religion or aesthetics with two facts and a thesis, and i can conquer it. (the correspondence of northrop frye and helen kemp, 1932–1939 1: 435; italics mine)referring to frye’s youthful reading of dickens’s a child’s history of england, biographer john ayre comments, “the obvious twisting of facts to suit ideology impressed northrop even then” (33). regarding blake in particular, frye explains in a letter of 11 march 1935: oh, my god, child, is it that long since i’ve written you? i don’t know what dimension i’m working in any more. nothing has mattered, nothing has even existed, for the past six weeks, but blake, blake, blake: i’ve spun the man around like a teetotum, i’ve torn him into tiny shreds and teased and anatomized him with pincers, i’ve stretched my mind over passages as though it were on a rack, i’ve plunged into darkness and mist, out again into the clear light—where i started from in the first place—rushed up blind alleys of comparison and sources, broken down completely from sheer inertia, worked all night on a paragraph no better in the morning. at that i’ve completed, as far as the actual typing out goes, only the preface and the first chapter, which runs to about sixty pages. but what i have done is a masterpiece; finely written, well handled, and the best, clearest and most accurate exposition of blake’s thought yet written. if it’s no good i’m no good. there isn’t a sentence, and there won’t be a sentence, in the whole work that hasn’t gone through purgatory. christ! why was i born with brains? (the correspondence of northrop frye and helen kemp, 1932–1939 1: 414-15; italics mine) the result is an altered version that has less to do with blake than with frye, who sought to resituate the heretofore outlier as the center of a universal system. to that end, in the process of tearing blake into shreds he reformulated the text in such a way that it conformed with his preconceptions about literature. anticipating the anatomy of criticism, frye used the blakean distortions as the basis for a system he would then, in a series of essays written after the mid-1950s, exploit to validate his reading of blake.angela esterhammer compiled all of frye’s essays on blake, including those written after the publication of the anatomy of criticism, in northrop frye on milton and blake, vol. 16 of the collected works of northrop frye. in her introduction, she cites recurring themes in his writings on blake. first, he insists on blake’s sanity, even when many modern critics are still repeating, in different forms, the charges of blake’s own contemporaries that he was mad (and therefore unreliable and inconsistent). second, there is a strong, articulated structure to the mythology of blake’s prophecies, which has been recognized by the pioneering blake critic s. foster damon and frye himself, but not by most other critics. third, blake and frye are in the line of those who believe that art has a prophetic authority of its own, though many critics try to assimilate the artist to social critique or political systems. fourth, blake needs to be read on his own terms. (xxvii-xxviii) my concern is how well frye himself adheres to the fourth principle. these distortions revolve around frye’s theory about canonization, as well as the consistency and conventionality of archetypes. 1) canonization by the time he wrote the anatomy of criticism, frye felt no need to explain why he was excluding from his study what today is called western esotericism.in the introduction to the third essay, “archetypal criticism: theory of myths,” he says: in this book we are attempting to outline a few of the grammatical rudiments of literary expression, and the elements of it that correspond to such musical elements as tonality, simple and compound rhythm, canonical imitation, and the like. the aim is to give a rational account of some of the structural principles of western literature in the context of its classical and christian heritage. (133) in the earlier fearful symmetry, however, he apparently believed that if he wished to include blake within his proposed canon, he would first have to extract him from the kabbalistic context. the problem was exacerbated by earlier blake criticism. although he makes no mention of the early pierre berger, william blake, mysticisme et poésie (1907; english translation, 1914), much less milton o. percival, william blake’s circle of destiny (1938), which was published during the period when he was working on fearful symmetry, frye was strongly influenced by denis saurat, who, in blake and modern thought (1929), explicitly attributes the shift in intellectual attitudes of the late eighteenth century to the esoteric tradition:referring to books that frye gained access to on a summer job in the central reference library, ayre notes, the most important … was denis saurat’s 1924 book blake and modern thought. frye later repudiated it but it awoke his interest in blake. fascinated by the reverberations of the book, frye came in a half-hour early every morning to read it. although absorbed to an excessive degree with blake’s occult and mystical background, saurat planted a golden seed in frye’s mind that, once these sources were understood, “blake’s ideas … considered as a whole, are perfectly coherent and reasonable.” (62; ayre confuses the date of blake and modern thought with that of saurat’s blake and milton) frye seems to have remained ambivalent about the question of blake’s mysticism, citing texts, though without explaining the value of their specific approaches. for example, in the bibliographical note of selected poetry and prose of william blake (xxix-xxx), he includes both percival and saurat. a few years after that, in the bibliographical essay “william blake,” he praises berger, without referring to the book’s subject matter, as, “among other things, the first really thoughtful and systematic study yet made of the prophetic books. it demonstrated a coherent and controlling mind at work in them; the commentary provides much new and specific information about blake’s meaning” (14). but the complete change came with the positive phase when man, having deplaced god from the throne of the creator, tried to hoist himself into that supreme seat. this was to lead to the idealism of the nineteenth century: the doctrine that it was the mind of man that created the world. but the german philosophers from kant to hegel only codified eighteenth century thought. men vastly inferior to them in logical power, but perhaps superior in intuitive and psychological insight, like swedenborg and de saint martin, had preceded them in the identification of the powers of man and the powers of god. (x) according to saurat, “blake stands at the moment of the change” (xi), having been influenced by the gnostics and the hindus, among other non-western traditions. regarding kabbalism in particular, saurat explains: the jewish cabalists had worked out the identification of god and man to its furthest possible limits; and a long string of christian cabalists from pico della mirandola to fludd and swedenborg, had taught the european mind that in the cabala there was a living spring of fertilising ideas. blake is full of the cabala and of its christian exponents. (xiii)saurat devotes a section to “the cabala” (98-106) in the third part of his study, “pantheistic idealism.” apparently, frye felt that if blake was to be included within the exoteric tradition, he would first have to be removed from the esoteric context. for most scholars (read “pedants,” in frye’s vocabulary), this would entail a close reading of blake and his sources, culminating in a logical argument intended to persuade others that saurat was wrong. frye, though, “meet[ing] a recalcitrant fact,” simply “knock[s] it down.” by “put[ting] it in a different position,” he reconfigures the field, effectively defining out of consideration that which, for his own unexplained reasons, he wished to bracket off from blake. he begins the process early, in the first section of fearful symmetry: i am not speaking now of merely vulgar misunderstandings. no one who has read three lines of our straightforward and outspoken poet can imagine that he wished to be pursued by a band of superstitious dilettantes into the refuge of a specialized cult. whatever blake’s prophecies may be, they can hardly be code messages. they may need interpretation, but not deciphering: there can be no “key” and no open-sesame formula and no patented system of translation. the amateur of cabalism who accepts obscure truisms for profound truths, and sentimental platitudes for esoteric mysteries, would do well to steer clear of blake. no: i mean the tendency to describe blake in terms of certain stereotypes which imply that he can be fully appreciated only by certain types of mind, and which tend to scare the ordinary reader away from him. the poet who addressed the four parts of his most complicated poem, jerusalem, to the “public,” jews, deists and christians—to anyone who cares to look at it—the poet who boasted of being understood by children, would have resented this treatment strongly. it is true, however, that the poet who said “exuberance is beauty” demands an energy of response. he is not writing for a tired pedant who feels merely badgered by difficulty: he is writing for enthusiasts of poetry who, like the readers of mystery stories, enjoy sitting up nights trying to find out what the mystery is. (7) it is hard to avoid the inference that frye’s “amateur of cabalism who accepts obscure truisms for profound truths,” not to mention the “tired pedant who feels merely badgered by difficulty,” is saurat. regardless, in this passage, frye replaces reasoned argument with innuendo and name-calling, discrediting any competing reading as an “open-sesame formula,” as opposed to frye’s system of archetypes.frye’s specious distinction between deciphering and interpretation had been undermined at least as far back as ferdinand de saussure (1857–1913) and on through frye’s time by roman jakobson (1896–1982) and roland barthes (1915–80), to name but three major figures in the field. conversely, his use of the pejorative “amateur of cabalism” blurs together the various aspects of an inherently complex field. frye balances the introductory dismissal of kabbalism with an appendix, “general note: blake’s mysticism” (431-32), in which he presents mysticism in such a way that it can be completely isolated from blake’s enterprise:frye’s personal attitude toward mysticism is perplexing. when marketing his manuscript to princeton university press, “while he said his study focussed on the prophecies, he emphasized that it dealt with blake as poet rather than mystic or occultist, and attempted to make blake relevant to the contemporary world” (ayre 191). yet, in 1949, “frye flirted with outright mysticism, suggesting a ‘higher unity,’ a precious, inviolable, supernal zone of significance which, like the postulated but unknown ‘god’ of theology, must be approached with care along a special path” (ayre 218). one cannot help but wonder if the emphatic denunciation of mysticism in fearful symmetry had less to do with blake than with frye. the word “mystic” has never brought anything but confusion into the study of blake, and, in my anxiety to prevent it from cluttering up this book, i have begun by conceding, as a sort of opening gambit, the conventional mystic’s attitude to the artist as the imperfect mystic who cannot wholly detach himself from the sensible world. but it does not follow that i am willing to let the conventional mystic remain in possession of the field. (431) in his definition, which arbitrarily restricts mysticism to non-verbal contemplation, frye conveniently excludes not only mystical poetry, but the vast area of theosophical speculation—myth—that is a significant component of kabbalism, and the subject of saurat’s comments. in this way, he can exclude the kabbalistic myth from blake—except, of course, for those few instances that he feels might be helpful in constructing his own system.in general, frye remains derisive of kabbalism, in fearful symmetry denying that blake would have contaminated his myth with such questionable material. after acknowledging its existence as “a source of new imaginative interpretations of the bible” (151), he then brackets off what he calls “cabbalistic pedantry” (156) from serious consideration: to understand blake’s thought historically, we must keep in mind an affinity between three renaissance traditions, the imaginative approach to god through love and beauty in italian platonism, the doctrine of inner inspiration in the left-wing protestants, and the theory of creative imagination in occultism. in these traditions, again, we should distinguish certain elements which, though often found in the vicinity of blake’s type of thinking, were either ignored or condemned by him. the renaissance development of the symposium is blakean: the pythagorean tendencies derived from the timaeus and the cabbala are not. (155) the first instance is actually a misinterpretation of the kabbalistic adam kadmon. as mentioned, adam kadmon, primordial man, was the first completed entity in the creation process. although originally intended to serve as a passive model for adam rishon to emulate, as a result of the initial fault he was forced to assume an active role, separating out the shards of negation so that the contaminated lights could be purified and rise again. as seen most clearly in jerusalem, this is the function of los, who compelled his spectre “‘to assist me in my terrible labours,’” explaining, “‘i am inspired. i act not for myself; for albion’s sake’” (8.15, 17, k 627; e 151). adam kadmon is to be differentiated from adam rishon, “first man,” the biblical adam who, in his initial state, spanned the four planes of the cosmos and contained within him all souls. at the primordial fault, adam rishon was reduced in size and many of the souls broke away from him. in fearful symmetry, frye follows saurat’s lead in blurring the two together. first saurat: we find here adam kadmon, the total man of the cabala, whom blake calls albion …. in short, blake drew from the cabala two of the greatest leading ideas of his mythology: the idea of the one being from whom all beings are drawn; the idea of the division into male and female. we shall see that the cabala explains much more of the detail of blake’s visions. indeed the cabalistic element is so closely woven into the very fabric of the prophetic books that it is only in studying blake’s system as a whole that we shall be able to judge of the influence of the cabala upon him. (102-03) now frye: this myth of a primeval giant whose fall was the creation of the present universe is not in the bible itself, but has been preserved by the cabbala in its conception of adam kadmon, the universal man who contained within his limbs all heaven and earth, to whom blake refers. a somewhat more accessible form of the same myth is in the prose edda, a cyclic work systematizing the fragmentary apocalyptic poems of the elder edda, which to blake contained traditions as antique and authentic as those of the old testament itself. (125) significantly, frye ignores saurat’s conclusion that more research needs to be done on both systems, blake’s and the kabbalistic. instead, he reduces the image not only to a conventional archetype, but to one “more accessible.” the implication seems to be that there is nothing to be learned by a more extensive analysis of kabbalism, which is only old wine in cloudy bottles.percival repeats saurat’s misinterpretation of adam kadmon, also without attribution: in a sense there is only one character in the myth. he is albion, the last of a long line of primordial cosmic figures with which the platonizing imagination filled ancient speculation and which came down along esoteric by-paths through the middle ages and emerged again into the main highway of knowledge in the grand man of swedenborg. there was, for instance, the adam kadmon of the kabbalah, primordial and archetypal, the image of everything that is above and everything that is below, the sum of the ten divine emanations and the embodiment, therefore, of all manifestations. (william blake’s circle of destiny 13) in a second instance, frye reduces the kabbalistic emphasis on language to an “analogy.” referring to blake’s assertion in “to the public” that “every word and every letter is studied and put into its fit place” (jerusalem 3, k 621; e 146), he says: it is understandable then that hebrew traditions should have preserved in cabbalism a respect for the letter as well as the word of their scripture, and perhaps one may see in the cabbalistic frenzy of superstitious pedantry an “analogy” of the vision of a god who is alpha and omega. … it was no doubt the influence of what he knew of cabbalism that caused blake to say of jerusalem that not only every word but every letter in it had been “studied.” (416-17)frye’s rejection of kabbalistic linguistics could, to a degree, be a defense mechanism for his own limitations. as he says in the introduction to the great code: “i am not a biblical scholar, and anyone who was one could say of my hebrew and greek what samuel johnson said, with far less justice, of milton’s two tetrachordon sonnets, that the first is contemptible, and the second not excellent” (xiv). the kabbalistic attitude toward language completely contradicts frye’s entire project. predicated on the belief that the hebrew bible is the word of god, kabbalism exploits the non-communicative functions of language as the means of apprehending the mind of god. in contrast, frye’s interest throughout his career was in reader’s response as opposed to author’s intention. in the late the great code: the bible and literature, he positions himself as a literary critic who explores “the impact of the bible on the creative imagination,” not “the much more fully cultivated areas of faith, reason, and scholarly knowledge” (xxi). antecedents of this attitude are evident in the passage quoted above from fearful symmetry, where he first denigrates the kabbalistic practice as a “frenzy of superstitious pedantry,” then diminishes blake’s familiarity to “what he knew of cabbalism.” in this way, as advised in the anatomy of criticism, frye is able to salvage what he finds useful, while discounting anything that might undermine his project.denham’s discussion of the ways frye exploited the kabbalistic attitude toward language as the basis for his own theory of philology (northrop frye: religious visionary and architect of the spiritual world 189-93) parallels what i see as frye’s use of blake as the basis for his theory of myth. 2) consistency key to frye’s edifice is the principle of consistency, his assertion that the same archetypes can be found throughout literary history. in order for blake to be situated within the system, the same would have to be true of his work as well. consequently, by fiat, if not with any basis in fact, frye attributes to blake the same principle, asserting that “even in matters of opinion blake shows little variation …. his principles he held with bulldog tenacity all his life. … obstinacy in maintaining what he believed to be true was itself one of his leading principles” (fearful symmetry 13). on the basis of this assertion, frye infers that “anything admitted to that canon, whatever its date, not only belongs in a unified scheme but is in accord with a permanent structure of ideas” (14). in order to maintain the consistency of his system, he then imposes a consistent interpretation on texts that, in themselves, are highly inconsistent. a good example is the figure of bromion. first introduced in visions of the daughters of albion (1793), bromion is subsequently included in night the eighth of the four zoas (c. 1796–1807) in an extended catalogue of the sons of los and enitharmon; then, in milton (1804–11), he is identified as one of los’s four sons, the one “loving science” (24.12, k 508; e 119); finally, in jerusalem (1804–c. 1820), as one of the four ungenerated sons of los and jerusalem, he is described as wielding “iron tongs & glowing poker reddening fierce” (16.2, k 636; e 159). in his first appearance, though, as most readers concur, bromion is a rapist who takes and, when he is finished, discards an unwilling oothoon: bromion rent her with his thunders; on his stormy bed lay the faint maid, and soon her woes appall’d his thunders hoarse. bromion spoke: “behold this harlot here on bromion’s bed, “and let the jealous dolphins sport around the lovely maid! “thy soft american plains are mine, and mine thy north & south: “stampt with my signet are the swarthy children of the sun; “they are obedient, they resist not, they obey the scourge; “their daughters worship terrors and obey the violent. “now thou maist marry bromion’s harlot, and protect the child “of bromion’s rage, that oothoon shall put forth in nine moons’ time.” then storms rent theotormon’s limbs: he roll’d his waves around. (1.16-2.3, k 190; e 46) apparently in order to make this bromion consistent with the role he is assigned in the major prophecies, frye completely misreads the text, seeing not a rape but an extramarital affair: theotormon and oothoon represent, more or less, the precarious type of wedded love that so easily turns into a jealous possessiveness rationalized by a priggish morality. this morality is personified by bromion (gk. … “roaring”), a kind of mr. grundy. oothoon has engaged in an extramarital amour, apparently with bromion, and has inherited the jealousy of her husband and the thunderous denunciations of her lover. in order to horrify bromion into calling her a harlot it is not necessary, of course, for oothoon to do more than find pleasure in sexual experience. the stupidity of bromion, however, is not a cause of his actions but an effect of them: their real cause is a fear based on common sense, a bad theory of knowledge. he lacks neither intelligence nor sensitivity, but he believes that there is an unthinkably mysterious and remote world beyond his reach. hence, he reasons, only mechanical laws like the law of gravitation can hold it together. … theotormon’s relation to all this is simply that of the victim to the tyrant, the host to the parasite, the cuckold to the cuckoo. he knows, in a vague and lugubrious way, that bromion may not be wholly right, but his spirit has been broken by bromion’s arguments, and he has neither the courage nor the energy to settle his cloudy doubts one way or the other. (fearful symmetry 238-39) by ignoring the rape, frye is able to reconcile this bromion, along with theotormon, the man who will subsequently be identified as his brother, with their later manifestations, as he says when discussing what he has labeled the orc cycle: “theotormon and bromion, [represent] social service and science respectively” (261). to account for their antisocial behavior in visions of the daughters of albion, he explains, “all of these sons may under the wrong conditions be perverted, and in fact are usually so portrayed. … theotormon [may become] moral cowardice, bromion dogmatic prejudice” (261), though he never cites—and i cannot find—examples of where they “are usually so portrayed,” nor does he explain how “dogmatic prejudice” relates to a love of science or labor at the furnace, the only specific characteristics blake actually attributes to bromion. later, when discussing jerusalem, frye refers to “our old friends rintrah, palamabron, theotormon and bromion,” whom he now describes as corresponding to the zoas, as “manifestations of culture within the world of time” (378).according to frye, they “correspond to the zoas, rintrah to urizen, palamabron to luvah, theotormon to tharmas, and bromion to urthona, but, being sons of los, they are manifestations of culture within the world of time, and are therefore less inclusive conceptions” (378). significantly, he never explains the association between particular zoas and specific sons of los. from the kabbalistic perspective, from highest to lowest, urthona and rintrah could correspond, respectively, to albion’s and los’s immortal souls; luvah and palamabron to their spiritual souls; urizen and theotormon to their rational souls; and, finally, tharmas and bromion to their animal souls (see “wonders divine” 110). there is an obvious disparity between bromion’s first appearance, in visions of the daughters of albion, and subsequent references in the major prophecies. yet, in fearful symmetry, frye glosses over the differences by generating an interpretation that bridges the gap. 3) conventionality the success of frye’s enterprise rests on the concept of conventionality, his belief that virtually all images can be classified into easily identifiable categories. as defined in the glossary to the anatomy of criticism, an archetype is “a symbol, usually an image, which recurs often enough in literature to be recognizable as an element of one’s literary experience as a whole” (365). these individual images are then structured in terms of a cosmic vision. according to frye, there are two types of cosmologies, “the kind designed to understand the world as it is, and the kind designed to transform it into the form of human desire” (unnumbered preface to the 1969 edition of fearful symmetry). the former, which he associates with platonists and occultists … after newton’s time, according to blake, became the accepted form of science. cosmology of this type is speculative, which, as the etymology of that word shows, is ultimately intellectual narcism, staring into nature as the mirror of our ordinary selves. what the mirror shows us is what blake calls “mathematic form,” the automatic and mindless universe that has no beginning nor end, no up nor down. what such a universe suggests to us is resignation, acceptance of what is, approval of what is predictable, fear of whatever is unpredictable. this is to be contrasted with what frye identifies as “blake’s cosmology, of which the symbol is ezekiel’s vision of the chariot of god with its ‘wheels within wheels.’” this cosmology is a revolutionary vision of the universe transformed by the creative imagination into a human shape. this cosmology is not speculative but concerned, not reactionary but revolutionary, not a vision of things as they are ordered but of things as they could be ordered. blake is often associated with speculative cosmologists, but the psychological contrast with them is more significant than any resemblances. blake belongs with the poets, with the milton whose raphael advised adam that while studying the stars was all very well, keeping his own freedom of will was even more important. blake’s poetry, like that of every poet who knows what he is doing, is mythical, for myth is the language of concern: it is cosmology in movement, a living form and not a mathematical one. leaving aside the fact that one of the earliest forms of kabbalistic speculation was throne or chariot mysticism (the contemplation of ezekiel’s chariot), frye’s distinction, as with others already mentioned, is specious, enabling him to bracket off the cosmology of “platonists and occultists” so that he could revise blake as he chose. this revision, in particular, rests on frye’s identification of ulro as hell. as mentioned earlier, the four planes of blake’s cosmology can be seen to correspond to the four planes of the kabbalistic cosmos (which also, not coincidentally, correspond to the fourfold nature of ezekiel’s chariot), with ulro explicitly situated beneath beulah, corresponding to the world of archetypal formation. frye, however, was more attracted to the medieval conception of the cosmos.see the section “cosmology and vision” in adamson, northrop frye: a visionary life (45-52). as he would later explain in the secular scripture (originally published in 1976): explicitly for the first eighteen centuries of the christian era, and implicitly after and long before that, these patterns of ascent and descent have been spread over a mythological universe consisting of four main levels, two above our own, one below it. the highest level is heaven, the place of the presence of god: this world is strictly beyond space, but may be symbolized, as in dante’s paradiso, by the spatial metaphor of heaven in the sense of the sky, the world of sun, moon, and stars. the world above the moon is traditionally thought of as the world that escaped the fall, and is consequently what is left of the order of nature as god originally made it. level two is the earthly paradise or garden of eden, where man lived before the fall. the associations of the word “fall” suggest that eden is to be thought of as the highest point in the world, as it is geographically in dante. level three is the world of ordinary experience we now live in. animals and plants seem to be well adjusted to this world, but man, though born in it, is not of it: his natural home is level two, where god intended him to live. level four is the demonic world or hell, in christianity not part of the order of nature but an autonomous growth, usually placed below ground. (64) in fearful symmetry, he relocates ulro beneath generation in order to superimpose the medieval prototype onto blake’s cosmology: we have said that there are at least three levels of imagination. the lowest is that of the isolated individual reflecting on his memories of perception and evolving generalizations and abstract ideas. this world is single, for the distinction of subject and object is lost and we have only a brooding subject left. blake calls this world ulro; it is his hell, and his symbols for it are symbols of sterility, chiefly rocks and sand. above it is the ordinary world we live in, a double world of subject and object, of organism and environment, which blake calls generation. (48-49)justifying his representation of blake’s cosmos, frye enthused in his last public lecture on blake, “blake’s bible”: to have turned a metaphorical cosmos eighteen centuries old upside down in a few poems, and provided the basis for a structure that practically every major thinker for the next century would build on, was one of the most colossal imaginative feats in the history of human culture. the only drawback, of course, was that no one knew blake had done it: in fact blake hardly realized he had done it either. (northrop frye on milton and blake 427) although frye is putatively talking about blake, it is hard to avoid the inference that he is referring to himself as the individual who had at least discovered—if not actually accomplished—the feat. this is more than simply a geographical shift. as frye said in the 1969 preface, cosmology provides the basis for vision; by reversing the order of the cosmic planes, he has replaced blake’s vision with his own.the impetus to situate ulro beneath generation seems to have had more to do with frye’s needs than with blake’s system. herbert lindenberger, one of frye’s students in a class on romanticism, recorded: usually at the beginning of each class session mr. frye put a chart on the board based on blake’s map of the psyche. it looked like this: eden beulah generation ulro in the course of the session he would fill in each of those categories with concrete matter—images, titles of poems or parts of poems, names of authors, all manner of things. i had never seen anything of the like before. he never explained directly what he was up to. (quoted in ayre 232) while frye’s original error preceded the availability of an accurate discussion of the kabbalistic cosmos, he still never corrected himself, even after he had read scholem and schaya, among other sources that were available during the time he worked on the secular scripture. in so doing, he has raised some issues that he does not address. first, if ulro and hell are the same, why would blake go to the trouble of coining a new name? does this mean, as frye had denied in the first section of fearful symmetry, that blake has simply produced a code in which his names are to be substituted for the more conventional ones? if not, what is the difference between ulro and hell? in fact, blake did use the conventional meaning of hell in earlier works—most obviously in the marriage of heaven and hell—and even after coining the name ulro in the four zoas, he continued to use the word hell as well. if there is no difference, why would he use one name rather than the other? if there is a difference, then ulro is not hell, but something else. v. conclusion frye’s enterprise rests on the logical process of generalizing, conventionally defined as the analysis of a significant number of typical instances in order to derive a general conclusion. if the conclusion is to be considered valid, three basic questions must be addressed: 1. is the sample large enough? 2. are the instances typical? 3. can the negatives be explained away? it must be emphasized that generalizing can lead at best only to probability, not certainty. finally, as already mentioned, it is necessary to avoid the fallacy of the inductive leap, that is, drawing a conclusion beyond the range justified by the evidence. in the totality of his work, frye’s hypothesis was that he could generate a universal series of archetypes that would subsume all western literature, including blake. as far as the first question is concerned, most readers remain in awe of frye’s encyclopedic knowledge of western literature, reflected by his ability to cite numerous instances in support of his assertions. for blake scholars, though, the pedants whom frye excoriates throughout fearful symmetry, the other two questions remain problematic. in order to use blake as the central instance of his universal theory of literature, frye had first to demonstrate that the supposed outlier was, in fact, typical. to that end, as i argue in this paper, he misread, misinterpreted, and, when necessary, misrepresented the text in such a way that blake was reconfigured as the avatar of frye’s version of western literature. in the process, frye “tor[e] him into tiny shreds,” the result being a blurring of the difference between frye and blake. readers have persistently complained about the way frye merged his attitudes with blake’s, leaving the impression that the poet and the critic spoke with one voice, and that, therefore, the audience might just as easily read frye as blake. carlos baker, upon reading the manuscript of fearful symmetry, found it “impossible to distinguish between frye’s commentary and his paraphrasing of blake. … he concluded that frye was creating his own tragedy in the book by knowing and seeing so much. he saw the book as a ‘diffuse epic in prose’” (ayre 193).at that time a shelley scholar, baker (1909–87) evaluated frye’s manuscript for princeton university press. see ayre’s survey of the initial response to fearful symmetry (191-95). as implied by baker’s response, frye’s writing about blake is not criticism, but fiction, defined broadly as a narrative drawn from imagination, as opposed to history or fact.frye’s own definition of fiction is rather anomalous: “literature in which the radical of presentation is the printed or written word, such as novels and essays” (anatomy of criticism 365). in his rendition, frye leaves blake behind, replacing the poet’s text with the critic’s imaginative ruminations, which, for many in the audience, are equally provocative, and certainly, for those interested in frye’s critical enterprise, equally significant.according to bentley, this was also true of frye’s 1953 modern library edition, the selected poetry and prose of william blake, “valuable for the introduction and notes, though the quality of the editing of blake’s text itself is negligible” (182). not so for those of us interested in blake. the third test for induction, explaining away the negative, presented a greater challenge to frye. throughout history, western esotericism has existed as a counterweight to the exoteric tradition. in their own self-defense, the dominant institutions have attempted to eliminate the threat, primarily by defining it beyond the pale of acceptable belief, using the label heresy as the means of discrediting anything that might challenge the stability of the system. so, too, with frye, who defined out of the range of acceptability anything that did not fit within his theory. in fearful symmetry, the rubric “mysticism” became the catch-all for that which he wished to extirpate. it is true that he differentiated between what he considered to be good mysticism and bad, but still, neither was permitted within his system. most germane to blake, by defining mysticism out of the range of acceptability, frye also eliminated the kabbalistic myth. an alternative mode of thought, the myth originated in the middle ages, through the interaction between jews and christians, with the result that what was attributed to the jews could easily be adapted for christian needs. as consolidated by luria, and then christianized by van helmont, the myth became the negative that frye could not explain away. though predicated on the bible, it is a totally different system of archetypes; in other words, it forms its own version of a “great code.” as such, it constitutes the specific instance that undermines frye’s claim of universality. therefore, if frye’s system is to remain useful, it must be explicitly redefined as being limited to the western exoteric tradition, with an acknowledgment that the esoteric has its own validity, and is not simply to be dismissed. this leaves the question of where to put blake. in the process of exploiting the poet for his own purposes, frye not only distorted blake, but also, given the “massive and pervasive” influence noted by bentley, spawned generations of critics who have accepted frye’s pronouncements at face value and, as a result, produced their own distorted interpretations of the illuminated books. now it is time to reverse the process, that is, to extricate blake by looking at what he actually had to say, then evaluating how much frye’s reading does or does not help us to understand the poet.mark ryan would disagree with me; he ends his essay “fearful symmetries: william blake, northrop frye, and archetypal criticism,” a jungian analysis of frye’s blake, with the conclusion, “in carefully investigating blake’s physical imagery to reveal a preoccupation with cerebral and neural processes, frye’s work has remained the sine qua non for blake specialists” (182). works cited adamson, joseph. northrop frye: a visionary life. toronto: ecw p, 1993. ayre, john. northrop frye: a biography. toronto: random house, 1989. balfour, ian. northrop frye. boston: twayne, 1988. bentley, g. e., jr. “blake on frye and frye on blake.” the legacy of northrop frye. ed. alvin a. lee and robert d. denham. toronto: u of toronto p, 1994. 177-89. berger, p. william blake, mysticisme et poésie. 1907. english translation: william blake: poet and mystic. trans. daniel h. conner. london: chapman & hall, 1914. blake, william. blake: complete writings with variant readings. ed. geoffrey keynes. london: oxford up, 1966. ———. the complete poetry and prose of william blake. ed. david v. erdman. newly rev. ed. new york: anchor-random house, 1988. ———. poetry and prose of william blake. ed. geoffrey keynes. london: nonesuch p, 1927. ———. selected poetry and prose of william blake. ed. northrop frye. new york: modern library, 1953. ———. the writings of william blake. ed. geoffrey keynes. 3 vols. london: nonesuch p, 1925. dan, joseph. “jewish influences iii: ‘christian kabbalah’ in the renaissance.” hanegraaff, dictionary of gnosis and western esotericism 2: 638-42. denham, robert d. northrop frye: religious visionary and architect of the spiritual world. charlottesville: u of virginia p, 2004. forster, malcolm. “the debate between whewell and mill on the nature of scientific induction.” handbook of the history of logic. volume 10: inductive logic. ed. dov m. gabbay, stephan hartmann, and john woods. amsterdam: elsevier, 2011. 93-115. frye, northrop. anatomy of criticism: four essays. princeton: princeton up, 1957. ———. “blake’s treatment of the archetype.” english institute essays, 1950. ed. alan s. downer. new york: columbia up, 1951. 170-96. ———. the correspondence of northrop frye and helen kemp, 1932–1939. ed. robert d. denham. 2 vols. the collected works of northrop frye, vols. 1-2. toronto: u of toronto p, 1996. ———. fearful symmetry: a study of william blake. 1947. princeton: princeton up, 1969. ———. the great code: the bible and literature. new york: harcourt brace jovanovich, 1982. ———. northrop frye on milton and blake. ed. angela esterhammer. collected works of northrop frye, vol. 16. toronto: u of toronto p, 2005. ———. the secular scripture and other writings on critical theory, 1976–1991. ed. joseph adamson and jean wilson. collected works of northrop frye, vol. 18. toronto: u of toronto p, 2006. ———. “william blake.” rev. martin k. nurmi. the english romantic poets and essayists: a review of research and criticism. ed. carolyn washburn houtchens and lawrence huston houtchens. rev. ed. new york: modern language association of america, by nyu p, 1966. 1-35. halmi, nicholas. “northrop frye’s fearful symmetry.” essays in criticism 55.2 (2005): 159-72. hanegraaff, wouter j., ed. dictionary of gnosis and western esotericism. 2 vols. leiden: brill, 2005. ———. “esotericism.” dictionary of gnosis and western esotericism 1: 336-40. ———. “jewish influences v: occultist kabbalah.” dictionary of gnosis and western esotericism 2: 644-47. kilcher, andreas b. “jewish influences iv: enlightenment/romanticism.” hanegraaff, dictionary of gnosis and western esotericism 2: 642-44. lange, marc. “hume and the problem of induction.” handbook of the history of logic. volume 10: inductive logic. ed. dov m. gabbay, stephan hartmann, and john woods. amsterdam: elsevier, 2011. 43-91. leicht, reimund. “jewish influences i: antiquity.” hanegraaff, dictionary of gnosis and western esotericism 2: 633-37. ———. “jewish influences ii: middle ages.” hanegraaff, dictionary of gnosis and western esotericism 2: 637-38. percival, milton o. william blake’s circle of destiny. new york: columbia up, 1938. rousse-lacordaire, jérôme. “mysticism.” hanegraaff, dictionary of gnosis and western esotericism 2: 818-20. ryan, mark. “fearful symmetries: william blake, northrop frye, and archetypal criticism.” english studies in canada 37.2 (june 2011): 173-83. saurat, denis. blake and modern thought. new york: l. macveagh, dial p, 1929. schaya, leo. the universal meaning of the kabbalah. trans. nancy pearson. london: george allen & unwin, 1971; secaucus, nj: university books, 1972; baltimore: penguin books, 1973. scholem, gershom g. major trends in jewish mysticism. new york: schocken, 1941; 2nd ed., 1946; 3rd ed., 1954. segal, robert a. myth: a very short introduction. oxford: oxford up, 2004. sleigh, charlotte. literature and science. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, 2011. spector, sheila a. jewish mysticism: an annotated bibliography on the kabbalah in english. new york: garland, 1984. ———. “kabbalistic sources—blake’s and his critics’.” blake 17.3 (winter 1983–84): 84-101. ———. “wonders divine”: the development of blake’s kabbalistic myth. lewisburg: bucknell up, 2001. van helmont, francis mercury. sketch of christian kabbalism. trans. and ed. sheila a. spector. leiden: brill, 2012. yates, frances a. giordano bruno and the hermetic tradition. chicago: u of chicago p, 1964. new information about william blake’s pre-publication proofs of his job engravings new information about william blake’s pre-publication proofs of his job engravings by mei-ying sung mei-ying sung (maysung70@hotmail.com) is the author of william blake and the art of engraving (pickering & chatto, 2009). she is currently taking part in cataloguing and researching the printing woodblock collection at the huntington library, california, usa, and teaching in the history department, foguang university, taiwan. this essay examines a unique set of impressions of william blake’s illustrations of the book of job in the beinecke library, yale university. the body of evidence it presents means that our understanding of the stages of production of this series of engravings now needs to be reconsidered. the beinecke set, hereafter known as the rosenbloom set, reveals the meticulous detail in which an artist and craftsman worked. the essay offers previously unrecorded information about the early stage of blake’s engraving of the job illustrations that will augment our knowledge of his working methods. it aims to record the details of the rosenbloom proofs and revise the current sequence of pre-publication proofs set up by robert n. essick. it will be necessary to summarize essick’s important work in order to give the full context for the development of the job plates.the research for this paper was supported by a grant from the paul mellon centre for studies in british art, yale university (2003) and the bsa-asecs fellowship for bibliographical studies in the eighteenth century from the bibliographical society of america (bsa) in conjunction with the american society for eighteenth-century studies (asecs) (2008). i am grateful to robert n. essick for the loan of photographs of many pre-publication job proofs. i would also like to thank both essick and david worrall for their suggestions, as well as sarah jones for her careful checking and editing work. william blake engraved twenty-two plates for illustrations of the book of job in the last few years of his life and published them in 1826. the work arguably represents the best combination and manifestation of his lifelong training and practice as an engraver and, not least, his efforts to be recognized as an original designer. the engraving and printing processes of blake’s job have been discussed extensively and thoroughly, most notably by essick in comparing and cataloguing in great detail the many pre-publication proof states.robert n. essick, “blake’s engravings to the book of job.” however, i examined a further set of highly significant pre-publication proofs in the beinecke library during my trip to see the copperplate of “chaucers canterbury pilgrims” in the yale university art gallery in 2003. the details of this set have not been recorded until now. the images can be viewed in the beinecke digital collections database: <http://​brbl-dl.​library.​yale.​edu/​vufind/​record/​3432519>. this run of proofs necessitates a recataloguing of the engravings’ proof states. while print “impressions” refer to the number of pulls taken from a plate at the press, the “states” of a print refer to the changes made by the etcher or engraver. normally, a printmaker would take impressions of each state in order to inspect how the plate had printed and to determine what further changes, if any, needed to be made. since these changes are usually (but not always) additions to the image or its accompanying text, scholars of printmaking can use this information to work out the sequence and number of the states. of course, the number and sequence are not apparent by examination of the final print, or even by examination of the copperplate (if it is extant), so the study of the states reveals otherwise invisible information about the artistic process. although blake’s job was frequently reproduced in the twentieth century, most studies concentrated on the development and meaning of the iconography, with bo lindberg’s william blake’s illustrations to the book of job (1973) perhaps the best example of this trend. these studies were supplemented by david bindman’s 1987 blake trust edition, with its elegant catalogue raisonné by essick. however, the previously unexamined beinecke proofs, particularly as they record so many early states of the job impressions, add significantly to our knowledge of the development process. not least, the new states further extend our notion of the number of states that were needed and proofed by blake in order to produce a finished engraving. in addition, the existence of these proofs corroborates my findings, outlined in william blake and the art of engraving, about the hammer marks for revision on the versos of the job copperplates, which are now in the british museum.the hammer marks found on the versos of blake’s engraved copperplates are traces of the repoussage technique. as described in handbooks of printmaking, repoussage is used to correct mistakes or make changes on line-engraving copperplates by scraping and burnishing the lines and hammering up the area from the back of the plate to make it into an even surface for further engraving. in the blake trust edition, essick lists nine sets of pre-publication proofs—british museum (two sets: evans, tatham), fitzwilliam museum (two sets: keynes, riches), houghton library, harvard university (one set: hofer), national gallery of art, washington, dc (two sets: linnell, white), and university of texas (two sets: el dieff, hanley)—plus some odd proofs in other collections.pl. 1, last recorded in the collection of douglas cleverdon, who is now deceased (the whereabouts of the plate is not known); pls. 1, 2, and 11 in essick’s collection; pls. 17 and 19 at mcgill university, montreal; pl. 11 at the morgan library and museum, new york; and pl. 13 at the philadelphia museum of art (essick, “blake’s engravings to the book of job” 54). he adds that there is “one highly significant group of untraced pre-publication proofs of the job engravings” (54), recorded in an auction catalogue of the american art association/anderson galleries of new york, 9 december 1936, lot 62. at the time of writing he was not able to locate the set, but he realized its importance: “if indeed these are first pulls after the addition of borders, they record a crucial point in blake’s development of the job copperplates, perhaps the first time he could determine fully the success or failure of his combination of outline borders and highly-finished central designs. the rediscovery of these impressions could occasion some major adjustments in the known record of progress proofs” (essick, “some unrecorded proofs” 96). my study therefore bridges this gap and adjusts essick’s otherwise authoritative catalogue raisonné of pre-publication job proofs. the 1936 sale catalogue has a 4¼-page description of this set of proofs, particularly concentrating on its differences from the finished state, which exactly match the features of the rediscovered set in the beinecke library. especially important are plates 1 and 21 (both reproduced in the auction catalogue and also in essick’s two essays), which have several textual variants on the border design. plate 1 lacks the first two lines on the altar in the lower border (“the letter killeth / the spirit giveth life”), but under the altar are the extra words “prayer to god is the study of imaginative art”, which are not in any other impression. in the same place on plate 21 is another inscription, “praise to god is the exercise of imaginative art”. the description in the auction catalogue is not sufficient, however, to decide the sequential state of these proofs. unable to locate the set, essick could not record this early state in his 1987 catalogue, but worked only from the vague evidence of the 1936 catalogue.essick assumes that pl. 1 is between his states 4 and 5, pl. 2 between 1 and 3, pl. 3 between 1 and 3, pl. 4 between 1 and 3, pl. 5 between 1 and 2, pl. 6 between 1 and 4, pl. 7 between 1 and 2, pl. 8 between 1 and 3, pl. 9 between 1 and 2, pl. 10 between 3 and 6, pl. 11 between 1 and 2, pl. 12 between 1 and 2, pl. 13 between 1 and 2, pl. 14 between 3 and 5, pl. 15 before state 2, pl. 16 between 2 and 3, pl. 17 between 1 and 3, pl. 18 prior to state 1, pl. 19 between 1 and 4, pl. 20 between 1 and 2, and pl. 21 between 1 and 2 (“blake’s engravings to the book of job” 56). all these assumptions match my conclusions from the examination of the proofs. g. e. bentley, jr., in his blake books supplement (1995), mentions this set as being at “yale” and reproduces plate 1 (194-96). in my thesis, “technical and material studies of william blake’s engraved illustrations of the book of job (1826)” (2005), i was able to announce its exact location at yale and add considerably more detail to the accounts set out by essick. the former owner of the set was unknown to essick; as he says, the 1936 catalogue does not mention the vendor’s name. the title page of the catalogue names eight sellers, but none is a known collector of blake (“some unrecorded proofs” 96). a bookplate at the back of the front cover of this new set of proofs, however, reveals the name of the former owner, charles j. rosenbloom, the famous blake collector of the early twentieth century. all illustrations of the rosenbloom set are from the beinecke library, yale university (call number 1976 +373). the bookplate is a copy of the painting the peaceable kingdom by the american painter edward hicks (1780–1849),hicks painted many versions of the peaceable kingdom; rosenbloom owned this oil painting that hicks made around 1837 and later bequeathed it to the carnegie museum of art, pittsburgh (accession number 74.7.13). one of rosenbloom’s favorite paintings. there is also another plate, printed “yale university library / bequest of / charles j. rosenbloom / yale 1920.” “yale 1920” refers to his year of graduation, rather than the year of the bequest. according to a photocopy of the dealer sessler’s unpublished sales records, charles sessler, inc., of philadelphia, acting as agent, bought the proofs at the 1936 auction for “rosenbloom.”  the invoice, dated 12.19.36, indicates that the cost was $5000 plus 10% commission to sessler.i am grateful to essick for this information. with this information, i am able to suggest that this rediscovered set of blake’s job proofs should be named after the early collector, consistent with other sets, and therefore be known as the rosenbloom proofs. charles j. rosenbloom (1898–1973) was a pittsburgh financier, philanthropist, art collector, and bibliophile. he developed a great interest in collecting paintings and prints, owning works by lucas cranach, pieter bruegel, albrecht dürer, rembrandt, joshua reynolds, and blake, as well as rosenbloom’s contemporary muirhead bone.see paintings and prints from the collection of charles j. rosenbloom. part of his growing print collection was exhibited at the carnegie institute in 1938.catalogue of a loan exhibition: prints from the collection of charles j. rosenbloom, with a foreword by edward duff balken, who praises rosenbloom as a discriminating collector. blake’s works were not included in this exhibition. as rosenbloom was a yale graduate, much of his book and manuscript collection was bequeathed to the university.he bequeathed many other works to the carnegie institute in pittsburgh. the beinecke call number for the job set is 1976 +373, the first number indicating the date of accession. the april 1975 issue of the yale university library gazette reports rosenbloom’s bequest of 184 items, including the job proofs.suzanne kutter and donald gallup’s “a check-list of the bequest” lists at no. 120, under the category of “illustrated books,” “[william blake.] illustrations of the book of job … london, published by william blake, 1825 [i.e., 1826]. twenty-one proof plates before all imprints. in original cloth portfolio” (330). on initial examination, the rosenbloom proofs, except for the title page, appear to be very early states. the printing is somewhat misregistered on the paper, sometimes tilted obliquely with awkward edges. some of the leaves have irregular shapes. there are random marks and stains on the leaves, some of which appear to be from inky fingers. in other words, these proofs seem to have been working proofs pulled by blake for his own reference, rather than for showing to john linnell as commissioneralthough the final imprints of the job illustrations do not bear linnell’s name, documents show that he commissioned the work, sponsored it, and sold copies (see bryant). or to collectors as images for sale. the rosenbloom proofs have the border design and text, including the signature and plate number, but lack the imprint and the word “proof.” essick assumed that many or all of the pre-publication proofs in the set are the very first states after the border was added (“some unrecorded proofs” 96). in most cases, this assumption is correct, except for plates 2, 3, 10, and 14 (see descriptions of each plate below). as described in the 1936 catalogue, two plates, 17 and 20, are printed on laid paper, and the others are on wove paper (the title page, which is in the published state, is printed on india paper laid on wove paper). five plates, 3, 9, 12, 16, and 21, have the watermark “j whatman 1823”. the watermark is consistent with the hofer proofs, of which plates 13, 15-18 are watermarked “j whatman 1823” (essick, “blake’s engravings to the book of job” 51). according to linnell’s accounts,there are two relevant linnell accounts, the cash account book 1822–36 (now in the john linnell archive, fitzwilliam museum) and the yale account book (beinecke). see bryant. before the payment to james lahee in march 1826 for the published “proof” sets on india paper there were two proving sessions, in march 1825 at lahee’s and at dixon’s (the other printer linnell used on the project). the charges for the paper and printing are combined in linnell’s record of the payments, implying that the paper came from the printers’ stock. there was also proving by blake himself using his own stock of paper, either before the dixon and lahee proving sessions or between this proving and the final printing at lahee’s. frederick tatham wrote in ink on one proof, essick’s state 4 of plate 19 (tatham proof), “proof printed by blake himself or by mrs. blake at his own press” (essick, “blake’s engravings to the book of job” 90). if a proof as late as the tatham proofs (after the addition of an imprint) was printed by blake or his wife, it is more likely that the rosenbloom proofs (before the addition of an imprint) were printed by blake himself. a list of the known pre-publication proofs, with provenance information, is given below (abbreviations follow essick, “blake’s engravings to the book of job”). pre-publication proof sets:for full descriptions of these sets (except rosenbloom), see essick, “blake’s engravings to the book of job” 50-54. el dieff (university of texas, austin, usa) the house of el dieff, the firm of the new york dealer lew david feldman, sold this set to the humanities research center, university of texas, austin, in 1967. it is a complete set of twenty-two plates, with all but the title page in pre-publication proof states. they seem to be a late state pulled after the hofer set and before the evans set. evans (british museum, london, uk) the british museum acquired the set in 1847 from evans, perhaps the london print dealer edward evans, who had acquired copies of job from linnell. this is a complete set, of which plates 2, 4, 5, 8-11, 13-15, 18, and 21 are pre-publication proofs. they are probably the last pre-publication impressions pulled. hanley (university of texas, austin, usa) the humanities research center, university of texas, austin, acquired this set from t. edward hanley in 1965. it contains pre-publication states of plates 1-3, 6, 11, 14, 16, 17, and 19-21. hofer (houghton library, harvard university, cambridge, massachusetts, usa) philip hofer owned this set, which was for many years on deposit at the houghton and passed to the library after hofer’s death in 1984. it comprises twenty-one pre-publication proofs, lacking only the title page, all in the states with blake’s imprint and the “proof” inscription. keynes (fitzwilliam museum, cambridge, uk) geoffrey keynes bequeathed this set to the fitzwilliam in 1982. it comprises thirteen pre-publication proofs: plates 1 (in two states), 2 (in two states), 6-8, 11, 14, 16, 17, 19, and 21. linnell (national gallery of art, washington, dc, usa) this set of sixty-six impressions contains many of the earliest pre-publication states; it remained in linnell’s collection until his death in 1882. the rare-book collector lessing j. rosenwald bought the set from the london dealer william robinson, who had acquired it from linnell’s grandson herbert. rosenwald gave his collection of engravings to the national gallery of art in 1945. riches (fitzwilliam museum, cambridge, uk) t. h. riches, linnell’s grandson-in-law, bequeathed the set to the fitzwilliam in 1935. this is a complete set of pre-publication impressions with the border designs, in the same states as the white proofs. rosenbloom (beinecke library, yale university, new haven, connecticut, usa) charles j. rosenbloom bought this set at auction in new york in 1936; it was bequeathed to yale in 1975, presumably in accordance with rosenbloom’s will after his death in 1973.see liebert. it is a complete set of twenty-two plates, of which all but the title page are pre-publication proofs. tatham (british museum, london, uk) tatham sold this set—pre-publication proofs of plates 2, 8, 11 (two impressions in different states), 16, and 19-21—to the british museum in 1867. white (national gallery of art, washington, dc, usa) the book collector william augustus white acquired this set, which had belonged to linnell’s daughter, hannah; later it went to lessing j. rosenwald, who gave his collection of engravings to the national gallery of art in 1945. this set is in the same states as the riches proofs. odd proof states: cleverdon (last recorded in the private collection of douglas cleverdon, london, uk)see note 4. plate 6 was sold by cleverdon in 1967, but is untraced since then. there is some uncertainty about its state. see essick, “blake’s engravings to the book of job” 69. plates 1, 6 essick (private collection of robert n. essick, altadena, california, usa)capital letters are used to distinguish the collection from the scholar. plates 1, 2, 11 mcgill (mcgill university, montreal, quebec, canada) plates 17, 19 morgan (morgan library and museum, new york, usa) plate 11 philadelphia museum of art (philadelphia, pennsylvania, usa) plate 13 the following section is a plate-by-plate description of the rosenbloom proofs, outlining their features in order to determine their states in comparison with other proofs. at the end of each description is a summary of the development of the known proof states. in the summaries i pay more attention to the states before and after the rosenbloom proofs, and note only important changes in other states.for full details of other states, see essick, “blake’s engravings to the book of job.” it is useful to summarize the overall development of the states: a. central design only. b. adding border and texts, including blake’s signature and the plate number. c. adding linnell imprint (“published march 8:1825 by j linnell. 6 cirencester place” [plate 6] and variations thereof).the linnell imprint is found on pls. 2 (hanley and keynes proofs), 3 (trace on hanley proof), 6 (linnell proofs), 11 (tatham proof), 16 (tatham proof), 19 (tatham proof), 20 (tatham proof), and 21 (hanley proof). d. changing imprint to blake’s (“london published as the act directs march 8:1825 by william [or willm] blake no 3 fountain court strand”). e. adding the word “proof” (published state a). f. removing the word “proof” (published state b). the rosenbloom proofs are located at the second stage, a very early and important phase of the development, where the full scale of the plates is formed. title page: published state see enlargement there is no specific difference between the rosenbloom title page and the published state. it is the only one in the set with the imprint—“london published as the act directs march 8:1825 by william blake no 3 fountain court strand”—and the only one that is not a pre-publication state. this page is very likely a later addition, as it is printed on thin india paper laid on top of thicker wove paper, and is therefore different from all the other rosenbloom impressions, which are printed directly on wove or laid paper. india paper was an option for subscribers who bought the published “proof” set. the presence of a published state of the title page suggests that no impression of the title page was pulled with the rosenbloom proofs, possibly because the title plate had not yet been executed. another possibility is that this page was simply added to make up a whole set, nearer to the time of the 1936 auction.the auction catalogue records that “the title-page, which was probably added in 1825, is the only plate on india paper.” the entry also mentions the printed job label. it is not clear who made up this proof set and when, but it was probably assembled fairly early on by blake or linnell using pre-publication proofs, plus the title page and label. i am grateful to essick for this information. the pre-publication title page appears in the riches and white proofs. the lack of a pre-publication title page in the rosenbloom set indicates that the decision to add a title page to the set by either linnell or blake himself would have been made after adding the border designs on all the other plates. the development of the title page: state 1 (riches; white): the same as in the published state, except lacking the horizontal lines between the hebrew inscription and “illustrations of”, the imprint, and some lines on the images. *published state (rosenbloom, etc.): adding the blake imprint and some more lines.the asterisk before a description is to emphasize the rosenbloom state. plate 1: state 5 see enlargement plate 1 of the rosenbloom proofs bears the most notable differences from the other states, lacking two lines of inscription on the altar in the lower border, “the letter killeth / the spirit giveth life”, but with an extra line under the altar, “prayer to god is the study of imaginative art”. these extra words seem to be drafts scratched in drypoint on the copperplate with a casual and irregular appearance. essick observes that photographs (of plates 1 and 21) in the 1936 auction catalogue “strongly suggest” that “the letters were scratched into the copperplates in drypoint rather than written with pen or pencil on the individual impressions” (“some unrecorded proofs” 97-98). my close examination of the original has allowed me to establish that the line is indeed cut and not added in pen. the inscription “it is spiritually discerned” above this extra line has the same character, before being cut more deeply with the graver in state 6 (essick’s state 5).essick’s copy of pl. 1 in this state is reproduced in his “some unrecorded proofs,” illus. 3, and william blake, printmaker, fig. 224 (where it is identified as the fourth state, an error later corrected in “blake’s engravings to the book of job” 59). other text on this plate has been engraved with the graver and so has more regular, straight, and neat characters. in essick’s catalogue, states 1 to 4 of plate 1 have only the central design. from his state 5 on, the inscriptions are the same as in the published state. the rosenbloom proof comes between his states 4 and 5 and is the new state 5. in his state 5 (the new state 6), “prayer to god is the study of imaginative art” has been removed and “the letter killeth / the spirit giveth life” has been added. this plate has the highest number of proofs in the series before the addition of the border design. it demonstrates blake’s uncertainty about how the engraved lines on the copperplate would show on the print, and thus it might have been the very first plate he engraved, as a trial. samuel palmer saw blake’s work on this plate in october 1824 (palmer 9-10, gilchrist 1: 297). the development of plate 1: state 1 (linnell b-4136): central design only, with outlines of figures and landscape. state 2 (linnell b-4137): central design only, with addition of much hatching. state 3 (linnell b-4138): central design only, with more lines. state 4 (keynes; linnell b-4139): central design only, with further darkening as well as burnishing of figures. the linnell version has a pencil sketch of the tent shape for the border design. *state 5 (rosenbloom): darkening slightly all the figures by adding more lines in the central design, most noticeably on job’s left leg; burnishing some parts, such as the hip and right leg of the daughter on the left of job’s wife; adding the border design, including the signature and number, with inscriptions as in the published state, except lacking “the letter killeth / the spirit giveth life” on the altar and having an extra line, “prayer to god is the study of imaginative art”, under the altar. state 6 [essick’s state 5] (linnell b-4140; riches; white; essick): further darkening all the figures in the central design; cutting with the graver and darkening the words and images in the border design; extending the cloud lines in the lower border to touch the corners of the altar; adding “the letter killeth / the spirit giveth life” on the altar; erasing “prayer to god is the study of imaginative art”. state 7 [essick’s state 6] (hanley; keynes; cleverdon): adding the blake imprint and “proof” inscription; darkening as well as highlighting with burnishing figures and background. state 8 [essick’s state 7] (el dieff; hofer): cutting the “proof” inscription deeper with the graver; adding more lines to the central design. published state: adding a few more strokes. plate 2: state 3 see enlargement plate 2 is very similar to essick’s states 2 and 3, with slight differences; it comes between them as the new state 3. the fact that as a set the rosenbloom proofs are earlier than the riches and white proofs (both essick’s state 3) also supports the argument that the rosenbloom plate 2 should be the new state 3. in state 2 the border design and text have been added, including the signature and number, but without the words “the angel of the divine presence” and the hebrew inscription that appear in the published state. the central design of rosenbloom’s plate 2 resembles state 2; no work was added to the central design before printing the rosenbloom proof. there are only very few additions to the border design, such as the small horizontal lines, perhaps nests, under the birds on both sides of the border. the proof lacks some features of essick’s state 3 (the new state 4), such as the rays of light above the frame of the central design on the left side of the left cloud band (below “up” in the inscription) and on the right side of the right cloud band (below the “l” of “likeness”). nothing of the imprint or of the rows of dots forming crowns on the heads of the son and daughter on job’s left is seen in the rosenbloom proof. the development of plate 2: state 1 (linnell b-4141): central design only, with a pencil sketch of a border design with two tree trunks and an arc. state 2 (linnell b-4142): adding the border design, with inscriptions as in the published state, except lacking “the angel of the divine presence” and the hebrew inscription above the central design; darkening and defining the figures in the central design (most noticeably, the halo around god has a clear edge). *state 3 (rosenbloom): adding very few details. see description above. state 4 [essick’s state 3] (linnell b-4143, b-4144, b-4145; riches; white; essick): further darkening all figures in the central design; strengthening words and images in the border with the graver; adding a second line at the end of the tendril on the upper left frame of the central design; adding rays on both sides of the two cloud bands in the upper border. state 5 [essick’s state 4] (hanley; keynes): adding part of the linnell imprint, with only ghostly lines of his name and address visible; adding crowns on the heads of job’s son and daughter; further darkening of images. state 6 [essick’s state 5] (tatham): changing the imprint to blake’s; adding the “proof” inscription. state 7 [essick’s state 6] (keynes): adding a little more hatching. state 8 [essick’s state 7] (el dieff; hofer): burnishing away the lines of radiance in god’s halo and defining the halo with a curving line; darkening some images and burnishing others. state 9 [essick’s state 8] (evans): adding the hebrew inscription and “the angel of the divine presence”; darkening images. published state: further darkening of images. plate 3: state 3 see enlargement in the development of the proof states, plate 3 had a major revision to its border, where flames in early states were later changed to serpents, leaving large areas of repoussage on the back of the copperplate.see sung, william blake and the art of engraving 91.for an explanation of the term repoussage, see note 3. the rosenbloom proof is between essick’s states 2 and 3 and becomes the new state 3. in state 2, both sides of the border have steps, as in the published state, with four large tongues of flame above them on each side. in essick’s state 3, flames and scorpions have been added in the border to the left and right of the lower corners of the central design. the rosenbloom proof has the four large tongues of flame on both sides and some extra flames above them, but is without the scorpions and flames in essick’s state 3. it also burnishes and highlights the quite dark state 2, most notably the right side of the column on the right side of the central design and satan’s left leg. the central design is further burnished and made brighter in the next state, the new state 4. in the new state 4 (essick’s state 3) two more downward tongues of flame are added on both sides of the border. all of the tongues of flame are removed in the new state 5 (essick’s state 4), leaving only some ghost lines (which are reengraved later) of two small tongues on the right border just below the cloud band; the tongues are replaced with the scaly tails of serpents. the development of plate 3: state 1 (linnell b-4149, b-4150): central design only. state 2 (linnell b-4151): darkening the central design; adding the border design, with two cloud bands in the upper border, four large tongues of flame and steps under them on both sides, inscriptions as in the published state, and the signature and simple flame lines in the lower border. *state 3 (rosenbloom): burnishing the central design; adding extra flames in the border. see description above. state 4 [essick’s state 3] (riches; white): further burnishing the central design to brighten the tone; adding on both sides of the border two extra-long flames to the four large tongues of flame and, below, a scorpion with extended flames. state 5 [essick’s state 4] (hanley): adding part of the linnell imprint; removing the flames under the cloud bands in the border except for two tongues on the right and replacing them with scaly tails of serpents on both sides; darkening as well as burnishing to highlight the central images. state 6 [essick’s state 5] (hofer): changing the imprint to blake’s name and address; adding the word “proof”; adding a third flame in the right border. state 7 [essick’s state 6] (el dieff): adding three tongues of flame in the left border; further darkening the central design. published state: adding more lines and hatching. plate 4: state 2 see enlargement essick’s state 1 of plate 4 has the central design only, while his state 2 has the border design and text. a comparison of his state 2 with the rosenbloom proof reveals that the latter also has the border design but lacks the cloud lines on both sides of the border, whereas there is no significant difference between the border design of essick’s state 2 and the published state. the rosenbloom proof is therefore a transitional state between his states 1 and 2 and becomes the new state 2. in this state the cloud outline and bolt of lightning below the lower right corner of the central design, as well as the flame above the lightning, are lightly sketched in drypoint but not yet cut with the graver. this shows how blake used drypoint for sketching at the earliest stage of developing motifs in the border. the relatively few proof states of this plate suggest that it was possibly engraved late, as blake’s technique grew more skillful, with fewer revisions required and fewer proofs needed. the few repoussage marks on the verso of the copperplate may also support this assumption.see sung, william blake and the art of engraving 92. the development of plate 4: state 1 (linnell b-4152, b-4153): central design only. b-4153 has a pencil sketch of a border design with gothic arches, completely different from the engraved design. *state 2 (rosenbloom): adding more details to the central design; adding the border design, including sketches of all inscriptions, the cloud outlines as in the published state, except for the lower part on the right and left sides, the flames below, and blake’s signature. some lines in the border have only been sketched in drypoint. see description above. state 3 [essick’s state 2] (riches; white): adding the lower part of the cloud lines in both the right and left borders; cutting more clearly with the graver the cloud outline and bolt of lightning in the lower right border and the flame above; adding more hatching patterns to the central design. state 4 [essick’s state 3] (el dieff; hofer): adding the blake imprint, the “proof” inscription, and more hatching patterns. state 5 [essick’s state 4] (evans): further darkening. published state: finishing with a few more lines. plate 5: state 2 see enlargement plate 5 of the rosenbloom proofs has an important difference from the published state. the auction catalogue of 1936 records that it lacks two lines of inscription in the bottom border: “and it grieved him at his heart / who maketh his angels spirits & his ministers a flaming fire”. this has been confirmed by my inspection. these words appear from essick’s state 2 onwards (essick, “blake’s engravings to the book of job” 54). the rosenbloom proof is therefore earlier than essick’s state 2, but later than state 1 with the central design only: it is the new state 2. in addition, the flames arching above the frame of the central design toward each other in essick’s state 2 (below “behold he is in thy hand: but save his life”) are not on the rosenbloom proof; they are added in essick’s state 2 and removed in his state 3. in the lower border, the rosenbloom proof lacks some of the flames above the serpents in essick’s state 2. the central design also lacks a great deal of work added in the next state. for example, the bread in job’s hands is depicted only in outline in the new state 2, but lines have been added for shadows in the next state (essick’s state 2), and the mountain left of the head of job’s wife develops from two ridges in the new state 2 to one in the next state. the development of plate 5: state 1 (linnell b-4154): central design only, with all figures in outline only except for satan, who has more lines and dots than the others. *state 2 (rosenbloom): adding the border design and text, including the signature and number, except for two lines of inscription. see description above. state 3 [essick’s state 2] (riches; white): defining and darkening the central design; adding flames below “behold he is in thy hand: but save his life” in the upper border, arching toward each other, and the inscription “and it grieved him at his heart / who maketh his angels spirits & his ministers a flaming fire” in the bottom border. state 4 [essick’s state 3] (el dieff; hofer): adding the blake imprint and “proof” inscription; erasing the flames below “behold he is in thy hand: but save his life” in the upper border; darkening the central design. state 5 [essick’s state 4] (evans): adding a little more hatching, especially on satan, god, and the block beneath job’s arm. published state: adding lines on the background hills. plate 6: state 2 see enlargement plate 6 is close to essick’s state 3, but has fewer strokes on the grass and straw below job’s leg in the central design, and the sun rays are less defined. thus, it is earlier than his state 3. a comparison of essick’s state 2 (hanley) with the rosenbloom proof shows that apart from the darker tone of the hanley proof, which may have resulted from inking, there is no specific difference between the two.i worked from a photograph of the hanley proof, so this difference could also be the result of darker lighting. the rosenbloom proof is very likely the same state as the hanley proof, and essick’s states remain unchanged. the development of plate 6: state 1 (linnell b-4155, b-4156, b-4157): central design only. *state 2 (hanley; rosenbloom): darkening the central images; adding the border design and text, including the signature and number. state 3 (riches; white): adding detailed engraved lines, such as the grass and the straw job lies on; burnishing and highlighting some areas, such as the rays at the edges of the cloud and satan’s left leg. state 4 (linnell b-4158, b-4159, b-4160): adding the linnell imprint. state 5 (keynes): changing linnell’s imprint to blake’s; adding “proof” inscription; burnishing some areas to highlight the contrast, such as the shafts of sunlight and the lower margins of the cloud below satan’s arms; modifying satan’s right heel. state 6 (hofer): adding more lines of detail. state 7 (el dieff; cleverdon [sold by him in 1967]): adding a few more strokes. published state: adding more hatching; defining outlines more clearly. plate 7: state 2 see enlargement plate 7 appears to be the state after the border and text have been added but before essick’s state 2. the outlines of most figures in the central design are cut deeper in his state 2 than in the rosenbloom proof. the print notably lacks the trees beside the shepherd and shepherdess in the border, which appear in essick’s state 2. the rosenbloom proof is therefore after state 1, which has the central design only, and becomes the new state 2. the two mourning figures in the border at the upper corners of the central design are only sketched in drypoint; they are cut more deeply and neatly with the graver in the new state 3 (essick’s state 2). the “i”s in the two instances of “recieve” in the upper border do not have dots, which are added in the new state 3. the development of plate 7: state 1 (linnell b-4161, b-4162): central design only, with figures sketched in stipple. *state 2 (rosenbloom): adding the border design and text, including the signature and number; adding nearly full details to the central design. see description above. state 3 [essick’s state 2] (linnell b-4163, b-4164, b-4165; riches; white): adding the trees beside the shepherd and shepherdess in the border; cutting the mourning figures in the upper border with the graver; defining and highlighting the outlines of the figures, especially the faces in the central design; adding more lines to the vegetation at the bottom of the central design, especially in the bottom left corner. state 4 [essick’s state 3] (keynes): adding the blake imprint and “proof” inscription; adding more hatching and crosshatching to the central images; creating some sun rays by burnishing above the head of job’s wife; burnishing the foremost friend’s feet and the grass below at the bottom left of the central design. state 5 [essick’s state 4] (hofer): further darkening the central design; cutting more deeply the border images. state 6 [essick’s state 5] (el dieff): adding some details to the central design. published state: reworking the radiance above the mountains; adding more lines. plate 8: state 2 see enlargement the rosenbloom proof is very close to essick’s state 2, with the border and text, but it has fewer strokes on the vegetation in the bottom border, most notably on the spiky branch below the left mushroom, and on the central image, such as the fabric at the waist of job’s wife, job’s face and beard, the outline of his knees and feet, and the outlines of the three friends. thus it becomes the new state 2, before essick’s state 2 but after state 1, which has only the central design. the “i” in the inscription “nights” on the lower border of the rosenbloom proof lacks the dot; it is added in the next state. the development of plate 8: state 1 (linnell b-4166, b-4167): central design only, with hatching for most of the background. *state 2 (rosenbloom): adding the border design and text, including the signature and number; filling details in the central design. state 3 [essick’s state 2] (riches; white): adding a few more strokes to the vegetation in the bottom border and to some details in the central design, such as job’s face and beard. see description above. state 4 [essick’s state 3] (tatham): adding the blake imprint and “proof” inscription; darkening the central design; making the crack on the column above the friends more prominent; adding more contrast to the whole image. state 5 [essick’s state 4] (keynes): adding further lines to the central design, especially the boils on job’s body. state 6 [essick’s state 5] (el dieff; hofer): adding further lines to the central design, especially job’s hair and beard and the clothes of job’s wife. state 7 [essick’s state 6] (evans): adding further lines to the central design, especially the clothes of job’s wife. published state: some burnishing of the central design, e.g., on job’s wife. plate 9: state 2 see enlargement plate 9 lacks details of the tree branches in the right and left borders and the cloud line and tree branches surrounding the inscription in the lower border, all of which are in essick’s state 2 and the published state. it also lacks the vertical lines that appear between tree trunks below the cloud outline in both the right and left borders in his state 2. this evidence indicates that the rosenbloom proof is before essick’s state 2, becoming the new state 2. the “i”s in “his” (three times) and “saints” in the upper and right borders and “spirit” and “hair” in the lower border all lack the dots, which are added in the new state 3 (essick’s state 2). the central designs in the rosenbloom state and the following state have very few differences. in the rosenbloom proof, some rays of light penetrate the cloud outline above the raised hand of the figure lower right. in the next state (the new state 3), these lines have been burnished away and the rays terminate at the outline of the cloud. the development of plate 9: state 1 (linnell b-4168): central design only, with many details already in place. blake sketched a border design, completely different from the engraved version, in pencil on this proof. *state 2 (rosenbloom): adding the border design and text, including the signature and number; adding more hatching to details in the central design, most notably the faces of all figures, and to the black rays that are below god’s garment and on the cloud band he stands on; burnishing the area right of god’s black mandorla to form a cloud band or another lighter mandorla. state 3 [essick’s state 2] (riches; white): adding more branches to the trees in the border design and the vertical lines between tree trunks; engraving the inscriptions more deeply with the graver; adding dots to the “i”s. see description above. state 4 [essick’s state 3] (hofer): adding the blake imprint and “proof” inscription; adding more hatching and crosshatching to the central design. state 5 [essick’s state 4] (el dieff): burnishing part of god’s garment. state 6 [essick’s state 5] (evans): adding more lines around the image of god. published state: adding more lines to the image of god. plate 10: state 5 see enlargement states 1 to 3 of plate 10 have the central design only. the rosenbloom proof is very close to essick’s state 4, where the border design has been added; both lack one of the two curving lines on the right side of the upper border in his state 5. in comparison with essick’s state 4, the rosenbloom proof has some areas of burnishing that are consistent with later states, such as the foremost friend’s legs and the straw under job’s left knee. there are significant differences in the outlines of the images in the central design: in the rosenbloom state, job’s waist is narrowed, his beard is lengthened, and the shape of the garment folds of the foremost friend is changed. job’s narrowed waist and extended beard are present in all the remaining proofs from essick’s state 5 to the published state. accordingly, the rosenbloom proof has to be after essick’s state 4; it becomes the new state 5. the many changes to the central design of plate 10 correspond to the numerous proof states both before and after the addition of the border design; these changes are consistent with the large areas of repoussage on the verso of the copperplate.see sung, william blake and the art of engraving 99-100. this plate is probably among the earliest to be engraved, perhaps after plate 1. the development of plate 10: state 1 (linnell b-4169): central design only, with outlines of the figures and some hatching for the background. state 2 (linnell b-4170): central design only, with more hatching and crosshatching for the figures and background, job’s right arm widened, his garment altered, and the foreground enlarged (the lower edge is increased about 2 mm.). blake sketched a border design in pencil on this proof. state 3 (linnell b-4171, b-4172, b-4173): central design only, with more darkening with hatching. state 4 (linnell b-4174): adding the border design and text, including the signature and number; adding more hatching to the central design, as well as the tears and forehead wrinkles to job’s wife; burnishing the outline of the mountain in the upper right corner. *state 5 (rosenbloom): burnishing some areas; changing image outlines in the central design. see description above. state 6 [essick’s state 5] (riches; white): adding a second line to the right curve in the upper border; adding more lines to the border design; partly darkening and partly burnishing the central images; changing once again the shape of the garment folds of the foremost friend in the central design. state 7 [essick’s state 6] (hofer): adding the blake imprint and “proof” inscription; further darkening and highlighting the central design; adding more lines to the border design. state 8 [essick’s state 7] (el dieff): partly darkening and partly burnishing the central design. state 9 [essick’s state 8] (evans): further darkening and adding lines to the central design. published state: adding more lines to the central design. plate 11: state 2 see enlargement under my inspection, plate 11 of the rosenbloom proofs has a mark that looks like an additional plate indentation to the right of the current one, indicating that the copperplate might have been passed through the press more than once, perhaps the first time to test the position before inking. alternatively, this supposed second platemark may be just a crease in the paper. the slanting position of the print also reveals that the printing was not by a professional printer or for sale. the number of proof states of this plate is the highest in the series, and the hammer marks on the verso of the copperplate are also among the most numerous.see sung, william blake and the art of engraving 100. the rosenbloom proof lacks many lines that define the flames on each side of the border design, as well as the details of the flames in the upper and lower borders, that appear in essick’s state 2. it is therefore the new state 2, before essick’s state 2, but after state 1, which has the central design only. the development of plate 11: state 1 (linnell b-4175, b-4176): central design only, with many details already in place. *state 2 (rosenbloom): adding the border design and text, including the signature and number, and more hatching to the central design. state 3 [essick’s state 2] (riches; white; morgan): adding many more lines for the flames on all sides of the border; adding more hatching to the central design; burnishing the left flame at the lower right corner of the central design to reveal the devil’s fingers. state 4 [essick’s state 3] (tatham): adding the linnell imprint; adding more details to and darkening the central design; adding more lines to the flames in the upper border. state 5 [essick’s state 4] (tatham): changing linnell’s imprint to blake’s; adding the “proof” inscription; darkening the central images. state 6 [essick’s state 5] (hanley): adding more hatching to the central design. state 7 [essick’s state 6] (hofer): adding some flames above job’s thigh and stomach; adding more crosshatching and hatching. state 8 [essick’s state 7] (essick): further darkening the central design, especially the thunderbolts in the upper left corner. state 9 [essick’s state 8] (keynes): adding a few more hatching and crosshatching lines to details. state 10 [essick’s state 9] (el dieff; evans): adding a few more hatching and crosshatching lines to details. published state: adding vertical strokes to the left leg of job’s bed. plate 12: state 2 see enlargement plate 12 of the rosenbloom proofs is the new state 2: it adds the border design to state 1, which has the central design only, but lacks the stars in the top border under the flying figures and the grass in the lower border (above “if thou sinnest what” and under “thou unto him” in the bottom right corner) in essick’s state 2. the flying figures in the border are only sketched in drypoint on the rosenbloom proof; they are made more defined with the graver in the next state (essick’s state 2). the hand of the figure in the left border touching the inner frame is traversed by the framing line, whereas the line within the hand is burnished in the states that follow. the development of plate 12: state 1 (linnell b-4177, b-4178): central design only, with many hatching lines on the background as well as on figures. *state 2 (rosenbloom): adding the border design and text, including the signature and number; adding more lines to details of figures in the central design. many flying figures in the border design are only sketched in drypoint. state 3 [essick’s state 2] (riches; white): adding stars above the frame of the central design and grass in the lower border; cutting the flying figures in the border more deeply with the graver; adding more hatching to the central design, e.g., the ground around elihu’s feet; defining the outlines of all figures more clearly; darkening all figures. state 4 [essick’s state 3] (el dieff; hofer): adding the blake imprint and “proof” inscription; adding hatching and crosshatching to the central design almost to the level of the finished state. published state: adding more hatching to the foremost friend’s knee below his hand. plate 13: state 2 see enlargement the rosenbloom proof has less detail on the tree in the lower border and fewer cloud lines in the left border than essick’s state 2: it is the new state 2. plate 13 is an extraordinary plate with unexpected developments among its proof states, and this proof reveals a dramatic change as blake developed his idea of the design. the upper frame of the central design is closed in the rosenbloom proof, suddenly opened, with the image extending to the upper border, in the new state 3 (essick’s state 2), and closed again in the new state 4 (essick’s state 3). it appears that blake at first created the more restrained whirlwind, then dramatically extended it, then restrained it again in all later states. the evidence of the rosenbloom state shows blake’s shift of mind in the most remarkable way: without it, the logical—but wrong—assumption would be that blake “began” with the exuberant whirlwind. on the rosenbloom proof, the upper frame of the central design is defined with two straight lines, but there are two or three curved lines extending from god’s whirlwind between the upper line of the central design’s frame and the clouds in the upper border. more of these whirlwind lines are added in the new state 3 (essick’s state 2), but the part between the two lines framing the central design is burnished out in the new state 4 (essick’s state 3), leaving only one curve on the left corner; this curve and the whirlwind lines between the upper line of the central design’s frame and the clouds in the upper border are all erased in the new state 5 (essick’s state 4). the development of plate 13: state 1 (linnell b-4179, b-4180): central design only, with a single-line frame on all sides. *state 2 (rosenbloom): adding the second line to the frame of the central design; adding the border design and text, including the signature and number; extending two or three lines from god’s whirlwind between the upper line of the central design’s frame and the cloud above. state 3 [essick’s state 2] (linnell b-4181): burnishing and opening the two lines of the top frame of the central design to extend the whirlwind lines into the upper border; extending the horizontal lines representing sky into the area between the two lines that framed the top of the central design. state 4 [essick’s state 3] (linnell b-4182, b-4183; riches; white; philadelphia museum of art): closing the top frame of the central design; clearing the whirlwind lines from the frame except for one curve extending from the top left corner of the central design; adding hatching lines to the central and border designs. some of the whirlwind lines extended from the central design to the upper border in state 3 remain in the border above the two lines of the frame of the central design. state 5 [essick’s state 4] (el dieff; evans; hofer): adding the blake imprint and “proof” inscription; clearing the last curved line from the left corner of the area between the two lines framing the top of the central design; removing the whirlwind lines between the upper line of the central design’s frame and the cloud above; further darkening the central design. published state: adding some more lines to the whirlwind in the upper border, e.g., the top left corner, left of the inscription “who is this ….” plate 14: state 5 see enlargement states 1 to 3 of plate 14 have the central design only; the rosenbloom proof is similar to essick’s state 4, which has the border design added. a comparison of the two reveals that the outlines of the figures in the central design, especially the halo around god’s head, are more defined in the rosenbloom proof, and the border design is cut more deeply with the graver, as is particularly noticeable on the cloud lines above the central design. this evidence determines that the rosenbloom proof comes after essick’s state 4 and is the new state 5. the proof lacks the small flames that appear in the right border of the published state in the interstices above and below the clouds framing the central vignette. these flames are added in the new state 6 (essick’s state 5). the development of plate 14: state 1 (linnell b-4184): central design only. state 2 (keynes; linnell b-4185): central design only, adding many details; burnishing the areas with stars above and around god’s halo. state 3 (linnell b-4186): central design only, adding more details. there is also a pencil sketch of the border design, which looks very different from the later version. state 4 (hanley): adding the border design and text, including the signature and number, as well as more details to the central design. *state 5 (rosenbloom): defining the outlines of figures in the central design; redarkening the burnished areas around god’s halo in states 2, 3, and 4; cutting the border design more deeply with the graver. see description above. state 6 [essick’s state 5] (riches; white): adding the small flames in the right border in the interstices above and below the clouds framing the central vignette; defining more clearly the outlines of all figures in the central design. state 7 [essick’s state 6] (hofer): adding the blake imprint and “proof” inscription; adding many more hatching lines to the central and border designs. state 8 [essick’s state 7] (el dieff): further darkening and highlighting the central design. state 9 [essick’s state 8] (evans): further darkening and highlighting the central design. published state: highlighting the central design. plate 15: state 1 see enlargement since there is no earlier proof with the central design only, plate 15 of the rosenbloom proofs stands out as the very first state in existence. it is close to essick’s state 1, which has the border design and text, but has fewer lines in the lower border defining waves just above the bottom outer frame line and on the body of behemoth in the central design (the heavy lines in the middle of his body that help define his haunch). the development of plate 15: *state 1 (rosenbloom): much developed central design with the border design and text, including the signature and number. hatching lines on the central design are quite near the last state. state 2 [essick’s state 1] (riches; white): adding more lines under the waves in the lower border above the bottom outer frame line; burnishing as well as adding lines to behemoth to make the muscles on his face and body more prominent; defining more clearly the outlines of all figures in the central design. state 3 [essick’s state 2] (el dieff; hofer): adding the blake imprint and “proof” inscription; adding more hatching lines in order to darken the central images. state 4 [essick’s state 3] (evans): adding more lines to the central design. published state: adding more lines to the central design. plate 16: state 3 see enlargement as mentioned in the 1936 auction catalogue, plate 16 of the rosenbloom proofs does not have the two lines of text on the left side of the border that are present in the published state: “the accuser of our brethren is cast down / which accused them before our god day & night”. the first line appears in essick’s state 3; the rosenbloom proof has to come before that state, and since states 1 and 2 have the central design only, it is situated between essick’s states 2 and 3 and becomes the new state 3. what the auction catalogue does not mention, however, is that on the rosenbloom proof there are traces of the erasure of an inscription at the place of “the accuser of our brethren is cast down”. blake might have put a different line of text, then changed his mind. the catalogue also notes a difference in the second line of inscription in the lower border: “and he said unto them” in the rosenbloom proof becomes “jesus said unto them” in the next state (essick’s state 3). this also supports the conclusion that the rosenbloom proof is the new state 3. as with plate 13, the central design of this plate had important changes to its upper frame: blake dramatically closed and opened the frame and then closed it again. the upper frame of the central design on the rosenbloom proof is defined with two straight lines, which are burnished and opened up to extend god’s mandorla to the upper border in the new state 4 (essick’s state 3), then this extension is burnished and closed with the double frame in the new state 5 (essick’s state 4). in the rosenbloom state, the upper border has a line of text under the cloud line and the two mourning angels’ wings on the two corners of the inner frame. it lacks the two cloud lines (and extended rays between the clouds) from the central design below and the uppermost child angels by god extending from below in the new state 4. these child angels are burnished and replaced with the two framing lines at the top of the central design in the new state 5, but the two cloud lines are retained in the upper border above the frame. the child angels in god’s mandorla on the rosenbloom proof appear to be the same as in state 2; their wings, only sketched lightly in drypoint, are engraved in the new state 4 (essick’s state 3). there are stipple dots at the sides of the lower child angels, removed in the new state 4. the proof lacks a few hatching lines that are present in the next state in the large flame around the three falling figures. on the border design, the proof lacks the small flames in the upper parts of the left and right borders and some lines defining water lower left and right that appear in the new state 4 (essick’s state 3). the development of plate 16: state 1 (linnell b-4187, b-4188): central design only, with many figures in stipple outline. state 2 (linnell b-4189): central design only, with its size increased slightly on the right and left sides; adding more hatching. *state 3 (rosenbloom): adding the border design and text, including the signature and number (there are four tongues of flame on the lower left side and five on the right side of the border); adding more details on the central design. the frame of the central design is defined with two straight lines. see description above. state 4 [essick’s state 3] (linnell b-4190): burnishing and opening the upper frame of the central design; extending the rays of god’s mandorla and the cloud lines on both sides of god in the central design to the upper border; adding more child angels in god’s mandorla and wings for them; adding in the border another large tongue of flame on the right, more small flames on the right and left sides, lines defining water lower right and left, and the inscription “the accuser of our brethren is cast down”; changing the inscription “and he said unto them” in the lower border to “jesus said unto them”. state 5 [essick’s state 4] (linnell b-4191, b-4192; riches; white): darkening the central design; clearing the upper frame of the central design and defining it with two straight lines as in state 3; removing the rays of god’s mandorla and the child angels in this area, but leaving the cloud lines above the upper frame of the central design. state 6 [essick’s state 5] (tatham): adding the linnell imprint and, in the left border, a final inscription, “which accused them before our god day & night”; removing the cloud outline and the rays under it above the central design; darkening as well as burnishing details on the central design, including burnishing the lines between satan’s head and the flames below. state 7 [essick’s state 6] (keynes): changing the imprint to blake’s; adding three letters (“pro”) of the “proof” inscription; further darkening the central design; further burnishing the area between satan’s head and the flames at the bottom. state 8 [essick’s state 7] (hanley; hofer): completing the “proof” inscription; adding more hatching and crosshatching lines to the central design; completing the border design to the level of the published state. state 9 [essick’s state 8] (el dieff): further darkening and highlighting details of the central design, especially around the figure of satan. published state: further darkening and highlighting details of the central design, especially around the figure of satan. plate 17: state 2 see enlargement plate 17 is quite close to essick’s state 2, most notably without the lower cloud line in the upper border and the radiance around the angel in the lower border in his state 3. the central images are less defined than those in essick’s state 2, especially god’s long beard, where some lines were burnished from state 1, then more lines were added again in essick’s state 2. the rosenbloom proof is therefore before essick’s state 2 and after state 1, which has only the central design. there is no difference in the border between the rosenbloom proof and essick’s state 2, whereas differences in the borders are crucial in establishing proof sequences for most other plates. on the rosenbloom proof, there is an indentation mark that looks like another tilted platemark on the left margin of the current platemark. as with plate 11, the paper was perhaps passed through the press a first time with the copperplate before inking to test the position, then a second time after the copperplate was inked. alternatively, it may be just a crease in the paper. the development of plate 17: state 1 (linnell b-4193, b-4194): central design only, with many hatching lines in places. *state 2 (rosenbloom): adding the border design and text, including the signature and number, with seven lines indicating rays in the upper border; adding more hatching and crosshatching in the central design; burnishing god’s long beard and the frontal lines of his legs and garment. state 3 [essick’s state 2] (keynes): re-adding lines to god’s beard and the frontal lines of his legs and garment. state 4 [essick’s state 3] (linnell b-4195; riches; white): defining the inner halo around god; adding more hatching and crosshatching to the central images; adding the rays around the angel and more lines to her in the lower border; removing all but one of the rays in the upper border and replacing them with a lower cloud line and some short rays beneath. state 5 [essick’s state 4] (hanley): adding the blake imprint, partly sketched in drypoint; further darkening the central design and border design. state 6 [essick’s state 5] (mcgill): completing the imprint; adding the “proof” inscription, with the first letter cut with the graver and the rest in drypoint; adding more lines to the central design. state 7 [essick’s state 6] (el dieff; hofer): cutting the “proof” inscription with the graver; further darkening the central design. published state: adding more hatching to the cloud left of god’s garment in the bottom left corner of the central design. plate 18: state 1 see enlargement since no earlier state with only the central design exists, plate 18 of the rosenbloom proofs is the first state, before all the others listed by essick. in comparison with essick’s state 1, it lacks the radiance at both sides of the upper border under the cloud band, the horizontal but slightly wavy line underneath the grain stalks and above the block in the right border, and the dot on the “i” of “friends”. the grain stalks on both sides of the border immediately next to the outer frames, the scroll lower right, and the horizontal lines (maybe of a table) beneath it are less defined in the rosenbloom proof. a little work was also added in the new state 2 (essick’s state 1) to the angels upper right. the development of plate 18: *state 1 (rosenbloom): this proof is already very close to the published state, with the central design and the border design and text, including the signature and number. state 2 [essick’s state 1] (riches; white): darkening and defining more clearly images in the central design and border; adding some more lines in the border, e.g., the plants, the scroll, the angels, and two sets of rays in the upper border. see description above. state 3 [essick’s state 2] (hofer): adding the blake imprint and “proof” inscription; adding more lines to the central design, most notably on the cloud band above the altar; burnishing areas such as the head of job’s wife; adding more lines to the border design. state 4 [essick’s state 3] (el dieff): adding a few more hatching lines to the central design. state 5 [essick’s state 4] (evans): defining the sun rays at the top of the central design more clearly; further darkening and highlighting the central design; adding five arrows in the white area at the top of the central design, above the rays. published state: final darkening. plate 19: state 2 see enlargement there is no obvious difference from essick’s state 2, where the border design and text have been added to the central design of state 1. since there is no new state for this plate, all of essick’s proof states remain unchanged. the development of plate 19: state 1 (linnell b-4196, b-4197): central design only, with many hatching lines already in places. *state 2 (keynes; rosenbloom): adding the border design and text, including the signature and number; darkening the central design. state 3 (riches; white): adding more leaves to the palm trees in the border design and more hatching lines to the central design. state 4 (tatham): adding the linnell imprint, more leaves to the palm trees in the right and left borders, and further hatching lines to the central design. state 5 (hanley): changing the imprint to blake’s (partly sketched in drypoint); adding further hatching lines to the central design. state 6 (mcgill): completing the imprint with the graver; adding a few more lines. state 7 (hofer): adding the “proof” inscription; further darkening the central and border designs. state 8 (el dieff): darkening as well as burnishing the central design. published state: partly darkening and partly highlighting the central design to create more contrast. plate 20: state 2 see enlargement plate 20 of the rosenbloom proofs lacks many details of essick’s state 2, so comes before his state 2 and after state 1, which has the central design only. it has fewer leaves and grapes on the vines on all sides of the border than in essick’s state 2. more importantly, there is a significant change in the first line in the lower border: the first word is “were”, rather than “there were” in essick’s state 2 and all the following states. blake might have noticed the awkward syntax of “were not found women fair as the daughters of job” after the rosenbloom proof and decided to add “there”, which is itself awkwardly squeezed in the left margin among the vines. this important change is not mentioned in the 1936 auction catalogue. although there are traces of the erasure of the “w” on later states and even on the published state under close examination, they are not noted in essick’s otherwise meticulous observations. in the central design, there are also several differences between the rosenbloom proof and the new state 3 (essick’s state 2); the latter has much more definition of the lower reaches of the gown worn by the daughter on the left and the line defining the neckline of the gown of the daughter on the right. in the new state 3, hatching strokes were also added to the ground pictured in the roundel upper right. the development of plate 20: state 1 (linnell b-4198, b-4199): central design only, with many hatching lines already in places. *state 2 (rosenbloom): adding the border design and text, including the signature and number. the first line of inscription in the lower border reads “were not found women fair as the daughters of job”. there are only six leaves in the lower border and ten in the upper border. the floor in the central design has been partially burnished from state 1. state 3 [essick’s state 2] (riches; white): adding more leaves and grapes to the border, as in the published state; changing the first line of inscription in the lower border to “there were …”; darkening the figures in the central design. state 4 [essick’s state 3] (tatham): adding the linnell imprint, the middle girl’s belt, the right girl’s right hand, and other details in the central and border designs. state 5 [essick’s state 4] (hofer): replacing linnell’s imprint with blake’s; adding the “proof” inscription and more lines. state 6 [essick’s state 5] (hanley): darkening and burnishing the central design; adding more details to the border design. state 7 [essick’s state 6] (el dieff): further darkening and burnishing the central design. published state: further darkening the central design. plate 21: state 2 see enlargement plate 21, like plate 1, is a crucial proof in the rosenbloom set. as noted by the 1936 auction catalogue and by essick (“some unrecorded proofs” 97-99, “blake’s engravings to the book of job” 55), this proof has an extra inscription under the altar, “praise to god is the exercise of imaginative art”, which is erased in essick’s state 2. as with plate 1, i can confirm that the inscription was cut rather than added in pen. this line, as well as the two lines on the altar, “in burnt offerings for sin / thou hast had no pleasure”, was written in drypoint. in essick’s state 2, the two lines of text on the altar have been cut with the graver and have a neater look, and “thou” has been changed to “thou”. other differences between the rosenbloom proof and the next state include the lightly sketched tongues of flame on top of the altar, sharply angled left and right of the main cluster, which are cut more clearly in essick’s state 2, and the blank scroll held by the central girl, which is filled with lines in his state 2. the rosenbloom proof is, therefore, the new state 2: obviously before essick’s state 2, but immediately after state 1, which has the central design only. the development of plate 21: state 1 (linnell b-4200, b-4201): central design only, with outlines of all figures and some hatching. *state 2 (rosenbloom): adding the border design and text, including the signature and number, and more hatching on the central design. state 3 [essick’s state 2] (riches; white): burnishing away the inscription “praise to god is the exercise of imaginative art”; changing “thou” to “thou” in the inscription on the altar; cutting with the graver the lines “in burnt offerings for sin” and “thou hast had no pleasure” and the two small flames on each side of the altar; adding more lines on the central design. see description above. state 4 [essick’s state 3] (hanley): adding the linnell imprint; adding more hatching and crosshatching, as well as some burnishing, to the central design. state 5 [essick’s state 4] (keynes): removing linnell’s imprint and replacing it with blake’s; adding some stipple and burnishing some areas to highlight them. state 6 [essick’s state 5] (tatham): adding the “proof” inscription and fine hatching. state 7 [essick’s state 6] (hofer): further darkening and highlighting the central design. state 8 [essick’s state 7] (el dieff): further darkening the central design. state 9 [essick’s state 8] (evans): adding some more dots and lines to the central design. published state: finishing with a little burnishing on the central design. the tables below summarize the sequence, from earliest to latest, of the sets of pre-publication proofs: linnell, rosenbloom, riches and white, hofer, el dieff, and evans. the states of three sets—tatham, keynes, and hanley—are not consistent in their order, but mostly they are tatham-keynes-hanley. the inconsistency is probably because each set was not printed at the same time, but was assembled by collectors or sellers from different proof states. the states of blake’s pre-publication job proofs, title page to plate 10 proofs title 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 plates linnell   1, 2, 3, 4 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1, 2, 3 central design only     keynes 4                         linnell 2 linnell 2             linnell 4 border and text added rosenbloom   5 3 3 2 2 2 2 2 2 5     linnell 6 linnell 4         linnell 3           essick 6 essick 4       hanley 2         riches; white 1 6 4 4 3 3 3 3 3 3 6 tatham                 4     imprint and “proof” inscription added               linnell 4         keynes   7 5       5 4 5     hanley   7 5 5                   cleverdon 7 tatham 6                       keynes 7                 hofer   8 8 6 4 4 6 5 6 4 7               cleverdon 7         el dieff   8 8 7 4 4 7 6 6 5 8 evans     9   5 5     7 6 9 the states of blake’s pre-publication job proofs, plates 11 to 21 proofs 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 plates linnell 1 1 1 1, 2   1, 2 1   1 1 1 central design only         keynes 2                       linnell 3                       hanley 4               border and text added rosenbloom 2 2 2 5 1 3 2 1 2 2 2               keynes 3   keynes 2           linnell 3, 4     linnell 4, 5 linnell 4           morgan 3   philadelphia 4                 riches; white 3 3 4 6 2 5 4 2 3 3 3 tatham 4, 5         6     4 4   imprint and “proof” inscription added keynes           7           hanley 6         8 5   5   4               mcgill 6   mcgill 6   keynes 5                       tatham 6 hofer 7 4 5 7 3 8 7 3 7 5 7   essick 8                 hanley 6     keynes 9                     el dieff 10 4 5 8 3 9 7 4 8 7 8 evans 10   5 9 4     5     9 the significance of the rosenbloom proofs is that they contain many early states of the engravings and thus represent some of blake’s earliest ideas for job, almost at the point at which he began the printmaking process. although, like other sets, the proofs are a mix of states, ranging from 1 to 5, they may be seen to stand for blake’s first printing of the designs as a whole. seventeen of the twenty-one impressions in pre-publication states (all except plates 2, 3, 10, and 14) are the first states after the border design has been added and the design can be seen as an entirety. these proofs are, however, not blake’s first thoughts about the border design. six of the linnell proofs have the engraved central design with a pencil sketch for the border design: plate 1 (state 4), plate 2 (state 1), plate 4 (state 1), plate 9 (state 1), plate 10 (state 2), and plate 14 (state 3). most of these sketches are very different from the border designs on the later engravings. the lack of any other pencil sketches of the border designs and the presence of many traces of drypoint sketching on the copperplates indicate that blake designed and executed the border directly on the copperplates in drypoint, then followed with the graver. in this sense of the use of drypoint sketches and revising or confirming with the graver, the execution on the copperplates, as shown in the rosenbloom proofs, is not a first thought but a second thought, an evolution of conception, or reconception. this is also true with the many revisions of the central design. as essick suggests, the textual revisions on plates 1 and 21 from the rosenbloom proofs to the later proof states (the erasure of “prayer to god is the study of imaginative art” on plate 1 and “praise to god is the exercise of imaginative art” on plate 21, and the addition of “the letter killeth / the spirit giveth life” on plate 1) demonstrate the practical aspect of blake’s ideal of the unity of conception and execution. in essick’s interpretation, the extra texts on the rosenbloom proofs suggest “underlying similarities between passive prayer and active praise. the latter may be superior to the former, but the difference is in means, not ends” (“some unrecorded proofs” 102). the revised version of plate 1 stresses instead the opposition of letter and spirit. in light of this change, essick thinks that blake’s conception of the job engravings came into being at a late stage, instead of fully preceding the execution on the copperplates. at the very least, the rosenbloom set should alert us to the complex processes, both visionary and revisionary, that blake used in one of his last published works. even the sketches in drypoint on the copperplates for the border designs have been altered and burnished before or after the cutting with the graver. the rosenbloom proofs suggest that the drypoint sketch represents the conception and the graver represents the execution, between which there exists a gap. they show an intermediate process, with some images sketched only in drypoint and others already defined with the graver. essick says that “only as he slowly developed his images in the difficult medium of line engraving did blake come to realize that the ‘perfect and upright’ man of ‘the land of uz’ (job 1:1) was not an archetype of the prayerful student of the arts but one who had already fallen in thrall to the dead letter of the law” (“some unrecorded proofs” 102). he also mentions “the errors which adumbrate satan’s entry into job’s life” as a theme of the job series (102). to blake, these errors are not only the wrong means that job used to worship god, but also the wrong notion of self-righteousness. as a practicing christian as well as an artist, blake illustrates the border of plate 18 with a painting brush and palette. the notion of perfection implied in the unity of execution and conception turns into the reality of a man who makes mistakes and constantly struggles with his satanic and godly natures. the job engravings seem to be a realization of the imperfection of human nature and a history of growth, not only in christian belief but also in artistic practice. whether this realization is conscious in blake’s work, however, is not clear. the text on the published plate 1 stressing “spirit” and opposing “letter” seems to go back to blake’s early identity as a visionary poet and artist who receives heavenly dictation and creates works without premeditation.blake once claimed that he wrote a “poem from immediate dictation twelve or sometimes twenty or thirty lines at a time without premeditation & even against [his] will” (e 729). in the job illustrations, the spiritual and visionary artist, such as the job in plate 21, is not born but is the result of long-term growth. perhaps in his later life blake realized that the visionary artist must achieve a state of maturity. despite the difference between the text on plates 1 and 21 of the rosenbloom proofs and the later revision, the versions are similar in meaning more than a shift of ideas. since the extra phrases on these two plates are the only texts not from the bible in the job engravings, they could have been changed simply because blake and linnell wanted to keep all the texts biblical in order to suit a wider audience, and thus decided to remove blake’s words. the rosenbloom version, therefore, provides the hidden implication in the published state. “the letter killeth” on the published plate 1 implies “the study of imaginative art” on plate 1 of the rosenbloom proofs, and “the spirit giveth life” implies “the exercise of imaginative art”. as a practicing artist, blake regards engraving as a high imaginative art that cannot be achieved by the study of “letter” or skills, but only by the spiritual exercise of a visionary hand. bibliography bentley, g. e., jr. blake books: annotated catalogues of william blake’s writings. oxford: clarendon press, 1977. ---. blake books supplement: a bibliography of publications and discoveries about william blake 1971–1992. oxford: clarendon press, 1995. ---. blake records. 2nd ed. new haven: yale university press, 2004. bindman, david, ed. william blake’s illustrations of the book of job. london: william blake trust, 1987. bryant, barbara, comp. “the job designs: a documentary and bibliographical record.” bindman 103-47. catalogue of a loan exhibition: prints from the collection of charles j. rosenbloom, february 8th to march 31st, mcmxxxviii. pittsburgh: carnegie institute, [1938]. erdman, david v., ed. the complete poetry and prose of william blake. newly rev. ed. new york: anchor–random house, 1988. [abbreviated as e.] essick, robert n. “blake’s engravings to the book of job: an essay on their graphic form with a catalogue of their states and printings.” bindman 35-101. ---. “blake’s job: some unrecorded proofs and their inscriptions.” blake 19.3 (winter 1985–86): 96-102. ---. william blake, printmaker. princeton: princeton university press, 1980. gilchrist, alexander. life of william blake, “pictor ignotus.” 2 vols. london: macmillan and co., 1863. kutter, suzanne, and donald gallup. “a check-list of the [rosenbloom] bequest.” yale university library gazette 49.4 (april 1975): 311-43. liebert, herman w. “the charles j. rosenbloom bequest.” yale university library gazette 49.4 (april 1975): 309-10. lindberg, bo. william blake’s illustrations to the book of job. åbo: åbo akademi, 1973. paintings and prints from the collection of charles j. rosenbloom … february 7–march 24 1946. [pittsburgh]: carnegie institute, [1946]. palmer, a. h. the life and letters of samuel palmer. london: seeley & co., 1892. sung, mei-ying. “technical and material studies of william blake’s engraved illustrations of the book of job (1826).” diss. nottingham trent university, 2005. ---. william blake and the art of engraving. london: pickering & chatto, 2009. the history of william blake’s job prints the history of william blake’s job prints by martin butlin martin butlin is the former keeper of the historic british collection at the tate, london. he is the author of detailed catalogues of the paintings and drawings of william blake and, with evelyn joll, the paintings of j. m. w. turner. at the risk of complicating an already highly complicated subject, i would like to develop a small point in the wonderfully thorough article by mei-ying sung on the newly identified “rosenbloom” set of job prints. in paragraph 11 the author states that two of the proofs of this set are printed on laid rather than woven paper. these are the proofs for plates 17 and 20. by an extraordinary coincidence, if such it be, these are the two subjects, the vision of christ and job and his daughters, that, it now seems to be genuinely agreed, were added to the nineteen subjects painted in watercolor c. 1805–06 for thomas butts. when john linnell commissioned blake in 1821 to paint a new series based on copies of the butts set, blake added these two subjects. he then repeated them so that butts would have the full set of twenty-one subjects. the additions are distinguished by, again, being on different paper from the rest of the butts watercolors and also by being late in style and possibly completed by blake’s widow. coming as part of one of the two early series of proofs (in the second of which blake began to print the border designs), the two new subjects were probably added at this relatively late stage to those chosen for the original watercolors for butts. in addition, it is possible to place this state of plate 20 at the end of a highly complex evolution of that subject (see butlin #394, #550 20, #551 20, #555, #556, #557 42, and #557 49). moreover, the placing of the two new subjects in the sketchbook in the fitzwilliam museum, cambridge, dated 1823 by blake, seems to show them to be integral to the whole scheme at that period in its evolution. the last few studies seem to have been drawn in this order: plate 17, a blank page, plate 18, plate 20 (the figures only), an alternative (not used) for plate 19, a blank page, plate 21, a blank page, plate 19, a blank page, plate 20 (the whole composition), and finally miscellaneous drawings and blank pages. there are tentative sketches for the borders in at least some of the earlier subjects (butlin #557 7, 9, and 11). similar rough sketches for the borders occur on six of the earlier, linnell series of proofs, some close to the states as found in the rosenbloom series, some not. plates 17 and 20 in the linnell series do not show any border designs, nor do the relevant sketches in the fitzwilliam sketchbook. in the rosenbloom series of proofs the border designs were more or less fully developed on the plates with, as sung points out, an important early state of the title on plate 20. unfortunately the national gallery of art in washington are too busy to examine the pre-publication proofs from the linnell series to ascertain which of these are on what types of paper. however, essick’s thorough discussion and catalogue of all the states of the linnell proofs makes it clear that, with few exceptions, the earliest states were on laid paper; the exceptions were the proofs for plates 2, 4, 9, and 21, with no examples of the parallel states for plates 15 and 18. this seems to confirm that the printing of the linnell and rosenbloom proofs overlapped, with those on laid paper occasionally interspersed, it seems, with those on wove (in addition, a number of first states, and a few second and third states, are on oriental paper), and that the fitzwilliam museum sketchbook was being used by blake at this same, crucial period. all this suggests that the new subjects were probably not added until blake began working on the engravings. but one must remember that artists, particularly visionary artists, do not always act in a logical manner. i am as ever grateful to sarah jones for her most helpful suggestions. she has pointed out that three of the early linnell proofs that are on wove paper (plates 2, 4, and 9) are all first states with sketches for the border designs and that the other linnell proofs that have sketches for the borders (plates 1, 10, and 14) are none of them first states. works cited butlin, martin. the paintings and drawings of william blake. 2 vols. new haven: yale university press, 1981. essick, robert n. “blake’s engravings to the book of job: an essay on their graphic form with a catalogue of their states and printings.” william blake’s illustrations of the book of job. ed. david bindman. london: william blake trust, 1987. 35-101. sung, mei-ying. “new information about william blake’s pre-publication proofs of his job engravings.” blake 49.2 (fall 2015): 19 pars. review: helen p. bruder and tristanne connolly, eds., queer blake helen p. bruder and tristanne connolly, eds. queer blake. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, 2010. xii + 264 pp. £64.00/$105.00, hardcover (also available as an e-book). reviewed by tilar j. mazzeo tilar j. mazzeo (tjmazzeo@colby.edu) is the clara c. piper associate professor of english at colby college. the central critical object of this essay collection is an interesting one. the authors gathered here undertake to consider how blake’s commitment to sexual liberation can be extended to include queer sexualities (defined, perhaps needless to say, not simply as homosexual but more broadly in the terms of post-structuralist theory). they are also considering, in many cases, how a “queered” blake intersects with the history of blake’s period and the history of blake studies. in the introduction, for example, the volume’s editors make the salient point that the critical investment in blake’s working-class political radicalism may have resulted in a bias against reading for homosexual or homosocial references in his work or his biography, because both were frequently coded as aristocratic “vices” (5-6). the editors have brought together the work of an impressive selection of scholars. the idea of a “queer” blake is fascinating, and the place where blake meets the discourses of critical theory has always seemed to me especially rich terrain. there are some excellent chapters in this collection—and there are parts of many more chapters that are compelling. reading some of the more sweeping claims in queer blake, however, i occasionally found the voice of my inner skeptic growing more and more insistent. about some of the larger claims, i was often not persuaded. queer blake as a collection is consistently engaged in a post-structuralist approach to blake studies. this is for me one of the least persuasive aspects of the larger argument. not every chapter engages theoretical paradigms explicitly, but the vast majority of chapters do. richard sha writes on blake and queering the idea of jouissance, for example, to argue that blake’s oeuvre pressurizes certain concepts in modern queer theory. elizabeth effinger’s essay on “anal” blake opens with an invocation of geoffrey hartman and ends with bakhtin’s carnival. martin myrone’s chapter on blake’s watercolor the blasphemer (1800) and christopher hobson’s on same-sex relationships and subjectivity both reference foucault. this is, in itself, entirely natural: it’s a collection of essays, after all, on notions of “queer” identities that have largely been articulated in post-structuralist terms. at the same time, showing that the work of blake can be seen to support the theories of foucault or lacan, for example, doesn’t in itself persuade me that blake is, therefore, queer or engaged in discourses of queering. there are moments where the theoretical argument of individual chapters feels vaguely circular: foucault draws on the tradition of western literature to formulate his theory about constructions of subjectivities; evidence in western literature of foucault’s theoretical constructions shows that his definitions of subjectivity can be naturalized. there are, of course, exceptions, but overall the theoretical paradigms weren’t especially illuminating, and the working definition of “queer” in the collection remained somewhat inchoate. at times, “queer” seemed to include everything that was not the missionary position with the lights out, and a more definitive account of how (and to what interpretive ends) “queer” is being mobilized as a rubric would have been welcome. reading the book, i wanted to be convinced in one of two ways that a queer blake “existed”: either by biographical evidence that blake was queer/was interested in what we would now call queer/was plausibly influenced by people or events or contemporary ideas that we would now call queer; or by evidence from his oeuvre that, biography aside, blake’s work engaged in ideas of queerness in sustained ways that don’t solely depend upon contemporary theoretical paradigms. sometimes i encountered here new arguments and information—the strongest chapters of the book. other times i didn’t find enough evidence to back up claims, especially the more sweeping and least historically grounded ones. i was not persuaded by the suggestions, for example—passim, but especially in the introduction—that blake may have been bisexual or experimented with gay sex personally. that may or may not have been the case. i have no horse in that race, as it were, and if that were the case it would be fascinating information. but i am a skeptical critic by nature: the suggestion that “where blake commands [catherine] to kneel before his brother” might be about submission and whipping or that “the twin portraits of william and robert in ecstatic poses” might have morphed into incestuous “eroticism” or that “the adolescent, michelangelo-adoring blake” might have “experiment[ed] (perhaps with the other boys at pars’s or basire’s)” (10) would need historical or textual support for me to be persuaded that this is firm ground to build a reading upon. the essays do function remarkably well together as groupings. several discuss blake’s patron william hayley, and those essays form for me the strongest core of this book. helen bruder’s chapter touches upon blake’s relationship with ann flaxman (an extension of her earlier work on blake and women) and includes some provocative contemporary details on hayley’s perceived effeminacy. keri davies’s chapter on (among other things) hayley’s essay on old maids (1785) is a wonderful point of entry into a discussion of the various spinsters whom blake knew and of the women who lived together as couples in his circle. davies’s discussion extends the published work of bruder, and his fruitful observation that one of the earliest owners of blake’s work was the spinster rebekah bliss, who lived for forty years with ann whitaker, and that her name may be relevant for reading puns on “bliss” in blake’s work, also builds upon earlier arguments.see davies, “mrs. bliss: a blake collector of 1794,” blake in the nineties, ed. steve clark and david worrall (basingstoke: macmillan, 1999) 212-30, and “rebekah bliss: collector of william blake and oriental books,” the reception of blake in the orient, ed. steve clark and masashi suzuki (london: continuum, 2006) 38-62. finally, mark crosby’s chapter on blake’s interest in a young male actor circa 1805, along with further details from contemporary accounts of hayley (including the possibility of unconsummated marriages and a sexual interest in adolescents) and details on blake’s greek lessons at felpham, is an excellent piece of work in all regards. susan matthews’s chapter goes on to develop a quite wonderful reading of the early an island in the moon and the figure of “mr. femality” that makes it another standout in the collection. (the discussion about the identity of “mr. femality” references prior work by hobson, another of the volume’s contributors [209].) the cross-fertilization here is productive, and i was thoroughly persuaded by this constellation of essays that blake’s relationship with hayley and his relationships with the “minor” figures of his acquaintance are worth considering more fully and that they are essential to establishing a context for thinking about a “queer” blake studies. there are also a number of excellent chapters that consider how blake’s work might have engaged ideas of queerness. several focus on themes of transvestitism and transgendered figures, in particular, and they form a second constellation in the collection. here, the claims are often thought-provoking but sometimes less convincing. david fallon sees blake’s engagement with gender and power and the troubling nature of “transgender figures” through the prism of judith butler and contemporary “dominant political vocabulary” (187). in a piece on della cruscan verse of the 1780s and pope’s eloisa to abelard and the four zoas, steve clark rereads blake’s notebook and the pickering manuscript “in the context of the performative strategies emerging out of” della cruscan verse (177). in an excellent work, bethan stevens reads the “libidinized” rhetoric of female abolitionist poetry of the 1780s and 1790s in relation to visions of the daughters of albion. less persuasive to me than the part of her chapter on ann flaxman and hayley or her interesting analysis of examples of sexual sadism in blake’s verse, however, is bruder’s rubric of “textual transvestism” and her claim that “the throwaway remarks of some critical grandees, like morton paley, who comments that the ‘leotard’ is a garment ‘familiar to us from many … blake designs’ … and robert essick, who speaks of ‘blake’s predilection for tight-fitting (partly see-through) jumpsuits’ …, should be taken for what they are: evidence of pervasive transvestite passions” (114). in fact, part of what gives me pause about assuming that blake’s use of strategically placed garments signals a “pervasive transvestite passion” is peter otto’s essay here. otto reads one of the graphic pencil illustrations to the four zoas, primarily through the historical lens of swedenborg, and notes that “although parts of this sexually-explicit drawing have been erased, probably by one of its more prudish readers, most of its main features can still be discerned” (56). i wonder whether blake’s use of transparent or tight-fitting garments at moments in his designs might have a simpler explanation—a concession to audience, perhaps, rather than a passion for cross-dressing? after all, as davies notes in his chapter, no fewer than seven women—five of them spinsters—owned copies of his illuminated works during his lifetime (226). gilchrist also observes in his biography that, after the poet’s death, catherine blake was faced with selling the remaining stock, and she both colored and, on occasion, finished designs on some copies of the illuminated works.life of william blake (london: macmillan, 1880) 1: 410-11. a third subset of essays in the collection evaluates how blake’s work has impacted contemporary queer theory or contemporary queer artists. in addition to sha’s essay on how blake complicates particular queer-theory paradigms, jason whittaker considers “blake’s influence on post-war artists in britain and north america,” and tristanne connolly’s essay considers blake in relation to contemporary poetry and lyrics. as genealogies of blake’s lasting impact, these are significant contributions. on the whole, queer blake is a provocative and often informative collection of essays that considers the spectrum of genders and gendering in blake’s work and life and in blake criticism. that blake has a bawdy sense of humor, cracks dirty jokes more frequently than is often recognized, and understands sexuality as a matter of both perception and performance suggests that queering blake has the critical potential the editors identify in their introduction. perhaps like any collection, some pieces are stronger than others and more persuasive. overall, the quality is high. where queer blake is at its best, to my mind, is in those chapters where the essays are both historical and theoretical—where the writers explore both the center and the circumference of blake’s representations of disparate sexualities. review: susanne m. sklar, blake’s jerusalem as visionary theatre: entering the divine body susanne m. sklar. blake’s jerusalem as visionary theatre: entering the divine body. oxford: oxford university press, 2011. xvii + 310 pp. £74.00/$135.00, hardcover. reviewed by r. paul yoder r. paul yoder (rpyoder@ualr.edu) is a professor of english at the university of arkansas at little rock. he is the author of articles on milton, alexander pope, samuel richardson, thomas gray, blake, and wordsworth. his book, the narrative structure of william blake’s poem jerusalem: a revisionist interpretation, was published by the edwin mellen press in 2010. he has also co-edited, with wallace jackson, two essay collections on pope. every reader brings his or her own strengths to blake’s jerusalem. susanne sklar’s strength lies in her biblical and theological background, and in blake’s jerusalem as visionary theatre: entering the divine body, she identifies an extensive range of biblical references and echoes in blake’s masterpiece, while she also embeds the poem in the context of various eighteenth-century social and religious movements, including freemasonry, moravianism, and the messianism of joanna southcott. sklar also wants to use the notion of “visionary theatre” to show that jerusalem can be read both synchronically (holistically, like a painting) and diachronically (for its story and plot). however, she is more successful at deploying the biblical and theological context than with applying the visionary theatre aspect, and the result is a discussion without a clear overall thesis. it is worth noting at the outset that sklar uses copy e of jerusalem as the base text for her reading, rather than the more commonly used copy a. as most readers know, jerusalem exists in two forms: copies a, c, and f exhibit one sequence of plates in chapter 2, while copies d and e exhibit another. for many years, david erdman’s edition of blake’s work has been the standard critical text, and since he uses the a-c-f sequence, most discussions of jerusalem have been based on that. however, twenty years ago, joseph viscomi showed that the copy d-e sequence is in fact blake’s final intention for the poem.joseph viscomi, blake and the idea of the book (princeton: princeton university press, 1993) 339-41. nonetheless, the ready availability and authority of erdman’s edition have meant that most work on the poem is still based on the a-c-f sequence. thus sklar’s decision reflects a shift in the textual assumptions underpinning critical approaches to the poem. this shift has been encouraged by the increasing availability of facsimiles of copy e, both in the blake trust edition of 1991 and in the online blake archive. indeed, sklar suggests that the reader keep the facsimile open while reading her commentary. this advice is useful because she makes more effort than most to integrate interpretations of the illuminations with the interpretations of the text. also, much of her commentary refers to conversations she had about the illuminations with other scholars while working with copy e itself at the yale center for british art. the book opens with an introduction that includes what is now a fairly standard review of the literary criticism of jerusalem. she covers most of the important critics (ellis and yeats, gilchrist, damon, frye, erdman, wittreich, mitchell, paley, doskow, witke, and dortort), as well as some more theologically oriented writers such as j. g. davies and thomas altizer, and a good number of others. after the introduction, the book is divided into two major parts: part i: perspectives, characters, settings, and part ii: the commentary. part i introduces the notion of “visionary theatre” and the related issue of “dramatis personae” before focusing more specifically on “jerusalem: her character and context,” “jerusalem’s jesus,” and “shifting settings—building projects.” part ii offers a chapter-by-chapter discussion of blake’s poem, leading up to an “encore” that somewhat belatedly returns to the issue of the synchronic reading of jerusalem. part i sets up an admirable context that promises much for the more detailed reading of the poem. the strengths here lie in the extensive detail that sklar brings to the context she creates for the poem. for example, like morton paley and vincent de luca, she makes much of the influence of joseph mede’s clavis apocalyptica (key to the revelation) on jerusalem, partly by way of milton. paley cites in general terms joseph wittreich’s work on mede’s influence on milton, but sklar includes the juicy tidbit that mede was “one of [milton’s] cambridge tutors” and that clavis apocalyptica was published “during milton’s second year at christ’s college” (22). similarly, while the influence of freemasonry on blake has been discussed by earlier critics such as stuart peterfreund, sklar emphasizes the influence via blake’s master during his apprenticeship, james basire, noting both the assertion by hamill and gilbert that “basire was ‘certainly a member of the craft’” (although she admits to having found “no documentary evidence to support this”) (36) and the fact that the dedication and consecration of the freemasons’ tavern and hall were “done with pomp and circumstance directly opposite basire’s studio and home on great queen street” (37). in her examination of the character of jerusalem, sklar compares her to christ, while also creating a context for blake’s depiction that includes jacob boehme’s sophia and the evangelist southcott. in discussing blake’s jesus, she examines the similarities and differences between blake’s poem and edward young’s night thoughts, the epistles of st. paul, the moravian church, and the writings of emanuel swedenborg. it is in sklar’s focus on visionary theatre that her book holds the most promise. the synchronic readings that have dominated criticism of jerusalem for years commonly invoke the notion of “visionary theatre” as it was applied to revelation by david pareus and mede in the seventeenth century, but these approaches are now being called into question by a variety of critics (including myself). sklar states early that “visionary theatre allows us to engage with blake’s composite art both sequentially and synchronically” (3). this effort to bring the synchronic and diachronic readings into interplay is an important focus for future discussions of jerusalem: it has become increasingly clear that the synchronic approach does not address important issues in the poem, such as what constitutes a synchronic fragment, or why blake oscillated between two different sequences in chapter 2. nonetheless, the synchronic readings cannot simply be dismissed, and at least early in her book, sklar tries harder than most to bring the synchronic and diachronic possibilities of jerusalem into proximity. moreover, she rightly argues that the emphasis on visionary theatre should draw the reader’s attention to issues of character, motive, dramatic scene or episode, and setting, elements often ignored in the drive to read jerusalem as a set of synchronic fragments of a single event. despite sklar’s intent to engage the poem both sequentially and synchronically, her discussion in part i of the characters and their relationships tends to collapse blake’s time scheme in a way that finally misrepresents the drama and action of the poem. for example, she describes the “erotic spirituality” of jesus in jerusalem, saying that jerusalem (the character) “flies into the arms of her bridegroom, who makes her his wife (j20:35-41), and they experience ‘holy raptures’ on their heavenly couch in their ‘secret chamber’ in spain, spreading joy throughout the world (j79)” (107). sklar is certainly correct that blake connected eroticism and spirituality, and the two quotations she cites are textually accurate, but those quotations come from scenes at opposite ends of the poem. moreover, her description ignores the dramatic context because the actions she specifies do not happen in the narrative present of the poem. on plate 20, jerusalem does say that “the lamb of god … made me his bride & wife” (20.39-40), but this statement occurs in the middle of a scene in which jerusalem and vala are talking about sin, guilt, and forgiveness, including the latter’s response to what may have been a rape by albion, as jerusalem describes to vala how he “rent thy veil,” yet “thou forgavest his furious love” (20.36-37). similarly, in the second scene noted by sklar in this passage, jerusalem does describe her love with the saviour, but again, that scene is not in the narrative present. instead, on plate 79 jerusalem describes her situation in terms recalling ezekiel’s account of the babylonian exile, especially ezekiel chapter 33, in which he reports the destruction of the city of jerusalem. jerusalem’s statements depict that time when she was happier, before the destruction of the city and the exile of the people. within the context of the poem, sklar’s statements about these relationships focus on the lost past and a possible future, but not the situation that confronts blake’s characters in the drama of jerusalem’s visionary theatre. the problem is that sklar lacks an adequate working definition of “visionary theatre.” she devotes an early chapter to “visionary theatre—apocalyptic images,” in which she brings together with pareus and mede the book of revelation, musicals, alchemy, boehme, freemasonry, and blake’s oft-noted reference to “sublime allegory” (see his letter to thomas butts of 6 july 1803) to construct a web of possible connections and influences. however, she is more interested in the “visionary” than the “theatre.” she is more concerned with the possibility of seeing past, present, and future all at once (22) and with the characters as “windows to eternity” (43) than with identifying theatrical scenes that unfold a plot in a narrative present. following the chapter on visionary theatre, the bulk of part i is largely a matter of definitions, using jerusalem, jesus, and blake’s cosmology to introduce key terms and motifs in the poem. that makes a good introduction, even though there is little consideration of the details of the development of the drama. we expect that those details will come in “the commentary” of part ii. unfortunately, they do not. part ii should explain how the concept of visionary theatre helps the reader to identify and interpret individual scenes and their interrelationships. instead, the concept mainly serves to authorize a variety of theatrical metaphors (overture, encore, curtain call). ideas about dramatic context, characterization, and motive introduced in part i, ideas that should be clarified and crystallized in their application to the sequential details of the poem, are left vague and ill defined. in part ii sklar provides summaries of what the characters say without much attention to who is speaking to whom, where, when, and why. in part i, following the four-point outline of revelation suggested by pareus, sklar does say, when i apply these “vision-divisions” to jerusalem i see the structure of its story: chapter one depicts the calamity of albion rejecting the saviour’s song and jerusalem’s love; in chapter two, albion’s cities, friends, and immortals offer comforts; in chapter three, calamities amplify … and in chapter four, the spectrous selfhood, or “anti-christ accursed” (j89:10) is overcome. (21) she repeats this outline several times throughout the book, but we hardly need pareus, mede, or any of the modern critics she mentions to grasp this general chain of events. when sklar gets down to the particulars of the drama, she divides jerusalem’s chapters 1 and 4 into six scenes, and chapters 2 and 3 into seven scenes (plus a preface and “interval” for each chapter), but she does not explain her rationale for these divisions, nor does she consider more than in passing how one set of events relates to the ones that come before and after it. part ii is basically a paraphrase of the actions described by the characters in the text; it is not an analysis of those conversations as dramatic events. sklar provides a fairly detailed sequential summary of the poem, but she does not explain what defines the dramatic scenes she uses in that summary. without a sense of what constitutes a scene change, she fails to consider how the action of the drama develops. for example, she offers fairly extensive discussions of the final scenes in beulah in chapters 1 and 2 of jerusalem, but she makes no comment on the similarity or difference between the cry from beulah asking the “lamb of god” to “take away the imputation of sin” in chapter 1 (25.12) and the cry from beulah in chapter 2 for the “lamb of god” to “take away the remembrance of sin” (50.24, 30). similarly, she does not comment on the increase in the arrogance and power of the spectre evident in the change from his self-identification—“i am your rational power”—in chapter 2, where he is merely “worshipd as god” (33.5, 18), to his claim in chapter 3 that “i am god” (54.16). it is in these sorts of progressions that the details of jerusalem’s unfolding drama are most evident. thus she dismisses as “banal bickering” the important scene in chapter 4 in which the problems of jealousy finally infiltrate into los’s own family, despite the fact that the scene parallels jerusalem’s taking of the foaming cup from vala and immediately precedes los’s consolidation of error that culminates in the awakening of albion. that scene is not banal; it is the climax of the poem. sklar’s book is a valuable resource for the “prophetic, poetic, and historical sources” (43) informing jerusalem; i would add theological sources as well. but the book is also a missed opportunity to tell us something even more valuable about the structure of blake’s masterpiece. sklar does stipulate at the beginning of her part ii, “i am not arguing that jerusalem is visionary theatre or creating a theory about it; i am using this notion as an approach to the text, an imaginative way of reading that clarifies how characters, settings, imagery, and action interrelate” (148). i’m just not convinced that’s enough. her theatrical metaphors do (or should) carry meaningful implications for the text to which they are applied. why is “visionary theatre” a better way to approach the poem than some other? i’m still not sure. review: sarah haggarty and jon mee, william blake: songs of innocence and of experience: a reader’s guide to essential criticism sarah haggarty and jon mee. william blake: songs of innocence and of experience: a reader’s guide to essential criticism. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, 2013. x + 200 pp. £55.00/​$90.00, hardcover; £17.99/​$30.00, paperback; £16.99/​$29.99, e-book. reviewed by alexander s. gourlay alexander s. gourlay (agourlay@risd.edu) teaches at the rhode island school of design. the subtitle of this overview of critical responses to songs raises the questions, “essential for what?” and “essential to whom?” the book is not really right for beginners trying to understand the songs, since the poems themselves are barely mentioned, much less explicated; it isn’t comprehensive enough to help scholars establish that what they want to say has not already been said; and it is a poor substitute for reading the critics it treats, because for the most part it characterizes and analyzes rather than epitomizes their approaches. its two authors both write clearly and well, and they usually explain concepts and terms that would not be familiar to undergraduates, but the efficiently allusive prose is still likely to be over the heads of many of those seeking help reading blake criticism. thus the optimal audience for this book is small—perhaps panicky doctoral candidates preparing to cram for comprehensive exams or junior professors who have just been told that next semester’s lecture course on romanticism will become an advanced seminar on the songs. several of my undergraduate students recently found the book in the library and used bits of it as if it were a typical reader’s guide to the poems. in general they benefited from their exposure to it, especially in that it helped them to identify influential criticism to read without having to slog through the vast swamps of undifferentiated twaddle that turn up in a computer-assisted scholarly search. it can certainly do more good than cliff’s notes (proposed motto: “for those who don’t get it, by those who don’t get it”) or the beckoning internet sites (for example, sparknotes <http://​www.​sparknotes.​com/​poetry/​blake>) that entice the blake bemused into drinking the lethe-like waters of complete bafflement. the most useful chapter for those seeking a foothold in the songs themselves is probably the first, which describes the general circumstances and processes of the composition and initial publication of innocence and then experience, but thereafter the book is more concerned with reception, reaction, editing, and republication—it is around rather than about the songs. chapters 2 through 5 review early readers’ responses, concentrating on a decade or two at a time: haggarty and mee identify a few influential figures in a given period and briskly sketch each one’s take on blake and/or the poems (for many nineteenth-century readers blake was the songs), usually working off short quoted passages that better indicate how the writers approached blake than what they said about his work. this historical review culminates in an extensive discussion of the contributions of s. foster damon, represented here as the figure who established blake as an “academically respectable” (94) author, one whose works reveal both extensive ties to tradition and a vast system of original thought, two perennial favorite subjects of professorial explication. with chapter 6, “the post-war foundations: system, myth, and history,” the discussion begins to slow down and spread out as it recounts how academic critics seized upon the newly certified major author that damon gave them, beginning with jacob bronowski’s romantic marxist visions of blake’s oeuvre, and then the great triumvirate of northrop frye (emphasizing system), harold bloom (myth), and david v. erdman (history). haggarty and mee explain these critics’ distinctive interests, then suggest how their perspectives could (and did) harmonize, especially in the work of their numerous critical heirs. chapter 7 covers several of that next generation of critics, especially robert gleckner, whose the piper and the bard was the first full-length critical treatment of the songs as an independent and coherent work, followed by waves of ideologically and methodologically focused witnesses: feminists, historicists, freudians, mystics, and more. many of the earliest of these scholars bore well-marked volumes of damon, bloom, erdman, and/or frye in one hand and an edition of blake in the other, and set to work refining, solidifying, and clarifying their panoramic insights. others were more anxious about influences, repudiating the triumvirate’s versions of blake. inevitably, given the size and scope of this guidebook, and of the subject, this chapter and those that follow are both partial and somewhat breezy in their coverage of the explosively expanded field, focusing on critics with novel and explicitly theorized approaches. that may be why zachary leader’s reading blake’s songs (1981) is treated but not robert n. essick’s modestly framed but masterful scholarly edition and facsimile of the songs (2008) or andrew lincoln’s well-illustrated edition in the princeton/blake trust series of facsimiles of the illuminated books (1991). indeed, although haggarty and mee acknowledge and discuss the role of nineteenth-century republications and facsimiles in shaping public understanding of the songs, they pay little attention to the critical significance of textual/editorial matter and the quality of images of blake’s pages in currently available print editions of his work, such as g. e. bentley, jr.’s william blake’s writings (1978) or the mary lynn johnson/john e. grant critical editions of blake’s poetry and designs (1979, 2008). admittedly, not all aspects of all editions are original enough or coherent enough to constitute criticism. for example, geoffrey keynes’s slight remarks in the immensely important trianon/​orion/​oxford facsimiles of songs were never very useful. on the other hand, haggarty and mee pay considerable attention to the critical significance of erdman’s heroic, if somewhat problematic, textual work. it’s probably not fair to complain about other omissions in an overview that does not claim to be comprehensive, but i don’t understand the absence of some works that foreground discussion of the illustrations to the songs: for instance, erdman’s illuminated blake (1974) made the case for attending to the subtlest pictorial details in multiple copies, even if it also led to a lot of arbitrary over-reading, and, in a more judicious version of the same spirit, grant’s ideologically unclassifiable, minutely particular essays on blake’s words and pictures are still worth reviewing before writing about any of the songs.see the checklist of grant’s work in my festschrift collection, prophetic character (west cornwall: locust hill press, 2002) xxi-xxvi. chapter 8 is probably the one most likely to be widely influential, at least for a while, because it thoughtfully combines reasoned discussion of the fierce debates about blake’s material practices in producing his texts and images with an account of some of the partially corollary, largely theory-driven investigations of text, textuality, and image in blake’s work, many of which invoke the nitty-gritty of his publishing techniques. this chapter is no substitute for reading the relevant books and articles, but its overview of the relationship between these wildly heterogenous ways of thinking about blake seems fair to all sides and likely to be a real help to those coming in late to this strange but very important conversation. the book closes with the unfortunately titled “worlding blake today: ‘past, present and future sees’ [sic],” which sketches what was most recently hot, welcoming scholars from the departments of gender and body studies, postcolonial studies, and ecocritical studies to join the blake studies party (which, without departmental affiliation, they have long attended anyway). this chapter is particularly likely to be useful to undergraduates looking for a place to start reading blake criticism, especially because these approaches are not only au courant but often fruitful when applied to the songs, even by beginners; furthermore, they don’t call for a personal supply of stopping varnish and nitric acid or seem to require that one preface every critical argument by tracking it back to its origins in the nineteenth century. the universal format of these palgrave guides to criticism of literary texts suggests a whiggish presumption that the secondary literature on a work forms a coherent and progressing whole, and that a tour pointing out the more salient bricks in the wall of secondary literature would be just what every undergraduate needs to get started. i am somewhat willing to entertain the possibility that there might be authors out there somewhere who are susceptible to this approach, but blake is not one of them. the back cover of this book proposes that it is “an invaluable resource for anyone who is seeking to navigate their way through the mass of criticism surrounding blake’s most widely-studied book.” the implication that the critical literature is an obstacle to understanding blake will resonate with anyone who has read large amounts of it: few critics read blake’s texts or study his pictures carefully, many do not read or study anything carefully, and too many read blake only in snippets found in other critics. guidance at the palgrave level of generality may suggest leading the uninitiated briskly through a circle of the deaf, who are discussing the reports of a committee of the blind, who may or may not have their hands somewhere on the blakean elephant. it is easy to imagine a blandly even-handed account of the secondary literature on the songs that would be valuable to few and essential to none. but this is not an even-handed survey, or a mindless echo of the critical cacophony. the authors are familiar with the pachyderm themselves, and they are fair minded and efficiently accurate in describing some of the most influential critical literature of the last two centuries. at the same time, they are not shy about taking sides, pointing out blind spots, or tipping idols. at their best (and throughout the book they are in alert good form) they go beyond summary to offer valuable second-order perspectives on the criticism they survey, tracing antipathies and affiliations among critics while at the same time contextualizing the work historically, intellectually, and (especially in the case of early criticism) biographically and even psychologically. i continue to wonder who might be the ideal reader for this book, but it is a creditable effort to map the terrain it undertakes to describe. “bound ... by their narrowing perceptions”: sympathetic bondage and perverse pity in blake’s the book of urizen “bound ... by their narrowing perceptions”: sympathetic bondage and perverse pity in blake’s the book of urizen by sarah eron sarah eron (sarah.eron@gmail.com) is an assistant professor of english at the university of rhode island. she has published articles in a number of journals and online publications on issues of language and aesthetics, time and form, and gender and genre in eighteenthand nineteenth-century literature and philosophy. she is currently completing a book manuscript on inspiration in the early eighteenth century. the eye sees more than the heart knowsblake, visions of the daughters of albion, title page (johnson and grant 70; all citations of blake’s poems are from this edition, unless otherwise specified). the book of urizen as a rewriting, or reinterpretation, of the genesis myth has long been important to blake studies in terms of understanding the very crux of blakean mythology and the nature of what has come to be known as blake’s bible.see, in particular, david worrall’s introduction to the urizen books. he describes the book of urizen as blake’s effort to ask “when, why and how man’s ideas of god and religion came into existence” (10). by essentially reading the act of “genesis” (what one might normally associate with an establishment of order and origin) as a kind of reverse creation myth, blake suggests in urizen that the birth of humanity emerges at the moment of its fall. hence, what was once a story of creation out of chaos becomes for blake a visionary apocalypse. i use the term “visionary” here not simply because urizen acts as blake’s artistic vision of man’s genesis, but because, for blake, the nature of our origins as apocalypse is dependent upon the fall of our perceptions, on a collapse of both human and divine vision.  if the blakean fall predates an exile of humanity from paradise, then it becomes divine in origin, stemming from acts of godly creation. blake’s radical mythology essentially can be read as a critique of aesthetics and of our standards of both divine and artistic creation. we know from the original genesis myth that divine creation arises out of god’s command “let there be light.” however, blake’s anti-genesis begins and ends in obscurity, in a world devoid of light that remains in darkness throughout all of urizen’s acts of creation. therefore, we can read the book of urizen as a story of blindness, or of the relationship that emerges between man and god as both lose their ability to perceive fully. of course, blake’s preoccupation with sight extends beyond his biblical poems. in turning to an analysis of urizen, we might recall the opening epigraph on the title page of visions of the daughters of albion, “the eye sees more than the heart knows.” here, blake plays with our concept of vision by destabilizing the traditional association of sight with knowledge. if the language of prophecy is dependent upon foresight, a knowledge that stems from visionary perception, then the eye’s perceptions might dictate the knowledge of the mind or heart. however, in visions blake suggests that we see more than we know, or, in other words, we never internalize all of our perceptions. this is a phenomenon that can be explained through the narrative of urizenic genesis, a myth that seeks to unfold the story of man’s emergence into a world of “narrowing perceptions.” more importantly, in the epigraph for visions, it is not the mind that knows, but rather it is the heart that becomes the primary organ of thought. thus blake associates feeling with thinking. ironically, the heart, an organ that comes to represent feeling as thinking, also fails to feel and/or think adequately through acts of visionary perception. why then does blake perceive the heart as blind? this is a question that can be explained in light of urizen. once we understand the book of urizen as dependent upon a narrative of thwarted perceptions, we note the immediate connection between urizen, or “your reason,” and a critique of enlightenment thinking. at the center of blake’s dark conception of the enlightenment lies an eighteenth-century preoccupation with sentiment, and thus we begin to see how blake’s critique of reason ties into matters of the heart. moreover, we begin to associate urizen, a book that links allegorical reason to divine creation and thereby to ideologies of genesis and origin, with eighteenth-century philosophies of the self. both the ontological and aesthetic implications of the poem shed light on blake’s ongoing desire to expose the hypocrisy of eighteenth-century theories of sensibility, a topic that a number of blake critics, james chandler and stephen cox in particular, have begun to explore in their work. i would like to argue, more specifically, that we can read the book of urizen as blake’s commentary on the moral and structural failings of sympathy, a phenomenon associated with philosophies of sensibility and one that blake sees as an identificatory process that tricks the imagination into false perception. hence, we can account for the strong relationship in the poem between sight and the cognitive dissonances that arise out of a blakean conception of pity. in particular, i would like to read blake’s critique of pity in the book of urizen, which critics such as cox have connected with issues of division in the poem, as standing in direct opposition to eighteenth-century theories of sympathy found in humean and smithian moral philosophies of subjectivity and aesthetic judgment.  in other words, for blake, sympathy as a sentiment that distorts or tricks our real perceptions is perverse in that it creates only imagined, or illusory, union. by striving for conformity, sympathy ultimately blinds us, creating only division and solipsism where it seeks to unite. thus blake’s world of “narrowing perceptions” at the end of the poem is the result not only of urizenic genesis but of a kind of creation that arises out of man’s distorted perception, out of a paradoxical “pity” that blake reads as man’s perverse desire to seek for himself in others by simultaneously likening himself to and distancing himself from them.  ironically, the identificatory desire to unite to another subject results for blake only in a doubling of the self, in a mimetic self-reproduction reliant on projection. blake’s urizenic world is founded upon sympathy, upon the mirrorings of the self, which seeks to find itself, reproduce itself, in everything. although the urizenic world is one that begins in isolation, with the creator brooding on his own, urizen ultimately creates a society founded on the laws of “unity,” “pity, compassion, [and] forgiveness” (4.34-35). thus urizen’s world defies the blakean ideals of individualism by seeking for itself in others, by imagining unity where none exists, and thereby creating only nonproductive mimesis and division.  critics have long acknowledged blake’s critique of pity in the songs of innocence and of experience: “pity would be no more, / if we did not make somebody poor” (“the human abstract”).the other representation of pity that has occupied blake critics over time is the color print pity, which is analyzed by david bindman in william blake: his art and times. the design has been interpreted as illustrative of the following lines from shakespeare’s macbeth: and pity, like a naked new-born babe, striding the blast, or heaven’s cherubim hors’d upon the sightless couriers of the air shall blow the horrid deed in every eye, that tears shall drown the wind. bindman relates the conceptions of pity in the book of urizen to the allegorical design, arguing that in both pity appears as a negative emotion, which in urizen arises out of los’s pity for urizen. pity causes los’s division (into the two sexes) and the consequent separation of enitharmon and los (115-16). an anxiety about the repression of sensory perception also pervades the songs, most particularly “to tirzah,” which shares with urizen the apocalyptic fear that emerges from a binding of the senses. nevertheless, my focus in this essay will be on the book of urizen, for two reasons. first, critics have focused less on the topic of sympathy in urizen than in blake’s other poetry, and, second, urizen as blake’s rewriting of the genesis myth specifically critiques theories of sympathy because of their connection to mimetic models of thinking, perceiving, and creating. in this manner, blake’s critique of sympathy in the book of urizen most likely arises out of the aesthetic and subjective issues that stem from eighteenth-century conceptions of sympathy and the self. his critique focuses upon both the social consequences of sympathy and the philosophical rhetoric and structure that empiricists use to describe acts of sympathetic identification. if we turn, for example, to some of the major philosophies of sympathy in blake’s time, we see that at the heart of this discourse lies a larger implication for both aesthetics and the psychology of the individual, an implication that stands in direct conflict with some of blake’s own moral preoccupations. one of blake’s greatest issues with sympathy as theorized in the late eighteenth century is that it is founded upon a false sense of unity, on an imagined, as opposed to a real, psychological bond.  most importantly, this imagined connection relies upon a restriction of the senses, or rather a relationship in which thought, or reason, supersedes sensory perception. in his treatise of human nature, hume foregrounds his commentary on the imaginative work of sympathy by discussing the relationship between sensation and reason, or what he calls “impressions” and “ideas”: all the perceptions of the human mind resolve themselves into two distinct kinds, which i shall call impressions and ideas. the difference betwixt these consists in the degrees of force and liveliness, with which they strike upon the mind, and make their way into our thought or consciousness. those perceptions, which enter with most force and violence, we may name impressions; and under this name i comprehend all our sensations, passions and emotions, as they make their first appearance in the soul. by ideas i mean the faint images of these in thinking and reasoning …. (7) for hume, an “impression” is a kind of perception that is also a sensation, an act of vision that instantly gives rise to a bodily, emotional reaction. an “idea,” on the other hand, not only becomes a conceptualization, or a memory, of our impression, but also a mimesis of this impression. “when i shut my eyes and think of my chamber,” hume writes, “the ideas i form are exact representations of the impressions i felt …” (8). therefore, for hume, there is something inherently mimetic about thinking; our ideas are replicas of our reality, and what is real is primarily based upon both sight and sensory experience. moreover, hume states that “in sympathy there is an evident conversion of an idea into an impression” (208). thus hume illustrates a chain of mimetic responses in which impressions become ideas and ideas become impressions. affections such as sympathy, he argues, rely less upon an immediate sensory experience than they do on the faculties of our memory and imagination. sympathy as a kind of affection becomes a function of the imagination. we feel sympathy, argues hume, not through direct sensory experience but from a faint mimesis, a recollection, of our former sensations. this is to say that sympathetic bonds arise not from sensory perceptions but from the reproductive, mimetic work of the mind. smith explains the imaginative nature of sympathy through a similar rhetoric. here, we can further grasp why sympathy as an affective bond with another being must rely upon the mimetic faculties of the mind rather than upon any direct or immediate sensation: though our brother is upon the rack, as long as we ourselves are at ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers. they never did, and never can, carry us beyond our own person, and it is by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his sensations. neither can that faculty help us to this any other way, than by representing to us what would be our own, if we were in his case. it is the impressions of our own senses only, not those of his, which our imaginations copy. (the theory of moral sentiments 11-12) we cannot, according to smith, directly experience the emotions of another person. in order to experience those emotions in acts of sympathy, we place a map of our former impressions and sensations onto another subject.according to chandler in “blake and the syntax of sentiment,” the theory of moral sentiments argues that to sympathize with a person is “not to feel what that person feels,” but “rather to feel what we ourselves should feel in a like situation.” in this manner, sympathy relates to performance. when we sympathize, we “feel what it would be like to be that person,” and thus we enter into that person’s state or situation by way of imitation (106). however, chandler argues, to put oneself into the case of another “requires a … remediation of oneself in relation to all that is not oneself” (107). this includes one’s body. when we pity, we imagine a virtual set of circumstances with which to identify; thus pity becomes “an act of disembodiment and (at the same time) of virtual reembodiment.” “thus to become an object of sympathetic identification,” chandler writes, “is to have one’s experience mediated in two related senses” (107), between “the universal and the particular,” and “rendered” so as to admit “virtual” and imaginative experience. for blake, chandler claims, sympathy is not a matter of sympathetic imagination, i.e., of putting oneself into the case of another, or imagining what it would be like to be them. rather, he argues that for blake sympathy becomes a matter of characters “metamorphosing into one another” (112). according to chandler, blake attempts to “denaturalize the level of habitual reflection and exchange that marks the sentimental” (116). here is where i wish to depart from chandler’s analysis. his model seeks to establish a blakean ideal for sympathy, whereas i read urizen as an outright argument against the evils of sympathetic identification. there is no need, blake seems to say, to eradicate difference, a desire that seems to lie at the heart of the late eighteenth-century’s preoccupation with sensibility. the book of urizen, i argue, rejects smithian sympathy as a form of self-doubling or projection. smithian sympathy is necessarily reliant on imaginative projection; the sympathizer tries to conform the experiences of the sympathetic object to his own in order to establish a sense of likeness. such a case would point not to an imaginative transport into the object but rather to a kind of imaginative projection onto the object of one’s pity. for smith, not only is sympathy a function of the imagination, but it acts as a repetition of the self; it relies on mimesis. we can see how for blake this mimetic aspect of sympathy might appear solipsistic. if we were to read smith via, or in conjunction with, hume, then sympathy might look like a doubly mimetic process; in sympathy, we take an idea, a replica of an initial impression that we experienced in the past, in an attempt to mimic the unknown sentiments of another. thus the sympathetic bond describes an act of mimetic mapping; a doubly reproduced sensation creates an illusory connection. in contrast to the image-making faculties of blakean creation or thought, eighteenth-century theories of sympathy thereby define the imagination as something that never creates but only reproduces or copies sensation. this notion seems to highlight the generally solipsistic nature of a work like the book of urizen, which is, as many critics have argued, dependent upon narcissistic forms of reproduction, on “a continual reproduction of selfhood,” as paul mann states.mann 56. for blake, it is the mimetic properties of sympathy, along with its connection to the mind, the imagination, and the self, that violate an artistic code of originality and a moral paradigm of individualism.this vision of sympathy for blake as an “imagined” or “thought-constructed” act that gives rise to division where it intends to unite becomes further emphasized in his use of the term “pity.” pity as a type of sympathy only emphasizes a need for difference as well as hierarchy in order to produce an illusory feeling of likeness. see smith’s definition of pity as closely aligned with the nature of sympathy, but exclusive to feelings of sorrow or misery (smith 13). according to smith, therefore, we can read pity as a mere subclassification of sympathy, which is how i intend to use this term with regard to blake. finally, note also hume’s definition of pity (hume 238-40). for hume, pity, like sympathy, functions as an imaginative faculty, not a real bond or likeness, which is (as in smith’s analysis of sympathy) triggered by sight and therefore connected to our powers of thought and perception. the threat of a humean or smithian conception of sympathy connected to the mimetic faculties of the imagination could only disturb any blakean ideals of originality and individual subjectivity as seen in both his poetry and his method of printing.see joseph viscomi’s article “illuminated printing” from the william blake archive, in which he describes the unique process behind blake’s method of printing. for the aesthetic implications behind blake’s artistic process, see also note 29. thus blake represents sympathy in the book of urizen as a reproduction of the self that breeds division in its attempt to unite. moreover, the urizenic mind must reproduce its own past sensations, must essentially form a double of itself that is then projected outward, divided from the self, in order to create the sympathetic bond. late eighteenth-century philosophers of sympathy link it to spectatorship, arguing that sight always triggers sympathetic reactions; thus our perceptions become a key aspect of all acts of sympathetic bonding. hume classifies “impressions” and “ideas” as “perceptions of the … mind” and therefore suggests that sympathy acts as a hybrid idea-impression, as a function of the imagination and as a kind of perception. for smith, the sympathetic plight of the spectator arises out of a visual perception of a situation that triggers an emotional response that intends to capture or mimic the would-be emotions of the sympathetic object. blake acknowledges this aspect of the sympathetic discourse when he places recurrent emphasis throughout the book of urizen on images and acts of perception. even the very first word of the poem (after its preludium) serves as a perfect introduction to the importance of sight in the narrative of urizen’s material genesis: “lo, a shadow of horror is risen / in eternity! unknown, unprolific?” (3.1-2; emphasis mine). “lo” here, of course, can mean “low” as in something base, dark, and obscure rising upward. however, we could also read “lo” as a kind of elided articulation of the phrase “lo and behold.”“lo” can also be read as a pun on the name and figure of los in the poem. in “the meaning of los,” edward j. rose argues that “los” should be interpreted as the “traditionally shortened form of the interjection, ‘lo.’” in this sense, we should read the name of los, who fittingly becomes the figure of the prophet in blake’s urizen, as meaning to “‘look’ or ‘behold’” (10). thus the poem immediately asks us to see, to behold, this vision; it places urizen in the position of something viewed, an object awaiting sympathy. to some extent, urizen already loses a kind of individual agency here, even as a divine power. not only does blake figure him in the first stanza as a spectacle that calls forth our attention, but he also describes urizen as essentially “unknown.” urizen becomes known only to the extent that he is called “urizen”: “some said / ‘it is urizen’” (3.5-6). in this initial act of naming, blake emphasizes our desire, or the desire of the eternals, to comprehend urizen through a strained act of perception. here, blake acknowledges the assumption that seeing is knowing, and that an assumed piece of knowledge always leads to a secondary desire: one of naming, defining, and incidentally confining the unknown. this points to the very predicament of the original genesis myth, in which speaking and naming (in terms of both god’s declarative fiat lux and adam’s status as he who names all things) become essential to the process of material creation. the paradox here, of course, lies in blake’s and the eternals’ asking us to see something that has no material form, for at the opening of the poem the concept of urizen exists in a pre-genesis state of chaos. urizen is unshapen, a void, an essence, something, therefore, “unseen” and “unknown” (3.10), which already indicates our desire to “see,” to “know,” and to sympathize with him. los becomes in the poem the “eternal prophet” and thus the ultimate “seer.” incidentally, it is los too who as seer, and as craftsman or creator, will play the role of the quintessential sympathizer, reproducing, producing, dividing, and creating throughout his continual acts of pity. hence, the opening of the poem poses a threat of perception, which foreshadows a subsequent threat of sympathetic bondage for blake. notably, we exit the pre-genesis state of urizen and fall into materiality only when he introduces “laws of peace, of love, of unity” into creation,cox reads urizen’s desire to put into effect “laws of peace, of love, of unity: / of pity, compassion, forgiveness” as urizen’s establishment of the rules of sensibility. he argues that los’s attempt to limit urizen involves him in a urizenic excess of sensibility. when los observes urizen, pity divides his soul. blake, states cox, is “aware of the overcompensating element in the eighteenth century’s ability to generate an ethic of sympathy from its fear of solipsism.” thus, when los experiences sympathy for urizen, this creates a division, an anguish of being rent from urizen’s side. sympathy in the book of urizen thus acts as a “failed attempt to use feeling for others to recover from a perceived absence of those others” (153-54). an act that blake describes as a darkness unfolding (4.31-35). hence, sympathy becomes an event of false enlightenment, a miltonic fall into “darkness visible.” stanzas 8 and 9 of chapter 3 connect this notion of sensual bondage to sympathy with the introduction of los, a formerly silent bystander who intervenes and emerges in accordance with his role as the sympathetic spectator:according to harold bloom, pity enters into the book of urizen through the character of los, whose dismay at the disaster suffered through urizen’s solipsistic intellect prompts him to action. urizen, when contemplating his creation, “weeps hypocritical tears of abstract pity.” his weeping is thus akin to the mercy of a destructive god. “as in ‘the human abstract,’” urizenic pity “breeds monstrous growth,” argues bloom (174). and los round the dark globe of urizen kept watch for eternals to confine the obscure separation alone; for eternity stood wide apart, as the stars are apart from the earth. los wept howling around the dark demon: and cursing his lot; for in anguish, urizen was rent from his side. (5.38-41; 6.1-4) los’s immediate perception, or prophecy, arises from his role as urizen’s guardian. (we might compare los here to the miltonic angel or demon who keeps watch.) this initial perception both predicts and reifies urizen’s confinement. in the horrifying spectacle of urizen’s creation,morton d. paley argues in “spectre and emanation” that los’s endeavor to save albion in jerusalem is actually an endeavor “to reintegrate his … spectre with his emanation” (150). again, we see a problematic between internality and externality in blake. what represents external relations may also represent internal struggles and relations. thus the nerves and fibers of the urizenic origin create a world with very few boundaries, which through a solipsistic form of creation exists as a kind of universality, a connective tissue that unites and binds the individual to himself and to his surroundings. his markedly demonic and solipsistic separation, blake introduces los as the perpetuator of separation and division in the poem. los’s “pity” for urizen separates the two. just as urizen’s laws of pity force him to divide from the eternals, los’s sentiments of sympathy divide him from urizen. hence, blake begins to establish a concrete relationship between pity and division: “los wept howling around the dark demon: / and cursing his lot; for in anguish, / urizen was rent from his side” (6.2-4).worrall argues that “los is ‘rent’ from urizen’s side in a way analogous to eve’s division from adam. … los then subdivides into a female form (enitharmon)” (10). see also note 19. despite los’s lamentations, urizen remains a formless mass that, divided from the eternals and los, is “unorganiz’d, rent from eternity” (6.8).  nonetheless, the image or sight of an “unorganiz’d” urizen only increases los’s pity. these lamentations eventually heal los himself, although they fail to heal urizen: “los howld in a dismal stupor, / groaning! gnashing! groaning! / till the wrenching apart was healed. / but the wrenching of urizen heal’d not” (7.1-4). such a representational analysis of pity recalls what blake sees as the self-serving, self-projecting forces of a smithian conception of sympathy. in blake’s world, the consequences of sympathy result only in a self-mimetic, solipsistic form of materialization in which the sympathizer “forms” the other subject out of the substance of his own sentiment. as urizen “heal[s] not” and los’s pity is again aroused, sympathy leads to the formation of urizen’s body, a binding of his previously formless senses. such an ending to chapter 3 is not surprising, since blake intends to reveal pity as a self-serving emotion that never succeeds in healing or helping the object of one’s sympathy. not only, therefore, do los’s sympathetic lamentations create division, but they also facilitate the fall of the urizenic world into materiality. chapter 3 concludes with a petrific image of los’s horror at the sight of urizen, a vision that forms the basis of the illustration on plate 7 (illus. 1),for a substantial analysis of the imagery of these plates, see worrall’s “themes and contexts” (32-34; pls. 6 and 7 in copy d, reproduced in worrall). which concludes with the lines “till los rouz’d his fires, affrighted / at the formless unmeasurable death” (7.8-9). 1. the book of urizen copy g (c. 1818), pl. 7. library of congress. image courtesy of the william blake archive. here blake depicts los surrounded by fire and in an enclosed, womb-like posture, with his circular mouth open. in this position, los binds his own body, with his arms overlapped and intertwined in front of his chest. chapter 4 then begins with the formation of urizen’s skeletal structure. fittingly, the image on plate 8 of urizen’s new body (illus. 2) seems to mirror the image of los on plate 7. 2. the book of urizen copy g (c. 1818), pl. 8. library of congress. image courtesy of the william blake archive. blake depicts the bones that los shapes and binds into “nets & gins” (in order to embody urizen) as a skeleton encircled in a fetal position, suggestive of rebirth but also of the womb-like position as a kind of enclosure. even the words on plates 7 and 8 suggest a kind of bondage, with vines (or veins) circling the text of the poem like its own etched “nets & gins.” notably, blake figures los, the eternal prophet, as a craftsman whose creation acts as a mimesis of himself. blake thus critiques the association of creation with imitation,mann and david simpson connect this mimetic process of regeneration and creation to the masturbatory language that abounds in the book of urizen. christopher hobson accounts for blake’s views on masturbation in conjunction with his views on narcissistic/mimetic reproduction as fitting with those of his time. masturbation, hobson argues, is condemned as a form of non-reproductive sexuality, as something that generates nothing, or at least nothing new (39). particularly in relation to the original genesis myth, which highlights god’s desire to create man in his own image. most importantly, when los creates, or forms, urizen’s body, he does so out of an act of pity. thus urizen’s embodiment once again narrates a smithian theory of sympathy as los projects himself onto the object of his pity. urizen becomes a supposedly new conception of thought, which is actually derived from a double (or division) of los’s own self. here, the imagination as a creative faculty serves only to reproduce and mimic but never to create anew. essentially, the formation of urizen’s body becomes a narrative of sensual bondage that critiques eighteenth-century theories of sympathy as they relate to new, philosophical conceptions of reason and its relationship to aesthetics.when i use the term “aesthetic” here, i refer to its eighteenth-century use as a “feeling,” sentiment, or “affect.” see definition 1 in the oed, which associates the aesthetic with “sensuous perception.” the changes that urizen experiences in the binding of his senses can be read as an eighteenth-century triumph of ideas over impressions (or a kantian departure from empiricism)see kant’s account of the sublime in the second book of the first part of the critique of the power of judgment. in which the awakening of reason attempts to make up for the restriction of the senses. urizen’s embodiment indicates the anti-empirical formation of a new world conception of reason in which thought separates from sensory experience. thus blake emphasizes urizen’s “eternal name” as though this original name has been perverted somehow with the changes of “urizen.” in the new world of urizen, reason is now misinterpreted for blake as something connected to pity and the laws of sympathy or affect: and urizen (so his eternal name) his prolific delight obscurd more & more in dark secresy, hiding in surgeing sulphureous fluid his phantasies. the eternal prophet heavd the dark bellows, and turn’d restless the tongs; and the hammer incessant beat; forging chains new & new, numb’ring with links, hours, days & years. (10.11-18) here, urizen struggles against los’s desire to bind and embody him by continually attempting to hide his self, or his “phantasies,” in “sulphureous fluid.” the “sulphureous fluid” implies images both of masturbation and of the amniotic fluid of urizen’s rebirth, but it also emphasizes fluidity as indicative of formlessness. we recall the opening to the book of urizen, when urizen as free-floating sensation is defined by his lack of form. in this stanza we also see the creation of time, which los fashions in the image of a chain. thus temporality, like materiality, for blake indicates a kind of bondage definitive of the earthly, human world. los not only forges temporality by dividing it into the subdivisions of hours, days, and years, thereby associating creation with mimesis or division, but he also “numb’r[s]” the divisions like the links on a chain. blake’s use of the word “numb’ring,” in which he elides the “e,” creates a pun on the act of counting. the forging, or material bondage, of time not only indicates los’s attempt to number and divide, but also points to the numbing (“numb-ring”) of sensory experience. hence, blake reiterates in los’s act of creative division a triumph of ratiocination over sensation, a war in which the logic of time overrides empirical being through a stifling of the senses. plates 11-13 continue to associate “numb-ring,” or measuring, with the numbing of sensory experience. here, time is measured out in the seven ages of “dismal woe” that all arise with the stages of urizen’s literal embodiment. once again, his formation is figured as a binding of sensory perception. perhaps the most significant age of sensory bondage is the third, which illustrates the material creation of urizen’s eyes: his nervous brain shot branches round the branches of his heart on high into two little orbs and fixed in two little caves hiding carefully from the wind, his eyes beheld the deep, and a third age passed over: and a state of dismal woe. (11.11-18) blake’s depiction of the eyes recalls both the opening assertion of visions, in which “the eye sees more than the heart knows,” and a humean account of sympathy. in blake’s description, the branches of the brain strangle and bind the branches of the heart. thus we encounter a blakean critique of hume’s theories of affect and perception. such eyes that “hid[e] carefully from the wind” are modeled after a notion of perception derived from reason’s attempt to perform the work of the heart: hence hume’s conception of affect as an idea that mimics (so as to become) impression. as the senses attempt and yet fail to branch out, or break free, from urizen’s bodily bondage, the formation of ears, eyes, nostrils, a throat and tongue gives rise to new phases “of dismal woe”; thus the senses embodied become eras that indicate the triumph of “your reason” over sensual perception. the association of measurement and “numb-ring” with sensual bondage indicates that urizen’s fall into materiality becomes a fall from sensory perception into an idea-based type of perception, or, more specifically, a fall into judgment. smith chooses to associate judgment, a cognitive discernment of difference,see oed, “judgment,” definition 9b. see also locke’s definition of judgment in an essay concerning human understanding (156). with sympathy, an affection that attempts to establish likeness.see oed, “sympathy,” definitions 1 and 2. blake recognizes an association between measurement and judgment, aligning urizen’s embodiment with a critique of the sympathetic discourse. consequently, he sees urizen’s fall into materiality and los’s fall into sympathy as incidents that create division as opposed to unity. in this case, the senses divide, or become separated from the external world. therefore, los’s sympathy, his attempt to create likeness, divides urizen from his surroundings, forcing him to perceive the world through difference (judgment) as opposed to unity, and thereby inhibiting his true ability to see clearly. judgment and measurement for blake thus become inadequate methods of perception that are linked more to our faculties of “reason” than to our sensory organs. in separating him from the external world, urizen’s embodiment thus “narrow[s]” his “perceptions”: all the myriads of eternity: all the wisdom & joy of life: roll like a sea around him, except what his little orbs of sight by degrees unfold. (13.28-32) again, blake describes urizen’s eyes as little sensory windows into the world from which he is isolated, confined, and bounded by his corporeal prison. in a world dictated and created by sympathy, sight still remains necessary, particularly as a faculty that triggers sympathetic reactions. urizen’s “narrow[ed] perceptions” also invoke a humean conception of perception, divided into impressions and ideas. if urizen’s eyes are the only part of him that can “by degrees” allow him to perceive (or sensually experience) the world, then he must rely on his faculties of thought, on his “ideas” (which mimic his few past impressions) in order to relate to the world that he has been divided from. thus urizen’s sight, his vision of the world, depends upon a new kind of reason that restricts and narrows sensual perception and experience. urizen’s embodiment, therefore, results from an act of sympathy and in turn makes him susceptible to sympathetic perception. the laws of sympathy thereby produce an inescapable cycle of sympathetic relations as urizen’s fall into materiality breeds further actions and reactions of pity. for example, once los abandons his labors, he becomes bound to urizen as a result of his sympathetic desire for unity: “the eternal prophet & urizen clos’d” (13.40). this state of bondage can be read as a direct result of the psychological process of sympathy. falling prey to an endless cycle of mimetic reproduction, los creates urizen in his likeness (a result of sympathetic projection) and in turn becomes united to urizen in sympathetic bondage. upon experiencing the consequences of his sympathetic desires, los looks back on an undivided eternity, only to feel the sublime image striking “horror into his soul” (13.47). such sublimity, inspiring a desire for unity, thus prompts los to further acts of pity and division: los wept, obscur’d with mourning: his bosom earthquak’d with sighs; he saw urizen deadly black, in his chains bound, & pity began, in anguish dividing & dividing (for pity divides the soul). (13.48-53) once again, blake makes a direct connection between pity and division when he maintains that “pity divides the soul.” we can read this division as stemming from self-mimesis and from the eighteenth-century discourse of sympathy. pity divides the soul by forcing us to reproduce our own past sensations in order to create unity where only division and distinction exist. thus los’s persistent desire to create illusory union prompts him toward self-division and sympathetic bondage (in which he becomes tied to another by conceiving of that other in his own image). here too blake connects acts of sympathy with lamentation and mourning, suggesting that sympathy creates only loss, as opposed to real unity. this sense of mourning permeates the allegorical representation of pity in the creation of enitharmon. not surprisingly, this act of generation and creation once again stems from los’s sympathetic impulses. as in the original genesis myth, the first woman, los’s female counterpart, emerges from his own body.enitharmon can be characterized as an “emanation” of los, a classification that becomes important to the role of gender relations in blake. note here, in particular, alicia ostriker’s definition of “emanation” in “desire gratified and ungratified,” where sexual division between the male and the female becomes a prototype for all forms of self-division (i.e., in relation to the self, the self and the other, and the self and god), as ostriker analyzes blake’s emanations through the paradigm of the jungian anima. blake thus rereads the creation of eve from adam’s rib in his parallel pairing of los and enitharmon as indicative of the philosophical structure of sympathy. in blake’s version of the myth, man in pity forms a mimetic double of himself by dividing his own form:irene tayler, in “the woman scaly,” equates the division of the sexes with other examples of division in blake’s poetry. she proclaims that sensual enjoyment leads to the movement outward from self-enclosure. tayler also examines female “emanations” in blake’s work, describing women as derivatives of men, but also as divisions from the male counterpart. my reading of sympathy in the book of urizen largely depends upon the interplay between the genders in blake’s works as divisions rather than unifications (particularly in regard to los and enitharmon). the globe of life blood trembled, branching out into roots; fibrous, writhing upon the winds: fibres of blood, milk and tears: in pangs, eternity on eternity. at length in tears & cries imbodied, a female form trembling and pale waves before his deathy face. (18.1-8) again, blake portrays embodiment as a binding of the senses, which actively attempt to free themselves by branching outward. nevertheless, the nerves and fibers become trapped beneath an embodied shell. not only does blake make a point of emphasizing the importance of nerves and fibers as sensual organs in terms of their relationship to sympathy and sensibility, but he also defines pity, or enitharmon, as “in tears & cries imbodied.”enitharmon, argues cox, becomes a satire of contemporaneous notions of sympathetic love, especially as it relates to forms of humanitarian pity. blake’s identification of pity with a woman creates a “parody” of the eighteenth-century belief that women possess “a greater sensibility than men” (54) (hence the association of nerves, or nervous disorders in the poem—often attributed to female ailments and tempers—with sympathetic sensibility). moreover, los here might be characterized as the sentimental lover, or the man of feeling. thus pity becomes an expression not of fellow-feeling but rather of lamentation and loss.nelson hilton analyzes the lamentation imagery in blake, in particular his evocations of dew and tears, and states that enitharmon’s false tears in the four zoas indicate a type of weeping indicative of false mourning. hilton attributes the falseness of these tears to blake’s attack on the self-dramatization of sentimentality, or more specifically on the eighteenth-century preoccupation with melancholy. blake sees this focus on sentiment and melancholia, hilton argues, as inhibiting “the true light of the imagination” and a truer, more ideal version of sympathy (49). pity embodied appears as a horrific image, a sight that produces only further sentiments and an endless cycle of sympathy. once enitharmon receives her allegorical name from the eternals, who flee from her in terror, los pities his creation, embracing her. as the quintessential sympathetic spectator, los ironically comes to pity pity itself: all eternity shudderd at sight of the first female now separate, pale as a cloud of snow waving before the face of los. wonder, awe, fear, astonishment, petrify the eternal myriads; at the first female form now separate. they call’d her pity, and fled. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . but los saw the female & pitied. he embrac’d her, she wept, she refus’d; in perverse and cruel delight she fled from his arms, yet he followd. eternity shudder’d when they saw man begetting his likeness on his own divided image. (18.9-15, 19.1; 19.10-16) notably, it is the vision of enitharmon that both defines her as, and gives rise to, pity. once again, blake connects sympathy with sight. enitharmon’s allegorical naming mirrors the initial act of naming in the poem with the figure of urizen. the eternals, who are revealed as the namers of urizen, are likewise the namers of enitharmon. in the case of urizen before his fall, his original naming reveals his essential nature. likewise, enitharmon’s essential nature, as she who stems from and inspires pity, is reflected by her eternal name. enitharmon’s petrifying image both hinges upon the association between sympathy and sight and recalls the image of sin in milton’s paradise lost.a number of critics have drawn parallels between blake’s urizen and milton’s paradise lost. susan matthews, in blake, sexuality, and bourgeois politeness, connects stories of rape in blake’s work to incest (ch. 3, 56-81), considering the relationship among satan, sin, and death in paradise lost (although she does not directly make a connection here to urizen) (79-80). see also worrall’s analysis of urizen (43). los’s attempt to “beget his likeness / on his own divided image” not only becomes a sexual allegory for the act of sympathy but also becomes associated with incest. the incestuous relationship between milton’s satan and sin signifies a narcissistic form of reproduction, for sin spawns from satan’s own self. in springing from satan’s head, sin emerges as a mimetic double of satan derived from what could be read as satan’s mental faculties, his psychological projections or reifications.  thus blake views the sexual relationship between enitharmon and los as something perverse in its underlying reliance on self-mimesis as incest. moreover, the metaphor of incest for their relationship further highlights the perversity of sympathy itself, since both los’s creation of and desire for enitharmon arise in the poem as part of a narrative representation of his own pity. out of los and enitharmon’s sexual relations comes the birth of orc. once again, we see a parallel to paradise lost, with the implications of further incest when the triangular relationship among los, enitharmon, and orc comes to mirror that of satan, sin, and death. many critics have argued that the chain that binds los in plate 21 (illus. 3) represents the bondage of jealousy, and thus the illustration indicates a secondary incestuous relationship between orc and enitharmon.cox reads pl. 21, a kind of family portrait in which orc clings to his mother, as suggestive of incest (155). notably, he argues, orc hangs upon his mother’s breasts and genitals; thus he reads los’s chain as a chain of jealousy. 3. the book of urizen copy g (c. 1818), pl. 21. library of congress. image courtesy of the william blake archive. moreover, orc’s birth parallels both the horrific womb imagery of urizen’s embodiment and that of sin, whose snake-like entrails become food for her own progeny. orc as the child of pity undergoes a birth similar to his mother’s when his image produces a horrific response on the part of the eternals, who then name him the “human shadow.” again, los responds by pitying his child and by bathing him in “springs of sorrow,” an image of pity as a perverse baptism into a corrupt world centered upon sympathetic relations, as orc grows “fed with milk of enitharmon [pity]” (20.7). moreover, orc’s eternal name recalls his association with urizen, the original “shadow” in the poem. the persistent image of the shadow in the book of urizen serves as a symbol of imitation for which the object of sympathy acts as a mimesis of the sympathizer’s self. furthermore, the human shadow becomes connected to images of lamentation and wandering in urizen when it foreshadows urizen’s pilgrimage of sympathetic wandering that concludes the poem. as urizen is incorporated into a world of his own imaginative making, he thus becomes bound down to the human world and separate from eternity in falling prey to the sights and seductions of sympathetic bondage.cox likens urizen’s pity to that of los in that they both highlight a certain inefficacy of pity: “pity fails to redeem situations which are regarded as pitiable” (157). in part this has to do, as i have stated above, with pity’s reliance on narcissism and mimesis. hence, his exile transforms into a sympathetic pilgrimage in which he laments creation at the expense of individual and sensual freedom: cold he wander’d on high, over their cities  in weeping & pain & woe!  and where-ever he wanderd in sorrows  upon the aged heavens  a cold shadow follow’d behind him  like a spider’s web, moist, cold, & dim, drawing out from his sorrowing soul the dungeon-like heaven, dividing  where ever the footsteps of urizen  walk’d over the cities in sorrow.  till a web dark & cold, throughout all  the tormented element, stretch’d  from the sorrows of urizen’s soul.  and the web is a female in embrio.  none could break the web, no wings of fire,  so twisted the cords, & so knotted  the meshes: twisted like to the human brain.  and all calld it, the net of religion. (25.5-22) here the image of the wanderer, as in the typical romantic prototype, connotes mourning and lamentation.hilton discusses acts of wandering as characteristic of romantic melancholy in his analysis of visions of the daughters of albion. lamentation, “almost by definition,” he suggests, is a state of purposelessness that leads to wandering (29). we can, of course, read urizen’s inclination to wander as psychological as well as literal. thus his exile serves as an attempt to repair his self-loss according to a freudian conception of mourning.hilton relates blakean lamentation to freud’s “mourning and melancholia”: “the melancholic mourns narcissistically for him or herself, for the passing of some earlier fixation is seen as a death or loss of the precious self: the intellectualized version of this self-indulgence hides itself as ‘contemplation,’ and thought becomes the precipitation of mourning” (50). the “cold shadow” points to a double of urizen’s self, his lost essence. returning to a humean model of sympathy and subjectivity, we might read the shadow as an outward projection of urizen’s identity, which both doubles and divides him through sympathetic sentiment. urizen’s pity, the cold shadow that divides his soul, becomes an infectious web that branches out like sympathetic fibers in an attempt to unite affectively to the objects of urizen’s perception, an attempt that of course results only in further division, for the “dungeon-like heaven” is divided. blake, therefore, figures urizen’s shadow of sympathy as an identificatory loss that breeds further acts of mourning and lamentation, for it jeopardizes the selfhood of both urizen (as sympathizer) and the objects of his pity. the hopeful icon of sympathy, the “heaven” in this new world of materiality, resembles more a “dungeon” than an edenic paradise. moreover, blake highlights the mimetic properties of sympathy when he depicts this new world as an extension of urizen’s “sorrowing soul.” the web, described as “female in embrio,” not only reiterates the notion of materiality and sympathetic bondage as womb-like (a perverse conception of creation that does not generate so much as it imprisons), but also points to the woman “pity,” enitharmon’s eternal name, as the seed of this perverse cycle of sympathetic bondage. blake likens the “twisted … cords” and knots to symbols of binding that, like the image of corporeal veins, encircle the brain, a new-world icon of rationality and “your reason” that replaces the former one of the formless senses. for blake, this new world’s revised conception of reason hinges upon a philosophical and religious discourse of sensual and sympathetic bondage. hence, he reveals the true nature of religion by naming urizen’s cold, shadowy web the “net of religion.”worrall states that blake’s “net of religion” is a “symbol of feminized sensibility” and an “effect of [the] ‘shrinking’ senses” (22). for more on the topic of religion in urizen, see worrall’s “themes and contexts” section (19-27) and his introduction (9, 11, 12). the book of urizen closes, both literally and figuratively, with another image of circularity and womb-like bondage, as “the salt ocean roll[s] englob’d” (28.23). blake concludes the poem by reiterating that in this new world of sympathetic bondage, urizen’s “net” of pity stifles and binds the senses, the most important of which is still sight: and their thirty cities divided  in form of a human heart  no more could they rise at will  in the infinite void, but bound down  to earth by their narrowing perceptions,  they lived a period of years  then left a noisom body  to the jaws of devouring darkness. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . the remaining sons of urizen beheld their brethren shrink together  beneath the net of urizen.  perswasion was in vain;  for the ears of the inhabitants  were wither’d & deafen’d & cold.  and their eyes could not discern  their brethren of other cities. (25.43-47, 28.1-3; 28.11-18) here blake emphasizes the bleak relationship of vision to a world dependent upon sympathy. whenever sight inspires feelings of pity, it leads only to sympathetic or sensual bondage and thus to blindness. humanity in its corporeal form becomes “bound down / to earth by [its] narrowing perceptions.” thus the “englob’d” earth resembles the prison of the human body, and the “narrow perceptions” recall blake’s former image of eyes as “little orbs / of sight” that can perceive only “by degrees.” sympathy not only divides, as opposed to uniting, humanity, but under the guise of “a human heart,” it blinds the human race. we attempt to see, unite, and relate to the objects of our pity, argues blake, but are bound to an “idea” so remote from our actual selves that sympathy, by valuing thought over “impression” and by robbing impression of its immediacy through mimesis, deprives us of sensual experience and, most importantly, of visionary perception. the mimetic concept of the imagination that stems from a smithian or humean discourse on sympathy becomes, for blake, a way of obscuring our sight so that our “eyes [cannot] discern / [our own] brethren.” thus sympathy, the creator and perpetuator of the urizenic landscape, which illustrates a world that has fallen into material bondage, divides us from our surroundings through a mask of unity and fellow-feeling. moreover, pity perverts our vision, our ability to perceive and thus create, for the sympathetic eye is one that mimics without seeing or creating anew. thus the freedom of the self, the senses, and the imagination all fall with the fall of urizen, giving rise to the tragedy of a perverse new order that, for blake, centers around the laws of sympathy.  the “human heart” that blinds and binds humanity becomes an ironic symbol of perverse sympathy that also recalls the sensual bondage of the circulatory system and brain, as seen in urizen’s embodiment. hence, blake’s dark vision of the enlightenment emerges from a concept of blindness that links back to visions. in the world of urizen, sympathy is an agent of blindness, a corrupt sentiment that narrows our perceptions. thus the critique of sympathy in blake’s anti-genesis myth emphasizes his desire to reawaken our sight, to cleanse “the doors of [our] perception”in the marriage of heaven and hell, blake describes his method of printing as a way of “illuminating” the aesthetic object by revealing its inner essence: “the ancient tradition that the world will be consumed in fire at the end of six thousand years is true, as i have heard from hell. … this will come to pass by an improvement of sensual enjoyment. but first the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul is to be expunged; this i shall do, by printing in the infernal method, by corrosives, which in hell are salutary and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid. if the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite” (marriage 14). hence, blake’s method of printing becomes a way of cleansing our eyes, or “doors of perception.” in this manner, it elevates creation over a mimetic form of reproduction and meanwhile combats blindness while giving rise to individual and sensual freedom. through a method of illumination, or illuminated printing, reminding us all the while of blake’s cautionary motto that “the eye sees more than the heart knows.” bibliography bindman, david. william blake: his art and times. new haven: yale center for british art, 1982. ---, ed. william blake. the complete illuminated books. new york: thames and hudson, 2000. bloom, harold. blake’s apocalypse. garden city, ny: doubleday, 1963. chandler, james. “blake and the syntax of sentiment: an essay on ‘blaking’ understanding.” blake, nation and empire. ed. steve clark and david worrall. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, 2006. 102-18. connolly, tristanne j. william blake and the body. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, 2002. cox, stephen. love and logic: the evolution of blake’s thought. ann arbor: university of michigan press, 1992. frye, northrop. fearful symmetry: a study of william blake. princeton: princeton university press, 1947. hagstrum, jean h. the romantic body: love and sexuality in keats, wordsworth, and blake. knoxville: university of tennessee press, 1985. hilton, nelson. literal imagination: blake’s vision of words. berkeley: university of california press, 1983. hobson, christopher. blake and homosexuality. new york: palgrave, 2000. hume, david. a treatise of human nature. ed. david fate norton and mary j. norton. oxford: oxford university press, 2000. johnson, mary lynn, and john e. grant, eds. blake’s poetry and designs. new york: w. w. norton, 1979. kant, immanuel. critique of the power of judgment. ed. paul guyer. trans. paul guyer and eric matthews. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2000. locke, john. an essay concerning human understanding. ed. peter h. nidditch. oxford: oxford university press, 1975. mann, paul. “the book of urizen and the horizon of the book.” unnam’d forms: blake and textuality. ed. nelson hilton and thomas a. vogler. berkeley: university of california press, 1986. 49-68. matthews, susan. blake, sexuality, and bourgeois politeness. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2011. ostriker, alicia. “desire gratified and ungratified: william blake and sexuality [from blake 16.3 (winter 1982-83)].” critical essays on william blake. ed. hazard adams. boston: g. k. hall, 1991. 90-110. otto, peter. constructive vision and visionary deconstruction. oxford: clarendon press, 1991. oxford english dictionary. 2nd ed. 20 vols. oxford: clarendon press, 1989. paley, morton d. “spectre and emanation [from the continuing city: william blake’s jerusalem (1983)].” critical essays on william blake. ed. hazard adams. boston: g. k. hall, 1991. 150-63. rose, edward j. “the meaning of los.” blake 1.3 (dec. 1967): 10-11. simpson, david. “reading blake and derrida—our caesars neither praised nor buried.” unnam’d forms: blake and textuality. ed. nelson hilton and thomas a. vogler. berkeley: university of california press, 1986. 11-25. smith, adam. the theory of moral sentiments. ed. knud haakonssen. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2002. tayler, irene. “the woman scaly [from bulletin of the midwest modern language association (spring 1973)].” johnson and grant 539-53. viscomi, joseph. “illuminated printing [from the cambridge companion to william blake, ed. morris eaves (2003)].” william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert essick, and joseph viscomi. <http://www.blakearchive.org>. warner, janet. blake and the language of art. kingston: mcgill-queen’s university press, 1984. worrall, david, ed. william blake. the urizen books. princeton: princeton university press/william blake trust, 1995. blake and exhibitions, 2018 blake and exhibitions, 2018 by luisa calè luisa calè (l.cale@bbk.ac.uk), birkbeck, university of london, works on practices of reading, viewing, and collecting in the romantic period. her publications include fuseli’s milton gallery: “turning readers into spectators”; co-edited volumes on dante on view: the reception of dante in the visual and performing arts and illustrations, optics and objects in nineteenth-century literary and visual cultures; and special issues on “the disorder of things” (eighteenth-century studies, 2011), “the nineteenth-century digital archive” (19: interdisciplinary studies in the long nineteenth century, 2015), and “literature and sculpture at the fin de siècle” (word and image, 2018). her current project, entitled the book unbound, explores practices of collecting and dismantling the book, with chapters on walpole, blake, and dickens. she is also the exhibitions editor for blake. in 2018 a retrospective at petworth reconsidered blake’s corpus, focusing on how the experience of the sea and the landscapes of the south downs affected his work, from the landscapes of the early 1800s to late works such as the virgil woodcuts and dante drawings. the works on display also offered an opportunity to reflect on his relationships with key patrons, from william hayley to thomas butts and george o’brien wyndham, third earl of egremont. in an exhibition held by the dom museum, which hosts the collection of vienna’s cathedral, plates from blake’s book of urizen were displayed alongside illuminated manuscripts and a book sculpture that questioned the primacy of the word. while the dom museum placed blake within medieval, renaissance, and contemporary visual cultures of the book, illuminating poetry: pre-raphaelite and beyond at the keats-shelley house in rome focused on the nineteenth-century legacy of the illuminated book. the desire to reinvent the middle ages in different moments of technological innovation shaped blake’s dialogue with the pre-raphaelites and contemporary interpretations of books and stained-glass windows in visions and visionaries at the guildhall art gallery in london. in the exhibition kiss and tell: rodin and suffolk sculpture at christchurch mansion in ipswich, experiments in the representation of bodies in space included the serpentine groupings of whirling souls captured in blake’s line engraving “the circle of the lustful” from dante’s commedia, which was displayed alongside drawings and sculptures from the pre-raphaelites to the twentieth century, selected to complement auguste rodin’s sculptural group the kiss. the end of the year also saw blake’s association with the fiftieth anniversary of the moon landing in the moon: from inner worlds to outer space at the louisiana museum of modern art in denmark, which showed a magnified reproduction of his emblematic etching “i want! i want!” as part of an iconography of the moon from the incas to galileo’s map, from the moon race to space colonization. 7 october 2017–23 august 2018 dom museum, vienna bilder der sprache—sprache der bilder exhibition catalogue: bilder der sprache und sprache der bilder/images in language and the language of images. ed. johanna schwanberg, with texts by schwanberg, nina binder, and katja brandes and translations by wolfgang astelbauer and georg bauer. vienna: dom museum, 2017. in german and english. this exhibition inaugurated the renovated dom museum in vienna, a historic church museum that houses the cathedral’s treasures. its collection includes sacred objects, altars, liturgical manuscripts, and books, ranging from the gothic period to art deco, as well as the otto mauer art collection (expressionists, secessionists, and austrian and international avant-garde artists). two plates from blake’s the first book of urizen, on loan from the albertina in vienna, were displayed in the initial section of the exhibition, which was dedicated to open books and included micha ullman’s book of sand. micha ullman, sandbuch iii (2001). photo by lena deinhardstein. image courtesy of the dom museum, vienna. within its empty opening, this book sculpture made of pressed sand posed the question, “what was in the beginning, before words, before pictures[?]” (cat. p. 33). this focus on the book without words also shaped the selection of scenes from urizen: blake’s title page represents urizen in a mosaic scene of writing in which “the slabs are still empty,” while plate 5 hosts “a cosmic book containing neither pages nor signs, with swirling flames and shadows” (cat. p. 63). while the book within the book featured in plate 5 resists deciphering, the image occupies the position of a title vignette above text arranged in two columns, suggesting the page layout of a bible. the juxtaposition of the book held open with the text etched below articulates an allegory of the bible and its commentary, the visual and the verbal. blake’s work connected the book sculpture’s reflection on the medium without the message with the tradition of the illuminated manuscript. a pictorial initial in the klosterneuburg evangeliary (c. 1410) illuminated “the tension between handwriting and pictorial motif” (cat. p. 38), while pages from the klosterneuburg library’s early sixteenth-century illuminated manuscript of the antichrist and anton koberger’s biblia germanica (nürnberg, 1483) showed the integration of text and image in the layout of illuminated manuscripts. taken together, these works test the possibilities of the book as a medium for the dialectic of word and image. the first book of urizen, copy j, plate 1, title page (composed and printed 1794). albertina, vienna, dgnf9346/1. the first book of urizen, copy j, plate 5 (composed and printed 1794). albertina, vienna, dgnf9346/5. 13 january–25 march 2018 petworth house (national trust) william blake in sussex: visions of albion building on the blake collection at petworth, this exhibition explored the impact of blake’s sussex period on his development as an artist, tracing his reimagining of sea, light, and landscape in later works to his experience of maritime and rural scenes during his felpham period.for a review of this exhibition with more images, see luisa calè, blake 52.2 (fall 2018). © scott ramsey. image courtesy of petworth house, national trust. exhibition catalogue: william blake in sussex: visions of albion. ed. andrew loukes, with essays by martin butlin, mark crosby, naomi billingsley, loukes, and hayley flynn. london: paul holberton publishing, 2018. works in the list below are grouped by theme, then by order of display: thomas phillips, william blake (1807). national portrait gallery, london, npg 212. many admirable things (projects for hayley and related works) edmund spenser (c. 1800–03). butlin #343.9. manchester city galleries, 1885.5. john milton (c. 1800–03). butlin #343.11. manchester city galleries, 1885.3. winter (c. 1800–03).butlin #808, followed by the tate, dates the work c. 1820–25; in his essay in the exhibition catalogue, butlin redates it to the felpham period (p. 17 and note 20). butlin #808. tate britain, london, t02387. landscape near felpham (c. 1800). butlin #368. tate britain, london, a00041. henry howard, william hayley (c. 1800). national portrait gallery, london, npg 662. william hayley, little tom the sailor (1800). british museum, london, prints and drawings 1862,0712.296. william cowper (c. 1801–04). butlin #354. ashmolean museum, university of oxford, wa1963.89.8. the shipwreck, after romney (1804), preparatory drawing for the engraving for hayley’s life of george romney. butlin #350. british museum, london, prints and drawings 1936,0613.1. william hayley, an essay on sculpture (1800), “the death of demosthenes.” lord egremont. william hayley, designs to a series of ballads (1802), tailpiece to the preface (view of chichester). bodleian library, university of oxford, douce b 818. william hayley, ballads (1805), “the eagle.” west sussex record office, west sussex county council, chichester, crookshank 327. william hayley, life … of william cowper (1803–04), “the weather house.” lord egremont. william hayley, the triumphs of temper (1803), “canto v. verse 43.” west sussex county council library service, 821hayley. on the stocks (biblical watercolors) the three maries at the sepulchre (1800–03). butlin #503. fitzwilliam museum, university of cambridge, pd.31-1949. the sacrifice of jephthah’s daughter (1803). butlin #452. british museum, london, prints and drawings 1949,1112.3. the angel of the divine presence clothing adam and eve with coats of skins (1803). butlin #436. fitzwilliam museum, university of cambridge, pd.29-1949. ruth the dutiful daughter-in-law (1803). butlin #456. southampton city art gallery. under a fortunate star (the petworth blakes in context) robert blair, the grave (1808), title page. lord egremont. the resurrection of the dead (1806), alternative design for the title page to robert blair’s the grave. butlin #613. british museum, london, prints and drawings 1856,0712.208. blake’s letter of 18 january 1808 to ozias humphry describing his vision of the last judgment watercolor.on the three versions of this letter, see robert n. essick, “blake in the marketplace, 2015,” blake 49.4 (spring 2016), caption to illus. 8. lord egremont. the vision of the last judgment (1808). butlin #642. petworth house (national trust), nt 486270. the fall of man (1807). butlin #641. victoria and albert museum, london, p.29-1953. illustrations of the book of job (1826), “job and his family.” lord egremont. illustrations of the book of job (1826), “job’s sons and daughters overwhelmed by satan.” lord egremont. two letters of 1829 from catherine blake to the third earl of egremont regarding the characters in spenser’s “faerie queene.” lord egremont. “chaucers canterbury pilgrims,” probably third state (c. 1810–20). lord egremont. the characters in spenser’s “faerie queene” (c. 1825). butlin #811. petworth house (national trust), nt 486263. satan arousing the rebel angels (1808). butlin #536.1. victoria and albert museum, london, fa.697. satan calling up his legions (c. 1800–05). butlin #662. petworth house (national trust), nt 486264. arrows of desire (sussex, milton, and jerusalem) milton, copy a, plate 29 (composed c. 1804–11, printed c. 1811). british museum, london, prints and drawings 1859,0625.29. milton, copy a, plate 2, preface (composed c. 1804–11, printed c. 1811). british museum, london, prints and drawings 1859,0625.2. milton, copy a, plate 36 (composed c. 1804–11, printed c. 1811). british museum, london, prints and drawings 1859,0625.36. “vala, hyle, and skofeld,” separate impression of jerusalem plate 51 (composed 1804–c. 1820). fitzwilliam museum, university of cambridge, p.709-1985. jerusalem, copy a, plate 26 (composed 1804–c. 1820, printed c. 1820). british museum, london, prints and drawings 1847,0318.93.26. jerusalem, copy a, plate 37 [bentley numbering] (composed 1804–c. 1820, printed c. 1820). british museum, london, prints and drawings 1847,0318.93.33. versus blake (the artist on trial) the information and complaint of john scolfield (1803). west sussex record office, west sussex county council, chichester, qr/w643/78. true bill “john scholfield/john cock/sworn in court” (1803). west sussex record office, west sussex county council, chichester, qr/w643/63. charge sheet for assault (1803). west sussex record office, west sussex county council, chichester, qr/w643/64. on the banks of the ocean (later pastoral and marine subjects) robert john thornton, the pastorals of virgil (1821), seventeen wood engravings (printed 1977). tate britain, london, t02115-31. the dove brooding over the face of the waters (c. 1805–10). butlin #604. british museum, london, prints and drawings 1936,0613.3. the spirit of god moved upon the face of the waters (c. 1820–25?). butlin #690 recto. abbot hall art gallery, kendal. the angel marking dante with the sevenfold “p” (1824–27). butlin #812.79. royal cornwall museum, truro. the sea of time and space (1821). butlin #803. arlington court (national trust), nt 985730. 29 january–28 april 2018 keats-shelley house, rome illuminating poetry: pre-raphaelite and beyond this exhibition, curated by giuseppe albano and dinah roe, situated blake’s “spring” within a medieval aesthetic of bookmaking in the long nineteenth century, supplementing the collection of the keats-shelley house with loans from the american academy in rome, the fitzwilliam museum, the national library of scotland, and private collections. songs of innocence, copy r, plate 22, “spring” (composed 1789, printed c. 1802). fitzwilliam museum, university of cambridge, p.673-1985. 13 september 2018–20 january 2019 louisiana museum of modern art, humlebæk, denmark månen—fra den indre verden til det ydre rum/the moon—from inner worlds to outer space to celebrate the upcoming fiftieth anniversary of the first moon landing, this exhibition displayed a magnified reproduction of blake’s etching “i want! i want!,” featuring a figure climbing a ladder connecting the earth to the moon, among works documenting the prehistory of moon travel. as curator marie laurberg argues, “we traveled there imaginatively long before we were physically able to.”quoted by andrew dickson in “the meaning of the moon, from the incas to the space race,” new york times 12 september 2018. also on display were works by joseph wright of derby and caspar david friedrich. the exhibition reconstructed the moon’s hold on our imagination from the incas to the moon race, from early modern mapping to nasa imaging, and from surrealism to artists who held residencies at nasa (robert rauschenberg, laurie anderson). also on show were newly commissioned works by contemporary artists. for children: the gates of paradise, plate 11 [bentley numbering], “i want! i want!” (composed 1793). magnified photo reproduction from an unidentified copy. 24 november 2018–28 april 2019 christchurch mansion, ipswich kiss and tell: rodin and suffolk sculpture blake’s line engraving of the circle of the lustful from dante’s commedia was part of a group of loans from the tate and east anglia collections for an exhibition built around auguste rodin’s sculptural group the kiss, alongside sculptures and life drawings by thomas woolner, ellen mary rope, henry moore, maggi hambling, and elisabeth frink. photo by megan wilson. image courtesy of ipswich borough council. “the circle of the lustful: francesca da rimini,” line engraving (composed 1826–27, printed 1968 [for lessing j. rosenwald]). tate britain, london, t01950. 11 december 2018–30 april 2019 guildhall art gallery, london visions and visionaries: visions and imaginings in blake, burne-jones, allen ginsberg, john latham, and other masters exhibition catalogue: visions and visionaries: visions and imaginings in blake, burne-jones, allen ginsberg, john latham and other masters. ed. orietta benocci adam, luke farey, francesco gonzales, and marcello pecchioli, with a preface by the sir denis mahon charitable trust, a foreword by elizabeth scott, essays by gonzales, gareth bell-jones, farey, pecchioli, saskia rubin, and michelle cioccoloni, and translations by gonzales, leonardo passeri, and alessandra totta. [london]: sir denis mahon charitable trust, 2018. this small exhibition responded to the pre-raphaelite collection of the guildhall by juxtaposing blake with nineteenth-century and contemporary visionary artists whose visions can be associated with what marcello pecchioli terms “techno medioevo—age of future reloaded.” pecchioli’s research agenda has been articulated through a series of avant-garde exhibitions that explore parallels between our “shiny, electronic super-modernity” and the “technological, artistic, epistemological, cosmological, multimedia” middle ages (cat. p. 180). in the guildhall display, blake’s illustrations to gray’s medievalizing poems hung next to edward burne-jones’s st. dorothy and st. agnes in the lower section of the exhibition, entitled “the temple room.” photos of the guildhall exhibition by luisa calè. drawn after stained-glass cartoons for lights in the east window at all saints’ church, cambridge (cat. pp. 124, 134-35), burne-jones’s designs linked the lower part of the room to “the mezzanine,” which featured grayson perry’s watercolor and collage at woodbury park and john latham’s screen print on metallic foil and glass/book sculptures. the mezzanine also hosted works in the third section of the exhibition, “age of future”: massimo trenti’s time capsule, star-inspired enamel works by leonardo passeri, and pecchioli’s luminescent stained-glass window, alien priest. while the works by blake and the pre-raphaelites looked back to the middle ages, in the mezzanine medieval inspiration propelled art forward into the future. the blake items on display were from: william blake’s water-colour designs for the poems of thomas gray (clairvaux: trianon press for the william blake trust, 1972). collotype and hand-stenciling on wove paper with separately printed text on laid paper. leaves 42 x 32.6 cm. “the bard,” page bearing manuscript list of titles plus 13 pages. butlin #335.52-65. “the fatal sisters,” page bearing manuscript list of titles plus 10 pages. butlin #335.66-76. remembrance: g. e. bentley, jr. gerald eades bentley, jr. 23 august 1930–31 august 2017 by karen mulhallen karen mulhallen (karenmulhallen@rogers.com) is professor emeritus, ryerson university. he who would do good to another, must do it in minute particulars jerusalem pl. 55 i had been thinking of jerrydonations in his memory may be made to the victoria university library, where jerry’s blake collection lives on. <http://​my.​alumni.​utoronto.​ca/​gebentley> all thursday after i received an e-mail from his daughters, sarah and julia, on wednesday afternoon, 30 august, telling me he had taken a turn for the worse and that sarah was flying to toronto and julia had canceled her trip to take her daughter, anjali, to vancouver to begin university at ubc. i checked my e-mail constantly that day and was unable to focus. friday at noon came the news of his death. death by e-mail. i had written and spoken to jerry occasionally over the brief summer while he was at the family cottage in dutch boys landing, mears, michigan, and i had phoned as i always did to wish him an early happy birthday. it was then that i learned of his fall and that he was in hospital waiting to come back to hospital in toronto, where he could begin rehabilitation. i met the irresistible force who was jerry bentley, a.k.a. geb, in the fall of 1973, when i audited his graduate course in eighteenth-century book illustration. my own phd thesis was well under way, i had a wonderful and supportive advisor, poet and bibliographer douglas lochhead, and i was embarked on a journey through early twentieth-century private presses. i had already learned how to set type, had worked on wooden presses, and had published some of my printing, but i was teaching fulltime, and coming to grips with my thesis was difficult. i told myself what i needed was an immersion in an area related to my academic subject, and although i was a modernist i thought the eighteenth century was not so very far away. i quickly learned that passive observers were not the order of the day in geb’s graduate seminar, and after a month he pointed a finger at me and said, “ms. mulhallen, as your contribution for this experience you will make a presentation in three weeks on blake’s night thoughts.” i had no idea what he meant by night thoughts—my only knowledge of blake’s illustrations was for the songs of innocence and of experience, and the night thoughts drawings had not been published, except as microfilm and slides. over the next weeks, between my fulltime lecturing downtown and my work as an editor on two magazines, i made my way to the thomas fisher rare book library with a notebook in hand and i looked at 537 slides of blake’s night thoughts watercolors. i was pretty unhappy when i discovered the scale of the assignment, which of course made me determined to succeed. when the day for my presentation arrived, the seminar was transferred to the fisher rare book library and the deed was done. afterwards geb invited me back to his office and asked me about my thesis. he suggested i ought to change my topic. i was terrified and spoke both to my advisor and to another of my graduate professors, the great bloomsbury scholar s. p. “pat” rosenbaum. neither of them hesitated—“do it,” each said. “bentley is the world’s greatest blake scholar and blake is one of the english language’s greatest poets. just do it.” later i would learn what was meant by “bentley is the world’s greatest blake scholar,” a scholar who almost singlehandedly shifted the focus of blake criticism from formalism and symbolism to the minute particulars of blake’s life and work, to the metals and papers of his books, and to the historical context in which he developed his art. but my learning about the extent of geb’s work—his ongoing passion—and his curiosity and generosity only occurred as i worked on my own blake project. one of the many extraordinary aspects of geb was his physical appearance. there was no other english professor at the university of toronto at that time who in any way resembled him. he wore a cape and had a shirt with lace cuffs. he was tall and handsome with a regal bearing and a clipped beard, and by the time i met him his hair was a yellowish white, although i think when he was a very young man it had a reddish hue. one of his colleagues said geb looked like blake’s job. another compared him to general custer, yet another to colonel sanders. i think in general his appearance inspired awe. even in the last few years he was always meticulous in his dress. at one of his monthly teas recently he was dressed in an impeccable pink dress shirt, which showed admirably against his white hair and beard. late one 2017 winter afternoon i visited him and he greeted me at his door dressed in a chinese scholar’s robe. i had no idea why geb chose me forty-four years ago for the night thoughts task, as i had no eighteenth-century courses and i would have to make them up for my doctorate, as well as conjure a new proposal and travel the world to do the thesis. and as geb himself said, “the night thoughts is a sinkhole.” nonetheless, i said yes, frightened as i was, and in the summer of 1974 i went to england to see blake’s actual night thoughts drawings. when i returned from the british museum department of prints and drawings that summer, geb in effect, but cunningly, set a thesis chapter timetable for me. and he did it by bribing me. i was lecturing fulltime, so only evenings and weekends were possible for writing. i became a ghost in my university office, the staff refrigerator held my supper, and i went home, my own private hotel, only to sleep. the bribes were transparent. for example, geb would say, “if you finish that section by next friday, i will give you such and such a book.” since i had no blake books, and like all scholars was book amorous, if not book omnivorous, i would succumb. i would write through the night, hang a bag of paper on the bentleys’ front doorknob, and paddle down to my university. at 5 or 6 p.m. i would go back to the bentleys’ to pick up my chapter. my fellow graduate students often waited weeks on end for their advisors’ replies, but mine were ready the same day. beth would often say to me, “you haven’t eaten, come in and eat before you leave.” and so the relationship, the friendship, grew. i was no longer frightened—instead, i was caught up in the irresistible bentley force. within the year, i was ready to submit. jerry and beth were in india, and i was on my own with the thesis committee. some revisions were demanded. there was some consternation over my thesis length, the size of three toronto telephone books, and it was suggested by more than one committee member that this was typical of bentley. but geb was one of the ever-prolifics (jerusalem pl. 73) of blake’s world. he was always at work on a new book or even two, finishing many articles, compiling an annual checklist of everything published on blake, conducting meetings and exchanges by e-mail and snail mail and telephone with scholars throughout the world. constant productivity, continuous curiosity, endless generosity. after that first summer of studying blake in england, my travels in blake often overlapped with the bentleys’, for jerry and beth traveled the world together with blake by their side. they lived in north africa, in france and in england, and in india. they went annually to the huntington library and art gallery in california. they made friends worldwide, and those friendships have been maintained over the decades. life for jerry and beth was a great adventure, and they were generous in taking me along. one year i gave a paper in california at the american society for eighteenth-century studies. geb no longer gave papers, but he generously prepared one so he could present with me in my session. then he and beth and i ate dinner on the docked queen mary. i spent a month with jerry and beth when they were living in australia. i went to a party that his graduate students at the military college in canberra threw for them, but we also explored southeastern australia together. we visited a sheep ranch, rode horses, searched for books in the outback, watched kangaroos and anteaters, and went to the sydney opera house. as geb’s eightieth birthday approached, i began to muse on the festschrift edited by alexander gourlay, prophetic character: essays on william blake in honor of john e. grant (locust hill, 2002). why not a festschrift for geb, i thought? surely he, who has been so dedicated to enabling the work of others, to building an ideal community of scholars, should be celebrated? the time was short, but in the spring of 2009 i asked geb whom he considered the most promising scholars writing on blake. i went home and wrote to each of them immediately, and simultaneously sent in a proposal to the university of toronto press. i began to plan a symposium and, in collaboration with robert brandeis, then head of the victoria college libraries, a blake exhibition accompanied by a catalogue. i had to raise approximately $40,000 to finance the books’ pictures and other costs associated with the events, but three of my own graduate students signed on to help, and every scholar to whom i wrote also signed on, promising an essay and often helping with the editing of the volume. the book and the events were to be secret gifts, and i managed to keep it all from geb until the book was listed in the university of toronto press catalogue. i remember the afternoon in december 2009 and the soft winter light in jerry and beth’s living room. i had come over for a late afternoon drink, my little dog, matilda, had climbed up on beth’s lap from the footrest on her wheelchair, and jerry was talking to me about some very interesting finds in his annual compilation of blake studies for blake. “here’s a book you’ve missed,” i said, as i showed them the listing for blake in our time: essays in honour of g. e. bentley jr. and so in the summer of 2010 scholars came from all over north america, europe, and asia to celebrate the irresistible force, g. e. bentley, jr. papers, musical performances, a banquet, an exhibition, a catalogue, and a book of essays. happy eightieth birthday, jerry, from us all. like blake and catherine, jerry had an extraordinary helpmate in beth. she managed her own scholarly activities while supporting not only geb and their family but also their enormous adopted family. after her death in 2011, he not only continued her monthly teas, which they had called “beth’s fourth monday at home teas,” but also continued to write, including his annual checklists for blake of all the publications on blake, as well as a family memoir. over the past few years, we often discussed the family memoir, as well as his travels in the blake world, his friendships with other scholars, and the extraordinary collectors he encountered. he was a great storyteller, and often regaled guests at the monthly teas with accounts of some of his and their adventures. he continued to say we this and we that as if beth were still alive with him, right there in the room. and perhaps she was. although he never said so to me, i felt he had enjoyed his life immensely. two years ago, two friends held a small birthday dinner for me. it was intimate, only six at table. geb was there, and he brought me a poem as his gift. it’s a poem about aging, and “the satisfaction of work well done.” the joy “in the discovery of the perfect word.” the recognition that “tomorrow is not forever,” that “three hours sleep is an accomplishment / as is the work one may do then.” but beth’s presence enters the poem most movingly with the poet finding that the head beside me, sleeping on my arm in the wide bed, is my cat’s, not my beth’s. in the preface to his acclaimed 2001 biography of blake, the stranger from paradise, geb speaks of his intimate relationship to his subject: for half a century i have been wrestling with the spirit of william blake, with the protean shapes of blake’s myth and the factual laocoon of his life. and i have enjoyed it all. if i could believe that this biography is worthy of him, i would feel that i had won his blessing. (xvii) i often think of this passage and the manner in which geb himself has given to each of us—his friends, his students, his colleagues, his fellow travelers—his continuous blessing. blake, illustrations to night thoughts, preface, page ii. © trustees of the british museum. 1929,0713.3 (verso). a blake riddle: the diagonal pencil inscription in an island in the moon a blake riddle: the diagonal pencil inscription in an island in the moonthe contents of this article were for the most part originally published in the introduction to my critical edition and translation of blake’s an island in the moon (una isla en la luna [madrid: cátedra, 2014] 41-48). line numbers and quotations from an island here follow my edition. i am grateful to the late g. e. bentley, jr., and alexander gourlay for reading this paper and for their many helpful suggestions. by fernando castanedo in memoriam g. e. bentley, jr. fernando castanedo (fernando.castanedo@uah.es) teaches at the universidad de alcalá, madrid. the text pages of william blake’s manuscript an island in the moonthe holograph was given in 1905 to the fitzwilliam museum at cambridge university by its owner, the painter charles fairfax murray. as is well known, the title is not blake’s, but was adapted by e. j. ellis and w. b. yeats from the opening words of the text (edwin john ellis and william butler yeats, eds., the works of william blake, poetic, symbolic, and critical [london: bernard quaritch, 1893] 1: 187). end with a conspicuous diagonal pencil inscription: “a leaf is evidently missing before this one” (illus. 1). 1. diagonal pencil inscription on folio 9 recto of an island in the moon, with a 37° rightward tilt (see it in the context of the page). cfm 31, © fitzwilliam museum, cambridge. although the line has been consistently regarded as a non-authorial annotation to blake’s early satire, its influence has been decisive for interpreting the break in logic between folios 8 verso and 9 recto of the holograph. editors have given credit to—and paraphrased—the inscription,“here a page is wanting, if not more” (edwin j. ellis, the real blake: a portrait biography [london: chatto & windus, 1907] 82); “here a leaf, or more, is missing” (geoffrey keynes, ed., blake: complete writings with variant readings [1957; london: oxford university press, 1966] 62); “here a leaf or more is missing” (david v. erdman, ed., the complete poetry and prose of william blake [1965; new york: anchor-random house, 1988] 465); “four or more pages seem to be missing from the manuscript at this point” (g. e. bentley, jr., ed., william blake’s writings [oxford: clarendon press, 1978] 2: 899n9); “preceding this fragment a sheet or sheets are missing from the centre of the quire, amounting to four, or a multiple of four, pages of the manuscript” (michael phillips, ed., an island in the moon [cambridge: cambridge university press, 1987] 99); “two or more leaves may have been removed, at an unknown time prior to 1905, between leaves 8 and 9” (morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi, eds., william blake archive <http://​www.​blakearchive.​org>, an island in the moon, editors’ note to object 17 [folio 9 recto] [2010]). and commentators have tacitly relied on its authority to support their readings of the work.see william royce campbell, “the aesthetic integrity of blake’s island in the moon,” blake studies 3 (1971): 137-47; martha w. england, “the satiric blake: apprenticeship at the haymarket?” bulletin of the new york public library 73 (1969): 440-64 and 531-50; robert f. gleckner, “blake and satire,” wordsworth circle 8.4 (autumn 1977): 311-26; eugene kirk, “blake’s menippean island,” philological quarterly 59 (1980): 194-215; marsha keith schuchard, “blake’s ‘mr. femality’: freemasonry, espionage, and the double-sexed,” studies in eighteenth-century culture 22 (1993): 51-71; r. j. shroyer, “mr. jacko ‘knows what riding is’ in 1785: dating blake’s island in the moon,” blake 12.4 (spring 1979): 250-56. however, the first explicit reference to the annotation dates from 2010,eaves, essick, and viscomi, in an editors’ note to object 17 (see note 3 above), report, “a diagonal pencil inscription at the bottom of the page, not in blake’s hand, reads, ‘a leaf is evidently missing before this one’.” and it seems that thus far no inquiries have been made as to its origins.two previous owners of the manuscript are known: anne gilchrist, who was the first to mention it, in a letter of 18 november 1863 to w. m. rossetti (william michael rossetti, rossetti papers, 1862 to 1870 [london: sands & co., 1903] 41-42), and the aforementioned charles fairfax murray, whose ownership is acknowledged by ellis and yeats in their 1893 the works of william blake, poetic, symbolic, and critical (1: 186-87): “the ms. belongs to mr. fairfax murray, the painter, whose kindness places it at the disposal of the present editors, with the sole proviso that however largely it be quoted, and however fully described, it is not to be printed entire.” while i was working on a critical edition and translation into spanish of an island,see note 1 above. this edition includes the diagonal pencil inscription as part of blake’s original text. the style and content of the diagonal inscription caught my attention, and several questions arose. who might have written it, and why anonymously? whose authoritative voice could produce such a unanimously accepted annotation? why had the unknown hand pronounced itself about this lacuna so confidently? was it not somewhat bold, even for nineteenth-century standards, to qualify the absence of a leaf with “evidently”? when might this annotation have been produced? does the handwriting bear absolutely no resemblance to blake’s? why did blake leave folios 10 to 15 unused? to raise suspicions further, why do the stains on folio 9 recto seem to be mirroring quite precisely the lines on folio 8 verso and, moreover, on 8 recto? and, more generally, could the satirist who had named himself quid the cynic in an island be playing a prank on his readers here, as he had done before in the text? these and other questions seemed to find reasonable answers when i considered the possibility that the line might have been written by blake himself. in order to see where this hypothesis might lead, as a first step i consulted a curator in manuscript paper at the instituto del patrimonio cultural de españa on the stains on folio 9 recto. simultaneously, i asked an expert in handwriting identification to compare the pencil inscription with the pen-and-ink text. both provided valuable insights. along with other arguments, such as the satirical vein in an island, its emphasis on the topic of literary manipulations and forgeries, the six leaves that blake left unused in the manuscript, and its well-documented indebtedness to laurence sterne’s tristram shandy, the hypothesis might affect and perhaps enrich our understanding of blake’s 1786 text.this is the date i propose in “on blinks and kisses, monkeys and bears: dating william blake’s an island in the moon,” huntington library quarterly 80.3 (autumn 2017): 437-52. at this point a review of the basic facts about the manuscript is in order. at the time of its donation to the fitzwilliam museum, it consisted of eight sheets of paper, folded and cut to form sixteen folios (leaves)—that is, thirty-two pages. while folios 2 to 8 bear identical watermarks, and 9 to 15 the corresponding countermarks, folios 1 and 16 invert this pattern, with 1 bearing the countermark and 16 the watermark.all watermarks and countermarks are identical. the watermarks bear the royal arms of england and scotland under the early hanoverian kings, and the countermarks present a royal cipher: a crown above the initials gr, georgius rex (king george). see my “watermarks in blake’s an island in the moon,” forthcoming in blake. blake used folios 1 to 8, recto and verso, and almost half of 9 recto, to write the text in ink. below this half the diagonal pencil line was inscribed. apart from several sketches and handwriting proofs (some with backwards lettering, as for copperplate engraving) on 16 verso,folio 16 verso is titled the lamb lying down with the lion and other drawings, from “an island in the moon” manuscript and catalogued as no. 149 in martin butlin, the paintings and drawings of william blake, 2 vols. (new haven: yale university press, 1981). the remaining pages were left blank—thus, folios 9 verso, 10-15 recto and verso, and 16 recto are all unused. given the clear, regular pairing of watermarks and countermarks (eight of each), most editors have reasonably assumed that if the break in logic between 8 verso and 9 recto was due to an expurgation of the manuscript, then at least one folded sheet of paper (two folios or leaves—that is, four pages) must have been removed. folio 8 verso ends with a song by sipsop, perhaps ironically celebrating a victorious william of orange, and 9 recto begins with a non sequitur—“them illuminating the manuscript”—in what seems an interrupted discourse on a new printing method that will make blake’s alter ego, quid, rich.for a more detailed description of the manuscript, including the inks used therein and the different writing phases, see g. e. bentley, jr., blake books (oxford: clarendon press, 1977) 221-24. according to bentley, the pages “may have been removed because they reveal too directly or too inaccurately blake’s secret method of illuminated printing” (223). in his 1987 edition, michael phillips reported that he had examined folios 8 verso and 9 recto for traces of inks from the leaves that would have been lost from the center of the manuscript, with no success.phillips 99. after proceeding likewise, i arrived at the same conclusion. other stains could be perceived, however, on both 8 verso and 9 recto (see illus. 2 and 3).palmer brown already hinted at the offset on 9 recto in the early 1950s: “am i deceived by shadows in the photograph, or is there a faint offset of some sort visible on the leaf in question, both above and below so much of the pencil notation as reads ‘a leaf is evidently’?” (letter to l. a. holder, 13 august 1951, p. 3; correspondence in the administrative file pertaining to an island, fitzwilliam museum, cambridge). according to paper expert maría del carmen hidalgo brinquis, those on 8 verso “resulted from the use of a rather porous paper and iron gall ink (especially in the deletions).”correspondence, 14 march 2014. thus, these stains were quite obviously produced by blake’s writing on the other side of the same folio, 8 recto. 2. folio 8 verso (see enlargement). cfm 31, © fitzwilliam museum, cambridge. as for those on 9 recto, they appear to be mirroring the lines in folio 8, both verso and, more surprisingly, perhaps recto. 3. folio 9 recto (see enlargement). cfm 31, © fitzwilliam museum, cambridge. could it be that the inks in folio 8 found their way onto a page facing it, even if at the time of writing there were two leaves between them? it might be interesting to consider one instance from each page. line 26 in 8 recto begins with a somewhat blotched capital t, “to bowl the ball …,” which apparently has a matching stain in 9 recto. as for 8 verso, the heavily inked deletions of lines 15 and 16 seem to have a corresponding stain in 9 recto, also between lines 15 and 16. in order to determine the source of these stains—to confirm or disprove that they match the distribution of lines in folio 8, and whether they thus derive from contact with this leaf—folios 8 verso and 9 recto were digitally superimposed (illus. 4). 4. digital overlay of folios 8 verso and 9 recto (see enlargement). cfm 31, © fitzwilliam museum, cambridge. in view of this test, the paper curator confirmed that the stains in 9 recto proceed from contact with folio 8, both recto and verso. according to her, 8 verso and 9 recto must have been facing each other for a very long period of time, and the offset would most probably have appeared “a short time after the writing took place, through pressured contact if the manuscript remained in a humid place.”correspondence, 12 march 2014. finally, this outcome would have been less likely to occur had there been two leaves between them at the time when blake was writing an island.in 1951 palmer brown contacted paper expert herbert c. schultz, who was of the same opinion: “exceptional pressure and moisture in the presence of susceptible ink fairly soon after writing could produce offset in a few days or weeks, while under contrary conditions no offset would occur over centuries” (p. brown to l. a. holder, 13 august 1951, p. 3; correspondence in the administrative file pertaining to an island, fitzwilliam museum, cambridge). alexander gourlay, on the other hand, pointed out to me that “an offset could occur at any time that the pages were in contact, even long after the writing occurred, if a component of the ink was sufficiently diffusible or hygroscopic or the paper became even slightly humidified for even a few minutes” (correspondence, 10 august 2016). thus, given that no traces of inks from previously extracted leaves have been found, and considering how stains and writing match in the digital overlay of these two folios, would it seem reasonable to conclude that the removed pages might never have existed? additionally, there is the oddity that what was expunged would have been one folded sheet (two folios) precisely in the center of the quire. did the contents that blake—or the expurgator—wish to remove happen to be just there by chance? these and other objections inevitably arose after each fresh speculation on the possible contents of the missing leaves. however, if blake had written the pencil inscription in accordance with the satirical vein of an island, both the break in logic between folios 8 and 9 and the mysterious leaves in between might be accounted for. the next step was to analyze the hand that produced the inscription, comparing it to blake’s own. as is well known, the question of blake’s script is a difficult and vexed one. in alexander gourlay’s words, “identifying blake’s handwriting … is very hard … because [his] hand is so protean—he had a very distinctive casual hand but he also had a huge repertoire of more formal hands.”correspondence, 31 october 2014. the text of an island would be an instance of his casual writing, whereas the inscription might perhaps be closer to one of his formal scripts—if it is indeed his. an additional problem derives from the fact that the inscription seems to have been written forcibly, given the tilt of the line. this in turn may have resulted in a distortion of the letters and, as a consequence, of the annotator’s handwriting, according to calligrapher josé javier simón. be this as it may, the calligrapher proceeded to compare the inscription with the text, analyzing the samples in the following table.all images in the table and in the following paragraph are © fitzwilliam museum, cambridge. in the left-hand column are cropped words from the pencil inscription, and, to the right, words written in ink from an island. words diagonal pencil inscription an island in the moon (text in ink) a 9 recto, line 3 4 recto, line 35 leaf 9 recto, line 3 6 verso, line 1, “deaf” 3 recto, line 10, “if” is 5 recto, end of line 1 5 recto, line 3 evidently* 4 verso, line 1, “devils” 5 recto, line 33, “lightly” 6 recto, line 39, “lightly”1 verso, line 5, “indeed” 2 recto, line 23, “adorn’d” missing* 2 verso, line 37, “ministers” 2 verso, line 6, “sing” 8 verso, line 8, “sing”3 recto, line 30, “assembly” before 2 recto, line 38 4 recto, line 41 this 1 recto, line 18 1 recto, line 19 one 4 verso, line 21 8 verso, line 8 * an asterisk indicates that the word in the inscription does not appear in the text of an island. the calligrapher’s authentication report concludes that there are “several similar features, many of them unique and concurrent to the same person’s handwriting.”simón produced his twelve-page report (“informe pericial caligráfico”) on 4 april 2014. translations of the quoted excerpts are mine. firstly, he points out how the “e”s in both instances of “leaf” share a blind eye: “leaf” (pencil inscription) “leaf” (9 recto, line 3) as a second example, he describes the following scripts for “is” as partaking of “a characteristic hook at the end of the ‘s,’ and of having the points of the ‘i’ in analogous areas to the body of the letters”: “is” (pencil inscription) “is” (5 recto, end of line 1) he also marks the resemblances between the “v”s in “evidently” and “devils,” “both with a similar upstroke and ligature to the following ‘i,’ and with comparable ascenders for the ‘l’”: “evidently” (pencil inscription) “devils” (4 verso, line 1) likewise, he points out how in “evidently” and “lightly” “both ‘t’s share a particular ligature with the following ‘l,’ in which the same slight change of direction takes place”: “evidently” (pencil inscription) “lightly” (6 recto, line 39) similarly, the “m”s in “missing” and “ministers” were produced with the same “peculiarity of a long initial sinuous stroke”: “missing” (pencil inscription) “ministers” (2 verso, line 37) furthermore, the calligrapher stresses the similar ligatures between the letters “n” and “g,” and also points out the ending hooks in the “g”: “missing” (pencil inscription) “sing” (8 verso, line 8) “sing” (2 verso, line 6) finally, according to the report, the “b”s in “before” present similar characteristics “in the shape and curving of the ascending loop, and in the same small loop previous to the ligature with the following ‘e’”: “before” (pencil inscription) “before” (2 recto, line 38) in view of this analysis, the calligrapher concludes that “both samples of script share a common authorship.” if blake wrote the diagonal pencil inscription, it is relevant to consider why he produced it. two answers seem possible: he could have been warning future readers that his holograph was incomplete, in the knowledge that he himself had been the expunger, or he might have done so in order to persuade readers of the existence of a missing portion in the manuscript—a lacuna—for the sake of playing a fairly common satirical prank. in the first case, one might speculate how and why the expungement occurred. perhaps all too practically, blake simply needed some paper and, finding none at hand, took the leaves from the center of the quire.according to phillips, “perhaps blake used the missing sheet or sheets from the centre for a purpose that had gained precedence, as copy drafts for etching other songs of innocence; or perhaps they fell victim to a later, more restrained sensibility” (21). another possibility is that in the autumn of 1803, while anguishing over his pending trial for treason after the brawl with the soldier john schofield in felpham, he decided to eliminate what could become incriminating evidence, should it fall into unfriendly hands.schuchard conjectures that the expunged pages contained “some kind of political satire. perhaps the higher stakes of the political game, engendered by cagliostro’s revolutionary pronouncements, persuaded blake to destroy those pages and abandon the zany but biting comedy” (59). i am not sure that blake considered at any time the publication of the satire, especially in view of the many abstruse and domestic references therein (see, for instance, my “‘mr jacko’: prince-riding in blake’s an island in the moon,” notes and queries 64.1 [march 2017]: 27-29). i therefore do not see why, at this early time (schuchard suggests that he abandoned the piece in the spring of 1786), blake might have decided to destroy any of its pages. venturing into conjectures such as these could lead, however, to limitless plausible suppositions that, lacking further evidence, might bring us to different impasses in our understanding of the manuscript. on the other hand, the possibility that he was playing a literary joke would be in tune with the genre of an island and with its indebtedness to tristram shandy. the intensely satirical character of the manuscript has been consistently pointed out by blake scholars, particularly robert f. gleckner and eugene kirk.see also england (note 4 above) and nancy bogen, “william blake’s island in the moon revisited,” satire newsletter 5 (1968): 110-17. gleckner emphasizes the extent to which tristram shandy stands out among the many sources blake drew from in an island;as gleckner notes, “blake mentions sterne in two letters (to hayley, february 23 and may 4, 1804), the latter of which suggest [sic] a clear familiarity with the novel” (319). also worthy of note is john m. stedmond’s early contention that “although sterne ‘is not a blake … an island in the moon is in the sterne tradition’” (gleckner 325n20, quoting the comic art of laurence sterne [toronto: university of toronto press, 1967] 101n). for echoes of sterne’s a sentimental journey in blake, see g. e. bentley, jr., “sterne and blake,” blake 2.4 (1 april 1969): 64-65. kirk, on the other hand, learnedly records the presence of features in blake’s text that are characteristic of the menippean satire. among these, kirk points out the skit-like, fragmentary scenes, where ridiculed individuals indulge in banal, though purportedly brilliant, conversation. further traits are the presence of a cynic as main character (quid), the mocking of knowledge, science, and of the holders thereof, and an abundance of wordplay and scatological humor. all these characteristics match the classical description of the genre. most interestingly, kirk notes how “the lacuna or desideratum, furnished at a place of great revelation in a text, was a characteristic menippean ruse.” he recalls how humanists, in their satires, “would impersonate some philosophus praeclarus, have him just about to reveal a stupendous mystery of learning—the secret of the philosopher’s stone, for example—and then the page would be filled with asterisks, or be missing, or suffer some accident.” thus, “it may well be that the ‘leaf or more’ identified as missing by erdman was left out or taken out on purpose.”kirk 209. while it seems unlikely that blake would have written a leaf that he intended to leave out, the possibility that he might have purposefully created this lacuna, precisely where a money-making printing method should be described, would not be out of keeping with the spirit of an island.among other instances of these lacunae in early modern texts, the self-styled “second narrator” in cervantes’s don quixote could not continue recording the battle between the squire from biscay and don quixote: “but the trouble with all this is that, at this exact point, at these exact words, the original author of this history left the battle suspended in mid-air, excusing himself on the grounds that he himself could not find anything more written on the subject of these exploits of don quixote than what has already been set down” (don quixote 1.1.8). perhaps the most explicit instance of how much the narrator—or blake—enjoys playing with his readers’ expectations is found at the end of chapter 4: “then mr inflammable gass ran & shovd his head into the fire & set his hair all in a flame & ran about the room—no no he did not i was only making a fool of you.” this is not, however, the only whimsical resource that blake might have borrowed from another playful satirical narrator, tristram shandy—or sterne—as gleckner notes.for gleckner, tristram shandy is “the most neglected of the possible satiric sources (or inspirations) for blake” (319). prior to this, the first known commentator on an island, w. m. rossetti, mentioned it as “somewhat in the shandean vein,” before confirming to anne gilchrist that he also thought it rubbish (see note 6 above). five years after gilchrist’s letter, swinburne similarly described it as “a sort of satire on critics and ‘philosophers,’ [that] seems to emulate the style of sterne in his intervals of lax and dull writing” (algernon charles swinburne, william blake: a critical essay [london: john camden hotten, 1868] 183n). traits such as the odd punctuation and the constant use of dashes, the chapters of capriciously varying lengths,compare tristram shandy volume 2, chapter 13, and volume 6, chapter 15, with an island chapter 2. the non sequiturs and cross-conversations, and the sets of characters driven by their obsessions (for example, the battle of namur, the influences of names, whistling, and large noses in tristram shandy; antiquities, experiments, philosophy, and mathematics in an island) are present in both works. furthermore, at times blake seems to be inspired quite literally by sterne, as in the emulation of tristram’s burlesque catalogues: our knowledge physical, metaphysical, physiological, polemical, nautical, mathematical, ænigmatical, technical, biographical, romantical, chemical, and obstetrical, with fifty other branches of it, (most of ’em ending, as these do, in ical) …. (tristram shandy volume 1, chapter 21)all quotations are from the life and opinions of tristram shandy, gentleman, ed. ian campbell ross (1983; oxford: oxford university press, 1988). he was the god of physic. painting perspective geometry geography astronomy, cookery, chymistry [conjunctives] mechanics. tactics pathology phraseology theology mythology astrology osteology. somatology in short every art & science adorn’d him as beads round his neck. (an island chapter 3) blake inserts yet another humorous list in chapter 5, this time with a considerable number of mocking neologisms and deformed spellings: “i think in the first place that chatterton was clever at fissic follogy, pistinology. arsdology, arography. transmography phizography. hogamy hatomy.” but perhaps for the riddle posed by the diagonal pencil inscription it is unnecessary to produce an exhaustive inventory of parallels. it might suffice to observe the shared characteristics of the two narrators—how, for example, both try to endear themselves to their readers by apostrophizing them amusingly: therefore, my dear friend and companion, if you should think me somewhat sparing of my narrative on my first setting out,—bear with me,—and let me go on, and tell my story my own way:—or if i should seem now and then to trifle upon the road,—or should sometimes put on a fool’s cap with a bell to it, for a moment or two as we pass along,—don’t fly off,—but rather courteously give me credit for a little more wisdom than appears upon my outside;—and as we jogg on, either laugh with me, or at me, or in short, do any thing,—only keep your temper. (tristram shandy volume 1, chapter 6) if i have not presented you with every character in the piece call me [ass * arse] assblake’s ass-arse pun (or his doubts as to which word he should use) is perhaps echoing the same wordplay in tristram shandy volume 8, chapter 32. — (an island chapter 2) at the end of chapter 4, previously quoted, the narrator in an island aspires to become intimate with his readers by playing on them the joke of recanting what he has just said (“no no he did not i was only making a fool of you”). a similar event, although in the opposite sense, takes place at the end of volume 3, chapter 3, in sterne’s novel. instead of a narrator who makes a retraction, here we have one who, having made a mistake in describing a character’s actions, is immediately corrected by a reader who rushes into the novel (much as the diagonal annotator sneaks into an island) and discreetly amends tristram with a rhetorical understatement: —my uncle toby dismounted immediately. —i did not apprehend your uncle toby was o’ horseback.— likewise, this narratorial playfulness that blurs the line between what is within and without the imaginary space created by the text, purposely revealing its fictional nature, is to be found in an island: so all the people in the book enterd into the room & they could not talk any more to the present purpose. (an island chapter 5) lacunae, when inserted as ruses in literary texts, work as lighthearted disrupters of the story. sterne’s narrator includes a fair number of them in tristram shandy. these lacunae are graphically signaled with asterisks, and on one occasion some of the pages written by tristram end up being used as curlers—papilliotes—by a frenchwoman (volume 7, chapters 37-38). whole chapters are simply left blank after the headings, although their contents are subsequently restored (volume 9, chapters 18-19). of all the lacunae feigned by sterne, the one that could possibly have been a direct source of inspiration for an island’s diagonal pencil inscription is in volume 4, when the narrator jumps from chapter 23 to 25, and begins the latter: —no doubt, sir—there is a whole chapter wanting here—and a chasm of ten pagesas ross points out in a note (p. 569), sterne’s playfulness with the peritextual elements in his novel went even further: “ten pages: in the first edition, only nine pages were in fact omitted, with the result that for the remainder of the fourth volume, the odd-numbered pages were on the verso of the leaf, the even numbers on the recto.” blake’s indebtedness may perhaps be noted in the inconsistent numeration of an island, if the pencil numbers scattered on some pages of the manuscript were indeed written by him (eaves, essick, and viscomi consider them to be nonauthorial). made in the book by it—but the book-binder is neither a fool, or a knave, or a puppy—nor is the book a jot more imperfect, (at least upon that score)—but, on the contrary, the book is more perfect and complete by wanting the chapter, than having it, as i shall demonstrate to your reverences in this manner …. but before i begin my demonstration, let me only tell you, that the chapter which i have torn out … was the description of my father’s, my uncle toby’s, trim’s and obadiah’s setting out and journeying to the visitations at ****. we’ll go in the coach, said my father …. thus tristram proceeds to recount the contents of the “torn out” chapter 24. it seems likely that blake would have admired here the paradox of incomplete perfection as presented by tristram. moreover, when compared to the classical english satirists of the eighteenth century, sterne’s was a “dazzlingly unconventional imagination, the very kind blake would certainly have been attracted to,” as gleckner points out.gleckner 321. however, if the inscription in an island was indeed written by blake, and if it was written with either this or another sternian lacuna in mind, then there are at least two issues worth considering. first, why would blake have chosen to write his line diagonally, using a pencil instead of pen and ink and employing those rather awkward and exaggerated curlicues in, at least, “before” and “one”?another two words might also be considered: “a” and “leaf.” according to the calligrapher, given the tilt of the inscription these curlicues would be rather unnatural marks in anyone’s handwriting. a probable answer, in due logic, is that he would have wanted to make it seem as if the inscription had not been produced by him, and thus proceeded to write it as unlike the rest of the document as possible: diagonally, in pencil,another pencil inscription is transcribed by eaves, essick, and viscomi (an island in the moon, object 14 [2010]). blake wrote an “x” to the left of the initial line in the first known version of the “nurse’s song” from songs of innocence (chapter 11, folio 7 verso, line 33). as is well known, he had used these “mark[s] … of uneasiness” following johann caspar lavater’s final advice in aphorisms on man (london: j. johnson, 1788): “set a mark to such [aphorisms] as left a sense of uneasiness with you” (for the use of these marks, see e 583). thus, the “x” in an island must have been written after the publication of lavater’s volume, and, more interestingly, it gives us the image of the poet before his manuscript with a pencil in his hand. could blake have written the diagonal inscription at that sitting, with the same pencil? for the connection between this “x” in an island and blake’s “x” by some of lavater’s sayings, compare the topics of childhood, play, calmness, and laughing in “nurse’s song” and in aphorisms 21, 54, and 226 (e 584, 585, and 588). and embellishing several words with flourishes, as opposed to the casual hand that he used in the rest of the manuscript. considering that an island has as one of its leitmotifs chatterton and his rowley fakes—alluded to in chapter 1, and explicitly mentioned in chapters 3, 5, and 7thus quid the cynic—blake’s alter ego—in chapter 7: “chatterton never writ those poems. a parcel of fools going to bristol—if i was to go id find it out in a minute. but ive found it out already—”—it would not be surprising that blake decided to produce the (mocking) forgery of an alien inscription in his own manuscript. on the other hand, it is also worth considering how blake might have intended to continue his satire. perhaps following the example of sterne’s volume 4, chapter 24, he would have completed the break in logic between folios 8 verso and 9 recto by including (after the inscription) the contents of the “leaf” that is “evidently missing.” this he might have done with a description of the new printing method—although this would be surprising—or with some explanation as to how quid and mrs. nannicantipot seem now to be living together (in chapter 7, quid lives with suction, possibly robert blake). alternatively, he might have recounted the scene at mr. femality’s, announced immediately before the annotation: “when we are at mr femality’s do yo snap & take me up—and i will fall into such a passion ill hollow and stamp & frighten all the people there & show them what truth is” (an island, folio 9 recto). given that an island is a far looser and more fragmentary text than tristram shandy, to link folios 8 verso and 9 recto by accounting for the “missing” leaves would not have been difficult. all this is rather speculative, but there is an eloquent piece of material evidence: unless blake had it in his mind to continue writing, or, at least, had not fully dismissed that possibility, it might be reasonable to expect that he would have used the six blank leaves of paper (folios 10-15). as bentley observes, “his poverty and his frugality directed that when he had in hand redundant stocks of paper no longer useful for their original purpose, he should carefully use them for other purposes as well.”g. e. bentley, jr., “the date of blake’s pickering manuscript, or, the way of a poet with paper,” studies in bibliography 19 (1966): 232-43 (243). by “redundant stock,” bentley is very possibly referring to a larger quantity than half a dozen leaves. however, should blake have decided to use these for other purposes, he would have had enough paper to produce a holograph of roughly the same size as the ballads (pickering) manuscript,the six unused leaves in an island are 30.8 x 18.3 cm., and the eleven leaves (twenty-two pages) in the ballads manuscript are 18.4 x 12.5 cm. by folding the six leaves from an island blake could have obtained a twenty-four-page notebook, 18.3 x 15.4 cm. without having to trim printed pages carefully from the unsold remains of his designs to a series of ballads. in sum, both the menippean satire and sterne’s influence on blake suggest how the simulated expurgation of leaves in an island might be accounted for. moreover, it is perhaps a simple and reasonable conjunction of all the information presently at our disposal, and clearly in tune with the spirit of the work. however, it is unlikely that this article fully explains the ruse of the “missing” leaf/leaves of paper and the diagonal pencil inscription in the manuscript. there is the enigma, for instance, of how blake intended to proceed after writing the paragraph and the annotation in folio 9 recto, and the time at which he wrote this page is also open to debate. perhaps the only certainty conveyed here is that, if the hypothesis is sound, an island ought to be taken for an unfinished manuscript, but maybe not any longer for an incomplete or expunged one. in the future, editors might wish to return to a standard numbering of the manuscript (folios 1-16) and to include the inscription as authorial. finally, i believe that this riddle does provide a sense of blake’s early literary workings: his devotion to humor, the playful emulation of other authors, and how in an island he might have wished to build a larger, less fragmentary variation on the typically brief skits of the menippean satire. after all, as northrop frye suggests, satire often seems to be the “real medium” of a poet who belonged to “the race of rabelais and apuleius.”northrop frye, fearful symmetry (princeton: princeton university press, 1947) 193. paper and watermarks in blake’s an island in the moon paper and watermarks in blake’s an island in the moon by fernando castanedo fernando castanedo (fernando.castanedo@uah.es) teaches at the universidad de alcalá, madrid. research for this article was generously funded by wellesley college’s committee on faculty awards. i would like to thank paper historian peter bower for his kind help in answering my questions, and suzanne reynolds, nicholas robinson, edward cheese, and emma darbyshire for their generous assistance at the fitzwilliam museum.although the watermarks in an island in the moon have been the object of research by several scholars, thus far they have not been clearly described or, i believe, reproduced. both palmer brown and paul miner made inquiries in the 1950s with the staff at the university of cambridge’s fitzwilliam museum, where blake’s manuscript is kept, and miner speculated on the identity of the paper.in response to a query by brown of 2 july 1951, l. a. holder (principal assistant at the time) answered, “watermark resembles though not very closely, churchill 216 (no cmk given). countermark resembles that given for churchill 213” (holder to brown, 19 july 1951). holder’s references are to w. a. churchill, watermarks in paper … in the xvii and xviii centuries … (amsterdam: menno hertzberger & co., 1935). years later, in a 1 january 1958 letter, miner asked the museum for confirmation that the watermarks and countermarks are “the same as fig. 20 (p 163) and fig. 25 (p 164)” in thomas balston, james whatman, father and son (london: methuen, 1957). again, holder clarified that they do not correspond to those in an island (holder to miner, 27 august 1959). correspondence quoted from the administrative file pertaining to an island, fitzwilliam museum, cambridge. in his 1977 blake books, g. e. bentley, jr., also noted the similarities between several whatman watermarks and countermarks and those in blake’s holograph.“the marks are similar to but distinct from figures 19 and 25 in thomas balston” (blake books [oxford: clarendon press, 1977] 221n1). for watermarks in paper used by blake, see bentley, blake books 71-73 and blake books supplement (oxford: clarendon press, 1995) 40; robert n. essick, william blake, printmaker (princeton: princeton university press, 1980); martin butlin, the paintings and drawings of william blake, 2 vols. (new haven: yale university press, 1981); and peter bower, “blake’s papermakers: watermarks found in papers used by william blake,” the oxford papers: proceedings of the british association of paper historians fourth annual conference, held at st. edmund hall, oxford, 17-19 september 1993 (studies in british paper history, vol. 1), ed. bower (london: baph, oak knoll press, 1996) 72-74 (appendix). before i describe these devices and compare them with other watermarks from the same period, a review of the basic facts about the paper in this manuscript seems in order.given its extremely fragile condition, the manuscript was remounted and set on hinges in 2015 in order to better its conservation. at the time of its donation to the fitzwilliam by the painter charles fairfax murray in 1905, the manuscript consisted of eight sheets of the english writing paper size known as foolscapfoolscap is a synecdoche for paper of a certain size that bore as watermark a fool’s cap. this paper became the most common for writing purposes. in the eighteenth century, according to bower, the foolscap size was “usually indicated by a watermark of britannia seated in a crowned oval. but in times of war … several english paper mills became very patriotic and used the royal arms in foolscap sheets” (correspondence of 13 september 2016). perhaps a patriotic mill such as this produced the paper watermarked with royal arms that blake used for an island. (308 x 374 mm.), folded and cut to form sixteen folios (leaves)—that is, a quire of thirty-two pages. blake used folios 1 to 8, recto and verso, and almost half of 9 recto, to write the text in ink.in view of a diagonal pencil inscription on folio 9 recto reading “a leaf is evidently missing before this one,” editors have consistently suggested that one or two sheets might have been expunged from the middle of the quire. i have questioned this in “a blake riddle: the diagonal pencil inscription in an island in the moon,” blake 52.1 (summer 2018). apart from several sketches and handwriting proofs (some with backwards lettering, as for copperplate engraving) on 16 verso,folio 16 verso is titled the lamb lying down with the lion and other drawings, from “an island in the moon” manuscript and catalogued as no. 149 in butlin. the remaining pages were left blank—thus, folios 9 verso, 10-15 recto and verso, and 16 recto are all unused. coincident pairings of watermarks and countermarks show that the folios were conjugate at some time prior to the manuscript’s bequest, and that each full sheet contained both a royal arms watermark, centered in one half of the sheet, and a crowned gr as countermark, centered in the other half.a description of the paper may also be found in michael phillips, ed., an island in the moon (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1987) 3. while folios 2 to 8 bear identical watermarks, and 9 to 15 the corresponding countermarks, folios 1 and 16 invert this pattern, with 1 bearing the countermark and 16 the watermark. for some unknown reason, perhaps because he wanted the felt side of the sheet to act as a cover, or simply by chance, blake turned the orientation of the outer sheet. the countermark (39 x 29 mm.) presents a crown above the initials gr, georgius rex (king george) (illus. 1).according to alfred h. shorter, “the earliest known counter mark used by whatman has been found in a paper of 1747 …. by 1750 he was using britannia with jw incorporated in the device, and this is always found opposite the mark of the crown with gr, which possibly implies that the paper was made for some government department” (paper making in the british isles [newton abbot: david & charles ltd., 1971] 56). bower disagrees, however:the english monarchy have never had paper specially watermarked for their exclusive use nor do english government departments. one of the quasi governmental organisations, the east india company did have its own watermark. the crown / gr countermark predates george i by many years and did not originally refer to any of the king georges. it was first used by several dutch papermakers at the end of the 17th century and the early years of the 18th century when the gr initials stood for gulielmus rex, the latin form of william rex, for william of orange. large amounts of dutch made paper were imported into england until the middle of the 18th century so people were accustomed to seeing the gr countermark. by the time of the georges many of the english mills were using the crown gr countermark and people assumed the initials stood for george rex. (correspondence of 14 september 2016) 1. an island in the moon, countermark (39 x 29 mm.) in folio 11. cfm 31, © fitzwilliam museum, cambridge. see an enlargement. the watermark (113 x 71 mm.) bears the royal arms of england and scotland under the early hanoverian kings (illus. 2). 2. an island in the moon, watermark (113 x 71 mm.) in folio 16. cfm 31, © fitzwilliam museum, cambridge. see an enlargement. see a grayscale enlargement with the shades inverted. a description of the heraldic symbols in these arms, which are necessarily much simplified in the watermark, reads: quarterly, first quarter, per pale, dexter,in heraldry “dexter” refers to the right side of a shield from the bearer’s point of view—that is, the spectator’s left. three lions passant guardant (for england), sinister, a lion rampant within a double tressure (for scotland—the tressure is single in the watermark), second quarter, three fleurs de lys (for france), third quarter, a harp (for ireland), fourth quarter, tierced per pale and per chevron, first two lions passant guardant (for brunswick—only one in the watermark), second a lion rampant (for lüneburg), third a horse courant (for hanover, the so-called saxon steed), the whole surrounded by the garter (double bordered on the outside and single on the inside, buckleless, motto-less), and, for a crest, the imperial crown proper. the inner border of the garter crops slightly all four corners of the english-shaped (with a pointed base) square escutcheon. the main features of the paper in an island (all measurements in mm.) are: paper watermark countermark distance between chain lines collection date of use 8 foolscap sheets 308 x 374 royal arms 113 x 71 crowned gr 39 x 29 26-27 fitzwilliam museum, cambridge 1786, and possibly earlier blake’s mocking references to samuel johnson indicate that he was working on chapter 9 of the satire in march-april 1786. see my article “on blinks and kisses, monkeys and bears: dating william blake’s an island in the moon,” huntington library quarterly 80.3 (autumn 2017): 437-52. following is a chronological table of five documents bearing the same watermark design as an island (again, all measurements in mm.). only documents 4 and 5 are accessible via the internet, but essential facts, such as the size of the paper and the precise folios that bear the marks, are not available. the information on numbers 1-2 is even more limited, derived from the printed catalogues of watermarks that have been consulted. for number 3, however, full images of the document were examined, and the size of the paper and distribution of the marks have been confirmed. 11. edward heawood, watermarks, mainly of the 17th and 18th centuries (monumenta chartæ papyraceæ, vol. 1) (hilversum: paper publications society, 1950); see pl. 75 and p. 74. 12. according to bower, ct & son was the commercial name for “clement taylor and his son, also clement, upper tovil mill in the loose valley, near maidstone, kent, 1781–1791” (correspondence of 12 september 2016). heawood (on the authority of bruce bannerman) states that the same countermark may be found in a 1781 manuscript (74). 13. thomas l. gravell and george miller, a catalogue of foreign watermarks found on paper used in america, 1700–1835 (new york: garland publishing inc., 1983). 14. the 1779 date provided by gravell and miller conflicts with bower’s contention that the mill was active from 1781 to 1791 (see note 12). 15. much of the information on document 3 was provided or confirmed by the joseph downs collection of manuscripts and printed ephemera at winterthur library. 16. see the gravell watermark archive, <http://​www.​gravell.​org/​record.​php?​&action=get&recid=2248>. 17. see the gravell watermark archive, <http:/​/www.​gravell.​org/​record.​php?​&action=get&recid=2285>.   catalogue and reference no. watermark size countermark and size distance between chain lines collection collection no. place of use date of use 1 heawood 447 113 x 73 ct & son 17 x 99 26-27 papermakers’ association of great britain not provided, paper fragment — — 2 gravell and miller 141-42 113 x 73 ct & son 18 x 97 25-26 delaware historical society box 6 philadelphia, pa ?1779 3 gravell and miller 342-43 113 x 75 hp 13 x 38 25-26 winterthur museum, garden & library col. 363 74x16.11 york or yorktown, ?nj, ny, pa, va 1790 4 gravell archive arms.199.1 102 x 73 — 26-27 library of congress, thomas jefferson papers series 1: general correspondence. 1651–1827. box 9, #3433-19-88. microfilm reel: 005. ?middletown, ct 1786–89 5 gravell archive arms.203.1 112 x 72 m (size not provided) ref.: letterm. 004.1/tj 48 26-27 library of congress, thomas jefferson papers series 1: general correspondence. 1651–1827. box 18, #8186. microfilm reel: 011. charleston, sc 1789 the watermark for document 1 (illus. 3) is found in a paper fragment that bears the countermark of clement taylor and son, “ct & son”, a well-known mill in kent (see note 12). heawood provides drawings rather than photographs of watermarks, which perhaps accounts for some differences in wire details. the limbs of the three lions passant guardant in the first quarter of the shield, for instance, are not represented by a single wire only, as they seem to be in the other examples. also, the line that separates quarters three and four in the others, coincident with a chain line, seems to be absent in this one, but then heawood does not indicate where chain lines run in this watermark (he does, however, point them out in the countermark, by three small vertical lines above it). finally, the crown’s circlet is here composed of alternating diamonds and small circles, whereas in others, an island included, it seems to have a central diamond and alternating small and large circles on both sides. 3. document 1 watermark (113 x 73 mm.) and countermark (17 x 99 mm.), from heawood pl. 75. 4. document 2 countermark (left, 18 x 97 mm.) and watermark (right, 113 x 73 mm.), from gravell and miller, a catalogue p. 59, nos. 141-42. the watermark image has been flipped horizontally to show the shield appropriately. see an enlargement of the countermark. see a grayscale enlargement of the watermark with the shades inverted. the crown in document 2 (illus. 4) apparently has precisely the same circlet as in document 1. besides bearing identical watermarks of the same size, both documents present the same countermark (“ct & son”) crossed by three chain lines at the same points—the left-hand line cutting through the “t” before the mast, the middle parting the ampersand, and the right-hand line between the “s” and the “o”. given these similarities—despite the slight differences in dimensions for the countermark, which may well be because heawood provides sketches—it seems very likely that the paper in both of these documents was produced in the same mould, or in moulds produced simultaneously at the same mill. the clement taylor and son mill was active from 1781 to 1791 (see notes 12 and 14). document 3 is a commercial letter from william harris to andrew clow & company, merchants, philadelphia. harris placed his order on 16 november 1790 from a location that is written by him as both york and yorktown, which possibly refers to towns in new jersey, new york, pennsylvania, or virginia. the paper used is a sheet of approximately 298 x 368 mm., folded to form two leaves. this is roughly the same size as the sheets in an island, 308 x 374 mm., which are near the regular dimensions for foolscap writing paper. 5. document 3 countermark (left, 13 x 38 mm.) and watermark (right, 113 x 75 mm.). the watermark image has been flipped horizontally to show the shield appropriately. courtesy the winterthur library: joseph downs collection of manuscripts and printed ephemera. see an enlargement of the countermark. see a grayscale enlargement of the watermark with the shades inverted. although bearing a different countermark, “hp”, from an island, document 3 presents the same watermark design (illus. 5).butlin no. 120, the good farmer (c. 1780–85), bears also a mark with “hp”. a closer inspection, however, reveals a small difference in detail that indicates both the skill with wires of device makers and the rarity of finding sheets of paper produced in the exact same mould or batch of these, as might be the case with documents 1 and 2. in this regard, it must be stressed that watermarks were handmade and that important mills worked simultaneously with a considerable number of moulds bearing the same design but, inevitably, with subtle variations.as heawood remarks, “considering the large number of vats and even greater (perhaps double) number of paper moulds in use in any important establishment at the same time, it is not surprising that so few absolutely identical specimens of marks should be found in a collection drawn from many sources” (41). the differing detail in document 3 may be seen in the double outer border of the garter to the right of the shield in the image of the watermark (illus. 5), where the two wires are prominently apart. as mentioned earlier, documents 4 and 5 are both available for examination online. they belong to the thomas jefferson papers in the library of congress. the earlier is a copy of a letter from general samuel h. parsons to president ezra stiles of yale college, originally dated 27 april 1786, probably in middletown, connecticut (illus. 6).“samuel h. parsons to ezra stiles, april 27, 1786, exploration along ohio river; indian mounds,” 04-27, 1786, manuscript/mixed material, <https://​www.​loc.​gov/​item/​mtjbib001909>. parsons’s letter informs stiles of his paleontological findings near the ohio river. this copy, in two leaves—perhaps forming the same full sheet—has the following inscriptions on the verso of the second leaf: “general parsons letter to president stiles 1786” and “copy forwarded to his excelly gov. jefferson ambassador at paris.” jefferson held the office of ambassador to france from 1785 until 1789. thus, the copy must have been produced between 27 april 1786, when the original was written by parsons, and 1789, the end of jefferson’s term in paris. the gravell watermark archive does not mention the presence of a countermark in this letter, or which of the two leaves holds the watermark. it does, however, give a smaller size (102 x 73 mm.) for this device, which also appears to have a rounder shape than the rest. on the other hand, the number of wire lines between motifs does not vary, and the more circular aspect could well be because the image was taken from a different angle. 6. document 4 watermark (102 x 73 mm.). the watermark image has been flipped horizontally to show the shield appropriately. image from daniel w. mosser and ernest w. sullivan ii, with len hatfield and david h. radcliffe, the thomas l. gravell watermark archive <http://​www.​gravell.​org>. © virginia tech. see an enlargement. the last document with the same watermark design as an island is a three-leaf “extract from the journals of the honorable privy council, at charleston, in the state aforesaid [south carolina]. / friday 27th march, 1789” (illus 7).south carolina privy council, 03-27, 1789, manuscript/mixed material, <https://​www.​loc.​gov/​item/​mtjbib004189>. considering that the document is an extract from the minutes taken at that meeting, it must have been produced sometime after the council was held. page 3 mentions a request by letter “from the governor of south carolina” on 4 april 1789, eight days after the meeting and perhaps prior to the document’s production. the 4 april date seems, however, to have been inscribed by a different hand, maybe at a later time. these leaves record a council meeting that discussed the payment of bonds issued by the state to foreign creditors, where jefferson would act as provider of certificates. the document is signed “john neufville, secretary to the governor.” according to the gravell archive, it bears a countermark with the letter m, which distinguishes it from the crowned gr countermark in the paper used by blake. 7. document 5 countermark (left, no size provided) and watermark (right, 112 x 72 mm.). images from daniel w. mosser and ernest w. sullivan ii, with len hatfield and david h. radcliffe, the thomas l. gravell watermark archive <http://​www.​gravell.​org>. © virginia tech. see an enlargement of the watermark. it would be interesting to know the exact size of the paper in documents 4 and 5, but neither the gravell archive nor the library of congress provides this information.a query about the size of the paper in both documents, the precise leaves bearing the watermarks, and the presence of other marks, etc., was made to the manuscripts division of the library of congress in june 2016. nevertheless, the web site of the library of congress does supply full images of the documents, and the paper used in both appears to be of the same proportions as that in an island. these two documents and blake’s manuscript were written on laid paper of apparently the same foolscap size, with almost identical watermarks, equal distances between chain lines (26-27 mm.), and a like number of wire lines between motifs in the design.for instance, the number of wire lines between the upper border of the escutcheon and the inner line of the garter at the point where it meets the central chain line is consistently five.  were it not for the different countermarks in an island and the privy council extract (document 5), one might judge that the paper in both, and possibly in the copy of the parsons letter as well (document 4, with the caveat of the different size of the watermark), was likely to have been produced in the same british mill. according to heawood, there are at least two plausible explanations for finding “two identical marks, maybe of a large size, associated with the names of two different makers.”heawood 41. the first would be a mill owned in partnership by two papermakers, where their different names would be inserted into the same moulds at different times. heawood does not find this option fully convincing. a more probable explanation, in his view, might be found in the trading of whole stocks of moulds that would change hands from one firm to another. a subsequent change in the countermark could happen, as some instances have shown.heawood 41. however, as peter bower points out, it is also well documented that mills would copy devices from high-quality paper to mark their own productions, thus appropriating prestige from competitors and increasing sales.according to bower, “mills generally designed their own marks but often copied designs that had originated in good quality papers. the initials of several papermakers were often appropriated by english papermakers as marks of quality. examples include iv, the initials of jean villedary who worked several mills around angouleme and lvg, the initials of lubertus van gerrevinck, of the phoenix mill at alkmaar in holland” (correspondence of 14 september 2016). it would be tempting to conclude that documents 3-5 (all produced from 1786 on), along with the uncertain date of 1779 for document 2, provide some evidence for dating an island. they do not. it would be highly speculative to relate the paper in these documents to that used by blake to transcribe his satire.phillips describes an island as “largely fair copy” (5), while david v. erdman regards it as “obviously copied from an earlier draft, the most frequent revision being a second thought replacing a word just written down” (the complete poetry and prose of william blake, ed. david v. erdman, newly rev. ed. [new york: anchor-random house, 1988] 849). bentley points out that it might well have been written in various stages over a period of time (blake books 223), and phillips agrees with this as well. essick, however, questions why blake would have produced a fair copy before finishing the manuscript (rev. of an island in the moon, ed. michael phillips, huntington library quarterly 52.1 [winter 1989]: 141). considering how loosely structured an island is—in the lucianic tradition an end for dialogues or situations of this kind is extremely vague—and also the importance and number of unedited poems included by blake in the manuscript, i tend to agree with phillips and erdman that the satire is, for the most part, a transcription of previously drafted and edited material. first, the fact that the paper was produced in britain and used in the united states would have to be taken into account, and there seems to be no relevant scholarship on british exports of paper to the united states in the first years of the republic. more generally, as heawood remarks, the furnishing of watermarks and documents for dating purposes, whether the first are produced to date the second or vice versa, may barely provide conclusive evidence.the use of paper many years after it was produced is, of course, very common. blake himself, as bower points out, used paper that “was nearly thirty years old when [he] began working on john linnell’s commission to illustrate the divine comedy” (“the vivid surface: blake’s use of paper and board,” william blake: the painter at work, ed. joyce h. townsend [princeton: princeton university press, 2004] 59). finally, another source of information that ought to be considered in the future lies in works by blake catalogued as bearing marks possibly coincident with those in the satire. butlin, for instance, lists sixteen early works as marked “‘gr’ and coat of arms.”see butlin p. 627 and my appendix. that blake was frequently using laid paper of similar quality and size at this time can be seen in his tiriel (1789), where the countermark is an identical crowned gr, and the watermark also shares some prominent elements.see g. e. bentley, jr., ed., william blake: tiriel (oxford: clarendon press, 1967) 52-53. in tiriel, however, the crowned gr countermark has chain lines crossing at different points, and the watermark shares the same crown and garter, but with the figure of britannia instead of the royal arms. in sum, should dated paper of the same size and bearing the same watermark-countermark pairing as in blake’s an island be found, it might be possible to pursue further analysis. appendix: works catalogued in butlin as marked gr and coat of arms no. 12  countess aveline, side view of her tomb, c. 1775 no. 15  king sebert, the north front of his monument, c. 1775 no. 17  henry iii, from the wall-painting above the monument of king sebert, c. 1775 no. 25  queen eleanor, head and shoulders from her effigy, c. 1774 no. 26  edmund earl of lancaster, side view of his tomb, c. 1774–79 no. 27  edmund earl of lancaster, his effigy seen from above and detail of the painted trefoil in the centre pinnacle, c. 1774–79 no. 28  william de valence, side view of his tomb, c. 1777 no. 30  aymer de valence, side view of his tomb, c. 1774–79 no. 34  john of eltham, his effigy from above, 1777 no. 37  the children of edward iii, their effigies seen from above, c. 1777 no. 38  queen philippa, side view of her tomb, c. 1774 no. 40  queen philippa, head and shoulders from her effigy, c. 1774 no. 41  edward iii, side view of his tomb, c. 1774 no. 42  edward iii, his effigy seen from above, c. 1774 no. 45  richard ii and queen anne, their effigies on the tomb seen from above, c. 1774 no. 46  richard ii, head and shoulders from his effigy, c. 1774 review: poems of thomas gray with watercolour illustrations by william blake [folio society edition, 2013] shades of gray[poems of thomas gray with watercolour illustrations by william blake. london: folio society, 2013.]there is no separate title page; the title here is from the cover and the imprint is by inference. folio (32.4 x 42.2 cm.), 116 illustrations. limited to 1020 copies (1000 for sale). £495.00/$895.00 (plus p&p), hardcover. reviewed by g. e. bentley, jr. in 2014 g. e. bentley, jr., (gbentley@chass.utoronto.ca) published william blake in the desolate market (mcgill–queen’s university press) and essays in blake and notes and queries. in the press are the edwardses of halifax, 2 vols. (university of toronto press, expected in 2015) and essays in blake and notes and queries. “william blake and his circle” and “sale catalogues of blake’s works, 1791-2014” were significantly expanded online. colophon: “reproduced from the originals held at the yale center for british art … by dot gradations, wickford, essex, and printed by appl, wemding, germany, on [thick, heavy, unwatermarked] natural evolution paper. … bound by zanardi, padova, italy, in nigerian goatskin leather with cloth sides …; the endleaves are of curious metallics gold leaf backed with nettuno carruba.” the reproductions are housed in a fitted box (36.6 x 46.4 x 8.3 cm.) with irene tayler, blake’s illustrations to the poems of gray, ed. martin butlin (london: folio society, 2013). blake’s 116 enormous watercolors illustrating the poems by mr. gray (1790) were commissioned in 1797 by “my dearest friend” john flaxman as a gift for flaxman’s wife, nancy. the price was apparently £10.10.0g. e. bentley, jr., blake records, 2nd ed. (new haven: yale university press, 2004) [hereafter br(2)] 246. or 1s. 10d. per design. nancy flaxman may have shown the drawings to a few friends,the rev. joseph thomas asked to see them in 1805 (br[2] 207). and presumably they were visible when they were sold with flaxman’s collection at christie’s, 1 july 1828, lot 85 (£8.8.0), but none of blake’s contemporaries save the flaxmans is known to have seen them. they were rediscovered in 1919,h. j. c. grierson, “blake’s designs for gray. discovery in hamilton palace,” times 4 nov. 1919: 15. they were erratically recorded by w. m. rossetti in alexander gilchrist, life of william blake (1863) 2: 255 (114 designs) and (1880) 2: 275 (118 designs). and since then there have been a surprising number of reproductions of the whole series: 1922 william blake’s designs for gray’s poems, reproduced full-size in monochrome or colour [six designs] from the unique copy belonging to his grace the duke of hamilton. with an introduction by h. j. c. grierson. london, 1922. illustrations full size (37.5 x 50.5 cm.) in monochrome, bound, printed on both sides of the leaf, with pp. 56, [65], [83], 90, 97, and [149] duplicated in color, printed on one side only; 650 copies. 1971 irene tayler. blake’s illustrations to the poems of gray. princeton: princeton university press, 1971. illustrations in monochrome, greatly reduced in size. 1971 william blake’s water-colour designs for the poems of thomas gray. with an introduction and commentary by geoffrey keynes, kt. london, 1971; chicago and paris, 1972. “a commemorative catalogue to accompany the exhibition arranged by the william blake trust” (iv). the 116 designs are reproduced in black and white, mostly reduced to four to a page, plus nineteen large reproductions in color.see g. e. bentley, jr., “the accuracy of the blake trust gray catalogue,” blake 6.4 (spring 1973): 95-96 (comments on “some serious minor” falsifications in the catalogue reproductions); geoffrey keynes, “the blake trust gray catalogue and the blake trust facsimiles,” blake 7.3 (winter 1973-74): 64-66 (the gray catalogue was “hastily put together at the last moment, the color-plates being printed by a four-color offset process at another machine shop in paris,” not by the trianon press); bentley, “the accuracy of the blake [trust] reproductions,” blake 8.3 (winter 1974-75): 88-89 (keynes wrote that reproductions in the gray catalogue had “no pretentions to accuracy,” though the text did not say this). 1972 william blake’s water-colour designs for the poems of gray. introduction and commentary by geoffrey keynes, kt. london, 1972. william blake trust. illustrations full size (32.5 x 42.7 cm.), in color, not bound, printed on only one side of the leaf (not recto-verso as in the original); printed text leaves pasted on windows of leaves for the watercolors (no other edition attempts this); 518 copies. “it took about a month to obtain a satisfactory first proof of a single plate. … it took seven to nine weeks to apply the colors by hand …. to reproduce blake’s illustrations for gray’s poems … 18 craftsmen worked continuously for four years.”zoe ingalls, “the trianon press: a ‘triumph of enthusiasm over reason,’” chronicle of higher education 17 july 1991: b6-7, an account of the blake trust archive in santa cruz and the blake trust facsimiles. 1996 frank a. vaughan. again to the life of eternity: william blake’s illustrations to the poems of thomas gray. selinsgrove: susquehanna university press, 1996. 116 much-reduced designs in monochrome. 2000, 2007 blake’s water-colours for the poems of thomas gray with complete texts. mineola, ny: dover publications, 2000. 116 reproductions one-eighth the size of the blake trust reproductions (32 x 42 cm. vs. 9.2 x 16.4 cm.), which they are copying (a fact not mentioned in the text). 2005 blake’s watercolors for gray have been reproduced electronically in color in the william blake archive since 2005. 2012? the designs are reproduced electronically in color by the yale center for british art. which of these should be given the accolade of a true facsimile? i take facsimile to mean an exact copy attempting very close reproduction of an original named copy, including size of image, color of printing (and of tinting if relevant), and size, color, and quality of paper, with no deliberate alteration as in page order or numbering or obscuring of paper defects or centering the image on the page.this statement, or one very like it, appears in the annual checklists of “william blake and his circle” in blake (1994 ff.). this standard excludes the editions of 1922, 1971 (two), and 1996 because they are in monochrome, and those of 1971 (two), 1996, and 2000 because they are radically reduced in size. and there is no paper at all in the electronic versions of 2005 and 2012. this leaves only the blake trust edition (1972) and the folio society edition (2013). in the blake trust edition the reproductions are printed only on one side of the leaf, unlike the originals, which are printed on both recto and verso. the folio society differs from the original in not printing the inset printed text on paper different from the surrounding watercolors. in the color reproductions of 1922, 1972, and 2013, the outlines and the basic shapes seem identical. the chief differences are in the coloring.of course every copy of the blake trust edition (1972) differs from the others because it was hand finished by the colorists. presumably other copies differ from the victoria university copy i examined. but each copy of the grierson (1922) and folio society (2013) editions should be like every other copy of the same edition. comparison of color plates in grierson (1922) with the blake trust (1972) and folio society (2013) editions   blake trust (1972) folio society (2013) p. 56 darker, especially in the blue; paper whiter; yellow in 1922 is pale brown in 1972 the flesh of father thames is more pink p. [65] text paper much paler; vaults much less yellow vaults much less yellow; text paper paler p. [83] background pink (not in 1922); flowers at bottom left gray rather than brown; many other differences no pink in background; flowers at bottom left more gray than brown p. 90 stream of figures much less yellow; more shades of yellow on the top figure; ground at bottom much darker brown stream of figures much less yellow; more shades of yellow in top figure; orange shade in rainbow is much more intense; ground more yellow brown p. 97 beard much less yellow; leaves different shades of green; the branch over the arm is pink, not brown; the head at bottom right is much paler beard much less yellow; branch over arm pale brown, not dark brown; leaves at left more brown than green; head at bottom right much paler p. [149] sky is a much more vivid blue; church is brownish gray, not pale yellowish brown, and part of it is uncolored church partly uncolored (all pale yellowish brown in 1922); sky a much more vivid blue i conclude that none of these printed works is a facsimile. they can be compared in images with the excellent online color reproductions of the yale center for british art and the william blake archive, but these of course are intangible and give no sense of facing images, etc. of the three, the folio society edition seems to me distinctly the most reliable. the fidelity of the folio society reproductions is indicated by the show-through of printed text from the other side of the leaf. blake’s drawings are amazingly sure—there was no room for new leaves, no spit-backs. many of the designs represent stupendous figures such as “father thames” (p. 56), “the fury passions” (p. 58), “the painful family of death” (p. 60), “the bard” (p. [95]), and “hyperion” (p. 86) (see illus. 1). 1. “hyperion,” p. 86 (32.5 x 42 cm., much reduced here). “hyperion’s … glitt’ring ſhafts of war” anticipate the rout of the rebel angels (1807, 1808) for paradise lost book 6, in which christ in the sun with bow and arrow drives the rebel angels downward. notice that hyperion’s finger is not guiding the arrow. in the rout of the rebel angels (thomas and butts sets), the arrow is not guided by a finger, but in blake’s engraving of “gods and titans” for flaxman’s hesiod (1817), the bow-finger is correctly guiding the arrow. yale center for british art, paul mellon collection. among these titans are some charming vignettes, such as the flying builders of gothic churches (p. [65]) and “the laughing flowers” (p. [83]) (see illus. 2). 2. “the laughing flowers,” p. [83] (bottom left corner, 19 x 16.5 cm.). angelic figures collect water from “helicon’s harmonious ſprings” to nourish personified flowers. yale center for british art, paul mellon collection. the folio society edition is full of incidental delights. on p. [158], blake’s poem to nancy flaxman, across “william blake,” are four very clear brown fingerprints,fingerprints are formed from sweat from the endocrine glands or from ink or other viscous substances impressed from the friction ridges of fingers. dermatoglyphics, the systematic study of fingerprints, is a creation of the late nineteenth century. in 1858 sir william james herschel initiated the use of fingerprint records in india, and in mark twain’s life on the mississippi (1883) a killer is identified by his thumbprint. the fingerprints are clear in the blake trust and folio society editions but barely visible in that of grierson. they are clear but not commented on in the online reproductions of the william blake archive and the yale center for british art. see my discussion of blake’s fingerprints on text pages for gray in “william blake and his circle,” blake 48.1 (summer 2014): pars. 6-7 of the introductory essay and part i, section a, under inscriptions on designs. the right hand, i think, which are on top of the writing, after the writing ink had dried (see illus. 3). 3. four fingerprints vertically across “william blake” on blake’s poem to nancy flaxman, p. [158] (5.1 x 12.7 cm.). they are clearly on top of the writing. probably they are those of the poet. no other example of his fingerprint is known outside the gray designs. yale center for british art, paul mellon collection. the color of the fingerprints seems to derive from animal glue. if so, they almost certainly were added in the process of gluing the printed leaves of gray (1790) to the large leaves for blake’s watercolors. since the fingerprints are on top of blake’s poem, this suggests that the printed leaves were glued to the design leaves after the watercolors were finished. it is very probable that the fingerprints belong to william blake, but catherine is also a possibility. they make one feel very close to the artist. morton paley points out to me that even more interesting than the presence of these fingerprints may be their absence elsewhere. both painters and printers handle ink, and they frequently have inky fingers. why aren’t there more fingerprints on blake’s works? i guess that master engravers and painters were pretty severe with apprentices who left fingerprints. irene tayler. blake’s illustrations to the poems of gray. ed. with a new foreword by martin butlin. london: folio society, 2013. 15.6 x 27.8 cm., xiv, 210 pp., one reduced monochrome illustration, no isbn. published to accompany the folio society facsimile (2013). butlin, “foreword” (vii-x), says that he has altered the references to blake’s writings in the 1971 printing from the edition of geoffrey keynes to that of d. v. erdman and the references to contemporary texts to g. e. bentley, jr., blake records, 2nd ed. (2004), that he has given more accessible references to reproductions of blake’s art than in the 1971 edition, and that he has added footnotes signed “m.b.,” a “list of works cited” (203-05), and a “supplementary bibliography” (206-07). “irene tayler’s text is still the most satisfactory introduction to the subtleties of blake’s illustrations to the poems of gray” (ix). george romney and ozias humphry as collectors of william blake’s illuminated printing george romney and ozias humphry as collectors of william blake’s illuminated printing by morton d. paley morton paley (mpaley@berkeley.edu) is coediting the reception of william blake in europe. his current research is on george romney’s treatment of literary subjects. the importance of the artistsi am indebted to robert n. essick and to joseph viscomi for generously sharing their knowledge with me, and to sarah jones for her indispensable assistance. any errors are of course my own responsibility. george romney and ozias humphry as collectors of william blake in the mid-1790s has yet to be fully described and evaluated. although romney had told their mutual friend john flaxman that blake’s historical drawings “rank with those of ml. angelo,”letter from flaxman to william hayley, 26 april 1784. see g. e. bentley, jr., blake records, 2nd ed. (new haven: yale university press, 2004) 31. this book will be cited as br(2). his early acquisition of at least five (or four if the songs are counted as one book) illuminated books was unknown until 1989.see joseph viscomi, “the myth of commissioned illuminated books: george romney, isaac d’israeli, and ‘one hundred and sixty designs … of blake’s,’” blake 23.2 (fall 1989): 48-74. viscomi’s source is collection of pictures, reserved after the death of that celebrated and elegant painter romney, auction catalogue of messrs. christie, manson, and christie, friday and saturday, 9-10 may 1834. the sale included visions, america, urizen, and item 86x, “blake’s two volumes,” which refers, as viscomi shows, to the songs of innocence and of experience copy a. humphry’s role as a blake collector has long been known, but most scholarly attention has been on his later relations with blake, especially his obtaining for blake the commission for one of the last judgment drawings (national trust, petworth) and eliciting a detailed written description of it in 1808,see the complete poetry and prose of william blake, ed. david v. erdman, newly rev. ed. (new york: anchor-random house, 1988) 552-54. this edition will be cited as e, followed by page number. rather than on his importance to blake as a client earlier. humphry commissioned two sets of images, mostly from illuminated books: the eight folio-sized prints known as a large book of designs copy a, and a small book of designs copy a (comprising twenty-three prints); he also purchased america copy h, europe copy d, and copy h of songs.see bentley, blake books (oxford: clarendon press, 1977) pp. 103, 146, 159, 356-57, 384, and 416. this book will be cited as bb. bentley dates these purchases “about 1796.” see his “ozias humphry, william upcott, and william blake,” humanities association review 26 (1975): 120. songs copy h (maurice sendak foundation), consisting of songs of experience only, is characterized by viscomi as “one of four sets of beautifully color printed experience plates [made] while experience was still in progress” (e-mail communication). romney acquired america copy a, the [first] book of urizen copy b, visions of the daughters of albion copy f, songs copy a, and a copy of europe that has been identified as a.in an as yet unpublished paper (“blake’s printed paintings”) that he has kindly allowed me to read, viscomi argues in detail that romney owned seven of the “deluxe set” (eight in all) of blake’s illuminated books. the case is especially strong for europe (a), since, as viscomi demonstrates from physical evidence, it was produced as one of a pair with romney’s america (a). taken together, the two artists’ purchases compose a substantial portion of blake’s known sales of illuminated books and associated material in the period from his initial prospectus “to the public” (e 692-93), dated 10 october 1793, to 1796. romney and humphry had been associated since the early parts of their respective careers in london. each exhibited regularly at the society of artists/free society of artistsromney exhibited at the free society of artists from 1763 to 1769 and at the society of artists from 1770 to 1772; humphry exhibited at the society of artists from 1765 to 1771. see algernon graves, the society of artists of great britain 1760–1791, the free society of artists 1761–1783 (london: george bell, 1907) 217-18, 125. and each sketched in the duke of richmond’s sculpture gallery in whitehall. they painted each other’s portraits. romney showed his friend in profile as a pensive-looking man holding a book to his chest, with one finger inserted to mark his place. this was to become the best-known image of ozias humphry: it was exhibited at the society of artists in 1772, engraved by valentine green (illus. 1) that same year, and again engraved by caroline watson in 1784.family collection, knole. humphry also took romney’s portrait (knole, family collection). for this information i am grateful to valerie porter, estate office secretary at knole. 1. mezzotint of ozias humphry by valentine green after george romney (1772). 45.2 x 32.7 cm. © trustees of the british museum. 1886,0617.76. in 1773 they traveled to italy together, first stopping at knole, the estate of humphry’s patron, john frederick sackville, third duke of dorset. once in italy, humphry and romney lived and traveled independently. humphry later characterized romney during this time as “a man of uncommon concealment; in no way communicative.”joseph farington, the diary of joseph farington, ed. kenneth garlick, angus macintyre, and kathryn cave, 16 vols., plus index by evelyn newby (new haven: yale university press, 1978–98) 28 august 1803, 6: 2117. there was some truth in this: whether in london or abroad, romney tended to keep his distance from other artists,see david a. cross, a striking likeness: the life of george romney (aldershot: ashgate, 2000) 52. and he sometimes resisted showing his works-in-progress, perhaps because his supersensitive nature could make him abandon a painting after a disapproving word from a visitor. romney left italy in 1775, and humphry stayed on until 1777. after romney’s return to london, he wrote to humphry, recounting his trip to venice en route home, telling him about the titians he saw there, and informing him of henry fuseli’s exhibition at the society of artists. this does not suggest a man who considered himself estranged from his correspondent. for humphry’s part, although he received letters calculated to make him envy romney, he did not rise to the bait. the gossipy watercolorist joshua (joe) green, remarking on romney’s success in london, urged humphry to surpass him, asking, “do you think you can spin the flax off romney’s distaff?”10 december 1776, royal academy, ozias humphry papers, hu/2/47. evidently humphry expressed his annoyance with such innuendo, because in a later letter green expostulated that he had not intended “to make jealous rivals” of “two friends.”14 february 1777, royal academy, ozias humphry papers, hu/2/52. the incorrigible green then continued, “as to r --, he keeps himself so much to himself that it would be a work of great difficulty to make an enemy of him ….” as blake wrote, “the poison of the honey bee / is the artists jealousy” (“auguries of innocence” 49-50, e 491). however, romney and humphry do not appear to have resumed close relations in london. one reason may have been the difference in their fortunes. they had been more or less equals when they went to italy, but once back in london, romney flourished, while humphry, whose eyesight was failing as a result of injuries caused by a fall from a horse, was hindered in his career as a miniaturist. consequently, he attempted portraits in oil, a mode in which he could never hope to rival romney, and, with greater success, in pastel. in 1779 humphry exhibited at the royal academy, an institution from which romney had deliberately excluded himself, and was made an associate that year. in hopes of making his fortune as a miniaturist in india, he went there in 1785, only to return disappointed in 1787.see john brewer, the pleasures of the imagination: english culture in the eighteenth century (new york: farrar, straus and giroux, 1997) 316-17. he was, however, elected a full academician in 1791, and was appointed portrait painter in crayons to the king in 1792. after sir joshua reynolds’s death in 1792, romney succeeded him as the most sought-after portraitist in london. according to the famous wit and talker richard “conversation” sharp, romney was worth £50,000 in 1795.farington, diary, 8 december 1795, 2: 432. in 1793, despite the setbacks caused by the deterioration of his eyesight, humphry took a house in old bond street at an annual rent of 200 guineas,farington, diary, 18 october 1793, 1: 72. a considerable sum that may have strained his finances. farington says that around that year humphry asked romney to lend him £200, and that romney refused.farington, diary, 4 january 1797, 3: 738. farington condemned romney’s “peevishness” toward humphry. he got this story from nathaniel marchant, a highly successful gem engraver, who had advised romney and humphry on what route to take on their italian journey. romney was well known for his liberality; after his death, flaxman praised romney’s generosity to him when a young sculptor and to others as well, writing, “i have seen him frequently relieve distress with a princely generosity.”romney collection: typescript, morgan library and museum, call no. 917 r76, record id 288571. however, in the mid-1790s humphry’s behavior was at times unsettled and erratic.see brewer 309-10. on 31 july 1796 farington reported that humphry had offended his patrons, the duke and duchess of dorset: humphry is quite out of favor at knowle. he went to knowle when the duke was not there … and took possession of a room without previously shewing a proper attention to the duchess. … the duke is equally disgusted on some account. one charge is that he painted copies of portraits at knowle, & demanded payment for them as having been ordered by the duchess, which she denied. (diary 2: 624) he also enraged his friend (up to then) sir george yonge, when, after being introduced by yonge to the prince and princess of orange, he offered to paint their portraits as gifts, then billed the royal couple for them.see neil jeffares, dictionary of pastellists before 1800 <http://​www.​pastellists.​com/​articles/​humphry.​pdf>. richard cumberland later characterized romney as “a man of a most gentle temper, with most irritable nerves.”richard cumberland, “memoirs of mr. george romney,” european magazine 43 (june 1803): 423 [417-23]. if humphry asked for a loan in a manner that offended, romney’s most irritable nerves may have overcome his princely generosity. if romney indeed refused to lend humphry money, it seems unlikely that they were on terms that would have allowed them to visit blake together. each, as we will see, had to come at least twice, and each almost certainly did so without the other. how did they learn of blake’s works? it is possible that one or both of them came across blake’s 1793 prospectus or saw illuminated books displayed in the shop of the publisher and bookseller joseph johnson in 1794.for confirmation that johnson exhibited some of blake’s illuminated books in 1794, see keri davies, “mrs. bliss: a blake collector of 1794,” blake in the nineties, ed. steve clark and david worrall (new york: st. martin’s press, 1999) 216-17. also, there was a network of communication connecting these artists with their contemporaries. in this instance, the link is likely to have been flaxman, who had been close to blake for a long time. not long after flaxman’s return from italy, in october 1794,see david irwin, john flaxman 1755–1826: sculptor, illustrator, designer (london: studio vista, 1979) 53. he bought a copy of songs of experience from blake (later combined with a copy of innocence to form copy o of songs of innocence and of experience), and he would have known what blake had on offer.flaxman may have purchased much more than that. in their sale catalogue of 25 june 1862, willis and sotheran advertised “a volume of extreme rarity, from the library of john flaxman, the sculptor, with his autograph,” comprising america, europe, visions of the daughters of albion, the book of thel, and the first book of urizen, “5 vols. 4to. in one, half calf, £21.10s.” none of these has ever been located. they were again advertised by willis and sotheran in their catalogue of 25 december 1862. if these identifications are correct, flaxman’s blake collection rivaled romney’s and humphry’s. see bentley, “sale catalogues of blake’s works: 1791–2013,” <http://​library.​vicu.​utoronto.​ca/​collections/​special_​collections/​bentley_​blake_​collection/​sale_catalogue/​1800.html>. flaxman and romney remained close until the end of romney’s life: romney painted john flaxman modeling the bust of william hayley (yale center for british art) in 1795, and flaxman wrote the section about romney’s art in hayley’s life of george romney.william hayley, the life of george romney, esq. (london: t. payne, 1809) 305-13. after flaxman’s return from italy, he and romney were neighbors as well as friends.see arthur b. chamberlain, george romney (new york: charles scribner’s sons, 1910) 195-96. the house flaxman took after his return was at 6 buckingham street, fitzroy square. romney lived at 37 cavendish square. humphry was said to consider flaxman “the greatest sculptor that had ever lived,” and, when challenged on this by the sculptor joseph nollekens, refused to retract his statement.john thomas smith, nollekens and his times (london: henry colburn, 1828) 2: 365. nollekens, according to smith, accused humphry of “coddling close to him [flaxman] at the councils” (presumably of the royal academy of arts). humphry drew a fine, sensitive pastel portrait of flaxman (lady lever art gallery) in 1796. blake’s first biographer, alexander gilchrist, wrote, with reference to the songs, “flaxman recommended more than one friend to take copies.”alexander gilchrist, life of william blake, “pictor ignotus” (london: macmillan, 1863) 1: 124. blake evidently did not consider himself in need when he issued his prospectus of 1793, in which he had declared, “no subscriptions for the numerous great works now in hand are asked, for none are wanted” (“to the public,” e 693). in 1795 he was engaged in the illustrations for edward young’s night thoughts, a project for which he had great hopes and on which he expended tremendous energy, producing 537 watercolors and 43 engravings from 1795 through 1797. for the drawings he accepted the very low price of twenty guineas, no doubt on the expectation that his profit would come from the plates that he would engrave. there had then been no suspicion that in the end only the first part of the edition would be published, in 1797, and that it would be a commercial failure. there is no record of blake’s being paid for the plates before richard edwards went out of business the following year.bentley suggests that blake may have been paid in copies of night thoughts that he and his wife could color and sell (william blake in the desolate market [montreal: mcgill-queen’s university press, 2014] 49-50). as blake’s primary source of income was engraving, this meant the loss of a large sum that he expected to receive by 1797, not to mention his expectations for the future volumes, which would have left a considerable vacuum in his finances. by 15 august 1797 one of his customers, dr. james curry, could write to humphry, “as poor blake will not be out of need of money, i shall beg you to pay him for me, and to take the trouble when you return to town of having a box made for the prints ….”see bentley, “dr. james curry as a patron of blake,” notes and queries 27.1 (1980): 71-73. (although “the prints” are not named here, it is likely that one of them was the second impression of the first state of “albion rose,”see essick, the separate plates of william blake: a catalogue (princeton: princeton university press, 1983) 25. of which humphry owned the first impression.) romney and humphry genuinely admired blake’s work, but their purchases may also have been meant to help him financially. of the ten works blake advertised in 1793, six are designated as “in illuminated printing”: america, a prophecy, visions of the daughters of albion, the book of thel, the marriage of heaven and hell, songs of innocence, and songs of experience. of these titles, romney took copies of america, visions, and the combined songs, all of them later copies than those available in 1793. he also purchased two books that had first been created as recently as 1794: europe and the [first] book of urizen. humphry also took a copy of europe, copy d, as well as america (h) and songs (h). he probably owned these before he commissioned a large book of designs (a) and a small book of designs (a) no later than 1796, the year inscribed on an impression from urizen in copy b of the small book, which, as viscomi points out, was probably produced in the same printing session as copy a.it is likely that humphry owned the illuminated books before commissioning the two books of designs, since duplication of plates he already owned was avoided. see bentley, bb p. 356n1 and viscomi, “the myth of commissioned illuminated books” 62. the fact that romney’s and humphry’s choices overlapped in at least three instances (america, songs of experience, and europe) suggests that there was no prior agreement as to which works would be bought by each, and, as will be seen, their tastes were very different as far as blake’s productions were concerned. one further question concerning humphry must be answered. why would a man who was going blind buy and even commission works of art? it is true that more than a decade later, after his sight is supposed to have failed entirely, humphry caused blake to write a detailed account of the version of the last judgment commissioned by the countess of egremont. this was an act of friendship—the picture, blake wrote to humphry, “but for you might have slept till the last judgment.”written in 1808 at the end of blake’s description (e 554). humphry also owned a copy, annotated by blake, of the leaflet advertising blake’s exhibition of 1809. see essick, the works of william blake in the huntington collections: a complete catalogue (san marino, ca: huntington library, art collections, botanical gardens, 1985) 179-80. however, in 1796, when he praised blake’s designs to farington,his admiration was expressed in a conversation noted by farington on 19 february 1796: “west, cosway & humphry spoke warmly in favour of the designs of blake the engraver, as works of extraordinary genius & imagination. smirke differed in opinion, from what he had seen, so do i” (farington, diary 2: 497). humphry was still sufficiently sighted both to enjoy and to make art. he had exhibited nine works at the royal academy exhibition the previous year,see graves, the royal academy of arts: a complete dictionary of contributors and their work from its foundation in 1769 to 1904, 8 vols. (london: h. graves, 1905–06) 4: 194. one of them the striking pastel portrait baron nagell’s running footman (tate britain), and he may have thought his eye problem was in remission.professor kenneth polse of the school of optometry, university of california, berkeley, suggests (e-mail communication) that optical damage from a riding accident was likely to be to the cerebral cortex rather than to the eyes themselves. in humphry’s time, such brain damage would have been far beyond the capacity of surgery to cure or ameliorate. unfortunately, his crayon portraits of the prince and princess of orange, shown at the royal academy in 1797,see george c. williamson, life and works of ozias humphry, r.a. (london: john lane, 1918) 5. were among the last pictures he exhibited. in order to make their purchases, blake’s clients had to visit him, as the works were, in the words of “to the public,” “on sale at mr. blake’s, no. 13, hercules buildings, lambeth” (e 692). if, as viscomi argues, humphry bought his three illuminated books on different occasions,viscomi, “blake’s printed paintings.” he may have visited blake five times, as he also ordered the plates that he wanted blake to color print without texts. he would then have returned to pay blake for them, and to take them away. romney, in order to commission his watercolored copy of urizen, must first have seen a color-printed one at blake’s, as all the other copies of this period are color printed. all this suggests more customer traffic at hercules buildings in the mid-1790s than is sometimes supposed. ❧ what were the interests of romney and of humphry as collectors? although they obviously shared considerable common ground in desiring to own blake’s works, in some respects their preferences were very different. the nature of their entire collections is an indication of this. romney’s collection was sold in a series of auctions that took place from a year before his death to 1894.for dates and locales of sales and titles of catalogues, see frits lugt, répertoire des catalogues de ventes publiques (leiden: idc publishers, 2004–) <http://​lugt.​idcpublishers.​info>. sold first, at christie’s on 18 may 1801, were his casts of antique sculpture.a catalogue of the capital collection of casts from the antique: among which are the apollo of belvidere; castor and pollux, and the laocoon; a very fine skeleton; various basso relievos, busts, and fragments, being the entire collection of that celebrated artist, george romney, esq. at his late residence, holybush hill, hampstead. romney had accumulated these, largely with the help of flaxman, for the benefit of the art students who would come to his house in hampstead to sketch, just as he himself had sketched in the duke of richmond’s cast gallery early in his career. romney’s paintings, drawings, and prints were sold at six subsequent sales. the philipe sale of 22-23 may 1805 (lugt 6955), comprising 228 prints, 13 books of prints, and 24 portfolios, was entirely devoted to the graphic art. there were drawings ascribed to giulio romano, rembrandt, rubens, and parmigianino, and prints by marcantonio raimondi (over 100), rembrandt (116), dürer (27 “wooden prints” and 16 engravings), piranesi, bonasone, aldegrever, mantegna, earlom, and john hamilton mortimer. the christie’s sale of 27 april 1807 (lugt 7230) included some oil sketches romney had made after raphael, titian, barocci, and other masters, “a pietà by caravaggio, original and fine” (bought by the dealer michael bryan for £6.16.6), and some of romney’s own paintings. a number of unsold items were again offered at christie’s on 29 june 1810 (lugt 7823). romney’s mrs. [perdita] robinson (wallace collection) was then bought by the marquess of hertford for 20 guineas,see alex kidson, george romney: a complete catalogue of his paintings, 3 vols. (new haven: yale university press, 2015) 2: 495. and newton and the prism by william chamberlayne, an ancestor of romney’s future biographer, for £31.10.see kidson, george romney: a complete catalogue of his paintings 3: 822. for the price, see the getty provenance index. the reference is to arthur b. chamberlain (see note 24). (it is reportedly still in the possession of the chamberlayne family.) the philipe sale of 22-23 may 1825 (lugt 10898) was, like the 1805 one, principally of prints—240 of them—plus 6 drawings and 24 “various.” the sale of the collection of john romney, the artist’s son, in may 1834 featured important paintings that had been bought in at previous auctions, some of which were again bought in at this one. what is most important to us about this sale, however, is that, as viscomi discovered, it included some of blake’s illuminated books. last, at the elizabeth romney sale (lugt 52642) at christie’s on 24-25 may 1894, 57 paintings were listed, 26 drawings, 65 prints, 4 miniatures, some autographs, 46 books, and 8 “various”—a total of 207 items. as we can see, as a collector romney was primarily interested in prints. most of the paintings and drawings he owned were by himself, either sketches made for his own use or paintings that for one reason or another had not been sold, not been paid for, or not delivered. in contrast, his print holdings were both extensive and diverse. unfortunately, the catalogues are uninformative about individual prints, but it is striking that, in addition to mainstream printmakers like marcantonio raimondi and rembrandt, romney shared with blake an interest in less avidly collected engravers like bonasone, dürer, aldegrever, and mantegna. in the first prospectus for his “canterbury pilgrims” engraving, blake aligned himself with “albert durer, lucas, hisben [hans sebald beham], aldegrave and the old original engravers, who were great masters in painting and designing” (e 567). blake also showed a friend george cumberland’s book on bonasone in 1800,letter to cumberland, 1 september 1800 (see br[2] 96). cumberland’s some anecdotes of the life of julio bonasoni, a bolognese artist was published by g. g. j. and j. robinson in 1793. and, although he does not mention mantegna, it has been authoritatively stated that “blake takes us very close, indeed, to an understanding of the hard, lapidary, intellectually complex and high-minded, demanding world of mantegna and his insistence on the ‘wirey line of rectitude.’”keith christiansen, the genius of andrea mantegna (new york: metropolitan museum of art, 2009) 46. the quotation is from blake’s descriptive catalogue, e 550. as far as affinity with blake as an artist is concerned, romney, at times a linearist himself (as in his great drawings at liverpool),see kidson, george romney 1734–1802 (princeton: princeton university press, 2002) 118-37. was clearly interested in blake’s “hard and wirey line of rectitude and certainty.” the back-and-forth aspect of the two artists’ work was noted as early as 1906: an india-ink drawing … entitled “har and heva bathing: mnetha looking on” (one of a set of twelve illustrations to his own poem “tiriel”), is a good example of the romney influence, which is clearly distinguishable in the curves of the figures, in the breadth of the light effects, and in the character of the forest background; and from the designs of the latter from “shakespeare” and “milton” it is sufficiently clear that the gain was not on blake’s side alone.archibald g. b. russell, ed., the letters of william blake together with a life by frederick tatham (london: methuen, 1906) xxii-xxiii. subsequent scholarship has made us all the more aware of affinities between blake and romney. arguing from strong circumstantial evidence, jean h. hagstrum asserts that in the late 1780s and early 1790s blake knew romney’s drawings, and that “a linear and thematic stamp from romney is visible on blake’s works from the early tiriel to the very late dante illustrations.”jean h. hagstrum, “romney and blake: gifts of grace and terror,” blake in his time, ed. essick and donald pearce (bloomington: indiana university press, 1978) 208-09 [quotation from 208]. considering romney as both a collector and an artist, it is not surprising that he responded so positively to blake. humphry was a different kind of collector, if, indeed, he can be called a collector at all. his works of art, some of which were sold at christie’s on 29 june 1810, fall into several groups.lugt 7823. humphry’s son, william upcott, made a manuscript catalogue of his father’s pictures (british library add ms 49682). the contents of these sources are not identical, partly because upcott kept some items, such as the blakes. some are oil copies that he did in italy of paintings by, among others, michelangelo, raphael, titian, and rubens. there are also some oil copies after british artists, including reynolds and samuel collins (the bath miniaturist who taught humphry). his original paintings by other artists include view of dover castle by his friend william hodges; diana and callisto attributed to domenichino; a portrait of anna sophia herbert, countess of carnarvon, attributed to anthony van dyck; a head of christ attributed to fra bartolomeo; what is characterized as “a repetition picture” of pope paul iii by titian; and a striking oil portrait of humphry himself (wadsworth atheneum) painted in 1784 by gilbert stuart. (he also acquired james barry’s chiron and achilles by 1808, but here he appears to have acted as a middleman for david steuart erskine, earl of buchan, who owned it by 1809.)see williamson, life and works of ozias humphry 203-04. this painting, now entitled the education of achilles, is at the yale center for british art. among his own paintings appear the ambitious double portrait the ladies waldegrave (which was to become the object of a lawsuit after its sale as by romney in the early twentieth century) and portrait of lady affleck, wife of admiral affleck, habited as a greek. humphry’s “crayon portraits, not framed” include warren hastings, william pitt, and two of benjamin west. among the subjects of “crayon portraits, framed and glazed” are samuel johnson, the prince of orange, and the princess of orange. baron nagell’s running footman was kept by upcott and auctioned in 1846. among miniatures are portraits of charles stuart, the pretender (done in italy), richard brinsley sheridan, and hastings. the reason for humphry’s owning some portraits that he had painted may be that he wanted to keep versions of images already sold, or that he produced more copies of a portrait than could be sold.there are, for example, at least two examples of the stuart portrait in private collections. see <http://​www.​npg.​org.​uk/​collections/​explore/​by-​publication/​kerslake/​early-​georgian-​portraits-​catalogue-​charles.​php>. also, some portraits were never paid for, such as those of the prince and princess of orange, and therefore never delivered. humphry also owned ninety or so engravings, many of them after his own portraits, and some after others. however, it should be mentioned that our two sources of information are not complete. for example, humphry’s engraving by johann gottfried haid after nathaniel dance, “the death of virginia” (british museum 1873,0809.235), published by henry parker in 1767, is to be found neither in the 1810 sale catalogue nor in upcott’s manuscript list. the same may be said of his blake holdings, none of which, including the very rare moore & co. engraving (british museum 1868,0711.439), appears in either source, although we know that upcott retained his father’s illuminated books and also owned “four drawings, by blake.”upcott sale, no. 91, sold for five shillings (evans, 25 june 1846). the drawings have yet to be identified and located. humphry also owned hodges’s select views in india (1786–87), comprising forty-eight aquatints, given him by the artist. it is possible that humphry’s print collection was more extensive than previously thought. for the most part, however, the art owned by him was, unlike romney’s, largely connected with his own career and professional interests. ❧ with this background in mind, we may consider the choices that the two artists made from among blake’s works. romney’s america (a) (morgan library) is relief etched and hand colored, with white-line etching on some plates, as is its companion, europe (a) (yale center for british art). his visions (f) (morgan library) is relief etched and color printed with hand coloring, with white-line etching on one plate, while songs (a) (british museum) is relief and white-line etched, with hand coloring. his magnificent urizen (b) (morgan library) is so intensely watercolored that its medium has been mistaken for color printing. it is not their media that distinguish these works as a group, but their superlative quality. his copies of america, songs, europe, and urizen belonged to a deluxe large-paper, recto-only edition of all blake’s illuminated books through 1794. visions (f) was not part of the deluxe set, although printed recto only on relatively large paper. it may be that someone else bought the deluxe visions (g) before romney had the opportunity to do so. copy a of the songs, partly because of the beauty and subtlety of its coloring and partly because of the quality and size of its paper, is one of the most splendid. it comprises fifty leaves. compared to the size of the images, which typically measure 11 x 7 cm., the paper size is enormous, 38 x 27.1 cm.for this copy the leaf size is from bentley, bb p. 367, verified by my own measurements. (although bentley gives width first, i give height first, as is the norm.) the image size is my own measurement. one might think that blake’s relatively small prints would appear lost on the folio-sized leaves, but actually the opposite is true. the surrounding white space acts as a foil to the gemlike designs, seeming to funnel the eye into them. the coloring, applied by hand to the relief-etched print, is remarkably subtle, perhaps most so in its blues and greens. sometimes this involves an independent effect, like the strikingly blue-clad angel in the right margin of “the little boy found” or the greenery that entirely surrounds the text in the first plate of “a cradle song” and extends horizontally into it to divide the stanzas. more often it is a matter of combinations. in the “introduction” to innocence, for example, all the figures in the panels formed by the bright-green vines are seen against pale-blue backgrounds. green dominates the top half of the first plate of “the ecchoing green,” with its luxuriant leafage above and light-blue background, on which float green tendrils, below. jesus in the second plate of “the little black boy” sits under a blue sky with his feet on the green earth and a tree’s green leaves bending over him. rich greenery fills the right side of the second plate of “night,” almost touching the shrubs that stand in the background against a pale-blue sky; of the five figures walking on the greensward, two are clad in a darker blue. this is not to say that equally beautiful color combinations do not occur in other copies of the songs; rather, in copy a the blues and greens of innocence cumulatively create a mellifluous, cool effect that evidently appealed to romney’s painterly eye. we would not expect to encounter such harmony in experience. there is a remarkable range of colors in the designs, from the palely tinted garments of the title page to the sky, part bright yellow, part deep blue, of “the fly.” in the frontispiece deep-blue hills stand against a rich yellow-to-reddish sky. similarly colored hills and skies appear in “holy thursday” and “a poison tree,” the dead body in each belying the beauty of these backgrounds. yellow turns up in unexpected places, such as the clouds on which the text of the “introduction” is written and the skies of “the angel.” only “the chimney sweeper” image mirrors its text: the black cloud matches the color of the boy’s clothing and bag of equipment, the surrounding snow his white face. romney’s copy (f) of visions of the daughters of albion was one of fifteen or sixteencopy q is known only from a sales catalogue listing of 1897 (bb p. 477). produced by blake from 1793 to 1796. unfortunately, very little is known about the dates at which the others were originally sold or who bought them, other than that blake’s close friend cumberland obtained copy b (british museum), presumably early on. h. i. reveley acquired copy c (glasgow university library) at an unknown date but probably early as well,see bb p. 473. bentley plausibly conjectures that h. i. reveley may have been a relative of willey reveley, with whom blake corresponded in october 1791 and who commissioned blake to engrave plates after drawings by william pars for volume 3 of the antiquities of athens (see e 699). if that is so, h. i. reveley is likely to have been an early purchaser. and the bibliophile thomas dibdin owned copy g (houghton library, harvard university) by 1816. visions (f) is the only illuminated book owned by romney that was not part of the deluxe set. it is nevertheless printed on very large paper, all but one leaf measuring 38.2 x 27 cm., and with generous margins (bottom 12.27 cm., top 7.78 cm., left side 8 cm., right side 7.3 cm.). the leaves are printed on one side only, as in deluxe copy g, but not in copies a-e or h-m.see bb pp. 466-67, according to which the only copies in addition to f and g that were printed on only one side are n, o, p (all c. 1818, printed on paper watermarked 1815), and q. the coloring is extraordinarily dramatic—only in copy g does the intensity of coloring even approach that of f. the frontispiece is very dark, so dark that the orb seen in a break in the clouds might be the moon rather than the sun, were it not for a ruddy glow around it. in contrast, some areas of the title page are very bright, with deep-red color printing suggesting a fiery heart behind the fleeing figure of oothoon, and a wash of rainbow-like colors going diagonally across most of the design. however, the background, exposed to the right and lower left, is inky black. plate 3,for the illuminated books, i use bentley numbers. where there are etched or penned blake numbers, i give blake numbers with bentley numbers in brackets (if the blake and bentley numerals are the same, only one is given). “the argument,” has vivid bands of primary color—yellow, red, violet, and blue—streaming from the ground with the reticulated, grainy texture imparted by color printing. of special interest in this regard are plates in which the beauty of the color printing and watercolor sharply contrasts with the agony of the scenes: the golden ground on which naked victims lie at the bottom of plate 4 and the horizontal band showing a dying slave near the middle of plate 2 [5] (illus. 2). 2. blake, visions of the daughters of albion copy f (printed c. 1794), pl. 2 [5]. 17.1 x 11.7 cm. reproduced by permission of the morgan library and museum. pml 63138. image courtesy of the william blake archive. in plate 6 an eagle attacks oothoon, lying like a female prometheus on a white cloud in a cerulean sky. in 7 oothoon, chained by one leg, implores a theotormon hunched in despair against a golden sunset sky. heavenly suffering returns in plate 9; this time it is theotormon on a cloud in a sky of beautiful blue hues, flagellating himself as oothoon buries her face in her hands. that romney would not have been put off by such subject matter we know from his numerous drawings featuring the reformer john howard among prisoners and the insane,see, for example, john howard visiting a prison (morgan library) and john howard visiting a lazaretto (abbot hall, kendal). some of which are at least as disturbing. in fact, romney’s almost obsessive interest in depicting suffering victims in such drawings suggests that, if anything, the anguish of the figures in almost every plate of visions may have attracted him all the more. the william blake archive describes romney’s america (a) as “relief etching, with hand coloring and extensive white-line etching on plates 1, 8, 10, 11, and 15,” adding that “most other plates bear at least touches of white-line etching/engraving.” its colored state puts it in the minority of the copies of america (the other known colored copies are k, m, and o).see d. w. dörrbecker, ed., william blake: the continental prophecies (princeton: princeton university press/william blake trust/tate gallery, 1995) 77. the tally here does not include copy r. robert n. essick informs me (e-mail communication) that copy r, sold at christie’s new york on 13 nov. 1987, lot 46, is uncolored. blake liked copy a enough to use it as a model (or to have catherine blake so use it) for the hand coloring of copy k (beinecke library, yale university). it may be that romney first saw copy a uncolored and asked blake to color it as a companion for his europe, or simply because he preferred color to monochrome, or both. the colors are at times very striking indeed. in the frontispiece, the wings, hair, and legs of the chained giant figure are yellow, as are the woman’s hair and left thigh and parts of the damaged structure to our right. this may be meant as an effect of the setting sun (imagined as behind the viewer), which also touches the black clouds, giving them rosy outlines against the black sky. yellow appears again in the reading female and child of the next plate, but the dominant color here is blue—the color of the reading male, of the lower part of the cloud on which both he and the female sit, and of the dress of the woman who is vainly trying to revive a supine man with the kiss of life. in the first page of text, intense blues and greens are the predominant colors. a naked man and woman stand against the sky on a green hummock, displaying gestures of grief and horror at the sight of a boy chained on the ground (these are or will become los, enitharmon, and orc, whose narrative is not given here but in night the fifth of the four zoas). next, against a sky washed blue the unchained boy pushes himself out of the ground, his flesh color contrasting with the gray earth around him. facing a yellow sun, he rises next to a grape vine with two enormous green leaves. the pink and blue sky remains in plate 3 [5], with a male figure, trailing chains, floating upward. enormous reddish flames emerge at the center from a huge trumpet blown by another male figure, while at the lower left a man, a woman, and a child run on the green earth, against a bright-yellow background, from the red flames behind them. the three refugees reappear at the lower right of plate 4 [6] beneath blue clouds tinged with green and rose. in the foreground is a bright-green hummock that in some other colored copies, o, for example, is gray, differentiated in color from the ground and appearing to be a sea creature (an orca?) with two pairs of flippers and no visible head. white is used both for the child and for the bearded old man (urizen?)erdman identifies the falling figure as george iii and suggests that the design relates to the text of cancelled plate b. see the illuminated blake (1974; new york: dover, 1992) 142. diving down the left margin, pursued by a green, winged dragon-serpent with human hands. two blues color the sky of plate 5 [7], one a bright azure, the other tinged with gray shading downward to almost black. the figures are defined especially sharply in black ink. in plate 6 [8] the newly resurrected man sits on a bright-green hummock and the green earth again appears, with a green-leaved knapweed, at the bottom of the plate. (erdman suggests that the knapweed is “harmless,”see erdman, the illuminated blake 144. but in fact it is an aggressive invader of environments, and some species are poisonous. as ever, blake is conscious of the two faces of the natural world.) a striking example of how design can relate to text is plate 7 [9], where the herod-like fulminations of albions angel are contrasted with an edenic scene in which birds of paradise sit on a birch tree and two naked children sleep on the green earth beside a sleeping ram. the sky is awash with colors—from left to right violet, blue, yellow (becoming very intense above the sleepers), pale blue, and a darker blue. greenish-yellow blue, forming the cloud mass against which the text appears, is almost the only coloring in plate 8 [10], except for the heightening of urizen’s paleness with white on his right knee, arms, and the lower edge of his garment, associating him with the white crests of the waves below. the white-line etching that forms the basis of the cloud masses in most copies becomes secondary here. yellowish wheat bends over a child whose rigidity suggests death in plate 9 [11]. green-leaved flowers among the wheat have been variously identified, but the fact that they are there at all, symbols of hope, is what is important. they are much more noticeable in color. the naked figure of orc in plate 10 [12] is entirely surrounded by flames, which he seems to be orchestrating with his outstretched arms. a reddish flame that crosses his upper body has been, as the blake archive editors point out, added in watercolor. it connects with a flame, barely noticeable in the monochrome copies, licking up over the figure’s left shoulder. the fire that fills much of the plate is red, black, and yellow, the text appears in a violet-to-rose background, and the youth’s curly hair is touched with yellow. whether intentionally or not, the coloring gives the conflagration a massive solidity. the main difference that color makes in plate 11 [13] is the beautifully variegated deep blue and yellow of the serpent at the bottom. the child riders are flesh colored. as richard thomson recognized, the bent-over, bearded patriarch with a stick, seen entering an archaic-looking, mausoleum-like structure in plate 12 [14], is “another instance of mr. blake’s favourite figure of the old man entering at death’s door.”smith, nollekens and his times 2: 477. thomson previously commented on the image of the old man in “london” as “a favourite one with him [blake],” and his use of the expression “death’s door” suggests he had seen luigi schiavonetti’s engraving “death’s door” after blake in either the 1808 or the 1813 edition of the grave by robert blair. on thomson, see par. 33. the nude figures at the top and bottom of plate 13 [15] (illus. 3) are colored greenish gray, and the whole text washed blue green. the eagle perched on the upper, female body is tinged with bright yellow. blake’s use of white line for both the surface and the depths of the ocean is very striking. thomson singled this plate out as “a very fine specimen” of blake’s success in depicting water.smith, nollekens and his times 2: 477. 3. blake, america copy a (printed 1795), pl. 13 [15]. 23.6 x 17.4 cm. reproduced by permission of the morgan library and museum. pml 16134. image courtesy of the william blake archive. in plate 14 [16] the background of the text is blue, as are the clouds that form the background of the central image. the worshipful youth’s garment is green, and a patch of greensward lies beneath him. his expression is not as fearful as it is in copy h and other uncolored copies. flames colored similarly to those in plate 10 [12] fill the lower margin of plate 15 [17], with flesh color, and in one instance green, added to the naked women who “feel the nerves of youth renew, and desires of ancient times” (line 25). the grape leaf at our left is bright green, but the dark bunch of grapes below it is partially obscured by black flame. in 16 [18], the final plate, some blue is added to the white beard of the kneeling giant to make clear that it turns into a waterfall. on the whole, the coloring of america (a) is not entirely successful. america was conceived as a monochromatic work, the form in which humphry purchased it. dörrbecker remarks that “the extensive use of white-line modelling for added structuring of the relief-etched plateaus of the plates [is] a technique which creates marked graphic contrasts that are strongest when left uncoloured.”dörrbecker 77. this white-line work is sometimes partly, though not entirely, obscured by coloring. (europe [a] also suffers from this problem: in both, hand coloring tends to obscure the tonal hatching.) romney may have owned copy a of europe. the darkness and heavy coloring of a number of its plates have suggested to some that the coloring of this copy may have been done, at least in part, by a hand other than william blake’s.see david bindman, william blake: his art and times (new york: thames & hudson, 1982) 106. the opaque red and black paint of plate 1 produces a murky effect, some plates have thicker outlines than those of other copies of the mid-1790s, and some are colored more darkly and more heavily. the editors of the blake archive, however, attribute these effects to blake’s own attempt to imitate color printing.see <http://​www.​blakearchive.​org/​new-window/​note/​europe.a?descid=​europe.a.illbk.01>. romney may have chosen copy a because it was part of the deluxe set of 1794–95, of which he owned at least three other examples, the songs, america, and urizen. in addition to the frontispiece, full-page designs 6 [9] and 11 [10] are powerful visual statements of themes that occupied blake in works both before and after europe, like a breach in a city, the morning after the battle (c. 1795–1800, ackland art museum, unc chapel hill)martin butlin, the paintings and drawings of william blake, 2 vols. (new haven: yale university press, 1981) #191. this book will be cited as butlin, followed by catalogue number. and pestilence (c. 1790–95, ex-gregory bateson, butlin #190). plate 6 [9] shows two women (perhaps a servant and her employer), one of whom is hunched over in despair and the other, who wears a pearl choker, is looking anxiously upward. before them is a naked, supine child, stiff in death like the ones in america plate 9 [11] and in “holy thursday” of experience. behind is a huge, arched fireplace, heated by red flames and issuing black smoke, with an enormous cauldron in it. (massive structures seldom portend good in blake’s art.) near the top center of this page in humphry’s copy d, someone wrote, “preparing to dress the child.”the pen-and-ink annotations in europe (d) are attributed to george cumberland, but according to dörrbecker (209), this note, in pencil, is in another hand. jonathan swift had made the devouring of children the vehicle of his satire in a modest proposal (1729); here blake renders the subject visually as a metaphor of his own contemporary england. plate 11 [10] alludes to the great plague of 1665 but also to the sickly state of britain in the mid-1790s. a grim-faced bellman walks along a brick wall in front of which one woman is gesticulating in despair, while another lies dying in a man’s arms. unlike most copies of europe, copy a does not have a shadow slanting through the design and darkening its entire upper-right area. this shadow was added to the print in watercolor, and so could have been left out in coloring. europe is rich in large designs in addition to the full-page ones. romney might have found one of these of particular interest. 4. blake, europe copy a (printed 1795), pl. 13 [16]. 23.2 x 16.8 cm. yale center for british art, paul mellon collection. b1992.8.4(15). plate 13 [16] (illus. 4) is a powerful image, part of a tradition of “prisoner” images. john hamilton mortimer exhibited his drawing the captive at the society of artists in 1774, and it was published as an etching by robert blyth in 1781.see benedict nicolson, john hamilton mortimer a r a 1740–1779 (london: paul mellon foundation for british art, 1968) 43 and fig. 82. joseph wright of derby painted two versions of the subject: 1774 (vancouver art gallery) and 1775–77 (derby museum and art gallery). the former was engraved by thomas ryder in 1786, the latter, in mezzotint, by john raphael smith in 1779. these images display the concurrence of late eighteenth-century sentimentalism and the urge for prison reform. so does francis wheatley’s group picture john howard esq. visiting and relieving the miseries of a prison (earl of harrowby), also depicting walls and an archway, exhibited at the royal academy in 1788 and engraved by james hogg in 1790. blake’s plate is very much part of this tradition. he shows a fettered victim against a wall of bulky stones, throwing his hands out in terror; in place of an archway is a stairway opening, through which we see the back of his key-bearing jailer. as noted, romney’s enormous number of drawings of howard visiting the miserable inhabitants of prisons and lazarettossee victor chan, “pictorial image and social reality: george romney’s late drawings of john howard visiting prisoners,” 2 vols., phd diss., stanford university, 1983. testifies to his intense concern with this subject. the greatest glory of romney’s blake collection is the [first] book of urizen. at first sight, it appears to be color printed (as are six of the eight extant copies of urizen), and it was once taken as such. however, as viscomi was the first to show, the medium is actually watercolor and pen and ink, displaying some of the intensity and apparent texture of color printing.viscomi, “the myth of commissioned illuminated books” 50. it is possible that this copy was custom made for romney. perhaps he saw other copiescopies d (british museum) and j (albertina) have 1794 watermarks. see bentley, bb p. 168 and blake books supplement (oxford: clarendon press, 1995) p. 72. at hercules buildings and commissioned a copy to his own specifications. while it is true that blake’s attitude toward his illuminated books of this period was “print it, and they will come,” urizen (b), part of the large-paper set produced in 1794–95, may be the rule-proving exception. the ordering of leaves in urizen varies, and scholars have made efforts to interpret the significance of these variations.see, for example, robert e. simmons, “urizen: the symmetry of fear,” blake’s visionary forms dramatic, ed. david v. erdman and john e. grant (princeton: princeton university press, 1970) 146-73. blake himself numbered the pages of copy b.see bb p. 168, column headed “blake numbers.” two other copies, d (british museum) and g (rosenwald collection, library of congress) have blake numbers; neither of these has all twenty-eight plates. i will give a brief, literal description of those designs that are especially striking and/or those that display interesting differences between copy b and five copies that blake produced in 1794: a (yale center for british art), c (yale center for british art), d (british museum), f (houghton library, harvard university), and j (albertina museum, vienna).i have not seen copy e (private collection). plate 1: the title is the first book of urizen (by 1818, during which he produced copy g, blake knew there would be no second). the image below shows a white-bearded, white-haired old man, seated against rocks that suggest the tables of the law. his eyes are closed, and he is writing with both hands. his tools, indistinct in some copies, are in this impression clearly a quill pen in his left hand and a graver in his right. he uses the big toe of his right foot as a pointer for the illegible text he is transcribing, perhaps an allusion to the jewish yad, or torah pointer. dark tones prevail, except for the whitish appearance of the old man and his book. plate 2: the words “preludium / to” and “the / first book of / urizen” are separated by the graceful image of a woman in a form-revealing gown flying in midair, curving her body and reaching her left arm out to clasp the right hand of a flying infant with prominent dark eyes. the background is gray speckled with white, as if it were color printed, but the effect has been produced by brush and pen. the image and text convey alternative realities, with the latter promising to unfold “dark visions of torment” (line 7). plate 3: the top of the first column reads “chap: i”. an athletic nude man, flesh colored except for his white head, leaps with his back to us through enormous red flames. this page begins the double columns of text, imitating the format of the printed bible and satirizing it as well.blake was not alone in producing a double-columned book imitating a book of the bible. see my “william blake, jacob ilive, and the book of jasher,” blake 30.2 (fall 1996): 51-54. plate 4: a man sits on the seaside with thick black rain falling on him and his hands gripping his head in an attitude of despair. this plate, headed “i urizen: c ii”, is found only in copies a, b, and c.for an explanation of why this plate may have been omitted in other copies, see essick, “variation, accident, and intention in william blake’s the book of urizen,” studies in bibliography 39 (1986): 230-35. plate 5 [14]: in this full-page design a naked man, white hair streaming, balances his body on two rocks against a black background. this is the first of ten full-page images in urizen, a feature that must have appealed to romney, who was principally a print collector, not a book collector. 5. blake, the [first] book of urizen copy b (printed 1795), pl. 8 [7]. 14.9 x 10.5 cm. reproduced by permission of the morgan library and museum. pml 63139. image courtesy of the william blake archive. plate 8 [7]: the fire is red only at its top and black in the rest of the design, while in the other four copies of this period that include this plate it is red almost throughout. a naked male figure is on his knees among flames, his face a grotesque mask of terror (illus. 5). his right foot, only slightly suggested in other copies, has been drawn in, in keeping with blake’s extensive use of pen and ink in this copy. plate 11 [8]: a skeleton, its bones colored greenish brown and black, is hunched in a fetal position against a dark-blue background becoming black toward the bottom. a stroke of light blue, darker in the other copies, goes along part of the toothlike serrations on his back. plate 13 [22]: a full-page design shows a naked, white-bearded man sitting with his knees drawn up almost to his shoulders, chained hand and foot, his eyes shut. yellow to gold rays emanate from his head, but his lips are severely downturned. the heavy chain, curving downward from his right wrist, is visible only in this copy and copy g. the background is mottled, greenish above, dark red below, showing how easily this watercolor could be mistaken for color printing. plate 15 [9]: another full-page design shows a white-bearded and white-haired nude man, eyes closed, with one knee and both hands on the ground. his hair and beard are marked by dark, wavy lines only in this copy. he seems to be supporting a huge, greenish rock of the sort that the young man of 9 [10] is removing. both this image and the plate “earth” in for children: the gates of paradise (1793) bear a striking resemblance to a book illustration engraved after raphael by blake’s master, james basire, and published in 1778.charles rogers, a collection of prints in imitation of drawings. see essick, “blake in the marketplace, 2004,” blake 38.4 (spring 2005), cover and pp. 134-35. plate 16 [15]: at the top it reads “1 urizen c.v:”. a young man leans down from the blue/bluish sky between the heads of two white-bearded men and extends his left arm and hand into the earth. the eyes of the two old men are closed (open in copies a and d). from behind the one at the right a yellow cloak, absent in copies a, c, d, and f, swirls over to the back of the central figure. yellow flames, reddish toward the center (the rising sun?) run along most of the curve of the globe, and onto it from the youth’s extended hand. plate 17 [16]: this full-page design shows a beardless, nude male, hair streaming outward, arms bent behind his head. he is surrounded by flames going from yellow to red to very dark red (almost black). this plate is present only in copies a and b among the copies of this period. only in this copy do we see tears on the figure’s cheeks. plate 18: the heading is “1 urizen. c:v.” most of the plate is occupied by a design showing a naked man, with abundant ringlets of hair, in flames. the flames go from yellow and yellow green to dark red to black. his genitals are obscured by a tongue of flame, a curious detail for an artist who had declared “the genitals beauty.”the marriage of heaven and hell 10.1, e 37. (in copy j the covering flame is omitted, and we see no genitals at all.) plate 20 [19]: a male figure kneels in a despairing attitude, hands to lowered head, before a curving female whose face indicates anguish. the background is a very dark red, mottled in imitation of color printing. only in this copy is the male’s bodysuit red (see bb p. 178). 6. blake, the [first] book of urizen copy b (printed 1795), pl. 25. 16.3 x 10.3 cm. reproduced by permission of the morgan library and museum. pml 63139. image courtesy of the william blake archive. plate 25: this brightly colored design shows two nude humans, probably female, caught in the toils of a gigantic worm or worms (illus. 6). only the upper parts of their bodies are shown. a bat-winged creature with a human face is partially visible behind them. faces and wings vary from copy to copy.for attempts to disentangle the details, see erdman, illuminated blake 207, and david worrall, ed., william blake: the urizen books (princeton: princeton university press/william blake trust/tate gallery, 1995) 51-53. copy b’s is the most brightly colored of the versions. plate 26: a full-page design shows a boy wearing a white smock, his hands clasped in front of him and an expression of anxiety on his face as he looks upward. behind him a large dog raises its head as if howling. the background is a door, the panels of which are less visible in some other copies, divided diagonally into areas of light below and areas of darkness above. the diagonal goes the other way in copies a and f and is not visible in the dark background of copy d or in the almost-as-dark one of copy j. is the darkness to be thought of as encroaching? perhaps a solar eclipse is in progress, causing the boy’s fear and the dog’s howling. the greatness of copy b of urizen, the only copy blake is known to have produced by a method other than color printing before c. 1818,in 1818 he printed and hand colored copy g (rosenwald collection, library of congress). lies not in individual details, important as these may be, but in its overall effect. its extraordinary richness and variety of color, combined with its firm, detailed outlines, make it one of blake’s masterworks. did romney read the texts of the illuminated books he bought? he did have an interest in mythological subjects, as evidenced, for example, by his collaboration with hayley on illustrations for the cupid and psyche of apuleius, and most of the large cartoons now at the walker art gallery, liverpool. however, these myths were classical. it is likely that romney, like most of blake’s clients, admired blake’s designs but did not appreciate his texts.an exception was blake’s friend benjamin heath malkin, who wrote appreciatively of blake’s poetry, but only of poems in poetical sketches and songs of innocence and of experience (a father’s memoirs of his child [london: longman, hurst, rees, and orme, 1806] xxvi-xl). of blake’s longer poems malkin wrote, “the unrestrained measure, however, which should warn the poet to restrain himself, has not unfrequently betrayed him into so wild a pursuit of fancy, as to leave harmony unregarded, and to pass the line prescribed by criticism to the career of imagination” (xl-xli). henry crabb robinson, who first introduced german readers to blake in his article in the vaterländisches museum (1811), found only “obscurity” in america and wrote that “europe is a similar mysterious and incomprehensible rhapsody.”quoted from the translation in br(2) 602. thomson, so appreciative of blake as an artist, could say even of some of blake’s most accessible poems, “the poetry of these songs is wild, irregular, and highly mystical, but of no great degree of elegance or excellence, and their prevailing feature is a tone of complaint of the misery of mankind.”smith, nollekens and his times 2: 477. thomson is speaking of the songs of experience. it is unlikely that romney read his illuminated books, other than perhaps the songs. the same is probably true of humphry, especially as thirty-one plates of his purchase from blake were prints, mostly from illuminated books, without their texts. ❧ humphry’s america (h) (british museum), the only uncolored work that either artist acquired, has the special beauties of blake’s monochrome printing at its best. it has the full eighteen plates, printed recto/verso except for the frontispiece and the title page. as in the majority of copies (but not romney’s copy a), four lines of plate 4, which may be taken to express blake’s loss of faith in the american revolution, were masked. its leaves (which may have been cut down) measure 37.4 x 24.6 cm., with comparatively little margin.the margins of paper around the printed plate are: bottom 7.30 cm., top 6.67 cm., left side 4.13 cm., right side 3.49 cm. for the title page the rightand left-side margin measurements are 1.90 cm. and 4.13 cm. one of its most striking features is, as in the other uncolored copies, the prominence of white-line etching, as in the wings of the giant figure of the frontispiece and the sky behind him (illus. 7). 7. blake, america copy h (printed 1793), pl. 1. 23.2 x 16.9 cm. © trustees of the british museum. 1856,0209.399. because of humphry’s eye problem, he preferred brightly colored images to texts that he would have had difficulty in reading. he probably chose europe because of the relative quantity as well as the quality of its visual content. of its seventeen plates,a complete copy has eighteen plates, but plate 3 is missing from all but two. four (counting the title page) are full-page designs. some other designs, among blake’s most memorable, occupy half or more of the space of ten more pages. there were probably several copies to choose among. of the eight that blake printed in 1794 and 1795, the original buyer of only one, george cumberland’s copy c (houghton library, harvard university) is certain. (a) was in the collection of isaac d’israeli by 1835, but is thought to have previously belonged to romney (see above). the owner of copy b (glasgow university library), perhaps by 1821, was thomas griffiths wainewright, but he may not have been the original buyer. the first owners of (e) (rosenwald collection, library of congress), (f) (berg collection, new york public library), (g) (morgan library), and uncolored (h) (houghton library) are unknown. thus blake may have had several copies of europe on hand when humphry visited him. (d) (british museum) is brightly colored by a combination of color printing and watercolor on ten large (36.3 x 25.5 cm.) leaves printed recto/verso. humphry’s europe was studied by more than one of blake’s contemporaries. as mentioned, on some of its pages there are pen-and-ink inscriptions, attributed to cumberland, taken from edward bysshe’s art of english poetry.there are also some inscriptions in pencil by another hand (see note 65). (although blake owned a copy of bysshe and copied two texts from it into his notebook in 1807,see e 696. on this subject, see s. foster damon, william blake: his philosophy and symbols (boston: houghton mifflin, 1924) 347-51. there is no way of knowing whether he had anything to do with choosing the quotations.) in 1810, shortly after his father’s death, upcott probably showed this copy, with other blake material from his father’s collection, to robinson, who wrote down some passages for reference.see br(2) 297. upcott also showed his blakes to john thomas smith, and smith in turn showed them to thomson, who wrote comments about them.see smith, nollekens and his times 2: 454-88. thomson’s remarks are on 475-80. curiously, thomson (writing of experience) says that “the whole of these plates are coloured in imitation of fresco” (2: 477) although, as one of our sources of what blake meant by “fresco,” smith himself should have known that they were not. see my “william blake’s ‘portable fresco,’” european romantic review 24.3 (2013): 271-77. thomson, who was to be joint author, with upcott and e. w. brayley, of the london institution’s library catalogue,a catalogue of the library of the london institution: systematically classed. preceded by an historical and bibliographical account of the establishment, 4 vols. (london: c. skipper and east for the london institution, 1835–52). may have become involved in smith’s project through upcott. thomson was an expert on medieval illuminated manuscripts, and it is likely for that reason that smith chose him to write about blake. (although thomson did not publish his books on illumination until much later,for example, a lecture on some of the most characteristic features of illuminated manuscripts, from the viii. to the xviii. century … to which is added a second lecture on the materials and practice of illuminators: with biographical and literary notices illustrative of the art of illumination (london, 1857). he shows his interest in and knowledge of the subject in earlier works.)see an historical essay on the magna charta of king john (london: john major and robert jennings, 1829) xiii, xiv, and 537. we do not know to whom else upcott may have shown his blakes, but these instances should remind us that the reception history of blake’s illuminated books should not be limited to their owners. of plate 1 of humphry’s copy of europe thomson wrote a comment that blake himself would have relished: the frontispiece is an uncommonly fine specimen of art, and approaches almost to the sublimity of raffaelle or michel angelo. it represents “the ancient of days,” in an orb of light surrounded by dark clouds, as referred to in proverbs viii. 27, stooping down with an enormous pair of compasses to describe the destined orb of the world,* “when he set a compass upon the face of the earth.”smith, nollekens and his times 2: 478. following this thomson quotes a passage from milton’s paradise lost, book 7, corresponding to lines 224-31 in modern editions and beginning “in his hand / he took the golden compasses ….” smith added to this a note on the origin of the image: he [blake] was inspired with the splendid grandeur of this figure, by the vision which he declared hovered over his head at the top of his staircase; and he has been frequently heard to say, that it made a more powerful impression upon his mind than all he had ever been visited by. this subject was such a favourite with him, that he always bestowed more time and enjoyed greater pleasure when colouring the print, than any thing he ever produced. (2: 478n) smith’s account, later repeated in gilchrist’s biography, was presumably given to him by blake himself. this frontispiece has become what is probably blake’s best-known image. another image in copy d is of special interest. with the exception of his monochrome america, everything humphry bought from blake in 1794–96 was color printed. he evidently enjoyed the textured quality of prints such as the title page, with its varicolored coiling serpent, and 9 [12], with its beautiful rococo curves, those of the bending wheat reflected in those of the two flying figures, and in turn by their curling trumpets. humphry may not have realized the irony of such beauty’s being the agency of disease and death; cumberland’s inscription, “mildews blighting ears of corn,”this and cumberland’s other inscriptions are to be found at <http://​www.​blakearchive.​org/​copy/​europe.d?descid=​europe.d.illbk.01>, under supplemental views. could have enlightened him. thomson also appreciated the meaning of this image (though not its contemporary relevance), as well as its beauty, describing it as “two angels pouring out the black spotted plague upon england …; in which the fore-shortening of the legs, the grandeur of their positions, and the harmony with which they are adapted to each other and to their curved trumpets, are perfectly admirable.”smith, nollekens and his times 2: 479. humphry’s songs (h) (maurice sendak foundation) is a very early copy of experience only,at the time of writing, copy h was not available for inspection, and so could be examined in reproduction only, in gert schiff, william blake 22 september–25 november 1990 (tokyo: national museum of western art, 1990) 80-84 (sixteen of the seventeen plates). numbering only seventeen plates. printed in 1794 when experience was still in the process of formation, it lacks eight plates (as did copies f, g, and t1 at the time of printing).see viscomi, blake and the idea of the book (princeton: princeton university press, 1993) 269. four of these, containing “the little girl lost,” “the little girl found,” and “the school boy,” had been included in songs of innocence. the others—“the sick rose,” “the garden of love,” “the little vagabond,” and “infant sorrow”—already existed in manuscript drafts but may not yet have been ready for etching and printing. like the other three early copies of experience, (h) is color printed. essick suggests a correlation between the medium and meaning. “the patterns of opaque colors,” he writes of the color-printed copies in general, “match in miniature the ‘fallen light’ and ‘slumberous mass’ of the ‘introduction’ to experience, ‘the forests of the night’ in ‘the tyger,’ the ‘tangled roots’ in ‘the voice of the ancient bard,’ and the threatening bare roots and branches illustrating ‘earth’s answer,’ ‘holy thursday,’ ‘the fly,’ and ‘a poison tree.’”essick, william blake printmaker (princeton: princeton university press, 1980) 149. schiff remarks on “the tyger,” “the yellow of the animal’s skin is overlaid by streaks of brown, blue, crimson, and black, as if the tiger had to adapt, by way of mimicry, to the strident colors of a tropical forest.”for enabling me to consult an english typescript of schiff’s remarks on copy h (pp. 32-35), i am grateful to robert n. essick. even when viewed in reproduction, blake’s color printing produces some extraordinary effects. humphry’s interest was principally in blake’s images and not his texts, and for that reason he commissioned the prints now called a small book of designs (a) and a large book of designs (a). the leaves for the former measure approximately 26.0 x 18.8 cm. and for the latter 34.5 x 24.5 cm.,figures from the british museum website: see <https://​www.​britishmuseum.​org/​research/​collection_​online/​collection_​object_​details.​aspx?objectid=1351975​&partid=1​&page=1&>, under curator’s comments. no matter what the size of the designs; hence small and large book. the leaves of the small book have stitch marks showing that they were once bound together; those of the large book do not. later, blake seems to have regretted separating the two components of his composite art, writing to the collector dawson turner on 9 june 1818: “those [works] i printed for mr humphry are a selection from the different books of such as could be printed without the writing tho to the loss of some of the best things  for they when printed perfect accompany poetical personifications & acts without which poems they never could have been executed” (e 771). however, the question of whether we regret the existence of these magnificent prints is similar to that of whether max brod should have destroyed franz kafka’s manuscripts, as kafka had directed. in the mid-1790s humphry was much taken with strong coloring, as in his baron nagell’s running footman, in which the black skin of the subject contrasts with his sharply red-and-white feathered headpiece, white jabot, and red sleeves.ruth kenny of tate britain points out that these are the colors of the dutch flag and that baron nagell was the dutch ambassador to london. see her note at <http://​www.​tate.​org.​uk/​art/​artworks/​humphry-​baron-​nagells-​running-​footman-​t13796>. smith was struck by “great depth of knowledge in colouring”smith, nollekens and his times 2: 475. in the large and small books and other ex-humphry blakes. a british museum curator remarks that blake’s “luminous, jewel-like impressions … may have seemed particularly fitting given humphry’s own artistic productions.”see the link in note 98, above. it may also be, as an expert on miniatures suggests, that during humphry’s time in india “he was carried away by the glowing colour of the robes worn by the various native officials whose portraits he delighted to paint ….”williamson, the miniature collector: a guide for the amateur collector of portrait miniatures (new york: dodd, mead, 1921) 147. as noted, in commissioning these prints, humphry took care not to duplicate plates from the illuminated books he already owned. four of the prints in the large book exist principally as separate plates,the first-state impression of “the accusers of theft adultery murder” was bound into marriage copy b at some point (see par. 43), and the second impression of the first state of “albion rose” (see par. 5) was added to the song of los copy e, but neither of these prints is to be seen in any other copy of an illuminated book. while the rest of the large book and the small book are from the marriage of heaven and hell, the book of thel, the [first] book of urizen, and visions of the daughters of albion. (blake took second impressions of these for copy b,see martin butlin and robin hamlyn, “tate britain reveals nine new blakes and thirteen new lines of verse,” blake 42.2 (fall 2008): 52-72. which is not part of our subject here.) to what extent would the textless designs of the two books interest viewers unfamiliar with blake’s myth (a category that would include almost anyone likely to see them)? in the large book most, though not all, of the prints establish meaning visually without need of a textual interface. the first, untitled like all the other prints in both series, was called by gilchrist “a personification of morning, or glad day,”gilchrist 1: 32. the original order of the prints is unknown. “albion rose” happens to come first in the british museum’s arrangement, but in this discussion the prints are arranged for heuristic purposes. probably referring to shakespeare’s “night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day / stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops” in romeo and juliet (3.5.9-10). “glad day” was used in a. g. b. russell’s pioneering catalogue of blake’s engravings, and then by laurence binyon (then keeper of prints and drawings at the british museum).archibald g. b. russell, the engravings of william blake (boston: houghton mifflin, 1912) 54; laurence binyon, the drawings and engravings of william blake (london: studio, 1922), pl. 34. that title is not to be found in blake, however. around 1804 blake produced an uncolored second state,see essick, separate plates 25. signed “wb inv 1780”,this date, as frequently in blake, probably indicates the original conception, in this instance pencil drawings of a similar nude male figure made on the recto and verso of a single leaf (victoria and albert museum). anthony blunt suggests visual sources in vincenzo scamozzi’s l’idea della architettura universale (1615) and in de’ bronzi di ercolano; see essick, separate plates 27-28. and gave it the two-line caption “albion rose from where he labourd at the mill with slaves / giving himself for the nations he danc’d the dance of eternal death.” these lines appear without a title in erdman’s 1965 edition of the poetry and prose of william blake,garden city, ny: doubleday, 1965. but in a textual note are given the title “albion rose.” both states are now known by this title.see essick, separate plates 24. however, blake’s distich connects with images of a caterpillar and a bat-winged moth that were added in the second state, and we should not apply the symbolism of that state—or perhaps even the title—to the first. the theme of self-sacrificial redemption does not figure in the earlier version. instead, we have a celebration of “the human form divine,” with “the head sublime, the heart pathos, the genitals beauty.”see “the divine image,” e 13, and the marriage of heaven and hell 10.1, e 37. another separate plate appears to be related to america (though not published in that work) because of six lines, beginning “as when a dream of thiralatha flies the midnight hour,” etched on it in relief but covered by pigment (e 59). (the lines are still partially visible in impression b [national gallery of art, rosenwald collection], reproduced by essick in separate plates, pl. 5.) these lines would, however, not contribute much to a viewer’s experience of the image, nor would the connection of the plate to america. thiralatha appears in europe as one of two “secret dwellers of dreamful caves” (14.26, e 66) and is identified by damon as “the erotic dream. … thiralatha is the final stage in enitharmon’s repression of sex, its reduction to the last, futile effort of the imagination.”damon, a blake dictionary: the ideas and symbols of william blake, rev. ed. (hanover, nh: university press of new england, 1988) 402-03. as damon points out, she also appears as diralada in the song of los, again representing sexual denial: “but in the north, to odin, sotha gave a code of war, / because of diralada thinking to reclaim his joy” (3.30-31, e 67). in blake’s color-printed relief etching the dreamer sits with her head between her knees, a barren tree arching over her as almost a second self. her dream, to the left, is of a naked woman holding aloft a child, the fruit of satisfied desire, and kissing him. this image, separate from what was once the accompanying text, is sufficient unto itself. “joseph of arimathea preaching to the inhabitants of britain”see essick, separate plates 44-46. is also a separate plate. its subject is connected to blake’s early series of small watercolors on british historical subjects,see bindman, “blake’s ‘gothicised imagination’ and the history of england,” william blake: essays in honour of sir geoffrey keynes, ed. morton d. paley and michael phillips (oxford: clarendon press, 1973) 29-49. to a list of such subjects in his notebook (e 672), and to “the history of england, a small book of engravings,” advertised in his 1793 prospectus (e 693) but not known to exist. it is one of many examples of blake’s linking britain with the world of the bible. joseph of arimathea in all three synoptic gospels asks pilate for the body of jesus, as in matthew 27.59-60: “when joseph had taken the body, he wrapped it in a clean linen cloth, and laid it in his new tomb which he had hewn out of the rock, and he rolled a large stone against the door of the tomb, and departed.” according to legend, joseph took the holy grail to england with him.see damon, a blake dictionary 224-25. damon does not think joseph of arimathea is the subject of this print, but in this he is alone among blake scholars. he planted his staff in glastonbury, and it blossomed into a thorn tree. in a drawing of this subject of c. 1780 (rosenbach museum and library),butlin #76 recto. the basic composition is the reverse of that of the print, in which all the figures are on the same plane and joseph, on the far right, extends his right arm to point above and beyond them. the white of joseph’s garment brings his image forward, accentuating the drama of his preaching the word. the spectators react with varied expressions—concern, deep reflection, faith, and shared wonder. the viewer would need to know the subject of the print, but little more, to appreciate it fully. this is a small print—the image measures 7.8 x 10.7 cm. on a leaf 34.7 x 24.7 cm. in size. this contrast, far from diminishing the effect of this extraordinary print, increases it. a fourth separate plate is, unlike the ones mentioned so far, a second state. “the accusers of theft adultery murder” had first been produced as an intaglio monochrome print entitled “our end is come” in 1793. the only known copy of this state (bodleian library) was bound as the frontispiece of copy b of the marriage of heaven and hell, but whether by blake or by a subsequent owner is unknown.copy b was bought by francis douce from a dealer named dyer in 1821 and bequeathed by douce to the bodleian library (bentley, bb p. 298). 1821 is an unusually early date for the third-party sale of a blake, especially considering this one’s rarity. in the second-state impression from the large book heavy coloring makes the clouds to the figures’ left black and those above fiery red. something terrible (all the more so for being unseen) up ahead is producing these signs of destruction. blake typically thought of accusers as threefold, as in jerusalem plate 93, where the image of three pointing men is inscribed “anytus melitus & lycon thought socrates a very pernicious man …” (e 253). in the print from the large book the leftmost figure wears a roman soldier’s tunic and holds a spear. next to him is a crowned king, unarmed, wearing a suit of armor and a red cape and holding his hands to the sides of his head in horror. the third man, his face contorted in fear, is bare to the waist, holds a sword, and wears blue breeches. all three wear sandals. we are looking at a king flanked by his guards, all three impotent before whatever is approaching. at some time this print bore the title inscription “when the senses are shaken / and the soul is driven to madness”, with “page 56” to the right of it.see essick, separate plates 31, 36. this page number refers to blake’s own “prologue, intended for a dramatic piece of king edward the fourth” (e 439) in poetical sketches, where the lines are preceded by “o for a voice like thunder, and a tongue / to drown the throat of war!” the warlike men in blake’s print are already close to madness, as their faces show, and they will not stand. the remaining full-page designs in the large book were not originally produced as independent works. one is an impression of plate 14 of the [first] book of urizen, showing a naked male figure supporting himself by his arms, hands on the ground. it is necessarily different from the corresponding pages of the other copies of urizen color printed around this time, because color printing produces variations in each copy pulled. as scholars have been unable to agree on who this is or what he is doing,see erdman, illuminated blake 196; worrall 40-41. plate 14 can stand on its own. this cannot be said of urizen plate 21. the basic situation here is described in chapter vii of the text: the three figures are the bearded los, spirit of prophecy, identified by his blacksmith’s hammer, his wife, enitharmon, and their son, orc. in this oedipal situation, the chain of jealousy grows out of los’s chest, and with it he binds his son to a rock on a mountain. (in night the fifth of the four zoas, where this story is retold, the oedipal element is reinforced when “los beheld the ruddy boy / embracing his bright mother & beheld malignant fires / in his young eyes discerning plain that orc plotted his death” [60.7-9, e 340]. blake’s ideal reader/viewer would of course be familiar with all the works he had produced.) an astute observer would recognize the family situation, and, if so oriented, might further interpret in a freudian manner los’s doleful look at his adolescent son embracing his mother, and perhaps even the significance of the chain. however, the full meaning of the figures and the situation can only be established by reading the text. no. 5 in the british museum ordering is the full-page frontispiece design from visions of the daughters of albion. here the decontextualization of the frontispiece from the rest of the work makes an important difference. the reader of visions will learn that the central figure is oothoon, “the soft soul of america” (1.3, e 45) and embodiment of female libidinal freedom. she is “bound back to back” (2.5, e 46) to the tyrannical bromion, and the chains are “spells of law” (5.22, e 49), symbolizing marriage. the hunched-up male figure above them is oothoon’s lover, theotormon, “weeping upon the threshold” (2.21, e 47), powerless and despairing. the design is of course striking on its own, but it is clear that something is going on in it, and the viewer has no way of knowing what that something is. this involves not just the names of the characters but also the symbolism and themes of the entire work. this is what blake meant when he wrote to turner of “the loss of some of the best things.” the small design from plate 7 of visions shows the affinity of some of these plates to miniature painting. only 7 x 11.8 cm. and very richly colored, it displays the “luminous, jewel-like” quality of which the british museum curator (see above) speaks. furthermore, the leaf size—about 34.7 x 24.7 cm.—is around the same as the others in the large book; consequently, this aspect of the image is intensified by its being a small object placed in a large space. as for the scene itself, even the viewer who has not read the text can recognize two of the figures from the frontispiece here: a woman with a manacle on her left foot pleading with a man hunched over in despair. although, as frequently in blake’s illuminated books, the design does not illustrate the text on the plate, this situation is close to that described by oothoon: “why does my theotormon sit weeping upon the threshold; / and oothoon hovers by his side, perswading him in vain” (2.21-22, e 47). the basic situation is clear without the words, but not its relation to the theme of the work—that sexuality is pure and that rejection, fear, and condemnation of it are “a sick mans dream” (6.19, e 50). of a small book of designs, thomson wrote: another publication by mr. blake, consisted only of a small quarto volume of twenty-three engravings of various shapes and sizes, coloured as before, some of which are of extraordinary effect and beauty. the best plates in this series are,—the first of an aged man, with a white beard sweeping the ground, and writing in a book with each hand, naked; a human figure pressing out his brain through his ears; and the great sea-serpent; but perhaps the best is a figure sinking in a stormy sea at sun-set, the splendid light of which, and the foam upon the black waves, are almost magical effects of colouring.smith, nollekens and his times 2: 480. more than half of the small book—thirteen plates—is from the [first] book of urizen. the reason for this may be self-evident. a full copy of urizen contains twenty-eight plates, the largest number that blake had produced in an illuminated book to date. two of the other three illuminated books from which humphry chose images for the small book, the book of thel and visions, comprise only eight and eleven plates respectively. the third, the marriage of heaven and hell, has twenty-seven plates, but marriage as a whole was less suited to humphry’s purpose, as fifteen of its plates are primarily text, and it has no full-page designs. humphry chose only four images from it for the small book. the top part of marriage plate 16 shows an old man flanked by two youths on either side, in what can be supposed a thick-walled dungeon in some copies but not in others. the small book version has a black background, and so belongs to the latter class. some viewers might have associated this image with dante’s ugolino group, which had been the subject of reynolds’s count hugolino and his children in the dungeon (1773), widely known through john dixon’s mezzotint of 1774.see my the traveller in the evening (oxford: oxford university press, 2003) 101-02. this association would have been stronger in those copies where the heavy stones are visible. small book 2plate numbers for a small book refer to copy a (british museum). shows a naked mother and baby in a lush botanical background, which includes a human face in the bark of a tree, with a sun-crowned figure rising behind them. in some of the illuminated-book examples the woman is clothed, but, more importantly, the text describes a genealogy of the gods that resulted in “choosing forms of worship from poetic tales” (line 12), and this meaning cannot be inferred from the image alone. taken from the top of plate 14 of marriage, small book 5 shows a male corpse among flames, with a woman, arms outstretched, hovering above him. although the text of marriage plate 14 features apocalyptic imagery of fire, this is not closely connected with the image. the sea monster leviathan from marriage plate 20, also an apocalyptic image, occupies small book 6. although nothing on marriage plate 20 refers to him, leviathan is the subject of the text of its preceding two plates, which is as melodramatic as this image; together, they make the reader/viewer aware that blake is satirizing the fears of the angel who views the monster with the narrator. two small designs are from visions of the daughters of albion plates 10 and 3 (small book 17 and 20 respectively). the former shows four robed women, three of them hunched over so their faces cannot be seen, one looking upward with an expression of anxiety. their misery is evident, but not the reason for it. in the context of visions, we know that these are daughters of albion, the women of britain, whom the first line of plate 4 describes as “enslav’d.” however, the other image, from visions plate 3, conveys considerable meaning without any text. a naked young woman in a venus pudica attitude, but kneeling on a green mound, kisses a naked child who seems about to fly into the air. in the foreground is a plant with two large golden flowers. it requires no knowledge of blake’s symbolism to tell that this conveys a message of joyful physical freedom. the lines headed “the argument” are arcane, but on the next page “the bright marygold of leutha’s vale” (line 5) conveys the erotic content implicit in “the argument,” deepening the impact of the image that accompanies it. in contrast to marriage, no page of urizen is without an image, and ten are full-page designs without any text. counting the two plates in the large book, humphry commissioned more than half of urizen’s pages as textless separate plates. to what extent is a full appreciation of these dependent on knowledge of the text? for some of the full-page designs the lack of a verbal context hardly matters. small book 11 (urizen plate 27), showing a rear view of a white-haired man in a long whitish garment flying into a cloud, is an example of this. why are his hands raised to head height with fingers splayed out? does he see something frightening ahead, like the accusers in the large book? he might be urizen, but assigning him this name doesn’t tell us much. 12 (urizen plate 2) is a rare relief from the generally dark subject matter of urizen, showing a woman in a floating gown flying through a beautifully streaked blue, red, and pink sky, with her left arm extended to a flying baby. indeed, it seems not to be at home here. there is no passage of urizen corresponding to it. in copy b of the small book, blake inscribed this design “‘teach these souls to fly’” (tate britain). 9, from urizen plate 3, could also stand on its own; scholars have not been able to agree whom it represents. a naked male figure running through flames could be orc, los, or a young urizen. the same is true of 15 (urizen plate 10), where a powerfully muscled figure, seen from behind (like the athletic runner), appears to be holding a large rock on his shoulders. those who believe that urizen is forever old cannot accept this image as representing him, while others do. the text does not help us here. 7 (urizen plate 23) shows a white-bearded man carrying a red disk from which spiky rays protrude, like a bowling ball. his left arm is outstretched with the hand turned palm out, like a football running back. black hills and dark-blue sky form the background. at the right, a lion, no more frightening looking than the tyger, looks on. this image illustrates, more literally than most, urizen’s exploring his dens with a globe of fire at the beginning of chapter viii. it would have little significance on its own. 8 (urizen plate 24) depends entirely on the text, without which it would seem to be a man drowning. actually, it is part of a full-page design showing four figures (sometimes only two) representing the elements with blakean names. this one is utha. without the text we would not know that the skeletal human of 13 (urizen plate 8), curled in a fetal position, is the urizen of chapter iv in one stage of his development. the same skeleton, fettered, appears sitting in yellow and red flames in 19 (urizen plate 11). a naked man holding a hammer occupies the other side of the composition. the hammer identifies los, but little further significance can be derived without the text. 14 (urizen plate 19) shows the los and enitharmon of chapter v, after the female has separated from the male in a pessimistic parody of the creation of eve in genesis and in paradise lost. (the humped-up los recalls theotormon.) blake has used the mottled colors created by color printing to great advantage here. that the male figure howling in flames in 18 is los, we know from lines 1-2 of the corresponding plate in urizen (plate 7), in which “los howld in a dismal stupor, / groaning! gnashing! groaning!” most of blake’s representation of los is positive, and the viewer would have difficulty recognizing him without the text. the other plates of the small book show similar gradations of independence from and dependence on verbal contexts. 10, the lower part of the thel title page, is darker and richer in color than the illuminated-book versions but otherwise identical in detail. the viewer who had read erasmus darwin’s the loves of the plants could have recognized in any of these a display of plant sexuality, but no meaning is further conveyed by the text than by the image alone. however, this is not true of 16 (thel plate 6), where the reader alone would recognize the infant among the plants as the worm and the flying figure as the cloud, each of whom has an important message to convey to the standing woman, thel. again, in 22 (thel plate 7) thel examines the infant/worm with the matron clay, who has begun her speech on the preceding plate, as has the bowing lilly of the valley of 23 (thel plate 4). ❧ the importance of romney and humphry as collectors of blake’s illuminated printing can hardly be exaggerated, especially considering how little we know of blake’s original clients in the 1790s. taken together, their purchases made up a large part of the work in illuminated printing that blake had sold to date. humphry owned a total of 83 prints, romney 124—altogether 207 plates. blake’s known income for 1796 was £43.1s. (br[2] 758). mostviscomi, “blake’s printed paintings.” of romney’s items were part of a deluxe set, and humphry’s two books of designs were color printed to order. blake was an artist very conscious of the value of his time, and he charged accordingly. he later wrote to cumberland, “i am now printing a set of the songs of innocence & experience for a friend at ten guineas …. the last work i produced is a poem entitled jerusalem the emanation of the giant albion, but find that to print it will cost my time the amount of twenty guineas” (12 april 1827, e 784).this was copy x, purchased by wainewright (br[2] 371n). over the thirty-one years from 1796 to 1827, both the value of the pound and the cost of living went up only slightly,see house of commons library research paper 99/20, 23 february 1999, charts 1-4 <http://​researchbriefings.​parliament.​uk/​researchbriefing/​summary/​rp99-20>. but blake’s prices rose steeply. in 1793 the price of each set of songs had been five shillings. blake’s increased prices were due partly, as he says, to his cramped quarters at fountain court, but also to the elaborate coloring of some of his late works. for example, according to gilchrist, the sculptor francis chantrey paid £20 for “a highly finished copy of the songs of innocence and experience” in 1827.gilchrist 1: 357. what romney and humphry paid for these works we do not know, but the prices must have been in a considerably different range from those in the prospectus of 1793, and as both men were friends of blake’s and far better off than he, it is unlikely that they drove a hard bargain. these purchases must have made a considerable practical difference to william and catherine blake in 1794–96, just as, because of their high quality and graphic interest, they contribute greatly to our knowledge and appreciation of blake’s illuminated printing today. review: karl kroeber, blake in a post-secular era: early prophecies karl kroeber. blake in a post-secular era: early prophecies. ed. and with a foreword by joseph viscomi. [college park, md]: romantic circles, 2012. xxvi + 156 pp., 28 black-and-white illus. $19.95, paperback; free as an e-book from <http://​www.​rc.​umd.​edu/​reference/​kroeber>. reviewed by j. b. mertz j. b. mertz (jeffrey_mertz@hotmail.com) works for a real estate investment fund in washington, dc, and as an adjunct instructor of english at maryville university. karl kroeber (1926–2009) was a scholar of british romanticism, romantic visual art, and native american literature, and his numerous writings include criticism on william blakesee his “graphic-poetic structuring in blake’s book of urizen,” blake studies 3.1 (fall 1970): 7-18; “delivering jerusalem,” blake’s sublime allegory: essays on the four zoas, milton, jerusalem, ed. stuart curran and joseph anthony wittreich, jr. (madison: u of wisconsin p, 1973) 347-67; and british romantic art (berkeley: u of california p, 1986) 9-33. as well as occasional reviews for this journal.david wagenknecht, blake’s night: william blake and the idea of pastoral, blake 8.4 (spring 1975): 116; stephen c. behrendt, the moment of explosion: blake and the illustration of milton and edward hodnett, image and text: studies in the illustration of english literature, blake 19.2 (fall 1985): 75; and morris eaves, ed., the cambridge companion to william blake, blake 38.4 (spring 2005): 151-54. his death from cancer interrupted the completion of what would have been a much longer book, and the present work merely comprises what kroeber “originally intended as introductory to a study of william blake’s longest and most complex poems” (xxi) (that is, vala or the four zoas, milton a poem, and jerusalem the emanation of the giant albion). as an “interrupted” work, blake in a post-secular era calls to mind peter fisher’s unfinished book, the valley of vision, which had the benefit of being edited for publication by no less a scholar than northrop frye after fisher’s accidental death.peter f. fisher, the valley of vision: blake as prophet and revolutionary, ed. northrop frye (toronto: u of toronto p, 1961) v-vii. frye had supervised fisher’s 1949 university of toronto doctoral dissertation, which was the basis for the book. in the case of blake in a post-secular era, not only has another eminent scholar stepped forward to edit an unfinished study of blake, but the deceased author and his posthumous editor also worked together: joseph viscomi attended kroeber’s “life-changing” seminar on blake at columbia university in 1975 (xiii), and kroeber personally encouraged viscomi to undertake his dissertation on blake.joseph viscomi, “remembrance,” <http://​karlsfriends.​wordpress.​com/​2010/​09/​06/​remembrance> (accessed 20 october 2013). anyone who has enjoyed the incisiveness of kroeber’s finished works will be continually reminded that blake in a post-secular era, though developed in certain respects, is far from complete and does not reflect fully his scholarly capability. in large part, this may be a consequence of the speed at which he worked (the text was apparently written between march and the end of august 2009, as described in viscomi’s foreword). kroeber begins by stating that we are entering a post-secular era in which “it will be valuable for academic humanists to recognize” blake’s extensive influence on “american writers, painters, musicians, performing artists, and film and tv makers over the past half-century” (xxi). it seems to me that few people could plausibly argue that blake is not among the most influential “canonical” poets in terms of his impact on modern popular culture,see, as a recent example, “part iii: blake in film and graphic arts,” blake 2.0: william blake in twentieth-century art, music and culture, ed. steve clark, tristanne connolly, and jason whittaker (basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, 2012). yet kroeber believes, notwithstanding “the impressive, even revolutionary, expansion of specialized scholarly studies of blake during the past thirty years,” that he “has totally disappeared from the view of theorizing critics who claim leadership of academic literary humanism.” such critics ignore blake “primarily because one of their fundamental principles is that all religious concerns should be excluded from literary criticism.” kroeber envisions “post-secularism” as a response to the “manifest dubiousness of that principle.” “the essential point of this study,” according to kroeber, “is simply that blake offers a view of art, science, and religion as … products of imagining” (14). the book consists of an introduction, five chapters discussing certain of blake’s works from 1788 through 1794 (all religions are one, there is no natural religion, songs of innocence and of experience, the marriage of heaven and hell, the book of thel, visions of the daughters of albion, and the [first] book of urizen), a conclusion, two appendices, endnotes, and a list of works cited. kroeber wrote parts of the endnotes and appendices (“blake and science” and “blake and contemporary popular culture”), and viscomi was able to develop these sections from materials kroeber was using for the project. although the focus varies somewhat from chapter to chapter, kroeber pursues the theme of blake’s insistence upon “the essential uniqueness of each and every human” (20), the awareness of which is sustained by the imagination. it would be uncharitable to criticize this book for lapses or lacunae because it has not undergone the extensive editing, revision, and peer review usually applied to scholarly publications. nevertheless, i could wish for clear critical discussions (rather than endnote references, sometimes without commentary) of precisely what kroeber meant by “post-secular age” (3) and “modernism” (6). also, it would be helpful to have some names when he finds fault with “theorizing critics” (3) and “academic intellectuals” (8) in his introductory chapter, or celebrates “biologists” who “accommodate their discoveries to acceptance of the absolute uniqueness of every individual organism” (115) in his conclusion. he makes some disconcertingly broad and unqualified statements that probably would not have survived the editorial process: “blake was continuously and actively engaged, not with the past, never in nostalgia, but always with the emerging developments of what we now call print culture” (9); “contemporary life is what he was solely concerned with” (27); and “blake differs from every major modern philosopher, social and economic thinker, psychologist, political scientist, or politician” (62; my emphasis). i also find several passages where kroeber is plainly paraphrasing blake and wonder why he did not quote blake to substantiate his argument: “‘innocence’ is the condition of a well organized person of any age, ‘experience’ is the condition of individuals who have become disorganized” (21); “what we call crimes or acts of evil are not in fact actions but their hindering” (53); and “this fiction [of good and evil] encourages us passively to accept regulation of thought and behavior by others” (55). finally, we might ask why america and europe, both of which are explicitly identified as prophecies, do not have their own chapter or chapters in a book on blake’s early prophecies. of course, i hasten to emphasize my belief that many of these concerns would certainly have been addressed had kroeber lived to realize fully his intention in writing this study. since the book is in an incomplete state, we might reasonably wonder whether there can be an audience for it other than, perhaps, kroeber’s own students. viscomi writes elsewhere of the importance of kroeber’s interaction with his students for the generation of his publications,see viscomi, “remembrance”: “he wrote with the mind of a teacher and taught with the depth and curiosity of a scholar, always developing new courses and seminars that yielded wonderful books in a few short years …. he loved the blake seminar he taught spring of 09, loved the students; it was the catalyst he hoped it would be ….” and it is easy to see in blake in a post-secular era the vigorous debates and “collaborative criticism” (xv) he considered indispensable to teaching and learning (and that obviously contributed to this book’s making). notwithstanding any reservations we might have about the publication of an unfinished work, blake in a post-secular era stands as a fine memorial of kroeber’s enthusiasm as an educator. it conveys some sense of the energy with which he approached his final seminar at columbia and, indeed, his fifty-seven years as a teacher (xviii-xix). even though this book appears to be a mere armature for what kroeber might have ultimately accomplished, his instincts had him heading in the right direction, especially with respect to what he describes as blake’s “ubiquity in contemporary popular culture” (3). for confirmation, we need look no further than recent collections of essays such as blake 2.0 and blake, modernity and popular culture (2007), or alan moore’s from hell (1999) and the writings of robert duncan.see linda freedman, “blake, duncan, and the politics of writing from myth,” blake 47.2 (fall 2013): n1. review: tracey emin and william blake in focus (tate liverpool, 2016-17) tracey emin and william blake in focus. tate liverpool, 16 september 2016–3 september 2017. reviewed by sibylle erle sibylle erle (sibylle.erle@bishopg.ac.uk), frsa, is reader in english literature at bishop grosseteste university lincoln, author of blake, lavater and physiognomy (legenda, 2010), co-editor of science, technology and the senses (special issue for ravon, 2008), and volume editor of panoramas, 1787–1900: texts and contexts (5 vols., pickering & chatto, 2012). with morton d. paley she recently co-edited the reception of william blake in europe (bloomsbury, 2019). she co-curated the display blake and physiognomy (2010–11) at tate britain and devised an online exhibition of tennyson’s copy of blake’s job for the tennyson research centre (2013). apart from reception, her current research projects are on monsters and monstrosity as well as character in the romantic period. in liverpool, as part of tate liverpool’s in focus series, tracey emin (b. 1963) and william blake (1757–1827), two london-based artists, shared exhibition space for almost a year. the intention, according to tate liverpool’s web site, was to show “a shared concern with birth, death and spirituality in both artists’ work.” the highlights of the exhibition, it says, included my bed (1998) and drawings by emin, blake’s large color print pity (c. 1795, butlin #310), presented to the tate in 1939 by w. graham robertson, and the ink and watercolor painting the crucifixion: “behold thy mother” (c. 1805, butlin #497), originally part of a series done for thomas butts illustrating christ’s crucifixion and resurrection. the painting was given to the tate in 1949, a year after robertson’s death. to link emin and her art to that of blake is not new: “to say that emin is like blake, as has often been done, is not to claim that she is his equal. but it is true that she, like him, is a romantic who, although admired by many, has also disturbed people to the point of fear. … both artists, in their search for poeticised truth, manifest a strong disregard of opinion” (brown 10). the first information board inside the gallery reiterated the proposed thematic connections between emin and blake, “birth, death and spirituality,” but there was also something inherently material or matter of fact about the juxtaposition. emin, who grew up in margate and eventually moved to london to study at the royal college of art, is a successful artist—her art sells and is very expensive. she is one of the young british artists, who include damien hirst and the chapman brothers, a group that first attracted attention in the 1980s. in the 1990s she worked with sarah lucas, producing a pop-up shop. a member of the royal academy since 2007, she was professor of drawing from 2011 to 2013, and has also lectured there. this is quite different from blake, who enrolled as a student at the royal academy but was never a member; years later he scribbled on the title page of joshua reynolds’s works, “this man was hired to depress art    this is the opinion of will blake my proofs of this opinion are given in the following notes” (e 635), directing readers to the annotations in the margins of his copy (some annotations to reynolds are from 1808–09, when blake was preparing his own exhibition above his brother’s shop). about the same time he finally turned his back on the academy, having first exhibited there in 1780 and last in 1808. when my bed was exhibited at tate britain in 1999, it was as one of the works shortlisted for the turner prize. it didn’t win, and emin attracted more media attention than her work. blake, by comparison, was almost unknown in his lifetime, and the only time he attracted public attention was when he confronted a soldier who had entered his garden without his permission. he was accused of high treason; there was a trial and testimonies were given, but blake, supported by his friends and good character references, was acquitted. what do these two people have in common? can this kind of exhibition be more than a mere exercise in creative meaning-making, while paying tribute to the vast richness of the tate’s growing collection? to show works by one of britain’s most important living female artists in the context of those of a dead but by now canonical male artist creates a dialogue. darren pih, the curator of the show, explained that emin was exploring the wider historical framework of her work. my bed had already been shown alongside works by francis bacon at tate britain and, by the time this review is published, it will have appeared with those of j. m. w. turner at the turner contemporary in margate. emin’s unmade bed, with its abundant and provocative symbolism, was the star of the exhibition in liverpool. in fact, the idea of this bed is bigger than the bed itself, and the bed, to be honest, was a lot smaller than i thought it would be. while it may have shocked audiences in the late 1990s, in liverpool it evoked relief. it has become so familiar through reproductions and accounts of its history that seeing it in the flesh meant that i could finally tick this work of art off my list. what happens to blake when exhibited alongside emin? my impression was that he was overshadowed, because, at least during my visit at the end of august 2017, most of the gallery’s visitors gathered around the bed and had only a few seconds for blake. the exhibition consisted of three rooms, one red (room 1) and two dark blue (rooms 2 and 3). room 1 as i entered i immediately came upon my bed, first bought by charles saatchi and now on indefinite loan from the duerckheim collection. on a plinth and guarded by a member of staff, it attracted attention from all visitors, which is not something we could say about blake. the bed, on a blue piece of carpet, stood out against the red of the walls as well as the blakes. the suitcases were positioned to its left and a few meters away. the noose, normally hanging above, was wrapped as ropes around the cases, as it would probably have detracted attention from the bed. there was a lot of empty space surrounding the bed; room 1, the biggest of the three, created a very particular viewing experience, so that it was almost an effort to walk all the way to blake. all images © tate liverpool, roger sinek. see enlargement. the bed has been interpreted as a self-portrait and a private performance of a particularly traumatic time in emin’s life. she had had two abortions and her relationship with billy childish had failed. her work is autobiographical and confessional, but we should accept that we know only what she tells us; there is (as in blake) an element of myth-making. emin has described herself as an anorexic, heavy-drinking woman—as a person living on the edge. in her autobiography, strangeland, she writes: “when i was twenty, i went to margate by train. i left my flat in rochester, drunk and crying. … i said, ‘goodbye’ and threw myself off the harbour wall, fully clothed, the note in my pocket. i sank beneath the water and, like a cork, popped back up. the sea became my bed as i floated for a while, a tiny part of this great world and more alive than ever” (53-54). my bed can also be interpreted as an ever-changing reflection on an experience; it exists in versions because emin sets it up (as she did in liverpool) differently each time—there is nothing spontaneous about it anymore. the suggestive rip in one of the pillows was not wear and tear, but a deliberate act of textile violence (for symbolism’s sake, so i heard someone say next to me). the sheets are no longer soaked with fluids; they are still there—in the unwashed bedding—but the site of physical excess dried long ago. thinking of the bodily fluids in terms of color and imprints of the body, we might—at a stretch of our imagination—associate them with blake’s printing technique and three-pull production process employed with the large color prints in room 3. perhaps including examples of blake’s illuminated books and color printing was an attempt by emin to historicize her work. there were polaroid prints (very personal snapshots, depicting private moments in her life) on the bedside table, but, again, we can only imagine what they might show. the array of bottles (vodka and orangina, which, the guide told me, could only be had abroad in the 1990s) told something about emin’s drinking habits. the marlboro lights (a woman’s cigarette) projected another self-image chosen by emin: a toned-down version of the marlboro man. the guide, who was happy to share stories about the objects, said that one of the toys was a present from a lover from a visit to prague. except for the ashtray, which ironically dated the bed to a pre-e-cigarette age, most of the objects were everyday. the bed has a narrative, but it changed yet again, as we will see, in the context of the exhibition. blake became part of the bed’s newly updated narrative, which engineered a historical framework. what did this narrative bring into focus? behind the bed were the seven engravings (c. 1826–27) from blake’s illustrations to dante’s divine comedy, reprinted in 1968 on japanese paper. each print is inscribed in pencil, “a restrike from the copper plate in my collection. august 1968 lessing j. rosenwald.” these prints, presented by rosenwald to the tate in 1975, are from the original plates in the rosenwald collection at the national gallery of art in washington, dc. blake had been commissioned by john linnell in 1824 and worked intermittently on 102 watercolor illustrations until his death. he managed to engrave only seven plates, which remain unfinished. the choice to include them was a poignant gesture, as they evoke blake’s visionary art as well as his death. in comparison with the watercolors, which make the figures transparent, the engravings, normally associated with determinate outlines, render the bodies equally intangible for those who know that work on them was not completed. rather than the stories from dante’s inferno, these plates added loss of physical substance to the ideas projected by emin’s empty bed. see enlargement. to the right, on the walls leading to room 2, were pity and the crucifixion: “behold thy mother.” pity, to the left of the passage, was inspired by lines spoken by macbeth before his murder of king duncan (macbeth act 1, scene 7). blake’s response is both literal and visionary, because the face of the baby, held by the female figure on horseback above the prostrate figure at the bottom, bears a resemblance to blake’s adult profile. the title, moreover, gestures toward “the divine image” (songs of innocence), where pity gets associated with the human face (“for mercy has a human heart / pity, a human face,” lines 9-10, e 12). another connection is to the story in the [first] book of urizen (“pity began, / in anguish dividing & dividing / for pity divides the soul,” 13.51-53, e 77) and the figure of enitharmon, the first female to be created (“they call’d her pity, and fled,” 19.1, e 78). pity is a powerful and disruptive force in blake’s creation myth. however, in the context of the exhibition, the trail led not to the two plates from urizen in room 2, but to the themes of death and dying. hope was introduced through the crucifixion: “behold thy mother,” which triangulates the gazes of jesus, mary, and john. the title suggests an abstract notion of motherhood and the moment embodied in the painting relates to the emotion prevailing in the figures after jesus has spoken those words. this emotion is not divisive pity but unconditional and all-embracing love. jesus says that the relationship he has had with his mother should be extended to include another person. room 2 see enlargement. upon entering room 2 i saw blake’s the body of abel found by adam and eve (c. 1826, butlin #806) to the right and, to the left, a vision: the inspiration of the poet (elisha in the chamber on the wall) (c. 1819–20?, butlin #756). the stark contrast between these works was accentuated by their positioning on either side of the passage. in a vision, a delicate pencil and wash drawing that originates from the time of blake’s collaboration with john varley, a seated figure appears to be writing what the standing figure to its right dictates. the drawing’s rendering of space as a container of the visionary brought the careful nesting of an evolving narrative inside the exhibition space into focus. the body of abel shows cain discovered by his parents as he is burying his brother. this highly charged emotional scene of despair and shock led to another, similar representation of death and dying, but this time a much more serene one. on the wall to the right was the pencil drawing the soul hovering over the body reluctantly parting with life (c. 1805, butlin #625), from blake’s sketches for robert h. cromek’s edition of blair’s grave (1808). this image resonated with pity from the previous room and reinforced the themes of death and dying, its prostrate figure serving as a reminder of emin’s bed. behind, on the walls of the passage from room 1, were satan smiting job with sore boils (c. 1826, butlin #807) and two urizen plates from a small book of designs copy b (1796, c. 1818): plate 15 shows los giving birth to enitharmon, who flows as a “globe of life blood” (18.1, e 78) out of los’s head, and plate 21 shows how urizen “explor’d his dens / … with a globe of fire lighting his journey” (20.46, 48, e 81). the red globes in these plates, which were purchased by the tate in 2009, resonated with the painting diagonally opposite, the body of abel. because of the visual connections created in this exhibition, the stories of both works were decontextualized and thus the historical framing of my bed continued. the combination magnified shock and horror (because urizen is not happy with what he sees and nobody in urizen is delighted to meet enitharmon) rather than physical pain. this also applied to satan smiting job, another image with a prostrate (male) figure. in this visionary representation of the cause of job’s illness we see satan precariously balanced on job’s body. because of the tempera’s proximity to the soul hovering over the body, this scene turned into a death scene. in the context of the biblical story, this is the moment job falls ill, but what we saw—in the context of the exhibition—was more than just a loss of good health. the small female figure (job’s wife) crouching at job’s feet reminded me of the figures in death of the strong wicked man, another of the sketches for blair’s grave. room 2, perhaps the most powerful (at least for this reviewer), brought the experiences of death and dying into focus and thus challenged habitual interpretations of blake’s works. room 3 see enlargement. in room 3 were emin’s six drawings (gouache on paper) from 2014, with the exit to the right. their positioning on the back wall suggested that these posing nudes were the culmination of the exhibition: all for you, i could feel you, just waiting, on her side, stay up, and total reverse. the connecting theme is female sexuality; here the exhibition came full circle because these bodies all too easily link back to my bed. how did blake fit in? to the right, to either side of the exit, were the frontispiece to visions of the daughters of albion from a large book of designs copy b (c. 1795, butlin #264) and the watercolor the death of the virgin (1803, butlin #512). to the left were four of the large color prints: elohim creating adam (1795–c. 1805, butlin #289), nebuchadnezzar (1795–c. 1805, butlin #301), the night of enitharmon’s joy (c. 1795, butlin #316), and the house of death (1795–c. 1805, butlin #320). see enlargement. see enlargement. all these color prints, with the exception of the night of enitharmon’s joy, include horizontal figures. room 3 appeared to be a female space, and the figure in enitharmon’s joy chimes with emin’s drawings, which means that the theme of sexuality was introduced to the viewing experience of this color print. emin is a twin and she lost two children. would she identify with this figure or connect with the faceless youngsters behind it? in strangeland we find: “as a baby, i tried to die a couple of times. my most successful attempt was suffocation by pressing my mouth against the side of a carrycot. but paul saved me—saved me with his constant screaming. it seemed that he would always be there, looking out for me” (4). the experience emin describes resonates, of course, with the frontispiece to visions and the story of oothoon, her rape, and her potential pregnancy (“now thou maist marry bromions harlot, and protect the child / of bromions rage, that oothoon shall put forth in nine moons time” [2.1-2, e 46]). emin writes: “when my mum was pregnant with me and paul, people used to spit at her in the street and call her a nigger-lover. friends tried to persuade her to have an abortion because she wasn’t married to our father. even worse, there might be a throwback: we might come out black” (strangeland 13). alongside this strand of the exhibition’s narrative ran the absence of newton (recalled through the rainbow in the death of the virgin), which alluded to a spiritual void—a feeling of emptiness that the exhibition had been toying with. emin’s bed is empty, yet full of meaning. in this exhibition, blake’s works stood in for the absent presence of emin. a board in room 3 finally gave information about blake and a timeline. the last point, the text below the year 1827, was particularly relevant: “blake falls ill. on his deathbed he draws a picture of catherine, his loyal wife and artistic assistant. he dies on 12 august at the age of sixty-nine and is buried in an unmarked grave in the dissenters’ graveyard at bunhill fields, london.” this passage, read within the context of the exhibition, brought to mind frederic shields’s blake’s work-room and death-room. the drawing depicts blake’s bed in the room he worked and died in; like emin’s, blake’s bed is empty. the bed in shields’s drawing is the artist’s imagining. this association helps to counterpoint the idea that emin’s my bed is her real bed, a bed that she left not so long ago—at least this was public opinion in the late 1990s, when the bed was exhibited at tate britain. talking about the relations of male and female figures in paintings, john berger writes that “the social presence of a woman is different in kind from that of a man. a man’s presence is dependent upon the promise of power which he embodies. if the promise is large and credible his presence is striking. if it is small or incredible, he is found to have little presence” (45). blake’s presence in this exhibition was enormous, even though most visitors appeared to ignore him. in reverse, emin brought out blake’s preoccupation with death and dying. the potential for narrative intervention was huge, and the tate did well to have guided tours, one of which i was lucky enough to join on the day i visited. the objects in the exhibition were powerful, but their stories needed to be told. bibliography berger, john. ways of seeing. london: penguin books, 1972. blake, william. the complete poetry and prose of william blake. ed. david v. erdman. newly rev. ed. new york: anchor-random house, 1988. [abbreviated as “e”.] brown, neal. tracey emin. london: tate publishing, 2006. butlin, martin. the paintings and drawings of william blake. 2 vols. new haven: yale university press, 1981. [abbreviated as “butlin”.] ———. william blake, 1757–1827. tate gallery collections, vol. 5. london: tate gallery, 1990. emin, tracey. strangeland. london: sceptre, 2005. merck, mandy, and chris townsend, eds. the art of tracey emin. london: thames & hudson, 2002. mitchell, liz. “uncompromising, naked, blunt … humanity in extremis”: tracey emin and william blake @ tate liverpool—reviewed.” <http://​www.​thedoublenegative.​co.​uk/​2016/​09/​uncompromising-​naked-​blunt-​humanity-​in-​extremis-​tracey-​emin-​and-​william-​blake-​tate-​liverpool-​reviewed>. tate liverpool. “join us for tracey emin and william blake in focus and discover surprising links between the two artists.” <http://​www.​tate.​org.​uk​/whats-​on/​tate-​liverpool/​exhibition/​tracey-​emin-​and-​william-​blake-​focus>. review: elizabeth b. bentley, ed., george cumberland, the emigrants or a trip to the ohio george cumberland. the emigrants or a trip to the ohio, a theatrical farce (1817). ed. elizabeth b. bentley, with a preface by angus whitehead. lewiston: edwin mellen press, 2013. xvii + 190 pp. $159.95/£109.95, hardcover (also available as an e-book). reviewed by james rovira james rovira (jamesrovira@gmail.com) is associate professor and department chair of english at mississippi college, where he teaches british literature, poetry, and literary theory. over the last four years he has presented at national conferences for the modern language association, the american society for eighteenth-century studies, the national society for the study of romanticism, and others. his monograph, blake and kierkegaard: creation and anxiety, was published by continuum in 2010. his most recent scholarship extends romanticism as a field to contemporary film and television in articles for edited anthologies forthcoming from the university of mississippi press and palgrave macmillan. he is currently at work on the edited anthologies interpretation: theory: history and rock and romanticism. elizabeth b. bentley’s edition of george cumberland’s the emigrants, or, a trip to the ohio makes available for the first time this previously unpublished and unperformed play by one of william blake’s closest associates. bentley painstakingly edited and transcribed this play, currently existing only in a single fair copy held in special collections at victoria university (toronto); the book provides a photographic reproduction of the manuscript following her transcription. editorial apparatus includes “characters in the dramatis personae,” “the date of the farce,” notes on the manuscript and its transcription, descriptions of scene designations and stage directions, and explanations of speech headings, punctuation, capitalization, spelling, and corrected misspellings, all of which are well supported by footnotes. to these bentley adds an extensive bibliography and an index of names along with two appendices, one listing her addition of parentheses when necessary and the other listing further editorial interventions in cumberland’s punctuation. angus whitehead’s preface locates cumberland’s play in respect to its antecedents in british drama, while bentley’s introductory biography contextualizes it within cumberland’s relationship to the theater and his sources. the play itself is a short, lighthearted farce, consisting of five scenes that take up 54 manuscript pages and about 69 print pages, or about 12,000-14,000 words. it is about the acres family and their attempt to emigrate to the united states to start a farm on the ohio river with the family sheep. the first scene opens at an inn in falmouth as the acres are waiting to board their ship, the rattle-snake. scenes 2-4 take place aboard ship as it begins to sail to the united states. the action in the middle of the play consists largely of mr. acres’s son, bobby, trying to steal rum and ale from the ship’s stocks while villainous major dandy pursues acres’s daughter, miss acres, with mrs. acres’s unwitting complicity. in many ways, mr. and mrs. acres are reminiscent of the bennets in austen’s pride and prejudice (1813). the play ends with the ship being blown back to falmouth by a violent storm. upon arrival the sheep have all been killed in the storm, major dandy is arrested, and family members have to appear before a magistrate to affirm that they were not complicit in any of major dandy’s crimes. the magistrate finds the acres innocent, and when mr. acres declares that he has given up any intent to emigrate to the united states, the magistrate responds, “he that cannot be happy under the british constitution cannot live contented any where” (86). this single line at the end of a comedy of errors—the play’s humor lies primarily in the bad judgment of some characters and the dishonesty of others—serves as cumberland’s commentary on british colonial ambitions and on the colonies themselves. readers may find conflicting information about the date of composition of cumberland’s the emigrants. robert brandeis’s appendix to blake in our time (ed. karen mulhallen, university of toronto press, 2010) sets a date of 1800–05 for the manuscript, but bentley convincingly argues on the basis of watermarks and references to contemporary events that the play could not have been written before 1817. while the play itself is somewhat imperfectly executed, perhaps comparable to blake’s an island in the moon in that way, this edition provides a valuable contribution to any university serious about supporting the study of eighteenthor nineteenth-century british or american drama, especially if one is interested in the representation of the united states, its people, and its dialects in british literature. it is also a significant addition to holdings on cumberland himself and blake’s circle of acquaintances, and can serve libraries supporting the study of textual editing as a fine example of rigorous attention to detail and full editorial disclosure. ideally, in the future this edition will contribute important background to an extensive digital humanities project devoted to cumberland and his manuscripts at victoria university. review: mark crosby, ed., “william blake’s manuscripts,” huntington library quarterly 80.3 (autumn 2017) mark crosby, ed. “william blake’s manuscripts.” special issue, huntington library quarterly 80.3 (autumn 2017). reviewed by bruce graver bruce graver (beg@providence.edu) is professor of english at providence college. the autumn 2017 special issue of huntington library quarterly, edited by mark crosby, is devoted to manuscript studies of the works of william blake. several of these studies were originally presented at a 2013 symposium at the huntington library, which, as blake scholars know, houses one of the world’s finest blake collections. taken together, the essays demonstrate the variety of ways in which the close study of blake’s manuscripts and prints can yield significant new discoveries about his engraving techniques, his working habits, and his influences. or, as crosby puts it in his introduction, “the eight essays … range in methodological approach from considering the materiality of blake’s manuscripts to more conceptual concerns, with particular attention given to discussing the instability of long-term preservation” (363). the collection begins with joseph viscomi’s “signing large color prints: the significance of blake’s signatures.” having closely examined the blake archive’s digital images of twenty-nine surviving impressions of blake’s color monoprints, viscomi has “been able to identify the status of each print and resolve the problems of date and sequence.” using image-editing software, i have been able to remove yellowish varnishes, or brighten colors to recover original conditions, or enhance images to reveal (or determine the absence of) obscured substructures and features. most important, i have been able to enlarge any area multiple times without distortion and focus on how designs were printed rather than on how impressions were finished. as a result, i have identified which impressions of a design were printed together and in what order, which were printed separately, and which were refinished, or freshened up in preparation for sale. (376) besides his examination of the prints, viscomi also sequences the impressions of the monoprints according to the various ways blake signed, or didn’t sign, them. in so doing, he proposes a hitherto unknown printing session (c. 1796), argues that blake reconceived of the prints as paintings about 1807, and suggests that blake’s “market and audience was larger than is generally acknowledged, his economic situation slightly better, and his artistic appeal and reputation slightly wider” (402). this is an important essay, filled with the kinds of detail we have learned to expect from viscomi, all of it well worth attending to. in “blake writes backward,” alexander gourlay puts blake’s engraved signatures under the microscope to show the different ways he experimented with backward writing, or retrography. as detailed as viscomi’s piece, gourlay’s essay traces the development of blake’s retrographic technique, showing it to be distinct from those employed by other engravers, and demonstrating that the study of it is useful in determining the relationship between the signed plates and the lettering used in his illuminated works. angus whitehead turns from blake’s engravings to his letters—to the “kitchen letter” to john linnell, postmarked 25 november 1825, discovered in the john murray archive by michael phillips. this letter, containing a brief account of blake’s kitchen and referring to a printing session of the job illustrations, was treated by both phillips and whitehead in 2005 articles, but whitehead returns to it here to examine, more minutely, specific references in it. in so doing, he fleshes out our understanding of the blakes’ living arrangements as well as blake’s rather difficult (at this stage of his life) relationship with linnell. fernando castanedo examines a more problematic manuscript, that of an island in the moon, and attempts to redate it slightly—to 1786 (at least in part) rather than 1784–85, as had been argued by keynes, erdman, bentley, and the blake archive editors. castanedo maintains that the work contains a reference to hester piozzi’s 1786 anecdotes of samuel johnson, particularly to her story of reynolds’s “blinking sam” portrait, and may also refer to satirical prints of johnson and boswell in the hebrides, published in april of that same year. the next three essays in the collection treat various problems with blake’s most difficult manuscript work, the unfinished vala, or the four zoas. luisa calè, in “blake, young, and the poetics of the composite page,” looks first at blake’s procedures in developing his illustrations to night thoughts. she describes carefully the process by which he took young’s printed quarto leaves and, by adding leaves of whatman wove paper, turned them into the extra-illustrated, folio-sized work now housed at the british museum. selected watercolors from the extra-illustrated folio were then engraved and published in an atlas-sized quarto volume in 1797, and blake used proofs of the prints in preparing the manuscript of vala. calè is interested in the ways that blake’s procedures subvert “the letterpress as a support for reading,” and especially how in vala he “challenged the teleology of printing, staged the separation of illustration from letterpress, and inverted the relationship between print and manuscript production” (459). wayne ripley approaches the vala manuscript in a different way: rather than examining its composition, he looks at revisions in the manuscript that seem to echo moravian hymns published in john gambold’s a collection of hymns of the children of god in all ages (1754). as others have noted, these hymns may be the source of blake’s use of the word “zoa.” ripley goes further to argue that a number of late revisions to the manuscript seem to respond to phrases and theological ideas (particularly the femininity of god) from many parts of the hymnal, and he suggests that further study of gambold’s collection is necessary for understanding both milton and jerusalem. finally, rachel lee considers the challenges faced by the blake archive in attempting to create a digital edition of the vala manuscript. the problem with digital encoding, from the beginning of the tei initiative, has been the hierarchical structure of its system, which does not always take into account the arbitrary nature of manuscript entries. lee looks at the problems blake’s manuscript presents and describes both the successes and failures of the way she and her fellow text-encoders have tried to solve them. especially important is her discussion of the durability of digital texts: editors must encode for the long term, so that their projects are not thrown into the dustbin the next time a platform or a software display system changes. the collection closes with a meditation by morris eaves on permanence and impermanence in the digital universe. as someone whose digital edition<http://​www.​rc.​umd.​edu/​editions/​lb>. was completed (eaves eulogizes, at one point, the many hundreds that were not), and who has wondered, many times, how long our tei-lite-code-converted-to-html-by-a-perl-script will continue to be legible by web browsers, eaves’s words struck home. we must build with the future in mind, even if we can’t yet imagine it. and we must be resigned to letting things die—a fitting conclusion to as fine a collection of essays on blake as i have read. review: paul peucker, a time of sifting: mystical marriage and the crisis of moravian piety in the eighteenth century paul peucker. a time of sifting: mystical marriage and the crisis of moravian piety in the eighteenth century. university park: pennsylvania state university press, 2015. xvi + 248 pp. $84.95, hardcover; $24.95, paperback. reviewed by marsha keith schuchard marsha keith schuchard (keithschuchard@gmail.com), phd, independent scholar, has published many articles on blake and his circle, as well as the books restoring the temple of vision: cabalistic freemasonry and stuart culture (brill, 2002), why mrs. blake cried: william blake and the sexual basis of spiritual vision (random house, 2006), emanuel swedenborg, secret agent on earth and in heaven: jacobites, jews, and freemasons in early modern sweden (brill, 2012), and masonic rivalries and literary politics: from jonathan swift to henry fielding (forthcoming). in 1863 blake’s biographer alexander gilchrist lamented that he had been unable to learn anything about the artist’s mother, catherine: “she is a shade to us, alas! in all senses: for of her character, or even her person, no tidings survive.”alexander gilchrist, life of william blake, “pictor ignotus,” 2 vols. (london: macmillan, 1863) 1: 96. though more information emerged over the next decades, the discovery that she was a widow before she married james blake, father of william, and that she and her first husband, thomas armitage, were members of the moravian church in london in 1750–51, provided a new context for her personal development and influence on her son william.keri davies and marsha keith schuchard, “recovering the lost moravian history of william blake’s family,” blake 38.1 (summer 2004): 36-43. the armitages participated in moravian affairs at the height of the “sifting time,” when their leader, count nikolaus ludwig von zinzendorf, and his son, christian renatus, implemented radical experiments in sexuality, art, and music. the term was applied to this turbulent period in the wake of widely published accusations of scandalous behavior, when intimidated and cautious church officials claimed that their faith had been strengthened after being tested by satan: “and the lord said, simon, simon, behold, satan has desired to have you, that he may sift you as wheat” (luke 22.31). what is relevant to blake’s mother is that christian renatus (or christel, as he was called by his infatuated followers), the leader and propagator of the sexual excesses at the center of the “sifting,” participated in the london church from may 1749 to may 1752, when he died at age twenty-four. paul peucker, former archivist of the moravian archives in herrnhut, germany, and current director of the church’s archives in bethlehem, pennsylvania, has pieced together the reality of the sexual excesses practiced and encouraged by christel from the fragmentary surviving documents of the sifting time. he also places them within the context of zinzendorf’s own beliefs about the “mystical marriage” between the believer and christ, especially the count’s teaching that sexual intercourse within marriage was a liturgical act in which the couple could experience full union with jesus. the moravians’ pioneering techniques of sex education infused a spiritual dimension to marital copulation that was very similar to that of jewish kabbalists. craig atwood, colin podmore, and other current moravian historians have written lucidly and positively about these concepts and practices.craig d. atwood, “sleeping in the arms of christ: sanctifying sexuality in the eighteenth-century moravian church,” journal of the history of sexuality 8 (1997): 25-51; colin podmore, the moravian church in england, 1728–1760 (oxford: clarendon press, 1998). what peucker has brought to the history is a deeper investigation of german sources that reveal how far christel and his devotees extended the notion of sacramental sexuality into radical rituals of gender changing, homosexual activity, extramarital intercourse, and possibly group sex. he narrates these documentary discoveries without sensationalizing them or making them seem perverted, while being frank and explicit about his textual materials. though peucker does not mention blake or deal with the london context of christel’s activities, he makes clear that the charismatic young man brought to london his radical ideas and practices, as well as a group of his closest disciples, his “schätzel ” or “sweethearts” (50). he focuses on the crisis that emerged in february 1749 when zinzendorf sent from london to all moravian congregations a letter of reprimand aimed at ending the sexual misconduct, which had become more egregious after christel held a gender-changing ceremony in december 1748 at the moravian center in herrnhaag, germany. in order to overcome the difficulty of male marriage with jesus, zinzendorf declared that every soul is feminine (anima) and that at death the male body would be shed. as peucker observes, “by teaching that men were essentially women, zinzendorf enabled moravian men to envision their intense love for christ in the same sensual manner as women did” (113). but christel and the younger generation “could no longer wait,” and “they had learned that any manly (sinful) gender identity was only temporary and that inside each man a maiden was hiding” (113-14). in a joyous but controversial ceremony, christel “declared all brothers to be sisters” (114), and they were forgiven for all previous and future “manly” sins: “for moravians, an antinomian phase had begun” (117). in the hothouse atmosphere of herrnhaag and other moravian centers (infused with powerful music, ritualized dance, elaborate artworks, and thousands of candles), the infatuated “sweethearts” frolicked and played in increasingly uninhibited sexual relationships. one radical group formed a society of “sixty queens,” composed of sixty select men and women who held private ceremonies in their rooms (116). emanuel swedenborg recounted that when he was in london in 1748–49 he was taken by two moravians to a secret room where the members pronounced antinomian sentiments and indulged in promiscuous rituals.emanuel swedenborg, the spiritual diary, trans. alfred acton (1962; rpt. london: swedenborg society, 1977) nos. 3439, 3447, 3450-53. as atwood memorably remarked, the sifting time was “primarily a youth movement,” and its manifestation at marienborn and herrnhaag can be compared “to the ‘summer of love’ in san francisco in 1968. it was a time when a youth culture frightened the authorities.”atwood, community of the cross: moravian piety in colonial bethlehem (university park: pennsylvania state university press, 2004) 17n57, 90. for readers of blake who are interested in his often radical and uninhibited portrayals of sexual variety, peucker’s revelation of the actual words of moravian enthusiasts and their critics will be provocative and worth further examination. that blake’s mother was privy to christel’s activities in london, where he was adored by the congregation, makes the question of her possible transmission of his ideas to her son intriguing. thus, peucker’s discussion of the songs of the sifting time (93-103) becomes especially relevant to the study of blake, who considered himself a singer and composer as much as a pictorial artist. when zinzendorf tried to suppress the sifting, he ordered members to turn in their hymn books, which were buried or burned. however, many members kept their own handwritten hymn books, which contained not only the congregations’ but their own compositions. the count worried that “it will take several years for us to get rid of these songs, since people learned them by heart” (quoted on 93). singing was “a spirit-filled, almost ecstatic matter” (94), and hymns were sung with “a ragingly glowing feeling of love” (96, quoting a letter to zinzendorf). a former moravian accused zinzendorf of “using the tunes of whore songs as sacred hymns” (quoted on 97). though, as mentioned, peucker’s book does not include catherine armitage and william blake, his painstaking and thorough examination of the surviving german archival sources and his open-minded and even-handed analysis of their historical and religious significance make his book an important resource for blake scholars. he concludes with the account of a newly appointed moravian archivist in 1802 who came upon a sealed bundle of contemporary documents from the sifting time; he did not dare open it and sent it to the elders, who read the documents, were horrified, and threw everything into the fire (172). peucker concedes that his study has “only partially lifted the veil that covered the sifting time” (170), but we must be grateful that he has lifted it further than has any previous archivist or historian. blake in the marketplace, 2015 blake in the marketplace, 2015 by robert n. essick robert n. essick has been collecting and writing about blake for over forty-five years. table of contents: introductory essay abbreviations blake: illuminated books drawings and paintings manuscripts separate plates and plates in series letterpress books with engravings by and after blake, including prints extracted from such books interesting blakeana blake’s circle and followers: barry, james basire, james flaxman, john fuseli, henry linnell, john palmer, samuel richmond, george romney, george sherman, welby stothard, thomas appendix: new information on blake’s engravings the first three months of 2015 brought forth two important works by blake, a tempera painting (illus. 7) and a manuscript (illus. 8), but neither was fresh to the market. the year began more spectacularly for scholars and collectors of blake’s circle and followers. by the end of january, sotheby’s and christie’s had offered at auction fourteen drawings and a painting by fuseli, including eleven previously unrecorded works (illus. 11-12), two drawings by romney, and a palmer oil painting. lowell libson’s january catalogue featured five works by flaxman, romney, and palmer. even ebay made a modest contribution with an annotated proof of one of palmer’s illustrations for charles dickens’s pictures from italy (illus. 14). details are presented in the lists below. in conjunction with a major blake exhibition at the ashmolean museum, oxford, blackwell’s issued an online william blake short list 30 in mid-january. the sixty-seven items include many original graphics and muir facsimiles from john windle’s stock. most of these works were previously offered in october 2014 by sotheran’s in london, but failed to find buyers at that venue. their appearance in blackwell’s catalogue, with some revised prices, is recorded below. in mid-april, a private collector brought to windle’s bookshop in san francisco a volume of songs of innocence plates for evaluation. this was quickly identified as copy w, untraced since its sale for £50 in an april 1941 sotheby’s auction. in late october, windle disbound the book at the owner’s request for sale plate by plate—see the single entry under illuminated books, below, and illus. 1-3. fortunately, i was able to inspect copy w shortly before it was disbound. its twenty-two plates, printed in black ink on twenty-two leaves of wove paper, were arranged in the following order: blake books plates 3, 2, 4, 6, 7, 25, 11, 12, 19, 15, 8, 5, 20, 21, 16, 17, 22, 23, 27, 24, 26, 54. the leaves, 20.2 x 11.8 cm., were glued (not sewn) into a thick paper wrapper, split at the hinges, in turn inserted loose in a black morocco binding gilt stamped “william blake.” on the front cover.pl. 2, the frontispiece, is shorter, at 19.7 cm.; there are other variations of about 1 mm. in leaf sizes. sotheby’s catalogue of 28-30 april 1941, #641, describes copy w as in “wrappers, loose in morocco binding.” this statement indicates that the book was then in the condition in which i found it shortly before it was disbound. windle believes that the morocco dates from the first half of the 20th century. about a quarter of the morocco backstrip is missing. it is difficult to avoid the supposition that blake’s plates were formerly bound in the morocco covers, but the bibliographic evidence for this is not as solid as one would wish. the leaves bearing blake’s poems fit into the morocco reasonably well, but the thick wrappers do not match the paper of the paste-down endpapers still within the morocco. the blank leaf between the front wrapper and the first plate and a matching blank between the last plate and the back wrapper are 20.5 cm. in height, whereas the paste-downs are 19.9 cm. high. thus, neither the paper binding nor the blanks could have been free endpapers continuous with the paste-down endpapers. one scenario that could explain this situation is that, after removal from the damaged morocco, blake’s plates were bound in the paper wrapper and the two blank leaves to protect the prints. alternatively, the morocco covers were used as a folder for blake’s leaves, but the leaves were never bound into those covers. removing the leaves from the binding revealed three stabholes, the top hole approximately 5.0 cm. from the top edge. the top hole is 3.7 cm. above the middle hole, and the bottom hole 3.7 cm. below the middle hole. these are not part of the recent glued binding and may be remnants of the original binding, possibly created by blake’s wife, catherine. the left edges of some leaves show many small indentations, probably the right half of stabholes from a binding later than the one indicated by the three holes but before the recent glued binding. plate 23, the second plate of “spring,” shows a j whatman watermark running vertically, bottom to top, just to the right of the center of the leaf. plate 15, “laughing song,” bears two pencil inscriptions, probably by different hands, lower left: “wb” overwritten with another word, probably “laughing.” neither hand is blake’s. a pencil inscription on the verso of the front wrapper, “l l h,” may be either the initials of an earlier owner or a dealer’s price code. if the latter, the inscription may be “£ £ h” (£28?). copy w, like copy u, was assembled from the first printing of songs of innocence for which we have any evidence.joseph viscomi, blake and the idea of the book 243-47, makes a convincing case that copy u (houghton library, harvard) was assembled from the first known printing of songs of innocence and claims that untraced copy v is also from this early press-run. the only record of copy v states that it was on “30 leaves, with beautiful designs coloured by the artist, wants title, half bound, sold with all faults” (sotheby’s london catalogue, 13 march 1891, #350). viscomi has explained to me (email of 11 jan. 2016) that he groups copy v with u and w because he believes that all three originally contained 31 plates printed on rectos only and that these were the only copies blake produced with that number of plates printed on rectos only. the coloring of copy v may have been executed at a later date. viscomi 297 tentatively suggests that copy w “may initially have been joined with experience of songs copy n,” but neither viscomi nor i now believe this to be the case. these two were printed at different times. the fact that these are the only recorded copies containing the first state of plate 25, “infant joy” (illus. 3), is crucial in establishing their priority. although all religions are one and there is no natural religion were etched c. 1788, there are no extant impressions printed before c. 1794. thus, these two copies of innocence were produced in the earliest known printing of any illuminated book. they share several characteristics: first state of plate 25, rich black ink, printing on rectos only, leaves of whatman wove paper of about the same size,the leaves of copy u measure 18.9 x 11.8 cm. the heads of the leaves in copy u were probably trimmed slightly before they were gilt (see blake books p. 373n5). viscomi 247 states that the leaves of copy u are “sheets of whatman imperial paper cut into sixteen leaves per sheet”; this may also be true of copy w. etching borders wiped free (or mostly free) of ink, ink smudges and splatter in white areas, overinking of some design areas, and three stabholes from what was probably their original bindings. the quality of the impressions in copies u and w indicates that the blakes were just beginning to develop their skills at inking and printing relief etchings. the leaves in the recent binding order of copy w are numbered, in light pencil upper right, 2, 1, 3-20, 25, 26. these numbers are not by blake and may have been written by a binder. the frontispiece, the second printed leaf in the glued binding, was apparently the first leaf when numbered. the gap in numbering between 20 and 25 suggests that at least four further leaves were present when the pencil numbers were inscribed. in comparison to the complete set of thirty-one innocence plates in copy u, copy w lacks blake books plates 9, 10, 13, 14, 18, 34-36, and 53.blake books pp. 366 and 377 record a duplicate impression of pl. 9 (1st pl. of “the little black boy”) in copy u, but this is no longer kept as part of copy u, disbound c. 1891. the upper margins of a few leaves are stained, apparently by a liquid, and the edges of some leaves bear indications of rough treatment. if copy w originally contained all innocence plates, perhaps these nine missing plates were too damaged to be retained, including the group of four between the leaves numbered 20 and 25 and a group of five at the end of the copy.blake printed per plate, not per copy. we know from copy u that thirty-one copperplates were available for printing at the time that blake also printed the impressions in copy w. it would make little sense to pull two impressions of twenty-two plates and just one of nine plates. it is also possible, as joe viscomi has suggested to me in an email of 11 dec., that five plates were removed before the pencil numbering. blake’s tempera paintings, such as the virgin hushing (illus. 7), are rarely available for purchase. when a second was offered by a new york dealer in april (st. matthew, illus. 6) and yet a third entered sotheby’s auction rooms in may, i began to suspect that the market was rapidly becoming oversaturated. the holy family: “christ in the lap of truth” (illus. 5) was completely overpainted in oil by another hand and thus little better than a simulacrum of a work by blake. the painting fetched a winning bid of £16,000, which, with the buyer’s premium added, matched the low estimate of £20,000. hill-stone, the new york art dealer, published an important catalogue of british prints and drawings in 2013. works on offer included blake’s separate plate of “george cumberland’s card,” two drawings by romney and one by fuseli, and rare states of prints by barry and palmer. these are listed below; apologies for my tardy reporting. i am becoming increasingly suspicious of prices on ebay when an item is listed as sold and quickly appears again. for example, a copy of darwin’s botanic garden sold for €127.55 in late february and was relisted in march, selling for €139.89. the first sale may be a purchase by an agent for the vendor in an attempt to support a price level. and can we trust that the second sale was genuine? over the last few years i have made changes in the survey of blake’s circle and followers. below is a list of the coverage for each artist, including a few revisions established for the current and future marketplace reports: barry, james. drawings, paintings, and original graphics (that is, prints both designed and engraved by barry). basire, james. engravings and etchings executed during blake’s apprenticeship, 1772–79. calvert, edward. early drawings, paintings, and prints, but not later drawings and paintings. flaxman, john. drawings and sculpture, but not copy engravings and lithographs of flaxman’s classical designs. blake’s engravings of flaxman’s works are included under letterpress books with engravings by and after blake. fuseli, henry. drawings, paintings, and separate plates (including those executed by others). linnell, john. early drawings, paintings, and original graphics.linnell’s later paintings present problems in attribution, particularly when one is working only from online images. it is sometimes difficult to distinguish his work from his sons’ paintings. several of linnell’s more popular designs were imitated by others. mortimer, john hamilton. no longer included. palmer, samuel. drawings, paintings, and rare states of original graphics. parker, james. no longer included. works related to blake will be listed under interesting blakeana. richmond, george. early drawings, paintings (excluding portraits unless related to blake’s circle), and original graphics. romney, george. drawings and paintings (excluding portraits unless related to blake’s circle). sherman, welby. paintings, drawings, and prints. stothard, thomas. drawings, paintings, and original graphics. manuscripts and letters by the artists listed above, except for mortimer, will be included when relevant to their work or to relationships within the circle of blake’s contemporaries and followers. works of exceptional interest will be recorded even if outside the genres specified above. the year of all sales and catalogues in the following lists is 2015, unless indicated otherwise. most reports about auction catalogues are based on the online versions. coverage of regional auctions is selective. dates for dealers’ online catalogues are the dates accessed, not the dates of publication. works offered online by dealers and previously listed in any one of the last four sales reviews are not repeated here. most of the auction houses add their purchaser’s surcharge to the hammer price in their price lists. these net amounts are given here, following the official price lists. the value-added tax levied against the buyer’s surcharge in britain is not included. i am grateful for help in compiling this review to g. e. bentley, jr., david bindman, gordon cooke, mark crosby, alexander gourlay, gretchen hause, scott jordan, sarah lindberg, melinda mccurdy, william pressly, andrea rico, kevin salatino, carmen socknat, richard thompson, joseph viscomi, and john windle. my special thanks go to jenijoy la belle for assistance in all matters. once again, sarah jones’s editorial expertise and john sullivan’s digital imaging have been invaluable. abbreviations ah abbott and holder, london baeyer emanuel von baeyer, london bb g. e. bentley, jr., blake books (oxford: clarendon p, 1977). plate numbers and copy designations for blake’s illuminated books and commercial book illustrations follow bb. bbs g. e. bentley, jr., blake books supplement (oxford: clarendon p, 1995) bg bloomsbury auctions, godalming bhl bonhams auctions, london bho bonhams auctions, oxford bl bloomsbury auctions, london br(2) g. e. bentley, jr., blake records, 2nd ed. (new haven: yale up, 2004) butlin martin butlin, the paintings and drawings of william blake, 2 vols. (new haven: yale up, 1981) cat(s). catalogue(s) cb robert n. essick, william blake’s commercial book illustrations (oxford: clarendon p, 1991) cl christie’s auctions, london cny christie’s auctions, new york coxhead a. c. coxhead, thomas stothard, r.a. (london: bullen, 1906) csk christie’s auctions, south kensington dickens the letters of charles dickens, vol. 4, ed. kathleen tillotson (oxford: clarendon p, 1977) dw dominic winter auctions, south cerney, gloucestershire e the complete poetry and prose of william blake, ed. david v. erdman, newly rev. ed. (new york: anchor-random house, 1988) eb ebay online auctions gb galerie bassenge auctions, berlin gp grosvenor prints, london gpf guy peppiatt fine art, london hs hill-stone, new york illus. illustration(s), illustrated lister raymond lister, catalogue raisonné of the works of samuel palmer (cambridge: cambridge up, 1988) ll lowell libson, london pl(s). plate(s) sl sotheby’s auctions, london sny sotheby’s auctions, new york sp robert n. essick, the separate plates of william blake: a catalogue (princeton: princeton up, 1983) st(s). state(s) of an engraving, etching, or lithograph swann swann auctions, new york viscomi joseph viscomi, blake and the idea of the book (princeton: princeton up, 1993) weinglass d. h. weinglass, prints and engraved illustrations by and after henry fuseli (aldershot: scolar p, 1994) # auction lot or catalogue item number illuminated books songs of innocence, copy w. twenty-two pls. on 22 leaves. for bibliographic details, see the introductory essay. provenance: early history not known; sold from the “property of a nobleman” at hodgson’s auction, london, 28 june 1940, #260 (£25 to “private”); sold sl, 30 april 1941, #641 (£50 to the dealer b. f. stevens); acquired at an unknown time, perhaps shortly after the 1941 auction, by a private american collector; by inheritance to the private american collector who brought the volume to john windle, the san francisco book dealer, in april 2015; on consignment with windle in oct.; disbound by windle at the owner’s request in late oct.; pls. 2 (frontispiece), 5 (“the shepherd”), 15 (“laughing song”), 25 (“infant joy”), 54 (“the voice of the ancient bard”), and the former paper binding and morocco folder acquired late oct. by essick; pls. 3 (title page), 11 (“the blossom”), 16-17 (“a cradle song”), and 26 (“a dream”) acquired dec. by the e. j. pratt library, victoria university, toronto; pls. 6-7 (“the ecchoing green”) acquired early jan. 2016 by the morgan library and museum, new york; pl. 8 (“the lamb”) acquired early jan. 2016 by the lilly library, indiana university, bloomington, indiana; pls. 4 (“introduction”) and 27 (“on anothers sorrow”) acquired late jan. 2016 by alan parker, london; pls. 22-23 (“spring”) and 24 (“nurses song”) acquired feb. 2016 by the university of north carolina at chapel hill library; pls. 12 (“the chimney sweeper”) and 20-21 (“night”) acquired march 2016 by the charles deering mccormick library of special collections, northwestern university, evanston, illinois. pl. 19 (“holy thursday”) is the only remaining pl. from copy w available from windle as of mid-march 2016 (price on request). see illus. 1-3. 1. frontispiece from songs of innocence, copy w, untraced between april 1941 and april 2015 (see enlargement). relief etching printed in black ink, 1789. bb pl. 2, 10.9 x 6.9 cm., leaf of wove paper 19.7 x 11.6 cm. numbered “1” in pencil, upper right in an unidentified hand, but written so lightly that the number is probably not visible in this reproduction. the presence of stabholes in the left margin indicates that this impression was not bound facing the title page, as in conventional books with frontispieces. the thread projecting from the middle of the left margin is probably a remnant of the binding that used multiple holes, visible as small indentations along the left edge of the leaf, and not part of the original binding with three holes. the frontispiece in innocence copy u, printed in the same press run with this impression from copy w, is less heavily inked. the plate in copy u may be the second pull with some reinking. these two copies were probably not intended for hand coloring. all traced copies of innocence produced c. 1789 and tinted with watercolors were more delicately printed in softer colors, including green, raw sienna, and yellow ochre. essick collection; digital image taken after the volume was disbound. a gray tone appears in the whites above the child’s head, surrounding the tree limbs upper left, and left of the piper’s right arm. at first glance this looks like wash applied by hand, but under magnification it becomes clear that the gray haze is composed of minute ink droplets printed from the copperplate. this foul inking of whites is very probably accidental, a product of the overinking of contiguous relief plateaus, but the effect is not unpleasing. such deposits of ink in recessed areas of the copperplate might be considered the equivalent, for a plate etched in relief, of “plate tone”—that is, ink purposefully printed from the surface of a plate etched or engraved in intaglio, a technique famously exploited by james whistler. 2. title page from songs of innocence, copy w (see enlargement). relief and white-line etching printed in black ink, 1789. bb pl. 3, 12.0 x 7.4 cm., leaf of wove paper 20.2 x 11.8 cm. numbered “2” in pencil upper right in an unidentified hand. the dark patches that obscure the image lower right are the result of overinking. the title page in innocence copy u, printed in the same press run with this impression, is more heavily inked throughout. the plate here in copy w may be a second pull with little or no reinking. e. j. pratt library, victoria university, toronto. digital image taken before the volume was disbound, courtesy of john windle. 3. “infant joy” from songs of innocence, copy w (see enlargement). relief etching with touches of white-line work printed in black ink, 1789. bb pl. 25, 11.1 x 6.8 cm., leaf of wove paper 20.1 x 11.7 cm. numbered “6” in pencil upper right in an unidentified hand. first st. of 2, with the 1st letter of “joy” in the title descending into the petal below, heretofore known only in songs of innocence copy u (see viscomi 243-47 and illus. 251). blake cut away the part of the initial “j” below the upper outline of the petal to create the 2nd st. pl. 25 in copy u, printed in the same press run with this impression, shows much more ink splatter in the design above the text and residual ink on the etching borders. the plate here in copy w may be a second pull after some cleaning and careful reinking. the text is more lightly printed than in copy u. essick collection; digital image taken after the volume was disbound. drawings and paintings the counsellor, king, warrior, mother and child. monochrome wash drawing, 19.0 x 28.3 cm., datable to c. 1780–85. butlin #136. cl, 7 july, #93, titled the counsellor, king, warrior, mother and child, bodies on a battlefield, sold “the property of a lady,” possibly “one of the unidentified works, twenty-two in all, sold in a portfolio as lot 146 [error for 147, “william blake: slight sketches and studies”] at the george richmond sale, in these rooms, 29 april 1897, and bought by ‘cicely’” (£2.10s. to richard sisley), martin butlin thanked for his help with the detailed cat. entry, illus. (not sold; estimate £60,000-80,000). in an email of 1 aug., harriet drummond of christie’s informed john windle that the drawing had been sold by private treaty after the auction. the vendor was very probably the “private collection, great britain” (or the estate of the collector) listed as the owner in butlin. she acquired the work by descent, probably in 1975, from david alexander robert lindsay, the 28th earl of crawford and 11th earl of balcarres (1900–75). the suggestion that the drawing may have been in the 1897 auction is not recorded in butlin. see illus. 4. 4. the counsellor, king, warrior, mother and child (see enlargement). monochrome wash drawing on laid paper, 19.0 x 28.3 cm. butlin #136, dating the work to c. 1780–85. photo courtesy of christie’s london. according to david bindman, blake as an artist (oxford: phaidon, 1977) 31, “the black cloud contains the barely distinguishable figure of death hurling darts.” i have not seen the original, but i am unable to find this figure in a high-resolution digital image. there are a few lines extending from the center of the drawing toward the right that may not be part of the cloud, but these do not seem to constitute a figure. a cluster of diagonal lines extending toward the lower right corner might be bindman’s “darts,” but they could also be rain in this stormy scene. the disposition of the bodies was influenced by blake’s study of tomb effigies in westminster abbey while an apprentice to james basire. this work may form a group—although probably not a series—with at least 2 other wash drawings of the 1780s on the theme of war and its consequence, sketch for “war unchained by an angel, fire, pestilence, and famine following” and searching among the dead on a battlefield (butlin #186 recto, 197a). a watercolor of war unchained and its watercolor companion, a breach in a city, the morning after a battle (butlin #187-88), were exhibited at the royal academy in 1784; both are now untraced. blake returned in 1805 to basic features of the design reproduced here for 1 of his illus. to blair’s grave, engraved by luigi schiavonetti as pl. 4 in r. h. cromek’s 1808 edition. the setting is a tomb in the grave illus., rather than a battlefield, and the figure lower left holding a sword is not included. christie’s cat. of 7 july associates the present design with two further drawings of the 1780s, the spirit of a just man newly departed appearing to his mourning family and burial scene (butlin #135, 137 recto), apparently because of their relationship to the later grave illus. as well as their theme of mortality. harpers and other drawings (recto), preliminary sketches for america and europe (verso). pencil, leaf of wove paper 20.4 x 24.6 cm., datable to 1792–93. not in butlin because not discovered until 2010. acquired oct. by essick from ll, john windle acting as agent. for information on these drawings and illus., see blake 46.4 (spring 2013): par. 7 and illus. 9-11, martin butlin, “harpers and other drawings: the case for a unified composition,” blake 47.2 (fall 2013), and blake 47.4 (spring 2014). the holy family: “christ in the lap of truth.”  tempera, 60.0 x 50.0 cm., datable to c. 1810(?), overpainted in oil by another hand. butlin #671, located in a “private collection, london.” sl, 27 may, #146, sold “from the estate of mary, duchess of roxburghe” (1915–2014), illus. (£20,000; estimate £20,000-30,000). the duchess inherited the painting from her father, the 1st marquess of crewe (1858–1945). see illus. 5. 5. the holy family: “christ in the lap of truth” (see enlargement). tempera, 60.0 x 50.0 cm., datable to c. 1810(?), overpainted in oil by another hand no later than april 1862. butlin #671. photo courtesy of sotheby’s london. as butlin indicates, william michael rossetti appears to have recorded this work twice in his catalogue of blake’s paintings and drawings in vol. 2 of alexander gilchrist, life of william blake, 1863. the first listing (p. 230, #183) titles the work “the same” as the prior entry, “the holy family,” a watercolor of the same design now in the cleveland museum of art (butlin #471). rossetti describes the medium as “tempera” and identifies the figures as “the virgin” holding “the infant christ,” with joseph and “anna” (st. anne, mary’s mother) beside them and “the infant baptist, with a lamb,” lying on the ground. the second entry (p. 231, #191) is definitely the present painting, titled “christ in the lap of truth, and between his earthly parents,” and described as an “oil-picture … rather concealed than displayed at the [1862] international exhibition.” rossetti repeats the title given in the 1862 exhibition cat. and implies that the woman seated on the right is mary rather than anne. the central female is thus taken to be truth personified. perhaps rossetti saw the painting before it was overpainted, wrote his first entry, and saw it again at the 1862 exhibit without realizing that it was the same work, now considerably altered due to the overlay of oil paint. click to show more. butlin believes that the woman holding jesus is indeed his mother. the identification of the woman on the right as st. anne is supported by her aged appearance, with a wrinkled forehead, in both the cleveland watercolor and the painting. a thin halo hovers above mary’s head; christ’s arms are prophetically extended in a cruciform position. worshipful angels guard the family on three sides. sotheby’s london, which sold the work at auction on 27 may, employed rica jones, formerly a conservator at tate britain, to inspect the holy family, attempt to find how much of blake’s original lies beneath the oil, and consider removing the overpainting. in a letter to mark griffith-jones of sotheby’s of 9 april 2015, rica jones writes as follows: “the summary answers to these questions are that the picture is almost completely repainted and that in the very few areas where blake’s original tempera paint is visible with the aid of a microscope, it is very badly cracked and worn. even if it were possible to remove the overpaint safely, which is very doubtful, the indications are that all the dark areas and probably many of the lights would be ghostly or barely existent. … apart from the visible ‘victorian’ style of the repainting, there is microscopic evidence that the repainting could have taken place around the time of the first recorded sales of the painting in the 1850s and 1860s.” butlin records sales at auctions in june 1853 and march 1854 (the work was titled “the holy family: ‘christ in the lap of truth’” in both sales cats.), and ownership of the painting by richard monckton milnes in 1862 when he lent it to the international exhibition, crystal palace, london, #221 in the “oil-paintings” section of the official catalogue of the fine art department. in his handbook to the pictures in the international exhibition of 1862, p. 74, tom taylor comments that “tameness and insipidity” are “the most striking characteristics of … christ in the lap of truth.” the observation nicely befits the “oil-picture” described by rossetti after seeing it at the crystal palace exhibition that opened 1 may 1862. click to show less. st. matthew. tempera, datable to 1799. butlin #396. the new york art dealer paul herring, april private offer, apparently representing a european owner (€600,000). previously available through nicholas lott of larkhall fine art, nov. 2013 (price on request). see illus. 6. 6. st. matthew (see enlargement). tempera on canvas, 37.2 x 25.7 cm., datable to 1799. butlin #396. one of 4 paintings of the evangelists, all in vertical format (2 untraced). the design represents an angel offering a divine revelation to the saint; it does not appear to be based on any specific passage in the gospel of matthew. the red marks on the scroll suggest hebrew letters, but these do not constitute a legible text. the rectangular object behind and to the left of the figures may be a stone wall or altar. the paint layer is unusually thin for a tempera of 1799. the weave of the canvas support is visible, possibly the result of overcleaning. photo courtesy of john windle. the virgin hushing the young baptist, who approaches the sleeping infant jesus. tempera, 1799. butlin #406. ll, jan. cat., pp. 64-69, extensively described, illus. (not priced). for previous offers to sell, see the 2014 sales review, blake 48.4 (spring 2015). see illus. 7. 7. the virgin hushing the young baptist, who approaches the sleeping infant jesus (see enlargement). tempera on paper mounted on canvas, 27.0 x 38.2 cm., inscribed “wb inv [in monogram] 1799.” butlin #406. st. john carries a butterfly in his right hand; another flies in the sky upper right. traditionally associated with psyche in classical mythology, butterflies became an emblem of the soul, particularly when liberated from the body, in christian iconography. blake may have included butterflies in this painting as prophetic symbols of jesus’s baptism, when the “spirit” of god appeared as another winged creature, “a dove” (mark 1.10), and his resurrection. the butterfly soaring heavenward adumbrates the assumption of the virgin, jesus, or both. these events are far in the future, and thus the virgin admonishes john not to awaken jesus prematurely. two butterflies are pictured in blake’s engraving of “the conjugal union of cupid” and psyche after a design by george cumberland, published in cumberland’s thoughts on outline, 1796, blake’s pl. 4. henry fuseli’s use of moths and butterflies in his designs may have influenced the virgin hushing as well as the lepidopteric imagery in the 2nd st. of “albion rose” and the title page of blake’s jerusalem. the book held by the virgin might be the old testament, with its prophecies of the coming of the messiah, now closed as it is being replaced by the new dispensation of christ. the landscape seen through the doorway includes the “wilderness” where john will baptize his followers (mark 1.4). the white cloth below the sleeping child evokes christ’s burial shroud—the “linen clothes folded up” (the marriage of heaven and hell, e 34) after his resurrection. blake’s images constitute a typological and prophetic iconography. photo courtesy of john windle. wat tyler. pencil, 24.2 x 19.2 cm., inscribed “octr 30. 1819,” probably p. 66 from the larger blake-varley sketchbook. butlin #737, then in the collection of edwin wolf 2nd. described by butlin as the original, but the discovery of the larger blake-varley sketchbook revealed the original drawing, p. 65, of which this version is a counterproof. bauman rare books, sept. online cat., marginal stains, framed, illus. ($65,000). for earlier sales and attempts to sell, see the 2014 sales review, blake 48.4 (spring 2015). manuscripts letter of 18 jan. 1808 to ozias humphry, 4 pp. describing blake’s vision of the last judgment watercolor (butlin #642). bhl, 18 march, #91, “on two separated leaves, paper watermarked ‘ivy mill / 1806,’ central fold professionally strengthened, trace of former guards, slight overall dust staining,” illus. (£43,750 to the london dealer benjamin spademan; estimate £10,000-15,000). each leaf measures 22.0 x 18.4 cm.; the watermark appears in the 2nd leaf (pp. 3/4).according to sarah lindberg, manuscript specialist, bonhams, email of 2 march 2015. earlier sales and attempts to sell since the provenance recorded in bb p. 280 and bbs p. 95: roy davids, march 2000 cat. for the artist as a portrait exhibition and sale (3-14 april 2000) at the fine art society, london, #10, 1st and last pp. illus. (£40,000); reportedly sold by davids late 2002 to an anonymous private collector but returned to davids by 2008; bhl, 29 march 2011, #264, from the stock of roy davids, 1st and last pp. illus. (not sold; estimate £50,000-60,000). davids was almost certainly the vendor at the 2015 bhl auction. see illus. 8. 8. page 1 of blake’s letter of 18 jan. 1808 to ozias humphry describing blake’s vision of the last judgment watercolor now at petworth house (butlin #642) (see enlargement). leaf of wove paper, 22.0 x 18.4 cm. one of 3 versions of blake’s description of his picture. photo courtesy of bonhams london. click to show more. the text of the complete letter in e 552-54 is “consolidated by treating as deletions all words not in the final and briefest draft” (textual note, e 881). this editorial procedure does not permit one to determine which version of the text is the source for any specific reading recorded as a deletion. a more useful text is provided by william blake’s writings, ed. g. e. bentley, jr. (oxford: clarendon p, 1978) 2: 1637-41. bentley prints the present letter, designated version a, as his reading text and supplies detailed notes on variants found in versions b (lord egremont, petworth house) and c (lord cunliffe), the latter dated “feby 1808” and thus clearly the last to be written. the same letter designations appear in bb p. 272. the letters of william blake, ed. geoffrey keynes, 3rd ed. (oxford: clarendon p, 1980) 131-35, prints this letter, which keynes also calls version a, with substantive variants in version b in italic and inserted within brackets, followed by bentley’s version c (which keynes calls a “second draft”) as a separate text. keynes claims that “it is difficult to say which version [a or b] was written first” (210), but bentley states that “blake copied this letter (a) twice” (2: 1637n1), thereby implying that it is the 1st version. roy davids’s 2000 cat., the artist as a portrait, presents evidence, repeated in the bhl cat. of 29 march 2011, that the present letter (bentley’s a) is the 2nd, a revision of b that is closer in its substantive variants to c than b is to c. for example, in the 1st paragraph shown here, both a and c read “by your recommendation for the countess of egremont,” whereas b reads “by your recommendation under a fortunate star, for the [countess del] earl of egremont” (writings, ed. bentley, 2: 1638n5). the final line on p. 1 in a, “into which the wicked are descending,” reads the same in c but is very different in b: “into which the wicked are descending while others rise from their graves on the brink of the pit” (writings, ed. bentley, 2: 1639n35). this pattern supports davids’s chronology of composition, b-a-c. how, then, did version b, if a 1st draft, find its way to lord egremont, while version a, if a revised version, stayed with humphry until it passed to his son, william upcott (see the provenance record in bb p. 280)? davids answers this question by suggesting that humphry, to whom all 3 versions are addressed, sent the wrong version to egremont “as a result of confusion arising from humphry’s near-blindness” (the artist as a portrait 18). the letter shows 4 emendations. in the penultimate line on p. 1, shown here, and in the 5th line from the end on p. 2, the word “harlots” has been changed to “harlot’s” by scraping away the terminal “s” and substituting an apostrophe and a new terminal “s” to create the possessive. in both cases, the ink differs from the rest of the text and has stained the surrounding paper brown. no such browning appears elsewhere in the document. as alexander gourlay has reminded me, blake had little concern for the consistent use of apostrophes in possessives; it is highly unlikely that he would go to the trouble to add them here. i suspect that these revisions were made by someone else, possibly upcott, who had the letter in his possession no later than 1828. in versions b and c, the word is “harlots” on both pages (writings, ed. bentley, 2: 1639n33 and 65), as in the unrevised state of the present letter (a). the word is “harlot’s” in both passages in the transcription of version a in j. t. smith, nollekens and his times, 1828 (see br[2] 622-24). gourlay suggests that smith, to whom upcott apparently lent the letter, may have been the culprit as he prepared the manuscript for typesetting (email of 18 march 2015). smith’s text does not prove that the letter itself had already been amended; his use of the apostrophe may only be an editorial regularization that also included changing the initial “h” to lower case. his published version contains other variants from the manuscript not inscribed on it. on p. 3, line 10, the end of the word “air” is abraded. it seems as though a second “r” was added at the end of the word, but the first “r” is still present. this odd, possibly incomplete correction is in the same ink as the rest of the text (with the 2 exceptions noted above) and was probably made by blake. the word is “air” in version b and “air” in version c (writings, ed. bentley, 2: 1640n90). also on p. 3, line 3 from the end, the second letter of “veil” has been overwritten, probably by blake simply to correct a poorly formed inscription of the same letter. the presence of only 2 corrections by blake reinforces davids’s contention that this letter (a) was not a working draft but a revised copy of version b. click to show less. separate plates and plates in series “carfax conduit, oxford.” an impression on wove paper, trimmed to 28.2 x 22.0 cm. and thus with the title below the design and the finial and its maltese cross at the top of the pl. cut off, was acquired in march by the e. j. pratt library, victoria university, toronto.according to g. e. bentley, jr., emails of 15-16 march 2015. bentley also tells me that the victoria university impression was acquired from an edinburgh dealer through sanders of oxford. this is not the print offered in sanders’s online cat. of aug. 2014, acquired by john windle for stock, and subsequently sold to a private american collector. for information about this pl., see the 2014 sales review in blake 48.4 (spring 2015). “chaucers canterbury pilgrims.” blackwell’s, jan. online william blake short list 30, #9, 5th st., sp impression 5zz, colnaghi printing on laid india (£9000); #10, another impression, 5th st., colnaghi printing on laid india, illus. (£9000). dante engravings. blackwell’s, jan. online william blake short list 30, #13, “a restrike of one of the original copperplates” (not further described) included in a copy of blake, illustrations of dante (trianon press, 1978), 2 vols., publisher’s half morocco and folding box (£3500); #26-29, pls. 6, 2, 4, 5 offered individually, probably the 1892 printing, illus. (£5000, £6500, £9500, £6750 respectively). libreria antiquaria pregliasco, april new york book fair, complete set on laid india, probably the 1892 printing with a fragmentary “n” watermark, 2 pls. darkly and evenly browned ($82,500). “george cumberland’s card.” hs, 2013 cat. 17, #5, sp untraced impression 7, apparently black ink printed on paper rather than card, illus. (not priced). blackwell’s, jan. online william blake short list 30, #8, black ink printed “on thick card,” illus. (£12,750). for information on the impression offered by blackwell’s, see the 2013 sales review in blake 47.4 (spring 2014). job engravings. hs, 2013 cat. 17, #8, pl. numbered 16 only, published “proof” impression, paper not described, illus. (not priced). blackwell’s, jan. online william blake short list 30, 1874 printing on laid india, 4 pls. offered individually as follows: #31, pl. numbered 6 (£1350), #32, pl. numbered 7 (£1125), #33, pl. numbered 8, illus. (£1400), #34, title page (£1359). swann, 5 march, #1, pl. numbered 9 only, 1874 printing on laid india, illus. ($2750); 24 sept., #3, pl. numbered 21 only, 1874 printing on laid india, illus. ($4160). john windle, cat. for the london book fair, may, published “proof” impressions on laid india, light foxing, 3 pls. offered individually as follows, all illus.: #11, pl. numbered 2 ($2750), #12, pl. numbered 16 ($3250), #13, pl. numbered 20 ($2750). dirk soulis auction, lone jack, missouri, 25 sept., #355, pl. numbered 7 only, 1874 printing on laid india, illus. ($500); same impression(?), eb, nov., illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $1200). dennis auction, stewartsville, new jersey, 16 oct., #1070-71, pls. numbered 19 and 7 only, apparently published “proof” impressions on laid india, foxed, illus. ($850 each). sny, 4 dec., #879, complete set, 1874 printing on laid india, “light foxing on a few plates,” clamshell case worn, illus. ($22,500 to windle for stock). “rev. john caspar lavater.” andrew edmunds, london print fair, 23-26 april, 3rd st. on wove paper, illus. on the artsy.net website (price on request). letterpress books with engravings by and after blake, including prints extracted from such books allen, roman history, 1798. blackwell’s, jan. online william blake short list 30, #25, pls. only (£950). freeman’s auction, philadelphia, 22 oct., #360, pls. foxed, contemporary sheep very worn, covers detached, all 4 pls. illus. ($423). ariosto, orlando furioso, 1785. world of rare books, nov. online cat., vol. 3 only but presumably with blake’s pl., foxed, original(?) boards very worn, illus. (£46.99). bible, the royal universal family bible, 1780–81. halcyon books, april online cat., vol. 1 only, contemporary calf very worn, shabby front cover illus. (£90). four of blake’s 5 pls. are in vol. 2. blair, the grave. blackwell’s, jan. online william blake short list 30, #1, 1808 quarto, later half calf over marbled boards, rebacked, illus. (£3000); #11, blake’s pl. 7 only from the 1813 quarto (£325). christopher edwards, feb. cat. 65, #12, 1808 quarto, margins of pls. foxed, inscriptions at foot of engraved title page trimmed off, contemporary half roan with a replacement morocco spine, illus. (£2250). doyle auction, new york, 15 april, #204, described as the 1808 “folio” but probably the quarto, leaves trimmed to 34.0 x 27.0 cm., contemporary calf rebacked, blake’s pls. 1 (imprint cut off) and 8 in their quarto sts. illus. ($3125; estimate $800-1200). serrell auction, malvern, worcestershire, 14 may, #319, apparently the 1808 quarto, imprint on title page trimmed off, no description of binding, illus. (£240). john windle, july online cat., 1808 folio, 1st published sts. of all pls., “slight foxing” to the frontispiece and blake’s pl. 1, 19th-century half calf, illus. ($8950). sl, 14 july, #66, 1808 folio, leaves trimmed slightly to 41.1 x 31.9 cm., “some light soiling and foxing to plates and text,” contemporary morocco, illus. (£2500 to sims reed); same copy, sims reed, sept. online cat. (£9500). heritage auction, dallas, 5 aug., #45345, [1870] folio, scattered foxing, publisher’s cloth rebacked, illus., previously available since july 2008 from krown & spellman for $1850 ($687.50). bauman rare books, sept. online cat., 1813 quarto, bookplate of robert hoe, “uncut” in later three-quarter morocco, illus. ($3500). sworders auction, stansted, essex, 7 oct., #433, apparently the 1808 quarto, later half calf, with 20th-century facsimiles (not otherwise described) of the book of thel and the marriage of heaven and hell, 3 vols. in all, illus. (£400). books & bidders, nov. online cat., 1813 quarto, scattered light foxing, half morocco worn, illus. ($1500). librairie paul jammes, nov. cat. 294, pls. offered individually, apparently from the 1808 quarto: #295, pl. 1 (€120), #296, portrait frontispiece (€120), #297, pls. 5, 6, 8-11, pl. 10 illus. (€75 to €150 each). see also the counsellor, king, warrior, mother, and child (illus. 4) under drawings and paintings, above, and portrait of blake, 1808, under interesting blakeana, below. boydell’s graphic illustrations … of shakspeare, c. 1803. john windle, cat. for the london book fair, may, #18, publisher’s morocco, illus. ($7500). previously offered at the same price by windle, feb. 2012 occasional list 1, #12, illus. bryant, new system … of ancient mythology, 1775–76. sequitur books, nov. online cat., 2nd ed., 3 vols., contemporary calf worn, some covers detached ($1000). catullus, poems, 1795. john windle, march online cat., 2 vols., imprints present, pl. 1 foxed, “old half calf worn,” covers rehinged ($1250). darwin, botanic garden. blackwell’s, jan. online william blake short list 30, #54, 3rd ed. of part 1, 1795, 4th ed. of part 2, 1794, 2 vols. in 1, “occasional foxing as usual,” modern calf (£2500). eb, feb., 3rd ed. of part 1, 1795, 4th ed. of part 2, 1794, 2 vols., contemporary calf very worn, some covers loose and half of 1 backstrip missing, illus. (€127.55); same copy, march-april, illus. (€139.89); nov., 1799 ed., vol. 1 only, water stains, contemporary calf worn, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of £125). bg, 12 march, #366, 1st ed. of part 1, 3rd ed. of part 2, both 1791, 2 vols. in 1, “some spotting,” modern half morocco, illus. (£372). oldrich hrdina, april online cat., 1799 ed., 2 vols., contemporary half calf (€475). flaxman, hesiod designs. m. d. hawkes, feb. online cat., 1817 ed., marginal stains, half “leather” worn (£850). john windle, feb. online cat., 1870 ed., pls. loose within publisher’s printed boards ($375). robert s. brooks, nov. online cat., 1817 ed., “seems to be bound backwards,” quarter calf worn ($325). tamlyns auction, bridgwater, somerset, 24 nov., #228, 1817 ed., 2 copies, with the iliad designs, 1805, all 3 vols. in original boards with cover labels, scattered foxing, illus. (£85). fonsie mealy auction, castlecomer, kilkenny, ireland, 15 dec., #316, 1817 ed., bound with the iliad and odyssey designs, 1805, and the aeschylus designs, 1831, 19th-century morocco, binding illus. (€200). for preliminary sketches, see judgment of paris and the muses under flaxman, below, and illus. 10. i suspect that the odd-looking set with crude lettering sold eb, nov., illus. (£64), is a complete suite of pen and ink tracings in another hand of blake’s pls. on thin paper laid onto large (45.7 x 29.2 cm.) backing leaves. flaxman, iliad designs, 1805. eb, feb.-march, bound with flaxman’s odyssey designs, 1805, some pls. badly foxed, 19th-century half calf very worn, illus. (£100); may, iliad only, foxed and water stained, 19th-century half morocco, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $250 or “best offer”); aug., iliad only, scattered foxing, original boards with cover label, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $500); same copy of the iliad in boards, sept., illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $175). henry adams auction, chichester, 6 aug., #266, marginal water stains, later half calf worn, illus. (£30). john windle, nov. online cat., original boards with cover label very worn ($575). see also flaxman, hesiod designs, above. gay, fables. blackwell’s, jan. online william blake short list 30, #56, 1793 ed., 2 vols., contemporary calf (£975). william reese, april online cat., 1793 ed., 2 vols., light foxing, modern morocco, illus. ($1250); same copy and price, july cat. 325, #62, illus. docet libreria di loris rabiti, april online cat., 1793 ed., 2 vols., contemporary “leather” (€750). frontis books, nov. online cat., 1793 ed., 2 vols., full calf (£950). heritage book shop, nov. online cat., 1793 ed., 2 vols., half calf ($1000). bryn mawr bookstore, 1793 ed., 2 vols., foxed, calf worn and rebacked, illus. ($450). keys auction, norwich, 19 nov., #370, [1811] ed., 2 vols., stained, calf very worn, illus. (£75). hartley, observations, 1791. better world books, nov. online cat., quarto issue, “leather” very worn, hinges cracked ($299.93). hayley, ballads, 1805. blackwell’s, jan. online william blake short list 30, #59, 1st sts. of the pls., “some spotting,” later boards and spine label, illus. (£4750). john windle, cat. for the london book fair, may, pls. only, all 5 offered individually, 1st sts., #6-10, all illus. ($975 each). dw, 10 june, #381, 1st sts. of the pls., lightly foxed, contemporary calf, front cover lacking and back cover detached, all 5 pls. illus. (no bids on an estimate of £500-800); same copy, 15 july, #312 (£220). hayley, essay on sculpture, 1800. royoung bookseller, april online cat., “plates toned,” modern boards, binding illus. ($200). see also tuer, follies & fashions of our grandfathers, below. hayley, life of cowper, 1803–04. blackwell’s, jan. online william blake short list 30, #60, 2nd ed., 3 vols., some foxing, contemporary half calf (£800). eb, feb., 1st ed., vols. 1-2 only in 1 vol., recent half calf, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of £95); aug., 2nd ed. of vol. 2 only with pls. 3-4 but apparently also with pls. 5-6 from vol. 3, contemporary calf very worn, illus. (£62); sept., 1st ed., 3 vols., scattered foxing, “full leather,” illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $129.95); nov., pl. 3 only, 2nd st., imprint trimmed off, minor foxing, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of £40); same impression of pl. 3, dec., illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £100); dec., 1st ed., 3 vols., foxed, contemporary calf very worn, backstrips missing, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $89.95 or “best offer”). baeyer, aug. online cat., pl. 5 only, leaf 26.7 x 20.5 cm. (smaller than uncut copies of the book), “on the full sheet outside the edition,” illus. (£1800); pl. 6 only, illus. (£320). see also miniature of william cowper under romney, below. hayley, life of romney, 1809. eb, feb.-march, “lacking frontispiece and other plates” but with blake’s pl., scattered foxing, contemporary half calf, illus. ($49.99); july, imprint on blake’s pl. bound into the spine, title page missing, scattered foxing, contemporary calf very worn, front cover missing, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $3000); same copy, aug., illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $1000 or “best offer”). for 8 preliminary sketches by romney for the painting copied in blake’s engraving, see the 1st entry under romney, below. hayley, triumphs of temper, 1803. blackwell’s, jan. online william blake short list 30, #61, large-paper issue, modern calf, illus. (£1750); #62, small-paper issue, a “little spotting,” contemporary calf rebacked, cloth slipcase (£625). aardvark books, april online cat., issue not indicated, calf with morocco spine ($465). eb, sept., pl. 3 only, illus. ($134.50); pl. 4 only, illus. ($50.95). hogarth, the beggar’s opera by hogarth and blake, 1965. material culture auction, philadelphia, 6 feb., #401, publisher’s folding box, illus. ($125). eb, feb., blake’s pl. and publisher’s folding box badly water stained, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $329 or “best offer”). hogarth, works. material culture auction, philadelphia, 20 dec. 2014, #465, blake’s pl. only, a late st., probably 6th or 7th, framed, illus. ($50). swann, 19 may, #206, undated baldwin and cradock issue, 115 leaves of pls., foxed, other defects including tears, half morocco very worn ($585). eb, june-july, blake’s pl. only, 6th st., said by the vendor to be from “the 1822 heath folio edition,” but the st. indicates that this is from an undated baldwin and cradock issue with norman or wade named as the printer on p. 42, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $325 or “best offer”). winter auction, plainville, connecticut, 2 nov., #44, blake’s pl. only, a later st., illus. ($175). belvoir bookmonger, nov. online cat., undated boydell ed. (c. 1795), “107 plates,” some damp stained, modern half morocco, illus. (£3500). argosy book store, nov. online cat., undated baldwin and cradock issue, 116 leaves of pls., “title page damaged,” three-quarter “leather” worn ($4000). hunter, historical journal, 1793, quarto issue. dw, 4 march, #22, “occasional light offsetting and soiling,” disbound, blake’s pl. illus., imprint either not shown or trimmed off (£920); another copy, 10 june, #11, some soiling and marginal wormholes, contemporary half calf very worn, blake’s pl. illus. (£920). david mason, april online cat., foxed and badly damp stained, recent half calf, illus. ($4535). bl, 21 may, #353, uncut in contemporary half russia rebacked and worn, illus. (£1860). bellcourt books, nov. online cat., later calf ($4100). kimpton, history of the bible, c. 1781. boundlessbookstore, nov. online cat., “may miss one or two” pls., foxed and soiled, “leather boards” very worn, illus. (£90). lavater, aphorisms. anybook ltd., april online cat., 1794 ed., “in fair condition, suitable as a study copy,” half calf (£250). second-hand rows, nov. online cat., 1789 ed., 1st st. of blake’s pl., 20th-century cloth, illus. ($350). lavater, essays on physiognomy. manfred nosbüsch, april online cat., “1792” (c. 1818) ed., 3 vols. in 5, scattered foxing, “decorative bindings” worn (€3800). eb, may, “1792” (c. 1818) ed., 3 vols. in 5, “sporadic foxing, but nothing heavy,” contemporary morocco slightly worn, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $2250); sept., blake’s pl. 2 only, hand colored, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $150); blake’s pl. 3 only, hand colored, illus. ($60.59); oct., vols. 1-2 only but including blake’s pls., 1789–92, contemporary calf, hinges split, illus. (£115.44).  gonnelli auction, florence, 27 may, #248, 1810 ed., 3 vols. in 5, scattered foxing, heavy on blake’s pl. 2, later cloth with calf spines, illus. (€900). sny, 19 june, #63, “1792” (c. 1818) ed., 3 vols. in 5, “a few plates heavily browned or spotted,” 19th-century morocco worn “in a wooden slipcase,” illus. ($3750). baeyer, aug. online cat., blake’s pl. 2 only, illus. (£2000). librairie jean-étienne huret, nov. online cat., “1792” (c. 1818) ed., “5 vol. in-4” (actually 3 vols. in 4?), full calf (€4400). arroyo seco books, nov. online cat., 1789–98 ed., 3 vols. in 5, full calf ($2500). malkin, father’s memoirs, 1806. blackwell’s, jan. online william blake short list 30, #64, modern half morocco, illus. (£1200). novelist’s magazine, vol. 9, 1785. eb, jan., sterne’s sentimental journey only with blake’s pl., badly stained, bound as the frontispiece, early half calf very worn, front cover detached, several pages loose, illus. (offered at the ridiculously high “buy it now” price of $2500). vol. 9 contains 3 pls. by blake, but only 1 for sterne’s novel. novelist’s magazine, vols. 10-11, 1783. lyppard books, april online cat., 2 vols. in 4, lacking the engraved novelist’s magazine title pages, contemporary quarter calf, illus. (£240). chapter 1 books, nov. online cat., no mention of the pls. but presumably present, foxed, contemporary boards very worn, front cover to vol. 10 missing ($133). see also richardson, below. rees, cyclopædia, 1820. tavistock books, nov. online cat., text vols. in the original “80” parts bound in publisher’s “light blue paper-covered boards” with printed text, 7 vols. of pls. in half “leather,” cover of vol. 30, part 1, illus. ($8250). bb #489 specifies “79 fascicles.” remember me!, 1825. john windle, feb. private offer, the date rubbed off the engraved title page, “occasional small spots on plates,” full calf, covers and backstrip “richly gilt-panelled with the binder’s name at the foot of the spine ‘purgold,’ slightly worn” ($30,000). purgold was a binder in paris c. 1800–35; see the “index of binders and binding” in a catalogue of fifteen hundred books remarkable for the beauty or the age of their bindings (london: quaritch, 1889) 222. richardson, sir charles grandison, printed for t. kelly, 1818. james cummins, april online cat., 2 vols., contemporary calf rebacked ($300). francis edwards, april online cat., 2 vols., scattered stains, later half calf worn (£55). contains the 4th sts. of blake’s 3 pls. 1st published in novelist’s magazine, vol. 10 (see above). ritson, select collection of english songs, 1783. gb, 22 oct., #608, 3 vols., contemporary calf, illus. (€500). madoc books, nov. online cat., 3 vols., contemporary calf, illus. (£950). salzmann, elements of morality. wonder books, jan. online cat., 1791 ed., 3 vols. in 1, lacking title pages to vols. 1-2 and the pls. numbered 1, 5, 12, 21, 30-33, 44, early 19th-century half calf worn ($850). the missing pls., except for the pl. numbered 1, are attributed to blake in cb 51-59. mair wilkes books, nov. online cat., 1792 ed., vols. 1 and 3 offered individually, marginal stains, full calf (£165 each). scott, poetical works, 1782. eb, nov., blake’s pl. 2 only, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $19.99). shakespeare, dramatic works, 1802. eb, may-june, 8 (of 9) vols. only, lacking vol. 4 but apparently with blake’s pl. in vol. 9, scattered foxing on pls., contemporary calf worn and repaired, illus. ($935.98). robert frew, nov. online cat., 9 vols., scattered marginal foxing, contemporary morocco, possibly the same copy 1st offered by frew in his aug. 1993 cat., #197, for £1100 (£12,500). shakespeare, plays. eb, july, 1805 ed., 9 vol. issue, scattered foxing, contemporary calf very worn, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $249.99); same copy, july-aug., illus. ($249.99). mcconnell fine books, nov. online cat., 1811 ed., 9 vols., later calf, illus. (£1500). stedman, narrative, hand-colored copies. peter harrington, april online cat., 1806 ed., 2 vols., wrongly stating that “the first edition of 1796 was not issued in a coloured state,” contemporary half russia, illus. (£15,000). sl, 17 nov., #148, 1796 ed., 2 vols., “occasional spotting or slight soiling,” contemporary russia worn and rebacked, illus. (£8750). the coloring of some pls. in the harrington copy suggests that they may be remainders from the 1796 ed.     stedman, narrative, uncolored copies. eb, feb., 1806 ed., 2 vols., pls. foxed and stained, contemporary half calf worn, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $3000); same copy, feb.-march, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $3500 or “best offer”); same copy, march, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $2750); same copy, april, illus. (withdrawn by the vendor); same copy, may, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $3500 or “best offer”). bho, 24 march, #291, 1813 ed., apparently 2 vols. in 1, “occasional spotting,” contemporary half calf worn and rebacked, illus. (£937). swann, 26 march, #20, 1796 ed., 2 vols., pls. foxed, contemporary calf repaired, illus. ($1250); another copy, 14 april, #356, 2 vols., foxed and damp stained, “unsightly modern buckram,” illus. ($2125). john windle, july online cat., 1796 ed., 2 vols., contemporary calf repaired, illus. ($6500). bauman rare books, sept. online cat., 1796 ed., 2 vols., later calf, illus., 1st offered privately in sept. 2011 ($8500). sl, 30 sept., #1203, 1796 ed., 2 vols., contemporary calf, illus. (£3250). argosy book store, nov. online cat., 1813 ed., vol. 2 only, contemporary quarter calf very worn ($1750). national book auction, ithaca, new york, 13 dec., #4244, 1813 ed., 2 vols., imprints apparently trimmed off some pls., scattered foxing, later calf worn, 3 covers detached, illus. ($1800). stuart and revett, antiquities of athens, 1762–1816. mary louise bryan/paralos gallery, nov. online cat., 4 vols., 19th-century half calf, illus. (€25,000). tuer, follies & fashions of our grandfathers, 1886–87. gp, april online cat., blake’s pl. only, a restrike in sanguine ink of his pl. 3 from hayley’s essay on sculpture, 1800, illus. (£40). vera enterprises, nov. online cat., large-paper issue, publisher’s boards ($458.25). louella kerr books, nov. online cat., large-paper issue rebound in half morocco ($355). anne godfrey, nov. online cat., large-paper issue, publisher’s boards worn, illus. (£190). goldcrest books, nov. online cat., issue not indicated, publisher’s boards repaired with “leather” spine and corners, illus. (£170). jeffrey marks, nov. online cat., issue not indicated, publisher’s boards ($250). poor man’s books, nov. online cat., small-paper issue, publisher’s boards worn, illus. ($240). church stretton books, nov. online cat., large-paper issue, publisher’s boards, library markings (£25). varley, zodiacal physiognomy, 1828. bg, 16 july, #97, “presentation copy with ink inscription at head of title, … foxed and browned, … original boards, rubbed, covers detached, spine worn with loss, edges uncut” (£1240 to john windle for stock; estimate £300-400); same copy, aug. private offer from windle, inscribed “m. a. shee esq. with the author’s best respects,” covers now “re-attached, plates cleaned, restoration by court benson,” housed in a “folding box” ($10,950). blake’s pls. 2-3 are in the 1st sts. before the addition of the page references. the presentation inscription is to the artist martin archer shee (1769–1850), one of the royal academicians named as a subscriber to the 1808 ed. of blair’s grave in prospectuses and advertisements for that publication—see br(2) 210, 214, 226, and 256. virgil, pastorals, 1821. sny, 4 dec., 2 vols., “presentation copy from thornton [sic] to his daughter,” publisher’s sheep although the binding is not mentioned in the cat., illus. ($30,000 to john windle for stock). wit’s magazine, 1784. blackwell’s, jan. online william blake short list 30, #30, 1784–85, with the 2nd version of blake’s frontispiece (bb pl. 2, cb pl. 1b), contemporary boards rebacked with calf, illus. (£3750). young, night thoughts, 1797. blackwell’s, jan. online william blake short list 30, #35-53, unspecified pls. offered individually, pls. 13 and 32 illus. (£400-975 each). john windle, cat. for the london book fair, may, #14, pl. 3 only, illus. ($495). pook & pook online auction closing 2 sept., #1068, pl. 12 only, framed, illus. ($49); same impression, eb, sept., illus. ($68). interesting blakeana blake’s cottage, 1 blake’s road, felpham, west sussex. sold sept. to a charitable trust established by the blake society, london—see <http://​www.​blakesociety.​org/​blakecottage>. “man on a drinking horse.” etching by thomas butts, jr., 1806, probably with blake’s assistance. eb, aug., c. 1942 printing on original mount with letterpress text, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $199); sept., same impression, minimum bid, and result; oct., same impression, minimum bid $99, same result. for the discovery of this print, see alexander s. gourlay, “‘man on a drinking horse’: a print by thomas butts, jr.,” blake 37.1 (summer 2003): 35-36. portrait of blake, engraved by schiavonetti after phillips, 1808. christopher mendez, april private offer, 1st published st. printed on india paper backed with laid paper, as in the 1808 folio issue of blair’s grave, leaf 46.5 x 31.0 cm., “from dawson turner’s volume of prints after thomas phillips” (£1250); same impression and price, oct. online cat., illus. previously sold, in a “book of portraits” of and after thomas phillips from turner’s collection, sl, 12 july 1972, #110 (£1100 to andrew edmunds). the height of the leaf is greater than uncut copies of the 1808 folio (41.5 cm.), and thus this impression may have been printed independently. tomb effigy of two knights, attributed to george cumberland. watercolor, 17.8 x 22.9 cm., framed, typed label on back stating “mayors chapel, bristol 1809.” eb, jan., illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $125); march, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $100). the front figure may be based on the effigy of maurice de gaunt in the south aisle of the lord mayor’s chapel, st. mark’s, bristol. if the attribution and date are correct, cumberland’s interest in this subject may have been prompted by blake’s design of tomb effigies published in blair’s grave, 1808, “the counseller, king, warrior, mother & child, in the tomb.” w. blake, plaster life mask, 1823. bho, 1 july, #774, “with green black painted finish,” illus. (£562 on an estimate of £200-250). very probably 1 of the many 20th-century reproductions made from the version in the national portrait gallery, london, although the price suggests that at least 2 bidders thought it a cast from the original mold. john martin (british artist, 1789–1854), autograph letter signed to bernard barton (british quaker poet, 1784–1849), 12 feb. 1830. three pp. on 2 leaves. samuel gedge, june cat. 20, #68, illus. (£750; acquired june by the e. j. pratt library, victoria university, toronto). gedge notes that martin expresses “his pleasure in discovering that barton’s opinion of the life of blake [in allan cunningham’s lives of the most eminent british painters, vol. 2, 1830] coincided with his own.” the cat. quotes as follows from martin’s letter: “i had no conception that he [blake] would prove so especially interesting, he was indeed a most important character. … [blake’s night thoughts illus. are] exceedingly good, indeed i like them better than any of his works that i have seen.” w. blake, songs of innocence and of experience, ed. james john garth wilkinson, pickering ed., 1839. john windle, feb. online cat., issue without “the little vagabond,” publisher’s cloth worn, the copy previously offered for £5500 by blackwell’s, aug. 2014 short list 26, #1, illus., and sept. cat. b180, #5 ($15,000); another copy, feb. private offer, issue without “the little vagabond,” recto of front free endpaper signed “rossetti” in both pencil and ink, top right, by dante gabriel rossetti, and inscribed in ink at the bottom “this is i believe the first form in / wh. poems by blake became known / to gabriel (whose penciling is above) / & to myself — the editor, as i understand / was dr. wilkinson. / w.m.r. [william michael rossetti] / 1905.”, publisher’s cloth worn ($27,500); another copy, cat. for the london book fair, may, #15, issue without “the little vagabond,” 1st st. of the publisher’s binding with “blake’s poems.” gilt stamped on the spine rather than the front cover, “upper joint just splitting but holding, similar split to the [rear?] hinge,” binding and p. 46 illus. ($17,500); same copy and price, oct. online cat., binding illus.the only other recorded copy with the 1st st. of the binding includes “the little vagabond”—see blake 31.4 (spring 1998): 125. bauman rare books, sept. online cat., issue with “the little vagabond,” publisher’s cloth “recased,” morocco clamshell box, illus. ($14,000). windle tells me that the rossetti copy has 1 manuscript revision in the text of “the tiger” [sic], p. 46, last line of the 3rd stanza: “? and what” crossed out and “formed thy” inserted (thus the line reads “what dread hand formed thy dread feet?”). this same revision, probably in blake’s hand, appears in copy p of songs of innocence and of experience—see the illus. in geoffrey keynes and edwin wolf 2nd, william blake’s illuminated books: a census (new york: grolier club, 1953), facing 53. the whereabouts of copy p between 1833 and 1931 are not known; see bb p. 419. rossetti’s source might have been 1 of the 2 facsimiles based on copy p, although neither can be linked to the rossetti family; see the “alpha” and “beta” copies in bbs pp. 132-34. the copy p revision also appears in the versions of “the tiger” [sic] printed in nightingale valley, ed. “giraldus” [william allingham] (london: bell and daldy, 1860) 95-96, and in alexander gilchrist, life of william blake (london: macmillan, 1863) 2: 59. b. disraeli, autograph letter signed to anne gilchrist, 4 pp., 5 nov. 1862. lion heart autographs auction, new york, 15 may, #29, all 4 pp. illus. (not sold; highest bid $1000 on an estimate of $1500-1800). for the text of this letter about isaac d’israeli’s blake collection, see raymond lister, “a letter from benjamin disraeli to anne gilchrist,” blake 14.2 (fall 1980): 99. a. gilchrist, life of blake, 1863, extra-illus. copies only. blackwell’s, jan. online william blake short list 30, #57 (£2250). see the 2012 and 2014 sales reviews in blake 46.4 (spring 2013) and blake 48.4 (spring 2015) for details. w. blake, the marriage of heaven and hell, camden hotten facsimile, 1868. blackwell’s, jan. online william blake short list 30, #16, publisher’s roan-backed boards, spotted as usual, illus. (£1500). a. c. swinburne, william blake, 1868. eb, may, the rare 1st issue with “zamiel” printed below the title-page vignette, modern cloth, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $149.99). w. muir facsimiles of blake’s illuminated books, 1885–86. blackwell’s, jan. online william blake short list 30, #5, the book of thel, 1885, copy no. 21, original wrappers, cloth slipcase, illus. (£3000); #17, the marriage of heaven and hell, 1885, copy no. 35, original wrappers, “backstrip largely defective” (£2900); #18, songs of experience, 1885, copy no. 32, original wrappers (£6500); #20, songs of innocence, 1885, copy no. 35, with songs of experience, 1885, copy no. 50, 2 vols., 20th-century half morocco with original wrappers bound in, illus. (£6850); #21, there is no natural religion, 1886, copy no. 34, original wrappers worn (£1750); #22, visions of the daughters of albion, 1885, copy no. 34, 20th-century half morocco, original wrappers bound in (£3000). g. keynes, autograph letter signed to eduard rosenbaum, 2 pp., dated “14—2—[19]43.” bl, 31 march, #91, illus. (£199). keynes states that it had occurred to him, “after the war,” that “it would be worth collecting some blake papers …. but no one else has ever made the suggestion. i am encouraged to think it may be worth while to do so, and i am grateful for your interest. i have been working at w. b. since 1908, and a good deal has accumulated!” by “blake papers” keynes may be referring to his own essays on blake, revised and published in his blake studies of 1949. notice to blake scholars: save your letters from sir geoffrey! blake and the youthful ancients: being portraits of william blake and his followers engraved on wood by leonard baskin, 1956. john windle, june online cat., a “proof copy” in wrappers, numbered “x,” rather than 1 of the 50 copies issued in quarter morocco ($3750). robert longo (american artist, born 1953). precise copy in charcoal of blake’s frontispiece to europe (“the ancient of days”), 16.5 x 11.6 cm., dated “[20]08.” sl, 11 feb., #342, illus. (£10,000). probably a record price for a reproduction of a single image by blake—unless one considers the overpainted holy family (see above under drawings and paintings) a reproduction. blake’s circle and followers works are listed under artists’ names in the following order: paintings and drawings sold in groups, single paintings and drawings, letters and manuscripts, separate pls., books by (or with pls. by) the artist. barry, james drawings, paintings, and original graphics the william and nancy pressly collection of james barry prints. acquired jan. by the snite museum, university of notre dame, south bend, indiana. the collection includes the following original graphics listed in the order given in catherine bindman, “a genius of first rank, lost to the world”: prints by james barry from the collection of william l. pressly ([new york]: c. g. boerner, 2014): “king lear and cordelia” st. 5, “the temptation of adam” st. 8, “birth of venus,” 2 impressions, sts. 2 and 7, “the phoenix or the resurrection of freedom” st. 3, “job reproved by his friends” st. 5, “william pitt, earl of chatham,” 2 impressions, sts. 1 and 5, “ticket of admission for horace’s ‘carmen seculare,’” 2 impressions, st. 1, “the discovery of adam and eve” st. 5, “lear” (lithograph) only st., “milton dictating to ellwood the quaker,” 2 impressions printed recto/verso, sts. 2 and 3, “jupiter and juno on mount ida” st. 3, “minerva turning from scenes of destruction & violence to religion and art” st. 2, “orpheus instructing the savage people in the art of social life” st. 2, “a grecian harvest home” st. 2, “the distribution of premiums at the society of arts” st. 4, “king george and queen charlotte” st. 4, “the glorious sextumvirate,” proof before letters, “queen isabella, las casas and magellan” st. 2, “two of elysium’s pensive sages” only st., “blessed exegesis” only st. all pls. illus., no prices listed. “job reproved by his friends,” etching/engraving, 1777. gb, 28 may, #5285, 3rd st., illus. (€25,000; estimate €16,000-18,000). the recent increase in prices for barry’s prints is astonishing. “jupiter and juno on mount ida,” etching/engraving, 1777. hs, 2013 cat. 17, #2, “with residual traces of aquatint,” illus. (not priced). “king lear,” lithograph, c. 1803. hs, 2013 cat. 17, #4, “first edition” with the original mounting leaf with aquatint border, illus. (not priced). “king lear and cordelia,” etching/engraving, 1776. hs, 2013 cat. 17, #3, “apparently a proof impression aside from those bound into some copies of the artist’s etched works,” illus. (not priced). “philoctetes,” etching/engraving, 1777. baeyer, aug. online cat., 2nd st., 1872 printing, illus. (price on request). basire, james engravings during blake’s apprenticeship, 1772–79 “le champ de drap d’or,” imprint dated 10 nov. 1774, engraved by basire after a watercolor by edward edwards of 1771, in turn based on the anonymous original painting now in the royal collection, hampton court. willingham auction, willingham, cambridge, 28 march, #786, hand colored, framed, illus. (not sold; estimate £200-400); same impression, 25 april, #673, illus. (£200). “the encampment of the english forces near portsmouth,” imprint dated 1 june 1778, engraved by basire after an anonymous painting then at cowdray house, sussex. dreweatts auction, bristol, 29 jan., #5, illus. (£312). roseberys auction, london, 8 sept., #598, center fold, bad tears and stains on right, illus. (no bids on an estimate of £300-400). “sir james burrow,” inscribed in the pl. “painted by arthur devis” and “drawn & engraved by james basire, 1780.” eb, march, stains, center fold with marginal tears, illus. ($125). boningtons auction, epping, 27 july, #277, most of imprint trimmed off or covered by the frame, marginal stains, illus. (no bids on an estimate of £20-40). basire’s shop may have been working on this large pl., 55.0 x 38.5 cm., before blake’s apprenticeship ended in 1779. carter, journey from gibraltar to malaga, 1777. antiquates, jan. online cat., 3 vols., contemporary calf worn (£1500). contains 4 pls. by basire after francis carter. cook, voyage towards the south pole, 1777. eb, jan.-feb., frontispiece to vol. 1 only, portrait of cook by basire after william hodges, marginal stains, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $150); same impression, aug., illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $145); aug., 1 pl. only, “woman of the island of tanna,” engraved by basire after hodges, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £125); aug.-sept., 1 pl. only, “the landing at mallicolo,” engraved by basire after hodges, imprint trimmed off, illus. (€10). gostling, a walk in and about the city of canterbury, 1777. barter books, jan. online cat., later faux vellum worn (£280). contains 2 pls. by basire after j. raymond. gough, british topography, 1780. castle hill books, jan. online cat., 2 vols., “full leather” (£650). keogh’s books, jan. online cat., 2 vols., early calf rebacked, illus. (£350). archaeology plus, jan. online cat., 2 vols., contemporary calf very worn, 1 cover detached and 1 missing, illus. (£300). contains 4 pls. by basire, possibly begun before the end of blake’s apprenticeship. gray, poems, 1775. peter keisogloff, jan. online cat., contemporary calf rebacked, illus. ($325). rulon-miller, jan. online cat., contemporary calf repaired, illus. ($275). jarndyce, jan. online cat., 19th-century cloth (£173). argosy book store, jan. online cat., contemporary calf repaired ($200). powell’s bookstores, jan. online cat., “moderate soiling throughout,” contemporary calf worn ($180). kenneth karmiole, july online cat., contemporary calf worn, hinges repaired ($200). the frontispiece portrait of gray, dated 1775 in the imprint, was engraved by basire after william mason and benjamin wilson. hutchins, history and antiquities of the county of dorset, 1774. stella & rose’s books, jan. online cat., 2 vols., modern cloth, illus. (£1133). contains 6 pls. by basire. martin, history of the town of thetford, 1779. sue lowell books, jan. online cat., later half calf, illus. (£850). jackdaw books, jan. online cat., later calf worn, illus. (£825). tombland bookshop, jan. online cat., light foxing, later half calf, illus. (£425). missing books, jan. online cat., original boards very worn with later endpapers (£412.50). contains 3 pls. by basire. monro, works of alexander monro, 1781. gp, sept. 2014 online cat., frontispiece portrait of monro, engraved by basire after allan ramsay, illus. (£120, acquired by essick may 2015). see illus. 9. 9. two blakean serpents (see enlargement). top image: detail of the serpent’s head from the frontispiece portrait of alexander monro published in the works of alexander monro (edinburgh: charles elliot, 1781). etching/engraving by james basire, the portrait after allan ramsay’s painting. dated 1781 in the imprint, but “1776” following basire’s signature. area shown 3.1 x 4.5 cm. essick collection. this serpent coils around the rod of asclepius (an emblem of medicine) pictured below the oval frame surrounding the portrait of dr. monro (1697–1767, founder of the edinburgh medical school). the artist who designed the serpent and other framing motifs is unknown, but the images may have been developed in basire’s shop. it is even possible that blake played a role in the invention and/or execution of the serpent during his apprenticeship with basire, 1772–79. a line on the serpent’s head suggests a nascent crest; a triangular shape toward the back of the head may indicate a small horn. for a mere framing device, the serpent is surprisingly lively and expressive. is he pleased with his ferocity? for the full pl., see the impressions in the british museum, registration nos. 1850,1014.267 and 1890,0415.224. bottom image: detail of the serpent’s head from blake’s europe, pl. 13. relief etching with hand coloring, 1794. area shown 3.3 x 8.6 cm. essick collection. basire’s engraving may have influenced blake’s development of his own serpents, although this dramatic example from europe, with its flame-like crest, larger tongue, and more open mouth, moves further from the zoological toward the mythic. the eye of each snake is emphasized, the pupil darkly engraved in basire’s rendering and deepened with black watercolor in blake’s. in both prints, scales are indicated by crossing strokes that form x patterns. the snakes in the book of thel pl. 8 and america pl. 13 have horns rather than crests; see also the looping serpent dominating the europe title page, the small snake pictured on the cup held by the good samaritan in blake’s watercolor illustration to young’s night thoughts, night the second, p. 35 (butlin #330.68), and the very large serpent on the fly-title to night the third in the young designs (butlin #330.78). snakes coil around human figures, similar to the way basire’s version twists around the rod of asclepius, in america pl. 15, jerusalem pl. 63, and the large color print of satan exulting over eve. flaxman, john drawings and sculpture see also flaxman under letterpress books with engravings by and after blake, above. a folio of 17 small pencil studies attributed to flaxman. lawrences auction, crewkerne, 16 jan., #1823, “various sizes,” with a small group of works “by other hands,” from the alfred de pass collection, illus. (£360). david bindman, who inspected these drawings shortly before the auction, believes that a few of these slight sketches are by flaxman but others are questionable. three of the flaxman drawings were offered and illus. in ah, march online cat. 445, as follows: #43, a line of figures (recto), man consoling a woman (verso), 9.5 x 22.9 cm. (£325); #44, women ascending to heaven, 17.8 x 21.6 cm. (£325); #45, a little group of figures, inscribed “throwing over the bridge,” 8.3 x 19.1 cm. (£225). two pencil and pen and ink drawings, orestes standing over the bodies of clytemnestra and aegisthus, 20.3 x 29.2 cm., and oceanus and prometheus bound, 22.9 x 28.5 cm., the latter signed, both datable to c. 1793. ll, jan. cat., pp. 60-63, illus. (not priced; both sold to a “private collection, usa” by march). these designs were engraved by tommaso piroli for the 1st ed. of flaxman’s aeschylus illus., 1795. but god is faithful & will not suffer you to be tempted. pen and ink over pencil, 19.0 x 15.0 cm. bellmans auction, wisborough green, west sussex, 2 dec., #1026, extensively inscribed, illus. (£220). apparently an illus. to 1 corinthians 10.13; the illus. in the auction cat. is not clear enough to read the full inscription. doris bearing a letter over the sea, pencil sketch. see the muses, below, and illus. 10. flaxman, anonymous oval miniature portrait on ivory, 5.5 x 4.2 cm., inscribed “j f / 1786,” mounted in a gilt frame 6.0 x 4.7 cm. acquired feb. by the huntington library, art collections, and botanical gardens, san marino, california (bequest). the donor suggested that this is a self-portrait, but that is unlikely. flaxman, self-portrait in profile, age 14. oval jasperware medallion by wedgwood, 8.2 x 6.3 cm., c. 1779. eb, may, possibly a later replica, hairline crack, illus. (£240.99). flaxman, self-portrait in profile. circular plaster medallion, 15.0 cm. diameter. woolley & wallis auction, salisbury, 8 jan., #444, based on a “wax portrait bust [that] was almost certainly carried out while flaxman was living in rome under josiah wedgwood’s sponsorship c. 1790,” with “a painted plaster model of a classical female figure standing on a ledge cast after john flaxman,” illus. (£550). holy family. pen and wash, 71.5 x 50.5 cm. bhl, 28 oct., #292, a design based on michelangelo’s doni tondo and “lithographed by henry noel humphreys and published in 1829,” illus. (£1875). a proof before letters of the lithograph is in the rosenwald collection, national gallery of art, washington, accession no. 1980.45.1713. judgment of paris. pencil and pen and ink, leaf 13.0 x 17.8 cm. stair galleries auction, hudson, new york, 14 march, #89, with study of classical figures, pencil, leaf 21.6 x 18.1 cm., framed together, illus. ($950). judgment of paris is a study for flaxman’s iliad designs, pl. 37, engraved by james parker in the 1805 ed. the classical figures are studies for the hesiod designs, pl. 33, engraved by blake in the 1817 ed. previously offered eb, may 2012 (no bids on a required minimum bid of $2500). the muses, a preliminary sketch for flaxman’s hesiod designs, pl. 23. feb. private offer by a representative of the tulk and ley families, with doris bearing a letter over the sea on the same backing mount (acquired by essick). see illus. 10. 10. john flaxman, 2 pencil and pen and ink sketches pasted to a backing mount, 21.4 x 17.2 cm., the mount showing a “j whatman / turkey mill / 1832” watermark, the date trimmed in half by the bottom edge of the leaf (see enlargement). this leaf was removed from an album compiled by caroline tulk, the 2nd daughter of charles augustus tulk (1786–1849), the swedenborgian friend of flaxman and blake. the pencil inscriptions, “j. flaxman” below each drawing, were probably written by caroline tulk. essick collection. top drawing: the muses. a preliminary sketch, datable to 1807–14, for flaxman’s hesiod designs engraved by blake, pl. 23, “jupiter and the muses.” leaf of laid paper, 7.7 x 16.1 cm., chain lines approximately 2.6 cm. apart. this drawing lacks the figure of jupiter, far right in the engraving. the muse second from the right holds a musical instrument in the published version; the muse far right sits at a greater distance from her companions and has both arms lowered into her lap rather than the left hand raised under her chin. the pencil sketch in the british museum, registration no. 1862,0308.44, is considerably closer to the engraving. a very similar, but more finished, drawing of the 5 muses in the houghton library, harvard university, is an illus. to flaxman’s poem “the casket,” dated to 1812 in david irwin, john flaxman 1755–1826 (london: studio vista, 1979) 112-15 and illus. 153. bottom drawing: doris bearing a letter over the sea. a preliminary sketch, datable to c. 1807, for an illus. to milton’s “elegy iv. to his tutor, thomas young,” engraved by abraham raimbach and published in latin and italian poems of milton translated … by the late william cowper (london: j. johnson and r. h. evans, 1808), facing p. 20. laid paper identical to the drawing above, leaf 8.6 x 15.1 cm. with part of a crown and maltese cross watermark. the following lines are inscribed below the design in raimbach’s engraving: “hence my epistle__skim the deep__fly o’er / yon smooth expanse to the teutonic shore!” the published version includes accompanying “nymphs,” one of whose knees appears upper right in this drawing. this fragmentary motif suggests that the figure of doris, whose neck is marred by a small hole in the paper, was cut from a larger composition. a drawing almost identical to the engraving is reproduced in sidney colvin, the drawings of flaxman in the gallery of university college london (london: george bell and sons, 1876), pl. xviii. autograph letter signed to charles augustus tulk, 1 p., 23 sept. 1818. swann, 22 oct., #369, with reference to “inscriptions” for a “tablet,” illus. ($455). fuseli, henry drawings, paintings, and separate plates eleven previously unrecorded drawings. cny, 29 jan., offered in the following lots, all illus.: 90. “psychostasia” of achilles and memnon (recto), a seated young woman, nude, with elaborately coiffed hair, and a man with arms outstretched, possibly david and bathsheba (verso). pencil and wash, leaf 60.3 x 48.2 cm. (not sold; highest bid $95,000 on an estimate of $120,000-180,000). see illus. 11-12. 11. henry fuseli, “psychostasia” of achilles and memnon (see enlargement). pencil and gray, brown, and pink washes, leaf of wove paper 60.3 x 48.2 cm. “psychostasia” is a weighing of a soul to determine a person’s destiny. plutarch, in his moralia, reports that a lost play by aeschylus, titled psychostasia, featured a contest between achilles and memnon, an ethiopian king who fought with the trojans. the gods determine who should prevail by weighing their souls. the scales near the top of the drawing tip toward the warrior on the right—presumably the loser, memnon, who raises his lance in protest and may be about to flee to the right. achilles stands in a more composed posture on the left, gesturing upward toward the scales to indicate his adversary’s fate. one of achilles’s warriors is about to thrust a spear at memnon. fuseli has chosen an obscure incident in greek mythology for his subject, but one represented in greco-roman art. for the pictorial tradition, see a. kossatz-deissmann, “memnon,” in lexicon iconographicum mythologiae classicae, vol. 6 (zurich: artemis and winkler, 1992) 451-53. see illus. 12 for the verso. photo courtesy of christie’s new york. 12. henry fuseli, a seated young woman, nude, with elaborately coiffed hair (right) and a man with arms outstretched, possibly david and bathsheba (left), the verso of illus. 11 (see enlargement). pencil, pen and brown ink, brown wash, leaf of wove paper 60.3 x 48.2 cm. both titles are proposed in christie’s new york auction cat. of 29 jan. 2015, #90. if the tentative title for the design on the left is correct, then bathsheba is the small figure in pencil outline immediately above the man’s head. photo courtesy of christie’s new york. 91. two studies of satan and the birth of sin, recto and verso. pencil, chalk, and wash, 43.0 x 27.9 cm. ($56,250). 92. study of two male nudes, chained to a post (recto), study of a greek athlete (verso). pen and ink, 22.9 x 8.4 cm. ($37,500; estimate $10,000-15,000). 93. a sheet of figure studies including a possible study of mrs. fuseli (recto), studies of women’s heads in elaborate headdresses (verso). pencil, pen and ink, 22.7 x 18.4 cm. ($32,500). 94. study of a pugilist, recto and verso. pen and ink, 22.8 x 11.1 cm. ($11,250). 95. four studies of frightened figures, possibly paolo and francesca, attributed to fuseli. pencil, pen and ink, 26.0 x 31.2 cm. ($6000). 96. hero embracing the drowned leander. pencil and chalk, 22.8 x 18.3 cm., inscribed “hero” in greek and “p[utney]. hill 1. may. 15.” ($11,875). 97. a dying figure supported by two others, perhaps from “conrad freeing gulnare.” pencil, 29.6 x 20.4 cm. ($7500). 98. two studies of king lear. pencil and chalk, 48.8 x 32.2 cm. ($8125). 99. studies of the dioscuri, recto and verso. pencil and chalk, 32.1 x 20.4 cm. ($10,000; estimate $3000-5000). 100. a contemplative woman seated, attributed to “circle of henry fuseli.” pencil and wash, 29.5 x 17.2 cm., inscribed “fuseli” ($2000 to john windle for stock). windle, oct. online cat. ($4750). the right-handed hatching strokes indicate that this is not by the left-handed fuseli. the cat. entry for #90 comments as follows: “not since the album sold in these rooms in april 1992 has such a quantity of previously unknown drawings by fuseli appeared on the art market. purchased as a folio in the early part of the 20th century, they have not been seen in public until now. this group of eleven drawings span fuseli’s career, demonstrate his extraordinary ability in a variety of media and depict a wide range of subjects, dating from the late 1770s through 1819.” for the newly discovered drawings sold in 57 lots at the cl auction of 14 april 1992, see blake 26.4 (spring 1993): 151-54 (sale incorrectly dated to 14 march 1992). dante observing the soaring souls of paolo and francesca. pen and ink, wash, 47.2 x 30.0 cm. sny, 28 jan., #43, illus. ($161,000; estimate $35,000-55,000). the intimate concert. pencil, 28.3 x 20.1 cm., inscribed “k. july 30. [18]14.” sny, 28 jan., #40, illus. (not sold; highest bid $17,000 on an estimate of $25,000-35,000). previously sold cl, 28 nov. 2000, #35, titled two lovers, one playing a cithern, illus. (£43,475). lady susan, countess of gilford and her daughters. oil, 69.0 x 54.0 cm., datable to c. 1810. galerie hans, hamburg, advertisement in burlington magazine, vol. 157, whole no. 1346 (may 2015): xv, illus. (not priced). preliminary sketch for “odysseus in front of scylla and charybdis.” pencil, pen and brown ink and brown and rose washes, 12.8 x 7.6 cm. csk, 9 dec., #188, “with inscription in greek (on a label verso),” illus. (£8750). a cat. note states that “the present drawing represents fuseli’s preliminary study of ulysses between scylla and charybdis (milton gallery no. 121; schiff 894), in which odysseus is the only survivor of the carnage wreaked by the scylla on his crew.”the reference is to gert schiff, johann heinrich füssli 1741–1825 (zurich: verlag berichthaus; munich: prestel-verlag, 1973) 1: 517, #894; 2: 249, illus. 894. i find the attribution to fuseli questionable; the design is completely different from the oil painting to which the cat. refers. salmon-boos-obed. pen and ink, wash, 12.1 x 12.5 cm. hs, 2013 cat. 17, #30, “based upon michelangelo’s fresco lunette in the sistine chapel,” illus. (not priced). the three witches appearing to macbeth and banquo. oil, 87.3 x 111.7 cm., datable to c. 1800–10. cny, 28 jan., #45, illus. ($377,000). a similar design, reversed, was engraved by james heath and 1st published in 1807 by stockdale in the plays of william shakespeare, vol. 3. the witches floating above macbeth and banquo. pen and ink, wash, 46.5 x 66.2 cm. sny, 28 jan., #166, illus. ($281,000; estimate $60,000-80,000). a young woman brandishing a whip (recto), a young woman sewing (verso). pencil, leaf 30.4 x 17.5 cm. showing an 1812 watermark. sl, 8 july, #230, illus. (£10,000). previously sold cny, 24 may 1985, #344, illus. ($8800). “beatrice eavesdropping on hero and ursula,” mezzotint by john jones, 1791. gerrards online auction closing 2 june, #262, framed, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of £25). possibly the same impression offered border auction, hawick, scottish borders, 8 feb. 2014, #278, illus. (£10). baeyer, aug. online cat., illus. (price on request). “evening thou bringest all,” lithograph by fuseli after his own design, 1802. gp, april online cat., removed from the original backing leaf, “trimmed, losing printed area top and left, small nicks and tears; vertical crease on left; foxing to edges,” illus. (£1800). cl, 9 dec., #233, printed in brown ink, removed from the original backing leaf, trimmed at top but not quite as much as in the gp impression, illus. (£1250). “lear & cordelia” (inscribed title), mezzotint by john raphael smith, 1784. weinglass #72, titled “lear awakens to find cordelia beside his bed.” eb, march, 1st st., brown ink, trimmed to the image at top and on both sides, foxed, several large tears at the top, illus. (€20.50). biksady galéria auction, budapest, 2 dec., #27, color printed, illus. (not sold; reserve price €190). “the nightmare,” aquatint. gp, april online cat., printed in sepia, trimmed close, “some spotting,” illus. (£380). possibly weinglass #67b, “le cochemar,” engraved by de ville neuve, 1784. “the night mare,” engraved by w. raddon, 1827. eb, july, all inscriptions below the title either trimmed off or covered by the mat, framed, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of £25); same impression, aug., illus. (£17.78). “the spirit of plato,” stipple engraving by moses haughton, with imprint “london, publish’d 1.st dec.r 1824, by h. gibbs great newport str”. stag online auction closing 25 jan., #198, title in open letters, imprint present, printed on laid india, backing leaf of wove paper 51.5 x 58.7 cm., margins ragged, illus. (£4 to john windle acting for essick). the design is based on a passage in milton’s il penseroso. weinglass #260 does not record the imprint and notes that the impression sold at auction from fuseli’s collection in 1827 was described as “unpublished,” but the gibbs imprint suggests otherwise. the 2 examples in the british museum are a proof before letters (registration no. 1867,1214.204) and an impression trimmed just above the imprint (registration no. 1850,1014.883). apparently the only other impression recorded by weinglass, in the kunsthaus, zurich, also lacks the area where the imprint appears. a. burnett, ed., the medical adviser and guide to health and long life, 1823–24. ian marr, may cat. 11, #139, vol. 1 only, issues 1-27, “slight occasional spotting,” contemporary half calf worn, illus. (£150). vol. 1, issue 9 (31 jan. 1824): [129], includes an unsigned wood engraving of fuseli’s nightmare to illustrate an anonymous essay titled “incubus, or night-mare,” pp. 129-32 and continued in 3 later issues. fuseli is not mentioned. not in weinglass. magasin pittoresque, year 31, 1863. eb, may, p. 29 only with an illus. of fuseli’s witches from macbeth, copied by louis alexandre eustache lorsay and engraved on wood by charles tamisier, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of €25). not in weinglass. milton, poetical works, published by w. suttaby and b. crosby, 1808 (vol. 1), 1806 (vol. 2). eb, dec., 2 vols. in 1, 2 pls. after fuseli, contemporary calf very worn, illus. (£27.32). the frontispiece in vol. 1, engraved by abraham raimbach in 1806, is listed by weinglass, #261, but this 1808 issue of poetical works is not noted. weinglass #262 lists fuseli’s design for the title-page vignette engraved by andrew duncan in 1821, but not this version in vol. 1 engraved by anker smith in 1808. linnell, john early drawings, paintings, and original graphics country lane. watercolor, 15.0 x 22.0 cm., signed. wellers auction, guildford, 24 sept., #674, illus. (£720). date uncertain, but possibly c. 1825–35. llanberris n. wales (inscribed title). watercolor, 19.0 x 28.0 cm., signed and dated 1813. david lay auction, penzance, 15 jan., #49, illus. (£450). the new puppy. watercolor and gouache on ivory, 18.0 x 13.0 cm. eb, april, contemporary gilt frame, “monogram on the bottom right” (not visible in the illus.), inscribed in pencil on the back “the new puppy  j linnell” and “‘the new puppy’ / by / john linnell / 1818,” illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £2200 or “best offer”). sheep study. pencil with touches of white, 18.5 x 28.0 cm., signed and dated 1815. mallams auction, oxford, 11 march, #281, illus. (£170). sketch of a windmill on a heath, attributed to linnell. watercolor, 10.0 x 17.0 cm. batemans auction, stamford, lincolnshire, 10 july, #226, illus. (not sold; estimate £70-100). the attribution seems solid to me; date uncertain but possibly early. view near windsor. charcoal with wash on gray paper, 27.0 x 27.0 cm., inscribed “j linnell nr windsor 1815.” cheffins auction, cambridge, 26 nov., #398, illus. (£440). “the just judges,” an engraved copy of a wing of hubert and jan van eyck’s ghent altarpiece, signed “jno linnell sculp.t 1826.” eb, march, only known st. printed on laid india, backing leaf of heavy wove paper 63.3 x 33.1 cm., illus. (acquired by essick at the “buy it now” price of €250). for discussions and illus. of this unpublished print, see david bindman, william blake: his art and times ([london]: thames and hudson, 1982) 188, william vaughan, elizabeth e. barker, and colin harrison, samuel palmer 1805–1881: vision and landscape (london: british museum p, 2005) 101-02, and vaughan, samuel palmer: shadows on the wall (new haven: yale up, 2015) 62, 67, 384n40. there are 3 impressions in the british museum, but this is the only example i’ve seen on the market since sl, 19 june 1981, #398, illus. (£110). “portrait of william bray,” etching. baeyer, aug. online cat., dated to 1832 (the year of bray’s death), “proof impression before all letters,” inscribed (signed?) “linnell” in pencil lower left, leaf 43.9 x 29.8 cm., illus. (£850). story lists a “mezzotint” portrait of bray dated to 1833, but not this etching; see alfred t. story, the life of john linnell (london: richard bentley, 1892) 2: 243. story’s note that the oil portrait of bray was “engraved” (2: 249) is probably a reference to the mezzotint he lists in the section of his book devoted to linnell’s “engravings.” michael angelo’s frescoes in the sistine chapel, 1833–37. special auction services auction, newbury, berkshire, 17 sept., #237, 39 (of 42?) pls., hand colored possibly by linnell’s daughter hannah, wife of samuel palmer, early (original?) boards with cloth spine, no title page, illus. (£1100; estimate £100-150). palmer, samuel drawings, paintings, and rare states of original graphics box hill, surrey. oil on paper, 24.0 x 40.1 cm., datable to 1848. sny, 28 jan., #42, illus. ($32,500; estimate $5000-7000). previously sold sl, 19 feb. 1987, #123, illus. (£1430). the campagna and aqueducts of rome. watercolor, gouache, and gum arabic, 14.6 x 40.2 cm., datable to 1843. gpf, may cat., #44, illus. (£16,000). the goatherd. watercolor, 20.9 x 29.2 cm., datable to c. 1879. arader galleries auction, new york, 13 june, #205, illus. ($12,000). previously offered cl, 3 june 2004, #72, from the collection of george goyder, illus. (not sold; estimate £50,000-80,000); previously sold cl, 5 june 2006, #58, illus. (£21,600). going to evening church. watercolor, gouache, and gum arabic, 30.0 x 70.0 cm. fine art society, spring 2014 cat., #30, illus. (not priced). offered jan. 2015 to john windle for $600,000. previously sold sl, 19 nov. 2013, #13, titled old england’s sunday evening, illus. (£266,500). see illus. 13. 13. samuel palmer, going to evening church (see enlargement). watercolor, gouache, and gum arabic, 30.0 x 70.0 cm., signed lower left and datable to 1874 when palmer exhibited the work at the society of painters in water colours, #91, titled old england’s sunday evening. lister 208, #669. photo courtesy of the fine art society, london. like many of palmer’s works beginning in the 1840s, going to evening church shows his attempt to combine the density of oil painting for the landscape with the translucency of watercolors for the sky. the subject embodies his conservative christianity and sacramental concept of nature and recalls his famous shoreham period painting coming from evening church (tate collection, lister 77, #123). the dramatic sunset hints at the influence of palmer’s father-in-law, john linnell, and possibly turner. an illustration to milton’s “lycidas.” watercolor and gouache, 10.4 x 15.1 cm., signed. ll, jan. cat., pp. 126-29, extensively described, “painted c. 1864–1870,” illus. (not priced; sold by may to a “private collection, usa”). previously sold cl, 9 nov. 1976, #131, titled the evening ploughman, illus. (£1700), and sl, 9 july 2014, #199, illus. (£25,000). these earlier sales cats. date the work to c. 1873, as in lister 218, #m7. landscape—twilight. oil and tempera, 26.5 x 38.0 cm., probably the work exhibited at the royal academy in 1834. ll, jan. cat., pp. 96-105, extensively described and with an essay by william vaughan, illus. (not priced). for previous offers to sell, see the 2014 sales review in blake 48.4 (spring 2015). the poet. watercolor, 19.5 x 42.0 cm., signed, datable to c. 1865. arader galleries auction, new york, 13 june, #204, illus. (no bids on an estimate of $35,000-45,000). previously sold sl, 9 april 1992, #115, titled a poet, illus. (£33,000). charles dickens, autograph letter signed to palmer, 13 may 1846, 2 pp. sl, 15 dec., #39, assuring palmer that “i would on no account dream of allowing the book to go to press, without the insertion of your name on the title page,” illus. (£2000). previously offered jarndyce, feb. 2012 cat. 197, the library of a dickensian, #66, illus. (£3000). dickens is referring to his pictures from italy; “the vignette illustrations on wood by samuel palmer” is printed on the title page. this letter is printed in dickens 546-47. autograph letters signed, 1866–81. bhl, 24 june, #39, “series of over forty” letters with “substantial fragments of six” others, “one with a sketch,” illus. (£9750). the cat. entry notes that 1 letter mentions “the blake exhibition” (probably the 1876 exhibit at the burlington fine arts club, london) and that 16 of the letters “are apparently unpublished.” “the early ploughman,” etching. hs, 2013 cat. 17, #44, 5th st., “a working proof” to which “palmer added touches of black ink to the birds in the sky at the left and to the left-hand ox,” illus. (not priced). “the herdsman’s cottage,” etching. dw, 16 oct., #130, 1st st., illus. (£420; estimate £100-150). “the lonely tower,” etching. bhl, 17 june, #8, 5th st., “signed in pencil, inscribed ‘trial proof’, with the ‘ahp private press’ blindstamp lower left, … with a handwritten note taped to the back of the frame by the original owner, mr f. g. stephens, stating that this impression was a gift from the artist in 1880 …,” illus. (£11,875). “the vine” or “plumpy bacchus,” etching. hs, 2013 cat. 17, #43, 2nd st., “a unique, early trial proof, extensively worked by the artist in pencil,” illus. (not priced). previously offered campbell fine art, feb. 1990 cat. 2, #75, illus. (£5500). s. g. w. benjamin, a group of etchers (new york: dodd mead & company, 1882). eb, july, publisher’s cloth, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $1500). includes an impression of palmer’s “the herdsman’s cottage or sunset,” 2nd st., erroneously titled “sunrise” in the list of contents. this vol. not in lister. dickens, pictures from italy, 1846. eb, jan., with an inserted proof before letterpress text of the wood engraving of palmer’s design “the villa d’este at tivoli from the cypress avenue” (letterpress caption, published st.), later morocco with the publisher’s cloth spine and covers bound in, illus. ($593.93 to essick). see illus. 14 for the proof, now removed from the book, and dickens’s letter to palmer, above. 14. proof before letterpress text of the anonymous wood engraving of samuel palmer’s design “the villa d’este at tivoli from the cypress avenue,” published in charles dickens, pictures from italy (london: bradbury & evans, 1846) [1] (see enlargement). printed image 13.3 x 7.4 cm. on a leaf of wove paper 16.0 x 10.4 cm. pasted to a backing leaf 20.0 x 15.0 cm. with pencil inscriptions, some extending onto the backing leaf, and corresponding corrections in the image by palmer. essick collection. the annotations are as follows: upper right: “opposite are a few touches / on the slender cypress / two very thin lines of light / on the stem / specks of light on the / foliage—”. lower left: “there is a / thick black line / on the block thus ) / which i have / here crossed with / specks of white— / although it is in / the body of the tree / it kills the fine / work on the villa”. this note is followed by a vertical series of curving pencil lines, perhaps representing foliage. bottom left: “the thickness of outline / on the light side of this / vase unfinishes the / foreground — i have / here altered it”. bottom right: “the thick outline of this / leaf unfinished every thing / about it”. bottom right corner: possibly the top of a number (“23”?), possibly in another hand. as the note lower left indicates, palmer added minute droplets of white pigment to the cypress leaves in the area indicated by a parenthesis and a horizontal pencil line. other small corrections in white appear in the cypress left of the note upper right, on the vase lower center to which palmer drew two pencil lines, and on 1 leaf of the large plant right of the tree trunks lower right. the annotations were first printed, with some minor errors, in frederic g. kitton, dickens and his illustrators (london: george redway, 1899) 187, “second proof.” although kitton does not explicitly identify the owner of this proof, it was probably in the collection of palmer’s son, alfred herbert palmer, in the late 19th century. kitton 186-87 also quotes the annotations on what he calls the “first proof,” now untraced but apparently once in a. h. palmer’s collection. lister 254-55 reprints kitton’s transcriptions. click to show more. the proof shown here includes the wood-engraved word “on” printed top left, also appearing in 1 of palmer’s preliminary pencil sketches but omitted from the published engraving. as kitton points out, the design was probably intended to appear at the beginning of the chapter titled “going through france” with text beginning “on a fine sunday ….” when moved to the 1st page of the preliminary section, “the reader’s passport,” with text beginning “if the readers …,” an initial “on” was no longer appropriate.kitton 184-85. see also dickens’s letter to palmer of 27 april 1846: “i am afraid i cannot comfortably manage an s. what do you say to the word ‘on’? could you possibly do that?” (dickens 541). in a footnote to this letter, tillotson offers the same explanation as kitton; both are commenting on the drawing with “on,” not this proof. the drawing containing “on” is illus. in kitton, facing p. 186, then in the collection of a. h. palmer and now in essick’s collection. another preliminary drawing, more finished and detailed but lacking “on,” is in the morgan library and museum, new york, accession no. 1963.11; see lister 150, illus. 412ii. this dickens illus. recalls 2 watercolors of the villa and its cypress grove palmer executed while in italy in 1838. these works are now in the victoria and albert museum, london, museum no. p.29-1919 (lister 127-28, illus. 314), and the morgan, accession no. 1962.18 (lister 128, illus. 315). the victoria and albert also holds an impression of the published st. of the wood engraving, museum no. e.3896-1920, with the letterpress caption below the design but before all other letters. the annotations and touches of white pigment offer insights into palmer’s working methods and habits of mind. his revisions center on the ways in which light is reflected off various surfaces. the miniscule corrections in the design can be seen only with the aid of a magnifying glass and probably seemed trivial to the craftsman responsible for the wood engraving. it would be very difficult to achieve in wood the subtle effects sought by palmer, and thus it is not surprising that published impressions of the design show no evidence that his directions were followed. perhaps palmer’s unhappy experiences with this and other illus. for dickens’s book contributed to his decision in 1850 to etch his own designs. he worked tirelessly on those copperplates to capture the play of light and shadow unachievable by journeymen wood engravers. click to show less. richmond, george early drawings, paintings, and original graphics figure studies. pencil, leaf 22.9 x 30.5 cm. ah, feb. online cat. 444, #34, illus. (£125). one of these sketches might be a variant posture for the figure in richmond’s etching of 1827, “the shepherd.” the other drawings are much later. portrait miniature of welby sherman. watercolor on ivory, 1827. matthew barton auction, london, 24 nov., #413, in a “gilt-metal frame,” illus. (£38,400; estimate £1500-2500). see illus. 15. 15. george richmond, portrait miniature of welby sherman (see enlargement). watercolor on ivory, 1827. the matthew barton auction cat. of 24 nov. gives the size only as “rectangular 12cm” and states, rather confusingly because of a lack of punctuation, “backboard with applied label inscribed: welby sherman / painted geo richmond / jany [two deleted words]: 1825 [altered to 27 by thomas knyvett richmond] and tkr / 1877.” the bracketed words in the above quotation are in the online cat. entry. the “and” before “tkr” is probably not part of the inscription. the cat. records the provenance as “the artist; his son, thomas knyvett richmond (1833–1901) by 1877.” photo courtesy of matthew barton ltd. little is known about sherman other than his friendship and engraving activities with palmer, richmond, calvert, and other members of the “ancients,” the circle of young artists who gathered around blake in the last few years of his life. sherman “was perpetually short of money, and at last, in 1836, having swindled palmer’s brother william, a weak character, out of £500 in wagers on games of billiards, he fled abroad” (raymond lister, samuel palmer and “the ancients,” exhibition cat. [cambridge: fitzwilliam museum, 1984] 88). richmond drew at least 2 pencil portraits of sherman c. 1827–28: portrait of welby sherman in the british museum, registration no. 1929,0416.4, and welby sherman asleep in a chair in the cleveland museum of art, accession no. 1981.29. for a list of sherman’s engravings, see campbell dodgson, “the engravings of george richmond and welby sherman,” print collector’s quarterly 17.4 (oct. 1930): 361-62. study of a man’s right leg. ink over pencil, leaf 17.5 x 7.0 cm. aspire auction, cleveland, 29 oct., #113, illus. ($383.50). previously offered agnew’s, oct. 2001 richmond cat., #1, illus. (£2750); sold sny, 25 jan. 2011, #153, with 2 other works by richmond, illus. ($8125). romney, george drawings and paintings excluding portraits three sketchbooks of figure studies, 23, 18, and 26 pp. with sketches illustrating macbeth, paradise lost, john howard visiting a lazaretto, and 8 for shipwreck at the cape of good hope, each booklet 14.2 x 23.6 cm. bound in quarter calf, the 3rd vol. showing a whatman 1794 watermark. bhl, 8 july, #3, illus. (not sold; highest bid £15,000 on an estimate of £20,000-30,000). the sketches for shipwreck are preliminaries for the painting engraved by blake and published in hayley’s life of romney, 1809. a sketchbook, 132 leaves, 13.3 x 17.2 cm., with 67 pencil drawings and 73 pen and ink drawings including studies for macbeth and john howard visiting a lazaretto, datable to 1791–92. cl, 7 july, #94, illus. (£62,500 to the huntington library, art collections, and botanical gardens, san marino, california). the death of cordelia. pencil, 14.0 x 23.0 cm. dreweatts auction, newbury, 25 march, #77, illus. (£450). ah, nov. online cat. 452, #98, illus. (£1200). possibly the drawing offered with study of the warren family, sl, 8 july 2011, #301 (not sold; estimate £3000-5000). the effects of pride and jealousy. pencil, 13.5 x 22.0 cm. woolley & wallis auction, salisbury, 23 sept., #80, illus. (£900). female figure in profile. pen and ink, 7.9 x 4.7 cm. gb, 27 nov., #6603, illus. (€800). miniature of william cowper, a copy of a portrait by romney. pencil and watercolor on card, oval 7.6 cm. high. sny, 5 dec., #186, the back inscribed “william cowper after the sketch by romney, attributed to ozias humphrey” (to which the cat. adds “[sic]”), the “offered lot was probably taken from blake’s engraving” of romney’s portrait, gilt-copper frame, illus. ($625). the blake engraving noted in the auction cat. is blake’s pl. 1 in hayley, life of cowper, 1803. romney’s 1792 pastel portrait of cowper is in the national portrait gallery, london, cat. no. npg 1423; blake’s monochrome wash copy, the basis for his engraving, is in the library of congress, call no. ne642.b5 a465, rosenwald collection (butlin #351). mother and child with attendant. pencil, brown wash, 27.0 x 19.0 cm. csk, 21 july, #436, illus. (£3250). mother and child with three figures, attributed to romney. pen and ink, wash, over pencil, 25.4 x 26.4 cm. freeman’s auction, philadelphia, 16 june, #58, illus. (no bids on an estimate of $1000-1500). reclining figure. pen and ink, black wash, 14.6 x 14.0 cm. stair galleries auction, hudson, new york, 24 oct., #35, illus. ($1400). a seated woman, three-quarter length, with a dog. brown ink and wash, 31.1 x 26.7 cm. sny, 5 dec., #24, illus. ($8750). sketches for satan rallying his host. pencil, leaf 33.0 x 40.6 cm. aspire online auction closing 10 dec., #55, illus. ($849.60). studies of a woman’s head. pen and ink, black chalk, wash, 18.8 x 11.1 cm. hs, 2013 cat. 17, #47, illus. (not priced). study for a family portrait. pencil, 15.0 x 12.0 cm. dreweatts auction, newbury, 25 march, #76, illus. (£550). previously offered spink-leger galleries, sept. 1999 head and shoulders cat., #39a, illus. (£1200). study for a portrait of a seated lady. pen and brown ink, 8.8 x 9.2 cm. mitchells auction, cockermouth, cumbria, 4 sept., #1024, illus. (£1900). possibly related to the priestess in the initiation of a rustic nymph and hence datable to c. 1780–84. for another study for this figure in romney’s unfinished painting, see priestess for “initiation of a rustic nymph” in the fitzwilliam museum, cambridge, reproduced in patricia jaffé, drawings by george romney (cambridge: cambridge up, 1977) pl. 31. study for “lady hamilton as a bacchante.” pen and ink, landscape study in pencil on verso, leaf 18.7 x 11.3 cm. gpf, may cat., #4, illus. (£3500). study for “the destruction of niobe’s children.” pencil, pen and ink, brown wash, 11.0 x 18.5 cm. cny, 29 jan., #103, illus. ($3750). study for “the leveson-gower children.” pen and ink, wash, 23.8 x 24.1 cm., datable to c. 1776. ll, jan. cat., pp. 36-38, illus. (not priced). study for two figures in an attitude of exultation. pen and ink, wash, 40.3 x 21.3 cm. hs, 2013 cat. 17, #46, illus. (not priced). study of a nude woman. pencil, leaf 18.9 x 12.0 cm. gpf, may cat., #5, illus. (£2200). study of a standing woman (recto), a man and three children in a landscape (verso). pen and ink, 11.0 x 18.5 cm. sny, 28 jan., #171, illus. (not sold; highest bid $3750 on an estimate of $5000-7000). sl, 8 july, #217, illus. (£2500). study of a woman and children. pencil, leaf 19.0 x 12.0 cm. gpf, may cat., #6, illus. (£2200). study of a woman in profile. pencil, leaf 19.0 x 12.0 cm. gpf, may cat., #3, illus. (£2200). study of john milton. oil, 63.0 x 76.0 cm., datable to 1792. baeyer, dec. online cat. of sold works, “a preparatory sketch for romney’s history painting of milton and his daughters begun in 1792,” illus. (not priced; “bought by a foundation, germany”). study of prisoners, or inmates of a lazaretto. pencil, 16.5 x 24.8 cm. ah, may online cat. 447, #48, dating the work to c. 1792, stamped “g. romney” lower right, illus. (£1500). sherman, welby see portrait miniature of welby sherman under richmond, above, and illus. 15. stothard, thomas drawings, paintings, and original graphics eleven drawings of chinese punishments and one of a chinese musician, attributed to stothard. watercolors, 23.8 x 16.7 cm. to 30.3 x 21.3 cm., one inscribed “t. stothard del.” sl, 30 april, #255, illus. (£3500). two monochrome wash drawings, 12.0 x 7.0 cm. and 9.5 x 2.5 cm. eb, jan., illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of £349.99). dw, 16 july, #137, “one showing a sword fight between a gentleman in a kilt and a semi-naked native in a turban, with a young woman kneeling beside in supplication, … the other showing a monk in an attitude of devotion gazing up at sun rays emanating from the clouds,” illus. (£170). previously offered moore allen & innocent auction, cirencester, 25 oct. 2013, #155, oddly titled othello and saint, illus. (not sold; estimate £200-300). the bridal of january & may. monochrome wash, 14.0 x 9.5 cm. litchfield county auctions, litchfield, connecticut, 10 sept., #151, illus. ($145). an illus. to chaucer’s “the merchant’s tale” or to alexander pope’s “january and may; or, the merchant’s tale.” i have not been able to find an engraving of this design. child listening to the grown-ups at dinner. gray wash, 8.9 x 7.0 cm., datable to 1794. ah, june online cat. 448, #43, illus. (£225). engraved by james parker and published in m. [j.-f.] marmontel, belisarius (london: e. harding, 1794), facing p. 2. composition study inspired by the elgin marbles. pen and ink, 12.7 x 16.5 cm., inscribed “stothard,” datable to c. 1810. ah, june online cat. 448, #70, illus. (£275). a family’s sorrow. pen and ink, wash, 9.5 x 12.5 cm., inscribed “t. stothard” (probably not his signature). eb, march-april, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £975 or “best offer”). previously offered as a family’s lament; see blake 44.4 (spring 2011): 140. figures crowding excitedly. pen and ink, wash, 14.0 x 11.0 cm., inscribed “t. stothard.” eb, may, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of £595); again in may, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £590 or “best offer”). previously offered ah, may 2005 online cat. 367, #61 (£250). genius crowns minerva. monochrome wash, size not recorded. criterion auction, london, 19 oct., #54, illus. (not sold; highest bid £80 on an estimate of £100-200). the preliminary drawing for an engraving, a “frontispiece to an unidentified publication” (british museum registration no. 1849,0721.671). this drawing is probably about the same size as the engraving, 13.0 x 8.0 cm. the lady in the coach discovers the count lying senseless. monochrome wash, oval, 10.0 x 8.0 cm., inscribed on the verso “[sto]thard delt.” eb, march, framed, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of €165 or “best offer”); april, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of €149 or “best offer”). the design is an illus. to the persian letters, engraved by walker and published in harrison’s british classics, 1785–87. coxhead 79. music. oil, oval, 21.6 x 27.9 cm. ah, june online cat. 448, #14, illus. (£1750). not the oil of the same title sold sl, 7 oct. 1992, #46, with merrymaking, a companion painting (£1210). othello and desdemona, attributed to stothard. oil, 25.2 x 35.3 cm. bho, 17 feb., #444, illus. (not sold; estimate £500-700); 14 april, #392, illus. (£437). previously offered bho, 3 dec. 2014, #467, illus. (not sold; estimate £1000-1500). a storyteller. pen and ink, blue wash, leaf 9.5 x 9.0 cm. baeyer, aug. online cat., illus. (£600). two married women and the widow. oil, 17.5 x 22.0 cm. anderson & garland auction, newcastle, 16 june, #532, illus. (£300). uncle toby telling my father of the punishment of the grenadier. watercolor, 11.5 x 7.0 cm., datable to c. 1781. dreweatts auction, newbury, 14 april, #150, illus. (£55). an illus. to laurence sterne, tristram shandy, engraved by james heath and published in the novelist’s magazine, vol. 5 (1781), inscribed “plate ii.” coxhead 63. venus and adonis. pen and ink, watercolor, 8.3 x 7.0 cm. ah, may online cat. 447, #51, illus. (£225). “satan, sin, and death,” engraved by bartolozzi after stothard, 1792. eb, feb., trimmed to the image on 3 sides but retaining signatures and the 1792 john jeffryes imprint, insect damage along left margin, with “adam and eve,” engraved by bartolozzi after stothard, both framed, both illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £120 or “best offer”). coxhead 103. apparently rare; only the 2nd impression of “satan, sin, and death” i’ve seen on the market. the pl. was not included in copies i’ve inspected of graphic illustrations of milton’s paradise lost … engraved by francis bartolozzi … from paintings by thomas stothard, published by jeffryes in 1818. appendix: new information on blake’s engravings listed below are substantive additions or corrections to robert n. essick, the separate plates of william blake: a catalogue (1983), and essick, william blake’s commercial book illustrations (1991). newly discovered impressions of previously recorded published sts. of blake’s engravings are listed for only the rarer pls. the separate plates of william blake: a catalogue pp. 38-40, “a dream of thiralatha.” a preliminary pencil sketch for the two figures is included on the recto of harpers and other drawings in essick’s collection. the figures are the reverse of the color-printed relief etching, with the legs of the descending figure together rather than spread apart. two other figures on this leaf of sketches may be an alternative version for the print. the lower figure appears to be a child, facing away from the viewer, rather than the adult in the print. the descending figure is pictured from the back. pp. 125-31, “morning amusement” and “evening amusement,” after watteau. this pair of prints is listed in anon., “vermischte nachrichten,” neue bibliothek der schönen wissenschaften und der freyen künste 28.1 (1783): 162, with a price of 15s.the references to neue bibliothek listed here are recorded in g. e. bentley, jr., “william blake and his circle: a checklist of publications and discoveries in 2009,” blake 44.1 (summer 2010): 17, 19. pp. 132-33, “robin hood & clorinda,” after meheux. the print is listed in anon., “vermischte nachrichten,” neue bibliothek der schönen wissenschaften und der freyen künste 30.2 (1785): 337, with a price of 4s. pp. 134-38, “the fall of rosamond,” after stothard. the print is listed in anon., “vermischte nachrichten,” neue bibliothek der schönen wissenschaften und der freyen künste 30.2 (1785): 342, with the “same” size and price as the engraving listed immediately above, “ophelia,” ogborn after stothard, priced at 7½s. william blake’s commercial book illustrations pp. 94-96, hayley, life of george romney, 1809. for 8 preliminary sketches by romney for the painting reproduced in blake’s engraving, “sketch of a shipwreck after romney,” see the 1st entry under romney, above. pp. 106-07, flaxman, compositions from the works days and theogony of hesiod, 1817, pls. 23, “jupiter and the muses,” and 33, “the brethren of saturn delivered.” for preliminary sketches, see judgment of paris and the muses under flaxman, above, and illus. 10. rosenbach and blake rosenbach and blake by g. e. bentley, jr. editors’ note: g. e. bentley, jr., died on 31 august 2017. this article, published with the blessing of his daughters, sarah and julia, is his final contribution to a journal to which he contributed so much. introduction abbreviations and symbols new sources of information rosenbach’s blake dealings arranged in alphabetical order printed books, prints, and manuscripts paintings and drawings rosenbach’s blake dealings arranged by date william blake’si am deeply indebted for advice and assistance to kathy haas, associate curator of the rosenbach of the free library of philadelphia at the time of my inquiries, and to robert n. essick. [editors’ note: the editors would also like to thank robert n. essick, for his invaluable help with outstanding questions.] works have always been rare. the most common of them is songs of innocence and of experience, for which we have records of twenty-nine copies produced during blake’s lifetime, each of them distinctly different from the others. for ten of blake’s printed writings only one or two complete copies have been traced.these printed blake rarissima are “blake’s chaucer: the canterbury pilgrims” (1809); the book of ahania (1795); the book of los (1795); “a descriptive catalogue” advertisement (1809); “exhibition of paintings in fresco” (1809); the french revolution (1791); “laocoön” (1826?); large book of designs (1796); “mirth” (1820?); and small book of designs (1796). indeed, no complete copy of there is no natural religion has ever been recorded, and “to the public,” blake’s prospectus (1793), has not been traced since 1863. to give some context, note that forty-eight substantially complete copies of the gutenberg bible are known, while some two hundred and thirty copies of the shakespeare first folio (1623) have been traced, fourteen in the collection of w. a. whiteanon. (“our london correspondent”), “a great bibliophile,” glasgow herald 4 june 1927: 10, an obituary of white recounting a visit to him in 1923. and eighty-two in the folger library.see <https://​www.​folger.​edu/​what-​is-​a-​first-​folio>. the person who dealt with more copies of blake’s works than any other was dr. a. s. w. rosenbach (1876–1952),for rosenbach’s own account of his career, see a. s. w. rosenbach, books and bidders: the adventures of a bibliophile (boston: little, brown, and company, 1927).the rosenbach business was continued by john fleming. the famously successful dealer in philadelphia and new york. he handled forty-two of blake’s works in illuminated printing, eighty-seven drawings and paintings, “the everlasting gospel,” and the pickering [ballads] manuscript, a large proportion of them from w. a. white. most of those he handled went to lessing j. rosenwald (1891–1979). note that all rosenbach’s customers for blake were in the united states. 1. a. s. w. rosenbach between c. 1915 and c. 1920. george grantham bain collection. library of congress, prints and photographs division, lc-dig-ggbain-30661.tif. rosenbach was willing to spend very substantial sums of money on acquiring blakes. at the parke-bernet sale of george c. smith, jr., on 2 november 1938 he paid nearly $30,000 for blakes, and at the parke-bernet sale of a. e. newton on 16 april 1941 he paid $45,750 for blakes. the only dealerw. a. white owned 28 copies of blake’s writings in print and in manuscript and 598 drawings (plus more drawings in blake’s notebook). who is even close to rosenbach is bernard quaritch (1819–99), who established his bookshop in london in 1847. he handled twenty-six copies of blake’s works in illuminated printing, and after his death his firm, which still flourishes, sold thirty-two more. by far the most important blake transaction ever made by rosenbach—or by anyone else for that matter—was from the estate of william augustus white (1843–1927). this included eleven works in illuminated printing, two works in conventional typography, twenty-four commercial books with blake engravings, eleven separate prints, two manuscripts (including the pickering manuscript), and eleven drawings.the only works of blake scholarship included in the lists below are those that appear in rosenbach’s 1927 inventory of the blakes of w. a. white. rosenbach is such an important figure in blake studies that it is worth recording in detail his handling of blake’s original works. the two lists below include every contemporary blake that rosenbach is known to have dealt with. the first list comprehends all the rosenbach blakes arranged in alphabetical order, and the second list gives the same blakes organized by date. it is only in the second list that the extraordinary importance of his handling of the blakes from the w. a. white collection is made plain. abbreviations and symbols * signifies not previously published ** contains information not in hard-copy authorities, defined as: g. e. bentley, jr., blake books (1977), blake books supplement (1995) martin butlin, the paintings and drawings of william blake (1981) robert n. essick, the separate plates of william blake (1983) <butlin> martin butlin, the paintings and drawings of william blake (1981). references are to catalogue numbers, e.g., <butlin #458> <essick> robert n. essick, the separate plates of william blake: a catalogue (1983). references are to state/impression numbers, e.g., <essick 2c> new sources of information grolier club, undated, unsigned list “given to f. w. emerson by w. a. white. works of wm blake.” rosenbach acquisition cards, 1922–52 <the rosenbach of the free library of philadelphia> * rosenbach’s own acquisition cards. prices in brackets derive from rosenbach’s price code h o v e r z a c k s [1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0] plus “ns”, which i take to mean “no cents” or “.00”. n is used as an alternate 0. in a string of zeroes it will alternate with s. x stands for a repeat of the previous non-zero digit. in the bottom left corner, opposite the purchase code price, is a price that i take to be the sale price. i omit the rosenbach inventory numbers. rosenbach typescript list headed “william blake,” 1927 <the rosenbach of the free library of philadelphia> a rosenbach inventory of the blakes in w. a. white’s estate, with valuations. rosenbach typescript list of “the w. a. white collection of the works of william blake,” 1 may 1929 <the rosenbach of the free library of philadelphia> an rosenbach invoice (total $115,000) for works by blake from white’s estate purchased by rosenwald. rosenbach typescript list of “books from the library of the late mr. w. a. white,” 1929 <the rosenbach of the free library of philadelphia> a want-list of works not restricted to blake, organized by prospective purchaser (e.g., “desired by j. w. f. [john w. frothingham]”), with two sets of prices or valuations, one headed “swann” and the other presumably by rosenbach. mrs. thorne’s catalogue cards * mrs. thorne committed her blakes to the morgan by 1971, but some were not delivered until 1975. i first saw the collection in august 1965 in her flat at 740 park avenue, new york. her own catalogue cards, perhaps provided by rosenbach, mostly give no information about where, when, and for how much she acquired them. i was given reproductions of the cards in 1971. on her collection, see g. e. bentley, jr., the blake collection of mrs. landon k. thorne (new york: pierpont morgan library, 1971). w. a. white’s own accession list <houghton library, harvard university> * rosenbach’s blake dealings arranged in alphabetical order links in this section to blake’s works are to images online. links to exhibition numbers and auction lots are to scans of the catalogues online. printed books, prints, and manuscripts “the accusers of theft adultery murder” <essick 2c; butlin #285> sold anonymously at hodgson’s, 14 january 1904, lot 227, for £15.15.0 to quaritch; acquired by w. a. white by 1905; sold from white’s estate with “joseph of arimathea preaching” <essick 1b; butlin #286> on 1 may 1929 for $3000 through rosenbach to rosenwald <now national gallery of art, washington, dc>. “the accusers of theft adultery murder” <essick 3g>, “albion rose” <essick 2d>, “the chaining of orc” <essick 1a>, and “the man sweeping the interpreter’s parlour” <essick 2k> acquired by george c. smith, jr.; sold posthumously with his collection at parke-bernet, 2 november 1938, lot 42, for $450 to rosenbach for rosenwald <now national gallery of art, washington, dc>. aeschylus, tragedies (1779), blake’s copy acquired by gabriel wells, from whose estate it was acquired in 1947 by rosenbach, who offered it in his catalogue (1947), lot 105, at $345; his successor, john fleming, offered it in his catalogue (1961), lot 182, for $345, from which it was bought by mrs. landon k. thorne <now morgan library and museum>. “albion rose” <essick 2d> see “the accusers” <essick 3g>. charles allen, roman history (1798) acquired by w. a. white, for whose estate it was valued at $15 in 1927 by rosenbach. * america (b) acquired by george c. smith, jr.; sold posthumously with his collection at parke-bernet, 2 november 1938, lot 22, for $2600 to rosenbach; acquired by 1939 by mrs. landon k. thorne <now morgan library and museum>. america (c) offered in rosenbach, catalogue of an exhibition of manuscripts and rare books (january–february 1931), no lot number or price, and five centuries of bookmaking: an exhibition (30 nov. 1931–16 jan. 1932), no lot number or price; “this copy [was] bot of jas. f. drake ca. 1924 by rosenbach” and “i bot of rosenbach, march. 1936” (according to philip hofer’s notes with it) <now houghton library, harvard university>. america (d) acquired by w. a. white, probably in 1891; possibly the “uncolored. morocco” copy from white’s collection valued at $1500 by rosenbach in 1927; acquired by cortlandt f. bishop between 1926 and probably 1929; sold from bishop's collection at american art association-anderson galleries, 5 april 1938, lot 281, possibly to rosenbach; rosenbach’s successor, john fleming, sold it in 1965 to caroline newton <now princeton university library>. ** america (e) bought on 21 december 1896 from the dealer pearson for £33 by w. a. white; possibly the “uncolored. morocco” copy from white’s collection valued at $1500 by rosenbach in 1927; sold from white’s estate on 1 may 1929 through rosenbach to rosenwald <now library of congress>. america (m) acquired by w. a. white; valued for white’s estate (“colored. morocco,” “family”) at $7500 by rosenbach in 1927; acquired by white’s daughter frances white emerson <now yale center for british art>. america (q) sold by herschel v. jones at anderson galleries, 2 december 1918, lot 183, for $3600 to rosenbach; acquired by a. e. newton by 1924 <now princeton university library>. america (a) acquired by george c. smith, jr.; sold posthumously with his collection at parke-bernet, 2 november 1938, lot 23, for $500, possibly to rosenbach, for rosenwald[editors’ note: lots 23, 27, 31, and 40 from the smith sale are not linked to rosenbach in blake books pp. 340-41. they are listed on a remittance slip from rosenwald among copies of rosenbach records concerning sales to rosenwald, supplied to robert n. essick by ruth fine, who was curator of the rosenwald collection. the slip does not, however, name rosenbach explicitly as the payee.] <now library of congress>. america pl. 1 <butlin #266> acquired by w. a. white? by 1905; acquired by rosenbach,the rosenbach slip for it says hodgson’s (1913) for £2.10.0, a sale of which i have no record. * who bequeathed it to the rosenbach foundation <now the rosenbach of the free library of philadelphia>. ** america pl. a, copperplate acquired by w. e. moss, who sold it at sotheby’s, 2 march 1937, lot 171, for £50 to rosenbach for rosenwald <now library of congress>. america pl. d (“a dream of thiralatha”) <essick 1b> sold by mr. and mrs. anton g. hardy at parke-bernet, 14 january 1942, lot 20, for $575 to rosenbach for rosenwald <now national gallery of art, washington, dc>. “the battle of ai” [for maynard’s josephus] <essick 1a> and “the morning amusements of her royal highness” and “a lady in the full dress” [for the ladies new and polite pocket memorandum-book, for the year of our lord 1783 (1782)] <essick 2c> probably acquired by w. e. moss and sold at sotheby’s, 2 march 1937, lot 218 (a large collection of blake prints), for £11 to rosenbach for rosenwald <“the battle of ai” now in the library of congress; “the morning amusements …” now in the national gallery of art, washington, dc> ** bible, job (1825) “proofs unbound.” acquired by w. a. white, for whose estate they were valued at $250 in 1927 by rosenbach <probably the set now in the national gallery of art, washington, dc (b4286-b4307)>. bible, job (“1825”) “half russia.” acquired by w. a. white, for whose estate it was valued at $150 in 1927 by rosenbach <untraced>. ** bible, job (“1825”) “calf.” acquired by w. a. white, for whose estate it was valued at $150 in 1927 by rosenbach <untraced>. ** bible, job (1826) “21 plates … folio, original boards, with label, having on it an ms. note: ‘---’s copy of proofs presented to g. wyther, esqr. by john linnell, dec. 2 1863”, “260.00”, “horns [$125.00]”, “mrs. l. b.[?] preston 13/11/22”, “sold to mrs. landon k thorne 2|25|63” <rosenbach card> <now morgan library and museum>. * ** bible, job (1826) purchased by rosenbach for $150 at the american art association sale of charles eliot norton (2 may 1923), lot 14, described as with a clipping of lot “14”, “proof … folio, loose sheets laid in blue cloth … no watermark appears in this set … brilliant early impressions”, “sold hofer 7/24/23 norton sale amer. art 5/2/23”, “hrsns [$150.00]”, “22500”, “sold [john j.] emery 11/9/25” <rosenbach card>. * ** bible, job (1826) “all brilliant impressions. folio, original limp boards. paper label”, acquired at anderson galleries, 12 november 1923, the library of john quinn, part one, lot 717 [$145], priced at $225 and “sold to a. van sinderenmrs. adrian van sinderen was the niece of w. a. white. 10, 1930” <rosenbach card>. * ** bible, job (1826) “a beautiful ‘proof’ copy of blake’s finest work”, “sold 448/4”, “original boards. with the original label on the front cover dated march 1826. engraved title and 21 plates, each marked [sic] ‘proof’ … fredrick locker* lampson [sic] copy with bookplate. 6/30 felix isman ocsns [$280.00]”, “[$]675-” <rosenbach card>. * ** bible, job (1826) “9/11/52 n.y[?]”, “large-paper proofs, title-page and 21 plates, printed on india paper watermarked ‘j. whatman 1825’ and marked ‘proof’ on lower right-hand corner. large 4to, totally uncut in the original sheets. enclosed in a blue cloth case. | 581/15 | hrsns [$150.00]”, “sold 9/18/52” <rosenbach card> <untraced>. * ** bible, job (1826) “21 plates. folio, green morocco. inscribed on fly ‘milton riviere. this book came to me at my father’s death in 1876.david valentine riviere subscribed to job (br[2] 784). he had it from blake, having subscribed for it on its publication.’” “[fr. p. hofer, on exchg.]”, “200-phila11/11/25”. “off. to f. s. meara 12/22/26 | sent to phila. 1929” <rosenbach card> <untraced>. * ** bible, job (1826) offered in rosenbach catalogue 28, five hundred rare books … (1936), lot 41, “folio, gray calf, blind tooled sides,” “proofs on india paper,” $235 <untraced>. bible, job (1826) offered in rosenbach’s the world of yesterday (1939), lot 47, published proof copy on india paper, inscribed “to marian—mrs. john linnell senr. decr. 1868”, $200 <untraced>. laurence binyon, little engravings (1902) “boards.” acquired by w. a. white, for whose estate it was valued at $3.50 in 1927 by rosenbach <untraced>. robert blair, the grave (1808) folio, “brown calf, gilt tooled borders, gauffred edges. armorial bookplate of cholmeley charles william dering $50.00 osns [$20.00]”, “phila 11/11/25”. another card, apparently a continuation of this one, reads, “inserted are two original sketches by blake drawn on both sides of a sheet of paper. the more complete one is in ink and the one on the verso is in pencil. this one has a small part cut off and lacking. it is probably a tentative drawing of plate vi [“the soul hovering”] in the book as the idea differs very slightly. also inserted is an engraving by blake extracted from another book. … 12/29 osrns[editors’ note: the entry in “william blake and his circle” for 2014 gives the rosenbach code as oxrns ($225.00).] [$205.00]”these drawings are apparently not in butlin, and i know nothing further of them. <rosenbach card> <untraced>. * ** see illus. 2. 2. rosenbach company archive, stock card rco ix-b:03. 10.2 x 15.2 cm. (4" x 6"). the rosenbach of the free library of philadelphia. robert blair, the grave (1808) “large paper. half morocco” [with the signature and bookplate of marsden j. perry and signature of w. a. white]. acquired by w. a. white, for whose estate it was valued in 1927 at $50 by rosenbach; rosenbach’s successor, john fleming, sold it for $1250 in 1972 to robert n. essick <now essick collection>. ** robert blair, the grave (1808) “boards.” acquired by w. a. white, for whose estate it was valued at $20 in 1927 by rosenbach <untraced>. ** robert blair, the grave (1808) offered in rosenbach catalogue 28, five hundred rare books … (1936), lot 40, “original boards, with paper label, rebacked, uncut, in half red morocco case. … inserted is a portrait of schiavonetti, the engraver,” $175 <untraced>. robert blair, the grave (1813) “royal 4o, old half morocco. extra illustrated with about 60 other engravings of blake’s designs,the insertions are from young’s night thoughts (1797); see “william blake and his circle: a checklist of publications and discoveries in 2013,” blake 48.1 (summer 2014). cut out and pasted on fly-leaves and blank portions of pages pasted [sic] throughout the book. according to a note on the front-end-leaf, this interesting copy was obtained in its present condition from william thane, an artist and picture restorer, who knew blake. it is probable that these extra illustrations were early or trial proofs given by blake to thane, as it is unlikely the latter would have cut up valuable books to embellish his copy of ‘the grave.’ if that be the case these engravings should be of particular interest.this is more or less word for word (except for the ungrammatical duplication of “pasted”) from the sale catalogue of anderson galleries, 12-14 nov. 1923, the library of john quinn, part one [a-c], lot 716. | quinn sale, 11/23. krsn [$950?],[editors’ note: the entry in “william blake and his circle” for 2013 gives the sale price as $95.] $1,250”. “dr frank d. meara | app. geo c. smith jr. ret 10/28/24” <rosenbach card>. acquired by rosenwald <now library of congress>. * ** robert blair, the grave “new york, undated.” acquired by w. a. white, for whose estate it was valued at $2.50 in 1927 by rosenbach <untraced>. ** robert blair, the grave copperplates for blake’s designs, offered in rosenbach catalogue of an exhibition of rare books, autograph manuscripts, and literary documents (28 november–23 december 1921), no lot number or price; acquired by george c. smith, jr.; sold for $750 to rosenbach for rosenwald at the parke-bernet sale of george c. smith, jr., 2 november 1938, lot 38 <now national gallery of art, washington, dc>. the book of ahania (a) pls. 2-6 sold by the earl of crewe at sotheby’s, 30 march 1903, lot 7, for £103 to quaritch, presumably for w. a. white; sold from his estate on 1 may 1929 through rosenbach to rosenwald <now library of congress>. the book of thel (c) acquired on 20 march 1891 by w. a. white; valued for white’s estate (designated “family”) at $4500 by rosenbach in 1927; acquired by white’s relative john w. frothingham; frothingham’s daughter gave it in 1940 to white’s daughter frances white emerson, for whom it was sold posthumously at sotheby’s, 19 may 1958, lot 1, for £1900 to rosenbach’s successor, john fleming; acquired by mrs. landon k. thorne <now morgan library and museum>. the book of thel (e) sold by herschel v. jones at anderson galleries, 2 december 1918, lot 182, for $79 to rosenbach <now beinecke library, yale university>. the book of thel (f) sold with the collection of george c. smith, jr., at parke-bernet, 2 november 1938, lot 14, for $2200 to rosenbach for rosenwald <now library of congress>. the book of thel (h) sold for major w. van r. whitall at the american art association, 14 february 1927, lot 111, for $5000 to rosenbach for rosenwald[editors’ note: the list of works from the collection of w. a. white sold through rosenbach to rosenwald in may 1929 includes a copy of thel, “blue morocco,” which suggests copy h. perhaps rosenbach bought it in the february 1927 auction for white, not rosenwald, and then sold it to rosenwald in 1929.] <now library of congress>. the book of thel (l) acquired by e. d. church; found after 1909 by rosenbach “on dodd & livingston’s shelves priced at $280”;edwin wolf 2nd and john f. fleming, rosenbach: a biography (cleveland: world publishing company, 1960) 74. sold in may 1911 to henry e. huntington, who bequeathed it in 1927 to the huntington library. ** the book of thel (o) acquired by frank bemis; after his death it was sold through rosenbach on 18 september 1939 to rosenwald <now library of congress>. john brown, elements of medicine (1795) “2 vols, 8vo., original blue cloth, uncut”, “coleridge’s copy, with his initials on half-title of vol. i”, “from the h. b. forman collection, with bookplate”,this copy was sold with the h. b. forman library at anderson galleries, 15 march 1920, lot 39. “$150.00”, “csns [$80.00]”, “phila 5/4/26”, “off omera [and] to smith” <rosenbach card>. sold to rosenwald <now library of congress> * ** gottfried augustus bürger, leonora, trans. stanley (1796) acquired by w. a. white, for whose estate it was valued at $50 in 1927 by rosenbach; sold from white’s estate on 1 may 1929 to rosenwald <now library of congress>. ** “the chaining of orc” <essick 1a> see “the accusers” <essick 3g>. geoffrey chaucer, prologue (1812) acquired by w. a. white, for whose estate it was valued at $100 in 1927 by rosenbach; sold from white’s estate on 1 may 1929 to rosenwald <now library of congress>. geoffrey chaucer, prologue (1812) acquired by w. e. moss, from whose collection it was sold through sotheby’s, 2 march 1937, lot 225, for £45 to rosenbach, probably for rosenwald. “chaucers canterbury pilgrims” <essick untraced impression 23> acquired by w. a. white, for whose estate it was valued at $100 in 1927 by rosenbach; perhaps the same as <essick 3u>, acquired in 1953 from the rosenbach foundation by the philadelphia museum of art. george cumberland’s card <essick 1h> see poetical sketches (d). george cumberland’s card <essick 1x, 1y> acquired by w. e. moss, from whose collection they were sold through sotheby’s, 2 march 1937, lot 208, for £12 to rosenbach, from whom they passed to rosenwald <now national gallery of art, washington, dc>. george cumberland’s card <essick untraced impression 2> acquired by w. a. white, who loaned it to the exhibition of the grolier club (1919–20), no. 35, and that of the fogg (1924); valued at $20 in 1927 by rosenbach; probably sold from white’s estate in 1929 to rosenbach <perhaps the one in now the rosenbach of the free library of philadelphia>. dante prints (“1839”) “half morocco.” acquired by w. a. white, for whose estate they were valued at $30 in 1927 by rosenbach; probably sold from white’s estate to rosenbach, who bequeathed them to the rosenbach foundation <now the rosenbach of the free library of philadelphia>. dante prints “imperial folio, 1/2 green ^red morocco^, gold lettering on back. (lacks paper label, giving list of plates) india proof impressions [sic] of the 7 plates. onrsn [$205.00] isman 6/30”further notes indicate that it was offered in rosenbach’s the world of yesterday (1939), lot 40, for $385. <rosenbach card>. * ** descriptive catalogue (f) felix isman sold it in 1932 to rosenbach, who sold it the same year to chauncey brewster tinker <now beinecke library, yale university>. descriptive catalogue (l) sold anonymously at sotheby’s, 4 july 1895, lot 1129, for £3.3.0 to quaritch for w. a. white; valued at $75 in 1927 by rosenbach; sold from white’s estate on 1 may 1929 through rosenbach to rosenwald <now library of congress>. descriptive catalogue (m) sold from the collection of w. e. moss at sotheby’s, 2 march 1937, lot 196, for £50 to rosenbach; listed in rosenbach’s the world of yesterday (1939), lot 41, $375, and the march of books through the ages (1944/45), lot 45, $375; bequeathed to the rosenbach foundation <now the rosenbach of the free library of philadelphia>. ** descriptive catalogue (p) sold to rosenbach for £95 at the sotheby’s sale of arthur randle, 11 october 1948, lot 34 <now morgan library and museum>. “edmund pitts” <essick 2e> see “rev. john caspar lavater” <essick 3q>. william enfield, the speaker (1795) “12mo., old sheep, hinges weak. bookplate: h*b* forman.”, “$20.00”, “ons. [$2.00]”, “phila 2/4/26” <rosenbach card>. sold to rosenwald <now library of congress>. * ** europe (c) acquired in 1903 by w. a. white; valued for white’s estate (designated “family”) at $9000 by rosenbach in 1927; acquired by white’s son-in-law f. m. weld, jr. <now houghton library, harvard university>. europe (e) sold posthumously for a. e. newton at parke-bernet, 16 april 1941, lot 129, for $8000 to rosenbach for rosenwald <now library of congress>. europe (g) see visions of the daughters of albion (h). europe (c) pl. 2[editors’ note: europe pl. 2 is in the final published state, not a “proof” as described in the smith auction catalogue. thanks to robert n. essick and joseph viscomi for their help on this point.] (with jerusalem pl. 8 on the verso) acquired by george c. smith, jr.; sold posthumously with his collection at parke-bernet, 2 november 1938, lot 27, for $150, possibly to rosenbach, for rosenwald[editors’ note: see note 7.] <now library of congress>. europe (c) pls. 5b, 9a, 10, 11a, and 12 acquired by george c. smith, jr.; sold posthumously with his collection at parke-bernet, 2 november 1938, lot 31, for $280, possibly to rosenbach, for rosenwald[editors’ note: see note 7.] <now library of congress>. europe (c) pls. 18a-b see jerusalem, proofs of pls. 9, 19-20, 38a-b, 48, 50, 58, 78. europe pl. 1 (with jerusalem pl. 30 on the verso) acquired by w. a. white by 1905; sold from his estate in 1929 to rosenbach, who sold it in november 1952 to mr. rabinowitz <now yale center for british art>. europe pl. 1 (blake books #10a, “ancient of days”) acquired by rosenbach; probably the copy loaned to the philadelphia exhibition (1939), no. 72; bequeathed to the rosenbach foundation <now the rosenbach of the free library of philadelphia>. europe pl. 18 on 29 july 1942 percy e. lawler of the rosenbach company offered the print to joseph holland for $58.50according to the letter now in the collection of robert n. essick—see his “blake in the marketplace, 1995,” blake 29.4 (spring 1996): 121. before the firm sold it on 7 april 1947 to the museum of art, rhode island school of design. ** “the everlasting gospel,” manuscript fragment acquired by w. a. white; acquired from his estate by rosenbach, who bequeathed it to the rosenbach foundation <now the rosenbach of the free library of philadelphia>. the first book of urizen (b) a. e. newton sold it posthumously at parke-bernet, 16 april 1941, lot 131, for $8250 to rosenbach; acquired by 1971 by mrs. landon k. thorne <now morgan library and museum >. the first book of urizen (g) sold by the earl of crewe at sotheby’s, 30 march 1903, lot 6, for £307 to quaritch for w. a. white, from whose estate it was “delivered mar. 2, 29” for $27,500 through rosenbach to rosenwald <now library of congress>. the first book of urizen pl. 1 <butlin #276> probably acquired by w. a. white by 1905, from whose estate it was acquired by rosenbach, who bequeathed it to the rosenbach foundation <now the rosenbach of the free library of philadelphia>. ** the first book of urizen pl. 22, perhaps once part of the small book of designs (b) <butlin #261 11> sold for h. buxton forman at anderson galleries, 15 march 1920, lot 66, for $1060 to rosenbach <now essick collection>. see illus. 3. 3. the first book of urizen pl. 22. <butlin #261 11> leaf 26.2 x 18.5 cm., watermark 1794, color-printed relief etching finished in pen and watercolor, inscribed “‘frozen doors to mock’ | ‘the world: while they within torments up lock’”. perhaps it was once part of the small book of designs (b). essick collection. john flaxman, naval pillar (1799) acquired by w. a. white, for whose estate it was valued at $20 in 1927 by rosenbach; sold from white’s estate on 1 may 1929 to rosenwald <now library of congress>. for children: the gates of paradise (a) sold from the collection of w. e. moss at sotheby’s, 2 march 1937, lot 176, for £460 to rosenbach for rosenwald <now library of congress>. for children: the gates of paradise (c), with four drawings <butlin #201a 1-4> acquired by herschel v. jones, who sold it at anderson galleries, 2 december 1918, lot 185, for $610 to rosenbach; sold to a. e. newton by 1941 <now in an anonymous collection>. ** for children: the gates of paradise (d) sold posthumously for frederick locker through dodd, mead & co. on 27 april 1905 to w. a. white, for whose estate it was valued at $1000 in 1927 by rosenbach; sold from white’s estate on 1 may 1929 to rosenwald <now library of congress>. for the sexes: the gates of paradise (d) acquired by thomas boddington and sold posthumously for him at sotheby’s, 4 november 1895, lot 94, for £21 through quaritch to w. a. white, from whose estate it was probably sold in 1929 to rosenbach; offered in rosenbach, catalogue of an exhibition of manuscripts and rare books (january–february 1931), no lot number or price; in a catalogue of rare books of six centuries (1935), lot 148, for $2465; in the world of yesterday (1939), lot 43, for $2750; in a bibliophile’s miscellany (1941), lot 56, for $2750; and in the march of books through the ages (1944/45), lot 47, for $2750; acquired by 1971 by mrs. landon k. thorne <now morgan library and museum>. ** for the sexes: the gates of paradise (e) acquired by frederick locker, who sold it through dodd, mead & co. to w. a. white; it was sold from his estate to rosenbach, who bequeathed it to the rosenbach foundation <now the rosenbach of the free library of philadelphia>. for the sexes: the gates of paradise (h) bought by rosenbach for $750 at the parke-bernet sale of george c. smith, jr., 2 november 1938, lot 52 <now princeton university library>. henry fuseli, lectures on painting (1801) acquired by w. a. white, for whose estate it was valued in 1927 by rosenbach at $15 <untraced>. “genesis: the seven days of the created world” [by tasso] sold for h. buxton forman at anderson galleries, 15 march 1920, lot 68, for $1350 to rosenbach; offered in rosenbach catalogue 20 (october 1920), lot 8, $2500, and in his catalogue of an exhibition of rare books, autograph manuscripts, and literary documents (28 november–23 december 1921), no lot number or price <now princeton university library>. the ghost of abel (a), on homer (a), and “the man sweeping the interpreter’s parlour” <essick 2j> sold by the earl of crewe at sotheby’s, 30 march 1903, lot 8, for £43 to quaritch; acquired by 1905 by w. a. white; the ghost of abel (a) and on homer (a) were acquired from white’s estate on 1 may 1929 by rosenwald <now library of congress> and “the man sweeping the interpreter’s parlour” <essick 2j> was acquired in 1938 by mrs. landon k. thornemrs. thorne’s “man sweeping” catalogue card has a manuscript note: “dr. r. | 1938 | $100 | bought from phila— | shop”. * <now morgan library and museum>. thomas gray, designs for gray’s poems, ed. grierson (1922) acquired by w. a. white, for whose estate it was valued at $10 in 1927 by rosenbach <untraced>. * william hayley, ballads (1805) acquired by w. a. white, for whose estate it was valued at $30 in 1927 by rosenbach <untraced>.perhaps this is the copy of mrs. thorne. her catalogue card for it has a manuscript note: “b.k.l— | 1941 | $325”. * * william hayley, designs to a series of ballads (1802), all four parts acquired by w. a. white, for whose estate it was valued at $500 in 1927 by rosenbach; sold from white’s estate on 1 may 1929 to rosenwald <now library of congress, with the pencil signature of w. a. white>. william hayley, designs to a series of ballads (1802) “royal 4to., full green levant morocco binding. first edition. the contents consist of four ballads … there are only three other perfect copies known: h.e.h; b. b. macgeorge and w. a. white.robert n. essick, “blake in the marketplace, 1999,” blake 33.4 (spring 2000): 125-27, traces complete copies in cambridge, the essick collection, the huntington (2 sets), the library of congress, princeton, and trinity college (hartford, connecticut), and records an untraced copy that belonged to macgeorge and w. e. moss. over.” “$275.00 $975.00”, “phila 2/29/26” <rosenbach card>. offered in rosenbach, five hundred rare books … (1936), lot 44 (with “two designs of blake on two sides of a leaf” <butlin #361> and “an engraving by blake extracted from another book” [hayley, life of cowper, pl. 4], both inserted by a previous owner, frederick locker-lampson, the drawing and probably the print acquired by rosenwald by 1939), $975; in his the world of yesterday (1939), lot 42 (the drawing and print no longer present), $185; and in his the march of books through the ages (1944/45), lot 46, $185 <now essick collection>. * ** william hayley, life of cowper, 3 vols. (“1803”) acquired by w. a. white, for whose estate it was valued at $10 in 1927 by rosenbach <probably the copy now in the library of congress>. jerusalem (i) sold by the earl of crewe at sotheby’s, 30 march 1903, lot 15, for £83 to quaritch for w. a. white, after whose death it was sold on 1 may 1929 through rosenbach to rosenwald <now library of congress>. jerusalem pl. 8 see europe (c) pl. 2. jerusalem, proofs of pls. 9, 19-20, 38a-b, 48, 50, 58, 78, plus europe (c) pls. 18a-b acquired by george c. smith, jr.; sold posthumously with his collection at parke-bernet, 2 november 1938, lot 40, for $500, possibly to rosenbach, for rosenwald[editors’ note: see note 7.] <now library of congress>. jerusalem pl. 28 (with pl. 35 on the verso) acquired by w. a. white by 1905, from whose estate it was acquired by rosenbach, from whose firm it was purchased in 1952 by mr. rabinowitz <now yale center for british art>. jerusalem pl. 30 see europe pl. 1. “joseph of arimathea among the rocks of albion” <essick 2h> acquired by 1905 by w. a. white, for whose estate it was valued at $25 in 1927 by rosenbach; sold by rosenbach on 7 december 1938 for $135 to rosenwald <now national gallery of art, washington, dc>. “joseph of arimathea preaching to the inhabitants of britain” <essick 1b; butlin #286> sold anonymously at hodgson’s, 14 january 1904, lot 228, for £26.10.0.to quaritch, who sold it in february 1904 to w. a. white, from whose estate it was sold with “the accusers of theft adultery murder” <essick 2c; butlin #285> on 1 may 1929 for $3000 through rosenbach to rosenwald <now national gallery of art, washington, dc>. “joseph of arimathea preaching to the inhabitants of britain” <butlin #780> (not in essick) owned by w. a. white by 1905; owned by rosenbach by 1939 <now the rosenbach of the free library of philadelphia>. john caspar lavater, aphorisms (1794) acquired by 1905 by w. a. white, for whose estate it was valued at $10 in 1927 by rosenbach <perhaps the copy now in the library of congress>. “lear and cordelia” <essick 1a, 2b, 3d, 4f, and 4g> acquired by 1919 by w. a. white, for whose estate they were valued at $50 in 1927 by rosenbach; acquired by rosenwald <now national gallery of art, washington, dc>. “let him look up” [“experimental relief plate”] <essick 1a> acquired by george c. smith, jr., with whose collection it was sold posthumously at parke-bernet, 2 november 1938, lot 24, for $800 to rosenbach for rosenwald <now national gallery of art, washington, dc>. see illus. 4. 4. “let him look up,” relief and white-line etching, perhaps with engraving, c. 1805–22. <essick 1a> plate 16.2 x 9.5 cm. rosenwald collection, 1964.8.1777. national gallery of art, washington, dc. letter of 2 july 1800 sold at american art association-anderson galleries, 25 may 1938, lot 73, for $280, possibly to rosenbach, for rosenwald[editors’ note: a remittance slip from rosenwald for this sale is among copies of rosenbach records concerning sales to rosenwald, supplied to robert n. essick by ruth fine, who was curator of the rosenwald collection. the slip does not, however, name rosenbach explicitly as the payee.] <now library of congress>. letter of 19 october 1801 sold from the collection of william harris arnold at anderson galleries, 10 november 1924, lot 53 [$150 to rosenbach] <rosenbach card>; sold by rosenbach in 1926 to mrs. alice bemis taylor <now morgan library and museum>. * ** letter of 30 january 1803 sold from the collection of w. e. moss at sotheby’s, 2 march 1937, lot 281, for £150 to rosenbach for rosenwald <now library of congress>. letter of 28 september 1804 sold posthumously for george c. smith, jr., at parke-bernet, 2 november 1938, lot 6, for $325 to rosenbach for rosenwald <now library of congress>. letter of 9 june 1818 acquired by w. a. white by 1905, from whose estate it was acquired by rosenbach, who bequeathed it to the rosenbach foundation <now the rosenbach of the free library of philadelphia>. letter of 31 march 1826 “a.l.s. to john linnell; [london], 31 march 1826. 1 page, 12mo; with address portion of cover preserved; mounted”. quotes three paragraphs. “$575.00” “12/26/50 | g. wells estatethe letter was offered by charles boesen, rare books, manuscripts, first editions, autograph letters from the estate of the late gabriel wells catalogue 1 (new york, 1948), lot 28, $350. blake books says nothing of rosenbach’s ownership of the letter. | oears [$247.50?]” <rosenbach card>. acquired by 1971 by mrs. landon k. thorne <now morgan library and museum>. * ** letter of february 1827 sold at american art association-anderson galleries, 25 may 1938, lot 74, for $140, possibly to rosenbach, for rosenwald[editors’ note: see note 28.] <now library of congress>. benjamin heath malkin, a father’s memoirs of his child (1806) acquired by w. a. white, for whose estate it was valued at $20 in 1927 by rosenbach <perhaps the copy now in the library of congress or the one now in the rosenbach of the free library of philadelphia>. “the man sweeping the interpreter’s parlour” <essick 2d> see poetical sketches (d). “the man sweeping the interpreter’s parlour” <essick 2i> acquired by w. e. moss; sold from his collection at sotheby’s, 2 march 1937, lot 202, for £75 to rosenbach for rosenwald <now library of congress>. “the man sweeping the interpreter’s parlour” <essick 2j> see the ghost of abel (a). “the man sweeping the interpreter’s parlour” <essick 2k> see “the accusers” <essick 3g>. the marriage of heaven and hell (d) sold from the collection of george c. smith, jr., at parke-bernet, 2 november 1938, lot 35, for $8800 to rosenbach for rosenwald <now library of congress>. the marriage of heaven and hell (e) acquired in april 1896 by w. a. white; valued for white’s estate (designated “family”) at $5000 by rosenbach in 1927; acquired by white’s daughter frances white emerson <now fitzwilliam museum>. the marriage of heaven and hell (f) sold from the collection of a. e. newton at parke-bernet, 16 april 1941, lot 135, for $6300 to rosenbach; owned by 1969 by mrs. landon k. thorne <now morgan library and museum>. “the morning amusements of her royal highness …” <essick 2c> see “the battle of ai” <essick 1a>. “mrs q” <essick 2j> sold from the collection of c. f. bishop at anderson galleries, 19-20 november 1935; sold 7 december 1938 by rosenbach to rosenwald for $365 <now national gallery of art, washington, dc>. notebook (called “blake’s scrap book”) acquired by w. a. white in 1887; it passed from his estate, probably in 1929 through rosenbach, to white’s daughter frances white emerson,“ros[s]etti (blake’s) manuscript notebook” was “bought from estate by f. w. e.”, according to an anonymous undated note in the grolier club, of unknown authority. * ** who gave it in 1957 to the british museum department of manuscripts <now british library>. on homer (a) see the ghost of abel (a). “order” of the songs of innocence and of experience bought by rosenbach for rosenwald for $550 (with nine plates from songs) at the sale by parke-bernet of george c. smith, jr., 2 november 1938, lot 18 <now library of congress>. pickering manuscript (called “poems original manuscript”) acquired by w. a. white, for whose estate it was valued at $1500 in 1927 by rosenbach, who loaned it to the philadelphia exhibition (1939), no. 105; acquired by 1971 by mrs. landon k. thorne <now morgan library and museum>. poetical sketches (d) sold from the collection of beverly chew at anderson galleries, 8 december 1924, lot 28 (with “the man sweeping the interpreter’s parlour” <essick 2d> and george cumberland’s card <essick 1h> laid in), for $900 to rosenbach; acquired by john j. emery, who loaned it to the blake exhibition of the philadelphia museum of art (1939), no. 1 <now cincinnati art museum>. poetical sketches (r) acquired by w. a. white, from whose estate it was probably sold in 1929 to rosenbach, who bequeathed it to the rosenbach foundation <now the rosenbach of the free library of philadelphia>. “rev. john caspar lavater” <essick 3q>, “edmund pitts” <essick 2e>, “rev.d robert hawker” <essick 1b, 1c>, and “wilson lowry” <essick 4k>“wilson lowry” could be copy 4l in the national gallery of art, washington, dc. sold from the collection of w. e. moss at sotheby’s, 2 march 1937, lot 218 (a large collection of blake prints), for £11 to rosenbach for rosenwald <“edmund pitts,” “rev.d robert hawker” <essick 1b>, and “wilson lowry” <essick 4k> now library of congress; “rev. john caspar lavater” and “rev.d robert hawker” <essick 1c> now national gallery of art, washington, dc>. “rev. john caspar lavater” <essick untraced impression 3> acquired by 1905 by w. a. white, for whose estate it was valued at $10 in 1927 by rosenbach <untraced, though perhaps the same as essick 3m, now library of congress>. “rev.d robert hawker” <essick 1b, 1c> see “rev. john caspar lavater” <essick 3q>. joseph ritson, ed., a select collection of english songs (1783) acquired by the rosenbach foundation <now the rosenbach of the free library of philadelphia>. c. g. salzmann, elements of morality (1791) acquired by w. a. white, for whose estate it was valued at $50 in 1927 by rosenbach <perhaps the copy now in the library of congress>. john scott, poetical works (1782) acquired by w. a. white, for whose estate it was valued at $15 in 1927 by rosenbach <perhaps one of the two copies now in the library of congress>. john scott, poetical works (1782), “proofs before letters printed on india paper” sold by w. e. moss at sotheby’s, 2 march 1937, lot 218 (a large collection of blake prints), for £11 to rosenbach <untraced>. william bell scott, william blake: etchings from his works (1878) acquired by w. a. white, for whose estate it was valued at $5 in 1927 by rosenbach <untraced>. the song of los (b) acquired by w. a. white, from whose estate it was sold on 1 may 1929 through rosenbach to rosenwald <now library of congress>. the song of los (c) see visions of the daughters of albion (h). songs of innocence (b) acquired by w. e. moss, from whose collection it was sold at sotheby’s, 2 march 1937, lot 143, for £750 to rosenbach for rosenwald <now library of congress>. songs of innocence (p) bought through rosenbach in 1940 by chauncey brewster tinker <now beinecke library, yale university>. songs of innocence and of experience (c) acquired by w. e. moss, from whose collection it was sold at sotheby’s, 2 march 1937, lot 144, for £1400 to rosenbach for rosenwald <now library of congress>. songs of innocence and of experience (d) acquired by a. e. newton, from whose collection it was sold at parke-bernet, 16 april 1941, lot 136, for $6100 to rosenbach; acquired by a. a. houghton <now in an anonymous collection>. songs of innocence and of experience (i) acquired by rosenbach by 1911; offered in his catalogue (december 1911), lot 74, no price; sold by 1918 to the library of harry elkins widener <now widener library, harvard university>. songs of innocence and of experience (s) sold from the collection of beverly chew at anderson galleries, 8 december 1924, lot 29, for $5500 to rosenbach; acquired by john j. emery, who loaned it to the blake exhibition of the philadelphia museum of art (1939), no. 42 <now cincinnati art museum>. songs of innocence and of experience (u) acquired in 1895 by w. a. white; valued for white’s estate (designated “family”) at $12,000 by rosenbach in 1927; acquired by white’s daughter mrs. hugh d. marshall <now princeton university library>. songs of innocence and of experience (v) sold from the collection of algernon methuen at sotheby’s, 19 february 1936, lot 499, for £1050 to rosenbach; acquired by mrs. landon k. thorne, who loaned it to the blake exhibition of the philadelphia museum of art (1939), no. 46 <now morgan library and museum>. songs of innocence and of experience (z) sold from the collection of willis vickery at american art association-anderson galleries, 1 march 1933, lot 16, for $6000 to rosenbach; acquired by frank bemis; sold posthumously on 4 november 1938 through rosenbach to rosenwald <now library of congress>. songs of innocence and of experience (g1) sold at the h. buxton forman sale, anderson galleries, 15 march 1920, lot 51, for $60 to rosenbach; acquired by a. e. newton by 1941 <now princeton university library>. songs of innocence and of experience (g2) sold at the h. buxton forman sale, anderson galleries, 15 march 1920, lot 52, for $65 to rosenbach; possibly the copy offered in rosenbach’s catalogue of an exhibition of rare books, autograph manuscripts, and literary documents (28 november–23 december 1921), no lot number or price; acquired by r. b. adam, who sold it at anderson galleries, 15 february 1926, lot 36, for $50 to rosenbach, who gave it in the autumn of 1938 to rosenwald <now library of congress>. songs of innocence and of experience (h) acquired by h. buxton forman; sold from his collection at anderson galleries, 15 march 1920, lot 53, for $90 to rosenbach; possibly the copy offered in rosenbach’s catalogue of an exhibition of rare books, autograph manuscripts, and literary documents (28 november–23 december 1921), no lot number or price; acquired from mr. reid (a dealer of chesterton, south carolina) by charlton m. theus, jr. <now essick collection>. ** songs of innocence and of experience pl. 42 [“the tyger”] and pl. 51 [“a little girl lost”] acquired by george c. smith, jr., from whose collection they were sold at parke-bernet, 2 november 1938, lot 19, for $160 to rosenbach <untraced>. songs of innocence [and of experience] (1839) acquired by w. a. white, for whose estate it was valued at $5 in 1927 by rosenbach <untraced>. ** there is no natural religion (b) acquired by w. a. white and obtained by his daughter “f. w. emerson | mch. 11. 1929. from w. a. w’s heirs | $1600” and “offered by rosenbach | at that date | £200” (according to notes on the fly-leaf) <now yale center for british art>. there is no natural religion (c) acquired by w. a. white, from whose estate it was sold on 1 may 1929 through rosenbach to rosenwald <now library of congress>. there is no natural religion (f)[editors’ note: copies f and i consist mainly of nineteenth-century facsimiles, although this was not known at the time that rosenbach handled them; see joseph viscomi, blake and the idea of the book (princeton: princeton university press, 1993) 198-216.] acquired by a. e. newton, from whose collection it was sold at parke-bernet, 16 april 1941, lot 153, for $1500 to rosenbach for rosenwald <now library of congress>. there is no natural religion (i) acquired by h. buxton forman, from whose collection it was sold at anderson galleries, 15 march 1920, lot 48, for $625 to rosenbach; offered in rosenbach catalogue 20 (october 1920), lot 9, for $1800, and in his catalogue of an exhibition of rare books, autograph manuscripts, and literary documents (28 november–23 december 1921), no lot number or price; acquired by george c. smith, jr., by 1930; sold at parke-bernet, 2 november 1938, lot 13, for $1000 to rosenbach; acquired by mrs. landon k. thorne, who loaned it to the blake exhibition of the philadelphia museum of art (1939), no. 8 <now morgan library and museum>. ** “tornado,” fuseli-blake (1795) for darwin, botanic garden acquired by w. a. white, for whose estate it was valued at $10 in 1927 by rosenbach <untraced>. ** visions of the daughters of albion (f) and pls. 1-3 <butlin #263 for pl. 1> acquired by paul hyde bonner, who sold them at american art association-anderson galleries, 15 february 1934, lot 11, for $5200 to rosenbach; sold by 1971 to mrs. landon k. thorne <now morgan library and museum>. visions of the daughters of albion (h), europe (g), the song of los (c), and three watercolors acquired 2 march 1908 by w. a. white, who gave them in 1917 to his daughter frances white emerson, for whom they were sold posthumously (without the drawings) at sotheby’s, 19 may 1958, lot 4, for £23,000 to rosenbach’s successor, john fleming, who sold europe (g) and the song of los (c) to mrs. landon k. thorne <now morgan library and museum>; visions (h) went to the rosenbach foundation <now the rosenbach of the free library of philadelphia>. visions of the daughters of albion (i) acquired in july 1904 by w. a. white; valued for white’s estate (designated “family”) at $3500 by rosenbach in 1927; acquired by white’s niece mrs. adrian van sinderen <now yale center for british art>. visions of the daughters of albion (j) purchased for $3700 by rosenbach for rosenwald at the sale by parke-bernet of the collection of george c. smith, jr., 2 november 1938, lot 20 <now library of congress>. visions of the daughters of albion (l) purchased by rosenbach[editors’ note: blake books p. 476 gives gannon as the buyer, though sale catalogues of william blake’s works (updated may 2017) <http://​library.​vicu.​utoronto.​ca/​collections/​special_collections/​bentley_blake_collection/​pdf/​may_2017/​may_2017_sale_catalogue_blake.​pdf> gives rosenbach.] for $2500 at the sale by parke-bernet of the collection of george c. smith, jr., 2 november 1938, lot 21 <now princeton university library>. visions of the daughters of albion pls. 1-3 see visions of the daughters of albion (f). “wilson lowry” <essick 4k> see “rev. john caspar lavater” <essick 3q>. “wilson lowry” <essick untraced impression 4> acquired by w. a. white, for whose estate it was valued at $10 in 1927 by rosenbach; acquired by caroline newton by 1968 <probably one of the two copies now in princeton university library>. wit’s magazine (1784) acquired by w. a. white, for whose estate it was valued at $30 in 1927 by rosenbach <perhaps one of the three copies now in the library of congress>. mary wollstonecraft, original stories from real life (1791) acquired by the rosenbach foundation <now the rosenbach of the free library of philadelphia>. edward young, night thoughts (1797) acquired by w. a. white, for whose estate it was valued in 1927 by rosenbach, who bequeathed it to the rosenbach foundation <now the rosenbach of the free library of philadelphia>. edward young, night thoughts (1797) acquired by w. a. white, for whose estate it was valued in 1927 by rosenbach <untraced>. ** edward young, night thoughts (1797), colored copy (b) acquired by w. e. moss, from whose collection it was sold at sotheby’s, 2 march 1937, lot 261, for £800 to rosenbach for rosenwald <now library of congress>. edward young, night thoughts (1797), colored copy (j) acquired by w. a. white, from whose estate it was sold on 1 may 1929 through rosenbach to rosenwald <now library of congress>. edward young, night thoughts (1797), colored copy (k) acquired by george c. smith, jr., by 1927; sold at parke-bernet, 2 november 1938, lot 45, for $675 to rosenbach for mrs. landon k. thornemrs. thorne’s catalogue card for colored copy (k) has a manuscript note: “parke-bernet | smith sale— | 1938 | dr. r— | $675”. <now morgan library and museum>. edward young, night thoughts (1797), colored copy (m) acquired by w. a. white; given in 1913 to his daughter frances white emerson, for whom it was sold posthumously at sotheby’s, 19 may 1958, lot 6, for £850 to rosenbach’s successor, john fleming <now bibliotheca bodmeriana, cologny-geneva, switzerland>. edward young, night thoughts (1797), colored copy (n?) offered in rosenbach catalogue (december 1911), lot 75 (no price). paintings and drawings affection and love <butlin #797> acquired by w. a. white by 1905, from whose estate it was probably acquired in 1929 by rosenbach; acquired by chauncey b. tinker <now beinecke library, yale university>. albion and the letter that killeth <butlin #568> acquired by w. a. white by 1905; probably sold from his estate in 1929 through rosenbach to rosenwald <now library of congress>. america and other books, sketches <butlin #226> acquired by w. a. white by 1905, from whose estate it was probably acquired by rosenbach, who loaned it to the philadelphia exhibition (1939), no. 194 <now essick collection>. anatomical sketches <butlin #594> acquired by w. a. white by 1905, from whose estate it was probably sold in 1929 to rosenbach, who bequeathed it to the rosenbach foundation <now the rosenbach of the free library of philadelphia>. an armed man spurning a woman <butlin #239>, the descent of peace <butlin #539>, two legs <butlin #606>, a figure ascending in a glory of clouds <butlin #619>, an ascending spiral of figures <butlin #771> acquired by george c. smith, jr., from whose collection they were sold at parke-bernet, 2 november 1938, lot 108, for $120 to rosenbach for rosenwald, who loaned the descent of peace to the blake exhibition of the philadelphia museum of art (1939), no. 202 <now national gallery of art, washington, dc>. an ascending spiral of figures <butlin #771> see an armed man spurning a woman. an ass with a long sword and other sketches <butlin #213> acquired by w. a. white by 1905, from whose estate it was probably sold in 1929 to rosenbach; sold to caroline newton <now princeton university library>. canute <butlin #721, visionary head> acquired by george c. smith, jr., from whose collection it was sold at parke-bernet, 2 november 1938, lot 104, for $300 to rosenbach for rosenwald, who loaned it to the blake exhibition of the philadelphia museum of art (1939), no. 207 <now national gallery of art, washington, dc>. the children of israel receiving the ten commandments from moses <butlin #114> acquired by w. a. white, from whose estate it was probably sold in 1929 to rosenbach, who sold it to george c. smith, jr., by 1938 <now israel museum, jerusalem>. christ appearing to the apostles after the resurrection, color print <butlin #326> acquired by 1919 by w. a. white, for whose estate it was valued at $2500 in 1927 by rosenbach; sold through rosenbach as an “original drawing in colors” in 1929 to rosenwald <now national gallery of art, washington, dc>. ** see illus. 5. 5. christ appearing to the apostles after the resurrection, color print, c. 1795. <butlin #326> 43.2 x 57.5 cm. rosenwald collection, 1943.3.8995. national gallery of art, washington, dc. christ raising the son of the widow of nain <butlin #483> acquired by f. p. osmaston; sold at sotheby’s, 26-28 july 1926, lot 763, to gabriel wells; ?rosenbach; acquired by a. e. newton, who loaned it to the blake exhibition of the philadelphia museum of art (1939), no. 167 <now carnegie museum of art, pittsburgh>. dante, sketch for the engraving of “the six-footed serpent attacking agnolo brunelleschi” <butlin #822> offered in rosenbach catalogue 18 (1916), lot 17 (with milton, comus, etc.), and his catalogue 24 (1916); sold in 1916 to henry e. huntington, who bequeathed it in 1927 to the huntington library. the day of judgment <butlin #645, the last judgment> acquired by w. a. white, for whose estate it was valued at $750 in 1927 by rosenbach; it was probably sold from the estate in 1929 to rosenwald <now national gallery of art, washington, dc>. the descent of peace <butlin #539> see an armed man spurning a woman. diana and actaeon? <butlin #781> acquired by w. a. white by 1905, from whose estate it was probably sold in 1929 to rosenbach, who loaned it to the blake exhibition of the philadelphia museum of art (1939), no. 201 <now princeton university library>. donald the hammerer: copy after blake <butlin #783> acquired by george c. smith, jr., from whose collection it was sold at parke-bernet, 2 november 1938, lot 100, for $150 [anon., i.e., rosenbach]; sold by 1974 to mrs. landon k. thorne <now morgan library and museum>. the eagle <butlin #363> acquired by w. graham robertson, for whom it was sold posthumously at christie’s, 22 july 1949, lot 56, for £78.15.0 to rosenbach, who sold it to mrs. landon k. thornemrs. thorne’s catalogue card for the eagle bears a manuscript note saying it was in the graham robertson sale, 22 july 1949, bought by rosenbach for [$]318. * <now morgan library and museum>. edward i (or iii) <butlin #735, visionary head> acquired by george c. smith, jr., from whose collection it was sold at parke-bernet, 2 november 1938, lot 107, for $175 to rosenbach for rosenwald <now national gallery of art, washington, dc>. a female figure crouching in a cave <butlin #134> sold by miss thena clough at sotheby’s, 5-6 march 1934, lot 338, for £18 to dulau; sold to rosenbach; acquired by edwin wolf 2nd <now anthony wolf>. a figure ascending in a glory of clouds <butlin #619> see an armed man spurning a woman. fire <butlin #194> acquired by w. graham robertson, for whom it was sold posthumously at christie’s, 22 july 1949, lot 8, for £1050 to rosenbach; sold to mrs. landon k. thornemrs. thorne’s catalogue card for fire has a manuscript note: “christie—july 22 1948 [i.e., 1949] robertson sale—4,242”. * <now morgan library and museum>. full-face head of a young woman <butlin #686> acquired by rosenbach; sold by his successor, john fleming, to lawrence lande by 1953 <now mcgill university library>. the ghost of samuel appearing to saul <butlin #458> acquired by a. e. newton, from whose collection it was sold at parke-bernet, 16 april 1941, lot 116, for $4000 to rosenbach for rosenwald <now national gallery of art, washington, dc>. the good farmer <butlin #122> acquired by w. a. white by 1905, from whose estate it was probably acquired in 1929 by rosenbach; acquired by george c. smith, jr. (sold 1938) <now essick collection>. the great red dragon and the beast from the sea <butlin #521> acquired by marsden j. perry, who loaned it to the blake exhibition of the grolier club (1905), no. 90c; sold in 1908 to w. a. white, from whose estate it was sold in 1929 through rosenbach to rosenwald <now national gallery of art, washington, dc>. see illus. 6. 6. the great red dragon and the beast from the sea, pen and watercolor, c. 1803–05. <butlin #521> 40.1 x 35.6 cm. rosenwald collection, 1943.3.8997. national gallery of art, washington, dc. the great red dragon and the woman clothed with the sun <butlin #520> acquired by a. e. newton, from whose collection it was sold at parke-bernet, 16 april 1941, lot 118, for $10,100 to rosenbach for rosenwald <now national gallery of art, washington, dc>. group of men seated in a circle <butlin #148> “sold at an unidentified sale 22 december 1938” (butlin) to rosenbach; sold to rosenwald <now national gallery of art, washington, dc>. job and his daughters <butlin #394, tempera> acquired by george c. smith, jr., from whose collection it was sold at parke-bernet, 2 november 1938, lot 109, for $1200 to rosenbach for rosenwald <now national gallery of art, washington, dc>. job and his daughters <butlin #555> acquired by h. h. gilchrist, for whom it was sold at sotheby’s, 24 june 1903, lot 26, for £3 to quaritch for w. a. white, from whose estate it was probably sold in 1929 through rosenbach to rosenwald <now national gallery of art, washington, dc>. a man seen from behind, rising on clouds <butlin #230> probably acquired by w. a. white by 1905 and probably sold from his estate in 1929 through rosenbach to rosenwald, who loaned it to the blake exhibition of the philadelphia museum of art (1939), no. 197 <now national gallery of art, washington, dc>. “marriage of heaven and hell,” “original drawing,” “damaged” <not in butlin> acquired by w. a. white, for whose estate it was valued at $250 in 1927 by rosenbach; it may have been sold from the estate in 1929 to rosenbach <untraced>. ** “mercury and argus,” “in the manner of blake” <not in butlin> acquired by w. a. white, for whose estate it was valued at $50 in 1927 by rosenbach; it may have been sold from the estate in 1929 to rosenbach <untraced>. * milton, comus, the thomas set <butlin #527 1-8> acquired by f. t. sabin (1913); offered in rosenbach catalogue 18 (1916), lot 17 (with other drawings), and in his catalogue 24 (1916); sold in 1916 to henry e. huntington, who bequeathed it in 1927 to the huntington library. milton, on the morning of christ’s nativity, the butts set <butlin #542 1-6> offered in rosenbach’s catalogue (december 1912), lot 11 (no price), and his catalogue 17 (november 1913), lot 61, $9500; sold in 1916 to henry e. huntington, who bequeathed it in 1927 to the huntington library. milton, paradise lost, ten of the watercolors for the thomas set: satan calling up his legions; satan, sin, and death: satan comes to the gates of hell; christ offers to redeem man; satan spying on adam and eve and raphael’s descent into paradise; the rout of the rebel angels; the creation of eve; the temptation and fall of eve; the judgment of adam and eve: “so judged he man”; michael foretells the crucifixion; and the expulsion <butlin #529 1-4, 7-12> acquired 1906 by f. t. sabin; sold by rosenbach in 1911 to henry e. huntington, who bequeathed it in 1927 to the huntington library. milton, paradise lost, one of the watercolors for the butts set: satan, sin, and death: satan comes to the gates of hell <butlin #536 2> acquired by f. t. sabin in 1907; rosenbach, 1911; sold in 1916 to henry e. huntington, who bequeathed it in 1927 to the huntington library. milton, paradise lost, one of the watercolors for the butts set: the judgment of adam and eve: “so judged he man” <butlin #536 10> acquired by w. a. white, for whose estate it was valued at $1500 in 1927 by rosenbach; acquired by harold t. white, probably by inheritance <now houghton library, harvard university>. moses and aaron(?) flanked by angels <butlin #112> acquired by w. a. white by 1905, from whose estate it was probably sold in 1929 to rosenbach; sold by rosenbach’s successor, john fleming, in 1957 to caroline newton <now princeton university library>. moses staying the plague(?) <butlin #115> acquired by w. a. white by 1905; “sold at an unidentified sale 22 december 1938” (butlin) to rosenbach; sold to rosenwald <now national gallery of art, washington, dc>. nebuchadnezzar, “visionary head” <butlin #704?> acquired by w. a. white, for whose estate it was valued at $200 in 1927 by rosenbach; it was probably sold from the estate in 1929 to rosenbach <untraced>. * ** nude male figures <butlin #593> acquired by w. a. white by 1905, from whose estate it was probably sold in 1929 to rosenbach, who bequeathed it to the rosenbach foundation <now the rosenbach of the free library of philadelphia>. the number of the beast is 666 <butlin #522> acquired by 1905 by marsden j. perry, who sold it in 1908 to w. a. white; his son harold t. white sold it in 1950 to rosenbach, who bequeathed it to the rosenbach foundation <now the rosenbach of the free library of philadelphia>. an old man seated leaning on a pile of books; a young man approaches <butlin #235> acquired by w. a. white by 1905, from whose estate it was probably sold in 1929 to rosenbach, who bequeathed it to the rosenbach foundation <now the rosenbach of the free library of philadelphia>. an old man standing, another kneeling <butlin #75a, “probably not by blake”> acquired by w. a. white, from whose estate it was probably sold in 1929 to rosenbach, whose firm sold it in 1953 to an anonymous collector. “one male three female figures,” “in pencil” acquired by w. a. white, for whose estate it was valued at $100 in 1927 by rosenbach; it may have been sold from the estate in 1929 to rosenbach.the design of “one male three female figures” does not correspond to any recorded in butlin that passed from white to rosenbach. rees, cyclopaedia, sketches <butlin #678a> acquired by w. e. moss, for whom it was sold at sotheby’s, 2 march 1937, lot 199 (with blake’s seven engravings for rees), for £100 to rosenbach for rosenwald <now library of congress>. a resurrection scene <butlin #600> acquired by w. a. white by 1905, from whose estate it was probably sold in 1929 through rosenbach to rosenwald <now national gallery of art, washington, dc>. samson breaking his bonds <butlin #453> sold by j. l. field at sotheby’s, 30 july 1946, lot 464, for £1100 to rosenbach, who sold it to mrs. landon k. thornemrs. thorne’s catalogue card for samson breaking his bonds has a manuscript note: sotheby 29-30 july 1946, lot 464 (property of j. l. field) to rosenbach for £4,500. * [editors’ note: £4500 may be a mistake for $4500; see, for comparison, the notes to the eagle and fire.] <now morgan library and museum>. saul and david <butlin #118> “sold at an unidentified sale 22 december 1938” (butlin) to rosenbach, who sold it to rosenwald <now national gallery of art, washington, dc>. a shepherd with his dog on the edge of a precipice <butlin #333> acquired by 1905 by w. a. white, from whose estate it was probably sold in 1929 to rosenbach; given by the print club of cleveland in 1932 to the cleveland museum [of art]. solomon <butlin #701, visionary head> acquired by george c. smith, jr., from whose collection it was sold at parke-bernet, 2 november 1938, lot 105, for $250 to rosenbach; acquired by morris wolf <owned by edwin wolf 2nd in 1980, now presumably with one or more descendants>. st. augustine converting king ethelbert of kent <butlin #58> acquired (by 1905?) by w. a. white, from whose estate it was probably sold in 1929 through rosenbach to rosenwald <now national gallery of art, washington, dc>. three compositions <butlin #212> acquired by 1905 by w. a. white, from whose estate it was probably sold in 1929 to rosenbach, whose firm sold it to caroline newton by 1975 <now princeton university library>. time’s triple bow <butlin #567> acquired by 1905 by w. a. white, from whose estate it was probably sold in 1929 through rosenbach to rosenwald <now national gallery of art, washington, dc>. two legs <butlin #606> see an armed man spurning a woman. two swans <butlin #332a> acquired by 1905 by w. a. white, from whose estate it was probably sold in 1929 to rosenbach, who bequeathed it to the rosenbach foundation <now the rosenbach of the free library of philadelphia>. a warring angel <butlin #78> probably acquired by 1905 by w. a. white, from whose estate it was probably sold in 1929 to rosenbach, who sold it to rosenwald, who loaned it to the blake exhibition of the philadelphia museum of art (1939), no. 193; acquired by rosenwald <now national gallery of art, washington, dc>. wat tyler <butlin #737, visionary head> acquired by george c. smith, jr., from whose collection it was sold at parke-bernet, 2 november 1938, lot 101, for $100 to rosenbach, from whom it passed to morris wolf, who loaned it to the blake exhibition of the philadelphia museum of art (1939), no. 213 <on sale by bauman rare books (new york)>. wat tyler’s daughter <butlin #741, visionary head> acquired by w. a. white, for whose estate it was valued at $200 in 1927 by rosenbach; sold by rosenbach by 1939 to rosenwald <now national gallery of art, washington, dc>. william cowper after romney <butlin #351> acquired by george c. smith, jr., from whose collection it was sold at parke-bernet, 2 november 1938, lot 102 (with three engravings of cowper), for $350 to rosenbach for rosenwald <now library of congress>. wollstonecraft, mary, original stories from real life (1791), ten designs <butlin #244 1-10> acquired by a. e. newton, from whose collection they were sold at parke-bernet, 16 april 1941, lot 120, for $1500 to rosenbach for rosenwald <now library of congress>. a woman bewailing over a figure stretched along the ground <butlin #203> acquired by 1905? by w. a. white, from whose estate it was probably sold in 1929 through rosenbach to rosenwald <now library of congress>. a woman with snaky locks <butlin #202, inscribed on the verso “father & mother i return …”> acquired by 1905 by w. a. white, for whose estate it was valued at $100 in 1927 by rosenbach; it was probably sold in 1929 through rosenbach to rosenwald <now library of congress>. rosenbach’s blake dealings arranged by date links in this section to catalogue titles and lot numbers are to scans of the catalogues online. links to blake’s works are to the detailed listings in the section above. 1910? the book of thel (l) 1911 december rosenbach catalogue 74 songs of innocence and of experience (i), no price 75 young, night thoughts (1797), colored copy (n?), no price 1911 milton, paradise lost, ten of the watercolors for the thomas set <butlin #529 1-4, 7-12> milton, paradise lost, one of the watercolors for the butts set<butlin #536 2> 1912 december rosenbach catalogue 11 milton, on the morning of christ’s nativity, the butts set <butlin #542 1-6>, no price 1913 november rosenbach catalogue 17 61 milton, on the morning of christ’s nativity, the butts set <butlin #542 1-6>, $9500 1916 rosenbach catalogue 18 17 milton, comus, the thomas set <butlin #527 1-8>, plus “the original designs for ‘america,’ dante’s ‘inferno,’ blair’s ‘grave,’ etc., etc.”, $29,000 1916 rosenbach catalogue 24 as in rosenbach catalogue 18 (1916). 1918 december 2 anderson galleries, catalogue of the library of herschel v. jones [a-h] 182 the book of thel (e), $79 to rosenbach 183 america (q), $3600 to rosenbach 185 for children: the gates of paradise (c), with four drawings <butlin #201a 1-4>, $610 to rosenbach 1920 march 15 anderson galleries, the library of the late h. buxton forman [part i] 39 john brown, elements of medicine (1795), $80 to rosenbach 48 there is no natural religion (i), $625 to rosenbach 51 songs of innocence and of experience (g1), $60 to rosenbach 52 songs of innocence and of experience (g2), $65 to rosenbach 53 songs of innocence and of experience (h), $90 to rosenbach 66 the first book of urizen pl. 22, $1060 to rosenbach 68 “genesis: the seven days of the created world,” $1350 to rosenbach 1920 october rosenbach catalogue 20 8 “genesis: the seven days of the created world,” $2500 9 there is no natural religion (i), $1800 1921 november 28–december 23 rosenbach, catalogue of an exhibition of rare books, autograph manuscripts, and literary documents   songs of innocence and of experience (g2) or (h)   there is no natural religion (i)   “genesis: the seven days of the created world”   robert blair, the grave, copperplates for blake’s designs 1922 november 13 bible, job (1826) 1923 may 2 american art association, illustrated catalogue of american and english “men of letters” … mainly from the library of the late charles eliot norton 14 bible, job (1826), $150 to rosenbach 1923 november 12 anderson galleries, the library of john quinn, part one [a-c] 716 robert blair, the grave (1813), $950[?][editors’ note: see note 15.] to rosenbach 717 bible, job (1826), $145 to rosenbach 1924 november 10 anderson galleries, catalogue of the william harris arnold collection of manuscripts, books, and autograph letters 53 letter of 19 october 1801, $150 to rosenbach 1924 december 8 anderson galleries, the library of the late beverly chew [part one] 28 poetical sketches (d) (with “the man sweeping the interpreter’s parlour” <essick 2d> and george cumberland’s card <essick 1h> laid in), $900 to rosenbach 29 songs of innocence and of experience (s), $5500 to rosenbach 1925 november 11 bible, job (1826) robert blair, the grave (1808) 1926 february 15 anderson galleries, english literature from the library of mr r. b. adam 36 songs of innocence and of experience (g2), $50 to rosenbach 1926 february 29 william hayley, designs to a series of ballads (1802) 1926 april 2 william enfield, the speaker (1795) 1926 april 3 mylius, “the junior class-book … 6 plates engraved by blake. 12mo., contemporary marbled calf. london … [sic] for godwin ..[.] 1809. bookplate: forman [not in keynes] kns [$9.00]”, “$25.00”, “see also lamb (c) phila 3/4/26”plainly this comes from the anderson galleries sale of h. buxton forman, 26 april 1920, lot 53: william frederic mylius, the junior class-book; or, reading lessons for every day in the year (london, 1809), “illustrated with six plates by blake.” it is very unlikely that the prints are by blake. see “william blake and his circle: a checklist of publications and discoveries in 2014,” blake 49.1 (summer 2015). <rosenbach card> <untraced>. * 1926 april 5 john brown, elements of medicine (1795) 1927 february 14 american art association, the notable library of major w. van r. whitall 111 the book of thel (h), $5000 to rosenbach 1927 “william blake” (collection of w. a. white valued by rosenbach)some blakes that white gave away to his family are not included in rosenbach’s 1927 list, such as the letter of april? 1826, given to his brother alfred t. white; songs of innocence (g), given on 10 aug. 1895 to his daughter frances; and songs of innocence (q), given to alfred. printed books, prints, and manuscripts charles allen, roman history (1798) * $15 america (d) or (e), “uncolored. morocco” ** $1500 america (m), “colored. morocco,” “family” $7500 bible, job (1825), “proofs unbound” ** $250 bible, job (“1825”), “half russia” ** $150 bible, job (“1825”), “calf” ** $150 laurence binyon, little engravings (1902), “boards” ** $3.50 robert blair, the grave (1808), “large paper. half morocco” ** $50 robert blair, the grave (1808), “boards” ** $20 robert blair, the grave, “new york, undated” ** $2.50 the book of ahania (a) pls. 2-6 ** $2000 the book of thel (c), “morocco,” “family” ** $4500 gottfried augustus bürger, leonora (1796) ** $50 “chaucers canterbury pilgrims” <essick untraced impression 23> ** $100 geoffrey chaucer, prologue (1812) ** $100 george “cumberland message card” <essick untraced impression 2> ** $20 dante (“1839”), “half morocco” ** $30 erasmus darwin, botanic garden (1795), print of “tornado” ** $10 descriptive catalogue (l) ** $75 europe (c), “plates loose in portfolio,” “family” ** $9000 “the everlasting gospel” ** $1000 the first book of urizen (g), “morocco” ** $5000 john flaxman, naval pillar (1799) ** $20 for children: the gates of paradise (d), “morocco” ** $1000 for the sexes: the gates of paradise (d), “large paper proofs. half calf” ** $1500 for the sexes: the gates of paradise (e), “morocco” ** $1000 henry fuseli, lectures on painting (1801) ** $15 the ghost of abel (a) ** $500 thomas gray, designs for gray’s poems, ed. grierson (1922) ** $10 william hayley, ballads (1805) ** $30 william hayley, designs to a series of ballads (1802), “four parts” ** $500 william hayley, life of cowper, 3 vols. (“1803”) ** $10 jerusalem (i), “morocco” ** $5000 “joseph of arimathea among the rocks of albion” <essick 2h> ** $25 john caspar lavater, aphorisms (1794) ** $10 “lear and cordelia” <essick 1a, 2b, 3d, 4f, 4g> ** $50 letter of 9 june 1818 ** $300 benjamin heath malkin, a father’s memoirs (1806) ** $20 the marriage of heaven and hell (e), “half roan,” “family” ** $5000 notebook, “blake’s scrap book. containing many pages in blake’s autograph and a number of original sketches. old half calf” ** $6500 pickering manuscript ** $1500 poetical sketches (r), “sheets, unbound and unstitched” ** $750 “rev. john caspar lavater” <essick untraced impression 3> ** $10 c. g. salzmann, elements of morality, 3 vols. (1791) ** $50 john scott, poetical works (1782) ** $15 william bell scott, william blake: etchings from his works (1878) ** $5 the song of los (b) ** $3000 songs of innocence and of experience (u), “morocco,” “family” ** $12,000 songs of innocence [and of experience] (1839) ** $5 there is no natural religion (b), “russia” ** $1000 there is no natural religion (c), “morocco” ** $1250 visions of the daughters of albion (h), “loose plates,” “family” ** $3000 vision of the daughters of albion (i), “half morocco,” “family” ** $3500 “wilson lowry” <essick untraced impression 4> ** $10 wit’s magazine (1784) ** $30 edward young, the complaint (1797), “half calf” ** $300 edward young, the complaint (1797), colored copy (j), “plates colored by mrs. blake,” “half morocco” ** $600 edward young, the complaint (1797), “large paper,” “half morocco” ** $100 paintings and drawings robert blair, the grave, “original drawing” ** $400 robert blair, the grave, “original drawing” ** $300 christ appearing to the apostles after the resurrection <butlin #326> ** $2500 the day of judgment <butlin #645, the last judgment>, “original drawing” ** $750 the judgment of adam and eve: “so judged he man” <butlin #536 10> ** $1500 “marriage of heaven and hell,” “original drawing,” “damaged” <not in butlin> ** $250 “mercury and argus,” “in the manner of blake” <not in butlin> ** $50 nebuchadnezzar, “visionary head” <butlin #704?> ** $200 “one male three female figures,” “in pencil” ** $100 “original drawing from ‘america’” <in margin is “in book”> ** $1500 “original drawing,” “uncolored” ** $750 “three draped figures,” “original drawing” ** $750 wat tyler’s daughter <butlin #741, visionary head> ** $200 a woman with snaky locks <butlin #202, inscribed on the verso “father & mother i return …”> ** $100 1929 may 1 “the w. a. white collection of the works of william blake” (purchased by rosenwald through rosenbach)works from white’s estate other than those explicitly listed here were acquired by rosenwald probably around this time; others were acquired by rosenbach. see the entries under rosenbach’s blake dealings arranged in alphabetical order. america (e), “with original drawing. brown morocco, uncut” $11,500 the book of ahania (a) pls. 2-6, “unbound, in half green morocco case” $21,500 the book of thel (h?), “blue morocco” $9000 gottfried augustus bürger, leonora, trans. stanley (1796), “green morocco” $100 geoffrey chaucer, prologue (1812), “original half calf” $1250 descriptive catalogue (l), “green morocco, uncut, by zaehnsdorf” $1250 the first book of urizen (g), “full levant (delivered mar. 2, 29)” $27,500 john flaxman, naval pillar (1799), “wrappers uncut. in half morocco case” $100 for children: the gates of paradise (d), “green morocco” $4000 the ghost of abel (a), “unbound in half morocco case” $1500 william hayley, designs to a series of ballads (1802), “4 parts. wrappers in slip case” $1500 jerusalem (i), “red morocco” $9000 a large book of designs, “unbound, in half green morocco case” [i.e., “the accusers of theft adultery murder” <essick 2c> and “joseph of arimathea preaching” <essick 1b>] $3000 on homer (a), “unbound in half morocco slip case” $1500 the song of los (b), “unbound, in cloth portfolio” $17,500 there is no natural religion (c), “green morocco” $4000 edward young, night thoughts (1797), colored copy (j), “half morocco, uncut” $800 price for the collection ………… $115,000 1930 june bible, job (1826) dante engravings 1931 january–february rosenbach, catalogue of an exhibition of manuscripts and rare books   america (c)   for the sexes: the gates of paradise (d) 1931 november 30–1932 january 16 rosenbach, five centuries of bookmaking   america (c)   for the sexes: the gates of paradise (d) 1932 descriptive catalogue (f) 1933 march 1 american art association-anderson galleries, rare books from the library of the late willis vickery 16 songs of innocence and of experience (z), $6000 to rosenbach 1934 february 15 american art association-anderson galleries, collection of paul hyde bonner 11 visions of the daughters of albion (f) and pls. 1-3, $5200 to rosenbach 1934? a female figure crouching in a cave 1935 rosenbach, a catalogue of rare books of six centuries 48 for the sexes: the gates of paradise (d), $2465 1936 february 19 sotheby’s, catalogue of valuable printed books … comprising the library of sir algernon methuen 499 songs of innocence and of experience (v), £1050 to rosenbach 1936 rosenbach catalogue 28, five hundred rare books … 40 robert blair, the grave (1808), $175 41 bible, job (1826), $235 44 william hayley, designs to a series of ballads (1802) (with “two designs of blake on two sides of a leaf” <butlin #361> and “an engraving by blake extracted from another book” [pl. 4 of hayley, life of cowper]), $975 1937 march 2 sotheby’s, catalogue of the very well-known and valuable library, the property of lt. col. w. e. moss 143 songs of innocence (b), £750 to rosenbach for rosenwald 144 songs of innocence and of experience (c), £1400 to rosenbach for rosenwald 171 america pl. a, copperplate, £50 to rosenbach for rosenwald 176 for children: the gates of paradise (a), £460 to rosenbach for rosenwald 196 descriptive catalogue (m), £50 to rosenbach 199 abraham rees, cyclopaedia, sketches <butlin #678a> (with blake’s seven engravings for rees), £100 to rosenbach for rosenwald 202 “the man sweeping the interpreter’s parlour” <essick 2i>, £75 to rosenbach for rosenwald 208 george cumberland’s card <essick 1x, 1y>, £12 to rosenbach 218 “the battle of ai” <essick 1a>, “the morning amusements of her royal highness” and “a lady in the full dress” <essick 2c>, “rev. john caspar lavater” <essick 3q>, “edmund pitts” <essick 2e>, “rev.d robert hawker” <essick 1b, 1c>, john scott, poetical works (1782), “proofs before letters printed on india paper,” and “wilson lowry” <essick 4k/4l>, £11 to rosenbach for rosenwald 225 geoffrey chaucer, prologue (1812), £45 to rosenbach, probably for rosenwald 261 edward young, night thoughts (1797), colored copy (b), £800 to rosenbach for rosenwald 281 letter of 30 january 1803, £150 to rosenbach for rosenwald 1938 april 5 american art association-anderson galleries, the cortlandt f. bishop library part one [a-h] 281 america (d), possibly to rosenbach 1938 may 25 american art association-anderson galleries, americana, autographs, library sets, first editions … two important letters by william blake 73 letter of 2 july 1800, $280, possibly to rosenbach, for rosenwald 74 letter of february 1827, $140, possibly to rosenbach, for rosenwald 1938 november 2 parke-bernet, william blake: the renowned collection … collected by the late george c. smith, jr. 6 letter of 28 september 1804, $325 to rosenbach for rosenwald 13 there is no natural religion (i), $1000 to rosenbach 14 the book of thel (f), $2200 to rosenbach for rosenwald 18 index to the songs (with nine plates from songs), $550 to rosenbach for rosenwald 19 songs of innocence and of experience pl. 42 [“the tyger”], 51 [“a little girl lost”], $160 to rosenbach 20 visions of the daughters of albion (j), $3700 to rosenbach for rosenwald 21 visions of the daughters of albion (l), $2500 to rosenbach 22 america (b), $2600 to rosenbach 23 america (a), $500, possibly to rosenbach, for rosenwald 24 “let him look up” [“experimental relief plate”] <essick 1a>, $800 to rosenbach for rosenwald 27 europe (c) pl. 2 (with jerusalem pl. 8 on the verso), $150, possibly to rosenbach, for rosenwald 31 europe (c) pls. 5b, 9a, 10, 11a, and 12, $280, possibly to rosenbach, for rosenwald 35 the marriage of heaven and hell (d), $8800 to rosenbach for rosenwald 38 robert blair, the grave, copperplates, $750 to rosenbach for rosenwald 40 jerusalem, proofs of pls. 9, 19-20, 38a-b, 48, 50, 58, 78, plus europe (c) pls. 18a-b, $500, possibly to rosenbach, for rosenwald 42 “the accusers” <essick 3g>, “the chaining of orc” <essick 1a>, “albion rose” <essick 2d>, and “the man sweeping the interpreter’s parlour” <essick 2k>, $450 to rosenbach for rosenwald 45 edward young, night thoughts (1797), colored copy (k), $675 to rosenbach 52 for the sexes: the gates of paradise (h), $750 to rosenbach 100 donald the hammerer: copy after blake <butlin #783>, $150 [anon., i.e., rosenbach] 101 wat tyler <butlin #737, visionary head>, $100 to rosenbach 102 william cowper after romney <butlin #351> (with three engravings of cowper), $350 to rosenbach for rosenwald 104 canute <butlin #721, visionary head>, $300 to rosenbach for rosenwald 105 solomon <butlin #701>, $250 to rosenbach 107 edward i (or iii) <butlin #735, visionary head>, $175 to rosenbach for rosenwald 108 an armed man spurning a woman <butlin #239>, the descent of peace <butlin #539>, two legs <butlin #606>, a figure ascending in a glory of clouds <butlin #619>, an ascending spiral of figures <butlin #771>, $120 to rosenbach for rosenwald 109 job and his daughters <butlin #394>, $1200 to rosenbach for rosenwald 1938 december 22 auctioneer unidentified   moses staying the plague(?) <butlin #115> [to rosenbach]   saul and david <butlin #118> [to rosenbach]   group of men seated in a circle <butlin #148> [to rosenbach] 1938 december “mrs q” <essick 2j> 1939 september 18 the book of thel (o) 1939 rosenbach, the world of yesterday 40 dante, india proofs, $385 41 descriptive catalogue (m), $375 42 william hayley, designs to a series of ballads (1802), $185 43 for the sexes: the gates of paradise (d), $2750 47 bible, job (1826), published proof copy on india paper, inscribed “to marian—mrs. john linnell senr. decr. 1868”, $200 1940 songs of innocence (p) 1941 april 16–17 parke-bernet, rare books, original drawings, autograph letters and manuscripts collected by the late a. edward newton 116 the ghost of samuel appearing to saul <butlin #458>, $4000 to rosenbach for rosenwald 118 the great red dragon and the woman clothed with the sun <butlin #520>, $10,100 to rosenbach for rosenwald 120 mary wollstonecraft, original stories from real life (1791), ten designs <butlin #244 1-10>, $1500 to rosenbach for rosenwald 129 europe (e), $8000 to rosenbach for rosenwald 131 the first book of urizen (b), $8250 to rosenbach 135 the marriage of heaven and hell (f), $6300 to rosenbach 136 songs of innocence and of experience (d), $6100 to rosenbach 153 there is no natural religion (f), $1500 to rosenbach for rosenwald 1941 rosenbach, a bibliophile’s miscellany 56 for the sexes: the gates of paradise (d), $2750 1942 january 14 parke-bernet, the splendid library of mr. and mrs. anton g. hardy 20 america pl. d (“a dream of thiralatha”) <essick 1b>, $575 to rosenbach for rosenwald 1942 july 29 europe pl. 18 1944/45 rosenbach, the march of books through the ages 45 descriptive catalogue (m), $375 46 william hayley, designs to a series of ballads (1802), $185 47 for the sexes: the gates of paradise (d), $2750 1946 july 30 sotheby’s catalogue, j. l. field 464 samson breaking his bonds <butlin #453>, £1100 to rosenbach 1947 rosenbach catalogue 105 aeschylus, tragedies (1779), blake’s copy, $345 1948 october 11 sotheby’s catalogue, arthur randle 34 descriptive catalogue (p), £95 to rosenbach 1949 july 22 christie’s, catalogue of original works by william blake, the property of the late graham robertson 8 fire <butlin #194>, £1050 to rosenbach 56 the eagle <butlin #363>, £78.15.0 to rosenbach 1950 december 26 letter of 31 march 1826 1952 september 18 bible, job (1826) 1958 may 19 sotheby’s, catalogue of the celebrated collection of books illuminated and illustrated by william blake, the property of the late mrs. william emerson [frances white emerson] 1 the book of thel (c), £1900 to rosenbach’s successor, john fleming 4 visions of the daughters of albion (h), europe (g), the song of los (c), £23,000 to fleming 6 edward young, night thoughts, colored copy (m), £850 to fleming changes to the masthead changes to the masthead the death of g. e. bentley, jr., in august left blake bereft of a longtime contributor as well as a friend and colleague. his first note, “blake apocrypha,” appeared in the october 1967 issue; his final article, “rosenbach and blake,” leads this issue. jerry had been the journal’s bibliographer since 1994, his checklist of publications and discoveries an annual feature. we have asked three scholars to contribute to our summer 2018 issue: luisa calè (birkbeck, university of london) will cover exhibitions, jason whittaker (university of lincoln) music, and wayne c. ripley (winona state university) recently published scholarship—with the input of fernando castanedo (universidad de alcalá) for scholarship in the romance languages and hikari sato (university of tokyo) for publications in japanese. we have emphasized that they are free to follow their own paths in terms of content and format. in her role as exhibitions editor, luisa will also coordinate exhibition reviews, beginning in the new year with william blake in sussex at petworth house; sandy gourlay will remain our book review editor. sibylle erle (bishop grosseteste university) has joined our advisory board. sibylle is author of blake, lavater and physiognomy (2010), co-editor of “science, technology and the senses” (special issue for ravon, 2008), and volume editor of panoramas, 1787–1900: texts and contexts (5 vols., 2012). with morton paley she is now co-editing the reception of william blake in europe (bloomsbury). she has co-curated the display blake and physiognomy (2010–11) at tate britain and devised an online exhibition of tennyson’s copy of blake’s job for the tennyson research centre (2013). morris eaves and morton d. paley, editors ocean growing: blake’s two versions of newton and the emerging polypus ocean growing: blake’s two versions of newton and the emerging polypus by joseph fletcher joseph fletcher (jafletch@email.unc.edu) is a doctoral candidate at the university of north carolina at chapel hill, where he also serves as project manager of the william blake archive. more of his research on the intersections between literature and natural philosophy in the long eighteenth century can be found in a forthcoming issue of essays in romanticism. i. blake printed the newton large color print three times, twice in 1795 (first and second pulls) and once in 1804–05. the dating of the final impression is owing to martin butlin’s discovery of an 1804 watermark on this print, a finding published in his 1981 article “a newly discovered watermark and a visionary’s way with his dates.”the other design reprinted in 1804–05 is nebuchadnezzar; he, like newton, appears in a contracted, fallen position. i am grateful to joseph viscomi for generously sharing information concerning the dates of the three printing sessions for newton from a manuscript for a forthcoming book; he argues that nebuchadnezzar was reprinted twice c. 1804–05. one of the two 1795 impressions is untraced, leaving two of the three extant: one from 1795 (illus. 1) and one from 1804–05 (illus. 2).butlin acknowledges that there may have been a third printing (paintings and drawings no. 307), and viscomi argues for the untraced 1795 impression based on evidence of a second printing during that year. 1. blake, newton (1795) (see enlargement). 46.0 x 60.0 cm. butlin, paintings and drawings no. 307. reproduced courtesy of the evangelical lutheran church in america. image courtesy of the william blake archive. 2. blake, newton (1804–05) (see enlargement). 46.0 x 60.0 cm. butlin, paintings and drawings no. 306. reproduced courtesy of the tate. image © tate, london 2015. newton is part of the series of twelve large color prints centered, according to the editors of the william blake archive, “upon images of the fallen world.” the 1804–05 impression, which features the naked natural philosopher contracted and applying dividers to a mathematical design while seated on what appears to be a coral reef on the ocean bottom, certainly adheres to this theme. in this fallen world, one cannot fall any lower than the sea floor. the mysterious image invites interpretation, especially given newton’s prominence as a target—along with bacon and locke—insofar as he represents limited imaginative vision and a mechanistic metaphysics throughout blake’s poetry.an early instance occurs in pl. 4 of the song of los (1795), when urizen, weeping, hands the “philosophy of five senses” to newton and locke (e 68). david bindman, for instance, reads the print as representing “the triumph of science and natural religion in the 18th century” (graphic works 477). no interpretation, however, has discussed the marked differences between the two prints of newton: the 1795 version portrays newton sitting in the same hunched posture on a very dissimilar rock formation, the surface of which—with the exception of some patches of burnt orange and blue—is largely bare, like his own body.butlin writes that the inscription “newton” that appears on the rock in the 1795 print “is totally uncharacteristic of blake’s hand and would seem to be some later restorer’s imaginative reconstruction of some worn pen drawing indicating texture on the rocks to the left of the protagonist” (“physicality” 17). in his catalogue raisonné, he provides a clue as to why a restorer or owner might have written newton’s name on the design: the print was sold as “archimedes” in the hogarth sale of 1854 (p. 167). since blake inscribed “newton” below the design of the 1804–05 print (166), the text on the 1795 print might have been an attempt to rectify the misidentification of newton as archimedes. i am grateful to robert essick for informing me that the 1795 print was sold on 11 dec. 1865 by the estate of samuel prince for £5.10s. to halstead (butlin indicates this sale as well, p. 167) and that it was titled “newton” and described as “a fine fresco drawing in colours, signed by the artist” (blake signed the print “fresco w blake inv”). thus, at least by 1865, the figure in the 1795 print was correctly identified as newton. william michael rossetti’s catalogue raisonné, included in alexander gilchrist’s 1863 biography of blake, identifies the 1804–05 print (owned by butts) as newton (2: 203), but makes no mention of another extant print. rossetti lists “archimedes” (2: 250) in blake’s “uncoloured works”; butlin suggests that this is a reference to the pencil sketch for newton (paintings and drawings no. 308) or a confusion with the 1795 color print. he seems meant to be associated with the rock on which he sits, emphasizing blake’s view that the laws of newtonian physics had fixed the world in urizenic petrification, as later stated in a descriptive catalogue: “the horse of intellect is leaping from the cliffs of memory and reasoning; it is a barren rock: it is also called the barren waste of locke and newton” (e 546).jean h. hagstrum connects the newton print to this quotation (“william blake rejects the enlightenment” 73); he, however, is referring to what is now identified as the 1804–05 print. in the 1804–05 print the rock is teeming with life, as if a coral population of sponges and spiky urchins had proliferated on the work in the intervening ten years. the richly textured and finely articulated coralline forms result from blake’s method of color printing, which viscomi has described as “printing wet paint from flat millboards or relief plates onto large sheets of paper.” the printed paint could be left in its “accidental” spongy state (closely resembling the rough texture of a coral reef), which blake could choose to refine by washing over the printed colors in watercolors and by outlining them in pen and ink (blake and the idea of the book 128). perhaps the rich, spongy forms resulting from blake’s color-printing technique suggested, in the later version, marine creatures, which he could then develop in pen and ink. the most notable additions in this regard are the two sea anemones or marine polyps rooted below newton’s buttocks. their tentacles trail in an ocean current, an effect that lends a dynamism to this later design. these sea anemones are blake’s first visual depiction of the polyp, the asexual self-regenerating “animal flower” that made its textual debut in blake’s poetry in the book of los (1795), in which the “formless” parts of los are compared to a “white polypus / driv’n by waves & englob’d on the tide” (e 93). s. foster damon refers to the creatures depicted in the 1804–05 print of newton as “squid” (332), erroneously i think, since their rooted stems and tentacles bear a much closer resemblance to the sea anemone. according to several eighteenth-century naturalists, the sea anemone, along with the polyp, is one of the many coralline members of the zoophyte family. the close relationship between these creatures was explicitly articulated in three essays by abbé dicquemare published between 1773 and 1777 in philosophical transactions, all of them containing engravings by james basire, under whom blake served as an apprentice during those years (illus. 3 and 4).william s. doxey provides a complete list of philosophical transactions articles containing engravings by basire published from 1772 to 1778 (254-60). dicquemare’s essays were translated from the original french for their publication in the transactions. 3. basire, engraving for dicquemare, “an essay, towards elucidating the history of the sea-anemonies,” philosophical transactions (1773), tab. xvi, p. 402, detail. reproduced courtesy of the british library. image © the british library board, general reference collection c.144.l.1. 4. basire, engraving for dicquemare, “an essay, towards elucidating the history of the sea-anemonies,” philosophical transactions (1773), tab. xvii, p. 403, detail. reproduced courtesy of the british library. image © the british library board, general reference collection c.144.l.1. for dicquemare, the larger sea anemone afforded the natural historian a more perceptible demonstration of the reproductive and self-organizing properties also observable in the polyp (properties that will be discussed in more detail in my section iii): “in so minute an object as the fresh-water polypus, much is easily overlooked; but in the sea-anemonies, although we are far from seeing every thing, yet it is possible, even without the assistance of glasses, to discern a great deal which must escape us in the most diligent examination of the other animal” (“a second essay” 232). by his third essay, he felt confident enough to declare that his observations had “afforded [him] an opportunity to justify some eminent men, whose assertions concerning the multiplication of the fresh-water polypi by sections, have met with the most unmerited contradictions” (57). another essay in philosophical transactions containing engravings by basire focuses on a third member of the zoophyte family, the gorgonia (illus. 5). 5. basire, engraving for ellis, “on the nature of the gorgonia,” philosophical transactions (1776), tab. i, p. 8, detail. reproduced courtesy of the british library. image © the british library board, general reference collection c.144.l.1. in “on the nature of the gorgonia; that it is a real marine animal, and not of a mixed nature, between animal and vegetable,” john ellis writes that “the gorgonia is an animal of the polype kind, resembling the common fresh water polype in many of its qualities” (2). the polyp “sends out its young from its side, like buds,” as “every one knows,” and “the gorgonia grows nearly in the same manner” (2). although the images of the sea anemone and gorgonia engraved by basire more closely resemble the coralline forms in blake’s later print than do illustrations of the polyp in works addressed in section iii below, all of the organisms demonstrate the vital, self-regenerative, and reproductive properties that are crucial to my discussion. in this essay i use the term polyp—which blake spells “polypus”—to designate a set of vital properties exhibited by several organisms, including the sea anemone, in the coralline family of zoophytes.according to volume 3 of the cyclopaedia of ephraim chambers (1786–88), all coral animals, including the “polype,” belong “to the genus of hydra, in the class of worms, and order of zoophytes, in the linnaean system.” ebenezer sibly’s a key to physic, and the occult sciences (1795) reiterates this classification (60) and contains additional information, under the broader heading “of animal flowers,” on the “polypus” and the “sea-anemone.” sibly writes, “the grand argument for animal life in vegetables, was inferred from the curious construction of the fresh-water polypus, and the actinia genus, called animal flowers, sea-anemone, sea-sun-flower, &c. which having indeed the external form and figure of vegetables, with scarcely any progressive motion, might easily deceive superficial observers” (56). james anderson’s recreations in agriculture, natural-history, arts, and miscellaneous literature (1799–1802) also calls the sea anemone an “animal flower … an animal of the polypus tribe, so called from the resemblance it bears to the flower of that name” (2: 79, 80). in this essay, though i use blake’s spelling of “polypus” when discussing the creature in connection with his work, i use “polyp” when discussing the larger eighteenth-century discourse. the term was also used in eighteenth-century medical texts, as it still is today, to designate abnormal growths of tissue. in addition to the detailed coralline forms and the shading and enhanced musculature of newton’s body, another aspect of the later print that is lacking in the 1795 design is the mathematical diagram that newton is measuring with his dividers: a curve inscribed within a triangle. although he is clearly using dividers on a scroll in the earlier print, no design is perceptible. these details—polypus and diagram—raise the question, what motivated blake to make such significant changes to the design in the later print? the 1795 print is neglected in critical discussions,paul miner, in the earliest full essay devoted to blake’s symbolic treatment of the polypus in his poetry, writes, “blake illustrated the sea anemone in his famous color print of newton” (198n1), suggesting that he is referring to the 1804–05 print. anne t. kostelanetz [mellor], essick (“blake’s ‘newton’”), john gage, and stefani engelstein all refer to and include reproductions of the later print in their studies, as does w. j. t. mitchell. reproductions of the work in the two book-length studies of blake and newton, donald ault’s visionary physics and stuart peterfreund’s william blake in a newtonian world, are of the later print. additionally, all major articles and chapters addressing newton over the past half century have discussed only the 1804–05 print. though butlin’s discovery allows for a comparative examination of the two extant prints, executed nearly ten years apart. i take that opportunity here. butlin initially assumed that 1795 was the date of composition for the tate (1804–05) print because it is the date that blake himself inscribed on the work (see paintings and drawings no. 306). however, his discovery of the watermark led him to characterize blake’s date as an instance of “visionary dating”: “there is absolutely no way in which the copy of newton in the tate gallery …, on paper watermarked 1804, can have received its basic color printing some nine years earlier in the ‘1795’ of the date actually written on the design by blake himself” (“physicality” 6). according to viscomi, blake is operating more like a printmaker than a painter: he dated the printable matrix and not each subsequent printing, just as he did with the illuminated books.i am again indebted to viscomi’s manuscript for this information. critics prior to viscomi have also addressed the difficulty of dating blake’s works. see, in addition to butlin’s “a newly discovered watermark,” erdman’s “the dating of william blake’s engravings.” although the detailed coralline forms in the 1804–05 print provide substantial evidence, several commentators have been tentative about or outright opposed to locating the scene undersea. in the catalogue raisonné assembled for gilchrist’s biography, william michael rossetti described the print as “full in the colour of the sky and rocky bank” (2: 203), while dante gabriel rossetti—in the supplement to the biography—characterized newton as sitting on a “rock covered with fossil substance or lichen of some kind”; interestingly, however, this “fossil substance” must have suggested something aquatic, since he compared its intricate and realistic-looking texture to “a photograph from a piece of seaweed” (1: 375). yet a century later, hagstrum described newton as sitting “on a rock in [a] kind of stony and desolate landscape” (“william blake rejects the enlightenment” 73); according to gage, “it seems improbable that [newton] is seated on the sea-bed (i.e. beneath the waters of materialism), as has recently been suggested” (372),as gage notes, the “recent suggestions” had been made by kostelanetz and kathleen raine. prior to these suggestions, geoffrey keynes, in discussing the pencil drawing on which the design is based, argued that “it has not usually been noticed that in [the later color print] newton appears to be seated at the bottom of the sea, the water symbolising the materialism of newton’s philosophy. the evidence of this are the anemones attached to the rock … and the sea-weeds waving in the current” (pencil drawings, no. 8). morton paley also identifies the sea anemones in the later print, but refers to the “lichened rock”—not a coral reef—behind newton (37). and the aquatic appearance of the vegetation is merely a result of the “colour-printing process, and does not differ from similar features in the nebuchadnezzar” (373n8).essick claims that “the oft repeated contention that ‘newton’ is an underwater scene is as difficult to substantiate beyond reasonable doubt as it is hard to dismiss” (“blake’s ‘newton’” 149). more recently, mitchell asked, “are we beholding a nocturnal meditation or an undersea tableau, a coral reef adorned with luminous vegetation washed by invisible tides?” (455).ault also poses the possibility in the form of a question, suggesting another option as well: “is the figure sitting under water on a rock? or is he in an outer-space void (perhaps dotted with the particulate ‘aether’)?” (3). i find that the rich variety of forms surrounding newton in the 1804–05 print discounts the hypothesis that the scene is set in merely an aether-dotted void. i believe the latter, insofar as the 1804–05 print—with its carefully depicted sea anemones, sponges, and urchins—is concerned. i do not make the same claim for the 1795 print, however, which appears not to be undersea. the coloring here suggests that newton is sitting on a rock that is partially covered with moss and lichen, like the rocky forms surrounding urizen in plate 9 of the first book of urizen (1794) (illus. 6). 6. blake, the first book of urizen copy c (1794), pl. 9. 14.8 x 10.4 cm. yale center for british art, paul mellon collection. b1978.43.1427. the blue-green area in the lower left corner of the 1795 print has been touched up in places, as at the base of the rock, to resemble tufts of grass, and the reddish-orange splotches here could be fallen leaves. there is more evidence in this early print to indicate that the scene is located at the base of a large rock in a dark forest, and not at the ocean bottom. i contend that between 1795 and 1804–05 blake decided to change newton’s rock to a coral reef—a drastic modification, and an instance of what essick calls blake’s “creative revisionism—not the static maintenance of the same ‘original’ image, but its continual reconception each time it is executed” (language of adam 163).viscomi argues in his unpublished manuscript that the method of color printing made it so that blake was not tied to the model. he could take liberties with the design because the medium encouraged improvisation. the millboard matrix from which the design was printed contained only the outline of the composition. each time the outline was painted anew, the surface areas, as well as the foreground and background, created noticeably different-looking designs. in this paper i wish first to explore—in sections ii and iii—the historical factors that may have motivated the 1804–05 reconception of newton. i claim that there is a complex and charged discourse concerning the significance of the polyp for proponents of vitalism in works of eighteenth-century natural philosophy.the concept of vitalism took many forms in the eighteenth century, but it can be broadly construed as a response to cartesian mechanism, which described the universe as obeying physico-mechanical principles; for mechanists, all bodily phenomena could be explained in terms of inert, extended matter and motion, the laws of which newton elaborated. in the work of descartes, the machine was an apt metaphor for living bodies, man being distinguished from the beasts insofar as he possessed an immaterial soul. for vitalist thinkers, however, this mechanical model could not explain living organisms, whose matter appeared much less inert than described by descartes and newton. according to peter hanns reill, for vitalists, “living matter was seen as containing an immanent principle of self-movement or self-organization whose sources lay in active powers, which resided in matter itself” (7). my use of the terms vitalism and mechanism should be read with this distinction in mind: vitalism refers to an immanent and active principle within living matter, while mechanism implies inert matter acted upon from without and obeying fixed laws. as ault points out, however, newton’s theory of gravity, or attractive forces, undermined the strict mechanism of descartes (8), so blake’s labeling newton a mechanist is not entirely fair. kevin hutchings makes a similar distinction between cartesian mechanism and newton’s challenge to it (120-23), noting that blake’s equation of newton with mechanistic philosophy is a “reductive misrepresentation” (122). furthermore, i find that blake’s treatment of the corallines in the later newton print shares philosophical affinities with the vast and contested body of writing on the polyp as an emblem of vitalist metaphysics. in section iv i argue that blake’s employment of the polypus and the undersea setting in his revised newton satirizes what he saw as the inflexibility of newton’s mechanical philosophy, which had been celebrated throughout the eighteenth century. the ironic depiction of newton in the 1804–05 design features a mechanistic philosopher contracted in underwater darkness, blind to the vital properties of the self-replicating coralline creatures for which his physical laws could not account. moreover, his gloriously powerful body is contracted and fallen solely as a result of his mental fixation with an abstract diagram. ii. the sea anemone in the later print of newton corresponds to a proliferation of references to the polypus in blake’s poetry between 1795 and 1804–05. after its first appearance in the book of los, the polypus emerges in abundance in the texts of the later prophecies: three times in the four zoas, nine times in milton, and eight times in jerusalem. in addition, there are the numerous designs for jerusalem that feature human-animal-plant hybrids, the representative symbol for which, according to denise gigante, is the polyp: “by providing empirical evidence for the generation of new life forms beyond the traditional coupling of the sexes, [the polyp] decentralized god’s creative power, spreading it through all the fibers of nature and shattering those structures (preformed parts and germs) supposed to contain it” (“blake’s living form” 481).see chapter 3 of her life, which is devoted to an analysis of epigenetic symbols in both jerusalem and the first book of urizen (the latter does not mention or visually depict the polypus). epigenesis refers to the theory that matter contains within itself the capacity for growth and differentiation into various organs (in the case of an embryo). gigante uses this biological model as a lens through which to discuss blake’s two illuminated books and speculates that blake may have been influenced in this regard by the german vitalist physiologists caspar wolff and johann blumenbach (111). after 1795—and thus after the initial printings of newton—the polypus occupied a significant place in blake’s imagination, appearing as a multifaceted motif in several works, and the change to the design of newton serves as a record of this artistic transformation.this study, in confining its interpretive scope to the two large color prints of newton, does not attempt to analyze the polypus as it functions in the poetry of blake’s prophecies. aside from gigante’s chapter (see note 15), the most extended study of the polypus motif in blake’s poetry remains miner’s essay. what influenced blake to feature the polypus so abundantly in his poetry after 1795 and to depict it in the 1804–05 newton print? in the second chapter of anxious anatomy, engelstein suggests that blake’s source was the cyclopaedia (1802–20), for which he engraved eight plates: “rees’s cyclopedia discusses coral not only under its own entry …, but also under the heading ‘polype, marine’” (104).mitchell also suggests that rees was blake’s primary influence (457). although essick writes that “blake may have become involved in the project as early as 1803” (commercial book illustrations 109), blake could have read the same entries that engelstein refers to in rees’s 1786–88 edition of the cyclopaedia.the cyclopaedia was first published by ephraim chambers in 1728, and several editions followed. rees supplemented and expanded upon chambers in a five-volume 1786–88 edition. the version to which blake contributed engravings had grown to thirty-nine volumes. i find the identification of the cyclopaedia as blake’s source to be doubtful for several reasons. although he contributed engravings to the 1802–20 edition, those engravings were mainly of sculpture, unrelated to any coralline topic. blake’s sculpture plates have imprint dates of 1815 and 1816 (essick, commercial book illustrations 110-12), while fascicle 55, containing the entry on the “polype,” was published in 1814. given these late dates, the edition of the cyclopaedia that engelstein and mitchell cite could not have been the source for blake’s incorporation of the polypus in the newton print. even the entry on coral—to which engelstein alludes—was not published until 1808, more than two years after the later version of newton was printed.thomas butts’s receipt account with blake indicates that the later print was purchased on 7 sept. 1805 (keynes, letters 117-18). moreover, blake’s consistent spelling of “polypus” differs from the “polype” that appears in all editions of the cyclopaedia.blake’s use of the three-syllable spelling was metrically significant as well. i am grateful to the journal’s anonymous reader for pointing this out. i contend that the entry on the polyp in rees’s editions is only part of a varied discourse that proliferated over the course of the eighteenth century, and that, in addition to the philosophical transactions articles with engravings by basire, there are more likely and compelling sources for blake’s employment of the polypus—among them georges-louis leclerc, comte de buffon, and erasmus darwin.though i focus on literary sources (some of which—such as the philosophical transactions articles—contain illustrations), it is also possible that blake witnessed an exhibition of coralline creatures. nelson hilton speculates that blake may have seen a “polypus” in the 1780s at john hunter’s anatomical theatre (“blake and the perception of science” 57-58). moreover, during his time by the sea in felpham (1800–03), he might have observed coralline creatures in tidal pools near his home. iii. references to the polyp in the eighteenth century are difficult to find without the accompanying name of abraham trembley, the swiss naturalist whose experiments with the freshwater polyp in the early 1740s were first published in french in 1744. his findings were discussed and replicated in england even before this date, however, as evidenced by his three-way correspondence with the president of the royal society at the time, martin folkes, and the french naturalist buffon. these letters were published in philosophical transactions in 1742–43, and trembley’s reputation in england grew immediately thereafter.for more detailed historical accounts of trembley and his experiments, see vartanian and chapter 3 of schwartz. another correspondent with folkes, henry baker, an englishman and fellow of the royal society, published an attempt towards a natural history of the polype in 1743, which both summarized trembley’s work and described baker’s own course of experiments that replicated trembley’s. baker’s work includes over 150 illustrations of the polyp, several of them bearing a resemblance to the waving tendrils in the coralline forms in blake’s 1804–05 print of newton (illus. 7). it is quite likely that blake would have been aware of trembley’s experiments without reading a direct account of them; engelstein makes the astute observation that he makes a punning reference to trembley in milton, where the polypus “must tremble in the heavens” (quoted in engelstein 101; italics hers).engelstein is one of the few critics to connect trembley and blake. hilton was the first blake scholar to discuss trembley within the history of the polyp in the eighteenth century and to apply this history to blake’s work (literal imagination 87-89). hutchings also discusses him in connection with blake’s use of the polypus in milton (188ff.). 7. baker, an attempt towards a natural history of the polype (1743), p. 32. reproduced courtesy of the british library. image © the british library board, general reference collection 955.d.21. trembley (and baker) discovered that cutting the polyp into segments resulted in the regeneration of each segment into an autonomous organism; each of these autonomous beings would then become parents themselves, capable of further division into separate organisms.although trembley was the first to observe this in the polyp, such properties of living organisms had been noted as early as aristotle, who writes in de anima that “plants and many animals when divided continue to live, and each segment is thought to retain the same kind of soul” (409a8-9). in the absence of cutting, the polyp reproduced asexually: offspring would emerge as buds from a creature’s main stem, vegetate, and detach from the parent, often budding offspring of their own before detaching. moreover, trembley found that he could graft separate polyps to each other to form a larger, hybrid creature. thus, the organism could exponentially divide into multiple autonomous creatures and those disparate organisms could fuse with each other and become a unified polyp. given the polyp’s plant-like characteristics and the fact that its original discoverer, antonie van leeuwenhoek, had called it a plant, trembley resisted identifying the organism as an animal. he was eventually convinced by the older and more renowned naturalist rené réaumur, who is credited with naming the polyp.resistance to identifying the polyp as an animal did not stop with réaumur’s assertion. according to vartanian, voltaire was not alone in insisting in 1768 that the polyp was a plant (284). the creature’s remarkable regenerative capabilities challenged both cartesian mechanism and newtonian physical laws, which dominated natural philosophy throughout the first half of the eighteenth century. stephen gaukroger contends that trembley’s study challenged the preformationist theory of reproduction held by biomechanics, which stated that preexistent invisible germs of all organisms were contained in the ovaries or sperm (depending on the variant of the theory) of humanity’s first parents;also known as preexistence, the theory of preformation also held that “there was no true generation in living nature: all organic structures were literally created by god at the beginning. mechanical processes merely brought the miniatures to life one by one to maintain the successive generations” (bowler 46). the contrary position was the theory of epigenesis, defined in note 15. for a more detailed historical account of the preformationism/epigenesis debate, see roe. challenged classification (was the polyp an animal or plant?); and suggested the disturbing possibility that nature was able to generate living beings. “if this was the case—and especially if the distinctions between mineral, plant, and animal realms were ones of degree rather than ones of kind—then the question had to be raised whether matter was intrinsically active” (gaukroger 358). thus, as vartanian writes, “the polyp became involved in speculations … ranging from the nature of the soul to the teleology of organic forms” (260).reill also discusses the challenge that the polyp presented to preformationism (62). would god have preordained such rampant, chaotic, and seemingly monstrous growth? although for foucault “the continuity of nature is a requirement of all natural history” in the eighteenth century (147), the polyp represented the shadowy underside of such continuity, resistant as the creature was to the rigid classificatory categories—instituted by linnaeus and others—that characterized eighteenth-century taxonomy.the polyp’s significance as an emblem of changeability predates eighteenth-century debates concerning mechanism and vitalism. desiderius erasmus advises readers to “adopt the outlook of the polyp” and claims that “there will be nothing to prevent us from applying the name ‘polyps’ to those who turn themselves into any and every shape in the wish to stand well with everyone” (adages 41, 42). i am grateful to jessica wolfe for this reference. in the context of blake’s newton, i emphasize erasmus’s allusion to the material transformative capacities of the polyp as resonating with eighteenth-century vitalist accounts of the corallines; i do not mean to suggest that blake makes the same metaphorical argument in applying such changeability to human behavior. such larger metaphysical debates and speculations were not taken up by trembley himself, who remained a preformationist despite the implications of his experiments. rather, it was julien offray de la mettrie, whose l’homme machine was published in 1748 (with the first english translation, man a machine, appearing the following year), who based his atheist materialist philosophy on trembley’s experiments with the polyp. “look in your turn at trembley’s polyp!” he exclaims, “does it not contain inside it the causes of its own regeneration? why then would it be absurd to believe that there exist physical causes for which everything was made. … there may be something else which is neither chance nor god; i mean nature, the study of which can as a result only produce unbelievers” (24). in la mettrie’s view, the self-propagating polyp was one of many examples of what albrecht von haller—to whom la mettrie dedicated l’homme machine—termed the “irritability” of animal muscular tissue: the ability to contract with a force far greater than the force of the stimulus, a phenomenon that could be demonstrated even in severed human limbs.see reill 130ff. for a more detailed account of haller’s work. blake was certainly aware of haller, since he executed a portrait engraving for henry’s memoirs of albert de haller, published in 1783. for la mettrie, irritability pointed to the generative and active powers inherent in matter itself; contra cartesian mechanism and newtonian laws of force, which were helpless to explain an irritable reaction of tissue far exceeding the force of stimulus, no god or spiritual agent was necessary as first, efficient, or final cause. as vartanian writes, “in la mettrie’s opinion, the ability of severed muscle-tissue to move in its functional manner when touched (independently of the nervous system) was evidence of the materiality of the soul or, at least, of the ‘vital principle’ of organisms” (271). in the polyp, this vitality was present not just in the parent organism, but also in all of its autonomous parts when the creature was cut into pieces. la mettrie pushed his controversial vitalist materialism further with his next publication, l’homme plante (1748). far from excluding man from taxonomic ambiguity, he instead writes (after noting several parallels between human and plant functionality): “if man is not a vegetal production … he is at least an insect whose roots grow into the womb, as the fertilised plant germs do in theirs. however, there would be nothing surprising about the idea, since needham [john needham, british natural philosopher] observes that polyps, barnacles and other animals multiply themselves by vegetation” (82). by describing man as a root-producing insect, he introduces a flat ontology to his natural system, implicitly bringing man to the level of the polyp and the vegetable.he also compares man to a plant in man a machine: “[man] is like a wandering plant which has transplanted itself” (9). the concept of flat ontology is shared today by the object-oriented philosophy of graham harman, levi bryant, ian bogost, and others. harman, for instance, writes, “whether we speak of humans, amphibians, insects, or birds … no genuine ontological distinctions between the species have emerged so far, whatever our preconceptions on this question may be” (220). see also timothy morton, who notes, “we share 98 percent of our dna with chimps and 35 percent with daffodils …. that’s the disturbing thing about ‘animals’—at bottom they are vegetables” (66, 68). the same idea is expressed by gilles deleuze, who, in his book on the vital characteristics of henri bergson’s philosophy, notes the persistent “hint of the animate in plants, and of the vegetable in animals” (96). the suggestions in the two works that man is an organic machine capable of plant-like self-generation scandalized orthodox natural philosophy and triggered much debate both on the continent and in england throughout the latter half of the eighteenth century. in la mettrie’s metaphysics, the matter of all living organisms is self-motile and self-organizing, and there is no divine causal agent or immaterial soul to distinguish man from the beasts. la mettrie’s flat ontology describes a nature without god, and as such it differs from a blakean metaphysics that locates divinity not in a transcendent godhead, but in the immortal “scatterd portions” of living material forms (the four zoas 114 [110].7, e 385).see also the concluding assertion of the marriage of heaven and hell that “every thing that lives is holy” (e 45) and blake’s annotation to lavater’s aphorisms on man: “every thing on earth is the word of god & in its essence is god” (e 599). according to la mettrie, the polyp not only decentralized god’s power, as gigante claims, but made god’s power unnecessary. as i will argue in the following section, the polypus as it appears in the 1804–05 print of newton serves as a symbol of a godless vitalist system that contrasts with a newtonian deistic metaphysics in which form is imposed externally and adheres to fixed physical laws. furthermore, blake’s rendering of newton’s powerful body as a fallen “human form divine,” which exhibits some of the vitalist properties of the polyp, provides an anti-atheistic critique of la mettrie’s philosophy. trembley’s correspondent buffon is another vitalist natural philosopher from whom blake might have drawn in his treatment of the polypus. buffon’s thirty-six-volume natural history was published 1749–88 and was widely available in multiple english translations. most notable among these was j. s. barr’s rendering, titled barr’s buffon, the first edition of which was published in 1792. buffon’s work was so well known and discussed both in england and on the continent in the latter half of the century that “to know what buffon or albrecht von haller … believed did not require one either to have read these authors directly or to have owned their books: the compilations and reviews sufficed” (reill 13). like la mettrie, buffon believed that matter was self-activating and possessed epigenetic qualities. though he was nominally a lockean and cartesian, his belief in spontaneous generation and an “interior mould” that guided the formation of organisms from within placed him outside traditional mechanist positions. reill claims, “like aristotle and the hermetic philosophers, buffon vivified much of nature” (45). and as gaukroger notes, buffon’s proto-evolutionary vitalism was the first to historicize and “dynamize” natural philosophy, in contrast to newton’s universe, for which the physical laws were constant (368).see also bowler 76-80 and foucault, who quotes buffon’s anti-linnaean claim that “nothing really exists in nature except individuals” (147). the parallel between la mettrie and buffon can be seen in the importance that the latter ascribes to the polyp, which for him bridges the animal and vegetable kingdoms. he writes, in barr’s translation: there is no absolute essential and general difference between animals and vegetables, but that nature descends, by degrees, imperceptibly from an animal, which is the most perfect, to that which is the least, and from the latter to the vegetable. the water polypus may, therefore, be considered as the line where the animal creation ends and that of plants begin [sic]. … the [animal] foetus, at its first formation, may be said rather to vegetate than live. (2: 262-63) by making the epigenetic claim that the animal fetus vegetates, or expands its material form like a plant,for buffon, this is something different from living, as the last phrase indicates. he is perhaps differentiating between the asexual cell growth of the embryo and sexual animal reproduction. buffon suggests that humans, polyps, and plants all develop in the same fashion, a concept that blake vividly depicts in his hybrid forms, such as the frontispiece of for children: the gates of paradise with its vermicular infant on a leaf (illus. 8). 8. blake, for children: the gates of paradise copy d (1793), pl. 1. 9.4 x 6.3 cm. library of congress. image courtesy of the william blake archive. the text for this plate, “what is man!”, speaks to the ambiguity of classification raised by la mettrie and buffon. schwartz devotes much attention to blake’s use of the worm in this regard: “simultaneously seductive and horrifying, helpless and shrewd, the worm irrevocably demonstrates the slippage of true forms so that its putrid figure is transformed into a constructive agent of cultural representation” (xxiv). another of the many hybrid human-plant examples in blake’s designs is plate 3 of for children, which features a woman stooping to pull a child out of the earth as if she were harvesting a plant (illus. 9); the editors of the blake archive note that blake may here be drawing on the formal likeness between mandrakes and human bodies. 9. blake, for children: the gates of paradise copy d (1793), pl. 3. 7.8 x 6.4 cm. library of congress. image courtesy of the william blake archive. this similarity between animal and vegetable is—for buffon and for la mettrie—due to the vital properties of matter itself. as buffon claims, “the living animated nature, instead of composing a metaphysical degree of beings, is a physical property, common to all matter” (2: 272). this claim works against the earlier passage, quoted above, in which he describes a chain of beings descending from the most perfect to the least. here he rejects the notion of a “metaphysical degree of beings,” instead asserting that all life is reducible to the animated quality of matter itself, shared by all organisms. hence, the flat ontology implied by la mettrie is evident in buffon as well. the “polypus” is discussed in several volumes of natural history and, unsurprisingly, trembley’s experiments are described at length.in addition to the passages quoted above, barr’s translation addresses the “polypus” in four other volumes. three volumes of an earlier, six-volume english translation (1775–76) contain references to the “polypus”; vol. 4 features an extended description of the creature, with references to trembley. regarding the indeterminate form of the polyp, buffon concludes: “we cannot call these animals, nor can we say they are vegetables, and certainly we can still less assert they are minerals” (3: 166). rather, the polyp is a vital, self-proliferating nexus where the animal and vegetable kingdoms converge, an idea often repeated by english naturalists and commentators in the latter half of the century. for example, johann herder’s outlines of a philosophy of the history of man, a copy of which was owned by blake’s friend henry fuseli (according to the auction catalogue of his library), reads: “when nature makes a transition from a plant, or a stone, to the animal kingdom, does she more clearly unfold to us the instincts of organic powers? the polypus appears to blossom like a plant, yet is an animal” (60).see also john collier’s essays on the progress of the vital principle from the vegetable to the animal kingdoms and the soul of man (1800): “the line of demarcation is so slightly marked in the polypus, star-fish, sea-nettle, and other marine plants, as well as in the tremellae and self-moving plants, that … it remains a doubt whether to class them as subjects of the vegetable kingdom or animal” (249-50). others who reiterate buffon’s claim for the “polypus” as bridge between animal and vegetable include bonnet (24), spallanzani (318), sturm (3: 116), goldsmith (7: 244), sulivan (3: 338), smellie (524), brookes (4: xiv), mavor (2-3), lobb (2: 188), wesley (3: 73), and sibly (52). all of these works were published in english before 1804. according to the 1821 sale catalogue of his library, william hayley, blake’s patron and neighbor in felpham from 1800 to 1803, owned goldsmith’s an history of the earth, and animated nature (munby 2: 115). i include this lengthy list to indicate the degree to which the “polypus” was a contentious issue of discussion in england in the sixty years following trembley’s experiments. and there are many works that do not match blake’s spelling of “polypus,” but that also taxonomically locate the creature in the unstable border between plant and animal. for instance, adams devotes an entire chapter to the “water polipe,” discussing its properties as well as trembley’s experiments. significantly, this chapter, full of illustrations, is the last of his chapters on animals; the following chapter is “of vegetables.” buffon is also notable, insofar as blake’s 1804–05 newton is concerned, for not restricting his discussion of the polyp to trembley’s freshwater variety, but for describing the many forms that the creature can take, including the sea anemone. a two-volume abridged translation (not barr’s) of natural history, also published in 1792, contains a nine-page section on the “polypus.” in discussing its marine forms buffon writes, “in other parts of the sea are seen sponges, of various magnitude, and extraordinary appearances, assuming a variety of phantastic forms, like large mushrooms, mitres, fonts, and flower-pots” (2: 396).like buffon, dicquemare observed the same vitalist properties of the polyp in the larger sea anemone, and he was aware of the anti-mechanistic metaphysical implications of such organisms: “the sea-anemonies give evident marks of sensibility; shall i thence conclude, that a soul animates them; or shall i grant that they are deprived of sensation, although favoured with the organs of it?” (“a second essay” 239). in the third essay the question still concerns him: “can it be admitted that in these animals the vital principle is peculiar to every particle?” (64). the sea anemone takes its name from the flower, as anderson later remarked (see note 7). anderson also observed a similarity between other types of polyp and the marigold blossom (2: 80); see sibly 59 on the sea anemone and the marigold. the rough, tufted texture of the creatures in blake’s later color print conveys this parallel, suggesting that there may be more polyps on the reef than just the two sea anemones. he goes on to discuss how the polyp produces the coral in and on which it lives, with the multitude of excretions joined together to form “a considerable mass, and, as most animals are productive, in proportion to their minuteness, so these multiplying in a surprising degree, at length form those extensive forests that cover the bottom of the deep” (2: 398). such a living forest of sponges and flower-like coralline forms is an apt description of the “considerable mass” upon which newton sits in the 1804–05 color print, as opposed to the mostly barren rock of the 1795 version. another writer who shared the vitalist attitudes of la mettrie and buffon and who also addressed the mysterious properties of the polyp is equally—if not more—likely as a source: erasmus darwin.schwartz, who devotes a chapter to darwin (not in connection with blake), claims that he is a mechanist, “following in the tradition of empiricist philosophers francis bacon, isaac newton, and john locke” (41). i find this position difficult to support. i grant that darwin was an empiricist, like blake’s infamous triumvirate of bacon, newton, and locke, but he believed in spontaneous generation and the self-activating powers of the natural world (see additional note 1 of the temple of nature, entitled “spontaneous vitality of microscopic animals”). the economy of vegetation (the first part of the botanic garden) describes, in poetry and philosophic notes, the dynamic material evolution of the earth, echoing many of buffon’s proto-evolutionary ideas. this is a telluric narrative quite out of keeping with newton’s static cosmology. what is more, god is absent as first cause in darwin’s account, which would have scandalized bacon, newton, and locke, just as it did many of darwin’s contemporaries. thus, while darwin could be described as a materialist, i think it inaccurate to label him a mechanist. alan richardson discusses how the overlapping of the terms “mechanism,” “materialism,” and “vitalism” in the latter decades of the eighteenth century causes confusion for modern readers (192n58). blake engraved six plates for the 1791–95 editions of darwin’s the botanic garden, and both men were connected through the publisher joseph johnson (essick, commercial book illustrations 45-48). there is little doubt that blake was familiar with darwin’s work, and several blake critics have noted similarities between the two.erdman was one of the first to note parallels between darwin’s the loves of the plants—the second part of the botanic garden—and blake’s the book of thel (the illuminated blake 33-34). see also baine, king-hele’s chapter on blake and darwin, and, more recently, green. darwin was quite prolific between 1795 and 1804, publishing two major works of natural philosophy, zoonomia (1794–96) and phytologia (1800), as well as his well-known and best-selling philosophical poem the temple of nature (1803)—all of which were published by johnson.hayley owned two copies of the botanic garden, as well as copies of zoonomia and the temple of nature (munby 2: 118). the polyp is mentioned in all three. describing vegetable animation in the first volume of zoonomia, darwin writes that “the anthers and stigmas are real animals, attached indeed to their parent tree like polypi or coral insects, but capable of spontaneous motion” (1: 105). as in buffon, the polyp is here linked to coralline animals, while it is also used as an analogy for vegetable growth. and, like la mettrie and buffon, he conflates the vegetable and animal kingdoms: the reproductive organs of plants are “real animals.”darwin had already achieved notoriety for his erotic anthropomorphizing of floral reproduction in the loves of the plants. darwin, who claims that polyps are “all male animals” (1: 488), carries the conflation by analogy further, stating that the creature “can only propagate like vegetable buds by the same kind of irritative motions, which produces the growth of his own body” (1: 495). the use of the phrase “irritative motions” to describe epigenetic growth suggests darwin’s familiarity with the vitalist principle of irritability argued for by continental natural philosophers such as haller and la mettrie. the same language persists in phytologia, where the polyp is again linked to coral life: “a tree therefore is a family or swarm of individual plants, like the polypus, with its young growing out of its sides, or like the branching cells of the coral-insect” (2). later in the work, darwin also describes the cutting and grafting of the polyp by johann friedrich blumenbach, who replicated trembley’s experiments (121-23). like the botanic garden before it, the temple of nature poetically describes—with the supplement of natural-philosophical prose notes—a world formed by what contemporary theorist jane bennett calls “vibrant matter.”placing herself in the monist tradition of spinoza, bennett writes, “the habit of parsing the world into dull matter (it, things) and vibrant life (us, beings) … encourage[s] us to ignore the vitality of matter and the lively powers of material formation” (vii). darwin echoes la mettrie’s and buffon’s arguments for the self-activating and self-organizing capacity of organic matter, which is radically different from newton’s inert corpuscles: “hence without parent by spontaneous birth / rise the first specks of animated earth” (1.4.247-48). the “animated earth” recalls the anima, or world-soul, of the neoplatonists, which for eighteenth-century vitalists was diffused as an immanent, generative principle throughout living matter, as trembley’s polyp saliently demonstrated.see, for instance, plotinus: “nature is a soul, offspring of a yet earlier soul of more powerful life” and “through soul this universe is a god” (enneads 3.8.4, 5.1.2). the concept of anima can be traced further back to plato’s timaeus, where god, in creating the material universe, “in the center put the soul, which he diffused throughout the body, making it also to be the exterior environment of it,” and thus “he created the world a blessed god” (34b). in the eighth additional note darwin describes how polyps “perpetually propagate themselves by solitary reproduction.” moreover, in the second canto, he writes: so the male polypus parental swims, and branching infants bristle all his limbs; .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .   unknown to sex the pregnant oyster swells, and coral-insects build their radiate shells. (2.2.85-86, 89-90) by linking the polyp to other coral insects, darwin is referring to the marine form of the creature, and by describing the offspring as “branching,” he again echoes la mettrie and buffon in hybridizing the creature as a link between the plant and animal kingdoms, an animal flower. even if blake did not read these lines in the poem itself, this passage is quoted in reviews of the temple of nature in the annual review for 1803 (1804): 592-93 and the universal magazine (may 1804): 514.phytologia was reviewed in the monthly review of oct. 1800: “according to some [naturalists], the union of small beings, which may be reproduced individually, has formed the approximation of the coral and polypus to a vegetable state” (114). in addition to reviews of darwin’s work, several other references to the “polypus” can be found in british periodicals between 1795 and 1804. one is a letter from “b. e.” to both the universal magazine (aug. 1801) and the edinburgh magazine (oct. 1801), “on the difference between animals and vegetables,” which contains references to buffon and darwin.buffon is even quoted: “the fresh water polypus may be regarded as the last of animals and the first of plants” (edinburgh magazine 255), though the author is arguing against buffon’s famous conflation of the two kingdoms. an anonymous letter to the editor of the july 1804 issue of the universal magazine is entitled “on the propagation of life among animals and vegetables” and states, “the principle of life seems equally diffused through every part of [the polypus’s] structure” (15). thus, many works participate—more forcefully and to greater effect than rees’s cyclopaedia entry—in the eighteenth-century debate over the vital properties of the polyp. i contend that blake drew on the ideas shared by la mettrie, buffon, and darwin—and disseminated in the numerous works that engage in the same ideas—to develop a design in the later newton print that is more symbolically complex than the 1795 version. iv. blake’s depiction of newton in the two color prints comes after nearly a century of artistic glorification of the natural philosopher in england and elsewhere. newton’s legacy as the symbol of enlightenment reason is nowhere so aptly expressed as in pope’s famous epitaph: “nature and nature’s laws lay hid in night. / god said, let newton be! and all was light” (6: 317). for pope and other deifiers of newton in the years following his death in 1727, he is the “light” in the enlightenment (though of course pope would not have used this term), not least because his opticks (1704) transformed the way in which light was understood. james thomson’s “a poem sacred to the memory of sir isaac newton” (1727) is even more unabashed and hyperbolic than pope in deifying newton, who is variously described as the “all-piercing sage” (l. 23) and the “philosophic sun” (l. 90) “whose well purged penetrating eye” (l. 73) “could trace the secret hand of providence” (l. 15). he is capable of “ardent flight” (l. 57) and is powerful enough to subdue nature so that “every latent glory” (l. 38) is laid open to his view. in thomson’s mythologizing account, newton’s laws bind the sun and planets to their spheres, and his mind is even brighter than light in that he could discern the latter’s constituent colors.here thomson attempts to one-up milton’s famous hymn to light at the beginning of book 3 of paradise lost by placing newton above god insofar as newton could discern and dissect the light that, for milton, was god. in the newton prints blake is drastically subverting this poetic traditionsee nicolson for a full account of the treatment of newton in eighteenth-century british poetry. she claims that blake’s animosity belied a secret attraction: “we may question whether blake could have hated newton so heartily had he not responded to him more than he was willing to admit” (166); see also ault 162.—nothing could be more antithetical to thomson’s image of newton than the nude figure hunched in the gloom of the seafloor in the later print. taken in isolation, newton’s youthful, muscular body is consistent with the angelic, heroic image conjured by thomson’s poem. but blake ironizes this deification by immobilizing such a body in a contracted, humiliating posture.anne mellor compellingly argues that the posture of blake’s figures is more revealing than facial expressions or other physical attributes, given the smallness of most of blake’s designs: “once the identity of, say, urizen has been established … his particular gesture—crouching down, crawling, spreading his arms over a prostrate figure—further exemplifies his closed or oppressive mind” (human form divine xxii). janet warner also discusses the language of gesture in blake’s designs. she writes that newton’s “downturned” left hand signifies “creativity turned to rationalism and abstraction” (102). the same contraction and lowering of a powerful human form is seen in newton’s companion color print, nebuchadnezzar, which depicts the tyrant bestialized, crawling on his hands and knees with a terrified expression on his face.paley reads newton’s posture as “mid-way between the hunched-over adam [of god judging adam] and the on-all-fours nebuchadnezzar” (37). according to anthony blunt, nebuchadnezzar “is evidently intended as an exact pendant to the newton, and the parallel probably extends to the settings” (art of william blake 60n17). mellor argues that these two prints show blake using “the conventions of romantic classicism” to depict a fallen world characterized by political tyranny and “limited, rationalistic philosophy” (human form divine 151, 155).blunt traces the position of newton’s body to blake’s drawing based on ghisi’s engraving of michelangelo’s abias on the ceiling of the sistine chapel (butlin, paintings and drawings no. 168, verso). he claims that blake combined the michelangelesque form with the figure of euclid from raphael’s the school of athens (“symbolism of the compasses” 61n6, art of william blake 35). mellor also notes the connection between the figure of newton and michelangelo’s abias (human form divine 130), and paley describes newton as “michelangelesque” (37). it is newton’s mind, preoccupied with mathematical abstraction, that has brought his divine body to such a fallen state. blake’s positioning of newton at the bottom of the ocean further ironizes his angelic physicality. as butlin notes, the undersea setting is for blake often a symbol of a limiting and limited materialist vision (paintings and drawings p. 167). this motif is previously evident, for instance, in the underwater depiction of urizen (whose rigidly rational metaphysics and desire for “one law” result in his fall) in plate 12 of the first book of urizen (illus. 10). 10. blake, the book of urizen copy g (c. 1818), pl. 12. 15.4 x 10.2 cm. library of congress. image courtesy of the william blake archive. in the 1804–05 color print, newton has fallen from the heights described in thomson’s poem to the marine floor, where he persists in imposing his mechanistic laws. blake’s rendering of newton’s body suggests that he could regain his angelic nature—in vital, material form—if he could abandon his mental fixation on abstraction. blake stresses newtonian metaphysical imposition of order from above with the iconographic use of the dividers in the design. for newton, since matter is inert and dead, form and order are imposed via a transcendent deity, as he writes in the second edition of the opticks (1718): “it seems probable to me, that god in the beginning form’d matter in solid, massy, hard, impenetrable, moveable particles, of such sizes and figures, and with such other properties, and in such proportion to space, as most conduced to the end for which he form’d them” (query 31, 375-76).earlier in the same query he claims that “even the rays of light seem to be hard bodies …. and therefore hardness may be reckon’d the property of all uncompounded matter” (364). see johnson for a discussion of blake’s response to newton’s argument for the particulate nature of light. newton’s description of matter as fundamentally composed of inert, solid particles of various sizes and shapes is consistent with epicurean atomism as elaborated by lucretius; this is perhaps why blake places newton in such a tradition in his annotations to reynolds’s discourses (e 660). a significant difference, however, is that for newton god created matter, which is eternal and uncreated in epicurean metaphysics. for an account of how newton eclectically borrowed from both epicurean and stoic philosophy, see dobbs. the dividers are an apt symbol for the deity’s (or deified newton’s) division of the material from the spiritual during the act of creation. blake had previously employed them to make a similar visual argument: plate b10 of copy l of there is no natural religion (1788) also features a man in a compromised position (crawling on all fours) using dividers to measure a triangle inscribed on the ground.the crawling man also prefigures the posture of nebuchadnezzar in the companion piece to newton. the text accompanying this design is applicable to the newton print: “he who sees the infinite in all things sees god. he who sees the ratio only sees himself only” (e 3).hagstrum also connects the text on pl. b10 to newton (“william blake rejects the enlightenment” 73), as does bindman (blake as an artist 100). likewise, newton focuses only on the ratio of his geometric design; he is consumed by his own metaphysical system, which he mistakes for the lone reality, despite the evidence of the proliferating marine world around him. blake also employed dividers in the now iconic “ancient of days” frontispiece to europe (1794) (illus. 11), in which, as butlin writes, “the creator in the guise of urizen imposes a rational order on the universe” (paintings and drawings p. 167).hagstrum reads the design—and text—of pl. b10 of there is no natural religion as anticipating the frontispiece to europe (poet and painter 78). like urizen, newton is consumed and confined by the ratio of his law, blind to the creative potential of the material universe.dividers closely resemble another design tool, the compass, which has a stylus on one end for inscription; dividers lack a stylus and are used to measure or compare lengths in a drawing. given the placement of the ends of the tool at two of the triangle’s vertices in the newton print, it seems that newton is measuring one of the sides, since a compass cannot be used to inscribe a triangle. (if he were using a compass to inscribe the arc within the triangle, the non-stylus end would be incorrectly placed.) in this regard i disagree with blunt’s identification of the tool as a compass (“symbolism of the compasses” 61). 11. blake, europe copy e (1794), pl. 1. 23.4 x 16.9 cm. library of congress. image courtesy of the william blake archive. newtonian metaphysics also divides its fundamental massy, inert particles from the active gravitational forces responsible for the dynamism in the universe, as blake’s use of the dividers suggests. for newton, though these forces of attraction ultimately have god as their cause, divine activity operates on solid matter but does not inhere in it, as he makes clear in a letter of 1692–93: “tis inconceivable that inanimate brute matter should (without ye mediation of something else wch is not material) operate upon & affect other matter without mutual contact” (correspondence 3: 253). as john yolton writes, newton “emphatically rejected” the idea that such divinely caused forces could inhere in matter (92). there is thus in newton’s view a strict distinction between inanimate material particles and the immaterial transcendent deity responsible for their motion. this ontology radically differs from the vitalist materialisms discussed above, in which matter immanently contains the active forces responsible for its regenerative and reproductive properties. as dicquemare writes, these vitalist properties are immanent in every particle of the living organism: “the smallest particle of a living animal, has an organization which far exceeds every idea we can conceive of it” (“a third essay” 57). such self-active and self-organizing particles are a far cry from the dead atoms of newton’s system. by including the mathematical diagram in the later color print, blake strengthens his ironic subversion of newtonian mechanism. according to gage, the diagram resembles figure 2 of the first part of book 1 of the opticks (illus. 12). 12. newton, opticks, 3rd ed. (1721), book i, par. i, tab. i, fig. 2. reproduced courtesy of the british library. image © the british library board, general reference collection drt digital store 1609/5551. figure 2 does indeed contain a triangle, observed from the lower right by the disembodied eye (with the browless eyebrow hovering above it) that appears in most of the illustrations to newton’s work. i argue, however, that the diagram in blake’s design corresponds more closely to figure 10 in the same work, which, in addition to the triangle, contains the same curved line that is found in blake’s diagram (illus. 13).all editions of the opticks contain these figures. 13. newton, opticks, 3rd ed. (1721), book i, par. i, tab. ii, fig. 10. reproduced courtesy of the british library. image © the british library board, general reference collection drt digital store 1609/5551. this line curves away from the disembodied eye, which looks at it; the resemblance between newton’s diagram and the conical side-view of the eyeball (conical because the eyelids meet to form the apex of the open triangle) with its inward curving line of the iris is explicit. the single eye visible in the profile of newton in blake’s design also visually echoes the diagram on the sea floor. the lone eye, separated from its human form in the figures of the opticks, suggests what blake refers to in an 1802 letter to butts as newton’s “single vision” (e 722), and it is replicated in the color print in newton’s one eye and lone optical diagram. as essick writes, “newton is himself calculating the extent of his fallen vision as he measures the width of his pupil” (“blake’s ‘newton’” 158). one would need only to close the right side of the triangle in newton’s figure 10 to reproduce what blake depicts. the fact that blake has closed the triangle—in effect blocking the eye’s capacity for vision—further reinforces the limited nature of newtonian vision. blake’s setting newton and the reef against a background of obscure undersea gloom, indicated by the marine greenish-blues above and to the right of the natural philosopher’s head in the 1804–05 print, also parodies newton’s own description of his experiments in the opticks. in order to discern the mathematical properties of light, he shut himself in dark rooms with his prism, allowing only a single small hole for light to enter: “and, the sun shining into my dark chamber through a little hole in the window-shut, i placed [the prism]” (47).he refers to his “dark chamber” twelve other times in this edition. blake’s design emphasizes this aspect of the enlightenment hero: he spent a lot of time in the dark. and if newton seeks to understand the sun, blake portrays him facing the wrong way, in thrall to a diagram of his own creation.kostelanetz also makes this claim: “the limited vision of newton is further emphasized by the fact that he looks downward rather than up to heaven” (126). his downward-focused gaze suggests a perverted form of worship and recalls blake’s later claim, in the annotations to berkeley’s siris, that “god is not a mathematical diagram” (e 664). i stress a contrast between newton’s philosophy and the coralline universe by which he is surrounded, while the few critics who have commented on these aspects of the later color print more often attempt to equate newton with the polypus. essick, for instance, writes that the creature is “a pictorial embodiment of a symbol which in blake’s poetry describes the world created when man falls from divine vision into material perceptions …. newton is fittingly portrayed as the inheritor of some of blake’s major images for the limited world created by that vision” (“blake’s ‘newton’” 156). similarly, engelstein claims that “the polypus is a monster of newtonian materialism, the consequence of a failure of imagination,” revealing “the danger implicit in the failure of scientific objectivism to recognize complicity in its conclusions” (102).additionally, raine writes, “blake saw in this soulless vegetation the same error at work that produced newton’s soulless physics” (1: 241). the only eighteenthor early nineteenth-century text linking newton and the polyp is the newtonian system of philosophy adapted to the capacities of young gentlemen and ladies, and familiarized and made entertaining by objects with which they are intimately acquainted (1761), the title page of which indicates that the work is a collection of lectures delivered by “tom telescope” to the “lilliputian society,” collected and published by john newbery. the work went through nine editions between 1761 and 1798, and in it “master telescope, a young gentleman of distinguished abilities,” asks his classmates, “is it not … miraculous, that if some animals are cut in pieces, every separate piece … of the original animal will become one entire animal of itself? yet that the polype or polypus is endowed with this property has been demonstrated” (2, 93-94). telescope then invites his peers to view such regenerated polyps through a microscope, though he fails to explain exactly how this property accords with the “newtonian system” indicated in the work’s title. as for engelstein’s first claim, i argue that the vital polypus operates in opposition to newtonian materialism—it is not a monster of such a worldview, but a monstrous and shadowy threat to it. the unchanging laws of newton’s philosophy are better symbolized by the stony structure in the 1795 print—with its connotations of the tomb and death, a motif also evident in the title page of urizen—than by the dynamic living coral in the 1804–05 revision.i do not mean to imply that the polypus should be taken as a positive emblem of artistic creation. as miner and others have shown, such a claim cannot be substantiated when considering passages elsewhere in blake’s work, such as pl. 34 of milton, where ulro is characterized as a polypus of “living fibres” that is “self-devouring” and “monstrous.” i am suggesting that in the context of the 1804–05 newton, the polypus is emblematic for blake of a vitalist philosophical system—elaborated by la mettrie, buffon, and darwin—that cannot be contained within a newtonian mathematical and mechanistic worldview. discussing newton’s body and the coralline organisms surrounding him, mitchell writes, “what the picture really shows us, however, is the ‘swerve’ between two antithetical conceptions of the world, depicted as contrasting regions” (456). however, as his title, “chaosthetics,” indicates, mitchell is more concerned with the contrast between chaos and order, specifically as it is manifested in blake’s artistic method (reticulated paint bounded by an imposed line); i, on the other hand, am emphasizing the metaphysical contrast of vitalism with mechanism. additionally, i argue for a contrast between the diagram and the polypus, which i take to be more fundamental than the contrast that mitchell emphasizes between the “enamel-like clarity” of newton’s naked body and the richly textured vegetation of the “aquamarine atmosphere” surrounding him (455). he goes on to suggest that, like the coralline polyps, newton also excrementally contributes to the growth of the reef on which he crouches: “newton must be seen as sitting on—indeed, inhabiting as his ground and dwelling place—a gorgeous mound of excrement that he himself has produced” (457).engelstein also discusses newton’s attachment to the coral: “blake’s figure of newton, which resembles los in his youth, strength, and muscular definition, remains, like each individual polyp, anchored by his foot to the coralline surface on which he sits” (104). focusing on the excremental nature of coral formation, mitchell bolsters his claims with the writings of georges bataille, who is fascinated with excess and those forces—whether of sex, violence, or death—that resist orderly containment. the shadowy, prolific, unclassifiable polyp would be an appropriate subject for bataille’s philosophy, and mitchell stresses the fact that newton is unknowingly shitting the reef on which he sits. however, if newton’s body exhibits polyp-like properties, he is not behaving like one in all respects, since contemporary accounts stressed the fact that the polyp had a distinct propensity for facing the sun, unlike newton in blake’s design.see, for instance, “description of the common polypus” in the ipswich magazine of 1799: “all animals of this kind have a remarkable propensity to turn towards the light” (69). as the disembodied eye in the figures of the opticks suggests, newton’s abstract mathematical system is divorced from the material reality of both the coralline creatures’ and his own living form. i argue that it is this separation that blake’s later design critiques.the image, then, is a variant of blake’s theme of the dangers that ensue when systematizers—like newton—“realize or abstract the mental deities from their objects” (the marriage of heaven and hell, e 38). ault writes that blake objected to newton because of the latter’s attempt to reify subjective metaphor in the form of mathematics: “newton’s system is a substitute for imaginative organization” (162). in the 1804–05 print newton’s system is represented by the idealized and idolized geometric diagram of the eye, not by the body of the philosopher, which is connected (according to the flat ontology implied by the living matter in the systems of la mettrie, buffon, and darwin) to the living and foliating coralline structure around him. in his limited and limiting concentration on an externalized mathematical form, which is positioned below both his body (he is partially stepping on his drawing) and the coral reef, the natural philosopher neglects the vital and non-mechanistic properties of his own divine body. for blake, that body is the highest form of the living universe, contrasting in appearance with but integrally connected to the corallines.dicquemare likewise makes connections between the vital tissue of the sea anemone and that of the human body. in considering the irritability and sensitivity of all parts of the marine organism, he hints that the same might be true of the human body: “the nerves seem to be the chief, perhaps the only, organs of sensibility in man, and the muscular fibres to be the principal seat of irritability; yet how many are the doubts entertained concerning the parts that are and are not endowed with one and the other!” (“a second essay” 209). he asks, “might not the rapid and singular reproduction of the parts of this animal [the sea anemone] be attributed to their gelatinous texture? and if so, may we not reasonably conclude, that the reproduction of our vascular and fleshy parts in the consolidation of wounds is in great measure owing to such a gelatinous matter” (209-10). his third essay goes further, comparing the “gelatinous” appearance and texture of the sea anemone to that of the human brain: “shall we suppose that the gelatinous matter [of the sea anemone] is nothing but an irregular, incoherent substance? at first sight the same might be said of the white substance of the brain, although it seem [sic] to have more consistency; yet in many places it appears fibrous, and if we could trace it through the nerves, we should no doubt discover a most admirable organization” (75). in modifying the 1795 color print of newton, which had equated newton and his philosophy with the rocky form on which he sits, blake was able to make a strikingly ironic and more complex visual argument. this argument drew on a vast discourse concerning vitalism as an anti-newtonian philosophy of life, a discourse whose emblematic organism in the eighteenth century was the polyp. placing newton at the bottom of the ocean drastically inverts the tradition of elevation and deification that had been occurring for a century. hunched in the submarine depths, blindly consumed by his mathematically abstracted system, newton in blake’s later print is a dark parody of his reputation as a promethean bringer of light, and blake’s inclusion of the diagram resembling figure 10 of the opticks adds a further level of irony. by radically transforming the rock of the 1795 print into the living coralline mass in the later version, he presents a powerful contrast between the urizenic rigidity and transcendent imposition of newtonian mathematical mechanism—represented by the diagram—and the vital, immanently generative polypus, with which newton’s own body has more in common. while both the polypus and the mathematical laws may be products of a fallen world, only the polypus is capable of transformation, unlike the oppressive and unchanging 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[accessed in ecco, 3 may 2013.] yolton, john w. thinking matter. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 1983. blake, paul, and sexual antinomianism blake, paul, and sexual antinomianism by christopher z. hobson christopher z. hobson (hobsonc@oldwestbury.edu), professor of english at suny old westbury, is the author of the chained boy: orc and blake’s idea of revolution, blake and homosexuality, and, most recently, james baldwin and the heavenly city: prophecy, apocalypse, and doubt. know ye not that ye are the temple of god, and that the spirit of god dwelleth in you? if any man defile the temple of god, him shall god destroy; for the temple of god is holy, which temple ye are. (1 corinthians 3.16-17) for every thing that lives is holy, life delights in life; because the soul of sweet delight can never be defil’d. (america 8.13-14) this essay considers the biblical contexts for the genesis, elaboration, and later reworking of what can be called blake’s sexual antinomianism—his view of the body, genitals, and sexual love as holy, in opposition to moral law. these contexts, and blake’s sexual antinomianism generally, are surprisingly underdiscussed; in recent decades, religious influences on blake’s antinomianism more often have been treated through seventeenthand eighteenth-century parallels and with regard to other issues. here i propose that the development of blake’s ideas on sexuality and moral law centers on a sustained appropriative and revisionary, sometimes polemical, engagement with biblical texts, particularly st. paul’s teachings on the body and moral conduct, and that this development can be traced through several texts that interact both with one another and directly or implicitly with paul. the three key texts in my discussion are “the divine image” (especially line 11); america 8.10-14, whose “every thing that lives is holy” formula—with its iterations in several other works—acts to link my chosen texts to one another; and the everlasting gospel section f, “was jesus chaste.” together these outline a series of attitudes that, despite some affinities to contemporaries and precursors, form a distinct, recognizably blakean mix that persists in his later work but, i argue, is modified to allow for humanity’s deep imperfection in the state he calls generation. there are two reasons for thinking paul may be particularly significant in understanding blake’s view of bodily holiness. first, parallels between blake and religious traditions such as seventeenth-century antinomianism and contemporaneous moravianism provide only general and partial resemblances and in any case do not reveal the particular logic by which blake works out his ideas.for example, major elements of moravian worship are unknown or distinct in blake (rix 9), including sexual fetishization of christ’s wounds and a substitutionary view of atonement (christ pays the penalty for sin; compare blake’s “offering of self for another” in “brotherhood,” jerusalem 96.21). see below for some divergences between blake’s ideas and those of abiezer coppe, often considered an antinomian forerunner. similar suggestions have been made for jacob bauthumley (makdisi 250, noted below; thompson 26, 27, 41), laurence clarkson (especially makdisi 95, 97), john saltmarsh (mee 61), and others; see mee’s useful point that antinomianism should be considered “[not] so much a specific heresy as a tendency” (59). on moravianism, see extensive writings by keri davies, marsha keith schuchard, and the two together. in doing so, he is likely to have relied on his overall practice of using and rethinking biblical materials; for issues of the body, sexuality, and sexual conduct, paul is the most relevant biblical source. more broadly, paul is a key reference for the overall antinomianism many observers find in blake.see davies and worrall 44-46 for a dissent, though limited to the term’s applicability to moravian doctrine and without discussion of blake’s texts or art. moreover, davies and worrall do not refer to eighteenth-century opinions (notably wesley’s and in part whitefield’s) that did regard moravianism as quasi-antinomian (see, for example, coppedge 45-49 and dallimore 324-32). in a book-length treatment, jeanne moskal argues that blake at first embraces antinomian rejection of the law, but that this rejection is self-limiting in that it remains logically dependent on the law it tries to reject. moskal believes that later blake, in a “sequential” or “successive” stage in his thinking (9, 10), supersedes antinomianism by basing forgiveness mainly on an interior ethics of “virtue” or “dispositions” and an interpersonal “ethics of care and alterity” (3, 7). her division of stages is misleading both because blake continues to attack law and moral strictures in later work and, more fundamentally, because we remain under the law’s domination, so that rejecting law remains a necessary part of blake’s thought. in blake and the bible, christopher rowland proposes that “blake’s antipathy to devotion to a bible or sacred code has its origins in the pauline corpus,” and that blake shared paul’s belief that with christ’s coming “the dispensation of the law is past” (215). rowland further finds in both an emphasis on “indwelling spirit” and the importance of “visionary experience” (200-01). finally, he notes blake’s investment, despite differences, in paul’s idea of the collective body of christ and the “space opened up by the divine life in christ as an arena for epistemological and ethical transformation” (214-15; see also rose, especially 406). of the differences between blake and paul, the most important for my discussion is what rowland sees as blake’s “inclusive” rather than exclusionary idea of the divine body (200), a point related to several critics’ emphasis on blake’s view of god both “as christ” and as a “quantum of divine energy dispersed throughout all life” (thompson 158) or on his relation to pantheist traditions (makdisi 249-51). rowland makes the deeply suggestive point that paul, in focusing on the community of believers as the body of christ, never asserts “anything akin to blake’s ‘every thing that lives is holy’” (215, quoting the marriage of heaven and hell pl. 27). these points of contact and difference, together with paul’s ideas on the physical body and bodily restraint, form the backdrop for the blake texts i consider. the selected texts work together, each supplying something the others do not. “the divine image,” the only one with no significant allusion to paul (though an implicit differentiation), presents both an idealized statement of and a theological basis for blake’s view of the body and sexual love as holy.paul uses “image” or “likeness” mainly to designate christ’s similitude to god, but occasionally in the poem’s sense, referring to humans’ relation to god (for example, 1 cor. 11.7, col. 3.10). the poem’s apparent reference to an ideal and timeless world (and, in biblical reference, a prelapsarian one) is crucial for blake; it leaves unstated, however, the reality of the present world, seen in its contrary poems, “a divine image” and “the human abstract.” america plate 8 and “was jesus chaste” deal with the extant world, a key point because paul’s ethics and idea of christ’s body were based on what paul and blake both see as postlapsarian and, presently, eschatological contexts. these two poems view the world through the distinct lenses of an imminently expected eschaton and of jesus as ever-present opponent of law and restraint. both perspectives bring blake face to face with paul’s ambiguous legacy as the theorist both of the law’s supersession in christ’s new dispensation and of voluntary observance of the law and restraint, especially in sexual practices. in these texts, blake selects two linked statements of paul’s ideas, both from 1 corinthians, for polemical contestation (america) and for paraphrase, revision, and recontextualization (“was jesus chaste”). in so doing he states, restates, and then modifies his sense of what the body’s holiness means in the world. “love, the human form divine” “the divine image” (see enlargement). songs of innocence and of experience copy y, composed 1789, 1794 and printed 1825. leaf 15.7 x 14.1 cm. metropolitan museum of art, new york. rogers fund, 1917. accession no. 17.10.18. image courtesy of the william blake archive. “the divine image” (1789) reworks and expands a foundational biblical statement, “and god said, let us make man in our image, after our likeness” (gen. 1.26), presenting humans’ resemblance to the divine not as the result of an originary act but as a correspondence between qualities of two entities, “god our father dear” and “man his child and care” (lines 6, 8). of the four qualities blake mentions—mercy, pity, peace, and love—the last is said to have “the human form divine” (line 11), though in the fourth stanza all four are said to constitute this form (lines 15-16). blake’s statement is therefore that love has the “form” of the human body, that this form is itself “divine,” and, by implication, that the particular parts involved in love, including the sex organs, are also divine, not in origin but in themselves (as other physical embodiments of love, such as the mother’s smiles of “a cradle song” line 11, would be). by presenting the divine as a manifestation of qualities found in both god and humanity, blake avoids the implication that bodily and sexual love are sacred only as reflections of god’s love; the qualities and the body are themselves holy, as shown by the fact that we pray “to” them (lines 1, 15). against this valuation of the body, leo damrosch argues that blake’s formula means “exactly what it says: the form is divine and must be distinguished from ‘the body of clay’” (172).damrosch’s statement (quoting “was jesus chaste” line 94) is part of a chapter section (165-76) arguing that blake’s idea of the body is dualist as well as pauline. (his view of blake’s “every thing that lives” is similar; see 168-69.) both points have merit insofar as blake, like paul, distinguishes between the flesh, or “mortal part,” and spirit, or that which is “from generation free” (“to tirzah” lines 9, 3). damrosch discounts a major blake-paul difference argued below, blake’s rejection of paul’s view of the flesh (sarx) as a source of corruption. indeed, he argues by implication that blake shares that view, citing varied late works. (damrosch generally avoids distinctions between early and later blake.) blake’s attitudes on this and other topics are often ambivalent, so there is some support for the point; overall, however, damrosch misses the nuanced quality of blake’s later presentations of generation. but most readers, i suspect, will feel that the human form in “the divine image” is the physical body, and gerhard von rad’s observation about the biblical passage is apt here: “one will do well to split the physical and the spiritual as little as possible” (58). blake does not say, however, that the divine is present only in the human, as often thought; stanza 2 locates the four qualities in both “god our father” and “man his child,” with the precise relation between these manifestations undefined. thus, the view of god’s “immanence and transcendence as contraries or mutually constituting states” in later blake (rosso 13) is basic in this early work as well. this early formulation may seem oversimple, since “the divine image” reflects an ideal state. yet “love, the human form divine” is a foundational idea in blake, and its biblical grounding in prelapsarian existence rather than later life, in which the human relation to the divine is compromised, makes this statement a kind of base-level truth for him, comparable to those of other “innocence” poems whose ideas remain central in his work, such as “on anothers sorrow.” the line’s very simplicity contributes importantly to later, more complex formulations of the idea that the body is holy, and the phrase “human form divine” itself reappears, always in contexts of fundamental importance, in blake’s three later long poems as well as in the everlasting gospel.see the four zoas night 9, 126.10; milton 32 [35].13; and jerusalem 27 [verse].58. “every thing that lives is holy”: blake and paul in america plate 8 america copy m, plate 8 (erdman) [plate 10 in bentley], composed 1793 and printed c. 1807 (see enlargement). leaf 36.8 x 26.7 cm. yale center for british art, paul mellon collection. b1992.8.2(10). image courtesy of the william blake archive. blake’s “every thing that lives is holy,” in its varied settings, particularly that of america (1793) plate 8, plays a crucial role in the development of his sexual antinomianism. the apothegm itself expands the “human form divine” formula while moving from an unspecified time of innocence to america’s eschatological moment (“the times are ended,” 8.2). its contexts make clear its primarily moral-sexual reference while connecting it to social-political revolution, women’s status and sexuality, and, in america, oppositional correction of paul.this and other works composed in the same period refer fairly often to paul’s writings, which blake must have known from early on. “to tirzah” (probably c. 1795—see viscomi 268, 298-99) quotes 1 cor. 15.44 as an inscription in its design; marriage pl. 8 (proverb 25), howard jacobson shows, responds to and corrects 1 cor. 11.7, “the woman is the glory of the man”; mary lynn johnson and john e. grant find probable allusions in “the clod and the pebble” lines 1-3 (1 cor. 13.4-7), america 5.1 (2 cor. 3.3), and europe 13.1-5 (1 cor. 15.52) (see johnson and grant 31n, 88n, 105n). blake’s watercolor st. paul preaching in athens (c. 1803) presents paul as an inspired figure. blake refers to paul by name in poetry only in lists of churches and sons of los in the four zoas, milton, and jerusalem—that is, as a symbol for an epoch in institutional christianity, and in los’s related complaint that paul facilitates albion’s creation of “female will” (jerusalem 56.42). finally, the apothegm’s context and development in america link that text and “the divine image” to blake’s deeply antinomian elaboration of jesus’s identity and of sexual conduct in “was jesus chaste.” the most plausible biblical source for blake’s phrase is psalm 145.17, “the lord is righteous in all his ways, and holy in all his works,” implying that all god made is holy, but the correspondence is too loose to be decisive. saree makdisi, who uses the apothegm’s universalism as part of an important reading of blake as aligned with anti-empire traditions, relates it to jacob bauthumley’s “god is in all creatures, man and beast, fish and fowle, and every green thing,” and, more distantly, to hermeticists such as giordano bruno (250), but does not comment on its sexual meanings.in contrast to what i argue for blake, bauthumley is emphatic that “the flesh [does not] partake of the divine being” (8). contrary to some suggestions (thompson 26), bauthumley has a fairly standard view of sin as comprising acts and impulses “contrary [to] or below god” (31-42 [40]). in each of its iterations in blake, however, the formula is associated with physical sexuality. it is counterposed to unmet or wearying “corporeal desires” and to “pale religious letchery,” and associated with “the soul of sweet delight” and with “little glancing wings” that “drink [their] bliss”—not always positively, for in the four zoas it and the latter phrases occur in the contexts of sexual reproduction and female entrapment, raising the issue of blake’s later treatment of generation, discussed below.see e 590 (annotations to lavater), in the phrase’s precursor form, “all life is holy”; marriage pl. 27 (chorus); america 8.10, 14; visions of the daughters of albion 8.10; the four zoas night 2, 34.78-81, 93-96. though these contexts differ from one another and from “the divine image,” the parallel between “love, the human form divine” and “every thing that lives is holy” should be clear: as in the earlier poem, here too blake’s wording must include both the body in general and, implicitly, its sexual organs. although in early works blake does not raise the latter idea directly, he could have found support for it in 1 corinthians 12.23.jonathan roberts proposes that 1 cor. 12.12-27, on the body of christ, influenced blake’s aesthetic (68, 71-72); in any case, blake is likely to have known the passage. paul argues there that “those members of the body, which we think to be less honourable, upon these we bestow more abundant honour; and our uncomely parts have more abundant comeliness” (12.23). paul’s reference is to the genitals (martin 94-95, 269n22); he uses the point as an analogy supporting mutual respect among jesus’s corinthian followers, but the statement independently suggests these organs’ beauty and worth. in addition to this basic meaning, the apothegm is linked to an exposure of the theology of sexual restraint. in marriage, this exposure occurs through an attack on religious support for chastity, or “that [which] wishes but acts not” (pl. 27, chorus); in visions, it is implied through oothoon’s rhapsodic praise of sexual bliss. in america, the attack on restraint takes the form of a loosely syllogistic argument in which the second term is not necessary from the first: (1) “every thing that lives is holy”; (2) “the soul of sweet delight can never be defil’d”; so (3) the harlot possesses “virginity” and the “ravish’d” working-class girl (“coarse-clad honesty”) remains “undefil’d” (8.10-14, rearranged). this conclusion may involve the common libertine assumption that such women take pleasure in their sexual exploitation or—more consistent with visions plates 3 and 6-8—that they maintain a core capacity for sexual bliss despite brutalization.on the critical debates over visions, especially the once-fraught issue of female degradation in oothoon’s final speech, see matthews, introduction and chapter 1, especially the comment that the speech affirms a fundamental “right … of sexual fantasy” (28). either way, the implication of “virginity” and “undefil’d”—that these persons are morally untouched, and hence that people and acts usually thought “defil’d” are pure and holy—is the heart of blake’s polemic. this argument, transgressive on its face, is also a counterstatement to paul’s sexual and moral theology, particularly but not exclusively in two passages of 1 corinthians, 3.16-17 and 6.9-19.as mentioned below, several writers note blake’s later allusion to 3.16 and 6.19 in “was jesus chaste.” i argue that blake engages these passages, by allusion, in their full pauline contexts and as early as america. both contrast the body’s holiness in christ with its defilement, the first through one of paul’s favorite devices, aphoristic antithesis, and the second through extended argument. in the first, application to sexual defilements, among others, is implicit; using the plural for the believing community as a whole, paul asks, “know ye not that ye are the temple of god, and that the spirit of god dwelleth in you? / if any man defile the temple of god, him shall god destroy; for the temple of god is holy, which temple ye are.” in the longer passage, paul first considers those whose acts bar them from god’s kingdom, including “fornicators,” “adulterers,” the “effeminate,” and “abusers of themselves with mankind,” then distinguishes what is permissible from what is proper: “all things are lawful [permissible] unto me, but all things are not expedient: all things are lawful for me, but i will not be brought under the power of any.” he then mentions two specific violations that should be shunned: joining one’s body “to an harlot,” whereby (as “one flesh”) christ’s members become “the members of an harlot,” and “fornication” in general. he sums up, echoing 3.16, “know ye not that your body is the temple of the holy ghost which is in you, which ye have of god, and ye are not your own?” (6.9, 12, 15-16, 18, 19).see fee 243-44, furnish 87-92, and sampley 858-59 for issues of translation and varying views of paul’s strictures on homosexual acts. “all things are lawful for me” is generally taken as a corinthian maxim that paul is answering. both passages strikingly embody paul’s ambiguous legacy. the statements that we are god’s temple and our bodies temples of the holy ghost, if isolated from paul’s full argument, bear obvious similarity to blake’s idea of a divine essence in humanity and the body. additionally, the central pauline idea of human participation in christ’s body, implied here and explicit elsewhere in 1 corinthians (10.16, 12.12-27), romans (12.5), and other texts, would have been attractive to blake. further, we can assume he would have approved of the eschatological framework of 1 corinthians and its opposition to social distinctions (part of paul’s argument against status differences at corinth; see martin), though these are not salient in his references. at the same time, what blake would see as negative in paul appears in the warning on defilement in 3.17 and in three features of the longer passage. one is the listing of sexual (and other) practices considered exceptionally heinous in blake’s era, when paul’s teaching, though originating in an eschatological context, served as traditional pastoral doctrine. matthew henry’s influential biblical commentary, for example, calls these acts “gross sins” and those who commit them “the scum of the earth.”i quote henry from an unpaginated online source, subdivided by book and chapter. secondly, 1 corinthians 6.12 and following provide an elaboration of paul’s teaching on the supersession of mosaic law (what he calls being “dead to the law by the body of christ” in rom. 7.4) and the resulting issue of whether those “in christ” are free from any standards or should practice self-restraint. consistent with his teaching elsewhere,for example, “shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound? / god forbid. how shall we, that are dead to sin, live any longer therein?” (rom. 6.1-2). rowland identifies these verses as rejecting the view that the saved need not have “concern about how one behaves” (203), more or less the idea paul criticizes in 1 cor. 6.12. paul recommends the latter in verse 12: though “all things are lawful,” they may not be advisable and one should master one’s desires; in practice he urges readers to “flee fornication” (verse 18) as well as harlotry in all circumstances. finally, paul’s argument involves underlying assumptions about the relation between spirit and flesh and between the believing community and “the world” (raised in a preceding section on suing in outside, secular courts, 6.1-8, and implicit in the discussion of prostitutes, assumed to be outsiders). these are linked issues for him. dale b. martin’s study of the intellectual contexts of 1 corinthians shows that paul viewed “flesh” and “spirit” (sarx, pneuma) as radically opposed, with flesh a “corrupt element, that element of the cosmos in opposition to god and the spirit,” and the source of pollution and impurity in the body’s flesh-spirit continuum (171-73 [172]). while this opposition is only implicit in the 1 corinthians passages, it is explicit elsewhere (for example, in rom. 8.13). in parallel, the believing community constituted a holy spiritual body, quite literally the collective body of christ, governed by spirit and apart from the corrupt outer world (martin 169-70, 176-79). for paul, then, both individual and community were in danger of contamination, one by its own flesh and the other by the outside world. both were holy (a “temple,” 1 cor. 3.16, 6.19) to the extent that they avoided this contamination. blake challenges paul on all these issues in america plate 8, through pointed uses of paul’s own language. placed within this plate’s and the poem’s eschatological framework (8.2), blake’s phrasing in 8.10-12—“that pale religious letchery, seeking virginity, / may find it in a harlot, and in coarse-clad honesty / the undefil’d tho’ ravish’d in her cradle night and morn”—replicates and responds to paul’s repeated use of “harlot” and his warning against those who “defile” god’s temple; his rejection of paul’s language of defilement echoes and deepens in the concluding line of the passage, “the soul of sweet delight can never be defil’d” (14). through plate 8’s structure, blake further takes up paul’s distinction between being “dead to the law by the body of christ” (rom. 7.4) and still being subject to “another law in my members … bringing me into captivity to the law of sin” (rom. 7.23), an idea closely related to that of being “brought under the power” of desire (1 cor. 6.12). plate 8 presents the law’s “death” in its first section, as orc smashes the mosaic tablets and “scatter[s] religion abroad” (8.3-7). however, blake rejects paul’s qualified approval of the law under the mosaic dispensation (seen in chapter 7 of romans and elsewhere), opposing law from the start to “fiery joy” (8.3, 9).tolley similarly comments about “was jesus chaste” that blake “goes beyond paul, in objecting to the law absolutely” (174). the second part of plate 8, presenting bodily desire as “the soul of sweet delight” and a locus of “virginity” (in visions’ sense of “virgin bliss,” 6.6), counters paul’s view of desire as “the law of sin” and its many analogues elsewhere in paul. finally, and most crucially, “every thing that lives is holy” responds to and revises the deepest level of paul’s teaching in 1 corinthians 6, his linked ideas of the community and body. in its universality, the apothegm acts as a counterstatement to paul’s idea of the body of christ as a special holiness community, or what rowland calls paul’s transfer of “cultic holiness” from the physical temple to “a group of ‘special’ people who behaved in special ways, not like the heathen” (215). in this aspect, blake’s “every thing that lives” expands paul’s “the temple of god is holy” (1 cor. 3.17) from its narrow application to the believing community to apply to all living things. similarly, but in a more contestative way, the formula’s inclusion of the physical body and (implicitly) genitals revises paul’s teaching on the flesh (sarx) as a “corrupt element” (martin 172) insofar as the flesh and its members are part of “every thing that lives.” to be clear, blake does not necessarily discard any distinction between spirit and flesh, but he does reject the idea that the two are antagonistic. indeed, his words following “every thing that lives is holy” suggest this rejection: “life delights in life” and “the soul of sweet delight” imply that physical being and acting possess emotional qualities (“delight”) and allow access to “soul”—broadly speaking, what paul denies for sarx. blake’s apothegm, then, allows him to reject paul’s ethic of restraint and to confront what he sees as the positive and negative in paul’s “temple of god” without, for the moment, addressing this formula directly. the centrality of the critique of paul in blake’s understanding of the body becomes clearer first from a return to “the divine image” and, secondly, from a brief comparison with writing by abiezer coppe, the seventeenth-century antinomian often seen as a blake precursor.coppe’s relevance to blake was probably first suggested by a. l. morton (45-48 and 51-52). see more recent references by makdisi 97, 291-93, and elsewhere; rowland 172-74; and thompson 24, 27. with paul’s teachings in mind, it is evident that, even before america, the idea of a “human form divine” in “the divine image” implicitly rejects paul’s view of sarx as corrupting, while the further idea that this form is divine in “heathen, turk or jew” (line 18) similarly contravenes paul’s restrictive sense of christ’s body. by comparison, coppe, who expresses transgressive sexual ideas with some similarity to blake’s, including justification of “wanton kisses” (46), does not reject paul’s sense of the corruptness of flesh. coppe bases these ideas on his own reading of paul’s teaching against status and hierarchy, specifically on paul’s words that “god hath chosen base things, and things that are despised, to confound—the things [that] are” (coppe 43; 1 cor. 1.28). but if this appropriation shows a theologically adept use of paul, it also shows entrapment in his dualism and belief in sexual sin. coppe’s celebration of “wanton kisses” reads as an affirmation of transgression within paul’s terms, one that still feels sin as truly sinful, though to be gloried in as part of exalting the despised. in contrast, blake’s view of the flesh and bodily love as sacred in themselves rests both on his initial adaptation of this idea from genesis 1 and on his later use of “every thing that lives” to answer paul’s dualism and exclusivity. “was jesus chaste”: reassessing the temple “was jesus chaste,” section f of the everlasting gospel (c. 1818), based on the story of the woman taken in adultery (john 8.3-11),blake uses the name mary for the unnamed woman, based on the patristic conflation of her with mary magdalene, from whom jesus purged seven devils (mark 16.9, luke 8.2). provides a much later and more radically antinomian treatment of blake’s ideas on sex and the body, in light of his later concern with imperfection and sin. the story is an ideal vehicle for blake. it allows him to complete and then go beyond his critique of paul; additionally, while it is sometimes marginalized in modern theological commentary because added to john’s gospel after the earliest known texts,see o’day 627-30 for the textual history and a treatment minimizing the story’s moral importance; ashton omits it altogether. the episode’s teaching of tolerance or forgiveness has made it one of the most prominent parts of john in the popular imagination. “in no other place,” a character in fiction thinks, “did the saviour speak with greater sweetness.”rölvaag 199. this twentieth-century novel about norwegian lutheran immigrants in the us mentions the passage twice (once in full quotation) to connote forbearance toward disfavored sexual and social practices. this quality, we will see, is not only opposed to paul’s censures against sexual transgression, but also lets blake broach the very broad question of how or whether an ethic of sexual holiness should become operative in generation. though the poem (section f, my focus here) is based on john and paraphrases several of jesus’s statements from john (omitting the last, “go, and sin no more,” 8.11b),blake paraphrases john 8.7 and 10-11 in lines 26 and 47-49; the most likely reason for omitting 8.11b is that this injunction is unreasonable in the world of generation (see below). paul is still a major target. blake’s dramatization achieves its restatements through direct opposition to mosaic law in its first half, and, in its second, through continuing blake’s engagement with pauline morality. here, blake appropriates and revises paul’s temple metaphor in a way that opens unexpected new complexities, which bring the idea of a “human form divine” fully in touch with his late concerns. in the process, “was jesus chaste” redefines sin and blasphemy—but in deeply problematical ways—as well as forgiveness, and it also radically shifts the poetic gendering of theological authority. in the poem’s reconsideration of sexuality and redemption, its overtly antinomian first part—including the statement by jesus (jesus’s or god’s “breath,” lines 10, 19) that “good & evil are no more” (line 21) and jesus’s attack on the “angel of the presence divine,” a “demiurge and lawgiver” (rowland 187) who is an aspect of himself—is less central than its subsequent theological revisions in dialogue between jesus and mary (lines 43-80).on the angel, a recurrent figure in blake’s works, see rowland, especially 73-75 (on biblical backgrounds) and 185-87 (on this poem). on this figure as an aspect of jesus, see line 33, “my presence i will take from thee”; on its affinity with the “shadowy man” (lines 81-96), see below. the two major recent interpreters of this latter material see it differently. morton d. paley believes mary’s view of herself as “a sinner in need of forgiveness” violates the poem’s premise of the “holiness of physical love” (194); rowland sees no such violation, since the sins of hypocrisy and conventionality that mary confesses, as well as jesus’s distinction between “love” and “dark deceit” (line 58), assume that “love is not a crime” (188). paley’s point remains apposite, however, in light of late-eighteenth century debates that “focus[ed] specifically on questions of female sexuality” (matthews 188), since mary shows considerable shame over her acts. my analysis, incorporating this point, builds on but also diverges from rowland’s. the holiness of the body and genitals (jesus and mary) in casting out mary’s seven “devils” or accusers, jesus tells them they “shall be beggars at loves gate”; mary, explaining her actions, says the accusers treat as “a shame & sin / loves temple that god dwelleth in,” making it a “hidden shrine” in which to hide “the naked human form divine” and scorning as “lawless” that “on which the soul expands its wing” (lines 56, 63-68). the shrine image refers to the “religion of chastity and holiness” that blake explores in jerusalem and other later works (rosso 158 and elsewhere), which treats women’s sexuality as such a shrine or tabernacle, enticing and forbidden at once.schuchard, in associating moravian uses of “chapel” and “tabernacle” for the vagina with blake’s (“‘the secret’” 212), seems not to note the negative connotations blake gives shrine, chapel, and tabernacle. see schuchard’s why mrs. blake cried for her overall analysis. jesus’s and mary’s phrases, in contrast, repeat the basic idea of sexual holiness—“loves gate” probably denotes the vagina (a place by which love is allowed entry), while “loves temple” may do so as well, or refer to a woman’s body as a whole. in these lines blake makes explicit the holiness of the genitals, implied but not stated in “the divine image” and america plate 8 and its cognates, and he underlines the foundational importance of “the divine image” by repeating its signature phrase as the target of the accusers’ cult of chastity. redefining the temple (mary) besides its direct metaphorical reference, mary’s phrase “loves temple” also alludes to 1 corinthians 3.16 and 6.19, as several commentaries note.see tolley 175, paley 194 (6.19 only), and rowland 259n14. however, blake’s words do not simply appropriate but radically revise paul, whose point is that the temple or body, individual and collective (the believing community), essentially belongs to god. discussing 3.16, j. paul sampley notes both the theological point that calling the body a temple identifies it as “god’s special building”—“ye are not your own” but god’s, paul admonishes believers (6.19)—and the cultural resonance that “gentiles and jews at that time were familiar with the care given to protecting the holiness of temple sites as a fundamental reverence for the deity in charge” (831-32). moreover, as buildings dedicated to god, the individual and collective bodies are to live according to the spirit, subordinating the flesh: “ye through the spirit [shall] mortify the deeds of the body” (rom. 8.13). “loves temple,” by contrast, particularly in its structural parallelism with “loves gate,” its pairing with “the naked human form divine,” and its reference to an act of physical sex, means that the body and genitals are of and for love, so that the temple becomes human and physical, a temple to a human divine capacity, and eliminates the flesh-spirit dichotomy implicit in paul. in sum, to say god dwells in “loves temple” is quite different from saying the body should be god’s temple. “loves temple” completes blake’s reassessment of 1 corinthians 3.16-17 and 6.9-19 on one level, insofar as mary’s redefinition finishes blake’s correction of paul’s devaluation of the body and his strictures on specific acts. blake has not fully completed his critical engagement with paul, however, since the redefinition does not deal with two broader aspects of paul’s moral theology, his view of the body of christ as an exclusionary community and his judgments on those outside it. blake, we will see, in a deeply meaningful narrative choice, locates these aspects of paul’s theology in jesus himself, manifested in his words to mary, “what was thy love let me see it / was it love or dark deceit” (lines 57-58). redefining sin, blasphemy, and forgiveness (mary) as part of a long response to jesus’s question (lines 59-80), mary offers several possible explanations of her conduct, adds the temple statement, and offers what amounts to a redefinition of sin and blasphemy: but this o lord this was my sin when first i let these devils in in dark pretence to chastity blaspheming love blaspheming thee (lines 69-72) sin and blasphemy, then, are not attributes of conventional illicit sex but precisely the attitudes that reject this sex as sinful. as rowland points out, “the sin to which mary confesses … is hypocrisy, habit, a pretence to chastity,” rather than her sexual acts, while “blaspheming love had meant blaspheming christ” (“thee,” line 72) and amounts to “a denial of the holy spirit” (188). while these redefinitions are valid on one level—mary has not acted from love—i differ from rowland in not seeing them as simple and unproblematical. indeed, it is on this point that blake, having made his most radical revision of paul in the redefinitions of the temple and of sin and blasphemy, radically rethinks the implications of that revision. the problem stems from jesus’s question about mary’s experience. from mary’s first words, “love too long from me has fled. / twas dark deceit to earn my bread / twas covet or twas custom or / some trifle not worth caring for” (lines 59-62), we realize how much she internalizes jesus’s distinction. we realize, too, that the redefinition of the temple also responds to that distinction, in a deeply ambiguous way. if positive in rejecting paul’s subordination of the body and his specific moral stances, the temple redefinition also opens the way to a new dualism between treating the sexual body as sacred and as less than sacred, and a new exclusionism toward those who do the latter. (in effect, they have defiled the temple, not through specific acts but through using it without reverence.) further, while recognizing that her “sin” was to “let these devils in” (to devalue the temple as “shame & sin” and make “pretence to chastity”), mary also views her acts as a source of genuine shame: “thence rose secret adulteries / and thence did covet also rise” (lines 73-74). in sum, mary’s responses, including her list of motives and acts (lines 59-62, 73-74) and her redefinitions of the temple (lines 64-68), sin, and blasphemy (lines 69-72), all show the risk of enacting a new and rigid religion of holiness, this time of the sexual body, and a new ethic of shame for debasing it. “blaspheming,” in this context, is a particularly percussive term, for given the near-sacred valuation of love in mary’s statement, as well as the inclusion of “thee” or jesus (based on “the breath divine is love,” line 42), the formula recalls jesus’s words defining what is often called the sin against the holy ghost: “but he that shall blaspheme against the holy ghost [spirit] hath never forgiveness” (mark 3.29, also noted by rowland 188). mary is afraid, then, that her acts may merit damnation without possible reprieve. all these ideas stem from and build on the dualism in jesus’s original question (line 58). while mary shows no apparent awareness of this point, her own words, “to earn my bread,” expose the hollowness—indeed, male incomprehension—of jesus’s distinction. easy to valorize because of the speaker, jesus’s words overlook the realities that prostitutes must sell sex to earn bread and, further, that people do engage in sex out of “covet” (advancement of various kinds), “custom” (whether the “frozen marriage bed” of visions 7.22 or the mixed emotions of a marriage voluntarily maintained over a lifetime), and the thousand “trifle[s]” of ordinary life, including sheer sexual attraction without love. all these, of course, impinge most on women, though to some degree on everyone. further, and more basically, to describe jesus’s words as shallow and uncomprehending is also to say they are theologically inadequate, in two ways. they are pharisaical, in the sense of designating a group of people (those capable of living for and by love) assumed to be superior to others, and they are soteriologically empty, in that they cannot save the people jesus has come to save. there is no way out for mary within this self-accepted duality, which can only condemn her acts. the result is an intuitive leap of astonishing power, in four passionate questions that supersede jesus’s dualism without seeming to: my sin thou hast forgiven me canst thou forgive my blasphemy canst thou return to this dark hell and in my burning bosom dwell and canst thou die that i may live and canst thou pity & forgive (lines 75-80) the questions supersede jesus’s distinction because they apply to the ordinary terrain of human life that his distinction neglected. this terrain is also that of blake’s state of generation, the condition of ordinary sexually generated or “vegetated” bodies, with which much of his late work, and implicitly this poem, is concerned. generation, blake’s readers know, is the arena of much behavior that is degraded and cruel, that denies and blasphemes the spirit, but it is also the site of countervailing actions: “then los conducts the spirits to be vegetated, into / great golgonooza … / … / that satans watch-fiends touch them not before they vegetate” (milton 29 [31].47-50). generation, g. a. rosso argues, cannot be avoided but must be the ground of the struggle to transcend its own limits; the “core falsehood” identified in blake’s myth, that “humanity is reducible to a generated body,” is “false because the body also partakes of the immaterial divine realm, making that realm accessible” (187).rosso’s chapter 5 (on jerusalem) is the best account of the dual aspects of sexuality in generation. i return to blake’s assessment of this topic in my conclusion. within this arena of struggle, forgiveness is necessary because of the betrayals we all commit daily in generation—admitting the “religion of chastity” into our minds, devaluing the body and genitals, and more. these are why, despite mark 3.29, the jesus blake imagines cannot condemn the behavior he has differentiated from love but must forgive it: if, indeed, having sex for the wrong reasons “hath never forgiveness,” who can hope to be forgiven?moskal’s brief discussion of “was jesus chaste” (41-42) misses this concern with generation. her chapter summation characterizes blake’s idea of forgiveness as based on contrariety—that is, recognizing and accepting, rather than negating, others’ “acts of imagination according to their own genius”; forgiveness is “achieved in the face of good, namely the continual exposure to the individual genius of others” (47). these formulations are devastatingly inadequate to blake’s emphases on intended injury and self-betrayal in generation. as his question to mary shows (“was it love or dark deceit”), the poem’s jesus is already prepared to accept “acts of imagination”; mary’s failures to live according to imagination (“love too long from me has fled”), which all in generation share to some extent, are what open up the necessity of universal forgiveness. forgiveness in this sense, moreover—if granted—is not individual but part of blake’s (and, changing what must be changed, paul’s) body of christ, a community that affords a “space” in which those bodies not able through error, convention, circumstance, or cowardice to live in the temple may become able to do so.similar examples include the “spaces of erin” (jerusalem 9.34, 11.12) and the “space” that grows from gwendolen’s falsehood in which los plants seeds of redemption (jerusalem 84.31-85.5); see essick 206-07, mcclenahan 150, 152, and rosso 189. this necessity also means that the jesus seen in lines 1-80 has not yet become the jesus blake wishes us to see. regendering theological authority (narrator) in the coda of “was jesus chaste,” blake makes an unexpected narrative move that leads to its conclusion. the narrator does not specify any response by jesus to mary’s questions, but follows them with new information: “then rolld the shadowy man away / from the limbs of jesus to make them his prey” (lines 81-82). thus, the poem seems to shift focus. the “shadowy man,” newly introduced, is an aspect of jesus himself (part of his “limbs,” line 81) and similar in some ways to the angel of the presence divine, likewise an aspect of jesus (“my presence i will take from thee,” line 33). the angel, by implication, was that part of jesus’s theology that initially accepted the law, and so was rejected in the antinomian affirmation of the poem’s first segment. in contrast, the “shadowy man” seems more bound up with jesus’s inner being, but, similarly to the angel, rejects part of jesus, his fellowship with those “god has afflicted for secret ends / he comforts & heals & calls them friends” (lines 89-90; see “on anothers sorrow”). however, while the introduction of the shadowy man is crucial to the poem’s outcome, the shift in emphasis is only apparent. the narrative fact that mary’s questions are immediately followed by the shadowy man’s action implies that jesus’s responses, whether spoken or in his heart, must have been positive, since the shadowy man, opposing jesus’s oneness with sufferers, now divides from him. additionally, and crucially, we can infer that jesus’s prior implied judgment on mary (“was it love or dark deceit”) resulted partly from the shadowy man’s presence within him. finally, it seems probable that with these lines blake is not simply jumping to the moment of the crucifixion (anticipated in lines 82, 85, and 91-93) but evoking a fictive new phase in jesus’s ministry, more fully antinomian (11-42) and more antithetical to the world’s judgments (43-82), that leads toward that outcome.erdman considers the shadowy man “all that remains of the ‘angel of the presence’” (345), a view similar to mine; paley as jesus’s “spectre” (194); pearce as “the historical christ” (of the church) as opposed to the “spiritual jesus” (61); rowland as similar to the “selfhood” (188). there is no suggestion of a turning point in john, whose chronology places the incident about half a year before jesus’s crucifixion the following passover. thus, the poem’s crucial event, jesus’s achieving his identity as savior of all, is determined by his silent acceptance of mary’s standard of forgiveness in the space between lines 80 and 81. several interpretive conclusions emerge from this denouement and the poem’s earlier segments. first, blake fictionally posits a three-step crystallization of jesus’s view of sin and forgiveness through this one incident: jesus solidifies the rejection of law (lines 11-42); completes his rejection of paul’s theology of restraint within the former law, instead implying a standard of the holiness of sexual acts undertaken in love (lines 57-58); and confronts the exclusionary and pharisaical aspects of that standard through his forgiveness of those who violate it (implied in lines 81-82). these steps dramatize blake’s own evolved view of sacred sexuality (and perhaps his progression toward it), involving an acceptance that his early statements of the body’s divinity (“the divine image”) and the holiness of life and transgression (america pl. 8 et al.), while remaining fully valid, are not adequate to what he now sees as the complex landscape of generation. “was jesus chaste” also, in some sense, goes further than jerusalem in its idea of forgiveness. jerusalem, at least on the surface, restricts itself to conventionally defined sins. crucially, the tableau involving jesus’s mother, mary, and joseph (pl. 61), central in jerusalem’s treatment of this topic, focuses on adultery as a forgivable sin, without asking if adultery can ever be justified. elsewhere, i have argued that this self-limitation in jerusalem is part of a narrative strategy of offering broad common ground to those who accept conventional ideas, in effect creating a “fusion of tolerance with continued debate over its full meaning” (hobson 182). “was jesus chaste,” in contrast, defines in blake’s own terms the full meaning of his sexual antinomianism. this poem, concerned with the same conventional sin as jerusalem plate 61, asserts its potential holiness through jesus’s dismissal of the accusers and his words in lines 57-58, but then moves to the implied new standard of holiness that this affirmation raises, and shows that violation of that standard, as of conventional ones, cannot be a bar to entry into jesus’s body. finally, each of these issues—the narrative outcome, the redefinitions of sin, blasphemy, and forgiveness, and the latter’s broad catholicity—involves a regendering of the poetics of theological authority. this point is relevant to arguments in recent general and gender-focused blake criticism that find strong elements of female autonomy in blake’s works. rowland argues, for example, that in blake’s watercolor the woman taken in adultery (c. 1805), on the same subject as the present poem, “it is jesus who in stooping to the ground in effect bows before the woman”; visually, “jesus the divine human honours another with the divine image in her” (181-82; see john 8.6, 8). similarly, susan matthews urges that in the penance of jane shore (exhibited 1809), shore’s “erect and dignified figure” makes “a coded reference to [blake’s] continuing defence of active female sexuality” and against “scapegoating of the adulterous” (197, 198). both interpreters, then, see female characters projecting divinity or dignity through physical affect. beyond such implied messages, others believe female mythic characters in blake’s later works play symbolically and theologically independent, initiating roles, as catherine mcclenahan argues for erin (157-58) and rosso for ololon (145-56). mary in “was jesus chaste” fits both points, especially the latter. while in one sense, as discussed earlier, mary is intellectually entrapped within jesus’s initial dualism, her assertive voice in the text is the equivalent of the self-reliant visual affect that matthews notes in jane shore. further, she shows an active, probing intellect that, while not challenging jesus’s distinction or his theological authority in making it, works out its implications, applies them to her own case, then appeals against their consequences, and in this way becomes part-author of the outcome. from the point at which jesus’s voice ceases (line 58), it is mary who is responsible for each of the redefinitions in lines 59-80; who explains her motivations and so, by implication, reveals the inadequacy of jesus’s dualism; and who thereby brings him to abandon it and complete the theological evolution just described.though one might argue that jesus’s “love or dark deceit” is parabolic, designed to prompt mary’s further thought, the text provides no evidence for this view, and the jesus of this work generally says just what he means (for example, lines 49-56). in this respect, the poem contrasts with jerusalem plate 61, in which the crucial interpretation of sin and forgiveness is provided by males (the divine vision/voice or lamb, god’s angel, and then joseph) to females (mary and, in vision, jerusalem) (see 60.5-61.17). noting mary’s active role does not mean, of course, that jesus plays no role of his own. it does mean that both the intellectual process leading to the poem’s outcome and that outcome itself occur through a plural theological agency that is both male and female, fracturing conventional ideas of theological authority as univocal and male. in keeping, then, with the revisioning of women’s roles others have seen in later blake works, and particularly by incorporating intellectual definition and interrogation, this poem’s female character has significantly affected its meaning. mary’s assertiveness and questioning contribute decisively, though not unilaterally, to closing its plot, making jesus into what we think of as “blake’s” jesus, and, most fundamentally, situating the holiness of the body in the context of our attempt in generation to become more fully human. conclusion: “‘an attempt’ / ‘to be human’” two principal points follow from my discussion. methodologically, blake’s habitual procedure of revisionary appropriation of the bible, rather than influences from earlier or contemporaneous radical christianities, provides the best key to the inner logic of his evolving sexual ideas. as seen earlier, this logic takes him from early assertions of bodily and sexual holiness through condemnation of law and restraint to a new ethic of holy sexuality that is, finally, relativized as one but not the only way of living in generation as part of jesus’s body. at every point in this evolution blake adapts, extends, contests, and revises biblical ideas, particularly from genesis and the pauline epistles. while current and earlier theological traditions may have provided some context, direct use and revision of biblical ideas drive blake’s evolving treatment of sex. substantively, the richest stage of the evolution traced here is the last. this point can be understood more clearly through a double juxtaposition, with damrosch’s critique of blake in symbol and truth in blake’s myth, mentioned above, and with a lesser-known contemporaneous work by blake himself. in three major chapter sections on sexuality (194-243), damrosch argues that blake’s presentations exemplify the “problem of dualism” (chapter title) in ways that deepen over time. blake’s early works, he believes, envision a “sexual paradise” that blake also portrays as undercut by “the gap between sex as experienced and sex as a wished-for ideal” (195, 199). later works, damrosch contends, reify the dualism, excluding sex from eden and “demoting” or “dismissing” it to beulah (234, 236, 238) while, on the other hand, regarding sex in generation as essentially negative and entrapping: blake “appears increasingly troubled by the fact that the ‘places of joy & love’ … are ‘excrementitious’” (196, quoting jerusalem 88.39). damrosch notes that los’s spectre is speaking, but adds that “it would be hard to deny that [blake] has experienced the uneasiness that the spectre expresses” (196). it is easy to quarrel with damrosch’s specifics, including his view of eden as sexless (on this point see connolly 214-21, hobson 169-70) and his discounting or omission of late passages on the holiness of sex and the genitals, such as “was jesus chaste” lines 64-66 (briefly mentioned on 196) or jerusalem’s invocation of “holy generation,” in which the lamb of god appears in generation’s “gardens” and “palaces” (7.65, 69). more fundamentally, damrosch was at least approximately right in seeing an unacknowledged dualism in blake’s earlier work, but wrong in finding that blake’s evolution reified this dualism in an eden-generation split in later work, rather than acknowledging it as a duality within generation itself. his theorization owes much to reliance on an idea of generation taken over from critical tradition—“the fallen world of generation, which [sex] perpetuates by its power of reproduction” (198)—in place of full analysis of blake’s presentations of sex in generation. those presentations, in both “was jesus chaste” and jerusalem, lead to a mixed, partly contradictory recognition of the holiness of sexual life and the inability of many to live in this holiness, and hence of what i call above “our attempt in generation to become more fully human.” urizen plate 11 from a small book of designs copy b, printed 1796 and finished c. 1818 (see enlargement). leaf 26.6 × 18.5 cm. reproduced courtesy of the tate. image © tate, london 2019. t13003. those words are not mine alone, but draw on one of blake’s most suggestive, if gnomic, works, a version of the image of two males, one chained and the other with a hammer, also found in the book of urizen and a small book of designs copy a. probably printed at the same time as copy a, but finished for the small book of designs copy b about 1818, contemporaneously with “was jesus chaste” and late work on jerusalem, this page is one of several for copy b that came to light only in 2007.see butlin and hamlyn for particulars, especially p. 65 for the image and p. 58 for the image description. the urizen image is plate 11 in erdman’s numbering (object number varies in the blake archive); the small book copy a image is object 19 in the archive. in the image’s original context in urizen, the figures represent urizen and los, who, after hammering a form for urizen, sinks back in the image, having “shrunk from his task” (13.20). a leaning or falling tower and a domelike shape in the background suggest the “revolutions of empires” theme that preoccupied blake at the time. as the image is re-presented in small book copies a and b, with no narrative specifying these identities, the figures seem more general emblems, perhaps slave or prisoner and free laborer (the chains and hammer), or a human creation and creator in general. the radical new element in small book copy b is blake’s caption, “‘every thing is an attempt’ / ‘to be human’”. this gives the design a new interpretive context in which the figures remain situated in history, suggested by the tower and dome, but their individual efforts and their relationships to each other and to history emerge as “attempt[s] / to be human.” of course, we must ask what it means to “attempt / to be human.” in blake’s terms, the figures with their background seem to mean that “human” is what we all are, in all our blood and filth. thus, the long history of war, enslavement, and degradation, as well as hope and love, that blake begins chronicling in urizen, including our lives in generation, shown in both “was jesus chaste” and jerusalem, are “attempt[s] / to be human.” at the same time, for blake the “human” is the potential for eden within us individually and as parts of the human populations that his emblematic figures suggest. the “human,” further, is the “human form divine,” not only the beautiful bodies of sexual beings and their often dishonored loves, but also their attempts to live and move forward in generation. blake does not know how—even whether—this move forward will occur, but he knows the attempt exists. in this sense, the design and inscription from small book copy b and “was jesus chaste” comment on each other, and both together comment on blake’s masterwork jerusalem: “every thing” that these works describe is an attempt “to be human.” finally, in the present context, “‘every thing is an attempt’ / ‘to be human’” can be heard as an echo—in effect a distinct, late iteration—of the signature phrase in america and sister works, “every thing that lives is holy,” claiming both less and more than they: not an 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nora o. solum and rölvaag. 1929. lincoln: university of nebraska press, 1982. rose, edward j. “blake’s jerusalem, st. paul, and biblical prophecy.” english studies in canada 11.4 (dec. 1985): 396-412. rosso, g. a. the religion of empire: political theology in blake’s prophetic symbolism. columbus: ohio state university press, 2016. rowland, christopher. blake and the bible. new haven: yale university press, 2010. sampley, j. paul. “the first letter to the corinthians.” the new interpreter’s bible. vol. 10. ed. leander e. keck et al. nashville: abingdon, 2002. 771-1003. schuchard, marsha keith. “the ‘secret’ and the ‘gift’: recovering the suppressed religious heritage of william blake and hilda doolittle.” women reading william blake. ed. helen p. bruder. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, 2007. 209-18. ———. why mrs. blake cried: william blake and the sexual basis of spiritual vision. london: century, 2006. thompson, e. p. witness against the beast: william blake and the moral law. new york: new press, 1993. tolley, michael a. [j.]. “william blake’s use of the bible in a section of ‘the everlasting gospel.’” notes and queries 9.5 (may 1962): 171-76. viscomi, joseph. blake and the idea of the book. princeton: princeton university press, 1993. von rad, gerhard. genesis: a commentary. trans. john h. marks. rev. ed. philadelphia: westminster press, 1972. a copy of blake’s adam and eve asleep a copy of blake’s adam and eve asleep by robert n. essick robert n. essick has been collecting and writing about blake for fifty years. martin butlin has recently attributed to william blake a previously unrecorded watercolor drawing of adam and eve asleep based closely on the work of the same title in the series of blake’s paradise lost designs commissioned by thomas butts in 1808.butlin, “blake’s unfinished series of illustrations to paradise lost for john linnell: an addition,” blake 51.1 (summer 2017). for the butts version, see butlin, the paintings and drawings of william blake (new haven: yale up, 1981) [hereafter cited as “butlin” followed by catalogue entry number] 1: 385-86, no. 536.5. butlin further claims that the newly discovered drawing is a fourth member of the john linnell series of paradise lost designs of 1822 (butlin no. 537), modeled on the butts group. i first became aware of this work when a london art dealer kindly sent me a high-resolution jpeg image of it late in august 2016. my first reaction was that the drawing was both beautiful and unfinished, as i told the dealer in an e-mail. as i continued to study the work, i became increasingly disturbed by the weakness (or absence) of pen and ink outlining of forms and the awkward face of the rightmost angel. after e-mail discussions with a few fellow blake enthusiasts, i concluded that the drawing is a copy of the butts version by a hand other than blake’s. this assessment is based on the digital image provided by the dealer; i have not seen the drawing itself.for a rationale for basing attributions on high-resolution digital images, see essick, “attribution and reproduction: death pursuing the soul through the avenues of life,” blake 45.2 (fall 2011): 66-70. the new version of adam and eve asleep lacks the firm and determinate outlining of motifs in pen and ink typical of blake’s drawings, including the linnell group of paradise lost watercolors. the pen and ink outlines in adam and eve asleep are rigid and studied, quite unlike blake’s lively and assured lines. the absence of any outlining on many forms, such as the upper edge of eve’s left thigh, led to my initial belief that the work was unfinished. her leg is outlined in blake’s typical fashion in the butts design. the faces of the hovering angels are weak and unconvincing in the copy. the work is slavish—yet often inept—in its repetition of the motifs, their shading, and their positions, and lacks the types of variants that usually occur when the original artist is executing a new work based on an earlier model of his own making. for example, in satan watching the endearments of adam and eve in the linnell group (butlin no. 537.1), the stars in the sky are differently positioned in comparison to its model in the butts series (butlin no. 536.4), three stars have been added over satan’s legs, the sun on the horizon is differently configured, and there are a good many differences in coloring. a much larger halo surrounds christ’s head in the creation of eve in the linnell series (butlin no. 537.2) than in its prototype (butlin no. 536.8), and there are more tree trunks in the background of the linnell example. nothing like the great burst of light surrounding christ in michael foretells the crucifixion in the linnell group (butlin no. 537.3) appears in its model (butlin no. 536.11). the areas where the newly discovered adam and eve asleep varies from the butts watercolor look like errors or oversights rather than purposeful revisions. compared to the crisp outlining and careful shading of eve’s feet in the butts version, the rendering of her feet in the copy looks uncertain, haphazard, even amateurish. when a digital image of the butts version is enlarged, the legs and feet of adam and eve retain their integrity; those in the copy become less defined and meaningful (see illus. 1). 1. left: adam and eve asleep, detail of adam’s and eve’s feet. private collection, uk. right: adam and eve asleep (butlin no. 536.5), detail of adam’s and eve’s feet. image courtesy of the william blake archive. © 2017 museum of fine arts, boston. accession number 90.102. see enlargement. similar dissolutions of form and structure become evident when many other motifs in the copy are enlarged. the toes on adam’s right foot differ from those in the butts version because they are weakly drawn. just above, a small cluster of five leaves dangles without the stem that supports them in the original, while the vertical stem with leaves to the right is carelessly executed and smudged at its base. the leaves extending diagonally into the top left corner of the butts version are poorly imitated and become almost unrecognizable as leaves in the copy. fine ink lines on the flowers below eve’s right knee define petals in the butts watercolor; haphazard ink lines in the copy do not represent anything. the copyist overlooked the outline of the star-shaped halo around the head of the rightmost angel where it points toward the neck and left shoulder of his companion. eve’s lively curls in the butts version are limp in the copy, sketchily imitated with the brush and devoid of pen and ink outlining. the overall tonality of the linnell group is consistently richer, deeper, and more vibrant than the source images in the butts set. blake’s palette had changed between 1808 and 1822. in contrast, the newly discovered adam and eve asleep imitates the much paler coloring of the butts version. even if it is now slightly faded due to overexposure to light, it could never have had the palette of the linnell drawings. if placed side by side with the linnell set, adam and eve asleep leaps out as an anomaly in color, outlining, and brushwork. the manner in which shading on figures is rendered is completely different: small strokes with a relatively dry brush in the linnell watercolors, broader strokes with a wetter brush in adam and eve asleep. the procedure lends volume to rounded forms in the drawings for linnell; similar motifs in adam and eve asleep remain more two dimensional. all three designs for linnell are on laid paper, whereas adam and eve asleep is on wove.i am grateful to joseph viscomi for this information about the linnell group. if the work had been executed as the fourth member of the group, one would expect it to be on the same type of paper. placing the newly discovered drawing in the context of the 1822 paradise lost watercolors weakens the case for attributing the former to blake. in the absence of provenance information, one must ask how adam and eve asleep became detached from its companions if once part of the linnell set. his acquisition of the three paradise lost watercolors is certain; they remained in the family until their sale in the great linnell auction at christie’s in 1918. only the three drawings are listed in linnell’s collection in william michael rossetti’s 1863 catalogue of blake’s pictures.in alexander gilchrist, life of william blake (london: macmillan, 1863) 2: 212, nos. 91-93. i have not been able to find any record of linnell or his heirs selling individual blake watercolors prior to 1918. i hesitate to propose an attribution for the copy of adam and eve asleep with any assurance. john linnell might seem an obvious possibility. in 1821 he “traced outlines” of the butts series of blake’s job watercolors, subsequently finished by blake to create the linnell set (butlin no. 551). linnell may have had access to the butts series of paradise lost illustrations when blake was copying three of its designs for him in 1822. but why would linnell copy one of the paradise lost watercolors when he had commissioned blake to prepare at least three? if he had desired a version of adam and eve asleep, he could have added it to blake’s assignment. we know that linnell’s children copied some of blake’s pictures, but they were either too young to produce this watercolor in 1822 (the eldest, hannah, was born in 1818) or not yet born. a better candidate is thomas butts, jr. (1788–1862). he no doubt had access to the butts series before his father’s death in 1845, inherited the watercolors at that point, and sold adam and eve asleep in 1853. in 1806 blake began to give lessons in etching and engraving to the younger butts, who apparently had some artistic interests and abilities.g. e. bentley, jr., blake records, 2nd ed. (new haven: yale up, 2004) 222-23. the most important product of those lessons is an etched and engraved copy of blake’s wash drawing christ trampling down satan.butlin no. 526. for the engraving, see essick, the separate plates of william blake: a catalogue (princeton: princeton up, 1983) 214-19. christ’s profile in the print is poorly executed. the copy of adam and eve asleep shows generally similar, albeit less severe, problems in imitating the angels’ faces in blake’s original. andrew m. cooper, william blake and the productions of time andrew m. cooper. william blake and the productions of time. farnham: ashgate, 2013. xiv + 348 pp.; 37 illustrations. £95.00/$149.95, hardcover. reviewed by r. paul yoder r. paul yoder (rpyoder@ualr.edu) is a professor of english at the university of arkansas at little rock. he is the author of articles on milton, alexander pope, samuel richardson, thomas gray, blake, and wordsworth. his book, the narrative structure of william blake’s poem jerusalem: a revisionist interpretation, was published by the edwin mellen press in 2010. he has also co-edited, with wallace jackson, two essay collections on pope. he has an article forthcoming on blakean pedagogy and the songs in william blake and pedagogy in the romantic circles pedagogy series, and he is a contributor and co-editor (with michelle levy and colette colligan) of leading study abroad trips to the lake district and other parts of england, forthcoming from the same series. he is currently examining ways to combine his interests in english romanticism and bob dylan. andrew cooper’s william blake and the productions of time offers many challenges and many rewards. in a discussion that spans blake’s career, but focuses primarily on the songs of innocence, urizen, milton, and the painting of the vision of the last judgment, cooper explores the interface between the past and the future (otherwise known as the present), between the external world of objects and the internal mental world of ideas, and between the human and the divine. in doing so, he connects blake to eighteenth-century explorations of brain physiology and the processes of perception. cooper approaches these interfaces as a sort of zeno’s paradox, asking just how close do you have to be to the wall to register as contact? in his discussion, blake’s image of the vortex serves as the vehicle by which this constant but constantly changing moment is entered. as dense as his argument sometimes is, cooper does a very good job of identifying his purpose at key points along the way. in the introduction, for example, he spells out his project: i aim neither to historicize blake nor to re-mystify him, but rather to investigate his modernity as a formalist who exploited contemporary scientific and philosophical research on vision, sense, and mind for prophetic goals. my further intention is to show how blake’s powerful abstractions from physical reality encompass concepts in four-dimensional geometry and the relativistic idea of a space-time continuum. (2-3) this effort focuses largely on what he calls the “performativity” of blake’s work, which he defines, “broadly speaking, [as] what occurs when blake marries his cynical satiric impulse to explode god through the application of an enlightened skepticism toward religion, with his post-enlightened romantic task of prophesizing the mystery of the divine through redemptive myth-making of his own invention” (2). it is not surprising that cooper’s approach, with its emphasis on formalism, is explicitly antagonistic toward new historicism: “if my own book has a polemic, it is that the attempt to view blake’s vision in historical perspective, as opposed to seeing it for oneself, comprises a deeply self-contradictory denial of his performativity” (7). more specifically, “it appears new-historical approaches to blake fall short [because] their strenuous revisionary dialectics too closely resemble his allegories of irony to succeed in placing him in a timely perspective” (13). despite this antagonism, cooper says that he seeks “to marry historicism with a reader-response type of performativity”; that is, he wants to situate “the experience of reading and viewing blake’s works within his critique of enlightenment rationalism and his theory of sense perception” (15). his study certainly examines areas entirely new to me at least, especially eighteenth-century theories of brain physiology. in the latter parts of the discussion, he makes much of blake’s use of metalepsis—the shift of a figurative term from one metaphoric context to another—and indeed his own book often functions that way, revealing literal implications of language that we have commonly read as figurative, and physiological implications for images that we have commonly read as psychological. the book is divided into an introduction and then eight chapters, followed by a conclusion examining the importance to blake of the year 1804, which appears on the title page of both milton and jerusalem. the first five chapters introduce the conceptual elements necessary for the discussion in the final three chapters and conclusion. chapter 1 explores the interface between past and future, focusing on “anamnesis” as “visionary recollection” (27). chapter 2 examines blake’s performativity in the songs of innocence and the tension between “paralyzed self-reflexivity and disruptive satire” (58-59). chapter 3 builds on the work of stewart elliott guthrie to distinguish between “anthropocentrism” and “anthropomorphism,” and cooper argues that “guthrie’s anthropomorphism is the ‘universal poetic genius’ of blake’s all religions are one and there is no natural religion” (79). chapter 4 uses visions of the daughters of albion to argue that blake anthropomorphizes the mechanisms of perception, and to suggest an individualized “common sense” that projects the human onto the “external-seeming visible images” (121). the introductory section climaxes in chapter 5, where cooper provides his fullest explanation of the blakean image of the vortex, which is brilliant and far reaching, but also dense and complex. he argues, “in sum, as blake began to move beyond lyric and pastoral toward epic narrative, he needed a more diachronic form for organizing the shifting imagery seen and heard in songs. this he would eventually discover in the conceptual metaphor of the vortex” (163-64). for cooper, the vortex is both a structure and a mode of transport. as a structure, it links “together traditional allegory’s twin poles—the temporal and the eternal, narrative and symbol” and “creates last judgments wherein readers may bear witness to time’s perpetual perishing” (167). as a mode of transport, it provides access to the interface between states, however those states are manifested. perhaps the most clear statement of cooper’s understanding of the vortex concerns the transition from external to internal reality: “physiologically, the vortex represents the trace-path of a percept as it spirals inward from the ‘bound or outward circumference’ (mhh 3; e 34) of the physical eye or ear into the common sense, the seat of touch, where true contact occurs and sensations of light or sound become objects of thought” (168). the vortex provides access to the interface between the past and the future, between the percept and the idea, between (in aristotle’s terms) “the now of the common sense and the soul’s ‘saying’ that now to itself” (168). with these components in place—the emphasis on interfaces, the humanizing of the processes of those interfaces, and the vortex as the symbolic mechanism of the poet’s access—cooper turns to demonstrating what his approach reveals about three important works. in chapter 6, “freedom from the book of urizen,” he applies the image of the vortex to blake’s greatest short prophecy while also blasting certain critical positions for complicity in urizen’s systems. he notes that in urizen, blake “exploits the performativity of storytelling to re-enact the fall of his own invented ur-myth into the received christian one, the main object of his satire” (191) and that “urizen’s evolving fall-creation takes the form of a vortex” (194). the poem, according to cooper, creates for readers “an ethical crisis, the only real crisis any literary work can effect: a fresh engagement with ordinary practical life, whose mindless duties and heavy routines are found, upon inspection, to dissolve, being in truth abstracted from countless contingent, often improvised individual choices and decisions” (191). not surprisingly, given the polemic he announced at the outset, cooper finds many readers wanting: all too compatibly with urizen’s idea of himself, [recent critics] portray him as a truly hegemonic power. … if the cause of urizen’s fall is his insistence on certainty, then criticism has repeated this error by conceiving of the contrary relation existing between urizen and los, and between the book and the reader, according to formal models of blindness and insight or subversion and containment. … if critics have overlooked just how radically urizen’s authority depends upon their own interpretive choices and decisions, it is perhaps not because they are unaware of their complicity with him but rather the opposite, because they are too stricken with liberal guilt to embrace the freedom that blake (by contrast with his antihero) holds out to them. (196) and just for good measure: “if urizen is a structural presence in everyday life, it is not, as he insists, because mankind are inherently evil but because individuals are so pathetically willing to suffer long and hard to prop up urizenic systems that might otherwise collapse under their own weight (or so blake hopes)” (197). and that extends to the academy: “in terms of recent literary criticism, blake’s amalgam of resistance and compliance points up the naïvete of the academy’s still secretly cherished belief that genuine, revolutionary change can come only from some organized political opposition located outside the system” (197); or, as james scott puts it, these critics suffer from an “ironic combination of both leninist and bourgeois assumptions of what constitutes political action” (quoted in cooper 198). all this leads to an impressive critique of the way in which “even blake became a target for disciplinary self-dissatisfaction” in the 1980s and 1990s (198). chapter 7, “the picture of the mind in ‘the vision of the last judgment,’” shifts from the critique of recent criticism to images of the brain in eighteenth-century studies of brain physiology. referencing blake’s pen-and-watercolor rendering of the last judgment from the egremont collection, his “day of judgment” design for robert blair’s the grave, and the lost painting described in “a vision of the last judgment,” cooper draws in the discussion from chapter 4 of blake’s humanized images of the mechanisms of perception and applies it to the vision’s crowds of human figures. he asserts that “the goal of blake’s later mythological works is to catch hold—in the full, tactual sense of the phrase—of how that which is objective is given to us in cognition in the first place” and that “the purpose of the blakean vortex is to facilitate this gradual grasping of ideal entities” (222). on this foundation, he argues that the vision “is a picture of the mind consisting of a series of schematic cross-sections based on brain anatomy” (227); that is, all those teeming human figures rising to and falling from the saviour, swirling around the design, depict the anthropomorphized mechanisms by which the sensations of the outside world are internalized as ideas. the cross-section of brain shows the interface between, as blake calls it in jerusalem, “an outside spread without, & an outside spread within / beyond the outline of identity” (18.2-3) (cooper cites the phrase “outline of identity,” but not from this passage). there is much discussion of duration (the persistence of an object at a particular point in three-dimensional space) as a fourth dimension, of the individualized human common sense, and of the search for the bodily site of the soul. the payoff is good: “in this way, ‘the last judgment’ establishes an anatomical basis for blake’s lifelong identification of jesus with the imagination. its central emphasis on touch as the means by which the human common sense recognizes its own divinity constitutes a neuroromantic reprise of michelangelo’s god giving life to adam” (239). in chapter 8, “the physiology of vision in milton,” cooper examines the physiology of the eye and optic nerve, and “the capability of each sense to perceive its own power of perception” (277). in this context, he suggests, “the vortex is a mediatory form of inner touch, a way to look within without the strain of going extremely cross-eyed” (251). the target in this inquiry is “‘outness’—the mind’s chronic mistaken tendency to regard objects as external” (250), and cooper manages to bring into question the status of the body itself: “if the body is the universal site of perception, as all agree, then what if the body as we know it is a contingent effect of how it has been perceived, namely ‘by the five senses the chief inlets of soul in this age’” (252). this chapter continues the theme of the previous chapters—cooper argues that “through milton’s universal moment, blake mythologizes contemporary physiology” (261)—and each new area of inquiry turns up new implications: in other words, sense is a necessary but not sufficient condition for perception. this seems a fair description of the blake poet’s invocation and gradual awakening in milton; the passage [from berkeley on platonic anamnesis] helps clarify the basis for that poem’s unlikely combination of contemporary nerve physiology with a neoplatonic theory of emanations. (280) finally, in the conclusion, “‘1804,’” cooper says, “i want to bring this book full circle by suggesting that milton and jerusalem—the poems of ‘1804’—implicitly associate the gleeful paradoxes and flippant ironies of [an island in the moon and the marriage of heaven and hell] with a certain glib artistic dishonesty or at least evasiveness: namely, the obstructive spectre of nihilism, attachment, and personality” (287). his fine-tuning of our understanding of the spectre is especially useful: “milton recasts europe’s burke-faced felon as the spectre, a new figure in his mythology embodying not state paranoia and repression but their insidious psychic effects” (289). blake himself felt these psychic effects: the recursive nature of blake’s mythmaking drove him to recognize that the monolithic satan-urizen of history portrayed in the book of urizen included a more shadowy and elusive figure: the lengthening spectre of the aging poet’s personal life history. his efforts to free the present from the burden of the past were accumulating a past of their own. (291-92) between 1784 and 1804, blake had become plagued by his own ambitions and resentment at their frustrations, and the result, according to cooper, is that blake did, after all, withdraw into vision—not after 1804 but during the decade before when, as paley shows, he began to model his painting after flemish and italian old masters and to imitate what he later called “that infernal machine, called chiaro oscuro … like walking in another man’s style … unappropriate and repugnant to your own individual character” (dc; e 547). (301) after 1804, blake’s poetry became even more personal, and cooper argues that “the reason milton and jerusalem are so obscure and cantankerous is that their mythologies are more, not less, revealingly linked to the author’s life experience than ever before” (291). thus “the climax of [milton’s main tale of milton-blake’s journey to felpham] is not, as in the four zoas, a wistful, patently imaginary apocalypse of time and history. rather, it is the poet’s direct personal vision of that event, recast as an apotheosis of the indwelling imagination” (306). ultimately, cooper parallels blake’s friendship with the liberal joseph johnson circle with his ill-fitting relationship to modern historicist critics. of the johnson circle he says, “they could only have been corporeal friends. their liberalism was rooted in locke and reason, their religious beliefs were deistic and coolly enlightened, their projected utopias founded in political science not prophecy” (301), while of recent historicist critics he says: the irony of blake today … is that historicizing criticism, ever on guard against ‘uncritical absorption in romanticism’s own self-representations,’ paradoxically tends to reinforce the cordon sanitaire erected after his death by the original blake enthusiasts, the ancients. these young admirers rebutted the reputation of madness that had dogged him since hunt’s review, sanitized his antinomian excesses, and ensured a posterity for his work by representing it as fundamentally christian. (315) cooper does not argue that blake was mad or that he was not christian. rather, he argues that for most of his career blake was caught between the drive to speak and a fear of speaking, and those two states imply the same sort of interface cooper has been examining all along. in the deletions in the first preface to jerusalem, blake “confronts and rejects spectrous orthodoxy, while at the same time acknowledging his inability to find a moral language not liable to religious appropriation” (317); thus by gouging out words from that preface, blake “did not cancel and revoke his preface’s message of love and forgiveness. instead, he updated the message by incorporating into it his perceived failure to be heard, and published a garbled transmission” (318). i like this book a lot. the pieces build on each other well as cooper draws the early chapters into the discussions in the second half of the book. i find the discussions of urizen and the vision of the last judgment to be especially enlightening. there are some minor problems. as clear as cooper is about his argument in many places, he is equally obscure in other places, and the reader is sometimes left with the sense of having read a great sentence without really knowing what it meant. the book needs a close proofreading. “the ecchoing green” gets confused with “laughing song” and becomes “the ecchoing song” (75). “thistle” and “thorn” get confused in a reference to blake’s letter to thomas butts of 22 november 1802 (300), and “gordian knot” appears as “gordian not” (302)—a good pun, but i don’t think it’s deliberate. some of the illustrations are misnumbered. but the biggest weakness here is actually a strength: the book leaves me wanting to know more. cooper talks much about what blake finally calls the “outline of identity,” yet he does not discuss how it functions in jerusalem as the meeting site of the sons of albion when they judge jerusalem as their harlot sister (18.3). similarly, he says much that is useful about “vehicular form,” but does not mention los’s appearance as “the vehicular form of strong urthona” at the outset of chapter 3 of jerusalem (53.1). i cannot but wonder how cooper might apply his understanding of the blakean vortex to blake’s explanation of “the nature of infinity” in milton (15.21), or jerusalem’s exploration of the relationship between substance and shadow, above and below, without and within (71.1-9). at 348 pages, william blake and the productions of time is hefty enough, but contrary to samuel johnson’s assessment of paradise lost, one might still wish it longer. blake and music, 2019 “for him our yearly wakes and feasts we hold,” from thornton, pastorals of virgil (1821). metropolitan museum, harris brisbane dick fund, 1931. accession number 31.87.25. blake and music, 2019 by jason whittaker jason whittaker (jwhittaker@lincoln.ac.uk) is head of the school of english and journalism at the university of lincoln. he is the author of several works on william blake, including william blake and the myths of britain (palgrave, 1999), radical blake: influence and afterlife from 1827 (with shirley dent, palgrave, 2002), and blake 2.0: william blake in twentieth-​century art, music and culture (with steve clark and tristanne connolly, palgrave, 2012). his main research interests deal with the reception of blake, and his next work, divine images: the life and works of william blake, is to be published by reaktion books in november 2020. 2019 was something of an annus mirabilis in terms of settings of blake to music, in the form of either direct adaptations of his poems or original songs based on his life and work. while the previous listing recorded nine releases from 2018, the list of new works below includes twenty-three from 2019 (with an additional four from 2018 and one from 2017). one significant reason for the proliferation of blake recordings (as with other forms of music) is that in the past two years it has become increasingly easy for independent or solo artists to release their music via streaming services such as apple music, amazon music, and spotify. indeed, for the majority of entries this year the format indicated is streaming, meaning that they are not available in physical formats such as vinyl or cd. among the highlights of 2019, perhaps the most significant was the world premiere in april of allan bevan’s ancient of days by the edmonton metropolitan chorus and concordia symphony orchestra. a large number of albums were devoted entirely to blake’s work, including those by michael emmanuel, fearful symmetry, william mac davis, nailah nombeko, mick and kate stannard, strange mystery flower, and steven taylor, the former member of the fugs, whose cd contains arrangements of blake’s songs set to music by him and allen ginsberg. of other releases with incidental settings of blake’s works, two particular favorites were astralingua’s space-folk rendition of “a poison tree” and nerina pallot’s extremely affecting version of “jerusalem.” as in previous years, this list omits tracks that use only a single quotation or allusion to blake, although it does contain some releases of works—most notably by britten and vaughan williams—that have been recorded previously. wherever possible, the country of the artist is listed, as well as the work’s instrumentation, duration, publisher, copyright date, genre, and format. most entries also include at least one link to a recording, usually amazon, apple, or spotify. anarchy17 — russia from серая лента; for voice, keyboards, percussion. 00:29:33. koronator, © 2019. electronic/​dance. streaming. contents: 8. love’s secret. links: amazon, apple, spotify. astralingua — usa from safe passage; for voice, mandolin, flute, violin, cello. 00:45:04. joseph andrew thompson, © 2019. folk/​country. cd. contents: 8. a poison tree. links: apple, spotify, youtube. bevan, allan, edmonton metropolitan chorus, and concordia symphony orchestra — canada ancient of days; for chorus, orchestra, vocal soloists, actors. © 2019. classical. manuscript/​score. contents: ancient of days (original composition). note: the world-premiere performance of this original piece took place at the winspear centre for music, edmonton, alberta, on 15 april 2019. bevan, mary, and william vann — uk from time and space; for voice, piano. 01:15:54. albion, © 2019. classical. cd. contents: 17. blake’s cradle song. note: this album is a compilation of settings by ralph vaughan williams and gustav holst, including vaughan williams’s version of “a cradle song.” links: amazon, apple, spotify. ceely, robert — usa from so far ; for voices. 00:41:00. vivace records, © 2019. classical. streaming. contents: 5. five contemplative pieces: ii. eternity by william blake. links: amazon, apple, spotify. dyrud, torbjørn, nina t. karlsen, and ensemble 96 — norway from so is my love; for voices. 00:43:18. lindberg lyd, © 2017. choral. cd. contents: 9. laughing song. links: amazon, apple, spotify. emmanuel, michael — usa songs of innocence and of experience, vol. ii; for voice, guitar, percussion. 01:10:00. michael koch music, © 2019. folk/​country. cd. contents: 1. piping down the valleys wild; 2. the shepherd; 3. the little black boy; 4. laughing song; 5. holy thursday (innocence); 6. the school boy; 7. nurse’s song (innocence); 8. infant joy; 9. on another’s sorrow; 10. the angel; 11. introduction/​earth’s answer; 12. nurse’s song (experience); 13. garden of love; 14. london; 15. infant sorrow; 16. to tirzah; 17. poison tree; 18. little boy lost (experience); 19. [a] little girl lost (experience); 20. night; 21. voice of the ancient bard. link: amazon. fearful symmetry — uk louder than words; for voice, keyboard, guitars, drums. 00:40:20. 1422246 records dk, © 2019. rock/​pop. cd. contents: 1. louder than words; 2. form and substance; 3. innocence; 4. ceaseless strife; 5. rule of reason; 6. damn, braces: bless relaxes; 7. orc and luvah; 8. city of art. note: the debut album by prog rock band fearful symmetry comprises a series of original compositions based on blake’s works, rather than settings of his poetry to music. links: amazon, apple, spotify. the floodshark — usa from another william blake; for voice, keyboards. 01:09:21. floodplain productions, © 2018. new age. streaming. contents: 5. the clod and the pebble; 11. the sick rose. links: amazon, apple, spotify. g-flat — russia/​netherlands from all too human? ; for voice, guitar. 00:38:06. 1524427 records dk, © 2019. folk/​country. streaming. contents: 9. little boy lost (feat. william blake). links: amazon, apple, spotify. hirst, grayson, kenneth klein, and new york virtuosi chamber symphony — usa from benjamin britten: essential works; for voice, chamber orchestra. 02:21:38. menuetto classics, © 2019. classical. streaming. contents: 9. serenade for tenor, horn, and strings, op. 31: iv. elegy. andante appassionato (a setting of “the sick rose” by william blake). links: amazon, apple, spotify. mac davis, william, lynda poston-smith, and robert carl smith — usa from fearful symmetry: the songs of william mac davis; for voice, piano. 00:59:33. centaur records, © 2019. classical. cd. contents: 1. fearful symmetry: no. 1, hear the voice of the bard; 2. fearful symmetry: no. 2, the shepherd; 3. fearful symmetry: no. 3, the sick rose; 4. fearful symmetry: no. 4, the fly; 5. fearful symmetry: no. 5, a cradle song; 6. fearful symmetry: no. 6, the tyger; 7. fearful symmetry: no. 7, the lamb; 8. fearful symmetry: no. 8, piping down the valleys wild. links: allmusic, amazon, apple, spotify. midas — italy william blake; for voice, keyboards, percussion. 00:02:33. capillare diffusione musicale, © 2018. electronic/​dance. streaming. contents: 1. william blake. links: amazon, apple, spotify. the mighty ur — uk from light mind rising; for voice, keyboard, guitars, percussion. 00:35:15. andrew clark-monks, © 2018 (released 2019). rock/​pop. streaming. contents: 6. fourfold city. note: while blake informs the themes of much of the album, it is on track 6, “fourfold city” (taking its inspiration from milton), that he is most directly invoked. links: amazon, apple, spotify. msngrs — usa from psychopomp & circumstance; for voice, guitars, keyboards, percussion. 00:33:25. vulcanic studioz entertainment, © 2019. rap/​hip hop. streaming. contents: 4. tyger. links: amazon, apple, spotify. nombeko, nailah, sarah comfort reed, michelle horsley, sara paar, and marcia eckert — usa short songs to the poetry of william blake; for voice, piano. 00:07:09. nailah nombeko, © 2019. classical. streaming. contents: 1. the lilly; 2. the garden of love; 3. the divine image; 4. my pretty rose tree; 5. the sick rose. links: amazon, apple, spotify. pallot, nerina — uk from english /​jerusalem; for voice, piano, guitar. 00:06:43. idaho records, © 2019. folk/​country. streaming. contents: 2. jerusalem. links: amazon, apple, spotify. pax — italy from humans failed; for voice, keyboards, percussion. 00:32:36. pax, © 2018. electronic/​rap. streaming. contents: 1. william blake (feat. solo ap). links: amazon, apple, spotify. pereny, george — usa from george: poems, songs & raps; for voice, guitar. 00:32:35. pompton turtle productions, © 2018. folk/​country. streaming. contents: 8. rock & roll waters—william blake. link: amazon. rands, bernard — uk/​usa; shelton, lucy, and boston modern orchestra project — usa from canti lunatici; for voice, chamber ensemble. 00:33:00. bmop, © 2019. classical. streaming. contents: 6. the moon (william blake). note: the inspiration for this track is blake’s illustration “i want! i want!” from for children: the gates of paradise. links: amazon, apple, spotify. schurmann, gerard — java/​uk/​usa; bills, randall, and mark robson — usa from chamber and instrumental music and songs, vol. 4 ; for voice, piano. 01:17:04. toccata classics, © 2019. classical. cd. contents: 16. 6 songs of william blake: no. 1, augury; 17. 6 songs of william blake: no. 2, ah, sun-flower; 18. 6 songs of william blake: no. 3, i laid me down upon a bank; 19. 6 songs of william blake: no. 4, eternity; 20. 6 songs of william blake: no. 5, the sick rose; 21. 6 songs of william blake: no. 6, to the evening star. note: this is a new release rather than a new work; see schurmann in donald fitch, “blake set to music: supplement 2001,” blake 35.2 (fall 2001): 57. links: amazon, apple, spotify. stannard, mick, and kate stannard — uk visions of william blake; for voice, variously accompanied. 00:51:21. cherry tree music, © 2019. folk/​country. streaming. contents: 1. the garden of love; 2. a poison tree; 3. auguries of innocence; 4. the tyger; 5. the echoing green; 6. the sick rose; 7. the lamb; 8. earth’s answer; 9. holy thursday; 10. the door of death; 11. the angel; 12. jerusalem. links: amazon, apple, spotify. strange mystery flower — spain strange mystery flower sing william blake; for voice, guitars, percussion, harmonica. 00:23:54. strange mystery flower, © 2019. folk/​country. streaming. contents: 1. song first by a shepherd; 2. spring; 3. miss gittipin’s second song; 4. night; 5. holy thursday; 6. on another’s sorrow; 7. nurse’s song; 8. the little vagabond; 9. a little girl lost; 10. ah sunflower. links: amazon, apple, spotify. taylor, steven — usa william blake’s songs of innocence and of experience; for voice, guitars, bass, keyboards, piano, mellotron, drums. 01:12:09. ace records, © 2019. rock/​pop. cd. contents: songs of innocence: 1. introduction; 2. the shepherd; 3. the ecchoing green; 4. the lamb; 5. the little black boy; 6. the blossom; 7. the chimney sweeper; 8. the little boy lost & the little boy found; 9. laughing song; 10. a cradle song; 11. the divine image; 12. holy thursday; 13. night; 14. spring; 15. nurse’s song; 16. infant joy; 17. a dream; 18. on another’s sorrow. songs of experience: 19. introduction; 20. earth’s answer; 21. holy thursday; 22. nurse’s song; 23. the sick rose; 24. the fly; 25. the angel; 26. my pretty rose-tree; 27. ah! sun-flower; 28. the garden of love; 29. london. note: taylor worked for a number of years with allen ginsberg, and this cd includes his arrangements of many of the songs he recorded with ginsberg. link: amazon. turner, frank — uk from no man’s land; for voice, guitars, strings, drums, keyboards. 00:49:39. polydor, © 2019. rock/​pop. vinyl. contents: 3. i believed you, william blake. note: the track “i believed you, william blake” is an original piece sung as though from the perspective of catherine blake. links: amazon, apple, spotify. van wissem, jozef, and jim jarmusch — usa from an attempt to draw aside the veil; for voice, guitar, lute. 00:38:03. sacred bones records, © 2019. avant garde. vinyl. contents: 7. when the sun rises do you not see a round disc of fire. links: allmusic, amazon, apple, spotify. vox poesis — usa from un quehacer en el abismo (or translations in the void) ; for voice, keyboards, percussion. 00:56:07. vox poesis music, © 2019. new age. streaming. contents: 5. el humano abstracto (william blake, trans. espada). links: amazon, apple, spotify. vox poesis — usa from rhapsodies: the journey begins; for voice, guitar, keyboard, percussion. 01:39:31. vox poesis music, © 2019. new age. streaming. contents: 15. earth’s answer (william blake). links: amazon, apple, spotify. my poison tree my poison tree by sharon portnoff sharon portnoff holds the elie wiesel chair in judaic studies and is associate professor of religious studies at connecticut college. her poems have appeared in midstream, the wallace stevens journal, the poetry porch <http://​poetryporch.​com>, and in the collection rumba under fire: the arts of survival from west point to delhi, ed. irina dumitrescu (punctum, 2016). poems are forthcoming in free inquiry and moment. the sun invited my attention my neighbors shaded me protected me but i would out alas my trunk was hugged by my enemy my sprig thoughtlessly dropped now sprouted to a tree i strove for the light far out i reached but topped unable now to reach the height review: jesse, william blake’s religious vision: there’s a methodism in his madness jennifer g. jesse. william blake’s religious vision: there’s a methodism in his madness. lanham, md: lexington books, 2013.  xiv + 298 pp. $84.00/​£54.95, hardcover; $44.99/​£29.95, paperback or e-book. reviewed by jennifer davis michael jennifer davis michael (jmichael@sewanee.edu) is professor and chair of english at the university of the south in sewanee, tennessee, and the author of blake and the city (bucknell, 2006). her current book project is entitled “poetry at the edge of silence.” as blake’s religious views have come under fresh scrutiny and reassessment during the past decade or so (ankarsjö, davies and schuchard, rix, ryan, schuchard), it is refreshing to see some theologians wade into the waters previously ruled by literary scholars. jennifer g. jesse’s book challenges the predominant association of blake with antinomian radical dissent (mee), viewing him instead as a religious moderate in the tradition of john wesley. not only does she claim that blake “endorses methodist doctrines and values” (7), she also wishes to correct a common misconception that methodism at the time was based on irrational “enthusiasm.” she advances her argument by positing that blake wrote differently for different audiences, so that an antirational discourse might be aimed at deists, while antinomians might be challenged to accept a more moderate view of reason. jesse identifies images and phrases (comparable to the “family values” of recent currency in the us) as “hot buttons” for particular sects. her book thus highlights the need to contextualize blake’s work more fully with regard to the christian religious discourse of the day. as the problematic role of reason is fundamental to jesse’s argument, broad chapter divisions address three potential functions of reason: “definitive of religion,” “destructive of religion,” and “redemptive of religion.” under these headings, she considers blake’s “road signs” addressed to specific groups: deists, the established anglican church, the religious radicals such as muggletonians, and the moderates such as methodists. within each category, she further selects one or two spokespersons—for example, samuel johnson for the established church. at times these selections seem arbitrary, especially when it comes to the radical groups, of whom it is more difficult to identify a representative view. jesse does not claim to treat any of blake’s theological arguments “exhaustively,” and she deliberately omits three rather large religious groups from her study: rational dissenters such as joseph priestley (whose faith in reason would have been shared by the anglicans of the time), swedenborgians (whose beliefs, she explains, were so wide ranging that there could be no single message addressed to them), and roman catholics (because she does not find this group engaging directly in the contemporary debates of the time). nor does she explore any non-christian religions, arguing that even blake’s abundant references to jews and judaism are really aimed at christian audiences, especially the muggletonians (who associated “jewishness” negatively with moral law) and the followers of richard brothers (who claimed he was appointed to lead the jews back into palestine). jesse is honest and explicit about her “roads not taken” (including the four zoas), and while these parameters may frustrate some readers and limit her argument, they allow ample room for future study. in a key chapter (chapter 3), she problematizes the traditional dichotomy in which urizen is cast as villain and los as hero. she emphasizes the ambiguity of both figures, suggesting that urizen not only represents “your reason” but may also be the “appointed” or “ordained” one, designated as “separate” (drawing on other meanings of the greek “horizō”). such ordination and designation might be positive, in the sense that paul uses the same greek verb, or, conversely, critical of paul’s theology (52-53). moreover, she notes the ambiguity of urizen’s presentation, even in his own nominal book, which might be a book by or about him. the book by urizen, for example, might well be describing los in its first line, “lo, a shadow of horror is risen”: the same los who governs time and space. the separation of los from urizen obscures the fact, evident to “a christian reader of any stripe,” that we are already “risen” with jesus: resurrected and reunited (57-58). the possibility of a risen or redeemed reason drives jesse to question “the metanarrative that is usually imposed on blake’s myths that valorizes los and demonizes urizen” (55). she uses urizen and los as a test case for her theory that “blake is addressing multiple audiences at once … using urizen and los as tropes to diagnose what he sees as the theological disorders of his day” (59), so that what she calls “the first story line” with urizen as villain appeals to radical/antinomian readers, while the “second story line” with los as the instigator of superstition appeals to rationalists. yet, puzzlingly, she does not address in this chapter the varying sequence of plates among different copies of the book of urizen, mentioning this fact only in a footnote. this seems a missed opportunity to address the question of variant audiences more specifically. and while jesse makes a valid point about the reductive way in which the character of urizen is usually read, she also seems to make assumptions about her own audience and to assume a prescriptive attitude on blake’s part—for example, “if we are in the appropriate frame of mind sculpted for us by the poem [milton] and have images of paradise lost dancing in our heads, we will surely see …” (62). i must admit, when i first read the subtitle, “there’s a methodism in his madness,” it sounded like a joke. jesse, however, is serious in her effort not only to uncover a neglected connection between blake and this very popular evangelical movement, but also to correct the common caricature of methodism as pure sentiment and enthusiasm. she briefly summarizes the calvinist/arminian divide within evangelicalism and reads milton as an “arminian-style conversion narrative,” claiming that the theological commitments revealed in this poem would be recognized as arminian by blake’s contemporaries (192). the methodist leaders john wesley and george whitefield seem to be the only contemporary religious leaders given positive mention in blake’s corpus, and while there was a split between them along arminian/calvinist lines, jesse agrees with morton paley that blake downplays that split in order to present them as prophets and models of self-annihilation (188). on the other hand, blake’s application of the “three classes of men” clearly seems to mock and undermine calvinism—but, according to jesse, his expansion of the two calvinist categories into three seems designed “to appeal to the understanding of those he addresses, to draw them gently into his story” (190). she spends time defining the central and yet balanced role that reason plays in wesley’s theology (essential to faith, but not exclusively defining it), then returns to her examination of urizen’s role in redemption, tracing the positive use of reason all the way back to blake’s early tractates on natural religion. intriguingly, she suggests that in these tractates blake emulates methodist empiricist formulas (202), putting reason to the test of experience. indeed, what blake calls “poetic genius” in all religions are one sounds a great deal like the “spiritual sense” wesley affirms in his sermons. jesse suggests that blake’s perennial emphasis on “experience” and “experiment” not only complicates our view of urizen but also employs the vocabulary of wesleyan methodists as much as deists (239). the emphasis on conversion and redemption in milton and jerusalem also provides fodder for her interpretation. while jesse announces at the outset that she is not attempting “to squeeze blake into a methodist box” (8), blake’s relationship to methodism would seem—from the hints given here—to warrant more than two chapters’ worth of exploration, particularly in terms of the imagery and language she identifies. the book culminates in a reading of all religions are one from the perspective of each of the groups already identified, finding that it rejects the deist conception of reason while not rejecting reason altogether. in other words, it advocates “a mediating theology” (267), tempering both deist and anglican positions while refining methodist doctrine on an important point (identifying the poetic genius as innate) (263). this persuasive reading synthetically and effectively demonstrates the methodology she has been advocating in the preceding chapters. the “madness” in the title is far less prevalent in the book than the methodism, and indeed could have been omitted altogether, although jesse frames the book with this secondary theme. chapter 1 attributes the perennial assertions of blake’s madness to his association with antinomianism and antirationalism (4). the final chapter, “whose madness?,” cites the arminian (methodist) view of salvation as “madness indeed” to the rationalists (275). however, an inability to be rational and a conscious rejection of rationalism are not the same thing; hence this argument tends to distract (if not detract) from her main one. in conclusion, this is an interesting and provocative book that could have used more careful editing. to my taste, the book sometimes reads like a transcription of a lecture, with some of the repetitions and other verbal tics one might find there. exclamation points appear frequently, as well as clichés such as “part and parcel,” “doom and gloom,” “lock, stock, and barrel.” the use of terminology is not always precise either, as when “images” seems to refer to ideas (122). nonetheless, jesse has opened up important and unexpected areas of inquiry that are likely to yield a greater understanding of blake’s polyphonic work in a heterogeneous religious milieu. works cited ankarsjö, magnus. william blake and religion: a new critical view. jefferson, nc: mcfarland, 2009. davies, keri, and marsha keith schuchard. “recovering the lost moravian history of william blake’s family.” blake 38.1 (summer 2004): 36-43. mee, jon. “is there an antinomian in the house? william blake and the after-life of a heresy.” historicizing blake. ed. steve clark and david worrall. basingstoke: macmillan; new york: st. martin’s p, 1994. 43-58. paley, morton d. “milton and the form of history.” aligarh journal of english studies 10 (1985): 66-80. rix, robert. william blake and the cultures of radical christianity. aldershot: ashgate, 2007. ryan, robert. “blake and religion.” the cambridge companion to william blake. ed. morris eaves. cambridge: cambridge up, 2003. 150-68. schuchard, marsha keith. william blake’s sexual path to spiritual vision. rochester, vt: inner traditions, 2008. review: haggarty, blake’s gifts sarah haggarty. blake’s gifts: poetry and the politics of exchange. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2010. x + 238 pp. £58.00/$99.00, hardcover. reviewed by grant f. scott grant f. scott (scott@muhlenberg.edu) is professor and chair of english at muhlenberg college in allentown, pennsylvania. he is the author of the sculpted word: keats, ekphrasis, and the visual arts (1994), editor of joseph severn: letters and memoirs (2005) and, most recently, co-editor with sue brown of new letters from charles brown to joseph severn (romantic circles electronic edition, rev. 2010). he is currently working on a scholarly edition of the illustrated letters of richard doyle to his father, 1842-43. this book is more about the social function of blake’s art in a number of physical and personal economies than it is about the art itself. haggarty examines the idea of the gift as well as related ideas about spiritual exchange in selected passages from a few poems—mostly jerusalem and milton—but the predominant focus remains the social network of blake’s friends and patrons and the larger cultural matrix that governed the etiquette of giving in the eighteenth century. as such the primary texts are blake’s letters, annotations, and descriptive catalogue. the secondary texts are myriad, though bourdieu, derrida, and marcel mauss frame the most significant discussions and mee and makdisi plug the interstices. in addition, a teeming hive of contemporary characters like duff and hayley, reynolds and robinson swarm these pages and at times push blake to the margins.  haggarty examines gift-giving in five “discursive domains” that ascend steadily from secular to spiritual: economy, patronage, charity, inspiration, and salvation. her contention is that gift-giving is not only a central preoccupation “but a quasi-formal principle” of blake’s work (2). because of his “horror of money” (20; crabb robinson’s phrase), blake continually tried to navigate the terrain between the grubby economy of business and the generosity of the gift, a generosity based upon forging friendships rather than setting prices, adhering to contracts, or exacting compensation. the paradoxes and vexations of blake’s “intermingling” of these realms form the heart of this book. blake’s conception of the gift underwrites “his radical critique of commerce, polite consensus, self-righteous morality, and church doctrine” (2) and is bound closely with his views of reciprocity and friendship. to the bemusement and often annoyance of his patrons, blake’s notion of reciprocity rested on “an exercise of co-operative antagonism” (3) that often threatened to strain the very ties of the friendship itself. in the final chapters, haggarty looks at various incarnations of the divine gift—the “free gift” and “pure gift,” including christ’s sacrificial offering of his life—which disrupt and complicate both the mercantile contract and the more personal idea of reciprocity. the first chapter, “economy,” analyzes the representation of the gift in blake’s letters and annotations and the transaction of his illuminated books in the world. blake implies “the incommensurability of price, debt, and money with human experience,” substituting for the cash nexus his own divinely inflected discourse of “treasures, rewards, gold, talents, and riches” (12), borrowed of course from the new testament. in this transfiguration “treasures” are “gifts that can be exchanged” (12). the unique production of blake’s books, his “cottage economy” (paul mann’s term), and the way that individual sales along with the sharing of his books embody their value constitute more of a social than commercial form of transaction. “what is particularly interesting about blake’s home-studios,” as haggarty insightfully remarks, “is that, in them, places of sale are also places of production and, as it were, the work of consumption. the home-studio is thus, potentially at least, a site of unalienated exchange” (21). the chapter concludes with a fine analysis of the architecture and building of golgonooza in jerusalem, a passage that intermingles earthly and heavenly details in ways that attest blake’s practical difficulty with “treasure.” exploring the historical role of patronage in a transitional time and blake’s experiences with this institution, the second chapter is the most informative and strongest of the book. haggarty demonstrates that patronage was changing in the late eighteenth century, becoming increasingly, in dustin griffin’s phrase, “a site of contestation” (46) that involved overlapping economies of aristocratic and commercial culture. in some ways blake was a throwback to the past in that from the turn of the century until his death he became almost entirely dependent for his income on three patrons—hayley, butts, and linnell. on the other hand, he worked hard to guarantee that these were not exclusively business partnerships, that he did not compromise his artistic freedom in these relationships, and that he was intent on “forging, rather than breaking, the bonds between men” (51). this tightrope act could be challenging, however, particularly since blake based so many of his friendships on the proverb “opposition is true friendship.” haggarty usefully reveals how blake negotiated such difficulties in her depiction of his wily dedication to the countess of egremont (1808), in which he fashions a recusatio that nimbly pirouettes between praise and pride (58-59). haggarty outlines the differences between derrida and mauss in their understanding of the gift’s relation to gratitude and suggests that blake shares more of an affinity with mauss’s notion of a gift “at once free and obligatory” (63). she then applies these ideas to a discussion of blake’s volatile relationship with william hayley and his circle. blake plays the game of patronage through subtle expressions of gratitude in his letters, yet his numerous “eruption[s] of feeling” (72) and “small acts of resistance” (73) indicate that he was “subtly contesting the terms of his relationship with hayley” (72). blake’s defiance and indignation at the drudgery of hayley’s projects ultimately doomed the relationship, and he broke with his patron in 1805-06. he could no longer sustain the paradox of being hayley’s “devoted rebel” (71). as haggarty frankly admits, though blake improvised various forms of reciprocity and friendship with his patrons, he was never entirely successful at communicating the idea of a gift as both open and obligatory—at intertwining friendship and finance or responding promptly with appropriate expressions of gratitude —and often wound up qualifying his ideals of “co-operative antagonism” (83) and artistic freedom. blake’s understanding of charity, shown in his annotations to thornton’s lord’s prayer, newly translated (1827) and in passages from milton and jerusalem, partly subscribes to, partly resists the constructions of charity in contemporary writings on religion and political economy. he opposes “the purification of the gift” (86) and hints that the free gift is always attached to the economist logic it means to refute. haggarty examines blake’s critique of the free gift in the context of writings on the voluntarism of almsgiving by burke, malthus, copleston, and chalmers. from the problems associated with charity and the free gift, she moves to blake’s theory of inspiration, a genuinely pure spiritual gift with no quid pro quo but a curious relationship with temporal boundaries: “it disrupts time’s homogenous flow[,] … resists the division and supervision of labor under industrial capitalism. but it also refuses to break with the temporal cycle altogether. inspiration’s ‘non existent’ time seems … [to be] the generous present of the ‘moment’ in milton” (113). in both later epics, inspiration defies measure, though it is never divorced from labor as many of blake’s contemporaries believed. “rather, inspiration and labor arrive together, in the time of the generous present” (114).  haggarty then considers the disparity that h. c. robinson and others pointed out between blake’s claims to divine inspiration and his working methods, particularly his attention to copying. she argues that blake differentiated between a “seeming” copy and a “real” one and maintains that the latter is more truly like its source (127).  more compellingly, she claims that in his descriptive catalogue, blake proposed that visionary copying was unmediated and that “emulating rather than imitating these originals” was the pathway to genius (129). the balance of the chapter weighs various contradictory definitions of inspiration in blake’s writings, setting them against those of figures such as plato and reynolds and arguing, among other things, that the artist may as readily be “empowered as … dispossessed by [inspiration’s] eruption” (131). for blake, inspiration was not passive, required the reciprocity of labor, and “was as much human as it was divine” (142). that it could just as easily destabilize or interrupt the continuity of a work is made clear in plate 3 of jerusalem, where, as haggarty notes, entire passages are “gouged out” (paley’s words) or painted over and prominent gaps propel the poem “into ever increasing discontinuity” (152). here is evidence of a gift that cannot be realized in human space or time. the final chapter, “salvation,” investigates blake’s unorthodox representation of christ’s “saving gift” (157), his sacrifice of himself for albion in jerusalem.  haggarty shows how the bible and later writings link the doctrine of salvation to sacrifice; how blake critiques such figurations in his portrait of a god who manifests himself through the incarnate christ in the book of urizen; how blake sees christ’s sacrifice as an example that humankind has the capacity to imitate; and how the image of christ’s crucifixion and albion’s response on plate 76 of jerusalem both encapsulate and extend these ideas. her visual analysis of this plate is instructive, revealing that in blake’s image of christ “it is almost as if the archetype is now in some sense paler than its copy [albion]” (182). a brief conclusion reflects further on at least two aspects of blake’s conception of the gift that frustrate any tidy thesis—his ruptures with friends and patrons and his erasure of passages from the third plate of jerusalem that imply a close relationship with the reader. in a book that offers such subtle analyses of the complex systems of social and economic transaction surrounding blake’s concept of the gift, it would have been helpful to see clear transitional bridges between chapters and a consistent evolution of the argument. it requires a good deal of patience to identify the trajectory of the thesis and follow its permutations. too often the chapters read like discrete essays that plunge us into thickets of dense theoretical matter without a machete or the author’s megaphone. so much of the material here is quoted, so many ideas overlap, that often one has a hard time discerning the source of an insight (is it mann or mauss?). in place of a direct payoff from the amassing of evidence stand lengthy cited passages. it’s true that haggarty eventually qualifies or modifies most views expressed by cultural or literary theorists, but the reader has to work very hard to unearth these interventions. one casualty of the book’s format is blake himself, who often bows to bourdieu or derrida and whose poetic texts emerge tentatively at the ends of chapters. the brief close readings of passages and plates are valuable, but they leave us hankering for more commentary, especially on the designs. in the end perhaps only the veteran blake scholar will find wisdom along this book’s perilous path. the rest of us, like rintrah, shall roar and shake our fires in the burdened air. blake in the marketplace, 2013 blake in the marketplace, 2013 by robert n. essick robert n. essick has been collecting and writing about blake for over forty years. table of contents: introductory essay abbreviations blake: illuminated books drawings and paintings separate plates and plates in series letterpress books with engravings by and after blake, including prints extracted from such books interesting blakeana blake’s circle and followers: barry, james basire, james calvert, edward cumberland, george flaxman, john fuseli, henry linnell, john mortimer, john hamilton palmer, samuel richmond, george romney, george stothard, thomas appendix: new information on blake’s engravings after two hectic years, blake collectors deserved a respite. it was not to be. january brought to auction two visionary figures (illus. 10) on a leaf from the smaller blake-varley sketchbook and, for the second time in seven years, the gambols of ghosts according with their affections previous to the final judgement (illus. 7), one of blake’s watercolor illustrations to robert blair’s the grave. the estimate range for gambols was considerably lower than in 2006, when bidders failed to exceed the reserve price. sotheby’s new york succeeded this time at the top estimate of $600,000 ($722,500 inclusive of the buyer’s premium charged by the auction house). in my 2012 sales review i mentioned arthur vershbow’s death and the pending auctions of the wide-ranging collection he and his wife, charlotte, assembled over many years, including posthumous copy p of songs of innocence and of experience, containing 42 plates, and two drawings by blake, colinet and thenot, with shepherds’ crooks and the waking of leonora (illus. 3-6, 11). the illuminated book and the illustration to gottfried augustus bürger’s lenore were offered on 9 april by christie’s new york. the last posthumous copy of the songs sold at auction was in 1981, when it fetched $15,000 (copy h, 57 impressions of 54 plates; see blake 15.1 [summer 1981]: 59-60 and 16.2 [fall 1982]: 87). more recently, single impressions have changed hands at about the same price. some plates in the vershbow copy were unevenly inked and printed. the waking of leonora had serious condition issues. for these reasons, when i learned in mid-january of christie’s estimates, i thought that they were optimistic, but was quickly disabused of that notion when the scruffy doodle from the blake-varley sketchbook made its high estimate of $18,000 ($22,500 with the buyer’s premium). i did not attend this first vershbow auction but watched it on christie’s webcam. bidding on the songs seemed lackluster but managed to achieve a hammer price at the low estimate of $100,000 ($123,750 with the buyer’s premium).beginning 11 march 2013, christie’s charged the buyer 25% on amounts up to $75,000, 20% on amounts thereafter to $1.5 million, and 12% on amounts above $1.5 million. beginning 15 march 2013, sotheby’s charged 25% on amounts up to $1 million, 20% between $1 and $2 million, and 12% thereafter. two bidders quickly drove the leonora watercolor well past the high estimate of $80,000. the work sold for a hammer price of $170,000 ($207,750 with the premium). i have not been able to discover the purchaser of either lot, but both were knocked down to felix de marez oyens, an “international consultant” for christie’s, probably acting for a private collector or collectors. john windle suggests that the purchaser of the watercolor may have been a german collector because of the importance of bürger’s poem to the literary history of that nation.lenore, first published in 1774, quickly became famous and immensely influential. it was translated into all the major european languages under several variant titles, including leonora, leonore, and ellenore. it was not until 29 october that christie’s offered colinet and thenot (illus. 6), a preliminary drawing for one of blake’s virgil wood engravings, and other works by blake from the vershbow collection. blake’s illustrations for ambrose philips’s “imitation” of virgil’s first eclogue are among the most important and influential in the history of british wood engraving. a virgil drawing (butlin #769.19) sold at auction in 1992 for $79,750, including the buyer’s premium; two in one lot (butlin #769.2, 13) fetched £71,900 in 1997. i had expected bidding for the vershbow example, butlin #769.3, to race through the $40,000-$60,000 estimate. thus i was pleasantly surprised when the drawing was acquired by windle, bidding on my behalf, at $32,000 ($40,000 with the premium). in 1785 blake exhibited at the royal academy a group of three watercolors illustrating the biblical account of joseph and his brothers (butlin #155-57, fitzwilliam museum). his career as an original artist seemed to be well underway at that time along stylistic lines established by the neoclassicism of benjamin west and james barry. a large (for blake) and vigorous preliminary watercolor for one of the exhibited works, joseph ordering simeon to be bound, came to market at sotheby’s london on 3 july with an estimate of £20,000-30,000 (illus. 8). john windle, acting for me, appears to have been the only bidder. the drawing was quickly sold at £22,000 (£27,500 including the buyer’s premium). condition issues may have dissuaded some collectors, yet the problems in this instance were less severe than with the leonora watercolor. the sales of these two works within a dozen weeks of each other demonstrate how difficult it is to predict the outcome of auctions. the falling prices for blake’s virgil drawings—almost a 50% discount between 1992 and 2013—deepen the uncertainties. two recto/verso plates from the marriage of heaven and hell, untraced since 1938, turned up in early november—see the first entry under illuminated books, below, and illus. 1-2. the blake materials collected by maurice sendak remain in his estate.see blake 46.4 (spring 2013): par. 5. in the list of works in sendak’s collection i failed to include the clippings from jerusalem pls. 18/19 and 28/35 (see bbs 87). i had expected that his collection would go to the rosenbach museum and library, philadelphia, but that may be true only for books. the blakes, or at least some of them, might come to market in the next few years. online catalogues continue to surprise with rare prints by and after blake—see “zephyrus and flora” under separate plates and the blair (pl. 4 proof, illus. 15), bonnycastle, earle, hogarth (quaritch printing), and wollstonecraft, marie et caroline, entries under letterpress books with engravings by and after blake. while not among blake’s major achievements, such works help document his career and early reputation. they also provide opportunities for collectors priced out of the market for blake’s drawings and original graphics. searching the internet daily can be tiresome but occasionally rewarding. the section of these marketplace reports devoted to blake’s circle and followers is once again threatening to overwhelm the artist/poet himself. beginning with this sales review, i will no longer list separate plates and book illustrations for blake’s circle and followers unless executed by the original artist. exceptions will be made for particularly important or rare works, such as large separate plates designed by fuseli, discoveries, and plates by artists, such as basire, of interest principally for their copy engravings. the coverage of blake and interesting blakeana will remain unchanged. the year of all sales and catalogues in the following lists is 2013 unless indicated otherwise. most reports about auction catalogues are based on the online versions. coverage of regional auctions is selective. dates for dealers’ online catalogues are the dates accessed, not the dates of publication. works offered online by dealers and previously listed in any one of the last three sales reviews are not repeated here. most of the auction houses add their purchaser’s surcharge to the hammer price in their price lists. these net amounts are given here, following the official price lists. the value-added tax levied against the buyer’s surcharge in britain is not included. late 2013 sales will be covered in the 2014 review. i am grateful for help in compiling this review to g. e. bentley, jr., nancy bialler, david bindman, robert brandeis, mark crosby, harriet drummond, mark griffith-jones, gretchen hause, richard lloyd, nicholas lott, constance mcphee, alan parker, william pressly, lucy rosenburgh, joseph viscomi, francis wahlgren, and john windle. my special thanks go to alexander gourlay for his generosity in keeping me abreast of internet auctions and catalogues and for help with high-resolution imaging and identifying blake’s handwriting. once again, john sullivan’s digital imaging and sarah jones’s editorial expertise have been invaluable. abbreviations ah abbott and holder, london bb g. e. bentley, jr., blake books (oxford: clarendon p, 1977). plate numbers and copy designations for blake’s illuminated books and commercial book illustrations follow bb. bbs g. e. bentley, jr., blake books supplement (oxford: clarendon p, 1995) bennett shelley m. bennett, thomas stothard: the mechanisms of art patronage in england circa 1800 (columbia: u of missouri p, 1988) bg bloomsbury auctions, godalming bhl bonhams auctions, london bho bonhams auctions, oxford bl bloomsbury auctions, london br(2) g. e. bentley, jr., blake records, 2nd ed. (new haven: yale up, 2004) butlin martin butlin, the paintings and drawings of william blake, 2 vols. (new haven: yale up, 1981) cat(s). catalogue(s) cb robert n. essick, william blake’s commercial book illustrations (oxford: clarendon p, 1991) cl christie’s auctions, london cny christie’s auctions, new york coxhead a. c. coxhead, thomas stothard, r.a. (london: bullen, 1906) csk christie’s auctions, south kensington dw dominic winter auctions, south cerney, gloucestershire e the complete poetry and prose of william blake, ed. david v. erdman, newly rev. ed. (new york: anchor–random house, 1988) eb ebay online auctions gp grosvenor prints, london illus. illustration(s), illustrated pba pba galleries auctions, san francisco pl(s). plate(s) sl sotheby’s auctions, london sny sotheby’s auctions, new york sp robert n. essick, the separate plates of william blake: a catalogue (princeton: princeton up, 1983) st(s). state(s) of an engraving, etching, or lithograph swann swann auctions, new york # auction lot or catalogue item number illuminated books the marriage of heaven and hell, pls. 5-6 printed recto/verso. sold by private treaty in nov. by commonwealth books, boston, to john windle acting for essick. see illus. 1-2. 1. the marriage of heaven and hell, pl. 5 (see enlargement), printed in reddish-brown ink with pl. 6 in red ink on the verso (illus. 2). relief etching with white-line work and blue watercolor in the design above the text, platemark 15.0 x 10.7 cm. wove paper without watermark, leaf 16.0 x 11.7 cm. both pls. probably printed c. 1790. blake also used ink colors very similar to the reddish-brown of pl. 5 for 14 pls. in copy b of the marriage, also printed c. 1790. mounted in a window cut in a leaf of wove paper without watermark, 31.2 x 23.8 cm. and numbered “90” (not shown) in pen and brown ink top right. a framing line is inscribed in brown ink on the mount very close to the edges of the window. this is very probably the mount into which the leaf bearing pls. 5 and 6 was inlaid and the mount in turn bound “about 1853” (bb 337) by george a. smith with the “order” of the songs of innocence and of experience and many other prints from blake’s illuminated books. the number top right probably represents the position of this leaf within the album. these impressions were formerly untraced since their sale at auction in 1938; see bb 287, 301, 338 #54, 341 #m1-2. eight stabholes, cut into by the left edge of the mount, measure from the top hole 4.0, 3.8, 1.9, 2.5, 4.7, 5.4, and 4.15 cm. apart. a second set of 18 much smaller holes is about 3 mm. within the left edge of the mount; these are all about 1.5 cm. apart. the mount inscribed in pencil below the print, “from marriage of heaven & hell page 5”; the verso inscribed in the same position by the same hand “heaven & hell page 6.” essick collection. click to show more. a label associated with these marriage pls., probably once pasted to the back of a former mat or frame, bears a pen and ink inscription: “purchased for john j. slocum / by dr. jacob schwartz / at the [george c.] smith sale, nov. 2, 1938, [#36] / for $45.00., at park[e] bernet galleries / j. j. s. attended sale with his / aunt olivia & uncle sherman flint.” the price recorded on this label apparently includes a $5 fee for schwartz, since the lot sold for $40. provenance: as in bb to 1938; acquired at the smith auction by the dealer jacob schwartz acting for the american diplomat and james joyce bibliographer john j. slocum (1914-97); by inheritance in 1997 to the person who brought the work, framed and double glazed, to commonwealth books, boston, in oct.; on consignment with commonwealth books, nov. (not priced); sold nov. to john windle acting for essick. a lightly inked outline curves right of the horse in the design above the text and loops just above the final word in line 1 (“theirs”). a similar shadowy line, even more lightly printed, can be seen above and to the left of the falling figure. this is the escarpment of a plateau created by step etching. after an initial etch, blake covered the design with acid resist, then etched the uncovered areas to a slightly greater depth. the inking ball caught the edge of the plateau and deposited a little ink. the smudged appearance of these lines suggests that blake attempted to wipe them clean of ink but did not completely succeed. a similar effort may have extended to the areas between the man’s legs and below the horse’s muzzle, leaving behind a slight brown tone. there is no evidence of the edge of a step between the design and the text; the application of acid resist may have extended over both. if so, then only the large blank areas upper right and left would have been exposed to a second treatment with acid. the ink ball would not have been supported by relief surfaces in these portions of the copperplate; it makes sense to etch them more deeply to prevent foul inking. some ink also adhered to and printed from the etching dike, particularly along the lower left and right margins. blake may have cleaned most of the ink from the top and bottom etching dikes, although parts of their inner edges can still be seen. the serpent above the 3rd line of text from the end does not show the white-line stippling, deployed to indicate scales, clearly visible in copy b of the marriage. i suspect that the white-line work was present on the copperplate when this impression was pulled but that it was obscured by heavy inking and printing. this would also appear to be the case with pl. 5 in copy c. the platemark, more prominent than in the vast majority of blake’s relief etchings, also indicates that this example was printed with greater pressure than usual. the blue coloring used to indicate sky in the design seems unimpressive at first sight, but the tinting on the falling figure was applied with some care, perhaps as an undertone in anticipation of subsequent applications of rose and pink. blake used such combinations of colors to represent flesh in his watercolors. i hesitate, however, to attribute the washes to either blake or his wife, catherine. click to show less. 2. the marriage of heaven and hell, pl. 6, printed in red ink with pl. 5 on the recto (illus. 1). relief etching, probably printed c. 1790. the platemark is 10.1 cm. in width. the edge of the window into which the leaf is inlaid covers the top platemark; bb 68 records a height of 15.1 cm. text from pl. 5 shows through as a blind embossment on this verso, particularly lower left. essick collection. see the caption to illus. 1 for further information. the pl. is poorly printed lower left. joseph viscomi suggests that this resulted from an unbalanced roller in blake’s press. perhaps this impression and its companion on the recto were trial pulls before blake had properly adjusted his press. pl. 6 in copy b of the marriage shows slightly better, but still weak, printing lower left. neither viscomi nor i have been able to find a close match for the red ink of this impression among blake’s other printings of marriage pls. datable to c. 1790. the color befits the “memorable fancy” beginning on this pl.: “as i was walking among the fires of hell, ….” songs of innocence and of experience, posthumous copy p. forty-two pls. (bb pls. 1-14, 16-29, 33-36, 38-43, 46, 49, and 52-53) on 42 leaves of wove paper, 18.7 x 12.9 cm., some showing j whatman / 1831 and j whatman / 1832 watermarks. printed in black ink by frederick tatham in 1832 or later. bound in 19th-century green morocco, quarter morocco folding case. bbs 112, 130. cny, 9 april, #64, from the collection of arthur and charlotte vershbow, “brief autograph description of the book laid in,” illus. ($123,750; estimate $100,000-150,000). i have had no response to a letter of inquiry kindly passed along to the new owner by francis wahlgren of christie’s. see illus. 3-5. 3. title page to songs of innocence and of experience, posthumous copy p (see enlargement of design). bb pl. 1. relief etching printed in black ink, image and platemark 11.5 x 7.1 cm., leaf of wove paper 18.7 x 12.9 cm. printed 1832 or later by frederick tatham. photo courtesy of christie’s new york.  this impression is in a previously unrecorded 2nd st. when compared to lifetime impressions, such as the well-inked and uncolored example in copy bb, this posthumous impression shows that work with a tool has cut away some of the relief surfaces left of the upper figure’s left upper arm, above his head (thereby eliminating part of his left hand), and along the lower edge of his left leg and foot. similar work appears on the lower figure’s left upper arm, above and to the left of her head, and on her left upper leg and foot. a relief patch in the upper outline of her back, just below the man’s right knee, has been almost completely cut away. some of the relief surface just above the lower left margin may also have been eliminated with a tool, although blotchy inking contributes to the white-line effects in this area. i have found this 2nd st. only in other posthumous copies (e.g., copies b and h); it does not appear in late copies printed by blake, such as z and aa of 1826. the 2nd st. alterations may have been made by blake’s wife, catherine, or tatham after blake’s death. 4. “the lamb,” songs of innocence and of experience, posthumous copy p. bb pl. 8. relief etching printed in black ink, image 11.8 x 7.8 cm., platemark 12.3 x 7.8 cm., leaf of wove paper 18.7 x 12.9 cm. printed 1832 or later by frederick tatham. this impression shows weak inking and printing along the right border and the top left corner. photo courtesy of christie’s new york. 5. “london,” songs of innocence and of experience, posthumous copy p. bb pl. 46. relief etching printed in black ink, image and platemark 11.3 x 7.0 cm., leaf of wove paper 18.7 x 12.9 cm. printed 1832 or later by frederick tatham. this impression is reasonably well printed in a grainy ink, but with some foul inking of recessed areas within the cloud of smoke right of the second stanza. was this style of inking and printing a purposeful attempt to create a smoky effect? a positive answer might be giving too much credit to tatham. photo courtesy of christie’s new york. drawings and paintings colinet and thenot, with shepherds’ crooks, leaning against trees, a preliminary drawing for blake’s 4th wood engraving in r. j. thornton’s ed. of the pastorals of virgil, 1821. monochrome wash drawing, 3.7 x 9.6 cm., datable to c. 1820. butlin #769.3 (then untraced). cny, 29 oct., #790, from the collection of arthur and charlotte vershbow, framed, illus. ($40,000 to john windle acting for essick). see illus. 6. 6. colinet and thenot, with shepherds’ crooks, leaning against trees, a preliminary drawing for blake’s 4th wood engraving (bb #504, pl. 8) in r. j. thornton’s ed. of the pastorals of virgil, 1821 (see enlargement). gray and black ink (possibly over pencil), white and gray wash, 3.7 x 9.6 cm., datable to c. 1820. the strengthening of selected lines in black ink may have been added at a slightly later time than the drawing in gray ink. butlin #769.3 (then untraced). essick collection. click to show more. this small drawing shows a surprising number of pentimenti. colinet, the younger shepherd on the left, was originally placed closer to the sheep. he may have been kneeling. the sheep closest to colinet was sketched further left, his head raised higher. a few lines above the dog suggest foliage, either a tree on a distant hill or branches and leaves descending from the large tree on the left, as in the relief etching of the design. the dog’s head may have been sketched closer to the running shepherd’s right leg. this man’s right arm was first sketched a little lower, his left arm a little higher, and his shepherd’s crook higher and further right. the branch arching above thenot, the older shepherd on the right, and its leaves above the flock of sheep were originally slightly higher than their bolder execution in black ink. a patch of light gray pigment just below thenot’s left armpit probably masks some preliminary sketching. blake then added a few ink lines over the white area to define thenot’s chest and left upper arm. thin washes around colinet’s hands hint at other modifications. the cluster of light brown lines below the running flock may simply be stains similar to the darker brown spots along the design’s lower edge. this drawing is intermediate between blake’s relief etching of the design and his wood engraving; see essick, “a relief etching of blake’s virgil illustrations,” blake 25.3 (winter 1991-92): 117-27. all of blake’s wood engravings illustrate ambrose philips’s “imitation” of virgil’s first eclogue. in this preliminary drawing, as in the wood engraving, colinet holds his shepherd’s crook in his left hand and panpipes in his right. thenot leans against the tree on the right and gestures with his right hand toward a third shepherd, lightfoot, who runs on the background hill followed by his barking dog. blake is probably responding to a brief speech by thenot: “see lightfoot; he shall tend them [the sheep] close; and i / ‘tween whiles, across the plain will glance mine eyes.—” (1: 14 of thornton’s ed.). lightfoot seems to be driving the hillside flock rapidly to the right, but the sheep have their heads turned back toward the left. the marks top center would appear to be fragments from a mostly scraped away inscription in brown ink. based on extensive analysis using high-resolution images captured with a celestron digital microscope, alexander gourlay has determined that the word is “wolves.” the lines illustrated in philips’s text do not refer to any predators, but a slightly later passage, illustrated by another wood engraving, names both the “fox” and “wolf” as potential threats. if “wolves” is a title or caption for the design reproduced here, it provides an explanation for the running dog, man, and sheep: all are fleeing wolves. as butlin points out, lightfoot’s posture “recalls the messengers in the job illustration” coming to tell job and his wife of the destruction of their possessions, including their “sheep” (job 1.16). blake first executed the job design as a watercolor c. 1805-06 (butlin #550.4). similar brown-ink fragments of different words, probably including “colinet” on butlin #769.2 and possibly “thenot” on butlin #769.7, appear top center on several other virgil drawings; see blake 31.4 (spring 1998): 124, caption to illus. 9. this ink differs from the gray and black inks blake used in the drawings, and thus these inscriptions are probably not by him. they may have been written by john linnell, who acquired the drawings no later than 1839. the sharply slanted terminal “s” in the inscription on this drawing is similar to those in the first line of his manuscript draft of an advertisement for blake’s job engravings; see the reproduction in blake 45.4 (spring 2012): 121. i hesitate to speculate about who attempted to delete the inscriptions or why. provenance: as in butlin to 1927; sold 1980 from the collection of mrs. matthew baird to goodspeed’s book shop, boston; acquired 1980 by arthur and charlotte vershbow, newton centre, massachusetts (price not recorded); sold 2013 from the vershbow estate as recorded above under drawings and paintings. click to show less. the gambols of ghosts according with their affections previous to the final judgement. watercolor, 26.9 x 20.7 cm., datable to 1805. sny, 30 jan., #285, illus. ($722,500 to a bidder on the telephone; estimate $400,000-600,000). previously offered sny, 2 may 2006, #12, illus. (not sold; highest bid $520,000 on an estimate of $700,000-1,000,000). the dealer libby howie, the vendor at the 2006 auction, stated that this work was “no longer available” in april 2008. see illus. 7. 7. the gambols of ghosts according with their affections previous to the final judgement (see enlargement). watercolor, 26.9 x 20.7 cm., datable to 1805. one of 19 watercolor illus. to robert blair’s the grave discovered in 2001; see martin butlin, “new risen from the grave: nineteen unknown watercolors by william blake,” blake 35.3 (winter 2001-02): 68-73. photo courtesy of the william blake archive. click to show more. this complex design is discussed in william blake’s watercolour inventions in illustration of the grave by robert blair, ed. martin butlin, essay by morton d. paley (lavenham, suffolk: william blake trust, 2009) 56. as butlin indicates, “at the top of the right-hand side blake seems to have included a scene of baptism in its most negative form: an horrific old man clutching a very reluctant child as he dips his hand in a bowl of water held by two young figures.” there would appear to be another parodic version of one of the sacraments—or more precisely a prelude to it—at top left. a young man holds a round object, very probably a ring, in his left hand. he grasps a young woman’s left wrist with his right hand and may be about to slip the ring over one of the extended fingers of her left hand. he looks not at his intended but at the approaching patriarchal figure to the right, who points his left index finger at the couple and raises a dagger in his right hand. is this the girl’s angry father, threatening violence as a way of halting an impending engagement? the girl’s raised right hand, palm facing right, may be a gesture directed at the old rather than the young man. her open mouth and general expression indicate alarm. the two women below the pair may be pulling them downward and thereby helping their entry into the church where a wedding ceremony can commence. these may be personifications of the desires of lovers caught between fulfillment and restraint. nineteen grave watercolors, including gambols of ghosts, were offered at sny, 2 may 2006. for discussions of this auction, see e. b. bentley, “grave indignities: greed, hucksterism, and oblivion: blake’s watercolors for blair’s grave,” blake 40.2 (fall 2006): 66-71, and essick, “blake in the marketplace, 2006,” blake 40.4 (spring 2007): 116-17, 120-26. all 20 grave watercolors are available in the william blake archive <http://​www.​blakearchive.​org>. click to show less. harpers and other drawings (recto), preliminary sketches for america and europe (verso). pencil, leaf 20.4 x 24.6 cm. not in butlin because not discovered until 2010. lowell libson, jan. cat. of “british paintings & works on paper,” pp. [50]-55, titled studies for “america: a prophecy” and an early treatment of “job,” with a detailed discussion of the drawings, recto and verso illus. (not priced). for information on these drawings and illus., see blake 46.4 (spring 2013): illus. 9-11, and martin butlin, “harpers and other drawings: the case for a unified composition,” blake 47.2 (fall 2013). still offered on libson’s web site, early march 2014. joseph ordering simeon to be bound. pen and watercolor over pencil, 33.8 x 48.3 cm., datable to c. 1785. butlin #158, then located in a “private collection, milan.” sl, 3 july, #160, illus. (£27,500 to john windle acting for essick). see illus. 8-9. 8. joseph ordering simeon to be bound (see enlargement). pen and watercolor over pencil, 33.8 x 48.3 cm., datable to c. 1785. butlin #158. laid paper with a fleur de lis watermark near the center of the leaf, chain lines running horizontally 2.9 cm. apart. although the drawing is pasted on all margins to a backing mat, these features of the paper are discernable in a raking light. the glue used to affix the drawing to the mat has stained the margins of the recto, particularly at the top, upper left side, and on the right. a vertical tear extends 1.0 cm. from the top center margin. the flesh-pink and yellow watercolors are faded. essick collection. click to show more. this drawing is a preliminary for the more finished watercolor (illus. 9) in the fitzwilliam museum. the design illustrates events recounted in genesis 42. ten of joseph’s half-brothers have been sent by their father, jacob, to egypt to buy corn. eight brothers are clearly pictured on the left; a 9th is represented only by a few lines delineating head and hair between the upper and lower figures furthest left. pharaoh has placed joseph, seated on the throne-like bench or chair in the center of the design, in charge of preparing for the predicted 7 years of dearth. the brothers do not recognize joseph, but he knows who they are, accuses them of being spies, and places “them all together into ward three days” (genesis 42.17). his favorite brother, benjamin, is not among the group that has come to egypt. after releasing them from prison, joseph orders one of the visitors, simeon, to be taken hostage to enforce his demand that benjamin will be included during their next trip to egypt. simeon half kneels on the right while being bound by an egyptian servant or guard not referred to in genesis; the brothers on the left respond with surprise and regret at this harsh treatment, the reasons for which they do not understand. joseph overhears his brethren discussing their guilt over selling him into bondage and “he turned himself about from them, and wept” (genesis 42.24). blake pictures this moment in the narrative. joseph’s turning away from his brothers indicates his complex psychological state, a contradictory mixture of familial attachment, anger at past crimes against him, and awareness of his present powers to punish or forgive. the rhythm of head, eye, and hand positions contributes substantially to the interplay of emotions among the figures expressed by blake’s design. the prominence of eyes and hands in blake’s art of the 1780s may be due in part to the necessity for an engraver to concentrate on their coordination. butlin notes that there are “a number of pentimenti” in this drawing. the head and upper body of the figure far right were first drawn higher and a little further to the right; the head and shoulder of the brother top left were originally sketched higher in the design. a few very light pencil lines left of joseph’s upper body suggest that he was first sketched in a more upright posture. click to show less. 9. joseph ordering simeon to be bound (see enlargement). pen and watercolor over pencil, 40.5 x 56.0 cm., datable to 1785. butlin #156. photo courtesy of the fitzwilliam museum, cambridge. see illus. 8 for a preliminary design. blake exhibited this work and its 2 companions, joseph’s brethren bowing before him and joseph making himself known to his brethren (butlin #155, 157), at the royal academy in 1785. at least one strand of old testament narrative treats jacob’s 12 sons as the progenitors of the 12 tribes of israel (see 1 kings 18.31). thus, the story of joseph and his brethren can be read as a harbinger of the struggles of the israelites to be one nation in spite of quarrels among their tribes. blake may have seen the story as a paradigmatic example of the eternal conflicts between the forces of unification and fragmentation that figure so prominently in his writings. the restoration of psychic and communal harmony through the forgiveness of sin, an important motif in blake’s later work, is foreshadowed by the final episode of the joseph story in genesis 45, illustrated by blake’s concluding design. for an interesting biographical interpretation of the 3 joseph designs, see david bindman, blake as an artist (oxford: phaidon, 1977) 34-35. butlin #156 lists the major differences between the preliminary drawing (illus. 8) and this finished watercolor, but does not note the addition of 5 or 6 serpents in the elaborated background of the latter. the 4 most prominent snakes coil around columns and foliage to emblemize the intertwined and potentially harmful family relationships unfolding in the foreground. for further discussion, see christopher heppner, reading blake’s designs (cambridge: cambridge up, 1995) 12-21, 89-92. parental affection, or the meeting of a family in heaven (recto), sisyphus rolling the stone up a hill (verso). recto watercolor, verso pencil, leaf 14.3 x 9.2 cm. not in butlin because not discovered until 2010. lowell libson, jan. cat. of “british paintings & works on paper,” pp. [44]-49, recto titled the meeting of a family in heaven, with a detailed discussion of the work and its possible swedenborgian subject, recto and verso illus. (not priced). reported on libson’s web site in sept. to have been sold to a “private collection, usa.” for information on these drawings and illus., see blake 46.4 (spring 2013): illus. 12-14. st. matthew. tempera, 37.2 x 25.7 cm., datable to 1799. butlin #396, located in a “private collection, milan” (very probably the same collection from which emerged joseph ordering simeon to be bound, above). offered privately in nov. through nicholas lott of larkhall fine art, bath (price on request). two visionary figures, mountains behind, p. 53 from the smaller blake-varley sketchbook, verso (p. 54) blank except for scribbled lines. pencil, leaf 20.7 x 15.5 cm., datable to c. 1819. butlin #692.53, 54. cny, 31 jan., #147, p. 53 titled an angel, arms upraised, with another figure, illus. ($22,500 to the e. j. pratt library, victoria university, toronto; estimate $12,000-18,000). pratt library call no. blake suppl. no. 426. previously sold cl, 15 june 1971, #157 (£162.50 to “pearson” for anchard fine arts ltd., stoke d’abernon, surrey). see illus. 10. 10. two visionary figures, mountains behind, p. 53 from the smaller blake-varley sketchbook (see enlargement). pencil, leaf 20.7 x 15.5 cm., datable to c. 1819. butlin #692.53. collection of the e. j. pratt library, victoria university, toronto. photo courtesy of christie’s new york. click to show more. christie’s detailed auction cat. entry of 31 jan., #147, notes an “indistinct inscription in the hand of john varley ‘hotspur…’ and further indistinct inscriptions (recto) and with indistinct inscription in the hand of john varley ‘it is allways [sic] to keep yourself collected’ (verso). … the reference to hotspur and his [varley’s] need to keep himself ‘collected’ may refer to a lost drawing on the missing facing page” of the sketchbook. the cat. also provides a description of the design: it is difficult to make out the subject of the present example. what appears to be an angel raises his arms, behind which two wings can be seen, unless indeed they are rising flames or emanations of divine inspiration. the other figure seems to have just approached him with arm outstretched as if to indicate from whence he has come; his head is silhouetted against what seems to be a large halo. alternatively, this second figure could be female. behind runs a line of regularly shaped hills or perhaps pyramids. might the figure on the left, not the one on the right, be female? note the rounded breasts. the supposed halo is offset to the right; it could be the rising or setting sun. curving horizontal lines on the right suggest more hills or mountains, irregularly rather than “regularly” shaped. three horizontal lines above the peaks on the left may be clouds. i am unable to decipher the two vertical lines, with a looping line at their base, left of the leftmost peak. clusters of lines left of the figures’ feet and between their feet may be the rudimentary beginnings of foreground motifs. the raised arms of the figure on the left recall satan in several versions of blake’s illus. of the fallen angel calling up his legions in paradise lost (see butlin #529.1, 536.1, possibly 591), but other motifs make such an identification questionable. the precise subject of the design has not yet been determined. the condition report provided by christie’s mentions several problems, including the extensive but light brown staining evident in a color reproduction, “three small areas of old restoration towards the upper edge of the sheet,” some “fading to the pencilwork,” and a water stain lower left. many of the lines also look rubbed; note particularly the cluster of graphite fragments below the figures’ feet. the brown stains were probably caused by the “acidic mount” to which the drawing has been “taped along the upper edge.” when removed from the sketchbook and sold at cl, 15 june 1971, #157, the leaf was not mounted. thus, one of its subsequent owners taped it to the harmful mount. let that be a warning to us all about the care and keeping of works of art. click to show less. the waking of leonora, design for the tailpiece for bürger’s “leonora.” watercolor, 6.7 x 12.9 cm. on leaf 8.2 x 14.0 cm., datable to c. 1796. butlin #338. cny, 9 april, #65, from the collection of arthur and charlotte vershbow, framed, illus. ($207,750; estimate $60,000-80,000). i have had no response to a letter of inquiry kindly passed along to the new owner by francis wahlgren of christie’s. see illus. 11-12; see also illus. 13-14 for related works. 11. the waking of leonora, design for the tailpiece for bürger’s “leonora.” watercolor, 6.7 x 12.9 cm. on leaf of wove paper 8.2 x 14.0 cm., datable to c. 1796. see illus. 12 for the inscription lower right. butlin #338 records the first owner of the watercolor as “mrs. dew-smith by 1912.” christie’s cat. of 9 april, #65, adds to this provenance the sensible speculation that the drawing passed to her (i suspect by inheritance) from her husband, albert george dew-smith (1848-1903). he owned several works by blake, including america copy b, acquired in 1874. for information on a. g. dew-smith, see joseph viscomi, “two fake blakes revisited; one dew-smith revealed,” blake in our time: essays in honour of g. e. bentley jr, ed. karen mulhallen (toronto: u of toronto p, 2010) 35-78. photo courtesy of christie’s new york. see also illus. 13, 14 for related works. 12. top: inscriptions lower right on the waking of leonora (illus. 11). area shown approximately 0.5 x 2.6 cm. bottom: the same, manipulated in adobe photoshop to increase the visibility of the inscription right of “del” (see enlargement). blake first wrote an inscription lower right, “blake del & sc.,” very lightly in pencil. he appears to have written some version of “& sc.” twice, one above the other. the lower “& sc.” is on roughly the same line as “blake del” in pencil and thus was probably written along with the first part of the inscription. the characters may have been poorly formed; this would explain the need for writing a more legible version above. the wording of the pencil inscription names blake as both the delineator (“del,” an abbreviation for “delineavit”) and the engraver (“sc.,” an abbreviation of “sculpsit”) of the design. blake then wrote “blake del__” over his pencil inscription in a dark black medium, possibly the same black watercolor or ink used to outline motifs in the design. the letters of “blake” are offset to the left, and the dash or underscore following “del” runs through the lower “& sc.” inscription. the pencil version indicates that blake believed that he would be employed to engrave this illus., and probably the two others he designed, for j. t. stanley’s translation of bürger’s poem. having learned that someone else would engrave the illus., he changed the wording to take credit for the design but not its execution as a print. engravers were generally paid more for their copy work than the original artists of book illus., and thus these layered inscriptions indicate what may have been a financial disappointment for blake. he was similarly treated in 1805, when r. h. cromek failed to hire him to engrave the designs for robert blair’s the grave. photo courtesy of christie’s new york. 13. sketch for “the waking of leonora” (see enlargement). pencil, 9.5 x 13.5 cm., leaf of wove paper 14.9 x 23.5 cm., inscribed in pen and ink lower right “drawn by william / blake. / vouched by fred.k tatham.” butlin #339. a preliminary drawing for the watercolor (illus. 11). photo courtesy of the keynes collection, fitzwilliam museum, cambridge. the three principal figures are basically the same as in the watercolor and subsequent engraving (illus. 14), but this sketch includes cloudborne figures not retained in the 2 later versions. five figures descend in an arc above leonora’s head. four have their arms, or possibly trumpets, extended toward her. these may be “sweet spirits” awakening her (p. 15 of stanley’s translation of leonora; see also the poem’s concluding stanza, quoted in the caption to illus. 14). at least 5(?) figures hover above leonora’s mother on the left. they may represent the “airy rabble” of “spectres” haunting leonora’s nightmare (p. 10). another figure to the right descends diagonally toward the group of 5 with at least one arm extended toward them. there may be flames, or several alternative positions for a sword, rising from this figure’s extended hand. this may be a benign presence, chasing away the creatures of leonora’s frightening dream. i am not able to decipher the cluster of forms sketched immediately above the head of leonora’s mother on the left; they may be related in some vague way to the horse ridden by leonora in her nightmare ride to the land of the dead. 14. tailpiece, p. 16, to gottfried augustus bürger, leonora, translated and altered by j. t. stanley, 1796. stipple etching/engraving by “perry” (full name unknown) after blake’s watercolor (illus. 11). design 6.5 x 12.7 cm., platemark 9.5 x 15.2 cm. bb pl. 3. essick collection. click to show more. blake’s design illustrates the final stanza of stanley’s translation, printed just above this tailpiece on p. 16: “wake, leonora!—wake to love! “for thee, his choicest wreath he wove;” death vainly aim’d his dart. the past was all a dream; she woke— he lives;—’twas william’s self who spoke, and clasp’d her to his heart. the text does not indicate the presence of leonora’s mother, pictured on the left, in this concluding scene. blake represents her as one of his figures of fallen nature, a “mother of my mortal part” (“to tirzah,” e 30), or as a personification of “aged ignorance” (for children: the gates of paradise, e 32; see also europe, e 64). a particularly close visual and thematic parallel is the seated woman in the illus. to the 1797 ed. of young’s night thoughts, p. 35 (bb pl. 20). in stanley’s version of bürger’s poem, the mother utters conventional pieties in her attempt to assuage her daughter’s grief over the supposed death of leonora’s fiancé, william, but also proposes that he may still be alive and has found another lover. the mother also admonishes her daughter for questioning god. perhaps blake associated such sentiments with the established church and its restrictive moral codes. the mother’s features are more refined, and her expression less stupefied, in perry’s engraving than in blake’s drawing.  the passage illustrated is stanley’s addition to bürger’s original, which ends with leonora dead and william still absent. in a letter of 15 april 1796 to the book’s publisher, william miller, quoted in the “advertisement” in the book, stanley complains that the poem might be “calculated … to injure the cause of religion and morality” (vi). “such reflections have tempted me to make the alterations i have alluded to” (vii). in his “preface,” miller further explains that “the poem will be found, in many respects, to have been altered from the original; but more particularly towards the conclusion, where the translator thinking the moral not sufficiently explained, has added several lines” (x). miller then offers a more “literal” translation of bürger’s final 8 lines, ending with the following address to leonora: though rack’d with sorrow, be resign’d, thy earthly course is at an end, may god unto thy soul be kind. (x) by replacing this with a happy ending, stanley vindicates the mother’s beliefs in the goodness of god and the power of prayer. the theological and ethical perspectives shared by the translator and the publisher have much in common with leonora’s mother. is blake’s characterization of her also a critique of them? click to show less. separate plates and plates in series “chaucers canterbury pilgrims.” john windle, march online cat., 5th st., 1st colnaghi printing of feb. or early march 1881 on thin laid “japan” paper, edges lined with later paper, “a superb impression” ($20,000). for this printing, see the anonymous notice of “recent impressions which have been struck off [by colnaghi] on japanese paper” in notes and queries, 6th series, vol. 3 (5 march 1881): 200. colnaghi acquired the copperplate at cl, 4 feb. 1881, #483 (£35). dante engravings. swann, 1 may, #285, pl. 4 only, impression on laid india, 1838 or 1892 printing, illus. ($6240 to the e. j. pratt library, victoria university, toronto). quinn’s auction, falls church, virginia, 15 sept., #285, pl. 3 only, 1968 printing, illus. ($300). “enoch,” modified lithograph, sp impression 1b. acquired no later than fall 2013 by the metropolitan museum of art, new york, accession no. 2013.146. for the sale of this impression at auction and illus., see “blake in the marketplace, 2012,” blake 46.4 (spring 2013). for cat. information and illus. of both the recto and the verso inscription, see the met web site, <http://​www.​metmuseum.​org/​collections/​search-the-collections/​426771?rpp=60&pg=3&ao=on&ft=william+blake+1757-1827&pos=123>. “george cumberland’s card.” john windle, march online cat., printed in black ink on “thick card … trimmed very close to the image at the left and right edges, once pasted down and thus with traces of mounting on the verso and pencil notes from an earlier collector” ($20,000). the impression offered at csk, 5 dec. 2012, #192, leaf 4.1 x 8.1 cm. (not sold; acquired by windle after the auction). the verso notes would appear to include the awkward ejsw monogram of edward j. shaw of walsall, active as a blake collector c. 1890-1925. bhl, 16 july, #27, printed in black ink on laid paper, sp untraced impression 7, illus. (£2500). job engravings. skinner auction, boston, 1 feb., #29, pl. numbered 20 only, 1874 printing on laid india, framed, illus. ($2600); 20 sept., #19, title page and pl. numbered 10 only, 1874 printing on laid india, framed, illus. ($1140). swann, 7 march, #2, pl. numbered 4 only, apparently the 1826 printing on whatman paper after removal of the “proof” inscription, illus. (not sold; estimate $1500-2500); #3, pl. numbered 8 only, same printing, illus. ($3360); 1 may, #281-83, pls. numbered 8-10 only, published “proof” impressions on laid india, illus. (pl. 8 not sold, pl. 9 $2880, pl. 10 $2640); #284, pl. numbered 16 only, published “proof” impression apparently printed directly on wove, illus. ($2400); 12 sept., #1, pl. numbered 7 only, apparently the 1826 printing on whatman paper after removal of the “proof” inscription, illus. ($1875); #2, pl. numbered 17 only, published “proof” impression on laid india, illus. ($1750); 30 oct., #239, pl. numbered 2 only, 1874 printing on laid india, illus. ($2750); #240, pl. numbered 7 only, published “proof” impression on laid india, illus. (not sold; estimate $2000-3000); #241, pl. numbered 16 only, 1874 printing on laid india, illus. (not sold; estimate $2000-3000). r. e. lewis & daughter, may cat. of “recent acquisitions,” #6, pl. numbered 16 only, published “proof” impression on laid india, illus. ($3000). bl, 30 may, #108, complete set, 1874 printing on laid india, curiously “loose in a custom made hinged wooden box with glazed viewing panel to front cover,” illus. (not sold; estimate £10,000-15,000); same copy, 11 july, #215, illus. (not sold; estimate £5000-7500). lyon & turnbull auction, edinburgh, 20 july, #210, 3 pls. only: pls. numbered 9 and 12, published “proof” impressions on laid india, pl. numbered 14, 1874 printing on laid india, illus. (“£1300” but perhaps bought in); same group, 4 oct., #74, illus. (£1000). sl, 17 sept., #1, complete set, published “proof” impressions on laid india, full morocco by riviere & son, illus. (£31,250). cny, 29 oct., #792, from the collection of arthur and charlotte vershbow, the property of ann vershbow, complete set, published “proof” impressions on “french paper” (bb 519), scattered minor foxing, original buff boards worn with cover label, illus. ($68,750; estimate $30,000-50,000). cl, 20 nov., #345, pl. numbered 18 only, 1874 printing on laid india, margins foxed, from the “collection of the late mrs t.s. eliot,” illus. (£500). eb, nov., pl. numbered 11 only, published “proof” impression on wove, foxed, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $2700 or “best offer”). “mrs q,” after villiers, 1820. adam partridge auction, macclesfield, cheshire, 31 jan., #545, with a “bill of sale for £35 dated 18th december 1944 from chas. j. sawyer ltd,” framed, illus. (£120). the figure’s auburn hair suggests a 2nd st. impression from blake’s original copperplate rather than the lithographic facsimile of 1906 with darker brunette hair. possibly the impression from the w. e. moss collection sold at auction in 1937, lot 201, with “top and side margins cut away,” as in this impression, and offered in a sawyer cat. of the same year for £25—see sp 196, untraced impression 19. see also the 1906 facsimile under interesting blakeana, below. “zephyrus and flora,” after stothard, 1784. eb, dec. 2012, lightly stained, matted and framed, illus. (acquired by essick at the “buy it now” price of £14.95). a previously unrecorded impression printed in dark brown ink on laid paper with an illegible watermark probably composed of letters. leaf 18.0 x 21.0 cm. trimmed to an oval close to the design, only the signatures retained among the inscriptions. the st. of this impression cannot be determined beyond doubt because the only differences between the 2 sts. appear in the inscribed title. the paper, however, suggests that this is a 1st st.; the 3 recorded impressions of that st. are on laid paper, whereas the 3 recorded impressions of the 2nd st. are on wove. the only other traced impression in dark brown ink (keynes collection, fitzwilliam museum) is printed in that color plus blue and reddish brown. the british vendor on eb, “pat” of “4 changinghands,” tells me that she acquired this impression in a mixed lot of prints at an auction house (i suspect bamfords) in derby, but has no further provenance information. only the 3rd impression i’ve ever seen on the market; the others were sold in 1976 (2nd st., black ink, from the collection of geoffrey keynes, sp impression 2c) and 1999 (1st st., sanguine ink; see blake 33.4 [spring 2000]: 109). stothard’s “zephyrus and flora” may have influenced blake’s depiction of the 2 figures hovering near flowers on the title page to the book of thel. if so, then blake’s male may be the wind attempting to embrace (and pollinate?) the female personification of the flower from which she emerges. letterpress books with engravings by and after blake, including prints extracted from such books allen, roman history, 1798. eb, april, lacking pl. 1, scattered foxing on pls., modern quarter calf, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £300). ariosto, orlando furioso. justin croft/simon beattie, feb. cat. of “english verse 1751-1800 part i: a-g,” #30, 1785 ed., 5 vols., pls. foxed and browned, contemporary calf, illus. (£300). havercroft books, june online cat., 1783 ed., 5 vols., some browning, some pls. (including blake’s) loose, contemporary calf worn, the same copy offered by hava books for £350, april 2012 online cat. (£385). poor richard’s books, june online cat., 1783 ed., 5 vols., later calf, vol. 5 “fragile” (£350). john taylor books, june online cat., 1783 ed., 5 vols., contemporary half calf worn, bindings illus. (£300). old saratoga books, june online cat., 1799 ed., 5 vols., some leaves “grubby,” contemporary calf very worn, bindings illus. ($350). caliban books, june online cat., 1785 ed., 5 vols., scattered foxing, contemporary calf worn ($150). eb, july-aug., 1799 ed., vol. 3 only with blake’s pl., stained, no description of binding other than “pieces of covering missing,” illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of £9.99). bible. royal universal family bible, 1780. victoria bookshop, oct. online cat., “vol 1” only (old testament) and thus presumably with blake’s pl. 1 (of 5), “boards detached” (£123.30). blair, the grave, 1813 quarto, hand-colored copy. cny, 29 oct., #789, from the collection of arthur and charlotte vershbow, the frontispiece portrait of blake not colored, “date defaced” (so that this copy could be taken for the 1808 ed.?), 19th-century “niger” by the “hempstead bindery,” rebacked, top edges gilt, “dampstaining at the foot,” illus. ($93,750; estimate $60,000-80,000). the auction cat. states that this is “possibly the master copy, colored by blake,” and that “according to martin butlin, the present copy appears to have been colored by blake himself.” bbs 199 lists this copy as an 1808 quarto and states that the coloring is “apparently by blake.” john windle and i suspect that the hand coloring is c. 1850 or later.windle inspected the original in early 2013. i studied the original in 1980 and good-quality digital images of all pls. in nov. 2013. the heavy coloring of flames and the tinting of angels’ wings in multiple pastel hues seem particularly uncharacteristic of blake. the auction cat. points out that the vershbows acquired this copy from “scopazzi, 1971.” windle tells me that the san francisco dealer john scopazzi (1910-87) specialized in acquiring uncolored maps and prints and having them professionally colored in period styles. i doubt that this copy of the grave was colored by scopazzi, but such a source always raises suspicions. the auction cat. also refers to “the keynes copy of the 1813 edition” hand colored, but i have not been able to find any record of such a copy, nor do i recall seeing such a work in sir geoffrey’s collection. a hand-colored copy of the 1808 quarto ed. is in the huntington library, call no. 54049. its tinting is more skillful, restrained, and convincing than the vershbow copy. the palette and placement of colors in the huntington volume share some characteristics with hand-colored copies of young’s night thoughts, but i hesitate to ascribe the tinting to blake or his wife, catherine. blair, the grave, uncolored copies. eb, jan., pl. 7 only, 1813 imprint, illus. (£7.99); jan.-feb., “1813” (actually 1870) folio, publisher’s cloth rebacked, illus. ($330.87); may, 1808 quarto, foxed, contemporary quarter calf very worn, front cover detached, illus. ($356); june, pls. only, probably the camden hotten 1870 printing of the pls. only issued unbound in portfolio, marginal browning, later cloth portfolio worn, front cover detached, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $499.99); pl. 4 only, a previously unrecorded prepublication proof, light foxing, illus. (£59.95); oct., 1808 quarto, text apparently complete but lacking all but pls. 1 (title page), 2, 4, 6-9, imprint trimmed from pl. 1, some pls. “yellowed,” scattered foxing, 19th-century half calf worn, illus. (£138). arader galleries, feb. online cat., 1808 quarto, library label of estelle doheny, modern morocco ($4500). the doheny copy was sold cny, 21 feb. 1989, #1709 ($1320). houle (sometimes spelled houlé) rare books, feb. online cat., 1808 quarto, modern three-quarter morocco ($3750). antipodean books, feb. online cat., frontispiece portrait of blake only, no indication of st. or printing, framed ($275). waverley books, june online cat., 1808 “folio” (but probably the quarto), “hard covers” (£2000). d & e lake, june online cat., “1813” (actually 1870) folio, modern cloth ($2500). peter l. stern, june online cat., “1813,” probably the quarto, contemporary half morocco worn ($1750). contact editions, june online cat., “1813” (but probably the 1870 folio), damp staining, “blind decorated black cloth” restored ($1500). bonhams auction, new york, 25 june, #3217, 1808 quarto, inscription by james neagle (probably the engraver, 1765-1822) dated 22 feb. 1816, “some marginal damp-stains,” uncut in original boards worn and rebacked with cloth tape, “paper label upper cover,” quarter morocco slipcase, illus. (not sold; estimate $2000-3000). leslie hindman auction, chicago, 7 aug., #88, 1813 “folio” (but probably the quarto), scattered foxing, original boards with cover label, very worn with boards detached and morocco spine “deteriorated,” illus. ($688). bg, 15 aug., #281, 1808 quarto, marginal foxing, contemporary calf worn, new endpapers, illus. (£1000); #282, 1813 quarto, browned and foxed, “later calf with original wrappers laid down on boards and mounted on covers, original printed label on upper cover,” with a “facsimile on [of?] the same” (£400); 14 nov., #28, “1813” quarto (but probably the 1870 ed.), “original blind-stamped cloth” rebacked (£366). cny, 29 oct., #788, 1808 folio, from the collection of arthur and charlotte vershbow, occasional foxing, pls. 8 and 9 in the 2nd published st. as in the 1808 quarto, all other pls. in the 1st published st., later morocco, illus. ($12,500). edward nudelman, oct. online cat., 1808 “folio size” (probably the quarto), contemporary calf worn and rebacked ($4500). celsus books, oct. online cat., 1808 quarto, light foxing to margins, contemporary calf worn and rebacked, illus. (£1995). for the proof of pl. 4, see illus. 15. 15. luigi schiavonetti after blake, “the counsellor, king, warrior, mother & child in the tomb,” pl. 4 for robert blair, the grave, 1808 (see enlargement). previously unrecorded 1st prepublication proof st. of this etching/engraving. essick collection. image 14.0 x 22.8 cm. on leaf of laid paper 14.6 x 23.4 cm., 0.22 mm. thick. no watermark and no clearly visible chain lines in spite of prominent wire lines. the 1st published st., appearing in the 1808 folio issue of the grave, is on a very similar laid paper—but measurably thicker at 0.30 mm. the design in the impression reproduced here lacks a number of hatching strokes present in all later sts. the most noticeable absences appear on the counsellor’s right arm above and below the elbow, the left (upper) extension of his long mustache, and both legs below the knees, particularly where his gown or shroud gathers at his ankles. the pillow below and left of his head, the unrolled portion of the scroll below and to the right of his right hand, and the pillow below the king’s head lack diagonal hatching patterns found in all later sts. fine horizontal lines have been added to the warrior’s thighs, the mother’s breasts, and the right side of the child’s chest in the next recorded st. oddly, a small patch of hatching on the central extension of the counsellor’s beard, about 2.5 cm. right of his mouth, does not appear in later sts. these 4 lines were probably burnished off the pl. the flame extending from the oil lamp, upper center, has been brightened and made more prominent in the next st. by burnishing away a few interior lines and adding a stronger outline on its left side. the leaf on which this proof is printed extends 2.0 mm. below the lower margin of the design. the upper half of the signatures found in the 1st published st. would appear if they had been present. since the next known st. is a proof on whatman wove paper with the design completed but before all letters (essick collection), it seems probable that the copperplate from which the proof reproduced here was printed also lacked all letters. bonnycastle, introduction to mensuration, 1791. thomas joyce, june online cat., contemporary sheep worn ($175, acquired by john windle and sold to a private american collector). only the 2nd copy of this ed. i’ve ever seen on the market. boydell’s graphic illustrations … of shakspeare, c. 1803. antiquariat manfred nosbüsch, june online cat., marginal foxing, later half morocco (€3900). brown, elements of medicine, 1795. allison robinson, june online cat., apparently vol. 1 only but with blake’s pl., foxed, calf very worn ($250). bryant, new system … of ancient mythology, 1st ed., 1774-76. eb, feb., 3 vols., contemporary morocco worn, some covers loose, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $775); same copy, april-may, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $679.99); same copy, may-june, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $550). bürger, leonora, 1796. cny, 29 oct., #784, from the collection of arthur and charlotte vershbow, minor staining, 19th-century half morocco, illus. ($3000 to john windle acting for a private american collector). catullus, poems, 1795. eb, feb., 2 vols. in 1, imprints trimmed off both pls., contemporary calf very worn, front cover detached, illus. ($99). caliban books, june online cat., 2 vols., half calf very worn ($800). darwin, botanic garden. pba, 18 feb., #72, 3rd ed. of part 1, 1795, 4th ed. of part 2, 1794, 2 vols. in 1, contemporary calf worn and rebacked, “original green spine label printed in black” (i doubt that it is the original label), illus. ($900). edward nudelman, march online cat., 1st ed. of part 1, 3rd ed. of part 2, both 1791, 2 vols. in 1, foxed, covers detached ($1750). possibly the same copy offered in nudelman’s nov. 1991 cat. 18, #104 ($325). barter books, june online cat., 2nd ed. of part 1, 1791, 2nd ed. of part 2, 1790, 2 vols., scattered foxing, “modern rebind,” illus. (£320). by the book, june online cat., 3rd ed. of part 1, 1795, 4th ed. of part 2, 1794, 2 vols. in 1, calf very worn, spine repaired ($400). eb, july, 1st ed. of part 1, 1791, 2nd ed. of part 2, 1790, 2 vols. in 1, some stains, covers and most of backstrip missing, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $650); same copy, july-aug., illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $455); same copy, aug., illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $377.65); another copy, aug.-sept., 1st ed. of part 1, 3rd ed. of part 2, both 1791, 2 vols. in 1, some bad stains, contemporary calf, front cover loose and backstrip missing, illus. ($233.50); nov., blake’s pl. 1 only, illus. (£98). bl, 3 oct., 3rd ed. of part 1, 1795, 4th ed. of part 2, 1794, 2 vols. in 1, some foxing, contemporary calf worn, rebacked, blake’s pl. 6 (“tornado”) illus. (£744). hordern house, oct. online cat., 1st ed. of part 1, 3rd ed. of part 2, both 1791, 2 vols. in 1, scattered light foxing, contemporary calf, illus. ($6500 australian). chiswick auctions, hounslow, 27 nov., #74, 3rd ed. of part 1, 1795, 4th ed. of part 2, 1794, scattered foxing, 19th-century calf rebacked, illus. (£270). darwin, poetical works, 1806. william allen, june online cat., 3 vols., scattered light foxing, later half calf, illus. (£1500). arroyo seco books, june online cat., 3 vols., quarter calf worn ($2500). earle, practical observations on the operation for the stone, 1793, with appendix to a treatise on the operation for the stone, 1796.  uncommon books, may online cat., pls. 1-2 foxed, cb pl. 3 (mentioned in bb #451 but not numbered) in the 1st st., published as part of the appendix but misbound upside-down facing p. 80 in the 1793 text, bound with earle, a treatise on the hydrocele, 1796, 19th-century boards, spine repaired with cloth tape ($288 to essick). the only copy of earle’s appendix, and the only impression of cb pl. 3, i’ve ever seen on the market. bb states that the attribution of this 3rd pl. to blake “seems far from conclusive” (550). cb 61 accepts it as blake’s work, an attribution 1st made in geoffrey keynes, “william blake and bart’s,” blake 7.1 (summer 1973): 9-10. the lettering in the scratched inscriptions added to the 2nd st. of cb pl. 3 is crucial in establishing the attribution. in bbs 211, bentley states that he is “now willing to include the plate as blake’s, though balking at their [keynes’s and essick’s] certainty.” see also leslie f. chard, ii, “two ‘new’ blake engravings: blake, james earle, and the surgeon’s art,” blake studies 6.2 (1975): 153-65. enfield, the speaker, 1795. eb, aug.-sept., contemporary calf very worn, covers loose, illus. ($128.50). fenning and collyer, new system of geography, 1785-86. versandantiquariat karl heinz schmitz, april online cat., 2 vols., lacking most pls., modern quarter calf, binding illus. (€180; apparently sold by may). schmitz has not responded to my inquiry, but john windle tells me that only blake’s pl. 1 is present, 1st st. flaxman, hesiod designs, 1817. ursus books, jan. online cat., later boards ($1500). wickham books, jan. online cat., 30 (of 37) pls., “light to severe foxing throughout,” half “leather” (£474.74). eb, feb., bound with flaxman’s odyssey, 1805, iliad, 1805, and aeschylus, 1831, designs, scattered foxing, contemporary morocco worn, illus. ($1077); another copy of the same group, nov., 19th-century morocco, illus. ($360.50). quinn’s auction, falls church, virginia, 20 june, #221, 3 pls. foxed, modern quarter calf ($170). bonhams los angeles, 23 june, #7182, bound with flaxman’s odyssey, 1805, iliad, 1805, and aeschylus, 1831, designs, scattered foxing, 19th-century morocco worn, upper cover detached, illus. (not sold; estimate $300-500); the same copy or another of the same group, bho, 26 nov., #135, “moderate dampstaining throughout,” 19th-century morocco, with “another” work not described (£100). bg, 10 oct., #51, bound with flaxman’s iliad, 1805, odyssey, 1805, and aeschylus, 1831, designs, “slightly foxed, a little soiled,” contemporary morocco worn, binding illus. (not sold; estimate £300-500); 14 nov., #51, 2 copies, “occasional spotting,” original boards with label, worn, with flaxman’s iliad designs, 1805, 34 (of 39) pls. only, foxed and damp stained, many pls. “loose” (not sold; estimate £120-180). flaxman, iliad designs, 1805. hollett & son, jan. online cat., “rather foxed and water-stained in places throughout, sometimes heavy,” contemporary half calf worn, binding illus. (£402.50). dw, 15 may, #525, with flaxman’s odyssey, 1805, and aeschylus, n.d., designs, all 3 foxed and stained, iliad and odyssey in (publisher’s?) boards very worn, aeschylus in contemporary half morocco very worn, upper cover detached (£100). bg, 19 june, #456, bound with flaxman’s odyssey designs, 1805, some tears and creases, contemporary morocco worn (not sold; estimate £250-350); same copy, 15 aug., #292 (£240). eb, aug., bound with flaxman’s odyssey designs, 1805, a few marginal repairs, contemporary morocco worn, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £900 or “best offer”). bg, 12 sept., #175, 2 copies, foxed, 1 copy in original boards with cover label, rebacked, the other contemporary morocco very worn, with a bound collection of 47 prepublication proofs of the aeschylus, iliad, and odyssey designs engraved by piroli, many before all letters (£488 to john windle for stock on an estimate of £100-150; vol. of proofs acquired oct. by essick). bl, 3 oct., #104, bound with flaxman’s odyssey designs, 1805, foxed, contemporary half calf very worn, illus. (£248). finecopy, nov. online cat., bound with flaxman’s odyssey, 1805, “without any foxing,” contemporary morocco, illus. (£800). see also hesiod designs, above. fuseli, lectures on painting, 1801. bl, 3 oct., #78, minor spotting, later morocco, illus. (£62). gay, fables. eb, jan., 1793 ed., 2 vols., contemporary half calf, illus. ($334); [1811] ed., 2 vols., later calf, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $1450); april, [1811] ed., 2 vols., some pls. badly foxed in margins, contemporary calf repaired, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $1100 or “best offer”); june-july, 1793 ed., 2 vols., foxed, contemporary morocco worn, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of £425); july, 1793 ed., 2 vols., later calf, illus. (£255); nov.-dec., 1793 ed., 2 vols., pls. “spotted,” contemporary morocco very worn, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £725 or “best offer”). swann, 28 feb., #75, 1793 ed., 2 vols. in 1, scattered foxing, contemporary calf, illus. ($450); 27 june, #84, blake’s pls. only, described as “a group of 11 (of 12)” pls., but all 12 are illus., scattered foxing ($210). csk, 20 march, #352, 1793 ed., 2 vols., later morocco, illus. (£563). james cummins, april cat. 117, #9, 1793 ed., 2 vols., contemporary morocco, illus. ($1750). robert frew, june online cat., [1811] ed., 2 vols., later morocco (£1500). second story books, june online cat., 1793 ed., 2 vols. in 1, scattered foxing, contemporary morocco worn ($1500). argosy books, june online cat., 1793 ed., 2 vols., contemporary calf worn ($1200). bl, 11 july, #120, 1793 ed., 2 vols., lacking pp. 203-04 in vol. 1, with aesop, fables, 1793, 2 vols., uniformly bound in later calf worn, illus. (£350). bearnes hampton & littlewood auction, honiton, devon, 21 aug., #147, 1793 ed., 2 vols., later calf, illus. (£310). skinner auction, boston, 17 nov., #141, 1793 ed., 2 vols., later morocco worn, illus. ($420). pls. sold individually are not included. gough, sepulchral monuments, 1786-96. bl, 14 dec. 2012, #266, 4 of 5 parts only (but including all pls. attributed to blake) in 2 vols., contemporary russia worn (£1700; estimate £300-400). chiswick auctions, hounslow, 5 march, #109, 2 vols. in 3, light staining and foxing, contemporary half calf worn (£900). hartley, observations on man, quarto issue, 1791. arroyo seco books, jan. online cat., contemporary calf ($3500). hayley, ballads, 1805. bl, 3 oct., #79, 1st st. of pl. 1, sts. of other pls. not recorded, contemporary russia very worn, covers detached, modern cloth box, illus. (£868). cny, 29 oct., #787, from the collection of arthur and charlotte vershbow, 1st st. of pl. 1, sts. of other pls. not recorded, uncut in original boards with spine label worn and repaired, illus. ($2500). hayley, life of cowper, 1803-04. eb, feb., pl. 3 only, 1st st., imprint trimmed off, foxed, the same impression offered eb, june-july 2012, illus. (once again no bids on a required minimum bid of $299); july, pl. 2 only, foxed, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $140); same impression of pl. 2, dec., illus. (same price). bhl, 10 april, #107, pl. 1 only, 1st st., framed, illus. (£350). shapero books, june online cat., 1st ed., “two volumes” (lacking vol. 3?), contemporary calf (£300). better world books, june online cat., ed. not indicated, 3 vols., “leather” very worn, front cover of vol. 1 detached ($305.25). cotswold internet books, june online cat., 2nd ed., vol. 2 only (presumably with blake’s pls. 3-4), “large paper,” foxed, calf rebacked and worn (£30). jarndyce, sept. cat. 203, #614, 1st ed., 3 vols., pl. 4 in the 2nd st., with cowper, poems, 1806, and cowper, illustrated by a series of views, 1803, 5 vols. in all uniformly bound in contemporary calf, illus. (£1200). gp, oct. online cat., pls. 1-3, 5, 6 only, illus. (£220, £190, £140, £90, and £90 respectively). hayley, life of romney, 1809. eb, march-april, scattered foxing on pls., 19th-century morocco, illus. (unstated reserve not met). gp, may online cat., blake’s pl. only, imprint trimmed off, marginal foxing, illus. (£220). g. w. stuart, june online cat., minor foxing, later half morocco ($575). sanctuary books, june online cat., contemporary calf rebacked ($475). powell’s books, june online cat., stained, contemporary calf very worn ($350). offas dyke books, june online cat., half calf worn (£240). besley’s books, nov. online cat., scattered foxing, contemporary calf, illus. (£350). hayley, triumphs of temper, 1803. eb, may, small-paper issue, contemporary calf worn, illus. (£77). bohemian bookworm, june online cat., probably the small-paper issue, “leather cover” ($850). am here books, june online cat., probably the small-paper issue, contemporary calf worn ($525). quaritch, aug. cat. of “new acquisitions,” #32, small-paper issue, “ownership inscription of louisa anne hope dated 1807, bookplate of her descendant julius hope, baron von szilassy,” contemporary calf (£650). louisa hope may be the second wife (née louisa beresford) of the important collector and connoisseur thomas hope (1769-1831). he commissioned flaxman’s designs for dante’s divine comedy no later than 1793. maria flaxman, john flaxman’s half-sister, invented the designs blake engraved for this 1803 ed. of hayley’s triumphs. jarndyce, sept. cat. 203, #7, apparently the small-paper issue, lacking the half-title, “few spots,” later calf (£650). cny, 29 oct., #786, small-paper issue, lacking the half-title, from the collection of arthur and charlotte vershbow, contemporary morocco, illus. ($813 to john windle for stock). bg, 14 nov., #29, contemporary calf worn, with 7 other vols. (£391). hogarth, works. eb, jan., blake’s pl. only, a late st., possibly 5th, illus. ($112.50); feb., blake’s pl. only, 6th st., framed, illus. ($168.50); blake’s pl. only, 4th st., illus. (sold at the “buy it now” price of $60); may, blake’s pl. only, the 7th (final) st. from the “1822” (actually c. 1880) issue by quaritch, stabholes from prior binding in top margin, tear in bottom margin, light staining in margins, the only impression of this printing i have ever seen on the market, illus. (£23 to essick). bl, 30 may, #111, boydell ed., n.d. (1790), 108 pls. on 87 leaves, some browning and spotting, lower left margins damp stained, contemporary half morocco worn, illus. (£1300). john king, june online cat., 1822 ed., 119 leaves of pls., stains and a few tears, cloth rebacked with buckram ($4794). hunter, historical journal, 1793, quarto issue. halewood and sons, june online cat., occasional light spotting, contemporary calf, illus. (£6000). peter harrington, june online cat., scattered foxing, later calf, binding illus. (£3850). george bayntun, june online cat., contemporary boards rebacked with calf, illus. (£3500). stainbeck road, june online cat., lacking 3 pls. but with blake’s, modern buckram (£2950). hordern house, oct. online cat., early 19th-century calf, joints repaired, illus. ($10,500 australian). bl, 28 nov., #315, light foxing, contemporary calf rebacked, illus. (£2480). josephus, works. tombland bookshop, june online cat., probably bb issue b or c, foxed, contemporary calf very worn, covers detached (£225). blackwell’s, june online cat., probably the 1st issue published by c. cooke with the title page as in bb issue d, but the body of the text not “reset” (description of issue d, bb p. 588) and thus as in issue c, recent half calf, title page illus. (£750, acquired by john windle for essick). eb, aug., bb issue a, scattered foxing with some soiling and damp staining, contemporary calf very worn, illus. (£375); sept., bb issue c, marginal foxing, contemporary morocco worn, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £575). kimpton, history of the bible, c. 1781. hard to find books, june online cat., soiled, “leather boards” detached ($380). lavater, aphorisms. eb, may, 1794 ed., 2nd st. of the pl., foxed, contemporary calf very worn, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £199.95). northgate books, june online cat., 1788 ed., later calf (£300). lavater, essays on physiognomy. eb, dec. 2012, 1789-98 ed., 3 vols. in 5, contemporary calf worn, illus. (€655); aug., “1792” (c. 1818) ed., 3 vols. in 5, contemporary morocco very worn, illus. ($202.50). philadelphia rare books, june online cat., 1789-98 ed., 3 vols. in 5, moderate to mild foxing, contemporary calf rebacked, illus. ($2500). bl, 3 oct., #76, “1789-92” (a mixed set?), 3 vols. in 5, soiled and with repairs, contemporary calf worn, rebacked, illus. (£199). pba, 21 nov., #107, 1810 ed., 3 vols. in 5, light foxing, 19th-century calf worn, illus. (not sold; estimate $1500-2000); same copy, 19 dec., #184, illus. ($510). malkin, father’s memoirs of his child, 1806. bonhams auction, san francisco, 16 dec. 2012, #5243, later cloth, illus. ($25; estimate $200-300). john windle tells me that this copy was in very poor condition. eb, jan.-feb., minor foxing on blake’s pl., uncut in later cloth, illus. ($720). david lay auction, penzance, 20 aug., #1245, scattered foxing, contemporary calf, illus. (£250). bg, 10 oct., #52, occasional spotting, contemporary half calf, with 4 vols. unrelated to blake (£415; estimate £150-200). nicholson, introduction to natural philosophy. scarthin books, june online cat., 1782 ed., 2 vols., contemporary calf worn (£300). alfa antikvariat, june online cat., 1787 ed., half calf worn ($463). novelist’s magazine. chapter 1 books, june online cat., vols. 10-11 (sir charles grandison) only, 1783, foxed, “front board of vol 10 is missing” ($140). eb, aug.-sept., vols. 10-14 only, 1783, lacking the general title pages, contemporary half calf very worn, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of £99.99); same copy, sept., illus. (£79.99). blake’s 3 pls. are in vol. 10. rees, cyclopædia, 1820. antiquariat gertrud thelen, june online cat., complete in 39 text vols. and 6 pls. vols., half calf worn, bindings illus. (€9500). country books, june online cat., 38 text vols. (lacking vol. 17) and 4 pls. vols. (apparently lacking vols. 3 and 5 and thus blake’s pl. 3), half calf very worn ($1164). eb, july, pls. vol. 1 only, many pls. stained, contemporary calf worn, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $200); pls. vols. 1, 2, and 4 only, offered individually, half calf very worn, illus. ($20.50 each); pls. vol. 3 only, with cb pl. 3b, half calf very worn, illus. ($37.56). clearances, nov. online cat., pls. vol. 1 only, “original cloth[?], later rebacked” (£950). ritson, select collection of english songs, 1783. travis & emery music, june online cat., vols. 1 and 2 only offered individually, 2 leaves detached in each, contemporary calf worn, covers loose (£87.90 each). blake’s 9 pls. are in vols. 1-2. salzmann, elements of morality. artisan books & bindery, april online cat., 1799 ed., 3 vols., contemporary calf, illus. ($2750). quinn’s auction, falls church, virginia, 25 april, #263, 1792 ed., lacking vol. 2 (of 3), modern quarter calf, with an unrelated vol., illus. (no price information; estimate $80-120). john windle, oct. online cat., undated juvenile library ed. dated in bb #492e to c. 1815, 2 vols., no description of the binding ($1500). scott, poetical works, 1782. justin croft/simon beattie, nov. cat. of “english verse 1751-1800 part iii: r-z,” #45, contemporary calf (£600). shakespeare, dramatic works, 1802. rosenbad antique books, june online cat., 9 vols., scattered foxing, contemporary calf rebacked and worn, illus. ($9900). d & e lake, june online cat., 9 vols., lacking 4 pls. but apparently with blake’s, scattered foxing, contemporary morocco worn ($8325). arundel books, june online cat., 9 vols., foxed and browned, calf very worn, some covers loose ($4500). heritage book shop, nov. online cat., 9 vols. in 6, 95 pls., contemporary morocco rebacked ($12,500). shakespeare, plays. eb, jan.-feb., 1805 ed., 10 vol. issue, later half calf worn, illus. ($190—a great bargain if the pls. are in good order); oct., 1805 ed., 9 vol. issue, damp staining in 2 vols., later calf, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $1200). pba, 18 feb., #190, 1805 ed., 10 vol. issue, contemporary calf rebacked, bindings illus. ($1440). bookshop on the heath, june online cat., 1811 ed., 9 vols., contemporary calf (£1495). mw books, nov. online cat., 1811 ed., 9 vols., contemporary calf, bindings illus. ($1954). stedman, narrative, 1806, colored copy. doyle auction, new york, 25 nov., #413, 2 vols., scattered stains, contemporary half calf worn, 1 cover detached, illus. ($6875). stedman, narrative, uncolored copies. lyon & turnbull auction, edinburgh, 16 jan., #441, 1813 ed., 2 vols., marginal tears, “contemporary boards” worn, illus. (£400). freeman’s auction, philadelphia, 4 april, #324, 1796 ed., 2 vols., contemporary calf worn, 1 pl. repaired, scattered foxing, illus. ($1792). krull books, june online cat., 1806 ed., 2 vols., some pls. browned, later calf (€7150). sabero books, june online cat., 1806 ed., 2 vols. in 1, contemporary calf rebacked (£4000). halewood and sons, june online cat., 1796 ed., 2 vols., scattered foxing, contemporary calf rebacked, illus. (£2295). booklore, june online cat., 1813 ed., 2 vols., later morocco, bindings illus. (£1750). maggs, july online cat., 1796 ed., 2 vols., many pls. foxed, contemporary calf worn with hinges repaired, illus. (£4000). eb, oct., 1796 ed., 2 vols., lacking blake’s pl. 14, scattered foxing, contemporary calf rebacked, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $5500); same copy and price, nov. stuart and revett, antiquities of athens. sl, 28 feb., #130, 1762-1816, 4 vols., early 19th-century morocco, illus. (£39,650; estimate £10,000-15,000). sotheran’s, march “art and architecture” cat., #207, 1762-94, 3 vols., 19th-century russia, illus. (£16,200). blake’s 4 pls. are in vol. 3 of 1794. varley, zodiacal physiognomy, 1828. odyssey books, june online cat., blake’s pls. 2-3 in their 2nd sts., some pls. stained, later cloth, illus. ($10,500). virgil, pastorals, 1821. howes bookshop, sept. cat. 353, #29, vol. 2 only with blake’s pls. 26-27, late 19th-century half morocco (£750). cny, 29 oct., #791, 2 vols., from the collection of arthur and charlotte vershbow, the property of alexander vershbow, occasional minor spotting, 19th-century calf, illus. ($17,500; estimate $5000-7000). blake’s wood engravings are in vol. 1. wollstonecraft, marie et caroline, year vii of the revolutionary calendar (22 sept. 1798 to 22 sept. 1799). eb, march-april, marginal stains, later calf, illus. (€810.55 to john windle, who sold it immediately to the e. j. pratt library, victoria university, toronto). a french translation of original stories from real life with reengravings of blake’s pls. 2-6 1st published in 1791 (see bbs 265, 268-69). the author’s name is given as “marie vollstonecraft godwin” on the french title page. only the 2nd copy i’ve ever seen on the market. for description and illus. of all 5 pls., see g. e. bentley, jr., “marie vollstonecraft godwin and william blake in france: the first foreign engravings after blake’s designs,” australian journal of french studies 26.2 (1989): 125-47. wollstonecraft, original stories, 1791. bromer booksellers, july online cat. 36, no item #, 2nd sts. of the pls., ink spots in a few margins, modern calf, the same copy offered in aug. 2011 for $8500, illus. ($6500); same copy, nov. ($7000). freeman’s auction, philadelphia, 26 sept., #141, sts. of the pls. not indicated, scattered foxing, contemporary calf very worn ($1750). young, night thoughts, 1797. eb, jan., pl. 18 only, framed, illus. ($300); april-may, lacking the “explanation” leaf, some pls. cropped, light brown stains in lower margins, contemporary morocco rebacked, illus. ($5100). luxury catalogs, feb. online cat., with the “explanation” leaf, “occasional foxing,” contemporary morocco, illus. ($20,000). bl, 30 may, #107, with the “explanation” leaf, various defects and stains, many margins “defective,” many pls. “silked” (covered with semi-transparent silk), contemporary morocco worn and rebacked, illus. (£1300). charmaz books, june online cat., no mention of the “explanation” leaf, original “leather” rebacked, all edges gilt ($12,000). cny, 29 oct., #785, from the collection of arthur and charlotte vershbow, with the “explanation” leaf, uncut, “tipped to guards throughout,” modern quarter “leather,” illus. ($10,000). antiquariat post, nov. online cat., 38 (of 43) pls. only, no description of binding and thus possibly unbound (€6800). interesting blakeana blake’s cottage, 1 blake’s road, felpham, west sussex. jackson-stops, june online cat., #52661, a 17th-century brick and flint cottage, listed grade ii*, blake’s residence sept. 1800 to fall 1803, on the market for the 1st time since 1928, many illus. including a detailed floor plan (guide price £650,000). according to the blake society, london, e-mail of 5 sept., a sale was pending at £600,000 to a private buyer. william locke, jr. (1767-1847), an album of 44 pencil, pen and ink, and chalk drawings. bhl, 10 april, #235, some signed and dated between 1780 and 1787, with 3 framed landscape drawings, “by descent through the family of william gilpin,” illus. (£6250; estimate £2000-3000). the album was probably acquired by rafael valls gallery, london, which held “an exhibition of drawings by william lock the younger,” 4-14 dec. locke (or lock) was a student of fuseli’s, whose influence is evident in these studies. locke is listed as a subscriber to r. h. cromek’s ed. of robert blair’s the grave with blake’s designs in the 1st and 2nd prospectuses (both nov. 1805) and in 2 of the subsequent advertisements for the book (br[2] 210, 214, 226). novelist’s magazine, vol. 9, 1782, bb pl. 1 for “sentimental journey,” blake after stothard. eb, feb., printed in dark brown, with signatures but lacking all other letters, with some lines removed (in comparison to the proof before all letters in the british museum) in the lower frame of the cartouche below the central design, illus. (acquired at the “buy it now” price of $200 by a gullible essick). although offered as an original impression from blake’s pl., this turned out to be a reproduction, probably a photo-etching or zincograph. the platemark was altered slightly from 17.4 x 11.2 cm. to 16.9 x 11.0 cm., but the design, including the elaborate frame, was reduced considerably from 15.6 x 10.5 cm. in original impressions to 12.6 x 8.6 cm. the paper of this reproduction is a type of hard wove sometimes called “japan vellum” or “faux vellum” and not known to have been available in england until the second half of the 19th century. the theatrical remembrancer, 1788. elaine beardsell, aug. online cat., foxed, recent quarter morocco, illus. (£65). the bookshop, chapel hill, aug. online cat., with barker’s complete list of plays, 1803, extensively annotated in pen and ink in an early hand, 2 vols. in original boards worn with spines amateurishly repaired with cloth tape ($175). bb #522a (1788 ed.) and c (1803 ed.). the theatrical remembrancer would appear to be a reissue of egerton’s theatrical remembrancer, also 1788. the title page, leaf [a1], in the reissue is probably a cancellans. all 3 titles noted here list blake’s “king edward the third” from poetical sketches. the issue with “egerton’s” as the 1st word in the title (not in bb or bbs) is the earliest published bibliography to include a work by blake. for further comments see the next entry, below. barker’s continuation of egerton’s theatrical remembrancer, 1801. centerbridge books, april online cat., scattered foxing, later cloth, illus. ($150). lists blake’s “king edward the third” from poetical sketches. bb #522b points out that the drama is wrongly attributed to “murdock” in this 1801 ed., a mistake resulting from “a conflation from the 1788 theatrical remembrancer, where the entry after blake’s ‘king edward the third’ is john murdock [sic], double disguise, 12 mo, 1783.” the compiler of the 1801 ed. also made a spelling error, for the 1788 ed. (see above) accurately records the author of double disguise as “john murdoch” (258). the errors in attribution and spelling are repeated in barker’s complete list of plays, 1803 (see below), but authorship is returned to “blake” in the drama recorded; or, barker’s list of plays, 1814 (see below). barker’s complete list of plays, 1803. bb #522c. james cummins, aug. online cat., quarter calf ($300). for another copy, see the theatrical remembrancer, 1788, above, and for comments see the entry immediately above. the drama recorded; or, barker’s list of plays, 1814. bb #522d. sessabks, aug. online cat., title page boldly stamped in red, “mercantile library philada.,” modern half buckram over 19th-century boards worn, calf spine label probably from an earlier binding ($200). for comments, see barker’s continuation of egerton’s theatrical remembrancer, 1801, above. e. englantine, memoirs of the life of the celebrated mrs. q, 1822. ian marr, oct. cat. 7, #23, 19th-century calf, illus. (£450). the frontispiece is a reduced reengraving of “mrs q,” engraved by blake after villiers in 1820. annual biography and obituary for the year 1828. eb, june, contemporary boards very worn, front cover missing, illus. ($14.99). includes obituaries of blake (bb #842) and flaxman. catalogue of engravings, by the most esteemed artists, … forming part of the stock of moon, boys, and graves, 1829. bbs 285. hanselled books, nov. online cat., modern half calf, binding illus. (£175 on hanselled’s web site, but £140 via abebooks). includes blake’s engraving of “romeo and juliet” after john opie, published c. 1802-03 in boydell’s graphic illustrations of the dramatic works of shakspeare (bb #437) and in boydell’s ed. of the dramatic works of shakspeare (bb #497), “prints, 4s. proofs, 7s.6d.” (p. 65). the pl. is also listed without price in the section of the cat. titled “boydell’s small shakspeare” (p. 159) and in the subject index, p. 204. all 3 listings name “blake” as the engraver. “boydell’s small plates” for shakespeare, presumably a version of bb #437 including blake’s pl., is offered in the section on “books and books of prints,” £6.6s. for “modern impressions, half-bound,” and £8.8s. for “very old impressions, in sheets” (p. 188). the cat. also includes pls. after designs by barry, flaxman, fuseli, romney, and stothard, and engravings by parker and linnell. w. blake, songs of innocence and of experience, pickering ed., 1839. honey & wax booksellers, oct. online cat., issue without “the little vagabond,” publisher’s cloth, spine faded, illus. ($9500). w. blake, the marriage of heaven and hell, camden hotten facsimile, 1868. cny, 29 oct., #793, from the collection of arthur and charlotte vershbow, publisher’s roan-backed cloth, illus. ($688 to john windle for stock). allgemeine familien zeitung, no. 36, 1873. eb, feb., illus. (offered at the “buy it now” prices of €24.80 unframed and €44.60 framed or “best offer”). the front page includes a wood engraving, signed “f. bocourt” lower left and “l. chapon” lower right, reproducing schiavonetti’s engraving of blake’s “death’s door” (reversed) from blair’s the grave. this is the same wood engraving by léon louis chapon (1836-1918) published in m. w. bürger, histoire des peintres de toutes les écoles: école anglaise, 1863 (bb #1317, indicating that “bürger” is a pseudonym for j. thore [that is, thoré]). the design may have been traced from schiavonetti’s engraving or drawn on the block by bocourt (probably marie firmin bocourt, 1819-1904) and cut in the wood by chapon. w. blake, songs of innocence, william muir facsimile, 1885. carpe diem books, april private offer, copy “0” with a presentation inscription by muir to the editor of the academy, letter by muir to the editor laid in loose, publisher’s wrappers, later slipcase ($8500). w. blake, for the sexes: the gates of paradise, pl. 14. bhl, 5 june, #15, illus. (£650). the auction cat. failed to point out that this is a leaf from the william muir facsimile of 1888. w. blake, songs of innocence and of experience, quaritch facsimile, introduction by edwin j. ellis, hand-colored issue, 1893. cny, 29 oct., #794, from the collection of arthur and charlotte vershbow, contemporary calf with the “original cloth covers bound in at end,” illus. ($688 to john windle for stock). eb, nov., 1 leaf loose, half calf worn, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $3150). w. blake, poetical sketches, vale press, 1899. bl, 4 april, #116, 1 of 8 copies printed on vellum, illus. and “decoration” by charles ricketts, full morocco gilt with the “lh” initials of laurence hodson, binding illus. (£7000 to bromer booksellers; estimate £3500-5000); bromer, july online cat. 36, no item # ($22,500). “mrs q,” blake after villiers, 1906 facsimile. cl, 19 sept., #293, wove paper, platemark 33.0 x 24.0 cm., with the companion print, “windsor castle” engraved by maile, from the collection of “professor sir albert richardson, p.r.a.,” both framed, illus. (not sold; estimate £700-1000). the cl cat. entry initially offered these as originals, but a “saleroom notice” posted on the cl web site by 13 sept. indicated that they are the 1906 facsimiles. original impressions of “mrs q” have a platemark of 35.2 x 24.9 cm. cheffins auction, cambridge, 14 nov., #385, “heavy laid paper,” stained, with the companion print, both elaborately framed, illus. (£300; estimate £70-100). although offered by cheffins as an original impression, this is very probably the 1906 facsimile. i have never seen an original on laid paper, but an example of the facsimile in my collection is on heavy laid paper. jerusalem (“and did those feet in ancient time”). stanzas from william blake’s “prophetic books” set to music by c. hubert h. parry. curwen edition, no. 40009. london: j. curwen & sons, n.d. (c. 1916). eb, march-april, 2 conjugate leaves unbound as issued, pencil annotations on front cover, illus. (£2.75). the 1st ed. of parry’s music for blake’s “jerusalem” lyric in the “preface” to milton a poem. the publication date is based on the “copyright 1916” statement printed in the 1944 reissue. thomas b. harned, ed., the letters of anne gilchrist and walt whitman, 1918. antic hay books, aug. online cat., publisher’s cloth and dust jacket ($75). ed conroy bookseller, aug. online cat., publisher’s cloth ($61.50). between the covers, aug. online cat., publisher’s cloth worn ($50). phyllis tholin books, aug. online cat., publisher’s cloth worn ($12). in a letter of 2 may 1884, gilchrist tells whitman about a visit from edward dowden (poet and critic, 1843-1913) and spending “three hours together, talking of you & looking through blake’s drawings” (225). “a dream of thiralatha” (sp impression 1a) and the song of los, copy d, pl. 5, frederick hollyer color reproductions, datable to the 1920s. justin schiller, april new york book fair ($500 each). w. blake, songs of innocence and songs of experience, william muir facsimiles, 1927. heritage book shop, june online cat., 2 vols., copy numbers not recorded, bookplate of a. edward newton, quarter morocco, original wrappers bound in ($3500). probably copies no. 22 (innocence) and 29 (experience) in the newton auction, parke-bernet, 17 april 1941, #182 ($60) and #183 ($70). eric gill (british sculptor and calligrapher, 1882-1940), pamphlet with reproductions of blake’s songs of innocence and of experience, 1931. eb, june, 54 pp. of illus. bound in paper wrappers, the front cover inscribed by gill “songs of innocence & experience,” 1st leaf with a presentation inscription, “denis t. [gill’s son-in-law, denis tegetmeier] from eg 25, dec. 1931,” illus. (£390). the reproductions were taken from facsimile of the original outlines before colouring of the songs of innocence and of experience, introduction by edwin j. ellis (london: bernard quaritch, 1893). craddock & barnard, an illustrated catalogue of engravings & etchings, cat. 82, [1956]. uncle phil’s books, july online cat., original wrappers (£8.50). item 55 is the set of prepublication proofs of blake’s job engravings (£325) from george richmond’s collection, acquired by philip hofer and now in the houghton library, harvard university, accession no. pf typ 6500.55.3. william blake’s illustrations to the bible, trianon press, 1957. bl, 3 oct., #83, no. 18 of 20 copies with 5 proofs of 1 pl. (the frontispiece in this copy), publisher’s morocco, illus. (£1054). w. blake, auguries of innocence, illus. by leonard baskin, 1959. cny, 29 oct., #795, from the collection of arthur and charlotte vershbow, “this copy designated ‘printer’s copy’ and signed by baskin,” presentation inscription from baskin to “charlotte & arthur,” with 2 “proof engravings signed [apparently by baskin] and inscribed to the vershbows laid-in,” illus. ($1188). blake’s circle and followers works are listed under artists’ names in the following order: paintings and drawings sold in groups, single paintings and drawings, letters and manuscripts, separate pls., books by (or with pls. by) the artist. barry, james ancient greek battle scene, attributed to barry. watercolor, 38.0 x 45.0 cm. sheppards auction, durrow, ireland, 9 july, #120, illus. (no price information; estimate €1200-1800). an interesting design, but william pressly does not believe that it is by barry. the education of achilles. pen and ink over pencil, 35.0 x 27.0 cm., signed, datable to c. 1772. sl, 5 july, #354, with standing male in the pose of hercules, brown wash over black chalk on 2 sheets of wove paper, 38.4 x 21.2 cm., signed and inscribed “c. bentley” lower right, datable to c. 1780, both illus. (£27,500; estimate £2500-3500). satan, sin and death: “death and sin met by satan on his return from earth.” pencil, pen and ink, gray and brown washes with touches of white, 59.0 x 41.6 cm., inscribed on the backing leaf “picture xxii milton gallery.” cny, 31 jan., #146, “possibly” the work sold “christie’s, london, 10 april 1807, part of lot 54 (£4.6s. to denham),” illus. ($47,500). barry’s etching of the design is datable to c. 1792-95. “a grecian harvest home,” etching. galerie bassenge auction, berlin, 28 nov., #5335, 4th (final) st., illus. (€14,000; estimate €1800-2400). i am amazed at the prices that barry’s prints have been fetching at auction; see “job reproved by his friends” in blake 46.4 (spring 2013). basire, james (with an emphasis on pls. produced during blake’s apprenticeship to basire in the 1770s) james basire the younger (engraver, 1769-1832, the son of blake’s master). manuscript journal, 1813-19, 68 leaves, with references to apprentices (for example, james dix), sermons, trials, and executions. dw, 30 jan., #337, illus. (£1100; estimate £200-300). the extensive cat. entry makes no reference to blake or james parker. “the siege of boulogne by king henry viii. mdxliv,” engraved by basire after a “coeval painting” copied by samuel hieronymus grimm, 1788. bl, 31 july, #96, with 6 unrelated prints, illus. (£140). at 59.5 x 169.0 cm., 1 of basire’s largest pls. “the stoning of st. stephen” after raphael, etched by richard dalton, engraved by basire, 1753. eb, feb.-march, signed lower right “r dalton del & acqua forti fecit. j. basire junr. sculp.,” illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of €49); same impression, march, illus. (€59). bryant, new system … of ancient mythology, 1774-76. see under letterpress books with engravings by and after blake, above. cook, a voyage towards the south pole, and round the world, 1777. hordern house, aug. online cat., 1 pl. only, “captain james cook, f.r.s.” engraved by basire after william hodges, illus. ($1450 australian). antipodean books, aug. online cat., 1 pl. only, “captain james cook, f.r.s.” after hodges, 2 impressions ($750 and $475). eb, aug., 1 pl. only, “the landing at mallicolo” engraved by basire after hodges, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $575). eighty-two prints, engraved by f. bartolozzi, &c., from the original drawings by guercino, in the collection of his majesty, published by boydell, n.d. (c. 1764?). eb, march-april, 6 pls. only (5 landscapes, 1 figure study), offered individually, illus. (all sold for prices between €18.50 and €51); april, 1 pl. only, a landscape, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of £39.50); 1 pl. only, “saint petronilla mourned,” illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of €240); 1 pl. only, a landscape, apparently a proof before framing lines and letters, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of €120); 1 pl. only, a landscape, framed, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $449.99); 1 pl. only, a landscape, framed, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of £29.50); dec., 1 pl. only, a landscape, marginal stains, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of €120). gray, poems, 1775. robert temple, aug. online cat., portrait frontispiece by basire after w. mason and b. wilson, original boards worn ($515). eos buchantiquariat benz, aug. online cat., pl. only, illus. ($155). hamilton, account of the discoveries at pompeii, 1777. bl, 3 oct., #73, with 13 pls. by basire, stains, later morocco, with hamilton, observations on mount vesuvius, 1773, and “another by hamilton” (£868). eb, nov., modern half morocco, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $2750). hollis, memoirs of thomas hollis, 1780. am here books, aug. online cat., “magnificent large paper” copy apparently bound in 2 vols., original boards rebacked ($2750). blake may have participated in the production of the 9 full-page pls. and 1 small vignette signed by basire. in addition, blake was interested in the portraits of john milton in this work—see cp 117-18. monro, works of alexander monro, 1781. gp, oct. online cat., only the frontispiece portrait engraved by basire, 1776, illus. (£120). rogers, collection of prints in imitation of drawings, 1778. eb, jan., 1 pl. only, “a monument” after bernini, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of €30); 1 pl. only, “sleep in the arms of night” after passignano, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of €35); 1 pl. only, “time” after rysbrack, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of €30); march-april, 1 pl. only, “moses exposed” after le sueur, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of €35); same impression, april, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of €35); april, 1 pl. only, “cupid with the sword of mars” after carracci, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of €220); 1 pl. only, “the immaculate virgin” after maratti, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of €280). stuart and revett, antiquities of athens, 1762-1816. see under letterpress books with engravings by and after blake, above. calvert, edward the early engravings of edward calvert, carfax and co., 1904. bl, 4 april, #286, 1 of 30 copies, “two sheets slightly spotted, not affecting image, unbound in original folder,” illus. (£6000; estimate £8000-12,000). this portfolio includes original impressions of 2 of calvert’s 3 intaglio engravings, all 7 of his wood engravings, and his 2 lithographs. another source for the 2 intaglio engravings and 6 of the wood engravings, a memoir of edward calvert artist by his third son, 1893, does not include original impressions of the lithographs. cumberland, george cumberland, lewina the maid of snowdon, bound with cumberland, a poem on the landscapes of great-britain, both 1793. justin croft/simon beattie, feb. cat. of “english verse 1751-1800 part i: a-g,” #189, modern quarter calf, illus. (£1800). this cat. ascribes all the pls. in both works to cumberland, as their title pages indicate, but a note by george cumberland, jr., accompanying an impression in my collection of the tailpiece to lewina, states that it was designed “jointly with thos stothard r. a.” for other notes attributing this pl. to both men, see g. e. bentley, jr., a bibliography of george cumberland (1754-1848) (new york: garland publishing, 1975) 7n1. flaxman, john see also flaxman under letterpress books with engravings by and after blake, above. a group of 18 drawings, including 1 by flaxman. sl, 5 july, #379, the largest drawing 25.7 x 39.4 cm., the flaxman illus. (£2875). flaxman’s pencil, pen and ink, and monochrome wash drawing (size not indicated) pictures a battle scene or its aftermath. the central male is winged and wears a helmet adorned with a serpent. david bindman suggests that the subject may be taken from the book of enoch. if so, the winged figure could be the angel gabriel, sent by “the lord” to “destroy the children of fornication, the offspring of the watchers, from among men; bring them forth, and excite them one against another. let them perish by mutual slaughter; …” (the book of enoch, trans. richard laurence [oxford: oxford up, 1821] 10.13). amphion and zethus delivering their mother antiope from the fury of dirce and lycus. pencil, pen and ink, wash, 16.1 x 29.2 cm., signed “flaxman, roma, 1789.” lowell libson, jan. cat. of “british paintings & works on paper,” pp. 41-[43], illus. (not priced). ballet. pencil, pen and ink, 9.0 x 10.8 cm., title inscribed in pencil lower right. roseberys auction, west norwood, london, 11 june, #704, attributed to “circle of john flaxman,” illus. (£160); ah, nov. online cat. 431, #20, firmly attributed to flaxman, illus. (£475). i agree with abbott and holder’s attribution to flaxman. the braschi venus. pencil and wash, 74.3 x 51.1 cm., datable to 1811. lowell libson, jan. cat. of “british paintings & works on paper,” pp. 38-40, illus. (not priced). reported on libson’s web site in sept. to have been sold to “the royal academy of arts, london.” a lithograph of the design by g. childs, titled “venus of cindos—praxiteles,” was published as pl. 22 in flaxman, lectures on sculpture, 1829. design for the tomb of mary ann bosanquet. pencil, 11.4 x 18.4 cm., datable to 1819-20. canterbury auction, canterbury, 16 april, #544, misidentified as a design for the tomb of “william basanguet” and wrongly dated to “circa 1813,” foxed and stained, framed, illus. (£480). for a model of the tomb, see margaret whinney and rupert gunnis, the collection of models by john flaxman r. a. at university college london (london: athlone p, 1967) 29 #40 and pl. 3a. italian woman with a child. monochrome wash, 13.5 x 11.8 cm. grisebach auction, berlin, 27 nov., #100, illus. (not sold; estimate €9000-12,000). previously offered heim gallery/christopher powney, spring 1976 “john flaxman” cat., #58, illus. (£240). john flaxman and his wife. a pair of wedgwood circular portrait plaques, 14.0 cm. diameter, profiles on a pale blue ground. woolley & wallis auction, salisbury, 30 april, #322, dated to “late 18th/early 19th century,” framed, illus. (£300). i suspect that these may be a good deal later than the date suggested by the auctioneer. “maternal tenderness”: memorial to lady fitzharris. plaster cast, 68.0 cm. high, inscribed “published as the act directs may[?] by mr flaxman and mr denman buckingham street fitzroy square,” datable to 1816. lowell libson, march online cat., from the tulk family collection, illus. (price on request). only 1 other cast is recorded, now in sir john soane’s museum, london. sold by sept. to the carnegie museum of art, pittsburgh. two classical figures riding a ram. pen and ink, gray wash, 20.3 x 30.5 cm., datable to c. 1788. eb, jan., inscribed “flaxman—” on the damaged mount, illus. (£320). the subject is almost certainly the ram with the golden fleece carrying phrixus (or phrixos or phryxus) and his sister helle over the waves from thebes to colchis (see the bibliotheca of pseudo-apollodorus, book 1, and ovid’s fasti, book 3). helle never made it; she fell into a part of the sea subsequently called the hellespont. david bindman tells me that the design derives in part from a roman mosaic flaxman saw in naples in 1788 and may be connected with a relief sculpture he tried to sell to the earl of bristol. young, pensive maiden with an oil lamp. pen and ink, wash, 23.7 x 14.8 cm. galerie bassenge auction, berlin, 31 may, #6423a, dated to c. 1790, illus. (€2800; estimate €600). autograph letter written in the 3rd person to the publisher richard phillips, 1 p., 28 nov. 1814. bhl, 19 march, #124, with reference to flaxman’s design for a monument to admiral nelson, illus. (£375). ticket for admission to a royal academy exhibition signed by flaxman. bhl, 19 march, #115, with 2 admission tickets to royal academy lectures signed by fuseli and a large group of letters and other materials related to british art in the early 19th century, letter by philip de loutherbourg illus. (£4000; estimate £1000-1500). fuseli, henry joseph interpreting the dreams of the pharaoh’s baker and butler. oil, 86.6 x 65.1 cm., inscribed on the stretcher “given by henry fuseli esq. to lady georgina north it being his first painting.” cl, 4 dec., #178, illus. (£140,500; estimate £30,000-50,000). previously offered cl, 2 dec. 2008, #28, illus. (not sold; estimate £120,000-180,000). anon., portrait of a gentleman, traditionally believed to be heinrich fuseli. oil, 40.0 x 32.0 cm. cheffins auction, cambridge, 20 june, #498, illus. (not sold; estimate £600-800); 11 july, #388, illus. (£480). tickets for admission to royal academy lectures signed by fuseli. see the ticket signed by flaxman, above. “the night mare,” engraved in stipple by “a. zaffonato” and published by suntach, 1795. eb, may, trimmed just outside the platemark, marginal foxing, illus. (€369). as the vendor on eb indicates, the engraver was the italian alessandro zaffonato, born c. 1730 and active until c. 1795. for illus., see blake 41.4 (spring 2008): 156. speculations in the caption to the 2008 illus. that the engraver’s name was a punning pseudonym are wrong. “queen katherine’s dream,” engraved in stipple by francesco bartolozzi, 1788. eb, march, image showing wear, imprint trimmed off, light marginal stains, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of €52). a catalogue of the small and very select classical library of the late henry fuseli, sl, 22-25 july 1825. doyle auction, new york, 25 nov., #313, with 2 engraved portraits of fuseli and a “manuscript account of fuseli by the writer of spanish travelogues richard ford [and] 1945 ownership signature of ruthven todd,” with 5 other sale cats., boards detached, illus. ($875). linnell, john (excluding later portraits) apple gatherers, attributed to linnell. oil, 76.2 x 101.6 cm. duke’s auction, dorchester, 26 sept., #265, illus. (£1700). possibly by william linnell. a boy fishing. oil, 43.0 x 26.5 cm., inscribed on the back “belongs to h. m. palmer / 13 july 1919” and “contributed to the loan collection of s. palmer’s / works by a. h. palmer april 1923 / shorham [sic] period.” sl, 4 july, #204, with “a pencil study of a young boy seen through an open door, and other figures,” illus. (not sold; estimate £20,000-30,000). previously sold sl, 21 nov. 1984, #96, attributed to linnell and palmer, illus. (£35,200). castle field, reigate, attributed to linnell. watercolor, 25.0 x 36.5 cm. stride & son auction, chichester, 26 july, #1766, illus. (£150). the cow yard. oil, 29.0 x 35.0 cm., signed. tayler & fletcher auction, cheltenham, 20 june, #267, illus. (not sold; estimate £3000-4000). i suspect that this is a copy by someone other than linnell of the much finer version, signed and dated 1831, in the victoria and albert museum, london, accession no. fa.134[o]. the eel pie house, twickenham. watercolor, 8.9 x 14.6 cm., signed and dated 1861. csk, 5 dec., #126, illus., with tending sheep, watercolor, 10.4 x 15.8 cm., signed and dated 1863 (not sold; estimate £800-1200). farm workers seated. pencil, 8.5 x 11.0 cm., signed with initials. bho, 21 aug., #25, framed, illus. (withdrawn; estimate £200). gorringes auction, lewes, east sussex, 5 dec., #1731, illus. (£130). farm worker, young child, and sheep. oil, 17.8 x 25.4 cm., signed. keys auction, norwich, 12 july, #108, illus. (not sold; estimate £400-500); 6 dec., #78, illus. (not sold; estimate £400-500). the attribution is questionable. figure by a stream at dusk. oil, 40.0 x 51.0 cm., signed. woolley & wallis auction, salisbury, 4 dec., #82, illus. (£1400; estimate £500-800). a landscape scene with trees. watercolor, 20.3 x 35.6 cm., signed and dated 1876. neals auction, woodbridge, suffolk, 26 june, #193, framed, illus. (£430). landscape with shepherd and cows. oil, 35.6 x 45.7 cm., signed “j. linnell.” skinner auction, boston, 20 sept., #514, illus. ($960). pastoral landscape with shepherds tending a flock on a hillside. oil, 22.5 x 30.0 cm., signed. anderson & garland auction, newcastle upon tyne, 17 sept., #354, framed, illus. (£1600). portrait of a gentleman. watercolor, 37.5 x 29.8 cm., signed and dated 1824. csk, 9 april, #413, illus. (not sold; estimate £1000-1500). portrait of thomas chevalier. pencil and sepia wash, 20.0 x 16.0 cm., signed and dated 1816. bellmans auction, billingshurst, sussex, 22 may, #416, framed, illus. (withdrawn; estimate £150-250). linnell’s engraving of this portrait is dated 1825. portrait of thomas hill. oil, 33.0 x 25.4 cm., signed and dated 1831. eb, jan., illus. ($1703.98). this is probably the portrait of hill exhibited at the royal academy in 1832, #57. linnell’s preliminary chalk drawing of hill’s head and shoulders was sold cl, 10 july 1990, #29, illus. (£264). redhill common, surrey. oil, 71.1 x 99.0 cm., signed and dated 1874. sny, 2 feb., #833, illus. (not sold; estimate $15,000-20,000). red sunset. oil, 81.0 x 106.0 cm., signed, inscribed on a label “a red sun-set / begun aug 8/77 / john linnell sn.” sl, 19 nov., #15, illus. (not sold; estimate £8000-12,000). previously sold from linnell’s estate, cl, 14 march 1918, #13 (£65.2s.); previously offered sl, 9 july 2009, #30, illus. (not sold; estimate £20,000-30,000). saint john the baptist. oil, 72.5 x 92.0 cm., signed and dated 1867. bho, 13 march, #204, illus. (£1750). previously offered bhl, 17 april 2012, #72, illus. (not sold; estimate £4000-6000), and 23 oct. 2012, #67, illus. (not sold; estimate £2000-3000). self portrait. oil, 30.0 x 22.0 cm., datable to the 1820s. sl, 5 july, #363, illus. (£10,625; estimate £4000-6000). shepherd and his collie guarding the flock. oil on panel, 52.1 x 68.6 cm., signed and dated 1832. csk, 20 june, #132, illus. (£6250). the illus. shows several cracks in the panel. shepherd driving his flock down a country lane. watercolor, 31.0 x 49.0 cm., signed. boldon galleries auction, east boldon, tyne and wear, 6 march, #374, illus. (£340). shepherds at dusk. oil, 71.1 x 101.6 cm., signed and dated 1869. matthews auction, bray, wicklow, ireland, 3 nov., sale of the contents of violet hill house, the “former residence of mr. sean connery” in the 1970s, #204, illus. (€15,000; estimate €200-400). shoreham, kent. pencil, white chalk, and watercolor on buff paper, 27.9 x 43.6 cm., possibly executed in 1828, inscribed “j linnell / shoreham / kent.” cl, 20 nov., #283, from the “collection of the late mrs t.s. eliot,” illus. (£6250). previously sold sl, 14 april 1994, #339, illus. (£14,950). two anglers on a fenland waterway. watercolor, 22.0 x 32.5 cm., signed. anderson & garland auction, newcastle upon tyne, 17 sept., #152, framed, illus. (£500). two sheep. pencil, 9.0 x 14.0 cm., inscribed “from life j. linnell.” bho, 16 oct., #78 (not sold; estimate £500-700); 30 oct., #19, illus. (£225). the watering place. oil, 14.5 x 19.5 cm., signed. charterhouse auction, sherborne, dorset, 4 july, #188, illus. (£600). welsh scene, attributed to linnell. oil, 17.0 x 24.0 cm. abbotts auction, campsea ashe, suffolk, 13 march, #297, illus. (£190). a wooded river landscape, attributed to linnell. watercolor, 7.6 x 12.1 cm., inscribed in pencil on the verso, “on the thames near putney after sunset.” brightwells auction, leominster, 27 march, #470, illus. (£100). an early work, if indeed by linnell. woodland study. oil, 11.4 x 21.0 cm. ah, jan. online “archive 2012” cat., no item #, from the collections of mrs. joan linnell-burton and judy egerton, illus. (£450). the wynd cliff on the river wye with bristol channel in the distance, attributed to linnell. oil, 30.5 x 38.1 cm., signed indistinctly. eb, july and again in aug.-sept., illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £5,950 or “best offer”); oct., illus. (£740). possibly by william linnell. autograph letter signed by mary ann linnell to her husband, john linnell, 1 p., 5 jan. 1825. bhl, 19 march, #128, with a reference to linnell’s portrait engraving of thomas chevalier and with drawings by the linnell children and a pencil sketch by j. linnell of a mother and her children, illus. (not sold; greatly overestimated at £3000-4000); 19 june, #187 (£312; estimate £1000-1500). “sheep at noon,” etching, 1818. eb, april, with the march 1818 imprint, wove leaf trimmed just outside the platemark to 14.1 x 22.9 cm., badly stained, particularly in the top margin, pasted to a backing mat, illus. (£103). mortimer, john hamilton a bacchanalian dance. oil, 122.6 x 168.2 cm., datable to c. 1770-75. cl, 2 july, #42, illus. (£97,875). a bandit taking up his post. oil, 41.2 x 30.4 cm., datable to the mid-1770s. lowell libson, jan. cat. of “british paintings & works on paper,” pp. 22-24, illus. (not priced). previously sold cny, 6 june 2012, #58, illus. ($21,250). caius marius seated amongst the ruins of carthage. pen and ink, 41.0 x 35.6 cm., datable to c. 1774. sl, 5 july, #355, illus. (£56,250; estimate £6000-8000). the design was engraved by robert blyth in 1782. don quixote at the inn. pen and ink, brown wash, 24.4 x 19.8 cm. bl, 12 june, #486, illus. (not sold; estimate £2000-3000); bg, 12 sept., #203, illus. (not sold; estimate £1000-1500); 14 nov., #36, illus. (not sold; estimate £500-600). reclining man by a stream in a wooded landscape. pen and brown ink, 18.0 x 27.5 cm. swann, 29 jan., #296, illus. ($2040). a satyr embracing a woman. pen and ink, oval, 17.0 x 13.6 cm. pia gallo, master drawings fair, new york, 26 jan.–2 feb., illus. in the advertising booklet (not priced). previously sold cny, 26 jan. 2012, #31, illus. ($3750). the design was engraved in 1780 by charles reuben ryley. soldiers at rest, attributed to mortimer. oil, 30.5 x 22.8 cm. csk, 26 feb., #365, illus. (£1500). study of a recumbent child. pen and ink, wash, 10.5 x 17.3 cm., signed and dated march 1768. pro auction, bath, online auction closing 14 june, #79d, illus. (not sold). previously offered eb, oct. 2007, titled sleeping baby, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $450). “elegy,” etching, from the suite of pls. dedicated to sir joshua reynolds, 1778. gp, oct. online cat., illus. (£120). “falstaff,” etching, 1776. bl, 31 july, #113, with “bardolph” and “york” also from the set of twelve characters from shakespeare, probably palser printing of 1812 or 1816, with 3 etchings after mortimer, “falstaff” illus. (£70). palmer, samuel an aqueduct in the roman campagna. watercolor, 14.8 x 40.4 cm. signed on the verso, datable to 1843. cl, 2 july, #80, illus. (£8125). previously offered sl, 10 july 1980, #178, illus. (not sold; estimate £3500-5000); previously sold cl, 20 nov. 1984, #116, illus. (£4968), and bl, 14 nov. 2012, #661, illus. (£3500). florence. watercolor, 42.0 x 61.0 cm., datable to c. 1837-39. sl, 12 nov., #225, illus. (not sold; highest bid £9500 on an estimate of £10,000-15,000). previously sold sl, 21 march 2002, #195, illus. (£12,000). the near and the distant: from southern italy. watercolor and body color, 41.7 x 60.0 cm., signed, datable to 1870. sl, 3 july, #206, in its “original frame” with label reading “no. 2 / the near and the distant: from southern. italy. / samuel palmer, / furze hill house, mead vale, red hill / surr[ey],” illus. (£97,300). the north devon coast. watercolor, body color, and black chalk, 18.7 x 26.9 cm., datable to c. 1849. sl, 3 july, #205, illus. (£23,750). old england’s sunday evening. watercolor and body color, 30.0 x 70.0 cm., datable to 1874. sl, 19 nov., #13, illus. (£266,500). oxen ploughing at sunset. watercolor, body color, and red chalk, 40.7 x 28.0 cm., signed. cl, 20 nov., from the “collection of the late mrs t.s. eliot,” illus. (£170,500). previously sold sl, 15 july 1993, #118, illus. (£62,000). sheep in a landscape, attributed to palmer. watercolor and body color, 24.0 x 41.5 cm. stride & son auction, chichester, 26 july, #1402, illus. (£70). view from trentham hall, attributed to palmer. watercolor, 12.0 x 17.5 cm., inscribed “july 17 ‘57 [possibly ‘67] / trentham hall.” biddle & webb auction, birmingham, 13 sept., #1234, badly stained and foxed, illus. (not sold; estimate £500-800). autograph letter signed to leonard valpy, 4 pp., 11 dec. 1866. bl, 14 dec. 2012, #43, discussing some of palmer’s paintings and “milton’s supposed preference for paradise regained to paradise lost,” illus. (£700). a. h. palmer, 5 letters, total of 14 pp., to laurence w. hodson concerning etchings by samuel palmer, 1892. bl, 4 april, #263, included in a large group of letters to hodson by various correspondents (£420). “the early ploughman,” etching. bhl, 5 june, #28, 7th st., trimmed inside the platemark, illus. (£562); 16 july, #29, “a working proof of an intermediate state between v and viii” (but looks like 5th st. to me), laid paper, signed in pencil and inscribed “early state before the changes” lower left, illus. (£4750). “the herdsman’s cottage,” etching. eb, april, 2nd st. from the portfolio, 1872, full leaf, illus. ($425). bhl, 5 june, #31, 2nd st., illus. (£687). dw, 17 july, #317, 2nd st., illus. (£440). duke’s auction, dorchester, 26 sept., #39, 2nd st., illus. (£180). see also hamerton, etching and etchers, below. “the lonely tower,” etching. bhl, 5 june, #29, 5th st., illus. (withdrawn; estimate £700-1000). “the morning of life,” etching. eb, april, 7th st., illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of £990); same impression, june, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of £1010). perhaps 1 of the impressions offered on eb in 2012 at lower starting bids. bhl, 5 june, #30, 7th st., laid india, 1872 printing, illus. (£812). “opening the fold,” etching. bhl, 20 feb., #52, 8th st., illus. (£1750). duke’s auction, dorchester, 26 sept., #55, probably 7th or 8th st., illus. (£160). “the sleeping shepherd,” etching. lyon & turnbull auction, edinburgh, 20 july, #212, with “the lonely tower,” signed in pencil and inscribed “trial proof,” “the bellman” with marginal notes about alterations of the pl., “the skylark,” “the rising moon,” “opening the fold” signed in pencil, “the weary ploughman,” “the early ploughman,” “the herdsman’s cottage,” and “the morning of life” trimmed to the image, sts. not recorded, illus. (£13,000; estimate £1500-2000). bhl, 18 sept., #21, 4th st. on laid india, illus. (£625). “the willow,” etching. bhl, 5 june, #32, 3rd st., 1926 printing, illus. (not sold; estimate £500-700). etchings for the art-union of london, 1857. bl, 28 feb., #368, 30 etchings on laid india, mounts foxed, loose in publisher’s cloth with spine worn away, illus. (£3500; estimate £400-600). halls auction, shrewsbury, 4 dec., #401, lacking 2 pls. but with all 3 by palmer, publisher’s cloth very worn, illus. (£3100; estimate £80-120). includes palmer’s etchings “the rising moon,” 7th st., “the skylark,” 7th st., and “the sleeping shepherd,” 4th st. etchings for the art-union of london, 1872. bl, 28 feb., #369, 20 etchings on laid india, mounts foxed, publisher’s cloth worn, illus. (£500). bho, 10 sept., #398, contents loose in publisher’s cloth, illus. (£475). includes palmer’s etching “the morning of life,” 7th st. hamerton, etching and etchers, 1880. cny, 29 oct., #851, from the collection of arthur and charlotte vershbow, publisher’s roan-backed cloth worn, illus. (not sold; highest bid $1500 on an estimate of $2000-3000). includes palmer’s etching “the herdsman’s cottage,” 2nd st. palmer, english version of the eclogues of virgil, 1883. cny, 29 oct., #852, from the collection of arthur and charlotte vershbow, large-paper copy, publisher’s vellum, illus. ($1063 to john windle acting for a private collector). richmond, george (excluding most portraits) the agony in the garden, after raphael. oil, 25.0 x 28.5 cm., signed. bonhams chester, 6 march, #395, “inscribed and dated 1875 verso,” illus. (£600). i suspect that this work may be a good deal earlier than the verso date. the lovers. oil, 49.0 x 66.0 cm. cheffins auction, cambridge, 19 sept., #568, framed, illus. (£6500). previously sold csk, 23 may 2002, #273, illus. (£3290). a sheet of studies including a head study of samuel palmer. pencil, 20.4 x 15.9 cm., leaf with watermark “gm / 1838.” csk, 9 april, #406, with 3 other leaves of sketches by richmond, illus. (£500). for earlier attempts at sale, see the sales review for 2012 in blake 46.4 (spring 2013). a shepherd waking. pencil and ink, 14.0 x 20.3 cm., datable to the 1820s. ah, feb. online cat. 423, #40, “inscribed by the artist beneath the mount,” illus. (£1100). for earlier attempts at sale, see the sales review for 2012 in blake 46.4 (spring 2013). sir william blake richmond’s memorial to his father, george richmond r. a. plaster relief, 31.4 x 40.6 cm., datable to 1896. lowell libson, jan. cat. of “british paintings & works on paper,” pp. 126-[27], illus. (not priced). the three graces (recto), figure studies (verso). pen and brown ink, leaf 25.4 x 21.1 cm. swann, 29 jan., #297, illus. (not sold; estimate $1500-2500). two figure studies. pencil and wash, leaf 18.6 x 24.5 cm., inscribed lower right in pen and ink “from taddeo—” (possibly copied after taddeo zuccaro). swann, 29 jan., #298, illus. ($450). view of a wooded hillside. oil, 18.0 x 32.5 cm. roseberys auction, west norwood, london, 19 dec. 2012, #629, illus. (not sold; estimate £400-600); 9 feb., #436, illus. (£240). romney, george (excluding most portraits) eros & psyche. pen and ink, wash, 28.0 x 24.1 cm. gorringes auction, lewes, east sussex, 4 july, #1407, from the alfred de pass and truro museum collections, illus. (£850). figure studies. pen and ink, 11.0 x 18.5 cm. woolley & wallis auction, salisbury, 12 dec. 2012, #291, from the collection of iolo williams, “paper yellowed,” illus. (not sold; estimate £800-1200). figure studies. pencil, 26.0 x 40.0 cm. anderson & garland auction, newcastle upon tyne, 17 sept., #99, framed, illus. (£240). four women in two poses. pen and ink, 10.8 x 18.4 cm. duke’s auction, dorchester, 11 april, #50, possibly studies for miranda in the tempest, framed, illus. (£750). john howard visiting a lazaretto. pencil, leaf 27.5 x 35.8 cm. swann, 29 jan., #293, “double-sided” (perhaps meaning that there is a similar sketch on the verso), illus. (not sold; estimate $2000-3000). john howard visiting a lazaretto. pencil, leaf 20.0 x 15.2 cm. swann, 29 jan., #294, “double-sided” (perhaps meaning that there is a similar sketch on the verso), illus. (not sold; estimate $1500-2500). john howard visiting the lazaretto. pencil, 15.7 x 19.1 cm. guy peppiatt, may cat., #1, illus. (£1800). motherly figure holding a child, attributed to romney. pen and ink, 15.2 x 20.3 cm. gardiner houlgate auction, bath, 21 march, #844, illus. (not sold); 27 june, #972, illus. (£60). prisoners in a lazaretto. pencil, pen and ink, gray wash, 26.6 x 49.4 cm. cl, 2 july, #69, illus. (not sold; estimate £8000-12,000). studies of male heads & figures, recto and verso, attributed to romney. pencil, 15.2 x 20.3 cm. aldridges auction, bath, 30 july, #232, illus. (not sold; estimate £400-600). study of a boy reading. oil, 40.7 x 35.6 cm. csk, 5 july, #141, illus. (£15,625). this may be a profile of william hayley’s son, thomas alphonso hayley (1780-1800). blake engraved flaxman’s profile medallion portrait of the youth for hayley’s essay on sculpture, 1800 (bb #467, pl. 3). study of a mourning female figure. pen and ink, brown wash over pencil, 32.5 x 18.7 cm. sl, 5 july, #326, illus. (£13,750; estimate £6000-8000). study of a woman holding scales, a small child clasping her. pen and ink, 11.9 x 7.1 cm., datable to the late 1770s. bhl, 30 oct., #308, illus. (not sold; estimate £2000-3000). two seated female figures. pencil, 28.0 x 41.5 cm. holloway’s auction, banbury, 1 oct., #253, with an unrelated drawing not by romney, illus. (£200). stothard, thomas two monochrome wash drawings, oddly titled othello and saint by the auctioneer, sizes not recorded but probably small. moore allen & innocent auction, cirencester, 25 oct., #155, illus. (not sold; estimate £200-300). the apparition. oil, 21.0 x 15.9 cm. eb, july, from the collection of gordon heath, elaborately framed, illus. ($560); nov., illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $650); dec., illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $556). design for a tented garden pavilion. watercolor, 20.3 x 22.2 cm., inscribed “stothard” on the mount. cl, 19 sept., #363, illus. (£688). the franciscan monk asking charity of yorick, an illus. to sterne, sentimental journey. monochrome wash, 11.4 x 7.6 cm., datable to c. 1782. eb, oct., wrongly said to have been engraved by birrell and published in harding’s ed. of sentimental journey, 1792, illus. (£149.95). james heath’s engraving of the design was published in the novelist’s magazine, vol. 9 (london: harrison, 1782), facing p. 5. on the way to market, an illustration to oliver goldsmith’s “the deserted village.” watercolor, 12.6 x 9.0 cm. lots road auction, chelsea, 10 march, #487, framed, illus. (not sold; estimate £250-350); criterion auction, wandsworth, 25 march, #141, illus. (not sold; estimate £150-210); eb, march-april, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £1000 or “best offer” but quickly withdrawn); high road auction, chiswick, 9 april, #75, illus. (£300). the design was engraved by john romney and published by suttaby in an 1818 ed. of the poetical works of oliver goldsmith (coxhead 118, describing the pl. but not identifying the book). stothard’s oil painting of the same scene, but with a horizontal format and additional figures on the right, was offered sl, 23 nov. 2006, #70, illus. (not sold; estimate £3000-4000). the punch bowl. oil, 22.9 x 15.2 cm. eb, july-aug., from the collection of gordon heath, elaborately framed, illus. ($963). saul and the witch of endor. oil, 35.5 x 29.9 cm. csk, 25 june, #571, attributed to “circle of thomas stothard,” illus. (not sold; estimate £800-1200). i do not believe that this painting is by stothard, but it is an interesting essay in the sublime and probably of the period. blake’s drawings of the same subject, the witch of endor: saul and the ghost of samuel and saul and the ghost of samuel, can be dated to c. 1775-80 (butlin #74 recto and #75). a seated ottoman gentleman with standing female attendants. oil, 13.0 x 15.2 cm. semley auction, shaftesbury, 26 jan., #65, illus. (not sold; estimate £200-300); 13 july, #211, illus. (no price information; estimate £100-200).semley charges a fee to access sales results. i declined. probably the design engraved as a book illus. and described by coxhead as “a girl and a man sitting on a divan, her arm around his neck; attendants behind” (220). i have not been able to discover the text illustrated. “the letter,” an illus. to frances burney’s cecilia, engraving by joseph strutt, 1792. eb, nov., proof before title but with signatures and imprint, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $497.50). “the lost apple,” lithograph, 1803. swann, 1 may, #286, on the original backing mount with aquatint border, illus. ($1680). “ruins of palmyra,” etching/engraving signed “stothard del.” and “[james] heath sculp.,” design 12.5 x 17.6 cm., platemark 15.3 x 20.2 cm., on a leaf of wove paper 21.2 x 26.3 cm. eb, march, light marginal stains, illus. (£4.99 to essick). apparently a later st., without imprint but with framing lines added, of a pl. 1st published in william frederick martyn (pseudonym of william fordyce mavor), the geographical magazine; or, a new, copious, compleat, and universal system of geography, vol. 1 (london: harrison and co., 1785), pl. with a 1 may 1782 imprint facing 223. the later st. was very probably published in a book, as stabholes along the lower margin indicate, but i have not been able to identify the publication. stothard also designed the frontispiece, engraved by heath, for vol. 1 of the geographical magazine and delineated 2 further pls., “ruins of persepolis,” engraved by andrew birrell, and “view of the porcelain tower in nankin in china,” engraved by william angus. vol. 2 of martyn’s book, dated 1793, also contains a frontispiece designed by stothard and engraved by heath. stothard very probably designed and executed drawings for the frontispieces, but the preliminary drawings for the 3 engraved views signed “stothard del.” (delineavit, as distinct from invenit) were probably delineated by stothard on the basis of images originally executed by artists who visited the sites pictured. coxhead 168-69 lists only the 2 frontispieces and wrongly attributes their engraving to blake; bennett 66 correctly indicates “5 illus. by stothard.” “this engraving, to commemorate the establishment of the british & foreign bible society, represents britain recommending the sacred records to the attention of the different nations of the world,” engraved by william henry worthington and published by robert bowyer, 1816. eb, nov., leaf of laid paper 42.8 x 53.9 cm., tears in margins, 1 extending into the title inscription, illus. ($75 to essick). a large separate pl., image including inscriptions 39.2 x 49.0 cm. not in coxhead or bennett. g. cumberland, lewina the maid of snowdon, 1793. see under cumberland, above. letters of abelard and eloisa. london: w. lowndes et al., 1788. eb, march, contemporary calf worn, illus. (£45). includes 1 pl. after stothard, “abelard & eloisa,” engraved by william sharp and dated 1788 in the imprint. this pl. 1st appeared in a 1787 issue by lowndes and was used again in his 1802 reissue. not in coxhead or bennett. w. martyn, the geographical magazine, 1785, 1793. eric chaim kline, march online cat., 2 vols., some stains, “leather” very worn ($3750). eb, aug., vol. 2 only, contemporary calf very worn, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £795 or “best offer”). see “ruins of palmyra,” above, for discussion. [peregrine phillips], a diary kept in an excursion to little hampton, 1780. chiswick auctions, hounslow, 27 nov., #210, with a frontispiece engraved by james heath after stothard, foxed and stained, contemporary calf very worn, illus. (£300). not in coxhead or bennett. j. thomson, the works. london: j. rivington and sons, … t. cadell, et al., 1788. eb, aug.-sept., 3 vols., contemporary calf worn, illus. (£78). includes 3 pls. after stothard illustrating edward and eleonora (engraved by john keyse sherwin), tancred and sigismunda (engraved by john neagle), and coriolanus (engraved by james heath). all 3 pls. have 1788 imprints by “t. cadell.” coxhead 95-96 (describing the coriolanus pl. as an illus. to shakespeare) and 175 (the edward and eleonora pl.); the pl. of tancred and sigismunda not recorded. apparently listed in bennett 68, but only “sigismunda” named. neither coxhead nor bennett lists the book. appendix: new information on blake’s engravings listed below are substantive additions or corrections to robert n. essick, the separate plates of william blake: a catalogue (1983), and essick, william blake’s commercial book illustrations (1991).  newly discovered impressions of previously recorded published sts. of blake’s engravings are listed for only the rarer pls. the separate plates of william blake: a catalogue pp. 17-20, “job.” in blake 44.4 (spring 2011): 116, 120, i noted my acquisition of the 2nd known impression (the so-called “summers copy”) of the 1st st. of this pl. i can now give more information about its condition and history. the discovery of this impression was announced in martin butlin and robin hamlyn, “tate britain reveals nine new blakes and thirteen new lines of verse,” blake 42.2 (fall 2008): 52-54. butlin and hamlyn state that “this impression has no inscriptions on the surviving area of margin below the intact image” and that this “suggests that the new copy is a proof before letters” (52). as illus. 1 accompanying their article shows, there is only a ragged thread margin below the center of the image where blake’s signature (“painted and engraved by william blake”) appears in the other 1st st. impression (1a, keynes family trust, on deposit in the fitzwilliam museum, cambridge). this margin measures 2.0 mm. over the initial “p” of “painted,” the letter closest to the lower edge of the image. this just misses the top of the “p.” the 2.2 mm. margin between the image and the next highest letter, the “b” of “blake,” also barely fails to reach its top. elsewhere the even smaller margin is short of the tops of other letters by 0.2 mm. or more. the design itself is in the same st. as the portions of the keynes impression not altered by its restoration, and thus there is no evidence that the summers/essick impression is in a st. different from the keynes impression. the original frame, dated by butlin and hamlyn to the “early to mid-nineteenth century” (52), includes some paper lining on its inner lip bearing a fragmentary letterpress text: “better done at no expense … allotted to the … really elicited eviden[ce] … th[e] adjustment of ….” this text matches, in wording, typography, spacing, and lineation, p. 145 of jeremy bentham, justice and codification petitions (london: robert heward, 1829), thereby establishing a terminus a quo of 1829 for the frame. butlin and hamlyn record a pencil inscription on the frame that they tentatively transcribe as “bennett” (52). infrared photography has revealed the inscription as “bennett 4,” upper center right of the frame when viewed from the back. this inscription was probably written by the frame-maker as a record of who ordered the frame; perhaps “bennett” had ordered 4 frames in all or the number was used to distinguish this customer from 3 others with the same surname. this purchaser of both the print and its frame may have been lady mary elizabeth bennett (1785-1861), the 5th child of the 4th earl of tankerville, chillingham castle, northumberland. she was a student of john linnell’s, taking from him lessons in both engraving and painting miniature portraits (see alfred t. story, the life of john linnell [london: richard bentley and son, 1892] 1: 219). we know that linnell was instrumental in selling impression 2c (2nd st.) of “job” on behalf of blake’s wife, catherine; he may have also been involved in the sale of impression 2d to thomas chevalier or charles heathcote tatham, both well known to linnell. it seems likely that linnell also played a role in selling the summers/essick impression for blake’s wife in 1829 or at a slightly later date before her death in 1831. it is less likely, because of poor relations between linnell and frederick tatham, that linnell had anything to do with a sale after tatham had acquired blake’s stock of works upon mrs. blake’s death, nor is there any record of contact between tatham and lady mary bennett. thus the tentative provenance for the summers/essick impression is as follows: william blake, thence by inheritance to his wife, catherine, upon his death in 1827; sold by catherine blake (with the assistance of john linnell) to lady mary elizabeth bennett between 1829 and 1831; by inheritance through the bennett family, or by sale(s) to other parties, until may or june 2004, when acquired by a lincolnshire antiques dealer at a house sale; sold by him at the kempton market, sunbury-on-thames, to gabriel summers of london in june 2004; sold by summers to robert essick, nov. 2010, john windle acting as agent. the print was cleaned and matted by early 2011, the original frame, stretcher, and backing canvas retained separately. p. 55, “enoch,” impression 1b. for the acquisition of this impression by the metropolitan museum of art, new york, see under separate plates and plates in series, above. pp. 61-62, “chaucers canterbury pilgrims,” hand-colored impressions 2b and 2c. either of these impressions may have been the 1 sold at sotheby’s, 19 may 1866, lot 20 from the collection of robert arthington, “coloured by himself” (i.e., blake), with “stothard’s print of the same subject” (£1.9s. to “hillis”?—perhaps an error for the dealer ellis). p. 118, “george cumberland’s card,” untraced impression 7. for the sale of this impression, see under separate plates and plates in series, above. pp. 139-41, “zephyrus and flora,” after stothard, 1784. for a previously unrecorded impression, probably of the 1st st., see under separate plates and plates in series, above. p. 180, “edmund pitts, esqr.,” after james earle. a 3rd untraced impression was offered by james tregaskis, caxton head catalogue no. 673, 19 july 1909, item 62 (25s.), and cat. no. 689, 18 july 1910, item 251 (25s.). this might be 1 of the traced impressions, 2d through 2h. p. 196, “mrs q,” after villiers, 1820, untraced impression 19. for the sale of what may be this impression, see under separate plates and plates in series, above. william blake’s commercial book illustrations p. 23, josephus, genuine and complete works. four dates are listed for 4 issues of josephus. at least 6 issues have now been recorded: bb issue a, bbs issue ab, and bb issues b-e. these are tentatively dated as follows in bbs 228: 1785-87, 1787-88, 1788-89, 1789-90, 1791-92, and 1792-93. a 7th issue (call it cb), not recorded in bb or bbs, would appear to fit chronologically between bb issues c and d—see josephus under letterpress books with engravings by and after blake, above. the pls. in issue cb are in the 2nd (1st josephus) sts. pp. 43-44, the original works of william hogarth, 1st proof st. of blake’s pl. an impression of the etched proof, “inscribed by blake ‘beggars opera,’” is listed in the collection of berthold wolpe in geoffrey keynes, engravings by william blake: the separate plates (dublin: emery walker, 1956) 73. this impression is offered in philip c. duschnes, nov. 1959 cat. 140, #57, “inscribed in blake’s own hand, ‘beggar’s opera’” ($750), but is now untraced. p. 61, james earle, practical observations on the operation for the stone, 1793. at least 1 copy of the 1st ed., 1793, is bound with an appendix to a treatise on the operation for the stone (london: j. johnson, 1796), heretofore found only with the 2nd ed. of practical observations, 1796, and its reissue in 1803. this copy (essick collection) includes the 1st st. of pl. 3, inscribed “to face p. 8, appendix,” misbound upside-down facing p. 80 of the 1793 text. review: g. a. rosso, the religion of empire: political theology in blake’s prophetic symbolism g. a. rosso. the religion of empire: political theology in blake’s prophetic symbolism. columbus: ohio state university press, 2016. xviii + 274 pp. 8 color plates, 6 black-and-white illustrations. $69.95, hardcover; $19.95, pdf e-book. reviewed by r. paul yoder r. paul yoder (rpyoder@ualr.edu) is an emeritus professor of english at the university of arkansas at little rock. he is the author of articles on milton, alexander pope, samuel richardson, thomas gray, blake, and wordsworth. his book, the narrative structure of william blake’s poem jerusalem: a revisionist interpretation, was published by the edwin mellen press in 2010. he has also co-edited, with wallace jackson, two essay collections on pope. he is a contributor and co-editor (with michelle levy and colette colligan) of study abroad in the lake district, recently published as part of the romantic circles pedagogy commons <http://​www.​rc.​umd.​edu/​pedagogies/​commons/​abroad>. his most recent work explores connections between british romanticism and bob dylan. in the religion of empire: political theology in blake’s prophetic symbolism, g. a. rosso makes a strong, systematic case for the importance of the character rahab in blake’s three longest poems, the four zoas, milton a poem, and jerusalem the emanation of the giant albion. it is an interesting case because rahab is a relatively late arrival into blake’s work, and, as rosso himself admits, she “never speaks directly in blake’s entire corpus” (185). nonetheless, in an introduction and six chapters he logically and clearly moves from rahab’s roots in the bible to what he sees as the character’s initial appearance in night vii of the four zoas as the “shadowy female,” her increasing ascendancy through milton and jerusalem, and her crucial role as part of the “dark hermaphrodite” that menaces albion in jerusalem. the introduction, “reading blake’s long poems,” lays out the critical context of the argument, positing a widespread perception that blake’s work fundamentally changed after 1800: for a majority of scholars, this shift involves a move away from the more accessible and overtly political work of the 1790s to the more obscure and mystical work after 1800, when religion allegedly trumps politics in blake’s outlook. this book aims to challenge that position by finding in blake’s later poems a broadly political critique of empire and its theological justifications in judeo-christian history. (1-2) rosso responds to works like julia wright’s blake, nationalism, and the politics of alienation and blake, nation and empire, edited by steve clark and david worrall, by “reading the long prophecies in close relation to their anti-imperial biblical contexts and by correlating blake’s radical approach to narrative and characterization with his critique of empire” (11). he finds this critique in blake’s handling of the character of rahab. i’m not sure the critical divide about earlier and later blake is as profound as rosso suggests, and in my case at least, he is preaching to the choir about blake’s blend of religious-political critique even late in his career. much more important, however, is his sharp and unwavering focus on rahab as the embodiment of the alliance of religion and empire. chapter 1, “the biblical roots of blake’s political theology,” traces rosso’s argument back to three specific biblical incidents: the willingness of the female prostitute rahab to help the hebrew spies sent into jericho in the early chapters of the book of joshua, and the two appearances, in isaiah 51 and in psalm 89, of a divinely defeated male sea dragon, also called rahab. rosso argues that blake “deconstructs the bible’s positive evaluation of rahab [the harlot],” ultimately “making her the embodiment of the power elite that crucifies christ” (23). he seizes on rahab’s “differently gendered identities” (22) to argue that by blending the female harlot of jericho with the male sea dragon, blake created a hermaphroditic figure, a monstrous contrary to the androgynous savior figure of ololon in milton. perhaps rosso’s boldest move for blake’s readers is to replace vala with rahab in our thinking about blake’s later prophecies, asserting that rahab and jerusalem “constitute the core female opposition in [blake’s] long prophecies” (23). in the discussions in chapters 2-6, rosso confronts the problem of demonstrating the importance of a character whose influence is shadowy at best. as he admits, the challenge in identifying rahab’s influence in blake’s work lies in what he calls her repeatedly “surreptitious role” in which her “indefiniteness enhances the mystery and extension of her power” (182). as noted earlier, he acknowledges that rahab “never speaks directly in blake’s entire corpus,” and, in the discussion of jerusalem, he writes that her “inherent formlessness conceals the nature of her power. ironically, it is only by discerning this lack of form that rahab can be known” (185). rosso’s discussion suggests that rahab emerges in blake’s work as blake himself comes to understand how he can use her biblical dual sexuality “as the containing form for a dizzying array of other female characters” (6), as well as a similar array of ideas. rahab is not even named in her first appearance as the “shadowy female” in night vii of the four zoas; in milton she does not appear until the latter half of the bard’s song, and is named only three times in book 2. much of our awareness of her influence in jerusalem, rosso says, depends on noting the “periphrastic nature of rahab’s presence” (197)—that is to say, “although rahab appears by name only once in each of the first two chapters [of jerusalem], her increasingly explicit presence in chapters 3 and 4 indicates her gradual ascendency in the narrative” (158). yet that “increasingly explicit presence” is most evident in a cluster of “periphrastic” images associated with the biblical rahabs and with blake’s interpretation of them. thus references to flax or to harlots (including the whore of babylon), for example, imply rahab’s presence or influence, since the prostitute rahab hid joshua’s spies under piles of drying flax; leviathan or the sea dragon similarly implies rahab’s presence because of the associations in isaiah and psalm 89. to these more obvious references to rahab, rosso adds most prominently the “abomination of desolation,” which he says carries meanings “ontological-sexual,” “eschatological,” and “ideological” that together relate the generation of the temple veil and its rending at the crucifixion to the “interrelation of british religious thought and enlightenment philosophy” (197). rahab is the “harlot-dragon” that symbolizes “the alliance of religion and empire” (48); she is “blake’s magna mater” (151), associated with weaving and vala’s “ontological veil” (164), as well as with druids, deism, and the covenant of priam. despite rahab’s shadowy influence, rosso makes a good case for the importance of the character. chapter 2, “the harlot and hermaphrodite: rahab symbolism in the four zoas,” focuses on “rahab’s story”—her “emergence” in night vii, her “revelation” in night viii, and her “ironic redemption” in night ix—“as central to the development of blake’s political mythology in the four zoas” (90). her hermaphroditic nature, rosso says, serves two important functions: 1) “structural …, draw[ing] together the multiple strands and characters in the narrative and creat[ing] a containing form for them”; and 2) “thematic …, establish[ing] an analogy between christian origins in roman palestine with corruptions of christianity in contemporary europe” (55). he argues that in juxtaposing “the conversion of early christianity into christendom and the secularization of radical protestantism in the enlightenment,” blake shows “how revolutionary energy is compromised in each age by … the monstrous union of religion and empire” (55). as for blake’s more immediate historical concerns, rosso says that insofar as “the rulers in britain and france both appeal to religion to justify imperial expansion and war, blake places both within the constellation of rahab’s power” (55). in chapter 3, “the birth of rahab: a reading of the bard’s song in milton,” rosso emphasizes “the female presence [implicating rahab] in the [bard’s] song as the crucial component of satan’s rule, … essential to the formation of his hermaphroditic body,” which itself “symbolizes england’s church-state imperium in the post-miltonic era” (95). this hermaphroditic satan, he says, “profoundly alters the romantic portrait of satan in the marriage,” so that instead of “representing the energy of religious and political revolt, satan becomes an icon of state power and its hegemonic practices” (96). in the drama of the bard’s song, rosso sees a sort of allegory for how “the english state (satan) seeks to take control of apocalyptic tradition by sowing division between sectarian prophecy (rintrah) and its allies in parliament (palamabron)” (105). chapter 4, “the divided emanation in milton,” examines how “blake ties the elements of rationalism and monotheism in enlightenment philosophy and religion to milton’s theology and … charges both with undermining revelation and denying christ’s divinity” (124). rosso says that, in opposition to the hermaphroditic body of rahab, blake offers ololon, whose “identity is both androgynous and collective … a multitude that joins with the messiah to create a divine body more powerful and diverse than rahab’s ‘hermaphroditic’ alliance with satan” (125). at stake here is the recovery of “milton’s prophetic heritage, specifically the visionary and antiwar elements” personified in ololon (124). as rosso’s argument develops, the hermeneutical struggle returns again and again to the problem of distinguishing between options that seem similar but that imply radically different worldviews. in milton, he says, whether the subject is language, violence, writing, war, or eschatological history, blake “foregrounds the difference between literal and spiritual signification, which serves ultimately to distinguish rahab and ololon” (152). in chapters 5 and 6, rosso splits his religion/empire theme into separate discussions, noting that blake himself does not separate them, but rather uses imagery of veils and weaving to carry “political and economic as well as cosmological and sexual meanings” (158). thus, in chapter 5, “the veil of moral virtue in jerusalem,” rosso’s “goal is to foreground the religious aspect of [his] religion-of-empire thesis and reserve analysis of its political dimensions” (158) for chapter 6. in this focus on the religious aspect, he examines the relationships between the female characters in jerusalem, especially that “between jerusalem and vala as shaped by the hidden but ubiquitous power of rahab” (157), and he argues that in jerusalem “blake develops more fully the sexual and imperial dimensions of rahab’s religious power” (179). chapter 6, “the abomination of desolation: empire and apocalypse in jerusalem,” demonstrates how rahab, with associated phrases and symbolic figures, “constitutes a broad-scale attack on the conceptual bases of british imperialism, which blake identifies with the political theologies that support empire generally throughout history” (197). part of this discussion includes a fascinating account of the influence of claudius buchanan, chaplain of the east india company who became vice-provost of the college at fort william in calcutta. rosso concludes from this account that “the ‘exalted’ character of buchanan’s missionary elite, the role he assigns the state church in his vision of british christianity in india, and his attitude of racial superiority all contrast sharply with blake. in fact, they are defining features in his characterization of rahab” (202). i do wish that rosso had considered more the implications of his discussion for our understanding of blake’s characterization. all too often, in my opinion, we tend to treat blake’s characters as mouthpieces for certain ideas, and we pay little attention to them as characters with feelings and motivations. rosso makes good progress against this way of thinking in his handling of los. for example, in his consideration of jerusalem’s “primal scene” (19.36-25.16) he says, “thus los, whose prophetic capacity is instrumental in keeping a transformative vision of the past alive, also cannot serve as a dependable guide in the scene because of his own fear of generation and bias against vala” (160). similarly, rahab’s “surreptitious role” and her “hidden but ubiquitous power” suggest not simply a symbol of oppression but a shadowy, scheming character, whose machinations extend across millennia. she is like the recurring figure in the background of crime-scene photos whose complicity is implied by her repeated presence. near the end of his book, rosso makes an important point about the conclusion of jerusalem. he notes that the “most celebrated of [blake’s] apocalyptic finales,” the final speech on plate 98, is “expressed in the form of rhetorical questions,” suggesting that even here, “blake retains the contraries of faith and doubt” (217). blake could easily have phrased those lines as statements—“where is the covenant of priam” (jerusalem 98.46) could just as easily be “gone is the covenant of priam”—but his deliberate use of the questions may suggest both the ongoing struggles of faith and doubt and, perhaps more darkly, a nostalgia for a more certain resolution. in his conclusion, “building jerusalem?,” rosso focuses on the implications for modern blake scholarship of “the contrary forces of order and entropy in the long poems” (233). he notes that “relating blake’s amalgam of religion and empire to these broader contexts [political tensions surrounding the emergence of christianity in the time of st. paul] helps show that blake scholarship has not taken full account of the heterogeneous nature of millenarian culture, relying on a historical method that separates religious from critical thought” (239). i have my doubts about the prevalence of the separation of religious from critical thought in blake studies, but i do take rosso’s point: even blake specialists can settle into an all too easy acceptance of certain “truths” that require periodic questioning and review. what rosso has done is to identify the character of rahab as the shadowy form that drives those questions in blake’s long poems. back in the early 1980s, when i first started to work on jerusalem, i was lucky enough to discover a series of essays written in the 1960s and 70s by edward j. rose on particular aspects of the poem, including the structure, the characters of hand and los, and images of the opened center, circumcision, and wheels within wheels.“the structure of blake’s jerusalem,” bucknell review 11 (1963): 35-54; “blake’s hand: symbol and design in jerusalem,” texas studies in literature and language 6 (1964): 47-58; “the symbolism of the opened center and poetic theory in blake’s jerusalem,” studies in english literature, 1500–1900 5 (1965): 587-606; “the meaning of los,” blake 1 (dec. 1967): 10-11; “circumcision symbolism in blake’s jerusalem,” studies in romanticism 8 (1968): 16-25; “wheels within wheels in blake’s jerusalem,” studies in romanticism 11 (1972): 36-47. see henry summerfield’s a guide to the books of william blake for innocent and experienced readers (gerrards cross: colin smythe, 1998) for a fuller bibliography of rose’s essays. in the time before morton paley’s the continuing city (1983), even before minna doskow’s william blake’s jerusalem: structure and meaning in poetry and picture (1982), rose’s essays offered hope that blake’s most baffling poem was actually approachable, and they suggested a method—focus on a particular element of the poem, catalogue the textual evidence, look for patterns in that evidence. i was never the same after reading those essays. rosso’s the religion of empire may not have the impact on me that rose’s essays did, but it does remind me very much of them in the way it gathers and synthesizes information, laying the foundation for much future work. blake and exhibitions, 2019 blake and exhibitions, 2019 by luisa calè luisa calè (l.cale@bbk.ac.uk), birkbeck, university of london, works on practices of reading, viewing, and collecting in the romantic period. her publications include fuseli’s milton gallery: “turning readers into spectators”; co-edited volumes on dante on view: the reception of dante in the visual and performing arts and illustrations, optics and objects in nineteenth-century literary and visual cultures; and special issues on “the disorder of things” (eighteenth-century studies, 2011), “the nineteenth-century digital archive” (19: interdisciplinary studies in the long nineteenth century, 2015), “literature and sculpture at the fin de siècle” (word and image, 2018), and “sibylline leaves” (studies in romanticism, 2020). her current project, entitled the book unbound, explores practices of collecting and dismantling the book, with chapters on walpole, blake, and dickens. she is the exhibitions editor for blake. 2019 was an extraordinary year for blake. the retrospective at tate britain reassessed his work in the context of the choices that shaped the making of an artist’s career in romantic-period london; elsewhere, individual works were reinterpreted within thematic exhibitions. the judgment of paris, illustrating homer’s iliad, was displayed as part of troy: myth and reality. a selection of blake’s illustrations represented the tension between fact and fantasy in an exhibition accompanying the 2019 biennial conference of the british association for romantic studies in nottingham. in extreme nature!, behemoth and leviathan from illustrations of the book of job came across as an attempt to imagine all-powerful biblical beasts, captured within the frame of a book illustration, as examples of restrained, domesticated, and vanquished pride. the national maritime museum used blake’s miniature emblem captioned “i want! i want!,” featuring a tiny figure propping up a long ladder across the sky to bridge the distance between earth and moon, to introduce the imagining of moon travel among mythical and scientific specimens brought together to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the moon landing. blake’s watercolor christ refusing the banquet offered by satan from john milton’s paradise regained exemplified the dynamic of temptation and abstinence in a religious relationship with food in feast and fast: the art of food in europe, 1500–1800, while earlier series illustrating paradise lost and on the morning of christ’s nativity were on view at tate britain as examples of the patronage of the rev. joseph thomas. versions of the good and evil angels were on display in three exhibitions. the pen and watercolor from 1793–94 was central in shaping the demonic power and active energy of the elements in fire: flashes to ashes in british art, 1692–2019 from june to september, while in october it went home to the higgins, where its child-snatching element was inflected in a new context in dreams and nightmares. meanwhile, tate britain’s impression of the color print of 1795 appeared on the wall of an outdoor basketball court as part of the animation of a series of iconic works in sam gainsborough’s trailer for the blake retrospective.the works in the trailer are the ghost of a flea (tate), “the ancient of days” (the whitworth, manchester), satan smiting job with sore boils (tate), the good and evil angels (tate), and newton (tate). on the site-specific installations accompanying the retrospective, see the blake archive blog post “‘i again display my giant forms to the public’: q&a with tate britain” (30 march 2020). inside the gallery, it was hung among the twelve large color prints—whose only known contemporary collector was thomas butts—showing how they might work as a series translating the experience of renaissance cycles within a bourgeois interior. 10 november 2018–24 february 2019 clark art institute, williamstown extreme nature! blake’s illustration to the book of job shows behemoth and the leviathan among the examples of pride brought down and controlled by the awful power of the lord in job 40-41. while the text’s questions exhibit the violence of domestication, the artist’s skill contains the “fearful symmetry” of biblical beasts as vanquished subjects within a circle inscribed on a rectangular printing surface. another biblical image of vanquished pride featured in the exhibition was john martin’s mezzotint “the fall of the rebel angels” (1825), where the sense of extremes is conveyed through a dangerous landscape. together with william westall’s watercolor entrance to the peak cavern, derbyshire (c. 1822) and the engraving after it by e. f. finden, these romantic works joined a mostly later corpus. works on display included classical personifications of natural might, such as centaurs and triton, an underwater landscape illustration of jules verne’s vingt mille lieues sous les mers, images of the four elements, and more realistic attempts to capture floods, fires, fireworks, eclipses, winds, and arctic ice in a range of media, including hand-colored lithographs, wood engravings on newsprint, albumen prints, and gelatin silver prints. illustrations of the book of job (1826), plate numbered 15, “behold now behemoth which i made with thee.” clark art institute, 2007.8.1.16. 30 april–5 july 2019 coventry cathedral light in darkness: the mystical philosophy of jacob böhme exhibition catalogue: claudia brink, lucinda martin, and cecilia muratori, eds. light in darkness: the mystical philosophy of jacob böhme. dresden: sandstein, 2019. this exhibition had some overlap with the böhme exhibition curated by claudia brink and lucinda martin for the staatliche kunstsammlungen dresden in 2017, discussed in blake 52.1 (summer 2018). illustrations to edward young’s night thoughts (c. 1795–97), frontispiece, “the christian triumph.” butlin #330.1. reproduction on cardboard panel. illustrations to edward young’s night thoughts (c. 1795–97), night viii, page 69. butlin #330.415. reproduction on cardboard panel. newton (1795–c. 1805). butlin #306. reproduction on cardboard panel. 10 may–25 august 2019 weston gallery, university of nottingham romantic facts and fantasies: culture and heritage of the romantic age, c. 1780–1840 blake’s engraving “tornado” from henry fuseli’s design for erasmus darwin’s the botanic garden documented the tension between the “empirical observation of material reality” and “the power of the imagination” in this exhibition, curated by a team from the school of english and manuscripts and special collections at the university of nottingham to accompany the conference of the british association for romantic studies. the exhibition also featured “the reunion of the soul & the body,” engraved from blake’s design for robert blair’s the grave, to exemplify “a preoccupation with matters of the mind, the body and the soul” in the section entitled “imagined bodies and the individual.” a trianon facsimile of plate 57 of jerusalem, displayed in the same section, represented the visionary power of “reimagined national bodies.” the curators used an excerpt from the plate as a title: “what is a wife & what is a harlot?” for plate 46 they adopted the title “chimera,” a word that is absent from blake’s corpus. this choice harnesses blake’s imagination to the neoclassical world of robert adam’s grotesques and john flaxman’s hesiod.the closest point of contact with the classical figure of the chimera is blake’s engraving of “typhaon echidna geryon” in john flaxman’s compositions from the works days and theogony of hesiod (1817), where the chimera is represented as a fire-breathing half-lion, half-goat figure compressed in the bottom right corner of the composition. the scene represents a chariot drawn by hybrid human-animal creatures with the heads of bearded elders. a serpentine curl of hair coming out of each of their foreheads ends in a hand, one of which extends backward to grasp a writing implement from a bird-headed figure on its back, while the other points the way forward. they have quadruped bodies. morton paley argues that this illustration provides “almost a rorschach test”: while blake may have illustrated “the plow of jehovah, and the harrow of shaddai” (46.14, e 188), foster damon sees “the serpent of nature … drawn by the human-headed bulls of luvah” and david erdman sees unicorns. paley thinks the hybrid animals evoke the sculptures of nineveh and persepolis, while the shaft and wheels of the chariot made of serpents allude to “the serpent-wheeled chariot in which ceres rides in search of her daughter proserpine,” reproduced in abbé montfaucon’s antiquity explained.morton d. paley, the continuing city: william blake’s “jerusalem” (oxford: clarendon press, 1983) 107-10. susanne sklar considers the chariot a mutated form of an interlinear illustration on plate 33, a georgic scene in which a plough is drawn by human-headed quadrupeds.susanne m. sklar, blake’s “jerusalem” as visionary theatre: entering the divine body (oxford: oxford university press, 2011) 190. in both plates 33 and 46 blake’s decision to give human heads to the beasts of burden suggests a critique of animal labor, made much more dramatic by their intense eyes and apocalyptic cross-species multiplicity in plate 46. in presenting the human form subjected to the sprawling physicality of its hybrid animal limbs, blake’s chariots may tease out the tension within the compound nature of plato’s charioteer in thomas taylor’s neoplatonic work, or the triumphal car of dante’s purgatory (purgatorio 29-30). as the prophetic poem is turned into a series of plates for exhibition, titles recreate the individual elements as alternative forms, becoming what different readers behold in them. the dialectic of forms underlying blake’s iconography of the chariot might feel lost in translation. erasmus darwin, the botanic garden (3rd ed., 1795). open to blake after henry fuseli, “tornado.” university of nottingham, special collection oversize, pr3396.a66.d95. robert blair, the grave (2nd ed., 1813). open to luigi schiavonetti after blake, “the reunion of the soul & the body.” university of nottingham, special collection oversize, pr3318.b7.g7. jerusalem copy e (composed 1804–c. 1820, printed c. 1821), plate 57. from “jerusalem”: a facsimile of the illuminated book (trianon press/​blake trust, 1951), university of nottingham, special collection oversize x, pr4144.j4. jerusalem copy e (composed 1804–c. 1820, printed c. 1821), plate 46. from “jerusalem”: a facsimile of the illuminated book (trianon press/​blake trust, 1951), university of nottingham, special collection oversize x, pr4144.j4. jerusalem copy e (composed 1804–c. 1820, printed c. 1821), plate 37. from “jerusalem”: a facsimile of the illuminated book (trianon press/​blake trust, 1951), university of nottingham, special collection oversize x, pr4144.j4. 15 june–1 september 2019 royal west of england academy, bristol fire: flashes to ashes in british art, 1692–2019 exhibition catalogue: gemma brace, rachael nee, and christiana payne. fire: flashes to ashes in british art, 1692–2019. bristol: sansom and company, 2019. “it shines in paradise. it burns in hell. it is gentleness and torture. it is cookery and it is apocalypse. … fire can contradict itself; thus, it is one of the principles of universal explanation”: gaston bachelard’s words from the psychoanalysis of fire were used as an epigraph to the third exhibition dedicated to the elements, after the power of the sea (2014) and air (2017). this exhibition explored the destructive and beneficial aspects of fire. the fiery energy of blake’s biblical visions joined company with romantic works that illuminate mythical and historical conditions shaping the material imagination of fire: godfried schalcken’s a boy blowing on a firebrand to light a candle (c. 1692–98), the spectacle of ships on fire in samuel scott’s french firerafts attacking the british fleet off quebec, 28 june 1759 (1767), john robert cozens’s satan summoning his legions (c. 1776), joseph wright of derby’s vesuvius in eruption, with a view over the islands in the bay of naples (c. 1776–80), john martin’s sadak in search of the waters of oblivion (1812), j. b. pyne’s bristol riots: the burning of the toll houses, prince street bridge (c. 1831), and j. m. w. turner’s fire at the grand storehouse of the tower of london (1841). from this rich romantic nucleus, the exhibition ranged through nineteenthand twentieth-century art. just as in the 2018–19 visions and visionaries exhibition at the guildhall art gallery, blake’s work joined a canon of artist books that included the work of john latham. blake’s watercolor god writing upon the tables of the covenant associates fire with divine writing on the tablets on mount sinai, while latham shows how fire can mutate books in the original reading and writing machine (c. 1960), a mixed-media bookwork wired to electrical heating as part of his book-burning experiments of the 1960s. among twenty-first-century engagements with fire on display, douglas gordon reflects on idol worship through the burnt photographic print, smoke and mirror self portrait of you + me (2-piece andy) (2008) and tim shaw captures man on fire (2009) in the medium of sculpture. jeremy deller’s textile banner come friendly bombs and fall on eton (2018) shifts john betjeman’s infamous line about slough to the public school that most symbolizes the elitism of the british establishment; in another work on show, deller has painted on wood the scene of the college burning. god writing upon the tables of the covenant (c. 1805). butlin #448. national galleries of scotland, d 2281. the good and evil angels (c. 1793–94). butlin #257. the higgins, bedford, p.272. 19 july 2019–5 january 2020 national maritime museum, greenwich the moon exhibition catalogue: melanie vandenbrouck, megan barford, louise devoy, and richard dunn, eds. the moon: a celebration of our celestial neighbour. london: collins, 2019. blake’s book of emblems, open to the miniature image of the ladder held up to reach the moon, inaugurated the imagined and real experiences of travel commemorated in the landmark exhibition marking the fiftieth anniversary of the moon landing. for the sexes: the gates of paradise copy l (composed 1793, c. 1818; printed c. 1826–27), plate numbered 9 [bentley 11], “i want! i want!” fitzwilliam museum, p.444-1985. 11 september 2019–2 february 2020 tate britain, london william blake exhibition catalogue: martin myrone and amy concannon, with an afterword by alan moore. william blake. london: tate publishing, 2019. tate britain’s blake retrospective reassessed blake’s career as an artist, two decades since its previous retrospective had focused on him as a printmaker. we documented this exhibition with an interview with co-curator martin myrone before it opened, as well as a review after it closed that examined the works in the order in which they were hung on the walls; see blake 53.1 (summer 2019) and 53.4 (spring 2020). the order given below follows the “list of exhibited works” in the catalogue (209-15), which differs from the exhibition hang discussed in the review. the most notable difference is that in the exhibition the last phase of blake’s production was introduced by works associated with the patronage of john linnell, with jerusalem displayed in the final room. introduction “albion rose” (first state, 1795). butlin #284. huntington library, art collections, and botanical gardens, 000.124. study for “albion rose” (c. 1780). butlin #73 verso. victoria and albert museum, 8764c. academy study: standing male nude seen from behind (c. 1779–80). butlin #72. british museum, 1874,1212.110. portrait of william blake (c. 1802). collection of robert n. essick. catherine blake (c. 1805). butlin #683. tate, n05188. “blake be an artist!” the royal academy anonymous, cincinnatus (plaster cast, 1700s). royal academy of arts, 03/1488. all installation images © tate (seraphina neville). see enlargement. drawing of legs of cincinnatus (c. 1779–80). butlin #104a verso. bolton museum & archive. part of a face: copy from a plaster cast: a daughter of niobe? (c. 1779–80). butlin #178 verso. tate, a00045. abias (c. 1785). butlin #168 verso. british museum, 1867,1012.206. thomas stothard, reclining female nude viewed from the back (c. 1800). royal academy of arts, 05/3082. attributed to robert blake, sketchbook (1777). butlin #r1. huntington library, art collections, and botanical gardens, 000.54. attributed to edward francis burney, sketchbook (c. 1779–80). royal academy of arts, 09/1808. thomas stothard, a scene on the medway (c. 1780–81). tate, t07042. early watercolors and drawings moses receiving the law (c. 1780). butlin #111. yale center for british art, paul mellon collection, b1975.4.1883. robert blake, the preaching of warning (c. 1785). butlin #r6 recto. tate, a00003. the good farmer, probably the parable of the wheat and the tares (c. 1780–85). butlin #123 recto. tate, n05198. an allegory of the bible (c. 1780–85). butlin #127. tate, t01128. job, his wife, and his friends: the complaint of job (c. 1785). butlin #162 recto. tate, n05200. age teaching youth (c. 1785–90). butlin #91. tate, n05183. joseph’s brethren bowing down before him (1784–85). butlin #155. fitzwilliam museum. joseph ordering simeon to be bound (1784–85). butlin #156. fitzwilliam museum. joseph making himself known to his brethren (1784–85). butlin #157. fitzwilliam museum. the exhibition of the royal academy, m.dcc.lxxxv. the seventeenth (catalogue, 1785). tate library and archive. the spirit of a just man newly departed appearing to his mourning family (c. 1780–85). butlin #135. royal collection, rcin 913598. enoch walked with god (c. 1780–85). butlin #146. cincinnati art museum, 1977.214. oberon, titania, and puck with fairies dancing (c. 1786). butlin #161. tate, n02686. the death of the wife of the biblical prophet ezekiel (c. 1785). butlin #166. philadelphia museum of art, 1964-110-11. tiriel tiriel supporting the dying myratana and cursing his sons (c. 1789). butlin #198.1. yale center for british art, paul mellon collection, b1977.14.4150. john boydell and josiah boydell, a collection of prints, from pictures painted for the purpose of illustrating the dramatic works of shakspeare, by the artists of great britain (1803). open to richard earlom after henry fuseli, “king lear, act 1, scene 1” (“king lear casting out his daughter cordelia”) (1792). lord egremont. har and heva bathing, mnetha looking on (c. 1789). butlin #198.2. fitzwilliam museum, pd.13-1953. james barry, “jupiter and juno on mount ida” (c. 1804–05). tate, t06584. har blessing tiriel while mnetha comforts heva (c. 1789). butlin #198.4. british museum, 1913,0528.7. the blind tiriel departing from har and heva (c. 1789). butlin #198.6. collection of robert n. essick. tiriel cursing his sons and daughters (c. 1789). butlin #198.8. fitzwilliam museum. “tiriel” (manuscript, c. 1789). open to page numbered 5, “and aged tiriel stood ….” british library, egerton ms 2876. har and heva asleep with mnetha guarding them (c. 1789). butlin #198.11. fitzwilliam museum, pd.161-1985. tiriel and his children (c. 1789). butlin #88 recto. harvard art museums/​fogg museum, 1967.45. making prints, making a living engraving and illustration “joseph of arimathea among the rocks of albion” (second state, c. 1820–25). fitzwilliam museum. james basire after benjamin west, “pylades and orestes” (1771). tate. blake after william hogarth, “beggar’s opera, act iii” (probably third published state, c. 1795). tate, t06462. joseph ritson, a select collection of english songs, vol. 1 (1783). tate library and archive. wit’s magazine, vol. 1 (1784). tate library and archive. c. g. salzmann, trans. mary wollstonecraft, elements of morality (3rd ed., 1792). tate library and archive. erasmus darwin, the botanic garden (3rd ed., 1795). tate library and archive. mary wollstonecraft, original stories from real life (new ed., 1796). open to the frontispiece. tate library and archive. john gabriel stedman, narrative, of a five years’ expedition (1796). city of westminster archives. william enfield, the speaker (new ed., 1797). tate library and archive. william shakespeare, the plays of william shakspeare, vol. 6 (1805). tate library and archive. the history of england “edward and elenor” (1793). british museum, 1938,0409.6. the house of death (c. 1790). butlin #259. tate, n05192. pestilence (c. 1795–1800). butlin #192. bristol museum & art gallery, k2081. relief etching and the illuminated books los and orc (c. 1792–93). butlin #255. tate, t00547. “hell beneath is moved for thee, to meet thee at thy coming”—isaiah xiv.9 (c. 1780–85). butlin #145. royal collection, rcin 913600. lucifer and the pope in hell (c. 1794–96). butlin #287. huntington library, art collections, and botanical gardens, 000.125. there is no natural religion copy b (composed c. 1788, printed c. 1794). open to plate 10 [bentley b3], “mans perceptions are not bounded ….” yale center for british art, paul mellon collection, b1992.8.15(10). for children copy e (composed and printed 1793). open to plate 1, “what is man!” yale center for british art, paul mellon collection, b1978.43.1484. the book of thel copy i (composed 1789, printed c. 1789). open to the title page. bodleian libraries, arch. a d.22. the marriage of heaven and hell copy b (composed and printed 1790). open to the title page. bodleian libraries, arch. g d.53. the marriage of heaven and hell copy h (composed and printed 1790). open to plates 14, “the ancient tradition …,” and 15, “a memorable fancy.” fitzwilliam museum, p.123-1950. europe a prophecy copy a (composed 1794, printed 1795). open to the title page. yale center for british art, paul mellon collection, b1992.8.4(2). europe a prophecy copy e (composed and printed 1794). open to plates 17, “ethinthus queen of waters …,” and 18, “shot from the heights of enitharmon ….” library of congress, lessing j. rosenwald collection, 1806. the first book of urizen copy g (composed 1794, printed c. 1818). open to plate numbered 14 [bentley 16]. library of congress, lessing j. rosenwald collection, 1807. songs of innocence and songs of innocence and of experience songs of innocence and of experience copy s (composed 1789, 1794, printed c. 1811, 1795). open to “the tyger.” cincinnati art museum, 1969.509.8. songs of innocence copy x (composed and printed 1789). all fourteen plates (seven leaves recto/​verso) displayed. national gallery of victoria, p122.1-14-1988. songs of innocence, “the shepherd” (c. 1795). butlin #262a. yale center for british art, paul mellon fund, b1978.1.2. songs of innocence, “spring” (c. 1795). butlin #262b. yale center for british art, paul mellon fund, b1978.1.1. see enlargement. america a prophecy frontispiece to america a prophecy (1793). harvard art museums/​fogg museum, g4316. three canceled plates from america a prophecy bound in with six other plates (1793). open to canceled plate c, “then albions angel rose ….” library of congress, lessing j. rosenwald collection, 1805. america a prophecy copy m (composed 1793, printed c. 1807). all eighteen plates displayed. yale center for british art, paul mellon collection, b1992.8.2(1-18). the books of designs a large book of designs copy b (1796): visions of the daughters of albion, frontispiece. butlin #264. visions of the daughters of albion, plate 4 [bentley 7]. butlin #265. tate, n03373, n03374. a small book of designs copy b (1796, c. 1818): urizen, plate 2. butlin #261.5. tate, n03696. a small book of designs copy a (1796): plate 2. butlin #260.2. plate 1. butlin #260.1. plate 4. butlin #260.4. plate 5. butlin #260.5. plate 6. butlin #260.6. plate 7. butlin #260.7. plate 8. butlin #260.8. plate 9. butlin #260.9. plate 11. butlin #260.11. plate 12. butlin #260.12. plate 21. butlin #260.21. british museum, 1856,0209.426, 425, 428-33, 435-36, 445. a large book of designs copy a (1796): plate 3. butlin #262.3. plate 7. butlin #262.7. british museum, 1856,0209.419, 423. a small book of designs copy b (1796, c. 1818): thel, plate 6 [bentley 7]. marriage, plate 16. urizen, plate 6 [bentley 7]. urizen, plate 10 [bentley 11]. urizen, plate 11 [bentley 12]. urizen, plate 15 [bentley 17]. urizen, plate 17 [bentley 19]. urizen, plate 21 [bentley 23]. tate, t13000-04, t12997-99. patronage and independence john flaxman and george cumberland john flaxman, studies after william blake (1792). private collection. john flaxman, portrait of william blake (c. 1804). yale center for british art, paul mellon collection, b1992.8.11(59). edward young, night thoughts (1797). colored copy f. sir john soane’s museum, 3653. illustrations to thomas gray’s poems (1797–98). “ode on the spring,” pages 1-2, and “elegy written in a country church-yard,” pages 1-12, displayed. butlin #335.1-2, 105-16. yale center for british art, paul mellon collection, b1992.8.11(1), (53-58). george cumberland, thoughts on outline (1796). tate library and archive. thomas butts thomas butts (c. 1809). butlin #376. british museum, 1942,1010.4. elizabeth butts (1809). butlin #377. british museum, 1942,1010.5. thomas butts ii (c. 1809). butlin #378. british museum, 1942,1010.6. the body of christ borne to the tomb (c. 1799–1800). butlin #426. tate, n01164. the christ child asleep on the cross (1799–1800). butlin #411. victoria and albert museum, p.27-1953. christ blessing the little children (1799). butlin #419. tate, n05893. the conversion of saul (c. 1800). butlin #506. huntington library, art collections, and botanical gardens, 000.29. samson subdued (c. 1800). butlin #455. philadelphia museum of art, 1964-110-4. the number of the beast is 666 (c. 1805). butlin #522. the rosenbach, philadelphia, 1954.0011. moses striking the rock (1805). butlin #445. philadelphia museum of art, on loan from the evangelical lutheran church in america. christ girding himself with strength (c. 1805). butlin #464. bristol museum & art gallery, k2082. the crucifixion: “behold thy mother” (c. 1805). butlin #497. tate, n05895. the entombment (c. 1805). butlin #498. tate, n05896. the magdalene at the sepulchre (c. 1805). butlin #504. yale center for british art, paul mellon collection, b1975.4.1794. satan in his original glory: “thou wast perfect till iniquity was found in thee” (c. 1805). butlin #469. tate, n05892. the great red dragon and the beast from the sea (c. 1805). butlin #521. national gallery of art, washington, rosenwald collection, 1943.3.8997. the angel rolling away the stone (c. 1805). butlin #501. victoria and albert museum, p.7-1972. david delivered out of many waters (c. 1805). butlin #462. tate, n02230. the river of life (c. 1805). butlin #525. tate, n05887. the assumption (1806). butlin #513. royal collection, rcin 913379. twelve large color prints satan exulting over eve (c. 1795). butlin #291. tate, t07213. the night of enitharmon’s joy (formerly hecate) (c. 1795). butlin #316. tate, n05056. pity (c. 1795). butlin #310. tate, n05062. nebuchadnezzar (1795–c. 1805). butlin #301. tate, n05059. newton (1795–c. 1805). butlin #306. tate, n05058. elohim creating adam (1795–c. 1805). butlin #289. tate, n05055. see enlargement. the house of death (1795–c. 1805). butlin #320. tate, n05060. the good and evil angels (1795–c. 1805). butlin #323. tate, n05057. lamech and his two wives (1795). butlin #297. tate, n05061. christ appearing to the apostles after the resurrection (c. 1795). butlin #327. tate, n05875. god judging adam (1795). butlin #294. tate, n05063. naomi entreating ruth and orpah to return to the land of moab (c. 1795). butlin #299. victoria and albert museum, 69-1894. illustrations to milton for the rev. joseph thomas illustrations to john milton’s paradise lost (1807). all twelve watercolors displayed. butlin #529. huntington library, art collections, and botanical gardens, 000.1-2, 4-13. illustrations to john milton’s on the morning of christ’s nativity (1809). all six watercolors displayed. butlin #538. the whitworth, manchester, d.1892.26-31. illustrations to shakespeare for the rev. joseph thomas six extra-illustrations to a second folio edition of shakespeare (1806, 1809). four watercolors displayed: brutus and caesar’s ghost, queen katharine’s dream, jacques and the wounded stag, and richard iii and the ghosts. butlin #547.4, 3, 1, 2. british museum, 1954,1113.1.26, 22, 11, 21. william hayley and sussex milton a poem copy d (composed c. 1804–11, printed 1818). open to plate 40 [bentley 36], “when on the highest lift ….” library of congress, lessing j. rosenwald collection, 1810. blake after george romney, william cowper (1801). butlin #353. cowper and newton museum. the rev. john johnson (1802). butlin #347. cowper and newton museum. attributed to blake, thomas alphonso hayley (c. 1800). butlin #345. yale center for british art, yale art gallery collection, b1979.12.741. landscape near felpham (c. 1800). butlin #368. tate, a00041. the entrance front of hayley’s house at eartham (1801). butlin #369. yale center for british art, paul mellon collection, b1981.25.2396. landscape with spire (c. 1801). butlin #371. yale center for british art, paul mellon collection, b1977.14.4922. a woody landscape (c. 1801). butlin #372. yale center for british art, paul mellon collection, b1977.14.4923. heads of the poets (1800–03). five temperas displayed: william shakespeare, william cowper, edmund spenser, john milton, and dante alighieri. butlin #343.10, 17, 9, 11, 4. manchester city galleries, 1885.2, 9, 5, 3, 16. see enlargement. william hayley, ballads (1805). west sussex record office, crookshank 327. sketch for the frontispiece to “the lion” (1802). butlin #364 verso. royal academy of arts, 07/1418. the horse (c. 1805). butlin #366. yale center for british art, paul mellon collection, b2001.2.34. william hayley, the life, and posthumous writings, of william cowper, vols. 1-2 (1803). tate library and archive. william hayley, the triumphs of temper (13th ed., 1807). tate library and archive. evening (c. 1805). butlin #809. national gallery of art, washington, 1990.22.1. winter (c. 1805). butlin #808. tate, t02387. paintings for elizabeth ilive, countess of egremont satan calling up his legions (1800–05). butlin #662. petworth house (national trust), nt 486264. the vision of the last judgment (1808). butlin #642. petworth house (national trust), nt 486270. independence and despair see enlargement. thomas phillips, william blake (1807). national portrait gallery, npg 212. benjamin malkin, a father’s memoirs of his child (1806). tate library and archive. john flaxman, portrait of robert hartley cromek (c. 1804). fitzwilliam museum. anthony cardon after henry edridge, “luigi schiavonetti” (1811). national portrait gallery, npg d48178. title page for “the grave” (1806). butlin #616. huntington library, art collections, and botanical gardens, 000.30. the death of the good old man (1805). collection of robert n. essick. death of the strong wicked man (1805). musée du louvre, rf 54420 recto. the soul hovering over the body reluctantly parting with life (1805). butlin #625. tate, n05300. the counseller, king, warrior, mother and child, in the tomb (1805). collection of robert n. essick. heaven’s portals wide expand to let him in (1805). collection of robert n. essick. christ descending into the grave (1805). private collection. friendship (1805). private collection. “deaths door” (1805). collection of robert n. essick. robert blair, the grave. four copies displayed: three from 1808 and one from 1813. tate library and archive, lord egremont, sir john soane’s museum, city of westminster archives. josé joaquín de mora, meditaciones poéticas (1826). university of liverpool library. the 1809 exhibition and fresco painting the spiritual form of nelson guiding leviathan (c. 1805–09). butlin #649. tate, n03006. the spiritual form of pitt guiding behemoth (1805?). butlin #651. tate, n01110. the bard, from gray (1809?). butlin #655. tate, n03551. satan calling up his legions (1795–1800). butlin #661. victoria and albert museum, p.8-1950. the soldiers casting lots for christ’s garment (1800). butlin #495. fitzwilliam museum, pd.30-1949. christ in the sepulchre, guarded by angels (c. 1805). butlin #500. victoria and albert museum, p.6-1972. ruth the dutiful daughter-in-law (1803). butlin #456. southampton city art gallery. the penance of jane shore in st. paul’s church (c. 1793). butlin #69. tate, n05898. catalogue of the fifth annual exhibition by the associated painters in water colours (1812). tate library and archive. the exhibition of the royal academy, m.dcccviii. the fortieth (catalogue, 1808). tate library and archive. the virgin and child in egypt (1810). butlin #669. victoria and albert museum, p.25-1953. an allegory of the spiritual condition of man (1811?). butlin #673. fitzwilliam museum, pd.27-1949. canterbury pilgrims “chaucers canterbury pilgrims” (probably third state, c. 1810–20). lord egremont. “chaucers canterbury pilgrims” (fifth state, or a late impression of the fourth state of c. 1820–25 lacking the drypoint inscriptions). tate, p14339. luigi schiavonetti and james heath after thomas stothard, “the pilgrimage to canterbury” (1809–17). tate, t06857. william carey, critical description of the procession of chaucer’s pilgrims to canterbury, painted by thomas stothard, esq. r. a. (1808). tate library and archive. “a new kind of man” jerusalem jerusalem copy h (composed 1804–c. 1820, printed c. 1832). fitzwilliam museum. jerusalem copy b (composed 1804–c. 1820, printed c. 1820). all twenty-five plates displayed. private collection. jerusalem, plates 28 and 35 (recto/​verso proof impressions, c. 1820). yale center for british art, paul mellon collection, b1992.8.1(105). john linnell, samuel palmer, and john varley john linnell, william blake wearing a hat (c. 1825). fitzwilliam museum. the ghost of a flea (c. 1819). butlin #692.94. private collection. the ghost of a flea (c. 1819–20). butlin #750. tate, n05889. william blake and john varley, the [larger] blake/​varley sketchbook (1819). private collection. old parr when young (1820). butlin #748. huntington library, art collections, and botanical gardens, 000.48. the death chamber (possible sketch for jerusalem, c. 1800–07). butlin #565. harvard art museums/​fogg museum, 1959.162. illustrations to robert thornton’s pastorals of virgil (c. 1821, printed 1830, probably by edward calvert). tate, a00111-27. robert thornton, the pastorals of virgil (3rd ed., 1821). city of westminster archives. illustrations to john milton’s paradise lost (1822), the creation of eve. butlin #537.2. national gallery of victoria, 1024-3. illustrations of the book of job (1826). four copies displayed. ashmolean museum, lord egremont (2), city of westminster archives. the body of abel found by adam and eve (c. 1826). butlin #806. tate, n05888. satan smiting job with sore boils (c. 1826). butlin #807. tate, n03340. illustrations to dante for john linnell (1824–27) the inscription over the gate. butlin #812.4. tate, n03352. cerberus. butlin #812.12. tate, n03354. plutus. butlin #812.14. tate, n03355. capaneus the blasphemer. butlin #812.27. national gallery of victoria, 997-3. the symbolic figure of the course of human history described by virgil. butlin #812.28. national gallery of victoria, 998-3. the simoniac pope. butlin #812.35. tate, n03357. the devils setting out with dante and virgil. butlin #812.39. national gallery of victoria, 1003-3. the thieves and the serpents. butlin #812.47. national gallery of victoria, 1004-3. vanni fucci “making figs” against god. butlin #812.49. national gallery of victoria, 1005-3. the six-footed serpent attacking agnolo brunelleschi. butlin #812.51. national gallery of victoria, 1006-3. the serpent attacking buoso donati. butlin #812.53. tate, n03361. ephialtes and two other titans. butlin #812.62. national gallery of victoria, 1011-3. the lawn with the kings and angels. butlin #812.76. national gallery of victoria, 1016-3. dante and virgil approaching the angel who guards the entrance of purgatory. butlin #812.78. tate, n03367. dante and statius sleeping, virgil watching. butlin #812.86. ashmolean museum, wa1918.3. matilda and dante on the banks of the lethe with beatrice on the triumphal chariot. butlin #812.87. british museum, 1918,0413.5. beatrice addressing dante from the car. butlin #812.88. tate, n03369. beatrice and dante in gemini, amid the spheres of flame. butlin #812.93. ashmolean museum, wa1918.5. saint peter, saint james, and saint john with dante and beatrice. butlin #812.96. british museum, 1918,0413.6. blake’s illustrations of dante (engravings, composed 1826–27). city of westminster archives. illustrations to bunyan’s pilgrim’s progress (1824–27) illustrations to john bunyan’s pilgrim’s progress. twenty-eight watercolors displayed. butlin #829.1-19, 21-29. private collection. the final paintings the sea of time and space (1821). butlin #803. arlington court (national trust), nt 985730. the characters in spenser’s “faerie queene” (c. 1825). butlin #811. petworth house (national trust), nt 486263. epitome of james hervey’s “meditations among the tombs” (c. 1820–25). butlin #770. tate, n02231. “the ancient of days” (colored 1827). butlin #271. the whitworth, manchester, d.1892.32. 12 october 2019–22 march 2020 [gallery closed 21 march; exhibition extended to 6 september] the higgins, bedford dreams and nightmares exhibition catalogue: christiana payne and victoria partridge. dreams and nightmares. bedford: the higgins, 2019. this exhibition showcased a selection of works from the collection of the higgins. one month after the end of fire: flashes to ashes in british art, 1692–2019, blake’s the good and evil angels (c. 1793–94) returned to its home to reappear in the different context of dreams and nightmares, structured around manifestations of unconscious fears, nightmares, and the supernatural, but also romantic dreams, daydreams, and dreamscapes. the catalogue places blake’s work in a section dedicated to “sublime and spiritual visions,” next to “creation of the universe” (c. 1893) by paul gauguin and henry moore’s death of the suitors, “the odyssey” (1944). but the work’s title and iconography shift when placed against other areas of the exhibition, since the child-snatching theme resonates with an earlier section on witches, which featured richard westall’s macbeth and the witches (c. 1797), john anster fitzgerald’s fairy lovers in a bird’s nest watching a white mouse (c. 1860), richard doyle’s the altar cup of aagerup (1883) and riding through the air, and arthur rackham’s moonlight, pixies in the wood. blake’s connection with some of these works might have been mediated by henry fuseli’s the nightmare (1781), which is certainly an iconographic source for max klinger’s “dead mother” (1898), the arresting etching reproduced on the exhibition poster. blake’s late miniature wood engravings “sabrina’s silvery flood” and “colinet’s fond desire strange lands to know” for robert thornton’s pastorals of virgil featured alongside samuel palmer’s etching “the early ploughman” (c. 1861), palmer’s watercolor with body color the bellman (from il penseroso) (1881), and graham sutherland’s etching “the village” (1925), reflecting the experience of nature “transfigured by effects of light and by the selection and careful delineation of detail, like a particularly vivid dream.”christiana payne, catalogue p. 67. these dreamscapes concluded the exhibition. the good and evil angels (c. 1793–94). butlin #257. the higgins, bedford, p.272. illustrations to robert thornton’s pastorals of virgil (c. 1821), “sabrina’s silvery flood.” the higgins, bedford, p.603. illustrations to robert thornton’s pastorals of virgil (c. 1821), “colinet’s fond desire strange lands to know.” the higgins, bedford, p.604. 21 november 2019–8 march 2020 british museum, london troy: myth and reality exhibition catalogue: alexandra villing, j. lesley fitton, victoria donnellan, and andrew shapland. troy: myth and reality. london: thames & hudson, 2019. the british museum offered a multimedia review of the story of troy, which presented each episode through a proliferation of narrative versions and variations. blake’s watercolor was part of the final section, showcasing the reception of troy in history, including modern retellings, translations, and pictorial representations. the judgment of paris (c. 1806–17). butlin #675. british museum, 1949,1112.4. 26 november 2019–26 april 2020 [museum closed 17 march] fitzwilliam museum, cambridge feast and fast: the art of food in europe, 1500–1800 exhibition catalogue: victoria avery and melissa calaresu, eds. feast and fast: the art of food in europe, 1500–1800. london: bloomsbury, 2019. this exhibition explored the iconography, ideology, identity, and history of food through almost 300 objects in different media. the watercolor christ refusing the banquet offered by satan, one of twelve illustrations to john milton’s paradise regained (c. 1816–20) owned by john linnell, documents temptation and abstinence. featured religious iconography also referenced the temptation of adam and eve and food rituals, such as jan sadeler’s “preparation for the passover” (c. 1585) from exodus. abraham bosse’s “taste” (c. 1638) suggests the multisensory appeal of food, which the exhibition explored through artifacts ranging from still lifes to landscapes, from meissen to staffordshire and chelsea porcelain figurines and vessels fashioned in the shape of food, from trompe l’oeil plates to edible sugar architectural centerpieces. illustrations to john milton’s paradise regained (c. 1816–20), christ refusing the banquet offered by satan. butlin #544.6. fitzwilliam museum, pd.18-1950. review: william blake in sussex: visions of albion (petworth house, 2018) william blake in sussex: visions of albion. petworth house (national trust), 13 january–25 march 2018. andrew loukes, ed. william blake in sussex: visions of albion. london: national trust, in association with paul holberton publishing, 2018. 120 pp. £16.50, paperback. reviewed by luisa calè luisa calè (l.cale@bbk.ac.uk), birkbeck, university of london, works on practices of reading, viewing, and collecting in the romantic period. her publications include fuseli’s milton gallery: “turning readers into spectators”; co-edited volumes on dante on view: the reception of dante in the visual and performing arts and illustrations, optics and objects in nineteenth-century literary and visual cultures; and special issues on “the disorder of things” (eighteenth-century studies, 2011), “the nineteenth-century digital archive” (19: interdisciplinary studies in the long nineteenth century, 2015), and “literature and sculpture at the fin de siècle” (word and image, 2018). her current project, entitled the book unbound, explores practices of collecting and dismantling the book, with chapters on walpole, blake, and dickens. she is also blake’s exhibitions editor. landscape near felpham (tate, cat. no. 3, butlin no. 368), a watercolor seascape with a boat in the bottom foreground and a ray of light illuminating william blake’s cottage in the mid-distance, reflects blake’s first impressions upon arrival in felpham, sussex, where he spent three years from 1800 to 1803: “heaven opens here on all sides her golden gates   her windows are not obstructed by vapours.”blake to john flaxman, 21 september 1800, e 710, quoted in the catalogue by hayley flynn (64). in an earlier letter, he presented his imminent move “as the time … when men shall again converse in heaven & walk with angels.”blake to flaxman, 12 september 1800, e 707. this promise of visionary conversation is borne out in a tail-vignette in milton captioned “blakes cottage at felpham,” featuring a scene of visitation with the virgin ololon descending from the sky. the poem attributes the move to his prophetic character los, so “that in three years i might write all these visions” (milton 36 [40].24, e 137). the importance of place is confirmed in jerusalem: “in felpham i heard and saw the visions of albion” (jerusalem 34 [38].41, e 180). while analysis of the “three years <herculean> labours at felpham” (e 572) has focused on the composition of milton and jerusalem, a wider case about blake’s visual corpus was made in william blake in sussex: visions of albion, the exhibition curated by andrew loukes at petworth house from january to march 2018. it reconstructed the impact of blake’s felpham period by bringing together works composed in sussex, those commissioned or acquired by the countess and earl of egremont, and later works inspired by rural and maritime scenes experienced in sussex. petworth’s art collection was formed in three key phases in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries. algernon percy, tenth earl of northumberland (1602–68), collected titian and was an important patron for anthony van dyck and peter lely. in the mid-1700s charles wyndham, second earl of egremont (1710–63), focused on netherlandish paintings: bosch, cuyp, hobbema, rembrandt, and david teniers’s archduke leopold’s gallery.christopher hussey, “the petworth collection of pictures. i,” country life (5 december 1925): 899-903; st. john gore, “old masters at petworth,” studies in the history of art 25 (1989): 121-31. george o’brien wyndham, third earl of egremont (1751–1837), added to this nucleus of old masters one of the most significant collections of modern paintings. alongside portraits and landscapes, he collected narrative subjects from british history and literature, including boydell shakespeare gallery paintings such as kauffmann’s diomed and cressida, northcote’s murder of the princes in the tower, reynolds’s macbeth and the witches and death of cardinal beaufort, and romney’s shakespeare nursed by tragedy and comedy, as well as fuseli’s macbeth, banquo and the witches, which was painted for the rival shakespeare gallery planned by james woodmason.christopher hussey, “the petworth collection of pictures. ii,” country life (12 december 1925): 936-39; rosie dias, exhibiting englishness: john boydell’s shakespeare gallery and the formation of a national aesthetic (new haven: yale university press, 2013) 221. while the second earl had collected classical sculpture through gavin hamilton in rome, the third acquired john flaxman’s sculptural group of st. michael overcoming satan. he is best known, however, as a patron of j. m. w. turner.martin butlin, mollie luther, and ian warrell, turner at petworth (london: tate gallery, 1989); for an account of the third earl, see 105-23. his earliest turner was ships bearing up for anchorage, exhibited at the royal academy in 1802 in the middle of blake’s felpham period; turner’s petworth landscapes found their place below holbein’s portrait of henry viii in the carved dining room in the late 1820s and 30s.butlin et al., turner at petworth 18, 24-25, and fig. 16 on p. 116. while turner would find in petworth a second home, there is no record of blake’s visiting during his time in sussex. in his catalogue essay, “‘under a fortunate star’: the petworth blakes in context,” loukes reconstructs how the artist entered petworth. the three blakes hanging in the collection came through a different route, thanks to the patronage of elizabeth ilive, countess of egremont (1769–1822), whose portrait hangs in the main gallery (fig. 22 in the catalogue). she commissioned satan calling up his legions (1800–05, cat. no. 20, butlin no. 662) and the vision of the last judgment (1808, cat. no. 22, butlin no. 642) when she was estranged from her husband. the vision of the last judgment offers a gendered vision of the afterlife embodied in a feminine collective body. blake’s composition arranges the bodies of the dead around a central opening that alludes to female genitalia, while groupings of the elect ascending to heaven in clusters of parents and children amount to a “glorification of family life.” according to loukes, the “figure crownd with stars & the moon beneath her feet with six infants around her”blake to ozias humphry, 18 january 1808, e 553, quoted by loukes (60). rising among the just, whom blake presents as an allegory of the church, alludes to his patron, the countess, with her six surviving children, while the artist makes his own appearance as the figure bent at his work to the right. while the countess’s two blakes were probably transferred to petworth after her death in 1822, a third painting, the characters in spenser’s “faerie queene” (1825, cat. no. 28, butlin no. 811), was purchased by the earl from blake’s widow.loukes 53. these works formed the nucleus of the exhibition, which was richly supplemented by correspondence from the petworth archive. all images courtesy of petworth house, national trust. © scott ramsey. see enlargement. landscape near felpham hung next to thomas phillips’s 1807 portrait of blake to introduce the exhibition, which was held in the servants’ quarters gallery situated opposite the main house, a long room divided into sections roughly corresponding to the walls. the first, “under a fortunate star,” used blake’s wording from the letter to ozias humphry in january 1808, in which he describes his design of the last judgment for the countess (e 552).this letter, reproduced in the catalogue (no. 23), documents the deletion of the word “countess,” substituted by “earl” in a different hand, suggesting that it was acquired by the earl together with the characters in spenser’s “faerie queene” from blake’s widow. this section centered on the apocalyptic works in the petworth collection. lord egremont’s copy of robert blair’s the grave (1808, cat. no. 26) was open to the engraved portrait of blake after phillips reproduced as the frontispiece, while the awakening of the dead encircles the facing title page. this image echoes michelangelesque groupings in the vision of the last judgment and the fall of man (1807, v&a, cat. no. 24, butlin no. 641), which were hung together. see enlargement. an alternative watercolor title page for the grave, presenting the resurrection of the dead (1806, british museum, cat. no. 27, butlin no. 613) floating upward toward heaven, hung opposite on the edge of a partition wall that elegantly separated landscapes from biblical subjects. an inspired curatorial choice placed the line engraving of “chaucers canterbury pilgrims” (cat. no. 30) at a right angle to the watercolor of the characters in spenser’s “faerie queene.” see enlargement. this layout made the two processions of characters converge in the corner, putting striking emphasis on the transition from one wall to the other while inviting us to read them as pendants on the basis of composition and size.butlin (no. 811) argues that the spenser composition was probably intended for a companion engraving. this turn marked a shift in focus toward the literary canon, with chaucer and spenser followed by milton as the wall continued with blake’s satanic subjects from paradise lost: satan arousing the rebel angels (1808, v&a, cat. no. 21, butlin no. 536.1), painted in watercolor for thomas butts, hung next to satan calling up his legions, painted in tempera for the countess of egremont. see enlargement. this juxtaposition offered a great opportunity to see how blake reworks a miltonic subject in different media. while both compositions show the sculptural attitude of apollo belvedere in satan’s posture, his smaller size and higher positioning in the petworth painting allow for more focus on the luminescent volcanic landscape of the damned, enhanced by gold leaf. visitors to blake in sussex saw the michelangelesque elements shaping blake’s visual engagement with the poetry of blair, milton, and the bible in a range of formats and media, from watercolor to tempera, and through the mediation of schiavonetti’s engraving. another reference to apollo belvedere can be traced in the spiritual form of nelson guiding leviathan, which is reproduced opposite petworth’s satan in the exhibition catalogue to illustrate martin butlin’s point that blake’s nelson may have been painted in sussex.martin butlin, “vision and frustration: blake’s sussex in the context of his life and art,” william blake in sussex: visions of albion 17 and figs. 7 and 8. nelson also shares with satan the fallen and falling michelangelesque groupings framing the main figure, a reference that would have been picked up by visitors to the 1809 exhibition, where both subjects were on viewthe version of satan calling up his legions exhibited in 1809 was butlin no. 661 (v&a). and the catalogue invited them to read sculptural allusions to the “gods of priam” in the spiritual forms of the present and the past—bacchus in chaucer’s franklin, hercules in the miller, apollo in the squire, satan, and nelson, “eternal principles or characters of human life … which, when erected into gods, become destructive to humanity” (e 536).for a reading of sculptural forms and their contemporary counterparts in “chaucers canterbury pilgrims,” see alexander s. gourlay, “‘idolatry or politics’: blake’s chaucer, the gods of priam, and the powers of 1809,” prophetic character: essays on william blake in honor of john e. grant, ed. gourlay (west cornwall, ct: locust hill press, 2002) 97-147. see enlargement. next to satan, a section was dedicated to relief etchings from milton and jerusalem under the title “arrows of desire,” a quotation from the “jerusalem” hymn in milton, which encouraged viewers to situate “englands pleasant pastures” in the land of sussex, asking them to consider “jerusalem builded here” (e 95). plates from milton also included blake’s representation of the felpham cottage as a site of celestial inspiration and milton’s hitting blake’s left foot (milton pls. 2, 29, 36 [bentley numbering], cat. nos. 31a-c). by contrast, the selection from jerusalem registered the more negative spectral forms haunting the late prophetic writings. the appearance of “hand” (jerusalem pl. 26, cat. no. 32a) alludes to the hunt brothers and the examiner because of their negative review of the 1809 exhibition. “one stood forth from the divine family” (jerusalem pl. 37 [bentley numbering], cat. no. 32b) is read as los’s attempt to rescue albion. the plate is framed by two vignettes in which blake explores the iconography of the recumbent figure. in the head-vignette he represents albion in the attitude of the body of christ as depicted in renaissance pietàs and deposition scenes. albion’s dangling head and arm may also recall those of the sensational female sleeper in fuseli’s the nightmare (1781). the catalogue entry follows martin myrone in identifying fuseli’s depiction of demonic oppression as a source for the bat-shaped spectre hovering over the more static, shrouded figure of jerusalem in the tail-vignette.martin myrone, gothic nightmares: fuseli, blake and the romantic imagination (london: tate, 2006) 50. the entry also suggests that the theme may “have been further incited by [blake’s] recent engraving after maria flaxman’s design of serena’s bedside for hayley’s triumphs of temper in 1803” (cat. no. 12). blake’s revisionary reading of the felpham period presents hayley as a “spiritual enemy,” positioned as “hyle” next to “skofeld” (jerusalem pl. 51, cat. no. 33), a reference to blake’s altercation with private john scofield, which led to the trial for sedition documented in the vitrine opposite (cat. no. 15). this corner brilliantly mediated the transition from blake’s infernal miltonic views to the virgilian pastorals on display in the next section, “on the banks of the ocean.” see enlargement. “none can know the spiritual acts of my three years slumber on the banks of the ocean” (e 728), blake wrote to butts on 25 april 1803, “unless he has seen them in the spirit or unless he should read my long poem ….” the same marine coordinate returns as a starting point for visionary work in the opening of his address “to the public” in jerusalem: “after my three years slumber on the banks of the ocean, i again display my giant forms to the public” (jerusalem pl. 3, e 145). while in the letter the spiritual acts compensate for and exceed the world of paintings in london, which he failed to see during the three years he spent in sussex, the section entitled “on the banks of the ocean” (later pastoral and marine subjects) used blake’s phrase as a cue to explore the influence of sussex on his landscape painting. see enlargement. some of the works had formed part of the bp spotlight display landscape in blake, curated by hayley flynn as part of her collaborative doctoral award at tate britain, while wood-engraved illustrations to robert j. thornton’s pastorals of virgil (british museum, cat. no. 34) are often on view, yet in the context of the exhibition they took on a striking new meaning. flynn’s catalogue essay, “the influence of felpham: blake’s pastoral experience,” registers a range of local references in blake’s pastorals, from the social implications of the rollers and the work of the ploughman as a potential allegory of the wood-engraver’s craft to exploring whether the houses can refer to hayley’s turret house, petworth, stourhead, or more simply to a generic country house articulating the relationship between manual labor and landed gentry. beyond specific references, blake’s pastoral scenes from virgil capture the unbounded horizons of the south downs within the miniature format of his wood engravings. one of the big claims about the elemental imagination associated with sussex has to do with the discovery of the sea. while blake had represented the sea before, the exhibition brought together a corpus of seascapes shaped by empirical observation. the catalogue entry points out the “convincing rendition of wave formations” in the spirit of god moved upon the face of the waters (abbot hall art gallery, cat. no. 36, butlin no. 690), a drawing variously related to the creation of water (genesis 1.2) and the flood (genesis 7.19-24), while the rainbow at the top-left corner unconvincingly suggests the covenant. powerful waves also appear in the enigmatic arlington court painting (1821, cat. no. 37, butlin no. 803), which was initially thought to be a “typical old testament scene,” then linked to the odyssey and seen to be representing one or both of odysseus’s landings on phaeacia and ithaca and expressing a conflict between the divine inspiration associated with the sea and the material world of classical or scientific thought associated with the land and the pagan depiction of the sun.james lees-milne, diaries 1946–1949 (london: murray, 1996) 405; kathleen raine, “the sea of time and space,” journal of the warburg and courtauld institutes 20.3/4 (1957): 318-37; david bindman, blake as an artist (oxford: phaidon, 1977) 207-08. discovered in 1949, the painting is known as the sea of time and space, an expression that appears in a letter to butts of 10 january 1803 (e 724), in the fourth night of the four zoas (e 337), and three times in milton (15 [17].39, 46, e 110; 34 [38].25, e 134), showing how the elemental world of the sea resurfaces in blake’s prophetic imagination. another seascape selected for the exhibition, the angel marking dante with the sevenfold “p” (1824–27, royal cornwall museum, truro, cat. no. 38, butlin no. 812.79), represents dante at the entrance of mount purgatory (purgatorio 9.101-05). almost all blake’s purgatorio illustrations set the mountain against a marine landscape,the sea also features in blake’s illustrations to purgatorio 1.120-28, 2.53-117, 4.16-65, 4.42-47, 5.22-62, 9.64-101, 9.101-05, 10.25-92, 10.106-27, 12.14-64, 13.20-117, 27.6-19, 27.34-42, and 27.85-109 (butlin nos. 812.70, 72, 73, 74, 75, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, and 86). the textual references follow william blake, la divina commedia, ed. david bindman (paris: bibliothèque de l’image, 2000). but what makes this illustration stand out is dante’s abject kneeling while the angel of god inscribes his brow with seven ps, which stand for “peccata” (sins) (purgatorio 9.112). according to the catalogue entry, this posture might reflect “blake’s experience of william hayley’s patronage at felpham.” blake registered his dislike for dante’s architecture of retribution in a diagram of the nine circles of hell (butlin no. 812.101). in dante’s purgatorio forgiveness is the outcome of a hard-won ascent to make up for the enduring weight of sin. the posture of subjection to a higher power might carry personal associations with the humiliations of social inequality and patronage. while painting the illustrations for purgatorio, blake might have thought of hayley because dante’s was among the heads of the poets that hayley had commissioned blake to paint for his library in felpham. a further connection to felpham is provided by a missed purchase. the dante illustrations—blake’s last great work, dated 1824–27 and left unfinished at his death—were commissioned by john linnell, who offered them to the third earl of egremont. the earl declined and bought two sets of blake’s line-engraved illustrations of the book of job (1823–26, cat. no. 25) instead. hayley’s patronage, discussed by mark crosby in “‘three years herculean labours at felpham’: blake’s sussex experience,” is central to the sussex period and associated with many of the works on view, from allegorical references in milton and jerusalem to the big tempera portraits of the poets commissioned for his library—represented by the heads of spenser and milton on loan from the manchester art gallery (cat. nos. 6 and 7)—and the spectacular, evanescent urizenic form of winter, painted in tempera on pine as part of a chimney decoration scheme for the reverend john johnson, a cousin of william cowper (cat. no. 20). these were on view in a section entitled “many admirable things.” see enlargement. hayley came into focus on a small partition wall featuring three key exhibits: a portrait by henry howard (c. 1800, national portrait gallery, cat. no. 2) was followed by the hand-colored, relief-etched broadsheet of hayley’s ballad little tom the sailor, “printed for & sold by the widow spicer of folkstone for the benefit of her orphans october 5, 1800” (british museum, cat. no. 4). blake’s headand tailpieces represent tom’s plight in two pregnant moments that illustrate the contrast between sea and home: in the headpiece he is placed at the center of a dramatic shipwreck scene with “his fathers free soul, in the clouds” watching “o’er the venturous boy” caught in such a “scene of distress”; in the tailpiece he appears as “a cottagers son” at the cottage door with a hilly landscape opening to the right.a detail of the head-vignette (from a different copy) is reproduced on the cover of blake 51.4 (spring 2018). next to the ballad hung a small oval watercolor portrait of cowper (1800–03, ashmolean museum, cat. no. 8) drawn from george romney’s painting (national portrait gallery).blake’s miniature portraits of cowper and hayley’s commission to engrave portraits and illustrations for his life of william cowper (1803–04) are discussed in morton d. paley, “cowper as blake’s spectre,” eighteenth-century studies 1.3 (spring 1968): 236-52 (see 237n4). at a right angle on the next wall hung the shipwreck, after romney (1804, british museum, cat. no. 13, butlin no. 350), a drawing from a romney painting that is now lost, which blake engraved for hayley’s life of romney. examples of his book commissions were in the vitrine opposite. see enlargement. see enlargement. while blake complained about hayley’s commissions as “meer drudgery of business” (e 724), the biblical watercolors displayed next to the shipwreck were works painted during the felpham period for butts. displayed under the title “on the stocks” was a selection from the biblical subjects blake listed as such in a letter to butts:blake to butts, 6 july 1803 (e 729). the three maries at the sepulchre (1800–03, cat. no. 19, butlin no. 503), the sacrifice of jephthah’s daughter (1803, cat. no. 17, butlin no. 452), the angel of the divine presence clothing adam and eve with coats of skins (1803, cat. no. 16, butlin no. 436), and ruth the dutiful daughter-in-law (1803, cat. no. 18, butlin no. 456). as naomi billingsley observes in her catalogue essay, “‘on the stocks’: biblical watercolours from the felpham period,” these works can be read as pairs: the dynamic composition of the maries and ruth articulates the drama of choice and response, while the more controlled, centralized symmetries of the sacrifice of jephthah’s daughter and the angel of the divine presence, positioned in the middle of the wall, exemplify the oppressions of institutionalized religion in a postlapsarian world in which access to the divine presence is constrained by mediation and intercession, and the odd scale of adam and eve exemplifies a human form contained and “witherd up … / by laws of sacrifice for sin” (jerusalem 27.53-54, e 173). david bindman has pointed out that, unlike the biblical temperas blake had produced for butts in 1799–1800, the felpham watercolors are remarkable for “an astonishing radiance, which flows outward from the holy figures to pervade the whole pictorial space …, a suffusing ethereal light, transcending modelling, but leaving every form distinct and whole.”bindman, blake as an artist 137. insight into this technical development comes from the correspondence with butts, with whom blake shared his thinking about art, having “now given two years to the intense study of those parts of the art which relate to light & shade & colour” (e 718), as well as his ambivalent feelings about miniature, portraiture, and hayley’s pressures toward a branch of art that would provide a livelihood.blake to butts, 22 november 1802, e 718; see also bindman’s chapter on “felpham” in blake as an artist (134-39). while earlier assessments of the felpham period have focused on its significance as a site of inspiration for his late prophetic writings rather than his visual output,“while few works of art of any importance were produced at felpham, blake’s mind was never more active, and his spiritual development is amply charted in his letters” (bindman, blake as an artist 134). this exhibition shed light on its lasting impact on blake’s art. underpinned by careful reconstruction of the networks of patronage that supported blake’s work in the 1800s, william blake in sussex showcased the alternative art genres supported by hayley and butts during his felpham stay and the apocalyptic works for the countess of egremont, while the mystical arlington court painting and later works associated with the new sense of landscape acquired in sussex connected the felpham period to the works of the 1820s. the transfer of blakes to the petworth collection took place at a time when that “house of art,” as john constable described it in 1834, had become an established landmark among the british galleries of art discussed in periodicals in the run-up to the opening of the national gallery.constable is quoted in butlin et al., turner at petworth 105. petworth in the 1820s is captured by turner’s 1827 interiors, showing the recent acquisition of flaxman’s st. michael overcoming satan (1826) in the north gallery (tate, turner bequest ccxliv 13) as well as macbeth and the witches hanging at the center of the south wall of the square dining room (tate, turner bequest ccxliv 108). signs of changing taste are evident in george patmore’s assessment of reynolds’s painting as an “execrable picture,” in contrast to his praise for cuyp—see “british galleries of art.—no. vii. lord egremont’s gallery at petworth,” new monthly magazine vol. 8, no. 31 (january 1823): 162-69 (166). hazlitt praised petworth for “the finest vandykes in the world”—see william hazlitt, “pictures at wilton, stourhead, &c.,” london magazine 8 (october 1823): 357-60 (360). however, blake’s outsider status was captured in inventories dating to 1835 and 1838, which situate his works “upstairs in the old library.” none is listed in gustav waagen’s celebration of the petworth collection as “one of the finest in england” in treasures of art in great britain (1854).gustav waagen, treasures of art in great britain: being an account of the chief collections of paintings, drawings, sculptures, illuminated mss., &c. &c., 3 vols. (london: murray, 1854) 3: 31-43. when anthony blunt rehung the house for its public opening as part of the national trust in 1953, blake’s three paintings were relegated to the chapel passage; they joined the core romantic collection in the north gallery only in the 1990s.loukes 51. the north gallery at petworth house. see enlargement. 70 blake/an illustrated quarterly fall 2011 or technical grounds. death of the strong wicked man and the grave personified are quite richly colored with considerable attention to flesh tones created through the application of very small brushstrokes in blue, brown, and rose. in contrast, parts of prone on the lonely grave—she drops are left uncolored or shaded only with broad washes. the day of judgment exhibits a wide range of coloring techniques. an area of dark sky above the dome in the lower right quadrant, probably applied with a relatively dry brush, shows the sort of fine reticulations we can also see on death’s face, right arm, right thigh, and torso in death pursuing—and in the same or a very similar color. the detailed brushwork in death pursuing also recalls blake’s work as a portrait miniaturist begun in 1801 under william hayley’s tutelage.16 butlin has interestingly associated a destroying deity, a drawing in the philadelphia museum of art, with the grave designs and has even identified a passage in the poem it may illustrate (blake trust publication, p. 54). this deity’s bat-like wings are strikingly similar to death’s and, to my eye, executed in a similar manner with washes and pen-and-ink outlining. butlin’s proposal that someone had “gone over” death pursuing “to make it more saleable in the later 19th century” prompts several questions. the history of the drawing after t. h. cromek, who died in 1873, is somewhat speculative until it entered the collection of mrs. artemas holmes, philadelphia, no earlier than the 1930s. it may have been the drawing sold at christie’s in 1880 for £1.15s.17 thus, the work had very little market value in the second half of the nineteenth century. the tinting of death’s face and parts of his body is minutely articulated with small brushstrokes; the blue and red touches are hardly visible to the naked eye. why would anyone go to all the trouble to execute such detailed work, principally in monochrome washes, when a few splashes of rich color (perhaps yellows and fiery reds, pink flesh for the soul, prominent blood on her neck) would have added much more to the drawing’s saleability? it is possible that a colorist may have believed that the labor required for detailed development of the drawing would be adequately compensated in the marketplace, but if prompted by a profit motive such a colorist must have been badly informed about the commercial value of blake’s art and sorely disappointed. no amount of argument or theorizing can overcome the primacy of the vision and intuitions of the connoisseur’s eye. i have no vain hope of changing anyone’s opinion of death pursuing, least of all butlin’s. rather, my purpose has been 16. see the miniatures of john johnson, william cowper, thomas butts, mrs. butts, and thomas butts, jr., nos. 347, 353, 354, 376-78 and pls. 455, 459, 460, 476-78 in butlin, the paintings and drawings of william blake. for a discussion of this technique in the context of another attribution problem, see essick, “a (self?) portrait of william blake,” blake 39.3 (winter 2005-06): 126-39. 17. for this part of the provenance record, see butlin, the paintings and drawings of william blake, no. 635. at the time he wrote his catalogue, butlin did not know that death pursuing probably remained in t. h. cromek’s possession until at least 1863. to exemplify some ways of using reproductions and historical contexts in cases of attribution, particularly when a leading expert has vacillated between attribution and deattribution. although i believe that death pursuing is entirely blake’s work, i must confess to some slight misgivings. if someone else fiddled with the drawing, i suspect that it was fairly early in its history and confined to death’s face.18 the most likely candidate for any such intervention is t. h. cromek, a skilled watercolorist, although i find little similarity between the techniques used in death pursuing and cromek’s renderings of landscapes and buildings. whatever the truth, however, cromek, butlin, and i would appear to share a common fate, spending part of our lives brooding over death pursuing. 18. david bindman has expressed doubts similar to mine in conversation in apr. 2009. r e v i e w hazard adams modestly introduces blake’s margins by describing it as “less for scholars … than for people who want to know more about blake’s thought … and for students in the early stages of study of his work” (3). beginners will find most of this eminently sensible and learned book edifying, but in fact there are very few blake scholars anywhere who would not benefit from reading it straight through. in some ways, blake’s annotations are among the least ironic of his writings, but every blakean marginalium is a tail that wags a very substantial dog: we can’t really understand a given one without attending to the interplay with the full annotated text and with the broader contexts that contributed to blake’s response. since even the best blake editions inevitably misrepresent the marginalia by supplementing them with (at most) snippets of the annotated texts, many of which are unfamiliar and/or out of print, it would be a good thing if blakists were in the habit of reviewing the relevant chapter in adams before quoting anything written in a margin. of course it would be even better if we all reread, say, the last third of berkeley’s siris with care before repeating “god is not a mathematical diagram,” but if that is not to happen, hazard adams. blake’s margins: an interpretive study of the annotations. jefferson: mcfarland, 2009. viii + 212 pp. $39.95, paperback. reviewed by alexander s. gourlay fall 2011 blake/an illustrated quarterly 71 adams’s judicious summaries will help us much more with the nuances of that declaration than, for instance, the two barely relevant sentences from berkeley quoted by david erdman in his edition (e 664). and of course it’s even more complicated than that: as adams shows, the relevant context of blake’s annotations to siris includes not only berkeley’s principles of human knowledge, but beyond berkeley, john locke, with whom blake had his own extensive dialogue. sometimes the wagged dog is a whole pack: for the two (somewhat conjectural) annotations to spurzheim’s observations on the deranged manifestations of the mind, or insanity, adams adduces the relevance of “spurzheim’s career, that of his mentor franz joseph gall, phrenology as practiced by them, and the contents of spurzheim’s book,” as well as the various physiognomical texts derived from the work of johann caspar lavater (139-40). covering thirteen surviving or recorded instances of annotation,1 adams proceeds author by author in the approximate order in which blake wrote his remarks. he introduces each annotatee briefly, locates the annotated work in the annotatee’s career, discusses the general reception of the work, and then moves through it, remarking upon blake’s most notable responses. adams is alert to both variations in blake’s mode of reading and modulations in his rhetorical stance: at times blake seems to be an earnest student taking notes, or a helpful editor, sometimes a cheerleader or contentious crank, more often an acidic antagonist. in many cases, the stance changes as blake reads the book, and at other times he seems to have read the text through at least once, then returned, loaded for bear. although adams often comments about how a given remark fits into blake’s thought as expressed elsewhere, he is careful not to squeeze all expressions into a universal blakean ideology, and regularly reminds us when the critical vocabulary of the annotations is the annotatee’s, not blake’s. the most successful chapters are those in which adams can bring to bear his wide learning in literature and philosophy at large, as in the chapters on bacon, watson’s apology for the bible, or wordsworth’s poems. he also seems more confident when the cultural contexts are primarily verbal—he knows blake’s visual art well but rarely discusses pictures by others, even when blake appears to be responding to visual art and artistic practices. the substantial chapter on blake’s mostly vitriolic responses to malone’s edition of reynolds’s discourses covers the territory that is most familiar to blakeans, and is probably the subject most thoroughly considered by adams himself, but for me this chapter was less efficiently helpful than, say, that on swedenborg, which is roughly as long. adams, whose procedure throughout is eminently reasonable, strives mightily to establish terms in which bitterly unreasonable blake and smooth, slippery reynolds might have been able to discuss 1. to which should probably be added now the cardinales’ recent discovery of blake’s annotations to thomas taylor’s mystical initiations (see blake 44.3 [winter 2010-11]: 84-102). important questions about art, but for blake at least, the encounter with reynolds is a battle to the death with error, and he seems to have found very little to be reasonable about. adams’s deft summaries of the thrust of the annotatee’s arguments are less relevant here than elsewhere in the book: when responding to reynolds, blake isn’t much interested in the ostensible arguments, which seem to him a mere cloak for wicked intentions. even when blake agrees with something reynolds says, it is because the sheep’s clothing necessarily has something to do with the lamb, not because blake is any friendlier to the wolf. a brief addendum on blake’s reading summarizes discursively the information assembled about blake’s library by keynes, bentley, and others. this could have been an entire book on its own—and if adams were to write such a book it would be a wonderful thing—but even at this length it is a helpful list. and yet “books read” is a much more complicated category—and subject of study—than “books annotated,” because one has no way to tell which of blake’s diverse modes of reading he applied to a given book that he demonstrably read. further, the criteria used to decide whether to report that blake read a book or an author are not discussed, so dozens of complicated questions are skirted. one can’t tell whether marshall’s the life of george washington, which blake told hayley he had but hadn’t read “yet” (e 749), is omitted because we can assume he never read it or simply because it was overlooked; similarly, potter’s (not “palmer’s”) translation of aeschylus is listed as read (196) even though the book in question is unmarked beyond blake’s signature, and as far as i know unmentioned by blake, though it is reasonable to suppose that he would have been interested in it. further, we know that blake owned and read a copy of bysshe’s art of poetry, with its extensive collection of snippets of verse, so one can’t be sure he actually read all the poets whom he quotes if the quoted texts are included in bysshe. another problem is that we can’t tell from the fact that he engraved plates for a book whether he ever saw, much less read, the actual text of it. blake’s margins is hardly the last word that will be written about the marginalia. it is sturdily unpretentious in method as well as modest in its claims, and its virtues are more likely to prove durable than those of, say, jason snart’s much more ostentatious study, the torn book: unreading william blake’s marginalia (selinsgrove: susquehanna university press, 2006), which adams praises faintly as “interesting” (6). but it will probably be some time before there is much need for another comprehensive treatment of the marginalia as a whole. adams has found a level of discussion that suits the annotated volumes in all their variety, and the most fruitful of the next round of studies will probably focus on blake’s responses to individual authors. blake and music, 2017 blake, illustrations to gray’s poems, c. 1797–98, “ode for music,” page 1. yale center for british art, paul mellon collection, b1992.8.11(47). image courtesy of the william blake archive. blake and music, 2017 by jason whittaker jason whittaker (jwhittaker@lincoln.ac.uk) is head of the school of english and journalism at the university of lincoln. he is the author of several works on william blake, including william blake and the myths of britain (palgrave, 1999), radical blake: influence and afterlife from 1827 (with shirley dent, palgrave, 2002), and blake 2.0: william blake in twentieth-​century art, music and culture (with steve clark and tristanne connolly, palgrave, 2012). his main research interests in blake deal with the reception of the poet and artist, and he is currently completing a book on the first hundred years of the hymn “jerusalem.” william blake has long been a favorite of a number of composers and songwriters, and when donald fitch published blake set to music: a bibliography of musical settings of the poems and prose of william blake in 1990, he listed 1412 pieces that had been composed by 1988. this was then expanded by his “blake set to music: supplement 2001” in blake 35.2 (fall 2001) and ashanka kumari’s “adding to blake set to music” in blake 49.4 (spring 2016). the original blake set to music had largely concentrated on classical settings of blake’s works; fitch’s supplement, as well as incorporating additional classical compositions that had appeared since the end of the 1980s, also included a significant number of pop songs that had been produced earlier. kumari continued with both classical and popular additions, and my list of entries adheres to the format established by fitch and followed by kumari. as kumari’s piece concluded with 2013 releases, the entries here concentrate on those that have been released since 2013, although some earlier ones, not included by either her or fitch, also appear below. there is one significant difference between this list and those produced by both previous authors: while they generally avoided songs that simply mentioned blake and instead concentrated on settings of blake’s poetry, this list also includes songs that are about blake in some shape or form. i have avoided the substantial number of albums that make some passing—usually superficial—reference to the songs of innocence and of experience, although two albums by u2 are listed because critics have observed that they are significantly, if somewhat obliquely, influenced by blake’s poetry. wherever possible, the originating country of the artist(s) is listed, as well as instrumentation, copyright dates, publisher, and genres. each source list also includes at least one link to a recording, usually amazon, apple, spotify, or youtube. agnes and aubrey — uk from artsongs: ten songs about artists; for voice, piano, guitar, percussion. duration: 31:22. tate, © 2006. rock/​pop. contents: 9. william blake. (quirky song about blake’s life to match similar tracks about frida kahlo, jackson pollock, and wassily kandinsky.) links: allmusic, amazon, apple, spotify, youtube. ashman, howard, and alan menken — usa from kurt vonnegut’s god bless you, mr. rosewater; for voices, variously accompanied. duration: 53:57. menken music, © 2017. musical. contents: 11. a poem by william blake. links: amazon, apple, spotify. beeler, alan — usa from the real beeler: symphonic music of alan beeler; for symphony orchestra. duration: 1:13:12. navona records, © 2014. classical. contents: 22. mad song after william blake. links: allmusic, amazon, apple, spotify. bottegasonora — italy from disco naïf; for voice, keyboards, percussion. duration: 34:00. bottegasonora, © 2009. rock/​pop. contents: 5. the chimney sweeper (feat. william blake). links: amazon, apple, spotify, youtube. burnett, matt — usa from wildflower; for piano. duration: 30:01. walnut tree music, © 2005. classical. contents: 3. jerusalem (william blake and h. h. parry). links: amazon, spotify. burnside, alan — uk from corridors of memory; for voice, guitar, harmonica. duration: 35:01. alan burnside, © 2017. folk. contents: 2. william blake. links: soundcloud, spotify, youtube. caestles — usa from a treatise on human combustion; for voice, guitars, bass, percussion. duration: 20:20. caestles, © 2010. rock/​pop. contents: 2. william blake. links: amazon, apple, spotify. the cleavers — usa from television mind; for voice, guitars, bass, percussion, strings. duration: 42:56. allright records, © 2004. folk. contents: 4. william blake. links: apple, spotify. dave taylor octet — usa from the atomic bomb blues (live); for brass octet. duration: 1:02:54. composers concordance records, © 2015. classical/​jazz. contents: 1. five songs from william blake: no. 2, tiger! tiger!; 14. five songs from william blake: no. 1, the divine image. (new arrangements of compositions by virgil thomson.) links: amazon, apple, spotify. earth — usa hex; or printing in the infernal method; for guitars, percussion, keyboards. duration: 46:26. southern lord, © 2005. rock/​pop. contents: 1. mirage; 2. land of some other order; 3. the dire and ever circling wolves; 4. left in the desert; 5. lens of unrectified night; 6. an inquest concerning teeth; 7. raiford (the felon wind); 8. the dry lake; 9. tethered to the polestar. (a concept album loosely based on blake’s the marriage of heaven and hell.) links: allmusic, amazon, apple, spotify, youtube. echo, erin — usa from various artists, when worlds collide: a tribute to daniel amos and the music of terry scott taylor; for voice, variously accompanied. duration: 1:10:35. ferris wheel, © 2000. rock/​pop. contents: 2. william blake. (draws upon “the tyger” and “the lamb.”) links: amazon, apple, spotify, youtube. escombe, luke — australia from skeleton blues; for voice, guitar. duration: 47:46. fogsongs, © 2017. rock/​pop. contents: 11. william blake. links: apple, spotify, youtube. fang — spain from monster; for voice, keyboard, percussion. duration: 46:08. k. industria cultural, © 2001. rock/​pop. contents: 8. william blake’s flowers; 11. remix william blake’s flowers. links: apple, spotify. ginsberg, allen — usa songs of innocence and experience; for voice, variously accompanied. duration: 1:47:19. omnivore recordings, © 2017. avant garde/​folk. contents: disc 1: songs of innocence: 1. (a) introduction (b) the shepherd; 2. the ecchoing green; 3. the lamb; 4. the little black boy; 5. the blossom; 6. the chimney sweeper; 7. (a) the little boy lost (b) the little boy found; 8. laughing song; 9. holy thursday; 10. night. songs of experience: 11. introduction; 12. nurses song; 13. the sick rose; 14. ah! sun-flower; 15. the garden of love; 16. london; 17. the human abstract; 18. to tirzah; 19. the grey monk. bonus tracks: 20. the grey monk (alternate take, previously unissued); 21. brothels of paris (previously unissued). disc 2: blake songs: 1. a cradle song; 2. the divine image (previously unissued); 3. spring (previously unissued); 4. nurses song (previously unissued); 5. infant joy; 6. a dream; 7. on another[s] sorrow; 8. holy thursday (previously unissued); 9. the fly; 10. the school boy; 11. the voice of the ancient bard. (this compilation brings together several items listed under finch [1990] #495.) links: allmusic, amazon, apple, spotify. grave closure — uk from dark lane; for voice, keyboard, guitars, percussion. duration: 1:16:02. 624353 records, © 2016. rock/​pop. contents: 4. the garden of love; 5. the human abstract; 7. the echoin green by william blake. links: amazon, apple, spotify. the great veil — denmark from aldrig mere elske; for voice, guitars, bass, percussion. duration: 42:22. repo man records, © 2016. rock/​pop. contents: 3. love’s secret (poem by william blake). links: amazon, apple, spotify, youtube. the groundsmen — usa from livelife; for voice, guitars, percussion. duration: 31:09. spat! records, © 2008. rock/​pop. contents: 1. william blake. links: apple, spotify, youtube. gunthorpe, zac — australia from long lost love lies; for voice, guitars, percussion. soul arch recordings, © 2012. alternative country. contents: 3. william blake. links: amazon, apple, spotify, youtube. harle, john, and marc almond — uk from the tyburn tree: dark london; for voice, variously accompanied. duration: 53:50. sospiro music ltd., © 2013. avant garde/​classical. contents: 12. jerusalem. (incorporates lines from milton a poem and jerusalem the emanation of the giant albion.) links: allmusic, amazon, apple, spotify, youtube. kidane, daniel — uk songs of illumination; for voice and piano. daniel kidane, © 2018. classical. (three pieces based on “a dream,” “the land of dreams,” and “the little black boy.”) link: web site. krylov, andrei — russia from gothic music fantasy for renaissance celtic lute and classical guitar; for lute and classical guitar. duration: 1:24:48. andrei krylov, © 2015. classical. contents: 28. lute ballad dedicated to william blake. link: spotify. lawler, kevin, and nevada jones — usa stranger from paradise; for voices, variously accompanied. kevin lawler and nevada jones, © 2017. classical. (opera drawing upon the life and works of blake.) link: web site. leo, lou — usa from lou leo sings the electric poet (george pereny); for voice, guitar, bass, percussion. duration: 1:13:43. pompton turtle, © 2000. country. contents: 11. william blake. links: allmusic, amazon, apple, spotify. like a stuntman — germany from original bedouin culture; for voice, variously accompanied. duration: 40:43. bureau b, © 2009. alternative/​indie. contents: 1. wake up william blake. links: allmusic, amazon, apple, spotify, youtube. lovenstein, jonathan — usa blake songs and other works; for voice, piano. duration: 1:12:27. titanic, © 1994. classical. contents: 2. the lamb; 3. morning; 8. love to faults is always blind; 12. a divine image; 13. london; 14. a poison tree; 17. song; 18. infant sorrow. links: allmusic, apple, spotify. lovenstein, jonathan — usa blake songs and other works, volume 2; for voice, piano. duration: 46:14. titanic, © 1999. classical. contents: 1. introduction to songs of innocence; 3. a cradle song; 8. laughing song; 11. the fly. links: apple, spotify. ndesandjo, mark obama — usa/​china the divine comedy: reflections on william blake; for piano. duration: 1:06:25. mark o. ndesandjo, © 2017. classical. contents: 1. aria; 2-28. cantos 1-27. (composed and performed by the paternal half-brother of former president obama.) links: amazon, apple, spotify. noisy minority — switzerland from first silence; for voice, variously accompanied. duration: 53:02. unit records, © 2001. jazz. contents: 11. poem: little fly (william blake). links: allmusic, amazon, apple, spotify, youtube. fernand pena — france ode to william blake; for voice, variously accompanied. duration: 1:10:04. fernand pena, © 2011. rock/​pop. contents: 1. song of innocence; 2. the little vagabond; 3. the little boy found—lost; 4. the chimney sweeper; 5. the little black boy; 6. infant sorrow; 7. the human abstract; 8. to tirzah; 9. laughing song; 10. london; 11. the school boy; 12. a poison tree; 13. little girl lost; 14. o, i say you joe; 15. holy thursday; 16. william bond; 17. the mother said; 18. get thee away. link: youtube. fernand pena — france ode to william blake, volume 2; for voice, variously accompanied. duration: 1:19:43. fernand pena, © 2016. rock/​pop. contents: 1. never pain to tell thy love; 2. mary; 3. the land of dream[s]; 4. a fairy skip’d upon my knee; 5. my spectre around me night & day; 6. night; 7. the little girl lost; 8. the little girl found; 9. the ecchoing-green; 10. the cristal [sic] cabinet; 11. the tyger; 12. fayette; 13. earth’s answer; 14. when klopstock england defied; 15. long john brown & little mary bell; 16. you don’t believe; 17. the fly; 18. on another’s sorrow. link: web site. quatre bouches and eisler trio — holland the william blake experience; for voices, guitar, cello. duration: 59:50. quatre bouches productions, © 2014. classical. contents: 1. introduction innocence; 2. the ecchoing green; 3. the lamb; 4. the little black boy; 5. the blossom; 6. laughing song; 7. a cradle song; 8. the divine image; 9. night; 10. infant joy; 11. a dream; 12. introduction experience; 13. earth’s answer; 14. the sick rose; 15. the tyger; 16. the garden of love; 17. london; 18. the human abstract; 19. the school boy; 20. the voice of the ancient bard. links: amazon, apple, spotify. sanders, ed — usa from poems for new orleans; for voice, variously accompanied. duration: 1:17:42. paris records, © 2007. jazz. contents: 3. what if william blake had gone to new orleans? links: allmusic, amazon, spotify. shasta — usa from the outsider; for voice, guitar, percussion. duration: 52:00. e. “shasta” bates and mountain thunder music, © 2009. country. contents: 4. one-​eyed jacks with william blake. links: amazon, spotify. silent religion — italy from absence; songs for voice, keyboards, electronic instruments, percussion. duration: 23:73. silent realm, © 2016. rock/​pop. contents: 3. homage to william blake. (based on blake’s “the fly.”) links: soundcloud, youtube. sky, ananda from for you; for voice, guitar. duration: 37:51. ananda sky, © 2001. folk. contents: 5. two poems by william blake. (based on “eternity” and “auguries of innocence.”) links: apple, spotify. sophya baccini’s aradia — italy from big red dragon (william blake’s visions); songs for voice, guitar, bass, keyboards, percussion. duration: 1:08:30. black widow records, © 2013. rock/​pop. contents: 1. william; 2. angel of the revelation; 3. satan; 4. love of hecate; 5. la porta dell’inferno; 6. the number; 7. just; 8. cerberus; 9. while he’s sleeping; 10. au premier matin du jour; 11. beatrice; 12. big red dragon; 13. jerusalem. (a concept album drawing widely upon blake’s poetry and art for its inspiration.) links: amazon, apple, spotify, youtube. thaur, simon — austria william blakes songs of innocence and experience; for voice, electronic instruments, percussion. duration: 1:02:49. platyn records, © 2011. techno/​electronica. contents: 1. the tyger; 2. garden of love; 3. children of the future age; 4. the divine image; 5. a poison tree; 6. the fly; 7. about the angel in my dreams; 8. the little black boy; 9. the chimney sweeper; 10. london; 11. the little girl lost and found; 12. introduction. links: amazon, spotify. tiger tooth — usa from tiger tooth; for voice, electronic instruments, percussion. duration: 1:12:39. baby tooth, © 2016. techno/​electronica. contents: 13. william blake. (a version of “the tyger.”) links: apple, spotify, youtube. treacher, graham — uk divine madness: the visions of albion; for voice, viol consort. duration: 56:00. graham treacher, © 2016. classical. (based on milton a poem and other writings of blake.) link: vimeo. turn off your television — sweden from humble waves; for voice, variously accompanied. duration: 31:58. turn off your television, © 2012. rock/​pop. contents: 3. my apple tree (thank you william blake). links: apple, spotify. tyler, alan — uk william blake’s songs of innocence; for voice, guitars, violin, percussion. duration: 38:48. littlefield, © 2015. folk. contents: 1. introduction; 2. the shepherd; 3. the ecchoing green; 4. the lamb; 5. the little black boy; 6. the blossom; 7. the chimney sweeper; 8. the little boy lost and the little boy found; 9. laughing song; 10. a cradle song; 11. the divine image; 12. holy thursday; 13. night; 14. spring; 15. nurse’s song; 16. infant joy; 17. a dream; 18. on anothers sorrow. links: amazon, apple, spotify. u2 — irelandthis is the most contentious addition here, as u2 neither directly reference blake nor set his poetry to music, but the parallels between their two albums and blake’s songs of innocence and of experience have been recognized by a number of music critics. as such, their songs of innocence and songs of experience are listed, along with walter zimmermann’s songs of innocence & experience, which includes a series of ritornels directly drawn from blake’s poetry.variant titles of the songs are always popular, including the following list of albums that do not particularly invoke blake’s work in any other way: adequate seven — songs of innocence and of experience (2003); augustus & the emperors — songs of innocence and of experience (2011); danielle buonaiuto, bethany pietroniro — songs of innocence and experience (2014); caprice — songs of innocence and experience (2006); j. j. crown — songs of innocence and experience (2011); the echoing green — songs of innocence and experience (2006); fitz — songs of innocence and experience (2008); lisa howard — songs of innocence & experience (2011); love syndicate — songs of innocence and experience (2002); paul mcdowell — songs of innocence and experience (2012); anda al sinaia — songs of innocence and experience (2005); jasper steverlinck — songs of innocence (2004). songs of innocence; for voice, variously accompanied. duration: 48:06. island records, © 2014. rock/​pop. contents: 1. the miracle (of joey ramone); 2. every breaking wave; 3. california (there is no end to love); 4. song for someone; 5. iris (hold me close); 6. volcano; 7. raised by wolves; 8. cedarwood road; 9. sleep like a baby tonight; 10. this is where you can reach me now; 11. the troubles. links: allmusic, amazon, apple, spotify. u2 — ireland songs of experience; for voice, variously accompanied. duration: 1:07:38. island records, © 2017. rock/​pop. contents: 1. love is all we have left; 2. lights of home; 3. you’re the best thing about me; 4. get out of your own way; 5. american soul; 6. summer of love; 7. red flag day; 8. the showman (little more better); 9. the little things that give you away; 10. landlady; 11. the blackout; 12. love is bigger than anything in its way; 13. 13 (there is a light); 14. ordinary love; 15. book of your heart; 16. lights of home (st. peter’s string version); 17. you’re the best thing about me (u2 vs. kygo). links: allmusic, amazon, apple, spotify. vesper land — france a folk tribute to william blake; for voice, guitars. duration: 20:51. lco art, © 2012. folk/country. contents: 1. a dream; 2. the sick rose; 3. i laid me down upon a bank; 4. why was cupid a boy; 5. i asked a thief to steal me a peach; 6. a divine image. links: apple, spotify. walcott, christopher from relaxation; for voices, variously accompanied. duration: 53:00. discmedi, © 2011. new age. contents: 2. le livre de thel (d’après un poème de william blake). links: amazon, apple, spotify. wilson, dan, and mark huggett project — south africa/​uk from max roach park; for voices, variously accompanied. duration: 1:15:22. musketeer records, © 2007. jazz. contents: 6. william blake. links: amazon, apple, spotify. woerner, danielle, and sylvia buccelli — usa from she walks in beauty: the songs of otto luening and robert starer; for voice, piano. duration: 1:17:10. parnassus, © 2013. classical. contents: 22. selected songs to poems of william blake: love’s secret; 23. selected songs to poems of william blake: ah! sun-flower; 24. selected songs to poems of william blake: the little vagabond. links: amazon, apple, spotify. zimmermann, walter, and sonar quartett — germany songs of innocence & experience; for string quartet. duration: 02:23:11. mode, © 2012. classical. contents: disc 1: 1-10. fränkische tänze, sublimated for string quartet with drone quartet, parts 1-10; 11. keuper, for string quartet; 12. patientia; 13. occasio; 14. poenitentia; 15. regressus in infinitum; 16. songs of innocence & experience, 23 ritornels for string quartet and tape. disc 2: 1-2. die sorge geht über den fluß, for violin solo, parts 1-2; 3. taula; 4. novo ben; 5-14. fränkische tänze, sublimated for string quartet without drone quartet, parts 1-10. (zimmermann wrote that the original inspiration for the ritornels was hearing ginsberg’s recordings of blake while traveling through the usa.) link: allmusic. blake’s unfinished series of illustrations to paradise lost for john linnell: an addition blake’s unfinished series of illustrations to paradise lost for john linnell: an addition by martin butlin martin butlin is the former keeper of the historic british collection at the tate gallery, london. he is the author of detailed catalogues of the paintings and drawings of william blake and, with evelyn joll, the paintings of j. m. w. turner. william blake, adam and eve asleep (see enlargement). pen and watercolor over pencil, 197 ⁄ 8 x 1515 ⁄ 16 in. (50.4 x 40.5 cm.). private collection, uk. the unexpected appearance of a large watercolor of adam and eve asleep, similar in size, technique, and finish to the three known watercolors from the series done for john linnell in 1822, is a surprise. so, perhaps, is the fact that it is a surprise. the fact that all three of the known paradise lost watercolors are fully completed works, unlike the series of illustrations to dante and to the pilgrim’s progress, both left incomplete at blake’s death, may well have put off speculation about what would seem to have been intended as a complete set of near copies of the twelve subjects of the series done for thomas butts. blake’s first series of illustrations to paradise lost, twelve in number, was painted for the reverend joseph thomas in 1807.butlin, paintings and drawings 1: 378-81, nos. 529 1-12. huntington library, art collections, and botanical gardens, san marino, california. the series was repeated at twice the size for butts, the most important patron of blake’s earlier years; most of these watercolors are dated 1808 and one subject, satan spying on adam and eve and raphael’s descent into paradise, was replaced by the subject of the newly discovered watercolor, adam and eve asleep.butlin, paintings and drawings 1: 383-88, nos. 536 1-12. the series is divided: nos. 3-9 and 11-12 are in the museum of fine arts, boston, no. 1 is in the victoria and albert museum, london, no. 2 is in the huntington library, art collections, and botanical gardens, san marino, california, and no. 10 is in the houghton library, harvard university, cambridge, massachusetts. for the possible execution of this series over a number of years and the possibility, no more, that blake topped and tailed the twelve subjects with watercolors of the same size depicting the fall of man and a vision of the last judgment (butlin, paintings and drawings 1: 466-67, nos. 641 and 639), see butlin, “the dating and composition.” nearly fifteen years later, on 9 may 1822, linnell, who succeeded butts as blake’s chief patron in his later years, recorded that “mr blake began copies from his drawings from miltons p.l. [paradise lost].”bentley, br(2) 383. unlike butts’s series, which was much larger in size and differed in many details of composition from that done for thomas, the works completed for linnell were basically similar to the butts set, at least in the outlines. this had already been the case with the job watercolors done for linnell after the butts series, before the addition of two subjects and their further development in the set of engravings. the only difference was the precise wording of linnell’s description of the way the repetition was made. instead of “copies” linnell recorded, under saturday, 8 september 1821, “traced outlines from mr blakes designs from job all day.” on the following monday, 10 september, he “traced outlines from mr blakes drawings of job—all day / mr blake finishing the outlines—all day. / … mr blake took home the drawings of job—.”bentley, br(2) 379. if linnell was precise in his wording, he had begun by tracing blake’s outlines even though blake had concluded by “finishing the outlines”; all this within three days. three examples of the linnell series were known until the appearance of adam and eve asleep, having been included in the catalogue by william rossetti, brother of dante gabriel rossetti, at the end of the first life of blake, alexander gilchrist’s life of william blake, “pictor ignotus,” published in 1863 and again, revised, in 1880. these, as linnell’s note implies, follow the compositions of butts’s watercolors and are the same size. they show satan watching the endearments of adam and eve, the creation of eve, and michael foretells the crucifixion; the first two are now in the national gallery of victoria, melbourne, and the last is in the fitzwilliam museum, cambridge.butlin, paintings and drawings 1: 388-89, nos. 537 1-3, and butlin and gott 27-36, 46-52. the newly discovered watercolor matches these three in size, in being executed in pen and watercolor over pencil outlines, in the somewhat looser finish that distinguishes blake’s late works, and in brighter and more varied coloring as compared with the butts prototypes. the two works in melbourne follow their prototypes closely though not exactly (blake has added stars on satan’s legs), but michael foretells the crucifixion is completely transformed by the addition of rays of light emerging from the body of christ. adam and eve asleep resembles the two works in melbourne, particularly satan watching the endearments of adam and eve, in closely following its prototype without elaboration, but there are enough variations in detail to show that this is no mechanical copy; these can be found particularly in the foliage, the rounded forms of the couple’s luxurious bed, and the points of the halos of the two angels. some of the outlines of the figures and their clothing reflect the broken outlines also found in the works in melbourne. like the other three works, there are also a number of minor pentimenti. as in the case of the other three watercolors, the under-drawing in pencil is presumably the product of the “copying.” only the first of the linnell series, satan watching the endearments of adam and eve, is signed, in blake’s typical late manner, “wblake inv”. however, all four watercolors are very slightly trimmed and seem originally to have been slightly larger than their butts equivalents, and there are places along the lower edge of adam and eve asleep where it is possible, with the eye of faith, to see the upper traces of some kind of inscription, perhaps another signature. the paper of adam and eve asleep has been identified by the paper expert and historian peter bower as typical of that produced by james whatman the younger’s successor, william balston, at springfield mill, maidstone, kent, in about 1820; this accords well with linnell’s commission of 1822. the paper is, however, wove rather than the laid of the other three watercolors but, as bower has pointed out, blake was not always uniform in his choice of paper for individual series of works, as, for instance, in the watercolors for the grave. a recent conservation report by heather norville-dayheather norville-day of norville-day limited was formerly a senior conservator working on the blakes in tate britain. has revealed that the original paper has been relined with modern paper, “firmly bound to the original watercolour paper, suggesting it was subjected to excessive pressure when lined. … the remnants of the skinned paper and adhesive currently attached to the verso of the watercolour paper have given the paper an additional strength and rattle different to the original watercolour paper”; this “has resulted in the sheet having a flattened, consolidated and dense texture.” the work had already suffered to a certain extent from a previous treatment. it may be that the physical state of the new paradise lost drawing reflects its rather unfortunate earlier conservation history. in particular, the overly stern expression and the mishandling of the shadow falling on the forehead of the foremost angel as compared with the butts original could well have happened as part of a reinforcing of the pen outlines (as opposed to the pencil outlines, which were presumably the result of the “copying” noted by linnell). once the bodges were made they were uncorrectable. the works from the series in melbourne and cambridge were all in the great linnell sale of 15 march 1918, which included the main part of linnell’s collection, sold by his grandson herbert. however, various other works passed to other members of linnell’s large family, and it may well be that this work, the provenance of which is at present totally unknown, could have descended by way of other members of linnell’s large progeny.for a list of possible linnells, see bentley, blake books p. 1043 and br(2) 541n, 917, and, for linnell descendants, the “acknowledgements” in the exhibition catalogue john linnell: a centennial exhibition viii. the newly discovered watercolor illustrates the passage from book 4, lines 799-819, of paradise lost, in which the angels ithuriel and zephon are sent by the archangel gabriel to guard the sleeping adam and eve against satan, who has just entered into the garden of eden; there they find him, squat like a toad close at the ear of eve; assaying by his devilish art to reach the organs of her fancie, and with them forge illusions as he list, fantasms and dreams …. ithuriel, touching the toad lightly with his spear, restores the fiend to his natural appearance. subsequently, in book 5, lines 27-94, eve tells adam of her dream, as convincing as real life, in which satan leads her to the tree of knowledge and tempts her to eat of the fruit thereof. works cited bentley, g. e., jr. blake books. oxford: clarendon press, 1977. ———. blake records. 2nd ed. new haven: yale university press, 2004. [here cited as br(2).] bower, peter. “the paper used for adam and eve asleep, william blake (1757–1827), in the context of blake’s use of paper.” december 2016. unpublished report. butlin, martin. “the dating and composition of william blake’s larger series of illustrations to paradise lost.” british art 1740–1820: essays in honor of robert r. wark. ed. guilland sutherland. san marino, ca: huntington library, 1992. 145-67. ———. the paintings and drawings of william blake. 2 vols. new haven: yale university press, 1981. butlin, martin, and ted gott. william blake in the collection of the national gallery of victoria. introd. irena zdanowicz. melbourne: national gallery of victoria, 1989. crouan, katharine. john linnell: a centennial exhibition. cambridge: cambridge university press and fitzwilliam museum, 1982. norville-day, heather. “‘adam exulting over eve’ [sic] by w. blake.” 21 november 2016. unpublished conservation report. b l a k e vol. 53, no. 4 spring 2020 angela esterhammer, victoria college, university of toronto nelson hilton, university of georgia tilar j. mazzeo, colby college robert w. rix, university of copenhagen joseph viscomi, university of north carolina at chapel hill david worrall, the nottingham trent university martin butlin, tate gallery, london, retired tristanne j. connolly, university of waterloo detlef w. dörrbecker, university of trier sibylle erle, bishop grosseteste university robert n. essick, university of california, riverside a d v i s o r y b o a r d a n i l l u s t r a t e d q u a r t e r l y volume 53 number 4 spring 2020 c o n t e n t s www.blakequarterly.org article blake in the marketplace, 2019 by robert n. essick reviews william blake, tate britain, 11 september 2019–2 february 2020 martin myrone and amy concannon, with an afterword by alan moore, william blake reviewed by luisa calè james rovira, ed., rock and romanticism: blake, wordsworth, and rock from dylan to u2 reviewed by r. paul yoder minute particular the publisher not mad by karen mulhallen © 2020 copyright morris eaves and morton d. paley cover: edward young, night thoughts (1797), detail of pl. 34. colored copy bb, essick collection. e d i t o r s editors: morris eaves and morton d. paley review editor: alexander s. gourlay exhibitions editor: luisa calè bibliographer (criticism): wayne c. ripley bibliographer (music): jason whittaker managing editor: sarah jones sarah.jones@rochester.edu production office: department of english, university of rochester, rochester ny 14627-0451 b l a k e volume 54 number 2 fall 2020 angela esterhammer, victoria college, university of toronto nelson hilton, university of georgia tilar j. mazzeo, colby college robert w. rix, university of copenhagen joseph viscomi, university of north carolina at chapel hill david worrall, the nottingham trent university martin butlin, tate gallery, london, retired tristanne j. connolly, university of waterloo detlef w. dörrbecker, university of trier sibylle erle, bishop grosseteste university robert n. essick, university of california, riverside a d v i s o r y b o a r d a n i l l u s t r a t e d q u a r t e r l y volume 54 number 2 fall 2020 c o n t e n t s www.blakequarterly.org articles interpreting blake’s the magdalene at the sepulchre by g. a. rosso translating blake’s prophetic poetry: the case of milton by juliana steil and lawrence flores pereira minute particulars james blake of rotherhithe, timber merchant by wayne c. ripley an overannotated “auguries of innocence” by alexander s. gourlay review sendak and blake illustrating “songs of innocence” with an essay by prof. robert n. essick reviewed by mark crosby © 2020 copyright morris eaves and morton d. paley cover: detail of blake, the magdalene at the sepulchre (c. 1805). watercolor, 43.8 x 31.1 cm. yale center for british art, paul mellon collection. b1975.4.1794. e d i t o r s editors: morris eaves and morton d. paley review editor: alexander s. gourlay exhibitions editor: luisa calè bibliographer (criticism): wayne c. ripley bibliographer (music): jason whittaker managing editor: sarah jones sarah.jones@rochester.edu production office: department of english, university of rochester, rochester ny 14627-0451 all religions are one: a note on sources all religions are one : a note on sources by robert w. rix robert w. rix (rjrix@hum.ku.dk) is associate professor at the university of copenhagen. he has published widely on eighteenth-century politics, language, book history, nationalism, and religion. he has written a number of articles on william blake and is the author of the monograph william blake and the cultures of radical christianity (2007). in recent years, he has published the barbarian north in medieval imagination: ethnicity, legend, and literature (routledge, 2014) and edited a volume of essays on romantic-era print history (mt press, 2015). all religions are one the voice of one crying in the wilderness the argument      as the true method of knowledge is experiment the true faculty of knowing must be the faculty which experiences. this faculty i treat of. principle 1st    that the poetic genius is the true man. and that the body or outward form of man is derived from the poetic genius. likewise that the forms of all things are derived from their genius. which by the ancients was call’d an angel & spirit & demon. principle 2d    as all men are alike in outward form, so (and with the same infinite variety) all are alike in the poetic genius principle 3d    no man can think write or speak from his heart, but he must intend truth. thus all sects of philosophy are from the poetic genius adapted to the weaknesses of every individual principle 4.    as none by traveling over known lands can find out the unknown. so from already acquired knowledge man could not acquire more. therefore an universal poetic genius exists principle. 5.    the religions of all nations are derived from each nations different reception of the poetic genius which is every where call’d the spirit of prophecy. principle 6    the jewish & christian testaments are an original derivation from the poetic genius. this is necessary from the confined nature of bodily sensation principle 7th    as all men are alike (tho’ infinitely various) so all religions & as all similars have one source the true man is the source he being the poetic genius (e 1-2) william blake’s early tract all religions are one was etched on ten copperplates c. 1788. in seven “principles,” blake sets out to prove that a spiritual dimension of man, which he names the “poetic genius,” exists, and that this has been the origin of all religions. the gnomic principles have remained somewhat impenetrable because scholarly criticism has lost sight of the intellectual context in which the tract was produced. this short note is an attempt to recover the most important discourses to which blake provides a response. the most important influence is that of the swedish theosophist emanuel swedenborg (1688–1772). in the late 1780s, blake was attracted to swedenborg’s writings: he annotated several of swedenborg’s books and was in contact with swedenborgian circles in london. his sympathy was probably at its height at the time he etched all religions are one. when the tract is read within a swedenborgian framework, its resonances with the theosophist’s work become clear. this is not to imply that blake sought any profound allegiance with swedenborgianism. in fact, his twisting of swedenborgian mainstays bespeaks an urge to reformulate swedenborg’s ideas. as blake says in the marriage of heaven and hell, swedenborg has not spoken any new truths, but only written “the contents or index of already publish’d books” (e 42). all religions are one amalgamates several contemporary pseudoscientific discourses that—although confirming some of the ideas propounded in swedenborg’s writings—were refashioned by blake into a new synthesis that transcends its constituent parts. the poetic genius in all religions are one, blake sets out to address “the true faculty of knowing,” which is “the faculty which experiences.” arguably, this sounds lockean (frye 14, 28, damon 343). but, in dealing with the internal spiritual man, blake is closer to swedenborg’s focus in true christian religion (a summary of swedenborg’s teachings given to initiates) on man’s “faculty of attaining knowledge,” which includes both sensory impressions and spiritual knowledge communicated to the spirit within (n. 480). elsewhere, swedenborg also writes at length about the “faculties of the soul,” through which man experiences an “influx” of divine knowledge in varying degrees (influx 57). blake’s key term “poetic genius” is also directly linked to a swedenborgian context, insofar as it appears twice in blake’s annotations to the english translation of swedenborg’s divine love and divine wisdom (1788). in both cases, he replaces swedenborg’s reference to god’s love and wisdom, which man is said to receive as an influx into his inner being, with the notion of “poetic genius” (e 603). swedenborg identifies the holy ghost as the name given to the divine spirit that proceeds out of god to convey divine knowledge to the human race. in the statement “religions of all nations are derived from each nations different reception of the poetic genius,” blake is using “genius” in the eighteenth-century sense of a spirit that inspires a nation or a people to their particular manners and poetry, and thereby creates their essence. for swedenborg, a people’s religion was determined by their ability to receive the divine spirit. for instance, he speaks of the africans in the interior parts of the continent as surpassing “other gentiles in the strength and clearness of interior discernment” because of their specific “genius and temper” (tcr nn. 837, 840). but what are we to make of blake’s designation “poetic”? blake’s “poetic genius” functions as the divine spirit that acts as a catalyst for religious narratives around the world. with this usage, blake tweaks “genius” to mean a people’s poetic capability to produce religious codes. the term is found verbatim in the dissenting radical gilbert wakefield’s note to thomas gray’s “progress of poesy.”the 1786 edition with wakefield’s notes was not the one blake used when he was commissioned to illustrate “the progress of poesy” and other of gray’s poems in 1797. here, wakefield describes the “influence of poetic genius over the remotest and most uncivilized nations … the erse, norwegian, and welch fragments, the lapland and american songs” (69). this is a recognition of the literary quality inherent in the many non-christian religious texts that were being edited and published at the time. blake says something similar when he later (in his annotations to bishop watson) promotes the reading of “the edda of iceland the songs of fingal the accounts of north american savages [and] … homers iliad.” contrary to the anglican scholars of comparative religion who called such mythologies “savage,” blake holds that they contain an element of divine truth (e 615). in the sixth principle of all religions are one, blake emphasizes that the biblical testaments stem from the “poetic genius”—although they are only a “derivation,” since man can only communicate spiritual truth through his “confined nature of bodily sensation.” this constellation of ideas points in the direction of swedenborg, who identifies what can be construed as a “poetic” element in the testaments. in the 1784 translation of swedenborg’s heaven and hell (which blake owned and annotated), a note explains that “the art of poetry confessedly borrows it’s [sic] most striking beauties” from the “emblematical similitude” between “our natural world” and a higher spiritual truth. so, for example, “the lillies of the valley,” from song of songs, denote candor, humility, and the true church in “correspondent natural emblems” (59). according to swedenborg, antediluvian man was able to communicate divine truths in a purely abstract language immediately understood without reference to any objects on earth. this ability was lost, however. so, at the time the testaments were written, divine messages could only be invoked through a language of symbols that had recourse to natural objects, “like similitudes, and comparisons taken from such things as are in nature” (tcr n. 215). when blake states that “the religions of all nations are derived from each nations different reception of the poetic genius” and that “all sects of philosophy are from the poetic genius adapted to the weaknesses of every individual,” he follows the basic outline of swedenborg’s ideas. in true christian religion, swedenborg explains that the biblical apostles were filled with the spirit of the divine when they wrote, but that each one of them spoke “according to his own particular intelligence; the lord filled them all with his spirit, but each took a portion thereof according to the quality of his peculiar perception, and exercised it according to the quality of his strength or power.” the same goes for every minister of the church. all religious men aim to speak the truth, but due to the different degrees of their receptive faculties, the communications of the divine spirit will be expressed in “an infinite variety.” this creates different sects, as “every particular tenet or doctrine may be explained a thousand different ways, being like a cornucopia, from which each person draws forth what favours, and is adequate to his own particular genius” (tcr n. 154). rather than rejecting non-christian religions, blake holds that no religious teacher “can think write or speak from his heart, but he must intend truth.” it is much the same argument that swedenborg puts forward in true christian religion when he speaks of the “mahometans … who acknowledge god, and love what is just, and do good from religious motives” (tcr n. 832). but blake takes this pluralism further, presumably influenced by the widening scope provided by eighteenth-century comparative mythography. one of the main sources he used was undoubtedly jacob bryant’s a new system, or an analysis of ancient mythology (1774–76), for which blake’s master, james basire, was commissioned to provide engravings (damon 61, feldman and richardson 241-48). bryant claims that egyptian, greek, and other pagan mythologies were essentially derived from the worship of the sun, which in turn was the source of the original israelite worship of the one true god. blake would later refer to bryant as one of the many antiquarians who had proved that “the antiquities of every nation under heaven … are the same thing …. all had originally one language, and one religion, this was the religion of jesus, the everlasting gospel” (e 543). the internal and external form of man the fact that the “poetic genius” can only express itself in the language of the natural world finds a parallel in blake’s assertion that “the body or outward form of man” is only a derivative of the inner “genius” in man. with this statement, he is rehearsing a recognizable strain of swedenborgian philosophy, according to which “the material body, with which his [man’s] spirit is cloathed in the natural world, is an accessary covering for the sake of continuing his species, and for the sake of the formation of the internal man; for the internal man is formed in the natural body, as a tree in the ground, and as seed in the fruit” (tcr n. 454). for swedenborg, our physical body is activated from inside by our soul; that is to say, the human soul “receives it’s [sic] influx from god, and transmits it through the perceptive faculties of the mind to the body” (influx 6). swedenborg also explains a little later: “it seems indeed to outward appearance, as if the tongue and the lips spake, and the arms and hands acted by some power of life in themselves; whereas it is thought that speaks, and the will that acts … through their respective material organs formed from this outward natural world” (influx 50). blake makes the claim that since all men share certain outward characteristics, so the internal form of man must be alike too. his interest in the human as a category of sameness-in-variety would undoubtedly have been piqued through his reading of johann caspar lavater. in 1787, blake’s friend henry fuseli was preparing a translation of lavater’s aphorisms on man, which was published by joseph johnson in 1788 (blake was commissioned to engrave the frontispiece). the first two aphorisms in lavater’s book clearly invoke the work of the french naturalist georges louis leclerc, comte de buffon: “1. know, in the first place, that mankind agree in essence, as they do in their limbs and senses. 2. mankind differ as much in essence as they do in form, limbs, and senses—and only so, and not more.” this struck a chord with blake (as several critics have noted), who annotates, “this is true christian philosophy far above all abstraction” (e 584). lavater’s idea of an essence that underlies all human variety is further pursued in his essays on physiognomy (english translation 1789–98), to which blake contributed engravings. lavater refers to buffon’s natural history, in which we find the origin of this idea. buffon identifies the existence of an interior agent—the “internal mould” (“moule intérieur”)—as the basis of all species, including the human one. this agent directs the growth and development of the organism and keeps it within the confines of the species. he describes the “internal mould” as “the essence, the unity, and the continuation of the species” and states that it will therefore act as a matrix that forms and shapes the species “till the end of time” (buffon 2: 215), while a “fortuitous assemblage of organic particles” will combine to “produce an infinite variety of organized bodies” (2: 267). this comes close to blake’s assertion that “all men are alike (tho’ infinitely various).” in all religions are one, blake’s assertion that “the body or outward form of man is derived from the poetic genius” appears to indicate that men’s external works are reflections of the virtues emphasized in a nation’s religious texts. this reminds us of “the divine image” from songs of innocence (1789), in which we are told that every man can become an image of the divine since “mercy has a human heart / pity, a human face: / and love, the human form divine, / and peace, the human dress” (e 12-13). thus, if these virtues are practiced every human may resemble christ, no matter whether he be “heathen, turk or jew,” for “where mercy, love & pity dwell, / there god is dwelling too.” this follows the swedenborgian dictum that when the external man acts in accordance with the inner divine, “he becometh an image of god” (tcr n. 41)—what swedenborg also refers to as the “divine human.” context which audience did blake have in mind for his tract? one possibility is that it was aimed at the rationalist coterie who frequented johnson’s shop in st. paul’s churchyard. blake had close connections to several of the authors who gathered there and was commissioned to engrave illustrations for several of johnson’s publications from 1780 onwards. it has often been assumed that the liberals who were johnson’s primary authors and customers rejected all mystical contemplation. however, it was possible to buy the swedish poet and radical thomas thorild’s true heavenly religion restored (1790) from johnson’s shop. thorild presents a thesis that supports the existence of a higher spiritual reality through the language of natural philosophy. but, in the last chapter, thorild aligns his philosophical reflections with “the principal beauties of swedenborgianism” (126). the reviewer in the analytical review, johnson’s journal, affirms that “in this plan or idea of divine religion, divinity, that never could pretend to the shadow of a demonstration, becomes for the first time a science” (333). in setting up propositions as numbered points, thorild emulates the format of the systematic-philosophical method that swedenborg had carried over from his time as a natural philosopher, before he began to have visions. blake seems to capitalize on the same rationalist format that got so many readers excited about swedenborg’s mysticism under the guise of being a science. thorild’s propositions are developments of swedenborgian ideas and can be compared with blake’s “principles” in several respects. for instance, thorild proffers that god influences man “according to [his] degrees of perfection” (21). in a later passage, it is further explained that god no longer needs to perform miracles for mankind, because he “has prepared all [men] for the full perception of truth” in the present “age of science and reasoning” (121). in another place, he speaks of the bible as written in a language of “human fancy, of error or mere appearances,” behind which is a “purer language” of “eternal truth” (79-80). in comparison with blake’s fifth principle, which states that the “reception of the poetic genius … is every where call’d the spirit of prophecy,” thorild also speaks of an “interior or pure sense,” which he names “vision,” and which can be proved by “so vast a number of prophetic, of mystic, and heavenly minds that have appeared in all ages” (83). it seems that, only a few years before, blake attempted to deliver something not entirely different, albeit in a shorter and more concise form. works cited blake, william. the complete poetry and prose of william blake. ed. david v. erdman. newly rev. ed. new york: anchor-random house, 1988. [abbreviated as “e”.] buffon, georges louis leclerc, comte de. natural history, general and particular … translated into english. illustrated with above 260 copper-plates. 9 vols. edinburgh: william creech [vol. 9, london: w. strahan and t. cadell], 1780–85. damon, s. foster. a blake dictionary: the ideas and symbols of william blake. updated ed. with a new foreword and annotated bibliography by morris eaves. hanover, nh: dartmouth college press, 2013. feldman, burton, and robert d. richardson. the rise of modern mythology, 1680–1860. bloomington: indiana university press, 1972. frye, northrop. fearful symmetry: a study of william blake. 1947. princeton: princeton university press, 1969. gray, thomas. the poems of mr. gray. with notes by gilbert wakefield. london: g. kearsley, 1786. swedenborg, emanuel. a treatise concerning heaven and hell, and of the wonderful things therein. 2nd ed. london: printed by r. hindmarsh … and sold by t. evans et al., 1784. ---. a treatise on the nature of influx: or, of the intercourse between the soul and body. 3rd ed. london: r. hindmarsh et al., 1788. ---. true christian religion; containing the universal theology of the new church. 2 vols. london: j. phillips and j. denis & son, 1781. [abbreviated as “tcr”.] [thorild, thomas]. true heavenly religion restored, and demonstrated upon eternal principles. with a call to christians of higher sense … by a philosopher of the north. london: printed by r. hindmarsh … and sold by j. johnson, 1790. rev. of true heavenly religion restored, by [thomas thorild]. analytical review vol. 8 (nov. 1790): 332-33. review: allen ginsberg, the complete songs of innocence and experience allen ginsberg. the complete songs of innocence and experience. omnivore recordings, ov-220, 2017. $22.98, cd (two discs); $15.99, digital download. reviewed by luke walker luke walker (luke77walker@hotmail.com) completed his phd on “william blake in the 1960s: counterculture and radical reception” at the university of sussex, and has published various articles and book chapters relating to this topic. his most recent publication is “beat britain: poetic vision and division in albion’s ‘underground’” in the routledge handbook of international beat literature (2018). his next major blake project will be a study of blake’s influence on modern children’s literature. there are several reasons why this 2017 album release represents a significant moment for anyone interested in the role played by william blake in shaping the counterculture of the sixties (and the role of that counterculture in shaping academic and popular understandings of blake). the most basic is that the original 1970 album, songs of innocence and experience [sic] by william blake, tuned by allen ginsberg, has never previously been made available as a cd or digital download. however, it is a credit to pat thomas, who produced this expanded reissue for omnivore recordings, that there are other, more important, reasons to celebrate. the double-cd complete songs of innocence and experience is not just a rerelease of the album in a new format with a few alternative takes added as filler; rather, at over twice the length, it aims for the first time to fulfill ginsberg’s original intentions for his extensive blake recording project, to which he devoted much of his creative energy between 1968 and 1971.with the blessing of the ginsberg estate, the 1970 album continues to be freely available to stream from the university of pennsylvania’s pennsound website, as it has been for the last decade or so: <http://​writing.​upenn.​edu/​pennsound/​x/​ginsberg-blake.​php>. as might be expected from a package such as this, the cd booklet contains abundant background information on the recording sessions of 1969 and 1971, including details of the impressive (if eclectic) roll call of musicians whom ginsberg persuaded to work with him. the booklet concludes by quoting the beginning of ginsberg’s fascinating essay “to young or old listeners: setting blake’s songs to music, and a commentary on the songs,” which formed the liner notes to the original album and was also printed in the winter 1971 issue of this journal.allen ginsberg, “to young or old listeners,” blake 4.3 (winter 1971): 98-103. as he reminds us there, his personal connection to several of the songs had begun two decades earlier, with his famous vision of 1948, when “in mind’s outer ear i heard blake’s voice pronounce [ah!] sun flower and the sick rose … and experienced an illumination of eternal consciousness.” with suitably blakean emphasis, he describes how “after 20 summers musings over the rhythms,” during which he lived through the “apocalyptic history” of the beat fifties and countercultural sixties, he had eventually “imagined this music” into existence. photo taken at apostolic studios, new york, during the 1969 recording sessions. courtesy of the ginsberg collection/​barry miles. while the roots of the blake recording project were personal and visionary, the more immediate inspiration was political. this explains the anomalous presence of “the grey monk” within an album devoted to blake’s songs; recognizing the appropriateness of the poem’s theme to the political situation of the late sixties (“but vain the sword & vain the bow / they never can work wars overthrow”), ginsberg had sung this poem during the tumultuous event that he epigrammatically refers to in his blake essay as “democratic convention 1968 tear gas chicago.” as the tension in chicago began to build up to the climactic police riot, he sat cross-legged on an outdoor stage, accompanying himself on his indian harmonium as he sang “the grey monk” and hindu mantras. this was his first musical performance of blake’s poetry, and it directly inspired him to begin setting the songs themselves to music. the songs released on the 1970 album represented the first fruits of this labor, and these, along with two previously unreleased tracks from the same session, make up the first cd of the complete songs. but as he had promised in “to young or old listeners,” ginsberg continued to “tune” blake’s songs over the next few years, and organized a second series of recording sessions in the summer of 1971, accompanied by a new group of musicians, which notably included the avant-garde cellist arthur russell.the guitarist jon sholle was the only accompanying musician to play on both the 1969 and 1971 sessions. these 1971 sessions unfortunately never led to the envisaged second blake lp, even though, as barry miles notes in the cd booklet, “allen had learned a lot from the 1969 recordings … had performed the songs live onstage for two years and also learned better microphone technique.” eleven blake songs from these later sessions are now included on the second disc, so that the expanded album, though not quite truly “complete,” finally contains an impressive total of thirty-one of the songs, plus “let the brothels of paris be opened” and two versions of “the grey monk” (one featuring appropriately martial drums and one a newly discovered, stripped-back version as ginsberg had originally performed it in chicago). it may seem conceptually inconsistent to some listeners that after “the voice of the ancient bard,” the second disc concludes with over twenty minutes of buddhist and hindu mantras, which ginsberg and the musicians had also recorded during the 1971 sessions. before considering the artistic and interpretative merits of the complete songs, i want to address this aspect of the album by suggesting that in the context of the ginsberg-blake connection—itself a central strand of blake’s broader sixties reception—these additions are far from incongruous. among ginsberg scholars, it has sometimes been suggested that buddhism competed with blake for ginsberg’s attention, with his 1963 poem “the change” typically interpreted as marking the beginning of that shift in allegiance; my own research suggests, however, that while ginsberg’s deepening commitment to buddhism in the sixties and seventies helped him to overcome a problematic fixation with the 1948 blake vision, it also coincided with (and even influenced) his growing intellectual involvement with blake’s poetry, including a strong engagement with contemporary and historical blake scholarship.see luke walker, “allen ginsberg’s blakean albion,” comparative american studies 11.3 (2013): 227-42. as ginsberg admits at the beginning of “to young or old listeners,” his familiarity with blake at the time of his vision, and for some time thereafter, had been at best “fragmentary.” but the resumed blake recording sessions of the early seventies coincided not only with his decision to take formal vows of refuge in tibetan buddhism, but also with an acceleration of his reading as he prepared to teach a series of literature classes on blake. fascinating insights into the range and depth of ginsberg’s engagement with blake in this period can be found in several of his distinctive to-do list poems. thus, in “what i’d like to do” (1973), he urges himself to “study prophetic books interpret blake unify vision”; he hopes this will provide the “inspiration” necessary to “compose english apocalypse … tibetan mantra blues” and also to extend further the blake recording project: “compose last choirs of innocence & experience, set music to tongues of rossetti mss. orchestrate jerusalem’s quatrains.”allen ginsberg, collected poems, 1947–1997 (new york: harpercollins, 2006) 610. after the 1971 sessions, a handful of blake’s songs still remained to be “tuned,” but no further blake recording sessions took place. ginsberg did, however, continue to perform his blake settings live, and also initiated various subsequent (non-blakean) musical projects, including collaborations with bob dylan and the clash. similar concerns, as well as evidence of his reading of secondary literature on blake, can be found in his 1978 poem “all the things i’ve got to do.” here, among a great variety of unfinished projects and chores—poetic, political, spiritual, and domestic—ginsberg reminds himself to read “david erdman’s symmetries of the song of los / a paper on my bookshelf a year” and to “xerox my blake music sheets.”allen ginsberg, wait till i’m dead: poems uncollected, ed. bill morgan (london: penguin, 2016) 134-35. it may have been sitting on his “bookshelf a year,” but erdman’s essay had only been published the year before (in studies in romanticism), so ginsberg was actually remarkably up to date with his blake scholarship. before offering an analysis of the recordings themselves, i want to draw attention to morris eaves’s insightful and open-minded review of the original album, which appeared in the same 1971 issue of this journal that contained ginsberg’s own essay. eaves notes that ginsberg and especially his life-partner, peter orlovsky, who contributed vocals to some of the songs, possess “outrageous voices”; indeed, “ginsberg and company demand of the listener a child’s indifference to conventional musical values.” despite this (or even because of it), eaves is ultimately hugely sympathetic to the album, concluding that “ginsberg’s compositions are the best of any yet written for blake,” although he fears that “few will think so.”morris eaves, rev. of allen ginsberg, songs of innocence and experience by william blake, tuned by allen ginsberg, blake 4.3 (winter 1971): 90-97. as eaves suggests, much of the power of this music comes from its heartfelt sense of purpose and the deep love of blake that it reveals. however, now that we can finally also hear the richer, subtler, and more harmonious 1971 recordings on the second disc of the complete songs, it is obvious that ginsberg gained the ability to create much more polished music, without sacrificing any of the blakean innocence of the 1969 sessions. as such, these later recordings throw into relief the faults as well as the successes of the original album. in the context of this much-expanded and improved body of work, it no longer seems necessary to defend several rather painful tracks on the original, such as “the chimney sweeper” and “holy thursday” (innocence), even if ginsberg himself insisted that the jarring sound of the latter was deliberate: “spaced out orlovsky singing against don cherry on flute and trumpet zapped the tune up to ecstatic joy instead of a tender lamblike chorus.”ginsberg, “to young or old listeners” 101. (a few of orlovsky’s vocal contributions, such as on “night,” are more harmonious, but it is hard not to conclude that the 1971 sessions are improved by his absence.) the opening track of the second disc, “a cradle song,” immediately reveals a wholly different sound and technique, as ginsberg’s newly open, tuneful singing voice emerges, accompanied by the cello and flute. similarly, on tracks such as “spring” and “infant joy,” he creates a beautifully balanced state of joyous innocence. although eaves is surely correct to argue that the original album aims to immerse the listener in a state of blakean innocence that transcends intellectual criticism, it is here on these simplest of blake’s lyrics that the interpretative potential of this technique is fully realized, with a sound and a subtlety that are quite different from the early sessions. meanwhile, on 1971 recordings like “the divine image,” ginsberg adopts the same simple technique that he had earlier used on “the sick rose” and “the human abstract,” chanting solo against the insistent drone of his indian harmonium. while these represent some of the best songs on the original album, “the divine image” shows that this indian sound can also work very well with a more open singing voice. overall, the additional tracks on the complete songs add enormously to the enjoyment of ginsberg’s blake album, as well as emphasizing the way in which he employed a wide variety of techniques and influences in his settings of blake, both during the original 1969 sessions and later. referring to ginsberg’s hope “that musical articulation of blake’s poetry will be heard by the pop rock music mass media electronic illumination democratic ear” and his linking of blake (and himself) to bob dylan and other well-known musicians of the period, eaves suggests that “ginsberg’s own music resembles none of the musicians he names so much as it does the incredible string band.”eaves 92. this is indeed an apt comparison, and it comes as little surprise to read in joe boyd’s recent memoir that this psychedelic folk group were themselves strongly influenced by blake’s poetry.joe boyd, white bicycles: making music in the 1960s (london: serpent’s tail, 2007) 121-23. however, a range of other influences and similarities can indeed be heard in ginsberg’s music; together, these illuminate and contribute to blake’s sixties identity. thus, as eaves points out, on “the blossom” ginsberg and the musicians create an impressively natural and unforced approximation of the music of blake’s own period (or perhaps earlier). elsewhere, on both discs of the expanded album, ginsberg makes deliberate use of various atonal or microtonal settings that extend beyond the use of his indian harmonium and are sometimes reminiscent of the avant-garde music of the velvet underground. i am thinking particularly of the unusual sound texture achieved on “the little black boy,” which eaves hesitatingly describes as “sort of oriental.” perhaps most importantly, the claimed link to dylan should not be dismissed, although as always with the blake-dylan-beat connection, the dynamics of these “relationships of ownership” (to borrow a phrase from dylan’s blakean song “gates of eden”) are more complicated than they at first appear. part of ginsberg’s impetus for setting the songs to music had been to encourage dylan’s interest in blake, and dylan later included footage of ginsberg singing “nurse’s song” (innocence) in his epic experimental film renaldo and clara (1978).see luke walker, “tangled up in blake: the triangular relationship among dylan, blake, and the beats,” rock and romanticism: blake, wordsworth, and rock from dylan to u2, ed. james rovira (lanham, md: lexington books, 2018) 1-18. meanwhile, the elements of dylan’s oeuvre that seem to chime most directly with ginsberg’s blake are those associated with his late-sixties recordings. ginsberg’s settings of “the garden of love” on the first disc and “holy thursday” (experience) on the second include country elements that are somewhat reminiscent of dylan’s john wesley harding (1967) and nashville skyline (1969); however, a sound and more especially a sensibility are found throughout ginsberg’s blake recordings that particularly bring to mind dylan’s 1967 basement tapes sessions with the band (released in 2014 as the bootleg series, vol. 11). as greil marcus masterfully demonstrates in his book on the basement tapes, the power of these dylan sessions comes from the way they link the late-sixties moment to specific periods and places in american history, and ultimately to a substratum of myth and archetype.greil marcus, invisible republic: bob dylan’s basement tapes (new york: henry holt and company, 1997), later revised as the old, weird america: the world of bob dylan’s basement tapes (2011). i want to suggest firstly that this weaving of place, myth, and history can be aligned to blake’s own mythopoeic method, and secondly that through his blake recordings, ginsberg similarly weaves blake into the “apocalyptic history” of the sixties. this is a mythic version of the present that ginsberg views through blakean eyes; throughout “to young or old listeners,” he displays a particular interest in gnosticism, which in blakean fashion he links to the historical particularities of the present day. thus, his lengthy notes on “to tirzah” (one of the best songs of the original album) begin by describing blake’s text as a “late wisdom, gnostic-kabalistic-buddhist transcendental put-down of the entire phenomenal sensory universe as a mental illusion,” but go on to relate gnostic myth (and the history of the early christian church) to the politics of the late sixties: “the roman state coopted religion at council of nicea & … established the satanic state, presidently headed by richard nixon, jehovah in disguise forgetting to whom he is beholden … only a flash of sophia’s consciousness.” ginsberg’s intention, when “tuning” the songs, to evoke the blakean connections between hermetic tradition and the apocalyptic politics of the 1790s and 1960s also forms the main topic of an interview for partisan review, conducted as he was preparing to record the 1971 sessions.allen ginsberg, spontaneous mind: selected interviews, 1958–1996, ed. david carter (new york: harpercollins, 2001) 259-72. his first blake settings had sprung “from the ashes of the body of american democracy in chicago,” while his recent setting of “the school boy” had been inspired by the news of the massacre of protesting students at kent state in may 1970. ginsberg describes meditating until “blake’s gnostic transcendental psychedelic inner glow comes on,” bringing with it an awareness “that the poems have a particular reference, a little hermetic sometimes, to any time-space continuum, to any political event.” blake’s “the school boy,” ginsberg now realized, “appeals to certain emotional softnesses and tendernesses and innocencies which are completely repressed in the revolutionary-counterrevolutionary battle.” for him, as for blake, the personal, the political, and the spiritual are inseparable, and these comments on “the school boy” are immediately followed by an explication of the ancestral connections between different religious traditions that he sees as embodied in blake: “he’s an eighteenth-century vehicle for western gnostic tradition that historically you can trace back to the same roots, same cities, same geography, same mushrooms, that gave rise to the aryan, zoroastrian, manichaean pre-hindu yogas.” this, ginsberg explains, is why it is not at all incongruous to describe blake as his “guru.” finally, therefore, ginsberg’s album is valuable as more than simply a historical artifact of the sixties’ countercultural blake; eaves’s brave conclusion—“ginsberg’s music and blake’s songs possess corresponding powers”—has stood the test of time. i am confident that, with the revelatory addition of the second disc of songs from the 1971 sessions, the complete songs of innocence and experience will enable many more listeners to agree. review: william blake, the marriage of heaven and hell, ed. michael phillips william blake. the marriage of heaven and hell. ed. with an introduction and commentary by michael phillips. oxford: bodleian library, 2011. x + 173 pp. 52 color illus. £50.00/$80.00, hardcover; £14.99/$25.00, paperback. reviewed by j. b. mertz j. b. mertz (jeffrey_mertz@hotmail.com) completed his doctorate on william blake at the university of oxford in 2010. he works for a real estate investment fund in washington, dc, and as an adjunct professor of english at lindenwood university. there are nine known complete copies (a-i) of the marriage of heaven and hell; michael phillips’s edition reproduces the copy (b) bequeathed to the bodleian library by the antiquarian francis douce (1757-1834).copy designations for the marriage follow g. e. bentley, jr., blake books (oxford: clarendon press, 1977). in addition to the variations that make all copies of blake’s illuminated books distinct, copy b is further distinguished by its frontispiece illustration, the etching entitled “our end is come,” which is not a part of any other known copy of the marriage. the marriage is the only undated illuminated book produced by blake while he lived in lambeth. however, “our end is come” bears the date “june 5: 1793,” and phillips’s introduction and commentary offer a detailed exploration of the marriage in relation to the intellectual and cultural milieux of the early 1790s that appear to have influenced blake as he produced one of his most celebrated works. phillips also describes the materials and methods of printmaking during the period in his account of how blake may have etched, printed, and colored an illuminated work like the marriage. an undertaking such as this is certain to invite comparisons with previous (and, in most cases, now scarce) english-language facsimiles of the marriage with commentaries. max plowman’s 1927 edition (which reproduces copy i from the fitzwilliam museum, university of cambridge) is known to students of blake as a high-quality color facsimile, and plowman’s commentary includes a significant critical discussion of the structure of the marriage. the next major edition was the extraordinary 1960 color facsimile by the blake trust and trianon press, which reproduces copy d from the library of congress and includes a brief commentary by geoffrey keynes. clark emery’s 1963 edition reproduces plowman in black and white and is not particularly noteworthy for its commentary. keynes’s 1975 edition reproduces copy h (also from the fitzwilliam) and is probably the best known and heretofore most easily accessible color facsimile. on the verso of each facsimile plate, keynes provided commentary on blake’s writing as well as descriptions of the interlinear and marginal designs, with some enlargements to show detail. with the exception of the third volume of the blake trust facsimiles, which was first issued in 1993 and is not a stand-alone edition (one might also mention the digital editions of copies b-m in the blake archive), the marriage has not been published as a single-volume quality facsimile with commentary for more than 35 years. therefore, phillips’s update of this challenging work is most welcome. phillips’s edition is available in paperback as well as in a hardback collector’s edition,i have not examined the hardback collector’s edition, but su wheeler of bodleian library publishing has kindly informed me that the hardback edition reproduces the late eighteenthor early nineteenth-century binding of the bodleian copy (half red morocco over marbled boards—see image of cover). and contains a color reproduction of the marriage (b), preceded by introductory and contextual materials and followed by plate-by-plate commentary and a bibliography. this edition also includes reproductions of copies k (proof copies of plates 21-24) and m (a separate issue of “a song of liberty”), plate 14 from copies a, c, h, f, e, d, g, and i (“to illustrate how blake altered the way each was finished over a period of more than 30 years” [31]), and the alternative sequence of plates 15, 14, 12, and 13 from copy g. phillips’s plate-by-plate commentary is keyed to literary works and blake scholarship and includes the most extensive analysis of the illustrations and interlinear and marginal designs in the marriage that i have seen. whereas earlier reproductions, such as that in david erdman’s illuminated blake (1974) or in his essay “reading the illuminations of blake’s marriage of heaven and hell,”david v. erdman with tom dargan and marlene deverell-van meter, “reading the illuminations of blake’s marriage of heaven and hell,” william blake: essays in honour of sir geoffrey keynes, ed. morton d. paley and michael phillips (oxford: clarendon press, 1973) 162-207. occasionally provide enlarged details of plates, phillips’s treatment exceeds previous efforts in detail and in the quality of the reproductions. (i count more than 100 enlargements of details from all plates but one of the marriage in phillips’s commentary.) readers with access to bentley’s blake books and blake books supplement will also notice that phillips has newly measured leaf sizes in all copies of the marriage and that the dimensions and descriptions provided in the helpful checklist of copies differ in several instances from those recorded by bentley. in his introduction, phillips observes that “the story behind the creation of blake’s work is every bit as controversial as what it has to say” (2). readers familiar with the controversy concerning blake’s printing methods (for instance, whether he printed his plates using one or two pulls), which occupied many pages of this journal in 2002,see robert n. essick and joseph viscomi, “an inquiry into william blake’s method of color printing,” blake 35.3 (winter 2001-02): 74-103; michael phillips, “color-printing songs of experience and blake’s method of registration: a correction,” blake 36.2 (fall 2002): 44-45; martin butlin, “‘is this a private war or can anyone join in?’: a plea for a broader look at blake’s color-printing techniques,” blake 36.2 (fall 2002): 45-49; essick and viscomi, “blake’s method of color printing: some responses and further observations,” blake 36.2 (fall 2002): 49-64; butlin, “william blake, s. w. hayter and color printing,” blake (2002) [online only]; and essick and viscomi, “response,” blake (2002) [online only]. may be relieved that phillips does not return to this topic except for brief comments in the introduction (32-36). he does not shy away from controversy, however, with respect to the question of whether blake completed the marriage in 1790 or 1793. phillips devotes considerable space in his introduction to developing the argument that the marriage “made its first public appearance in 1793 rather than 1790” (42).for arguments in favor of 1790 as the year of completion, see joseph viscomi, blake and the idea of the book (princeton: princeton university press, 1993) 233-34 and 237; viscomi, “the evolution of the marriage of heaven and hell,” huntington library quarterly 58 (1997): 284-85; viscomi, “the lessons of swedenborg; or, the origin of william blake’s the marriage of heaven and hell,” lessons of romanticism: a critical companion, ed. thomas pfau and robert f. gleckner (durham: duke university press, 1998) 176-81; and william blake, the early illuminated books, ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi (princeton: princeton university press/william blake trust, 1993) 113-15 and 209-10. i have only three minor complaints respecting phillips’s edition. the first is primarily a reflection of my own research interests, but blake biography as well as his career as an engraver provide some warrant for it: i would have liked to see even greater emphasis in phillips’s introduction and commentary upon influential members of the circle of blake’s regular employer joseph johnson (such as richard price, mary wollstonecraft, joseph priestley, and erasmus darwin). in this regard, i note that robert essick’s excellent article “william blake, thomas paine, and biblical revolution”studies in romanticism 30 (1991): 189-212. (which reads the marriage in relation to writings from the johnson circle) is strangely absent from phillips’s introduction, commentary, and the otherwise almost exhaustive bibliography. blake engraved more than 80 plates for books published by johnson between 1790 and 1795, and may have interacted professionally as well as socially with johnson and his authors during this period. indeed, the marriage seems to engage in meaningful and specific ways with ideas that appear in price’s discourse on the love of our country (1789), wollstonecraft’s first vindication (1790), priestley’s history of the corruptions of christianity (1782) and his edition of hartley’s theory of the human mind (2nd ed., 1790), and darwin’s botanic garden (1791). my second concern relates to phillips’s transcription of the text. for the most part, the transcription matches blake’s text on a plate-by-plate basis (which erdman, for instance, does not always accomplish with full accuracy), but there are the familiar difficulties of discerning whether blake meant to use a comma, period, colon, or semicolon due to imperfect inking or printing of plates. i find several instances where phillips’s transcription does not agree with erdman or, it would seem, with this reproduction of copy b of the marriage. for example, line 13 on plate 11 is transcribed by phillips as “and at length they pronounced that the gods” when the reproduction of plate 11 clearly shows “pronouncd” (again, one might cite numerous instances where erdman either mistranscribed blake’s words or silently corrected them). of course, different copies of the same blake title occasionally have different text on the same plate, either because blake altered his copperplates between printings or overwrote words or letters on his printed page. in this regard, phillips’s transcription faithfully renders a variation unique to copy b (from line 16 of plate 26), where blake wrote “charots” in ink, even though “chariots” printed clearly in all eight other copies.see the early illuminated books 222. it is safe to say that such details do not substantially alter our reading of the marriage, yet few people would disagree with the importance of properly representing the words and punctuation marks blake engraved—to the extent, of course, that his media will permit us to discern them. finally, the numbering of the color plates may be the occasion of confusion for some readers. there are 52 color plates, keyed to the list on p. vi by numbers in the lower corner of each reproduction (i.e., as figures 1-52). figures 3, 5, 7-31 are each further identified by phillips with a typed plate number in pale ochre outside the platemark (i.e., as plates 1-27 of the marriage) in the upper corner of each image, which is an aid, for example, to comparing each plate with phillips’s transcription on pages 59-86. confusion may arise, however, because figures 2-3, 5, 7-31 also have a further handwritten foliation (i.e., 1-28) in the upper corner,su wheeler sent an explanation from clive hurst (head of rare books and printed ephemera at the bodleian library) in response to my query concerning the handwritten foliation: the numbers were written in pencil by hurst “many years ago” to identify images to be photographed. which is not explained by phillips. notwithstanding these minor complaints, phillips has produced a volume that makes one of blake’s most fascinating works accessible to new readers while also providing an up-to-date critical edition for experienced readers. it will be a valuable tool for students as well as scholars and answers the need for a reasonably priced stand-alone facsimile of the marriage. phillips and bodleian library publishing should be commended for completing this difficult undertaking. william blake’s visionary landscape near felpham william blake’s visionary landscape near felpham by jonathan roberts jonathan roberts (roberts@liv.ac.uk) is senior lecturer in the school of english, university of liverpool. perhaps the most striking account of a religious vision that blake offers is a poem enclosed in an 1800 letter to his friend and patron thomas butts. this rare moment of autobiographical verse, usually referred to by its first line, “to my friend butts,” describes blake’s vision on the beach at felpham. the poem is well known beyond blake studies, as it occurs more frequently in anthologies of mysticism than any other passage from his work (with the possible exception of the opening lines of “auguries of innocence”). yet within blake studies it has received comparatively little scholarly attention. this may be due in part to its anomalous character, something that it shares with another work from the same period and place: blake’s pencil and watercolor sketch landscape near felpham. i argue below that there is a significant and demonstrable relationship between these two works, and that this connection offers a valuable resource for reflection on our treatment of the relationship between the material and the transcendent in our discussion of blake. my argument will be in three parts. part i connects “to my friend butts” to its biographical and biblical contexts and shows the ways in which it is in dialogue with butts’s own overlooked poem to blake. part ii provides a detailed analysis of landscape near felpham, establishing blake’s position and perspective when making the sketch, demonstrating its visual accuracy, then dating it by relating its minutiae (foliage, tide, weather, and so on) to historical records. i thereby show that although they are not usually linked, the poem and the sketch were probably made on the same morning, on the shore at felpham on one of the days leading up to thursday, 2 october 1800. part iii looks at the broader correspondence of the period, in which blake draws on genesis 28 (jacob’s ladder) to negotiate his new life situation, and i use his watercolor of that story to reflect on the poem to butts and the felpham sketch. i then connect the vision of god/jesus at felpham to its surprising reappearance as a vision of satan in milton. i conclude by reflecting on these different elements and by suggesting that the popular and academic reception of blake’s religion is at odds with the hermeneutic of his christological “fourfold vision.” i. “to my friend butts” blake’s three-yearfrom september 1800 to september 1803; his subsequent trial was held in chichester on 11 january 1804 (see bentley, blake records 179). stay at felpham has long been considered a turning point in his life, through disillusionment, depression, the incident with schofield the soldier, and through what jean h. hagstrum called a “genuine conversion” whereby “anger, energy, action” impelled him to “become once again the dedicated artist-prophet.”hagstrum 322. blake and his wife, catherine, moved from their london home to felpham on thursday, 18 september 1800. on 23 september blake sent a letter to butts recounting the “chearfulness & welcome” of the journey, the beautiful countryside, glorious weather, and, in some detail, the excellence of their cottage. the villagers, air, wind, trees, and birds are all mentioned, and in the days following their arrival blake’s wife and sister, conscious of the fashion for bathing at nearby bognor,blake to george cumberland, 1 sept. 1800 (bentley, blake records 95-96). alternatively, they may have been prompted by william hayley: catherine had “exhausted her strength” (blake to hayley, 16 sept. 1800 [e 709]), and hayley, on “any and every occasion, … would ‘plunge into the ocean’, and he would, moreover, encourage others to plunge. what is more, he would thus plunge at periods which, to our softer ideas, seem positively inhumane. october bathing, for instance, was nothing to him” (bishop 96). bognor would later become bognor regis when george v went there to convalesce in 1929, as it was thought that the sea air would, likewise, be good for his health (see, for example, <http://​www.​bognorregis.​gov.​uk>, under “history”). had already visited the seashore “courting neptune for an embrace.”blake to butts, 23 sept. 1800 (e 711). butts replied within a week with a letter that basil de selincourt rightly describes as “a cordial, jocular epistle,” adding, however, that it is “in not too perfect taste,”de selincourt 274. presumably due to butts’s preoccupation with imagining mrs. blake in the heated embraces of blake, of neptune, and of butts himself. butts writes: i am well pleased with your pleasures, feeling no small interest in your happiness, and it cannot fail to be highly gratifying to me and my affectionate partner to know that a corner of your mansion of peace is asylumed to her, & when invalided & rendered unfit for service who shall say she may not be quarter’d on your cot—but for the present she is for active duty and satisfied with requesting that if there is a snug berth unoccupied in any chamber of your warm heart, that her portrait may be suspended there, at the same time well aware that you, like me, prefer the original to the copy. your good wife will permit, & i hope may benefit from, the embraces of neptune, but she will presently distinguish betwixt the warmth of his embraces & yours, & court the former with caution. i suppose you do not admit of a third in that concern, or i would offer her mine even at this distance. allow me before i draw a veil over this interesting subject to lament the frailty of the fairest sex, for who alas! of us, my good friend, could have thought … so virtuous a woman would ever have fled from hercules buildings to neptune’s bed?hercules buildings was the blakes’ residence in london. butts returns to the image at the end of the letter: “mrs butts greets your wife & charming sister with a holy kiss and i, with old neptune, bestow my embraces there also” (butts to blake, sept. 1800 [letters 25-27]). the couplet is the finale to butts’s struggling attempt to stage-manage the sustained innuendo concerning mrs. blake; he is more at ease with the metaphors drawn from his job as chief clerk to the commissary general of musters. alongside this giggly flirtation, butts includes a well-meant poem blessing blake and catherine, wishing them long life and visions, and imagining their ascent, after death, to heaven: happy, happy, happy pair, on earth, in sea, or eke in air, in morn, at noon, & thro’ the night from visions fair receiving light, long may ye live, your guardians’ care, and when ye die may not a hair fall to the lot of demons black, be singed by fire, or heard to crack, but may your faithful spirit upward bear your gentle souls to him whose care is ever sure and ever nigh those who on providence rely, and in his paradise above where all is beauty, truth & love, o may ye be allowed to chuse for your firm friend a heaven-born muse, from purest fountains sip delight, be cloathed in glory burning bright, for ever blest, for ever free, the loveliest blossoms on life’s tree.letters 26-27. these are strange images to communicate to a friend, because by hoping that blake’s and catherine’s bodies will not singe or crack in demonic fires, butts has imagined that very scenario. g. e. bentley, jr., who has contributed so much to our knowledge of butts, depicts him as a “white collar maecenas” who, in “the grey years when reputation and even employment were hidden to blake, … befriended and supported perhaps the most independent and extraordinary genius that ever offered wisdom for sale in the empty market place where none come to buy.”bentley, “thomas butts, white collar maecenas” 1066. the homily is entirely justified, but, like wordsworth’s epitaphic paradigm of “truth hallowed by love—the joint offspring of the worth of the dead and the affections of the living” (essays upon epitaphs), it can occlude intriguing aspects of butts’s character. in particular, it is interesting to ponder what enabled butts—unlike so many contemporaries—to recognize the genius of blake’s work. it may well be that in this one surviving letter from buttsthe original is not extant; butts, however, retained the draft and kept it with the letters he received from blake (letters 27n1). it is, as bentley puts it, “an undated draft which begins in a beautiful, clerkly copperplate hand and degenerates, through many deletions … to hasty pencil at the end … later darkened in ink” (blake records 102fn). we have an answer: he himself had a barely containable imagination that even in a single correspondence is entertaining a ménage à trois with his friends, their consummation in hellfire, and their ascent into heaven. blake’s reply of 2 october, like butts’s original, mixes humor with seriousness, reflecting the contractual relationship between the two men, the literary aspirations of each (they both enclose poems), their fondness for each other and each other’s wives, and the desire that they have to impress one another. as bentley puts it, the “relationship revealed in these letters is one of close mutual friendship and cordiality, with every sign of having been established for some time.”bentley, “thomas butts, white collar maecenas” 1055. the exchange is reciprocal: butts, who would later buy a copy of songs, may well be nodding to “the tyger” in his line “cloathed in glory burning bright,” while blake’s gentle, jovial reply in turn picks up images and ideas from butts’s letter, with blake describing himself as “the determined advocate of religion & humility”—tongue in cheek, i suspect—in response to what bentley calls the “somewhat fulsome moral advice” offered by butts.bentley, “thomas butts, white collar maecenas” 1055. after mentioning settling into the new cottage and apologizing for not having completed butts’s recent commissions, blake offers his “return of verses” that constitute the poem “to my friend butts.” the poem describes blake’s “first vision of light” while sitting on the sands at felpham. gazing at the sea, he sees the particles of the sun’s light revealed as human forms—“heavenly men”—who beckon to him and illuminate the human reality of all natural phenomena (“cloud meteor & star / are men seen afar”). approaching—or perhaps following—them, blake finds himself looking down upon the village from above, seeing “felpham sweet / beneath my bright feet” (emphasis mine), sensing there the “shadows” of himself, his wife, sister, and friend, and reflecting that we “like infants descend / … on earth.” the heavenly men eventually coalesce as one divine man, who enfolds blake to his bosom. the poem ends, and without further comment, blake’s letter returns to the matter of commissions, the cottage, the weather, and so on, before concluding with a second, much shorter verse, addressed to mrs. butts. the poem and the containing letter are appended to this article, but the section of the poem that is most commonly anthologized is the opening: to my friend butts i write my first vision of light on the yellow sands sitting the sun was emitting his glorious beams from heavens high streams over sea over land my eyes did expand into regions of air away from all care into regions of fire remote from desire the light of the morning heavens mountains adorning in particles bright the jewels of light distinct shone & clear— amazd & in fear i each particle gazed astonishd amazed for each was a man human formd. swift i ran for they beckond to me remote by the sea saying. each grain of sand every stone on the land each rock & each hill each fountain & rill each herb & each tree mountain hill earth & sea cloud meteor & star are men seen afar the less frequently quoted ascent into the divine bosom that follows is described in this way: i stood in the streams of heavens bright beams and saw felpham sweet beneath my bright feet in soft female charms and in her fair arms my shadow i knew and my wifes shadow too and my sister & friend. we like infants descend in our shadows on earth like a weak mortal birth my eyes more & more like a sea without shore continue expanding the heavens commanding till the jewels of light heavenly men beaming bright appeard as one man who complacent began my limbs to infold in his beams of bright gold like dross purgd away all my mire & my clay soft consumd in delight in his bosom sun bright i remaind. soft he smild and i heard his voice mild saying this is my fold o thou ram hornd with gold who awakest from sleep on the sides of the deep on the mountains around the roarings resound of the lion & wolf the loud sea & deep gulf these are guards of my fold o thou ram hornd with gold and the voice faded mild i remaind as a child all i ever had known before me bright shone i saw you & your wife by the fountains of life such the vision to me appeard on the seablake to butts, 2 oct. 1800 (e 712-13). this unique lyric vision offers a poetic report of a personal religious epiphany in a specific locale, which took place, presumably, in the days immediately preceding the composition of the letter.the poem picks up imagery from butts’s letter, which, although undated, must have been written between 24 september (after receipt of blake’s, postmarked 23 september) and 30 september (to have been delivered in time for blake to have composed a reply by 2 october); see also bentley, blake records 102fn. the poem owes its first-person, loco-descriptive character, so unusual in blake, to its occurrence halfway through a letter to a friend. it has other notable features too: it refers to the poet’s wife, sister, and friend, and the catalyst to the vision is an experience of the natural world. all these are characteristics that we might expect of, say, a conversation poem, and in the wider romantic context, none of them is unusual. we are quite used to this sort of setup in the work of other poets of the period (wordsworth’s “lines written a few miles above tintern abbey” and coleridge’s “the eolian harp” are obvious examples). in blake, however, it is a rarity. elsewhere, we have many reports of blake’s visions; individuals such as henry crabb robinson and alexander gilchrist recount tales about the boy blake’s being terrified by god poking his head in at a window or delighted by finding angels up a tree. but as a firsthand, to-the-moment account of being caught up into heaven from felpham and looking down at the village from above, this poem is unique among blake’s writings. moreover, the first-person narrative voice is different from that of the blake to whom quotations are often attributed, for this is neither the voice of the devil, nor a song of innocence, nor the dramatized narrator of one of the prophecies. it was not written for publication, but is more like the semi-private effusion of wordsworth’s “distressful gift! this book receives.” its intimate character gives it a special place in his oeuvre, and, consistent with the letter in which it is found, its privacy and inwardness show us things less often seen in blake. our understanding of “to my friend butts” may be enhanced by considering its companion piece, the rarely discussed poem for mrs. butts that blake encloses in the same letter. “mrs butts,” he writes, “will excuse the following lines”: wife of the friend of those i most revere. recieve this tribute from a harp sincere go on in virtuous seed sowing on mold of human vegetation & behold your harvest springing to eternal life parent of youthful minds & happy wife one way to read this overlooked poem is as a disarming of butts’s bit of innuendo. declining to sustain the banter about embracing neptune, blake instead writes a rather chaste verse about mrs. butts, reasserting her proper place as the wife of his revered friend. with that established, he is able to praise her pedagogical,“betsy [butts] had a boarding school for girls at 9 great marlborough street at which blake may have taught and which was decorated with his drawings” (bentley, blake records 90). maternal, and matriarchal fruitfulness—all this in the language of fertility—without turning his verse to her body or sexuality.a final note on the tenor of the poem. blake, perhaps unsurprisingly given his new setting—by the sea and cornfields—uses images of water and of harvest. the mention of “springing to eternal life” echoes john 4.14 (“whosoever drinketh of the water that i shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that i shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life”). likewise, the invocation to “go on in virtuous seed sowing … / … & behold / your harvest springing to eternal life” evokes numerous new testament passages, not least the parable of the sower in matthew 13.2-9, a passage that—with a wonderful appropriateness given the context—is immediately preceded by the line “the same day went jesus out of the house, and sat by the sea side.” all quotations from the bible are from the authorized (king james) version. this response may provide a helpful cue for thinking about how “to my friend butts” is responding to butts’s “happy … pair.” butts’s poem is surprisingly carnal in its imagined burning of his friends’ flesh, and just as blake’s verse to mrs. butts seeks to limit the sexual life of his friend’s letter, so “to my friend butts” may likewise be neutralizing the apocalyptic elements of butts’s vision by bringing that vision out of the future into the present and out of heaven and hell back to felpham. there may be both an element of good-humored visionary one-upmanship here and a practical demonstration by blake of what vision is. there is also, though it goes against the grain of a widely cherished image of blake, a unique instance of the great champion of unfettered imagination and supposed advocate of free love attempting to tone down and rein in the fantasies of his patron and friend.even val, the renegade of marilyn french’s the women’s room, who “saw the whole world in terms of” sex, “used to say that only blake had known what the world was really about” and “read blake at night: the book lay always on her bedside table” (chapter 16). the situation is only complicated by (i) blake’s later (1809) picture of the whore of babylon, which bears a striking resemblance to mrs. butts, although bentley decides this “must be coincidental” (caption to pl. 75, the stranger from paradise), and (ii) the romantic overtones of blake’s “the phoenix to mrs butts.” joseph viscomi notes that perhaps “it is not a coincidence that the couplets of blake’s other verses have three or five beats to the line, whereas those of ‘the phoenix’ have four, the same number of accents as in the couplets of thomas butts’s poem to blake.” moreover, he says that “mr. butts also wrote blake a poem, included in a september 1800 letter, explicitly acknowledging his affection for catherine blake and blake’s affection for mrs. butts—acknowledgments not without double entendres” (viscomi 15). the affection that viscomi mentions is expressed in the letter rather than the poem. what is certain is that the two poems are in dialogue, and that our understanding of “to my friend butts” can be deepened through consideration of its response to the narrative and imagery of butts’s “happy … pair.” this dialogue is especially evident in the shared religious (and specifically biblical) imagery that the two men deploy, which both provides common ground and marks out their differences. butts’s poem uses the second person in an imagined future and draws on the book of revelation to narrate his hope that after their deaths the blakes will ascend to heavenhe uses “paradise above” rather than “heaven,” but the synonymity is clear from the other details and has biblical precedents in, for example, the crucifixion narrative of luke 23.42-43: “and he said unto jesus, lord, remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom. and jesus said unto him, verily i say unto thee, to day shalt thou be with me in paradise.” and be united with god. the narrative structure—judgment and burning, ascent and glory—also echoes the final chapters of the new testament, in which the casting of the devil into the lake of fire and brimstone in chapter 20 is followed by the description of the new heaven and earth in chapters 21 and 22. the picture of heaven that butts unfolds, in which the blakes will from “purest fountains sip delight” and become the “loveliest blossoms on life’s tree,” appears to be drawn from the crystal-clear river and tree of life of revelation 22.1-2.“and he shewed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of god and of the lamb. in the midst of the street of it, and on either side of the river, was there the tree of life, which bare twelve manner of fruits ….” likewise, butts’s hope that the blakes will be “cloathed in glory” may relate to the martyrs in revelation 6.9-11, who are given “white robes,” which also feature in revelation 7.9-17. he may also be drawing on 1 corinthians 15 at this point,“for this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality” (1 corinthians 15.53). a discussion in which paul, like butts, is emphatically concerned with death and resurrection, kinds of glory, and being clothed anew. blake, by contrast, works with a different paradigm of the transformation being wrought on the individual, as he presents not new clothing in his poem, but a bodily union with the “one man” who enfolds his limbs. blake, like butts, has biblical precedents here,for example, philippians 3.20-21, in which jesus “shall change our vile body, that it may be fashioned like unto his glorious body.” but his account has a freshness and intimacy with the divine, in comparison with which butts’s offer of a future encounter with a god “known by his attributes”“him whose care / is ever sure and ever nigh / those who on providence rely”; the quotation in the text is from blake’s critique of newton’s vision of god in the everlasting gospel (e 519). seems like an ideal in a picture book. this shift epitomizes the way in which blake’s poem fulfills or reimagines the hopes of butts’s verse: butts wishes blake “visions fair receiving light,” and blake responds with his own “first vision of light”; butts hopes that after death blake’s soul will be borne up to heaven, and blake responds with a full-blown account of how this has already happened, being taken up into god’s bosom as a present reality, not as an imagined afterlife. butts concludes by wishing that the blakes will from “purest fountains sip delight”; blake closes by recounting how he “saw you [butts] & your wife / by the fountains of life.” in sum, blake reclaims butts’s narrative by retelling it in the present, in the first person, and by offering an immediate, earthly realization of the eschatological promises of butts’s poem. this is a marked contrast from butts’s vision because, for blake, our place in heaven does not have to come at the expense of our place in the world.i will return to this continuity of the eternal and the everyday when discussing the relationship of the poem to the sketch. acknowledgment of this biblical dialogue is important because it has largely been lost in the reception history of the poem.the poem occasionally appears in scholarly publications, but is usually discussed in passing, often in the demonstration of some larger theory of blake’s work (see, for example, frye 42). kathleen raine picks it up in a footnote in blake and tradition, linking blake’s imagery of the “one man” (line 51) to the work of swedenborg, speculating that blake may have read newton’s opticks during his residence at felpham, and noting that the particles of light (line 19) have newtonian resonances (raine 1: 420-22). in one of the few sustained discussions of the poem, donald ault’s visionary physics relates these resonances to blake’s theory of fourfold vision, a theme also discussed by david wells in a study of william blake’s letters. de selincourt provides some helpful observations on the poem in william blake, and stephen d. cox, who looks at the visionary logic of the poem, suggests it is “the clearest, least mediated, literary record we have of a blakean vision” (cox 31). in symbol and truth in blake’s myth, leopold damrosch, jr., provides perhaps the fullest reading of the poem as the testimony of a biographical event and attempts to analyze the kind of experience that blake is recounting. my earlier discussion of the biblical imagery of “to my friend butts” is in blake. wordsworth. religion. 75-80. “to my friend butts” has remained a staple of popular anthologies of mystical verse over the last century, from the oxford book of english mystical verse (1917) to poetry for the spirit (2002), and, as the title of the latter suggests, has been widely admired in what might be called new-age publications.see, for example, the 1963 article in the theosophist journal, which quotes the poem and then comments, “to know ourselves fully as the one heavenly man is the goal of our return journey. on the outward journey, the monad through the ego discovers the circumference, the not-self, the many. on the return journey he rediscovers that the many are the one” (galloway 92). this has been facilitated by the abridgment of the second half of the poem, an abridgment that foregrounds the generic mystical featuresi mean the sorts of characteristics categorized by william james (see james 329). while obscuring the biblical dialogue that is taking place. recovering this dialogue enriches and clarifies the meanings of the poem,as robert n. essick and viscomi write about milton, “much of the code of milton remains obscure unless we attend to the bible” (essick and viscomi 13). as two instances will demonstrate. first, blake’s ascent above felpham. appearing initially in the third-person stories of enoch (genesis 5.24) and elijah (2 kings 2.11), accounts of being taken in vision up into heaven are given in the first person by ezekiel, paul the apostle, and john of patmos.for a fuller discussion of blake’s interest in enoch and the ascent of enoch through the palaces of heaven in 1 enoch, see rowland. ezekiel, for example, is lifted up by the spirit and taken into vision,“and he put forth the form of an hand, and took me by a lock of mine head; and the spirit lifted me up between the earth and the heaven, and brought me in the visions of god to jerusalem” (ezekiel 8.3). and paul and john record comparable experiences in 2 corinthians“i will come to visions and revelations of the lord. i knew a man in christ above fourteen years ago, (whether in the body, i cannot tell; or whether out of the body, i cannot tell: god knoweth;) such an one caught up to the third heaven. and i knew … how that he was caught up into paradise, and heard unspeakable words, which it is not lawful for a man to utter” (2 corinthians 12.1-4). and in revelation.“after this i looked, and, behold, a door was opened in heaven: and the first voice which i heard was as it were of a trumpet talking with me; which said, come up hither, and i will shew thee things which must be hereafter. and immediately i was in the spirit: and, behold, a throne was set in heaven, and one sat on the throne” (revelation 4.1-2). blake’s poem participates in this tradition, sharing the elements of being taken up into heaven or paradise and hearing god speak, then returning to earth to report the news. second, the union with (and identity of) the “one man.” geoffrey keynes is only partially right in his assumption that this is “los, the spirit of prophecy.”see letters 29n1. keynes derives this from sloss and wallis. i will discuss the connection to los more closely (with reference to milton) in the final section. the “one man” often appears in blake’s work, whether as the “universal family” (e 180, 311), “universal humanity” (e 377), or as jesus (e 116, 143). in “to my friend butts” the extensive biblical allusions make the identification clear, for although god and jesus are not explicitly named, there are numerous associations. the “one man,” like god and jesus, is figured as a shepherdsee, for example, psalms 23.1 and john 10.11. (he refers twice to the earth as his “fold,” and addresses blake as his “ram”).the language of mountain, sea, wolf, and sheep in the poem is also found in isaiah 11, which anticipates the messiah. blake’s encounter with him is, moreover, personal and intimate: blake rests in his “bosom” just as lazarus rests in the bosom of abraham (luke 16.22) and as the beloved disciple rests in the bosom of jesus at the last supper (john 13.23). the passage itself has a baptismal character, as blake’s “mire” and “clay” are “like dross purgd away,” and the central vision of light reflects visionary encounters with god and jesus found throughout the bible. the visions of ezekiel, paul, and john mentioned above are likewise all associated with light;the spirit that lifts ezekiel is “a likeness as the appearance of fire: from the appearance of his loins even downward, fire; and from his loins even upward, as the appearance of brightness, as the colour of amber” (ezekiel 8.2). during paul’s conversion near damascus “suddenly there shined round about him a light from heaven” (acts 9.3), and jesus christ, who appears to john, is described in these words: “his head and his hairs were white like wool, as white as snow; and his eyes were as a flame of fire” (revelation 1.14). moses’s encounter with god leaves his face shining (exodus 34.29ff.), an image recapitulated in the transfiguration of jesus, whose “face did shine as the sun” and whose “raiment was white as the light” (matthew 17.2), and by blake in the preface to milton, which asks (about jesus) “did the countenance divine, / shine forth upon our clouded hills?” (e 95). the association of jesus with light is also central to the gospel of john.“in the beginning was the word, and the word was with god, and the word was god. … in him was life; and the life was the light of men. and the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not. … that was the true light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world” (john 1.1-9). in sum, “to my friend butts” is suffused with biblical imagery, and that imagery is not limited to the poetic moment but is part of a wider discussion that carries through into blake’s correspondence of this period. in part iii i will be extending this discussion to look at the central organizational metaphor of this poem and of blake’s wider correspondence, before relating it to blake’s contemporary sketch landscape near felpham, to which i now turn. ii. landscape near felpham 1. william blake, landscape near felpham, c. 1800. see enlargement. © tate, london 2013. landscape near felpham (illus. 1) is a sketch in pencil with a watercolor wash. it depicts the view toward felpham from the south, looking across cornfields to (from left to right) white mill and an outbuilding,this was perhaps the largest smock mill ever built in sussex (a smock mill is typically wooden, tapered, and hexagonal or octagonal in plan). see blythman 45. including the cap and two-storey base, it appears to have been seven storeys tall. the tower and church of st. mary the virgin, hayley’s new villa, the turret (later known as turret house), and, to the right, the blakes’ cottage.the identification is made in butlin 1: 313 (#368). the sketch is faint, but the mill, trees, tower, church, and cottage are all quite clear. some details are less obvious. the rough brushstrokes in the foreground represent the sea, and there is the most elementary boat to the right, with a large oblong shape over it that is difficult to make out: it might represent a cow grazing, or possibly a shrub (at the bottom right of this unpainted rectangle is a pencil detail that could depict either an animal’s legs or the stems of a plant). in the left foreground there is vegetation on the shoreline. a fence runs across the field, and a little right of center is a rider on a horse (riding right to left). between the rider and the mill two figures, perhaps, stand against the fence. on the right of the field, and slightly more distant, might be another figure or animal. there are clouds and sunshine, with rays of light falling on the cottage. the pencil elements of the sketch are naturalistic and attentive to detail: the original winding device of the mill and the abat-son (although not the crenellation) of the church tower, for example, are both visible. the felpham sketch is, in some respects, blake’s most ordinary picture, prompting raymond lister to write that the scene “amply demonstrates what the main body of his work has led some to doubt, that he was capable of painting straightforward landscapes.”lister pl. 25. blake, as far as we know, rarely sketched his surroundings. the examples that we do have are principally of hayley’s previous house, at eartham, and appear to have been made for the latter’s records.in butlin there are a number of sketches from c. 1801 that were probably made on the same day as one another when blake visited eartham (see 1: 313-14, #369-73). yet the oddness of this “straightforward” romantic landscape sketch only really becomes apparent against the wider backdrop of blake’s visual art. in the 1990s, the blake room at the tate was dominated by the great color prints that include elohim creating adam, the good and evil angels, newton, and nebuchadnezzar, and the temperas of the spiritual form of nelson guiding leviathan and the ghost of a flea. then—in a sudden departure from this apocalyptic cosmos—there was landscape near felpham. it is a work that seems to step out of blake’s mythological world and into his everyday life, and like the letter and poem to butts, it is a private work that discloses a rarely seen side of his character and art. certainly by the end of the decade, blake would not have hung the felpham sketch in an exhibition. the very different kind of public artist that he later wished to be is clear from the 1809 catalogue of his “exhibition of paintings in fresco, poetical and historical inventions.”for example, “if art is the glory of a nation, if genius and inspiration are the great origin and bond of society, the distinction my works have obtained from those who best understand such things, calls for my exhibition as the greatest of duties to my country” (e 528). see also david blayney brown and martin myrone’s discussion in “william blake’s 1809 exhibition.” the central similarity between “to my friend butts” and landscape near felpham is an obvious one: both describe an experience on the beach at felpham. moreover, the relationship of the sketch to blake’s wider visual oeuvre is similar to the relationship of the poem to his wider literary oeuvre: both offer an atypical first-person account of a local scene, and both forego the characteristic polemical and dramatic elements of blake’s art. put in these terms, one might expect the two to have been linked critically, yet they have not.although the poem and sketch have long been recognized as works from approximately the same place and time, their apparent experiential disparity seems to have discouraged critical investigation of their actual connection. so, for example, when discussing the sketch, lister (pl. 25) does quote part of the poem, but does not suggest that the two may represent the same moment. butlin writes that it is “tempting to see this watercolour as blake’s first reaction to the prospect that opened up with his move to felpham,” and quotes the letter to flaxman concerning “celestial inhabitants” (see paragraph 24, below), but takes this intuition no further (1: 313). i discuss the connection between the sketch and poem in blake. wordsworth. religion. 7-15 and 34-36. so what historical evidence is there that the sketch and poem are two sides of the same coin? given the first-person character of these pieces, it is worth beginning with blake’s location: where was he when he made the sketch, and when did he make it? frederick tatham, who vouchsafed the picture, added “subject not known. perhaps near felpham”; in fact, there is no question of the location, as this is certainly felpham itself, the village seen from a viewpoint that can be located to within a few meters. the scene can no longer be viewed, not only because the mill and turret no longer exist, but because of the extensive twentieth-century housing that now fills the landscape. nonetheless, the four fixed points in the sketch—the mill, the church, the turret, and the cottage—are visible on the first edition of the ordnance survey county series map,ordnance survey county series 1:2500, 1st ed. (1854–1901), “sussex county.” the layout of turret house can be established from surviving architectural plans and pictures; see crosby, “the sketch on the verso of blake’s self-portrait: an identification.” and their coordinates can be cross-referenced with modern satellite imagery such as that provided by google earth. the exact positions of the buildings can thereby be established,mill: 50.785652, -0.654725; church: 50.790731, -0.654655; turret: 50.790617, -0.652571; cottage: 50.788670, -0.652510. these coordinates can be pasted directly into the search bar of google earth. as can the distances between them,mill–church: 560.7 m; mill–turret: 572.8 m; mill–cottage: 362.7 m; church–turret: 149 m; church–cottage: 272.5 m. and this information can be related to their relative positions within the sketch itself. blake’s position when drawing the sketch can then be estimated using triangulation.we imagine blake standing facing the scene he is painting, with his sketchbook in front of him. visual angles between landmarks in the scene will be represented as distances between them on his canvas. although we can’t know the scale of this representation, given three landmarks we can look for locations where the relative angles between adjacent pairs of landmarks are in the same proportions as those blake has depicted. this leads to an equation whose solution is a one-dimensional curve on the map. in the painting there are four prominent landmarks, so that we have two such curves, and we conclude that blake was standing where these curves intersect. there is only one such point from which the landmarks would also be in the same order, left to right, as in blake’s painting. so where was blake standing (or sitting)? the main evidence comes from the sketch itself: in the foreground are waves and a boat, suggesting that blake himself must have been in a boat, a little out to sea, when he drew the scene. further out from the shore felpham beach slopes very gradually; close to the shoreline it shelves steeply, as can be seen in illus. 2, yet blake has a high eyeline on the scene before him. there are numerous groynes on the beach, but (again, as illus. 2 shows) these would still not provide sufficient elevation for the given eyeline. this suggests that the sketch must have been made at full tide—anything less would have provided insufficient elevation—and indeed the tide appears full in the image. blake’s approximate position, triangulated from the sketch,50.785471, -0.654257. is a little out to sea, although this evidence is only suggestive, as early nineteenth-century maps of the scene lack detail of the shoreline, and the shore has eroded substantially since 1800, eventually taking the mill with it.blythman 44. the erosion is quite evident when the ordnance survey map is overlaid on a modern satellite image of felpham. although the mill was dismantled in 1879, there are a number of surviving images of the building from the nineteenth century. the erosion of the shore can be seen in illus. 2 (percy thomas’s 1878 etching), and the sheer size of the mill can be seen by looking at the human figures in illus. 3. 2. white mill, felpham. copy of an etching by percy thomas, 1878. west sussex records office, general photographic collection. catalogue no. ph 21347. what these images offer is a perhaps unique opportunity to establish the facility and accuracy with which blake was able to draw three-dimensional architectural objects from life. of particular interest is a mid-nineteenth-century photograph of white mill alongside blake’s sketch (from a different angle) of the same (illus. 3). 3. (left) detail from a copy of a mid-nineteenth-century photograph of white mill. west sussex records office, general photographic collection. catalogue no. ph 21344. (right) detail from landscape near felpham. © tate, london 2013. illus. 3 provides an interesting contrast to illus. 4, in which blake’s depiction of his cottage in milton (pl. 36) is juxtaposed with an early twentieth-century photograph.the similarities between the cottage in landscape near felpham and the milton image have been noted by butlin (1: 313); see also the 1979 photograph of allen ginsberg wielding the milton image in front of the cottage <http://​www.​allenginsberg.​org/​index.php?page=blake-s-cottage-at-felpham>. a painstakingly detailed account of the original structure of the cottage can be found in crosby, “‘the sweetest spot on earth’: reconstructing blake’s cottage at felpham, sussex.” 4. (top) blake’s cottage (early twentieth-century postcard). collection of robert n. essick. (bottom) william blake, milton copy d (1818), pl. 36, detail. library of congress; image courtesy of the william blake archive. the milton cottage is presumably drawn from memory at a later date, and is naive compared to the simple, confident, and accurate lines of the mill.landscape near felpham and milton are in different media; nonetheless, the proportions of the mill appear to be much more accurate than those of the cottage. this difference is also evident in the detail of the waves and the boat in the felpham sketch. the picture is unfinished, but the waves bear little resemblance to the surface of any sea, and the boat, which looks unlike any contemporary (or seaworthy) vessel, is, however, similar to the moon boats in jerusalem (see illus. 5). 5. details of boats from landscape near felpham and jerusalem copy e (c. 1821), pls. 24 and 44. landscape near felpham © tate, london 2013. jerusalem images from the yale center for british art, b1992.8.1(24) and (44). this difference in style and medium suggests that the boat and watercolor wash are later additions to the sketch.they seem to me to be visual annotations rather than part of a two-stage composition process in which the image is developed. they are roughly done, and in a medium that will not allow them to be overpainted. part of the singular character of the sketch is that blake is relaxed enough to drop his principled opposition to copying from nature, which he elsewhere treats as “the dirt upon my feet no part of me,” claiming that “natural objects always did & now do weaken deaden & obliterate imagination.”a vision of the last judgment (e 565); annotations to wordsworth’s poems (e 665). see also the discussion in milton of “the murderers / of jesus, who deny the faith & mock at eternal life: / who pretend to poetry that they may destroy imagination; / by imitation of natures images drawn from remembrance” (e 142). in summary, landscape near felpham provides a number of distinct, though related, kinds of accuracy that can be cross-checked with nineteenth-century maps and photographs. it demonstrates (as perhaps no other work by blake does) that he could and did sketch landscapes accurately from life, and that he could do so with an impressive precision in terms of spatial relationships, perspective, proportion, and visual detail. this mimetic accuracy offers, moreover, an unusual opportunity in blake criticism to attempt to date the composition by careful consideration of the other details (tidal, meteorological, botanical) of the picture. working with the hypothesis that this is a record of a real scene (i.e., as seen by blake on a particular day at a particular time), we can relate the conditions that are evident in the sketch (i) to one another, (ii) to details in blake’s correspondence, and (iii) to other sources, such as contemporary newspapers. the date that we derive from this specific combination of temporal details can then be related to the composition date of “to my friend butts.” let us begin with the year of composition. there are only four possibilities: 1800, 1801, 1802, 1803, as blake was not in felpham either before or after these dates. unlike the letter, the sketch is undated, but has been designated as 1800,butlin dates the sketch c. 1800 (1: 312). and the logic here seems just: the picture is full of optimism with its open skies and fields and the sunbeams falling on the cottage. the cheerful mood and the uncharacteristic interest in the subject matter are concomitant with the effusive delight over his cottage and setting that blake expresses in his letters in the weeks before and after his arrival in felpham. that delight is not present in later correspondence,the one later exception is “felpham cottage / of cottages the prettiest,” 11 sept. 1801 (e 717). hayley says, “our good blake grows more & more attach’d to this pleasant marine village” (to flaxman, 18 oct. 1801 [letters 37]), but this is part of a pair of open letters that includes content from blake, who doesn’t pick up on the comment. and this is not simply due to the shine wearing off his surroundings. blake became unhappy quite quickly, and catherine was ill for a long period, almost from arrival. whereas the 1800 letters are full of optimism and delight, the letters of 1801 and 1802 are, as david bindman puts it, “full of impassioned distress.”bindman 135. by 22 november 1802 blake explains to butts that he has “been very unhappy & could not think of troubling you about it or any of my real friends (i have written many letters to you which i burnd & did not send).”e 719. that dark mood carries from the letters into the poetry of the later period, and is manifest in another rare loco-descriptive poem of this time, which offers a fascinating point of comparison to “to my friend butts.”in his second letter to butts of 22 november 1802, blake specifically states that he has written a poem while walking: “i will bore you more with some verses which my wife desires me to copy out & send you with her kind love & respect they were composed <above> a twelvemonth ago [in a] <while> walk<ing> from felpham to lavant to meet my sister” (e 720). it is a poem that starts in a mood similar to that of 2 october 1800: with happiness stretchd across the hills in a cloud that dewy sweetness distills with a blue sky spread over with wings and a mild sun that mounts & sings but like a dark counterpart to felpham’s “heavenly men,” it is the dead who show up, as the pleasant scene of nature rapidly degenerates into visionary horrors: with my father hovering upon the wind and my brother robert just behind and my brother john the evil one in a black cloud making his mone tho dead they appear upon my path notwithstanding my terrible wrath they beg they intreat they drop their tears filld full of hopes filld full of fears the visceral force of this later writing is unmistakable, and for these reasons the year of composition of the sketch seems certain to be 1800. but what about the month? we are fortunate in this respect that the sketch shows both trees and crops, and this is consistent with the letters of this period, in which blake is uncharacteristically detailed about his surroundings. he writes to cumberland: i have taken a cottage at felpham on the sea shore of sussex between arundel & chichester. mr hayley the poet is soon to be my neighbour[;] he is now my friend; to him i owe the happy suggestion, for it was on a visit to him that i fell in love with my cottage. … we lie on a pleasant shore[;] it is within a mile of bognor to which our fashionables resort[.] my cottage faces the south about a quarter of a mile from the sea, only corn fields between.blake to cumberland, 1 sept. 1800 (bentley, blake records 95-96). these are the same fields portrayed in the sketch, but there they do not depict acres of waving corn;blake could draw corn; see, for example, the blighted corn in lister pl. 63(i). rather, they appear to be bare. a rider on a horse trots across the field, and there are no stalks, leaves, or ears of corn visible either generally or around, for example, the base of the fences. this indicates that the sketch was not made during blake’s initial visit to felpham in july 1800,he was in felpham for most of july 1800: “on 5 july 1800, flaxman sent with blake a letter and gifts to hayley, and on 16 july hayley wrote to flaxman that ‘our good enthusiastic friend blake will … extend the time of his residence in the south a little longer than we at first proposed’” (bentley, stranger from paradise 208fn). a time at which the corn would have been fully grown. the early harvest was brought in during august,“agriculture—monthly report for august. from the uncommon fineness of the weather during the whole of the last month, and the greatest part of the present, the harvest in most places commenced a fortnight or three weeks sooner than usual, and in many of the southern and western districts, on this account, much of the crops have been already secured” (hampshire chronicle 8 sept. 1800). after blake had gone back to london; therefore the sketch must have been made after he returned to felpham in mid-september, by which time the fields were being prepared for the following year. indeed, one of the first events recorded by blake after his return is seeing the ploughman: “a roller & two harrows lie before my window. i met a plow on my first going out at my gate the first morning after my arrival & the plowboy said to the plowman. ‘father the gate is open.’”blake to butts, 23 sept. 1800 (e 711). this gives us 19 september 1800—the blakes’ first full day in felpham—as the earliest date for the sketch, but what is the latest possible date? here the foliage provides an answer. the trees that are visible in the sketch (and which can be identified on the ordnance survey map) are a line of boundary trees. from the sketch, they appear to be deciduous hardwoods, quite possibly the same types of large spreading trees that still grow in the same location today: beech, oak, and horse chestnut. although these trees would still have been in full leaf in september, the seasonal defoliation would have been quite advanced by the end of october, and given that there are no visible branches or other signs of defoliation in the sketch, it seems reasonable to take the end of october as the latest possible date for the picture’s composition.as the weather had been unseasonably mild, the trees might have held their leaves a little longer. even so, there are no branches visible on any of the trees in the picture. certainly all leaves (and many branches) would have been gone by sunday, 9 november, when a hurricane blew down houses, a mill, a barn, and uprooted 200 “stately oaks” at glynde bourne (hampshire chronicle 17 nov. 1800). this establishes a six-week window within which the sketch might have been made, between friday, 19 september 1800 and friday, 31 october 1800 (by which time arboreal defoliation would have been clearly visible). narrowing the timeframe further requires working with a combination of tidal and solar information. the visibility of crepuscular rays in the sketch makes it possible to estimate the position of the sun, as the point of convergence of the rays can be located toward the top right of the picture.“in real skies the crepuscular rays (the bright and dark beams apparently radiating from the sun when blocked by clouds) help one considerably to guess where the sun is, because they cross one another at the solar position. this phenomenon makes it very easy to locate the sun” (barta et al. 1032). the sketch is made facing north, and the sun is shown to be in the east/southeast in the image, so this is certainly morning, and the elevation of the sun would suggest mid-morning. for the purposes of this discussion i am therefore giving the broad parameters of a time of composition at least an hour after dawn and at least an hour before noon. this timeframe can then be related to the tidal conditions in order to narrow further the date. as i demonstrated earlier, for the sketch to have been made the tide must have been full, and indeed we see it lapping against the field’s edge. the dates on which high water occurred between one hour after dawn and eleven in the morning during the period from 19 september to 31 october are as follows: (i) tuesday, 30 september to thursday, 2 october inclusive; (ii) wednesday, 15 october to saturday, 18 october inclusive; and (iii) wednesday, 29 october.tide timetables (which include times of sunrise and sunset) are available for bognor for this period, along with tide heights. see <http://​easytide.​ukho.​gov.​uk>. the last date is the least likely due to the probability of visible defoliation (of which the sketch shows no evidence). we are left with only two 3-4 day periods during blake’s three-year stay in felpham when the sketch could have been made. the first (30 september to 2 october) exactly coincides with the composition of the poem and letter to butts. the probability of this particular timeframe (rather than the later date) corresponding to the composition of the sketch is further increased, as the details of weather (sunshine and clouds) described in both the letter and the poem it contains coincide with what we see in the picture.blake writes, “our cottage looks more & more beautiful. and tho the weather is wet, the air is very mild. much milder than it was in london when we came away” (to butts, 2 oct. 1800 [e 713-14]). on top of this, of course, we know that blake had been at the location of the sketch at this time because his presence there is the subject of the poem. what can we conclude from this? it is highly probable that the sketch of felpham and the poem to butts were composed within the same three-day period, and it is probable (given consistency of internal details regarding weather and time of day) that the scene they describe refers to the same day. might they be the visual and literary manifestations of the same biographical experience? at first it seems not, as the sketch indicates that blake was on a boat, whereas the poem has him on “the yellow sands sitting.” it is difficult to be certain how the shoreline looked in 1800, but today, at least, the “yellow sands” are not visible when the tide is full, as the upper shore is shale. it is possible, of course, that blake was “on the yellow shale sitting” or “on the yellow shingle sitting” but that he preferred to use “sand,”there is a poetic latitude in the description of the clouds as “heavens mountains,” for example. we have no record of blake’s using the terms “shale” or “shingle” elsewhere. which is such a significant term elsewhere in his work.he uses the word in poems that bear a significant thematic relationship to the subject under discussion; see, for example, the “world in a grain of sand” of “auguries of innocence” (e 490), and the sands of the seashore (and particles of light) that reflect the “beams divine” and that blow into atheist eyes in “mock on mock on voltaire rousseau” (e 477). such an argument need only be made, however, if it is assumed that the epiphany took place in a moment. yet this is not what the poem narrates. blake recounts an experience that takes place over time, and that starts out as a vision by the sea, but ends with a vision on it: “such the vision to me / appeard on the sea” concludes the poem. perhaps, then, blake’s vision began on the shore and ended on a boat. but wouldn’t he have mentioned putting out in a boat? not necessarily, as he makes no explicit acknowledgment of his position in the sketch of the same scene. perhaps so, but does “on the sea” mean that blake was on the sea, or just the vision? granted, this is ambiguous, though the prepositional structure echoes the opening of the poem, which locates blake and his “vision of light / on the yellow sands.”the poem is more difficult to locate in space and time. the extempore character of the sketch and its visual accuracy indicate that there was no chronological space between the events depicted and the recording of those events, but this is not necessarily the case with the poem. blake might have written the poem sitting on the beach or on the boat. but he might equally have composed it as part of his letter to butts back at the cottage later the same day, or a day or two later, though the phrasing of the letter suggests that the poem was already written, as blake “cannot resist the temptation” of sending it to butts. no firm conclusions can be drawn here; rather, the subject opens out the great difficulty of discussing recorded “religious” experience: such visions may be autobiographical, but they are also inextricably textual. it is these textual parameters and the continuity of metaphor and image with blake’s correspondence in this period that i now wish to consider in more detail. iii. stairway to heaven essick and viscomi write in their introduction to milton that “blake was so fully imbued with the language of the bible that it is frequently difficult to separate purposeful allusion from the unselfconscious repetition of habitual patterns in many of blake’s poems.”essick and viscomi 13. indeed, throughout his art and correspondence, the bible is not so much a subject of discussion as a means to understanding. it is not a static, self-interpreting monolith (the very thing his art contests), but a heuristic resource to understand his own life situation. this is especially evident in the correspondence surrounding the move to felpham, which shows that the central tropes that blake employs in “to my friend butts”—the ascent to heaven and return to earth, and the interaction of heavenly and earthly beings—neither begin nor end with the correspondence to his patron, but are a more widespread element of his thought at this time, and may be found in the letters that date back to his preliminary journey to felpham in july. in july, blake had written to cumberland “i begin to emerge from a deep pit of melancholy,”blake to cumberland, 2 july 1800 (e 706). and by the time he had reached felpham in september, he could write “and now begins a new life. because another covering of earth is shaken off.”blake to flaxman, 21 sept. 1800 (e 710). in his letters of this period these images of ascent—of release from the pit, of resurrection, of shaking off the earth—eventually take the form of a specific and repeated biblical topos that derives from genesis 28: and jacob went out from beer-sheba, and went toward haran. and he lighted upon a certain place, and tarried there all night, because the sun was set; and he took of the stones of that place, and put them for his pillows, and lay down in that place to sleep. and he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven: and behold the angels of god ascending and descending on it. and, behold, the lord stood above it, and said, i am the lord god of abraham thy father, and the god of isaac: the land whereon thou liest, to thee will i give it, and to thy seed; and thy seed shall be as the dust of the earth, and thou shalt spread abroad to the west, and to the east, and to the north, and to the south: and in thee and in thy seed shall all the families of the earth be blessed. and, behold, i am with thee, and will keep thee in all places whither thou goest, and will bring thee again into this land; for i will not leave thee, until i have done that which i have spoken to thee of. and jacob awaked out of his sleep, and he said, surely the lord is in this place; and i knew it not. and he was afraid, and said, how dreadful is this place! this is none other but the house of god, and this is the gate of heaven. (genesis 28.10-17) this passage shares with the visions discussed earlier (of ezekiel, paul, john, and of blake himself) the possibility of ascent into heaven and of encounter with the divine. the passage also narrates jacob’s exile and wandering, and the establishment of a new covenant between him and god, which blake appropriates to conceptualize his own changed circumstances as he moves from the political and religious ferment of 1790s london to beginning a new century in this quiet, south-coast seaside village.for blake’s visceral response to contemporary london, see the letter to cumberland, 1 sept. 1800 (bentley, blake records 95-97). this new covenant characterizes blake’s new life in his reestablished connections with god, with friendships, and with artistic inspiration. in the correspondence of this period blake clearly envisages jacob’s ladder as beginning in heaven and descending in a spiral over felpham, winding around the turret (his new place of work) to arrive at his own cottage door. in verses enclosed in a letter to anna flaxman, he writes: away to sweet felpham for heaven is there the ladder of angels descends thro the air on the turret its spiral does softly descend thro’ the village then winds at my cot i[t] does end you stand in the village & look up to heaven the precious stones glitter on flights seventy seven and my brother is there & my friend & thine descend & ascend with the bread & the wine the bread of sweet thought & the wine of delight feeds the village of felpham by day & by night and at his own door the blessd hermit does stand dispensing unceasing to all the whole landmrs. blake to mrs. flaxman, 14 sept. 1800 (e 709). blake’s mention of his “brother” could refer to hayley,hayley is, presumably, the “blessd hermit” of the penultimate line. but in this inspirational context, with angels ascending and descending from heaven, it seems more likely to refer to his dead brother robert, with whom blake continues to “converse daily & hourly in the spirit.”blake to hayley, 6 may 1800 (e 705). the imagery of the new covenant is emphasized through the bread and wine elements of the last supper,matthew 26.26-29; mark 14.22-25; luke 22.13-20. and the “seventy seven” flights of steps perhaps correspond to the forgiveness of sins that blake considers central to christianity.“then came peter to him, and said, lord, how oft shall my brother sin against me, and i forgive him? till seven times? jesus saith unto him, i say not unto thee, until seven times: but, until seventy times seven” (matthew 18.21-22); blake: “forgiveness of sins this alone is the gospel & this is the life & immortality brought to light by jesus” (e 875). the “precious stones” may relate to the stones of genesis 28.11, while the “house of god” and the “gate of heaven” of genesis 28.17 are likewise, blake suggests, to be found in felpham itself: felpham is a sweet place for study. because it is more spiritual than london  heaven opens here on all sides her golden gates  her windows are not obstructed by vapours.  voices of celestial inhabitants are more distinctly heard & their forms more distinctly seen & my cottage is also a shadow of their houses.blake to flaxman, 21 sept. 1800 (e 710). blake’s particular uses of jacob’s ladder in the correspondence of this period have a striking visual counterpart in his undated watercolor jacob’s ladder.he exhibited the picture as both jacob’s dream and jacob’s ladder; see butlin 1: 338 (#438). 6. william blake, jacob’s ladder. see enlargement. © trustees of the british museum. 1949,1112.2. the subject is not new, as there is a long-standing iconographical tradition depicting this famous biblical scene, in which jacob is typically presented as lying asleep, with the ladder taking the form of a beam of light leading up into the sun. blake is certainly conscious of such works,see, for example, ludovico cardi da cigoli’s jacob’s dream (1593); johann wilhelm baur’s jacob’s dream (c. 1600-40); michael willmann’s landscape with the dream of jacob (1691); aert de gelder’s jacob’s dream (c. 1710-15). blake certainly knew raphael’s painting of this subject (see beer 31-32). and in characteristic fashion he follows the tradition, but also recasts it: his use of a spiral staircase in this context is, as anthony blunt puts it, “a complete novelty in the iconography of this subject.”quoted in paley 200. yet it is not a complete novelty in blake’s work because it is the very image used in the poem to anna flaxman. like the painting, his poem describes not a “ladder” with rungs, but one with seventy-seven “flights” of stairs glittering with precious stones and—as in his painting—that staircase is specifically “spiral.” moreover, at the bottom of the staircase in the painting are two angels carrying a basket of bread (with some grapes and vine leaves) and a pitcher of what is presumably wine; again these are not part of the iconographical tradition of the subject (nor of the genesis narrative), yet they correlate to the poem, in which “my friend & thine / descend & ascend with the bread & the wine.”this eucharistic inflection may derive from jesus’s apparent reference to the genesis passage when he proclaims “hereafter ye shall see heaven open, and the angels of god ascending and descending upon the son of man” (john 1.51). blake also includes not just angels but humans (including friends, lovers, infants, and children) on his ladder, a populous world which, like the letters of this period, is full of angels. blake calls hayley “leader of my angels” (16 sept. 1800 [e 709]); his “dear flaxman” is “a sublime archangel” (21 sept. 1800 [e 710]); butts is the “dear friend of my angels” (23 sept. 1800 [e 711]); “the time is now arrivd when men shall again converse in heaven & walk with angels” (to flaxman, 12 sept. 1800 [e 707]); and, in one of the more flighty passages, blake is “more famed in heaven” for his works than he “could well concieve” because in his brain “are studies & chambers filld with books & pictures of old,” which he “wrote & painted in ages of eternity” before his mortal life, and those “works are the delight & study of archangels” (to flaxman, 21 sept. 1800 [e 710]). this continuity between blake’s painting and his poem to mrs. flaxman is striking. it is more than just his painting a subject that is a presiding metaphor in his correspondence at this time: his images and letters share certain specifics that are part of neither the original genesis narrative nor the iconographical tradition of the subject, and that do not occur together elsewhere in his corpus. their conjugation suggests, although does not prove, that the painting may have been composed around the time of blake’s move to felpham.it is currently dated c. 1799-1806 by the british museum and c. 1805 by butlin. the continuity has been noted by keynes, among others (letters 21n3). what is certain is that blake had the same imagery in his mind at the time of his relocation and at the time of the composition of the painting.in the painting, jacob is lying on the shore of the ocean, a detail that again is not part of the biblical text or the iconographical tradition, but is relevant to blake’s felpham setting. the painting suggests a universality through its visual gestures to space, sky, earth, shore, and sea, indicated respectively by the stars, the clouds immediately above jacob’s left arm and staff, the curve of the globe to the right of his foot, the rocks immediately under his right arm and side, and the waves lapping against those rocks to the bottom left of the picture (the waves resemble, for example, those in pl. 1 of visions of the daughters of albion [copy o] and pl. 10 of the marriage [copy h]). this contiguity of imagery allows us to ask what light the shared elements of blake’s painting and the poem to mrs. flaxman might shed on landscape near felpham and “to my friend butts,” for the image of jacob’s ladder has strong resonances in those works. as i mentioned earlier, the iconographical tradition of the jacob story typically presents the ladder as a crepuscular ray, and this is echoed in the naturalistic landscape near felpham, in which the rays descend from the sun to the cottage, just as the ladder “at my cot” “does end” in the poem to anna flaxman. in “to my friend butts” there is, likewise, a great emphasis on the rays of the sun: not only the “glorious beams” pouring from “heavens high streams”these “streams” in heaven may also echo the fountains and river of revelation and butts’s poem discussed earlier. and “the streams / of heavens bright beams” that blake stands in immediately prior to finding himself above felpham, but also the “beams of bright gold” that enfold his limbs. the correlation to the iconographical tradition discussed above is clear: blake’s journey with the particles of light into the sky above felpham and into the bosom of god/jesus is a figuration of the ascent of jacob’s ladder among angels, who for blake—as many of his paintings show—were beings of light.see, for example, his c. 1803-05 watercolor angel of the revelation. “to my friend butts” reconfirms numerous other elements anticipated in the letters: the transformation of felpham into a gateway to heaven; the focus on the immediacy of firsthand experience; the glittering stones (anticipating the “particles bright”); and the vision of blake’s “brother” and “friend” (in “to my friend butts” blake sees his “sister & friend”). this material is characterized by the coexistence and interplay of naturalistic and symbolic elements. in blake’s jacob’s ladder, a painting rich in symbolism, we might expect to find “the lord” standing above the top of the ladder as the text states (genesis 28.13), but instead we find a comparatively naturalistic sun (from which rays emanate, but they do not form the staircase); in landscape near felpham, the rays of sunshine that fall on blake’s cottage may be naturalistic, but, as lister notes, they also seem to serve a symbolic function.lister (pl. 25) suggests that the “sunbeam” is “perhaps meant to denote the light of inspiration shining on his home.” again, in “to my friend butts” the richly symbolic narrative of blake’s ascent into the bosom of god/jesus to be purged of the “mire” and the “clay” resonates with the language of baptism, resurrection, and transfiguration. yet it can also be read as a naturalistic account of a man sitting on the beach enjoying the wonderful sensation of basking in sunshine. neither reading negates the other, as this body of work is monistic: it is simultaneously earthly and heavenly, and there is no dividing line between naturalistic and symbolic content, or between material and spiritual elements. this continuity is still more fully realized in milton, the prophetic poem that reaches its climax with blake’s vision of milton in his cottage garden at felpham. the vision is complicated, so i will first recap some of its key (bewildering) events. blake is in his garden when ololon (approximately milton’s emanation) descends in the form of “a virgin of twelve years” and speaks to him (36.17, e 137). milton’s shadow also descends, though his form is rather more complex, as he is the covering cherub, appearing as “the wicker man of scandinavia” (37.11, e 137). he is large and contains multitudes: inside him is satan, and inside satan is rahab. also inside him are the “monstrous churches of beulah” and “the gods of ulro dark” (37.16, e 137), yet he nonetheless appears as the puritan of tradition, dressed in black (38.8, e 138). while this is happening, the spectre of satan is roaring on the sea “upon mild felpham shore” (38.13, e 139) and rolling his thunders against milton. rather than describing satan from the vantage point of his cottage garden, blake enters into satan’s bosom (38.15, e 139), and from there shows satan as a “ruind building of god not made with hands” (38.16, e 139) where mystery babylon dwells and where jerusalem is bound in chains. milton now addresses satan, announcing that he (milton) is come in self-annihilation, an act that will simultaneously annihilate satan. satan counters aggressively with the claim that he himself is “god the judge of all,” and that milton must fall down and worship him (39.51-53, e 139). events now intensify. the “starry seven” are burning on blake’s path, making it “a solid fire, as bright / as the clear sun” as “milton silent” comes down upon it (39.3-5, e 140). calling on albion to awake, “forms / human” go forth from the limbs of the starry seven, forming a “mighty column of fire / surrounding felphams vale, reaching to the mundane shell” (39.8-10, e 140). meanwhile, satan is “howling in his spectre” (39.18, e 140), and in this final stage of the confrontation with milton extends his claim to divinity by appearing in the likeness of god, surrounded by inversions of the four beasts or zoassee, for example, ezekiel chapter 1 and revelation chapter 4. (satan’s are chaos, sin, death, and ancient night [39.22-30, e 140]). albion hears the call of the starry seven, but has not the strength to respond. seeing in satan his own “embodied spectre” he tries to “walk into the deep” at felpham (his left foot is on the nearby “rocks of bognor”), but his strength fails and “with dreadful groans” he sinks back onto his couch (39.46-51, e 141). ololon speaks conciliatory words to milton, confessing her own part in creating a destructive natural religion (rahab), and immediately rahab babylon herself appears in satan’s bosom (40.17-20, e 141). milton replies to ololon that he has come in self-annihilation and to renounce the “selfhood, which must be put off & annihilated alway / to cleanse the face of my spirit by self-examination” (40.36-37, e 142). his sixfold emanations (in one sense the wives and daughters he was alienated from during his earthly life)“those three females whom his wives, & those three whom his daughters / had represented and containd” (17.1-2, e 110). now separate from ololon and reenter milton’s shadow, thereby rehumanizing him (42.3-6, e 143). the starry seven of earlier in the scene have now become a “starry eight” through the reintegration of milton. ololon as “a moony ark” descends “to felphams vale,” while the starry eight are transfigured into “one man jesus the saviour” and the “clouds of ololon” fold round his limbs “as a garment dipped in blood” (42.10-12, e 143). jesus walks forth from felpham’s vale to enter albion’s bosom, while blake falls outstretched on his path (much as john of patmos falls at jesus’s feet in revelation 1.17); the lark mounts with a loud trill (the moment of dawn), and among final apocalyptic images, the poem ends (42.19-20, 25, 29, e 143). like the works discussed earlier, milton consistently expresses continuities between the naturalistic and symbolic and the material and spiritual, not least through its characters, who are (among other things) both psychic forces and natural phenomena: los appears as the sun,in blake’s second letter to butts of 22 november 1802, mentioned above, the verses include a description of los as the sun: “then los appeard in all his power / in the sun he appeard descending before / my face in fierce flames in my double sight / twas outward a sun: inward los in his might” (e 722). in milton there is a corresponding passage: “los descended to me: / and los behind me stood; a terrible flaming sun: just close / behind my back; i turned round in terror, and behold. / los stood in that fierce glowing fire” (22 [24].5-8, e 116-17). this bears a resemblance to the union with the “one man” of “to my friend butts,” and perhaps explains why sloss and wallis identify this figure as los (see note 31, above). ololon as the moon (42.7, e 143), milton as lightning (20.26, e 114), as a cloud (21.36, e 116), and so on. yet there is a still closer association to the earlier felpham material, again centered on the topos of jacob’s ladder. the connection is brought to light by the phrase “paved work,” which occurs three times in milton’s climactic scene (38.6, e 138; 39.24, e 140; 40.18, e 141). what is this “paved work”? behind the vision of satan stands a biblical vision of the lawgiver god of exodus. exodus 24.10 states that the israelites “saw the god of israel: and there was under his feet as it were a paved work of a sapphire stone, and as it were the body of heaven in his clearness.”god promises the “tables of stone, and a law, and commandments which i have written” to moses just two verses later (exodus 24.12). the image of satan “coming in a cloud with trumpets & with fiery flame” (39.23, e 140) points us to neighboring passages such as exodus 19.16-20. blake (like many interpreters) takes the clear blue “paved work” as the sky itself. milton “descend[s]” on this paved work, and it offers a passage between heaven and earth in the same manner as jacob’s ladder: milton collecting all his fibres into impregnable strength descended down a paved work of all kinds of precious stones out from the eastern sky; descending down into my cottage garden: clothed in black, severe & silent he descended. (38.5-8, e 138) here the “paved work” corresponds to the night sky, and the “precious stones” are the stars, something we have seen before in the letter to mrs. flaxman, where the “precious stones” glitter on the “flights” of steps.in book 1 of milton, satan turns the translucent “paved terraces” of his interior into the blackness of space as he shuts out the divine vision: thus satan rag’d amidst the assembly! and his bosom grew opake against the divine vision: the paved terraces of his bosom inwards shone with fires, but the stones becoming opake! hid him from sight, in an extreme blackness and darkness, and there a world of deeper ulro was open’d, in the midst of the assembly. in satans bosom a vast unfathomable abyss. (9.30-35, e 103) the stars are also depicted in blake’s painting of jacob’s ladder surrounding the lower flights of the stairs, and in two of the major milton images (pls. 29 and 33) we see stars about to enter the feet of blake and his brother robert, who stand next to what looks like—as erdman points out—“the lower steps of jacob’s ladder in blake’s watercolor.”“we see that the stones of satan’s paved terraces that had grown opaque have in an instant recovered their original glory as a luminous hewn-stone ladder of returning and going forth. they may properly remind us of the lower steps of jacob’s ladder in blake’s watercolor” (erdman, “the steps” 82). satan too stands on this “bright paved-work / of precious stones,” again in darkness: loud satan thunderd, loud & dark upon mild felphams shore coming in a cloud with trumpets & with fiery flame an awful form eastward from midst of a bright paved-work of precious stones by cherubim surrounded: so permitted (lest he should fall apart in his eternal death) to imitate the eternal great humanity divine surrounded by his cherubim & seraphim in ever happy eternity beneath sat chaos: sin on his right hand death on his left and ancient night spread over all the heavn his mantle of laws. (39.22-30, e 140) the paved work of exodus also appears as the sky of day, as we see in its final iteration when rahab-babylon appears as the sun in the east: rahab babylon appeard eastward upon the paved work across europe & asia glorious as the midday sun in satans bosom glowing. (40.17-19, e 141) in milton then, the “paved work” corresponds to the skies of both day and night, and this too is consistent with blake’s watercolor of jacob’s ladder, in the lower half of which it is night and stars shine, while in the upper half the sun blazes its glorious rays.the similarity of the “paved work” to the ladder of blake’s picture does not extend to its taking a spiral form, yet milton is nonetheless full of spiral images. los (himself the sun) has taken blake from lambeth to felpham in a “whirlwind” (36.21, e 137); the flight of the lark is a spiral ascent; the “ears in close volutions / shot spiring out in the deep darkness” (3.17-18, e 97); and infinity is described as a “vortex” that is expressly linked to the sun, moon, and stars: the nature of infinity is this: that every thing has its own vortex; and when once a traveller thro eternity. has passd that vortex, he percieves it roll backward behind his path, into a globe itself infolding; like a sun: or like a moon, or like a universe of starry majesty. (15.21-25, e 109) the same luminescent passage to the heavens springs up from blake’s garden in the climax to milton, as the starry seven take on “forms / human” and stand “in a mighty column of fire” reaching from felpham to the sky (39.8-9, e 140).the “column of fire” is yet another human-formed connection between heaven and earth, and also evokes the “pillar of fire” found in exodus 13.21-22 and elsewhere. as they do so, they integrate with milton, and thereby become “one man jesus the saviour” (42.11, e 143). this column of shining human forms is strongly reminiscent of the “heavenly men beaming bright” who likewise appear as “one man” who enfolds blake in his “bosom sun bright” and makes himself known to blake, as i suggested earlier, as jesus. yet what is so extraordinary about blake’s redeployment of the felpham vision in milton is that he not only uses it in his vision of jesus, but also in his vision of satan: the spectre of satan stood upon the roaring sea & beheld milton within his sleeping humanity! trembling & shuddring he stood upon the waves a twenty-seven-fold mighty demon gorgeous & beautiful: loud roll his thunders against milton loud satan thunderd, loud & dark upon mild felpham shore not daring to touch one fibre he howld round upon the sea. i also stood in satans bosom & beheld its desolations! a ruind man: a ruind building of god not made with hands; its plains of burning sand, its mountains of marble terrible: its pits & declivities flowing with molten ore & fountains of pitch & nitre: its ruind palaces & cities & mighty works; its furnaces of affliction in which his angels & emanations labour with blackend visages among its stupendous ruins arches & pyramids & porches colonades & domes: in which dwells mystery babylon, here is her secret place from hence she comes forth on the churches in delight here is her cup filld with its poisons, in these horrid vales and here her scarlet veil woven in pestilence & war: here is jerusalem bound in chains, in the dens of babylon. (38.9-27, e 139) as in “to my friend butts,” blake sees an anthropomorphic vision over the sea at felpham and enters into its bosom. the view from that bosom likewise opens onto sands and mountains, but they are “burning” and “terrible,” and rather than “felpham sweet,” blake sees “ruind palaces & cities.” this is no longer the mountain of the lord as imagined by isaiahsee note 33, above. and “to my friend butts,” but the mountain of the god of exodus, the hell of paradise lost, and the dwelling place of babylon where jerusalem is bound in chains. the beings of light are now “angels & emanations” with “blackend visages,” and the journey into the sun is not a journey into god, but into rahab babylon, who appears “glorious as the midday sun in satans bosom glowing.” why do this? it seems extraordinary that rather than keeping the divine vision of “to my friend butts” in his heart, safe from contamination, blake redeploys it as a vision of satan that is so appalling, so sublime, that the reiteration is not even immediately obvious. one possibility is that he felt he had been deluded by felpham and wished to revoke his vision,there are lines in milton that would support this idea. the poem provides a sustained critique of “natural religion,” and it may be that blake felt that he had been deceived by nature at felpham, committing to its delights in a way that subsequently betrayed him (he was initially delighted by it, but catherine became ill and things fell apart): my vegetated portion was hurried from lambeths shades he set me down in felphams vale & prepard a beautiful cottage for me that in three years i might write all these visions to display natures cruel holiness: the deceits of natural religion[.] (36.22-25, e 137) but the redeployment seems to me entirely consistent with blake’s wider work. as he never tires of showing, meaning cannot be legislated or restricted by narratives. blake’s “infernal” readings of paradise lost and the book of job in the marriage of heaven and hell and of the early chapters of genesis in the book of urizen offer striking examples of this. throughout his work, he draws our attention to the fact that art provides us not with meanings, but with narrative—or imaginative—structures (such as those of paradise lost and the bible) wherein meaning may be sought, contested, found, or relinquished. this applies even to his own work, such that the felpham “vision of light” can be renarrated as an instance of “single vision & newtons sleep,” disclosing, among other things, the apocalyptic horror of an england that has come to regard reason as the only true understanding, and materialism as its core (and only) reality. blake develops this hermeneutic through his concept of fourfold vision, whereby the difference between being a haunted failure living in a dead universe and becoming an individual who has “traveld thro perils & darkness not unlike a champion” to conquer and to “go on conquering … among the stars of god & in the abysses of the accuser” is not about living in different worlds, but about seeing the same world at a more fully human level.the move from the former to the latter is enacted autobiographically in “with happiness stretchd across the hills,” the poem from the second letter to butts of 22 november 1802, which narrates blake’s recovery from depression to fourfold vision (e 720-22). the quotations in the text are from another letter to butts of the same day (e 720). he suggests that our lives, our experiences, just as much as our art, are narrative structures, and that the content of those structures is not fixed. salvation from the satanic nightmare, blake suggests, involves ascending jacob’s ladder, being raised to the divine-human level of vision through the incorporation and integration of the different aspects of our humanity, both individual and corporate. hence the redemption of milton—who has become dehumanized through his estrangement from his emanation—depends on his being restored to the fullness of his personhood. this is a familiar theme in blake’s works, in which albion’s redemption depends on the reintegration of his four zoas and their emanations. this process of redemption is not incidental to blake’s work; it is its central theme and its method, as his art enacts the ongoing labor of reopening and reconnecting closed-off aspects of our humanity (both as individuals and as societies). yet it is a difficult topic to discuss, and the satanic (fallen) and divine (redeemed) versions of the felpham vision bring into clear focus the challenge raised in any account of blake’s “religion”: however preferable the latter is to the former, the two cannot be permanently split apart, as they constitute different aspects of what we are.even at a formal level their continuity is evident. they cannot be divided along an earthly-heavenly axis, as they are equally biblical, epiphanic, and “religious.” like “to my friend butts,” the milton passage is couched in the language and imagery of revelation, which is drawn on to depict babylon’s dominion over the churches. in revelation 13.1 john, like blake, “stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea.” the complexity of blake’s prophetic books suggests how difficult it is to hold on to this central truth, and it has proved evasive in the reception history of his work. that reception is characterized by an antagonistic division of “religious” and “secular” outlooks, and a bifurcation of “transcendent” and “materialist” interpretations into two worldviews that have little interest in one another. hence, in the case of “to my friend butts,” i suggested earlier that the transcendent character of the poem has assured its sustained presence in non-academic appropriations of blake (particularly in anthologies of mystical writing), and that this has evolved with a concomitant disregard for the material context of the vision (the abridged poem is invariably presented as a self-sufficient and self-explanatory entity). in academic studies, the reverse has been true: the scholarly discussion of blake and religion continues to flourish, and since the early 1990s in particular has sought a more detailed understanding of the material and cultural contexts of blake’s religion,blake is at the heart of the ferment of interest in london’s dissenting subcultures catalyzed by jon mee’s dangerous enthusiasm (1992) and discussed in a range of subsequent works, including e. p. thompson’s witness against the beast (1993), robert rix’s william blake and the cultures of radical christianity (2007), magnus ankarsjö’s william blake and religion (2009), and a host of essay collections and journal articles. which has often been cast as a historical concern with his denominational affiliations (anglican, moravian, muggletonian, swedenborgian). this conversation has been correspondingly less engaged with the transcendent aspects of blake’s work, and “to my friend butts” has not featured in it. the depth and pervasiveness of this religious/secular binary can be seen in the astonishing claim made in one recent critical work that blake “flaunted his secular religiousness deliberately by constantly writing of god and christ even though he was an atheist and an unbeliever.”see quinney 25-26. this is the same blake who wrote in one of the letters to butts discussed earlier, “i still & shall to eternity embrace christianity and adore him who is the express image of god,” and for whom milton is the means to “cast off” “the destroyers of jerusalem … the murderers / of jesus, who deny the faith & mock at eternal life.”22 nov. 1802 (e 720); milton 41.12, 21-22 (e 142). my aim in showing the range of literary and biographical contexts within which “to my friend butts” occurs has been to reconnect its material and transcendent aspects. by giving a different perspective on this material, i have tried to show that the sketch and poem (and the later reworking in milton) offer an account of the undoing, or integration, of the material/transcendent dyad, as blake’s religious experience turns out to be neither material nor transcendent but both, because the two entities are ultimately revealed to be different aspects of the same human-divine reality. how so? let me recap. blake begins a new life in felpham in 1800. he conceptualizes that change through a small group of biblical topoi that center on new life through a divine covenant. he is so deeply grounded in the bible that the conceptualization is, as it were, natural to his self-understanding, and fills his correspondence to friends at the time. shortly after beginning this life he experiences a vision that constitutes a fulfillment of the anticipated covenant. he reports this epiphany among the domestic details of an affectionate letter to a friend. the vision is expressed in the same relaxed, amicable, first-person voice as the correspondence in which it appears. in comparison with the author’s other work, it betrays few signs of intellectual struggle or rhetorical forcefulness. nonetheless, it gently engages the local landscape, the visions and poetry of his correspondent, his own readings from swedenborg and newton, and a wide range of biblical texts, while bringing together the living, the dead, the past, and the future. it provides an integration of past time into the present (“all i ever had known / before me bright shone”); an integration of god and the individual as the narrator is incorporated into the divine humanity (“in his bosom sun bright / i remaind”); an integration of humanity and natural phenomena (stones, rocks, hills, herbs, trees become men, “human formd”); an integration of epistemology (newtonian physics, swedenborgian theology, and biblical narrative are harmonized); and an experiential integration in the narrator (the transcendent elements are inseparable from the domestic context and affections). in addition to all this, the vision has a visual counterpart, a sketch that is realist in execution, yet which shares the same quiet joy. the continuity of material and transcendent elements across the two works testifies that earth and heaven, humanity and god constitute a single reality for blake at this time. in sum, the trauma of a divided universe—elsewhere the great drama of blake’s work—is healed for a moment with a wonderful lightness of touch as the poem performs the work of integration. that lightness may come from all the things that the poem and sketch are willing to relinquish: in their mildness they let go of the vatic authorial persona of milton and jerusalem; of the dramatis personae of the prophecies; of the political, social, and psychological critique of the songs; of the theological polemic of the marriage; and of the righteous indignation of the letter to dr. trusler. paradoxically, blake’s most intimate, autobiographical lyric and its visual counterpart are the least “blakean” instances of his art that we possess. yet blake does not enshrine this quiet vision, but instead gives its life to a prophetic poem in which it can also stand as a structure of ruination. by doing so, he reminds us that the sacred and the secular must not be used as categories to split the universe in two, for if we encounter them in the fullness of our humanity, they are not divisible phenomena outside us, but living continuities within. similarly, the act of separating and reifying single aspects of life—whether biographical, natural, rational, sexual, political, religious, material, historical, or whatever—constitutes, in blake’s terms, the error of the unredeemed milton, of urizen, of the twenty-seven churches, and, as the preface to milton puts it, of the hirelings in the camp, the court, and (more than ever) the university. it is, to borrow from the marriage, to take portions of existence and fancy that the whole. what then is blake’s alternative? he is an unrelenting critic of the bible, of religion, and of the churches, but he is also a christological“christological” is not really the right word, as his concern is principally with jesus, but “jesusological” seems awkward. artist, for whom christianity meant the integration of what we have culturally divided into the human and the divine, the material and the transcendent. his work is everywhere concerned with human integration (both within individuals and between people), which is to say building jerusalem and restoring albion. however, as for wordsworth, developing a unified vision of the world requires labor, and blake’s christianity is emphatically not constituted by passive intellectual assent to a static corpus of propositions. rather, it is concerned with striving to participate in a living body of humanity that blake calls “the divine body of the lord jesus” (milton 3.4, e 96). the work of that process of integration is—in blake’s terms—the work of art: “prayer is the study of art / praise is the practise of art,” as he would later write in laocoön (e 274), and this process of building jerusalem also means—as milton shows—rehumanizing the material universe so that it is no longer the alienated “newtonian voids between the substances of creation” (37.46, e 138). blake’s work calls for, and exemplifies, a life that is not reduced either to separate categories of the material and the transcendent, or to the disciplinary divisions of academia. so, where then do “visions and revelations” such as that of “to my friend butts” take place? they occur where the separation of human and divine, spirit and body is relinquished; to borrow from paul the apostle’s own account, “whether in the body, i cannot tell; or whether out of the body, i cannot tell: god knoweth” (2 corinthians 12.1-2). appendix: blake’s letter to butts (e 711-14) felpham octr 2d 1800 friend of religion & order i thank you for your very beautiful & encouraging verses which i account a crown of laurels & i also thank you for your reprehension of follies by me fosterd. your prediction will i hope be fulfilled in me. & in future i am the determined advocate of religion & humility the two bands of society. having been so full of the business of settling the sticks & feathers of my nest. i have not got any forwarder with the three marys or with any other of your commissions but hope, now i have commenced a new life of industry to do credit to that new life by improved works: recieve from me a return of verses such as felpham produces by me tho not such as she produces by her eldest son. however such as they are. i cannot resist the temptation to send them to you to my friend butts i write my first vision of light on the yellow sands sitting the sun was emitting his glorious beams from heavens high streams over sea over land my eyes did expand into regions of air away from all care into regions of fire remote from desire the light of the morning heavens mountains adorning in particles bright the jewels of light distinct shone & clear— amazd & in fear i each particle gazed astonishd amazed for each was a man human formd. swift i ran for they beckond to me remote by the sea saying. each grain of sand every stone on the land each rock & each hill each fountain & rill each herb & each tree mountain hill earth & sea cloud meteor & star are men seen afar i stood in the streams of heavens bright beams and saw felpham sweet beneath my bright feet in soft female charms and in her fair arms my shadow i knew and my wifes shadow too and my sister & friend. we like infants descend in our shadows on earth like a weak mortal birth my eyes more & more like a sea without shore continue expanding the heavens commanding till the jewels of light heavenly men beaming bright appeard as one man who complacent began my limbs to infold in his beams of bright gold like dross purgd away all my mire & my clay soft consumd in delight in his bosom sun bright i remaind. soft he smild and i heard his voice mild saying this is my fold o thou ram hornd with gold who awakest from sleep on the sides of the deep on the mountains around the roarings resound of the lion & wolf the loud sea & deep gulf these are guards of my fold o thou ram hornd with gold and the voice faded mild i remaind as a child all i ever had known before me bright shone i saw you & your wife by the fountains of life such the vision to me appeard on the sea mrs butts will i hope excuse my not having finishd the portrait. i wait for less hurried moments. our cottage looks more & more beautiful. and tho the weather is wet, the air is very mild. much milder than it was in london when we came away. chichester is a very handsom city seven miles from us we can get most conveniences there. the country is not so destitute of accomodations to our wants as i expected it would be we have had but little time for viewing the country but what we have seen is most beautiful & the people are genuine saxons handsomer than the people [ar] about london. mrs butts will excuse the following lines to mrs butts wife of the friend of those i most revere. recieve this tribute from a harp sincere go on in virtuous seed sowing on mold of human vegetation & behold your harvest springing to eternal life parent of youthful minds & happy wife w b— i am for ever yours william blake bibliography ault, donald d. visionary physics: blake’s response to newton. chicago: university of chicago press, 1974. barta, andrás, gábor horváth, and victor benno meyer-rochow. “psychophysical study of the visual sun location in pictures of cloudy and twilight skies inspired by viking navigation.” journal of the optical society of america a 22.6 (2005): 1023-34. beer, john. blake’s visionary universe. manchester: manchester university press, 1969. bentley, g. e., jr. blake records. 2nd ed. new haven: yale university press, 2004. ---. the stranger from paradise: a biography of william blake. new haven: yale university press, 2001. ---. “thomas butts, white collar maecenas.” pmla 71.5 (dec. 1956): 1052-66. bindman, david. blake as an artist. oxford: phaidon, 1977. bishop, morchard. blake’s hayley: the life, works, and friendships of william hayley. london: gollancz, 1951. blayney brown, david, and martin myrone. “william blake’s 1809 exhibition.” tate papers 14 (2010). <http://​www.​tate.​org.​uk/​research/​publications/​tate-papers/​william-blakes-1809-exhibition>. blythman, guy. lost windmills of sussex. [england]: guy blythman, 2008. butlin, martin. the paintings and drawings of william blake. 2 vols. new haven: yale university press, 1981. cox, stephen d. love and logic: the evolution of blake’s thought. ann arbor: university of michigan press, 1992. crosby, m. “the sketch on the verso of blake’s self-portrait: an identification.” blake 41.2 (fall 2007): 92-95. ---. “‘the sweetest spot on earth’: reconstructing blake’s cottage at felpham, sussex.” british art journal 7.3 (winter 2006-07): 46-53. damrosch, leopold, jr. symbol and truth in blake’s myth. princeton: princeton university press, 1980. de selincourt, basil. william blake. london: duckworth, 1909. erdman, david v., ed. the complete poetry and prose of william blake. newly rev. ed. new york: anchor–random house, 1988. [abbreviated as e.] ---. “the steps (of dance and stone) that order blake’s milton.” blake studies 6.1 (1973): 73-87. essick, robert n., and joseph viscomi, eds. william blake: milton a poem and the final illuminated works. princeton: princeton university press/william blake trust, 1993. frye, northrop. fearful symmetry: a study of william blake. 1947. princeton: princeton university press, 1969. galloway, joan. “man the creator.” theosophist 84.8 (1963): 87-97. hagstrum, jean h. “‘the wrath of the lamb’: a study of william blake’s conversions.” from sensibility to romanticism. ed. frederick w. hilles and harold bloom. new york: oxford university press, 1965. 311-30. jacobs, alan, ed. poetry for the spirit: an original and insightful anthology of mystical poems. london: watkins, 2002. james, william. the varieties of religious experience: a study in human nature. 1902. london: routledge, 2002. keynes, geoffrey, ed. the letters of william blake. 3rd ed. oxford: clarendon press, 1980. [abbreviated as letters.] lister, raymond. the paintings of william blake. cambridge: cambridge university press, 1986. nicholson, d. h. s., and a. h. e. lee, eds. the oxford book of english mystical verse. oxford: clarendon press, 1917. paley, morton d. “the fourth face of man: blake and architecture.” articulate images: the sister arts from hogarth to tennyson. ed. richard wendorf. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 1983. 184-215. quinney, laura. william blake on self and soul. cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 2009. raine, kathleen. blake and tradition. 2 vols. 1968. london: routledge, 2002. roberts, jonathan. blake. wordsworth. religion. london: continuum, 2010. rowland, christopher. blake and the bible. new haven: yale university press, 2010. viscomi, joseph. “william blake’s ‘the phoenix / to mrs butts’ redux.” blake 29.1 (summer 1995): 12-15. wells, david. a study of william blake’s letters. tübingen: stauffenburg, 1987. review: claire colebrook, blake, deleuzian aesthetics, and the digital claire colebrook. blake, deleuzian aesthetics, and the digital. london: continuum, 2012. xl + 160 pp. £60.00/$120.00, hardcover; £17.99/$30.95, paperback; £17.99/$27.99, e-book. reviewed by mark lussier mark lussier (mark.lussier@asu.edu) is professor and chair of english at arizona state university. he is the author of romantic dynamics: the poetics of physicality (1999) and romantic dharma: the emergence of buddhism into nineteenth-century europe (2011), editor of romanticism and buddhism (2006), and co-editor of perspective as a problem in the art, history and literature of early modern england (1994) and engaged romanticism: romanticism as praxis (2008). his essays have appeared in numerous collections and journals. his latest book, the wiley-blackwell encyclopedia of romantic writers and writing, was co-authored with dana tait and will be published in 2014. in blake, deleuzian aesthetics, and the digital, claire colebrook pursues the dual theoretical aims of exploring blakean textual operations through deleuzean aesthetics and of grounding blake’s aesthetic commitments within the philosophical concepts associated with gilles deleuze. the result of this double procedure, while perhaps not pleasing to all blake scholars, nonetheless discloses the continuing ability of the illuminated canon and its mythopoeic construction to absorb the most sophisticated critical modes without exhausting blake’s evolving vision of subjectivity. in this sense, colebrook’s well-written and energetic assessment joins a long tradition of theoretical discussions that find in the composite textual states in which blake works connections to contemporary modes of analysis. as she states in her conclusion, “two centuries of blake criticism have followed from the working through of those moments in his poetry that are resistant to synthesis[,] with criticism having to repeat, master, narrativize, and trace the geneses of the inassimilable” (136). this historical reading of blake criticism, as the preface to the work makes clear, emerges from the nature of blake’s modes of production, where “there is both the art of marking, tracing, sculpting, and binding (or experience’s world of repeated, already-known and fully actualized matters) and the destruction of any system with an influx of pure powers (or the openness of innocence)” (xxv). the digital evoked in the title relates to blake’s textual states in at least two senses: the fate of the individuated process of textual production well known to blake studies (where the hand and its digits enact the haptic as creative process) and the codification of this hapticity into digital modes of reproduction (which translates the unique analogical dimensions of any given work into a system for consumption). blakean aesthetics, like that pursued by deleuze, is positioned on this ontological fault line, and the blakean text thereby “will rehearse … the inherent impossibility and destructiveness of digitalism, alongside digitalism’s persistent necessity” (xxxv). certainly, one of the strengths of this book is its dedication to remain poised at this juncture, and another is its willingness to resist enacting a purely mechanical juxtaposition of blake and deleuze, which can be discerned in its swerve away from deleuze into other forms of criticism (e.g., that practiced by jerome mcgann) in the later chapters. through such a procedure, “tensions or seeming contradictions in blake’s work” (xiv) become the center of concern for the emergence of a “transcendental empiricism” (142) that clearly anticipates deleuze’s notion of a “pure immanence” in the work of the same title. colebrook’s attention to blake’s mode of production begins with a recognition that much of his work explores the operations of “a destructive imagination” necessary to resist creative work simply inscribing “the same dull round of systemic repetition” while articulating an “individualized” textuality that resists a fall into “undifferentiated chaos” (2). what emerges, in her estimation, is a highly complex form of dynamic contraries beyond the binaries at work in blake’s early canon (e.g., innocence and experience or reason and energy) “composed of a multiplicity of voices and transformations of single voices from redemptive vision to totalizing despair” that are both “diagnostic” yet “disturbingly undecidable” (6). blake’s work achieves “the creation of an analog language” posited by deleuze (in relation to the painter francis bacon) capable of resisting any easy translation into “systems that are not one’s own” (17, 21), which identifies it as a participant in “a counter-enlightenment tradition” (38) extending through nietzsche to deleuze. the tracks of this tradition point toward an emphasis on the type of incarnation related to both the theme of blake’s larger works and his evolving method of textual production, which unveil the tensions between bodies expressive of “an actual and richer difference” and the genesis of “bodies that cover over the fluxes of force” (45). as colebrook argues, “this ambivalence regarding the status of the body and its matter is the very motor of blake’s poetry and visual work” by exploring textually and exploring thematically “a productive undecidabilty [sic] whereby form is content” (47). this ambivalence is encoded in blake’s work upon numerous planes of expression, whether in the aesthetics of the hand and the eye, the interplay between the body and the spirit, or the politics of history and the psyche, with colebrook’s analysis consistently connecting these tensions to a wide range of blake’s early and late prophetic poems. some critics might argue that this perspective, to borrow blake’s phrase about swedenborg from the marriage of heaven and hell, is thus only “a recapitulation of all superficial opinions” (e 43) filtered through deleuzean aesthetics, yet i would argue that such an assessment is flawed. the analysis breaks open new critical spaces within which to probe blake’s continuing, and indeed constantly evolving, relevance in a world increasingly dedicated to the digital and the erasure of the analogical precisely by connecting deleuzean method to that of mcgann’s theory of “texts as acts” (65) and alain badiou’s related view of text as event (67). read in relation to both mcgann and badiou, the poem generally and blake’s poetry in particular are “essentially open” (85). given the return of the psychoanalytic in romantic criticism, primarily through the work of joel faflak, the degree to which blake composed “a symptomatology of the modes of life” (88) has achieved a new context and adds an intensified context for colebrook’s analysis. the inward politics of the psyche and the outward politics of physical conflict, connected so intensely in the late illuminated prophecies, provide a vehicle to create in the poetic body “a performative contradiction” (92), which in colebrook’s well-chosen phrase is not only “the very condition of poetry, [but] which is also the condition of life” (95). such a view lends to blake’s work a “counter-vitalist imperative” much needed in “the twenty-first century” (97). this emphasis on “life” assumes priority in the closing chapters of colebrook’s book, which address blake’s “[double-edged] attacks on modernity” (99) and become the primary means to assess the poet’s use of this counter-vitalist aesthetics as a corrective antidote to “the challenge of madness” (103) always lurking on the margins of the last prophetic works. the deployment of deleuze, then, is also corrective of traditional forms of psychoanalytic criticism as applied to blake’s work, since the often depressive pessimistic analytic modes of freud and lacan are supplemented by recent neuroscientific work to shift analysis toward “the true nature of life as affective, rather than cognitive” (113). this places in a better context the blakean commitment to self-annihilation, a shift from “self-maintenance” toward “self-overcoming” (115), which opens onto the thoroughly blakean view that “stresses that actual human being and all natural life are already eternal and infinite” (120). as my review suggests, there is much to admire in colebrook’s creative collision of blakean and deleuzean aesthetics, yet her analysis could also be considered somewhat problematic for the last generation of blake scholars. judging from the critical work put into play throughout the book, it would be easy to assume that this type of engagement is completely new, yet that would be an error in judgment and in research, since a number of blake scholars, including myself, have sought to position the assessment of blake upon this same theoretical ground. while the range of theoretical voices allows “the analog differences of variation to become audible within the digital system of phonemes” (139), colebrook’s inattention to other, more recent critical analyses has ignored or overlooked precisely the same type of analysis in blake criticism itself. one obvious location is romantic circles <http://​www.​rc.​umd.​edu>, which has a special issue dedicated to romanticism and the new deleuze (january 2008), and a number of other recent secondary studies have explored blake’s work through analogous analytic frames of reference. with that said, colebrook’s work is written with energy and insight and creates an enriched critical environment to judge anew blake’s aesthetics and to account for the curious ability of blakean modes of textuality to absorb almost any theoretical apparatus without exhaustion. review: sarah haggarty, ed., william blake in context sarah haggarty, ed. william blake in context. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2019. xxii + 371 pp. £69.99/$89.99, hardcover; $72.00, e-book. reviewed by alexander s. gourlay alexander s. gourlay (agourlay@risd.edu) teaches at the rhode island school of design. as often happens when blake appears in a critical series that addresses many individual authors, this contribution to cambridge’s literature in context volumes inhabits its format uneasily. blake was an exceptional character but no hermit—even at his most isolated, he was engaged in his communities and his times, and profoundly aware of deep cultural history (and sometimes cultural futurity) in visual art, popular culture, politics, literature, theology, philosophy, the biological and physical sciences, and more, so there are certainly contexts aplenty in which to consider him. as sarah haggarty notes in her introduction (1), blake’s various identities—verbal and visual artist, illustrator and original writer, engaged social critic and alienated crier in the wilderness—all demand consideration in profoundly disparate milieux. blake’s mental geography was untethered from both space and time, and he was as likely to attack, satirize, or parody as to harmonize with elements of any given context; even his allegories tend to operate in both hermeneutic directions, so it can be very hard to decide which contextual end is up. as a result, many of these essays are better described as topical overviews rather than expositions of blake in context. and even when he can be treated in a well-defined context of some sort, one is soon acknowledging that blake’s place in and relationship to that particular set of phenomena are unique, and that the understanding gained by thinking about him in those specific terms is at once genuinely useful and yet ultimately both partial and evanescent, if not downright illusory. as editor of this collection, haggarty recognizes the categorical and theoretical complexities of the undertaking and has wisely determined not to worry about them too much. she has assembled an impressive array of romanticists and blake specialists, most of them wise veterans, to write almost two-score essays in four broad overlapping categories of contexts or quasi-contexts. the result is very successful overall, even if reading it straight through is a bit like working one’s way through an encyclopedia from a to z. the entries offer not only various contexts but also various (largely untheorized) conceptions of context itself. most provide cogent, tactful reviews of insights from selected recent work clustered around recognized topics, and the quality of the essays is such that, for the next decade or so, i expect that readers will be peeking into the index and table of contents as the first step in exploring a new topic in blake, or to remind themselves of other angles when a given critical approach is not helping, or to gather their thoughts before teaching a class. it will be particularly useful to beginners in blake studies who need sound, authoritative generalizations about him, his work, and his times as a foundation for more particular discussions. the first division of the book, “life, works, and reception,” features the most blake-focused versions of context, including a brisk eight-page biography by leo damrosch; a sketch by jon mee of the various circles of friends, patrons, competitors, admirers, imagined readers, and incidental acquaintances who gathered around—and, in many cases, later drew away from—blake at one time or another; and short discussions, reviewing categories in blake’s oeuvre, of “engraving” (mark crosby), “illuminated books” (david worrall),in listing blake’s poetry in conventional typography (not his topic), worrall omits poetical sketches and “to the queen” (35). “manuscripts” (haggarty), “book illustration” (luisa calè), and “painting” (martin myrone); these are followed by “early reception” (sibylle erle and keri davies, particularly good on female patrons), “late reception” (jason whittaker), and a judicious historical review by morris eaves of the great swamp of blake studies, “editing and editions,” admirably nondismal and alligator free. “part ii: form, genre, and mode,” as one might expect, is somewhat more concerned with the ways blake’s work responds to non-blake phenomena; edifying and thoughtful sections on “comedy” (fred parker), “prophecy” (ian balfour), “rhythm” (derek attridge), “songs” (steve newman), “sound” (a particularly useful review by michael d. hurley of the aspects of blake’s prosody not covered by attridge), “sublimity” (david baulch), and “system, myth, and symbol” (tilottama rajan) mostly address the way his work relates to these headings in the abstract rather than the response of blake texts and pictures to any particular extra-blakean context. the last two divisions, “part iii: creative cross-currents” (with eight dense chapters on such massive topics as “the bible” by steven prickett and “milton” by g. a. rosso) and “part iv: history, society, and culture” (including thirteen essays on such topics as “animals” by kurt fosso, “london” by saree makdisi, and “sex, sexuality, and gender” by susan matthews), are thoroughly blake-centric but address contexts further removed from blake himself. some of these essays are barely long enough to get beyond superficiality, and some achieve depth by focusing on a subtopic: rosso’s seven pages, for instance, consider blake’s relationship with milton mostly in terms of blake’s evolving responses to the earlier poet’s engagement with his cultural and civil contexts. those who have explored these topics for themselves will inevitably think of omissions large and small, but there are riches here; indeed, the accumulated expertise and high level of generality that prevail mean that throughout the book one encounters useful observations, modestly offered, that reflect insights gained by the authors’ years of studying and writing about much more minute particulars. there are also critical juxtapositions that might not have come up in a narrower discussion, or one that defined context as the realm of “not-blake”; calè observes, for instance, that the format of the job designs, with text surrounding an image, inverts that of blake’s gray and young designs, in which the design surrounds a block of typographic text (64). if one is hoping for a treasury or even an index of heretofore unrecognized intertexts or startlingly relevant historical phenomena, however, one will be disappointed. this book will be useful to scholars, but the reader for whom it will be most appropriate is one who needs a well-informed answer to the question, “what do i absolutely need to know about this, or what’s the consensus on this?” if one wishes to learn more about these topics one will find leads in the “further reading” section but neither a comprehensive bibliography nor many examples of contextual texts or images.there are illustrations in the book, but except for a print by basire cited by crosby, all are blake works. nevertheless, the collection has already proven its value; in the week since i finished reading it, i have already quoted makdisi in a class on hogarth and blake—“london was … in blake’s lifetime a city of scavengers and beggars, a city of those living precariously on (or over) the margins of civilised life” (279)—and recommended calè’s essay to someone. in the future, i expect i will regularly refer stumped students to a chapter or two, hoping to provide a view of the lay of the land sufficient to get them started. review: tobias churton, jerusalem! the real life of william blake tobias churton. jerusalem! the real life of william blake. london: watkins, 2014. xl + 360 pp. £25.00/​$29.95, hardcover. reviewed by dennis m. read dennis m. read (read@denison.edu) is associate professor emeritus at denison university, granville, ohio. he now lives in ashland, oregon. he is the author of r. h. cromek, engraver, editor, and entrepreneur. starting with its boastful title, complete with an exclamation point, tobias churton’s book promises much. the boast is driven by two claims: that the papers of churton’s ancestor ralph churton (1754–1831), an english churchman and oxford university academic, significantly illuminate blake’s life and times, and that blake’s works should be viewed through the lens of gnosticism, particularly the theosophy of jakob böhme. churton argues that blake “has been lost under a myriad of inadequate biographies, college dissertations and arts commentaries, too frequently written by people who have not found the luminescent keys to blake’s symbolism and liberating spirit” (xxviii). he aims to provide luminescence. disappointingly, he delivers more heat than light. first, the churton papers. ralph churton was a close contemporary of blake, born three years earlier and dying four years later. during his lifetime he published several biographies of church worthies. tobias churton draws from them, as well as from ralph churton’s letters, diaries, and pamphlets, “to cast light and perspective on blake’s life and times,” explaining that the “essential interests [of blake and churton], the spiritual destiny of their country, remained, fascinatingly, the same” (xxxvii). the two, however, were completely unknown to each other; furthermore, churton offers no evidence that either man was aware of the other’s public production. (the closest ralph churton came to blake was in january 1806, when he met john flaxman in london to confer about mending broken sculptures in the arundel collection at oxford.) the usefulness of the churton papers, therefore, lies in ralph churton’s recording various moments of state affairs and reflecting on their import. churton lards his biography of blake with quotations from ralph churton’s writings, and, while they indeed illuminate decisive moments, they add little to our sense of blake. for instance, the diary entry about the battle of waterloo: 23rd june [1815]. banbury [oxfordshire]. important victory of the duke of wellington near nivelles, 150 cannon taken & 60 in the night by prince blucher in pursuit [of french forces]; but with heavy loss of officers etc. 18th the decisive day in a battle [waterloo] from 10 till 7, & fighting on 16th and 17th. d.g. [thanks be to god]. (313) other entries express ralph churton’s concern about the restless and possibly revolutionary mood of the english common people, forms of dissent from the church of england, and changes in the politics of the english parliament. he offers no special insight into these matters, and they have no direct implication for blake—with the possible exception of his diary entry of 11 march 1803 that “the french are arming …. o lord, be thou our defence & shield; & let not those who would overturn the world prosper; pardon, unite, and save us for thy dear son’s sake” (271), which registers the desperate patriotism of the nation underlying the charge of blake’s sedition later that year. the other engine is the gnostic source of blake’s thought. tobias churton’s strongest credential is as a scholar of western esotericism, a grab bag of mysticism including neoplatonism, swedenborgianism, and böhme’s writings. in this regard he is inspired by the writings of kathleen raine (the dedicatee of his book) and, more recently, the published research of marsha keith schuchard and keri davies into the blake family’s involvement with the moravian church. his argument that blake was substantially influenced by the gnostic tradition is unsustained, however, despite great attention to parallels between böhme’s writings and blake’s the marriage of heaven and hell (165-77). blake indeed refers approvingly to böhme in marriage, but establishing his indebtedness to such mystical thinkers requires a much more systematic and detailed study. churton follows the lead of schuchard’s why mrs blake cried: william blake and the sexual basis of spiritual vision (2006) in suggesting that an exercise of sexuality promotes visionary states, a belief that blake took from swedenborg (151). this line of thought leads him to pay particular attention to plate 29 in milton, depicting milton’s star entering blake’s left foot. churton claims, “the figure [of blake] has a healthy erection, obscured in some copies of the plate by underwear …, applied for reasons of ‘taste’ by either tatham or linnell” (297). he goes on to state that, according to swedenborg, “the big toe of the left foot [is connected] to the genitals (a tantric doctrine also), and its stimulation by the spiritual condition of the person brings to the left foot a ‘fiery’ sensation linked to the fire in the genitals.” the suggestion is tantalizing, but likely nothing more. later, in his discussion of jerusalem, churton states that los’s hammer “is clearly a phallus and testes” (308). to paraphrase freud, however, sometimes a hammer is just a hammer. the biography otherwise follows the established course of blake’s career, with particular attention given to the last two decades of the eighteenth century (chapters 7-18, pp. 77-261, more than half the text). along the way, churton laments what he calls serious mistakes of blake’s judgment. the first is his becoming an engraver: “a seven-year apprenticeship as an engraver was the wrong footing for blake altogether. it was the worst and most fundamentally damaging decision of his life, and he made it, or was forced into it, when he was just 14” (62). churton maintains that blake should have channeled his talents exclusively into painting because engraving was regarded as a craft, not an art, and blake consequently was branded as a tradesman not capable of realizing artistic expression. considering that the bulk of blake’s work is his illuminated writings, it is a strange position to take. the second mistake, according to churton, is blake’s joining james parker to establish a print shop in 1784: blake himself now made another of what hindsight shows was one of his singularly bad decisions. … ten years later a print shop might have done better business, but it was not a good time for prints, and the shop was not situated advantageously for the trade. they might have made a success of it on the strand or in piccadilly, or even golden square itself, but broad street was no artistic mecca, and blake was no businessman. (102) the key word in this passage is “hindsight.” certainly the business was not a success. but it seems odd to single out this venture. throughout his life blake showed over and over that he was no businessman. churton makes several other remarkable claims. regarding the lost large-scale vision of the last judgment and the ancient britons he asserts, “had the paintings survived, perception of blake’s artistic significance would most certainly have been enhanced, and people might see why he compared himself, without qualification, to michelangelo and raphael” (300). earlier, he speculates, “had blake been born in germany, he would have been considered a great philosopher” (250). such cannonballs are arresting, if nothing else. throughout the biography, churton shows that he is not stuck in antiquarianism by making copious references to such recent pop figures as van morrison, the doors, and, especially, the beatles. he sprinkles in other recent figures, events, and issues as well, perhaps to show that blake is relevant today. these references, along with churton’s generally adulatory tone, make clear that he holds blake in the highest regard. that counts for much and makes the study more engaging. his writing leaves much to be desired, however. i’ll single out only a couple of howlers: “to ignore the gifts of the spirit is to ignore god’s voice; the result is to become a slave to history, a passive performer whose acts are dust: an empty fool who has put his wealth in a house of cards built on sand” (126). the combination of dust, a house of cards, and a foundation of sand makes for a precarious situation. “on 2 july, blake wrote to cumberland, bearing his soul” (257). one can silently emend the word to “baring,” but the image of churton’s formulation is haunting. overall, churton’s delineation of blake’s life is derivative and his facts need more careful verification. for instance, he states in a footnote that cromek collected 89 subscriptions to the grave (341). the actual number is 680. but even if some details are questionable, this biography is nevertheless a worthwhile effort. churton is an apostle who gives blake proper homage, and he brings to life a blake who engages us as an artist and thinker. reading jerusalem: the horizon of expectations reading jerusalem: the horizon of expectations by sheila a. spector sheila spector (sheilaspector@verizon.net) is an independent scholar who has devoted her career to exploring the intersection between romanticism and judaica in general, and blake and kabbalism in particular. in preparation for her work on blake, she compiled jewish mysticism: an annotated bibliography on the kabbalah in english (garland). she then published “glorious incomprehensible”: the development of blake’s kabbalistic language and “wonders divine”: the development of blake’s kabbalistic myth (both bucknell up). currently, she is working on a book-length study of blake’s evolution from an exoteric to an esoteric thinker and artist (to be published by routledge). introduction i. purpose ii. point of view iii. myth setting characterization plot iv. theme conclusion despite blake’s belief that jerusalem fulfilled its purpose, its readers have found it puzzling, if not incomprehensible.in a letter to george cumberland (12 april 1827), blake says he considers jerusalem to be “finishd” (e 784). (all blake citations are to the erdman edition, abbreviated e; unless indicated otherwise, all blake quotations are from jerusalem.) in “jerusalem and blake’s final works,” essick initiates twenty-first-century criticism with the observation, “to plunge into jerusalem is to confront a profoundly unsettling experience” (251). more recently, the focus has shifted from blake’s intention to reader’s response. in the most extensive studies, yoder’s the narrative structure of william blake’s poem jerusalem approaches the poem “as a combination of narrative and drama” (15), while sklar’s blake’s jerusalem as visionary theatre interprets it as “visionary theatre” (3). both provide good surveys of the earlier critical context (yoder 4-21, sklar 8-15). it should be noted that while essick, yoder, sklar, and i frequently arrive at the same conclusions, our assumptions and procedures differ. this disparity between his intention and their response reflects a hermeneutical dysfunction: attempts to reconcile the conventional horizon of expectations with the prophecy have proved unsuccessful. although the tendency has been to blame blake for not conforming to his audience’s preconceptions, the opposite is the case: their horizon of expectations is predicated on two generally unexamined, inappropriate premises. first, despite blake’s assertion that he created his own system, readers have consistently approached jerusalem as though it were predicated on the conventional western exoteric myth, which is polarized around the duality of good and evil. the second assumption is that the myth remains consistent throughout blake’s corpus, a supposition that has led to a kind of anachronism in which interpretations of earlier works have been imposed on texts written sometimes decades later, or, conversely, in which later works have been used to back-read earlier texts. these two assumptions constitute the primary obstacles to understanding jerusalem. as a corrective, this paper seeks to generate an alternative horizon of expectations, predicated on an esoteric, as opposed to exoteric, approach.for purposes of clarity, i oversimplify “esoteric” to signify that which is limited to a privileged inner circle, and “exoteric” that which is designed for public consumption. for a historical overview, see hanegraaff, “esotericism.” von stuckrad discusses the intellectual implications in “conceptualizing the study of esoteric discourse,” the third chapter of locations of knowledge in medieval and early modern europe (43-64). finally, i follow frye’s lead in anatomy of criticism (133) and merge classical and christian archetypes into an amalgamated western myth, which i describe with the phrase “exoteric christian.” this is not an arbitrary choice; as i demonstrate in my companion volumes “glorious incomprehensible”: the development of blake’s kabbalistic language and “wonders divine”: the development of blake’s kabbalistic myth, blake gradually incorporated aspects of the kabbalistic attitude toward language and elements of the kabbalistic myth into his composite art, culminating in jerusalem.the historical, cultural, and textual justifications for most of my assertions can be found in these two books. rather than repeat myself, i include parenthetical references to indicate where more information is located, using the abbreviations gi for “glorious incomprehensible” and wd for “wonders divine.” in those studies, i explored what blake had done; here, i consider how and why he did it. based on and designed only for jerusalem, the following horizon of expectations is meant to provide the foundation for more coherent readings of blake’s final prophecy. reduced to the basics, narrative revolves around four elements: 1) purpose; 2) point of view; 3) myth; and 4) theme. governing all choices is purpose. unlike conventional literature, which is said either to imitate an action or to express an emotion, the esoteric text is intended to elevate consciousness so that readers can experience vision for themselves. this alternative purpose yields an entirely new approach to point of view. as the source of the narrative, point of view is usually interpreted in terms of a consolidated ego whose knowledge, bias, and psychological state all determine how the story is told. the esoteric narrator, in contrast, situates himself as a mediating secretary, attempting to annihilate the selfhood so that he can translate the divine vision into comprehensible language, as structured by the culture’s dominating myth. in the west, exoteric christianity provides the basis for interpreting the setting, characters, and plot sequence. through the esoteric myth, blake replaces the corporeal world of time and space with the fourfold kabbalistic cosmos. characters, no longer lining up along the moral axis of good and evil, aggregate around the three main figures: jerusalem, the eponymous heroine; los, the macrocosm; and albion, the microcosm. finally, the plot conforms to the cycle of exile and return. together, these formal elements produce an allegory articulating jerusalem’s theme, the prisca theologia: belief that there existed a pure form of christianity historically suppressed by the organized church. obviously heretical, the theme helps explain why blake felt the need for an esoteric—that is, private—as opposed to an exoteric—public—horizon of expectations. i. purpose the purpose of jerusalem is transformative (gi 27-33, 151-63). basic communication, though necessary, is self-limiting, implying that anything beyond its bounds is irrelevant, if not nonexistent. the fundamental flaw in empirical logic is its failure to acknowledge that the supposedly objective mode of thought is essentially subjective: “if perceptive organs vary: objects of perception seem to vary: / if the perceptive organs close: their objects seem to close also” (30 [34].55-56, e 177). basically, as los points out, it is impossible for the physical senses to perceive anything not amenable to the physical senses. this does not mean that nothing else can exist, only that empiricism is incapable of processing anything beyond its circumscribed capabilities. jerusalem encourages the development of what blake had earlier called the “poetic genius,” the innate gnostic extrarational faculty that apprehends spiritual realms beyond the range of empiricism.though apparently unaware of scholarship on the subject, sklar, in describing the “visionary theatre” (3), and yoder, in explaining the “rhetoric of discontinuity” (the narrative structure 97), both approximate the transformative mode of thought. on plate 4, albion initiates the crisis when, choosing demonstration over faith, he denies the possibility of alternative modes of knowing. the ensuing prophecy depicts how to transgress those newly imposed boundaries, by recognizing and developing the gnostic faculty, identified as “a gate of precious stones and gold / seen only by emanations, by vegetations viewless” (34 [38].55-56, e 181). while it still exists—“there is a grain of sand in lambeth that satan cannot find”—that faculty has been diminished, if not obscured, by organized religion: “but should the watch fiends find it, they would call it sin / and lay its heavens & their inhabitants in blood of punishment” (37 [41].15, 19-20, e 183). although condemned, the gnostic faculty, as los realizes at the climax of chapter 4, endows man with the ability to apprehend higher spiritual realms: “when in eternity man converses with man they enter / into each others bosom (which are universes of delight)” (88.3-4, e 246). finally, at the end of the prophecy, everyone “conversed together in visionary forms dramatic” (98.28, e 257).coming from an exoteric direction, easson derives basically the same conclusion, that blake “sacrificed those vegetable traits we call beauty for another order of beauty altogether” (327). in order to fulfill his purpose of enabling his audience to emulate los’s example, blake developed a radical form of defamiliarization. more than simply presenting the ordinary in an extraordinary manner, he shatters the expected relationships among the various formal and thematic elements of narrative by substituting esoteric for exoteric archetypes. preventing the audience from automatically processing the content, blake encourages them, instead, to reflect on the mode of presentation, so that they can then reconnect with their own innate gnostic faculties. in this way, he accomplishes his “great task! / to open the eternal worlds, to open the immortal eyes / of man inwards into the worlds of thought: into eternity” (5.17-19, e 147). 1. correspondences in jerusalem: kabbalistic archetypes and blakean equivalents (see enlargement). chart by the author. ii. point of view interpretation hinges on point of view, the consciousness through which a narrative is filtered. in the kabbalistic system, there is a hierarchy of four modes of interpretation—literal, allegorical, moral, and mystical: [literal], the “simple” interpretation of the scriptures, approaching it by all the ways available to elementary reasoning; [allegorical], “allusion” to the many meanings hidden in every phrase, every letter, sign and point of the torah; [moral], the “homiletic exposition” of doctrinal truths, including all possible interpretations of the torah; [mystical], “mystery,” initiation into … the divine wisdom concealed in the scriptures and called, insofar as it is a teaching, … the esoteric “wisdom of the tradition.” (schaya 18) the four levels of exegesis are manifested, in jerusalem, by four distinct voices. the most basic, the biographical blake, corresponds to the literal presentation of the vision. next, the analytical voice of the prose plates provides the explanation for “every letter, sign and point” of the text. third, the recipient of the vision (the italicized blake) conveys the moral implication of his vision (gi 156-59). finally, what might be called the “visualizer” coordinates between the visual and verbal to convey the esoteric “wisdom” of jerusalem. the poem as a whole is grounded by references to the biographical blake, who “write[s] in south molton street, what i both see and hear” (34 [38].42, e 180). like a videographer, blake introduces references to european and middle-eastern geography, recent history, current events, and personal experiences in order to correlate the spiritual vision with human experience in the corporeal world.as clark notes, “jerusalem should be read not as the culmination of a self-enclosed mythic system, aloof from and disdainful of contemporary history, but … as a text specifically of the 1820s” (“jerusalem as imperial prophecy” 181). in this way, he also exemplifies the individual who develops his gnostic faculty to apprehend higher spiritual matters. as the recipient of supernatural dictation, he encourages himself at the end of chapter 2: “shudder not, but write, & the hand of god will assist you! / therefore i write” (47.17-18, e 196). on the second level, the speaker of the prose plates explains how he has “produced a variety in every line, both of cadences & number of syllables. every word and every letter is studied and put into its fit place” (pl. 3, e 146).see my “kabbalistic reading of jerusalem’s prose plates.” specifically, as prefaces, the four prose plates trace the history of religion, culminating in blake’s version of true christianity, the prisca theologia. the first, “to the public,” introduces both the poem as a whole and chapter 1 in particular, placing jerusalem within a nonsectarian christian context: “i also hope the reader will be with me, wholly one in jesus our lord, who is the god [of fire] and lord [of love] to whom the ancients look’d and saw his day afar off, with trembling & amazement” (pl. 3, e 145). next, he appeals “to the jews,” whom he approaches philo-semitically, like pre-christians who share the same values: “if humility is christianity; you o jews are the true christians” (pl. 27, e 174).lincoln associates “to the jews” with “the disingenuous ecumenical gestures of the evangelical mission to the jews” (159). third, “to the deists” condemns natural religion for denying the visionary faculty: “but your greek philosophy (which is a remnant of druidism) teaches that man is righteous in his vegetated spectre: an opinion of fatal & accursed consequence to man” (pl. 52, e 200). finally, “to the christians” advocates the true version of christianity: “i know of no other christianity and of no other gospel than the liberty both of body & mind to exercise the divine arts of imagination” (pl. 77, e 231). the third level of exegesis is provided by the italicized blake. unlike the conventional creative consciousness, which either imitates an action or expresses an emotion, the narrator blake assumes the role of secretary (gi 156-57): this theme calls me in sleep night after night, & ev’ry morn awakes me at sun-rise, then i see the saviour over me spreading his beams of love, & dictating the words of this mild song. (4.3-5, e 146) he fulfills that function by subordinating his own ego. in praying to “annihilate the selfhood in me” (5.22, e 147), blake seeks to make himself a transparent recipient of the divine vision: “so spake the vision of albion & in him so spake in my hearing / the universal father” (97.5-6, e 256). finally, the mystical level is provided by the visualizer, the implicit level of consciousness that coordinates the verbal and visual components into coherent image acts, the bimodal counterpart to the conventional speech act.the term image act was coined by liza bakewell, who argues that “images, rather than re-present reality and therefore be largely descriptive, are more accurately categorized as actions. … furthermore, a theory of speech, together with a theory of images, must also compose a significant part of a theory of human communication: communication as action” (22). although bakewell does not refer to blake, her conclusion gestures toward his composite art: “therefore, a proper theory of speech acts should incorporate images, in the same way that a proper theory of image acts should incorporate language. these two systems of communication, as different as they are in practice, as separate and apart they often seem, are, in fact, in cahoots” (30). unlike the conventional relationship between a verbal text and its visual illustration, in jerusalem the mediums are complementary in the sense that each fulfills its own function, the term visualizer referring to the level of consciousness that determines which to use and how to organize their interrelationship. from this perspective, each plate can be viewed as a discrete image act, while in its totality the succession of 100 plates reflects the choices made by the visualizer as the means of conveying “the divine wisdom concealed in” blake’s vision. iii. myth myth provides the structuring principle for intentionality, determining the kind of relationship the mind establishes with externality (wd 19, 177n1). thus, myth controls thought, validating and prioritizing ideas in terms of how well they conform to preexisting archetypes. in the west, the exoteric christian myth provides the basis for most of the fundamental elements of fiction, including setting, characterization, and plot. by the time blake worked on jerusalem he had substituted the christianized form of kabbalism for the exoteric myth, to liberate himself from the preexisting system that threatened to enslave him.adams intuits the influence of western esotericism, inferring “some prior ur-myth,” though concluding, erroneously, “that myth never existed as such” (628). setting kabbalists view our world as one of a series of cycles of existence that originated in and will revert to a primordial chaos. temporally, jerusalem depicts a seven-thousand-year cycle that works itself out in the first six thousand—“and all that has existed in the space of six thousand years: / permanent, & not lost” (13.59-60, e 157)—then reverts to the state of chaos in the last thousand, in preparation for the next cycle. spacially, the cosmos consists of four planes, governed by four souls (see illus. 1; wd 19): 1) the highest, the world of emanation, corresponding to the godhead’s original idea to create and governed by the immortal soul; 2) the world of prototypical creation, where the idea is actualized on the spiritual plane by the spiritual soul; 3) the world of archetypal formation, where the idea is given form by the rational soul; and 4) the world of fact, where the form is implemented by the animal soul. all four planes were originally intended to be purely spiritual; however, the primordial error resulted in a cosmic crisis. although the highest world remained unaffected, it became isolated from the others, which collectively became known as the world of separation. each of these was lowered a degree, and the last, our world of fact, became corporeal. now the goal is to reconnect all four. the souls were divided in a corresponding manner, the lower three being separated from the immortal soul. in the now-corporeal world of fact, the animal soul is tasked with providing for physical subsistence. the rational soul is to organize the rules by which survival can be perpetuated. on the third level, the spiritual soul is to analyze the process by which the rules are organized so that the three of them can reunite with the immortal soul and all can merge with the undifferentiated reality of the one soul. the impediment to the process is caused by the rational soul, which, misperceiving itself as the height of all things, prevents, rather than facilitates, reunification. only when reason accepts its role as passive mediator, whose function is to facilitate apprehension of higher spiritual matters, can restoration occur. blake explores the conflict among the souls in the four zoas; in jerusalem, however, they are treated collectively (see zoas in the section on characterization). the setting for jerusalem, “the sleep of ulro” (4.1, e 146), is the cycle initiated when albion “turns down the valleys dark” (4.22), thereby causing the cosmic crisis: “the ancient porches of albion are / darken’d! they are drawn thro’ unbounded space, scatter’d upon / the void in incoherent despair!” (5.1-3, e 147). the cycle ends when “the breath divine went forth over the morning hills albion rose” (95.5, e 255). in the interim, the three lower planes remain isolated from the highest, blake’s eden, whose point “is walled up, till time of renovation” (12.52, e 156). beulah, blake’s world of prototypical creation, contains the actualization of the idea on the spiritual plane, as the saviour says: “ye are my members o ye sleepers of beulah, land of shades!” (4.21, e 146). the third plane is “this dark ulro & voidness” (23.38, e 169), the site where the archetypes are distorted; they are then implemented in blake’s generation, the arena in which regeneration can occur: “the all tremendous unfathomable non ens / of death was seen in regenerations terrific or complacent” (98.33-34, e 258). not the penalty of adam, corporeality is the site where—once the archetypal forms have been corrected—mortality can be transformed into immortality: “of the passage through / eternal death! and of the awaking to eternal life” (4.1-2, e 146). supplementing the kabbalistic myth, los re-forms the archetypes in golgonooza. while “around golgonooza lies the land of death eternal” (13.30, e 157), within the city is “a wondrous golden building immense with ornaments sublime” (59.24, e 209). the archetype for regeneration is the mundane shell: “in all the twenty-seven heavens, numberd from adam to luther; / from the blue mundane shell, reaching to the vegetative earth” (13.32-33, e 157).on the significance of twenty-seven, as well as other numerological patterns, see my “numerological analysis of jerusalem.” at the end of chapter 3, the form is complete: and above albions land was seen the heavenly canaan as the substance is to the shadow: and above albions twelve sons were seen jerusalems sons: and all the twelve tribes spreading over albion. as the soul is to the body, so jerusalems sons, are to the sons of albion: and jerusalem is albions emanation. (71.1-5, e 224) finally, in chapter 4, the archetype is actualized and unity is restored: “driving outward the body of death in an eternal death & resurrection / awaking it to life among the flowers of beulah rejoicing in unity” (98.20-21, e 257). characterization conventionally, characters line up moralistically, as symbolic representatives of christ and satan. in jerusalem, blake denigrates this mode of thought as nothing more than “the manner of the sons of albion”: in their strength they take the two contraries which are calld qualities, with which every substance is clothed, they name them good & evil from them they make an abstract, which is a negation not only of the substance from which it is derived a murderer of its own body: but also a murderer of every divine member. (10.7-13, e 152-53) blake replaces this duality with an internal conflict between what the figure was intended to be and what it now appears to be: “names anciently rememberd, but now contemn’d as fictions!” (5.38, e 148). this paradigm revolves around three main figures: jerusalem, the eponymous heroine; los, the macrocosm; and albion, the microcosm. the others are either their components or manifestations on various cosmic planes. this section explains the basic archetypal identities of the figures; the significance of their interactions is indicated in the section on plot. (bold print indicates names with their own entry.) jerusalem jerusalem is blake’s version of the shekhinah, the kabbalistic divine presence (wd 110, 140-41, 145). she has no active role in the myth, having gone into exile at the initial fault, to be redeemed at the end of the cycle. however, she serves as the touchstone for the action. her initial existence indicates that there was originally to have been an immanent relationship between the creator and his creation, and her subsequent exile identifies the loss of that relationship. albion’s rejection of the saviour is merged with his repudiation of jerusalem: “jerusalem is not! her daughters are indefinite: / by demonstration, man alone can live, and not by faith” (4.27-28, e 147). the prophecy begins with albion’s denial of jerusalem and ends with his call for her return: “awake! awake jerusalem! o lovely emanation of albion / awake and overspread all nations as in ancient time” (97.1-2, e 256). kabbalistically, the exile of the shekhinah is symbolized by her relationship with adam kadmon (primordial man), identified by christians as the saviour. in a radical mythic reversal, each time adam rishon (created man) couples with his wife, he is said to help facilitate the reunification of adam kadmon and the shekhinah. thus, the microcosm actively assists in the restoration of the macrocosm. in jerusalem, blake projects the reunification of the shekhinah/jerusalem and adam kadmon/los through their ungenerated sons—rintrah, palamabron, theotormon, and bromion. intellectualizing the myth, he does not have adam rishon/albion sexually facilitate the reunification of jerusalem and los, but, instead, teaches him to differentiate between the shadow, vala, and the essential reality of jerusalem: “vala is but thy shadow, o thou loveliest among women! / a shadow animated by thy tears o mournful jerusalem!” (11.24-25, e 154). los described as a manifestation of the saviour, los conforms to the kabbalistic adam kadmon, as opposed to the exoteric version of christ (gi 159-63, wd 141-42). in the kabbalistic myth, adam kadmon—primordial man, the first completed entity—was intended to serve as the passive model for adam rishon—created or first man—to emulate. after the initial fault, adam kadmon was forced to assume an active role in cosmic restoration; to that end, he was fragmented into a series of physiognomies, corresponding to the souls and planes. from top to bottom, these are the ancient of days, the father, the mother, the son, and the daughter. the “son,” as the active manifestation of adam kadmon, was the most important; not surprisingly, he was associated by christian kabbalists with their saviour. mythically, the ultimate goal is the reunification of adam kadmon and the shekhinah, his female counterpart. as adam kadmon, los “enterd the door of death for albions sake inspired” (1.9, e 144) and labors at his furnace to complete the archetypes of restoration. in earlier iterations of the myth, blake had experimented with the physiognomies, associating los with the father, enitharmon the mother, orc the “son,” and the shadowy female the daughter. however, by the time he worked on jerusalem, he had abandoned those specific associations in favor of los as “the vehicular form of strong urthona” (53.1, e 202)—that is, the active manifestation of the immortal soul. at the end, albion learns from jesus that los has fulfilled the true christological function: “i see thee in the likeness & similitude of los my friend” (96.22, e 256). albion comparable to the biblical adam—his name signifying the individual, the race, and the land—albion conforms to the kabbalistic adam rishon, first or created man (gi 159, wd 142-45, 150). before the initial fault, adam is said to have been of enormous stature, extending through the four cosmic planes and containing within himself all of the souls. at the initial fault, his stature was reduced and the souls were separated from him. some were unaffected and rose back to their source; others were contaminated and need to be purified. to that end, they undergo a series of revolutions (see reuben), and when all are purified, the cosmos will be restored. within this context, the biblical adam’s disobedience is subordinated to the level of a secondary cause. had he not eaten the forbidden fruit, the cosmos would have immediately reverted to its originally intended form; because he did, the entire cycle must be traversed. as adam rishon, albion’s initial fault is to reject the saviour and deny the existence of jerusalem, immanence. to compensate, he must experience the entire cycle of existence so he can differentiate between physical death and spiritual annihilation—“o that death & annihilation were the same!” (23.40, e 169)—and understand the true meaning of grace: self-sacrifice for the sake of others. the other figures in the prophecy aggregate around these three. an alphabetical list of the major players follows, with brief indications of who they are and how they relate to the central conflict. ahania see emanation. bath bath is religion, a concept that, depending on the power structure, can be used either positively or negatively: “bath who is legions: he is the seventh, the physician and / the poisoner: the best and worst in heaven and hell” (37 [41].1-2, e 183). in chapter 2, before the institutionalization of religion, bath’s positive spiritual associations are emphasized: “bath, mild physician of eternity, mysterious power / whose springs are unsearchable & knowledg infinite” (41 [46].1-2, e 188). in chapter 3, the city is co-opted by exoteric christianity: “they vote the death of luvah, & they naild him to albions tree in bath” (65.8, e 216). finally, by the end of the chapter, bath has degenerated into an instrument of natural religion: “bath stood upon the severn with merlin & bladud & arthur / the cup of rahab in his hand” (75.2-3, e 230). bromion see ungenerated sons of los and jerusalem. dinah as “the youthful form of erin,” dinah appears at the end of chapter 3 to foreshadow the rebirth of the female will (gi 153, wd 141, 156): “i see a feminine form arise from the four terrible zoas / beautiful but terrible struggling to take a form of beauty” (74.52-54, e 230). underscoring her mythic function, her name is the feminine form of din, hebrew for the rigorous form of judgment governing the left side of the sefirotic tree (see emanation, and below under plot). emanation blake’s concept of emanation is tangentially related to the kabbalistic myth, where creation is effected through a process in which the godhead is said to have emanated from himself a series of sefirotsefirah (sing.), sefirot (pl.). to avoid confusion with blake’s entirely different use of the term emanation, i refer to the kabbalistic emanations with their hebrew designation.—hypostases, commonly referred to as emanations—that perform the work of creation. the sefirot assumed a number of different configurations, the most significant being that of the sefirotic tree (see illus. 2-5). horizontally, the tree corresponds to the four cosmic planes; vertically, the three columns represent the hermaphroditic split: a right side of pity, a left side of rigor, and the mediating central column. at the primordial fault, the sides were said to have separated, leaving each to tend toward the extreme of its nature. now, the goal of the cosmic cycle is for the central column to restore balance between male and female, pity and rigor. iconographically, the sefirotic tree has been used to symbolize virtually all aspects of creation, including the macroand microcosm, the cosmic planes, the souls, names of god, colors, planets, and body parts, to name a few (see illus. 4). while blake does not explicitly refer to the sefirotic tree, beginning with the butts tempera series he began organizing his visual art in terms of the three-columned structure.bindman, though not knowing its source, notes the tendency: “even so there are signs also in the butts tempera series of distinctive compositional modes, less easily explained in terms of such outside influences. there is a tendency towards centralization in some of the paintings, which is achieved by placing the central figure firmly on the main vertical axis. … in some cases blake goes further and relates figures on opposite sides of the picture to each other” (128). verbally, blake frequently uses the human correspondences of the central column—head, heart, loins, and feet—to signify the state of the individual. he introduces the concept on plate 14: los beheld his sons, and he beheld his daughters: every one a translucent wonder: a universe within, increasing inwards, into length and breadth, and heighth: starry & glorious: and they every one in their bright loins: have a beautiful golden gate which opens into the vegetative world: and every one a gate of rubies & all sorts of precious stones in their translucent hearts, which opens into the vegetative world: and every one a gate of iron dreadful and wonderful, in their translucent heads, which opens into the vegetative world. (14.16-24, e 158; emphasis mine) in this instance, the feet are omitted because the children are as yet ungenerated in “the vegetative world,” the world of fact. extensions of the concept of the hermaphroditic split, blake’s emanations are female counterparts to specific zoas, blake’s name for the souls (see illus. 1). enitharmon is the emanation of urthona, vala of luvah, ahania of urizen, and enion of tharmas. only enitharmon and vala play significant roles in jerusalem. finally, as los explains, in order for restoration to occur, “sexes must vanish & cease / to be” (92.13-14, e 252); emanations and zoas must merge into the central column, as depicted on plate 99 (see illus. 14). the following illustrations are included to indicate the plenitude of the sefirotic tree as an archetypal symbol. 2. the sefirotic tree (see enlargement). r. casway, a miscellaneous metaphysical essay (london, 1748), between pp. 358 and 359. this is the basic sefirotic tree, showing the positions of the emanations along the three columns, all linked through a series of canals. of special note is the “place of science,” the projected eleventh sefirah: da’at (knowledge), a necessary prerequisite for reuniting the world of separation and the world of emanation. 3. the sefirot and their cosmic correspondences (see enlargement). arthur edward waite, the secret doctrine in israel: a study of the zohar and its connections (london: william rider & son, 1913), frontispiece. this illustration portrays the relationship between the physiognomies that adam kadmon fragmented into and the divine emanations. the head at the top is the ancient of days; to his right and left are father and mother; the full figure beneath da’at is the “son”; and at the bottom is the head of the daughter. 4. multiple significations of the sefirot (see enlargement). chart by the author. the chart suggests the comprehensiveness of the sefirotic tree. in addition to the cosmic planes and their governing souls, the emanations are associated with divine potencies, names of god, colors, and body parts, among other things. 5. human configuration of the sefirot (see enlargement). christian d. ginsburg, the kabbalah: its doctrines, development, and literature (1863; london: longmans, green, reader, and dyer, 1865), between pp. 16 and 17. in this illustration, the sefirotic tree is the structural basis for what blake called the human form divine. the x in the figure’s right palm, symbolizing the stigmata, associates him with the christian saviour. enion see emanation. enitharmon the role of enitharmon as an emanation is complicated by her male counterpart, los, identified as “the vehicular form of strong urthona” (53.1, e 202), making him the active manifestation of adam kadmon. in earlier works, blake had experimented with the kabbalistic physiognomies, making los the father and enitharmon the mother (see above under los). although by jerusalem he had abandoned that concept, he still retained the relationship between los and enitharmon, identifying her as “a vegetated mortal wife of los” (14.13, e 158), who labors at her loom to effect restoration. however, given the relationship between los and urthona, she is also the emanation of the immortal soul, one of “two immortal forms” who “alone are escaped” (43 [29].28-29, e 191). they are identified as the emanation of los & his spectre: for whereever the emanation goes, the spectre attends her as her guard, & los’s emanation is named enitharmon, & his spectre is named urthona. (44 [30].1-4, e 193) the spectre urthona is the oxymoronic manifestation of immortality in the corporeal cosmos (see below under spectre); in this context, enitharmon is his female counterpart. erin expanding erin’s signification beyond the traditional name of ireland, blake includes the hebrew cognate aron, which could mean either “ark” or “tomb,” to create a symbol for the regenerated cosmos (gi 153, wd 141): “and the spaces of erin reach’d from the starry heighth, to the starry depth” (11.12, e 154).on the political implications of erin, see essick, “erin, ireland, and the emanation in blake’s jerusalem.” luvah luvah represents the spiritual soul (gi 131, wd 107), being “cast into the furnaces of affliction and sealed” (7.30, e 150). as albion laments, “the footsteps of the lamb of god were there: but now no more / no more shall i behold him, he is closd in luvahs sepulcher” (24.50-51, e 170). in chapter 3, luvah is depicted in terms of the exoteric christ, whose crucifixion is voted on (65.8, e 216). allegorically, the exoteric church scapegoated spirituality for the sake of its own hegemony (see theme, below). see also zoas. palamabron see ungenerated sons of los and jerusalem. rahab a blakean construct, rahab, whose name is based partly on the hebrew root for breadth, signifies space in the corporeal cosmos (gi 134-36, 182n11). as daughters of vala, whose association with urizen consolidated a material form of religion, rahab and tirzah together constitute its coordinates, “weaving the deaths of the mighty into a tabernacle” (67.33, e 220). reuben reuben symbolizes the reincarnated soul: “reuben slept in the cave of adam, and los folded his tongue / between lips of mire & clay, then sent him forth over jordan” (32 [36].5-6, e 178) (gi 151-53, wd 149-50). rintrah see ungenerated sons of los and jerusalem. satan in characterizing satan, blake exploits the hebrew etymology of the name, “the adversary.” in exoteric christianity, where obedience is postulated as the greatest good, its antithesis is defined as disobedience. by analogy, when the greatest good is redefined as self-annihilation, its antithesis—the consolidation of the selfhood—becomes the referent signified by the name satan: “the great selfhood / satan: worshipd as god by the mighty ones of the earth” (29 [33].17-18, e 175). as an antithetical value, satan has no independent existence except within the framework of a binary opposition: he is a “body of doubt that seems but is not” (93.20, e 253). sefirotic tree see emanation. shadow an adaptation of the kabbalistic ẓel, “shadow” is the projection of an inner identity (wd 110, 145): when all their crimes, their punishments their accusations of sin: all their jealousies revenges. murders. hidings of cruelty in deceit appear only in the outward spheres of visionary space and time. (92.15-17, e 252) when consolidated, the inner identity becomes a spectre. spectre the spectre is a blakean adaptation of the kabbalistic ẓelem, “the principle of individuality with which every single human being is endowed, the spiritual configuration or essence that is unique to him and to him alone” (scholem 158). in the kabbalistic myth, “the [animal, rational, and spiritual souls] were each assigned a ẓelem of their own which made it possible for them to function in the human body. without the ẓelem the soul would burn the body up with its fierce radiance” (159). in jerusalem, the spectres are consolidated manifestations of individual figures (wd 110, 145): “an abstract objecting power, that negatives every thing / this is the spectre of man” (10.14-15, e 153). the most important is los’s spectre. once consolidated, he articulates the doubts los has about his entire enterprise, though at the end, after “los alterd his spectre & every ratio of his reason” (91.50, e 252), restoration occurs. see also urthona. tharmas introduced as “the vegetated tongue even the devouring tongue” (14.4, e 158), tharmas represents the animal soul, physical existence in the corporeal cosmos (gi 136-37, wd 108, 111): “luvah slew tharmas the angel of the tongue & albion brought him / to justice in his own city of paris, denying the resurrection” (63.5-6, e 214). see also zoas. theotormon see ungenerated sons of los and jerusalem. tirzah her name deriving from the seventh commandment, lo tirzaḥ (“thou shalt not kill”), tirzah signifies the mortality of time: “tirzah sits weeping to hear the shrieks of the dying: her knife / of flint is in her hand” (67.24-25, e 220) (gi 134-36). together, tirzah and her sister rahab constitute time and space, coordinates of the corporeal cosmos, the world of generation that will be transformed into regeneration: “other daughters weave on the cushion & pillow, network fine / that rahab & tirzah may exist & live & breathe & love” (59.42-43, e 209). ungenerated sons of los and jerusalem a blakean innovation, the collective use of bromion, theotormon, palamabron, and rintrah in los is analogous to the four zoas in albion (wd 158). in the kabbalistic myth, the reunification of adam kadmon and the shekhinah signifies cosmic restoration; in jerusalem, the sons remain mostly ungenerated, their labor signifying the process through which restoration will be achieved: “these four remain to guard the four walls of jerusalem” (72.13, e 226). urizen urizen represents the rational soul, the intellectual faculty intended to organize the rules by which the animal soul survives (gi 131, 157).for a detailed analysis of the name urizen, see my “the reasons for ‘urizen.’” in earlier works, blake focused on the rational soul’s responsibility for causing the initial fault; in jerusalem, though, urizen actually does what he is supposed to do, “delivering form out of confusion” (58.22, e 207). see also zoas. urthona three mythemes converge in the figure of urthona. the first two are kabbalistic—the immortal soul (gi 132) and adam kadmon/los. as los comforts himself: “i know i am urthona keeper of the gates of heaven, / and that i can at will expatiate in the gardens of bliss” (82.81-82, e 241). finally, as the active manifestation of urthona, los represents the true christological function: “the divine appearance was the likeness & similitude of los” (96.7, e 255). see also zoas. vala vala’s identity is a combination of two distinct archetypes: the emanation of luvah and the shadow of jerusalem (gi 138-39, 153, 183n16-17, wd 145-46). as the former, vala is the rigorous manifestation of spirituality. at the initial conflagration, she feeds luvah into the furnace, eliminating the merciful right side and leaving the judgmental form of religion, as manifested through two of her daughters, rahab and tirzah. as the shadow of jerusalem, immanence, she is by implication transcendence. as jerusalem reminds vala: “the lamb of god reciev’d me in his arms he smil’d upon us: / he made me his bride & wife: he gave thee to albion” (20.39-40, e 165-66). vala should be to albion as jerusalem is to the lamb. however, the shadow has consolidated into the emanation who fed luvah into the furnace, rejecting her intended function. zoas collectively, the four zoas represent the four souls: urthona, luvah, urizen, and tharmas (gi 138). in the macrocosm, they govern the four cosmic planes, eden, beulah, ulro, and generation respectively. in the microcosm, they constitute the intellectual faculties whose interactions reflect albion’s state of mind: “the four zoa’s who are the four eternal senses of man” (32 [36].31, e 178). collectively, their state is used as a touchstone for evaluating albion’s progress: in chapter 2, “the four zoa’s clouded rage” (32 [36].25, e 178); in chapter 3, “the four zoa’s rush around on all sides in dire ruin” (58.47, e 208); and immediately before albion rises in chapter 4, “the four zoa’s in all their faded majesty burst out in fury / and fire” (88.55-56, e 247). plot in the west, plot, organized around the conflict between good and evil, usually conforms to a linear six-part structure: exposition, conflict, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution. in contrast, the christian kabbalistic myth, replicating the cycle of exile and return, expands the three-part jewish prototype into four: primordial institution, state of destitution, modern constitution, and supreme restitution (wd 40-46). the first phase depicts creation through a process of emanation in which the godhead produced a series of ten hypostases (for different representations, see illus. 2-5). these divine lights were placed in vessels made of dross, intended to restrain their natural effulgence. the initial fault occurred when, during the emanative process, the fifth divine light, din (judgment), overestimating its potency, drew the other lights into its own vessel, which, proving too weak, shattered. the result was the state of destitution. while some of the lights, remaining unaffected, were able to return to the world of emanation, others were contaminated by the shards and drawn down to the lower worlds, with the lowest becoming corporeal. in the modern constitution, it is necessary to separate out the shards of dross so that the lights can return to their original locations. the process is to be accomplished through the efforts of both the macroand microcosm. on the macrocosmic level, adam kadmon fragments into a series of physiognomies, the most significant being the “son,” whose function is to perform the actual separation. on the microcosmic level, adam rishon is to purify the soul. because the task cannot be completed in a single lifetime, each soul must undergo a series of revolutions. supreme restitution will occur when all of the shards have been separated and all of the souls purified. at that point, the cosmos will return to the primordial state, in preparation for the next cycle of existence. christians identify adam kadmon as christ, associating the final phase with the saviour’s ultimate defeat of satan.this is the structure found in van helmont, sketch of christian kabbalism. blake adapts the christian kabbalistic archetype to structure his four-part story, each chapter depicting a particular phase of jerusalem’s exile and return: chapter 1, the primordial institution, is devoted to the initial crisis; chapter 2, the state of destitution, to the aftermath of that crisis; chapter 3, the modern constitution, to the compensation for the crisis; and chapter 4, supreme restitution, to cosmic restoration.for earlier attempts to explain the four-part structure of jerusalem, see wd 189n30. more recently, sklar has argued that the “characters’ overlapping stories create a tale of albion’s fall and jerusalem’s banishment (in chapter one), a series of rescue attempts (in chapter two), a chaotic crescendo of violence and war (in chapter three), and finally, humanity’s great awakening in jerusalem, a woman-city embodying forgiveness and liberty (in chapter four)” (145). in contrast, yoder “offer[s] an outline of the poem … to identify the major narrative episodes and to suggest the lines of narrative continuity that unify them” (the narrative structure 56-57). within each chapter, the non-linear structure is neither synchronic nor diachronic, in the causal sense.in “the problems of synchrony,” the first chapter of the narrative structure, yoder surveys the critical controversy over whether jerusalem is synchronic or diachronic (23-54). rather, analogous to the relationship between blake’s painting the last judgment and his notebook description of “a vision of the last judgment,” each chapter depicts a panoramic vision of a particular state, comprising a series of vignettes that constitute the vision.this process can be seen most clearly in chapter 2, where blake shifted around the order of several vignettes. while there is no discernible causal effect, the changed order does alter the reader’s perception of the chapter. for a detailed analysis of the two sequences, see yoder, “what happens when.” within that context, the plot is sequential in the sense that the four chapters depict the stages that must be experienced. as a discrete phase, each chapter is introduced emblematically by a partial-plate design, complemented by a verbal passage. at the conclusion of each, a full-plate design encapsulates the progress to that point. albion initiates the cycle by denying jerusalem’s existence. the chapter opens on plate 4, with a bimodal image act in which the top third visualizes the ensuing conflict between the divine presence and her shadow (illus. 6). at the bottom of the design, vala perverts the function of the central column, separating two figures. to the side, jerusalem leads some souls through the cycle of reincarnation. the motto at the top says “jesus only.” this is the lesson to be learned: albion’s choice of demonstration over faith is equivalent to the exile of the shekhinah. 6. jerusalem copy e, plate 4 (see enlargement). yale center for british art, paul mellon collection, b1992.8.1(4). image courtesy of the william blake archive. from that point on, the entire cosmos is affected. on the macrocosmic level, adam kadmon/los, who is fragmented into his spectre and emanation, begins to organize the spaces of erin into the world of separation so that he will be able to form the archetypes of restoration at his furnaces, located in golgonooza, where he will counteract the damage done in ulro. on the microcosmic level, adam rishon/albion, having chosen demonstration over faith, can no longer apprehend the shekhinah/jerusalem, and erroneously embraces vala, her shadow. the chapter ends with a prayer: “descend o lamb of god & take away the imputation of sin / by the creation of states & the deliverance of individuals” (25.12-13, e 170). in the last five lines of the chapter, blake calls for a complete revision of thought, in which the concept of sin is revealed to be but a component of the larger cycle of existence. by removing sin from the causal framework of action and reaction, he implies a kind of cyclical determinism, making sin but a state to be passed through. encapsulating the plot of chapter 1, the full-page design on plate 26 (illus. 7) depicts the exile of the shekhinah, a visual counterpart of the design on plate 4. although the initial crisis occurred during the creation process, adam’s sin is said to have extended the cycle. in the picture, the focal point is hand, albion’s eldest son, metonymically mortal man. he is engulfed in the iconography of the exoteric myth—surrounded by hell fires and with a serpent woven around his arms, which are stretched out in cruciform. though looking back at jerusalem, he walks away from her, thus replicating albion’s original error of rejecting faith. he also remains oblivious to the verbal messages. between him and jerusalem is the notation that “jerusalem is named liberty.” also, looking back, he misses the motto inscribed along the left margin of the plate: “such visions have / appeard to me / as i my orderd race have run.” visually alluding to daniel 5, the message indicates that all is part of the succession of states—“orderd race”—to be traversed. 7. jerusalem copy e, plate 26 (see enlargement). yale center for british art, paul mellon collection, b1992.8.1(26). image courtesy of the william blake archive. in chapter 2, corresponding to the state of destitution, the world of separation is consolidated simultaneously on both the macroand microcosmic levels. blake’s theme, the postlapsarian state of the cosmos, is depicted on plate 28 (illus. 8) by the edenic couple embracing, followed by the verbalized perversion of that state: every ornament of perfection, and every labour of love, in all the garden of eden, & in all the golden mountains was become an envied horror, and a remembrance of jealousy: and every act a crime, and albion the punisher & judge. (28.1-4, e 174) 8. jerusalem copy e, plate 28 (see enlargement). yale center for british art, paul mellon collection, b1992.8.1(28). image courtesy of the william blake archive. on the macrocosmic level, adam kadmon/los begins his labor of forming the archetype of restoration, to be actualized at the end of the prophecy. as his primary labor, he sends reuben over the jordan, tracing the cycle of reincarnation through which the souls can then be purified. with his own faith sorely tested, los attempts to pull albion backwards through the furnace, though he is prevented because “the will must not be bended but in the day of divine / power” (39 [44].18-19, e 186). on the microcosmic level, adam rishon/albion, now in the corporeal world of time and space, becomes subject to empirical reasoning, defined as “the great selfhood / satan: worshipd as god by the mighty ones of the earth” (29 [33].17-18, e 175). albion is traduced by the superficial glamour of vala, the shadow: “the divine vision / is as nothing before thee” (29 [33].33-34, e 175). having lost his faith, he calls for ransom: “will none accompany me in my death? or be a ransom for me” (35 [39].19, e 181). the result of albion’s choice is despair: “hope is banish’d from me” (47.18, e 196). as the low point of the cycle, this is also the turning point of the action. on the next plate, the saviour “reciev’d him, in the arms of tender mercy” (48.2, e 196) and gives him the bible (48.8-11, e 196).the list of books corresponds to those swedenborg believed to have been divinely inspired (see paley’s edition of jerusalem, 207). immediately after that, “from this sweet place maternal love awoke jerusalem” (48.18). the chapter ends with the commencement of albion’s return, the daughters of beulah calling for the lamb to “take away the remembrance of sin” (50.30, e 200). plate 51 (illus. 9) balances the introduction on plate 28, where blake depicted a prelapsarian couple embracing. here, he visualizes albion’s state of despair in terms of the hermaphroditic split. in the design, a male crouches with his head between his knees, as the off-center central column. to one side is the female emanation, sitting in defeat, and to the other is the male selfhood, in flames and enchained.paley’s edition of jerusalem contains discussion of an early proof that identifies the three figures as vala, hyle, and skofeld (211). the elimination of the names expands the focus from the microcosm to the macrocosm. while albion may not yet realize it, the audience has been given a visual indication that this is but a state to be passed through, and that reunification will occur. 9. jerusalem copy e, plate 51 (see enlargement). yale center for british art, paul mellon collection, b1992.8.1(51). image courtesy of the william blake archive. 10. jerusalem copy e, plate 53 (see enlargement). yale center for british art, paul mellon collection, b1992.8.1(53). image courtesy of the william blake archive. corresponding to the modern constitution, in which the shards of negation are separated from the lights of purity, chapter 3 reveals the error underlying albion’s choice of reason over faith; simultaneously, los completes the mundane shell, the means by which that error will be compensated for. the theme is introduced on plate 53 (illus. 10), where the picture of vala, surrounded by gaudy icons of organized religion, is balanced by the verbal introduction of los as “the vehicular form of strong urthona” (53.1, e 202), the manifestation of the immortal soul in the world of separation. he is adam kadmon, the saviour, though at this point his function is “incomprehensible / to the vegetated mortal eye’s perverted & single vision” (53.10-11, e 202). sharply differentiated from the exoteric version of christ, who will be scapegoated on plate 65, los builds golgonooza, the archetype of restoration, “the spiritual fourfold / london” (53.18-19, e 203). the chapter depicts human history in the corporeal cosmos, when “albion fled beneath the plow / till he came to the rock of ages. & he took his seat upon the rock” (57.15-16, e 207). while albion sits, los constructs “the habitation of the spectres of the dead & the place / of redemption & of awaking again into eternity” (59.8-9, e 208). within that context, the exoteric myth of the crucifixion is presented in the middle of the chapter as one component of the larger divine plan: “in ignorance to view a small portion & think that all” (65.27, e 216). luvah’s crucifixion exposes vala as the shadow, the dark reflection of true spirituality, “weaving the deaths of the mighty into a tabernacle / for rahab & tirzah; till the great polypus of generation covered the earth” (67.33-34, e 220). counteracting the shapeless polypus, los forms the archetypal mundane shell in preparation for the consolidation of true christianity. balancing the introductory image of vala’s religion, a full-plate depiction of true christianity concludes the chapter: a picture of the crucified saviour at the top, facing forward, with light emanating from his head (illus. 11). opposite him is the human reflection, standing at the bottom, his back to the viewer, looking up at christ. this is adam kadmon mirroring for adam rishon the true goal of separating the shards. 11. jerusalem copy e, plate 76 (see enlargement). yale center for british art, paul mellon collection, b1992.8.1(76). image courtesy of the william blake archive. in contrast to the agon that concludes exoteric narrative, the esoteric resolves when the shards of negation have been removed so that the lights of purity can rise. in the final chapter, vala’s falsehood, which threatens to obliterate jerusalem’s truth, is exposed so that restoration, foreshadowed by the image on plate 76, can occur. the theme is introduced on plate 78 (illus. 12), with albion sitting on the rock of ages, his bird’s head possibly a symbol of regeneration.for possible interpretations of the bird’s head, see paley’s edition of jerusalem, 261. the text below the design explains how albion’s intellect will be restored: los, as adam kadmon, will separate the shards, much as “the potter breaks the potsherds” (78.5, e 233). 12. jerusalem copy e, plate 78 (see enlargement). yale center for british art, paul mellon collection, b1992.8.1(78). image courtesy of the william blake archive. in the first half of the chapter, the error is consolidated so that, in the second, it can be put off. the chapter opens with a description of jerusalem in ruins, followed by her lament over the unintended consequences of vala’s usurpation, that right/male and left/female have not only separated from each other, but each has moved toward its own extreme: “outside appears / thy masculine from thy feminine hardening against the heavens / to devour the human!” (79.70-72, e 236). gwendolen, representing the extreme left side, fears the loss of female power and lies: “forgetting that falshood is prophetic” (82.20, e 239), she claims to have “heard enitharmon say to los: let the daughters of albion / be scatterd abroad and let the name of albion be forgotten” (82.22-23). she then forms the infant hyle (whose greek etymology means “matter”) into a material counterpart of the lamb, intended to perpetuate her hegemony. however, as the embodiment of her lie, he grows into the anti-christ, the consolidation of the error: “a vegetated christ & a virgin eve, are the hermaphroditic / blasphemy” (90.34-35, e 250). at the climax of the poem, los puts off the error: thus los alterd his spectre & every ratio of his reason he alterd time after time, with dire pain & many tears till he had completely divided him into a separate space. (91.50-52, e 252) significantly, he does not eliminate his adversary in the exoteric sense, but alters his spectre, whom he then relegates “into a separate space.” once los’s task of separating the shards is complete, jerusalem can return on plate 92 (illus. 13) and albion can rise, recognize jesus “in the likeness & similitude of los [his] friend” (96.22, e 256), annihilate his selfhood, and restore the cosmos. 13. jerusalem copy e, plate 92 (see enlargement). yale center for british art, paul mellon collection, b1992.8.1(92). image courtesy of the william blake archive. with only five lines of text, most of plate 99 is devoted to the visual reunification of the sexes into the central column (illus. 14). 14. jerusalem copy e, plate 99 (see enlargement). yale center for british art, paul mellon collection, b1992.8.1(99). image courtesy of the william blake archive. this is followed by the final image on plate 100 (illus. 15), a response to the low point of the action that had been depicted on plate 51 (illus. 9). here, instead of a distorted sefirotic tree, with a crouching figure flanked by his defeated emanation and flaming selfhood, los now stands leaning on his hammer and tongs, the instruments he used to re-form the cosmos; he is flanked by his emanation and spectre. 15. jerusalem copy e, plate 100 (see enlargement). yale center for british art, paul mellon collection, b1992.8.1(100). image courtesy of the william blake archive. as this brief summary suggests, the four chapters collectively constitute a panorama of the four states of existence. within each chapter, the action consists of a series of simultaneously coexisting bimodal image acts, each of which is designed to illuminate some aspect of that state. according to blake, “these are states permanently fixed by the divine power” (32 [36].38, e 178). therefore, they cannot be explained in terms of material causality; rather, “iniquity must be imputed only / to the state [souls] are enterd into that they may be deliverd” (49.65-66, e 199). in other words, the plot traces “the passage through / eternal death! and … the awaking to eternal life” (4.1-2, e 146). iv. theme jerusalem is an allegory whose vehicle, the esoteric kabbalistic myth, conveys the theme of the prisca theologia. generally, prisca theologia refers to the traditional belief in an originally pure form of religion.gi 41, wd 30, 33. on the prisca theologia, see hanegraaff, “tradition.” because my focus is strictly on jerusalem, i ignore aspects of the prisca theologia not directly relevant to this paper. for the relationship of the prisca theologia to the seventeenth-century origins of freethinking, see champion, especially chapter 5, “prisca theologia” (133-69). in the renaissance, the concept was christianized to signify what adherents identified as the true form of christianity, said to have existed in the first few centuries of the common era—between paul and constantine, in blake’s twenty-seven heavens—before the organized church erased traces of its existence. what made the prisca theologia both distinct and threatening was its assertion that there exists an extrarational gnostic faculty that endows people with the ability to apprehend the spiritual realm directly, without the need for any institutional intercession. blake apparently alludes to the prisca theologia in milton when he refers to “an old prophecy in eden recorded” (20 [22].57, e 115; 23 [25].35, e 119). then, in jerusalem, he develops that reference, using the exile of the shekhinah to symbolize the usurpation of true christianity.while i agree with the first part of kroeber’s assertion in “delivering jerusalem” that “the purpose of jerusalem is to attack this foundation of institutionalized religion,” i reject the second, “which blake represents as druidism” (366). blake seems as opposed to the institutionalization of christianity as he is to any other system whose effect is to deny liberty. key to the allegory is the combination of vala’s two identities: the emanation of luvah and the shadow of jerusalem. as an emanation, she signifies generally the left, rigorous column of the sefirotic tree, and as luvah’s in particular, she embodies the judgmental component of spirituality. when, at the initial conflict, she feeds luvah into the furnace, she eliminates the right side, mercy. the result, as seen in chapter 2, is a rationalized form of religion in which “vala, builded by the reasoning power in man” (39 [44].40, e 187), forms “a pretence of religion to destroy religion” (38 [43].36, e 185). this is followed, in chapter 3, by the politicization of religion: “are not religion & politics the same thing?” (57.10, e 207). in this chapter, vala consolidates the institution by crucifying spirituality—“they vote the death of luvah” (65.8, e 216)—to create a realm of spiritual death: “and all the arts of life. they changd into the arts of death in albion” (65.16). the result is the oxymoronic corporealization of spirituality, when “the twelve daughters in rahab & tirzah have circumscribd the brain / beneath & pierced it thro the midst with a golden pin” (67.41-42, e 220). in other words, exoteric christianity survives by lobotomizing its adherents. finally, she degenerates into the antithesis of spirituality, intending “to destroy the lamb & usurp the throne of god” (78.19, e 234). her entire system is constructed around her delusion (lie?) that “luvah orderd me in night / to murder albion the king of men” (80.17-18, e 236). the second component of vala’s identity is the shadow. if vala, in distorting her intended function, degenerates into a destructive, militaristic form of organized religion, then jerusalem must be the prisca theologia, the true form of christianity. in the beginning, albion chooses vala over jerusalem, and the poem traces the disastrous consequences of that choice. at the end, when los restores the cosmos, “jerusalem took the cup which foamd in vala’s hand” (88.56, e 247). by removing the communion cup from vala’s possession, jerusalem restores the prisca theologia. fittingly, this is the last reference to vala in the prophecy, and the beginning of jerusalem’s restoration. conclusion technically, readers of jerusalem have engaged not in analysis, but in dissection, the process of breaking something down into its component parts. this can be seen most obviously in a blake dictionary: the ideas and symbols of william blake, where damon painstakingly describes virtually every component of the corpus. more recently, sklar has applied the same process: “i begin by separating and dissecting jerusalem’s components; then i discuss how they interrelate, both sequentially and holistically,” that is, “without time constraints” (4, 251). missing has been the other constituent of analysis, the principle of structure, the organizing rationale for how the various components interrelate in terms of a unified whole.this distinction between dissection and formal analysis is clarified in brooks and warren: “an analysis cannot take place except in accordance with the principle of the structure of the thing being analyzed.” that principle explains “the relation among the parts” (95). hermeneutically, this is the function of the horizon of expectations, upon which the reading process hinges. minus a principle of structure, a text, at worst, is unintelligible, as karen swann describes her students’ response to jerusalem: “the whole chapter was just mud to them” (398). her own reception is more complex: as i returned to the text again and in subsequent years of teaching, i would often have the experience of coming across a passage that i had once seized upon as the lynchpin to a reading of the whole work but which now felt dead to the point where i couldn’t even reconstruct what i had seen in it. (and, conversely, passages i barely remembered from previous readings would leap into prominence.) (399) swann’s protean response traces her own growth as a reader; her personal horizon of expectations was altered by exposure to other texts in the interim, between encounters with jerusalem. as los says, in a line quoted earlier, “if perceptive organs vary: objects of perception seem to vary.” swann’s example illustrates the basic assumption with which i began: there has existed no viable horizon of expectations for jerusalem. for this reason, my intention is not to present a unique, much less definitive, interpretation. rather, i have returned to the fundamental premises upon which the reading process is predicated, in order to configure a more consistent and appropriate horizon of expectations. i believe that the kabbalistic myth provides a viable principle of structure, and that the esoteric approach will enable future readers to generate more fruitful, provocative interpretations of jerusalem, the book that blake considered “finishd.” works cited adams, hazard. “jerusalem’s didactic and mimetic-narrative experiment.” studies in romanticism 32.4 (winter 1993): 627-54. bakewell, liza. “image acts.” american anthropologist 100.1 (march 1998): 22-32. bindman, david. blake as an artist. oxford: phaidon; new york: dutton, 1977. blake, william. the complete poetry and prose of william blake. ed. david v. erdman. newly rev. ed. new york: anchor-random house, 1988. ———. jerusalem: the emanation of the giant albion. ed. morton d. paley. blake’s illuminated books, vol. 1. general ed. david bindman. princeton: william blake trust/princeton up, 1991. brooks, cleanth, and robert penn warren. modern rhetoric. shorter 3rd ed. new york: harcourt brace jovanovich, 1972. champion, j. a. i. the pillars of priestcraft shaken: the church of england and its enemies, 1660–1730. cambridge: cambridge up, 1992. clark, steve. “jerusalem as imperial prophecy.” clark and worrall 167-85. clark, steve, and david worrall, eds. blake, nation and empire. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, 2006. curran, stuart, and joseph anthony wittreich, jr., eds. blake’s sublime allegory: essays on the four zoas, milton, and jerusalem. madison: u of wisconsin p, 1973. damon, s. foster. a blake dictionary: the ideas and symbols of william blake. index by morris eaves. boulder: shambhala, 1979. easson, roger r. “william blake and his reader in jerusalem.” curran and wittreich 309-27. essick, robert n. “erin, ireland, and the emanation in blake’s jerusalem.” clark and worrall 201-13. ———. “jerusalem and blake’s final works.” the cambridge companion to william blake. ed. morris eaves. cambridge: cambridge up, 2003. 251-71. frye, northrop. anatomy of criticism: four essays. princeton: princeton up, 1957. hanegraaff, wouter j., ed. dictionary of gnosis and western esotericism. 2 vols. leiden: brill, 2005. ———. “esotericism.” dictionary of gnosis and western esotericism 1: 336-40. ———. “tradition.” dictionary of gnosis and western esotericism 2: 1125-35. kroeber, karl. “delivering jerusalem.” curran and wittreich 347-67. lincoln, andrew. “restoring the nation to christianity: blake and the aftermyth of revolution.” clark and worrall 153-66. schaya, leo. the universal meaning of the kabbalah. trans. nancy pearson. london: george allen & unwin, 1971; secaucus, nj: university books, 1972; baltimore: penguin books, 1973. scholem, gershom. kabbalah. new york: quadrangle, 1974. sklar, susanne m. blake’s jerusalem as visionary theatre: entering the divine body. oxford: oxford up, 2011. spector, sheila a. “blake as an eighteenth-century hebraist.” blake and his bibles. ed. david v. erdman. west cornwall, ct: locust hill p, 1990. 179-229. ———. “glorious incomprehensible”: the development of blake’s kabbalistic language. lewisburg, pa: bucknell up, 2001. ———. jewish mysticism: an annotated bibliography on the kabbalah in english. new york: garland, 1984. ———. “a kabbalistic reading of jerusalem’s prose plates.” women reading william blake: “opposition is true friendship.” ed. helen p. bruder. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, 2007. 219-27. ———. “kabbalistic sources—blake’s and his critics’.” blake 17.3 (winter 1983–84): 84-101. ———. “a numerological analysis of jerusalem.” prophetic character: essays on william blake in honor of john e. grant. ed. alexander s. gourlay. west cornwall, ct: locust hill p, 2002. 327-49. ———. “the reasons for ‘urizen.’” blake 21.4 (spring 1988): 147-49. ———. “wonders divine”: the development of blake’s kabbalistic myth. lewisburg, pa: bucknell up, 2001. swann, karen. “teaching jerusalem.” european romantic review 25.3 (june 2014): 397-402. van helmont, francis mercury. sketch of christian kabbalism. trans. and ed. sheila a. spector. leiden: brill, 2012. von stuckrad, kocku. locations of knowledge in medieval and early modern europe. leiden: brill, 2010. yoder, r. paul. the narrative structure of william blake’s poem jerusalem: a revisionist interpretation. lewiston: edwin mellen p, 2010. ———. “what happens when: narrative and the changing sequence of plates in blake’s jerusalem, chapter 2.” studies in romanticism 41.2 (summer 2002): 259-78. b l a k e volume 54 number 4 spring 2021 angela esterhammer, victoria college, university of toronto nelson hilton, university of georgia tilar j. mazzeo, colby college robert w. rix, university of copenhagen joseph viscomi, university of north carolina at chapel hill david worrall, the nottingham trent university martin butlin, tate gallery, london, retired tristanne j. connolly, university of waterloo detlef w. dörrbecker, university of trier sibylle erle, bishop grosseteste university robert n. essick, university of california, riverside a d v i s o r y b o a r d a n i l l u s t r a t e d q u a r t e r l y volume 54 number 4 spring 2021 c o n t e n t s www.blakequarterly.org articles blake in the marketplace, 2020 by robert n. essick diagrammatic blake: tracing the critical reception of “the mental traveller” by caroline anjali ritchie © 2021 copyright morris eaves and morton d. paley cover: design based on page 5 of the pickering manuscript, lines from “the mental traveller.” morgan library & museum. ma 2879. gift of mrs. landon k. thorne, 1971. image courtesy of the morgan library & museum, new york. e d i t o r s editors: morris eaves and morton d. paley review editor: alexander s. gourlay exhibitions editor: luisa calè bibliographer (criticism): wayne c. ripley bibliographer (music): jason whittaker managing editor: sarah jones sarah.jones@rochester.edu production office: department of english, university of rochester, rochester ny 14627-0451 review: christopher m. bundock, romantic prophecy and the resistance to historicism christopher m. bundock. romantic prophecy and the resistance to historicism. toronto: university of toronto press, 2016. xii + 273 pp. $65.00, hardcover and e-book. reviewed by john patrick james john patrick james (jjames@berkeley.edu) is pursuing a phd in english literature at the university of california, berkeley. his scholarship appears on the blog of v21: victorian studies for the 21st century and, co-authored with nathan k. hensley, at branch: britain, representation, and nineteenth-century history. he is also a poet; his first book, the milk hours, received the max ritvo poetry prize and is forthcoming in june 2019 from milkweed editions. what is history and what does it mean to be historical? these are not only fitting questions for an era of political upheaval and epistemic change, but ones endemic to the polyvalent inquiry and future-oriented temporality exhibited by many of romanticism’s most influential figures. what blake, goethe, coleridge, and others all share—besides a penchant for observation and an inclination toward linguistic play—is an ability to combine what today seem distinct modes of inquiry into literary forms no less valid for their imaginative structure than the abstruse prose tracts of kierkegaard or the aesthetic writings of kant or burke. such multidisciplinary works propagate a novel sense of historicity, one that distinguishes itself from the accumulated chain of events that forms the present, and, beyond it, the future such poems surreptitiously portend. many influential studies have deftly adopted this theme, among them james chandler’s england in 1819: the politics of literary culture and the case of romantic historicism (1998), kevis goodman’s georgic modernity and british romanticism: poetry and the mediation of history (2004), and saree makdisi’s william blake and the impossible history of the 1790s (2003). christopher m. bundock’s romantic prophecy and the resistance to historicism complicates this discussion by underscoring an apocalyptic dimension to romantic temporality central less to its ability to foresee the future, or to see itself as somehow outside time, and more to prophecy’s capacity to operate “outside and parallel to the systematic, variously scientific elaborations of historiography” (5) and to position the prophet as “an antior at least a para-institutional agent” (3). such readings are especially pertinent to blake, whose work exhibits a staunch resistance to the hermeneutic authority of juridical, religious, and educational institutions.for more on this topic, see rix. the study is also useful for understanding the prophetic dimensions of the various texts bundock takes up, from wordsworth’s the prelude to kant’s lesser-known writings on swedenborg to mary shelley’s post-apocalyptic novel the last man. throughout these discussions, bundock exhibits remarkable erudition, contextualizing the book’s concerns within the sometimes obscure scientific and religious discourses of the period while theorizing that argument for an inherently evolving and contentiously understood present. because bundock reconfigures the manner in which scholars have traditionally thought about prophecy, as both a literary mode and a form of mystic insight, his blake chapters offer a trenchant reconsideration of blake’s prophetic writings. he cites alexander gilchrist, who complains in his 1863 life of william blake that america a prophecy “has no distinctly seizable pretensions to a prophetic character, being, like the rest of blake’s ‘books of prophecy,’ rather a retrospect, in its mystic way, of events already transpired” (quoted in bundock 169). indeed, blake himself distinguished between prophecy and prediction, writing in his annotations to richard watson’s an apology for the bible (1797), “every honest man is a prophet he utters his opinion both of private & public matters … he never says such a thing shall happen let you do what you will. a prophet is a seer not an arbitrary dictator” (e 617). in the most literal sense, blake’s prophecies, from america to milton, are not prophetic at all: as bundock says of blake’s prefaces, they “do not pave the way to the future but rather dig ever deeper into the impossibility of their own function” (169). he argues, drawing on makdisi, that blake’s books interrogate “how the narratives produced by historians fail if they limit history to the understandable,” “rewrit[ing] historiography” for an era that not only understands itself as temporally homogenous but that suffers from a hierarchical concentration of power within institutions (141-42). such (re)inscription is performed via the engraver’s burin, metaphorized in milton—as s. foster damon, robert n. essick, and others have observed—by palamabron’s “harrow of the almighty” and rintrah’s “plow” (milton 3.41-4.1, e 97). “the work [the harrow] performs,” writes bundock, “resembles blake’s practices of etching and engraving” (142), rendering visual, material, and textual an inscriptive modality that erases history even while writing it. bundock also insists on the separability of blake’s prefaces from the body-texts themselves, reading the preface as its own constitutive and impossibly (in the makdisian sense) predictive generic mode. “blake’s bard in milton,” he writes, “plays this role, singing an allegorical preface … to the larger event of milton’s descent from eternity” (168). readers will recall blake’s imperative in the prose preface: “painters! on you i call! sculptors! architects! suffer not the fash[i]onable fools to depress your powers by the prices they pretend to give for contemptible works” (milton pl. 1, e 95). the short lyric that follows famously exhorts readers to “buil[d] jerusalem, / in englands green & pleasant land” (lines 15-16, e 96). bundock argues—correctly, i think—that “blake’s art resists the concept of progressive development, following instead a deeply disjunctive itinerary drawn from his thinking about history” (168).a similar argument is made in morris eaves, william blake’s theory of art and the counter-arts conspiracy. thus works that purport predictability quickly undermine their own futural logic by offering a prediction for a text with little narrative structure and virtually no diegetic progression. similar disjunctions between prefaces and their body-texts exist throughout the romantic era: “wordsworth’s prelude is also conceived as a preface to an epic, though one that eclipses the work it would announce” (168). the preface becomes its own epic. by contrast, in two of the four copies of milton (copies c and d) blake omits the preface entirely, a decision that does not eradicate the poem’s prophetic element but that downplays its predictive logic in favor of the inscriptive historiography that bundock describes above. the epic, blake decided—between 1811 and 1818for the dates, see viscomi’s chapter on the production of milton (315-29), especially 327n27.—needs no preface at all. there’s more to romantic prophecy than blake. perhaps most interesting to romanticists is chapter 8, which investigates mary shelley’s the last man, a work that has garnered much recent attention as a forerunner to science fiction’s now ubiquitous narratives of apocalypse and survival. speaking of both the last man and valperga, bundock notes how, for shelley, “prophecy is the form that restriction, punishment, and regulation often take when women, especially, attempt to assert historical agency. yet, shelley does not, ultimately, understand prophecy only as a repressive discourse,” as one might view it given its predication on predictive “binding” (197). instead, bundock reads the last man as a “failed utopia”—or an “immanently dystopic” one—whose “drive for renovation” more closely resembles blake’s “revisionary power” than it does the pessimism of the world’s end so readily expressed by figures like byron: such a drive “hesitates to produce total or final visions” (197). the “survivor of a global plague,” lionel verney is, as bundock points out, “the last man on earth” (214). he argues that the last man represents what maurice blanchot describes as a “limit-experience”: “a state of being where the hegelian end of history encounters a kind of disappointment with its own success” (bundock 215). “this dissatisfaction discloses a negativity,” he concludes, “that does not get drawn up into dialectical activity” and thus becomes the “twilight” in which “shelley’s text finally leaves what is remaining of the historical subject” (216). such negativity represents the inherent failure of prophecy as a predictive mode, a failure that ultimately enables it as “a mechanism for radically anti-institutional thought,” which “clear[s] spaces for … genuinely different, unprethinkable futures” (7). romantic prophecy casts an impressively wide net, one that not only encompasses a vast array of literary and philosophical texts but that, for this reason, makes itself relevant to literary historians, theologians, and historians of science alike, not to mention the romanticists who remain its target audience. the book might also interest ecotheorists, who seek to imagine the world-shaping change that prophecy itself engenders: a radical adjustment of resources and the institutions that regulate them that might, in our own era, permit sustainability for a planet whose fragile systems are increasingly imperiled. indeed, the portents of ecological disaster are so pervasive that they engender passive acceptance. as a mode of instigating social action, prophecy has utterly failed. yet prophecy paradoxically succeeds through its own failures: by falling short of accurate prediction, it “disencumbers the future from the weight of the past and from attempts to entail the future to the past” (7). “writing the failure of utopia can, then, reorient the discussion of social conflicts by recalibrating fundamental ideas about the good” (196). engendering a critique of ideologies past, romantic prophecy assembles a similar failure, a via negativa that enables a futurist vision by extricating that future from the burdens of the past. while we can place only so much weight on literary criticism, bundock allows us to view our present more clearly by viewing it through the lens of the past, and, by doing so, to instigate social, political, and perhaps even ecological change. not only does such “new prophecy” permit readers to “distinguish productive uncertainty from crippling precariousness,” it urges us to recognize that the future is not set, that “states … can actually change” (225), and that what now seems an unthinkable future is not only possible but imminently real. works cited blake, william. the complete poetry and prose of william blake. ed. david v. erdman. newly rev. ed. new york: anchor-random house, 1988. blanchot, maurice. the infinite conversation. trans. susan hanson. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 1993. chandler, james. england in 1819: the politics of literary culture and the case of romantic historicism. chicago: university of chicago press, 1998. eaves, morris. the counter-arts conspiracy: art and industry in the age of blake. ithaca: cornell university press, 1992. ———. william blake’s theory of art. princeton: princeton university press, 1982. goodman, kevis. georgic modernity and british romanticism: poetry and the mediation of history. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2004. makdisi, saree. william blake and the impossible history of the 1790s. chicago: university of chicago press, 2003. rix, robert. william blake and the cultures of radical christianity. farnham: ashgate, 2007. viscomi, joseph. blake and the idea of the book. princeton: princeton university press, 1993. blake’s hebrew calligraphy blake’s hebrew calligraphy by abraham samuel shiff abraham samuel shiff (abe.sam.shiff@gmail.com) studies in the master of arts in liberal studies program, the graduate center, city university of new york. another paper, blake’s priestly blessing: god blesses job, is forthcoming in blake. he has also published on shakespeare. the exhibition at the morgan library and museum of william blake’s world: “a new heaven is begun” (sept. 2009–jan. 2010) provided an opportunity to examine closely blake’s hebrew calligraphy.i am indebted to anna lou ashby, andrew w. mellon curator of the morgan library and museum, for her encouragement and advice, and for being my authority for facts and information pertaining to blake. three works in the exhibition (see illus. 2.1, 3.1, and 3.6)this paper examines the three works for blake’s use of hebrew characters as calligraphy. additional works (from the morgan and elsewhere) are described when helpful for the analysis. the paper is not a survey of all of blake’s use of hebrew. for the literature examining his use of hebrew (mystical or otherwise), see spector, “blake as an eighteenth-century hebraist” and “blake’s graphic use of hebrew,” cheskin, paice, and their bibliographies. contain errors in forming hebrew characters; some are deliberate to create clever visual illusions. for clarity, several conventions are adopted for this article: 1. images: items from the morgan are cited by accession number, and if exhibited also by exhibition number. the exhibited images are viewable on the museum’s web site <http://www.themorgan.org/collections/works/blake>.click on “begin exhibition.” the images are numbered from 1 through 92. they are in color and may be manipulated for magnification. 2. hebrew alphabet: for the convenience of readers without any knowledge of hebrew, a numeric code is used (see table 1). for example, english is read from left to right. the first four characters of the english alphabet are a b c d. in contrast, hebrew is read from right to left. the first four characters of the hebrew alphabet are  א   ב   ג   ד‎. the encoded hebrew becomes 04-03-02-01. some letters of the hebrew alphabet change shape when located at the end of a word. the code “f” identifies a final character. for example, the four-letter english word “amen” is the three-letter hebrew word “אמן‎” that encodes as        א   מ   ן‎        14f-13-01, where        14f indicates that the last letter of the word is character “נ‎” (14) written in its final form, which is “ן‎” (14f). table 1: traditional serif hebrew characters converted to code alef א 01   nun נ 14 bet ב 02   final nun ן 14f gimel ג 03         dalet ד 04   samekh ס 15 he ה 05   ayin ע 16 vav ו 06         zayin ז 07   pe פ 17 het ח 08   final pe ף 17f tet ט 09         yod י 10   tsadi צ 18         final tsadi ץ 18f kaf כ 11         final kaf ך 11f   qof ק 19         resh ר 20 lamed ל 12   shin ש 21         tav ת 22 mem מ 13         final mem ם 13f         other symbols: __ a double underscore indicates space before and after a word. a hyphen separates the code numbers within a word. … an ellipsis indicates an incomplete word. f a lowercase “f” signifies a letter in its final form. there are five such letters. ? a question mark indicates an incomplete or ambiguous letter. r an uppercase “r” flags a reversed letter. notes: letters of hebrew words are neither capitalized nor connected by ligatures. diacritical symbols (“points”) are omitted. the english names for the hebrew characters are as assigned by microsoft word, symbol chart, times new roman font, unicode hexadecimal representation. the description of hebrew characters in this paper is simplified but sufficient for the arguments advanced. for more information about the historical development of the alphabet and for specimens, see s. birnbaum et al., “alphabet, hebrew”; s. birnbaum, the hebrew scripts; minkoff; sirat; toby; and yardeni. 1. night thoughts when blake illustrated edward young’s night thoughts (1797), he included an image of god holding a scroll with hebrew characters (illus. 1.1). 1.1. edward young, the complaint, and the consolation; or, night thoughts (london: printed by r. noble for r. edwards, 1797), “night the third,” p. 63. not exhibited. accession number pml 63943. pierpont morgan library, new york. gift of mrs. landon k. thorne, 1973. note the emanating radiance and pensive expression. compare to the depiction of god in illus. 3.6. by enlarging and rotating the scroll i have made it possible to interpret the characters more easily (illus. 1.2). 1.2. night thoughts p. 63, with the scroll enlarged and rotated. the ambiguous letters are flagged “?” and those that are obviously reversed are marked “r”. these apparent words align with the right margin, as they should. they do not appear to form legible words, however, but to be scrambled for visual effect. most surprising is that the letters are in reverse—wrongly engraved. even though letters “א”‎ (01) are reversed, they are drawn in classical hebrew-style serif. in later drawings and engravings, blake adopts an “n” shape for letter “א”‎ (01). serif hebrew letters are composed of segments drawn broad and narrow, as seen in table 1. here blake made the broad elements, which are usually solid, in outline, as if hollow. in doing so, he may be mimicking a popular hebrew lexicon that used “hollow” letters as a teaching guide (illus. 1.3).john parkhurst designed his hebrew and english lexicon to teach hebrew, as the title explains: … adapted to the use of learners, and of those [self-taught students] who have not the benefit of a master. illus. 1.3 is from the 1762 edition; later editions were published in 1778, 1792, and 1799, and all four are viewable in eighteenth century collections online (ecco). each edition has a section on hebrew grammar containing hollow letters. in a footnote, parkhurst instructs the student: “if the reader will take the trouble to colour the hollow letters with red ink, in this and the following examples, he will make the examples still more clear and distinct; and indeed this may be no unprofitable exercise to a beginner” (1762, ecco image 17; 1778, 45; 1792, 22; 1799, 24). for examples of hollow letters, examine the grammar section pages following the instruction. the last three editions also contain a chart with a title implying it is a writing guide (1778, ecco image 38; 1792, 15; 1799, 17), but which actually portrays fragmented and distorted letters, as if to be a guide to reading print made by battered type. blake may have used the fragments as models for some of his graffiti-like hebrew characters, though it is only speculation that he saw and emulated parkhurst’s lexicon. illus. 1.3 is an enlarged portion of a verb conjugation table (1762, ecco image 19). copies of parkhurst may be seen in google books. 1.3. parkhurst’s lexicon: hollow and solid letters. © british library board, shelf-mark 12904.f.23. although scholars search for meaning in the “words,” what blake engraved appears to be graffiti-like emulation of hebrew.spector describes the “words” as “pseudo-hebraic” (“blake’s graphic use of hebrew” 67). for attempts to decipher their meaning, see young, night thoughts (folio society), commentary vol., 71-72. hebrew words are in a preparatory drawing for a plate never engraved (illus. 1.4).for reproduction of the complete set of watercolors, see the folio society edition; see also the british museum web site <http://www.britishmuseum.​org>. 1.4. night thoughts, “night the ninth,” p. 17. © trustees of the british museum. image an18981001. bm 1929,0713.219. the hebrew enlarged is in illus. 1.4.1. 1.4.1. hebrew inscription enlarged. clearly visible is the penciled outline for the left “א”‎ (01). beyond any doubt, blake uses the classical serif style, but this is not proof that he had command of the hebrew language. of the competence perceivable in the composition, h. m. margoliouth notes, “[blake] seems to have been provided with some hebrew, perhaps not very legible, of which he made a muddle” (emphasis mine).“a hebraist tells me … there are two hebrew words, meaning ‘hereafter pain’ and referring to ‘awful eternity! offended queen!’, which are fairly correct. … here he [blake] seems to have been provided with some hebrew, perhaps not very legible, of which he made a muddle” (margoliouth 49). hebrew words written without the diacritical symbols that indicate vowels can be ambiguous and challenging to translate.i thank ari cohen for his insightful assistance with this translation. fortunately, the context is known. on the left side of the block of text, between the first and second lines, blake penciled an “x” (visible in illus. 1.4) identifying the words that he chose to illustrate:see young, night thoughts (folio society), commentary vol., xviii. time was! eternity now reigns alone! awful eternity! offended queen! the offended queen is the crowned woman. she points upwards towards eternity while holding a book with hebrew words—a metaphor for godfor blake, god is eternal and awe inspiring. he associates hebrew with god (see illus. 1.1, 3.1, 3.6, and 3.7).—and standing triumphantly on the face and throat of two vanquished figures—a metaphor for time.blake often depicts death in night thoughts by two different figures. one has a shaven head, sometimes with just a topknot, as drawn here. the other is an aged man with flowing hair and beard. in this composition, he uses both to represent time that brings death to all living beings. blake uses well-known representations for death and time: see quarles, “book 3. emblemes,” 181, and “hierogliph vi,” 23. mindful of the context, we may now attempt a translation. at first glance, there are two words, one on each page of the open book. actually, this is a phrase of three words spread over the two pages.blake uses the same composition in placing a hebrew slogan in a job drawing (see the analysis of illus. 3.1, below). we begin with the right page, as hebrew is read from right to left. parse the letters into two words, each of three letters. the rightmost word, “ריב”‎ (__02-10-20__), means “strife.” next is “אחר”‎ (__20-08-01__), which translates to “after.” the left page contains one word. finding a meaningful translation consistent with the theme requires three manipulations to correct errors typical of a neophyte hebraist. as written, “כאם”‎ (__13f-01-11__) translates to “as a mother.” clearly, this is contextually inappropriate. (1) replace the “א”‎ (01) with “ע”‎ (16), as both have the english sound of a.the two consonants, “א”‎ (01) and “ע”‎ (16), have the same pronunciation in the ashkenazi and sephardi dialects. neophytes to hebrew often use one for the other. (interestingly, the dialect spoken by jews from yemen maintains a tradition of different pronunciations for the two consonants.) (2) replace the “ם”‎ (13f), which has the english sound of m, with the near identically shaped “ס”‎ (15), which has the english sound of s. the word becomes “כעס”‎ (__15-16-11__), meaning “anger.”the hebraist quoted by margoliouth (see note above) stopped at this point. this is still not contextually acceptable. another correction is possible. (3) replace the “ס”‎ (15) with the same-sounding “ת”‎ (22).in both the sephardi and ashkenazi dialects “ס”‎ (15) has the s sound. not so with “ת”‎ (22) (see next note). in the ashkenazi dialect spoken by jews in blake’s london who originated from germanic and east european regions, the “ת”‎ (22) is pronounced s as in “sav” (and not t as in “tav,” as indicated in table 1).in the sephardi dialect, today prevalent in israel, “ת”‎ (22) is pronounced as t, as in “tav,” with or without the diacritical mark dagesh, especially when a word ends with this letter. (the dagesh symbol is a dot placed in the center of a letter: microsoft word, symbol chart, times new roman font, unicode hexadecimal representation 05bc.) in the ashkenazi dialect spoken in germanic lands and central europe—and today by those trained in this tradition, as was the author—the rule for pronouncing the diacritical mark is observed, thus “ת”‎ as s, as in “sav,” and “תּ”‎ as t, as in “tav.” for example, the word “sabbath” is written “שבת”‎ (__22-02-21__), pronounced by the sephardi speaker as shah-baht and by the ashkenazi as shah-bahs. table 1 conforms to the microsoft office word symbol chart’s convention for assigning english names to hebrew characters. the times new roman font, unicode hexadecimal representation 05ea is assigned to “ת”‎ and is labeled “hebrew letter tav.” fb4a is assigned to “תּ”‎ and is labeled “hebrew letter tav with dagesh.” it is obvious that whoever assigned the english labels for the “sav” and “tav” used the sephardi dialect. for a linguist’s explanation, see bar-adon, chapter 6, “on some basic differences between the ashkenazi and the sephardi traditions of pronunciation,” 27-30. to conceptualize this third and necessary correction, the ashkenazi pronunciation is critical. make this change, and the word becomes “כעת”‎ (__22-16-11__), meaning “as time.” together, the hebrew phrase may be translated:the impression given by the phrase is that it is a simplistic translation of the english “time, as after the strife,” literally replacing each english word with a hebrew equivalent, one by one, working from left to right as english is written and read, instead of creating a hebrew translation from the sense of the english. ריב   אחר   כעת‎ as time, after strife the image portrays the offended queen pointing to eternity triumphant over vanquished time, after strife has concluded. blake had another opportunity to include hebrew characters in night thoughts (illus. 1.5). that image illustrates an incident described in daniel chapter 5, where strange words appear on a wall to announce the impending doom of the startled and alarmed king belshazzar. the complete slogan is mene, mene, tekel upharsin (daniel 5.25). in the engraving, however, blake uses a few faintly drawn english characters to represent the slogan, instead of hebrew letters. 1.5. edward young, the complaint, and the consolation; or, night thoughts (1797), “night the second,” p. 33. not exhibited. accession number pml 63943. pierpont morgan library, new york. gift of mrs. landon k. thorne, 1973. one may infer that blake was not in command of the hebrew alphabet in 1797, because in night thoughts he uses hebrew-like graffiti mixed with actual letters (although reversed) and hebrew words with apparent errors. in 1803 he writes to his brother, declaring that he was then first learning hebrew—“am now learning my hebrew”—and demonstrating the first three letters of the alphabet: “אבג”‎ (__03-02-01__) (illus. 1.6). 1.6. detail of blake’s letter to his brother, 30 jan. 1803. lessing j. rosenwald collection, library of congress. for the whole letter, see <http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.rbc/rosenwald.1793>, images 5-8 (the hebrew is in image 8). he also writes, “i go on merrily with my greek & latin … i read greek as fluently as an oxford scholar & the testament is my chief master ….” it is tempting to speculate that blake in later works forms the hebrew “א”‎ (01) as the greek letter “nu” (n) because he studied greek and read the septuagint. the use of the n-shape must be deliberate, because we have here evidence of his ability to form the “א”‎ (01) in its classical shape from the letter of 1803 and in the earlier night thoughts engraving and drawing. to support an argument advanced later, i here make note of the variety of errors in publishing the hebrew characters that blake wrote to his brother (see illus. 1.6); some of these errors have been brought to the attention of blake scholars by arnold cheskin.see cheskin 178, 180. table 2: proofing errors in publishing blake’s hebrew “abc” “אבג‎” note: red indicates error     code date editor publisher 0 __03-02-01__ 1803 blake autograph 1 __11-02-01__ 1921 keynes grolier club 2 __02-06-10-01__ 1925 keynes nonesuch 3 __02-06-10-01__ 1927 wilson nonesuch 4 __11-14f-10-01__ 1932 wilson peter davies 5 __14-06-10-01__ 1948 wilson hart-davis 6 __03-02-01-♦__ 1956 keynes hart-davis 7 __03-?-01-?__ 1957 keynes nonesuch 8 __03-02-01-10__ 1965 erdman doubleday 9 __03-?-01__ 1966 keynes oxford u 10 __03-02-01__ 1968 keynes hart-davis 11 __02-06-10-01__ 1969 wilson cooper square 12 __14-02-01__ 1971 wilson oxford u 13 __03-02-01__ 1978 bentley clarendon 14 __03-?-01__ 1979 johnson norton 15 __03-11-01__ 1980 keynes clarendon 16 __03-11-01__ 1982 erdman u california 17 __03-11-01__ 1988 erdman anchor commentary 0. see illus. 1.6. blake ends his english sentence with a period, followed by the three hebrew letters for abc, “אבג‎” (__03-02-01__), all properly formed and without punctuation. 1. geoffrey keynes, a bibliography of william blake (new york: grolier club, 1921), “appendix iii: letters hitherto uncollected, letter 23,” 451. the leftmost letter is wrong. 2. geoffrey keynes, ed., the writings of william blake, 3 vols. (london: nonesuch press, 1925) 2: 242. fales library and special collections, new york university. instead of the abc that blake wrote, the nonesuch edition inexplicably uses the four-letter hebrew word for “job” (see illus. 3.5). 3. mona wilson, the life of william blake (london: nonesuch press, 1927) 142. wilson apparently copied the 1925 keynes (nonesuch). could this be an error by the same nonesuch editor? 4. mona wilson, the life of william blake (london: peter davies, 1932) 144. the typesetting of the 1932 edition is an egregiously erroneous reproduction of the 1927 wilson (nonesuch). 5. mona wilson, the life of william blake (london: hart-davis, 1948) 149. the error of using job’s name is perpetuated in this edition with an attempt to reproduce the 1927 wilson (nonesuch). however, the error is compounded because the leftmost letter is wrong for job’s name. 6. geoffrey keynes, ed., the letters of william blake (london: hart-davis, 1956) 83. hart-davis corrects the leftmost-character error of the 1921 keynes (grolier) edition, but inexplicably adds a superscript symbol that is in the shape of a diamond, indicated by the red arrow. blake has no character or symbol to the right of his rightmost letter. in hebrew, the traditional full stop (period) may be a single diamond subscript, or two diamonds one above the other (as in a colon). since hebrew is read from right to left, the full stop would properly be placed to the left of the leftmost letter. did the typesetter intend the letter “י”‎ (10) and use a diamond instead? 7. geoffrey keynes, ed., the complete writings of william blake: with all the variant readings (london: nonesuch press, 1957) 821. poorly printed, as if done with battered type. the letter left of center could be either “ב”‎ (02) or “כ”‎ (11). the rightmost is not a superscript diamond—possibly just battered type “י”‎ (10). 8. david v. erdman, ed., the poetry and prose of william blake, commentary by harold bloom (garden city, ny: doubleday, 1965) 696. erdman adds a fourth, superfluous character on the extreme right. 9. geoffrey keynes, ed., the complete writings of william blake: with variant readings (london: oxford university press, 1966) 821. the three letters are printed with battered type, making the center ambiguous, either “ב”‎ (02) or “כ”‎ (11). 10. geoffrey keynes, ed., the letters of william blake, 2nd ed. (london: hart-davis, 1968) 65. the three letters are correct. 11. mona wilson, the life of william blake (new york: cooper square publishers, 1969) 53. the same error as in the 1927 wilson (nonesuch). 12. mona wilson, the life of william blake (london: oxford university press, 1971) 169. this edition of wilson has been modified to attempt what blake actually wrote, except that the leftmost character is wrong. 13. g. e. bentley, jr., ed., william blake’s writings, 2 vols. (oxford: clarendon press, 1978) 2: 1570. the three letters are correct. further note is made that in 1: 666, where the laocoön is described, bentley’s representation of blake’s hebrew for “jesus” is wrong. blake engraved two letters in reverse, but the letters are correct (see illus. 3.7b). bentley has it as “ישצ‎” (__18-21-10__). the typesetter mistakenly used “צ‎” (18) instead of the “ע‎” (16) that blake engraved backwards, and the error was not recognized. see also illus. 3.2a3. 14. mary lynn johnson and john e. grant, eds., blake’s poetry and designs: authoritative texts, illuminations in color and monochrome, related prose, criticism (new york: w. w. norton, 1979) 465. the center letter is poorly printed, as if with battered type, and could be either “ב”‎ (02) or “כ”‎ (11). 15. geoffrey keynes, ed., the letters of william blake: with related documents, 3rd ed. (oxford: clarendon press, 1980) 53. the center letter is incorrect. 16. david v. erdman, ed., the complete poetry and prose of william blake, commentary by harold bloom, newly rev. ed. (berkeley: university of california press, 1982) 727. a double error is introduced. the center letter is wrong, and it is printed with a diacritical symbol—the dot in the center of the letter, the dagesh—which blake did not use. 17. david v. erdman, ed., the complete poetry and prose of william blake, commentary by harold bloom, newly rev. ed. (new york: anchor books, 1988) 727. the center letter is incorrect. 2. christ nailed to the cross: the third hour we next consider a drawing from the passion cycle: christ nailed to the cross: the third hour (illus. 2.1). behind the head of christ is a person with hebrew on his costume in two places: over the forehead on the miter, and on the hem of the robe draped over the left forearm. 2.1. christ nailed to the cross: the third hour. exhibition image 66. accession number evt 9. thaw collection, pierpont morgan library. the headpiece identifies the person as the high priest, whose official vestments included a miter with a gold plate. as described in exodus 28.36, engraved on the plate were the words the right word means “holy” (consecrated), and the left contains the tetragrammatontetragrammaton is defined in table 3, note a. and translates as “to the lord.”see the monograph on priestly vestments by haran in the encyclopaedia judaica. blake drew something different: five distinct letters are flanked by two ambiguous characters (illus. 2.2). 2.2. christ nailed to the cross: the third hour. the high priest’s miter. blake’s letters are which may be parsed as perhaps he intended to write “נ”‎ (14) instead of what appears clearly to be “ג”‎ (03).the justification for this assumption is the obvious error in illus. 3.2e, where “ג”‎ (03) is used in place of a textually required “נ”‎ (14). see also how blake forms the “ג”‎ (03) in the letter to his brother (illus. 1.6). also, if the ambiguous letters on either side are “י”‎ (10), the phrase will read the right word is the tetragrammaton and the left translates as “i,” for the two-word phrase “i am the lord.”i am indebted to ari cohen for this suggestion. literally interpreted, this would have the high priest proclaim himself to be god—certainly not a jewish theological concept, but blasphemy, as blake would have known.did blake use this opportunity to slur the high priest? spector explains: “although difficult for someone of the twentieth century to comprehend, the most significant aspect of eighteenth-century christian hebraism was its anti-semitism” (“blake as an eighteenth-century hebraist” 180). see also alexander gilchrist, life of william blake, “pictor ignotus” : “though at one with paine, godwin, fuseli, and the others [of his circle], as to politics, he was a rebel to their theological or anti-theological tenets. himself a heretic among the orthodox, here among the infidels he was a saint, and staunchly defended christianity—the spirit of it—against these strangely assorted disputants” (1: 94). gilchrist does not report details of the theological debates. any discussion about christianity would necessarily draw upon its judaic roots. alternatively, perhaps blake wrote “ל”‎ (12) instead of “י”‎ (10) as the right ambiguous lettersee the comment on illus. 3.2a on the manner in which blake forms the letter “ל”‎ (12). note that the line that blake drew is as dense as the adjacent letter, and may not be what appears at first glance as the edge of the plate. in an attempt to have the right word represent (as a contraction) “to the lord.” literally translated, the phrase becomes the awkward “i am to the lord.”a third suggestion is that the apparent “ג”‎ (03) is actually a poorly executed “ב”‎ (02), making the left word “אבי”‎ (__10-02-01__), which means “my father.” the slogan would then read “the lord my father.” however, blake’s obvious error demonstrated in illus. 3.2e makes this possibility unlikely. i am indebted to carin and ben dachs for this suggestion. if we set aside consideration of any theological purpose that blake had in mind in writing this slogan, it appears to represent the same theme as in job’s evil dreams (illus. 3.1). there, satan points to the slogan “your god gave from heaven,” which is blake’s way of depicting god’s authority and permission to test job, with satan as his agent. blake may here be assigning to the high priest the role of a satanic-like agent of god in the crucifixion. whatever the purpose, blake uses the high priest’s vestments as a slogan board, just as he makes use of the tablets of the ten commandments in the job drawing. i now consider the second slogan. the high priest wears a robe with a string of characters on the hem draped over his left forearm (illus. 2.3). the monograph in the encyclopaedia judaica (see note above) describes and illustrates the priestly vestments, as specified in the bible: there is no robe, nor are there embroidered characters. for blake, the hem appears to be yet another convenient call-out or balloon space to place one more slogan, although this slogan is not obvious. the words at the start and end are incomplete, as if lost in the folds of the robe, and some characters are ambiguous. one word is distinct, however: “צור”‎ (__20-06-18__), which translates to “rock.” 2.3. christ nailed to the cross: the third hour. the high priest’s robe, with the hem enlarged and rotated. this suggests that blake was depicting a common phrase, recognizable from just the segment visible. if the phrase was from the old testament, a hebrew bible concordance should identify it. a concordance search yielded thirty-eight entries for the word “צור”‎ (__20-06-18__) and fourteen for “צורי”‎ (__10-20-06-18__), “my rock.”wachsman 1602-03. no match was found. the william blake archive suggests that the slogan on the hem is an abstract representation of the phylactery worn on the left arm during certain jewish prayer services.in e-mail correspondence dated 7 march 2010, the blake archive graciously provided an advance draft of an editorial note suggesting the phylactery theory: “the hebrew letters are written vertically, bottom to top, on the priest’s cloak where it falls below his left arm, possibly as an unconventional substitute for the phylactery conventionally worn on the left arm.” the complete note is now published; see the william blake archive, drawings and paintings, water color drawings, illustrations to the bible, object 33, editors’ note on line 02. the wearing of phylacteries is a biblical command (deuteronomy 6.8) as a devotional reminder during prayer of the covenantal relationship between god and israel. the phylactery contains passages from the bible: deuteronomy 6.4-9 and 11.13-21, and exodus 13.1-16.p. birnbaum 5n-6n. no sentence there contains the word “צור”‎ (__20-06-18__), which blake depicts so clearly and centrally. perhaps he quotes from the new testament, or from some commentary, or one of his own works, translating the words into hebrew. 3. job series we next examine job’s evil dreams, one of the twenty-one drawings for the thomas butts job series, which contains eight hebrew words (illus. 3.1). 3.1. job’s evil dreams. exhibition image 26. accession number 2001.73. pierpont morgan library, new york. in the upper center background, partly obscured by satan’s cloven-hoofed leg and the snake coiled around his torso, there is a representation of the ten commandments on two conjoined tablets, with hebrew in sans-serif characters. blake wrote the letters sans serif in his typical flowing manner. serif offers certain visual clues to identify one letter from another that are lost in sans serif, thus demanding great caution in forming the letters. even if we allow for artistic liberties, he formed many incorrectly.spector argues that “since blake probably had a hebrew text before him as he worked [on job’s evil dreams], had he wished, he could have reproduced this source [the ten commandments] exactly. the picture’s irregularities, then, are probably deliberate rather than accidental” (“blake as an eighteenth-century hebraist” 201; emphasis mine). having thus dismissed consideration that blake made errors, spector hypothesizes his rationale for drawing as he did. of course, he was in the early stages of his hebrew studies at this time, if indeed he continued to study much beyond the 1803 date of the letter to his brother (illus. 1.6). the crucial contextual guide to recognizing the letters that blake wrote is the words of the ten commandments as given in exodus 20.2-14. although the commandments vary in wordiness in the biblical text, tradition represents each with two words. tradition also places five two-word representations on each of the two tablets (see table 3). table 3: the ten commandments   exodus 20   two words in hebrew   commandment right tablet 1. 2 [a]   i am the lord thy god, who brought thee out …. 2. 3-6     thou shalt have no other gods before me …. 3. 7     thou shalt not take the name of the lord thy …. 4. 8-11     remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy …. 5. 12     honor thy father and thy mother, that thy days ….   left tablet 6. 13 (1 of 4) [b]     thou shalt not murder. 7. 13 (2 of 4)     thou shalt not commit adultery. 8. 13 (3 of 4)     thou shalt not steal. 9. 13 (4 of 4)     thou shalt not bear false witness against thy …. 10. 14     thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house …. a. god is known by many names in the bible. those who strictly adhere to the third commandment, “thou shalt not take the name of the lord thy god in vain,” use traditional euphemisms in writing and speaking. “lord thy god” is an example of an english-language euphemism. the greek tetragrammaton, literally the four letters, is another, as is the numeric coding scheme used in this paper. when hebrew is written or spoken, the traditional euphemism is to substitute letters. for the tetragrammaton, the four-letter word “יקוק”‎, which is not a name of god (and codes as __19-06-19-10__), is written or pronounced. the euphemism adopted by this paper to avoid substituting hebrew letters in writing any of god’s names simply is not to write a word. each letter stands alone. b. exodus 20.13 contains four commandments, the sixth through the ninth. the sixth to eighth are sentences of two words, while the ninth is a sentence of five words. illus. 3.2 shows blake’s tablets enlarged. if we bear in mind that hebrew is written and read from right to left, the right tablet (to the viewer) should contain five two-word representations of the first through fifth commandments. blake’s has only one word. the left tablet should begin with the sixth commandment. the sixth is actually the second line. commandment seven and a portion of the eighth are the third and fourth lines, respectively. 3.2. job’s evil dreams. enlargement of the tablets. my analysis of the calligraphy begins with the left tablet, setting aside the first line, which will be discussed last. blake depicts on the second line the two-word convention for the sixth commandment, “thou shalt not kill” (illus. 3.2a): 3.2a. job’s evil dreams. left tablet, second line. note letter “ל”‎ (12). here and elsewhere, blake does not carefully form the top horizontal segment. it tends to be a squiggly zigzag shape.blake’s propensity to form this letter without a horizontal top is important in the analysis of the calligraphy in christ nailed to the cross: the third hour (illus. 2.2). letter “א”‎ (01) shows two overlaid angle strokes, one correct and the other an error. examination by microscopenikon smz-u zoom 1:10. thaw conservation center of the morgan library and museum. shows that the erroneous diagonal was drawn first and then overlaid by the correct stroke (illus. 3.2a1-2). at the instant of drawing the letter, blake demonstrates ambivalence. the obvious confusion with forming the first letter of the alphabet indicates that at the time of creating the job series he was not a practiced writer of hebrew. 3.2a1-2. job’s evil dreams. magnification of “א”‎ (01) on left tablet, second line. analysis of nearly every other letter reinforces this impression. letter “ת”‎ (22) is distorted. properly formed, it contains four segments: a top horizontal stroke, an attached vertical stroke descending on the right side, and a vertical stroke descending on the left side with a small additional horizontal stroke at the base turning away from the body of the letter (consider a leg with an attached foot). in sans serif, the foot is the only visual indicator that it is not the similar “ח”‎ (08). blake drew both vertical strokes with feet attached. is this artistic embellishment at the expense of legibility or confusion over how to form the letter? letter “צ”‎ (18) is curious. at first glance, it appears to be the expected צ‎-shape. however, when the image is magnified, blake’s ambiguity becomes obvious. it appears to be a distorted “ע”‎ (16). the stick figures below (illus. 3.2a3) demonstrate how the letters differ in construction. “צ”‎ (18) blake “ע”‎ (16) letter “צ”‎ (18) is drawn with a long diagonal descending from the upper left to the lower right to meet with the rightmost end of a horizontal base. a short diagonal from the upper right touches the long diagonal near midpoint. letter “ע”‎ (16) does not have a horizontal base. the long diagonal descends from the upper right and then angles acutely to the lower left. a shorter diagonal line begins upper left and descends at an angle towards the right until it meets the long diagonal coursing to the left. compare the stick figures for letters “צ”‎ (18) and “ע”‎ (16) to blake’s letter in the drawing under magnification.the magnification feature is one of the strengths of the morgan’s online exhibition. it is not the pattern expected from an experienced hand. the third line, of two words, is the seventh commandment: “thou shalt not commit adultery” (illus. 3.2b). blake wrote: 3.2b. job’s evil dreams. left tablet, third line. the letter “א”‎ (01) is twice used. careful comparison of the “א”‎s demonstrates that the right instance is reversed, while the left is properly formed. blake often reverses this letter, which has three elements: an angled stroke that runs from the upper left to the bottom right and two vertical strokes of uneven sizes joined to each side of the angled stroke. blake uses the “n” shape drawn sans serif. the reversed letter is perfectly recognizable because of the three elements, but the ambiguity in the proper presentation of the first letter of the hebrew alphabet in this line is glaringly obvious. letter “נ”‎ (14) is distorted almost to the point of confusion. when properly drawn, the top horizontal segment is shorter than the bottom. with the two horizontal strokes identical, it may be confused with sans-serif letters “ב”‎ (02) and “כ”‎ (11); with the base angled down towards the left, there is room for confusion with “ג”‎ (03). from the context, “נ”‎ (14) is the intended letter. here, and in examples to follow, blake shows a propensity to slant what should be a horizontal baseline. the eighth commandment, “thou shalt not steal,” is line four (illus. 3.2c). there blake wrote a fragment of a word with distorted letters, the end of the second word of the commandment. 3.2c. job’s evil dreams. left tablet, fourth line. the complete commandment is from context, the partial character “?” in illus. 3.2c must be “ת”‎ (22), and the “כ”‎ (11) is a distorted “ג”‎ (03) whose lower-right extension is truncated, apparently by artistic design because of the overflowing edge of satan’s garment. nevertheless, the apparent “ו”‎ (06) is a distorted “נ”‎ (14), and the last letter, which appears to be “נ”‎ (14), is actually a poorly executed “ב”‎ (02). the ninth and tenth commandments are not depicted. before we consider the first line of the left tablet, it is necessary to analyze the single word on the right tablet, which appears immediately beneath satan’s outstretched, pointing hand (illus. 3.2d). blake wrote four letters: 3.2d. job’s evil dreams. right tablet, line of text. the first letter (reading from right to left) is certainly “ש”‎ (21), even though when examined under magnification it is hesitatingly drawn, and the center vertical segment, which should angle downwards to the left, is angled towards the right. at first glance, the second letter appears to be “ם”‎ (13f), obviously an error because “ם”‎ is a final letter. from context, it cannot be the very similar “ס”‎ (15). blake intended “מ”‎ (13). the last letter, “ח”‎ (08), shows a hesitatingly drawn line at its base when magnified, as if blake was indecisive about the bottom, which, if closed, converts the apparent “ח”‎ (08) to “ם”‎ (13f). the corrections yield which translates into the word “heaven.” there is no such word, however, in the two-word abbreviations of any of the first five commandments. as will be made clear below, blake has written “heaven” for another purpose. for the left tablet’s topmost line (illus. 3.2e), blake wrote: 3.2e. job’s evil dreams. left tablet, top line. to correct his calligraphy, we replace the “ח”‎ (08) with the similar “ה”‎ (05), the poorly shaped “ף”‎ (17f)what i describe as a poorly shaped “ף”‎ (17f) spector perceives to be a “ך”‎ (11f) with a vowel point (qamats) shaped like a “┬” under the top horizontal stroke (microsoft word, times new roman font, unicode hexadecimal representation 05b8). first, and especially in sans serif, it is the small dangling appendage attached to and hanging from the left edge of the top horizontal stroke that differentiates the “ף”‎ (17f) from the “ך”‎ (11f), and it is this appendage that blake apparently misplaced and mangled. second, a vowel point must stand apart: no portion should touch any part of the letter. the assumed vowel is attached to the letter, as the magnified drawing clearly shows. therefore, it is part of the letter and not a vowel point. third, observe the letter’s vertical stroke bifurcated at its bottom where it should be a single line in both the “ף”‎ (17f) and “ך”‎ (11f). this is just another poorly formed letter. further, it is usual for multiple letters in a word to be vowelled, when vowels are used at all (although, as spector points out, there are exceptions). see “blake’s graphic use of hebrew” 69. with the similar “ך”‎ (11f), the clearly formed “ג”‎ (03) with the very similar “נ”‎ (14), and the last letter of the second word, “ג”‎ (03), with “נ”‎ (14) in its final form, “ן”‎ (14f). the corrected words now read which translates as “your god gave,” or, alternatively, “your god gives.”blake omits vowel symbols. the context permits either version. with artistic license, blake actually wrote a three-word slogan across the two tablets. beginning with the lone word on the right tablet, and continuing with the two words at the top of the left tablet, the slogan translates into the almost grammatically correct phrase “your god gave [gives] from heaven.” blake precisely depicts the plain text of the bible—satan declares his authorization to inflict tribulations on job by pointing to the tablets of the ten commandments, which represent god.he graphically portrays the literal story told in the first two chapters of job (the authorization is indicated in italics). satan challenges god: “‘but put forth thy hand now, and touch all that he hath, surely he will blaspheme thee to thy face.’ and the lord said unto satan: ‘behold, all that he hath is in thy power; only upon himself put not forth thy hand’” (job 1.11-12 [soncino edition]). in the plain text we read of satan, as god’s “hand,” killing every person belonging to job, sparing only those who are more useful as tormentors if kept alive, and destroying his wealth (flocks and herds of animals). job withstands the challenge. satan returns to god for more authority: “and the lord said unto satan: ‘… he still holdeth fast his integrity, although thou didst move me against him, to destroy him without cause.’ and satan answered the lord, and said: ‘… but put forth thy hand now, and touch his bone and his flesh, surely he will blaspheme thee to thy face.’ and the lord said unto satan: ‘behold he is in thy hand; only spare his life.’ so satan went forth from the presence of the lord, and smote job with sore boils from the sole of his foot even unto his crown” (2.3-7). the plain text makes it clear that satan does nothing of his own volition, without god’s permission and authority. first, god grants satan permission to test job, and sets a limit—you may not touch him physically. thereafter, god extends that authority to permit physical torment, with a new limit—you may not kill him. satan is the “hand” put forth as god’s authorized agent. blake graphically portrays the story by showing satan pointing towards the source of job’s travail, god, metaphorically represented by the tablets of the ten commandments. he then adds imagery not in the bible—satan points to his assistants who inflict the tormenting nightmare.in illustrations of the book of job, plate numbered 11 (illus 3.4), blake describes in a title line what he engraved (emphasis in italics): “satan himself is transformed into an angel of light & his ministers into ministers of righteousness.” as a footnote, blake quotes job 7.14: “with dreams upon my bed thou scarest me & affrightest me with visions” (the soncino edition has “then thou scarest me with dreams, and terrifiest me through visions”). in this lament, “thou” refers to god, not to satan. blake deliberately made the slogan appear to be a commandment—a visual illusion. later, when blake prepared a set of the job drawings for john linnell, he did not attempt to duplicate this ambitious use of hebrew (illus. 3.3). 3.3. job’s evil dreams. harvard art museum, fogg art museum, bequest of grenville l. winthrop, 1943.422. photo: allan macintyre. © president and fellows of harvard college. the clever illusion and slogan in the butts drawing never appeared in print. when the job set was engraved (illus. 3.4),the plates carry the engraved date 1825, but they were published in 1826. one line of indistinct hebrew-like graffiti replaced the many lines of hebrew in the butts drawing. now, the tablets alone—without words—serve blake’s purpose, as satan points to them to declare the true source of job’s tribulations and his authority as agent to inflict torments. 3.4. illustrations of the book of job, plate numbered 11. not exhibited. accession number pml 63939. pierpont morgan library, new york. gift of mrs. landon k. thorne, 1973. in illustrations of the book of job, only two plates have hebrew, each with two words. the first is the title page (illus. 3.5), in which artistically embellished serif characters reflect the style of the english letters. although this license causes a distortion to the base of one letter, no ambiguity results because the letter remains distinct and the context is unmistakable. the word on the right translates as “book” and that on the left as “job,” for “job’s book,” or, as blake properly has it, “the book of job.” 3.5. illustrations of the book of job, title page. not exhibited. accession number pml 63939. pierpont morgan library, new york. gift of mrs. landon k. thorne, 1973. careful examination of the hebrew shows that letter “פ”‎ (17) has an erroneous embellishment (illus. 3.5.1). 3.5.1. illustrations of the book of job, title page. hebrew enlarged. extended to the right beyond the vertical stroke, the baseline matches that of letter “ב”‎ (02). this is improper, because the extension is a feature unique to “ב”‎ (02) to differentiate it from the similar “כ”‎ (11), especially in sans serif. this may be artistic license, or not understanding the import of the flourish. it is also possible that blake mimics a style not used today (see the discussion of illus. 3.6.2j, below). he uses the “n” shape for “א”‎ (01). the title page offers a unique opportunity to appreciate blake’s artistic embellishments of hebrew letters by comparison with the english word immediately below (illus. 3.5.2). 3.5.2. illustrations of the book of job, title page. hebrew and english enlarged. note the drooping, angled baseline of the letter “l,” the distortion of the letter “t,” and the embellishments and distortions of “u,” “s,” and “n”: flamboyant artistic license, all. did blake express the same license when forming non-serif hebrew letters, even at the expense of legibility? the third plate in the job series, numbered 2 (illus. 3.6), contains two hebrew words, one of which by context is apparently misspelled. 3.6. illustrations of the book of job, plate numbered 2. exhibition image 63. accession number pml 63939. pierpont morgan library, new york. gift of mrs. landon k. thorne, 1973. the words are in the top border, immediately beneath “the angel of the divine presence” (illus. 3.6.1): 3.6.1. illustrations of the book of job, plate numbered 2. top border enlarged. the left word is the tetragrammaton, which blake apparently used to represent the english words “divine presence,” although the hebrew is usually translated as “lord” (and commonly transliterated as “jehovah”). the three-letter right word is problematic, because it translates as “king,” not “angel.” the two-word phrase, if considered alone, is not a problem (“lord the king” or “jehovah the king”). if blake intended the hebrew to represent “the angel of the divine presence,” however, he should have engraved the four-letter word for “angel,” which contains the three letters used for “king”: before we consider the riddle that is wrapped in this enigma of blake’s calligraphy, observe carefully the letter “מ”‎ (13). for whatever reason, blake here uses a cursive form of the letter. curiously, he is not consistent, because the letter “ל”‎ (12) remains serif. compare his letters for “king” (illus. 3.6.2) to the same word from a twentieth-century book whose type is set in cursive (illus. 3.6.2a). the double quotation mark figure in the illustration indicates that the letters on either side form a contraction of a common phrase, which the reader is expected to recognize and comprehend from context. it is “גם כן”‎, meaning “also, as well.” the typesetting mimics handwritten cursive, which contains many such contractions to speed writing. 3.6.2 (top left). illustrations of the book of job, plate numbered 2. blake’s cursive “מ”‎ (13) and serif “ל”‎ (12). 3.6.2a (bottom). the book of the congregation of israel “ספר כנסת ישראל”‎ (warsaw: simon rothenberg “שמעון רוטינבערג”‎, 1911) 9 (author’s library). this ubiquitous cursive typeface is often termed semi-cursive. 3.6.2b (top right). author’s handwriting. the word “king” in rabbinic style. by using symbols formed by the fewest possible strokes, hebrew cursive facilitates speedy handwriting. letters take on simplified and sometimes radical changes of shape, as indicated by the red arrows (left to right): 01, 11f, 12, 13, 04, 21, and 02. “rashi” is the name given to the cursive style shown in illus. 3.6.2a. used in writing medieval manuscripts and publishing biblical and talmudic incunabula, this typeface continues in use to this day. the sentence is from a book at hand selected to demonstrate “king.” (also, compare the cursive rashi letter “ד”‎ (04) in illus. 3.6.2a with the “t” in “illustrations” in illus. 3.5.2. blake apparently mimics rashi.)residing in london, he would have had the opportunity to examine hebrew typography in books printed with rashi-style letters, if only by browsing the shelves of booksellers. in illus. 3.6.2b, i have written the word “king” in another cursive style in common use, where the letter “מ”‎ (13) takes the shape of a squeezed “n.” blake’s “מ”‎ (13) matches neither cursive style. specimens of “מ”‎ (13) near contemporary with blake are in illus. 3.6.2c-j. examples c-h are handwritten. blake’s “מ”‎ 3.6.2c 3.6.2d 3.6.2e 3.6.2f 3.6.2g 3.6.2h handwritten specimens of cursive (near) contemporary with blake. 3.6.2c. written in pencil on the inside back cover of gerald fitz-gerald, the hebrew alphabet: on a scale of equal parts showing the serviles and radicals at one view. a hebrew grammar, for the use of the students of the university of dublin (dublin: r. e. mercier & co., university press, trinity college, 1799). dorot jewish division of the new york public library (hereafter nypl). 3.6.2d. written in the margin of gregory sharpe, an hebrew lexicon: containing all the primitive and many deriv’d words, containing their various significations in hebrew and english, free from the masoretic points … and the five letters on that language (london: john millan, 1745) 14. nypl. 3.6.2e. from marginalia in christian simon schröder, seder ‘olam rabah ve-z uta u-megilat ta’anit (hamburg: christian simon schröder, 1757), leaf 22a. special collections of the mendel gottesman library of hebraica/judaica of the yeshiva university (hereafter yu), new rare 87-049. 3.6.2f. from a manuscript, jacob vivante, sansan le-yair (florence, italy, c. 18th-19th century), leaf 2a. yu, ms. 1290. 3.6.2g. from a manuscript, compendium of selected prayers (italy?, 1723), preface. yu, ms. 1294. 3.6.2h. from a work critically attacking the then newly emerging hassidic movement, solomon gottlieb stern, kotenot passim (1832), leaf 52. yu, ms. 1380. again, none matches, for two reasons: first, blake has an embellished flat base extending to the right, and second, he has suppressed the protruding small stroke that should be on the upper-left portion of the letter pointing upwards. he is doing something different. illus. 3.6.2i-j are from a book published in 1735. 3.6.2i-j. joh. simonis, arcanum formarum nominum hebrææ linguæ, sive de significatione formali tractatus philologicus, vol. 1 (halæ magdeburgicæ: impensis orphanotrophei, 1735), “sectio i. præliminaris,” 14. nypl. specimens of this style appear in title pages of books printed in 1787 and 1802, and it was in use as early as 1527. see orr-stav 16-17 and rosenfeld 343 (pl. 560) and 431 (pl. 817). exaggerated ornamentation embellishes all letters in this unusual serif-style typeface. it is possible that blake knew and mimicked this style because his letter “פ”‎ (17) in illus. 3.5.1 has the same extension of the baseline towards the right as the character in illus. 3.6.2j. nonetheless, blake’s “מ”‎ (13) significantly differs from illus. 3.6.2i. there is yet one more comparison to make. christian d. ginsburg (1831–1914) was born in poland a few years after blake died and received a traditional jewish religious education. after emigrating to england as a young man in 1846, he converted to christianity, entered the circle of the london christian hebraists, and eventually became a noted biblical scholar.for a biographical sketch of ginsburg, see bloch 583n. although the word in illus. 3.6.2k was written some five decades after blake died, it may be compared with blake’s style because ginsburg studied hebrew when a child, making him a virtual contemporary. the five-letter word translates as “in the wilderness.” it was selected because the letter “ב”‎ (02) appears twice, with the right instance adjacent to the letter “מ”‎ (13). lastly, i place blake’s and ginsburg’s “king” side by side in illus. 3.6.2l. 3.6.2k-l. christian david ginsburg, masorah (c. 1880) 57 and 75. yu, ms. 721. the manuscript contains english, greek, and hebrew written in ginsburg’s precise micrographic hand. without question, ginsburg was a skilled hebraist who knew how to form hebrew characters. not so blake. the impression given by the comparison is that blake engraved “ב”‎ (02) instead of the intended “מ”‎ (13).examination of london archives may uncover examples contemporary with blake of the same version of “ב”‎ (02) as used by ginsburg. the next step of the analysis compares the job plate (illus. 3.6) with another famous work by blake, the laocoön (illus. 3.7), which has the same slogan, “the angel of the divine presence.” 3.7. laocoön, copy b. collection of robert n. essick. image courtesy of the william blake archive. blake incorporated hebrew four times in the laocoön. a two-letter name for god, in perfectly formed serif letters, is at bottom left (illus. 3.7a). in the upper left is the hebrew for jesus, with two letters reversed (illus. 3.7b).the name jesus is spelled with four letters, “ישוע”‎ (__16-06-21-10__), as spector points out (“blake’s graphic use of hebrew” 78). the letter “ו”‎ (06) functions as a vowel indicator. with the vowel omitted, the three letters __16-21-10__ mean “to save, to deliver,” as defined in parkhurst’s lexicon (parkhurst, 1762, ecco image 157). blake may be using the hebrew to represent the concept of christ as savior. however, he may have intended the actual name of christ, because the protestant theologians of his era promoted the study of hebrew without vowels (points), a concept expressed in the full title of parkhurst’s lexicon (see works cited and parkhurst, 1762, ecco image 1). except for the top horizontal segment of letter “ת”‎ (22), which is reversed (red arrow), otherwise perfectly formed serif letters, right of center, identify the attacking serpent as lilith, the female temptress-serpent-demon (illus. 3.7c). top center, very prominently engraved under the english slogan “the angel of the divine presence,” are two words (illus. 3.7d): the tetragrammaton on the left, and “angel” on the right, but with a reversed “א”‎ (01) and a nearly cursive “מ”‎ (13). finally, with all the above in mind, it is now possible to consider (a) the riddle posed by blake’s misspelling “angel” in the job plate by omitting letter “א”‎ (01) when he has it correct in the laocoön; and (b) the enigma of the reversed letter “א”‎ (01) in a word that is so prominently and centrally displayed in the laocoön. i begin by quoting spector as representative of the scholarly discourse: blake’s work is full of such inconsistencies, not only within single drawings, but among individual drawings as well. for example, at the top of “the laocoön” is the heading “the angel of the divine presence,” followed by a corrupt hebrew version in which the alef [letter “א”‎ (01)] of the word “angel” is reversed …. in contrast, the identical phrase heads the … job illustration, but here, blake omits the alef entirely, leaving us with … the hebrew word for “king”…. if we assume that blake did not simply forget to include the alef, especially since he knew the word, then we must conclude that the corruption was deliberate, though the explanation for the alteration may defy our powers of analysis.spector, “blake as an eighteenth-century hebraist” 202. emphasis mine, except for the word “alef.” see also 225n40. the truth is sometimes to be found in the simplest theory (occam’s razor). it may be, as g. e. bentley, jr., suggests, that blake made errors when doing hebrew.bentley, william blake’s writings 1: 664n. how this could have occurred is suggested in a letter by john linnell where we learn that the “borders [of the job plates] were an afterthought, and designed as well as engraved upon the copper without a previous drawing” (emphasis mine).bentley, the stranger from paradise 396. because blake worked on the job borders extemporaneously, it is possible that he did the same when adding words to the laocoön plate. rosamund paice so argues.paice argues that the words were added late in blake’s life: “the uneven spacing, and the mistakes, of the surrounding text suggest that it probably was scratched and/or engraved straight into the plate. … this suspicion is supported by the fact that the inscriptions (including the signature line) appear to have been cut with a graver, and not etched” (57). this may be the cause of the errors—surely, blake was capable of human mistakes, no different from the many editors who attempt to reproduce his “abc” “אבג‎” (see table 2). however, for those who cannot accept fallibility in blake, i propose a more elaborate and speculative explanation. who is, and where is, the angel in the two engravings? the answer is obvious in the job plate (illus. 3.6), where satan is front and center.blake places satan centrally in every job engraving in which he appears. what could be more evident? now examine the laocoön (illus. 3.7). how is satan depicted? he is clearly off to the side, entangled and helpless in the coils of lilith, and identified as one of the two children of god (illus. 3.7a). here, he is a minor character in the composition, unlabeled.lilith is labeled (illus. 3.7c), but satan and adam are not. consider the four figures, as blake perceives them: god is not an angel—god is the creator; lilith is a demon, certainly no angel; adam is a man, also not an angel; satan is the angel. now examine the placement of the slogan (illus. 3.7d). it is not over the head of whichever of the two “sons” represents satan, but directly above god, as it is in the job engraving (illus. 3.6). blake placed the english above the hebrew, and the hebrew above god, in both. why above god, when it clearly refers to an angel, which could only be satan? the answer, i suggest, is to consider that the hebrew refers not to satan at all, but only to god. we now consider the illusion in each engraving. the job engravings were published in 1826, and, by current judgment, the laocoön is dated afterwards.for the history of the laocoön and an analysis of the imagery, see essick, separate plates xxvii, 98-101. however, for the most recent scholarship on its dating, see the william blake archive, which assigns a print date after the job: “the central image of the statue may have been executed as early as c. 1815 …. the inscribed texts surrounding the statue were almost certainly added at a much later date, c. 1826-27.” “print date: c. 1826-27” (illuminated books, laocoön, introduction and copy information for copy b, accessed 8 march 2010). bentley dates it “1826?” (the stranger from paradise 463). job: a person whose primary language is english will instinctively read from top left to bottom right, and on encountering the phrase “the angel of the divine presence” will probably assume that the words immediately below are a hebrew translation. the hebraist will form the same assumption, then immediately realize upon reading the hebrew that it has a different interpretation: the hebraist, expecting the equivalent of the english “the angel of the divine presence,” instead perceives “lord the king” (or “jehovah the king”) and will be confounded. the meaning becomes clear, however, if the hebrew phrase is associated with the image of god (“lord the king”) immediately below, and not with satan, as implied by the word “angel” in the slogan above. in this plate (illus. 3.6), blake depicts three lines from the biblical plain text. job 1.6, quoted in small letters at the very bottom of the plate,as blake engraves it: “there was a day when the sons of god came to present themselves before the lord & satan came also among them to present himself before the lord.” sets the stage. we see two parallel scenes: heaven above, earth below. in heaven, a radiant god sits enthroned, an open book in his lap, attended by the “sons of god,” all in contemplative study. on earth, duplicating the heavenly tableau, a righteous job with book in hand converses with angels, surrounded by his family, all in contemplative study.the heavenly scene is in job 1.6. blake includes the earthly scene because of job 1.8. god calls satan to account for his whereabouts; the latter replies that he was traveling the world (1.7: “and the lord said unto satan: ‘whence comest thou?’ then satan answered the lord, and said: ‘from going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it’”).soncino edition. blake depicts this by showing a pensive god looking at satan, who is in mid-stride. next, in job 1.8, god asks satan: “hast thou considered my servant job, that there is none like him in the earth, a whole-hearted and an upright man, one that feareth god, and shunneth evil?”soncino edition. blake shows this by words and image: the words are in an arc at the top of the plate, and the image shows god pointing down towards job.thereafter, in job 1.9-12, satan issues the challenge that god should test job, and god authorizes satan to so do (see note above). he further emphasizes god by engraving phrases above and below that refer to god in one manner or another. the composition of this plate, therefore, has god at the top and job, a mortal on earth, necessarily at the bottom. only midpoint remains for satan. blake does not place satan there because of his prominence and importance, but because of compositional demands. satan is subordinate to god, who is paramount, and the focus is on god’s role in the job story. this is the context necessary to understand the hebrew slogan. now we consider the three central title lines. all are about god. in an arc, blake engraved “hast thou considered my servant job,” the question posed by god. the second line identifies whom it is that god is addressing (see illus. 3.4, describing satan as an “angel”). the third, in hebrew, labels the image of god. associating hebrew with god is not a new theme for blake; three decades earlier, in night thoughts, he shows god with a scroll of hebrew letters (see illus. 1.1), and the hebrew slogan on the open book represents god, to whose heavenly realm the triumphant queen points (see illus. 1.4). the perception of a wrong translation is just an illusion caused by considering only the second and third lines without the overall context. it matters not if blake deliberately or inadvertently created the illusion. if deliberate, the english reference to an angel would be a red herring to mislead the hebraist. if inadvertent, we may imagine blake’s surprise when a hebraist complained that he erred because the hebrew for “angel” (מלאך‎) is misspelled. whichever, it is an illusion of a translation. by the overall context, blake intended “king” (מלך‎), and that is what we see. laocoön: the hebrew words with the largest letters act as a headline or banner to attract the eye. the non-hebraist, for whom the words convey no meaning, will probably assume that the hebrew is the equivalent of the english engraved immediately above: “the angel of the divine presence.” the hebraist will immediately understand the two hebrew words as a phrase to mean “the lord’s angel” (or “jehovah’s angel”), a translation perfectly consistent with the english. however, the hebraist will simultaneously recognize that something is wrong, because the “א”‎ (01) is reversed. the reversal is a clue. upon deliberately reconsidering the word with the offending letter deleted, the hebraist will suddenly perceive “king” (מלך‎) in place of “angel” (מלאך‎). the translation becomes “lord, the king,” a title consistent with the central figure of the laocoön, whom blake conceptualizes to be a representation of god. spector supposes that blake could not have erred because he knew the hebrew words for “angel” and “king” (“blake as an eighteenth-century hebraist” 202). if not by error, then he did it for a purpose. i offer two suggestions for the reversed letter in the laocoön. perhaps blake intended the hebrew to convey a double meaning: “angel,” as a translation of the english slogan above, and “king,” as a label for the image below. it could, however, be another red herring to reinforce the illusion of a translation. ignore the offending reversed letter, and the word becomes “king.” the critical concept is to recognize that the hebrew banner is immediately above god, not above satan, just as we see in the job.linnell studied greek and hebrew; his biographer, alfred thomas story, tells of his learning hebrew (and greek) after conversion to the baptist communion in 1812 in order to study the bible. his teacher was thomas palmer, his future father-in-law, described as having “a good knowledge of hebrew.” story is of the opinion that “[linnell] does not appear to have carried his studies very far … at that time, and they were probably soon relinquished.” in 1843, he resumed serious study and gained a degree of competence (story vol. 1, ch. 5; vol. 2, ch. 7). on the relationship between blake and linnell, story says: “a similarity of thought between the two men soon led to a very close intimacy between them, and they remained fast friends until the death of the elder closed as kindly a chapter of friendship as is anywhere to be met with in the annals of art or literature” (vol. 1, ch. 12). the modern revision of story’s biography by linnell’s great-grandson offers this comment about linnell’s meeting blake for the first time on 24 june 1818: “the two men seem to have taken to each other at once. linnell was then twenty-six and blake sixty-one. their friendship lasted until blake’s death, ten years later in 1827. linnell was obviously fascinated by this man whose art and writings reflected so strongly a special image of god. he was surprised to discover that blake too had learned greek and hebrew, and this immediately put their discussions about religion on a special footing” (d. linnell 53). the implication of all this is that at the time that blake was engraving the job and the laocoön hebrew slogans, linnell had some command of hebrew (the extent of which is unknown). one may suspect that they discussed the hebrew as work on the plates progressed. if discussions did occur, and if linnell understood the difference in the hebrew spelling of “king” and “angel,” then what blake engraved was for a purpose. in the absence of documentary evidence, however, the vetting of blake’s hebrew by linnell remains just an enticing speculation. blake’s motive for introducing hebrew wordplays into his art is argued in a forthcoming paper, blake’s priestly blessing: god blesses job. conclusion these few samples of blake’s hebrew calligraphy may not be statistically representative or relevant. considered in and of themselves, the images from the period before 1803 indicate a lack of command over the written character. although the butts watercolors demonstrate blake’s great artistic mastery, they do not demonstrate mastery of the hebrew alphabet. the hebrew words from the job and laocoön engravings are properly formed, but imply a confusion in the spelling of the words “angel” and “king,” if not part of a deliberate illusion. blake may also be distorting hebrew characters for an ulterior purpose in support of a personal theology. his graphic representations of hebrew show only what the eye can see, and tell no tale of how they came into being. if these specimens are typical of blake’s written hebrew, however, then they may be a measure of his command of the language. acknowledgements this paper could be written only because of the magnificent resources of the morgan library and museum, and its ever-cooperative staff. my deepest expression of thanks is extended to anna lou ashby, andrew w. mellon curator, whose unflagging encouragement and assistance cannot be overstated. the reading room staff is unfailingly supportive as they serve the rarities in their care, and i wish to acknowledge inge dupont, head of reader services, maria isabel molestina triviño, reader services librarian, sylvie merian, reader services librarian, and sandy koppelman, reading room attendant. also, for micrographic imaging, i thank frank trujillo, associate book conservator of the thaw conservation center. my appreciation is gratefully proffered to the staff of other libraries for their helpful support and courtesies extended, especially to michael terry, chief librarian of dorot jewish division of the new york public library, jay rovner, manuscript bibliographer of the jewish theological seminary, shulamith z. berger, curator of special collections of yeshiva university, and charlotte priddle, librarian for printed books of fales library and special collections, new york university. my gratitude is extended to sarah jones, managing editor of blake, for bringing the manuscript to its polished state in both the web and the print-on-demand versions. i also acknowledge the assistance of friends. i am fortunate to be able to draw upon the extensive knowledge of professor ari cohen. ben and carin dachs carefully proofread and offered helpful suggestions. lastly, any errors in this paper are solely the responsibility of the author. works cited bar-adon, aaron. the rise and decline of a dialect: a study of the revival of modern hebrew. the hague: mouton, 1975. bentley, g. e., jr. the stranger from paradise: a biography of william blake. new haven: yale university press, 2001. ---, ed. william blake’s writings. 2 vols. oxford: clarendon press, 1978. birnbaum, philip, trans. and annotated. the daily prayer book: ha-siddur ha-shalem. new york: hebrew publishing company, 1977. birnbaum, solomon a. the hebrew scripts. 2 vols. leiden: e. j. brill, 1954-71. birnbaum, solomon a., et al. “alphabet, hebrew.” encyclopaedia judaica. 16 vols. jerusalem: keter publishing, 1971-72. 2 [a–ang]: cols. 674-746. bloch, joshua. “ginsburg’s masoretic bible.” bulletin of the new york public library 32.9 (sept. 1928): 579-84. cheskin, arnold. “the echoing greenhorn: blake as hebraist.” blake 12.3 (winter 1978-79): 178-83. essick, robert n. the separate plates of william blake: a catalogue. princeton: princeton university press, 1983. gilchrist, alexander. life of william blake, “pictor ignotus.” 2 vols. london: macmillan, 1863. haran, menahem. “priestly vestments.” encyclopaedia judaica. 16 vols. jerusalem: keter publishing, 1971-72. 13 [p–rec]: cols. 1063-69. job: hebrew text and english translation. introduction and commentary by victor e. reichert. 5th impression. london: soncino press, 1965. linnell, david. blake, palmer, linnell and co.: the life of john linnell. sussex: book guild ltd., 1994. margoliouth, h. m. “blake’s drawings for young’s night thoughts.” review of english studies ns 5, no. 17 (jan. 1954): 47-54. minkoff, harvey. “graphemics and diachrony: some evidence from hebrew cursive.” afroasiatic linguistics 1.7 (march 1975): 2-16. orr-stav, jonathan. learn to write the hebrew script: alef through the looking glass. new haven: yale university press, 2006. paice, rosamund a. “encyclopaedic resistance: blake, rees’s cyclopædia, and the laocoön separate plate.” blake 37.2 (fall 2003): 44-62. parkhurst, john. an hebrew and english lexicon, without points: in which the hebrew and chaldee words of the old testament are explained in their leading and derived senses, the derivative words are ranged under their respective primitives, and the meanings assigned to each authorised by references to passages of scripture. to this work is prefixed a methodical hebrew grammar, without points; adapted to the use of learners, and of those who have not the benefit of a master: also, the hebrew grammar, at one view. london, 1762. quarles, francis. emblemes (1635), with edward benlowes’ quarlëis; hieroglyphikes of the life of man (1638). introduction by karl josef höltgen and john horden. hildesheim: georg olms verlag, 1993. rosenfeld, moshe. hebrew printing from its beginning until 1948: a gazetteer of printing, the first books, and their dates with photographed title-pages and bibliographical notes. jerusalem: m. rosenfeld, 1992. sirat, colette. hebrew manuscripts of the middle ages. ed. and trans. nicholas de lange. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2002. spector, sheila a. “blake as an eighteenth-century hebraist.” blake and his bibles. ed. david v. erdman. west cornwall, ct: locust hill press, 1990. 179-229. ---. “blake’s graphic use of hebrew.” blake 37.2 (fall 2003): 63-79. story, alfred t. the life of john linnell. 2 vols. london: richard bentley and son, 1892. toby, l. f. the art of hebrew lettering: with twenty-six calligraphic, typographic and historical tablets by rothschild-lippman and the author. 7th rev. ed. holon, israel: shuster, 1981. wachsman, h. the practical concordance to the holy scriptures, complete and unabridged. jerusalem: milonim le-’am, 2000. yardeni, ada. the book of hebrew script: history, palaeography, script styles, calligraphy and design. london: british library, 2002. young, edward. night thoughts: the poem by edward young, illustrated with water colours by william blake. commentary by robin hamlyn. 3 vols. london: folio society, 2005. review: william blake and the age of aquarius (northwestern university, 2017-18) william blake and the age of aquarius. mary and leigh block museum of art, northwestern university, 23 september 2017–11 march 2018. stephen f. eisenman, ed. william blake and the age of aquarius. princeton: princeton university press, 2017. xii + 232 pp. $45.00/£35.00, hardcover. reviewed by jennifer davis michael jennifer davis michael (jmichael@sewanee.edu) is professor and chair of english at the university of the south in sewanee, tn. she is the author of blake and the city (bucknell, 2006). her current project is called “poetry at the edge of silence.” “bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, / but to be young was very heaven!” thus wordsworth looked back at the heady days of paris in 1789 from the vantage point of 1805. such nostalgia, of course, is a hallmark of romanticism. nor is it a simple recollection, but a multilayered process of memory: in this case, wordsworth looks back at a time of looking forward, much as blake writes in 1793 a “prophecy” of america in 1776. then there is the memory of memory, as in wordsworth’s “tintern abbey,” where the speaker remembers how a remembered scene has sustained him in the intervening five years. in the 1799 prelude, he turns back to his earliest memories—“was it for this?”—in an attempt to resolve his writer’s block. looking backward in order to move forward is a quintessentially romantic exercise, one complicated further by the uncertainty of imagining what “might will have been,” as emily rohrbach has shown (2). such was the case when i visited william blake and the age of aquarius at the mary and leigh block museum of art at northwestern university, curated by stephen f. eisenman. the exhibition explored how and why blake became a role model for artistic revolutionaries in postwar america, building up to the countercultural upheaval of the 1960s. but this was not a straightforward study of one-way influence in which blake served as background. in the catalogue, lisa g. corrin, director of the block museum, expresses “hope that seeing blake against the backdrop of the ‘age of aquarius’ will enable us to reconnect to the radicalism of this iconic figure and to find in his multidimensional contributions meaning for our own tumultuous times” (vii). as eisenman adds, “the products of both periods are potentially valuable resources for social movements still to come” (6). in a romantic act of meta-recall, this exhibition recalls the recollection of blake. back in 1995, morris eaves referred to blake’s perennial status as “the sign of something new about to happen” (414). that “something new” begins, as ever, with a romantic glance backward. the more than fifty blake prints came from a variety of sources, including the yale center for british art, the rosenbach in philadelphia, and northwestern’s own charles deering mccormick library, which also supplied a number of the posters and other material from the 1960s. the exhibition occupied five rooms on the airy second floor of the museum’s modern glass building beside lake michigan. in the foyer, visitors encountered a large reproduction of the frontispiece of europe with a brief introduction. the first room of the exhibition proper was an immersion in blake. all exhibition images courtesy of the block museum of art, northwestern university. © clare britt photography. see enlargement. visitors were introduced first to songs of innocence through its title page and such poems as “the shepherd” and “infant joy,” then to songs of experience with an especially fine example of “london” (copy f, yale center for british art), and from there to the prophecies of america, europe,i was surprised to see the placard describing the frontispiece to europe as “the ancient of days,” a title not conferred by blake and not particularly accurate (as anthony blunt pointed out decades ago). and the book of urizen. the narrative of the show thus claimed innocence as a radical state in itself, not an apolitical condition, in keeping with eisenman’s introduction in the catalogue, which begins by focusing on the symbolism of the flower in the peace movement. yet experience is not necessarily a fallen condition in aquarian terms, as seen through the lens of jimi hendrix’s “are you experienced?” see enlargement. see enlargement. one of the most interesting aspects of this room was the arrangement of blake’s seven dante engravings above a series of images from copy h of visions of the daughters of albion, a juxtaposition intended to counter the assumption that blake’s radicalism faded with age. while the placard pointed predictably to the depiction of the lustful in inferno 5, who seem far from tormented in blake’s rendition, i was even more interested in how the bodies of dante’s thieves often mirror the tortured and twisted poses of bromion and theotormon in the earlier work. see enlargement. in a small room to the left hung a complete set of job illustrations from eisenman’s collection. the connection to the age of aquarius seemed somewhat tenuous: the placard mentioned how, for blake, the only “true religion” is that which honors the body and its impulses, yet the job illustrations don’t celebrate energy in the way that, for instance, the marriage of heaven and hell does. there might have been an opportunity to probe further into the biblical underpinnings of revolution and “infernal reading,” perhaps through allen ginsberg and his use of moloch. i initially went the wrong way upon leaving this room, turning the corner by the watercolor the number of the beast is 666 to enter the psychedelic room, with rick griffin’s poster for kenneth anger’s film lucifer rising making an obvious, if abrupt, connection. what i should have done, however, was turn right from the first room into a room displaying visual artists’ responses to blake from the 1940s on, especially the journal tiger’s eye and artists’ books by kenneth patchen and others. i know how difficult it is to light these galleries, but i did find that glare made it hard to view some works, such as ad reinhardt’s screen prints, which at first appeared solid black. see enlargement. see enlargement. the artists of the 1940s seem to have been primarily interested in reproducing blake’s method of printing and/or the visual effect of his composite art. for instance, stanley william hayter at his workshop, atelier 17 (relocated from paris to new york), experimented with various methods of color printing. he collaborated with ruthven todd to reproduce blake’s method of relief printing. as eisenman notes, “they largely got it wrong, supposing blake used a transfer process in order to avoid writing backwards” (44). still, the resulting portfolio of prints based on short poems by todd is engaging, and it demonstrates further that it was not only blake’s revolutionary ideas that attracted these followers. his method of combining word and image on a single plate and in a single process spoke to the abstract expressionists. as much as jackson pollock and reinhardt differ in style from blake and from each other, they share certain aesthetic principles. as clifford ross puts it, “abstract expressionist images invoke; they do not depict. they confront; they do not describe” (18). like blake, these artists are engaged in “a heroic, one-on-one confrontation with the subconscious” (ross 18). while blake’s visual works are, of course, more representational, they also reveal an awareness of the limits of representation. other works in this room, moving forward into the 1950s and 1960s, reflected a more thematic blakean influence. diane arbus published a series of photographs in harper’s bazaar called auguries of innocence, captioned with lines from blake’s manuscript poem of that title. according to eisenman, these photos, published in the wake of john kennedy’s assassination in 1963, evoke “the national mood of lost innocence” (72). the artist jess engaged in deliberate blakean appropriations in a variety of media, such as an oil painting entitled salvages vi: rintrah roars …, with paint so thick that it becomes almost sculptural, like a bas-relief, and an untitled “paste-up” featuring a shepherdess and her flock decorated with speech bubbles, some from newspaper clippings and others simply articulating “no! no! no!” or “universal yes!” see enlargement. this piece captures not only something of blake’s composite art but also his engagement with the print culture of his own time. i was struck to find that, in a further instance of blakean intervention and annotation, maurice sendak, author of the very blakean where the wild things are (1963), had produced illustrations for a limited edition of blake’s songs in 1967. the illustration for “night” shows a benevolent lion (remarkably like the one in sendak’s pierre) “guard[ing] o’er the fold” (e 14). also included was a page from sendak’s lullabies and night songs (1969; first published 1965), in which he experiments with printing the text inside the illustration. in “sleep, sleep, beauty bright” (titled “a cradle song” in blake’s notebook, e 468), the cradle is flanked by a tiger (facing forward) and a mother/nurse (facing away), while children perch in the tree branches above. jay defeo’s the rose incorporates elements of the europe frontispiece as well as “albion rose.” the rose is an enormous canvas upon which the artist layered paint, mica, and wood, up to a foot thick in some areas (ferrell, catalogue p. 120). while the exhibition did not include this 1800-pound painting (whitney museum), it did include a study for it (a graphite and gelatin silver print on paper), as well as wallace berman’s photographs of defeo naked in front of it. see enlargement. these photographs recall not only “albion rose” but also leonardo’s vitruvian man and the crucifixion (see traps), in each case revising the original with the body of a female artist. in an alcove off this room, visitors could watch bruce conner’s film the white rose, depicting the removal of the massive relief when defeo was evicted from her studio. the film is slow, lyrical, and elegiac, while also giving a sense of the scale of this monumental piece. more compelling to me than the white rose was what i call the psychedelic room. this room was truly multimedia, with more of an emphasis on musical responses to blake. using headphones, visitors could listen to renditions of songs by ginsberg and the fugs. see enlargement. martin sharp’s large poster jimi hendrix explosion echoes blake’s letter to hayley, “my fingers emit sparks of fire with expectation of my future labours” (e 709). knowing that hendrix drew on blake for his “voodoo chile,” it would have been nice to have some video or audio recording of him in this exhibition. what we did have was another alcove in which visitors could recline on beanbag chairs and watch the psychedelic experience (1965), a representation of an lsd trip introduced by timothy leary, followed by several videos of the doors in performance. leary and the doors both allude (directly or in spirit) to the infinite vision promised “if the doors of perception were cleansed” (e 39). see enlargement. just outside this haven of audiovisual escape was a wall full of concert posters for the doors, the yardbirds, the grateful dead, and others. i wondered whether the psychedelic “melting letters” so characteristic of 1960s typography were meant to mimic a drug trip or the vegetative letters of blake. victor moscoso, who designed many of these posters, studied with josef albers at yale. so did richard anuszkiewicz, from whom we have a portfolio of screen prints entitled inward eye, each of which the artist captioned with text from blake. see enlargement. according to eisenman, “anuszkiewicz created the images first and chose the texts second” (56). the format of inward eye alludes to the emblem book and blake’s own variations on that form, but the designs here are purely abstract. these vertiginous optical experiences are a hallmark of op art, “a movement explicitly aligning itself with technology; yet in its interventions aimed at quotidian perception … implicitly visionary” (rimanelli 324). as the title inward eye suggests, anuszkiewicz, like blake, is questioning what it means to see. see enlargement. finally, a smaller video screen in the main psychedelic room featured film clips of the 1968 riots in chicago. the juxtaposition with the other videos led me to ponder the contrasting modes of resistance: retreating into vision or engaging in direct action. i appreciated the way the exhibition did not settle this question, but rather allowed the footage to stand as another artifact from the age of aquarius. the associated publication bearing the name of the exhibition is not a catalogue in the usual sense—a list of all the objects in the show. i wish that it were. nevertheless, it is a handsome, high-quality volume with color reproductions of many of the visual works, so that those who missed the exhibition can still experience much of it vicariously. it also reproduces other blake works not included in the show and provides crucial interdisciplinary context for students of blake who might be unfamiliar with the aquarian counterculture, and vice versa. eisenman’s general introduction (from which i have already quoted) deftly begins with the san francisco “flower children” as heirs of blake’s roses and sunflowers, then presents a brief but effective introduction to blake’s “life and times” and to his art, concluding with “the american blake revival” via whitman, ginsberg, and frye, which forms a bridge to discussion of specific works. other articles in the volume provide a variety of depth and range. mark crosby’s “prophets, madmen, and millenarians” usefully situates blake in the context of various radical subcultures, while acknowledging that his work has been adopted by establishment forces as well.unfortunately, crosby repeats the error in leo damrosch’s eternity’s sunrise that a proverb of hell graces the walls of donald trump’s library (80). see my “blake, trump, and the road of excess: an urban legend.” elizabeth ferrell’s “william blake on the west coast” delves deeply into a specific subgroup of artists and writers who began to discover blake in the late 1940s. the interplay between the beat poets and such visual artists as defeo and conner is especially rich. jacob henry leveton’s “william blake and art against surveillance,” a shorter article, is also more critically sophisticated, less a historical overview than a layered reading of blake’s method of color printing (exemplified in the book of urizen) as a prototype for the work of the abstract expressionists, such as pollock and reinhardt. two other articles probe the corners of blake’s influence: john p. murphy’s “building golgonooza in the age of aquarius” elaborates on a little-known commune that existed outside athens, ohio, from 1969 to 1986. this church of william blake was meant to serve as “the aesthetic equivalent of noah’s ark” in the darkened world of the cold war (161). crosby’s second article, “sendak, blake, and the image of childhood,” focuses on the popular children’s author and his visual and thematic engagement with blake, amplifying the few examples in the exhibition. (on a personal note, as one born in 1967, i can say that sendak was a formative influence long before i encountered any blake—or ginsberg or the doors, for that matter.) w. j. t. mitchell’s brief “blake now and then” forms a fitting epilogue to the volume, especially if one recalls his 1982 essay “dangerous blake,” in which he predicted several areas in which blake studies might soon venture. one of those areas, the question of madness, has particular bearing on the 1960s, with its embrace of such epithets as “crazy” and the emergence of mad magazine (202). but mitchell also explores the slipperiness of temporal categories with regard to blake. in some ways, blake may have seemed to belong to the “now” of the 1960s more than the “then” of the 1790s, but we are in a “now” half a century later, when the “summer of love” seems a naïve figment of dreamy beulah. perhaps the lesson, however, is that resistance and revolution always appeal to nostalgia, as the word radical refers to roots. as another mitchell, joni, sang, “we are stardust / we are golden / and we’ve got to get ourselves / back to the garden.” that song itself looks back to a moment of anticipation before collapsing that time into the woodstock festival, an event that joni mitchell did not attend. and i, born in the late 1960s but always fascinated by a culture i cannot quite remember, found myself back on a campus where i had begun my serious study of blake in the early 1990s, watching current northwestern students, a further generation removed, as they encountered blake, hendrix, and ginsberg all at once. a golgonoozic moment indeed. works cited blunt, anthony. “blake’s ‘ancient of days’: the symbolism of the compasses.” journal of the warburg institute 2.1 (1938): 53-63. damrosch, leo. eternity’s sunrise: the imaginative world of william blake. new haven: yale university press, 2015. eaves, morris. “on blakes we want and blakes we don’t.” huntington library quarterly 58.3/4 (1995): 413-39. kintner, amy. “back to the garden again: joni mitchell’s ‘woodstock’ and utopianism in song.” popular music 35.1 (2016): 1-22. michael, jennifer davis. “blake, trump, and the road of excess: an urban legend.” millions 16 june 2016. mitchell, w. j. t. “dangerous blake.” studies in romanticism 21.3 (fall 1982): 410-16. rimanelli, david. “beautiful loser: op art revisited.” artforum international 45.9 (may 2007): 312-27. rohrbach, emily. modernity’s mist: british romanticism and the poetics of anticipation. new york: fordham university press, 2016. ross, clifford, ed. abstract expressionism: creators and critics. new york: harry n. abrams, 1990. traps, yevgeniya. “romance of the rose: on jay defeo.” paris review 14 may 2013. b l a k e volume 54 number 1 summer 2020 exhibitions music publications angela esterhammer, victoria college, university of toronto nelson hilton, university of georgia tilar j. mazzeo, colby college robert w. rix, university of copenhagen joseph viscomi, university of north carolina at chapel hill david worrall, the nottingham trent university martin butlin, tate gallery, london, retired tristanne j. connolly, university of waterloo detlef w. dörrbecker, university of trier sibylle erle, bishop grosseteste university robert n. essick, university of california, riverside a d v i s o r y b o a r d a n i l l u s t r a t e d q u a r t e r l y volume 54 number 1 summer 2020 c o n t e n t s www.blakequarterly.org remembrance dmitri smirnov, 1948–2020 by vera serdechnaia articles william blake and his circle: a checklist of scholarship in 2019 by wayne c. ripley, with works in romance languages collected and compiled by fernando castanedo, works in japanese collected and compiled by hikari sato, and works in turkish collected and compiled by hüseyin alhas blake and exhibitions, 2019 by luisa calè blake and music, 2019 by jason whittaker review peter otto, ed., william blake ; nicholas shrimpton, ed., william blake: selected poems reviewed by alexander s. gourlay © 2020 copyright morris eaves and morton d. paley cover: blake, the horse (c. 1805), one of the works in the william blake exhibition at tate britain, 2019–20. tempera with pen and black ink on a copper engraving plate, 10.6 x 6.4 cm. yale center for british art, paul mellon collection, b2001.2.34. e d i t o r s editors: morris eaves and morton d. paley review editor: alexander s. gourlay exhibitions editor: luisa calè bibliographer (criticism): wayne c. ripley bibliographer (music): jason whittaker managing editor: sarah jones sarah.jones@rochester.edu production office: department of english, university of rochester, rochester ny 14627-0451 william blake and his circle: a checklist of publications and discoveries in 2012 william blake and his circle: a checklist of publications and discoveries in 2012 by g. e. bentley, jr. with the assistance of hikari sato for japanese publications and of li-ping geng 耿力平 for chinese publications g. e. bentley, jr. (gbentley@chass.utoronto.ca) shepherded through the press george cumberland, the emigrants or a trip to the ohio, a theatrical farce (1817), ed. elizabeth b. bentley (edwin mellen press, 2013). his the edwardses of halifax: the making and selling of beautiful books in london and halifax 1749-1826 by william, john, richard, thomas, and specially james edwards, the medicean bookseller, with catalogues of their publications, 2 vols. (university of toronto press), 860 pp., 29 reproductions, is slouching toward publication, and william blake in the desolate market: blake’s curious courtship of the goddess fortune (mcgill-queen’s university press), 245 pp., 33 reproductions, should see the light this year. editors’ notes: a number of entries below have a link to an online article or catalogue. some items are freely accessible and others may be behind a subscription barrier, depending on your or your institution’s access. all are included on the grounds that even those with restricted access often provide a freely available abstract or excerpt. addenda and corrigenda to blake records, 2nd ed. (2004), now appear online. they are updated yearly in conjunction with the publication of the checklist. table of contents: introductory essay symbols abbreviations division i: william blake part i: blake’s writings section a: original editions, facsimiles, reprints, and translations section b: collections and selections part ii: reproductions of drawings and paintings section a: illustrations of individual authors section b: collections and selections part iii: commercial engravings section a: illustrations of individual authors section b: collections and selections part iv: catalogues and bibliographies part v: books owned by william blake the poet part vi: criticism, biography, and scholarly studies division ii: blake’s circle barry, james cumberland, george flaxman, john fuseli, john henry linnell, john palmer, samuel blake publications and discoveries in 2012 this was a bumper year for records of previously unrecorded blake publications. the total is a multiple of the discoveries in any previous year. much of this wealth derives from worldcat, now for the first time systematically mined for blake. worldcat is an extraordinary tom tiddler’s ground of silver and fool’s gold. on 11 december 2012 it listed 25,195 entries for william blake.the list is not quite so formidable as it seems, for there is endless redundancy and irrelevance to our william blake. many listings are spot on, but a significant number are so erratic as to be unusable. i looked at the first 5,000,worldcat does not permit one to search beyond 5,000. the last 20,000 seem to be inaccessible. but i did get access to more by looking separately under books (13,792), articles (4,860), and dissertations (1,704, mostly mas). which is one reason why there are so many ephemeral works in the present checklist. many of the newly recorded works here are in periodicals that i rarely search in—indeed that i had never heard of—such as classification quarterly, francis w. parker school year book, psychological medicine, and victoriographics. in worldcat, i ignore archives (987 entries—i looked fruitlessly at the first 100), audiobooks (511), images (617), interactive multimedia (12), music (1,775), sound recordings (18), and videos (1,176). a large proportion of the works marked here as unseen (§) derive from worldcat, which provided the first use of “cunnilingus” in a title that also mentions blake. in the catalogue, the title of works reviewed is frequently given merely as “william blake,” so that the authorship, etc., given here may be significantly hypothetical. numbers of works about blake recorded in blake books (1977), blake books supplement (1995), and blake/an illustrated quarterly (1992-) record for books [a] including   editions and catalogues essays including reviews   bb 1,406   573 254 3,218 595 [b] bbs 1,010   354 123 4,069 177   misc. [c] 1,951             1992-93 54   21 15 279 62   1994 50   16 5 234 84   1995 56   22 12 239 74   1996 37   14 10 160 136   1997 75   29 11 135 178   1998 69   32 6 233 59   1999 46   21 3 235 71   2000 73   13 12 52 56   2001 57   23 3 181 175   2002 52   26 6 208 45   2003 50   17 8 205 47   2004 31   8 6 153 81   2005 43   9 6 139 79   2006 110   48 11 237 41   2007 118   70 17 336 100   2008 193   68 54 330 107   2009 122   32 30 621 239   2010 180   78 13 313 78   2011 110   23 21 224 43   2012 294 [d] 54 70 805 228   totals 6,187   1,551 696 12,606 2,755   a. the books include reprints. editions and catalogues are subdivisions of books, and reviews are a subdivision of essays. b. one hundred reviews in bb were published before 1863. c. the miscellaneous sources include the essick collection, the online versions of the times [london] and the new york times, reviews in philological quarterly (1925-69), and reviews in blake before 1992, when i began reporting reviews in this checklist. d. the books include a number of dissertations. the non-english languages recorded for blake studies in 2012 were afrikaans, arabic, catalan, chinese, croatian, dutch, french, frisian,note also “de sike roas,” hjir no. 6 (dec. 1996): 6 (english on p. 5), “de tiger,” hjir no. 1 (march 1997): 5 (english on p. 4). german, hebrew, italian, japanese,there are also four english essays in japanese books and periodicals. norwegian, polish, portuguese, russian, slovenian, and spanish. curious items a collection of fifteen religious tract society 16º pamphlets (1841, 1846, and, mostly, n.d.), with the upper covers painted so that when assembled they represent blake’s good and evil angels (butlin #257), was “created in 1999 to celebrate the bi-centenary of the institution of the religious tract society.”john windle, antiquarian bookseller, catalogue fifty (san francisco: john windle, sept. 2012) 8-9; the picture is reproduced on p. 8. “the trianon press collection of dean pananides” with “every variant,” including the blake trust facsimiles, was offered in john windle, antiquarian bookseller, catalogue fifty (san francisco: john windle, sept. 2012) 61. one of the rarest pieces of blakeana is the tiny color adaptation of the phillips portrait of blake for blair’s grave (5 x 8 cm.) (illus. 1), which speaks in favor of stamina in character and trousers. i bet even bob essick doesn’t have a copy. 1. a card [?1950s] with a bad color reproduction of the phillips portrait of blake, 5 x 8 cm., is inscribed: “120. william blake … a man of stamina … [an advertisement for] stamina self-supporting trousers for men and boys” (copy in victoria university in the university of toronto). advertisements for “stamina self-supporting trousers” appeared in the age [melbourne, australia], 18 june 1952 and 2 dec. 1953; the firm flourished 1946-66. an action of remarkable generosity and usefulness with extraordinary and characteristic munificence, the yale center for british art has reproduced in color on their web site virtually all their images from blake’s prints and drawingsthe unique works include watercolors and sketches, america (m), the book of thel (b, r), descriptive catalogue (j), europe (a) and pl. 1, the first book of urizen (a, c), for children (e), for the sexes (g), gray watercolors, job watercolors (new zealand set), jerusalem (e) and pls. 28, 30, 35, songs of innocence (g), songs of innocence and of experience (f, l, and alpha), there is no natural religion (b), tiriel illus. 1, visions of the daughters of albion (i), and colored young’s night thoughts (n, q). there are also reproductions of ordinary copies of blake’s commercial prints such as blair’s grave, dante engravings, gay’s fables, hayley’s ballads, cowper, romney, triumphs of temper, illustrations of the book of job, ritson’s select collection of english songs, salzmann’s gymnastics, thornton’s virgil, and young’s night thoughts. and made it possible to download them without charge. this is an action truly appropriate for paul mellon, the founder of the yale center. the broken fire hydrant the problem of evanescent online works is illustrated by lisa guernsey, “searchable archive zooms in on william blake’s illuminated books,” chronicle of higher education 17 sept. 1997 <blake §(2001)>, which is no longer visible. blake’s writings mr. arthur vershbow of newton centre, massachusetts, who died on 16 april 2012, owned songs (p) and blake sketches for bürger’s leonora (1796) (butlin #338, bbs p. 203) and thornton’s virgil (1821) (butlin #769.3), which will be auctioned at christie’s (new york) in april 2013.see robert n. essick, “blake in the marketplace, 2012,” blake 46.4 (spring 2013). the death of maurice sendak (1928-8 may 2012) is a loss not only to literature and art but also to blake studies. his blake collection included: works in illuminated printing the first book of urizen pl. 3 jerusalem pls. 18-19, 28, 35 songs of innocence (j) songs of innocence and of experience (h) drawings virgil design (butlin #769.19) butlin #139, 245, 816 engravings for books hayley, little tom (1800), colored hayley, ballads (1805), colored. virgil, pastorals (1821), cuts 2-5, proofs before the blocks were cut up separate plates “chaucers canterbury pilgrims,” 3rd state “the man sweeping the interpreter’s parlour,” 2nd state the new home of these unique works will be of great interest to blake scholars. drawings and paintings genesis: william blake’s last illuminated work, ed. mark crosby and robert n. essick with an essay by robert r. wark (2012), is a remarkable accomplishment. the work had its genesis as part of the brave series of materials for the study of william blake by the american blake foundation (roger easson and kay parkhurst easson). they commissioned from g. e. bentley, jr., texts for america (published 1974), europe (published “1975,” i.e., 1979), an island in the moon, the song of los, and visions of the daughters of albion,the completed typescript texts for an island in the moon, the song of los, and visions of the daughters of albion remain in bentley’s possession. and from robert r. wark an essay for blake’s illuminated transcription of genesis. wark’s essay was set up in typeproofs of the essay are in the collections of robert n. essick and victoria university in the university of toronto. but progressed no further toward publication then. blake’s transcription of genesis had been reproduced, much reduced in size, in martin butlin, the paintings and drawings of william blake (new haven: yale university press, 1981), pls. 974-75, 1084-92, and in robert n. essick, the works of william blake in the huntington collections (san marino: huntington library and art gallery, 1985). the 2012 edition is a true facsimile, in color and in the enormous size of the original—31.5 x 43.1 cm., almost as large as vala. blake’s transcription is fascinating for what it adds to the text of genesis 1-4. for instance, blake interpolated “the lord god formed man ^adam^ of the dust of the ground ^adamah^” (2.7; see 2.19), and substituted “jehovah” for “the lord” (4.1) and “gods (elohim)” for “gods” (3.5). his transcription is also intriguing for what it omits. thus for “the lord set a mark upon cain, lest any finding him should kill him” (4.15), blake wrote “the lord set a mark upon cains forehead,” and in genesis 1.18, 25 he omitted “and god saw that it was good.” crosby and essick identify “six layers of writing and letter-coloring …. with every layer, blake reformatted and thus re-conceptualized his preliminary intentions” (32). it is only in this edition that such details are visible and explored. this is a meticulous,i noticed only two typographical errors: “srepent” for “serpent” (5) and “scared codes” (a nice concept) for “sacred codes” (34). fascinating, and fruitful facsimile. commercial engravings a new copy of the proof of “death’s door” (1806) for blair’s grave (1808), only the third recorded, was discovered in 2012 and acquired by victoria university in the university of toronto—see illus. 2. perhaps cromek used it to show to potential customers on his subscription tours in 1806-08. the plates in a french edition (1798) of stedman’s narrative, of a five years’ expedition, against the revolted negroes of surinam (1796) copy blake’s prints so closely that they must have been traced—see illus. 3-4. since blake almost certainly made significant adaptations to stedman’s designs when he engraved them, does this mean that the french prints deserve to be recorded in a bibliography of blake? catalogues and bibliographies this account of publications records, among others, blake exhibitions and sales in 1988 (new york), 2005-06 (cork and sligo), 2007 (london), 2008 (london), 2011-12 (moscow), and 2012 (new york, london, vienna, and madrid). the one in madrid was widely reviewed. criticism, biography, and scholarship four substantial collections of essays about blake are recorded here. the first is blake (10 essays, 5 reviews). of these, the most lastingly valuable are robert n. essick, “blake in the marketplace, 2011” (spring 2012), meticulous as always, g. e. bentley, jr., with hikari sato and li-ping geng, “william blake and his circle … 2011” (summer 2012), customarily painstaking, and abraham samuel shiff, “blake’s hebrew calligraphy” (fall 2012), with learned details about the eccentricities of blake’s written hebrew. and angus whitehead, “‘mr clay of hercules buildings’” (spring 2012), has reliably redated the beginning of the blakes’ stay in lambeth to 1791, which means, incidentally, that the marriage of heaven and hell (?1790) can no longer be considered a lambeth book. the second collection is blake 2.0: william blake in twentieth-century art, music and culture, ed. steve clark, tristanne connolly, and jason whittaker (2012), with 17 essays about the surprisingly extensive influence of blake in the previous century, particularly in music. angus whitehead’s essay on mona wilson and her biography of blake (1927ff.) is particularly fruitful. the third collection of essays is re-envisioning blake, ed. mark crosby, troy patenaude, and angus whitehead (2012), with 12 essays, notably keri davies and david worrall arguing that blake was probably not a dissenter, mark crosby and angus whitehead on catherine blake, and craig d. atwood on eighteenth-century moravian “erotic spirituality” as an influence on blake’s mother when she joined the church. the fourth collection is blake, gender and culture, ed. helen p. bruder and tristanne j. connolly (2012), with 12 essays. one of the most remarkable developments in blake studies in very recent years is the multiplication of chinese publications about blake. there are 112 entries here, compared with 14 in blake books, 9 in blake books supplement, and 74 in blake (1994-2012). the frequent analyses of “the tyger” and comparison of blake’s “london” with wordsworth’s “composed upon westminster bridge, 1802” suggest that these themes are a set topic in chinese education. blake’s circle there are records here of a newly discovered cumberland sketchbook and numerous previously unrecorded periodical essays by cumberland. the sketchbook has very miscellaneous sketches of ruins in italy (e.g., at pompeii), buxom italian maidens, scenery, and dreams, plus prints and clippings. in particular, there are several very interesting finished watercolors for paradise lost—see illus. 6-7, 9-10. * * * * * * * * * the annual checklist of scholarship and discoveries concerning william blake and his circle records publications and discoveries for the current year (say, 2012) and those for previous years that are not recorded in blake books, blake books supplement, and “william blake and his circle.” installments of “william blake and his circle” are continuations of blake books and blake books supplement, with similar principles and conventions. i have made no systematic attempt to record audio books and magazines, blogs, broadcasts on radio and television, calendars, cd-roms, chinaware, coffee mugs, comic books, computer printouts (unpublished), conferences, electronic editions of works by blake, e-mails, festivals and lecture series, flash cards, furniture, interactive multimedia, jewelry, lectures on audiocassettes, lipstick, manuscripts about blake, microforms, mosaics, movies, murals, music, notebooks (blank), novels merely tangentially about blake,such as russell potter, ed., pyg: the memoirs of toby, the learned pig (new york: penguin books, 2012); “winsome 18th-century pig … encounters such luminaries as samuel johnson, robert burns and william blake”; the work is “chiefly based on the 1817 ed. of the life and adventures of toby the sapient pig.” pageants, performances, pillows, places named after blake,for instance, the william blake pub, 174-80 old street, london ec1v 9bp. playing cards, plays,for example, trace crawford, “lady and ‘the tyger’ or william blake’s ‘how i met your mother,’” the best ten-minute plays 2011, ed. lawrence harbison (hanover [new hampshire]: smith and kraus, 2011). podcasts, poems about blake,such as §heberto padilla, “infancia de william blake,” el justo tiempo humano: poemas (1962), in spanish. portraits, postcards, posters and individual pictures, recorded readings and singings, refrigerator magnets, stained-glass windows, stamps (postage and rubber), stickers, sweatshirts, t-shirts, tattoos (temporary or permanent), tiles, typescripts (unpublished), video recordings, and web sites. i take blake books and blake books supplement, faute de mieux, to be the standard bibliographical books on blake,except for the states of the prints for blake’s commercial book engravings, where the standard authority is robert n. essick, william blake’s commercial book illustrations (oxford: clarendon press, 1991). significant further details, especially about collations, are given in roger r. easson and essick, william blake book illustrator: a bibliography and catalogue of the commercial engravings, vol. 1: plates designed and engraved by blake (normal: american blake foundation, 1972); vol. 2: plates designed or engraved by blake 1774-1796 (memphis: american blake foundation, 1979); vol. 3 never appeared. the standard authority for blake prints issued separately is essick, the separate plates of william blake: a catalogue (princeton: princeton university press, 1983). and have noted significant differences from them. the organization of division i of the checklist is as in blake books. in part vi: criticism, biography, and scholarly studies, collections of essays on blake are listed under the names of the editors, and issues of periodicals devoted extensively to him are listed under the titles. reviews, listed here under the book reviewed, are only for works which are chiefly about blake, not for those with only, say, a chapter on blake. note that blake books and blake books supplement normally do not include reviews. division ii: blake’s circle is organized by individual (say, william hayley or john flaxman), with works by and about blake’s friends and patrons, living individuals with whom he had significant direct and demonstrable contact. it does not include important contemporaries with whom blake’s contact was negligible or nonexistent, such as john constable and william wordsworth and edmund burke. there is nothing in blake books and blake books supplement corresponding to division ii. research for this checklist was carried out particularly in the libraries of the university of toronto and victoria university in the university of toronto, as well as with the electronic resources of copac, google, google books, google scholar, and worldcat. works published in japan were found in cinii (national institute of informatics scholarly and academic information navigator), the national diet library online catalogue, komaba library and the general library of the university of tokyo, and the national diet library. for publications in china, works were found in the national library of china (beijing)the online catalogue of the national library of china includes a search-and-download function for the texts of periodicals. and the databases of complete texts for periodicals in china, vip chinese periodicals in science and technology, and wan fang data (digitized periodicals). these chinese online databases are very difficult to access. i should be most grateful to anyone who can help me to better information about the unseen (§) items reported here, and i undertake to thank them prettily in person and in print. i am grateful for many kinds of favors to sarah bentley, professor robert n. essick (especially for an early sight of his “blake in the marketplace, 2012” and improvements in this essay), sarah jones (for extraordinarily meticulous copyediting), mr. david man (for his web site about the cumberland family), dr. jeff mertz, paul miner (for offprints), ross petras (for help with arabic), dr. vera serdechnaya, tom simpson (rare book cataloguer, e. j. pratt library, victoria university in the university of toronto, for bringing many publications about blake to my attention), and angus whitehead. symbols * works prefixed by an asterisk include one or more illustrations by blake or depicting him. if there are more than 19, the number is specified. if the illustrations include all those for a work by blake, say thel or his illustrations to l’ allegro, the work is identified. § works preceded by a section mark are reported on second-hand authority. abbreviations bb g. e. bentley, jr., blake books (1977) bbs g. e. bentley, jr., blake books supplement (1995) blake blake/an illustrated quarterly br(2) g. e. bentley, jr., blake records, 2nd ed. (2004) butlin martin butlin, the paintings and drawings of william blake (1981) isbn international standard book number division i: william blake part i: blake’s writings section a: original editions, facsimiles, reprints, and translations table of collections addenda essick, robert n. illuminated works: innocence (y) pls. 13-14 fuss, adam illuminated works: innocence (y) pl. 11 northwestern university illuminated works: innocence (y) pls. 6-7 victoria university in the university of toronto illuminated works: innocence (y) pl. 8 anon. illuminated works: innocence (y) pl. 15 private owners and public institutions that have disposed of original blakes addendum neuerburg illuminated works: innocence (y) pls. 6-8, 11, 13-15 table of watermarks addendum watermark found in w [whatman countermark] a woman enthroned (butlin #99, now essick collection)robert n. essick, “blake in the marketplace, 2011,” blake 45.4 (spring 2012): 113. * * * * * * * * * the book of thel (1789) editions *the book of thel [m]. ed. nancy bogen. 1971. <bb #27> review §donald ault, modern philology 71.2 (nov. 1973): 218-21. §*the book of thel [?j]. adelaide: university of adelaide library, 2012. e-book. a reproduction with a transcription. europe (1794) copy d it was reproduced in the william blake archive in 2012. edition *europe [d]. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2012. the first book of urizen (1794) edition *the book of urizen [g]. 1958. william blake trust. <bb #40> review §martin butlin, burlington magazine 101.676-77 (july-aug. 1959): 301-02. for children: the gates of paradise (1793) pl. 15 watermark: laid paper without watermark; vertical chain lines 2.75 cm. apart. (for children a-b, d-e are on wove paper.) leaf size: 7.4 x 8.5 cm. platemark: 7.2 x 8.1 cm. second state. history: sold anonymously at rosebery’s auctions (london), autumn 2011, to nicholas lott of larkhall fine art (bath), who sold it on 30 december 2011 to robert n. essick.all the information about for children pl. 15 derives from robert n. essick, “blake in the marketplace, 2012,” blake 46.4 (spring 2013), who reproduces it. this is the only known loose print from for children; all the known copies are complete. however, there are numerous loose prints from for the sexes: the gates of paradise. the leaves for the known prints from for children are significantly larger than pl. 15 here, and in for the sexes only pls. 6-7 (keynes–fitzwilliam) are this small (7.3 x 8.9 cm.). the fragmentary for the sexes copies j and l (far larger) lack pl. 15. for the sexes: the gates of paradise (?1826-31) copy m history: for the sexes: the gates of paradise pls. 1, 3, 8-18 (called copy m in bbs p. 79), which were offered anonymously at sotheby’s, 17 march 1966, lot 92 [bought for £180 by the dealer christopher mendez] and sold to various buyers, were from the muir facsimile (1888).robert n. essick, “blake in the marketplace, 2012,” blake 46.4 (spring 2013), reporting what “nicholas lott tells me.” copy m, therefore, is a ghost, here laid to rest. the ghost of abel (1822) edition §the ghost of abel: a revelation in the visions of jehovah. transcribed by algernon charles swinburne. presented in 1939 by c. a. stonehill to lessing j. rosenwald. 2 pp., 33 x 21 cm. it is in the library of congress. jerusalem (1804[-31]) editions *jerusalem [e]. 1951. william blake trust. <bb #78> review §c. n. p. p., burlington magazine 94.587 (feb. 1952): 62. *jerusalem [e]. ed. morton d. paley. 1991. <bbs p. 88> review see kitson in part vi. william blake’s “jerusalem” explained. ed. d. whitmarsh-knight. 2007. <blake (2008)> review see jason whittaker, year’s work in english studies 89 (2010), in part vi. §yerushalayim: haʼatsalato shel ha-ʻanaḳ albiyon [jerusalem: the emanation of the giant albion]. trans. ruth blumert. tel aviv: ḳeshev le-shirah, 2012. 23 cm., 215 pp. in hebrew. large book of designs (1796) copy a it was reproduced in the william blake archive in 2012. edition *large book of designs [a]. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2012. letters (1791-1827) date   collection 1796 may 12 letters from j. g. stedman untracedaccording to stedman’s journal, in may 1796 “i wrote … 12 letters to blake” (br[2] 70). edition *the letters of william blake. ed. geoffrey keynes. 1956, 1968 …. <bb #93> review (of 1968) §rodney baine, “some recent blake books: an essay review,” georgia review 24.1 (spring 1970): 38-45 (with beer, blake’s humanism, raine, blake and tradition, and rosenfeld, ed., william blake: essays for s. foster damon). the marriage of heaven and hell ([?1790]-[?1827]) editions §the marriage of heaven and hell … 1790. rome: de fonseca editore, 1945. phoenix no. 1. 26 cm., 38 pp. *the marriage of heaven and hell [d]. 1960. william blake trust. <bb #107> review §martin butlin, burlington magazine 103.701 (aug. 1961): 368. §the marriage of heaven and hell. drawings by clark stewart. knoxville [tennessee]: darkpool press, 1972. 29 cm., 35 pp., “limited to 100 copies.” <bb #109, here amplified> §zawāj al-jannah wa-al-jaḥīm [marriage of heaven and hell]. trans. ḥasan ḥilmī. cairo, 2000. in arabic.this is the official arabic transliteration used by oclc. the translator’s name could also be given as hassan helmi. *the marriage of heaven and hell. ed. michael phillips. 2011. <blake (2012)> review alexander s. gourlay, notes and queries 59.4 (dec. 2012): 606-07 (“a striking book” with “excellent high-resolution colour facsimile pages”; the editorial matter “is rich with new information, but it is marred by incautious pronouncements … questionable logic, and … gratuitous resurgences of longstanding disputes,” while “perplexed readers’ most urgent questions are barely addressed”). §*le mariage du ciel et de l’enfer. trans. jean-yves lacroix. paris: éditions allia, 2011. 14 cm., 69 pp.; isbn: 9782844854124. in french and english. §les noces del cel i l’infern. trans. segimon serrallonga, ed. francesc codina. barcelona: cafè central, 2012. jardins de samarcanda, 63. 21 cm., 115 pp.; isbn: 9788497664226. in catalan and english. milton (1804[-11]) edition §*juliana steil. “tradução comentada de milton de william blake.” universidade federal de santa catarina [brazil] doctoral thesis, 2011. 345 pp. in portuguese. notebook (?1793-?1818) edition *william blake’s notebook (enhanced). [london: “publisher: the british library,” 18 sept. 2011]. 109 pp. a facsimile “with audio and text commentary on selected pages” available through itunes. poetical sketches (1783) edition poetical sketches. [ed. eric partridge]. 1927. <bb #133> review §bernard e. c. davis, review of english studies 5.19 (july 1929): 364-65. small book of designs (1796) copy a it was reproduced in the william blake archive in 2012. edition *small book of designs [a]. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2012. songs of innocence (1789) copy g it was added to the william blake archive in 2012. copy y (pls. 6-8, 11, 13-15)pls. 6-8, 11, 13-15 are reproduced and extensively described in robert n. essick, “blake in the marketplace, 2012,” blake 46.4 (spring 2013), from which much of the present account derives. description: pl. 15 was printed in dark reddish-brown c. 1795, like songs (o), colored then, and touched up, including gold, and numbered c. 1811. pls. 6-7, 13-14 were printed in light brown ink c. 1802, like innocence (o), and partly colored then; hand coloring, with shell gold, and numbers were added c. 1811. pls. 8 and 11 were printed in gray-black, colored, and numbered c. 1811. the text was clarified in dark brown ink and made into copy y c. 1811. sizes: 14.2 x 20.0 cm. (pl. 6) 14.8 x 20.9 cm. (pl. 7) 14.6 x 20.7 cm. (pls. 8, 13) 14.6 x 20.9 cm. (pl. 11) 14.6 x 20.8 cm. (pl. 14) 15.0 x 20.7 (pl. 15) watermark: wove paper (pls. 6-8, 11, 13-15), butta[nshaw] on pl. 7.buttanshaw watermark appears in 3 songs pls., buttanshaw │ 18[  ] on blake’s letter of 19 oct. 1801, and buttanshaw │ 1802 on innocence (?o) and songs (p, q). numbering: pls. 6-8, 11, 13-15 are numbered in pen and ink at the top right corner as 5-7, 10, 12-14. history: the remaining prints of copy y were sold at sotheby’s (new york) on 26 april 2012 (see 2012 26–27 april in part iv). editions *songs of innocence [i]. frederick hollyer facsimile. 1923. <bb #158> review §r. r. t., burlington magazine 46.267 (june 1925): 320-21. *songs of innocence [g]. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2012. songs of innocence and of experience (1794-1831) copy n it was added to the william blake archive in 2012. copy w it is reproduced in songs of innocence and [of] experience (2012), collector’s library. editions songs of innocence and of experience. ed. george h. cowling. 1925. <bb #179> review §b. e. c. davis, review of english studies 3.9 (jan. 1927): 116. *songs of innocence and of experience [w]. ed. andrew lincoln. 1991. <bbs p. 136> review see kitson in part vi. §songs of innocence and [of] experience. boston: mobilereference.com, 2008. 43 pp.; isbn: 9781605019956. an e-book. it includes an anonymous “author biography.” the same firm published works of william blake (2007) <blake §(2011)>. *songs of innocence and of experience [e]. ed. robert n. essick. 2008. <blake (2009)> review *alexander s. gourlay (see blake 46.1 in part vi). §william blake’s songs of innocence and [of] experience. epilogue and other comments by robert crayola; afterword and commentary on the illustrations by rachel yee. illus. robert crayola. [n.p.: robert crayola, 2011]. 26 cm., 126 pp.; isbn: 9781456428228. §songs of innocence and songs of experience—the original classic edition. dayboro: emereo pub., 2012. 23 pp.; isbn: 9781486414017. an e-book. §*songs of innocence and [of] experience [w]. london: collector’s library, 2012. illustrated in color, complete and unabridged. 119 pp.; isbn: 9781907360749. foreword by peter harness. a facsimile of copy w, with transcriptions on facing pages. *songs of innocence and of experience [n]. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2012. section b: collections and selections §ancient of days: selected poetry of william blake. ed. roy taylor. bramhall [cheshire]: cool publications, 2004. isbn: 9781844810772. an e-book. §antología bilingüe. ed. and trans. enrique caracciolo trejo. 1987, 1996. <bbs p. 167 b, blake (1998)> c. 2002. d. 3rd ed. madrid: alianza editorial, 2012. el libro de bolsillo. 18 cm., 300 pp.; isbn: 9788420658506. in spanish. *blake. london: henry frowde, [1911]. 24º (7 x 9.7 cm.), 66 pp., not paginated, in shot silk covered boards <victoria university in the university of toronto>. <bb #336, bbs p. 148> the half-title calls it “songs of innocence and other poems,” the title under which it is recorded in bb. §blake: poezje wybrane [blake: selected poems. selected and trans. z(ygmunt) kubiak]. warsaw: ludowa spółdzielnia wydawnicza, 1991. in polish. *blake’s poetry and designs. ed. mary lynn johnson and john e. grant. 1979, 2008. <bbs pp. 149-50, blake (2008)> review (of 2008) see jason whittaker, year’s work in english studies 89 (2010), in part vi. §bu lai ke shi xuan [selected poems of william blake]. trans. kejia yuan and liangzheng zha. beijing: wai yu jiao xue yu yan jiu chu ban she, 2011. 21 cm., 153 pp.; isbn: 9787513513944. in chinese. §the divine image. printed and designed by linda landers. [?london]: spoon print press [2011]. 59 cm., 8 pp. §escritos de william blake. trans. alberto marsicano and regina de barros carvalho. porto alegre, rio grande do sul: l & pm editores, [1984]. rebeldes & malditos, 7. 21 cm., 140 pp. in portuguese. it includes william butler yeats, “william blake e a imaginação” [“william blake and the imagination,” ideas of good and evil (1903)] and t. s. eliot, “blake” [the sacred wood (1920)]. presumably it is the same as o casamento do céu e do inferno e outros escritos, trans. alberto marsicano (2007) <blake §(2012)>. §eternity is in love with the productions of time. tarrytown [new york]: rectory basement press, [1980]. postcard format broadside, 15 x 10 cm. it is a keepsake of the 1980 annual conference of the american printing history association. the title is from marriage pl. 7. on the verso are chinese characters in orange. *the illuminated blake. annotated by david v. erdman. 1974. <bb #a261> the “introduction” (10-21) is reprinted on 107-11 of §a book of the book: some works and projections about the book and writing, ed. jerome rothenberg and steven clay (new york: granary books, 2000). review §hugh luke, “another blake,” prairie schooner 48.4 (winter 1974-75): 367-68. §night by william blake. illustrated by roberta f. c. waudby. london: medici society, [1930s]. 4 leaves, including wrappers. the poem is from innocence pls. 20-21. roberta waudby also illustrated the piper (i.e., “introduction” to innocence, pl. 4) <bbs p. 160, blake (2009)>. *poems. selected by patti smith. 2007. <blake (2008)> b. §[n.p.]: paw prints, 2008. isbn: 9781439584477. §poems. [?ottawa]: ebookslib, 2010. 23 pp.; isbn: 9781412188609. *the poems of william blake. ed. w. h. stevenson. 1971, 1972, 1989, 2007. <bb #296, bbs p. 161, blake (2008)> review (of 1989) §david fuller, review of english studies 42.168 (nov. 1991): 612. §poems of william blake—the original classic edition. dayboro: emereo pub., 2012. an e-book. the poetical works of william blake: a new and verbatim text. ed. john sampson. 1905 …. <bb #300, bbs p. 162> review §g. gregory smith, modern language review 1.4 (july 1906): 343-45. *the poetry and prose of william blake. ed. david v. erdman. 1965 …. <bb #304, bbs pp. 162-63, blake (2009)> j. §the complete poetry and prose of william blake. [n.p.]: paw prints, 2011. isbn: 9781448776375. review (of 1970) §h. j. l[uke], prairie schooner 44.3 (fall 1970): 276. §the prophecies of william blake. ed. john wood. photographs by mitch dobrowner. [south dennis, massachusetts]: stephen albahari, 21st editions, 2012. 42 x 53 cm., no isbn. “the deluxe edition of the prophecies of william blake is limited to thirty-nine copies …. each book is accompanied by three loose prints from a selection of twelve, nine of which are bound.” *the prophetic writings of william blake. ed. d. j. sloss and j. p. r. wallis. 1926, 1957, 1964. <bb #309> reviews §benjamin brawley, north american review 223.833 (dec. 1926-feb. 1927): 704-06. §bernard e. c. davis, review of english studies 3.9 (jan. 1927): 99-101. §m. o. percival, journal of english and germanic philology 27.1 (jan. 1928): 83-87. §*prose and prophecy: selections from the prose and prophetic books of william blake. franklin [new hampshire]: hillside press, 1964. 6 cm., xvi, 52 pp., 375 copies. <bb #310, here amplified> the poems are from innocence, experience, and blake’s notebook. [the cover designs are by jessie m. king.]robin de beaumont, “towards a check-list of books illustrated by jessie m. king, 1875-1949,” private library 2nd series 10.3 (autumn 1977): 99-122. selected poems of william blake. ed. f. w. bateson. 1957 …. <bb #318, bbs p. 165> review §v. de s. pinto, review of english studies 9.35 (aug. 1958): 345-46. §the shepherd. illustrated by linda anne landers. [london]: spoon print press, 2012. 39 cm., 5 leaves, no isbn. §the tiger [sic]. linweave limited editions, mcmxxxi. [springfield (massachusetts)]: linweave association, 1931. the book is “a collection of ‘linweave limited editions’ on sample papers ([44] p. on double leaves),” 31 cm., with plates. for the individual design, see blake (2006). §two songs: infant sorrow and infant joy. [oldham, england]: incline press, [2005]. 20 cm., 4 leaves. colophon: “designed, set & printed by christopher anagnostakis, graham moss & kathy whalen … july 2005 …. an edition of one hundred and sixty copies ….” §wieczna ewangelia. wybór pism [the everlasting gospel: a selection]. selected and trans. michał fostowicz. wrocław: pracownia “borgis,” 1998. in polish. §wiersze i pisma williama blake’a [poems and writings of william blake]. selected and trans. m. fostowicz. kraków: miniatura, 2007. in polish. §*william blake. [poesiealbum band 153, ausgewählt und eingerichtet am 29. juli bis 1. august 2012.] ed.[?] bernd jentzsch. flamersheim: chidher, 2012. 20 cm., 117 pp., no isbn. in german. william blake archive <http://www.blakearchive.org> europe (d), large book of designs (a), small book of designs (a), songs of innocence (g), songs of innocence and of experience (n), five temperas, eleven watercolors for the bible, hecate (color print, impression from the national gallery of scotland), and john flaxman, compositions from … hesiod (1817) were added to the archive in 2012. reviews m. hamel-schwulst, choice 35, supplement (1998): 72. stuart peterfreund, european romantic review 13 (2002): 472-76. merlot english editorial board, merlot (multimedia educational resource for learning and online teaching) 25 nov. 2010. §william blake: milton, zaślubniny nieba i piekła [william blake: milton and the marriage of heaven and hell]. trans. w(iesław) juszczak. kraków: universitas, 2001. in polish. *william blake: poems. selected by james fenton. 2010. <blake (2011)> b. §london: faber, 2011. isbn: 9780571275526. *william blake: selected poetry and prose. ed. david fuller. 2000, 2008. <blake (2001, 2009)> review (of 2008) see jason whittaker, year’s work in english studies 89 (2010), in part vi. §william blake: wiersze i poematy [william blake: poetic works]. ed. krzysztof puławski. izabelin: świat literacki, 1997. in polish. *the writings of william blake. ed. geoffrey keynes. 1925, 1957 …. <bb #370, bbs p. 170> review (of 1957) §hazard adams, american scholar 27.2 (spring 1958): 257, 264. zwischen feuer und feuer: poetische werke. trans. and ed. thomas eichhorn. 1996. <blake (1998)> b. 2010. isbn: 9783423135993. part ii: reproductions of drawings and paintings section a: illustrations of individual authors bible in 2012, 16 illustrations to the bible (5 temperas and 11 watercolors) were reproduced in the william blake archive. bible genesis (1826-27) edition *genesis: william blake’s last illuminated work. edited, with a commentary, by mark crosby and robert n. essick. with an essay by robert r. wark. san marino: huntington library, art collections, and botanical gardens, 2012. folio, xxx, 58 pp., 23 reproductions (including 11 leaves of facsimile); isbn: 9780873282475. the work consists of: the manuscript (11 leaves); this “is the first complete reproduction in color and the first in the size of the original” (23). “transcription of blake’s genesis manuscript” (1-6). “notes to the transcription” (7-9). “substantive differences between blake’s genesis manuscript and the king james bible” (11-13). (blake’s transcription of genesis 1-4 is fascinating both for what it adds, e.g., “the lord god formed man ^adam^ of the dust of the ground ^adamah^” [2.7], and for what it omits, e.g., “and god saw that it was good” [1.18, 25].) john murdoch, “foreword to robert r. wark’s essay” (16). “editors’ note to wark’s essay” (16). robert r. wark, “blake’s illuminated manuscript of genesis” (17-22). (wark comments that the unusual gothic script of the text of genesis 1-4 is not formed very fastidiously.) commentary by the editors (23-46), including: “blake and the genesis tradition” (23-28) “blake’s patron, john linnell” (28-31) “the manuscript” (31-46) (crosby and essick identify “six layers of writing and letter-coloring …. with every layer, blake reformatted and thus re-conceptualized his preliminary intentions” [32]) “notes to the editors’ commentary” (47-51). this is a meticulous, fascinating, and fruitful facsimile. job (1823-26) editions of drawings *illustrations of the book of job by william blake: being all the water-colour designs pencil drawings and engravings reproduced in facsimile. ed. laurence binyon and geoffrey keynes. 1935. <bb #374> reviews §h. r., burlington magazine 67.392 (nov. 1935): 233-34. §philip hofer, parnassus 8.1 (jan. 1936): 28. illustrations of the book of job. reproduced in facsimile from the original “new zealand” set made about 1823-4, in the possession of philip hofer. 1937. <bb #375> review rhoda shapiro, journal of bible and religion 6.4 (autumn 1938): 239-40. blair, robert, the grave (1805) two of the watercolors at the sotheby’s (new york) 2 may 2006 sale, the soul hovering over the body reluctantly parting with life [bought in at $520,000] and death’s door [bought in at $750,000] were offered anonymously through david benrimon fine art (new york) in early 2012 (prices on request).information from robert n. essick, “blake in the marketplace, 2012,” blake 46.4 (spring 2013). dante, divine comedy (1824-27) edition *william blake: illustrations to the divine comedy of dante. 1922, 1968. <bb #380> review (of 1968) §martin butlin, burlington magazine 111.798 (sept. 1969): 570. gray, thomas, poems (1797-98) edition *william blake’s designs for gray’s poems, reproduced full-size in monochrome or colour …. with an introduction by h. j. c. grierson. 1922. <bb #384> review §archibald g. b. russell, burlington magazine 41.235 (oct. 1922): 198. young, edward, night thoughts (1797) edition *illustrations to young’s night thoughts. ed. geoffrey keynes. 1927. <bb #395> review §a. g. b. r., burlington magazine 54.310 (jan. 1929): 45-46. section b: collections and selections *binyon, laurence. the drawings and engravings of william blake. ed. geoffrey holme. 1922, 1967, 2010. <bb #404, blake §(2011)> d. §adelaide, 2012. an e-book. *the paintings of william blake. ed. darrell figgis. 1925. <bb #408> review §r. r. tatlock, burlington magazine 48.278 (may 1926): 271-72 (with another). *pencil drawings by william blake. ed. geoffrey keynes. 1927. <bb #409> review §a. g. b. r., burlington magazine 52.298 (jan. 1928): 48-49. visionary heads owen glendower, a replica of butlin #743, was given by grace lansing lambert to charles ryskamp and bequeathed by him in 2010 to the frick collection (no. 2010.3.08).robert n. essick, “blake in the marketplace, 2011,” blake 45.4 (spring 2012): 110. *william blake. ed. morton d. paley. 1978. <bbs p. 182> review §william vaughan, burlington magazine 121.915 (june 1979): 394. part iii: commercial engravingsfrom 2010 i record pre-1863 references to separately issued prints by blake. section a: illustrations of individual authors allen, charles, a new and improved history of england (1797) new locations: agence bibliographique de l’enseignement supérieur (montpellier [france]), auburn (montgomery [alabama]), auckland, basel, berne, brandeis, carleton (ottawa), cleveland public library, davidson college, dickinson college, european university institute (istituto universitario europeo [fiesole (italy)]), florida southern, groningen, hastings college of the law, kansas state, kent state, leiden, macquarie (australia), massachusetts (boston), mississippi, monash, muhlenberg college, new brunswick (fredericton, st. john), oregon, sarah lawrence college, simon fraser, south florida, victoria (british columbia), virginia commonwealth, western carolina, wright state. blair, robert, the grave (1808, 1813, 1847, 1858, [1870]) 1813 new location: victoria and albert museum (2 copies). pl. 11 proof (1806), inscribed “death’s door. | tis but a night, a long & moonleſs night. | we make the grave our bed, & then are gone. | london published by r. h. cromek feby 1st 1806”, “drawn by wm blake”, “etched by l. schiavonetti” (offered online in may 2012 for £220 by grosvenor prints [london], bought by john windle and sold immediately to victoria university in the university of toronto). 2. proof of “death’s door” (feby 1st 1806) (see enlargement of inscription) for blair’s grave (1808) (victoria university in the university of toronto). only two other copies of this proof are known, one in the collection of robert n. essick and one untraced. the lettering differs from that in the published version (1808). this makes three known copies of the 1806 proof:much of this information derives from an e-mail from robert n. essick to me of 30 nov. 2012. robert n. essick copy leaf size: 24.8 x 39.2 cm. platemark: 20.3 x 35.7 cm. watermark: laid paper without watermark. victoria university in the university of toronto copy leaf size: 20.3 x 31.4 cm. top and bottom edges deckled. platemark: none visible (the leaf size here is smaller than the platemark in the essick copy). watermark: laid paper (faint horizontal chain lines [as in a quarto] 3 cm. apart) of indifferent quality (there are thin places where droplets of water from the vat fell on it); two-thirds of the way up the left margin of the printed side is a rectangular shape (4.5 cm. high, 3 cm. wide, cut off by the margin) that must be from a watermark, and the bottom margin has very faint regular rectangular shapes for which i cannot account. untraced copy recorded in a. g. b. russell, the engravings of william blake (london: grant richards, 1912) 130, then in the collection of f. w. bourdillon. watermark: “j. whatman, 1806”; the watermark distinguishes it from the essick and victoria university copies. the first published state in the folio edition (1808) reads “drawn by w. blake” (not “wm blake” as in the 1806 proof here) and “death’s door” (not “death’s door” as in the 1806 proof). brown, john, elements of medicine (1795) new locations: chicago, cleveland health sciences library, georgetown, georgetown medical center, missouri (columbia, 2), north carolina (chapel hill), state university of new york (binghamton), tufts, victoria university in the university of toronto, virginia commonwealth, william & mary. chaucer, geoffrey, the prologue and characters of chaucer’s pilgrims (1812) new locations: boston athenaeum, carnegie mellon. cumberland, george, an attempt to describe hafod (1796) reproduced online at the cumberland family web site, maintained by david man. reviews, notices monthly magazine (march 1796): 138 (listed at 2s. under “new publications in this month”). monthly review (aug. 1796): 479 (brief). critical review 20 (june 1797): 236-37 (mostly quotations). british critic (1798): 440-41 (at 2s. 6d.). cumberland, george, card history: pasted in a copy of the catalogue of english poetry (hayward, 1947) inscribed in the hand of geoffrey keynes (with his initials) in his characteristic reddish-brown ink to the poet skelton; acquired some years ago at a toronto[!] bookshop by william st. clair.it is not listed in robert n. essick, the separate plates of william blake: a catalogue (princeton: princeton university press, 1983), with other copies owned by keynes (n-q, z). cumberland, george, outlines from the antients (1829) new locations: chicago, cincinnati and hamilton county public library, columbia, huntington library, kent state, koninklijke bibliotheek (the hague [netherlands]), lehigh, missouri (columbia), tennessee state library, toronto, victoria and albert museum (2), wisconsin historical society. “mr. george cumberland, of bristol … is … preparing for publication a work with sixty plates, on the principles of the composition of the ancients,” monthly magazine (1 may 1810): 363-64; the identical paragraph is given in edinburgh monthly magazine and review 1 (may 1810): 62. perhaps this became outlines from the antients (1829) with four blake prints. cumberland, george, thoughts on outline (1796) new locations: alberta, arizona, auckland, brandeis, brigham young, cornell, davidson college, delaware, durham (new hampshire), fordham, kentucky, michigan, new brunswick, old dominion, texas (tyler), victoria (wellington [new zealand]), washington (seattle), yeshiva. reproduced online at the cumberland family web site, maintained by david man. thoughts on outline (robinson) was offered at 15s. in boards in monthly magazine 2.8 (sept. 1796): 649. earle, james, practical observations on the operation for the stone (1793) new locations: bodleian, royal college of surgeons (london), thüringen, victoria university in the university of toronto. emlyn, henry, a proposition for a new order in architecture (1781, 1784) 1781 new locations: canadian centre for architecture (montreal), colonial williamsburg foundation (williamsburg [virginia]), melbourne, william & mary (?imperfect). flaxman, john, compositions from … hesiod (1817, 1870, 1881) 1817 new locations: art gallery of new south wales (sydney [australia]), art institute (chicago), auburn (montgomery [alabama]), boston, boston athenaeum, brown, bryn mawr college, california (berkeley), cincinnati and hamilton county public library, claremont colleges, cleveland public library, cornell, corporation of london libraries, deakin, duke, essex, georgia, harvard (fine arts library, harvard college, houghton), iowa state, johns hopkins, kansas state, kiel, lafayette college, london, louisiana (lafayette), massachusetts institute of technology, middle temple (honourable society of the, london), minuteman library network (natick [massachusetts]), national library of scotland, national library of wales, north carolina (chapel hill), oberlin college, ohio state, rijksmuseum (amsterdam), st. john’s college (annapolis), state university of new york (cortland), temple, thüringen (jena [germany]), toledo-lucas county public library, toronto public library, trinity lutheran seminary (columbus [ohio]), vanderbilt, virginia, wake forest, washington (seattle). the first edition was reproduced in the william blake archive in 2012. flaxman, john, the iliad of homer (1805) new locations: alabama, boston athenaeum, boston college, bryn mawr college, cape town, carleton college, carnegie mellon, chicago, cincinnati, cincinnati and hamilton county public library, claremont colleges, clearwater christian college, cleveland public library, colorado (boulder), columbus college, cornell, corporation of london libraries, creighton, denver public library, depaul, duke, glasgow school of art, hamilton college, hennepin county library (minnetonka [minnesota]), houston, indiana state, iowa state, lafayette college, mcgill, mcmaster, ohio wesleyan, old dominion, oregon, pennsylvania, pittsburgh, st. john’s college (annapolis), smith college, texas (austin), tulsa, wake forest, washington (st. louis), wayne state, western michigan, witwatersrand, yale. gay, john, fables (1793, [1811]) 1793 new location: victoria university in the university of toronto (royal 8º). hayley, william, ballads (1805) new locations: arizona, auckland, california lutheran, cleveland-marshall college of law (cleveland [ohio]), cleveland state, colorado (boulder), dayton, hertfordshire, leicester, london metropolitan, massachusetts (amherst), memorial (st. john’s [newfoundland]), ohio, pennsylvania state, pepperdine, portland state (portland [oregon]), st. mary’s (halifax [nova scotia]), simon fraser, simpson, state library of ohio, tennessee (chattanooga), texas a&m (san antonio), toledo, virginia military institute, xavier (cincinnati [ohio]), yeshiva. hayley, william, designs to a series of ballads (1802) a leaf of sketches including some for hayley’s designs (butlin #617, untraced since 1922) was acquired in october 2011 by the metropolitan museum (new york) (no. 2011.448).see robert n. essick, “blake in the marketplace, 2011,” blake 45.4 (spring 2012): 110. hayley, william, essay on sculpture (1800) new locations: adelaide, agence bibliographique de l’enseignement supérieur (montpellier [france]), alabama (birmingham), alberta, andrews (berrien springs [michigan]), arizona, auburn (montgomery [alabama]), auckland, bayerische staatsbibliothek (munich [germany]), bibliothèque nationale (paris), brandeis, brigham young, claremont colleges, cornell, dalhousie, davidson college, delaware, edinburgh, european university institute (istituto universitario europeo [fiesole (italy)]), florida southern, fordham, hastings college of the law, kansas state, kent state, king’s college university (halifax [nova scotia]), king’s college (london), la trobe (bundoora [victoria, australia]), landesbibliothek oldenburg (germany), london, london metropolitan, macquarie (australia), maryland state medical faculty, melbourne, minnesota (duluth, morris), mississippi, missouri (columbia), monash, mount saint vincent (halifax [nova scotia]), muhlenberg college, murdoch (australia), national library of medicine (bethesda [maryland]), new brunswick (fredericton), new hampshire, oklahoma, old dominion, otago, st. john’s (new york), san diego, sarah lawrence college, simpson, staatsbibliothek zu berlin, state library of victoria (melbourne), sydney, texas (tyler), universitätsund landesbibliothek sachsen-anhalt (halle [germany]), university college (cork [ireland]), university college (dublin), victoria (british columbia), virginia commonwealth, western australia, western carolina (cullowhee [north carolina]), wisconsin (milwaukee), wright state, yeshiva. hayley, william, the life, and posthumous writings, of william cowper, esqr. (1803-04) a set was inscribed “from the author” to “penelope chetwynd”, and “this copy of cowper’s life is presented to mrs william chetwynd by the author as a memorial of friendship. 1803”.quaritch catalogue (jan. 2012), lot 73, £1,250, cited by robert n. essick, “blake in the marketplace, 2012,” blake 46.4 (spring 2013). mrs. chetwynd was also a friend of blake; see angus whitehead, “‘mrs chetwynd & her brother’ and ‘mr. chetwynd,’” blake 42.2 (fall 2008): 75-79. hayley, william, the triumphs of temper (1803, 1807) 1803 new location: victoria and albert museum. henry, thomas, memoirs of albert de haller, m.d. (1783) new locations: california (berkeley), huntington library, london library, london metropolitan, pennsylvania, pennsylvania state, simpson, sorbonne, texas (dallas). hunter, john, an historical journal of the transactions at port jackson and norfolk island (1793) new locations (quarto and octavo merged): australian museum research library, canberra, king’s college (london), la trobe (bundoora [victoria, australia]), monash, newcastle (new south wales), queensland museum (south bank [brisbane, australia]), south australian early imprints project (adelaide), state library of new south wales (sydney), state library of tasmania (hobart), state library of victoria (melbourne). lavater, j. c., essays on physiognomy (1789-98, 1810, “1792” [i.e., 1817]) 1789-98 new locations: american art portrait gallery (washington, dc), mary lynn johnson, mcmaster, morgan library (2—bbs records 1). “1792” (i.e., 1817) new locations: stewart naunton, spokane public library. undated or mixed sets new locations: duke, andrew greg. the new locations here are due to the kindness of andrew greg. malkin, benjamin heath, a father’s memoirs of his child (1806) new locations: alberta, bilkent (ankara [turkey]), caen basse-normandie, city college (new york), eichstätt (germany), free library of philadelphia, herzogin anna amalia bibliothek (weimar [germany]), kinjo gakuin (nagoya [japan]), london metropolitan, melbourne, st. mary’s (halifax [nova scotia]), simpson, stanford, trinity college (dublin), youngstown state. a proof before letters of blake’s frontispiece was acquired from david bindman in 2012 by robert n. essick.robert n. essick, “blake in the marketplace, 2012,” blake 46.4 (spring 2013). novelist’s magazine, vols. x-xi samuel richardson, sir charles grandison (1783, 1785, 1793, ?1800, 1811, 1818) 1811 new location: robert n. essick (a portrait of richardson [not by blake] is watermarked 1814; the prints are in the fourth state as in the 1818 edition, not in the third state as in the set in victoria university in the university of toronto).robert n. essick, “blake in the marketplace, 2012,” blake 46.4 (spring 2013). [ritson, joseph], a select collection of english songs (1783) new locations: alabama, arkansas state, bangor, basel, boston athenaeum, bowling green state, brooklyn public library, california (irvine, riverside), calvin college, carnegie library (pittsburgh), chicago, chicago public library, city college (new york), columbia, connecticut college, cornell, dartmouth college, denver public library, duke, emory, gonzaga, gustavus adolphus college, hamilton college, hennepin county library (minnetonka [minnesota]), humberside county council (hull [?2]), hunter college, illinois wesleyan, john carroll, johns hopkins, koninklijke bibliotheek (the hague [netherlands]), lehigh, london metropolitan, los angeles public library, louisiana state (baton rouge, shreveport), louisville, michigan, minnesota (minneapolis), mississippi, missouri (columbia), mount allison, national library of ireland, national library of wales, new york public library, new york state historical association, northwestern, ohio state, queens college (flushing [new york]), rochester, san antonio, san francisco public library, simpson, smith college, southern illinois, southern oregon, stanford, tennessee, texas a&m, toronto public library, trinity college (dublin), tulane, vermont, victoria (british columbia), vrije universiteit amsterdam, washington (seattle), wayne state, wesleyan (middletown [connecticut]), western michigan, wisconsin (milwaukee). scott, john, poetical works (1782, 1786) 1782 new locations: fordham, kent state. shakespeare, william, the dramatic works (1802, 1832) 1832 new locations: muhlenberg college, st. lawrence, southern methodist, wales. stedman, j. g., narrative, of a five years’ expedition, against the revolted negroes of surinam (1796, 1806, 1813) voyage | a surinam, | et dans l’intérieur | de la guiane, | contenant | la relation de cinq années de courses et d’observations faites | dans cette contrée intéressante et peu connue; | avec des détails sur les indiens de la guiane et les nègres; | par le capitaine j. g. stedman; | traduit de l’anglais par p. f. henry: | suivi du tableau de la colonie française de cayenne. | = | collection de planches. | = | a paris, | chez f. buisson, imprimeur-libraire, rue hautefeuille, no. 20. | an vii de la république [1798]. 4º, 44 prints.this is part of stedman’s voyage à surinam, 3 vols. in 8º (19.6 x 12.2 cm.), 1 vol. in 4º (29.2 x 21.3 cm.). <victoria university in the university of toronto, in original boards with marbled endpapers> all the plates are “gravé par tardieu l’ainé”,“tardieu l’ainé” is “probably jean baptiste pierre tardieu (1746-1816)” rather than his younger brothers antoine françois tardieu (1757-1822) or jean baptiste tardieu (1768-1837), who were also engravers (see robert n. essick, “blake in the marketplace, 2012,” blake 46.4 [spring 2013]). sometimes with his address, never with an imprint. in general, he copied blake’s plates very carefully.robert n. essick, william blake’s commercial book illustrations (oxford: clarendon press, 1991) 72, says that the edition of “paris, 1798” reproduces “pls. 1, 2, 4, 5, 8-10, 12, 13, 15” and that the edition of amsterdam (1799-1800) has the “same plates as paris 1798,” but does not notice how faithful they are to blake’s. the design sizes of these blake prints are mostly within 0.1-2 cm. of 18.1 x 13.1 cm. (pl. 1 is 17.7 x 13.5 cm., and pl. 2 is 18.0 x 12.9 cm.), while the tardieu french prints are within 0.1 cm. of 18.3 x 13.3 cm. the tardieu prints are remarkably close to blake’s, probably made by some form of tracing. notice, for instance, that in pl. vi (illus. 3), the knee-laces seem virtually identical to those in blake’s first print (illus. 4). however, the designs were reversed in tardieu pls. ix, xxi, xxv, xxxvii, and clouds have been added or the sky altered in all the tardieu prints after blake. except for the design reversals and the sky alterations, these tardieu prints are as closely imitated from blake as was possible with the technology of the eighteenth century. the prints copying blake’s are: pl. vi: “chaſseur nègre, armé” (illus. 3) [blake pl. 1: “a coromantyn free negro, or ranger, armed” (illus. 4)]. 3. j. g. stedman, voyage à surinam (paris: f. buisson, [1798]), pl. vi, “chaſseur nègre, armé” (stedman–tardieu), design size 18.3 x 13.2 cm. (victoria university in the university of toronto). notice that the soldier’s knee-laces are virtually identical to those in blake’s print (illus. 4). 4. j. g. stedman, narrative (1796), pl. 1, “a coromantyn free negro, or ranger, armed” (victoria university in the university of toronto). pl. ix: “nègre suspendu vivant, par les côtes” [blake pl. 2: “a negro hung alive by the ribs to a gallows”]. pl. xiii: “le micou, et le kisi-kisi” [blake pl. 4: “the mecoo & kishee kishee monkeys”]. pl. xiv: “le capitaine stedman fait écorcher le serpent aboma après l’avoir blessé” [blake pl. 5: “the skinning of the aboma snake, shot by cap. stedman”]. pl. xxi: “esclave samboe, déchirée de coups de fouet” [blake pl. 8: “flagellation of a female samboe slave”]. pl. xxv: “le coiata et le saki-winki singes” [blake pl. 9: “the quato & saccawinkee monkeys”]. pl. xxvii: “planteur de surinam en habit du matin” [blake pl. 10: “a surinam planter in his morning dress”]. pl. xxxii: “marche à travers un marais de la guiane” [blake pl. 12: “march thro’ a swamp or marsh, in terra-firma”]. pl. xxxvii: “famille d’esclaves nègres de loango” [blake pl. 13: “family of negro slaves from loango”]. pl. xxxxi [sic]: “le célèbre graman quacy” [blake pl. 15: “the celebrated graman quacy”]. varley, john, a treatise on zodiacal physiognomy (1828) new locations: cincinnati and hamilton county public library, mcmaster, northwestern, princeton, rutgers, victoria and albert museum. virgil, the pastorals, ed. r. j. thornton (1821) new locations: boston athenaeum, california (berkeley), carnegie mellon, columbia, dartmouth college, goucher college, national gallery of canada, northwestern, otago, tulsa, victoria and albert museum (2 sets, one lacking map and 2 prints, one lacking pp. ix-x; bb lists 1 copy), wake forest, wesleyan (middletown [connecticut]). copies in st. paul’s school prize bindings are recorded in (1) collection of robert n. essick; (2) christie’s (new york), 10 dec. 1999, lot 110 [$18,400 to the dealer simon finch]; and (3) bonhams auctions (oxford), 31 jan. 2012, lot 254 (vol. 1 only) [£11,875 to the london dealer sims reed], sold in 2012 to a british private collector.robert n. essick, “blake in the marketplace, 2012,” blake 46.4 (spring 2013). wollstonecraft, mary, original stories from real life (1791, 1796) 1791 new locations: california (riverside), chicago, cincinnati and hamilton county public library, claremont colleges, colorado (boulder, denver), dartmouth college, depaul, free library of philadelphia, furman, mercer, mills college, notre dame, occidental, pennsylvania, rutgers, southern mississippi, union college (schenectady [new york]), vermont, wesleyan (middletown [connecticut]). 1796 new location: victoria and albert museum. section b: collections and selections *butterworth, adeline m. william blake, mystic. 1911. <bb #516> review §reviewer not named, burlington magazine 20.106 (jan. 1912): 241. part iv: catalogues and bibliographies 1897 29 april §christie, manson & woods. catalogue of a choice collection of engraved portraits after sir joshua reynolds, the property of the late george richmond, r.a.; water-colour drawings, the remaining works of george richmond, r.a., and engravings after his works; and drawings by james barry, r.a., william blake, t. gainsborough, r.a., s. palmer and others. london, 1897. 14 pp. lot 120, “head of william blake” by george richmond. lot 147 includes blake drawings (butlin #77, 178, 200, 220, 368, 465, 516, 587-88, 798, 826, r6-9). lot 148, “william blake: allegorical figures” (with a work by cristall). lot 160, “a set of blake’s wood engravings for virgil.” 1901 4 november §sotheby, wilkinson & hodge. catalogue of a small but valuable collection: choice books and autographs forming a portion of the library of the late mr. f. s. ellis, including wm. blake’s songs of innocence and [of] experience …. london, 1901. 15 pp. lot 5, songs [(y) sold for £700 to jackson]. [?1904] §a list of choice and rare engravings (chronologically arranged), drawings, and books by j. m. w. turner … and prof. ruskin … also a few miscellaneous works by thos. gainsborough, r.a., william blake, paul sandby … collected and for sale by william ward, 2 church terrace, richmond, surrey. [london]: printed by strangeways & sons, [?1904]. the blake is presumably the sketch for “tiriel denouncing his sons and daughters” (butlin #199), offered in william ward’s catalogue of drawings, engravings, and books (1914), lot 1, £8.8.0. 1911 1–2 may §sotheby, wilkinson & hodge. catalogue of books and manuscripts comprising the property of a gentleman. including valuable works in french literature in fine bindings … the property of a lady including first editions of the writings of matthew arnold, william blake … the second folio shakespeare … early works on aeronautics … works illustrated by cruikshank …. london: dryden press, j. davy and sons, 1911. 47 pp. lot 321, poetical sketches [(l) sold for £49 to quaritch]. lot 323, descriptive catalogue [(m) sold for £10.5.0 to tregaskis]. 1912 *archibald g. b. russell. the engravings of william blake. 1912, 1912, 1968. <bb #603> review §h. w. l., burlington magazine 24.130 (jan. 1914): 232-33. 1918 14 march §walpole galleries. books, autographs and ex-libris, including the library of the late william w. phillips of new york city … to be sold by auction … [at] the walpole galleries, no. 10 east 49th street, new york. 1918. 51 pp., 602 lots. the sale includes a painting by william blake. apparently not in butlin. 1920 5–6 february sotheby, wilkinson & hodge. catalogue of important autograph letters and historical documents; the property of charles fairfax murray (deceased), (sold by order of the executors) … including william blake … with another property. london, 1920. <british library> lot 18, letter of 2 july 1800, “2¼ pp. sm. 4to,” partly paraphrased and quoted [to morton]. lot 19, letter of 21 sept. 1800, “2 pp. sm. 4to,” partly quoted, “and an engraving of his cottage” [to morton]. lot 20, letter of 16 march 1804, “2½ pp. 4to,” partly paraphrased and quoted [to morton]. lot 21, letter of 12 april 1827, “1¾ pp. 4to,” partly quoted, illustrated [to morton]. 1920 15–17 march §anderson galleries. the library of the late h. buxton forman [part one] … manuscripts, first editions, autograph letters and association copies of … william blake. new york, 1920.for a much abbreviated account of the buxton forman sale, see bb #613. lot 35, poetical sketches [(m), $410]. lot 36, blake’s copy of james barry, account of a series of pictures (1783) [$250]. lot 48, no natural religion [(i), $625]. lot 50, twelve copperplates for job [i.e., blair’s grave]. lot 51, songs [(g1, $60]. lot 52, songs [(g2), $65]. lot 53, songs [(h), $90]. lot 65, drawings for mary wollstonecraft’s original stories (with 5 letters from h. h. gilchrist) [$1,000]. lot 66, urizen pl. 22 [$1,060]. lot 67, jerusalem pls. 4, 18-19, 28, 35, 37 [$610]. lot 68, genesis manuscript [hayley translation of tasso, $1,350]. lot 69, blake’s letter of 12 march 1804 [$125]. lot 71, blake’s letter of 27 april 1804 [$170]. lot 72, blake’s letter of 28 sept. 1804 [$140]. 1920 26 april anderson galleries. the library of the late h. buxton forman [part two]. new york, 1920. <princeton> lots 46-65 are blakes, of which the most important are: lot 46, joseph hallett, jr., a free and impartial study of the holy scriptures recommended … [3 vols.] (vol. 1: london, 1729; vol. 2: 1732; vol. 3: 1736), with “blake’s … autograph in each volume dated 1799. in the first volume he has also written the price he paid for the work, £1. 1s.” lot 64, “information and complaint of john scofield, and blake’s memorandums …” [br(2) 159-61], 3½ pp. folio, “speech of counsellor rose” [br(2) 179-83], 6¼ pp., 2 pieces, contemporary copies [$17]. 1923 16–18 april §american art association. illustrated catalogue of books, manuscripts, drawings of superlative importance [sold by col. henry d. hughes]. new york, 1923. 1,009 titles. lot 117, visions [(l), $1,450 to james williams]. lot 118, blake’s job (1826), colored. lot 128, blake’s exhibition of paintings in fresco (1809) plus his letter of may 1809 [$125]. 1923 2 may §american art association. illustrated catalogue of american and english “men of letters”: autograph presentation copies and holograph manuscripts by famous writers … also original painting in tempera and an original watercolor drawing by william blake: mainly from the library of the late charles eliot norton of boston, massachusetts, to be sold … by order of elizabeth gaskell norton and the other persons hereinafter named. new york, 1923. *lot 13, blake’s color print of christ appearing to the apostles (butlin #325) [$6,100 to gabriel wells]. lot 15, watercolors [for the john camden hotten facsimile] of marriage pls. 1-2 <bb p. 299n1>. 1923 10–11 december §sotheby, wilkinson & hodge. catalogue of valuable printed books, illuminated and other manuscripts, drawings, caricatures and book-plates, autograph letters, literary relics, etc. … comprising … very fine copies of william blake’s milton and thel, and a collection of over 1500 drawings by t. stothard, formerly in the library of the late b. g. windus, esq. …. london, 1923. 66 pp. lot 252, thel [o] and milton [d] [sold for £3,400 to pickering]. 1924 30–31 january, 1 february §american art association. the herman l. r. edgar collection of first editions of w. m. thackeray; inscribed first editions of joseph conrad; charles b. eddy collection of first editions; superb sporting prints in color; fresco paintings by william blake …. new york, 1924. *lot 66, newton color print (butlin #307). 1924 23 june §sotheby, wilkinson & hodge. the valuable stock of autograph letters, historical documents, etc., the property of messrs. j. pearson & co. (c. e. shepheard & f. a. wheeler), 5, pall mall place, london, s.w. 1 (sold owing to the dissolution of their partnership) …. london, 1924. the sale includes manuscripts of william blake and william hayley. pearson had previously bought or sold blake’s letters of 2 july 1800 (1893), 13 dec. 1803 (1858), 16 march 1804 (1885), april 1826 (1885), and april 1827 (1893). i do not know what blake manuscripts they sold in 1924. 1924 22–23 october §anderson galleries. selections from the library of mr. william s. hall, new york city; first editions in great variety, including many blake, whitman and burroughs volumes; with other private collections in a separate alphabet. new york, 1924. 66 pp. william s. hall is not otherwise known to have owned first editions of blake, but see 1929 19–20 february. 1924 december §francis edwards. catalogue 466. a catalogue of english literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, mostly first editions. london, 1924. 21 cm., 51 pp. according to butlin #676, blake’s philoctetes and neoptolemus at lemnos was offered by francis edwards in dec. 1924 (lot 59), 1925, and nov. 1926 (lot 459), at £650, and a. edward newton sold it at parke-bernet, 16 april 1941. 1925 6–8 april §sotheby & co. catalogue of highly important manuscripts, extremely valuable printed books, autograph letters and historical documents … comprising … an extremely fine drawing by william blake, the property of mrs. a. r. crosby. london, 1925. *lot 152, by the waters of babylon (butlin #466) [£600]. 1926 laurence binyon. the engraved designs of william blake. 1926, 1967. <bb #627> c. §paderborn [germany]: klassik art–salzwasser verlag, 2012. isbn: 9783954910595. 1927 27–29 april §sotheby’s. valuable printed books, european and oriental miniatures and manuscripts, autograph letters and historical documents … comprising … a fine drawing by william blake. london, 1927. the blake drawing is oberon and titania on a lily (butlin #245). 1928 1 february §american art association. important first editions, manuscripts and letters of jane austen, j. m. barrie, william blake, robert burns … and others, mainly from original english sources. new york, 1928. 1928 17–21 december §sotheby & co. catalogue of important autograph letters, literary, historical and medieval manuscripts, valuable printed books, drawings by william blake, &c … which will be sold by auction … on monday, 17th of december, 1928, and four following days. london, 1928. 164 pp., 1099 lots. lot 137, oberon and titania, preceded by puck (butlin #246). lot 138, the complaint of job (butlin #163). lot 139, the new zealand set of job watercolors [not by blake]. 1929 19–20 february §american art association. first editions of nineteenth and twentieth century authors, dreiser, hardy, johnson, kipling, millay, o’neill, shaw, trollope; finely illustrated works, william blake, french engravings of the eighteenth century, examples of early printing, vierge, etc., and a series of nonesuch press books. new york, 1929. 94 pp., 754 lots. the property of the artist miss clara tice, mr. william stanley hall. 1934 11 july §sotheby & co. catalogue of the collection of important paintings and drawings mainly by english eighteenth and nineteenth century masters, the property of colonel fairfax rhodes (deceased); comprising paintings by j. s. cotman, john constable (a portrait), george romney, richard wilson, william blake …. london, 1934. 36 pp. lot 3, “illustration to urizen” [butlin #635, death pursuing the soul through the avenues of life for blair’s grave] [£40 to jacob schwartz]. 1936 17–19 february §*sotheby & co. catalogue of valuable printed books, illuminated and other manuscripts, autograph letters, topographical drawings of american interest, etc.: comprising the library of sir algernon methuen, bt. (decd.) … including: the magnificent butts-crewe copy of songs of innocence and [of] experience (the second largest known, and the only one with tinted wash borders); the famous copy of young’s night thoughts coloured throughout by blake, also from the butts-crewe collections; very fine copies of thel and visions of the daughters of albion … which will be sold by auction …. london, 1936. lots 349-516, 529-30 were important blakes: lot 499, songs [(v), sold for £1,050 to rosenbach]. lot 501, thel [(b), sold for £420 to quaritch]. lot 503, visions [(m), sold for £540 to quaritch]. lot 505, colored night thoughts [(a), sold for £580 to robinson]. 1938 25–26 may §american art association/anderson galleries. americana, autographs, library sets, first editions … two important letters by william blake …. new york, 1938. lots 73-74, blake’s letters of 2 july 1800 and february 1827. 1942 14 january *parke-bernet galleries. the splendid library of mr. and mrs. anton g. hardy including the important painting in tempera “faith, hope, and charity” by william blake. new york, 1942. <yale> <bb #652> lot 19, faith, hope, and charity [butlin #428, charity], reproduction [$2,100 to sessler (for charles j. rosenbloom)]. lot 20, “a dream of thiralatha” [america pl. d, butlin #267], color print, 8⅜ x 9⅜", matted; acquired by osmaston “in [14 january] 1904” [$575 to rosenbach]. lot 22, the death of the good old man [butlin #631, copy of the upper part of schiavonetti’s engraving], wash drawing. lot 24, bürger, leonora. lot 25, young, night thoughts (1797). lot 26, blair, the grave (1808). lot 27, job. 1946 10 may §american book auction. a fine collection of books from various owners: art, william blake, books about books, first and limited editions, literature, presentation copies, sets, walt whitman, etc., etc. new york, [1946]. 1949 3 march §swann auction galleries. fine william blake collection, americana books and prints, new england and the west, art and illustrated books, books about books and bookbindings, press books and first editions, french literature and art, early printed books, autographs, etc. new york, 1949. 33 pp., 344 lots. <grolier club> 1950 8 december §american book auction. the important library of william h. atkinson and other consignors. new york, 1950. sale code 174. the subjects include art books, william blake, and books about books. 1953 20–21 july §sotheby & co. printed books … collection of works by, and after, william blake …. london, 1953. lot 469, no natural religion [(l1), £205]. lot 470, no natural religion [l2], all religions are one pl. 1, and for the sexes [l] pl. 21 [£42]. lot 484, for the sexes [l] pls. 2, 4-8, 10-14, 16-18 [£64]. 1954 §charles j. sawyer, ltd. catalogue 220: oil paintings, original drawings in water-colour and other media by william blake, thomas rowlandson, thomas baines and arthur rackham, also bronzes, sculptures, etc. all of literary or historical interest, offered for sale …. london, 1954. 25 cm., 40 pp. lot 3, the visionary head of corinna (butlin #708), previously offered in his catalogue 196 (1949), lot 1, both at £175. 1955 12 january §swann auction galleries. important americana; the revolution; the west; civil war; confederacy; western pioneer letters; maximilian’s travels with the atlas; the 1820 “picturesque views of america”; fine william blake collection …. new york, 1955. 22 cm., 33 pp., 320 lots. 1956 27–28 february §sotheby & co. catalogue of a selected portion of the celebrated library from brogyntyn, oswestry, salop, the property of the rt. honble. lord harlech … also, william blake’s book of urizen, one of only two complete copies known, the property of major t. e. dimsdale which will be sold by auction …. london, 1956. 84 pp. lot 531, urizen [(a), sold for £6,800 to howard samuel]. 1958 3–4 march §sotheby & co. catalogue of valuable printed books, autograph letters, and historical documents comprising … young’s night thoughts with illustrations by william blake, coloured by the artist …. london, 1958. 24 cm., 94 pp. lot 47, young’s night thoughts (1797), colored [(q), sold for £680 to traylen]. 1961 13–14 march §sotheby & co. catalogue of valuable printed books, autograph letters and historical documents … including … william blake’s poetical sketches, 1783. london, 1961. lot 503, poetical sketches [(e), £1,300]. 1961 27 october §christie, manson & woods. catalogue of fine english pictures and drawings, the properties of the lady elizabeth clyde, mrs. g. r. delaforce, the viscountess lee of fareham, the late dowager viscountess harcourtlady hesketh wrote on 16 june 1802 about the first of hayley’s designs to a series of ballads (1802) illustrated by blake that she had “sent one to lord & lady harcourt” [william harcourt (1743-1830), third earl of harcourt, field marshal, and his wife, mary (d. 1833)] (br[2] 132). … and others, which will be sold at auction … on friday, october 27, 1961. london, 1961. *lot 43, blake’s the horse (butlin #366), sold by upholland college. 1968 13 november §parke-bernet galleries. american and european autographs and manuscripts … including … a william blake drawing. new york, 1968. *lot 16, los walking on the mountains of albion (butlin #784, $2,100). 1969 december–1970 february *william blake engraver: a descriptive catalogue of an exhibition by charles ryskamp …. 1969. <bb #700> review §fredric j. mosher, library quarterly 40.3 (july 1970): 361. 1970 13 january §sotheby parke-bernet. fine books; with drawings by william blake, george cruikshank and others …. new york, 1970. the widow of t. e. hanley sold three visionary heads: lot 124, edward iii [?] (butlin #736). lot 125, boadicea (butlin #718). lot 126, lais of corinth (butlin #712). 1970 10 december sotheby & co. catalogue of printed books: comprising architecture: campbell’s vitruvius britannicus, vol. 1-3, 1715-25; art: books by and relating to william blake, including the book of job, new york, 1935 …. london, 1970. lots 2-13, 17, 19-22, 24-25, 27-28, 30-33, 53, 60-61 are by or relate to blake. 1971 19 october §parke-bernet galleries. sale 3246: fine books: modern illustrated books: oriental miniatures: illustrated manuscript leaves: illustrated and fine books from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries including a copy of william blake’s book of thel, sporting books …. new york, 1971. 56 pp. lot 343, thel [(a), $21,000 to warren howell]. 1972 16 may sotheby parke-bernet. fine books … including … a drawing by william blake. new york, 1972. the “drawing by william blake” is a false attribution. 1972 §bernard quaritch. private press books, with some other limited editions and a section of books by or about william blake. london, 1972. 1972 *roger r. easson and robert n. essick. william blake: book illustrator … volume i: plates designed and engraved by blake. 1972. <bb #709> review §irene h. chayes, studies in romanticism 13.2 (spring 1974): 155-64. 1975 18 june §samuel t. freeman & co. from the libraries of the late harold h. kynett, francis l. randolph, lewis heizmann (of reading, pa.) and other estates and accounts: first editions, rebecca gratz, lord byron and william blake material …. philadelphia, 1975. 1979 29 march–13 may §diana l. johnson. “william blake (1757-1827).” fantastic illustration and design in britain, 1850-1930. [catalogue for an exhibition] … march 29-may 13, 1979 at museum of art, rhode island school of design. providence: rhode island school of design, 1979. 49-50. 1979 15 november–20 december §p. & d. colnaghi. exhibition of english drawings and watercolours. london, 1979. lot 27, blake’s the witch of endor (butlin #74). 1980 13 november §sotheby parke-bernet & co. eighteenth and nineteenth century british watercolours and drawings: … by william blake … john constable … joseph mallord william turner … which will be sold at auction … thursday, 13th november, 1980. london, 1980. 201 pp. lot 106, ugolino (butlin #208). lot 107, the good farmer (butlin #120a). lot 108, searching among the dead on a battlefield (butlin #197a). 1982 7 october §swann galleries. art and architecture: american art, oriental art, ceramics, jewellery, william blake, furniture, antiquities, topography, etc. new york, 1982. 1987 13 november §christie, manson & woods. printed books and manuscripts: the properties of … the estates of … margaret m. sullivan …. new york, 1987. lot 46, america [r]. 1988 november §jack tilton gallery. literary vision: november 1988, a. r. ammons, john ashbery, william blake, william burroughs, e. e. cummings …. new york, 1988. 28 cm., 30 pp. 1989 national gallery of victoria exhibition. <bbs pp. 306-07> review §*david bindman, “melbourne, william blake.” burlington magazine 132.1042 (jan. 1990): 75. 1990 28 june §christie, manson & woods. important old master prints and british colour linocuts: the properties of the trustees of the hirshhorn museum and sculpture gardens, the trustees of phillips academy, andover, massachusetts, the viscount scarsdale and the kedleston trustees and from various sources …. london, 1990. lots 7-8 are prints by william blake. 1990 *donald fitch. blake set to music. 1990. <bbs pp. 309-10> review §bryan n. s. gooch, notes 48.1 (sept. 1991): 107-08. 1991 *robert n. essick. william blake’s commercial book illustrations. 1991. <bbs p. 310> review see kitson in part vi. 1993 18 november §swann galleries. rare books: art and architecture, bindings, william blake, color plate books …. new york, 1993. 245 lots. 1997 2 april–6 july *patrick noon. the human form divine: william blake from the paul mellon collection. 1997. <blake (1998)> review g. ingli james, burlington magazine 141.1157 (aug. 1999): 485-86. 2000 9 november–2001 11 february; 2001 27 march–24 june *william blake. [catalogue of an exhibition at the] tate, metropolitan museum of art. 2000, 2001. <blake (2001, 2002)> reviews §hoban, sally. “william blake: england’s artist prophet.” lancet 357.9249 (6 jan. 2001): 75-76. <blake (2002), under anon.> §l. gordan, “william blake: the exhibition,” antiquarian book monthly 28.314 (2001): 20-35. §john loughery, “‘alfred stieglitz and his new york galleries’ at the national gallery; vermeer and william blake at the metropolitan museum,” hudson review 54.2 (2001): 286. 2002 26 september §swann galleries. modern press and illustrated books: including william blake, jean cocteau …. new york, 2002. 2005 16 october–2006 7 may §rené zechlin and ciara healy. blake and sons: alternative lifestyles and mysticism in contemporary art. catalogue of an exhibition held at the lewis glucksman gallery, cork, ireland, 16 october 2005-29 january 2006 and the model arts and niland gallery, sligo, ireland, 24 february 2006-7 may 2006. cork: lewis glucksman gallery, [2005]. 24 cm., 143 pp.; isbn: 9780950244099. it includes christopher bucklow, “this is personal: blake and mental fight” (131-39). 2007 7 april–2008 6 april *david bindman. mind-forg’d manacles: william blake and slavery. 2007. <blake (2008)> review see jason whittaker, year’s work in english studies 88 (2009), in part vi. 2007 7 october–2 december §every eye sees differently as the eye: presented in collaboration with the great unsigned: charles avery, dirk bell, heiko blankenstein, ernesto caivano, kerstin kartscher. london: the drawing room, tannery arts, 2007. 1 sheet (folded), 21 cm. “published on the occasion of an exhibition at the drawing room, 7 oct.-2 dec. 2007, to mark the 250th anniversary of william blake’s birth,” with an essay by irene bradbury. 2008 §christine riding. cecil collins and william blake. tate britain, 2008. an exhibition apparently without a published catalogue. 2009 2 april–28 june *michael phillips, ed., with the assistance of catherine de bourgoing. william blake (1757-1827): le génie visionnaire du romantisme anglais. [2009]. <blake (2010)> review §meredith davis, caa.reviews (2009). 2009 20 april–4 october *martin myrone, ed. seen in my visions: a descriptive catalogue of pictures. 2009. <blake (2010)> review see jason whittaker, year’s work in english studies 90 (2011), in part vi. 2010 §christine riding. art and the sublime: terror, torment and transcendence. london: tate publishing, 2010. 19 pp. especially about j. m. w. turner, william blake, john martin, and douglas gordon. 2011 autumn §rosebery’s auctions, london. sold for children pl. 15. 2011 29 november–2012 19 february §*alison smith et al. uil’jam blejk i britanskie vizionery. moscow: izd. “krasnaja ploščadʹ,” 2011. 262 pp., isbn: 9785915210485. in russian. 2012 15 march–17 june §agnes husslein-arco and thomas zaunschirm. gold. vienna: österreichische galerie belevedere; munich: hirmer, 2012. in german. the exhibition included blake. 2012 26–27 april sotheby’s. prints. new york, 2012. sold from songs of innocence (y): lot 42, *“the blossom” [pl. 11] (estimate: us $40,000-$60,000) [$74,500 to the photographer adam fuss].see §adam fuss and andrew roth, ark ([kolkata [india]: adam fuss], 2007). 43 cm., 35 pp. according to the colophon, it was “designed by adam fuss and andrew roth. 333 signed and numbered copies printed by anderson printing house and laurens & co. press, kolkata, india. engraving by william blake, 1776. all daguerreotypes 2004.” prices and buyers here derive from robert n. essick, “blake in the marketplace, 2012,” blake 46.4 (spring 2013). lot 43, *“the lamb” [pl. 8] (estimate: us $35,000-$45,000) [$40,625 to john windle for victoria university in the university of toronto]. lot 44, *“laughing song” [pl. 15] (estimate: us $40,000-$50,000) [$80,500 to an anonymous collector on the telephone]. lot 45, *“the ecchoing green” [pls. 6-7] (estimate: us $70,000-$100,000) [$116,500 to the dealer james cummins for northwestern university]. lot 46, *“the little boy lost” [pl. 13] (estimate: us $10,000-$20,000) [$59,375 to john windle for robert n. essick]. lot 47, *“the little boy found” [pl. 14] (estimate: us $35,000-$45,000) [$68,500 to john windle for robert n. essick]. 2012 3 july–21 october william blake 1757-1827: visiones en el arte británico. an exhibition at caixaforum, madrid. in spanish. the blakes are from the tate. reviewsaccording to the web caixaforum entry on 19 oct. 2012, there were “47,000 results” for the blake exhibition. i have been somewhat selective in recording them. *ángeles garcía, “el fantástico y profético universo de blake llega a caixaforum,” el país [madrid] 2 july 2012. in spanish. *victor novoa, “william blake, profecías de un grabador,” hoyesarte [madrid] 2 july 2012 (a long review). in spanish. *anon., “william blake en caixaforum madrid,” hoyesarte [madrid] 4 july 2012. in spanish. anon., “caixaforum: william blake (1757-1827): visions in british art,” madrid about you 21 july 2012 (“more than 80 pieces”). 2012 7 september §skinner auctions, boston. lot 30 offered for children: the gates of paradise pl. 10, “plate size” (i.e., platemark) 8.8 x 12.0 cm. in fact, this is for the sexes: the gates of paradise pl. 10, w. a. white facsimile (c. 1913) (8.8 x 12.0 cm.) <bb #46, bbs p. 80>.information from robert n. essick, “blake in the marketplace, 2012,” blake 46.4 (spring 2013). the dimensions of blake’s plate are 6.3 x 9.3 cm. 2012 6 december christie’s. old master prints. london, 2012. lot 96 is blake’s *enoch lithographthe enoch lithograph is also reproduced in essick, “blake in the marketplace, 2012,” blake 46.4 (spring 2013). the leaf is 33.1 x 23.8 cm. on wove paper without watermark. purchased by edward croft-murray from colnaghi’s in 1957 for £3; estimate: £100,000-£150,000 [sold for £170,000 (hammer price) to, it is rumored, a us institution]. the *cumberland writing on the verso shows through on the print; “a made up paper loss in the upper subject, a short repaired tear and pale stain upper right, otherwise in good condition.” part v: books owned by william blake the poet cumberland, george, the captive of the castle of sennaar (1798) reproduced online at the cumberland family web site, maintained by david man. “mr. george cumberland will shortly publish an african tale, under the title of ‘the castle of sennaar,’ which will contain various anecdotes of the sophians, hitherto unknown to the world,” according to “literary and philosophical news,” monthly magazine (dec. 1798): 456. see cumberland in division ii. part vi: criticism, biography, and scholarly studies a   b   c   d   e   f   g   h   i   j   k   l   m   n   o   p   q   r   s   t   u   v   w   x   y   z a §abrahams, cecil. “william blake and the romantic perception of humanism.” the question of humanism: challenges and possibilities. ed. david goicoechea, john luik, and tim madigan. buffalo: prometheus books, 1991. *ackroyd, peter. blake. 1995 <blake (1996)> … §trans. ewa kraskowska. poznań: zysk i s-ka wydawnictwo, 2001. in polish. hear also §peter ackroyd, blake (newport beach: books on tape, 1997), 13 sound cassettes (1½ hours each), read by ian whitcomb. §[ackroyd, peter] akroĭd, piter, trans. svetlana likhacheva. “chelovek po imeni vĭl’liam bleik.” inostrannaya literatura 3 (2011): n. pag. in russian. §ackroyd, peter. “william blake, a spiritual radical.” the collection. ed. thomas wright. london: chatto & windus, 2001. from his reviews and articles in the spectator. *adams, hazard. blake’s margins: an interpretive study of the annotations. 2009. <blake (2011, 2012)> review *morton d. paley, review 19 (22 may 2010). <blake (2012), here corrected> see jason whittaker, year’s work in english studies 90 (2011), below. *adams, hazard, ed. critical essays on william blake. 1991. <bbs p. 331> review see kitson, below. *adams, hazard. william blake on his poetry and painting: a study of a descriptive catalogue, other prose writings and jerusalem. 2011. <blake §(2011)> review r. paul yoder (see blake 46.2, below). §adams, hazard. “william blake: imagination, vision, inspiration, intellect.” inventions of the imagination: romanticism and beyond. ed. richard t. gray et al. seattle: university of washington press, 2011. §adda, maggy. “william blake (1757-1827). le graveur inspiré.” art et métiers du livre no. 224 (may-june 2001): 36-37. in french. *ahearn, edward j. “an anatomy of the visionary: blake’s marriage of heaven and hell.” visionary fictions: apocalyptic writing from blake to the modern age. 1996. <blake (1998)> review §keri davies, journal for eighteenth-century studies 22.2 (1999): 224-26 (with gardner, the tyger, the lamb, and the terrible desart: songs of innocence and of experience in its times and circumstance, lucas, william blake, summerfield, a guide to the books of william blake for innocent and experienced readers, and williams, ideology and utopia in the poetry of william blake). §aitken, james, ed. “william blake.” english letters of the xviii century. harmondsworth [middlesex]: pelican books, [1946]. pelican books [a163]. *altizer, thomas j. j. the new apocalypse: the radical christian vision of william blake. 1967, 2000. <bb #807, blake (2004, 2010)> review §f. w. dillistone, theology today 25.4 (jan. 1969): 495-97. an, xiao-hong. “yi shi lun shi—dui bu lai ke shi zuo ‘lao hu’ de xin jie du [poetics—a new reading of ‘the tyger’ by blake].” heng shui xue yuan xue bao [journal of hengshui university] 9.2 (june 2007): 46-48. in chinese. the essay suggests that “the tyger” implies “blake’s poetics” on romanticism. ankarsjö, magnus. william blake and gender. 2006. <blake (2007, 2008)> review mark lussier, european romantic review 21.1 (feb. 2010): 132-38 (with clark and suzuki, eds., the reception of blake in the orient, and snart, the torn book: unreading william blake’s marginalia). ankarsjö, magnus. william blake and religion: a new critical view. 2009. <blake (2010§, 2012)> review see jason whittaker, year’s work in english studies 90 (2011), below. §annwn, david. grief’s work and death’s questioners: dunbar, blake and robert duncan. [n.p.: n.p., ?1996]. 15 pp. “a paper delivered at the open university arts faculty conference: sickness and death, manchester … october 19th, 1996.” §anon. anarchism in england: english anarchists, william blake, michael moorcock, clifford harper, lemmy, gee vaucher, alex cox, peter neville. memphis: books llc, 2010. this is a string of wikipedia articles. §anon. “blake, the body of abel found by adam and eve.” techniques of the great masters of art. secaucus [new jersey]: chartwell books, 1985. b. §[london]: new burlington books, 1987. c. §secaucus: chartwell books, 1989. d. §1993. e. §london: quantum books, 1996. f. §kent [england]: grange books, 2000. g. §london: quantum books, 2004. the work is an amalgamation of techniques of the world’s great painters, techniques of the impressionists, and techniques of modern art. anon. “the sculptor’s career.” eliza cook’s journal (2, 9 april 1853) <blake (2010)> b. anon. “the sculptor’s career. from eliza cook’s journal.” littell’s living age no. 471 (28 may 1853): 538-42. c. pen and pencil [cincinnati] (4, 11 june 1853) <blake (2010)> d. anglo-american magazine [toronto] (july 1853) <blake (2010)> casual, very fictional references to blake. the account is adapted by samuel smiles (see smiles, below). §anon. “small provincial images: william blake.” poetry review 98.1, supplement (2008): 59. §anon. “william blake.” lancet 163 no. 4194 (1904): 177. §anon. “william blake archive expands with new grant.” herald-sun [durham, north carolina] 14 sept. 2010. §anon. “william blake archive online.” news and observer [raleigh, north carolina] 3 oct. 2010. anon. “william blake birthday concert.” time out london 12 nov. 2012. to be held at st. james’s church, piccadilly, sponsored by the william blake society. §anon. “william blake drawings.” metropolitan museum of art bulletin 23.3 (march 1928): 70-71. ansari, a. a. william blake’s minor prophecies. 2001. <blake (2003)> review see jason whittaker, year’s work in english studies 82 (2003), below. antal, éva. “‘labour of love’—ovidian flower-figures in william blake’s songs.” eger journal of english studies [eszterházy károly college, eger, hungary] 8 (2008): 23-40. §auler, robert m. “martin bresnick’s for the sexes: the gates of paradise: analysis of a multi-media [musical] composition.” cincinnati phd, 2006. §*avens, roberts. blake, swedenborg & the neo-platonic tradition. ([n.y.: swedenborg foundation, ?198-]) introduction by dr. george f. dole. 28 cm, 12 pp.  b b-m, w. g. “blake, william.” an encyclopædia of occultism: a compendium of information on the occult sciences, occult personalities, psychic science, magic, demonology, spiritism and mysticism. ed. lewis spence. new york: dodd, mead & company, 1920. 71-73. b. §new york: strathmore press, [1960]. c. §secaucus [new jersey]: citadel press, 1974. d. §secaucus: citadel press, 1977. e. § an encyclopaedia of occultism and parapsychology …. detroit: gale research, 1984. f. §2nd ed. gale research, 1985. g. §london: bracken books, 1988. h. §3rd ed. gale research, 1991. i. §4th ed. gale research, 1997. j. §5th ed. gale research, 2001. k. §mineola [new york]: dover publications, 2003. l. new york: cosimo inc., 2006. m. §kessinger, 2007. n. §new york: avon, 2008. a conventional biographical account with little more to say about “occultism” than that blake was “a prince among mystics.” bai, feng-xin, and ping she. “wei lian bu lai ke—cong tian zhen dao jing yan de fei yue—qian tan bu lai ke tian zhen yu jing yan zhi ge zhong yong heng de ‘dui zhao’ [william blake: a leap from innocence to experience—on the contraries in william blake’s songs of innocence and of experience].” cang zhou shi fan zhuan ke xue xiao xue bao [journal of cangzhou teachers’ training college] 25.3 (sept. 2009): 12-14, 22. in chinese. the essay analyzes the “contraries” in blake’s songs of innocence and of experience in terms of “theme,” “language,” and “writing skills.” *balboa, justino. william blake: un extraño en el paraíso. madrid: ártica editorial, 2011. 21 x 13 cm., 276 pp., 48 blake pls. (colors sometimes flamboyant, size shrunken or swollen at the convenience of the lay-out person); isbn: 9788493879211. in spanish. a biography (juvenile), echoing the title (but no more) from the stranger from paradise. §barilli, renato. “blake en el alba del contemporáneo.” artes: la revista [medellin] 1.2 (july-dec. 2001): 12-40. in spanish. §barr, mark l. “practicing resistance: blake, milton, and the english jury.” european romantic review 18.3 (2007): 361-79. §beach, j. m. “william blake.” studies in poetry: the visionary. dallas: university press of america, 2004.  §*beaumont, elie de [pseudonym of e. l. g. den dooren de jong]. william blake. [’s-gravenhage]: trio, [1959]. curiosa typografica, 2; 21 cm., 24 pp. <bbs p. 362, here amplified> in dutch. a biography. beer, john. blake’s humanism. 1968. <bb #1143> review §g. thomas, english 17 no. 99 (sept. 1968): 102-03 (with raymond lister, william blake: an introduction to the man and to his work, and one other). §rodney baine (see under letters, ed. keynes, in part i, section a). *beer, john. william blake: a literary life. 2005. <blake (2006)> review see jason whittaker, year’s work in english studies 86 (2007), below. *bentley, g. e., jr. blake records. 1969. <bb #1158> b. 2nd ed. 2004. <blake (2005)> review (of 2004) see jason whittaker, year’s work in english studies 85 (2006), below. *bentley, g. e., jr. “blake’s murderesses: visionary heads of wickedness.” huntington library quarterly 72 (2009) <blake (2010)> review see jason whittaker, year’s work in english studies 90 (2011), below. *bentley, g. e., jr. “blake’s works as performances: intentions and inattentions.” text: transactions of the society for textual scholarship 4 (1988) <bbs p. 366> b. §ecdotica [bologna, italy] no. 6 (2009) [anglo-american scholarly editing, 1980-2005, ed. paul eggert and peter shillingsburg]: 136-56. *bentley, g. e., jr. the stranger from paradise: a biography of william blake. 2001, 2003. <blake (2002, 2004)> review see jason whittaker, year’s work in english studies 82 (2003), below. bentley, g. e., jr. william blake’s conversations. 2008. <blake (2009)> review see jason whittaker, year’s work in english studies 89 (2010), below. *bian, zhi-lin. “tan tan bu lai ke de ji shou shi [on blake’s poems].” shi kan [poetry periodical] no. 7 (1957): 87-96. in chinese. a combination of biographical sketch and critical analysis of several of blake’s poems in songs of innocence and songs of experience, e.g., “the chimney sweeper” and “the tyger,” to mark blake’s 200th anniversary. it does not distinguish innocence from experience, possibly owing to the failure to realize the differences between the two. bidney, martin. blake and goethe: psychology, ontology, imagination. 1988. <bbs p. 372> review j. m. q. davies, review of english studies 41 no. 161 (feb. 1990): 128-30. §bidney, martin. “slowed-down time and the fear of history: the medievalist visions of william blake and william morris.” journal for early modern cultural studies 2.2 (fall-winter 2002): 100-20. §binder, tim, and ron owen. “william blake.” walk with the wise: an invitation to see life differently. london: loose chippings, 2011. *binyon, laurence. the followers of william blake: edward calvert, samuel palmer, george richmond and their circle. 1925, 1968. <bb #1201> review §r. r. tatlock, burlington magazine 48 no. 278 (may 1926): 271-72 (with another). §blackstock, alan. “dickinson, blake, and the hymnbooks of hell.” emily dickinson journal 20.2 (2011): 33-56, 124-25. “there is no evidence of dickinson having read blake.” blake/an illustrated quarterly volume 17, number 4 (spring 1984) *anne maheux. “an analysis of the watercolor technique and materials of william blake.” 124-29. the essay is silently reprinted from her “an analysis of the watercolour technique and materials of william blake” (see maheux, below). blake/an illustrated quarterly volume 39, number 2 (fall 2005) *angus whitehead. “‘i also beg mr blakes acceptance of my wearing apparel’: the will of henry banes, landlord of 3 fountain court, strand, the last residence of william and catherine blake.” 78-99. review see jason whittaker, year’s work in english studies 86 (2007), below. blake/an illustrated quarterly volume 42, number 3 (winter 2008-09) *angus whitehead. “‘this extraordinary performance’: william blake’s use of gold and silver in the creation of his paintings and illuminated books.” 84-108. the blake web site has supplementary illustrations for it. blake/an illustrated quarterly volume 43, number 2 (fall 2009) céline mansanti. “william blake in transition magazine (paris, 1927–38): the modalities of a blake revival in france during the 1920s and 1930s.” 52-60. review see jason whittaker, year’s work in english studies 90 (2011), below. blake/an illustrated quarterly volume 45, number 4 (spring 2012) *robert n. essick. “blake in the marketplace, 2011.” 108-43. (masterful, as always.) minute particular angus whitehead. “mr clay of hercules buildings.” 143-44. (“mr clay of [13] hercules buildings” was robbed by his housekeeper of all his household goods, which “were to have been sold the next day,” according to the evening mail of 26 january 1791 and the times of 28 january 1791, indicating that the blakes did not move into 13 hercules buildings until about february 1791.) [poem] paul miner. “denouement.” 144. newsletter anon. “blake goes online only.” 144. blake/an illustrated quarterly volume 46, number 1 (summer 2012)from 46.1 (summer 2012), blake appears in two forms: (1) html, with sidenotes, and (2) pdf, with footnotes. g. e. bentley, jr., with the assistance of hikari sato for japanese publications and of li-ping geng for chinese publications. “william blake and his circle: a checklist of publications and discoveries in 2011.” *eliza borkowska. “translating blake’s jerusalem into polish.” 23 paras. (it includes “some reflections concerning the history of polish blake translations” (para. 1) with a list of blake “references,” mostly from anthologies, in polish and english.) reviews *grant f. scott. sarah haggarty, blake’s gifts: poetry and the politics of exchange. 10 paras. (in the “thickets of dense theoretical matter … perhaps only the veteran blake scholar will find wisdom along this book’s perilous path” [para. 10].) *alexander s. gourlay. robert n. essick, ed., songs of innocence and of experience. 10 paras. (“an intellectual and critical gem” [para. 1].) blake/an illustrated quarterly volume 46, number 2 (fall 2012) *abraham samuel shiff. “blake’s hebrew calligraphy.” 34 paras.shiff’s typescript is in the morgan library. (a dauntingly learned essay on the forms of blake’s written hebrew characters; they are “in classical hebrew-style,” sometimes “scrambled,” requiring “ashkenazi pronunciation,” often with the letters erratically formed, creating ambiguity in their interpretation.) minute particular g. e. bentley, jr. “the mathews as patrons.” 5 paras. (new information concerning the mathew family, especially subscriptions to books [1771, 1782, 1785, 1789, 1810].) reviews alexander s. gourlay. dennis m. read, r. h. cromek, engraver, editor, and entrepreneur. 9 paras. (a “valuable book,” but “a bit slapdash”; it “refines and updates the arguments” in his cromek articles.) *r. paul yoder. hazard adams, william blake on his poetry and painting: a study of a descriptive catalogue, other prose writings and jerusalem. 8 paras. (there are “gems scattered throughout the book,” but the writing is “a bit dry.”) blake/an illustrated quarterly volume 46, number 3 (winter 2012-13) *sarah eron. “‘bound … by their narrowing perceptions’: sympathetic bondage and perverse pity in blake’s the book of urizen.” 27 paras. (“i read urizen as an outright argument against the evils of sympathetic identification” [para. 9, note 4].) *david w. ullrich. “deciphering blake’s ‘the angel that presided o’er my birth.’” 25 paras. (a minute and fruitful examination of the transcription of blake’s 3-line poem, chiefly in the editions of keynes [1957], erdman [1988], and bentley [1978], focusing on whether l. 3 reads “live” [“go live without the help …”] or “love.” it “illustrates … difficult issues confronting editors in transcribing blake’s manuscripts and in making informed, but sometimes conflicting, decisions” [para. 25].) minute particular *mark crosby. “the blake memorial window in st. mary’s church, felpham.” 6 paras. (a description and reproductions of the designs by meg lawrence installed in 2010.) reviews dennis m. read. tom dunne and william l. pressly, eds., james barry, 1741-1806: history painter. 12 paras. (“its scholarship is impressive, its writing stimulating, and its approaches engaging.”) *joseph wittreich. karen mulhallen, ed., blake in our time: essays in honour of g. e. bentley jr. 6 paras. (“a magnificent tribute to g. e. bentley, jr.” with “many outstanding essays,” especially those by essick, johnson, butlin, and paley.) blake studies (1968-1980) indexes of articles and reviews, by detlef w. dörrbecker, are on the blake web site. §blanca, oscar tusquets, et al. l’escalier. paris: citadelles & mazenod, 2012. in french. it discusses blake, inter alia. §bletz, j. a. william blake: op zoek naar rijkdom en erkenning: leven en werk van william blake (1757-1827). lelystad: stichting ivio, 1992. 18 cm., 20 pp. in dutch. §bloch, iwan, trans. richard deniston. “a private cabinet of the erotic art of william blake.” ethnological and cultural studies of the sex life in england, illustrated, as revealed in its erotic and obscene literature and art; with nine private cabinets of illustrations by the greatest english masters of erotic art. new york: falstaff press, 1934. §bloom, harold. “william blake.” the visionary company. 1961 …. <bb #1232, bbs pp. 415-16> la compañía visionaria. william blake. buenos aires: adriana hidalgo editora, 2011. isbn: 9789879396063. in spanish. *blunt, anthony. the art of william blake. 1959 …. <bb #1235, bbs pp. 417> reviews martin butlin, burlington magazine 102 no. 693 (dec. 1960): 544-46. §gert schiff, zeitschrift für kunstgeschichte 25.1 (1962): 88-92. §blythe, ronald. “a bucolic paradise: ronald blythe examines william blake’s influence on the work of the 19th-century artist samuel palmer.” spectator (20 dec. 2008): 78. §boaten, ernest timothy. “a diunital vision: william blake’s response to the newtonian world view: a study in the history of ideas.” new mexico phd, 1983. 364 leaves. boer, roland. “e. p. thompson, antinomianism, and the theology of william blake [additional title in chinese].” sino-christian studies [taiwan] 8 (2009) <blake §(2012)> a thoughtful and persuasive essay. §bouchet, claire. “les métaphores dans la poésie de william blake: enjeux de traduction.” université sorbonne nouvelle-paris iii phd, 2004. in french. §bratcher, meredith lynn. “the demiurge: a study of the tradition from plato to joyce.” duke phd, 1985. 231 leaves. it is especially about blake, hardy, and joyce. §briedis, hassanah. “the language of reproduction: the worm and the womb in william blake’s virgins, harlots and ‘breeding women,’ 1789-1794: a hallidayan discourse analysis.” monash phd, 2003. 389 leaves. §britton, ronald. “william blake and epistemic narcissism.” belief and imagination: explorations in psychoanalysis. london: routledge, 1998. new library of psychoanalysis, 31. §brock, a. j. “william blake psychologized.” british medical journal 4507 (24 may 1947): 740-41. §broeke, isabelle van den. “visual anti-tales: the phantasmagoric prints of francisco goya and william blake.” anti-tales: the uses of disenchantment. ed. catriona mcara and david calvin. newcastle upon tyne: cambridge scholars, 2011. 142-51. broglio, ron, ed. digital designs on blake. 2005. <blake (2008)> review see jason whittaker, year’s work in english studies 86 (2007), below. bronowski, jacob. william blake, 1757-1827: a man without a mask. 1943 …. <bb #1288, bbs p. 426, blake (2010)> k. 1976 [in japanese] <bbs p. 426> l. 2008 <blake (2009)>. n. §william blake and the age of revolution. new york: faber and faber, 2012. 314 pp.; isbn: 9780571286935. *bruder, helen p. william blake and the daughters of albion. 1997. <blake (1998)> review see worrall, below. §bruder, helen p., and tristanne j. connolly, eds. blake, gender and culture. london: pickering & chatto, 2012. the body, gender and culture no. 10. 24 cm., xvii, 242 pp.; isbn: 9781848933040. helen p. bruder and tristanne j. connolly. “introduction: naked history displayed.” 1-10. 1. mark crosby. “‘merely a superior being’: blake and the creations of eve.” 11-23. 2. g. a. rosso. “the last strumpet: harlotry and hermaphroditism in blake’s rahab.” 25-36. 3. peter otto. “sex, violence and the history of this world: blake’s illustrations to the book of enoch.” 37-56. 4. keri davies. “bridal mysticism and ‘sifting time’: the lost moravian history of blake’s family.” 57-70. 5. marsha keith schuchard. “‘a secret common to our blood’: the visionary erotic heritage of blake, thomas butts and mary butts.” 71-82. 6. catherine l. mcclenahan. “changing the sexual garments: the regeneration of sexuality in jerusalem.” 83-97. 7. david fallon. “philoprogenitive blake.” 99-110. 8. elizabeth bernath. “‘seeking flowers to comfort her’: queer botany in blake’s visions, darwin’s loves and wollstonecraft’s rights of woman.” 111-22. 9. elizabeth effinger. “‘or wilt thou go ask the mole?’: (con)figuring the feminine in blake’s thel.” 123-31. 10. luisa calè. “gendering the margins of gray: blake, classical visual culture and the alternative bodies of ann flaxman’s book.” 133-43. 11. bethan stevens. “the virgil woodcuts out of scale: blake’s gigantic, masculine pastoral.” 145-63. 12. steve clark. “closet drama: gender and performance in blake and joanna baillie.” 165-75. *bruder, helen p., and tristanne connolly, eds. queer blake. 2010. <blake (2011)> review see jason whittaker, year’s work in english studies 91 (2012), below. §brylowe, thora. “of gothic architects and grecian rods: william blake, antiquarianism and the history of art.” romanticism 18.1 (april 2012): 89-104. bucke, richard maurice. “william blake.” cosmic consciousness: a study in the evolution of the human mind. 1901 …. <bb #a1306, bbs pp. 427-28, blake (2010)> ee. §new york: cosimo classics, 2006. ff. champaign [illinois]: book jungle, 2007. <blake (2010) ee> gg. §mineola: dover, 2009. <blake (2010) ff> hh. §cambridge: cambridge university press, 2010. ii. §guildford [surrey]: white crow, 2011. §buckland, raymond. “blake, william (1757-1827).” the spirit book: the encyclopedia of clairvoyance, channeling, and spirit communication. canton [michigan]: visible ink, 2005. §budziak, anna. “genius and madness mirrored: rossetti’s and yeats’ reception of william blake.” crossroads in literature and culture. ed. jacek fabiszak, ewa urbaniak-rybicka, and bartosz wolski. berlin: springer, 2012. second language learning and teaching. §butlin, martin. “correction: the bicentenary of william blake.” burlington magazine 100.661 (april 1958): 141. corrects his essay in the feb. issue (100.659) <bb #1324>. §byrne, joseph. “william blake’s illustrations to night thoughts: resistance to rationalisation in the late eighteenth-century book trade.” book illustration in the long eighteenth century: reconfiguring the visual periphery of the text. ed. christina ionescu. newcastle upon tyne: cambridge scholars, 2011. 115-55. c cai, han-ao. “jie shao yi wei zi xue cheng cai de shi ren wei lian bu lai ke [an introduction to william blake, a self-taught poet].” shan xi shi da xue xue bao (she ke ban) [journal of shanxi normal university (philosophy and social sciences edition)] no. 4 (1986): 83-86. in chinese. an introduction to blake’s life and work. cao, liang-cheng. “‘si’ chu ‘ai’ mo [the loss of love and the birth of death].” an hui wen xue [anhui literature] no. 9 (2008): 202-04. in chinese. a deconstructive reading of “the garden of love.” §caracciolo-trejo, e. “los poetas metafísicos ingleses; the penguin book of latin american verse; la poesía de vicente huidobro; william blake, visiones; baroque poetry [with j. p. hill].” essex phd, 1976. §carnevale, susana. fotos tan íntimas: emily dickinson, william blake, jacques lacan. buenos aires: vinciguerra, 2010. 23 cm., 118 pp.; isbn: 9789508437969. in spanish. §caro, ann. “william blake (1757-1827): a bibliographical continuation to the grolier bibliography of 1921.” london diploma in librarianship, 1963. 144 leaves. a supplement to geoffrey keynes, a bibliography of william blake (new york: grolier club, 1921). *cary, elisabeth luther. the art of william blake. 1907. <bb #1349> review §john la farge, burlington magazine 12.60 (march 1908): 388-90. §castillejo, jorge. “notas sobre la poesia de william blake.” razon y fabula [bogota] no. 29 (may-aug. 1972): 6-15. in spanish. §cauchi, francesca. “the cash nexus of blood and iron in william blake’s the four zoas.” southern humanities review 46.2 (spring 2012): 126-41. §cerovac, branko, and ivo antič. “blake/allison: ob razstavi kolografij in akvatint dana allisona, zda, v malem salonu, org. moderna galerija rijeka, 2.-14.4.1991 na reki.” likovne besede 19-20 (aug. 1991): 85-86. in slovenian. §chahine, anis. “gibran entre w. blake et f. nietzsche.” doctorat d’état, lyons, 1988. in french. §chapman, m. “william blake, hubert parry, and the singing of ‘jerusalem.’” hymn 62.2 (2011): 41-51. chen, guang-ming. “wei lian bu lai ke de shi yu hua [the poetry and the painting of william blake].” zhong guo mei shu guan [china’s art gallery] no. 5 (2005): 96. in chinese. a brief introduction to blake [a synopsis of the author’s longer article, below]. *chen, guang-ming. “wei lian bu lai ke de shi yu hua [the poetry and the painting of william blake].” zhong guo du shu bao [china reading newspaper] 30 march 2005: 18. in chinese. chen, hui-lan. “bu lai ke ‘lun dun’ yu hua zi hua si ‘zai xi min si qiao shang’ zhi bi jiao [a comparative study of blake’s ‘london’ and wordsworth’s ‘composed upon westminster bridge 1802’].” su zhou jiao yu xue yuan xue bao [journal of suzhou education college] 18.1 (2001): 57-59. in chinese. chen, mei. “mei li yu chou lou—hua zi hua si he bu lai ke shi zhong lun dun xing xiang [beautiful and ugly: on the images of london in the poems by wordsworth and blake].” yun yang shi fan gao deng zhuan ke xue xiao xiao bao [journal of yunyang teachers’ training college] 23.1 (feb. 2003): 86-88. in chinese. on the use of different images in the “london” poems by wordsworth and blake, attributing them to “the two poets’ different points of view and different techniques.” chen, run-ping. “sheng ming de dui zhi yu rong he—dui bu lai ke de ‘yang’ he ‘hu’ de jie gou xing yue du [neither lamb nor tyger: a deconstructive reading of ‘the lamb’ and ‘the tyger’].” jiang su ji shu shi fan xue yuan xue bao [journal of jiangsu teachers’ training university of technology] 23.208[9] (2008): 97-100. in chinese. a deconstructive reading of “the lamb” and “the tyger” in terms of “the binary oppositions in the two poems.” chen, xiao-ling. “lun dun shi tian tang hai shi di yu—hua zi hua si yu bu lai ke de lun dun shi bi jiao [is london heaven or hell: a comparative study of the two london poems by wordsworth and blake].” huang shi jiao yu xue yuan xue bao [journal of huangshi education college] 21.1 (march 2004): 54-57. in chinese. an attempt to analyze the social differences between the two london poems by wordsworth and blake. *chesterton, gilbert keith. william blake. 1910. b. *1920. <bb #1381a-b> c. §1973. d. §1976. e. §*1977. f. *1978. <bbs p. 436c-f> g. darby [pennsylvania]: arden library, 1980. 24 cm., viii, 210 pp., no isbn (reprint of 1910 ed.; “this is a limited edition of 150 copies”). h. paris: nouvelles editions oswald, 1982. 22 cm., 174 pp.; isbn: 9782730401258. <bbs p. 436g> i. 1991. <bbs p. 436h> j. §2000. <blake (2003) i > k. trans. victoria león, introduction antonio rivero taravillo, epilogue andré maurois. [seville]: espuela de plata, 2007. 17 cm., 216 pp.: isbn: 9788496133914. in spanish. k. 2010. 17 cm., 246 pp.; isbn: 9788415177029. in spanish. l. breinigsville [pennsylvania]: nabu press, 2010. 25 cm., viii, 210 pp.; isbn: 9781172347506. m. trans. lionel forestier. paris: gallimard, 2011. le cabinet des lettrés (paris). 17 cm., 168 pp.; isbn: 9782070132072. in french. a fragment of the book was published as §“william blake,” chesterton review (the light within: the new age and christian spirituality) 26.1-2 (2000): 19-21. §chevrier, jean-françois. “william blake: la démonologie romantique.” l’hallucination artistique: de william blake à sigmar polke. paris: editions l’arachnéen, 2012. 23 cm., 683 pp.; isbn: 9782952930291. chapter 3. in french. §cho, nancy jiwon, and david worrall. “william blake’s meeting with dorothy gott: the female origins of blake’s prophetic mode.” romanticism 16.1 (2010): 60-71. §chossegros, aurélia. “le site à la loupe: the william blake archive.” l’observatoire critique 17 jan. 2007. in french, with an english abstract. §ciez, kathleen ann. “blake’s milton: re-fabricating the metaphor of the female.” florida phd, 1993. 72 leaves [sic]. *ciseri, ilaria. il romanticismo 1780-1860: la nascita di una nuova sensibilità: joseph wright of derby, heinrich füssli, francesco goya, jacques louis david, william blake …. 2003. <blake (2006)> b. §romanticism 1780-1860: the birth of a new sensibility: joseph wright of derby, heinrich fuseli, francisco goya, jacques-louis david, william blake …. new york: barnes & noble, 2004. 32 cm., 399 pp.; isbn: 9780760759417. c. §le romantisme 1780-1860: la naissance d’une nouvelle sensibilité. paris: gründ, 2004. in french. *clark, lorraine. blake, kierkegaard and the spectre of dialectic. 1991. <bbs p. 438> review see kitson, below. clark, steve. “‘visionary forms dramatic’ in blake and baillie.” yuruginaki shinnen: igirisu roman shugi ronshu (a firm perswasion: essays in british romanticism). ed. hatsuko niimi and masashi suzuki. tokyo: sairyusha, 2012. 321-51. *clark, steve, tristanne connolly, and jason whittaker, eds. blake 2.0: william blake in twentieth-century art, music and culture. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, 2012. 23 cm., xiii, 309 pp.; isbn: 9780230280335. steve clark, tristanne connolly, and jason whittaker. “blake 2.0: introduction.” 1-10. part i: blakean circulations 1. mark lussier. “mirrored text/infinite planes: reception aesthetics in blake’s milton.” 13-26. (he explores “the wide spectrum of possible reception and response dynamics” [13].) 2. peter otto. “‘rouze up o young men of the new age!’: william blake, theodore roszak, and the counter culture of the 1960s-1970s.” 27-40. 3. *roger whitson. “digital blake 2.0.” 41-55. 4. shirley dent. “‘rob & plunder … translate & copy & buy & sell & criticise, but not make’: blake and copyright today.” 56-68. (largely concerned with the william blake archive.) 5. angus whitehead. “‘new matter’: mona wilson’s the life of william blake 85 years on.” 69-88. (he explores “the troubling and hitherto unexplored complexity of mona wilson’s ‘popular’ 1927 biography of blake” [69] with many biographical details and an account [pp. 78-80] of the differences in the editions of 1927, 1932, 1948, and 1971.) part ii: blake and visual art 6. colin trodd. “celebration and censure: william blake and stories of masterliness in the british art world, 1930-59.” 91-101. (he proposes that “blake’s relation to masterliness became the rocket fuel for his take-off in art historical and curatorial discourses” [92].) 7. mei-ying sung. “blake and surrealism.” 102-19. 8. *mark crosby. “‘the sculptor silent stands before his forming image’: blake and contemporary sculpture.” 120-31. (concerned especially with eduardo paolozzi and helen martins.) 9. philippa simpson. “‘mental joy & mental health / and mental friends & mental wealth’: blake and art therapy.” 132-45. part iii: blake in film and graphic arts 10. susan matthews. “‘and did those feet’? blake and the role of the artist in post-war britain.” 149-61. 11. mark douglas. “film in a time of crisis: blake, dead man, the new math(s), and last days.” 162-74. 12. matthew j. a. green. “‘the end of the world. that’s a bad thing right?’: form and function from william blake to alan moore.” 175-86. (concerned with comics and graphic novels.) part iv: blake in music 13. keri davies. “blake set to music.” 189-201. “appendix 13.1. blake set to music: selected recordings.” 202-08. 14. steve clark and james keery. “‘only the wings on his heels’: blake and dylan.” 209-29. 15. tristanne connolly. “‘he took a face from the ancient gallery’: blake and jim morrison.” 230-47. 16. david fallon. “‘hear the drunken archangel sing’: blakean notes in 1990s pop music.” 248-62. 17. jason whittaker. “mental fight, corporeal war, and righteous dub: the struggle for ‘jerusalem’, 1979-2009.” 263-73. *clark, steve, and masashi suzuki, eds. the reception of blake in the orient. 2006. <blake (2007)> reviews see jason whittaker, year’s work in english studies 87 (2008), below. mark lussier (see under ankarsjö, william blake and gender, above). clark, steve, and jason whittaker, eds. blake, modernity and popular culture. 2007. <blake (2008)> review see jason whittaker, year’s work in english studies 88 (2009), below. *clark, steve, and david worrall, eds. blake in the nineties. 1999. <blake (2000)> review §margaret storch, modern language review 96.1 (2001): 165-67 (with whittaker, william blake and the myths of britain). *clark, steve, and david worrall, eds. blake, nation and empire. 2006. <blake (2007)> review see jason whittaker, year’s work in english studies 87 (2008), below. §clarke, jay a., ed. landscape, innovation, and nostalgia: the [sir edward a. g.] manton collection of british art. new haven: yale university press, distributed for the sterling and francine clark art institute, williamstown [massachusetts], 2012. 311 pp. a collection of essays, including one on blake. neither sir edward manton nor the sterling and francine clark art institute is recorded by butlin. §cockburn, andrew. “‘the furnaces of affliction become fountains of living water’: a psychotherapist looks at william blake.” winnicott studies no. 5 (1990). §cogeval, guy. “l’apocalypse selon william blake.” beaux arts magazine (1991). in french. §colebrook, claire. blake, deleuzian aesthetics and the digital. london: continuum, 2012. isbn: 9781441155337. an intensely theoretical book that “explores three claims through the concept of incarnation” and “hapticity.” connolly, tristanne. “‘nourished with milk ye serpents’: blake, infant nursing, and female bloods.” yuruginaki shinnen: igirisu roman shugi ronshu (a firm perswasion: essays in british romanticism). ed. hatsuko niimi and masashi suzuki. tokyo: sairyusha, 2012. 353-79. *connolly, tristanne j. william blake and the body. 2002. <blake (2003)> review see jason whittaker, year’s work in english studies 84 (2005), below. §copeland, ann. “works and digital resources in the catalog: electronic versions of book of urizen, the kelmscott chaucer and robinson crusoe.” classification quarterly 33.3-4 (2002): 161-80. §cormack, alistair. “j. g. ballard and william blake: historicizing the reprobate imagination.” j. g. ballard: visions and revisions. ed. jeannette baxter and rowland wymer. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, 2012. §coverley, merlin. “william blake (1757-1827) and the new jerusalem.” occult london. the pocket essential guide. n.p.: summersdale publishing, 2008. e-book. cox, kenyon. “william blake.” old masters and new: essays in art criticism. 1905. <bb #1420> b. new york: duffield, 1908. c. §freeport [new york]: books for libraries press, [1969]. d. §[whitefish, montana]: kessinger publishing, 2006. *crosby, mark, troy patenaude, and angus whitehead, eds. re-envisioning blake. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, 2012. 8º, xv, 262 pp.; isbn: 9780230275515. mark crosby, troy patenaude, and angus whitehead. “introduction: ‘the fierce rushing of th’inhabitants together.’” 1-12. (the volume draws from the papers at the conference on blake at 250 [july 2007] at york university [7].)  1. saree makdisi and jon mee. “‘mutual interchange’: life, liberty, and community.” 13-29. 2. keri davies and david worrall. “inconvenient truths: re-historicizing the politics of dissent and antinomianism.” 30-47. (despite the statements by crabb robinson [1811] and alexander gilchrist (1863) that blake was from a dissenting community, he was probably not a dissenter.) 3. shirley dent. “‘thou readst white where i readst black’: william blake, the hymn ‘jerusalem’, and the far right.” 48-62. 4. andrew lincoln. “blake, america, and enlightenment.” 63-82. (“this chapter explores some of the ways in which blake’s america a prophecy (1793) can be seen to allegorize historical events” [63].) 5. *mark crosby and angus whitehead. “georgian superwoman or ‘the maddest of the two’? recovering the historical catherine blake, 1762-1831.” 83-107. (a careful survey of “the few hard facts and contemporaneous accounts of catherine” [86].) 6. *susan matthews. “blake’s malkin.” 108-29. (“this essay aims to reconstruct the malkin family culture in order to show both why malkin promoted blake, and why his appreciation was limited” [109].) 7. *john e. grant. “prospects of divine humanity: a vision of heaven, earth, and hell.” 130-43. (an analysis of blake’s picture usually called the fall of man; grant proposes that it should be known as prospects of divine humanity [130].) 8. *mary lynn johnson. “the death and assumption of blake’s mary: anomalous subjects in the biblical watercolour series for thomas butts.” 144-59. (on blake’s watercolors the death of the virgin [1803] and the assumption of the virgin [1806].) 9. craig d. atwood. “christ and the bridal bed: eighteenth-century moravian erotic spirituality as a possible influence on blake.” 160-79. (a careful account of the beliefs and practices of the london moravian congregation at the time when blake’s mother joined it.) 10. *troy patenaude. “‘nourished by the spirits of forests and floods’: blake, nature, and modern environmentalism.” 180-206. 11. jason whittaker. “zoamorphosis: 250 years of blake mutations.” 207-24. 12. morris eaves. “afterword: the end? remember me!” 225-31. crown, sarah. “blake’s vision tree returns to peckham rye.” guardian [london] 20 sept. 2011. an oak sapling was planted on peckham rye to commemorate blake’s vision there, sponsored by the blake society and the forestry commission. d dai, liu-ling. “lun bu lai ke de ‘lun dun’ [on blake’s ‘london’].” zhong shan da xue xue bao [journal of sun yat-sen university] no. 3 (1957): 48-58. in chinese. an interpretation of blake’s “london,” using the approach of social criticism, e.g., the miserable life of the chimney sweepers, the pathetic and complaining prostitutes. §dale, margaret. “when the morning stars sang together.” ballet review 19.1 (spring 1991): 68-77. analysis of ninette de valois’s dance piece based on blake’s illustrations of job. §dane, joseph a. out of sorts: on typography and print culture. philadelphia: university of pennsylvania press, 2011. the william blake archive is discussed on 136-40. davies, j. g. the theology of william blake. 1948, 1965. <bb #1466> reviews §douglas knight, journal of religion 29.2 (april 1949): 161. §w. d. dunkel, theology today 7.4 (jan. 1951): 560-62. §davies, mary. “‘nature has no outline: but imagination has’: a study of the early novels of patrick white, in relation to william blake’s symbolic practice and theory of imagination.” western australia (crawley) phd, 1998. 428 leaves. §davies, susan. uncreated light: the traditional doctrine of the intellect in dante and blake. bendigo [victoria, australia]: la trobe university, 1997. studies in western traditions occasional papers no. 6. 21 cm., 64 pp.; isbn: 9780909977306. §dawson, terence. “here i stand: blake’s the marriage of heaven and hell as confessional writing.” jung journal: culture and psyche 6.2 (spring 2012): 43-67. about the marriage of heaven and hell as “within the tradition of confessional writing.” dawson, terence. “myth and the creative imagination in the book of urizen.” international journal of jungian studies 4.2 (2012): 87-103. *de luca, vincent. words of eternity: blake and the poetics of the sublime. 1991. <bbs p. 450> reviews see kitson, below. §donald ault, modern philology 91.4 (may 1994): 526-32 (with otto, constructive vision and visionary deconstruction). §denize, joseph. “l’imagination créatrice chez william blake et james joyce.” université de paris viii doctorate, 2001. 411 leaves. in french. *de selincourt, basil. william blake. 1909, 1971. <bb #1480> review §robert ross, “a recent criticism of blake,” burlington magazine 16.80 (nov. 1909): 84-87. ding, hong-wei. “ling shi yu yu bi: bu lai ke mo gui zuo fang de si xiang yi yi [vision and allegory: the significance of blake’s devil’s workshop].” wai guo wen xue ping lun [foreign literature review] no. 2 (2007): 79-88. in chinese. a reading of a vision of the last judgment and some poems by blake, giving the author’s interpretations of blake’s thoughts. dong, yun. “shi ge ‘the tyger’ zai qing jing yu jing zhong de qian jing hua [foregrounding of ‘the tyger’ in the context of situation].” hu nan ren wen ke ji xue yuan xue bao [journal of hunan institute of humanities, science, and technology] no. 4 (2005): 104-07. in chinese. an analysis of blake’s poem with the help of “halliday’s foregrounding theory.” §*drehkopf, jutta. “zum problem der wechselseitigen erhellung der künste am beispiel william blakes.” hamburg dissertation, 1976. 158 leaves. in german. du, ke-fu. “wei lian bu lai ke de ‘lao hu’ yin yun xiao guo qian xi [an analysis of the sound effects of william blake’s ‘tyger’].” wai guo wen xue yan jiu [foreign literature studies] no. 4 (1992): 125-27. in chinese. du, ke-fu. “wei lian bu lai ke—fan di de kuang ren [william blake—a madman against the empire].” shan dong wai yu jiao xue [shandong foreign language teaching journal] issue 105[2] (2005): 96-99. in chinese. an attempt to argue that blake, living through “three revolutions,” has a rebellious spirit and uses his poems to criticize the industrial revolution and the british empire. du, ke-fu. “wei lian bu lai ke shi ge de zhe xue jie du [philosophical analysis of william blake’s poems].” anhui shi da xue xue bao (zhe she ban) [journal of anhui normal university (philosophy and social sciences edition)] 26.2 (1998): 214-18. in chinese. the essay agrees with the general critical claim of “the dialectic of contraries and progression” in blake’s poems. du, wei-ping. “bu lai ke shi ‘lun dun’ shang xi bu zhui [an appreciation of blake’s ‘london’].” qi ha er da xue xue bao [journal of qiqihar university] no. 1 (1999): 39-41. in chinese. a comment on blake’s “london,” focusing on its theme and form. §duerden, paul. “producing blake.” wales (swansea) phd, 1999. §duhet, paule-marie. “signes traditionnels, symbole et invention dans l’oeuvre graphique de william blake.” université françois rabelais (tours), thèse de 3e cycle, 1971. 263 leaves. in french. §duncan, robert. “variations on two dicta by william blake.” buying time: an anthology celebrating twenty years of the literature program of the national endowment for the arts. ed. scott walker. saint paul [minnesota]: graywolf press, 1985. e §easthope, m[alcolm]. students’ guide to a choice of poets: wordsworth, blake, lawrence, grave, frost. singapore: g. brash, 1986. 19 cm., 126 pp.; isbn: 9789971947989. *eaves, morris, ed. the cambridge companion to william blake. 2003. <blake (2004)> review see jason whittaker, year’s work in english studies 84 (2005), below. §eaves, morris. “picture problems: x-editing images 1992-2010.” digital humanities quarterly 3.3 (summer 2009). on work at the william blake archive. §economides, louise. “blake, heidegger, buddhism, and deep ecology: a fourfold perspective on humanity’s relationship to nature.” romanticism and buddhism. ed. mark lussier. feb. 2007. romantic circles praxis series. 17 paras. §edmundson, mark. “under the sign of satan: william blake in the corporate university.” hedgehog review 14.1 (2012): 8-16. §edwards, david l. poets and god: chaucer, shakespeare, herbert, milton, wordsworth, coleridge, blake. london: darton, longman, & todd, 2005. review david jasper, literature and theology 20.1 (march 2006): 87-88. *eitner, lorenz. “british neoclassicism and william blake: william blake, 1757-1827.” an outline of nineteenth century european painting: from david through cézanne. 1987. <bbs p. 461> b. §1992. c. §rev. ed.: nineteenth century european painting: david to cézanne. boulder: westview press, 2002. §eldridge, æthelred [“aethelred, the unready”]. one tooth on the petrific key to william blake’s system: (‘adam new created in edam’), the work in progress. millfield [ohio]: the author, 1976. “printed by hand in golgonooza—as a matter of fact, in ohio, millfield, r.r. 1, 45761—300 copies—where the church of william blake the stop-gap dislocates.” 15 cm., 16 pp. (4 folded sheets). eliot, t. s. “blake.” the sacred wood. 1920. <bb #1544b, bbs p. 461, blake (2009, 2011)> … escritos de william blake. trans. alberto mariscano and regina de barros carvalho. 1984. in portuguese. *erdman, david v. blake: prophet against empire. 1954. <bb #1561> review §anthony blunt, burlington magazine 99.648 (march 1957): 101-02. *erdman, david v., and john e. grant, eds. blake’s visionary forms dramatic. 1970. <bb #1580> review §david bindman, burlington magazine 116.857 (aug. 1974): 482-83. erdman, david v., et al. a concordance to the writings of william blake. 1967. <bb #1579> review §harold e. pagliaro, “a new concordance to blake,” computing and the humanities 4.4 (march 1970): 283-85. erle, sibylle. blake, lavater and physiognomy. 2010. <blake §(2011)> review see jason whittaker, year’s work in english studies 91 (2012), below. essick, robert n. “william blake, thomas paine, and biblical revolution.” studies in romanticism 30 (1991) <bbs pp. 465-66> review see kitson, below. *esterhammer, angela. creating states: studies in the performative language of john milton and william blake. 1994. <blake (1995)> review §terence allan hoagwood, modern language review 91.4 (1996): 974-76. §evans, lloyd. “fine arts special—william blake.” spectator (27 oct. 2007): 68. f fairchild, b. h. such holy song: music as idea, form, and image in the poetry of william blake. 1980. <bbs p. 469> reviews §brian wilkie, rocky mountain review of language and literature 35.2 (1981): 165-66. §douglas m. catron, south central bulletin 42.1-2 (spring-summer 1982): 20. §faller, francis. “how long is the present? reflections on teaching william blake’s songs, and our measure(s) of time.” english academy review 20.1 (2003): 115-36. §fallon, david. “‘that i may awaken albion from his long & cold repose’: william blake addresses the nation.” transnational england: home and abroad, 1780-1860. ed. monika class and terry f. robinson. newcastle upon tyne: cambridge scholars, 2009. fan, yi-ming. “ping yi zhi zhong jian qi jue—ping wei lian bu lai ke shi ge de yin hua yi shu shou fa [elaboration in the plain—a study of the vocal and visual artistic techniques in william blake’s poems].” he fei gong ye da xue xue bao (she hui ke xue ban) [journal of he fei university of technology (social sciences edition)] 21.2 (april 2007): 125-29. in chinese. an appreciation of the sound and visual effects produced by blake’s poems. fang, han-quan. “bu lai ke de bian zheng guan yu ti xian qi bian zheng guan de ruo gan shi zuo [blake’s dialectics and its expression in some of his poems].” jie fang jun wai guo yu xue yuan xue bao [journal of pla university of foreign languages] 31.4 (july 2008): 82-86. in chinese. a reading of “blake’s dialectics which developed initially from his concept of ‘contrary states of the human soul.’” §farrell, michael. “william blake and edward young’s night thoughts.” scriblerian and the kit-cats 43.1 (2010): 44. §faunce, b. k. “shadows of desire: feminine discourse in william blake.” california (riverside) phd, 1992. 323 leaves. *ferber, michael. the poetry of william blake. 1991. <bbs p. 470> review see kitson, below. ferber, michael. the social vision of william blake. 1985. <bbs p. 471> review §nelson hilton, modern language studies 18.1 (winter 1988): 195-97. §ferguson, james b. “a study of william blake’s jerusalem with special reference to the book of ezekiel.” edinburgh phd, 1974. §fiddes, paul s. “william blake and the image of the city.” freedom and limit: a dialogue between literature and christian doctrine. new york: st martin’s press, 1991. fischer, kevin. converse in the spirit: william blake, jacob boehme, and the creative spirit. 2004. <blake (2005)> review see jason whittaker, year’s work in english studies 85 (2006), below. fitzsimons, andrew. “blessed william skullbullet: blake, thomas kinsella and digital humanities.” eibungaku kenkyu shibu togo go (studies in english literature, regional branches combined issue) 4 (2012): 191-99. §flores moreno, cristina. “el legado de william blake en la poética y poesía madura de miguel de unamuno [william blake’s legacy in miguel de unamuno’s mature poetry and poetics].” estudios ingleses de la universidad complutense 19 (2011): 89-104. in spanish. §forbes, nicholas george. “the encyclopaedia of hell: william blake and the differential imagination.” bristol phd, 2011. jerusalem “is analysed in relation to the encyclopaedic discourse of walter benjamin’s arcades project.” §*frayling, christopher. horace walpole’s cat. illustrated by richard bentley, william blake, and kathleen hale. london: thames & hudson, 2009. 79 pp., 32 cm.; isbn: 9780500514917. freed, eugenie r. “blake and the ‘aleph-bet.’” notes and queries 59.3 (sept. 2012): 361-62. blake does not distinguish between the letter “bet,” “having a dot in the middle” and the letter “vet,” which is similarly formed but without the dot. *freeman, kathryn s. blake’s nostos: fragmentation and nondualism in the four zoas. 1997. <blake (1998)> review see worrall, below. §fremantle, anne [jackson], ed. “william blake.” the protestant mystics. boston: little, brown, [1964]. b. §[new york]: new american library, 1965. mentor books, 628. frosch, thomas r. the awakening of albion: the renovation of the body in the poetry of william blake. 1974. <bb #a1637> review §john e. grant, wordsworth circle 5.3 (summer 1974) (with mellor, blake’s human form divine, sabri-tabrizi, the “heaven” and “hell” of william blake, and wagenknecht, blake’s night: william blake and the idea of pastoral). *frye, northrop. fearful symmetry: a study of william blake. 1947 … 2004. <bb #1646, blake (2005)> review (of 1947) §herbert marshall mcluhan, “inside blake and hollywood,” sewanee review 55.4 (oct.-dec. 1947): 710-15. review (of 2004) §alan bewell, university of toronto quarterly 75.1 (2006): 383-85 (with another). g §gage, john. “blake’s newton.” color and meaning: art, science, and symbolism. berkeley: university of california press, 1999. §gallant, christine. “blake’s coded designs of slave revolts.” wordsworth circle 42.3 (summer 2011): 211-17. §gallas, g. e. (written and illustrated by). the poet and the flea: ode to william blake. 2012-13 (published serially online). a graphic novel, set in 1790. review §sarah goode, british society for eighteenth-century studies 17 jan. 2013 (blake is depicted as “a young johnny depp”). gao, gui-fang. “zai ‘tian zhen’ yu ‘jing yan’ zhong cheng zhang qi lai de bu lai ke [blake’s growth in ‘innocence’ and ‘experience’].” shan dong wen xue [shandong literature] no. 4 (2007): 62-63. in chinese. a comment on blake’s switching “from singing the praise of the society to castigating the society.” gao, juan. “mei li de bei hou—wei lian bu lai ke ‘bing mei gui’ de duo chong xiang zheng yi [behind the beautiful: multiple symbolic meanings in william blake’s poem ‘the sick rose’].” wen jiao zi liao [culture and education documents] no. 2 (2008): 31-32. in chinese. a reading of the imagery in blake’s poem. §garcía, adrián muñoz. see muñoz garcía, adrián. *gardner, charles. william blake the man. 1919. <bb #1662> review §reviewer not named, art and life 11.8 (feb. 1920): 466. *gardner, stanley. the tyger, the lamb, and the terrible desart: songs of innocence and of experience in its times and circumstance. 1998. <blake (1999)> review §keri davies (see under ahearn, above). §garofalo, daniela. “‘take thy bliss’: surplus enjoyment and oothoon’s joy in blake’s visions of the daughters of albion.” women, love, and commodity culture in british romanticism. farnham [surrey]: ashgate, 2012. ge, gui-lu. “wei lian bu lai ke zai zhong guo de jie shou [the acceptance of william blake in china].” huai yin shi fan xue yuan xue bao [journal of huaiyin normal university] 20.79[2] (1998): 47-52. in chinese. the essay describes the three periods regarding the reception of blake’s works in china: as a charismatic poet of mystery between 1911 and 1949, as a progressive poet between 1949 and 1979, and as a prophet of modernism in the 1980s. §gerard, w. b. “kinship in chaos: ‘circe’ and william blake’s ‘an island in the moon.’” james joyce quarterly 39.3 (2002): 562-68. *gilchrist, alexander. life of william blake, “pictor ignotus.” 1863, 1880, 1907 …. <bb #1680, bbs p. 484, blake (1999, 2002, 2007, 2010, 2011, 2012)> s. §[charleston, south carolina: nabu press, 2012]. nabu public domain reprints. xxi, 431 pp.; isbn: 9781274802248. review (of 1907) §g. a. w., burlington magazine 10.46 (jan. 1907): 263-64. §gillet, louis. “le cas de william blake.” revue des deux mondes (1923). b. essais et conférences sur l’art: de giotto à matisse. ed. eryck de rubercy. [paris]: klincksieck, 2012. esprit et les formes, 32. §ginsberg, allen. “eternity: blake/poetry class, kent state, april 7, 1971.” allen verbatim: lectures on poetry, politics, consciousness. ed. gordon ball. new york: mcgraw-hill, 1974. §ginsberg, allen. “lecture transcript on william blake’s auguries of innocence: naropa institute, boulder, colorado, april 19, 1991.” new censorship 5.4 (1994): 1-21. §gitelman, lisa. “new media </body>.” always already new: media, history, and the data of culture. cambridge: mit press, 2006. 123-50. she discusses the william blake archive on 139-44. §glück, louise. “on ‘the little black boy’ by william blake.” first loves: poets introduce the essential poems that captivated and inspired them. ed. carmela ciuraru. new york: scribner, 2000. §glynn, alexandra. “saussure looks at william blake: persuasion, memory, power.” northern plains conference on early british literature [20-21 april 2007, proceedings]. ed. stephen hamrick. moorhead: minnesota state university moorhead, 2008. §goelkel, hernando valencia. “el libro de thel.” mito: revista bimestral de cultura [bogota] 1.3 (aug.-sept. 1955): 147-51. in spanish. gong, si-yue. “lun wei lian bu lai ke ban hua ji shu he ta du te de shi jue yu yan [an analysis of william blake’s engraving techniques and his unique visual language].” shang hai gong yi mei shu [shanghai art and crafts] no. 3 (2009): 74-75. in chinese. a comment on the relationship between the engravings and the text in blake’s poems. §goss, erin m. revealing bodies: anatomy, allegory, and the grounds of knowledge in the long eighteenth century. lewisburg: bucknell university press, 2012. transits literature, thought and culture. especially about william blake, edmund burke, and mary tighe. §graham, brian russell. “beauty and truth i: frye’s theory of blake’s poetry.” the necessary unity of opposites: the dialectical thinking of northrop frye. toronto: university of toronto press, 2011. §grčić, marko. “francuska revolucija.” republika 45.9-10 (n.d.): 210-22. in croatian. about blake’s french revolution. §green, matthew joseph arthur. “corporeality and ideas of god, man and the bible in william blake’s works, 1788-1795.” leeds phd, 2001. 278 leaves. green, matthew j. a. visionary materialism in the early works of william blake: the intersection of enthusiasm and empiricism. 2005. <blake (2006)> review see jason whittaker, year’s work in english studies 86 (2007), below. §grgas, stipe. “william blake and the empowerment of the epic voice.” romantična pesnitev: ob 200. obletnici rojstva franceta prešerna/mednarodni simpozij obdobja—metode in zvrsti, ljubljana 4.-6. december 2000. ed. marko juvan. ljubljana: center za slovenščino kot drugi/tuji jezik pri oddelku za slovanske jezike in književnosti filozofske fakultete univerze v ljubljani, 2002. 75-86. §grierson, herbert john clifford, and sandys wason, eds. “milton, a poem in two books. preface.” the personal note; or, first and last words from prefaces, introductions, dedications, epilogues. london: chatto & windus, 1946. grimes, ronald l. the divine imagination: william blake’s major prophetic visions. 1972. <bb #a1755> review §william mallard, journal of the american academy of religion 43.2 (june 1975): 451. *grønbech, vilh. william blake, kunstner, digter, mystiker. 1933, §2002. <bb #1756, blake (2010)> review §ida bachmann, books abroad 7.4 (oct. 1933): 493-94. §gundy, jeff. “notes toward the heretical sublime.” cross currents 60.1 (march 2010): 24-44. about blake and heresy. guo, jian-qiang. “lao hu, bu lai ke, duo leng jing [tiger, blake, prism].” san wen yu sui bi [prose and essay] no. 7 (2007): 48-51. in chinese. a running commentary on blake’s poems. §*gustafson, carol. “william blake’s archive of illustrations of dante divine comedy.” los angeles: antioch university, 2007. a dvd with a slide show. h *haggarty, sarah. blake’s gifts: poetry and the politics of exchange. 2010. <blake (2011§, 2012)> reviews *grant f. scott (see blake 46.1, above). see jason whittaker, year’s work in english studies 91 (2012), below. *haggarty, sarah, and jon mee, eds. blake and conflict. 2009. <blake (2010)> review see jason whittaker, year’s work in english studies 89 (2010), below. *hagstrum, jean h. william blake poet and painter: an introduction to the illuminated verse. 1964 …. <bb #1770, bbs p. 498> reviews §irene h. chayes, modern language journal 49.4 (april 1965): 261-62. §thomas j. j. altizer, “still burning bright,” christian scholar 48.2 (summer 1965): 165-67. §martin k. nurmi, modern philology 64.2 (nov. 1966): 166-68. §hall, jennie. “preparation of an exercise on william blake.” francis w. parker school year book 2 (june 1913): 11-19. §hall, lillie. “blake and the metaphysical poets.” south carolina dissertation, 1935. 260 leaves. §hamlyn, robin. “william blake: a talk.” studies in illustration no. 42 (summer 2009): 6-23. han, hong. “qian xi wei lian bu lai ke de ‘xiang xiang li’ [a study of william blake’s ‘imagination’].” ha er bin xue yuan xue bao [journal of harbin university] 26.5 (may 2005): 76-79. in chinese. an attempt to analyze the quality of blake’s power of imagination. §hannah, daniel. “‘panting struggling’: william blake’s transatlantic erotics.” symbiosis: a journal of anglo-american literary relations 16.1 (april 2012): 57-72. harada, taoka. “kodomo no tame no shi to blake no muku to keiken no uta [poetry for children and blake’s songs of innocence and of experience].” hermes tachi no kyoen: eigo eibei bungaku ronbunshu (a symposium of critics: scholarship on literature and language in honor of professor shoichi matsushima). ed. shoichi matsushima. tokyo: otowa shobo tsurumi shoten, 2012. 129-50. in japanese. harper, george mills. the neoplatonism of william blake. 1961, 2003. <bb #1793, blake (2006)> review §andrew harrison, philosophical books 3.3 (july 1962): 6-8. §*harris, james c., md. “william blake’s the great red dragon and the woman clothed with the sun.” archives of general psychiatry 69.8 (aug. 2012): 765. §hartigan, sean. “recycling (and counter-recycling) in william blake’s the marriage of heaven and hell.” a culture of recycling/recycling culture? ed. wojciech kalaga, marzena kubisz, and jacek mydla. frankfurt: peter lang, 2011. §hassan, amira mohammed morsi, hussein mahmood gebaly, et al. graphic art in the work of william blake. cairo: al jamila, 1995. §hawksley, lucinda. “william blake.” fifty british artists you should know. munich: prestel, 2011. §hayashi, tetsumaro. “steinbeck and william blake.” steinbeck’s literary dimension: a guide to comparative studies. metuchen [new jersey]: scarecrow press, 1991. the essay was originally published in a journal. hayles, n. katherine. “entering the electronic environment.” writing machines. cambridge: mit press, 2002. 34-45. the william blake archive is discussed on 42-45. he, fei, and wei xiao. “wei lian bu lai ke ‘sao yan cong de xiao hai’ yin yun jie zou shang xi [an analysis of the rhyme and rhythm in william blake’s ‘the chimney sweeper’].” mu dan jiang jiao yu xue yuan xue bao [journal of mudanjiang college of education] 103.3 (2007): 55-56. in chinese. an observation of how skillfully “blake employs phonetic and rhythmical means” to relate to the text and express his “anger at the exploitation of the chimney sweepers.” he, hong. “duo jiao du shen shi bu lai ke li zuo—‘lao hu’ [a multi-perspective view of blake’s poem ‘the tyger’].” jiang xi sheng tuan xiao xue bao [journal of the communist league school of jiangxi province] no. 1 (2004): 46-47. b. he bei guang bo dian shi da xue xue bao [journal of hebei radio and tv university] 10.1 (jan. 2005): 40-41. in chinese. a comment on the use of sound and imagery in “the tyger.” the second essay has no reference to the first, which is identical. he, hong. “‘lao hu’ de yin yun xiao guo ji yi xiang fen xi [an analysis of the use of sounds and the imagery in ‘the tyger’].” fei tian [flying apsaras] no. 10 (2009): 82-83. in chinese. §hecimovich, gregg. “‘the infinite which is hid’: william blake and the puzzle of albion’s wake.” puzzling the reader: riddles in nineteenth-century british literature. new york: peter lang, 2008. chapter 1. studies in nineteenth-century british literature, vol. 26. it includes the wit’s magazine, an island in the moon, “blake and the oral and literary tradition,” and “waking the body of albion: blake’s jerusalem.” §herman, david. “stories, media, and the mind: narrative worldmaking through word and image.” wai guo wen xue yan jiu: foreign literature studies 32.4 (aug. 2010): 42-50. especially about blake’s “a poison tree.” §heymans, peter. “eating girls: deleuze and guattari’s becoming-animal and the romantic sublime in william blake’s lyca poems.” humanimalia 3.1 (fall 2011): 1-30. <blake §(2012)> b. “the cute and the cruel: taste, animality and sexual violence in burke and blake.” animality in british romanticism: the aesthetics of species. new york: routledge, 2012. routledge studies in romanticism. chapter 5 (101-17). the blake section (110-17 of 2012) focuses on “the little girl lost” and “the little girl found”; “the victimising process of animalisation only inverts into the emancipating performance of becoming animal when it affects both parties equally” (110). §hidalgo, maria de los angeles castro. “william blake: innocence in childhood and in adulthood.” repertorio americano no. 17 (jan.-june 2004): 129-31. §hijazi, hassan. an introduction to blake and translations of his poems in the journal aldiyar [london], beginning 1 april 2012. in arabic. §hiraide, takashi. uiriamu bureiku no betto. tokyo: genkishobo, 2004. 18 cm., 211 pp.; isbn: 9784901998086. in japanese. b. §tokyo: genkishobo, 2012. 18 cm., 215 pp.; isbn: 9784901998970. in japanese. §hoekstra, eric. “oersetting fan william blake syn ‘de sike roas.’” m3 no. 1 (1999): 40-41. in frisian. §hoekstra, eric. “oersetting fan william blake syn ‘de tiger.’” m3 no. 1 (1999): 37-39. in frisian. §holme, brian. “william blake.” the studio annual 1942-43. n.p.: n.p., 1943? §horn, bernard. “‘the tongue of gods and children’: blakean innocence in randall jarrell’s poetry.” children’s literature 2.1 (1973): 148-51. §horrocks, john brownlow. “imagining the tyger: the role of mental images in the interpretation of poetry.” victoria (wellington, new zealand) phd, 2000. 322 leaves. hu, guo-hong, and fu-shun liu. “guan yu wei lian bu lai ke de ‘lao hu’ de zai ping ding [a reassessment of william blake’s ‘the tyger’].” chang chun shi fan xue yuan xue bao [journal of changchun teachers’ college] 18.1[1] (1999): 69-72. in english. a discussion (in english) of what “tyger” stands for and what the poem tries to express. hu, jian-hua. “bu lai ke de ‘ren lei ling hun de liang zhong dui li zhuang tai’ [on blake’s two contrary states in the human soul: from songs of innocence to the marriage of heaven and hell].” wai guo wen xue [foreign literature] no. 3 (1996): 43-48. in chinese. an essay on the contrary states of mind in the human soul as expressed by blake’s songs of innocence and the marriage of heaven and hell, suggesting that there is a dialectical relationship between the two states. hu, xiao-shen, and zhong-jie deng. “wei lian bu lai ke chuang zuo jie duan hua fen chu yi [on the stages of william blake’s poetic creation].” wai guo wen xue yan jiu [foreign literature studies] no. 1 (1998): 103-07. in chinese. the essay argues that blake’s poems should be divided into three stages of creation: before 1783, between 1783 and 1796, and after 1796. §hull, robert r. “william blake and his poverty.” thought 5.2 (1930): 281-97. §hutchings, kevin. “nature, ideology, and the prohibition of pleasure in blake’s ‘garden of love.’” romanticism and pleasure. ed. thomas h. schmid and michelle faubert. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, 2010. nineteenth-century major lives and letters. 187-207. i *imagetext: interdisciplinary comics studies volume 3, number 2 (winter 2007) “william blake and visual culture,” ed. roger whitson and donald ault. <blake (2009)> review see jason whittaker, year’s work in english studies 88 (2009), below. j jackson, noel. “the ‘sense of history’ and the history of the senses: periodizing perception in wordsworth and blake.” science and sensation in romantic poetry. 2008. <blake (2009)> b. 2011. §james, david e. “blake’s laocoön: a degree zero of literary production.” pmla (1983) <bbs p. 525> b. power misses: essays across (un)popular culture. london: verso, 1996. chapter 2 (25-47). james, laura dewitt. william blake: the finger on the furnace. 1956 …. <bb #1949> review §a. r., review of metaphysics 10.2 (1956): 363. jennings, luke. “beyond ballets russes; blake diptych.” observer [london] 25 march 2012. the fleur darkin ensemble ballet called “blake diptych” is inspired by blake’s songs of innocence and of experience. jiang, hai-ying. “kuai huo de meng chong—dui wei lian bu lai ke ‘meng chong’ yi shi de hu wen xing jie du [the happy fly: an intertextual approach to william blake’s poem ‘the fly’].” fu jian lun tan (she hui jiao yu ban) [fujian tribune (social sciences and education edition)] no. 12 (2009): 36-37. in chinese. jin, yan. “lun bu lai ke shi zhong de yi xiang [on the imagery in blake’s poems].” nan jing guang bo dian shi da xue xue bao [journal of nanjing radio and tv university] 48.3 (2007): 52-54. in chinese. a general comment on blake and his poems. jing, an-da. “bu lai ke feng fu xian li de lai yuan ji te djan. [the origin and characteristics of blake’s imagination].” wen jiao zi liao [culture and education documents] no. 11 (2009): 15-16. in chinese. a comment on the origin and character of blake’s power of imagination. §jobert, barthélémy. “william blake et la question du monotype.” nouvelles de l’estampe 191-92 (2003): 13-16. in french. *jones, john h. blake on language, power, and self-annihilation. 2010. <blake (2011)> review see jason whittaker, year’s work in english studies 91 (2012), below. *jones, jonathan. “monstrous minds: william blake’s the ghost of a flea.” guardian [london] 25 sept. 2012. joosten, julie. “‘minute particulars’ and the visionary labor of words.” european romantic review 19.2 (2008): 113-18. about jerusalem. §jost, sarah. zeitkritik in william blakes “songs of innocence and of experience.” munich: grin verlag, 2009. 21 cm.; isbn: 9783640421497. in german. §juengel, scott jordan. “about face: physiognomics, revolution, and the radical act of looking.” iowa phd, 1997. 247 leaves. he deals especially with lavater, godwin, mary wollstonecraft, blake, and mary wollstonecraft shelley. k *king, james. william blake his life. 1991. <bbs pp. 535-36> review see kitson, below. §kirschenbaum, matthew. “documenting digital images: textual meta-data at the blake archive.” electronic library 16.4 (aug. 1998): 239-241. kirschenbaum, matthew. “remediating blake.” artbyte: the magazine of digital culture 2.2 (summer 1999): 100-01. §kirschenbaum, valerie. “the visual prophet: william blake.” goodbye gutenberg: hello to a new generation of readers and writers. new york: global renaissance society, 2005. designer writers series. §kirwan, michael. “‘a candle in sunshine’: desire and apocalypse in blake and hölderlin.” contagion: journal of violence, mimesis, and culture 19 (2012): 179-204. kitson, peter. year’s work in english studies [for 1991] 72 (1993): 275-86. reviews, among others, jerusalem, ed. morton paley (276) (“stunning”), songs of innocence and of experience, ed. andrew lincoln (276-77) (“extremely beautiful”), robert n. essick, william blake’s commercial book illustrations (277) (“careful and detailed,” “an essential research tool”), james king, william blake his life (277-78) (“attractively written and useful … but will probably disappoint serious blake scholars”), vincent de luca, words of eternity: blake and the poetics of the sublime (279) (“his arguments are detailed and ingenious, although sometimes unconvincing”), lorraine clark, blake, kierkegaard and the spectre of dialectic (279-80) (“lucid and intelligent,” but “it denies the historic specificity of the writers”), peter otto, constructive vision and visionary deconstruction (280) (“erudite and intelligent,” but “somewhat insensitive to the historical context”), hazard adams, ed., critical essays on william blake (280-81) (“useful”), michael ferber, the poetry of william blake (281), and robert n. essick, “blake, paine, and biblical revolution,” studies in romanticism (281) (admiring). §koch, william n. “fearful summary: what northrop frye’s scholarship has taught me so far.” english studies in canada 37.2 (2011): 33-40. §kockum, keiko. “the introduction of william blake to japan, 1900-1932.” outstretched leaves on his bamboo staff: studies in honour of göran malmqvist on his seventieth birthday. ed. joakim enwall. stockholm: association of oriental studies, 1994. §komisaruk, adam carl. “private persons: class and the construction of sexuality in british romanticism.” california (los angeles) phd, 1998. 228 leaves. especially about william wordsworth, mary wollstonecraft shelley, and william blake. §koppenfels, werner von. “gegen die ketten des geistes: vor 250 jahren wurde william blake geboren. kennen wir ihn?” neue zürcher zeitung 24 nov. 2007. in german. *kroeber, karl. blake in a post-secular era: early prophecies. ed. with a foreword by joseph viscomi. [n.p.: n.p., 2012]. a romantic circles monograph. 8º, xxv, 155 pp., 28 black-and-white illustrations; isbn: 9781105900624. “ebook versions available at http://www.rc.umd.edu” joseph viscomi, “foreword” (vii-xix). this study of “blake’s ‘prophetic’ poems executed between 1788 and 1794” (xxi), with appendices (mostly bibliographies) of “blake and science” and “blake and contemporary popular culture,” was composed as part of a book (never written) on milton, jerusalem, the four zoas, and the laocoön. “i emphasize blake’s focus upon the uniqueness of each individual person” (3). §*kruger, kathryn sullivan. “weaving the word: the metaphorics of weaving and female textual production.” miami phd, 1994. 255 leaves. especially about blake and tennyson. the thesis matured into her book with the same title (2001) <blake (2003)>. l §la cassagnère, christian. “the voice of the child: language and desire in blake’s songs and the book of urizen.” études anglaises 63.1 (2010): 6-17. §lamont, william m. “william blake, benjamin franklin and the london muggletonians.” last witnesses: the muggletonian history, 1652-1979. aldershot: ashgate, 2006. langridge, irene. william blake: a study of his life and art work. 1904, 2010. <bb #2098, blake §(2011)> review §reviewer not named, burlington magazine 6.20 (nov. 1904): 163. §lankford, ryan dale. “william blake’s minor literature.” georgia phd, 1997. 230 leaves. <blake §(1999), under langford> larrissy, edward. blake and modern literature. 2006. <blake (2007)> reviews §jeffrey longacre, james joyce quarterly 45.1 (2007): 176-78. david fallon, romanticism 14.1 (2008): 75-77 (“a decent attempt to narrate a complex history,” “with some howlers”). see jason whittaker, year’s work in english studies 87 (2008), below. le, mei-er. “shi dian fu hai shi chao yue?—dui bu lai ke ‘fei ying’ zhi huan yuan xing jie du [reconstructive reflections on blake’s ‘the fly’].” hu bei jiao yu xue yuan xue bao [journal of hubei institute of education] 24.9 (sept. 2007): 16-18, 30. in chinese. the essay analyzes the “intertextuality,” “self-reflection,” and “philosophical reasoning” in the poem. le, mei-er. “zai hou xian dai yu jing xia chong shen bu lai ke shi ge zhong de zi you jing shen [a reconsideration of the post-modern spirit of freedom in blake’s poems].” shao xing wen li xue yuan xue bao [journal of shaoxing university] 28.1 (feb. 2008): 93-98. in chinese. an attempt to show some “post-modernist elements” in blake’s poetic style. *lee, debbie. “lost girls, lost women: foundlings in the art and poetry of william blake.” prism(s) 15 (2007): 129-53. “blake’s work shows traces of … foundling hospital children” (132). §*lee, monika. “‘happy copulation’: revolutionary sexuality in blake and shelley.” “and never know the joy”: sex and the erotic in english poetry. ed. c. c. barfoot. amsterdam: rodopi, 2006. 189-205. li, chao-ran. “shi ge ‘lao hu’ zai qing jing yu jing zhong de yu qi he qing tai fen xi [on mood and modality in ‘the tyger’ in terms of situational context].” wen jiao zi liao [culture and education documents] no. 3 (2008): 23-24. in chinese. an attempt to apply “situational context” theory to the reading of blake’s poem. li, fan. “ye xing hu huan de li shi xian sheng—qian tan bu lai ke ‘lao hu’ de fan chuan tong yi shi [the earlier call of the wild—the anti-convention consciousness in blake’s poem ‘the tyger’].” harbin xue yuan xue bao [journal of harbin university] 28.8 (aug. 2007): 115-17. in chinese. a reading that suggests that blake believes that “the wild nature of both animals and man is a positive power.” li, gui-yuan. “shi lun wei lian bu lai ke shi ge te dian [on the characteristics of william blake’s poems].” zuo jia za zhi [writers] no. 5 (2009): 87-88. in chinese. a general comment on a couple of poems by blake. li, hai-yun. “bu lai ke ‘lun dun’ yin yun xiao guo tan xi [an analysis of the use of rhyme in blake’s ‘london’].” she hui ke xue lun tan [tribune of social sciences] no. 7 (2007): 187-89, 205. in chinese. a comment on the use of rhyme and rhythm in blake’s poem in terms of their contribution to the theme. li, qing, and zhi-wen wu. “‘bing mei gui’ de xiang zheng shou fa ji qi ta [on the symbolism of ‘the sick rose’].” shao guan da xue xue bao (she hui ke xue ban) [journal of shaoguan university (social sciences edition)] 20.5 (1999): 104-08. in chinese. li, xiao. “qian xi wei lian bu lai ke shi zhong de dui bi yun yong shou fa [on the use of antithesis in william blake’s poetry].” zuo jia [writers] no. 5 (2008): 79. in chinese. li, xiao. “tan tao wei lian bu lai ke shi zhong de dui bi yun yong fang fa [on the use of antithesis in william blake’s poetry].” ke ji zi xun [science and technology information] no. 10 (2006): 46. in chinese. a brief introduction to blake. lian, xiao-li. “qian tan bu lai ke shi ge de biao xian shou fa [on blake’s methods of expression].” he bei jian zhu ke ji xue yuan xue bao (she ke ban) [journal of he bei institute of architectural science and technology (social science edition)] 23.2 (june 2006): 45-46. in chinese. a brief explanation of blake’s methods of composition. lindsay, jack. william blake: creative will and the poetic image. 1927 … <bb #2131> review §s. foster damon, modern language notes 44.6 (june 1929): 415-17. *lister, raymond. william blake: an introduction to the man and to his work. 1968. <bb #2137> reviews §g. thomas (see under beer, blake’s humanism, above). §p. malekin, review of english studies 21.82 (may 1970): 249. liu, fang. “two contrary states of human soul.” ke ji xin xi [science information] no. 15 (2007): 171. a general comment (in english) on blake and his poems. liu, fu-li. “yin yun keng qiang shen wei he he—tan bu lai ke ‘lao hu’ de yin yi tong gou [the deafening sounds and mystic divinity—on the structural identicalness between sounds and meaning in ‘the tyger’].” lang fang shi fan xue yuan xue bao [journal of langfang teachers’ college] 21.1 (march 2005): 32-36. in chinese. this paper analyzes the “sounds, rhyme, and rhythm” in “the tyger” and tries to find “the psychological basis of the structural identicalness between sounds and their meanings.” liu, li-xia, and na wang. “hui gui hu xing—bu lai ke ‘lao hu’ yi shi de zhu ti fen xi [returning to the nature of the tiger: an analysis of the theme of william blake’s ‘the tyger’].” yan shan da xue xue bao (zhe xue she hui ke xue ban) [journal of yanshan university (philosophy and social sciences edition)] 8.4 (dec. 2007): 113-16. in chinese. the essay comments on “the tiger’s energy, power, and symmetry” and on “blake’s dialectical thinking.” *liu, wei. “shen sheng de feng zi—ji nian wei lian bu lai ke dan chen 250 zhou nian [a divine madman—to commemorate william blake’s 250th birthday].” shi jie wen hua [world culture] no. 10 (2007): 12-13. in chinese. a biographical sketch of blake. liu, wei, and xiao-yan cui. “lun bu lai ke shi ge ‘fei ying’ de zhu ti [an analysis of the theme of ‘the fly’].” fei tian [flying apsaras] no. 6 (2009): 62-63. in chinese. liu, xi-yan. “jie du bu lai ke he ta de ‘lao hu’ [on blake and his poem ‘the tyger’].” chang chun shi fan xue yuan xue bao [journal of changchun teachers’ training college] 23.3 (may 2004): 120-22. in chinese. a reading of blake’s “tyger” as revolutionary, indicating the poet’s revolutionary ideas and spirit. liu, yu-mei. “ti yan xing he dong tai xing zhang li xia wen xue yu pian de zheng ti xing shi jie—yi wei lian bu lai ke de ‘london’ wei li [holistic construal of literary text: a case analysis of william blake’s ‘london’].” wai guo yu wen [foreign language and literature] 25.2 (april 2009): 18-22. in chinese. the essay uses a “construal approach” to blake’s text. liu, zhao-hui. “‘ying’ zhi mi: dui bu lai ke de nü xing zhu yi yan jiu [the mystery of ‘shadow’: on feminism in blake].” wai guo wen xue yan jiu [foreign literature studies] no. 1 (2000): 81-86. in chinese. feminist theory is used to analyze the images of women in blake’s poems. §lloyd, john, and john mitchinson. “william blake.” the book of the dead: lives of the justly famous and the undeservedly obscure. new york: crown publishing, 2010. §lopez, julio. “aproximacion bibliografica a william blake.” quimera: revista de literatura [barcelona] no. 42 (oct. 1984): 39-45. in spanish. §love, matt. “cloudy william blake.” love and the green lady: meditations on the yaquina bay bridge: oregon’s crown jewel of socialism. pacific city [oregon]: nestucca spit press, [2011]. §low, katherine. “domestic disputations at the dung heap: a reception history of job and his wife in christianity of the west.” texas christian phd, 2010. deals with blake, inter alia. lu, chun-yan. “wei lian bu lai ke shi ge de zhu ti jie du [understanding the theme of william blake’s poems].” chong qing gong xue yuan xue bao [journal of chongqing institute of technology] 19.7 (july 2005): 115-17. in chinese. the essay suggests that blake’s poems change in patterns and themes over time, that his early works eulogize revolution and his later works indulge in fantasy with a strong religious character. lu, xiao-xian. “hui gui xiang xiang yu ji qing—chong du bu lai ke [return to imagination and passion—rereading blake’s poems].” fu jian wai yu [journal of fujian foreign language studies] issue 65[3] (2000): 52-55. in chinese. the essay discusses the imagination exhibited in blake’s poems and his rejection of rationalism. *lucas, john, ed. william blake. 1998. <blake (1999)> review §keri davies (see under ahearn, above). lundeen, kathleen. knight of the living dead: william blake and the problem of ontology. 2000. <blake (2001)> reviews §ron broglio, pacific coast philology 36 (2001): 121-24. §david m. baulch, romanticism on the net no. 23 (2001). §lussier, mark. “blake, deleuze, and the emergence of ecological consciousness.” ecocritical theory: new european approaches. ed. axel goodbody and kate rigby. charlottesville: university of virginia press, 2011. 454-80. §lussier, mark. “scientific objects and blake’s objections to science.” wordsworth circle 39.3 (summer 2008): 120-23. §lussier, mark. “self-annihilation/inner revolution: blake’s milton, buddhism, and ecocriticism.” religion and literature 40.1 (spring 2008): 39-57. §lussier, mark s. “selfhood and self-annihilation in blake’s milton.” romantic dharma: the emergence of buddhism into nineteenth-century europe. new york: palgrave macmillan, 2011. nineteenth-century major lives and letters. §lutman, andrej. “navedki navedenega: blake.” delo 48.298 (27 dec. 2006): 24. in slovenian. m §maduagwu, chimdi. “the mythic imagination and literary creativity of william blake and wole soyinka.” uluslararası sosyal araştırmalar dergisi: journal of international social research [turkey] 4.17 (spring 2011): 99-119. §maheux, anne f. “an analysis of the watercolour technique and materials of william blake.” papers presented by conservation students at the third [i.e., eighth] annual conference of art conservation training programmes, may 1982. kingston [ontario]: queen’s university, 1982. the essay was silently reprinted in blake 17.4 (spring 1984): 124-29. *makdisi, saree. william blake and the impossible history of the 1790s. 2003. <blake (2004)> review see jason whittaker, year’s work in english studies 84 (2005), below. mao, xue-qing. “tian zhen yu jing yan: ren lei ling hun de dui li zhuang tai—jian xi bu lai ke de tian zhen yu jing yan zhi ge [innocence and experience—two contrary states of the human soul: on blake’s songs of innocence and of experience].” he bei qing nian guan li gan bu xue yuan xue bao [journal of hebei youth administrative cadres’ college] no. 1 (2005): 93-95. in chinese. in songs of innocence and of experience blake describes two kinds of world that he calls “two contrary states of the human soul.” §marks, cato whitfield. “forging a political aesthetic: the influence of john milton’s political prose on the later prophetic poems of william blake.” london phd, 2008. marsh, nicholas. william blake: the poems. 2001. <blake (2002)> b. §2nd ed. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, 2012. review see jason whittaker, year’s work in english studies 82 (2003), below. §marshall, i. “songs of william blake.” interdisciplinary studies in literature and environment 15.2 (july 2008): 271-72. a review of the compact disc by kevin hutchings of songs of william blake. §martin, r. “‘the eye altering alters all,’ william blake.” practical neurology 11.3 (june 2011): 182-83. only the title is related to blake. §*matheson, william. “lessing j. rosenwald: ‘a splendidly generous man.’” quarterly journal of the library of congress 37.1 (winter 1980): 2-24. includes a detailed account of his blake gifts. §mattessich, stefan. “blake and pynchon: a study in discursive time.” california (santa cruz) phd, 1996. 375 leaves. <blake (1998), here corrected> mccaslin, susan. letters to william blake [poetry]. salt spring island [british columbia]: (m)other tongue press, 1997. review §s. cheda, “cunnilingus, or how i learned to love figure skating—letters to william blake—a woman’s fingerprint,” canadian woman studies 18.2-3 (1998): 162. §mccawley, nichola lee. “re-sounding radicalism: echo in william blake and the chartist poets ernest jones and gerald massey.” manchester phd, 2012. “there is no demonstrable link between blake and chartism.” §*mcdaniel, douglas. william blake in cyberspace. scottsdale [arizona]: mythville metamedia, 2004. 23 cm., 58 pp.; isbn: 9781411679139. fiction: “the mad designer for bar code couldn’t have of really peppered up the place anymore by ‘repurposing’ more of satan’s sympathetic mo’ better blues.” §mcgarvey, kathleen. “burning bright.” rochester review 70.4 (march-april 2008): 30-35. about the william blake archive. §mcgrane, sally. “‘fearful symmetry’ now in pixels bright.” new york times 22 july 1999: e8. <blake (2000), under anon.> about the william blake archive. §mclachlan, j. “the religion of william blake.” faith and freedom 53.151 (2000): 115-19. §mclean, thomas. “‘that woman, lovely woman! may have dominion’: catherine the great and poland.” the other east and nineteenth-century british literature: imagining poland and the russian empire. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, 2012. §mcquail, josephine a. “sexual knowledge and children’s literature: william blake’s songs of innocence and of experience and jamila gavin’s coram boy.” new review of children’s literature and librarianship 8 (2002): 89-103. *mee, jon. dangerous enthusiasm: william blake and the culture of radicalism in the 1790s. 1992. <bbs p. 571> reviews §david worrall, albion 26.1 (spring 1994): 165-66. §william stafford, history workshop no. 37 (spring 1994): 223-24. §david fuller, review of english studies 46.182 (may 1995): 280-81. §michael scrivener, criticism 37.1 (1995): 166. *mellor, anne kostelanetz. blake’s human form divine. 1974. <bb #a2211> reviews §john e. grant (see under frosch, above). §william bonney, college literature 2.2 (spring 1975): 150-51. §menneteau, patrick. “william blake: l’allégorie, l’exemple et le sentiment de vérité.” bulletin de la société d’études anglo-américaines des xviie et xviiie siècles 41 (1995): 37-50. in french. §miall, david s. “romanticism in the electronic age.” romanticism: an oxford guide. ed. nicholas roe. oxford: oxford university press, 2005. 708-20. miall discusses the william blake archive on 713-15. §milner, marion. “1956: the sense in nonsense (freud and blake’s job).” the suppressed madness of sane men. london: routledge, 1987. 168-91. miner, paul. “blake and atalanta fugiens: two plates, three conjectures.” notes and queries 59.3 (sept. 2012): 366-67. miner, paul. “blake: job and ‘the mental traveller.’” notes and queries 59.3 (sept. 2012): 362-66. some “crucial elements” of “the mental traveller” “are conflated from the book of job.” miner, paul. “blake: milton inside milton.” studies in romanticism 51.2 (summer 2012): 233-76. densely allusive. miner, paul. “blake, paine, and moses.” notes and queries 59.3 (sept. 2012): 355-61. blake “was influenced by thomas paine’s the age of reason” “affirmatively as well as negatively” (357). miner, paul. “blake’s ‘proverbs of hell.’” notes and queries 59.3 (sept. 2012): 350-54. miner, paul. “a query on blake and swedenborg.” notes and queries 59.1 (march 2012): 104-05. blake’s phrase “marriage love” “clearly has swedenborgian origins.” §mitchell, w. j. t. “idolatry: nietzsche, blake, poussin.” seeing through race. cambridge: harvard university press, 2012. w. e. b. du bois lectures. §moore, michael. “naked in a tree: james dean, the william blakes, yossarian, melanie, et al.” notes on contemporary literature 40.3 (may 2010): 8-10. §mueller, judith c. “creatures against the law: blake’s antinomian renderings of paul.” interdisciplinary studies in literature and environment 19.1 (winter 2012): 123-41. §müller, karl. “william blake als vorläufer der englischen romantik.” marburg phil. diss., 1922. 156 leaves. in german. <bb #2256, here corrected> *mulhallen, karen, ed. blake in our time: essays in honour of g. e. bentley jr. 2010. <blake (2011)> reviews tristanne connolly, english studies in canada 36.4 (dec. 2010): 119-23 (the book is “beautifully presented”; “these two [frye and bentley] are the world-scale giants” of blake studies, and “elizabeth bentley appears … as a formidable force”). gillian fenwick, university of toronto quarterly 81.3 (summer 2012): 743-45 (“bentley’s scholarship lies at the very roots of blake’s reputation today”). clint stevens, eighteenth century 53.4 (winter 2012): 513-17 (it is “to honor the late bentley”; essick’s is the “most engaging essay”; the rest are summarized author by author). see jason whittaker, year’s work in english studies 91 (2012), below. joseph wittreich (see blake 46.3, above). §mulvihill, james. “blake’s the marriage of heaven and hell.” explicator 56.3 (1998): 124-26. §mulvihill, james. “called to ‘the sports of night’: blake’s europe and the court masque.” romanticism 18.2 (july 2012): 129-42. §mulvihill, james. “a voice without form: blake’s book of ahania and song of solomon.” english studies 88.5 (2007): 522-30. §muñoz garcía, adrián. “alas de ira: la poética de la revolución y mitopoesis en william blake.” amaltea: revista de mitocrítica 3 (2011): 225. in spanish. §muñoz, adrián. “blake y el sentido infernal de la biblia.” acta poetica (mexico) 31.2 (2010): 133-34. in spanish. §muñoz, adrián. “hermenéutica y disensión con el canon: la doctrina de la energía en la tripurā-tāpinī-upaniṣad y the marriage of heaven and hell.” estudios de asia y áfrica (mexico) 43.2 (may-aug. 2008): 383-425. in spanish. §murphy, j. stephen. “the death of the editor.” essays in criticism 58.4 (oct. 2008): 289-310. the william blake archive is discussed on 301-03. §murphy, robbin. “illuminating william blake.” intelligent agent: interactive media in arts and education 2.2 (1998). about the william blake archive. *myrone, martin. the blake book. 2007. <blake (2008)> review see jason whittaker, year’s work in english studies 88 (2009), below. n §natoli, joseph. “william blake.” critical survey of poetry: british, irish and commonwealth poets. ed. rosemary m. canfield reisman. 4th ed. pasadena: salem press, 2011. the third edition was in 2003. ning [apparently an abbreviated name]. “shui zao jiu le bu lai ke? [who created blake?].” wai guo wen xue ping lun [foreign literature review] no. 3 (1994): 137-38. in chinese. a note on the social environment of blake’s poems. *nurmi, martin k. william blake 1975. <bb #a2299> review §george h. gilpin, wordsworth circle 8.3 (summer 1977) (with another). o §o’malley, frank. “the wasteland of william blake.” review of politics (1947) <bb #2326> b. “the wasteland of william blake.” the image of man: a review of politics reader. [notre dame, indiana]: university of notre dame press, [1959]. c. 1966. <bbs p. 594> §osborne, catherine. “introduction: on william blake, nature, and mortality.” dumb beasts and dead philosophers: humanity and the humane in ancient philosophy and literature. oxford: oxford university press, 2007. 3-24. *otto, peter. constructive vision and visionary deconstruction. 1991. <bbs p. 596> reviews §brian wilkie, modern language review 88.3 (july 1993): 731-32. see kitson, above. §donald ault (see under de luca, above). ou, hong, and yao chen. “wei lian bu lai ke yu hou xian dai zhu yi [william blake and postmodernism].” zhong shan da xue xue bao (she hui ke xue ban) [journal of sun yat-sen university (philosophy and social sciences edition)] 48.213[3] (2008): 34-41. in chinese. an analysis of the perceived postmodernist elements in blake’s poems. p *paley, morton d. the traveller in the evening: the last works of william blake. 2003. <blake (2005)> review see jason whittaker, year’s work in english studies 84 (2005), below. paley, morton d. “william blake, richard phillips and the monthly magazine.” studies in romanticism 51.1 (spring 2012): 41-57, 119. about hayley’s ballads (1805), blake’s letters to the monthly magazine, and the review of fuseli in bell’s weekly messenger. *paley, morton d., and michael phillips, eds. william blake: essays in honour of sir geoffrey keynes. 1973. <bb #a2350> review §g. thomas, english 23.115 (march 1974): 36-37 (with 5 others). pan, yu-wen. “bu lai ke de ‘lun dun’ yu hua zi hua si de ‘lun dun 1802’ zhi bi jiao [a comparative study of blake’s ‘london’ and wordsworth’s ‘london 1802’].” hu zhou shi fan xue yuan xue bao [journal of huzhou teachers’ training college] 23 (may 2001): 194-96,198. in chinese. a comparison of the two poems, discussing the similarities in background and intention and pointing out the differences in style and diction. §pantazakos, michael. “the bible on william blake’s proverbs of hell (an interpretive gloss by citation to the king james version).” liverpool law review 23.2 (2001): 211-19. §parfrey, a. “four artists of the apocalypse: who does it think it’s kidding? there’s more apocalyptic vision in william blake’s little finger than there is in all the artists in the ra’s new show put together.” art review (sept. 2000): 26-29. §parini, jay. “blake and roethke: when everything comes to one.” some necessary angels: essays on writing and politics. new york: columbia university press, 1997. pearsall, derek. william langland, william blake, and the poetry of hope. 2003. <blake (2004)> review see jason whittaker, year’s work in english studies 84 (2005), below. *percival, milton o. william blake’s circle of destiny. 1938 …. <bb #2379> reviews §harold r. willoughby, journal of religion 18.3 (july 1938): 370. §samuel c. chew, philosophical review 48.5 (sept. 1939): 547-49. *peterfreund, stuart. william blake in a newtonian world: essays on literature as art and science. 1998. <blake (1999)> review §donald ault, modern philology 97.4 (may 2000): 611-15. §pharabod, hélène. “les discours sur l’art et le discours de l’art: la querelle de william blake et de sir joshua reynolds.” bulletin de la société d’études anglo-américaines des xviie et xviiie siècles 40 (1995): 47-66. in french. §pharabod-ibata, hélène. “william blake: l’invention d’une esthétique.” paris 3 sorbonne nouvelle phd, 1998. 495 leaves. in french. *phillips, michael. william blake: the creation of the songs from manuscript to illuminated printing. 2000. <blake (2001)> reviews §michael ferber, criticism 43.4 (2001): 492-96. §jeremy tambling, modern language review 98.2 (2003): 438-40. §d. walker, journal for eighteenth-century studies 26.2 (2003): 294-96. §piccitto, diane. “reclaiming ‘the grandeur of inspiration’: authenticity, repetition and parody in william blake’s milton.” paradoxes of authenticity: studies on a critical concept. ed. julia straub. bielefeld [germany]: transcript, 2012. cultural and media studies. *pieper, eleonore frauke. “imitation is criticism”: dante gabriel rossetti und william blake. 1997. <blake (1999)> this was a münster dissertation, 1996, 428 leaves. *pierce, john b. the wond’rous art: william blake and writing. 2003. <blake (2004)> review see jason whittaker, year’s work in english studies 84 (2005), below. *plowman, max. an introduction to the study of blake. 1927, 1952, 1967. <bb #2421> d. §*new delhi: atlantic, 1994. vii, 183 pp.; isbn: 9788171564842. e. §charleston: bibliolife, 2012. 23 cm., xxiv, 159 pp.; isbn: 9781113432704. the 2012 edition is a facsimile of the barnes & noble edition of 1967. preston, kerrison. “impressions of melbourne’s felton [blake] bequest.” melbourne age 19 march 1955. §prickett, stephen. “swedenborg, blake, joachim and the idea of a new era.” emanuel swedenborg: herald of a new era. sydney: swedenborg lending library and enquiry centre, 1989. papers presented at a symposium in honor of the tricentenary of the birth of emanuel swedenborg held in sydney, australia, on 29 january 1988. the same title appeared in studia swedenborgiana (1992) <blake (1996)>. §printz-påhlson, göran. “‘innocence’ and ‘nature’: two concepts of romanticism.” ästhetik der skandinavischen moderne. ed. annegret heitmann and karin hoff. 1998. 291-300. about anna maria lenngren’s poem “pojkarne” and blake’s “the ecchoing green.” pritchard, william h. “responding to blake.” hudson review (1996) <blake (1998)> b. §talking back to emily dickinson, and other essays. amherst: university of massachusetts press, 1998. §[pullman, philip] pullman, filip, trans. alekseĭ kruglov. “chem ia obiazan vil’lamu bleĭku.” inostrannaya literatura 3 (2011): n. pag. in russian. punter, david, ed. william blake. 1996. <blake (1997)> review §michael o’neill, romanticism on the net no. 7 (1997) (with 5 others). §purinton, marjean d. “the de-gendered self in william blake’s poetry.” essays on the modern identity. ed. william d. brewer and carole j. lambert. new york: p. lang, 2000. studies on themes and motifs in literature, vol. 55. q qiu, le-ying. “jie lu zi ben zhu yi she hui chou e xian shi de yi mian jing zi—bu lai ke ‘lun dun’ yu hua zi hua si ‘lun dun 1802 nian’ [a mirror-reflection of the dark side of the society: on william blake’s ‘london’ and william wordsworth’s ‘london, 1802’].” jia xing xue yuan xue bao [journal of jiaxing college] 15.4 (july 2003): 127-29. in chinese. blake’s “london” and wordsworth’s “london, 1802,” though different in overall arrangement, style, subject, and tenses, both reveal the terrible reality of the capitalist society of the time [author’s abstract]. qiu, yi. “lun bu lai ke shu qing shi de jing shen jing jie [on the spiritual world in blake’s lyrical poems].” guangxi she hui ke xue [guangxi social sciences studies] no. 3 (2000): 123-27. in chinese. an interpretation of the meanings of some lyrical poems in blake’s songs of innocence and songs of experience. quinney, laura. william blake on self and soul. 2009. <blake (2010§, 2011)> reviews see jason whittaker, year’s work in english studies 90 (2011), below. §michael buhagiar, victoriographies 2.1 (may 2012): 77-78. §stuart peterfreund, european romantic review 23.4 (aug. 2012): 502-10. §a. lincoln, studies in romanticism 51.1 (2012): 98-102. r raine, kathleen. blake and the new age. 1979. <bbs pp. 612-13> b. §hoboken: taylor & francis, 2011. e-book. isbn: 9780203807743. *raine, kathleen. blake and tradition. 1968. <bb #2478> review §rodney baine (see under letters, ed. keynes, in part i, section a). §raine, k. “william blake prophet of imagination: an introduction to the renowned poet, painter, visionary and mystic.” resurgence no. 204 (2001): 6-9. §ranger, c. m. “friendly enemies: blake, bakhtin, feminism.” essex phd, 2000. 248 leaves. §rash, shirley. “‘what dread hand?’: the question of the creator’s identity in william blake’s ‘the tyger.’” sigma tau delta review 9 (2012): 98-105. rawlinson, nick. william blake’s comic vision. 2003. <blake (2004)> review see jason whittaker, year’s work in english studies 84 (2005), below. *read, dennis m. r. h. cromek, engraver, editor, and entrepreneur. 2011. <blake (2012)> review alexander s. gourlay (see blake 46.2, above). §reisman, rosemary m. canfield, ed. romantic poets. ipswich [massachusetts]: salem press, 2012. critical survey of poetry. isbn: 9781429836555. §reisman, rosemary m. canfield, ed. visionary poets. ipswich [massachusetts]: salem press, 2012. critical survey of poetry. isbn: 9781429836524. ren, hui. “bu lai ke shi zuo de yi xiang yun yong [on the use of imagery in blake’s poetry].” huai nan shi fan xue yuan xue bao [journal of huainan normal university] 7.32[4] (2005): 41-44. in chinese. blake uses anti-traditional images to transcend his time. ren, hui. “kuang re yu fan pan—bu lai ke de zong jiao si xiang ji qi chuang zuo biao xian [fanaticism and rebellion—blake’s religious thoughts and the expression in his works].” su zhou xue yuan xue bao [journal of suzhou university] 23.5 (oct. 2008): 55-57, 60. in chinese. an attempt to suggest that “blake seeks a path of fanaticism and rebellion” in his works. ren, hui, and qian chu. “tan bu lai ke he ai lue te yi xiang yun yong de xiang si xing [on the similarities in the use of imagery by blake and eliot].” chao hu xue yuan xue bao [journal of chaohu college] 6.68[5] (2004): 84-88. in chinese. a comment on what t. s. eliot inherited from blake. *ripley, wayne c., and justin van kleeck, eds. editing and reading blake. 2010. <blake (2011)> review see jason whittaker, year’s work in english studies 91 (2012), below. §rix, robert. “happy songs every child may joy to hear: william blake’s works for children.” angles on the english-speaking world 8 [cultures of childhood: literary and historical studies in memory of julia briggs] (2008): 38-50. rix, robert. william blake and the cultures of radical christianity. 2007. <blake (2008)> review see jason whittaker, year’s work in english studies 88 (2009), below. *rix, robert w. “william blake’s ‘the tyger’: divine and beastly bodies in eighteenth-century children’s poetry.” anq 25.4 (oct. 2012): 222-27. §roberts, richard. “the poet as rebel: william blake.” the jesus of poets and prophets. london: student christian movement, 1919. b. §2nd ed. london: student christian movement, 1920. c. §reprint of the 1919 ed. port washington [new york]: kennikat press, 1971. §robinson, henry crabb, trans. jordi doce. “reminiscencias de william blake.” cuadernos hispanoamericanos [madrid] no. 607 (2001): 21-27. in spanish.note also blake’s “canciones y epigramas,” trans. jordi doce, cuardernos hispanoamericanos no. 607 (2001): 7-19, and “tiriel,” no. 660 (2005) <blake §(2006), under doce>, in spanish. §rodríguez santerbás, santiago. “william blake, entre el cielo y el infierno.” triunfo 27, no. 496 (april 1972): 45. in spanish. rolfe, gary. “the marriage of heaven and hell: william blake 1790.” nurse education today 32.3 (2012): 195-96. roos, jacques. aspects littéraires du mysticisme philosophique et l'influence de bœhme et de swedenborg au début du romantisme: william blake, novalis, ballanche. 1951. <bb #2549> reviews §george m. harper, comparative literature 5.2 (spring 1953): 188-89. §heinrich meyer, books abroad 28.1 (winter 1954): 39. *rosenfeld, alvin h., ed. william blake: essays for s. foster damon. 1969. <bb #2565> reviews §rodney baine (see under letters, ed. keynes, in part i, section a). §max f. schulz, eighteenth-century studies 4.2 (winter 1970-71): 223-29. donald weeks, journal of aesthetics and art criticism 29.3 (spring 1971): 429. §ross, haj. “the taoing of a sound: phonetic drama in william blake’s ‘the tyger.’” phonosymbolism and poetic language. ed. patrizia violi. turnhout [belgium]: brepols, 2000. semiotic and cognitive studies, 7. rossetti, william michael. letters of william michael rossetti concerning whitman, blake, and shelley …. 1934, 1968. <bb #2574> reviews §harold blodgett, american literature 6.3 (nov. 1934): 357-58. §k. b. m., new england quarterly 7.4 (dec. 1934): 754-55. §herbert g. wright, review of english studies 11.43 (july 1935): 370. §*rousselot, jean. “william blake: poète et graveur mystique.” la france graphique (n.d.): 43-48. in french. rovira, james. blake and kierkegaard: creation and anxiety. 2010. <blake §(2011)> review robert rix, comparative literature studies 49.3 (2012): 472-75 (“on the whole, he succeeds”). *rowland, christopher. blake and the bible. 2011. <blake (2012)> reviews stephen prickett, international journal for the study of the christian church 12.3-4 (aug. 2012): 346-48 (“sane and learned,” “lucid, intelligent, and scholarly,” “a heroic achievement”). §julia a. sienkewicz, magill’s literary annual, 2012: essay-reviews of 200 outstanding books published in the united states during 2011, with an annotated list of titles (ipswich [massachusetts]: salem press, 2012). rowland, christopher. “wheels within wheels”: william blake and the ezekiel’s merkabah in text and image. 2007. <blake (2008)> reviews §brad e. kelle, religious studies review 34.4 (dec. 2008): 287. see jason whittaker, year’s work in english studies 88 (2009), below. §russell, a. g. b. “william blake: the linnell collection.” burlington magazine 32.180 (march 1918): 118-19. the linnell collection will be sold at christie’s on 15 march. §rutland, laura e. “the romantic in the attic: william blake’s place in kenneth burke’s intellectual circle.” kenneth burke and his circles. ed. jack selzer and robert wess. west lafayette [indiana]: parlor press, 2008. §ryan, mark. “fearful symmetries: william blake, northrop frye, and archetypal criticism.” english studies in canada 37.2 (june 2011): 173-83. s *sabri-tabrizi, g. r. the “heaven” and “hell” of william blake. 1973. <bb #a2611> review §john e. grant (see under frosch, above). sato, hikari. “senge motomaro to william blake: muku na ‘rakuen no shijin’ (senge motomaro and william blake: an innocent ‘poet in paradise’).” yuruginaki shinnen: igirisu roman shugi ronshu (a firm perswasion: essays in british romanticism). ed. hatsuko niimi and masashi suzuki. tokyo: sairyusha, 2012. 381-97. in japanese. sato, hikari. “yanagi muneyoshi yori john sampson ni ateta zenshu mishuroku no shokan nitsuite: meiji taisho ki no william blake shoshi gakusha tachi (hoi) (a letter from yanagi muneyoshi to john sampson uncollected in the complete works of yanagi muneyoshi: william blake bibliographers in japan in the 1910s and the 1920s [addenda]).” annual bulletin of the johnson society 36 (2012): 5-9. in japanese. §saurat, denis. “blake et le catharisme anglais.” annales de l’institut d’études occitanes no. 17 (1954): 1-10. in french. §sayers, janet, and nanette monin. “blake’s ‘london’: diabolical reading and poetic place in organisational theorising.” culture and organization 18.1 (jan. 2012): 1-13. §schelkle, r. “stranger on a train: william blake and jim jarmusch’s dead man—media and violence, poetry and politics.” zeitschrift für anglistik und amerikanistik 58.4 (dec. 2010): 335-49. §schmid, susanne. “from fin de siècle mysticism to günter brus’s provocations: william blake in the german-speaking lands.” comparative critical studies 9.1 (2012): 83-104. §schmidt, erika. “miltons weltschau.” freie universität berlin dissertation, 1956. 326 leaves. in german. deals extensively with blake. §schneider, barbara. “das verhältnis von ‘innocence’ und ‘experience’ in der lyrischen dichtung william blakes.” hamburg dissertation, 1980. 128 leaves. in german. §schrire, sarah. “the pulsation of an artery: rediscovering blake through hypermedia.” bar ilan (israel) phd, 2010. 295 leaves, abstract in hebrew. *schuchard, marsha keith. why mrs. blake cried. 2006. <blake (2007)> review see jason whittaker, year’s work in english studies 87 (2008), below. §sealey-morris, gabriel stephen. “william blake’s tractates: lessons in prophetic encounter.” georgia phd, 2010. 234 leaves. §selborne, joanna. “william blake and edward calvert.” british wood-engraved book illustration, 1904-1940: a break with tradition. oxford: clarendon press, 1998. clarendon studies in the history of art. chapter 4. §*serdechnaya, vera. malye poemy uil’yama bleika: povestvovanie, tipologiya, kontekst [short epics by william blake: narration, typology, context]. st. petersburg: dmitrii bulanin publishing house, 2012. 22 cm., 240 pp., 50 color reproductions; isbn: 9785860076822. in russian. about short epics from tiriel to the book of los, dealing with bible epics, alchemical symbolism, and the reception of blake in the twentieth century, with an annotated translation of the song of los. shang, bi-wu. “jian dan he fu za de wan mei jie he—qian tan wei lian bu lai ke de shi ge [the perfect integration of simplicity and complexity—on william blake’s poetry].” an hui gong ye da xue xue bao (she ke ban) [journal of anhui university of technology (philosophy and social sciences edition)] 19.1 (march 2002): 74-77. in chinese. william blake is an important representative in english romanticism. his poems have the characteristics of simplicity on the surface and complexity at the deep level. there is a perfect integration of simplicity and complexity in his poetry [author’s abstract]. §shanks, andrew. “blake: shakenness in confrontational form” and “a shaken sacramentalism: hölderlin and blake.” what is truth?: towards a theological poetics. london: routledge, 2001. shen, bao-guo. “yun yong ren zhi tui li: tou shi bu lai ke ‘lao hu’ [a perspective of blake’s ‘tyger’ with abductive inference].” bao ding shi fan zhuan ke xue xiao xue bao [journal of bao ding teachers’ college] 19.1 (jan. 2006): 24-25. in chinese. a brief analysis of “the tyger” by “abductive inference.” §sims, nicholas. “andré gide, traducteur d’anglais littéraire.” mcgill phd, 1981. in french. chapter 6 deals with gide’s translation of the marriage of heaven and hell. §sinclair, iain. blake’s london: the topographic sublime. london: swedenborg society, 2011. §singer, june. “on william blake: reason versus imagination.” c. g. jung and the humanities: toward a hermeneutics of culture. ed. karin burnaby and pellegrino d’acierno. princeton: princeton university press, 1990. selected essays and discussions from a 1986 conference sponsored by hofstra university and the c. g. jung foundation. *singer, june k. the unholy bible: a psychological interpretation of william blake. 1970 …. <bb #2707, bbs p. 640, blake (2001, 2006)> review §ronald l. grimes, journal of the american academy of religion 41.3 (sept. 1973): 460-61. §sitar, sandi. “william blake: svet v zrncu peska: legendarne osebnosti ezoterike.” gea 18.4 (april 2008): 60-62. in slovenian. smiles, samuel. “john flaxman.” household friends for every season. boston: ticknor and fields, 1864. 176-84 (blake on p. 178). b. favorite authors in prose and poetry. three volumes in one. illustrated. boston: james osgood and company, 1885 [copyright 1860, 1863, 1865, 1884]. 176-84 (blake on p. 178). the account originated in smiles’s self-help (1859). §smiles, samuel.  self-help; with illustrations of character and conduct. 1859. chapter 5: workers in art. b. 1860. <blake (2010)> at fifteen flaxman entered a student at the royal academy. he might then be seen principally in the company of blake and stothard, young men of kindred tastes and genius, gentle and amiable, yet ardent in their love of art. (110 [1859]) the account is adapted from anon., “the sculptor’s career” (see eliza cook’s journal, above). §*smith, g. munro. “literary notes.” british medical journal 2541 (11 sept. 1909): 710. responses by §charles h. melland, “william blake’s drawings,” 2543 (25 sept. 1909): 919-20 and §h. elliot-blake (920). smith responds to both in “william blake’s drawings,” 2544 (2 oct. 1909): 1012. snart, jason. “blake’s awareness of ‘blake in a newtonian world’: william blake, isaac newton, and writing on metal.” history of european ideas 31 (2005): 237-49. <blake (2006)> review see jason whittaker, year’s work in english studies 86 (2007), below. §snart, j. “the imaginative mind: william blake’s self-renewing creative imagination.” analecta husserliana 71 (2001): 299-315. §snart, j. “repetition as re-vision: william blake’s watercolor designs for edward young’s night thoughts.” nineteenth century studies 24 (2010): 1-15. *snart, jason allen. the torn book: unreading william blake’s marginalia. 2006. <blake (2007)> review mark lussier (see under ankarsjö, william blake and gender, above). *spector, sheila a. “glorious incomprehensible”: the development of blake’s kabbalistic language. 2001. <blake (2002)> review see jason whittaker, year’s work in english studies 82 (2003), below. *spector, sheila a. “wonders divine”: the development of blake’s kabbalistic myth. 2001. <blake (2002)> review see jason whittaker, year’s work in english studies 82 (2003), below. §spengemann, william c. a new world of words: redefining early american literature. new haven: yale university press, 1994. it includes a comparison of benjamin franklin’s autobiography, blake’s the marriage of heaven and hell, and jane austen, northanger abbey. steenburg, david. “chaos at the marriage of heaven and hell.” harvard theological review 84 (1991): 447-66. “i offer … a mathematical recipe for the ‘soul’ of a black spleenwort fern.” §stevanovič, sandra. “william blake in moč imaginacije.” dialogi 40.5-6 (2004): 40-50. in slovenian. §stevens, bethan kathleen. “lost works of art: a critical and creative study of reception and restitution.” sussex dphil, 2012. in “my third study … i look at william blake’s virgil woodcuts, reading them through their missing parts, including chopped-off edges.” §stevens, david j. “william blake in education: a poet for our times?” changing english 7.1 (2000): 55-63. stock, r. d. the holy and the daemonic from sir thomas browne to william blake. 1982. <bbs p. 647> reviews §anon., psychological medicine 12.4 (nov. 1982). §r. g. collmer, journal of church and state 26.3 (1984): 559. *summerfield, henry. a guide to the books of william blake for innocent and experienced readers. 1998. <blake (1999)> review §keri davies (see under ahearn, above). sun, ai-ling. “‘zui qiang you li de duan shi’—wei lian bu lai ke de ‘lun dun’ [‘the most powerful short poem’—william blake’s ‘london’].” jiang su wai yu jiao xue yan jiu [journal of jiangsu foreign language teaching and research] no. 2 (1999): 87-88. in chinese. a brief analysis of “london.” *sung, mei-ying. william blake and the art of engraving. 2009. <blake (2010)> review see jason whittaker, year’s work in english studies 90 (2011), below. suzuki, masashi. “jidai no mokugegkisha: ‘venechiaha no hiden’ to koten sakuhin kaisetsu mokuroku (1809) (an eyewitness: ‘venetian secret’ and a descriptive catalogue of pictures [1809]).” yuruginaki shinnen: igirisu roman shugi ronshu (a firm perswasion: essays in british romanticism). ed. hatsuko niimi and masashi suzuki. tokyo: sairyusha, 2012. 421-40. in japanese. §swainson, william perkes. “william blake, seer, poet and artist.” the christian mystics. 3 vols. london: c. w. daniel, [1903-08]. 15 cm. presumably it is the same as his william blake, seer, poet, and artist [1908] <bb #2790>. *swinburne, algernon charles. william blake: a critical essay. 1868 …. <bb #2795, bbs p. 652> h. william blake. trans. giusi de pasquale and maria croci gulì. palermo: novecento, 1992. narciso d’oro. 22 cm., 321 pp.; isbn: 9788837301439. in italian. §swinkin, rachel. “the limits of sympathy: animals and sentimentality in eighteenth-century british literature and culture, 1759-1810.” california (davis) phd, 2012. chapter 3 is about blake. symons, arthur. william blake. 1907 …. <bb #2804, blake (2011)> review §h. ellis, british journal of psychiatry 54.224 (jan. 1908): 141-42. t takanashi, erisa. “muku to keiken no uta ni okeru blake no kodomo kan: 18 seiki josei shijin tono hikaku (william blake’s idea of children in songs of innocence and of experience and the eighteenth century women poets).” nihon joshi daigaku eibeibungaku kenkyu (japan women’s university, studies in english and american literature) 47 (2012): 51-65. in japanese. tambling, jeremy. blake’s night thoughts. 2005. <blake (2006)> review see jason whittaker, year’s work in english studies 86 (2007), below. tanaka, minne. “william blake to fresco: ushinawareta inishie no hijutsu wo motomete [william blake and fresco: in search of the lost secret arts of the ancients].” hermes tachi no kyoen: eigo eibei bungaku ronbunshu (a symposium of critics: scholarship on literature and language in honor of professor shoichi matsushima). ed. shoichi matsushima. tokyo: otowa shobo tsurumi shoten, 2012. 151-67. in japanese. tang, mei-xiu. “bu lai ke de dong fang mei xue guan [blake’s eastern aesthetic view].” chang sha li gong da xue xue bao (she hui ke xue ban) [journal of changsha university of science and technology (social science edition)] 22.1 (march 2007): 119-22. in chinese. a commentary on blake’s “eastern aesthetic view,” saying that he adopts the eastern cognitive aesthetic perspective of “heart-object monism” and “the aesthetic principle of integration between poetry and painting.” tang, mei-xiu. “bu lai ke de er yuan dui li yun si fang shi ji qi fan chuan tong yi shi—‘lao hu’ yi shi shi xi [blake’s concept of dichotomy and anti-traditional consciousness—an analysis of ‘the tyger’].” chang sha dian li xue yuan xue bao (she hui ke xue ban) [journal of changsha university of electric power (social sciences edition)] 18.2 (may 2003): 105-08. in chinese. a comment on the poet’s concept of dichotomy and anti-traditional consciousness via “his artistic interpretation of the theological ideas of the holy bible.” tang, mei xiu. “bu lai ke dui mi er dun de wu du [on blake’s misreading of milton].” tian jin wai guo yu xue yuan xue bao [journal of tianjin foreign studies university] 12.6 (nov. 2005): 57-61. in chinese. blake “has completely subverted the native traditional christian orthodox doctrines” by “adopting an anti-sublime strategy of demonization” and by “misreading” milton. §taufer, jasna škrinjar. “albion: blake v galeriji tate.” 2000 nos. 148-50 (2002): 95-107. in slovenian. thanhouser, ed. urizen wept: william blake and the sublime in milton a poem. 2008. <blake §(2011)> review see jason whittaker, year’s work in english studies 89 (2010), below. §thomas, julia. “getting the picture: word and image in the digital archive.” european journal of english studies 11.2 (2007): 193-206. the william blake archive is discussed on 197-200. §thomas, troy. “william blake and dead man.” adaptation 5.1 (march 2012): 57-87. *thompson, e. p. witness against the beast: william blake and the moral law. 1993. <blake (1994)> reviews §william stafford, history workshop no. 38 (1994): 242-44. §brian wilkie, modern language review 90.2 (april 1995): 416-17. §lisa plummer crafton, south atlantic review 60.3 (sept. 1995): 128-31. §m. scrivener, criticism 37.1 (1995): 166. §roy porter, english historical review 111.442 (june 1996): 743-44. *tinkler-villani, v[aleria]. visions of dante in english poetry: translations of the commedia from jonathan richardson to william blake. 1989. <bbs p. 661> review §richard bates, translation and literature 1.1 (1992): 181-84. §titlestad, peter. “william blake: the ranters and the marxists.” english academy review 21.1 (2004): 118-29. *townsend, joyce h., ed. william blake: the painter at work. 2003. <blake (2005)> reviews §katherine olivier, journal of the american institute for conservation 44.2 (summer 2005): 150-51. see jason whittaker, year’s work in english studies 84 (2005), below. §*trodd, colin. visions of blake: william blake in the art world 1830-1930. liverpool: liverpool university press, 2012. xiv, 520 pp.; isbn: 9781846311116. §tseng, ming-yu. “image schemas as a way to analyse words and images: examples from william blake and a buddhist text.” in search of (non)sense. ed. elżbieta chrzanowska-kluczewska and grzegorz szpila. newcastle upon tyne: cambridge scholars, 2009. §tsuchiya, shigeko. kotuba to vijon: bureiku kara begetto made: “never seek to tell thy love.” [n.p.]: chuo daigaku shuppan, [2012]. 22 cm., 329 pp.; isbn: 9784805751749. in japanese. u §unamuno, miguel de. “de actualidad: william blake y tomas meabe.” el liberal [madrid] 15 dec. 1920. in spanish. §uthaug, geir. “kunsten er himmelporten. om den visjonære kunstneren william blake.” p2-akademiet no. 32 (2005): 89-93. in norwegian. v §*v., a. “skrivnosti williama blakea naprodaj.” lucas nos. 5-6 (1991): 33-34. in slovenian. §vacca, roberto. “reading william blake: a christian perspective.” christ in the classroom: adventist approaches to the integration of faith and learning. ed. h. m. rasi. silver spring [maryland]: institute for christian teaching, 1994. christ in the classroom, vol. 10. §van schaik, pamela. “the significance of ‘mental fight’ in ben okri and william blake.” journal of literary studies 28.4 (dec. 2012): 87-97. summary in english and afrikaans. mostly from mental fight and jerusalem. *vaughan, frank a. again to the life of eternity: william blake’s illustrations to the poems of thomas gray. 1996. <blake (1997)> review §b. tice, antiquarian book monthly 23.10 (1996): 26. vevle, siri. “an unnoticed parallel between william blake’s fiery pegasus and the marriage of heaven and hell.” notes and queries 59.3 (sept. 2012): 354-55. the leaping horse on marriage pl. 14 resembles that on blake’s design for 1 henry iv. *viscomi, joseph. “blake’s invention of illuminated printing, 1788.” branch: britain, representation and nineteenth-century history. ed. dino franco felluga. extension of romanticism and victorianism on the net. accessed 1 sept. 2012. a long, important essay concluding that “illuminated poetry was the child and not the mother of invention.” §vogel, amber. “mungo park’s lament, and other narratives of loss: themes in african travel-writing, 1759-1830, with reference to goldsmith, blake, and brontë.” north carolina (chapel hill) phd, 2000. 262 leaves. §vrišer, sergej. “razstava williama blaka v mariboru.” nova obzorja 9.4-5 (1956): 303-05. in slovenian. §vrišer, sergej. “william blake, umetnik in mislec: mariborska umetnostna galerija od 18. iii. do 1. iv. 1956.” večer 12.73 (28 march 1956): 3. in slovenian. w wada, ayako. “production of blake’s america and europe revisited.” yuruginaki shinnen: igirisu roman shugi ronshu (a firm perswasion: essays in british romanticism). ed. hatsuko niimi and masashi suzuki. tokyo: sairyusha, 2012. 399-420. *wagenknecht, david. blake’s night: william blake and the idea of pastoral. 1973. <bbs p. 670> review §john e. grant (see under frosch, above). §wagenknecht, d. a. “william blake and the idea of pastoral.” sussex dphil, 1971. 336 leaves. wan, chang. “bu lai ke de tong nian [on blake’s childhood].” fu mu bi du [essential readings for parents] no. 11 (1983): 32. in chinese. a comment on blake’s odd imagination when he was a child and how he was abused by his father but nurtured by his patient mother. wang, hai-ying. “wei lian bu lai ke he ta de ‘lun dun’ [william blake and his ‘london’].” ke ji xin xi [science and technology information] no. 33 (2009): 584, 562. in english. the essay comments on some of the metrical techniques used in blake’s poem. wang, jia-yin. “shi lun wei lian bu lai ke de shi ge feng ge ji yi shu te se [on the poetic style and artistic character of william blake’s poetry].” wen xue ping lun [literary criticism] no. 40 (2004): 211. in chinese. a sketchy description of blake’s poetry. wang, lin. “wei lian bu lai ke shi ge zhong de yi xiang shi yong de fen xi: yi ‘lun dun’ wei li [an analysis of the images in william blake’s poem ‘london’: a case study].” an hui wen xue [anhui literature] no. 7 (2009): 91. in chinese. wang, lu. “cong tian zhen zhi ge ji qi ban hua tan shi bu lai ke de xin yang [an exploration of the blakean beliefs through an interpretation of the plates in songs of innocence].” liao ning jiao yu xing zheng xue yuan xue bao [journal of liaoning educational administration institute] 24.5 (march 2007): 112-14. in chinese. an interpretation of the text and plates in blake’s work, suggesting that “the world of innocence” is “an enclosed world under the protection of a kind guardian god.” wang, sha-lie. “bu lai ke yu hua zi hua si de shi ge ‘lun dun’ [a comment on the ‘london’ poems by blake and wordsworth].” song liao xue kan (she hui ke xue ban) [journal of song liao (social sciences edition)] no. 4 (1992): 106-09. in chinese. a comment on the similar subject matter, i.e., the seamy side of london, in the london poems by blake and wordsworth. wang, sha-lie. “ying guo shi ren bi xia de lun dun—cong bu lai ke dao hua zi hua si [london under the pen of the english poets—from blake to wordsworth].” ji lin shi fan da xue xue bao (ren wen she hui ke xue ban) [journal of jilin normal university (humanities and social sciences edition)] no. 1 (2005): 59-62. in chinese. in their london poems, blake and wordsworth paint two pictures: blake’s london “is a prison” that “kills life,” whereas wordsworth’s london is “a pool of stagnant water, deprived of its ancient inward happiness.” wang, sheng-yu. “keng qiang de yin yun duo ren de sheng shi—shi xi ‘lao hu’ yi shi de wen ti te se [on the stylistic features of ‘the tyger’].” yan tai shi fan xue yuan xue bao (zhe she ban) [journal of yantai normal university (social sciences edition)] no. 4 (1999): 56-59. in chinese. an analysis of “the tyger” using “foregrounding” theory in stylistic studies. wang, shu-ping, and yue-juan he. “tian zhen shi jie de mi shi: du wei lian bu lai ke de jing yan zhi ge you gan [the loss of innocence: a reading of william blake’s songs of experience].” shi dai wen xue [literature of the times] no. 10 (2008): 140. in chinese. wang, xiu-yan. “tan xi wei lian bu lai ke bi xia de ‘lun dun’ [on william blake’s ‘london’].” xian dai qi ye jiao yu [modern enterprise education] no. 20 (2006): 208. in chinese. a brief introduction to blake’s “london.” wang, xue-qiang, zhi-gang zhao, and jun-jie du. “bu lai ke shi zhong de xiang zheng shou fa ying yong chu tan [on the use of symbolism in blake’s poetry].” zuo jia [writers] no. 7 (2008): 91. in chinese. wang, zhen-li, and bao-guo shen. “yong dui li chuang xin he xie shi jiao tou shi bu lai ke shen hua ti xi [an analysis of blake’s myth system from the perspective of contrary, creativeness, and harmony].” shi dai wen xue [literature of the times] no. 20 (2009): 91-92. in chinese. the essay suggests that blake juxtaposes “innocence” and “experience” to indicate a harmonious state for humanity. wang, zuo-liang. “mi er dun, pu bai, bu lai ke: du shi sui gan zhi yi [milton, pope, and blake: a reading sketch].” du shu [reading] no. 1 (1987): 81-86. in chinese. a comment on a few lines from milton, pope, and blake. *wark, robert r. “blake’s ‘satan, sin and death.’” ten british pictures 1740-1840 [in] the huntington library. 1971. <bb #2924> b. §the revolution in eighteenth-century art: ten british pictures, 1740-1840. san marino: huntington library, 2001. *warner, janet. other sorrows, other joys: the marriage of catherine sophia boucher and william blake. 2003. <blake (2004)> review see jason whittaker, year’s work in english studies 85 (2006), below. §wat, pierre. “un jeu sérieux: la théorie de l’imitation dans les écrits des artistes romantiques allemands et anglais: caspar david friedrich—philipp otto runge—carl gustav carus—william blake—joseph mallord william turner—john constable.” paris 1 panthéon-sorbonne phd, 1996. 386 leaves. in french. §watson, j. h. “the religious beliefs of william blake.” expository times 87, no. 11 (aug. 1976): 340-44. wei, jin-long, ma yong, and chang-ying li. “qian tan bu lai ke shi jie guan de zhuan bian [on the change of blake’s world outlook].” zuo jia [writers] no. 1 (2008): 114. in chinese. a sketch of the changes in blake’s mind. *weir, david. brahma in the west: william blake and the oriental renaissance. 2003. <blake (2004)> review see jason whittaker, year’s work in english studies 84 (2005), below. §weissman, judith. “william blake: harsh instruments of sound and witches with knives.” of two minds: poets who hear voices. hanover [new hampshire]: university press of new england for wesleyan university press, 1993. §*wheatley, debra jane. “the metaphysical works of david scott, rsa: ‘the scottish blake’ and his symbolist tendencies.” aberdeen phd, 2008. 403 leaves, including 100 leaves of plates. §whitson, roger. “applied blake: milton’s response to empire.” interdisciplinary literary studies 9.2 (2008): 87-101. whittaker, jason. “blake.” year’s work in english studies [for 2001] 82 (2003): 522-30. reviews, especially of g. e. bentley, jr., the stranger from paradise (“immensely important scholarship”; “bentley is also significant, of course, for his monumental contributions … in … blake books and blake records”), sheila spector, “glorious incomprehensible”: the development of blake’s kabbalistic language (“spector’s book is thorough and engaged”) and “wonders divine”: the development of blake’s kabbalistic myth (“less satisfactory”), a. a. ansari, william blake’s minor prophecies (“a difficult book to read”), and nicholas marsh, william blake: the poems (“rather inadequate”). whittaker, jason. “blake.” year’s work in english studies [for 2006] 87 (2008): 724-31. includes substantial reviews of marsha keith schuchard, why mrs. blake cried (724-25) (it “excels … in terms of the historical context … essential reading for anyone interested in blake,” but “some claims made by schuchard … appear difficult to substantiate”), edward larrissy, blake and modern literature (725-26), masashi suzuki and steve clark, eds., the reception of blake in the orient (726) (“a marvellous introduction to blake’s effect on japanese culture”), steve clark and david worrall, eds., blake, nation and empire (726-28), and nicholas m. williams, ed., william blake studies (728). whittaker, jason. “blake.” year’s work in english studies [for 2007] 88 (2009): 730-38. includes substantial reviews of robert rix, william blake and the cultures of radical christianity (731) (“exhaustive detail and fascinating analysis”), steve clark and jason whittaker, eds., blake, modernity and popular culture (731-32), david bindman, mind-forg’d manacles: william blake and slavery (exhibition 2007-08) (732), christopher rowland, “wheels within wheels”: william blake and the ezekiel’s merkabah in text and image (733) (“excellent material” about the “biblical tradition,” critically “fair but rather uninspiring”), martin myrone, the blake book (733-34) (“a digest of the work done in the last two decades”), and “william blake and visual culture,” ed. roger whitson and donald ault in imagetext (735-36). whittaker, jason. “william blake.” year’s work in english studies [for 2003] 84 (2005): 635-44.  especially on paley, the traveller in the evening (635-36), townsend, william blake: the painter at work (“outstanding on the technical details”), makdisi, william blake and the impossible history of the 1790s (637), connolly, william blake and the body, pierce, the wond’rous art (637-38) (“post structuralist readings” but “useful”), weir, brahma in the west, rawlinson, william blake’s comic vision, pearsall, william langland, william blake, and the poetry of hope (a “charming and insubstantial pamphlet”), and eaves, the cambridge companion to william blake (“an excellent introduction”). whittaker, jason. “william blake.” year’s work in english studies [for 2004] 85 (2006): 612-20. reviews, among others, g. e. bentley, jr., blake records, 2nd ed. (613) (“one of the most important texts issued in 2004”), julia m. wright, blake, nationalism, and the politics of alienation (613-14) (“extremely important”), kevin fischer, converse in the spirit: william blake, jacob boehme, and the creative spirit (614) (“extremely valuable”), and janet warner, other sorrows, other joys: the marriage of catherine sophia boucher and william blake (615-16). whittaker, jason. “william blake.” year’s work in english studies [for 2005] 86 (2007): 657-62. reviews of publications about blake, particularly beer, william blake (657-58) (“sympathetic and extremely readable”), jeremy tambling, blake’s night thoughts (658) (“disjointed,” “ambitious … problematic”; “his allusive style can be maddening”), green, visionary materialism (658-59), broglio, digital designs (659), whitehead on henry banes in blake (661) (“excellent”), and snart, “blake’s awareness of ‘blake in a newtonian world’” in history of european ideas (662) (“not always fully convincing”). whittaker, jason. william blake and the myths of britain. 1999. <blake (2000)> reviews §andrew lincoln, review of english studies 51.202 (may 2000): 306-08. §margaret storch (see under clark and worrall, above). whittaker, jason. year’s work in english studies [for 2008] 89 (2010): 635-42. especially on sarah haggarty and jon mee, eds., blake and conflict (635-37), g. e. bentley, jr., william blake’s conversations (637) (“typically scholarly and careful,” with “some extremely useful insights” and “a truly fascinating concordance”), d. whitmarsh-knight, william blake’s “jerusalem” explained (637-38) (“i am unconvinced”), william blake: selected poetry and prose, ed. david fuller (new edition, 2008) (638), blake’s poetry and designs, ed. mary lynn johnson and john e. grant (2nd ed., 2008) (638), and ed thanhouser, urizen wept: william blake and the sublime in milton a poem (638). whittaker, jason. year’s work in english studies [for 2009] 90 (2011): 650-58. review of blake studies, particularly sung, william blake and the art of engraving (650-51) (“erudite,” “incredibly detailed, highly technical”), adams, blake’s margins (651-52), the tate exhibition (652-53), ankarsjö, william blake and religion (653-54) (“often confusing”), quinney, william blake on self and soul (654-55), mansanti in blake (658) (“marvellously detailed”), and bentley, “blake’s murderesses” in huntington library quarterly (658) (“entertaining and vivid”). whittaker, jason. year’s work in english studies [for 2010] 91 (2012): 671-77. reviews, particularly of sarah haggarty, blake’s gifts (671-72) (“always sophisticated”), john h. jones, blake on language, power, and self-annihilation (672-73), sibylle erle, blake, lavater and physiognomy (673) (“compelling and convincing,” “superb”), r. paul yoder, the narrative structure of william blake’s poem jerusalem (673), karen mulhallen, ed., blake in our time (673-74) (“mulhallen’s introduction is particularly valuable” and essick’s essay on “collecting blake” is “most fascinating”), wayne c. ripley and justin van kleeck, eds., editing and reading blake (674-75), and helen p. bruder and tristanne connolly, eds., queer blake (675). §williams, j. “building a heaven in hell’s despair: the everlasting gospel of revolution according to william blake and douglas oliver.” romanticism 18.2 (july 2012): 155-64. *williams, nicholas m. ideology and utopia in the poetry of william blake. 1998. <blake (1999)> reviews §keri davies (see under ahearn, above). §sharon o’toole dubois, utopian studies 10.1 (1999): 297-99. §margaret storch, modern language review 95.1 (jan. 2000): 186-87. §u. böker, anglia 120.2 (2002): 286-90. *williams, nicholas m., ed. william blake studies. 2006. <blake (2007)> review see jason whittaker, year’s work in english studies 87 (2008), above. *wilson, mona. the life of william blake. 1927, 1932, 1948, 1951, 1969, 1970, 1971 (ed. geoffrey keynes). <bb #2981> angus whitehead (see clark, connolly, and whittaker, above) summarizes the authoritative editions: 1927: 24 illustrations, notes, 6 appendices; 1932: no illustrations (except a frontispiece), notes, or appendices, but a new preface, revisions, and list of new matter; 1948: has 6 illustrations; omits the 1932 revisions; 1971: keynes, who edited it heavily, “re-paragraphs” the text and “rephrases” the notes. reviews (of 1932) §a. g. b. russell, burlington magazine 63, no. 364 (july 1933): 48. §anon., journal of nervous and mental disease 78.6 (dec. 1933): 690. §woods, jeanine. “teaching blake’s poetry with paintings.” english journal 72.3 (march 1983): 38-40. worrall, david. “blake.” year’s work in english studies [for 1997] 78 (2000): 490-97. reviews of, inter alia, helen bruder, william blake and the daughters of albion (492-93), and kathryn s. freeman, blake’s nostos: fragmentation and nondualism in the four zoas (494-95) (“lucid and coherent”). §worrall, david, and jonathan roberts. “blake at 250: two responses to the conference debate.” bars bulletin and review 32 (2007): 16-18. on the york conference. *wright, andrew. blake’s job: a commentary. 1972. <bb #376> review §g. thomas, english 22.114 (sept. 1973): 118-19 (with 6 others). *wright, julia m. blake, nationalism, and the politics of alienation. 2004. <blake (2005)> review see jason whittaker, year’s work in english studies 85 (2006), above. wu, pei-hong. “cong ‘tian zhen’ dao ‘jing yan’—jian lun bu lai ke shi ge de pi pan xian shi zhu yi jing shen [from ‘innocence’ to ‘experience’: on the spirit of critical realism in blake’s poetry].” han shan shi fan xue yuan xue bao [journal of hanshan teachers’ college] no. 4 (2000): 61-64, 97. in chinese. a comment on social criticism in blake’s poems. x *xiang, yun-gen. “wei lian bu lai ke: xian dai zhi e de yu yan zhe [william blake: a prophet of modern evil].” wen yi yan jiu [art and culture studies] no. 8 (2009): 162. in chinese. blake as a prophet predicts with his poetry and engravings that the “human spirit will be enslaved by material gains” and that “modernism will bear evil fruits.” xin, yue-zhao. “wan zheng ren ge: bu lai ke shi ge zhong de nü xing xing xiang [perfect character: the images of women in blake’s poems].” xian dai yu wen [modern chinese] no. 1 (2009): 135-36. in chinese. a reading of blake’s images of women with the help of freud’s theory of personality, suggesting that in blake’s poems the images of women fit the three personality types prescribed by freud. xu, zhen-zhong. “bu lai ke yu gong zi zhen de shi ge bi jiao [a comparison of the poems by blake and gong zi-zhen].” li ming zhi ye da xue xue bao [journal of liming vocational university] issue 52[3] (2006): 56-59. in chinese. the similarities in theme and method of the poems by blake and gong zi-zhen, a contemporary chinese poet. y yan, li. “xiang zheng huang dan qiu jie—shi xi bu lai ke dai biao zuo ‘lao hu’ de wen xue yi xiang te zheng [symbolism, absurdity, and inquiry: an analysis of the images in ‘the tyger’ by william blake].” an hui guang bo dian shi da xue xue bao [journal of anhui broadcasting and television university] no. 2 (2003): 81-83. in chinese. yan, xiao-ru. “yi li sha zi kan shi jie—cong bu lai ke de liang shou tong ming shi kan shi ren chuang zuo si xiang de yan bian ‘to see a world in a grain of sand’—the evolution of blake’s thoughts from his two poems of the same title].” sha yang shi fan gao deng zhuan ke xue xiao xue bao [journal of shayang teachers’ training college] no. 1 (2007): 30-32, 38. in chinese. an attempt to show the changes in blake’s mind by comparing the versions of “the chimney sweeper” in the songs of innocence and the songs of experience. yang, ping. “qian xi wei lian bu lai ke de zuo pin ji qi dui ren xing de du te jian jie [on william blake’s view of human nature as reflected in his poetry].” zuo jia [writers] no. 10 (2008): 70. in chinese. yang, xiao-hong. “bu lai ke jing yan zhi ge de xi tong jie gou [the structure of blake’s songs of experience].”   wai guo wen xue ping lun [foreign literature review] no. 3 (1996): 93-99. in chinese. an analysis of blake’s songs of experience with the help of the systemic theory of meaning. yang, xiao-hong. “bu lai ke ‘lun dun’ tan wei [on blake’s ‘london’].” hang zhou shi fan xue yuan xue bao [journal of hang zhou teachers’ college] no. 7 (1995): 42-48. in chinese. an analysis of the linguistic, religious, and sexual elements in blake’s “london.” yeats, w. b. “william blake and the imagination.” ideas of good and evil. 1903. <bb #3047b, bbs p. 691, blake (1995, 1999)> … escritos de william blake. trans. alberto mariscano and regina de barros carvalho. 1984. in portuguese. … “wei lian bu lai keyu xiang xiang li [william blake and the imagination].” trans. zhi ye. shi tan suo [exploration of poetry] no. 2 (1997): 84-86, 123. in chinese. §yedema, piter. “william blake sprekwurden fan de hel: oersetting.” de moanne: algemien-kultureel opinyblêd 10.3 (april 2011): 28-30. in frisian. about translating blake’s proverbs of hell? *yi, ying. “bu lai ke yu ying guo lang man zhu yi hui hua [blake and british romantic painting].” shi jie mei shu [world art] (1983): 26-29. in chinese. a brief comment on the influence on blake’s poetry of artists james barry, john hamilton mortimer, samuel palmer, and edward calvert. yin, hong-hua. “bei qing yu xiang xiang—tan xun bu lai ke de bei ju yi shi [sadness and imagination: on blake’s sense of tragedy].” ke ji xin xi [science information] no. 8 (2006): 145. in chinese. a brief comment on blake’s “sense of tragedy,” “the basis of his imagination.” *yoder, r. paul. the narrative structure of william blake’s poem jerusalem: a revisionist interpretation. 2010. <blake §(2011)> review see jason whittaker, year’s work in english studies 91 (2012), above. §youngquist, paul. “vision, madness, myth and william blake.” dionysus in literature: essays on literary madness. ed. branimir m. rieger. bowling green: bowling green state university popular press, 1994. 113-32. b. madison: university of wisconsin press, 2011. yu, chi-hua, and ke-qiang wang. “bu lai ke yu ‘shi de su miao’ [blake’s poetical sketches].” shan xi shi da xue xue bao (she ke ban) [journal of shanxi normal university (philosophy and social sciences edition)] no. 3 (1985): 108. in chinese. a brief introduction to blake’s early work, which the authors read as an unfinished dramatic piece. yuan, hong-geng, mei-er le, and hai-ying jiang. “ying xiang de jiao lü yu jiao lü de ying xiang: dui bu lai ke xiao shi ‘fei meng’ de san ceng chan shi [anxiety of influence and influence of anxiety: a threefold interpretation of william blake’s poem ‘the fly’].” lan zhou da xue xue bao (she hui ke xue ban) [journal of lanzhou university (social science edition)] 35.5 (sept. 2007): 94-99. in chinese. the essay attempts to examine blake’s poem “the fly” by “locating and interpreting some of its ‘intertexts’” and by identifying “the correlation between the poem and these intertexts.” yuan, xian-jun. “wei lian bu lai ke de bei jü yi shi [william blake’s sense of tragedy].” bei jing da xue xue bao (ying yu yu yan wen xue zhuan kan 2) [journal of beijing university (special issue 2 on english language and literature)] (1992): 25-30. in chinese. yuan argues that blake’s sense of tragedy is the basis of his aesthetic mind; blake thinks that “only human beings can save themselves from their own misery.” yuan, xian-jun. “wei lian bu lai ke de ling shi shi jie [william blake’s visionary world].” wai guo wen xue [foreign literature studies] issue 69[1] (1998): 47-53. in chinese. an interpretation of blake’s vision of the world along the lines of plato’s spiritual world and the biblical world that suggests that blake tries to liberate himself from the fetters of the material world. yuill, david. “artist to return to re-paint graffiti mural.” southwark news 14 april 2009. about the 50' mural representing the tree with angels at peckham rye of blake’s vision, painted by stan peskett on goose green. z zeng, fang-rong. “bu lai ke shi ge zhong de lun li si xiang [on the ethical thoughts in blake’s poetry].” wai guo wen xue yan jiu [foreign literature studies] no. 6 (2005): 20-27. in chinese. blake pursues an ideal ethical world in his poems, which consists of “freedom” and “happiness.” zhang, chi-heng. “bu lai ke—xian dai zhu yi de yu yan zhe [blake: the prophet of modernism].” wai guo wen xue ping lun [foreign literature review] no. 4 (1989): 103-06. in chinese. a comment on blake as an announcer of the arrival of modernism on the basis of the modernist elements in his poems. zhang, de-ming. “mo gui de zhi hui [the wisdom of the devil: on blake’s poems about hell].” du shu [reading] no. 8 (1988): 108-13. in chinese. a running commentary on several poems in songs of innocence and songs of experience but not distinguishing the different versions of the same-title poems. zhang, dong-rui. “ren lei ling hun de jie mi zhe, tan suo zhe he ge ming zhe—cong shi zhong gan shou shi ren wei lian bu lai ke [william blake: the man who reveals, explores, and revolutionizes the human soul].” ping yuan da xue xue bao [journal of pingyuan university] no. 4 (2008): 50-51. in chinese. a general comment on blake as a poet. zhang, guo-shen. “wei lian bu lai ke shi ge zhong de xian dai zhu yi chu xing [the embryo of modernism in william blake’s poems].” an qing shi fan xue yuan xue bao (she hui ke xue ban) [journal of anqing teachers’ training college (social sciences edition)] 26.1 (jan. 2007): 19-21. in chinese. the essay argues that “blake’s poems are against religious traditions” and that he “eulogizes the liveliness and vigor of the original human spirit.” zhang, hong, and na wang. “ren lei xin ling de liang zhong dui li zhuang tai—qian xi bu lai ke de tian zhen zhi ge he jing yan zhi ge [‘two contrary states of the human soul’: an analysis of blake’s songs of innocence and songs of experience].” cang zhou shi fan zhuan ke xue xiao xue bao [journal of cangzhou teachers’ training college] 23.3 (sept. 2007): 20-21. in chinese. a sketchy comment on blake’s work. *zhang, mi. “yi sha yi shi jie [to see a world in a grain of sand].” zhong xue sheng bai ke: wen zong li zong [encyclopedia for middle-school students: humanities and sciences] no. 12 (2009): 57-58. in chinese. a biographical sketch of blake. zhang, si-qi. “bu lai ke shi ge chuang zuo zhong de dong fang yin su [on the oriental elements in blake’s poetic creations].” tian jin wai guo yu xue yuan xue bao [journal of tianjin foreign studies university] 12.1 (jan. 2005): 21-27. in chinese. a running commentary on elements of painting and mysticism in blake’s poems, but little discussion of the “oriental elements.” zhang, su-ping. “bu lai ke ‘the tyger’ yi shi de yin yu jie du [an interpretation of blake’s metaphor in ‘the tyger’].” xin zhou shi fan xue yuan xue bao [journal of xinzhou teachers’ training university] 23.4 (aug. 2007): 49-50. in chinese. a reading of the political, religious, and social meanings in blake’s metaphor in the poem. zhang, xiao-ning. “bu lai ke shi ge fan ying de she hui xian shi [on the social reality reflected in blake’s poems].”  xin xiang xue yuan xue bao (she hui ke xue ban) [journal of xinxiang university (philosophy and social sciences edition)] 22.3 (june 2008): 108-10. in chinese. a comment on how blake’s poems “reflect the social reality” in two respects: “poor people’s miserable lives, the church’s cruelty.” zhang, xun. “lun bu lai ke ‘tian zhen zhi ge’ de tian zhen [on innocence in blake’s songs of innocence].” xi an wai guo yu xue yuan xue bao [journal of xi’an international studies university] 13.2 (june 2005): 90-92. in chinese. the essay suggests that blake reveals through the songs that innocence is exactly the way to the essence of the universe, that innocence is wisdom, and that it commands a profound power. zhang, yang-li. “lun bu lai ke ‘lao hu’ de xiu ci yi shu xiao guo [on the rhetorical and artistic effects of blake’s poem ‘the tyger’].” gui gu [silicon valley] no. 10 (2008): 193-94, 191. in chinese. an analysis of blake’s use of rhyme, imagery, allusion, and rhetorical questions in “the tyger.” zhao, jian-fen, and guo-yan yang. “shi lun ‘tian zhen zhi ge’ zhong bu lai ke de si xiang yan bian [on the spiral development of blake’s thinking].” shijiazhuang xue yuan xue bao [journal of shijiazhuang university] 9.2 (march 2007): 70-73. in chinese. a comment on blake’s changes from idealism to realism as reflected in his poems. zhao, li-hong. “tan bu lai ke shi ge xiang zheng shou fa de miao yong [on the perfect use of symbolism in blake’s poetry].” shan xi guang bo dian shi da xue xue bao [shanxi radio and tv university journal] 7.4 (dec. 2005): 93-94. in chinese. a brief discussion of imagination, imagery, and religion in blake’s poems. zhao, li-hong, and gui-e yan. “bu lai ke zuo pin zhong zong jiao de shen ke ying xiang [the religious impact on william blake’s poetry].” hu nan guang bo dian shi da xue xue bao [journal of hunan radio and tv university] no. 2 (2008): 61-62. in chinese. an attempt to show how blake’s thoughts change “from religious fantasy to religious criticism.” zhao, wei. “wei lian bu lai ke shi ge wen ti shi xi [on the style of william blake’s poems].” ji nan da xue xue bao [journal of jinan university] 9.6[6] (1999): 63-66. in chinese. an analysis of “the fly” and “the sick rose,” focusing on the diction, vocabulary, and grammar of the poems. *zhao, zhi-fang. “huo zhi hu: xi fang yi dai shen hua [fire tiger: a western myth].” du shu yu xie zuo [reading and writing] 11 (2000): 10-12. in chinese. a brief analysis of “the tyger.” zheng, an-wen. “ai zhi guo [‘the garden of love’].” ying yu zhi shi [knowledge of english] no. 4 (2008): 13. in chinese. a translation and running commentary on blake’s poem. zhu, fang. “shi xi wei lian bu lai ke de ‘lao hu’ de yi xiang te se [an analysis of the characteristics of imagery in william blake’s poem ‘the tyger’].” liao ning jiao yu xing zheng xue yuan xue bao [journal of liaoning educational administration institute] no. 3 (2009): 161-62. in chinese. an interpretation of the meanings transmitted by the images in “the tyger.” zhu, gui-cheng. “shi lun tian zhen yu jing yan zhi ge zhong yi xiang—xiang zheng de yun yong [on the use of images and symbols in songs of innocence and of experience].” si chuan wai guo yu xue yuan xue bao [journal of sichuan international studies university] 17.1 (2001): 45-47. in chinese. many of the symbols in blake’s songs of innocence and of experience are implicit and elusive, but most are drawn from the bible and the greek myths. they can also be observed as a whole or a system, in which blake employs a major or a central group of related symbols to form a dominant symbolic pattern [author’s abstract]. zhu, xiang-jun. “cong bu lai ke de ‘lun dun’ tan ying yu shi ge de shang xi [from blake’s ‘london’ to appreciation of english poetry].” huai hua shi zhuan xue bao [journal of huaihua university] 10.4 (1991): 91-93. in chinese. the essay uses blake’s “london” to explain the use of imagery, figurative language, rhythm, and sound in poetry. §zimbaro, valerie p. “william blake.” encyclopedia of apocalyptic literature. santa barbara [california]: abc-clio, 1996. zou, guang-sheng. “lun bu lai ke shi ge de chao yue xing [on the transcendental quality in blake’s poems].” xu zhou shi fan da xue xue bao (zhe she ban) [journal of xuzhou normal university (philosophy and social sciences edition)] 24.2[6] (1998): 117-20. in chinese. the essay comments on the romantic urges in blake’s songs of innocence and songs of experience and suggests that blake transcends the ethical confinement of the time and dreams of an ideal world. division ii: blake’s circle barry, james (1741–1806) irish painter *dunne, tom, and william l. pressly, eds. james barry, 1741-1806: history painter. 2010. <blake (2011)> review dennis m. read (see blake 46.3, above). cumberland, george (1754–1848) dilettante, polymath, friend of blake a remarkably excellent web site for the cumberland family, maintained by david man, reproduces the volume of 19 watercolors entitled on the handsome gilt front cover views | in | spain and portugal | taken during the campaigns of his grace | the duke of wellington | — | by g. cumberland, jun. with a printed “description of the views. … no. 6, king’s road, sloane square, | london: printed by william nicol, | cleveland-row, st. james’s,” signed in old brown ink “geo cumberland j.r”. these were printed as views | in | spain and portugal | taken during the campaigns of his grace the duke | of wellington | by george cumberland j.r. | only 30 copies printed | = [watermark 1818] with 12 prints (copies in the british library and the british museum department of prints and drawings). this is a parallel to g. cumberland, jr., scenes chiefly italian (1821). the site also reproduces numerous publications by george cumberland, including two with engravings by blake (thoughts on outline [1796] and an attempt to describe hafod [1796]), one that blake owned (the captive of the castle of sennaar [1798]), and cumberland’s contributions to the monthly magazine. a volume of “drawings | by the | late | g. cumberland” (as it is described on the binding) was acquired in 2012 by the e. j. pratt library of victoria university in the university of toronto. there are scores of drawings pasted into it and loose. many of the drawings represent scenes from his travels in italy (florence, venice, pompeii, gandolfo lake, frascati, naples) and later in england (“bishopsgate near windsor,” where cumberland lived for a time, bristol [he lived for many years in clifton], bath, westminster abbey, and driffield, where his brother richard was vicar). there are portraits of his artistic friends such as charles townley (engraver), granville sharp, charles stothard and his father thomas stothard (blake’s friend), samuel shelley (miniaturist), and richard collins (miniaturist). there are also illustrations for paradise lost and don quixote. see illus. 5-7, 9-11. cumberland’s paradise lost watercolors are particularly exciting because blake was profoundly interested in milton (he was “of the devils party without knowing it” [the marriage of heaven and hell, pl. 6]). blake made scores of illustrations for milton’s works, particularly l’allegro (6 in 1816-20), comus (8 in 1801, 8 in 1815), on the morning of christ’s nativity (6 in 1809, 6 in 1815), paradise lost (12 in 1807, 12 in 1808, 3 in 1822), paradise regained (12 in 1816-20), and il penseroso (6 in 1816-20). cumberland’s watercolors for paradise lost are for adam and eve in the garden of eden (illus. 6), adam and eve listening to the angel (illus. 7), the expulsion from the garden, called “forsake me not adam” (illus. 9), and “satan sin & death” (illus. 10). an inventory of the contents of the sketchbook will be published as “george cumberland sketchbook discovered” in notes and queries in march 2014. 5. “the captive designed by g cumberland senr 1771” (cumberland sketchbook, victoria university in the university of toronto, watercolor at f. 21v). the captive, in a brown robe, sits on a pile of straw and looks toward a small, low, barred window. a black shape on the window embrasure may represent the shadow of a person with a pointing finger. beside the captive is a low stone bench (his bed?) with a brown wicker basket on it. a massive chain fixed to the bench seems to lead to the captive’s right ankle, and another heavy chain is affixed to the wall behind him. this may be the picture of the captive, from sterne, which cumberland exhibited at the royal academy in 1782, as lot 551. 6. adam and eve in the garden of eden (cumberland sketchbook, victoria university in the university of toronto, watercolor at f. 48r). adam and eve, frankly naked, are watching a squirrel in a tree, with brilliant tropical flowers and birds round them. a reaping hook(!) and a bound sheaf of grain are in the foreground, a lamb lying on the back of a lion is behind adam, and a long but harmless serpent is wrapped round the tree between adam and eve. in all these milton illustrations, adam has tightly curled black hair and eve has long wavy orange locks. 7. adam and eve with the angel (cumberland sketchbook, victoria university in the university of toronto, watercolor at f. 49r). adam and eve, both naked, are listening to a seated angel with orange hair and a long white robe. adam lies on the ground leaning on his right elbow and looking with a rapt expression at the angel, while eve stands holding a pineapple. exotic fruits and flowers are spread before them, over their heads is a vine heavy with grapes and bright birds, behind the angel is a date palm in fruit, and at the bottom right is a large brown raptor. blake made watercolors of raphael warns adam and eve (1807) (butlin #529.6, pl. 637) and (1808) (butlin #536.6, pl. 650). 8. john flaxman, adam and eve with guardian angels (14.6 x 11.4 cm.) (n.d.) (yale center for british art, paul mellon collection, b1975.4.321). the subject, except for the guardian angels, is the same as in cumberland’s watercolor of adam and eve in the garden, but there is a powerfully dramatic contrast between the peacefully self-absorbed adam and eve and the bursting energy of the guardians. 9. adam and eve expelled from the garden of eden (cumberland sketchbook, victoria university in the university of toronto, watercolor at f. 50r), inscribed “forsake me not adam.” adam and eve are naked but for leaves; adam kneels on his left knee with a gesture of submission while holding the right wrist of eve, who hides her eyes. above them are date palms in fruit, beside them is a long snake, and in the trees are bright birds. beneath the tree canopy amid clouds a black-haired figure with a headband gestures for them to leave. blake made watercolours of the expulsion of adam and eve from the garden of eden (1807) (butlin #529.12, pl. 643), (1808) (butlin #536.12, pl. 656), and (1820-25) (butlin #781a, pl. 1026). 10. “satan sin & death” (cumberland sketchbook, victoria university in the university of toronto, watercolor at f. 51r). satan at left, winged and naked but for a gray cloth over his shoulders and a shield, poises his spear at death at right, gray and emaciated, naked but for a golden crown. death flourishes his spear at satan. between them sin, naked, raises her right hand to restrain satan, while she holds in her left hand the wrist of death. behind death billow clouds of smoke, and behind satan are four howling dogs. in the background is a wall of massive stones with what may be a portcullis, and behind the dogs hangs a massive key. the legs of sin are scaled and serpentine. blake’s designs of satan, sin and death are surprisingly similar to cumberland’s but not close: (c. 1780) (butlin #101, pl. 108), (1807) (butlin #530, pl. 725), (1807) (butlin #529.2, pl. 633), and (1808) (butlin #536.2, pl. 646). 11. two small, loose sketches with the cumberland sketchbook (victoria university in the university of toronto) lettered “geo. cumberland sen.r” and “tho. stothard, r.a.” (stothard was elected to the royal academy in 1794). cumberland’s self-portrait represents him sketching al fresco. cumberland, some anecdotes of the life of julio bonasoni (1793) reviews monthly review (aug. 1793): 406-10 (“3s. boards,” mostly quotation from the “plan for the improvement of the arts in england”; “all this seems rational”). “new books.” scots magazine 55 (aug. 1793): 389 (listed at “3 s. boards”). anon. [john ireland?], “monthly catalogue,” critical review (nov. 1793): 360 (“2s. 6d. boards”; about the plan for a national gallery). cumberland, a sermon ([1807]) 12. [george cumberland],  a sermon, for a general fast [1807], collection of david man, a previously untraced work discovered in 2012 by the collector. = │ a │ sermon, │ for a │ general fast, │ suitable to christians of all denominations │ and calculated to revive the genuine spirit │ of our holy religion. │ = │ by a layman. │ = │ confess your faults one to another and pray one for another, │ that ye may be healed. james v. 16. │ = │ london: printed for longman, hurst, rees, and │ orme, paternoster-row; and b. barry, bristol. │ price one shilling. │ lane and co. printers, bristol [1807]. location: david man, the only copy known to me. size: 14 x 21.6 cm., untrimmed. watermark: vertical chain lines. binding: stitched but not bound. this previously untraced work was described in the posthumous “list of [cumberland’s] works” as “a sermon for a general fast. london: printed for longman, hurst, rees, & orme, and b. barry, bristol.” in his letter to the monthly magazine 33 (1 april 1812): 212, cumberland called it “a sermon without any signature.” the authoritative list of cumberland’s works in anon., the bristol memorialist (bristol: printed for and published by william tyson, 1823) 63, describes it as “a sermon for a general fast, suitable to christians of all denominations, calculated to revive the genuine spirit of our holy religion, by a layman, 1804.” however, the date should probably be february 1807, for it is listed at 1s. among “books published february 1807” in universal magazine of knowledge and pleasure ns 7.39 (feb. 1807): 174. a “presentation copy to mr. douce” of a sermon is inscribed “i wrote and published this when we were making a farce of parting.—g.c.”samuel halkett and john laing, dictionary of anonymous and pseudonymous english literature, 9 vols. (edinburgh: oliver and boyd, 1926-63) 5: 228, erroneously identifying “g.c.” as “george colman, the younger.” cumberland, original tales (1810) original tales was listed at 10s. in belfast monthly magazine 26 (sept. 1810): 222. g. cumberland. monthly magazine (1 april 1807): 233-34.cumberland’s contributions to the monthly magazine here largely derive from the reproductions of them at the cumberland family web site, maintained by david man. none is recorded in bentley, a bibliography of george cumberland (new york: garland, 1975). most are untitled letters “to the editor of the monthly magazine.” the titles here derive from the running heads. quotations from the translation of baptista porta’s natural magic (1658) in folio about extracting salt from salt water. g. cumberland, bristol, 4 nov. 1807. “painting in transparent colours on transparent bodies.” monthly magazine (1 dec. 1807): 430-31. george cumberland. “appeal in favour of milliner’s [sic] apprentices.” monthly magazine (1 april 1808): 196-98. g. cumberland. “remarks on the bishop of london’s address.” monthly magazine (1 july 1808): 493-95. g. cumberland. “lord elgin’s collection of antiquities from athens.” monthly magazine (1 july 1808): 519-20. g. cumberland, bristol, 14 june 1808. “education of the poor.” monthly magazine (1 aug. 1808): 27. correspondence about literacy among prisoners in newgate between cumberland and sir richard phillips, one of the sheriffs of london [and publisher of the monthly magazine].recorded from a clipping without identification of the monthly magazine in bentley, a bibliography of george cumberland 59. g. cumberland, bristol, 4 jan. 1809. “on the prevention and cure of consumption.” monthly magazine (1 april 1809): 226-28. g. cumberland, culver-street, bristol, 10 april 1809. “vindication of chatterton, from a mis-statement in an essay, by dr. sherwin.” monthly magazine (1 june 1809): 436-38. g. cumberland. monthly magazine (1 nov. 1809): 377-79. an addendum and corrigenda to his account of charles grignion (jan. 1809); about “rules for executing caricaturas.” g. cumberland. “account of dr. fox’s asylum for lunatics.” monthly magazine (1 dec. 1809): 477-79. g. cumberland, bristol, 25 aug. 1811. “description of an alligator from jamaica.” monthly magazine (1 nov. 1811): 327-28. g. cumberland, 10 oct. 1811. “inefficacy of the act for regulating stage-coaches.” monthly magazine (1 nov. 1811): 336. g. cumberland, bristol, 10 jan. 1811. “abraham taylor, the musical boy.” monthly magazine (1 feb. 1812): 7-8. g. cumberland, 10 jan. 1812. “whitewashed monuments.” monthly magazine (1 march 1812): 110-11. g. cumberland, bristol, 4 april 1812. “mr. cumberland on lancaster’s school.” monthly magazine (1 may 1812): 322. george cumberland, bristol, 1 may 1812. “mr. cumberland, on female prostitution” or “mr. cumberland, on the reformation of females.” monthly magazine (1 june 1812): 417-19. cumberland deals with the same subject in the captive of the castle of sennaar (1798) and in his letters to the monthly magazine, (1 april 1814): 199-203 and (1 oct. 1814): 210. mr. g. cumberland. “placed under mr. banks’s fine bust of john horne tooke, esq. on his birth day in mdcccx.” monthly magazine (1 june 1812): 450-51, under “original poetry.” the poem, extracted from cumberland’s manuscript poem “happiness,” ll. 573-614, was “printed [in] only 25 copies” (according to his inscription in the copy in victoria university in the university of toronto).see bentley, a bibliography of george cumberland 29. g. cumberland, bristol, 18 oct. 1814. “neglect of foot-paths.” monthly magazine (1 april 1815): 221-22. g. cumberland, bristol, 29 april. “mr. cumberland’s schemes for preserving the lives of persons shipwrecked.” monthly magazine (1 june 1815): 402-03. g. cumberland. “mr. cumberland on proper objects of geology” or “mr. cumberland on the effects, &c. of the deluge.” monthly magazine (1 sept. 1815): 130-33. g. cumberland, “mr. cumberland on the reformation of stage coaches.” monthly magazine 40 (1 nov. 1815): 289-91.see bentley, a bibliography of george cumberland 64. for replies, see john farey, sen., “improvement of stage travelling,” monthly magazine (1 dec. 1815): 384-86, and e., “stage-coach travelling,” monthly magazine (1 dec. 1815): 406-07. g. cumberland, bristol, 4 oct. 1815. “mr. cumberland on the mosaic system.” monthly magazine (1 dec. 1815): 404-05. “p.s. i have nearly terminated my collection of all the parts of the bradford encrinate, and made very correct drawings of them. when i see an opportunity, i mean to publish them, as it will give a key to the system of nearly all of the species.” probably this is his reliquiae conservatae (1826). “mr. george cumberland has prepared for the press a work on the commencement and progress of the art of engraving, as far as relates to the advantages derived from the productions of the italian school,” according to “intelligence in literature and the arts and sciences,” new monthly magazine (1 dec. 1816): 431. this may be his essay on the utility of collecting the best works of the ancient engravers of the italian school (1827). g. cumberland. “on the neglect of a most useful servant of god and mankind. sonnet.” monthly magazine (1 june 1821): 439. it begins: “immortal lancaster!” flaxman, john (1755–1826) sculptor, friend of blake §symmons, sarah. “john flaxman and francisco goya: infernos transcribed.” burlington magazine 113.822 (sept. 1971): 506, 508-12. fuseli, john henry (1741–1825) painter, friend of blake elmes, james. the arts and artists, or anecdotes and relics, of the schools of painting, sculpture and architecture. 3 vols. london: john knight & henry lacey, 1825. 12º. a collection of brief anecdotes, some acknowledged to be from pilkington’s dictionary [ed. fuseli], including “a royal academician and professor fuseli” (1: 26), “professor fuseli and the portrait painters” (1: 115), “haydon, northcote, and fuseli” (1: 115-16), “fuseli’s character of albert durer” (2: 26-28), “fuseli’s opinion of albert durer” (2: 57-59), “professor fuseli’s definition of the style of rubens” (2: 165-66), and “fuseli’s character of michel angelo” (3: 142-43). linnell, john (1792–1882) painter, blake’s friend and patron 2008 april 1-18 power & poetry: the art of john linnell. catalogue of lowell libson ltd. and the fine art society. 2008. <blake (2009)> huon mallalieu, “introduction: the landscapes of john linnell.” palmer, samuel (1805–81) painter and disciple 2012 may 30-june 22 samuel palmer, his friends and his followers: edward calvert, george richmond, frederick griggs, paul drury, graham sutherland, robin tanner. catalogue of an exhibition held at the fine art society, london, may 30-june 22, 2012. 27 cm., 87 pp. printing imperfections in william blake’s virgil wood engravings and what they reveal printing imperfections in william blake’s virgil wood engravings and what they reveal by louise wilson louise wilson (louise.wilson@ngv.vic.gov.au) has been conservator of paper at the national gallery of victoria since 2008 and contributes to the care of the ngv’s rich and diverse paper-based holdings. she has broad research interests and has published on a range of subjects, including the conservation of middle eastern manuscripts, conservation treatment of indian papercuts, technical examination of eighteenth-century tapa cloth from the pacific region, european watermark collections, and the materials and techniques of william blake, albrecht dürer, and francisco de goya. the national gallery of victoria (ngv) in melbourne, australia, is perhaps best known to blake scholars for its magnificent suite of watercolors illustrating dante’s divine comedy, which was purchased from the john linnell sale at christie’s in london in 1918. the ngv also holds a composite group of fourteen wood engravings that blake designed and engraved for dr. robert thornton’s pastorals of virgil, which were purchased in london in 1959 and are believed to have formed part of linnell’s collection as well. at first glance, these wood engravings are underwhelming; four are quite poor impressions, and one is a unique hybrid between a print and an ink wash drawing. nevertheless, extensive technical examination undertaken by the ngv’s paper conservation studio has revealed a range of printing imperfections, attributable to material choice and studio practices, which provide a tangible commentary on the complex history of blake’s virgil woodblocks and the various artists who printed from them. much has been written about the history of blake’s wood engravings, so only a brief overview will be provided here. at linnell’s suggestion, thornton commissioned blake to produce wood engravings for his third edition of the pastorals of virgil (1821), a schoolbook designed to teach young boys latin. blake’s task was to illustrate ambrose philips’s imitation of virgil’s first eclogue, which follows two shepherds—​the old, sagacious thenot and the young, brooding colinet—​in various rural settings. working in a pocket sketchbook, he created preparatory drawings in pencil, pen and ink, and wash that he later copied with ink onto pieces of boxwood in readiness for engraving (illus. 1).blake’s uncut woodblock of the prophet isaiah foretelling the destruction of jerusalem (british museum, 1939,0114.19) shows his technique of drawing lines with ink directly on the boxwood as a guide for cutting. i am indebted to bethan stevens for showing me this woodblock. 1. illustration for thornton’s virgil, and unyok’d heifers, loitering homewards, low (see enlargement). pen and black ink and gray wash over graphite, 3.7 x 9.1 cm. princeton university art museum. gift of frank jewett mather, jr. x1944-531. the boxwood preparer would have provided blake with pieces of timber that had been cut across the growth rings. known as the end grain, this feature (which enables more exacting, detailed cutting) distinguishes wood engravings from woodcuts, which are carved into timber cut longitudinally along the grain. using familiar tools for engraving on metal, blake cut away the compositional lines on the boxwood and printed proofs in black ink on china paper with his rolling press.china paper is believed to have come to the united kingdom as the lining of timber chests carrying tea. it is sometimes referred to as india paper, since the tea was imported by the british east india company, but this is a misnomer (jenkins 1). the growth rings of the end grain are sometimes visible as lines of reduced printing on wood engravings, as is the case with blake’s proof sheet now at the fitzwilliam museum (illus. 2). 2. proof sheet, showing curved lines of reduced printing corresponding to the concentric growth rings of the boxwood (see enlargement). wood engraving, 17.0 x 10.4 cm. (sheet). photo © fitzwilliam museum, cambridge. ms cfm 31 f.3r. i am grateful to amy marquis, research assistant in the department of paintings, drawings, and prints at the fitzwilliam museum, for confirming the measurements. when the woodblocks were prepared for publication, they were cut down, presumably to enable four images to fit on the chosen paper size with room for a title underneath each. the impressions in thornton’s schoolbook would have been printed on a hand press, which was ideally suited to relief processes like wood engraving. the printer would have positioned four of the small woodblocks, with a title in letterpress type under each one. the type and images were then wedged tightly together in a forme so that they didn’t move during the printing process.the individual blocks and letterpress type would have been put in a frame-like structure called a chase, with any vacant space around the blocks packed out with small pieces of timber known as furniture. quoins (expandable metal locks) would have been placed within the chase and opened with a key until the blocks were locked tight. this locked-up unit is referred to as a forme (see marsh). while bound copies of thornton’s virgil are highly collectible and expensive today, at the time of publication it was a simple textbook, to be printed within a budget. to keep costs down, a variety of poor-quality papers (both machineand handmade) were used.i noted the variety and quality of the paper while examining a copy (1863,1114.299) at the british museum on 25 july 2019. generally, impressions in the work are not fine quality, possibly because of the speed of production and the paper. shortly after the book was published, linnell purchased the woodblocks for his collection, and he later commissioned fellow artist edward calvert to print sets.according to linnell’s diary for 8 september 1828, calvert brought impressions printed from the original blocks (lister, edward calvert 24). linnell had eight children, five of whom are known to have been artists.his sons—​john, james, william, and thomas—​are all recorded in census records as artists. he commissioned his daughter hannah to copy pictures for him while she was in italy with her new husband, samuel palmer (lister, letters of samuel palmer 94). the woodblocks remained in the linnell family for over a century, with various family members undertaking printing sessions over this time.personal communication with robert n. essick, 16 september 2016, and nick lott, 7 may 2016. four different paper types (indicating at least four different printing sessions) were used to produce the ngv’s impressions: two subtly different china papers and two western papers, one made on a laid mould and the other on a wove mould (illus. 3-6). 3. “menalcas’ yearly wake” (see enlargement). wood engraving, 3.5 × 7.4 cm. (image), 6.4 × 9.9 cm. (sheet). national gallery of victoria, melbourne. 1883-5. printed on western laid paper; viewed by shining light through the sheet (transmitted light), showing the slightly transparent laid lines running vertically down the paper support.the titles assigned to the virgil wood engravings vary from institution to institution. those i use for the ngv impressions are from the most recent ngv blake catalogue (leahy). 4. “colinet resting at cambridge by night” (see enlargement). wood engraving, 3.3 × 7.3 cm. (image), 4.5 × 8.2 cm. (sheet). national gallery of victoria, melbourne. 1881-5. printed on western wove paper; viewed under transmitted light, showing the fine woven texture of the paper. 5. “with songs the jovial hinds return from plow” (see enlargement). wood engraving, 3.5 × 7.6 cm. (image), 5.6 × 9.1 cm. (sheet). national gallery of victoria, melbourne. 1885-5. printed on china paper with transparent lines (known as su lines) running horizontally across the sheet; viewed under transmitted light. 6. “thenot remonstrates with colinet, lightfoot in the distance” (see enlargement). wood engraving, 3.7 × 7.4 cm. (image), 4.1 × 7.6 cm. (sheet). national gallery of victoria, melbourne. 1875-5. printed on china paper without transparent su lines; viewed under transmitted light. perhaps most striking is the range of printing imperfections, potentially showing different hands and studio practices at work. to better understand these faults and use them to identify printing sessions, i consulted eighteenthand nineteenth-century printing treatises and sought other virgil wood engravings for comparison. the ngv holds the only nineteenth-century impressions of these engravings in australia. with no comparable material to examine locally, i traveled to the united kingdom to study a variety of material related to the prints, including blake’s preparatory drawings, proofs, and original woodblocks; bound copies of the pastorals of virgil; over 150 impressions of the wood engravings; and documents pertaining to the woodblocks in the john linnell archive.this travel opportunity was made possible through the generous support of peter clemenger, ao, and the late joan clemenger, ao. to gain insight into calvert’s printing technique and choice of materials, i examined numerous impressions of his own wood engravings. calvert is best known for his intricate wood engravings of pastoral idylls, which are heavily influenced by blake’s virgil designs. he ceased producing his own meticulous prints around 1831 and is unlikely to have been printing from the virgil woodblocks after this date (butlin and gott 138). an extraordinary album of prints and drawings assembled by alexander constantine ionides (illus. 7) contains a complete set of the virgil wood engravings and eleven of calvert’s fifteen pastoral compositions (evans 540-41). ionides became acquainted with calvert around 1828, when the latter was producing virgil impressions for linnell; it has been suggested that the virgil wood engravings in the album are from this printing session (evans 544). the scrapbook is therefore the perfect starting point for comparing calvert’s materials and methods—​in the impressions of both his own and the virgil wood engravings—​with virgil impressions in other collections. 7. alexander constantine ionides album, fol. 2r (see enlargement). photo © victoria and albert museum, london. e.1349-2001. the contents of the ionides album are adhered to the pages, limiting the scope for paper examination. despite this impediment, it was possible to discern that most of the paper supports used to print the virgil and calvert wood engravings bear the hallmarks of china paper. this very thin support, which many of the virgil impressions that i examined are printed on, is produced from bamboo fibre. the addition of clay filler gives it a beautiful opacity, and the lack of sizing agent makes the end product highly absorbent of ink and yielding to woodblocks (schenck 33-34).the addition of clay, which is hygroscopic, renders china paper vulnerable to foxing, which is initiated by moisture. many of the impressions examined (including those in the ngv collection) have undergone aqueous treatment to reduce foxing stains. this type of treatment causes subtle changes to the original character of the paper, such as altering the dimensions and thickness. it is easily identified, even on very small works like the virgil wood engravings, because it commonly contains the marks of its making, such as tiny spherical pits or inclusions resulting from the addition of clay. under raking light (a light source shining across the paper), distinct linear indentations can be observed on one side. these surface imperfections are attributed to the way that chinese papermakers attach newly formed sheets to a drying wall with a coarse brush, the hairs impressing lines on the surface of the wet sheet (illus. 8; schenck 33-34). 8. “colinet departs in sorrow, a thunder-scarred tree on the right” (see enlargement). wood engraving, 3.6 × 7.4 cm. (image), 3.8 × 7.6 cm. irreg. (sheet). national gallery of victoria, melbourne. 1876-5. verso viewed under raking light, showing diagonal linear striations across the china paper support. while most prints in the ionides album are on china paper, at first sight the impressions of “with songs the jovial hinds return from plow,” “colinet’s fond desire strange lands to know,” “colinet mocked by two boys,” and calvert’s “the ploughman” appear to be printed on western laid paper. this finding is not entirely surprising, since there are virgil impressions on western laid paper, such as “menalcas’ yearly wake” at the ngv. laid paper is made on a timber frame (a mould) with a sieve-like surface consisting of closely spaced brass wires running horizontally across the frame (the indentations these leave on the paper are called laid lines) and more widely spaced wires running vertically that are twisted around the laid wires to hold them in place (the indentations these leave are known as chain lines) (illus. 9-10).although the laid wires are oriented horizontally on the papermaking mould, when the paper is used, the artist might turn the paper so that these lines are oriented vertically (see illus. 3 and 11). 9. griffith jones of nash mill, hertfordshire, laid papermaking mould and deckle (1809) (see enlargement). oak, pine, copper, and brass, 42.6 x 107.2 cm. © bower collection, london. the chain wires on this mould (which is designed for making two sheets at a time) are 3.2 cm. apart and there are eight laid wires per cm. (the wires are not clearly visible in this image; see the detail in illus. 10.) the watermark is a fleur-de-lys on a crowned shield with a gj monogram below; the countermark is g jones / 1809. i am indebted to peter bower for this information. 10. detail of the mould in illus. 9, showing the horizontal laid wires (see enlargement). the twisted chain wires are just visible, sitting on top of the timber ribs of the mould. © bower collection, london. when paper is formed, the wet pulp settles into the gaps, leaving thinner paper furrows in the areas corresponding to the placement of the laid and chain wires. laid paper can be identified with transmitted light, which reveals the uneven thickness that results from the surface of the mould (see illus. 3). the side that the paper is formed on is referred to as the wire side. the laid lines, when viewed under raking light, form a texture on the wire side (like the surface of corduroy fabric) (illus. 11). the verso of the sheet, the felt side, is relatively smooth. 11. “menalcas’ yearly wake” (see enlargement). wood engraving, 3.5 × 7.4 cm. (image), 6.4 × 9.9 cm. (sheet). national gallery of victoria, melbourne. 1883-5. viewed under raking light, showing the ridges between laid lines running vertically down the paper support. as i studied more virgil impressions and calvert wood engravings in other collections, i noted the appearance of laid lines on numerous prints. some of these prints are not adhered to secondary supports, making it possible to examine them using transmitted light. when light was shone through them, the distinctive alternating density of laid lines was not visible, and it became clear that they are printed on china paper, not western laid paper as their appearance suggests.in addition to the impressions in the ionides album at the victoria and albert museum, i found many examples at the fitzwilliam museum, british museum, and national gallery of scotland. i thank harry metcalf, paper conservator, fitzwilliam museum, for carefully examining the proof first state of calvert’s “the ploughman” (p.605-1985) and confirming that it is printed on china paper. there will of course be cases where impressions, whether adhered to secondary supports or not, appear to be on laid paper and indeed are. under magnification, it was evident that the lines are areas of reduced printing seemingly related to the printing process, rather than the paper support (illus. 12). 12. edward calvert, “the ploughman,” showing horizontal lines of reduced printing (see enlargement). wood engraving, 23.2 x 37.9 cm. photo © fitzwilliam museum, cambridge. p.605-1985. the spacing of the lines was found to be the same frequency as the laid lines of many western papers,i am grateful to yvonne (bonnie) hearn, former sherman fairchild conservation fellow, thaw conservation center, morgan library & museum, currently conservator of paper, ngv, for measuring lines of reduced printing on calvert’s “the ploughman” (1974.50:2) at the morgan. which confirmed that laid paper was in close contact with the primary support during the printing process. for example, it could have been used as an interleaving to help freshly printed impressions to dry, though this is improbable because china paper, highly absorbent of ink, does not require humidification prior to printing. moreover, examination did not reveal any signs that interleaving paper had been removed from the recto of the prints, such as deposition of fibres on inked areas. the more likely explanation is that laid paper was placed on top of the china paper during printing, perhaps to add cushioning or assist with handling the thin primary support, resulting in slightly reduced contact between the inked block and the china paper in areas corresponding to the furrows of the laid lines. in 1828, calvert lent his press to linnell, noting that “its great defects are in being too small and being altogether a make-shift” (lister, edward calvert 24).a “make-shift” press for printing could refer to one designed for another purpose, such as a winepress. it is difficult to discern whether he is alluding to a type of hand press or a rolling press; potentially either could have produced impressions with the lines of reduced printing that i observed. in both scenarios, the inked matrix would have been placed face up on the bed of the press and covered first with the paper to be printed, followed by a piece of wastepaper. in the case of calvert prints with lines of reduced printing, the wastepaper was probably laid paper, with the wire side in direct contact with the verso of the printing paper, and the impressions would have been pulled using moderate pressure.great pressure would have flattened the texture of the laid paper, resulting in more even contact between the woodblock and the china paper and thus more uniform printing. not all calvert prints bear this printing imperfection, because when the wastepaper required replacement, either laid paper—​with the felt side in contact with the printing paper—​or wove paper could have been used. linnell is known for his landscape and portrait paintings and engravings. like many artists, he regularly had his engravings printed professionally, negating the need for a printing press of his own (viscomi, blake and the idea of the book 103).he purchased a few copperplates from hughes & kimber, who supplied presses and materials for letterpress, lithographic, and intaglio printing. they were also copperplate printers, so it is possible that he utilized this service (“british artists’ suppliers”). at times, however, there was at least one printing press at his studio in cirencester place, fitzroy square. the year before linnell borrowed calvert’s press, catherine blake had moved to cirencester place, bringing her late husband’s rolling press with her (bentley 468). the press remained there from august 1827 until spring 1828, when catherine relocated to charles heathcote tatham’s office and studio (viscomi, “posthumous blake”). the ngv’s impressions of “sabrina’s silvery flood” and “thenot and colinet sup together” (illus. 13-14) both have imperfections indicating that they were produced on a rolling press: isolated areas of unintentional printing on their margins, referred to as foul ink. this error can occur if a rolling press is used to print thick woodblocks without the necessary adjustments being made. blake’s virgil woodblocks are approximately 2 cm. thick, so the height of the rollers should have been raised and the printing blankets staggered to create a gradual incline for the rollers to travel along.a printing blanket is made of felted wool. the slight pliability of the blanket helps to achieve good contact between the printing matrix and the paper to be printed on. the inked matrix would have been placed face up on the bed of the press and covered first with the paper to be printed, followed by a piece of wastepaper, and a printing blanket would have been laid over the top of this sandwich. while there is no way of knowing if these impressions come from the press that belonged to blake, the presence of foul ink shows that the precautions required for printing them on a rolling press were not taken; as a result, a small jolt occurred as the woodblocks passed under the rollers, shifting the paper slightly and accidentally transferring ink to the margins (faithorne 57). 13. “sabrina’s silvery flood,” showing foul ink on the left side of the upper margin (see enlargement). wood engraving, 3.3 × 7.3 cm. (image), 3.5 × 7.5 cm. (sheet). national gallery of victoria, melbourne. 1879-5. 14. “thenot and colinet sup together,” showing foul ink on the lower margin (see enlargement). wood engraving, 3.4 × 7.6 cm. (image), 6.0 × 8.9 cm. irreg. (sheet). national gallery of victoria, melbourne. 1884-5. the unique and beautiful ngv impression of “unyoked heifers loitering homeward, low” (illus. 15) has an unusual black square in the lower-left margin, signaling that it was printed at the same time as another block (as was the case when the woodblocks were printed for thornton’s pastorals of virgil). since formes are not commonly used with a rolling press and it would have been very difficult to print multiple blocks at the same time without one, i assume that this impression comes from a hand press. 15. “unyoked heifers loitering homeward, low,” showing partial printing of another woodblock in the lower-left corner (see enlargement). wood engraving, 3.3 × 7.7 cm. (image), 4.7 × 9.4 cm. (sheet). national gallery of victoria, melbourne. 1886-5. i examined numerous impressions where the ink was too heavily applied in some passages, leading to loss of definition, and underapplied in others, creating a hazy, indistinct effect (illus. 16). 16. “the good shepherd chases away the wolf,” showing underinking on the lower-left corner and overinking in areas of the tree on the right (see enlargement). wood engraving, 3.5 × 7.4 cm. (image), 4.1 × 8.1 cm. (sheet). national gallery of victoria, melbourne. 1878-5. there are several potential causes: inconsistent pressure when printing, because of the uneven height of the woodblock (unlikely, since the impressions that i studied did not exhibit reduced printing in the same location on each image);this issue can be rectified by a process called making right, whereby the back of the woodblock is gradually built up by adhering fragments of paper, shaped identically, to the areas that are underprinting. uneven dampening of the paper prior to printing (improbable for impressions on china paper, as previously noted); or, the most likely cause in the case of the virgil wood engravings, uneven application of ink.personal communication with michael phillips, 2 august 2019. in the nineteenth century, both daubers and composition rollers were tools for applying ink to a matrix, with daubers being the traditional implement.daubers are also called ink balls or dabbers. they are the shape of a muller and can be made by rolling wool or cloth into a ball and covering it tightly with linen or leather to form a round pad. a wooden handle is bound into the open end. it is probable that, like blake, calvert and the linnell family used a dauber to apply ink to the virgil woodblocks. achieving an even application requires considerable skill, the ink needing to be built up with consistently thin sequential layers on the surface of the matrix. “menalcas’ yearly wake” (ngv, illus. 17) and tate’s impression of the same image, “for him our yearly feasts and wakes we hold” (tate, a00123), were printed with ink that does not have a well-balanced ratio between pigment and oil, leaving an oily halo. 17. “menalcas’ yearly wake,” showing the mottled appearance of the image relating to the use of excess weak oil to make the ink (see enlargement). wood engraving, 3.5 × 7.4 cm. (image), 6.4 × 9.9 cm. (sheet). national gallery of victoria, melbourne. 1883-5. this imperfection suggests the application of an ink that was not commercially produced. printing treatises available during blake’s time describe the making of ink at length and discuss the use of “weak” and “strong” oil combined with dry pigment to create black printing ink (faithorne 62-64). weak oil is not heated to the same extent as strong oil, resulting in differences in their flowing qualities—​weak oil is more mobile and ideally suited to intaglio techniques, where it migrates into the incised lines, while strong oil is more viscous, producing an ink with a short tack that sits on the surface of the matrix and is ideally suited to relief techniques like wood engraving.personal communication with adrian kellett, 11 october 2019. the appearance of the ink in these impressions reveals that weak rather than strong oil was added. linnell produced intaglio prints and was probably more familiar with the type of ink required; calvert was more focused on wood engraving and would have known the nuances of preparing ink for that technique. this suggests that these two prints are more likely to have been created by a member of the linnell family. “menalcas’ yearly wake” also has marked blind embossing on its verso (illus. 18), indicating that the pressure exerted during printing was much greater than that used to pull tate’s impression.tate’s impressions have undergone aqueous treatment, which could have reduced blind embossing, but is unlikely to have removed it completely.i am grateful to rosie freemantle, former paper conservator, tate, for sharing details of the treatment history of tate’s prints. 18. “menalcas’ yearly wake,” viewed from the verso under raking light, showing blind embossing (see enlargement). wood engraving, 3.5 × 7.4 cm. (image), 6.4 × 9.9 cm. (sheet). national gallery of victoria, melbourne. 1883-5. it was probably printed on a rolling press, where the pressure is easily controlled. printers sometimes increase pressure to achieve a second pull, meaning that they do not reink the matrix and instead try to extract any residual ink.personal communication with michael phillips, 2 august 2019. the ngv’s print is on a medium-weight western laid paper support, which is not ideally suited to achieving a good impression from a woodblock. it was possibly created as the first stage of cleaning the block after a printing session, a process requiring great care to avoid compromising the clarity of the engraved lines. pulling prints using scrap paper lying around the studio is a quick, easy, and common method of removing the bulk of the residual ink prior to gentle wiping with a soft cloth.personal communication with ros atkins, 27 october 2019. the resulting prints are referred to as maculature impressions. many of the impressions that i studied have tiny dots of ink within fine compositional lines. for example, the sky region of the ngv’s “colinet mocked by two boys” (illus. 19) and tate’s impression of the same work, “colinet with his shepherd’s pipe, mocked by two boys” (tate, a00122), have numerous dots within identical lines. they may have been produced during the same printing session, or the blocks may not have been adequately cleaned between sessions, allowing minute nuggets of ink to dry.personal communication with nick lott, 7 may 2016. 19. “colinet mocked by two boys,” showing tiny nuggets of dried ink trapped between engraved lines around the figure of the boy on the left (see enlargement). wood engraving, 3.5 × 7.7 cm. (image), 3.9 × 8.2 cm. (sheet). national gallery of victoria, melbourne. 1882-5. the ngv’s “unyoked heifers loitering homeward, low” (illus. 15) is very lightly printed and extensively touched with bistre ink.infrared examination confirmed that the ink is bistre, a brown ink made from chimney soot. like “menalcas’ yearly wake,” it may well be a maculature impression, casually produced as a means of cleaning the block at the end of a session; rather than casting it away, somebody, perhaps blake himself or one of the linnells, applied delicate washes of ink in a manner similar to blake’s preparatory drawings (see illus. 1). blake and his wife, catherine, are known to have touched prints with ink in order to rectify a printing imperfection or enhance the composition, as are members of the linnell family.the woodblocks of “thenot remonstrates with colinet,” “blasted tree and blighted crops,” and “colinet departs in sorrow, a thunder-scarred tree on the right” were cut down roughly, leaving an upper corner angled. on an impression of “thenot remonstrates with colinet” (fitzwilliam museum, p.59-1950), pencil has been used to continue the composition into the margin, creating a right-angled corner. an impression of “blasted tree and blighted crops” in the collection of michael phillips has been touched with ink on the upper-left corner to complete the composition (phillips, william blake: apprentice and master 193). linnell or his sons are credited with hand coloring seven virgil wood engravings; hannah palmer (née linnell), who colored a set of linnell’s lithographs, could also have had a hand in them.see lister, the letters of samuel palmer 94; catalogue of the john linnell collection 10; and james. linnell’s set of lithographs after michelangelo are described in the 1918 sale catalogue as being colored in italy by mrs. samuel palmer. i am indebted to lauren lott for showing me the catalogue and the hand-colored set of lithographs. the artist responsible for the beautiful brushwork on “unyoked heifers loitering homeward, low” is unlikely to have been calvert, as he was strongly against touching wood engravings with ink (lister, the letters of samuel palmer 18). technical examination of the virgil wood engravings in the ngv and comparison with examples in other collections have provided insights into how imperfections can help us to understand the method in which an impression was produced. the ngv’s composite group includes impressions printed with different presses, papers, and inks. several that were perhaps destined for the dustbin were retained, and one was extensively touched with ink and transformed into a work of great beauty. examination of works in collections in the united kingdom revealed a subtle quirk of calvert’s printing technique that can aid identification of virgil impressions printed by him. it is now possible to appreciate the ngv’s wood engravings in their broader context and to recognize that, while many of them may not be the finest impressions, they provide a valuable window into the history of blake’s virgil woodblocks. works cited bentley, g. e., jr. blake records. 2nd ed. new haven: yale university press, 2004. “british artists’ suppliers, 1650–​1950 h.” national portrait gallery. <https://​www.​npg.​org.​uk/​research/​programmes/​directory-​of-​suppliers/​h>. accessed 21 nov. 2019. butlin, martin, and ted gott. william blake in the collection of the national gallery of victoria. melbourne: national gallery of victoria, 1989. catalogue of the john linnell collection of highly important works by william blake obtained direct from the artist …. london: messrs. christie, manson, & woods, 1918. evans, mark. “blake, calvert—​and palmer? the album of alexander constantine ionides.” burlington magazine 144, no. 1194 (sept. 2002): 539-49. faithorne, william. the art of graving and etching. 2nd ed. london: a. roper, 1702. james, g. ingli. “blake’s woodcuts illuminated.” apollo 99 (1974): 194-95. jenkins, penny. “plate papers and india proof prints.” quarterly [newsletter of the british association of paper historians] no. 13 (dec. 1994). 11 pp. leahy, cathy. william blake. melbourne: national gallery of victoria, 2014. lister, raymond. edward calvert. london: g. bell and sons, ltd., 1962. —​—​—​, ed. the letters of samuel palmer. vol. 1. oxford: clarendon press, 1974. marsh, peter. “letterpress printing.” museums victoria collections. <https://​collections.​museumsvictoria.​com.​au/​articles/​1323>. accessed 12 apr. 2020. phillips, michael. william blake: apprentice and master. oxford: ashmolean museum, 2014. schenck, kimberly. “the role of china paper in nineteenth-century french printmaking.” looking at paper: evidence and interpretation. ed. john slavin, linda sutherland, john o’neill, margaret haupt, and janet cowan. proceedings of a symposium held at the royal ontario museum and art gallery of ontario, toronto, 13-16 may 1999. ottawa: canadian conservation institute, 2001. 32-40. viscomi, joseph. blake and the idea of the book. princeton: princeton university press, 1993. —​—​—​. “posthumous blake: the roles of catherine blake, c. h. tatham, and frederick tatham in blake’s afterlife.” blake 53.2 (fall 2019): 141 pars. whitehead, angus. “‘an excellent saleswoman’: the last years of catherine blake.” blake 45.3 (winter 2011–​12): 76-90. remembrance: john e. grant john e. grant, 1925–2020 by alexander s. gourlay alexander s. gourlay (agourlay@risd.edu) teaches at the rhode island school of design. “singular & particular detail is the foundation of the sublime” i first encounteredthis tribute is adapted from the foreword to prophetic character: essays on william blake in honor of john e. grant (west cornwall, ct: locust hill press, 2002). john e. grant as a graduate student taking a team-taught course at the university of iowa. i had chosen it because half of it was devoted to william hogarth—​jack’s half, the other half, was about blake. i planned to put up with blake, who seemed by turns naive and utterly opaque, and concentrate on hogarth. when my first efforts in the course came back to me covered front and back with jack’s marginal commentary—​acidic, oracularly terse, and plentiful—​i became more determined than ever to steer clear of blake and, especially, this impossible grant person. it didn’t work out that way. at some point i noticed that although jack was copiously critical of my work, he was paying extraordinary (and probably undeserved) attention to what i had written—​dissecting every argument, looking up every allusion, double-checking my notes—​and that even when he was laying waste to my pretensions and sophistries he was doing so without hostility or sadism. i noticed as well that if i managed to get anything right he would find it and say so. i read some of his published work and was utterly taken by his passionate contrarianism and strange prose, glittering and graceful at times, but also rambling and digressive, with occasional baffling passages in which the enthymemes seem to be suppressing all premises as too obvious to be mentioned. particularly winning were his wit, his occasional ferocity, but most of all the great care he took to get everything as right as he possibly could, even if the result was neither immediately impressive, admirably neat, nor notably conclusive. i took a couple more courses from jack, eventually collaborated on some articles, and wrote a dissertation with him—​even lived in a basement bedroom in his house while working as an editorial assistant on the iowa blake videodisc project.the 1981–85 videodisc project, created by jack, mary lynn johnson, and joan sustik huntley, proposed to link databases held in a computer to several thousand individually addressable video frames of blake works on a videodisc; a pilot version focusing on the night thoughts designs worked very well but was not distributable for technical and copyright reasons. the full version of the project, eventually rejected for funding by the national endowment for the humanities, anticipated many of the features now incorporated in the william blake archive (http://​www.​blakearchive.​org). the archive uses digital technologies barely dreamed of in 1985 (indeed, one neh reviewer argued against funding the iowa project on the grounds that a pc with a 20mb hard drive, which was needed to run it, would never be affordable). see mary lynn johnson, “the iowa blake videodisc project: a cautionary history,” wordsworth circle 30 (1999). i came to appreciate his great, peculiar gifts as a scholar, his honesty and doggedness as a thinker, and his extraordinary virtues as a friend and colleague—​however terrifying he sometimes seemed to be in print, he was modest and courtly in person, warm and very funny in company, and a brilliant correspondent. a chronological checklist of jack’s scholarly writings on blake and others follows. even the blake pieces are only in part about blake, and jack also wrote in characteristic fashion about other romantics and artists and writers as diverse as reynolds and magritte, austen and beckett. several of his best-known essays are jeremiads against various forms of critical sloth, cant, and carelessness, but these are more properly understood as a side effect of his critical project than as central to it, explosions of exasperated energy accumulated in the course of struggling carefully through arguments that didn’t prove to be worth the effort. jack was also noted for combining a warlike spirit with exhaustive attention to detail, on the assumption that even the most passionate campaign against error has to be conducted with due attention to blake’s “minute particulars.” in struggling to avoid the kinds of mistakes he deplored, jack regularly found himself—​and sometimes lost himself—​discovering the irreducible constituent atoms of the matter before him, and then dealing with them one by one. william kupersmith, the longtime editor of philological quarterly, once remarked as he read one of jack’s long, severely detailed reviews, “this man has an instinct for the capillaries.” but sweating the small stuff was not really the essence of his criticism either. the most notable theme for me, in that it accounts for so many other features of his work, is his insistence, above all, that understanding a work of art requires the interpreter to take it and its creator seriously, no matter how difficult (or impossible) it may be to prove anything definitive about the creator’s intentions, and no matter how many other interesting things might also be going on in the individual or collective unconscious, or in the broader culture, or in the mind of the critic. jack was himself often very interested in such epiphenomena, especially when they cast light upon matters that concerned him more—​he was not a garden-variety intentionalist or a mere critical reactionary, as he sometimes appeared to be at his most harrumphing. he assumed that both artists and their interpreters are engaged in profoundly serious projects, and that critics must attend with modesty and care to the complexity and subtlety with which texts and/or pictures can convey meaning, especially meaning to which the creators might reasonably be expected to assent. that principle often led to exasperation with criticism that didn’t reflect such care or that was disproportionately attentive to past criticism or to a novel theory rather than to the creator’s work. for jack a good critic was a prophet, never a priest invoking a sacred tradition or a methodological mystery. he was always looking for ideas that were both original and useful for thinking about art, literature, and the world: prophecy in application. he collaborated and/or kept company with several great scholar-activists, but for the most part jack’s direct engagement in social causes was practical rather than theoretical—​especially during the vietnam war, when he spent a vast amount of energy on picket lines, vigils, and meetings. his more recent intellectual engagement tended to be isolated rather than collective or partisan, perhaps because telling one’s best account of truth as uncompromisingly as possible is almost always impolitic in the short run. not all authors or artists were equally susceptible to jack’s characteristic approach. as a critic he generally focused on those who seemed to him to be most serious about their own work, then struggled to find an approach that did them justice. in the case of blake this meant respectfully rethinking even the most basic interpretive assumptions of the first few generations of his critics and vigorously attacking subsequent interpreters when they compound the old errors. it also led jack early to champion blake criticism that treats his visual and verbal art together, recognizing both as equally sophisticated, inseparable products of the same unconventional, brilliant mind. jack was not the first, loudest, or most prolific advocate of such criticism of blake. but as a result of his efforts, along with those of several other scholars of the post-war generation, critics working today rarely assume, as they once did, that they can write about blake’s visual art without knowing and thinking about its literary contexts, or write about his poetry or prose without thinking about his art and its contexts. jack’s most characteristic critical move was to review the whole history of intellectual responses to a given artistic phenomenon or trope, both creative and critical, then show how the work at hand might represent a meta-response reflecting not only the most sophisticated of these responses but somehow transcending the level of understanding that they represent. these projects didn’t always pan out. the stage of historical review was often so expansively and digressively thorough that neither jack nor the reader could ever quite get home again from the preliminary tour of the intellectual arena, and sometimes the transcendent dimension was so subtle that it was doubtful whether anyone but jack could find it. but even when he didn’t wrap everything up in a neat bundle, his passionate carefulness and commitment to discovering some kind of enduring truth about the art that he was examining set an extraordinarily high standard for others to follow, and most of his pieces, long or short, are sown with enigmatic references to promising critical paths that he never fully explored. if jack told you something was worth looking into he was almost always right, even when he himself had gone off in search of some other grail. many of the works in the checklist will be useful reading long after the controversies that gave rise to them have been forgotten.i have not included most letters to editors. some important unpublished work is not listed here—​most notably the draft commentary on the night thoughts designs that jack and david v. erdman, edward j. rose, and michael j. tolley worked on for decades, and have occasionally circulated in manuscript. also omitted are at least a dozen papers read at conferences but never prepared for print; once jack solved a problem to his own satisfaction he often moved on to another rather than spending additional time to promulgate the results. i particularly recommend the little-known “apocalypse in blake’s ‘auguries of innocence’” from 1964, the better-known “the fate of blake’s sun-flower” from 1973, and the more recent “on first encountering blake’s good samaritans” of 1999/​2000, but there is great and enduring critical writing to be found throughout the list, much of it tucked into his book reviews. anyone who undertakes to consider any topic that jack covered would be well advised to read him carefully before setting out—​at the very least, jack’s point of view will clear the critical sinuses, and even if he makes only a little progress in solving them, his perspective will elucidate some of the most important problems. a good deal of jack’s work will vanish, however, not because of the quality of the thought that went into it but because it is written in the margins of papers and books, in letters, and, most famously, on museum postcards (my graduate school office-mate noticed while reading gail godwin’s 1974 novel the odd woman that she had merged selected characteristics of jack, someone like ruskin, and mr. casaubon to create gabriel weeks, the rossetti scholar who communicates with postcards carefully chosen from a vast stock in his desk). even if one were to preserve jack’s private correspondence, most of it wouldn’t mean very much to anyone other than its recipient, and even the recipient might struggle to keep up with the densely allusive sentences packed into a grant missive, typically a large manila envelope containing several pages of prose in jack’s loopy, unambiguous handwriting, a copy (“fyi”) of a carefully sharpened letter to some editor, murky photocopies of several pictures with cryptic annotations, and one or more postcards bearing only a word or two to hint at their relevance. when these packets arrived i knew how i would be spending the rest of the day, and i never threw them away when i finished them, but when an old one turns up, carefully repacked into its envelope, i usually find that i have lost the context, and that what was once a glorious puzzle has become an impenetrable enigma. what will endure, though it won’t necessarily bear his name, is the fruit of jack’s work in private consultation and correspondence. as the checklist shows, much of his best-known published work is collaborative, including blake’s visionary forms dramatic (1970, with david v. erdman), the great night thoughts edition (1980, with erdman, michael j. tolley, and edward j. rose), and the norton critical edition of blake’s poetry and designs (1979, 2nd ed. 2007, with mary lynn johnson). but jack was a collaborator in another very important way. at one time or another (and sometimes without knowing it), many blake scholars have run something past jack for the kind of critical rolfing that only he could do. his commentary on a manuscript, crawling up the margins and spilling onto the backs of the pages, often reflected as much scholarly energy as the text on which he was commenting, and no essay was ever the worse for having its capillaries worked over by jack. mary lynn johnson and jack grant a chronological checklist of publications by john e. grant 1. (co-author) “the identity of esther summerson.” modern philology 55 (1958): 252-58 (with james h. broderick). 2. (co-author) “a critical dialogue on shakespeare’s sonnet 71.” texas studies in literature and language 1 (1959): 214-32 (with jack m. davis). 3. “the art and argument of ‘the tyger.’” texas studies in literature and language 2 (1960): 38-60. (see also item 4.) 4. (editor) discussions of william blake. boston: d. c. heath, 1961. this anthology contains an expanded version of item 3 (64-82) as well as an introduction and a summary of criticism (vii-xi). 5. “misreadings of [blake’s] ‘the fly.’” essays in criticism 14 (1961): 481-87. (see also item 9.) 6. “dante’s mirrors, and apocalypse.” texas studies in literature and language 4 (1962): 289-313. 7. “animadversions upon professor brown’s ‘apocalypse.’” noble savage 5 (1962): 12-18. 8. “blake on bloomsday.” yale review 52 (1963): 591-98. a review of bloom, blake’s apocalypse. 9. “interpreting blake’s ‘the fly.’” bulletin of the new york public library 67 (1963): 593-613. rept. in blake: a collection of critical essays. ed. northrop frye. twentieth century views. englewood cliffs, nj: prentice-hall, 1966. also rept. (trans.) in interpretationen. ed. willi erzgraber. frankfurt: fischer bücherei, 1970. 10. “apocalypse in blake’s ‘auguries of innocence.’” texas studies in literature and language 5 (1964): 489-508. (a shorter version was read at the 1961 meeting of the modem language association.) 11. “blake: original and new.” modern language quarterly 25 (1964): 356-64. a review of damon, blake’s “grave” ; adams, william blake; bentley, ed., william blake, “vala” or “the four zoas.” 12. “the colors of prophecy.” nation 200 (1965): 91-92. a review of keynes, blake: poet. printer. prophet. 13. review of bostetter, the romantic ventriloquists. keats-shelley journal 14 (1965): 93-96. 14. review of hagstrum, blake: poet & painter. journal of aesthetics and art criticism 24 (1965): 126-28. 15. review of bentley and nurmi, a blake bibliography. modern philology 63 (1966): 351-64. 16. reviews of erdman, ed., the poetry and prose of william blake, with a commentary by bloom; damon, a blake dictionary ; ostriker, vision and verse in william blake. philological quarterly 45 (1966): 533, 533-35, 536-38. 17. “a checklist of writings by and about northrop frye.” northrop frye in modern criticism: english institute essays, 1965. ed. murray krieger. new york: columbia university press, 1966. 147-88. 18. (a and b) “tense and the sense of blake’s ‘the tyger.’” pmla 81 (1966): 596-99, 600-02. a two-part response and rejoinder to f. c. robinson, “verb tense in blake’s ‘the tyger,’” pmla 79 (1964): 664-69, which criticized certain details of item 3 and its manifestation in item 4. 19. “the revelation of the grand inquisitor.” southern review [australia] 2 (1967): 240-60. a penetrating discussion of this section of the brothers karamazov. 20. reviews of damon, ed., blake’s “job”; gillham, blake’s contrary states. philological quarterly 46 (1967): 328-30. 21. (a, b, and c) “recognizing fathers.” blake 1.2 (1967): 7-9. a critique of an article by connolly and levine in pmla 82 (1967): 257-264. “mother of invention, father in drag, or observations on the methodology that brought about these deplorable conditions and what then is to be done.” blake 2.2 (1968): 29-32. a surrejoinder to a rejoinder by connolly and levine in blake 1.3 (1967). “mothers and methodology.” blake 2.3 (1968): 50-54. a continuation of the above dispute, which is mostly about the adult accompanying the boy in songs 14. 22. review of keynes, ed., blake’s “songs of innocence and of experience.” philological quarterly 47 (1968): 571-80. 23. “two flowers in the garden of experience.” william blake: essays for s. foster damon. ed. alvin h. rosenfeld. providence: brown university press, 1969. 333-67. 24. “you can’t write about blake’s pictures like that.” blake studies 1 (1969): 193-202. a critique of an article by taylor in blake studies 1 (1968). 25. (a and b) “discussing the arlington court picture: part i, a report on the warner-simmons theory.” blake 3.4 (1970): 96-105. part ii, “studying blake’s iconography for guidance in interpreting the picture.” blake 4.1 (1970): 12-25. (see also item 28.) 26. review of dorfman, blake in the nineteenth century. philological quarterly 49 (1970): 328-29. 27. (a, b, and c) (co-editor) blake’s visionary forms dramatic. princeton: princeton university press, 1970 (with david v. erdman). it contains “from fable to human vision: a note on the first illustration [‘the haunted stream’ from blake’s illustrations to milton’s l’allegro]” (xi-xiv) and “envisioning the first night thoughts” (304-35). 28. “redemptive action in blake’s arlington court picture.” studies in romanticism 10 (1971): 21-26. a critique of an interpretation presented by warner and simmons in the same issue and a proposal for a new theory. (see also item 25.) rept. in the visionary hand: essays for the study of william blake’s art and aesthetics. ed. robert n. essick. los angeles: hennessey and ingalls, 1973. 29. “addenda and some solutions to tolley’s blake puzzles.” blake studies 3 (1971): 29-35. comments on an article in the same issue and discussion of a previously unnoticed drawing. 30. reviews of erdman, blake: prophet against empire, rev. ed.; raine, william blake. philological quarterly 50 (1971): 407-08, 409-10. 31. “imagination dead?” james joyce quarterly 8 (1971): 336-62. a contribution to a samuel beckett issue. 32. (a and b) “blake’s designs for l’allegro and il penseroso: part i, a survey of the designs.” blake 4.4 (1971): 117-34, with a related article by judith rhodes, “blake’s designs for l’allegro and il penseroso: thematic relationships in diagram,” 135-36. part ii, “the meaning of mirth and her companions.” blake 5.3 (1971–​72): 190-202. part i rept. in the visionary hand: essays for the study of william blake’s art and aesthetics. ed. robert n. essick. los angeles: hennessey and ingalls, 1973. 33. review of paley, energy and imagination. english language notes 9 (1972): 210-16. 34. “the visionary perspective of ezekiel.” blake studies 4 (1972): 153-57. 35. reviews of bentley, ed., the blake collection of mrs. landon k. thorne; bindman, ed., the blake collection of the fitzwilliam museum; bogen, ed., the book of thel; butlin, ed., the blake collection of the tate gallery, rev. ed.; todd, william blake: the artist; and four other books and articles. philological quarterly 51 (1972): 642-48. 36. “visions in vala: a consideration of some pictures in the manuscript.” blake’s sublime allegory: essays on “the four zoas,” “milton,” and “jerusalem.” ed. stuart curran and joseph anthony wittreich, jr. madison: university of wisconsin press, 1973. 141-202. 37. “the fate of blake’s sun-flower: a forecast and some conclusions.” blake studies 5 (1973): 7-58. 38. review of wright, blake’s “job”: a commentary. philological quarterly 52 (1973): 467-68. 39. (co-author) “illuminated books in the cincinnati art museum.” blake 7.2 (1973): 40-43 (with mary lynn johnson). a description and commentary. 40. “blake’s ‘illustrations of the book of job.’” times literary supplement (30 november 1973): 1484. a discussion of the newly rediscovered colored proofs. 41. reviews of wagenknecht, blake’s night ; sabri-tabrizi, the “heaven” and “hell” of william blake; frosch, the awakening of albion; mellor, blake’s human form divine. wordsworth circle 5 (1974): 183-89 (with replies by wagenknecht and mellor). 42. review of lindberg, william blake’s illustrations to the book of job. philological quarterly 53 (1974): 651. 43. review of elkins and forstner, eds., the romantic movement bibliography: 1937–​1970. romantics quarterly 13 (1974): 352. 44. review of phillips and paley, eds., william blake: essays in honour of sir geoffrey keynes. blake studies 7 (1974): 85-96. 45. (co-author) “blake’s vision of spenser’s faerie queene: a report and an anatomy.” blake 8.3 (1974–​75): 56-85 (with robert e. brown). this important article includes an excellent large-scale reproduction of the picture and many other illustrations. 46. “the female awakening at the end of blake’s milton: a picture story with questions.” milton reconsidered: essays in honor of arthur e. barker. ed. john karl franson. salzburg studies in english literature, elizabethan and renaissance studies 49. salzburg: universität salzburg, 1976. 78-101. 47. review of erdman and moore, eds., the notebook of william blake. modern philology 75 (1977): 196-201. 48. (co-editor) blake’s poetry and designs: a norton critical edition. new york: w. w. norton, 1979; 2nd ed., 2007 (second editor, with mary lynn johnson). 49. (co-editor) william blake’s designs for edward young’s “night thoughts”: a complete edition. 2 vols. oxford: clarendon press, 1980 (first editor, with edward j. rose, michael j. tolley, and david v. erdman). 50. review of s. foster damon, a blake dictionary, with a new index by morris eaves. blake 14.3 (1980–​81): 131-35. 51. “some drawings related to blake’s night thoughts designs.” blake 16.1 (1982): 7-11. 52. “who shall bind the infinite and arrange it in libraries? on bentley’s blake books and william blake’s writings.” philological quarterly 61 (1982): 277-304. 53. “blake in the future.” studies in romanticism 21 (1982): 436-43. a contribution to a festschrift issue in honor of david v. erdman. 54. (co-author) “the norton critical edition of blake: addenda and corrigenda.” blake 16.2 (1982): 107-10 (second author, with mary lynn johnson). 55. (co-author) “the melancholy shepherdess in prospect of love and death in reynolds and blake.” bulletin of research in the humanities 84 (1982): 169-89 (second author, with alexander s. gourlay). 56. “shows of mourning in the text of jane austen’s persuasion.” modern philology 80 (1983): 283-86. 57. “a re-view of some problems in understanding blake’s night thoughts.” blake 18.3 (1984–​85): 155-81 (with responses by w. j. t. mitchell, morton d. paley, and d. w. dörrbecker). 58. (co-author) “visual resources for teaching songs.” approaches to teaching blake’s “songs of innocence and of experience.” ed. r. f. gleckner and m. l. greenberg. new york: modern language association, 1989. 28-33 (with mary lynn johnson). 59. reviews of eaves and fischer, eds., romanticism and contemporary criticism; reed, ed., romanticism and language. blake 22.4 (1989): 124-33. 60. “this is not blake’s ‘the tyger’ (with apologies to rené magritte).” iowa review 19 (1989): 112-55. 61. “the apparition and evanishment of coleridgean form in recent critical discourse.” coleridge’s theory of the imagination today. ed. christine gallant. new york: ams press, 1989. 113-27. 62. “jesus and the powers that be in blake’s designs for young’s night thoughts.” blake and his bibles. ed. david v. erdman. west cornwall, ct: locust hill press, 1990. 71-115. 63. (co-author) review of the franklin library edition of songs of innocence and of experience. blake 24.1 (1990): 260-61 (second author, with alexander s. gourlay). 64. “discovering ‘la belle dame sans merci.’” approaches to teaching keats’s poetry. ed. walter h. evert and jack w. rhodes. new york: mla, 1991. 45-50. 65. review of ferber, the poetry of william blake. blake 28.2 (1994): 71-77. 66. “original sinners.” harvard magazine 97 (1994): 88. 67. “on first encountering blake’s good samaritans.” blake 33.3 (1999–​2000): 68-96. 68. “krapp and godot play iowa city.” beckett circle/le cercle de beckett 23 (2000): 1-2. 69. “the powers of ‘death’ in blake’s night thoughts engravings.” 1650–​1850: ideas, aesthetics, and inquiries in the early modern era 7 (2002): 257-80. 70. “prospects of divine humanity: a vision of heaven, earth, and hell.” re-envisioning blake. ed. mark crosby, troy patenaude, and angus whitehead. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, 2012. 130-43. an argument that blake’s picture known as the fall of man should be called prospects of divine humanity. review: william blake, vahiy kitapları [prophetic works], trans. kaan h. ökten william blake. vahiy kitapları [prophetic works]. trans. kaan h. ökten. i̇stanbul: pinhan publications, 2015. 233 pp. 40,60 try (approximately $8.00), paperback. reviewed by ramazan saral ramazan saral (ramosaral@gmail.com) is a research assistant in the department of english language and literature at ege university, turkey. he is currently a phd candidate in the same department, focusing on romanticism with a particular interest in the works of william blake. unfortunately william blake is not widely known in turkey. this obscurity is partly because of his difficult symbolism. even people adept at english find blake challenging and incomprehensible; some relinquish the endeavor after giving it a try, but most never take it up. even academics in turkish literary departments tend to stay clear of blake (with the exception of the songs, this is true in many places, not just in turkey); the general public is even less exposed to him. under these circumstances, this new translation by kaan h. ökten (professor at mimar sinan fine arts university, i̇stanbul) is particularly valuable, and an important stepping stone for the introduction of blake in turkey. the compilation includes eight of the early illuminated prophetic works, ordered chronologically (except for the first book of urizen, which disrupts the chronology, as ökten places it together with its complementary works): the book of thel (1789), visions of the daughters of albion (1793), america a prophecy (1793), europe a prophecy (1794), the song of los (1795), the first book of urizen (1794), the book of ahania (1795), and the book of los (1795). in a concise introduction, ökten portrays blake as an artist and an engraver, describes the prophetic works, and sketches the significance they hold for greater understanding of blake’s central concerns. he then explains his method of translation, in which he tries to make use of the vast expressive range of the turkish language while keeping the epic cadence of blake’s diction as much as possible. he finishes with a personal note about the purpose of his translation: he aims to reach those who are as interested in the blakean perception of the universe as he is. although there have been other translations of blake (especially of songs and the marriage of heaven and hell) by prominent figures in turkish academia, ökten notes that his is the first that provides facsimiles of the plates and employs his novel approach to translation. previous translations, while trying to retain as much of the original meaning as possible, seemed bland, with a lack of blakean sublimity. the translations of the songs could not retain the rhythm peculiar to them because of complications caused mainly by the differences in structure and poetic conventions between the two languages. moreover, all previous translations i have seen were text focused, without the relief-etched designs, thereby stripping the plates of their unity. ökten’s compilation, however, is a wonderful rendition that captures blake’s original work and passes it to the turkish public through a mythic language that still has a certain blakean touch. it is difficult to maintain such mythical and visionary poetic diction as blake’s—ökten masterfully manages to do so. the archaic words he uses in translation give the poems an air of mysticism, and he captures as well something like the rhythmic language so peculiar to blake. here is his version of “thel’s motto,” together with a phonetic rendering: /θel'ɪn düs'tʊrʊ kʊyʊ'nʊn dɪbɪnde'kɪnɪ kʌr'tʌl bɪlɪr mɪ hɪtʃ joksʌ vʌrəp kœstebeɤe: mi sormʌlə hɪtʃ sʌklʌnər mə hɪkmet gümüʃ a:sa:dʌ joksʌ ʌʃkə ʌltən kʌseje mi kojmʌlə/ the summaries he supplies before each work give an overall understanding of blakean mythology even to those who have never been acquainted with it. in addition, the brief blake glossary he presents at the end of the introduction (simplified selections from s. foster damon’s a blake dictionary) is a great help for the reader who gets lost in the intricate symbolism. reading blake’s poetry without the illustrations is like walking through a valley of flowers with your eyes closed; you get only a portion of the eternity he lays before you. ökten’s compilation and translation are nearly optimal in this respect, as the left-hand pages contain the plates, and the right-hand pages the turkish translations. “i inhabited the land of ulro long before blake taught me its proper name”: czesław miłosz’s ziemia ulro/the land of ulro “i inhabited the land of ulro long before blake taught me its proper name”: czesław miłosz’s ziemia ulro/​the land of ulro by eliza borkowska eliza borkowska (https://​www.​elizaborkowska.​com) is associate professor of literature at swps university of social sciences and humanities in warsaw. she is the author of but he talked of the temple of man’s body: blake’s revelation un-locked (csp, 2009) and a pair of books presenting contrastive takes on wordsworth’s religious discourse, the presence of god in the works of william wordsworth and the absent god in the works of william wordsworth (routledge, 2020). she is also the coauthor (with rafał stankiewicz) of the first translation of blake’s jerusalem into polish (work in progress). olga tokarczuk, in her nobel lecture of 7 december 2019, observed that the public nowadays prefers facts to fiction (10-11). this is an auspicious remark for my purposes, as my theme will be the autobiographical book of czesław miłosz, another polish winner of the nobel prize for literature, who received his award in 1980, a year after tokarczuk’s literary debut. the blake of tokarczuk’s novel drive your plow over the bones of the dead is part of a fictional world, a curious addition to the story: agnieszka holland’s film spoor, adapted from the book and cowritten by the novelist, eliminates the blake references without much (or perhaps any) loss to the plot. conversely, the blake of miłosz’s ziemia ulro, initially published in 1977 (a round anniversary of blake’s birth and death), is a vital part of life. i will first recall a few relevant details from miłosz’s bi(bli)ography, then reflect on the character and quality of his tribute to william blake. unlike my chapter for the reception of william blake in europe, whose profile dictated the method (that is, an overview) and the narrow focus on the role miłosz’s book played in the history of the reception of blake in poland (borkowska 485-92), i will engage here more intensively with ziemia ulro and, by doing so, postulate a much more extensive appeal of miłosz’s work. in particular, i will be pointing to the importance and value of this book—​translated into english by louis iribarne as the land of ulro—​for international blake circles. miłosz (1911–​2004) was the author of numerous volumes of poetry, volumes of translations of poetry (into and from polish), and a variety of works in prose. the last category includes literary history and criticism (the massive historia literatury polskiej [the history of polish literature] and countless essays and prefaces), fiction (for example, the novel zdobycie władzy [the seizure of power]), and a number of works in which, as he puts it in the preface to the english translation of ziemia ulro, he “tried to explain the corner of europe from which [he came]” (v), like zniewolony umysł (the captive mind) or rodzinna europa (native realm). in 1951, he emigrated from communist poland to the west, first to france, then, in 1960, to the united states of america. at the time he was writing ziemia ulro, he was a professor of slavic languages and literatures at the university of california, berkeley, teaching courses on dostoevsky, manichaeism, and polish literature. the latter, as he repeatedly emphasizes, was a spectacularly inconvenient position, because “what … polish writers could have been taught in america in the absence of any translations? only gombrowicz and witkiewicz” (13).unless specified otherwise, quotations from ziemia ulro derive from iribarne’s translation (with references to page numbers in the 1984 edition). this explains why miłosz was so active as a translator of polish literature into english: he needed material he could teach (see franaszek 401-02). at the same time, he continued writing his own poetry and prose in polish, his “incomprehensible language,” as he calls it (8). “i do not believe in the possibility of communing outside a shared language, a shared history” (4), he adds; this claim receives a complex illustration in ziemia ulro. the book, conceived as a work “for an exclusively polish audience” (7), is principally miłosz’s intellectual autobiography, his “spiritual self-portrait,” as it is characterized on the jacket of the english translation. yet, while looking back at the six-odd decades of his life from the vantage point of his residence in america, miłosz traverses the twentieth century, moving between poland and the west, europe and america, and offering in this way a humanist reflection that is much wider and more resonant than just a personal memoir. when he says, “i inhabited the land of ulro long before blake taught me its proper name” (183), he does not mean capitalist america, or capitalist france, or, for that matter, communist poland, but modern civilization: as he sees it, “the only civilization that has conquered the entire planet earth” (50)—​that is, both the west and the east. “originally confined to a small western european peninsula, that civilization elaborated its philosophy and science by modifying concepts of christian theology.miłosz further elaborates on this point in a later chapter of ziemia ulro: “by professing christianity, we assume a long legacy of spiritual and bodily oppression, of pacts between the altar and the throne, between the altar and the power of money. and yet there is the christianity of the locomotive and the electric bulb, of the atomic bomb and the laser, in short, of that mighty technology which rules the earth. … modern science and technology, universally studied by people of all races and tribes, is the product of tiny western europe, whose boundaries roughly coincide with the territorial radius of ecclesiastical latin” (265). since the eighteenth century, it has turned openly against its christian sources” (50). in this way, ziemia ulro transcends the boundaries of miłosz’s twentieth century. it relates to the entire “secular age” (taylor), including our own times, labeled in sociological and political discourse as a/the “post-secular moment.” exactly as miłosz predicted when he claimed that “this book joining past and present … is, in fact, a book addressed to the future, if not my own, then that of others” (27), ziemia ulro participates in the ongoing debate concerning the division between modern philosophy and theology—​science and religion, reason and faith—​and the resultant antinomy between scientific truth and human truth: “the world of scientific laws—​cold, indifferent to human values—​and man’s inner world” (94). miłosz is concerned with the psychological, moral, and spiritual effects of this schism, with the state of man who imbibes the attitudes and beliefs (and disbeliefs) of this science-oriented and science-defined civilization, which, following blake, he calls “ulro”: “urizen’s domain,” “that realm of spiritual pain such as is borne and must be borne by the crippled man,” “the land of the disinherited … where man is reduced to a supererogatory number, worse, where he becomes as much for himself, in his own eyes, in his own mind” (183, 32, 122). “myriads of planets spinning around in an infinite and absolute space. easily said,” he reflects, “but let us try to imagine, to locate our home in that infinity” (153). the primary focus of his discussion of this civilization is, for obvious reasons, literature; after all, ziemia ulro is an intellectual autobiography of a man who devoted all his life to writing, translating, anthologizing, criticizing, and teaching literature on an academic level. bearing this in mind, a particularly striking feature is that this outstandingly active, versatile, and well-read man of letters, when reflecting on the contemporary literary scene, is not able to name any authors who could suggest a convincing and sustaining alternative to this scientifically defined (and confined) paradigm. he says, “my blood runs cold when i pronounce the words: the twentieth century. vast territories of silence. in the din of language, in the millions of words per minute” (41). as miłosz sees it, the literature of what he calls “our savage century” (125) is a growth of ulro. it is a product of the crippled imagination chained within a crippling culture, unable to offer anything but vagueness,namely, various forms of escapism: the “isms” of twentieth-century art. despair, or decadence with its puerile tactics of self-defence—​sarcasm, irony, mockery, blasphemy—​which merely reflect this civilization, endorse its philosophical nihilism, and confirm the diminution of human values and the diminishment of humankind. it is in this context that miłosz points to four authors who, he claims, offer a much more adequate response to ulro in that they put up resistance and seek release. they engage “the ‘scientific world-view’ in a fundamental dialogue” (158) and come up with imaginative alternatives—​“a countervailing argument,” as he calls it. he identifies these authors in retrospect as the most important influences on his own “mind’s progress” (159). “life is short,” he adds, “and i am attracted less and less to a literature which is self-consciously literary. the degree to which a work is of extraliterary importance is determined by the power of a given author’s philosophy, that is, by the passion with which it is engaged with ultimate things” (121). these authors, whom i briefly survey below, are the four pillars of miłosz’s book. the first of those figures selected from the literatures of the world to support the argument of ziemia ulro is adam mickiewicz (1798–​1855), a leading polish romantic poet, the author of ballady i romanse (ballads and romances), the poetic drama dziady (forefathers’ eve), the national epic poem pan tadeusz, and numerous other works, which are quoted, referenced, analyzed, and criticized on dozens of pages of miłosz’s book. he reads mickiewicz as a writer resisting “scientific progress” through reliance on faith and the imagination, and as a poet of the earth-garden, from which the mind was not disinherited; miłosz once said that “every line of [his own] verse was indebted to mickiewicz” (120). the second figure in his list is oscar milosz (o. v. de l. milosz, 1877–​1939), miłosz’s relative, who mostly wrote in french; the shared family name and the affinity of fates (as émigrés) contributed to his interest in and special understanding of this author. miłosz lays particular emphasis on the way oscar milosz’s “metaphysical poems” in prose “lay out a kind of anti-newtonian ‘visual physics,’” opposing the notions of absolute space and time, and “castigat[ing] the mind which condemns itself to a homeless exile in a space factored and divided without end” (202). the third name highlighted in ziemia ulro is emanuel swedenborg, whose presence in this blakean context certainly does not surprise, but who was, however, an interest mediated by oscar milosz:miłosz admits: “if not for my interest in the work of oscar milosz, i would be largely uninformed about swedenborg” (136). czesław’s studies of swedenborg were prompted by his engagement with the writings of his relative (136-39), including oscar’s marginalia in a copy of the english translation of vera christiana religio “preserved in his private library” (138). and the fourth name in miłosz’s list is william blake—​notably, the only figure in this tetrad who comes entirely from outside the sphere of the author’s family connections or polish roots. miłosz emphasizes this point himself: “my resistance to foreign influence is worth stressing—​first, so no one will doubt that i am most of all indebted to the poetry of my native tongue; and second, so that my weakness for blake will be judged an exception and the extraliterary reasons for it made evident” (49-50). at the same time, blake is the strongest presence—​the most prominent of the four pillars supporting ziemia ulro—​because it is from blake that miłosz derives the metaphors and concepts, including the titular “ulro,” that organize his autobiographical book. what miłosz calls his “conversion to blake” dates back to wartime warsaw. “in one anthology,” he recalls, “i came across a few of blake’s poems, and i recognized them at once”: “in those times and in that landscape,” blake restored him to the raptures of his childhood. this early attraction was, as he puts it, “an emotional one, for my understanding failed me the moment i began to ponder the meaning of individual poems and lines.” yet these first encounters led to “several more attempts at deciphering [blake],” which were then followed by a period when he “delved in earnest.” by the time he was working on his book, the early “emotional” conversion transformed into an “intellectual fascination,” which he defines as “fundamental” (31). accordingly, throughout his reflection on blake in ziemia ulro, miłosz gives full vent to his expertise. he presents blake’s cosmology, explains his mythology and his system, and supports his readings with references to blake critics, including s. foster damon, kathleen raine, and northrop frye; the long quotations from, for example, fearful symmetry (195, 383-84)these passages from fearful symmetry are quoted on pp. 181-82 and 177-78 respectively. are explained with a graceful disclaimer: “paraphrasing is laborious work; if this task has already been performed for us, there is no reason why we should not make use of it” (181). true to the focus of the book, the miłoszian blake is, chief of all, a poet of resistance to ulro: he defends human values and the inner world of man by opposing “scientific progress,” the mathematical-empirical “scientific method,” and the “objective” mechanistic model of the universe. simultaneously, blake is able to offer “a countervailing argument,” an alternative to ulro: he constructs “a vision of man and the world vastly different from that adduced by eighteenth-century science and its modern descendants” (135)—​just like mickiewicz, swedenborg, and oscar milosz. what is specific to blake alone, however, and what constitutes his unique force, is the extent to which he resorts to what miłosz calls “aggressive tactics” (106). the blake of ziemia ulro is “a poet of fury”: embattled with the age, he attacks and indicts where others might bemoan: a christianity become an instrument of control in the hands of the powerful, a system of rules and punishments; the tyranny of kings who wage bloody wars; the human misery wreaked by the industrial revolution, then under way in england; the plight of slaves and indians, of women and children; the puritanical hypocrisy of sexual prohibitions; prostitution. above all, his fury was directed at that which sustained, facilitated, and sanctioned such an order, which became in a way its code, the language of the fall: at the science and philosophy founded by francis bacon. (165-66) another blakean strength underscored by miłosz is that, unlike, for instance, mickiewicz (who was “sheltered, for a time, by his provincial muse, lithuania” and “protected himself from the ‘learned’”), blake “bravely joined the battle” (122, 106). like goethe, who was waging his “thirty years’ war against newton” (94, 135)miłosz borrows this phrase from erich heller (heller 12).—​and also like oscar milosz, who was laying out his “anti-newtonian ‘visual physics’” and envisioning a science of the futureas miłosz further explains, “although he had not so much as heard the name einstein in 1916, [oscar milosz] had found—​as early as epître à storge—​confirmation of his intuition of the general theory of relativity” (202).—​blake “carr[ied] the contest to the enemy” (106). the miłoszian blake is a poet “endowed … with an intuitive grasp of the most complicated problems of physics” (172), a point that miłosz supports with references to fearful symmetry, as well as to books by ronald grimes and donald ault. “the material contained in these works,” he adds, “like the blakean oeuvre itself, would provide enough food for thought to last the next couple of [centuries]” (171-72).i am correcting here an obvious misprint in the english translation; where iribarne reads “decades” (172), the miłoszian original reads “centuries” (“dwieście lat,” ziemia ulro 177). a particularly precious feature of ziemia ulro, when measured against anglo-american scholarly and critical studies, is that the unusual context and environment in which blake is placed here—​in this autobiography of a polish poet, written in polish for a polish public—​enable several vital insights into blake’s writings, bringing into focus a number of qualities of the prophetic works that become especially apparent when these works are handled in the medium of a foreign language. one of those insights concerns blake’s mythology. specifically, the strengths of blake’s system emerge through the juxtaposition with the systems of swedenborg and oscar milosz. when handling their writings, miłosz was assuming that all those foreign-language materials were unfamiliar to his polish reader because they were unavailable in polish translation. (again, we are dealing here with that communicative impasse: miłosz stood vis-à-vis his original reader in the same inconvenient position from which he faced his american students at berkeley.) as a result, his commentary on these sources takes the form of descriptive discourse, whose function is to introduce and elucidate. what is especially striking in this context is that, when handling swedenborg’s writings, miłosz repeatedly acknowledges that a variety of ideas are “implausible” (151); he also mentions the “cloying repetitiveness,” the “manifold tautologies,” the “pedestrian style, stripped of poetic fancy” (147). to read swedenborg’s “multi-volumed work running into thousands of pages, and all composed in a pedantic latin … is to wander through a hall of mirrors arousing a range of conflicting emotions: mockery abruptly turns to awe, rejection to assent and vice versa, curiosity to strenuous boredom, and acceptance to categorical rejection” (137). when reflecting on oscar milosz’s french “metaphysical poems,” miłosz regularly interrupts his discussion with frustrated comments acknowledging the “obscur[ity],” “intractab[ility],” “inaccessib[ility],” lack of “intelligibility,” and “inscrutab[ility]” of numerous aspects of the system (64, 188, 219, 239, et passim). in the case of blake, there are no interruptions or qualifications of this kind.on the contrary, miłosz uses blake to elucidate some of the miloszian intricacies (see, for example, his discussion of les arcanes in chapter 34). this prompts an important inference concerning blake’s mythology (the overall argument of ziemia ulro means that the chief emphasis falls on blake’s imaginative rendering of the catastrophe—​that is, the urizenic myth, including the creation of ulro—​but a lot of attention is also devoted to, for example, blake’s conception of the contraries, or his idea of states). considering that miłosz is not able to construct a similarly convincing discourse when dealing with his other sources, blake’s myth transpires as remarkably plastic material, which can be transposed into another language and culture without a single apology for its minute particulars. other important conclusions that can be drawn from miłosz’s testimony in ziemia ulro concern blake’s style and language. miłosz opens his discussion of the prophetic books with a disclaimer asserting that this material cannot be successfully translated into polish;he claims, “i swear that i am not now trying to convert anyone to blake—​still less when i foresee how he would be travestied in translation” (159). this point has been emphasized in my chapter for the reception of william blake in europe (borkowska 492). on second thought, however, it is important to pay attention to his practice. he regularly supports his summary with quotation, and in fact the further he goes into his discussion of blake, the more of that quotation/​translation (from milton and jerusalem) he provides. one critical inference that can be drawn from this is that blake cannot be rendered adequately through mere summary; you must quote to give the right insight. the minute particulars are as important as the overall design (this can be contrasted with miłosz’s discussion of swedenborg, where he does not offer a single passage in translation, but relies exclusively on explanatory discursive paraphrase, as if assuming that quotation is unnecessary). another important implication is that, as he progressed and multiplied his translations from blake’s prophetic writings, miłosz clearly recognized that, despite his skepticism and his disclaimer, blake actually sounds phenomenally good when translated into polish. to draw a larger context around this claim, the history of the reception of blake in poland legitimizes the conclusion that polish blake translators could be divided into two categories: first, blakeans, who primarily aimed at transmitting the originals; second, the growing number of poets whose major objective was, of course, to produce good poetry. it appears that miłosz, who obviously started as a representative of the first group, must have recognized in the course of his work that blake is excellent material for the second category of translators as well. (the huge presence of blake in translation, as evidenced by the reception volumes, probably suggests the same about the translatability of blake into other languages.) yet another insight prompted by ziemia ulro concerns the idiom of the prophetic writings, blake’s own linguistic practice. from all the systems at his disposal, and all the languages among which he moved (polish, russian, french, english, latin, greek, hebrew), miłosz chose blake’s neologism “ulro” as the leading metaphor and the most adequate namehe stresses that ulro has been given different names, mentioning, for example, the “wasteland”—​“another of the names by which it is known” (269). t. s. eliot’s the waste land is one of the numerous english-language works that miłosz translated into polish. for the “spectral ” civilization that is “the great paramount theme” (6) of his book. in a work that repeatedly underscores the limitations, failures, and insufficiencies of language, blake’s idiom strikes as a powerful means of communicating with extreme precision. regardless of the context in which this neologism is used, it cannot be confused; it points instantaneously and unambiguously to blake and to his definition of its meaning (evoking in this way the entire mythology). one other feature that is particularly visible in miłosz’s book, so deeply concerned with the subject of untranslatability and “barriers posed by language” (93), is that blake’s neologism is perfectly translingual. “ulro” does not need translation, and since it does not derive from any english-language root, it does not lose anything when transposed into a different language. inevitably, some of the effects i point out above are obliterated in the english translation. it is also fair to acknowledge that making the land of ulro from ziemia ulro was, in a number of ways, an exercise in the arts of omission. this book foregrounding the subject of untranslatability wherever its author handled his foreign-language sources often proved intractable material for the translator (iribarne, and other translators as well)following miłosz’s nobel prize, ziemia ulro was translated into a number of languages, including slovenian (1981), german (1982), serbo-croatian (1982), and french (1985). because of the extent to which it engages literature written in polish, miłosz’s “incomprehensible language.” again, we are dealing with that communicative impasse, whose consequence is that a number of references are abandoned in the english version; many sentences, sometimes entire paragraphs, are skipped.on the other hand, the translation includes a denouncement of communism (254), which is missing in the polish original; the topical comment was either censored or, more likely, written purposely for the english version. even so, probably unaware of these numerous concessions, the commentators reviewing the land of ulro shortly after it appeared in 1984 complained all the same that the book relies too heavily on literature unavailable in english; as succinctly put by michiko kakutani in her review for the new york times, miłosz “liberally quotes the opinions that obscure critics hold of slightly less obscure authors.” other than that, the translation was read through national and political stereotypes. anne husted burleigh, for instance, charged: “there is one figure who is surprisingly missing from this book: pope john paul ii” (167); dealing with a translation published several years after miłosz’s nobel prize, the reviewer clearly failed to note that the original, ziemia ulro, had been written and published before karol wojtyła became the pope. michael glover, on the other hand, concluded: “there is no denying that the freedom to exercise one’s universal pessimism in comfortable surroundings is a freedom of a not altogether undesirable kind. [miłosz’s] polish kin would surely agree” (54). this comment, no doubt meant as a sensitive and generous reference to the situation of poland under communist rule, is markedly ungenerous toward miłosz, who in a number of his other works—​the seizure of power or the captive mind, for instance—​foregrounds the subject of totalitarianism and relates to the contemporary situation in poland (which, incidentally, largely contributed to his protracted exile). besides, there is the question whether an opinion that denies a polish writer the license to write on a general humanist theme can actually be considered generous toward poland; there is an implication in this comment that a writer from a communist country is not supposed to pronounce judgments on topics other than communism. then again, glover’s review also prompts the impression that the tone of the anglophone reception of the land of ulro was largely dictated by commentators who, inevitably, had no access to miłosz’s polish-language sources, but who did not fully appreciate his english-language references either—​specifically, the import of his engagement with blake’s prophetic writings. a reviewer recruited from blakean circles would have no difficulty seeing that a writer who denounces his own civilization as “ulro” cannot be labeled a universal pessimist. (see the review written in 1988 for blake by tadeusz sławek, a polish blakean, who underscores throughout the miłoszian focus on hope, the future, and “the other shore” [the land of ulro 270]—​that is, his search for the way out of the maze of the wasteland, the exit from ulro.) miłosz closes his autobiography with a reminiscence of himself at school, “that boy who as he sat at his school desk, oblivious of the teacher’s words …, spent hour after hour filling his notebooks with the fantastic sketches of his ideal countries” (273). i think blakeans are in a position to capture most readily and imaginatively the analogy that miłosz proposes: to see that the boy of the past drawing pictures of ideal realms and “the old professor in berkeley” writing ziemia ulro indeed engaged in the same activity. as miłosz sums it up, “the song of innocence and the song of experience share a common theme” (275). thus, miłosz’s blakean book has a lot to gain, of course, from being read by blakeans. to return to the point i made at the beginning, however, the transaction is reciprocal. notwithstanding the omissions and the concessions, the land of ulro, miłosz in the english translation, also has a great deal to offer blakeans, because the unique formula of the book allows him to put blake to a number of remarkably unique uses. perhaps most strikingly, while acknowledging blake’s insightful attacks on the institutions of eighteenthand nineteenth-century england, miłosz refuses to abide by—​and, in effect, makes the blake of the land of ulro overcome—​chronological and geographical boundaries. he remarks: “if man in the age of reason lived with the vision of ‘starry wheels,’ how much more susceptible to such a vision are we who have seen our earth photographed from the moon in the shape of a sphere?” (179). as i have stressed before, miłosz applies blake, first and foremost, to his own times and culture, pointing to ulro and the myth that lies behind it as the most valid and imaginatively potent description of the secularized twentieth century, with its urizenic cosmos, urizenic consumer culture, urizenic theology unable to defend religion, and urizenic literature. second, miłosz applies blake to other authors—​swedenborg, of course, or junghe translates blake’s zoas to jungian terms, pointing out that jung, “an empiricist who passionately defended the empirical method, … adduced formulations more or less identical to those of the great laborers of the imagination” (184). “some passages,” he adds, “read almost like a verbatim transposition” (184-85).—​but also to authors and texts that lie outside the focus of blake scholars. he widens the spectrum of blake reference by indicating, for instance, the consanguinities between blake and mickiewicz, or blake and oscar milosz, or, most resonantly perhaps, blake and dostoevsky. he uses blake’s categories to diagnose and name the malady of dostoevsky’s protagonists: the man from the underground, raskolnikov, ippolit terentiev, stavrogin, kirilov, ivan karamazov—​“each of them,” he claims, “changes gradually to a spectre” (“każdy z nich zmienia się stopniowo w spectre,” ziemia ulro 131).these are references to dostoevsky’s notes from underground, crime and punishment, the idiot, demons, and the brothers karamazov. i translate straight from ziemia ulro rather than relying on iribarne’s the land of ulro because, paradoxically, the polish original is more “blakean” here than the english version. miłosz does not translate “spectre” (the vernacular equivalent would be “widmo,” regularly used in polish translations of blake’s prophecies); instead, he reaches for the blakean term, italicizes it, and leaves it in english, preserving also blake’s capitalization. in the english translation, on the other hand, the presence of blake in this passage is eradicated; it reads simply “all are reduced to specters” (123). iribarne’s “specter” becomes an ordinary word, not a marker of blake’s presence in miłosz’s analysis of dostoevsky but part of the translator’s vocabulary. (incidentally, the impossibility of doing this with “ulro” points to the force and resistance of blake’s neologism.) just as insightfully and valuably, he links “the blakean tetrad” to the brothers karamazov, “that most extraordinary philosophical novel in world literature”: the father, fyodor, represents the burden of carnality, tharmas. dmitri is the embodiment of blind passion … —​or luvah. ivan is urizen, or the suffering luciferian element. … alyosha personifies urthona, imagination, a vulnerability to the inspiration of the holy ghost. (185) “when applied to the novel as a whole,” claims miłosz, “[this blakean symbolism] can charge, as though electrically, many hitherto dormant energies into something vibrant and volatile” (185). he adds that, to his knowledge, no one has applied blake to dostoevsky in this way (and, to my knowledge, this claim, made nearly half a century ago, is still valid). similarly, miłosz widens the range of blake reference by juxtaposing him with twentieth-century “urizenic” authors—​gombrowicz, for instance, or, most spectacularly, samuel beckett, whom he reads as standing at the opposite extreme from the author of milton and the builder of jerusalem: beckett wishes to tease us with the obvious; he is like a man who sidles up to a hunchback and begins to needle him: “hunchback, you’re a hunchback; you’d rather not be reminded of it, but i shall see to it that you are reminded.” as for me, i know i am a hunchback; i make no pretense to the contrary; that is, i know full well the poverty of my human existence. yes, there were times when i felt like howling, ramming my head against the wall, but from sheer exertion of will, from sheer necessity, i buckled down and went to work. then along comes this man, boasting to me of his “discovery,” and i say there is something not quite right about it. (243) miłosz calls beckett, bitterly, the most “honest” writer of ulro (240), and he classifies his work among the (“savage”) twentieth century’s crippling/​crippled literature of despair, mockery, and blasphemy—​the art of “reduction of human nature” (243). such “total striptease,” he adds, “is not to my taste, not because i am personally incapable of it, but just because it comes naturally, in a way, to a part of the human spirit i regard as inferior” (243-44). he appends a sharp postscript: it defies comprehension how the citizens of ulro can be so solicitous of their bodies—​by dieting, by avoiding certain foods, by not bathing in polluted waters—​yet seem to take for granted that their souls are vigorously healthy, that it is uncivil to decline some literary or philosophical fare with a polite “i’m sorry, it’s bad for me.” (247-48) lastly, and just as memorably, throughout his autobiography miłosz applies blake to himself: “i inhabited the land of ulro long before blake taught me its proper name … .” he points to blake as one of the few authors who provided the literary and philosophical fare that stimulated his own “mind’s progress.” the blake of ziemia ulro is not an addition to a story, but the vital tissue of the author’s life/​life, part of his own story. miłosz uses blake’s mythology as an instrument of self-analysis and self-diagnosis; he utilizes the zoas to inspect his own faculties and chart their development and history/​ his story: my curse was always the specter—​an ego strong enough to keep me a prisoner of urizen’s domain, where only the general, the collective, the statistical, etc., have any claim to validity. my poor urthona, or imagination, tried to release me from that imprisonment; finding all exits barred, she began tunneling an escape route, occasionally—​as in three winters [one of miłosz’s early volumes of poetry]—​succeeding. (183) miłosz’s engagement of and with blake is completely unlike literary reworkings or artistic responses (that is, two categories of blake-inspired projects that have been important focuses of the reception of william blake in europe and the reception of blake in the orient), because it is purely intellectual.“literarily,” he adds, “with respect to literary technique, i have borrowed little from blake—​not one to be easily imitated, by the way” (159); for exceptions (as pointed out by polish scholars jolanta dudek, aleksander fiut, and łukasz front), see borkowska 488. at the same time, ziemia ulro/​the land of ulro is unlike academic or critical studies, because it is inimitably personal: not a scholarly book on blake, but a self-portrait of a blake scholar. works cited ault, donald d. visionary physics: blake’s response to newton. chicago: university of chicago press, 1974. borkowska, eliza. “the reception of blake in poland: from voices in the night to ‘the choir of the day!’” erle and paley 2: 473-99. burleigh, anne husted. “in the land of ulro” [book review]. modern age 30.2 (1986): 162-67. clark, steve, and masashi suzuki, eds. the reception of blake in the orient. london: continuum, 2006. damon, s. foster. a blake dictionary: the ideas and symbols of william blake. providence: brown university press, 1965. dudek, jolanta. “gdzie wschodzi słońce i kędy zapada.” europejskie korzenie poezji czesława miłosza. kraków: uniwersytet jagielloński, 1991. erle, sibylle, and morton d. paley, eds. the reception of william blake in europe. 2 vols. london: bloomsbury, 2019. fiut, aleksander. “poema nienaiwne.” poznawanie miłosza 2: część pierwsza, 1980–​1998. ed. aleksander fiut. kraków: wydawnictwo literackie, 2000. 171-93. franaszek, andrzej. miłosz: a biography. ed. and trans. aleksandra and michael parker. cambridge, ma: belknap press of harvard university press, 2017. front, łukasz. recepcja wiliama blake’a w twórczości czesława miłosza. biblioteka tradycji 2, no. 78. kraków: collegium columbinum, 2008. frye, northrop. fearful symmetry: a study of william blake. princeton: princeton university press, 1947. glover, michael. “czeslaw milosz’s land of ulro” [book review]. pn review no. 50, 12.6 (1986): 54. grimes, ronald l. the divine imagination: william blake’s major prophetic visions. metuchen, nj: scarecrow press, 1972. heller, erich. “goethe and the idea of scientific truth.” the disinherited mind: essays in modern german literature and thought. 4th ed. london: bowes & bowes, 1975. 1-34. kakutani, michiko. “the land of ulro. by czeslaw milosz” [book review]. new york times 24 aug. 1984. <https://​www.​nytimes.​com/​1984/​08/​24/​books/​books-of-the-times-154199.html>. accessed 30 apr. 2020. miłosz, czesław. the captive mind. trans. jane zielonko. london: martin secker & warburg, 1953. —​—​—​. the history of polish literature. 2nd ed. berkeley: university of california press, 1983. —​—​—​. the land of ulro. trans. louis iribarne. new york: farrar, straus, and giroux, 1984. —​—​—​. native realm: a search for self-definition. trans. catherine s. leach. garden city, ny: doubleday & company, 1968. —​—​—​. the seizure of power. trans. celina wieniawska. new york: criterion books, 1955. —​—​—​. ziemia ulro. paris: instytut literacki, 1977. kraków: wydawnictwo znak, 1994. raine, kathleen. blake and tradition. 2 vols. princeton: princeton university press, 1968. sławek, tadeusz. “czeslaw milosz, the land of ulro” [book review]. blake 21.4 (spring 1988): 160-65. taylor, charles. a secular age. cambridge, ma: belknap press of harvard university press, 2007. tokarczuk, olga. drive your plow over the bones of the dead. trans. antonia lloyd-jones. london: fitzcarraldo editions, 2018. —​—​—​. “the tender narrator.” nobel lecture. 7 dec. 2019. <https://​www.​nobelprize.​org/​prizes/​literature/​2018/​tokarczuk/​104871-lecture-english>. accessed 18 jan. 2020. an overannotated “auguries of innocence” an overannotated “auguries of innocence” by alexander s. gourlay alexander s. gourlay (agourlay@risd.edu) teaches at the rhode island school of design. recently, in reviewing two new editions of blake, i used “auguries of innocence” as a test case to assess the explanatory notes provided by the editors. i chose the poem because it seems to me particularly susceptible to—​and in need of—​intervention of the kind provided by editorial annotation.in his e editions david v. erdman reorganizes the poem by subject matter and theme; the unfortunate result is to de-emphasize the visionary procedures involved in favor of moral, practical, and philosophical implications. each individual augury poses an intellectual problem of some kind. many are apparently designed to exercise and strengthen the visionary capabilities of the reader, usually depending on a critical unstated fact or idea, but the supplementary information provided in existing editions of this work is sparse and more often occludes than illuminates. i thought it might be useful to some future editors as well as readers to create an “edition” of this poem with explicit versions of every note i could think of, not as a paradigmatic textbook text of the poem (it’s too thorough, though far from exhaustive) but as a resource from which editors could select the information that would be most helpful to their readers. i invite corrections, expansions, refutations, and other responses. “auguries of innocence”in ancient rome, augury was a system of civic divination, a means of learning the thoughts of the gods, and was regarded in the christian era as a form of impious prying (grant 490). it was based particularly on observation of the flight patterns, calls, and actions of various species of birds, which were considered to be the messengers of jupiter, as well as meteorological phenomena and other prodigies of nature. roman augury was also associated with forms of divination that involved animal sacrifice. it was used on momentous public occasions such as the installation of rulers, hence the term “inauguration,” and also at the beginning of military ventures. because auguries could have political consequences, only a tightly controlled group of priests was allowed to interpret the signs. blake dismissed the ancient romans as “slaves of the sword“ (e 95), victimizers and victims of a pervasive and pernicious imperial culture of war; by adding “of innocence” to “auguries” in the title he suggests a distinction between his benign visionary practice and the corrupt roman form. this poem was written out in blake’s neatest ordinary handwriting in a twenty-two-page manuscript collection of poems often called the pickering manuscript, after an early owner. the poems were probably composed c. 1800–03 and this fair copy created shortly thereafter. the structure of the poem—​a loosely organized compilation of paradoxes, puzzles, and predictions—​is unique in blake’s work. the closest analogue is probably the proverbs of hell in the marriage of heaven and hell, but those are thoroughly ironized as reflections of the habitual ideology of the devils in hell; further, their primary significance is as an implicit critique of conventional “heavenly” ideology. by contrast, the ideas about the world expressed in the auguries are at once more blakean and less important in themselves than the promotion of the paradoxical mental processes by which they are understood. unlike such ironic exercises as the songs of innocence and of experience, which often sustain multiple readings involving very different ways of thinking about their subjects and speakers, “auguries” establishes little or no distance between its speaker and its author. there are no specific real or fictional human characters except generic types (the miser, the butcher),arguably, “caesar” in line 98 is julius rather than a generic caesar. and although heaven and hell are invoked throughout, god with a human form appears only at the end. to see a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wild flower hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hourthe first four lines are the only ones in alternating rhyme; the rest are in couplets or quadruplets (that is, double couplets). the woven rhyme pattern indicates that these lines should be taken together as a quatrain, a four-line unit of thought, rather than as contrasting pairs like the next four related lines. blake’s tetrameter couplets, a form he used very sparingly, mimic both the distichs in which classical fortunes were often expressed and the couplets of neoclassical poetry; more positively, their binary nature suggests the two elements of divination, with the first line usually supplying the signifying phenomenon and the second the significance of it, often in another dimension of reality. the opening quatrain constitutes a sort of quick-start guide to augury, implying that we readers are all potential augurs, a more inclusive prophetic class than was found in rome: in milton (e 96), blake quotes numbers 11.29: “would to god that all the lords people were prophets.” his instructions are paradoxical. in order to see an insignificant grain of sand as a sublime object comparable to the whole earth, with its towering alps and vast oceans, or a tiny, evanescent, sweet-smelling wildflower as a heaven, one might try to shrink oneself to stand on the edge of the grain’s equivalent of the pacific, or slow time enough to render the flower’s fragile beauty as durable and extensive as that of heaven. instead, blake instructs us to “hold” the infinities of time and space in proportions that correspond with the size and lifespan of a human being, at which point human consciousness transcends scale, rendering both time and space imaginatively manageable (rather than obliterating these illusions). grant explains that the visionary mode of “auguries” is not full-bore prophecy, which is apocalyptic in effect, but an intermediate form that promotes incremental understanding by those still in this world (493). accordingly, the main thrust of most of the auguries is to reveal inversions, paradoxes, and other phenomena that undercut ordinary material reality, which is right side up, subject to gravity, and stuck in the slow sequence of time. a robin red breast in a cage puts all heaven in a ragelike any bird, the robin is a creature of the skies, so heaven has a special interest in its happiness or unhappiness; there are also numerous popular sayings that are relevant, such as “little cock robin and little jenny wren, / are god almighty’s little cock and hen” (holloway 90), or legends associating the bird with various good deeds on behalf of jesus. a dove house filld with doves & pigeons shudders hell thro all its regionsdoves and pigeons are homing birds that in blake’s day were kept in open dovehouses, to which they would return even if carried many miles away, so their situation is only apparently similar to that of the caged robin. tradition has it that immediately following his death on the cross christ descended into hell to redeem adam, eve, moses, and other virtuous persons, an event called the harrowing of hell; it was accompanied by an eclipse and an earthquake that dante blames for the state of the infernal bridges. heaven is offended at the caging of a robin, but hell convulses (and perhaps loses a soul or two) when innocent birds are allowed to live as they prefer. see, however, perkins 11; he believes that the doves and pigeons are victims. a dog starvd at his masters gate predicts the ruin of the statea dog fulfilling its duty to its master but denied food is a microcosm of misrule, analogous to an abused citizenry harboring revolutionary resentments that could topple the government. a horse misusd upon the road calls to heaven for human bloodit seems possible that blake was thinking about hogarth’s “four stages of cruelty” set of engravings when he wrote “auguries”: it features a battered, broken-down coach horse neighing in pain, children as animal torturers, bats and owls symbolizing benighted error, tortured cattle, misused lambs, cockfighting, and other instances of cruelty also present in the poem. the four pictures also include a prophetic boy in plate 1 and an overall symmetry in which instances of cruelty are answered with cruelty in retribution: an eye for an eye. blake’s poem often breaks out of the cycle of cruelty by inverting a cruel reality rather than merely mirroring it. each outcry of the hunted hare a fibre from the brain does tearbrain fibers are neurons, recognized in blake’s day as components involved in mental activity. connoisseurs of the hunt relished the final cries of the doomed prey when surrounded by dogs; blake suggests that every hunt makes the hunter a little bit stupider. a skylark wounded in the wing a cherubim does cease to singlarks are unusual among songbirds in that they sing and fly at the same time, and skylarks fly so high that they can be heard but not seen. they are thus invisible singing flyers like cherubim (used as singular here but actually a plural of “cherub”). when one invisible singer can’t fly, another invisible flyer won’t sing. the game cock clipd & armd for fight does the rising sun affrighta gamecock has its wings clipped so it can’t fly away from the fight, and it has razor-sharp blades augmenting its talons; in civilian life it is a rooster, herald and companion of the sun. every wolfs & lions howl raises from hell a human soulthe howling of wild beasts was often represented in the eighteenth century as a manifestation of infernal energy (see chapter 2 of defoe’s robinson crusoe), but here it is a redemptive phenomenon related to the harrowing earthquake; like the doves and pigeons, these animals are doing what they want to do. the wild deer wandring here & there keeps the human soul from caredeer were the property of the king, and only the upper classes were allowed to hunt them; picturesque deer wandering at will are apparently not quite as good for our souls as sublimely howling wolves. the lamb misusd breeds public strife and yet forgives the butchers knifemistreatment of the lamb is an offense against the human/​animal social order. see hogarth’s “four stages of cruelty,” plate 2, where a drover gratuitously clubs a lamb on the way to smithfield market, where the butcher awaits. the bat that flits at close of eve has left the brain that wont believe the owl that calls upon the night speaks the unbelievers frightbats and owls, whose element is darkness, were traditionally regarded as emblems of ignorance and error. blake’s lines evoke the phrase “bats in the belfry” and suggest that the faithless skeptic’s questions are as empty as the hooting of an owl: “who? who?” he who shall hurt the little wren shall never be belovd by men he who the ox to wrath has movd shall never be by woman lovdlines 29-32 invite consideration together as a study in contrasts. tiny, fierce, and fearless, wrens are traditionally gendered female; the huge patient ox, though neutered, is usually considered male. in many places in england it was illegal to sell the meat of an ox unless it had been tenderized by torturing the animal to exhaust itself, causing lactic acid to build up in its muscles before death (houghton 1: 289). this cruel practice was a popular sport for its own sake, known as bull-baiting, often involving bulldogs and firecrackers. the wanton boy that kills the fly shall feel the spiders enmity he who torments the chafers sprite weaves a bower in endless night“sprite” means spirit or soul. the chafer, or cockchafer, is a large beetle that lives underground for the first part of its life. when it emerges as an adult it is famously inclined to fly toward candles and other lights at night. in the prophetic dimension the tormentor of chafers pays for his cruelty by preparing a chamber for himself in eternal darkness, enacting the light-loving chafer’s life cycle in reverse. the catterpiller on the leaf repeats to thee thy mothers griefthe particular grief of mothers is the pain of childbirth, traditionally assigned after the fall to eve and her daughters, along with the fallen work of spinning and weaving. presumably the caterpillar’s weaving of its cocoon and its traumatic emergence (from the cocoon’s perspective) are reminiscent of the mother’s labors. images relating weaving and the woven body are scattered through the poem. kill not the moth nor butterfly for the last judgment draweth nighmoths and butterflies were classical symbols of the soul in which emergence corresponds with death (see previous note); killing one in the face of imminent judgment is unwise. he who shall train the horse to war shall never pass the polar barin an 1804 letter to william hayley, blake deplores the pernicious training of warhorses (e 739). the polar bar is the gate of heaven, probably envisioned here as a steeplechase obstacle that would defy even the best-trained leaper. the beggers dog & widows cat feed them & thou wilt grow fatthough they might wish to do better, widows and beggars can’t feed their companion animals well. the gnat that sings his summers song poison gets from slanders tonguethe gnat sings a nasty song before it bites, like the gnattering tongue of personified slander. the poison of the snake & newt is the sweat of envys footenvy motivates satan in paradise lost, so it is appropriate that the snake and newt (an amphibian mistakenly believed to be a poisonous reptile), which were cursed after the fall to crawl on their bellies and war with adam’s feet, should get their poison from the sweat of envy’s foot. the poison of the honey bee is the artists jealousylike the artist, the honeybee is productive but sometimes inclined to sting. vasari’s lives of the artists describes the driving spirit of the renaissance masters as paragone, comparative/​competitive struggle between arts and artists. the princes robes & beggars rags are toadstools on the misers bagsthis origin story for poison takes some unpacking. instead of heeding the parable of the talents (matthew 25.14–30), the miser distorts the economy by hoarding his wealth in money bags in his cellar. from the damp, dirty bags grow poisonous toadstools of economic inequality, represented by the contrast between the prince’s elaborate garments and the beggar’s miserable rags. any royal person wears fine clothes, but around 1803 the wastrel prince of wales was a particularly ostentatious dresser. a truth thats told with bad intent beats all the lies you can invent it is right it should be so man was made for joy & woe and when this we rightly know thro the world we safely go joy & woe are woven fine a clothing for the soul divine under every grief & pine runs a joy with silken twinethis extraordinary pair of double couplets represents corporeal pain and pleasure as the warp and perpendicular woof of the fabric of the material body, the garment of the soul. silk is the gentlest and smoothest of fabrics, so silken strands would be appropriate for bodily pleasures. the babe is more than swadling bands throughout all these human lands tools were made & born were hands every farmer understandsthe set of two related couplets resonates with the last eight lines and others—​for instance, swaddling bands are another fabric enclosing and limiting the soul—​but the expected further point is elusive. the words of jesus in matthew 6.25 are probably relevant: “therefore i say unto you, take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment?” every tear from every eye becomes a babe in eternity this is caught by females bright and returnd to its own delightthe four lines 67-70 continue the theme of birth in terms suggesting a connection with “the mental traveller,” a poem on nearby pages of the pickering manuscript. the bleat the bark bellow & roar are waves that beat on heavens shoreclassical augurs interpreted animal sounds as messages from heaven, but innocent auguries work differently. the howling of wolves and lions in lines 19-20 saves souls from hell; these diverse animal cries of increasingly fierce beasts (lamb, dog, bull, lion?) are heard in the alternative perspective of heaven as a kind of cresting wave of sound. the babe that weeps the rodthe rod of punishment, as in “spare the rod ….” beneath writes revenge in realms of death the beggars rags fluttering in air does to rags the heavens tear the soldier armd with sword & gun palsied strikes the summers sunthe soldier is the human counterpart of the armed rooster of lines 17-18. the sun can cause sunstroke, often accompanied by palsy shakes, a phenomenon particularly associated with british soldiers, who trained to go out in the noonday sun by marching around in summer heat. in this case the prospect of an armed human strikes (as in “stroke”) the sun with palsy. the poor mans farthing is worth more than all the gold on africs shore. one mite wrung from the labrers handsa mite is a tiny coin of little value, though it was not used for an actual coin in britain or judea. lines 79-80 discredit absolute intrinsic value, following the parable of the widow’s mite (mark 12.41-44). the gold sands of the gulf of guinea were famously the source of much of the gold used to make the coins called guineas. shall buy & sell the misers lands or if protected from on high does that whole nation sell & buy he who mocks the infants faith shall be mock’d in age & death he who shall teach the child to doubt the rotting grave shall neer get out he who respects the infants faith triumphs over hell & death the childs toys & the old mans reasons are the fruits of the two seasons“toys” are the fanciful thoughts that accompany play. the two seasons are youth and age. the questioner who sits so sly shall never know how to replythe philosopher george berkeley called himself the querist, but blake was probably thinking of all philosophy that avoids positive declaration, including socratic questioning. he who replies to words of doubt doth put the light of knowledge out the strongest poison ever known came from caesars laurel crownlaurel or bay leaves, used in wreaths, crowns, and cooking, were erroneously thought to contain a deadly poison. aside from the title, this is the most overt reference in the poem to roman culture. nought can deform the human race like to the armours iron bracein his visual art blake often represents knights and other warriors in scale armor—​made of small metal plates—​which suggests reptilian scales. when gold & gems adorn the plow to peaceful arts shall envy bowthis doubly sly couplet depends on isaiah for the antithesis of plow and sword: “and he shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people: and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more” (isaiah 2.4). ceremonial swords covered with precious gems were on display at the tower of london; blake indicates that when the culture sees fit to decorate the plow, a tool of peace, productivity, and generosity, rather than the sword, a tool of war, destruction, and imperial theft, then the sustaining arts of peace will have the better of the deadly arts of envy. a riddle or the crickets cry is to doubt a fit reply the emmets inch & eagles mile make lame philosophy to smilean emmet is an ant, and an inch is to an emmet what a mile is to an eagle, but while these examples extend blake’s theory of relativity to extension in space, it is not clear why philosophy is lame or smiling. a scholarly scoundrel might seek refuge in the thought that blake wrote dame philosophy, but the word is unambiguously “lame.” the thought is clear enough: “scalar perspective changes everything.” he who doubts from what he sees will neer believe do what you please if the sun & moon should doubt theyd immediately go out to be in a passion you good may do but no good if a passion is in youthe probable distinction here is that a passion that is in you governs your mind, whereas your mind governs an assumed passion. the whore & gambler by the state licencd build that nations fate the harlots cry from street to street shall weave old englands winding sheetthese lines make clear the perniciousness of some weaving, often implied above; blake’s pictures for “the bard,” a poem by thomas gray, show how the last welsh bard weaves a bloody prophecy that extirpates the line of his persecutor, edward i. the winners shout the losers curse dance before dead englands hearsethe cries of the harlots and gamblers are the urban counterparts of the bird songs interpreted by classical augurs. most eighteenth-century burials were of naked bodies wrapped in a winding sheet or shroud. see also the note on line 127. the reference to dancing before the hearse is probably an allusion to king david dancing naked before the ark of the covenant (2 samuel 6). every night & every morn some to misery are born every morn & every night some are born to sweet delight some are born to sweet delight some are born to endless night we are led to believe a lie when we see not thro the eyeseeing “through the eye” rather than with it means that one is not deceived by its limitations as a means of perception. which was born in a night to perish in a nightan allusion to the gourd plant or castor bean that god caused to grow miraculously overnight, sheltering jonah while he waited for the destruction of the repentant city of nineveh in fulfillment of the prophecy god had ordered him to deliver to the city (jonah 4). the gourd, like the body and bodily eye, is a short-lived shelter for the soul, which slumbers while our consciousness is in the fallen world. some conventional theologians suggest that god sent a gourd-destroying worm in the morning to make a point to jonah about the value of all living things; blake seems to be saying something much more complicated about the reasons why jonah has so much trouble being a good prophet. one stage in casting off jonah’s errors is to recognize that the eye sees light, which it takes for god, but god is better seen by the imagination as a “human form.” when the soul slept in beams of light god appears & god is light to those poor souls who dwell in night but does a human form display to those who dwell in realms of day works, some cited freeman, kathryn s. “auguries of innocence.” a guide to the cosmology of william blake. abingdon: routledge, 2017. 31. gourlay, alexander s. “more on blake’s ‘auguries.’” notes and queries 58.4 (dec. 2011): 522-23. grant, john e. “apocalypse in blake’s ‘auguries of innocence.’” texas studies in literature and language 5.4 (winter 1964): 489-508. holloway, william. a general dictionary of provincialisms. lewes: sussex press, 1839. houghton, john, rev. richard bradley. husbandry and trade improv’d. 3 vols. london, 1727. milne, anne. “blake’s ‘auguries of innocence’ as/​in radical animal politics, c. 1800.” beastly blake. ed. helen p. bruder and tristanne connolly. cham: palgrave macmillan-springer, 2018. 65-85. miner, paul. “blake: the complexity of allusions.” notes and queries 58.1 (march 2011): 63-65. perkins, david. “animal rights and ‘auguries of innocence.’” blake 33.1 (summer 1999): 4-11. blake in the marketplace, 2020 blake in the marketplace, 2020 by robert n. essick robert n. essick has been collecting and writing about blake for over fifty years. table of contents: introductory essay abbreviations blake: illuminated books drawings and paintings manuscripts first editions of blake’s writings first published in letterpress in blake’s lifetime separate plates and plates in series letterpress books with engravings by and after blake interesting blakeana blake’s circle and followers: flaxman, john fuseli, henry linnell, john palmer, samuel richmond, george appendix: new information on blake’s engravings the 2020 blake market, like much of the world’s commercial activity, was hindered by the covid-19 pandemic. none of his drawings or paintings came fresh to market, nor any illuminated books or leaves therefrom, nor any rare separate plates. “holy thursday” from songs of innocence copy w and poetical sketches copy e changed hands, but both had been on offer for at least two years and both sold before america and europe began to shut down nonessential businesses. the two watercolors listed below under drawings and paintings, cumea (illus. 1-2) and whilst surfeited upon thy damask cheek, had been available for purchase sporadically since 2002 and 2006 respectively. restrictions on in-store visits forced book and art dealers to rely more than ever on their websites and other online resources to keep their businesses afloat. several annual book fairs, including the major one in london, were cancelled. in response, the trade established two online sites, the abaa virtual book fair, 4-7 june, and firsts: london’s rare book fair, 5-12 june. the few original works by blake in these virtual fairs are included in the lists below. john windle continued to be the leading dealer in blake and blakeana. his list for the new york international antiquarian book fair, 5-8 march, features several original works by blake as well as william muir facsimiles of blake’s illuminated books. only materials not included in other recent windle catalogues are listed below. the most important work in the new york list, a receipt signed by blake, was acquired by windle at auction in 2019. he had planned to exhibit at the tokyo international antiquarian book fair, 20-22 march, but cancelled. nonetheless, in mid-march he published the handlist for the fair, retitled the booth that never was: 30 books for the tokyo antiquarian book fair. the william muir facsimiles of blake’s illuminated books and a copy of the 1977 printing of blake’s virgil wood engravings offered in this list are included below. with this installment i am initiating some significant changes in coverage in these marketplace reviews. from time to time i have indicated that i am listing complete copies only of specific books with blake’s commercial book illustrations, thereby excluding single prints removed from the books in which they were published. this will now be a regular feature and will be extended to blake’s job and dante engravings.with two exceptions: very rare plates and single impressions of blake’s engraving after william hogarth removed from hogarth’s works (bb #475, cb #xx) or from the 1965 portfolio, the beggar’s opera by hogarth and blake (bb #475, issue i), will be included. prepublication proofs and other impressions with special characteristics will still be included. james barry, james basire, george romney, and thomas stothard will no longer appear in the section devoted to blake’s circle and followers. works directly related to blake by those four artists, such as a drawing by stothard preliminary to one of blake’s engravings, will be presented in letterpress books with engravings by and after blake, under the author and title of the book containing the relevant engraving, or in interesting blakeana. the year of all sales, catalogues, and correspondence in the following lists is 2020, unless indicated otherwise. most reports about auction catalogues are based on the online versions. illustrations are in color, unless noted otherwise. coverage of regional auctions is selective. dates for dealers’ online catalogues are the dates accessed, not the dates of publication. works offered online by dealers and listed in previous sales reviews are not repeated here. most of the auction houses add their purchaser’s surcharge to the hammer price in their price lists. these net amounts are given here, following the official price lists. estimates in auction catalogues are usually for hammer prices. i am grateful for help in compiling this review to mark crosby, morris eaves, alexander gourlay, guy peppiatt, and john windle. my special thanks go to jenijoy la belle for assistance in all matters. once again, sarah jones’s editorial expertise has been invaluable. abbreviations ah abbott and holder, london bb g. e. bentley, jr., blake books (oxford: clarendon p, 1977). plate numbers and copy designations for blake’s illuminated books and commercial book illustrations follow bb. bbs g. e. bentley, jr., blake books supplement (oxford: clarendon p, 1995) bhl bonhams auctions, london br(2) g. e. bentley, jr., blake records, 2nd ed. (new haven: yale up, 2004) butlin martin butlin, the paintings and drawings of william blake, 2 vols. (new haven: yale up, 1981) cat(s). catalogue(s) cb robert n. essick, william blake’s commercial book illustrations (oxford: clarendon p, 1991) cny christie’s auctions, new york dh donald heald rare books, new york dw dominic winter auctions, south cerney, gloucestershire eb ebay online auctions fm forum auctions, london illus. illustration(s), illustrated kfa keys fine art auctions, aylsham, norfolk ly lowell libson & jonny yarker ltd., london pl(s). plate(s) sl sotheby’s auctions, london sny sotheby’s auctions, new york sp robert n. essick, the separate plates of william blake: a catalogue (princeton: princeton up, 1983) st(s). state(s) of an engraving, etching, or lithograph sw swann auctions, new york weinglass d. h. weinglass, prints and engraved illustrations by and after henry fuseli (aldershot: scolar p, 1994) windle john windle antiquarian bookseller, san francisco # auction lot or catalogue item number illuminated books pl. 19, “holy thursday,” from songs of innocence copy w. sold jan. by windle to a canadian private collector. previously listed in windle’s feb. 2018 online short title list for the california antiquarian book fair, #2 ($150,000). for illus., see the 2016 sales review, blake 50.4 (spring 2017): illus. 4. for the rediscovery of copy w and details about it, see the 2015 sales review, blake 49.4 (spring 2016): pars. 3-7 and the entry under illuminated books. drawings and paintings cumea, a copy of michelangelo’s fresco of the cumean sibyl in the sistine chapel. pen and black ink, watercolor, 17.0 x 12.0 cm., with a pencil study of one of the ignudi from the sistine chapel on the verso. not in butlin because not discovered until 2002. arader galleries auction, new york, 10 oct., #0101, framed, recto illus. ($31,250 to a private collector in boston, massachusetts). previously sold sl, 28 nov. 2002, #236, dated to “circa 1773,” recto illus. (£14,340); previously offered arader galleries, may 2008 online cat., dated to “1773,” recto illus. ($90,000, apparently unsold and available from arader until its sale on 10 oct.). see illus. 1-2. 1. cumea (so inscribed), a copy of michelangelo’s fresco of the cumean sibyl in the sistine chapel (see enlargement). pen and black ink, watercolor, 17.0 x 12.0 cm. on wove paper. the colors of the sibyl’s costume accord with michelangelo’s except for the drapery (a large cloak?) over the figure’s lap and right leg, a bronze color in the fresco. reproduced courtesy of arader galleries. in my 2002 marketplace review, i indicated mild skepticism about the attribution of this work to blake and proposed that the underlying monochrome drawing might be an early work, c. 1779–​85, but that the colors may have been added by blake at a later date—​see blake 36.4 (spring 2003): 116-19. in an e-mail to me of 16 sept., david bindman also proposes a two-step production process but suggests that the coloring is by a hand other than blake’s. i find bindman’s view compelling. if the underlying drawing is indeed by blake, he may have executed it at about the same time as his 7 “copies after michelangelo’s sistine ceiling” (british museum, butlin #167-70, dated to c. 1785, including 3 verso drawings). the watercolor is only slightly larger than the largest pen and monochrome wash drawing (abias, 16.5 x 11.7 cm.), but its wove paper has a rougher texture than the whatman paper blake used for the set of 7. thus, i suspect that the drawing reproduced here is not a detached member of the group on whatman. the sl and arader auction cats. state that the watercolor contains “pencil” work. i have not been able to discern clear evidence of pencil sketching in high-resolution images of cumea, but if that medium is present it would further distinguish the watercolor from the british museum drawings, executed in pen and ink and wash only. 2. pencil sketch of one of michelangelo’s ignudi from the sistine chapel (see enlargement). verso of illus. 1, size not recorded. i doubt that this drawing is by blake. the rendering of the face is particularly uncharacteristic. reproduced courtesy of arader galleries. whilst surfeited upon thy damask cheek, an illus. to robert blair’s the grave. pen and gray and black inks and watercolor over traces of pencil, 19.6 x 13.3 cm., datable to the fall of 1805. not in butlin because not discovered until 2001. acquired oct. by essick, windle acting as his agent, from the dealer libby howie, acting for marburg ltd. ($150,000). previously offered sny, 2 may 2006, #5, illus. (not sold; estimate $700,000-1,000,000), and sny, 25 jan. 2017, #108, illus. (not sold; estimate $180,000-240,000). for illus. and comments, see the 2006 sales review, blake 40.4 (spring 2007): illus. 3. manuscripts receipt signed by blake, 5 july 1805, to thomas butts for £5.7s. windle, list for the new york international antiquarian book fair, 5-8 march, #13, wrongly claimed to be “written in blake’s own hand [only the signature is blake’s] … for four of his greatest masterpieces” ($125,000). for earlier sales and comments, see the 2019 sales review, blake 53.4 (spring 2020). first editions of blake’s writings first published in letterpress in blake’s lifetime poetical sketches, 1783, bb and bbs copy e. acquired from windle in late 2019 by the charles deering mccormick library, northwestern university, evanston, illinois, and included in its online cat. by feb.see <https://​search.​library.​northwestern.​edu/​permalink/​01nwu_inst/​h04e76/​alma9980782900402441>, accessed 24 feb. for earlier sales, see the 2007 sales review, blake 41.4 (spring 2008): 147. for a black-and-white illus. of the title page, including john flaxman’s presentation inscription, see blake 40.4 (spring 2007): back cover. separate plates and plates in series “chaucers canterbury pilgrims.” dh, jan. online cat., 5th st., sessler printing of 1941, leaf of rives wove paper 43.8 x 101.0 cm., illus. ($17,500). windle, online list for the abaa virtual book fair, 4-7 june, no entry #, 5th st., sessler printing of 1941, the impression sold doyle auction, new york, 30 april 2019, #11, for $4062 to windle for stock, illus. ($15,000; acquired dec. by an american private collector). bhl, 18 june, #24, 5th st., colnaghi printing on laid india, backing leaf 44.0 x 107.0 cm., illus. (£5687). dante engravings, complete set. fm, 9 june, #375, laid india, probably the c. 1892 printing, “some sheets with minor toning,” all 7 pls. illus. (not sold; estimate £20,000-30,000). job engravings, complete sets. windle, list for the new york international antiquarian book fair, 5-8 march, #11, 1826 “proof” printing on laid india, leaves 42.4 x 31.5 cm., “bound by riviere” in morocco (the same copy offered at $75,000 by bruce mckittrick at the march 2019 new york book fair and in mckittrick’s july 2019 online cat. 67, #9) ($89,500); same copy and price, june online cat., london firsts online 2020: 12 works, #4, illus.; same copy, online firsts: london’s rare book fair, 5-12 june, no entry #, illus. (£70,600); same copy, online salon d’hiver virtuel, 11-13 dec., no item #, illus. (€73,675). bhl, 11 march, #35, 1826 printing on wove paper after removal of the “proof” inscription, leaves trimmed to 26.0 x 23.0 cm., mounted on stubs and bound in modern half calf, cloth portfolio, illus. (£6120). gonnelli casa d’aste auction, florence, 26 may, #348, 1826 printing on wove paper after removal of the “proof” inscription, leaves 37.5 x 27.0 cm., original wrappers with letterpress cover label stained reddish brown, spine restored, illus. (€17,920). dh, nov. online cat., 1826 “proof” printing on laid india, leaves 43.2 x 33.0 cm., “early grey paper boards” with original cover label, modern cloth box, illus. ($75,000). letterpress books with engravings by and after blake ariosto, orlando furioso, 1783. bauer rare books, april online cat., 5 vols., “calf bindings” ($350). blair, the grave. raptis rare books, feb. online cat., 1808 quarto, later half morocco, illus. ($2000). humbert & ellis auction, towcester, northamptonshire, 6 feb., #672, 1808 quarto, scattered foxing, heavy in some pl. margins, half “leather” rebacked, illus. (£420). christopher edwards, california international antiquarian book fair, 7-9 feb., 1808 quarto, later half morocco ($3375). rainford & parris, march online cat., 1808 quarto, light marginal foxing on pls., later half morocco, illus. (£950). eb, april, 1808 quarto, blake’s pl. 1 trimmed at foot, modern half calf, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $1900). anah dunsheath, may online cat., 1813 quarto, “some staining,” half calf ($1274). pba galleries auction, berkeley, california, 10 sept., #18, 1808 quarto, original boards very worn and stained, front cover label, illus. (no bids on an estimate of $2000-3000); same copy, 22 oct., #30, illus. ($1140). paul foster, online cat. for the boston virtual book fair, 12-14 nov., no entry #, [1870] portfolio of pls. only, publisher’s brown cloth portfolio as issued, illus. (£1500). bonnycastle, introduction to mensuration, 1791. sue lowell books, feb. online cat., “full leather” (£300). boydell’s graphic illustrations … of shakspeare, c. 1803. sw, 17 nov., #272, scattered foxing “chiefly marginal,” half morocco worn, blake’s pl. illus. ($1375). bryant, new system … of ancient mythology. harry e. bagley, april online cat., 2nd ed., 1775–​76, 3 vols., contemporary calf very worn, bindings illus. ($500). george jeffery, april online cat., 2nd ed., 1775–​76, 3 vols., scattered foxing and heavy offsetting, “all volumes lacking boards,” illus. (£280). eb, june, 1st ed., 1774–​76, 3 vols., modern cloth, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $450 or “best offer”). bürger, leonora, 1796. windle, july private offer, bound with 6 other eds. of the poem including the 1796 ed. with illus. by diana beauclerc, “old calf, very worn, covers detached, preserved in a new box” ($29,750). catullus, poems, 1795. eb, dec., 2 vols., blake’s pls. lightly foxed and with imprint trimmed off his pl. 1, contemporary calf, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $2000); same copy and price, burnside rare books, dec. online cat., illus. cumberland, thoughts on outline, 1796. mullen books, nov. online cat., missing pl. numbered 24 (not by blake), foxed, “cardboard wraps” very worn, spine missing ($150). gorringe’s auction, lewes, east sussex, 30 nov., #278, marginal stains, original boards very worn, modern box, illus. (£517). darwin, botanic garden. fm, 26 march, #122, 1st ed. of part 1, 1791, 2nd ed. of part 2, 1790, 2 vols. in 1, scattered foxing, contemporary calf worn, illus. (£975). jarndyce, april online cat., 1st ed. of part 1, 1791, 2nd ed. of part 2, 1790, 2 vols. in 1, “some light foxing,” modern half calf, binding illus. (£1760). adrian harrington, april online cat., 4th ed., 1799, 2 vols., “some browning and spotting around plates,” contemporary calf, binding illus. (£750). munster & company, april online cat., “1791 … second edition” (of the general title page, ed. of each part not indicated), 2 vols., “light foxing” ($800). vintage books, april online cat., 3rd ed. of part 1, 1795, 4th ed. of part 2, 1794, 2 vols. in 1, “light foxing,” contemporary “leather” repaired ($325). eb, june, 1799 ed., 2 vols., contemporary calf, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £700 or “best offer”). dw, 10 sept., #433, 2nd ed. of part 1, 3rd ed. of part 2, both 1791, 2 vols., “some leaves loose or detached, edges untrimmed, original publisher’s boards, lacking spines,” blake’s pl. 1 illus. (£209); possibly the same copy, eb, nov., large paper, lacking 2 pls. but apparently with all pls. engraved by blake, illus. (£425). enfield, speaker. eb, jan., 1797 ed., 2nd st. of blake’s pl., later quarter calf, with 7 unrelated vols., illus. (£19.99). libreria oreste gozzini, may online cat., 1781 ed., scattered foxing, described as containing blake’s pl., presumably in the 1st st., contemporary calf very worn, illus. (€180). flaxman, hesiod designs, 1817. william glynn, feb. online cat., foxed, half morocco worn, illus. (£300). ely books, sept. online cat., inscribed “to the rev.d william gunn / with the author’s affectionate respects”, with “4 small pages of the publishers catalogue, dated feb. 1817, tipped-in at the front,” foxed, “card covers,” illus. (£450). flaxman’s portrait of his friend william gunn (1750–​1841) was published as a lithograph by richard james lane c. 1841. toovey’s auction, washington, west sussex, 11 nov., #3178, no description of binding, with flaxman, odyssey designs, 1805, and flaxman, dante designs, 1807, illus. (£374). flaxman, iliad designs, 1805. eb, jan., scattered foxing, later half calf, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £300 or “best offer”). william glynn, feb. online cat., scattered foxing and soiling, later half calf, illus. (£250). ader auction, paris, 8 july, #32, original boards worn with front cover label, with flaxman, odyssey designs, 1805, boards worn, illus. (€314). showplace auction, new york city, 8 nov., #0266, with flaxman, odyssey designs, 1805, both vols. in half calf worn, original cover labels retained, illus. ($531). fuseli, lectures on painting, 1801. grand auction, folkestone, kent, 17 feb., #114, an anonymous watercolor copy, 15.0 x 10.0 cm., of blake’s pl., illus. (no bids on an estimate of £100-150). gay, fables. schilb antiquarian, feb. online cat., [1811] ed., 2 vols., later calf, illus. ($795); nov. online cat., 1793 ed., 2 vols., 19th-century calf, illus. ($950). eb, march, 1793 ed., 2 vols., scattered light foxing, later morocco, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $2400 or “best offer”); another copy, march, 2 vols., foxed and stained, modern calf, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $750 or “best offer”); another copy, june, 2 vols. in 1, 19th-century calf worn, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $745 or “best offer”); another copy, july, 2 vols., light foxing, 19th-century morocco by w. pratt, covers stained, illus. ($316); same copy, sept., illus. ($261). peter harrington, may online cat., 1793 ed., 2 vols., contemporary half sheep, “a superior copy, tall and clean,” illus. (£1650); another copy, nov., 2 vols. in 1, scattered foxing, “near-contemporary smooth russia,” illus. (£1750). chorley’s auction, cheltenham, gloucestershire, 23 july, #684, 1793 ed., 2 vols., badly foxed, “rebound in cloth,” bindings illus. (£76). pba galleries auction, berkeley, california, 19 nov., #86, [1811] ed., 2 vols., foxed, contemporary half calf worn, illus. ($204). see illus. 3 for blake’s pl. 1 and related engravings. 3. four versions of an illus. to john gay, fables, “introduction to the fables. the shepherd and the philosopher.” essick collection. top image (see enlargement): etching/engraving, 7.3 x 9.5 cm., signed by william kent as the designer and peter fourdrinier as the engraver, published in fables. by mr. gay (london: j. tonson and j. watts, 1727), unnumbered page, above letterpress text beginning “introduction.” unfortunately, the paper in this ed. is very thin and the letterpress text from the verso shows through to this image on the recto. second image from the top (see enlargement): etching/engraving, 7.6 x 9.4 cm., signed by kent as the designer and gerard van der gucht as the engraver, published in fables. by the late mr gay (london: c. hitch et al., 1757), vol. 1, unnumbered page, above letterpress text beginning “introduction.” other eds., including one also published by hitch in 1757, include versions of kent’s design changed to a vertical format. third image from the top (see enlargement): etching/engraving, 7.7 x 9.4 cm., based on kent’s design and signed by blake as the engraver. first published in fables by john gay (london: john stockdale, 1793) 1: facing p. 1. blake has thoroughly modified kent’s design, replacing the latter’s haystack or conical hut with a small, rectangular house—​complete with door, window, and chimney—​in the middle distance on the left. the shepherd is a more elegant figure, clearly attentive to the philosopher and possibly smiling. the somewhat scruffy philosopher in fourdrinier’s and van der gucht’s engravings has become one of blake’s own bards or prophets, close in general character to the bard in “the voice of the ancient bard,” 1st published in songs of innocence, 1789. the sheep are of the same blakean species as those in the frontispiece and “the shepherd” in songs of innocence. perhaps geoffrey keynes slightly overvalues the extent of blake’s modifications of kent’s design by claiming that “the print [by blake] is, indeed, to be regarded as an original design by blake rather than as a copy from anyone else.”keynes, “blake’s engravings for gay’s fables,” book collector 21.1 (spring 1972): 62. which engraving, fourdrinier’s or van der gucht’s, did blake consult when executing his version of kent’s design? the similarity between the 2 earlier works and the extent of blake’s revisions make this question difficult to answer. his treatment of the clouds above the mountain, upper left, is closer to the 1727 pl. than to the 1757 pl. this is hardly conclusive evidence, but it appears that blake was looking at fourdrinier’s rendering of kent’s design. bottom image (see enlargement): unsigned etching/engraving, 6.7 x 9.3 cm. oval, published in fables by john gay (london: f. & c. rivington et al., 1793), facing p. [1]. the retention of blake’s revisions of the design indicates that the anonymous engraver for this rivington ed. copied blake’s version. this work comes close to fitting into the category of pls. designed by blake (at least in part) and engraved by other engravers. gough, sepulchral monuments, 1786. guy peppiatt fine art, march cat., british portrait and figure drawings, #54, blake’s pl. 10 only on consignment, a prepublication proof, illus. (£3500; acquired april by windle and immediately sold to the e. j. pratt library, victoria university, toronto). previously sold cheffins grain & comins auction, cambridge, england, 28 oct. 1999, #98 (£440); previously offered privately by christopher edwards, feb. 2004 (£2750). in the collection of raymond lister (1919–​2001) from at least 1974 to 1999. see illus. 4. 4. “portrait of queen philippa from her monument,” etching/​engraving published in richard gough, sepulchral monuments in great britain, 1786 (see enlargement). a prepublication proof of blake’s pl. 10 before all inscriptions and lacking a few shading strokes on the figure’s face, particularly evident on and around her eyes and on the bridge of her nose, design 32.9 x 26.8 cm., platemark 40.4 x 28.7 cm., leaf of wove paper 49.5 x 37.9 cm. with the gough pl. number top right (“pl. xlix p. 125”), title below the design (“portrait of queen philippa from her monument” with “queen of edward iii.” lined through), and signature lower right (“basire del & sc.”) inscribed in pen and ink in an unidentified hand (possibly gough’s). another ink inscription in the same hand, just above the bottom edge of the leaf and lined through, reads “put under q portrait of q eleanor pl. xxiii*” (a deleted misidentification of the subject and pl. number). two pencil inscriptions in 2 different hands, the one right of the portrait identifying the subject and concluding with letters and numbers that may be a dealer’s pricing code. the pencil inscription below the portrait is in the same hand as the pen and ink inscriptions. it reads “mr ashley your people have made a mistake which appears very / extraordinary as it is very clearly wrote with only one l / philippa”. ashley may be the writing engraver whose shop executed the printed inscriptions in the published st. reproduced courtesy of guy peppiatt fine art. the published st. is signed by blake’s master james basire as both the delineator of the portrait and the engraver. the preliminary drawing in pencil, now in the bodleian library, oxford, is attributed to blake in butlin #40, titled queen philippa, head and shoulders from her effigy and dated to c. 1774. blake probably had a hand in engraving the pl.; see bb #461, pl. 10, bbs pp. 217-18, and cb pp. 118-20, pl. 3 and illus. 291 (the published st.). it was conventional in the late 18th century for the master to sign an engraving even if executed in whole or in part by an apprentice. hayley, ballads, 1805. fm, 30 jan., #108, 1st st. of pl. 1, sts. of other pls. not indicated but probably 1st, marginal stains on pls., some leaves detached, contemporary half calf very worn, front cover detached, pl. 1 illus. (£325). eb, july, 1st sts. of the pls., some leaves soiled, contemporary boards very worn, modern leather spine, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $2490 or “best offer,” quickly reduced to $2190 or “best offer”). hayley, designs to a series of ballads, 1802. windle, online salon d’hiver virtuel, 11-13 dec., no item #, pl. 1 only, leaf 25.0 x 17.4 cm., illus. (€40,750). previously offered by windle in oct. 2016 exhibition and sales cat., no item #, illus. ($49,500). hayley, essay on sculpture, 1800. bunch auction, chadds ford, pennsylvania, 28 july, #11662, foxed, 1 p. torn in half, 19th-century half calf very worn, illus. ($246). open boat booksellers, oct. online cat., pls. foxed, 19th-century half calf worn, illus. ($950). hayley, life of cowper, 1803–​04. mallams auction, oxford, 30 jan., 1st ed., 3 vols., contemporary calf rebacked, with an unrelated vol., bindings illus. (£86). babushka books & framers, april online cat., 2nd ed., 3 vols., “half leather” worn (£190). eb, may, 2nd ed., 3 vols., imprints trimmed off some pls., scattered foxing, contemporary quarter calf worn, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £192 or “best offer”). hayley, triumphs of temper, 1803. dw, 4 march, #238, later calf rebacked, title page illus. (£172). rare book cellar, april online cat., no mention of the pls., contemporary half calf, binding illus. ($875). eb, april, contemporary calf worn, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of £440); same copy, june, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £528 or “best offer”); oct., another copy, large paper, light marginal foxing to some pls., later half morocco, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £840 or “best offer,” quickly changed to $1158.71 or “best offer”). rooke books, may online cat., contemporary calf very worn, illus. (£323); another copy, dec. online cat., half morocco, illus. (£700). heritage auction, dallas, 16 dec., #45317, minor foxing, contemporary calf rebacked, modern cloth box, illus. ($239). hoare, inquiry, 1806. windle, sept. online cat., 20 works for london firsts 2020, #12, original boards worn, illus. ($2750). hogarth, the beggar’s opera by hogarth and blake, 1965. eb, march, blake’s pl. only, a very worn impression of the 7th st., framed, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $99 or “best offer”); another impression, april, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $138). hogarth, works. eb, march, blake’s pl. only, a late st., possibly 5th, framed, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $325 or “best offer”); march, a complete(?) copy, baldwin and cradock undated ed. printed by woodfall c. 1835–​37, “including … the engraved plate by william blake,” probably 5th st., many leaves foxed, 19th-century half calf worn, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $1400); april, same copy, required minimum, and result; may, same copy, $1200 required minimum bid, same result; july, blake’s pl. only, probably 4th st., tear into image upper right, water stain lower left margin, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $95); another impression of blake’s pl. only, july, a later state, possibly 5th, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $138); another impression of blake’s pl. only, sept., possibly 3rd st., lower margin lightly stained, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $300 or “best offer”); nov., 1822 ed., blake’s pl. torn through the image, contemporary half calf, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £2250 or “best offer”). dw, 9 oct., #373, blake’s pl. only, probably 3rd st., leaf 46.0 x 58.0 cm., “two short closed tears to lower portion” of bottom margin, illus. (£74). quaritch, dec. online cat., new acquisitions, #16, baldwin and cradock undated ed. printed by woodfall c. 1835–​37, no mention of blake’s pl. but presumably present among the “116 leaves of plates,” later 19th-century half morocco worn, illus. (£2500). it is difficult to determine the sts. of impressions of this pl. based on low-resolution online images. hunter, historical journal, 1793, quarto issue. fm, 22 jan., #223, “occasional foxing,” contemporary half russia worn, blake’s pl. illus. (not sold; estimate £800-1200); same copy, 20 feb., #62, illus. (£1040). barter books, april online cat., foxed, modern calf, illus. (£1000). josephus, works. eb, feb., bb issue a, c. 1785–​87, “57 plates” (of 61), no mention of blake’s 3 pls., some pls. damaged, contemporary calf very worn, illus. (£49.95); feb.-march, bb issue e, c. 1792–​93, light marginal stains, contemporary calf very worn, illus. (£127); may-june, bb issue a, modern cloth, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $220 or “best offer”). common crow books, april online cat., bb issue a, contemporary calf very worn, illus. ($600). lavater, aphorisms, 1789. colin page, may online cat., contemporary calf “a little rubbed,” illus. (£200; acquired by windle for stock); same copy, windle, june online cat., illus. ($595). kfa, 16 june, #315, contemporary half calf very worn, illus. (£132). lavater, essays on physiognomy. george jeffery, april online cat., 1789–​98 ed., 3 vols. in 5, scattered foxing, early calf rebacked, illus. (£850). dh, sept. online cat., “1792” (actually c. 1818) ed., 3 vols. in 5, “with paper watermarked 1804,” scattered foxing, contemporary morocco, illus. ($4500). bbs p. 236 reports watermarks in this c. 1818 ed. of 1806, 1812, and 1817, but an “1804” watermark has not been recorded previously. colin page, dec. online cat., “1792” ed., 3 vols. in 5, a few pls. foxed, contemporary calf, illus. (£1200). malkin, father’s memoirs, 1806. rulon-miller books, april online cat., blake’s pl. lightly foxed, original boards rebacked, original printed spine label retained, illus. ($1562.50). probably the same copy offered eb, april 2019, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $1515 or “best offer”). nicholson, introduction to natural philosophy, 1782. thomas rare books, april online cat., 2 vols., contemporary calf worn (£700). olivier, fencing familiarized, 1780. peter harrington, feb. online cat., “scattered foxing and offsetting,” contemporary calf rebacked, illus. (£1750). ritson, select collection of english songs, 1783. galerie bassenge auction, berlin, 7 april, #395, 3 vols., full calf, illus. (no bids on an estimate of €500). colin coleman music, april online cat., 3 vols., full calf (£780). keogh’s books, april online cat., 3 vols., “occasional foxing,” later half calf, illus. (£600). shakespeare, dramatic works, 1802. raptis rare books, feb. online cat., 9 vols., no mention of blake’s pl., half morocco, bindings illus. ($9500). some copies do not include blake’s pl., inscribed as a “variation” of peter simon’s pl. after a painting by john opie. for the relationship between the 2 pls., see cb p. 83. shakespeare, plays. eb, jan., 1805 ed., 10 vol. issue, leaves 28.0 x 18.0 cm., 19th-century calf worn, illus. (a bargain at £78); march, 1811 ed., 9 vols., scattered foxing, contemporary calf worn, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £1406.30); nov., 1805 ed., 9 vol. issue, later half calf, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £950 or “best offer”). cheffins auction, cambridge, england, 9 jan., #309, 1805 ed., 10 vol. issue, “boards detached,” with an unspecified quantity of unrelated vols., bindings illus. (£294). polyanthus books, feb. online cat., 1805 ed., 10 vol. issue, contemporary calf rebacked, with william richardson, essays on shakespeare’s dramatic characters, 1812, illus. (£465). neverland books, april online cat., 1811 ed., 9 vols., scattered foxing, contemporary calf worn, bindings illus. ($600). potter & potter auction, chicago, 10 sept., #501, 1805 ed., 10 vol. issue, later half morocco, illus. ($1320). stedman, narrative, hand-colored copy. carmarthenshire rare books, april online cat., 1806 ed., 2 vols., contemporary “leather” rebacked with new spines, illus. (£9750). the coloring in this 1806 copy matches the palette used in large-paper copies of the 1796 ed. the pls. may be remainders from that earlier ed. stedman, narrative, uncolored copies. dw, 29 jan., #52, 1796 ed., 2 vols., scattered foxing on pls., contemporary calf rebacked, worn, front cover of vol. 1 detached, illus. (£1560). sw, 26 march, #81, 1796 ed., 2 vols., lacking 1 unidentified pl., “minor foxing, minimal dampstaining,” modern half morocco, illus. (estimate $1500-2500; auction postponed because of the coronavirus pandemic); same copy and estimate, 7 may, #81, illus. ($1690). alan wofsy fine arts, april online cat., 1806 ed., 2 vols., “slightly foxed,” calf rebacked, illus. ($2250). besley’s books, april online cat., 1806 ed., 2 vols., scattered foxing, half calf repaired, illus. (£1250). toovey’s auction, washington, west sussex, 27 aug., #3071, 1796 ed., 2 vols., “occasional minor spotting, mainly to plate margins,” contemporary calf very worn, rebacked, hinges strengthened with tape, with another copy of vol. 1, backstrip missing, bindings illus. (£1743). virgil, pastorals, 1821. cny, online auction, 2-18 june, #68, 2 vols., a few marginal stains, binding described as “19th-century calf” but at least the backstrips are publisher’s sheep with “pocket / edition” stamped in gilt at the foot, illus. (no bids on an estimate of $15,000-25,000). virgil, the wood engravings of william blake for thornton’s virgil, 1977. windle, march online list, the booth that never was: 30 books for the tokyo antiquarian book fair, #13, publisher’s folding box ($12,500). whitaker, the seraph, c. 1818–​28? windle, april online cat., bb issue a, 2 vols., marginal stains, publisher’s cloth worn, possibly a remainder binding, the copy offered by oxfam books, dec. 2019, for £300, illus. ($975); windle private offer, aug. ($500; acquired by essick). wit’s magazine, 1784. eb, july, blake’s pl. 3 only, hand colored, imprint trimmed off, stains in the design top center, bottom right corner damaged, illus. (£205 to windle for stock); windle private offer, aug. ($450; acquired by essick). see illus. 5. 5. “tythe in kind; or the sow’s revenge,” engraved by blake after samuel collings. bb pl. 3 in the wit’s magazine, published in the feb. 1784 issue (see enlargement). etching/​engraving with hand coloring, image 16.0 x 21.8 cm., leaf of wove paper 17.2 x 21.8 cm. pasted to a backing leaf 18.0 x 22.8 cm. essick collection. according to an advertisement on the back wrapper of a copy of the nov. 1784 issue in my collection, “prints of the wit’s magazine, finely coloured, may now be had, (independent of the work) price only sixpence each.” pls. included in the magazine were folded twice to fit horizontally within its text leaves of approx. 23.0 x 14.0 cm. the absence of folds in this impression indicates that it is one of these “independent” prints. all impressions published in the magazine i have seen are on laid paper. thus, the wove paper of this example suggests a separate printing for the impressions intended for hand coloring. this is the only example i have ever seen of the separate issue of a pl. engraved by blake for the wit’s magazine. young, night thoughts, 1797. sw, 21 may, #292, 2nd st. of pl. 11, leaves trimmed to 40.1 x 30.0 cm., no mention of the “explanation” leaf, “bound” but no description of binding, illus. (no bids on an estimate of $4000-6000). dh, online list for the abaa virtual book fair, 4-7 june, no entry #, with the “explanation” leaf, “uncut on the fore-edge and lower edge,” later half morocco, illus. ($15,000). interesting blakeana j. böhme, works, the so-called “law edition,” 1764–​81. windle, list for the california international antiquarian book fair, 7-9 feb., #14, 4 vols., modern half calf ($22,500); same copy and price, june online cat., london firsts online 2020: 12 works, #5, illus.; same copy, online firsts: london’s rare book fair, 5-12 june, no entry #, illus. (£18,250); same copy, sept. online cat., god help us! 30 books on religion, #11, illus. ($22,500); same copy, online salon d’hiver virtuel, 11-13 dec., no item #, illus. (€18,525). the ed. of böhme known to blake and perhaps owned by him—​see his comment to henry crabb robinson on the beauty of the “figures” (i.e., illus.) in “law’s transl.n” (br[2] 423). j. gay, fables. london: f. & c. rivington et al., 1793. eb, may, contemporary calf rebacked, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £250 or “best offer”); another copy, may, contemporary half calf worn, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $350). buddenbrooks, dec. online cat., contemporary calf ($495). argosy book store, dec. online cat., contemporary calf repaired ($400). as the final paragraph in bb #460 points out, this ed. “contains two [oval, unsigned] plates to a page which very closely copy (often reversed) those in the 1793 stockdale edition [with blake’s 12 pls.]; most notable in this respect is the strikingly blakean shepherd imitated from blake’s first engraving” (p. 566). the standing philosopher seems to me more “strikingly blakean” than the sitting shepherd; see illus. 3, bottom image. “faux william blake print,” etching/​engraving inscribed “wb. del nov 16.th 1809.” joseph burridge books, april online cat., “image of an oak, hollow with a doorway at the bottom and three cows, hand coloured,” a poem engraved below titled “the oak in penshurst park” and signed “f d c.”, illus. (£400). not by our blake. for discussion and black-and-white illus. of an uncolored impression, see g. e. bentley, jr., “blakewell,” blake 13.3 (winter 1979–​80): 152-53. w. whitman, autograph letter signed to “my dear swinton” (john swinton, managing editor of the new york times), dated 31 march 1868, 1 p. bonhams auction, new york, 11 dec., #116, complete letter illus. with reference to an unsigned article, “swinburne’s william blake,” in the 29 march 1868 issue of the times (not sold; estimate $4000-6000). for the text of this letter and its sale for $3750, see interesting blakeana in the 2016 sales review, blake 50.4 (spring 2017). w. muir, facsimiles of blake’s illuminated books, 1885–​1920. pba galleries auction, pasadena, california, 6 feb., #75, the book of thel, 1885, lacking original wrappers and copy no., rebound in morocco, with muir’s 1920 issue of thel, rebound in “half leather, with muir’s signed limitation statement and copy number from the original wrappers mounted on front endpaper,” illus. ($2500 to windle and offered by him at the california international antiquarian book fair, 7-9 feb., for $4500); #76, visions of the daughters of albion, 1885, lacking original wrappers and copy no., rebound in half calf, slipcase, illus. ($1250 to windle and offered by him at the california international antiquarian book fair, 7-9 feb., for $4500). windle, list for the new york international antiquarian book fair, 5-8 march, #12, songs of innocence and songs of experience, both 1885, 2 vols., original wrappers, innocence inscribed “no. 0 pearson’s copy”, experience inscribed “for the times” ($14,500); march online list, the booth that never was: 30 books for the tokyo antiquarian book fair, #6, america, 1887, hand-colored copy no. 3, original wrappers rebacked ($12,500), #7, europe, 1887, copy no. 11, original wrappers ($12,500), #8, milton, 1886, copy no. not recorded, half calf, original wrappers bound in ($9500); sept. online cat., 20 works for london firsts 2020, #4, the marriage of heaven and hell, 1885, copy no. 40, original wrappers, illus. ($5750), #5, the book of thel, 1885, same copy listed above, illus. ($4500). the america and europe previously offered at the same prices in windle’s handlist for the boston antiquarian book fair, 10-12 nov. 2017, #9 and 10. toovey’s auction, washington, west sussex, 16 sept., #180, europe pl. 1, described only as “a late 19th century watercolour” but clearly the muir facsimile of “the ancient of days” with coloring based on europe copy d, framed and matted to the image, illus. (£162 to windle for stock; sold oct. to a private collector in chicago); see illus. 6. fm, 25 sept., #133, milton, 1886, copy no. 7, morocco “a little rubbed and marked,” illus. (£1875); #134, europe, 1887, copy no. not recorded, leaves “mounted on stubs” and bound in “later half calf … rubbed,” illus. (£3500). sophie schneideman rare books, online list for the boston virtual book fair, 12-14 nov., #27, songs of experience, 1885, no copy no. recorded, contemporary calf (£3400). 6. “the ancient of days” (frontispiece to europe a prophecy). william muir facsimile, datable to c. 1885 (see enlargement). watercolor without any underlying printed image, design 23.8 x 16.7 cm. on leaf of wove paper 28.2 x 20.3 cm. muir usually signed and numbered his facsimiles of “the ancient of days,” top left approximately 5.0 cm. above the design, but if such an inscription was present it was trimmed off this example. photo courtesy of john windle. the coloring is based on the frontispiece to europe copy d, in the british museum since 1859. this work may have been executed by e. druitt, one of the best artists in muir’s circle of facsimilists. she produced other blake facsimiles for muir, completely executed by hand and based on originals in the british museum. for further information about the muir facsimiles of “the ancient of days,” both those with and without a lithographic base, see the 2006 sales review, blake 40.4 (spring 2007): 146, addendum to sp pp. 258-60. blake, the book of ahania, william griggs facsimile, [1892]. pba galleries auction, pasadena, california, 6 feb., #74, full morocco, “original plain wrappers bound at rear,” illus. ($625 to windle and offered by him at the california international antiquarian book fair, 7-9 feb., for $2750). blake, songs of innocence and of experience. liverpool: henry young & sons, 1923. windle, list for the new york international antiquarian book fair, 5-8 march, #14, no. 13 of 51 hand-colored copies of this facsimile, half morocco ($5500); another copy, sept. online cat., 20 works for london firsts 2020, #6, no. 44 of 51 hand-colored copies, “original roan, very well restored and rebacked,” illus. ($5500). l. binyon, manuscript of an unpublished lecture titled “william blake; painter, poet, seer.” windle, april short list 19 (new series), #3, dated by windle to c. 1932–​33, the lecture written in ink by binyon’s wife, cicely, on rectos only of 19 leaves, cloth box, illus. ($2950). previously sold cny, 20 nov. 1992, #18 ($550), and christie’s east, new york, 2 dec. 1994, #20 ($633); previously offered james cummins, nov. 2006 cat. 97, #10, illus. ($2000). minutes of the william blake trust, 1948–​69. windle, april short list 19 (new series), #2, typescript and manuscript, 240 pp., “all reports are signed by geoffrey keynes in his distinctive brown ink, and the text is annotated and otherwise added to by arnold fawcus,” half roan worn, illus. ($6500; acquired late april by a british private collector). previously offered at the same price by windle, dec. 2016 online cat., illus., and march 2017 cat. 65, part 3, p. 82, #1, illus. blake, poems from william blake’s “songs of innocence,” illus. by maurice sendak, 1967. type punch matrix, sept. online cat., publisher’s wrappers, illus. ($4750). patti smith (american singer, songwriter, artist, and poet, born 1946). blake’s life mask, 2003. gelatin silver print photograph, image 10.7 x 8.2 cm. cny, online only auction, 5-14 oct., #119, signed by smith and inscribed “1/10” in pencil on verso, illus. ($1875). blake’s circle and followers works are listed under artists’ names in the following order: paintings and drawings sold in groups, single paintings and drawings, letters and manuscripts, separate pls., book illus. flaxman, john drawings and sculpture see also flaxman under letterpress books with engravings by and after blake, above. an album of drawings. fm, 26 march, #161, including “43 original drawings by john flaxman of cups, candelabra, ornamental friezes and of figural compositions, pen and inks, watercolours, pencil and chalks,” mounted in 2 vols. on leaves approximately 39.0 x 29.0 cm., with 108 drawings by other artists, half morocco worn, illus. (£39,000). the bard, probably of thomas gray’s poem. pencil, pen and ink, 28.0 x 28.5 cm. ah, march online cat. 501, #40, illus. (£4250). previously offered sl, 31 march 1999, #6, illus. (not sold; estimate £2000-3000). design for a ewer (recto), study of a mother and child (verso). pencil, leaf 19.0 x 13.5 cm., signed “j. flaxman.” in ink on verso. ly, nov.-dec. online cat., thirty drawings for the holidays, no entry #, recto and verso illus. (£1800). previously offered lowell libson, july 2017 online cat., recto titled design for an urn, illus. (not priced). design for the pediment of the temple of liberty at woburn abbey. pencil, 6.9 x 19.7 cm., datable to 1803. ly, nov.-dec. online cat., thirty drawings for the holidays, no entry #, illus. (£2200). previously offered by lowell libson, july 2017 online cat., illus. (not priced). figure composition. pencil and brown ink, foxed, 8.9 x 10.8 cm. ah, dec. online cat. 510, #19, illus. (£225). autograph letter signed by william hayley to flaxman, dated 24 july 1784, 3 pp. dw, 11 nov., #20, included in an extra-illus. copy of j. t. herbert baily, emma, lady hamilton: a biographical essay, 1905, all 3 pp. of hayley’s letter illus. (no bids on an estimate of £3000-4000). much of this letter deals with the “fitting up” of hayley’s new library at his home in eartham, sussex, including “a dozen heads of the following persons of that size, which is commonly sold, i think, for a guinea, but i apprehend some of them are not to be had—​ homer rousseau milton voltaire demosthenes dryden cicero pope sophocles sterne aristophanes metastasio”. the letter indicates that hayley is asking for sculpted “busts” of these “heads,” not paintings. blake, c. 1800–​03, decorated the library at hayley’s turret house, felpham, with a group of “eighteen heads of poets” (butlin #343), executed in pen and tempera on canvas, that includes 7 of the persons listed in this letter: homer, milton, demosthenes, cicero, voltaire, dryden, and pope. hayley also asks, “pray is there any bust of otway existing?” thomas otway is included among blake’s “heads of poets.” flaxman, lectures on sculpture, 1838. windle, july online cat., serious, sensational, satirical: 34 victorian books, #15, “extra-illustrated with 28 original pages from flaxman’s sketchbooks bearing drawings in a number of different styles, several relating directly to the illustrations in the book,” pp. 33-48 missing, walter crane’s copy, “original green cloth with printed paper spine label, rubbed and worn,” illus. ($18,500). previously offered privately by windle at the same price, dec. 2018. fuseli, henry drawings, paintings, and separate plates head of a woman with a feather hat (recto), an abduction (verso). pencil and gray wash (recto), pencil (verso), leaf 24.8 x 19.9 cm., recto inscribed and dated “k. r. may 30. [18]19.” cny, 28 jan., #123, recto and verso illus. (not sold; estimate $8000-12,000). the recto is almost identical to study of a lady, wearing a choker and an elaborate head-dress, pencil, 22.2 x 14.9 cm., sold sl, 13 march 1986, #106, illus. (£3520), and offered sl, 6 july 2016, #333, illus. (not sold; estimate £3000-5000). maria and feste looking down at the imprisoned malvolio. monochrome wash drawing, 16.5 x 9.8 cm., datable to c. 1803. ly, oct. 2020 cat., recent acquisitions, pp. 32-35, illus. (£15,000). previously sold christie’s auction, london, 14 april 1992, #24, illus. in black and white (£4620). a variant of this design was engraved by william bromley and published in plays of william shakspeare, 1805 (weinglass #192, dated 1803 in the imprint). “beatrice listening to hero, & ursula” (inscribed title), mezzotint by john jones, 1791. weinglass #113, titled “beatrice eavesdropping on hero and ursula.” gerrards auction, lytham st. annes, lancashire, 7 feb., #979, margins damaged, illus. (not sold; estimate £80-100); same impression and estimate, 28 feb. and 20 march, #979a in both auctions, illus. (not sold). possibly the same impression offered grosvenor prints, april 2016 online cat., “fine impression but damaged,” illus. (£480, “sold or reserved”). “belisane & parcival under the enchantment of urma,” mezzotint by j. r. smith, 1782. antiquariat peter kiefer auction, pforzheim, germany, 15 feb., #5109, apparently trimmed close to the image, illus. (€96). eb, june, with the inscriptions below the image, ragged margin at top, illus. (€39.50). “the weird sisters,” mezzotint by j. r. smith, 1785. bellmans auction, wisborough green, west sussex, 14 july, #1057, 1st st. with the oxford street address in the imprint, lower margin scuffed, framed, illus. (£549; estimate £100-150). linnell, john early drawings, paintings, and original graphics english countryside. watercolor, 17.8 x 25.4 cm., signed. eb, jan., illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $200 or “best offer”). possibly an early work. north wales. pencil heightened with white, 24.0 x 29.0 cm., inscribed “n wales j linnell 1813.” kfa, 29 may, #25, illus. (£348). view of a country house. watercolor, 10.0 x 17.0 cm. kfa, 18 jan., #426, illus. (£96). previously offered cheffins auction, cambridge, england, 18 sept. 2014, #581, “attributed” to linnell, illus. (not sold; estimate £300-500). an early work, if indeed by linnell. palmer, samuel drawings, paintings, and rare states of etchings an evening landscape. watercolor and gouache, 21.0 x 44.0 cm., signed “s. palmer.” ly, jan. online cat., dating the work to “c. 1880,” illus. (not priced). harlech castle. watercolor and gouache, 36.8 x 44.5 cm., inscribed “harlech castle north wales from the meadow of the waterfall”, datable to 1836. andrew clayton-payne, march private offer (price on request). harvest field near tivoli. watercolor, 39.1 x 50.2 cm., datable to the mid-1840s. heritage auction, dallas, 29 may, #68041, illus. ($16,250). the poet. watercolor, 20.3 x 43.2 cm., signed, datable to c. 1865. arader galleries auction, new york, 10 oct., #0189, illus. (not sold; estimate $50,000-100,000). richmond, george early drawings, paintings, and original graphics adam and eve. pen and ink over pencil, 21.0 x 12.7 cm., possibly dating from the 1830s. guy peppiatt fine art, march cat., british portrait and figure drawings, #55, illus. (£1200). study of comus carrying his cup (recto), figure studies (verso). pen and ink, pencil, on laid paper, 33.0 x 21.2 cm., recto inscribed in pencil “paris 1829 a 30” and “comus”, verso inscribed indistinctly “first sketch for picture of woman of samaria 1828”. ly, nov.-dec. online cat., thirty drawings for the holidays, no entry #, recto illus. (£4800). previously sold sl, 18 nov. 1976, #176 (£360), and bonhams, new york, 5 nov. 2014, #63, illus. ($2500); previously offered by colnaghi, nov.-dec. 1979 cat., english drawings and watercolours, #5, illus. in black and white (£850), and by lowell libson, jan. 2016 cat., pp. 77-79, illus. (not priced). appendix: new information on blake’s engravings listed below are substantive additions or corrections to essick, william blake’s commercial book illustrations (1991). p. 38, wit’s magazine, pl. 2. for a hand-colored impression issued separately from the magazine, see wit’s magazine under letterpress books with engravings by and after blake, above, and illus. 5. p. 119, gough, sepulchral monuments, pl. 3. for more information about the prepublication proof once in raymond lister’s collection, see gough under letterpress books with engravings by and after blake, above, and illus. 4. my blake (part 1: in russia) my blake by dmitri nikolaevich smirnovalso known by the pen names dmitri n. smirnov and d. smirnov-sadovsky. dmitri nikolaevich smirnov (dmitrismirnov@hotmail.co.uk) is a russian and british composer, born in minsk into a family of opera singers and now living in st. albans, hertfordshire. he studied at the moscow conservatory 1967–72 and in 1979 was blacklisted as one of “khrennikov’s seven” at the sixth congress of the union of soviet composers for unapproved participation in some festivals of soviet music in the west. he was one of the founders of russia’s new acm (association for contemporary music), established in moscow in 1990. smirnov has resided in england since 1991 and has taught at goldsmiths, university of london, since 2003. many of his works reflect his fascination with the poetry and art of william blake. he has translated into russian all the literary works of blake except the poem vala, or the four zoas, which he is now working on. part 1: in russia i grew up in a country where english literature was considered exemplary, and it was faithfully translated into my native language by many generations of eminent translators. british or american classics were almost as popular as russian, but of course william shakespeare always stood in the first place and eclipsed all other authors of the world. therefore, it is not surprising that in my early youth, when i began to write music and was looking for texts for my vocal compositions, i initially turned to setting some of shakespeare’s sonnets from the most popular russian translation, by samuil marshak. i had only started studying english then. one day in 1967, when by chance in a bookshop, i bought a soviet book with an english title, in the realm of beauty, a collection of english-language poetry printed in english. i was struck by william blake’s short quatrain to see a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wild flower hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour. it impressed me with its depth and universality–an incredible flight of the imagination while, at the same time, an amazing simplicity. i immediately felt that i had found the main thing i was looking for in art, poetry, music, and in life itself. after translating it into russian i began to translate everything from that book–there were works of shakespeare, byron, shelley, coleridge, keats, burns, edgar allan poe, and many other great poets, but blake drew me in more than anybody else. back then, i could not have foreseen how much this hobby would affect my music and life, causing me eventually even to emigrate to the country of the english bards. later my wife, elena firsova, also a composer, set my first translation to music for chorus and orchestra in augury, op. 38, 1988, one of her most monumental works, commissioned by and performed at the bbc proms in london. i also set to music the same text, but in the original english version, in my three blake songs for voice and ensemble of two clarinets, viola, cello, and double bass, op. 61, no. 3, 1992. a later version of this work is here: to make it possible to perform not only in english but also in russian, i placed my russian translation below the english text in the score: 1. the beginning of “to see a world …,” op. 61, no. 3, 1992. however, the list of my works setting blake to music begins with another piece, the crystal cabinet for violin and piano (or celesta), op. 27g, 1979. i was enchanted by blake’s poem of the same title from the pickering manuscript that begins the maiden caught me in the wild where i was dancing merrily she put me into her cabinet and lockd me up with a golden key. the poem tells the story of a miraculous meeting of a young man with a translucent threefold maiden “each in the other closd” with her threefold smile and threefold kiss. it gave me the simple but rather unusual structural idea to compose a piece in which every bar of the accompaniment contains four triads made of different notes but together embracing a complete chromatic scale. the series of these triads forms multiple and always different combinations, and on top of this harmony appears the melodious line of the violin, which is built of the notes suggested by the triads of the accompaniment. 2. the beginning of the crystal cabinet, op. 27g, 1979. in december 1979 one of the most pivotal of my compositions was completed—the seasons for voice, flute, viola, and harp, op. 28, the setting of four blake verses from his earliest collection, poetical sketches: “to spring,” “to summer,” “to autumn,” and “to winter.” the cycle begins o thou, with dewy locks, who lookest down thro’ the clear windows of the morning; turn thine angel eyes upon our western isle, which in full choir hails thy approach, o spring! it was difficult to believe that these beautiful and powerful poems were written by such a young man—the four seasons were treated by blake as a complete cycle of a human life from birth to death. it was a real pleasure to set to music such wonderful poetry; this was my first serious musical turn to blake, which later grew into a kind of conversion to blake’s faith. i’ve found that the soprano voice, together with such an exquisite instrumental combination, is indeed capable of communicating some powerful drama. i extracted the pitch material from different segments of the natural overtone scale, guided by the intuitive idea of the emotional color of certain musical intervals that could transmit the images of the seasons of the year. the intervallic materialpitch material and intervallic material are interconnected; there is, however, a principal distinction between them. pitches are particular notes: a, b-flat, c, d-sharp, etc. intervals are the distances between notes: minor and major seconds, thirds, perfect fourths, fifths, etc., taken melodically (one after another) or harmonically (simultaneously) from any pitch. of a young, ecstatic spring is the cohesion of two minor thirds through a major second, in semitones, +3-2+3, where plus means an ascending interval and minus a descending one; a more calm and balanced summer is identified with two major thirds connected by a minor third, +4-3+4; autumn, sad and burdened with fruits, is expressed by the conjugation of two minor seconds through a perfect fifth, +1+7-1; and a cold, gloomy winter is depicted with the “deadest” of intervals, the tritone linked to another tritone by means of a minor second, +6+1+6. 3. the beginning of “to spring” from the seasons, op. 28, no. 1, 1979. this work was the most successful of my compositions of those years. after the moscow premiere on 10 march 1980, performed by soprano lydia davydova and the ensemble under the baton of sergei skripka, it was repeated there in 1982, with nikolai korndorf as conductor, then at the berlin festival in 1986, with soprano janis harper and the ensemble modern conducted by péter eötvös, and later in england and the usa. the score and set of parts were printed by an american publisher, g. schirmer. in may 1980 i decided to write a symphony in four movements based on my song cycle the seasons to recreate the music by only symphonic means, without singing, just as a painter turns his black-and-white sketch into a colorful canvas. i was encouraged by the example of gustav mahler with regard to his symphonies, some of which were written on the basis of his vocal cycles. my first symphony (the seasons) for large symphony orchestra, op. 30, was completed in september 1980 and dedicated to the memory of blake. the premiere took place on 8 october 1981 in riga; vassily sinaisky conducted with great inspiration and the latvian state symphony orchestra played excellently. after that, quite a few performances followed: in moscow, gorky (now nizhny novgorod), dzerzhinsk, tanglewood (massachusetts, usa), daegu (south korea), london, the hague, and twice in columbus (ohio, usa). i attended most of these events, which was great fun. the score was printed by sovetsky kompozitor publishers, moscow, 1988; now the publishing rights belong to boosey & hawkes, london. 4. left: the seasons (new york: g. schirmer, 1991). right: first symphony (the seasons) (moscow: sovetsky kompozitor, 1988). in january 1981 i wrote the song cycle fearful symmetry, six poems by william blake for voice and organ, op. 32, that includes “to apollo”—an excerpt from “an imitation of spenser”—and “to the muses” (both from poetical sketches), “morning” and “day” (from the notebook), and “the sick rose” and “the tyger” (from songs of experience). it premiered five years later, 10 march 1986, in moscow with lydia davydova, soprano, and ekaterina prochakova, organist. much later i created a version for voice and piano, op. 32a, 1981/2003/2010. the first, fourth, and fifth songs are available here: the music of “to the muses” also became the basis of my ballade, op. 35, 1982, for alto saxophone and piano. the music of “the tyger” i rearranged a few times for different casts of performers (opp. 41, 61, 61a, and 132). all the texture of my setting of “the tyger” is based on the idea of “fearful symmetry”: everything that appears in the lower register of the accompaniment is mirrored later in the upper one, and vice versa: 5. “the tyger,” op. 32, no. 6, bars 9-17. in addition to composing music, i used my spare time to translate english poetry into russian, and when i finished working on blake’s early lyrics, i approached his first so-called prophetic poems. on 18 february 1983 i finished a translation of tiriel, which i worked on with great enthusiasm because i felt that this was the thing that i had been seeking for so long, an excellent operatic plot: a former tyrant, removed from power and filled with the thirst for revenge, sends devastating, malicious curses to all destined to cross his path—his sons, daughters, brothers, dear old parents, and, finally, to himself, and by this he brings death to all humanity. i read the translation to my wife, elena, and she approved my idea for the opera. for a few days i worked on a libretto, and then on 24 february began to compose the music.for more information on the opera, see <https://​en.​wikipedia.​org/​wiki/​tiriel_​(opera)>; for the libretto, see <http://​wikilivres.​ru/​tiriel_​(libretto)>. i began the symphonic prologue to tiriel after inventing a specific system of repetitions of the sounds of a twelve-tone series that is reminiscent of a rope twined with two identical strings. the eminent russian musicologist yuri kholopov comments: the composer began his composition with a prologue (a kind of overture), based on a series that is symmetrical in its structure …. the individual mode comes from the principle of imitative interpolation of a pair of identical series leading to a regular repetition of the sound pitches … and even to the obvious tonal colouring (quasi g-moll).yuri kholopov, “nashi v anglii. dmitri smirnov, elena firsova,” muzyka iz byvshego sssr, vypusk 2 (moscow: kompozitor, 1996) 265; in english as yuri kholopov, “russians in england: dmitry smirnov, elena firsova,” “ex oriente …—i”: ten composers from the former ussr (berlin: verlag ernst kuhn, 2002) 207-66. 6. tiriel, the beginning of the symphonic prologue, op. 41a. tiriel, op. 41, for soloists, chorus, dancers, and full symphony orchestra, was completed in january 1985. to view the rest of the opera, see <https://​www.​youtube.​com/​results?​search_query=​dmitri+​n.+​smirnov​%3a​+tiriel>. to the text of the libretto i added five more blake poems: “introduction” from songs of innocence, “the tyger” from songs of experience, “the divine image” from songs of innocence, “a divine image” from songs of experience, and “a cradle song” from the notebook. the last became an epilogue to the opera: sung by the goddess mnetha, it represents a sort of lullaby to mankind, which has already passed away. the opera ends: o, the cunning wiles that creep in thy little heart asleep. when thy little heart doth wake, then the dreadful lightnings break. from thy cheek & from thy eye o’er the youthful harvests nigh infant wiles & infant smiles heaven & earth of peace beguiles. i reused the music of this lullaby in the second movement of my second string quartet, op. 42, 1985, which i dedicated to my son, philip, who had just been born on 8 april. after this i began writing my second opera, the lamentations of thel (or just thel), op. 45, after the book of thel. i liked that intimate and lyrical parable about a girl, thel, who complains of her future death and searches for the meaning of life. when i read to elena my just completed translation of the poem, she said, “this is about me.” i explained that was why i decided to write an opera setting this story. i worked on this chamber opera between 1985 and 1986. it became a sort of sequel to tiriel, but much shorter, with a smaller cast: it required only four singers, a small chorus, and an ensemble of sixteen players.for more information, see <https://​en.​wikipedia.​org/​wiki/​thel_(opera)>. to view the rest of the opera, see <https://​www.​youtube.​com/​results?​search_query=​dmitri+​n.+​smirnov​%3a​+thel>. from the very beginning of the prologue the music is full of the intonations of uncertainty, tormenting questions, and sorrowful lamentations. 7. thel, the beginning of the prologue, op. 45a. in moscow we didn’t live in complete isolation from the world. foreign guests—composers, musicians, publishers—who increasingly visited us, were interested in our new scores, which they took with them to their homes. jürgen köchel from hans sikorski publishers took the score of tiriel to hamburg, and david drew from boosey & hawkes took thel to london, assuring me that it was for them. soon i received a telegram from köchel reporting the place and date of the premiere of tiriel: freiburg, germany, on 28 january 1989. it was going to be staged in the german translation by paul esterházy, directed by siegfried schoenbohm and conducted by gerhard markson. eight performances of the opera were announced. this was followed by a phone call from gerard mcburney from london, who delighted me with the news that thel would be staged by the company théâtre de complicité at the almeida theatre, london, on 9, 10, and 11 june 1989, under the baton of the young and enthusiastic conductor jeremy arden. soon we learned more news: in august 1989 elena and i were invited to tanglewood, where oliver knussen would conduct my first symphony (the seasons). all this turned out to be an amazing gift for my fortieth birthday. 8. left: the poster for tiriel, freiburg, germany, 1989. right: the poster for thel, london, uk, 1989. in 1987–88 at the request of liza wilson, cellist and director of the chameleon ensemble, i wrote a chamber cantata called songs of love and madness, op. 49, for voice, clarinet, celesta, harp, and string trio. for the text i chose four early blake songs: “how sweet i roam’d,” “my silks and fine array,” “love and harmony combine,” and “mad song.” it premiered in november 1990 at the huddersfield festival with margaret field, soprano, the chameleon ensemble, and andrew ball, who conducted and played celesta at the same time. the next work, written in april to june of 1988, was a piano cycle, the seven angels of william blake, op. 50. to view the rest of the work, see <https://​www.​youtube.​com/​results?​search_query=​dmitri+​n.+​smirnov​%3a​+7​+angels​+of​+blake>. there are eight movements in the cycle: 1. “prelude (angel),” 2. “lucifer, the morning star,” 3. “molech, the executioner,” 4. “elohim creating adam, adam creating elohim,” 5. “shaddai’s anger,” 6. “pachad’s fear,” 7. “jehovah appealing to eternity,” 8. “jesus, the lamb.” the list of these gods and demons was taken from blake’s epic poems the four zoas, milton, and jerusalem. i wanted to provide each of the characters with a musical portrait. in the work i realized my idea of the extraction of musical material from the english language itself, by establishing a relationship between words and melodic intervals: 9. musical alphabet, letter=interval, © dmitri n. smirnov, moscow, 1988. for example, the name lucifer in this system is turned into the following chain of musical intervals: 10. the thematic pattern for “lucifer.” the work premiered on 23 november 1989 in glasgow with its dedicatee, the pianist susan bradshaw. in 1988 i received a commission from the nash ensemble for a new chamber work, and i immediately thought about blake’s astonishing watercolor malevolence. i wanted to reflect its striking images in music. blake himself explained the subject: “a father taking leave of his wife & child. is watchd by two fiends incarnate. with intention that when his back is turned they will murder the mother & her infant.” i chose instruments that correspond to the characters of the picture: the viola, piccolo, and violin represent the positive characters of the father, child, and mother, whereas the bass clarinet and double bass represent the two villains of the piece; the full moon at the center of blake’s composition that shines out good and evil in equal measure is represented by the cello. i thought about the piece as a kind of visionary ballet and included in it a theatrical effect: the viola player, who represents the father, leaves the stage in the middle of the performance and then plays from the balcony. i called the piece the moonlight story, op. 51. the score was finished 14 august 1988 in moscow and the work premiered 8 june 1989 at the almeida theatre, london, with the nash ensemble and lionel friend, conductor. the piece became the first part of my visionary ballet blake pictures. later i traveled to philadelphia especially to see this picture in the museum of art. it was hidden in special storage, but i was allowed to see and keep the picture in my hands for an hour. it was an exceptional experience, and to my surprise i discovered that the colors of the picture radiate light. when i worked on my first violin concerto, op. 54, 1990, for violin and string orchestra, i thought about blake’s beautiful picture jacob’s dream and tried to reflect its ascending and descending images. soon after completing a short diptych for chorus a capella, from evening to morning, op. 55, 1990, a set of two blake poems (“to the evening star” and “to morning” from poetical sketches), i received a commission from the michael vyner trust to compose a new piece for a large instrumental ensemble. this gave me an opportunity to continue my visionary ballet blake pictures, with jacob’s ladder for sixteen players, op. 58, 1990, a piece dedicated to the memory of michael vyner. here i returned to blake’s watercolor jacob’s dream, c. 1805, which depicts a giant spiral staircase descending from a sun to jacob, stretched out asleep on a rock, with winged creatures gliding up and down. i represented the ladder using different scales (including the overtone series) and their mirror forms. the figure of jacob is represented by a solo bassoon; the stars in the blue sky with bell-like metal percussion, harp, and celesta; the angels by string and wind instruments; and the words spoken by god by the bass drum. the work premiered on 17 april 1991 at queen elizabeth hall, london, with the london sinfonietta conducted by gennady rozhdestvensky. the score was printed by boosey & hawkes. 11. left: the seven angels of william blake (moscow: kompozitor, 1996). right: jacob’s ladder (london: boosey & hawkes, 1993). my last work written in soviet russia was a song of liberty, op. 59, 1991, an oratorio setting the epilogue of the same title from blake’s prophetic phantasmagoria the marriage of heaven and hell. it was commissioned by the leeds festival chorus for their 135th anniversary, to be performed together with mozart’s c minor mass on 30 january 1993 at the leeds town hall, with the leeds festival chorus and the bbc philharmonic orchestra conducted by jerzy maksymiuk. i used the same cast as in mozart’s mass: four singers and mixed chorus and orchestra, adding only some percussion instruments and harp. this work comprises nine movements: 1. “the eternal female groan’d,” introduction 2. “albion’s coast, the american meadows,” passacaglia 3. “shadows of prophecy,” soprano aria 4. “france, spain, rome,” canon 5. “the new born terror,” fantasia i 6. “the fire,” chorale 7. “londoner, jew, african,” quartet 8. “the fiery limbs,” the battle of liberty, fantasia ii 9. “priests of the raven,” final chorus 12. the beginning of “londoner, jew, african,” a song of liberty, op. 59, no. 7. the oratorio concludes with the words “for everything that lives is holy!” step by step times were changing. in the so-called perestroika period my wife and i were able to go abroad more and more to attend performances of our music. i had visited a few western european countries, poland, the united states, and even south korea. i had been to england three times already, attending performances of the seasons in 1988, the lamentations of thel and the moonlight story in 1989, and songs of love and madness in 1990. i had viewed the remarkable display of blake’s paintings and drawings at the tate, and in the british library i was given the opportunity to see a selection of his manuscripts and to read from the original copies of books printed and colored by his own hand. it made me think of this country as the place i especially would like to live. at the same time, the political situation in russia began to look uncertain: mikhail gorbachev was definitely losing his power, and our colleagues and friends, composers and musicians, were looking for any possibilities to abandon the sinking ship. in january 1991 in moscow i suddenly received a postcard from kathleen raine, whom i had never met before but whose wonderful books about blake i loved very much. she wrote that she had been very surprised to learn from some of her friends that in russia there is a composer who is crazy about blake, as she is. and she asked me when i was next in london to come to her place at 47 paulton square for a cup of tea. i answered that i was happy to accept her invitation and invited her to the performance of my jacob’s ladder in april at the southbank festival. very soon i received her letter where she wrote: it was with great surprise and pleasure that i received your letter about blake and your love for him and your music based on his great inner worlds. i will make every effort to come to the performance of ‘jacob’s ladder’ on april 17th. of all blake’s paintings it is probably the one i love best …. it is wonderful to think that you have made blake renouned in russia at this time. 13. the letter from kathleen raine, 8 february 1991. the southbank festival sent the invitation to us in september 1990, a long time in advance, and we began to prepare documents for obtaining the visas. to our great surprise we received something that we had never received before, permission to take our small children with us: philip was six and alissa only four then. this suddenly opened an incredible opportunity for us to try to begin a new life in a completely different part of the world, and on 13 april 1991 we arrived in great britain, where we have lived ever since. blake set to music by dmitri n. smirnov works written in russia 1. the crystal cabinet, for violin and piano (or celesta), op. 27g, 1979/2010, 4 mins. inspired by blake’s poem of the same title. first performance: 23 may 2014, council chamber, deptford town hall, london. natasha sachsenmeier, violin, alissa firsova, piano. published: meladina press, st. albans. recording: <https://​www.​youtube.​com/​watch?v=icvjhls1nzy>. this music was reused in the following compositions: hermitage: roman portrait, tv score for orchestra, op. 27d, 1979 <https://​www.​youtube.​com/​watch?v=x1gz7dtx0wm&t=817s> (at 13′48″) piano quintet, op. 72 (second movement), 1992 the magic box, for piano, op. 77 (nos. 45 and 50), 1993 well-tempered piano, op. 125 (nos. 7 and 13), 2000 2. the seasons, for voice, flute, viola, and harp, op. 28, 1979, 22 mins. four poems by blake from poetical sketches: 1. “to spring,” 2. “to summer,” 3. “to autumn,” 4. “to winter.” the texts include parallel russian translations by the composer. first performance: 10 march 1980, union of composers, moscow. lydia davydova, soprano, irina lozben, flute, mikhail bezruky, viola, olga ortenberg, harp, sergei skripka, conductor. published: g. schirmer, new york, 1991 <https://​www.​amazon.​co.​uk/​seasons-​op-​28-​voice-​flute-​viola/​dp/​079350449x>. recording: <https://​www.​youtube.​com/​watch?v=7acctgokiya&t=498s>. 3. first symphony (the seasons), for full symphony orchestra (without singing), op. 30, 1980, 26 mins. based on the vocal cycle the seasons, op. 28. four movements: 1. “to spring,” 2. “to summer,” 3. “to autumn,” 4. “to winter.” first performance: 8 october 1981, philharmonic hall, riga. latvian state symphony orchestra, vassily sinaisky, conductor. published: sovetsky kompozitor, moscow, 1988; boosey & hawkes, london. recording: <https://​www.​youtube.​com/​watch?v=nivw8fpt9mo&t=632s>. 4. fearful symmetry, six poems by william blake, for voice and organ, op. 32, 1981/2003, 18 mins. 1. “to apollo” (an excerpt from “an imitation of spenser”), 2. “to the muses” (poetical sketches), 3. “morning,” 4. “day” (notebook), 5. “the sick rose,” 6. “the tyger” (songs of experience). the texts include parallel russian translations by the composer. first performance: 10 march 1986, union of composers, moscow. lydia davydova, soprano, ekaterina prochakova, organ. published: meladina press, st. albans. another version of the same work: 5. fearful symmetry, six poems by william blake, for voice and piano, op. 32a, 1981/2003/2010, 18 mins. first performance (in part): 29 november 2011, pushkin museum, moscow. joan rogers, soprano, andrew west, piano. published: meladina press, st. albans. recording: <https://​www.​youtube.​com/​watch?v=jy63prewmgk>. 6. ballade, for alto saxophone and piano, op. 35, 1982, 8 mins. based on the setting of blake’s poem “to the muses,” op. 32, no. 2. first performance: 14 april 1982, union of composers, moscow. lev mikhailov, saxophone, mikhail muntian, piano. published: sovetsky kompozitor, moscow; meladina press, st. albans. disc (lp): melodia c1020849 004, ussr; cd: <https://​www.​amazon.​co.​uk/​gp/​product/​b01i1uba86/​ref=dm_ws_sp_ps_dp>. 7. tiriel: prologue to the opera, for full symphony orchestra, op. 41a, 1983, 11 mins. associated with blake’s dramatic poem of the same name and “a cradle song” (from the notebook). first performance: 30 october 1984, grand hall, moscow conservatory, moscow. state symphony orchestra of the ministry of culture, gennady rozhdestvensky, conductor. published: meladina press, st. albans. recording: <https://​www.​youtube.​com/​watch?v=xqzeba6b8gg&t=12s>. this music was rearranged for different combinations: 8. tiriel, for baritone saxophone and piano, op. 41b, 1983, 9 mins. first performance: 25 april 1984, union of composers, moscow. margarita shaposhnikova, saxophone, sergey solodovnik, piano. published: sovetsky kompozitor, moscow; meladina press, st. albans. cd: proyecto mockba, edita icaria, icd128 (spain). recording: <https://​www.​youtube.​com/​watch?v=ucdy-o4afts>. 8a. tiriel, for cello and piano, op. 41c, 1983, 9 mins. first performance: 5 march 1987, kishinev. ivan monighetti, cello, yuri lisitchenko, piano. published: boosey & hawkes, london; meladina press, st. albans. recording: <https:/​/www.​youtube.​com/​watch?v=k7-wkwpdaak&t=38s>. 8b. tiriel, for solo piano, op. 41d, 1983, 9 mins. published: meladina press, st. albans. 9. dance of the nightingale, from the opera tiriel, for solo piccolo, op. 43g, 1984, 2 mins. published: meladina press, st. albans. 10. “introduction” to songs of innocence (“piping down the valleys wild”), from the opera tiriel, duet for low soprano and baritone with piano, op. 41i, 1984/2011, 2 mins. the text includes a parallel russian translation by the composer. first performance: 29 november 2011, pushkin museum, moscow. joan rogers, soprano, roderick williams, baritone, andrew west, piano. published: meladina press, st. albans. 11. dance, from the opera tiriel, for cello and piano, op. 41j, 1984/2017, 3 mins. 33 secs. published: meladina press, st. albans. 12. tiriel, аn opera in three acts (nine scenes) with prologue, for seven singers, male chorus, dancers, and full symphony orchestra, op. 41, 1983–85, 110 mins. libretto by dmitri n. smirnov after blake, in english or russian (trans. smirnov) or german (trans. paul esterházy). to the text of blake’s poem tiriel were added five more of his poems: “introduction” (songs of innocence), “the tyger” (songs of experience), “the divine image” (songs of innocence), “a divine image” (songs of experience), “a cradle song” (notebook). first performance (in german): 28 january 1989, stadttheater, freiburg, germany. siegfried schoenbohm, director, gerhard markson, conductor. published: meladina press, st. albans. recording: <https://​www.​youtube.​com/​results?​search_query=​dmitri​+n.​+smirnov​%3a​tiriel>. 13. second string quartet, op. 42, 1985, 14 mins. the second movement is a meditation on blake’s “a cradle song” (from the notebook). published: meladina press, st. albans. cd: <https://​www.​amazon.​co.​uk/​dp/​b00069i6q0/​sr=8-1/​qid=1501323304/​ref>. recording: <https://​www.​youtube.​com/​watch?v=piiknxne-wm>. 14. thel (the lamentations of thel): prologue to the opera, for chamber ensemble of sixteen players and choir (optional), op. 45a, 1985, 10 mins. published: boosey & hawkes, london. recording: <https://​www.​youtube.​com/​watch?v=w0m0osusrts>. 15. thel (the lamentations of thel), chamber opera in four scenes with prologue, for four singers, chamber chorus, and ensemble of sixteen players, op. 45, 1986, 52 mins. libretto by dmitri n. smirnov after blake’s the book of thel, in english or russian (trans. smirnov). first performance: 9 june 1989, almeida theatre, london. théâtre de complicité, annabel arden, director, jeremy arden, conductor. published: boosey & hawkes, london. recording: <https://​www.​youtube.​com/​results?search_query=​dmitri​+n.​+smirnov​%3a​+thel>. 16. songs of love and madness, in four movements, for voice and chamber ensemble of six players (clarinet, celesta, harp, violin, viola, and cello), op. 49, 1987, 20 mins. texts by blake from poetical sketches: 1. “the golden cage” (“how sweet i roam’d”), 2. “despair” (“my silks and fine array”), 3. “love and harmony combine,” 4. “mad song.” the texts include parallel russian translations by the composer. first performance: november 1990, huddersfield festival. margaret field, soprano, chameleon ensemble, andrew ball, celesta/conductor. published: hans sikorski, hamburg. 17. the seven angels of william blake, in eight movements, for solo piano, op. 50, 1988, 23 mins. inspired by blake’s poem vala, or the four zoas. 1. “prelude (angel),” 2. “lucifer, the morning star,” 3. “molech, the executioner,” 4. “elohim creating adam, adam creating elohim,” 5. “shaddai’s anger,” 6. “pachad’s fear,” 7. “jehovah appealing to eternity,” 8. “jesus, the lamb.” first performance: 23 november 1989, glasgow university. susan bradshaw, piano. published: kompozitor, moscow; meladina press, st. albans. recording: <https://​www.​youtube.​com/​results?​search_query=​dmitri​+n.​+smirnov​+7​+angels​+of​+blake>. 18. the moonlight story (blake pictures i—the first part of an imaginary ballet), for chamber ensemble of six players (piccolo, bass clarinet, violin, viola, cello, and double bass), op. 51, 1988, 14 mins. after blake’s picture malevolence. first performance: 8 june 1989, almeida theatre, london. nash ensemble, lionel friend, conductor. published: meladina press, st. albans. recording: <https://​www.​youtube.​com/​watch?v=lbaqnaxdpym>. 19. first violin concerto, for violin and string orchestra, op. 54, 1990, 20 mins. a meditation on blake’s picture jacob’s dream. first performance: 10 october 1993, st. andrew’s hall, norwich. andreas seidel, violin, leipzig chamber orchestra, george moosdorf, conductor. published: boosey & hawkes, london; meladina press, st. albans. 20. from evening to morning, in two movements, for mixed chorus, op. 55, 1990, 12 mins. a setting of two blake poems from poetical sketches: 1. “to the evening star,” 2. “to morning.” the texts include parallel russian translations by the composer. published: meladina press, st. albans. 21. jacob’s ladder (blake pictures ii—the second part of an imaginary ballet), for chamber ensemble of sixteen players, op. 58, 1990, 14 mins. after blake’s picture jacob’s dream. first performance: 17 april 1991, queen elizabeth hall, london. london sinfonietta, gennady rozhdestvensky, conductor. published: boosey & hawkes, london; meladina press, st. albans. 22. a song of liberty, an oratorio in nine movements, for four singers, chorus, and orchestra, op. 59, 1991, 42 mins. a setting of “a song of liberty” from blake’s the marriage of heaven and hell. 1. “the eternal female groan’d” (introduction), 2. “albion’s coast, the american meadows” (passacaglia), 3. “shadows of prophecy” (soprano aria), 4. “france, spain, rome” (canon), 5. “the new born terror” (fantasia i), 6. “the fire” (chorale), 7. “londoner, jew, african” (quartet), 8. “the fiery limbs” (the battle of liberty, fantasia ii), 9. “priests of the raven” (final chorus). the texts include parallel russian translations by the composer. first performance: 30 january 1993, leeds town hall. leeds festival chorus, bbc philharmonic orchestra, jerzy maksymiuk, conductor. published: boosey & hawkes, london; meladina press, st. albans. recording: <https://​www.​youtube.​com/​watch?v=bt0w-fthnai> (seventh movement). part 2: in england will appear in our summer 2018 issue (vol. 52, no. 1). remembrance: bo ossian lindberg photograph by lars beggren “all his neighbourhood bewail his loss”: bo ossian lindberg, 1937–​2021 by morton d. paley morton d. paley (mpaley@berkeley.edu) is the co-editor of blake. my dear friend professor bo ossian lindberg died on 4 july 2021, after a long illness. a professor of art history at åbo akademi (finland) who had also taught at lund university (sweden), ossian permanently changed the face of blake studies with his study of the job illustrations. because it had been issued as a printed doctoral dissertation (åbo akademi, 1973)—​printed, but not published—​it was neither advertised nor sent out to journals for review. yet when approached by scholars such as martin butlin and myself, university presses in the uk and usa declined to publish it because it was already in print! in 1974, when we first met, ossian told me that seven copies had been sold. however, it gradually was recognized as revolutionary, like all great works of scholarship. although it’s difficult to isolate any part of its rich exposition from the whole, two of its distinctive characteristics are the presentation of a large section of its text in the form of a catalogue and its application of the warburgian conception of pathos-formula to the job designs. in reviewing it, g. e. bentley, jr., wrote: i conclude that mr. bo lindberg’s dissertation on william blake’s illustrations to the book of job is the best dissertation i have ever examined, one of the two or three best i have ever read, and one of the half dozen most important books on blake’s art. every responsible blake scholar must read it. it is a work of the highest distinction. we are all indebted to mr. bo lindberg. continuing his passionate engagement with blake’s art and poetry, ossian published articles and reviews in blake, a short, updated discussion of the engravings in the great blake trust edition of job, and the chapter on sweden and finland in the reception of william blake in europe. the festschrift published in his honor reflects the depth and diversity of his scholarly interests. he was also a richly inventive painter, whose imaginative cycle on the life of blake in the turku art museum (finland) has been documented in blake and whose other works, such as the one reproduced here, indirectly but unmistakably reflect blake’s influence. in both writing and painting, his was the hand of los. the minerva owl (see enlargement) by bo ossian lindberg, interior wall painting in åland. acrylic. reproduced courtesy of tia itkonen. select bibliography bentley, g. e., jr. review of bo lindberg, william blake’s illustrations to the book of job. blake 8.4 (spring 1975): 125-26. bindman, david. “blake and ossian.” songs of ossian: festschrift in honour of professor bo ossian lindberg. ed. åsa ringbom and renja suominen-kokkonen. taidehistoriallisia tutkimuksia 27. helsinki: taidehistorian seura, 2003. 3-7. lindberg, bo ossian. “blake’s reception in sweden and finland.” the reception of william blake in europe. ed. sibylle erle and morton d. paley. 2 vols. london: bloomsbury academic, 2019. 2: 437-51. —​—​—​. “the meaning of blake’s job.” william blake’s illustrations of the book of job. ed. david bindman. london: william blake trust, 1987. —​—​—​. review of david bindman and simon baker, william blake 1757–1827 [catalogue of the exhibition at the helsinki city art museum, 11 april–​25 june 2000]. blake 35.4 (spring 2002): 132-35. —​—​—​. review of robert n. essick, william blake, printmaker. blake 15.3 (winter 1981–​82): 140-48. —​—​—​. review of carl-johan malmberg, stjärnan i foten. dikt och bild, bok och tanke hos william blake. blake 48.3 (winter 2014–​15): 14 pars. —​—​—​. william blake’s illustrations to the book of job. åbo: åbo akademi, 1973. volume 56 number 4 spring 2023 b l a k e in australia angela esterhammer, victoria college, university of toronto nelson hilton, university of georgia tilar j. mazzeo, colby college robert w. rix, university of copenhagen joseph viscomi, university of north carolina at chapel hill david worrall, the nottingham trent university martin butlin, tate gallery, london, retired tristanne j. connolly, university of waterloo detlef w. dörrbecker, university of trier sibylle erle, university of lincoln robert n. essick, university of california, riverside a d v i s o r y b o a r d a n i l l u s t r a t e d q u a r t e r l y volume 56 number 4 spring 2023 c o n t e n t s www.blakequarterly.org articles blake in the marketplace, 2022 by robert n. essick prophet against empire? william blake in australia by alexis harley, claire knowles, and chris murray reviews joseph fletcher, william blake as natural philosopher, 1788–1795 reviewed by james rovira john higgs, william blake now; john higgs, william blake vs. the world reviewed by alexander s. gourlay © 2023 copyright morris eaves and morton d. paley cover: adobe stock map of australia (#121553992), with details of (clockwise from left) jerusalem copy i, plate 16 (library of congress); “tornado” for darwin, the botanic garden (metropolitan museum); “to the queen” dedication for the grave (courtesy of john windle); “a family of new south wales” for hunter, an historical journal (national gallery of victoria); dante running from the three beasts (national gallery of victoria); “thomas hayley” for hayley, an essay on sculpture (collection of robert n. essick); milton copy b, plate 32 (huntington library); and illustrations of the book of job, plate numbered 15 (collection of robert n. essick). thanks also to the william blake archive. e d i t o r s editors: morris eaves and morton d. paley review editor: alexander s. gourlay exhibitions editor: luisa calè bibliographer (criticism): wayne c. ripley bibliographer (music): jason whittaker managing editor: sarah jones sarah.jones@rochester.edu production office: department of english, university of rochester, rochester ny 14627-0451 william blake and his circle: a checklist of publications and discoveries in 2013 william blake and his circle: a checklist of publications and discoveries in 2013 by g. e. bentley, jr. with the assistance of hikari sato for japanese publications and of fernando castanedo for spanish publications g. e. bentley, jr. (gbentley@chass.utoronto.ca) is trying to learn how to recognize the many styles of handwriting of a professional calligrapher like blake, who used four distinct hands in the four zoas. editors’ notes: the invaluable bentley checklist has grown to the point where we are unable to publish it in its entirety. all the material will be incorporated into the cumulative “william blake and his circle” and “sale catalogues of william blake’s works” on the bentley blake collection site, victoria university in the university of toronto. the article below includes previously unrecorded copy, binding, and history information for the works of blake and his circle, catalogues and editions from the last ten years (2004 on), and criticism from the last ten years and prior to the publication of gilchrist’s life (1863). a number of entries below have a link to an online article or catalogue. some items are freely accessible and others may be behind a subscription barrier, depending on your or your institution’s access. all are included on the grounds that even those with restricted access often provide a freely available abstract or excerpt. addenda and corrigenda to blake records, 2nd ed. (2004), now appear online. they are updated yearly in conjunction with the publication of the checklist. table of contents: introductory essay symbols abbreviations division i: william blake part i: blake’s writings section a: original editions, facsimiles, reprints, and translations section b: collections and selections part ii: reproductions of drawings and paintings section a: illustrations of individual authors section b: collections and selections part iii: commercial engravings section a: illustrations of individual authors part iv: catalogues and bibliographies section a: individual catalogues section b: collections and selections part v: books owned by william blake the poet part vi: criticism, biography, and scholarly studies division ii: blake’s circle boydell, john cumberland, george flaxman, john fuseli, henry hayley, william linnell, john mathew, anthony stephen palmer, samuel smith, john thomas stothard, thomas tulk, charles augustus blake publications and discoveries in 2013 the checklist of blake publications recorded in 2013 includes works in french, german, japanese, russian, spanish, and ukrainian, and there are doctoral dissertations from birmingham, cambridge, city university of new york, florida state, hiroshima, maryland, northwestern, oxford, universidade federal de santa maria, voronezh state, and wrocław. the folio society facsimile of blake’s designs for gray’s poems and the detailed records of “sale catalogues of blake’s works 1791-2013” are likely to prove to be among the most lastingly valuable of the works listed. gallica a wonderful resource new to me is gallica, the digital library of the bibliothèque nationale de france, which reproduces over 2,000,000 searchable documents. for works in french it is invaluable. free library of philadelphia and rosenbach museum according to an online press release of 17 april 2013, the “free library of philadelphia foundation and the rosenbach museum & library announce intent to join forces to create nation’s preeminent rare book collection,” “the rosenbach of the free library of philadelphia foundation.” the rosenbach library has descriptive catalogue (m), for the sexes (e), poetical sketches (r), and visions of the daughters of albion (h), plus loose blake prints, while the free library of philadelphia has numerous books with blake’s commercial engravings. curiosa the online gravestone photographic resource includes the gravestone in bunhill fields of william and catherine blake. blake’s writings newly recorded works songs (cc, q) are identified here for the first time. blake fingerprints there are many fingerprints on top of the writing in the edition of thomas gray’s poems (1790) that was inset into blake’s watercolor illustrations for gray (see inscriptions on designs in part i). some are admirably clear (see illus. 1). the date at which the fingerprints appeared must be after c. 1797, when blake made his watercolors for gray. of course we cannot be certain that the prints that appear near “william blake” in his poem “to mrs. ann flaxman” are those of the poet-artist. they could, for example, be those of catherine blake, who, it is believed, often helped her husband with simple tasks such as gluing the printed leaves of gray into the windows cut in the paper used for the watercolors.the leaves for blake’s watercolors (1795-96) illustrating young’s night thoughts were made in a way very similar to that used in the illustrations for gray’s poems. the printed leaf was cut from the host volume (often eliminating or curtailing catchwords and ms. line numbers) and glued to a window cut in the leaf for the watercolor, and a red line was meticulously drawn round the cut-out leaf, with several red lines on title pages. however, the night thoughts leaves bear no fingerprints. apparently the large leaves already had printed text mounted in them when they were given to blake. whether the fingerprints are those of blake or his wife, they give an extraordinary sense of immediacy in the creative process. commercial engravings job proofs are newly identified here. an exciting “new” blake was the copy of blair’s grave (1813), with coloring attributed to william blake by martin butlin, that appeared in the vershbow sale of 29 october 2013. the copy had been previously described but not reproduced. one of the most curious blake productions of this or any other year is the copy of blair’s grave (1813) that was extra-illustrated by blake’s acquaintance william thane with a pastiche of images from young’s night thoughts (see illus. 2-4). a proof of blake’s unpublished self-portrait of george romney for hayley’s romney (1809) was acquired by robert n. essick. only one copy has been recorded, and then lost,philadelphia blake exhibition (1939), lot 104. the print was loaned by rosenwald but has not been traced among the blakes he gave to the library of congress and the us national gallery. since blake described it in his letters of 1803 and 1804. a new owner is recorded for a colored copy (v) of young’s night thoughts (1797). criticism, biography, and scholarship one of the most curious discoveries here is miss louisa lane’s poem about “the last scene in blake’s life,” published in the guernsey and jersey magazine (1838). this is the only known connection of blake with the channel islands and the only known drama-fragment about blake. blake’s circle important new details are provided for george cumberland, including the first publication of his farce the emigrants, ed. elizabeth b. bentley (2013), john linnell, including writings and drawings, a. s. mathew (his will), and charles augustus tulk (his album, with drawings by blake and flaxman). * * * * * * * * * the annual checklist of scholarship and discoveries concerning william blake and his circle records publications and discoveries for the current year (say, 2013) and those for previous years that are not recorded in blake books, blake books supplement, and “william blake and his circle.” installments of “william blake and his circle” are continuations of blake books and blake books supplement, with similar principles and conventions. i have made no systematic attempt to record audio books and magazines, blogs, broadcasts on radio and television, calendars, cd-roms, chinaware, coffee mugs, comic books, computer printouts (unpublished), conferences, dvds, electronic editions of works by blake, e-mails, festivals and lecture series, flash cards, furniture, interactive multimedia, jewelry, lectures on audiocassettes, lipstick, manuscripts about blake, microforms, mosaics, movies,see aethelred the unready, a short documentary (2012) on aethelred eldridge in honor of his receiving emeritus status from ohio university. murals, music, notebooks (blank), novels merely tangentially about blake, pageants, performances, pillows, places named after blake, playing cards, plays, podcasts, poems about blake, portraits, postcards, posters and individual pictures, recorded readings and singings, refrigerator magnets, stained-glass windows, stamps (postage and rubber), stickers, sweatshirts, tapestries,see anon., “theatre: blake remembered at west dean [college],” in part vi. t-shirts, tattoos (temporary and permanent), tiles, typescripts (unpublished), video recordings, and web sites. i take blake books and blake books supplement, faute de mieux, to be the standard bibliographical books on blake,except for the states of the prints for blake’s commercial book engravings, where the standard authority is robert n. essick, william blake’s commercial book illustrations (oxford: clarendon press, 1991). significant further details, especially about collations, are given in roger r. easson and essick, william blake book illustrator: a bibliography and catalogue of the commercial engravings, vol. 1: plates designed and engraved by blake (normal: american blake foundation, 1972); vol. 2: plates designed or engraved by blake 1774-1796 (memphis: american blake foundation, 1979); vol. 3 never appeared. the standard authority for blake prints issued separately is essick, the separate plates of william blake: a catalogue (princeton: princeton university press, 1983). and have noted significant differences from them. the organization of division i of the checklist is as in blake books. in part vi: criticism, biography, and scholarly studies, collections of essays on blake are listed under the names of the editors, and issues of periodicals devoted extensively to him are listed under the titles. reviews, listed here under the book reviewed, are only for works which are chiefly about blake, not for those with only, say, a chapter on blake. note that blake books and blake books supplement normally do not include reviews. division ii: blake’s circle is organized by individual (say, william hayley or john flaxman), with works by and about blake’s friends and patrons, living individuals with whom he had significant direct and demonstrable contact. it does not include important contemporaries with whom blake’s contact was negligible or nonexistent, such as john constable and william wordsworth and edmund burke. there is nothing in blake books and blake books supplement corresponding to division ii. research for this checklist was carried out particularly in the libraries of the university of toronto and victoria university in the university of toronto, as well as with the electronic resources of copac, google, google books, google scholar, and worldcat. works published in japan were found in cinii (national institute of informatics scholarly and academic information navigator), the national diet library online catalogue, komaba library and the general library of the university of tokyo, and the national diet library. i should be most grateful to anyone who can help me to better information about the unseen (§) items reported here, and i undertake to thank them prettily in person and in print. i am deeply grateful to sarah bentley (for transliterations from russian), fernando castanedo (for works in spanish), robert n. essick (especially for records of quaritch catalogues and an early sight of his “blake in the marketplace, 2013”), alexander gourlay, heather jackson, mary lynn johnson, sarah jones, jeff mertz (for reproductions of scores of works on blake), rachel kahan noyce, hikari sato (for publications in japanese), and v. v. serdechnaya (for works in russian). symbols * works prefixed by an asterisk include one or more illustrations by blake or depicting him. if there are more than 19, the number is specified. if the illustrations include all those for a work by blake, say thel or his illustrations to l’ allegro, the work is identified. § works preceded by a section mark are reported on second-hand authority. abbreviations bb g. e. bentley, jr., blake books (1977) bbs g. e. bentley, jr., blake books supplement (1995) blake blake/an illustrated quarterly br(2) g. e. bentley, jr., blake records, 2nd ed. (2004) butlin martin butlin, the paintings and drawings of william blake (1981) isbn international standard book number division i: william blake part i: blake’s writings section a: original editions, facsimiles, reprints, and translations editors’ note: please consult bentley, “sale catalogues of william blake’s works,” for further particulars of catalogues mentioned in this section. table of watermarks addenda w elgar 1796 enoch designs ([1824-27]) <butlin #827 1-2>not recorded in butlin’s table of watermarks (1: 627). hayes | 17 little tom the sailor 1797 little tom the sailor fleur-de-lisan island in the moon (?1784) has a watermark of a fleur-de-lis above a shield. (with horizontal chain lines 2.9 cm. apart) joseph ordering simeon to be bound (?1785) <butlin #158> copperplate-makers’ markscopperplate-makers’ marks were previously recorded in bb 86n4, 145, 235-36, 381n4, 518-19, 532, 545, and bbs 195n10. addendum willm & buss pontifex & compny nos. 46, 47 & 48 shoe lane, london “christ trampling on satan” (blake–butts) (copperplate verso) america (1793) table copy plates leaves watermark blake nos. leaf size in cm. printing color #fogg 1 1 ?? __ 16.8 x 23.3 [a] dark blue [b] a. trimmed to the image. b. copies printed partly in blue were produced in 1793 (c-d, h) and ?1807 (m), according to joseph viscomi, blake and the idea of the book (princeton: princeton university press, 1993) 376-81. copy a binding/history: it was “in portfolio” when offered by quaritch (june 1904), lot 1602, for £260. editions *america [b]. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2013. *america [i]. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2013. the book of thel (1789) copy a history: offered with the first book of urizen (f) and the marriage of heaven and hell (a) in quaritch rough list, no. 73 (nov. 1885), lot 51, for £150. copy e history: offered in quaritch catalogue no. 190 (july 1899), “7 engraved pages … coloured by blake, uncut, in paper cover, preserved in a morocco case, by rivière,” “it was stothard’s,” £25. copy j history: quaritch offered it for £85 in his catalogue no. 62 (june 1893), miscellaneous catalogue (nov. 1893), and catalogue no. 178 (march 1898). copy k history: quaritch offered it for £700 in his catalogues no. 665 (1949) and no. 672 (1949). copy r binding/history: it was still “in the original paper wrapper, uncut” when offered in quaritch catalogue no. 203 (dec. 1900), lot 194, for £63. editions *the book of thel [b]. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2013. *the book of thel [i]. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2013. descriptive catalogue (1809) copy f history: quaritch offered it in his catalogues no. 178 (march 1898) and no. 190 (july 1899), “green morocco extra, from the beckford library,” for £10.10.0, and in catalogue 197 (1 march 1900), lot 3659, for £10. europe (1794) plates 6-7 <bb p. 162> in the pull of pl. 6 in tate britain, the leaf is cut off in mid-angel, and the vivid coloring is not blake’s. edition *europe [a]. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2013. the first book of urizen (1794) copy f history: see the book of thel (a), above. plates 5, 10 <bb p. 183> history: offered in james tregaskis and son, caxton head catalogue 830 (sept. 1920), lots 41 (£65) and 42 (£70). for the sexes: the gates of paradise (?1826) plate 14 <bb p. 204> history: sold at sotheby’s, 19 jan. 1885, lot 575 (the ghost of abel erroneously described as a “facsimile”) for £1.16.0 to j. pearson, who offered them in his catalogue 58 at £12.12.0. inscriptions on designs designs (1797) for gray, poems (1790) <bb p. 216> fingerprints:the only previous reference to blake fingerprints i have found is in bb p. 217, which locates them on the gray title page, pp. 58, 158, “and occasionally elsewhere.” there are brownish-rust fingerprints, perhaps made from animal glue, on the text (never on the watercolors): the title page, above, below, and to the right of “a new edition” gray p. 58: “ode on a distant prospect of eton college,” after “ſee, how all around ’em wait” gray p. [62]: captions for “a long story,” beneath “riding on flies” gray p. [76]: captions for “ode to adversity,” above “thy suppliants” gray p. [107]: title page for “the fatal sisters,” over “orcades” gray p. [158]: poem “to mrs. ann flaxman,” above and below “william blake,” four fingers of the right(?) hand, the clearest of them all (see illus. 1). 1. four clear fingerprints are visible on blake’s poem to ann flaxman on text p. [158] of gray’s poems (1790) with watercolors by blake (see enlargement of text area). yale center for british art, paul mellon collection. b1992.8.11(58). the color apparently consists of glue made from animal matter. the prints are on top of the writing and were almost certainly added when the leaves for the printed text were glued into windows cut in the far larger leaves that carry blake’s watercolor illustrations. this means that they were probably made by william or catherine blake. more fingerprints are faintly visible on other gray pages, but no blake fingerprint from elsewhere has been identified. in some, probably most, cases, blake’s writing on blank text pages was added after the watercolor for that page was completed. on p. [54], the list of designs overflows the text box, and nos. 8-10 are on the leaf for the watercolor. in this case, at any rate, the watercolor preceded the list of designs.  on p. [158], blake wrote the poem to mrs. flaxman on the blank verso of the printed text box, then glue fingerprints were left on top of the manuscript poem, probably in the process of gluing the printed leaves onto the windows of the large leaves for the watercolors. in this case, the manuscript probably preceded the watercolor. “joseph of arimathea among the rocks of albion” (1773, c. 1810-20) see the entry in part iii. letters (1791-1827) 1800 1 april history: offered by james tregaskisaccording to keynes, bibliography (1921), keynes, ed., letters (1956, 1968), it was “offered for sale in several catalogues of … james tregaskis about 1910.” keynes, letters (1968), says it was sold at sotheby’s, 5 july 1909, lot 106, for £3.18.0 to quaritch; bb p. 275n4 comments: “the only sotheby sale of this date which i can trace consists entirely of coins.” in caxton head catalogue 655 (14 sept. 1908), lot 41, catalogue 720 (1912), lot 80, catalogue 733 (18 nov. 1912), lot 65, and catalogue 800 (4 feb. 1918), lot 55. 1800 22 september history: blake’s letters of 22 september, end of september, 2 october 1800, 10 may, 11 september 1801, 10 january, 22 november (both parts) 1802, 25 april, 6 july, 16 august 1803 were offered in quaritch catalogue 317 (1878).not first sold “about 1906,” as in keynes, ed., letters (1968) <see bb p. 276>. 1815 29 july (josiah wedgwood to blake) corrigenda stamped, like all the wedgwood manuscripts here, with “the property of | josiah wedgwood & sons, ltd., | etruria museum”. annotated in modern ink at the top right corner with the wedgwood museum reference number: 4382-6. the text is as in bentley, ed., william blake’s writings (1977) 1647, except that (1) there is no comma after “together”; (2) after “two or three drawings” for “[.]” read “&”; (3) for “vessel” read “veſsel”; (4) at the conclusion, for “i am sir | your mo obt servt” read “i am sir your mo. obd servt”. 1815 8 september (blake to josiah wedgwood) corrigenda annotated in modern ink at the top right corner with the wedgwood museum reference number: 4383-6. along the right margin is show-through, presumably a docket: “w blake | 15 sept 1815”. the text is as in bentley, ed., william blake’s writings (1977) 1648, except that the lineation of the conclusion is different: 17 south molton street william blake 8 septembr 1815   edition letters [1825-27]. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2013. the marriage of heaven and hell (?1790-93) copy a history: see the book of thel (a), above. copy e history: offered by quaritch in catalogue no. 62 (june 1893) and miscellaneous catalogue (nov. 1893), “n.d. (1800),” “4to. 27 unnumbered leaves … coloured by blake, hf. bd. uncut” in each. plates 5-6 see “the order in which the songs of innocence and experience ought to be paged,” below. editions §el matrimonio del cielo y del infierno. trans. xavier villaurrutia. with a prefatory note taken from g. k. chesterton. 1942, 1998, 2003, 2004. in spanish. <bb #115, blake (2009)> e. seville: editorial renacimiento, 2007, 2010. colección “el clavo ardiendo,” 12o, 64 pp.; “g. k. chesterton,” with the correct initials, does not include “a song of liberty” or the “chorus”; isbn: 9788484723363. preface (1½ pp.) by “c. [sic] k. chesterton.” [fernando castanedo has found the original text in english in chesterton’s william blake (?1910) 208-10.] *el matrimonio del cielo y el infierno [h]. ed. and trans. fernando castanedo. 2002. in spanish, with facing english for marriage. <blake (2003)> b. 2007. c. 2010. d. 4th ed., revised. 2012. review *j. l. c., “william blake poeta, pintor, visionario y librepensador,” la tribuna de albacete [albacete] 20 april 2008: 48 (also published in diario palentino [palencia] 24 april 2008: 42) (in spanish). *the marriage of heaven and hell [b]. ed. michael phillips. 2011. <blake (2012)> review j. b. mertz (see blake 47.1 in part vi). §*le mariage du ciel et de l’enfer. trans. patrick bryand. amazon digital services, kindle edition, 2013. in french and english. milton (1804[-11]) copy b history: offered by quaritch in catalogues no. 61 (1891), £180, rough list 122 (end of march 1892), £180, and no. 62 (june 1893), £160, described as “large 8vo. 45 leaves … coloured by the hand of william blake; calf neat.” “the order in which the songs of innocence and experience ought to be paged” (?after 1818) description: marriage pls. 5-6i am grateful to robert n. essick for many of the new details about pls. 5-6. see “blake in the marketplace, 2013,” blake 47.4 (spring 2014): illus. 1-2, where the prints are described minutely. on the recto and verso of a leaf 11.7 x 16.0 cm., printed probably about 1790 in reddish brown (pl. 5)not “sepia” as in bb p. 287. marriage copy b pls. 1, 3, 6, 8-9, 12, 14-15, 18-19, 22-23, 26-27 were also printed (?in 1790) in reddish brown, as were pls. 1-9, 12, 14-15, 18-19, 22-23, 25-27 in copy h and all of copy g (watermarked 1815). and red (pl. 6); essick writes: “neither [joseph] viscomi nor i have been able to find a close match for the red ink of this impression among blake’s other printings of marriage pls. datable to c. 1790.” pl. 5 has blue wash for sky behind the falling man and horse. watermark: wove paper without watermark. binding: the leaf is mounted on an unwatermarked leaf (23.8 x 31.2 cm.), with a brown line boxing pl. 5. at the top right of the mount of pl. 5 is written “90” in pen and brown ink. the host-leaf and number were probably added “about 1853” (bb p. 337) by george a. smith. the mount was stabbed at least twice; it has eight stabholes and a set of eighteen smaller holes. in pencil below pl. 5 is “from marriage of heaven & hell page 5” and on the verso in the same hand “heaven & hell page 6.” the leaf with pls. 5-6 was acquired in a frame with glass on both sides, but the glass was removed by essick. history: see bb p. 340-41 and essick, “blake in the marketplace, 2013,” blake 47.4 (spring 2014): illus. 1. song of los (1795) copy c binding/history: “bound in contemporary half morocco” with europe (g) and visions of the daughters of albion (h), according to quaritch catalogue no. 203 (dec. 1900), lot 193, £315. edition “the song of los: pesn' losa.” trans. into russian with commentary by v. v. serdechnaya. volshebnaya gora [moscow] no. 15 (2009): 461-68. reprinted in russian in her malye poemy uil'yama bleika: povestvovanie, tipologiya, kontekst [small poems of william blake: narrative, typology, context] (see serdechnaya in part vi). songs of innocence (1789) copy j history: offered in quaritch catalogue 197 (1 march 1900), lot 3651, frontispiece, title page, plus ten leaves, for £20. songs of innocence and of experience (1794[-1831]) table copy plates missing or added leaves watermark blake nos. leaf size in cm. printing color cc untraced -1, 39 52   3-28, 30-53 unknown unknown q untraced -1, 2, 28-54 25   __ unknown [a]   a. it was described as “high 4to.” in the quaritch catalogues of 1871 and 1873. order of the plates in songs of experience cc the last plate is pl. 39; no other copy ends with pl. 39. variant newly recorded plate 1 (combined title page) see copy p, below. copy i binding/history: offered in quaritch catalogue no. 217 (july 1902), lot 130, for £315: “coloured by the author, comprising 54 leaves printed on one side of the paper only; bd. … a flyleaf bears the signature of h. w. phillips, the painter.” copy k binding/history: “inlaid on folio size cardboards, with guards, half morocco, g.e.” when sold in the catalogue of the library of the late alfred aspland at sotheby’s (19 jan. 1885), lot 309, for £7.10.0 to suarez. copy u binding/history: offered in quaritch catalogue no. 62 (june 1893) and miscellaneous catalogue (nov. 1893) for £170: “coloured, and gilt by the author, green morocco super extra, gilt edges, by c. lewis, extremely rare, from the beckford library, hamilton palace … pages 1-54, title included.” copy w it is reproduced in the russian facsimile (see песни невинности и опыта: songs of innocence and of experience [2010], below). newly recorded copy copy cc binding: described in quaritch rough list, no. 73 (nov. 1885), lot 52, as bound in “12mo. calf gilt”: “collation; songs of innocence, 1789: plate 1 (frontispiece [pl. 2]), plate 2 (title [pl. 3]), plates numberedthe fact that the plates are numbered indicates that this is not a posthumous copy. 3-28 (no 29) and plate 30—songs of experience, 1794, the plates numbered on 31-53.” “on comparing this copy with that from hamilton palace [u] (priced £170), it appears to want the general title [pl. 1] and the plate ‘the sick rose’ [pl. 39].“the sick rose,” which is missing, must have been numbered “54”. no extant copy of the songs has pl. 39 as the last leaf. plain copies are scarcer than those issued in a coloured state.” history: offered in quaritch rough list, no. 73 (nov. 1885), lot 52, for £31.10.0; untraced. copy p for the binding and history, see 2013 9–10 april, lot 64, in part iv. robert n. essick, “blake in the marketplace, 2013,” blake 47.4 (spring 2014): illus. 3, notes that the title page (pl. 1) is in a previously unrecorded second state. newly recorded copy copy q binding: described in quaritch catalogues no. 270 (march 1871), lot 35, as “high 4to. a series of 20 poems, engraved on copper, and surrounded with eccentric designs, hf. bd. … s.a. (?1830),” and no. 289 (april 1873), lot 14716, “high 4to. a series of 20 plates of very quaint execution, hf. bd. … s.a. (? 1830).” it probably consisted of pls. 3-27 on 25 leaves. history: offered in quaritch catalogue no. 270 (march 1871), lot 35, £2.16.0, and no. 289 (april 1873), lot 14716, £2.2.0; untraced. plate a history: offered in james tregaskis, caxton head catalogue 796 (15 oct. 1917), lot 3 (£23), catalogue 810 (20 jan. 1919), lot 4 (£23), and james tregaskis and son, caxton head catalogue 830 (sept. 1920), lot 46 (£23). editions *canciones de inocencia y de experiencia. trans. josé luis caramés and santiago garcía corugedo. 1987. <bbs p. 137> in spanish. b. 1995. c. 1999. d. 2003. e. 2006. f. 2009. g. 2012. it consists of “introducción” (7-51), divided into “william blake (1757-1827)” (9-12), “contexto” (12-20), “ritual” (20-28), “simbología” (28-37), “cosmología y canciones de inocencia y de experiencia” (37-44), “nota a esta edición” (45-46), “tabla de concordancias” (47), “obras de william blake” (48), “bibliografía” (49-51). english and spanish texts on facing pages (56-161). according to the editors, blake identified the essence of poetry with the process of a ritual. reproduces a few blake designs and plates in black and white. *песни невинности и опыта: songs of innocence and of experience [w]. 12.0 x 20.5 cm., 240 pp. moscow: rudominо, 2010. <§blake (2012)> review *vera serdechnaya (see blake 47.1 in part vi). *facsimile of the original outlines before colouring of the songs of innocence and of experience [u]. 1893. <bb #173> b. §facsimile of what is believed to be the last replica of the songs of innocence and of experience. [charleston, south carolina]: nabu press, 2012. 146 pp.; isbn: 9781279004845. the 2012 edition is scanned from that of 1893. there is no natural religion (?1788) copy e history: offered in james tregaskis, caxton head catalogue 796 (15 oct. 1917), lot 2, from the stopford a. brooke collection (£52). tiriel (?1789) manuscript history: it was lent, apparently by mrs. gilchrist, to algernon swinburne in 1864;according to swinburne’s letter to w. m. rossetti, 13 oct. [1864], “the one autograph ms ever entrusted to me was tiriel” (uncollected letters of algernon charles swinburne, ed. terry l. meyers, vol. 1 [1848-1874] [london: pickering & chatto, 2005] 29). joseph knight wrote to swinburne on 9 feb. 1865: “my friend purnell can lend you the volume of blake you require. … i will call on sunday afternoon for the m.s.” (1: 31). it isn’t clear whether the “volume of blake” is the same as the “m.s.” swinburne’s friend thomas purnell (1834-89) is not recorded in bb, bbs, blake, br(2), or butlin. … offered by quaritch in catalogues no. 243 (oct. 1905), lot 180 (£125), and no. 271 (jan. 1909), lot 194 (£50), each described as “about 1790,” “neatly written in a small hand on 8 leaves; with the original blue paper wrapper,” “the inscription on … the original blue paper cover, ‘tiriel, ms. by mr. blake’ is in blake’s own handwriting,” “the handwriting is the same, though the pen with which the last part is written is somewhat finer.” visions of the daughters of albion (1793) copy f binding/history: described in quaritch catalogue no. 405 (dec. 1926), lot 242 (£525), as “folio, 11 ll., printed in brown on one side only and finely coloured by hand by blake, with water-colour and opaque pigment, the frontispiece has been inlaid and a torn leaf has been skilfully repaired; loosely inserted in a volume; half morocco, uncut … duplicates of the first three plates, printed in green and painted in water-colours, are inserted.” copy i binding: described in quaritch catalogue no. 231 (june 1904), lot 1601, as “folio, 11 leaves … coloured by the hand of the artist himself; half morocco, gilt edges, with the bookplate of thomas gaisford.” edition *visions of the daughters of albion [h]. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2013. section b: collections and selections blake shishu [the poems of blake]. trans. bunsho jugaku. 1950, 1968. <bb #235> c. tokyo: iwanami shoten, 2013. 448 pp.; isbn: 9784003221730. with plates reproduced by the hands of jugaku. in japanese. §“božeska podoba [divine image].” ruske slovo [novi sad] 37 (2009): 12. in ukrainian. “the edition of the works of wm. blake” by “the blake press at edmonton” (1884–90) <bb #249> volume i (b) the book of thel james tregaskis, caxton head catalogue 676 (11 oct. 1909), lot 93 (£15.15.0), offered muir’s facsimile of the book of thel executed completely by hand, “red morocco, gilt border, gilt edges” [n.d.] [apparently not the lister-essick copy bound in olive brown morocco, edges not gilt]. §europe | lambeth 1794 |  printed by blake. an anonymous watercolor adaptation of europe pl. 2 (title page) on laid paper showing a kneeling naked man(?) with a curling serpent (as in europe pl. 2) growing from his head. offered on ebay, december 2013. §“he who bends to himself a joy.” shanty bay, ontario: shanty bay press, 2002-07. broadside, limited to 50 copies. §“infant joy.” shanty bay, ontario: shanty bay press, 2002-07. broadside, limited to 50 copies. *libros proféticos i. trans. bernardo santano. vilaür [gerona]: atalanta, 2013. colección imaginatio vera 80. 4o, 704 pp.; isbn: 9788494094156. in spanish. contains patrick harpur, “introducción a los libros proféticos de william blake” (9-22); bernardo santano, “prefacio del traductor” (23-27); “bibliografía de william blake en español” (28-29); tiriel (31-60); el libro de thel (61-80); el matrimonio de cielo e infierno (81-123); la revolución francesa (125-59); visiones de las hijas de albion (161-91); américa: profecía (193-235); europa: profecía (237-74); el [primer] libro de urizen (277-342); el libro de ahania (343-74); el libro de los (375-94); el cantar de los (395-414); vala, o los cuatro zoas (415-701); “créditos” (702-03) (credits for works reproduced). illustrated hardcover volume (first of two) with twelve works by blake; brief individual introductions by bernardo santano; blake in english and spanish on facing pages; includes significantly illustrated plates, leaving out those mainly with text (e.g., of marriage [d] it reproduces 13/27 plates: 1-5, 10-11, 14-15, 16, 20-21, 24); announces forthcoming second volume with milton, jerusalem, and a glossary (for 2014). an imposing edition. reviews *jesús garcía calero, “william blake, el hombre que vio el lado oscuro de la modernidad,” abc (cultura) [madrid] 19 nov. 2013 (in spanish). *iván pintor iranzo, “el paraíso de william blake, recobrado,” la vanguardia (cultura) [barcelona] 4 dec. 2013: 6-7 (with the spanish edition of kathleen raine’s golgonooza) (in spanish). *antonio colinas, “blake. libros proféticos i,” el cultural (el mundo) [madrid] 6 dec. 2013: 12-13, and fernando aramburu, “blake el oscuro,” p. 13 (in spanish). *fernando castanedo, “clamor en el desierto,” el país (babelia) [madrid] 7 dec. 2013: 8 (in spanish). §william blake: selected poetry and letters. ed. with an introduction by j. m. beach. austin: west by southwest press, 2012. 234 pp.; isbn: 9781479155026. part ii: reproductions of drawings and paintings section a: illustrations of individual authors gray, thomas, poems (1797-98) see inscriptions on designs under part i, section a. edition *[poems of thomas gray with watercolour illustrations by william blake. london: folio society, 2013.]there is no separate folio society title page; the title here is from the cover, and the imprint is by inference. folio (32.4 x 42.2 cm.), 210 pp., 117 illustrations, including flaxman’s portrait of blake; no isbn. limited to 1020 copies (1000 for sale). colophon: “reproduced from the originals held at the yale center for british art … by dot gradations, wickford, essex, and printed by appl, wemding, germany, on [thick, heavy, unwatermarked] natural evolution paper … bound by zanardi, padova, italy, in nigerian goatskin leather with cloth sides … the endleaves are of curious metallics gold leaf backed with nettuno carruba.” it is in a fitted box (36.6 x 46.4 x 8.3 cm.) with *irene tayler, blake’s illustrations to the poems of gray, ed. martin butlin (see tayler in part vi). the facsimile is so faithful that it represents clearly the show-through of printed text. the folio flier has twenty illustrations. section b: collections and selections smaller blake-varley sketchbook (1819) a separate leafthere are slightly disfiguring oil stains in the paper, which could have come from a book or piece of wood resting on it. <butlin #692 53-54 [two visionary figures, mountains behind]> was sold at christie’s, 15 june 1971, lot 157 [£157.15.0 to “hearson” (i.e., pearson) for anchard fine arts ltd]. it was sold again at christie’s (new york), 31 january 2013, lot 147 (see 2013 31 january in part iv). the design represents an angel with arms and wings upraised standing before a man who is pointing to our right. surrounding the head of the pointing man is a large circle, perhaps representing a halo or the sun, and in the background are three pyramid-shaped objects. the verso is inscribed by varley “it is allways [sic] to keep yourself collected”, and, according to butlin #692 53, the recto is “inscr. by varley … ’hotspur …’, the rest illegible, apparently on four lines below drawing.”butlin tells me in an e-mail of march 2013 that the hotspur inscription was still legible when he saw it in 2012. neither i nor several advisors using raking light and magnifying glasses of various powers could find where the writing is supposed to be, much less read it. it is difficult to relate the design or the words to henry percy (1364–1403), son of the earl of northumberland, who was killed at the battle of shrewsbury (see shakespeare’s henry iv, part 1). blake made a separate visionary head of hotspur <butlin #745>, which is visually unrelated to this drawing. and in the same blake-varley sketchbook <butlin #692 131> is a drawing unrelated to hotspur inscribed “hotspur said … we shou[l]d have had the battle had it not been for those cursed stars[.] hotspur said he was indignant to have been killed by … such a person as prince henry who was so much his inferior” (br[2] 368). part iii: commercial engravingsfrom 2010 i record pre-1863 references to separately issued prints by blake. section a: illustrations of individual authors editors’ note: please consult bentley, “sale catalogues of william blake’s works,” for further particulars of catalogues mentioned in this section. bible ספר איוב‎ illustrations of the book of job (1826, 1874) colored copy: in bb p. 523, after “american art association, 16 april 1923, lot 118,” add “[$3125 to james williams].” newly recorded thirteen “excessively rare” “early proof impressions” of job pls. numbered 1-3, 6-8, 11, 14, 16-17, 19-21 were offered in quaritch rough list 73 (november 1885), lot 55 (£10.0.0), and are now untraced. blair, robert, the grave (1808, 1813) a copy of the 1808 quarto bound in “calf, extra, gilt edges [by edwards of halifax]” was offered in dulaw and company, ltd., catalogue 182, rare books ([london]: 32 old bond street, [?1931]), lot 182, £120, and has not since been traced. a proof of pl. 4, “the counsellor, king, warrior, mother & child in the tomb,” on a leaf without watermark 23.4 x 14.6 cm., 0.22 mm. thick, was acquired by robert n. essick in 2013. it lacks some hatching strokes but has “a small patch of hatching on the central extension of the counsellor’s beard” not present in later states; it was “probably burnished off the pl.”essick, “blake in the marketplace, 2013,” blake 47.4 (spring 2014), gives a detailed description of the unique features of the proof. william thane’s copy of the grave a copy (1813) in the library of congress pr3318.b7 a7 1813, rosenwald collection. to view the entire work, see <http://​hdl.​loc.​gov/​loc.​rbc/​rosenwald.​1827.1>. illus. 2-4 here are images 12, 13, and 132. is extra-illustrated with designs cut from young, night thoughts (1797). the night thoughts prints are slightly larger than those in the grave, and therefore the full-page designs were trimmed in both dimensions, including the imprint. occasionally an attempt is made to repeat motifs in the illustrations to the grave with facing prints from night thoughts (see illus. 2-3). sometimes it is difficult to perceive a controlling motif (see illus. 4). 2. blair’s grave (1813) extra-illustrated with prints from young’s night thoughts (1797) p. 19 (trumpeter plunging to skeleton), p. 46 (nude woman gesturing), and p. 43 (woman with stars in her hair). the page carefully echoes the engraved title page of blair’s grave (1808), which faces it (illus. 3). library of congress, rosenwald collection. 3. blair’s grave (1808) engraved title page from the extra-illustrated copy. the plunging trumpeter is more explicitly naked than the one in night thoughts. library of congress, rosenwald collection. 4. the night thoughts cuttings are from p. 87 (in center, christ with children), p. 31 (at right, man in chair beneath floating woman), p. 4 (on left, man in woods), p. 49 (above him, head of curly-haired man), p. 15 (above him, floating figure reoriented from almost vertical to horizontal), and p. 75 (at top right, figure reoriented). it is difficult to find a common theme in these images. library of congress, rosenwald collection. binding: originally in blue paper wrappers (only the back one survives); bound (post-1929) in modern red morocco with marbled endpapers at front and back. history: assembled by william thane—the back blue paper cover is inscribed “this book was given to me by mṛ wṃ thane the picture restorer with the additional slips pasted in—just as it is—mṛ thane knew blake—”; sold in the library of john quinn, anderson galleries, 12-14 november 1923, lot 716 [for $95] to rosenbach, who sold it on 3 may 1929 for $1200 to lessing j. rosenwald; given to the library of congress. kathryn barush reports nine previously unrecorded loose copies of blair prints in the ashmolean museum, oxford,they are not listed in the catalogue of the douce bequest to the bodleian library (1840). their discovery is reported by kathryn barush, “visions of mortality” (see barush in part vi), which reproduces nos. 1, 3, 5, 8-9 on a greatly reduced scale, but not the proof of no. 10 (“the death of the good old man”). another proof of no. 10 is in the collection of robert n. essick. the presence of pencil prices of “2/” on no. 1 and “3/6” on nos. 5, 8, and the facts that “the matting, quality and size of the prints vary, suggest … that they were assembled separately” (barush 60). consisting of pls. 1. title page, proof, with the douce collection stamp.“douce collection, un[iversity] ox[ford].” 3. “the meeting of a family in heaven” with the douce collection stamp. 4. “the counseller, king, warrior, mother & child, in the tomb.” 5. “death of the strong wicked man” with the douce collection stamp. 7. “the descent of man into the vale of death.” 8. “the day of judgment” with the douce collection stamp. 9. “the soul exploring the recesses of the grave.” 10. “the death of the good old man,” “an untitled proof copy, before the final lettering.” 11. “death’s door.” the print of the title page displays, at the bottom-right corner, the etched legend “proof copy r.h.c. price 5.5.0” (as in the large paper copies of 1813 in harvard and princeton [see bb p. 533]).the 1813 copies with “proof copy …” are remainders from the 1808 printing. “death’s door” reproductions (nineteenth century)omitting the prints, reduced to about a quarter of the original size, signed by a. l. dick and reproduced in new york editions of 1847, 1858, and ?1879. i am deeply grateful to robert n. essick for suggestions and facts. 1805 blake’s experimental white-line etching (plate size 11.7 x 18.6 cm.), never published, one copy known; the old man moves to the right and the young man looks up to the left. 1808 louis schiavonetti’s conventional engraving (plate size 17.5 x 29.7 cm.) for blair’s grave; the directions are reversed (see illus. 5). for the 1806 proof, see blair in “william blake and his circle, 2012,” blake 47.1 (summer 2013). 5. “death’s door” (plate size 17.5 x 29.7 cm.), engraved after blake by l. schiavonetti for blair’s grave (1808). collection of robert n. essick. image courtesy of the william blake archive <http://​www.​blakearchive.​org>. 1852 w. j. linton, wood engraving of “death’s door,” the ladies’ drawing room book (new york, [1852]) and anon., “death and immortality,” illustrated exhibitor and magazine of art 1 (12 june 1852): 369-71, signed on the threshold with a wjl monogram, design size of each 13.7 x 21.9 cm., with rounded upper corners; the old man moves to the right. 1853 the same wood engraving appears in anon., “mourir, c’est renaître,” le magasin pittoresque [paris] (feb. 1853): 41 (illustration), 42 (text). 1860 w. j. linton, thirty pictures by deceased british artists (1860) (design size 12.05 x 20.8 cm.), reprinted in john jackson, a treatise on wood engraving, 2nd ed. (1861) and in the new ed. [?1881]. the old man faces left. this version is different from that printed in 1852. 1863 a wood engraving (design size 11.3 x 17.4 cm.) signed “l. chapon” (léon louis chapon [1836-1918]), printed in m. w. bürger, [i.e., j. thoré], histoire des peintres de toutes les écoles: école anglaise (paris, 1863). it is reprinted on the front page of allgemeine familien zeitung no. 36 (1873), signed “f. bocourt” (probably marie firmin bocourt) and “l. chapon.”robert n. essick, “blake in the marketplace, 2013,” blake 47.4 (spring 2014). bürger, gottfried augustus, leonora a tale, trans. j. t. stanley (1796) the tailpiece of a soldier running to a woman on a couch is signed “blake. in[v].” and “perry. sc”. however, blake’s watercolor for the tailpiece is inscribed lightly in pencil “blake del & sc.”,robert n. essick, “blake in the marketplace, 2013,” blake 47.4 (spring 2014): illus. 12. indicating that he expected to engrave it. “christ trampling on satan” (blake–thomas butts) the copperplate was given in 2002 by gertrude w. dennisthe bookand print-shop of mrs. dennis’s father, e. weyhe, regularly had copies of the print for sale and repeatedly denied to geb that they knew where the copperplate was or whether it survived. to the morgan library (b3 c 114 04l). size: 16.6 x 31.2 cm. copperplate-maker’s mark on the verso: willm & buss | pontifex & compny | nos. 46, 47 & 48 | shoe lane, london cumberland (george) card copies were offered in james tregaskis, caxton head catalogue 810 (20 jan. 1919), lot 3 (£14), catalogue 815 (23 june 1919), lot 5 (£14), james tregaskis and son, caxton head catalogue 830 (sept. 1920), lot 45 (£14), and tregaskis bulletin 8 (feb. 1934), lot 22 (£3). an impression (collection of robert n. essick) was reproduced by the william blake archive in 2013. “edmund pitts” (after earle) copies were offered in james tregaskis, caxton head catalogue 673 (19 july 1909), lot 62 (£1.5.0) and catalogue 689 (18 july 1910), lot 251 (£1.5.0). on the acquisition of the morgan impression (s e. 18.4) [essick 2g], acquired with an album of blakeiana (b3 031 a02) including drawings on tracing paper “possibly attributable to linnell after designs by blake,” see §nineteenth report to the fellows of the pierpont morgan library, 1978-1980, ed. charles ryskamp (new york: pierpont morgan library, 1981) 178. enfield, william, the speaker (1774 [i.e., 1780], 1781, 1785, 1795, 1797, 1799, 1800) at the end of a 1795 copy in victoria university in the university of toronto is an eight-page catalogue of joseph johnson publications, including bonnycastle, mensuration (“price 3s. bound”), salzmann, elements of morality with fifty plates (“price 10s.6d. bound”), and wollstonecraft, original stories from real life (“price 2s.6d. with cuts bound, or 2s. without cuts”). flaxman, john, a letter to the committee for raising the naval pillar (1799) edition a letter to the committee for raising the naval pillar. gale ecco print editions, 2010. isbn: 9781140710479. a digitized version of the british library copy. hayley, william, an essay on sculpture (1800) blake’s plates (collection of robert n. essick) were reproduced by the william blake archive in 2013. hayley, william, the life, and posthumous writings, of william cowper, esqr. (1803-04) blake’s plates (collection of robert n. essick) were reproduced by the william blake archive in 2013. hayley, william, the life of george romney, esq. (1809) for a print of romney’s self-portrait (engraved by blake as the frontispiece for hayley’s biography but never published), see crosby under blake 47.3 in part vi. this print was also reproduced by the william blake archive in 2013. blake’s published plate, “sketch of a shipwreck after romney,” was reproduced by the william blake archive in 2013 (collection of robert n. essick). hayley, william, little tom the sailor (1800) the copy in the sendak collection is watermarked “hayes | 17”.blake’s letters of 11 sept. 1801, 22 nov. 1802, and 16 aug. 1803 are on paper watermarked “f hayes | 1798”. three copies (one from the collection of robert n. essick and two from the fitzwilliam museum) were reproduced by the william blake archive in 2013. hayley, william, the triumphs of temper (1803) blake’s plates (collection of robert n. essick) were reproduced by the william blake archive in 2013. hogarth, “beggar’s opera” a copy was offered in james tregaskis and son, caxton head catalogue 830 (sept. 1920), lot 48a (£5.10.0). “the idle laundress” (after morland) a copy was offered in james tregaskis, caxton head catalogue 673 (19 july 1909), lot 59 (with “industrious cottager”) (£52.10.0). “industrious cottager” (after morland) see “the idle laundress,” above. “joseph of arimathea among the rocks of albion” (1773, c. 1810-20) copy d history: offered at £2.2.0 in quaritch catalogue no. 62 (june 1893) and miscellaneous catalogue (nov. 1893), both “10 in. by 5½ in.” josephus, flavius, works (?1787-?1790) a victoria university in the university of toronto copy of issue a (see bb #477) has directions to the binder for sixty prints. new version db   title page as in d, but text as in c rather than reset as in d. copy acquired in 2013 by robert n. essick. the ladies new and polite pocket memorandum-book (1782) a copy of “the morning amusements of her royal highness [and] a lady in the full dress” was offered in james tregaskis, caxton head catalogue 770 (19 july 1915), lot 94 (£2.2.0). scott, john, poetical works (1782, 1786, 1795) quaritch catalogue no. 539 (1937), lot 432, remarks: it has not, we believe, been noted before that two variants exist of the 1782 edition. in variant a, presumably the earlier, the verso of leaf a4 is occupied by 15 lines of errata. in variant b this leaf is blank and the errata, with one exception, are corrected in the text. although the setting up of the variants corresponds, page for page, the pagination differs, owing to a fly-title to the elegies being present in variant b, but not in a. this conclusion is summarized in quaritch catalogue no. 979 (1977), lot 50. stedman, j. g., narrative, of a five years’ expedition (1796, 1806, 1813) stedman’s designs for the engravings have not been traced, but a watercolor by him of a black groom with a blood horse in surinam is reproduced in gordon n. ray, the illustrator and the book in england from 1790 to 1914 (new york: pierpont morgan library; london: oxford university press, 1976) 9. blake’s pls. 2-3, 7-8, 10, 12-16 are reproduced (two of them twice) without reference to stedman’s narrative or the text of the novel about the slave revolt of 1733-34 in what is now the virgin islands, in john lorenzo anderson, night of the silent drums (tortola, 1992), first illustrated virgin island edition.first, unillustrated, edition: new york: charles scribner’s sons, 1975. young, edward, night thoughts (1797) for references to young’s night thoughts in catalogues of 1800, 1807, 1833, 1835, 1837, 1838, nov. 1839, and dec. 1839, see ripley under blake 47.3 in part vi. colored copies copy n binding: a copy of the 1796 prospectus (4 3/8″ x 5 5/8″) is pasted to the front free endpaper. the front pastedown bears the small rectangular bookplate of ex museo ǀ arbuteano ǀ … ǀ w. s. lewis and the small round red bookplate of paul mellon, along with a clipping describing this copy when it appeared in the parke-bernet sale of newton’s collection on 16 april 1941, lot 138 (“engravings brilliantly colored by william blake”), plus a statement on the stationery of a. edward newton, ǀ “oak knoll” … written in blue ink by c. b. tinker dated 11 june 1936 describing “the two copies [a and n] … in the possession of a. edward newton.” copy v history: perhaps this is the copy with “forty-two illustrations … colored by the artist’s own hand” (ordinarily there were 43 prints)the copy exhibited in 1903 and copy v are the only ones lacking one leaf; n lacks two leaves. that was lent by william doxeywilliam doxey is not known to have owned any other original work by blake. of new york to the exhibition in “the art room of the erie public library” organized by the woman’s club of erie, pennsylvania, in january 1903.anon., “an exhibition in erie, penn.,” new york times 24 jan. 1903. part iv: catalogues and bibliographiesbeginning with this issue of blake, i do not report catalogues of 2013 ff. that offer unremarkable copies of books with blake’s commercial engravings or blake’s separate commercial prints. section a: individual catalogues editors’ note: please consult bentley, “sale catalogues of william blake’s works,” for pre-2005 catalogues. 2005 20–21 april §bloomsbury auctions. private press and limited editions, children’s and illustrated books and performing arts. london, 2005. <grolier club> includes “william blake, trianon press.” 2005 august–4 september *cloud and vision. 2005. <blake (2006)> review raymond edwards, “blake takes back seat,” catholic herald 19 aug. 2005 (all except the “topographical essay” by michael phillips form “a dire collection of art school pretentiousness”). 2006 2 may *sotheby’s. william blake: designs for blair’s grave. new york, 2006. <blake (2007)> reviews, etc. *paul jeromack, “bomb-a-rama,” artnet 29 june 2006. 2007 23 june–7 october §robert flynn johnson, karin breuer, and louise siddons. rembrandt to thiebaud: a decade of collecting works on paper. san francisco: fine arts museums of san francisco, 2007. an accompanying volume to an exhibition at the california palace of the legion of honor, which included “artist books by william blake ….” [2009] bernard quaritch. around rousseau, bernard quaritch list 2009/19. london, 2009. 50 [darwin], the botanic garden, vol. 1 (1791), vol. 2 (1789), “very occasional spotting to vol. i, offsetting to title from frontispiece, and from other plates to facing pages, … in contemporary speckled calf, with gilt-tooled spines and gilt borders to sides, gilt morocco lettering pieces, with the armorial bookplate of sir george shiffner in both vols., and the contemporary ownership inscription of one a. lewis 1795 to front free endpaper in both vols.,” with two copies of a print, £2500. 2011 28 november–2012 19 february §*уильям блейк и британские визионеры. каталог выставки [uil'yam bleik i britanskie vizionery. katalog vystavki] [william blake and the british visionaries. exhibition catalogue]. moscow: krasnaya ploshchad', 2011. 248 pp. in russian. <§blake (2013)> review *vera serdechnaya (see blake 47.1 in part vi). 2012 2 july–21 october william blake (1757-1827): visiones en el arte británico. caixaforum madrid. <blake (2013)> organized by tate britain and produced by obra social “la caixa.” curated by alison smith, london. no catalogue was published. there were seventy-four works by blake, including watercolors, etchings, drawings, and paintings, and pieces by british artists influenced by him: cecil collins (1908-89), john piper (1903-92), graham sutherland (1903-80), ceri richards (1903-71), and eduardo paolozzi (1924-2005). a poetry reading celebrating blake was held on 5 july. spanish poets antoni marí (coordinator), antonio martínez sarrión, jorge riechmann, jordi doce, and carlos marzal read their poems and songs of innocence and of experience. review *michelle ferreira (see blake 47.2 in part vi). 2013 30 january *sotheby’s. old master drawings. new york, 2013. 285 the gambols of ghosts according with their affections previous to the final judgement, watercolor, reproduced (estimate: $400,000-$600,000) [sold for $722,500; at its previous sale on 2 may 2006, lot 12, it was bought in at $520,000]. review, etc. colin gleadell, “william blake, craigie aitchison and tracey emin work up for sale,” telegraph 29 jan. 2013. 2013 31 january *christie’s. old master and early british drawings and watercolors including an important canadian collection and a distinguished private collection. new york, 2013. 147 “an angel, arms upraised, with another figure” <butlin #692 53-54, smaller blake-varley sketchbook, p. 53> (20.7 x 15.5 cm.), “indistinct inscription[s] in the hand of john varley ‘hotspur …’” on the recto and “it is allways [sic] to keep yourself collected” on the verso, reproduced (estimate: $12,000-$18,000) [$22,500 to victoria university in the university of toronto]. 2013 january peter harrington. exceptional books and manuscripts, catalogue 90. london, 2013. 2 young, night thoughts (1797), “ownership inscription of george kelly, 1823,” £12,500. 2013 [january] *lowell libson limited. british paintings & works on paper. london: lowell libson, 2013. *“william blake 1757-1827. the meeting of a family in heaven.” 44-49. watercolor from the tulk album, very interesting. [no price; reported on libson’s web site in sept. 2013 to have been sold to a “private collection, usa.”] *“william blake, 1757-1827. studies for ‘america: a prophecy’ and an early treatment of ‘job.’ ” 50-55 [no price]. very interesting sketches.see martin butlin, “harpers and other drawings: the case for a unified composition,” blake 47.2 (fall 2013). it was “still offered on libson’s web site, early march 2014,” according to robert n. essick, “blake in the marketplace, 2013,” blake 47.4 (spring 2014). see also the tulk album of drawings in division ii. 2013 8 february–23 june *anon. burning bright: william blake and the art of the book. [manchester, 2013]. 22 pp., 22 reproductions; no isbn. a booklet to accompany the exhibition, curated by stella halkyard, at the john rylands library, university of manchester. according to burning bright, the undertaking was a project for the students of colin trodd. there is no list of what was exhibited. there is some éclat about the statement that “many of these works have previously lain undetected” (4). their obscurity to the students may be explained in part by the fact that the section on “further reading and resources” omits roger r. easson and robert n. essick, william blake book illustrator, essick, william blake’s commercial book illustrations, bb, bbs, and “william blake and his circle” (blake), which record the manchester works reproduced here. review, etc. *anon., “blake etchings discovered at the john rylands library,” university of manchester news 21 jan. 2013 (“they discovered that a large proportion of the books blake engraved had found their way into the rylands collection including a number of engraved illustrations by the artist.” many of them will go into the exhibition “next month”). 2013 9–10 april christie’s. the collection of arthur and charlotte vershbow. new york, 2013. *64details are as in bbs pp. 112, 130, unless noted; bbs says it was sold by mrs. george madison millard of pasadena for $100 to mrs. john hudson poole (née boeing). the birth and death dates are not in bbs. beginning in march 2013, “christie’s charged the buyer 25% on amounts up to $75,000, 20% on amounts thereafter to $1.5 million, and 12% on amounts above $1.5 million. … sotheby’s charged 25% on amounts up to $1 million, 20% between $1 and $2 million, and 12% thereafter” (robert n. essick, “blake in the marketplace, 2013,” blake 47.4 [spring 2014]). songs of innocence and of experience (p), bound in “late-19th-century english green roan, sides panelled with triple gilt fillets and blind roll-tooled border, spine gilt in compartments with fleurons and lettering, gilt edges, marbled endpapers, laid-paper flyleaves,” “printed in grey-black ink,” “brief autograph description of the book laid in.” sold by the pasadena bookseller alice parsons millard (1873-1938) to caroline boeing poole (1884-1932); acquired in 1977 by bernard m. rosenthal (b. 1920), who sold it in 1979 to the vershbows. the otherwise unique selection of plates “corresponds precisely with copy d (printed in sepia …)” (estimate: $100,000-$150,000) [sold for $100,000 ($123,750 with buyer’s premium)]. *65 the waking of leonora <butlin #338>, preliminary watercolor for bürger, leonora (1796), tailpiece (p. 16) (estimate: $60,000-$80,000) [sold for $170,000 ($207,750 with buyer’s premium) to an unidentified buyer]. 2013 14–23 june ebay. a veteran bookseller of bath offered a facsimile of songs of innocence and of experience ([st. dominic’s press, “1920’s”]), “54 printed pages,” bound in pale-blue card, with a calligraphic ms. title on the cover (“songs of | innocence & | experience”) and spine and, in the same hand, a gift inscription from eric gill to his son-in-law denis tegetmeier (d. march 1987): “denis t. from | eg | 25.dec.1931” [sold for £390]. the reproductions show the title pages of songs [pl. 1], innocence [pl. 3], and experience [pl. 29], printed in reddish brown, 12 x 15.5 cm., with red framing lines round the design (2 on pl. 1, 1 on pls. 3, 29), numbered in red ink within the top right corner of the framing lines (1, 3, 29, implying an overall order of pls. 1-54). there is no coloring, but on pl. 1 the fig leaves are outlined in black ink. probably these are the prints from the facsimile of the songs by quaritch (1893). 2013 25 june §bonhams. fine books and manuscripts. new york, 2013. 3217 blair, the grave (1808), quarto, uncut, in original boards worn and rebacked, “paper label to upper cover,” quarter morocco slipcase, inscription of 22 february 1816 by james neagle [“mr neagle” was an original subscriber] (estimate: $2000-$3000) [not sold]. 2013 3 july §sotheby’s. old master and british drawings. london, 2013. 160 joseph ordering simeon to be bound <butlin #158>, pen and watercolor over pencil. 48.2 x 33.8 cm., reproduced (estimate: £20,000-£30,000) [£27,500 to john windle on behalf of robert n. essick]. 2013 5 july–1 september revolutionary light: blake, [anish] kapoor, turner. whitworth art gallery, manchester. the blakes are his designs for hymn on the morning of christ’s nativity and the ancient of days. 2013 august bernard quaritch. english books and manuscripts, new acquisitions, summer 2013: music, poetry, the stage, beckford, byron, milton, broadsides, translation. london, 2013. <huntington> 32 hayley, the triumphs of temper (1803), “in contemporary marbled calf, spine gilt with wheel motif, red morocco label; ownership inscription of louisa anne hope dated 1807, bookplate of her descendant julius hope, baron von szilassy,” £650. 2013 17 september sotheby’s. prints and multiples—old master, modern and contemporary. london, 2013. 1 job (1826), “‘proof’ edition,” from the estate of mrs. adolph (bucks) weil, jr. (estimate: £15,000-£20,000) [£31,250 with buyer’s premium]. 2013 29 october christie’s. the collection of arthur and charlotte vershbow, part four: the neoclassical, romantic, symbolist and modern periods. new york, 2013. 784 bürger, leonora (1796) (estimate: $3000-$4000) [$3000 to john windle for a private customer]. 785 young, night thoughts (1797), with the “explanation” leaf, tall (42.5 x 33.2 cm.), uncut (estimate: $10,000-$15,000) [$10,000]. 786 hayley, the triumphs of temper (1803), lacking half-title (estimate: $800-$1200) [$813 to john windle for stock]. 787 hayley, ballads (1805), “original boards, paper spine label, uncut,” with a slipcase (estimate: $1500-$2000) [$2500]. 788 blair, the grave (1808), large-paper proof, text watermarked “j whatman 1801,” bound by charles hering in cathedral style (estimate: $10,000-$15,000) [$12,500]. 789 blair, the grave (1813), text watermarked “edmeads & pine 1802” or “edmeads & co 1811,” “all finely hand colored,” “possibly the master copy, colored by blake.” “according to martin butlin, the present copy appears to have been colored by blake himself”; “butlin proposes that the coloring of this copy is consistent with blake’s coloring scheme, and two plates show ‘heavy areas’ typical of his coloring.” “the death of the strong wicked man” and “the reunion of the soul & the body” are reproduced, showing very blake-like coloring, especially in the red flames (estimate: $60,000-$80,000) [$93,750]. 790 virgil pen, ink, and watercolor drawing for “colinet and thenot” (estimate: $40,000-$60,000) [$40,000 to john windle for robert n. essick]. 791 virgil (1821), “wood and steel-engraved plates,” signed on a flyleaf by “s. k. blake,” with frances hofer’s bookplate (estimate: $5000-$7000) [$17,500]. 792 job (1826), “original buff boards,” paper label, wove paper (estimate: $30,000-$50,000) [$68,750]. 793 the marriage of heaven and hell ([camden hotten], 1868) (estimate: $700-$1000) [$688 to john windle for stock]. 794 facsimile of what is believed to be the last replica of the songs of innocence and of experience (quaritch, 1893) (estimate: $500-$700) [$688 to john windle for stock]. 795 auguries of innocence (1959), wood engravings by leonard baskin (estimate: $800-$1200) [$1188]. section b: collections and selections g. e. bentley, jr. “sale catalogues of blake’s works, 1791-2013.” toronto, 2013. <http://​library.​vicu.​utoronto.​ca/​collections/​special_collections/​bentley_​blake_​collection>. detailed lists of the blake contents of about a thousand catalogues, recorded in chronological order. part v: books owned by william blake the poet editors’ note: please consult bentley, “sale catalogues of william blake’s works,” for further particulars of catalogues mentioned in this section. aeschylus, tragedies (1779) it was offered in james tregaskis, caxton head catalogue 809 (16 dec. 1918), lot 38 (£20), and james tregaskis and son, caxton head catalogue 833 (20 dec. 1920), lot 52 (£20). part vi: criticism, biography, and scholarly studies a   b   c   d   f   g   h   i   j   k   l   m   n   o   p   q   r   s   t   u   v   w   y   z a §albertovna, tokareva galina. “the myth in the literary system of william blake.” phd, 2005. anon. “artistes anglais.—william blake. (i).” gazette littéraire: revue française et étrangère de la littérature, des sciences, des beaux-arts [paris] 1, no. 17 (25 march 1830): 265-68. <bibliothèque nationale de france> in french. b. [fr. grille].the name of fr. grille (françois-joseph grille [1782-1853]) is given on the title page of the volume but not on the essay. “blake, peintre, graveur et poète anglais.” le bric-à-brac: avec son catalogue raisonné. vol. 1. paris, 1853. 293-301. <bibliothèque nationale de france> c. françois grille. “blake, peintre, graveur et poëte anglais.” revue universelle des arts 14 (1861): 372-75. <blake (2010)> the gazette littéraire account is an adjusted translation of cunningham’s ¶2-3, 8-12, 14-29, 36-39, 41-42, 44-47, 49 (¶39, 44-47, 49 much contracted). a footnote says: “nous avons emprunté les détails contenus dans cette notice à l’ouvrage intitulé: lives of english artists, par m. allan cunningham, qui a été récemment publié à londres.”the work cited is the lives of the most eminent british painters, sculptors, and architects, vol. 2 (1830) 140-79. the accounts by françois grille give cunningham ¶11-12, 18, 37, 47 via gazette littéraire. that in bric-à-brac is corrected and improved in revue universelle. anon. “blake (william), graveur, peintre et poëte anglais.” dictionnaire encyclopédique usuel. ed. charles saint-laurent. 4th ed. paris: librairie scientifique, industrielle et agricole de lacroix-comon, 1858. 149. <bibliothèque nationale de france> one short paragraph in french. anon. “city’s historic link to blake.” chichester observer 28 nov. 2007. the 4′ x 6′ coat of arms was probably in the guildhall when blake was tried for sedition. anon. “felpham school children follow in footsteps of blake.” chichester observer 31 march 2008. by writing poetry. anon. “theatre: blake remembered at west dean [college].” chichester observer 11 jan. 2009. announcement of a “performance of the life and work of blake.” the college has a tapestry of “the ancient of days … woven by the west dean tapestry studio.” arnault, a. v., a. jay, e. jouy, j. norvins, et autres hommes de lettres. biographie nouvelle des contemporains ou dictionnaire historique et raisonné de tous les hommes qui, depuis la révolution française, ont acquis de la célébrité par leurs actions, leurs écrits, leurs erreurs ou leurs crimes, soit en france, soit dans les pays étrangers. vol. 19 (san-thou). paris: librairie historique, 1825. 53-54. in french. the entry for “schiavonetti (louis)” mentions his engravings “d’après blake, pour … le tombeau de blair.” b barber, john. “wild things: maurice sendak’s ravishing posthumous work was inspired by his older brother, but also by william blake’s visionary songs of innocence and [of] experience.” globe and mail [toronto] 9 feb. 2013: r18. a review of maurice sendak, my brother’s book (harpercollins, 2013). [one design reproduced is quite like the star-struck “william” (milton pl. 29), which is paired with blake’s brother “robert” on milton pl. 33.] *barush, kathryn. “visions of mortality: the vast collection of antiquarian francis douce incorporated a wide range of images of death and the afterlife. these included a set of william blake’s designs for the grave, now in oxford’s ashmolean museum, resonant romantic additions to an age-old pictorial tradition.” apollo no. 605 (jan. 2013): 56-62. for details of the blake prints, see blair’s grave in part iii. §baulch, david m. “‘like a pillar of fire above the alps’: william blake and the prospect of revolution.” european romantic review 24.3 (2013): 279-85. *biles, jeremy. “o rose, i’m sick too: notes on william blake’s ‘the sick rose.’” cultural society 14 may 2007. on the productive irritants of the poem. §bill, stanley. “crisis in the christian dialectic: czeslaw milosz reads william blake and fyodor dostoevsky for a secular age.” northwestern phd, 2013. blake/an illustrated quarterly volume 46, number 4 (spring 2013) *robert n. essick. “blake in the marketplace, 2012.” (comprehensive, precise, exciting.) *małgorzata łuczyńska-hołdys. “‘life exhal’d in milky fondness’—becoming a mother in william blake’s the book of thel.” 29 pars. (“thel’s dilemma—whether to become a mother” is “proof of her maturity and independent spirit” [par. 1].) *g. e. bentley, jr. “blake and stedman as costumiers: curious copies of blake’s engravings in 1821.” 21 pars. (ten of blake’s engravings for stedman are adapted in the bilingual edition of jules ferrario, le costume ancien et moderne [milan, 1817-1826], with 1500 folio prints.) minute particular angus whitehead. “‘another, but far more amiable enthusiast’: references to catherine and william blake in the literary gazette and la belle assemblée (1830).” 4 pars. (a review of cunningham’s lives with a significant new account of blake.) blake/an illustrated quarterly volume 47, number 1 (summer 2013) *g. e. bentley, jr., with the assistance of hikari sato for japanese publications and of li-ping geng for chinese publications. “william blake and his circle: a checklist of publications and discoveries in 2012.” (2012 was “a bumper year for records of previously unrecorded blake publications” [1099 entries], especially from worldcat, with 112 publications in chinese and the discovery of george cumberland’s sketchbook and meticulous imitations of blake’s stedman engravings [paris, 1798].) minute particular *kurt fosso. “blake’s ‘introduction’ [to innocence] and hesiod’s theogony.” 9 pars. reviews *linda freedman. christopher rowland, blake and the bible. 6 pars. (a “deeply scholarly … truly valuable contribution to blake studies.”) *vera serdechnaya. william blake and british visionary art, pushkin state museum of fine arts, moscow, and its catalogue, уильям блейк и британские визионеры. каталог выставки [uil'yam bleik i britanskie vizionery. katalog vystavki] [william blake and the british visionaries. exhibition catalogue]. 11 pars., plus large, unlabeled photographs of the exhibition. (the “lavish” catalogue included works by blake’s successors; “the queue [was] half a kilometer long,” but the responses were mostly perplexed.) *vera serdechnaya. уильям блейк. песни невинности и опыта: william blake. songs of innocence and of experience [w]. 5 pars. (“for the first time in russia, this edition reproduces the illuminated prints of the songs, and all translations [by m. falikman, m. kostionova, a. kruglov, s. lichacheva, and m. lipkin] are new.” there are “introductions by richard holmes [from the folio society edition of 1992] and gregory kruzhkov as well as critical commentary by sasha dugdale,” with an appendix that gives “alternative translations.”) j. b. mertz. michael phillips, ed., the marriage of heaven and hell [b]. 8 pars. (this is “a valuable tool,” though “i find several instances where phillips’s transcription does not agree with … this reproduction of copy b.”) blake/an illustrated quarterly volume 47, number 2 (fall 2013) linda freedman. “blake, duncan, and the politics of writing from myth.” 46 pars. (if “we read both poets [blake and robert duncan] alongside each other, we arrive at a better understanding of the involvement of politics with hermetic vision” [par. 1].) *jonathan roberts. “william blake’s visionary landscape near felpham.” 39 pars. (a fine essay showing that blake’s poem about “my first vision of light” in his letter of 2 october 1800 was probably made at the same time as his landscape near felpham <butlin #368 (c. 1800)> drawn when “blake … must have been in a boat, a little out to sea” “at full tide” [par. 16] on the morning of 2 october [the tide was high at the right time only on 30 september to 2 october (par. 20)]. blake’s watercolor of jacob’s ladder <#438, c. 1805> may have been made about the same time, for the letter to nancy flaxman of 14 september 1800 refers to where “the ladder of angels descends” to “my cot” in felpham [par. 25].) minute particular j. b. mertz. “the responses of william blake and joseph priestley to two swedenborgian ideas.” 5 pars. (both blake and priestley mock swedenborg’s “ideas of space, or duration,” as priestley put it.) reviews *michelle ferreira. william blake (1757-1827): visiones en el arte británico, caixaforum madrid. 13 pars. r. paul yoder. susanne m. sklar, blake’s jerusalem as visionary theatre: entering the divine body. 10 pars. (“it is in sklar’s focus on visionary theatre that her book holds the most promise … [but] sklar lacks an adequate working definition of ’visionary theatre.’”) discussion *martin butlin. “harpers and other drawings: the case for a unified composition.” 6 pars. (a persuasive argument that the newly discovered drawing from the tulk collection offered for sale by lowell libson has a single subject in diminishing perspective.) blake/an illustrated quarterly volume 47, number 3 (winter 2013-14) *mark crosby. “‘ah! romney!’: blake’s ‘supernaculum’ portrait engraving of george romney.” 20 pars. (a proof before letters of george romney’s self-portrait, acquired in 2011 by robert n. essick, may be the proof for the frontispiece to hayley’s life of george romney [1809], which blake sent to hayley in december 1804. the print is on wove paper trimmed inside the platemark [image size: 14.5 x 18.4 cm.]. this is the only traced impression of blake’s print.) *abraham samuel shiff. “blake’s priestly blessing: god blesses job.” 29 pars., with 21 blake reproductions. minute particular wayne c. ripley. “new night thoughts sightings.” 11 pars. reviews mark lussier. claire colebrook, blake, deleuzian aesthetics, and the digital. 6 pars. (a “well-written and energetic” book that “breaks open new critical spaces,” about which there is “much to admire,” but it will “perhaps not [be] pleasing to all blake scholars,” such as lussier.) bruce graver. jonathan roberts, blake. wordsworth. religion. 4 pars. *the blake society. calendar of events for 2013. london: st. james’s church, 197 piccadilly, [may] 2013. square octavo, 20 pp., no isbn, handsomely illustrated. “our present ambitions include buying blake’s two surviving homes” [17 south molton street, london, and blake’s cottage, felpham, sussex] (3). §boutilier, emily gold. “showstopper.” amherst 64.2 (winter 2012): 26-29. about the acquisition of the raising of jairus’s daughter <butlin #417> by amherst college. *bruder, helen p., and tristanne connolly, eds. sexy blake. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, 2013. 8o, xii, 260 pp.; isbn: 9781137332837. helen p. bruder and tristanne connolly. “introduction: ‘bring me my arrows of desire’: sexy blake in the twenty-first century.” 1-18. i: violence and dominance 1. *lucy cogan. “subjectivity, mutuality and masochism: ahania in the book of ahania and the four zoas.” 21-34. 2. ayako wada. “visions of the love triangle and adulterous birth in blake’s the four zoas.” 35-46. 3. *yoko ima-izumi. “blood in blake’s poetry of gender struggle.” 47-63. 4. michelle leigh gompf. “ripped from complacency: violence and feminist moments in blake.” 65-80. ii: chastity, redemption and feminine desire 5. sean david nelson. “in the ‘lilly of havilah’: sapphism and chastity in blake’s jerusalem.” 83-97. 6. magnus ankarsjö. “‘abstinence sows sand all over’: william lost in paradise.” 99-112. 7. david shakespeare. “‘the sight of all these things’: sexual vision and obscurity in blake’s milton.” 113-24. 8. *susanne sklar. “erotic spirituality in blake’s last judgement.” 125-40. 9. kathryn sullivan kruger. “blake’s bowers of bliss: the gitagovinda, the four zoas, and two illustrations for l’allegro.” 141-58. iii: conceptual sex, conceptual art 10. tommy mayberry. “hélyos and ceylèn [a poison tree].” 161-76. 11. paige morgan. “the hinges on the doors of marriage: the body’s openness to information in the art of stelarc and blake.” 177-92. 12. angus whitehead and joel gwynne. “the sexual life of catherine b.: women novelists, blake scholars and contemporary fabulations of catherine blake.” 193-210. (the women novelists are lachman and warner.) 13. philippa simpson. “blake and porn.” 211-18. iv: coda 14. christopher z. hobson. “normalizing perversity: blake and homosexuality in 2013.” 221-34. 15. christopher z. hobson. “commemorating the vere-street ‘monsters.’” 235-37. §byrne, joseph e. “worlds trodden and untrodden: political disillusionment, literary displacement, and the conflicted publicity of british romanticism.” maryland phd, 2013. a study of william wordsworth, william godwin, mary wollstonecraft, and william blake. c §cabrera, víctor. “william blake arriba a la estación violenta” [poem]. anuario de poesía mexicana 2008. ed. maría baranda. mexico city: fondo de cultura económica, 2009. in spanish. castanedo, fernando. “blake, a vueltas con dios.” el país (babelia) [madrid] 22 sept. 2012: 2. in spanish. on blake’s visionary powers versus his mysticism. §cogan, lucy nicole. “william blake’s bible of hell, and the fall into materialism and language.” cambridge phd, 2010. 271 leaves. colebrook, claire. blake, deleuzian aesthetics, and the digital. 2012. <§blake (2013)> review mark lussier (see blake 47.3, above). §collé-bak, nathalie. “spiritual transfers: william blake’s iconographic treatment of john bunyan’s the pilgrim’s progress.” bunyan studies no. 16 (2012): 32-51. cooper, andrew m. william blake and the productions of time. farnham [surrey]: ashgate, 2013. 4o, xiv, 348 pp., 36 black-and-white reproductions; isbn: 9781409444411. “two or three pages from chapter 2 [‘seeing voices in songs of innocence’] were co-authored with michael simpson in ‘the high-tech luddite of lambeth: blake’s eternal hacking,’ the wordsworth circle 30 (1999): 125-31,” and “a shorter version of chapter 6 [‘freedom from the book of urizen’] appeared as ‘freedom from blake’s book of urizen,’ studies in romanticism 48 (2009): 187-218” (xiv). “this book … is a biography … of the life allegory disclosed by his [blake’s] developing poetic practice” ([1]). §corby, james. “blake, yeats, larkin: nihilism and the indifferent consolation of post-romanticism.” new questions on literary criticism. ed. efe duyan. istanbul: dakam publishing, 2012. 159-69. §correa urquiza, martín. “william blake: dulce corazón satánico.” cañamo: la revista de la cultura del cannabis no. 130 (oct. 2008): 58-59. in spanish. *coughlan, sean. “school librarian finds fake blake poem.” bbc news 19 june 2013 (also new york times 19 june 2013). thomas pitchford discovered that “two sunflowers move into the yellow room” in nancy willard’s a visit to william blake’s inn (1981) was “widely attributed to william blake, including in school reading lists,” particularly in the united states. cunningham, allan. “william blake.” the lives of the most eminent british painters, sculptors, and architects. vol. 2. 1830. 140-79. <bb #1433, bbs p. 445> review §anon., “monthly view of new publications, music, the english and foreign drama, the fine arts, literary and scientific intelligence, &c.,” la belle assemblée ns no. 63 (march 1830): 120-23 (a review of cunningham discusses blake). d *damon, s. foster. a blake dictionary: the ideas and symbols of william blake. 1965 …. <bb #1445, bbs p. 447> g. 2013. §dumitrana, magdalena. “the christian poetry and the formation of an intercultural attitude: ‘the little black boy’ by william blake.” euromentor journal 3.2 (june 2012): 1. f fernández campón, miguel. “william blake (el libro como concreción de lo humano).” libros con arte, arte con libros. maría del mar lozano bartolozzi (coord.). badajoz: universidad de extremadura, 2007. 279-89. isbn: 9788498520262. in spanish. §fernie, ewan. “the marriage of heaven and hell.” the demonic: literature and experience. foreword by jonathan dollimore. abingdon: routledge, 2013. chapter 13 (165-68). §fitzsimons, andrew. “william blake’s tavern.” gakushuin daigaku eibun gakkaishi 2012 [journal of the english literary society of gakushuin university 2012] (2013): 35. follansbee, eleanor. heavenly history: an account of heavenly architecture after dante, milton, swedenborg and blake. 1927. <bb #1624> b. §2011. isbn: 9781258024888. a digitized version. fragmentumthe italicized initial letter of “fragmentum” is obscured when the title is normalized in italics. the online journal is sponsored by the universidade federal de santa maria, brazil. *no. 34: “william blake, poeta, pintor e artista-gravurista” (2012) enéias farias tavares. “william blake, poet, painter, and artist-printmaker: an interview with michael phillips.” (an illuminating autobiographical account of the life and scholarly career of michael phillips from 1940 in new york to 2012.) enéias farias tavares. “william blake, poeta, pintor e artista-gravurista: uma entrevista com michael phillips.” in portuguese. enéias farias tavares. “figures/figuras.” in english and portuguese. (sixteen reproductions especially showing phillips imitating blake’s plates and printing them.) “referências bibliográficas.” “referências das imagens.” enéias farias tavares. “autores.” in portuguese. (on blake, phillips, and tavares.) g §gades, andrew. “music, image, and text: a multi-domain analytical approach to bolcom’s songs of innocence and of experience.” florida state phd, 2013. 153 pp. gallant, christine. “blake’s coded designs of slave revolts.” wordsworth circle 42.3 (summer 2011): 211-17. <§blake (2013)> “the designs encode his real intent as the texts do not … the capsule history of this revolt up to 1794,” but the resemblances are often pretty approximate, and it is curious to find evidence of “the haitian revolution” in blake’s copies of stedman’s designs of surinam. *gilchrist, alexander. life of william blake, “pictor ignotus.” 1863, 1880, 1907 …. <bb #1680, bbs p. 484, blake (1999, 2002, 2007, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013)> 1863 the copy inscribed “robert browning, from mrs. gilchrist” (browning’s poem “pictor ignotus” supplied the subtitle of gilchrist’s biography) was offered at sotheby’s london, 7 june 1991, lot 113, and is now in the collection of mark samuels lasner on loan to the university of delaware library. a copy inscribed “clarence cook | from julia sept 8th 1867” with a letter to cook from herbert h. gilchrist, 28 april 1893, about “dispersing my collection of drawings & engravings of william blake” is in victoria university in the university of toronto. “w e frost’s copy ^with his notes^ who collaborated on it”the only known association of william edward frost (1810-77), r.a., with blake or gilchrist’s life is the acknowledgement that he provided the transcription of blake’s “to the public” (2: 263-64), which is untraced and otherwise unknown. was acquired on 14 april 1910 by william augustus white, according to his acquisitions list (houghton library, harvard). i have not traced frost’s copy. the copy “with ms. notes by the late mr. linnell” offered in hodgson’s catalogue of 28-29, 31 may 1906, with “a selection from the property of the late john linnell, esq., jun.,” lot 524 (day 2), has not been traced since. the copy annotated by blake’s disciple george richmond is in the collection of stephen keynes. d. g. “rossetti’s copy of gilchrist’s life of blake, which contains in the margins numerous pencil annotations in his autograph,” and thirty-two leaves with his transcriptions of various portions of blake’s notebook were offered in ellis & white, catalogue 52 (london, [?1883]), lot 67, and f. s. ellis, catalogue of the very choice collection … formed by mr. ellis, 16 nov. 1885 + 11 days, lot 608 (day 3) [sold for £85]. they have not been traced since. the copy of vol. 1 signed by adam white, 21 aug. 1865, with a letter of 17 may 1866 to white from “youknowwho” [john linnell] about “slanderous assertions” about blake,youknowwho’s letter is quoted in the 1959 catalogue and in br(2) xxvii. the volume included a visionary head of edward iii(?) <butlin #736> sold at sotheby parke-bernet, 13 jan. 1970, lot 124. was sold at sotheby’s, 20-22 july 1959, lot 521 (£7 to the dealer j. schwartz), and has not been traced since. review *anon. [francis turner palgrave], quarterly review 117, no. 233 (jan. 1865): 1-27 (“we consider this book one of the most satisfactory amongst our recent biographies” [1]). see also anon., london quarterly review 117, no. 233 (jan. 1865): 1-13. a summary appears in the london review (28 jan. 1865): 131. 1880 d. g. rossetti’s additions for gilchrist (1880), 60 pp., were offered at sotheby’s, 27 july 1911. they may be the set of dante gabriel rossetti’s ms. notes for gilchrist (1880), vol. 2, in the delaware art museum (wilmington). review frederick wedmore, “william blake,” temple bar (1881) …. <bb #2939, blake (2012)> anon., new york times 12 june 1881. *goldsmith, steven. blake’s agitation: criticism and the emotions. baltimore: johns hopkins university press, 2013. 4o, viii, 406 pp., 36 black-and-white illustrations; isbn: 9781421408064. a theory-laden work that deals, inter alia, with kenzaburo oe’s rouse up o young men of the new age (219-25). his “blake’s agitation,” south atlantic quarterly 95 (1996): 753-96 <§blake (1998)>, was “an early version of chapter 1,” and “parts of” his “william blake and the future of enthusiasm,” nineteenth-century literature 63 (2009): 439-60 <blake (§2010, 2011)>, reappear in “the introduction and chapter 5” (318). *goldsmith, steven. “‘cracked across’: blake, milton, and the noise of history.” studies in romanticism 51.3 (fall 2012): 305-42. goldsmith “wonder[s] why blake never illustrated” samson agonistes, which “haunted” him. §gompf, michelle leigh. thomas harris and william blake: allusions in the hannibal lecter novels. jefferson: mcfarland, 2014. 185 pp.; isbn: 9781476606163. §goode, mike. “the joy of looking: what blake’s pictures want.” representations 119.1 (june 2012): 1-36. §goss, erin m. “what is called corporeal: blake and the body’s origin.” revealing bodies: anatomy, allegory, and the grounds of knowledge in the long eighteenth century. lewisburg: bucknell university press, 2013. chapter 3 (87-118). it is about “blake’s assertion of the body’s ‘fallacy’ and ‘imposture’ as it appears in the narration of the body’s origin” (89). “much of chapter 3” is drawn from “what is called corporeal: william blake and the question of the body,” eighteenth century 51.4 (winter 2010): 413-30 <§blake (2012)>. h *haggarty, sarah. blake’s gifts: poetry and the politics of exchange. 2010. <blake (§2011, 2012, 2013)> review matthew rowlinson, studies in romanticism 51.3 (fall 2012): 461-63 (a “smart and original book”). §haggarty, sarah. “what is the price of experience?: william blake and gift relationships.” cambridge phd, 2006. 248 leaves. *halkyard, stella. “pictures from a library: 3 regaining a corner of paradise: william blake’s pastorals of virgil.” pn review 38.6 (july-aug. 2012). §hannah, daniel. “invitations and withdrawals: queer romantic ecologies in william blake’s the book of thel and john clare’s ‘the nightingale’s nest.’” essays in romanticism 20 (2013): 1-18. it is about “the ways in which queer desires surface … as fissures in their ecological imaginaries.” *hiraide, takashi. william blake no bat (william blake’s bat). tokyo: genki shobo, 2012. 215 pp. in japanese. a collection of essays on trips, sports, and driving, in one of which the author discusses a cricket bat in the illustration of “the ecchoing green.” i *imamura, takeshi. “johann heinrich füssli und william blake: ihre kunst und die gordon-aufstände.” tokyo rika daigaku kiyo (studies in liberal arts and sciences, tokyo university of science) no. 45 (2013): 183-93. in german with a japanese synopsis. j §jackson, kevin. “a william blake alphabet.” letters of introduction: an a-z of cultural heroes and legends. manchester: carcanet press, 2004. chapter 1 (1-24). jackson-stops [estate agent]. “cottage for sale felpham, west sussex po22 7eb.” 2013. “formerly the home of william blake,” “most picturesque”; “guide price of £650,000.” §jenkins-handy, david. “visual culture and visionary satire: the bodies politic of william blake.” birmingham phd, 2004. 391 pp. *jesse, jennifer g. william blake’s religious vision: there’s a methodism in his madness. plymouth: lexington books, 2013. 4o, xiv, 297 pp.; isbn: 9780739177907. a serious, methodical book; an “educated guess about the religious insights expressed in blake’s [literary] works” (7); an attempt “to contextualize blake’s works theologically” (99). she is concerned particularly with the audiences blake addresses. §jessen, elisabeth engell. “conversion as a narrative, visual, and stylistic mode in william blake’s works.” oxford dphil, 2013. §johnston, kenneth r. “blake’s america, the prophecy that failed: william blake (1757-1827).” unusual suspects: pitt’s reign of alarm and the lost generation of the 1790s. oxford: oxford university press, 2013. chapter 18 (307-22). juninus. “conversations on the arts.” repository of arts, literature, commerce, manufactures, fashions, and politics no. 56 (aug. 1813): 63. in a conversation about hogarth’s works, he mentions “beggars’ opera, mr. walker as macheath, miss fenton as polly, w. blake sc.” juninus gives similar information about the print in “on splendour of colours, &c.,” repository of arts 4 (sept. 1810): 130-31; see br(2) 304-05. the 1813 reference was first recorded by robert n. essick in an e-mail to me of february 2013. junod, karen. “crabb robinson, blake, and perthes’s vaterländisches museum (1810-1811).” european romantic review 23.4 (aug. 2012): 435-51. chiefly about perthes and crabb robinson’s role “as mediator of english literature to germany” (435). k kato, kazutoshi. “w. blake no muku to keiken no uta: rhythm no jikken to iu sokumen kara (an experiment of poetic rhythm: blake’s songs of innocence and of experience).” mulberry no. 62 (2013): 21-41. in japanese. kellogg, carolyn. “tyger, tyger burning bright: william blake’s cottage is for sale.” los angeles times 15 july 2013. for $978,000. §koelb, janice hewlett. “reading and rhetorical generation: the example of blake’s thel.” literary studies and the pursuits of reading. ed. eric downing, jonathan m. hess, and richard v. benson. rochester: camden house–boydell & brewer, 2012. studies in german literature, linguistics, and culture. chapter 7 (148-67). §kumar, r. ashok. “perception of syntactic deviations in poetry—a study of william blake’s songs of innocence.” language in india 12.10 (oct. 2012): 83. l lane, louisa. “william blake.” guernsey and jersey magazine 5, ed. f. b. t. (london: sherwood, gilbert and piper, 1838): 70-75. <british library: pp 6071> a brief summary of blake’s life (70-71), silently paraphrased and quoted from cunningham,“at ten years of age he became an artist, and at twelve a poet” (cunningham  ¶3, lane p. 70); “she [kate] seemed to have been created on purpose for blake” (cunningham ¶10, lane p. 70); “to the wildest flights of his imagination she bowed the knee” (cunningham ¶10, lane p. 71). lane quotes (71) somewhat approximately from cunningham ¶47-48. serves as an introduction to “the last scene in blake’s life” (71-75) in blank verse. solitude—loneliness i never knew; the midnight’s solemn hour was fraught with phantoms of the mighty dead, and, shaking off the fears of weak mortality, i conversed with them—man to man; my spirit walked with theirs through the wide world; they taught the mysteries of my noble art, the secrets of the dead, and made them mine. heroes and sages, patriarchs of old, and fallen angels with their faded light, e’en yet too dazzling for a mortal’s eye, came as familiar things …. (73) this is the only known dramatic extract based on blake. louisa lane (1812-83), daughter of major-general ambrose lane and mary le meurier, married the rev. thomas clarke and lived in his parish of wood eaton, oxfordshire, until his death in 1865. she then returned to guernsey. she published extensively under her married name about the natural history and folklore of the channel islands (e.g., folk-lore of guernsey and sark [1880]).see edgar macculloch, guernsey folk lore, ed. edith carey (london: elliot stock; guernsey: f. clarke, 1903). for earlier poems about blake, see felicia hemans, “the painter’s last work: a scene,” blackwood’s edinburgh magazine 31 (feb. 1832): 220-21, and lucy hooper, “the fairy’s funeral,” long island star 27 nov. 1833: 1. §lang, bernhard. “meeting in heaven according to john bunyan in the pilgrim’s progress. with a note on an illustration by william blake.” tod und jenseits in der schriftkultur der frühen neuzeit. ed. marion kobelt-groch and cornelia niekus moore. wiesbaden: harrassowitz, 2008. language. philology. culture язык. словесность. культура no. 1 ([march] 2013) 1. vera serdechnaya. “a dialogue in the doors.” 8-11. in russian and english. (a summary.) blake studies 2. andrew solomon. “william blake’s great task.” 13-19. in english and russian. 3. *gerald eades bentley, jr. “blake’s loose canons.” 20-45. in english. (about editing blake, chiefly william blake’s writings [1978].) 4. thomas stearns eliot. “blake.” trans. d. smirnov-sadovsky. 46-51. in russian. 5. tatyana alexandrovna tyutvinova. “an artistic method by william blake: ‘mystification’ or ‘prophecy’?” 52-59. text in russian, footnotes, references, and abstract in english. 6. daniel gustafsson. “blake and orthodoxy.” 60-77. in english. (the orthodoxy is eastern religious orthodoxy.) 7. vera vladimirovna serdechnaya. “‘russian’ blake: translations, research, allusions.” 78-94. text and footnotes in russian, abstract in english. 8. *dmitri smirnov-sadovsky [pen name of dmitri nikolaevich smirnov]. “‘bard’ by william blake.” 95-107. text and footnotes in russian, quotation of “the bard” from the descriptive catalogue in english. 9. *tat'yana eduardovna koksharova. “caterpillar—cocoon—butterfly as a symbolic triad in poetry and painting of william blake.” 108-20. text and footnotes in russian, abstract and references in english. 10. marina alekseevna vashchenko and aleksandr vladimirovich vashchenko. “the dichotomy of new and old world in the mystics of william blake.” 121-30. text in russian, footnotes, abstract and references in english. 11. galina al'bertovna tokareva. “william blake’s philosophy of laughter and the romantic excess.” 131-54. text in russian, abstract and references in english. translations 12. vera serdechnaya. “an island in the moon by w. blake: two russian translations.” 155-57. in russian and english. 13. “island on the moon” (1784). trans. g. a. tokareva. 158-82. text and footnotes in russian. 14. “island on the moon” (1784). trans. d. smirnov-sadovsky. 183-207. text and footnotes in russian. 15. “authors and translators.” 208-18. in english and russian, with portraits. *larrimore, mark. the book of job: a biography. princeton: princeton university press, 2013. lives of great religious books. 183-94. §lestringant, frank. “william blake, clé de dostoïevski.” andré gide, l'inquiéteur. 2 vols. [paris]: flammarion, 2011, 2012. in french. lister, raymond the archive of raymond lister, painter, collector, blake scholar, editor of samuel palmer’s letters, was given to the fitzwilliam museum (cambridge university), which published an online catalogue of it (seen 2013). lobanova, v. v. see also under her married name, vera serdechnaya. §lobanova, v. v. “kommujnikativnyi kod svifta i sterna v satire u. bleika ‘ostrov na lune’ [communicative code of swift and sterne in w. blake satire ‘the island of the moon’].” mir romantizma: materialy mezhdunarodnoi konferentsii “mir romantizma” (xii gulyaevskikh chtenii) [the world of romanticism: proceedings of the international conference “world romanticism” (xii gulyaevskie readings)]. ed. e. mil'ugina. [tver] 10.34 (2004): 11-16. in russian. §*low, katherine. “william blake’s job.” the bible, gender, and reception history: the case of job’s wife. london: bloomsbury, 2013. library of hebrew bible/old testament studies 586. scriptural traces: critical perspectives on the reception and influence of the bible 1. chapter 5 (135-94). it includes “overview of blake’s job engravings” (143-83) and “job and his wife in blake’s job series” (184-94). the illustrations include job pls. “1”-“21”. §lubbock, tom. “albion rose.” english graphic. london: frances lincoln ltd., 2012. 122-25. also “blake shapes” (110-17) and “jerusalem the emanation of the giant albion” (118-21). there are chapters on flaxman, fuseli, palmer, and romney. *lüdeke, roger. zur schreibkunst von william blake: ästhetische souveränität und politische imagination. munich: fink, 2013. münchener studien zur literaturwissenschaft. 4o, 296 pp., 15 color plates; isbn: 9783770552467. in german. lussier, mark. “scientific objects and blake’s objections to science.” wordsworth circle 39.3 (summer 2008): 120-23. <§blake (2013)> “blake was acutely aware of the mediational function of scientific instrumentation and its impact on the imagination ….” m *matthews, susan. blake, sexuality and bourgeois politeness. 2011. <§blake (2012)> review wayne c. ripley, european romantic review 24.1 (2013): 108-15 (with another) (a chapter-by-chapter digest; in her “ambitious and important” book, matthews is “interested in positioning blake within a series of discursive networks related to bourgeois sexuality,” “occasionally losing blake in a network of connections that don’t always seem to illuminate blake’s meaning” [111, 109]). mazzeo, tilar j. “william blake’s golden string: jerusalem and the london textile industry.” studies in romanticism 52.1 (spring 2013): 115-45. jerusalem is “essentially” or at least “in some fundamental way, engaged with the textile trade” (116, 118); the evidence about the trade, chiefly in silk, is fascinating, but details from jerusalem are sparse. §mckegg, bro. william h., f.r.c. “william blake—painter, poet and mystic.” rosicrucian digest (may 1932). b. *rosicrucian beacon 19.4 (sept. 2010): 9-12. a biography; blake was “a rosicrucian adept,” but mckegg offers no evidence. mendoza serrano, carolina. “el tigre como lo exótico: un estudio sobre la metáfora del tigre en ‘songs of innocence and of experience’ de william blake y ‘el oro de los tigres’ de jorge luis borges.” cartaphilus: revista de investigación y crítica estética 1 (2007): 80-87. in spanish. §mezquita fernández, maría antonia. “dos poetas visionarios: william blake y claudio rodríguez.” anuario del instituto de estudios zamoranos florián de ocampo no. 22 (2005): 399-408. in spanish. michéa, c.-f. [claude-françois]. du délire des sensations. 2nd ed. paris: labé, 1851. 75-76. in french. he gives the story about blake’s visionary head of william wallace from louise belloc, “extrait de la vie de blake revue encyclopédiq. 1830, tom. xlvi, p. 666” (xxii). milosz, czeslaw. “blake and swedenborg.” philosophy, literature, mysticism: an anthology of essays on the thought and influence of emanuel swedenborg. ed. stephen mcneilly. london: swedenborg society, 2013. note also keri davies, “‘the swedishman at brother brockmer’s’: moravians and swedenborgians in eighteenth-century london” and h. j. jackson, “‘swedenborg’s meaning is the truth’: coleridge, tulk and swedenborg.” §miner, paul. “blake: musings and counter-musings.” notes and queries 60.2 (june 2013): 218-22. §miner, paul. “william blake’s creative scripture.” literature and theology 27.1 (march 2013): 32-47. miyamachi, seiichi. “honyaku nicholas marsh, william blake: the poems [translation of chapter two, nicholas marsh, william blake: the poems].” sapporo gakuin daigaku jimbun gakkai kiyo (journal of the society of humanities, sapporo gakuin university) no. 92 (2012): 119-68. in japanese. morimatsu, kensuke. kinsei igirisu bungaku to shizen: shakespeare kara blake made (nature in british literature: from shakespeare to blake). tokyo: chuo daigaku shuppanbu, 2010. in japanese. review tomoya oda, igirisu romanha kenkyu (essays in english romanticism) no. 36 (2012): 88-91. in japanese. §mounic, anne. “william blake, du tigre à l’infini.” l’esprit du récit ou la chair du devenir: éthique et création littéraire. paris: honoré champion, 2013. bibliothèque de littérature générale et comparée 112. in french. muhammad, sardar. “man or muse: affinities in the inspirational roles of rumi’s shams and blake’s milton.” journal of humanities and social sciences 20.1 (june 2012): 99. about jalal-ud-din rumi’s shams and blake’s milton. *mulhallen, karen, ed. blake in our time: essays in honour of g. e. bentley jr. 2010. <blake (2011)> review wayne c. ripley, european romantic review 24.1 (2013): 108-15 (with another) (a chapter-by-chapter digest. “blake in our time pays fitting tribute to the blake scholar and bibliographer g. e. bentley with a host of carefully researched articles rooted firmly in the type of concrete bibliographical and historical facts that are the hallmark of bentley’s erudite and meticulous scholarship. … almost every essay of blake in our time builds on facts originally discovered or insights first posited by bentley himself” [109]. mary lynn johnson’s essay on blake and butts “most deserves to be listened to” [110]. the review also covers the podcasts of the 2010 symposium that launched blake in our time [109]). mulvihill, james. “a voice without form: blake’s book of ahania and song of solomon.” english studies 88.5 (2007): 522-30. <§blake (2013)> “ahania’s lament exhibits a mannered eroticism tracing its provenance to song of solomon” (523). n nagashima, kazuhiko. “blake no tiriel ni okeru muku to keiken: tairitsu to hitei tono kanren ni oite (innocence and experience in blake’s tiriel, in relation to contraries and negations).” kawamura eibungaku no. 18 (2013): 1-16. in japanese. o §osińska, agnieszka. “the religious and mythological symbolism in the writings of william blake and juliusz słowacki.” wrocław [poland] phd, 2013. *otto, peter. blake’s critique of transcendence: love, jealousy, and the sublime in the four zoas. 2000. <blake (2002)> review keri davies, studies in romanticism 43.3 (fall 2004): 492-97. p *paley, morton d. “william blake’s ‘portable fresco.’” european romantic review 24.3 (2013): 271-77. a description of what blake meant by “fresco.” *parray, ashaq hussain. “songs of innocence and [of] experience: a trans-historical humanitarian discourse.” language in india 13.7 (july 2013): 136-41. general reflections on blake. *parrish, susan scott. “embodying african knowledge in colonial surinam: two william blake engravings in stedman’s 1796 narrative.” slave portraiture in the atlantic world. ed. agnes lugo-ortiz and angela rosenthal. new york: cambridge university press, 2013. chapter 9 (257-81). the two prints are of “a private marine of col. fourgeoud’s corps” and “the celebrated gramman quacy.” blake is fairly incidental to the essay; the designs are by stedman, after all. §pullman, p. “the week in books: the inexhaustible blake.” guardian [london] 26 nov. 2011. §pyle, eric allan. “william blake’s illustrations for dante’s divine comedy.” hiroshima daigaku (hiroshima university) phd, 2012. an abstract was published in hiroshima daigaku daigakuin sogokagaku kenkyuka kiyo i, ningen kagaku kenkyu (studies in human sciences, bulletin of graduate school of integrated arts and sciences i, hiroshima university) no. 7 (2012): 85-86. q quinney, laura. william blake on self and soul. 2009. <blake (§2010, 2011)> review §s. sklar, scottish bulletin of evangelical theology 30.2 (2012): 247. r radiatus. “the gnostic element of distance in blake.” voidlight: the mystery of gnosis in distance. [n.p.: n.p.], 2010. chapter 9 (73-81). raebeck, barry. tyger on the crooked road: william blake, poet, painter, prophet. bloomington: iuniverse llc, 2013. 8o, viii, 355 pp.; isbn: 9781475990775. it is “a novel of historical fiction based on blake’s life” (vii). *raine, kathleen. golgonooza city of imagination: last studies in william blake. 1991. <bbs p. 614> b. *ocho ensayos sobre william blake. trans. carla carmona. vilaür [gerona]: atalanta, 2013. colección imaginatio vera 76. 8o, 273 pp.; isbn: 9788494094132. in spanish. the spanish edition contains “introducción” (11-19), “la ciencia y la imaginación en william blake” (21-47), “blake y maya” (49-71), “la mitologización del tiempo en los libros proféticos de blake” (73-105), “blake, swedenborg y lo divino humano” (107-38), “la ciudad en la poesía profética de blake” (139-66), “el sufrimiento según las ilustraciones de blake del libro de job” (167-217, with black-and-white reproductions of the title page and pls. 1-21 of blake’s illustrations of the book of job), “el apocalipsis: blake y miguel ángel” (219-40), “el sueño de albion” (241-63), “index” (264-69). review *iván pintor iranzo (see libros proféticos i in part i, section b). roberts, jonathan. blake. wordsworth. religion. 2010. <blake (§2011, 2012)> review bruce graver (see blake 47.3, above). §roberts, jonathan. “st. paul’s gifts to blake’s aesthetic.” glass 15 (2003): 8-18. <blake (§2008)> b. §visions and revisions. ed. r. kojecký and a. tate. newcastle upon tyne: cambridge scholars publishing, 2013. *rowland, christopher. blake and the bible. 2011. <blake (2012)> reviews §nicholas king, scripture bulletin 41.2 (2011): 89-91. *linda freedman (see blake 47.1, above). §wayne c. ripley, christianity and literature 62.3 (2013): 455-58. §rowland, christopher. “‘mr. blake, apoor rather ana-calyptic poet, and painter’: apocalyptic hermeneutics in action.” die johannesapokalypse: kontext—konzepte—rezeption. ed. jörg frey, james a. kelhoffer, and franz tóth. tübingen: mohr siebeck, 2012. s sato, hikari. “1900 nendai no blake aikoka no keifu: bernard leach, augustus john, john sampson (the genealogy of blake enthusiasts in the 1900s: bernard leach, augustus john, and john sampson).” choiki bunka kagaku kiyo (interdisciplinary cultural studies) no. 18 (2013): 33-53. in japanese, with english synopsis. it is highly conceivable that the enthusiasm for blake was transmitted from sampson to john and from john to leach, who also shared interests in bohemianism. sato, hikari. “william blake shoden [a short introduction to the life of william blake].” shikai [bulletin of japan poets club] no. 260 (2013): 30-40. in japanese. sato, hikari. “william blake to yanagi muneyoshi [william blake and yanagi muneyoshi].” shikai tsushin [report of japan poets club] no. 59 (2012): 9-11. in japanese. sato, hikari. “yanagi muneyoshi ni okeru ‘temperament’: william blake (1914) no kiteion (the use of the word ‘temperament’ by yanagi muneyoshi: the basal tone of william blake [1914]).” hikaku bungaku (journal of comparative literature) no. 55 (2013): 22-35. in japanese, with english synopsis. sato, hikari. “yanagi muneyoshi william blake: hanko no seishin to kosei no soncho [william blake by yanagi muneyoshi: the rebellious spirit and the respect of individuality].” igirisu romanha kenkyu (essays in english romanticism) no. 37 (2013): 109-14. in japanese. sedgwick, marcus, julian sedgwick, john higgins, and marc olivent. dark satanic mills. london: walker books ltd., 2013. 4o, 172 pp.; isbn: 9781406329889. a graphic novel. all of “jerusalem” from milton is printed on the fold-out title page, and there is a note “on william blake and other influences” ([170-71]). serdechnaya, vera. see also under her maiden name, v. v. lobanova. §serdechnaya, v. v. “dialektika didaktiki: ‘brakosochetanie nebes i ada’ uil'yama bleika [dialectics of didactics: ‘marriage of heaven and hell’ by william blake].” didaktika khudozhestvennogo teksta: sb. nauch. statei [didactics of literary text: collection of scientific articles]. ed. a. tatarinov. krasnodar, 2005. 44-53. in russian. §serdechnaya, v. v. “genre of small poem in the works of william blake and the english romantics: narrative strategies: zhanr maloi poemy v tvorchestve u. bleika i romantikov anglii: narrativnye strategii.” yazyk slovesnost' kul'tura: language. philology. culture no. 2 (2011): 104-25. in russian. §serdechnaya, v. v. “glupyi belyi chelovek, ili kto umiraet v ‘mertvetse’ dzharmusha? [stupid white man, or who dies in the ‘dead man’ of jarmusch?]” volshebnaya gora [moscow] no. 14 (2007): 534-53. in russian. reprinted in her malye poemy uil'yama bleika: povestvovanie, tipologiya, kontekst [small poems of william blake: narrative, typology, context] (see below). §serdechnaya, v. v. “‘i must create a system’ …: k voprosu o tsiklizatsii ‘malykh’ prorocheskikh poem uil'yama bleika [‘i must create a system’ …: on the cyclization of ‘small’ prophetic poems by william blake].” mir romantizma: materialy mezhdunarodnoi nauchnoi konferentsii “mir romantizma” [world of romanticism: proceedings of the international conference “world romanticism”]. ed. e. mil'ugina. 12.36 (2006): 13-17. in russian. §serdechnaya, vera. malye poemy uil'yama bleika: povestvovanie, tipologiya, kontekst [small poems of william blake: narrative, typology, context]. st. petersburg: dmitrii bulanin, 2012. 4o, 240 pp., 47 reproductions, mostly in color; isbn: 9785860076822. in russian. a contextual analysis and typology of blake’s lambeth prophecies. it reprints her “glupyi belyi chelovek, ili kto umiraet v ‘mertvetse’ dzharmusha? [stupid white man, or who dies in the ‘dead man’ of jarmusch?]” (see above). §serdechnaya, v. v. “na pirakh vechnosti: ‘pesn' losa’ uil'yama bleika [at the feasts of eternity: ‘the song of los’ by william blake].” volshebnaya gora [moscow] no. 15 (2009): 456-60. in russian. §serdechnaya, vera. “narrativnye strategii malykh prorocheskikh poem uil'yama bleika: problemy tipologii i svoeobraziya v istoriko-kul'turnom kontekste [the narrative strategies of short prophetic poems of william blake (the problems of typology and identity in historical and cultural context)].” voronezh state university [russia] phd, 2006. in russian. §serdechnaya, v. v. “narrativnye strategii vetkhozavetnykh prorochestv v poemakh uil'yama bleika [narrative strategy of the old testament prophecies in the poems of william blake].” khudozhestvennaya literatura i religioznye formy soznaniya materialy mezhdunarodnoi nauchnoi internet-konferentsii [fiction and religious forms of consciousness: proceedings of the international online scientific conference]. ed. g. isaev and i. motygin. astrakhan, 2006. 41-45. in russian. §serdechnaya, v. v. “poet voobrazheniya [the poet of imagination].” pedagogichekii vestnik kubani no. 2 (2005). 50 pp. the poet is blake. §serdechnaya, v. v. “small (lambeth) poems by william blake: the question of classification: malye (lambetskie) poemy uil'yama bleika: k voprosu klassifikatsii.” yazyk slovesnost' kul'tura: language. philology. culture no. 1 (2011): 115-25. in russian. §serdechnaya, v. v. “syuzhetika tsikla prorocheskikh poem uil'yama bleika: istoriko-mitologicheskii kontekst [plot structure of the prophetic cycle of poems by william blake: the historical and mythological context].” aktual'nye problemy sovremennogo yazykoznaniya i literaturovedeniya: materialy 4-oi mezhvuzovskoi konferentsii molodykh ucheniykh [actual problems of modern linguistics and literary studies: proceedings of the fourth inter-university conference of young scientists]. ed. v. abramov et al. krasnodar, 2005. 318-24. in russian. *sklar, susanne m. blake’s jerusalem as visionary theatre: entering the divine body. 2011. <blake (2012)> reviews stephen prickett, “holy bricolage,” times literary supplement 22 march 2013: 24 (“sklar’s scholarship is … monumental”). r. paul yoder (see blake 47.2, above). §sotuela elorriaga, lur. “william blake: el ‘misticismo’ de un poeta maldito.” pasos de arte y cultura no. 7 (2008): 96-97. in spanish. steck, christopher. “re-embedding moral agency: linking theology and ethics in blake.” journal of religious ethics 41.2 (june 2013): 332-53. in “blake, theology, and ethics” (342-50), jerusalem is used as a test of his theory about “the connection between ethics and theological vision.” §stevens, matt. “the evolution of william blake’s genesis.” huntington frontiers 8.1 (spring-summer 2012): 22-23. about the crosby–essick edition of blake’s genesis transcript. suzuki, masashi. “kenbikyo teki sozoryoku no keifu (2): sir joshua reynolds kara william blake e [the genealogy of microscopic imagination (2): from sir joshua reynolds to william blake].” eibun gakkaishi [journal of the english literary society] no. 41 (2012): 3-28. in japanese. swinburne, algernon charles. uncollected letters of algernon charles swinburne. ed. terry l. meyers. vol. 1 1848-1874 [vol. 2 1875-1889] [vol. 3 1890-1909]. london: pickering & chatto, 2005. there are occasional references to blake, chiefly to swinburne’s own book (1868). of these, the most important are swinburne’s letter of 13 oct. 1864 about tiriel (see tiriel in part i, section a) and the letter from francis cunningham (the son of allan cunningham, blake’s biographer) to swinburne (3 nov. 1866), enclosing an extract of a letter from etty the painter to campbell the poet …. the fact mentioned in it has not been noticed by any of blake’s biographers, and is so honorable to lawrence’s memory that i hope you will deem it important enough for an allusion in your book (1: 81-82). etty’s letter of 25 march 1830 (not with cunningham’s) about lawrence’s gift of £100 to blake is given in br(2) 525; it was first recorded by robert n. essick, “william blake and sir thomas lawrence,” notes and queries 223 (1978): 211-13. in the same letter, cunningham says that he owns the drawings by blake, rossetti catalogue [1863] 242, nos. 22-23, the “last judgment” and a tracing of it (1: 82). rossetti no. 22 is the last judgment <butlin #644>, sold by tatham, sotheby’s, 29 april 1862, lot 179, to palser; alfred aspland owned it by 1876 and sold it at sotheby’s, 27 jan. 1885, lot 64. rossetti no. 23 is the last judgment—tracing <#646>, sold with rossetti no. 22 in the 1862 sale, lot 179, to palser, and owned by mrs. gilchrist in 1880. the only francis cunningham recorded by butlin is a lt. col. who owned butlin #111 and 506. t §tavares, enéias farias. “‘as portas da percepção’: texto e imagem nos livros iluminados de william blake.” universidade federal de santa maria [brazil] phd, 2012. in portuguese. *tayler, irene. blake’s illustrations to the poems of gray. 1971. 118 reproductions much reduced in size, all but one in monochrome. <bb #2824> b. *ed. with a new foreword by martin butlin. london: folio society, 2013. 15.6 x 27.8 cm., xiv, 210 pp., one reduced monochrome illustration; no isbn. published to accompany the folio society facsimile (2013). in his “foreword” (vii-x), butlin says that he has altered the references to blake’s writings from the edition of geoffrey keynes to that of david v. erdman, and the references to contemporary texts to g. e. bentley, jr., blake records, 2nd ed. (2004), that he has given more accessible references to reproductions of blake’s art than in the 1971 edition, and that he has added footnotes signed “m.b.,” a “list of works cited” (203-05), and “supplementary bibliography” (206-07). “irene tayler’s text is still the most satisfactory introduction to the subtleties of blake’s illustrations to the poems of gray” (ix). §tayson, richard. “ghostly language and liminal experience: william blake, romantic discourse on the sublime, and american punk sound.” city university of new york phd, 2012. §tholoniat, yann. “william blake, songs of innocence and [of] experience.” guide de la littérature britannique. ed. jean pouvelle and jean-pierre demarche. paris: ellipses, 2008. 111-14. *thompson, michael. “william blake and the illustrations for blair’s grave part one.” fellowship of american bibliophilic societies 27.2 (fall 2013): 18-22, 24. a curiously inaccurate account with no indication of the sources of its information. tsuchiya, shigeko. kotoba to vision: blake kara beckett made [language and vision: from blake to beckett]. hachioji: chuo daigaku shuppanbu, 2012. 329 pp.; isbn: 9784805751749. in japanese. <§blake (2013)> part 1 consists of eight essays on blake: [1]. “ai no himitsu ko [on ‘love’s secret’].” 3-9. [2]. “mushin to keiken no kozu [the structure of innocence and experience].” 10-32. [3]. “keiken no uta saiko [songs of experience revisited].” 33-39. [4]. “blake to fukugo geijutsu [blake and composite art].” 40-53. [5]. “tengoku to jigoku no kekkon [the marriage of heaven and hell].” 54-63. [6]. “blake no milton: seisei suru vision [blake’s milton: the generated vision].” 64-82. [7]. “erusaremu [jerusalem].” 83-105. [8]. “blake no yobuki [blake’s book of job].” 106-20. §tweedy, roderick. the god of the left hemisphere: blake, bolte taylor and the myth of creation. london: karnac books, 2012. 353 pp.; isbn: 9781780491011. “blake’s profound understanding of the human brain is finding surprising corroboration in recent neuroscientific discoveries, such as those of the … neuroanatomist jill bolte taylor.” the book deals extensively with urizen. u §ury-petesch, jean-philippe, ed. l’intertextualité lyrique: recyclages littéraires et cinématographiques opérés par la chanson. 2010. in french. it contains the essay “dog is life/jerusalem, entre chant mythique et détournement ironique: william blake repris et détourné par the fall.” v §*vaughan, william. william blake. 1999. <§blake (2000)> c. §london: tate publishing, 2013. 96 pp.; isbn: 9781849761901. §vine, steven. “william blake’s materialities.” reinventing the sublime: post-romantic literature and theory. eastbourne: sussex academic press, 2013. w §watson, ben. blake in cambridge: or “the opposite of david willetts.” london: unkant publishers, 2012. 21 cm., xiv, 132 pp.; isbn: 9780956817686. blake in the wedgwood museum (barlaston, stoke-on-trent) manuscript catalogue date subject box documents 1815 south molton st—engravings for catalogue 6 4382-83see letters in part i, section a. 1815 catalogue 47 29318 §whitfield, peter. “william blake.” illustrating shakespeare. london: british library, 2013. 46-47. §whitmarsh-knight, david. “william blake’s ‘the four zoas’ explained.” <§blake (2008)> b. shakespeare’s heir: blake’s doors of perception in jerusalem and the four zoas. cambridge: william blake press, 2010. 378 pp.; isbn: 9781448685806. §whitson, roger, and jason whittaker. william blake and the digital humanities: collaboration, participation, and social media. new york: routledge, 2013. xi, 211 pp.; isbn: 9780415656184. *wilson, sarah. “enluminures: représentations de william blake.” la revue de la bnu [bibliothèque nationale et universitaire de strasbourg] no. 4 (autumn 2011): 30-41. in french. y §yates, mark. “allegory and enlightenment in the eighteenth century: the frontispiece to william blake’s ‘there is no natural religion.’” proceedings of the salford postgraduate annual research conference (sparc) 2011. salford: university of salford, 2012. 7-16. yates, mark. “notes on william blake’s paper makers, c. 1789-1795.” anq 26.3 (sept. 2013): 169-79. a useful summary of the findings of other scholars. z §zhan, changjuan. “william blake and his poem ‘london.’” theory and practice in language studies 3.9 (sept. 2013): 1610-14. division ii: blake’s circle boydell, john (1719–1804) print publisher §dias, rosie. exhibiting englishness: john boydell’s shakespeare gallery and the formation of a national aesthetic. new haven: yale university press, 2013. viii, 274 pp. §whitfield, peter. “the boydell experiment.” illustrating shakespeare. london: british library, 2013. 48-53. cumberland, george (1754–1848) polymath, artist, friend of blake the emigrants or a trip to the ohio, a theatrical farce (1817): a comedic portrayal of english emigrants who never get to america.the title page was invented by the publisher. ed. with an introduction and notes by elizabeth b. bentley. with a preface by angus whitehead. lewiston: edwin mellen press, 2013. 8o, [12], i-xvi, 190 pp.; isbn: 9780773440883. the work consists of angus whitehead, “preface” (v-xvi), “introduction: george cumberland, a polymath” (1-15), text of the emigrants (17-87) with endnotes (89-94), reproductions (poor) of the manuscript of the farce [in the e. j. pratt library of victoria university in the university of toronto] (95-148), “characters in the dramatis personae” (149-69) with “the date of the farce” (157), “notes on the manuscript” (157-69), and bibliography (171-75). an essay on the utility of collecting the best works of the ancient engravers of the italian school; accompanied by a critical catalogue, … of rare and valuable prints … now deposited in the british museum and royal academy, in london (1827) according to the online catalogue of the british museum department of prints and drawings, most of cumberland’s print collection in the royal academy was sold in the 1950s. a poem on the landscapes of great-britain … with etchings by the author (1793) the copy in the yale center for british art is, according to the catalogue, “extra-illustrated; probably by the author, for a proposed illustrated edition.” g. cumberland, esq. “sketch of the strata of the vicinity of bristol, presented to the author of this tract, as a guide to collectors.” rev. john evans. the new guide, or picture of bristol, with the beauties of clifton: a descriptive arrangement of excursions in their vicinities, and an appendix on their geology, botany, &c. &c. illustrated with a plan of the city, a map, &c. 4th ed. bristol: aitkens, clifton …, 1828. 51-55. flaxman, john (1755–1826) sculptor, friend of blake 2010 27 july–29 october annette wickham. the language of line: john flaxman’s illustrations to the works of homer and aeschylus. london: royal academy, 2010. 23 cm., 12 pp. 2013 13 february–21 april [david bindman]. john flaxman: line to contour. birmingham: ikon, [2013]. 4o, 112 pp.; isbn: 9781904864813. catalogue of an exhibition at ikon gallery, birmingham. david bindman. “life into contour: flaxman’s drawings in practice and theory.” 9-16. david bindman. “the consolation of the afterlife: flaxman’s church monuments.” 75-78. david bindman. “flaxman and ucl.” 103-05. flaxman in the wedgwood museum (barlaston, stoke-on-trent) manuscript catalogue under flaxman, john date subject box documents 1775-1816 bills for models, monument to j. w., &c. 1 204-25 1781-1876 bills for models, sale of his works, &c. 2 1330-46 1786-87 seals for due [?duc] de bouillon, box of books & clothing 1 26272-73 1781-90 bills for models 2 30186-97 under flaxman, williamflaxman’s brother william (?1753-?95) exhibited models in wood and wax. 1786-1802 bills for frames & medals 17 3267-72 1785 bill for frames 2 30198 omhpoυ eπh. | — | homeri et homeridarum | opera et reliquiae. | ex recensione | frid. aug. wolfii. | — | nova recognitio. | multis locis emendatior. | vol. i[-ii]. | — | in usum scholarum. | — | lipsiae, | apud bibliopolam g. i. göschen. 1817 <victoria university in the university of toronto>in the victoria university copy, there are many learned pencil notes and a couple of small portraits, and the imposition of vol. 1, pp. 130-50, has gone wonderfully astray. text in greek; leaf size 12.0 x 17.4 cm.; plate sizes vary. the prints are apparently from the plates for flaxman’s umrisse zu homers iliade (leipzig: g. j. göschen, 1804), signed with various forms of “ludov. schnorr v k. del” and “v.h. schnorr v k acquafort. fec[it].” the 1817 work is not mentioned in g. e. bentley, jr., the early engravings of flaxman’s classical designs: a bibliographical study (new york: new york public library, 1964). symmons, sarah. “john flaxman and francisco goya: infernos transcribed.” burlington magazine 113.822 (sept. 1971): 506, 508-12. <§blake (2013)> sometimes goya copied flaxman “with astonishingly careful precision.” fuseli, henry (1741–1825) swiss-born painter “the night mare,” “painted by h. fusley,” “engraved by a. zaffanato,” “publish’d november 30tḥ 1795 by a. suntach” [no address]. the design is reversed, with the horse at the right and the incubus at the left. §dias, rosie. “‘the shakespeare of the canvas’: fuseli and the construction of english artistic genius.” exhibiting englishness: john boydell’s shakespeare gallery and the formation of a national aesthetic. new haven: yale university press, 2013. padilla, nathalie. l’esthétique du sublime dans les peintures shakespeariennes d’henry füssli (1741-1825). paris: l’harmattan, 2009. 4o, 428 pp., with 14 murky black-and-white reproductions; isbn: 9782296066540. in french. §pop, andrei. “henry fuseli: greek tragedy and cultural pluralism.” art bulletin 94.1 (march 2012): 78-98. §whitfield, peter. “henry fuseli.” illustrating shakespeare. london: british library, 2013. 42-45. hayley, william (1745–1820) man of letters and patron anon. “city poet being reclaimed by university.” chichester observer 8 april 2013. a plaque to hayley was unveiled at his eartham house. §barsham, diana, ed. william hayley (1745-1820): england’s lost laureate—selected poetry. chichester: university of chichester press, 2013. 96 pp.; isbn: 9781907852206. §foster, paul, ed. william hayley (1745-1820)—poet biographer and libertarian: a reassessment. chichester: university of chichester press, 2013. essays by diana barsham, anthony cane, tracey carr, janet carter, mark crosby, paul foster, lisa gee, “william hayley and the culture of sensibility,” susan matthews, suzanne e. may, “the jupiter of sussex: william hayley and his portraits,” and john wyatt. linnell, john (1792–1882) painter, blake’s patron the e. j. pratt library of victoria university in the university of toronto acquired in 2013 a newly discovered pretty little metal box (17.5 x 11.3 cm.) shaped like a book, with gilt edges, clasps, and decorated covers, the spine of tooled leather. the front cover has an octagonal mother-of-pearl surface decorated with flowers (some rust stains). the front and back inner boards are white watered silk with gilt dentelles with a white watered-silk pull. inside the box is a white watered-silk folder containing six leaves (the last two from a larger leaf folded in two) gilt on all four edges, watermarked “j wh | 18” on the folded leaf and “& son | 0” on leaf 4. 6. exterior and interior of a metal box (17.5 x 11.3 cm.) shaped like a book, with gilt edges, clasps, and decorated covers, the front cover of mother-of-pearl decorated with flowers, the spine of tooled leather. victoria university in the university of toronto. inside the box is a portrait by john linnell of robert gooch, a sketch of bedgellert by john varley, a description by gooch of “a dream” about a skeleton, and an account by gooch of going round the wards of the hospital at yarmouth with nelson after the battle of copenhagen. the leaves include: 1. a sketch inscribed in pencil at the bottom “this shall be improved another time” and, on the verso in ink: this portrait of robert gooch. m.d. to accompany the account of his dream. drawn by john linnell from the picture painted by him from the life. for sir wṃ knightonon 20 june 1827 linnell sent a copy of blake’s job to the king for £10.10.0 by order of dr. gooch and sir william knighton (br[2] 801). to whose daughter this scetch [sic] is sent as a token of thanks for the very patient sittings during the painting of her portrait | april 1827 | 6. cirencester place | fitzroy sqr | — 2. a very simple sketch of a bridge called “bedgellert | an account of a dream connected with the above view will be given at another period | j. varley.” 3. on the double leaf is written: a dream it is well known that the last thought in the mind on going to sleep often suggests the dream of the night. from 15 to 21 years of age i lived with a surgeon at yarmouth on the coast of norfolk. my bed room was at the top of the house & over looked the sea, only a quarter of a mile distant. a skeleton in a tall box hung at my bed’s foot, and in the day when i had nothing else to do i used to go up to my bed room—take down the skeleton[,] seat him in a chair & taking a seat near him with cheselden’s anatomy before me, learn the bones. for some time i used to approach this silent personage with something very like fear—i liked to have a third person in the room with me—it was a long time before i became perfectly indifferent about these silent tetes-a-tetes.—one night in august i went up stairs to bed at the usual hour. it was very sultry weather and bright moonlight, and after undreſsing i stood for a long time looking out of the chamber window on the moon light seda, watching the white sails which every now & then paſsed. at length i got into bed. the moon shone bright into my room and was reflected from the white wall on the wainscoat door which inclosed the mysterious companion of my daily studies, but at this moment the thought of him was not quite agreable. i tried to forget him[,] i shut my eyes, & endeavoured to go to sleep. how long i had been doing this—whether i was asleep or awake or between both i know not, but i distinctly felt—distinctly as if it had been real—a pair of cold, hard, bony hands grasp my ankles and pull me down the bed. for a minute or two i became breathleſs almost senseleſs: when i came to myself sufficiently i began to observe the posture in which i was lying[.] the pull was so violent that if it had been real, it must have dragged me half out of bed, but i found myself lying with my head on my pillow just as i had laid myself down to sleep & this is now the only proof i have that it was not a reality but a dream. robert gooch nelson after the battle of copenhagen, nelson sent his wounded seamen to the naval hospital at yarmouth, and a week afterwards came into the road himself. his arrival was soon known throughout the town. the military was drawn up in the market place to receive the hero, and when he landed on the jetty he was met by the populace with shouts, but the first thing he did was to go straight to the hospital. happening to be there when nelson arrived i went round the wards with him & was much struck by his behaviour to the sailors. he stopped at every bed & to every man had something kind & cheering to say. one man had lost his right arm close to the shoulder—the same arm which nelson himself had lost. with this man he talked several minutes. “well jack what’s the matter with you?” “lost my right arm your honour[.]” on hearing this nelson paused—looked down at his own empty sleeve—then at the sailor—“well jack then you & i are in the same plight—spoiled for fishermen—that’s all—cheer up my brave fellow[”]: he hurried on to the next bed, but these few words had a magical effect, for as i turned away i saw the sailor’s face brighten up. it was by such things as these that nelson gained the hearts as well as the confidence of his crews. r g mathew, anthony stephen (1733–1824) clergyman and patron of blake the “last will and testament of me anthony stephen mathew of ruſsell place in the parish of st. pancras in the county of middlesex clerk”“clerk” is made explicit in the marginal note: “the revd anthony stephen mathew”. was written on 28 january 1818, with codicils of 23 february 1819 and 14 december 1822, and proved on 22 november 1824. in it he give[s] unto my son william henry the ground rents of four houses in upper titchfield street in the parish of marybone middlesex … my ground rents on five houses in howland street & one house & workshop yard in cleveland street in the parish of saint pancras middx … [and] 5 houses in york street marybone … and … the residue of my substance … in money or … annuities or any other government stock whether in … jewels plate books paintings & all other … property “& after his decease to his wife dorothea.”prerogative court of canterbury, prob 11/1692/230, in the national archives. note that the hand that transcribed the wills gives “e” for “&”; i have substituted “&” for this “e”. william henry mathew (born 1769) was a surgeon. the lack of reference to a. s. mathew’s wife, harriet, suggests that she had died before 28 january 1818. these fifteen houses plus a “workshop yard” suggest considerable prosperity. there is no indication as to whether his “books paintings” included any by his sometime protégé william blake. none has ever been traced to him, not even the poetical sketches (1783), the printing of which anthony stephen mathew partly paid for. palmer, samuel (1805–81) painter and disciple 2005 21 october–2006 22 january; 7 march–29 may vaughan, william, et al. samuel palmer 1805-1881: vision and landscape. 2005. <blake (2006)> review roberta smith, “a tree-hugger ahead of his time,” new york times 17 march 2006. harrison, colin. “samuel palmer and the pastoral vision.” architectural design 83.3 (may 2013): 20-25. on blake’s influence on palmer. §payne, christiana. “‘a mild, a grateful, an unearthly lustre’: samuel palmer and the moon.” burlington magazine 154, no. 1310 (may 2012): 330-36. it includes references to blake. §shaw-miller, simon, and sam smiles, eds. samuel palmer revisited. 2010. <§blake (2011)> review §elizabeth e. barker, print quarterly 29.1 (march 2012): 92-95. smith, john thomas (1766–1833) artist, early friend of blake smith’s collection of sale catalogues was bought by fritz lugtj. f. heijbroek, frits lugt 1884-1970: living for art: a biography, [trans. lynne richards] (bussum [netherlands]: thoth publishers; paris: fondation custodia, 2012) 253. lugt’s great répertoire des catalogues de ventes, which includes the smith catalogues, is available online. and is now in his fondation custodia in paris. stothard, thomas (1755–1834) painter, early friend of blake the decameron or ten days’ entertainment of boccaccio with introduction by thomas wright, m.a., f.s.a. with portrait after raffaelle, and ten designs by t. stothard. london: chatto and windus, [1876]. <victoria university in the university of toronto> the stothard plates are from the pickering edition (n.d. given). tulk, charles augustus (1786–1849) swedenborgian and politician tulk album of drawings description:the details here derive from robert n. essick, “blake in the marketplace, 2012,” blake 46.4 (spring 2013), and from the libson catalogue (see 2013 [january] in part iv). the album contained 90 pp.; old master drawings, drawings by flaxman, and two leaves with drawings by blake. one of the blake drawings is a watercolor of an aged couple at the left embracing a boy and a girllibson calls it the meeting of a family in heaven, the title of a design (1805) for blair’s grave (1808), but the two designs are dissimilar, and essick points out that the setting is distinctly terrestrial. the leaf in the album to which the drawing was attached was inscribed in pencil “parents meeting” (essick). it is based on a drawing (1790-92) in blake’s notebook, p. 41 (as essick points out). in front of gothic columns, with a very rough pencil sketch on the verso called by lowell libson sisyphus rolling the stone up a hill. the other blake leaf is of a seated middle-aged couple playing harps.libson relates them to the harpers in job (1826) pl. “21”; on the composition, see also robert n. essick, “blake in the marketplace, 2012,” blake 46.4 (spring 2013): illus. 9, and martin butlin, “harpers and other drawings: the case for a unified composition,” blake 47.2 (fall 2013). to their left is a naked young man leaning on a shovel who is “almost identical” to the grave-digger on the general title page for his watercolors (1795-97) for young, night thoughts <butlin #330 2> (as essick points out), and above them are two floating figuresthey are similar to the flying angels at the top of the title page of night i <butlin #330 6> of night thoughts, as essick points out. who seem to be pouring out something. on the verso is a series of disparate studies (reversed) for america (1793) and europe (1794). sizes: the album mounts are 27 x 22 cm.; blake’s drawings are 9.2 x 14.3 cm. (the aged couple) and 24.6 x 20.4 cm. (the harp players). watermark: whatman paper mounts in the album. binding: bound in calf. history: see the provenance in robert n. essick, “blake in the marketplace, 2012,” blake 46.4 (spring 2013): illus. 12. diagrammatic blake: tracing the critical reception of “the mental traveller” diagrammatic blake: tracing the critical reception of “the mental traveller” by caroline anjali ritchie caroline anjali ritchie (car566@york.ac.uk) is a phd student at tate britain and the university of york. her research relates blake’s work to the history and theory of mapping. “the mental traveller” i would like to thank jon mee for his guidance during my work on this article.is one of blake’s most notoriously enigmatic poems. the only extant version from blake’s lifetime appears in the neatly penned pickering manuscript;on the dating of the poem, see bentley, blake books 342; on the dating of the manuscript, see also his earlier “the date of blake’s pickering manuscript.” it consists of twenty-six even quatrains in iambic tetrameter, rhyming abcb and lacking any annotations or designs. whatever neat rhyme and reason the poem’s appearance might suggest, there is, however, an unmistakable unruliness to its internal logic that makes it extraordinarily difficult to parse. summary can hardly do justice to the twists and turns of the narrative, in which a speaker describes the courses taken by a male and a female (or females?) who age and grow young again in a series of peculiar concertina-like arcs, traversing a constantly changing landscape. spatiotemporally, syntactically, perspectivally, it is profoundly disorientating. i am certainly not the first to point out the difficulty of interpreting “the mental traveller.” although the earliest commentator, william michael rossetti (in alexander gilchrist’s 1863 life of william blake), confessed no immediate qualms about the challenges,rossetti was apparently quite comfortable interpreting the poem as symbolizing the life cycle of a “mental phænomenon”: “the mental phænomenon here symbolized seems to be the career of any great idea or intellectual movement—​as, for instance, christianity, chivalry, art, &c.” (gilchrist 2: 98). numerous scholars from william butler yeats onwards have readily declared their perplexity and, on occasion, have even dismissed the poem as an object of interest altogether.yeats discussed his difficulty in explaining the poem in a vision (see harper and hood 134). bernard blackstone dashed out his view in a mere two sentences, declining to pursue the matter further: “the mental traveller is an extremely cryptic poem in quatrains: as to its meaning, one reader’s guess seems as good as another’s. it is based on blake’s favourite dichotomies of male and female, age and youth, freedom and bondage, and is cyclic in its action” (131). for many scholars, however, an acknowledgement of the poem’s sheer opacity features chiefly as the precursor to a claim to have found a unifying meaning of some kind or other—​a way of making it make sense, of pointing to something outside the poem as if to say, this is what blake really meant. in an astonishingly large number of cases, that meaning is presented in the form of a diagram. the diagrammatic tradition so common is the tendency to diagram this particular poem that it is possible to speak of a diagrammatic tradition peculiar to scholarship on “the mental traveller.” this tradition began with yeats and enjoyed a life span of over fifty years, no insignificant period in the history of blake studies. diagrams were proffered by yeats (1925), hazard adams (1963), martin k. nurmi (1964), donald ault (1974), james b. twitchell (1975), and izak bouwer and paul mcnally (1978–​79). crucially, northrop frye’s theory of the “orc cycle” (1947) leaned heavily on “the mental traveller,” which it sought to reduce to a cyclical model as a schema for a blakean system. frye’s cycle was probably the single most influential critical apparatus when later scholars came to visualize the poem as a diagram. despite the number of diagrams, the interpretive and epistemological premises of the diagrammatic tradition have not come under sustained scrutiny. since the 1970s, there seems to have been a substantial shift away from diagrams of “the mental traveller,” and i know of no attempts after bouwer and mcnally’s article. this shift occurred silently and without interrogation, and nowadays the poem rarely enjoys more than a glancing mention in studies of blake’s work. a more critical and explicitly revisionist reading is called for, with a view to dwelling on the poem’s inherent (and, i would argue, deliberate) resistance to codification. “the mental traveller” is by no means the only text or aspect of blake’s work to have been diagrammed by critics. though diagrams of it are exceptional in their number, they also participate in a wider and more longstanding tendency in blake scholarship, which has continued to show up on occasion during the twenty-first century.the diagrammatic and indeed cartographic impulse has had a firm foothold in blake criticism at large: see, for example, s. foster damon’s much-reproduced map of golgonooza in his blake dictionary (163). susan fox offers verbally what she later describes as a “standard diagram …, a series of concentric circles beginning at the infinite center point of eden” (9, 209). ault, one of the “mental traveller” diagrammers, employs a diagram elsewhere in visionary physics (37); see also the “list of charts” (viii) in his monumental narrative unbound. gerda norvig includes numerous diagrams in her dark figures in the desired country (144, 147, 166, etc.). saree makdisi produces a diagram linking the “spiritual fourfold london” with global geography in his romantic imperialism (168). hatsuko niimi includes two graphics, which she calls diagrams (and which might also be considered tables or charts) in “the book of ahania: a metatext” (52). still more recently, russell prather makes use of numerous diagrams (as well as several tables) in “william blake and the problem of progression” (514, 517, 520, 530). with this in mind, the present revisionist consideration of the “mental traveller” diagrams will also speak to some of the fundamental assumptions—​and the genealogies of these assumptions—​that have guided the methods of blake scholars. here i shall focus on three ironies within the “mental traveller” diagrammatic tradition. the first inheres in the fact that so many scholars have spoken of the poem as preeminently puzzling and multidimensional and yet, in the moment of criticism, have sought to solve the puzzle using two-dimensional abstract signs. my primary discomfort with this tendency lies in the brevity and superficiality of their justifications of the use of diagrams; by contrast, i advocate serious interrogation of the problems that go hand in hand with diagrammatic criticism when it comes to interpreting blake’s work. the second irony is that in using diagrams, these critics are acting in a rather unblakean spirit—​as many of them, though briefly, do point out themselves—​given blake’s well-known suspicion of diagrammatic forms (though he does use diagrammatic forms in the illuminated books—​a point to which i shall return). thirdly, it is ironic that the majority of “mental traveller” diagrams take the shape of a circle, even though blake was overtly suspicious of circular and spherical forms alike both in this very poem and elsewhere throughout his oeuvre, as we shall see. it is not my aim to belittle the achievements of the scholars who have proffered these diagrams. it should be borne in mind that their diagrammatic readings do go some way toward rescuing “the mental traveller” from the void of critical capitulation. they demonstrate that there is merit in taking the poem seriously. and, at least at a glance, one can certainly appreciate how a diagram might seem to provide a welcome prophylactic against textual chaos. in this article it is my contention, however, that diagrammatic interpretations come at the cost of flattening the poem’s radically and fundamentally disruptive logic. is there a way of living with the internal contradictions without resolving them into such petrific forms? the unruliness of blake’s work (and this may well be true of any text) is perhaps an inevitable casualty of criticism; the critic cannot fully escape the charges of objectification and reduction. with blake’s work it is not only a case of making a thick world thin; the world of his poetry and art is disjunctive in a way that criticism—​particularly of a diagrammatic bent—​struggles to accommodate. this limitation is also guaranteed to a certain extent by the logic of print; every work of criticism potentially risks the kind of abstraction to which blake famously and frequently objected, separating mind (what we take to be the text’s content or meaning) from matter (the formal makeup of the textual artifact) and placing the former within a new—​and usually linear—​material context (book, article, thesis). of course, “the mental traveller” itself is known only in its linear, fair-copy state, presumably in preparation for transposition into print. in formal terms the jump to linear print criticism therefore seems less immediately jarring than it does, for instance, in commentary on a manuscript text such as the four zoas, which features numerous verbal annotations and struck-out words, as well as graphic components. the primary issue in the case of “mental traveller” criticism therefore has to do not so much with the poem’s form as with its content—​the syntactic and spatiotemporal obstructions to the kind of smooth linearity that can all too easily appear to be the aspiration of print criticism both formally and rhetorically. recognizing this issue, recent scholars such as nicholas m. williams and especially james chandler have made great strides back toward the poem’s logic and syntax of resistance, suggesting that there may be ways of allowing its difficulties to participate in and even survive the critical moment, in part by making the difficulties the very theme (or indeed object) of criticism and, as much as possible, resisting the urge to abstract a single, positive meaning from the text.see williams 2-5 and chandler chapter 8, especially 275-81. in particular, chandler’s analysis (a rare twenty-first-century instance of detailed commentary on “the mental traveller”) characterizes the poem as disruptive or “inhospitable” to smooth circuits of “sentimental” exchange (277). while i eagerly endorse such approaches, i believe that there is value in retracing our steps to draw out a major strand of blake scholarship that has not been actively scrutinized, and that embodies many of the twentieth-century critical impulses that have shaped the field. in what follows, i shall firstly outline the “mental traveller” diagrams in chronological order, attempting to trace their genealogical roots and afterlives across the critical tradition and pointing out some of the problems that accompany them from an interpretive point of view. secondly, i shall connect the diagrammatic impulse with a broader tendency toward completion or transcendence of the blakean text in the act of criticism. finally, i shall turn to the tensions between the diagrammatic impulse and blake’s own lifelong suspicion of diagrammatic and circular forms. the “mental traveller” diagrams at the outset, three broad statements can be made to highlight three interpretive problems that accompany the diagrams. firstly, most focus on the poem’s temporal makeup, making very little or very vague reference to its spatialized landscape. one issue with this is that the bodies are thereby detached from the spaces wherein they do their moving in the poem’s unstable landscapes, and placed instead within the new, seemingly stable, spatial context of the diagram. another issue is that there are multiple temporalities within the poem. there is the past tense of the opening stanza and the present tense of all that follows. herein the male and female figures grow alternately old and young again so that time seems continually and simultaneously to unfold and refold itself against the linear thrust of the manuscript page. this separation between time and space can be connected with a broader separation between mind and body, since the presence of physical settings in the poem is central to its elaboration of overlaid mental and corporeal conceptions of journeying. whereas the title gestures to a privileging of mind over and above the world of the body, the kind of travel mentioned in the first stanza and the various other instances of travel in the poem are of a distinctly bodily nature. as williams has similarly noted, “what complicates the picture is the fact that what the mental traveller sees is a vision of extreme corporeality” (4). diagrammatic criticism assumes that, as rossetti proposes in his commentary, “the ‘mental traveller’ indicates an explorer of mental phænomena,” as though there were no bodily context at all (gilchrist 2: 98).the majority of critics affirm this position. morton d. paley, for example, seems to echo rossetti when he writes that the title “tells us that this poem is about ‘mental’ rather than ‘corporeal’ phenomena—​internal rather than external, spiritual rather than physical” (97). secondly, the critics’ diagrams take for granted that the message of the poem, the bit calling for a diagram, is the narrative constituted by the complementary courses taken by the male and female figures. in fact the poem is far more peopled than this tendency implies: it contains the guests who come to stay at the cottage (line 61, e 485), who may indeed differ from “the beggar & the poor / and the way faring traveller” (lines 38-39), the other male lover of the “female babe” (lines 49-50), further lovers wandering in “labyrinths of wayward love” (lines 83, 87), the shepherds and inhabitants of the cities (lines 91-92 and stanza 24), and indeed the possibility, repeatedly arising in the poem, that there is in fact more than one female figure (the “female babe” born in stanza 11 may differ from the initial “woman old” of stanza 3; the same goes for “a maiden” in line 56 and “a woman old” in line 102). it is also important to consider the route taken by the narrator and, relatedly, by the (mind of the) reader. throughout, the landscape of the poem shifts from rock, to cottage and garden, to desert and labyrinths, to city, and back to rock. it is difficult to ascertain whether the speaker is observing from afar or present every step of the way, and accordingly difficult to assume any stable readerly point of view in spatial terms, since we can never be sure where exactly we stand. thirdly, there is a tendency for the diagrams to assimilate “the mental traveller” to a wider system—​whether biblical, blakean, or otherwise—​supposed to be external and complete. it is true that, at various stages of the poem, the figures of the male and female share traits with members of blake’s mythology as elaborated in his other works: at one point or another the male figure can be identified with christ, orc, urthona, tharmas, urizen, luvah, fuzon, etc., and the female with vala, enitharmon, tirzah, rahab, the daughters of urizen, etc. the possible correspondences are too many and too convoluted, however, to be summarized by frye’s typological analysis, or indeed by diagrams like nurmi’s or bouwer and mcnally’s. john h. sutherland similarly acknowledges that “there is a violence and inaccuracy in the giving of abstract equivalents for these figures at any of the stages of their developments,” despite proceeding to base his analysis on precisely this kind of schematic approach (145). i shall return to the problems with the supplying of systems throughout my discussion of the diagrams. all of the critical problems outlined above are epitomized by yeats’s diagram. in the first edition of a vision (1925), reflecting on his initial analysis in the works of william blake, yeats readily confesses his earlier discomfort with the poem’s prodigiously challenging nature: when edwin j. ellis and i had finished our big book on the philosophy of william blake, i felt that we had no understanding of this poem: we had explained its details, for they occur elsewhere in his verse or his pictures, but not the poem as a whole, not the myth, the perpetual return to the same thing; not that which certainly moved blake to write it …. (134) upon returning to the poem, he claims to have reached an understanding of it “as a whole” via his theory and diagram of double gyres (see illus. 1): “when i had understood the double cones, i understood it also. the woman and the man are two competing gyres growing at one another’s expense.” when yeats first introduces his diagram of the interlocking cones, he uses terms strongly reminiscent of “the mental traveller”: “it is as though the first act of being, after creating limit, was to divide itself into male and female, each dying the other’s life living the other’s death” (130). 1. william butler yeats, a vision (london: t. werner laurie, ltd., 1925) 130. by supplying his own schema to explicate “the mental traveller,” yeats both assimilates the poem to an overall blakean system and, as barbara croft writes, “interprets the poem according to his own system in order to prove that his and blake’s systems are the same” (croft 45). his vision of the poem as being reducible to two interlocking cones through which the narrative moves continually is at the root of later critical diagrams of the poem, and at the root, too, of many of the problems involved with these diagrams. the impact of this visualization resounds through decades of blake scholarship. adams directly revises yeats’s model in proposing his own alternative, kathleen raine bases her reading of the poem on what she sees as the platonic underpinning of both yeats’s and blake’s thought systems (406-18), twitchell returns to yeats’s gyres in his diagrammatic version, and bouwer and mcnally cite yeats’s diagram in their article (192n14). as i have mentioned, a particularly foundational moment in the reception of “the mental traveller,” as in that of blake’s oeuvre at large, was the publication of northrop frye’s fearful symmetry in 1947. frye’s interest in what he calls poetic genres, modes, and archetypes positions blake as a practitioner of archetypal symbolism; he uses this premise to authorize a reading of blake’s myth as stable, systematic, and even schematic: “blake was, it is obvious, so conscious of the shape of his central myth that his characters become almost diagrammatic” (143). frye’s characterization of blake as a diagrammatist suggests a major root for the diagrammatic criticism that followed, a point to which i shall return. in particular, frye’s formulation of the orc cycle that he finds in blake’s mythological system is based in no small way on his cyclical reading of “the mental traveller.” following his typological method, frye explains “the mental traveller” in terms of blake’s mythological figures, conceptualized along the lines of natural processes as manifested in history: “orc, now urizen, dies a seed’s death as the world becomes ‘a dark desart all around,’ and eventually re-enters the world of generation as a reborn orc” (229). nowhere in “the mental traveller” are orc, urizen, or generation mentioned. indeed, the orc cycle, hugely influential in blake studies, has more recently been countered by critics such as christopher hobson, on exactly these grounds: that it “fails the most conservative of all methodological tests, that of textual and graphic evidence” (“the myth of blake’s ‘orc cycle’” 6).parts of this essay are also reproduced in hobson’s the chained boy, chapter 2 (46-92). hobson argues that blake’s orc cycle is actually frye’s orc cycle, a myth that frye imposes upon blake’s oeuvre to give it the appearance of conforming to a stable cyclical system, when in fact there is limited internal evidence to support frye’s claims (blake does not present orc in cyclical terms, orc is never actually shown aging into urizen, and so on). in mapping “the mental traveller” onto his orc cycle, frye is very much paving the way for subsequent diagrammers of the poem, many of whom either borrow the orc cycle model wholesale or impose their own external systems (or their own inferences about a blakean system).although he refrains from diagramming the poem, edward j. rose, citing frye alongside diagrammers adams and nurmi, similarly views it as a “concise” and “rhythmical” version of the orc cycle (“the entire punishing circle in which man and woman, and mankind and history, are caught”) (137-38). rose, too, draws upon a fryeian faith in universal archetypes: “orc is an eternal form of the imagination, (a psychological state) and blake, in describing orc, develops a structure of images present in all literature and all cultures. what we see is the repression of energy on an archetypal scale” (138, emphasis in original). hazard adams’s 1963 diagrams (illus. 2 and 3) are a case in point. 2. hazard adams, william blake: a reading of the shorter poems (seattle: university of washington press, 1963) 83. 3. hazard adams, william blake: a reading of the shorter poems (seattle: university of washington press, 1963) 98. adams seems to have wholly accepted frye’s argument that the key to the poem is the orc cycle, and both of his diagrams take the form of circles, a move that recalls and builds upon yeats’s gyres (81-82). following frye, adams analogizes the various temporal phases undergone by the gendered archetypes with mythological figures from blake’s other work—​orc, tirzah, urizen, rahab. moreover, as twitchell would later note, adams’s second diagram “gives no indication of the expansion and contraction of space” (3). in fact, despite adopting the spatial form of a diagram, the visualization is actually a reading of the poem’s temporal, rather than spatial (or indeed spatiotemporal), makeup. the disembodied perspectives of both of adams’s diagrams reflect his notion that the speaker is “reporting upon the fallen world from the point of view of eternity” after a past-tense “journey into the fallen world” (87). this notion is belied by the poem’s shifting tenses and perspectives, whereby the speaker appears simultaneously as a distanced prophetic observer (a “mental traveller”), who is physically removed from the events described, and as a journeyer in the present tense, who is physically present every step of the way. the next diagram is nurmi’s 1964 attempt, appended to his analysis (illus. 4). 4. martin k. nurmi, “joy, love, and innocence in blake’s ‘the mental traveller,’” studies in romanticism 3.2 (1964): 117. © 1964 trustees of boston university. reprinted with permission of johns hopkins university press. he makes no reference to either yeats’s or adams’s diagrams,nurmi notes that adams’s book appeared too late for him to respond to it (109-10n3). which perhaps indicates the existence of an independent diagrammatic impulse. although he comments on the vexing tendency of critics to “seize upon some aspect of it [“the mental traveller”] as a ‘key’ to its meaning,” nurmi does have recourse to keys of his own, chief among them—​yet again—​the orc cycle. “ultimately,” he writes, “its cyclical convolutions must be seen in context with the orc cycle as embodied in the major prophecies” (109). his diagram abstracts from the poem a system corresponding to blake’s mythology elsewhere in his oeuvre: the male babe is figured in turn as orc, palamabron, urizen, and tiriel. this mythological schema is further overlaid and systematized in relation to the cycle of the seasons. it is appropriate, at least, that nurmi identifies the discontiguity inherent in the route of the female figure or figures in the poem, unlike the basic contiguity implied by the neat forms of yeats’s gyres or adams’s circles. once again, however, nurmi’s diagram would have it that the poem advances a purely conceptual, mental vision that can be divorced from embodied experience, including that of the reader: “the characters in the poem,” he writes, “are symbolic states, not people” (117n22). donald ault’s diagrams of “the mental traveller” (illus. 5 and 6) in his visionary physics—​which charts the dispersal of newtonian elements throughout blake’s work—​are particularly impressive and devote greater attention to spatiality than any of the previous attempts. 5. donald d. ault, visionary physics: blake’s response to newton (chicago: university of chicago press, 1974) 187. 6. donald d. ault, visionary physics: blake’s response to newton (chicago: university of chicago press, 1974) 191. although his diagrams are not circular, ault, too, has recourse to the orc cycle, writing of “this cycle, which northrop frye has called the ‘orc cycle,’” and representing the “two intersecting cycles” of the male and female in smooth uninterrupted lines (186). in the first diagram, ault marks the settings of the garden—​cottage and city, but these are still located along the lines of a wider systematized schema of generation, ulro, and beulah, borrowing terms from blake’s mythology in other works. the male babe and female babe are likewise assimilated to codified labels drawn from blake’s other poetry. in the second diagram, space itself is reduced to a state of the female aspect of the poem: she comes to embody space, the male time, concepts that, we are told, cannot be appropriately integrated in the newtonian system. moreover, in the form of his diagrams ault imports his own additional graphic system as though to clarify the poem’s challenges, only briefly and parenthetically justifying his choice of layout: “clearly this poem, as parody of satanic recurrence, demands some kind of double helix diagram” (189). he offers no further indication as to why the double helix structure should be so “clearly” illuminating, instead moving swiftly on to elaborate further connections between “the mental traveller” and blake’s philosophical system. despite his stunning and intricate visualizations, ault ultimately cleaves to an understanding of the poem that views it mainly as a mental exercise through which blake supposedly epitomizes his philosophical system. the next diagram was proposed by twitchell in 1975 (illus. 7). 7. james b. twitchell, “‘the mental traveller,’ infinity and the ‘arlington court picture,’” criticism: a quarterly for literature and the arts 17.1 (1975): 4. copyright © 1975 wayne state university press, with the permission of wayne state university press. unlike nurmi and to a far greater extent than adams, ault, and bouwer and mcnally, twitchell most directly places himself within the diagrammatic tradition. his article includes reproductions of both yeats’s and adams’s diagrams (notably excluding nurmi’s and ault’s). challenging the circular emphasis of frye and adams, he contends that in “the mental traveller” and the sea of time and space (arlington court), blake is adapting the symbol of infinity (∞), newly introduced by the mathematician john wallis in 1655 and incorporated into calculus by the early eighteenth century (4). one of the benefits of his schema is that, like ault’s, it recognizes that space, as well as time, is represented in the poem. the bounding line represents the passage of time, while the area contained within the line represents expanding and contracting physical space. yet twitchell’s reading can only go as far as abstracting from the poem’s convolutions a general concept of space, one that eclipses the imagery of the rock, the garden, the cottage, and the desert that materialize within the poem. his schema also shares with the other diagrams a disembodied perspective that inevitably obscures the state or position of the reader in relation to the events of the poem. whichever shape one takes as most approximate to the poem’s (spatio)temporal composition, such diagrams are ultimately misrepresentative of the perplexing text that confronts the reader approaching “the mental traveller” from the ground. a further case in which the mentalized or allegorical message of the poem is extracted and then resolidified in the new spatial context of the diagram is izak bouwer and paul mcnally’s creation of two circular diagrams to represent what they perceive as the single route or narrative (illus. 8 and 9). 8. izak bouwer and paul mcnally, “‘the mental traveller’: man’s eternal journey,” blake 12.3 (winter 1978–​79): 185. 9. izak bouwer and paul mcnally, “‘the mental traveller’: man’s eternal journey,” blake 12.3 (winter 1978–​79): 189. their first diagram shows what they believe to be the theological cycle that is repeated in the poem: a cyclical process proceeding out of eden to earthly incarnation via the fall, and finally back to eden via the apocalypse. labels to either side indicate an analogy between the fall and man’s slumber, and the apocalypse and man’s awakening. in the second diagram, this theological cycle is further assimilated to the four zoas of blake’s mythology in a way that suggests “a basic correspondence between ‘the mental traveller’ narrative and the four zoas narrative” (189). while i agree that there are grounds to make such a broad comparison between the texts, i find the diagram to be reductive and indeed misleading. as sutherland rightly notes, “the male babe’s experiences are more complex than orc’s simple rise, stagnation, and fall” (141). like bouwer and mcnally’s diagram, frye’s orc cycle ultimately minimizes any sense of the variety of circumstances described in the poem (as well as in the four zoas). moreover, these diagrams again ignore the literal aspect of the journeying undertaken in the poem; the cycle is abstracted from the particularities of time and place: “the cycle is merely a representation of the various states in which man may find himself, and the apparent sequentiality is part of the metaphor used to represent contiguous states” (bouwer and mcnally 189). diagrams, allegory, and transcendence as all of these diagrams indicate, the critic resists allowing difficulty and disorientation to have the last word. the compulsion is to push further, to discover a message or allegory. this critical desire to diagram “the mental traveller” arguably takes its cue in part from the poem’s opacity, as i have already suggested, but also from the poem’s ostensible resemblance to allegory: it appears to personify abstract principles of some kind in the figures of the male and female. twitchell is one of a number of critics to view the poem this way, writing of “whatever you think blake may be allegorizing in the male” (2). more skeptically, williams notes the poem’s “tone of normative explanation (‘and if the babe is born a boy / he’s given to a woman old’ [9-10]),” which makes it resemble allegory, but “it is an allegory like no other, whose ties to established codes (the christian story, classical myth, etc.) are at best oblique.” he rightly points out that “despite attempts to translate it by reference to these codes or to blake’s own ‘mythology,’ the poem retains the characteristics of an interpretive scandal, and seems always fresh in its capacity to resist easy codification” (2). the desire to make the poem fit with a codifiable system may also be partly attributable to the legacy of frye’s critical methods, as i have claimed. frye notes blake’s well-known distrust of what he called “fable or allegory,” likening blake’s “allegory” to the simile, which points to something outside itself to find its meaning. by contrast, he suggests that blake’s allegory operates via the “universal significance in the artist’s creation of particular things” (121). in this, he both assumes that blake’s “archetypal symbolism” is stable and complete and places blake in an idealist camp by gesturing to romantic notions of the symbol. this is not really the place to anatomize blake’s relationship to romantic theories about figuration, but two things are worth noting for the purposes of this article. on the one hand, as frye knew, blake’s distrust of allegory was in part consonant with other romantic-era criticisms of allegory as a rhetorical device that, “in its restrictive enlightenment conception,” epitomized “all that passed under the name of artificial signs” (halmi 13). on the other hand, blake stands apart from the romantic symbolists in several regards, especially in the notion that symbols in poetry gesture to some infinite and transcendent truth of which they are a part. it is my claim that “the mental traveller” engages in a kind of negative dialectic against a range of possible systems to which we might point; it seems more to push negatively against meaning than positively to mean or symbolize anything in particular. if it recalls the bible, classical myth, or blake’s own myth, the presence of these symbolic systems is always provisional. in other words, blake conjures their spectres, only to negate the possibility for complete or lasting equivalence. by contrast, diagrammatic criticism has tended to foster a preference for closed, explanatory glosses without scrutinizing the moments where the very terms of the glosses come up against internal contradiction and flux across blake’s texts. whereas frye in an idealist manner endorses reading blake’s myth as a unified network or language of archetypes, recent critics have increasingly seen in blake’s work a logic of blockage and resistance to stable meanings. in the light of this trend, the notion, implicit in the diagrammatic criticism, that a codified system could facilitate a mental sublimation of the poem’s chaotic matter calls for reevaluation. the diagrams, in a manner shared with damon’s dictionary, suppose that the troublingly fragmentary and chaotic nature of blake’s poetry requires us at every turn to supply the missing referent, the absent represented truth, in the manner of the allegorical mode or some transcendent principle as privileged by romantic idealists. relatedly, the same critics repeatedly downplay the material conditions of the poem in favor of their putatively more important mental analogues. in recent decades tilottama rajan, peter otto, and steve vine, among many others, have cumulatively contested the notion that reading and interpretation along such lines might complete the blakean text through some transcendent vehicle or other (the imagination, the intellect, etc.). instead, these critics advise blake scholars to valorize the obstructions to this completion embedded within the texts themselves by way of deliberate catachresis and a variety of other visual and verbal strategies designed to thwart any semblance of significatory or narrative closure. each of these scholars draws attention to the material, historical specificities that inhere in blake’s texts, and that, always reaching impossibly toward the real of history, can be registered “only in the collapse of the symbolic” and hence “in their failure to symbolize their own content” (vine 245, emphasis in original). still more recently, scholars such as saree makdisi, jon saklofske, and jade hagan have sought to overcome the desire to stabilize, systematize, and hence transcend blake, proposing “network architecture” as a nonlinear and nonhierarchical means of modeling blake’s works that might celebrate limitless interconnections, mediating between minute particulars and what saklofske calls “wide area connections” (385). yet, as hagan argues, blake’s prevailing suspicion of forms and systems that can become totalizing and impersonal is such that his “attitude toward networks” ought to be construed as “ambivalent”: the network form is far from a stable or consistent key to blake. what is impressive and valuable about such scholarship is its studious interrogation of its own methods and models. saklofske and hagan especially have urged us to contemplate the collisions of warring states and impulses—​closure and openness, particularization and generalization, determinacy and indeterminacy—​as they are thematized in blake’s work and as they agonize and invigorate our own interpretive efforts. indeed, in the curious “interpretive scandal” (to adopt williams’s felicitous phrase) of “the mental traveller”—​occasioned in large part by its refusal to offer readers a stable spatiotemporal grounding and hence point of view—​blake ensures that any apparent completion achieved through transcendence or systematization cannot be satisfactorily accomplished. as otto has argued, blake’s later poems work actively to resist interpretive reduction that occurs through “recourse to an innocent, redemptive faculty or power” that might afford transcendence—​such as the much-touted romantic imagination or some supersensuous divinity (18). faced with the syntactical and spatiotemporal chaos of “the mental traveller,” diagrammatic criticism looks for transcendence of its own kind, wanting to complete (and, in doing so, reduce) the poem through recourse to codifiable systems, separating mind from matter. this impulse not only sidesteps the material embeddedness of “mental fight,” but also overlooks the precise and shifting relations that blake elaborates between mental and embodied aspects of experience. blake and diagrams without wishing to repeat such systematization, i would like to propose that “the mental traveller” is fundamentally operative in blake’s lifelong aversion to the totalizing impulse and abstracting epistemology that underpin diagrammatic forms. one of the poem’s diagrammers feels obliged to concede that “it is ironic that although blake hated diagrams, one often has to consult one’s own schema to explain points in his poetry otherwise impenetrable to criticism” (twitchell 1). in this section i shall put further pressure on this irony in suggesting that diagrammatic criticism, although it has been used so often in blake scholarship, is actually rather unblakean. at the risk of revisiting well-worn ground, i begin by adumbrating blake’s agonistic engagement with diagrammatic graphics. his famous caricature of newton as a diagrammatist (illus. 10) amply attests to the notion that a diagram—​as deployed by enlightenment-era physicists like newton—​epitomizes an arrogant effort to reinscribe the dualistic division between mind and matter that he finds to be constitutive of humanity’s fallen condition in his age. 10. william blake, newton (composed 1795, printed c. 1805). 46.0 x 60.0 cm. reproduced courtesy of the tate. n05058. photo © tate. this division is also suggested in the later depiction of “miltons track” (illus. 11). 11. william blake, milton copy d (composed c. 1804–11, printed 1818), plate 32 [bentley numbering]. 16.9 x 11.4 cm. library of congress, lessing j. rosenwald collection. catalogue number 1810. image courtesy of the william blake archive. it is an enticing image, ostensibly offering a hint of the straightforwardly illustrative or explanatory visualization that may be craved amid the chaos of blake’s disorientating mythography, but its enticements are offset on numerous fronts. as marsha newman writes, “that milton perceives globes and finite forms, even recognizable human forms, is indicative not only of narrowed perceptions, caused in part by science’s limited explanations of the material universe, but also that he enters a fallen world” (85). similarly, susan fox notes that “the map is paradoxical in that it traces a post-lapsarian event through a prelapsarian universe—​but that paradox is the only means by which a map might be drawn at all” (208). the finitude of the diagram as a stand-alone, stable image of the whole of blake’s cosmology in milton is itself undercut by the dynamic and anthropomorphic depiction of the four zoas in this and other books. and finally, even in this surprisingly schematic image, the imbrications of the orbs’ outlines point to the dynamic interrelations between the faculties that belie the image’s deceptively simple, two-dimensional appearance. even at his most diagrammatic, blake undercuts the potential for closure. yet his use of diagrammatic forms in such instances also suggests a degree of sympathy with diagrammers, appearing at least partially to concede that diagrams can be useful to think with, even if only for a moment. it seems to me that the issue, for blake, arises when schematization tries to become a substitute for minute and unstable constituents: this is what we find enacted in the kind of diagrammatic criticism that shies away from or minimizes its own deficiencies. the tendency—​in blakean diagrammatic criticism as in other fields—​is to point out the basic inadequacy of a given diagram or schema before proceeding to include it anyway, typically without dwelling on the precise reasons for its perceived inadequacy. those reasons, i insist, are of the utmost importance when it comes to interpreting blake’s disjunctive worlds. as i have suggested, our critics’ recourse to diagrams is especially ironic, since so many of the diagrams adopt the form of a smooth enclosed circle—​a form toward which blake’s attitudes were at best ambivalent. “the mental traveller” itself contains some much-quoted lines in which the “altering” eye collapses the world of the senses into nothing but a “ball”: the guests are scatterd thro’ the land for the eye altering alters all the senses roll themselves in fear and the flat earth becomes a ball (lines 61-64, e 485) the lines rehearse a typical blakean indictment of the kind of metaphysics that would view the world solely in terms of dead geometry, abstracted or aggregated from the minute particulars of the peopled universe. blake reprises this passage in his famous philippic against miniaturizations of the earth-as-globe in milton. in the milton passage we are told that one’s “universe” is best conceptualized as the realm of experience apprehensible from the “flat earth” surrounding one’s moveable “dwelling-place,” as opposed to the deadening and immobile “delusion” of a “globe rolling thro voidness” conjured by mathematical instruments (e 127). like blake’s globe, critics’ circular diagrams shrink the bodies and landscapes of “the mental traveller” into a ratio suspended in the void of a white page. although the final line of the poem (“and all is done as i have told”) seems to gesture toward cyclical repetition, the poem is replete with disruptions and obstructions that belie this semblance of seamless circularity, setting itself up as a veritable trap for the diagrammer. in its convolutions, breakages, and multiple trajectories the poem’s structure seems closer to what blake might have called a “crooked” road than to the smooth lines of scholars’ diagrams.“improvement makes strait roads, but the crooked roads without improvement, are roads of genius” (the marriage of heaven and hell plate 10, proverbs of hell line 66, e 38). yet any honest student of blake will no doubt identify to some extent with the diagrammatic impulse. despite our best efforts, it can be difficult to get away from the desire to complete the text through our critical practice: this urge, too, blake knew well. it is dramatized time and again in the figure of urizen, whose efforts to measure and circumscribe the world around him are, after all, not entirely ill intentioned. indeed, scholars’ frequent recourse to diagrams seems not dissimilar to the temporary comfort found by urizen in the hurried demarcation of the mundane shell, rationalizing from above the daunting “voidness” of “indefinite space” in another formidable manuscript work, the four zoas (e 314). urizen’s is an earnest and perhaps not entirely unfamiliar effort to make sense of the chaos around him. as with urizen’s petrific forms, critical diagrams seek impossibly to impose static order upon the seeming narrative chaos of “the mental traveller.” consequently, they are limited by their separation of mind from matter and their tendency to smooth over the untameable changes and contradictions inherent in blake’s relational universe. moreover, they approach the poem from the very disembodied, top-down perspective that urizen craves in the four zoas: “where shall we take our stand to view the infinite & unbounded / or where are human feet for lo our eyes are in the heavens” (e 391). urizen’s cry calls to mind the diagrammatic will to power evoked in blake’s iconic frontispiece to europe (illus. 12) and its reprisal in the color print newton (illus. 10), which, as has been argued time and again, cumulatively characterize the dualistic top-down worldview as oppressive, delusional, and reductionist. 12. william blake, europe copy e (composed and printed 1794), frontispiece. 23.4 x 16.9 cm. library of congress, lessing j. rosenwald collection. catalogue number 1806. image courtesy of the william blake archive. in contrast, throughout blake’s work, the position of “human feet” is repeatedly cast as absolutely vital to all forms of experience, from sensory to visionary. it is especially central to “the mental traveller,” in which the travels described are vividly, sometimes violently, corporeal. as otto has painstakingly demonstrated, again stressing corporeality, the four zoas (the production of which spanned the period in which “the mental traveller” was probably written) can be read as a call for readers to attend to a series of specific scenarios within a disorientating spatiotemporal setting in order to reach an understanding of their own fallen ontological condition. urizen could not act alone (nor indeed could los): in fact, urizen’s harmonious world depends upon los: the creations of reason must be given shape by the imagination. a body formed by reason and imagination would be little more than an inert diagram or sculpture. for the fallen body to come into being, it must also draw on luvah and tharmas. (78) otto’s terms may also provide a guide for ways of reading “the mental traveller” that focus on tensions between dynamically conflictual components, resisting the urge to supply a meaning into which those components might be resolved. seeking an external system to make sense of the poem can provide only temporary and imperfect resolution. anyone still tempted to yield to their diagrammatic impulses would do well to recall blake’s sketch on page 25 of the four zoas (illus. 13). 13. william blake, the four zoas (composed c. 1796–​1807), p. 25. 41.4 cm. x 32.8 cm. © british library board: add ms 39764 f25. image courtesy of the william blake archive. it is a shaky edifice indeed: as the figure, probably urizen, tries to wrestle three compassed spheres into submission, their unruly matter seems to push back with equal force against his diagrammatic might. among other things, the image sounds a cautionary note for the diagrammatist. though schematics may help us (or so we think) to work through some aspects of blake’s complicated mythology, try as we might, our diagrams ultimately cannot tame the unruly matter of the blakean universe. our mental travels through the world of blake’s poetry ought rather, i think, to attend to the words (and sometimes images) on the page and the ways in which they push back against our compasses—​against even our most cherished methods of sense-making. works cited adams, hazard. william blake: a reading of the shorter poems. seattle: university of washington press, 1963. ault, donald. narrative unbound: re-visioning william blake’s “the four zoas.” barrytown, ny: station hill press, 1987. —​—​—​. visionary physics: blake’s response to newton. chicago: university of chicago press, 1974. bentley, g. e., jr. blake books. oxford: clarendon press, 1977. —​—​—​. “the date of blake’s pickering manuscript or the way of a poet with paper.” studies in bibliography 19 (1966): 232-43. blackstone, bernard. english blake. cambridge: cambridge university press, 1949. blake, william. the complete poetry and prose of william blake. ed. david v. erdman. newly rev. ed. new york: anchor-random house, 1988. bouwer, izak, and paul mcnally. “‘the mental traveller’: man’s eternal journey.” blake 12.3 (winter 1978–​79): 184-92. chandler, james. an archaeology of sympathy: the sentimental mode in literature and cinema. chicago: university of chicago press, 2013. croft, barbara l. “stylistic arrangements”: a study of william butler yeats’s “a vision.” lewisburg: bucknell university press, 1987. damon, s. foster. a blake dictionary: the ideas and symbols of william blake. rev. ed. hanover: university press of new england, 1988. fox, susan. poetic form in blake’s “milton.” princeton: princeton university press, 1976. frye, northrop. fearful symmetry: a study of william blake. princeton: princeton university press, 1947. gilchrist, alexander. life of william blake, “pictor ignotus.” 2 vols. london: macmillan and co., 1863. hagan, jade. “network theory and ecology in blake’s jerusalem.” blake 53.3 (winter 2019–​20): 38 pars. halmi, nicholas. the genealogy of the romantic symbol. oxford: oxford university press, 2007. hobson, christopher z. the chained boy: orc and blake’s idea of revolution. lewisburg: bucknell university press, 1999. —​—​—​. “the myth of blake’s ‘orc cycle.’” blake, politics, and history. ed. jackie disalvo, g. a. rosso, and christopher z. hobson. new york: garland publishing, 1998. 5-36. makdisi, saree. romantic imperialism: universal empire and the culture of modernity. cambridge: cambridge university press, 1998. —​—​—​. william blake and the impossible history of the 1790s. chicago: university of chicago press, 2003. newman, marsha. “‘milton’s track’ revisited: visual analogues to blake’s vortex in the ‘law edition’ of boehme.” interdisciplinary literary studies 5.2 (2004): 73-93. niimi, hatsuko. “the book of ahania: a metatext.” blake 34.2 (fall 2000): 46-54. norvig, gerda s. dark figures in the desired country: blake’s illustrations to “the pilgrim’s progress.” berkeley: university of california press, 1993. nurmi, martin k. “joy, love, and innocence in blake’s ‘the mental traveller.’” studies in romanticism 3.2 (1964): 109-17. otto, peter. blake’s critique of transcendence: love, jealousy, and the sublime in “the four zoas.” oxford: oxford university press, 2000. paley, morton d. “the female babe and ‘the mental traveller.’” studies in romanticism 1.2 (1962): 97-104. prather, russell. “william blake and the problem of progression.” studies in romanticism 46.4 (2007): 507-40. raine, kathleen. “blake’s debt to antiquity.” sewanee review 71.3 (1963): 352-450. rajan, tilottama. “(dis)figuring the system: vision, history, and trauma in blake’s lambeth books.” huntington library quarterly 58.3-4 (1996): 383-411. rose, edward j. “good-bye to orc and all that.” blake studies 4.2 (1972): 135-51. saklofske, jon. “remediating william blake: unbinding the network architectures of blake’s songs.” european romantic review 22.3 (2011): 381-88. sutherland, john h. “blake’s ‘mental traveller.’” elh 22.2 (1955): 136-47. twitchell, james b. “‘the mental traveller,’ infinity and the ‘arlington court picture.’” criticism: a quarterly for literature and the arts 17.1 (1975): 1-14. vine, steve. “blake’s material sublime.” studies in romanticism 41.2 (2002): 237-57. williams, nicholas m. ideology and utopia in the poetry of william blake. cambridge: cambridge university press, 1998. yeats, w. b. a critical edition of yeats’s “a vision” (1925). ed. george mills harper and walter kelly hood. london: macmillan, 1978. “did he who made the lamb make the… tyger”? “did he who made the lamb make the… tyger”? by eliza borkowska eliza borkowska (eborkowska@swps.edu.pl) is assistant professor of english at the university of social sciences and humanities in warsaw. she is the author of but he talked of the temple of man’s body. blake’s revelation un-locked (2009), which studies blake’s idiom against rationalist philosophy of language. she is currently working on her contribution to the reception of william blake in europe, writing her second book (the presence of the absence: wordsworth’s discourses on god), and co-translating blake’s jerusalem into polish. none of the “duets” blake included in his songs of innocence and of experience contains more questions than the pair of lyrics that will be the focus of this essay, “the lamb” and “the tyger.” and none of these questions provokes more critical speculation than the experienced speaker’s “did he who made the lamb make thee?” it is just one of the unanswered queries of “the tyger,” but it catches the eye and inflames the pen the most.for example, damon pays attention to the question in his monumental william blake: his philosophy and symbols (277-78), and paley, in his splendid survey of criticism of “the tyger” (chapter 2, “tyger of wrath,” of his energy and the imagination), responds to damon’s analysis (39) and then refers to the question again in his discussions of “the sublime of terror” and of los’s furnaces. chapter 16 (“the tyger”) of raine opens and closes with this question; wagenknecht quotes it near the beginning of his chapter “the lamb and the tyger” (80) and then comes back to it repeatedly. peterfreund, on the other hand, concludes his “power tropes” by considering “the status of [this] question.” though other questions precede and follow it, critical intuition or simply sensitivity to sense and structure suggests that this is the climax of the poem’s (or indeed the poems’) questioning. in fact, sensitivity to the structure of “the tyger” should suggest one response to this question, which, though seemingly obvious, is seldom, if ever, given. immediately after “did he who made the lamb make thee?” comes the famous repetition—the lines that constitute the beginning of the poem, that open “the tyger.” by repeating the lines blake actually identifies the question’s “thee” and indicates its addressee: it is not a tyger or, worse, a tiger,the “beasts of prey” that appear in chapter 2 of paley (30-60) are thoroughly symbolic, but those that haunt chapter 16 of raine (2: 3-31) are not, nor is peterfreund’s “tiger,” which is reified as the speaker of experience “buys into newtonian metonymic logic of natural theology” (134; see 134-38). neither is the “tiger” that inspires hernadi’s question “what are the social and political implications of blake’s contrast between the domesticated lamb grazing on english pastures and the fierce tiger, chiefly roaming in untamed india?,” which he asks to illustrate the way that “new avenues of interpretation keep opening up” in our “post-colonial age” (69n11). but “tyger tyger burning bright, / in the forests of the night.” in other words, he emphasizes his experienced poem’s self-referential character and, in effect, suggests the answer (or at least an answer) to its climactic question. did he who made “the lamb” also make “tyger tyger burning bright”? of course he did, because there is one and the same maker behind the two works—william blake, who was perfectly aware of the provocation his work offered and who made it part of his artistic program aimed at “rouz[ing] the faculties to act.”adapted from blake’s letter to dr. trusler of 23 august 1799. roused by trusler’s objections concerning the obscurity of his work, blake replied: “you say that i want somebody to elucidate my ideas. but you ought to know that what is grand is necessarily obscure to weak men. that which can be made explicit to the idiot is not worth my care. the wisest of the ancients considerd what is not too explicit as the fittest for instruction because it rouzes the faculties to act” (e 702). without doubt the self-referential element of “the tyger” is blake’s way to add more fuel to the fires of experience to let them burn all the brighter. however, this self-referential turn is not an independent act but a part of the program as a whole, and it cannot be effectively performed before an unprepared audience, on an unprepared stage. let me therefore return to it later, at a more mature stage of this reflection, after i explain how i understand the idea of this performance. indeed, just like its self-referential turn, “the tyger” as a whole cannot be treated as an independent act either. its climactic question, by referring explicitly to “the lamb,” suggests that “the tyger” itself constitutes only part of this program. in other words, the poem of experience should not be discussed in isolation from the poem of innocence, which is likewise implied by the manner in which blake published the two works.it is well known that the songs of innocence were published separately in 1789 and then, in 1794, incorporated into the combined volume of songs of innocence and of experience. this is to say, “the tyger” should not be discussed separately from “the lamb,” a connection that is often ignored in critical practice; as wagenknecht puts it, “most critics have used the cryptic simplicity of ‘the lamb’ as a pretext for saying nothing about it” (80). they are programmed to form a whole, and only as parts of this whole, through the interaction into which they enter while combined, do they reveal their potential to provoke, stimulate, rouse. they throw light and shadow upon each other. they satirizethe “double-edged irony” of the songs was most memorably emphasized by frye: “the songs of experience are satires, but one of the things that they satirize is the state of innocence. they show us the butcher’s knife which is waiting for the unconscious lamb. conversely, the songs of innocence satirize the state of experience, as the contrast which they present to it makes its hypocrisies more obviously shameful” (237). and, simultaneously, illumine each other; they mock themselves and, at the same time, give an enthusiastic license to the attitudes they promote—when seen in this shade and this light. such a shadowy reading of the illuminated pair has of course been attempted, yet none of the analyses gives a full account of the poems’ dynamic nature, their shifts of perspective, and the range of attitudes inscribed in them by their provocative author, he who made both “the lamb” and “the tyger,” the tyger and the lamb. to return to the theatrical metaphor, which will to some extent organize the first stage of this discussion: the most vital element of the preparation of the audience is to redirect their attention. they come to the theatre with certain expectations: they are obviously familiar with the songs they are about to hear, and hence redirecting their attention consists largely in drawing it slightly away from ontological/​metaphysical exploration itself and focusing it more upon the form that this exploration takes. as i mentioned, none of the duets blake included in his songs asks more questions than these two lyrics. that is to say, blake himself makes an effort to draw our attention to questions, possibly because of their ambiguity. a question may be asked when the answer is genuinely sought, which means that it is not known. while betraying the questioner’s ignorance, such a question simultaneously reveals his/her knowledge: s/he knows that s/he does not know the answer (and that is why s/he asks the question); s/he has enough knowledge to formulate the query. then again, some questions, like those asked rhetorically, may imply that the questioner knows the answer very well (or, sometimes, that s/he knows very well that there is no answer). in brief, questions provoke questions concerning their status, and blake seems to rely upon the ambiguity they entail for the effect he wants to achieve—for the stimulation, for rousing the audience’s faculties to act. as for the preparation of the stage upon which the performance is given, three critical decisions will serve the purpose. the first is to remove everything that could disturb or distract; in the case of blake’s songs (or any performance based on blake), this means in particular sweeping up very carefully the cobwebs of morality. the second element is to push backwards metaphysical inquiries, so that they do not form a curtain that obscures the performance but are hung at the rear of the stage, mainly as a backdrop. and the third critical decision is to place the speakers of the lyrics at the front of the stage and adjust the spotlights so that sometimes one of these speakers is more visible, sometimes the other, and at other times both stand in focus. “the lamb.” songs of innocence and of experience copy f (1789, 1794). yale center for british art, paul mellon collection. b1978.​43.​1556. the beginning of the performance is simple. it starts with the spotlight focused solely on the speaker of innocence, with the speaker of “the tyger” invisible; in other words, it begins with “the lamb” as part of the separately published songs of innocence. read in this way, the lyric presents itself, indisputably, as an exposition of innocence, which gets defined as the poem’s questions find their confident answers. the speaker is a child; his identity does not need to be inferred but is revealed as directly as could be wished (“i a child”); even his sex is indicated in the illustration provided by the author. the speaker’s identity is also reflected on the level of sounds: the poem’s easily pronounceable “little lamb who made thee”; its smooth “gave thee clothing of delight”; its rhymes, which make the whole easy to remember, like a nursery rhyme. in this mood, the poem’s repetitions acquire a childlike tinge as well: the repeated questions and answers sound like the way children are taught or teach themselves about the world. the same is manifest in the poem’s vocabulary: its “meek & … mild” adjectives, which refer largely to qualities that depend upon the senses—the touch (“softest”), the sight (“bright”), the hearing (“tender voice”)—and its nouns, which stand for concrete objects—the “stream,” the “mead,” the “vales,” the “child,” and the “lamb” are all names for what falls within the experience of a child of nature. in this light, the “lamb,” he who made the world, seems to be incorporated within this range of the speaker’s experience as well; he is “meek” like the lamb, “mild” like its “tender” voice, which is echoed by—and spreads onto—the valleys that he made to sustain its life. this is probably why the questions about creation (“who made thee”), the sustenance of life (“bid thee feed”), and its aesthetic side in the first stanza find such an unimpeded answer. these are essentially the same questions as those that will be asked by the speaker of “the tyger,” but here they seem and sound easy because of the ease with which the answer is given. as i said above, seen on its own, “the lamb” defines the abstraction it represents and makes it as concrete as itself. innocence emerges from such a reading as possessed of the most fundamental knowledge and as an embodiment of the highest wisdom, because only wisdom is able to answer the most essential questions without hesitation or doubt. but this outlook on innocence (and innocence) is possible only as long as “the lamb” remains locked within the confines of the state (and the collection) it represents, that is, only when it is seen on its own, without any tygers on the horizon. the moment the other speaker steps into the spotlight, which is to say, the moment the poem is read along with the counterpart its maker provided in songs of experience, hesitation and doubt appear concerning the nature and definition of innocence. most explicitly, by asking his climactic question, the speaker of “the tyger” makes it clear that he knows about tigers as well as lambs. this does not seem to apply to the speaker of innocence. as far as the creation goes, he knows only (about) the lamb, and the doubt that appears at this point concerns precisely what he would say if he found himself in a different valley; how would he answer if he knew more? he also knows about the lamb. but, doubt prompts us to ask, how much does he know? is he aware that the meek and mild nature of the lamb, which he emphasizes, makes it a perfect sacrificial animal? in other words, is he aware of the implications of what he is saying? and another doubt follows: how is it that he actually knows about the lamb? would a child really come up with the argument that this child provides in his answer? would a child generate such an entirely language-based equation (“i a child & thou a lamb, / we are called by his name”)?the illustration for “the lamb,” particularly in its depiction of the child, is again remarkable in this context. discussing him along with other details of the etching, wagenknecht draws attention to “the slightly stiff unchildlike gesture of the infant” (81; emphasis mine). is the child’s answer, which stresses the unity of the creator (the lamb who became a little child) and the created (the lamb and the child himself), really intuitive? is it indeed based on the child’s experience? (let us remember, “the lamb” is not a poem of experience.) the answer stanza, which is based on linguistic association, sounds largely disconnected from the question stanza; it seems completely abstracted from the sensual details of delight, from the valley in which the questions are asked. so perhaps in the answer stanza, as in the other parts of this utterance, the child is simply repeating—this time not himself, but those who taught him the smooth equation, who teach by repeating and asking the child to repeat. in short, the foundations upon which the speaker of innocence builds his certainty seem uncertain. no longer confined to the limits of innocence, but seen in the light, or indeed the shadow, that experience sheds upon it, the knowledge of the spokesman of innocence seems restricted; “the lamb” no longer sounds like another romantic poem about the wisdom of children, about the child as “father of the man.” completely unaware of the complications and implications, asking questions only in order to repeat the ready answers, questioning but not inquisitive enough, innocence, when viewed in the shade of experience, emerges as an exhibition of ignorance. on the other hand, read in this dim light, or indeed in the shade of innocence’s ignorance, experience manifests itself as knowledge. as i pointed out above, its speaker knows about tigers as well as lambs, possibly all types of lambs—the bleating lambs, the bleeding lambs, the bleeding lamb. and he knows much more—in fact, he asks so many questions because he knows so much. unlike the speaker of innocence, the speaker of experience does not unveil his face; no matter how sharp the spotlight, it will never fully reveal his features,in fact, we cannot even be sure of the speaker’s sex. my reliance on gender-specific language, fully justifiable in the case of the speaker of innocence, is, in the case of the speaker of experience, motivated mainly by convenience. because in the state of experience nothing is given without effort on the part of the receiver, nothing is handed on a plate. the experienced voice only implies the identity of its source, and the ear that listens to this voice must work to infer whom it is listening to on the basis of what the speaker says and how it is said. “the tyger.” songs of innocence and of experience copy f (1789, 1794). yale center for british art, paul mellon collection. b1978.​43.​1573. from the very beginning, this voice attacks the listener with the harshness of the sounds it utters, with the vigor of its rhythms and rhymes. indeed, heard after the previous speaker’s performance, “the tyger” sounds like an advanced exercise in the art (the word used in line 9) of rhyming. it is patterned through its six stanzas into flawless couplets,including the seemingly irregular “eye”–​“symmetry,” which in the mouth of blake’s speaker did rhyme (see bentley 116-17), like “fly”–​“enmity” or “eye”–​“eternity” in “auguries of innocence” (lines 33-34, 67-68, e 490-91) or “family”–​“die” in pl. 27 of jerusalem (e 173). similarly, see wordsworth’s “high”–​“sanctity” and “sky”–​“mortality,” both from one stanza/paragraph of canto 7 (lines 1846-47 and 1852-53, h 416) of the white doe of rylstone, or the triplet “sky”–​“imagery”–​“eye” from “elegiac musings” (lines 19-21, h 583). whereas the speaker of “the lamb” seemed unable to sustain the consistency of the rhyming scheme through two simple stanzas. another striking thing is the extent to which the innocent speaker’s rhyming relied on repetition—at the beginning of each stanza (“thee”–“thee”), at the end (“thee”–“thee”), and in the middle of the second stanza (“name”–“lamb”, “lamb”–“name”)—as if he ran out of rhymes because his word stock was too poor. by contrast, the speaker of experience has plenty to draw from. his words are by no means limited to what the eye can see or the hand can touch. the first stanza’s adjective “immortal” or its abstract noun “symmetry” make this point visible, indeed glaring, burning bright: the poem’s fluency is impressive when read against the concrete vocabulary of the first stanza of its innocent counterpart. again, when the experienced speaker uses verbs, they are much more refined than the verbs of innocence (compare the second stanza’s “aspire” to “is”–“became” in the second stanza of “the lamb”). he can go for the less obvious synonym (compare the first stanza’s “frame” with “made” in the first stanza of “the lamb”). more than that, he can actually multiply synonyms: “sieze,” “grasp,” “clasp.” also, when it comes to concrete nouns, the experienced speaker is not limited to the surface, to what covers the skin (the “clothing wooly bright”), but he knows what is hidden under it (“the sinews of [the] heart”). he does not rely upon what is general (compare the forms of “make,” which are used five times within the first stanza of “the lamb”), but knows enough to be specific, to enumerate the concrete tools required in the process of making: “hammer,” “chain,” “furnace,” “anvil.” all the more strikingly, the speaker of experience knows enough to talk in a way that refers the audience to what they know. while trying to envision the artisan/the maker whose art could twist those sinews and whose hand or shoulder, or eye, could/dared handle these tools in whatever “deeps or skies,” he speaks a language that evokes associations with, for example, the fires of vulcan/hephaestus as much as with prometheus’s gift (or theft) of fire: “what the hand, dare sieze the fire?” the preceding question, “on what wings dare he aspire?,” placed immediately before an allusion to prometheus, brings to mind yet another ancient myth and prompts us to ask, were the wings of him who made the tyger like those of daedalus or like those of icarus? in other words, did he control the course of his flight? while making the tyger, did the maker know what he was doing? is the tyger an element of a plan? or, perhaps, is it an accident resulting from the fact that the maker lost himself, got carried away? the speaker of experience uses language that justifies even raine’s references to (in order of appearance) boehme, paracelsus, heraclitus, berkeley, mosheim, lardner, priestley, cerinthus, fludd, agrippa, hermes trismegistus, the alchemists and the gnostics, and their “ambiguous” demiurge (raine 2: 3-31). his words validate these and many other references because they are handled in a way that seems to be a deliberate, conscious evocation. the speaker is intelligent, and he is a poet (we could even risk using bloom’s phrase “the bard of experience”):bloom 137; emphasis mine. the phrase seems quite relevant in this context, though the construct itself that bloom arrives at is best characterized by paley as “entirely read into the poem” (paley 40). he knows how to be maximally concise and maximally suggestive at the same time. most importantly in our context, the speaker is knowledgeable; while thinking of the implications of what he says, the audience, blake’s readers or critics, do not seem to be in danger of knowing more than he knows. the innocent speaker’s words (for example, “he calls himself a lamb”) refer the audience to what the speaker seems not to know (for example, the sacrificial implications of the lamb). the experienced speaker, on the other hand, by the way he picks words and by the images he selects, suggests that he knows the whole range of myths and religions that critics have brought up in a century and a half of critical interpretation of “the tyger.”following paley (37), i regard swinburne’s william blake: a critical essay (1868)—“both a critical biography and a manifesto of radical poetics” (kuduk 253)—as the starting point of the long history of critics’ endeavors to determine the poem’s implications. for a survey of criticism followed by a list of 113 books, book chapters, and articles, see borowsky. his list could obviously be expanded by texts that appeared after it was created; for more recent contributions, see g. e. bentley, jr.’s “william blake and his circle,” published annually in blake. all these details considered, experience seems to communicate knowledge. and yet, although the spokesman of experience can generalize and look under the skin, though he is aware of implications and complications and, as wagenknecht puts it, has “access … to technical insights” (91), he is unable to handle the essentials. indeed, experience is unable to answer the fundamental question—who/what immortal hand or eye made thee?—that innocence answers without hesitation or doubt. in other words, experience is underlaid by the most elementary ignorance. it does not even know the most basic thing: how to make itself useful. having asked “did he who made the lamb make thee?,” the speaker of experience reverts to the questions he asked at the beginning. all the energy put into the formulation of the intermediate questions has been wasted, the whole exertion—of the speaker’s brain and heart—futile. or, perhaps, even worse than futile, if we look at the detail that tends to attract a lot of critical attention,see, for example, nurmi (680), grant (75), wagenknecht (85-86), and peterfreund (137). the disparity between the first stanza’s more neutral “could” and the last stanza’s awe-inspiring “dare.” employing his entire knowledge to envision the creature and the maker all the more precisely, the speaker progresses from seeing “fearful symmetry” (line 4) to perceiving “deadly terrors” (line 16); what in line 8 was “the hand” of the maker by line 12 has become a “dread hand” possessed of a “dread grasp” (line 15). no words of the speaker suggest that any change whatsoever has taken place in the maker or the tyger; it seems that they are as they were before all these intermediate questions have been asked. thus, the change seems to have occurred not in what is being described but entirely in the mind of the subject who produces the description. perhaps he did start by asking questions about the tyger and its maker, but he evidently ends up inquiring about the constructs of his own mind.in this context, it is good to remember raine’s reminder that, in the four zoas, “the tigers … are created by urizen” (2: 4). somewhere along the way the act of describing got detached from the object of the description. this is clearly visible in the tiger blake drew under the poem, which is not “ferocious”the word has been borrowed from ferber; commenting on the reproduction of “the tyger” in phillips (william blake: the creation of the songs: from manuscript to illuminated printing [2000]), he writes parenthetically: “the ‘tyger’ is the same as the one from copy t in the blake trust/princeton edition; it is, alas, no more ferocious than in other copies …” (492). enough; to borrow pagliaro’s memorable phrase, it looks like “a cat with a human face” (87) and is completely incompatible with the last line’s awesome “dare.” let me repeat that such an application, indeed misapplication, of energy and exertion is not just futile. it is an intellectual error resulting from the speaker’s most elementary ignorance: he simply does not know what he is talking about. in brief, experience, which seemed to imply knowledge, compromises itself. it knows only how to ask questions, but does not know how to answer them, because its questions, fed by its “knowledge,” take it further and further away from the object of reflection. viewed—or indeed reviewed—from this shadowy perspective where experience betrays its ignorance, innocence reestablishes itself as wisdom. it can ask and answer without exertion, with ease. it resolves the tension of a question by a prompt answer in a way that is as natural as exhaling after inhaling. children of innocence answer with the simple “yea, yea; nay, nay” (matthew 5.37), which is also how grown-ups of experience should answer (after all, the lamb’s sermon on the mount was addressed to adults, to those who know of tygers, who have heard them roar). a little later in his gospel, matthew records how jesus “called a little child unto him, and set him in the midst of [his disciples], and said, verily i say unto you, except ye … become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven” (matthew 18.2-3). again, to assume the attitude of a child is certainly not a task for children: it is adults of experience who must train themselves in the wisdom of innocence—trust, rely on the word/word rather than demonstration (“blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed”),jesus’s words to doubting thomas (john 20.29). learn what they have been taught, repeat and have faith in what they have been told. however much the tygers along the way have managed to roar the “tender voice” down, adults of experience must teach themselves again how to breathe, how to answer fundamental questions (“who made thee”) without hesitation or doubt. paley is right to insist that blake’s innocence is not an “illusion” (31). it never loses its validity. it has the power to reassert itself, no matter how many ironies experience heaps upon it. a good example is the innocent trust in “mercy pity peace and love” (“the divine image”). experience, making a pretense of being a perceptive response to innocence’s naiveties, can ridicule it: “mercy no more could be, / if all were as happy as we” (“the human abstract”). but the viewpoint offered by blake’s mythology supports the innocent, not the experienced, attitude. mercy, being the forgiveness of sins, is confirmed as the first attribute of god (“the divine mercy / … redeems man in the body of jesus amen,” jerusalem 32[36].54-55, e 179); love, mercy, pity, and peace emerge from jerusalem as the genuine features of the divine image.see the subchapter “love-mercy-pity-peace: man as a temple of god” (219-21) in my but he talked of the temple of man’s body. in other words, while trying to compromise innocence, experience compromises itself. it operates through deceit. it defaces the divine image and perverts the divine sense of “mercy pity peace and love” by artfully replacing the keywords of innocence, the virtues of delight, with their homonyms, the social corruptions (generated by experience itself) of the divine attributes: “mercy” that subsists on someone’s misery, “pity” that lives on someone’s poverty, etc. while heaping ironies on innocence, experience heaps ironies on itself. it seems to communicate discernment and maturity, but in reality its perceptiveness is fake, its ripeness rotten. “the lamb” and “the tyger,” as part of the same collection of poems and of the same poetic program to “rouze the faculties to act,” operate in much the same way as “the divine image” and “the human abstract.” but here the “complex awareness which blake’s double perspective creates” (paley 31) is even more complex than in the case of that pair, or “the chimney sweeper,” “holy thursday,” or “i heard an angel singing,”“a notebook poem contemporary with songs of experience” (paley 52n1) that sounds like a combination of “the divine image” and “the human abstract”; see e 470-71. all of which paley considers in energy and the imagination (32, 51-52). the wisdom of “the lamb,” perceived as ignorance in the light of the “learning” of “the tyger,” establishes itself again as wisdom in the shade of the futility and elementary ignorance that “the tyger” uncovers and satirizes. however, the rigor of this particular performance requires that the audience recognize that experience is not an illusion either. the fearful symmetry of this pair demands that experience also has the means and the power to reassert itself. partly it reasserts itself without the help of innocence. this is particularly visible in the poem’s repetitions. as i noted above, they are completely unlike the repetitions in “the lamb,” which sound like the way children are taught or teach themselves. the experienced speaker’s repetitions have nothing to do with learning or teaching; they are rather an exposition of the futility of acquiring knowledge. the disparity between the first stanza’s “could” and the last stanza’s “dare,” on the other hand, shows that the knowledge acquired in experience leads to an intellectual error, because the person relying upon such knowledge goes further and further away from what he would desire to know (“did he who made the lamb make the… tyger”?). and yet, groping in the forests of the night, the speaker of experience seems aware of the fact that he actually trips over the obstacles he has put in his own way. peterfreund claims that the speaker makes the error of “reason[ing] back from the tiger as created effect to an understanding of his creative first cause” (127). but the point is that the speaker of experience is wise enough to know it. rationalists, natural scientists/​theologians—newton himself (whose version of metonymic logic presented in principia is the focal point of peterfreund’s essay), robert boyle and william paley (whom peterfreund quotes on p. 129), as well as bacon and locke (who, along with newton, form the false trinity that blake criticized for worshipping urizen)—all made the error that peterfreund identifies. they attributed “‘the causes of natural things’ to a divine first and final cause” (peterfreund 128-29) and tried to understand the “creative [transcendent] first cause” by studying the “created effects.” as a result, they ended up worshipping the image of the creator that was the effect of their reasoning: god as a “work-master,” “the all-wise architect,” “the infinite wise contriver of us and all things about us.”the first term comes from bacon’s advancement of learning (2.14.9); the other two are from locke’s essay concerning human understanding (2.23.12). but the speaker of experience seems more conscious of his own predicament than peterfreund is ready to acknowledge. he does not need to be informed or reminded that there is an intellectual error in his reasoning, that his acts are “deluded” (peterfreund 135), that his questions are “metonymic” and their logic “circular” (127), that questions asked in this way will not lead to any valid answers. the object he is trying to grasp/clasp is evading him, and he shows he knows it by concluding with doubt rather than with certainty, by repeating the initial question rather than attempting to answer it. in short, the “bard of experience” is not “in mental darkness” (bloom 137) at all. by the way he picks words, by the images he selects and, as it turns out, by the rhetorical devices he relies upon, the experienced speaker suggests that he knows as much as the critics who comment upon his words. but experience reasserts itself also when viewed against innocence, not, interestingly, because there is another shadow that makes innocence dark, but because the light of innocence seems dim when compared with the fires of experience. innocence is like the lamb’s clothing, “wooly bright”; experience is like the tyger, “burning bright.” the brightness of innocence pertains to the surface (the clothing) and depends on the brightness around: the lamb’s clothing will not look “wooly bright” in the night. the fires of experience, which do not emanate from our sun but come from “distant deeps or skies,” are part of the internal makeup of the tyger. they break through its eyes and skin (the golden stripes on its fur look like flames of fire) and, “burning bright, / in the forests of the night,” are able to illumine the darkness around. to make use of these metaphors and see how the wisdom of experience reasserts itself against the wisdom of innocence, it is crucial to look at the climactic stanza of “the tyger,” which contains the question that this discussion has revolved around. in particular, it is time to consider the two lines that open the stanza, “when the stars threw down their spears / and water’d heaven with their tears.” these lines give trouble to those whose acquaintance with blake is limited to the songs, and they give scholars an opportunity to refer to blake’s later writings, specifically “night the fifth” of the four zoas, where the stars’ throwing down their spears is associated with the fall of urizen.to quote urizen, “i calld the stars around my feet in the night of councils dark / the stars threw down their spears & fled naked away / we fell” (p. 64, e 344). since erdman’s blake: prophet against empire (194), these lines have regularly been cited in criticism of “the tyger”: see, for example, nurmi (672-74), gleckner (283), adams (“reading blake’s lyrics” 58), raine (2: 29), wagenknecht (94), and paley (54). if we apply the light of blake’s prophecy to his lyric, it transpires that the climax of the experienced speaker’s confrontation with the tyger and his attempt at a confrontation with its maker is the disarming of the rational power. the stars dissolve in powerless tears. reason gives up, as it can no longer explain, systematize, rationalize, methodize. the questioner comes to a standstill; his reasoning process collapses in his repetition (and the awesome variation within his repetition: “dare” instead of “could”). and it is exactly in this repetition that the highest wisdom of experience is contained. indeed, seen against the uncontrollable fires of experience, which come from “distant deeps or skies” and are a gift from without, the brightness of innocence appears to depend too much upon our sun. in fact, seen against the uncertainties of “the tyger,” the certainties of “the lamb” seem to derive too much from the rational power itself: this manifests itself through the poem’s puns, through the second stanza’s equation, which constructs the image of god on the basis of the study of language, and through the mathematical proportion of the answer it provides (he a lamb, he a child, “i a child & thou a lamb”). the fearful symmetry of the tyger (and “the tyger”) will not be resolved by such formulas. the repetition of the poem’s last stanza contains the ultimate wisdom of experience: that dumb amazement, the wonder expressed in a question mark, may be as near an experience of the divine as the finality of the full stop. in short, blake’s experience asserts itself again as wisdom, exactly like innocence. the crucial thing is to see that blake does not oppose a “better” wisdom against a “worse” wisdom; he simply juxtaposes the wisdom of knowing the answer against the wisdom of allowing oneself not to know. “the lamb” and “the tyger” form a symmetry that is indeed fearful: no imbalance in this pair will justify simple solutions, in particular a recourse to the distorting categories of “good” and “evil.” in principle, critics remember that such categories are not to be employed in blake criticism, though some of them forget the principle when it comes to analyzing blake’s provocative songs.raine, for example, opens chapter 16 of blake and tradition with the claim that “the question of good and evil” is “the inspiration of ‘the tyger’” (2: 3), and she relies on categories of good and evil throughout her discussion: “if we may call [the creator of the tyger] good, must we also call him evil?” (2: 3); “much evidence might also be brought to prove that the tyger is indeed an emblem of evil” (2: 4), etc. but of course the most notable and telling document in this respect is paley’s long note (39-40n2), which is introduced with a sentence that reads “since the time of these pioneer critics, writers on the poem have continued to disagree about whether the tyger is ‘good’, created by the lamb’s creator; ambiguous, its creator unknown and the question of the poem unanswerable; or ‘evil’, created by some maleficent force.” the note classifies commentators on blake’s lyric according to the position they took in this good-ambiguous-evil debate. but this troubling collection, as much as the marriage of heaven and hell or blake’s later prophecies, is part of his poetic program, which was meant to rouse the faculties to act and not to put them to sleep by feeding them on compromised morality. and this is exactly what the songs, including “the lamb” and “the tyger,” do: they activate, stimulate, and provoke, very much unlike the work of blake’s rationalist predecessors, who mainly wanted to instruct. they are a dialogical work, a dramatic performance. indeed, they are songs, which means that they are meant to be sung, thereby turning a listener into a performer who takes attitudes, abandons them, then embraces them again, depending on whether the stage upon which the singing is done is lit by the rays of innocence or the fires of experience. the lyrics throw both light and shadow upon each other, satirize each other, and mock themselves. they give the lie to the fictions their counterparts seem to propagate. at the same time, they give an enthusiastic license to the attitudes they promote and, by doing so, illustrate the ultimate truth about contraries: that they are “necessary to human existence.”the dictum from the marriage of heaven and hell pl. 3, quite understandably regularly quoted in criticism of the songs. it is vital to know the answer to the question “who made thee,” to learn the definition provided by the biblical revelation (he a child, he a lamb) and be able—when someone asks, or when something asks within us—to produce it on demand. and it is equally vital to know that to define him best is to tremble with awe and astonishment, to be amazed, “terrified with admiration.”seen against the light of the wisdom of innocence, the attitude of the experienced speaker is most accurately captured by this powerful phrase from jerusalem (12.22, e 155); the speaker is not “hypnotized by fear and awe” (wagenknecht 86), but, precisely, “terrified with admiration.” probably the most expressive response to “the sublime of terror” in criticism of “the tyger” is paley’s “tyger of wrath” chapter in energy and the imagination (30-60). i am returning here to the metaphors i used at the very beginning of this discussion, and i can likewise return to the idea with which these reflections opened, the self-referentiality of “the tyger,” which can be viewed as yet another way in which the wisdom of experience, its self-awareness, manifests itself in the concluding stanzas of the poem. to rehearse the major point, immediately after the climactic question comes the repetition; “did he who made the lamb make thee?” asks the speaker, who then starts reciting “the tyger” as if he wanted to specify what “tyger,” what “lamb,” and what maker he is in fact asking about. given the long history of criticism of “the tyger,” this claim about the poem’s self-referential character may sound like a provocation. but the provocation is not in the claim; it is in the material that inspires it. it will be helpful to remember that the poem was written around the time of the marriage of heaven and hell, whose provocation is readily apparent and derives, partly at least, precisely from its self-referential character: “the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul, is to be expunged; this i shall do, by printing in the infernal method, by corrosives, which in hell are salutary and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid” (marriage 14, e 39). another detail to consider is that no matter how “the lamb” in the climactic question of “the tyger” is understood (as the lamb, or “the lamb”—blake’s erratic spelling and punctuation open up such doubts), the question does contain an allusion to the poem of innocence. and it comes at the end of a largely self-referential stanza that leaves the reader in the dark unless s/he considers its symbols in the light of blake’s later prophecies, particularly the four zoas.for an extensive discussion of the relationship between “the tyger” and the four zoas, see in particular chapter 15 of gleckner (275-87). the speaker of experience wonders at the “hand or eye” that dared reach out, “sieze the fire,” and make the fire burn in the tyger’s eyes, so that the tyger (and “the tyger”) are “burning bright, / in the forests of the night.” he wonders at the shoulder that could handle the chain and the hammer, at the labor performed at the anvil and in the furnace. these accessories of a blacksmith appear in the final version of the stanza that precedes the climactic one,to quote erdman, “after line 12 several starts were made on a 4th stanza, first: ‘could fetch it from the furnace deep / and in [thy] <the> horrid ribs dare steep’ then: ‘in the well of sanguine woe’ then: ‘in what clay & in what mould / were thy eyes of fury rolld’” (e 794). ackroyd’s reconstruction of blake’s thought process in composing this stanza (144) has provoked criticism for his “tone of authoritative certainty about something as elusive as the creative process” (benton 86), much as nurmi’s earlier attempt to reconstruct the probable movements of blake’s mind on the basis of the study of the manuscript revisions (“blake’s revisions of ‘the tyger’”) was criticized by grant as “unaccountably erroneous” (64). nevertheless, if we are to draw conclusions concerning the creative process on the basis of the created effect, it seems legitimate to insist that it is only when blake came up with the entire range of allusions to a blacksmith’s workshop that he accepted stanza 4 as part of his work in progress. as erdman adds, in the course of the lyric’s composition this stanza was further “experimented with,” but, it appears, the “experiment” did not involve these allusions (see e 794-95). and they, like the “stars” and their forsaken “spears,” are also allusive. of course they bring to mind the workshop of los,the association between the allusions to a blacksmith’s tools and the workshop of los is emphasized by practically every critic who views “the tyger” in the light of blake’s later prophetic books; see, for example, gleckner (284-85), miner (67-68), raine (2: 18, 23), paley (57-59), and wagenknecht (91-92). who, according to damon, “is poetry, the expression in this world of the creative imagination” (a blake dictionary 246) and who, as “the expression of the imagination, is the creator of all that we see” (247): a poet translating perception or experience into poetry. as damon reminds us, in milton (22[24].12, e 117) “los … descends and becomes one with blake” (a blake dictionary 251). in jerusalem, on the other hand, los may be taken as blake himself, the poet developing his own philosophy and warring against the spiritual evils that afflict his nation. his great task is “to open the eternal worlds, to open the immortal eyes of man inwards into the worlds of thought, into eternity ever expanding in the bosom of god, the human imagination” (5:18). (a blake dictionary 251) in summary, the questions of “the tyger” are arranged in such a way that, beginning with the break after the third stanza (where the axis of this poem’s symmetry lies), they start drawing attention more and more forcefully to blake’s other work,wagenknecht says that “there is hardly the tiniest echo of the poem in the larger prophetic poems which has not been recorded, amplified, and meditated” (80); quite significantly, he makes this comment after quoting the poem’s climactic fifth stanza. quoting the stanza again on p. 92, he comments upon its references to other poems in the songs, as well as the french revolution, milton, the four zoas, the book of urizen, and europe (92-99). to his labor as a poet, to him as a maker, and to this particular poem as a product of his art, the work of his “hand” and “eye.” in other words, on one level, the poem is an expression of awe and amazement at the maker who fashioned it in his furnace,blake’s symbol of the imagination; see paley (58-59), who supports the meaning of the furnace as the imagination with images from the bible, paracelsus, and boehme. whose hammer beat its rhythm, whose chain could frame a tiger within the fearful symmetry of “the tyger”: “did he who made the lamb make thee? / tyger tyger burning bright ….” if wordsworth, for example, asked a similar question implying surprise at his own achievement and amazed admiration for his own work, it would sound egocentric, indeed narcissistic (though of course he would not ask such a question; there are hardly any memorable tigers in his work, as he mainly wrote of lambs).perfectly natural ones, let us add, as in “the last of the flock” (h 114-16) or his sonnet “composed on a may morning, 1838,” which begins “life with yon lambs, like day, is just begun” (h 278). his best tigers function merely as metaphors, though they may be strikingly powerful, as in the prelude, where revolutionary paris is “a place of fear / unfit for the repose of night, / defenceless as a wood where tigers roam” (the prelude [1805] 10.80-82). intriguingly, according to bateson (133), this passage was written a year or two after wordsworth copied blake’s “the tyger” into his commonplace-book (see also paley 36). jonathan wordsworth claims, however, that “blake poems, including ‘the divine image’ and ‘the tyger,’ [were] copied by wordsworth into his commonplace-book” in spring 1807, and that the first part of book 10 of the prelude, including the passage in question, was written before summer 1804 (see the prelude. the four texts xvi, xvii). but when blake/blake’s lyrical “i” asks the question, it expresses the most fundamental guideline of his philosophy, his most sacred conviction about (the nature of) art. commenting specifically on a statement by wordsworth in the preface to the poems of 1815—“the powers requisite for the production of poetry are, first, those of observation and description …” (poems by william wordsworth 1: viii)—blake writes: “one power alone makes a poet.—imagination the divine vision” (e 665).for an extensive discussion of blake’s annotations to wordsworth, see chapter 9 (160-76) of adams, blake’s margins. as he says in milton (3.3-4, e 96) and then reiterates in jerusalem,see jerusalem 5.58-59 (e 148), 24.23 (e 169), 60.57 (e 211), and 74.13 (e 229). imagination is “the divine body of the lord jesus.” and the same persuasion is expressed and expanded in the laocoön: “the eternal body of man is the imagination. / that is god himself / the divine body / jesus” (e 273). jerusalem’s formulation of los’s “great task,” quoted above, also contains the same conviction: “the human imagination” is “in the bosom of god” (5.20). the rhymed verse in the preface “to the public,” which comes shortly before this formulation of los’s (and blake’s) poetic program, addresses the reader as “[lover] of books! [lover] of heaven, / and of that god from whom [all books are given]” (e 145); under it, blake writes: “when this verse was first dictated to me ….” books—as much as individual poems—are not written, they are dictated, because “we who dwell on earth can do nothing of ourselves, every thing is conducted by spirits” (e 145). every creative impulse comes from “distant deeps or skies.” and if the “deeps” are indeed “hell,” as raine seems to believe (2: 19), it is important to remember that in the marriage (which, raine stresses repeatedly, was “written about the same time” as “the tyger”),raine is particularly emphatic on this point. the full opening sentence of her chapter 16, quoted in part in note 19 above, reads: “the question of good and evil, which forms the theme of the marriage, was likewise the inspiration of ‘the tyger’, written about the same time” (2: 3), and she repeats the information that “the tyger” and the marriage were “written about the same time” on p. 31. the printing in the infernal method, by corrosives, is likewise carried out in “hell.” for all these reasons, “the tyger,” blake’s supreme act as a lyricist, which, on one level, is a tribute to what imagination can perform “when the stars thr[o]w down their spears,”as paley notes (supporting his argument with quotations from boehme and paracelsus), “the defeat of the stars,” apart from the disarmament of reason, “signifies the casting off of both cosmic and internal constraint, freeing man to realize his potentially divine nature” (55; emphasis mine); then, however, paley reduces the meaning of this image to revolutionary and social implications (56). is not narcissistic. it is an expression of man’s surprise, awe, and amazement at something that does not in fact come from or pertain to man, that cannot be seen as man’s achievement, because it was given: it is a gift.to quote damon again, imagination “is the gift of the holy ghost” (a blake dictionary 195). the poem captures a human being as he trembles, feeling a stirring of the spirit that works through him. as suggested above, the poem’s self-referential character may be seen as yet another element of the provocation melted into the tissue of “the tyger.” but on deeper reflection, or, more precisely, on reflection illumined by blake’s later writings, this self-reflective character of experience only sounds like a provocation but is in fact an expression of the highest wisdom concerning the imagination and the fundamental unity of the human and the divine. to refer to the blake dictionary for the last time, imagination, “the basis of all art,” was in blake’s opinion “the central faculty of both god and man”; as damon sums it up, “indeed, here the two [god and man] become indistinguishable” (195; emphasis mine). in fact, “the lamb” expresses the same wisdom. but it only talks about the unity of the human and the divine: he a child, i a child. “the tyger,” on the other hand, does not assert but executes this unity.much like the “introduction” to experience, which, according to raine, accomplishes a similar identification through its “ambiguous syntax” and “erratic punctuation” (2: 27-28): “the voice of the bard is the voice of imagination; the voice of imagination is the voice of the holy word ….” the poem shows how this unity works. most essentially, it demonstrates that it works. and it forces blake’s audiences, his readers and his critics, “lover[s] of books! lover[s] of heaven,” to accept the power of this demonstration and engage actively in the same execution (which, by the way, suggests that he could not but “smile [such] work to see”). the author who made “the tyger” and “the lamb” asks “did he who made the lamb make thee? / tyger tyger burning bright …,” and his readers and critics, trying to answer this question, regularly think, speculate, and write about god. bibliography ackroyd, peter. blake. london: sinclair-stevenson, 1995. adams, hazard. blake’s margins: an interpretive study of the annotations. jefferson: mcfarland, 2009. ---. “reading blake’s lyrics: ‘the tyger.’” discussions of william blake. ed. john e. grant. boston: d. c. heath and co., 1961. 50-63. bateson, f. w. wordsworth: a re-interpretation. london: longmans, green, 1954. bentley, g. e., jr. “blake’s pronunciation.” studies in philology 107.1 (2010): 114-29. benton, michael. “reading biography.” journal of aesthetic education 41.3 (2007): 77-88. the bible. authorized (king james) version. swindon: bible society, oxford university press, n.d. blake, william. the complete illuminated books. with an introduction by david bindman. london: thames & hudson, 2000. ---. the complete poetry and prose of william blake. ed. david v. erdman. newly rev. ed. new york: anchor–random house, 1988. [abbreviated as “e”.] bloom, harold. blake’s apocalypse: a study in poetic argument. garden city, ny: doubleday & co., 1963. borkowska, eliza. but he talked of the temple of man’s body. blake’s revelation un-locked. newcastle: cambridge scholars publishing, 2009. borowsky, bruce. “‘the tyger’—an annotated bibliography.” <http://​imej.​wfu.​edu/​articles/​1999/​1/​06/​demo/​songs/​42/​42bib.​html>. 1996. damon, s. foster. a blake dictionary: the ideas and symbols of william blake. rev. ed. hanover: university press of new england, 1988. ---. william blake: his philosophy and symbols. gloucester, ma: peter smith, 1958. erdman, david v. blake: prophet against empire: a poet’s interpretation of the history of his own times. rev. ed. princeton: princeton university press, 1969. ferber, michael. review of william blake: the creation of the songs: from manuscript to illuminated printing, by michael phillips. criticism 43.4 (2001): 492-96. frye, northrop. fearful symmetry: a study of william blake. princeton: princeton university press, 1947. gleckner, robert f. the piper and the bard: a study of william blake. detroit: wayne state university press, 1959. grant, john e. “the art and argument of ‘the tyger.’” discussions of william blake. ed. john e. grant. boston: d. c. heath and co., 1961. 64-82. hernadi, paul. “literature and evolution.” substance 30.1-2 (2001): 55-71. kuduk, stephanie. “‘a sword of a song’: swinburne’s republican aesthetics in songs before sunrise.” victorian studies 43.2 (2001): 253-78. miner, paul. “‘the tyger’: genesis and evolution in the poetry of william blake.” criticism 4.1 (1962): 59-73. nurmi, martin k. “blake’s revisions of ‘the tyger.’” pmla 71.4 (1956): 669-85. pagliaro, harold. selfhood and redemption in blake’s songs. university park: pennsylvania state university press, 1987. paley, morton d. energy and the imagination: a study of the development of blake’s thought. oxford: clarendon press, 1970. peterfreund, stuart. “power tropes: ‘the tyger’ as enacted critique of newtonian metonymic logic and natural theology.” william blake in a newtonian world: essays on literature as art and science. norman: university of oklahoma press, 1998. chapter 6 (126-38). raine, kathleen. blake and tradition. 2 vols. london: routledge & kegan paul, 1969. swinburne, algernon charles. william blake: a critical essay. london: john camden hotten, 1868. project gutenberg ebook #35995, released 2 may 2011. <http://​www.​gutenberg.​org/​files/​35995/​35995-h/​35995-h.​htm>. wagenknecht, david. blake’s night. william blake and the idea of pastoral. cambridge, ma: belknap press, 1973. wordsworth, william. poems by william wordsworth: including lyrical ballads, and the miscellaneous pieces of the author. with additional poems, a new preface, and a supplementary essay. 2 vols. london: longman, hurst, rees, orme, and brown, 1815. ---. the poems of william wordsworth. ed. thomas hutchinson. london: humphrey milford, 1916. [abbreviated as “h”.] ---. the prelude. the four texts (1798, 1799, 1805, 1850). ed. jonathan wordsworth. london: penguin books, 1995. william blake as a student of the royal academy: a prosopographical perspective william blake as a student of the royal academy: a prosopographical perspective by martin myrone martin myrone (martin.myrone@tate.org.uk) is lead curator, pre-1800 british art, at tate britain, london. he was curator of the exhibition gothic nightmares: fuseli, blake and the romantic imagination (tate britain, 2006) and is author of the blake book (london: tate publishing, 2007). his current research focuses on artistic training and identity in the romantic period, and he is planning a major exhibition of william blake for tate britain, scheduled for 2019–20. introduction | appendices | biographical dictionary | abbreviations | entries the dayi am especially indebted to mark pomeroy and his colleagues at the library of the royal academy of arts, london, for the access provided to materials there and for advice and suggestions. i would also like to thank viccy coltman, brad feltham, mark hallett, martin hopkinson, sarah monks, sarah moulden, lucy peltz, michael phillips, jacob simon, robin simon, david solkin, greg sullivan, sarah v. turner, annette wickham, and alison wright. thanks also to morris eaves and morton d. paley for their support and advice, and especially to sarah jones for her careful editorial work. any errors that may remain are entirely the responsibility of the author, who would welcome corrections and additions to the biographical records set out here. of william blake’s formal registration as a student at the royal academy of arts in london, 8 october 1779, has often been taken as marking an important turning point in his biography. the date certainly marked an important juncture, following the end of his apprenticeship as an engraver with james basire (which, if it followed the normal seven-year term, would have been in august 1779) and taking him into the heart of the art establishment, with its program of elevated art practice centered on the ideality of the classical body and the moral and political commitment of the high-minded artist. even if blake’s relationship with the academy has too often been taken as simply oppositional, an idea that endures despite excellent work that has shown to the contrary that he had a more complex relationship with the art establishment and its values and owed quite specific debts to academic idealism in the formation and direction of his art (however unconventional in many respects),notably aileen ward, “‘sr joshua and his gang’: william blake and the royal academy,” huntington library quarterly 52.1 (winter 1989): 75-95. the significance of this date has never really been in doubt. as david bindman wrote in his seminal study of blake as a visual artist, “it is difficult to penetrate the obscurity of blake’s apprentice days, but with his entry into the royal academy in 1779 he emerges more clearly; he now became acquainted with more readily identifiable figures and we begin to discern something like a blake circle.”david bindman, blake as an artist (oxford: phaidon, 1977) 19. the date generally provides a neat chapter division in chronological accounts of his life, and a section or section break in exhibition presentations.for example, peter ackroyd, blake (london: sinclair-stevenson, 1995) 63; g. e. bentley, jr., the stranger from paradise: a biography of william blake (new haven: yale university press, 2001), in a section headed “‘blake be an artist,’” 48-55; bentley, blake records, 2nd ed. (new haven: yale university press, 2004), in part 2, “from artisan to artist,” 18-25; michael phillips, william blake: apprentice and master (oxford: ashmolean museum, 2014), section 4, 49-59. the biographical dictionary of blake’s fellow students that this essay accompanies and glosses is intended to offer the materials for a further illumination of this turning point in blake’s career, if only in rather indirect or circumstantial ways. it offers a perspective on our understanding of blake as an academy student by providing a volume of data about his peers at the schools, a collective biography (prosopography) that should deepen our sense of blake’s social and artistic environment and provide one kind of historical measure against which his personal fortunes and achievements might be tested. the dictionary provides biographical details (sometimes full, sometimes very sparse) attached to 236 names, probably referring in total to about 233 individuals, allowing for the ambiguities of some of the records, who can be documented as having first attended the royal academy schools between 21 march 1774 and 16 december 1785.this survey represents a portion of a larger biographical dictionary encompassing students attending the royal academy schools between 1769 and 1830, in preparation for publication under the title “the talent of success: art students’ lives in romantic london, c. 1770–1830.” the present essay draws on certain conclusions from that larger study, while focusing on blake’s cohort. students were generally registered at the schools in march–april and in october–november, corresponding to the seasonal openings. the chronology allows for the identification of students who might reasonably be considered as blake’s close contemporaries at the schools, at one extreme in their final season as students (the normal admission period being at this time six years), or entering the schools when blake would have been in a similar position. the admissions procedures and the various opportunities and advantages provided for registered students of the academy are well known, and can be summarized briefly here.see sidney c. hutchison, “the royal academy schools, 1768–1830,” volume of the walpole society 38 (1960–62): 123-91; also holger hoock, the king’s artists: the royal academy of arts and the politics of british culture 1760–1840 (oxford: clarendon press, 2003) 52-62 and passim. the schools were apparently housed until 1779 at old somerset house, and comprised a plaster academy, where students had access to plaster casts of mainly antique sculptures, and a life academy, where male and female models sat for two-hour sessions in the evenings (illus. 1, 2).the drawing schools are generally stated to have been held at old somerset house from 1771 until the move into new somerset house in 1780. however, the academy was instructed to vacate the premises by march 1776 (martin postle, “the royal academy at somerset house: the early years,” british art journal 2.2 [winter 2000–01]: 29-35 [31]). old somerset house was demolished to make way for the new complex, so it is not clear whether the schools were held in some remaining portion of the building or (more likely) elsewhere. that being the case, the drawing by burney identified as showing the plaster academy in old somerset house (illus. 2 here) may need to be reconsidered. thank you to mark pomeroy and annette wickham for their thoughts on this point. 1. elias martin? the life school of the royal academy, c. 1770. sheet 45.9 x 32.2 cm. wellcome library, london. no. 44427i. 2. edward francis burney. the plaster academy at old somerset house, 1779. 33.5 x 48.5 cm. © royal academy of arts, london. sydney lee fund. 03/7485. in 1780 the schools moved into the academy’s purpose-built rooms in the new somerset house (illus. 3). 3. edward francis burney. the plaster academy at somerset house, c. 1780. 33.5 x 48.5 cm. © royal academy of arts, london. sydney lee fund. 03/7484. the plaster academy was overseen by the keeper of the royal academy, in blake’s time george michael moser, succeeded in 1783 by the sculptor agostino carlini. the life academy was overseen by academicians, elected to the role of visitor each year; the character and quality of instruction varied greatly according to who was in the post, and often seems to have descended to interference rather than active encouragement or direction. a student would be admitted initially to the schools as a probationer, on showing a drawing to the keeper and providing a letter of recommendation; he would be permitted to draw from the collection of casts of antique sculpture in the plaster academy for three months, being expected to produce a drawing that would then be presented to the council of the royal academy together with a letter attesting to his moral character. if the council judged that the student was sufficiently qualified, he would be admitted as a full student, apparently for a term of six years (extended to seven years in 1792, then to ten years in 1800), although attendance and other records indicate that many students continued for longer than the allotted term, at least until the reform of the schools in 1799–1800.that the term of study was six years until 1792 is stated by hutchison (130) and generally repeated in the modern literature, but appears not to be clearly documented. hoock may be right in stating that “six years was the period fixed briefly for confirmed students admitted in 1790–2” (53), but even that seems to exaggerate the formality of the situation regarding the length of student attendance, at least until the several campaigns of reform at the schools after 1799. even after that date, it was clear that there were a surprising number of individuals attending the schools without having been through the formal procedures.in march 1813 the royal academy’s council reviewed “a list of persons drawing in the antique academy, consisting of 15 probationers—12 students & 17 others admitted by the keeper,” these last apparently not registered even as probationary students (library of the royal academy of arts, london, council minutes, vol. 5, p. 26 [6 march 1813]). the name of a new student who went through the formal process of admission would be entered in the register, and he would be issued with a ticket granting him privileges: routine access to the collection of casts housed in the plaster academy; the chance to draw from the male or female model if the student was considered sufficiently qualified by the keeper (and was over twenty years old and/or married, in the case of attending class when a female model was sitting); the chance to compete for the silver medals awarded for figure drawing, and the gold medal for history painting or sculpture, and for the three-year scholarship to rome made intermittently available to gold medal winners; the use of the library, with its reference books and prints; and the right to attend the annual exhibition for free four times each year, the various lectures on painting, anatomy, and perspective, and, most importantly, the annual prize-giving lectures of the president (the discourses). although blake’s admission to the academy schools has always been an established fact of his biography, we still know really rather little about his time there. malkin, having talked with blake in person, provides the most assertive account: “here he drew with great care, perhaps all, or certainly nearly all the noble antique figures in various views. … he drew a great deal from life, both at the academy and at home.”benjamin heath malkin, a father’s memoirs of his child (london, 1806) xxii. later biographers, from gilchrist onwards, have been much more noncommittal. aileen ward, carefully weighing the circumstantial evidence, was surely right in suggesting that blake may in fact have attended through what was the normal term of six years, that is, until 1785.ward 78-79. we can be more confident in asserting that he did not have an extended attendance record at the schools. while there are several cases where the names of students admitted before 1785 appear in the attendance registers of the plaster and life academies that happen to survive (which date from 1790 and after), blake’s is not among them. so, while some of his peers did continue to attend the schools until this later date, blake appears not to have done. even if we are not sure how long he attended the drawing schools, blake himself related using the library, where he disputed the aesthetic value of early prints with moser, so he at least made use of that facility.bentley, blake records 20. there is scarce material evidence to help decide how much and how seriously blake studied at the academy; a few drawings survive that may be relevant, although the lack of more of this kind cannot be taken as a reliable indicator of any lack of commitment to academic study, as noted below. among the scraps of drawings after the antique, that of the legs of the figure of cincinnatus can reasonably be asserted to have been undertaken in the plaster academy; as robin hamlyn notes, that antique figure featured prominently in edward francis burney’s views of the cast room in its old and new settings (illus. 2, 3).martin butlin, the paintings and drawings of william blake, 2 vols. (new haven: yale university press, 1981), cat. no. 104a (verso). robin hamlyn, william blake: independence and innovation, exhibition leaflet (london: tate gallery, 1993) n. pag. other studies, apparently of casts, include butlin nos. 115 (verso) and 178. of the two important life drawings by blake in the british museum, only one appears certain to be an academy drawing, the heavy musculature and anonymized character of the figure drawn from behind corresponding closely with other life school drawings of the period (illus. 4, 5).butlin nos. 71-72. butlin notes the records of four lost drawings that may have been academic life studies (nos. 866-69). 4. william blake. life drawing, c. 1779–80 (butlin no. 72). 34.9 x 22.5 cm. © trustees of the british museum. 1874,1212.110. 5. thomas stothard. life drawing, c. 1800? 15.4 x 8.6 cm. © royal academy of arts, london. 05/3163. the other, a slimmer, smooth-limbed figure with an unconventionally individualized visage, has been taken as a drawing of robert blake or even as a self-portrait; if it is an academy drawing it features a model whose physique was untypical and cannot be found in other designs (illus. 6). 6. william blake. life drawing, c. 1779–80 (butlin no. 71). 47.9 x 37.0 cm. © trustees of the british museum. 1878,0413.34. yet academy students must have produced many hundreds, indeed thousands of life studies and drawings from the antique during the early years of the academy. the bankruptcy sale of the london embroiderer henry fremont, who was blake’s contemporary in the schools, having registered in march 1779, included a lot comprising seven portfolios with as many as 150 academy studies, together with multiple other drawings in red chalk that seem similarly to have derived from his time at the academy.westminster archives, london, acc 36/107. j. m. w. turner apparently attended the plaster academy over 130 times and the life academy over 100 times up to the point he became an associate of the royal academy (ara) in 1799.see ann chumbley and ian warrell, turner and the human figure: studies of contemporary life, exhibition catalogue (london: tate gallery, 1989) 12-13. yet even with a figure of his stature, whose studio contents were so completely preserved, whose dedication to academic study so notable, we have only a handful of drawings that appear to derive from his time at the schools.eric shanes, young mr. turner: the first forty years, 1775–1815 (new haven: yale university press, 2016) 33-34. these were, after all, only exercises, discarded as such and rarely preserved in any quantities, when at all.there are exceptions, including groups of academic drawings from this period by john rubens smith at the library of congress, washington, dc, and by j. j. masquerier at the wellcome trust, london; there is a group of life drawings by thomas stothard, although dated to around 1800, at the royal academy, london, and individual designs by william artaud, edward francis burney, and joseph strutt at the british museum, london. securing entry to the academy schools was an honor. a later student, c. r. leslie, boasted to family back home in america: “i have lately been made a student in the academy … i have now access to the library every monday, besides the privileges of wearing my hat in the academy, & coming in with a greater swagger than before.”letter of 4 april 1813. tate archive, london, 9613.1.3.1. blake arrived at the school at an auspicious moment in the academy’s history. in december 1779, just two months after he registered, the first official event took place in the new somerset house.postle 31. the academy had triumphed, and was without a real challenger as an exhibiting body and teaching institution for many years. accordingly, many former students made much of their association with this esteemed body. drawing masters’ advertisements routinely stated when an artist had studied in the academy, and the affiliation appears to have counted as much in boston as in bolton. at a later date, the kent-born artist thomas sidney cooper, who ventured to london without connections in the metropolis and secured a place at the academy, was called home almost immediately following the death of his father; nonetheless, his ivory ticket was sent to him and, although he never actually attended the schools as a student, he immediately had a trade card printed that stated his association with the academy.t. sidney cooper, my life, new ed. (london: richard bentley and son, 1891) 86. sometimes the point was rather strained, with artists’ being named “royal academician” in newspaper notices on the basis only that they studied there, rather than being elected members, and there were a few cases where artists advertised provincially as former students where there is no evidence that they were. then there is the striking case of faithful christopher pack, a contemporary of blake’s at the schools, who throughout his life claimed to be a student of reynolds and assiduous student at the academy, a point gently denied by the president himself: “if all those whom i have endeavoured to help forward by lending them pictures and telling them their faults should do me the honour of calling themselves my scholars, i should have the greatest school that any painter had.”john ingamells and john edgcumbe, eds., the letters of sir joshua reynolds (new haven: yale university press, 2000) 135. for pack and others, merely attending the schools was valuable, above and beyond the practical training that was provided, as it implied an intimacy with the art establishment, even with sir joshua himself, that might not have actually existed. the schools were a convivial setting, which itself fostered a certain sense of community that must previously have been lacking among students. earlier drawing schools had been set up by artists for themselves and their pupils, whereas the academy schools were open to all (male) comers who could demonstrate their interest and talent. a remarkable anonymous sketchbook at the academy, tentatively but plausibly attributed to edward francis burney, shows students (sometimes named) lolling around, posing for one another (illus. 7).thanks to annette wickham for sharing her unpublished catalogue notes on the sketchbook with me. 7. edward francis burney? students of the royal academy, c. 1779–80. 15.8 x 19.6 cm. © royal academy of arts, london. 09/1808. although the sketchbook is dated precisely to blake’s time on the basis of the students identified by inscriptions, our artist does not, sadly, seem to make an appearance. the setting implied by these designs would not appear to be the drawing rooms themselves, but perhaps other rooms at the academy (there was once a directive from the council forbidding students from lounging around and drinking in the foyer) or, more likely, a nearby tavern or even one of the students’ lodgings. there are several references among the students’ personal accounts to their drinking and eating together after evening study, or routinely walking to or from the academy together—notably james northcote’s attempts to avoid walking out with a fellow student, james roberts, whom he took a dislike to (“but he sticks to me as a limpet does to a rock and most commonly goes with me from the academy if i do not make hast[e] to get out or join some of those who i do like”).library of the royal academy, nor/6. there are, certainly, records of student misbehavior. thomas burgess, a mature student and already established as a drawing master, was in 1773 ordered to apologize publicly for some perceived slight to the visitor.library of the royal academy, council minutes, vol. 1 (9 november 1773): “agostino carlini esq made a complaint that thomas burgess one of the students had grossly insulted him in the execution of his office as visitor on the 4th instant & the same being confirmed by messrs grignion & sherwin (two of the students).” there are anecdotal stories of plaster casts being broken, of tomfoolery, and of arguments over seating arrangements (particularly in the plaster schools, where movable wooden boxes were employed and where getting good sight of the casts in the crowded and rather poorly lit room was not always easy). there is, also, the evidence of the admissions books, one of which includes an appended, rather stern notice: “this book being examined occasionally, it is expected, that the students do enter their names legibly—and not tear or blot it.”admission book for the plaster academy, 23 march-19 october 1795 (library of the royal academy, raa/kee/2/1/8). such direction was evidently necessary. a number of students would choose to sign in cheekily with the designation “ra,” while a fellow student altered the signature of the engraver john hogg, “john hogg alias pig” (11 october 1791), and the sculptor william coffee’s autograph was supplemented more extensively, “w coffee sold here wholesale & retail tea &c &c &c &c &c &c” (3 december 1791). it seems unlikely that such drollery was restricted to the moment in the 1790s when the attendance registers happen to have survived, and we might hope that the author of an island in the moon had his moment, too, when he put his name down. blake clearly did socialize with fellow students. it was one fellow student, thomas trotter, who introduced him to thomas stothard, whom trotter must have known through the calico printing trade in which both served. there were other figures who feature in blake’s biography. john flaxman and george cumberland had registered at an earlier date, and william lock of norbury was apparently admitted to the life academy in 1785, from a note in the council minutes “that mr lock junr be allowed to draw after the female model.”library of the royal academy, council minutes (7 march 1785). fellow apprentices from basire’s workshop would have been known to him—james parker, who became his business partner, was a contemporary at the schools. g. e. bentley, jr., dates to around september 1780 or 1781 a sketching trip on the medway with stothard and “mr. ogleby,” apparently an older man, or “parkes an engraver pupil with blake & basire,” who has reasonably been identified as parker, but who might also be thomas park, later notable as an antiquarian, who had registered as a student (“engraver”) in 1777.bentley, “blake’s first arrest, at upnor castle,” blake 31.3 (winter 1997–98): 82-84; blake records 24, quoting a description of an impression of the print after stothard at the british museum. with britain at war, they were suspected of being spies taking an interest in nearby chatham docks, and briefly arrested. they were released by intercession of the royal academy, quite certainly not because the academy testified to their “carrying out a student assignment,”as suggested by bentley, “blake’s first arrest” 83. something that was unheard of at this time, but rather by virtue of their being students and therefore of sound moral (and political) character. the same took place a few years later, in what were surely rather more serious circumstances relating to a student, john ramsay, who had been imprisoned in enemy france in 1804: “we voted a certificate to john ramsay, a prisoner at verdun, declaring him to be a student of the royal academy.”the fortress of verdun was used to house britons still in france at the resumption of war in 1803; they were said to number about 800 by the beginning of 1804 (james forbes, letters from france, written in the years 1803 and 1804. including a particular account of verdun, and the situation of the british captives in that city, 2 vols. [london: j. white, 1806] 2: 220). i have not been able to establish ramsay’s fate after this date. for blake around 1780, and (perhaps) for ramsay in 1804, the association with the academy meant that they had the authority of the british state to protect them.on the academy as a state institution, see hoock; see also patrick joyce, the state of freedom: a social history of the british state since 1800 (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2013) 205. so, quite aside from the practical opportunities, in terms of access to casts and models and prints and reference books, as well as instruction, study at the royal academy evidently provided status by association, a guarantee of moral character and sound political principles, and, to some degree at least, a form of corporate identity as well as a social network. study at the academy mattered to the more than two hundred students recorded here, in ways that are complex and manifold.one measure would be membership of the academy itself, on which point ward calculated that twenty-seven of the aras elected from 1786 to 1805 were former students, about one in fifteen—“more than one man a year” from the student intake (89n22). i hope that the short biographies in the survey will provide matter of interest in detail and as a basis for comparison with blake. given the scale of the record, the biographies will, largely, have to speak for themselves, but we can take a more abstracted overview of blake’s contemporaries at the academy schools, with reference to the basic data about geographical origin and social background summarized in the two appendices below. it has proved possible to establish geographical origins for 169 students, over 70% of the total. of these, 79 were born in london, a third of the total, and almost half of those whose birthplace is documented. another 51 were from england, meaning that 55% of the whole were english born, with a very strong metropolitan bias. there was a reasonably large irish contingent of 10 students (although there were doubtless more born in england to irish parents), but relatively few scottish students, and only 2 from wales. as holger hoock has noted, drawing on a sketchier survey of students across the period 1769–1829, “the apparent dearth of scottish ra students at least before 1800 can in part be explained by the existence of indigenous art institutions and a tradition of scottish students being educated on the continent.”hoock 61. hoock was able to establish birthplaces for about a third of the 223 students he sampled. strikingly, there were more american-born students than either scottish or welsh, a sharp reminder that london was (until 1783) still, in the phrase helpfully foregrounded by the historian julie flavell, “capital of america.”julie flavell, when london was capital of america (new haven: yale university press, 2011). blake’s student contemporaries were as transatlantic in their makeup as they were british in the broad sense. they were also cosmopolitan, in that there were at least 18 students born in europe, as well as many others who were born in england to continental european parents. so around 10% of students were born outside the british isles.in the famously globalized present day, 80.8% of students in higher education in the uk are from the uk, 5.6% are from the eu, and 13.6% from the rest of the world. figures for 2015–16, provided by the uk council for international student affairs, <https://​institutions.​ukcisa.​org.​uk/​info-​for-​universities-​colleges--​schools/​policy-​research--​statistics/​research--​statistics/​international-​students-​in-​uk-​he/​#international-​students-​in-​uk-​he-​by-​domicile,-​level-​and-​mode,​<br>-​european-​union-​(eu)-​(excluding-uk)-​and-​non-​eu,-​2014-15>. for a moment, at least, the royal academy must have seemed like a thrilling entrepôt, a european, even global, center of art study. given the relatively belated foundation of the royal academy compared to many countries on the continent, it is striking that the schools attracted academically trained artists from europe, including two russian students sent over with court funding in 1773, one of whom, gavriil ivanovich skorodumov, reported in 1777: here the arts flourish and artists are highly esteemed and greatly encouraged. english gentlemen are great connoisseurs and have their own collections, filled with the works of the old masters. apart from the royal academy, there are a great number of schools where drawing and other skills are taught.quoted in a. g. cross, “by the banks of the thames”: russians in eighteenth century britain (newtonville: oriental research partners, 1980) 213. skorodumov’s report was, doubtless, on the optimistic side (he was applying for continued funding from his homeland), and there is, on the contrary, a record of students complaining about the poor quality of the facilities at the schools.see rhodri windsor liscombe, “the ‘diffusion of knowledge and taste’: john flaxman and the improvement of the study facilities at the royal academy,” volume of the walpole society 53 (1987): 226-38. this, together with external events, seems to have led to a temporary decline in student numbers in general, but more enduringly of foreign students in particular.hoock tracks declining student numbers through the later 1770s and 1780s, which picked up only intermittently after 1790 (35, fig. 1). in the event, non-british students declined in number after 1785, even with the momentary influx of émigrés in the 1790s. the composition of the student body changed decisively after blake’s time, and numbers of non-british students did not pick up, even after the conclusion of the long french wars in 1815.of the 302 students joining the schools in the period 1821–30, only 4 (or 1.3%) were born outside the british isles (2 french and 2 american). myrone, “the talent of success” (forthcoming). such a sweeping survey has pitfalls, of course, but the general pattern is clear, and the evidence fairly robust. establishing social origins is a more treacherous matter, given the slippery nature of social rank and even occupation in the eighteenth century. but an attempt has been made here to identify family backgrounds, based on paternal occupation, using categories derived from the social tables of gregory king (for 1688), joseph massie (for 1759), and patrick colquhoun (for 1801–03), as revised and streamlined influentially by peter lindert and jeffrey williamson in 1982.peter h. lindert and jeffrey g. williamson, “revising england’s social tables 1688–1812,” explorations in economic history 19 (1982): 385-408. although evidently intended to suggest a rough social ranking (lords at the top, vagrants at the bottom), these tables indicate occupational sectors rather than status or income in a strict way; the income ranges provided by massie and colquhoun make it clear that there were many clergymen who were poorer than tailors, who ranked below them in the social table, for instance. reducing a family background to parental occupation in this way is, obviously, reductive, particularly as so many people in the eighteenth century pursued multiple careers and drew wealth from investments and property. nonetheless, we can tentatively draw some conclusions, based on the 57% of the student body where it has proved possible to establish parental occupation. first, the relatively high social status of the student cohort is striking. a total of 47 students, 20% of the total or 35% of that portion where the father’s occupation has been established, were from the top-ranking “titles and professions.” the number is doubtless skewed, as artists and musicians were counted by both massie and colquhoun among that top rank, but it is also the case that at least 21 were from more securely genteel backgrounds, with fathers who were property-owning gentlemen, “esquires,” professionals, or office holders. a larger number, 83 (over 35% of the total), were from trade and commerce, which could, however, range from wealthy merchant to lowly tailor. within those groups there is, surely predictably, a strong representation of the design-oriented crafts (goldsmiths, jewelers, housepainters, and carvers and gilders) and the building trades (including masons). taking these together with the artists and sculptors ranked among the “professions,” about a quarter of the total number of students came from family backgrounds already connected with the visual arts, pointing to quite a strong tendency to occupational inheritance. not so predictable, but rather intriguing, given blake’s family background, is the strong showing of tradesmen connected with textiles: a total of 7 linen drapers, hatters, and hosiers, compared to 2 butchers and 2 bakers. we may suspect that a business concern with textiles, however mundane, connected the household to the world of art and design more directly than most other trades. such an idea might also be supported by some notable shortages when this cohort is set against the population of england as a whole. agriculture is barely represented—1% of the student body—while 14.5% of the population were counted by colquhoun as farmers and freeholders. the maritime and military are similarly underrepresented (less than 1%, compared to 11% of the population in the britain at war surveyed by colquhoun). and there is the complete absence of “labourers and the poor,” making up over 35% of the population as a whole. it is perhaps possible that the 43% of students whose family backgrounds have not been documented in this survey were all sons of tin miners or hedgers and ditchers, vagrants or prostitutes. but, on the circumstantial evidence provided in their biographies, and on the basis of the larger survey of academy students (where family backgrounds have been established for a higher proportion of students), this seems highly unlikely. putting parental occupation aside, we can note that at least 40 of the students (about 17%) are recorded as having been formally apprenticed to a master, although the accessible records of apprenticeship are far from comprehensive and the actual proportion was doubtless much higher. within this record we can detect certain concentrations of activity, with some masters in relevant trades training apprentices particularly inclined to academic study. this includes blake himself, two others documented as apprentices to basire (john dawson and james parker), and one more said to have been his pupil (william skelton).another, thomas ryder, had apparently registered at the schools in 1772, as “thomas ride.” basire’s workshop was, in fact, notable in producing academy students, along with that of the coach painter thomas maxfield (three students from this cohort)blackmore, gray, and minnitt. and the sculptor john walsh (the same).braithwaite, horwell, and sinnott. all these are, however, rather overshadowed by the stipple engraver francesco bartolozzi: at least 11 students from this survey were currently or had been his pupils.bettelini, william bond, fagan, fielding, marcuard, ogborne, saunders, edmund scott, simon, sintzenich, and tomkins. like blake, parker appears to have joined the schools only after his apprenticeship; dawson would have still been an apprentice, and skelton was still within the term of his apprenticeship to the engraver john lodge, unless he had already transferred to basire. two of maxfield’s apprentices would have been students after the seven-year term of apprenticeship, and the third was within term, while all three of walsh’s apprentices were within their apprenticeship periods while attending the schools. there is evidence that masters could be actively against academic study, as in the case of richard westall, later a watercolor painter of some eminence but then an apprentice to a lettering engraver, who “permitted him to draw at the royal academy, in the evenings; but for that indulgence he worked a corresponding number of hours in the morning.”gentleman’s magazine (february 1837): 213. overall, however, apprenticeship and academic study were not always mutually exclusive, and some masters were moderately encouraging of, or at least reconciled to, their charges’ attending the schools. tracing the professional and personal fortunes of around 233 students is perhaps a matter best covered by the individual biographies, however sketchy they may be. but we can note the four documented suicides (john alefounder, filiter stepanov, edward dayes, and robert fagan), which, without any reliable source on the suicide rates at this period, nonetheless hardly seem excessive, and also the need for charity by a relatively small number of former students. of the twelve who applied personally for support from the artists’ general benevolent institution, or whose widows applied, five were engravers, which surely suggests the disproportionate economic vulnerability of that profession. these include cantlo bestland, ruined by the commercial failure of his large engraving of henry singleton’s group portrait of the royal academicians, published along with a key by him in 1802; john william edy, “his business is nearly extinct having hardly any sale of his works, repeated illness, some debts contracted thro’ many unproductive years, advanced age & this year a broken arm & other misfortunes”; john ogborne, “incapable of following his profession from a nervous affection of the head”; john louis sailliar, who left his widow with “nothing but her needle to depend upon”; and john walker, who applied in 1834 complaining that “the abundance of cheap engravings from steel plates, renders it next to impossible for a person of his description to obtain even the most scanty livelihood.”taken from case records in the applicants’ books, archive of the artists’ general benevolent institution, london. thanks to brad feltham for making these records available for me to consult. how does blake measure up when set in the context of this larger record of students’ lives? we should note that blake himself applied, once, for charity from the royal academy, receiving £25 in 1822,bentley, blake records 384-85. as did fellow students or their dependents, including francis haward and benedict van assen (both, again, engravers), on other occasions. however, he seems never to have applied to the artists’ general benevolent institution (agbi), nor suffered the absolute poverty and obscurity that we can find in the biographical record as a whole. he lived long, much longer than many of his contemporaries, and was put into the art historical record relatively early: only hoppner and morland from among this cohort received biographical treatment along with blake in allan cunningham’s lives of the most eminent british painters.allan cunningham, the lives of the most eminent british painters, sculptors, and architects, 6 vols. (london: john murray, 1829–33). in being a londoner, with a family in trade, he was typical, in some strictly numerical sense. but he was also part of a distinctly middle-class student body, one that was inclined toward the social elite rather than the economically depressed. if many of the students were sons of tradesmen and artisans, they mixed almost exclusively with the sons of artists, gentlemen, and professionals, rather than laborers or servants. nor did they generally face much parental disapproval; instead, there is a record of indulgent fathers, who actually encouraged their sons in art, james blake, the hosier, among them.malkin recounts that blake’s father purchased casts and prints for him to draw from (xviii-xix). the life of the artist seems, perhaps rather unexpectedly, to have been something that middle-class parents were comfortable with. we can see this by taking another perspective, looking only at the intake of students alongside blake on 8 october 1779. this comprised thomas gosse, registered as a painter; peter holland, painter; joseph toomer, painter; john willam edy, painter; john smith cranfield, sculptor; and joseph cappe, painter. gosse, aged only fourteen at the date of registration, was from a family of west country merchants and wool manufacturers; his father held office. after family affairs declined, he was apprenticed to john raphael smith and became a professional engraver. later in life he was a traveling miniature painter. holland’s family background is unclear, although the holland family was quite well established in cheshire, and he appears to have been based mainly in the neighboring city of liverpool, having lodged in london during his studies. he was active as a portrait and landscape painter, married, and appears to have achieved moderate success. toomer, aged nineteen, was from a family of bankers and ironmongers in berkshire, and returned to that life himself, ending up living a peaceful life in retirement in kent. edy, aged nineteen, was the son of a bristol baker, although he may also have been related to a sculptor called edey; he exhibited at the academy in 1785 and again in 1801 and 1802, and worked as a printmaker and publisher, sometimes of satirical subjects. he may be counted among the casualties of this cohort, receiving charity from the academy in 1823 and applying successfully to the agbi in 1827. the agbi also provided support in his final years and assistance to his widow after he died of typhus in 1832. cranfield, aged about twenty-one, was irish, the son of a carver and gilder, and returned to dublin in 1783 to go into business with his father. he died relatively young, in one of the rare occasions of workplace injury in the record. finally, cappe, aged nineteen, can be identified as the son of a unitarian minister; he exhibited a portrait in 1780 but went on to study medicine, dying young in 1791. there is, evidently, social variety here, but there are also some fairly clear parameters. these young men did not come from poverty and were not necessarily destined for poverty themselves. they doubtless had to work, but also had family networks to support them. there is much more to be done here, but by way of conclusion i would point to a striking, almost entirely overlooked fact, the relevance of which may not immediately be obvious: when blake exhibited at the royal academy in 1800 (“the loaves and fishes”), it was as an “honorary” exhibitor, the designation employed by individuals showing works for their own satisfaction rather than in the expectation of professional gain (whether immediate sale, or attracting new clients or commissions).bentley, blake records 89. bentley’s explanation (89n) that this was because of reforms at the academy schools in 1799 is misleading. students were asked to submit drawings in order to demonstrate that they were qualified to continue in the schools, but this did not affect the status of former students or the right of any student to exhibit. accordingly, blake did not provide his address; honorary exhibitors were not seeking unsolicited contact from the exhibition’s visitors. yet it was, as indicated by bentley’s meticulously composed figures, only at that moment, around 1800, that blake (largely thanks to the patronage of thomas butts) was anywhere near earning as much from his paintings as from commercial printmaking.bentley, william blake in the desolate market (montreal: mcgill-queen’s university press, 2014) 105, notes income from painting in the period 1800–09 as £460, compared to £650 from engraving, almost four times as much as it had been in 1790–99 and making up over half of his £825 lifetime earnings in that medium. the point at which blake could reasonably imagine himself living as a painter of serious religious and literary themes, fulfilling, to some degree at least, the ideal of the history painter promoted by the royal academy, was also the moment that he presented himself publicly as what we would think of as an “amateur.” in his review of william blake in the desolate market, mark crosby notes that bentley has, perhaps rather unwittingly, exposed an important question about blake’s reputation: the perception of blake as an otherworldly figure, unconcerned about and far detached from the economic realities of his time, has long permeated blake studies. … the information that bentley has marshaled, particularly the amount of money earned over the first twenty-five years or so of blake’s professional career, suggests a rather different william blake: a highly skilled engraver frequently attuned to a developing marketplace, who explored numerous commercial opportunities with varying degrees of economic success.mark crosby, rev. of william blake in the desolate market, by g. e. bentley, jr., blake 50.2 (fall 2016): par. 2. i think we might extend this revision further, and add another dimension to blake’s identity in light of the social composition of his cohort of academy students. what the academy’s record indicates, even from the period 1774–85 but with greater clarity in the decades that followed, is that the pursuit of art was undertaken by a hugely disproportionate number of individuals from middle-class and even elite backgrounds, to the almost complete exclusion of the bulk of the population further down the social table, the laboring masses. this is not, i think, at all surprising, and could be explained away with reference to any number of strictly utilitarian factors. but it does mean that we might want to recalibrate our sense of blake’s social profile, and, indeed, the social character of the artist in the romantic age more generally. if the literature tends to emphasize social aspiration and conflict, bohemianism and radical sentiment, among the artists of those turbulent years, the prosopography points to a rather different picture, in which boys and young men from established trade, commercial, and genteel backgrounds chose to go into art, usually with parental approval. this is not at all to underplay the very real risks involved in an artistic career, perhaps more than ever during those decades of war and unrest. there is plenty of evidence from the lives of blake’s contemporaries of careers thwarted by neglect or buffeted by a volatile market. it is, however, to suggest that we need to think carefully about who felt able to take such risks and face up to such obstacles. in surveying the student body at the royal academy, i have been struck by the parallel with what angela mcrobbie has observed of her own students in the creative industries as the “middle-classification” of the student body.angela mcrobbie, be creative: making a living in the new culture industries (cambridge: polity press, 2016) 10-12 and passim. mcrobbie’s account makes it clear that this restriction in terms of class background accompanies ostensible freedoms, freedoms associated with free-market liberalism. indeed, she suggests that the freedoms associated particularly with artists’ lives have become exemplary for all working people; they are something for even the established middle classes to aspire to, notwithstanding the risks and perils this pursuit entails. it is, it appears, the established middle classes who feel most able to withstand the travails of living life as a creative individual. blake’s era was, after all, the era of adam smith and david ricardo, and the emergence of the free market as economic, social, and cultural force. it may be, unexpectedly, that blake, whom we might wish to be a countercultural icon, bohemian, and outsider, and in these regards the exemplary artist, was much more fully part of that process at its earliest stage than we might wish to believe. appendix 1 geographical origins of ra students, 1774–85 this statement of geographical origins is based on the birthplace of the students. united kingdom and ireland london 79 south east 10 east anglia 8 midlands 11 northern england 13 western england 9 wales 2 ireland 10 scotland 4 total 146 europe france 3 netherlands 4 italy 3 switzerland 4 germany 3 russia 1 total 18 america north america 5 total 5 appendix 2 social backgrounds of ra students, 1774–85 classification is based on the occupation of the father, or other parental figure where the father died young. the occupational classifications are derived from the seminal social tables drawn up by gregory king (for 1688), joseph massie (for 1759), and patrick colquhoun (for 1801–03), as consolidated and revised by peter lindert and jeffrey williamson in 1982.see note 39. a. high titles and professions (including persons professing liberal arts and sciences, and those employed in theatrical pursuits) titled 3 “esquire” 4 “gentleman” 3 landowner 2 clergy 3 surgeon 1 official 1 steward 1 yeoman 1 accountant 1 mathematician 1 artist (including 5 ara or ra) 15 sculptor 5 music master 2 musician 2 actor 2 total 47 b. commerce (innkeepers, tradesmen, and merchants) manufacturer 2 merchant 5 shopkeeper 2 ironmonger 1 linen draper 4 lapidary 2 hatter/hosier 3 leatherseller 1 apothecary 2 quack doctor 1 brewer 1 innkeeper 3 wine merchant 1 butcher 2 baker 2 corn-chandler 1 salesman 1 porter 1 total 35 c. industry and building (mining, building trades, manufacturers, artisans) carpenter/builder/surveyor 6 coach builder 2 coach/housepainter 4 paper hanger/stainer 1 carver/gilder/framemaker 7 stuccoist 1 turner 1 goldsmith 1 watch/clockmaker 2 jeweler 3 gunmaker 1 engraver 5 printer 2 tailor 2 peruke-maker 1 barber 1 perriwig-black maker 1 reed-maker 1 blacksmith 1 potter 1 gardener 2 miner 2 total 48 d. agriculture (freeholders and farmers, excluding laborers) farmer 3 total 3 e. military and maritime (excluding traders) chelsea pensioner 1 mariner 1 total 2 a biographical dictionary of students of painting, sculpture, and engraving who attended the royal academy schools, 1774–85 the scope of the dictionary the following biographical dictionary provides details on around 233 individuals who first attended the royal academy schools in london between 21 march 1774 and 16 december 1785, professing that they wished to pursue painting, sculpture, or engraving. students professing architecture, always in a minority and poorly provided for, are generally omitted, with a few exceptions. although john alefounder registered as an architect, his silver medals were for figure drawings and he practiced as an artist, and john linnell bond first registered for “drawing” before being marked as an architect, and also seems to have studied from the figure. additionally, george stoddart registered with the dual vocations of architect and painter. the major source of information is the register maintained by the keeper (raa/kee/1/1 register of admission of students, 1769–1830), which at this date generally provided the name, age, and date of birth of the student, the art professed, and any medals secured (silver for drawing the figure; gold for history painting and modeling). the original register was organized alphabetically by surname, with additional entries being added each year on the appropriate page. it was published by sidney c. hutchison in volume of the walpole society in 1962, and has been a standard source. hutchison’s transcription is almost entirely faithful, although he does not always transcribe additional notes, such as the annotations indicating that the student had died (this apparently being done before the register stopped being used at the end of 1830). the register marked the date at which the student was formally enrolled and could enjoy access to the plaster academy, to the life academy when considered properly qualified by the keeper (and when of an appropriate age, for classes where a female model was sitting), the library, and the annual exhibition. the registration of students was also marked in the minutes of the royal academy’s council meetings, and hutchison generally notes discrepancies that do occasionally arise between these records, as regards a date of entry to the schools, the spelling of a name, or even whether a student was actually admitted. the council minutes also occasionally provide details of others attending the schools, either as probationary students preparing to apply for full registration, or more informally. other sources, such as biographies and memoirs, sometimes give indications that individuals attended the schools, although their names do not appear in the register or the council minutes. given that, at this date, students admitted to the schools as probationers were not routinely recorded, such evidence has been accepted and these individuals are included. the form of the biographies the name (and variant spellings) and other details of the student as entered in the register, council minutes, or as derived from other primary sources are provided in bold at the head of each entry. the alphabetical ordering of the entries is based on the name as given in the original record. the number provided in hutchison’s edition of the register is given in parentheses, as an “h” number. the biographical entry that follows provides the name of the student as given in modern sources, life dates, primary occupation or status, and a narrative account of his life. it is skewed toward details of the student’s background, upbringing, and training, and in particular his experience of study at the royal academy. primary source material relating details about student activity is quoted fully, where available. the later life and career of the student is sketched with the intention of giving an evidence-based account of his professional destiny and personal fortunes, without attempting to be exhaustive. accordingly, the biographies of the lesser-known figures tend to be longer than the most familiar, whose life stories are well established. the sources of quoted material, or of biographical data that may be disputed or novel, are given within the text; key sources specific to the artist are noted at the end of the entry. sources and abbreviations this list comprises the main published, unpublished, and electronic sources referred to in compiling the student biographies. specific reference is made to these sources within the biographical texts where they are directly quoted or contradicted, or where they appear to be the sole source of information that does not appear elsewhere. additional sources, including monographs, newspapers and magazines, and commercial directories, are cited within the biographical entries. parochial and civil records providing details of birth, baptism, marriage, death, and burial have been accessed via the subscription service <http://​www.​ancestry.​co.​uk>. these key life dates have been checked even where they are available in the standard published sources below; where there are significant factual discrepancies, these are noted within the text. the principle has been to provide sufficient information to allow for repeat searches, without encumbering these short texts with full archival citations. similarly, insurance records are drawn from the online index of sun fire policies at the london metropolitan archives (lma), and references to court documents and other archival materials are from london lives, 1690 to 1800 (london lives) and proceedings of the old bailey, 1674–1913 (old bailey). agbi artists’ general benevolent institution, london ms applicants’ books anb american national biography online <http://​www.​anb.​org/​articles/​home.​html> annals james elmes, ed., annals of the fine arts, 5 vols. (london, 1817–20) ara associate of the royal academy bdsb ingrid roscoe, emma hardy, and m. g. sullivan, a biographical dictionary of sculptors in britain, 1660–1851 (new haven: yale university press, 2009); online edition <http://​liberty.​henry-moore.org/​henrymoore/​index.php> beard geoffrey beard, craftsmen and interior decoration in england, 1660–1820 (new york: holmes & meier, 1981) beard & gilbert geoffrey beard and christopher gilbert, with brian austen, arthur bond, and angela evans, dictionary of english furniture makers, 1660–1840 (london: furniture history society, 1986) bénézit emmanuel bénézit, dictionnaire critique et documentaire des peintres, sculpteurs, dessinateurs, et graveurs, 14 vols. (paris: gründ, 1999) bl british library, london bm british museum, london; online collections information, including biographical notices and other curatorial notes <https://​www.​britishmuseum.​org/​research/​collection_online/​search.​aspx> bryan michael bryan, ed. g. c. williamson, dictionary of painters and engravers, new ed., 5 vols. (london: george bell, 1903–05) cced clergy of the church of england database <http://​theclergydatabase.​org.​uk> cm see raa colvin h. m. colvin, a biographical dictionary of british architects, 1600–1840, 4th ed. (new haven: yale university press, 2008) croft-murray edward croft-murray, decorative painting in england, 1537–1837, 2 vols. (london: country life, 1962–70) darlington anne carol darlington, “the royal academy of arts and its anatomical teachings: with an examination of the art-anatomy practices during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in britain,” phd diss., university of london, 1990 dayes the works of the late edward dayes (london: mrs. dayes, 1805) dco r. o. bucholz, database of court officers, 1660–1837 <http://​courtofficers.​ctsdh.​luc.​edu> dodd thomas dodd, “memorials of engravers that have exercised or practised the art in great britain, including those of foreign countries in practice therein, from 1550 to 1800,” 14 vols., bl add. mss 33394-33407 dunlap william dunlap, a history of the rise and progress of the arts of design in the united states (1834; 2 vols. in 3, new york: dover, 1969) edwards edward edwards, anecdotes of painters who have resided or been born in england (london: leigh and sotheby, 1808) farington kenneth garlick, angus macintyre, et al., eds., the diary of joseph farington, 17 vols. (new haven: yale university press, 1978–98) farington, notebooks joseph farington, notebooks on artists and art, royal collection; edited typescript on microfilm (ep microform, 1973) figgis nicola figgis, ed., painting 1600–1900 (art and architecture of ireland, vol. 2) (dublin: royal irish academy, 2014) forrer l. forrer, biographical dictionary of medallists, coin-, gem-, and seal-engravers, mint-masters, &c., ancient and modern, 8 vols. (1904–30; london: baldwin, 1979) foskett daphne foskett, a dictionary of british miniature painters, 2 vols. (london: faber & faber, 1972) foster william foster, “british artists in india, 1760–1820,” volume of the walpole society 19 (1930–31): 1-88 founders online founders online: correspondence and other writings of six major shapers of the united states <https://​founders.​archives.​gov> fsa free society of artists, london getty provenance index getty provenance index databases <http://​piprod.​getty.​edu/​starweb​/pi/​servlet.​starweb?path=pi/​pi.web> gilbey sir walter gilbey, animal painters of england from the year 1650 [vol. 3: 1600]. a brief history of their lives and works, 3 vols. (london: vinton & co., 1900–11) grant maurice harold grant, a chronological history of the old english landscape painters in oil, rev. ed., 8 vols. (leigh-on-sea: f. lewis, 1957–61) graves algernon graves, the society of artists of great britain 1760–1791, the free society of artists 1761–1783: a complete dictionary of contributors and their work from the foundation of the societies to 1791 (1907; bath: kingsmead reprints, 1969)   algernon graves, the royal academy of arts: a complete dictionary of contributors and their work from its foundation in 1769 to 1904, 8 vols. (london: h. graves, 1905–06) grimwade arthur g. grimwade, london goldsmiths, 1697–1837: their marks and lives: from the original registers at goldsmiths’ hall and other sources, 3rd ed. (london: faber & faber, 1990) highfill philip h. highfill, jr., kalman a. burnim, and edward a. langhans, a biographical dictionary of actors, actresses, musicians, dancers, managers and other stage personnel in london, 1660–1800, 16 vols. (carbondale: southern illinois university press, 1973–93) hop history of parliament online <http://​www.​historyofparliamentonline.​org/​research/​members> huber & rost/ huber & martini m. huber with c. c. h. rost and c. g. martini, manuel des curieux et des amateurs de l’art, 9 vols. (zurich: orell, 1797–1808) hutchison sidney c. hutchison, “the royal academy schools, 1768–1830,” volume of the walpole society 38 (1960–62): 123-91 an edition of the student register at the ra; the numbered entries provided by hutchison are indicated as “h” numbers in the biographical dictionary that follows. ingamells john ingamells, a dictionary of british and irish travellers in italy, 1701–1800: compiled from the brinsley ford archive (new haven: yale university press, 1997) jeffares neil jeffares, dictionary of pastellists before 1800 (london: unicorn press, 2006); online edition <http://​www.​pastellists.​com> lemoine-bouchard nathalie lemoine-bouchard, les peintres en miniature: actifs en france, 1650–1850 (paris: éditions de l'amateur, 2008) lma london metropolitan archives records of sun fire office, policy registers, 1710–1886, clc/b/192/f/001; indexed online <http://​search.​lma.​gov.​uk> london lives tim hitchcock, robert shoemaker, sharon howard, jamie mclaughlin, et al., london lives, 1690 to 1800 <https://​www.​londonlives.​org> (version 1.1, april 2012) mallalieu h. l. mallalieu, the dictionary of british watercolour artists up to 1920, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (woodbridge: antique collectors’ club, 1986) mcewan peter j. m. mcewan, dictionary of scottish art and architecture (woodbridge: antique collectors’ club, 1994) murphy paula murphy, ed., sculpture 1600–2000 (art and architecture of ireland, vol. 3) (dublin: royal irish academy, 2014) national archives national archives, kew ir/1  register of duties paid for apprentices’ indentures, 1710–1811, accessed through <http://​www.​ancestry.​co.​uk> prob  england and wales, prerogative court of canterbury wills, 1384–1858, accessed through <http://​www.​ancestry.​co.​uk> npg jacob simon et al., research directories at the website of the national portrait gallery, london british artists’ suppliers, 1650–1950, 2006; last updated january 2017 british picture framemakers, 1600–1950, 2007; last updated january 2017 british picture restorers, 1600–1950, 2009; last updated january 2017 british bronze sculpture founders and plaster figure makers, 1800–1980, 2011; last updated january 2017 <http://​www.​npg.​org.​uk/​research> odnb oxford dictionary of national biography, 62 vols. (oxford: oxford university press, 2004); online edition, last updated january 2017 <http://​www.​oxforddnb.​com> old bailey tim hitchcock, robert shoemaker, clive emsley, sharon howard, jamie mclaughlin, et al., proceedings of the old bailey, 1674–1913 <https://​www.​oldbaileyonline.​org> (version 7.0, 24 march 2012) ottley william young ottley, notices of engravers, and their works, being the commencement of a new dictionary (london: longman, rees, orme, brown, & green, 1831) pasquin anthony pasquin [john williams], an authentic history of the professors of painting, sculpture, and architecture, who have practised in ireland (london: h. d. symonds, 1796) pyke e. j. pyke, a biographical dictionary of wax modellers (oxford: clarendon press, 1973) (with supplements published 1981 and 1983) ra royal academy of arts, london; royal academician raa archive of the royal academy, library of the royal academy of arts, london cm  council minutes nor  letters of james northcote raa/kee/1/1  register of admission of students, 1769–1830 raa/kee/2/1  plaister [antique] academy attendance books, 21 july 1790–17 march 1798 raa/kee/2/2  life academy attendance books, 21 july 1790–23 november 1799 raa/kee/1/3  register of admissions to the life academy, 1790–1803 (“students admitted to draw in the royal academy. the dates of their obtaining students tickets and of their admission into the life acad. by the committee of 1800 and the council”) redgrave samuel redgrave, a dictionary of artists of the english school: painters, sculptors, architects, engravers and ornamentists: with notices of their lives and work (1874; 2nd ed., london: george bell and sons, 1878) rkd netherlands institute for art history: rkdartists& database <https://​rkd.​nl/​en/​explore/​artists> rollco records of london’s livery companies online <http://​www.​londonroll.​org> sa society of artists, london saur allgemeines künstlerlexikon: die bildenden künstler aller zeiten und völker, 94 vols. (munich: k. g. saur, 1990–2017) smith j. t. smith, nollekens and his times, 2 vols. (1828; ed. wilfred whitten, london: john lane, 1920) stewart & cutten brian stewart and mervyn cutten, the dictionary of portrait painters in britain up to 1920 (woodbridge: antique collectors’ club, 1997) strickland walter g. strickland, a dictionary of irish artists, 2 vols. (dublin: maunsel & company, 1913); online edition <http://​www.​libraryireland.​com/​irishartists> survey of london survey of london, 47 vols. (london, 1900–2008); online edition <http://​www.​british-history.​ac.​uk/​survey-london> tuer andrew w. tuer, bartolozzi and his works, 2 vols. (london: field & tuer, 1882) waterhouse ellis k. waterhouse, the dictionary of british eighteenth century painters in oils and crayons (woodbridge: antique collectors’ club, 1981) whitley william t. whitley, artists and their friends in england, 1700–1799, 2 vols. (london: medici society, 1928) the biographical dictionary a   b   c   d   e   f   g   h   i   j   k   l   m   o   p   r   s   t   v   w john alefounder registered as a student 4 october 1776, aged 19 last september; architect (h270) silver medal 1782, 1784 marked as “deceased” in the register john alefounder (1757–94). portrait and miniature painter. although admitted to study as an architect, he won silver medals for academy figures and established a career as a portrait painter. born in greenstead, near colchester, the son of john alefounder (1731–87), carpenter, builder, and surveyor, and his wife sarah (vaughan). the father was named as “of the parish of saint gyles in the fields in the county of middlesex timber merchant” in a legal contract of 1760 (london lives) and was bankrupted in 1762, “carpenter, surveyor, dealer and chapman” (gazetteer 20 september 1762). in 1774 he was appointed “surveyor” of “the district of saint luke old street and the liberty of glass house,” and died holding that post in 1787. the surname is not common and the family originated in essex and suffolk; family members included a pawnbroker, navy surgeon, and carpenters. the elder john alefounder originated in colchester. john alefounder exhibited at the ra from 1777. he married in london in 1784, a marie jane curd or evans, but subsequently traveled to india, appearing in calcutta in 1785. he struggled to become established as a portrait painter, and in 1786 advertised that his studio contents were to be put up for sale. in 1788 thomas daniell reported that “alefounder (entre nous) does not get forward, nor ever will here. his unfortunate outset makes against him” (foster 6), but he struggled on, trying various schemes to make money from his art, before announcing his departure for england in 1793. in november of that year he wrote to his cousin in england: fortunes in this part of ye world are not made rapidly as heretofore, although my works (which chiefly is miniature) are approved, & i have the pleasure to tell you are highly spoken ^of. the chief part of the inhabitants are poor, and any price is thought too high for the times, 20 gold mohurs for a bracelet or ring, 25 do for a large locket, & 50 for a child’s whole length o[r] larger size, had i plenty of employment i should undoubtedly save money, a gold medal mohur is near 2£s english. but expences here are very high, and ye number of servants every gentleman is obliged to keep soon devour ye profits of my labour, when encouragement slackens. (photocopy at essex record office, online at alefounder family site, run by peter alefounder on rootsweb) his plans postponed, he died by his own hand in india in december 1794. a contemporary noted, “poor alefounder destroyed himself, and (shocking to relate) with a penknife. his head almost cut off. he had been very melancholy for some days” (foster 7). his will, written before departing for india, was proved 1795, referred to him as “portrait painter” of “bow street, covent garden” (national archives, prob 11/1266), and alluded to artist friends william elmer and john nash and a brother, george alefounder. m. j. alefounder received charity from the ra as “widow of j. alefounder, painter. student” (cm). (alefounder ancestors, run by peter alefounder) william alexander registered as a student 27 february 1784, aged 18, 10 april next; painter (h451) noted in the life school register 1 november 1790 william alexander (1767–1816). artist and museum curator. born in maidstone, kent, the son of harry alexander (d. 1783), a coachbuilder, and his wife, elizabeth. he attended maidstone grammar school before moving to london around 1782. a notice issued by his mother in the local press in 1783 indicated that his father, “coach and coach harness maker,” had died and “the business will be continued, for the benefit of herself and children, by the same workmen” (kentish gazette 29 november 1783). “he first studied drawing under mr william parr, of fountain court, strand, and afterwards was placed with ibbotson, the celebrated landscape painter” (“memoir of the author” in william alexander, a journey to beresford hall [london, 1841]). farington heard from former fellow student henry edridge that he “continued with him several years. during that time ibbetson was much employed by picture dealers in copying the works of loutherbourgh &c, which were frequently sold as originals. in this practice he was assisted by alexander, who continued in the same kind of employ after his engagement with ibbetson had terminated, and painted much in this way for a picture dealer & broker of the name of clarke, who resided in princes street, soho square” (notebooks 3: 9). in 1792–93 he was junior draftsman on lord macartney’s embassy to china, which provided subject matter for his exhibited and published work for the rest of his career. he married, in 1795, jane wogan or wagan, but she died shortly afterwards. in 1808 he was appointed assistant librarian at the british museum, and became first keeper of the newly formed department of prints and drawings. he died at his uncle’s house in maidstone in 1816. charles ansell registered as a student 6 september 1780, aged 24 next november; painter (h365) charles ansell (1756–active 1799). animal painter. “reputed for his drawing of the horse” (redgrave). possibly connected with the m. ansell who exhibited needlework as an honorary exhibitor at the sa 1776–80, latterly from the boarding school, tottenham. charles ansell exhibited at the ra 1780–81, from 1 edward street, cavendish square. probably, therefore, the son of, or otherwise closely related to, robert ansell (d. 1789), carver and gilder, and picture dealer, who was based in edward street, cavendish square, around 1777–82. in 1785 he advertised the publication at 1 edward street of an aquatint print of “the celebrated convent, called the paraclete, founded by abelard in the year 1130 … engraved by f. jukes, from the view taken on the spot by c. ansell” (morning post 24 january 1785). this suggests he had traveled in france. he provided illustrations for an edition of thomson’s seasons published in london and paris in 1792, and designs for social satires until 1799, which seems to be the latest date he is recorded as an artist. william arminger registered as a student 21 march 1774, aged 21, 22 last november; sculptor (h225) marked as “do” [“decd”] in the register william arminger (1751–93). sculptor. baptized 17 november 1751, st. stephen’s, norwich, the son of john arminger and his wife mary. his father is probably the john arminger, carpenter, who took an apprentice in norwich in 1754 (national archives, ir 1/52), and also presumably the “late carpenter” of norwich who died 1800 (national archives, prob 11/1341). armingers remain engaged in the building trades in norwich to the present day. he was apprenticed in norwich to thomas rawlins, “carver,” in 1766 (national archives, ir 1/56). he came to london to study art, and was employed by nollekens. j. t. smith said he came to nollekens stating he was a “cutter of funeral inscriptions come from the city of norwich, and would be glad of a job.” he died in paddington in 1793, smith reporting that he had “what is called a very pretty fortune.” his art collection was sold by auction early in 1794 (getty provenance index). william artaud registered as a student 31 december 1778, aged 15, 24 march last; painter (h327) silver medal 1783, gold medal 1786 noted in the life school register 30 october 1790 rome prize 1795 william artaud (1763–1823). portrait and history painter. born london, the son of stephen artaud, a jeweler of huguenot descent, and his wife, elizabeth. he won prizes at the society of arts 1775–82, and after academic prizes at the academy secured the rome scholarship in 1795. he was reportedly a political radical, but was initially successful as a history painter on returning to london in 1799. he exhibited at the ra until 1822, and died, apparently unmarried, in london in 1823, “an artist of eminence” (morning post 18 february 1823). (a. c. sewter, “the life, work and letters of william artaud 1763–1823,” 2 vols., ma thesis, university of manchester, 1951; kim sloan, “william artaud: history painter and ‘violent democrat,’” burlington magazine 137 [february 1995]: 76-85) joseph baker registered as a student 25 march 1779 (cm only) (h341) not identified. foskett notes a j. baker who advertised as a miniaturist in chester in 1785, but it is very uncertain that it was this student. john baldrey registered as a student 29 march 1781, aged 23, 18th inst.; engraver (h386) noted in the life school register 13 november 1793 john baldrey (1758–active 1805). engraver and print publisher. jeffares asserts he was the son of andrew baldrey (d. 1802), general painter of ipswich, and his wife mary (1728–1806), and therefore younger brother of joshua kirby baldrey (1754–1828), artist and drawing teacher, although it has previously been suggested that there were two john baldreys, father and son, or a john baldrey who was the son of joshua kirby baldrey. john baldrey, “engraver in london,” married the daughter of robert cole, baker of ipswich, in 1783 (ipswich journal 1 november 1783). probably the “s. baldrey” who exhibited stained drawings at the sa in 1780, from “mr dibb’s, green street, grosvenor square,” although that address was also used by joshua kirby baldrey for prints published around that date. the bm notes he was imprisoned in 1792 “for an offensive satire” (information from david alexander). john and joshua kirby baldrey worked together occasionally but appear to have fallen out by 1805 (farington, 13 september 1805; noted by bm). his later career appears to be undocumented. his brother is known to have struggled financially. mary jane baldrey, widow of joshua kirby baldrey, “an eminent engraver,” applied to the agbi in 1834, stating that her husband had died in 1828, leaving her “in a very destitute state, having nothing to support herself and family but the sale of a few prints and drawings,” with seven dependent children (agbi applicants’ book). she was granted £10. john banister registered as a student 31 march 1777, aged 16 last 12 may; painter (h286) john bannister (1760–1836). comedian. born deptford, the son of charles bannister (1738?–1804), actor, and his wife sarah. noted as a former fellow student by guy head (farington 4: 1380) and as a particular friend of thomas rowlandson. he was said to have been a student only a short time, leaving in 1778, and was more occupied in pranks than study: “the more regular students were glad when he left them” (adolphus 1: 15). henry angelo recounted: bannister having manifested a taste for drawing whilst a school-boy, his father, not wishing to bring him up to the stage, or indeed to thwart his inclinations in the choice of his future profession, procured him early admittance as a student in the royal academy. his progress there was flattering, as i have been informed by his coevals; and his love for the study of painting, which has abided by him through life, gave presage of future excellence, had he continued his course. indeed, it is likely that he would have continued to follow his art in the landscape department, had not a fortuitous circumstance intervened, which entirely changed his future destiny. (1: 263) the “circumstance” related by angelo was his father’s inability to pay the full apprenticeship fee demanded by philip james de loutherbourg. he began his stage career in august 1778, achieving success as a performer and manager. (john adoplhus, memoirs of john bannister, comedian, 2 vols. [london, 1839] 1: 13-15; henry angelo, reminiscences, 2 vols. [london, 1828–30] 1: 263-67 and passim) thomas barrow registered as a student 31 march 1777, aged 28 years; painter (h287) thomas barrow (1737–1822). portrait painter. “probably northern provincial” (waterhouse). foskett identifies a thomas barrow (1737–1822), son of matthew barrow of great eccleston, lancashire, presumably on the basis of the detailed information given by fishwick. the discrepancy with the birthdate given in the register remains unresolved. the barrow family were well established in eccleston, and included shoemakers and carpenters. thomas barrow gave his address as 4 furnival’s inn court when he exhibited with the fsa in 1769; william barrow, “gentleman,” was latterly insured at furnival’s inn court (1808 and 1810) and was presumably connected (lma). joseph charles barrow (active 1789–1802), who gave drawing lessons at 12 furnival’s inn court after 1792, may possibly have also been connected (although his father has been identified as charles barrow, a tradesman in twickenham; john a. ramm, “neglected master,” antique dealer and collectors’ guide [february 1992]). thomas barrow gave romney’s address on exhibiting in 1770, so was presumably a pupil or assistant. he continued to exhibit in london 1771–74, giving a york address. he was in london again in 1775. the thomas barrow identified by fishwick “painted the portraits of many people in the fylde district, and some of them show considerable merit”; he died in 1822 at great eccleston. a death notice in the local press suggested incorrectly that he was an ra, and stated that he was “formerly a portrait painter of great eminence in the metropolis,” being 84 years old when he died (lancaster gazette 30 november 1822). he is identified as thomas barrow, “gent,” in his will, held at lancashire archives (r142/31); a further document at the same location identifies him as portrait painter and stephen barrow of great eccleston, “gent,” as the sole executor (dda 292). (henry fishwick, the history of the parish of st. michaels-on-wyre in the county of lancaster [manchester, 1891] 199; josephine malone, peter newby: friend to all mankind [ayleford, 1964] 96-98; helen quartermaine, “thomas barrow: portrait painter, contemporary and friend of romney,” transactions of the romney society 17 [2012]; p. whittle, the history of the borough of preston [preston, 1837] 2: 246-47) james barry registered as a student 21 march 1774, aged 18, 6 november last (h226) james barry (1756–active 1819). miniature painter. “little is known about this artist who painted some excellent miniatures” (foskett). however, he appears to be “barry, the miniature painter,” noted by farington in 1794: “he & the revd. dr barry are sons to an apothecary of that name who lived at bristol hot wells. he married a miss brown, daughter of a minor canon of bristol, a pretty & good kind of woman.—the revd. dr barry was brought up an apothecary and not being able to obtain orders in england, went to the isle of man, where he was ordained” (1: 265). he must, therefore, be the son of samuel barry, doctor in physic, who died in bristol in 1814, his will benefiting sons, including james barry, the rev. edward barry, and the rev. charles barry (national archives, prob 11/1554). a james barry was baptized in bristol 15 december 1756, son of anna and samuel, and is probably this individual. exhibited at the ra from 1784; went to lisbon in 1788 for health reasons, but resumed his career in london in 1792. an occasional exhibitor up to 1819. francis bartoli registered as a student 29 march 1781, aged 16, 4 next november; painter (h387) francis saverio massimigliano bartoli (1765–active 1793). decorative painter. born in sproatley, yorkshire, 4 november 1765, the son of domenico bartoli (active c. 1761–1805), italian-born stuccoist, originally from livorno. domenico bartoli was employed at burton constable 1763–66, which explains the birthplace of his son. he had been first recorded in britain in 1761. the baptism records of further children born in london show that the mother’s first name was ursula, which may indicate that she too was italian. domenico bartoli was in business with john augustus richter in london 1767–77, and is last recorded in 1805. f. bartoli of 18 sherrard street, golden square, exhibited at the ra in 1783; as f. bartoli, jr., he exhibited with the same body in 1793, from 38 great suffolk street. he, and/or his father, was the “bartoli” who painted the “beautiful columns of verde antico” at mrs. montagu’s great room at her house in portman square, london, in 1791 (st. james’s chronicle, quoted in peter meadows, joseph bonomi: architect, 1739–1808 [riba, 1988] 20). ursula bartoli, presumably his mother, was insured at 15 james street, haymarket, in 1800 (lma), which may suggest that his father was already dead and that the later records noted by the bdsb refer to this student, or another member of the family. william bell registered as a student 8 april 1778, aged 23 next may; painter (h318) william bell (1755–active 1778). not identified. foskett suggests that he may be the william bell who married mary ann ward at st. marylebone, 16 may 1804, distinguishing him from the william bell (1735?–c. 1804), miniature and history painter from newcastle. john hodges benwell registered as a student 25 march 1779, aged 17, 6 next may; painter (h342) silver medal 1782 john hodges benwell (1762–85). draftsman and illustrator. born blenheim palace, oxfordshire, in 1762, “where his father was under-steward to the duke of marlborough” (odnb). jeffares notes that “his social standing may have been rather higher than this suggests, as he was the son of samuel benwell” who died 1777, whose will “bequested his estate to james benwell, a well-known sadler of bartholomew lane … on trust for his widow rachel hodges, to pass to their children on her death,” which occurred in 1788. he studied under sanders, probably john sanders (active 1750–83). he exhibited in 1784 at the ra, giving his address as 24 henrietta street, covent garden, and was active as a drawing master in bath. he died of consumption in london in 1785, his obituary writer in the gentleman’s magazine noting him as “miniature and historical painter, of henrietta-street, covent-garden.” cantlo bestland registered as a student 25 march 1779, aged 16 next april; painter (h343) cantelowe or cantlo bestland (1763–1842). miniature painter, engraver, and printseller. he was probably the son of the cantlo bestland who was buried at sturminster marshall in 1783, aged 56, his will benefiting his widow amy thompson bestland. presumably also related to henry bestland, esq., who died at dorchester 16 march 1738 (gentleman’s magazine). exhibited miniatures at the ra from 1783 to 1837, initially from addresses in tavistock street. he appears as “limner,” great marlborough street, in wakefield’s directory, 1790. he married, in 1810, elizabeth longman, at st. giles cripplegate. he must be the cantlo bestland, “artist,” said to be aged 83, who appears in the 1841 census in st. marylebone, with a wife, elizabeth, and a daughter, elizabeth, aged 46, and therefore the individual of the same name who died in 1842 and was buried at st. marylebone in june 1842, although his age was then given as 97 (presumably a simple transposition in the record). in january 1842 he had applied to the agbi for support, “painter & engraver now in the 79th year of his age and from very long illness and great bodily infirmity and want of employment, he is at this time reduced to a state of complete want and destitution” with a wife in poor health: early in life he was induced to undertake the work of the royal academy the engraving of which was entirely by his own hand. this work completely failed to answer and he lost a large sum of money by it. (agbi applicants’ book) bestland’s large engraving of henry singleton’s group portrait of the royal academicians had been published by him in 1802. he was granted an initial sum of £20 by the agbi. his widow, mrs. elizabeth bestland, applied to the agbi in june 1842 and was granted £30. peter bettelini registered as a student 12 november 1784, aged 20 last september; engraver (h461) silver medal 1786 pietro bettelini (1763–1829). he “was born at lugano, in italy, in 1763, and came over when very young to this country to study under bartolozzi. he appears … to have been somewhat wild …. bettelini eventually settled down to work, following the classic style of raphael morghen, and achieved a considerable reputation” (tuer 2: 47-48). he was publishing in paris in 1784, but exhibited biblical subjects at the ra in 1786, from 7 coventry street, and was publishing in rome in 1793. william redmore bigg registered as a student 31 december 1778, aged 24 next january/79; painter (h328) william redmore bigg (1755–1828). genre painter. born felsted, essex, the son of william bigg and his wife grace (redmore). the biggs were well established in the area as farmers and landowners, and william redmore bigg appears to have inherited property at felsted. according to farington, he received a classical education (9: 3211), which would point to a genteel upbringing. in his biographical note, farington left his reference to his father’s occupation incomplete, but noted that bigg was at the age of 14 “placed as an apprentice, with a wine merchant at colchester, where he remained seven years” (notebooks 4: 55). his gentlemanly manners were noted in early biographical notices (bensusan-butt 192-93). he studied in london under edward penny and exhibited 1780–1827. he married, in colchester in 1784, martha frost, the daughter of samuel frost of beaumont-cum-moze. his genre paintings were initially popular and widely reproduced, but in the 1790s he struggled financially and took to picture dealing and picture restoration. he was made ra in 1814. he died in london. (john bensusan-butt, ed. shani d’cruze, essex in the age of enlightenment: essays in historical biography, 2nd ed. [2009] 191-94) john lewes blackmore registered as a student 8 april 1778, aged 20 last january; painter (h319) john lewis blackmore (1758–1827). housepainter. baptized 14 february 1758, st. mary’s, lambeth, the son of john blackmore and his wife elizabeth. he may be related to john blackmore who exhibited at the fsa in 1769, from “at mr wilkes opposite dorset street piccadilly,” and thomas blackmore (c. 1740–after 1780), mezzotint engraver, who exhibited prints at the sa in 1769 and fsa in 1773 and is known from published works from 1769 to 1771. he was apprenticed to thomas maxfield, citizen and painter stainer, in 1773. when he was insured at 6 hollis street, cavendish square, in 1791, it was as a “painter,” which indicates he had entered the trade (lma). in his will, which referred to his late wife, maria, he was identified as “esquire” of upper norton street, suggesting material success (national archives, prob 11/1728). he appears to have remarried, to amelia, “daughter of the late j. hitchins, esq, of garston-hall, surrey,” in 1825 (oxford university and city herald 12 november 1825). he owned property in london, which was bequeathed to his family but was subject to legal dispute in 1830 (morning advertiser 12 february 1829; london courier 29 december 1830). robert blake registered as a student 2 april 1782, aged 14 last 4 august; engraver (h415) traditionally identified as robert blake (1762 or 1767–87), the brother of william blake, therefore born in london, the son of james blake, hosier, and his wife, catherine (wright). the evidence has been weighed by aileen ward, who concludes that robert blake was probably the son of james and catherine baptized as richard blake in 1762, but is less certain that this is the same individual as the ra student. the identification remains credible, however, given the absence of another clear candidate, the pattern of siblings following each other into the ra schools, and the haphazard character of the register, which often gives birthdates and ages at variance with other records. (aileen ward, “who was robert blake?” blake 28.3 (winter 1994–95): 84-89) william blake registered as a student 8 october 1779, aged 21, 28 last november; engraver (h358) william blake (1757–1827). engraver, poet, and painter. born in london, the son of james blake, hosier, and his wife, catherine (wright). john linnell bond registered as a student 4 december 1783, aged 19, 14 last september; drawing (architect) (h440) silver medal 1784, gold medal 1786 john linnell bond (1764–1837). architect. in the register “drawing” is struck through in favor of “architect.” although the odnb asserts that “of his parents nothing is known,” he was evidently the brother of william bond, confirmed by the record of baptism at st. james, westminster, with the same parents, william bond and mary (linnell), october 1764. william bond is also named as his brother in obituaries (gentleman’s magazine; morning chronicle 13 november 1837). his father had been apprenticed to william linnell (d. 1763), carver, in 1753. he must be the j. bond noted in the life school register 7 october 1790, indicating that he continued to study the figure. he was an executor of john linnell, the carver, in 1797, and was identified as “godson and kinsman” in the ensuing legal dispute. see also pat kirkham, “the london furniture trade, 1700–1870,” furniture history 24 (1988): 97-98. william bond registered as a student 4 december 1783, aged 20, 9 last may; sculptor (h441) noted in the life school register 30 september 1790 william bond (1763–1842). engraver. baptized 21 may 1763 in westminster, the son of william bond, carver, and his wife mary (linnell). his father had been apprenticed to william linnell (d. 1763), carver, in 1753. this student is presumably the “mr william bond, jun, white-chapel, pupil to mr burgess, sen.” who exhibited at the sa in 1772, though he would have been only 9 years old. although registered as a sculptor, he was said to have studied stipple engraving under bartolozzi and appears to have practiced only as a printmaker. he was presumably the “mr w. bond. drawing-master, from london” who was advertising in kent in 1786 (kentish gazette 21 july 1786). he was prominent as a stipple engraver and was first president of the society of engravers on its foundation in 1803. his will referred to several properties in london (national archives, prob 11/1965). thomas bonnor/bonner registered as a student 31 december 1778, aged 33 next february; engraver (h329) thomas bonnor (1746–active 1807). draftsman and engraver. he “was a native of gloucestershire, and drew and engraved the churches of that county” (redgrave). there were bonnors in gloucestershire in the mid-eighteenth century, including a thomas bonnor (d. 1743), a mason, thomas bonnor, son of thomas bonnor, grocer, made free of the city of gloucester in 1760, and a thomas bonnor (d. 1785), “gentleman” (worth between £600 and £1000 at death), who seem likely to be relatives. he won a premium at the society of arts, 1763. he married, in 1768 in gloucester, a miss fry “of the college,” being then described as “an eminent engraver, in new ormond-street, london” (bath chronicle 29 december 1768). thomas bonnor exhibited engravings at the sa in 1773, his address given as great ormond street. he exhibited at the ra in 1780 and (assuming it is the same individual) 1807. he was the “father and original founder” of the gloucestershire society in london in 1770, but latterly lived in gloucester (gloucester journal 27 may 1793; gloucestershire chronicle 20 february 1836). the death of his wife was noted in the bath press in 1790: “after a long illness, mrs bonnor, wife of mr bonnor, engraver of glocester [sic],—late of this city” (bath chronicle 21 october 1790). he advertised the publication of his topographical “copper plate itinerary” from gloucester in 1795 (gloucester journal 20 july 1795). he was active in 1807 and is said to have died before 1812 (gloucester citizen 18 may 1950; odnb). mathias bordley registered as a student 31 march 1777, aged 19, 25 october last; painter (h288) matthias bordley (1757–1828). plantation owner. born maryland, the son of john beale bordley (1727–1804), plantation owner, judge, and amateur artist, and his wife margaret (chew). he was sent to england with his brother thomas (1755–71) for their education in 1767, their father consigning them to the care of his half-brother edmund jennings, engaging a private tutor, and sending them to preparatory schools and, reportedly, eton college. he was painted with his brother in a miniature by charles willson peale (smithsonian), who had been sent to london by their father and other sponsors, and in an oil as archers in van dyck costume, which was exhibited at the sa in 1768 (illus. mcgrath). another brother, john beale bordley (1764–1815), followed them to england in 1773. in 1771 peale had reported to their guardian, “the boys draws [sic] very cleverly i wish their master may teach [them] to sketch from nature, i mean landscape, it may be very useful, will certainly be a great amusement, one rude line from nature is worth an hundred from coppys, enlarges the ideas and makes one see and feel with such sencesations—as are worthy of the author,” which indicates they were getting a preliminary training in drawing (lillian b. miller, ed., the selected papers of charles willson peale and his family [new haven, 1983] 1: 101). the signed card admitting “mathias bordley” as a student at the ra, 31 march 1777, is in the university of pennsylvania library. he was living at the family estate by around 1781 (gibson 122). in 1783, peale, in philadelphia, wrote to john beale bordley, “i have observed with what attention matthias looks on works of art, and i prognosticate that he will excel if … he is not diverted from the art by other pursuits. i have promised him all the assistance in my power,” subsequent letters referring to his provision of art materials and equipment (miller 1: 391). matthias bordley took on the estates at wye island, maryland, when his father moved to philadelphia in 1791, but continued as an amateur artist. he married susan heath in 1799. (elizabeth bordley gibson, biographical sketches of the bordley family of maryland [philadelphia, 1865]; francis sims mcgrath, pillars of maryland [richmond, va, 1950]) peter borgis registered as a student 8 april 1778, aged 39; painter (h320) peter maria borgnis (1743–1814). printseller, publisher, and drawing master. born at craveggia in the val di vigezzo, near domodossola, the son of giuseppe maria borgnis (1701–61), italian decorative and historical painter. his birthdate is given as 1743 in documentary sources (croft-murray). the elder borgnis came to england around 1751, presumably bringing his family with him. in 1783 the architect robert adam referred in a letter to “mr peter bornis” who “paints ornaments & figures. but as there is little encouragement at present for anything of taste, he has taken a shop in marybone street where he proposes to sell drawings, prints, &c” (quoted in croft-murray). his trade card (bm) identifies him as “drawing master and miniature painter.” he was based in marylebone street, haymarket, where he was insured as “printseller” in 1786, and later in oxford street (lma). he died in 1814, said to be of st. marylebone and aged 77, and was buried as a nonconformist in the family grave at whitefield’s memorial church in camden. his older brother giovanni borgnis (1728–active 1783) was also an artist, active in england. the joseph borgnis, printseller of great portland street, declared bankrupt in 1801, must have been another relative (morning post 2 february 1801). croft-murray also notes a t. borgnis, in business as a colorman in high holborn in 1818. john boultbee registered as a student 4 december 1775, aged 22; painter (h255) john boultbee (1753–1812). sporting painter. baptized osgathorpe, leicestershire, 4 june 1753, one of the twin sons of thomas boultbee (1724–85) of stordon grange, leicestershire, and his wife jane (bage; d. 1789), the other child being his fellow student thomas boultbee. the family were well-established landowners in leicestershire. according to gilbey, “both the boys evinced marked artistic talent at an early age, and in course of time became pupils of sir joshua reynolds” (1: 68). exhibited ra 1776–88, from oxford street and then from loughborough, leicestershire. later lived in chester and finally edge hill, liverpool, where he died in 1812 (lancaster gazette 12 december 1812). (thomas pownall boultbee, the history of the family of boultbee [1889], web version by richard boultbee) thomas boultbee registered as a student 4 december 1775, aged 22; painter (h256) thomas boultbee (1753–1808). landscape and portrait painter. baptized osgathorpe, leicestershire, 4 june 1753, one of the twin sons of thomas boultbee (1724–85) of stordon grange, leicestershire, and his wife jane (bage; d. 1789), the other child being his fellow student john boultbee. the family were well-established landowners in leicestershire. according to gilbey, “both the boys evinced marked artistic talent at an early age, and in course of time became pupils of sir joshua reynolds” (1: 68). “he is said to have given up the professional exercise of painting and his works are not known” (waterhouse). exhibited ra 1776–83, from oxford street and then derby. he married in 1792 and lived in shropshire. (thomas pownall boultbee, the history of the family of boultbee [1889], web version by richard boultbee) hugh boyd registered as a student 29 march 1781, aged 20, 9 inst.; painter (h388) hugh boyd (1761–active 1781). he must be the hugh boyd born burr street, aldgate, 9 march 1761, whose birth was registered as a nonconformist, 6 march 1777, the son of william boyd and his wife margaret, daughter of isaac saar. his parents had married in 1760, his father then identified as being of walthamstow, essex. the occupation of his father has not been established, but the houses on burr street were relatively substantial, albeit adjacent to the red lion brewery and the london docks. insurance records point to the street being populated by “gentlemen” as well as mariners and tradesmen (lma). the family history indicates that he was born into an affluent situation. hugh boyd appears not to have been active as an artist. he married in 1781, but his wife and twin children died early and he took to religion. he married again and raised a second family, becoming a dissenting minister. (smith family tree, posted by “anatuana” on <http://www.ancestry.co.uk>, and private information) w. braithwaite registered as a student 25 march 1776, aged 18 last october 13th; sculptor (h267) silver medal 1782 william braithwaite (1757–active 1782). sculptor. apprenticed to john walsh (active 1757–77), statuary of st. george, hanover square, in 1776 (national archives, ir 1/28), but not known other than from his record as a student at the academy. he seems likely to be related to the braithwaites who were active as cabinetmakers, upholders, and carvers in london in the mid-eighteenth century, including a samuel braithwaite (active 1757–1811), also an auctioneer and appraiser, and ebenezer braithwaite (active 1757), the sons of samuel braithwaite, cheesemonger, of st. andrew’s, holborn (beard & gilbert). thomas brooks registered as a student 30 september 1777, aged 28 last september; painter (h306) thomas brooks (1749–active 1791?). landscape painter. apparently from a family of trade painters in london. perhaps connected to the thomas brooks of the painter stainers’ company who died 1743 (national archives, prob 11/724) and the thomas brooks who was master of the painter stainers’ company in 1775. the thomas brooks who had been apprenticed to william evans, painter stainer, in 1742 may be his father. this student may be the thomas brooks described as a liveryman and painter stainer of st. olave, southwark, who died in 1794, naming a widow, jane (national archives, prob 11/1247). he exhibited in 1782–83 and then in 1791. waterhouse suggests that he was a relative of the william brooks who exhibited landscapes from 1780–1800. mather brown registered as a student 7 january 1782, aged 19, 5 last october; painter (h406) mather (byles) brown (1761–1831). portrait and history painter. born boston, the son of gawen brown, a clockmaker, and elizabeth byles (d. 1763). his mother was descended from famous puritan divines, and the family portraits that remained with the byleses have been identified as an early source of inspiration for mather brown. he may have been given art lessons by his aunt, catherine byles, who took on a parental role after the early death of his mother. instructed briefly by gilbert stuart in america, he worked as an itinerant miniature painter, saving up enough to travel to europe in 1780. he was in paris in 1780, and secured a letter of introduction from benjamin franklin, which he took to england in 1781, gaining him a place in benjamin west’s studio. by his own account, he “was patronized in early life by dr franklin, who recommended him to study at the louvre and french academy” (bl add. ms 33397, f. 267). he also had a letter of introduction from franklin’s grandson, william temple franklin, identifying him as “a young gentleman from america, who purposes residing sometime in london with a view of perfectioning himself in the art of miniature painting—he is a young man of good family & of a very amiable character” (evans 15). he reported drawing in the plaster schools and in the life school (evans 23-24). he was also painting in oils at the size of life, exhibiting such a work at the ra in 1782. however, he also declared his commitment to history painting: i am oblidged [sic] to keep close to business as i am convinced i am at the most critical period of my life and every moment carries its importance with it; history painting is what i prefer to all others, as it [is] on a more extensive plan, and requires the advantages of education united with the luxuriance of a fine imagination. (letter of august 1782, quoted in evans 28) he enjoyed success as a portrait and history painter in the 1780s and early 1790s, and secured royal patronage, but his professional fortunes declined after 1800. in 1808 he moved out of london and took on some teaching at a school in buckinghamshire. he traveled to bath, liverpool, manchester, and elsewhere, teaching and practicing as an artist. his later years were spent in london, living in a room in the house of the landscape painter thomas hofland. he died unmarried in 1831. (dorinda evans, mather brown: early american artist in england [middletown, ct, 1982]) samuel bunce registered as a student 7 march 1785, aged 20, 20 last january; painter (h466) marked as “dead” in the register samuel bunce (1765–1802). architect. possibly descended from john bunce, warden and master of the plaisterers’ company in london, 1717–18 (beard), and the thomas bunce, plasterer in spitalfields, active in the 1720s and 1730s (survey of london). he exhibited architectural designs at the ra 1786–88, initially from “mr wyatt’s, queen anne street east,” indicating he was a pupil of the architect. he went to rome 1788–90, returning to london to practice as an architect. in 1796 he was appointed the first architect to the admiralty, which post he held until his death. his widow received a navy pension. henry jacob burch registered as a student 25 march 1779, aged 16 last december; engraver (h344) noted in the life school register 23 october 1790 henry jacob burch (1762–c. 1840). gem engraver and miniature painter. the son of edward burch (1730–1814), gem engraver and ra, and his first wife, ann (stockley; d. 1793), and baptized st. bride, fleet street, 30 december 1762. he married, in 1784, elizabeth beresford, in st. marylebone. as “h. burch junior” he exhibited at the sa in 1790, “8 macclesfield street, soho, going to remove to 28, gerrard street”; he exhibited at the ra from 1787 to 1831. a fire destroyed his house in rathbone place in 1793. his brother, edward burch, jr., also exhibited, as a medalist, 1789–1804. this student seems likely to be the individual identifying himself as the son of edward burch, ra, and aged 67, who was noted in the cm 30 may 1831 asking for charity, as he was “wholly without employment.” he applied to the agbi in 1839, stating that he was 76 and suffering paralysis; he was granted £20 (agbi applicants’ book). george burder registered as a student 9 april 1774 (cm only). compounded with the entry for stephanoff by hutchison. rev. george burder (1752–1832). independent minister. born london, his birth registered as a nonconformist at fetter lane, 18 june 1752, the son of henry burder (1718–88), deacon of fetter lane congregational church, and his wife sarah (1718–62). his father was identified as “esquire” in his will (national archives, prob 11/1165). educated at two schools in hatton garden, but “having discovered, as my father thought, some partiality for drawing, i was placed under the care of mr isaac taylor, an artist of some eminence” (burder 8). taylor (1730–1807) was an engraver, and duties were paid on the apprenticeship in 1766 (national archives, ir 1/25). he noted in the memoranda of his early life under “1773” (when his seven-year apprenticeship would have ended), “about this time i became a student in the royal academy, somerset house, for improvement in drawing and perspective. i drew from the casts of antique figures. i also attended lectures on anatomy, on architecture, &c” (burder 20). he recalled falling ill early in 1774, and traveled with his father from may and june that year, so his time at the academy must have been rather limited. although engravings by him from 1775 to 1777 are in the bm, by his own account he became more committed to spiritual affairs in that earlier year, becoming a subscriber and director of the evangelical society in 1776. writing of the year 1777, he stated: “after prayer, deliberation, and advice, i … entirely laid aside my business as an artist” (burder 45), becoming minister of the independent church in lancaster. he was prominent in dissenting affairs, being a founding figure of the british and foreign bible society, the religious tract society, the london missionary society, and editor of the evangelical magazine. (henry forster burder, memoir of the rev. george burder [london, 1833]) christien burkhardt registered as a student 31 december 1777, aged 15, 24 last october; painter (h312) silver medal 1780 christian borckhardt (1762–1826). portrait and miniature painter. born in london, baptized 14 november 1762, st. martin in the fields, westminster, the son of john borkhardt [sic] and his wife mary. presumably of swiss origins; he was apprenticed in 1777 to the swiss-born enamel painter and founder ra george michael moser. c. borckhardt exhibited miniatures and pastels at the ra 1784–1810, from 59 little castle street, oxford market, various other london addresses, and, from 1807, hampstead. he was insured at 46 goodge street in 1790, “portrait painter” (lma). he married frances pritchett (d. 1826) in st. pancras in 1803, with whom he already had children. he died in hampstead in 1826. edward francesco burney registered as a student 31 march 1777, aged 16, 17 last september; painter (h289) silver medal 1780 noted in the life school register 18 february 1791 edward francesco burney (1760–1848). illustrator and comic artist. son of richard burney (1723–92) of barborne lodge, worcester, a music master, and his wife elizabeth (humphries; c. 1720–71). nephew of the musicologist charles burney, and cousin of fanny burney. the connection with charles burney ensured privileged attention from reynolds. in 1779, charles burney noted: sr jos. has seen 2 or 3 of my nephews academy drawings & has lent him birk’s portrait to copy—i asked him to send him a picture, & he has kindly desired him to come & chuse—upon seeing the timid young man’s drawings—he asked if he had been under cipriani—said they were in a grand style—& told him he wd lend him a more pleasing subject next time—&c—this i know will please you & our fan, to whom i beg you to tell it, as i have not time—’tis a modest lad of real merit—i dare not say genius—but i will say his disposition toward the brush is strong. (alvaro ribeiro, the letters of dr. charles burney: volume i, 1751–1784 [oxford, 1991] 290) in september 1784 charles burney noted him as “a student in the r. acad. of painting & a lad of very great genius, who has made 3 drawings for my commemoration account, that the king & queen have seen, & i was told, were highly delighted with:—but what is still more & better, sir jos. reynolds, mr strange, bartolozzi, wyatt, & other very eminent artists have said very kind & flattering things of them” (ribeiro 436). he was prolific as an illustrator until the 1820s, but pursued his art largely privately: “never would he listen to any representation that anybody made that tended to demand some courage, or even the smallest exertion to bring his merit forward” (fanny burney in a letter of 1826, quoted in patricia crown, drawings by e. f. burney in the huntington collection [san marino, ca, 1982] 3). thomas frederick burney registered as a student 7 march 1785, aged 19, 22 january last; engraver (h467) thomas frederick burney (1765–85). son of richard burney (1723–92) of barborne lodge, worcester, a music master, and his wife elizabeth (humphries; c. 1720–71). according to family notes, “at the age of about 15, [he] display’d an uncommon genius for pen & ink drawings” (quoted in alvaro ribeiro, the letters of dr. charles burney: volume i, 1751–1784 [oxford, 1991] 436n). in september 1784 his uncle, the musicologist charles burney, noted in a letter referring to charles’s brother richard at worcester: “he has a 5th [son] who lives with him at worcester, a lad of great genius, likewise, for drawing, & if you should make an excursion to worcester, my brother will shew you such a collection of prints & drawings, as would take 2 or 3 days at least to examine” (ribeiro 436). he exhibited at the ra, a portrait, in 1785, from 79 long acre, but died of consumption in october of that year. joseph cappe registered as a student 8 october 1779, aged 19, 25 last july; painter (h359) marked as “dd” in the register joseph cappe (1760–91). medical student. the son of the unitarian minister and preacher newcome cappe (1733–1800) and his wife sarah (turner). he exhibited, a portrait, at the ra in 1780, from 2 tavistock row, covent garden. this was noted as “a good likeness of mr walker, lecturer in philosophy” (a candid review of the exhibition [london, 1780] 26). he studied medicine in edinburgh and london, getting a degree at leyden in 1790. he died in york in february 1791, the gentleman’s magazine noting, “he had particularly distinguished himself by his knowledge in chemistry and anatomy, and had attained considerable skill in painting.” william carr registered as a student 7 january 1784, aged 24, 1 last july; painter (h448) noted in the life school register 13 august 1794 william carr (1759–active 1792). portrait painter. waterhouse notes “a small (and bad) family group” signed w. carr and dated 1792. he does not appear as an exhibiting artist and is not otherwise recorded. c. carter registered as a student 8 april 1778 charles carter (c. 1760–active 1788). domestic servant and amateur printmaker. he is identified by dodd: “an amateur practitioner in etching resided at york at the date 1770—of his hand we denote the three following portraits” of edith pope, stephen croft, fas, and william mason, ma (bl add. ms 33398, f. 63). james grainger identified him as the servant of mason (biographical history of england [london, 1824] 336). mason refers to him in his correspondence with walpole, noting in march 1778 that “i left him in town to perfect himself in drawing at the academy” (13 march 1778; the yale edition of horace walpole’s correspondence, <http://​images.​library.​yale.​edu/​hwcorrespondence>). he had referred to him in 1773 as “my boy charles,” suggesting he was then a youth, so he was probably born c. 1760. charles catton, junr registered as a student 6 march 1775, aged 18, 30th december last; painter (h241) charles catton, jr. (1756–1819). landscape and animal painter and illustrator. born london, the son of charles catton (1728–98), coach painter and painter of landscapes and animals. he trained with his father and exhibited at the ra from 1776 to 1800, initially from his father’s address. a reviewer commenting on a dog portrait exhibited in 1780 stated that “this young artist seems to tread close in his father’s steps” (a candid review of the exhibition [london, 1780] 14). he worked with his father, including on a set of scottish views published by francis jukes in 1793. he emigrated to america around 1802, “where he did not paint professionally” (waterhouse). dunlap, who had information from catton’s daughter, states he had become a widower and was “possessed of property which he supposed would render him independent in the new world, the republican institutions of which were congenial to him.” he purchased a farm in ulster county, and while he did not pursue art professionally from this point, dunlap notes landscapes by him and the occasion that he painted a theatrical backdrop during a visit to new york in 1813. he died “at his seat at new paltz, in the county of ulster, state of new york … an artist of superior rank and of distinguished merit; but latterly devoted his attention principally to agricultural pursuits; and seldom exercised his pencil, except to gratify personal friendship, or enliven the dull monotony of a rural winter life” (public ledger 14 june 1819). john chandler registered as a student 12 november 1784, aged 21, 1 may; painter (h462) john westbrooke chandler (1762–1807). portrait painter and poet. the illegitimate son of frederick greville, earl of warwick (1719–73). he exhibited at the ra in 1787–91, from 110 strand, 1 red lion square, and in 1791 from warwick castle. he was also a published poet (though “rhyming is not the business of my life,” sir hubert: an heroic ballad [london, 1800] viii). he appears to have been politically radical, and redgrave alludes to his “freethinking”; he certainly knew the radical writer william godwin, whose portrait he painted in 1798 (tate) and with whom he socialized until around 1800. in 1801 he moved to scotland, where he continued as a portrait painter. he died at stafford in 1807, declared “an artist of eminence” by an obituary writer, who noted that he had latterly focused on landscape painting (athenaeum [june 1807]: 658). (john bastin and julie wieznegger, the family of sir stamford raffles [singapore, 2016] 65-69) pierre francois chenu registered as a student 29 october 1784, aged 24, 8 october; sculptor (h453) silver medal 1785, gold medal 1786 noted in the life school register 8 december 1795 peter francis chenu (1760–1834). sculptor. born in paris in saint-nicolas-des-champs, the son of nicolas-françois chenu, a sculptor and an assistant professor and exhibitor at the académie de saint-luc, and his wife marie-françoise marchandon, the daughter of a sculptor. he studied at the académie royale in 1778–82 before moving to london. he exhibited at the ra 1788–1822, initially from 28 great castle street, cavendish square. he worked in a variety of sculptural genres and probably had a focus on sculptural reproductions. he died in lambeth in 1834, leaving as much as £4000 in shares, benefiting the widow of his brother and his nephews, suggesting he was unmarried. the peter francis chenu born 6 january 1760 and baptized 27 january 1760 at st. anne, soho, the son of joshua chenu, carver, and his wife elizabeth (franklin) appears to be a different individual, who died in 1800 (see npg, british bronze sculpture founders and plaster figure makers, 1800–1980). john/peter chester registered as a student 4 december 1783, aged 22, 29 last september; painter (h442) john chester (1761–active 1783). portrait painter. he must be the j. chester who exhibited at the ra in 1783, a portrait, from charlotte street, rathbone place. his family background has not been established, and he is not otherwise recorded as an artist. henry cipriani registered as a student 31 march 1777, aged 15, 17 last december; painter (h290) sir henry william joseph cipriani (1761–1843). officer of the yeomen of the guard. the younger of two sons of g. b. cipriani (1727–85), italian history and decorative painter, founder ra, and his wife ann (booker), baptized st. martin in the fields, westminster, 27 december 1761. edwards stated of the father, “he married a young lady, with whom he afterwards received a genteel fortune, and by her he had two sons and a daughter: the latter died young. the eldest son possesses an appointment in the treasury. the youngest began the study of painting, and executed the drawing from mr copley’s picture of the death of lord chatham, from which mr bartolozzi engraved the print: this drawing, made in water-colours, was a most excellent though a laborious production” (113). farington noted of g. b. cipriani, “the second son, henry, was brought up to his father’s profession … he afterwards declined the profession & became an officer in the huntingdon militia” (notebooks 2: 2). he exhibited a “portrait of a young nobleman” at the ra, 1781, from his father’s address, hedge lane. the portrait is declared “childish” by waterhouse, who notes he “soon abandoned art and was ultimately knighted 13 september 1831 as senior exon of the yeomen of the guard.” he was appointed as a corporal of the yeomen of the guard in 1791, appointed senior exon in 1831, and knighted at the time of the coronation, 13 september 1831; he stepped down in 1832 (dco). he was living in charlton, kent, for the 1841 census, listed as financially “independent.” he died in brighton in 1843; his will, describing him as of woolwich, kent, was proved in 1843 (national archives, prob 11/1973). edmond coffin, junr registered as a student 14 october 1785, aged 24 last march; sculptor (h471) silver medal 1795 noted in the life school register 22 october 1790 edmond coffin (1761–1826). wax modeler. he seems certain to be related to the edmund coffin, sculptor of exeter, active 1759–70, and thomas coffin, goldsmith of the same place, made free of the city in 1769. his designation “junr” may suggest he was the son of the former, but this is not documented. edmond coffin exhibited at the ra 1787–1803. by 1793 he had moved to a large house at 4 mary street, tottenham court road, where he remained until his death. he worked for the goldsmiths john wakelin and robert garrard in the 1790s, and produced at least one monument. he died in 1826, his will, identifying him as “sculptor of st. pancras,” benefiting his widow and referring to extensive properties, mostly in exeter. nicholas joseph collibert/collebert registered as a student 29 october 1784, aged 30 april last; engraver (h454) nicolas colibert (c. 1750–1806). painter and engraver. born in paris around 1750, or in london in 1748, according to different sources. presumably of french origin in either case. he was based in england from about 1782, exhibiting a view of st. james’s park at the ra in 1785, from 21 rupert street, the address of the landscape painter william tomkins. he returned to paris in the early 1790s but died in london. richard collins registered as a student 4 october 1776, aged 21, 30th last january; painter (h271) richard collins (1755–1831). miniature painter. born in gosport, hampshire; he must be the richard collins, son of james collins and sarah, baptized at holy trinity, gosport, on 30 january 1755. his father’s will, proved 1782, identifies him as “gentleman” and includes the substantial bequest of £2900 of stock to his son, named as richard collins (national archives, prob 11/1089). he was initially apprenticed to a mercer, but became a pupil of joseph meyer, ra; farington stated he was instructed by john plott and then ozias humphry (notebooks 3: 11). exhibited from 1777, initially from “mr gripp’s, facing beaufort buildings, strand,” becoming successful as a miniature painter. he stopped exhibiting in 1806 and retired to the country in 1811, but later returned to london. farington stated that “he married advantageously, and had also the good fortune to be recommended to the royal family, by whom he was much employed, and was authorised to stile himself portrait painter to his majesty” (notebooks 3: 11). william collins registered as a student 14 october 1785, aged 31 october inst.; painter (h472) william collins (1754–1819). landowner and amateur artist. he exhibited crayon portraits at the sa in 1791 as “honorary”; these, portraits of himself and his wife, sarah (astill, of birmingham), reappeared on the art market in 2009 (jeffares). he died in greenwich in 1819 (national archives, prob 11/1617), his obituary writer noting he was an artist “of no mean skill, and although he merely pursued the art as a recreation, his crayon portraits are striking specimens of bold outline, rich colouring and strong resemblance” (gentleman’s magazine [1819]). richard corbould registered as a student 21 march 1774, aged 17, 18th last april; painter (h227) richard corbould (1757–1831). painter and illustrator. born london, and baptized st. edmund the king and martyr, lombard street, on 24 april 1757, the son of george corbould (1725–66) and his wife, anne (ramsay). his father was an engraver (“of allhallows in lombard street,” national archives, prob 11/926), goldsmith, and banker. he had been apprenticed to thomas ramsay, engraver and goldsmith, and married his master’s daughter. the john corbould, engraver of foster lane, who appeared as a witness at city of london sessions and at the old bailey in 1758, must be his uncle (1726–71), whose children were also artists. richard corbould was articled to “mr maris,” farington noting (2 april 1807), “he was a pupil of maris and resided with him in glanville street, in the year 1773 in the house in which i at that time resided” (8: 3001). maris was a painter trained by arthur devis, and married into the devis family. corbould exhibited at the fsa in 1776 from 6 chandos street, covent garden, and at the ra 1777–1811. he appears as one of the students sketched in an anonymous set of drawings of students dating from the late 1770s at the ra. in 1800 farington was told that “corbould married mr heaths sister. he was first placed under maris with a fee of £200.—his guardian expended the remainder of his fortune, but he has lately had a fortune worth £10,000 bequeathed to him” (4: 1357). he had married, in 1785, charlotte phillipson, sister-in-law of james heath the engraver, and cousin of benjamin west. their children included the engraver george james corbould (1786–1846) and the landscape painter henry corbould (1787–1845). he died in london in 1831. (george c. b. poulter, the corbould genealogy [ipswich, 1935]) lawrence joseph cosse registered as a student 3 december 1784, aged 26 april 1784 (h464) silver medal 1788 laurence joseph cossé (1758–1840). miniature and subject painter. apparently born in dusseldorf, according to a notice by the american visitor to london louis simond (journal of a tour and residence in great britain, 2 vols. [new york, 1815] 1: 42). he began exhibiting at the ra in 1784, initially from “mr hedges’, covent garden,” and continued to exhibit until 1837. he married, at st. marylebone in 1803, sophia elizabeth albert. in 1811 he was an unsuccessful candidate for ara. said by foskett to have worked in dusseldorf and london. he is recorded providing “pictures and frames” to the cobb family of margate (kent history centre, u1453/c360). he applied to the agbi in 1837, stating his age as 76, “having lived upwards of fifty years in this country”; “for the [last] three years he has not had a single commission and suffered much from ill health” (agbi applicants’ book). he was granted £20. he must be the lawrence joseph cossé of new road who was buried at st. pancras in 1840, his age recorded as 80. his widow was supported by the agbi in 1841 and 1842. william craft registered as a student 4 november 1774, aged 39; painter (h236) william hopkins craft (1731–1811). enamel painter. he is said to have been born in tottenham, but he seems certain to be the william hopkins craft baptized st. mary at lambeth, 1731, the son of john craft, potter of st. john wapping, and his wife anne (logan), whose clandestine marriage was recorded at fleet in 1730 (the record provides details of john craft’s address and occupation). toppin notes that the name was spelled croft as well as craft contemporaneously, perhaps deliberately to evoke an association with the more socially distinguished croft family, but it is unclear whether he was “of middle class origin, or a ‘cadet’ of an ancient family” (18). the identification of his parents suggests, instead, a background in trade. this is implied in the suggestion that he “was probably a relation, perhaps a brother, of thomas craft, who was employed at the porcelain works” at bow (odnb). he is believed to have worked in paris before forming a partnership with david rhodes in london. together they worked for wedgwood. he exhibited at the ra from 1774 to 1781, initially from “mr turner’s, 100 st. martin’s lane.” “he produced some large works in enamel, which were very good in the manipulation of his material, but very weak in art” (redgrave). he was admitted to the charitable charter house at the end of his life, a “poor brother.” he died there in 1811, the gentleman’s magazine noting, “aged 80, mr croft, formerly a painter, but latterly on the establishment of the charter house. he was suddenly taken ill on clerkenwell green, and being conveyed home in a coach, expired on entering his apartment.” (aubrey j. toppin, “william hopkins craft, enamel painter (1730?–1810),” english ceramic circle transactions 3.4 [1959]: 14-18) john smyth cranfield registered as a student 8 october 1779, aged 21, 7 february last; sculptor (h360) john smith cranfield (1759–1802). sculptor. the son of richard cranfield (1731–1809), woodcarver and gilder in dublin. he exhibited at the society of artists in dublin as early as 1769, when he appears to have been only 10 years old, and won a premium for wood carving there in 1772. from around 1783 he was back in ireland in business with his father. he married, in 1789, elizabeth, daughter of the builder and stonecutter george darley. he died in 1802 from “the effects of a wetting while attending to his kiln” (strickland, quoted in bdsb). james cranke registered as a student 8 april 1775, aged 27; painter (h248) james cranke (1746–1826). portrait painter and copyist. born in london, and baptized at st. george’s, bloomsbury, on 9 march 1746, the son of the landscape painter james cranke (1707–80) and his wife, elizabeth (essex; 1729/30–91), the latter of “a family of some rank” (gaythorpe 130). the family moved to urswick, lancashire, in the 1750s, where the cranke family had been established for many generations. the young james cranke is believed to have attended a grammar school there, and presumably had access to his father’s extensive library, including art books (gaythorpe 134). he traveled in germany and the netherlands, where he appears to have produced painted copies of altarpieces, before returning to england by 1773, where he found work as a portrait painter and copyist in lancashire and cheshire. he worked in london after that date, but moved to care for his brother john cranke, vicar of gainford, from 1798. he continued working as an artist and general painter. after his brother’s death he returned to urswick and lived with a nephew, dying there in 1826. (harper gaythorpe, “two ‘old masters’—the crankes of urswick,” transactions of the cumberland and westmorland antiquarian and archaeological society 6 [1906]: 128-42) robert crone c. 1779–84? robert crone (c. 1718–c. 1779). landscape painter. born in dublin, “of unknown parentage” (odnb). he was trained at the dublin society schools and sent to italy by one of his teachers (and relative), philip hussey, in 1755. he was a pupil of richard wilson in rome and was active as an art dealer. he was in london in 1767, exhibiting up to 1778. noted by j. t. smith: “nollekens observed one morning, after he had attended sir joshua’s lecture at the royal academy the preceding evening, that he believed all the deformed students in the academy had assembled together upon one spot, while waiting the opening of the lecture-room, since he had noticed ryley, flaxman, the two edwards’s, crone, and feary.” this would date the incident to the time when smith was in nollekens’s studio, 1779–84. crone suffered from epilepsy and physical deformity, being described as “a little crooked irishman” (ingamells). he is not otherwise recorded as a student at the academy, and smith’s recollection, if at all accurate, may only indicate that he attended reynolds’s lecture. james crook registered as a student 4 october 1776, aged 17, 10th last january; painter (h272) silver medal 1778, 1779 james crook (1759–active 1781). portrait and history painter. known only from his record of exhibition. he exhibited at the ra 1778–81, from “mr crook’s, islington.” edward dampier registered as a student 25 march 1779, aged 20 last october; painter (h345) edward dampier (1758–1827). baptized at wareham, dorset, 10 october 1758, the son of john dampier and his wife mary. the dampier family of wareham and castle corfe were prominent locally. his father must be the john dampier, esq., of wareham who died in 1811, aged 78, his will benefiting his sons, including edward (national archives, prob 11/1537), although creditors made a claim on the will in the court of chancery (hampshire chronicle 22 may 1820). dampier was an honorary exhibitor of portraits at the ra in 1784–86. benjamin danks/danker registered as a student 11 october 1782 (cm only) (h422) registered as a student 8 november 1782, aged 17, 24 last july; painter (h429) benjamin danks (1765–active 1790). painter of domestic subjects. exhibited at the ra in 1783 and 1790. said by waterhouse to be a pupil of henry walton, as he exhibited in 1783 from “mr walton’s, half moon street,” that artist’s london address in the mid-1780s. john dawson registered as a student 6 september 1780, aged 15, 25th last april; engraver (h366) john dawson (1765–active 1780). engraver. son of richard dawson of bagnio court, newgate street, engraver. he was admitted to st. paul’s school in 1776, said to be aged 9, where his father’s identity is stated (robert barlow gardiner, the admission registers of st. paul’s school from 1748 to 1876 [london, 1884] 164). apprenticed to james basire in 1779; the record of apprenticeship also provides the occupation of his father, who paid the premium of £52.10 (rollco). edward dayes registered as a student 6 september 1780, aged 17, 6 last august; painter (h367) edward dayes (1763–1804). watercolor painter and writer. born london, the son of samuel dayes (1720–74), turner, and his wife mary ann (williams). his father was apparently impoverished and perhaps in poor mental health at the end of his life. edward dayes was apprenticed to the engraver and miniature painter william pether. edwards states: “in the early part of his life he painted miniature, and also scraped mezzotinto, but afterwards practised the drawing of landscapes” (285-86). he married, in 1786, sarah parker. he also started exhibiting at the ra in that year, and had ambitions as a painter in watercolors of historical subjects. he struggled professionally and died by his own hand in 1804. his written “works” were published in 1805, for the benefit of his widow. (tim marshall, “edward dayes: his ancestors, family and descendants,” british art journal 8.3 [winter 2007–08]: 31-38) john deare registered as a student 31 december 1777, aged 18, 26 october last; sculptor (h313) gold medal 1780 rome prize 1785 marked as “dead” in the register john deare (1759–98). sculptor. born liverpool, the son of thomas deare (active 1757–89), jeweler and artist in hair, and his wife esther (molyneaux). he was apprenticed in 1776 to the carver thomas carter in london. at the end of his apprenticeship in 1783 he worked independently, producing several ambitious reliefs, before securing the rome scholarship in 1785. he traveled to italy with his fellow student john charles felix rossi, obtaining several important commissions for classical subjects. he married in or before 1796, but died in rome in 1798, reportedly from a chill caught while sleeping on a cold block of marble seeking inspiration. (peggy fogelmann, peter fosco, and simon stock, “john deare (1759–1798): a british neoclassical sculptor in rome,” sculpture journal 4 [2000]: 85-126) john de bruijn/bruyn registered as a student 11 october 1782, aged 18, 9 last september; painter (h423) marked as “dead” in the register john de bruyn (1763–active 1782). son of theodore de bruyn (1730–1804), dutch decorative and history painter, who came to england around 1768 and who had himself entered the ra schools as a mature student in 1773. a brother, henry, entered the ra schools in 1792. redgrave notes of their father, “he died in london, in the early part of 1804, leaving a son, who was then a student at the academy, and was afterwards two or three times an exhibitor.” edwards notes of theodore de bruyn, “he left a son who for some time practised the art, and was a student in the royal academy, but has lately become a land-surveyor” (284); from later press references this would appear to be henry de bruyn rather than this student. james de maria registered as a student 14 october 1785, aged 17, 27 april last; painter (h473) james de maria or demaria (1768–1851). scene painter. perhaps the son of john de maria of edinburgh. active as a scene painter at covent garden from 1793, and the new drury lane from 1794 to 1799. in 1800 he was working at the birmingham theatre, but was back in london c. 1811–14. the death of “mrs james de maria, wife of the artist, of a decline much regretted by all who knew her” was noted in the london press in 1807 (morning post 18 february 1807). in a letter of 1814 he indicated that he was intending to retire (highfill). he seems likely to be the james demaria, aged around 70, living in norfolk street, marylebone, at the time of the 1841 census, “independent,” but living with two men in their twenties identified as artists, presumably assistants or pupils. he died in london in 1851, described as of 51 marylebone street, “son of john de maria of edinboro’ deceased.” john de maria is recorded as an advocate in edinburgh in the 1830s, and may be a relative. the surname occurs in edinburgh, but also in london, within the relevant timeframe. a john de maria, “a native of italy,” died aged 85 in edinburgh in 1818 (edinburgh advertiser 29 december 1818); he seems likely to be related. peter denys registered as a student 4 october 1776, aged 16 last june; engraver (h273) peter denys (1760–1816). drawing master. son of a swiss musician and teacher who may also have had an interest in art, if he is the “dennys” who exhibited at the fsa in 1764, “a landscape, ornamented with coraline, etc.,” from mr. hawthorne’s, meard’s court, wardour street. peter denys exhibited “a dog” in crayons at the ra, 1779. farington heard about his circumstances from fuseli in 1794, recalling lord pomfret (1722–85) and his children: peter denyss, a young man, who had been recommended by mr moser, of the royal academy, to ld. pomfret was then at easton, employed in teaching the young people to draw.—peter was the son of a swiss settled in england, as a language master.—peters younger brother was bred a musician, and his sister kept a boarding school situated on the other side of blackfryars bridge.—after the death of lord pomfret peter married lady c, his daughter, with the consent of her mother & two young brothers. she has £4000, a year in her own right … peter is very plain in person and near sighted. (1: 273) by virtue of this marriage denys inherited part of the pomfret estates and became socially established; he was sheriff of northamptonshire in 1812. in 1811 fuseli again recounted what he knew of denys to farington: he spoke of peter denyss who married the daugr of the late earl of pomfret, lady charlotte fermor. denyss is the son of a native of geneva, who was a fidler, & fuseli believes played on the fiddle at the english opera house. he had several children, & mr moser, the first keeper of the royal academy, was acquainted with him, which caused p. denyss the son, to be entered a student in the royal academy. while he was in this situation the earl of pomfret applied to moser to recommend to him a young artist capable of giving instruction in drawing to his lordship’s children. moser recommended denyss who went to easton neston his lordship’s seat in northamptonshire. here he continued subject to many caprices of his lordship till the latter died, & not [long] after that he married lady charlotte with the consent of her mother, a woman who had as well as her lord much tendency to derangement of mind. eventually lady charlotte inherited £4000 a year besides other property, all of which denyss enjoys. he is vigilant in looking after his money concerns, and has much improved lord pomfrets estates particularly lead mines in yorkshire. he has several children by lady charlotte who is of a gloomy turn of mind. his eldest son has married a miss hill against the consent of denyss, who will not at present acknowledge him. denyss is a performer on the violin, & often gives expensive musical entertainments. he bought the house build by holland, the architect, near sloane st. & has a house at bath. (11: 3937-38) a daughter, charlotte, of peter denys, esq., and lady charlotte denys of hans place, chelsea, died at the age of 14 and was buried in the family vault at easton neston, northamptonshire, in 1816 (northampton mercury 20 july 1816). a son, george william denys, was equerry to the duke of sussex and became an mp, receiving a baronetcy in 1813 (hop). thomas denys registered as a student 31 december 1778, aged 15, 16 last november; painter (h331) rev. thomas denys (1763–1842). clergyman. the younger brother of peter denys, “bred a musician,” according to farington’s notes (1: 273). their father was apparently a swiss musician and teacher. he was admitted to magdalene hall, oxford, in 1788, aged 25, getting his ba in 1793 and ma in 1796. he held an appointment at easton neston, presumably by virtue of his brother’s marriage into the fermor family. he went on to become vicar of bourne, lincolnshire, and died in 1842 (british magazine [1842]: 348). arthur devis, junr registered as a student 31 december 1774, aged 12 august last; painter (h239) arthur william devis (1762–1822). portrait and history painter. born london, son of arthur devis (c. 1711–87), portrait painter. studied under his father, and exhibited at the fsa 1775–80 as “master devis,” giving his father’s great queen street address in 1779–80. traveled to india 1782, spending time in china before establishing a successful practice in india 1785–95. returned to england but “he was financially feckless in his later years and was mainly supported by john biddulph of ledbury” (waterhouse). his widow, isobel devis, applied to the ra for charity in 1822 (cm); she also went to the agbi, “being left intirely destitute through his property having been sold for the benefit of his creditors. she has neither age or infirmities to plead but trusts that with the donation rec’d from the royal academy, and what this institution may be pleased to bestow, she shall not only be shielded from immediate want, but enabled to place herself in a situation of respectability” (agbi applicants’ book). she was granted £7. john dixey registered as a student 29 october 1784, aged 21, 19 last august; painter (h455) john dixey (1762–1820). sculptor. born dublin, “came to london at an early age, and studied at the royal academy” (redgrave). “of his parents, nothing is known” (odnb). he exhibited in london in 1788, but went to america in 1789, where he remained until his death in 1820, having achieved moderate success in his profession. dunlap states that he had been selected for the rome prize but chose instead to go to the us (1: 329). james dorrington registered as a student 4 december 1775, aged 29; painter (h258) james dorrington (c. 1746–active 1775). possibly connected with the “master dorrington” described as “pupil to miss williams” who exhibited “a drawing in chalks from plaister, first attempt” at the fsa in 1773. this student would have been 26 or 27 in that year, according to the age given in the register, so is unlikely to have been described as “master.” william doughty registered as a student 8 april 1775, aged 17 last july; painter (h249) marked as “died” in the register william doughty (1757–82). portrait painter and mezzotint engraver. born york, and baptized at st. michael le belfrey, 14 august 1757, the son of john doughty, the keeper of a fishing-tackle shop, and his wife, anne (kirby). a protégé of william mason, who sent him to london to study art, where he was a pupil of reynolds, joining his household. he married, in 1777, margaret joy, one of reynolds’s servants. he visited ireland in 1778, and returned to london, gaining a reputation as a mezzotint engraver. he set out for india in 1780 but died en route in 1782, at lisbon (waterhouse). his widow continued to india, and died there shortly afterwards. benjamin dransfield registered as a student 29 march 1781, aged 22, 21 last september; painter (h389) marked as “dead” in the register benjamin dransfield (1758–1817). born kent, baptized in bromley 13 october 1758, the son of benjamin dransfield and his wife elizabeth. his father must be the benjamin dransfield recorded as an innholder at sevenoaks, kent (records at lambeth palace). he is probably the benjamin dransfield apprenticed in december 1773 to william williams, “citizen and toyman.” he died in bermondsey in 1817, said to be aged 58, and was buried in the independent colliers rents, southwark. william dunlap admitted as a probationer 1784 william dunlap (1766–1839). miniature painter, art historian and writer, and theatrical manager. born perth amboy, new jersey, the son of samuel dunlap, an irish-born former soldier and merchant, and his wife margaret sargent dunlap. the father was a loyalist, and the family moved to new york for their safety after the outbreak of war. despite his loyalty, his father apparently retained his property and built up his business after the end of the war. dunlap was in london 1783–87, training as an artist with benjamin west. although he is not recorded as a student, his autobiography indicates that, with west’s support, he was admitted as a probationer: mr west offered his casts for my practice when i should be ready to draw …. i sat down to draw in black and white chalks from the bust of cicero; and having mastered that, in every point of view, i drew from the fighting gladiator (so called),—and my drawing gained me permission to enter the academy at somerset house. i know not why—perhaps, because i was too timid to ask mr west to introduce me, or too bashful and awkward to introduce myself; but i never made use of the permission. i had an awe of distinguished men that caused many weaknesses in my conduct; a bashfulness that required encouraging, at the same time that i was the first of the boldest among my companions—but so it was; i went with my porfolio, port-crayon, chalks and paper, and delivered them to the porter, made some excuse for not going in, and walked off; i never entered the school or saw my portfolio again. he nonetheless continued to study with west and became a friend of raphael west. by his own account his studies were desultory, and he was recalled to new york in 1787 by his father. he made some attempt to establish himself as a portrait painter, but “by degrees my employers became fewer, my efforts were unsatisfactory to myself. i sought a refuge in literature, and after a year or two abandoned painting, and joined my father in mercantile business.” he continued as a painter, theatrical manager, and writer, producing most importantly his history of the rise and progress of the arts of design in the united states (1834), based on personal observation and personal information solicited from living artists. (maura lyons, william dunlap and the construction of an american art history [amherst, 2005]) gainsborough dupont registered as a student 6 march 1775, aged 20, 24 december last; painter (h242) marked as “dead” in the register gainsborough dupont (1754–97). portrait and landscape painter. born sudbury, and baptized st. peter’s sudbury, the son of philip dupont (c. 1722–88), carpenter, and his wife sarah (gainsborough). he was the nephew of thomas gainsborough, to whom he was apprenticed in bath in 1772. he became his uncle’s studio assistant and imitator. he continued in gainsborough’s studio after the latter’s death in 1788, until 1793, and achieved moderate independent success as a portrait painter. john eames/emes registered as a student 6 september 1780, aged 17, 30 december last; engraver (h368) john emes (1762–1808). landscape painter, engraver, and silversmith. the son of william emes (1729/30–1803), landscape gardener of bowbridge fields, mackworth, derbyshire, and his wife mary (innocent; d. 1789). he was apprenticed to william woollett, the engraver, in london in 1778. exhibited at the ra in 1790–91, from 1 north street, upper charlotte street, rathbone place. he was insured at that address in 1786, “engraver and printseller” (lma). he must be john emes, the engraver who was taken as a partner in thomas chawner’s silversmithing firm in 1796, subsequently becoming the sole owner of the firm before his death in 1808. his widow, rebecca (d. 1828?), continued the business after his death. henry edridge registered as a student 7 january 1784, aged 15, 12 october last; engraver (h444) silver medal 1786 noted in the life school register 14 december 1790 henry edridge (1768–1821). miniature painter and watercolor painter. born paddington, and baptized at st. james’s, paddington, on 3 october 1768, the son of henry edridge, “a tradesman in st. james’s” (odnb), and his wife, sarah (brett). he was educated at home and at a school in acton. farington heard in 1808 that “he had raised himself by his merit & prudence. his father was a butcher in st. james’s market, and died while his children were young. edridge indicated a disposition to drawing. edmonds, the upholsterer, being a friend of the family happening to pass through the strand saw a paper at a window …” (9: 3128). farington’s note is incomplete but the suggestion is that the young edridge was put to a master who was advertising for an apprentice, and he is known to have been apprenticed to william pether, the mezzotint engraver, at the age of 14. it seems likely, taking into account farington’s comments, that his father was the william henry edridge, butcher, who was imprisoned for debt in marshalsea in 1761 (london gazette 18-21 april 1761) and died in st. james’s market in 1773 (st. james’s chronicle 21-23 september 1773). henry edridge took up miniature painting after studying at the academy and gaining the notice of reynolds. he exhibited at the academy from 1786, initially giving pether’s address. he achieved success as a portrait miniaturist and also produced landscape watercolors. he died in london in 1821, leaving a substantial fortune of £12,000 to his widow. edwards attended the schools c. 1779–84? noted by j. t. smith: “nollekens observed one morning, after he had attended sir joshua’s lecture at the royal academy the preceding evening, that he believed all the deformed students in the academy had assembled together upon one spot, while waiting the opening of the lecture-room, since he had noticed ryley, flaxman, the two edwards’s, crone, and feary.” this would date the incident to the time when smith was in nollekens’s studio, 1779–84. one edwards is certainly edward edwards; whitten (ed. of smith) suggests the other is the botanical illustrator sydenham teak edwards (1768–1819), born usk, the son of a schoolmaster. john william edy registered as a student 8 october 1779, aged 19, 7 last march; painter (h361) john william edy (1760–1832). printmaker and publisher. he must be the john william edy baptized as a nonconformist, son of francis and sarah edy, born 6 march 1760, christmas street, bristol. his father seems likely to be the francis edy, baker of bristol, who paid duties on an apprentice in 1769. however, he may also have been related to the edey, sculptor, known only from his widow’s successful application for charity from the ra in june 1769. he exhibited at the ra in 1785, from new store street, bedford square, and again in 1801–02. henry angelo recalled him among “the list of clerical caricaturists”: “he was the author of a few political plates; but his favourite subjects were ludicrous, and highly humorous” (1: 427). the “mr edy” given charity by the ra in 1823 appears to be this former student (cm). mr. j. m. edy applied to the agbi in 1827: painter, engraver & draughtsman, has been in the royal academy 47 years, his business is nearly extinct having hardly any sale of his works, repeated illness, some debts contracted thro’ many unproductive years, advanced age & this year a broken arm & other misfortunes, has, with a family of girls reduced me to the very earth. (agbi applicants’ book) he was granted £5. in a subsequent application of 1828 he stated he was 67 years old, “having been in the royal academy 48 years & has hitherto lived in a respectable manner.” his wife applied to the agbi on his behalf in 1832, his having been struck down by “the typhus fever, during the thunder storm on the 11th june.” she applied again in january 1833, having been widowed. (henry angelo, reminiscences, 2 vols. [london, 1828–30]) william elmer registered as a student 11 october 1782, aged 21, 6 january next; painter (h424) william elmer (1759?–1836?). he seems likely to be the william, son of john elmer, who was baptized st. andrew, farnham, 26 january 1759, although this year is different from the birth year suggested in the register. he was more certainly a nephew of stephen elmer (c. 1715–96), still-life painter of farnham, surrey (although redgrave notes of stephen elmer that “his son was an artist,” and it has often been assumed that this was his relationship with william elmer). the elmers were established as limners in farnham since the beginning of the eighteenth century, and while he is said to have trained with his successful uncle, stephen, a brother of that artist, john, probably this student’s father, was also mentioned in records of payments for painting from the local church, suggesting that he also followed the trade. stephen elmer was critically and materially successful, and able to purchase property later in life, including a brewery, which has led to his being identified, apparently mistakenly, as a maltster. william elmer exhibited at the sa in 1778 and 1780, latterly giving his uncle’s addresses (“farnham and 44 watling street”). when he first exhibited at the ra, in 1783, it was from “mr flaxman’s, 420 strand”—that is, the plaster figure maker john flaxman, sr. he exhibited at the academy again in 1784, 1797, and 1799. stephen elmer’s will benefited various nephews, including william elmer (national archives, prob 11/1280). edwards notes that a nephew inherited elmer’s collection of paintings and exhibited it in london in 1799 (232). he has been said to have died in 1799, although he also appears to have benefited from the insurance claim made after his uncle’s stock of paintings was destroyed by fire in 1801. he may in fact be the william elmer who died badwell ask, suffolk, in 1836, aged 78. (ann sumner, stephen elmer (c. 1715–1796) [museum of farnham, 1993]) henry elouis/edwin registered as a student 29 october 1784, aged 29, 20 january last; painter (h456) silver medal 1786 john-pierre-henry elouis (1753–1840). portrait painter and miniaturist. born caen, france. a pupil of restout in paris. came to london 1784 and practiced in england briefly before moving to america c. 1787, where he worked in several cities before settling in philadelphia in 1792. in 1793 he wrote to george washington pleading for support: “i have experienced great troubles since four years; i had the good fortune to conquer all difficulties, but so many have fallen upon me all at once, that i do not know how to extricate myself, if not helped” (20 july 1793; founders online). he returned to france c. 1807 and was curator at the museum at caen from 1814 (waterhouse). the register notes by his name: “n.b.—a silver medal was given in 1786 to hen. edwin. whose name is not entered as admitted,” which seems clearly to suggest that it was this student. james evans registered as a student 21 june 1781, aged 21 last october; painter (h397) james evans (1759–active 1781). “nothing is known of his work” (waterhouse), a situation confirmed by the assiduous jeffares (“nothing is known of this pastellist”). the latter notes a dated pastel of 1779 that may be associated with him. he may be the j. evans, “then a pupil of c knight,” that dodd notes for a stipple engraving of 1787 (bl add. ms 33398, f. 280). robert fagan registered as a student 21 june 1781, aged 20 last 5 march; painter (h398) marked as “decd” in the register robert fagan (1761–1816). portrait and history painter and art dealer. probably born in london, the son of michael fagan (1728–83), originally from cork but established with a bakery business in long acre. a pupil of bartolozzi. traveled to italy in 1781, settling in rome. he remained in italy for the rest of his life, although visiting england. active as an art dealer as well as a portrait painter. appointed consul general for sicily and malta in 1809, moving to palermo. he died by his own hand in 1816, beset by financial problems. thomas fielding registered as a student 7 january 1784, aged 21, 18 january 1784; engraver (h445) thomas fielding (1763–active 1798). engraver. his family background has not been established, and the age in the register varies from the date of 1758 usually given in biographical sources. dodd notes him as “an obscure practitioner in engraving of whom we trace nothing more on record” than two prints, one after kauffman and a portrait of thomas taylor of lloyd’s coffee house (bl add. ms 33400, f. 460). he may be related to the john fielding, engraver of panton street, who was a subscriber to john warburton’s vallum romanum (1753) and samuel boyce’s poems on several occasions (1757). thomas fielding studied under bartolozzi and worked extensively for william wynne ryland (tuer 2: 50). the bm notes him as a stipple engraver and publisher, still active in 1798, who worked in partnership with william palmer and john walker. james fittler registered as a student 8 april 1778, aged 22 next october; engraver (h322) james fittler (1758–1835). engraver. exhibited at the fsa in 1776, giving the address as “at mr fittler’s, wells street, near germain street, st. james’s.” it is likely that the william fittler “of wells street in the parish of saint james” described as “taylor” in a legal document of september 1787 was his father, if not another close relative (london lives). william fittler, tailor, was listed at 7 wells street, jermyn street, in a commercial directory of 1790 (wakefield’s). he married elizabeth johnson (d. 1847) in 1781. james fittler was insured as an engraver at tottenham court road from 1783, and subsequently at charlotte street (lma). he paid duties on taking as apprentices william miller in 1791, john g. guignon in 1799, and william smart in 1807 (national archives, ir 1/38). the william fittler, esq., listed in holden’s, 1805–07, at the same address may be his father living with him. he exhibited at the ra 1788–1814, and was made ara in 1800. fittler was appointed marine engraver to george iii by 1790. he may be the same as the j. fidler noted by waterhouse as a topographical artist, active 1796–1803. he died in chiswick in 1835, his will proved 1836, benefiting his widow and referring to copyhold estate at twickenham (national archives, prob 11/1856). raimbach asserts that he died “in impoverished circumstances” (36). in the 1841 census his widow, eliza, was still living in chiswick and described as financially “independent.” (abraham raimbach, memoirs and recollections of the late abraham raimbach, esq., engraver [london, 1843]) carlo fontanelli registered as a student 4 october 1776, aged 21 last august; painter (h274) marked as “dead” in the register charles fontanella (1755–83). portrait painter. presumably italian in origin, although there are a number of individuals named fontanella recorded in mid-eighteenth century england, and he may have been born in britain. as carlo fontanella he exhibited at the fsa, “portrait of a lady; small whole length,” in 1779, giving his address as john street, adelphi. he was lodging with the decorative painter zucchi at 25 air street, piccadilly, when he exhibited at the ra in 1780, suggesting he was a pupil or assistant. he married, in 1782, sarah dean, at st. martin in the fields, westminster. there is no later record of him as an artist, so he is most likely the charles fontanella who was buried in st. marylebone in february 1783 (although another charles fontanella was buried in st. marylebone in 1805). william franks registered as a student 31 march 1777, aged 16, 23 last july; drawing (h291) william franks (1760–98?). the unusual designation of “drawing” as profession on registration may indicate an amateur interest in the art. however, he exhibited “a cupid; done in human hair” at the sa in 1776, from “mr clinton’s, jeweller, salisbury street, strand,” and this may indicate that he was an apprentice or assistant there. he has been identified with the william franks who was active as a miniature painter in new york from 1796 until his death in 1798. (carrie rebora barratt and lori zabar, american portrait miniatures in the metropolitan museum of art [new haven, 2010] 84) robert freebairn registered as a student 2 april 1782, aged 18, 16 last march; painter (h416) noted in the life school register 1 october 1792 marked as “decd” in the register robert freebairn (1764–1808). landscape painter. farington records he “was born febry 1764 in scotland, near the tweed, but was brought to london when only 6 months old” (notebooks 3: 25). briefly a pupil of richard wilson, going on to study with philip reinagle. in 1807 farington heard from the sculptor rossi: freebairn’s father was a chymist in gooch street, but died when freebairn was only 14 years old, leaving two other sons. freebairn after his father’s death having a strong inclination to painting placed himself under reinagle & gave him £100. after leaving reinagle he went to italy & on his return married a young woman who he became acquainted with while he was at reinagle’s she being the nursery maid. (8: 3132) his father must then be the george freebairn listed in directories at 37 goodge street from around 1774–82. robert freebairn exhibited at the ra 1782–1807, giving his address initially as at “mr reinagle’s, great castle street, cavendish square.” he does not, however, appear to have been materially successful. he moved out to paddington in 1806 and died in january 1808 (farington, notebooks 3: 25, 1: 20). he died in financial distress, leaving a widow and sons, who turned to the academy for charity. a son, samuel freebairn, died aged 14 in 1813, after a schoolboy prank (caledonian mercury 26 april 1813); another son became a student of the academy and an engraver. thomas freeman registered as a student 25 november 1776, aged 19, 15 october last; painter (h280) silver medal 1779 noted in the life school register 20 november 1790 thomas freeman (1756–active 1790). he must be the thomas freeman born 15 october 1756 and baptized 1 november 1756 at st. sepulchre, holborn, the son of charles freeman and his wife elizabeth. the surname is common and his father’s occupation has not been established. exhibited at the ra from windsor in 1780, and from 8 margaret street, westminster, in 1784. his fuselian satan leaving the court of chaos is at the ackland art gallery. he is not recorded as an artist after being named in the life register and seems likely to have died young. henry fremont registered as a student 25 march 1779, aged 20, 20 last june; painter (h346) henry-james fremont (1759–89?). embroiderer. he seems certain to be the henry fremont of 9 broad street, golden square, embroiderer, who was bankrupted in 1783. the catalogue of his household and stock put up for auction by order of the assignees included drawing materials, prints, and drawings, mostly more obviously connected with his trade, including “a book of drawings, by mr fremont, with sundry pricked patterns, his own designs.” as embroiderers were reckoned generally dependent on others for designs, fremont was perhaps unusual in originating his own (see r. campbell, london tradesman [1747]). more notably still, the auction included drawings, indicating that he had pursued academic studies, including “seven port folios, and 150 drawings of academy figures” and “venus de medicis, and 20 others in red,” probably indicating red chalk drawings after the antique (westminster archives, acc 36/107). a receipt in the same place refers to rent being paid on his house in berkeley square. he is therefore the henry fremont, aged 22, who married in 1781, ann pridden; one son, henry james, was baptized in westminster in 1782, and another son, john fremont, was baptized at st. bride, fleet street, in 1784, when it is noted of the father that he was “late of berkeley sq (my brother in law).” he may be the henry fremont whose death in st. james’s, westminster, is recorded in 1789. he seems likely to be related to john fremont (d. 1774), weaver of spitalfields, noted in commercial directories and other sources in the 1770s, although his will referred only to a son, john, with whom he had been in business. he may also be connected to the etcher philip richard fremont, active c. 1734. the surname suggests a french huguenot origin. george garrard registered as a student 31 december 1778, aged 18, 31 may last; painter (h332) george garrard (1760–1826). animal painter and sculptor. born london, and baptized at st. lawrence jewry, 31 may 1760, the son of robert hazlewood (haselfoot) garrard and his wife marian (richards). his father must be the robert haselfoot garrard, linen draper, who appears at 127 cheapside in kent’s directory, 1774, and the individual of the same name buried at all saints, edmonton, in april 1793. according to gilbey, “he came from a family of artists, tracing his descent to marcus garrard who came from bruges to england in 1580, and became painter to queen elizabeth” (176). gilbey states he studied “under joseph simpson, a famous drawing master” (177). he was then a pupil of sawrey gilpin, whose daughter he married. he exhibited at the ra from 1781, initially from “mr gilpin’s, knightsbridge.” he became established as an animal painter and sculptor in the late 1780s, enjoying sustained patronage from the brewer samuel whitbread (1720–96) and his son, also samuel (1764–1815), and becoming ara in 1800. he worked in a range of media, nollekens dismissing him as a “jack of all trades.” despite his success, he left little and his widow turned to the ra for charity. peter gaugain registered as a student 25 march 1779, aged 16, 4 november last; painter (h347) peter john gaugain (1762–1813). engraver and printseller. born london, baptized at st. anne, soho, the son of philip john gaugain and his wife mary anne (malherbe). he was therefore the younger brother of the engraver thomas gaugain, who was baptized with the same parents in 1756 (see his entry in the odnb). the family included jewelers and engravers. married jane lecointe, a minor, with the permission of her father, at st. ann’s, westminster, in 1787. he was in partnership with his brother thomas as a printseller and publisher. peter john gaugain, printseller, copperplate engraver, and stationer, was insured at 4 little compton street between at least 1785 and 1804 (lma). he died in enfield in 1813, aged 51, his house being auctioned the following year: “a neat, comfortable cottage, in good repair, large garden &c” (morning post 20 august 1814). james gillray registered as a student 8 april 1778, aged 21 next august; engraver (h323) james gillray (1756–1815). caricaturist. born in chelsea, the son of the scottish-born james gillray (1720–99) and his wife jane (coleman). his father had been a blacksmith and served in the queen’s dragoons, losing an arm at the battle of fontenoy (1745). he became a pensioner of the royal hospital, chelsea, in 1748. james gillray was apprenticed to henry ashby, lettering engraver, but emerged as a political printmaker in 1775, working for william humphrey of soho. although he initially sought work as a reproductive engraver and produced miniatures, he found celebrity from the 1780s as a caricaturist. he worked for several publishers before, from 1791, working exclusively for hannah humphrey (d. 1818), lodging with her in old bond street and then st. james’s street. he suffered a mental and physical breakdown in 1807 and was unable to produce new work from 1809. john gladwin registered as a student 31 march 1777, aged 25, 24 last october; painter (h292) john gladwin (1751–active 1777). known only from his record as a student (waterhouse). several john gladwins appear in the london records, including a publican, a porter, and a miller (london lives). augustus temple goodman registered as a student 6 september 1780, aged 26, 9 last april; painter (h369) augustus temple goodman (1754–1820). painter. born salisbury court, fleet street, and baptized 16 april 1754 at st. bride’s, the son of augustus goodman (c. 1720–c. 1770) and his wife charlotte. his father’s trade or occupation is unknown, but augustus temple goodman was listed as a “gentleman,” market street, in the westminster poll book as early as 1774, suggesting the family was materially secure. he married mary jane fullmer in 1776, and they began a family. he was listed as a portrait painter, 35 tufton street, in 1788–90, and with the same occupation in palmer’s village, 1796 (london lives). he must be the augustus t. goodman, “wheelwright,” st. james’s, who took an apprentice in 1799 (national archives, ir 1/37). he was living in walworth by at least 1801, and had the position of “money porter” in the tellers’ office at the exchequer by 1811. he married for a second time in 1815 and died at carlisle lane, lambeth, in 1820. his will, describing him as of the “tellers office exchequer westminster of saint mary lambeth, surrey,” was proved 1820, and refers to family portraits in oil and miniatures painted by him (national archives, prob 11/1633). (roger varrow family tree, on <http://www.ancestry.co.uk>) thomas gosse registered as a student 8 october 1779, aged 14, 6 last july; painter (h362) thomas gosse (1765–1844). mezzotint engraver and miniature painter. born in 1765, the son of william gosse (1714–84) of ringwood, hampshire, and his wife, elizabeth (corbin; 1723–89). the gosse family was well established as landowners, weavers, and merchants. his father, “who had served, by virtue of some welsh estates, as high sheriff of radnorshire, was a cloth manufacturer on a considerable scale, but he was ruined by the introduction of machinery into the woollen trade. in the days of his prosperity he was a patron of the fine arts in the quiet mode of those days” (edmund gosse 141). thomas gosse wrote that the family lived “in credit and good repute and shared in that genteel liberal ease that appertains to such a condition, amidst a due attention to business and the main chance” (quoted in fayette gosse 13). his autobiography of around 1799 provides a detailed account of his childhood interest in art and progress at the academy. “i always had an inclination for drawing” and, though he was sent to school, his interest in art prevailed, and in 1777 “my school education was resigned for the practice of drawing at home” (edmund gosse 141). he recounts going to london for the first time in the summer of 1779, where a letter of recommendation from “mr compton, the bistern squire” to edward penny secured him entry to the ra: “here i drew from plaster-casts of human figures after the antique, and was aided therein by the book of anatomical figures which my father bought for me before he returned to ringwood” (edmund gosse 142). he returned home for the winter of 1779–80, but was back in london to continue studies by june 1780, competing unsuccessfully for the silver medal and attending lectures. he recalls: after staying half a year at home, i am sent again to london, to improve in drawing at the royal academy; & reside <1780> at mr wilmot’s—no relation of my uncle’s—living in wood street near cheapside. it was soon after the riots which were headed in london by lord george gordon <june 2 1780> … in my walks after breakfast to the royal academy to draw; i meet again that horribly, diabolically looking man that i before mentioned. the academy now is at the new range of building close to the strand, a magnificent edifice; whereas before it was the antiquated mansion somerset house. … during all september <1780> at the royal academy, i cease to draw there; it was then vacation-time, & not the only vacation neither in the year: for the months of april & may were exhibition-time, & then i ceased to draw there likewise: but as a student i had the privilege of visiting the exhibition for the sight of the pictures four times gratis. at other times, i went to the library—belonging to the academy—on the monday forenoon; either to look over folio books of fine engravings from the master-pieces of painting, or to read those volumes whose subjects were connected with painting.—on monday evenings, i attended now—(the middle of autumn)—dr hunter’s lectures on the <superficial> anatomy of the human body, with the view to the instruction of the students in the drawing of the human figure. the lecture-room was in the attic-story of the edifice.—medals are proposed, in a framed sheet of paper for the students to inspect, to be given for the best three drawings of an academy figure. i was once a candidate or competitor: but was unsuccessful. these were silver medals. but the gold medals were to be won by the best historical painting from a given & specified subject; & by the best historical piece of modelling—which is to sculpture what design or drawing is to painting; & there was for the best design of such & such a subject in architecture. a little before xmas, sir joshua reynolds, who is the president of the royal academy, delivers a lecture on the subject, at the distribution of the prizes, the several medals.—i had also gone to hear lectures on perspective at mr wale’s. (bl add. ms 89020/6) he returned to ringwood once more in 1781–82, then back to london for study, which continued until the death of his father in february 1784. “i continue drawing at the academy day by day as usual: hear the lectures, keep the vacations, & go to the anniversary exhibition, as before.” the family moved out of ringwood, and “it was now resolved to put me to the business of engraving” (edmund gosse 143). he was apprenticed to john raphael smith, but ran away to hampshire with “hodges, another youth,” who must be charles howard hodges. in 1785 he was sent back to london and became the pupil of the mezzotint engraver william ward. he found work as a mezzotint engraver from around 1788, but around 1799 he gave up engraving for miniature painting, which he pursued mainly in the west of england. he advertised in birmingham in 1804: “t. gosse, from the royal academy, london … takes the correctest likenesses in miniature, at three and four guineas each” (aris’s birmingham gazette 6 august 1804). he married, in worcester in 1807, hannah best (1780–1860), “the daughter of a worcestershire yeoman.” his itinerant lifestyle continued, now with a young family, but in 1812 he settled in poole. he died in london in 1844, in a house provided by his son, the successful natural historian philip henry gosse. (edmund gosse, “fragments of the autobiography of thomas gosse,” burlington magazine 27, no. 148 [july 1915]: 141-50; fayette gosse, the gosses: an anglo-australian family [canberra, 1981]) george graham registered as a student 6 september 1780, aged 16, 23 last november; painter (h370) george graham (1764–active 1813). engraver and painter. he has been identified as scottish, perhaps only on the basis of his surname. he may perhaps be connected with the george graham, stationer and bookseller, insured at craven street, strand, in 1777 (lma), dying in 1791 (national archives, prob 11/1204). possibly the george graham apprenticed to james cope (c. 1728–99), citizen and coachmaker of london, in 1781 (when this student would have been 16 or 17). he exhibited as an honorary exhibitor in 1783, and thomas gosse referred to him as “my fellow-pupil at ward’s” (149 [article by edmund gosse under gosse, above]), that is, the mezzotint engraver william ward. gosse’s memoir indicates that he and graham went together from ward’s to hodges’s in 1788. the bm notes him as a painter, illustrator, and engraver in stipple and mezzotint, active c. 1786–1813. he may be the same george graham who was in america from at least 1812, the engraver of a mezzotint after gilbert stuart of george washington. john graham registered as a student 10 march 1783, aged 28, 17 march inst.; painter (h431) john graham (1755–1817). history and portrait painter. his family background has not been established; he is said to have been born in the north of scotland. trained as a coach painter in edinburgh, being apprenticed to george macfarquhar (active 1763–99). he came to london, where he was based in the 1780s and 1790s, at first pursuing coach painting before his studies at the academy. exhibited at the sa in 1783 and at the fsa 1782–83, producing quite ambitious history paintings. he was appointed master of the trustees’ academy, edinburgh, in 1798, and was influential as a teacher, encouraging academic principles of study based on copying the antique. he died in edinburgh in 1817. thomas gray registered as a student 30 september 1777, aged 25 last july; painter (h307) thomas gray (1752–active 1783). the son of john gray, shopkeeper of st. andrew’s, holborn. he was apprenticed to thomas maxfield, citizen and painter stainer, in 1767, which record provides details of his father. probably the gray who exhibited animal paintings at the fsa in 1783, from king’s road, bedford row. he is not further recorded as an artist. john hippesley green registered as a student 21 march 1774, aged 20, 30 june last; sculptor (h228) silver medal 1780 noted in the life school register 19 november 1792 john hippisley green (1753–1832). sculptor and landscape painter. the son, out of wedlock, of jane hippisley (1719–91), later mrs. green, prominent as an actor. he was an assistant to the sculptor joseph nollekens, and exhibited at the ra 1775–1820. after 1800 he focused on landscape painting. he died in hampstead in 1832, said to be in his 80th year, when it was noted that he was “one of the eldest students of the royal academy” (evening mail 29 february 1832). john guard registered as a student 4 december 1775, aged 18, 19th this december; painter (h259) marked as “dead” in the register john guard (1757–active 1775). very likely the john guard born 29 december 1757, baptized 8 january 1758, st. james, westminster, the son of william guard and his wife susanna. his father must be the william guard recorded as a carpenter in the poll books at leicester street, st. james piccadilly, and covent garden, 1774–88, who died in 1788, his will benefiting his widow, susanna, daughters, and a son-in-law, without naming a son (national archives, prob 11/1164). this may simply indicate that john guard predeceased him. john guard is not recorded as active as an artist. thomas guest registered as a student 31 march 1777 (cm only) (h293) thomas robert guest (1754–1818). artist, art teacher, and merchant. jeffares speculates he may have been related to thomas guest, a tailor of bath, who was the father of mary jane guest (c. 1762–1846), piano teacher to the princesses amelia and charlotte. he first carried on business in the west country and london. in 1779 he married margaret douglass in plymouth; in 1788 he was advertising in bath as “miniature and portrait painter (late from italy)” (cited by jeffares). in 1801 he was granted a patent for a design of paintbox, and was then stated to be of plymouth and 82 pall mall, london. at the latter address he was in business as a colorman with thomas rowney, a perfumer. the partnership was dissolved in 1802 and guest removed to salisbury. there he went into business as a drawing master, picture restorer, and artists’ supplier. his son, thomas douglas guest (1781–1855), registered at the ra schools in 1801 and pursued a controversial career as a history painter. in 1807 the elder thomas guest published a new pocket sketch book containing an easy measure of drawing from nature. that year farington noted that the rev. mr. davis from salisbury reported that “the father of douglas guest is a portrait painter. he sometime ago came to salisbury a stranger, and finding out that mr and mrs davis were people well known requested them to allow their eldest son to sit to him—which he did —& the likeness being approved, he obtained a great deal of business.—he also made some copies of a picture of corregio, which he sold for 80 guineas each” (8: 2947). as well as his artistic pursuits, he ran the circulating library and sold snuff and fishing tackle; farington heard reference to him in 1810 as a “watchmaker.” in 1810 he exhibited in london a painting of stonehenge, and in 1814 he executed a group of archaeological still lifes recording finds at an excavation in winterslow, wiltshire (see sam smiles, “thomas guest and paul nash in wiltshire: two episodes in the artistic approach to british antiquity,” sam smiles and stephanie moser, eds., envisioning the past: art and archaeology [oxford, 2004]). in 1801 andrew robertson, a contemporary of thomas douglas guest at the ra schools, noted: “his father was an artist and student in london. turned merchant and made £50,000. this is his only son, he sent him to rome, france, spain and portugal.” the record of thomas robert guest’s various business and artistic enterprises suggests less concrete success than is indicated here, and there is other evidence that the younger guest could be liberal with the truth. thomas robert guest died in salisbury in 1818. silvester harding registered as a student 25 november 1776, aged 25, 5 august last; painter (h281) sylvester harding (1745/1751–1809). miniature painter, engraver, and print publisher. born stafford, the son of sylvester harding and mary, who apparently married only after his birth (odnb). according to rupert sims (bibliotheca staffordiensis [lichfield, 1894] 209), his father was a coach builder. “he was born at newcastle-under-lyme, july 25, 1745. sent to an uncle in london at the age of 10 years, he was placed by him to a trade which he disliked—it is said to a hair-dresser—and at 14 he ran away and was not heard of for several years. he had joined a company of strolling players” (redgrave). the date of birth given by redgrave conflicts with the register, but the birthplace in staffordshire may be correct, as it can be noted that a sylvester harding was baptized at st. mary, stafford, in 1723, and may be related to this student. a thomas harding, son of sylvester harding and his wife mary, was baptized at st. mary, stafford, in january 1752, although his birthdate is too close to sylvester harding’s (as provided in the register) for him to be a brother. sylvester came to london with another brother, edward (1755–1840), and together they opened a print and bookseller’s shop in fleet street. sylvester harding exhibited at the fsa in 1776, from 5 george’s court, bennet hill, doctors’ commons, and at the ra, 1777–1802, initially from 83 fleet street. he had married sarah perfect, a daughter of william perfect, md, of kent; at the death of a son in 1796, he was noted as “an eminent portrait painter and engraver” (gentleman’s magazine). the business partnership with edward harding ended in 1797; sylvester continued in business in pall mall. he died in pall mall, london, in 1809, said to be 64 years old. (jane roberts, “edward harding and queen charlotte,” diana dethloff et al., eds., burning bright: essays in honour of david bindman [ucl press, 2015]) john/james hardy registered as a student 29 march 1781, aged 27 last xmas; engraver (h390) john hardy (1752–active 1781). engraver. born derbyshire, the son of william hardy (d. 1765), miner and writer on mining, and his wife mary (allen). redgrave notes a j. hardy who was a portrait painter in london “toward the end of the 18th century,” and foskett a james and jonathan hardy active as miniature painters in the early nineteenth century. alan davison identifies him as john hardy, the brother of thomas hardy who had registered as a student in 1778, although the family record states his birthdate as 24 january 1752, which conflicts with the register. (alan davison, “new light on the painter and engraver thomas hardy (1757–1804),” british art journal 12.1 [summer 2011]: 37-41) thomas hardy registered as a student 31 december 1778, aged 21 last june; painter (h333) thomas hardy (1757–1804). portrait painter. born derbyshire, the son of william hardy (d. 1765), miner and writer on mining, and his wife mary (allen). previously mistakenly identified with the political radical of the same name; alan davison has established his family background and career. he may have trained with joseph wright of derby. he exhibited at the ra 1778–98, initially from portland street and in 1783 from chatsworth, where he was working for the duke of devonshire, who may also have provided further support. his clientele included musicians as well as derbyshire sitters. he died in stafford in 1804. his widow, ann, applied for the post of housekeeper at the ra. farington noted that “he died aged 47 in consequence of a cold caught at the academy while painting copies of the king & queen for lawrence” (quoted davison 38). their sons charles and john were students at the academy. (alan davison, “new light on the painter and engraver thomas hardy (1757–1804),” british art journal 12.1 [summer 2011]: 37-41) john harrison registered as a student 30 september 1777, aged 17, 12 december 1776; painter (h308) john harrison (1759–active 1794). foskett suggests he is the miniature painter who exhibited at the ra 1784–93, initially from 3 new ormond street. he seems likely to be the john harrison insured opposite the windmill in vauxhall road, “painter,” in 1794 (lma). the name is commonplace and it has not proved possible to identify him more fully. francis haward registered as a student 25 march 1776, aged 17, 19th next april; engraver (h268) marked as “dead” in the register francis haward (1759–97). engraver. although the odnb asserts that nothing is known of his family background, he must be the francis haward baptized at st. mary, lambeth, 27 april 1759, son of searle edward haward and his wife anne. his father was described as a “gentleman” in his will of 1767, and apparently owned property (national archives, prob 11/928). francis haward is named among their six children in the legal record of a later dispute over his father’s property (morning advertiser 21 january 1818). his widow, mary haward, received ra charity in 1799 (cm). henry haworth registered as a student 31 march 1777, aged 16, 14 september last; sculptor (h294) henry haworth (1760–81). woodcarver. the son of samuel haworth (d. 1779), who ran an extensive woodcarving business in denmark street, st. giles in the fields. he was appointed the resident woodcarver of the carron company of scotland in 1779, but died young of pneumonia. william haworth registered as a student 31 march 1777, aged 17, 21st june/76; sculptor (h295) william haworth (1759–1838). woodcarver. the son of samuel haworth (d. 1779), who ran an extensive woodcarving business in denmark street, st. giles in the fields. he joined the ra schools on the same day as his brother, henry. he exhibited at the ra in 1781, and took over from his brother as resident carver of the carron company of scotland on the latter’s death in 1781. he remained at the company for the rest of his life. joseph haynes registered as a student 25 march 1779, aged 18, 23 last february; painter (h348) joseph haynes (1761–1829). printmaker and drawing master. baptized at st. mary, shrewsbury, 20 february 1761, son of thomas haynes and his wife margaret (mills). the occupation of his father is not known; the poll book for shrewsbury for 1796 includes a number of hayneses, variously carpenters, laborers, and gardeners, as well as this joseph haynes, “artist.” he moved to london in his youth and studied under john hamilton mortimer, producing prints of his works after his death. according to the odnb, “the later part of haynes’s life was spent in shrewsbury and chester, working as a drawing-master, although it is reputed that he lived for a while in jamaica.” he died in chester in 1829, apparently unmarried, described as “drawing master” by his obituary writer, who suggests that he was sent to london to study under mortimer by his “friends,” which implies a sponsorship arrangement (gentleman’s magazine [1830]: 379). guy head registered as a student 8 april 1778, aged 16, 4 june next; painter (h324) marked as “decd” in the register guy head (1762–1800). history painter and copyist. born carlisle, the son of thomas head, a butcher, and his wife, isabella. he exhibited from “mr warwick’s, snow hill” at the sa in 1780, and at the ra 1779–80, “48 snow hill.” this must have been guy warwick, grocer, of snow hill, whose will was proved 1801 (national archives, prob 11/1358). he married, in 1781, jane lewthwaite, the daughter of a carlisle businessman and an amateur artist. he went to holland in 1786, with letters of introduction to the hope family of merchants from sir joshua reynolds. the hopes supported head in italy, where he achieved academic success. he died shortly after returning to london in 1800. m. henard noted in cm, 1785 charles hénard (1757–active 1808). miniature painter. born bourg-en-bresse. a pupil of taraval and a student at the académie royale in paris, 1778. noted in cm in march 1785: “mons m henard an eminent artist a foreigner, having applied for leave to draw from the plaister. order’d, on the above account that the keeper permit him to draw from the plaister only.” he exhibited at the ra in 1785, 1799, and 1800, and at the paris salon 1791–1808. basil long, cited by foskett, gave the initial as “m,” which matches the record in the cm and the name as given at the ra exhibitions, but biographical sources identify him as charles. william higgins registered as a student 29 october 1784, aged 25, 15 september last; painter (h457)silver medal 1785 william higgins (1761–active 1811?). portrait painter. waterhouse identifies him with the “w. higgin” who exhibited a “portrait of a lady” at the ra, 1786, from 11 holborn bars. two portraits of members of the agar family are in york art gallery, one dated 1808. probably also the “w. higgins” who exhibited a portrait at the ra in 1811, from 71 newman street. william hincks registered as a student 27 october 1780, aged 28; painter (h381) william hincks (1752–1808?). irish-born painter in crayons, oils, and miniatures (waterhouse), also an engraver. reportedly the son of a blacksmith (warburton, history of the city of dublin [1818], quoted by jeffares), although the earlier account from pasquin states only that he was “born in waterford, and apprenticed to a blacksmith; this ingenious and indefatigable gentleman is self taught” (44). he exhibited in dublin 1773–80 and married there. he exhibited at the ra 1781–97, initially from 16 old compton street, soho, and at the fsa in 1782. hincks, “miniature painter and engraver,” was a member of the society for the encouragement of arts, manufactures and commerce; in 1787 he presented a portrait of its founder, william shipley. jeffares speculates that he may be the william hincks recorded as being buried at st. anne’s, soho, in 1808. charles howard hodges registered as a student 8 march 1782, aged 17, 23 last july; engraver (h410) silver medal 1784 charles howard hodges (1764–1837). portrait painter and mezzotint engraver. born london, the son of the miniature painter charles hodges. he was trained by his father and at the age of 15 went to work in the studio of the printseller william humphrey, a family friend; he was said to have spent time in reynolds’s studio, and was also a pupil of john raphael smith, the mezzotint engraver. exhibited at the sa in 1783, from 15 goodge street, tottenham court road. he married, in london in 1784, margaret harmar (b. 1759). after visiting the netherlands in 1788, he and his family moved to the hague in 1792; he became a citizen of the hague in 1793 and joined the academy there. he established a successful career as a portrait painter in the netherlands, moving to amsterdam in 1797. he was also active as an art dealer. failing eyesight and poor health forced his retirement from art, and he died in amsterdam in 1837. “he was an admirable painter and engraver, and a man of most excellent private character” (public ledger 27 july 1837). (a. c. a. w. baron van der felz, charles howard hodges 1764–1837 [assen, 1982]) james hogg registered as a student 6 september 1780, aged 19 last january 28; engraver (h371) noted in the life school register 5 november 1790 james hogg (1761–active 1793). engraver. said to be scottish, presumably on the basis of his surname. waterhouse identifies him with the “james hog” who exhibited pastels at the fsa in 1773, when he was described as a pupil of the engraver james caldwell. he is known from stipple engravings dating from 1785 to 1793, latterly published by him from 52 berwick street. dodd notes: “a reputable engraver in the stipple method—we however have but very few examples of his practice” (bl add. ms 33402, f. 30). peter holland registered as a student 8 october 1779, aged 22, 1 march inst.; painter (h363) silver medal 1781 peter holland (1757–1823). portrait and landscape painter. perhaps a member of the well-established holland family who owned property in cheshire and lancashire; peter was a favored name in that context. he exhibited at the ra in 1781–82, from “mr finney’s, 56 frith street, soho.” this must be john finney, dealer in turnery, who was insured at 57 frith street in 1806 (lma). he married elizabeth chapman (1762–1837). active in liverpool from around 1784, exhibiting firstly from london (“portrait of an artist”). when he exhibited in london in 1793 it was from liverpool. he was first vice-president of the liverpool academy in 1810. he exhibited in liverpool until 1812. he died in liverpool in 1823 and was buried at holy trinity, a gravestone providing details of his family (<http://​www.​findagrave.​com>). william beulow gould, born william holland in liverpool 1801 and transported 1827, has been identified as his son (isabella mead, “william beulow gould,” papers and proceedings of the royal society of tasmania 93 [1959]). john hoppnar registered as a student 6 march 1775, aged 17, 25 april next; painter (h243) silver medal 1778, gold medal 1782 noted in the life school register 21 october 1790 marked as “dead” in the register john hoppner (1758–1810). portrait painter. born in london, perhaps at st. james’s palace, the son of john hoppner, a surgeon, and his wife mary anne, both german. in 1795 he told farington of his background and progress: hoppner told me, that his father & mother were germans. his father was a surgeon. hoppner was recommended to the king as a lad of genius, and the king had him placed to board with mr chamberlains family. mr chamberlain who is now in the kings library, and was one of the pages.—he was acquainted with mrs hoppner (the daugr. of mrs wright the modeller in wax), several years before they were married.—hoppner has been married upwards of 12 years.—on his marriage being known, he recd. a message from the king that his majestys allowance wd. be withdrawn. hoppner was during several years subjected to great difficulties.—he had lodgings, a two pair of stairs floor, in cockspur street. when he took a house in charles st., st. james’s square, he painted three quarter portraits for 8 guineas a head. in this time he contracted a heavy debt, & had relatives besides his wife & children to provide for.—during some years while in charles st. he did not get near £400 a year.—lord hampden, has been a continued friend.—he had bad health owing to a weakness of the bowels … mrs hoppner assisted in all her power to relieve him in his difficulties. she made herself his cloaths as well as those of the children. (2: 286-87) he had married in 1781 phoebe wright, daughter of the wax sculptor patience wright and sister of fellow student joseph wright. he had begun exhibiting in 1780 and achieved success as a portrait painter, being seen as the successor to reynolds. he was also active as an art critic. he suffered poor health in the 1800s and died in 1810. thomas/j. horsley registered as a student 8 april 1778, aged 24, 2nd november next; painter (h325) horsley (1754–active 1778). waterhouse conjectures that he may be the “master horsley” who exhibited at the fsa in 1774, from james street, covent garden, although the age of this student based on that given in the register makes this unlikely. foskett notes a t. j. horsley who exhibited at the ra 1820–33. charles horwell registered as a student 31 march 1777, aged 23, 1 april/77; sculptor (h296) silver medal 1784, gold medal 1788 noted in the life school register 1 october 1790 marked as “dead” in the register charles horwell (1754–1830). sculptor. he was apprenticed to john walsh (active 1757–77), statuary of st. george, hanover square, in 1776. he exhibited at the ra 1785–1807, initially from 3 tottenham court road. he gave that address on winning a premium at the society of arts in 1788, and appeared as “statuary,” store street, tottenham court road, in the universal british directory, 1791. redgrave notes that after he exhibited a design for nelson’s monument in 1807, “the trace of his art is lost.” he apparently came into money, for in 1815 “charles horwell, a sculptor” purchased a property in hemel hempstead for £650, which he bequeathed to henry horwell and ann woodward on his death in 1830; the legitimacy of the purchase was subsequently disputed in rolls court (morning post 27 april 1843). henry hudson registered as a student 6 september 1780, aged 18 next 26 march; engraver (h372) henry hudson (1763–95). mezzotint engraver and pastelist. he is likely the henry hudson, son of henry hudson and his wife sarah of gray’s inn lane, baptized at st. andrew’s, holborn, on 22 april 1763. the will of henry hudson of st. andrew’s, holborn, proved 1776, likely that of his father, provides no details as to occupation and refers to nieces but no son (national archives, prob 11/1025). probably the hudson who was an honorary exhibitor of a portrait at the ra in 1781. his published works in mezzotint date from 1782 to 1791, mainly reproducing works by contemporary artists. he moved to india around 1793, establishing his own printing press in calcutta. a contemporary there referred to his success as an engraver, and that “he has also set out in painting small crayon portraits at sicca rupees 100 each, which are very clever, and i daresay he will do well” (foster 50). however, he died of illness in india in july 1795. ralph charles hurter registered as a student 29 march 1781, aged 13, 25 march inst.; painter (h391) charles ralph hurter (1768–active 1791). miniature painter. the son of johann heinrich von hurter (1734–99), born schaffhausen, miniature and enamel painter who traveled extensively in europe. j. h. hurter was active in bern 1768–70, and charles ralph hurter was probably born there. the elder hurter was based in england and exhibited as john henry hurter at the ra 1779–81, from 2 tavistock row, covent garden, and 53 great marlborough street. charles hurter exhibited at the ra in 1787 and 1789, from 53 great marlborough street. james irvine registered as a student 31 march 1777, aged 20, 18 march last; painter (h297) james irvine (1759–1831). painter and art dealer. born in scotland, 18 march 1759 (contrary to the register), the third son of alexander irvine, seventeenth laird of drum (1711–61), and his wife mary (ogilvie). he exhibited at the ra in 1787 and 1794, being based in italy from 1791 and again 1797–98. he was initially ambitious as a history painter, described in 1786 as “a painter, a young scotsman, who has been here 7 years, a very decent modest young man who seems to colour very well” (journal of henry quin, quoted in ingamells). he became, however, primarily an art dealer of some prominence, returning to italy again in 1800–06. he “married the widow of manley, an artist, an italian lady, by whom he had no issue” (douglas wimberley, a short account of the family of irvine of drum [inverness, 1893] 47). this artist must be george manley (d. 1794), who had been in business as a picture dealer with irvine in rome (ingamells). daniel jenkins registered as a student 25 march 1779, aged 24 last october; engraver (h349) daniel jenkins (1754–active 1786?). printmaker. redgrave notes him as an engraver: “there are two plates by him of horse races, dated 1786.” he appears as one of the students sketched in an anonymous set of drawings of ra students dating from the late 1770s at the ra. he also produced a stipple of a nymph kneeling beside a pool, published by thomas macklin in 1781 (dodd notes the print, misreading the engraver’s name as “d. fenkins”; bl add. ms 33400, f. 454). george francis joseph registered as a student 3 december 1784, aged 20, 25 november last; engraver (h465) gold medal 1792 noted in the life school register 8 october 1790 george francis joseph (1764–1846). portrait and history painter. often said to have been born in dublin, though the odnb suggests he may have been the george francis joseph who was baptized on 16 december 1764 at st. botolph aldgate, london, the son of thomas joseph and his wife, ann, of red lyon alley, minories, which is not unreasonable, given his stated birthdate in the register. he was a cousin of the sculptor samuel joseph. waterhouse notes him as “mainly a rather dull portraitist.” he exhibited at the ra 1788–1846, initially from 27 strand. elected ara 1813. he died in cambridge in 1846. michael kean registered as a student 29 october 1784, aged 23, 16 october last; painter (h458) michael kean (1761–1823). painter of portraits in crayon and miniatures. born dublin and trained at the dublin schools, where he won a medal at the dublin society of arts, and with a sculptor, e. smith, before coming to london. pasquin states that he studied under benjamin west, but this may simply allude to his time at the ra schools. he exhibited at the ra 1786–90, from 20 southampton street, bloomsbury, and 190 piccadilly. he largely gave up painting on becoming a partner in the china factory at derby with william duesbury in 1795. he married duesbury’s widow, elizabeth, and was the dominant figure in the derby porcelain factory until 1811. (gerald pendred, “michael kean and the duesbury miniatures,” derby porcelain international society 3 [1996]: 9-19) christopher kinder registered as a student 29 march 1781, aged 25, 2 november last; painter (h392) entered as “benjamin” in the register, altered to “christopher” christopher kinder (1754–1833). coach painter and varnish maker. he seems certain to be the christopher kinder of 12 north place who died in 1833, aged 79 (so born c. 1754), and was buried at st. andrew’s, holborn. the kinders were coach painters in north place, gray’s inn lane. christopher kinder of king’s mews, coach painter, took an apprentice in 1783. he was made free of the city of london by redemption of the company of painter stainers in 1787. in 1790 he had insured properties at liquorpond road, king’s mews (near gray’s inn lane), and little james street (lma). in his will he describes himself as a varnish maker (national archives, prob 11/1824). a range of his london properties, “producing 1000l. per annum,” was put up for auction by order of his executors and trustees in 1834 (morning post 24 june 1834). george king registered as a student 31 december 1778, aged 22, 30 last november; painter (h334) george king (1756–active 1778). “master king” exhibited sculptures and drawings at the fsa 1771–73, as “mr king junr” in 1774, and “at mr king’s, 54 wells street, oxford road” in 1775–76. a g. king exhibited “portrait of a gentleman” from wells street, marylebone, in 1778. the bdsb notes him as the brother of william king, who exhibited sculpture at the fsa 1769–82, from 48 wells street, oxford street, and who is recorded as making a chimneypiece for the earl of coventry in 1797. these connections would surely point to a family background in the building trades, but such cannot currently be documented. thomas kirk registered as a student 7 january 1784, aged 18, 17 last october; painter (h449) marked as “dd” in the register thomas kirk (1765–97). historical painter and illustrator. his family background has not been established. however, the kirk who competed unsuccessfully to be the engraver of the dies for the ra’s medals in 1770 may be related (cm); this must be john kirk (1724–76), medalist and gem engraver of st. paul’s churchyard. a pupil of richard cosway (waterhouse). he exhibited at the ra 1785–96, firstly from 50 berwick street, oxford street. he achieved some brief prominence, but died of consumption in 1797; he must be the thomas kirk, aged 32, who was buried at st. pancras old church in november 1797. dayes says that “he passed like a meteor through the region of art.” james laboreau registered as a student 4 november 1774, aged 28; designer (h237) james laboreau (c. 1746–96). pattern drawer. presumably of french origin. possibly connected with the miss labare or labar who exhibited works in hair at the fsa 1766–83, from “mrs labare, 2 nottingham street, mary bone high street” in 1783. he must be the james laboreau, pattern drawer of st. anne, soho, whose will was proved 1796, benefiting his widow, mary (gordon) (national archives, prob 11/1277). thomas langdon registered as a student 10 march 1783, aged 14, 6 last february; engraver (h432) thomas langdon (1769–active 1802). miniature painter and engraver. he must be the thomas langdon born 6 february 1769 and baptized 6 march 1769, st. marylebone, son of william langdon and his wife margaret. his father is probably the william langdon, hosier and mercer of 17 vere street, oxford street, who appears in kent’s directory, 1774. exhibited at the ra 1785–1802, initially from 19 vere street, presumably his father’s oxford street address. he gave the vere street address when he won a prize at the society of arts in 1785. foskett suggests he may be the t. langdon who was active as a miniature painter in bath 1809–22, with a wife who “taught painting on glass, velvet etc., and modelling in wax.” francis legat registered as a student 1 april 1783, aged 22, 8 last march; engraver (h436) noted in the life school register 6 december 1790 francis legat (1761–1809). engraver. born scotland in march 1761. j. t. smith recalled him as “a north briton … educated at edinburgh, under alexander runciman.” other sources note him as a pupil of the engraver andrew bell in edinburgh (edinburgh annual register [1816]; edinburgh monthly magazine [february 1821]). he told smith in 1780 that he was 25, putting his birthdate back to 1755, contrary to the statement in the register. in london he first lived at charles street. legat exhibited paintings at the ra in 1796 and 1800, from 11 camden town and 3 charles street, middlesex hospital. he was prominent as an engraver of historical subjects and was historical engraver to the prince of wales. his burial record from st. pancras old church, april 1809, stated that he was 47 when he died, more in conformity with the ra register. redgrave states he died in debt, “which a friend discharged.” nicholas lemesle/newton lamech registered as a student 4 december 1775, aged 15, last 18th august; painter (h260) his birthdate must be 18 august 1760. the discrepancy in the names given in the cm and register cannot be explained. lemesle suggests a french huguenot origin, but he has not been further identified. richard livesay registered as a student 21 march 1774, aged 23, 8 last december/73; designer (h230) richard livesay (1750–1826). miniature painter, drawing master, and engraver. he exhibited at the ra 1776–1821, firstly from “mr spilsbury’s, tavistock street,” suggesting he was a student of jonathan spilsbury, then from mrs. hogarth’s house, leicester fields (to 1785). he did copies and engravings after hogarth. a pupil and assistant of benjamin west, moving to windsor to work for him c. 1790. he taught drawing to some of the royal children c. 1790–93. he was drawing master at the royal naval college at portsea from 1796. he received charity from the ra in 1820 (cm) and applied to the agbi, described as of ryde, isle of wight: an artist once in a respectable station of society and now oppressed by two great evils, old age & poverty; being reduced to great distress in the 70th year of his age, and now (the 12th of july) under confinement at the suit of an angry creditor and obliged to hope for liberty only by the benevolence of the law for the relief of insolvents. the produce of his professional exertions are also diminished to such a degree as to afford at best but scanty provision when he gets his liberty; so that his future prospects are as gloomy as his present situation is distressing. (agbi applicants’ book) he was given a donation of £20 in 1820. he is said to have died in hampshire in 1826. his will, dated 1826, stated he was an artist, harrington street, bath, and benefited his nephew in portsmouth, john livesay; this was filed in 1831 (national archives, prob 22/46). william lock attended the life academy c. 1785–87? william lock (1767–1847). amateur artist. son of the collector and patron william lock, esq. (1732–1810), of norbury park, surrey, and his wife frederica augusta (schaub; 1750–1832). his father inherited wealth from william lock, mp (d. 1761), who is taken to be his natural father, and was prominent as a collector of antiquities and patron of art. the younger lock was educated at the rev. william gilpin’s school at cheam. his upbringing therefore gave him hugely privileged access to influential artists and writers on art. his entry to the ra schools presumably rested on these influential connections, for he was not enrolled as a probationer. instead, the council noted on 7 march 1785 only “that mr lock junr be allowed to draw after the female model.” this was an exception in several respects, as not only was he not a student, he was also unmarried and under the age of 20. he appears to have studied at the academy for short periods, for in 1787 he was again heading to london for a week in order to visit the schools; his father, who generally encouraged him in his art, considered this unnecessary and they argued: “tis a whim of william’s, but when they are young they will have their whims” (duchess of sermoneta, the locks of norbury [london, 1940] 35). lock was actively encouraged by henry fuseli, a friend of his father’s; as professor of painting at the academy, fuseli dedicated his published lectures (1801) to the son. lock traveled to rome in 1789 and married elizabeth jennings, daughter of the collector john constantine jennings, in 1800. he paid little attention to norbury park, and went on in 1819 to sell it. after that date he mainly traveled, notably to italy and france. he died in london in 1847, “of the prevailing influenza” (sussex advertiser 21 december 1847). wilson lowry attended the schools c. 1778? wilson lowry (1760–1824). engraver. born in whitehaven, cumberland, the son of strickland lowry (1737–80/85), portrait and landscape painter, and his wife sarah (watson). his father worked in staffordshire, shropshire, and ireland, and wilson lowry worked with a housepainter in warwickshire and in london and sussex before settling with the family in worcester, where he worked for a local engraver called ross. at the age of 18 he returned to london, where he worked for the publisher john boydell. “though he never formally enrolled as a student, it is said that he took drawing lessons in the royal academy schools and was taught perspective by thomas malton the elder” (odnb). this would presumably have been around 1778. in the later 1780s he spent four years training as a surgeon, but returned to engraving and worked for a number of leading engravers. he established a particular reputation for illustrating architecture and mechanism. he was responsible for several technical innovations in printmaking and took a serious interest in science. he married twice, and although professionally successful he suffered ill health and poverty late in life, becoming dependent on the artists’ annuity fund. he died in london in 1824. william lyford registered as a student 6 september 1780, aged 26 next september; painter (h373) william lyford (1755–1830). drawing master. probably the william lyford, son of richard lyford and his wife elizabeth, baptized at st. martin in the fields, 5 october 1755. his father is likely the richard lyford of 24 strand listed as a leatherseller in kent’s directory, 1774, and the individual of that name insured at 463 strand as a leatherseller, 1781 (lma), and entered in the poll books to 1784 (london lives). william lyford exhibited london views at the ra 1784–89, from 463 strand, and as honorary from 1787. william lyford, drawing master, was insured at 463 strand in 1791–92 (lma). probably the william lyford of a corresponding age who was buried at st. martin in the fields, 1830. richard mabbet registered as a student 25 march 1779, aged 19, 2 march 1779; painter (h350) richard mabbet (1760–active 1781). miniature painter. perhaps the richard mabbet, son of richard mabbet and his wife jane, baptized at newland, gloucestershire, 9 march 1760. his family background has not been further established, although it seems likely that his father is the “late richard mabbet, esq. of colford” whose daughter married in bicknor in 1798, suggesting some degree of gentility (gloucester journal 20 august 1798). he exhibited at the ra 1780–81, from 24 villiers street, strand. a dated miniature by him is in the national maritime museum. foskett reports that “[basil] long saw two examples of his work which he did not consider very good; they were almost in monochrome.” william macaulay registered as a student 4 october 1776, aged 24 last august; painter (h275) william macaulay (1752–active 1776). not identified. robert makepeace registered as a student 6 september 1780, aged 19, 11 last july; painter (h374) robert makepeace (1761–1827). goldsmith. very likely the robert makepeace baptized 2 august 1761 at st. anne and st. agnes, city of london, the son of robert makepeace and his wife margaret. his father was a goldsmith, first based in newcastle until around 1755. “robert makepeace son of robert makepeace of serle street lincolns inn fields county of middlesex goldsmith citizen and goldsmith of london” was apprenticed to his father in 1776. the younger robert makepeace, goldsmith, first entered his name as plate-worker in partnership with richard carter in 1777. the serle street address was insured by “robert makepeace junior” in 1791 (lma); his father, “gentleman” of serle street, died in 1801 (national archives, prob 11/1352). he was the robert makepeace of lincoln’s inn fields who was buried in highgate, december 1827, aged 67. his will, identifying him as “goldsmith,” was proved 1828. the firm continued after his death. robert marcuard registered as a student 31 march 1777, aged 18, 25 december last; engraver (h298) robert samuel marcuard (1758–92). engraver. although the name suggests a french origin, he has been identified as “an englishman … esteemed one of bartolozzi’s best scholars” (tuer 2: 52). he practiced in mezzotint and stipple. there are several marcuards in records from the late eighteenth century. daniel augustin marcuard married julie fornered at st. botolph-without-bishopsgate in january 1757, and is very likely to be this student’s father, given the dates. an m. c. marcuard was recorded as a ratepayer in newman street in 1791 (london lives). william mckenzie registered as a student 21 june 1781, aged 16, 7 august 1781; engraver (h399) william mckenzie (1765–c. 1837). he must be the william mckenzie born upper mount street, st. george’s, hanover square, 7 august 1765, and baptized 16 august 1765 at the nonconformist scotch church, swallow street, the son of roderick mckenzie and his wife charles [sic]. a younger brother, george, was baptized at the same place in 1767, his parents’ address then given as king street. his father was, then, very likely the roderick mckenzie who appeared as a wine merchant at king street, st. james, in 1788, and who had married charles clark in edinburgh in 1751. the bm records a william mckenzie active as a print publisher until the 1840s in “glasgow, edinburgh, london & new york,” who may be a relative. mcewan identifies him with the miniature painter of this name who was working in edinburgh in 1820 and exhibited in scotland 1832–37. robert mitchell meadows registered as a student 7 january 1784, aged 20, 26 last november; engraver (h446) robert mitchell meadows (1763–before 1812). engraver. said to have been born cardigan, wales (bm), but his family background has not been established. he married, in 1793, mary ogborne, at the parish chapel, st. pancras; she is possibly the engraver and sister of the engraver john ogborne, who was a student registered in 1776. both ogborne and robert meadows were pupils of joseph strutt (strutt 73). engraved for boydell and published in 1809 lectures on engraving. foskett says he “may possibly have painted miniatures” as well as engraving. redgrave states he died before 1812. (william strutt, a memoir of the life of joseph strutt, 1749–1802 [london, 1896]) thomas medland registered as a student 31 march 1777, aged 18, 7 march inst.; painter (h299) thomas medland (1759–1833). engraver and draftsman. “of unknown parentage” (odnb). he is possibly the thomas medland baptized 5 april 1759 at wolborough and newton abbot, devon, the son of william medland. several medlands are recorded at hatherleigh, devon, in the late eighteenth century, including bakers and thatchers, and it seems likely that this provides his family background. he did much topographical work and exhibited at the ra 1777–1822, initially from old palace yard, westminster. he became the drawing master of the east india company’s hailsbury college, hertford, on its foundation in 1806, and remained there until his death in 1833. john minnitt registered as a student 8 april 1778, aged 22, 11 april 78; painter (h326) john minnitt (1756–1823). painter and glazier. the son of john minnitt of hanover square, westminster, gardener. he was apprenticed in 1770 to the coach painter thomas maxfield, citizen and painter stainer. john minnett or minnitt, painter and glazier, was insured at 35 dartmouth street, westminster, in 1806 (lma), and appears in building records for several london developments (survey of london). the j. minnett who exhibited a london view in 1811 from 13 stargate walk, lambeth, may have been this artist or a relative. the will of john minnitt, painter and glazier of dartmouth street, westminster, was proved may 1823 (national archives, prob 11/1670). alexander monies registered as a student 31 december 1778, aged 15, 27 january 1779; painter (h335)silver medal 1784 alexander monies (1764–active 1809). portrait painter. he won a premium at the society of arts for a drawing of venus in 1776. an “a. h. monies” exhibited portraits at the ra 1797–1809, initially from 29 henrietta street, covent garden. james moore registered as a student 31 december 1777, aged 19, 12 last june; painter (h314) james moore (1758–99). wholesale linen draper and antiquary. probably the son or otherwise closely related to francis moore, linen draper and warehouseman at cheapside, who appeared in kent’s directory, 1774. very likely the “master james moor” who exhibited drawings and paintings at the fsa 1771–74 and perhaps the “mr moore,” 48 widegate street, whitechapel, who exhibited a view in 1783. an honorary exhibitor of the same name appeared at the sa in 1790–91, and these may all be identified with james moore (1762–99), a wealthy wholesale linen draper based in cheapside, who was also an amateur antiquary and draftsman. the date of birth generally given, 1762, is based on bell’s statement of “family records” (47). he traveled extensively in britain 1784–95, collaborating with thomas girtin in the 1790s and publishing in 1792 monastic remains and ancient castles in england and wales. he had married, in 1786, mary howett, and died in may 1799. his family background is not much established, although the obituary in the gentleman’s magazine refers to his father as “the late mr moore of mechanical memory,” which suggests he was an inventor of some kind. (c. f. bell, “fresh light on some water-colour painters of the old british school, derived from the collection and papers of james moore, fsa,” volume of the walpole society 5 [1915–16 and 1916–17]: 47-83) george charles moreland registered as a student 7 january 1784, aged 21, 26 last may; painter (h450) george morland (1763–1804). landscape and genre painter. born london, the son of henry robert morland (c. 1719–97), painter of portraits and fancy pictures. he was trained by his father and started exhibiting as early as 1773. he lodged with william ward, marrying his sister, anne ward, in september 1786; ward married morland’s sister, anne, in october. he went on to achieve commercial and critical success as a painter of rural life, although also gaining a reputation for unreliability and alcoholism. he suffered financial problems from the late 1780s, was under suspicion of forgery at one point, and was arrested on suspicion of being a spy in 1799. he continued to exhibit until his death in 1804, being arrested once again for debt a few days before his demise. after his death there was a proliferation of biographies and accounts of the artist. (george morland: art, traffic and society in late eighteenth century england, exhibition catalogue, stanley & audrey burton gallery [university of leeds, 2015], with references to earlier literature) george mortimer registered as a student 31 december 1778, aged 14, 13 june last; painter (h336) george mortimer (1764–active 1778). not identified. despite the discrepancy in the year of birth, he is possibly the george mortimer born 11 june 1765 and baptized 13 june 1765 at the british lying-in hospital, holborn, the son of joseph mortimer, peruke-maker, and his wife elizabeth. richard mortimer registered as a student 29 march 1781, aged 23 last october; painter (h393) richard mortimer (1757–active 1782?). not identified. perhaps the “mortimer” who exhibited at the fsa 1778–82 from 16 marybone street, golden square. thomas mortimer, tailor, was later (1808) insured at golden square (lma), but there is no evidence to connect them. munton noted in cm, 1775 noted in cm 4 december 1775, at the admission of new students, “that mr munton be desired to draw another figure.” he is not otherwise noted as a student or artist. john murphy registered as a student 25 march 1779, aged 23, 25 last november; engraver (h352) john murphy (1753–c. 1820). printmaker and print publisher. apparently born in ireland, but according to the odnb “nothing is known about him until 1778, when his career in london commenced.” he lived in air street, piccadilly, at the house of the bookseller patrick keating, until 1788, but subsequently moved to warwick street, golden square, and paddington green, producing and publishing mezzotints independently. he was still noted as active in 1820 (annals). henry mutlow registered as a student 31 december 1777, aged 21, 29 last november; engraver (h315) henry mutlow (1756–1827). engraver and printer. born clerkenwell, so perhaps connected with the james mutlow of st. john’s street, clerkenwell, who appeared as a witness at the old bailey in 1801. apprenticed to the william darling, “engraver,” st. martin in the fields, in may 1771. in partnership with thomas jones woodman in the 1780s; woodman had been apprenticed to thomas dent, engraver of allhallows lombard street, in 1772 (rollco). a press notice in 1785 announces that “woodman and mutlow, engravers, map and print-sellers, respectfully inform the nobility, gentry and publick in general, that they have succeeded mr. ashby in that well established shop, formerly mr. spilsbury’s, no. 30, russell-court, covent-garden” (daily advertiser 3 january 1785). his trade card (bm) describes “h. mutlow & son, engravers &c. to his majesty … arms found, printed on velum & engraved on stone, steel & silver medal. visiting cards, book plates &c.” presumably the “mutlow head shopman to cadell and davies,” the publishing firm, noted by farington in 1819 (15: 5357). he had engraved maps for cadell and davies and was noted by dodd as “an engraver of mediocre talent, whose productions consist chiefly of book plates, for various common publications” (bl add. ms 33403, f. 115). his eldest son died as a schoolboy in a horrific accident involving a “hogshead of sugar unloaded from a cart” (reading mercury 18 december 1797). this may be the henry mutlow, son of henry mutlow and his wife sarah, baptized at st. martin in the fields, westminster, in 1787. henry mutlow & son was listed for 3 york street, covent garden, in 1819 (po directory). he died in 1827, said to be 70 years old (hereford journal 17 january 1827); his will benefited his widow, anne (barrington), and an infant son, henry (national archives, prob 11/1727). this youngest henry mutlow had been born in 1817 and baptized at st. pancras (the father’s occupation stated as “engraver”). john ogborne registered as a student 25 november 1776, aged 21, 22nd last july; engraver (h282) john ogborne (1755–1837). engraver. born chelmsford, essex, the son of david ogborne (active 1740–d. 1800/01), engraver and print publisher, and his wife ruth (howe). his father had a local reputation as an artist and also wrote poetry and plays. john ogborne was apprenticed to william wynne ryland in london and went on to become his assistant. also noted as being a pupil of bartolozzi, although this was refuted by william strutt, who said that he was a pupil of his father, joseph strutt (strutt 74). he exhibited at the ra in 1785, from 58 tottenham court road. he married, probably in 1790, elizabeth jackson. his sister mary ogborne (b. 1764) was also a printmaker and married robert meadows, a fellow student and also a pupil of strutt; john ogborne engraved a portrait of strutt. he still exhibited in 1828 and 1837, but applied to the agbi in 1835, stating his age as 80, “incapable of following his profession from a nervous affection of the head”; he was granted £20 (agbi applicants’ book). he died in 1837, his widow receiving further support from the agbi. (william strutt, a memoir of the life of joseph strutt, 1749–1802 [london, 1896]) daniel orme registered as a student 7 march 1785, aged 18, 25 last august; engraver (h468) daniel orme (1766–1837). miniature painter and engraver. born manchester, the son of aaron orme (1707–82), fustian manufacturer, and his third wife, margaret (walmsley; baptized 1739–d. 1808). exhibited as a portraitist in miniatures, but mainly occupied as an engraver. he married, in 1787, ann barr. he exhibited at the ra 1797–1801, but continued to produce and engrave his own works. he worked closely with mather brown, a fellow student, embarking in the 1790s on a project to publish and exhibit scenes from naval history. he was appointed engraver to george iii. returned to manchester after 1814, where he continued to practice as an artist and taught art. his brother edward orme was an artist and publisher; another brother, william orme (1771–1854), a painter. peter paillou registered as a student 29 october 1784, aged 27, 1 december; painter (h459) peter paillou, jr. (1757–1835). miniature painter. son of peter paillou (active 1724–84), bird painter, who exhibited at the fsa in 1763 and the sa in 1778, from paradise row, islington (see christine e. jackson, dictionary of bird artists of the world [woodbridge, 1999]). peter paillou, jr., exhibited at the ra 1786–1800, initially from 9 white lion row, islington. latterly based in scotland, where he advertised as a portrait painter in glasgow in 1803, stating that he “has had nearly twenty years practice in london” (glasgow courier 23 april 1803). he appears in commercial listings for glasgow from at least 1813–30. the will of peter paillou, glasgow, was proved 1835, suggesting a slightly later death date than usually stated (national archives, prob 11/1852). william palmer registered as a student 10 october 1783, aged 19, 18 last november; painter (h438)silver medal 1785 william palmer (1763–90). portrait painter. born limerick, the son of alexander palmer, a linen draper (strickland). studied in dublin before moving to london, where he became a pupil of reynolds. he exhibited pastel portraits at the ra 1784–88, from 14 mercer street, long acre, and 23 great queen street. he returned to limerick after 1788 and died in ireland. the honorary exhibitor at the ra of this name noted by graves as exhibiting in 1792 and 1796 must be another individual. thomas park registered as a student 31 march 1777, aged 17, 24 inst.; engraver (h300) noted in the life school register 21 february 1799 thomas park (1758/59–1834). mezzotint engraver, antiquary, and bibliographer. born in east acton, middlesex. the family background is not clear, although it was clearly sufficiently affluent to, apparently, send park to a grammar school in durham (although his name is not included in t. h. burbidge, durham school register, 3rd ed. [cambridge, 1940]), and east acton was a rural setting favored by professional and military men. his biographer states that his parents lived in east acton “in lowly and peaceful retirement,” his father having “raised himself by honest industry to a position in which he was able to live with comfort” (robert c. jenkins, the last gleanings of a christian life: an outline of the life of thomas park, fsa [london, 1885] 8-9). his father seems likely to be john park of acton, whose son, thomas park, was appointed executor and beneficiary of his will, proved in 1786; the will refers to an unspecified sum in shares and £50 bequeathed to his son, but also details a life of comfort, including furniture, silver medal, and a portrait by “stewart” (national archives, prob 11/1146). “he was brought up as an engraver, and in the late 1780s produced several mezzotint portraits” (odnb). presumably the t. park who exhibited architectural designs at the ra 1780–81, from 14 garlick lane, bow hill, cheapside. he married, in 1787, maria hester reynolds. in the 1790s he focused on literary pursuits, writing poetry and becoming an editor. he died in hampstead in 1834 and was buried in acton, with his parents. his sonnets and other small poems (1797) included an epitaph to his parents, from “a grave stone in acton church yard.” james parker registered as a student 6 september 1780, aged 23 last september; engraver (h376) james parker (1756–1805). engraver and print publisher. born in st. mary-le-strand, london, the son of paul parker, a corn-chandler. he was apprenticed to the engraver james basire (1730–1802) in 1773 (rollco). exhibited at the fsa and sa in 1783, from 19 little drury lane. partner of william blake in a short-lived print shop in 1784, which did not flourish. he died suddenly in london in 1805, having achieved moderate success as a print publisher. christopher parks registered as a student 2 april 1782 (cm only) (h417) faithful christopher pack (1760–1840). artist and drawing teacher. born in norwich, the son of a quaker merchant. according to pasquin, “his father was the lineal descendant of sir robert pack, bart who made himself conspicuous in the reign of charles i and was a merchant in that city [norwich]; but having entered into partnership with men, who, under the cloak of puritanical sanctity, concealed the basest designs, he found himself in a short time plundered of his property” (52). he first worked for his father in business, but took an interest in art: the duty he owed to the inclinations of his parents, for some years overbalanced his natural propensity; but the repeated losses his father sustained, and the stagnation put to their trade by the american war, determined him to abandon it, and pursue painting as a profession. (pasquin 53) he moved to london in 1781 to pursue art, supposedly becoming a pupil of reynolds. although he is not previously noted as having attended the ra schools, this reference would appear to be to him. in a letter written in 1824, he claimed that he spent two years with reynolds from the age of 16, but his “intensity of application to study—not only of painting but surgery and physic so impaired [his] constitution that a removal to the country was deemed necessary” (quoted by jeffares). he was in liverpool 1783–87, exhibiting there in 1784, but returned to london before embarking for dublin in 1789. reynolds wrote to his liverpool friend william roscoe in 1784, stating that mr pack called on me a few days since to desire i would lend him a picture to copy for his improvement; about three or four years ago i lent him many for that purpose, and he used to bring me his works from the life, in order to be told their faults, as he was only one of many that did the same, i did not recollect the name, nor am i sure i ever knew it. if all those whom i have endeavoured to help forward by lending them pictures and telling them their faults should do me the honour of calling themselves my scholars, i should have the greatest school that any painter had. (john ingamells and john edgcumbe, eds., the letters of sir joshua reynolds [new haven, 2000] 135) he advertised in dublin in 1790, “mr pack, historical, portrait, and landscape painter, from the royal academy, london” (dublin evening post 11 march 1790). he was mainly based in dublin until around 1820, lecturing on art and teaching, as well as practicing as a painter. his fortunes declined in later years. he applied to the agbi in 1834: portrait & landscape painter, that he had the high honor & privilege of being instructed in the art of painting by the late sir jos reynolds, that in 1784 he visited liverpool and in conjunction with the late mr roscoe & others established an academy for the study of fine arts & there commenced lecturer on painting, returning to london he gave lectures in the adelphi on painting where he first promulgated the doctrine of universal harmony. that 1787 he went to dublin to form a royal academy, which was retarded by the death of the duke of rutland the viceroy where he enjoyed a high rank in his profession, but a domestic calamity obliged him to leave all & return to england, where as an artist he is almost unknown & unemployed, having been deprived of the property he had saved, is now in debt for rents & taxes & expects his chattels will be seized. he was granted £15, and another £12 in 1835. he continued exhibiting until the year of his death, 1840. his will referred to his wife (who had, however, died by the date the will was proved) and a daughter, and property in dublin (national archives, prob 11/1944). charles patterson registered as a student 4 october 1776, aged 16 last may; painter (h276) charles patterson (1760–active 1776). not identified. he may be a brother of samuel patterson, who registered at the schools in 1784. his family background has not been established. samuel patterson/paterson registered as a student 12 november 1784, aged 19, 16 november/84; painter (h463) samuel patterson (1765–active 1789). waterhouse notes he exhibited a “portrait of an artist” at the ra in 1789, from the sun fire office (bank street in the city of london), “which suggests his later profession.” he may be connected to the john paterson who was clerk at the sun fire office in 1795, when he was the victim of a pickpocket (old bailey). he may be a brother of charles patterson, who had registered at the schools in 1776. the family background of the brothers (if that is what they are) has not been established. charles peart registered as a student 29 march 1781, aged 21, 22 last december; sculptor (h394) gold medal 1782 charles peart (1759–98). sculptor. said to be born at english newton, monmouth, but his family background is not documented. however, it seems likely he is connected with the peart who was a huguenot goldsmith active in london by the 1740s (tessa murdoch, “second generation huguenot craftsmen in london: from the ‘warning carriers’ walks’ 1744,” proceedings of the huguenot society of great britain and ireland 26.2 [1995]) and the john peart (active 1742–97), upholder of london, noted by beard & gilbert. he exhibited at the ra 1778–98, initially from “mr abington’s, paulin street, hanover square.” he worked for wedgwood as well as producing his own work, and secured a monumental commission connected with the east india company through his wife, elizabeth, whose sister’s husband worked for the company. he died in 1798, leaving a widow and child, farington noting that he was “much in arrears in the parish of st. pancrass having rec’d money as parish officer” (bdsb). mrs. elizabeth peart, who must be his widow, received ra charity in 1799 (cm). frederick plowman registered as a student 6 september 1780, aged 21 next november; painter (h377) frederick prussia plowman (1760–1820). miniature painter, pastelist, and portrait painter. born in john’s-lane, dublin, according to pasquin (18). jeffares suggests he may be the frederick plowman baptized at st. john’s, dublin, on 27 october 1756, son of joseph plowman and his wife jane (dobbins), while also noting the discrepancy in birthdate with the register. his family background has not been further established. he appeared as an exhibitor in dublin in 1773, from winetavern street. he studied at the dublin society schools, winning prizes there in 1776 and 1779. he was in dublin again in 1781 and seems to have retired long before his death in marino, co. down, in 1820 (strickland). thomas proctor registered as a student 30 september 1777, aged 24, 22 april last; painter (h309) silver medal 1782, 1783, gold medal 1784 noted in the life school register 26 november 1790 rome prize 1794 (“dy’d. when preparing to go”) thomas procter (1753–94). sculptor and history painter. born at settle, yorkshire, the son of an innkeeper who ran the spread eagle in the village and owned property locally. educated at giggleswick grammar school and had jobs at a tobacconist in manchester and as a clerk in london before embarking on an artistic career in 1776. the shift was probably prompted by the death of his father in 1776, which provided him with funds and property. he exhibited at the sa 1780 and 1790, and at the fsa 1780. exhibited at the ra 1780–94, initially from “settle or 8 new inn.” widely acclaimed as a painter and modeler of rigorously high-minded subjects, he died shortly before leaving for italy, having been awarded the rome prize at the academy. the circumstances of his death were immediately romanticized, but his family background appears to have been reasonably comfortable and it seems unlikely that he was anywhere near as desperate as was made out. nonetheless, his memory was kept alive for the following generations, and his biography appears in several widely circulated collections and histories. (martin myrone, “‘the chatterton of sculpture’: thomas procter and the martyrology of the british school,” jason edwards and sarah burnage, eds., the british school of sculpture, c. 1760–1832 [london, 2017] 146-62) george purdon registered as a student 4 october 1776, aged 17, 25 last may; painter (h277) george purdon (1759–active 1777). portrait painter. probably the george purdon baptized 3 june 1759 at st. peter le poer, city of london, the son of thomas purdon and his wife elizabeth. his father’s occupation has not been established, but he may be the thomas purdon, salesman, who died in 1772, said initially to be worth £40,000 (the report was corrected in the daily advertiser 28 october 1772: “his circumstances were very far from being affluent; and it is suspected that the report was raised to prejudice the publick against salesmen in general”). george purdon was formally apprenticed to william burgess, “drawingmaster,” st. paul’s, covent garden, in 1772 (national archives, ir 1/27). he exhibited as “master george purdon” at the fsa 1772–75, giving his address as “at mr burgess’s drawing academy, 33 maiden lane,” and exhibited at the sa in 1777. john pye registered as a student 31 march 1777, aged 31 this march; engraver (h301) john pye (1746–active 1789). engraver. quite possibly the john pye, son of richard pye, reed-maker, and his wife elizabeth (sibley), born paternoster row, city of london, 12 march 1745/46, his birth registered as a protestant dissenter, 1760. a “richard pye esq” died in islington, 1768, but it has not proved possible to connect them (st. james’s chronicle 24 november 1768). apprenticed to thomas major, engraver, st. martin in the fields, in 1760 (national archives, ir 1/22). exhibited at the sa in 1769–73, “at mr birk’s, sadler, little queen street, lincoln’s inn fields” and “at mr edwards, duke street, lincoln’s inn fields,” then from city addresses in 1772–73. thomas pye registered as a student 16 june 1775, aged 19, 29 next july; painter (h254) thomas pye (1756–active 1797). portrait painter and copyist. born in ireland, his family background unknown, and studied at the dublin society schools 1770–74. he exhibited as an honorary in dublin in 1773, noted as a pupil of robert west. he exhibited at the sa in 1774–75 and at the ra in 1776, giving his address as “mr dowling’s, new court, temple bar.” he subsequently moved to italy, where he was based 1781–97: he was “a painter of modest ability, whose work in italy was principally confined to making copies” (ingamells). keith ralph registered as a student 4 december 1775, aged 23 last sept.; painter (h262) george keith ralph (1752–active 1811). portrait painter. his family background has not been established. he exhibited at the ra 1778–1811, initially from 15 orange street, leicester fields. exhibited at the sa in 1790, from 100 st. martin’s lane. based at bury st. edmunds later in life. he was appointed “portrait painter to the duke of clarence” in 1792 (morning chronicle 5 may 1792). he became a freemason, joining the lodge of concord in 1795, stating his occupation as portrait painter, carlisle street, soho, and age as 40. according to the odnb, “his work is competent and straightforwardly painted, but lacks distinction,” and he was last recorded in covent garden, in 1811. john henry ramberg registered as a student 7 december 1781, aged 18 last november; painter (h404) silver medal 1784 johann heinrich ramberg (1763–1840). subject painter and engraver. born hanover, son of johann daniel ramberg (1732–1820), the war secretary to the electorate and “lover of art” (odnb), and sophie (gerstenberg; 1739–1811). he trained in germany. came to england at the invitation of george iii in 1781. “london ist in der tat ein ungeheurer orth. ich glaube das hier mehr kutschen als leute in hannover sind, den alle strassen wimmeln davon, und alles reitet frauensund masleute” (johann heinrich ramberg 1763–hannover–1840 [historisches museum hannover, 1998] 17). he exhibited at the ra 1781–88, initially from 19 eaton street, pimlico. he became a pupil of benjamin west, but left england in 1788. he was appointed electoral court painter in hanover, and died in germany in 1840. francesco renaldi registered as a student 4 october 1776, aged 21 last january; painter (h278) francesco renaldi (1755–1800). born in piedmont, italy, perhaps from a family of bakers. he exhibited at the ra in 1777, from “mr negri’s, queen street, berkeley square,” the well-known confectioner. he was in italy in 1781, where he was a friend of the landscape painter thomas jones. he was based in india 1786–96, apparently successful as a portrait painter, after which he returned to london. he last exhibited in 1798. he seems certain to be the francis renaldi who was recorded as a taxpayer in london in 1799; francis renaldi, esq., “a native of piedmont, but residing at cheltenham,” died in 1800, his will referring to substantial wealth in excess of £6000, benefiting relatives in italy, to the widow of his late uncle francis negri, and to his cousin francis negri, who was bequeathed “several trunks of books paintings clothes” still in berkeley square, london (national archives, prob 11/1351). a death notice also identified him as piedmontese (whitehall evening post 12-14 june 1800). the will also mentioned brothers in italy who were bakers, which may point to the family trade. given the connections with the negri family, renaldi may be the student labeled “mr negri” in rowlandson’s drawing a bench of artists (tate), a figure who has otherwise resisted identification. william ridley registered as a student 14 october 1785, aged 19, 16 april last; engraver (h474) william ridley (1766–1838). engraver. he is possibly the william ridley, son of william ridley, yeoman of giltspur street, who was apprenticed to john robins, goldsmith of st. john street, in 1777, when this student would have been about 11 years old and so potentially a youthful apprentice. produced book illustrations and reproductive engravings in partnership with william holl (1771–1838) and thomas blood (1777–1850), those partnerships being dissolved in 1808 and 1809 respectively, which may indicate that he was retiring from the trade. redgrave states, “he died at addlestone, where he had for many years retired, august 15, 1838, aged 74.” his burial record from addlestone, surrey, states he was 72. john rising registered as a student 31 december 1778, aged 25 last june; painter (h338) john rising (1753–1817). portrait and genre painter, picture restorer, and copyist. his family background is not known. the surname originated in norfolk, and the individuals of the name john rising recorded in the late eighteenth century were associated with east anglia; however, the details of none of these correspond with this individual. waterhouse notes, “he is said to have been friendly with reynolds and he later specialised in restoring and copying his works.” he exhibited at the ra 1785–1814. he is documented restoring pictures at the ra, belvoir castle, knole, and for sir john soane. he died at his home in portland place in 1817, his will benefiting his widow, mary. his obituary noted that he had “for many years devoted his study to the restoration of valuable pictures, particularly those of our late eminent sir joshua reynolds” (gentleman’s magazine, quoted npg). a son advertised that the business of picture restoration would be continued by him, “collections in the country undertaken as usual” (morning post 2 april 1817). samuel roberts registered as a student 8 march 1782, aged 25 last february; painter (h411) samuel roberts (1756?–99?). still-life painter and floor-cloth manufacturer. probably the samuel roberts, son of samuel roberts and his wife catherine, baptized st. bride’s, fleet street, 8 april 1756, born salisbury court, 10 february 1756. “roberts, apothecary” of salisbury court was reported to be the victim of a street robbery in 1753, the address also later used by this samuel roberts, presumably pointing to the occupation of his father (london daily advertiser 21 april 1753), although “mr roberts, draper” at the same address appears in multiple press notices of the early 1760s (public advertiser 15 january 1760; 11 august 1764). it is unclear whether the earlier report refers to a different roberts or if the same individual changed trade. the father is also likely to be the samuel roberts, “gent,” of salisbury court, fleet street, who was named in a legal document of 1766 (national archives, e 134/​7geo3/​mich7). known as an artist only from his record of exhibition at the ra, 1778–82, giving his address as “at mr howard’s, 5 wormwood street, old broad street” and “3 salisbury court, fleet street,” the latter presumably the family address. he appears to be the samuel roberts, floor-cloth manufacturer of 91 fleet market (where he was insured in 1791–95; lma), if he is the student mentioned by james sowerby as a contemporary at the academy who went on to success in the trade. no other student can be matched to known floor-cloth manufacturers. robey notes the business as being in operation in fleet market by 1790, offering floor cloths, varnished table covers, and heraldry painting from the manufactory in blackfriars road (ann robey, “floorcloth manufacture in knightsbridge,” georgian group journal 7 [1997]: 160-67 [165]). his widow, ann, continued the business after 1801, to judge from insurance records (lma). samuel roberts, corn-chandler, had been insured at 97 fleet market in 1788 (lma); whether this was the father, or the son entering a new trade, is unclear. a memorial in st. bride’s, fleet street, recorded samuel roberts, who died 29 november 1799, said to be 41 (so born 1758), with his widow, ann, who died 25 july 1824, aged 64. it seems likely from the circumstances that this was the student under consideration here. hugh robinson registered as a student 2 july 1779, aged 21 next michaelmas; painter (h357) hugh robinson (1758–96). portrait painter. said to be born malton, yorkshire, apparently into a genteel family. he has been identified as the son of henry robinson, esq., of malton (york herald 15 march 1881), and is likely also connected to the thomas robinson, wine merchant of new malton, yorkshire, who died in 1815 (national archives, prob 11/1569), and the solicitor william robinson of the same place, who died 1811 (national archives, ir 26/434/545). he exhibited at the ra in 1780 and 1782, from 12 carey street and 16 mitre court, temple. he went to italy in 1783, hoping to become a history painter, but died of consumption on the return journey in 1796. a contemporary lamented that “he certainly promised to be a very great portrait painter—and has done latterly some exceeding fine ones” (ingamells). godfrey kendrick rode registered as a student 6 september 1780, aged 27, 1 next november; painter (h378) gottfried heinrich rode (1753–1823). miniature painter. born in the hague. a pupil of j. j. schalch and j. h. hurter (the latter of whom was active in england at this time, and whose son registered at the ra in 1781). rode may well have come over as his assistant. foskett notes basil long’s referring to a miniature by him of the prince of wales, dated london, november 1781. he was a member of the brotherhood of the hague in 1782. he died in the hague in 1823 (rkd). harry rogers registered as a student 31 march 1777, aged 18, 24 next may; drawing (h302) harry rogers (1759–active 1777). not identified. perhaps connected with the harry rogers, widower of st. george, hanover square, who died in 1782, his next of kin identified as elizabeth rogers, spinster (lma, dl/​c/​0367/​044r/​001). that same individual must be the harry rogers recorded at trotts court, st. george, in tax records from at least 1760, and latterly noted as bankrupt (“gentleman”). this student is conceivably the harry rogers, pig hill, sydenham, kent, “gentleman,” who was insured in 1797 (lma). the unusual designation of “drawing” as profession on registration may indicate an amateur interest in the art. henry rohan registered as a student 31 december 1778, aged 22; painter (h339) henry rohan (c. 1756–active 1778). not identified. the name suggests a french huguenot origin. john roonkin registered as a student 11 october 1782, aged 21, last 7 january; engraver (h425) john rooukin (1761–98). miniature painter and engraver. he appears to be the son of john rooukin, somerset street, who was buried st. botolph aldgate, 1770. there are records of richard, martha, and mary being baptized at that church 1757–65, with john rooukin named as the father. this student must be the john roukin, son of john and elizabeth of somerset street, baptized at st. botolph aldgate, 1 february 1761. it seems credible that his father is the john rookin, son of a westmorland tailor, who was apprenticed to richard wilson, citizen and gunmaker of london, in 1746, and who became a gunmaker himself (dewitt bailey ii, “the wilsons: gunmakers to empire, 1730–1832,” online). the younger john rooukin was apprenticed to the engraver william sharp in 1774, his father identified as john rooukin of st. botolph, gunmaker (rollco). in the apprenticeship record his father is noted as dead. rooukin’s name appears on prints from the 1780s. in 1789 he advertised proposals for publishing by subscription a pair of prints of democritus and heraclitus, “from the original pictures … in the possession of r. eden, surgeon,” giving his address as 5 swan street, minories (kentish gazette 10 november 1789). a trade card advertises grainger & rooukin, engravers (bm). rooukin exhibited a miniature at the ra in 1791, from 3 swan street, minories. he seems likely to be the john rooukin of hoxton town, aged 36, who was buried at st. leonard, shoreditch, in december 1798. charles rossi registered as a student 29 march 1781, aged 19, march 8 inst.; sculptor (h395) silver medal 1781, gold medal 1784 rome prize 1785 john charles felix rossi (1762–1839). sculptor. in 1808 he told farington: “he did not know where he was christened, his father was a foreigner, a roman catholick, & irregular in his conduct but he was born in nottingham” (9: 3240). according to an obituary writer, his father, ansano rossi, an italian from siena, was a “quack-doctor to the neighbourhood” (art union, quoted in bdsb). ansano rossi was based in london in 1775, when he was engaged in finding evidence in connection with the divorce case involving teducci, the castrato. rossi was apprenticed to the sculptor locatelli, and became his assistant. he won the ra’s rome scholarship in 1785, traveling to italy with fellow student john deare. back in england he worked for manufacturers, and latterly started his own ceramic stone business in lisson grove, although in the 1790s and 1800s he was prominent as the maker of monuments for westminster abbey and st. paul’s. he exhibited at the ra 1781–1834. he was appointed sculptor to the prince of wales in 1797, and became sculptor in ordinary to william iv in 1830, but struggled financially in later years. he was presumably related to (probably brother of) the lewis or louis rossi of st. martin in the fields, “enterpreter,” who appeared at the middlesex sessions in 1772; lewis rossi of 1 maid court, wardour street, appeared at the old bailey as a witness in 1778, where he stated, “i get my bread by translating from foreign languages into english” (old bailey). he appeared as a witness again in 1786. lewis rossi of st. martin in the fields was buried as a nonconformist, 1793, aged 46. gabriel rugeroh registered as a student 21 march 1774, aged 23 in december next; painter (h231) gabriel rugeroh (1750–1813). baptized 15 january 1751 at st. paul, shadwell, the son of “magnus rugeroh, mariner in shakespear walk & mary his wife.” he was apprenticed to william moses young, “citizen of & blacksmith of london,” in 1768. he is not otherwise recorded as an artist. he is likely to be the gabriel rugeroh of camberwell who was buried at st. paul, shadwell, in 1813, although the age of that individual is not stated in the record. lewis saillart registered as a student 25 march 1779, aged 20 last december; engraver (h353) john louis sailliar (c. 1748–c. 1822). engraver. sources state that he was born in paris around 1748 (contrary to the information in the register) and based in london around 1779–80. he opened a shop in paris in 1781 specializing in the sale of imported english prints. he appears to have returned to london around 1783 and died there (huber & martini; bm). however, a louis saillart, “an engraver, & formerly a student in the royal academy,” applied successfully for charity from the ra in 1821 (cm). mrs. catherine sailliar, widow of john lewis sailliar, “an engraver,” applied to the agbi in 1823, “being left in low circumstances at the age of 60 and has nothing but her needle to depend upon” (agbi applicants’ book). joseph sanders registered as a student 8 april 1775, marked “to be discharged” in the register (h251) joseph saunders (active 1772–1811). miniature painter. exhibited at the sa and fsa 1772–76, the first address given being berwick street, near noel street, soho, and at the ra 1778–1807. he is known from several works (foskett). perhaps the joseph saunders noted by tuer as a pupil of bartolozzi (2: 63). joseph saunders, “limner,” maddox street, appears in the westminster poll book, 1788, and joseph sanders, “engraver,” was insured at 16 somers place east, somers town, in 1793 (lma). a number of sanders and saunders were operating as artists in the late eighteenth century, and it is not always possible to distinguish them. richard santler registered as a student 29 december 1780, aged 19, 28 september last; sculptor (h383)silver medal 1782 richard santler (1761–active 1787). wax modeler. he exhibited wax portraits at the ra 1785–87, from 13 long acre, 22 rathbone place, and 125 strand. he is otherwise obscure. c. scheener registered as a student 29 october 1784, aged 24, october 1784 (cm/deleted from register) (h460) c. scheener (active 1783–89). musician and artist. apparently swiss. he must be the “mr scheener, a genevan artist” who published proposals for a print of mrs. siddons in edinburgh, 1783 (hibernian journal 19 december 1783), presumably a sideline, as mr. scheener appears as a violinist in press notices in dublin, edinburgh, bath, and hereford from 1783 to 1789. he must also be the scheener, a swiss violinist much noted by susan burney in her journal and letters. as edward francesco burney and thomas frederick burney were at the schools around the same time, and as this student did not apparently commit to study, the circumstantial evidence is quite strong. scott/a. scott registered as a student 30 september 1777 (h311) possibly the scott who was an honorary exhibitor of marine views at the ra in 1786. an a. scott exhibited miniatures at the ra 1807–08, from 29 mortimer street, cavendish square, but could well be a separate individual. edmund scott registered as a student 5 november 1781, aged 23, 28 last march; engraver (h401) edmund scott (1758–1815). portrait painter and stipple engraver. born in london, baptized at st. andrew, holborn, the son of henry scott and his wife ann, of gray’s inn lane. his father’s occupation has not been established. he exhibited at the fsa in 1774–75 as “master edmund scott” from 74 gray’s inn lane, the family home. a pupil of bartolozzi. he married in 1781, mary ann rigg, at st. andrew’s, holborn. he was insured at 138 holborn in 1785 (lma), “engraver,” and appointed “engraver to the duke of york” around 1789. a biographical note published in 1835, quoted by jeffares, indicates that he started as an engraver but later turned to pastel, raised a large family, and ran into financial difficulties, being “arrested and in confinement.” he was latterly based in brighton, where he died in 1815. samuel shelley registered as a student 21 march 1774, aged 17 last august (h232) samuel shelley (1754–1808). miniature painter. said to have been born in whitechapel, so certainly the samuel shelley, son of george shelley and his wife, susannah, of the high street, baptized st. mary, whitechapel, in 1754, which is closer to the date given in the register than the traditionally ascribed birthdate of 1750. williamson asserts that his father was a shoemaker (george c. williamson, the miniature collector [london, 1921] 175). his father may be the george shelley of george shelley & son, “hosiers and hatters” of 92 whitechapel (high street), appearing in kent’s directory, 1774. george mabbs shelley, hosier, st. mary, whitechapel, was bankrupt in 1809, and was probably a brother (chester courant 28 november 1809). dayes asserted that he “may, in some measure, be considered as self-educated. he derived great advantage by copying the works of reynolds in the early part of life, and on which he may be said to have formed his style. he is one among the few who do not consider the profession in a mercenary point of view” (348). exhibited at the ra 1774–1804, initially from “mr shelley’s” at 92, 24, or 62 whitechapel, and achieved some prominence as a miniature painter. he died in 1808, his studio contents sold by auction by peter coxe in march 1809. the catalogue includes a note on the artist, indicating that his father and brother survived him, and asserting that “he … had not received the benefit of much early instruction; for he was in a great measure self-taught” (bl add. ms 33404, f. 218). john sigrist registered as a student 31 march 1777, aged 17, 5th last february; painter (h303) john sigrist (1760–active 1799). presumably the john sigrist, son of john sigrist and his wife mary, baptized in westminster in 1760. his father seems certain to be the john sigrist, paper hanger and paper stainer of piccadilly active in the 1760s and 1770s, noted in the literature on wallpaper history and in exeter working papers. an advertisement of 1756 announces, “by his majesty’s royal letters patent j. harris and j. sigrist at the king’s arms the corner of green-street, leicester square have finished a great variety of new patterns for paper hangings, in imitation of the india, printed from copper plates, and pencil’d by hand” (public advertiser 23 march 1756). john sigrist the elder appears in the westminster poll book in 1774, paper stainer, piccadilly. he died in brompton in 1799, his will benefiting his widow mary and son, john sigrist. sigrist trade cards are in the bm and point to an extensive business and a royal patent. robson, hale, and hawley, “paper hanging manufacturers and painters in water colours, to his royal highness the prince of wales,” were advertising as “successors to mr sigrist” at 218 piccadilly in 1789 (world 4 may 1789), which indicates that the younger john sigrist did not continue the business. john peter simon registered as a student 31 december 1778, aged 14, 1st august last; engraver (h340) john peter simon (1764–c. 1810). engraver. baptized, as jean pierre simon, 19 august 1764 at the artillery, french huguenot, spitalfields, the son of jean pierre simon and his wife janne (auder). his father is presumably the j. p. simon who appears in tax records in the city of london 1774–80 and seems likely to have been involved in the textile trades. exhibited miniatures at the ra in 1785–86, from 6 meard street, dean street, soho. noted by tuer as a pupil of bartolozzi (2: 66). his date of birth has been given as c. 1750, but the later date recorded in the register suggests it must be a relative who was the simon who contributed to worlidge’s collection of drawings from curious antique gems (1768). he seems very likely to be related to the mezzotint engraver john simon (1675–1751), of huguenot descent and active in london from the 1700s. john peter simon worked for boydell in the 1790s. he died about 1810, according to redgrave. henry singleton registered as a student 10 march 1783, aged 16, 19 last october; painter (h433) silver medal 1784, gold medal 1788 noted in the life school register 1 october 1790 henry singleton (1766–1839). portrait and history painter. born in london “into an artistic family” (odnb). he appears to be a member of the singleton family of bury st. edmunds who were established as masons and builders from at least the late seventeenth century. his father died when he was only 2, and he was raised by his uncle, the painter william singleton (d. 1793), a pupil of ozias humphry. another uncle, joseph singleton (1751–1810), was a miniature painter, of bury st. edmunds. henry singleton was practicing as a portraitist from the age of 16 and exhibited at the sa as early as 1780 and the ra 1784–1839, achieving success as a portrait painter, history painter, and illustrator. he married his cousin, a daughter of william singleton, in 1807. his sisters maria singleton and sarah macklarinan singleton were also artists. james sinnott registered as a student 21 march 1774, aged 21, 8 august last (h233) james sinnott (1752–active 1774). sculptor. possibly the james sinnott, son of lavotte sinnott, peruke-maker of cox’s buildings, baptized at st. george in the east on 3 september 1751, although this means a discrepancy with the year of birth stated in the register. john sinnott, peruke-maker, provided the first bond for a foundling at the foundling hospital, in 1748, and may be another close relative; similarly joseph sinnott, cordwainer and shopkeeper of wargrave, berkshire, who died in 1784 (national archives, prob 11/1118). lavotte sinnott, widower, remarried, in 1761, a widow, sarah salmon, at st. george in the east. james sinnott was apprenticed to john walsh (active 1757–77), statuary of st. george, hanover square, in 1769. sinzenich registered as a student 4 december 1775, aged 23; engraver (h263) heinrich sintzenich (1752–1812). stipple engraver. born mannheim, germany, and trained at the academy there. sent to london at the expense of the elector to train under bartolozzi 1775–78. later career in munich. member of the royal academy of arts in berlin and manager of the sintzenich kunstverlag in berlin. he died in germany in 1812. his brother peter was also an engraver, active from around 1789, and was presumably younger (and therefore not this student), although he and his family remained in england; he must be the “sintzenich, designateur, engraver, and printseller” advertising in london in 1801 (hampshire chronicle 6 april 1801) and the peter sintzenich of spring place, kentish town, and new bond street, hanover square, “print seller,” bankrupt in 1808 (morning chronicle 22 june 1808). “mr zintzenich, jun, drawing master, from london” and “g. sintzenich jun” advertised drawing lessons in cheltenham in 1809–12 (cheltenham chronicle 20 july 1809 and 23 january 1812). it seems more likely that he was a son of peter sintzenich, and seems to be identified as such in a marriage notice of 1820 (bristol mercury 14 february 1820). peter john sintzenich died, aged 72, in bristol at his son’s home (western times 13 march 1830), suggesting a birthdate of c. 1758. gustav sintzenich, aged 40, painter, became a member of the artists’ benevolent fund in 1826. william skelton registered as a student 29 march 1781, aged 17, 14 june last; engraver (h396) william skelton (1763–1848). engraver. born in london, son of william skelton of st. james, westminster, copperplate printer. “he was descended from the ancient family of skeltons, in cumberland, by a branch which settled subsequently in yorkshire” (press cutting, bl add. ms 33404, f. 287). apprenticed to the engraver john lodge, 2 july 1777, the record where his father’s identity is established. also said to be a pupil of james basire and of william sharp: “he was also a student of the royal academy, and enjoyed through life the intimacy of most of the distinguished members of that society” (press cutting, bl add. ms 33404, f. 287). worked for the british museum and for boydell, and produced royal portraits. “from this work and other labours he realised a competence, and retired to ebury street, pimlico,” living with his only daughter. his brother, joseph skelton, was also an engraver (redgrave). john smart registered as a student 1 april 1783, aged 27, 4 last march; painter (h437) john smart (1756–active 1831). portrait and landscape painter and picture restorer. based in east anglia, exhibiting local scenes at the ra from london and ipswich addresses 1786–1813. references to smart undertaking picture restoration and copying appear in the diary of john longe, vicar of coddenham, suffolk, from 1796 to 1831 (michael stone, ed., the diary of john longe (1765–1834): vicar of coddenham [woodbridge, 2008]). john thomas smith attended the schools c. 1784–85? john thomas smith (1766–1833). topographical draftsman, printmaker, and curator. born in london, the son of nathaniel smith (1738–1809), sculptor, and his wife elizabeth (tarr; d. 1779). he entered the studio of the sculptor joseph nollekens after the death of his mother in 1779, but went on to focus on drawing and studied with john keyse sherwin. several references in his anecdotal nollekens and his times (1828) indicate that he studied at the ra schools, although he appears never to have registered. the odnb asserts that he “attended occasional evening lectures at the royal academy,” but it seems more likely that he did go to the schools, at least as a probationary student. he wrote that “during the short time morland drew at the royal academy, i was his fellow-student.” morland registered in january 1784. he referred to hearing barry lecture “when i was a student in the royal academy” and to drawing at the townley collection of park street “with many other students in the royal academy.” noted as an academy student who was “celebrated for his pen imitations of rembrant’s and ostade’s etchings, and copied several of the small pictures of gainsborough, by whom he was kindly noticed” (j. h. lewis, the history and topography of the parish of saint mary, islington [london, 1842] 155). smith established himself as a printseller in london in 1784 and developed a reputation as a topographical draftsman. he married, in 1788, anne marie prickett. he went on to become keeper of prints and drawings at the british museum in 1816, in which capacity he was also responsible for art students’ use of the townley marbles. he died in 1833, apparently leaving his widow “without a shilling” (john constable, quoted in odnb). james sowerby registered as a student 31 december 1777, aged 19, 22 last march; painter (h316) james sowerby (1757–1822). botanical illustrator. born in bolt in tun passage, fleet street, “a house afterwards forming part of white the bookseller’s premises” (simpkins 402), baptized st. dunstan in the west, london, 29 march 1757, the son of john sowerby, a lapidary, and his wife arabella (goodspeed; d. 1782), his birthdate recorded then as 21 march 1757. his early circumstances are related in a memoir by his son, james de carle sowerby, from 1825: his father john sowerby who was a lapidary had several children, who all died young except three sons and a daughter. unfortunately the father died when the eldest son john was too young to carry on the business, though he had served several years of his apprenticeship to his father and was an excellent workman, but what rendered the circumstances of the family more precarious was the change of fashion that took place about that time, the demand for coloured stones (such as garnet beads) which formed a great part of his employment diminishing rapidly. the property left by his father who had a considerable stock was gradually consuming; and eventually the family had to look to the productive genius of james for assistance and even support. this genius manifested itself in his earliest years, while yet a child he would amuse himself by cutting out watch papers, copying prints, making grotto’s & similar employments: when eight years old he cut in thin paper a piece representing his god-father coursing a hare …. (simpkins 402) although sent to a day school he continued making figures and toys, which he sold to schoolfriends, and “with the money he bought colors, pencils, prints, shells &c”: when he was 14 his friends contrived to raise 100£ with which he was bound for seven years to richd. wright from the isle of man, a celebrated painter of sea views …. unfortunately for our young artist his master was seized soon after with a paralytic stroke that prevented his painting, but he gave instructions & taught his pupils (among whom were his wife & daughters) to copy his own and other masters works and even to paint originals in which jamie as he used to call young sowerby was generally appointed to do the figures in which he excelled. (simpkins 403) “james sowerby apprentice to richard. weight of pimlico painter” was a witness at a coroner’s inquest in westminster in 1774 (london lives), which confirms his apprenticeship with the marine painter. he went on to a trial period with william hodges, but he was so “disgusted not only with the treatment he experienced being sent into the kitchen to scant meals but with the uncleanly state of the painting room, that he declined remaining with him” (403). he painted portraits and miniatures “at about three guineas each,” supporting himself, and “he shortly obtained admission to the royal academy where he was however very diffident of his abilities for it was a twelvemonth after mr moser, the keeper at that time, had recommended him to draw for admission to the life academy that he could be persuaded that he was able to produce anything good enough: his ticket to admit him to draw from the life is dated december. 1st [sic] 1777” (403). he was still at the academy schools when the institution removed to somerset house in 1780, the memoir recording that “there were at the same time two pupils whose prospects in life were uncertain with whom and mr sowerby a kind of emulation was excited to succeed best in life, one became a drawing master & married a lady of fortune the other became a floor cloth manufacturer with a good business” (408). the former is clearly peter denys; the latter may be samuel roberts, who registered at the schools in 1782. he is possibly the james, son of john sowerby, haberdasher, who was made free of the city in 1787, but his birthdate was given as 1759. he exhibited miniatures at the ra 1779–90, initially from the family address, 2 bolt and tun passage, fleet street. he married, in 1786, anne de carle, the sister of the sculptor robert de carle; sowerby had met the latter “while studying at the academy” (404). robert de carle “first assisted and afterwards succeeded bacon as modeller at miss coades artificial stone manufactory.” this must be robert brettingham de carle (1748–91) from the norwich-based family of statuaries, who is recorded as taking a lead role at coade’s manufactory, or his nephew, robert de carle (1761–1837), also a sculptor. one or the other exhibited at the ra in 1785, but neither is recorded as studying at the schools. from 1790 he began publishing botanical works and amassed an important collection of specimens, opening a museum at his home. he died in london in 1822. (diana m. simpkins, “biographical sketch of james sowerby, written by his son, james de carle sowerby, 1825,” journal of the society of the bibliography of natural history 6 [1971–74]: 402-15) john spiller registered as a student 5 november 1781, aged 18, 23 december next; sculptor (h402) john spiller (1763–94). sculptor. the son of john spiller of southwark, speculative builder. he was a pupil of the sculptor john bacon. exhibited as “john spiller jun” at the ra 1779–86, initially from highbury place, islington, a new development that had been built by his father in 1774–77. he was the brother of james spiller (c. 1761–1829), the architect. he died of consumption in croydon in 1794, the gentleman’s magazine noting, “at croydon, surrey, in a deep decline, mr john spiller, mason of temple-lane, blackfriars, brother to the famous architect.” his younger brother, robert spiller, was also active as a sculptor c. 1792–1827. john/jonathan spilsbury registered as a student 25 march 1776, aged 39; painter (h269) jonathan spilsbury (1737–1812). mezzotint engraver, portrait painter, and drawing master. born worcester, the son of thomas spilsbury (c. 1681–1741) and his second wife, mary wright (1718?–73). the family was of high standing in the region and included a number of artisans and artists. his father is likely the thomas spilsbury, “perriwig black maker,” who removed from london to worcester in 1736 (grub street journal 15 january 1736). jonathan spilsbury served an apprenticeship in birmingham under a cousin, george spilsbury, a japanner (apprenticeship record in birmingham public library). his aunt, sarah, had married jonathan richardson the artist, and it may be, as ruth young proposes, that this provided an introduction to thomas hudson (richardson’s brother-in-law) (6). he received prizes at the society of arts in london in the early 1760s. he married, in 1775, rebecca chapman (c. 1744–1812), also an artist. their daughter maria spilsbury (1777–c. 1823) was an artist. his brother john spilsbury (1739–69) was a printmaker and publisher; an elder half-brother, thomas (1733–95), was a printer in holborn. (keri davies, “jonathan spilsbury and the lost moravian history of william blake’s family,” blake 40.3 [winter 2006–07]: 100-09; charlotte yeldham, maria spilsbury (1776–1820): artist and evangelical [farnham: ashgate, 2010]; ruth young, father and daughter: jonathan and maria spilsbury, 1737–1812: 1777–1820 [london, 1952]) stephanoff registered as a student 9 april 1774, aged 29; painter (h235) silver medal 1775 “gertrude” entered in different ink in the register, and marked there as “dd” filiter stepanov (1745?–97). russian-born portrait and scene painter. “almost everything about stepanov is obscure and contradictory” (cross 217). there has been confusion caused by hutchison’s uncharacteristically misleading record of the council minutes, which compounds the references to stephanoff and another individual, “geo: burder” (george burder). his family background is unclear. an early account, perhaps drawn from his sons, was that he was a serf of the name of stepan who deserted his master during a visit to london. other accounts state that he was himself a member of the elite sent to england for his education. he received payment for painting at the drury lane theatre in 1777, and exhibited at the ra 1778–81. he married mara gertrude metz at st. pancras old church in 1782. she was a still-life painter, exhibiting as gertrude stephanoff. he was recorded working at the pantheon in 1791. he was said by edwards to have committed suicide “before the year 1790,” and this has been followed in modern accounts. his name appears in theatrical notices from at least 1783 to december 1790 (morning chronicle 23 december 1790), but on engravings until 1793, and a letter of 1798 refers to his death the previous year. (a. g. cross, “by the banks of the thames”: russians in eighteenth century britain [newtonville, 1980] 217-19) joseph stephenson registered as a student 11 october 1782, aged 25, 20th last january; painter (h426) joseph stephenson (1756–92). portrait and landscape painter. born in carlisle, probably the joseph stephenson baptized at st. cuthbert, carlisle, 2 february 1756. “from an early age he was dogged by illness” (cumberland artists, 1700–1900, exhibition catalogue, carlisle city art gallery [1971]). exhibited portraits at the ra in 1785, from brown street, grosvenor square. he returned to carlisle, where he practiced as a landscape painter, dying there “after a long illness” (a. henderson, a picture of carlisle [carlisle, 1810] 107). his work was included in the carlisle exhibition of 1823: “the late joseph stephenson—a native artist also and likewise self-taught …. we understand that mr stephenson was a student of the royal academy” (westmorland gazette 18 october 1823). thomas stewart registered as a student 8 march 1782, aged 15, 19 last october; painter (h412) silver medal 1788 noted in the life school register 1 october 1790 thomas stewart (1766–active 1801). portrait painter. apparently the son of a barber. exhibited at the ra 1784–1801, initially from 1 union street, bond street. he worked for the burney family, and the modern edition of burney papers provides some fragmentary information on him; fanny burney referred in 1783 to “steward’s father, the barber” (early journals and letters 5: 309n). in 1785 she reported a visit to lady thrale, who complained: “that boy steward has been here,—” & then she related a dialogue between herself & him, in which he desired to have poor dr johnson’s picture to copy; & after many complaints concerning the request & many gross faults related in the requester, she abruptly finished it all, by turning full upon me, & saying—“but i find it is for mr george cambridge—” and if it is, i thought, i am not responsible: though i wonder he should send with so little ceremony: unless part of the story be sunk for my satisfaction!—a little, i could scarce help thinking it possible mr g.c. might have sent steward on this business just now by way of hearing from him who of the family were about, for his father would probably have mentioned my unwellness to him; but ’tis a far fetched notion. yet it occurred to me the instant i heard his name, & before his employer’s came out. (stewart cooke, with elaine bander, eds., additional journals and letters of frances burney [oxford, 2015] 1: 202) in another note she referred to “mr cambridge’s account of the design he gave to a young painter steward for a caricature picture of boswell’s materials for his life of dr johnson” (early journals and letters 5: 309n). miss m. stewart, presumably a sister, exhibited at the ra 1799–1800, also from 1 union street, suggesting this was the family home. there appears to have been some connection with george stubbs, as thomas stewart exhibited that painter’s portrait in 1801, and waterhouse asserts that miss stewart was his pupil. (lars e. troide and stewart jon cooke, eds., the early journals and letters of fanny burney, volume v, 1782–1783 [montreal: mcgill-queen’s university press, 2012]) george stoddart registered as a student 26 march 1784, aged 18, 13 april next; architect and painter (h452) silver medal 1785 george stoddart (1766–active 1817). surveyor. born in london, baptized at st. george, hanover square, in 1766, the son of george stoddart, surveyor, and his wife, hester. although he professed both architecture and painting on registration, his silver medal was for an architectural drawing. the elder stoddart’s will, proved in 1793, referred to his widow, hester, and daughters (national archives, prob 11/1232). this student is probably the george stoddart, surveyor, of park place, marylebone, who was a witness at the old bailey in 1807 and bankrupt in 1817. thomas stothard registered as a student 31 december 1777, aged 22, 17 last august; painter (h317) thomas stothard (1755–1834). history painter and illustrator. born at the black horse inn, long acre, london, the son of thomas stothard (d. 1770), yorkshire-born innkeeper, and his wife mary (reynolds; 1711/12–99). at the age of 5 he was sent to school in yorkshire, where his father originated, and went on to boarding school in essex. in 1794 he told farington, “his father kept a public house in long acre. that he was bred in yorkshire, his father placed him at school that his morals might not be affected by the scenes in a public house” (1: 155). he moved back to london after his father’s death in 1770, having a bequest of £1200 from him. he was apprenticed to the silk weaver john vansommer. in 1813, farington recorded: stothard walking from the academy told me that in his youth he lost much time—went late an apprentice to spital fields—time not out till 22—then devoted to art—calculated upon 5 yrs—it answered—at 28 applied to booksellers—& got business cd not afford to work witht pay. (notebooks 5) he first exhibited in 1777 (when he was 22) at the sa, and at the ra in 1778, and began a prolific and successful career as an illustrator and painter of literary and mythological scenes, generally on a modest scale. he married, in 1784, rebecca watkins. he was made ara in 1791 and ra in 1794, and was appointed deputy librarian at the ra in 1810, serving as librarian from 1812 until his death. he died in 1834, leaving a substantial fortune of £5084 and a house and effects valued at £2482 to his surviving children. thomas stowers registered as a student 6 march 1775, aged 20, 6th last december; painter (h244) thomas stowers (1754–1817). landscape painter, coach and housepainter. baptized 16 december 1754 at st. martin in the fields, westminster, the son of thomas stowers (b. 1725), coach-harness maker, and his wife elizabeth (coles). his father’s trade is specified in thomas stowers’s apprenticeship record, binding him to john sykes, painter, of the painter stainers’ company, in 1769. thomas stowers, painter, was insured at 18 cow lane in 1780; described as a coach and housepainter, he was insured at charterhouse square in 1788, where he continued the business until late in life (lma). he married, in 1781, elizabeth clerk. exhibited at the ra 1778–1811, initially from 18 king street, snow hill, and latterly from charterhouse square. he appears as one of the students sketched in an anonymous set of drawings of ra students dating from the late 1770s at the ra. thomas stowers of charterhouse square, coach painter, died in mitcham, surrey, in 1817; his will referred to his business as a painter having been carried on with his son, also thomas stowers (national archives, prob 11/1590). this student’s art collection, including several copies by him, was sold by auction in 1818 (getty provenance index). thomas wright refers to him as an amateur friend and pupil of richard wilson. these circumstances suggest that the family business was sufficiently successful for this student to assume a more genteel identity, although he must be related to the thomas stowers, painter and glazier, who was listed at charterhouse square in the po directory in 1843, indicating that the business continued. (thomas wright, some account of the life of richard wilson, esq. r.a. [london, 1824]) francis tadman registered as a student 31 december 1774, aged 19, 20th last march; painter (h240) francis tadman (1755–87). apparently one of the tadman family, farmers of higham, kent. francis tadman of higham is identified as the artist of a satirical drawing of 1784 in medway area archives. william tadman, gentleman of higham, died 1774, aged 52, the chest tomb in st. mary, higham, and his will identifying francis as among his children. another william tadman, gentleman of higham, died in 1786, his will identifying francis as a son. william tadman of higham won premiums for agriculture at the society of arts in the 1780s. a francis tadman was buried at st. mary, higham, in 1787. the memorial identifies him as “francis tadman esquire captain in the west kent regiment of militia obiit january 8 1787 aetat 32,” giving an age that corresponds with the stated age of this student on registration (kent archaeological society, online information on st. mary, higham). oddly, in 1786 he had taken out an advertisement in the local press to refute the rumor that he had been the highwayman who had robbed a couple on the road at blackheath (kentish gazette 31 march 1786). philip tassaert/tasseart registered as a student 29 december 1780, aged 22 last june; painter (h384) marked as “dead” in the register philip tassaert (1758–94?). a member of the tassaert family of artists, who originated in antwerp. he seems likely to be the son of philip james tassaert (1736–1803), artist and art dealer. his father was “a native of antwerp, and the scholar of vanhaken, the drapery-painter. he came to england when very young, and was some time with mr hudson, probably as an assistant” (edwards 282). the elder tassaert was a member of the incorporated society of artists in 1769, and president in 1775. he was known primarily as an art dealer, working for james christie and employing william seguier as a picture cleaner. dodd opined: “as an artist he holds no elevated rank his works being neither originals or copies being a kind of mongrel imitation in subject and style of rubens and other eminent masters” (bl add. ms 33406, f. 1). farington’s opinion was that “he had great facility but little merit” (notebooks 3: 99). it was perhaps the son who exhibited portraits at the ra in 1785, from 28 st. alban’s street, pall mall. he must be the “mr tassaert, jun., of pimlico” who was rumored to be shot dead after an “affray” with mr. bromley, purser of the oxford east indiaman in 1793 (morning chronicle 11 january 1793). his actual death was noted by farington in 1794: “tassaerts son is dead of the yellow fever in the west indies. he was lately made a purser by sir john jervais, & promoted in other respects” (1: 225). the father died in soho, 1803, apparently without immediate family, and “in very poor circumstances” (national archives, prob 11/1400; farington 6: 2146). william tate registered as a student 31 march 1777, aged 28 last september; painter (h303) william tate (1748–1806). portrait painter. born liverpool, the son of paul tate (c. 1714–82) of gawber hall, barnsley, yorkshire, glassmaker and farmer. a pupil of joseph wright of derby; he and his family were important patrons of the artist. worked in liverpool and manchester, and frequently in london, where he generally stayed with wright. he moved to bath in 1804, where he died: lately, at bath, mr william tate, late of this town, portrait painter. he went to bed in remarkably good health and expired before three in the morning. his reputation as an artist was well known in this country; and in that particular department, to which he devoted his chief attention, few of his contemporaries have excelled him. he was several years a pupil to the late mr wright of derby, with whom he lived in habits of the greatest intimacy, and by whom he was strongly urged to the pursuit of the higher branches of the profession; but being well aware of the great difficulty attending historical compositions, as well as the small encouragement held out by the public (unless in the line of portrait painting) he did not paint many historical pictures; but of late years frequently amused himself with landscapes, and a few effects of fire light, which he admirably imitated in the manner of his instructor. (manchester mercury 15 july 1806) his brother, richard tate, was a liverpool merchant and amateur painter, and his sister elizabeth (1766–1822) also an amateur artist. (elizabeth e. barker and alex kidson, joseph wright of derby in liverpool [new haven, 2007]) alexander taylor registered as a student 4 december 1775 (h264) noted in the life school register 12 august 1796 alexander taylor (active 1774–d. 1804?). miniature painter. known from his exhibition record, which stretches from 1774 to 1796. foster suggests he is the alexander taylor who was a scottish-born portrait painter in india from 1797 and is recorded as having died in calcutta in 1804. william taylor registered as a student 6 march 1775, aged 24, 6th may last; painter (h245) william taylor (c. 1750–active 1775). not identified. john thelwall attended the schools c. 1782? john thelwall (1764–1834). radical political writer. son of joseph thelwall (d. 1772), silk merchant. the family were left struggling financially after his father’s death. he was apprenticed to a tailor, but the family finances meant he was unable to complete his apprenticeship. he also worked as a clerk in his younger years. according to his obituary (annual register [1835]) he was “first a student at the royal academy,” which would likely have been c. 1782. he is not otherwise recorded as such. his early biography, written by his widow, elaborated on but also qualified this suggestion: he now made a third effort in behalf of his favourite art; and waited personally upon several painters of eminence, with specimens of his drawings, in hopes of recommending himself to some employment under them. among the rest, he called upon benjamin west, who received him with very polite attention, recommended him not to out himself under any particular artist (who would, of course, require a very considerable premium), but, as the most eligible mode of study, enter himself at the royal academy, procure medallions and casts from the antique, observe the manner and execution of different artists, and exercise his own judgment in what might appear worthy of imitation in them all. happy as he would have been to have followed this advice, it was not in his power. the affairs of his family were brought to a crisis …. (the life of john thelwall, 2 vols. [london, 1837] 1: 17-18) it seems plausible that thelwall was a probationary student for some period, but evidently was unable to pursue his studies. later in life, his radical political activities brought him into association with a number of artists, including thomas banks, ra, and the engraver william sharp. john thiorais registered as a student 10 october 1783, aged 25; painter (h439) john thiorais (c. 1758–active 1817?). the name is french in origin and probably huguenot. he may be the john thiorais who married isabella purdie at st. james, westminster, in 1796. her death was recorded in edinburgh in 1817, said to be wife (not the widow) of “john thiorais of moscow” (caledonian mercury 23 october 1817). an eliza thiorais or de thiorais, “lately residing in moscow, in russia,” died before august 1856 (edinburgh evening courant 12 august 1856). thomas thompson registered as a student 6 september 1780, aged 18, 14 july last; painter (h379) silver medal 1788 thomas thompson (1762–1820?). waterhouse identifies him with the miniature painter who exhibited at the ra in 1793 and 1795 from 64 fenchurch street and 39 king street, cheapside, and suggests the artist of the same name who exhibited marines at the ra 1797–1810 must be a separate individual. waterhouse also notes a “thomas thompson junior” who exhibited a portrait from walworth at the fsa in 1783, which suggests his father had the same name and presumably lived in walworth. this student may be the thomas thompson of bedford row, walworth, noted in the press in 1805, dying in 1820 (globe 9 december 1805; national archives, prob 11/1624). william thompson registered as a student 4 december 1775, aged 25; painter (h265) william thompson (1750–active 1785). landscape painter. probably the son of william thompson (c. 1730–1800), irish-born portrait and landscape painter. exhibited cumberland and westmorland views at the ra 1781–84, from arlington street, piccadilly, and half moon street, piccadilly. the latter address was that of william thompson, sr., who exhibited at the sa and fsa 1760–82. “his marriage to a wealthy woman allowed him temporarily to relinquish his profession, but he fell into debt and was incarcerated in the king’s bench prison” (odnb). this student seems likely to be related, probably his son. an exhibition and sale of his landscape drawings and paintings was held in haymarket in 1785–86, which, together with the termination of his record of exhibition in 1784, may suggest that he died in 1785 (although the catalogue does not refer to him as “late,” as might be expected). william thompson, “painter,” appeared in the 1784 westminster poll book at half moon street, piccadilly, and is presumably the father, whose will of 1800 identifies him as “painter and glazier,” suggesting an interest in trade painting as well as landscape (national archives, prob 11/1338). james thomson registered as a student 25 march 1779, aged 19, 3 november last; designer (h354) james thomson (c. 1759–active 1779). not identified. the rare designation as “designer” suggests he was a draftsman in the trades. thomas thornley registered as a student 25 march 1779, aged 16, 16 next april; painter (h355) thomas thornley (1763–active 1779). not identified. peltro william tomkins/tomkyns registered as a student 6 march 1775, aged 15, 10 october last; engraver (h246) silver medal 1777 marked as “dead” in the register peltro william tomkins (1760–1840). engraver and draftsman. born london, the son of william tomkins, ara (c. 1730–92), landscape painter, and his wife susanna (callard). as well as painting country house views, william tomkins “practised much as a picture cleaner” (edwards). he was a pupil of bartolozzi, who reputedly said of him, “he is my son in the art” (tuer 2: 69). edwards noted that his older brother, charles, was an aquatint engraver, and that he “is an excellent engraver, having been the scholar of bartolozzi, and now resides in bond-street” (169). he married, in 1787, lucy jones. he taught the royal princesses and was appointed historical engraver to queen charlotte in 1793. he exhibited at the ra in 1799 and 1831–32. his brothers and daughter were also engravers. joseph toomer registered as a student 8 october 1779, aged 19, 3 march last; painter (h364) joseph toomer (1760–1853). ironmonger. foskett notes, “the above artist is known to have painted two large tinted miniatures on paper of a lady and gentleman in march 1781,” and records a further work dated december 1780. the surname is not common, and he appears to have been one of the toomers of newbury, berkshire, locally prominent ironmongers and bankers. he was probably the joseph toomer, son of samuel toomer and his wife sarah, whose birth in newbury on 3 february 1760 was registered as a nonconformist. probably the son of samuel toomer of newbury, banker (d. 1818), named in his will (national archives, prob 11/1602). joseph toomer, aged 80, so in conformity with this student’s recorded dates, was an ironmonger in newbury in the 1841 census; he had retired to the village of preston in kent for the 1851 census, and died in 1853. his will was proved 1854 (national archives, prob 11/2193). his brother was presumably edward toomer (c. 1765–1852), ironmonger, banker, and property developer, the father of the architect samuel edward toomer (1801–42). he may also be related to the george toomer, pawnbroker of southwark (d. 1776), whose business was continued by his widow, mary. george toomer’s will names only one son, george, who was under the age of 21 (national archives, prob 11/1021). thomas trotter registered as a student 25 march 1779, aged 22 last may; engraver (h356) noted in the life school register 1 october 1792 thomas trotter (1756–1803). landscape painter and engraver. born 5 may 1756 in fife, the son of the rev. john trotter (1726–1808) of the scotch church, swallow street, piccadilly, and his wife elizabeth (oswald; d. 1771) (for his father, see fasti ecclesiae scoticanae). biographical sources state that he was born in london, but the baptism record and the fact that his father did not take up his london appointment until 1769 indicate his birthplace was in scotland. redgrave describes him as the son of a clergyman, and … apprenticed to a calico printer. having some talent for drawing, he tried engraving, and soon produced some excellent portraits. he received some instruction from blake, who was his fellow-engraver, and finished a plate or two after stothard … prevented following his work as an engraver by an accidental injury to his sight, he found employment as a draughtsman, making drawings of churches and monuments for antiquarian publications. dodd states that he was the son of a merchant in edinburgh, thomas trotter (d. 1767), whose portrait he engraved (bl add. ms 33406, f. 61). however, the print’s inscription states that the subject died aged 82, so he may have been his grandfather or father. his obituary writer notes his apprenticeship to a calico printer (gentleman’s magazine [february 1803]), and j. t. smith notes that he “received instructions from blake” and was “a pattern-draughtsman to the calico-printers” who introduced blake to thomas stothard. he seems likely to be the thomas trotter who was apprenticed to william battersby, “citizen and merchant taylor,” in 1771 (national archives, ir 1/27); this is presumably the william battersby who is recorded as a stationer, engraver, and printer in the city of london in the 1780s, in business with a son. an earlier apprentice, abraham mondet, was certainly engaged as a designer at a calico printer, so battersby must have had some connections with the trade (anne puetz, “the society and the ‘polite arts’ 1754–1778,” susan bennett, ed., cultivating the human faculties: james barry (1741–1806) and the society of arts [branbury, 2008] 40). battersby’s trade cards include one identifying him (or his son) as a drawing master. thomas trotter exhibited at the ra 1780–1801 and achieved some eminence in engraving. however, the obituary writer noted his late struggles with poor sight after his accident (specified as involving an accidental blow on the head from a falling flower pot), and stated that he left his wife and daughter “totally unprovided for” (gentleman’s magazine [february 1803]). the widow became housekeeper at the ra for a time before falling out with the wife of the keeper, henry fuseli; the daughter appears to have studied art and exhibited at the ra 1809–15. john trumbull registered as a student 22 march 1785, aged 29, 6 june 1785; painter (h469) john trumbull (1756–1843). portrait and history painter, soldier and diplomat. born lebanon, connecticut, the son of jonathan trumbull, merchant, farmer, and the governor of connecticut from 1769 to 1784, and his wife faith (robinson). he graduated from harvard in 1773 and volunteered for military service in 1775. he resigned from the army in 1777, moving to boston, where he pursued business and art. in 1780 he traveled to paris before moving to england, where he became a pupil of benjamin west 1784–89. he arrived in london with a letter of introduction to edmund burke from his father, which ensured an introduction to reynolds: mr burke was the personal friend of sir joshua reynolds, and when i mentioned my predilection for history, and spoke of my intention to study especially under mr west, he did not appear to regard this preference with cordiality. i went on, however, painting by day at mr west’s house, and in the evening, drawing at the academy. here i frequently sat by the side of lawrence (afterwards sir thomas) so celebrated for his exquisite portraits. (theodore sizer, the autobiography of john trumbull patriot-artist, 1756–1843 [new haven, 1953] 85) lawrence registered at the schools in 1787, so their time at the academy did overlap. trumbull was in london again 1794–1804 and 1806–16, returning to america after that date and pursuing a prominent artistic career. george turner registered as a student 7 january 1782, aged 29, 1 last june; painter (h407) george turner (1752–1820). portrait and fancy painter and art teacher. exhibited at the ra and british institution from 1782 to 1820. waterhouse states that he ran a drawing academy. mrs. christian turner applied to the agbi in 1823: widow of mr george turner: an artist; student & exhibitor at the royal academy from 1782 to 1813 & at the british institution from the commencement to the year 1820 in which year her husband died, leaving his widow entirely destitute; having resided 55 years in the parish of st. martins, she has the benefit of the alms houses, but from the smallness of the monthly income for fuel, food & cloathing, she is obliged to solicit relief from this institution. (agbi applicants’ book) she was granted £2 in july 1823. in a subsequent application in 1826 she specified that her husband had “died suddenly on the 29 march 1820, leaving his widow entirely destitute,” and stated that she was now in an asylum. william turner registered as a student 22 march 1785, aged 22, 25 march inst.; painter (h470) william turner (1763–active 1816). landscape painter. known from his record of exhibition at the ra 1782–1813, initially from 2 great bath street, coldbath fields. this connects him with the turners who were engaged in the lapidary trade at this location. “samuel turner of great bath street … lapedary & jeweller” appeared as a witness at the city of london sessions in 1770. richard turner, “gentleman,” was insured at 11 great bath street in 1792 (lma). william turner, lapidary of st. leonard foster, referred to his brother, richard turner, in his will of 1801 (national archives, prob 11/1353). anthony van asson/assen registered as a student 4 december 1783, aged 16, 12 december inst.; painter (h443)silver medal 1788 noted in the life school register 15 november 1790 benedict anthony van assen (1767–c. 1817). engraver and illustrator. presumably originating in the netherlands, although the date of his arrival in england is not known. dutch engravers and artists of the name van assen or van ossen are recorded in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and it seems likely that this student came from such a background. waterhouse asserts, “he was mainly an illustrator but a rather feeble one.” he exhibited portraits and subjects at the ra 1788–1804, initially from 13 cambridge street, golden square. a notice in the world (15 april 1791) claims that “among the youthful prodigies of the present day, may be reckoned a young engraver, of the name of van assen, who, though a child in point of personal appearance, really, ‘enacts more wonders than a man.’” in 1815 he made an application for ra charity, noted as “b. van assen formerly a student, & an exhibitor in the royal academy,” and secured relief of 20 guineas and 8 guineas a year (cm). ottley states he died in london about 1817. henry vigne/h. g. vigne registered as a student 8 november 1782, aged 17, 15 last january; painter (h430) henry george vigne (1765–88). miniature painter. baptized 1 february 1765, the son of james vigne (c. 1734–1809), watchmaker, and his wife mary (keir). his parents had married at st. martin in the fields in london in the previous october, when his mother would have been already well advanced in her pregnancy; james vigne was recorded as being aged 30 or over on that occasion. the vigne family were of huguenot descent and were established as jewelers, watchmakers, and merchants in london. h. g. vigne exhibited at the ra 1785–87, giving the address as “at mr vigne’s, watchmaker, 2 charing cross.” ferdinand vigne, watchmaker of charing cross, who died in 1763, aged 53 (national archives, prob 11/887; london chronicle 7-9 april 1763), was related, and may be this student’s grandfather, given the shared charing cross address. james vigne, “jeweller and toyman” of st. giles in the fields, who died 1767 (national archives, prob 11/931), may be another relative. his father appears to be the james vigne of 2 charing cross (later designated as 2 strand) active in london from the 1760s to 1802 (to judge from commercial listings and the westminster poll and rate books) and then in dublin, where he died in 1809 (saunders’s news letter 20 september 1809). henry george vigne had died aged 23 in 1788, “at his father’s house, charing cross” (times 24 january 1788). he was identified in another death notice as a “miniature painter” (european magazine [january 1788]: 64). walker registered as a student 11 october 1782 (cm only) (h427) not identified; he may be the john walker who was registered the following year. john walker registered as a student 10 march 1783, aged 22, 11 last august; engraver (h434) john walker (1760–active 1802). engraver. redgrave states he was one of the ten children of the engraver william walker (1729–93), “all of whom were remarkable for their love of drawing,” and that he “finished many of his father’s plates.” the odnb states he was the only son of william walker, and that he was trained in engraving by him. his uncle, anthony walker (1726–65), was also a printmaker, who had trained his father. j. walker of 16 rosaman’s street exhibited at the ra 1796–1800, which was his father’s published address, and this seems certain to be this student. john walker engraved for the copper-plate magazine (1792–1802). he may be the j. g. walker, engraver, who applied to the agbi in 1828 (agbi applicants’ book). applying in 1834, he explained that “the abundance of cheap engravings from steel plates, renders it next to impossible for a person of his description to obtain even the most scanty livelihood.” robert watson registered as a student 6 march 1775, aged 20, 20th last april; painter (h247) noted in the life school register 19 february 1799 robert watson (1755–83). artist and engineer. born newcastle, 20 april 1755, and baptized at castle garth church, newcastle-upon-tyne, son of joseph watson, a member of the free porters’ company of newcastle. “at an early age he evinced such a fondness for drawing, that, after his education was finished, his parents apprenticed him to a coach painter. fortunately for him, his master’s misfortunes soon set him at liberty from a situation so ill suited to the sublimity of his genius; and leaving his native town, he went to london, where he became an industrious student at the royal academy” (e. mackenzie, a descriptive and historical account of … newcastle [newcastle, 1827] 1: 575-76n). he won a premium at the society of arts and exhibited at the ra in 1778, from 15 titchfield street, cavendish square. in 1796 farington noted: smirke spoke to me of his friend watson who died at madras.—he was a native of newcastle on the tyne, and was known to akenside the poet. watson proposed to have been an artist, but gave up that pursuit, his ambition not being likely to be soon qualified by what exertions he could make.—he was known to dr johnson, and was a young man of great parts and good principles.—watson, smirke, and porden, wrote the “anticipation of shanaghan.” (3: 655) the publication alluded to was a satirical review, an anticipation of the exhibition of the royal academy (1780). he went to india as an engineer in 1783, dying there of a fever at the age of 28. he reportedly left a tragedy “in the hands of the managers of one of the london theatres” that could not be recovered after his death (m. a. richardson, the local historian’s table book [newcastle, 1841] 1: 59). a biographical memoir was read at the newcastle institution in 1794, the source of early biographical accounts. a woodcut by the newcastle engraver charlton nesbitt of 1798 shows “the house, with wooden posts in front of it, where robert watson’s mother made and sold sausages for a livelihood in the latter part of her life” (richardson 1: 59). john webber registered as a student 8 april 1775; painter (h252) marked as “decd” in the register john webber (1751–93). landscape painter and draftsman. born london, the son of a swiss-born sculptor, abraham wäber (1715–80), and his english wife, mary (quant). he was sent to bern in 1757, in light of the family’s “straitened circumstances” (odnb). he lived with an aunt, who encouraged his artistic interests. he was apprenticed to the topographical artist johann ludwig aberli in 1767, and studied in paris with jean-georges wille and at the académie royale in 1770–75 before returning to london. he exhibited at the ra 1776–79 and took on work as a decorative painter. he was, famously, draftsman on captain cook’s last voyage (1776–80), and continued producing pacific scenes on his return. waterhouse opines, “his painting style is rather garish, glossy and linolear.” he was elected ara in 1785 and ra in 1791. he died unmarried, with a substantial estate of nearly £5000. (william hauptman, “webber before cook: two water-colours after sterne,” burlington magazine 136 [april 1994]: 237-41) raphael west registered as a student 7 december 1781, aged 15, 8 last april; painter (h405) raphael lamarr west (1766–1850). born london, the son of benjamin west (1738–1820), american-born history painter and founder ra, and his wife elizabeth (shewell), who came from america to join him in england in 1764. dunlap states: his school education was entrusted to one of the numerous academies that surrounded london, and it seems to have been a favourite with the americans of that day, as mather brown, john singleton copley (the son of the painter, and now lord lyndhurst) and raphael west, were school mates and playmates. (145) benjamin franklin’s grandson was another schoolmate, indicating that he must have attended james elphinston’s boarding school in kensington (benjamin west to benjamin franklin, 7 september 1783; founders online). in april 1782, benjamin west wrote: “my eldest son is now in his sixteenth year has increased in height two inches above his father … has greatly improved in painting, and i have determined to do my utmost to cultivate those talents which apear [sic] in him; that they may some day i hope be an ornament to the profession (to benjamin franklin, 28 april 1782; founders online). dunlap, who says he met him in 1784, stated that he was “one of the best designers, of the academy figure from life, that england possessed,” but that “he did not apply himself with the necessary industry to painting which ensures success, but seems to have been discouraged by the overshadowing merit and fame of his father” (146). c. r. leslie told dunlap that he “possessed more talent than industry” and that “he also drew the human figure with a masterly and anatomical precision equal to his father, and i believe he often assisted him in his large works” (147). benjamin west told farington in 1799 that he provided his son with an annual allowance of £400 (4: 1166). the elder west had purchased land in america, and in 1800 raphael was sent over “to improve wild lands, and although he did not exert his talents as a painter for the public, or exhibit any pictures during his stay, his taste had influence on the arts of the country … and the drawings he brought with him, and those executed during his residence at big-tree, and communicated or presented to his friends, must be considered as swelling the tide of western art by a copious though transient shower” (dunlap 146-47). he left in 1802, “disappointed, discouraged and home-sick” (147). he married, and had a daughter. his father’s estate, said to be worth £100,000, was shared between him and his younger brother, benjamin west, jr. however, he and his brother struggled financially and applied to the ra for support (william t. whitley, art in england, 1821–1837 [cambridge, 1930] 171). in the 1841 census he was recorded living with his wife in bushey, “independent.” richard westall registered as a student 16 december 1785, aged 20, 2 january 1786; painter (h476) richard westall (1765–1836). history painter and illustrator. born reepham, norfolk, the son of benjamin westall (1736–94), brewer, and his wife mary (ayton; 1739–70). the westalls “were an established norfolk family” (odnb). his mother died when he was a child, and his father’s business in norwich failed at around the same time. farington heard from westall himself: his father, and grandfather, were brewers, and had extensive business in this line many years: but some unfavourable circumstances caused a change in his fathers condition, and reduced his fortune so much that he quitted that city. (notebooks 4: 47) he was placed with an attorney in norfolk, but then moved to london, where he was apprenticed in 1779 to a john thompson of gutter-lane, cheapside, “an engraver of heraldry on silver &c”: in this humble department of the arts, mr westall’s genius raised him above his fellows: he became about this time acquainted with mr alefounder, an eminent miniature painter, who perceived his superior talents, and kindly fostered and encouraged them. in the last year of mr westall’s apprenticeship, mr thompson permitted him to draw at the royal academy, in the evenings; but for that indulgence he worked a corresponding number of hours in the morning. in 1786, mr westall was emancipated from, to his genius, a painful thraldom, and immediately commenced his splendid career. (gentleman’s magazine [february 1837]: 213) he exhibited at the ra 1784–1836. in 1793 farington noted, “westall at this time supports his father, mother, a brother, and a sister, who is blind. they now reside at hampstead. his father was formerly a brewer at norwich” (1: 5). he was made ara in 1792 and ra in 1794, enjoying considerable success for his ambitious watercolor designs and paintings. his reputation declined after 1815, and he was latterly drawing master to princess victoria. he died unmarried in 1836. thomas whitcombe registered as a student 8 march 1782, aged 18, 19 last may; painter (h413) thomas whitcombe (1763–1824). marine painter. his family background has been unclear, but he appears to be the son of richard whitcombe, merchant of london. he exhibited at the ra and british institution 1783–1824, initially from 43 st. mary axe (leadenhall street). the address was that of richard whitcombe, who is listed as “merchant” in the london directory, 1780, and appeared as a subscriber of the general dispensary for the relief of the poor in 1776. the elizabeth whitcombe insured as a tailor at that address in 1803 may be his widowed mother (lma). he may be the thomas whitcombe, aged 27, of st. paul, covent garden, who married, in 1791, elizabeth young. he may have remarried, as his widow was identified as mrs. a. whitcombe when she applied to the agbi in 1825: widow of the late mr t whitcombe. painter of marine views; formerly a student and for the last 40 years an exhibitor at the royal academy, who died last may leaving his widow & his youngest son a youth of 19 years old & afflicted with lameness completely without support. (agbi applicants’ book) she was initially declined, “not being properly attested,” but subsequently received charity from the agbi. charles wilkin registered as a student 7 january 1784, aged 28, 4 november last; painter (h447) charles wilkin (1755–1814). engraver. his family background has not been established, but he seems likely to be related to the engravers named wilkin active in norwich. awarded a premium at the society of arts in 1771. the charles wilkin noted as bankrupt in 1778, “formerly of gutter-lane, cheapside, and late of st. giles in norwich, engraver,” may be this student or his father or another relative (norfolk chronicle 4 july 1778). thomas wilkin, “engraver and copper-plate printer” of hog-hill, norwich, had advertised for a journeyman tallow-chandler in 1777 (norfolk chronicle 13 september 1777). he exhibited at the ra 1783–1808, initially from 52 wells street, oxford street. noted for his stipple engravings of contemporary portraits, working from ranelagh street, pimlico (where he was insured in 1790; lma), and other london addresses. “he died from the effects of an accident” (redgrave) in 1814, the mundane details of which were related in the press: mr wilkins, an engraver, at somers town, was a few evenings since, while drinking tea, balancing himself on the hind feet of his chair, when he lost his equilibrium, and fell with his head against a marble slab, by which his skull was fractured, and death ensued in consequence in four days. (stamford mercury 3 june 1814) solomon williams registered as a student 26 january 1781, aged 23 last july; engraver (h385) solomon williams (1757–1824). history and portrait painter. born dublin, the son of richard williams, goldsmith. he studied at the dublin society schools from 1771 and exhibited in dublin. traveled in italy after studying at the academy, and based in dublin from 1789, although he continued to work in london. he exhibited at the ra 1791–1806. he advertised in bath in 1799, “historical and portrait painter (member of the clementine academy) … he has a room calculated for establishing an evening academy” (bath chronicle 19 december 1799). he settled permanently in dublin in 1809 and became a founder member of the royal hibernian academy in 1823. george wilson registered as a student 2 april 1782, aged 17, 14 last february; painter (h418) george wilson (1765–active 1820). subject painter. he seems likely to be the george wilson apprenticed to william walker, engraver of st. james, clerkenwell, in 1783. william walker’s son john registered as a student in 1783. exhibited at the ra 1785–1819, initially from 457 strand. john wilson registered as a student 7 january 1782, aged 16, 8 april next; painter (h408) john wilson (1766–active 1783). portrait painter. his family background has not been established. exhibited at the ra in 1783, from 35 charlotte street, rathbone place. 36 charlotte street was the home of richard wilson, and william woollett. thomas witchell registered as a student 31 march 1777, aged 22 last february; painter (h305) very likely the thomas witchell born 10 february 1755, baptized st. luke, finsbury, 5 march 1755, son of george witchell and his wife mary. exhibited at the ra 1778–80, from 57 titchfield street, oxford street, and 79 wells street, oxford street. he is possibly the son of the mathematician george witchell (1728–85), who had married before 1755, and whose eldest son, thomas, was executor of his widowed father’s will, meaning he was over 21 at the date of its writing in 1777 (odnb). dean wolstenholm registered as a student 10 march 1783 (cm only) dean wolstenholme (1757–1837). sporting artist. born yorkshire, probably the son of sir john wolstenholme, bart. he spent his younger years in essex and hertfordshire. “the possessor of considerable means, he was able to indulge the full passion for sport which is betrayed in his pictures …. at this time he dabbled in art merely for amusement, painting occasionally for friends portraits of horses and hounds and also scenes of sport” (gilbey 2: 245). his studies at the academy were presumably pursued as an amateur. however, “by some misfortune (1793) he became involved in legal proceedings in connection with title of a property he had purchased at waltham,” and, his funds depleted by drawn-out legal proceedings, he was obliged to move to london to take up art professionally (gilbey 2: 245). he seems likely to be the dean wolstenholme, “the younger, of waltham cross, hertfordshire, innkeeper,” declared bankrupt (with an essex-based attorney) in 1802 (morning post 17 may 1802). he exhibited at the ra 1803–24, initially from turnford, cheshunt. he died in london in 1837. the dean wolstenholme, “chemist & druggist,” who opened a shop in leeds in 1824, is possibly related (leeds intelligencer 1 april 1824). his son, also dean wolstenholme (1798–1882), was an artist. william wood registered as a student 16 december 1785, aged 16, 19 march last; painter (h477) noted in the life school register 30 september 1790 william wood (1769–1809). miniature painter. born in ipswich, “he is declared to have come from an old suffolk catholic family and to have been specially welcomed in catholic circles,” although supporting evidence is lacking (george c. williamson, the miniature collector [london, 1921] 163-64). his obituary notice termed him “william wood, jun,” which suggests his father had the same name, but the elder william wood’s identity has not been further established (morning post 25 november 1809). this student exhibited at the ra from 1791, visiting the west country on several occasions to work as a miniaturist. he was a founder member of the new society of painters in miniature and watercolour in 1807. he died at his home in golden square, “at the prime of life” (morning post 25 november 1809). samuel woodforde registered as a student 8 march 1782, aged 18, 29 last march; painter (h414) noted in the life school register 16 january 1793 marked as “dead” in the register samuel woodforde (1763–1817). history and portrait painter. born ansford, near castle cary, wiltshire, “of a respectable family, long settled in that county” (redgrave). in 1807 he told farington that he “was born at allhampton a village near castle cary in somersetshire february 29th 1763” (notebooks 4: 177). his parents were heighes woodforde (1726–89), accountant, and his wife anne (1734–99), daughter and heir of ralph dorville, but it has been noted that his father was “in constant turmoil which resulted in a singular lack of money. he did little to provide for his large family” (william drummond, samuel woodforde, royal academician, 1763–1817, exhibition catalogue, william drummond at the kyburg gallery [1989]). he was supported by the hoares of stourhead, who knew his family. in 1807, farington noted: woodforde told me … that an uncle of his, an attorney, having business with the late mr hoare of stourhead, had carried some drawings which he had made, when between 16 & 17 years old, to mr hoare, who immediately offered him encouragement; allowed him to draw from pictures at stourhead, & then sent him to london to study at the royal academy. (8: 2941) his uncle, the rev. james woodforde, noted in his diary of january 1781 that he had a letter from heighes woodforde that “informs us that his son sam was at mr hoare’s, and is taken great notice of by mr hoare for his ingenuity in painting etc”; the next year he noted: he is very much grown and greatly improved—he is still at mr hoares of stourhead and kindly patronised by him in his painting—he sticks close to painting and mr hoare has got him into the royal academy and pays all his expenses—he has many presents also from him. (dorothy heighes woodforde, woodforde papers and diaries [bungay, 1990] 90) exhibited ra 1785–1815. he was well connected with the academicians, dining with them for the king’s birthday in june 1785 and noting in october that he “dined and spent the day at mr west’s” (woodforde 92-93). he seems no longer to have been attending the academy schools by that date. a trip to italy, where he remained 1785–91, was sponsored by the hoares; he again traveled in italy 1796–1802. he was elected ara in 1801 and ra in 1807. he married, in 1814, anne gardner, said to be one of his models, and they traveled together to italy, where he died of a fever in 1817. waterhouse opines, “his art was lightweight and his fancy pictures are terrible, but his best portraits are quite accomplished.” farington pointed to his comfortable financial circumstances: “woodford had £12,000 in the 3 per cents, accumulated” (14: 5118). joseph wright registered as a student 8 april 1775, aged 17, 16th last july; painter (h253) silver medal 1778 marked as “dead” in the register joseph wright (1756–93). portrait and miniature painter. born bordentown, new jersey, the son of joseph wright (d. 1769), a cooper, and his wife mrs. patience wright (lovell; 1725–1806), wax modeler. after being widowed, patience wright set up a waxworks exhibition, which toured to boston and new york but was destroyed by fire in 1771. he traveled with his mother to england after 1772, and became a pupil of benjamin west. he was working in norwich in 1773–74. he exhibited in london in 1780, a portrait of his mother at the ra, from “mrs wright’s, cockspur street, haymarket,” but returned to the us in 1782, where he worked in new york and philadelphia. his sister, phoebe, married fellow student john hoppner. review: james rovira, ed., rock and romanticism: blake, wordsworth, and rock from dylan to u2 james rovira, ed. rock and romanticism: blake, wordsworth, and rock from dylan to u2. lanham, md: lexington books, 2018. xxiv + 174 pp. $95.00/​£65.00, hardcover; $36.99/​£24.95, paperback; $35.00/​£23.95, e-book. reviewed by r. paul yoder r. paul yoder (rpyoder@ualr.edu) is an emeritus professor of english at the university of arkansas at little rock. he is the author of articles on milton, alexander pope, samuel richardson, thomas gray, blake, and wordsworth. his book, the narrative structure of william blake’s poem “jerusalem”: a revisionist interpretation, was published by the edwin mellen press in 2010. he has also co-edited, with wallace jackson, two essay collections on pope. he is a contributor and co-editor (with michelle levy and colette colligan) of study abroad in the lake district, published as part of the romantic circles pedagogy commons <http://​www.​rc.​umd.​edu/​pedagogies/​commons/​abroad>. his most recent work explores connections between british romanticism and bob dylan. at the first ever world of bob dylan symposium in may-june 2019 in tulsa, oklahoma, betsy bowden, one of the founders of dylan criticism, called for the development of a critical language that not only recognizes the similarities between songs and poems, but also respects their differences. rock and romanticism: blake, wordsworth, and rock from dylan to u2, edited by james rovira, participates in this development by connecting romantic-period poetry to rock-’n’-roll songs, although that is not its primary agenda. instead, rovira says that the book “seeks not only to demonstrate the influence of romantic literature on rock, which is already the subject of much attention, but to argue that rock itself is a late-twentieth-century expression of romanticism” (xi-xii). he grounds this argument in the work of robert sayre and michael löwy, and most of the contributors acknowledge a debt to them as well. sayre and löwy defined romanticism as “‘opposition to capitalism in the name of pre-capitalist values’” (quoted in rovira xiii),the book makes a distinction between sayre and löwy (“figures of romantic anti-capitalism,” new german critique 32 [1984]: 42-92) and löwy and sayre (romanticism against the tide of modernity, trans. catherine porter [durham, nc: duke university press, 2001]). and rovira uses this definition to describe romanticism “not as an era but as a response to historical conditions in a condition/​response model” (xv). liberated from the limits of a romantic period, the essays in the collection “assume that romanticism continues into the present as an essential feature of modern culture and takes on a specific, musical transformation in the period following world war ii” (xiv). the persuasiveness of the collection depends largely on how one views the persuasiveness of that understanding of romanticism. the book comprises eleven essays by various hands, plus the introduction by rovira. four essays concern blake, four focus on wordsworth, one on wordsworth and coleridge together, one on shelley, and one has a more continental focus on the scapigliatura and poètes maudits. the musicians discussed range from bob dylan, leonard cohen, and jackson browne to the rolling stones, nirvana, rush, u2, and american roots musician martha redbone. all of the essays run roughly ten to twelve pages of text, plus notes. unfortunately, there seems to have been some confusion about the final organization. in his introduction rovira writes, “an initial chapter engaging shelley and the rolling stones is followed by four chapters about blake and different figures in rock. the next chapter engages wordsworth and coleridge and is then followed by four chapters about wordsworth” (xviii), before the concluding chapter on the scapigliatura. this organization makes sense; it gathers the essays into cohesive groups that allow for relatively easy comparisons focused on particular poets. the problem is that the book does not follow this organization, as the table of contents reveals. instead of opening with janneke van der leest’s essay on shelley and the rolling stones, it begins with luke walker on blake and dylan, so that the four chapters concerning blake are interrupted by the chapter on shelley. the wordsworth group is similarly disrupted: instead of opening the second group, david s. hogsette’s essay on wordsworth and coleridge appears after david boocker’s and gary l. tandy’s essays on wordsworth. in the balance of the introduction, rovira himself follows the table of contents (and actual organization) as he describes the essays. it is not clear how the error occurred, but the book would be more focused with the arrangement that appears to have been canceled. “romanticism in the park: mick jagger reading shelley” would have been an excellent opening for the book, given the editor’s emphasis on the continuity of romanticism across periods. van der leest considers the implications of jagger’s 1969 reading of parts of shelley’s adonais as a tribute to the recently deceased rolling stones founder, brian jones. she sees in jagger’s tribute the same aligning of poets to commemorate past poets that extends beyond shelley and keats all the way to the beginning of pastoral elegy in bion’s lament for adonis and moschus’s lament for bion. van der leest focuses primarily on attitudes toward death among romantics and rockers, and concludes that the shared characteristics of romanticism and rock music “lead us to believe that a focus on rock music and its youth culture offers a way to study romanticism and romantic literature. at the same time, it reveals how romanticism lives on, and how rock culture can be put in a historical perspective that goes all the way back to romanticism” (30). all the essays in the collection offer variations on this theme. while the four chapters on blake do not really talk to one another, together they reveal fault lines in our conception of romanticism. in “tangled up in blake: the triangular relationship among dylan, blake, and the beats,” walker invokes a “blakean romanticism” (7) as he examines the “complex set of personal and cultural anxieties relating to influence and canonicity, romanticism and counterculture, beat poetry and rock music, and [how] these interlinked anxieties provide the key contexts for dylan’s relationship with the poetry of william blake” (1). “beat poetry” here mostly means allen ginsberg, who famously hallucinated blake and was also a friend of dylan. walker sees dylan and ginsberg as representative figures both to each other and to their public—​ginsberg representing the older beat generation and dylan the new musical threat to the beats’ relevance—​and he wisely cautions that “the oft-stated connection between [dylan and blake] has too rarely been subjected to rigorous critical analysis” (3). walker himself has little to say about the dylan songs we often associate with blake (“gates of eden,” “every grain of sand,” “golden loom”), but he does an admirable job of documenting points of contact between dylan and blake early and late in dylan’s career, questioning whether and how much ginsberg was involved. in “william blake: the romantic alternative,” douglas t. root looks at blake and kurt cobain as parallel members of parallel movements. according to root, “both the romantic (with or without blake) and grunge movements were fueled by a desire to break away from the popular works that preceded them” (44). he refers to what he calls blake’s “macabre romanticism” (35) without really saying what he means by that, but he does focus on the “‘prickly relationship between blake and [the critical establishment’s] constructions of romanticism’” (37, quoting david simpson) as paralleling cobain’s rejection of the rock establishment. for root, both artists reject not simply the inherited methods or means of production, but also the entire system in which these methods are used. nicole lobdell’s “digging at the roots: martha redbone’s the garden of love: songs of william blake” is part critical analysis, part album review. lobdell identifies an “appalachian romanticism” resulting from redbone’s interpretation of “blake’s poetry through memory, eulogizing what has been lost to time and progress, and celebrating, through lyric and melody, what remains” (52). she says that redbone’s album “showcases a collective lyrical history that joins, across centuries and continents, blake’s romantic england with redbone’s modern america” (51); lobdell defines “the overlapping ideals of appalachia and romanticism” as “organic imagination, self-reliance, and a spiritual connection to nature” (53). she notes that redbone’s “organic, diverse language of sound pushes against definitions of romanticism by reimagining blake’s canonical poetry in a feminine voice set against the musical backdrop of appalachia” (56). the album’s song selection, organization, and musical arrangements, lobdell says, chart “a loose narrative of fall and redemption alongside one about the individual’s search for community and home” (57). in “‘tangle of matter and ghost’: u2, leonard cohen, and blakean romanticism,” lisa crafton “situates this triangle of artists [blake, u2, cohen] in terms of acknowledged debts to their precursors, but, more importantly, the profound metaphorical and thematic connections that brand both cohen and u2 as romantic” (66). she discusses three “areas of intersection” among these writers: “social and cultural protest, the conflation of erotic/​spiritual love, and the representation of the rupture of that symbiosis, especially in the poetic treatment of judas, yahweh, and jesus” (67). crafton’s is the most theoretically self-aware essay of the collection, as she explicitly addresses the issue of influence, noting that while she does “acknowledge statements of ‘influence,’” she also concurs with steve clark, tristanne connolly, and jason whittaker in blake 2.0: william blake in twentieth-century art, music and culture in rejecting “‘writer-on-writer models of influence and residually patrilineal concepts of inheritance’” in favor of “‘alternative models’” that are “‘less defined and confined by various forms of affiliation or resistance’” (quoted in crafton 67). be that as it may, crafton’s argument is also among the most persuasive, at least in part because its “‘alternative models’” begin with those acknowledged “statements of ‘influence.’” in the organization that rovira initially describes, the blake essays would have been followed by “‘swimming against the stream’: rush’s romantic critique of their modern age,” in which hogsette draws on löwy and sayre and seeks to place rush among the romantics by redefining romanticism “as a visionary worldview that indeed began in the mid-to-late eighteenth century but did not end with the emergence of the victorian era” (111). relying mostly on correspondences between rush and wordsworth and coleridge, hogsette finds in rush’s work a romantic nostalgia for an idealized pastoral, coupled with a belief that individual freedom can be turned to social good. he acknowledges that rush’s perspective has been (mis)interpreted as ultraconservative, even fascistic, but argues that the band undercuts its own hard line with irony at both the verbal and musical levels. while hogsette explicitly disavows any reliance on formal definitions of romanticism, the nature of rush’s music as he describes it cannot but emphasize the element of quest-romance that informs so much of traditional british romanticism. four essays that flank hogsette’s, two on either side, align wordsworth with the beatles, jackson browne, recent southern rock band blackberry smoke, and a trio of literary works related to contemporary music by at least one degree of separation. the chapters on wordsworth almost all depend on parallel approaches or concerns, with only one point of explicit contact, in rachel feder’s discussion of brandon brown’s invocation of the prelude in top 40. in “the inner revolution(s) of wordsworth and the beatles,” boocker compares lyrical ballads to sgt. pepper’s lonely hearts club band, focusing on how both works invoke nostalgia to identify the goals and strategies for the internal personal changes necessary to bring about larger-scale social change. he finds that “in the end, what ultimately links the english romantic movement to the beatles is that they both signal momentous transitions after which poetry and music were never the same again,” so that “the acts of reading the poetry and listening to the music become progressive acts that move us toward restoring social order” (90). in “‘when the light that’s lost within us reaches the sky’: jackson browne’s romantic vision,” tandy focuses “not on proving influence but on identifying those elements of browne’s lyrics that demonstrate the continuity of his worldview with that of the european romantic movement, specifically of the revolutionary and utopian type” (107). while tandy’s references to specific romantic passages are relatively scant, as if he assumes (perhaps correctly) that his reader is already familiar with the lines one might expect him to cite, his discussion of browne’s songs provides one of the strongest, most detailed examinations of rock lyrics in the collection. in those lyrics he finds the romantic traits of melancholy, nostalgia (not to mention “melancholic nostalgia” [101]), and a forward-looking utopianism that projects browne’s lost idyllic state into the future as a personal and political possibility. ronald d. morrison’s “wordsworth’s ‘michael,’ the georgic, and blackberry smoke” argues that “both wordsworth’s poem and many of the songs of blackberry smoke should be considered as revitalized versions of the georgic that are focused on nuanced meanings of the term ‘environment,’ including human-created environments and culture” (127). morrison distinguishes between the timelessness of what keats called “cold pastoral” and the temporality of michael’s labor in the more realistic workaday world of the georgic. the discussion of “michael” is deeper than most of the discussions of romantic poetry in the collection, and morrison does a very good job of drawing out the georgic parallels between the issues addressed by wordsworth and those addressed by the working-class focus of blackberry smoke. in “wordsworth on the radio,” feder examines three poetry collections that use popular music as their starting points: brown’s top 40, lauren ireland’s dear lil wayne, and sarah blake’s mr. west. brown explicitly invokes wordsworth and the prelude in a collection of poems, each based on a top 40 song, in which, feder says, he addresses wordsworth’s “forms of refusal” (141), delaying both beginning and ending. ireland’s dear lil wayne collects postcards ireland wrote to lil wayne during his incarceration, and feder finds in them an ambiguity of private and public audience akin to the ambiguity of address in the prelude, as well as an emphasis on isolated moments that recalls wordsworth’s “spots of time.” in blake’s mr. west, “celebrity emerges as an alternative to memory,” such that “celebrities … might provide us, after all, with a different way to consume memory” (148). feder concludes that, in these three collections, “pop music functions as a vehicle of memory and futurity, a preludian thinking back into the past and casting into the future” (150). five of the first ten essays operate deliberately or not on those “‘writer-on-writer models of influence’” of which crafton expresses suspicion. as such, they build on demonstrable points of contact between the romantic writer and rock music—​jagger recites a shelley poem, dylan discusses blake with ginsberg, redbone records blake songs, u2 explicitly cite blake as an influence, and brown relates the prelude to a variety of top 40 hits. the other essays almost all depend less on sequential influence than on parallel concerns shared by romantic and modern writers; rather than evidence of influence, the arguments are built on comparing the different writers’ approaches to melancholy, nostalgia, labor, and the relationship of the individual to the larger world. the former approach emphasizes writers defined as romantic, while the latter focuses on issues that have been defined as romantic. indeed, my strongest reservation about the book concerns its operating definition of romanticism. to be sure, romanticism is not just one thing, and at different points in the collection we hear about “blakean romanticism,” “macabre romanticism,” “appalachian romanticism,” and “‘restitutionist romanticism.’” romanticism has always been difficult to define, and that is probably as it should be. liberation from the long eighteenth or nineteenth century, not to mention the traditional romantic period, will certainly make romanticism more inclusive. my concern is that it may also make the term so loose as to make it useless. once the romantic is defined as a movement “fueled by a desire to break away from the popular works that preceded [it]” (root 44), i’m not sure there is much basis left on which to make meaningful distinctions among literary types. assuming we still want to do that. the last essay, lorenzo sorbo’s “the scapigliatura and poètes maudits in the songs of piero ciampi (1934–1980),” shows just how complicated our notions of romanticism can be. like so many of the other contributors, sorbo cites löwy and sayre, but the focus on italian romanticism, directed at a primarily anglo-american audience, requires that he approach his topic from the beginning, defining the “scapigliati” (the “disheveled”) and their antagonism to the bourgeoisie, identifying key figures in the movement, and outlining parallels with british romanticism. for example, quoting rosa giovanna, sorbo notes that for the scapigliati “their disheveled narrative style focuses on a ‘hypertrophied ego’ enhancing ‘the solitude of the self-centered author’” (157). despite these parallels, sorbo recognizes that “the scapigliati railed against romanticism” (154). when he turns to ciampi, whose “musical production consists of only five albums produced between 1963–1975, several singles and collections, different unpublished songs, and many other songs written for other singers” (156), he again has to start at the beginning, with ciampi’s birth in 1934 in livorno. but sorbo’s conclusion nicely encapsulates the complications of trying to align romantic poetry and modern music: ciampi “has a romantic view of love in the literary sense, but his poems are in many ways completely anti-academic and anti-romantic” (162). sorbo’s conclusion points to the need for caution in this sort of work: comparisons based on abstract notions of romanticism make it all too easy to overreach in our generalities and to overlook the sorts of nuances and inconsistencies that sorbo is careful to document. the collection raises important questions about how romanticism is defined, and implicitly whether it is fair even to try to discuss romanticism or rock as a coherent concept. the questions of the book’s audience and how to address them are also tricky. in an essay on, say, blake and dylan, how much can you assume romanticists know about dylan? what do most dylanologists know about blake? how much can rush fans be expected to know about wordsworth and coleridge, or vice versa? if you are a romanticist already, you will not learn a lot about romanticism per se in rock and romanticism. you will learn much about rock music and how rock musicians have engaged with something that might be called romanticism. but you will also learn that there is no such thing as monolithic “rock music” any more than there is such a thing as a monolithic “romanticism.” if bowden is correct that we need to develop a critical vocabulary that recognizes the real similarities and differences between poems and songs, and if, as this collection contends, rock music really is the twentieth-century expression of romanticism, then that critical vocabulary of poems and songs in the modern era will necessarily include elements of romantic discourse. rock and romanticism is hardly the final word on that, but the essays do help us to understand the challenges involved in getting there. b l a k e vol. 53, no. 3 winter 2019–20 angela esterhammer, victoria college, university of toronto nelson hilton, university of georgia tilar j. mazzeo, colby college robert w. rix, university of copenhagen joseph viscomi, university of north carolina at chapel hill david worrall, the nottingham trent university martin butlin, tate gallery, london, retired tristanne j. connolly, university of waterloo detlef w. dörrbecker, university of trier sibylle erle, bishop grosseteste university robert n. essick, university of california, riverside a d v i s o r y b o a r d a n i l l u s t r a t e d q u a r t e r l y volume 53 number 3 winter 2019–20 c o n t e n t s www.blakequarterly.org articles network theory and ecology in blake’s jerusalem by jade hagan blake’s “holy thursday” and “the martyrdom of st. paul’s” by clare a. simmons remembrance blake and bloom, a memorial note by kenneth gross reviews kathryn s. freeman, a guide to the cosmology of william blake reviewed by james rovira sibylle erle and morton d. paley, eds., the reception of william blake in europe reviewed by silvia riccardi sarah haggarty, ed., william blake in context reviewed by alexander s. gourlay © 2020 copyright morris eaves and morton d. paley cover: design based on “holy thursday” (innocence) from songs copy l (composed 1789, 1794; printed 1795). yale center for british art, paul mellon collection. b1992.8.13(10). image courtesy of the william blake archive. e d i t o r s editors: morris eaves and morton d. paley review editor: alexander s. gourlay exhibitions editor: luisa calè bibliographer (criticism): wayne c. ripley bibliographer (music): jason whittaker managing editor: sarah jones sarah.jones@rochester.edu production office: department of english, university of rochester, rochester ny 14627-0451 review: sendak and blake illustrating “songs of innocence” with an essay by prof. robert n. essick sendak and blake illustrating “songs of innocence” with an essay by prof. robert n. essick. new york: battledore ltd./​society of illustrators, 2018. 40 pp., 22 of which include color pls. $30.00/​£24.00, hardcover. reviewed by mark crosby mark crosby (crosbym@ksu.edu) is an associate professor in the department of english and director of the digital humanities center at kansas state university. maurice sendak studied blake’s art and poetry,i would like to thank robert n. essick and justin g. schiller for fielding my queries about the fall 2018 exhibition of sendak drawings at the society of illustrators in new york city. any inaccuracies are entirely my own. and collected drawings, watercolors, illuminated books, and prints. in interviews, he frequently professed his adoration of blake, stating in 2001, “i love blake; i have all my life.”philip nel, “‘don’t assume anything’: a conversation with maurice sendak,” conversations with maurice sendak, ed. peter c. kunze (jackson: university press of mississippi, 2016) 120. the experimental synthesis of the verbal and visual in much of sendak’s work is self-consciously blakean, a deliberate evocation of the composite art of the illuminated books that is perhaps seen most forcefully in his final work, my brother’s book, completed before sendak’s death in may 2012 but published posthumously.see mark crosby, “sendak, blake, and the image of childhood,” william blake and the age of aquarius, ed. stephen f. eisenman (princeton: princeton university press, 2017) 185-97. in a much earlier work, a 1967 christmas keepsake published by bodley head, we find sendak engaging directly with the man whom he described in a 1970 interview as “my teacher in all things.”maurice sendak, “the coming together of all my various worlds: maurice sendak on receiving the hans christian andersen illustrator’s medal,” top of the news 26 (1970): 368. after recovering from a major heart attack during a 1967 promotional tour in northern england, and grateful to judy taylor, his editor at bodley head, for whisking him to hospital, sendak created seven pen-and-ink drawings illustrating seven poems from songs of innocence. john ryder, art director at bodley head, subsequently commissioned the christmas keepsake, poems from william blake’s “songs of innocence,” which reproduces the text of blake’s poems with sendak’s interlinear, headpiece, and tailpiece illustrations. this slim volume had a print run of only 275 copies, which were given to friends of the publishing house. in 1968, sendak gave taylor his original drawings with a copy that contains a dedication: “my sketches—my original blake pictures” as “sufficient example … of my devotion—affection—for you.”sendak and blake illustrating “songs of innocence,” fig. 2. the drawings, according to the antiquarian bookdealer justin g. schiller, “hung on her wall at home for half a century.”e-mail correspondence with mark crosby, 13 december 2019. between 23 october and 3 november 2018, the society of illustrators in new york exhibited sendak’s seven original pen-and-ink drawings and twenty-two pencil preparatory studies. to accompany the exhibition, battledore ltd. published a lavishly illustrated catalogue reproducing sendak’s published illustrations, the pen-and-ink drawings, pencil studies, and a selection of related plates from songs of innocence, along with a short introductory essay and commentaries on sendak’s drawings and blake’s plates by robert n. essick. according to schiller, the pen-and-ink drawings and preparatory studies constitute the only complete set of artwork for a sendak title “still in private hands.”e-mail correspondence with mark crosby, 13 december 2019. the exhibition and its catalogue were the first public appearance of these drawings. sendak and blake illustrating “songs of innocence” opens with essick’s essay discussing some of the similarities between blake’s and sendak’s respective approaches to illustration. it is pitched at a nonspecialist audience, adroitly summarizing the accepted view that for blake illustration was, as essick puts it, “a mode of critical commentary,” where pictorial motifs operate in a variety of ways to create meaning, such as de/​emphasizing particular themes and emotions, or operating antithetically to broaden “the range of reference and allusion beyond words.”quotations are from essick’s introductory essay and commentaries. there are no page numbers in this publication. sendak’s seven published illustrations evince some of these qualities as they respond to blake’s poetry and designs. essick notes that sendak was certainly aware of the composite art of blake’s illuminated books, possibly via the trianon edition of songs of innocence, though he never sought to imitate the aesthetic.as noted in the catalogue, sendak purchased copy j of songs of innocence in 2001, thirty-four years after he created these drawings. indeed, one of the key features distinguishing his pictures from other attempts to illustrate blake’s work is that they are “a matter of inspiration and innovative borrowings, never slavish imitation.” in terms of format, sendak’s illustrations in the bodley head edition, unlike the relief-etched designs in songs of innocence, where text and design frequently intertwine, are afforded a distinct visual presence on the page, separate from the text of blake’s poems. essick’s commentaries on blake’s original plates, sendak’s published illustrations, the pen-and-ink drawings, and the preparatory pencil studies, alongside color and black-and-white reproductions, account for the bulk of the catalogue. anyone familiar with essick’s edition of songs of innocence and of experience (2008), described by alexander gourlay as “an intellectual and critical gem,” will recognize and certainly be rewarded by the commentaries here.alexander s. gourlay, rev. of robert n. essick, ed., william blake, “songs of innocence and of experience” (san marino: huntington library, 2008), blake 46.1 (summer 2012): par. 1. they follow the order of blake’s poems and sendak’s illustrations in the bodley head christmas keepsake, beginning with sendak’s illustration of the “introduction,” followed by “a dream,” “the lamb,” “the ecchoing green,” “night,” “the little boy lost,” and “the little boy found.” visually, the catalogue displays the color reproductions on the initial spread for each poem, beginning with sendak’s published illustration in sepia ink, blake’s corresponding plate from songs of innocence, and sendak’s pen-and-ink design. the following spread presents black-and-white reproductions of the preparatory studies. the fifty-four reproductions in the catalogue are not facsimiles; nevertheless, the images of sendak’s published illustrations and the corresponding pen-and-ink drawings are, on the whole, quite sharp. the reproductions of the pencil studies are less crisp, and some “minute particulars” can be difficult to discern. in his commentaries, essick discusses how sendak’s illustrations, drawings, and studies respond to blake’s poems and designs. like the introductory essay, the commentaries are intended for a general audience and helpfully guide the reader through sendak’s process of “thinking on paper.” for several designs, sendak begins with a compositional arrangement of figures that is similar to blake’s originals. for example, the illustration of the “introduction” depicts, like blake’s frontispiece to songs of innocence, a (child) piper below a hovering infant in a rural setting. sendak refined this composition through four pencil studies that work out the vegetation, alter the clothing of the child piper, and amend the postures and gestures of piper and infant. while not strictly examples of pentimenti, the preparatory studies do show sendak changing his mind during the process of composition over three or four sketches. he also gave himself textual reminders of changes for future iterations; for instance, on a preparatory sketch for the “introduction” that depicts the hovering infant touching the piper’s head, he offers the following instruction: “don’t actually touch the head or pipes!” as essick notes, it was clearly important for sendak that the hovering infant inspire and direct “but … not physically engage, the boy and his pipe.” the preparatory studies reveal another similarity with blake, a concern with gestures. one of the three studies for the illustration of “a dream” is an enlarged sketch of the arms and hands of a weeping child. the larger scale allowed sendak, as essick observes, to “work out the details of the finger positions” before reducing the scale in the pen-and-ink drawing. one of the most striking and, for anyone familiar with sendak’s where the wild things are (1963), most recognizable images is the giant, watchful lion that commands the illustration of “night.” the dominating presence of this motif was at the forefront of sendak’s thinking about this illustration, as the preparatory studies reveal, and is a direct response to the text of blake’s poem rather than the design.the pen-and-ink drawings and preparatory studies also reveal a multitude of details difficult to discern in the published illustrations. for example, in my discussion of the interlinear illustration on the title page of the 1967 christmas keepsake, i suggest that the seated, robed, and bearded figure watching the children play is holding an “oversized compass” (see crosby, “sendak, blake, and the image of childhood” 190). a high-resolution digital image of the corresponding pen-and-ink drawing, once enlarged, shows that sendak has depicted a walking stick. i would like to thank robert n. essick for supplying me with the high-resolution image of the pen-and-ink drawing illustrating “the ecchoing green.” we may also detect visual echoes in sendak’s lion, with its slightly anthropomorphized features, of the wild things that max encounters, as well as perhaps a nod to blake’s depiction of a seemingly benign tiger in songs of experience. in terms of scholarly contribution, sendak and blake illustrating “songs of innocence” makes public for the first time a body of art that offers an enlightening glimpse into the development of sendak’s ideas about innocence and childhood as he responds to blake’s own configuration of innocence. at the end of his commentaries, essick offers an apposite personal anecdote recalling sendak’s love of “everything by blake connected with childhood.” an important conceit of songs of innocence, which can be traced through much of sendak’s published work, is that innocence is verbally and visually represented by childhood, where spontaneity and play are crucial for exercising imaginative freedom. it seems entirely fitting, then, that upon his recovery from what he believed was a near-death experience, he chose to engage directly with his “teacher in all things” by illustrating seven poems that in various ways present childhood as a period of puissant imagination. editors’ note: battledore ltd. is offering a promotion. if you mention this review, postage for the catalogue will be free within the us and at a $10 discount elsewhere. william blake and his circle: a checklist of publications and discoveries in 2011 william blake and his circle: a checklist of publications and discoveries in 2011 by g. e. bentley, jr. with the assistance of hikari sato for japanese publications and of li-ping geng for chinese publications g. e. bentley, jr. (gbentley@chass.utoronto.ca) publishes bibliographies, biographies, and editions of william blake (1963 ff.), george cumberland (1975), john flaxman (1964), the edwardses of halifax (forthcoming), and learned pigs (1980), with important separate essays on thomas butts, f. j. du roveray, illustrated bibles, and james parker. editors’ notes: a number of entries below have a link to an online article, catalogue, or auction lot number. some are freely accessible and some may be behind a subscription barrier, depending on your or your institution’s access. all are included on the grounds that even those with restricted access often provide a freely available abstract or excerpt. addenda and corrigenda to blake records, 2nd ed. (2004), now appear online. they are updated yearly in conjunction with the publication of the checklist. table of contents: introductory essay division i: william blake part i: blake’s writings section a: original editions, facsimiles, reprints, and translations section b: collections and selections part ii: reproductions of drawings and paintings section a: illustrations of individual authors part iii: commercial engravings section a: illustrations of individual authors part iv: catalogues and bibliographies part v: books owned by william blake the poet part vi: criticism, biography, and scholarly studies division ii: blake’s circle barry, james butts, elizabeth flaxman, john fuseli, henry hayley, william palmer, samuel parker, james stedman, john gabriel stothard, thomas tatham, frederick blake publications and discoveries in 2011 for me, one of the most important discoveries of 2011 was google scholar, which allows searches in scholarly periodicals and books. under “blake” for 2009–11 there were 48,400 entries in early november 2011, which effectively frightened me off. but i did plough through 5,950 entries under “william blake” for 2009–11, or rather i tried to do so, but (somewhat to my relief) i was only allowed to see the first thousand. the information is often not comprehensive, omitting pagination and sometimes even author (in which case i have had to ignore it). entries in other scripts such as arabic and chinese and greek and hebrew and japanese and korean may be incompletely metamorphosed into english or any other european language or script, and the titles may be translated, but they are never transliterated. but google scholar does provide wonderfully broad coverage, and a very substantial number of entries here derive from it. an online resource which is new to me is newspaper archive, which advertises 120,000,000 articles and is indeed very capacious and rewarding. the two workhorses of blake scholarship, robert n. essick, “blake in the marketplace,” which is customarily meticulous and deft, and g. e. bentley, jr., “william blake and his circle,” are occasionally capable of a caracole: the sketch of the olympic devils, implausibly attributed to blake, “attracted 17 bidders, 16 of whom were fortunate.”robert n. essick, “blake in the marketplace, 2010,” blake 44.4 (spring 2011): 125. there was a scattering of new references to blake in works published before gilchrist opened the floodgates in 1863. these were in 1798 (see young in part iii), 1800 (hayley, essay on sculpture, in part iii; tilloch in part vi), 1801 (hartley in part iii), 1818 (anon., “forged bank-notes,” in part vi), 1843 (“the chimney sweeper” in part ib), 1845 (saunders in part vi), 1846 (1846 in part iv), 1847, 1848, 1853 (lester in part vi), 1853 (john duke coleridge in part vi), 1856 (arvine and stephens in part vi), 1857 (symington in part vi), 1860 (1860 in part ib) and 1861 (gilchrist in part vi). perhaps the most interesting are those of 1800 and 1818 about blake’s connection with tilloch’s attempt to suppress forgery of bank notes and the newly recorded advertisements of 1798 for young’s night thoughts. numbers of works about blake recorded in blake books (1977), blake books supplement (1995), and blake/an illustrated quarterly for 1992-2011 record for books [a] including editions and catalogues essays including reviews bb 1,406 573 254 3,218 595 [b] bbs 1,010 354 123 4,069 177 misc. [c]         1,951 1992-93 54 21 15 279 62 1994 50 16 5 234 84 1995 56 22 12 239 74 1996 37 14 10 160 136 1997 75 29 11 135 178 1998 69 32 6 233 59 1999 46 21 3 235 71 2000 73 3 12 52 56 2001 57 23 13 181 175 2002 52 26 6 208 45 2003 50 17 8 205 47 2004 31 8 6 153 81 2005 43 9 6 139 79 2006 110 48 11 237 41 2007 118 70 17 336 100 2008 193 68 54 330 107 2009 122 32 30 621 239 2010 180 78 13 313 78 2011 112 25 22 279 59 totals 3,944 1,489 637 11,856 4,494 a. the books include reprints. editions and catalogues are subdivisions of books, and reviews are a subdivision of essays. b. one hundred reviews in bb were published before 1863. c. the miscellaneous sources include the essick collection, the online versions of the times [london] and the new york times, reviews in philological quarterly (1925-69), and reviews in blake before 1992, when i began reporting reviews in this checklist. the non-english languages recorded for blake studies in 2011 were arabic, chinese, croatian,i am told that when yugoslavia divided into bosnia and herzegovina, kosovo (albanian), macedonia, montenegro, serbia, croatia, and slovenia, each country declared that it had its own language, and some are mutually understandable with ease. french, german, italian, japanese, korean, montenegrin, portuguese, romanian, serbian, and spanish.unlike in past years, there was no blake publication recorded in danish, greek, macedonian, norwegian, polish, russian, slovenian, or swedish. note that the sudden surge of chinese publications about blake (wei lian bu lai ke) does not mean that in 2011 there were suddenly more publications in chinese than previously. it means that suddenly i have discovered how to find them. most of the essays in chinese are remarkably brief; twenty-six of them are only one or two pages. it is worth bearing in mind two factors about this brevity. in the first place, chinese writing, in which one character represents a whole word, is far more concise than alphabetical writing, in which, for example, “alphabetical” requires twelve characters. in chinese, a 5,000-word essay would require only three pages. and in the second place, candidates for the ma (a three-year degree) must publish two articles to qualify for the degree, though the quality of the essay and journal may be very modest. more than one entry is in arabic, which i cannot read.e.g., author illegible to me, “[utopia or labyrinth of reason? william blake’s polemic with francis bacon],” about the new atlantis and the book of urizen. doctoral dissertations noticed in 2011 are from coimbra (2009), exeter (2010), harvard (2010), indiana (2011), michigan (2011), city university of new york (2010), yale (2011), and york (england) (2010). web sites on blake web sites are a problem. new ones pop up (many), and old ones die (not many). some sites never change, and some change frequently. in 2011 web sites devoted exclusively or significantly to blake included: bentley collection, a catalogue of the works related to blake and his circle given in 2005 to the library of victoria university in the university of toronto, and subsequent additions thereto. blake digital text project, created by nelson hilton, with an electronic version of the complete poetry and prose of william blake, ed. david v. erdman, the concordance of erdman et al., a “graphical hypertext” of blake’s songs, and a hypertext edition of “the everlasting gospel” by david owen, plus bibliographical material. the blake society (london), for lectures, a journal, and blake advocacy. blake 2.0, a “community portal” devoted to blake studies, ed. jason whittaker and roger whitson, with a blog (zoamorphosis), podcasts, and a digital reading project. the cynic sang, “the (un)official blog of the william blake archive,” by members of the university of rochester archive team. the friends of william blake, by luis and carol garrido, with information about blake’s burial site. an island in the moon, with video, photos, and a text of the 1983 cornell theatrical production of joseph viscomi, with music by margaret lafrance. project blake, on blake community events in london. the william blake archive, ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi, with searchable electronic editions of blake’s literary and artistic works, bibliographies, collection lists, and an electronic version of the complete poetry and prose of william blake, ed. david v. erdman. blake’s writings two prints from songs of innocence and of experience (o) have been newly recorded in the philadelphia museum of art, and the first known loose print (pl. 15) from for children: the gates of paradise was offered for sale. how extraordinary that new copies of blake prints should still turn up. untraced letters from blake and to him have been newly identified below. alas, the possibility of actually finding any of these letters is extraordinarily slight. printings of single poems by blake in 1843 and 1860 are newly recorded here. by far the most exciting newly recorded copy of a literary work by blake is poetical sketches (y). it had not been recorded at all until it was offered for sale in 2011 and acquired by robert n. essick. it bears manuscript corrections by blake like those in other copies distributed by or for him, and they are identical to those in copy s sent by john flaxman to william hayley in april 1784. the recipient was apparently john hawkins, blake’s early admirer—the handwriting on the title page is his. he seems to have acquired his copy very soon after the book was printed in 1783, for the address he wrote on it (“at mr taylors green st. leicester fields”) was one where blake lived only in 1782-84. hawkins commissioned drawings from blake, but this is the only blake work he is known to have owned. this copy of poetical sketches helps to illuminate the most obscure period of blake’s creative life. the marriage of heaven and hell, edited with an introduction and commentary by michael phillips (2011), is an important edition, generously illustrated with 169 reproductions, including colored prints of copies b, k, and m. these reproductions make it particularly valuable. they are accompanied by a long, detailed, and careful study of the marriage, generously supported by useful information in the notes. the study often seems to be designed to correct, not very effectively in my view, the arguments about dates of composition, etching, and printing in joseph viscomi, blake and the idea of the book (1993). commercial engravings there are ambitious if uncertainly successful essays here on the costs of hayley’s designs to a series of ballads (1802) and the hypothetical costs of colored copies of young’s night thoughts (1797). catalogues and bibliographies the most remarkable new catalogues were john windle’s gorgeous omnium gatherum (2011) and pictorial blake (2011), the latter in particular with an impressive number of single prints from blake’s commercial book engravings. criticism, biography, and scholarship the most prolific performer in 2011 has been paul miner, who published twenty essays in the year, mostly about allusions in blake’s works. his first publication on blake of which i have record was fifty-four years ago, in 1958, and between then and 2010 he published at least twenty-six more essays on blake. this prodigious fecundity is the more remarkable because he has not had the leisure and resources of an academic, and his hometown of ponca city, oklahoma, is not known for its library riches. one of the most remarkable blake publications of 2011 was the special issue of the university of toronto quarterly (fall 2011), edited by karen mulhallen. this was phase five of the william blake project. the previous phases were (1) blake in our time: essays in honour of g. e. bentley jr, edited by mulhallen (2010); (2) the symposium blake in our time: a symposium celebrating the future of blake studies and the legacy of g. e. bentley jr (2010), orchestrated by mulhallen; (3) the symposium exhibition (2010); and (4) the catalogue of it called remember me! blake in our time: a keepsake book in celebration of an exhibition and symposium on the life and art of william blake (1757-1827) (2010). this is a very impressive panoply of scholarship and a wonderful credit to mulhallen. biography some of the best and most durable work today is being done on blake’s biographical context. an example of this is dennis m. read, r. h. cromek, engraver, editor, and entrepreneur (2011). the factual part of the book, derived largely from six of his previously published essays, provides a sympathetic and reliable portrait of cromek as a traveling salesman. read’s benevolent conclusions as to cromek’s amiability and reliability are a good deal more generous than those of most students of blake will be, even after they have read and admired the book. angus whitehead, “‘i write in south molton street, what i both see and hear’: reconstructing william and catherine blake’s residence and studio at 17 south molton street, oxford street,” british art journal (2010), is original, richly detailed, and valuable. his “‘humble but respectable’: recovering the neighbourhood surrounding william and catherine blake’s last residence, no. 3 fountain court, strand, c. 1820-27,” university of toronto quarterly (2011), has copious information about blake’s neighbors, particularly about periods of residence in fountain court, professions, and ages, whilst his extraordinarily detailed essay “‘an excellent saleswoman’: the last years of catherine blake,” blake (2011-12), provides crucial new evidence on where catherine lived and when, and about frederick tatham and his young wife. mary lynn johnson, “‘catalogue of some of blake’s pictures at “the salterns”’: captain butts as exhibitor, litigator, and co-heir (with his sister blanche),” university of toronto quarterly (2011), provides a great deal of information about the blake heritage of the butts family about 1850-1905. engravings minute portions of blake’s career as an engraver are dealt with in several new works. wayne c. ripley, “‘in great forwardness’?: 1798 advertisements for volume two of william blake’s night thoughts,” notes and queries (2011), gives valuable new details about blake’s most ambitious engraving commission. mark crosby, “blake and the banknote crises of 1797, 1800, and 1818,” university of toronto quarterly (2011), is concerned with the context of blake’s support of alexander tilloch’s effort to produce forgery-proof bank notes. g. e. bentley, jr., “remember me! customs and costumes of blake’s gift book,” university of toronto quarterly (2011), deals with the variety of binding decorations in remember me! and suggests a reason for the modesty of its sales. bibliography a considerable addition to the record in english of works on blake in japan is provided by the admirable and apparently exhaustive essay by hikari sato, “meiji taisho kino william blake shoshi gakusha tachi—yanagi muneyoshi, jugaku bunsho, sangu makoto: william blake bibliographers in japan in the 1910s and the 1920s—yanagi muneyoshi, jugaku bunsho, and sangu makoto,” choiki bunka kagaku kiyo: interdisciplinary cultural studies (2011). theology christopher rowland, blake and the bible (2011), is a careful and learned account of blake in a theological context. interpretation susanne m. sklar, blake’s jerusalem as visionary theatre: entering the divine body (2011), argues that “blake’s tantalizing words become comprehensible when they are heard” (147). the thesis is argued in a different context in her “‘in the mouth of a true orator’ (jerusalem’s operating instructions),” university of toronto quarterly (2011). * * * * * * * * * the annual checklist of scholarship and discoveries concerning william blake and his circle records publications and discoveries for the current year (say, 2011) and those for previous years which are not recorded in blake books, blake books supplement, and “william blake and his circle.” installments of “william blake and his circle” are continuations of blake books and blake books supplement, with similar principles and conventions. i have made no systematic attempt to record audio books and magazines, blogs, broadcasts on radio and television, calendars, cd-roms, chinaware, coffee mugs, comic books, computer printouts (unpublished), conferences, electronic editions of works by blake,for example, william blake: the complete works, which seems to include merely a biography (he was born at “28a broad street”) and 180 reproductions in color. e-mails, festivals and lecture series, furniture, jewelry, lectures on audiocassettes, lipstick, manuscripts, microforms, mosaics, movies, murals, music, notebooks (blank), novels merely tangentially about blake,for instance, §severin rossetti, the marriage of heaven and hell (kindle edition, 2010). pageants, performances, pillows, playing cards, podcasts, poems about blake,such as §eleanor cooke, “mr. blake and the baglady,” the return (london: salt, 2010). portraits, postcards, posters and pictures, recorded readings and singings, refrigerator magnets, stained-glass windows, stamps (postage and rubber), stickers, sweatshirts, t-shirts, tattoos, tiles, typescripts (unpublished), video recordings, and web sites. i take blake books and blake books supplement, faute de mieux, to be the standard bibliographical books on blake,except for the states of the prints for blake’s commercial book engravings, where the standard authority is robert n. essick, william blake’s commercial book illustrations (oxford: clarendon press, 1991). significant further details, especially about collations, are given in roger r. easson and essick, william blake book illustrator: a bibliography and catalogue of the commercial engravings, vol. 1: plates designed and engraved by blake (normal: american blake foundation, 1972); vol. 2: plates designed or engraved by blake 1774-1796 (memphis: american blake foundation, 1979); vol. 3 never appeared. the standard authority for blake prints issued separately is essick, the separate plates of william blake: a catalogue (princeton: princeton university press, 1983). and have noted significant differences from them. the organization of division i of the checklist is as in blake books. in part vi: criticism, biography, and scholarly studies, collections of essays on blake are listed under the names of the editors, and issues of periodicals devoted extensively to him are listed under the titles. reviews, listed here under the book reviewed, are only for works which are chiefly about blake, not for those with only, say, a chapter on blake. note that blake books and blake books supplement normally do not include reviews. division ii: blake’s circle is organized by individual (say, william hayley or john flaxman), with works by and about blake’s friends and patrons, living individuals with whom he had significant direct and demonstrable contact. it does not include important contemporaries with whom blake’s contact was negligible or nonexistent, such as john constable and william wordsworth and edmund burke. there is nothing in blake books and blake books supplement corresponding to division ii. research for this checklist was carried out particularly in the libraries of the university of toronto and victoria university in the university of toronto, as well as with the electronic resources of copac, google books, google scholar, and worldcat. works published in japan were found in cinii (national institute of informatics scholarly and academic information navigator), the national diet library online catalogue, komaba library and the general library of the university of tokyo, and the national diet library. for publications in china, works were found in the national library of china (beijing) and the databases of complete texts for periodicals in china, vip chinese periodicals in science and technology, and wan fang data (digitized periodicals). these chinese online databases are very difficult of access. i should be most grateful to anyone who can help me to better information about the unseen (§) items reported here, and i undertake to thank them prettily in person and in print. i am grateful for many kinds of favors to ashgate publishing, tanja bakić (for works in montenegrin and croatian),her volumes of poetry, *bolesna ruža [the sick rose] (podgorica: nova knjiga, 2009) and svilene cipelice [silken shoes] (podgorica: nova knjiga, 2011), are inspired by blake. sarah bentley, professor robert brandeis, professor robert n. essick (especially for an early sight of his “blake in the marketplace, 2011”), stephen ferguson (princeton curator of rare books), harvard university press, sarah jones (for extraordinarily meticulous copyediting), professor alan kahan, john koster, shelley langdale (curator at the philadelphia museum of art, for information about songs [o] pls. 28, 52), stephen massil, dr. jeff mertz, paul miner (for many offprints), professor morton paley, mary silverstein, tom simpson (rare book cataloguer, e. j. pratt library, victoria university in the university of toronto, for bringing many publications about blake to my attention), university of iowa press, joseph viscomi (especially for telling me of the newly recorded prints from songs [o]), john windle, professor duncan wu, and yale university press. symbols * works prefixed by an asterisk include one or more illustrations by blake or depicting him. if there are more than 19 illustrations, the number is specified. if the illustrations include all those for a work by blake, say thel or his illustrations to l’ allegro, the work is identified. § works preceded by a section mark are reported on second-hand authority. abbreviations bb g. e. bentley, jr., blake books (1977) bbs g. e. bentley, jr., blake books supplement (1995) blake blake/an illustrated quarterly br(2) g. e. bentley, jr., blake records, 2nd ed. (2004) butlin martin butlin, the paintings and drawings of william blake (1981) isbn international standard book number proquest proquest dissertations and theses largely replaces dai for north american phds division i: william blake part i: blake’s writings section a: original editions, facsimiles, reprints, and translations table of stabholes addenda three holes 4.4, 3.0 poetical sketches (y)   descriptive catalogue (f) (bb p. 138) table of collections addenda essick, robert n. type-printed work: poetical sketches (y) larkhall fine art illuminated work: for children pl. 15 philadelphia museum of art illuminated work: songs (o) pls. 28, 52 table of watermarks addenda 1802 hayley, designs to a series of ballads (1802)“1802” is also the watermark in the paper for blake’s list of apostles and his letter of 14 oct. 1807. * * * * * * * * * america (1793) a drawing (c. 1793)butlin #226, acquired in 2011 by robert n. essick (see illus. 1 in his “blake in the marketplace, 2011,” blake 45.4 [spring 2012]: 111-12). has sketches related to america pl. 2 (running woman [top right]), pl. 5 (man in chains [top middle], running woman [bottom left]), pl. 6 (arm with clenched fist), and pl. 8 (bent leg). “blake’s chaucer: an original engraving” (1810) date: it was in circulation by 20 june 1810 when the publisher robert bowyer sent to earl spencer “a prospectus” of an “engraving in the line manner ... a very fine etching” by blake.br(2) 300. copy d history: it was sent 20 june 1810 by robert bowyer to earl spencer; untraced. the book of thel (1789) copies d and g they were reproduced in the william blake archive in 2011. editions *the book of thel, copy d. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2011. *the book of thel, copy g. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2011. for children: the gates of paradise (1793) newly recorded impression plate 15 binding: loose, inscribed “13” at the lower left, second state. history: offered privately by larkhall fine art in dec. 2011 to robert n. essick, the source of my information about it. no other loose print from for children is known, and no copy of for children is missing a plate. letters newly recorded blake repeatedly referred to money received or parcels sent (e.g., with proofs or books), and these were probably accompanied by letters, but they are not included here unless a letter is mentioned. all are untraced; dates in italics indicate that the letter is written to blake. 1799 22? aug. from dr. john trusler between 16 and 23 aug. 1799, dr. trusler sent blake “a letter full of criticisms” of blake’s art which is quoted and paraphrased in blake’s letters of 23 and 26 aug. 1800 12 sept. to william hayley? in his letter of 12 sept. 1800, blake asked flaxman, “be so kind as to read & then seal the inclosed & send it on its much beloved mission.” perhaps the intended recipient was hayley. 1802 jan. from thomas butts in his letter to butts of 10 jan. 1802, blake referred to and partly paraphrased “your very kind & affectionate letter.” 1802 nov. from james blake blake wrote on 22 nov. 1802, “my brother tells me ...,” presumably in a letter. 1802 22 nov. to james blake in his letter to butts of 22 nov. 1802 blake wrote, “i have taken the liberty to trouble you with a letter to my brother which you will be so kind as to send or give him.” 1803 jan. from james blake “your letter mentioning mr butts’s account of my ague” is mentioned in blake’s letter to his brother james of 30 jan. 1803. 1803 late april from james blake in his letter to butts of 25 april 1803, blake referred to “a pressing letter from my brother.” 1803 late april from thomas butts blake referred in his letter to butts of 25 april 1803 to “your kind & heartening letter.” 1803 16 aug. to james blake in his letter of 16 aug. 1803, blake asked butts “to cause the enclosd letter to be deliverd to my brother.” 1803 dec. from william hayley “your letter has never arrived to me” (letter to hayley, 13 dec. 1803). 1804 jan. to samuel rose for “the writing” on “your noble present to mr rose,” “i was fortunate in doing it myself & hit it off excellently” (letter to hayley, 27 jan. 1804). 1804 march from william hayley in his letter of 16 march 1804 blake referred to “your kind letter.” 1804 march to prince hoare “i left it [your elegant & heart lifting compliment] with a short note” to hoare (blake to hayley, 16 march 1804). 1804 march from prince hoare “i now send you his [hoare’s] note to me” (blake to hayley, 21 march 1804). 1804 march from william hayley “i did not recieve your letter till monday” (blake to hayley, 31 march 1804). 1804 2 april to mr. dally “i write to him [dally] by this post to inquire about it [the £15 he had sent about 19 march]” (blake to hayley, 2 april 1804). 1804 late may from william hayley blake wrote to hayley on 28 may 1804, “i thank you heartily for your kind offer of reading, &c.” 1804? from joseph johnson “mr. johnson has, at times, written such letters to me as would have called for the sceptre of agamemnon rather than the tongue of ulysses” (blake’s letter to hayley of 28 may 1804). the dates of johnson’s letters could be any time from 1779 to may 1804. 1804 21? oct. from william hayley “i received your kind letter” and “i write immediately” (blake to hayley, 23 oct. 1804). 1804 late oct.? from william hayley blake thanked hayley in his letter of 4 dec. 1804 for “your kind proposal in your last letter,” apparently about hayley’s edward i. 1805 june from richard phillips blake wrote in his letter to hayley of 4 june 1805 that phillips “sent to me the last sheet [of hayley’s ballads [1805]) ... desiring that i would forward it to mr. seagrave. but i have inclosed it to you.” 1807 may to r. h. cromek cromek’s letter to blake of may 1807 referred to “your letter” and paraphrased it. 1818 june from dawson turner in his letter to dawson turner of 9 june 1818, blake referred to “the different works you have done me the honour to enquire after” with “very polite approbation of my works.” 1827 16 jan. from john linnell in his letter of 27 jan. 1827, blake apologized to linnell for not having acknowledged the receipt of “your letter” with the “five pounds from you on 16 jany 1827.” 1827 5 march from george cumberland in his diary for 5 march 1827, cumberland noted that he had “sent ... lett[er] to blake,” and blake paraphrased it in his letter of 15 march 1827. 1808 18 january (a) history: offered from the stock of roy davids at bonhams (london), 29 march 2011 (see 2011 in part iv). the marriage of heaven and hell (?1790) table copy watermark e __ [a] a. geoffrey keynes and edwin wolf 2nd, william blake’s illuminated books: a census (new york: grolier club, 1953), report a watermark of “e&p” (as in copy f) on 3 leaves, but this was not visible to me (bb p. 286) or to michael phillips (the marriage of heaven and hell [oxford: bodleian library, 2011] 161). editions *the marriage of heaven and hell. edited with an introduction and commentary by michael phillips. oxford: bodleian library, 2011 [distributed in north america by university of chicago press]. 4o, ix, 193 pp. and 52 color reproductions of copies b, k, and m and of pl. 14 in copies a, c-i and pls. 15, 14, 12-13 in copy g, plus 117 miscellaneous reproductions; isbn: 9781851243419. “acknowledgements” (vii-viii), “introduction” (1-47) and its notes (47-58), “transcript” of text of copy b (59-86), color reproductions, “commentary”it includes the loose pulls of pls. 3-4 (fitzwilliam) but not those of pls. 5-6, 11 (2 prints), 14 (2), 16, 20 in bb et seq. (87-154), “checklist of copies” (155-63), and “bibliography” (164-73), but no index. this is a long-announced, detailed, and careful study of the marriage. much of it aims, often silently and rather ineffectively, to correct joseph viscomi, blake and the idea of the book (1993). the detailed arguments about dates of composition, etching, and printing are not persuasive. §*the marriage of heaven and hell. ed. jason whittaker. revised edition. n.p.: “published by rintrah books,” 2011. kindle edition. zoamorphosis essential introductions. i do not know the meaning of “revised edition” here. the work is apparently available only electronically. “pickering [ballads] manuscript” (?after 1807) paper: the pickering manuscript p. 16 has a printed catchword (“with”) from hayley’s designs to a series of ballads (1802) p. 20 (e3v) <bb p. 341n2>. therefore the 22 pages of the pickering manuscript probably came from designs ballad 1, pp. 5-10 (b2r-b4v) and ballad 2, pp. 11-26 (d1r-e4v).the paper in the pickering manuscript is uniform, but it is only an hypothesis that it all comes from hayley’s designs to a series of ballads and that the leaves are in the same order as in the designs. the paper comes from the inner margins of conjugate unfolded sheets with the text cut away. the designs paper sometimes shows a watermark of “1802.” paper size: 12.5 x 18.4 cm. <bb p. 342>. since the leaves from hayley’s designs are 23.5 x 29.4 cm., therefore 11 cm. were trimmed from each dimension of the designs leaves to make the pickering manuscript leaves. the outer margins were trimmed to remove irrelevant printed text, but why were 11 cm. cut off the tops or bottoms? binding: the leaves have stabholes in the inner margins 3.9 cm. from the top and 4.5, 4.6 cm. apart <bb p. 342>. if they had been stabbed when they were part of designs to a series of ballads, one might expect to find two sets of stabholes, the first from when they were part of hayley’s designs and the second from when they became part of the pickering manuscript. the absence of duplicate stabholes suggests that the designs leaves were loose when they were converted to the pickering manuscript. edition the pickering manuscript. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2011. poetical sketches (1783) collation: 8o in 4s (half-sheet imposition).robert n. essick, “blake in the marketplace, 2011,” blake 45.4 (spring 2012): 115n5, properly corrects bb p. 343: “4o (half sheet imposition).” the chain lines run vertically, as in an octavo in half sheets, not horizontally, as in a quarto in half sheets. copy k history: perhaps this is the copy sold in the catalogue of the valuable library of the late william holgate (see 1846 in part iv).it could also be copies e, l-m, o-q, v-y. newly recorded copy copy y for the binding, history, manuscript additions on the title page (by john hawkins), and corrections to the text (by blake), see the entry on poetical sketches and illus. 4 and 5 in robert n. essick, “blake in the marketplace, 2011,” blake 45.4 (spring 2012): 115-19. facsimile pages <see bb p. 345, blake (2011)> note that the facsimile type of c. 1880 uses the archaic “ſ” for “s” and ligatures for “ct,” “fl,” “ſh,” “ſi,” “ſk,” “ſl,” “ſſ,” and “ſt,” as in the original. edition poetical sketches. decorations designed and cut on the wood by charles ricketts. 1899. <bb #131> §sotheran’s “private press” catalogue (2011), lot 330, offers 1 of 8 copies printed on and bound in vellum. songs of innocence (1789) copy b binding: the watermark on the front flyleaf is “beilby | & | knotts | 1825”, a birmingham firm, not “beilk | & | knot | 1825” as in bb p. 404, as i am told by stephen massil. copy e history: the “c. newman born july 21st 1804,” as recorded on the leather label, is charles newman, son of joseph and ann newman, who was born on 21 july and baptized at st. martin-in-the-fields on 12 aug. 1804, and charles r. robson, who acquired innocence (e) “at leicester in or about the year 1899” and sold it at sotheby’s, 15 dec. 1926, is probably charles raynor robson (1869-1947), schoolmaster of leicester and cricketer, as i am told by stephen massil. copy q history: exhibited and reproduced in color in the syracuse university exhibition and catalogue, 2003 (see 2003 in part iv). edition songs of innocence. decorated by charles robinson and mary h. robinson. [1912]. <bb #156> b. §mineola: dover publications, 2011. vii, 66 pp.; isbn: 9780486476049. songs of innocence and of experience (1794) table copy plates leaves watermark blake nos. leaf size in cm. printing color o philadelphia museum of art 28, [a] 52 2 j wha[tman] 18[ ] (pl. 28) j w[hatman] (pl. 52) __ 18.8 x 24.1 (pl. 28) 11.3 x 14.8 (pl. 52) black (pl. 28) brownish-red (pl. 52) a. pl. 28, like 5 other copies, has the platemaker’s mark of “jones no. 4[7?] | shoe lane london”. copy e it was reproduced in the william blake archive in 2011. newly recorded prints copy o pls. 28 (frontispiece to experience) and 52 (“to tirzah”) history: pls. 28 and 52, with notes about the charles eliot norton collection, were acquired by carl zigrosserzigrosser was director of the weyhe gallery until 1940, when he became curator of prints at the philadelphia museum of art. several of the prints in songs (o) came from weyhe. and given by him in 1975 to the philadelphia museum of art.they were not in the catalogue when i inquired in 1962, 1977, and 1980. the museum identification codes for pls. 28, 52 are 1975-226-19 [and 18]. their rediscovery was made by joseph viscomi, who told me of them. most of my information comes from the generosity of shelley langdale of the museum. the traced prints of songs (o) in 2011 are pls. 13, 20-21, 24, 28, 36, 38-39, 46, 49, 52-53. editions *canti dell’innocenza e dell’esperienza: che mostrano i due contrari stati dell’anima umana. trans. roberto rossi testa. 1997, 2001. <blake 2007> c. milan: feltrinelli, 2009. §*songs of innocence and of experience. trans. various. introductions by richard holmes and gregory kruzhkov, commentary by sasha dugdale. [moscow]: british council and all-russia state library for foreign literature, 2011. all the translations are by new young poets. the reproductions are in color. apparently it was published in conjunction with the pushkin museum exhibition (see 2011 in part iv). *songs of innocence and of experience. ed. richard willmott. 1990. <bbs p. 136> b. §2011. viii, 200 pp.; isbn: 9780198310785. the 2011 edition is said to be “revised.” *songs of innocence and of experience, copy e. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2011. “upcott’s autograph album” (16 jan. 1826) history: listed under “british artists” in original letters, manuscripts, and state papers. collected by william upcott, islington (privately printed, 1836) 46. works lostomitting drawings, prints without text by blake, and copperplates and woodcuts. account (1800) blake wrote to thomas butts on 22 sept. 1800, “my sister will ... bring with her your account,” but no such account is known. account (1802) on 22 nov. 1802 blake wrote to butts, “i have inclosed the account of money recievd & work done,” but no such account is known. account book (1804) blake referred in his letter to william hayley of 28 dec. 1804 to “my account book in which i have regularly written down every sum i have recievd from you,”joseph viscomi, blake and the idea of the book (1993) 250, remarks: “blake apparently kept no ledger detailing the cost of supplies.” but no such account book is now known. canterbury pilgrims subscription (1806) according to gilchrist, life of william blake, “pictor ignotus” (1863) 1: 204, “a subscription paper for an engraving of the canterbury pilgrims had been circulated by blake’s friends ... in 1806, two years before publication of the grave [1808].” no other reference to this “subscription paper” is known. it must have been compiled either by blake or from his information. the subscription paper cannot be “blake’s chaucer: the canterbury pilgrims” (“may 15th 1809”) or “blake’s chaucer: an original engraving” (n.d., watermark 1810),copies of each belonged to gilchrist’s son. which silently quote from the descriptive catalogue (1809). the date is important, for it seems to demonstrate that blake’s plan to engrave the canterbury pilgrims decisively preceded that of his rival stothard. ticket of admission to blake’s exhibition of 1809-10 the only evidence for the existence of the ticket is in the postscript to blake’s letter of may 1809 to ozias humphry: “i inclose a ticket of admission if you should honour my exhibition with a visit.” section b: collections and selections blake’s works reprinted in conventional typography before 1863 addenda (1844 [i.e., 1843]) “the chimney sweeper” (innocence) (see “the chimney sweeper,” below). 1860 “introduction to ‘songs of innocence,’” “the lamb,” “the divine image,” “the echoing green,” “on another’s sorrow,” poetry for school and home, from the best authors, ed. thomas shorter (london: t. j. allman, 1860) 1-2, 26, 139, 170-71. * * * * * * * * * §*alle religionen sind eins & es gibt keine naturbedingte religion. ed. with a commentary by christian w. bernhard. vienna: archetyp verlag, 2011. 96 pp.; isbn: 9783902746016. in german. there are color reproductions, some of them enlarged, those of no natural religion from several copies and lacking pl. 1b, with german translations of all religions are one and there is no natural religion. “the book of blake.” poet prophets: blake and wordsworth: the definitive guide to the two greatest visionaries of the romantic age. ed. joseph vogel. lincoln: iuniverse, 2006. xxxv, 556 pp.; isbn: 9780595677030. 2-276. §o casamento do céu e do inferno e outros escritos. trans. alberto marsicano. porto alegre [brazil]: l&pm, 2007. 136 pp. in portuguese. “the chimney sweeper” (innocence). [engraved title page:] the child’s gem 1844. | t.h. carter & co [typeset title page:] the | child’s gem. | a holiday gift. | edited by | mrs. s. colman. | — | boston: | t.h. carter and company. | 118½ washington street. | — | 1844 [copyright date 1843].the copy in victoria university in the university of toronto is inscribed “mary | christmas tree. | 1843” and “mary c. green | by her | affec parents decr 25 1843”. 85-88. a pretty 16mo; an advertisement at the end gives the price as 38¢. blake’s long lines are given as two lines each. on p. 88 is a vignette of a child playing a tambourine. pamela chandler colman published other blake poems in boys’ and girls’ magazine (1843), little keepsake for 1844 (boston, 1843), the child’s gem for 1845 (boston, 1844), boys’ and girls’ library (1844) <bbs pp. 147-48, 151-52, 157>—see raymond h. deck, jr., “an american original: mrs. colman’s illustrated printings of blake’s poems, 1843-44,” blake 11.1 (summer 1977): 4-18. §divine images: the words of william blake. ed. and with an introduction by jude rawlins. [thornhill, ontario]: hampstead house press, 2005. 105 pp. a selection from blake’s poems with a chronology of his life. [“introduction” to innocence], “the tiger,” “the blossom,” “the angel.” nightingale valley: a collection …. ed. giraldus [william allingham]. 1860. <bb #264a> for comments on allingham’s version of “the tyger,” see the entry in robert n. essick, “blake in the marketplace, 2011,” blake 45.4 (spring 2012): 127. §“kristalna odaja [the crystal cabinet].” trans. tanja bakić. vijesti [montenegro] 24 dec. 2011: 2. in montenegrin. §“luda pjesma i druge pjesme [mad song and other poems].” trans. tanja bakić. ars [montenegro] no. 4 (2010): 59-65. in montenegrin. §“poezija [poetry].” trans. tanja bakić. plima plus [montenegro] nos. 53-54 (2006): 101-09. in montenegrin. §the romantic poets: william blake. foreword by philip pullman. ed. nicholas wroe. [?london]: guardian, [2010]. 26 pp. no. 7 in a series of 7. no isbn. pullman, “foreword” (5-7). §“sakupljeni rukopisi [the pickering manuscript].” trans. tanja bakić. ars [montenegro] no. 3 (2011): 80-91. in montenegrin. *songs of innocence and of experience 1794. lessing j. rosenwald collection library of congress archive of the making of a portfolio of eighteen facsimile impressions flying horse editions, 2009. [london: “designed and printed by simon rendall”], 2010. 4o, 36 pp., 3 copies printed.however, the gift inscription by michael phillips in the copy in victoria university in the university of toronto says that this copy is “out of series.” michael phillips, “introduction” (3-8), followed by “checklist of contents” [51 items] (9-15), in order “to record … the flying horse editions facsimile” (2009) (31). it is about the title pages of innocence and experience (songs pls. 3, 29), apparently designed to accompany “three discs [not included here] that provide a photographic record of the contents” (9). “to the muses” (called “the poet complains to the muses of the decline of poetry”). cameos from the antique. ed. mrs. [rose] lawrence. 1849. <blake (2010), under reprints of blake’s works before 1863> blake is named only in the contents. in l. 10, “beneath the bosom of the sea,” lawrence gives “bottom” for blake’s “bosom,” a variant i have not noticed elsewhere. the poem is not in malkin; it seems to have been first printed in conventional typography by h. c. robinson (1811) (br[2] 585). there were earlier editions of cameos in 1831, 1833, and 1834, but i do not know whether they include “to the muses.” william blake archive <http://www.blakearchive.org> in 2011 the archive added 33 watercolor illustrations to the bible, preliminary drawings and illustrations for thornton’s edition of virgil’s pastorals, the book of thel (d, g), songs (e), and the “pickering manuscript,” and republished with extra features 9 series of blake’s milton watercolors. §william blake: écrits prophétiques des dernières années suivis de lettres. trans. pierre leyris. 2000. <blake (2009)§> b. 2nd ed. 2000. domaine romantique. isbn: 9782714307095. part ii: reproductions of drawings and paintings section a: illustrations of individual authors bible in 2011, 33 illustrations to the bible on new testament subjects were reproduced in the william blake archive. blair, robert, the grave (1808) edition *william blake’s watercolour inventions in illustration of the grave by robert blair. ed. martin butlin. 2009. <blake (2010)> review *kelly grovier, “gambols in the graveyard: william blake’s ‘watercolour inventions,’” times literary supplement 17 june 2011: 14-15 (“this lavish edition ought to reignite questions about the proprietary nature of cultural treasures and whether private interest should always be permitted to trump the public good”). virgil, pastorals (1821) in 2011, a selection of blake’s preliminary drawings was reproduced in the william blake archive. young, edward, night thoughts (1797) edition *william blake’s designs for edward young’s night thoughts: a complete edition. ed. with commentary by john e. grant et al. 1980. <bbs p. 177> review morton d. paley, studies in romanticism 21.4 (winter 1982): 674-82. part iii: commercial engravingsfrom 2010 i record pre-1863 references to separately issued prints by blake. section a: illustrations of individual authors allen, charles, a new and improved history of england (1797) new location: national library of ireland. allen, charles, a new and improved roman history (1798) new location: liverpool. bellamy’s picturesque magazine (1793) edition bellamy’s picturesque magazine. gale ecco print editions, 2010. 90 pp.; isbn: 9781170817551. a digitized version. bible illustrations of the book of job (1826, 1874) for an illustration and description of john linnell’s draft of the label for job, now in the essick collection, see illus. 6 in robert n. essick, “blake in the marketplace, 2011,” blake 45.4 (spring 2012): 120-21. for the printed version, much altered, see bb p. 519. all 22 prints are reproduced in john windle, pictorial blake (see 2011 in part iv). diamond bible (1832-34, 1836-37, 1840) (see <blake (2010)>) b. engraved title page: the lettering is the same as in the first version, but the date is altered from 1833 to 1834. typeset title page: like the 1834 typeset title page except for the imprint: london: | allan bell & co. and shepherd & sutton; | and fraser & co. edinburgh. | mdcccxxxvi [1836]. 1834-36 location: victoria university in the university of toronto (with additional title pages for the diamond new testament [engraved, n.d.; typeset, 1836], diamond book of psalms [london: allan bell & co, and simpkin & marshall, 1834], and the psalms of david [engraved, 1836; typeset, 1834]). blair, robert, the grave (1808, 1813 …) 1808 new locations: brooklyn museum, wake forest (gray stiff paper wrappers). 1813: all 13 prints are reproduced in john windle, pictorial blake (see 2011 in part iv). reviews, notices monthly literary advertiser 10 sept. 1807: 7.my references to monthly literary advertiser and bent’s monthly literary advertiser come from newspaper archive, which is so heavily corrupted as to be illegible. bent’s monthly literary advertiser 10 july 1844: 9 (price reduced from 12s. 6d. to 11s.). bent’s monthly literary advertiser 11 dec. 1844: 13. bonnycastle, john, an introduction to mensuration (1782, 1787, 1791, 1794) 1794 new location: colorado. the cabinet of the arts (1799) (addenda to <blake (2006, 2007)>) location: princeton copy 1 [gax 2006-3128n] with 112 prints (as in blake [2007]); copy 2 [ex item 5987716] with 134 prints.it was offered in alex fotheringham, catalogue 78 (march 2011), lot 76 (£650). copy 2 does not have the “f: revolution” plate, so it is present in only three of the eight known copies. size: princeton copy 2 is 23 cm. high. paper: princeton copies 1-2 are on laid and (mostly) wove paper, the latter with fragments of whatman watermark. sources of the prints: [robert riddell’s faux old scottish ballad] the bedesman on nidsyde (s. hooper, 1790), lady’s pocket magazine 4 (harrison & co., 1 aug. 1795); to the booksellers who originally published the prints add s. hooper. cumberland, george, thoughts on outline (1796) new locations: barr smith library (adelaide, australia), british library (2—bb records 1), mcgill, monash, wales (lampeter), westminster libraries. fenning, d., and j. collyer, a new system of geography (1785-86, 1787) 1785-86 new locations: robert n. essick, tasmania (morris miller library). 1787 new location: hennepin county library (minnetonka, minnesota). pl. 1: the date of “june 6.th 1784” in the british library copy of 1785-86 was altered in the essick and tasmania copies of 1785-86 to “july 16.th 1785”. pl. 2: the imprint date of “april 16.th 1787” (as in the 1787 edition) is found in the essick copy of 1785-86. the british library copy (1785-86) is reproduced in eighteenth century collections online. flaxman, john, compositions from … hesiod (1817, 1870) for the designs “in dec. 1970 in the possession of the dealer h. d. lyon” <bb p. 556>, substitute “were sold by maggs in 2011 to an unidentified collection,” according to robert n. essick, “blake in the marketplace, 2011,” blake 45.4 (spring 2012): 130. flaxman, john, the iliad of homer (1805) “the price i receive for engraving flaxman’s [3] outlines of homer [the iliad (1805)] is five guineas each,” according to blake’s letter of 4 may 1804. gay, john, fables (1793) new location: syracuse. hartley, david, observations on man (1791) according to herman andrew pistorius, notes and additions to dr. hartley’s observations on man … translated from the german original … mdcclxxii [1772], 3rd ed. (london: j. johnson, 1801) <bodleian>, “*** a print of the author, engraved by blake, in quarto, may be had of the publisher, price two shillings and six-pence” (iii). hayley, william, ballads (1805) blake wrote to hayley on 22 jan. 1805 that, according to phillips, the publisher of the ballads, “one thousand copies should be the first edition.” for each of the five “highly finishd” plates, blake said he was to have £21, according to his letter of 25 march 1805. hayley, william, designs to a series of ballads (1802) drawings the sketches on the verso of the resurrection of the dead, c. 1780-85 (butlin #79 [verso not recorded]), essick collection (2011), include the head of an eagle for ballad 2, “the eagle,” and the man’s leg for ballad 4, “the dog.” designs paper used for scrap for “pp. 19-20 &c. used for ‘the ballads [pickering] ms’ (morgan)” <bb p. 574>, read “pp. 5-26 (b2r-e4v) used for ‘the pickering [ballads] ms’ (morgan)” (see “pickering [ballads] manuscript” in part ia). hayley’s designs to a series of ballads were from the first a commercial undertaking. hayley said that they were intended “for the emolument of mr blake the artist,”hayley’s autobiography, quoted in br(2) 123. and he actively engaged his friends to become ballad mongers. the work was published at blake’s expense and for his benefit. debits and credits the chief cash costs were for (1) copperplates for the 6 large and 8 small engravings, (2) paper for text (watermarked “1802”) including separate printed blue covers and large prints, and (3) paper and printing the 10¼ sheets of text and the covers by joseph seagrave in chichester (the blakes printed the engravings in felpham). there was no cost for advertising (except in review copies), and no payment to the author, the designer, the engraver, and the plate printers, except in possible profit from sales. there was no profit. the 14 copperplates must have weighed 2,464.6 g (5½ pounds) and cost £3.13.1½.g. e. bentley, jr., “blake’s heavy metal: the history, weight, uses, cost, and makers of his copper plates,” university of toronto quarterly 76.2 (spring 2007): 740. the text consisted of 37 quarto leaves, with prints on pp. iv, 1, 9, 11, 26, 27, 39, 41: title page 1 leaf =2½ sheets preface (pp. i-iv) 2 leaves ballad 1: the elephant (pp. 1-10) 5 leaves blue paper covers 2 leaves       ballad 2: the eagle (pp. 11-26) 8 leaves =2½ sheets blue paper covers 2 leaves       ballad 3: the lion (pp. 27-40) 7 leaves =2¼ sheets blue paper covers 2 leaves       ballad 4: the dog (pp. 41-52) 6 leaves =2 sheets blue paper covers 2 leaves total   9¼ sheets in addition, there are 6 leaves (1½ quarto sheets) with full-page prints for preliminaries (1 print) and ballad 1 (1), ballad 2 (1), ballad 3 (1), and ballad 4 (2). each complete set of the designs, all four parts, used 43 leaves, 10¾ quarto sheets. the text must have been printed by seagrave in four print runs, one in late may 1802 for the preliminaries and ballad 1, one in late june for ballad 2, one in late july for ballad 3, and one in early september for ballad 4. the engravings, however, were only printed as they were called for. for paper for the full-page prints in the designs, “blake has ... [arranged] for his ballads to deal with his own stationer in london, & send it down as he thought proper,” according to hayley’s letter of 6 july 1802. we do not know how many copies of the designs were printed or what seagrave’s charges were for printing and paper, but we may make educated estimates based on blake’s statement in his letter of 28 dec. 1804 that he paid seagrave “30 pounds ... in part of his account”hayley wrote on 3 apr. 1803 that blake “has paid a bill of 30£ for paper” [and printing] for the designs. and on contemporary printing prices. on 10 oct. 1800 thomas bensley estimated that the cost of paper, printing, and hot-pressing 1,000 quarto copies of thomson’s seasons (5 sheets each) for f. j. du roveray would be £15.15.0 per sheet (£78.15 in all).quoted from the manuscript in the huntington library; see g. e. bentley, jr., “f. j. du roveray, illustrated-book publisher 1798-1806: the amateur and the trade,” bibliographical society of australia and new zealand bulletin 12 (1988): 70. perhaps blake’s provincial printer seagrave charged him £15 for paper and printing per thousand quarto sheets. it is a mere informed guess that the print run for ballad 1 was 250 copies and that this was continued for ballad 2 when the sales for ballad 1 at first seemed promising. when the sales for ballad 2 proved disastrous, blake must have reduced his print order, perhaps to 150 copies, for ballads 3-4. the expenses of printing and paper might have been as follows: cost of 250 copies of ballads 1-2   printing 1250 sheets (250 x 5 sheets) at £15 per 1,000 sheets [a] £18.15.0 187.5 sheets for 250 copies of 3 full-page quarto prints (quarter sheets) at £5 per ream of 500 sheets £1.17.3 total £20. 2.3     cost of 150 copies of ballads 3-4   printing 637.5 sheets (150 x 4¼ sheets) at £15 per 1,000 sheets £9.11.3 112.5 sheets for 150 copies of 3 full-page quarto prints (quarter sheets) at £5 per ream of 500 sheets £1. 2.6 total £10.13.9 total £30.16.0 a. the medium plate paper for flaxman’s iliad (1805) cost £4.8.0 per ream in 1805 and £5 in 1808 (bb pp. 561-62). the cheap blue paper for the covers (400 sheets for ballads 1-2, 200 sheets for ballads 3-4) would have cost a good deal less than the fine white paper. presumably seagrave printed copies of each ballad in chichester and sent them to blake in felpham; blake and his wife then printed engravings on text plates plus the full-page plates as the need arose, not all at once. hayley wrote to lady hesketh on 10 june 1802, “he & his excellent wife (a true helpmate!) pass the plates thro’ a rolling press in their own cottage together; & of course it is a work of some time to collect a number of impressions.”hayley repeats this in his letter to r. h. evans on 3 april 1803: “he and his good industrious wife together take all the impressions from the various engravings in their own domestic press.” when there proved to be demand for only a few score copies, blake was left with many copies of the printed text which were of no commercial value. he cannily kept these printed sheets, even taking them back to london with him in 1803, at considerable trouble, and he made drawings on them for the rest of his life, including designs for blair’s grave (1805), malkin’s memoirs (1806), job and dante (c. 1824).bb pp. 574-75 and bbs pp. 221-22 record 47 leaves from the designs used as scrap paper (see also the “pickering manuscript” in part ia), but none for finished engravings. (the “riddle manuscript” is on the verso of a proof-before-letters from the designs.) there are 9 leaves used as scrap from part 1, 24 from part 2, 8 from part 3, and 6 from part 4, which might suggest that part 2 provided most unvendible copies. a disproportionate number of scraps are on leaves which would have had prints on them: pp. 9 (5), 11 (1), 26 (6), 27 (1), 41 (2). no print from the designs is known to have been reused. sales the first reports of sales were encouraging. on 29 june 1802 hayley wrote that ballad 1 was “marching triumphantly on the road of prosperity,” and as late as 30 jan. 1803 blake wrote to his brother: “these ballads are likely to be profitable for we have sold all that we have had time to print. evans the bookseller in pallmall says they go off very well.” however, hayley told r. h. evans on 3 april 1803: “he has paid a bill of 30£ for paper & the copies he has disposed of in the country have not produced more than half that sum£15 would have paid for 120 individual ballads at 2s. 6d. each. however, we know that lady hesketh paid £5.5.0 for 10 copies and flaxman £1.17.6 for 4, leaving only £7.17.6 (£15 £7.2.6) or 63 copies. to reimburse him.” the £30 for seagrave was apparently partly advanced by hayley, for on 28 dec. 1804 blake thanked him for “the twelve guineas which you lent me when i made up 30 pounds to pay our worthy seagrave in part of his account.” blake wrote on 26 oct. 1803, “mr. evans ... gives small hopes of our ballads; he says he has sold but fifteen numbers at the most, and that going on would be a certain loss of almost all the expenses,” and on 22 jan. 1805 he wrote that the london bookseller phillips advised that “we must consider all that has been printed as lost, and begin anew.” the designs to a series of ballads were printed by j. seagrave in chichester and sold by him and p. humphry and r. h. evans in london “for w. blake, felpham.” we do not know how many copies seagrave sold—perhaps he only provided the copy for the reviewer in the sussex chronicle & chichester advertiser (2 june 1802), which he printed—but we have good information about how many were sold by evans in london (15, worth £1.17.6)the sales by evans included ballads 1-3 for anna seward and 3-4 for lady hesketh and some of her friends; evans would have deducted his commission. we have no information about sales by humphry. and how many were disposed of by friends of blake and hayley (120, worth £15),we can account for sales of 62 copies of ballad 1, 19 of ballad 2, 10 of ballad 3, and 12 of ballad 4 = 103 in all. only 53 numbers have been traced today. mostly in the country. the known distribution of the designs #1 anon., reviewer for the sussex chronicle & chichester advertiser (2 june 1802): 172. #1 charlotte collins, 9 copies (2 of which were to replace damaged copies), 1 of which went to mr. spilsbury (28 june 1802). #1 john flaxman’s 5 copies went to mr. [john] hawkins (2), mr. [william] long, mr. [samuel] rogers; flaxman paid “for the whole of my copy” [i.e., £1.17.6 for 15 numbers at 2s. 6d. each] (27 june 1802). #1 samuel greatheed received 6, but sold none (mr. courteney was sent a copy but it was “returned unpurchased”) (1 sept. 1802); he referred to them in his review of hayley’s ballads in the eclectic review (1 dec. 1805). #1 harriet, lady hesketh, was sent “a bundle of ballads” from hayley, which she disposed of to 3 bath libraries, lord [william] and lady [mary] harcourt, richard hurd, dr. randolph (2 copies, 1 to show to lord spencer), and “my sistr [theodora],” and she kept one; she paid £5.5.0 for them all (br[2] 129, 132, 135-36, 146), though by her own figures she only owed £1.5.0; lady hesketh received from blake “two packets of ballads” [5 in each] (15 oct. 1802). #1 johnny johnson was sent 20 copies and disposed of “several” (6 june, 7 july 1802). #1 e. g. marsh (“i … hope to contribute my little assistance to the payment” (20 june 1802). #1 mrs. throckmorton of bath was sent it by conder, bookseller of bucklesbury, but we don’t know if she bought it (3 sept. 1802). #1-2 anon., reviewer for the european magazine (aug. 1802): 125-26. #1-2 isaac reed (br[2] 856n84), perhaps from nancy flaxman, who gave him poetical sketches (f) in 1784. #1-3 anon., reviewer for the poetical register (1803): 410 (br[2] 143fn). #1-3 offered in r. h. evans’s catalogue (1804), lot 1001, no price (br[2] 143fn). #1-3 william hayley (br[2] 153). #1-3 anna seward, from the booksellers (3 march 1803). #1-4 thomas butts, for mr. [john] birch. in his letter to butts of 25 april 1803, blake says “i now send the 4 numbers for mr birch,” and in the 1806 account with butts is also a record of 3 numbers to mr. birch (7s. 6d.). blake also sent “some ballads” with his letter of 22 nov. 1802, perhaps the “4 nos of hayleys ballads” in his receipt of 3 march 1806 (br[2] 764). #1-4 r. h. evans, the book’s london publisher, sold 15 numbers “at the most” (blake’s letter of 26 oct. 1803). [a] #1-4 william hayley (br[2] 153). #1-4 “james parker,” copy in the library of congress. #1-4? charlotte smith’s daughter, from hayley. [b] #2 lady hesketh received 5 (#3-4 were to come from her bath bookseller), “as well as those i take in for my sistr [theodora] and some other friends,” sent blake £5.5.0 (28 june, 15 oct. 1802). #2 charlotte collins was ready to take 7 (28 june 1802). #3 samuel greatheed expected to receive copies (3 sept. 1802). #3 johnny johnson, some to be sent by hayley (6 aug. 1802). #4 mrs. flaxman, 5 copies sent via james blake (blake’s letter of 30 jan. 1803). #4 james blake, 5 copies, 2 of them for mrs. [penelope carleton] chetwynd (blake’s letter of 30 jan. 1803) and apparently 3 to butts (“3 hayleys ballads + brother,” account with butts of 3 march 1806). various friends took 22 copies. [c] a. the numbers sold by evans must have included all the copies sold through the booksellers: 5 copies each (10 in all) of #3-4 for lady hesketh, “my sistr and some other friends” (br[2] 146) (probably lord and lady harcourt, richard hurd, and dr. randolph, who took #1 through her), 1 set of #1-3 (3 in all) for anna seward, and 1 copy of #1 through conder’s in bucklesbury. this means that evans may have sold only 1 copy or none through the 3 bath libraries which displayed copies or from the “long list of cowpers” whom lady hesketh had directed to subscribe (br [2] 135). the list of sales by evans does not include the free review copies for the european magazine (#1-2), poetical register (#1-3), or the copy still unsold in his 1804 catalogue. b. letter of 16 dec. 1802 in the collected letters of charlotte smith, ed. judith phillips stanton (bloomington: indiana university press, 2003) 503: hayley’s “publication about animals.” c. sales “in the country” (i.e., through friends of hayley and blake) came to about £15, the price of 120 copies (see note above). we can account for sales through friends of 98 copies, suggesting that they sold 22 of which we have no other record. blake’s probable expenses for the designs were therefore for paper and printing (£30.16.0), copper (£3.13.1½), and advertising (15s. for 6 review copies), or £35.4.1½ in all, and his probable receipts (£16.7.6) left him considerably out of pocket. hayley’s generous gesture had been a disaster for blake, not only in losing money but also in wasting his creative genius. hayley, william, an essay on sculpture (1800) advertisement an announcement of its publication appeared in the morning post for 1 may 1800.see mark crosby, “blake and the banknote crises of 1797, 1800, and 1818,” university of toronto quarterly 80.4 (2011): 829. hayley, william, the life of george romney (1809) blake asked £31.10.0 for “finishd” quarto plates and £15.15.0 for the “less finishd,” according to his letter of 22 june 1804. he engraved two finished plates, but one was not used. he referred to his engraving of the self-portrait of romney in many letters (see bb p. 577), but it was not published, and no copy has previously been reported. however, a proof-before-letters of a quarto engraving of romney was offered by §grosvenor prints (london) in april 2011; robert n. essick thinks it might be the one by blake, and mark crosby will publish an article about it in blake. hayley, william, the triumphs of temper (1803) “i am to have 10 guineas each” for “a little work of mr h’s,” hayley’s triumphs of temper, according to blake’s letter of 30 jan. 1803. lavater, john caspar, aphorisms on man (1788, 1789, 1794) the fourth edition (boston: i. thomas & e. t. andrews, d. west, e. larkin jun.; worcester: i. thomas, 1790) <victoria university in the university of toronto> has an anon. frontispiece which copies blake’s frontispiece fairly carefully, not reversed. lavater, john caspar, essays on physiognomy (1789-98, 1792, 1810) the cover for part 5 (essick collection), dated 1788, includes blake’s first print: “7. aged figures, gardening.” monthly magazine (1797) blake’s engraving of “the late m.r wright of derby” is probably “the head i sent you as a specimen” for which “i had twelve” guineas, according to his letter to john trusler on 23 aug. 1799. mora, jose joaquin de, meditaciones poeticas (1826) sales “r. ackermann, book and printseller, and superfine water-colour manufacturer to his majesty [1827]:it says that ackermann has just moved from 101 strand to 96 beaufort buildings [1827], and this copy (with the stamp of bibliothèque de la ville de lyon) is bound with edinburgh review no. 91 (june 1827). meditaciones poeticas, por j. j. de mora, con estampas. 1l. 11s. 6d. half-bound.” “literary advertising list” [1828]it is bound with foreign review no. 1 (jan. 1828). <taylorian>, described as in ackermann’s 1827 list. a catalogue of spanish and portuguese books, on sale by vincent salvá [y pérez], 124 regent street, london. part 2. mdcccxxix [1829], lot 3510, £1.11.6. remember me! (1824, 1825) (see <blake (2011)>) 1824 new location: northwestern. the northwestern copy, not recorded in bentley, “remember me! customs and costumes of blake’s gift book” (see university of toronto quarterly in part vi), is in “publisher’s printed boards with old rebacking in red muslin, custom clamshell box” (according to §bonhams auction, san francisco, 2011, lot 2048). salzmann, c. g., elements of morality (1791, 1792, 1793, 1799, 1805, ?1815) to the entry in blake (2011) reporting robert n. essick’s suggestion about the involvement of blake’s apprentice, thomas owen, i would add that the alterations in 1792 and 1793 (described in essick, william blake’s commercial book illustrations [oxford: clarendon press, 1991] 50-51), which are more like blake’s usual style of engraving, may be by the master correcting the work of his apprentice. some of the 1791 designs are competently engraved, reversed, by h. weston in elements | of | morality, | for the | use of children; | with an | introductory address to parents. | = | translated from the german of the | rev. c.g. salzmann. | = | illustrated with twenty copper-plates, | in two volumes | — | vol. i.the only copy i have seen, in victoria university in the university of toronto, consists of vol. 1 only. in it pls. 3-4, 6-10 (at pp. 48, 72, 182, 188, 218, 226, 234) copy 1791 pls. 2, 6, 16, 18, 20, 22-23, including the inscriptions. | = | philadelphia: | printed by j. hoff & h. kammerer, jun. | m,dcc,xcvi [1796].bb p. 608 says of the edition of philadelphia, 1796, “the plates are different.” essick, william blake’s commercial book illustrations 51, says: “the 1796 philadelphia edition contains twenty of the designs re-engraved by another hand.” salzmann, c. g., gymnastics for youth (1800) new locations: amherst college, birmingham, california (los angeles), cambridge, indiana, kansas, leicester, mcgill, morgan library, oberlin college, paxton house (near berwick-upon-tweed), pennsylvania, providence public library, toronto public library, washington (st. louis), wellcome institute, west sussex record office. seally, john, and israel lyons, a complete geographical dictionary (?1784) ?1784 new location: robert n. essick (vol. 2 only, with all the blake plates). stedman, john gabriel, narrative, of a five years’ expedition … (1796, 1806, 1813) 1796 new locations: huntington (one of the two copies is colored),the colored huntington copy is reproduced in the william blake archive. victoria university in the university of toronto (very professionally colored). vetusta monumenta, vol. 2 (?1789) new locations: robert n. essick, society of antiquaries. virgil, pastorals (1821) larkhall fine art offered robert n. essick “21 impressions of bb #504.8 (blake’s 4th wood engraving) [and] 14 impressions of bb #504.13 (blake’s 9th wood engraving)” with an envelope with a pencil inscription by john linnell, jr.: “pastorals | 5 impressions—of the blocks | as samples for average strength [printing pressure?] | j. linnell.”robert n. essick, “blake in the marketplace, 2011,” blake 45.4 (spring 2012): 125. in 2011, blake’s illustrations (from a copy at the huntington) were reproduced in the william blake archive. wit’s magazine (1784) new location: bodleian (3—bb records 1). wollstonecraft, mary, original stories from real life (1791, 1796) 1791 new locations: british library (2—bb records 1), california (berkeley), melbourne, trinity college (cambridge) (2), turnbull library. 1796 new locations: amsterdam, arkansas, boston public, bryn mawr, california (irvine), michigan state, morgan library, swarthmore college, turnbull library, wisconsin (madison). young, edward, night thoughts (1797) new locations: bibliotheca librorum apud artificem (sydney, australia), brigham young, brown, cincinnati and hamilton county public library, elmira college, eton college, frick collection, hennepin county library (minnetonka, minnesota), leeds, national art library (london), national library of wales, new york university, staatsbibliothek zu berlin, university of the arts (philadelphia), wesleyan (middletown, connecticut), westmont college (santa barbara, california). r. noble, the printer of night thoughts, was a jobbing printer—or perhaps two printers—whose residence was given as 4 great shire lane, temple bar, in 1790, 1794-1800, and who registered press(es) at green arbour court, old bailey, in 1799 and 1800.according to william b. todd, a directory of printers and others in allied trades, london and vicinity 1800-1840 (london: printing historical society, 1972), richard noble, printer, of 4 great shire lane, temple bar, registered his press under the new law on 30 aug. 1799 with joseph burt and again by himself on 17 jan. 1800. robert noble, printer, resident at 4 great shire lane, registered his press with joseph burt at green arbour court, old bailey, on 16 jan. 1800. william calvert, printer, of 4 great shire lane, registered a press with james calvert on 1 july 1801 and operated it in 1801-23. r. noble was not apprenticed in the stationers’ company, according to stationers’ company apprentices 1701-1800, ed. d. f. mckenzie (oxford: oxford bibliographical society, 1978). i have traced his imprint on 55 editions printed in 1790-1804, mostly (36) in 1800-01; there were only 3 in 1796-98, and only one of the noble editions was a folio, young’s night thoughts. r. noble was far from the achievement—and probably from the expense—of the great rivals of richard edwards, thomas bensley with macklin’s great folio bible (1800), and william bulmer with the boydells’ great folio shakespeare (1791-1805) and milton (1793-97). costs of young’s night thoughts 537 watercolors and copyright therefor £21. 0. 0 paper for watercolors £5. 0. 0 paper and printing text of 250 copies [a] £96.18. 0 43 engravings paid for with 30 copies of the printed text £31.10. 0 printing 250 copies each of 43 engravings [b] at 6s. per 100 [c] £32. 5. 0 binding at 2s. 2d. each [d] £27. 1. 8 advertising [e] £1. 5. 0 total £214.19. 8 a. for thomas bensley’s rate for thomson’s seasons, 22 lines to a page, see the costs of hayley’s designs, above. the charges of r. noble, the printer of night thoughts with 30 lines to a page, were probably about the same. over 160 copies have been located in public collections, and perhaps 90 more are in private hands or were destroyed. b. the engravings were printed on the text pages and therefore required no additional paper. c. printing the plates for flaxman’s iliad (1805) cost 6s. per hundred pulls (bb p. 561). d. the binding of flaxman’s iliad cost 2s. 2d. each (bb p. 561). e. advertisements appeared in a separate flier and in monthly magazine 2 (nov. 1796): 807, true briton (31 march 1798), and the times (9, 11 july 1798), the last three after richard edwards retired. there were notices in the edinburgh magazine ns 8 (dec. 1796): 450, monthly epitome 1 (jan. 1797): 79, and monthly magazine 5 (june 1798): 455. it would be agreeable to think that the blakes were paid for printing the engravings. payments the heaviest investor in the work was william blake. he had asked £105 for his watercolors; instead he received £21 (9d. per design)joseph farington’s diary, 24 june 1796 (br[2] 71). blake’s friend j. t. smith called it a “despicably low ... price” (nollekens and his times [1828]; see br[2] 610). plus a ream of paper (£5.0.0). we do not know how much or even whether he was paid for his 43 folio engravings. at the very least he should have expected £5.5.0 each for these very large plates (c. 33 x 41 cm.), the sum he received for his smaller outline plates (c. 35 x 25 cm.) for flaxman’s iliad (1805) and hesiod (1817),bb pp. 561-62, 557-58. for his 12 highly finished, slightly smaller plates for blair’s grave, schiavonetti was paid perhaps £540 (br[2] 246); he asked £63 for “the day of judgment” (br[2] 245). a total of £225.15.0. it is possible that blake was paid for his engravings not in cash but in copies of the book, valued at £5.5.0 for all four parts or £2.2.0 for part 1 (£1.1.0 deposit and £1.1.0 on delivery).prospectus, br(2) 78-79. colored copies are not mentioned in contemporary advertisements and reviews. blake could then color and sell them for his own profit. perhaps he was given about 30 copies, worth £31. twenty-eight colored copies have been traced.copies a-t are recorded in bb pp. 642-46, 956-57, copies u-z in bbs pp. 272-73, and copies aa-bb in blake (2000, 2002). some have contemporary inscriptions associating them with blake: copy q is annotated “this copy was coloured for me by mr blake | w. e.”; copy r has “this copy colrd by w. blake”; copy c is signed “w. blake”; and copies c and w have notes that they were to serve “as pattern” for coloring, presumably by mrs. blake. a surprising number can be traced to contemporary owners, most of whom owned other works by blake: [rebekah] bliss (d. 1819) (d), thomas butts (1757-1845) (a), baron dimsdale (1712-1800) (x), “w. e.” (for william esdaile [1758-1837] or william ensom [1796-1832]) (q), ?richard edwards (1768-1827) (b), thomas gaisford (1779-1855) (g), john s. harford, jr. (1785-1866) (r), john soane (1753-1837) (f), and earl spencer (1758-1834) (o). the night thoughts were colored in two styles, one about 1797 (c-d, i-j, q-r, u), and the other about 1805 (b, h, l, p). presumably this means that blake carried copies with him when he moved from london to felpham in 1800 and then back again when he returned to london in 1803. how much was he paid for these colored copies? we have no direct evidence, but we can find a comfortable analogy in the prices of colored copies of works in illuminated printing of the same size. blake’s prospectus of 1793 lists uncolored copies of america with 18 folio plates at 10s. 6d. and visions of the daughters of albion with 11 folio plates at 7s. 6d., while the prices for colored copies in his letter of 9 june 1818 are £5.5.0 (america) and £3.3.0 (visions). subtracting the prices of uncolored copies from those for colored copies indicates that the price for coloring america was 5s. 3d. per plate and visions 5s. ½d. per plate. if blake calculated 5s. for coloring each of the 43 folio prints in night thoughts, he would have charged ten guineas per copy.the printed text of night thoughts is thrown in gratis. about 1797 blake was paid £10.10.0 for his 116 watercolor designs to gray (br[2] 246). even with a more modest five guineas per copy, he would have received £157.10.0 for 30 copies. with this he seems to have been content.when blake complained of neglect by the great illustrated book publishers boydell, macklin, and bowyer (notebook p. 23), he did not mention richard edwards, the publisher of his night thoughts, perhaps implying that he did not feel that he had been mistreated by edwards. advertisements the true briton no. 1644 (31 march 1798) carried an advertisement for a splendid edition of young’s night thoughts. with 150 engravings from original designs. this day is published, price one guinea to subscribers, part i. containing four books of young’s night thoughts, illustrated with 43 very spirited etchings, from the designs of mr. blake. the novelty of the style in which these engravings are introduced, surrounding the text they illustrate, and the masterly hand with which they are executed, must, it is presumed, command the attention of the literati, the amateur of the fine arts, and of the artist. the paper and type will be found correspondent with the elegance of such an undertaking; and it is hoped that, from the extremely low price which the editor has fixed upon the work to subscribers, it will meet with that liberal encouragement which its intrinsic merit, as well as its novelty, may justly claim from this enlightened and literary age. the subscription for the whole work is five guineas: one to be paid at the time of subscribing, and one on the delivery of each part. the book will be completed in four parts, with all the expedition consistent with the nature of a work of such magnitude. the price will be considerably advanced to non-subscribers, on the publication of the second part, which is in forwardness. london: sold by mr. edwards, pall-mall; mr. robson and mr. faulder, new bond-street; mr. payne, mews gate; mr. white, fleet-street; messrs. robinsons, paternoster-row; mr. clarke, bond-street; mr. bell, oxford-street; and mr. harding, pall-mall.this advertisement and those in the times, discussed below, were first recorded in wayne c. ripley, “‘in great forwardness’?: 1798 advertisements for volume two of william blake’s night thoughts” (see ripley in part vi); i have made minute adjustments on the basis of the originals. the booksellers are james edwards, 77 pall mall; james robson, 27 new bond street; robert faulder, 42 new bond street; thomas payne, mews gate; john white, 63 fleet street; george, george, and john robinson, 25 paternoster row; william clarke, 38 bond street; joseph bell, 148 oxford street; and edward harding, 98 pall mall. substantially the same announcement appeared in the times nos. 4225 and 4227 (9, 11 july 1798): young’s night thoughts, ſplendid edition, with 150 engravings from original deſigns.--this day is publiſhed, price one guinea to subſcribers, part the firſt, containing four books, of young’s night thoughts; illuſtrated ….the times version differs from that in the true briton in (1) using the old-fashioned long “s” (ſ); (2) reducing the central five paragraphs to one; (3) changing “whole work is” to “whole complete is”; (4) extending “amateur” to “amateurs”; (5) altering “five”, “four”, and “second” to “5”, “4”, and “2d”; (6) changing “in forwardness” to “in great forwardness”, the only substantial change; (7) omitting “london:” before the list of booksellers; (8) reducing the initial capital letters to lower case in “paper” and “type”; and (9) replacing “mr.” in “mr. edwards” with “messrs.” and omitting the succeeding “mr.”s and “messrs.” no second part was published,in his 1799 catalogue, thomas payne offered “young’s night thoughts … 2 numbers … 1797 & 98,” but there is no other evidence that part 2 was ever published. though an untraced engraved proof of “the only extant leaf of night 5” has been recorded.william blake: original drawings, engraved work, poetical works, books about blake, etc. mainly from the collection of dr. greville macdonald (london: francis edwards, [?1930]), lot 44. the 1798 advertisements echo the prospectus of spring 1797, correct its “forty” engravings to “43,” and add eight new booksellers while omitting richard edwards. the author of the advertisements (james edwards?) is notably more emphatic about blake’s plates—a “masterly hand” which will “command the attention of the literati, the amateur of the fine arts, and of the artist”—than the author (richard edwards?) of the “advertisement” in the 1797 edition, who conceived “it to be unnecessary to speak” of “the merit of mr. blake.”br (2) 78-79, 76. did richard edwards publish the night thoughts? richard edwards was identified as the publisher in farington’s diary (24 june 1796), in the prospectus (?spring 1797), along with james edwards and robert bowyer, and on the title page (1797). however, the advertisements in the true briton (march 1798) and the times (july 1798) omit him and instead name james edwards, robson, faulder, payne, white, robinsons, clarke, bell, and harding, whilst the notice in the monthly magazine (june 1798) names only robson. for some time richard edwards had been withdrawing from business;see g. e. bentley, jr., the edwardses of halifax: the making and selling of beautiful books in london and halifax by william, john, richard, thomas, and especially james edwards, the medician bookseller (toronto: university of toronto press, forthcoming). perhaps he did not publish night thoughts at all. the only known sale in 1797 is by his brother james on 6 november.br(2) 79. after richard edwards withdrew from business, the night thoughts was taken over by a congery of booksellers headed by james edwards, who advertised it in the true briton and the times. then james edwards too retired, and in 1798 james robson took over the night thoughts. the work sold very slowly, in part because the publishers kept changing. in 1811 crabb robinson claimed that blake’s edition of night thoughts “is no longer to be bought.”[crabb robinson], vaterländisches museum (1811) (br[2] 600). robinson bought a copy on 27 dec. 1810 (br[2] 600fn). the commission for the night thoughts was due to the genius of richard edwards. he chose a fine, expensive paper (1794 | j whatman) and a fine artist and engraver (william blake). however, his claim in the integral advertisement that “he has shrunk from no expence”br(2) 76. is plainly false. he allowed william blake to bear the major part of the expense of the only volume that was published. and he scarcely published the work, or perhaps he did not publish it at all. he withdrew from business, apparently for personal reasons, just when the night thoughts was finished. apparently he never advertised it in 1797 or sent out a review copy. the contemporary obscurity of young’s night thoughts (1797) with blake’s illustrations is significantly due to the commercial neglect of richard edwards. all 43 night thoughts prints are reproduced in john windle, pictorial blake (see 2011 in part iv). part iv: catalogues and bibliographies 1846 8–11 june catalogue of the valuable library of the late william holgate, esq. of the general post office … which … will be sold by auction, by messrs. s. leigh sotheby & co. … june 8th, and three following days. [1846]. <bodleian> “47 beloe (wm.) poems and translations, 1788—borrow, romantic ballads, from the danish, 1826—[henry card] brother-in-law, a com.[edy] lee priory press, 1817—boyd, plays, 1793—blake, poetical sketches    together 5 vol.” (rodd, 7s.). this is perhaps copy k.nb: the five works are not said to be bound together. 1898 1 june catalogue of some of blake’s pictures at “the salterns,” parkstone. [parkstone, dorset, 1 june 1898]. the catalogue of 35 pictures (34 by blake)butlin #194, 289, 294, 297, 301, 306, 310, 316, 320, 323, 434, 436, 440, 450, 452, 455-56, 459, 461, 464, 469, 483, 493, 497-99, 503, 505, 509, 511-12, 515, 525, 675. belonging to captain frederick john butts, the grandson of blake’s patron thomas butts, was almost certainly made for the visit to his home called the salterns on 1 june 1898 by the dorset natural history and antiquarian field club. the catalogue cites “rossetti’s book on blake,” i.e., william michael rossetti’s “annotated lists of blake’s paintings, drawings, [writings] and engravings” in alexander gilchrist, life of william blake, “pictor ignotus” (1863) 2: 199-264 (the references correspond to the 1863 edition, not to that of 1880). the only known copy of the catalogue is among the mary butts papers, beinecke library, yale university; the cover is reproduced and the contents transcribed in mary lynn johnson, “‘catalogue of some of blake’s pictures at “the salterns”’: captain butts as exhibitor, litigator, and co-heir (with his sister blanche),” (see university of toronto quarterly in part vi). johnson is the source of all the information here. 1927 §blake exhibition, free public library, lambeth. the exhibition is known only from the §typed catalogue with a collection of blake ephemera formed by thomas wright offered in §john hart, catalogue 91 (march 2011), lot 75. 1971 21 may–4 june an exhibition of english prints blake to sutherland may 21st-june 4th, 1971. folio fine art 6 stratford place london w1n 0bh. [1971]. seventy-two entries, with prices, including, under blake, 17 virgil prints at £460 (#2*), young, night thoughts (1797), £390 (#3), job “1825,” “very fine proof impressions on french paper,” £6,000 (#4*), plus calvert (#18-22) and palmer (#23-35). 1982 15 september–1983 15 february *david bindman. william blake his art and times. 1982, §1988. <bbs p. 298> review §*karen mulhallen, canadian forum 62, no. 723 (dec.-jan. 1982-83): 33-34. 1983 *robert n. essick. the separate plates of william blake: a catalogue. 1983. <bbs p. 301> for addenda, see blake 44.4 in part vi. 1987 *printmaking in britain 1775-1965: two centuries of the art of the print in britain [at the] william weston gallery. catalogue no. 1 (1987, year 20, issue no. 203). london: william weston gallery, 1987. blake is 96-100, palmer 101-05. 1991 *robert n. essick. william blake’s commercial book illustrations. 1991. <bbs p. 310> for addenda, see blake 44.4 in part vi. 2003 31 march–2 may *william blake at syracuse university. 2003. <blake (2007§)> the catalogue is an oblong 4o with 52 unnumbered pages and 79 reproductions (34 from innocence [q], 13 from gay, fables [1793], 22 from job [1826]). 2006 15 february–1 may *martin myrone. gothic nightmares: fuseli, blake and the romantic imagination. 2006. <blake (2007)> review §*stéphane guégan, “gothic nightmares: fuseli, blake and the romantic imagination,” tribune de l’art 24 march 2006 (in french). 2006 2 may *william blake: designs for blair’s grave [sotheby’s auction]. 2006. <blake (2007)> reviews, etc. §anon., “the watercolour windfall worth £5m,” scotsman 13 may 2003. §*jeremy lott, “blake watercolours export barred,” country life 31 march 2005. §*didier rykner, “dix-neuf aquarelles de william blake interdites temporairement de sortie du royaume uni,” tribune de l’art 16 may 2005 (in french). §carol vogel, “the splintering of a masterpiece,” new york times 15 feb. 2006. §anon., “blake collection to be broken up and sold in new york,” independent [london] 17 feb. 2006. §*didier rykner, “les aquarelles de blake pour designs for blair’s grave dispersées aux enchères,” tribune de l’art 17 feb. 2006 (in french). §andreas whittam smith, “paintings that are worth saving for the nation,” independent [london] 20 feb. 2006. §anon., “19 blakes tumble out of attic,” bahrain tribune 5 april 2006. *will bennett, “art sales: dream discovery turns to dust,” telegraph [london] 2 may 2006 (very full and useful). §*didier rykner, “les amis du louvre acquièrent une acquarelle de william blake pour designs for blair’s grave,” tribune de l’art 3 may 2006 (in french). 2007 7 april–2008 6 april *david bindman. mind-forg’d manacles: william blake and slavery. 2007. <blake (2008)> review jeremy tambling (see blake 44.4 in part vi). 2008 26 january–20 april blake’s shadow: william blake and his artistic legacy. <blake (2009)> review jeremy tambling (see blake 44.4 in part vi). 2009 2 april–28 june *michael phillips, ed., with the assistance of catherine de bourgoing. william blake (1757-1827): le génie visionnaire du romantisme anglais. [2009]. <blake (2010)> reviews §*jean-david jumeau-lafond and didier rykner, “william blake: le génie visionnaire du romantisme anglais,” tribune de l’art 5 june 2009 (in french). §*maría paz amaro, “william blake: la exposición de 1809,” istor: revista de historia internacional 10, no. 38 (2009): 92-99 (in spanish). §dominique blanc, “william blake, génie visionnaire,” connaissance des arts no. 670 (2009): 16-23 (in french) (under §?anon. in <blake (2010)>). *philippa simpson (see blake 45.1 in part vi). 2009 20 april–4 october *martin myrone, ed. seen in my visions: a descriptive catalogue of pictures. 2009. <blake (2010)> review paul flux, albion magazine (autumn 2009) (it leaves an “impression ... of worthiness”). 2010 8 november–2011 4 april §blake and physiognomy. devised and curated by philippa simpson and sibylle erle. tate britain, london. there was no catalogue. the display was associated with the publication of sibylle erle, blake, lavater and physiognomy (2010) <blake (2011§)>. review martin butlin, burlington magazine 153 (2011): 608 (with another) (butlin dates the display jan.-march 2011). 2011 25 january property from the collection of charles ryskamp sold for the primary benefit of princeton university. sotheby’s (new york). *lot 149: william blake, a woman enthroned, two figures on each side, pen and black ink (late 1770s) [butlin #99] (estimate $7,000-$10,000 [sold for $5,313 to john windle for robert n. essick]). *lot 209: sketches for america and other books (recto); the lion lying down with the ox (verso), 26.3 x 20 cm., given by grace lansing lambert to ryskamp 1969 (estimate $30,000-$50,000 [sold for $56,250 to john windle for robert n. essick]). 2011 22 march auction 18784: books, maps, manuscripts and historical photographs. bonhams (london). *lot 24: poetical sketches ([y]) (estimate £60,000-£80,000 [sold for £60,000 plus buyer’s premium of £12,000 = £72,000 to john windle for robert n. essick]). 2011 29 march auction 19386: papers and portraits: the roy davids collection part ii. bonhams (london). *lot 264: blake’s letter to ozias humphry of 18 jan. 1808 (a) (estimate £50,000-£60,000 [not sold]). 2011 march omnium gatherum. catalogue 48. san francisco: john windle, 2011. 4o. a gorgeously illustrated catalogue with splendid treasures including *28: job (1826), “proof” set, including the printed *label (unpriced) and linnell’s draft prospectus plus “the original hand-lettered wrappers” ($82,500) [previously offered in windle catalogue 46 (2009), lot 8]. robert n. essick bought the draft prospectus and the wrappers. *29: george cumberland’s card (1827) printed in pale brown, no indication of whether this copy is recorded in essick, separate plates ($17,500). *30: hayley, little tom (1800), muir’s excellent facsimile [1886] ($750). *31: gay, fables (1793), “very tall, possibly large-paper” ($1500). *32: hayley, ballads (1805), “very fine copy with large margins showing the plate marks. bookplate of lord eversley,” “with the first three plates in the first state” ($6750). *33: malkin, a father’s memoirs of his child (1806) ($1875). *34: stedman, surinam (1796), “large-paper copy,” “every plate with fine original coloring” (3 heightened with gold), “virtually identical” to a copy sold to essick in 2000, in “contemporary marbled boards” ($29,750). 2011 29 november–2012 26 february §william blake exhibition at the pushkin fine arts museum, moscow. the exhibition was organized with help from the british council, with 150 exhibits from the tate, british museum, victoria & albert museum, national portrait gallery, fitzwilliam museum, whitworth art gallery, petworth house, and britten-pears foundation (aldeburgh). the apparatus includes an interactive education program. reviews, puffs, etc.by jan. 2012 there were 3,343,000 online accounts of the exhibition; the first hundred i saw seemed to be merely publicity. i have not tried very hard—indeed scarcely at all—to find reviews, both because the vast majority of them simply recycle publicity handouts from the museum and because i can’t read cyrillic script. *joy neumeyer, “mysterious visions,” moscow news 12 dec. 2011. anon., “blake exhibition in moscow” (see blake 45.3 in part vi). 2011 10 december–2012 1 june §blake painting on display at mead art museum, amherst college. notice *anon., “a new blake for amherst,” amherst college online notice (blake’s tempera of the raising of jairus’s daughter was given by dr. henry deforest webster, ’48). 2011 [11 december] pictorial blake: a catalogue of recently acquired original blake illustrations from a private collection, along with the reference library and a complete run of the blake trust publications, and other facsimiles. also blake facsimiles from the biblioteca la solana, printed by robert n. essick. san francisco: john windle antiquarian bookseller, 2011. 4o, 80 pp., 135 reproductions; no isbn. there are 249 lots, nos. 1-118 being mostly single prints by blake taken from commercial books. *“a note on the blake facsimiles from the biblioteca la solana” (76-79). no. 248 and the previous lot [sold, no number] are prints pulled in july and aug. 2011 from “relief photo-etchings” on copper and zinc made “in the 1970s” by “professional craftsmen” and robert n. essick of no natural religion pl. a2, songs pls. 3, 8, 18, 24, 33, 47, america pls. 1-2, 12, 14, and the ghost of abel pls. 1-2 using “intaglio ink” and j whatman | 1794 or nineteenth-century or “modern” paper. the windle catalogue reproductions include all 22 for job (1826), all 13 for blair’s grave (1813), and all 43 for young’s night thoughts (1797). 2011 §*christopher baker. english drawings and watercolours 1600-1900 [in the] national gallery of scotland. edinburgh: national galleries of scotland, 2011. the blakes in the national gallery of scotland include hecate (butlin #317), god writing upon the tables of the covenant (#448), and job confessing his presumption to god who answers from the whirlwind (#461). part v: books owned by william blake the poet swedenborg, emanuel, the wisdom of angels, concerning divine love and divine wisdom (1788) the title-page transcription in bb p. 696 should be emended to read “printed and sold by w. chalklen, grocers court, | poultry. | m.dcc.lxxxviii” (that is, add “and sold” and start a new line before “poultry.”). blake’s copy in the british library is reproduced in §eighteenth century collections online, though his marginalia are rarely legible. part vi: criticism, biography, and scholarly studies *adams, hazard. blake’s margins: an interpretive study of the annotations. 2009. <blake (2011)> reviews *morton d. paley, new books on literature 19 (22 may 2010) <blake (2011)§> (“adams makes blake’s thought accessible in non-‘blakean’ terms”). *alexander s. gourlay (see blake 45.2, below). §albuquerque, sebastião júnior da cunha. “pantheism in the romantic poetry: william blake and william wordsworth.” revista seringal de idéias 1.1 (2008). ando, eiko. “william blake’s religious world.” muroran kogyo daigaku kiyo: memoirs of the muroran institute of technology 60 (march 2011): 1-8. ankarsjö, magnus. william blake and religion: a new critical view. 2009. <blake (2010)§> review *christopher rowland (see blake 45.1, below). *anon. “blake remembered after a century.” literary digest [new york] 94, no. 1951 (ns no. 11) (10 sept. 1927): 26-27, plus more reproductions on pp. 28 and 29. a summary of memorials of blake by john freeman, bookman <bb #1632>, s. p. b. mais, daily telegraph <bbs p. 557> (see mais, below), and r. r. tatlack, daily telegraph <bbs p. 657> (see tatlack, below). §anon. “forged bank-notes.” european magazine 73 (march 1818): 237. in the context of a spate of forged bank of england bank notes, and thirty-two hangings for bank-note forgery, anon.’s plan reprints tilloch’s testimonial for his proposal for a new, forgery-proof bank note of 5 april 1797 (see br[2] 78) with its list of nineteen engravers supporting it, including blake. see mark crosby, “blake and the banknote crises of 1797, 1800, and 1818,” under university of toronto quarterly, below. the plan seems to be reprinted in the times, 21 march 1818, new times, 1 april 1818: 4, and philosophical magazine, 1 july 1818.the records of these in newspaper archive are so heavily corrupted as to be almost illegible. anon. “22.02.11 london ec1.” times literary supplement 25 feb. 2011: 3. a photograph of blake’s tombstone in bunhill fields (now “becoming a grade i listed park”), with a paragraph about where he’s buried. anon. “william blake’s homes in lambeth and sussex.” spectator (1916) <bb #1080> it was written by alfred g. hopkins, author of “william blake’s house at lambeth,” times literary supplement (1918) <bb #1882>. §arvine, kazlitt. “blake, the poet, painter, and engraver.” cyclopaedia of anecdotes of literature and the fine arts. 1851, 1852. <bb #1091a-b> c. §1853. <blake (2009)> d. the cyclopædia of anecdotes of literature and the fine arts; containing a copious and choice selection of anecdotes of the various forms of literature, of the arts, of architecture, engravings, music, poetry, painting and sculpture, and of the most celebrated literary characters and artists of different countries and ages, etc. … with numerous illustrations. 3rd ed. boston: gould and lincoln; new york: sheldon, blakeman & company; cincinnati: geo. s. blanchard, 1856. [stereotype ed.] 250. <princeton> e. §1967. <blake (2009)> atkinson, juliette. “the life of william blake: pictor ignotus (1863).” victorian biography reconsidered: a study of nineteenth-century ‘hidden’ lives. oxford: oxford university press, 2010. 194-205. §bai, feng-xin. “[william blake: a leap from innocence to experience—on the contraries in william blake’s songs of innocence and of experience].” [journal of guangzhou teachers college] (2009). in chinese. bai, feng-xin, and ping she. “wei lian bu lai ke—cong tian zhen dao jing yan de fei yue—bu lai ke tian zhen yu jing yan zhi ge chuang zuo si xiang zhuan bian zhi yan jiu [william blake: the leap from innocence to experience—a study of the changing creative mind in blake’s songs of innocence and of experience].” he bei qing nian guan li gan bu xue yuan xue bao [journal of hebei junior cadres’ training institute] no. 6 (2010): 61-63. in chinese. a commentary on blake’s change from the “fancy of the innocent and happy world” to his “recognition and criticism of the rotten experienced world,” saying that this represents the poet’s maturity in creative thinking. §bakić, tanja. “mistični prijelazi—strašna simetrija [mystical transitions—a fearful symmetry].” zeničke sveske [bosnia and herzegovina] no. 12/10 (2010): 75-80. in montenegrin. about blake’s illustrations for the book of job. §bakić, tanja. “potraga za zagubljenim značenjima: rođenje mita iz muzike—uporedni pogled na lične mitologije blejka i morisona [pursuing the forgotten meanings: the birth of a myth in music: a comparative look at the personal mythologies of blake and morrison].” vijesti [montenegro] 24 dec. 2011: 10. in montenegrin. this is a shorter version of the essay in croatian, “utjecaji poezije williama blakea na rock glazbu jima morrisona,” below. §bakić, tanja. “sumorni fantomi kosmičke samoće: o misticismu viljema blejka [on the mysticism of william blake: gloomy phantoms of cosmical solitude].” vijesti [montenegro] 30 oct. 2010: 8. in montenegrin. §bakić, tanja. “utjecaji poezije williama blakea na rock glazbu jima morrisona [the influence of william blake’s poetry on the rock music of jim morrison].” nova istra [croatia] nos. 3-4 (2006): 168-88. in croatian. a shorter version in montenegrin is in her “potraga za zagubljenim značenjima,” above. §bakić, tanja. “žena na i u djelu williama blakea [female characters in the works of william blake].” zeničke sveske [bosnia and herzegovina] no. 09/09 (2009): 104-13. in montenegrin. §barlow, paul. “the aryan blake: hinduism, art and revelation in william blake’s pitt and nelson paintings.” visual culture in britain 12.3 (2011): 277-92. about blake’s use of indian imagery. §barry, kevin m. “william blake and william cowper.” language, music and the sign. cambridge: cambridge university press, 1987. 56-93 (chapter 2). b. §1989. c. 2009. it includes “autonomous song: chabanon and blake” (65-77). §beer, john. “lamb, coleridge, and blake.” charles lamb bulletin 136 (2006): 105-06. §behrendt, stephen. “‘a defect in their education’: blake, haydon, and the misguided british audience.” keats-shelley review 24.1 (oct. 2010): 53-65. bentley, g. e., jr. “blake and a fairy’s funeral.” notes and queries 256 (ns 58).1 (march 2011): 65-66. the number of reports of fairy funerals 1824-40 indicates that blake’s account is scarcely “an indication of ‘disordered ... sensations’ or fey eccentricity.” bentley, g. e., jr. “‘i hear a voice you cannot hear’: madness, blake, and the magazin für die literatur des auslandes (1833).” notes and queries 256 (ns 58).1 (march 2011): 66-73. *bentley, g. e., jr. the stranger from paradise: a biography of william blake. 2001, 2003. <blake (2002, 2004)> reviews donald m. hassler, utopian studies 12.2 (march 2001): 262-63 (“the book is most valuable as a rich mine of detail”; scholars “will love this book”; the author is retired “but still immensely productive”). §anon., “the world of paperbacks,” critical review 22 sept. 2006 (by “the leading blake scholar”). bentley, g. e., jr. “‘william blake flashed across the path’ in snippets: blake in the ladies’ cabinet (1840).” notes and queries 256 (ns 58).1 (march 2011): 73-74. the google snippet reproduction from the ladies’ cabinet (1840) is really from the illustrated london magazine (1867). bentley, g. e., jr. william blake’s conversations. 2008. <blake (2009)> review *alexander s. gourlay (see blake 45.3, below). *berger, harry, jr. “reading blake’s ‘the sick rose.’” caterpillage: reflections on seventeenth-century dutch still life painting. new york: fordham university press, 2011. 7-9. §berger, richard. “‘never seek to tell thy love’: e-adapting blake in the classroom.” redefining adaptation studies, ed. dennis cutchins, laurence raw, and james m. welsh. lanham: scarecrow press, 2010. 31-43. a version is available in bournemouth university research online. §black, jonathan [mark booth]. “swedenborg, blake and the sexual roots of romanticism.” the secret history of the world. 2007. b. §rev. ed. london: quercus, 2010. blake/an illustrated quarterly volume 44, number 4 (spring 2011) *robert n. essick. “blake in the marketplace, 2010.” 116-42. (a customarily meticulous and deft record of sales and offerings of works by and associated with blake. “editors’ note: color versions of all illustrations are online at the journal’s web site ….” an “appendix: new information on blake’s engravings” [141-42] has addenda for his the separate plates of william blake [1983] and william blake’s commercial book illustrations [1991].) review jeremy tambling. mind-forg’d manacles: william blake and slavery, whitworth art gallery, university of manchester, 26 jan.–6 april 2008; blake’s shadow: william blake and his artistic legacy, whitworth gallery 26 jan.–20 april 2008. 142-43. (largely about blake’s shadow, which seemed “patchy”; in mind-forg’d manacles (the catalogue), “some of bindman’s interpretations ... seemed oversimplifying.”) newsletter anon. “blake goes online.” 143. (from vol. 45, no. 1 [summer 2011], blake will be published both on paper and online; “the online and print content will be the same.”) blake/an illustrated quarterly volume 45, number 1 (summer 2011) *g. e. bentley, jr., with the assistance of hikari sato for japanese publications. “william blake and his circle: a checklist of publications and discoveries in 2010.” 4-36. (“editors’ notes: illustrations to the checklist are available in the online version of the article …. addenda and corrigenda to blake records, 2nd ed. (2004), now appear online. they are updated yearly in conjunction with the publication of the checklist.”) reviews *philippa simpson. michael phillips, ed., with the assistance of catherine de bourgoing, william blake (1757-1827): le génie visionnaire du romantisme anglais (2009). 37-38. (“it is hard to excuse the large overlaps among several of the essays,” and the catalogue of blake’s graphic work is oddly supported by “the concentration upon blake’s writing.”) *christopher rowland. magnus ankarsjö, william blake and religion: a new critical view (2009). 38-39. (“this book is an interesting read,” but it “omits key aspects of blake’s [religious] concerns.”) blake/an illustrated quarterly volume 45, number 2 (fall 2011) in memory of elizabeth b. (beth) bentley, 1930–2011 note that the online version has more reproductions, some of them in color (the reproductions in the hard-copy version are only in black and white). jennifer davis michael. “eternity in the moment: william blake and mary oliver.” 44-50. (the twenty-first-century poet mary oliver writes poems with faint echoes of blake.) *morton d. paley. “william blake, george romney, and the life of george romney, esq.” 50-65. (a careful presentation of the context of hayley’s biography and its illustrations.) *robert n. essick. “attribution and reproduction: death pursuing the soul through the avenues of life.” 66-70. (pace butlin, “i believe that death pursuing is entirely blake’s work, [although] i must confess to some slight misgivings” [70].) review *alexander s. gourlay. hazard adams, blake’s margins: an interpretive study of the annotations (2009). 70-71. (adams’s book is “eminently sensible and learned.”) blake/an illustrated quarterly volume 45, number 3 (winter 2011-12) *angus whitehead. “‘an excellent saleswoman’: the last years of catherine blake.” 76-90. (with copious and convincing facts, and contrary to br[2] and all other predecessors, whitehead demonstrates that catherine blake lived at 1 queen street, mayfair, in march 1828–spring 1829 and at 17 upper charlton street in spring 1829–october 1831.) reviews *tristanne connolly. laura quinney, william blake on self and soul (2009). 90-91. (“quinney’s emphasis on authentic experience of the self leads her away from adequate research and precise reading.”) nelson hilton. wayne c. ripley and justin van kleeck, eds., editing and reading blake (2010). 92-94. (in all this process of “editionings,” “immersive textuality,” and “electronic heuristics” which “remediate” blake, “would it be such apostasy to say that none of this matters …?”) *alexander s. gourlay. gerald e. bentley, jr., william blake’s conversations: a compilation, concordance, and rhetorical analysis (2008). 94-96. (bentley has “created something rich, strange, and likely to prove enduringly useful,” especially in the concordance and the “fascinating” evidence “about the way he [blake] probably pronounced words.”) *christopher z. hobson. sarah haggarty and jon mee, eds., blake and conflict (2009). 96-98. (the volume “does a great deal both to extend knowledge of blake’s intellectual and historical contexts and ... to sustain an ongoing debate over his complicity with or defiance of ideologies of oppression.”) *molly anne rothenberg. r. paul yoder, the narrative structure of william blake’s poem jerusalem: a revisionist interpretation (2010). 99-101. (because “yoder has truly understood the purport of the poem’s form,” his book “offers an indispensable introduction to jerusalem.”) kathryn freeman. james rovira, blake and kierkegaard: creation and anxiety (2010). 101-02. (the “argument [is] broad and shallow”; “the book’s breadth jeopardizes depth.”) mary silverstein. mickle maher, there is a happiness that morning is (theater oobleck, chicago, 2011). 103. (“a witty, amusing, and moving love story about two college professors,” inspired by “infant joy” and “the sick rose.” “editors’ note: photographs of the production are in the online version of this review.”) newsletter anon. “new members of blake’s advisory board.” 103. (they are tristanne connolly and tilar mazzeo.) anon. “blake exhibition in moscow.” 103. (announcement of “the first major exhibition of blake’s works in russia ... at the pushkin state museum of fine arts.”) §boer, roland. “e. p. thompson, antinomianism, and the theology of william blake.” sino-christian studies [taiwan] 8 (2009): 31-52. §boer, roland. “william blake and the politics of radical dissent.” criticism of theology: on marxism and theology iii. leiden: brill, 2010. §boland, tom. “romantic subjectivities: blake, wordsworth and the trace of the ‘other.’” textual practice 23.4 (2009): 559-80. booth, mark. see black, jonathan (his pseudonym), above. §brett, louise. “paper tiger? william blake at 10+2 level.” journal of nelta [nepal english language teachers’ association, kathmandu] 3.1-2 (1998): 52-58. §buchsbaum, julianne. “abjection and the melancholic imagination: towards a poststructuralist psychoanalytic reading of blake’s the book of urizen.” romanticism and victorianism on the net no. 56 (nov. 2009). §butts, mary jane briggs. proceedings of the dorset natural history and antiquarian field club (1898): lxvi-lxix. the paper, based on a. t. story’s life of blake (1893), was delivered by the hon. secretary of the club on the occasion of their visit to her home at the salterns to see the blake pictures there; the author (1863-1944) was the wife of captain frederick john butts (1833-1905), the grandson of blake’s patron thomas butts. the account of the blakes in the nude reading paradise lost in their garden has a (note by captain butts.—he remembers, as a small boy, hearing that his grandfather emphatically denied that there was a word of truth in this story,a. e. briggs, “mr. butts, the friend and patron of blake,” connoisseur 19 (1907): 95, wrote that butts’s grandson “distinctly remembers hearing his grandfather declare that there was no truth in it” (see br[2] xxvi-xxvii). ada briggs was the aunt of the widow of captain butts. which has however found a place in all blake’s numerous biographies.) the information here derives from mary lynn johnson, “‘catalogue of some of blake’s pictures at “the salterns”’: captain butts as exhibitor, litigator, and co-heir (with his sister blanche)” (see university of toronto quarterly, below). campbell-johnston, rachel. “william blake” and “palmer meets blake.” mysterious wisdom: the life and work of samuel palmer. london: bloomsbury, 2011. chapters 6 (60-67) and 7 (68-75). §canaday, john. the lives of the painters. vol. 2: baroque painters. new york: w. w. norton & company, 1969. 674-85. §cavill, paul, heather ward, et al. “william blake, songs of innocence and [of] experience.” the christian tradition in english literature: poetry, plays, and shorter prose. grand rapids: zondervan, 2007. 262-65. chen, hong. “bu lai ke de ‘hu’ de ‘tian zhen shi yue du’ [an ‘innocent’ of blake’s ‘tyger’].” wan guo wen xue yan jiu [foreign literature studies] no. 2 (2011): 79-85. in chinese. a “naive” reading of “the tyger” by “seeing the tiger as a real animal in the first place.” the poem’s “realistic concern about animals” reflects blake’s thoughts on the issue of real innocence. chilton, martin [digital culture editor]. “royal wedding: jerusalem triumphant at kate and will’s wedding: stars of stage and screen tweet to hail william blake’s famous hymn, which was performed at the royal wedding in westminster abbey.” telegraph [london] 29 april 2011. “and did those feet ...,” “first composed by william blake” and “later written to music ... by sir charles hubert hastings parry,” “was made the official anthem of the england football team” in 2000, and in 2008 the dean of southwark, the very rev. colin slee, “advised ... that the hymn would not be sung because it was ‘not in the glory of god.’” coleridge, john duke. the necessity of modernism in the arts, especially when devoted to the service of religion, … read at the quarterly meeting at the [?exeter] college hall, october 7, 1853. <bodleian> “we have lost, and cannot regain, for the church the powers of sir joshua and flaxman, of blake and turner; but we have great artists still left” (13). the heading describes the author as “john duke coleridge, esq., m. a., barrister at law, late fellow of exeter college, oxford.” john duke coleridge (1820-94), first baron coleridge (1873), lawyer, m.p., was a great-nephew of the poet. *connolly, tristanne j. william blake and the body. 2002. <blake (2003)> review w. b. gerard, eighteenth-century book reviews online 13 july 2009. §cords, john n. “‘word, work, & wish’: labor and productivity in william blake.” michigan phd, 2011. 325 pp. full text in proquest. about “the political valence of labor.” §cornils, ingo. “furchtbare symmetrien: romantische verwandtschaften im werk der dichter-maler hermann hesse und william blake.” arcadia: international journal for literary studies 46.1 (july 2011): 149-66. in german. “an intermedial comparison and an analysis of shared motifs and themes in the works of william blake and hermann hesse”; hesse’s work is a “continuation of blake’s visionary mysticism.” §crawford, joseph. “‘i beheld milton with astonishment’: the case of william blake.” raising milton’s ghost: john milton and the sublime of terror in the early romantic period. london: bloomsbury, 2011. §curran, stuart, ed. the cambridge companion to british romanticism. cambridge: cambridge university press, 1993. b. §*2nd ed. 2010. §darnill, elizabeth jane. “‘four-fold vision see’: allegory in the poetry of edmund spenser and william blake.” exeter phd, 2010. *davis, michael. william blake: a new kind of man. 1977. <bbs p. 449> review §bruce stillians, biography 1.3 (summer 1978): 86-88. §dykstra, james a. “exploitation, rape, bondage—blake’s revolutionary reaction.” rollins undergraduate research journal 5.1 (spring 2011). §eaves, morris, with the blake archive editors and staff. “the persistence of vision: images and imaging at the william blake archive.” rlg diginews 4.1 (feb. 2000). elliott, clare. “william blake and america: freedom and violence in the atlantic world.” comparative american studies (2009) <blake (2011)§> about “the american transcendentalists’ reading of songs of innocence and [of] experience (1794) in the 1840s” with “a reading of blake’s america: a prophecy (1793) showing that the civil war fulfilled his prophecy of inevitable future conflict” (209). §erle, sibylle. blake, lavater and physiognomy. 2010. <blake (2011)§> review martin butlin, burlington magazine 153 (2011): 608 (with another) (“the account of the publication of lavater’s several writings is detailed and fascinating”). §erle, sibylle. “the myth of the lost original: blake’s and lavater’s search for divine likeness.” in the embrace of the swan: anglo-german mythologies in literature, the visual arts and cultural theory. ed. rüdiger görner and angus nicholls. berlin: walter de gruyter, 2010. spectrum literaturwissenschaft/spectrum literature 18. 211-30. eyres, harry. “a modern jerusalem.” financial times 24-25 dec. 2011: 11. reflections on singing blake’s “jerusalem” hymn in school. feng, ke-fei. “ren lei ling hun de liang zhong dui li zhuang tai [on the two opposing states of the human soul—an analysis of blake’s dissection of the human soul as represented by ‘the lamb’ and ‘the tyger’].” anhui wen xue [anhui journal of literature] no. 2 (2010): 116. in chinese. a brief discussion of the significance of the opposing imageries of “the lamb” in innocence and “the tyger” in experience. §ferrara, mark s. “blake’s jerusalem as perennial utopia.” utopian studies 22.1 (2011): 19-33. §freedman, linda. “tom altizer and william blake: the apocalypse of belief.” literature and theology [issue on “poetry and belief”] 25.1 (march 2011): 20-31. fry, roger. “blake and british art.” nation 14 (7 feb. 1914): 791-92 <bbs p. 534 (under kerr)> b. §a roger fry reader. ed. christopher reed. chicago: university of chicago press, 1996. *gilchrist, alexander. life of william blake, “pictor ignotus.” 1863, 1880 …. <bb #1680, bbs p. 484, blake (1999, 2002, 2007, 2010, 2011)> reviews, announcements, etc. (1863 ed.) “life of william blake, the artist. by alexander gilchrist. with numerous illustrations from his works,” athenaeum no. 1771 (5 oct. 1861): 455 (an advertisement; notice that “pictor ignotus” has not yet been substituted for “the artist,” suggesting that the change was made after gilchrist’s death in 1861). reviews (1880 ed.) frederick wedmore, “william blake,” temple bar (1881) b. littell’s living age (1881) c. eclectic magazine (1881) <bb #2939a-c> d. good literature [new york] 2, no. 47 (20 aug. 1881): 166-70 (a digest of blake’s life from gilchrist; “to know blake is to be glad to be with him” [167]). e. library magazine of american and foreign thought 8 (1881): 615-31. charles hargrove, “william blake,” modern review 2 (july 1881): 565-77 (very sympathetic to blake—the book is “a real delight to eye and mind”—despite the fact that he was “an artist—who never learned to paint, nor even the refinements of his own lower craft of engraver” [565, 566]). §*giunta, graziana. “la forma dell’immaginazione: william blake e l’antroposofia.” libera conoscenza [spiritual science web site] ([2006]). 47 pp. in italian. *goldsmith, steven. unbuilding jerusalem: apocalypse and romantic representation. 1994. <blake (1995)> review §jacqueline leblanc, philosophy and literature 18.1 (april 1994): 162-63. §goss, erin m. “what is called corporeal: william blake and the question of the body.” eighteenth century 51.4 (winter 2010): 413-30. §gourlay, alexander s. “more on blake’s ‘auguries.’” notes and queries 256 (ns 58).4 (dec. 2011): 522-23. see paul miner, “interpreting blake’s ‘auguries,’” below. §green, matthew j. a. “‘she brings apocalypse’: sex, imagination and redemptive transgression in william blake and the graphic novels of alan moore.” literature compass 8.10 (oct. 2011): 739-56. §green, matthew j. a. “voices in the wilderness: satire and sacrifice in blake and byron.” byron journal 36.2 (dec. 2008): 117-29. *haggarty, sarah. blake’s gifts: poetry and the politics of exchange. 2010. <blake (2011)§> review shirley dent, times literary supplement 18 march 2011: 25 (it is often “acute” and “gripping,” but “dollops [of “untrammelled theory”] swirl into the narrative” “at inopportune moments”). *haggarty, sarah, and jon mee, eds. blake and conflict. 2009. <blake (2010)> review *christopher z. hobson (see blake 45.3, above). §heath, peter. “all text and no image makes blake a dull artist: inseparable interplay between poetry and picture in blake’s multimedia art.” at the edge 1 (2010): 92-114. hedley, gill. “mat collishaw, tracey emin, paula rego: at the foundling: songs of innocence, experience, ambivalence.” childhood in the past: an international journal 3.1 (sept. 2010): 5-14. compares the “sentiments” of the works contributed in 2010 to the foundling museum (london). §heymans, peter. “eating girls: deleuze and guattari’s becoming-animal and the romantic sublime in william blake’s lyca poems.” humanimalia 3.1 (fall 2011): 1-30. hoshino, eriko. “william blake’s influence upon william butler yeats, as a young poet: from the gnostic viewpoint (#1).” seibu bunri daigaku service keieigakubu kenkyu kiyo: journal of bunri university of hospitality 17 (2010): 57-62. hou, xia. “wai lian bu lai ke shi ge zhong de nǚ xing xing xiang fen xi [an analysis of the female imagery in william blake’s poems].” nei meng gu dian da xue kan [journal of inner mongolia radio and tv university] 121.3 (2010): 53-55. in chinese. an analysis of four types of women found in blake’s poems: “perfect ladies in illusion, nuns wandering on snowy ground, women aping men in greed and desire, and androgynous women.” *hutchings, kevin. “william blake and the music of the songs.” romanticism on the net (2007) <blake (2009)> he “examines blake’s musical practice in relation to the poetry and designs of songs,” which is part of a “multi-media project entitled songs of william blake, a cd featuring musical interpretations [some audible here] of fourteen poems from songs of innocence and of experience ... and a substantial liner-note commentary (from which the current essay is partly derived).” ibata, hélène. “william blake’s visual sublime: the ‘eternal labours.’” european romantic review (2010) <blake (2011)§> “a similar conception of the sublime as process can be discerned in the visual dimension of blake’s art” (32)—but no visual image is reproduced. imaizumi, yoko. “william blake to dvd kenkyu shiryo to sexuality [william blake, dvd research resources, and sexuality].” kokusai nihon kenkyu [international studies of japan] 1 (2009): 23-52. in japanese. §*ironside, r. “the tate gallery: wartime acquisitions.” burlington magazine 78, no. 455 (feb. 1941): 52-55, 57. about the blake collections of w. graham robertson and miss a. e. carthew. §ishizuka, hisao. “untying the web of urizen: william blake, nervous medicine, and the culture of feeling.” liberating medicine, 1720-1835. ed. tristanne connolly and steve clark. london: pickering & chatto, 2009. the enlightenment world no. 10. chapter 7. *jakobson, roman. “on the verbal art of william blake and other poet-painters.” linguistic inquiry (1970) <bb #1943> b. 1977. <bbs p. 524> c. §selected writings iii: poetry of grammar and grammar of poetry. ed. stephen rudy. the hague: mouton, 1981. 322-44. d. 1983. <bbs p. 524> e. 1987. <bbs p. 524> f. §berlin: de gruyter mouton, 2010 (reprint of 1981). jiang, xian-jing. “lun wei lian bu lai ke de shen hua ti xi [on the mythological system of william blake].” wen yi yan jiu [literature and art studies] no. 9 (2011): 45-52. in chinese. an interpretation of blake’s myth in his poems, arguing that “blake lauds the supreme power of human imagination at the expense of enlightenment and reason as well as of orthodox religion” and that his notion of mythology “reflects the revolutionary trends of his time.” §johnson, kurt a. “sir william jones and representations of hinduism in british poetry, 1784-1812.” york [england] phd, 2010. the poets dealt with are jones, blake, shelley, and southey. §johnson, rossiter. “william blake.” little classics: authors. vol. 16. boston: houghton, mifflin and company, 1875. 20-23. <michigan> §jones, raymond e. “‘different moments in the one cycle’: alchemical and blakean symbolism in michael bedard’s redwork.” children’s literature association quarterly 20.1 (spring 1995): 3-8. §kamčevski, danko. “paradoks u poeziji viljema blejka [paradox in the poetry of william blake].” koraci [journal of literature, art, and culture] (2010) <blake (2011)§> b. §književnost i jezik 57 (2010): 139-45. in serbian. §kang, ok sun. “[reading the image of fire in william blake’s prophetic poetry].” [literature and religion] 14.3 (2009): 193-212. in korean. keynes, geoffrey. the gates of memory. 1981. <bbs p. 534> review §ralph colp, biography 9.1 (winter 1986): 89-91. §kim, hee sun. “[paradoxical salvation in blake’s late prophecies: view of time and place in milton and jerusalem].” [literature and religion] 15.3 (2010): 219-45. in korean. §kim, jae oh. “[william blake’s critique of nationalism].” [eighteenth-century english literature] 6.2 (2009): 1-26. in korean. *kobayashi, keiko. “oe kenzaburo to blake (6) 2. nomi no yurei: blake and kenzaburo oe (6) 2. the ghost of a flea.” ritsumeikan bungaku [ritsumeikan literature review] no. 620 (2011): 918-08 [sic]. in japanese. §kobayashi, victor. “william blake and ‘nature has no outline’: imagination, mathematics, science, and education.” imaginative education research group conference papers archive. [?2007]. §kooistra, lorraine janzen. “from blake to beardsley: ‘on some of the characteristics of modern poetry.’” victorian poetry 48.1 (spring 2010): 1-9. kovel, joel. “dark satanic mills: william blake and the critique of war.” capitalism nature socialism (2010) <blake (2011)§> a meditation on the mic (military industrial complex) with assistance from blake. §lambert, jérémy. “blake et le laocoön: pour une poétique du mouvement.” image [&] narrative: online magazine of the visual narrative 11.1 (2010): 107-17. in french. §lee, sun woo. “[organicism of blake and jiyoung].” [journal of comparative literature east and west] 22 (2010): 131-57. in korean. §lester, john w. criticisms. london: longman, brown, & co.; cambridge: j. & j. j. deighton, 1847. 88-89. b. 2nd ed., rev. and enlarged. london: longman, brown, and co.; cambridge: j. deighton, 1848. <bodleian> c. §3rd ed. london: longman, brown, & co., 1853. “in painting, do we grow weary of … blake’s terrible and ghastly embodiments …?” (5 [1848 ed.]). li, ling. “yi sha yi shi jie, yi hua yi tian guo—bu lai ke ‘tian zhen de yu yan’ han yi de wen hua jie du [‘to see a world in a grain of sand, and a heaven in a wild flower’—a cultural reading of the translations of blake’s ‘auguries of innocence’].” wai guo yu wen [foreign languages and literatures] 26.5 (oct. 2010): 92-94. in chinese. a comment on four chinese versions of the first stanza of blake’s poem, claiming that the “paradoxes” there were “seldom known by western readers.” li, shuang-chong. “yun yong gong neng wen ti xue jie du ‘the chimney sweeper’ (song of innocence [sic]) [a functional stylistic approach to ‘the chimney sweeper’ (song of innocence)].” wen xue jie [literatures] no. 1 (2011): 72-73, 77. in chinese. an analysis of the poem, using a few points from michael halliday’s systemic functional linguistics. li, yin-juan, and chung-hong jiao. “bu lai ke shi ge fan ying de she hui xian shi [on the social reality reflected in blake’s poems].” da zhong wen yi [popular art and culture] no. 9 (2010): 163. in chinese. a brief comment on how some of blake’s poems reflect the harsh social conditions of the time. liang, xiao-xi. “wei lian bu lai ke he ta de ‘lao hu’ [william blake and his ‘tyger’].” xue zhou kan c [learning weekly c] no. 9 (2010): 204. in chinese. a brief comment on blake’s poem, suggesting that it is “revolutionary.” lio, jin-lin, and qioui-ying yu. “wei lian bu lai ke de li xing pi pan yu wen ming fan si [on william blake’s criticism of reason and civilization].” dong bei shi da xue bao (zhe xue she hui ke xue ban) [journal of northeast normal university (philosophy and social sciences edition)] no. 252 (ns no. 4) (2011): 124-27. in chinese. a commentary on blake as “a thinker of civilization,” suggesting that the poet “is aware of all kinds of evil in civilized society but does not mean to get rid of civilization out of prejudice.” liu, bao-an. “bu lai ke shi ‘hui yin cao ping’ zhong yi xiang de xiang zheng yi yi [the symbolic meaning of the imagery in blake’s ‘the ecchoing green’].” mu dan jiang shi fan xue yuan xue bao (zhe she ban) [journal of mudanjiang normal university (philosophy and social sciences edition)] no. 163 (ns no. 3) (2011): 38-40. in chinese. an interpretation of the symbolic meanings of the three-stanza structure of “the ecchoing green,” which represent “the three stages of man’s growth” and display “the poet’s love for life, nature, and mankind.” liu, bao-an. “lun bu lai ke shi ge zhong de zong jiao wen hua qing xiang [on the tendency of religious culture in blake’s poems].” le shan shi fan xue yuan xue bao [journal of leshan teachers’ training college] 26.6 (june 2011): 57-59. in chinese. an interpretation of the biblical elements in the poems, suggesting that blake criticizes the restraints by religion on men and in the process creates his own religious system. liu, yan, ying zhang, and shan-shan hu. “qian xi bu lai ke ‘lao hu’ zhong de xiang zheng yi yi [an analysis of the significance of imagery in blake’s ‘tyger’].” du shi jia jiao [home tutoring in metropolis] no. 12 (2011): 178. in chinese. an explanation of four possible approaches to the reading of “the tyger”: “imagistic,” “religious,” “political,” and “historical.” liu, yue-qin. “qian xi wei lian bu lai ke shi ge de she hui pi pan xing [an analysis of social criticism in william blake’s poems].” kao shi zhou kan [examination weekly] no. 37 (2010): 21-22. in chinese. a commentary on “blake’s attack on social problems of his time such as racial discrimination, child workers, religious persecution, and the widening gap between rich and poor.” §liu, yu-mei. “[holistic construal of literary text: a case analysis of william blake’s ‘london’].” [foreign language and literature] (feb. 2009). in chinese. §loughnan, michael. a grain of sand in lambeth. [?2002]. a play set on the day in 1805 when blake learned that schiavonetti was to engrave his designs for blair’s grave. reviews reviews have appeared in the gloucestershire echo, british theatre guide, and by shirley dent in culture wars. §lourenço, isabel maria graça. “the william blake archive: da gravura iluminada à edição electrónica.” university of coimbra phd, 2009. in portuguese. §lu, chun-yan. “[understanding the theme of william blake’s poems].” [journal of congqing institute of technology] (2005). in chinese. §lussier, mark. “blake’s golgonoosa [sic]: london and/as the eternal city of art.” romanticism and the city. ed. larry h. peer. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, 2011. isbn: 9780230108837. chapter 11. ma, tao-ran, and xiao-hong li. “qian tan wei lian bu lai ke chuang zuko zhi lu [on william blake’s path of creation].” shi dai wen xue [literature of the times] no. 10 (2010): 60. in chinese. a biographical sketch of blake’s creative career. §maher, mickle. there is a happiness that morning is. [a play, 2011]. review mary silverstein (see blake 45.3, above). §mais, s. p. b. “william blake. an angelic anarchist. a centenary appreciation.” daily telegraph [london] (1927). <bbs p. 557, no journal> see *anon., “blake remembered after a century,” above. mann, annika. “the epidemic of fellow feeling in britain, 1720-1826.” indiana phd, 2011. in proquest. she offers “close readings” of defoe, smollett, blake, barbauld, and mary shelley. §marks, cato. “writings of the left hand: william blake forges a new political aesthetic.” huntington library quarterly 74.1 (march 2011): 43-70. writings of the left hand are in prose. “blake sought to redeem the poet’s [milton’s] radicalism.” §mason, emma. “elihu’s spiritual sensation: william blake’s illustrations of the book of job.” the oxford handbook of the reception history of the bible. ed. michael lieb, emma mason, and jonathan roberts; consultant ed. christopher rowland. oxford: oxford university press, 2011. 460-76 (chapter 31). *matsushita, tetsuya. “william blake no kanso gaku: the physiognomy of william blake.” kokugakuin daigaku daigakuin kiyo: journal of the graduate school, kokugakuin university 42 (2011): 221-41. in japanese. §*matthews, susan. blake, sexuality and bourgeois politeness. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2011. cambridge studies in romanticism 88. x, 269 pp., 25 reproductions; isbn: 9780521513579. maunder, andrew, ed. encyclopedia of literary romanticism. new york: facts on file–infobase, 2010. the blake entries consist of brenda ayres, “london” (246-47), lynn lee ching, “a poison tree” (340-41), john h. jones, “the clod and the pebble” (75-76) and “the shepherd” (408-09), diane mason, “the chimney sweeper” (from innocence and experience) (70-72) and “the ecchoing green” (105-06), melissa ann greggs-west, “holy thursday” (innocence and experience) (181-83), tara mcgann, songs of innocence and of experience (420-26), jennifer banach palladino, “blake, william (1757-1827)” (34-37), valeria pellis, america (7), sarah peterson, visions of the daughters of albion (474-76), andrea rummel, “the garden of love” (149-50), jon saklofske, “the tyger” (466-67), g. r. taneja, jerusalem (210-11), “the little boy lost” and “found” (244-45), the marriage of heaven and hell (264-66), milton (275-76), “night” (298-99), and “nurse’s song” (innocence and experience) (305-06), marilyn walker, “the little black boy” (244), and elaine ward, “the sick rose” (412). §mccord, james. “mixed motives and deadly acts: historical and dramatic character in william blake’s king edward the third.” eighteenth-century studies 19.4 (summer 1986): 480-501. §*mcdaniel, douglas. “william blake in cyberspace.” mythville [blog] 12 feb. 2011. §mcfarland, alison sanders. “a deconstruction of william blake’s vision: vaughan williams and job.” vaughan williams essays. ed. byron adams and robin wells. aldershot: ashgate, 2003. 29-54 (chapter 3). miner, paul. “an aspect of blake’s double vision.” notes and queries 256 (ns 58).4 (dec. 2011): 518-20. in blake’s design of christ in the sepulchre, guarded by angels, “ark-tomb serves as ark-womb.” miner, paul. “blake and winckelmann’s ‘paltry critick.’” notes and queries 256 (ns 58).4 (dec. 2011): 535-37. the “paltry critic” in winckelmann’s reflections on the painting and sculpture of the greeks, trans. fuseli (1765), is echoed in blake’s defence of fuseli in the monthly magazine (1806). miner, paul. “blake: an unnoted iconographic ‘allusion’ in the book of urizen.” notes and queries 256 (ns 58).4 (dec. 2011): 514-16. echoes of paradise lost, especially in urizen pl. 25. miner, paul. “blake: an unrecognized allusion to plato.” notes and queries 256 (ns 58).1 (march 2011): 61-63. especially about the “four mighty ones” in the four zoas, p. 3, and plato’s timaeus, trans. thomas taylor (1793). miner, paul. “blake: findings in ‘a little girl lost.’” notes and queries 256 (ns 58).4 (dec. 2011): 516-18. on sexual contexts. miner, paul. “blake: milton’s poverty tree.” notes and queries 256 (ns 58).4 (dec. 2011): 513-14. in jerusalem pl. 98, blake “intentionally converts milton’s ‘precious’ tree of morality into ‘albion’s poverty tree.’” miner, paul. “blake: shame in a mist.” notes and queries 256 (ns 58).1 (march 2011): 59-61. “blake’s warping word-play of ‘shame in a mist’ [in “then she bore pale desire”] derives from milton’s paradise lost.” miner, paul. “blake: the birth of los, echoes from hervey and ovid.” notes and queries 256 (ns 58).4 (dec. 2011): 525-26. “blake’s iconography of los as an embryo in the book of los subtly revises james hervey’s meditations among the tombs and ovid’s metamorphoses.” miner, paul. “blake: the complexity of allusions.” notes and queries 256 (ns 58).1 (march 2011): 63-65. about charlemagne. miner, paul. “blake’s anti-lockian ‘bard.’” notes and queries 256 (ns 58).4 (dec. 2011): 530-32. “‘the voice of the ancient bard’ ... specifically rebukes the philosophy of john locke.” miner, paul. “blake’s anti-(rain)bow.” notes and queries 256 (ns 58).4 (dec. 2011): 507-09. in jerusalem pl. 39, the “puzzling emblem ... symbolizes a (rain)bow that is an anti-rainbow, a ‘black’ design” which “deliberately contrasts noah’s rainbow of forgiveness with satan’s (rain)bow of unforgiveness (an anti-rainbow).” miner, paul. “blake’s enemies of art.” notes and queries 256 (ns 58).4 (dec. 2011): 537-40. about the canterbury pilgrims designs of blake and stothard and the deaths of cromek’s engravers of stothard’s design. miner, paul. “blake’s sexual furrows and milton’s ‘labour’d ox.’” notes and queries 256 (ns 58).4 (dec. 2011): 511-13. “blake frequently re-defines minutiae from john milton’s texts.” miner, paul. “blake’s ‘swedenborgian’ fly.” notes and queries 256 (ns 58).4 (dec. 2011): 529-30. “the fly” from songs of experience “finds part of its philosophical coordinates in emanuel swedenborg’s the divine love and [divine] wisdom.” miner, paul. “the influence of milton on blake’s ‘night’ of innocence.” notes and queries 256 (ns 58).4 (dec. 2011): 509-11. miner, paul. “interpreting blake’s ‘auguries.’” notes and queries 256 (ns 58).4 (dec. 2011): 520-22. he “attempts to illuminate the meaning and counter-meaning of blake’s deliberately administrated darkness,” especially in animal contexts. see also alexander s. gourlay, “more on blake’s ‘auguries,’” above. miner, paul. “new implications: blake and james hervey’s meditations.” notes and queries 256 (ns 58).4 (dec. 2011): 523-25. miner, paul. “new vistas: blake, swedenborg and dante.” notes and queries 256 (ns 58).4 (dec. 2011): 527-29. on astronomical contexts. miner, paul. “nuances: blake, locke and ‘corporeal things.’” notes and queries 256 (ns 58).4 (dec. 2011): 532-33. in his essay concerning human understanding, locke says that “had mankind been made but with four senses, … the objects of the fifth sense” would be “far from our [corporeal] notice,” and in no natural religion, blake writes that “from a perception of only 3 senses, … none could deduce a fourth or a fifth.” miner, paul. “unexplored latitudes: blake and ossian.” notes and queries 256 (ns 58).4 (dec. 2011): 533-35. “blake borrowed profusely from macpherson.” §minetti, francesco. “sentimentalism and corporeity of the image: w. blake’s illustrations to e. young’s night the eighth.” textus 13.1 (2000): 75-92. §minetti, francesco. “william blake’s milton and the renaissance myth of hermaphroditus.” lingue e linguaggi 5 (2011): 125-32. §miyake, miho. “‘infant joy’ by william blake.” jissen english communication 41 (2011): 113-14. morgan, paige. “the minute particular in the immensity of the internet: what coleridge, hartley and blake can teach us about digital editing.” romanticism (2009) <blake (2011)§> “the four zoas is too big for the world wide web,” but coleridge’s account in biographia literaria (1817) of david hartley’s law of association in his observations on man (1749) “provides an admirable critique of the way that we think about the mechanics of the world wide web” (265, 267). morris, h[erbert] n[ewall]. “william blake, artist and poet.” new church young people’s magazine (1909) b. “william blake.” *flaxman blake coleridge and other men of genius influenced by swedenborg together with flaxman’s allegory of the “knight of the blazing cross.” 1915. <bb #2248a-b> c. §[ithaca]: cornell university library, 2009. 21 cm., viii, 166 pp.; isbn: 9781112191053. §mounsey, chris. understanding the poetry of william blake through a dialectic of contraries: a study of the philosophical contexts within which blake developed his ideas. with a foreword by david fairer. lewiston: edwin mellen press, 2011. 24 cm., xv, 349 pp.; isbn: 9780773416055. it includes five chapters on the four zoas. *mulhallen, karen, ed. blake in our time: essays in honour of g. e. bentley jr. 2010. <blake (2011)> review §naomi ossar, kritikon litterarum 38.3-4 (nov. 2011): 276-78. §muñoz, adrián. “the devil’s party: milton en la poética de william blake.” anuario de letras modernas [mexico] 15 (2010): 63-76. in spanish. *otto, peter. “jerusalem.” multiplying worlds: romanticism, modernity, and the emergence of virtual reality. oxford: oxford university press, 2011. 195-214 (chapter 8). ozeki, yasuhiro. “blake to kegon kyo: blake and the kegon sutra.” takachiho ronso [takachiho journal] 45 (2010): 81-102. in japanese. §paley, morton d. “william blake.” the cambridge companion to english poets. ed. claude rawson. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2011. 254-70 (chapter 13). *parker, fred. “blake and the devil’s party.” the devil as muse: blake, byron, and the adversary. waco: baylor university press, 2011. mci: the making of the christian imagination. xi, 207 pp.; isbn: 9781602582699. 63-112, 194-98 (chapter 3). §pharabod, hélène. “livre et espace plastique dans l’oeuvre de william blake.” bulletin de la société d'études anglo-américaines des xviie et xviiie siècles 48 (1999): 139-56. *[phillips, michael]. the illuminated books of william blake re-created. [2011]. essentially an advertisement for the sale of separate prints from his facsimile copperplates of america pls. 1-2, 9-13, europe pls. 1-2, “8(9),” “9(11),” “10(12),” “15(16),” and 17(18),” and songs, plus planned selections from marriage and jerusalem, which “can be printed to order, prices from £25 to £150 each,” some of them on whatman paper. there are sections on “making the plates,” “printing,” and “contact and purchase.” “plates of the songs can take to up to 30 minutes or more [sic] to ink and wipe, with the plates of america and europe taking up [to] two hours,” with up to four impressions without reinking. §picón, daniela. “william blake: escritura y lectura iluminadas.” revista chilena de literatura no. 78 (april 2011): 113-38. in spanish, with an abstract in english. §piña, gerardo. “william blake, profeta en la tierra.” istor: revista de historia internacional 10, no. 38 (2009): 101-07. in spanish. §potkay, adam. “romantic transformations of the king james bible: wordsworth, shelley, blake.” the king james bible after four hundred years: literary, linguistic, and cultural influences. ed. hannibal hamlin and norman w. jones. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2010. 219-33 (chapter 10). potter, polyxeni. “... a flea / has smaller fleas that on him prey; / and these have smaller still to bite ’em, / and so proceed ad infinitum.” emerging infectious diseases 16.3 (march 2010): 583-84. an explication of the cover reproduction of the ghost of a flea. the title is from swift’s “on poetry: a rhapsody” (1733). the author is at the centers for disease control, atlanta, georgia. §price, dennis. the missing years of jesus: the greatest story never told. london: hay house, 2009. 24 cm., xi, 274 pp.; isbn: 9781848500334. publisher’s blurb: “do william blake’s lyrics for the popular hymn ‘jerusalem’ reveal an extraordinary insight into the so-called ‘missing years of jesus’ …?”; “christ did indeed visit britain.” *pyle, eric allan. “chuyo ni sakaratte: william blake niyoru dante shinkyoku jigoku hen dai 2 ka no tameno soga ni kansuru kosatsu [against taking the middle course: on the illustrations for the second canto of the inferno of dante’s divine comedy by william blake].” geijutsu kenkyu [studies of art] 23 (2010): 15-27. in japanese. quinney, laura. william blake on self and soul. 2009. <blake (2010§, 2011)> the book is about “what blake said about … the subject’s experience of its own interiority” (xi). her “escape from repetition: blake versus locke and wordsworth,” ritual, routine, and regime: repetition in early modern british and european cultures, ed. lorna clymer (2006) <blake (2008)§>, is “the earliest writing i did for this project” (xv). reviews §nelson hilton, wordsworth circle 41.4 (autumn 2010): 230-31; §reply by quinney, 231. §mark crosby, review of english studies 62 (nov. 2011): 823-25. *tristanne connolly (see blake 45.3, above). *read, dennis m. r. h. cromek, engraver, editor, and entrepreneur. farnham: ashgate publishing, 2011. 4o, xi, 182 pp.; isbn: 9780754663997. this is a careful study of the man variously described by contemporaries as “very energetic and of a lively and cheerful disposition” (thomas goff lupton), “a perfect brain-sucker” (walter scott), of “most gentlemanly manners, and took much in society” (martha eastwick), and “a man of the most iniquitous duplicity” (his employee ralph rylance), but read has found the title “that perhaps best fits him: traveling salesman” (19, 135, 20, 145, 155). chapter 3 (19-44), “the grave,” derives in part from read’s “a new blake engraving: gilchrist and the cromek connection,” blake (1980) <bbs p. 390>; chapter 4 (45-86), “the canterbury pilgrims,” from his “the rival canterbury pilgrims of blake and cromek: herculean figures in the carpet,” modern philology (1988) <bbs p. 619> and “thomas stothard’s the pilgrimage to canterbury (1806): a study in promotion and popular taste,” chaucer illustrated: five hundred years of the canterbury tales in pictures, ed. william k. finley and joseph rosenblum (2003) <blake (2004), under stothard in division ii>; chapter 5 (87-106), “the chalcographic society,” from his “the context of blake’s ‘public address’: cromek and the chalcographic society,” philological quarterly (1981) <bbs p. 618>; chapter 6 (107-26), “reliques of burns,” from his “practicing ‘the necessity of purification’: cromek, roscoe, and reliques of burns,” studies in bibliography 35 (1982): 306-19; and chapter 7 (127-40), “remains of nithsdale and galloway song,” from his “cromek, cunningham, and remains of nithsdale and galloway song: a case of literary duplicity,” studies in bibliography 40 (1987): 175-87. the work was some time in gestation; it was described as “in the press” in bbs pp. 22, 30. review §karen junod, review of english studies 63 (april 2012): 337-39. §redondo, josé. “nóesis, nous poietikós, póiesis, poesía. acercamiento, desde la intuición creativa en plotino, a algunos aspectos del pensamiento poético moderno (blake, shelley, el surrealismo, heidegger y paz).” anuario de filosofía 1 (2007): 109-24. in spanish. ripley, wayne c. “‘in great forwardness’?: 1798 advertisements for volume two of william blake’s night thoughts.” notes and queries 256 (ns 58).1 (march 2011): 57-59. discovery of advertisements for blake’s night thoughts in the true briton (31 march 1798) and the times (9, 11 july 1798) referring to “the second part, which is in forwardness” (true briton) or even “in great forwardness” (times), though it was never published. ripley, wayne c. “william blake and the hunt circle.” studies in romanticism 50.1 (spring 2011): 173-93. an essay built on [leigh hunt’s] “account of a familiar spirit,” reflector (1811), for which he discovered a reprint in the analectic magazine (1814). *ripley, wayne c., and justin van kleeck, eds. editing and reading blake. 2010. <blake (2011)> review nelson hilton (see blake 45.3, above). rix, robert. “magnetic cure in william blake’s the french revolution.” explicator (2010) <blake (2011)§> “orleans … breath’d on them” (the members of the national assembly), and they respond as if mesmerized. roberts, jonathan. blake. wordsworth. religion. 2010. <blake (2011)§> mark knight and emma mason. “series editors’ preface.” viii. christopher rowland. “foreword.” xi. it is “a study of ‘religion’ in a blake text [“to my friend butts i write”] and in a wordsworth text [an extract from the excursion]” (1, 4). robinson, henry crabb. blake, coleridge, wordsworth, lamb, etc. ed. edith j. morley. 1922, 1932. <bb #2533> c. 1998. <blake (2002)§> d. §ithaca: cornell university library, 2010. rong, xiao-ju. “qian xi ‘xiao hei hai’ [an analysis of ‘the little black boy’].” xue zhou kan [learning weekly] no. 5 (2011): 194. in chinese. a running commentary on blake’s poem. §rovira, james. blake and kierkegaard: creation and anxiety. 2010. <blake (2011)§> it is based on his thesis, “kierkegaard, creation anxiety, and william blake’s early illuminated books” (2008) <blake (2009)§> review kathryn freeman (see blake 45.3, above). *rowland, christopher. blake and the bible. new haven: yale university press, 2011. 4o, xx, 289 pp., 27 “illustrations” (in black and white), 25 “plates” (in color); isbn: 9780300112603. a careful account of blake in a theological context. “blake deserves to be considered as one of the foremost english biblical interpreters” (xii). the enthusiastic moravian church of blake’s mother is barely mentioned. the reproductions include all the job engravings (22) and enoch drawings (5). there are design-by-design accounts of job (chapters 2-3 [13-72]) and “the enoch drawings” (106-18). reviews shirley dent, times literary supplement 13 may 2011: 26-27 (an “idiosyncratic take” which is “strangely unfulfilling”). §g. a. rosso, romantic circles (29 july 2011). §rowland, christopher. “william blake and ezekiel’s merkabah.” after ezekiel: essays on the reception of a difficult prophet. ed. andrew mein and paul m. joyce. new york: t. & t. clark–continuum, 2011. library of hebrew bible/old testament studies 535. 229-46 (chapter 13). note also his “ezekiel’s merkavah in the work of william blake and christian art,” the book of ezekiel and its influence, ed. henk de jonge and johannes tromp (2007) <blake (2008)§> rudd, margaret e. divided image: a study of william blake and w. b. yeats. 1953, 1970. <bb #2585> review §new statesman and nation 45 (1953). §ryu, son-moo. “william blake: the transgression of the sublime.” [eighteenth-century english literature] 7.1 (2010): 59-94. sahm, danielle. “contrary to expectations: exploring blake’s contraries in david almond’s skellig.” children’s literature (2010) <blake (2011)§> “david almond places blake at the center of his novel skellig” (115), particularly with respect to contraries. §saklofske, jon. “newradial: revisualizing the blake archive.” poetess archive journal 2.1 (2010). §saklofske, jon. “remediating william blake: unbinding the network architectures of blake’s songs.” european romantic review 22.3 (2011): 381-88. sato, hikari. “meiji taisho kino william blake shoshi gakusha tachi—yanagi muneyoshi, jugaku bunsho, sangu makoto: william blake bibliographers in japan in the 1910s and the 1920s—yanagi muneyoshi, jugaku bunsho, and sangu makoto.” choiki bunka kagaku kiyo: interdisciplinary cultural studies no. 16 (2011): 107-59. in japanese. with a chronological table (123-59) on the reception of blake in japan from 1893 to 1929 based on jugaku’s bibliography (1929) and sangu’s list (1929) with necessary amendments. (this is an extremely impressive list of 515 publications in japan, including details of individual blake poems and designs printed; many of these publications do not appear in g. e. bentley, jr., with keiko aoyama, blake studies in japan: a bibliography of works on william blake published in japan 1893–1993 [1994] <blake (1995)>). yanagi’s william blake (1914) in japanese was sent by yanagi with a manuscript inscription to sampson (10 aug. 1915) and by him to keynes in 1919; this copy is now in cambridge university library. sato, hikari. “naze ‘entotsu’ wo yakusanakattanoka—sangu makoto yaku blake senshu to meiji taisho kino blake rikai: why did he not translate ‘chimney’ into japanese?: the translation of blake by sangu makoto and the reception of blake in japan in the early twentieth century.” igirisu roman ha kenkyu: essays in english romanticism no. 35 (2011): 1-14. in japanese with an english abstract. “the chimney sweeper” was translated by sangu as “the dust sweeper” in japanese because traditional japanese houses did not have chimneys. sato, hikari. “william blake kara miki rofu e—muku to keiken no uta no hensokyoku: miki rofu inspired by william blake—a variation on songs of innocence and of experience.” hikaku bungaku: journal of comparative literature 53 (2010): 7-20. in japanese with an english abstract (20). saunders, john. cabinet pictures of english life. london: charles knight & co., 1845. <bodleian> in the courtyard of the tabard is a “waggon-office,” and immediately over this office, in the centre of the gallery, is a picture, said to be by blake, and ‘well-painted,’*the asterisk refers to a footnote, “*gentleman’s magazine, 1812.” see g. e. bentley, jr., “pictura ignota: blake’s most seen, least known painting,” descant (2010) <blake (2011)>. of the canterbury pilgrimage, though now so dirty or decayed that the subject itself is hardly discernible. (21) *schuchard, marsha keith. why mrs. blake cried: william blake and the sexual basis of spiritual vision. 2006. <blake (2007)> review §adrián muñoz, “la mística erótica de blake,” acta poetica 30.1 (2009): 379-84 (in spanish). *schulz, max f. “blake and the unending dialectic of earth and eden.” paradise preserved: recreations of eden in eighteenthand nineteenth-century england. 1985. <bbs p. 635> b. §2009 (paperback, print on demand). §sha, richard c. “blake, liberation and medicine.” liberating medicine, 1720-1835. ed. tristanne connolly and steve clark. london: pickering & chatto, 2009. the enlightenment world no. 10. chapter 6. shah, bhilal a. “understanding and sense: investigating william blake’s ‘ah! sunflower.’” lethbridge undergraduate research journal 4.1 (jan. 2009). shan, jun, and guang-ming kang. “wei lian bu lai ke ‘sao yan cong de xiao hai’ yu xiang xue jie du [a reading of william blake’s ‘the chimney sweeper’ from the perspective of graphetics].” wen xue jie [literary circles] no. 3 (2011): 52-53. in chinese. an attempt to read “the chimney sweeper” from experience by studying elements of its graphic design such as the use of various punctuation marks and of upper and lower cases and by interpreting what the graphic pattern means. (“graphetics” seems to be the study of the shape, size, and use of space in writing.) shi, xiao-jing, and yuan xu. “bu lai ke ‘lun dun’ de yi xiang fen xi [an analysis of the use of imagery in blake’s ‘london’].” ke jiao wen hui [essays on science and education] no. 5 (2010): 68-69. in chinese. a brief comment on blake’s use of “visual and acoustic imageries” in “london.” shin, eui-sun. [“‘the real self-discovery’ in poems text of eastern and western: in wangwei’s, han yong-woon’s and w. blake’s” [sic]]. [chinese literature research] 69 (2011): 225-42. in korean. §shin, na kyung. [“a study on the sublime and imagination in william blake’s painting.”] [journal of aesthetics and science of art] 31 (2010): 337-72. in korean. *shipp, horace. “william blake makes a minority report.” the british masters: a survey and guide. [1934]. <bbs p. 633, blake (2009)> bbs gives the page numbers as 96-112; “william blake makes a minority report” is 96-107 and “the tail of the comet,” about blake’s followers linnell, calvert, palmer, and richmond, is 108-12. shu, hui-xiang, and ying yang. “shi lun wei lian bu lai ke bi xia de he xie shi jie [on the harmonious world in william blake’s writings].” xian dai jiao ji [modern communications] no. 316 (2011): 51, 50. a comment on the happy harmony among god, men, and all others in the world created by blake, suggesting that harmony balances innocence and experience in man’s soul. §silva, maurício, and márcia moreira pereira. “crítica social e história em william blake e charles dickens.” revista e-scrita: revista do curso de letras da uniabeu 2.5 (2011): 123-35. in portuguese. *sklar, susanne m. blake’s jerusalem as visionary theatre: entering the divine body. oxford: oxford university press, 2011. oxford theological monographs. 4o, xvii, 310 pp.; isbn: 9780199603145. “blake’s tantalizing words become comprehensible when they are heard. … blake’s language and imagery started making sense: the spoken words were transformational” (147). stephens, frederick g. “some remarks upon the life of b. r. haydon, historical painter.” crayon 3.2 (feb. 1856): 46-48. a review of tom taylor’s biography of haydon. “the first great english designer, blake, was slowly starving, known to few, and still less appreciated than now” (46). stephens wrote briefly about blake in 1867, 1872, and 1875 <bb #2753-54, 1331>, and herbert palmer gave stephens blake’s set of aeschylus, tragedies (1779) on 15 july 1890. *storch, margaret. sons and adversaries: women in william blake and d. h. lawrence. 1990. <bbs p. 647> review §lydia blanchard, modern fiction studies 38.2 (summer 1992): 513-14. §stroe, mihai a. “mistica viziunii în opera profetică a lui william blake, între imaginația divină și rațiunea științifică.” text și discurs religios 1 (2009): 321-33. in romanian, with an english abstract. §stumpf, claudia. “lions of flaming fire: the violence of meaning in william blake.” literary and poetic representations of work and labor in europe and asia during the romantic era: charting a motif across boundaries of culture, place, and time. ed. christopher r. clason and robert f. anderson. lewiston: edwin mellen press, 2011. su, fang. “zhuang sheng meng die yu wei lian bu lai ke de cang ying zhi yu [zhuang zi’s butterfly dream and william blake’s metaphorical fly].” he tian shi fan zhuan ke xue xiao xue bao [journal of hetian normal school] 29, no. 68 (july 2010): 74-75. in chinese. a comparison of the differences in the notions of freedom in zhuang zi and blake. su, jing, and ben-biao yao. “ying guo lang man zhu yi sheng tai ge zhe zhi qian qu—bu lai ke [on blake: an ecological pioneer among the english romantic poets].” nei meng gu nong ye da xue xue bao (she hui ke xue ban) [journal of the inner mongolia agricultural university (social sciences edition)] 13, no. 57 [ns no. 3] (2011): 360-61. in chinese. a comment on blake’s ecological ethics in his nature poems; he “is against industrialization,” “longs to return to nature,” and “wishes for a harmonious co-existence shared by humans and animals.” sun, yong-fang. “cong ‘ye hua’ yi xiang kan bu lai ke dui chen meng jia shi ge de ying xiang [the influence of blake’s use of imagery in ‘the wild flower’s song’ upon the poems of meng-jia chen].” anhui wen xue [anhui journal of literature] no. 2 (2010): 80-81. in chinese. a comment on the use of wildflower imagery in blake’s “the wild flower’s song” and meng-jia chen’s “a wild flower,” suggesting that the chinese poet was influenced by the british poet. *sung, mei-ying. william blake and the art of engraving. 2009. <blake (2010)> review §alexander gourlay, studies in romanticism 49.3 (fall 2010): 518-23. *suzuki, masashi. “reynolds to blake no marginalia [marginalia by reynolds and blake].” albion 56 (2010): 46-73. in japanese. symington, andrew james. the beautiful in nature, art, and life. 2 vols. london: longman, brown, green, longmans, and roberts, 1857. <michigan> b. §[whitefish, montana]: kessinger, 2010. [mozart’s] wife constance weber ... was a very angel of goodness to him. seldom have artists been so singularly happy in their choice; we are reminded of the perfect sympathies existing between william blake the painter and his beloved kate—of john flaxman the sculptor ....” (2: 57-58). an unnamed “schoolboy” “would hear blake’s happy ‘songs of innocence,’ or the child piping in sir philip sydney’s arcadia, ‘as if he would never grow old!’” (2: 130). according to the index in vol. 2, at 1: 336 is a reference to “blake, flaxman, and stothard,” which i have not seen. symington was born in 1825. §tahvildary, negin. “poetry and the sensitive world: a comparative perspective on the poetic course of sohrab sepehry, arthur rimbaud and william blake.” new readings 7 (2004). sepehry is an iranian poet. tang, mei-xiu. “wei lian bu lai ke: wen huka bian yuan de lǚ bing zhe [william blake: a culturally marginalized rope-walker].” changsha li gong da xue xue bao (she hui ke xue ban) [journal of changsha university of sciences and technology (social sciences edition)] 25.2 (march 2010): 97-101. in chinese. an analysis of “the tyger” and “the lamb” in terms of “the eastern cognitive aesthetic perspective of heart-object monism.” §tatlack, r. r. “blake as an artist. his unique position.” daily telegraph [london] (1927). <bbs p. 657 under tatlock, no journal or date> see *anon., “blake remembered after a century,” above. §*tavares, enéias farias. “uma canção de liberdade, de william blake: discurso profético e tradução poética.” scientia traductionis [brazil] 7 (2010): 166-79. in portuguese. about “a song of liberty” from marriage. §teskey, gordon. “milton and the romantics.” a companion to romantic poetry. ed. charles mahoney. chichester: wiley-blackwell, 2011. blackwell companions to literature and culture. 425-42 (chapter 25). blake is on 434-38. §thomas, troy. “william blake and dead man.” adaptation 5.1 (2012): 57-87. tian, qing. “bu lai ke ‘tyger! tyger!’ yi shi de wan mei dui chen [the perfect symmetry of blake’s poem ‘the tyger’].” shang qiu zhi ye ji shu xue yuan xue bao [journal of shangqiu vocational and technical college] 10, no. 55 (aug. 2011): 77-78. in chinese. a comment on the “perfect symmetry” in “sound,” “structure,” and “imagery” of “the tyger.” §[tilloch, alexander]. star [london, ed. alexander tilloch] 29 april 1800. in the context of a new spate of bank-note forgeries, tilloch’s proposal of 1797 for a forgery-proof bank note, “which was recommended by almost every eminent artist in the kingdom,” is summarized, with a list of signatories, including blake. all the information here derives from mark crosby, “blake and the banknote crises of 1797, 1800, and 1818,” under university of toronto quarterly, below. todd, ruthven. “handlist 49: university of leeds, the library, ms 470, blake letters and papers of ruthven todd.” digitized june 2004. 56 pp. over 300 letters from bentley, butlin, erdman, essick, paley, rosenwald, et al., plus miscellaneous papers, with index. §tomlins, christopher. “revolutionary justice in brecht, conrad, and blake.” law and literature 21.2 (summer 2009): 185-213. tsuchiya, shigeko. “urizen no sho ko—blake shinwa no shikori: on the book of urizen: a tumor in blake’s myth.” jinbunken kiyo: journal of the institute of cultural science, chuo university 71 (2011): 95-106. in japanese. §tucker, herbert f. epic: britain’s heroic muse 1790-1910. oxford: oxford university press, 2008. 62-75, 104-15, 169-77, and passim. university of toronto quarterly volume 80, number 4 (fall 2011) special issue: the william blake project, ed. karen mulhallen the color illustrations in the online version are particularly important for the essays on milton and remember me! karen mulhallen. “the william blake project.” 779-85. (“the william blake project” consists of blake in our time: essays in honour of g. e. bentley jr, ed. mulhallen [2010]; blake in our time: a symposium celebrating the future of blake studies and the legacy of g. e. bentley jr [28 aug. 2010], orchestrated by mulhallen; the symposium exhibition and the catalogue called remember me! blake in our time: a keepsake book in celebration of an exhibition and symposium on the life and art of william blake (1757-1827) [2010]; and this issue of the university of toronto quarterly.) *morton d. paley. “william blake’s milton/a poem and the miltonic matrix of 1791-1810.” 786-814. (especially about pictorial representations of milton and his daughters.) mark crosby. “blake and the banknote crises of 1797, 1800, and 1818.” 815-36. (a densely factual account of the bank-note crisis of 1797 with a new testimonial document signed by blake, plus unrecorded reuses of it in the new crises of 1800 and 1818.) susanne sklar. “‘in the mouth of a true orator’ (jerusalem’s operating instructions).” 837-57. (persuasive arguments that jerusalem “has been designed to be read aloud” and that the bellicose, ruthless “hand” in jerusalem is far more like the ruthless, bellicose general charles lennox, third duke of richmond [1735–1806], who was a magistrate at blake’s trial for sedition [1804] and who, according to hayley, was “bitterly prejudiced against blake” [br(2) 183], than he is like the pacific, humanitarian leigh hunt, who has been traditionally associated by scholars with hand.)blake was attacked in the examiner in 1808-09; he attacked the examiner and the three hunt brothers who conducted it in his public address (notebook p. 52); there is a three-headed figure on jerusalem pl. 50; three men with pointing hands on jerusalem pl. 93 are associated with the accusers of socrates; articles in the examiner by the hunts were often signed with a pointing hand. angus whitehead. “‘humble but respectable’: recovering the neighbourhood surrounding william and catherine blake’s last residence, no. 3 fountain court, strand, c. 1820-27.” 858-79. (a dense record of who lived in fountain court when the blakes did [1821-27], their ages, births, deaths, marriages, and, often, their occupations, though of course there is scarcely anything of their social intercourse.) *g. e. bentley, jr. “remember me! customs and costumes of blake’s gift book.” 880-92. (the 24 known copies of remember me! differ from one another in “the pattern of binding, colour of fore-edges, endpapers, and the decorated sleeve-case”; the “paucity of sales may be related to the fact that the publisher john poole had little experience of book distribution. his speciality was as a maker of marble paper and fancy pocket-books, not in selling them” [880].) mary lynn johnson. “‘catalogue of some of blake’s pictures at “the salterns”’: captain butts as exhibitor, litigator, and co-heir (with his sister blanche).” 893-917. (a prolifically factual account of the butts family and its blake collections 1863-1905. the essay includes a transcription of the salterns catalogue [1898] [914-15] and a “butts family genealogical chart” of “descendants of blake’s patrons, thomas & elizabeth butts” [916-17].) *garry leonard. “‘without contraries there is no progression’: cinematic montage and the relationship of illustration to text in william blake’s the [first] book of urizen.” 918-34. (“i am claiming” that blake’s “strategy” in his illustrations “is comparable to the cinematic technique of montage” [918].) wada, ayako. “victoria cho ni okeru blake revival—d. g. rossetti no hatashita yakuwari: d. g. rossetti’s contributions to the victorian blake revival.” tottori daigaku kyoiku center kiyo: tottori university education center bulletin 7 (2010): 121-31. in japanese. an interesting study but without reference to previous scholarship on the subject. wang, han. “xiao hai shi cheng ren de fu quin—lun qiao sou yu bu lai ke de si xiang gong xing he jiong yi xu shu [the child is father of the man: on the thematic resonance and narrative differences between chaucer and blake].” zhangzhou shi fan xue yuan xue bao (zhe xue she hui ke xue ban) [journal of zhangzhou normal university (philosophy and social sciences edition)] 79.1 (2011): 77-80. in chinese. a comparison of the images, structure, and diction in the canterbury tales and “the chimney sweeper” from innocence, saying that both authors “highlighted the value of feelings through the same image of ‘child.’” wang, wei. “tian zhen zhi ge yu jing yan zhi ge de dui li tong yi [unity of opposites in songs of innocence and songs of experience].” hubei di er shi fan xue yuan xue bao [journal of hubei university of education] 28.6 (june 2011): 6-8. in chinese. an analysis of “the contrasting settings and characters, images and symbols, and contrary tones and moods,” which are “complementary and necessary to human existence.” *wang, wei-bin. “bu lai ke de lun dun [blake’s london].” ying yu xue xi [english language learning] no. 11 (2010): 63-65. in chinese. a biographical sketch of blake, especially his london habitats: “28 broad st, soho, 13 hercules buildings, lambeth, no. 17 south molton [street], and bunhill fields” burying ground. wang, xia-chan. “gan shou can ku—cong xi ju feng ci de jiao du yue du wei lian bu lai ke de er tong shi ge [feeling the cruelty—reading william blake’s poems about children in light of dramatic irony].” wen jiao zi liao [data of culture and education] no. 11 (2010): 18-19. in chinese. a brief analysis of several instances of dramatic irony in “the chimney sweeper” in songs of experience. wang, xian-tao. “cong jie gou zhu yi ‘er yuan dui li’ jiao du fen xi bu lai ke de shi ge [an analysis of blake’s poems from the binary opposition of structuralism].” qing nian wen xue jia [young writers of literature] no. 3 (2011): 218. in chinese. an attempt to explain the binary opposition shared by roland barthes and william blake. wang, xiao-juan. “wei lian bu lai ke ‘hu’ de xiang zheng yi xiang qian xi [an analysis of william blake’s ‘tiger’].” da jia [great masters] no. 8 (2011): 8. in chinese. a commentary. wang, xue-ying. “‘lao hu’ de xiang si xing jie du [a reading of the linguistic iconicity of ‘the tyger’].” chang jiang da xue xue bao (she hui ke xue ban) [journal of yangtze university (social sciences edition)] 33.2 (april 2010): 128-29. in chinese. an attempt to apply charles s. peirce’s semiotic theory of trichotomy (representamen, object, and interpretant) to the understanding of blake’s poem. wang, zheng-wei. “‘gao yang’ yu ‘lao hu’: ye yuan dao liang yuan hua de yi wen [from ‘the lamb’ to ‘the tyger’: a query on blake’s philosophical movement from monism to dualism].” wen jiao zi liao [data of culture and education] no. 8 (2010): 24-25. in chinese. a brief discussion of how the innocence of “the lamb” turned into the experience of “the tyger,” suggesting that “they combine to symbolize the order of things in this world.” weng, chia-je. “natural religion and its discontents: critiques in blake and coleridge.” yale phd, 2011. in proquest. whitehead, angus. “‘i write in south molton street, what i both see and hear’: reconstructing william and catherine blake’s residence and studio at 17 south molton street, oxford street.” british art journal 11.2 (2010): 62-75. richly detailed and valuable. §*wilkins, ernest h. “blake’s drawing of dante’s celestial scaleo.” annual reports of the dante society no. 68-72 (1954): 35-42. §williams, rowan. “‘the human form divine’: radicalism and orthodoxy in william blake.” radical christian voices and practice: essays in honour of christopher rowland. ed. zoë bennett and david gowler. oxford: oxford university press, 2012. chapter 9. wilson, eric g. my business is to create: blake’s infinite writing. iowa city: university of iowa press, 2011. muse books: the iowa series in creativity and writing. tall narrow 8o, x, 102 pp.; isbn: 9781587299902. on the nature of blake’s literary creativity and how to write—and how wilson writes. *wright, julia m. blake, nationalism, and the politics of alienation. 2004. <blake (2005)> review §michael scrivener, english studies in canada 34.2-3 (june-sept. 2008): 274-77. xie, nan. “wen xue chang de zu zhi gong neng tan xi: yi bu lai ke she ge ‘lun dun’ wei li [the organizational function of the literary field and blake’s ‘london’].” bei fang wen xue [northern literature] no. 9 (2010): 23-25. in english, despite the title in chinese. an attempt to apply “pierre bourdieu’s theory of literary field” to the understanding of blake’s poem. xin, chao-wei. “qian xi bu lai ke ‘lao hu’ zhong de ‘han hun’ mei li [on the charismatic ‘ambiguity’ in blake’s ‘tyger’].” anhui wen xue [anhui journal of literature] no. 5 (2011): 38-39. in chinese. a comment on the multiple significances of the poem conveyed by its ambiguous expressions. xu, yi-wen. “ping ying shi ‘lao hu’ de liang pian yi wen [on two translations of the english poem ‘the tyger’].” shaanxi jiao yu (gao jiao) [education in shaanxi (higher education edition)] no. 9 (2011): 23, 27. in chinese. a commentary on translations of “the tyger” by mo-ruo guo and zhi-lin bian, “the best translations in china,” pointing out their weaknesses and concluding that guo’s version is “spiritually true to the original,” while bian’s is “literally appealing.” xu, ying-hong. “ying shi ‘bing mei gui’ shang xi [an appreciation of the english poem ‘the sick rose’].” mao ming xue yuan xue bao [journal of maoming university] 20.2 (april 2010): 34-36. in chinese. an analysis of the “prosody, image, and symbolism” in blake’s poem. yang, yan-ru. “bu lai ke bi xia de ling lei mei gui [a reading of blake’s unique roses].” yichun xue yuan xue bao [journal of yichun college] 33.6 (june 2011): 184-85. in chinese. a running commentary on the contrast between “the sick rose” and “my pretty rose tree,” suggesting that the former implies “the dandy’s debauchery and the maiden’s misery” and the latter hints at “how a dutiful husband resists temptation but is still misunderstood by his wife.” §*yoder, r. paul. the narrative structure of william blake’s poem jerusalem: a revisionist interpretation. 2010. <blake (2011)§> review *molly anne rothenberg (see blake 45.3, above). yorimitsu, akiyo. “blake no shishu muku to keiken no uta ni tsuite [on blake’s songs of innocence and of experience].” fumanisumusu [humanism] 22 (2011): 31-34. in japanese. yotsumoto, yasuhiro. “shin yaku meishi sho—mohitotsu no shi sagashi (16) yorokobi ga harami, kanashimi ga umi otosu—william blake hen [a selection of newly translated poems—another exploration for poetry (16) joy impregnates. sorrows bring forth—william blake].” gendai shi techo [monthly report on modern poetry] 52 (2009): 113-19. in japanese. zeng, ling-fu. “bu lai ke shi ge ‘lao hu’ de yong heng mei li yu qi yu yan de han hun [on the linguistic ambiguity in and lasting charm of blake’s poem ‘the tyger’].” yi bin xue yuan xue bao [journal of yibin university] 10.4 (april 2010): 70-73. in chinese. a discussion of how blake’s “linguistic ambiguity stimulates the reader’s interest and imagination” in “the tyger.” zhang, jing-shuang. “shi bi jiao shi ge ‘lun dun’ yu ‘wei si min si te da qiao you gan’ [a comparison of ‘london’ and ‘composed upon westminster bridge’].” ke jiao wen hui [essays on science and education] no. 9 (2010): 71-72. in chinese. a comment on the similarities and dissimilarities between the two poems. zhang, min. “‘lao hu’ de gong neng wen ti xue fen xi [an analysis of ‘the tyger’ in terms of linguistic function and literary style].” xian dai yu wen [modern chinese] no. 2 (2010): 19-22. in chinese. zhang, qiang, and zhi-yong zhu. “bu lai ke shi ge biao xian shou fa qian xi [an analysis of the poetic methods of blake].” ming zuo xin shang [masterpieces review] no. 6 (2011): 135-36. in chinese. a comment on blake’s use of contrast, repetition, and ambiguity in his poems. zhang, rui. “‘bing mei gui’: san chong yi yun de er yuan dui li [‘the sick rose’: the binary opposition within the triple implications].” luoyang li gong xue yuan xue bao [journal of luoyang institute of science and technology] 25.5 (oct. 2010): 27-29. in chinese. a reading of the poem; blake “manifests three binary oppositions: life instinct versus death instinct, sick culture versus free fighter, and the world of innocence versus the world of experience.” “in this imbalance of the binary opposition, the former is destined to be eroded, slaughtered, and replaced by the latter.” zheng, xiao-dong. “yin ying ban bo de ‘tian zhen’ zhi jing [shaded ‘innocence’—an analysis of the multiple meanings of ‘innocence’ in blake’s songs of innocence].” hua nan shi fan da xue xue bao (she hui ke xue ban) [journal of south china normal university (social sciences edition)] no. 3 (june 2010): 88-92. in chinese. the essay argues that “innocence” is a word of “multiple meanings” and that “the poet has a self-contradictory attitude toward ‘innocence.’” zhou, biao. “yong ren zhi yin yu shi du wei lian bu lai ke de shi ge ‘lao hu’ [unscrambling william blake’s ‘the tyger’ from the perspective of metaphor and cognition].” nanjing cai jing da xue xue bao [journal of nanjing university of finance and economics] no. 2 (feb. 2010): 106-08. in chinese. the essay attempts “to interpret the diverse meanings of the word ‘tiger’ from the perspectives of metaphor and cognition.” zhou, li. “qian xi wei lian bu lai ke shi ge de wen hua yi jing—kan wen hua shi ying xing yuan ze zai she ge fan yi zhong de yun yong [an analysis of the cultural imagination in blake’s poems and the use of the principle of cultural understanding in translation of poems].” sui yue [years] no. 1 (2010): 31, 36. in chinese. a brief discussion of the importance of “a translator’s understanding of the original work’s cultural background and significance.” zhu, zhi-yong. “bai tuo li xing de zhi ku, hui gui xiang xiang yu ji qing—xiang xiang zai bu lai ke shi ge zhong de zuo yong [get rid of the shackles of reason and return to imagination and passion—the role of imagination in blake’s poetry].” he bei bei fang xue yuan xue bao (she hui ke xue ban) [journal of hebei north university (social sciences edition)] 26.1 (feb. 2010): 17-19. in chinese. a commentary on “blake’s supernatural and magnificent imaginative world.” zhu, zhi-yong, and xiao-juan ning. “qian xi wei lian bu lai ke shi ge de zhu ti [a brief analysis of the themes of william blake’s poetry].” da jia [great masters] no. 3 (2010): 228. in chinese. a brief comment on the connection between blake’s themes and the change of times. zhu, zhi-yong, and ying-yan zhang. “wei lian bu lai ke shi ge de xiang zheng yi xiang qian xi [an analysis of symbolic imagery in william blake’s poems].” da jia [great masters] no. 9 (2010): 19. in chinese. *zuber, devin. “hieroglyphics of nature: swedenborg, ecology and romantic aesthetics.” city university of new york phd, 2010. full text in proquest. chapters 4-5 are about blake and emerson. division ii: blake’s circle barry, james (1741–1806) artist §bennett, susan, ed. cultivating the human faculties: james barry (1741–1806) and the society of arts. bethlehem: lehigh university press, 2008. 162 pp.; isbn: 9780934223966. susan bennett. “prologue.” helen clifford. “introduction.” david g. c. allan. “james barry (1741–1806): a biographical outline.” anne puetz. “the society and the ‘polite arts’ 1754–1778: ‘best drawings,’ ‘high’ art and designs for the manufactures.” martin myrone. “patriotism, virtue, and the problem of the hero: the society’s promotion of high art in the 1760s.” charlotte grant. “arts and commerce promoted: ‘female excellence’ and the society of arts’ ‘patriotic and truly noble purposes.’” andrea mackean. “making a place for ornament: the social spaces of the society of arts.” david g. c. allan. “the olympic victors: the third painting in barry’s series, the progress of human knowledge and culture.” william l. pressly. “elysium’s elite: barry’s continuing meditations on the society of arts murals.” john manning. “‘this slip of copper’: barry’s engraved detail of queen isabella, las casas and magellan.” william l. pressly. “a preparatory drawing for barry’s glorious sextumvirate rediscovered: the search for the seventh man.” william l. pressly. “barry’s medal for the society of arts: a celebration of the three kingdoms.” david g. c. allan. “epilogue: barry’s death and funeral.” butts, elizabeth (c. 1770–1851) wife of thomas, blake’s patron “mrs. elizabeth butts, grafton street, fitzroy square” subscribed to guido sorelli, isabella degli aldobrandi, tragedia (london: presso l’autore, 18, piccadilly; p. rolandi, dikes e cooper, e. miller, 1838) <harvard>. flaxman, john (1755–1826) sculptor, intimate friend of blake 2003 24 april–14 june david bindman, ed. john flaxman, 1755–1826, master of the purest line. 2003. <blake (2004)§> the exhibition section of the catalogue includes: “the exhibition at the strang print room university college, london: john flaxman and the process of sculpture.” 44-50. “the exhibition at sir john soane’s museum: john flaxman: the possibilities of outline.” 51-60. “other exhibits at university college, london: display cases, flaxman gallery and strang print room: the flaxman gallery from 1847 to the present day.” 61-67. 2009 9 april–12 july §sylvie tritz and hans-ulrich kessler. john flaxman und die renaissance: ein meister des klassizismus im diolog mit masaccio und donatello. john flaxman and the renaissance: a master of neo-classicism in dialogue with masaccio and donatello. berlin: skulpturensammlung und museum für byzantinische kunst, staatliche museen, 2009. in german and english. <blake (2010)§ (entry for exhibition only)> §bonfatti, rossella. “palinsesti danteschi di primo ottocento. ‘l’ atlante’ di flaxman nell’ edizione stella-pistrucci.” studi e problemi di critica testuale no. 82 (2011): 115-32. in italian. §brigstocke, hugh, eckart marchand, and alison wright. john flaxman and william young ottley in italy. wakefield: produced for walpole society by the charlesworth group, 2010. walpole society no. 72. church, rev. alfred j. stories from the greek tragedians, with twenty-four illustrations from designs by flaxman and others. london: seeley, jackson, & halliday, 1880. 4o. i found no indication as to which designs are supposed to be flaxman’s. §petherbridge, deanna. “some thoughts on flaxman and the engraved outlines.” print quarterly 28.4 (dec. 2011): 385-91. discusses flaxman’s engravers blake, neagle, parker, and piroli. fuseli, henry (1741–1825) painter, friend of blake andres, sophia. “narrative challenges to visual, gendered boundaries: mary shelley and henry fuseli.” journal of narrative theory 31.3 (2001): 257-82. balmanno, mrs. [mary]. “henry fuseli, esq., r.a.” pen and pencil. new york: d. appleton & co., 1858. 193-209. §baskcomb, camilla, and ute larsen. “henry fuseli: necessity or frugality? the artist’s selection of drawing papers.” journal of the institute of conservation 32.1 (2009): 15-29. §liberto, f. “shakespeare, fuseli, and problems of visual representation in romantic culture.” textus 24.1 (2011): 131-52. §patz, kristine. “representing satan/lucifer as anthropological and aesthetic paradox: henry fuseli’s milton gallery (1791-1799).” [southern arts journal] (taiwan) 2 (2011): 187-202. §pop, andrei octavian. “neopaganism: henry fuseli, theatre, and the cultural politics of antiquity, 1765-1825.” harvard phd, 2010. 398 pp. full text in proquest. §pop, andrei. “sympathetic spectators: henry fuseli’s nightmare and emma hamilton’s attitudes.” art history 34.5 (nov. 2011): 934-57. §smith, hester camilla. “artist as educator? assessing the pedagogic role of folly in the early work of the anglo-swiss artist henry fuseli (1741-1825).” paedagogica historica 46.5 (2010): 559-83. §smith, camilla. “between fantasy and angst: assessing the subject and meaning of henry fuseli’s late pornographic drawings, 1800-25.” art history 33.3 (june 2010): 420-47. §young, richard a. “‘verano,’ de julio cortázar, ‘the nightmare,’ de john henry fuseli, y ‘the judicious adoption of figures in art.’” revista canadiense de estudios hispánicos 17.2 (1993): 373-82. in spanish. hayley, william (1745–1820) man of letters and patron o’sullivan, margaret. “for derby museums and art gallery: [nine] letters from joseph wright of derby to william hayley and william long, c. 1782-89. bought for ₤15,000 with the aid of a grant of ₤1,500 from the friends of the national libraries.” friends of the national libraries annual report for 2010 (2011): 19-23. the letters, generously transcribed for me by lucy salt, keeper of art, derby museums and art gallery, contain no reference to blake or to the copy of poetical sketches (s) which flaxman gave hayley on 26 april 1784. palmer, samuel (1805–81) painter and disciple 1987 see 1987 in part iv. 2004 samuel palmer 1805-1881 visions of landscape: robin tanner 1904-1988. london: fine art society, 2004. 4o. 18 exhibits, 10 by palmer. §attlee, james. “extollagers in the valley of vision. memory, moonlight, and samuel palmer.” nocturne: a journey in search of moonlight. chicago: university of chicago press, 2011. 56-66. §barringer, tim. “‘i am a native, rooted here’: benjamin britten, samuel palmer and the neo-romantic pastoral.” art history 34.1 (feb. 2011): 126-65. campbell-johnston, rachel. mysterious wisdom: the life and work of samuel palmer. london: bloomsbury, 2011. 400 pp.; isbn: 9780747595878. review lisa hilton, “beneficent light,” times literary supplement 12 aug. 2011: 30 (correction by paul goldman, “samuel palmer,” times literary supplement 19 and 26 aug. 2011: 6). §sauvignon, karine. “le point du jour, par samuel palmer.” l’estampille/l’object d’art no. 452 (2009): 21-22. parker, james (1757–1805) engraver, blake’s partner in a print shop (1784–85) anon. “monthly retrospect of the fine arts.” monthly magazine 14, no. 6 (1 jan. 1803): 530-32. sir william beechey painted a very characteriſtic and ſpirited portrait of the preſent chancellor of the exchequer, which … is now engraving in ſtroke, in a very capital ſtyle, by mr. james parker, for meſſrs. boydell, and will be publiſhed in about four or five weeks. (531)in g. e. bentley, jr., “the journeyman and the genius: james parker and his partner william blake with a list of parker’s engravings,” studies in bibliography 49 (1996): 226, this is listed under 1800. the subject is the right hon. henry addington, viscount sidmouth, prime minister 1801-04. anon. “proceedings of learned societies, societies of the arts, etc.” philosophical magazine 16 (1803): 175-84. a section on the “chalcographic society, london” (177-78) includes a list of officers and committee members, including “james parker, esq.” bentley, g. e., jr. “the journeyman and the genius: james parker and his partner william blake with a list of parker’s engravings.” studies in bibliography 49 (1996): 208-31. robert n. essick has discovered the following engravings by parker not recorded in bentley: “fainasollis, borbar & fingal” (1809) <bentley records only boydell, 1783> akenside, mark, pleasures of imagination (1806, 1810) <bentley records only 1795, 1796, 1803> armstrong, john, the art of preserving health (1796) <bentley records only 1795> collins, william, poetical works (sharpe, 1804) <bentley records only 1792, 1802> falconer, william, the shipwreck (1802, 1806, 1811) <bentley records only 1796, 1800> lodge, edmund, portraits of illustrious personages of great britain, 12 vols. (1823-35), 4 pls. <nb: parker died in 1805> macneil, hector, poetical works, 2 vols. (1802) pope, alexander, an essay on man (1796) robertson, william, history of scotland during the reigns of queen mary and of king james vi, 3 vols. (1797) rogers, samuel, the pleasures of memory (1803) <bentley records only 1801, 1802, 1806> shakespeare, william, plays, 12 vols. (1807) bryan, michael. dictionary of painters and engravers. new ed. vol. 1. london: george bell and sons, 1886. richard golding (b. 1785) was transferred as an apprentice in 1804 from [john] pass [of 4 chapel street, pentonville, fl. 1799-1805] to james parker (581).there is no appropriate golding or pass in stationers’ company apprentices 1701-1800, ed. d. f. mckenzie (oxford: oxford bibliographical society, 1978); details of pass come from ian maxted, the london book trades 1775-1800: a preliminary checklist of members (folkestone: dawson, 1977). stedman, john gabriel (1744–97) soldier of fortune §*kim, eun ryung. “[a travel writing as cultural translation: focusing on stedman’s narrative of a five years’ expedition].” [english language and literature studies] 51.4 (2009): 157-173. in korean. stedman’s “text … is a representation itself of cultural hybridity of contact zone.” senior, emily. “‘perfectly whole’: skin and text in john gabriel stedman’s narrative of a five years expedition against the revolted negroes of surinam.” eighteenth-century studies (2010) <blake (2011)§> a meticulous medical record. stothard, thomas (1755–1834) painter, early friend of blake §allen, regulus. “‘the sable venus’ and desire for the undesirable.” studies in english literature 51.3 (summer 2011): 667-91. about stothard’s engraved design. balmanno, mrs. [mary]. “thomas stothard, esq., r.a.” pen and pencil. new york: d. appleton & co., 1858. 182-89. kimber, mr. the life and adventures of joe thompson. a narrative founded on fact. london: harrison and co., 1783. <victoria university in the university of toronto> there are 5 prints after stothard’s designs. the format is that of harrison’s novelist’s magazine. §wyon, l. c. a bronze medal (5.7 cm. in diameter) representing stothard, with his canterbury pilgrims design on the reverse, was designed by l. c. wyon for the art union of london (1880) (british historical medals: bhm 3080). tatham, frederick (1805–78) sculptor and disciple anon. standard 22 july 1878. “july 13, after a short illness, at 45, oak village, n.w., frederick tatham, aged 73, eldest son of the late c. heathcote tatham.” §curtis, henry. “frederick tatham’s wife.” notes and queries 153 (1927): 9. “can any reader supply the dates of marriage and death, as also the parentage and maiden name of the wife of frederick tatham …?” none did so in notes and queries. new night thoughts sightings new night thoughts sightings by wayne c. ripley wayne c. ripley (wripley@winona.edu) is an associate professor of english at winona state university in minnesota. he is the co-editor of editing and reading blake with justin van kleeck for romantic circles. he has written on blake and edward young. to my list of catalogue references to blake’s night thoughts, which was augmented by g. e. bentley, jr.,wayne c. ripley, “printed references to and known prices of blake’s night thoughts, 1796–1826,” blake 43.2 (fall 2009): 72-75; g. e. bentley, jr., “sales and collection records, 1798–1840,” in “william blake and his circle: a checklist of publications and discoveries in 2010,” blake 45.1 (summer 2011): 18-19. should be added eight new listings. perhaps the most important is the february 1800 auction catalogue for the library of george galwey mills: a catalogue of a large, extensive, and valuable parcel of books, in every science, and in most languages; being the genuine library of george galwey mills, esq. (gone to the west indies) … which will be sold by auction, by mr. jeffery, at no. 11 pall-mall, on monday, the 24th of february, 1800, and the twelve following days, (sundays excepted.).the text is available via ecco. the other listings are found in google books. mills is best known as the owner of the sherborne missal,janet backhouse, the sherborne missal (toronto: university of toronto press, 1999) 56-57. which was sold at the 1800 auction for £215. the goal of the auction seems to have been quick cash for mills’s move to his family’s plantation on st. christopher.for mills’s financial situation, see backhouse 60. night thoughts is lot 457: “young’s night thoughts, finely printed, folio 1797,” and the handwritten note in the margin records that it was purchased for 10s. (30).the following item, granger’s biographical history of england, is also numbered 457. what is noteworthy in the description of the book is the fact that blake’s illustrations are not mentioned. blake’s edition was the only folio of night thoughts published (and certainly the only one in 1797). in addition, the book is classified under the category “miscellaneous, including the english classics” and not under “natural history, and books of prints,” which includes other well-illustrated books, most of which are folios. moreover, because mills was desperate for cash, the presence of any plates and other potentially lucrative bibliographic details are carefully noted in both categories. it is possible, therefore, that the catalogue describes the unillustrated state of night thoughts, first noticed by bentley in 1980.bentley, “young’s night thoughts (london: r. edwards, 1797): a new unillustrated state,” blake 14.1 (summer 1980): 34-35. whether or not this is the case, mills did know at least one of the edwardses, and his bookplate is found in a copy of junius’s stat nominis umbra, 2 vols. (london: t. bensley, 1796-97), with the inscription “1796 b[ough]t. of edwards.”bloomsbury auctions: <http://​www.​bloomsburyauctions.​com/​cms/​pages/​lot/​352/​263>. as bentley notes, the initials “j / e”, james edwards, appear on the inner front cover of the unillustrated night thoughts. as my discovery of the advertisements for volume 2 suggests, james may have been more involved in the production and distribution of the book than has been recognized.ripley, “‘in great forwardness’?: 1798 advertisements for volume two of william blake’s night thoughts,” notes and queries 58.1 (2011): 57-59. unfortunately, if mills did, in fact, own the unillustrated copy, the sales catalogue explains neither why he did so nor why the copy was created in the first place. the second new listing occurs in a catalogue of books, for the year 1807, … by cuthell & martin, middle row, holborn (london: n.d.). it is lot 960: “young’s night thoughts, beautifully printed, with engravings round the letter press, part i, all that was ever published, 15s — 1797” (39). what is painfully significant here is that blake’s name is not mentioned as either the designer or engraver, even as robert cromek was publicly trying to puff up blake’s status as a designer while privately denigrating his engraving skills. the catalogue offers many other editions of night thoughts, and the listing for an 1802 reprint of thomas stothard’s illustrations does mention his name. like the mills listing, cuthell and martin’s listing emphasizes the beauty of the printing. it also confirms that there were no more volumes. the third listing appears in a catalogue of the library of the late sir h [enry]. c [harles]. englefield, bart. … which will be sold by auction, by mr. stanley ([london], 1833). the copy is lot 1135, and it has a minimal description: “young’s night thoughts, illustrated by blake” (52). the catholic englefield (1752–1822) belonged to many scientific and artistic societies, including the society of antiquaries, the geological society, and the society of dilettanti. he also served as the antiquary for the royal academy, and his works were on display there between 1787 and 1789 (odnb). the fourth and fifth references are in the collection catalogues of richard heber and edward littledale. heber’s vast collection was sold at several auctions, spread over more than a year, and the night thoughts listing is found in bibliotheca heberiana. catalogue of the library of the late richard heber, esq. part the seventh, removed from his house at pimlico. which will be sold by auction, by mr. evans ([london], 1835). it is lot 6789: “young’s (e.) night thoughts, with blake’s designs, 1797” (305). littledale’s copy is in the catalogue of the library of the late edward littledale, esq. … sold by auction by mr. evans ([london], 1837), lot 2890: “young’s night thoughts, plates by blake, 1797” (124). heber’s and littledale’s copies are significant because both collectors were members of the roxburghe club, as were fellow night thoughts owners t. f. dibdin and francis wrangham. dibdin belonged to the roxburghe club from its founding in 1812 until 1843, and served as the club’s secretary. he met blake in 1816 and owned several copies of the illuminated books, but it is not known which copy of night thoughts he owned. heber was also an original member of the roxburghe club, while littledale joined in 1813. dibdin had a great interest in heber’s collection, and after heber’s death he played a major role in organizing and cataloguing the collection until the latter’s sister dismissed him for unknown reasons.arnold hunt, “the sale of richard heber’s library,” under the hammer: book auctions since the seventeenth century, ed. robin myers, michael harris, and giles mandelbrote (new castle [delaware]: oak knoll press; london: british library, 2001) 143-71. wrangham was a relative latecomer to the club, joining in 1822, but like dibdin, he would have brought a great deal of information about blake. in addition to his copy of night thoughts, wrangham also owned the descriptive catalogue, the illustrations to hayley’s designs to a series of ballads, blair’s the grave, and the engravings of job.bentley, blake books supplement (oxford: clarendon press, 1995) 284. his own copy of night thoughts may have been obtained quite early, since he knew richard edwards, who published his reform: a farce (london, 1792) and sold copies of his restoration of the jews (cambridge, 1795). reform was a satire of thomas paine written under the pseudonym “s[amuel]. foote, jr.,” which shows that wrangham placed himself in the tradition of the comic playwright samuel foote (bap. 1721–1777), whom blake would attack in jerusalem for his parodies of methodism. in light of blake’s later enmity to foote, it may be significant that reform makes a hostile reference to his and fuseli’s “fertilization of egypt,” which had been published in erasmus darwin’s botanic garden. attributing the design to fuseli alone, wrangham claims that what he calls “the fertilization of nile” was “borrowed from the jupiter pluvius of the columna antoniniana,” an engraving of which, in pieter burman’s petronii arbitri satyricôn (1709), wrangham reproduces to indicate the obvious borrowings.[wrangham], reform: a farce (london, 1792) 6. since he makes no reference to blake in the passage, however, how much knowledge he possessed of blake at this date is unclear. in addition to his early connections to edwards, wrangham was a promoter of leigh hunt, providing moral support at the time of his government prosecutionsee wrangham’s 29 december 1808 letter of support to hunt in the correspondence of leigh hunt, vol. 1 (london: smith, elder and co., 1862) 44-45. and making solicitations on behalf of the examiner (odnb). given his interest in the examiner, it is likely that he read robert hunt’s reviews of the grave and the 1809 exhibition, which he may have attended, and his job impressions suggest that he maintained an interest in collecting blake’s commercially available works. since neither heber nor littledale owned other works by blake, it is probable that their connection to dibdin or wrangham accounts for their possession of night thoughts. moreover, the ownership of night thoughts by four members of the roxburghe club provides a new context for dibdin’s widely reprinted remarks on the illustrations. these were first printed in the library companion, published two years after wrangham had joined the club: wherefore is it, that i love to read that portion of the poem, published in a folio form, with bizarre but original and impressive ornaments by blake? at times, the pencil of the artist* attains the sublimity of the poet: and it is amidst the wild uproar of the wintry elements—when piping winds are howling for entrance round every corner of the turretted chamber, and the drifted snow works its way into the window casement, however closely fastened—it is in moments like these that i love to open that portion of the text of young which has been embellished by the pencil of blake. my friends will laugh .. peradventure deride .. but let us all be endured in these venial moments of hallucination. the soul of poetry itself (we are told) is fiction: and i would feign happiness at such moments.dibdin, the library companion (london, 1824) 734. dibdin’s note refers to isaac d’israeli’s blake collection: my friend mr. d’israeli possesses the largest collection of any individual of the very extraordinary drawings of mr. blake; and he loves his classical friends to disport with them, beneath the lighted argand lamp of his drawing room, while soft music is heard, upon the several corridores [sic] and recesses of his enchanted staircase. meanwhile the visitor turns over the contents of the blakëan portefeuille. heber, littledale, wrangham, and other club members may have been among the “friends” who derided dibdin’s dreamy admiration of blake or among the visitors who floated about d’israeli’s private exhibitions of blake’s works. where heber and littledale obtained their copies is unclear, but it may suggest that alexander akehurst’s 1824 claim that copies were “now reposing in the warehouses of some of the london booksellers” has some validity.bentley, blake records, 2nd ed. (new haven: yale university press, 2004) 388. the sixth new listing is in an advertisement for the saturday, 10 november 1838 issue of the athenaeum, no. 576. the copy was offered by john bryant at the camden’s head, 9 king william street, and the advertisement reads: “young’s night thoughts, with blake’s curious designs, imp. 4to. large paper, half blue mor. 1l. 16s. 1797.” four previous listings had also described the illustrations as “curious.” the seventh listing is in a sotheby auction catalogue dated 20 november 1839. three collections were offered: one of a deceased clergyman, one of a deceased gentleman, and a third whose owner is not described. this last was the prize collection, with its key items, like audubon’s prints, highlighted on the title page. blake’s night thoughts was in this collection, listed as lot 417: “young’s night thoughts, with engravings after blake 1797” (15). the error in not attributing the engravings to blake may suggest that the compiler was familiar with the grave, since blake did not engrave his designs in that work. coincidentally, in the copy of the catalogue held by the bodleian and available through google books, the title page contains the signature of “rev dr bandinel,” the longtime bodleian librarian, who was also a member of the roxburghe club (1839–58). bandinel’s membership commenced the year of the catalogue, and he was also an acquaintance of isaac d’israeli.marc vaulbert de chantilly, “property of a distinguished poisoner: thomas griffiths wainewright and the griffiths family library,” under the hammer 130. i have not been able to access the catalogue of bandinel’s own extensive collection to see if he owned any blake items. the final new listing can be found in the literary advertisements to the gentleman’s magazine for december 1839. the copy was offered by j. f. setchel, no. 23 king street, covent garden. it was listed as lot 747: “young’s night thoughts, with blake’s designs, fol. 35s. hf.-bd. 1797” (13). this listing also emphasizes blake’s designs over the engravings. blake 55.3 winter 2021–22 blake in europe, edited by sibylle erle angela esterhammer, victoria college, university of toronto nelson hilton, university of georgia tilar j. mazzeo, colby college robert w. rix, university of copenhagen joseph viscomi, university of north carolina at chapel hill david worrall, the nottingham trent university martin butlin, tate gallery, london, retired tristanne j. connolly, university of waterloo detlef w. dörrbecker, university of trier sibylle erle, bishop grosseteste university robert n. essick, university of california, riverside a d v i s o r y b o a r d a n i l l u s t r a t e d q u a r t e r l y volume 55 number 3 winter 2021–22 introduction to see the worlds of a grain of sand: blake and reception by sibylle erle part i william blake’s black bible as a spectacle of doom: a recent note to blakean reception in romania by cătălin ghiță “i inhabited the land of ulro long before blake taught me its proper name”: czesław miłosz’s ziemia ulro/the land of ulro by eliza borkowska reading revolutions: corrado costa’s william blake in beulah, a visionary cartoon essay in 1977 italy by luisa calè the mental travellers: on blake’s reception by nikolai gumilyov by vera serdechnaia part ii “re-mediating” william blake in croatia and serbia by tanja bakić “sick as a rose”: william blake in leopoldo maría panero’s poetry of experience by cristina flores portuguese readings of william blake: fernando pessoa, a national poet, and três tristes tigres, a pop-rock band by alcinda pinheiro de sousa, cláudia franco souza, and joão carlos callixto “blake was a phenomenon”: artistic, domestic, and blakean visions in joseph paul hodin’s writing on else and ludwig meidner by sibylle erle © 2022 copyright morris eaves and morton d. paley cover: detail of europae academiae, engraved by william kip, 1602, hand colored. yale center for british art, paul mellon collection. rare books and manuscripts, g1807 .k4 1605. e d i t o r s editors: morris eaves and morton d. paley review editor: alexander s. gourlay exhibitions editor: luisa calè bibliographer (criticism): wayne c. ripley bibliographer (music): jason whittaker managing editor: sarah jones sarah.jones@rochester.edu production office: department of english, university of rochester, rochester ny 14627-0451 review: saree makdisi, reading william blake saree makdisi. reading william blake. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2015. xii + 137 pp. £30.99/​$45.99, hardcover; £12.99/​$19.99, paperback; $15.00, e-book. reviewed by andrew lincoln andrew lincoln is currently working on the culture of war in the long eighteenth century, a project that grew out of his researches on william blake and walter scott. he is an emeritus professor of the school of english and drama, queen mary university of london. this is a brief introduction to blake that novices and seasoned blakeans alike will enjoy and learn from. saree makdisi has the interests of the reader, and the process of reading, constantly in mind. he manages in a short space to elucidate a series of challenging ideas and gives a compelling sense of blake’s relevance to the modern world. aware that most readers are likely to encounter blake’s poetry initially through the songs of innocence and of experience, he has focused each chapter on a reading of one of the songs, moving from particulars to the questions they pose and then to other works by blake, gradually taking the reader from simpler to more complex issues. as a result, his explanations of difficult blakean themes are invariably easy to follow. the book is a celebration of blake rather than a critique. it always expresses the critic’s own admiration and communicates this warmly to the reader. a central concern is the difference between two approaches to reading: an authoritarian approach that would encourage a monopoly on interpretation available only to “an initiated and licensed elite,” and an alternative approach that regards authority as “something to avoid” and interpretation as “open to all” (29). these alternatives have counterparts in two kinds of text: one that makes us treat it as a sacred object to be decoded only by “a priestly or scholarly hierarchy,” and a “decentralized text”—epitomized by the blakean illuminated book—that encourages us to generate meanings freely. but alternative views of human existence are also at stake here, since makdisi argues that “the material form … of blake’s work embodies or expresses his understanding of our very being” (70). the blakean ideal is a joyous, expansive, collective mode of being “in which oppositions between internal and external forces … break down as the uncontained energy of life and being exceeds the parameters of individual selves” (54). this stands in stark contrast to a repressive view of existence that crystallizes in the seventeenth-century philosophy of “discrete individuality” and is based on the assumption that we should be “self-regulating, discrete, intermeasurable individuals” who can live by “the principles of exchange in a free market” (64). in this study, then, the choice between alternative modes of reading reflects, and perhaps even becomes, a choice between modes of being. the idea that the distinctive formal properties of blake’s illuminated books are aspects of his assault on authority is already well established in blake studies, but it has rarely been pursued as fully or as clearly as it is here. informed by recent research on blake’s printing methods, makdisi argues that blake’s books have “high entropy” since, besides the local variations arising from the printing process itself, their constituent elements can be rearranged in many ways “without subverting the overall structure of the book” (8). he celebrates the “unstable, ever-varying relations among and between different elements” (28) of the books, including relations between plates in different books and between different copies of the same book. these features are contrasted with the uniform productions of conventional letterpress printing. two key exhibits in makdisi’s discussion of “text” are the book of urizen and the marriage of heaven and hell. his argument that urizen “subverts the logic of the book” (45) depends in part on the variations between copies. he notes, as others have done, that only two of the eight known copies have all of the plates, every copy has the picture-only plates in a different sequence, and some copies have two sections headed “chap: iv.” these variations are seen as strategic: in writing about the urizenic will to control the world through the book, blake creates an “un-book” (45), which proves resistant to that will. in a comparable vein, the marriage of heaven and hell is described as the “ultimate un-book” (49); at least, blake thought of it “either as a modular book” or as an “amalgamation” of elements that don’t cohere into a “single, straightforward narrative” (48). its form ensures that no scholarly elite can hold a monopoly on its interpretation, since it refuses to be subject to “that kind of reduction and containment.” it is a work that “teaches us how to read in the spirit of blake” (49). if these un-books, like all of the illuminated books, are designed to resist authoritarian interpretation, makdisi’s own readings have to enact and exemplify interpretive openness. having defined the two opposed conceptions of the politics of interpretation, makdisi is acutely aware that his own involvement in the production of an academic book threatens to place him on the wrong side of this divide. accordingly, he does what he can to lessen the impression that he is writing as an authority. he insists that his book is “neither a guide nor a companion” (2), and that rather than offering “a filter or interpretive frame” he is presenting “a set of discussions” of important concepts in blake’s works in order to “open up … useful ways of thinking about them.” he wants to help readers develop their own readings, rather than “imposing” his own on them: we can “pick and choose” from the guidelines offered (17). the attempt to disavow critical authority and embrace openness leads to one of the most attractive features of the book, its disarmingly engaging style, which is at times informally conversational, and always a model of clarity. the enactment of interpretive openness takes time, which makdisi makes for himself by restricting the central focus of his discussion to a relatively small number of poems, making connections with other works and feeding in references to historical context as he proceeds. in the chapter on “image,” for example, his initial discussion of the “introduction” to songs of innocence shows how the work may encourage us “to re-read, to read backward and sideways and in circles rather than simply forward in a straight line” (14). once this idea of non-linear reading has been firmly established, he moves on to consider its broader relevance with brief but helpful references to a range of other works (including “london,” the book of urizen, “the little black boy,” and america). in moving between different plates (some illustrated in rather murky black and white here) he develops a lucid account of reading as a fluid experience of shifting perspectives, readjustments, and speculative connections, a process involving both words and visual images. like the reading process, blake’s own conception of being is at issue throughout the book, and is the subject of some individual chapters. in “desire” makdisi observes that the terms joy and desire consistently appear in blake’s work “in connection to collective rather than merely individual experiences” (50). where individuals do appear they “are always moving beyond their status as individuals” (51). he sees the contrast between the two versions of “nurse’s song” from innocence and experience as presenting not so much one between “selfish desire and repression” as between “two different forms of being.” the children in innocence have a sense of collectivity that is connected with a more general life force, including birds, sheep, and even hills; in them, “oppositions between internal and external forces … break down” (54). in contrast, the nurse of experience manifests a “closed, individualistic” form of being. reflecting upon the importance in blake’s work of images of the creation of fallen humanity, makdisi observes that “restriction into the self and the creation of the self as a self are, for blake, one and the same thing” (62). throughout the book major issues in blake’s work, from “image” and “text” to “time” and “making,” are explored in ways that find relationships between his ideas and the formal characteristics of his books. in the chapter on “time,” for example, makdisi considers the imposition of new working practices in britain that came with the proliferation of “dark satanic mills,” and the onset of “the struggle to impose clock time and national time” (98). this feeds into a discussion of time and repetition in industrial production: repetition “is the very key to homogeneity; it is the logic that produces a stream of identical interchangeable copies” (102). in contrast, blake’s method of book production ensures that repetition produces differences and disrupts the possibility of “mere blind replication.” each chapter attempts to elucidate a different aspect of the same understanding of the alternatives at issue in blake’s work. this inevitably leads to some overlap between the chapters, as the discussion itself revisits ideas and circles around them. but this overlap is often fruitful, as it allows ideas to be reexamined and elaborated in stages. the final chapter, “making,” develops further the significance of blake’s method of book production, taking as a starting point blake’s famous song “the tyger.” looking at the oft-noticed mismatch between the words of the song and the visual appearance of the plate (including the incongruous image of the tiger), makdisi notes that “the plate seems to deliberately undermine the cosmic or mysterious status of the tiger as contemplated object” (114). we see that what is at stake instead is “the act or process of creation and the unfathomable power of the creator.” this in turn leads us to think about various other kinds of symmetry, including that between the copperplate and the page printed from it (which is helpfully illustrated here with a photograph from a printmaking session using facsimiles of blake’s copperplates). the song is “a text about blake as artist” (116), which illustrates the conviction that artistic creation expresses the divine. “the tyger” is used to introduce a wider discussion of blake’s understanding of art as a common endeavor of all people, a process of endless making in which “art and life itself are truly indistinguishable” (126). in this way makdisi moves effortlessly from a close encounter with particulars to a lucid explanation of blake’s distinctive understanding of human creativity. the limitations of this book are closely related to its virtues. makdisi’s own repetitions, so important to the theme and his conception of the reading process, are not always fruitful. there is a separate chapter on “power,” for example, but since power is nearly always at issue in the book, this chapter does not add a great deal to what has already been discussed. there are separate chapters on “desire” and “joy,” but there seems relatively little difference between these subjects in makdisi’s account, as both are related directly to the blakean understanding of being as expansive and collective. since his focus is primarily upon sharply contrasted modes of being, the choice between these modes often seems to be relatively simple—as if corresponding to a choice between reading practices—rather than something that must emerge from a deadly struggle against errors rooted deep in a history of repression. makdisi therefore has little to say about the transformative potential of repressed desire in blake. the chapter on desire has no reference to blake’s major, troubling figure of enchained desire, orc (who is hardly discussed in the book). and just as surprising, it has almost no reference to sexuality. the plight of oothoon in visions of the daughters of albion is discussed in the context not of desire, but of joy, where makdisi gives relatively little attention to the “narrowly sexual dynamics” of the text, preferring to remain with the message of liberty. new readers who turn from makdisi to visions may well be surprised to find that oothoon’s desire, in spite of her “refusal of the logic of entrapment” (78), apparently remains obsessively fixed upon the unresponsive male figure theotormon. they might also be surprised at the emphasis in songs of experience on the troubling problems arising from sexual desire, and at the prominence given in other works to powerful, sexually alluring female figures. apart from oothoon, females get scant attention (catherine blake plays no part in makdisi’s account of the making of blake’s books). makdisi claims that “the limited and caverned form of being appropriate to self-regulating individual selves was not of much interest to blake” (67). this is like saying that the corruption of the times was of little interest to the biblical prophets. but the figure of the prophet is strangely absent here. this figure assumed a central place in blake’s illuminated books (and appeared in both innocence and experience). it is surely relevant to blake’s own sense of his role as a poet, and to the complex issue of “authority.” most tellingly, this figure, like orc, has the potential to disrupt the contrast makdisi makes between liberating and constraining practices, since blake often presents the prophet as contributing to the forces of repression even while struggling against them. los, blake’s “eternal prophet,” appears in europe as an airborne bard whose celebration of bliss and joy heralds an era of repressive religion. in urizen he appears as an agonized blacksmith who binds other figures with chains. some consideration of the intimate relationship between creativity and tyranny in this area of blake’s thought would certainly have been welcome. when makdisi, in his final chapter, considers “the tyger” as a work about artistic creation, his interesting discussion seems in some respects oddly unrelated to what has come before. readers new to blake may be left wondering why the unstable, ever-varying productions of the artist are, in “the tyger,” associated with the labor of the blacksmith, and what the speaker’s “fearful” response has to do with the “love, play, joy, and freedom” (36) that have been identified as key principles in blake’s work. makdisi’s investment in the distinctive material form of the blakean illuminated book as a challenge to authoritative reading leads him to suggest a simple dichotomy between a “decentralized text” and its authoritarian opposite. he sustains this dichotomy by offering, on the one hand, a close engagement with selected details of blake’s work and, on the other, an abstract idea of the authoritarian “book,” underpinned by references to “the logic of commandment” (49). this argument is presented in persuasive, but sometimes misleading, terms. makdisi himself claims that any text that “seeks to operate in terms of a logic of commandment and authority can contain within itself its very opposite” (37). and the reverse can be claimed: texts that challenge authoritarian reading may reproduce authoritarian gestures for their own purposes (as the dogmatic voice of the “devil” in the marriage of heaven and hell demonstrates). the bible offered blake a key example of the conjunction of authoritarian and libertarian writing; some engagement with the stylistic features and reading challenges posed by the bible might therefore have helped here. but in his discussion of the book of urizen makdisi quickly displaces blake’s obvious concern with the bible in order to suggest that urizen is “more generally a book critical of books”; it is an un-book about “the kind of book that would seek to command us how to read” (38). having established this simple book/un-book antithesis, makdisi classifies the marriage of heaven and hell as another un-book. but the formal characteristics that, in makdisi’s view, make blake’s marriage a subversive un-book—its mixture of many different forms and structures, different voices, contradictory points of view—are just as typical of the bible itself, a gallimaufry of disjointed histories, prophecies, psalms, laws, proverbs, parables, and epistles. does the bible make us treat it as a sacred object to be decoded only by a priestly hierarchy, or it is a decentralized text that encourages us to generate meanings freely? for blake it was both a “book of iron” (e 86) and “the great code of art” (e 274), depending on how it was read. makdisi acknowledges that any text can be read either in a dictatorial spirit or subversively. but this implies that texts do not and cannot in themselves determine how they are read; it implies that reading is never simply an unconditioned response to an offered stimulus, but is always influenced by particular social circumstances, conventions, and expectations. we can see the significance of this if we compare the different reading practices promoted by “priestly” and “scholarly” hierarchies (which makdisi tends to conflate). religious communities that rely on authoritarian reading practices can accommodate all kinds of writing practices, both writerly and readerly, including sublime prophetic writings of the kind that influenced blake (like ezekiel and revelation), and impose upon them absolutely dogmatic interpretations. academic communities, in contrast, may demand unambiguously clear and logical (readerly) interpretive writing that demonstrates the writer’s “authority,” but they regard such writing as the starting point for critical debate, disagreement, and alternative views. they can easily accommodate, and tend to promote, subversive reading practices. the attempt to place blake’s illuminated books as a whole in clear opposition to the kind of text that can be decoded only by “a priestly or scholarly hierarchy” is an attractive introductory strategy. makdisi succeeds admirably in making blake look like a reassuringly open writer, but only by avoiding the more bewildering difficulties. he engages with blake’s works at points where he can most easily contrast modes of being and reading practices; he disengages at points where the works threaten to draw him into a closer engagement with their formidable mythology. in blake it can be a short step from “what is not too explicit” (e 702) to what is bafflingly obscure. it is the cryptic nature of blake’s mythological narratives—their very lack of openness—that puts them into the realm of the specialist scholar, whatever blake intended. makdisi’s own gestures of openness cannot really disguise his authoritative role. the book is not a running commentary on blake, but it is certainly a guide and a companion, and of course it sets up an interpretive frame, based on historical research and a good knowledge of recent scholarship on blake’s printing process. his method inevitably “imposes” his own preferred way of reading. he regards the claim to “have a key to decode this reference or that character in blake’s work” as “the most un-blakean thing in the world” (17), but he does not hesitate to offer “the key to enjoying blake’s work” or to explain how to read “in the spirit of blake himself” (10). in this way he implicitly disqualifies one kind of critical activity, the kind that attempts to “decode” blake’s mythological obscurities, while attempting to set up a monopoly in another area of interpretive activity, the kind that he himself engages in. but, of course, in the realm of academic criticism, no such monopoly can stand. nobody has unmediated access to “the spirit of blake himself,” since all reading, as makdisi himself shows, is conditioned by the historical conditions in which it takes place. in the marriage of heaven and hell, blake describes an anticlimactic process by which inspiring visions, having been turned into books, are “arranged in libraries” (e 40). blake’s anxiety about the book apparently extends beyond the mechanical uniformity of letterpress to the processes of collation and preservation by which books can be transmitted to readers. the process by which blake’s poetic tales have been turned into objects of study has inevitably influenced how they are read. scholars have industriously tracked down the surviving copies of blake’s works and described them in meticulous detail, in forms that allow minute comparisons to be made. the heroic bibliographical labors of g. e. bentley, jr., and others made it possible for jerome j. mcgann to formulate his influential version of the “indeterminate” text—a concept that depends in part upon the ability to compare multiple copies (especially of the book of urizen).g. e. bentley, jr., blake books (oxford: clarendon press, 1977); jerome j. mcgann, “the idea of an indeterminate text: blake’s bible of hell and dr. alexander geddes,” studies in romanticism 25.3 (1986): 303-24. there is an obvious element of anachronism here, because such comparisons would not have been possible for those in blake’s day who bought individual copies of the works, and may not always have been possible for blake himself, since he did not possess in material form the complete works of william blake. the advent of the william blake archive in the last twenty years has, for the first time, allowed different copies of the same text to be read, electronically searched, and compared in detail by anyone with internet access. through this elaborate collation, a thoroughly comparable blake corpus has emerged, with different versions of the same work lying together like synoptic gospels. these historical developments have made it possible for makdisi to claim that “the fullest experience of reading blake comes from reading multiple different copies of the ‘same’ book simultaneously” (21). this is the logical conclusion of his approach, but it is not obvious that this is reading “in the spirit of blake.” while i love being able to compare different copies, i am not convinced that attempting to read simultaneously the nineteen copies of innocence currently available in the blake archive will necessarily produce the fullest reading experience. one of the things that makes blake a powerful and truly disturbing artist rather than a propagandist for his own view of being is that his impulse toward liberty coexists with a fascination with humanity’s “limited and caverned form of being”—its origins and its complex psychological and social effects. if we are to do full justice to blake we need to engage with—and offer suggestions about—the bizarre interactions between his oddly named characters, his sometimes arcane allusions, the mysterious metamorphoses and nightmarish landscapes that constitute his unique mythology. we need to embrace a variety of critical practices, including the kind from which makdisi prefers to distance himself. that is, we do indeed need openness. but this is to take us beyond the immediate business of an introduction to blake. makdisi is surely right that most readers initially approach blake through the songs, and the great virtue of his introduction is that, starting with relatively simple poems, it offers enticing ways to move from these into some of blake’s central preoccupations, and gives a vivid sense of their historical significance. it draws readers in, showing how the visual designs can be related to the text, how puzzles and disjunctions can be productive, and how the play of children, reflections on the passage of time, artistic labor, ideas of eternity, and industrial work practices can be closely related in blake’s thought. it is a book that will succeed very well in starting readers on a journey. violence, death, and autoeroticism: the alternative self-annihilation in visions of the daughters of albion violence, death, and autoeroticism: the alternative self-annihilation in visions of the daughters of albion by kang-po chen kang-po chen (kpchen@ntut.edu.tw) is an assistant professor in the department of english, national taipei university of technology, taiwan. he holds a phd in english literature from the university of edinburgh and has published several articles on shelley and keats. he is currently working on the cultural image of prostitutes in the eighteenth century and its representation in blake’s works. in blake’s system,parts of this article are from a chapter of the author’s doctoral thesis, “rethinking the concept of obscenity: the erotic subject and self-annihilation in the works of blake, shelley, and keats” (university of edinburgh, 2019). they were also presented at romantic improvement, the british association for romantic studies biennial international conference in july 2017 at the university of york. the self or selfhood denotes the satanic/​urizenic facet of the human psyche. it represents an alienated masculine persona, what blake terms the spectre, and an evil tendency to abstract and rationalize the outer world perceived by the senses. ensnared by the selfhood, human beings fall into self-righteousness, jealousy, and tyranny based on the moral laws and the ten commandments. the aggrandizement of the selfhood obstructs the poetic imagination and disintegrates the universal man, creating a fallen world of oppression. self-annihilation, therefore, is a key process that humans must undergo in order to restore the primary divinity—​that is, to regain the paradise, a state that reintegrates both the masculine and the feminine, “sexless in the sense that it is undivided” (tayler, “say first!” 250). on the title page of milton, blake depicts his greatest precursor recognizing his selfhood as satan/​urizen and striving to annihilate it by breaking his name and by descending to eternal death, where he will reconcile with his feminine aspect, “his sixfold emanation scatter’d thro’ the deep / in torment!” (2.19-20, e 96). in jerusalem, jesus’s sacrifice epitomizes the concept of self-annihilation; it is a “redemption through death and the annihilation of the righteous selfhood” and “a voluntary death of the old man and a waking of the new” (mcgann 10, 18), ideally replacing the notion of atonement—​that christ’s death is a ransom for the sin of humanity to alleviate god’s anger (ryan 49). in short, the process of blakean self-annihilation is a synthesis of religious epiphany, poetic inspiration, and harmonious reunion between the sexes. yet in blake’s representations of the erotic interactions between men and women, both textual and visual, the concept of self-annihilation does not always adhere to a unilaterally positive tenet of selfless sacrifice, one “that is echoed in every kindness any man performs for another” (doskow 164). i argue, therefore, that aside from being a central factor in blake’s revisionist christian system of the “human form divine,” self-annihilation is a major source of eroticism in his portrayal of unconventional sexual experiences. self-annihilation as an erotic phenomenon is empowered by the violent alteration of human subjectivity and the dissolution of social and biological preexisting identity. blake’s designs of oothoon and theotormon in visions exemplify this alternative aspect, as this essay attempts to demonstrate. visions is regarded in blake studies as an allegorical critique of plantation slavery and the institution of marriage from a historicist point of view.for early criticism concerning blake’s allusions to the contemporary abolitionist movement and marriage, see erdman, prophet against empire 235-42, frye 241, and damon 438. for feminist readings that focus on oothoon’s victimization as reflecting the predicament of eighteenth-century englishwomen, see mellor 369, tayler, “the woman scaly” 75, fox 513, and bruder 57, 82. as a psychological observation of the consequences of rape, which severely impact the male violator, the female victim, and the victim’s male partner, the poem also shows the possible route to liberation from these consequences.for discussion of the characters’ psychological states and possible routes of liberation for oothoon, see punter 484-85, linkin 185, and, more recently, stevens 150. departing from these two major readings, i explore the potential unconventional sexual activities embedded in blake’s designs in visions, with a particular focus on death, violence, and autoeroticism. as karen harvey points out in reading sex in the eighteenth century, the enlightenment witnessed a shift from a mind-centered subordination of the flesh to a “materialist philosophy” that “transformed the hierarchical mind-body pairing” (199). thus, “the status of the corporeal” (199) was increased by an emphasis on sensual experience. although blake believes that imagination and poetic genius cannot be limited by the bodily senses—​“mans perceptions are not bounded by organs of perception. he percieves more than sense (tho’ ever so acute) can discover” (there is no natural religion, e 2)—​he nevertheless pores over the possibilities of the human body in terms of sexual desire. from this perspective, the essay also highlights possible influences of the contemporary sexual discourse in light of the theory of autoeroticism advanced by freud, whose relevance to blake’s works has already been established.the most extensive discussion juxtaposing blake and freud is diana hume george’s 1980 monograph. while arguing that blake’s exploration of psychic processes not only predates freud’s but also clarifies the parts of freudian psychoanalysis that need expansion and revision, george notes that both freud and blake are aware of the conflict between human sexual instinct and the establishment of social norms. in visions, this conflict results in misery in the marriage of theotormon and oothoon, which is exposed by the rape: “jealousy and aggression in the male, resentment and frigidity in the female” (george 131). other studies include jerry caris godard, mental forms creating: william blake anticipates freud, jung and rank (lanham: university press of america, 1985) and morris dickstein, “the price of experience: blake’s reading of freud,” the literary freud: mechanisms of defense and the poetic will, psychiatry and the humanities vol. 4, ed. joseph h. smith (new haven: yale university press, 1980). as i argue, blake draws upon erasmus darwin’s botanic poetics in the loves of the plants (1789) to depict oothoon’s plucking of the marygold as a potentially polyamorous sexual experience that entails violence and approximates death. oothoon’s pursuit of erotic comfort through the plucking indicates her dissatisfaction with theotormon’s sexual conservatism. theotormon’s repressive attitude—​reflective of eighteenth-century society—​leads, as blake highlights, to the self-annihilating complex of autoeroticism. blake also engages with contemporary discourse on masturbation as found in tissot’s on onanism and rousseau’s confessions, illustrating the mechanism of autoeroticism that emerges from the seemingly passive status of oothoon and theotormon as the victims of the rape. he connects autoeroticism with poetic imagination to foreground a heterogeneous form of sexual pleasure that derives from the disintegration of identity and subjectivity. at the outset of the poem, oothoon’s psychological state, inherently unsettled even before the rape, is the remote cause of her and her lover’s self-annihilating autoeroticism. in the argument, she confesses her perception of love: “i loved theotormon / and i was not ashamed” (iii.1-2, e 45), a radical declaration in a cultural milieu that often prohibited female expression of sexual desire (bruder 74). even though she courageously articulates her love for theotormon, she trembles in “virgin fears” and conceals herself “in leutha’s vale” (iii.3-4). oothoon’s nameless virgin fears soon become “woe,” in which she wanders “along the vales of leutha seeking flowers to comfort her” (1.3-4).for the division between sighs and woes in the context of late eighteenth-century abolitionist poetry, see stevens. that woe, corresponding to blake’s use of the word in other poems (for example, “when early morn walks forth in sober grey” in poetical sketches and “the angel” in songs of experience), connotes the repression of sexual desire and the consequent emotions of negativity. woe thus represents the heroine’s sexual frustration—​her virgin fears. it is the consequence of contemporary conservative attitudes that derive from the christian ideology that, even in marriage, the sole purpose of sex is not pleasure but procreation.this sentiment is indicated in lady sarah cowper’s diary, in which she considers “[her] self a mirror of chastity, even beyond the most intact virgin, for to conceive four children without knowing what it is to have an unchaste thought or sensual pleasure” (quoted in kugler 313). in opposition to the prizing of chastity in orthodox christianity, blake does not consider virginity a passive status quo that needs to be preserved; for him, it is an active state in which the virgin aspires to embrace sexual desire in myriad forms. driven by her virgin fears and woe, oothoon converses with and plucks “the bright marygold of leutha’s vale” (1.5). critics commonly interpret this episode as the awakening of her sexual desire. george views the encounter as a representation of oothoon’s “conscious decision to become a sexual being” (127). anne k. mellor reads the marygold as oothoon’s female genitals, with which she equips herself to offer “her blossomlike clitoris and her fertile womb to her lover” (366). for nancy moore goslee, the plucking is a forecast of the rape because “the marigold seems an exuberant smaller version of [oothoon] herself” (106). in bruder’s view, the plucking is oothoon’s self-deflowering, a form of female masturbation that enables “her own potential for multiple and recurrent orgasm” and points to blake’s “validation of a woman’s right to pleasure herself” (75). taking a queer perspective, caroline jackson-houlston values the plucking as blake’s positive depiction of mutually consensual lesbian love. the sexual dynamic here is reminiscent of darwin. scholars have noted his influence on blake; erdman, for example, recognizes that the book of thel is “pictorially and metaphorically … a counterpart” of the loves of the plants (the illuminated blake 33). under the cover of botanic science, darwin shows a “fascination with hybridity” and “illicit loves” (connolly 604), indicating the potential for sexual relations that are free from the confines demanded by christianity. he discusses flowers’ reproductive activities, but of course these are analogous to humans’ engaging in illicit and unorthodox sexual acts. darwin’s humanization of plants and their sexuality provides a highly imaginative model for blake: as desmond king-hele observes, blake’s depiction of the marygold in visions reproduces darwin’s description of the flower that radiates sparks. the anthropomorphic form of the marygold also resembles “darwin’s viewing of the amorous antics of the plants” (45). blake, visions of the daughters of albion copy j (composed and printed 1793), erdman plate iii. see enlargement. 14.2 x 11.2 cm. lessing j. rosenwald collection, library of congress. rosenwald no. 1803. image courtesy of the william blake archive. the design of plate iii shows oothoon kneeling with her hands around her breasts, as the leaping nymph outstretches her arms. the light emitted from the marygold is delineated by four lines that radiate across the shining background. in blake’s image we can see striking similarities with darwin: [hygeia] saw the sad nymph uplift her dewy eyes, spread her white arms, and breathe her fervid sigh; call’d to her fair associates, youth, and joy, and shot all-radiant through the glittering sky. (the loves of the plants 2.375-78) darwin describes plants whose flowers seem to emit light, including marigold, garden nasturtium, orange lily, and the indian pink. in his view, certain electronic activities in the plants cause the shining, especially when a pistil is impregnated. he presents the tropaeolum with an erotic interaction between its eight stamens and one pistil: the chaste tropæo leaves her secret bed; a saint-like glory trembles round her head; eight watchful swains along the lawns of night with amorous steps pursue the virgin light; o’er her fair form the electric lustre plays …. (4.45-49) in line with the tropaeolum, the shining marygold that oothoon encounters has an innate sexuality that generates the glorious light illuminating plate iii. in a subversion of the institution of monogamy, darwin shows the tropaeolum’s sexual quality as polyandrous: the female has sexual encounters with several males. tristanne connolly proposes that darwin frequently italicizes numbers not only because they are significant in taxonomy, but also because they produce erotic thrills (606). the emphasis on numbers promotes sexual pleasure that is not limited by a one man-one woman relationship. in visions, blake recreates such darwinian sexual multiplicity in oothoon’s fantasy at the end of the poem, where theotormon makes love with “girls of mild silver, or of furious gold” in “wanton play” and “lovely copulation” (7.24-26, e 50). oothoon’s aspiration for theotormon’s promiscuous pleasure is often dismissed as blake’s sexist assimilation of the female into male-centered desire—​oothoon’s “slip-sliding away” into “an energetically ensnaring procuress” for men’s “harem fantasy” (bruder 82). on the other hand, saree makdisi reads this passage as a manifestation of oothoon’s freedom from being “confined, objectified, and turned into a productive mechanism” and from “the confines of unitary selfhood, the pressures of jealousy and possession” (96-97). as faramerz dabhoiwala points out in the origins of sex, the discourse on polygamy flourished in the eighteenth century with the emergent fundamentalist exegesis of the bible (that justifies concubinage),critics such as marsha keith schuchard and humberto garcia have paid attention to blake’s wish to have concubines. schuchard attributes it to his early adherence to the doctrines of the moravian church (234). garcia, on the other hand, argues for the influence of the english translation of the qur’ān (36). in addition to these religious influences, darwin’s poetics of plants might have inspired blake to explore concubinage and represent unconventional sexual orientations in visions. the promotion of sexual freedom as part of the natural law, and the newly developed theory of demography. reflecting this cultural debate, blake adopts the polyandrous anatomy of the flower in darwin’s work to implant unconventional sexual desire in the marygold and oothoon. such desire is not only free from monogamy (and additionally, the form of monogamy that aims solely at legitimate reproduction), but also makes room for the possibility of a woman’s having multiple husbands, an option absent from the eighteenth-century debate on polygamy, in which only one man taking multiple wives is considered.swedenborg’s discussion of polygamy and concubinage in the delights of wisdom pertaining to conjugial love (1768) condemns these institutions as lascivious and unlawful, except for legitimate causes (for example, the wife commits adultery or theft). in this respect, the marygold signifies a form of sexual love that rebels against the confines of oothoon’s restricted relationship with theotormon, who symbolizes obstructed desire that is “filld with care” (milton 24 [26].12, e 119)—​sexual conservatism necessitated by religious and moral repression. this is the reason that oothoon seeks inspiration from the marygold, who, with its polyamory resonant with the loves of the plants—​a particularly woman-centered sexuality—​provides the heroine the comfort that theotormon is unable to offer. the plucking of the marygold is often interpreted as the prelude to the rape, as “pluck,” like the more specific “deflower,” culturally indicates a woman’s loss of virginity by a male violator. yet, as jackson-houlston argues, oothoon’s plucking also emblematizes positive lesbian love between her and the marygold, a stark contrast to the subsequent heterosexual violence. even though oothoon’s action seems to be based on mutual consent, potential danger to the marygold is hinted at by her hesitation: “i dare not pluck thee from thy dewy bed!” (1.7, e 46). the nymph’s reply—​“pluck thou my flower oothoon the mild / another flower shall spring” (1.8-9)—​indicates that the action entails the death of the flower, so that a new flower can be born. this conversation implies that sexual love, regardless of the form, causes violent alterations of the participants’ mental and physical states. in other words, violence is the nature of eroticism, whose outcome is a simulative experience of death, la petite mort.before visions, blake had linked sex with death in the book of thel. when thel inquires about the cloud’s ephemeral life—​“why thou complainest not when in one hour thou fade away” (3.2, e 4)—​the cloud answers, “when i pass away, / it is to tenfold life, to love, to peace, and raptures holy” (3.10-11). in this line, blake correlates erotic ecstasy and its approximation to death with religious sacredness. such an experience leads to the enrichment of new lives: the marygold’s new flower and the cloud’s “tenfold life.” blake describes the rape with only two lines: “bromion rent her with his thunders. on his stormy bed / lay the faint maid, and soon her woes appalld his thunders hoarse” (1.16-17, e 46). the designs present only its aftermath at the bottom of plate 1, where the violator and the victim lie together.some critics do not regard these figures as oothoon and bromion. philippa simpson, for instance, sees the figure on the right also as a woman, who opens her thighs to show her vulva, “splayed in a way commonly associated with the hardcore pussy shot” (215). simpson takes this figure as an example of blake’s representation of “sexy amputation” that attests to the pornographic propensity of visions. blake, visions of the daughters of albion copy j (composed and printed 1793), erdman plate 1. see enlargement. 17.0 x 11.7 cm. lessing j. rosenwald collection, library of congress. rosenwald no. 1803. image courtesy of the william blake archive. oothoon lies facing upward with arms outstretched, exposing her “pure transparent breast” (2.16). one of her legs curls perpendicularly and the other is not shown; judging from her posture, we can speculate that the two are separate. in a similar posture, bromion spreads his legs in a triangular shape, displaying his pubic area with his genitals unseen. with this depiction, blake diminishes the distinction between bromion the rapist and oothoon the victim by presenting them equally immersed in a post-orgasmic state of residual pleasure. blake has oothoon, to a certain degree, take pleasure in the violent sex, as bromion claims that oothoon represents the slaves who “are obedient,” “resist not,” “obey the scourge,” and “worship terrors and obey the violent” (1.22-23). bruder notices a “representation of sexually acquiescent orgasmic collapse” in oothoon’s image, which reflects the archetypal portrayal of a sexually victimized woman who “adores what is above her” in late eighteenth-century art, especially henry fuseli’s works (70).as anna clark’s historical tracing of rape in england shows, the male fantasy that female rape victims enjoy being violated not only appears in modern pornography, but also in late eighteenth-century libertine literature, inspired by enlightenment thinkers’ espousal of sexual desire as a supreme human nature. thus, the victim’s resistance is interpreted as “coy acquiescence”—​“if a woman says no she really means yes” (clark 37). the image of oothoon at the bottom of plate 1 responds to some extent to the literary context of rape in the eighteenth century. what blake raises here is a question almost too provocative to be asked and addressed: bromion’s claim certainly reflects a common fantasy of rapists, but if oothoon feels sexual pleasure during the rape, should she be condemned as an accomplice and lose her justified position as a victim/​accuser? to be more specific, blake seems to suggest that despite being mentally afflicted, a rape victim can still be bodily aroused by her violator, for whom she holds no love at all. furthermore, the disappearance of bromion’s genitals suggests that the experience of sexual violence also drastically alters the condition of the violator, to the extent that he seems to forfeit his potency and masculine identity. with the designs at the bottom of plate 1, where both bromion and oothoon are in powerless paralysis, blake neutralizes the power relationship between the violator and the victim. after the rape, theotormon appears and folds “his black jealous waters round the adulterate pair / bound back to back in bromions caves terror & meekness dwell” (2.4-5, e 46), the scene displayed on the frontispiece. blake, visions of the daughters of albion copy j (composed and printed 1793), erdman plate i. see enlargement. 17.1 x 11.9 cm. lessing j. rosenwald collection, library of congress. rosenwald no. 1803. image courtesy of the william blake archive. with his two arms around his head, he recoils, immersing himself in profound grief. bromion and oothoon are chained back to back; the former squats with an expression of astonishment, while the latter kneels with an emotionless look on her drooping face. far in the background is a glaring sun among clouds, which resembles a human eye—​the reader’s voyeuristic spectatorship. dennis m. welch views theotormon in this scene as a self-proclaimed “offended party, now stripped of an enviable possession,” who shows “self-concernment, self-righteousness, and possessiveness” (118). but apart from his jealousy, grief, and despair, there is another mental complex hidden in theotormon’s posture. his legs form a triangular shape almost identical to bromion’s in plate 1; both spread their legs to expose their pubic areas. the difference between the two figures is that bromion’s upper body and right arm are outstretched, with his head facing upward, while theotormon recoils downward, with his face toward his unseen genitals and his arms encircling his head. if the image of legs spread in a triangular shape represents a post-orgasmic state, bromion’s open posture suggests that he is sexually interacting with others, projecting his desire outward. the image of theotormon has the same post-orgasmic undertone, but his enclosed upper body is the opposite of bromion’s open one, denoting an inward self-projection through which he directs his desire back to himself. thus, theotormon’s posture can be conceived as a representation of autoeroticism. in this respect, freud’s theory of mourning and melancholia is particularly useful. theotormon’s self-enclosed image consists, in freud’s terms, of the subject’s withdrawal of his libido-cathexis from the exterior world and its concentration on the subject’s own self and body (“on the introduction of narcissism” 5). the withdrawal of sexual desire from others to self is caused by extreme mental distress, which freud categorizes as melancholia: “melancholia is mentally characterized by a profoundly painful depression, a loss of interest in the outside world, the loss of the ability to love, the inhibition of any kind of performance and a reduction in the sense of self, expressed in self-recrimination and self-directed insults, intensifying into the delusory expectation of punishment” (“mourning and melancholia” 204). in the aftermath of his lover’s rape, theotormon’s static image on the frontispiece comprises the enclosed upper body of libido withdrawal and the triangular lower body of autoerotic self-projection. the passage on plate 2 following the binding of “the adulterate pair” also presents his mental state: the line describing how “theotormon sits wearing the threshold hard” (2.6) reinforces the sense of his “inhibition … of performance” and the phrase “secret tears” (2.7) emphasizes the unnamable nature of his distress. furthermore, his imagined self-flagellation in the design on plate 6 anticipates “the delusory expectation of punishment” in the symptoms of freudian melancholia. theotormon’s form of self-annihilation can be further illustrated through freud’s division between normal mourning and pathological melancholia. although both conditions are caused by the loss of the love object, in mourning this sense of loss is conscious/​presentable, while in melancholia it is unconscious/​unpresentable. this distinction brings forth the key element of melancholia, “an extraordinary reduction in self-esteem, a great impoverishment of the ego” (“mourning and melancholia” 205). in theotormon’s case, he cannot undergo the normal process of mourning and regain his ability to interact with the outside world because what he truly loses is not oothoon as a love object, but his sense of self and social identity as a heterosexual lover/​husband. as noted, theotormon’s sexual conservatism in his relationship with oothoon results in her early “woes” and, indirectly, her rape by bromion. this point is worth raising again because the loss of self-esteem and positive identity as a result of sexual inability is, for theotormon, unnamable, especially when he notices oothoon’s problematic arousal by her violation; this is the reason for his immobilization and self-enclosure. in this state of withdrawal, he can only channel his libido, “the burning fires / of lust” (2.9-10, e 46), into his own autoerotic lower body by emulating bromion’s post-orgasmic posture on plate 1—​that is, after recognizing oothoon’s possible pleasure in the rape, he attempts to identify with bromion’s sexual potency and violence, further disintegrating his identity as a loving husband in this autoerotic experience of self-annihilation. in previous discussions of blake’s view of autoeroticism in visions, critics have generally focused on oothoon’s later denouncement of such behavior as an unhealthy outcome of sexual repression by religious doctrines—​“the rewards of continence” and “the self enjoyings of self denial” (7.8-9, e 50). highlighting freud’s notion that masturbation provides only “substitute gratification,” george proposes that it is “an anti-act for blake, one accomplished in the dark, in silence, in the presence of an absence” (136). similarly, richard sha foregrounds the conflict between blake’s view of masturbation and his ideal of mutual affection in sexual interactions between individuals (204-05). in contrast, christopher hobson maintains that blake regards masturbation as an unconventional sexual behavior that stands for liberation (36). yet blake’s autoerotic design of theotormon on the frontispiece, which emulates bromion’s posture on plate 1, has not attracted much attention. from the perspective of the contemporary discourse on masturbation, the design of theotormon resonates with samuel-auguste tissot’s treatise on onanism (1760), which shaped the negative view in following decades. with two english translations in 1766, it was popular in blake’s time (jordanova 70), and he may well have known of or read it. tissot’s account is based on a central idea of “animal economy” that generally consists of the processes of “waste” and “reparation,” which are actualized by the generation, circulation, and consumption of humors. in his hierarchy of humors, milk is much more dispensable than blood, and semen is crucial: “the loss of an ounce of this humour would weaken more than that of forty ounces of blood” (10). if this loss occurs in an “unnatural” way, the ill consequences are even more severe. for example, tissot maintains that seminal issue that results from conjugal intercourse does less damage to the body than that from sexual intercourse with prostitutes; likewise, nocturnal emission is less harmful than masturbation because the former happens without the subject’s knowledge, while the latter is a deliberate act of unrestrained lasciviousness. hence, it is obvious that tissot’s apparently scientific treatise is infused with moral sensibility as well. these moral sentiments are common in the eighteenth century, as reflected in john armstrong’s popular 1736 poetic essay the oeconomy of love, where masturbation is dismissed as an “ungenerous, selfish, solitary joy” and “unhallow’d pastime”—​“to shed thy blossoms thro’ the desert air, / and sow thy perish’d off-spring in the winds” (lines 106, 122, 120-21). as one of the most unnatural ways to lose semen, masturbation not only damages the body—​weakened sight, pimples, weight loss, and fatigue—​but also causes the masturbator to experience mental catastrophe, diminishing “all the bodily senses and all the faculties of the soul” and resulting in the loss of imagination and memory; and imbecility, contempt, shame, ignominy …; the humiliating character of being an useless load upon earth; … a distaste for all decent pleasures; lassitude, an aversion for others, and at length for self; life appears horrible; the dread which every moment starts at suicide; anguish worse than pain; remorse, which daily increases … and serves perhaps for eternal punishment—​a fire that is never extinguished. (tissot 126, emphasis added) in tissot’s view, masturbation signifies the utter loss of one’s sense of identity as a social being, causing one to become “an useless load upon earth.” ludmilla jordanova points out that his description has a secondary effect; it “suggests an element of pleasure derived from the recounting of pain and misery in others” (75). in other words, tissot’s style of writing invites readers to imagine the masturbator’s situation—​the lust he indulges himself in, and the dreadful consequences he has to suffer—​and take pleasure in this process of imagination. his description renders masturbation, frequently called “the feats” in the treatise, not only frightening but also perversely attractive. apart from this mixture of fear and attraction, the physical pleasure of masturbation is also underlined by contemporary botanist bellenden ker, who claims that “there is more pleasure in frigging one’s self, considered in merely a sensual way” than in having sex with women (quoted in dabhoiwala 178). in tissot, the mental mechanism involved in masturbation is the self-annihilating process of forsaking one’s social identity and its function and purposefulness. the masturbator belittles himself in humiliation and shame, feelings that are blended with the experience of bodily pleasure. despite listing meticulously the fearful pathological damages on the body masturbation causes, tissot’s writing, perhaps unconsciously, indicates that such unnatural behavior grants the doer a unique pleasure that cannot be achieved through natural sexual intercourse. the potential autoeroticism of theotormon in visions reflects this description, as it also emerges in a humiliating situation where the social identities of theotormon as a husband, lover, and heterosexual man are breached. the autoerotic pleasure is begot, therefore, by the drastic alteration of subjectivity, which takes him out of his socially functioning role and renders him “an useless load upon earth.” in visions, blake not only reflects tissot’s observation of the negative effects of masturbation when he has oothoon call it “the self enjoyings of self denial,” but also acknowledges the intense pleasure of this unnatural sexual act. blake takes his idea of autoeroticism further in oothoon’s calling for self-punishment. diverging from tissot’s assertion that autoeroticism—​a passive behavior of torpidity—​results in “the loss of imagination,” he regards it as an active process of poetic imagination. oothoon responds to theotormon’s masturbatory status with her own autoerotic fantasy of self-punishment, “calling theotormons eagles to prey upon her flesh”: i call with holy voice! kings of the sounding air, rend away this defiled bosom that i may reflect. the image of theotormon on my pure transparent breast. (2.14-16, e 46) her desire for mutilation as a rape victim reminds us of the eponymous heroine in james macpherson’s poem oithona, one of the most prominent sources for visions. after being raped by dunromath, oithona condemns herself in shame in front of her lover, gaul: “why comest thou over the dark-blue wave, to nuäth’s mournful daughter? why did i not pass away in secret …?” she then plunges into despair: “i vanish in my youth; my name shall not be heard. or it will be heard with grief; the tears of nuäth must fall” (macpherson 107-08). oithona’s reaction to her rape is entirely passive: she denies her physical existence and social identity and wishes to be absent in her lover’s presence. following oothoon’s counterpart in oithona, blake seems to recreate the self-accusation of the rape victim in visions. as welch points out, the victim’s impulse for self-punishment is not uncommon, since it was usually the violated woman rather than the male violator who was condemned in the late eighteenth century (121). oothoon’s call for self-mutilation, though more or less reflective of this tradition, is a subtle manifestation of poetic imagination. like theotormon, she is also undergoing a process of autoerotic fantasy by imagining herself willingly being violated again. the image of an eagle rending its victim’s breast is an obvious allusion to prometheus, a symbol of rebellion and self-sacrifice. blake, visions of the daughters of albion copy j (composed and printed 1793), erdman plate 3. see enlargement. 16.8 x 11.6 cm. lessing j. rosenwald collection, library of congress. rosenwald no. 1803. image courtesy of the william blake archive. on plate 3 blake eroticizes oothoon’s imagined promethean posture, as she arches her body in a manner that again resembles the post-orgasmic images on plate 1. he realizes visually her fantasy of bodily affliction, presenting a scene of erotic violence, a darker aspect of sex that she first acquaints herself with through the plucking of the marygold and her rape by bromion. at this point, for oothoon, violence and suffering are the essential elements of sexual delight: “sweetest the fruit that the worm feeds on. & the soul prey’d on by woe” (3.17, e 47). the erotic pleasure is “sweetest” when it is engendered by victimization and destruction. therefore, oothoon’s call for eagles to maim her body is not only a penitent display of shame and guilt but also an expression of a heterogeneous aspect of sex that derives from violence and the intense bodily pain it brings about. in other words, oothoon’s imagined self-punishment is more than an inert and desperate resort to regain her lover’s affection. this vision, a manifestation of the active imagination of violence that brings forth alternative pleasure, can be read as another autoerotic fantasy in which the real object of desire is absent. she has to conjure up the eagle as the sexual other and imagine herself again in a victimized position. the process suggests that the operation of such a fantasy requires a disintegration of her identity. as a sexual subject, oothoon splits into two: a violating other and a violated self. the disintegration of the self and the recasting of subjectivity in autoeroticism also appear in jean-jacques rousseau’s confessions, a work blake was very familiar with.in blake’s earlier prophetic books, rousseau and voltaire are depicted as the positive momentum of the french revolution. but blake does not share their deistic view of religion; in jerusalem, rousseau, along with voltaire, gibbon, and hume, is accused of hypocrisy: “the book written by rousseau calld his confessions is an apology & cloke for his sin & not a confession” (e 201). see also damon 351-52. in terms of sexuality, both writers explore the mentality of autoeroticism. as harvey’s study shows, eighteenth-century thinkers, especially those from france, aligned their philosophies “with a veritable unleashing of sexual desires” (200). among them is rousseau, who is particularly concerned with the sexual relationships between men and women in larger social and political contexts. according to joel schwartz, rousseau believes that male sexual desire for women constitutes the mutual dependence between the sexes, which is a positive drive that ameliorates society and accomplishes “the political betterment of mankind” (3). autoeroticism—​the withdrawal of sexual desire from the external world—​therefore hinders such social improvement. for instance, in emile, rousseau dismisses masturbation so that a mature man can “enter society … to find there a companion worthy of him” (quoted in schwartz 105). despite this characterization of autoeroticism as an anti-social complex, rousseau still indulges himself in the seductive “feat”—​in tissot’s word—​of masturbation. schwartz distinguishes rousseau’s romantic relationship with thérèse levasseur, portrayed as a common and illiterate woman in the confessions, from emile’s relationship with sophie in emile. he points out that while the latter is based on mutual affection, the former originates entirely in corporeal desire. rousseau refers to his relationship with thérèse as a “supplement,” a word he also uses to describe his masturbation (schwartz 104-05). both are substitutes for his ideal love object, who is always absent. but the two substitutes are in essence different, because unlike the sex with thérèse, masturbation is not only a supplement, but also “ce dangereux supplément.” in book 3 of the confessions, rousseau gives a personal account of “this dangerous supplement which diverts the course of nature”: this vice, which shame and timidity find so convenient, has, besides, great enticements for lively imaginations; that is, to dispose, in a manner, at will, of the whole sex, and to make the beauties which tempt them serve their pleasures without the necessity of obtaining their consent. (1783 dublin ed., 1: 164, emphasis added) and in book 9, in a distress of longing without a real woman’s presence, he admits his “vice” in a suggestive way: the impossibility of attaining real beings threw me into the regions of chimera, and seeing nothing in existence worthy of my delirium, i sought food for it in the ideal world, which my imagination quickly peopled with beings after my own heart. … in my continual extacy i intoxicated my mind with the most delicious sentiments that ever entered the heart of man. (1790 london ed., 1: 342, emphasis added) in these passages, rousseau aestheticizes his experience of masturbation by accentuating its artistic quality of “lively imagination” in order to create images that generate utmost pleasure in his mind. because the object of desire is absent, he has to enter “the regions of chimera”—​a phrase that denotes the splitting of subjectivity. in an autoerotic ecstasy, where the subject imagines his love object, his subjectivity must be divided to assume several identities, like the chimera who is at the same time a lion, a goat, and a serpent. it is also a process of dissolving the conventional boundary of gender roles; schwartz notes that rousseau’s experiences in reading and imagination make him “both female and male, which is to say that he transcends the differentiation between the sexes, and is a human whole, not merely a sexual part” (107). this androgynous mentality corresponds to blake’s ideal of the universal man, a primary state of humanity and poetic genius that reunites the masculine spectre and feminine emanation. though blake deems the confessions a work of hypocrisy, there is a subtle resonance between blake and rousseau in terms of sexual experience (especially autoeroticism), which is analogous to artistic imagination. in her autoerotic fantasy illustrated on plate 3 of visions, oothoon also activates her “lively imagination” to split her subjectivity and form a scene in which the dominant image is erotic violence. this is exactly rousseau’s access to the masturbatory “regions of chimera” and his “ideal world, which my imagination quickly peopled with beings after my own heart.” with the potency of imagination, oothoon calls for theotormon’s violence on herself. as both a victim and a masochist, she paradoxically exerts the power of powerlessness and shows the activeness of passivity. by urging theotormon to mutilate her “defiled bosom,” oothoon actually takes control of the imperative language in this masochistic play. she is, as susan sontag would put it, “profoundly active in her passivity” (99). welch underscores the distinction between “this defiled bosom” and “my pure transparent breast” (emphasis added), arguing that oothoon’s call for self-mutilation is an assertion of her untainted essence, to “distinguish between her true self and her unwillingly defiled exterior” (121). but more than defending her essential innocence, with the self-disintegrating imagination of autoeroticism she is actually denouncing theotormon’s sexual impotence and conservatism—​which indirectly cause her, unwillingly, bodily arousal during the rape—​and his later inactivity and self-victimization. with the typical emotional withdrawal and enclosure of freudian melancholia—​“she cannot weep! her tears are locked up” (2.11, e 46)—​oothoon’s lamentations are intrinsically accusations: “they [melancholics] are not ashamed, they do not conceal themselves, because everything disparaging that they express about themselves is basically being said about someone else” (freud, “mourning and melancholia” 208). what oothoon says later in plate 2 about her dire state being limited by five senses is truly an indication of theotormon’s inability to see through her polluted exterior (“this defiled bosom”) and acknowledge her intact interior (“my pure transparent breast”). aggravatingly, he is unable to act like a real husband/​lover by bringing justice upon the rapist and asserting his unchanged love for her, perhaps as the hero in oithona does.gaul, the counterpart of theotormon, declares: “thou [oithona] art to me the beam of the east, rising in a land unknown. but thou coverest thy face with sadness, daughter of car-borne nuäth! is the foe of oithona near? my soul burns to meet him in fight. the sword trembles by the side of gaul, and longs to glitter in his hand” (macpherson 107). the themes of reunion with a damsel in distress and restoration of order permeate macpherson’s narrative. in visions, these themes that solidify masculine identity are entirely absent. conversely, blake’s poem shows the breakdown of theotormon’s masculine identity through self-annihilating autoeroticism. instead, theotormon’s selfhood based on the identity of husband/​lover has already been annihilated in his autoerotic emulation of bromion’s sexual violence, an abject situation that oothoon discloses with the pronouncement “all from life i was obliterated and erased” (2.34, e 47). theotormon fails to understand the profound meaning of oothoon’s call for self-mutilation: “theotormon hears me not! to him the night and morn / are both alike” (2.37-38); what he sees now is only a picture of autoerotic and masochistic fantasy. consequently, he undergoes further drastic alterations of his subjectivity. he perceives oothoon’s autoerotic imagination and “severely smiles. her soul reflects the smile; / as the clear spring mudded with feet of beasts grows pure & smiles” (2.18-19). here he is not only a humiliated husband but also a thrilled spectator of the erotic violence that oothoon presents through her “lively imagination.” his smile upon “the clear spring mudded with feet of beasts”—​a recapitulation of oothoon’s rape by bromion—​corresponds to his emulation of and identification with the rapist’s sexual violence on the frontispiece. in his discussion of spectacular violence in romantic imagination, ian haywood points out that in the triangular relationship among a victimizer, a victim, and a spectator, there is a certain “configuration of multiple points of view” that “breaks down the binary opposition of self and other which is implied in the simplistic viewer-victim model” (6). oothoon’s eagle-rent image on plate 3 and theotormon’s erotic reaction as a spectator exemplify such a “triangular vignette,” in which both characters alter their identities in a drastic manner, as oothoon becomes simultaneously victim and victimizer and theotormon forsakes his social identity as a husband/​lover (who is at least obliged to comfort oothoon, if not fully avenge her rape) to take pleasure in her second violation.plate 3 also reminds us of blake’s illustrations to john gabriel stedman’s narrative. his engravings of tortured slaves, based on stedman’s drawings, seem to evoke sympathy and abolitionist sentiments. the representation is problematic, however, for his erotic way of portraying afflicted human bodies. the extent to which blake approves of such eroticization of suffering requires further exploration. nevertheless, oothoon’s autoerotic fantasy and theotormon’s reaction seem to correspond to the images of the tortured slaves and suggest “the trans-historical nature of aesthetics, torture, the fetish, and pornography” (wood 94). to conclude, i turn to bromion’s lines on plate 4. though allegorically bromion represents plantation slavery and patriarchal oppression, this antagonist articulates the nature of eroticism for blake. after the lengthy and abstract conversation between oothoon and theotormon about the restriction of human perception, bromion urges theotormon to “gratify senses unknown”: thou knowest that the ancient trees seen by thine eyes have fruit; but knowest thou that trees and fruits flourish upon the earth to gratify senses unknown? trees beasts and birds unknown: unknown, not unpercievd, spread in the infinite microscope, in places yet unvisited by the voyager. and in worlds over another kind of seas, and in atmospheres unknown. (4.13-18, e 48) stevens proposes that the “senses unknown” allude to “a less conventional sexuality” (149), a queer interpretation that theotormon is both mentally and physically raped by bromion, who in this passage is suggesting homosexual anal sex as an unspeakable but tempting pleasure. certainly, bromion is referring to a wider scope of sexuality that is free from the institution of marriage and heteronormativity in blake’s time. in addition, with the repeated stress on the word “unknown” and the phrase “not unpercievd,” bromion promotes a kind of sexual experience that values sensual perception over knowledge, on which human subjectivity and selfhood are constructed. in visions, eroticism encompasses heterogeneous aspects of sex, including violence against the self and the other. this alternative form of eroticism is actualized in oothoon’s plucking of the marygold, which represents polyamorous sex and erotic approximation to death, in the rape itself as a violent embodiment of sex, and in the autoerotic fantasy that entails the disintegration of selfhood and subjectivity. oothoon and theotormon annihilate their previous social identities in the erotic experiences precipitated by the extreme conditions of violence and loss of love object. it might not be plausible to say that blake advocates sexual violence and self-denying autoeroticism in visions, which, as many critics have demonstrated, bears a social/​political message criticizing slavery and religious oppression. but these sexual negativities do empower his poetic imagination and there does emerge the irresistible pleasure of “the self enjoyings of self denial”—​tissot’s “feats,” rousseau’s “most delicious sentiments,” and blake’s “sweetest … fruit” blighted by the worm—​that somehow outweighs “normal” erotic love between individuals based on positive mutual affection. indeed, as the most prominent motif in milton and jerusalem, self-annihilation is a ceaseless “mental fight” that envisions a political/​religious paradise in “englands green & pleasant land” (milton 1 [i], e 95-96) with the harmonious reunion of men and women. yet an alternative aspect of self-annihilation is embodied by the restless “sword … in my hand,” a sexual euphemism since shakespeare. apart from being “forgiveness of sins” (jerusalem 98.23, e 257) and the key to reestablishing the genderless universal man in the later epics, the phenomenon of self-annihilation emerges in visions in the forms of sexual violence and autoeroticism, which generate unacknowledged pleasure by decentralizing subjectivity and disintegrating preexisting identity. works cited armstrong, john. the oeconomy of love: a poetical essay. new ed. london, 1745. [accessed in eighteenth century collections online (hereafter ecco), 28 june 2019.] blake, william. the complete poetry and prose of william blake. ed. david v. erdman. newly rev. ed. new york: anchor-random house, 1988. [abbreviated as e.] bruder, helen p. william blake and the daughters of albion. london: macmillan, 1997. clark, anna. women’s silence, men’s violence: sexual assault in england, 1770–​1845. london: pandora, 1987. connolly, tristanne. “flowery porn: form and desire in erasmus darwin’s the loves of the plants.” literature compass 13.10 (2016): 604-16. dabhoiwala, faramerz. the origins of sex: a history of the first sexual revolution. oxford: oxford university press, 2012. damon, s. foster. a blake dictionary. with a new index by morris eaves. london: thames and hudson, 1979. darwin, erasmus. the botanic garden. part ii. containing the loves of the plants. a poem. 2nd ed. london: j. nichols, 1790. [accessed in ecco, 27 june 2019.] doskow, minna. william blake’s “jerusalem”: structure and meaning in poetry and picture. rutherford: fairleigh dickinson university press, 1982. erdman, david v. blake: prophet against empire. 3rd ed. princeton: princeton university press, 1977. —​—​—​. the illuminated blake. oxford: oxford university press, 1975. fox, susan. “the female as metaphor in william blake’s poetry.” critical inquiry 3.3 (1977): 507-19. freud, sigmund. “mourning and melancholia.” on murder, mourning and melancholia. trans. shaun whiteside. london: penguin, 2005. 201-18. —​—​—​. “on the introduction of narcissism.” “beyond the pleasure principle” and other writings. trans. john reddick. london: penguin, 2003. 1-30. frye, northrop. fearful symmetry: a study of william blake. princeton: princeton university press, 1947. garcia, humberto. “blake, swedenborg, and muhammad: the prophetic tradition, revisited.” religion & literature 44.2 (2012): 35-65. george, diana hume. blake and freud. ithaca: cornell university press, 1980. goslee, nancy moore. “slavery and sexual character: questioning the master trope in blake’s visions of the daughters of albion.” elh 57.1 (1990): 101-28. harvey, karen. reading sex in the eighteenth century: bodies and gender in english erotic culture. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2004. haywood, ian. bloody romanticism: spectacular violence and the politics of representation, 1776–1832. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, 2006. hobson, christopher z. blake and homosexuality. new york: palgrave, 2000. jackson-houlston, caroline. “‘the lineaments of … desire’: blake’s visions of the daughters of albion and romantic literary treatments of rape.” queer blake. ed. helen p. bruder and tristanne connolly. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, 2010. 153-62. jordanova, ludmilla. “the popularization of medicine: tissot on onanism.” textual practice 1.1 (1987): 68-79. king-hele, desmond. erasmus darwin and the romantic poets. basingstoke: macmillan, 1986. kugler, anne. “constructing wifely identity: prescription and practice in the life of lady sarah cowper.” journal of british studies 40.3 (2001): 291-323. linkin, harriet kramer. “revisioning blake’s oothoon.” blake 23.4 (spring 1990): 184-93. macpherson, james. the poems of ossian. 2 vols. london, 1796. [accessed in ecco, 21 july 2016.] makdisi, saree. william blake and the impossible history of the 1790s. chicago: university of chicago press, 2003. mcgann, jerome j. “the aim of blake’s prophecies and the uses of blake criticism.” blake’s sublime allegory. ed. stuart curran and joseph anthony wittreich, jr. madison: university of wisconsin press, 1973. 3-21. mellor, anne k. “sex, violence, and slavery: blake and wollstonecraft.” huntington library quarterly 58.3/4 (1995): 345-70. punter, david. “blake, trauma and the female.” new literary history 15.3 (1984): 475-90. rousseau, jean-jacques. the confessions of j. j. rousseau …. part the second. 3 vols. london, 1790. [accessed in ecco, 19 nov. 2018.] —​—​—​. the confessions of j. j. rousseau: with the reveries of the solitary walker. 2 vols. dublin, 1783. [accessed in ecco, 8 dec. 2020.] ryan, robert m. the romantic reformation: religious politics in english literature, 1789–1824. cambridge: cambridge university press, 1997. schuchard, marsha keith. why mrs. blake cried: william blake and the sexual basis of spiritual vision. london: century-random house, 2006. schwartz, joel. the sexual politics of jean-jacques rousseau. chicago: chicago university press, 1984. sha, richard c. perverse romanticism: aesthetics and sexuality in britain, 1750–1832. baltimore: johns hopkins university press, 2009. simpson, philippa. “blake and porn.” sexy blake. ed. helen p. bruder and tristanne connolly. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, 2013. 211-18. sontag, susan. “the pornographic imagination.” story of the eye, by georges bataille. london: penguin, 2001. 83-118. stevens, bethan. “‘woes & … sighs’: fantasies of slavery in visions of the daughters of albion.” queer blake. ed. helen p. bruder and tristanne connolly. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, 2010. 140-52. tayler, irene. “say first! what mov’d blake? blake’s comus designs and milton.” blake’s sublime allegory. ed. stuart curran and joseph anthony wittreich, jr. madison: university of wisconsin press, 1973. 233-58. —​—​—​. “the woman scaly.” bulletin of the midwest modern language association 6.1 (1973): 74-87. tissot, samuel-auguste. three essays …. third, on onanism: or, a treatise upon the disorders produced by masturbation: or, the effects of secret and excessive venery. dublin, 1772. [accessed in ecco, 27 july 2016.] welch, dennis m. “essence, gender, race: william blake’s visions of the daughters of albion.” studies in romanticism 49.1 (2010): 105-31. wood, marcus. slavery, empathy and pornography. oxford: oxford university press, 2002. posthumous b l a k e^ volume 53, number 2, fall 2019 dedicated to g. e. bentley, jr. angela esterhammer, victoria college, university of toronto nelson hilton, university of georgia tilar j. mazzeo, colby college robert w. rix, university of copenhagen joseph viscomi, university of north carolina at chapel hill david worrall, the nottingham trent university martin butlin, tate gallery, london, retired tristanne j. connolly, university of waterloo detlef w. dörrbecker, university of trier sibylle erle, bishop grosseteste university robert n. essick, university of california, riverside a d v i s o r y b o a r d a n i l l u s t r a t e d q u a r t e r l y volume 53 number 2 fall 2019 c o n t e n t s www.blakequarterly.org article posthumous blake: the roles of catherine blake, c. h. tatham, and frederick tatham in blake’s afterlife by joseph viscomi © 2019 copyright morris eaves and morton d. paley cover: america a prophecy copy n, plate 4, detail. auckland libraries heritage collections 1794 blak. e d i t o r s editors: morris eaves and morton d. paley review editor: alexander s. gourlay exhibitions editor: luisa calè bibliographer (criticism): wayne c. ripley bibliographer (music): jason whittaker managing editor: sarah jones sarah.jones@rochester.edu production office: department of english, university of rochester, rochester ny 14627-0451 review: sibylle erle and morton d. paley, eds., the reception of william blake in europe sibylle erle and morton d. paley, eds. the reception of william blake in europe. 1 vol. in 2. the reception of british and irish authors in europe, no. 25. london: bloomsbury academic, 2019. lxvi + 384 pp., viii + 434 pp. 29 illustrations. £250.00/​$338.00, hardcover. reviewed by silvia riccardi silvia riccardi (silvia.riccardi@anglistik.uni-freiburg.de) is a postdoctoral assistant in the department of english at the university of freiburg. she has written on the reception of dante in england and is currently working on graphic and textual forms of biomorphism in blake’s illuminated manuscripts and on a monograph examining the aesthetics of dark romanticism. there is an outside spread without, & an outside spread within beyond the outline of identity both ways, which meet in one: an orbed void of doubt, despair, hunger, & thirst & sorrow. (jerusalem 18.2-4, e 162) the reception of william blake in europe is the twenty-fifth title in the series the reception of british and irish authors in europe, published under the editorship of elinor shaffer. as shaffer contends, the project sets a broader definition of the term “afterlife” in relation to the authors’ reception beyond britain. this transnational and comparative approach broadens our knowledge of “writers in any field whose works have been recognized as making a contribution to the intellectual and cultural history of our society” (xii). the identity and role of william blake as a “writer” have not always been taken for granted. within the timespan of two centuries, blake has been considered as both an artisan and one of the big six of british romanticism. for much of his life he worked as an engraver, socially considered among the reproducers of pictures rather than the creators. since his death, a recognition of a more complex figure around his name has emerged. today, across europe, blake is regarded as a printmaker and engraver, poet and painter, prophet and philosopher, mystic and musician. the assessment of a slow and unbalanced reception of such a multifaceted figure, whose role has morphed across the arts throughout different periods and regions, is one of the factors that makes this project especially valuable, creating “a unique and startling story, to which no label or temporal category is adequate” (shaffer, reception xiii). sibylle erle and morton d. paley took up the ambitious task of editing the first comprehensive and systematic reference guide to blake’s european afterlife, in collaboration with international scholars. the study resulted in a monumental collection of twenty-six chapters arranged in two volumes. covering an extraordinary diversity of disciplines, reception comprises essays on blake editions, music, exhibitions, and the reception histories in ireland, france, belgium, italy, the iberian peninsula, romania, germany, austria, switzerland, the netherlands, the nordic countries, the czech republic, poland, russia and the ussr, hungary, the former yugoslavia, bulgaria, greece, and turkey. the work also contains an introduction, a thoroughly compiled timeline of blake’s reception in continental europe, and a detailed bibliography in each volume, divided by chapter, including the major translations in the countries covered. paley opens the discussion with the editorial history of blake’s work, setting the stage for the remaining chapters. during blake’s lifetime, his reputation was clouded by his supposed insanity. the inaccessibility of his art and his social-class limitations were further impediments to his reception, even in his own country. unlike his romantic contemporaries, he remained a “pictor” and “poeta ignotus” for decades (25). the first widely promulgated acknowledgments of his literary and artistic achievements appeared about fifty years after his death, with alexander gilchrist’s and algernon charles swinburne’s biographical works, published in 1863 and 1868, and the 1876 burlington fine arts club exhibition. william butler yeats and edwin john ellis’s three-volume edition of the works of william blake (1893) was a watershed for blake’s afterlife abroad, proposing an esotericist view of the artist and anticipating jean h. hagstrum’s approach to blake’s work as “composite art.” as edward larrissy highlights, the enthusiastic editors attempted to proffer blake as an irish national. two years later, in his book of irish verse, yeats further affirmed that “william blake has been recently claimed as of irish descent, upon the evidence of dr. carter blake; and if, in the course of years, that claim becomes generally accepted, he should be included also in irish anthologies” (quoted in reception 39). helene richter, as erle and susanne schmid point out in their essays, was the first european scholar to reject this claim, in 1906. blake’s fortunes on the continent developed into disparate but often entwining threads across media. while in belgium interest was predominantly focused on his art in relation to the symbolist movement, in france attention was mostly given to his poetic pieces until recent times. in 1972, jean-jacques mayoux discussed the role of blake as an artist in his study on english painters, la peinture anglaise, drawing parallels with john flaxman and henry fuseli. from a political perspective, blake was best known for his radical views inspired by the french revolution. gilles soubigou and yann tholoniat note that he was compared by philosopher jean wahl to “rimbaud and nietzsche or a ‘dante révolté’ (‘rebellious dante’), a priest on the path towards wisdom” (quoted in reception 69). according to wahl, the english author conflated the spirit of three iconic figures in the cultural histories of france, germany, and italy. blake arrived in italy through visual means. his final, incomplete work on the illustrations to the commedia portrayed transcendence and corporeal translucence beyond dante’s words. the watercolor series was displayed in a comprehensive exhibition in 1983, though it has never been presented as a whole. translations, scholarship, and criticism on blake flourished even during the fascist period; by contrast, extended authoritarianism in the remaining romance-language countries affected the cultural acknowledgment of his work. cristina flores traces an early appreciation of his art in spanish in 1826 with josé joaquín de mora’s meditaciones poéticas. unlike in italy, however, there was no substantial continuation of the artist’s reception until 1928, when blake’s poetry was translated from a 1927 french version. the first portuguese translations appeared in 1979, followed, among others, by edições antígona’s publication between 1994 and 2009 of the complete illuminated writings. cătălin ghiţă expands on the relevance of translation in romania, drawing attention to mihai a. stroe’s bilingual project on blake’s works, “for it fills a significant reception gap in romanian culture” (223). of the ten-volume initiative, the four zoas and milton have been released so far, in 2006. the german section on blake’s afterlife is articulated in four chapters and explores the responses to the author’s writings and art in germany, austria, and switzerland, including an essay by david bindman on the great 1975 hamburg kunsthalle exhibition. the first mention of blake in germany dates back to 1789, but only in 1811 did he gain scholarly attention via henry crabb robinson. he was, however, mainly considered as a “madman” throughout the nineteenth century in german-speaking areas (239), until the publication of richter’s william blake in 1906. both schmid and erle acknowledge the importance of the austrian scholar’s contribution, which was also devoted to the illuminated books and their material qualities. notably, richter’s work influenced blake’s reception in the czech republic, the former yugoslavia, and switzerland. on the latter, angela esterhammer discusses blake’s relationship with the expatriated fuseli and the interest in blake’s mysticism among swiss audiences. after blake’s style, the psychoanalyst carl gustav jung incorporated illuminated handwritten text and images in his liber novus, the volume of visionary material he produced between 1913 and 1930 (302). the visionary and mystical aspects of blake also prevailed in the dutch reception until the works of jan veth (1893) and edward b. koster (1907) brought attention to his poetry. owing to the impact of the cold war, there was a late response in eastern europe. despite being presented as a revolutionary by the soviet poet marshak, blake is mostly appreciated for the visionary qualities of his art in russia today, and seen as a disciple of swedenborg in bulgaria. his reputation as a christian visionary poet was the cause of the slow reception in turkey, where some of his prophetic books appeared in translation only in 2015. the nordic response shows blake emerging in the twentieth century as a literary man in sweden, an artistic figure in finland, and a musical and theatrical inspiration in denmark. jason whittaker and martin myrone examine the crucial roles of popular and classical music and of traveling exhibitions in blake’s growing popularity. these have been accessible means for large numbers of people to appreciate his work without having to confront the written idiosyncrasies of his mythopoeia. blake originals first started traveling to the continent in 1937 (paris), and loan exhibitions became more common after world war ii, offering european audiences a direct experience with the materiality of the pieces, which remains central to his reception. one of the most attractive features of erle and paley’s collection is the extensive exploration of blake’s protean nature and the way in which the development of its varied discovery abroad has unfolded. as shaffer notes, “in the current volume we find ourselves in a unique world that eluded definition, and sometimes recognition, through its own originality” (xiii). each chapter is meticulously tailored to provide a sense of temporal and geographical—​and quintessentially european—​continuity. for instance, both schmid and erle highlight richter’s notable example of transnational response interlacing blake’s fortunes in multiple countries and, emblematically, luisa calè observes that “the first significant traces of blake in italy come through dante via germany” (125), bringing forth interwoven contingencies of different periods, cultures, and media that occurred beyond national borders. given the role of blake as a writer of pictorial language and the importance of his visual art for european audiences, the reader may expect the collection to offer more than twenty-nine black-and-white illustrations and to include, for example, reproductions of the stipple engravings recently identified in russia by tatiana tiutvinova. these pieces—“robin hood and clorinda” (1783) after john meheux, “calisto” and “zephyrus and flora” (1784) after thomas stothard, and “venus dissuades adonis from hunting” (1787) after richard cosway—“were coloured by blake himself” and testify that the first originals in europe arrived in russia in the 1820s and not in germany or austria (see 540-42 and erle and paley, “introduction” 21). the studies and material put forth in this work are, however, exceptionally substantial. blake is the only romantic author—​and one of the very few, with james joyce, charles darwin, charles dickens, and isaac newton—​to whom multiple volumes have been devoted in shaffer’s series. as erle and paley point out, this work is, after the one on alfred tennyson, “only the second … in elinor shaffer’s series the reception of british and irish authors in europe to have illustrations” (10). it may not be literally visual, but the reception of william blake in europe powerfully portrays the multiform image of william blake, presenting the fascinating and quasi-mythical construct of his figure as a central enigma from the romantic era to our own. william blake and his circle: a checklist of publications and discoveries in 2016 william blake and his circle: a checklist of publications and discoveries in 2016 by with the assistance of hikari sato for japanese publications, of li-ping geng 耿力平 for chinese publications, and of fernando castanedo for spanish publications g. e. bentley, jr. (gbentley@chass.utoronto.ca) published thomas macklin (1752–1800), picture-publisher and patron, creator of the macklin bible (mellen press, 2016), with a section on blake. editors’ notes: the invaluable bentley checklist has grown to the point where we are unable to publish it in its entirety. all the material will be incorporated into the cumulative “william blake and his circle” and “sale catalogues of william blake’s works” on the bentley blake collection site, victoria university in the university of toronto. the article below includes previously unrecorded copy, binding, and history information for the works of blake and his circle, editions from the last ten years (2007 on), and catalogues and criticism from the last ten years and prior to the publication of gilchrist’s life (1863). a number of entries have a link to an online article or catalogue. some such items are freely accessible, and others may be behind a subscription barrier, depending on your or your institution’s access. all are included on the ground that even those with restricted access often provide a freely available abstract or excerpt. addenda and corrigenda to blake records, 2nd ed. (2004), now appear online. they are updated yearly in conjunction with the publication of the checklist. table of contents: introductory essay symbols abbreviations division i: william blake part i: blake’s writings section a: original editions, facsimiles, reprints, and translations section b: collections and selections part ii: reproductions of drawings and paintings section a: illustrations of individual authors section b: collections and selections part iii: commercial engravings section a: illustrations of individual authors part iv: catalogues and bibliographies section a: individual catalogues section b: collections and selections part vi: criticism, biography, and scholarly studies division ii: blake’s circle cromek, robert hartley flaxman, john fuseli, henry johnson, joseph macklin, thomas stedman, john gabriel blake publications and discoveries in 2016 the checklist of blake publications in 2016 includes works in catalan, chinese, danish, dutch, french, greek, italian, japanese, korean, polish, portuguese, russian, slovenian, spanish, and turkish, and there are newly recorded doctoral dissertations from belgrade (serbia), bristol (uk), burdwan (india), florida (usa), ljubljana (slovenia), malaysia, north carolina (usa), north dakota state (usa), oxford (uk), and stanford (usa). copies of blake’s writings europe pl. 1 (d) and for the sexes: the gates of paradise (n) pls. 3, 7, 15, and 17 were sold in 2016. most of the book collection of maurice sendak, the subject of a lawsuit between his estate and the rosenbach, was awarded in october 2016 to the estate (see kennedy in division i, part vi). newly recorded sale of blake watercolor jeroboam and the man of god <butlin #460, 1803–05>, called “the withering of king jeroboam’s hand by the man of god,” was offered in the christie’s catalogue of 15 june 1908.my information comes from a volume of christie’s catalogues called art prices current, 1907–8, which was drawn to my attention by paul sternberg. original bindings of blake’s writings after a work was printed and collated and, where relevant, the sheets were folded, it was stabbed and sewn through the inner margin (not through the gutter of the folded sheet) into a folded sheet of heavy paper, often bluish-graythel (r), poetical sketches (b, v), innocence (g), songs (o), and tiriel retain gray, grayish-blue, or bluish-gray wrappers (see bb pp. 130, 347, 353, 406, 418, 449). or buff sugar paper.europe (f) is “in the original heavy buff wrappers,” innocence (e) was in “buff paper covers (still with the plates),” innocence (g) was “stitched through bluish-grey paper wrappers and a buff spine,” songs (h) is in grayish-buff wrappers, and songs (s) was “perhaps originally stabbed through heavy greyish-brown wrappers” (see bb pp. 159, 405-06, 415-16, 421). probably this sewing work was done by mrs. blake. most copies of blake’s writings still exhibit stabholes.for tables of stabholes, see bb pp. 55-56, bbs p. 31, and “william blake and his circle” (1994–). almost all these copies have been rebound. when a work is rebound, the binder normally trims the leaves, and often such trimming removed stabholes, which may be a reason why some copies no longer exhibit them. notice that the works in paper wrappers include the type-printed poetical sketches (b, v) and descriptive catalogue (c).descriptive catalogue (c) is in “original paper covers” (see bb p. 137). probably the sheets of poetical sketches came to the blakes “unbound, unstabbed, untrimmed, uncut, unfolded,” as copy r still survives,see bb p. 352. and quite possibly the descriptive catalogue did too. catalogues one of the most surprising discoveries here is a catalogue (1820) of edward evans, which offered colored and stitched copies of eight of blake’s major works at a fire-sale price.edward evans of great queen street and his successors should be distinguished from the bookseller and auctioneer r. h. evans of pall mall (see 1832 29 march–6 april and 1840 27-28 february in part iv, section a, and note 48). about the time blake’s financial distress led him to sell his print collection to colnaghi,see br(2) 384. he probably sold all his remaining copies of america, the book of thel, europe, the first book of urizen, the marriage of heaven and hell, the song of los, songs of innocence, and songs of experiencein his letter of 12 april 1827 blake said that he had “none remaining of all [my works] that i had printed.” to the prolific printseller evans, who offered them in his catalogue (july 1820), lot 382, each stitched, for 12s. apiece. the fact that they were separately stitched suggests that they were in the form in which they came from blake’s hands. it seems to me likely that evans had acquired blake’s entire stock of works in illuminated printing and that he had more than one copy of some of these works. the price at which he offered them suggests that he paid about 5s. each. if so, this was a sacrifice price for blake. in his letter of 9 june 1818 he had offered copies of america, europe, and the first book of urizen at £5.5.0, songs of innocence and songs of experience at £3.3.0, and the book of thel at £2.2.0.in “to the public” (1793) he offered america at 10s. 6d., the marriage of heaven and hell and visions of the daughters of albion at 7s. 6d., songs of innocence and songs of experience at 5s., and the book of thel at 3s. two works missing from the 1820 list are surprising: milton (all four copies printed in 1811 and 1818) and visions of the daughters of albion (copies n-p printed in 1818).the book of ahania and the book of los (1795) survive only in unique copies, and jerusalem was not finished until 1820. probably blake had sold all the copies of milton and visions he had in hand. more surprising is the presence of the song of los, all copies of which were printed in 1795. clearly blake still had one left over in 1820, even though he did not list it in his 1818 letter. notice that the evans list does not include type-printed copies of blake’s works, some of which certainly remained in blake’s possession. twelve copies (a, g-n, p, r, u, x) of poetical sketches (1783) and at least one copy (c) of descriptive catalogue (1809) were not disposed of until after his death in 1827. most of the catalogues of edward evans and his successors recorded here bear no date of publication, and their placement is sometimes distressingly arbitrary. criticism, biography, and scholarship a new publication that offers important information about blake is the joseph johnson letterbook, ed. john bugg (2016). the apparent discovery of a letter by blake of 23 august 1777 is merely the result of the discoverer’s inability to read the plainly written date of “august 23, 1799” (see popova in division i, part vi). sheila spector’s essay entitled “frye’s mistreatment of the archetype,” blake 50.2 (fall 2016), proposes a thesis that may have profound effects upon the respect paid to blake’s most influential critic: “frye’s writing about blake is not criticism, but fiction.” two longtime workhorses of blake scholarship, frequently consulted but rarely cited, are robert n. essick’s “blake in the marketplace” and g. e. bentley, jr. (et al.), “william blake and his circle,” in blake 49.4 (spring 2016) and 50.1 (summer 2016). two of the more surprising new publications cited here are bambini di satana (see dimitri in division i, part vi) and thehumandivinedotorg (see peat in division i, part vi). a number of previously unrecorded prints by the writing engraver william stadden blake have been discovered.on w. s. blake and the previously known prints, see [alexander tilloch], “prevention of forgery,” philosophical magazine 56 (july 1820): 63-67; geoffrey keynes, “engravers called blake,” times literary supplement 17 jan. 1942: 36, revised in his blake studies (1949, 1971); ruthven todd, “the two blakes,” times literary supplement 10 feb. 1945: 72; raymond watkinson, “‘white on black,’” times literary supplement 13 sept. 1974: 980; janet warner, “trade cards of w. s. blake,” book collector 32 (1983): 105-07; g. e. bentley, jr., “trade cards and the blake connection,” book collector 37 (1988): 127-33; bentley, bbs p. 277; and bentley, “w. s. blake: new facts and engravings,” blake 49.3 (winter 2015–16): 24 pars. they are: march, 29th, | 1799. | [swash:] prophecy and ocean. | [design of neptune seated on a dolphin beside a pyramid] | will be performed | at the theatre royal | hay-market, | the prophecy a sacred | oratorio in two parts, | & ocean an ode in one part, | compoſed by t. busby. | blake ſc ’change alley <british museum department of prints and drawings: c,2.1459> the favor of your company | is requested [by major green to a | ball &c at his cottage on wednesday | the 25.th ins.t at 7: o’clock to meet | the s.t olaves volunteers] | [on a curtain over a lion, sword, drum, and shield, with a cannon and cannonballs to the right, and on a banner] st olaves volunteers | blake ſc | [june 16. 1800 — this card to be produced at the garden gate] <british museum department of prints and drawings: c,2.1291, printed in red> [within an elaborate frame with a crown at the top] | the honor of your company is desired | to dine with | earl fitzwilliam, president. | the vice preſidents. | [two columns of names, separated by a vertical line] earl of inchiquin, ... lord rawdon, ... r.t hon.ble m.r pelham, ... r.t hon.ble m.r flood, ... ynyr burges esq.r treasurer, | and the governors of the benevolent society of | s.t patrick, on thursday the 17 march 1791, at | the london tavern in bishopsgate street. | dinner to be on table at half past five o’clock. | [two columns of names, separated by two vertical lines with the word stewards vertically between them] s.r edw.d leslie j. woodmason, esq.r w.m gregory, esq.r rob.t slade, esq.r sam.l sneyd, esq.r john bourke, esq.r john clements, esq.r r. b. o’reilly, esq.r j. wallace, esq.r james portis, esq.r capt.n h. burges john french, esq.r a collection after dinner. | [emblem with a harp] | benevolent society of s.t patrick | blake ſc ’change alley | [edd. p(?) blakeney no 242] <british museum department of prints and drawings: j,9.193, printed in blue> the company of proprietors. | of the | west middlesex water works | [design of a seated naked man (neptune?) before a woman holding a piece of paper; behind her are pipes and a building] | fontes perennis aquæ. | opened on the 4.th dec.r 1809, being the 50.th| year of the reign of his majesty george 3.rd | [swash:] directors. | george alderson esq.r thomas lumley esq.r benj.n brecknell esq.r robert pedder esq.r william cass esq.r alex.r ramsay robinson esq.r john cook esq.r edw.d stracey esq.r john dixon esq.r james lewis siordet esq.r james hebdin esq.r george watts esq.r rob.t s. sloper, chief clerk. | blake ſc ’change alley | ticket of admission. <british museum department of prints and drawings: 1894,0612.25, from herbert harlakenden gilchrist> * * * * * * * * * the annual checklist concerning william blake and his circle records publications and discoveries for the current year (say, 2016) and those for previous years that are not recorded in blake books, blake books supplement, and “william blake and his circle.” installments of “william blake and his circle” are continuations of blake books and blake books supplement, with similar principles and conventions. i have made no systematic attempt to record audio books and magazines, blogs, broadcasts on radio and television, broadsides, calendars,william blake wall calendars for 2017 (cafepress). cards, cd-roms, chinaware, coffee mugs, comic books,see john riordan, comic strip (first noticed by geb in 2016), “william blake, taxi driver,” time out magazine. computer printouts (unpublished), conferences,“gnostic mass marathon,” massapalooza at william blake lodge, 208 south pulaski st., baltimore, 30 sept.-2 oct. 2016. there are similar announcements for 8-10 april and 8-10 july 2016. dvds, e-mails, essays for sale,there are scores of blake titles for “buy essay online.” festivalsblakefest, bognor regis, 17-18 sept. 2016. and lecture series, flash cards, furniture, graphic novels,g. e. gallas, the poet and the flea vol. 1 (self published 15 april 2016 online and in soft and hard covers) (gallas sets her graphic novel about blake in 1790). interactive multimedia, jewelry, lectures on audiocassettes, lipstick, manuscripts about blake, maps, microforms, mosaics, movies, murals, music,“the vision of albion: fretwork and william blake,” kings place, london, 2 nov. 2016, with the premiere of graham treacher, “divine madness: the visions of william blake.” notebooks (blank), novels merely tangentially about blake, operas, pageants, performances, pillows, places named after blake, playing cards, plays, podcasts, poems about blake, portraits, postcards, posters and individual pictures, recorded readings and singings, refrigerator magnets, stained-glass windows, stamps (postage and rubber), stickers, sweatshirts, tapestries, t-shirts, tattoos (temporary and permanent), tiles, typescripts (unpublished), video recordings, and web sites. research for this checklist was carried out particularly in the libraries of the university of toronto and victoria university in the university of toronto, as well as with the electronic resources of the british museum, copac, google, google books, google scholar, worldcat, jstor, the mla international bibliography (2014–16), proquest dissertation and theses global, and the yale center for british art. works published in japan were found in cinii (national institute of informatics scholarly and academic information navigator), the national diet library online catalogue, komaba library and general library in the university of tokyo, and the national diet library. information for works published in china derives from the national library of china (beijing). research for works in spanish was carried out in the humanities library of the universidad carlos iii de madrid. i am grateful to ivana bančević (for a serbian dissertation on blake), to random cloud (for crucial bibliographical advice about night thoughts), to robert n. essick (for much advice beyond price and for an early sight of “blake in the marketplace, 2016”), to jeff mertz (for reproductions of obscure essays), to morton d. paley (for recent articles about blake), and to paul sternberg for most of the information about the evans family of printsellers, as of course to my generous collaborators, fernando castanedo, li-ping geng, and hikari sato. symbols * works prefixed by an asterisk include one or more illustrations by blake or depicting him. if there are more than 19, the number is specified. if the illustrations include all those for a work by blake, say thel or his illustrations to l’ allegro, the work is identified. § works preceded by a section mark are reported on second-hand authority. abbreviations bb g. e. bentley, jr., blake books (1977) bbs g. e. bentley, jr., blake books supplement (1995) blake blake/an illustrated quarterly <blake ([year])> the installment of “william blake and his circle” published in blake in the year specified br(2) g. e. bentley, jr., blake records, 2nd ed. (2004) butlin martin butlin, the paintings and drawings of william blake (1981) isbn international standard book number in the checklist, english translations of the titles of articles, books, and journals in other languages are often contained in either parentheses or brackets. parentheses indicate that the title is also included in english in the work; brackets that it is not. some journals, such as notes and queries, are published online several months before the hard copy appears. division i: william blake part i: blake’s writings section a: original editions, facsimiles, reprints, and translations table of collections addenda robert n. essick illuminated work: for the sexes: the gates of paradise (n) pls. 7, 15, 17 alan parker illuminated work: europe pl. 1 (“the ancient of days” [d]) victoria university in the university of toronto illuminated work: for the sexes: the gates of paradise (n) pl. 3 private owners and public institutions that have disposed of original blakes addenda anonymous illuminated work: europe pl. 1 (“the ancient of days” [d]) anonymous illuminated work: for the sexes: the gates of paradise (n) pls. 3, 7, 15, 17the remaining plates (pls. 4-6, 8, 13-14) are presumably still available from john windle. america (1793) a copy was offered for 12s. in edw. evans catalogue (july 1820), lot 382 (see 1820 [july] in part iv). copy h history: a. e. evans and son separated america (h) from europe (d) and the large book of designs (a) and offered america at £3.3.0 in their catalogues (after 19 june 1846), lot 1156 (see after 19 june 1846 in part iv), and (after 1848), lot 715 (see after 1848 in part iv). the book of thel (1789) a copy was offered for 12s. in edw. evans catalogue (july 1820), lot 382 (see 1820 [july] in part iv). copy d history: it was offered for £3.3.0 in a. e. evans and son catalogue (after 1848), lot 2214* (“the book of thiel”) (see after 1848 in part iv). europe (1794) a copy was offered for 12s. in edw. evans catalogue (july 1820), lot 382 (see 1820 [july] in part iv). copy l history: in 1913 walter t. spencer acquired posthumously printed uncolored copy l with posthumously printed uncolored america (q), had them colored, and sold them in 1913 as originals colored by blake. robert n. essick tells me he has discovered that the coloring of europe (l) is based on muir’s facsimile of 1887. in turn, the muir facsimile was based on “the ancient of days” (europe pl. 1) copy d (owned by muir), pls. 2, 5-6, 8 on europe (d) (in the british museum since 1859), pl. 4 from the “order” of the songs (owned by muir), and pls. 7, 9-18 on copy a. it would be interesting to learn whether america (q), now in princeton, was also colored after the muir facsimile. pl. 1 (“the ancient of days”)described as “the ancient of days” (d) in bb pp. 109, 339 (no. 100). binding: printed in blue ink (not “black,” as described in 1927 and 1938)see robert n. essick, “blake in the marketplace, 2016,” blake 50.4 (spring 2017). probably in 1794 on wove paper 17.5 x 23.9 cm. (platemark 16.9 x 23.2 cm.) and mounted in a window cut into a backing leaf, pen and ink framing lines on the mount, which is inscribed in pencil by an unknown hand, “from europe, frontispiece.” colored partially by blake or catherine, with implausible pink/rose tones added by another hand: “the haphazard coloring in dark rosy red on the rays of light and clouds surrounding the sun is certainly not by either blake.”essick, “blake in the marketplace, 2016,” blake 50.4 (spring 2017): illus. 1. history: it was sold with the “order” of the songs of innocence and of experience (see bb pp. 337-41, bbs pp. 103-04) until the parke-bernet sale of george c. smith, jr., 2 november 1938, lot 28 [$300 to anon.]; acquired by a. e. newton and offered at his posthumous sale of 16 april 1941, lot 130 [$175, apparently bought in]; given by newton’s daughter, caroline newton, by 1954 to w. h. auden,according to humphrey carpenter, w. h. auden: a biography (boston: houghton mifflin, 1981) 376, auden “and chester [kallman] moved in [to a new york city apartment] during february 1954 …. among the pictures that he and chester hung on the walls was an original blake watercolour, ‘the act of creation’, which had been a gift from caroline newton …” (essick, “blake in the marketplace, 2016,” blake 50.4 [spring 2017]). from whom it passed through three others to an american private collector, by whom it was consigned to the dealer john windle, who sold it for $375,000 to alan parker. the first book of urizen (1794) a copy was offered for 12s. in edw. evans catalogue (july 1820), lot 382 (see 1820 [july] in part iv). pl. 1 history: it was sold at puttick & simpson, a collection of mezzotint portraits and fancy subjects, 27 march 1896, lot 136, “blake (william, 1757–1827). lambeth, a coloured engraving, printed by william blake, 1796, and presented by his widow to f. tatham, sculptor,”urizen pl. 1 (lambeth, “1796”), probably from the small book of designs (b), inscribed “this coloured print by wm blake was given to me by his widow frederick tatham sculptor”. for £7 to pollard, according to the sale prices of 1896, vol. 1 (london: henry grant, 1897) 171. for the sexes: the gates of paradise (1818?) table copy plates leaves watermarks blake nos. leaf size in cm. [d] printing color n (various owners) [a] 3-8, 13-15, 17 [b] 10 [c] — — 10.7 x 13.0 (3) 11.7 x 13.8 (4)* 9.7 x 10.8 (5)* 9.5 x 10.6 (6)* 9.8 x 12.0 (7) 7.8 x 10.7 (8) 10.3 x 12.0 (13) 11.4 x 12.3 (14) 14.5 x 22.4 (15) 8.2 x 11.4 (17)* black a. for the owners, see the table of collections, addenda, and private owners and public institutions that have disposed of original blakes, addenda, above. b. the plates are loose. c. the wove paper is 0.21 to 0.25 mm. thick. d. the asterisks indicate that the size reported in the sotheby’s (new york) catalogue of “a gentleman” (the son of kevin vegas), 9 may 1991, lot 8 (and thence in bbs p. 78) is significantly different. the pl. 17 leaf size, given in bbs p. 78 as 8.2 x 10.4 cm., should probably be 8.2 x 11.4 cm.—see essick, “blake in the marketplace, 1991,” blake 25.4 (spring 1992): 146. copies j-k they were “probably printed c. 1827-28 by blake’s widow, catherine, perhaps with john linnell’s assistance.”according to joseph viscomi in e-mails to robert n. essick reported in essick’s “blake in the marketplace, 2016,” blake 50.4 (spring 2017). copy ndetails here derive from robert n. essick and from his “blake in the marketplace, 2016,” blake 50.4 (spring 2017). binding: the plates are in the final state and are very well printed in black on wove paper. “it is difficult to imagine prints of the final state better than copy n.” “the whiteness of the paper indicate[s] that the leaves of copy n were cleaned at some time after the 1991 auction.” history: sold at sotheby’s (new york), 9 may 1991, lot 8 (estimate $15,000-$25,000 [sold for $115,500]) to an american foundation, which consigned it in april 2016 to the dealer john windle, who offered it unsuccessfully at the new york antiquarian book fair, 7-10 april, for $350,000 and sold pls. 7, 15, 17 to robert n. essick, pl. 3 to victoria university in the university of toronto, and offered pls. 4-6, 8, 13-14 at $40,000 for each separate print. an island in the moon (1784?) edition *una isla en la luna. edición bilingüe de fernando castanedo. traducción de fernando castanedo. 2014. <blake (2015)> reviews miguel sanz jiménez, estudios de traducción 6 (2016): 277-79 (in spanish). cristina flores (see blake 50.3 in part vi). large book of designs (1796) copy a history: a. e. evans and son offered it for £5.5.0 in their catalogues (after 19 june 1846), lot 1157 (see after 19 june 1846 in part iv), and (after 1848), lot 717 (see after 1848 in part iv). letters 9 june 1818 history: it was sold at sotheby, wilkinson & hodge, 22-23 december 1896, lot 124, blake letter to dawson turner, long quotation, for £2.16.0 to booth, according to the sale prices of 1896, vol. 1 (london: henry grant, 1897) 379. the marriage of heaven and hell (1790–93) a copy was offered for 12s. in edw. evans catalogue (july 1820), lot 382 (see 1820 [july] in part iv). editions *el matrimonio del cielo y el infierno [h]. ed. and trans. fernando castanedo. 2002, 2007, 2010, 2012. in spanish, with facing english for marriage. <blake (2003, 2014)> e. 2014. *the marriage of heaven and hell [b]. ed. michael phillips. 2011. <blake (2012)> review §david fuller, bars review no. 46 (2015). *the marriage of heaven and hell [a]. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2016. milton (1804[–11]) edition §*milton, a poem. n.p.: svenska ljud classica, 2014. isbn: 9789176394045 (e-book); 9789176392560 (audiobook). poetical sketches (1783) edition §*уильям блейк: поэтические наброски. первое полное англо-русское двуязычное издание первой книги уильяма блейка (1757–1827). william blake: poetical sketches. the first complete english-russian bilingual edition of the first book by william blake (1757–1827). [trans. dmitri smirnov-sadovsky]. st. albans: meladina, 2016. complete works vol. 1. small book of designs (1796) copy a history: a. e. evans and son offered it for £10.10.0 in their catalogues (after 19 june 1846), lot 1158 (see after 19 june 1846 in part iv), and (after 1848), lot 718 (see after 1848 in part iv). the song of los (1795) a copy was offered for 12s. in edw. evans catalogue (july 1820), lot 382 (see 1820 [july] in part iv). copy a history: a. e. evans and son offered it for £5.5.0 in their catalogue (after 1848), lot 2214 (see after 1848 in part iv). songs of innocence and of experience (1794) a copy of songs of innocence and of experience was probably the work described as songs of innocence and songs of experience, offered at 12s. each in edw. evans catalogue (july 1820), lot 382 (see 1820 [july] in part iv). copy h history: a. e. evans and son offered it for £5.5.0 in their catalogues (after 19 june 1846), lot 1155 (see after 19 june 1846 in part iv), and (after 1848), lot 719 (see after 1848 in part iv). editions *cantos de inocencia e experiencia [sic]. trans. jesús david curbelo and susana haug morales. eutomia 1.3 (2009): 30-63. bilingual spanish-english on parallel columns. §songs of innocence and of experience. munich: bookrix, 2015. isbn: 9783736802087 (e-book). §*verzen van onschuld en van ervaring die de twee tegenovergestelde toestanden van de menselijke ziel laten zien. trans. c. w. schoneveld. amsterdam: de wilde tomaat, 2016. 20 cm., 118 pp.; isbn: 9789082428810. in dutch. visions of the daughters of albion (1793) copy a history: a. e. evans and son offered it for £4.4.0 in their catalogues (after 1846), lot 2097 (see after 1846 in part iv), and (after 1848), lot 714 (see after 1848 in part iv), and sold it in february 1847 to the british museum. section b: collections and selections §the brilliant new hercules: a blake reader. n.p.: unkant publishers, 2015. 210 pp.; isbn: 9780992650933. illustrated by andy wilson. §*the definitive william blake poetry collection illustrated with art by william blake. n.p.: createspace, 2009. 195 pp.; isbn: 9781449568665. “the edition of the works of wm. blake” by “the blake press at edmonton,” england (1884–90) <bb #249, bbs p. 152> “volume i” (e) the marriage of heaven and hell (edmonton, 1885) in the copy acquired by robert n. essick in 2016, the statement in the “preface” that the copy reproduced was copy a is lined through and below is written in pen and ink: “this copy is coloured after the original in the fitzwilliam museum at cambridge [copy i] w muir” [rather than copy a as in most copies]. *“holy thursday” (songs of innocence) [jane and ann taylor] city scenes; | or, | a peep into london. | with | [gothic:] seventy illustrations | designed by gilbert,john gilbert (1817–97). engraved by folkard.william a. folkard (fl. 1830–50). | — | [quatrain] | — | london; harvey and darton, | gracechurch street [1845?] the copy in victoria university in the university of toronto is unimaginatively colored. the print of “charity children coming from st. paul’s” (at p. 82) shows girls and beadles but no boy. it quotes, without title or author, blake’s “holy thursday” on p. 82. it is a square 12o in somewhat faded contemporary red publisher’s cloth blind stamped and gilt. colophon: joseph rickerby [sic], printer, sherbourn lane, king william street, city. bbs p. 157 dates it c. 1845 and lists six copies but says nothing of the designs. *libros proféticos i [-ii]. trans. bernardo santano. 2013, 2014. <blake (2014, 2015)>. review maría cruz villalón, norba 34 (2014): 339-42 (in spanish). o matrimônio do céu e do inferno e o livro de thel. trans. josé antônio arantes. 1987. b. 3rd ed. são paulo: iluminuras, 2007. isbn: 9788573212792. in english and portuguese. josé antônio arantes. “imagem de blake.” 9-12. §revolución y literatura en el siglo diecinueve: fuentes, documentos, textos críticos. ed. jerónimo ledesma and valeria castelló-joubert. vol. 1: blake, büchner. buenos aires: editorial de la facultad de filosofía y letras, universidad de buenos aires, 2012. isbn: 9789871785643. in spanish. the blake section is: 1. “un panfleto contra swedenborg (de el matrimonio del cielo y el infierno, 1790).” trans. jerónimo ledesma. 73-76. 2. “una fantasía memorable (de el matrimonio del cielo y el infierno, 1790).” trans. jerónimo ledesma. 77-80. 3. “una canción de libertad (de el matrimonio del cielo y el infierno, 1790).” trans. jerónimo ledesma. 81-84. 4. “la revolución francesa (1791). un poema en siete libros (fragmento).” trans. laura gavilán. 85-108. 5. “la revolución francesa. un poema en siete libros (fragmento).” trans. américo cristófalo. 109-12. 6. peter a. schock. “el matrimonio del cielo y el infierno: el mito de satán en blake y su matriz cultural (1993) [the marriage of heaven and hell: blake’s myth of satan and its cultural matrix].” trans. agustina fracchia and yamila bêgné. 185-228. <blake (2016), under schock in part vi> 7. joseph viscomi. “en las cuevas del cielo y el infierno: swedenborg y la impresión en el matrimonio de blake (1999) [in the caves of heaven and hell: swedenborg and printmaking in blake’s marriage].” trans. mario rucavado rojas. 229-68. <blake (2016), under viscomi in part vi> 8. lisa plummer crafton. “las ‘antiguas voces’ de la revolución francesa de blake (1997) [the ‘ancient voices’ of blake’s the french revolution].” trans. agustina fracchia. 269-98. §selected poems. new delhi: atlantic publishers and distributors, 2015. 23 cm., vii, 185 pp.; isbn: 9788126920426. §songs of inexperience. boulder: under [press]ure, 2016. 16 pp. twelve poems from songs of innocence and of experience, hand set and hand bound by the media theory in the humanities class at the university of colorado boulder. *songs of innocence & experience.the cover reads “songs of innocence & experience and the marriage of heaven & hell.” [rimey law, rookhope, county durham]: aziloth books, 2015. parchment books series. isbn: 9781909735781. the reproductions from the marriage of heaven and hell and songs of innocence and of experience are of the designs only; the text is in letterpress. *songs of innocence and of experience. a selection of plates printed by michael phillips on the replica of william blake’s rolling press in christ church upper library. oxford, 2016. “20 sets” of pulls by michael phillips of his facsimiles, with 16 prints in each, with an explanatory pamphlet. these will be followed by selected plates from the marriage of heaven and hell, america, europe, and jerusalem. the online announcement gives no hint of price, isbn, etc. the number of prints from the songs can be increased “up to 41 plates per set.” individual prints are available from songs of innocence and of experience at $50, america (2 plates) at $250, europe (7 plates) at $250, and jerusalem (1 plate) at $250. “the illuminated books re-created” (5 pp.). since very little is known of blake’s rolling press, a “replica” of it means merely that it is a rolling press. §tyger, tyger. [london]: penguin books, 2016. isbn: 9780241251966. little black classics. an anthology of blake. william blake archive <http://​www.​blakearchive.​org> in 2016 the archive added genesis, the marriage of heaven and hell (a), and back issues of blake 1967–69 and 1980–89, and unveiled a “complete and transformative redesign of its website.” §*william blake i udvalg. ed. ib johansen. copenhagen: det poetiske bureau, 2014. bureauets klassikerbibliotek. 340 pp.; isbn: 9788792280725. in danish. b. §2016. part ii: reproductions of drawings and paintings section a: illustrations of individual authors bible genesis (1827) edition *genesis. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2016. milton, john, paradise regained (c. 1816–20) edition §*john milton. paraíso reconquistado. trans. guilherme gontijo flores, adriano scandolara, bianca davanzo, rodrigo tadeu gonçalves, and vinicius ferreira barth. são paulo: editora de cultura, 2014. isbn: 9788529301846. in portuguese. includes blake’s twelve designs for paradise regained, with brief commentary. reviews juliana steil, “milton e blake em paraíso reconquistado,” letras [revista do programa de pós-graduação em letras, universidade federal de santa maria] no. 51 (dec. 2015): 315-22 (in portuguese). beethoven barreto alvarez, cadernos de tradução 36.3 (sept.-dec. 2016): 406-15. young, edward, night thoughts (1794–96) history: james bain apparently offered them to bernard buchanan macgeorge for £1000.“i remember mr macgeorge telling me that he had been offered at £1000 the set of 537 watercolours” for night thoughts (anon. [“our art correspondent”], “an art and book collector,” glasgow herald 4 feb. 1924, an appendage to the obituary of macgeorge [p. 11]). section b: collections and selections §*william blake drawings. ed. richard donaldson. 2015. 52 pp. §*william blake masterpieces in colour. ed. maria tsaneva. createspace, 2015. 8″ x 11″, 40 pp.; isbn: 9781508842750. part iii: commercial engravings section a: illustrations of individual authors blair, robert, the grave (1808, 1813 …) a prepublication proof before all letters of pl. 5, “death of the strong wicked man,” trimmed on or just within the platemark (28.0 x 23.8 cm.), lacking some lines and with pencil indications of others, was acquired in 2016 from the dealer nicholas lott by robert n. essick. hayley, william, the life, and posthumous writings, of william cowper, esqr. (1803–04) the bookseller joseph johnson wrote to the chichester printer joseph seagrave (12 may 1802): ordered j. seagrave to print 1000 demy & 150 royal of hayley’s life of cowper to be in this shop the beginning of novr next. afterwards 100 more royal were ordered.the joseph johnson letterbook 83 (see johnson in division ii). lavater, john caspar, essays on physiognomy (1788–1810 [or 1817]) the bookseller joseph johnson wrote to john mayne (28 aug. 1801): “from the list of numbers upon hand it appears that a very large proportion of the subscribers have not completed their sets” of lavater.the joseph johnson letterbook 77-78 (see johnson in division ii). malkin, benjamin heath, a father’s memoirs of his child (1806) a copy inscribed in pen and ink on the half-title “m. & l. ellis| from a. t. malkin” (the author’s third son, arthur thomas malkin [1803–88]), uncut, in original boards, with two impressions of blake’s frontispiece, was offered online by vashon island books (nov. 2016) [sold for $1000 to john windle for robert n. essick]. one of the impressions of blake’s print is inscribed on the copperplate “page”; later “page” was burnished off. rees, abraham, the cyclopaedia (1820)issued in parts jan. 1802–aug. 1820. the “first american edition” (title pages), published in 47 volumes (philadelphia: samuel f. bradford and murray, fairman and co. [c. 1811–22]), has engravings without imprints by us engravers closely copying blake’s: pl. 1: “c. g. childs, sct” (cephas g. childs [1793–1871]) pls. 2-7: “g. m.” or “g m” (george murray [d. 1822]) shakespeare, william, boydell’s graphic illustrations of … shakspeare (1803) new location: stanford. shakespeare, william, dramatic works (1802) a set in the “18 original parts of text” was vainly offered in dominic winter’s auction of 15 june 2016, lot 349 (see 2016 15 june in part iv). i have no other record of a set in the original parts. stedman, john gabriel, narrative, of a five years’ expedition (1796, 1806, 1813) the bookseller joseph johnson wrote to adriana stedman (25 oct. 1799), the widow of j. g. stedman: the edition of the colonel’s book being nearly sold i think there is a prospect of another smaller edition going off at a cheaper price, & if it meet with your approbation & theirs [the executors’] i will print one at my own risque & expense, & share with you whatever profit may arise from it.the joseph johnson letterbook 64 (see johnson in division ii). a colored set of the 1806 edition was offered online by pennymead books, nov. 2016 (£15,120). a colored set of the 1813 edition was offered by eureka books on ebay in jan. ($9374.95), feb. (same price), march ($12,499.95), and april 2016 (same price), and in eureka books’ online catalogue in nov. 2016 ($10,000). wit’s magazine (1784) a handsomely colored version of “may-day in london” is in the yale center for british art (b1977.14.17946). young, edward, night thoughts (1797) see 2016 30 november in part iv. separate prints “moore & co.’s advertisement” ([1797–98]) a second copy of the moore & co. print was discovered in 2016; the previously known one is in the british museum department of prints and drawings. the inscription between the columns and the latin quotation from martial below the design were probably executed by an anonymous writing engraver; the references to the “loom[s]” and “frame” and the signature (“blake. d. & sc:”) immediately below the design were scratched in drypoint by blake. … probably the same [state] as the only previously recorded impression, british museum registration no. 1868,0711.439. … the drypoint inscriptions are more clearly printed in this impression than in the british museum example. discovered early 2016 by jolyon hudson of marlborough rare books, london, in a pile of miscellaneous prints; earlier history unknown. essick collection.see essick, “blake in the marketplace, 2016,” blake 50.4 (spring 2017): illus. 7. part iv: catalogues and bibliographies section a: individual catalogues 1820 [july] title page of the evans catalogue of 1820 [july]. copy from the university of minnesota (017.3 ev15). image from google books. catalogue | of a | collection of books; | chiefly | books of prints, | and | works relative to the arts: | comprising | some of the best works | on | anatomy & medicine; agriculture, botany, & natural history; | architecture; coins, gems, & medals; costume & heraldry; | fine arts; | mathematicks, mechanicks, and philosophy; | british and foreign topography and antiquities; | voyages, travels, and | miscellaneous literature. | to which is prefixed, | a list of portraits, views, and miscellaneous prints. | now on sale | by edw. evans, | [gothic:] book and print seller, | 1, great queen street, lincoln’s inn fields, | corner of little queen street, holborn, | price 1s. 6d. | — | 1820.the introduction is dated “july 1, 1820.” blake probably lived at 31 great queen street with his master, james basire, in 1772–79. <bodleian (2593 d. 110); university of minnesota (017.3 ev15)> blake lots in the evans catalogue of 1820 [july]. copy from the university of minnesota (017.3 ev15). image from google books. folio. 381 “blake’s (wm.) illustrations of young’s night thoughts, bds. 1l. 1s. ………… 1797” 382 “——————— works; viz. song of los; europe, a prophecy; songs of innocence; songs of experience;probably a copy of songs of innocence and of experience rather than separate copies of songs of innocence and songs of experience. urizen; marriage of heaven and hell; america, a prophecy; and the book of thel; stitched, each 12s. ………… 1789the works here are dated 1789–95. no copy corresponds plausibly with the blakes in this sale. *** the preceding articles are all written, printed, and embellished by the author; and are coloured equal to the original drawings.” 405 “flaxman’s designs for homer’s iliad and odyssey, 2 vols. boards, 3l. 3s.………… 1850 [i.e., 1805]” 467 “cumberland’s thoughts on outline, sculpture, &c. 24 plates, 10s. 6d. ………… 1796” 1544 “ritson’s collection of english songs, 2 first v. bds. 5s. 1783” 1828 january no. 1. jan. 1828. [price 6d. | a catalogue | of | a collection of books, books of prints, | sets of plates, fine prints, &c. | on sale | by e. v. evans, | no 1, great queen street, lincoln’s inn fields <no separate title page> <bodleian (2593 d. 110)> there are no lot numbers.   “blake (wm.) illustrations of the book of job, on 21 plates, invented and engraved by this celebrated artist, fol. 2l. 12s. 6d. 1826” (p. 2). 1832 29 march–6 april catalogue | of the | splendid, curious, and valuable library, | of the late | philip hurd, esq. | including | … | which will be | sold by auction, | by mr. [r. h.] evans, | at his house, no. 93, pall-mall, | on thursday, march 29, and seven following days (sunday excepted.) | 1832. <bodleian> quarto. 1189 “blair’s grave, a poem, plates by blake, blue morocco, with silk linings, marble joints and gilt leaves, 1808” 1833the latest date on a work offered for sale is 1833 (no. 1390); no. 268 is misprinted “1850” for 1825. an addendum to gentleman’s magazine 103, part 1, no. 2 (ns 26) (feb. 1833): 10, announces: “this day is published” edward evans’s catalogue with works from an “eminent divine” and a “distinguished artist.” catalogue | of a | collection of books, | comprising | numerous works in the following classes: | the fine arts, | architecture, | painting, engraving, and sculpture, | bible illustrations, | [gothic:] coins, gems, and medals, | costumes and heraldry. | splendid galleries of art; | collections of portraits, | [gothic:] illustrations of ancient and modern literature, | natural history and anatomy, | english and foreign topography, | antiquities, | voyages and travels; | divinity, classics, and miscellaneous literature, | including the library of an eminent divine, | also that of a distinguished artist. | — | now on sale by | edward evans, | book and print seller, | great queen street, lincoln’s inn fields, | and 22, fleet street, london. | — | price one shilling. <bodleian (2593 d. 110); ; sir john soane museum (5127)> 384 “blake (w.) illustrations of job, fol. slightly stained, 30s. 1826” 421 “blake (wm.) illustrations of young’s night thoughts, 4to. bds. 30s. 1797” 422 “——— an additional plate to young by this eminent genius,bürger, leonora (1796) has a frontispiece “from young,” designed by blake and engraved by perry. hitherto unpublished, engraved by perry, 4to. 1s.” 423 “——— illustrations to blair’s grave, engraved by schiavonetti, 4to. bds. 30s. 1808” after june 1836the running head is “june,” and the latest date on a work offered for sale is 1836 (no. 323). catalogue | of a | collection of books | on the | [gothic:] fine arts, splendid galleries, bible illustrations, | [gothic:] natural history, anatomy. | works on coins, heraldry, calligraphy &c. | on sale by | a. e. evans, | no. 1, great queen street, lincoln’s-inn fields. <no separate title page> <bodleian (2593 d. 110)> 97 “blake (wm.) illustrations of young’s night thoughts, 4to. boards, 30s. 1797” 98 “———— ditto, red mor. gilt leaves, 2l.2s. 1797” 99 “———— an additional plate to young, by this eminent genius, hitherto unpublished, engraved by perry, 4to. 1s.”see note 41, above. 100 “———— illustrations to blair’s grave, engraved by schiavonetti, 4to, boards, 30s. 1808” 101 “———— ditto, half bound, neat, 1l. 14s. 1808” 102 “———— illustrations to the book of job, 21 plates, 4to. stitched, 30s. lond. 1826” 339 fuseli, lectures (1801), 12s. after 1839the latest date on a work offered for sale is 1839 (no. 107). *** the remaining portion of this catalogue will be ready | on the 1st of march … | — | catalogue of books | on sale by | a. e. evans & son, | [gothic:] book and print sellers, | great queen street, lincoln’s inn fields. <no separate title page> <bodleian (2593 d. 110)> 28 “blake’s illustrations to the book of job, 21 plates, large paper, india proofs, folio, boards, 2l. 15s. lond. 1826” 29 “—— illustrations to young’s night thoughts, fine impressions, royal 4to, half calf, very neat, fine copy, 2l. 2s. lond. 1797” 30 “—— illustrations to dante’s inferno, 7 plates, oblong folio, boards, 35s.” 1840 27-28 february catalogue | of a | collection of books | in history, belles lettres and every | department of literature, | including … | which will be | sold by auction | by mr. [r. h.] evans, | at his house, no. 93, pall-mall, | on thursday, february 27, and following day. | 1840. <bodleian> 651 “young’s night thoughts, cuts by blake, 1797” after 1843the latest date on a work offered for sale is 1843 (nos. 777, 2196). catalogue | of a | collection of books, | and books of prints, | comprising | [gothic:] numerous works in the following classes: | the fine arts, | architecture, | painting, engraving, and sculpture, | bible illustrations, | coins, gems, and medals, | costumes and heraldry. | splendid galleries of art; | [gothic:] collections of portraits, | illustrations of ancient and modern literature, | natural history and anatomy, | english topography, | arranged in counties, | antiquities, | voyages and travels, | miscellaneous literature. | — | now on sale by | a. e. evans & son, | book and print sellers, | no. 1, great queen street, lincoln’s inn fields. | — | price one shilling (allowed in purchases). <bodleian (2593 d. 110)> 90 “blake’s illustrations to blair’s grave, portrait and 12 fine plates, 4to, boards, uncut, 1l. 11s. 6d. lond. 1808” 91 “—— another copy, elegantly bound in red morocco, extra, gilt leaves, 2l. 12s. 6d. ibid.” 92 “—— illustrations to dante’s inferno, 7 plates, oblong folio, boards, 35s. *** engraved by him, but not published till some time after his death.” 1879 george cumberland, thoughts on outline (1796), boards, 6s. 3474 “blake’s illustrations to the book of job, 21 plates, folio, stitched, 35s. lond. 1826” after 1844the latest date on a work offered for sale is 1844 (no. 848). part iii.] | catalogue | of a collection of | books, books of prints, | and works in general literature, | on sale at very moderate prices. | — | a. e. evans & son, | 1, great queen street, lincoln’s inn fields, london <bodleian (2593 d. 110)> for the blake lots,lot 721 is “a small etching by him [blake], representing sampson destroying the lion”; “samson and the lion” was acquired from an a. e. evans catalogue as an etching by blake by the british museum (accession number 1847,0318.122), signed “ws | 1827”, though in fact it is an engraving by george richmond’s friend welby sherman, according to campbell dodgson [then keeper of prints and drawings in the british museum], “the engravings of george richmond, r.a., and welby sherman,” print collector’s quarterly 17.4 (oct. 1930): 361 (as i am told by robert n. essick and as cited by him in blake 45.4 [spring 2011]). see part iv in blake (2010), the catalogue there dated 1845. after 19 june 1846ithiel town was born in 1784 and died on 13 june 1844. songs of experience (h), america (h), large book of designs (a), and small book of designs (a) came from r. h. evans’s catalogue of 15-19 june 1846, lots 65, 277. part iv.] | [gothic:] catalogue | of a | collection of books, | books of prints, architectural works, | illustrated works and general literature, | selected | from the various libraries that have been sold during the last | few months, and comprising a very considerable portion | of the valuable library of the late ithiel town, esq., | the celebrated architect of new york. | on sale at the prices affixed. | — | a. e. evans and son, | 1, great queen street, lincoln’s inn fields, london. <no separate title page> <bodleian (2593 d. 110); robert n. essick; michigan> 1152 “blake’s (wm.) illustrations of the book of job, 21 plates, an original copy, folio, bds. 1l 15s 1825” 1153 “——— ditto, proofs on india paper, folio, olive morocco extra, edges gilt, 3l 3s 1825” 1154 “——— illustrations to young’s night thoughts, fine and large copy, royal 4to. half calf neat, scarce, 2l 2s lond. 1797” 1155 “——— songs of experience [h]: viz., introduction [pl. 30];the order of the prints (pls. 28-29?, 30, 47, 32, 31, 38, 51, 42-43, 41, 50, 46, 37, 49, 33, 40) differs entirely from that given in the sotheby catalogue of 20 dec. 1948 when it was still “loosely sewn” (pls. 28-32, 42, 38, 43, 49, 33, 41, 37, 50, 40, 46, 51, 47). the human abstract [pl. 47]; the clod and the pebble [pl. 32]; earth’s answer [pl. 31]; nurse’s song [pl. 38]; a little girl lost [pl. 51]; the tyger [pl. 42]; my pretty rose tree; the sun flower; the lilly [pl. 43]; the angel [pl. 41]; a little boy lost [pl. 50]; london [pl. 46]; the chimney sweeper [pl. 37]; a poison tree [pl. 49]; holy thursday [pl. 33]; the fly [pl. 40]; coloured, 12mo. stitched, 5l 5s —— [i.e., n.d.]” 1156 “——— america [h], a prophecy, uncoloured, folio, 3l 3s lambeth, 1793” 1157 “——— a series of eight designs,a large book of designs (a). the subjects of which are not explained; so highly coloured as to be mistaken for drawings, 4to. 5l 5s —— [i.e., n.d.]” 1158 “——— another series, of a much smaller size, but coloured and finished with equal care, the subjects of which (23 in number)a small book of designs (a). are also without explanation, 4to. 10l 10s —— [i.e., n.d.]” 1159 “——— the card plate of mr. cumberland, 5s w. blake inv. et. sc., æt. 70, 1827”   “*** the productions of this extraordinary artist are excessively rare; the poems, songs of experience, and america, were his own composition, and the designs were etched by a process known only to himself and mrs. blake, and which has never been made public; he printed and coloured them himself, and the colouring of many is of the most brilliant description. a very good account of blake and his works is to be found in cunningham’s lives of the british painters, published in the family library.” after 1846the latest date for the works offered for sale is 1846 (no. 1989). part vii.] | [gothic:] catalogue | of a | collection of books, | books of prints, galleries, | architectural works, fine arts, etc., | on sale by | a. e. evans and son, | 1, great queen street, lincoln’s inn fields, london. <no separate title page> <bodleian (2593 d. 110)> 2097 “blake’s visions of the daughters of albion [a], 11 pages, finely coloured by himself, excessively scarce, 4to. stitched, 4l 4s 1793” after 1848the latest date on the works offered for sale is 1848 (no. 1370). catalogue | of | books of prints, illustrated works, | galleries of pictures, | sceneries, pictorial topographical works, | collections of | prints, etchings & drawings, | [gothic:] emblems, early woodcuts, &c. | — | a. e. evans & son, | 1, great queen street, london. | — | part ix. <no separate title page> <bodleian (2593 d. 110)> 707 “blake’s (wm.) illustrations of the book of job, 21 plates, an original copy, folio boards, £1 12s 1825” 708 “—— ditto, folio half russia elegant, £2 2s ibid.” 709 “—— illustrations to young’s night thoughts, fine and large copy, royal 4to scarce, half bound elegant, £2 2s lond. 1797” 710 “—— ditto, large uncut copy, royal 4to, £1 12s ibid.” 711 “—— illustrations to blair’s grave, portrait and 12 fine plates, 4to boards 18s” 712 “—— ditto, 4to half russia, elegant, 25s 1808” 713 “—— ditto, large paper, proof impressions, royal 4to neat, £1 15s ibid.” 714 “—— visions of the daughters of albion [a],visions was apparently recorded in error in this catalogue, for it was acquired by the british museum in 1847. 11 pages, finely coloured by himself, excessively scarce, 4to stitched, £4 4s 1793” 715 “—— america [h], a prophecy, uncoloured, folio, £3 3s lambeth, 1793” 716 “—— the card plate of mr. cumberland, 5s w. blake inv. et. sc. æt. 70, 1827” 717 “blake’s (wm.) a series of eight designs,a large book of designs (a). the subjects of which are not explained; highly coloured and extremely rare, 4to £5 5s” 718 “—— another series, of a much smaller size,a small book of designs (a). but coloured and finished with equal care, the subjects of which (23 in number) are also without explanation, 4to, £10 10s ibid.” 719 “—— songs of experience [h]: viz., introduction [pl. 30]; the human abstract [pl. 47]; the clod and the pebble [pl. 32]; earth’s answer [pl. 31]; nurse’s song [pl. 38]; a little girl lost [pl. 51]; the tyger [pl. 42]; my pretty rose tree; the sun flower; the lily [pl. 43]; the angel [pl. 41]; a little boy lost [pl. 50]; london [pl. 46]; the chimney sweeper [pl. 37]; a poison tree [pl. 49]; holy thursday [pl. 33]; the fly [pl. 40]; coloured, 12mo stitched, £5 5s”see note 49, above.   “☞ the productions of this extraordinary artist are excessively rare; the poems, songs of experience, and america, were his own composition, and the designs were etched by a process known only to himself and mrs. blake, and which has never been made public; he printed and coloured them with his own hand, and the colouring of many is of the most brilliant description. a very good account of blake and his works is to be found in cunningham’s lives of the british painters, published in the family library.” 1000 “flaxman’s compositions from the days and works of hesiod, 37 beautiful outlines engraved by blake, oblong folio boards, £1 1s lond. 1817” 2214 “blake (w.) the song of los [a]: a poem, composed and illustrated by this extraordinary artist, on 8 leaves, a very highly coloured set: of extreme rarity; 4to uncut, £5 5s lambeth, 1795” 2214* “—— the book of thiel [d]: a poem, composed and illustrated by this artist, on 8 leaves, coloured, 4to uncut, extremely rare, £3 3s 1789” n.d.the firm was known as a. e. evans, great queen street (after june 1836 catalogue); as a. e. evans and son, great queen street (after 1839–after 1848); as a. e. evans and sons [plural], 403 strand (1857); and as e. and a. evans, 403 strand (after 1858 catalogue). general catalogue of books | and | books of prints, | on sale by | a. e. evans & son, | no. 1, great queen street, lincoln’s inn fields. <no separate title page> <bodleian (2593 d. 110)> 38 “blake’s (wm.) illustrations of the book of job, 21 plates, folio stitched, 1l. 11s. 6d. lond. 1826” 39 “—— illustrations to blair’s grave, engraved by schiavonetti, fine impressions, 4to, calf, 1l. 11s. 6d. lond. 1808” 40 “—— another copy, elegantly bound in red morocco, extra, gilt leaves, 2l. 12s. 6d. lond. 1808” 1852the date is very uncertain. it must be before 1857, when a. e. evans and sons [plural] were at 403 strand. i found no date for copies sold. the bodleian copy has a manuscript note at the top, “pre-1853.” part v. price 1s. | catalogue | of a | valuable and extensive collection of | engravings and etchings, | the production of every school and country, | [gothic:] ancient and modern; | on sale by | a. e. evans and son, | 1, great queen street, lincoln’s inn fields, london. <bodleian (2593 d. 110); getty research institute> begins with 2261. 2362 “the canterbury pilgrims; oblong sheet, fine impression and very scarce, £2 2s. w. blake.” 1857 the fine art circular | and | print collector’s manual. | = | catalogue | of nearly | six thousand | etchings and engravings | by | [gothic:] artists of every school and period, | comprising the | best examples of every eminent engraver, | from the earliest period to the present time, | with the size and price of each print, and references to the works of those authors who have made the art of engraving their study. | — | now on sale by | a. e. evans & sons, 403, strand, | london. — | with an appendix, | consisting of a catalogue raisonée | of nearly 400 prints | unknown to bartsch. <getty research institute; there are copies in the bodleian library and the victoria and albert museum.> 648 “the canterbury pilgrims; oblong sheet, fine impression and very scarce, £2 2s. w. blake.” after 1858the latest date on the works offered for sale is 1858 (nos. 2058, 2474, 2768). catalogue | of | books of prints, illustrated works, | [gothic:] galleries of pictures, sceneries, | pictorial topographical works, | collections of | prints, etchings, and drawings, | emblems, early woodcuts, &c. | = | e. & a. evans, | 403, strand, london, w.c. <bodleian (2593 d. 110)> there is no separate title page, and the lots are set out in double columns per page. 276 “blake (wm.) illustrated edition of young’s night thoughts; folio, full bound in morocco, £2 2s lond. 1797” 276* “—— ditto, half bound calf uncut, £2 2s ibid.” 277 “blake’s illustrations of blair’s grave, with the poem, portrait of the artist, and fine plates by schiavonetti, 4to, bds, uncut, 18s lond. 1808” 278 “—— ditto, 4to half bound 25s ibid.” 279 “—— ditto, large paper, proof impression, with portrait of the artist, on india paper, royal 4to, half bound morocco elegant, £1 15s ibid.” 2009 2 april–28 june *michael phillips, ed., with the assistance of catherine de bourgoing. william blake (1757–1827): le génie visionnaire du romantisme anglais. [2009]. <blake (2010)> review, notice, etc. §jean-françois poirier, “william blake (exposition),” encyclopædia universalis (in french). 2009 11 september–2010 3 january william blake’s world: “a new heaven is begun.” morgan library and museum, new york. <blake (2010)> review *steve shapiro, “william blake’s celestial visions and promethean lives,” art tatler (“it is curious how low-key the reception to the show has been”). 2014 4 december–2015 1 march *michael phillips [with martin butlin and colin harrison]. william blake: apprentice & master. oxford: ashmolean museum, 2014. <blake (2015)> reviews §*erica wagner, “divine machinations: william blake, apprentice and master,” new statesman no. 5244 (2015): 50-52. *susan matthews (see blake 50.1 in part vi). 2014 23 december–2015 5 april; 2015 7 may–2 august; 2015 27 august–13 december; 2016 23 january–24 april §tim barringer and oliver fairclough. pastures green & dark satanic mills: the british passion for landscape. princeton: princeton university art museum, 2015. the exhibition was mounted at the norton museum of art, palm beach (december 2014–april 2015), the frick art and historical center, pittsburgh (may–august 2015), the utah museum of fine arts, salt lake city (august–december 2015), and the princeton university art museum, princeton (january–april 2016). review stuart mitchner, “free thinking in a free museum with d. h. lawrence and william blake,” town topics: princeton’s weekly community newspaper since 1946 2 march 2016 (mitchner does not say that any work by blake was exhibited). 2015 17 november *sotheby’s. travel, atlases, maps and natural history. london, 2015. 148 stedman, narrative (1796), 2 vols., colored copy, “occasional spotting or slight soiling,” contemporary russia worn and rebacked, reproductions [sold for £8750]. 2015 november tavistock books. online catalogue. 2015.   rees, cyclopedia, in the original “80” parts, in “light blue paper-covered boards,” $8250. [the “apparently unique” set “in the original parts” in the oxford university department of botany is reported in bb p. 604.] 2016 28 january *sotheby’s. master drawings. new york, 2016. 176 the hymn of christ and the apostles <butlin #490>, watercolor, sold by a descendant of dorothy braude edinburg (1921–2015) of brookline, massachusetts. estimate $200,000-$300,000 [sold for $322,000 (hammer price and buyer’s premium) to john windle for robert n. essick]. 184 the descent of man into the vale of death for blair’s grave, last recorded in the sotheby’s catalogue of 2 may 2006, lot 8. estimate $200,000-$300,000 [sold for $225,000 (hammer price and buyer’s premium) to an anonymous telephone bidder]. 2016 [february] *john windle. catalogue 64. san francisco, 2016. i virgil, pastorals, inscribed by r. j. thornton to his daughter, $67,500. ii job (1874 reissue), $47,500. iii george cumberland’s card, $20,000. iv “chaucers canterbury pilgrims” (after 1881), $12,500. v dante pl. 4, $12,500. vii varley, a treatise of zodiacal physiognomy (1828), original boards (“covers re-attached”), inscribed “m.a. shee esq. with the author’s best respects,” $10,950 [sold to robert n. essick]. viii hayley, ballads (1805), $10,500. ix boydell’s graphic illustrations of the dramatic works of shakspeare (1803), with blake’s plate, $7500 [sold to stanford university library]. 2016 7-10 april james cummins. online catalogue for the new york antiquarian book fair, 7-10 april 2016. the catalogue has no entry numbers.   blair, the grave (1808), quarto, “‘subscriber’s copy’ at the foot of the engraved title-page,” “original drab boards,” “completely untrimmed,” “printed paper label on upper cover,” “finely rebacked to match,” $5500.   young, night thoughts (1797), bound in “full black morocco richly gilt … in regency period style by courtland benson,” without the explanation leaf, $12,000. 2016 20 april *de baecque. dessins, tableaux anciens et du xixe siècle/haute époque/arts d'asie/mobilier et objets d’art. paris, 2016. 55 the holy bible, notes by john kitto (london: charles knight, 1847), vol. 8, extra illustrated with job (1826), lacking pls. “9,” “11,” “13” (after the removal of “proof”), “oval pieces of paper pasted over the face of god”essick, “blake in the marketplace, 2016,” blake 50.4 (spring 2017). on pls. “2,” “5,” “16-17”; hayley, designs to a series of ballads (1802), frontispiece; hayley, romney (1809), blake’s print; malkin, a father’s memoirs (1806), frontispiece; blair, the grave (1808 or 1813), pls. 4, 6-7, 9, 11, imprints trimmed off or bound into the gutter; virgil, pastorals (1821), pl. 10 (linnell impression on india paper) [sold for €3000 to an american private collector; on consignment with john windle in may 2016 for $39,500, with the non-job prints removed in september and the plate from hayley, designs to a series of ballads, offered in october (see 2016 [14] october)]. 2016 april bauman rare books. new acquisitions. new york, 2016.   the dramatic works of shakspeare (london: boydell, 1802), 9 vols., “contemporary full straight-grain plum morocco gilt,” 94 prints, “armorial bookplate of walter charles james, 1st baron northbourne (1816–93),” $17,500. 2016 15 june dominic winter auctioneers. printed books, maps & documents. south cerney, gloucestershire, 2016. 349 shakespeare, dramatic works (1802), 9 vols. in “18 original parts of text, … untrimmed, original plain turquoise blue boards, with original printed label to upper cover of each volume,” the prints “all loose (presumably as issued) … loosely contained in original calf-backed boards, worn.” estimate £2000-£3000 [not sold]. 2016 [june] *john windle. short list 3 (new series) 30 books in six specialities. san francisco, 2016. 1 dante (“1838 or ca. 1892”) pl. 4, india paper mounted on wove paper, $12,500. 2016 10-18 september [dealer unknown]. biennale des antiquaires, paris.   st. matthew <butlin #396>, tempera (1799), €840,000.the work was acquired in march 2017 by the cleveland museum of art. 2016 16 september–2017 3 september tracey emin and william blake in focus. tate liverpool. about links between the two artists. review alex may, “william blake’s paintings give tracey emin’s famous bed new meaning: an exhibition in liverpool offers a rare chance to see two very different giants of art,” socialist worker issue 2522: 20 sept. 2016. 2016 6 october *dominic winter auctioneers. fine art, antiques & photography. south cerney, gloucestershire, 2016. 349 blake, visionary head of a girl <butlin #692 80, pencil>. estimate £5000-£8000 [sold for £15,312.50 to an anonymous telephone bidder]. 350 blake, visionary standing king holding a sceptre, a fortified town behind <butlin #692 74, pencil, with color notes>. estimate £5000-£8000 [sold for £8330 to an anonymous telephone bidder]. 2016 [14] october *john windle. the william blake gallery: opening exhibition: always in paradise: a william blake chrestomathy. san francisco, 2016. 4o, 8 pp. [1] the virgin hushing the young john the baptist (1799), <butlin #406>, tempera, “p.o.r.” (price on request) [sold to alan parker]. [2] the complaint of job, pen and ink (c. 1785), “n.f.s.” (not for sale?). [3] “holy thursday,” songs of innocence [w?], pl. 19, “p.o.r.” [4] george cumberland, calling card, $20,000. [5] for the sexes: the gates of paradise [n], pls. 4-6, 8, 13, 14, fifth state, $40,000 each. [6] “chaucers canterbury pilgrims,” fifth state (after march 1881), “sold.” [7] illustrations of the book of job, “first edition,” $125,000. [8] illustrations to dante’s inferno (1838), $350,000. [9] “adam and the beasts,” frontispiece to hayley, designs to a series of ballads (1802), $49,500. [10] “the dog,” “the lion,” “the hermits dog,” and “the horse” from hayley, ballads (1805), $975 each. [11] hogarth, “beggar’s opera,” “third and best state” (c. 1795), $3500. [12] trianon press blake facsimiles, including “over 2,500 facsimile plates,” no price>. reviews, notices, etc. *anon., “world’s largest william blake gallery to open in san francisco october 14, 2016,” art of the times: the magazine of the arts in south florida 12 aug. 2016. *rich rennicks, “new william blake gallery,” new antiquarian 28 nov. 2016. 2016 3 november–1 december *burning bright: the g. e. bentley blake collection today: an exhibition of recent additions to the collection. e. j. pratt library [victoria university in the university of toronto]. exhibition of songs of innocence and of experience (i), pls. 1, 8, 22-23, 25; songs of innocence pl. 23, color printed, trimmed to the design; songs of innocence (y), pl. 8, colored; songs of innocence (w), pls. 3, 11, 26; songs of innocence, pls. 16-17; drawing from the blake-varley sketchbook; for the sexes: the gates of paradise (n), pl. 3; stedman, narrative (1796), colored; stedman, narrative, proof of title-page vignette; carfax conduit print (1787?); wit’s magazine (1784–85); plus blakeana (1809–2014) from australia, canada, czechoslovakia, england, france, hong kong, japan, russia, turkey, and the united states. 2016 30 november §*christie’s. the giancarlo beltrame library of scientific books, part ii. london, 2016. 281 young, night thoughts (1797), lacking the “explanation” leaf, “title [page] printed on laid paper watermarked with a fleur-de-lys” rather than the usual wove paper, leaves 32.7 x 42.4 cm. “with deckle edges,” the herschel v. jones copy sold from the doheny library, christie’s (new york), 21 feb. 1989, lot 1707, for $4950. estimate £3000-£5000 [sold for £3750]. 2016 9-14 december §fitzwilliam museum. exhibition of blake’s watercolors for paradise lost and paradise regained. 2016 december §*bauman rare books. online catalogue.   wat tyler [counterproof], $42,500.bauman offered it in sept. 2015 for $65,000 (essick, “blake in the marketplace, 2016,” blake 50.4 [spring 2016]). section b: collections and selections g. e. bentley, jr. “sale catalogues of blake’s works.” <http://​library.​vicu.​utoronto.​ca/​collections/​special_collections/​bentley_​blake_​collection>. the document was updated in winter 2016 (1064 pp.). part vi: criticism, biography, and scholarly studies a   b   c   d   e   f   g   h   i   j   k   l   m   n   o   p   r   s   t   v   w   x   y   z a allentuck, marcia. “fuseli’s translations of winckelmann: a phase in the rise of british hellenism, with an aside on william blake.” studies in the eighteenth century ii: papers presented at the second david nichol smith memorial seminar, canberra 1970. ed. r. f. brissenden. [toronto]: university of toronto press, 1973. 163-85. <bb #a802> b. §ottawa: canadian electronic library, 2015 (e-book). anon. “blake, william.” britannica kids. 2016. anon. “glastonbury shrine hosts william blake society.” clifton diocese may 2015. a talk by geoffrey ashe on 18 april 2015 “at the shrine of our lady of glastonbury.” *anon [stephanie]. “morbid anatomy museum [brooklyn] presents the book of urizen.” zero=two 6 oct. 2016. “gnostic saint william blake’s epic work of mythology, the book of urizen, is set to music and performed by tom blunt and joshua martin, monday, october 10.” anon. obituary of roger easson (1945–2016). commercial appeal [memphis] 27 oct. 2016. roger easson earned a ba from kansas state university when he was nineteen, a phd from the university of tulsa when he was twenty-four, married kay parkhurst the day after he received his phd, worked extensively on william blake, published a seven-volume fantasy novel entitled song of the storm rider, and died of cancer. §anon. poetry for students: a study guide for william blake’s “the fly.” farmington hills, mi: gale, cengage learning, 2016. 27 pp.; isbn: 9781410346148 (e-book). “this concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more.” one of a number of study guides excerpted from gale’s multivolume poetry for students—others are for “the lamb” (17 pp.; isbn: 9781410350688), “london” (18 pp.; isbn: 9781410351340), “a poison tree” (21 pp.; isbn: 9781410355607), and “the tyger” (15 pp.; isbn: 9781410321213). anon. “william blake.” encyclopedia of world biography. §anon. “william blake, 1757–1827: entry devoted to the poem visions of the daughters of albion (1793).” poetry criticism vol. 171. ed. lawrence j. trudeau. farmington hills, mi: gale, cengage learning, 2016 (e-book). §arcement, ephrem. “learning how to see: thomas merton and the prophetic vision of william blake.” in the school of prophets: the formation of thomas merton’s prophetic spirituality. collegeville, mn: liturgical press, 2015. cistercian studies series, no. 265. argemí, josep m.  el somni de william blake. barcelona: males herbes, 2016. 150 pp., 18 x 11.5 cm.; isbn: 9788494469985.  in catalan. a collection of short stories on visionaries’ dreams. blake’s purported dream before writing ”the tyger” serves as title for the volume. §attridge, derek, and henry staten. “william blake, ‘the sick rose.’” the craft of poetry: dialogues on minimal interpretation. abingdon: routledge, 2015. chapter 1. §aung, myat thinzer. “the social hell of william blake: the impact of the industrial revolution on blake’s illustrations of dante’s inferno.” proceedings of the national conference on undergraduate research (ncur) 2016 [30th annual conference, 7-9 april 2016, at the university of north carolina, asheville]. b §barush, kathryn. “‘every age is a canterbury pilgrimage’: william blake as pilgrim and painter.” art and the sacred journey in britain, 1790–1850. abingdon: routledge, 2016. routledge studies in pilgrimage, religious travel and tourism. §bates, robin. “the utterly amazing william blake.” better living through beowulf. 17 dec. 2015. §beaumont, matthew. “london’s darkness: william blake.” night walking: a nocturnal history of london chaucer to dickens. london: verso, 2015. chapter 9 (261-96). §beharriell, ross. “seminar on william blake (1948–49).” northrop frye’s lectures: student notes from his courses, 1947–1955. transcribed and ed. robert d. denham. newcastle upon tyne: cambridge scholars publishing, 2016. bellei, sérgio luiz prado. “a literatura na rede: uma literatura enredada? literature on the internet: an entangled literature?” casa: cadernos de semiótica aplicada 13.2 (2015): 319-41. in portuguese (abstract in portuguese and english). “these two perspectives [the limitations of the printed book versus the online obscuring of the material conditions of production] can be perfectly understood in the work of the english poet william blake, a multimedia author avant la lettre.” *bentley, g. e., jr. “blake’s unnecessary letter.” papers of the bibliographical society of canada: cahiers de la société bibliographique du canada 53.2 (fall 2015 [2016]): 293-302. the unnecessary letter is the “‘s’ (   ſ   ),” which is “uniformly suppressed in all typeset editions of his works since 1800.” bentley, g. e., jr. “thomas macklin and william blake (1782–83).” thomas macklin (1752–1800), picture-publisher and patron, creator of the macklin bible (1791–1800). foreword by mark crosby. lewiston, ny: edwin mellen press, 2016. 29-34. blake was well paid but largely ignored by macklin. *bentley, g. e., jr. william blake in the desolate market. 2014. <blake (2015)> reviews §morton d. paley, wordsworth circle 46.4 (2015): 209-10. §jason whittaker, modern language review 111.3 (july 2016): 854-55. sibylle erle, university of toronto quarterly 85.3 (aug. 2016): 404-06 (letters in canada) (“because of the undisputed reputation of his works as indispensable books of reference they are kept within easy reach in every blake scholar’s library”). *mark crosby (see blake 50.2, below). blake/an illustrated quarterly for the inclusion of back issues of the journal in the william blake archive in 2016, see william blake archive in part i, section b. blake/an illustrated quarterly volume 49, number 4 (spring 2016) articles *robert n. essick. “blake in the marketplace, 2015.” (magisterial and wonderful.) *ashanka kumari. “adding to blake set to music.” (addenda [1976–2013] to donald fitch, blake set to music [1990] and his “supplement, 2001” in blake 35.2 [fall 2001]: 40-61; forty entries, including posman settings of thirty-two poems.) minute particular robert w. rix. “all religions are one: a note on sources.” 14 pars. (“the most important influence is … swedenborg.”) reviews james rovira. elizabeth b. bentley, ed., george cumberland, the emigrants or a trip to the ohio, a theatrical farce (1817). 3 pars. (“a valuable contribution to any university.”) alexander s. gourlay. william l. pressly, james barry’s murals at the royal society of arts: envisioning a new public art. 9 pars. (“in terms of intellectual content, editorial polish, and quantity and quality of visual matter, this is the most impressive scholarly art book i have seen in some time.”) whitney anne trettien. roger whitson and jason whittaker, william blake and the digital humanities: collaboration, participation, and social media. 10 pars. (among considerations of “fandom” and “folksonomic engagement,” whitson and whittaker envision “a ground-up retooling of ‘criticism’ as such”; “students of blake will find much to admire.”) discussion martin butlin. “the history of william blake’s job prints.” 4 pars. (in the “rosenbloom” set of job prints, only pls. 17 [i.e., bb pl. 18] and 20 [bb pl. 21] “are printed on laid rather than woven paper.”) blake/an illustrated quarterly volume 50, number 1 (summer 2016) article *g. e. bentley, jr., with the assistance of hikari sato for japanese publications, of li-ping geng for chinese publications, and of fernando castanedo for spanish publications. “william blake and his circle: a checklist of publications and discoveries in 2015.” reviews stephen r. millar. kate horgan, the politics of songs in eighteenth-century britain, 1723–1795. 6 pars. (“students of blake will perhaps be disappointed by his absence.”) *r. paul yoder. andrew m. cooper, william blake and the productions of time. 10 pars. (“brilliant and far reaching, but also dense and complex”; “i like this book a lot.”) *tilar j. mazzeo. helen p. bruder and tristanne connolly, eds., queer blake. 10 pars. (some chapters are “excellent” and some are “compelling,” but “i was often not persuaded.”) *susan matthews. michael phillips, william blake: apprentice and master, and the exhibition william blake, apprentice and master, ashmolean museum, oxford, 4 december 2014–1 march 2015. 12 pars. (the catalogue is “a major contribution to blake scholarship.”) blake/an illustrated quarterly volume 50, number 2 (fall 2016) article sheila a. spector. “frye’s mistreatment of the archetype.” 34 pars. (“frye’s writing about blake is not criticism, but fiction, defined broadly as a narrative drawn from imagination, as opposed to history or fact. … in the process of exploiting the poet for his own purposes, frye not only distorted blake, but also … spawned generations of critics who have accepted frye’s pronouncements at face value” [pars. 31, 34].) reviews *jennifer davis michael. jennifer g. jesse, william blake’s religious vision: there’s a methodism in his madness. 8 pars. (“an interesting and provocative book that could have used more careful editing. … jesse has opened up important and unexpected areas of inquiry that are likely to yield a greater understanding of blake’s polyphonic work in a heterogeneous religious milieu.”) *andrew lincoln. michael farrell, blake and the methodists. 11 pars. (“a detailed and very informative comparison of blake and john wesley,” but “farrell is sometimes inclined to press the case for similarity harder than he needs to, and in ways that can blur the very real differences between blake and wesley.”) *mark crosby. g. e. bentley, jr., william blake in the desolate market. 7 pars. (the book is “concise and accessible,” but “there seems little new here,” and “the lack of transparency is particularly worrying.”) minute particulars *robert n. essick and jenijoy la belle. “a sketch by robert blake revealed.” 8 pars. (a very detailed description of a very slight sketch.) g. e. bentley, jr. “william blake of the woolpack & peacock.” 10 pars. (a shop receipt of 1772 reproduces the emblem of “ja.s blake, | hosier & haberdasher | at the woolpack & peacock the upper end of | broad street carnaby market”.) discussion abraham samuel shiff. “blake’s priestly blessing: god blesses job—postscript.” 3 pars. (the discovery of blake’s copy of modena’s history of the present jews does not affect his argument in “blake’s priestly blessing: a god blesses job,” blake 47.3 (winter 2013–14), for modena does not describe the gesture.) blake/an illustrated quarterly volume 50, number 3 (winter 2016–17) article *morton d. paley. “george romney and ozias humphry as collectors of william blake’s illuminated printing.” 49 pars. (a carefully presented summary, especially valuable for the analysis of the coloring of the copies they owned. “the importance of romney and humphry as collectors of blake’s illuminated printing can hardly be exaggerated” [par. 49].) reviews *dennis m. read. tobias churton, jerusalem! the real life of william blake. 11 pars. (“disappointingly, he delivers more heat than light”; “his argument that blake was substantially influenced by the gnostic tradition is unsustained …”; “his writing leaves much to be desired …” (pars. 2, 4, 10].) cristina flores. fernando castenado, ed. and trans., william blake, una isla en la luna. 4 pars. (the book is “extraordinary and definitive” [par. 1].) *g. a. rosso. helen p. bruder and tristanne connolly, eds., sexy blake. 10 pars. (he praises especially “standout essays, one by angus whitehead and joel gwynne on catherine blake’s sexual life and the other by philippa simpson on blake and pornography.”) *mark a. sherman. eric pyle, william blake’s illustrations for dante’s divine comedy: a study of the engravings, pencil sketches and watercolors. 13 pars. (“pyle’s method throughout this book is to identify in blake’s drawings the expression of theological differences between the two poets.”) §*boast, hannah. “‘a clockwork jerusalem’: ‘new jerusalems’ in britain, from blake to brutalism.” imagining jerusalem 12 may 2015. §borkowska, eliza. “unweaving the national strand of the ‘golden string’ of jerusalem: blake’s british myth and its (polish) translation.” translating myth. ed. ben pestell, pietra palazzolo, and leon burnett. cambridge: modern humanities research association; abingdon: routledge, 2016. chapter 5 (101-15). *bruder, helen p., and tristanne j. connolly, eds. blake, gender and culture. 2012. <blake (2013)> b. §2015 (e-book). c. §abingdon: routledge, 2016. isbn: 9781138661943 (paperback). *bruder, helen p., and tristanne connolly, eds. queer blake. 2010. <blake (2011)> review tilar j. mazzeo (see blake 50.1, above). *bruder, helen p., and tristanne connolly, eds. sexy blake. 2013. <blake (2014)> review g. a. rosso (see blake 50.3, above). burdett, osbert. william blake. 1926, 1974, 2009. <bb #1316, bbs p. 429, blake(2010)> e. §parkstone international, 2015 (e-book). §*burkett, andrew. “blake’s moving images.” romantic mediations: media theory and british romanticism. albany: state university of new york press, 2016. studies in the long nineteenth century. chapter 3. c *calado, claudia regina rodrigues. “william blake: o estudo do processo de criação de um doppelbegabung.” letras [revista do programa de pós-graduação em letras, universidade federal de santa maria] no. 51 (dec. 2015): 35-51. in portuguese (abstract in portuguese and english). cao, xiao-tian. “bu lai ke shi zuo ‘lao hu’ yu ‘gao yang’ de xiu ci dui bi [a comparison of rhetorical effects in blake’s ‘the tyger’ and ‘the lamb’].” shan hai jing (zhe she ban) [classics of mountains and rivers (philosophy and social sciences edition)] no. 12 (2016): 35. in chinese. §chattopadhyay, manas. “poetry and painting in blake.” university of burdwan [india] phd, 2007. 189 pp. chevalier, tracy. burning bright. 2007. <blake (2008, 2009, 2010)> … blake no rinjin (burning bright).“blake no rinjin” literally means “the neighbors of blake.” trans. kaori nozawa. tokyo: kashiwa shobo, 2016. 406 pp.; isbn: 9784760146444. in japanese. §chubb, caldecot. “the marriage of heaven and hell by william blake.” the books that changed my life: reflections by 100 authors, actors, musicians and other remarkable people. ed. bethanne patrick. new york: regan arts, 2016. *churton, tobias. jerusalem! the real life of william blake. 2014. <blake (2016)> reviews §magnus ankarsjö, bars review no. 47 (2016) (“a thorough and well-researched study”). dennis m. read (see blake 50.3, above). §clark, caira. “falling ill. the [first] book of urizen and romantic medical theory.” verso: an undergraduate journal of literary criticism (2016). §*codsi, stephanie. “self-annihilation and creative labour in the poetry of william blake.” university of bristol phd, 2015. xvi, 281 leaves. §connor, alexandra. private view: the secret lives of the world’s great artists. london: robson, 2002. b. §private view. leicester: thorpe, 2016. it is in part about “william blake, who talked to the dead.” cooper, andrew m. william blake and the productions of time. 2013. <blake (2014)> b. §abingdon: routledge, 2016. isbn: 9781315234069 (e-book). reviews §mark crosby, review of english studies 66.273 (2015): 182-83. r. paul yoder (see blake 50.1, above). crafton, lisa plummer. “the ‘ancient voices’ of blake’s the french revolution.” the french revolution debate in english literature and culture. ed. lisa plummer crafton. 1997. <blake (1998)> b. §“las ‘antiguas voces’ de la revolución francesa de blake” (see revolución y literatura en el siglo diecinueve: fuentes, documentos, textos críticos in part i, section b). d *damrosch, leo. eternity’s sunrise: the imaginative world of william blake. 2015. <blake (2016)> an extract entitled “the artful religion of william blake” appeared in yale books unbound 2 nov. 2016. reviews *michael wood, new york times 30 oct. 2015 (mostly a summary and excerpts; “the heart of the book is in its evocation of the complexities of the early poems, and the ‘kaleidoscopic dreams’ of the vast later works”). §anon., choice 53.10 (june 2016). §patrick madigan, heythrop journal 57.5 (sept. 2016): 855-56. §dawson, terence. “‘a firm perswasion’: god, art, and responsibility in blake’s the marriage of heaven and hell.” jung journal 7.2 (2013): 62-77. de la barra, erika. “los ecos dorados del tigre de blake en cuatro piezas poéticas de jorge luis borges.” revista de teoría del arte nos. 19-20 (2011): 89-111. in spanish. §denizer bozkurt, serap. “irony in william blake’s poetry.” journal of foreign language teaching and applied linguistics 3.2 (2016): 1-7. *dimitri, marco. “la poetica di william blake: paralleli e paradossi con il satanismo.” bambini di satana 8 jan. 2015. in italian. *diniz, thaïs flores nogueira. “‘a rosa doente’ dos tempos modernos.” letras [revista do programa de pós-graduação em letras, universidade federal de santa maria] no. 51 (dec. 2015): 71-81. in portuguese (abstract in portuguese and english). *disalvo, jackie, g. a. rosso, and christopher z. hobson, eds. blake, politics, and history. 1998. <blake (1999)> b. §abingdon: routledge, 2016. routledge library editions: william blake, vol. 1. §doğan, ali fahri. “i̇ngiliz edebiyatı’nda bir mistik: william blake.” mütefekkir 2.4 (2015): 363-75. in turkish. §*dominiczak, marek. “the ‘madness” of william blake.” clinical chemistry 62.8 (2016): 1167-68. §downing, jonathan philip. “prophets reading prophecy: the interpretation of the book of revelation in the writings of richard brothers, joanna southcott and william blake.” oxford dphil, 2015. 306 pp. e essays in romanticism volume 23, number 1 ([april] 2016) of thirteen essays, eleven are about blake. §ashley reed, jon saklofske, and roger whitson. “blake and digital making: a critical cluster.” 19-21. §ashley reed. “craft and care: the maker movement, catherine blake, and the digital humanities.” 23-38. §jon saklofske. “catherine blake was an insect? a response to ashley reed.” 39-40. §roger whitson. “conjuring catherine blake’s material ghost: a response to ashley reed.” 41-43. §jon saklofske. “digital doors of perception: illuminating blake through new knowledge environments.” 45-63. §ashley reed. “challenging the digital humanities: a response to jon saklofske.” 64-65. §roger whitson. “aggregating blakean visuality in the digital humanities: a response to jon saklofske.” 66-68. §roger whitson. “there is no william blake: @autoblake’s algorithmic condition.” 69-87. §ashley reed. “channeling william blake: a response to roger whitson.” 88-90. §jon saklofske. “coming to terms with algorithmic demystification: a response to roger whitson.” 91-93. §joseph fletcher. “unruly children: blake’s book of urizen and embryology’s break from newtonian law.” 113-32. *esterhammer, angela. creating states: studies in the performative language of john milton and william blake. 1994. <blake (1995)> b. 2016. isbn: 9781442673571 (e-book). f §fallon, david. blake, myth, and enlightenment: the politics of apotheosis. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, 2017. isbn: 9781137390349. §fallon, david. “homelands: blake, albion, and the french revolution.” home and nation in british literature from the english to the french revolutions. ed. a. d. cousins and geoffrey payne. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2015. *farrell, michael. blake and the methodists. 2014. <blake (2015)> reviews andrew lincoln (see blake 50.2, above). §mark crosby, bars review no. 48 (2016) (with another). *fenlon, d. c. “william blake’s the great red dragon.” nouvelle art: magazine for art lovers 19 sept. 2016. ferber, michael. the social vision of william blake. 1985. <bbs p. 471> b. §2014. <blake (2015)> c. princeton: princeton university press, 2016. isbn: 9780691639468. §*firouz abadi, mahdi dehghani. “separation and union in selected poems of jalaluddin rumi and william blake in the light of hermeneutics.” universiti sains malaysia phd, 2015. 200 leaves. §*fisher, adrian ayres. “getting beyond the green wall: mary oliver, kay ryan and william blake.” ecological gardening 29 april 2015. b. §resilience 4 may 2015. §fletcher, joseph. “quid’s pantheism: william blake as natural philosopher.” north carolina (chapel hill) phd, 2016. 478 pp. §*ford, talissa j. “jerusalem is scattered abroad.” radical romantics: prophets, pirates, and the space beyond nation. edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2016. edinburgh critical studies in romanticism. chapter 4 (91-122). §*franke, william. “the logic of infinity in european romanticism: blake or leopardi?” secular scriptures: modern theological poetics in the wake of dante. columbus: ohio state university press, 2016. §*freeman, kathryn s. a guide to the cosmology of william blake. abingdon: routledge, 2017. 263 pp.; isbn: 9781472467126 (hardcover); 9781315564753 (e-book). alphabetical by subject, e.g., “abraham and isaac.” frye, northrop see beharriell, above. §fujimura, makoto. silence and beauty: hidden faith born of suffering. downers grove, il: ivp books [intervarsity press], 2016. 98-102. *fuller, david. blake’s heroic argument. 1988. <bbs p. 480> b. §abingdon: routledge, 2016. routledge library editions: william blake, vol. 2. g garland, jennifer. “on this day: william blake (d. august 12, 1827).” mcgill library | bibliothèque 12 aug. 2016. the mcgill holdings include stedman, surinam (n.d.), blair’s grave (n.d.), young, night thoughts, job, and dante. the text originally appeared in mcgill’s book meetings with books: special collections in the 21st century … (2014). §gavilán, laura, and jerónimo ledesma. “mito y función de la imaginación en the marriage of heaven and hell y the french revolution de william blake.” la imaginación romántica. antecedentes filosóficos—resonancias artísticas. ed. juan lázaro rearte and maría jimena solé. buenos aires: ediciones ungs, 2015. in spanish. *[gerlier, valentin]. “the spirit of poetic vision: a seminar course on the songs of innocence and of experience.” [london: blake society, aug. 2016]. 2 pp. gu, jia-ye. “wei lian bu lai ke ‘meng’ de yi xiang ji qi nei yun tan jiu [study of images and implications in william blake’s ‘a dream’].” xian dai yu wen (xue shu zong he ban) [modern chinese (comprehensive academic edition)] no. 1 (2016): 65-67. in chinese. the essay, based on blake’s religious thoughts and life experiences, tries to interpret the relationship between various images in blake’s “a dream,” thus exposing blake’s profound understanding of love. guo, jia-qi. “wei lian mu bu lai ke shi ge ‘the lamb’ zhong de ren cheng zhi dai he ren cheng zhuan huan [on personal reference and person shifts in william blake’s ‘the lamb’].” jian nan wen xue [jiannan literature] no. 12 (2016): 54-55. in chinese. a commentary on the deceptively simple words employed by blake, pointing out that the simple dialogue with the lamb contains blake’s devout religious thoughts and the repetitive structure of “the lamb” embodies the complicated usage of personal reference and person shifts [such as “i” and “thou”]. §gurton-wachter, lily. watchwords: romanticism and the poetics of attention. stanford: stanford university press, 2016. 45-58. h §haas, ryan. “sound and vision: sonic experience in wordsworth, blake, and clare.” stanford phd, 2016. hamlyn, susan. “robin hamlyn obituary.” guardian 5 sept. 2016. in part about his career as a blake scholar. hattori, kunikazu. “iijima koichi ‘william blake wo omoidasu shi’ no fukei to jiyu: liberal na nichibei domei, aruiwa ohoka makoto to sam francis [the landscape and liberty in ‘a poem which reminds me of william blake’ by koichi iijima: liberal alliance between japan and america, or makoto ohoka and sam francis].” kohon kindai bungaku [modern literature manuscripts] no. 40 (2016): 157-74. in japanese. an essay on the japanese poet koichi iijima (1930–2013) and blake in the context of modern japan. *holmes, richard. “building jerusalem: william blake and the counterculture.” thehumandivinedotorg 18 sept. [2016] [by “churchofblake”]. about what “we” did about 1968: “my blake, the radical visionary poet of the 1960s, seems almost old-fashioned now.” “this is an edited version of the greatness of william blake by richard holmes, which originally appeared in the new york review of books” [3 dec. 2015]. §holmes, richard. “william blake rediscovered.” this long pursuit: reflections of a romantic biographer. new york: pantheon books, 2016. hoshino, eriko. “kieta blake no ‘sobi’ (where has ‘the sick rose’ gone?).” yeats kenkyu (yeats studies) no. 46 (2015): 67-69. in japanese. the subject is further developed in the following entry. hoshino, eriko. “yeats ga william blake no ‘yameru sobi’ wo mushi suru riyu [the reasons why yeats disregards ‘the sick rose’ of william blake].” kodomo hoikugaku kyoikugaku kenkyu (journal of childcare and education study) no. 3 (2016): 35-39. in japanese. hu, xiao, and xiao-xiao yan. “qian xi wei lian bu lai ke de shi ge—kan si jian jie er tong su de yu yan zhong ying she ‘yan su’ de wen ti [analysis of william blake’s poetry—‘serious’ issues are reflected in the deceptively concise and simple language].” ying yu guang chang [english square] no. 7 (2016): 25-26. in chinese. the best poems in songs of innocence and of experience are in deceptively concise and simple language. §hughes, michael. the countenance divine. london: john murray, 2016. 24 cm., 291 pp.; isbn: 9781473636491. fantasy fiction with elements from blake. i §ione, amy. “art and anatomy: critics and hired hands; hogarth, science and society; william blake’s commentary; scientific illustrators; jan van rymsdyk.” art and the brain: plasticity, embodiment, and the unclosed circle. leiden: brill, 2016. consciousness, literature and the arts. chapter 9. §ishizuka, hisao. “untying the web of urizen: william blake, nervous medicine, and the culture of feeling.” liberating medicine, 1720–1835. ed. tristanne connolly and steve clark. 2009. chapter 7. <blake (2012)> b. §abingdon: routledge, 2016. j *jesse, jennifer g. william blake’s religious vision: there’s a methodism in his madness 2013. <blake (2014)> review jennifer davis michael (see blake 50.2, above). §jessen, elisabeth engell. “william blake, reader-response og det hellige rum.” (gen)klange: essays om kunst og kristendom tilegnet nils holger petersen på 70-årsdagen. ed. kristoffer garne and lars nørregaard. copenhagen: theology dept., copenhagen university, 2016. 78-86. in danish. §jessen, elisabeth engell. “william blake’s milton a poem as a conversion narrative in the behmenist tradition.” literature and theology 30.3 (2016): 293-308. jin, cheng. “yao xiang ying he de ‘feng’—zhuang zi ‘xiao yao you’ yu bu lai ke ‘yong chun’ de yi zhong bi jiao” “[correspondent ‘breeze’ from the distance—a comparative study of chuang tzu’s ‘a happy excursion’ and blake’s ‘spring’].” wen yi zheng ming [literature and art contending] no. 10 (2016): 175-79. in chinese. utilizing m. h. abrams’s theory of “the correspondent breeze,” jin compares the nature and employment of metaphors in chuang tzu’s “a happy excursion” and william blake’s “spring,” though chuang tzu was more than two thousand years older than william blake. §johansen, ib. “møder med blake & ginsberg: om at fordanske william blake—og andre fortællinger.” plys 29 (2015): 253-62. in danish. §johansen, ib. “tricksters in philosophy and fiction: from william blake to the postmodern age.” beyond words: crossing borders in english studies. ed. magdalena bleinert-coyle, michał choiński, and zygmunt mazur. kraków: tertium, 2015. 201-16. §jones, jonathan. “to oblivion and beyond: art and science at the edge of consciousness: from william blake’s vision of a soul leaving the body ….” guardian 3 feb. 2016. §*jones, josh. “william blake’s masterpiece illustrations of the book of job (1793–1827).” open culture 9 sept. 2016. §*jose, chiramel paul. “skinning ‘the lamb’ and ‘the tyger.’” english language and literature studies 5.2 (2015): 87-96. k *keach, william. arbitrary power: romanticism, language, politics. 2004. <blake (2008)> b. §princeton: princeton university press, 2015. isbn: 9780691168005. §kellett, lucy. “‘enough! or too much’: forms of textual excess in blake, wordsworth, coleridge and de quincey.” oxford dphil, 2016. ix, 330 leaves. kennedy, randy. “maurice sendak’s estate is awarded most of a book collection.” new york times 1 nov. 2016. “in a ruling in connecticut probate court [on 25 october], a judge awarded the bulk of the disputed book collection to the sendak estate, not to the [rosenbach] museum.” of the 340 disputed books, the judge awarded “88 to the rosenbach and 252 to the estate and foundation.” sendak owned the first book of urizen pl. 3, jerusalem pls. 18-19, 28, 35, songs of innocence (j), songs of innocence and of experience (h), a sketch for virgil (1821) <butlin #769 19>, hayley, ballads (1805), with the prints colored, hayley, little tom the sailor (1800), colored, and virgil (1821), cuts 2-5, proofs before the blocks were cut up. the christie’s sale of maurice sendak on 21 january 2015 had been stopped because of the lawsuit over ownership. §khan, jalal uddin. “the road not taken: a view of william blake’s originality.” gombak review: a biannual publication of creative writing and critical comment [gombak, malaysia] 4 (1999): 147-72. <blake (2002)> b. §perspectives: romantic, victorian, and modern literature. newcastle upon tyne: cambridge scholars publishing, 2015. chapter 1. §kilroy, thomas. blake. loughcrew, ireland: gallery press, 2015. 22 cm., 66 pp.; isbn: 9781852356477. from the publisher’s site: “blake is a fictionalized account of the visionary poet’s incarceration in a 19th-century london asylum.” §kondaratos, yannis. η θεωρία του william blake για την τέχνη και η σημασία του εικαστικού του έργου για την κατανόησή της [william blake’s theory of art and the significance of his artwork for its understanding]. athens: nissos, 2013. 328 pp. in greek. review elena hamalidi, historein 15.2 (2015): 103-06. §krueger, misty. “the rhetoric of rape: william blake’s visions of the daughters of albion as eighteenth-century rape trial.” interpreting sexual violence, 1660–1800. ed. anne greenfield. london: pickering & chatto, 2013. the body, gender and culture. chapter 13. b. §abingdon: routledge, 2016. l §lafford, erin. “‘asking with tears forgiveness’: weeping as ‘gentling’ in blake’s milton.” literature compass 11.2 (feb. 2014): 117-25. §lang, john. “william blake digital archive.” lone wolf librarian 15 april 2016. leader, zachary. reading blake’s songs. 1981. <bbs p. 546> b. §abingdon: routledge, 2016. routledge library editions: william blake, vol. 3. §*leporati, matthew. “william blake’s perspectives: teaching british romanticism in the community college classroom.” cea critic 78.1 (2016): 90-105. livingston, ira. “an emendation to erdman’s edition of blake’s ‘auguries of innocence.’” notes and queries 63.2 (june 2016): 223-24. in we are led to believe a lie when we see not thro the eye the second line should read “when we see with not thro the eye,” “as bentley notes,” though bentley does not note that the deletion of “with” is probably not by blake. *livio, mario. “on william blake’s ‘newton.’” huffington post 23 oct. 2014 [updated 23 dec. 2014]. “scientists are not blind to the beauty of the world.” *lloyd, harold. “blake within blake within blake without end.” huffington post 3 oct. 2016. about repetitions of pictorial ideas. §lorenz, matt. “blakean wonder and the unfallen tharmas: health, wholeness, and holarchy in the four zoas.” disabling romanticism. ed. michael bradshaw. london: palgrave macmillan, 2016. chapter 7 (127-45). §*low, katherine. “william blake’s job.” the bible, gender, and reception history: the case of job’s wife. 2013. <blake (2014)> b. §2015 (paperback). luo, jie. “chong gou de shen hua pu xi—wei lian bu lai ke zuo pin zhong de fan pan xing yan jiu [on reconstruction of the myth pedigree—study of rebelliousness exhibited in william blake’s works].” mei shu guan cha (guo ji shi ye) [art observation (international view edition)] no. 3 (2016): 142-46. in chinese. a comment on blake’s rebelliousness, arguing that blake has created “prophetic poetry” that imitates the bible. blake purposefully employs traditional christian symbols to achieve irony in his works. luo, jie. “la ao kong de bu lai ke shi yin yu [william blake’s metaphor of laocoön].” nan jing yi shu xue yuan xue bao (mei shu yu she ji) [journal of nanjing arts institute (fine arts and design)] no. 1 (2016): 29-32. in chinese. a commentary on the hebrew words that william blake adds to the laocoön, arguing that these words not only convey blake’s view of history but also his metaphor of “corruption-salvation,” thus disclosing blake’s religious view of graphic prints and artistic view. m §makdisi, saree. “blake and romantic imperialism.” british romanticism: criticism and debates. ed. mark canuel. abingdon: routledge, 2015. routledge criticism and debates in literature. §makdisi, saree. “william blake, charles lamb, and urban antimodernity.” sel: studies in english literature 1500–1900 56.4 (2016): 737-56. *maltby, kate. “there’s nothing patriotic about william blake’s jerusalem.” spectator: coffee house [blog] 14 jan. 2016. *masseran, claudia barbieri. “inocente experiência: pequeno diálogo com as canções de william blake.”  letras [revista do programa de pós-graduação em letras, universidade federal de santa maria] no. 51 (dec. 2015): 53-69. in portuguese (abstract in portuguese and english). *mcdevitt, niall. “a william blake/thomas de quincey walk.” international times: the newspaper of resistance 13 aug. 2015. a notice about a walk on 15 august. §mcfarland, alison sanders. “a deconstruction of william blake’s vision: vaughan williams and job.” international journal of musicology 3 (1994): 339-71. b. vaughan williams essays. ed. byron adams and robin wells. farnham: ashgate, 2003. c. abingdon: routledge, 2016 (paperback). §mcgee, patrick. “imagination as thought in blake’s milton.” political monsters and democratic imagination: spinoza, blake, hugo, joyce. new york: bloomsbury academic, 2016. §messager, annette. “annette messager on william blake.” in my view: personal reflections on art by today’s leading artists. ed. simon grant. 2012. <blake (2016)> b. *“william blake’s art inspires modern artist annette messager.” huffington post 3 oct. 2012. *michael, jennifer davis. “blake, trump, and the road of excess: an urban legend.” mm: the millions 16 june 2016. the rumour that trump had a blake quote in his suite was cited by leo damrosch. §miller, eric. “‘druid rocks’: restoration, originality, nature and authority in john dryden, titia brongersma and william blake’s visions of megalithic monuments.” lumen: selected proceedings from the canadian society for eighteenth-century studies/lumen: travaux choisis de la société canadienne d'étude du dix-huitième siècle 36 (2017 [seen 17 dec. 2016]): 143-59. about stonehenge. milne, w. s. “geoffrey hill and blake [letter to the editor].” times literary supplement 29 july 2016: 6. “hill’s poem ‘holy thursday’ … is clearly based on william blake’s poem of the same name.” miner, paul. “blake and aristotle.” notes and queries 63.2 (june 2016): 199-201. blake’s “references to … aristotle … [are] pejorative.” miner, paul. “blake’s mouth-space and the tongue of touch.” notes and queries 63.2 (june 2016): 202-11. especially about erotic and astronomical contexts. §mtubani, v. “the anti-slavery poetry of william blake.” marang: journal of language and literature 8.1 (1990): 64-77. b. §university of botswana, 2015. *mukherjee, dipayan. “beauty in the beast: an analytical reading of blake’s ‘the lamb’ and ‘the tyger’ from the perspective of animal studies.” spring magazine on english literature 2.1 (2016): 67-71. *mulligan, john. “blake’s use of geometry in newton (1805).” notes and queries 63.2 (june 2016): 224-28. “blake’s geometer would appear to be engaged in a fairly complex … demonstration of conic sections” (225). n nakayama, fumi. “blake sakuhin ni miru ‘shi’ no perusona [the personae of ‘four’ in blake’s works].” shiteki gengo no aspects: romanha wo koete [aspects of poetic language: beyond romanticism]. ed. chugoku shikoku. association of english romanticism. tokyo: shohakusha, 2016. 223-33. isbn: 9784775402320. in japanese. §natoli, joseph. dark affinities, dark imaginaries: a mind’s odyssey. albany: state university of new york press, 2017. “chapter one. william blake: prophet against empire” includes “introduction, twentieth-century blake criticism: northrop frye to the present” (“the pragmatics of reading blake” and “the politics of blakean criticism”), revised from his book of 1982 <bbs p. 299>; “excerpt from mots d’ordre: disorder in literary worlds” (“blake’s marriage” and “‘the argument’: the play of disorder”), reprinted from his book of 1992; and “why are we not roused to action?” §natoli, joseph. mots d’ordre: disorder in literary worlds. albany: state university of new york press, 1992. chapter 1, “‘the argument’: the play of disorder,” includes “blake's marriage” (16-18). natoli, joseph p. twentieth-century blake criticism: northrop frye to the present. 1982. <bbs p. 299> b. §abingdon: routledge, 2016. routledge library editions: william blake, vol. 4. §nersessian, anahid. utopia, limited. romanticism and adjustment. cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 2015. 280 pp.; isbn: 9780674434578. “she enlists william blake, william wordsworth, john keats, and others to redefine utopianism as a positive investment in limitations.” newlin, margaret e. see rudd, below. o §o’sullivan, michael. “blake’s visions.” philosophy and literature 39, 1a (sept. 2015): a317-25. p *peat, ray. “william blake as biological visionary.” thehumandivinedotorg 26 june [2016] [by “churchofblake”]. an edited version of his “can art instruct science? william blake as biological visionary” (2006). §peck, john, and martin coyle. “the romantic period: the age of revolution; william blake, william wordsworth, samuel taylor coleridge; lord byron, percy bysshe shelley, john keats; radical voices.” a brief history of english literature. 2nd ed. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, 2013. chapter 9. pellanda, nize maria campos, and sandra regina simonis richter. “william blake e fernando pessoa: poíesis e complexidade.” remate de males 35.2 (2015): 325-49. the abstract is in portuguese and english. *piccitto, diane. blake’s drama: theatre, performance, and identity in the illuminated books. 2014. <blake (2015)> review §mark crosby, bars review no. 48 (2016) (with another). *plowman, max. an introduction to the study of blake 1927, 1952, 1967, 1994, 2012. <bb #2421, blake (2013)> f. §abingdon: routledge, 2016. routledge library editions: william blake, vol. 5. *popova, maria. “william blake’s most beautiful letter: the 20-year-old artist’s searing defense of the imagination and the creative spirit.” brain pickings [14 july] 2016. the illustrations include a reproduction of the letter plainly dated “august 23, 1799,” which she dates “august 23, 1777” [when blake was nineteen]. *portela, manuel.  “livros iluminados digitais: autógrafo e reprodução em the william blake archive.”  letras [revista do programa de pós-graduação em letras, universidade federal de santa maria] no. 51 (dec. 2015): 15-34. in portuguese (abstract in portuguese and english). purešić, dragan. “dimenzije vremena u delu vilijama blejka [dimensions of time in the works of william blake].” belgrade phd, 2016. *pyle, eric. william blake’s illustrations for dante’s divine comedy: a study of the engravings, pencil sketches and watercolors. 2015. <blake (2015)> review mark a. sherman (see blake 50.3, above). r rawlinson, nick. william blake’s comic vision. 2003. <blake (2004)> b. 2014. isbn: 9781349410606 (paperback). §regier, alexander. “anglo-german connections in william blake, johann georg hamann, and the moravians.” sel: studies in english literature 1500–1900 56.4 (2016): 757-76. rix, robert. william blake and the cultures of radical christianity. 2007. <blake (2008)> b. §published by 2009 as an e-book. c. §abingdon: routledge, 2016. 25 cm., 182 pp.; isbn: 9780754656005. §*rosso, g. a. the religion of empire: political theology in blake’s prophetic symbolism. columbus: ohio state university press, 2016. 24 cm., xvii, 274 pp.; isbn: 9780814213162. literature, religion, and postsecular studies. examines vala, milton, and jerusalem through rahab. §rougemont, martine de. “travail de mémoire.” re-reading/la relecture: essays in honour of graham falconer. ed. rachel falconer and andrew oliver. newcastle upon tyne: cambridge scholars publishing, 2012. 281-87. in french. a memory of yeats’s essay on blake. §rowland, christopher. “blake, enoch, and emerging biblical criticism.” sibyls, scriptures, and scrolls: john collins at seventy. ed. joel baden, hindy najman, and eibert tigchelaar. 2 vols. leiden: brill, 2016. 2: 1145-65. §*rowland, christopher. “william blake and the apocalypse.” oxford research encyclopedia of religion. 2016. <http://​religion.​oxfordre.​com>. rucavado rojas, mario. “aspectos de la traducción del verso épico.” actas del vi congreso internacional de letras, 2014. transformaciones culturales. debates de la teoría, la crítica y la lingüística. buenos aires: universidad de buenos aires, 2014. 1513-21. in spanish. discusses the problems of translating blake’s fourteeners. rudd, margaret. divided image: a study of william blake and w. b. yeats. 1953, 1970. <bb #2585> c. §abingdon: routledge, 2015 (e-book). d. §abingdon: routledge, 2016. routledge library editions: william blake, vol. 7. *rudd, margaret. organiz’d innocence: the story of blake’s prophetic books. 1956, 1973. <bb #2586> c. §abingdon: routledge, 2016. routledge library editions: william blake, vol. 6. s §sabharwal, aditya. critical interpretation of william blake. new delhi: wisdom press, 2015. 23 cm., vi, 325 pp.; isbn: 9789382006275. §sandy, mark. “‘curse my stars in bitter grief’: william blake and the songs of loss.” romanticism, memory, and mourning. farnham: ashgate, 2013. chapter 1. b. §abingdon: routledge, 2016. *sato, hikari. yanagi muneyoshi to william blake: kanryu suru “kotei no shiso” [yanagi muneyoshi and william blake: the philosophy of affirmation of life and its global circulation]. 2015. <blake (2016)> the book received the watsuji tetsuro prize for culture, the shimada kinji memorial prize, and the japan comparative literature association prize. reviews takashi kajiya, hikaku bungaku (journal of comparative literature) 58 (2015): 98-101 (in japanese). ayako wada, eibungaku kenkyu (studies in english literature) 93 (2016): 87-91 (in japanese). mihoko higaya, nihon hikaku bungakukai kaiho (bulletin)the title should be bulletin of japan comparative literature association. no. 205 (2016): 20-22 (a commentary on the japan comparative literature association prizewinning book in 2016 by the head of the selection committee, which is also a review of the book) (in japanese). sato, katsuya. “william blake no shi tono deai nado jibun ni totte no shi [an encounter with poetry of william blake and poetry to me].” coal sack: sekitan bukuro no. 87 (2016): 45-49. in japanese. schaap, rosie. “letter of recommendation: william blake’s grave.” new york times 4 feb. 2016. “i have a thing for graveyards, and for poetry” and was inspired by blake’s. *schenker, d. b. “a celebration of william blake’s influence on contemporary culture: blakefest 2016 in bognor regis—a review.” louder than war 26 sept. 2016. schock, peter a. see revolución y literatura en el siglo diecinueve: fuentes, documentos, textos críticos in part i, section b. sha, richard c. “blake, liberation and medicine.” liberating medicine, 1720–1835. ed. tristanne connolly and steve clark. 2009. chapter 6. <blake (2012)> b. §abingdon: routledge, 2016. §*smirnov-sadovsky, dmitri nikolaevich. блейк: биография [blake: biography]. st. albans: meladina, 2016. in russian. §sohn, hyun. [“the difference of city and country in british romantic poetry: blake, wordsworth, masochism [sic].”] yŏngŏ yŏngmunhak/journal of english language and literature 61.4 (dec. 2015): 629-50. in korean. §son, hyesook. “canon formation and the reception of william blake’s and dickinson’s poetry in korea.” clcweb: comparative literature and culture 16.6 (2014), 10 pp. §spector, sheila a. “the evolution of blake’s myth: urizen’s multiple identities.” translating myth. ed. ben pestell, pietra palazzolo, and leon burnett. cambridge: modern humanities research association; abingdon: routledge, 2016. chapter 4 (60-100). §steven, mark. “high road to hell: milton, blake, mccarthy.” cormac mccarthy journal 14.2 (oct. 2016): 149-67. stock, r. d. “religious love and fear in late eighteenth century poetry: smart, wesley, cowper, blake.” the holy and the daemonic from sir thomas browne to william blake. 1982, §2014. <bbs p. 647, blake (2015)> c. princeton: princeton university press, 2016. §swensen, cole. “from ‘henry david thoreau: “walking”’; william blake; thomas de quincey; gérard de nerval [poems].” kenyon review 37.6 (2015): 22-25. t tavares, enéias farias, and andrio j. r. dos santos. “tradução intersemiótica iluminada a obra de william blake e sua releitura no século xx.”  letras [revista do programa de pós-graduação em letras, universidade federal de santa maria] no. 51 (dec. 2015): 109-34. in portuguese (abstract in portuguese and english). §tembong, denis fonge. “blake, hardy and the poetics of mixed beliefs.” anglisticum 3.5 (2014): 105-20. *toki, koji. “blake no hikyo shinwa [the mystic mythology of blake].” yuriika (eureka) 6.9 (1974): 192-99. <blake (1995)> b. metropolitanmetropolitan is a journal published by the department of english, tokyo metropolitan university, and no. 58 is a special issue devoted to the works of koji toki (d. 2014) of tokyo metropolitan university. no. 58 (2016): 212-25. in japanese. toki, koji. “blake to ‘fukugo geijutsu’ [blake and composite art].” eigo seinen (the rising generation) 119.4 (1973): 12-13. b. metropolitan no. 58 (2016): 174-80. in japanese. *toki, koji. “gui to genshi: gray no neko kara blake no neko e [allegory and vision: from gray’s cat to blake’s cat].” yuriika (eureka) 5.13 (1973): 170-77. b. metropolitan no. 58 (2016): 192-211. in japanese. toki, koji. “joyce to blake [joyce and blake].” yuriika (eureka) 9.11 (1977): 57-59. b. metropolitan no. 58 (2016): 231-36. in japanese. toki, koji. “‘seishin no tabibito’ no jikan kozo [the structure of time in ‘the mental traveller’].” yuriika (eureka) 5.9 (1973): 160-65. <blake (1995)> b. metropolitan no. 58 (2016): 181-91. in japanese. toki, koji. “william blake no sozoryoku [the imagination of william blake].” jimbun gakuho [bulletin of humanities] no. 86 (1972): 59-75. b. metropolitan no. 58 (2016): 109-28. in japanese. §*tomkowski, jan. william blake: poeta, mistyk, artysta. toronto: fj press, 2016. in polish. §trodd, colin. “william blake, the arts and crafts movement and the mythography of manufacture.” art versus industry? new perspectives on visual and industrial cultures in nineteenth-century britain. ed. kate nichols, rebecca wade, and gabriel williams. manchester: manchester university press, 2016. v viscomi, joseph see revolución y literatura en el siglo diecinueve: fuentes, documentos, textos críticos in part i, section b. volpone, annalisa. “paratextual transactions: text and off text in william blake’s milton and jerusalem.” medea 2.1 (june 2016): 1-24. §volpone, annalisa. “william blake’s last prophetic books and contemporary brain science.” symptoms of disorder: reading madness in british literature, 1744–1845. ed. ilaria natali and annalisa volpone. amherst, ny: cambria press, 2016. 67-93. §*vuga, gregor. “filozofija v pesništvu williama blakea: diplomsko delo.” university of ljubljana, slovenia, 2015. 81 leaves. in slovenian. w wahl, jean. “magie et romantisme: notes sur novalis et blake.” hermes no. 2 (1936): 7-13. <bb #2909> b. §existence humaine et transcendance. neuchâtel: éditions de la baconnière, 1944. 98. c. §“magic and romanticism: notes on novalis and blake.” human existence and transcendence. trans. william c. hackett. notre dame: university of notre dame press, 2016. thresholds in philosophy and theology. wang, li. “bu ke kao xu shi de shuang wei jie du—yi wei lian bu lai ke de shi ge ‘sheng tian jie’ wei li [a two-dimensional interpretation of unreliability: a case study of 'holy thursday' by william blake].” huai hai gong xue yuan xue bao (ren she ban) [journal of huaihai institute of technology (humanities and social sciences edition)] 14.9 (2016): 39-41. in chinese. the essay attempts to show that the study of “holy thursday” from songs of innocence from either one of the two methods of unreliability—the rhetorical method and cognitive method—tends to be one-sided. therefore, instead of isolating one method from the other, a justifiable evaluation of literary works should combine the two methods. wang, long-li. “lun wei lian bu lai ke ‘gao yang’ de yong ci te dian [on lexicon features of william blake’s ‘the lamb’].” jian nan wen xue [jiannan literature] no. 12 (2016): 58. in chinese. the essay focuses on verbs and adjectives in blake’s “the lamb.” wang, yu-xuan. “ying guo lang man zhu yi shi ren wei lian bu lai ke ying xiang xia de chen meng jia shi ge yan jiu [study of the british romantic poet william blake’s influence on chen meng-jia’s poetry creation].” xi an shi you da xue xue bao (she hui ke xue ban) [journal of xi’an shiyou university (social science edition)] no. 2 (2016): 87-90. in chinese. the chinese poet chen meng-jia’s poetry was greatly influenced by blake in (1) his naive poetic style, (2) thought-provoking images, and (3) mysterious religious elements. §watt, jim. work toward knowing: beginning with blake. [ed. norman minnick]. athens, ga: kinchafoonee creek press, 2015. 15.2 x 23 cm., xii, 164 pp.; isbn: 9781312990401. “i simply hope to suggest a means of approaching his art” (7). whitson, roger, and jason whittaker. william blake and the digital humanities: collaboration, participation, and social media. 2013, 2015. <blake (2014, 2015)> review whitney anne trettien (see blake 49.4, above). willer, claudio. “william blake, religião, misticismo e poesia.” letras [revista do programa de pós-graduação em letras, universidade federal de santa maria] no. 51 (dec. 2015): 83-108. in portuguese (abstract in portuguese and english). §wood, walton e. “fractal poetics in william blake’s urizen trilogy.” florida phd, 2014. about the first book of urizen, the book of ahania, and the book of los. woodman, ross. “blake’s fourfold body.” sanity, madness, transformation: the psyche in romanticism. 2005, 2009. <blake (2007, 2010)> chapter 3 (86-109, 253-55). c. §2016 (e-book). §wroe, ann. six facets of light. london: jonathan cape, 2016. 288 pp.; isbn: 9781910702321. meditations on the nature of light, with frequent references to samuel palmer and william blake. x xiao, zhi-bing. “ying yu shi ge ke tang jiao xue mo shi tan jiu—yi ‘the tyger’ wei yang ben [on teaching mode of english poetry class—take ‘the tyger’ as an example].” feng kuang ying yu (li lun ban) [crazy english (pro)] no. 1 (2016): 39-42. in chinese. using eleven aspects of poetry in blake’s “the tyger,” xiao attempts to construct a new mode for teaching english poetry and to foster students’ aesthetic taste to understand poetry better. §xu, jian-gang, rong huang, and dong-qing wang. “imagination and emotion in william blake’s poems.” journal of literature and art studies 6.1 (jan. 2016): 17-22. y *yamaguchi, mayumi. “william blake saku ‘leviathan wo michibiku nelson no reiteki sugata’ to ‘behemoth wo michibiku pitt no sugata’ (the spiritual form of nelson guiding leviathan and the spiritual form of pitt guiding behemoth painted by william blake).” philokalia no. 33 (2016): 109-40. in japanese. yang, hong-dan. “qian xi wei lian bu lai ke de ‘lao hu’ [an analysis of william blake’s ‘the tyger’].” bei fang wen xue [northern literature] no. 13 (2016): 51. in chinese. the essay, focusing on language usage and symbolic images, offers a better understanding of the connotations of blake’s poetry. ying, yi-wen. “bu lai ke de ‘tian zhen yu jing yan zhi ge’ de shu fa zhi mei [on aesthetics of calligraphy of blake’s songs of innocence and of experience].” mei shu guan cha (guo ji shi ye) [art observation (international view edition)] no. 3 (2016): 147-48. in chinese. the calligraphy of every word echoes the symbols and connotations of the poem. yu, kai-jia. “cong shi ge ‘the tyger’ yi ben bi jiao zhong fen xi bian zhi lin de yi shi si xiang [on zhi-lin bian’s thoughts of poetry translation—a comparative study of different translations of ‘the tyger’].” xian dai jiao ji [modern communication] no. 15 (2016): 94-95. in chinese. by focusing on the chinese translations of “the tyger” by zhi-lin bian, zhi-mo xu, and mo-ruo guo, this essay shows how bian’s version differs from those of the other two translators, thus manifesting bian’s unique conception of poetry translation. z zhang, lan-po. “tu shi yu shou fa de chong fu zai wei lian bu lai ke zuo pin zhong de yi yi [on purport of repetitive schema and technique in william blake’s works].” mei shu da guan [art panorama] no. 4 (2016): 72-73. in chinese. a stable pattern, which accords with the psychological structure of human visual perception, and repetition are the fundamental characteristics of blake’s painting. zhang, yan. “lun bu lai ke shi hua he ti yi shu ji qi yu xi fang ‘shi ru hua’ chuan tong de guan xi [blake’s composite art and its relations to western tradition of ‘ut pictura poesis’].” wai guo wen xue [foreign literature] no. 6 (2016): 36-45. in chinese. zhang argues that blake’s composite art follows the “ut pictura poesis” tradition and that this composite art shows a much more active and complicated relationship between poetry and painting than traditional practice, revealing the discrepancy and contradiction in the poetry-painting unity. zhao, bo. “wei lian bu lai ke ‘qiu song’ he ji ci ‘qiu song’ bi jiao yan jiu [a comparative study of william blake’s ‘to autumn’ and john keats’s ‘to autumn’].” wen xue jiao yu [literature education] no. 7 (2016): 18-19. in chinese. zhou, fang-yu. “cong wei lian bu lai ke de ‘gao yang’ he ‘lao hu’ de dui bi kan ren xing de ping heng [on the balance of humanity—a comparative study of william blake’s ‘the tyger’ and ‘the lamb’].” ya lu jiang (wen xue yan jiu) [yalujiang literature monthly (literature studies)] no. 10 (2016): 81. in chinese. blake’s poems describe the initial innocence and experienced worldliness of human beings, a balance between sensitivity and rationality. zhou, fang-yu. “ye se xia de hei an yu chen guang zhong de xi wang—bu lai ke de ‘lun dun’ yu hua zi hua si de ‘wei si min si te qiao shang’ dui bi shang xi [darkness of the night and hope of the dawn—a comparative study of blake’s ‘london’ and wordsworth’s ‘composed upon westminster bridge’].” ming ri feng shang [tomorrow’s fashion] no. 17 (2016): 326. in chinese. though the contents of blake’s “london” and wordsworth’s “composed upon westminster bridge” are different, they both embody people’s yearning for better life—a life without oppression, pollution [sic], or polarization. §zinter, erik andrew. “‘the tyger’ and ‘the lamb’: exploring the relationship between text and music in selected contemporary choral settings of two poems by william blake (1757–1827).” north dakota state dma, 2015. 71 pp. division ii: blake’s circlei do not record sales of their works, which are very extensively reported in essick, “blake in the marketplace, 2016,” blake 50.4 (spring 2017), seen in prepublication draft. of particular significance for blake are profile of a woman, eyes turned upward, attributed to john linnell, perhaps portraying catherine blake (see essick’s illus. 8); george richmond, a recollection of william blake (essick’s illus. 10); and “thirteen pen and ink drawings attributed to stothard of characters from chaucer’s canterbury tales” (see essick’s section on stothard). cromek, robert hartley (1770–1812) engraver, entrepreneur, blake’s bête noir *read, dennis m. r. h. cromek, engraver, editor, and entrepreneur. 2011. <blake (2012)> review mark crosby, bars bulletin & review no. 42 (2013): 30-31 (“an important biography”). flaxman, john (1755–1826) sculptor, friend of blake an “autograph letter signed by william hayley [n.d. given], to john flaxman, describing his new library in detail and requesting twelve busts” was offered but not sold with an extra-illustrated copy of j. t. herbert baily, emma, lady hamilton: a biographical essay with a catalogue of her published portraits (1905) at sotheby’s, london, 13 december 2016, lot 31. instead, blake was commissioned to make eighteen heads of the poets and did so in 1800–03. fuseli, henry (1741–1825) swiss painter, friend of blake §henry fuseli’s drawings. ed. daniel coenn. 2013. isbn: 9781300936787 (e-book). johnson, joseph (1738–1809) bookseller, patron of blake the joseph johnson letterbook. ed. john bugg. oxford: oxford university press, 2016. 14.5 x 22.1 cm., lxxxvi, 186 pp.; isbn: 9780199644247. contains all known joseph johnson letters (1766–1809), 190 from the newly recorded letterbook in the pforzheimer collection at the new york public library (sold by pickering & chatto in 1994), and 27 from other repositories (#1-12, 48-51, 54, 57-58, 153, 160, 162-63, 191, 197, 204, 217). an appendix gives 13 letters (1797–1810) relating to johnson’s business affairs. the volume includes letters to adriana stedman (25 oct. 1799) about a new edition of her late husband, j. g. stedman’s, surinam (p. 64); to john mayne (28 aug. 1801) about incomplete sets of lavater’s physiognomy (pp. 77-78); to joseph seagrave (12 may 1802) ordering print runs of hayley’s life (p. 83); and to james edwards (13 oct. 1804) about “rendering an essential service to a deserving man and old friend” (unnamed) (pp. 107-08).johnson’s letter to hayley about blake of 4 jan. 1802 is said to be “unpublished” (83), but it is given in br(2) 116-17. review §daisy hay, “from a trade to an art: joseph johnson, publisher of the romantics, in his letterbook,” times literary supplement 8 april 2016: 14-15. macklin, thomas (d. 1800) picture publisher g. e. bentley, jr. thomas macklin (1752–1800), picture-publisher and patron, creator of the macklin bible (1791–1800). foreword by mark crosby. lewiston, ny: edwin mellen press, 2016. 15 x 23 cm., [12 unnumbered pages], i-[x], 1-260 pp. plus 20 reproductions. stedman, john gabriel (1744–97) soldier of fortune, friend of blake edition narrative of a five years expedition against the revolted negroes of surinam transcribed for the first time from the original 1790 manuscript. ed. richard price and sally price. 1988. <bbs p. 257> b. §open road distribution, 2016. isbn: 9781504028943 (e-book). §hanson, lenora. “‘forms of living death’: mockery, marronage, and sovereignty in percy shelley and john gareth [sic] stedman.” essays in romanticism 23.2 (2016): 225-44. blake an illustrated quarterly volume 56, number 3 winter 2022–23 angela esterhammer, victoria college, university of toronto nelson hilton, university of georgia tilar j. mazzeo, colby college robert w. rix, university of copenhagen joseph viscomi, university of north carolina at chapel hill david worrall, the nottingham trent university martin butlin, tate gallery, london, retired tristanne j. connolly, university of waterloo detlef w. dörrbecker, university of trier sibylle erle, university of lincoln robert n. essick, university of california, riverside a d v i s o r y b o a r d a n i l l u s t r a t e d q u a r t e r l y volume 56 number 3 winter 2022–23 c o n t e n t s www.blakequarterly.org articles the notebook, laocoön, and blake’s beauties of inflection by matthew martello blake, lucretius, and prophecy: the book of los by andrew lincoln review lucy cogan, blake and the failure of prophecy reviewed by g. a. rosso © 2023 copyright morris eaves and morton d. paley cover: the notebook of william blake. add ms 49460, f.47r. image courtesy of the william blake archive, © british library board. e d i t o r s editors: morris eaves and morton d. paley review editor: alexander s. gourlay exhibitions editor: luisa calè bibliographer (criticism): wayne c. ripley bibliographer (music): jason whittaker managing editor: sarah jones sarah.jones@rochester.edu production office: department of english, university of rochester, rochester ny 14627-0451 “blake was a phenomenon”: artistic, domestic, and blakean visions in joseph paul hodin’s writing on else and ludwig meidner “blake was a phenomenon”: artistic, domestic, and blakean visions in joseph paul hodin’s writing on else and ludwig meidner by sibylle erle sibylle erle (sibylle.erle@bishopg.ac.uk), frsa, fhea, is reader in english literature at bishop grosseteste university in lincoln. she is the author of blake, lavater and physiognomy (legenda, 2010) and chapters and articles on blake, fuseli, lavater, tennyson, ludwig meidner, and frankenstein. she cocurated with philippa simpson the display blake and physiognomy (2010–​11) at tate britain, coedited with laurie garrison “science, technology and the senses” (special issue, ravon, 2008), and coedited with laurie garrison, verity hunt, phoebe putnam, and peter west panoramas, 1787–​1900: texts and contexts (5 vols., pickering & chatto, 2012). more recently, she coedited with morton d. paley the reception of william blake in europe (2 vols., bloomsbury, 2019) and with helen hendry “monsters: interdisciplinary explorations in monstrosity” (special issue, humanities & social sciences communications, 2019–​20). apart from reception, her current research is on monsters, perceptions of death in young adult literature, tennyson, and swedenborg, as well as conceptualizations and representations of “character” in romantic literature. when ludwig meidner (1884–​1966), the german-jewish expressionist painter, printmaker, and writer, returned to germany in 1953, he took what he could carry: personal belongings, books, and images, his prints, drawings, paintings, and watercolors.meidner arrived in london with three portfolios of prints, 2500 drawings, and eighty paintings (sander 228). in a letter of 18 june 1953, he says that he created “a few hundred interesting watercolors” (“ein paar hundert interessanter wasserfarbenbilder”) while there (breuer and wagemann 2: 486). refugees face difficult choices; they can take only what is absolutely necessary. meidner never adjusted during the fourteen years of exile and there is a sense that he wanted to eradicate all that reminded him of london—​except for blake. thomas grochowiak, who first noted the significance of meidner’s encounter with “the painter, poet, mystic william blake” (“maler-dichter-mystikers william blake”), suggests that he identified with blake’s adverse living conditions and artistic neglect, and argues that the occult aspects and especially the visionary heads interested him: “for him the preoccupation with old testament figures and prophets, with mystical philosophers or religious ecstatics, was just as natural as the everyday, familiar dealings with ghosts.”“ihm war die beschäftigung und auseinandersetzung mit den alttestamentlichen gestalten und propheten, mit mystischen philosophen oder religiösen ekstatikern ebenso selbstverständlich wie der alltägliche, vertrauliche umgang mit geistern” (grochowiak 200-01). meidner took not only john piper’s british romantic artists (1942) and ruthven todd’s edition of alexander gilchrist’s life of blake (1942), but also reproductions of william blake by thomas phillips, the large color print god judging adam (then known as elijah about to ascend in the chariot of fire), and james deville’s life mask. these images were part of a selection that were to adorn his studio in marxheim (1955–​63),see erle, “blake, ludwig meidner and expressionism.” where he shared his art with a small number of visitors who came to pay tribute to the old master of german expressionism (illus. 1). 1. ludwig meidner in his studio in marxheim, 1959 (see enlargement). film still from a documentary by the hessischer rundfunk. © hessischer rundfunk. image courtesy of the jüdisches museum frankfurt. meidner is known for his apocalyptic landscapes and his scrutinizing portraits and self-portraits.for examples of his work, see the collection at leicester museum and art gallery, <https://​www.​germanexpressionismleicester.​org/​leicesters-​collection/​artists-​and-​artworks/​ludwig-​meidner>. hans sahl, who visited marxheim in 1958 and was overwhelmed by meidner’s forgotten greatness, quotes him as saying that he could live only where people spoke german and that he hoped to spend his remaining days in germany.“aber ich kann nur leben, wo man deutsch spricht und schreibt … und so hoffe ich, den rest meiner erdentage hier zu verbringen und nicht genötigt zu sein, von neuem in die emigration zu gehen” (sahl 35). i am grateful to erik riedel, who shared this article with me. max peter maass, who met him around the same time, reflects on meidner’s intense visions of 1914 and 1939. (his work had been included in the entartete kunst [degenerate art] exhibition in munich in 1937 [illus. 2];see barron 53, 54, 298-99. he left germany on the eve of world war ii.) 2. entartete kunst exhibition booklet, pp. 20-21 (see enlargement). image courtesy of the jüdisches museum frankfurt. his visions, so he told maass, returned in london.meidner talked about new and very strong visions to hodin in 1953 (aus den erinnerungen 121). he may not have got recognition there, but he was, without doubt, productive, finding new themes in urban life and engaging with english art.for his borrowings from hogarth, gillray, and rowlandson, see dogramaci 265-74; for meidner and edward lear, see riedel 84. maass compares the watercolors from the years of exile in london with blake’s and fuseli’s representations of ghosts—​“gespenster-darstellungen des blake und füßli”—​and argues that they show how meidner dealt with the emotional pressures of isolation.“there is also psychologically important material here; it could shed light on how a creative mind of exceptional potency deflects disrespect and near-death impoverishment by locking the demons that beset him into an image and thus keeping them at a distance” (“zudem liegt hier psychologisch wichtiges material vor, das aufschluß darüber geben könnte, wie ein schöpferischer geist von ungewöhnlicher potenz mißachtung und todesnahe verelendung pariert, indem er dämonen, die ihn bedrängen, auf distanz bringt, wenn er sie bildhaft fixiert”) (maass 122). his isolation was rhetorical stance and biographical fact; as i will discuss later, he explores this theme artistically in the descriptions of his studios, allowing the visionary mode to disrupt narrative chronology. his return to germany, which he decided upon gradually,in letters to hannah bekker (22 may 1949) and wolf bergmann (25 sept. 1949), he is weighing his options (breuer and wagemann 2: 478-80). his decision consolidated during visits to germany; see letters to ernst buchholz (15 dec. 1952) and bergmann (1 feb. 1953) (breuer and wagemann 2: 484). marked the breakup of his family. son david, shocked at his father’s wanting to return to the country of the originators of the holocaust, emigrated to israel in may 1951 and broke off all contact. else meidner (1901–​87), his wife, a painterfor examples of her work, see the ben uri collection, <https://​www.​benuricollection.​org.​uk/​intermediate.​php?​artistid=95>. and former pupil, visited in april 1963 and stayed until may 1964 to look after her ailing husband. she returned to london to attend a retrospective of her art at the ben uri gallery and remained there, having become a british citizen in 1954. like ludwig, else considered herself german, but, in contrast, she had lost most of her family in the holocaust. though many kilometers apart, the meidners remained close; ludwig tried to comfort else, never challenging her decision and always encouraging her. both were interested in blake. else had given todd’s edition of gilchrist’s life to ludwig as a birthday present in april 1945 (illus. 3),breuer and wagemann 1: 180. and in december 1959 she put blake’s illustrations of the book of job, the reissue (1927) of the facsimile published by gowans & gray, into the post. blake’s job was an attempt to bridge the distance between them; in blake’s interpretation, job’s wife never leaves the side of her husband. the occasion was “chanukah 1959” (the eight-day jewish festival that started on 25 december in 1959), according to the inscription on the title page (illus. 4). blake had been part of the life they had shared in london; her present was a reminder of that time. 3. ludwig’s copy of alexander gilchrist, the life of william blake, ed. ruthven todd, with owner’s mark and dedication by else (see enlargement). ludwig meidner-archiv, jüdisches museum frankfurt. image courtesy of the jüdisches museum frankfurt. 4. ludwig’s copy of william blake, illustrations of the book of job, with dedication by else. ludwig meidner-archiv, jüdisches museum frankfurt. image courtesy of the jüdisches museum frankfurt. this essay, which engages with the artistic visions of else and ludwig meidner, focuses on their shared interest in blake as mediated by fellow émigré and czech-born art historian, art critic, and author joseph paul hodin (1905–​95), who managed, unlike the meidners, to build a career for himself in england. according to his obituary in the independent, paul hodin encapsulated in his work the values of the past, while devoting much effort to forging novel attitudes to interpret the art of the second half of the 20th century. the corollary was a dislike of, even an angry aloofness from, what was ephemeral, if insistent, in the artistic movements of the post-war years. (mullaly) hodin, who is principally known for his biography of oskar kokoschka (1966), approaches artworks through his understanding of the artist’s personality. he mentions blake three times in ludwig meidner: seine kunst, seine persönlichkeit, seine zeit (1973); blake, as we will see, is a touchstone for his perception of meidner’s character and artistic achievements in the years in exile. the book, begun in 1953, took twenty years to complete. the men met and corresponded and meidner, going by the evidence in the hodin archive at tate britain, took a keen interest in the manuscript. after meidner’s death, hodin produced a series of articles for darmstädter tagblatt (1966–​67), which present the material for the book at an intermediary stage, with hodin reluctant to share all he knew about meidner’s visions.meidner’s apocalyptic landscapes anticipate events of world war i: houses are burning and collapsing, human figures are running for their lives (grochowiak 48-51, 64-65, 72). in his biography, hodin views meidner’s expressionist works as testimonies of fear, emphasizing that meidner refused to identify the exact cause or reasons for his “doomsday gloom” (“weltuntergangsstimmung”): “‘ich habe—​unerklärlich—​entsätzliche angst gehabt’” (“‘i suffered—​for no apparent reason—​from excruciating fear’”) (ludwig meidner 61). this reluctance has something to do, i believe, with hodin’s getting to terms with the nature of these visions. his publications, primarily ludwig meidner and aus den erinnerungen von else meidner (1979), are inherently fragmented, as they juxtapose and combine different kinds of text, which also intertwine the meidners’ life stories. several pages into ludwig meidner, hodin explains that his approach is dialogic: what is recorded below was the subject of conversations i had with ludwig meidner in london in 1953. … because the material is based entirely on the painter’s personal statements as well as on the letters he sent me in the years 1953–​1955 from london, frankfurt am main, hofheim am taunus, and bad nauheim, it is to be reprinted here as an authentic statement, as it was in my manuscript from 1953, which the artist read and annotated in january of the following year.“was im folgenden aufgezeichnet ist, war der gegenstand von gesprächen, die ich mit ludwig meidner in london 1953 geführt habe. … weil sich das material ganz auf persönliche äußerungen des malers sowie auf den briefen aufbaut, die mir dieser in den jahren 1953–​1955 zuschickte aus london, frankfurt am main, hofheim am taunus und bad nauheim, soll es hier unverändert als authentische aussage abgedruckt werden, wie es in meinem manuskript aus dem jahre 1953 vorlag, das der künstler im januar des folgenden jahres gelesen und mit anmerkungen versehen hat” (ludwig meidner 25-26).the materials he refers to are typescripts, many of which have annotations in either hodin’s or meidner’s hand. else and ludwig meidner met hodin in the early summer of 1953—​the second part of ludwig meidner, entitled “else und ludwig meidner in england,” begins with the letter that ludwig wrote to introduce himself. hodin made else’s acquaintance on his second visit and quickly befriended her; he published two articles on else (in 1959 and 1960) and later included a long chapter on her in ludwig meidner. in aus den erinnerungen he uses materials written by else, dating from 1959–​60 and 1969–​70. for else, 1959, the year in which she sent blake’s job to ludwig, was a time of disappointment; an exhibition at the beaux arts gallery, which hodin helped with, achieved little to raise her public profile or find buyers for her artworks. that blake was on her mind is suggested in hodin’s preface to aus den erinnerungen, where she talks about her illustrious guests (“erlauchte gäste”), such as beethoven and goethe (9), who were, of course, visions. these stories, told by a woman who professed that she did not take ludwig’s visions seriously (ludwig meidner 143), have a blakean ring to them. else could have read the chapter on “john varley and the visionary heads” in gilchrist’s life, her present for ludwig in 1945, and hodin mentions that meidner was a frequent visitor to the tate gallery and shared his impressions with his wife (ludwig meidner 87).meidner knew about blake before he came to england through blake’s early twentieth-century german reception (see erle, “the reception of blake’s art in germany”). he would have seen blake’s works at the tate’s wartime acquisitions exhibitions (1942 and 1945), as well as at the major blake exhibition at the tate in 1947 (see erle, “meidner und blake”). it is possible that else invented these visions—​aware of hodin’s interest in ludwig’s experience of visions, she put on a show. her script—​and this is my point—​follows blake’s performance for varley in that it imagines a visionary community of famous people. there is much intertwining repetition in hodin’s writing about the meidners, which makes it near to impossible to get a sense of chronology in his texts. else’s obituary of ludwig comes at the end of ludwig meidner (133-34) and is repeated—​twice—​in aus den erinnerungen (74-75 and 123-24). “farewell to the master” (“abschied vom meister,” 1966), else’s official goodbye, was first published in darmstädter tagblatt. the fragmentation of and in the texts written by else especially creates a fascinating portrait of inner psychology. she continually tries to disentangle herself from her husband, claiming, for example, that she was self-taught (aus den erinnerungen 34). hodin’s role as a mediator of european culture in postwar britain cannot be underestimated.see lazar, “j. p. hodin: a bridge between europe and britain.” after settling in london in 1944, he made it his mission to challenge conservative tastes in art; he introduced english audiences to expressionism, and also wrote and lectured on contemporary british artists from a european perspective. in the dilemma of being modern (1956), he aligns graham sutherland with neoromanticism and describes this movement as “pantheistic romanticism,” a tradition he traces back to samuel palmer and especially to blake, whose “mysticism and religiousness” were a major influence on sutherland’s “mystical consciousness.”hodin, “graham sutherland” 120, 123, 126. hodin also developed a theory of art that stressed the spiritual and psychological, as well as his own unique method of “living art criticism.”see hodin, “problems of living art criticism.” i am grateful to shulamith behr for the opportunity to read her “reframing exilic identity for a german audience” prior to its publication. behr writes about the meetings between hodin and the meidners in june 1953 and explains how hodin used photography to document meidner’s personality. he wrote about his friends, artists whom he knew personally, so that he could interweave interpretations of art with his understanding of the person who created it.see vanek. in “expressionism” (1949), he insists that style and personality are connected and exist par excellence in expressionism: “the expressionist is an archetype in jung’s sense; that is, he possesses a collective unconscious whose content and functions are of an archaic nature. … in expressionism we are less concerned with a school than with personality” (45). his misunderstanding of jung speaks to his attempt to comprehend personal themes and resonances of biographical connections in works of art, rather than processes and modes of representation. until hodin’s biography of 1973, meidner was mainly known in germany through grochowiak, who had organized a major retrospective that traveled from recklinghausen to berlin to darmstadt (1963–​64). grochowiak’s ludwig meidner followed in 1966; it deals primarily with meidner’s expressionist art. grochowiak explains that meidner wanted, with agitated lines, to open the eye of the beholder to a vision of the future (74, 120), and this evaluation applies to his painting and writing.in im nacken das sternemeer (1918) and septemberschrei (1920), prime examples of expressionist book illustration, meidner considers the effects of color and brushwork. mid-process, it seems, he has stepped back to take stock: “my last picture is bleeding on its easel. it is like open wounds and sores. one can still see how the moist colour shines fervently ….” (“mein letztes bild blutet auf seiner staffelei. es ist wie offene wunden und schwären. noch sieht man, wie die feuchte farbe brünstig glänzt …”) (im nacken das sternemeer, quoted in grochowiak 77). in septemberschrei, he illuminates: “did not i always have to paint bloodstreams into my self-portrait as well as eroded [eaten away] wounds? in those days, i was still remote from god” (“mußte ich nicht auf mein selbstporträt immer blutrinnsale hineinmalen und zerfressene wunden? gott war mir noch ferne in jenen tagen”) (quoted in hodin, ludwig meidner 41). in his autobiographical works, meidner articulates his struggles, describing the easel as a space that could contain emotional pain as well as recreate an inner state or level of consciousness at which he could see what he describes. his paintings were created in a state of euphoria, though he later told hodin that he often painted under the influence of alcohol (ludwig meidner 83). meidner’s approach was physical but also visionary, in that his technique and description thereof reveal or evoke what normally remains hidden or is impossible to define (grochowiak 146-48, 184). meidner made various attempts at writing his autobiography, but most remain in manuscript or are unfinished; the narratives tend to focus on the expressionist phase. “dichter, maler und cafés” (“poets, painters, and cafés,” 1964), “mein leben” (“my life”), and “journal 1915” were published posthumously. an earlier version of “mein leben” had appeared in lothar brieger’s ludwig meidner (1919), where meidner explains that he started writing during world war i, as a soldier. his ambition was to become a second byron, heinrich heine, or victor hugo.breuer and wagemann 2: 361. this identity theme is continued by hodin, who refers to meidner as a painter and an author (44). he says that on learning that meidner was in london, he reached for his copy of eine autobiographische plauderei (2nd ed., 1923; ludwig meidner 15). this volume, with yet another version of “mein leben,” details how meidner took comfort in his newfound faith. the dramatic climax of meidner’s life story is his conversion, which, he says, took place in 1912 (sommerfeld). this experience turned him from a revolutionary atheist into an orthodox jew; it, too, exists in versions. the following is from “leben auf dem lande” (“life in the country,” 1958): raptures, visions, and ecstasies, i really experienced them, they were great and good gifts that suddenly started appearing from a day in december 1912. i was in my thirties and they always gave me incredibly outrageous experiences with such power that i learnt to curse the atheism, which i was still attached to, and recognize the truth of the belief in god with all my heart.“verzückungen, visionen und ekstasen, das erlebte ich wirklich, das waren große und gute gaben, die plötzlich von einem tage an im dezember 1912 auftauchten und in meinen dreißigern mir immer wieder unglaubliche unerhörte erlebnisse schenkten und mit solcher macht, daß ich den atheismus, dem ich noch nachhinkte, verfluchen lernte und die wahrheit des gottesglauben erkannte und meinem herzen zueigen machen konnte” (quoted in breuer and wagemann 2: 452). when talking to hodin, meidner condenses his story into a single event: “one day the grace came, the miracle occurred. it was on 4 december 1912, when the holy ghost, the schechina, visited and converted me. then i was religious.”“eines tages kam die gnade, das wunder ereignete sich. es war der 4. december 1912, da mich der heilige geist, die schechina, besuchte und bekehrte. dann war ich religiös” (hodin, ludwig meidner 116). his declaration evokes immediacy and creates a distinctive moment of no return, but also presents his judaism as colored by christianity. he wanted to underline the importance of religious practice for his art and needed hodin to understand why he had visions. he alludes to an altered state of consciousness, a power within and loss of self, and an experience that dissolved the boundary between him and his art.meidner had always been interested in religious art, believing that true art could only be created as a devotional act. see hille 42-50. in the summer of 1953, meidner, inspired by his perception of blake, set to constructing “mystic meidner” for what was to be hodin’s biography. what is at stake is meidner’s control over his telling of his life story and blake’s function within that story. working with hodin gave meidner the opportunity to help construct what i want to call a textual collage. as with the sessions in which he painted and sketched his likeness in front of a mirror, he realized that he needed an opposite in order to find his voice. his decision to approach hodin may have originated from reading gilchrist’s life, because gilchrist includes henry crabb robinson’s conversations with blake. i think that if the appeal of blake is one of biography, then meidner would have appreciated that gilchrist took blake’s visions seriously: now, in maturity, as when in youth producing the songs of innocence, or in age the illustrations of job, we see blake striking always the same mystic chord. the bridge thrown across from the visible to the invisible world was ever firm and sure to him. the unwavering hold (of which his “visions” were a result) upon an unseen world, such as in other ways poetry and even science assure us of, and whose revelation is the meaning underlying all religions—​this habitual hold is surely an authentic attainment, not an hallucination. (238-39) hodin was wary of what meidner was telling him, and appears to think that meidner was prone to exaggeration. he informs readers that he interpreted meidner’s statements as a commentary on everything that had been published about him, implying that meidner knew the critical debate on his art, personality, and philosophy: of course, everything that is pronounced by an artist must be assessed objectively and psychologically, especially in terms of the motives of the statement and the circumstances in which this happened. this applies both to clues concerning one’s own person, as well as to art theories and critical statements. but even here, even if there are exaggerations and distortions, the essential expression of individuality can be determined. i couldn’t publish anything about ludwig meidner at the time.“natürlich muß alles von einem künstler ausgesprochene objektiv und psychologisch gewertet werden, vor allem auf die motive der aussage hin und die umstände, unter denen dies geschah. dies gilt sowohl von hinweisen, welche die eigene person betreffen, als auch von kunsttheorien und kritischen aussagen. doch wird man auch hier, selbst wenn übertreibungen und verzeichnungen vorliegen, den wesentlichen ausdruck einer individualität feststellen können. publizieren konnte ich damals nichts über ludwig meidner” (ludwig meidner 80). these comments interrupt the narrative of the biography and, as a result, position the moment of writing in the years after meidner’s death. there is plenty of evidence for dialogue between the men, as well as for hodin’s editing of meidner’s life story. in the excerpt above, hodin goes back on his previously stated intention to publish (“reprint”) meidner’s “authentic” statements unchanged (ludwig meidner 26). the contradiction is a consequence of the fragmented nature of hodin’s text, but it also suggests that he changed his mind. the following sections map the writing process and hodin’s skepticism, and thus illuminate hodin’s engagement with meidner’s visions. reception: mystic meidner and appropriations of blake meidner’s exile began in a way typical for many german refugees; before settling in london and setting up a proper studio on finchley road in nw2 (1947–​53), he was interned (1940–​41). in a letter to hilde rosenbaum (6/7 nov. 1948), ludwig mentions that the orthodox community had offered him the post of death watch (shomer) for greater london, which he rejected, even though he and else desperately needed a stable income, as he wanted to work in his local community.breuer and wagemann 2: 477. turning down an offer for paid work testifies to his artistic integrity. he always worked at night, forgetting everything around him, capturing the vividness of his visions (ludwig meidner 114-15). the meidners’ efforts to get noticed by the london art world finally resulted in an exhibition at the ben uri gallery: ludwig meidner/​else meidner (5 oct.–​2 nov. 1949). preparations gave them a purpose, and ludwig was content to postpone his move to germany.he wrote to hannelore rothschild (13 feb. 1949): “life here is like living in a desert, far from all people. i have also had enough of london and am determined to leave england this year” (“man lebt hier wie in der wüste, fern von allen menschen. ich habe auch nun genug von london u. bin entschlossen england in diesem jahr zu verlassen”) (heuberger 78). this long-awaited opportunity turned into “ein ‘begräbnis zweiter klasse’” (“a ‘second-class funeral,’” ludwig meidner 67), however, because it did not attract much attention beyond the members of the ben uri, an organization that had been founded in 1925 to promote jewish immigrant artists. hodin quotes passages from the reviews, which describe the symbolic, mystical, and religious qualities of the works. the exhibition included expressionist art, but meidner had also been keen to show works created in london (ludwig meidner 104-05). the catalogue introduces him as “very much interested in theosophy, mysticism and magic” and asserts an affinity with blake: “since 1939 when mr. meidner settled in england he has become a great admirer of william blake.” i doubt that hodin grasped the full extent of meidner’s ambition for this exhibition, as well as for the works created in exile.see erle, “meidner und blake.” in london, meidner’s strategy was to extend his audience by seizing on the blake revival in the 1940s, propelled by the publicity around the arlington court picture.see erle, “the reception of blake’s art in germany” 288. the discovery of the picture—​also known as the sea of time and space (butlin #803)—​in 1947 was spectacular in that the work had truly been lost. we cannot know if meidner saw it, but there is enough circumstantial evidence to suggest that he was aware of its discovery. as noted above, the catalogue of the ben uri exhibition of 1949 emphasized meidner’s admiration of blake; the strategy did not pay off, however, because that exhibition was a failure. according to a short notice in the times (8 apr. 1950), the arlington court picture, “signed ‘w. blake inventor 1821,’” was exhibited in the blake room at the tate gallery: “this is the first showing of this picture since it was recently cleaned.”in the notice, the title of the picture is the circle of the life of man (see “blake works acquired by the tate”). keynes’s interpretation, published in country life (1949), might explain the appeal for meidner: the central group of this picture may represent adam kadmon, the first ideal man (personified in blake’s own books as albion, the ideal briton) with his emanation (personified by blake as jerusalem, or britannia) standing beside him. surrounding these two is a detailed sequence of symbolical figures in the mystical process of creation, beginning at the top with the “working of the chariot,” so called in allusion to the first chapter of ezekiel. (“a newly discovered painting”) keynes associates the painting with the cabbala and says that it is “unique in the whole range of blake’s art.” blake never commented on it and meidner, who had read gilchrist, would have projected his own associations. an entry point is the chariot with apollo and the muses in the upper left corner; the figures connect pictorially with the central female figure, but the reason for this connection is unexplained.christopher heppner discusses the greek-style decoration in the garment of the figure in red and claims to see hebrew characters in the hem (242). i am grateful to abraham samuel shiff, who says that there is no hebrew anywhere in this picture. shiff drew my attention to the symbolism of the hand gestures of the figure, identified by heppner as isaiah, which can be related to jewish rituals of priestly blessing (see shiff). a chariot for visionary transportation evokes the story of the prophet elijah’s ascent into heaven and provides a link to the large color print by blake, a reproduction of which meidner took back to germany. hodin, who saw meidner’s illustrations for the bible, refers in his chapter on meidner’s mysticism to a drawing that shows elijah taking his leave of elisha, with the heavenly chariot approaching (ludwig meidner 108).it is my belief that meidner was interested in the relationship between the two prophets, as well as the journey into the world of heaven. these charcoal drawings from the 1940s were the very kind of works that meidner wanted hodin to see. keynes’s attributions imbue blake’s painting with status; the idea of its being the missing piece in the greater puzzle of “blake” chimes with j. g. davies’s approach in the theology of william blake (1948). meidner possessed a clipping of keynes’s review: the author quotes an opinion that “to systematize blake is to kill him,” and hopes that he has not been guilty of this crime. readers of the book will at once exonerate him, and will feel grateful for what he has achieved. for it cannot be said that he has systematized blake; rather, he has coordinated him, and thereby not only made him more comprehensible, but demonstrated his consistency and the wholeness of his theological conceptions. evidence for the notion of a system driving interpretations of blake in the 1940s is also in northrop frye’s review, which commends davies’s book as a comprehensive introduction to blake and the “meaning” of his works. while frye, responding to the chapters, acknowledges “blake’s mysticism” and the influence of swedenborg, the emphasis is on christian ideas in blake’s art. meidner would have taken a keen interest in this discussion, as he was trying to understand his own visionary states, the outpouring of emotion into images, and how his visions changed how he perceived the world. we do not know when meidner annotated his copy of todd’s edition of gilchrist’s life, which has pencil marks on pages 332 (margin), 334 (underlining), and 336 (margin). the dog-eared pages are all in chapter 36, “declining health; designs to dante; mr. crabb robinson’s reminiscences; notes on wordsworth.” it is possible that he reread the chapter when talking with hodin. on page 332, he marked this passage: “at mr. aders’s house the german painter, götzenberger, met blake. on his return to germany he declared: ‘i saw in england many men of talent, but only 3 men of genius—​coleridge, flaxman and blake, and of these blake was the greatest.’” jakob götzenberger, a minor painter on the periphery of the nazarene brotherhood, visited in february 1827. while meidner may have compared his favorite english artists with götzenberger’s, he may also have pondered the character of robinson, who had taken götzenberger to see blake at home, and his role in gilchrist’s telling of blake’s life story. gilchrist quotes robinson’s reminiscences on page 336, and meidner made a mark against “götzenberger” in the passage where götzenberger admires blake’s illustrations of dante. above it, meidner marked a section from reminiscences that details blake’s poverty. hodin, too, describes the simplicity of meidner’s studio in london, while focusing on his charisma: “all this was very modest, poor even, but not without hope when meidner’s low voice sounded through the room.”“all dies war sehr bescheiden, arm sogar, aber nicht ohne hoffnung, wenn meidners leise stimme durch den raum klang” (ludwig meidner 83). on page 334, which also quotes robinson, meidner underlined “everything is good in god’s eyes” and “is there any purity in god’s eyes—​?” his focus on purity, goodness, and blake’s question—​asking if anything could ever measure up to divine standards—​suggests that he is navigating the challenges of religious doubt; to be pure, something needs to be rejected. while blake’s statements may have resonated with what meidner was thinking (regarding the consequences of decisions in his personal life), meidner might have read to the end of the paragraph, where robinson gives up, as he cannot see what blake is getting at. in robinson’s eyes, blake was confused, if not completely deluded: “my journal here has the remark that it is easier to retail his personal remarks than to reconcile those which seemed to be in conformity with the most opposed abstract systems.” gilchrist comments apologetically: perhaps, indeed, the attempt to methodize them into a system was so much labour lost? they key to the wild and strange rhapsodies blake would utter can be supplied by love, but not by the intellect. to go with blake, it almost required that a man should have the mind of an artist—​and an artist of a peculiar kind—​or one strongly in unison with that class of mind. blake’s pronouncements left meidner unfazed; like gilchrist, he was sympathetic and open to the possibility that what blake tried to communicate was not easy to grasp. perhaps reading blake reminded him of his own expressionist prose; hodin included long passages from meidner’s early expressionist writings in his biography, so that readers were able to go with meidner. this decision is consistent with hodin’s giving meidner the chance to express his personality freely (ludwig meidner 80). as previously outlined, hodin’s method appears to have its precursor in robinson with blake, or rather gilchrist’s decision to source descriptions of blake through those who knew him. artistic practice: mystic meidners and mystifying hodin aus den erinnerungen von else meidner allows for speculation about else’s reasons for choosing blake’s job in 1959. hodin reveals themes that connect with job: possibly alluding to job’s despair, else twice wonders why she is being treated like the “pariah” of mankind (20, 94). this biography relates the story of the aging else and her suicidal thoughts and growing disillusionment with friends and neighbors—​a woman who, surrounded by her paintings and books, is withdrawing from the world, as well as from hodin. he includes in the first half of the book else’s statements about her father’s continual financial support (43) and the turmoil of motherhood (44-45). in the second half, his narrative voice has all but disappeared. with ludwig and her son in other countries, else did not succeed in forging new intimate relationships. ludwig, who had been keen to establish himself in england, experienced a “renaissance” and late success in germany (ludwig meidner 88), while else had to accept total lonesomeness (“totale vereinsamung”) in england (aus den erinnerungen 42). the loss of a close friend in 1958 is captured in the poem “auf den tod eines freundes” (“on the death of a friend,” 69-70) and developed in her imagined “zwiegespräch mit tod” (“tête-à-tête with death,” 103-06). the chapter “aufzeichnungen von 1959” (“notes from 1959”) reveals feelings related to humiliation, shame, and the loss of self-belief: “it is not so easy to strengthen your own backbone when it is already bent and broken by all the kicks that have stamped on it”; “why do i have to suffer like this? why couldn’t a real friend come to me again?”“es ist nicht so einfach das rückgrat sich selbst zu stärken, wenn es schon ganz verbogen und zertrampelt ist von allen den fußtritten, die darauf gestampft sind”; “warum muß ich so leiden? warum konnte nicht ein wirklicher freund noch einmal zu mir kommen?” (aus den erinnerungen 89, 94). did else perceive herself as a female job? a chapter based on a manuscript that hodin says he found in her flat, “aus meinem leben” (“from my life”), ends with two short entries that articulate what can count as her identification with job: 1. april 1963 it was difficult enough to have to bear the general fate of the jews, but the personal tragedy of my life was too much grief and it had to ruin me. 2. april 1963 oh god, please deliver me from this loneliness so that i can once again feel a little joie de vivre.“1. april 1963 / das allgemeine judenschicksal zu tragen war schwer genug, aber die persönliche tragik meines lebens dazu war zuviel kummer und mußte mich ruinieren”; “2. april 1963 / oh gott, hilf mir doch aus dieser einsamkeit heraus, damit ich noch einmal etwas lebensfreude empfinde” (aus den erinnerungen 100). her identification with job’s dutiful and faithful wife, as represented in blake’s version, is not the whole story. in aus den erinnerungen hodin shows her worried about societal expectations; she comments bitterly about the remarks of married women who put their husbands first. in her reflections else manages to transcend the story of job to critique traditional views of good wives. she may have sent blake’s job to ludwig as a reminder of what they had shared in life and as a peace offering, but “aus meinem leben” brings else’s hardships into focus. there was to be no reward for her suffering, which was quite separate from that of her husband. hodin’s biographies are a complaint about the undeserved neglect of the meidners. the intention—​to address the marginalization of two artists—​determines much of the organization and layering of the texts; hodin starts ludwig meidner with reflections about the british reservations against expressionism (“ablehnende haltung londons,” 15). the tone of the early chapters is typical for hodin, who had made it his mission to educate, but since his biographies of the meidners were written in german, for german audiences, his agenda was slightly different. meidner had been persona non grata with the nazi regime. he was deeply religious and a practicing orthodox jew, and his leading role in and contribution to the expressionist art movement jarred with nazi ideology, which rejected modernist art as well as jewish artists and advocated a cult of beauty that idealized aesthetic effects of perfectly shaped human bodies. as noted, meidner’s art had been included in the entartete kunst exhibition; the only reason he survived the second world war, or rather the holocaust, was that he had left germany just in time. his decision to return to what he felt was still his homeland—​despite all the war crimes and atrocities that came to light in the postwar years—​was a remarkable step, which, though motivated by personal reasons, had political repercussions. hodin addresses this step and its significance by focusing on meidner’s suffering in exile in an attempt to allow german readers to connect and empathize with him, and by extension with the fate of many other jewish artists. in “ludwig meidners londoner jahre,” the first of the articles for darmstädter tagblatt, hodin is explicit, even scathing, about what meidner had to endure in london: “to the english bourgeoisie the artist is a crank, an oddball, who cannot be taken seriously and will only impress with high prices at sotheby’s and the resulting international fame.”“der künstler ist für den bürgerlichen engländer ein ‘crank’—​ein verschrobener kauz, den man nicht ernst nimmt und nur die hohen auktionspreise bei sotheby imponieren und bedingen eine hinwendung zu international berühmten namen.” in the final installment of the articles, which is on mysticism, he summarizes the injustices, above all the nazis’ destruction of meidner’s reputation, to accentuate the significance of meidner’s return to germany: “none of the artists persecuted by hitler suffered as much as meidner, who after [max] liebermann’s death was the most important german artist of jewish origin.”“keiner der von hitler verfolgten künstler hat soviel gelitten wie gerade meidner, der nach dem tode liebermanns der bedeutenste deutsche künstler jüdischer herkunft war” (“ludwig meidner—​der mystiker”). i think that hodin was grappling with the significance for the meidners’ marriage of ludwig’s decision to return. aligning the meidners with the postwar blake revival allowed him to pay tribute to their human complexity. in ludwig meidner hodin presents expressionism as a european art movement but says little about meidner’s art, focusing instead on personality (28) and religion (38). he even makes appearance a matter of religion when he says that meidner looked like a franciscan monk (82). in “gruss des malers an die dichter,” an essay first published in im nacken das sternemeer, meidner gives a list of authors who inspired him; it includes visionary, religious, and mystical writers, such as jeremiah and isaiah, augustine and thomas à kempis, jacob boehme and angelus silesius (24). hodin includes this passage in ludwig meidner (55) and comments: “could meidner not but feel the calling to awaking his slumbering consciousness to god, whose voice had comforted him one night so wonderfully? all mystical books opened up to him at that time.”“mußte sich meidner nicht berufen fühlen, das schlummernde gottesbewußtsein zu wecken, er, den selbst eines nachts eine stimme wunderbar getröstet hatte? alle mystischen bücher erschlossen sich ihm damals” (59). in this section of the biography meidner reflects that his development ought to be perceived through the prism of his library. he presents himself as a voracious reader, which suggests that in reality his conversion, dated to 4 december 1912 (116), was an incremental process, propelled by extensive reading.heuberger and riedel 32. regarding the construction of “mystic meidner” as a persona in hodin’s biography, it is worth noting that blake appears in different contexts, almost like a free-floating signifier. hodin’s “meidners studio in london,” one of the articles published in darmstädter tagblatt in 1966, has a paragraph titled “william blake.” the difference between this piece and the biography is instructive, as it tells us about hodin’s conceptualization of meidner’s creative practice. the passage in the article concludes: “the artist who is closest to me spiritually here is william blake.” in ludwig meidner, this statement appears at the end of the chapter on meidner’s london studio, with two sentences added on: “i got to know his work for the first time in 1932. not much was known of him in germany.”“der künstler, der mir jedoch geistig hier am nächsten steht, ist william blake. ich lernte sein werk 1932 zum ersten mal kennen. in deutschland wußte man nicht viel von ihm” (85). i have found no evidence in the correspondence in the hodin archive that meidner told hodin that he came across blake in 1932. he wrote to wolf bergmann on 25 september 1949 (ten days before the opening of ludwig meidner/​else meidner at the ben uri) that he encountered blake in 1922, which is when his expressionist phase is said to have ended.breuer and wagemann 2: 479-80. as noted, the catalogue of that exhibition creates the impression that he discovered blake once in london: “since 1939 when mr. meidner settled in england he has become a great admirer of william blake.” the only item that sheds light on hodin’s decision to amend meidner’s explanation and use 1932 is a note on the folder with the manuscript for the biography: “it is impossible to encounter blake in 1932 for the first time. (his paintings at most).”“man kann nicht blake 1932 zum ersten mal kennenlernen. (höchstens seine bilder),” in red pen on paper attached to the folder “meidner / i. teil / urmanuskript” (hodin archive, tate britain, tga 20062 4/4 box 102). hodin’s memo is a recognition of meidner’s attempt to rewrite the story of his life. hodin, who believes what meidner says to be false, not only acknowledges the importance of blake’s german reception but also hints at a trend in blake’s european reception, one that focused on mystical qualities. on this occasion hodin went with what meidner told him. the papers in the hodin archive are mostly typescripts with handwritten corrections. in “ludwig meidner in frankfurt” (no date, with notes by hodin), hodin says that meidner found a “kindred english spirit in william blake” (“verwandten englischen geist in william blake”),meidner first uses this descriptor (“kindred spirit”) in a letter of 23 january 1943 to walter and hilde rosenbaum (see breuer and wagemann 2: 474). and that the work of hogarth provided him with insights into satire and humor (“die kritik und die skepsis an der zeit”).“urmanuskript” titled “ludwig meidner: eine würdigung seiner kunst mit ihrer historischen bedeutung.” for the addition of “blake” in hodin’s hand, see page 17. the slightly longer, earlier version, titled “ludwig meidner kehrt wieder nach deutschland zurück” (crossed out and changed to “ludwig meidner wieder in deutschland”), is in a folder dated to 11 august 1953. the second, edited version of the 11 august document includes hodin’s handwritten corrections; the title has been changed again: “ein künstler kehrt in seine heimat zurück. ludwig meidner in deutschland [frankfurt]” (tga 20062 box 140 7). for ludwig meidner hodin was to edit this information and separate blake and hogarth, though they still appear in the same chapter; there is no mention of hogarth in what hodin wrote for darmstädter tagblatt. we can, moreover, be certain that it was hodin—​not meidner—​who added “blake” into the manuscript he shared with meidner; this manuscript, which hodin called “urmanuskript,” has annotations by meidner and hodin, but the insertion regarding blake is in hodin’s hand. this means that the information about the year when meidner first encountered blake was inserted by hodin, after meidner’s death. the second mention of blake in ludwig meidner is in the chapter on english and jewish art (“über englische und jüdische kunst”). this chapter, which is not in the “urmanuskript,” states why meidner found himself inspired by blake: “blake was a phenomenon, not just as a painter but especially and above all else as an artist, poet, and visionary.”“blake war ein phänomen, nicht nur als maler, sondern alles in allem, als künstler, dichter und visionär” (86). meidner uses the word “phänomen” in the letter to wolf bergmann of 25 september 1949 (see breuer and wagemann 2: 480). the word “phenomenon” gives expression to meidner’s admiration of blake but also invites the idea that his perception is rooted in an experience that is beyond explanation. the emphasis on blake’s singular role in meidner’s exile can also be traced in a document in the stadtarchiv darmstadt, a note that meidner wrote in germany in response to a question by hodin about his return: “to cut a long story short, i can only say: [the reason is my own] terrible and full-of-mistakes german.” meidner reiterates that he had always thought of himself as a writer as well as painter and that he, like most refugees, was speaking a mishmash—​that is, there were too many anglicisms in his language: “the german language owned my love, affection, admiration; it was my one and everything, my air, my innermost treasure.”“um ihre frage kurz und bündig zu beantworten, kann ich nur sagen: scheußliches und falsches deutsch”; “der deutschen sprache gehörte meine liebe, zuneigung, bewunderung; sie war mein ein und alles, meine luft, mein innerster schatz” (stadtarchiv darmstadt, st 45/67 meidner nr. 1647). in this note he asserts that english art and literature held nothing for him and that he did not want to open up to anything, with the exception of the “phenomenon of william blake” (illus. 5).“ich hatte keine lust mich mit der englischen kunst und literatur einzulassen. abgesehen von dem phänomen ‘william blake’ bekümmerte ich mich kaum …” (stadtarchiv darmstadt, st 45/67 meidner nr. 1647). 5. note from ludwig meidner to j. p. hodin, p. 3, in which he describes blake as a phenomenon (see enlargement). stadtarchiv darmstadt, st 45/67 meidner nr. 1647. image courtesy of the stadtarchiv darmstadt. hodin’s ludwig meidner contains sprawling passages that originate from previously published works (such as meidner’s eine autobiographische plauderei), that are transcripts of his conversations with meidner, or that are from meidner’s letters and postcards from germany. hodin intersperses them with his comments, explaining, for example, about traditions in art history or speculating on whether meidner would have agreed; the latter is an example of hodin’s method (his “living art criticism”) because he allows his narrator persona to come to the fore. thus he evokes the impression that the conversation with meidner is still going on. the longest passages from meidner are in the chapter “der mystiker,” where, after many pressing requests, he finally agrees to talk about mysticism, sharing his most personal thoughts and belief in the reality of his visions. here blake is mentioned for the third and final time, as a “visionary” rather than an “ecstatic” painter (127). whereas the former is an intellectual experience, based on the ability of the mind to imagine and associated with seeing in a dream or trance, the latter is a sensual experience that is pleasurable and all consuming. this section, which is on the experience of ecstasy (“ekstase”) in creative processes, can be traced back to a “conversation”; its context is a letter (25 aug. 1953) that introduces creativity as a topic for consideration. talking about the difference between ecstasy, trance, and vision,else was to refer to ludwig as an “ecstatic painter, draftsman, etcher and author of hymn-like prose” in her obituary (“ekstatischen maler, zeichner, radierer und verfasser hymnischer prosa”) (ludwig meidner 133). meidner writes: “true religious ecstasy is in the german gothic [period], in grünewald, michelangelo, [el] greco and bernini. blake is more visionary than ecstatic.”“echte religiöse ekstase ist bei der deutschen gothic, bei grünewald, michel angelo, greco und bernini. blake ist mehr visionär als ekstatisch” (tga 20062/4/258). see also ludwig meidner 127. hodin, who marked the passage in pencil to highlight its importance, was to include it in ludwig meidner but decided to omit it when writing for darmstädter tagblatt after meidner’s death. the mention of blake actually reads like an addendum, suggesting that he had come up in conversation in london.meidner and hodin, who were great friends, met often to talk and exchange ideas in coffee houses in hampstead and swiss cottage, with meidner sketching their favorite streets. i am grateful to annabel hodin for this information. in the letter, meidner underlined “bernini” (hodin does not in the biography) as if to create a certain hierarchy in his now more elaborate explanation, which relegates blake into an aside.he must be thinking of bernini’s ecstasy of saint teresa (1647–​52), a sculpture in santa maria della vittoria in rome that embodies the religious ecstasy of teresa of ávila, as recounted in her autobiography in the vision of the angel who touched her heart with a golden spear. visionary experience: traveling through the inner landscape of meidner’s studios hodin’s appreciation of meidner’s visions is guarded in the articles for darmstädter tagblatt, published between november 1966 and january 1967. in “ludwig meidner hatte erscheinungen” (dec. 1966), hodin refers to the visions as apparitions or ghosts: “without doubt, meidner had visionary powers. there was a spiritistic quality in his conceptualization of ideas. ghosts were a reality to him; they were not just psychic impulses that assume form in people’s fancies. this thought bothered me more than it heartened me, and yet at the same time it excited my imagination.”“meidner hatte ohne zweifel eine seherkraft. es war ein spiritistischer zug in seinen ideenvorstellungen. geister waren für ihn eine wirklichkeit, sie waren nicht nur psychische triebfedern, die in den vorstellungen von menschen gestalt annehmen. mich beunruhigte dieser gedanke mehr, als daß er mich aufbaute, und gleichzeitig reizte er meine phantasie.” in the biography, the passage appears in a new chapter, with material also not in the 1950s manuscripts (“parapsychologisches und künstlerisches,” 100-01). it seems that, in the 1960s, hodin had yet to decide how to work meidner’s contribution into his narrative. alluding, for example, to meidner’s vision of the future, he admits: “i do not want to publish it at this point in time.”“die ich jedoch einstweilen nicht publizieren möchte” (“ludwig meidner—​der mystiker”). hodin’s decision to publish else’s stories in 1979 contradicts his attitude toward ludwig’s “para-psychological bekenntnisse” (“parapsychological confessions”). he had decided in 1955 to publish ludwig meidner after his subject’s death (ludwig meidner 80-81). nevertheless, most of the material to go into the new chapter is already in “ludwig meidner—​der mystiker” (jan. 1967), where hodin relates how he challenged meidner by telling him that he doubted the reality of his visions.this section is also in the typescript—​“urmanuskript”—​that hodin shared with meidner. he starts the section in the biography with a teasing question: would meidner like to hear his first impression of the house? the second sentence is meidner’s answer: he nodded: “so you felt it too! this house was built for the purpose of carrying out abortions. you can also tell from the double windows that they intended to commit criminal acts against life here. the police intervened. sometimes at night, things happen on their own here. i see grey masses moving along the walls.” “so,” i said with a sigh. …“er nickte: ‘sie haben das also auch gespürt! dieses haus ist seinerzeit zu zwecken der abtreibung erbaut worden. sie sehen auch an den doppelfenstern, daß verbrecherisches hier gegen das leben verübt werden sollte. die polizei griff ein. in der nacht manchmal, da ereignen sich eigene dinge hier. ich sehe graue massen sich die wände entlang bewegen.’ ‘so,’ sagte ich gedehnt. …” (ludwig meidner 96). the dialogue meanders but eventually returns to the apparitions, with hodin admitting that he does not know what to make of meidner’s account; he is puzzled but also intrigued (100). assuming he knew that meidner had read gilchrist’s life, it might have occurred to him that meidner was rehearsing how blake had interacted with john varley.meidner’s explanations about ghosts appear to follow the episodes with varley and the pencil drawings that came to be known as the visionary heads (see ludwig meidner 96, 98, 100-02). for meidner’s engagement with blake’s nightly drawing sessions with varley, see erle, “blake, ludwig meidner and expressionism.” if there was any hesitation about meidner’s sincerity, hodin came round in the end, because meidner’s vision of a great famine, caused by ecological disaster, is in the chapter “der mystiker” in ludwig meidner: “in 1953, a vision kept repeating itself. he was obsessed with it. ‘what i experience, i have to talk about it.’ and just as he had announced both world wars in allegories—​they are often magical compositions—​this time he experienced the gloomy prediction of world hunger.”“im jahr 1953 wiederholte sich eine vision immer wieder. er war ganz besessen davon. ‘was ich erlebe, davon muß ich erzählen.’ und so wie er beide weltkriege in allegorien angekündigt hatte,—​es sind magische kompositionen oft—​so erlebte er diesmal die düstere voraussage einer welthungersnot” (121). this chapter also has meidner talking about death and religious ecstasy (114-33). we know that meidner was categorically against publishing the material on the apparitions. in his correspondence, he says that he is looking through hodin’s manuscript (“urmanuskript”) to indicate what needs to be cut or added. he laughs off the conversation about the ghosts; ghosts surely belong in the realm of the occult (22 dec. 1953) and not in the biography of a painter; in a more conciliatory manner he points out that ghosts have nothing to do with his personality, only with his house. meidner tells hodin (11 jan. 1954) that he intends to write a section about his religious development that ought to be included as a personal testimony.“anstatt der darstellung von geister-erscheinungen … möchte ich einen kurzen abriss meiner religiösen entwicklung einfügen, den ich selber schreibe …” (tga 20062/4/258). perhaps worried that these postcards had not reached hodin, he elaborates further in a letter (24 jan. 1954): “all my explanations about this and that … were part of a simple and casual conversation and not intended for publication. and now that i am reading them, they are really … getting on my nerves ….”“die ganzen ausführungen von mir über dies und jenes … waren in reinem u. lässigen plauderton u. nicht für publikation gedacht. und nun, da ich sie lese, gehen sie mir … mächtig auf die nerven …” (tga 20062/​4/​258). stressing that their chat is lacking in literary form, he says that he has no time to convert their conversation into “prose.” the ghosts have to go. in the manuscript in the hodin archive, we can see that meidner crossed out long passages.“urmanuskript,” tga 20062 box 140 7. hodin had the last word, however; he included the story about the apparitions that meidner thought irrelevant. i think that what was most likely humorous repartee sheds light on hodin’s skepticism about visions peculiar to meidner. he may have doubted their reality, believing that they were mere products of meidner’s imagination. meidner claimed that he could see into the future, as well as into another world, which suggests the enhanced alertness of his mind. his visions were genuine in that they created a different kind of “real”; by including the story about the ghosts, hodin therefore pays tribute to meidner’s creativity, presenting all his experiences as equally valid for the telling of his life story. meidner had conversed with hodin many times and needed to navigate common prejudice about visionary experiences, as well as hodin’s skepticism toward what appeared to be paranormal. to give an example of meidner’s treatment of visions, this essay now turns to the prose descriptions of his studios in london and marxheim. while the composition “beschreibung eines malerateliers in marxheim” (“description of the studio of a painter in marxheim”) is dated to the spring of 1962,breuer and wagemann 2: 453. we can only speculate that meidner wrote “kleine reise durch mein wohnzimmer” (“short journey through my [london] living room”) in the early 1950s. each studio is a space that contains images, books, papers, personal belongings, painting supplies, and knickknacks, while accumulating rubbish, leftovers, and dust. in “kleine reise durch mein wohnzimmer,” he transcends the physical confines of the studio by transforming his isolation, which goes hand in hand with feeling trapped, through an imaginary journey. the traveling motif chimes with an aphorism, written around the same time, that refers to blake: “william blake, millionaire with a round-trip ticket through all regions of the universe and the imagination of ‘the unknown world.’”“millionär mit einem rundreisebillet durch alle regionen des weltalls und der phantasie ‘der bekannten welt’” (breuer and wagemann 2: 454, “aphorismen über künstler” [“aphorisms on artists”]). meidner says that he has what it takes to be a “globetrotter,” but has been condemned to stay put. talking about the expectations imposed on refugees, he mocks: he should be modest and for heaven’s sake stay at home, because there is a lot to be admired there and the wisdom that he would have brought back from the south pole would in the end be no more comprehensive than, for example, that he collects on a single long evening, if he searches creeping around in his hermitage.“er soll sich bescheiden und um himmels willen zuhause bleiben, auch dort ist allerhand anzustaunen und die weisheit, die er vom südpol mitbrächte wäre am ende nicht umfassender als etwa jene, die er an einem einzigen langen abend einheimst, wenn er duckmäuserig in seiner klause umherspäht” (stadtarchiv darmstadt, st 45/67 meidner nr. 1547). by comparison, in the description of the studio in marxheim, he accentuates real over imagined space and actual over imagined movement, while also blurring the boundaries between them; he says that he goes for a walk to keep fit: “every evening i make my way through the newspaper pile, and even though my riding boots whirl up the dust, i march as if in a cloud of dust.”“so bahne ich mir jeden abend einen weg durch den zeitungshaufen, mögen auch meine reiterstiefel den staub aufwirbeln, daß ich wie in einer staubwolke marschiere” (breuer and wagemann 2: 453). in london, his eyes move across the room, and yet this mode of transport transcends the space whenever he forges a connection with the world beyond. whereas in london, meidner is surrounded by his paintings (in hodin’s words, “meidner sometimes used to open up his large portfolios, which otherwise stood leaning against the walls, silently concealing their wealth—​drawings, pastels, watercolors, old and new”) (illus. 6 and 7),“meidner pflegte manchmal seine großen mappen aufzutun, die sonst gegen die wände gelehnt standen, stumm ihren reichtum verbergend—​zeichnungen, pastelle, aquarelle, alte und neue” (ludwig meidner 83). in marxheim the portfolios appear untouched, stacked in a corner. meidner also distances himself from his paintings on the walls in marxheim. they “do not count” (“zählen nicht mit”): his “masterpieces” (“meisterwerke”), he writes, are “elsewhere; mostly wrapped up and also of course covered in dust, waiting, near the eastern wall, for their resurrection (“woanders; meist eingepackt und freilich auch verstaubt, harren sie, an der ostwand, ihrer auferstehung”).breuer and wagemann 2: 453. 6 and 7. two views of the meidners’ living room in london, taken by a photographer hired by j. p. hodin in the early 1950s (see enlargement of illus. 6; see enlargement of illus. 7). hodin archive, tate britain, tga 20062. m05216 and m05217. photos: tate. reproduced by permission of annabel hodin. his works, on display or wrapped up, as mentioned above, play an important part in the descriptions of his studios. he always chose to decorate his room with images that were meaningful to him. one, the reproduction of phillips’s william blake, is a physical connection to his living room in exile and to london itself. in his narrative, meidner never leaves the comfort of his own four walls. each studio space is a fluid backdrop for the rendering of the isolation theme, expressed through images that become part of a text that meidner orchestrates from his writing table. in “kleine reise durch mein wohnzimmer,” the description of the london studio, he starts his journey in the eastern corner and moves along the wall. the furniture regulates both his movement and narrative chronology. he passes a bookshelf, full of books from germany, without resting his eyes on a single volume, dismissing all of them as second rate. next, he approaches his bed, where he pauses to look at his “hero,” who was to emigrate with him to germany: but whom does an émigré-painter from germany hang over his bedstead? william blake, of course, who else?! you need to notice just a little bit in this room that you are in the british isles. and then blake is one of those you can truly lean on. and if you hang jakob boehme next to him, that’s fine and also a reminder of germany.“wen aber hängt sich ein maleremigrant aus deutschland über seine schlafstelle? natürlich william blake, wen sonst?! man muss auch in diesem raum ein bisschen merken, dass man auf den britannischen inseln ist. und dann ist blake wahrhaftig einer von denen an dem man sich aufrichten kann. und wenn man daneben jakob boehme hängt, so ist das ganz in ordnung und überdies ein gedenken an deutschland” (stadtarchiv darmstadt, st 45/67 meidner nr. 1547) (illus. 8). 8. ludwig meidner, “kleine reise durch mein wohnzimmer,” p. 7 (see enlargement). stadtarchiv darmstadt, st 45/67 meidner nr. 1547. image courtesy of the stadtarchiv darmstadt. meidner’s language slips; it moves from designating blake’s portrait to blake the person and to an imagined juxtaposition with boehme, again via a portrait, then person, and possibly book. blake, who initially serves as an anchor, gets associated with prewar germany, which allows him to join meidner’s list of mystical writers. what meidner constructs through his thinking on his imaginary journey is reminiscent of walter benjamin’s “theses on the philosophy of history”; benjamin argues that “when thinking suddenly stops in a configuration pregnant with tensions, it gives that configuration a shock, by which it crystallizes into a monad” (thesis xvii). this “monad,” for benjamin, is the “messianic cessation of happening.”benjamin 254. thinking accordingly alternates between “flow” and “arrest,” which is what meidner achieves; he moves through his studio but never abandons his vantage point. blake stops meidner in his tracks, but also “crystallizes” what can never take place in meidner’s lifetime. blake represents england and is a connection to the world outside and the blake revival, but as a stopover on the imaginary journey he causes meidner not to connect with london but to think of boehme and of germany, which in benjamin’s terms is part of his “oppressed past.” meidner, to put it simply, uses blake to communicate a moment of recognition. there is no mention of the phillips portrait in the account of the marxheim studio, where blake appears in a pile of books on mysticism and theosophy: “w. blake, [johann joseph] görres, [gershom] scholem.”breuer and wagemann 2: 453. meidner, again, immediately distances himself, saying that his pupil assembled the books. distance from london has perhaps given him a new perspective on what he saw when he looked at blake close up. in the narrative of the imaginary journey, blake was presented as particular; in the context of the account of the marxheim studio, blake has all but disappeared—​he is one of many images, high up on the wall. he is now literally with the mystical writers of meidner’s library, but also surrounded by growing piles of papers. if we take the descriptions together, the portrait of blake merges with the book about blake to reveal the changing contours of meidner’s inner landscape. this landscape, a metaphor for his life, is filling up with dust, signifying approaching death: i must not forget the dust that envelops everything, no ordinary everyday dust but a grayish millennium dust, thick, sticky, you dare not touch anything anymore. the dust, the newspapers, the pots, plates, and cups rule the room, and where is the art?“vergessen darf ich nicht den staub, der alles einhüllt, kein gewöhnlicher alltagstaub sondern ein gräulicher jahrtausendstaub, dick, klebrig, man wagt schon gar nichts mehr anzufassen. der staub, die zeitungen, die töpfe, teller und tassen regieren den raum und wo bleibt die kunst?” (breuer and wagemann 2: 453). as an orthodox jew, meidner could engage with his future only by breaking the chronology of the present, according to benjamin's argument;i am referring to benjamin’s concluding remarks: “we know that the jews were prohibited from investigating the future. the torah and the prayers instruct them in remembrance, however” (255). only by noticing the absence of his paintings can he anticipate or envision their afterlife in museums and galleries. he, by extension, will not be forgotten. while blake in london may have been looking over meidner, like paul klee’s angelus novus, in marxheim, where meidner lived and worked unrecognized from 1955 to 1963, blake is part of the “piling wreckage” of meidner’s life.benjamin 249. even though phillips’s william blake, with its unfocused eyes, no longer has prime position—​it is now part of a wall covered in images, three of which are blake related—​and the book about blake no longer sits on an easy-to-access bookshelf, there is going to be a future. the anecdote about the discovery of meidner in germany during a public lecture best speaks to his patient endurance. when the speaker paused to wonder what had happened to meidner and whether he had survived the holocaust, “hesitantly, a little old gentleman rose from amidst the audience, raised his finger, and in a voice barely audible said: ‘i am here—​meidner!’”“da herhob sich zögerned inmitten der zuhörer ein kleiner, alter herr, hob den finger, und man hörte, kaum vernehmbar: ‘hier bin ich—​meidner!’” (grochowiak 7). conclusion meidner continually bemoaned that he was either not painting or not writing.see, for example, the letter to hilde rosenbaum (6/7 nov. 1948) where he reflects that he ought to have returned to breslau, where he had attended the royal school of arts and crafts (1903–​05), and that the years in berlin, where he studied and worked until 1935, had wasted his talents (breuer and wagemann 2: 477-78). in a newspaper article of 1964 on the rediscovery of meidner in germany, ernst buchholz quotes him as saying: “i am convinced that if i had not been a painter and if hitler had not come, i could have improved my writing and would have become a good writer.”“ich bin überzeugt, daß, wäre ich nicht maler und wäre nicht hitler gekommen, ich hätte mein schreiben steigern können und wäre ein guter schriftsteller geworden” (see buchholz). in fact, meidner differentiates between reading, writing, and speaking. while in exile, his spoken english prevented him from making friends beyond the community of jewish refugees.“i can read and write but cannot hold a proper conversation; from the beginning i felt a deep antipathy toward this language and when i talk with english people i speak a mixture of french, german, and english” (“ich kann lesen u. schreiben, aber schlecht konversieren; ich hatte von anfang an eine tiefgehende antipathie gegen diese sprache u. rede mit engländern ein gemisch von französisch, deutsch u. englisch”) (letter to wolf bergmann, 20 mar. 1950, stadtarchiv darmstadt, st 45/67 meidner nr. 113). he never regretted his return to germany; writing to franz landsberger in june 1960, he acknowledges that he feels a little lonely (“etwas verwaist”) but is pleased with “the late flowering of my work as a painter” (“die spätblüte meiner malerischen arbeit”).breuer and wagemann 2: 487. in 1963 he moved to darmstadt, where else came to visit him, as mentioned above. she joined ludwig to support him and perhaps to witness the meidner revival, hoping that she too would receive the recognition she was due. when this hope didn’t materialize, she decided to return to london to attend the retrospective of her works at the ben uri. hodin, who tried in vain to place some of the material in england with the jewish chronicle or arts review (ludwig meidner 80), ended up preparing meidner’s biography in german and for a german audience after meidner’s death. a review, which hodin kept, overlooks tributes to blake and art produced in london. it commends the biography as “true to life” (“lebensnah dargestellt”) and affirms that meidner’s return to germany allowed him to realize long-postponed plans (“lange aufgeschobene pläne”).see “erinnerungen an ludwig meidner.” ignoring the nuances of meidner’s life in exile makes perfect sense, because his return to germany was remarkable; it came at great personal cost and must have tested meidner’s patience. the discovery that he was still alive, related in the anecdote above, appears to have been a lucky coincidence. according to grochowiak, meidner was there only because two friends from recklinghausen, who were collecting his works (“zwei recklinghäuser freunde, die bilder von meidner sammelten”) had given him a lift so that he could attend. similarly exceptional is perhaps the fact that hodin reduced the fourteen years in england to the topics of isolation and poverty. the perception of meidner as neglected and uncompromising does not do justice to his productivity in the 1940s; newly invigorated creativity was, in fact, the impetus for contacting hodin in the first place. as argued above, blake was part of meidner’s strategy for getting noticed in london; in meidner’s collaboration with hodin, however, blake became shorthand for “mystic meidner.” meidner was interested in satire and humor and was certainly inspired by hogarth and rowlandson, but in hodin’s writing (and especially his biography, as i have shown), the english influence is reduced to just blake. hodin’s tailoring of references to suit blake’s german reception also needs to be contextualized more broadly; in 1975, shortly after the publication of ludwig meidner, werner hofmann organized a major blake exhibition at the kunsthalle in hamburg. following the german tradition of understanding blake as a mystical thinker rather than just a visionary artist, hofmann included henry crabb robinson’s essay from 1811 in the catalogue. he introduced blake as a follower of boehme, and in the reviews and publicity surrounding the exhibition emphasis is put on the mystical and religious themes in blake’s art. in the 1970s, attempts to see blake as a radical and political thinker were almost nonexistent in germany.for the perception of blake in the context of exhibitions in germany, see erle, “the reception of blake’s art in germany” 261, 281-84. i first came across a connection between meidner and blake in dieter hoffmann’s review of the 1975 blake exhibition.erle, “the reception of blake’s art in germany” 284. tracing meidner’s relations with blake in the context of both blake’s german reception—​before and after meidner’s exile—​and the blake revival in england in the 1940s has been a fruitful endeavor in that this case study has allowed for unraveling the intertwining strands in his reception of blake.meidner was not the only refugee from nazi germany who was inspired or influenced by blake. see erle, “the reception of blake’s art in germany” 269-70, 275, 287-89. meidner understood, of course, that blake was not a mystic, and yet it was this quality in blake’s works that appealed to him. he could have read about blake in rudolf kassner’s die mystik, die künstler und das leben (1900) and adolf knoblauch’s william blake: ein umriss seines lebens und seiner gesichte (1925) and would have honed his understanding when he had the opportunity to see original artworks at the tate gallery in london.erle, “the reception of blake’s art in germany” 263-64, 288. another matter is that meidner kept abreast of blake studies while in london. he read todd’s edition of gilchrist and there are two blake-related newspaper cuttings of his in the jüdisches museum frankfurt, one of which is an announcement of a radio program that included commentary by jacob bronowski, author of william blake: a man without a mask (1943).erle, “blake, ludwig meidner and expressionism” 337-38. in effect, dieter hoffmann’s claim that meidner was influenced by blake cements the idea, whereas the reality is slightly more complicated. the 1975 exhibition, part of werner hofmann’s “kunst um 1800” series, changed the perception of blake in germany: “though not all commentators recognized it at the time, the very presence of blake on an equal footing with the most important romantic artists made it clear that he was a serious artist in his own right, and that his art was as significant in its own way as his poetry” (bindman 259). it marked the shift to more interest in blake’s political and radical ideas. the stories of ludwig and else meidner, as presented in hodin’s biographies of 1973 and 1979, bear testimony to how two artists who lived in england and germany in the mid-twentieth century talked about blake and his visions. works cited barron, stephanie, ed. “degenerate art”: the fate of the avant-garde in nazi germany. los angeles: los angeles county museum of art; new york: harry n. abrams, 1991. behr, shulamith. “reframing exilic identity for a german audience: joseph paul hodin’s encounter with else and ludwig meidner and its aftermath.” sites of interchange: modernism, politics and culture between britain and germany, 1919–​1955. ed. lucy wasensteiner. oxford: peter lang, 2021. 265-81. benjamin, walter. illuminations. ed. and with an introduction by hannah ahrendt. trans. harry zorn. london: 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das anschaubare: gespäche mit ludwig und else meidner.” hodin, aus den erinnerungen von else meidner 116-24. meidner, ludwig. eine autobiographische plauderei. 2nd ed. leipzig: klinkhardt & biermann, 1923. —​—​—​. “dichter, maler und cafés (unveröffentlicht).” dichter, maler und cafés. ed. ludwig kunz. zurich: arche, 1973. 11-22. —​—​—​. “gruss des malers an die dichter.” dichter, maler und cafés. ed. ludwig kunz. zurich: arche, 1973. 23-27. —​—​—​. “journal 1915.” dichter, maler und cafés. ed. ludwig kunz. zurich: arche, 1973. 30-49. —​—​—​. “mein leben.” dichter, maler und cafés. ed. ludwig kunz. zurich: arche, 1973. 83-86. mullaly, terence. “obituary: paul hodin.” independent 11 dec. 1995. <https://​www.​independent.​co.​uk/​news/​people/​obituary-​paul-​hodin-​1525239.​html>. accessed 25 may 2021. riedel, erik. “‘die inwendigen bilder’: ludwig meidners allegorien, visionen und humoresken aus dem englischen exil”/​“‘the internal images’: ludwig meidner’s allegories, visions and humoresques from his exile in england.” horcher in die zeit: ludwig meidner im exil/​eavesdropper on an age: ludwig meidner in exile [catalogue of an exhibition at the museum giersch der goethe-universität, frankfurt, 2016]. munich: hirmer, 2016. 80-91. sahl, hans. “besuch bei ludwig meidner: in stiller, dörflicher zurückgezogenheit lebt in hessen ein altmeister des deutschen expressionismus.” das schönste 5 (1958): 34-37. sander, birgit. “biographie”/​“biography.” horcher in die zeit: ludwig meidner im exil/​eavesdropper on an age: ludwig meidner in exile [catalogue of an exhibition at the museum giersch der goethe-universität, frankfurt, 2016]. munich: hirmer, 2016. 224-31. shiff, abraham samuel. “blake’s priestly blessing: god blesses job.” blake 47.3 (winter 2013–​14): 29 pars. sommerfeld, beate. “im horizont des göttlichen. ludwig meidners text-bildanthologien im spannungsfeld zwischen ästhetischer formanstrengung und sakralität.” interjekte 11 (2017): 41-47. vanek, vladimir. “joseph paul hodin: a biographical study.” j. p. hodin, european critic: essays. ed. walter kern. london: cory, adams and mackay, 1965. 83-104. william blake’s annotations to milton’s paradise lost: new evidence for attribution william blake’s annotations to milton’s paradise lost: new evidence for attribution by lisa sherlock lisa sherlock (l.sherlock@utoronto.ca) is chief librarian, victoria university library in the university of toronto. in 2000–​01, three books believed to have been owned or annotated by william blake were displayed in an exhibition at tate britain that focused on the state of blake scholarship at the time. two of the works, collections of engravings, are thought to have belonged to the young blake: historia del testamento vecchio dipinta in roma nel vaticano da raffaelle di urbino … al sig. annibale carracci (rome: giovanni orlandi, 1603 [amsterdam: excudit c. j. visscher, 1638]) and a political and satirical history of the years 1756 and 1757. in a series of seventy-five humorous and entertaining prints (london: printed for e. morris, n.d. [1757?]). the third book on display was a copy of john milton’s paradise lost, edited by richard bentley and published in 1732.bentley’s edition was never reprinted. in later years, pope would include bentley in the dunciad in four books (1743). the bentley edition is a large quarto, finely printed with superb engravings; an expensive book at the time, printed in limited numbers, that even in the eighteenth century became uncommon. all three belonged to michael phillips, guest curator of the exhibition, and are now held by victoria university library (toronto). following the critical reaction to these books, and particularly to the attribution to blake of annotations signed “wb” in the bentley milton,david bindman, in the burlington magazine, objected to the exhibition’s presentation of the three books as having belonged to blake, stating that he was “completely certain that … the annotations to milton were not written by blake.” in reviewing phillips’s book william blake: the creation of the “songs” from manuscript to illuminated printing (2000), alexander gourlay agreed that while the “wb” monogram used to sign the annotation on display in the exhibition is similar to the one with which blake signed his art, he had not seen any examples in blake’s text. gourlay disagreed that the rest of the annotation is in blake’s hand and found the sentiments expressed “at odds with [blake’s] usual opinions.” in “william blake and his circle, 2002,” g. e. bentley, jr., withdrew his initial support for considering the milton edition as having been owned or annotated by blake; he further critiqued the attribution in “william blake and his circle, 2008.” jason snart’s article in the european romantic review in 2005 was also critical of the attribution; it was followed up in his publication the torn book by the inclusion of the bentley milton volume as one requiring further research. mark crosby thoroughly examined the milton volume and published an article in the book collector in 2008 in support of the book’s having passed through blake’s hands. crosby compared the annotations in question, on pages 355 and 398, with the handwriting employed by blake in his vala manuscript. he also identified unique features in george vertue’s portrait engraving of milton on the frontispiece of bentley’s edition that are mirrored in blake’s tempera portrait of the poet, one of eighteen heads commissioned by william hayley to decorate his turret house library. these paintings were commissioned and completed during the period in which blake would have had access to the edition in hayley’s library. provenance the matter of this copy’s early provenance remained in question. in concluding his article, crosby pointed to a fragment of a bookplate that required further examination (illus. 1). 1. fragment of a bookplate in milton’s “paradise lost,” ed. richard bentley (london, 1732). victoria university library (toronto). blake suppl. no. 1079. reproduced with the permission of victoria university library. the bookplate has since been identified by anthony pincott of the bookplate society as belonging to william backwell, a descendant of a banking family and himself a founder of the banking house dawes, noble, & company in pall mall in london’s west end (phillips, unpublished) (illus. 2).i’m grateful to michael phillips for giving me permission to make use of his unpublished research. robert harding, director of the early british department at maggs bros. ltd., has corroborated this information (personal correspondence, 22 oct. 2019). his appraisal indicates that there is enough of the bookplate left to identify it as an armorial plate belonging to a member of the backwell family, “most likely william backwell (c. 1715–​70), a banker of caldecot manor, buckinghamshire.” 2. bookplate of william backwell. john rylands research institute and library, university of manchester. luis marino pérez collection: “festoon, wreath & ribbon,” box a-b e33. image © university of manchester. backwell—​and later his heir, william harwood, who changed his name to backwell in 1770—​resided and owned property in buckinghamshire, where his home, caldecot manor, was approximately five miles from the village of weston underwood (sheahan 457). weston underwood was where the poet william cowper lived at weston hall from 1786 until 1795 (sheahan 584). in 1791 joseph johnson commissioned cowper to edit an edition of milton for a proposed milton gallery.g. e. bentley, jr.’s blake records (60) gives 1 september 1791 as the date of the announcement by johnson and james edwards of “thirty capital plates, from subjects in milton” for the edition that cowper was commissioned to edit. the announcement includes blake among the engravers. cowper and hayley subsequently collaborated with each other, and after cowper’s death in april 1800 his papers passed to hayley, who prepared a biography of cowper and editions of cowper’s writings and editorial work on milton.hayley notes that cowper’s cousin, lady hesketh, gave him “all the writings of that poet relating to milton” (memoirs 2: 61). in the preface to his edition of the latin and italian poems of milton translated into english verse, and a fragment of a commentary on “paradise lost,” by the late william cowper, esqr. (1808), hayley notes that when cowper was contemplating a milton commentary, “he had several friends, who took a pleasure in the hope of supplying him with every thing he could require” (xviii-xix). in particular, he remarks upon a copy of bentley’s milton that was among the books loaned to cowper. the proximity of caldecot manor to weston hall makes it possible, even plausible, that the backwell family was the lender.cowper knew caldecot, as the village had invited him to compose an epitaph for the tomb of thomas abbott hamilton, a local lace merchant, who died on 7 july 1788 at the age of thirty-two (phillips, unpublished). the backwell copy also fits with hayley’s description of the book as “containing many very severe censures, in manuscript, against the presumptuous editor,” since it contains nearly eighty anonymous annotations, many of a censuring nature, in a contemporary hand, labeled by crosby as “hand c.” the two signed “wb” are designated as “hand d.” copies of bentley’s edition of paradise lost in hayley’s library the copy that hayley refers to should be distinguished from a copy of the same edition that at one time cowper owned and annotated. the latter appears in a list of books owned by cowper compiled by william barker (see keynes), and it is now in the collection of christ’s college library, cambridge. a comparison between the annotations made by “hand c” in the backwell copy (illus. 3) and cowper’s many annotations, critical in tenor toward the work of bentley, in his own copy (illus. 4) illustrates that they are not in the same hand. 3. annotation by the anonymous “hand c,” whose writing predominates in the copy of bentley’s edition of paradise lost under consideration (see enlargement). victoria university library (toronto). blake suppl. no. 1079. image used with the permission of victoria university library. 4. annotations by william cowper to his copy of bentley’s edition of paradise lost (see enlargement). christ's college library, old library, ee.2.8. reproduced with the kind permission of the master and fellows of christ's college, cambridge. a reference to another copy of bentley’s edition, uncovered in research by crosby subsequent to his 2008 article, surfaces in hayley’s unpublished correspondence.i’m indebted to mark crosby, associate professor at kansas state university, for giving me permission to make use of his unpublished research on hayley’s correspondence. in his preparations to write his biography of cowper, hayley borrowed a copy from the family of ashley cowper, the uncle of william cowper. in a letter to lady hesketh, ashley cowper’s daughter, hayley apologizes for borrowing the volume without letting her know; the letter is dated 10 january 1802, when blake would have been resident in felpham, working in hayley’s library (crosby, unpublished).mark crosby, “william blake’s annotations to milton’s paradise lost: the copy of paradise lost in hayley’s library during blake’s residence in felpham identified.” crosby’s transcription is taken from hayley’s autograph copy of the letter in the firestone library, rare books and special collections, princeton university, hannay collection, box 5, f. 19. he notes that hayley gives a slightly later date of 23 january 1802 in his memoirs. hayley needed to see this copy because it contained two inserted manuscripts: a verse by ashley cowper on “the absurd & pedantic editor of that milton” and an epigram by william cowper memorializing his uncle.“lines composed for a memorial of ashley cowper, esqr. immediately after his death, by his nephew william of weston” was reproduced by hayley in his life of cowper (2: 228). in his letter to lady hesketh, hayley promises to return the volume promptly. presumably it was returned, for it does not appear in the list of books owned by hayley that was compiled after his death. through cowper or cowper’s family, hayley had access to more than one copy of bentley’s paradise lost. one seems to have arrived with cowper’s papers and may be distinguished by hayley’s description of it as “containing many very severe censures, in manuscript, against the presumptuous editor.” this copy was to assist hayley in finishing cowper’s work on milton and was conceivably loaned to cowper from the library of william backwell. another was borrowed by hayley from lady hesketh in preparation for his life of cowper. this copy is distinguished as containing the two manuscripts described above. apparently, a third copy may also have been present. the sale catalogue of joseph mayer (july 1887), which includes items from hayley’s collection, lists a copy described as “formerly belonging to cowper.”see crosby’s note 61 in his essay in the book collector. when this one became part of hayley’s library is not known. at least two of the copies were in hayley’s library between 1800 and 1803, when blake was working there, researching and painting the series of eighteen portraits of the poets, including milton, while also producing engravings for hayley’s life of cowper. during his three years in felpham, blake began milton a poem, inspired, as g. e. bentley speculates, by visions that he experienced in his garden in felpham, which are at the heart of the poem (stranger 222, 244). in a letter to thomas butts in july 1803, blake refers to the prospect of being “fully employd” engraving his own designs, along with those after george romney and john flaxman, for “cowpers milton.” the handwriting of the annotations and blake’s letters to thomas butts a sample of backwell’s handwriting (illus. 5) illustrates that it is not the same hand that penned the annotations on pages 355 and 398 in the copy of bentley’s milton (illus. 10 and 11). 5. letter from william backwell to stephen fuller, 20 january 1756 (see enlargement). reproduced with the permission of the east sussex and brighton and hove record office. sas-rf/19/25. the criticism leveled against the attribution of these annotations to blake predominately disputes that they are in his hand. as others have pointed out, blake’s handwriting changes depending upon the context in which he was working, whether in annotations, correspondence, or other writings as they survive in manuscript.as noted by phillips in his response to snart in the european romantic review and acknowledged by snart, “the range of styles available to blake was considerable” (snart, the torn book 170). in “william blake and the sophocles enigma,” g. e. bentley, jr., notes that blake “used at least four quite distinct hands” (69) in the vala manuscript. the hand that appears in the manuscript notebook varies from the hand in the books that blake is known to have annotated. his handwriting and the hand that wrote the “wb” marginalia in the copy of bentley’s milton have not been fully compared to the letters that blake wrote from felpham to his friend and patron butts at the same time that he was employed by hayley and immersed in the work of milton. toward the end of his letter to butts on 2 october 1800, blake composed a verse directed to mrs. butts and signed it with a monogram (illus. 6) that bears comparison with the one in the annotation on page 355. 6. blake’s monogram on his 2 october 1800 letter to thomas butts. reproduced with the permission of the city of westminster archives centre. preston blake collection: letters from william blake to thomas butts, 1800–​03. the “wb” monogram on p. 355 (illus. 7) is in a spiky style characteristic of blake’s handwriting in his letters, marginalia, and other manuscripts, and the tilde-like downward-tilting dash after the b matches what is seen in the letter to butts. 7. “wb” from the annotation on p. 355. milton’s “paradise lost,” ed. richard bentley (london, 1732). victoria university library (toronto). blake suppl. no. 1079. reproduced with the permission of victoria university library. notable also is blake’s full signature at the bottom of the same letter to butts (illus. 8): the b in “blake” is written with the same upward loop that the annotator uses to complete the b in the second occurrence of “bentley” (illus. 9) in the marginal note on page 355 of the milton edition (illus. 10). 8. blake’s signature on his 2 october 1800 letter to thomas butts (see enlargement). reproduced with the permission of the city of westminster archives centre. preston blake collection: letters from william blake to thomas butts, 1800–​03. 9. “bentley” from the annotation on p. 355. milton’s “paradise lost,” ed. richard bentley (london, 1732). victoria university library (toronto). blake suppl. no. 1079. reproduced with the permission of victoria university library. 10. first annotation signed by “wb”, p. 355 (see enlargement). milton’s “paradise lost,” ed. richard bentley (london, 1732). victoria university library (toronto). blake suppl. no. 1079. reproduced with the permission of victoria university library. in both marginal notes (illus. 10 and 11), the annotator alternates between forming the letter b with a straight back and a looped back in the same way that blake alternates between the two letter forms in his monogram and signature on his october 1800 letter to butts. 11. second annotation signed by “wb”, p. 398 (see enlargement). milton’s “paradise lost,” ed. richard bentley (london, 1732). victoria university library (toronto). blake suppl. no. 1079. reproduced with the permission of victoria university library. a subsequent letter to butts, on 22 november 1802, is liberal in its use of quotation marks, either double or triple marks in some instances, to denote that blake is quoting joshua reynolds (illus. 12). 12. first page of a letter from blake to thomas butts, 22 november 1802 (see enlargement). reproduced with the permission of the city of westminster archives centre. preston blake collection: letters from william blake to thomas butts, 1800–​03. this practice is in play, too, in the annotation on page 355 of the bentley milton. we see quotation marks to demarcate the annotator’s reiteration of bentley’s note that queries milton’s text: bentley asks, “what is carnal fear?” “and doubt?” a few lines down, triple quotation marks enclose a further response to bentley’s changes: ‘“those new doubts and fears arisen in his nature, which was become less spiritual, more gross and carnal since his transgression —”’ other examples compared the first marginal note signed with the monogram “wb” (page 355) refers to book 11, line 212 of paradise lost, in which adam, in his loss of innocence, can no longer see god. richard bentley suggests that the word “film” be substituted for milton’s “fear,” and it is to this emendation that the author of the annotation responds: fear is certainly more appositely coupled to with doubt, than film. bentley / asks, “what is carnal fear?” “and doubt?” should be added. i don’t look upon it as a / chosen phrase of our author’s the word “carnal” is rather to make up the line; but by / a construction not overforced strained, may be said to mean, ‘“those new doubts and fears / arisen in his nature, which was become less spiritual, more gross and carnal / since his transgression —”’ the abused editor might in his turn ask bentley / “what carnal film means?” and which perhaps this “cold-blooded” critick, or / an anatomist only could only answer. —​—​—​wb— the second annotation (page 398) refers to book 12, lines 648-49, the final two lines of the poem. this was the page-opening displayed in the exhibition. bentley proposes changing these lines to alter their rhythm and alleviate the desolate atmosphere created by milton as adam and eve leave paradise. the annotator is emphatic in stating his opposition: i cannot enough admire the hardiness of bentley, who would expunge these / two last lines, as proper and surely as beautiful as any in the whole poem, / and substitute cold expressions foreign to the author’s judgement probable / and natural ^ meaning, viz “that they left paradise with regret,” if any one thinks otherwise / i desire no better proof of the state of his feelings. wb in his 2008 article, crosby provides instances of monograms that blake employed in his work between 1797 and 1805 that are similar to that which appears on page 398 of the bentley milton. they come principally from his engravings for richard edwards’s edition of edward young’s night thoughts (1797) and paintings such as bathsheba at the bath (c. 1799–​1800) (crosby 521). intermittently, this monogram appears in the vala manuscript, often on the bottom leftor right-hand side of the images (illus. 13). 13. vala, or the four zoas, monogram on f. 22r. © british library board. add ms 39764. in all examples, blake executes a semicircle that overarches the “wb” in the style of the “wb” on the page 398 annotation. however, the pen stroke moves from a loop formed at the base of the b and circles around and back over that letter, attaching to the top of the w from right to left. this is an opposite movement to that which forms the monogram on page 398 of the bentley milton, where the overarching pen stroke moves from left to right from the top of the w, curling over and in a semicircle around the b (illus. 14). 14. “wb” from the annotation on p. 398. milton’s “paradise lost,” ed. richard bentley (london, 1732). victoria university library (toronto). blake suppl. no. 1079. reproduced with the permission of victoria university library. yet the looping of the pen stroke over the letters, whether forward or backward, gives the same stylistic impression. as blake had been for some years proficient in reverse or mirror writing, he would have been able to write in either direction with ease (bentley, stranger 37). conclusion an annotated copy of richard bentley’s edition of milton’s paradise lost was displayed in the blake exhibition, first in london and then in new york, in 2000 and 2001. immediately following, the attribution to blake of two annotations signed “wb” was disputed. in response, the copy was made available for study from 2003 to 2005 in the manuscript reading room of the british library, and, from 2005 to 2007, in the bodleian library, oxford. during this time only mark crosby took the opportunity to examine it. it should be noted that, while on exhibition, the volume was open to the annotation on page 398; the annotation on page 355, with the clear and distinctive monogram matching, for example, the one that blake used to sign his letter to thomas butts on 2 october 1800, was not on display, nor did it appear in the exhibition catalogue. in his paper in the book collector, crosby concluded by asking if help could be given in identifying the fragment of an eighteenth-century bookplate in the volume. it is now identified as belonging to william backwell, who lived near william cowper at his home in weston underwood, making it possible that it was the backwell copy that cowper borrowed for his work on milton. we know that cowper’s books and papers were present in william hayley’s library from september 1800 to september 1803, when blake was employed by hayley and spending much of his time working in the library. as crosby has shown, blake’s portrait of milton for hayley’s library contains distinctive features that are found only in george vertue’s portrait engraving of milton in bentley’s edition of paradise lost. furthermore, hayley described the copy that cowper borrowed, and that presumably arrived in his library with cowper’s papers, as “containing many very severe censures”—​in other words, numerous annotations, many of a critical nature. this also describes the backwell copy, which has nearly eighty anonymous annotations, many disapproving of bentley’s emendations. as shown here, some of blake’s letters to butts written from his cottage at felpham are in a style of handwriting, and signed with a monogram, that share characteristics, some idiosyncratic, with those of the two annotations signed “wb” in the backwell copy of bentley’s edition. other examples of blake’s writing style and distinctive monogram have been cited by crosby. are the two annotations signed “wb” in the backwell copy of richard bentley’s edition of milton’s paradise lost (1732) attributable or not to the william blake? the new evidence presented here must be worthy of consideration. works cited bentley, g. e., jr. blake records. 2nd ed. new haven: yale up, 2004. —​—​—​. the stranger from paradise: a biography of william blake. new haven: yale up, 2001. —​—​—​. “william blake and the sophocles enigma.” blake 31.2 (fall 1997): 65-71. bentley, g. e., jr., with the assistance of hikari sato. “william blake and his circle: a checklist of publications and discoveries in 2002.” blake 37.1 (summer 2003): 4-31. —​—​—​. “william blake and his circle: a checklist of publications and discoveries in 2008.” blake 43.1 (summer 2009): 4-48. bindman, david. “william blake: london and new york.” burlington magazine 143, no. 1176 (mar. 2001): 172-74. crosby, mark. “william blake’s annotations to milton’s paradise lost.” book collector 57.4 (winter 2008): 513-46. —​—​—​. “william blake’s annotations to milton’s paradise lost: the copy of paradise lost in hayley’s library during blake’s residence in felpham identified.” unpublished article. 11 pp. gourlay, alexander s. rev. of michael phillips, william blake: the creation of the “songs” from manuscript to illuminated printing. blake 36.2 (fall 2002): 66-71. harding, robert. “re: milton’s paradise lost with annotations.” e-mail message to lisa sherlock. 22 oct. 2019. hayley, william. the life, and posthumous writings, of william cowper, esqr. with an introductory letter, to the right honourable earl cowper. 3 vols. london: j. johnson, 1803–​04. —​—​—​. memoirs of the life and writings of william hayley, esq., the friend and biographer of cowper. ed. john johnson. 2 vols. london: henry colburn and co., 1823. —​—​—​. “preface.” latin and italian poems of milton translated into english verse, and a fragment of a commentary on “paradise lost,” by the late william cowper, esqr. ed. william hayley. london: j. johnson and r. h. evans, 1808. vii-xxvii. keynes, geoffrey. “the library of william cowper.” transactions of the cambridge bibliographical society 3.1 (1959): 47-69. milton, john. paradise lost. ed. richard bentley. london: printed for jacob tonson et al., 1732. phillips, michael. “blake’s annotations in context.” european romantic review 16.1 (jan. 2005): 93-95. —​—​—​. “william blake’s annotations to milton’s paradise lost : the backwell library copy identified.” unpublished article. 13 pp. sheahan, james joseph. history and topography of buckinghamshire. london: longman, green, longman, and roberts, 1862. snart, jason. “blake’s milton: did blake own and annotate the 1732 bentley edition of milton’s paradise lost?” european romantic review 16.1 (jan. 2005): 79-91. —​—​—​. the torn book: unreading william blake’s marginalia. selinsgrove: susquehanna up, 2006. blake and music, 2021 blake and music, 2021 by camila oliveira and jason whittaker camila oliveira (camila.querino@etu.unige.ch) is a postdoctoral researcher at the university of geneva. she holds a phd in english literature from the federal university of rio de janeiro and king’s college london on the translation of blake’s jerusalem into portuguese and biblical intertextuality. she is currently working on romanticism and music reception and writing a monograph on william blake and contemporary music. jason whittaker (jwhittaker@lincoln.ac.uk) is head of the school of english and journalism at the university of lincoln. he is the author and editor of several works on blake, including william blake and the myths of britain (palgrave, 1999), radical blake: influence and afterlife from 1827 (with shirley dent, palgrave, 2002), divine images: the life and work of william blake (reaktion books, 2021), and jerusalem: blake, parry and the fight for englishness (forthcoming, oxford university press, 2022). his main research interests deal with the reception of blake, and he is the editor of the site zoamorphosis. last year’s introduction observed that the global pandemic had seen the flourishing of streaming settings of blake’s works, particularly for individual artists who clearly turned to music as a creative release from the stresses caused by covid. indeed, the list for 2020 recorded more new releases than that for 2019, but, by concentrating on the services provided by amazon, apple, and spotify, it did not account for a wealth of independent productions that were released on bandcamp and soundcloud. as such, half of this year’s list consists of tracks and albums from 2020, thanks to the research of camila oliveira. in future, we shall include more independent artists, many of whom embody blake’s creative ethos more thoroughly than established musicians and songwriters. the majority of releases during 2021, as well as those that were independently released in 2020, are settings of a single poem, with “the tyger” and “the sick rose” being among the most popular. nevertheless, there are several albums or extended collections of blake-inspired music that deserve special mention. yann lecollaire’s compositions on the states of the human soul, with vocal arrangements by sarah klenes, are especially beautiful and haunting, while john pope and john garner’s highly experimental collection judas is an original sound meditation on “on anothers sorrow.” interestingly, we have come across a number of songs in which blake himself is the theme; the cult of personality seems stronger than ever and merits a separate publication and study. we have also included settings inspired by blake’s visual work, as is the case with the blues track “the glad day” by the american duo vaca sagrada. as in previous versions, this list omits tracks that are based on a single quotation from or allusion to blake’s work. wherever possible, the country of the artist is given, as well as the work’s instrumentation, duration, publisher, copyright date, genre, and format. most entries include at least one link to a recording. 48 cameras with edward ka-spel — belgium songs from the marriage of heaven & hell; for voice, synthesizers. 00:14:16. interzone, © 2019. dark ambient. cd/​streaming. tracks: 1. the voice of the devil; 2. a memorable fancy #1; 3. the wedding; 4. a memorable fancy #2; 5. the divorce. link: bandcamp. albinotron — usa from arthropoda insecta; for guitar, synthesizers. 00:02:01. independent, © 2020. electronic/​dark ambient. streaming. track: 11. urizen. note: instrumental. links: apple, bandcamp, spotify. argoal — france the chapel; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, keyboards. 00:02:06. independent, © 2020. folk. streaming. track: 1. the chapel [“the garden of love”]. link: soundcloud. argoal — france the garden of love; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, keyboards. 00:03:48. independent, © 2021. folk. streaming. track: 1. the garden of love. note: this version is different from “the chapel,” listed above. link: soundcloud. argoal — france hear the voice; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, keyboards. 00:02:52. independent, © 2020. folk. streaming. track: 1. hear the voice. link: soundcloud. argoal — france nurse’s song; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, keyboards. 00:02:48. independent, © 2019. folk. streaming. track: 1. nurse’s song [experience]. link: soundcloud. argoal — france the voice of the ancient bard; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, keyboards. 00:03:10. independent, © 2019. folk. streaming. track: 1. the voice of the ancient bard. link: soundcloud. bag, august — uk four selected poems by william blake; for voice, guitar. 00:07:38. independent, © 2021. folk. streaming. tracks: 1. nurse’s song (sons of industries); 2. london; 3. introduction to the songs of innocence; 4. merry, merry sparrow. link: bandcamp. barkoskie, alvez, iv — usa little lamb; for voice, orchestra. 00:04:39. independent, © 2021. classical. streaming. track: 1. little lamb. link: soundcloud. berta & nico — spain canciones de experiencia; for voice, guitar. 00:11:51. independent, © 2021. folk/​indie. streaming. tracks: 1. preámbulo; 2. introducción; 3. la mosca; 4. mi bello rosal; 5. oh girasol; 6. la rosa enferma; 7. el lírio; 8. la voz del antiguo bardo. note: poems translated into spanish. link: soundcloud. blake — usa songs of innocence and of experience; for voice, guitar, drums, keyboards. 00:22:42. independent, © 2020–​21. folk/​indie. streaming. tracks: 1. night; 2. nurse’s song; 3. garden of love; 4. a dream; 5. on another’s sorrow. link: bandcamp. bourdon, benoit — france my william blake song book; for voice, guitar, strings. 00:24:35. independent, © 2020. folk. streaming. tracks: 1. the sick rose; 2. infant joy; 3. the cradle song; 4. laughing song; 5. on another’s sorrow. link: bandcamp. bromide, simon — uk from following the moon; for voice, guitar, electronics. 00:03:54. piccadilly records, © 2021. rock. cd/​streaming. track: 9. earth’s answer. links: apple, spotify. the canal — czech republic/​panama from transatlantic p(h)o(n)em session; for voice, guitar, drums, synthesizers. 00:04:09. blue lizard records, © 2020. electronic/​dark ambient. streaming. track: 12. the angel (william blake). note: the track was first released on an ep in 2013. link: bandcamp. cowp — usa from heal the people, heal the land; for guitar, synthesizers. 00:06:01. a beautiful idea, © 2020. electronic/​dark ambient. streaming. track: 21. ah sun flower. note: this is an instrumental setting of blake’s poem. link: bandcamp. crawl across the sky — usa from the void alone; for voice, guitar, bass, drums. 00:03:33. independent, © 2020. black metal. streaming. track: 22. telos ii: the human abstract. links: amazon, spotify. darshan ambient — usa from a day like any other ; for guitar, synthesizers. 00:06:57. brain laughter, © 2020. new age. streaming. tracks: 2. ah! sunflower; 3. the echoing green. note: these are instrumental settings of blake’s poems. links: bandcamp, spotify. de vico, remo — italy garden of love; for voice, drums, synthesizers. 00:03:01. independent, © 2021. experimental/​electronic. streaming. track: 1. garden of love. link: bandcamp. dog age — norway from like some bacon in the night; for voice, guitar, bass, drums. 00:03:24. voices of wonder records, © 2021. rock. streaming. track: 5. a poison tree. links: amazon, apple, spotify. dreams of december — brazil from ashes of a decadent life; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, keyboards. 00:04:28. independent, © 2021. post black metal. streaming. track: 3. the human abstract (william blake, 1794). link: spotify. fontana re:mix — sweden from traces of time; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, keyboards. 00:03:09. bauta records, © 2021. progressive rock/​free jazz. cd/​streaming. track: 3. french revolution. link: bandcamp. golem mecanique — france oracle; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, keyboards. 00:23:00. independent, © 2021. dark ambient. streaming. tracks: 1. daughters of albion; 2. urizen. notes: the songs are inspired by blake’s prophetic books. they are instrumental tracks with vocalization. link: bandcamp. g.rag — germany from no poetry; for voice, guitar, bass. 00:03:44. independent, © 2020. alternative punk/​alternative. streaming. track: 27. william blake. note: inspired by blake’s poetry. link: bandcamp. greenhill, mitch — usa blues of an ancient bard; for voice, guitars, flutes. 00:41:33. independent, © 2020. folk. streaming. tracks: 1. youth of delight come hither; 2. the nurse’s song; 3. mary part 1; 4. the tyger; 5. mary part 2; 6. cradle song; 7. albion turned away; 8. the garden of love; 9. mary part 3; 10. hear the voice of the bard/​earth’s answer; 11. jarusalem; 12. jerusalanthem. link: bandcamp. hagenberg, elaine — usa tyger ; for voice (satb), piano. 00:01:58. independent, © 2021. classical. streaming. track: 1. tyger. links: elaine hagenberg music, soundcloud. hemmelig — finland from first to fall; for electronics. 00:03:42. independent, © 2021. electronic/​dark ambient. streaming. track: 2. the human abstract. note: this is an instrumental setting of blake’s poem. link: bandcamp. higgins, michael — uk the garden of love; for piano, organ. 00:01:42. independent, © 2021. world music. streaming. track: 1. the garden of love. note: this is an instrumental setting of blake’s poem. link: soundcloud. howard, paul — uk from spirit songs: the best of paul howard, vol. 1; for voice, guitar. 00:06:17. independent, © 2020. folk. streaming. tracks: 5. london; 9. the echoing green. link: bandcamp. jacquot, nicolas — france from ordered ordinaries; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, synthesizers. 00:08:34. independent, © 2020. electronic/​experimental. streaming. track: 1. antimanifesto [excerpts from the marriage of heaven and hell in french]. link: bandcamp. köster, frederik, and die verwandlung — germany from golden age; for voice, piano, drums, bass, saxophone. 00:07:31. traumton records, © 2020. jazz. cd/​streaming. track: 9. (to the) evening star. link: spotify. lahr, barbara — germany from kintsugi; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, keyboards, brass. 00:05:25. phazz-a-delic, © 2021. jazz/​pop. cd/​streaming. track: 5. the tyger. link: bandcamp. lecollaire, yann — france the states of the human soul; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, keyboards. 00:37:33. thödol records, © 2020. pop/​experimental. streaming. tracks: 1. memory song [“memory, hither come”]; 2. to autumn; 3. the sick rose; 4. love song [“love and harmony combine”]; 5. london; 6. introduction [innocence]; 7. the fly; 8. mad song; 9. vale song [“when early morn walks forth in sober grey”]. link: bandcamp. lieutenant caramel — france the marriage of heaven and hell; for voice, guitar, bass, synthesizers. 00:54:58. independent, © 2020. electronic. streaming. tracks: 1. the burdened air; 2. evil is hell; 3. des anges à ma fenêtre; 4. l’homme-dragon; 5. les géants dévoreurs. note: inspired by the “proverbs of hell” and “a memorable fancy” from blake’s the marriage of heaven and hell. link: bandcamp. mahalia — italy from nomade 1992–​2020; for voice, accordion, strings. 00:07:11. dar soltane, © 2021. pop/​world music. streaming. tracks: 7. the little boy found; 13. the garden of love. links: amazon, apple, spotify. makabe, emi — japan/​usa from anniversary; for voice, guitar, bass, drums. 00:05:40. greenleaf music, © 2020. jazz. cd/​streaming. track: 3. chimney sweeper. link: bandcamp. martin x — russia from crapulous classics; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, synthesizers. 00:05:02. independent, © 2020. alternative rock/​electronic. streaming. track: 9. piping down the valleys wild. link: bandcamp. mel from melbourne — australia william blake remixed; for voice, guitars, synthesizers. 00:01:53. independent, © 2020. folk/​electronic. streaming. track: 1. william blake remixed. link: bandcamp. mighty gravillons — switzerland from some are born; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, keyboards. 00:05:04. independent, © 2021. reggae. streaming. track: 1. some are born [excerpts from “auguries of innocence”]. link: bandcamp. park, owain, and the epiphoni consort — uk from when love speaks: choral music by owain park; for voice, piano. 00:04:18. delphian, © 2020. classical. streaming. track: 11. the tyger. link: soundcloud. paterakis, giorgos/​string theory — greece from gallery dramaton; for voice, piano. 00:07:21. independent, © 2020. experimental. streaming. tracks: 5. the frozen marriage bed [setting of visions of the daughters of albion]; 9. the chimney sweeper. link: bandcamp. paterikon — usa william blake is doomed; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, keyboards. 00:18:15. independent, © 2021. doom metal. streaming. tracks: 1. to tirzah; 2. london; 3. the tyger; 4. the clod and the pebble; 5. the voice of the ancient bard. link: bandcamp. perfect blue — usa from respect existence or expect resistance; for guitar, synthesizers. 00:03:07. independent, © 2020. electronic/​dark ambient. streaming. track: 12. song of urizen. note: instrumental. link: bandcamp. pope, john, and john garner — uk judas; for keyboards, strings, electronics. 00:49:20. independent, © 2022. avant-garde. streaming. tracks: 1. can i see anothers woe; 2. and not be in sorrow too; 3. can i see anothers grief; 4. and not seek for kind relief; 5. can a mother sit and hear; 6. an infant groan an infant fear—; 7. no no never can it be; 8. never never can it be. note: this is a highly experimental instrumental response to “on anothers sorrow.” link: bandcamp. pyrroline — germany from struggling; for voice, drums, synthesizers. 00:05:51. electro aggression records, © 2021. ebm/​industrial. cd/​streaming. track: 12. the divine image. link: spotify. rabe, nils david — usa nils david sings and plays “the wild flowers song”; for voice, guitar, flute, percussion. 00:00:51. brownie records, © 2021. folk. streaming. track: 1. the wild flowers song. link: soundcloud. rahel acoustic breezes — usa/​israel/​south korea from alice, where are you going? ; for voice, synthesizers. 00:00:55. independent, © 2020. folk. streaming. track: 7. infant joy. link: bandcamp. the secret experiment — uk from v. ii; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, keyboards. 00:04:57. independent, © 2021. post-punk/​darkwave. streaming. track: 2. a poison tree. note: the words are from “auguries of innocence.” link: bandcamp. shydays — usa william blake words; for voice, synthesizers. 00:02:03. independent, © 2020. experimental/​ambient. streaming. track: 1. william blake words. notes: inspired by blake. link: bandcamp. siamois synthesis — canada from feu aimant; for guitar, drums, synthesizers. 00:10:23. independent, © 2020. electronic/​dark ambient. streaming. track: 6. urizen. note: this is an instrumental setting inspired by blake’s poetry. links: bandcamp, spotify. sideshow tom — syria from a manic tape from a basement; for voice, guitar. 00:04:30. independent, © 2020. folk/​indie. streaming. track: 6. to william blake. note: inspired by blake’s poetry. link: bandcamp. singapore police background — uk from singapore police background; for synthesizers. 00:05:33. steep gloss, © 2021. industrial/​experimental. streaming. track: 2. urizen. note: instrumental. link: bandcamp. tarbox, michael — usa from paler suns; for voice, guitar. 00:01:18. independent, © 2020. folk. streaming. track: 1. ah! sunflower. link: bandcamp. taylor, terry scott — usa from bedroom demos, vol. 35; for voice, guitars. 00:04:45. independent, © 2020. folk. streaming. track: 4. william blake. note: words adapted from “the tyger” and other poems. link: bandcamp. techno thriller — belgium from decameron; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, synthesizers. 00:03:01. teenage menopause records, © 2020. alternative/​metal. cd/​streaming. track: 3. jeudi saint [“holy thursday,” experience]. link: spotify. this is the bridge — uk from songs from a dead england; for voice, guitar, bass, percussion. 00:04:53. independent, © 2020. post-punk. cd/​streaming. track: 3. dead england. note: lyrics adapted from “auguries of innocence.” link: bandcamp. trans-neptunian colonists — usa from albion; for synthesizers. 01:00:16. independent, © 2021. dark ambient. streaming. tracks: 1. urizen; 2. tharmas; 3. luvah/​orc; 4. urthona/​los; 6. emanations; 7. vala; 8. dirge of eno; 9. then fell the fires of eternity; 10. the departure of dark religion; 11. enion; 12. enitharmon; 13. ahania; 14. albion city. note: all tracks are instrumental. link: bandcamp. tsantsa — sweden love’s secret; for synthesizers. 00:28:51. independent, © 2020. industrial/​dark ambient. streaming. track: 1. love’s secret. link: bandcamp. vaca sagrada — usa from one eye is the sun, one eye is the moon; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, keyboards, brass. 00:05:01. independent, © 2021. rock/​blues. streaming. track: 6. the glad day. note: the track is inspired by the illustration “glad day.” link: bandcamp. van vasey, mark — uk the caterpillar and the fly; for guitar, bass, celesta, cellos, voice. 00:20:08. independent, © 2021. avant-folk. streaming. tracks: 1. the garden of love; 2. the fly; 3. the human abstract; 4. the blossom; 5. the clod and the pebble; 6. the smile. link: bandcamp. v.o.e.r. — sweden from subconscious error ; for voice, electronics, synthesizers. 00:17:09. 4ib records, © 2020. industrial/​experimental. streaming. tracks: 5. the garden of eden; 6. a garden of flesh. note: inspired by blake’s prophetic books. link: bandcamp. wereju — ireland the tree of life and death (part one); for voice, guitar, bass, synthesizers. 00:30:23. independent, © 2020. dark ambient. streaming. tracks: 1. vegetative eye (part one); 2. art is the tree of life … science is the tree of death (part one); 3. vegetative eye (part two). notes: based on blake’s prophetic books. all tracks are instrumental. link: discogs. wereju — ireland the tree of life and death (part two); for voice, guitar, bass, synthesizers. 00:27:27. independent, © 2020. dark ambient. streaming. tracks: 1. vegetative eye (part three); 2. art is the tree of life … science is the tree of death (part two); 3. vegetative eye (part four). notes: based on blake’s prophetic books. all tracks are instrumental. link: discogs. wereju — ireland the tree of life and death (part three); for voice, guitar, bass, synthesizers. 00:27:45. independent, © 2020. dark ambient. streaming. tracks: 1. vegetative eye (part five); 2. art is the tree of life … science is the tree of death (part three); 3. vegetative eye (part six). notes: based on blake’s prophetic books. all tracks are instrumental. link: discogs. wilson, kenny — uk auguries of innocence (william blake); for voice, guitar, bass, keyboards. 00:13:21. independent, © 2021. alternative rock. streaming. track: 1. auguries of innocence (william blake). link: soundcloud. wisborg — germany from the tragedy of seconds gone; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, synthesizers. 00:05:29. danse macabre, © 2018. alternative rock/​electronic. cd/​streaming. track: 4. the sick rose. link: spotify. wyrm — usa from wolfish outlaws and other heathens; for voice, electronics. 00:05:04. 4ib records, © 2021. dark ambient. cd/​streaming. track: 7. voice of the ancient bard. link: bandcamp. volume 56 number 2 fall 2022 b l a k e angela esterhammer, victoria college, university of toronto nelson hilton, university of georgia tilar j. mazzeo, colby college robert w. rix, university of copenhagen joseph viscomi, university of north carolina at chapel hill david worrall, the nottingham trent university martin butlin, tate gallery, london, retired tristanne j. connolly, university of waterloo detlef w. dörrbecker, university of trier sibylle erle, university of lincoln robert n. essick, university of california, riverside a d v i s o r y b o a r d a n i l l u s t r a t e d q u a r t e r l y volume 56 number 2 fall 2022 c o n t e n t s www.blakequarterly.org articles the house of aumont and blake’s french revolution by matthew m. davis printing imperfections in william blake’s virgil wood engravings and what they reveal by louise wilson reviews mike goode, romantic capabilities: blake, scott, austen and the new messages of old media reviewed by james rovira marsha keith schuchard, a concatenation of conspiracies: “irish” william blake and illuminist freemasonry in 1798 reviewed by josephine a. mcquail fernando castanedo, ed. and trans., william blake, augurios de inocencia reviewed by alexander s. gourlay © 2022 copyright morris eaves and morton d. paley cover: detail of “unyoked heifers loitering homeward, low.” national gallery of victoria, melbourne. 1886-5. e d i t o r s editors: morris eaves and morton d. paley review editor: alexander s. gourlay exhibitions editor: luisa calè bibliographer (criticism): wayne c. ripley bibliographer (music): jason whittaker managing editor: sarah jones sarah.jones@rochester.edu production office: department of english, university of rochester, rochester ny 14627-0451 to see the worlds of a grain of sand: blake and reception to see the worlds of a grain of sand: blake and reception by sibylle erle sibylle erle (sibylle.erle@bishopg.ac.uk), frsa, fhea, is reader in english literature at bishop grosseteste university in lincoln. she is the author of blake, lavater and physiognomy (legenda, 2010) and chapters and articles on blake, fuseli, lavater, tennyson, ludwig meidner, and frankenstein. she cocurated with philippa simpson the display blake and physiognomy (2010–​11) at tate britain, coedited with laurie garrison “science, technology and the senses” (special issue, ravon, 2008), and coedited with laurie garrison, verity hunt, phoebe putnam, and peter west panoramas, 1787–​1900: texts and contexts (5 vols., pickering & chatto, 2012). more recently, she coedited with morton d. paley the reception of william blake in europe (2 vols., bloomsbury, 2019) and with helen hendry “monsters: interdisciplinary explorations in monstrosity” (special issue, humanities & social sciences communications, 2019–​20). apart from reception, her current research is on monsters, perceptions of death in young adult literature, tennyson, and swedenborg, as well as conceptualizations and representations of “character” in romantic literature. william blake’s influence on modern culture is undeniable.at the beginning of blake and modern literature, edward larrissy declares: “blake is the romantic writer who has exerted the most powerful influence on the twentieth century. indeed, the more one looks into the matter, the more surprised one may be by the extent and pervasiveness of that influence” (1). blake—​in contrast, for example, to p. b. shelley, wordsworth, or byron—​has a huge presence in literature, art, and music. striking parallels and historical evidence for connections between blake and his modern audiences have been identified and discussed, determining why he matters. from the discussions of synergies in the intellectual and emotional climates of his time and our own arise two questions, which this special issue on blake’s reception in europe endeavors to address: one, what of blake (person, poetry, and art) bridges the gulf of time, appears universal, or seems directly relevant? two, what happens to blake if works (texts and images) are separated and taken up by audiences that ostensibly have little in common, apart from a shared residual christian position or other—​esoteric or secular—​values originating in western culture? the latter, which is about ownership, leads to a further question: if there are too many idiosyncratic interpretations of blake, does the real blake get lost? scholarship on blake’s reception has come a long way since deborah dorfman’s blake in the nineteenth century (1969) and robert bertholf and annette levitt’s william blake and the moderns (1982). in his review of blake and the moderns, paul mann teases out the dynamics inherent in reception studies, while noting the difference between being inspired by a person, who becomes a symbol, and that person’s work, which is a product of a specific linguistic and historical context: [in the essays in the book] blake’s personal example serves as a sort of muse for other writers inclined toward similar activity. blake’s influence is less as an actual writer of actual poems than as a good angel of the imagination perched on the shoulders of writers who do not, for the most part, take much more from him than that. if his work explores division and reintegration in complex and pertinent forms, his successors seem to have found these forms, these actual poetic operations, either irrelevant or secondary. (170) though blake and the moderns was a disappointment to mann, he nevertheless projected the directions that studies into blake’s reception would take: research into the graphic context of his poetry and explorations of genre and printing technologies. a truly productive encounter with blake, in mann’s opinion, could only take place if it moved beyond the literal sense of his poetry; works that respond to or engage with blake’s creative processes and printing methods are of interest to a reception scholar. moreover, the early bias toward text has developed into two different, though interwoven, histories in blake’s reception. colin trodd’s visions of blake: william blake in the art world, 1830–​1930 (2012) remedied this bias by investigating the afterlife of blake’s paintings in victorian art and art criticism, outlining “how different models of blake relate to key perceptions of modern art” (9). another development regarding processes of reception is that discussions of methodology have become more pronounced. what tools are required to understand what is happening to blake? contemporary media ecology permits easy access to and wide circulation of blake. the editors of blake 2.0: william blake in twentieth-century art, music and culture (2012) ask provocatively: what happens if the blakean afterlife is detached from writer-on-writer models of influence and residually patrilineal concepts of inheritance and transmission? … the mapping of the terrain is immediately strikingly different when done via curatorial practice in exhibitions, the iconic fashioning of centenary biography, and the nuanced aestheticism of more specialist art scholarship. (3) the embracing of decentralized and interactive modes of communication, courtesy of web 2.0 media technology, resulted in a significant move away from harold bloom’s model of influence, which revolves around a reader who cannot but misread a text when trying to understand its author’s intentions.roger whitson and jason whittaker’s william blake and the digital humanities (2013) approaches blake’s texts as media, focusing on their structure and potential to exist as virtual artifacts. bloom’s model draws on freud’s theory of the mind. for bloom, any person who reads to then repeat (rightly or wrongly) in their own work what they have read and experienced has been influenced. he writes, “the later poet provides what his imagination tells him would complete the otherwise ‘truncated’ precursor poem and poet, a ‘completion’ that is as much misprision as a revisionary swerve is” (66). the intergenerational connection between poets, termed “tessera” by bloom, consists of patterns in language and appropriations of theme that are also shaped by context (in a lacanian sense); all are evidence for contact or, metaphorically speaking, collaboration. in the age of digital media, bloom’s model has been struggling to accommodate the many diverse and personal responses that do not originate in intensive readings of blake; it also doesn’t consider blake’s art, or the increase in settings of his lyrical poetry to music. critique of bloom’s model—​the sense of belatedness or feeling of coming after one’s predecessors—​and dismissal of direct influence are also at the heart of mike goode’s work, which understands the reception of blake’s illuminated books as an “enduring fragmentation, mutation, and atomistic circulation” and thus sees the ubiquity of blake’s words and images in popular culture as “evidence not of how they [the illuminated books] have been misread over time but of just how open their meaningful potential seems to have been historically to realizing different kinds of cultural relations and wants” (“the joy of looking” 6). turning his back on the illuminated books as verbal-textual composites, goode argues that words inhabit their media only temporarily, and therefore shifts emphasis to the qualities of blake’s texts as objects, to focus on a text’s unrealized potential. these explanations about agency in objects are upgraded into an examination and model of the absolute openness of blake, which, according to goode, most scholarship does not address. in romantic capabilities: blake, scott, austen, and the new messages of old media (2020), he discusses “the viral spread of blake proverbs” and “the media behavior of blake proverbs’ viral circulation” (36), while attacking “complacent historicism,” which, as an approach to blake, “ends up reifying historical difference” (26). he writes that the media behavior he has identified should send “the critic back to the archive searching for evidence of how the behavior might or could have existed as potential” (26). it is goode’s belief that “media behaviors can teach us new things … because blake … knew or sensed some things about media that we are still trying to understand, or at least still learning how to say” (27). a lingering impression is that goode thinks that blake anticipated what is happening to him, or rather to his works. this stance appears to turn viral spread into a consequence of authorial design; it is, no doubt, useful to approach letters, diaries, and manuscripts with a sharp eye for effect, which goode says bears testimony to the potential of the original blake text, but it is equally important to explore the material condition or situatedness of the object when considering different qualities of effect and how they are being channeled. goode’s approach, which elevates behavior over interpretation and disconnects from the idea of control attributed to the reader, who is an interpreter (in bloom’s sense), still resonates with the concept of “horizon” coined by the german philosopher hans-georg gadamer. when pondering the relations between origin, reception, and the history of effect in truth and method (1960), gadamer uses horizon to denote “a standpoint that limits the possibility of vision” (313), suggesting that any vantage point moves as a person adjusts. this history of effect, for gadamer, culminates in a “hermeneutic situation,” which refers to a self-consciousness or awareness of “being affected by history,” set within the tension between origin and reception (312). comparing continually forming and fusing horizons with the testing of our knowledge and prejudices, gadamer notes the role of reflection in understanding, achieved by a “transpositing” into the past: “understanding tradition undoubtedly requires a historical horizon, then. but it is not the case that we acquire this horizon by transposing ourselves into a historical situation. rather, we must always already have a horizon in order to be able to transpose ourselves. … into this other situation we must bring, precisely, ourselves” (315). consequently, if we do not transpose ourselves, we will fail to understand fully. interpretation is based on a model of communication that guarantees fluidity and generates endless readings, but that model—​in contrast to goode’s new media model—​depends on readers or viewers who are aware that they have unconscious biases and have accepted that there can never be a definitive meaning. as gadamer writes, “every historian and philologist must reckon with the fundamental non-definiteness of the horizon in which his understanding moves” (381). gadamer’s concept of horizon was taken up by hans robert jauss for the purpose of discussing the actualizing or concretizing of meaning during acts of interpretation; jauss puts text and reader into a dialogue (in gadamer’s sense) and on an equal footing. interestingly, jauss developed his model during the first rise of mass media, when literary studies came under pressure in germany to justify the humanities’ organization of knowledge in an increasingly consumer-oriented society: when, in view of the worldwide successes of linguistic structuralism and the most recent triumph of structured anthropology, a turning away from the paradigms of historical understanding first became apparent in the old human sciences, it became similarly apparent that the best chance for success for a new theory of literature would come not by transcending history but in utilizing the insight into historicity which is peculiar to art. not the panacea of perfected taxonomies, closed systems of signs, and formalistic descriptive models but a historical investigation that did justice to the dynamic process of production and reception, of author, work, and public …. (aesthetic experience xxx-xxxi) what jauss attests for the situation in germany in the 1960s and 1970s (in his preface to aesthetic experience) resonates with what is happening now, more than forty years on, and in discussions about the future of the humanities at higher-education institutions. the context for goode’s theory of reception and propositions for the historical study of blake is the rise of social and digital media. rejecting the role of an active reader makes sense if we consider the compelling ways in which new media behaviors alter horizons of expectation, as well as ways in which blake can be encountered. there is, however, an anglo-american favoritism in goode’s approach; blake is being translated into other languages, and even if his modern audiences share a similar cultural heritage, its expressions in art or everyday communication do not map seamlessly from one culture onto another. in the international context of blake’s reception, the function of the reader in the process of understanding includes an interpreter as well as a translator of blake, who may not necessarily produce a faithful translation, but rather offer a partial view that may reveal a certain bias, which can be regarded as a positive addition. reception can take us to the tensions and oddities in a literary work, and translation, in particular, can open up semantic and imaginative fields and add to already existing complex observations. unusual responses to blake’s works deserve critical attention so that we can determine how interpretations that originate in different cultural, linguistic, and artistic contexts resonate with our own. similarly, examinations of creative approaches to blake hold the potential for the unexpected. it is tempting to succumb to the allure of the democratizing tendencies and democratic participation of the digital age, as the promise of open access appears to fulfill what blake aspired to and articulated in a letter to george cumberland on 1 september 1800: i have now better prospects than ever[.] the little i want will be easily supplied[;] he [mr. hayley] has given me a twelvemonths work already, & there is a great deal more in prospect[.] i call myself now independent. i can be poet painter & musician as the inspiration comes. (bentley, blake records 95) in the early days of his stay in felpham, blake was happy in his cottage and felt that he had the prospect of a stable income. the self-positioning in the letter is an ideal scenario of a life that he thought would bring him creative fulfillment. this life appeared to be within reach; he would do what he was able to do. ambition cannot exist outside culture, however, and the souring relationship with his patron william hayley eventually overrode blake’s dreams and hopes and weighed heavily on him. regarding reception, i want to suggest that it is equally true that culture gets absorbed and that predecessors disappear when they are absorbed. blake wanted to be a musician, but all that survives is anecdotal evidence, recorded in j. t. smith’s nollekens and his times (1828), for his occasionally singing songs to “[self-]composed tunes” that were “singularly beautiful” at social gatherings (bentley, blake records 606). even if blake failed because, by his own admission, “he was entirely unacquainted with the science of music” (606), the musicality of his poetry has inspired many musicians since. speculating about latent potential being realized now (in goode’s sense), however, can also count as an act of colonization of the past, infusing it with retrospective and nostalgic sentiments. if the focus in reception studies is instead put on new productions, quoting and referencing blake in new ways, we can examine how he gets reworked by artists, critics, and translators who read and transplant blake while in dialogue with their local cultures. this stance proposes an openness of a different kind and extends to how blake should be taught and studied in universities or schools. in a footnote, goode talks about the “gap” in how blake is studied (by scholars) and taught (to students): “when reading and teaching blake’s words, many of us continue to work primarily off standard typographic editions [rather than “facsimile editions of the illuminated books”], for reasons that we will readily concede are ‘practical’” (romantic capabilities 70). goode’s bias toward text or preference for words in teaching contexts not only jars with the evidence of blake’s eventful afterlives in art and music, it underestimates and perhaps overlooks how productive “gaps” can be for any reader or viewer of blake. in “romantic expressive theory and blake’s idea of the audience” (1980), morris eaves imagines an ideal community of readers who continually move between authors and their works, thus building a relationship with the author that originates inside the work: the ideal reader for … blake … is someone with a fully developed mind and heart whose powers of intellect and passion are equal to those of the poet. the reader is not a passive receptable or an impassive judge; the poem is not an instrument of stimulation or an object to be judged by a set of external standards. to judge a poem, the reader must enter into an intimate relationship with it. (793-94) eaves’s argument about ideal relationships focuses on the qualities of the text that invite readers in; a text needs to allow for personal responses. readers, to paraphrase eaves, should approach the act of interpretation as a relationship, which means that they will find that they might agree, or they can be left feeling provoked and are, therefore, likely to disagree. this idea relating to reading experience connects with gadamer’s explanation of interpretation as hermeneutical conversation, the opening up of new meanings as readers transpose themselves: “in a conversation, when we have discovered the other person’s standpoint and horizon, his ideas become intelligible without our necessarily having to agree with him; so also when someone thinks historically, he comes to understand the meaning of what has been handed down without necessarily agreeing with it or seeing himself in it” (gadamer 314). since hermeneutical conversation is an ongoing process, readers would not completely be rejecting anything, as the exchange between author and reader via the text continues indefinitely. ideal readers, consequently, are those who are willing to engage with what they find difficult in, as well as about, blake. applying this means that there cannot ever be—​to state the obvious—​a unified image of blake. furthermore, the positioning of any critical investigation or research is complicated by the critics, writers, translators, and artists who are continually adding to blake. in his own time, blake had a small following that consisted mostly of his friends and patrons; curiously, he is believed to have anticipated his belated fame. i am referring to the oft-quoted “i labour upwards into futurity” (keynes 262), taken to be representative of his determination and unwavering self-belief. this line, which is an inscription on one of the illuminated pages usually bundled into the large or small books of designs, appears to speak to blake’s popular reception in the twenty-first century, but he may not have written it (e 890).the inscription is on the back of one of the impressions from the second copy of small book; it is not in blake’s hand, but it might copy an original on the front that was lost when the impression was trimmed (see butlin #261.10). pages from these books were included in the recent blake show at tate britain (2019–​20), but not discussed in a way that clarified their status as books or, indeed, consolidated the issue about the precarious authority of the inscriptions: “these were not ‘books’ in the sense even that the illuminated books were, but rather visual compendiums of plates detached from literary contexts, open to interpretation with the guidance only of our foreknowledge of blake’s invented universe … or, in some cases, suggestive new poetic inscriptions by the artist” (myrone 63). this slip in the presentation of blake is perhaps telling of what is projected onto him, as well as his posthumous fame. the notion of blake’s reaching into his own future, at the core of goode’s interest in the latent potential of literary texts, is part of a wider debate, one that explores his presence and relevance in the contexts of material production, counterculture, and exhibitions. it can be said that blake, to quote from saree makdisi’s reading william blake, “saw the potential carried within modernity for creating a very different kind of world, more closely integrated and networked, and yet also fairer, motivated by principles of love and sharing rather than aggressive, acquisitive selfishness” (4). when examining blake’s creative experiments—​culminating in the monoprints of 1795—​in william blake’s printed paintings (2021), joseph viscomi discusses the changing title of god judging adamit was known as elijah in the fiery chariot until 1965; viscomi renames it elijah/​god judging adam. to stress that “the inscribed and recorded titles represent a change of subject without a change of iconography” (11). reviewing the interpretation history of this monoprint, he notes the “inevitable ‘turn’ to text” (121), while considering that blake changed his mind during the creative process (about “a subject and scene still in flux,” 123), and concludes that “these titles did not change the meaning of the watercolor on which the monoprint is based, nor did they change the meaning of the monoprint as initially produced in 1795” (123-24). viscomi’s evidence for blake’s process, involving revision and reuse of images, is overwhelmingly convincing; his analyses are important because they challenge readings of text-image relationships in the 1795 monoprints, which are not unified wholes. there is, as he shows, much to suggest that blake was not only an extraordinary innovator in printing technologies but also an evolving painter: “modern readers appear to have a harder time severing themselves from blake’s texts than blake did” (207). viscomi’s point about contemporary readers is pertinent, as it is a reminder of the interpretative traditions that—​when determining blake’s relevance—​tend to install meaning by foregrounding specific perceptions of blake, rather than drawing attention to original design or artistic choices, just as in the tate exhibition’s presentation of the pages from the books of designs. makdisi explains the consequences of such an approach: “if we read blake through all those layers [of interpretation] we run the risk of losing much of what is most exciting and original about his work—​we end up reading the layers, as it were, rather than gaining access to the work itself” (1). blake’s works are rare, but access to reproductions has become a lot easier through affordable illustrated editions of his poetic works, books on his art, and high-resolution images in the blake archive, which can be scrutinized online in conjunction with explanatory texts, interpretations, and documentation of historical, artistic, and material contexts. why is blake so popular? in william blake vs. the world (2021), which introduces blake as a “misinterpreted … symbol of english identity” on its dust jacket, john higgs makes some bold claims. according to higgs, blake was open and progressive and had panoramic interests, intellectual seriousness as well as emotional depth: one of the reasons why blake’s work proves to be so multifaceted is because of the way he accepts all sides. if you dig into his work looking for something in particular, you are very likely to find it. it doesn’t matter whether your primary interest is political, spiritual, occult, sexual, social, historical or radical, when you explore blake’s mind you find that he has thought about what you are preoccupied by. (59) this description, which is broad and verging on the sensationalist, can lead to a reductive approach to studying and teaching blake’s works. higgs expects his readers to accept that blake not only wrote about absolutely everything but also “had somehow transcended and escaped the perspective of a single person” (59). moreover, higgs claims to have found an explanation for the visions that blake talked about:blake’s visions and presumed madness have found fertile grounds in european cultural traditions. “gothic” blake is the topic of a recent collection of essays, william blake’s gothic imagination, edited by chris bundock and elizabeth effinger, which is devoted to his gothic preoccupations and reception in contemporary creative ventures. he suffered from the condition now known as hyperphantasia. while it is productive to investigate what blake saw in his visual field, considering his visionary experiences in the context of sensory stimuli and perceptual phenomena, such as synesthesia, higgs’s book is generating a vocabulary that betrays a fascination with blake’s mental health and psychology. the claim that nothing gets rejected by blake says something about our time and is telling of higgs’s own approach, informed by eastern philosophy, but also harks back to my interpretation of eaves’s reading of blake and his ideal audience: it requires that the reader give blake the benefit of the doubt and continually strive for a compromise for the relationship to work. that blake matters to everybody is misleading, and higgs’s claims, which give license to use blake without intensive study, are problematic because they conflate popularity with reception; there is a lot in and about blake that resists logical explanation and remains strange, though perhaps not so strange for his contemporary audiences. making sense of blake now, be it through extensive reading or use of s. foster damon’s blake dictionary, is different from reception, where misunderstanding is considered productive and worthy of critical examination. in divine images (2021), jason whittaker reflects on reception processes: blake’s very obscurity allowed him to be remade in the image of those who discovered him first. … throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries a pattern of vogues and fashions for blake become apparent: for a while he would be the new discovery and thus become all the rage, but then, with time, reproductions of blake’s art or his poetry would oversaturate the market. people grew bored of him and so he fell out of fashion, only to be rediscovered by a later generation, so that interest in blake has often been cyclical. (22, 23) this is not to deny the importance of higgs’s book, but rather to explain that its success has to do with blake’s twenty-first century reception and not just with his undeniable popularity. have books like higgs’s or whittaker’s, written for a wider audience, replaced peter ackroyd’s blake (1995) or g. e. bentley, jr.’s the stranger from paradise (2001) and remade blake in different images? there are now many approaches on offer, yet attitudes toward blake’s posthumous life and popularity continue to resonate strongly with eaves’s assessment of developments in blake studies in “on blakes we want and blakes we don’t” (1995).in his discussion of the behavior of blake’s text, goode talks about the phenomenon of “viral media,” which he coins to describe the politics of the “intermedial capabilities of proverbs and pictures as forms themselves” (romantic capabilities 11). viral blake, as discussed earlier, applies to blake’s proverbs and pictures, which, according to goode, “have a recent history of becoming unmoored from their multi-medium and circulating virally” (10). while the phrasing is timely, in line with the language used to describe the current pandemic, it is highly suggestive with regard to how blake moves from his home country and travels abroad: he attacks texts unnoticed and infiltrates cultural contexts unseen, to change them from inside. this metaphor for reception is powerful, as it captures the intricacy of the process: we connect to blake when we share blake. even with the facts at our disposal, the historical contexts that have been mined, and the friendships and social connections that have been identified, eaves remains wary of the pitfalls of easy connection with blake: in blake, especially, i would think, the codes are simply too complex and cryptic—​or too ambiguous and contradictory—​to be cracked by straightforward reference to big public categories such as “evangelical,” “christian,” “rationalist,” and “abolitionist,” not to mention big late-twentieth-century categories such as “sexist,” “racist,” and so on. we can agree that blake uses the discourse of christianity as one of his master discourses, but he is no christian in the regular sense; he is not convenient to history. (438) the notion that blake cannot be contained despite increasing access, and this applies to understanding his person via biographies and his works via the blake archive, is worth revisiting. the danger, as eaves suggests, is that the desire for comprehension (in a urizenic kind of way, i think) can become a compulsion that prompts us to select from blake what fits, so that he can be understood. blake and continental europe reception is afterlife, and any investigation of afterlife should not be “limited to the native land,” as elinor shaffer emphasizes in the preface to the reception of william blake in europe (2019), which i coedited with morton d. paley. writing about the need for “systematic or large-scale” surveys and reception histories of british authors in europe, shaffer explains: the history of the reception of british authors extends our knowledge of their capacity to stimulate and to call forth new responses, not only in their own disciplines but in wider fields and to diverse publics in a variety of historical circumstances. often these responses provide quite unexpected and enriching insights into our own history, politics and culture. individual works take on new dimensions and facets. they may also be subject to enlightening critiques. (xii) one of the outcomes of the blake reception project, published as volume 25 in shaffer’s reception of british and irish authors in europe series, was the ongoing consideration of blake’s visionary christianity alongside the mystical or spiritual aspects of his works, which, in many cases, were linked to local traditions in the receiving cultures. we could see that these traditions gave shape—​as social or cultural forces—​to the understanding of blake’s works abroad. reception consists of survey chapters that trace blake’s impact on european cultures, charting processes of reception and identifying translations, anthologies, dictionaries, publishers, and criticism. the chapters are chronological in their approach; they capture different and often uneven strands in blake’s reception while recognizing the importance of exhibition culture and biographies. the timeline (1: xxxviii-lxv) lists first mentions, first publications, first encounters. the goal of reception was to map how blake arrived in different countries and to explain how he was transplanted into new contexts and what appealed to writers and artists with international reputations. the richness lies in the separate but also interlaced stories of discovery and rediscovery in the receiving countries. each of blake’s works undertook its own journey, and all works are unique, even engravings if they were colored by hand. about the newly discovered engravings in russia,six impressions of engravings after meheux, stothard, and cosway, some hand colored, arrived in russia in the late 1820s; they are now in the collection of the hermitage (see tiutvinova 540-42). we wrote with some satisfaction: “these discoveries mean that russia—​not germany or austria—​was the earliest destination of blake originals on the continent” (1: 21). i am returning to this example from our introduction as i want to reflect on the traveling metaphor. blake has “traveled” through exhibitions, edited collections, and translations, with and without images as well as with and without graphic context. in the determination of which sources were available or made available by whom, mediation emerged as a major factor in the histories of blake’s reception. there was also a sense of directness in this process, as our contributors read blake in english and often translated passages that carried a response to blake back into english for the first time. goode, who prefers a disembodied blake, discards the materiality of blake’s works and its “formidable champion” joseph viscomi (romantic capabilities 67) and insists on the “incoherence” of blake’s reception. he also objects to the organization of the contributions “by national group” (70). reception processes are organized through language, however, and it is important to acknowledge that each language has its own history and literature. any translator not only makes choices but also employs strategies that can guarantee a successful rendering of the words and syntax of a source into a new linguistic context. explanations about these choices and strategies are often articulated in translators’ prefaces; they also inform the scope of the paratextual apparatus, which needs to introduce blake’s life in the context of british history so that he can be understood by readers who are not familiar with the factors and parameters of his situation. the ongoing reception in continental europe, as mapped in our book, is a development that raises questions not just about blake’s ability to inspire or the capacity of his texts to infect (in goode’s sense), but also about the language used to describe reception processes, the strategies of mediators and especially translators, and the attitudes in receiving cultures, who may be ignoring blake’s englishness. two of the reviews of reception observe and agree about the extraordinary scenarios of blake’s arrival in europe: he was “divested of them [history and contexts] as he arrived” (ferber 331) and “blake is a foreigner wherever he goes, which means that he is equally at home everywhere” (öwre 159). these comments return us to the question about blake’s popularity. while it may be problematic that he is “divested” of the context of his life as well as his british and american reception, it is also acknowledged in the reviews that blake (or rather blake text, in goode’s sense, to emphasize that it is a quality in and of his works that allows for this) engages new audiences quickly and easily. i think that the language used to describe processes of reception blurs the boundaries between person and work, life and afterlife. the reminder of blake’s “foreignness” is similarly productive. the phrasing speaks of a defamiliarization that can enhance the spectrum of interpretations of blake. it also resonates strongly with what eaves argues in “on blakes we want and blakes we don’t” about continuing appeal: blake was then and continues even now to be the sign of something new about to happen, partly because of his brand of obscurity, situated right between portentous sense and arrant nonsense, and partly because of the importance that posterity has granted to his difficult illuminated books, whose multimedia character makes them even more difficult to read, to see, and to exhaust by reading or looking. a persistent problem in creating a taste for this work has been how to motivate readers to climb walls of such difficulty. (414) some, although not many, of blake’s works survive in archives in continental europe, and most, perhaps all, have been recorded by bentley, who has left an indelible mark on blake studies. as in britain, they tended to disappear into private collections; it was primarily through personal connections that knowledge of blake was transmitted. more recently, the success of exhibitions on the continent bears testimony to how physical objects can engage new audiences, as shown in reception. when envisioning future directions and approaches to blake, karen mulhallen talks about “archival urges that … constitute … the most promising wave of present and future blake studies” (“the william blake project” 779). mulhallen not only places the “ideal community of scholars” firmly inside the archive, but suggests that this community comprises several generations of bentley “students.” in celebration of bentley’s achievements, she writes: “bentley’s life’s work has constantly demonstrated the value of studying the work of art in as much detail as one studies the artist’s writings, in order to gain a holistic and deeper understanding and appreciation of his work” (“blake in our time” 5, 9). this special issue is committed to archival work and research that uncover traces of the connections between blake and his european audiences. each of the contributors presents a case study and reflects on popular and academic attitudes to reception processes. blake, reception studies, and world literature literary works are part of literary traditions; their content is shaped by literary conventions and communicated with codes that readers must decipher in order to appreciate them. this perspective on “text” is usually refracted through intertextuality, which captures the impact of the circulation of ideas and formulae, especially language, among texts, and hence speaks about exchanges between texts. this dialogue, created through borrowings and consisting of allusions and quotations, presents readers with a layering of meaning. in palimpsests: literature in the second degree (first published in french, 1982), gérard genette proposes a theory and practice that allows for a conceptualization of “text” and requires readers to remember earlier works so as to understand, for example, the style and purpose of parody. in reception studies, then, emphasis is on processes of reception and creation of new meanings in new contexts. jauss’s theory of audience reception, which revolves around how audiences experience and recognize genre in their encounters with literary works, was first articulated in “literary history as a challenge to literary theory” (first published in german, 1967). in this groundbreaking article he takes on marxist and formalist approaches to literature to address its “reception and impact” and establish the role of actual flesh-and-blood readers in “the circular aesthetic system of production and of representation” (7). this stance, which articulates the concept of influence, pertains to intellectual history and, in the present context, marxist readings of blake, such as the politics of the 1790s and calls for collective action. it offers the opportunity to return to creative responses to literary texts and acts of self-realization in blake. engaging with genette’s ideas and using gadamer’s concept of “horizon,” jauss defines reading as an activity that is shaped by what readers have encountered in the past; this influence, he says, is the “horizon of expectation.” in reception studies, he argues, the intervention of readers is the most important activity in the production of literature: in the triangle of author, work and reading public the latter is no passive part, no chain of mere reactions, but even history-making energy. the historical life of a literary work is unthinkable without the active participation of its audience. for it is only through the process of its communication that the work reaches the changing horizon of experience in a continuity in which the continual change occurs from simple reception to critical understanding, from passive to active reception, from recognized aesthetic norms to a new production which surpasses them. (8) for jauss, aesthetic enjoyment and historical understanding are on the same par. he explains that an intervention is determined by “the historical context in which a literary work appears” to emphasize that it “is not a factual, independent series of events which exists apart from the reader.” he qualifies this by saying that reading is a “literary event” that can only “continue to have an effect … if future generations still respond to it or rediscover it” (11). reception can happen later, as well as outside the original context; the impact of literature exists when readers are able to recognize a text’s significance for the oeuvre of an author and in relation to everything else that they have read. he writes, “the organization of literature according to events is primarily integrated in the artistic standards of contemporary and succeeding readers, critics, and authors” (11). the factors that remain constant are genre and reading competencies: awareness and knowledge of “textual strategies, overt and covert signals, familiar characteristics or implicit allusions.” readers must navigate between what they know and what they encounter, while modulating their “horizon of expectations” (12). furthermore, jauss’s description of the reading process can accommodate wolfgang iser’s concept of “the gaps left by the text itself” (285), inviting readers to engage. iser, who focuses on textual qualities and on what allows the reader to participate in the meaning-making process, argues: the convergence of text and reader brings the literary work into existence, and this convergence can never be precisely pinpointed, but must always remain virtual, as it is not to be identified either with the reality of the text or with the individual disposition of the reader. … even in the simplest story there is bound to be some kind of blockage, if only for the fact that no tale can ever be told in its entirety. indeed, it is only through inevitable omissions that a story will gain its dynamism. … these gaps have a different effect on the process of anticipation and retrospection, and thus on the “gestalt” of the virtual dimension, for they may be filled in different ways. for this reason, one text is potentially capable of several different realizations, and no reading can ever exhaust the full potential, for each individual reader will fill in the gaps in his own way, thereby excluding the various other possibilities; as he reads, he will make his own decision as to how the gap is to be filled. (279, 284, 285) these quotations from jauss and iser were chosen to make a simple point. jauss challenges the notion of an objective historical truth that emanates from the facts of certain events, arguing that there is always a bias that is introduced by the person assessing and essentially interpreting the consequences of those events. whereas jauss dedicates much of his thinking to historical context and explanations about how authors would develop if they engaged with the feedback they received from readers, iser concentrates on the processes, issues, and events that condition the writing situation of the author, then turns to the situation of the reader, who is responsible for actualizing meaning in respective local contexts. in our work on reception, which took seven years to complete, it stood out to us that there were several nobel prize winners who engaged with blake. while this is a comment on status rather than achievement, it seems that blake’s visibility to different national communities has increased through comparative studies. in defining world literature, david damrosch offers three categories that are helpful for understanding blake’s role abroad: “literature in general, and world literature in particular, has often been seen in one or more of three ways: as an established body of classics, as an evolving canon of masterpieces, or as multiple windows on the world,” emphasizing that “world literature is multitemporal as much as it is multicultural” (“what is world literature?” 9, 10). regarding reception and the academic appeal and popular reach of the concept of world literature, damrosch highlights the difference between authorial intention—​to attract a huge number of readers both at home and abroad—​and global markets, which allow diverse readerships to consume works in original languages as well as in translation. with the latter comes the assumption that works in translation need to be accessible to be appreciated, an expectation that is managed by the translator and is catered for through footnotes and appendices. for a reception scholar, the fascination of blake in translation is that his poetry, too, can exist in versions (complementing blake’s versions of his illuminated books) and in bilingual editions, which allow readers to move between originals and translation. particular choices made by translators introduce nuances that reflect back onto the original; a translation may be faithful to the source text, in the sense of a word-by-word rendition, but could equally be an equivalent. it is fairly straightforward to evoke the poetic elements (form, sound, and rhythm) of blake’s lyrical poetry in most european languages, but the prophecies tend to be done in prose. another factor is the selection, by editors of anthologies of english literature, of particular works or passages from blake’s poetry (which can be mediated through explanatory notes). because of his existences in different cultures as well as in versions of the illuminated books, blake can be seen to take on new life in his host culture. reception, therefore, is about how blake is presented by an artist, critic, or translator, and how he is framed by explanatory texts and information and in relation to new cultural contexts. the manner in which he is introduced and perceived is important, because rather than being acculturated, blake appears to be transculturated. to quote damrosch again: “if we do want to see the work of world literature as a window on different parts of the world, we must take into account the way its images have been multiply refracted in the process of transculturation” (“what is world literature?” 13). i wish to stress that damrosch’s position is articulated in response to the suspicion intrinsic to any cultural exchange; driven by the economic or imperialist agendas of the dominant culture, works of art are being “manipulated” or even “deformed” to suit new audiences, resulting in the loss of essence or soul. blake’s increasing visibility and popular reach, in other words, are potentially damaging to whatever we might perceive as the real blake. damrosch counters this phenomenon by emphasizing that every single item is “the locus of a negotiation between two different cultures” (14). this mode of cultural negotiation takes us back to the question of how many blakes we want, because tolerance is required for this dialogue to work, so that many blakes, popular and academic, can coexist. blake is known well beyond the borders of his homeland, but i don’t want to make a case for his place in the canon of world literature, though thinking of him as global has certain advantages for conceptualizing blake. globalization here means the circulation of literature on a large scale: a text travels, or rather circulates worldwide, beyond the borders of its national culture. the word “circulation” connotes movement, in the sense of travel, but also evokes a more temporally limited absence as well as a taking roots abroad, creating a scenario where blake is received—​that is, where foreign writers, translators, academics, and artists reach out and “take” him so that they can use him and his works, appropriate him for their own creative practices. in damrosch’s words, “virtually all literary works are born within what we would now call a national literature. the modern nation is, of course, a relatively recent development, but even older works were produced in local or ethnic configurations that have been subsumed into the national traditions within which they are now preserved and transmitted” (“national contexts” 513). integrating blake into another cultural context or artistic practice can be viewed as an act of protest, because his reputation and national identity, even if the latter gets ignored, make him a conscious choice to start with.blake’s contribution to counterculture and his “status as an agent of ‘forwardness’ in the visual and performing arts” are discussed in colin trodd and jason whittaker’s special issue of visual culture in britain, “william blake: the man from the future?”: “blake has been imagined as a friend of the future, a revolutionary, whose art—​or ideas about art—​outran his own period and predicted later developments in visual culture” (285). “taking” blake comes with a careful weighing up of the national world or context that he is a part of, and to take blake most certainly speaks to anglophile attitudes in the receiving culture. he is chosen precisely because he is english, which means that reception is an alliance with something that is other. it is not blake who chose to travel. foreign critics, artists and writers, translators and musicians borrow and interweave themes and ideas that can be found in or traced back to blake; they adapt them to integrate them into their own contexts and traditions. these processes of reception underline what damrosch calls the “creative [and critical] agency” of those engaging with, rather than just passively receiving, blake: it is equally possible to put the emphasis on the creative agency of the local writer, who may draw on the wider literary world less for its own sake than in order to open up new possibilities within the local tradition—​the sail coming in. this involves a different dynamic than the supplanting of local genres by imported ones; instead, the writer draws freely and quite selectively on foreign elements that can be reformulated and repurposed within a vital and ongoing home tradition. (“alternative discourse” 308) blake does not float free of context, even if some of his proverbs or images from the illuminated books do. the contributors to this special issue have found evidence of academic and creative engagement with blake abroad. in other words, blake does not exist inside the boundaries of his homeland alone, nor has he been confined inside the walls of british institutions since the early nineteenth century. contents of this special issue blake’s european reception started in the nineteenth century, consolidated around 1900, and gained momentum after the end of the cold war in 1989. despite ongoing research, there are few explorations of his reception outside his home country and anglo-american scholarship; in-depth case studies of his influence on european cultures are rare. a main route into blake has been and remains the study of historical context. in this special issue, familiar contexts are replaced with new contexts that merit our full attention, as they present the precise situation for blake and his receiving cultures. the issue continues to build the histories of his international reputation and inform on the significance of blake for other cultures. following on from reception, it offers case studies on blake in europe, charting lines of influence through books owned, annotated, and translated, and discussing how artistic, literary, and musical responses to blake’s work can be traced to some of the most exciting art in europe. each contributor details reception processes, ranging from acknowledging shared ideas, formal descriptors of language, and poetic elements to technical or mythographic challenges involved in producing the composite nature of blake’s works; each step for the artist or writer is filled with personal significance and each artist’s or writer’s response is articulated in dialogue with blake. the contributions showcase intricate knowledge and understanding of blake (person and/​or works) and present different ways of relating blake to his audiences. the issue is in two parts. part 1 starts with cătălin ghiță’s account of the romanian radio play biblia neagră a lui william blake (william blake’s black bible, 2016), written and directed by ilinca stihi. in his discussion of the “convoluted yet exciting spiritual recasting of blake’s complex and often baffling mythological universe,” ghiță gives a voice to the artist and identifies different musical forms and “allusion[s] and cross-reference[s]” to blake, explaining the significance of stihi’s coming to terms with a national disaster in dialogue with blake, whom she regards as “a rock star.” ghiță’s analysis shows the potential of blake when he is taken outside english culture; it also gives substance to the idea that blake scholars can understand their own cultures better through blake. a similar point is made by eliza borkowska, whose article focuses on czesław miłosz (1911–​2004), the polish-american poet, writer, and nobel prize winner, and his ziemia ulro (1977), translated into english as the land of ulro (1984). she quotes miłosz, who lived in exile and taught at berkeley, to exemplify the catalytic role that blake can play—​“i inhabited the land of ulro long before blake taught me its proper name”—​and explains that miłosz “does not mean capitalist america, or capitalist france, or, for that matter, communist poland, but modern civilization.” borkowska demonstrates that “it is from blake that miłosz derives the metaphors and concepts, including the titular ‘ulro,’ that organize his autobiographical book.” miłosz’s juxtaposition of blake with swedenborg and oscar miłosz, a french-lithuanian poet, brings “into focus a number of qualities of the prophetic works that become especially apparent when these works are handled in the medium of a foreign language.” in the context of this special issue, “polish blake” illustrates what happens when blake is drawn into a reflection on totalitarianism and spirituality. miłosz, to quote borkowska once more, “widens the spectrum of blake reference.” further evidence for the significance of applying blake to private as well as to public matters surfaces in the articles by luisa calè (italian blake) and vera serdechnaia (russian blake). calè’s discussion of corrado costa’s william blake in beulah (1977), a cartoon essay or comic book, presents blake as an enabler for “an avant-garde experiment in visual adaptation” and a direct influence: “encountering blake’s poems as typographical texts rather than in facsimiles reproducing his illuminated printing offered costa a visionary prompt to invent a new visual idiom around the words.” calè’s analysis is a fascinating reading, conditioned by the material conditions of the comic book; her article illuminates how “costa’s comic-panel grids challenge the expectation of sequential action subdivided in discrete spatiotemporal units.” considering ideas about hidden potential, calè brings the subversive and rebellious facets of blake to the fore: the result of costa’s “creative-critical intervention is to release blake’s sexual and political revolution.” costa, in other words, responds to blake but also makes us understand blake better: “costa’s art of spacing releases a free-love utopia from the control of blake’s syntax.” in the next article, serdechnaia examines the connection with blake in the work of the early twentieth-century russian poet nikolai gumilyov. like calè, she sketches a specific historical context for blake’s reception, including routes of transmission, reminding us of w. b. yeats’s role in the popularization of blake abroad. serdechnaia shares an archival discovery and discusses how blake’s poetry suited gumilyov’s poetics: “a leitmotif in gumilyov’s poetry is the spiritual pilgrimage, the return to the ‘india of the spirit’—​his special image of eden or a promised land in ‘zabludivshiisia tramvai’ [“the tram that lost its way”].” gumilyov’s translation of “the mental traveller”—​the first known—​dates from 1918–​21 and is one of several translations of english romantic poetry done on his return from london. his decision to translate blake was of personal significance, says serdechnaia, as he was working on a volume of his own poetry that includes an epigraph from blake’s “the land of dreams.” gumilyov’s engagement with blake was cut short; he was arrested and executed by the cheka in august 1921. part 2 starts with “‘re-mediating’ william blake in croatia and serbia.” tanja bakić returns to artworks that she introduced in her chapter in reception in order to explore how their originators, the contemporary artists zdenka pozaić, simonida rajčević, and aleksandra m. jovanić, perceived and received blake in their creative processes. bakić’s article, with its focus on mediation and remediation—​following linda hutcheon’s ideas about cultural transmissions as adaptations and reformatting—​gives insights into methodology and explains how blake’s work was transposed into new cultural contexts. in her case study, she thinks through the different processes of reception against a carefully woven review of literature; this review includes a discussion of broader issues pertaining to the “aural aspects” of romantic poetry, with reference to blake’s “proverbs of hell” and goode’s article “blakespotting.” bakić engages with goode’s take on blake’s popularity, based on freely circulating proverbs. she investigates how blake texts can take over and establish, rather than just inspire, artistic processes, which means that in her opinion, artists—​who are part of the audience that goode is talking about—​remain in control: “these ‘re-mediations’ … display ‘the ability to wrest works of art from the past by means of new interpretations, to translate them into a new present, to make the experiences preserved in past art accessible again …’” (quoting jauss). the next contribution is cristina flores’s article on the spanish poet leopoldo maría panero (1948–​2014). she expands her work on blake’s spanish reception by discussing panero’s capacity for visions and penchant for the theme of madness, arguing that his various blake-inspired poems reveal a darker, more gothic blake. according to flores, panero identified with the rose in “the sick rose” and associated it with death and dying in his own poems. about this powerful transformation of ideas, which extends to blake’s “tyger,” she writes: “panero, who claimed to feel ‘sick as a rose,’ found in blake’s ‘the sick rose’ a powerful metaphor for mental illness, another of the central concerns in his poetry”; “in panero’s imagery the rose and the tiger are often associated … as the tiger also represents his insanity.” noting panero’s lifelong drug abuse and precarious mental health, she emphasizes that “unlike blake’s songs of experience, in panero’s literary realm there is no room for the potential triumph of innocence.” panero was, as flores explains, “a polyglot, who mastered both english and french”; he was able to read blake in english and write in english as well as spanish. unmediated access to blake surfaces again in alcinda pinheiro de sousa, cláudia franco souza, and joão carlos callixto’s contribution on fernando pessoa (1888–​1935) and the portuguese band três tristes tigres. their article bears testimony to the breadth of blake’s reception in portugal, previously recorded in reception; it details the rise of english scholarship on pessoa and the importance of english literature for him. pessoa, who posthumously became a symbol of his nation’s culture, was “a superbly inspired reader of blake” in particular. his reading of blake, though of course refracted through a different culture and linguistic background that included his english schooling in durban, raises questions about his creative process, and the authors share archival evidence of his awareness of and preoccupation with blake to argue that he “chose to confront blake’s influence.” similarly, the first musical adaptation of a poem by blake (“the tyger”) to be sung in portuguese, which “is indeed an inspired and inspiring example of a close musical reading of the poem,” gets contextualized within the trends and developments of portuguese pop-rock music. in an interview, the band’s guitar player, alexandre soares, told callixto: “‘blake is no one’s contemporary.’” pondering soares’s appraisal of blake through the words of jorge luis borges while considering broader issues in academic and popular cultures, the authors emphasize in their conclusion that “borges’s statement seems to resonate in pessoa, who wrote about ‘the problem of celebrity, both occasional and permanent’ almost a century ago … : ‘a blake or a shelley can never appeal to the generality of any age; they have the beauty of rarities rather than the beauty of perfect things.’” the final contribution is on the german-jewish expressionist painter and writer ludwig meidner (1884–​1966), who, like panero, experienced visions. meidner read ruthven todd’s edition of gilchrist’s biography in the 1940s and knew that blake was interested in mystical writers. his affinity with blake exists via the spiritual aspects of his art; the article, which explores the artistic and personal relationship between else and ludwig meidner, discusses how each connected with blake. the mystical tradition, including writers like boehme, swedenborg, and paracelsus, was frequently noted as a reference point in reception, even though frye had tried to put a stop to the practice of regarding blake as a mystic: “most of the poets generally called mystics might better be called visionaries, which is not quite the same thing” (frye 8).in “general note: blake’s mysticism,” appended to fearful symmetry (1947), frye explains: “the word ‘mystic’ has never brought anything but confusion into the study of blake, and, in my anxiety to prevent it from cluttering up this book, i have begun by conceding, as a sort of opening gambit, the conventional mystic’s attitude to the artist as the imperfect mystic who cannot wholly detach himself from the sensible world” (431). since frye, the consensus has been that blake was not a mystic but a visionary. my article on the meidners agrees with frye’s assessment, because ludwig did not perceive blake as a mystic, and argues that blake, for ludwig, was a figure of identification on account of the mystical qualities of his writings and art. ludwig, who was an orthodox jew, is unique in that he experienced the blake revival in 1940s london and had encountered blake in pre-world war ii germany. his connection is personal; he saw blake as a neglected figure. i examine his changing relations with blake and attitude toward visionary experiences after his return to germany in 1953, as well as blake’s role in joseph paul hodin’s writings about the meidners. meidner would have been able to study blake’s art at the tate gallery. his approach to blake was guided by what he knew about him (via blake’s german reception) and what he experienced during his encounters with the originals. viscomi’s discussion in william blake’s printed paintings of production methods, changes to objects, and the ensuing impact on interpretation helps with understanding the process of reception. viscomi reminds us that we cannot claim that blake stays the same; new discoveries inevitably change how we perceive him and his works. in “posthumous blake” (2019), viscomi examines the qualities of posthumous prints and works through bibliographical facts and the provenances of blake’s illuminated books; he concludes that catherine was less actively engaged with posthumous printing than has previously been assumed. considering the production and reception of the prints, he not only corrects theories about catherine’s involvement in illuminated printing as “blake’s equal partner” (par. 138), but also insists that “we must continue to excavate the archives” (par. 140). there will always be more evidence; only evidence can curb speculation and redirect research and, as in this example, evaluate catherine’s role. his exhortation that we investigate blake’s markets resonates with the importance of the research into the particularities of blake’s writings and art, as well as the debates about artistic integrity. i enjoy spotting blake in unexpected places, but if we consider that neither blake nor his readers or viewers stay the same, we might be happy to admit that reception studies is an exciting, newly invigorated area of critical investigation within blake studies and at the interface of popular and academic debate. reading or viewing blake at home, online, or inside a gallery space is always framed; this frame, which prepares and sets the scene for the encounter in jauss’s sense of the horizon of expectation, mediates how blake is perceived and received. the connections are made in the minds of blake’s audiences. influence, therefore, should not be taken for granted, but discussed as part of comprehensive histories of linguistic and artistic, as well as social and cultural, transmission. we should consider how the discussion of influence is established or integrated into personal and academic narratives in meaningful ways. this can tell us about the significance of blake to other cultures. works cited ackroyd, peter. blake. london: sinclair-stevenson, 1995. bentley, g. e., jr. blake records. 2nd ed. new haven: yale university press, 2004. —​—​—​. the stranger from paradise: a biography of william blake. new haven: yale university press, 2001. blake, william. blake: complete writings with variant readings. ed. geoffrey keynes. rev. ed. london: oxford university press, 1971. —​—​—​. the complete poetry and prose of william blake. ed. david v. erdman. newly rev. ed. new york: anchor-random house, 1988. [abbreviated as e] —​—​—​. the william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. <http://​www.​blakearchive.​org>. bloom, harold. the anxiety of influence: a theory of poetry. 2nd ed. new york: oxford university press, 1997. bundock, chris, and elizabeth effinger, eds. william blake’s gothic imagination: bodies of horror. manchester: manchester university press, 2018. butlin, martin. the paintings and drawings of william blake. 2 vols. new haven: yale university press, 1981. clark, steve, tristanne connolly, and jason whittaker. “blake 2.0: introduction.” blake 2.0: william blake in twentieth-century art, music and culture. ed. steve clark, tristanne connolly, and jason whittaker. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, 2012. 1-10. damon, s. foster. a blake dictionary: the ideas and symbols of william blake. rev. ed., with a new foreword and annotated bibliography by morris eaves. hanover, nh: brown university press, 1988. damrosch, david. “what is world literature?” world literature today 77.1 (2003): 9-14. —​—​—​. “world literature as alternative discourse.” neohelicon 38 (2011): 307-17. —​—​—​. “world literature, national contexts.” modern philology 100.4 (2003): 512-31. eaves, morris. “on blakes we want and blakes we don’t.” huntington library quarterly 58.3/4 (1995): 413-39. —​—​—​. “romantic expressive theory and blake’s idea of the audience.” pmla 95.5 (1980): 784-801. erle, sibylle, and morton d. paley, eds. the reception of william blake in europe. 2 vols. london: bloomsbury, 2019. ferber, michael. review of the reception of william blake in europe, ed. sibylle erle and morton d. paley. eighteenth-century studies 53.2 (2020): 330-33. frye, northrop. fearful symmetry: a study of william blake. princeton: princeton university press, 1947. gadamer, hans-georg. truth and method. 1960 (in german). translation revised by joel weinsheimer and donald g. marshall. 2nd ed. london: continuum, 2004. genette, gérard. palimpsests: literature in the second degree. 1982 (in french). trans. channa newman and claude doubinsky. lincoln: university of nebraska press, 1997. goode, mike. “the joy of looking: what blake’s pictures want.” representations 119.1 (2012): 1-36. —​—​—​. romantic capabilities: blake, scott, austen, and the new messages of old media. oxford: oxford university press, 2020. higgs, john. william blake vs. the world. london: weidenfeld & nicolson, 2021. iser, wolfgang. “the reading process: a phenomenological approach.” new literary history 3.2 (1972): 279-99. jauss, hans robert. aesthetic experience and literary hermeneutics. 1977 (in german). trans. michael shaw. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 1982. —​—​—​. “literary history as a challenge to literary theory.” 1967 (in german). trans. elizabeth benzinger. new literary history 2.1 (1970): 7-37. larrissy, edward. blake and modern literature. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, 2006. makdisi, saree. reading william blake. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2015. mann, paul. review of william blake and the moderns, ed. robert j. bertholf and annette s. levitt. blake 17.4 (spring 1984): 169-72. mulhallen, karen. “blake in our time—​minute particulars.” blake in our time: essays in honour of g. e. bentley jr. ed. karen mulhallen. toronto: university of toronto press, 2010. 3-16. —​—​—​. “the william blake project.” university of toronto quarterly 80.4 (2011): 779-85. myrone, martin. “making prints, making a living.” william blake [catalogue of an exhibition at tate britain, london, 2019–​20]. with essays by martin myrone and amy concannon. london: tate publishing, 2019. 51-83. öwre, john. review of the reception of william blake in europe, ed. sibylle erle and morton d. paley. romantik: journal for the study of romanticisms 8.1 (2019): 159-62. tiutvinova, tatiana. “the reception of blake’s art in russia: an echo of blake’s universe.” erle and paley 2: 533-46. trodd, colin. visions of blake: william blake in the art world, 1830–​1930. liverpool: liverpool university press, 2012. trodd, colin, and jason whittaker. “introduction: william blake: the man from the future.” special issue, “william blake: the man from the future?” visual culture in britain 19.3 (2018): 285-88. viscomi, joseph. “posthumous blake: the roles of catherine blake, c. h. tatham, and frederick tatham in blake’s afterlife.” blake 53.2 (fall 2019): 141 pars. —​—​—​. william blake’s printed paintings: methods, origins, meanings. new haven: yale university press, 2021. whitson, roger, and jason whittaker. william blake and the digital humanities: collaboration, participation, and social media. new york: routledge, 2013. whittaker, jason. divine images: the life and work of william blake. london: reaktion books, 2021. b l a k e an illustrated quarterly the checklist issue: publications, music, exhibitions plus an interview with martin myrone on the upcoming tate exhibition volume 53 number 1 summer 2019 angela esterhammer, victoria college, university of toronto nelson hilton, university of georgia tilar j. mazzeo, colby college robert w. rix, university of copenhagen joseph viscomi, university of north carolina at chapel hill david worrall, the nottingham trent university martin butlin, tate gallery, london, retired tristanne j. connolly, university of waterloo detlef w. dörrbecker, university of trier sibylle erle, bishop grosseteste university robert n. essick, university of california, riverside a d v i s o r y b o a r d a n i l l u s t r a t e d q u a r t e r l y volume 53 number 1 summer 2019 c o n t e n t s www.blakequarterly.org articles william blake and his circle: a checklist of scholarship in 2018 by wayne c. ripley, with works in romance languages collected and compiled by fernando castanedo and works in japanese collected and compiled by hikari sato blake and music, 2018 by jason whittaker blake and exhibitions, 2018 by luisa calè interview william blake: the artist (tate britain, 11 september 2019–2 february 2020): an interview with martin myrone by luisa calè reviews william blake, vahiy kitapları [prophetic works], trans. kaan h. ökten reviewed by ramazan saral g. e. bentley, jr., boondoggles: travels of a restless professor reviewed by sarah jones © 2019 copyright morris eaves and morton d. paley cover: adapted from blake’s illustration to night thoughts, night v, page 44 (“but you are learn’d; in volumes, deep you fit; / in wisdom shallow: pompous ignorance!”). © trustees of the british museum. all rights reserved. 1929,0713.100 verso. e d i t o r s editors: morris eaves and morton d. paley review editor: alexander s. gourlay exhibitions editor: luisa calè bibliographer (criticism): wayne c. ripley bibliographer (music): jason whittaker managing editor: sarah jones sarah.jones@rochester.edu production office: department of english, university of rochester, rochester ny 14627-0451 interpreting blake’s the magdalene at the sepulchre 1. blake, the magdalene at the sepulchre (c. 1805). watercolor, 43.8 x 31.1 cm. yale center for british art, paul mellon collection. b1975.4.1794. see enlargement. interpreting blake’s the magdalene at the sepulchre by g. a. rosso g. a. rosso (rossoga1@gmail.com) has written and co-edited a number of books and essays on blake, including most recently the religion of empire: political theology in blake’s prophetic symbolism (2016), a study of blake’s three long poems. his essay “the lamb’s new song: apocalypse in early british hymnody” is forthcoming from religion & literature. the imagination.  that is god himself } עשי jesus the divine body it manifests itself in his works of art blake, יה & his two sons in 1805, blake painted the beautiful, solemn watercolor the magdalene at the sepulchre for his friend and patron thomas butts (illus. 1). it illustrates a scene from the resurrection narrative in the gospel of john, capturing the moment before mary recognizes that the figure who appears to her, outside the tomb, is the risen jesus: but mary stood without at the sepulchre weeping: and as she wept, she stooped down, and looked into the sepulchre, and seeth two angels in white sitting, the one at the head, and the other at the feet, where the body of jesus had lain. and they say unto her, woman, why weepest thou? she saith unto them, because they have taken away my lord, and i know not where they have laid him. and when she had thus said, she turned herself back, and saw jesus standing, and knew not that it was jesus. (20.11-14)all quotations from the bible are from the king james version, unless otherwise noted. the scene continues with an exchange between mary and jesus in which she at first mistakes him for the gardener and then recognizes him as her teacher (“rabboni”) once he calls her name. jesus tells her not to touch him because he has not yet ascended, then commissions her to inform the disciples of his resurrection and imminent ascent (20.15-18). this dialogue serves as the source of an extensive iconographic tradition in western art, the noli me tangere (“touch me not”), treated by giotto, fra angelico, dürer, titian, correggio, michelangelo, and rembrandt, among others (see illus. 2-4).nancy lists over forty paintings (103-05). the noli me tangere imagery traces back to illuminated manuscripts, altarpieces, and wall paintings in the ninth to tenth centuries (benay and rafanelli 20, 149). 2. fra angelico, noli me tangere (c. 1440–45). fresco, 180 x 146 cm. museum of san marco, florence. image courtesy of scala/​art resource, new york. 3. titian, noli me tangere (c. 1514). oil, 110.5 x 91.9 cm. image © national gallery, london/​art resource, new york. ng270. 4. rembrandt, christ and st. mary magdalene at the tomb (1638). oil, 61 x 49.5 cm. image courtesy of the royal collection trust/​© her majesty queen elizabeth ii, 2020. rcin 404816. though the biblical text is not explicit, most representations foreground the awkward dynamics of mary reaching toward jesus as he tries to avoid her touch (kleinbub 84). blake’s decision to illustrate the moment before the noli me tangere exchange is a significant departure from tradition and leads to a major iconographic innovation. he rearranges the pictorial space and thereby alters the figural dynamic of the scene: instead of the standard left-to-right movement of mary toward jesus, he creates a vertical plane that situates her at the center of the design.titian and dürer position jesus to mary’s left, but they too focus on her effort to touch him. rembrandt’s version is unique and anticipates blake in that he depicts mary kneeling and turning back and to the right to see jesus. he also illustrates the moment before mary reaches toward jesus, though after he calls her name and she recognizes him. this move shifts the focus away from mary’s attempt to embrace jesus and places it on her personal struggle, her effort to comprehend the identity of the figure who appears above her. the magdalene’s expression of awe and surprise compels viewers to enter into her experience and confront the issues blake raises about the nature of the body and the role of imagination in portraying the resurrection. the painting was composed at a moment of transformation for blake, following a period of personal, poetic, and artistic crises at felpham under william hayley’s patronage (1800–03). it thus bears scrutiny in relation to other works he was undertaking at this time. of special interest are two related subgroups of biblical illustrations he painted for butts: one features “mary” designs—​mary magdalene, mary the mother of jesus, and mary of bethany—​and the other depicts the entombment and resurrection.“mary” paintings include the woman taken in adultery (butlin #486), the raising of lazarus (#487), mary magdalene washing christ’s feet (#488), christ in the house of martha and mary (#489), the crucifixion: “behold thy mother” (#497), the three maries at the sepulchre (#503), and the assumption of the virgin (#513). entombment scenes appear in the entombment (#498), christ in the sepulchre, guarded by angels (#500), the angel rolling the stone away from the sepulchre (#501), and the resurrection (#502). numbers refer to entries in butlin’s catalogue. images of most are available at the william blake archive under “drawings and paintings,” “water color drawings illustrating the bible”: <http://​www.​blakearchive.​org/​work/​biblicalwc>. these works were executed when blake also was revising vala or the four zoas, adding an account of the trial, crucifixion, burial, and resurrection of jesus (c. 1802–07). considered together, they provide a valuable perspective on blake’s evolving aesthetic, opening several points of contact between his poetry, his theory of art, and his religious beliefs. in particular, they offer insight into blake’s signature equation of jesus and the imagination, which reaches its fullest expression in jerusalem, the job engravings, and the יה & his two sons print, published in the 1820s. in the magdalene at the sepulchre, blake presents jesus in a fairly traditional manner. he wears a seamless gown, has long, curly hair and a beard, and a nimbus or halo emanates from his body. blake places him at the top center of the design, standing on a wall outside the tomb above and behind mary, facing forward and looking down toward her. his left foot, imprinted with a stigma, steps toward the edge of the wall, and stigmata are slightly visible on his hands. perhaps the most intriguing feature is the gesture he makes with his hands, which deviates from tradition by not seeking to elude or ward off the magdalene. his palms face downward but are slightly open, perhaps showing his wounds. below the magdalene, on a ledge inside the tomb, are a white cloth, perhaps the linen clothes jesus has put off, and two vessels—​an urn and a jar. two angels, kneeling in rapt devotion, stare solemnly at the ground where jesus had lain, their winged bodies giving off intense light and their necks and faces flushed with a rosy hue.like the angels in the frontispiece to blake’s illustrations for young’s night thoughts, the angels avert their gaze from the risen jesus, in contrast to the magdalene. mary kneels on the step leading into the tomb and wears a black gown; a veil partly covers her long, curly hair and her arms are at her side, palms down. most strikingly, she turns and stretches her neck and head up and to the right to look at jesus, her lips pale with surprise and bewilderment (illus. 5). blake has chosen to illustrate the most suspenseful moment in john’s resurrection scene (20.14). 5. detail, the magdalene at the sepulchre. several other elements are important for understanding the painting and the way blake interprets john, inventing details that diverge from the text and from the main iconographic tradition. first, in terms of the pictorial setting, mary and jesus have switched places: he is now outside the tomb and she occupies the place where he had lain before his resurrection (billingsley 120). second, his facial expression and the gesture of his hands seem to beckon or call her to rise from the tomb, exhorting her to overcome her grief and confusion. this reading can be supported by comparing mary’s look of astonishment and hand gesture with the similar gesture and facial expression of lazarus in the raising of lazarus (illus. 6). the hands of both figures seem to suggest levitation. 6. details, the raising of lazarus (left) and the magdalene at the sepulchre (right). image of the raising of lazarus (c. 1805) © aberdeen city council (art gallery & museums collection). watercolor, 40.7 x 29.6 cm. abdag002369. the lazarus design also depicts “mary” (a composite of mary of bethany and mary magdalene) turning to her right and looking up toward jesus, except in joy and exultation (illus. 7). 7. details, the raising of lazarus (left) and the magdalene at the sepulchre (right). further support for the “rise up” gesture appears in the assumption of the virgin (illus. 8), which depicts mary, jesus’s mother, ascending from earth in a joyous pose, a response to the infant christ summoning or blessing her from above, his hands echoing the gesture of the risen jesus in the magdalene at the sepulchre.in her essay on the assumption of the virgin, johnson emphasizes “the variations of the central figure’s outstretched arms and angular turn of the head appearing elsewhere in the watercolor series,” including the raising of lazarus, the magdalene at the sepulchre, and the great red dragon and the woman clothed with the sun (butlin #520) (“the death and assumption of blake’s mary” 158). 8. details, the assumption of the virgin (left) and the magdalene at the sepulchre (right). image of the assumption of the virgin (1806) courtesy of the royal collection trust/​© her majesty queen elizabeth ii, 2020. watercolor, 40.2 x 26.7 cm. rcin 913379. since john does not draw these parallels between lazarus and mary, blake is asserting his own inventive freedom as an illustrator and interpreter of the gospel. a further observation about the composition of the design can open other dimensions of meaning that go to the heart of blake’s christology and aesthetics. the scene within and outside the tomb is suffused with radiance, illuminating the darkness with remarkable yet subtle power. light emanates from jesus’s head and from his chest and hands. it also is visible through the arched doorway, appearing in the sky behind him and softly brushing the outline of the bushes (or tombstones), suggesting the arrival of the new dawn. traditionally jesus is the source of light, visually and metaphorically, although here a conceptual disruption occurs. it is striking how much light comes from within the tomb. it shines most vividly on or from the two angelic bodies, especially their heads and arms, and gleams off the walls, moving upward to illuminate the magdalene’s face, neck, and hands. as morton paley suggests, the radiance “cannot come from a single external light source but must be inner and spiritual.”paley also states that blake’s treatment is “a spiritual counterpart” or contrary “to rembrandt’s chiaroscuro” christ and st. mary magdalene at the tomb (illus. 4), in which jesus and the magdalene are illumined by natural light (56). yet rembrandt anticipates blake in depicting mary’s inner struggle, her “state of startled confusion” (dykema 255). in related terms, w. j. t. mitchell states that for blake, pictorial space exists as an “extension of the consciousness of the human figures it contains” (38). in this sense, the angels fulfill a traditional function as divine messengers and represent an aspect of mary’s experience. exegetically, blake follows john in associating the angels with mary, not with peter and the “beloved” disciple, who are the first to enter the sepulchre but do not see the angels. the angels’ question—“woman, why weepest thou?”—registers her inner struggle, her fear and grief at finding the tomb empty. it also triggers the impulse that leads mary to turn toward jesus. as they are placed prominently in the design and reflect the brightest light issuing from the tomb, they help highlight the revelation that emerges in mary’s exchange with the risen jesus. but blake delays this exchange to focus attention on mary’s struggle at the tomb, a place that seemed to preoccupy his imagination at this pivotal stage of his life. in addition to his entombment-resurrection designs for butts, he was commissioned in 1805 to produce a set of drawings from robert blair’s the grave (1743), with similar eschatological themes and overlapping subjects for illustration.several of the engravings include images of a grave or tomb. in “christ descending into the grave,” the portrayal of jesus bears a close resemblance to the one in the magdalene at the sepulchre (see william blake archive, “commercial book illustrations,” the grave, object 3). he also was reminiscing about his gothic apprenticeship days to benjamin heath malkin, whose a father’s memoirs of his child (1806) contains an account of blake’s formative experiences among the sepulchral monuments of westminster abbey. in letters of this time, blake recalls his early days as a visionary engraver and history painter, claiming that his vocational struggles at felpham led to a “restoration to the light of art” (e 756). as david bindman comments, blake’s renewed sense of the gothic provides “a link between [his] youth and his present regenerate state,” which is associated with the “divine radiance and visionary clarity” expressed in his watercolor drawings (141). but this positive view must be placed alongside the more problematic focus on the tomb or sepulchre that blake brings to his revisions of vala. one of the most stimulating points of convergence in blake’s work at this moment is his preoccupation with the tomb as the site of an epochal struggle over the history and meaning of christianity. 2 the empty tomb is the most common feature shared by the gospel resurrection narratives, and one in which women play a primary role, a fact blake incorporates into both his watercolor series and his vala revisions.johnson suggests that blake’s gospel designs featuring women may have been commissioned to adorn the walls of a girls’ school managed by butts’s first wife, elizabeth (“the death and assumption of blake’s mary” 148). in night viii especially, the tomb is at the center of the poem’s proliferating narratives and is a key to the ultimate fate of the manuscript.pierce provides a helpful account of the narrative complexities and stages of the manuscript (39-62). the scenes at the tomb give rise to two contrasting modes of christianity: the true visionary religion of jesus that blake associates with the figure of jerusalem, and its false institutional simulacrum, or state religion, which he names rahab. the imbrication of these figures, which is a major theme of blake’s long poems, emerges in the space between crucifixion and resurrection, the moment captured in the magdalene at the sepulchre. unlike the watercolor, however, in vala the female character at the tomb (jerusalem) is overcome with fear and doubt and does not embrace the resurrection faith. to account for the difference between the poem and the entombment-resurrection watercolors we must delve briefly into the thicket of revisions to vala, where mary magdalene makes two fleeting but revealing appearances. blake initially conflates mary magdalene and rahab to suggest that mary becomes part of the development of the false church, but he later backs off this move in other revisions that distinguish the two characters. the closest parallels between the painting and the poem occur in the drama at the tomb following rahab’s crucifixion of jesus, especially on page 106, one of the most important and heavily revised pages in the manuscript.in an earlier draft the page directly linked the crucifixion (lines 1-6) with the merger and transformation of rahab-urizen (lines 17-48), the first and second portions of page 106 in erdman’s edition (e 379, 381-82). blake added the burial passage and instructions to “turn back 3 leaves”—​that is, to the bottom half of page 113, followed by pages 114-16 (e 379-81), containing three consecutive designs of the risen jesus. see pierce (127-39) and rosso (72-82) for discussion. this page contains the first of two entombment scenes in the manuscript, a ten-line marginal passage (106.7-16, e 379) in which los and jerusalem remove the body of jesus from the cross and jerusalem makes the fateful proposal: “let us build / a sepulcher & worship death in fear … / … / and let all nations of the earth worship at the sepulcher.” the scene is repeated nearly verbatim at the end of the night, just prior to rahab’s triumph over jerusalem, though blake adds a historical reference, saying that “jerusalem wept over the sepulcher two thousand years” (110.30-33, e 385). more significantly for my purposes, the second burial account replaces and follows a deleted passage in which jerusalem is identified with rahab through an allusion to mary magdalene: but rahab [hewd] a sepulcher in the rock of eternity and placing in the sepulcher the body which she had taken from the divine lamb wept over the sepulcher weaving her web of religion around the sepulcher times after times beside jerusalems gate but as she wove behold the bottom of the sepulcher rent & a door was opend thro the bottom of the sepulcher into eternity and as she wove she heard a voice behind her calling her she turnd & saw the divine vision & her (e 843) blake identifies rahab with jerusalem by saying that she weaves her religion “times after times beside jerusalems gate,” a temporal reference he associates with the two-thousand-year era of christendom in the revised passage. but along with the identification of rahab and jerusalem, the deleted passage implicates mary magdalene in creating the web of religion, for as rahab weaves she hears “a voice behind her calling her / she turnd & saw the divine vision & her.” blake abandons this version for the one involving los and jerusalem, but his allusion to the magdalene’s encounter with the risen jesus invites comparison with the watercolor. blake’s decision to break off the passage mid-sentence suggests ambivalence toward the figure of mary in the late revisions. he focuses on the same scene from john’s gospel in both the magdalene at the sepulchre and vala, but for rahab he chooses the moment after jesus calls mary’s name and “she turned herself” a second time, recognizing him and reaching to touch him (20.16-17). blake avoids the moment of recognition in the watercolor and forecloses it in the poem. john pierce shows that blake’s reason for canceling the lines before completing them is that he decides to place the revelation of rahab nearer to the crucifixion and to create a narrative connection between her exposure (113.38-43, e 379-80) and los’s long speech to her (113.46-116.6, e 380-81). the lines describing rahab’s revelation are taken from one of the few extant draft pages (145.20-23): but when rahab had cut off the mantle of luvah from the lamb of god it rolld apart, revealing to all in heaven and all on earth the temple & the synagogue of satan & mystery even rahab in all her turpitude …. (113.38-41, e 379-80) and rahab stripd off luvahs robes from off the lamb of god then first she saw his glory & her harlot form appeard in all its turpitude beneath the divine light & of luvahs robes she made herself a mantle (145.20-23, e 842) in both passages rahab weaves a “mantle” out of jesus’s mortal body, thus creating a church or temple in which to worship his death. blake brilliantly enacts this exposure of rahab’s temple form (her religion) simultaneously with the revelation of jesus’s immortal body. but in the draft passage, blake explicitly references rahab’s “harlot form” in the moment that she sees jesus “beneath the divine light,” the same moment that rahab turns to see the divine vision in the deleted passage on page 110. in effect, the lines from page 145 can serve to complete the canceled passage on page 110: “she turnd & saw the divine vision & her [harlot form appeard].” blake is thus very close to identifying rahab and mary magdalene, but he chooses not to make this potential link a part of the poem—​that is, he chooses not to identify mary magdalene with the false christian church that worships a dead christ at the holy sepulchre. he reserves that role for jerusalem, though her fate in the narrative is left undecided. at the opening of night ix, she still worships at the empty tomb, yet midway through the night she becomes the new jerusalem (122.1-20); how this comes about remains a mystery. without an articulated path from the tomb to the apocalypse, the poem lacks narrative coherence, which is one reason blake left it in manuscript form. 3 in addition to the watercolors and vala, blake engages with the figure of mary magdalene in two late works that present his most profound treatments of christianity, especially in relation to sexuality and the biblical idea of holiness. in the section “was jesus chaste” from the everlasting gospel (c. 1818) and on plates 60-62 of jerusalem (1820), he develops the positive portrayal of the magdalene from the watercolors while addressing the issue of doubt and despair that shadows her (and jerusalem) in the vala revisions. these texts differ from vala and the magdalene at the sepulchre in presenting their scenes through dialogue between jesus and the female characters and, more importantly, by adding the concept of chastity as the main target of critique. the women, like those in vala and the watercolors, are composite figures, though in the texts their dialogues with jesus involve painful self-reflections that bring intellectual and spiritual breakthroughs. the texts offer a creative response to the gospel depictions of mary magdalene, affirming the essential role of imaginative vision in the resurrection. they also exhibit what christopher hobson describes as a “regendering” of “theological authority” (par. 31), an issue at the heart of current feminist scholarship on mary magdalene and her role in early christianity.johnson lists several key magdalene studies in her bibliography to “blake’s mary and martha” (107-08). i have drawn especially on the work of d’angelo, de boer, and schaberg. the “was jesus chaste” section of the everlasting gospel contains the only explicit treatment of mary magdalene outside the watercolor series. as in the magdalene at the sepulchre—​but unlike vala or jerusalem—​she is the main character, although she is conflated with the woman taken in adultery (john 8.3-11) and, more obliquely, with jesus’s mother.lines from a canceled draft section, “was jesus born of a virgin pure,” state: “if he intended to take on sin / the mother should an harlot been / just such a one as magdalen / with seven devils in her pen” (e 877). blake follows tradition in regarding the magdalene as a reformed prostitute. in the dialogue between jesus and mary (lines 43-80, e 521-22), the core issue hinges on her willingness to open herself to jesus and confess her “sin” so that he can forgive it. however, mary comes to recognize that her sin—​the “seven devils” that torment her (luke 8.2)—​is not adultery or harlotry but a “dark pretence to chastity,” an outward show of morality that veils her desire for love, rendering “that a lawless thing / on which the soul expands its wing.” her sin is to internalize the view of those who condemn her for selling her body to survive: “that they may call a shame & sin / loves temple that god dwelleth in / and hide in secret hidden shrine / the naked human form divine” (lines 63-66). the juxtaposition of the hidden shrine and human form divine gets to the heart of blake’s critique of biblical teaching about holiness. as in jerusalem, the shrine doubles here as the tabernacle holy of holies and female genitalia. in the biblical temple, the inner sanctuary was separated from the rest of the congregation by a veil or partition, designed to protect god’s holiness from violation; at his death, jesus rends the veil, opening a “new and living way” between earth and heaven, humanity and the divine (hebrews 10.19-20). the shrine also serves to symbolize “sexual religion,” a phrase blake uses to convey how patriarchal control of women’s sexuality is secured by the code of chastity (jerusalem 44 [30].11, e 193). mary struggles to overturn this code’s hold on her by redefining adultery and harlotry not as sins against moral law but as blasphemy against jesus himself—​an unforgivable act in his teaching (mark 3.29). her intellectual and spiritual advance comes when she questions the finality of this judgment.in “blake, paul, and sexual antinomianism,” hobson argues that mary’s redefinition leads to her breakthrough in lines 75-80 (par. 27). she realizes that even the unforgivable act can be forgiven, an insight achieved by experiencing jesus’s redemptive death as her own: “and canst thou die that i may live / and canst thou pity & forgive” (lines 79-80). mary’s insight concludes the dialogue and her question is answered affirmatively, as it triggers the section’s denouement in the crucifixion: “then rolld the shadowy man away / from the limbs of jesus to make them his prey” (lines 81-82). this image mirrors the moment in vala when rahab strips the mantle from jesus and “it rolld apart,” exposing her as the false church. though the text is not explicit, we can assume, as christopher rowland argues, that mary’s “appropriation of christ’s experience on the cross” leads to her redemption, to her “rediscovering” the human form divine within (blake and the bible 135, 190). but as in vala, the resurrection is not portrayed explicitly in the text. only in jerusalem does blake fully address the issue he leaves unresolved in vala, returning also to the moment he visualizes in the magdalene at the sepulchre. on plates 60-62 of jerusalem, in his closest textual analogue to the butts painting, blake associates his titular heroine with both mary the mother of jesus and mary magdalene. the depth and complexity of his pictorial treatment of the magdalene are given poetic voice. as in the everlasting gospel, jesus—​or alternately here “the lamb of god” or “the divine voice”—​initiates the exchange.though blake does not use the name jesus on these plates, he refers to the speaker as “the divine lamb,” “the divine voice,” and “the lamb of god” (60.50, 60.65, 62.30, e 211, 213), phrases he often uses to designate jesus. he asks a series of questions that address the causes of jerusalem’s exile in babylon, challenging her complicity in being taken captive, the same situation she finds herself in at the end of night viii. similarly, the narrator tells us that vala has invaded jerusalem’s character and consciousness and “triumphs in pride of holiness” (60.45, e 210). as with the mary figure in “was jesus chaste,” jerusalem has internalized the code of chastity that condemns her as a harlot, though the conditions of her oppression here are much more devastating and difficult to overcome. imprisoned in a babylonian dungeon, she is beaten, tortured, and degraded to the point that “she raves upon the winds hoarse, inarticulate” (60.44). and while she still can see “the lineaments divine” and hear “the voice” of jesus, she remains confused, expressing the same bewilderment as jerusalem in the first vala entombment scene: “art thou alive! & livest thou for-evermore? or art thou / not: but a delusive shadow, a thought that liveth not” (60.54-55, e 211). despite her abject state, jerusalem insists that she knows jesus and affirms his presence “even in this dungeon,” saying “altho i sin & blaspheme thy holy name, thou pitiest me” (60.58-62), echoing mary’s insight in the everlasting gospel. yet unlike mary, who seems better able to resist the code that labels her an adulterer, jerusalem has become more deeply “deluded” into accepting the harlot label (60.63-64). in response, jesus offers jerusalem a vision to comfort her, an account of the mary-joseph story from matthew that inverts its orthodox meaning and undermines the equation of holiness and virginity. this justly celebrated retelling of matthew’s infancy narrative too often is read in isolation from the larger context of jesus and jerusalem’s exchange, which situates the story in a broader, richer web of biblical allusions and traditions. the most relevant of these are biblical treatments of jerusalem’s fall and exile in babylon and the covenant marriage metaphor, especially the harlot image that the prophets use to denounce her sins and justify her fallen condition.as baumann shows, in “prophetic marriage imagery” adultery and harlotry are equivalent terms, especially in relation to israel and jerusalem (figured as female), whose “idolatry” violates the covenant relation with god (1, 43). blake attaches this imagery to joseph, who responds in anger to mary’s “illegitimate” pregnancy, exclaiming “should i / marry a harlot & an adulteress?” (61.5-6, e 211). blake also departs from matthew by having mary speak on her own behalf, standing up to joseph and rejecting the demand for remorse and purification as inadequate to the covenant of forgiveness. after an angel convinces joseph to accept mary’s “impure” state, she breaks into a song of joy that contains a complex series of voices interweaving her story and identity with jerusalem’s. in the song, jerusalem’s voice emerges in a passage that disrupts the celebration of mary’s reunion with joseph: “and i heard the voice … / … saying, am i jerusalem the lost adulteress? or am i / babylon come up to jerusalem?” the questions recall jerusalem’s identity crisis in night viii, although here a second voice directly follows the first with another set of questions, echoing mary’s insight: “does the voice of my lord call me again? am i pure thro his mercy / and pity” (61.33-37, e 212). jerusalem struggles to internalize mary’s voice against her own shame and despair, entrapped by the judgments of her “idolatrous” and traumatic history. but she restores her sense of integrity and her relationship to god by redefining his holiness as forgiveness and compassion, thus envisioning his divine humanity (61.37-46). the song then appears to end positively, with jerusalem alluding to isaiah’s uniquely empathic use of the marriage metaphor: “fear not; for thou shalt not be ashamed …. thy maker … hath called thee as a woman forsaken …. for a small moment have i forsaken thee; but with great mercies will i gather thee” (isaiah 54.4-7).in isaiah, god looks upon the exile as caused by his abandonment of jerusalem, taking responsibility for the marriage crisis in what baumann regards as “an astonishing pose of self-renunciation toward his wife” (185). but jerusalem’s identification with mary remains problematic. jesus follows the song with an account of his own birth in which jerusalem serves as midwife in the establishment of western christendom: mary leaned her side against jerusalem, jerusalem recieved the infant into her hands in the visions of jehovah. times passed on jerusalem fainted over the cross & sepulcher she heard the voice wilt thou make rome thy patriarch … & the kings of europe his horsemen? (61.47-51, e 212) we have returned to the moment of jerusalem’s capitulation at the sepulchre in vala. this development now serves, however, as a catalyst for her spiritual evolution. in her final speech in the dialogue, a response to jesus’s call to repose on him “till the morning of the grave” (62.1), jerusalem transforms her fallen perspective at the tomb in vala and attains a revelation that augments mary’s radical stance and awareness in the infancy narrative. on plate 62, she at first reiterates mary’s insight that it is because of her impurity and sinfulness that she is forgiven and reconciled to jesus, who becomes her “husband” in spite of her “harlot” status (62.4-6, e 212-13). but she goes further in recognizing the flaws in the concepts of chastity and genealogy that inform the virgin birth. indeed, jerusalem achieves two major revelations in her speech. in the first, she says, “i see the maternal line, i behold the seed of the woman!” and she traces the line from genesis all the way to mary, whom she includes among “the daughters of vala, mother of the body of death” (62.8-13). this critical statement echoes both the proposal to worship “the body dead upon the cross” in night viii (e 379) and the equally critical statement at the end of the bard’s song in milton: “the body of death was perfected in hypocritic holiness, / around the lamb, a female tabernacle” (13 [14].25, e 107). uniquely in jerusalem, this revelation leads directly to a second one of even greater magnitude: but i thy magdalen behold thy spiritual risen body shall albion arise? i know he shall arise at the last day! i know that in my flesh i shall see god …. (62.14-16)in john, after jesus tells mary to announce his ascension to the others, the narrator states: “mary magdalene came and told the disciples that she had seen the lord” [or “i have seen the lord” (nrsv)] (20.18). despite her oppressed state, jerusalem achieves a level of consciousness matched only by albion’s visions of jesus later in the poem—​visually on plate 76 and textually on plate 96.the text reads: “jesus replied fear not albion unless i die thou canst not live / but if i die i shall arise again & thou with me” (96.14-15, e 255). interlacing references to the gospel of john and the book of job, blake presents jerusalem-magdalene not as a penitent prostitute but as a visionary and a prophet. jerusalem combines martha’s response to jesus about raising lazarus—​“i know that he shall rise again in the resurrection at the last day” (john 11.24)—​with job’s passionate response to his friend bildad—​“i know that my redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth: and … in my flesh shall i see god” (job 19.25-26). this creative exegesis enables jerusalem to surpass martha by imagining herself as the magdalene beholding the risen christ at the sepulchre. she sees beyond the body of death to the eschatological future, which blake’s jesus—​again quoting john (11.25)—​assures her is available in the present moment: “i am the resurrection & the life. / i die & pass the limits of possibility” (62.18-19). jerusalem’s vision of jesus’s spiritual body marks a stunning intellectual leap, one that offers an apt interpretive gloss on mary’s experience in the magdalene at the sepulchre. 4 blake’s concept of a spiritual body derives of course from paul, but he develops the idea in unique ways, combining paul with john to create a new theological and aesthetic perspective. he first uses the phrase in “to tirzah” (songs of experience) to counteract the power of generation he names tirzah and associates with mary, mother of jesus’s “mortal part.” claiming that jesus’s death has set him free, the speaker asks rhetorically, “then what have i to do with thee?” (line 16), quoting jesus’s brusque words to mary in john 2.4. below this line, written on the garment of the aged figure, is the verse from paul: “it is raised a spiritual body” (1 corinthians 15.44) (illus. 9).spector observes that tirzah takes on a more (ironically) redemptive role in vala: as “the means through which the incarnation can be achieved” (180), she enables jesus to give “his vegetated body / to be cut off & separated that the spiritual body may be reveald” (104.37-38, e 378). 9. detail, “to tirzah.” songs of innocence and of experience copy z (1789, 1794; printed 1826), plate 52. relief etching with hand coloring, 11.4 x 7.2 cm. library of congress, lessing j. rosenwald collection. 1801a. image courtesy of the william blake archive. simon jarvis comments that while blake develops paul’s concept, he alters its meaning: the spiritual body in paul is raised after the death of the natural body, while for blake “the spiritual body is the real one, now and eternally” (13). jarvis does not refer to john, but he suggests that blake adopts the more immediate or “realized” eschatology of john instead of paul’s focus on temporal sequence.it should be noted that in romans (6.9) and colossians (3.1), paul expresses a view similar to john’s in saying that followers are “raised from the dead” through the experience of baptism. these conceptions are in tension in paul’s work. in john, jesus announces that the “hour is coming, and now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the son of god: and they that hear shall live” (5.25, emphasis added). in his visual exegesis of these texts, blake is focused not on the nature or status of jesus’s risen body but on the centrality of transformation, coming to a different intellectual and ethical understanding of life through visionary perception. in discussing blake’s annotations to berkeley’s siris, jarvis makes another point about the spiritual body applicable to john’s magdalene. responding to blake’s notation “the natural body is an obstruction to the soul or spiritual body” (e 664), he writes that the natural body is “a mistake of our thinking, a self-misrecognition which our spiritual body makes” (13). again, however, jarvis does not reference john, whose mary initially seeks jesus’s natural body and at first misrecognizes his spiritual risen one, a mistake at the center of noli me tangere iconography. as we have seen, blake resists this move, focusing instead on mary’s turn away from the dead jesus and the sepulchral religion that typifies the church. blake also quotes john in an annotation that identifies the spiritual body with jesus manifesting himself as the divine imagination: “jesus considerd imagination to be the real man & says i will not leave you orphanned and i will manifest myself to you   he says also the spiritual body or angel as little children always behold the face of the heavenly father” (e 663). the text in john is one of the chief sources for blake’s theology and ethics: i will not leave you comfortless: i will come to you. yet a little while, and the world seeth me no more; but ye see me: because i live, ye shall live also. at that day ye shall know that i am in my father, and ye in me, and i in you. … he that loveth me shall be loved of my father, and i will love him, and will manifest myself to him. (14.18-21)the kjv reads “i will not leave you comfortless,” but “orphans” is used in multiple translations of the greek text available to blake; see wesley’s explanatory notes (256-57) and wakefield’s new testament (185). jesus’s prophetic statement, which is fulfilled when he appears to the magdalene at the tomb, is concerned less with the son’s relation to the father and more with how the divine presence is constituted by those whose love enables them to “see” jesus.adams makes a similar point in his analysis of the berkeley annotations, saying that jesus’s appearance to the magdalene and the other disciples is “an example of the imaginative power of those who saw” (156-57). the passage goes to the core of blake’s christian aesthetics, his emphasis on the transformative power of a faith informed by visionary experience, as his reuse of this statement in the job engravings affirms. blake’s reference to jesus manifesting himself comes from the farewell discourse in john (14-17), a major theological address that scholars view as a key for interpreting the magdalene’s encounter with jesus.see brown (1012) and de boer (172-76). rowland comments on the importance of this discourse to blake’s job engravings, plate 17 in particular, citing an inscription on the theme of mutual indwelling from the scroll in the lower margin: “at that day ye shall know that i am in / my father & you in me & i in you” (blake and the bible 60). rowland emphasizes that the visual appearance of god/​christ to job and his wife dominates the design of the plate, though the lower portion includes a medley of verses from john 14 that insist on the need for visionary experience in realizing this theme. the medley is headed by the caption for the central image, “i have heard thee with the hearing of the ear but now my eye seeth thee” (job 42.5), indicating the verse’s dual visual and thematic importance to the plate (illus. 10). 10. detail, illustrations of the book of job (1826), plate numbered 17. intaglio engraving, 20 x 15.1 cm. collection of robert n. essick. image courtesy of the william blake archive. blake twice quotes john 14.21 in these lines: in the open book to the left, on the right-hand side of the page, “he that loveth me / shall be loved of / my father,” and in the book to the right, on the left-hand side, “& i / will love him & / manifest myself / unto him.” or her, in the case of mary magdalene, who receives the supreme manifestation at the tomb, where she becomes the first apostle to see the spiritual risen body and to proclaim the resurrection. what rowland says of job is true of jerusalem and the magdalene—​that he comes “to a new theological understanding on the basis of vision” (“‘intimations’” 131).rowland adds that job’s wife shares job’s (and anticipates mary’s) transformative experience, for “she has sat in the dust with job throughout the previous sequence of images. blake has refused to allow her to have only a walk on part” (e-mail correspondence, 3 august 2019). an emphasis on the magdalene’s visionary experience also underpins the feminist recuperation of her in our time.d’angelo, schaberg, chilton, and de boer all emphasize the visionary element in the biblical and gnostic material on the magdalene. feminist scholarship challenges both the patristic devaluation of mary as a prostitute and modern subordination of her to the male disciples in the resurrection stories. scholars focus on the gospel of john because it gives the fullest and sharpest depiction of the magdalene as the primary witness and messenger of the easter faith, though traditional commentary argues that she did not grasp the full significance of her experience. jane schaberg contends that, until recently, the “protophany,” or first appearance of jesus to mary, has been regarded as “a minor, private … or unofficial encounter” in which a female follower is consoled by jesus before his public declaration (298). she argues that in the two scenes framing the encounter, the magdalene is “upstaged by the beloved disciple” (who is the first to “believe”) and by jesus’s response to thomas: “because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed” (john 20.8, 20.29). john’s emphasis in these scenes on belief over seeing diverts attention from mary’s role and “downgrade[s] the importance of her visionary experience” (337). on the other hand, esther de boer reads mary’s anguish and jesus’s consoling appearance to her as fulfillment of his prophecy in the farewell discourse: “let not your heart be troubled …. ye have heard how i said unto you, i go away, and come again unto you. if ye loved me, ye would rejoice, because i said, i go unto the father” (john 14.27-28).part of verse 28 appears on the scroll at the bottom of illustrations of the book of job plate 17, just below the lines on mutual indwelling. when jesus calls her name, mary recognizes that, despite her grief and bewilderment, she has not been orphaned, that jesus has manifested himself to her (173). further, jesus commissions her to proclaim his final message to the male disciples: “say unto them, i ascend unto my father, and your father; and to my god, and your god” (john 20.17). as de boer states (176-77), when mary delivers the message to the disciples, “i have seen the lord,” she establishes her prophetic and apostolic authority in the same manner as paul (acts 9.3-18; see illus. 11). with these comments in mind, we can turn to an important set of questions posed by mary lynn johnson about blake’s biblical watercolors: by choosing subjects or emphasising details passed over by other artists … does blake unsettle viewers’ expectations, defamiliarise well-known (perhaps too well-known) gospel stories of women, and open both texts and their associated iconographic traditions to interpretative possibilities that engage feminist biblical scholars of our time? (“blake’s mary and martha” 100) regarding the magdalene at the sepulchre, the answer is yes to each. blake’s choice to illustrate the moment that precedes mary’s recognition of jesus preempts a traditional iconographic treatment of the scene. he shifts focus away from jesus’s rebuff of mary, obviating the need to correct her or illustrate her ignorance and sensuality. he also avoids the tendency to represent mary as she “reaches toward the groin of jesus, and he recoils,” as schaberg puts it (330-31). susan haskins records the “transmutation of mary magdalene into a venus-figure,” beginning in the sixteenth century with naturalistic portrayals of her by titian and correggio: “correggio’s penitent in her grotto,” she writes, “had an extraordinary career which took her into the realms of eighteenthand nineteenth-century erotica” (236).haskins includes an array of images depicting mary’s erotic sanctity, culminating in the magdalene “craze” of the eighteenth century; see especially chapter 8, “vanitas,” for blake’s context. haskins attributes this change partly to the aesthetic shift in these centuries toward a more realistic style of drawing and partly to the counter-reformation, which oversaw the emergence of a sensual but chaste magdalene as “a symbol of church triumphant, of the true faith” (252). against this historical tradition, which he associates with rahab, blake reasserts the primacy of the florentine style, especially that of fra angelico and michelangelo. jean hagstrum suggests that in his noli me tangere (illus. 2), fra angelico showed blake “how to paint a resurrected body,” or “how to etherealize it without robbing it of substance” (144-45). he also provided a model for michelangelo and others to counter the trend that eroticized the magdalene in the guise of piety. analyzing michelangelo’s noli me tangere drawing, christian kleinbub argues that he deliberately toned down titian’s “sensual, even romantic, undertones” to focus attention on mary’s “astonishment before the image” (91-92, 122), a comment that applies to blake’s painting as well.kleinbub suggests that the gesture of michelangelo’s jesus touching mary’s right breast “served as an inverted sign for incorporeal sensations,” symbolizing the act of “planting … the seed of faith in [her] heart” (82, 117). yet despite indebtedness to them, blake’s portrayal of the magdalene as a spiritual seeker in an austere, gothic setting is even more devoid of naturalistic detail than the florentines’. in the history of our lord as exemplified in works of art, the victorian art historian anna jameson takes fra angelico to task for introducing what she deems the “wretched conceit” of portraying jesus as a gardener and the “miserable absurdity of commemorating [mary’s] momentary mistake” in reaching to touch him (2.281-82). while blake avoids both these features, as well as the convention of dressing mary in red to signify her sinfulness, angelico’s treatment remains important to him for other reasons. the french art theorist georges didi-huberman argues that the friar subscribed to an incarnational theology that enabled him to express the “mystery in bodies beyond bodies,” to embody “the supernatural in the visible or familiar aspect of things” (6). he finds a “pictorial equivalent” to this doctrine in the concept of “dissemblance,” an idea based on the medieval distinction between divine and phenomenal reality, which he says angelico uses in noli me tangere to disrupt the mimetic surface of the design. he points to the flowers on the ground between mary and jesus, showing that angelico applies red splotches of paint to create a mimesis of flowers that are, in fact, not like flowers at all, but a “displacement” of the stigmata on jesus’s feet, “a repetition of the same pictorial sign” (20). thus, angelico overlays the visible aspect of the image with “a visual operation” that seeks to “draw the gaze beyond the eye, the visible beyond itself, into the regions of the imaginary” (4). blake’s compositional strategies move in a similar direction. he focuses attention on the impact of jesus’s appearance to mary, tracing the experience as it imprints itself on her body. the sublime astonishment that blake conveys via the magdalene’s face—​especially her blanched lips and widened eyes—​attests to the impact that the risen jesus has upon her. but it is her intellectual struggle that opens this manifestation and her transformative experience that is dramatized in the painting. the magdalene at the sepulchre is a consummate example of blake’s incarnational aesthetic and a striking visualization of his interpretive approach to scripture. by choosing to illustrate this specific episode from john’s gospel, he invokes the illustrious noli me tangere tradition while departing from it, or, more accurately, by refusing to enter it at all. in his book on this tradition, jean-luc nancy provides insight into blake’s dual iconographic and exegetical strategy. he observes that painters are drawn to this scene from john “because it puts into play a particularly delicate and complex exercise of vision” (21). jesus appears in a transitional state: john portrays him as entering a dimension “from which alone comes glory,” a glory whose radiance can be seen “only insofar as it is received and transmitted” (17). mary magdalene is the first to receive and to transmit this glory, and in the language of paul, she is “changed into the same image from glory to glory” (2 corinthians 3.18). she too appears in a transitional state, on the cusp of a profound personal transformation that is at the same time a momentous historical one. at the threshold of moving from an earthly to a spiritual intimacy with jesus, she struggles to distinguish his divine body from his natural one, compelled to enter a new relationship with him that is not dependent on physical contact. mary’s experience is thus symbolic of christianity at the crossroads of the preand post-easter eras. like jesus, she cannot stay at the tomb: she must rise to report her revelation to the other followers and inaugurate a new stage of the faith. but blake does not illustrate this end to the story, choosing to dwell on the uncanny inception of the magdalene’s vision before it can be contained within a church or reduced to a moral tale. it is mary’s imagination that enables her to pass the limits of possibility and, like paul on the road to damascus, to manifest the divine body—​as blake does in this work of art. 11. details, the conversion of saul (left) and the magdalene at the sepulchre (right). image of the conversion of saul (c. 1800) © courtesy of the huntington art museum, san marino, california. watercolor, 40.9 x 35.8 cm. 000.29. works cited/​bibliography adams, hazard. blake’s margins: an interpretive study of the annotations. jefferson, nc: mcfarland, 2009. baumann, gerlinde. love and violence: marriage as metaphor for the relationship between yhwh and israel in the prophetic books. trans. linda m. maloney. collegeville, mn: liturgical press, 2003. benay, erin e., and lisa m. rafanelli. faith, gender and the senses in italian renaissance and baroque art: interpreting the noli me tangere and doubting thomas. abingdon: routledge, 2016. billingsley, naomi. the visionary art of william blake: christianity, romanticism and the pictorial imagination. london: i. b. tauris, 2018. bindman, david. blake as an artist. oxford: phaidon, 1977. brown, raymond e. the gospel according to john. introduction, translation, and notes. 2 vols. garden city, ny: doubleday, 1966–70. butlin, martin. the paintings and drawings of william blake. 2 vols. new haven: yale university press, 1981. chilton, bruce. mary magdalene: a biography. new york: doubleday, 2005. connolly, tristanne j. william blake and the body. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, 2002. d’angelo, mary rose. “reconstructing ‘real’ women in gospel literature: the case of mary magdalene.” women and christian origins. ed. ross shepard kraemer and mary rose d’angelo. oxford: oxford university press, 1999. 105-28. de boer, esther a. the gospel of mary: beyond a gnostic and a biblical mary magdalene. london: t. & t. clark, 2004. didi-huberman, georges. fra angelico: dissemblance and figuration. trans. jane marie todd. chicago: university of chicago press, 1995. dykema, bobbi. “woman, why weepest thou? rembrandt’s 1638 noli me tangere as a dutch calvinist visual typology.” mary magdalene: iconographic studies from the middle ages to the baroque. ed. michelle a. erhardt and amy m. morris. leiden: brill, 2012. 249-66. hagstrum, jean h. “christ’s body.” william blake: essays in honour of sir geoffrey keynes. ed. morton d. paley and michael phillips. oxford: clarendon press, 1973. 129-56. haskins, susan. mary magdalen: myth and metaphor. london: harpercollins, 1993. hobson, christopher z. “blake, paul, and sexual antinomianism.” blake 52.3 (winter 2018–19): 37 pars. jameson, anna. the history of our lord as exemplified in works of art. 2 vols. new ed. london: longmans, green, and co., 1892. jarvis, simon. “blake’s spiritual body.” the meaning of “life” in romantic poetry and poetics. ed. ross wilson. new york: routledge, 2009. 13-32. johnson, mary lynn. “blake’s mary and martha on the mount of olives: questions on the watercolour illustrations of the gospels.” women reading william blake. ed. helen p. bruder. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, 2007. 100-08. —​—​—​. “the death and assumption of blake’s mary: anomalous subjects in the biblical watercolour series for thomas butts.” re-envisioning blake. ed. mark crosby, troy patenaude, and angus whitehead. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, 2012. 144-59. kleinbub, christian k. “to sow the heart: touch, spiritual anatomy, and image theory in michelangelo’s noli me tangere.” renaissance quarterly 66.1 (spring 2013): 81-129. mitchell, w. j. t. blake’s composite art: a study of the illuminated poetry. princeton: princeton university press, 1978. nancy, jean-luc. noli me tangere: on the raising of the body. trans. sarah clift, pascale-anne brault, and michael naas. new york: fordham university press, 2008. paley, morton d. william blake. oxford: phaidon, 1978. pierce, john b. flexible design: revisionary poetics in blake’s “vala” or “ the four zoas.” montreal: mcgill-queen’s university press, 1998. rosso, g. a. the religion of empire: political theology in blake’s prophetic symbolism. columbus: ohio state university press, 2016. rowland, christopher. blake and the bible. new haven: yale university press, 2010. —​—​—​. “‘intimations of apocalyptic’: the perspective of the history of interpretation.” john’s gospel and intimations of apocalyptic. ed. catrin h. williams and christopher rowland. london: t. & t. clark, 2013. 128-43. schaberg, jane. the resurrection of mary magdalene: legends, apocrypha, and the christian testament. new york: continuum, 2004. spector, sheila a. “sources and etymologies of blake’s ‘tirzah.’” blake 23.4 (spring 1990): 176-82. tannenbaum, leslie. biblical tradition in blake’s early prophecies: the great code of art. princeton: princeton university press, 1982. wakefield, gilbert. a translation of the new testament. cambridge: cambridge university press, 1820. wesley, john. explanatory notes upon the new testament. 12th ed. new york: carlton & porter, c. 1856. james blake of rotherhithe, timber merchant james blake of rotherhithe, timber merchant by wayne c. ripley wayne c. ripley (wripley@winona.edu) is a professor of english at winona state university in minnesota. he is working on a project regarding blake’s broad street family, friends, and neighbors. thei’d like to thank my colleague andrew higl for his assistance. identity of william blake’s paternal grandfather, james blake i,as this formulation suggests, i refer in this note to blake’s grandfather as james blake i and his father as james blake ii. rests on two documents associated with blake’s father: first, james blake ii’s apprenticeship indenture with the linen draper francis smith, where james blake i is identified as “james blake of rotherhithe in the county of surrey gentleman,”g. e. bentley, jr., blake records, 2nd ed. (new haven: yale university press, 2004) 2-3. hereafter abbreviated br(2). and, second, the duty paid on the apprenticeship, where james blake i is named “james blake of rotherhith.”board of stamps, apprenticeship books, series ir1, piece 15 (national archives, via uk, register of duties paid for apprentices’ indentures, 1710–1811, ancestry.com). given both james blake i’s residence in rotherhithe and james blake ii’s probable age at the time of his apprenticeship, g. e. bentley, jr., identifies the “james ye s[on] of james & eliz: blake” who was christened at st. mary, rotherhithe, on 12 april 1722, as william blake’s father.br(2) 2, 848n3 (to “prelude” section). church of england parish registers, 1538–1812 (london metropolitan archives, via london, england, church of england baptisms, marriages, and burials, 1538–1812, ancestry.com). bentley, then, associates this couple with the james blake and elizabeth baker who were married, “p[e]r banns,” at st. olave, southwark, on 30 april 1721.br(2) 2. church of england parish registers, 1538–1812 (london metropolitan archives, via london, england, church of england baptisms, marriages, and burials, 1538–1812, ancestry.com). beyond this chain of evidence, bentley also raises the possibility that blake’s grandfather could be identified with james blake, a timber merchant who died in ratcliff, middlesex, in 1754. he bases this “tempting” speculation on the proximity of ratcliff and rotherhithe, and on the fact that this man’s will refers to several people who share names with members of blake’s extended family.br(2) xxxi. james blake of ratcliff had a son and a grandson named james (like blake’s father and brother), a wife named elizabeth (like blake’s paternal grandmother and the middle name of his sister), a brother named john (like blake’s brothers—one of whom died before the other was born),bentley’s claim that james blake ii had a brother named john is not supported by any documentary evidence. as he concedes, “the evidence that john blake was related to the poet’s father the hosier consists simply in the fact that they lived in the same house” (br[2] 735). but if the equation of james blake of rotherhithe and james blake of ratcliff holds, it seems more likely that the “jno blake” (br[2] 734n) who was listed in the 1743 watch rate book for the glasshouse residence a quarter before james blake ii entered was, instead, the uncle of james blake ii. in addition to the explicit reference to james blake of ratcliff’s brother in the 1754 will, james blake ii himself turned only twenty-one in april 1743, meaning that a younger brother would not yet have been of age. and a daughter-in-law named ann (a possible nickname for catherine, though one not previously associated with blake’s mother).br(2) xxxi-ii. i have now uncovered what i believe to be james blake ii’s admission paper for the freedom of the city of london, which includes new information that seems to validate bentley’s suspicion. freedom admissions papers, 1681–1930 (london metropolitan archives, col/chd/fr/02, via london, england, freedom of the city admission papers, 1681–1930, ancestry.com). see enlargement. son of james blake of rotherhithin surrey timber merch.t } } willimott mayor thursday the 6th day of october 1743 and in the seventeenth year of the reign of king george the second of great britain &c. this day mr chamberlain having presented unto this court james blake____to be made free of this city as the forty fifth of fifty granted unto him by this court the 22:d of september [illeg.]^1741 to be applyed toward the discharge of the publick debts of this city; it is ordered that the said james blake__________be admitted into the freedom of this city by redemption in the company of _______ wheelwrights________paying unto mr chamberlain for this city’s use the sum of forty^six shillings & eight pence n[?]b  if this order is not executed  in three months it is void    a haberdasher man andrew boson robert walker thomas shackleton ha[ber]d[a]sher edwd smith carman nath collyer[e] mercer [?] vintners 6 oct.r 1743 allowed and taken for security in the lord mayors court john partridge. (minories) the document labels its james blake as “a haberdasher” who resided at the time in the “minories.” the minories was a major road in the parish of st. botolph aldgate, and it is where the master of james blake ii, francis smith, had his shop. in october 1743, james blake ii was presumably still living with smith, and he was not listed in the st. james rate books at glasshouse street until 9 june 1744. why, however, he was applying for the freedom of the city just nine months before the end of his apprenticeship, which would have granted it anyway, is unclear. whatever the answer to this and other questions it raises, the document identifies james blake ii’s father as “james blake of rotherhith / in surrey timber merch.t” the shared professions of this “james blake of rotherhith” and james blake of ratcliff make it a near certainty that bentley’s association of the two men is correct. beyond the coincidence of family names in the 1754 will, there is now the coincidence of both apprenticeship and freedom of the city documents with fathers from rotherhithe named james blake, with the son in both cases having the same name and the same profession of haberdasher. it seems safe to assert as fact, then, that james blake i was a timber merchant who must have moved from rotherhithe to ratcliff sometime between 1743 and 1754, where he died three years before william was born. translating blake’s prophetic poetry: the case of milton translating blake’s prophetic poetry: the case of milton by juliana steil and lawrence flores pereira juliana steil (julianasteil@gmail.com) has taught translation theory and history at the universidade federal de pelotas since 2013, and translates literature and academic texts in the humanities into brazilian portuguese. lawrence flores pereira (lawflores3@gmail.com) has taught english literature at the universidade federal de santa maria since 2001. he has translated shakespeare’s hamlet, othello, and king lear for penguin/​companhia das letras. in his only sojourn outside london,we are grateful to juliet attwater for the translation of this article into english, to robert n. essick for his bibliographic suggestions on blake’s verse, and to paulo henriques britto for having called our attention to the potential link between blake’s prophetic verse and the ballad metre, as well as for his suggestions regarding the scansion of the lines from milton presented here. juliana steil would also like to thank walter carlos costa, saree makdisi, and rahul bery for the discussions about blake, milton, and translation. needless to say, any errors in this article are entirely the responsibility of the authors. william blake lived from 1800 to 1803 in the coastal village of felpham in sussex when he was working for william hayley, the respected biographer and editor of john milton. echoes of this experience can be heard in milton a poem, which was possibly started in 1804, but not finished before 1809.it seems that blake worked on the poem at the same time as he was composing jerusalem, and that it was probably based on the unfinished work the four zoas (essick and viscomi 36-37). essick and viscomi suggest that the first copies of milton were printed in late 1810 or early 1811. there are four known copies; according to damon (276), “the first two … [a and b] have forty-five pages each; the third [c] omits the preface and adds five new pages; and the last [d] is the same as the third, but has an extra page.” a more detailed description of the differences is given by bentley (310-11). like blake’s other prophetic books from his mature phase, milton was translated into portuguese only after the 1970s.according to the research to date (steil, “traduções de william blake”). in brazil, translated excerpts from the poem appeared in the compilations escritos de william blake (1984), by alberto marsicano and regina de barros carvalho, and poesia e prosa selecionadas (1993), by paulo vizioli. in portugal, the short poem beginning “and did those feet in ancient time,” which is part of the preface, appeared in the journal biblos: revista da faculdade de letras da universidade de coimbra (1981), translated by paulo quintela, and in a águia e a toupeira: poemas de william blake (1996), translated by hélio osvaldo alves; the work’s first complete portuguese translation, in poetic prose, was by manuel portela (2009). this paper uses a revised version of the 2011 annotated translation into brazilian portuguese by steil as its base,unless otherwise indicated, translations from blake are by juliana steil. the source text is copy b of milton, available online at the william blake archive. and discusses the translation of blake’s prophetic verse and the poem’s processes of phonic harmonization.chociay calls these “phonic harmonization processes” the “fruitful use of phonic material”; these processes do not refer to the “numerical arrangement of syllables, accents and pauses,” but to “the entire order of reiterations and contrasts,” such as alliteration, assonance, and rhyme (167). the term is useful for our purposes, as it means one can approach these different sound phenomena as a group. it starts by analyzing these elements in milton, then goes on to investigate strategies for a poetic translation into portuguese. an annotated translation (translation with commentary) is considered a fairly common form of research in the field of translation studies. the researcher translates a text and writes a commentary on the process: “this commentary will include some discussion of the translation assignment, an analysis of aspects of the source text, and a reasoned justification of the kinds of solutions you arrived at for particular kinds of translation problems” (williams and chesterman 9). as a result of research in this field, this article defends the use of a poetic form for the translation of blake’s prophetic poetry into portuguese, approaching the translation of poetry as a task of re-creation that seeks to “re-create, using the resources of the target language, the effects of content and form in the original—​or, again, at least a good number of them” (britto, “towards more objective evaluation” 1). seen from this perspective, translation is also a “live critical operation” (campos 44), necessitating a close reading of the source text and demanding contact with the elements that are part of the aesthetic functioning of that text. we aim to contribute to the debate around blake’s poetry and particularly to reflection on the compositional elements of his work that justify its creative translation into another culture and literature. 1. blake’s prophetic verse just as milton rejected “the troublesome and modern bondage of rhyming” (milton 45), blake rejected the unrhymed iambic pentameter, whose “monotony was not only awkward, but as much a bondage as rhyme itself ” (e 146). in his preface to jerusalem, he claims to have created “a variety in every line, both of cadences & number of syllables. … the terrific numbers are reserved for the terrific parts—​the mild & gentle, for the mild & gentle parts, and the prosaic, for inferior parts” (e 146). this is the only time he writes about the versification in his great prophecies; he doesn’t actually pinpoint specific passages where he is aiming to create “terrific,” “mild & gentle,” or “inferior” rhythmic effects, but leaves room for doubt. in the introduction to selections from the writings of william blake, laurence housman calls the verse in the prophetic poems a “bad metrical form” that would be better identified as poetic prose (xxviii-xxix). for housman, any reading of milton should ignore the divisions of metre in order to hear its “exceeding beauty,” an argument that illustrates the difficulties that commentators often have when dealing with blake’s prosody, as noted by ostriker (5). the form blake used in his longer prophecies is often identified as a septenary or heptameter (greene and cushman 617, ostriker 124). with analysis one can see, however, that these forms do not have the regularity of the metre in chapman’s translation of the iliad, for example, which uses iambic meter and because of its syllabic count is known as a fourteener. according to northrop frye, blake’s poetry could also be defined as “a line of seven beats rather than of seven feet” (187), since it has a varying number of syllables. alicia ostriker goes further and suggests that blake did not always restrict himself to seven beats: “alexandrines play an increasingly important distaff part in his verse, and octameter also becomes frequent. sometimes there are lines of four or five beats, and sometimes there are lines nine beats long or longer” (137). for ostriker, this irregularity—​which gradually intensifies throughout the poet’s prophecies—​is a conscious move away from traditional forms (123). in his history of english prosody, george saintsbury suggests that blake’s main models were the king james bible and the ossianic poems (21). blake considered himself “an admirer of ossian” (e 666), and one can find stylistic and rhythmic affinities between his prophecies and macpherson’s poetic prose, which demonstrates the influence of ballad metre: when oscar saw his friends around, his heaving breast arose. “the groans,” he said, “of aged chiefs: the howling of my dogs: the sudden bursts of the song of grief, have melted oscar’s soul.” (macpherson 2: 30) when oscar saw his friends around,in the style of malof, x represents unaccented syllables, represents accented syllables, and ‖ represents pauses. he scans below the line; we use this technique throughout the article. x x x x his heaving breast arose. x x x “the groans,” he said, “of aged chiefs: x x x x the howling of my dogs: x x x the sudden bursts of the song of grief, x x x x x have melted oscar’s soul.” x x x nigel fabb posits that, “though presented in prose, at least some of [macpherson’s] prose text is scannable as loose iambic trimeter,” possibly because it is a form that is close to the ballad, “thus it weakly implies ‘folk’ (in the nationalistic eighteenth-century notion of the folk) and so connects back to the idea that these are texts somehow emerging from the spirit of the nation” (140). as paulo henriques britto comments, “in english-language literature, the term ‘ballad metre’ actually represents four separate fixed forms, used not only in popular ballads—​narrative poems from england, scotland and the united states—​but also in protestant hymns” (“a tradução para o português” 25). following preminger and brogan (118-20), he gives the four forms, each with a quatrain rhyming abcb or abab: long metre—​4/4/4/4 (four lines with four iambic feet in each); common metre—​4/3/4/3 (four, three, four, and three feet); short metre—​3/3/4/3 (three, three, four, and three feet); half metre—​3/3/3/3 (three feet per line). the lines from macpherson transcribed above follow the metrical structure of the common metre. they also have rhymes, although these do not follow the most traditional rhyme schemes of the ballad. the presence of the ballad metre, even if not in its strictest sense, is clear in the ossian poems: the wrathful kings are lost in thought. they roll their silent eyes, over the flight of their land. the horn of fingal was heard; the sons of woody albion returned. but many lay, by turthor’s stream, silent in their blood. (macpherson 2: 317) the wrathful kings are lost in thought. x x x x they roll their silent eyes, x x x over the flight of their land. x x x x the horn of fingal was heard; x x x x the sons of woody albion returned. x x x x x but many lay, by turthor’s stream, x x x x silent in their blood. x x “thy strength was like the​ strength of a stream: thy speed like the eagle’s wing.” (macpherson 1: 370) “thy strength was like the​ strength of a stream: x x x x x thy speed like the eagle’s wing.” x x x x in milton, lines of four and three feet found in the ballad metre appear in certain passages: she ties the knot of nervous fibres, into a white brain! she ties the knot of bloody veins, into a red hot heart! (milton object 17, lines 56-57) she ties the knot of nervous fibres, x x x x x into a white brain! x x she ties the knot of bloody veins, x x x x into a red hot heart! x x -and i became one man with him arising in my strength: twas too late now to recede. los had enterd into my soul: his terrors now posses’d me whole! i arose in fury & strength. …………………………………………………………………………………… they vanish not from me & mine, we guard them first & last (milton object 20, lines 13-15, 24) and i became one man with him x x x arising in my strength: x x x x twas too late now to recede. x x x los had enterd into my soul: x x x x his terrors now posses’d me whole! x x x x i arose in fury & strength. x x x x x …………………………………… they vanish not from me & mine, x x x x we guard them first & last x x x there are substitutions in the iambic pattern and, as in macpherson, the traditional rhyme scheme of the ballad is not adhered to; nonetheless, the scansion of the excerpts above does nod toward the influence of the ballad metre, particularly the common metre. this means that the heptametrical structure for the prophecies could have been based on one of the ballad forms that are present in ossian’s poetic prose. however, the wide range of pauses and rhythms in the prophecies shows blake’s clear lack of interest in strict metre, as well as his desire to avoid the indiscriminate use of more “polished” verse, other than in strategic passages. the dominant factor that unites macpherson and blake is perhaps their adaptation of biblical parallelism. in his comment on “the six bards,” malcolm laing posits that macpherson’s main stylistic inspiration was robert lowth’s thesis on the nature of hebrew poetry (macpherson 2: 436-42). lowth argues in lectures on the sacred poetry of the hebrewsthe work was originally published in latin in 1753; an english translation appeared in 1787. that hebrew poetry was metrified, that the individual lines were of unequal length, though the lengths were not very different from each other within the same poem, and that there was a certain arrangement of parallel linesessick (145) calls attention to lowth’s definition of parallelism in the preface to his translation of isaiah: “the correspondence of one verse, or line, with another, i call parallelism. when a proposition is delivered, and a second is subjoined to it, or drawn under it, equivalent, or contrasted with it, in sense; or similar to it in the form of grammatical construction; these i call parallel lines; and the words, or phrases, answering one to another in the corresponding lines, parallel terms.” that meant even a prose translation could retain something of the original cadences, as seen in the translation of the bible into english (28-36). his own translation of isaiah (1778), which sought to maintain the rhythm of the hebrew original, is similar to the text of the king james bible (essick 144). essick compares blake’s “septenary” with lowth’s longer measures, and argues that the syllabic and accentual variations in both were based on the theory in vogue at the time that hebrew versification followed the meaning of the words and not predetermined metrics (144-45). he adds that these experiments were part of an attempt to rediscover the ancient poetic form on which the old testament was based, just as macpherson’s prose attempted to substantiate its supposed celtic poetic roots. for mee, both blake’s poetry and macpherson’s rhythmic prose are grounded “in the parallelism lowth found in the bible” (78). the rhythmic and numeric-syllabic variations of blake’s poetry present a problem that is very common when translating longer lines into portuguese: for lines of thirteen syllables or more, there are not enough similar metric examples to be able to discuss a tradition or consider an effective structured or melopoeaic alternative. the term “versos bárbaros,” which refers to the no-man’s-land of lines with more than twelve syllables, is testament to the bewilderment of both translators and poets who are used to the uniformity that can be found in classical forms, both decasyllabic and dodecasyllabic. the greatest danger in the translatorial process is to tear apart the internal rhythm and lapse into inexpressive prose, which could lead to the destruction of the powerful pulse of blake’s “septenary.” the omnipresence of the iambic metre in english, even when interrupted by trochees, spondees, anapaests, or dactyls, can on occasion be reproduced in portuguese, but such correspondence in terms of metre and syllabic count does not always result in a poetically expressive or convincing translation.for more on metrical and aesthetic correspondence, see pereira, who discusses the translation of iambic pentameter. the reason for this questionable correspondence is both objective and aesthetic. it is objective because of the lexical-morphological characteristics of the two languages: while the english lexis is full of monosyllabic and disyllabic words, these are far less frequent in portuguese. the aesthetic differences exist because premeditated aesthetic effects cannot be created with the same rhythms in english and portuguese. aesthetic effects are also important because, among other things, they embrace the multiplicity of form, content, and lexis. while poetic accentuation in portuguese tends to focus on primary stresses and allows poets to leave secondary stresses to design or chance, the english use of a scansion system based on iambs, trochees, and alternative rhythms reveals an entirely different principle, founded on the concept of predominance. in the case of blake and milton, the translator’s choice of base metre should aim for a balanced number of syllables, so that the lines are neither so short that they systematically curtail the original lexical schema—​thus negatively affecting the source’s semantic and aesthetic effects—​nor so long that they reduce the rhythmic effects that benefit from more concentrated lines. there is an advantage in avoiding free verse and in favoring a pattern in the syllabic count. if one considers that the underlying structure of blake’s prophetic verse is the heptameter, which gives a cadenced effect to milton and takes on a flexible rhythmic form—​possibly inspired by macpherson and lowth and certainly by the bible—​it follows that it is possible to achieve something similar in portuguese with the fifteen-syllable line (pentadecasyllable) as the underlying formal structure: virgin of providence fear not to enter into my cottage x x x x‖x xx xx what is thy message to thy friend? what am i now to do x x x x x ‖ x xis it again to plunge into deeper affliction? behold me x x x x x x x x ‖ x x ready to obey, but pity thou my shadow of delight x x ‖ x x x x x x enter my cottage. comfort her, for she is sick with fatigue x x x ‖ x ‖ x x x x (milton object 36, lines 31-35) virgem da providência, não temas entrar nesta casa. x x x x x ‖x x x -x x o que vens dizer a teu amigo? o que faço agora? x x x x x x x ‖ xx xmergulho mais fundo na angústia? farei o que disseres, x x x x x x ‖ x -x x xmas tem piedade de minha sombra de prazer: vem, entra x x x x x x x x x -‖ em minha casa, e alivia a fadiga que ela sente. x x x x ‖ xx x x -x xyour browser does not support the audio content. listen to juliana steil read the translation. the pentadecasyllabic base provides a functionally corresponding form for the long lines of the prophecy. this approach allows for a certain flexibility, benefits semantic interpretation, and attempts to preserve blake’s parallelisms: but turning toward ololon in terrible majesty milton x x x x x x x x x x ‖ x replied. obey thou the words of the inspired man x ‖ x x x x all that can be annihilated must be annihilated x x x x x x x x x x x that the children of jerusalem may be saved from slavery x x x x x x x x x x x there is a negation, & there is a contrary x x x x x x x x x the negation must be destroyd to redeem the contraries x x x x x x x x x x the negation is the spectre; the reasoning power in man x x x x x x ‖ x x x x x this is a false body: an incrustation over my immortal x x x ‖ x x x x x x x x spirit; a selfhood. which must be put off & annihilated alway x ‖ x x x x x x x x x x x to cleanse the face of my spirit by self-examination. x x x x x x x x x x to bathe in the waters of life; to wash off the not human x x x x x ‖ x x x x i come in self-annihilation & the grandeur of inspiration x x x x x x x x x x x x x to cast off rational demonstration by faith in the saviour x x x x x x x x x x x to cast off the rotten rags of memory by inspiration x x x x x x x x x x -x to cast off bacon. locke & newton from albions covering x x x x x x x x x to take off his filthy garments, & clothe him with imagination x x x x x x x x x x x x to cast aside from poetry, all that is not inspiration x x x x x x x x x x (milton object 42, lines 29-38, and object 43, lines 2-8) milton, porém, com majestade atroz, voltou-se para ololon x x ‖ x x x x ‖ xx xe respondeu: segue as palavras do homem inspirado; x x x ‖ x x x xx x o que pode ser anulado deve ser anulado x x x x x x x xx x para livrar os filhos de jerusalém da escravidão. x x x x x x x x x x x x existe uma negação & existe um contrário: x x x x x x x x a negação deve acabar para salvar os contrários. x x x x x x x x x x x x a negação é o espectro, o poder racional no homem; x x x x x x ‖ x x x x é um corpo falso: uma incrustação sobre o meu espírito x x x ‖ x x x x x x x x imortal; um ego a ser banido & anulado sempre. x x ‖ x x x x x x x x para lavar o rosto de meu espírito com o autoexame; x x x x x x x x x x x x x para banhar-me nas águas da vida e remover o não humano. x x x x x x x x x x x x eu venho em auto-anulação & no esplendor da inspiração x x x x x x x x x x x para trocar a prova racional pela fé no salvador; x x x x x x x x x x x x para trocar os trapos podres da memória pela inspiração; x x x x x x x x x x x x x para banir bacon, locke & newton da roupa de álbion; x x x x x x x x para despir sua veste imunda & o vestir de imaginação; x x x x x x x x x x x x para banir da poesia o que não for inspiração; x x x x x x x x x x x your browser does not support the audio content. as can be seen in this excerpt, occasionally blake privileges freer lines. when he does this, the parallel structures rhythmically and rhetorically sustain the lines, becoming an important poetic feature. in such cases the translation has focused on this feature, permitting greater deviations from the fifteen-syllable basic structure. among the possibilities with the fifteen-syllable line in terms of rhythmic organization is a structure of two hemistiches of seven syllables each (considering that in portuguese the poetic syllable count ends at the last stressed syllable): a negação é o espectro, o poder racional no homem; x x x x x x ‖ x x x x (milton object 42, line 35) your browser does not support the audio content. ser cruel com gentileza! tendo o poder de dizer x x x x x x ‖ x x x x x as coisas mais detestáveis ao modo sentimental; x x x x x x x x x x eis a serpe traiçoeira! assim fizemos por eles; x x x x x ‖ x x x x e é assim que eles nos pagam, aturdindo aqueles seres. x x x x x ‖ x x x x (milton object 10, lines 33-36) your browser does not support the audio content. as britto argues,see “correspondência formal e funcional,” “a tradução para o português,” and “towards more objective evaluation.” the closest brazilian portuguese form for the english ballad metre may be the heptasyllabic verse (redondilha maior) of popular cordel poetry. in this sense, through the organization of the pentadecasyllabic line in two hemistiches of seven syllables, it is then possible to achieve a functional correspondence for the ballad structures that may appear in blake’s prophetic verse;this approach is what james s. holmes calls the analogue form, where the translation goes beyond the source poem to look at the function of its form in the context of its poetic tradition in order to find a similar function in the context of the poetic tradition of the target language (95). when not arranged in this way, the pentadecasyllable is effective for the freer prophetic lines as well. 2. processes of phonic harmonization from his songs to his lengthy prophecies, blake used sophisticated phonic techniques. milton employs several processes of phonic harmonization from the start: daughters of beulah! muses who inspire the poets song record the journey of immortal milton thro’ your realms of terror & mild moony lustre, in soft sexual delusions of varied beauty, to delight the wanderer and repose his burning thirst & freezing hunger! (milton object 3, lines 4-8) both alliteration and assonance are exploited in this invocation to the muses (of inspiration, not memory), in repeating the consonant of the name of the title character (immortal milton-realms-mild moony) and in helping to describe the setting of beulah,isaiah 62.4: “thou shalt no more be termed forsaken; neither shall thy land any more be termed desolate: but thou shalt be called hephzibah, and thy land beulah: for the lord delighteth in thee, and thy land shall be married” (king james version); “já não te chamarão ‘abandonada’, / nem chamarão à tua terra ‘desolação’. / antes, serás chamada ‘meu prazer está nela’, / e tua terra, ‘desposada’. / com efeito, iahweh terá prazer em ti / e se desposará com tua terra” (bíblia de jerusalém). according to damon (42), in blake’s mythology this place between eternity and the material world could also be the realm of the subconscious, the source of dreaming and poetic inspiration. a place of harmony between the sexes and of “repose from the vigorous exercise of the imagination” (apesos 383). an example is “mild moony lustre,” where the suggestion of languor and rapture derives from the combination of repetition and alliteration interspersed with an oscillating vowel sequence. the translation seeks to recreate milton’s processes of phonic harmonization: filhas de beulá! musas que inspirais a canção do poeta, gravai a jornada do imortal milton por vossos reinos de horror & moles clarões lunares, em sonhos sexuais de beleza vária, deleitando o viajante e abrandando-lhe o fogo da sede & o frio da fome! your browser does not support the audio content. new repetitions and contrasts (“moles clarões lunares”)the translator’s thanks go to lawrence flores pereira for suggesting this solution. help to reinforce the suggestive power of these lines in portuguese. of course, with compensations and negotiations, some effects may get lost (britto, “towards more objective evaluation”). take a passage full of flourishes, like the lamentation of beulah: thou hearest the nightingale begin the song of spring: the lark sitting upon his earthy bed: just as the morn appears; listens silent: then springing from the waving corn-field! loud he leads the choir of day! trill, trill, trill, trill, mounting upon the wings of light into the great expanse. (milton object 31, lines 29-33) tu ouves o rouxinol abrir a canção da primavera: a cotovia, na aurora, pousada em seu leito terroso, silente escuta; depois salta do trigal que dança! e alto conduz o coral do dia! trila, trila, trila, trila, nas asas da luz partindo para a grande imensidão. your browser does not support the audio content. although the translation does not match “spring-springing,” it does manage to compensate for part of the assonance of [ɪ] (begin-sitting-his-listens-springing-mounting-wings-into-expanse) with its suggestive sonorous apex on the onomatopoeia in the fourth line of the excerpt. the reiteration of [aɪ] (nightingale-silent-light), with its slight contrast with [ɪ], has a functional counterpart in the repetition of the phoneme [ɔ] (ouves-rouxinol-pousada). the alignment “lark-listens-loud-leads-light” is echoed in “cotovia-conduz-coral” and “escuta-conduz-luz.” the translation has not achieved the impossible goal of reproducing the same suggestive sounds of the original; it has, however, managed to offer alternative sound combinations in order to achieve similar poetic effects in portuguese. this is an oft-used technique in the translatorial tradition for poetry into portuguese that had, until recently, been little deployed in translations of the prophetic poems from blake’s mature phase. another example of these creative translation strategies can be found in a passage that draws attention to the image of the lark. as well as emphasizing the sacredness of all things, the lines of milton that relate to the lesser creatures of nature provide a break in the narrative of spiritual battle. the lark, however, is special, because it is the messenger of los.“the lark is loss messenger thro the twenty-seven churches” (milton object 35, line 64). essick and viscomi (185) note that its recurring role in the poem was probably influenced by paradise regained (“the herald lark / left his ground-nest, high towering to descry / the morn’s approach, and greet her with his song”) and “l’allegro” (“to hear the lark begin his flight, / and singing startle the dull night / from his watch-tower in the skies, / till the dappled dawn doth rise”). these lines use the full mimetic power of the sounds to intensify the action and images: when on the highest lift of his light pinions he arrives at that bright gate. another lark meets him & back to back they touch their pinions tip tip: and each descend to their respective earths & there all night consult with angels (milton object 36, lines 2-5) quando lá no alto a levam suas asas leves e ela chega ao claro portal, vem outra cotovia & costas com costas tocam as asas: pec pec, e cada uma delas desce à sua terra, onde passam a noite ouvindo os anjos your browser does not support the audio content. the translation reflects the sound suggestion of high flight (“when on the highest lift of his light pinions he arrives”) by using a feature similar to the source, alternating vowels with an analogous alliteration in portuguese. in the line “they touch their pinions tip tip: and each descend,” “tip tip” draws a connection between sound and meaning that is particularly tricky for the translator. given the impossibility of finding a direct alternative, the onomatopoeic effect (“pec pec”) has been prioritized, as it was considered more important than the literal sense for the construction of the image. the mythology and intertextuality of blake’s prophecies are justifications in themselves for his work to be translated into portuguese. this article posits that the formal elements of the prophecies are just as important, and that, as in all good poetry, they constitute an inseparable relationship with the content, and thus merit equal attention in the translation. therefore, we have proposed translatorial strategies that both deal with the meaning of words and recreate the effect of the sound of the prophecies, even if that means using alternative rhythmic and phonic solutions in the target language. works cited apesos, anthony. “the poet in the poem: blake’s milton.” studies in philology 112.2 (spring 2015): 379-413. bentley, g. e., jr. blake books: annotated catalogues of william blake’s writings. oxford: clarendon press, 1977. bible. bíblia de jerusalém. são paulo: paulus, 2002. bible. king james version. <https://​www.​biblegateway.​com>. blake, william. a águia e a toupeira: poemas de william blake. introduction, selection, and notes by hélio osvaldo alves. guimarães: pedra formosa, 1996. —​—​—​. the complete poetry and prose of william blake. ed. david v. erdman. newly rev. ed. new york: anchor-random house, 1988. [abbreviated as e.] —​—​—​. escritos de william blake. translation by alberto marsicano and regina de barros carvalho. série rebeldes malditos. porto alegre: l&pm, 1984. —​—​—​. “milton.” translation, introduction, and notes by manuel portela. lisbon: antígona, 2009. —​—​—​. selections from the writings of william blake. with an introductory essay by laurence housman. london: kegan paul, trench, trübner, & co., 1893. —​—​—​. the william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. <http://​www.​blakearchive.​org>. —​—​—​. william blake: “milton a poem” and the final illuminated works. ed. robert n. essick and joseph viscomi. princeton: princeton university press/​william blake trust, 1993. —​—​—​. william blake—​poesia e prosa selecionadas. translation and preface by paulo vizioli. são paulo: alexandria, 1993. britto, paulo henriques. “a tradução para o português do metro de balada inglês.” fragmentos 34 (jan.-june 2008): 25-33. <https://​periodicos.​ufsc.​br/​index.​php/​fragmentos/​article/​view/​8835/​8181>. —​—​—​. “correspondência formal e funcional em tradução poética.” sob o signo de babel: literatura e poéticas da tradução. ed. marcelo paiva de souza, raimundo carvalho, and wilberth salgueiro. vitória: ppgl/​mel/​flor&cultura, 2006. 55-64. —​—​—​. “towards more objective evaluation of poetic translation.” translation by the author. paper originally delivered in portuguese at the seminar as margens da tradução, rio de janeiro, uerj, 2001. <http://​www.​letras.​puc-​rio.​br/​media/​filemanager/​professores/​paulo_​britto/​towards%20​more%20​objective%20​evaluation%20​of%20​poetic%20​translation.​pdf>. 10 pp. campos, haroldo de. “da tradução como criação e como crítica.” metalinguagem & outras metas. 4th ed., 2nd rpt. são paulo: perspectiva, 2006. 31-48. chociay, rogério. teoria do verso. são paulo: mcgraw-hill do brasil, 1974. damon, s. foster. a blake dictionary: the ideas and symbols of william blake. rev. ed. hanover: university press of new england, 1988. essick, robert n. william blake and the language of adam. oxford: clarendon press, 1989. fabb, nigel. language and literary structure: the linguistic analysis of form in verse and narrative. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2002. frye, northrop. fearful symmetry. 1947. boston: beacon press, 1962. greene, roland, stephen cushman, et al., eds. the princeton encyclopedia of poetry and poetics. 4th ed. princeton: princeton university press, 2012. holmes, james s. “forms of verse translation and the translation of verse form.” the nature of translation: essays on the theory and practice of literary translation. ed. james s. holmes. mouton: publishing house of the slovak academy of sciences, bratislava, 1970. 91-105. lowth, robert. isaiah. a new translation; with a preliminary dissertation, and notes critical, philological, and explanatory. london: j. nichols, 1778. —​—​—​. lectures on the sacred poetry of the hebrews. translation by george gregory, with notes by johann david michaelis. 3rd ed. london: thomas tegg & son, 1835. macpherson, james. the poems of ossian, &c. with notes by malcolm laing. 2 vols. edinburgh: james ballantyne, 1805. malof, joseph. a manual of english meters. bloomington: indiana university press, 1970. mee, jon. dangerous enthusiasm: william blake and the culture of radicalism in the 1790s. oxford: clarendon press, 1992. milton, john. “paradise lost” and “paradise regained.” ed. christopher ricks. new york: signet, 1968. ostriker, alicia. vision and verse in william blake. madison: university of wisconsin press, 1965. pereira, lawrence flores. “translating king lear and hamlet into portuguese: poetry, metric, rhythm and other problems.” semiannual newsletter of the massachusetts center for interdisciplinary renaissance studies (spring 2013): 22-25. preminger, alex, and t. v. f. brogan, eds. the new princeton encyclopedia of poetry and poetics. princeton: princeton university press, 1993. ramalho de sousa santos, maria irene. “blake no tempo: introdução ao poeta com traduções inéditas de paulo quintela.” biblos: revista da faculdade de letras 57 (1981): 677-751. saintsbury, george. a history of english prosody from the twelfth century to the present day. 3 vols. london: macmillan and co., 1906–10. steil, juliana. “tradução comentada de milton de william blake.” doctoral thesis, universidade federal de santa catarina, 2011. —​—​—​. “traduções de william blake no brasil.” revista letras raras 7.2 (2018): 58-66. <http://​revistas.​ufcg.​edu.​br/​ch/​index.​php/​rlr/​article/​view/​1120>. williams, jenny, and andrew chesterman. the map: a beginner’s guide to doing research in translation studies. manchester: st. jerome publishing, 2002. blake in the marketplace, 2018 blake in the marketplace, 2018 by robert n. essick robert n. essick has been collecting and writing about blake for over fifty years. table of contents: introductory essay abbreviations blake: illuminated books drawings and paintings first editions of blake’s writings first published in letterpress in blake’s lifetime separate plates and plates in series letterpress books with engravings by and after blake, including prints extracted from such books interesting blakeana blake’s circle and followers: barry, james basire, james calvert, edward flaxman, john fuseli, henry linnell, john palmer, samuel richmond, george romney, george stothard, thomas appendix: new information on blake’s engravings works by blake’s circle and followers had a stronger presence in the 2018 auction season than his own productions. henry fuseli’s vision of orestes (illus. 5), offered by christie’s new york in january, was bid a few steps over its high estimate to achieve a hammer price of $175,000 ($218,750 including the buyer’s premium). another dramatic composition by fuseli, the faerie queene appears to prince arthur (illus. 4), fetched almost three times high estimate at christie’s london in july, thereby setting a record price for a drawing by the artist. works by samuel palmer during his shoreham period, when his response to nature was most intense, rarely come to market. the estimate range of $250,000-350,000 proposed by sotheby’s new york in its 31 january auction for palmer’s a church with a boat and sheep of c. 1831 (illus. 7) seemed ambitious until the bidding began. after about four minutes of combat among four or five bidders, the drawing soared to a hammer price of two million dollars ($2,415,000 including the buyer’s premium). this is a record for a work by palmer and possibly a record for a monochrome drawing by a british artist. thomas stothard led us down from those heights with the march sale of the wash drawing for one of his novelist’s magazine illustrations engraved by blake—see musick beats time to labour under stothard and illus. 10. the original copperplates for two of john linnell’s most important etchings, “sheep at noon” (illus. 6) and “woodcutter’s repast,” were sold at auction in the same month. the robust market for blake’s followers continued into the fall with the late-october sales of palmer’s shoreham, a wash drawing of c. 1832–33, and george richmond’s the witch from ben jonson’s the sad shepherd (illus. 9), a painting of 1829–30. the richmond established a record price for one of his works. the lane side (illus. 8), an oil and tempera painting only recently attributed to palmer, fared less well at sotheby’s london in december. john windle’s william blake gallery in san francisco exhibited blake books: the commercial engravings of william blake, a tribute to gerald e. bentley, jr. from 2 february to 30 april. belying its title, the show included one of three copies of the 1783 edition of poetical sketches remaining in private hands. all works in the accompanying blake books online catalogue are listed below. windle closed the gallery at the conclusion of this exhibition but will continue to display—and of course sell—blake materials in smaller quarters in suite 232, across the hall from his main san francisco shop at 49 geary street, suite 233. sixteen works by or related to blake were displayed by windle at the california international antiquarian book fair held in pasadena, 9-11 february. all the original works by blake included in his online short title list for the fair appeared in earlier windle catalogues, but are repeated here for the record. with the exception of “chaucers canterbury pilgrims,” windle also exhibited these items at the same prices at the new york international antiquarian book fair, 8-11 march; because of this repetition, the new york fair is not listed in the entries below. he offered a smaller group of works at the london international antiquarian book fair, 24-26 may, and the melbourne international rare book fair, 6-8 july; these are recorded below. more information about many of these works is given in the 2017 sales review in blake 51.4 (spring 2018). windle brought his major blakean activities to a conclusion for the year with the late-september publication of catalogue 69, forty-one pages of blake and blakeana explosively titled blake blowout. a prefatory note announces that “we have recently acquired two more fascinating collections of material about william blake and his circle. due to this embarrassment of riches we are holding a once-only sale of blake material that we currently hold in multiple copies. … of especial interest to many customers will be the fact that we now have [and offer in this catalogue] all the trianon press blake trust facsimiles in multiple copies, both de luxe issues and regular issues.” increasing discounts, 10-50%, were offered according to the number of titles ordered. all original works by blake in this catalogue are listed below. most of blake’s works collected by sir geoffrey keynes were given to the fitzwilliam museum and the cambridge university library upon his death in july 1982, but a few important drawings and prints were retained in the sir geoffrey keynes will trust (also known as the keynes family trust). several of these works, since 1982 on deposit in the fitzwilliam, were given to the museum in 2018.arts council england, cultural gifts scheme and acceptance in lieu report 2018 (manchester: arts council england, 2018) 78-79, [90]. only the year of gifts is recorded, not the month. the europe frontispiece and title page and “chaucers canterbury pilgrims” hand colored are illustrated. the group includes the europe frontispiece and upper design from plate 4, a unique proof of the jerusalem frontispiece with the europe title page on the verso, the designs from visions of the daughters of albion plate 10 and the first book of urizen plates 1 and 3 from copy b of the small book of designs, one of blake’s wash drawings illustrating his manuscript poem tiriel, and three impressions of “chaucers canterbury pilgrims,” including one of two recorded second-state impressions hand colored. for details, see the entries below under illuminated books, drawings and paintings, and separate plates and plates in series. i am unaware of any newly discovered works by blake coming to market, but a few rare commercial engravings did appear, including an impression of “the idle laundress” with the full platemark, two copies of the protestant’s family bible, blake’s plate for elizabeth blower’s maria: a novel, and the 1826 issue of remember me! see the listings below under separate plates and letterpress books with engravings by and after blake. the appendix includes further information about one of two recorded proof impressions of blake’s print for remember me! and a newly discovered proof of plate 4, “the death of cleopatra” after fuseli, in allen’s roman history. paul sternberg has kindly informed me about important blake materials in early sales catalogues not previously recorded. they are listed below, including a copy of the book of thel offered at auction in 1803. these entries supplement g. e. bentley, jr., “sale catalogues of william blake’s works,” available online at <http://​library.​vicu.​utoronto.​ca/​collections/​special_collections/​bentley_blake_collection/​index.​html>. the year of all sales, catalogues, and correspondence in the following lists is 2018, unless indicated otherwise. most reports about auction catalogues are based on the online versions. illustrations are in color, unless noted otherwise. coverage of regional auctions is selective. dates for dealers’ online catalogues are the dates accessed, not the dates of publication. works offered online by dealers and previously listed in any one of the last four sales reviews are not repeated here. most of the auction houses add their purchaser’s surcharge to the hammer price in their price lists. these net amounts are given here, following the official price lists. estimates in auction catalogues are usually for hammer prices. i am grateful for help in compiling this review to david bindman, mark crosby, dennis david, harriet drummond, rachel eley, julian gascoigne, annika green, mark griffith-jones, nicholas lott, lara l’vov-basirov, rupert maas, edward maggs, michael phillips, justin schiller, john schulman, carmen socknat, paul sternberg, diana waghorn, and john windle. my special thanks go to jenijoy la belle for assistance in all matters. once again, sarah jones’s editorial expertise and john sullivan’s digital imaging have been invaluable. abbreviations ah abbott and holder, london bb g. e. bentley, jr., blake books (oxford: clarendon p, 1977). plate numbers and copy designations for blake’s illuminated books and commercial book illustrations follow bb. bbs g. e. bentley, jr., blake books supplement (oxford: clarendon p, 1995) bhl bonhams auctions, london br(2) g. e. bentley, jr., blake records, 2nd ed. (new haven: yale up, 2004) butlin martin butlin, the paintings and drawings of william blake, 2 vols. (new haven: yale up, 1981) cat(s). catalogue(s) cb robert n. essick, william blake’s commercial book illustrations (oxford: clarendon p, 1991) cl christie’s auctions, london cny christie’s auctions, new york cw chiswick auctions, london dw dominic winter auctions, south cerney, gloucestershire e the complete poetry and prose of william blake, ed. david v. erdman, newly rev. ed. (new york: anchor-random house, 1988) eb ebay online auctions fm forum auctions, london gp grosvenor prints, london illus. illustration(s), illustrated lh leslie hindman auctions, chicago lister raymond lister, catalogue raisonné of the works of samuel palmer (cambridge: cambridge up, 1988) pl(s). plate(s) sk skinner auctions, boston sl sotheby’s auctions, london sny sotheby’s auctions, new york sp robert n. essick, the separate plates of william blake: a catalogue (princeton: princeton up, 1983) st(s). state(s) of an engraving, etching, or lithograph sw swann auctions, new york wad waddington’s auctions, toronto weinglass d. h. weinglass, prints and engraved illustrations by and after henry fuseli (aldershot: scolar p, 1994) windle john windle antiquarian bookseller, san francisco # auction lot or catalogue item number illuminated books the book of thel. leigh, sotheby and son, london, auction of 20 dec. 1803, a catalogue of the valuable library, prints, and books of prints, of mr. henry bankes, of lincoln, bankrupt, #154 under “quarto”-size books, no author indicated, “the book of thel, plates, coloured” (price and purchaser unknown). this sale, not previously recorded, is the earliest known appearance at auction of one of blake’s illuminated books. the information in this cat. is too minimal to associate this copy of thel with any extant copy, although a few acquired directly from blake and not sold by the original owner until after 1803, such as george cumberland’s copy a, can be ruled out. according to the records of the office of commissioners of bankrupts held in the national archives at kew, henry bankes of lincoln was a “maltster and china manufacturer (dealer and chapman)” who was declared bankrupt on “1803 august 11; renewed 1819 august 4.”bankruptcy records kindly supplied by paul sternberg. the entire 1803 auction cat. is available online at <https://​books.​google.​com/​books?id=0bdfaaaacaaj>. see also cumberland, thoughts on outline, under letterpress books with engravings by and after blake. europe pls. 1 (uncolored) and 4 (upper design only, hand colored). leaves 25.1 x 18.4 cm. (pl. 1) and 14.3 x 17.0 cm. (pl. 4). bb pp. 161-62. given 2018 to the fitzwilliam museum by the sir geoffrey keynes will trust. see also jerusalem pl. 1, below. the first book of urizen pls. 1 and 3, designs only, color printed, from small book of designs copy b. leaves 26.0 x 18.2 cm. (pl. 1) and 9.9 x 15.0 cm. (pl. 3). bb pp. 182-83. given 2018 to the fitzwilliam museum by the sir geoffrey keynes will trust. jerusalem pl. 1, unique proof with inscriptions not printed in any other impression, with europe pl. 2 on the verso. leaf 25.7 x 19.3 cm. bb pp. 162, 261. given 2018 to the fitzwilliam museum by the sir geoffrey keynes will trust. jerusalem pls. 4 and 37 printed recto/verso and hand colored. leaf 6.7 x 16.0 cm., with both pls. trimmed to roughly the top one-third of the design and text. bb pp. 227, 261-62; bbs p. 87. given feb. by paul l. herring to the israel museum, jerusalem. songs of innocence copy w. windle, feb. online short title list for the california antiquarian book fair, #2, pl. 19 (“holy thursday”) only ($150,000). for illus., see the 2016 sales review, blake 50.4 (spring 2017): illus. 4. the 22 pls. of copy w are dispersed among the following owners: plate nos. owners 2, 5, 15, 25, 54 essick (pl. 25, “infant joy,” 1 of 2 recorded impressions in the 1st st.) 3, 11, 16-17, 26 e. j. pratt library, victoria university, toronto 4, 27 alan parker, london 6-7 morgan library and museum, new york 8 lilly library, indiana university, bloomington, indiana 12, 20-21 charles deering mccormick library, northwestern university, evanston, illinois 19 windle, as noted above 22-23, 24 university of north carolina library, chapel hill songs of innocence copy y. windle, feb. online short title list for the california antiquarian book fair, #1, pls. 16-17 (“a cradle song”) only ($250,000). sold april to a private collector, daniel crouch rare books, london, acting as agent for the purchaser. rumor in the trade whispers that the new owner is paul david hewson (bono), one of the world’s most famous rock musicians. his band, u2, recently produced albums titled songs of innocence and songs of experience. previously sold sny, 1 nov. 2007, #21, illus. ($115,000 to alan parker). for a black-and-white illus. of pl. 16, see the 2007 sales review, blake 41.4 (spring 2008): illus. 5. for an illus. of pl. 17, see the 2017 sales review, blake 51.4 (spring 2018): illus. 1. the 15 pls. of copy y are dispersed among the following owners: plate nos. owners 4, 5, 9-10, 13-14, 18 essick 6-7 charles deering mccormick library, northwestern university, evanston, illinois 8 e. j. pratt library, victoria university, toronto 11 adam fuss, new york 12 alan parker, london 15 anonymous private collector 16-17 private collector, possibly paul david hewson (bono) copy y and the 9 pls. of copy r (keynes collection, fitzwilliam museum) were originally part of the same (presumably complete) copy of innocence. visions of the daughters of albion pl. 10, design only, color printed, from small book of designs copy b. leaf 27.0 x 18.4 cm. bb p. 478. given 2018 to the fitzwilliam museum by the sir geoffrey keynes will trust. drawings and paintings a girl full-faced with bare breasts. pencil sketch from the smaller blake-varley sketchbook, leaf approximately 15.5 x 20.5 cm., c. 1819. butlin #692.82. jonny yarker, london art dealer, nov. private offer ($10,000). previously sold cl, 15 june 1971, #148 (£147 to alfred essex, london). a girl in profile, perhaps corinna. pencil sketch from the smaller blake-varley sketchbook, leaf approximately 15.5 x 20.5 cm., c. 1819. butlin #692.80. maas gallery, jan. online cat., titled “head of a woman,” illus. (not priced). david bindman, in an e-mail of 2 feb., tells me that the price is £28,000. previously offered cl, 15 june 1971, #146, illus. black and white (“b[ought]t. in” at £441 by “spurling,” according to butlin), and cl, 20 march 1990, #152, illus. black and white (not sold; estimate £1500-2000); previously sold dw, 6 oct. 2016, #349, illus. (£15,312.50 to an anonymous bidder on the telephone; estimate £5000-8000). see illus. 1. 1. a girl in profile, perhaps corinna (see enlargement). pencil drawing of a visionary head from the smaller blake-varley sketchbook, leaf 15.5 x 20.5 cm. butlin #692.80, the verso described as “blank save for a slight scribble.” butlin states that this may be the ancient greek poet corinna (flourished c. 500 bc) because the sketch is “comparable with the inscribed drawing of corinna (no. 708; see also no. 709).” butlin #708, showing both frontal and profile views, is inscribed, probably by john linnell, “corrinna the rival of pindar” and “corrinna the grecian poetess.” the similarities with this drawing are slight. butlin #709 is a much closer parallel, but it is not inscribed with the subject’s name. photo courtesy of rupert maas, maas gallery, london. a seated monarch with an agonized expression. pencil sketch from the smaller blake-varley sketchbook, leaf approximately 15.5 x 20.5 cm., c. 1819, inscribed in pencil by blake “crimson” on the man’s shirt or cloak and “green” on his breeches. butlin #692.64. jonny yarker, london art dealer, nov. private offer ($10,000). previously sold cl, 15 june 1971, #158, illus. black and white (£252 to alfred essex, london). tiriel denouncing his sons and daughters. monochrome wash drawing, 18.2 x 27.0 cm., c. 1788–89. butlin #198.8. given 2018 to the fitzwilliam museum by the sir geoffrey keynes will trust. first editions of blake’s writings first published in letterpress in blake’s lifetime poetical sketches, 1783, bb and bbs copy e. windle, feb. blake books online cat., no item #, modern morocco, title page with presentation inscription by john flaxman and binding illus. ($250,000); same copy and price, feb. online short title list for the california antiquarian book fair, #3, may online list for the london antiquarian book fair, #5, may short list 10 (new series), #3, title page and binding illus., july online list for the melbourne rare book fair, #4, and nov. online short title list for the boston antiquarian book fair, #6. see the 2017 sales review in blake 51.4 (spring 2018) for additional information. separate plates and plates in series “chaucers canterbury pilgrims,” 3 impressions: 2nd st. (hand colored), 3rd st., 5th st. sp impressions 2b, 3o, 5kk. given 2018 to the fitzwilliam museum by the sir geoffrey keynes will trust. “chaucers canterbury pilgrims,” 5th st. windle, feb. online short title list for the california antiquarian book fair, #7, colnaghi printing on laid india ($25,000); same impression and price, sept. cat. 69, #4, illus. black and white. dante engravings. sims reed, july cat., no item #, complete set on laid india, loose as issued, illus. (£60,000). eb, aug., pl. 4 only, 1968 printing on wove paper, inscribed in pencil by ruthven todd “proof pulled by harry hoehn; received in crumpled condition and damped, august 5, 1968 ruthven todd—given to john ulbricht, 19 august 1968,” illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $2000 or “best offer”); same impression, sept., illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $1000 or “best offer”). “george cumberland’s card.” windle, feb. online short title list for the california antiquarian book fair, #9, apparently the impression in black ink on thick card previously offered in windle’s march 2017 cat. 65, #11 ($20,000); same impression and price, sept. cat. 69, #3, illus. black and white. “the idle laundress,” after morland, 1788. windle, june private offer, 2nd st., color printed and with touches of hand coloring, leaf of wove paper 28.9 x 32.5 cm., all inscriptions and full platemark present, paper browned from overexposure to light, marginal stains (acquired, in exchange for another impression, and cleaned by essick). in poor condition when acquired, but the only impression with the platemark i’ve ever seen on the market. reeman dansie auction, colchester, 20 june, #1205, 2nd st., with the companion print, “industrious cottager” after morland, 3rd st., titles and imprints cut off and pasted to the backing mats, both printed in brown ink and uncolored, both illus. (£528 the pair to windle for stock); windle, same pair, sept. online cat., now “cleaned” and with “titles mounted below the prints,” illus. ($6750). “industrious cottager,” after morland. see “the idle laundress,” above. “james upton,” engraved by blake and linnell after linnell, 1818–19. for a drawing possibly (but rather distantly) related to this pl., see linnell, the artist’s sister, under blake’s circle. job engravings. eb, jan., pl. numbered 7 only, published “proof” impression on laid india, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $2000); same impression, jan., illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $2000 or “best offer”); same impression, march, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $1500 or “best offer”). clarke auction, larchmont, new york, 4 feb., #11, pl. numbered 3 only, apparently the 1826 printing on wove after removal of the “proof” inscription, illus. ($750). sw, 13 march, #1-3, pls. numbered 2-4 offered individually, published “proof” impressions on laid india, all illus. ($2750 each); 8 may, #232-34, pls. numbered 6 and 12 (both with the “proof” inscription, presumably on french paper) and 3 (after removal of the “proof” inscription, presumably on whatman paper) offered individually, all illus. (estimates $3000-5000 for pls. 6 and 12, $2000-3000 for pl. 3; none sold); 1 nov., #172-74, pls. numbered 7, 11, and 20 offered individually, published “proof” impressions on laid india, all illus. ($3250 for pl. numbered 11, others not sold). shapero rare books, may online cat., complete set, 1826 “proof” printing on french paper, leaves 42.0 x 27.5 cm., scattered light foxing, original boards “renewed,” later slipcase, illus. (£55,000). windle, may short list 10 (new series), #2, complete set, 1826 “proof” printing on laid india, leaves 32.0 x 25.4 cm., unbound in mats, illus. ($125,000). sk, 21 sept., #346, pls. numbered 6, 7, 12, and 15 only, “proof” printing apparently on french paper, “toning, foxing, staining, not examined out of frames,” illus. ($3198). “mrs q,” after villiers. windle, feb. blake books online cat., no item #, 2nd st., leaf 40.6 x 28.8 cm., repaired tear extending into the design, mat stains, illus. ($1500 to the university of north carolina library, chapel hill). mellors & kirk auction, nottingham, 29 nov., #373, pencil and watercolor copy, 27.0 x 21.0 cm., “after” blake’s engraving, with a pencil and watercolor copy of the companion print by georges maile after j. barrow, “windsor castle,” both illus. (£576). small book of designs copy b. see the first book of urizen and visions of the daughters of albion under illuminated books. letterpress books with engravings by and after blake, including prints extracted from such books allen, history of england, 1798. windle, feb. blake books online cat., no item #, modern calf, illus. ($3750 to the university of north carolina library, chapel hill). allen, roman history, 1798. windle, feb. blake books online cat., no item #, imprints trimmed off pls. 1 and 2, contemporary quarter calf worn, illus. ($3750 to the university of north carolina library, chapel hill). for a proof of pl. 4, see the appendix. ariosto, orlando furioso. peter harrington, jan. private offer, 1783 ed., 5 vols., contemporary calf (£875). green ink bookseller, april online cat., 1783 ed., 5 vols., lacking 1 pl. not by blake, full “leather” very worn (£300). black swan books, april online cat., 1791 ed., 2 vols., contemporary calf, binding illus. ($200). eb, june, 1783 ed., 5 vols., contemporary boards, cloth spines with printed title labels, illus. (£132); another copy, june-july, 1783 ed., 5 vols., contemporary calf, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $1200); same copy, july, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $900 or “best offer”); same copy, aug., illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $750 or “best offer”); same copy, sept., illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $700 or “best offer”); same copy, oct., illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $550 or “best offer”); same copy, nov., illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $450); same copy, dec., illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $350); july-aug., 1799 ed., 5 vols., contemporary calf, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $1200); sept., 1791 ed., 2 vols., foxed, contemporary calf very worn, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £72); nov., 1783 ed., 5 vols., contemporary calf, illus. ($227.50); nov., 1785 ed., 5 vols., modern buckram, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $133.50). ecbooks, sept. online cat., 1783 ed., 5 vols., later calf very worn, parts of backstrips missing, illus. (£350). harpo speaks, nov. online cat., 1785 ed., 5 vols., contemporary calf worn, illus. ($145). bible. protestant’s family bible, 1780–81. eb, may, lacking blake’s pl. 4, foxed, contemporary suede worn, illus. ($670.50 to windle for stock). debra coltham, may london antiquarian book fair, lacking the frontispiece engraved by joseph collyer after stothard but with the blake pls., title page repaired, contemporary calf worn (£3200 to windle for stock; the frontispiece from the eb copy added and this vol. sold july to the charles deering mccormick library, northwestern university). windle, sept. online cat., blake’s pls. 1-3 and 5 only, “a little browned around the edges” ($975 each). only the 2nd and 3rd copies i’ve ever seen on the market. blair, the grave, 1808 folio. arthur johnson & sons auction, nottingham, 13 jan., #12, blake’s pl. 9 only, framed, illus. (£48.80). blair, the grave, 1808 quarto. eb, jan., foxed, modern half morocco, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $2200). windle, feb. blake books online cat., no item #, uncut in original boards, cover label, illus. ($9750); another copy, sept. cat. 69, #1, uncut in half calf, illus. black and white ($5750). d & d galleries, feb. online cat., pls. trimmed close, scattered foxing and dust staining, modern half calf, illus. ($2200). chanticleer books, april online cat., leaves trimmed to 34.4 x 27.0 cm., “a few finger smudges to text and to margins of a couple of plates,” caption to blake’s pl. 7 “with some rubbing,” new half morocco ($3750). shapiro auction, new york, 2 june, #21, 1808 “folio” (but actually the quarto), leaves 36.0 x 29.0 cm., half morocco by riviere, illus. (not sold; estimate $3000-4000). bhl, 20 june, #15, 1808 “folio” with “text watermarked ‘j. whatman 1808’” (thus actually the quarto), contemporary half morocco worn, illus. (£350). sl, 9 july, #443, “spotting” on pls., from the collections of “richard monckton milnes, first baron houghton (1809–1885), [his] wheatsheaf stamp on binding; his son robert, marquess of crewe (1858–1945), armorial bookplate; his daughter mary, duchess of roxburghe,” half calf worn, illus. (£875); same copy, d & d galleries, aug. online cat., illus. ($2900). second story books, nov. online cat., some foxing and staining, half “leather” worn ($2500). see also r. blair, the grave, frederick hollyer reproduction, c. 1912, under interesting blakeana. blair, the grave, 1813 folio. windle, march online cat. of new arrivals, with “6 of the 12 [blake] plates in the first state,” frontispiece portrait on laid india, “some spotting and foxing mostly to margins,” modern boards with “morocco backstrip” ($9750). blair, the grave, 1813 quarto. eb, feb., frontispiece and blake’s pl. 1 water stained, original (?) boards worn with calf spine, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $899); june, frontispiece portrait only, crease lower-left corner, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $0.99). manfred nosbuesch, april online cat., “r. ackerman, 1913” (apparently an error for the 1813 quarto), later calf worn (€1800). anah dunsheath, april online cat., “some staining,” contemporary half calf worn, illus. ($1572.51). lh, 13 nov., #47, “last plate disbound with margins frayed, some light browning or spotting,” contemporary boards worn and backed with roan, illus. ($200). blair, the grave, [1870] folio. eb, march, frontispiece portrait of blake only, stained lower third torn off but retained, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £40); another impression, sept., “some light fox marks,” illus. (£45). roseberys auction, london, 22 march, #241, marginal stains, “half brown pigskin” (£221.40). kay craddock, april online cat., publisher’s cloth with later leather spine “with most of the original cloth spine laid on,” illus. ($1500 australian). chrisant & sons, april online cat., worm damage and bad foxing, quarter morocco ($800). heritage auction, dallas, 13 sept., #45266, marginal foxing, publisher’s cloth worn and repaired, illus. ($275). windle, sept. cat. 69, #2, publisher’s cloth, illus. black and white ($1500). blair, the grave, 1858 new york ed. with pls. engraved by a. l. dick. centerbridge books, april online cat., foxed, publisher’s cloth, illus. ($175). second story books, nov. online cat., “moderate water-staining throughout, getting worse towards the rear,” publisher’s boards ($200). [blower], maria: a novel, 2 vols., 1785. windle, aug. private offer, blake’s pl. only (the frontispiece to vol. 1 and the only pl. in the book), 2nd st., leaf of laid paper 13.2 x 8.5 cm., sp impression 2c, then in the collection of the american blake foundation, trimmed to just below the signatures under the design ($2000; acquired by essick).at the time i wrote sp, only detached examples of the print were known, and thus they were listed in a section of the cat. titled “book illustrations known only through separate impressions.” the book in which the pl. was published was discovered in 2000 by g. e. bentley, jr.; see his “william blake and his circle: a checklist of publications and discoveries in 2000,” blake 34.4 (spring 2001): 138-40, with the pl. (design only) reproduced in black and white from a copy in the bodleian library, oxford. the only impression, in or out of the book, i’ve ever seen on the market. brown, elements of medicine, 1795. leigh, sotheby and son, london, auction of the library of john strange, 16 march 1801 “and twenty-eight following days,” #5089, “brown (jo.) elements of medicine, with a biographical preface by dr. beddoes, 2 vol. 8vo (portr. by blake) lond. 1795” (8s. 6d. to “guthals”?). this auction cat. and its reference to blake not previously recorded. eb, aug., vol. 1 only, blake’s pl. foxed, modern buckram, illus. (€36.50). bryant, new system … of ancient mythology. eb, march, 2nd ed., 1775–76, 3 vols., uncut in original boards, later cloth spines worn, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of £599.99); same copy, may, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £599.99 or “best offer”); same copy, june, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £549.99 or “best offer”); same copy, july, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £399.99 or “best offer”). windle, sept. online cat., 2nd ed., 1775–76, 3 vols., contemporary calf, illus. ($1250); oct. private offer, 1st ed., 1774–76, 3 vols., contemporary calf rebacked ($2500). frey fine books, sept. online cat., 1st ed., 1774–76, 3 vols., contemporary calf worn, illus. ($725). lh, 13 nov., #57, 1st ed., 1774–76, 3 vols., contemporary calf worn, illus. (no bids on an estimate of $200-400). bürger, leonora, 1796. windle, feb. blake books online cat., no item #, pl. 1 (frontispiece) only, trimmed to the design on both sides and at top, trimmed just below the signatures at the bottom, illus. ($1750). catullus, poems, 1795. fm, 25 jan., #241, 2 vols. in 1, “some spotting and light browning,” contemporary calf rebacked, illus. (£375—but possibly bought in); same copy, 22 march, #235, illus. (£390). peter harrington, april online cat., 2 vols., slightly later calf, illus. (£1250). chaucer, poetical works, 1782. eb, aug., vols. 11-14 only, with blake’s pl. in vol. 13, light marginal foxing, contemporary calf very worn, illus. (£50). cumberland, thoughts on outline, 1796. leigh, sotheby and son, london, auction of 20 dec. 1803, collection of henry bankes, #161 under “quarto”-size books, “george cumberland on outline, sculpture and art, plates, 1796” (no price or purchaser recorded). for bankes, see the book of thel under illuminated books. darwin, botanic garden. windle, feb. blake books online cat., no item #, 3rd ed. of part 1, 1795, 4th ed. of part 2, 1794, 2 vols. in 1, “light spotting and foxing,” modern calf “a bit rubbed,” illus. ($3750); same copy, sept. cat. 69, #12, the binding now described as 19th-century calf rebacked, illus. black and white ($3000); april online cat., 1st ed. of part 1, 3rd ed. of part 2, both 1791, 2 vols., uncut in original boards worn, fragment of printed title label on spine of vol. 1, illus. ($2975); aug. online cat., blake’s pl. 1 (“fertilization of egypt”) only, “margins foxed,” illus. ($875). tennants auction, leyburn, north yorkshire, 7 march, #164, “1791” (apparently the date of the general title page, no information given on dates of the 2 parts), 2 vols. in 1, 1 text leaf torn, uncut in original boards worn, binding illus. (£504—but probably bought in); same copy, 21 april, #284, binding illus. (£176.25). hordern house, nov. online cat., 1st ed. of part 1, 3rd ed. of part 2, both 1791, 2 vols. in 1, light foxing, contemporary calf, the copy previously listed at $4593 in april 2009 online cat., illus. ($3911). shapero rare books, nov. online cat., 1st ed. of part 1, 3rd ed. of part 2, both 1791, 2 vols. in 1, “light spotting,” contemporary calf repaired (£1498.53). keogh’s books, nov. online cat., 3rd ed. of part 1, 1795, 4th ed. of part 2, 1794, lacking 2 pls. in part 1 (probably blake’s pls. 1 and 6), pls. spotted, contemporary calf falling apart, binding illus. (£200). flaxman, hesiod designs, 1817. eb, jan., bound with the iliad and odyssey designs, 1805, and the aeschylus designs, 1831, foxed and badly water stained, 19th-century calf worn, illus. (€58). meiwes, april online cat., with the iliad and odyssey designs, 1805, and the aeschylus designs, “1835” (probably an error for 1831), 4 vols., all with foxing, “original boards with cloth spine[s],” previously offered individually (€920). kensington estate auction, clintondale, new york, 6 aug., #36, with the iliad designs, 1805, 2 vols., scattered light foxing, both in original boards with cover labels, illus. ($620). sworders auction, stansted mountfitchet, essex, 11 sept., #59, foxed, front pastedown inscribed “to the rev.d william gunn with the author’s affectionate respects,” original boards with cover label, with the iliad and odyssey designs, 1793, and the dante designs, 1807, 4 vols., illus. (£516.60). phantom tollbooth, nov. online cat., bound with the iliad and odyssey designs, 1805, and the aeschylus designs, 1831, 19th-century morocco worn, illus. ($850). rooke books, dec. online cat., bound with the aeschylus designs, 1831, both with scattered stains and foxing, later half morocco, illus. (£384). flaxman, iliad designs, 1805. lyon & turnbull auction, edinburgh, 14 feb., #125, scattered foxing, with the odyssey designs, 1805, and the aeschylus designs, 1831, 3 vols. in original boards with cover labels, illus. (not sold; estimate £100-150). bamfords auction, derby, 15 march, #3746, bound with the odyssey designs, 1805, later morocco worn, covers detached, binding illus. (£54.45). “mrbooks,” april online cat., foxed, with the odyssey designs, 1805, 2 vols., half “leather” ($390). richard winterton auction, lichfield, staffordshire, 11 june, #48, pls. badly stained, 19th-century vellum, illus. (£82.25). eb, july, scattered light foxing, bound with the odyssey designs, 1805, and the aeschylus designs, 1831, 19th-century vellum, illus. (£119); another copy, sept., with the odyssey designs, 1805, 2 vols., both foxed, 19th-century half calf worn, illus. (£35). chrisant & sons, nov. online cat., bound with the odyssey designs, 1805, later morocco worn ($305). honey & wax booksellers, nov. online cat., bound with the odyssey designs, 1805, and the aeschylus designs, 1795, scattered foxing and marginal water stains, contemporary half calf repaired, illus. ($3000). see also flaxman, hesiod designs, above. gay, fables. windle, feb. blake books online cat., no item #, 1793 ed., “possibly large-paper,” 2 vols., contemporary calf “a bit scuffed and untidy,” illus. ($1500); no item #, blake’s pls. 3-9, 11, 12 only, all illus. ($750); another copy, sept. cat. 69, #14, 1793 ed., 2 vols. in 1, “old calf rebacked,” illus. black and white ($1500). dw, 14 feb., #37, 1793 ed., apparently 2 vols. in 1, “occasional light spotting,” contemporary calf worn and rebacked (£132). john price, april online cat., 1793 ed., 2 vols., late 19th-century calf (£1045). second story books, april online cat., 1793 ed., 2 vols., scattered foxing, contemporary calf rebacked ($1000). pleasant street books, april online cat., 1793 ed., 2 vols., “minor foxing,” title pages trimmed, “leather” rebacked ($800). rosenlund rare books, april online cat., 1793 ed., 2 vols., 19th-century half calf ($800). imperial fine books, july online cat., 1793 ed., 2 vols., with aesop, fables, 1793, 2 vols., uniformly bound by zaehnsdorf in morocco, bindings illus. ($7500). eb, sept., 1793 ed., 2 vols. in 1, some pls. partly hand colored, foxed and stained, later three-quarter buckram, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $1092.50); another copy, dec., 1793 ed., 2 vols. in 1, contemporary calf worn, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $1095 or “best offer”). black swan books, dec. online cat., [1811] ed., 2 vols., considerable foxing, half “leather,” illus. ($600). some of these “1793” copies may be the [1811] ed. hayley, ballads, 1805. eb, jan., 2nd sts. of pls. 1-3, “light foxing/spotting,” blue paper wrappers, the copy offered dec. 2017 at the “buy it now” price of $3000 or “best offer,” illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $1500); same copy, jan., illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $1400 or “best offer”); probably the same copy, gordon hopkins americana, april online cat., scattered light foxing, “later blue paper covers with cloth spine” ($1500). windle, feb. blake books online cat., no item #, 1st sts. of the pls., contemporary calf worn, illus. ($6500); same copy and price, may online list for the london antiquarian book fair, #7, and july online list for the melbourne rare book fair, #6. hayley, designs to a series of ballads, 1802. windle, feb. blake books online cat., no item #, pl. 1 (frontispiece) only, illus. ($49,500); same impression and price, feb. online short title list for the california antiquarian book fair, #4. hayley, essay on sculpture, 1800. eb, feb., large-paper copy, pls. badly foxed, later calf, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $499 or “best offer”); same copy, march, illus. ($116). hayley, life of cowper, 1803–04. windle, feb. blake books online cat., no item #, 2nd ed., 3 vols., “some spotting and foxing,” contemporary calf worn, illus. ($1250); another copy, sept. cat. 69, #16, 3 vols., “old diaper calf rebacked, new labels,” illus. black and white ($975). eb, march, pl. 3 only, 1st st., “small crease to paper at the bottom,” illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $399); another impression of pl. 3, aug., 2nd st., imprint partly trimmed off, “minor water stain lower right corner,” illus. (£109); sept., pl. 4 only, 2nd st. from the 1st ed., illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of £125); same impression (?) of pl. 4, dec., 2nd st., illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £145); sept.-oct., pl. 2 only, 1st st., illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of £120); sept.-oct., 1st ed., 3 vols., half calf very worn, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £220 or “best offer”); nov., pl. 1 only, 1st st., illus. (£227). hayley, life of romney, 1809. windle, feb. blake books online cat., no item #, “large paper copy,” later half calf, illus. ($3250). city bookshop, april online cat., foxed, later morocco, illus. (£295). francis edwards, dec. online cat., large-paper copy, some pls. water stained, contemporary half calf, illus. (£495). hayley, little tom the sailor, broadside, 1800, hand colored. according to arts council england, cultural gifts scheme and acceptance in lieu report 2018 (see note 1), 81, the copy in the estate of the duchess of roxburghe “has been temporarily allocated to the wren library, trinity college, cambridge, pending a decision on its permanent allocation.” for comments on this copy and illus., see the 2017 sales review, blake 51.4 (spring 2018): illus. 7. hayley, triumphs of temper, 1803. windle, feb. blake books online cat., no item #, “large-paper copy,” later half morocco, illus. ($2750); another copy, sept. cat. 69, #17, apparently small-paper issue, “old calf neatly rebacked,” illus. black and white ($675); another copy, nov. online cat., “a poor copy” with “an extensive stain, from pages 1 to 40,” pl. 5 stained, contemporary calf very worn ($200). james cummins, nov. online cat., apparently small-paper issue, inscription mostly cut away from the top of the title page, contemporary calf worn, illus. ($500). see also maria flaxman, serena viewing herself in the glass, 1803, under interesting blakeana. hoare, inquiry, 1806. eb, feb., blake’s pl. badly foxed, original boards uncut, printed spine label, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £700 or “best offer”). addison & sarova auction, macon, georgia, 3 nov., #79, blake’s pl. water stained, contemporary calf crudely rebacked with tape, illus. ($281.25). hogarth, the beggar’s opera by hogarth and blake, 1965. millea bros. auction, boonton, new jersey, 14 march, #2042, “with water stains and foxing, some foxing and staining to majority of prints,” original folding box worn, illus. (no bids on an estimate of $80-120). eb, march, blake’s pl. only, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $125); dec., blake’s pl. badly stained, damage to other leaves, publisher’s folding box damaged, the copy offered in july 2017 for $216.53 and possibly the same copy in the millea auction (above), illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $154.66 or “best offer”). hogarth, works. eb, jan., blake’s pl. only, probably 3rd st., marginal foxing and water stain in the left margin, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £130). dw, 8 march, #429, blake’s pl. only, probably 3rd st., trimmed to the image on both sides and at the top, bottom margin stained, illus. (£84). lh, 1 may, #9, apparently the quaritch reprint of c. 1880 dated “1822” on the title page, contemporary half morocco worn, blake’s pl. (7th st.) illus. ($1625). windle, aug. online cat., blake’s pl. only, “third state,” leaf of wove paper 65.0 x 49.0 cm., illus. ($500). john k. king, nov. online cat., 1822 ed., half “leather” very worn ($5175). hunter, historical journal, 1793 quarto. fm, 25 jan., #40, blake’s pl. foxed, contemporary calf worn and rebacked, illus. (£750). michael treloar, april online cat., foxed, later half calf worn ($5500 australian); another copy, foxed, “simulated calf” ($3000 australian). n1 books, april online cat., modern half calf, illus. (£1750). peter harrington, nov. online cat., scattered marginal foxing, contemporary calf rebacked, illus. (£3250). lamdha books, nov. online cat., foxed, half calf worn, binding and blake’s pl. (imprint trimmed off) illus. ($3850 australian). j & s l bonham, nov. online cat., foxed, recent half calf (£1750). josephus, works, c. 1785–90. eb, dec. 2017, bb issue a, blake’s pl. 2 described as “uncredited” (i.e., not signed?) but actually 2nd st. with signature, contemporary calf very worn, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $1500 or “best offer”); same copy, march, blake’s pl. 2 properly described, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $1150 or “best offer”); same copy and price, sept., illus.; june, bb issue b, contemporary calf rebacked and very worn, illus. (£52). caliban book shop, april online cat., bb issue a, contemporary calf very worn, illus. ($1005). bärbel hoffmann, april online cat., bb issue b or c, contemporary calf very worn, binding illus. (€195). kimpton, history of the holy bible, c. 1781. windle, feb. private offer, marginal tears in a few leaves, scattered foxing and other stains, later half morocco ($975 to the university of north carolina library, chapel hill). lavater, aphorisms. windle, sept. cat. 69, #18, 1794 ed., 2nd st. of the pl., “with many aphorisms having a faint pencil cross or squiggle alongside,” contemporary calf worn and repaired ($295); another copy, nov. online cat., 2nd st. of the pl., “old tree calf” ($495). eb, dec., 1789 ed., 1st st. of the pl., contemporary calf rebacked, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of £520); same copy, dec., illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £520 or “best offer”); same copy, rooke books, dec. online cat., illus. (£336). lavater, essays on physiognomy. eb, march-april, 1810 ed., 3 vols. in 5, scattered foxing, contemporary russia, spines worn, illus. (£299.95); another copy, april, 3 vols. in 5, contemporary calf, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $300); same copy, july, illus. ($255); july, vols. 1-2 only, 1789, 1792, foxed, contemporary quarter calf very worn, most covers loose, illus. (£176.33). lawrences auction, crewkerne, somerset, 8 june, #1543, 1810 ed., 3 vols. in 5, “some staining and spotting, a few leaves torn, contemporary vellum-backed boards” worn (£97.60). argosy book store, nov. online cat., 1810 ed., 3 vols. in 4, lacking a 5th vol. containing the part of the work designated as vol. 3 part 2 in the printed text, marginal foxing, contemporary calf worn ($1700). blake’s pls. are in vol. 1 as printed. malkin, father’s memoirs, 1806. windle, feb. blake books online cat., no item #, “large paper copy,” original boards worn, cloth spine, modern morocco slipcase, illus. ($3000); another copy, sept. cat. 69, #19, “original (remainder?) binding of pebbled dark green cloth, red label lettered gilt,” worn with upper joint repaired, illus. black and white ($1500). nicholson, introduction to natural philosophy, 1782. windle, april online cat., vol. 1 (of 2) only, 1st st. of the title-page vignette engraved by blake, contemporary calf worn ($375). alcuin books, nov. online cat., 2 vols., scattered foxing, contemporary calf worn and rebacked, illus. ($396.55). novelist’s magazine. lyppard books, july online cat., vol. 8 only, 1782, contemporary half calf worn (£295), and vol. 9 only, 1782, contemporary half calf worn, illus. (£199). caliban books, oct. online cat., vols. 10-11 only, 1783, 19th-century half calf, illus. ($350). for the preliminary drawing for blake’s pl. 1 in vol. 9, illustrating laurence sterne’s sentimental journey, see musick beats time to labour under stothard in blake’s circle and illus. 10. olivier, fencing familiarized, 1780. windle, feb. blake books online cat., no item #, later quarter roan, illus. ($1000 to the university of north carolina library, chapel hill). eb, sept., scattered foxing and other stains, contemporary calf very worn, upper cover detached, slipcase, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $500 or “best offer”). rees, cyclopædia, 1820. eb, march, pls. vol. 4 only with blake’s pls. 4-7, later half calf with older backstrip retained, illus. (£231). at the sign of the pipe, sept. online cat., described as “complete” with 39 text vols. and vols. 1-5 of pls. and thus apparently lacking pls. vol. 6, the “atlas,” contemporary calf, illus. (£5500). remember me! windle, feb. blake books online cat., no item #, issue for “1825,” binding described as “publisher’s de luxe original full brown polished calf” but actually rebound by the parisian binder purgold, illus. ($30,000); same copy and price, windle, feb. online short title list for the california antiquarian book fair, #8, may online list for the london antiquarian book fair, #6, and july online list for the melbourne rare book fair, #5; issue for “1826,” sept. cat. 69, #7, “occasional spotting,” publisher’s printed paper boards lacking backstrip, modern cloth box, illus. black and white ($19,500). only the 2nd copy of the issue for 1826 i have ever seen on the market. for a proof of blake’s pl., see the appendix. ritson, select collection of english songs, 1783. windle, sept. online cat., 3 vols., contemporary calf rebacked, illus. ($1250). salzmann, elements of morality. christopher edwards, feb. california antiquarian book fair, 1791 ed., 3 vols., repaired tear in 1 pl. by blake, other pls. with restored margins, later calf (£6500). eb, aug., 1792 ed., vol. 2 only, “approximately 14 [of 17] copper plates” partly and crudely hand colored, contemporary half calf very worn, covers loose, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £110 or “best offer”). harvardyard books, sept. online cat., undated “juvenile library” ed., c. 1815?, 2 vols., quarter “leather” ($1795). scott, poetical works, 1782. ed buryn, nov. online cat., quarter calf worn, front cover detached, priced at $450 in 2002 ($395). shakespeare, dramatic works, 1802. robert frew, may online cat., 9 vols., “plates generally spotted,” contemporary half russia, illus. (£4750). sl, 9 july, #421, 9 vols., some pls. foxed, contemporary morocco worn, illus. (£3250). alan wofsy, nov. online cat., 9 vols., “heavy foxing,” contemporary half calf repaired, illus. ($3500). shakespeare, plays. eb, jan., 1811 ed., 9 vols., “scattered foxing,” contemporary calf worn, bindings illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £1728.45); another copy, jan., 9 vols., later half calf worn, illus. ($104.50); may, 1805 ed., 10 vols., scattered foxing on pls., contemporary calf worn and repaired, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £1250 or “best offer”). windle, feb. blake books online cat., no item #, 1805 ed., 10 vols., contemporary calf worn, illus. ($2750); blake’s pl. 1 only, no item #, stained, illus. ($500). antiquariat friederichsen, april online cat., 1805 ed., 9 vols., contemporary half calf worn, illus. (€900). librairie du cardinal, april online cat., 1811 ed., 9 vols., 19th-century calf, illus. (€395). antiquariat tautenhahn, april online cat., 1805 ed., 9 vols., half “leather” very worn (€180). sonalsorises, sept. online cat., 1805 ed., 9 vols., apparently lacking blake’s pl. 2, “original leather” worn ($1250). premier galleries auction, chesterland, ohio, 28 oct., #141, 1805 ed., 10 vols., blake’s pl. 2 with a “tiny abrasion,” 19th-century calf worn, 1 cover detached, illus. ($480). stedman, narrative, 1796, uncolored copies. eb, jan., 2 vols., lacking blake’s pls. 2, 8, and 14, most pls. foxed, some badly, contemporary half calf worn, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of £1250); same copy, feb., offered at the “buy it now” price of £1250; another copy, july-aug., 2 vols., most leaves stained, modern calf, illus. ($1350). windle, feb. blake books online cat., no item #, blake’s pls. 9 and 13 only, illus. ($300 each). bhl, 21 march, #128, 2 vols., “some spotting” of the pls., contemporary calf worn, bindings illus. (£3125). antiquariaat a. kok & zn., april online cat., 2 vols., “leather” worn (€4345). dw, 20 june, #42, 2 vols., tears and repairs to text and pls., “moderate spotting,” contemporary calf rebacked, illus. (£648). sk, 20 july, #166, 2 vols., contemporary calf rebacked, illus. ($2460). jremington books, sept. online cat., 2 vols., lacking blake’s pl. 14, foxed, contemporary calf rebacked, illus. ($5500, the copy offered on eb in oct. 2013 at the same price). argosy book store, dec. online cat., blake’s pls. 1, 2, 8, and 10 only, pl. 8 badly stained in the image, marginal stains on the other pls., all illus. ($750 each for pls. 1 and 8, $650 each for pls. 2 and 10). stedman, narrative, 1806, pls. hand colored. windle, feb. blake books online cat., no item #, 2 vols., contemporary calf worn, illus. ($19,500); same copy and price, feb. online short title list for the california antiquarian book fair, #10. stuart and revett, antiquities of athens. hugh pagan, april online cat., vol. 3 only, 1794, pls. damp stained, “original boards” (£1540). ken sanders, nov. online cat., 4 vols., 1762–1816, extensive damp staining, half calf very worn ($6000). blake’s 4 pls. are in vol. 3. vetusta monumenta, vol. 2, c. 1789. eb, jan., blake’s pls. 3, 4, and 7 only, offered individually, illus. (no bids on required minimum bids of $19.99 each). virgil, pastorals, 1821. windle, feb. blake books online cat., no item #, 2 vols., “presentation copy inscribed by thornton to his daughter,” original sheep worn, (later?) spine labels, illus. ($67,500); same copy and price, may online list for the london antiquarian book fair, #10, and july online list for the melbourne rare book fair, #9; another copy, feb. online short title list for the california antiquarian book fair, #6, 2 vols., “juvenile library” label on the title page of vol. 1, later half morocco worn ($45,000); same “juvenile library” copy and price, sept. cat. 69, #24, illus. black and white (sold to stanford university library). see also the facsimile woodblock under interesting blakeana. virgil, the wood engravings of william blake for thornton’s virgil, 1977. windle, sept. cat. 69, #25, “a few mounts slightly foxed,” publisher’s folding box ($10,500). wit’s magazine, 1784. windle, feb. blake books online cat., no item #, 2 vols. in 1, 1784–85, with the 2nd version of the frontispiece in the jan. 1784 issue (bb pl. 2, cb pl. 1b), contemporary half calf worn, illus. ($5750); same copy and price, sept. cat. 69, #11, illus. black and white. eb, aug., 1784 issues, “twelve folding plate[s],” with the 2nd version of the frontispiece in the jan. issue (bb pl. 2, cb pl. 1b), scattered foxing, later half calf, illus. (£560). wollstonecraft, original stories, 1791. athena rare books, feb. california antiquarian book fair, 2nd sts. of the pls., contemporary calf rebacked ($8000). windle, feb. blake books online cat., no item #, pls. only, 2nd sts., “cleaned,” all illus. ($3000); aug. online cat., 2nd sts. of the pls., “extra plate at the front thought to be by blake (but not),” modern calf, illus. ($8750). young, night thoughts, 1797. longman & co., lackington & co., and others, catalogue of an extensive and valuable collection of books, … forming the late stock of white, cochrane, and co., april 1815, #318, “young’s night thoughts, with engravings upon the borders from designs by blake, boards, 1l. 11s. 6d.”; #319, “the same, with plates coloured, 2l. 2s.” this sale cat. not previously recorded. cult jones, feb. online cat., with the “explanation” leaf, letterpress title page foxed, later half calf worn, front cover detached, illus. ($10,000). windle, feb. blake books online cat., no item #, with the “explanation” leaf and “the extremely rare prospectus and specimen leaf at the back dated london: james bain, 1874, soliciting subscriptions for sets of the original watercolours in reproduction (never issued),” later half morocco, illus. ($15,000); another copy, sept. cat. 69, #26, with the “explanation” leaf, “half black morocco, marbled boards, a bit worn,” illus. black and white ($15,000). ketterer kunst auction, hamburg, 28 may, #351, lacking the “explanation” leaf, some foxing, half calf worn, illus. (no bids on an estimate of €6000). christie’s paris auction, 29 may, #5, 1st st. of pl. 11, no mention of the “explanation” leaf, 19th-century half morocco, illus. (€5000). interesting blakeana john quincy, pharmacopœia officinalis & extemporanea; or, a complete english dispensatory, london, 1733. windle, feb. online short title list for the california antiquarian book fair, #5, inscribed on the title page in brown ink “william blake / his book” ($49,500); same copy and price, may online list for the london antiquarian book fair, #11, and july online list for the melbourne rare book fair, #10. for a black-and-white illus. of the title page, see the 2000 sales review, blake 34.4 (spring 2001): 109 (illus. 2). abraham and the three angels, attributed to “circle of william blake.” watercolor, 33.0 x 42.0 cm., inscribed with blake’s “wb” monogram lower right. hessink’s auction, london, 25 sept., #69, illus. (not sold; estimate £500-700). similar in format to some of blake’s biblical compositions of the 1780s, but stylistically closer to the german nazarenes than to blake. possibly of the period or a little later, but probably by a continental artist. study of a standing male nude (recto), preliminary head study (verso), attributed to blake. pencil, recto 21.0 x 12.7 cm., not dated. john nicholson’s auction, haslemere, surrey, 25 july, #228, illus. (£930; estimate £200-300). almost certainly not by blake, but at least 2 bidders apparently thought otherwise. blake, for children: the gates of paradise, 1793, and for the sexes: the gates of paradise, c. 1818. woolley & wallis auction, salisbury, 11 sept., #156, pls. numbered 8 and 13 (bb pls. 10 and 15) only, with 4 unrelated drawings, illus. (£250). these 2 pls. are the muir facsimiles of 1888. pl. 10 derives from a 4th or 5th st. impression in for the sexes; pl. 15 imitates an impression in for children, probably the 2nd st. found in copies b-e. muir’s reproductions of the gates of paradise pls. differ significantly from their models in the lines delineating the designs and in the formation and spacing of the letters in the inscriptions. they are etchings/engravings, like blake’s pls., but evidently based on drawings rather than directly on photographs of the originals. maria flaxman, serena viewing herself in the glass when dressed for the masquerade whilst her maid adjusts her train, an illus. to william hayley, triumphs of temper. watercolor, approximately 12.0 x 9.0 cm., datable to 1803, inscribed in pencil on the mount “serena—trials of temper—sketch by miss flaxman, given by miss denman.” contained within “the caroline tulk scrapbook album,” part of “the burra moody archive: works from the charles augustus tulk collection,” offered privately in nov. to victoria university library, toronto (not priced).the mount inscription was probably written by caroline tulk (1815–81), the second wife of james peard ley, or her daughter beatrice, who inherited the album from her mother. caroline was the eldest daughter of charles augustus tulk (1786–1849), the swedenborgian friend of john flaxman and blake. “miss [maria] denman” was flaxman’s sister-in-law, the executor of his works, and a friend of female members of the tulk family. information about the watercolor, the tulk and ley families, and the album is based on the document offering the burra moody archive to victoria university library. this is not the same album once owned by louisa tulk, caroline tulk’s sister and the first wife of james peard ley. for the louisa tulk album, see the 2011 sales review in blake 45.4 (spring 2012): par. 3 and the 2012 sales review in blake 46.4 (spring 2013): par. 7. victoria decided not to acquire these materials (e-mail from carmen socknat, head of bibliographic services, victoria university library, 30 nov.). maria flaxman, john flaxman’s half-sister, executed 7 watercolors illustrating hayley’s poem. these were sold at cl, 26 feb. 1883, #295, and are now untraced (cb p. 84). blake engraved 6 of these designs for the 12th ed. of the triumphs of temper, 1803. in a letter of 24 aug. 1803 to william hayley, john flaxman expressed his regret that one of maria flaxman’s drawings, “serena viewing herself in the glass when dressed for the masquerade whilst her maid adjusts her train,” was not engraved. he further states that this omitted design “was so great a favorite with us that nancy [flaxman’s wife] & myself prevailed on my sister to make its fellow [i.e., a copy] for our private collection” (br[2] 166). given its mount inscription, the watercolor on offer is very probably this “fellow” rather than the version sold with the 6 other designs in 1883. adam and eve asleep, a copy of the watercolor of the same title in the butts series of paradise lost designs of 1808 (butlin #536.5). pen and ink and watercolor over pencil, 50.4 x 40.5 cm. andrew clayton payne, sept. private offer (price on request). martin butlin has ascribed this work to blake, as an addition to the linnell series of paradise lost watercolors of 1822 (butlin #537), but this attribution has been questioned by david bindman, robert essick, and joseph viscomi. see blake 51.1 (summer 2017) and 51.2 (fall 2017). i have not been able to discover any information about the provenance of this work. virgil, pastorals, 1821, blake’s 6th wood engraving, showing a stormy landscape. eb, dec., “original william blake hand engraved printing woodblock … acquired from the estate of uk publishing executive jonathan cape,” with “four original proofs” from the block, woodblock and 1 impression illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $950 or “best offer”). a facsimile woodblock, the print illus. showing minor differences in the design compared to impressions from blake’s original block in the british museum since 1939. the edges of the facsimile block differ considerably from the original, particularly at the top-right corner (top left in an impression) and at the bottom. i have not been able to find any publication in which this facsimile wood engraving is printed. blake, songs of innocence and of experience, pub. w. pickering, ed. wilkinson, 1839. windle, feb. online short title list for the california antiquarian book fair, #11, issue lacking “the little vagabond,” publisher’s 1st (or variant) cloth binding ($17,500); same copy and price, may online list for the london antiquarian book fair, #9, and july online list for the melbourne rare book fair, #8; same copy, sept. cat. 69, #8, “enclosed in a modern protective box,” title page illus. black and white ($15,000). photographic negatives of blake’s visionary heads, datable to 1867 or later. see the last entry under linnell in blake’s circle. a. gilchrist, life of william blake, 1880. kay craddock, sept. online cat., 2 vols., “with the original pictorial dust wrapper (a trifle cropped) bound in at front of volume 1,” later morocco, illus. ($2000 australian). this dust wrapper is a proof of the front cover and spine designs printed in reddish-brown ink on white paper. the published dust wrapper has the same designs printed in dark-blue ink on gray-green paper. w. muir, facsimiles of blake’s illuminated books, 1885–88, 1927. bauman rare books, dec. 2017 cat., #19, songs of innocence, 1885, “copy numbered ‘0’ and one of only five reserved for review,” inscribed “to the academy with compliments of the editor,” with a letter by muir “describing his labor of love in producing this facsimile,” the copy offered privately by carpe diem books, april 2013, for $8500, original wrappers, later slipcase, illus. ($12,000). windle, feb. online short title list for the california antiquarian book fair, #12, america, 1887, copy no. 3, hand colored ($12,500); #13, europe, 1887, copy no. 11, hand colored ($12,500); #14, songs of innocence and songs of experience, both 1885, 2 vols. in 1, copy nos. not given but probably both no. 20 ($14,500); same copies of innocence and experience bound together at the same price, aug. short list 12 (new series), #6, both no. 20, contemporary half calf, original wrappers bound in, illus., and online short title list for the seattle book fair, 13-14 oct., #6; march online cat. of new arrivals, songs of innocence and songs of experience, 2 vols., both 1927, original wrappers, no copy nos. but each front cover inscribed “for review / wm muir,” bookplate of raymond and pamela lister, cloth slipcase, illus. ($11,750); same copies of the 1927 songs of innocence and songs of experience at the same price, may online list for the london antiquarian book fair, #8, and july online list for the melbourne rare book fair, #7; another set of the 1927 songs of innocence and songs of experience, sept. cat. 69, #10, 2 vols., copies nos. 31 and 27, original wrappers, later slipcase worn, illus. black and white ($12,750). sw, 26 april, #33, songs of experience, 1927, copy no. 35, original wrappers worn, illus. (not sold; estimate $1500-2500). sk, 21 sept., #345, songs of innocence, copy no. 24, and songs of experience, copy no. 11, both 1885, “two volumes bound together,” with the gates of paradise, 1888, copy no. 17, no description of bindings, with 4 later blake-related vols., illus. ($3997.50 to windle for stock). see also blake, for children: the gates of paradise, above. blake and hayley, little tom the sailor, muir facsimile, 1886. windle, sept. cat. 69, #20, leaf of laid paper 54.3 x 22.5 cm. with a “[p] le bas” watermark, stained at mat edges, the same copy offered in windle’s cats. of april and sept. 2017, illus. black and white ($2000). r. blair, the grave, frederick hollyer reproduction of schiavonetti’s engravings of blake’s designs, c. 1912. trevanion & dean auction, whitchurch, shropshire, 15 dec., #343, illus. (£384 to windle acting for essick; estimate £80-120). enlarged lithographic reproductions of schiavonetti’s 12 pls., designs only without the engraved inscriptions, mounted within framing lines on backing mats, pl. 1 (engraved title page) stamped on the verso “copyright fredk.. hollyer, 9, pembroke square, kensington, w” and inscribed on the mat in pencil lower right “made by fredk hollyer,” with a black-and-white lithographic reproduction of blake’s death on a pale horse (butlin #517) added, the backing mat inscribed in pencil lower left “death on the white horse—william blake,” verso of the reproduction of death on a pale horse stamped “copyright, fredk hollyer, 9, pembroke square, kensington,” loose in publisher’s paper boards with cloth backstrip. the only recorded copy of this hollyer reproduction, heretofore known only from an announcement in [thomas wright, ed.?], the first meeting of the blake society: papers read before the blake society at the first annual meeting, 12th august, 1912 (olney: thomas wright, n.d.) [59]: “a small collection of reproductions of blake’s works (including the book of job, blair’s grave, and other interesting examples) can be seen at mr. frederick hollyer’s studio, 9, pembroke square, kensington, w. (earl’s court).” one of those odd cases in which a reproduction is rarer than the original. not in bb or bbs. m. sendak, 7 pen and ink drawings and 22 pencil preliminary sketches for his illus. in poems from william blake’s songs of innocence (london: bodley head, 1967). the pen and ink drawings range between 1.3 x 4.4 cm. and 5.4 x 5.65 cm., the pencil sketches between 1.3 x 4.35 cm. and 9.0 x 12.3 cm. “offered by battledore ltd. in an exhibition and sale at the society of illustrators [new york] … october 23–november 2, 2018,” according to the exhibition cat., sendak and blake illustrating songs of innocence (new york: battledore/society of illustrators, 2018) [2]. all 29 drawings and the 7 published designs illus., not priced. see illus. 2-3. 2. maurice sendak. piping down the valleys wild (see enlargement). pen and black ink drawing, 5.3 x 5.65 cm. on leaf 10.2 x 7.0 cm., the title inscribed by sendak in pen and ink. an illus., datable to 1967, to blake’s “introduction” in songs of innocence. first reproduced (by offset lithography?) in a warm reddish-orange ink in poems from william blake’s songs of innocence (london: bodley head, 1967) 5. photo courtesy of justin schiller, © 2018 maurice sendak foundation. sendak’s design is based on blake’s frontispiece to songs of innocence, an illus. to the “introduction” poem (e 7). both artists picture the poem’s 2 characters—the piper, who speaks the poem and strides with left foot forward, and the child who inspires him—but differences immediately arise. blake’s piper is youthful, but clearly an adult, facing forward and turning his head back to look at the nude child “on a cloud.” sendak’s piper is himself a child, facing away from us but with his head turned to the right. his outfit is vaguely eighteenth century—a three-quarter vented coat and breeches. blake’s piper moves forward to deliver his songs while looking up and back at the child of innocence; sendak’s piper leads us back into innocence. the piper has lowered his instrument in blake’s frontispiece, as the child directs him to do in the poem’s 3rd stanza; sendak’s piper is actively playing, as he is described in the poem’s opening line. sendak’s floating babe is cloudless; his gestures differ from blake’s version to make them more expressive of the poem’s interactions between child and piper. with his left hand and extended finger the babe points to the pipe, thereby picturing the 1st line of the 2nd stanza: “pipe a song about a lamb.” his right hand hovers just above the piper’s head, as if blessing or inspiring him. the babe’s slight smile may be sendak’s way of picturing his “laughing” speech and acknowledging the 3 appearances of the word “happy” in the text. the piper’s vertical left arm and hand extend into the sky, a gesture less directive than the hovering child’s but perhaps indicative of exuberant “joy” (final line) or a heavenly origin or destination for music and poetry. blake’s piper is embowered among trees; background sheep indicate that he is a shepherd as well as a musician. sendak’s landscape is more open, with one large tree anchoring the right margin and tall grasses or bushes substituted for the sheep. the absence of any indication in sendak’s design that the piper is also a shepherd eliminates one of blake’s many visual allusions to christ as the good shepherd in songs of innocence. this may be a purposeful attempt to avoid the religious implications of blake’s work in favor of a concentration on the child at play and the arts. the relationship between sendak’s 1967 illus. to songs of innocence and blake’s is a matter of inspiration and innovative borrowing, never slavish imitation. stylistically, sendak’s innocence illus. remain resolutely true to his own idiom. readers familiar with some of his masterpieces, such as where the wild things are, will immediately recognize his songs of innocence designs as sendak’s own, not as simulacra of blake’s. by engaging with blake’s pictures as well as his poems, sendak offers a double commentary by responding to both dimensions of blake’s composite art. 3. maurice sendak. alternative design for an illus. to blake’s “introduction” to songs of innocence (see enlargement). pencil sketch, 5.3 x 5.3 cm., datable to 1967. photo courtesy of justin schiller, © 2018 maurice sendak foundation. this sketch differs in major ways from both sendak’s published design (illus. 2) and blake’s frontispiece to songs of innocence. the piper, wearing a gown and (straw?) hat, faces to the left, standing with legs together rather than striding. here sendak borrows the cloud motif from blake’s frontispiece, but the child is sitting on it rather than soaring in front of it. his head is slightly bowed; both hands are raised to his face. he may be crying, thereby illustrating the final lines of the 2nd and 3rd stanzas of blake’s “introduction”: “so i piped, he wept to hear” and “he wept with joy to hear” (e 7). it is difficult to distinguish joyful weeping from its opposite in a small picture. this is a touching image, but the figures’ gestures are less dramatic than in the published version. the absence of energetic expression and the note of sadness may have led to sendak’s rejection of this alternative design. blake, the marriage of heaven and hell, facsimile, 2019. michael phillips, dec. online prospectus at <http://​www.​williamblakeprints.​co.​uk/​the-​marriage-​of-​heaven-​and-​hell> (accessed 2 dec.), “exact replicas of all 27 plates, … relief etched” and “printed monochrome in one of the colours of ink that blake specially mixed to print the early copies, … limited to 20 sets … printed to order … by paul w. nash at the strawberry press, moreton-in-marsh,” on “hand-made wove paper made by w. s. hodgkinson and co. around 1927,” with a “bound pamphlet printed in letterpress describing how the replica relief-etched copper plates were made and printed,” the pls. unbound in “an archival drop-back box,” 4 pls. illus. (price on request). blake’s circle and followers works are listed under artists’ names in the following order: paintings and drawings sold in groups, single paintings and drawings, letters and manuscripts, separate pls., book illus. barry, james drawings, paintings, and original graphics “detail of the diagorides victors,” etching, 1795. burstow & hewett auction, battle, east sussex, 22 feb., #1005, titled “the olympiad,” 4th st., probably the 1808 printing, illus. (£322). “the distribution of premiums at the society of arts,” etching, 1792. eb, april, possibly 2nd st., stain upper left, framed, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $175). “a grecian harvest-home,” etching, 1792. dw, 8 march, #407, 4th st., probably the 1808 printing, “trimmed to the plate mark, and with some marks and soiling, a few short closed tears, laid down on later card,” illus. (£288). “king lear,” lithograph, c. 1803. antiquariat peter kiefer auction, pforzheim, germany, 8 dec., #979, leaf 23.2 x 31.8 cm., apparently lacking the original backing leaf with aquatint border, illus. (not sold; estimate €600). basire, james engravings during blake’s apprenticeship, 1772–79 “north east view of ye city, mole, fortifications & port of algiers in barbary,” basire after robert wilkins, 1776. gp, march online cat., illus. (£620). bryant, new system … of ancient mythology, 1774–76. see under letterpress books with engravings by and after blake. carter, a journey from gibraltar to malaga, 1777. gp, march online cat., 1 pl. only, “west view of the mole of malaga,” basire after francis carter, illus. (£260). cook, a voyage towards the south pole, 1777. eb, jan., 2 pls. only offered individually, basire after william hodges, “woman of the island of tanna” and “man of the island of tanna,” illus. (offered at the “buy it now” prices of $115 and $100 respectively); same impressions, feb., (offered at the “buy it now” price of $85 each or “best offer”). monro, works of alexander monro, 1781. gp, dec. online cat., frontispiece portrait only, basire after allan ramsay, dated 1776 following basire’s name, illus. (£120). wilson, an account of the experiments made at the pantheon on the nature and use of conductors, 1778. gp, aug. online cat., 1 pl. only, “view of the apparatus and part of the great cylinder in the pantheon,” basire after michael angelo rooker, platemark 20.0 x 25.0 cm., illus. (£240). calvert, edward early drawings, paintings, and original graphics “the brook,” wood engraving. dw, 18 july, #207, 3rd st., “mount staining,” from the memoir, 1893, illus. (£456). larkhall fine art, sept. online cat., 3rd st., laid india paper, from the carfax portfolio of 1904, illus. (£650). flaxman, john drawings and sculpture see also flaxman under letterpress books with engravings by and after blake. anthony’s oration/the death of julius caesar. pencil and monochrome wash, 22.2 x 33.7 cm., signed, inscribed in pen and ink “anthonys oration” lower left, “death of jul: caesar” lower right, datable to c. 1768. wad, online auction ending 6 dec., #808, “this is a design for a lost plaque entitled ‘death of julius caesar’ which was exhibited at the royal society of arts in 1768 (no. 147),” illus. (not sold; estimate $3000-5000 canadian). an important early work, previously offered in john flaxman, sale cat. by christopher powney and heim gallery, 10 march–9 april 1976, #40, illus. (£1250), and included in the major exhibition john flaxman, royal academy, london, 26 oct.–9 dec. 1979, #6 in the cat. ed. david bindman (london: thames and hudson, 1979). design for a memorial to soldiers killed at talavera. pencil, 22.0 x 15.5 cm., datable to c. 1811. 25 blythe road auction, london, 28 march, #121, “the extant monument, which cost £700, was erected by public subscription and is in the parish church of st peter, leeds,” illus. (£446.40). previously offered ah, aug. 2000 online cat. 334, #58, titled a monument at leeds (£250). study for the 1811 memorial to captains samuel walker, 3rd regiment of guards, and richard beckett, coldstream guards. pencil, 22.9 x 15.9 cm. ah, june online cat. 482, #40, illus. (£875). seven autograph letters signed, 1811–25. sw, 8 nov., #368, many of the letters “concerning artworks,” with “a 36-line fragment of undated notes concerning a lecture entitled ‘3’d lecture on sculpture,’” 11 pp. in all, letter of 29 march 1811 to charles taylor illus. ($1750). flaxman, lectures on sculpture, 2nd ed., 1838. windle, dec. private offer, walter crane’s copy, “pp. 33-48 are missing but this is more than made up for by the extra illustration of the book with 28 original sketches by flaxman from his sketchbooks, many of which appear as plates in the book,” publisher’s cloth ($18,500). fuseli, henry drawings, paintings, and separate plates the faerie queene appears to prince arthur, from edmund spenser’s the faerie queene (recto), a sketch for the faerie queene and prince arthur (verso). recto pen and ink, black and gray wash, 38.7 x 50.8 cm., datable to c. 1769. cl, 3 july, #100, medium of the verso “sketch” not indicated, illus. (£728,750; estimate £150,000-250,000). see illus. 4. 4. henry fuseli. the faerie queene appears to prince arthur, from edmund spenser’s the faerie queene (see enlargement). pen and ink, black and gray wash, 38.7 x 50.8 cm., datable to c. 1769. photo courtesy of christie’s london, © 2018 christie’s images limited. the design is based on the description of prince arthur’s dream of the faerie queene in spenser’s faerie queene: for-wearied with my sports, i did alight from loftie steed and downe to sleepe melayd; the verdant gras my couch did goodly dight, and pillow was my helmet faire displayd: whiles euery sense the humour sweet embayd, and slombring soft my hart did steale away, me seemed, by my side a royall mayd her daintie limbes full softly down did lay: so faire a creature yet saw neuer sunny day.book 1, canto 9, verse 13 in spenser: poetical works, ed. j. c. smith and e. de selincourt (london: oxford up, 1912) 46. the cupid about to shoot his arrow at prince arthur is fuseli’s response to the opening lines of the next stanza: “most goodly glee and louely blandishments / she to me made, and bad me loue her deare ….” the artist has teased out and emphasized the erotic nature of arthur’s dream. the head of his “steed,” upper right, serves as a pictorial pun on “nightmare,” as in fuseli’s most famous painting, the nightmare. the faerie queene’s attendants in the left half of the drawing are fuseli’s fanciful additions to the scene, possibly warranted by various references to fairies, dwarfs, and elves throughout spenser’s epic. the “wofull dwarfe” of book 1, canto 7, verse 19 may have prompted the figure lower left with legs spread wide. fuseli painted in oils a generally similar version of the same subject, but with a vertical major axis, for thomas macklin’s poet’s gallery c. 1785–87, now in the kunstmuseum basel. this was engraved in stipple by peltro w. tomkins, titled “prince arthurs vision,” and published by macklin in 1788. the horse does not appear in these later works. jeune femme penchée en avant, possiblement harriot mellon. pencil, black chalk, gray and pink wash, 9.1 x 11.5 cm. christie’s auction, paris, 21 march, #96, illus. (€12,500). previously sold cl, 14 april 1992, #6, titled a young woman leaning forward, probably harriot mellon, illus. (£4950), and artcurial auction, paris, 31 march 2016, #56, titled young girl leaning over, illus. (€8000). portrait of henry fuseli. oval miniature on ivory by moses haughton, approximately 7.2 x 5.6 cm., mounted in a gold locket inscribed on the inside of the cover “henry fuseli / april 16 1825” (the date of fuseli’s death). one of several versions painted by haughton between 1802 and 1825.for a list, see richard walker, regency portraits (london: national portrait gallery, 1985) 1: 197. the miniature in the ashmolean museum, oxford, is dated to 1825 by walker. acquired july 1987 by g. e. bentley, jr., from john heath, a descendant of the engraver james heath (1757–1834), who, according to heath family legend, was given the portrait by haughton at fuseli’s funeral in st. paul’s cathedral, london, on 25 april 1825. sold april by windle, acting as agent for bentley’s family, to the museum of fine arts, houston, texas, philip mould acting as agent for the museum. study of a man, attributed to fuseli. pencil on laid paper, 14.5 x 10.0 cm., inscribed in pen and ink “zurich nov 18th 1778 fuzzeli.” hockessin auction, wilmington, delaware, 31 jan., #18, illus. (apparently bought in at $1000; estimate $2000-3000). previously sold eb, oct. 2017, from the collection of marcia allentuck, illus. ($873). possibly related to the portrait of bodmer in fuseli’s oil painting of c. 1778–81, the artist in conversation with johann jacob bodmer, but david bindman and i are suspicious of the attribution. the vision of orestes. pencil, pen and gray ink, gray and brown wash, 45.7 x 61.6 cm., datable to c. 1800 and inscribed “w blake” lower left. cny, 30 jan., #80, illus. ($218,750; estimate $100,000-150,000). see illus. 5. 5. henry fuseli. the vision of orestes (see enlargement). pencil, pen and gray ink, gray and brown wash, 45.7 x 61.6 cm., datable to c. 1800. inscribed “w blake” in a dark area over the right foot of the figure furthest to the left. photo courtesy of christie’s. this large drawing is based on a passage in euripides, iphigenia in tauris. orestes, the second figure from the left, is supported by his friend pylades. guilt-ridden and half-mad, he has a vision of two erinyes (or furies, upper right) pursuing him to avenge his murder of his mother, clytemnestra. they hold the dead body of clytemnestra, described by orestes both as a woman and as a giant rock that he believes the furies will hurl at him. in a related pen and ink drawing, illus. in the cny auction cat. of 30 jan., clytemnestra, looking rather lively for a corpse, holds the rock in her upraised hands. both her arm position and the rock appear in the drawing illus. here, but the rock is indicated only by light pencil lines. fuseli attempted to solve the problem of portraying a transformation, within orestes’s disturbed mind, of human form into stone by showing clytemnestra about to throw the missile rather than becoming it.the cny cat. states that “fuseli avoids the problem of depicting this transformation by omitting clytemnestra’s body altogether ….” this is clearly not the case. even if “omitting clytemnestra’s body” is a mistake for “omitting the rock,” this too would be wrong, the result of not noticing the pencil outlines. it is possible that fuseli decided to omit the rock from the finished drawing, but that would leave clytemnestra’s raised arms, outlined in pen and ink, both peculiar and unnecessary. i suspect that the drawing is unfinished and that fuseli intended to include the rock. the “w blake” inscription was probably added in the late 19th or early 20th century when works by fuseli were out of fashion and drawings by blake fetched higher prices. fuseli’s pen and ink drawing hercules and the cretan bull in the huntington library, art collections, and botanical gardens, is similarly inscribed with a faux-blake signature. even admirers of fuseli’s work may find the erinyes a bit clownish, more humorous than furious. all three figures upper right have smeared their lipstick. orestes and pylades, however, are drawn with fuseli’s usual vigor when representing male musculature in extremis. the visitation of faust by mephistopheles. watercolor and gray wash over pencil, 31.4 x 40.3 cm. on laid paper with a 1799 watermark, signed with initials and dated “july 18.” sl, 4 july, #191, illus. (£43,750). “joseph interprets the dreams of the baker and the butler,” aquatint by franz hegi, 1826. eb, oct., printed in brown ink on a leaf of wove paper 21.5 x 18.0 cm., full platemark, illus. (€25). the only impression i have ever seen on the market. this aquatint is based on a now-lost drawing (see weinglass p. 327), but fuseli’s oil painting of the design, joseph interpreting the dreams of the pharaoh’s baker and butler, datable to c. 1768, was sold cl, 4 dec. 2013, #178, illus. (£140,500). “the nursery of shakespeare,” stipple engraving by moses haughton, 1810. eb, march, trimmed to the image, title in open letters separately mounted, framed, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £290). “queen katharine’s dream,” stipple engraving by francesco bartolozzi, 1788. eb, sept., color printed in blue and 2 shades of brown, a few touches of hand coloring, leaf of wove paper 35.6 x 46.0 cm. trimmed to the image, stained and with tears, illus. (€30.50). the only color-printed impression i have ever seen on the market. published by thomas macklin in his “british poets” series, the design may have influenced blake’s versions of the subject (butlin #247, 547.3, 548-49). linnell, john early drawings, paintings, and original prints twenty-five pencil or chalk drawings and 2 watercolors by linnell, many signed and dating from 1805–19. sizes ranging between approximately 12.0 x 12.0 cm. and 43.0 x 30.5 cm. mostly landscapes and studies of buildings and farm equipment, 2 drawings of children. guy peppiatt fine art, oct. 2017 cat., john linnell (1792–1882) and his contemporaries 1800–1820, #1-27, all illus. (prices range from £450 to £6500). the artist’s sister, e. a. linnell. pen and ink, 11.5 x 19.0 cm., inscribed “my sister e. a. linnell,” signed and dated 1812. cw, 3 oct., #97, “with three further portrait drawings in pencil by john linnell, ‘mr upton’, ‘mr hogg’ and ‘mrs boyles’, all variously inscribed and signed,” illus. (£225). the portrait of upton was not illus. in the online cat., but annika green of windle antiquarian bookseller was able to acquire a digital image. the drawing shows upton’s face only, turned slightly to the right as in the portrait painted by linnell and engraved by blake and linnell in 1818–19 (sp xl). this drawing may be related to linnell’s development of the painting of upton, but it is probably not a preliminary for the engraving. english countryside. watercolor, 17.8 x 25.4 cm., signed. avra art auction, margate city, new jersey, 23 nov., #234, illus. ($125; estimate $800-1200). probably an early work. haymakers in a landscape, attributed to linnell. pen and ink over pencil, 11.0 x 17.5 cm. lawrences auction, crewkerne, somerset, 6 july, #1439, with 4 unrelated drawings, illus. (£244); ah, oct. online cat. 485, #52, without the “attributed” designation and retitled harvesters at rest, illus. (£475). possibly an early work. north wales mountains. pencil, 11.0 x 17.0 cm., signed and dated “[18]13.” david lay auction, penzance, 26 july, #231, illus. (£330.40). previously sold david lay auction, 1 nov. 2012, #362, illus. (£380). portrait of fanny sheppard playing the guitar. pencil and colored chalks, leaf 28.0 x 38.5 cm., signed, datable to c. 1825. dw, 18 july, #78, illus. (£360). sheppard was a student of linnell’s.linnell engraved 3 portraits executed by sheppard; see alfred t. story, the life of john linnell (london: richard bentley and son, 1892) 2: 243. “james upton,” engraved by blake and linnell after linnell, 1818–19. for a drawing possibly (but rather distantly) related to this pl., see the artist’s sister, above. copperplates by linnell and photographic negatives of blake’s visionary heads and portraits of blake. bhl, 21 march, #7, “group of glass-plate negatives of drawings by william blake and john linnell, including blake’s visionary heads and linnell’s three portraits of his friend, with photograph portraits and 6 copper plates (2 steel-coated) of etchings by linnell, the 14 negatives being 215 x 160 mm. and 160 x 120 mm.,” illus. (£2250 to nicholas lott of larkhall fine art, bath). the illus. of copperplates include linnell’s 2 etchings “sheep at noon” (illus. 6) and “woodcutter’s repast,” both executed in 1818 and both now steel faced. simon roberts of bhl told windle that “the vendor is a descendant of john linnell” (e-mail, 21 feb.). the negatives probably date from the late 1860s or 1870s; one is wrapped in paper with an 1864 watermark. a box for negatives included in the lot bears a label of “marion & co., 22 & 23, soho square, london.” the firm began operating under that name at that address in 1867; see <http://​historiccamera.​com/​cgi-bin/​librariumadmin/​pm.​cgi?action=​app_display​&app=datasheet​&app_id=2442>, accessed 22 march. perhaps linnell or one of his children intended to publish photographic reproductions of the visionary heads, but i have not been able to locate any such publication. the ambiguously worded cat. entry implies that the lot included some drawings. edward maggs inspected the materials on offer and found only photo negatives, 2 boxes, and copperplates (e-mail to windle, 27 feb.). 6. john linnell. “sheep at noon,” etching, 1818 (see enlargement). steel-faced copperplate, 13.8 x 22.8 cm., design 10.1 x 19.8 cm. some of the plating has flaked off the copper, particularly along the lower edge of the pl. photo courtesy of bonhams london. palmer, samuel drawings, paintings, and rarer states of etchings a church with a boat and sheep. pen and brown ink and wash heightened with scratching out, 18.3 x 13.7 cm., datable to c. 1831. sny, 31 jan., #13, sold from the collection of howard and saretta barnet, illus. ($2,415,000; estimate $250,000-350,000). see illus. 7. 7. samuel palmer. a church with a boat and sheep (see enlargement). pen and dark-brown ink and wash heightened with scratching out, 18.3 x 13.7 cm., datable to c. 1831. photo courtesy of sotheby’s. one of palmer’s shoreham-period “blacks,” as he called them, even though some are in sepia. raymond lister comments that “the excessively long and slender spire of the church is probably intended to convey the connexion between the heavenly paradise and the abundance of the earth.” in a similar vein, william vaughan notes that the design implies “the journey across the styx to the life beyond.”lister 80; vaughan, samuel palmer: shadows on the wall (new haven: yale up, 2015) [138]. given palmer’s sacramental view of nature, it is possible to carry these symbolic interpretations a little further. the glimmering light in the building on the far side of the river, a frequent motif in palmer’s art, may suggest the light within, the vision that links the human world to transcendent truths. if the river is a naturalized styx, then the boatman in the punt is a rural charon. if he is to carry the sheep, not just the two people, from pasture to town, then the animals may be going to slaughter. this imagined narrative leads by association to the paschal lamb and its typological parallel in jesus. palmer owned blake’s white-line etching of “deaths door.” like that print, a church with a boat and sheep indicates that death is a necessary passage for the soul to rise into “the heavenly paradise” to which the spire points. the lane side. oil and tempera on canvas, 29.8 x 45.7 cm., datable to 1834–35. sl, 5 dec., #43, illus. (not sold; highest bid £280,000 on an estimate of £300,000-500,000). previously sold as a work by john linnell, sl, 11 march 1987, #82, titled passing the orchard, illus. (£4400), and sl, 30 nov. 2000, #151, titled the orchard, illus. (£8400); previously sold attributed to “circle of john linnell,” cl, 10 july 2012, #150, titled figures on a wooded track, illus. (£2500). see illus. 8. 8. samuel palmer. the lane side (see enlargement). oil and tempera on canvas, 29.8 x 45.7 cm., datable to 1834–35. as the auction record indicates, this work was formerly attributed to linnell, demoted to “circle of john linnell” in 2012 with a consequent fall in market value, and promoted to a “late shoreham period” palmer in the sl cat. of 5 dec., #43. the new attribution is based on stylistic considerations, the discovery of a palmer signature and 1835 date “still very faintly visible” lower left (sl cat., #43, a crucial piece of information oddly buried in a footnote), and the supposition that this painting is the work titled the lane side, exhibited by palmer at the british institution in 1835, #341.the exhibition is recorded in lister 101, #211, a work “untraced since 1835.” black marks lower left, about 12.0 cm. from the left margin and 1.5 cm. above the bottom margin, may be fragments of the letters “pal” followed, at a slightly lower level and further to the right, by “18”. i am confident only about the “8”. the 5 dec. sl cat. also notes that there is a “false j. constable signature … added just above the figures lower right” at a diagonal rising from left to right across the fence between the leftmost child and the child and adult to the right. this signature is visible in the reproduction in the sl cat. of 11 march 1987, #82, but has disappeared from the illus. in the 5 dec. cat. and the digital image presented here. apparently the false “j. constable” has been cleaned off the painting itself. photo © sotheby’s. shoreham. brown wash over pencil, 8.5 x 11.5 cm., datable to 1832–33. sl, 30 oct., #5, illus. (£52,500; estimate £15,000-20,000). richmond, george early drawings, paintings, and original graphics portrait of henry walter. pencil with touches of pen and brown ink, 22.0 x 16.5 cm., datable to 1827. sl, 30 oct., #177, inscribed “henry walter decr 28 / 1827” (lower center) and “died & buried at torquay died may 28. 1849   gr” (lower left), illus. (£2750). previously sold sl, 19 nov. 2008, #22, illus. (£6250). walter (1799–1849) was associated with the ancients, the circle of young artists, including richmond and palmer, who gathered around blake in his final years. three studies of seated nudes. pen and ink, 8.3 x 20.3 cm., possibly dating from the 1830s. lh, 24 may, #93, illus. (not sold; estimate $1500-2500). the witch from ben jonson’s the sad shepherd. watercolor, gouache, and possibly tempera with a glue binder, 10.8 x 13.4 cm., datable to 1829–30. sl, 30 oct., #143, sold from the collection of christopher cone and stanley j. seeger, inscribed on the backing card “geo richmond pinxt / exhibited at the royal academy / somerset house in 1830,” illus. (£106,250; estimate £40,000-60,000). previously sold sl, 4 july 2001, #128, illus. (£80,500). see illus. 9. 9. george richmond. the witch from ben jonson’s the sad shepherd (see enlargement). watercolor, gouache, and possibly tempera with a glue-based binder, 10.8 x 13.4 cm., datable to 1829–30. exhibited at the royal academy in 1830, “the witch, from ben jonson’s sad shepherdess [sic]. g. richmond ”.the exhibition of the royal academy. mdcccxxx. the sixty-second (london: royal academy, [1830]) 24, section titled “antique academy,” #458. photo courtesy of sotheby’s. the design is based on a description of maudlin, the witch of papplewick, her companions, and her forest setting in act 2, scene 8, of jonson’s unfinished play the sad shepherd; or, a tale of robin hood: the venom’d plants wherewith she kills! where the sad mandrake grows, whose groans are deathful! the dead-numming nightthe stupefying hemlock! adders tongue!            [shade! and martagan! the shrieks of luckless owls we hear! and croaking night-crows in the air! green-bellied snakes! blue fire-drakes in the sky! and giddy flitter-mice with leather wings! the scaly beetles, with their habergeons, that make a humming murmur as they fly! there in the stocks of trees, white faies do dwell, and spang-long elves that dance about a pool! with each a little changeling in their arms! the airy spirits play with falling stars! and mount the sphere of fire to kiss the moon! while she sits reading by the glow-worms light, or rotten wood (o’er which the worm hath crept) the baneful schedule of her nocent charms, and binding characters, through which she wounds her puppets, the sigilla of her witchcraft.ben jonson, the sad shepherd: or, a tale of robin hood, a fragment (london: j. nichols, 1783) 47-48, the only separate printing of the play in the 18th century. the sad shepherd was 1st published in 1641. richmond pictures the glow-worm just left of the witch’s right shoulder. below, within the base of the large tree extending along the left margin, is one of the “faies” (fairies) who dwell “in the stocks of trees.” lower right, seen from behind and with arms outstretched, is one of the “spang-long elves that dance about a pool.”“spang” means “directly” or “completely,” but is almost certainly a misprint in the 1783 ed. for “span,” meaning that this fairy is no bigger than the span of one’s hand. the word is printed as “span-long” in the workes of benjamin jonson, vol. 2 (london: richard meighen, 1640 [i.e., 1641]) 150 of the sad shepherd. jonson’s owl glides above and to the right of the witch. the humanoid creature further to the right is one of the “airy spirits” who “play with falling stars.”this figure is misidentified as “puck-hairy,” the witch’s “demon spirit,” in the sl cat. of 30 oct., #143. we see this winged figure from an unusual perspective, supine in relation to the ground, with bent legs extending toward the viewer and arms reaching up toward the star. i have not been able to identify any of the vegetation with the plants named by jonson. a pencil, pen and brown ink study from the witch, 15.5 x 12.5 cm., was offered at sl, 24 nov. 1977, #21 (not sold; presently untraced). richmond’s painting may have been influenced by blake’s large color print of 1795 hecate. jonson refers to “dame hecate” in act 2, scene 3, of the sad shepherd (p. 33 in the 1783 ed.). although compositionally dissimilar, these designs share several major motifs: a witch, her book, her familiars, and those under her thrall. richmond could have seen the impression of hecate that remained in blake’s possession until his death in 1827 and is now in the huntington library, art collections, and botanical gardens (butlin #318). the hovering figure lower right is very similar to those in visions of the daughters of albion pl. 3 and the title page to america, top right.as noted in raymond lister, george richmond: a critical biography (london: robin garton, 1981) 131. other crosscurrents of influence are evident in the witch: fuseli (see his soft-ground etching of 1812, “the witch and the mandrake,” based on the “witch’s song” in jonson’s the masque of queens), palmer (particularly in the treatment of the vegetation and background landscape), and the northern renaissance engravers, including albrecht dürer and lucas van leyden, studied by richmond. the small figures in the witch anticipate victorian fairy pictures by artists such as richard dadd, john anster fitzgerald, joseph noel paton, and richard (“dickie”) doyle. the mixed media of the witch may offer a further connection with blake. chemical analysis of 2 of richmond’s most important early paintings, the creation of light (1826) and christ and the woman of samaria (1828), indicate the presence of glue in “layers applied to seal the ground” and possibly as a “component of the paint.”bronwyn ormsby with joyce h. townsend, brian singer, and john dean, “blake’s use of tempera in context,” townsend, ed., william blake: the painter at work (princeton: princeton up, 2003) 148. see also martin butlin, “george richmond, blake’s true heir?,” karen mulhallen, ed., blake in our time: essays in honour of g. e. bentley jr. (toronto: u of toronto p, 2010) 201-12. blake used glue (or in some cases gum with the properties of glue) in his large color prints of 1795 and continued the practice in his tempera paintings of the 19th century. richmond’s interest in blake’s media as a painter is documented in the works cited in note 16. only chemical analysis of the witch can confirm a close relation with blake’s techniques, but the opacity of its paint layers is reminiscent of blake’s temperas. romney, george drawings and paintings excluding portraits a bacchante. pen and ink, 11.0 x 7.0 cm., datable to c. 1784. cheffins auction, cambridge, 14 june, #364, “a little discolouration and browning,” illus. (£1397; estimate £200-300). figure studies. pen and ink, 11.1 x 18.0 cm. bhl, 25 april, #271, illus. (£250; estimate £1500-2000). the gower children. pencil, recto and verso, leaf 12.8 x 15.3 cm. sheppard’s auction, durrow, ireland, 8 nov., #50, illus. (€1920). studies for the oil painting of 1776–77 now in the abbot hall art gallery, kendal. head of a bearded man (presumed to be king lear), recto, prostrate classical female martyr or saint, verso. recto pencil and black chalk, verso pencil, pen and brown ink, verso inscribed “no. 158,” leaf 29.8 x 45.0 cm. wad, online auction ending 6 dec., #805, illus. (not sold; estimate $4000-6000 canadian). infant shakespeare surrounded by the passions. pencil, 8.0 x 19.1 cm., inscribed in pencil on verso “la naissance de shakespeare. / mars 1794.” potomack auction, alexandria, virginia, 29 sept., #170, illus. ($1950). john howard visiting a lazaretto. pencil, 16.7 x 24.5 cm. cw, 3 oct., #86, illus. (not sold; estimate £500-700); cw online auction ending 14 dec., #13, illus. (£362.50). john howard visiting a lazaretto. pencil, 15.0 x 19.0 cm. cw, 3 oct., #87, illus. (not sold; estimate £200-300). king lear, death of cordelia. pencil, 14.0 x 22.9 cm. ah, march online ten day spring sale, no item #, illus. (£1000). study of a seated woman. pen and brown ink, leaf 19.5 x 15.0 cm., datable to c. 1769. wad, online auction ending 6 dec., #866, “probably a sketch for the painting ‘the warren family’ exhibited in 1769,” illus. (not sold; estimate $800-1200 canadian). troilus and cressida, act iv, scene v—“the fight between hector and ajax i.” pencil, pen and gray ink, gray wash, 41.0 x 54.9 cm., datable to the late 1780s or early 1790s. cl, 3 july, #98, illus. (£12,500). previously sold cl, 10 jan. 1947, in #106 with the next drawing listed here (£41 2s. to “wingate”). troilus and cressida, act iv, scene v—“the fight between hector and ajax ii.” pencil, pen and gray ink, gray wash, 40.0 x 54.6 cm., datable to the late 1780s or early 1790s. cl, 3 july, #99, illus. (not sold; estimate £10,000-15,000). see the troilus drawing above for earlier sale. stothard, thomas drawings and paintings twelve drawings “inspired by geoffrey chaucer’s canterbury tales.” pen and ink, wash, each 1.7 x 6.4 cm. sl, 18 oct. 2017, #220, pasted to a single backing board inscribed “original drawings by stothard. r.a.,” illus. (£438). probably preliminary drawings for the royal engagement pocket atlas, 1784. eight small drawings and watercolors, various literary and historical subjects. dawson’s auction, maidenhead, 28 july, #148, with a map unrelated to stothard, all illus. (£336). four leaves of studies, including 2 of plants (pen and ink), design for a mantelpiece (pencil), and “sketch for a picture hang” (pencil). ah, jan. online cat. 477, #76, sizes not given but apparently small, framed together, illus. (£375). boccaccio, the decameron. lawrences auction, crewkerne, somerset, 12 oct., #1721, “a suite of five decorative subjects: the supper by the fountain; the garden; a musical party in a glade; a party in a colonnade; elegant company[,] each oil on panel[,] the largest 58.5 x 44.5cm.; the smallest 55.5 x 45cm.,” all 5 illus. (no bids on an estimate of £6000-9000). variant versions of these designs were engraved by augustus fox and 1st published as part of a suite of 10 unbound pls., illustrations of the decameron of boccaccio (london: william pickering, 1825), and in pickering’s ed. of il decamerone, 3 vols., also 1825. a countryside meeting. watercolor, 10.0 x 12.0 cm. 25 blythe road auction, london, 28 march, #58, illus. (£198.40). figure studies. pencil, wash, 24.5 x 20.5 cm. galerie moenius auction, berlin, 23 march, #471, illus. (not sold; estimate €100-200). a study for “ruth gleaning,” engraved in 1792 by james heath and published in the holy bible (london: thomas macklin, 1800–16). musick beats time to labour, an illus. to laurence sterne’s sentimental journey. monochrome wash drawing, 11.6 x 7.15 cm., datable to c. 1782. roseberys auction, london, 21 march, #135, not titled but described as a “group of figures by the door to an old inn,” pasted to a backing mat and framed, the masonite backing board for the frame bearing a thomas agnew & sons label, illus. (£184.50 to windle acting for essick). the auctioneer’s online illus. showed what appeared to be a bad rust stain in the foliage upper right, but the drawing itself is clean—see illus. 10. 10 (see enlargement). left image: thomas stothard, musick beats time to labour, an illus. to laurence sterne’s sentimental journey through france and italy, 1st published in 1768. monochrome wash drawing on laid paper, 11.6 x 7.15 cm., datable to c. 1782. this drawing, the basis for blake’s engraving, is trimmed into the design about 0.5 mm. on all edges and mounted on a stained backing mat. essick collection. right image: “sentimental journey,” engraved by blake after stothard, dated 1782 in the imprint. etching/engraving, 1st st. (of 2), inner design 11.7 x 7.1 cm., design including decorative frame 15.6 x 10.5 cm., platemark 17.4 x 11.2 cm. laid paper, leaf 21.0 x 12.9 cm. first published in the novelist’s magazine, vol. 9 (london: harrison and co., 1782), usually bound facing p. 52 of sentimental journey; see bb #486 pl. 1 and cb xi pl. 3. the fidelity of the engraving to its model indicates why blake was included among the team of engravers translating stothard’s drawings to copper during the 1780s. essick collection. stothard’s design illustrates a passage on p. 52 of the novelist’s magazine ed. of sterne’s text, a passing reference to the harvesting of grapes by the french peasantry when “musick beats time to labour.” sterne implies that the “labour” is crushing grapes, but does not explicitly describe that activity. stothard ignores the implication and pictures only dancers without grapes. the rev. mr. yorick, sterne’s narrator in this semi-autobiographical travelogue, sits just left of the violinist. blake includes a similar seated fiddler in his monochrome wash drawing (butlin #769.13) and 13th wood engraving (bb #504 pl. 17) illustrating j. t. thornton’s ed. of virgil’s pastorals (1821). a different design by stothard, engraved by andrew birrell, pictures the same scene in the ed. of sentimental journey published in london by j. good and e. and s. harding in 1792. sad farewell to a soldier. monochrome wash drawing, size not given, inscribed “t. stothard” (probably not a signature). eb, nov., “frame size 30 x 31.5 cm.,” illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £875 or “best offer”). scene from a contemporary novel. monochrome wash drawing, 9.0 x 7.0 cm., datable to 1800. thomson roddick auction, carlisle, cumbria, 18 july, #434, illus. (not sold; estimate £50-80). the design was engraved by james neagle and published in [henry mackenzie], the man of feeling (london: a. strahan, t. cadell, w. davies, 1800). studies of various standing figures. pencil, pen and ink, 13.3 x 15.9 cm., inscribed “t. stothard.” eb, aug., illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $125); same drawing, now titled classical figure studies, aug., illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $125 or “best offer”). summer flora europa (alternative identifications of the single figure represented). watercolor, 11.0 x 9.0 cm., inscribed “t. stothard,” badly faded and stained. eb, may-june, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of £39). the vicar of wakefield. oil, 30.5 x 40.0 cm. eb, may, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £1980 or “best offer”). previously sold byrne’s auction, chester, 20 sept. 2017, #297, dimensions given as 31.0 x 41.0 cm., illus. (£338.80). not one of stothard’s designs published as an engraved illus. of the novel. a woman, children, and blindfolded figure. watercolor, 10.2 x 12.1 cm. ah, july online cat. 483, #68, illus. (£475). appendix: new information on blake’s engravings listed below are substantive additions or corrections to roger r. easson and robert n. essick, william blake: book illustrator, vol. 1, plates designed and engraved by blake (1972), and essick, william blake’s commercial book illustrations (1991). newly discovered impressions of previously recorded published sts. of blake’s engravings are listed for only the rarer pls. william blake: book illustrator, vol. 1 note: revisions pertain only to information about blake’s pls., not to the bibliographic descriptions of the books. p. 53, “the hiding of moses” in remember me!, 1825 and 1826. a prepublication proof of the pl., showing more buildings on the far bank of the nile just inside the left margin, is in the estate of gillian bollard, who died in dec. 2017. this is the proof previously recorded in “the collection of a descendant of john linnell”—see blake 34.4 (spring 2001): 124. platemark 8.7 x 11.4 cm., leaf of wove paper 10.0 x 15.9 cm. bollard acquired this impression by inheritance from james thomas linnell (1823–1905), the 2nd son of blake’s patron john linnell, who may have acquired the proof directly from blake or his wife, catherine.i am grateful to diana waghorn, gillian bollard’s daughter, for this information about the family provenance of the proof (e-mail, 19 feb.). measurements given here correct those in william blake: book illustrator. the print is in the same proof st. as the impression in the rosenwald collection, national gallery of art, washington; see <https://​www.​nga.​gov/​collection/​art-​object-​page.​11489.html>. the design in these proofs measures 7.0 x 11.4 cm., reduced to 6.8 x 9.6 cm. for publication in remember me! blake’s signature in the proofs, “wblake. inven & sculp.”, is changed to “blake del et sculpt.” in the published st. the scratched title inscription was recut in more elegant letters for publication, probably by a writing engraver. william blake’s commercial book illustrations p. 31, novelist’s magazine, pl. 3, illus. to laurence sterne’s sentimental journey. for stothard’s preliminary wash drawing, see musick beats time to labour under stothard in blake’s circle, and illus. 10. p. 66, the poems of caius valerius catullus. the statues in verona on which both pls. are based have been attributed to the 15th-century sculptor alberto da milano—see <http://​www.​turismoverona.​eu/​nqcontent.​cfm?a_id=50570​&tt=m_turismo​&lang=en>, accessed 13 april. p. 77, allen, roman history, pl. 4, “the death of cleopatra.” in oct. nicholas lott of larkhall fine art, bath, sent me a digital image of a proof of this pl. in a private british collection. the proof lacks considerable finishing work in the design and the title and page inscriptions. the leaf of wove paper, approximately 16.6 x 9.5 cm., has the area where the imprint appears in the published st. cut off, but i suspect that the imprint had not yet been engraved on the copperplate when this proof was printed. review: william blake (tate britain, 2019-20) william blake. tate britain, 11 september 2019– 2 february 2020. martin myrone and amy concannon, with an afterword by alan moore. william blake. london: tate publishing; princeton: princeton university press, 2019. 224 pp. £40.00/$55.00. reviewed by luisa calè luisa calè (l.cale@bbk.ac.uk), birkbeck, university of london, works on practices of reading, viewing, and collecting in the romantic period. her publications include fuseli’s milton gallery: “turning readers into spectators”; co-edited volumes on dante on view: the reception of dante in the visual and performing arts and illustrations, optics and objects in nineteenth-century literary and visual cultures; and special issues on “the disorder of things” (eighteenth-century studies, 2011), “the nineteenth-century digital archive” (19: interdisciplinary studies in the long nineteenth century, 2015), “literature and sculpture at the fin de siècle” (word and image, 2018), and “sibylline leaves” (studies in romanticism, 2020). her current project, entitled the book unbound, explores practices of collecting and dismantling the book, with chapters on walpole, blake, and dickens. she is the exhibitions editor for blake. arms outstretched, standing on a mottled rock with legs spread apart, one slightly bent backward, and with multicolored rays shining behind him, “albion rose” greeted viewers entering the tate blake retrospective. the title comes from the inscription “albion rose from where he labourd at the mill with slaves” on a later state of this plate, which includes the signature “wb inv 1780.”rosenwald collection, national gallery of art, washington, dc, 1943.3.8990. since the first state was etched in the mid-1790s, this visionary dating suggests blake’s emancipation from his apprenticeship as an engraver (1772–79).leo damrosch, eternity’s sunrise: the imaginative world of william blake (new haven: yale university press, 2015) 96-101. casting aside the artisan printmaker who was central to the previous tate exhibition (2000–01) and to william blake: apprentice and master at the ashmolean (2014–15), the 2019–20 exhibition started with blake’s enrollment in the royal academy (1779–85?).martin myrone, “william blake as a student of the royal academy: a prosopographical perspective,” blake 51.2 (fall 2017). placed on the threshold of the exhibition, “albion rose” articulated a shared idiom of art practice through a dynamic, almost dancing allusion to leonardo’s vitruvian man, while the red, yellow, and blue rays radiating outward behind him brought to mind a prismatic color wheel. all installation images © tate (seraphina neville), unless otherwise indicated. see enlargement. lateral vision lured the eye from “albion rose” to the royal academy’s cincinnatus in the opposite corner of the first room, which was dedicated to blake’s calling, “blake, be an artist!,” as the spirit said to him.diary, reminiscences, and correspondence of henry crabb robinson, ed. thomas sadler, 3 vols. (london: macmillan, 1869) 2: 304; alexander gilchrist, life of william blake, “pictor ignotus,” 2 vols. (london: macmillan, 1863) 1: 340; myrone, catalogue 31. the plaster cast offered the cue for a series of associated academic studies that capture classical bodies and body parts from a range of views, as well as sketchbooks showing exercises and delightful portraits of students animating the social milieu of the academy and quotations from benjamin heath malkin and blake’s notebook commenting on the practice of drawing. blake’s watercolor drawings of joseph and his brethren, together with their entries in the royal academy exhibition catalogue for 1785 and an information panel spelling out the frustrations of the art scene, completed the introductory setting. while the poster and advertising campaign tagged blake with the subtitle “rebel, radical, revolutionary,” which brings to mind the title of marilyn butler’s influential romantics, rebels and reactionaries (1981), the first room set the exhibition’s agenda to reclaim blake the artist. both “albion rose” and “the ancient of days,” the first and last objects in the exhibition, had a double life inside and outside books, as book parts and as separate plates. as martin myrone points out in the catalogue, the version of “albion rose” on view was originally placed at the end of the huntington library copy of the song of los, offering the promise of a “glad day” to offset the grueling apocalyptic crescendo of the continental prophecy.catalogue 9-12. robert n. essick argues that “albion rose” was placed as the final plate sometime between 1903, when the song of los (e) was sold from the crewe collection, and 1915, when henry huntington acquired it (see essick, the works of william blake in the huntington collections: a complete catalogue [san marino, ca: huntington library, 1985] 165-68, 195-97. however, on the basis of the strong offset that “albion rose” left on the last plate of copy e, martin butlin believes that it may have been placed much earlier, indeed possibly by blake himself (see butlin, “footnotes on the huntington blakes,” blake 22.1 [summer 1988]: 17-18). “the ancient of days” functioned as a frontispiece to europe a prophecy (1794), but was also printed as a separate plate. the cyclical returns to this print could be considered as spiritual exercises: the manchester impression hanging in the exhibition was the last work blake colored before he died, “the best i have ever finished.”as reported by frederick tatham, quoted in amy concannon’s catalogue essay “‘a new kind of man’” 197. the exhibition paid great attention to the “‘bookishness’ of the books” and their modes of operation, suggesting their different “environments and experiences,” “how they are material objects held in a hand or put on a desk before you, how the context of a library or print collection is quite unlike the modern gallery setting,”myrone in luisa calè, “william blake: the artist (tate britain, 11 september 2019–2 february 2020): an interview with martin myrone,” blake 53.1 (summer 2019). and sourcing works in their original bindings, where possible. the contrast between different rhythms of reading and looking could be detected in the rich, informative captions displayed around the vitrines, as opposed to the more minimalist ones placed alongside works hanging on the walls. while the exhibition was informed by a deep investment in “the history of the print as an object,” the choice to limit the exhibition commentary left the viewer “free to decide quite otherwise—as the makers of tote bags and the designers of libertarian websites have discovered” (myrone, catalogue 12). this attention to the dissemination and transmediation of blake’s works chimes with mike goode’s call for a “pragmatics of fragmentation and circulation in pieces.”mike goode, “the joy of looking: what blake’s pictures want,” representations 119.1 (2012): 1-36 (see 5). in the current climate, the short captions and information panels steered away from “elitist, recondite … undemocratic ‘expertise’” (12). in producing a “blake for all,” the curators claim that “as exhibition makers we must acknowledge and work with the full spectrum of experiences blake’s works might be expected to elicit” (14). their blakean invitation to “rouze the faculties to act” is inherent in a phenomenological experience of the work. just as cincinnatus gave the cue for the royal academy display, the second part of “‘blake: be an artist!’” was defined by a huge book of prints from the boydell shakespeare gallery (1803), open to richard earlom’s engraving of henry fuseli’s king lear casting out his daughter cordelia (1792), in a vitrine in the proximity of blake’s oberon, titania, and puck with fairies dancing (c. 1786). biblical watercolors from the 1780s showed how blake’s idiom developed out of a common idiom of historical painting from the 1760s. his evolution as a new kind of artist combining text and illustration was documented through his work on tiriel (c. 1789), represented by a wall of wash drawings, including the juxtaposition of har and heva bathing, mnetha looking on and james barry’s “jupiter and juno on mount ida,” from the iliad, an etching, line engraving, and mezzotint dated 1804–05.this engraving reproduces jupiter and juno on mount ida, oil on canvas, c. 1804, museums sheffield; an earlier painting of the same subject, exhibited at the royal academy in 1773, now lost, may be reproduced in an engraving from 1777 in the ashmolean, which has a different composition. william l. pressly suggests that the striking similarity with blake’s har and heva bathing, mnetha looking on may indicate barry’s being influenced by blake’s design, unless barry “had made preparatory drawings for the canvas as early as the 1780s” (see pressly, the life and art of james barry [new haven: yale university press, 1981] 38-41, 149-51). the tiriel manuscript was displayed in the adjacent vitrine; myrone suggests that blake “planned to have the poem set in conventional type, and to print the illustrations separately,” perhaps “issued as single plates,” following the model of illustrated texts promoted by the literary galleries exemplified by the boydell shakespeare. while blake had a press with which he could produce the prints, “he did not have the facilities to print the text of the poem in the conventional manner” (catalogue 35). the fact that the project remained unfinished might explain his need for a new form of invention as a self-published artist, “a method of printing which combines the painter and the poet” (e 692), freed from the division of labor, mediation, and tyranny of printsellers like boydell. room 2: making prints, making a living in the second section of the exhibition, a selection of blake’s illuminated books in a vitrine at the center of the room showcased their range and scale through copies that survive in their early bindings, while disbound impressions of some of the designs were hung on the opposite wall under the title “books of designs.” the vitrine featured a late copy of the book of urizen (g), decorated with watercolor and gold leaf, reflecting the style that appealed to collectors associated with the roxburghe club, who might seek blake’s illuminated books “as knowing surrogates for archaic manuscripts and incunabula” (myrone, catalogue 83). a spectacular full-page design (plate numbered 14) showed how blake’s late illuminated printing emulated the print gallery format through books printed on the recto only. next to it stood two copies of europe: copy a open to the title page and copy e open to the ending, to contrast the gallery style with the more bookish look of the two-page spread associated with recto-verso printing. on the other side of the vitrine were the book of thel (copy i), for children (copy e), the tiny emblem book gifted by fuseli to the young daughter of one of his friends, and there is no natural religion (copy b). the copy of the marriage of heaven and hell acquired by the print collector francis douce, open to the title page and facing “our end is come,” repurposed as a bespoke frontispiece, was next to john linnell’s copy, open to the “memorable fancy” about the printing house in hell. plates from the books of designs occupied most of the wall facing the entrance and the adjacent partition wall. the information panel explained that blake “had more success selling his watercolours and individual prints. he produced several groups of prints taken from the illuminated books, with the texts masked out.” one such collection was described as a “small quarto volume of twenty-three engravings of various shapes and sizes” in 1828,john thomas smith, nollekens and his times, 2 vols. (london: colburn, 1828) 2: 480. but the tendency to identify such works as books of designs limits their potential to circulate as “visual compendiums of plates detached from literary contexts” (myrone, catalogue 63) or as illustrations inserted into other books in what was a more mobile and hybrid book culture in which the boundaries between books were less stable and definite. the claim on the information panel that this printing initiative “reimagined the plates as independent works of art” was borne out by the wall hang, but the pressure of the book environment was reflected in inconsistent captions that often reattributed the designs to the illuminated books that they were originally produced for. see enlargement. the display started with two plates tagged as the frontispiece and plate 4 of visions of the daughters of albion, from the tate’s collection, followed by “urizen, plate 3” from the british museum department of prints and drawings. the subsequent plate was tagged “small book of designs, plate 7, ‘of life on his forsaken mountains,’” following the habit of a prints and drawings department to identify a plate by the first line of text, although in this case the practice turns the plate into a ghost of its former bookish instantiation, since none of the text can be found on this design.british museum, department of prints and drawings, 1856,0209.431; the first line is taken from the corresponding plate of the first book of urizen, bm 1859,0625.66. the british museum mounts often included multiple items within a single frame, visible through windows narrowly cut around the printed area. this conservation practice forecloses the identities of these prints as individual works on paper. by contrast, the tate’s own separate plates hanging on the adjacent partition wall were framed in such a way as to show the full page including the margin, which emphasized their palpable paper format and identity as detached pieces. the tate’s plates from small book copy b are remarkable for the poetic inscriptions added in manuscript in the bottom margins, though these were not registered in the captions, which here too identified the plates through reference to the original books for which the designs were produced. the image of a female seated on the ground, bent over to attend to two miniature figures, one of them a small child, is inscribed with the line “‘doth god take care of these.’” while the gallery caption redirected the viewer to “the book of thel, plate 6,” the allusive inscription invited us to think about it anew. religious viewers would recognize blake’s biblical allusion to “doth god take care for oxen” (1 cor. 9.9), extracted from a passage commenting on the law of moses, which is important to blake’s proverbs of hell. the most striking image in this series was perhaps the one captioned “first book of urizen, plate 21” and inscribed with the miltonic-sounding “‘fearless tho in pain’ / ‘i travel on.’” compared to the british museum version captioned “small book of designs, plate 7” on the adjacent wall, the watercolor detailing suggests that the bearded figure may have aged, while the lion’s facial features have become more unmistakably anthropomorphic, perhaps registering blake’s interest in physiognomy as then developed in the visionary heads. to convey “‘vegetating in fibres of blood,’” the design labeled “first book of urizen, plate 15,” blake used red to mark out the back of a kneeling figure whose body seems to melt into the red globe beneath. the wall ended with a plate captioned “first book of urizen plate 6,” bearing the inscription “‘i sought pleasure & found pain’ / ‘unutterable.’” mouth open and eyes popping out in surprise and terror, the expressive figure compressed in this plate shaped the viewer’s engagement with the series, functioning as an ending or an alternative beginning, depending on the direction of travel along the wall. evidence of stitching suggests that these plates were once bound,martin butlin and robin hamlyn, “tate britain reveals nine new blakes and thirteen new lines of verse,” blake 42.2 (fall 2008): 52-72 (see 54-57). thus producing a book of emblems, and the exhibition captions identified them as variants of the illuminated books. however, in their disbound form as a series hanging on the wall they broke away from their bookish sequences and identities and articulated new visual possibilities shaped by different ways of seeing in different directions and from different angles. to the left of the “books of designs,” the viewer could be guided leftward by the powerful outstretched hand of lucifer and the pope in hell (1794–96), a vivid color print that elegantly echoes the gesture that points lucifer/the king of babylon toward a group of crowned heads in the adjacent pen and gray wash drawing “hell beneath is moved for thee, to meet thee at thy coming” (isaiah 14.9) (c. 1780–85). this juxtaposition of pictures showed blake’s stylistic evolution in handling his denunciation of kingship and priestcraft in different media, but it also led us backward into the gray-tone world of his earlier historical watercolors and the vitrines detailing the commercial work by which he made his living. the commitment to reconstructing the material conditions that shaped artistic careers was underpinned by myrone’s discussion of “how the socially determined temporalities experienced by different artists might direct those choices that might otherwise appear to be freely made: genre, scale, manner, even technique” (catalogue 54), and by admirably detailed research on the professional geographies of blake’s london in the catalogue. these details shaped the financial information provided around the commercial book engraving vitrine, where the viewer was invited to reflect on blake’s earnings as a commercial book engraver in comparison to a tradesperson or shopkeeper with a likely income of £80-150 a year and a middle-class professional earning £200-500 a year. captions informed us that blake is likely to have been paid £21 for engraving thomas stothard’s design of clarence’s dream for william enfield’s the speaker (1780), over £100 for his plates for the wit’s magazine (1784), £53 for his large engraving after william hogarth’s the beggar’s opera for john boydell (1790), £25 for engraving “fertilization of egypt” after fuseli for erasmus darwin’s the botanic garden (1791), over £330 for his thirty-two illustrations to mary wollstonecraft’s translation of c. g. salzmann’s elements of morality (1791), £10 for ten drawings and over £120 for the engravings illustrating wollstonecraft’s original stories from real life (1791), and “about £50” for the small plates after fuseli for the plays of william shakspeare (1805). the display of illustrations to john gabriel stedman’s narrative, of a five years’ expedition, against the revolted negroes of surinam (1796) was accompanied by a “content warning: a work in this showcase depicts the brutal treatment of an enslaved person.” alongside this trigger warning, the public was also invited to judge for themselves the racist potential of the images: “are such images critical of colonial exploitation, or do they participate in it?” these illustrations were placed in proximity to the 1792–93 watercolor los and orc, which documented how blake used the chained slave motif in different media and contexts, including the “preludium” to america a prophecy, on view in the second part of the room. the songs of innocence and of experience were presented on the threshold to the second section of the room through a vitrine showing copy s, decorated with gold, open to “the tyger,” chosen for being blake’s best-loved poem. later in the exhibition’s run the page was turned to “the little black boy,” with a careful caption detailing the racial issues involved in contrasting black and white: in representing skin color as “but a cloud” (e 9), the poem “reflect[s] the racist european conventions of the period.” the caption concluded that “it is impossible to say whether blake is endorsing or questioning this viewpoint.” on the wall, color prints of designs from “the shepherd” and “spring” from the yale center for british artpaul mellon fund, b1978.1.2 and b1978.1.1. came across as richly decorated miniatures, while the center of the room was taken up by a different kind of display that evoked an open book by placing three two-sided stands on plinths that enabled viewers to see both sides of each leaf from a disbound copy of songs of innocence (copy x, national gallery of victoria), printed in green ink and colored with a luminous blue wash. see enlargement. while the stands encouraged intimate viewing and reading of the disbound copy of songs, different viewing formats presented america: a frontispiece from the fogg art museum suggested an independent art work, a bound copy (copy a) open to canceled plate c in a vitrine referenced the work as a book, and finally the eighteen plates from the splendid disbound copy m occupied all four walls of the room. displaying one leaf next to the other along the wall meant adapting the medium of the book to the medium of painting, which can only present actions by placing bodies next to one another in space, as g. e. lessing argued. hanging america as a series of plates supported different ways of seeing, from the panoramic view to slower-paced kinds of engagement that alternated and combined viewing and reading, one plate at a time. the choice harked back to the installation of the whole 100 plates of jerusalem in the tate’s 2000–01 retrospective and of europe a prophecy at the petit palais in paris in 2009 and at the ashmolean in oxford in 2014–15. the jerusalem hang of 2000–01 was criticized for its visual monotony.david bindman, “william blake: london and new york,” burlington magazine 143.1176 (march 2001): 172-74. art historians and curators might object to the time required to view and read such “walls of words,” which may run counter to the functioning of the exhibition as a medium, since it slows down the rhythm of people’s progress through space. on the other hand, book people might say that this mode of display neuters the book as a reading tool. these different points of view demonstrate that blake’s illuminated books are hybrid objects that offer different aesthetic experiences through different modes of perception. room 3: patronage and independence “i call myself now independent. i can be poet painter & [written over f ] musician as the inspiration comes,” blake wrote to his friend george cumberland in 1800.transcribed in robert n. essick and morton d. paley, “‘dear generous cumberland’: a newly discovered letter and poem by william blake,” blake 32.1 (summer 1998): 4-13; discussed in sarah haggarty, blake’s gifts: poetry and the politics of exchange (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2010) 44. that year he exhibited at the royal academy a large tempera, with his name marked in the catalogue as “h” for “honorary,” meaning “not expecting to derive a living from the practice of art.” myrone points out that “the moment at which blake might justifiably consider himself to be an artist, in the sense that we might consider to define professional status, is also the moment that he disavowed professional standing” (catalogue 105). this new phase in his career as an artist occupied a large gallery divided into three sections, dedicated to the works he produced for patrons. in contrast to the blue-sky room devoted to the illuminated books, “patronage and independence” was painted a vivid green, perhaps to allude to blake’s preference for the “green house” of thomas butts as opposed to the “cold gallery of fashion” (e 724). myrone vividly reconstructs the social profiles of blake’s patrons in the associated catalogue chapter: butts, “a clerk in the office of the commissary general of musters … running a boarding school for girls with his wife, elizabeth, the daughter of a carver and gilder but trained as a schoolmistress”; cumberland, “a clerk in the royal exchange assurance company, while spending time as a student at the royal academy”; elizabeth ilive, “the daughter of an oxford printer and school teacher, who became the mistress of the earl of egremont at petworth” and then his wife; the reverend joseph thomas, “a sometime naval chaplain” who married well enough “to indulge his interests in art collecting and preparing his book of religious emblems without having a church appointment”; john flaxman, “the son of a successful plaster-figure maker”; and william hayley (catalogue 85). see enlargement. a display on the right-hand side of the room showcased an alternative book medium: while the prospectus of 1793 had advocated illuminated printing as a uniform medium that combined poet and painter, flaxman’s commission to decorate a copy of thomas gray’s poems for his wife in 1797 resulted in a work that stages the separation of media, as gray’s letterpress text is disbound and mounted in larger leaves decorated with splendid watercolor and pen and ink drawings. the format was inspired by the 537 preliminary watercolors that blake produced for an illustrated edition of edward young’s night thoughts (1797). a vitrine in the corner showed a hand-colored copy of the 1797 night thoughts edition owned by john soane, open to the arresting scene of darkness “brooding o’er unfinish’d fates / with raven wing incumbent” around the letterpress text, while the river of souls flows in the bottom margin. the facing page shows “angels sent on errands full of love” to relieve the grieving (pp. 54-55). it would have been wonderful to be able to compare some specimen of the original watercolor series for young with the gray watercolors, though probably there was a limit on loans from the british museum blakes. like the national gallery of victoria songs, the disbound pages from gray’s poems were mounted on two-sided stands on plinths, evoking the form of an open book that viewers could circumnavigate. the selection loaned by the yale center for british art included a youthful swan-riding poet soaring in the blue sky, painted in the margins of the title page to allude to gray’s pindaric endeavors, while walking around to the other side of the leaf we saw the poet seated in the pose of a michelangelesque prophet, with the blank back of the letterpress title page inscribed with blake’s list of titles of designs and an address to the reader in the bottom margin, “around the springs of gray my wild root weaves / traveller repose & dream among my leaves.” in addition to the title page and the envoy poem to the dedicatee, ann flaxman, the display included the designs for “elegy written in a country church-yard.” blake’s pictorial marginalia surround the printed words of the poet, confronting “the short and simple annals of the poor,” capturing “a flower” “born to blush unseen / and waste its sweetness on the desert air,” and giving voice to “some mute inglorious milton.” the process of extra-illustration places pages of gray’s text above the scenes of plowing and harvesting that blake drew in the lower margins of pages 5 and 6 of the poem. the elevated position of the words dramatize social inequality, differentiating the poet’s work from the laborer’s: while the poet has the prospect view and leisure time necessary for the practice of sympathy and philosophical abstraction, the laborer is bent downward, engaged in manual work that keeps him focused on repetitive detail, his outlook confined like a work animal limited to seeing through “narrow chinks” (e 39). if we take plowing as a metaphor for engraving, blake might have used these images to reflect on and denounce the social inequality structuring the distinction between poet and illustrator, invention and execution. the first thing that struck the eye upon entering the “patronage and independence” room was the extraordinary series of biblical watercolors on the facing wall. the number of the beast is 666 features a seated, naked, horned, multiheaded figure looking up to and perhaps addressing a bat-winged multiheaded horned beast at the center of the composition. the figure facing away may involve a satirical allusion to moses’s access to the divine (“thou shalt see my back parts,” exod. 33.23), yet it fails to interrupt direct access to the beast; in fact, it may function as a proxy, offering a sense of scale and a vicarious place for the viewer in the composition.in my analysis of the figure as a proxy for the viewer i follow joseph leo koerner, rather than the face-to-face structure of sympathy discussed by steven goldsmith: see koerner, caspar david friedrich and the subject of landscape, 2nd ed. (london: reaktion books, 2009) 190-94, 210-13, 245; goldsmith, “(without) sympathy,” william blake in context, ed. sarah haggarty (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2019) 333-44. the brilliant curatorial hang made the most of its demonic outstretched hand, for this powerful gesture extends outside the boundaries of the painting, turning the viewer’s option to go left or right into a sort of choice of hercules: those of us who were of the demonic party would follow the outstretched hand inviting the beast and us to turn our eyes to the left and encompass the full frontal heroic male body of the great red dragon and the beast from the sea. a great counterpart to this drawing might have been ezekiel’s wheels,butlin, the paintings and drawings of william blake, 2 vols. (new haven: yale university press, 1981) no. 468, c. 1803–05, museum of fine arts, boston, 90.108. revealing a striking similarity in color and composition, which suggests that the multiform demonic body of the red dragon is close to the fourfold body seen in the vision of the merkabah, variants in the collective body of the eternals. instead, what we found when we turned to the right was the more feminine and ambiguous apollonian radiance of satan in his glory: “thou wast perfect till iniquity was found in thee,” winged like a cherub, which introduces the demonic mutation of angel into devil, but in this context mediated the transition from the demonic visions of revelation to the christological world of the gospels as we moved toward the stunning dark compositions of the magdalene at the sepulchre, the crucifixion, the entombment, and the angel rolling away the stone. blake’s miniature portraits of thomas and elizabeth butts, placed next to the great red dragon, introduced the owners of the biblical watercolors hanging in this section. myrone points out david bindman’s suggestion that these watercolors may have been produced with a view to extra-illustrating a bible (catalogue 98).malcolm cormack, william blake: illustrations of the book of job, with an afterword by david bindman (richmond: virginia museum of fine arts, 1997) 76-77. that is what happened to the conversion of saul, on display elsewhere in the room, which used to be in the kitto bible among 30,000 other biblical subjects, including blake’s engraving of “fertilization of egypt” and engravings from the grave.the conversion of saul was inserted as leaf 10173 into volume 56 of the holy bible, illustrated by j. gibbs, a copy of john kitto’s the pictorial bible, 3 vols., augmented to sixty volumes (huntington library, call no. 49000). essick catalogues the blakes in the kitto bible in the works of william blake in the huntington collections 121-22, 154-55, 174, 206, 210, 217-18, 222. as with the plates associated with the books of designs, here we saw the alternative possibilities of blake’s designs as a series. three temperas displayed to the left of the butts portraits completed the biblical sample, selected from up to 200 works that the butts owned, some perhaps displayed in elizabeth’s school. behind saul an intermediate room was beautifully hung with impressions of the large color prints—whose only known contemporary collector was butts—conveying how they reinterpret the format of pictorial cycles for renaissance palaces in a medium and at a scale to fit “the decent-sized house of a senior civil servant … heroic art reduced to the private realm” (myrone, catalogue 115). see enlargement. work commissioned by thomas was comprehensively represented, from the miltonic series of twelve designs for paradise lost (1807) on loan from the huntington to six for “on the morning of christ’s nativity” (1809) from manchester. four of blake’s six contributions to thomas’s extra-illustrated folio of shakespeare, commissioned in 1801 together with comus but executed between 1806 and 1809,the terms of the commission are detailed in the postscript to a letter from flaxman to hayley, 31 july 1801, quoted in marcia allentuck, “blake, flaxman, and thomas: a new document,” harvard library bulletin 20 (1972): 318-19. were hung at the other end of the room. these works were inserted into a second folio embellished with works by painters including william hamilton, flaxman, robert ker porter, and william mulready between 1801 and 1809. seeing them as a series, rather than as parts of the book, reflected their archival history, since the british museum has taken them out of the book and classified them under the name of the artist.see british museum 1954,1113.1.11, 1954,1113.1.21, 1954,1113.1.22, 1954,1113.1.26. the exhibition placed them under the portrait of shakespeare that blake produced for hayley’s library, but it did not mention their book context otherwise, so the potential for comparison with the work of other artists included in the extra-illustrated folio was not available to the viewer. imagining these works in connection with hayley’s library in sussex makes sense, given that they were commissioned during blake’s stay at felpham by way of correspondence between hayley and flaxman. the final part of the room was introduced by a vitrine in the middle with blake’s relief-etched milton (copy d) from the rosenwald collection, open to the plate in which he inscribes his name and home in the prophecy: “blakes cottage at felpham.” this extraordinary visionary miniature showing the poet addressing the virgin ololon descending through midair guided our perception of the works blake produced in sussex; it faced the radiant watercolors that register his new experience of the sea, which were framed by the stunning chimney panels evening and winter, produced for the norfolk rectory of the reverend john johnson, william cowper’s cousin. the heads of the poets shakespeare, spenser, cowper, milton, and dante, commissioned for hayley’s library, were hung high on three sides. to the left, beneath the portrait of milton, were the tempera satan calling up his legions, inspired by paradise lost, and the watercolor the vision of the last judgment (1808), which blake produced for elizabeth ilive, the countess of egremont. the choreography of this swirling composition of bodies converges in an opening that suggests a vulva at the center of the picture beneath the more conventional figure of the lord unrolling a scroll above. this feminine articulation of the other world celebrates families going to heaven, including a female figure surrounded by six children, thought to represent ilive herself with her surviving children with the earl, their short marriage being over by 1803.andrew loukes, “‘under a fortunate star’: the petworth blakes in context,” william blake in sussex: visions of albion, ed. loukes (london: national trust, in association with paul holberton publishing, 2018) 58, 60. hung in the corner, before the opening to the next room, the vision of the last judgment announced blake’s illustrations to robert blair’s the grave in the following section. room 4: independence and despair “independence and despair” was introduced by thomas phillips’s 1807 portrait of blake, eyes turned upward, envisioning a visit from the archangel gabriel, who “‘stood in the sun, and beckoning to [him], moved the universe.’” for amy concannon, “phillips’s portrait marks the beginning of a period in which blake, too, sought to stand in the sun: to actively seek a larger public for his work, to rejuvenate his professional profile and claim his place in the london art world” (catalogue 133). the portrait was exhibited at the royal academy in 1807, then engraved as the frontispiece to blake’s illustrations to blair’s the grave (1808), commissioned in 1805 by robert hartley cromek. cromek obtained an impressive list of 589 subscribers, including the president of the royal academy, benjamin west, the professor of painting, john opie, the architect sir john soane, the engravers thomas bewick and john landseer, and patrons such as thomas hope and william locke: “this was the greatest show of support from the art world that blake was ever to receive in his lifetime” (concannon, catalogue 140). the volume’s marketing also included a dedication to queen charlotte. blake’s work on the grave was richly documented in the exhibition with copies of the book, with the respective drawings hanging around them on the wall. looking down, we could peruse in a vitrine the egremonts’ copy, open to “the death of the good old man,” and soane’s copy, with “christ descending into the grave,” while, lifting our eyes from the pages, we could look at the corresponding designs in ink, watercolor, and graphite on the wall, thus comparing schiavonetti’s engravings to blake’s originals. this elegant display allowed us to experience the different modes of address by which christ walks toward the viewer in a horizontally displayed design functioning as an illustration in a book or a vertical view of a composition on the wall. the hang of the watercolors demonstrated a claim made in the volume’s description of the engravings: “these designs, detached from the work they embellish, form of themselves a most interesting poem.”robert blair, the grave, a poem. illustrated by twelve etchings executed from original designs (london: printed by t. bensley … for the proprietor, r. h. cromek … and sold by cadell and davies [et al.], 1808) 33. the beautiful sequence hung along three walls included—in addition to the death of the good old man and christ descending into the grave—death of the strong wicked man, the soul hovering over the body reluctantly parting with life, and the counseller, king, warrior, mother & child, in the tomb, as well as an alternative title page from the huntington and subjects that were not engraved in the book. the exhibition documented the spanish reception of the designs by displaying josé joaquín de mora’s meditaciones poéticas (1826). blake’s “chaucers canterbury pilgrims” was hung at the other end of the room. at that point his relationship with cromek had turned sour. the deterioration was already clear early on in the blair commission, which quickly shifted from both invention and execution to the designs only, with schiavonetti employed for the engravings. the conflict emerging from cromek’s concurrent chaucer project was brilliantly visualized by the curatorial hang of blake’s original engraving from 1810 and a later impression of blake’s plate sometime prior to 1881 hung on either side of the competing engraving (1809–17) by schiavonetti and james heath after stothard’s the pilgrimage to canterbury, published by cromek. first, the pilgrims’ processions depicted in the two original engravings collided into each other, whereas the two compositions took opposite paths when we turned to look at the cromek pilgrims next to the later impression of blake’s engraving. blake’s high stakes in “chaucers canterbury pilgrims” are clear from his 1809 prospectus, where he looks back to dürer “and the old original engravers, who were great masters in painting and designing, whose method, alone, can delineate character as it is in this picture, where all the lineaments are distinct” (e 567). while the second prospectus markets the engraving for its precision and attention to historical detail down to “every particular of dress or costume” (e 568), in a descriptive catalogue of pictures, poetical and historical inventions (1809) blake celebrates his painting of the pilgrims as eternal “characters which compose all ages and nations,” “physiognomies or lineaments of universal human life,” and “visions of the eternal attributes, or divine names, which, when erected into gods, become destructive to humanity” (e 532-36). his investment in the subject is evident in his return to “chaucers canterbury pilgrims being a complete index of human characters as they appear age after age” as the starting point for a virulent, wide-ranging attack on commerce and patronage, calling on artists to “resist the contemptible counter arts” (e 580), in the manuscript “public address” penned in the notebook around 1809–10. the descriptive catalogue was central to the tate’s powerful reconstruction of the exhibition of 1809. “mr. b. appeals to the public, from the judgment of those narrow blinking eyes, that have too long governed art in a dark corner” (e 529). darkness barely visible indeed governed the recreation of the exhibition. see enlargement. while a previous experiment on the occasion of the bicentenary had hung the extant works in the white cube aesthetic of the modern gallery,william blake’s 1809 exhibition, room 8, tate britain, 20 april–4 october 2009, reviewed by alexander gourlay in blake 43.3 (winter 2009–10): 96-100. for discussions of the 1809 exhibition, see essays by david blayney brown and martin myrone, susan matthews, philippa simpson, and konstantinos stefanis in tate papers 14 (2010). this installation interrupted the homogeneous spatial flow of the twenty-first-century gallery with a reconstruction of a “modest domestic interior” whose other space and time were suggested by creaking wooden floorboards, sash windows, and dimly lit conditions. the 1809 exhibition was conjured up as an “immersive experience,” building on an architectural reconstruction of the upstairs rooms above blake’s brother’s hosiery shop.troy r. c. patenaude, “‘the glory of a nation’: recovering william blake’s 1809 exhibition,” british art journal 4.1 (2003): 52-63. for those who could seize the moment, this “middle-class interior” became a visionary gate:myrone in calè, “an interview with martin myrone.” at twenty-minute intervals the portraits of nelson and pitt were lit by a projector, which virtually restored what may have been their original colors by optical means; the visionary world of the descriptive catalogue was made present through the voice-over recitation of actor kevin eldon.on eldon’s association with blake, see the “wake for blake” in 2017 to fundraise for a marker to identify blake’s grave in bunhill fields burial ground: <https://​thevelvetonion.​com/​2017/​06/​10/​a-​wake-​for-​blake-​with-​eldon>. blake’s investment in pitt is confirmed by his “application of gold leaf between paint layers, which would have served to reflect light through the picture’s surface and increased the brilliance and intensity of its colour,” argues concannon (catalogue 153). after the historical reconstruction of the actual exhibition space, digital experiments captured the tensions that shape the dialectic of scale in the descriptive catalogue: “the artist has endeavoured to emulate the grandeur of those seen in his vision, and to apply it to modern heroes, on a smaller scale” (e 531). this statement invokes the performative power of the viewer to reimagine blake’s works, using his drawings as sketches or models for gigantic works and imagining what british visual culture might look like if blake had realized his visions on a larger scale. how can the “grandeur” of “those wonderful originals seen in my visions, … some of them one hundred feet in height” (e 531) be captured within the space of the modern exhibition? moving from the desperate darkness of the 1809 exhibition along the wall marked out to register the empty space that might have been occupied by blake’s lost largest canvas, the ancient britons, and past his largest extant canvas, an allegory of the spiritual condition of man (1811?), viewers were confronted with counterfactual experiments in perception in which the curators attempted to translate his work to the scale envisaged in the descriptive catalogue. a screen showed the apotheoses of nelson and pitt magnified to a hundred feet in height, emulating “oriental apotheoses.” see enlargement. on the adjoining wall a different kind of digital experiment responded to blake’s claim that “the artist wishes [drawings] were in fresco, on an enlarged scale to ornament the altars of churches” (e 549) with a large photomontage that magnified the 41 x 30 cm. watercolor of the crucifixion: “behold thy mother” to the scale required to fill the wall behind the altar of st. james’s piccadilly, the parish church attended by blake’s family. image © tate design studio. see enlargement. the location of blake’s exhibition outside the main trajectories of art appreciation is documented through an admirable discussion of the professional and trade associations of the broad street address, also pointing out how blake’s choice of media, and his refusal to paint in oils in particular, foreclosed exposure through the exhibitions that shaped artists’ professional recognition (concannon, catalogue 153-54). as we turned to enter the final section of the exhibition, the transition to the next phase of blake’s life was elegantly marked on the wall by a quotation from jerusalem that brought home the apocalyptic geography of blake’s fourfold london eternal: “the corner of broad street weeps; poland street languishes / to great queen street & lincolns inn, all is distress & woe” (84.15-16, e 243). room 5: “‘a new kind of man’” the title of this section comes from alexander gilchrist’s collection of testimonies from a younger generation of artists gathered around blake, who saw him as “a new kind of man, wholly original.”francis oliver finch, a pupil of john varley’s, quoted in gilchrist 1: 299, quoted in concannon, catalogue 161. his reputation as a “grey-haired visionary” was exemplified by works chosen from over 100 visionary heads, including the spectacular tempera the ghost of a flea (c. 1819–20), which blake supposedly saw in his nocturnal visions and penned on paper for john varley, who published a selection engraved by linnell in his treatise on zodiacal physiognomy (1828). linnell’s observation that varley “believed in the reality of blake’s visions more than even blake himself” leads concannon to suggest that blake “was thus enticed to perform with verve his role as the visionary artist” (catalogue 164). while linnell’s pencil portrait of blake during a walk through hampstead is characterized by “informality and intimacy” (161), the language of the visionary prophet shapes the recollections of blake’s followers. younger artists would congregate at “the house of the interpreter”; for samuel palmer he was “one of the antique patriarchs.”gilchrist, 1: 300; a. h. palmer, the life and letters of samuel palmer (london: seeley, 1892) 9, quoted in concannon, catalogue 161. the first part of this section focused on works that were shaped by blake’s crucial encounter with linnell in 1818. linnell’s role as a patron and mediator is explored through his copies of seventeen exquisite miniature woodcuts that blake produced for the pastorals of virgil, with a course of english reading, adapted for schools (1821), a latin textbook published by linnell’s family doctor, robert thornton. a vitrine documented blake’s illustrations of the book of job, commissioned by linnell in 1823 and published in 1826. the watercolor series produced for butts c. 1805–06 was unfortunately not represented in the exhibition, nor was the second series, traced for linnell in 1821, nor the fitzwilliam sketchbook in which the original watercolor compositions were reduced to the scale used for the engravings. while these engraved works were given great emphasis in the 2014–15 ashmolean exhibition, which had a whole section devoted to blake’s late printing in relation to the reception by palmer and edward calvert in particular, what dominated the tate reconstruction of blake’s encounter with linnell was dante. palmer remembered blake as “the maker, the inventor; one of the few in any age: a fitting companion for dante.”quoted in gilchrist 1: 301. linnell’s commission to illustrate dante’s commedia occupied the last years of blake’s life (1824–27), producing an unfinished series of 102 drawings in ink and watercolors, sketched in a large folio, illustrating seventy-two subjects from hell, twenty from purgatory, and ten from paradise. the national art collections fund bought the linnell dantes in 1918 and divided them among seven collections in the uk, usa, and australia. the exhibition represented the dante series through a powerful selection that supplemented the tate’s own splendid designs with loans from the national gallery of victoria, the ashmolean, and the british museum. the captions did not include references to the relevant cantos from dante’s commedia, despite the fact that blake carefully noted them in the bottom foreground of each design. the choice to adopt the titles given to these drawings by william michael rossetti in gilchrist’s life (1863) paved the way for seeing them as independent works, rather than illustrations that follow the sequence of the text. the display started with the inscription over hell-gate, plutus, the symbolic figure of the course of human history, and the simoniac pope (inferno 3, 7, 14, 19). blake’s fascination with the metamorphosis of thieves into serpents led him to produce a sequence of eight illustrations for inferno 24-25 to capture the metamorphoses through dramatic points in time.on this sequence, see my “bestial metamorphoses: blake’s variations on transhuman change in dante’s hell,” beastly blake, ed. helen p. bruder and tristanne connolly (cham: palgrave macmillan-springer, 2018) 153-81. while these were dispersed among different collections in 1918, the exhibition reunited the tate’s the serpent attacking buoso donati with a rich loan from the national gallery of victoria. however, the logic of the hang sometimes broke up direct connections for the sake of alternating vertically and horizontally oriented drawings. curatorial choices privileged the visual resonance between the horizontal form of cerberus, the three-headed dog that guards access to hell (inferno 6), and the blasphemer capaneus (inferno 14), placing these two designs around the vertical form of vanni fucci “making figs” against god (inferno 25.1-15). see enlargement. placing capaneus after vanni fucci interrupted the line of sight that could have shown spectacular metamorphoses of thieves into serpents as a more linear sequence. next came two horizontal compositions, one on top of the other: the devils setting out with dante and virgil (inferno 21) above another drawing from the serpent sequence, the thieves and the serpents (inferno 24.79-96), which as a result was placed lower than the following the serpent attacking buoso donati (inferno 25.79-93), again breaking up the line of sight. the eye had to adjust again to see another serpent transformation, the six-footed serpent attacking agnolo brunelleschi (inferno 25.46-60), hung higher to accommodate another picture beneath it, ephialtes and two other titans (inferno 31). the serpentine drawings on display are sequenced better in the catalogue (nos. 149-51), where blake’s watercolor epitome of james hervey’s “meditations among the tombs” (c. 1820–25) nicely prefaces the entrance to dante’s hell in canto 3. the wall was completed with two scenes from the ascent through purgatory: dante and virgil approaching the angel who guards the entrance of purgatory, followed by dante and statius sleeping, virgil watching (purgatorio 9, 27). see enlargement. around the corner, purgatory continued with the lawn with the kings and angels (purgatorio 7-8), then two scenes that mark the threshold of earthly paradise: matilda and dante on the banks of the lethe with beatrice on the triumphal chariot, followed by a closer view of the same episode showing the splendidly colored vision of the car and the griffin in the subsequent scene of beatrice addressing dante from the car (purgatorio 29, 29-30). from the ten drawings dedicated to paradise, the curators’ inspired choice singled out two extraordinary experiments in color that brilliantly capture blake’s artistic response to the visual challenge of the ineffability of heaven. his painterly imagination translates dante’s metaphor of the spheres into a visual concept, rendering the encounter between beatrice and dante in gemini, amid the spheres of flame (paradiso 24) as an intersection of spheres in which their original colors blend. while in this episode blake is directly translating dante’s metaphor visually, the color spheres in which he inscribes saint peter, saint james, and saint john with dante and beatrice (paradiso 25) do not intersect. in this case, dante and beatrice are inscribed in the sphere of st. john, while those of st. james and st. peter are behind it. blake concentrates on the dynamic change of color within st. john’s sphere as a light that becomes clearer as if within a crystal sphere, his “new effulgence come / unto the other two, who in a ring / wheel’d, as became their rapture.”paradiso 25.107-09, the vision; or, hell, purgatory, and paradise, of dante alighieri, trans. h. f. cary (london: warne, 1814) 331. set against this iconography, blake’s description of his wife in a letter to hayley from 1800 shows perhaps the early influence of dante’s talk of people as flames in paradise: “my wife is like a flame of many colours of precious jewels” (e 709). vibrant coloring connects blake’s dante to the set of twenty-eight pilgrim’s progress watercolors, another wonder of this exhibition, once owned by richard monckton milnes, then acquired from the crewe collection for the frick in 1941, but harder to see since it was deaccessioned in 1996 and acquired by a private collector. while robert essick attributed the lack of enthusiasm for the series when it went on the market to catherine blake’s coloring,essick, “blake in the marketplace, 1996,” blake 30.4 (spring 1997): 100, referring to butlin, paintings and drawings 1: 599-606, who indicates that this attribution goes back to rossetti’s catalogue in gilchrist 2: 235-36. renewed attention to the gendering of labor in artistic households and recent scholarship on catherine shaped the reassessment of her “creative and practical influence” (alex farquharson, catalogue 6) as part of the exhibition’s mission to focus on blake’s career as an artist.angus whitehead, “‘an excellent saleswoman’: the last years of catherine blake,” blake 45.3 (winter 2011–12): 76-90; mark crosby and angus whitehead, “georgian superwoman or ‘the maddest of the two’? recovering the historical catherine blake, 1762–1831,” re-envisioning blake, ed. crosby, troy patenaude, and whitehead (basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, 2012) 83-107; morton d. paley and mark crosby, “catherine blake and her marriage: two notes,” huntington library quarterly 78.3 (2015): 479-91; ashley reed, “craft and care: the maker movement, catherine blake, and the digital humanities,” essays in romanticism 23.1 (2016): 23-38. this shift was palpable from the first room of the exhibition, where the couple was presented through a delicate pencil portrait of catherine placed next to william’s. concannon points out her role in printing and coloring illuminated books and engaging with patrons, as well as her practical management. after blake’s death she “continued to work as ‘an excellent sales-woman’, building on her husband’s legacy by printing and colouring his illuminated books, just as she had done in his lifetime” (catalogue 197).for a different viewpoint, see joseph viscomi, “posthumous blake: the roles of catherine blake, c. h. tatham, and frederick tatham in blake’s afterlife,” blake 53.2 (fall 2019): 141 pars. jerusalem had pride of place in the final room, with a two-sided stand with proof impressions of plates 28 and 35 from the yale center for british art mediating the transition from the dante area, a vitrine in the middle of the room showing copy h open to the frontispiece—a traveler entering the door to the interior of the book—and the whole disbound copy b, comprising twenty-five plates, displayed in a long vitrine against the wall. relief etched in light brown with black and blue washes, this copy was once owned by another associate of linnell’s, the writer, collector, forger, and poisoner thomas griffiths wainewright, whose collection of blake books was perhaps the largest during the artist’s lifetime.g. e. bentley, jr., “william blake and his circle: a checklist of publications and discoveries in 2001,” blake 36.1 (summer 2002): 6. joseph viscomi has argued that this copy included only the first twenty-five plates in order to approximate the formats of europe and america, with which it was bound around 1821.bentley, blake books (oxford: clarendon press, 1977) 102, 258-59; viscomi, blake and the idea of the book (princeton: princeton university press, 1993) 352-56. wainewright comes up in the exhibition captions and the catalogue in association with the suggestion that later printings of blake’s illuminated books appealed to collectors as surrogate or facsimile illuminated manuscripts (myrone, catalogue 82-83). this possibility can be evinced from wainewright’s early account of jerusalem in the london magazine: dr. tobias ruddicombe, m. d. is, at my earnest entreaty, casting a tremendous piece of ordnance …. it is an account of an ancient, newly discovered, illuminated manuscript, which has to name ‘jerusalem the emanation of the giant albion!!!’ it contains a good deal anent one “los,” who, it appears, is now, and hath been, from the creation, the sole and fourfold dominator of the celebrated city of golgoonoza! the doctor assures me that the redemption of mankind hangs on the universal diffusion of the doctrines broached in this m.s.janus weathercock [thomas griffiths wainewright], “mr. weathercock’s private correspondence, intended for the public eye,” london magazine 2.9 (september 1820): 299-301 (see 300) (italics mine). the italicized part of this quotation was reproduced on the wall above the vitrine, together with other early mentions of jerusalem, such as an 1811 entry from henry crabb robinson’s diary, the lady’s monthly museum reaction to specimens displayed in 1812, and descriptions from j. t. smith’s (1828) and allan cunningham’s (1830) biographical accounts. myrone claims that wainewright’s “unexpectedly playful notice” was an unsuccessful “puff” that failed to provide customers for blake (catalogue 14, 83), but the context spells out blake’s place as another “new kind of man” within the cockney counterculture of the london magazine. penned under the pseudonym of cockney art critic and bibliomaniac janus weathercock, wainewright’s early parodic appreciation of jerusalem registers and debunks the pretentious exclusive world of blake’s roxburghe collectors with a brilliant riff on the medical context of thomas frognall dibdin’s bibliomania. wainewright’s performance, in other words, offers a fitting counterpart to blake’s performative visionary commerce with spirits. blake’s last version of “the ancient of days” (university of manchester) was symbolically placed next to the exit, but its power extended beyond the boundaries of the exhibition space, out into the city, when it was projected onto the dome of st. paul’s cathedral.<https://​www.​stpauls.​co.​uk/​history-​collections​/the-​collections/​arts-​programme/​william-​blake-​at-​st-​pauls-​cathedral>. advertising temporarily granted blake’s counterfactual wish for monumental national commissions that might realize his works “on an enlarged scale” (e 531, 549). his descriptive catalogue recalls the language of artists’ bids to turn st. paul’s into a modern british pantheon for “modern heroes.”plans for st. paul’s as a modern pantheon are discussed in holger hoock, “the british military pantheon in st paul’s cathedral: the state, cultural patriotism, and the politics of national monuments, c. 1790–1820,” pantheons: transformations of a monumental idea, ed. richard wrigley and matthew craske (aldershot: ashgate, 2004) 81-105. courtesy of the technique of projection bombing rather than blake’s portable fresco, an ephemeral modern counterpart of the apotheosis lit up the london sky, a gift that marked blake’s birthday on 28 november 2019 for four days. illuminations had celebrated the civic splendor of the romantic city on patriotic public occasions such as lord mayor’s day, the proclamation of the peace of amiens, the prince’s birthday, buonaparte’s defeats, and the coronation. on such occasions, public buildings, including mansion house, the bank, the admiralty, and east india house, as well as theatres, coffee houses, and commercial premises, such as rudolph ackermann’s repository of arts, were lit by lamps and transparent paintings. the iconography included mottoes, devices, and allegorical compositions featuring crowns, royal initials, and military trophies, such as victory crowning wellington with laurels.see, for instance, “lord mayor’s day,” morning post (10 november 1807), british library newspapers; “the illuminations” or “illuminations” (all military celebrations), times (18 august 1812, 6 july 1813, 6 november 1813, 12 april 1814), times digital archive. needless to say, such patriotic displays are far from blake’s fourfold london eternal. projected onto st. paul’s, the red tones of “the ancient of days” presented blake’s urizenic god as a visionary portent: for some, it marked blake’s apotheosis as a hero of british visual culture, following his absorption into a national canon since sir hubert parry’s “jerusalem” hymn; others might see it as a form of imposition identifying st. paul’s as the seat of priestcraft. image © tate (alex wojcik). see enlargement. review: fernando castanedo, ed. and trans., william blake, augurios de inocencia fernando castanedo, ed. and trans. william blake, augurios de inocencia. madrid: ediciones cátedra, 2020. 178 pp. €13.50, softcover. reviewed by alexander s. gourlay alexander s. gourlay (agourlay@risd.edu) teaches at the rhode island school of design. fernando castanedo’s bilingual critical edition of the ten poems from the so-called pickering manuscript is impressive, a sensitive translation into spanish combined with scholarly commentary and apparatus of very high quality. this book will win blake spanish-speaking friends wherever it goes, but there may be some confusion about what’s in it. on the back cover castanedo explains his title by referring to a tradition of naming a manuscript collection after its “most celebrated” poem. “auguries” is the longest and most important poem in the group, and as a title it is an informative improvement on “the pickering manuscript,” since pickering was merely an early owner, but the spanish equivalent of “poems from the ‘auguries’ manuscript” might have been better. in general this volume gets things just right. castanedo writes clearly in both english and spanish, and is a judicious, thorough, and painstaking scholar as well as a gifted translator. his renderings capture many of the subtleties of blake’s verse, ranging from sweetly fluid lyric to pounding incantation, and perhaps because rhymes are plentiful in spanish, many are preserved without greatly compromising sense or sonority. at the same time, one rarely feels that poetics are determinative for castanedo in his role as translator; in general, thought appears to have precedence over other considerations, and he seems to have consulted every available scholarly commentary in order to preserve as much as possible of the meaning of these disparate poems, many of them difficult. consider the opening stanzas of “el psiconauta,” castanedo’s version of “the mental traveller”: viajé por el país de unos hombres de hombres y mujeres también y escuché y vi tales horrores que nadie pudiera creer allí al nacer el niño ríe aunque se engendra con dolor igual que alegres cosechamos lo sembrado con aflicción my line-by-line prose retranslation indicates the extent of his success in capturing the wonderful strangeness of blake’s poem: the psychonaut i traveled through a country of certain men of men and women too and i heard and saw such horrors as no one could believe there at birth the boy laughs although engendered with pain just as we reap happily what was sowed with sorrow the retranslation is clumsy, but the castanedo version is pretty good, especially the second stanza. i think it is better than pablo neruda’s version,pablo neruda, visiones de las hijas de albión y el viajero mental (buenos aires: ediciones botella al mar, 1947). these translations first appeared in the journal cruz y raya in 1934. most of which is more literal and less lyrical, but i have a few quibbles. the laughter of the boy expressed in “ríe” does not include the parallel implication that instead of suffering in labor, the mother shares in the joy, the visionary alternative to bearing children in pain. also, the translated title is ingenious, but unless castanedo was trying to avoid neruda’s title, “el viajero mental,” i am not sure what motivated it. a psiconauta might be either a seafarer whose vessel is the mind (like an argonaut, who sails in the argo) or one who sails the mind (as an astronaut sails among the stars); furthermore, the idea of sailing introduces an extraneous spatial element that obscures the idea of purely mental anthropological exploration. and finally, i miss the “cold earth wanderers” passed by in line 4, but i am more impressed by blake’s suggestive efficiency than critical of castanedo’s translation when i try to imagine a line that could include the wanderers and everything else squeezed into the words “as cold earth wanderers never knew.” in addition to the transcription in english and the translation—​both annotated—​on facing pages, this small volume contains fourteen more discrete editorial components, including a critical biography (with the blakes as adam and eve in the garden), an exhaustive bibliography, the history of the manuscript, three textual appendices, and a full-color reduced reproduction. castanedo cuts no corners; the work seems to have been conceived as a full scholarly edition that happens to be in spanish, mostly, rather than a crib for literature students with weak english or a shallow popularization, though some of its features (the biography, for instance) might not appear in an english scholarly edition with such a narrow focus. together these disparate adjunctive materials make it potentially useful as a pocket-size introduction to one corner of blake for the general public, as a textbook for undergraduates, or as an aid to scholarship or pedagogy for a graduate student or beginning teacher. william blake’s “introduction” to songs of innocence: the role of the pipe 1. “introduction,” songs of innocence copy u (composed and printed 1789). 11.3 x 7.9 cm. houghton library, harvard university. typ 6500.34u. william blake’s “introduction” to songs of innocence: the role of the pipe by ian thomson ian thomson is an independent scholar who writes about the issues associated with woodwind instruments to which authors refer in novels, plays, poems, and librettos. he has published a book, the magic flute libretto, and a miscellany of articles—​for example, on arthur miller’s death of a salesman, d. h. lawrence’s aaron’s rod, donizetti’s lucia, and the pied piper. the “introduction” to songs of innocence (illus. 1) is a short poem about a piper. this article addresses one particular feature that has not been thoroughly considered: the significance of the piper’s pipe. examining the instrument and its role throws fresh light on the poem. background and previous commentaries the “introduction,” actually a proem, is a concise tale in lyric form with five quatrains relating an episode that occurs to a piper, apparently a shepherd, wandering in the countryside. while he is piping a child appears on a cloud and advises him to pipe a song about a lamb and then to stop playing and instead sing his songs, and subsequently to stop singing and write down the words of the songs. the poem contains motifs that appear in later poems in songs of innocence (for example, a lamb, clouds, shepherds, children, and pastoral settings), as well as issues of a religious and philosophical nature. the apparent focus is on happy circumstances, and numerous commentaries recognize that it has joyous and endearing qualities that have ensured its popularity. while many commentators have focused on the poem’s structural, emotional, and poetic features, few have referred to the piper’s pipe and none has seriously questioned its role. general observations that mention the pipe only in passing, if at all, are not addressed in this article. the lack of attention paid to the pipe is curious, given its prominence: the first word of the first line of the first stanza of the first poem in the collection refers to the act of “piping”; the poem’s development depends on the instrument; and images of a piper piping appear on the frontispiece (illus. 2) and on the title page (in the fold of the letter “i ” of innocence).erdman’s concordance (2: 1435-36) shows that “pipe” and related words (“piping,” etc.) are spread thinly among blake’s works. a flute is mentioned in songs of innocence in connection with a new beginning in “spring” (e 14). 2. frontispiece, songs of innocence copy u (composed and printed 1789). 11.0 x 7.0 cm. houghton library, harvard university. typ 6500.34u. when the pipe has been mentioned in criticism, there is no consensus as to what it is. for example, some refer to it as a shepherd’s pipe—​an unarguable position, given that the player is portrayed with sheep—​but the description is too imprecise to be helpful. wicksteed, on the other hand, writes that “the reeds … supplied his pipes” (80), which assumes, contrary to the frontispiece, that the piper has more than one pipe and, again without justification, that it is fabricated from reeds. bite maintains that it is a panpipe. erdman is more perceptive, suggesting on the basis of the frontispiece that it is “no simple shepherd’s pipe, it looks like an oboe” (illuminated blake 43). such varied commentaries make unwarranted assumptions about the instrument’s construction and thus obscure its identity and purpose. one reason for this confusion is the lack of clarity about blake’s intentions when he used the generic term “pipe.” did he, in the frontispiece, portray an instrument simply and imaginatively rather than accurately, an approach taken by many artists? or did he have in mind a particular kind of pipe, and, if so, which? while all pipes fall under the generic term “woodwind” and all derive, mythologically at least, from a syrinx made of reeds (discussed later), some produce tone when air is directed toward a sharp edge, whether internal or external, and others produce tone when air vibrates a reed. the former category includes the syrinx, duct flutes (including simple pipes, recorders, and flageolets), and transverse flute; the latter includes the ancient greek aulos (often translated confusingly from ancient texts as “flute”), oboe, clarinet, saxophone, and shawm. many of the pipes in both categories—​notably, the aulos, syrinx, some duct flutes, and clarinet (particularly in its early form as a chalumeau)—​have been associated with shepherds. the piper’s features the first stanza conjures an image that is common in folk art: the solitary piper. he is “piping down the valleys wild / piping songs of pleasant glee.”this opening line, referring to a piper wandering in the world of nature, resembles a scene in mozart’s opera die zauberflöte (vienna, 1791) in which papageno enters piping. glen suggests that the unattached present participles “give a sense of undirected, timelessly spontaneous energy” (65). not all commentators agree with the idea of a contented shepherd. in gleckner’s view, for example, blake’s shepherd leads a way of life that is far from peaceful: “irresponsible,” “infantile,” and “aimless” (he uses the latter adjective on four occasions [86, 89 (twice), 97]). gardner notes that the piper is coming “back from the open country towards the congenial, inhabited locality” (19), which may mean that he is guiding his flock down the valley from upper summer pastures. as gardner suggests, this piper is a “guardian of innocence” (18). this shepherd appears to be at peace in nature and content with his pastoral circumstances, a picture of tranquillity that has been portrayed in literature and visual art since classical times.the shepherd with his pipe appears, for instance, in the idylls of theocritus, the first of the bucolic poets, and as daphnis in the early novel daphnis and chloe by longus (theocritus 19, 21, 107, 161; longus 12-197). as a symbol of what came to be called arcadian bliss, the image remained popular (see, for example, john craxton’s 1948 pastoral for p. w.). classical authors express the extent to which contemporary shepherds revered pan, the ancient greek god of the natural world, who inhabited the fields and forests, usually playing pipes: theocritus reports that pipes were not played at noon because that was when pan slept, and he was not to be disturbed. it is difficult to conceive that blake constructed an image of a shepherd-piper in woodland valleys without having pan in mind, and the allusion has accordingly been recognized by many commentators (see, for example, wicksteed 79). while blake’s piper cannot be dissociated from the idea of pan, he is not “pan-like” (mclane 427) and does not represent pan figuratively. pan was given form as a disreputable, licentious, zoomorphic figure with cloven hooves, while the frontispiece of innocence depicts an upright, statuesque human form, barefoot and in token clothing, evoking classical representations of gods in sculpture. these contrasting features of blake’s piper cease to be contradictory when they are linked to the idea of progression or spiritual development—​the principal theme of this poem. the pipe plays an important role in this process. what is the pipe? the piper-pan allusion serves to define some fundamental features of the pipe and its ability to establish heavenly communication. the source for this is ovid’s metamorphoses, a work that records the ancient myths. despite harboring doubts about the neoclassical tendencies of his period, blake was well aware of the metamorphoses, which had been published a number of times in english during the eighteenth century, and is said to have “delighted” in it (damon 313, quoting samuel palmer). ovid explains how pan chased the nymph syrinx, who, wishing to escape his clutches, prayed to be transformed. in the margins of the water, she was transfigured into reeds, which in the breeze produced “sweet tones” (ovid 53).blake refers in the four zoas to the “soothing flute” (e 319). pan cut the reeds into different lengths and joined them together, making a set of proportionate pipes, each open at one end, which has since been called a syrinx in memory of the nymph (and frequently a panpipe in memory of pan). the syrinx became—​mythologically—​the first flute. while pan was unable to fulfill his carnal desires, he could communicate with syrinx through the reed pipes—​“this union, at least, shall i have with thee”—​and thus the reeds were the means by which he could overcome desire and embrace a spiritual attitude.pipes, even when not made from reeds, have continued to evoke a connection with the spiritual world. flutes appear on etruscan tomb decoration and a flute is the sound of the underworld in act 2 of gluck’s orphée et eurydice (1774). in blake’s “introduction,” this story is the mythological basis of the piper’s communication with the heavenly child, who appears in the third line of the first stanza. in that case, does the piper play an instrument derived from, or related to, the syrinx and reeds? there is no evidence that he plays a syrinx. the poem’s text refers to a “pipe,” not pipes. the frontispiece depicts the piper with a single pipe, even using the correct left/​right hand positioning for such an instrument. however, this identification can be dismissed for a number of reasons. the design shows a pipe approximately fifty centimeters in length, which implies that it has keys, and, most importantly—​blake makes this absolutely clear—​it has a beak and terminates with a pronounced bell, characteristics that exclude the possibility of its being a simple pipe. it is not a rustic device but an engineered instrument, most likely fabricated from boxwood or ebony. the size of the bell rules out other forms of flutes, such as the recorder or flageolet, and the beak rules out the oboe, a woodwind that produces tone when air is directed to a slim, exposed double reed, which then vibrates. it is also unlikely to be a shawm: there is no indication of a pirouette (a disc against which players rest their lips to prevent strain), and while shepherds have on occasion been portrayed with shawms the instrument tended to be played ceremonially by professional musicians. blake’s piper appears to be holding an eighteenth-century clarinet, an instrument that the musicologist johann gottfried walther records in his 1732 musicalisches lexicon (168). originally called a chalumeau, a bucolic instrument played by peasants, and alternatively and confusingly a “shepherd’s pipe,” the clarinet is suited in its upper register to outdoor use and remains an outdoor instrument in marching bands and folk ensembles in eastern europe. it became increasingly popular in european art music as the eighteenth century progressed. most specimens were fabricated from boxwood and ebony and all had a relatively large bell.see images of the early clarinet in baines, plate xxvii; rendall, plates 1 and 2. it is related to the reed, insofar as a clarinet produces tone by means of a vibrating reed secured to its beak. moreover, there is a close relationship between the clarinet and the changes that occur later in blake’s poem: clarinet is a diminutive of clarion, which was formerly the name for a trumpet.it is not always clear what instrument blake is referring to when he mentions the clarion—​he distinguishes clarions and trumpets in the four zoas (e 400) and america (e 55), but appears to associate trumpet and clarion as an instrument of revelation in “let the clarion of war begin” (poetical sketches, e 436). walther refers to this when he writes that the early eighteenth-century clarinet produced “the far-away sound of a trumpet, softened and sweetened by distance” (168).see also baines 117-18; rendall 64. there are numerous references, particularly biblical, to trumpets’ announcing or introducing important changes or events, so a trumpet-like instrument is perfectly appropriate for heralding the spiritual change that the piper experiences later in the poem.for example, in 2 chronicles 13:12 trumpets “sound the battle cry”; in matthew 6:2 they “announce”; and in revelation 8-11 seven trumpets are sounded, one at a time, to signal each of the apocalyptic events. a trumpet itself would have negated the essential image of a bucolic shepherd, whereas a clarinet, which is associated with shepherds and with a sound that has the qualities of a trumpet, makes an extremely effective compromise. the piper’s spiritual transition the opening lines of the poem present the piper in a pagan culture and in a lowly place, a valley. he is addressed by a child in a higher place, on a cloud, who asks him to pipe a song about a lamb. as many commentators have pointed out, the child almost certainly has a christian imperative, given that the capitalized “lamb” in christian imagery refers to christ. the pagan piper cannot at this point distinguish “lamb” from lamb and is unlikely to have piped a hymn—​he probably played a well-known traditional tune such as “baa, baa, black sheep”—​but the child is nevertheless ecstatic about what he hears. previously overlooked, but of particular significance in this christian context, is the child’s subsequent instruction to the piper to discard the pipe: “drop thy pipe thy happy pipe.” the child’s command is critically important for understanding the poem’s purpose, for two reasons. it signals change in accordance with the biblical comment “and the voice of … pipers … shall be heard no more” (revelation 18), a chapter that refers to overcoming unchristian activities. secondly, it alludes to the way in which the early church restricted piping. the circumstances are rooted in the use of pipes in agrarian economies to deceive birds—​the distichs of cato, for instance, uses the metaphor of birds’ being deceived by the hunter’s pipe to caution people to be wise: approve not men who wheedling nothings say: fowlers pipe sweetly to delude their prey. (disticha book 1, no. 27) the early church developed the metaphor, linking the pipe to the phallus and arguing that heretics and nonbelievers were deceived by the passions aroused by the pipe, just as they were by passions related to the phallus. an example may be found in the panarion, in which st. epiphanius expresses his profound concern about phallocentric gnostic doctrines and likens the phallus to an end-blown pipe (and thus the pipe to the serpent that deceived eve): for there is a spirit of imposture which, like breath in a flute, sets every fool in motion against the truth …. indeed, the flute itself is a replica of the serpent through which the evil one spoke and deceived eve. for the flute was prepared to deceive mankind, on its [the serpent’s] model and in imitation of it. (panarion book 1, no. 25, par. 4.9-10) phallocentric activities were considered degenerate, idolization of the phallus was condemned, and the church chose to stigmatize the pipe.epiphanius would have been referring to an aulos, an end-blown double-reed instrument that subsequently developed into the oboe. flute instruments did not reemerge significantly in western european culture until around the tenth century, and the images that accompanied their return were in the main courtly. abandoning the pipe was the means by which people were directed away from passions and toward reason/​wisdom.other christian writers condemned pipes: st. john chrysostom calls them “the very pomp and hotchpotch of the devil” (quoted in fitzgibbon 270). pipers were dissuaded from piping and the instrument fell into disuse for centuries, to be replaced in art by images of harps and other stringed instruments. despite blake’s nonconformist beliefs and his misgivings about the established church, he alludes in the “introduction” to one of the early roman church’s earliest challenges and appears to be siding with the church fathers. discarding the pipe signals that the piper’s association with pan has ended and refers, by implication, to the end of pan, who was the only greek god to die. the story was told by an egyptian sailor named thamus, who heard the cry “great pan is dead” coming from over the sea in the vicinity of paxi. his experience was subsequently documented by the greek historian plutarch in de defectu oraculorum (the obsolescence of oracles, c. 100 ad) (plutarch 401-03). medieval scholars considered the tale credible because it conveniently defined the point at which the era of paganism was over and christianity was in the ascendant. john milton refers to pan’s having descended to the underworld on christ’s birth in his celebratory work ode on the morning of christ’s nativity (written in 1629), a poem that blake knew well and illustrated (milton 22; swaim 487-93).milton writes: “full little thought they then, / that the mighty pan / was kindly come to live with them below.” blake’s “introduction” alludes unmistakably to the tale: the piper’s pagan associations stop when he develops as a christian, arguably as a christ figure. in reality, the transition from pan to christ was not as abrupt. paganism decayed as christ gradually acquired many of pan’s characteristics. some poets then fused the two: for example, the glossary to may in edmund spenser’s the shepheardes calender (1579) states that “great pan is christ, the very god of all the shepheards.” the pan-to-christ transition serves in part to explain the ambiguous two-god representation of the piper-shepherd in the frontispiece. discarding the pipe is the piper’s first step into the church: he is ready to conform to christian doctrine. accordingly, the pipe is not mentioned again and the piper acquires a more spiritual way of life, adopting first the voice and then the written word as a means of expression. the child weeps with joy at this development—​another unbeliever is converted and saved. it is generally accepted that the child is a channel for conveying divine favor to an otherwise undeserving human being, a pagan shepherd, but the significance of this in a christian context has not been addressed. the piper’s conversion means that the child has conveyed grace. the manner in which grace is applied is theologically complex and doctrines differ from church to church, but three points illustrate blake’s awareness of the issues: the poem is aligned with the idea that grace precedes faith; the grace is efficacious, which in reformed doctrine means that it is applied directly to the person (the shepherd) whom god wishes to save, and is irresistible, so the shepherd must comply with the child’s demands, giving the impression that he does so freely;this explains essick’s comment about the piper’s “responses being immediate, almost as though his independent will is suspended” (29). and intellectual faith is useless without accompanying good works, in this case writing the songs (“grace” 698; holy bible, james 2:14-17; jeffrey and davids 317). the poem is thus not entirely about the progression from rustic innocence to civilizing experience but about the power of reason over passion and in religious terms the enlightened progression out of an unchristian culture. the reed pen with the pipe dropped, the child calls for the piper to sing, and then transcribe, his songs. the demand for singing associates the poem with the moravian aspects of blake’s religious beliefs. count zinzendorf, founder of the moravian church, promoted singing, writing over 2000 hymns. moreover, the requirement for the piper to instantly fit words to his music reflects zinzendorf’s ability to write songs extremely quickly, often while religious services were in progress. in order to write the songs the piper fabricates a “rural pen” from a plucked reed. it is a writing implement that suits the circumstances, but its inclusion in a late eighteenth-century poem is curious, given that reed pens had been replaced by quills as early as the sixth century and possibly during roman times. john beckmann’s history of inventions and discoveries (published in english in 1797) notes that isidore of seville (c. 560-636) reported the use of quills in etymologiae (beckmann 2: 214-16; finlay 1-2). quills offered better elasticity and durability, were easier to cut, did not require seasoning, and were suitable for small writing. why, then, does blake not refer to a quill? it is partly because of the continuing use of the reed pen by artists, who appreciated its ability to produce bold strokes—​an attribute that draws attention to the significance of the piper’s words—​and partly because the reed pen supports blake’s allusion to the period when pan’s influence was declining and christ’s rising—​a time when such pens were commonplace. the reed, moreover, is a unifying feature in the poem. through the pipe’s mythological origin in reeds and its development in the clarinet (which requires a reed to produce tone), the instrument’s tones at the beginning of the poem are linked with the words transcribed by the reed pen. however, those who too closely associate the piper’s notes with his subsequent words (gillham 149-53) are incorrect. his notes are not sustained long term—​they are transitory and can never be played and heard in exactly the same way again. written words, on the other hand, last forever. this refers to the consistent authority of the “word of god.” the reed, with its ovidian mythology relating to spiritual conversion and communication between earth and heaven, is crucial to blake’s storyline. no other type of instrument would have served his purpose. it underpins the poem as a metaphor for the continuity of the human soul in changing circumstances: blake is saying that while humans are rooted in nature, they can, by restraining natural passions, acquire wisdom. * there is more to this poem than has been recognized to date. in particular, the works of ovid are fundamental to a full appreciation. ovid’s tale about pan’s conversion to a more spiritual way of life offered blake a perfect basis for developing a tale about a piper who is converted to christianity. it is a poem that relies on the juxtaposition of christ and pan, god figures representing (as blake writes of songs of innocence and of experience in 1794), “the two contrary states of the human soul.” bibliography antal, éva. “‘labour of love’: ovidian flower-figures in william blake’s songs.” eger journal of english studies 8 (2008): 23-40. “baa, baa, black sheep.” the oxford dictionary of nursery rhymes. ed. iona opie and peter opie. 1951. oxford: clarendon press, 1977. 88 (no. 55). baines, anthony. woodwind instruments and their history. reprint of corrected 3rd ed. mineola, ny: dover, 1991. beckmann, john. “writing-pens.” a history of inventions and discoveries. vol. 2. trans. william johnston [from beyträge zur geschichte der erfindungen]. london: j. bell, 1797. 206-24. bite, vishwanath. “piping down the valleys wild.” 9 feb. 2016. <https://​vishwanathbite.​wordpress.​com/​2016/​02/​09/​piping-​down-​the-​valleys-​wild-​by-​william-​blake>. blake, william. the complete poetry and prose of william blake. ed. david v. erdman. newly rev. ed. new york: anchor-random house, 1988. [abbreviated as e] catonis disticha. minor latin poets. trans. j. wight duff and arnold m. duff. loeb classical library. cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 1968. damon, s. foster. a blake dictionary. updated ed. hanover: dartmouth college press, 2013. epiphanius of salamis. panarion. book 1. trans. frank williams. 2nd ed., revised and expanded. leiden: brill, 2009. erdman, david v. the illuminated blake. garden city, ny: anchor-doubleday, 1974. erdman, david v., ed., et al. a concordance to the writings of william blake. 2 vols. ithaca: cornell university press, 1967. essick, robert n., ed. william blake: “songs of innocence and of experience.” san marino: huntington library, 2008. finlay, michael. “the history of the quill pen.” western writing implements in the age of the quill pen. carlisle: plains books, 1990. 1-7. fitzgibbon, h. macaulay. the story of the flute. 2nd ed. london: w. reeves, 1929. gardner, stanley. blake’s “innocence” and “experience” retraced. london: athlone press, 1986. gillham, d. g. blake’s contrary states: the “songs of innocence and of experience” as dramatic poems. cambridge: cambridge university press, 1966. gleckner, robert f. the piper and the bard: a study of william blake. detroit: wayne state university press, 1959. glen, heather. vision and disenchantment: blake’s “songs” and wordsworth’s “lyrical ballads.” cambridge: cambridge university press, 1983. “grace.” the oxford dictionary of the christian church. ed. f. l. cross and e. a. livingstone. 3rd ed. oxford: oxford university press, 1997. 697-98. jeffrey, david l., and peter h. davids. “grace, works.” a dictionary of biblical tradition in english literature. ed. david lyle jeffrey. grand rapids: william b. eerdmans, 1992. 316-20. longus. daphnis and chloe. trans. jeffrey henderson. loeb classical library. cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 2009. mclane, maureen. “ballads and bards: british romantic orality.” modern philology 98.3 (feb. 2001): 423-43. milton, john. ode on the morning of christ’s nativity. 1645. london: james nisbet, 1868. ovid. metamorphoses. vol. 1. trans. frank justus miller, rev. g. p. goold. loeb classical library. cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 1971. plutarch. de defectu oraculorum. moralia. vol. 5. trans. frank cole babbitt. loeb classical library. cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 1936. raine, kathleen. blake and tradition. vol. 2. london: routledge & kegan paul, 1969. rendall, f. geoffrey. the clarinet: some notes upon its history and construction. 2nd ed. london: ernest benn, 1957. spenser, edmund. the shepheardes calender. 1579. accessed at <https://​www.​luminarium.​org/​renascence-​editions/​shepheard.​html>. swaim, kathleen m. “‘mighty pan’: tradition and an image in milton’s nativity hymn.” studies in philology 68.4 (oct. 1971): 484-95. theocritus. theocritus. moschus. bion. ed. and trans. neil hopkinson. loeb classical library. cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 2015. walther, johann gottfried. musicalisches lexicon. leipzig: wolffgang deer, 1732. wicksteed, joseph h. blake’s “innocence” and “experience.” london: j. m. dent, 1928. review: sheila a. spector, the evolution of blake’s myth sheila a. spector. the evolution of blake’s myth. new york: routledge, 2020. xxii + 370 pp. $160.00/​£120.00, hardcover; $44.05/​£33.29, e-book. reviewed by r. paul yoder r. paul yoder (rpyoder@ualr.edu) is an emeritus professor of english at the university of arkansas at little rock. he is the author of articles on milton, alexander pope, samuel richardson, thomas gray, blake, and wordsworth. his book, the narrative structure of william blake’s poem “jerusalem”: a revisionist interpretation, was published by the edwin mellen press in 2010. he has also co-edited, with wallace jackson, two essay collections on pope. he is a contributor and co-editor (with michelle levy and colette colligan) of study abroad in the lake district, published as part of the romantic circles pedagogy commons <http://​www.​rc.​umd.​edu/​pedagogies/​commons/​abroad>. his most recent work explores connections between british romanticism and bob dylan. in the last week of 2019 i had the pleasure of spending two mornings with sheila spector touring the magnificent blake exhibit at the tate. we were the people blocking the line at copy b of jerusalem. spector was just finishing her latest book, the evolution of blake’s myth. i now realize that our conversation as we moved through the exhibit reflected the exoteric/​esoteric tensions that are the subject of that new book. she brought an approach to the spatial composition of blake’s plates informed by a notion of four levels of reality that seemed analogous to augustine’s four levels of interpretation, but not quite. her analysis of the arrangement of text and design on blake’s illuminated plates was fascinating, and over lunch we discussed the exhibit, blake criticism, and the impact of northrop frye. by the end of our visit, i knew i wanted to read the book. spector has spent much of her career championing a “canon of rejected knowledge” that she describes in her book as having been “extirpated from the bibliographies of acceptable resources” (330). the evolution of blake’s myth is her most ambitious and persuasive statement yet on the importance of esoteric or “hidden” traditions, largely kabbalistic, to blake’s work. spector discusses almost all of blake’s illuminated books and a good number of his paintings; she also develops a vocabulary for blake’s composite art that allows for a consistently integrated discussion of text and design. the reader is well advised to follow her suggestion that “the best way to approach this study is with an internet connection at hand, so that the plates and pictures can be accessed [at the william blake archive] as they are referred to” (xii). she argues that “though blake began as an exoteric thinker (admittedly with decidedly esoteric leanings), starting with the vision of his dead brother robert in 1787, he began the transition to the esoteric mode of thought, which crystallized, in 1804, during a visit to the truchsessian gallery” (17). blake’s brief description of his ecstatic, liberating reaction to this massive exhibit appears in his letter to william hayley of 23 october 1804, but spector says little about what exactly he might have seen at the truchsessian gallery that led to this crystallization of an esoteric mode of thought. instead, she uses 1804 as a sort of pivot point in blake’s career. thus, after the introduction, her book comprises three main parts: the first focuses on jerusalem, dated 1804 on the title page; the second part describes the development of both blake’s vision and the techniques needed to express it, starting with his earliest illuminated books and culminating in milton, also dated 1804; the third part looks at how blake’s new esoteric viewpoint influenced his work after 1804, including his revision of his own gates of paradise, his illustrations for the book of job, and his unfinished project to illustrate dante’s divine comedy. spector has explained these issues repeatedly elsewhere, but i do think it would be helpful in the present book if she were more explicit at the outset about the general distinction between exoteric and esoteric. the easiest answer here is that “exoteric” includes phenomena, perceptions, and concepts that are generally replicable and externally confirmable by others. these principles of replicability and confirmability serve as the rationale for material laws, scientific inquiry, the view of the human as limited to the senses, and the various moral, religious, or philosophical systems derived from those principles. “esoteric,” on the other hand, refers to a range of more personal, mystical, or alternative traditions, which include but are not limited to kabbalah. these traditions tend to share a reliance on correspondences between levels of reality, as well as transformations or transmutations from one form or state into another. kabbalah, and especially christian kabbalah, is perhaps the most well-known esoteric tradition, and the one developed in the most detail, with a full cosmology and mythic structure. spector traces the development of these esoteric perspectives as a response to various interpretive crises in the history of biblical exegesis, until “isaac luria (1534–​1572) consolidated the kabbalistic myth” and created “a unique horizon of [interpretive] expectations,” which was then christianized by christian knorr von rosenroth (1638–​89) and especially by francis mercury van helmont (1614–​99) (xix). she believes that most blake critics are ill informed about these traditions in general and blake’s relation to them in particular, a point that i readily concede for myself. nonetheless, her argument here is less about the errors of exoteric readings, and more about the value of readings made available by the esoteric interpretative horizon. the language of exoteric/​esoteric that spector employs in this book grants her a level of abstraction that enables her to extend her argument to include concepts and relationships whose value does not depend strictly on kabbalah. nonetheless, one important element of her argument is that esoteric approaches to blake, including kabbalistic ones, do have a long history, dating at least back to ellis and yeats. however, following frye’s fearful symmetry, these approaches were displaced by more exoteric assumptions that understated blake’s relationship with western mystical traditions. spector seeks to correct that view, and in many ways, i am her target audience. i was trained to be suspicious of associating blake with any sort of mysticism. the root of these misgivings, as she points out elsewhere on the same question, is that “while we generally assume that the problem of blake’s [relation to] kabbalah would be clarified if only we had his direct source, actually, the question is much more fundamental, for … there is no universal agreement about the material with which we are dealing.”sheila spector, “kabbalistic sources—​blake’s and his critics’,” blake 17.3 (winter 1983–​84): 84-101, on 85. even when we know of blake’s interest in mystics like boehme or swedenborg, for example, spector says, “the mainstream [of critical commentary] has, for the most part, limited investigation to superficial source studies, rather than considering any deeper implications” (4). without a clear direct source for blake’s connection to kabbalah, spector’s argument for those “deeper implications” depends on the preponderance of evidence, which consists largely of parallels between blake’s ideas and esoteric structures, and contrasts between his earlier and later work. i think she makes a persuasive case. one reason spector’s argument works is that she grafts the language of exoteric/​esoteric onto terms familiar to a blakean context. for example, concerning the marriage of heaven and hell, spector notes that the prolific and the devourer “can be read as symbolizing the esoteric and exoteric modes of thought” (94). the “exoteric system” depends on “material laws” (134), and the “exoteric doctrine” is “predicated on original sin and the cult of virginity” (145). it is marked by a “specious rationality,” and is often represented by blake as “a bearded old man” (145). exotericism is associated with empiricism and a moral system based on atonement and the vanquishing of the other. on the other hand, according to spector, the esoteric “does not oppose the exoteric in the binary sense. rather, viewing exotericism as an obstacle to be transcended, the esoteric unmasks the flaws inherent in the material laws on which the exoteric system is predicated” (134); that is, “the goal of the esoteric myth is to transcend the bounds imposed by the exoteric setting” (180). the corporeal, postlapsarian world in exoteric terms is the “penalty of adam,” while in esoteric terms it is “the arena in which the primordial error can be compensated for” (191). the esoteric reading “transforms original sin into the fortunate fall, the means by which the initial error can be corrected” (200). as spector explains, “theologically, the exoteric church had institutionalized the doctrine of original sin, and the concomitant cult of virginity, ostensibly to prepare man for the last judgment. from the esoteric perspective, not only was that entire mode of thought wrong, but it had consolidated into an impediment that prevented, rather than facilitated, cosmic restoration” (206). on plate 11 of marriage, blake himself makes much the same point, describing how institutional religion appropriated and corrupted imaginative experience; what is new in spector’s statement is her mapping of that blakean narrative onto the exoteric/​esoteric framework. one of the strongest parts of spector’s argument is her deployment of the concept of the “image act.” she argues that blake developed the image act as the “unit of discourse” necessary to express the complexity of his ideas (xii). she sees it as constituting the individual picture or engraving plate, with this important provision—​blake’s use of enjambment “between plates, as well as between mediums within plates, to problematize the expectation of the image act as a whole, or any of its component parts in particular, as self-contained units” (xii). thus, for spector, the notion of the image act tends to foreground the individual plate, but that does not mean that the plates should be considered as isolated moments, any more than the text or illumination should be considered separately. she begins “with the assumption that blake apprehended what he called the divine vision, an imaginative projection of the multivalent idea that comprises the one” (xi-xii). in order to divide the idea into smaller parts and articulate their implications, he “required a bimodal medium, one in which the verbal and visual each had its own responsibility in manifesting the idea” (xii). each image act “potentially, can be the result of the interaction among three different manifestations of consciousness: the narrator, responsible for the verbal portion; the visualizer, responsible for the pictorial component; and the compositor, for the coordination of the two into a unified and coherent image act” (xii). spector derives this notion of the image act from w. j. t. mitchell’s work on blake’s “composite art” and the “pictorial turn,” by way of kocku von stuckrad’s particular consolidation of mitchell’s theories with several other approaches, including that of liza bakewell, who seems to have coined the term as “‘an application of austin’s theory of speech acts to the field of pictorial communication’” (xi). “completing the circle,” spector takes “stuckrad’s approach back to blake” (xi). the result is a remarkably consistent consideration of the interaction of the verbal and visual throughout the book. of particular interest to me are the implications of spector’s argument for character in jerusalem, especially that of los. blake’s epic characters are often treated more as “mouthpieces” for blake’s ideas than as actors in a drama, but spector’s approach to jerusalem actually helps to clarify los’s development as a character. identifying albion with the kabbalistic “adam rishon,” “comparable to the biblical adam” (34), and los with “adam kadmon,” “a manifestation of blake’s saviour” (38), she explains that “in the kabbalistic myth adam kadmon (primordial man, the first completed entity) was intended to serve as the passive model for adam rishon (created or first man) to emulate” (38). i initially found this formulation doubtful because i have always understood albion to be anterior to all of the other characters in jerusalem, except for the various manifestations of the divine. but spector continues that “after the initial fault [adam rishon’s/​albion’s fall] adam kadmon was forced to assume an active role in cosmic restoration” (38). if she is correct in identifying los with the “passive model,” who only assumes an active savior role after albion falls, that may help to explain why his learning curve is so steep in jerusalem—​los must learn hard lessons about the “terrible wonder” of punishment and forgiveness; he gets frustrated with the friends of albion and he learns about the dangers of trying to enforce a moral code; he mistakes murder for “vision,” and “he saw in vala’s hand the druid knife of revenge & the poison cup / of jealousy, and thought it a poetic vision of the atmospheres” (jerusalem 63.36, 39-40, e 214-15). one implication of spector’s argument is that los’s character must learn how—​and how not—​to save albion. the book’s introductory materials begin with “a note on methodology: the image act,” in which spector introduces the key components of her approach to blake’s books and images. in the second introductory section, “preface: myth and hermeneutics,” she contends that the exoteric “horizon of expectations” (xviii) we bring to blake’s work has dominated blake studies by suppressing the esoteric alternative; spector’s preface shows how this esoteric alternative developed into christian kabbalism, which, she argues, became the basis for blake’s mature mythology. she concludes the introductory material with “introduction: the theory of myth,” in which she lays out the vocabulary she will use in discussing blake’s work, primarily “foundational principles” (the “a priori assumptions that govern the entire system”), “symbolic form” (“an aggregate of symbols organized by an internal logic … and interacting with each other in accordance with a characteristic operation”), and narrative (“flesh[ing] out” the symbolic form) (5). many of the terms, concepts, structures, and modes of interaction will seem alien to most readers, but that is exactly spector’s point: there is a well-developed esoteric tradition that offers a legitimate alternative to what was handed down from frye, but that we have been trained to disregard. the first section proper, “part i: the consolidation of blake’s esoteric myth,” uses two chapters to examine blake’s final epic, jerusalem, in order to demonstrate his fully realized adaptation of esoteric perspectives and christian kabbalism into his artistic vision. the first chapter presents the “foundational principles” and “symbolic form” of blake’s late myth, demonstrating first “how blake repudiated the exoteric laws of thought in favor of the esoteric characteristics,” and then focusing on the symbolic form, “isolating the symbols, and then revealing the inner logic and characteristic operation through which they cohere into a dynamic system” (25). this chapter is a bit dry and dictionary-like at times, simply because many new concepts and definitions must be introduced as spector maps jerusalem’s characters and events onto the esoteric framework. the second chapter looks at the narrative in terms of purpose, medium, point of view, setting, characters, and plot. the most significant aspect of the esoteric narrative as described here is its replacing of the typical agon, in which a protagonist and antagonist struggle until one defeats or banishes or destroys the other, with a narrative whose climax depends not on conquest but on the identification and removal of “shards” of negativity that act as obstacles to the final resolution. this is why the climax of jerusalem depends not on the vanquishing of the spectre, but on los’s identification of error in his description of the covering cherub. the four chapters of “part ii: the development of blake’s esoteric myth,” discuss almost all of blake’s illuminated books from there is no natural religion to milton a poem in order to trace the intertwining development of blake’s evolving myth and the medium he needed to express it. spector makes almost no mention of songs—​the focus here is on narrative—​but she does discuss a good number of blake’s separate drawings and paintings. chapter 3, “the foundation principles,” focuses on blake’s early composite art, dated roughly 1788–​93; spector argues that, especially in the prose works of this period, blake developed the “compositor,” not quite a persona, but “the level of consciousness through which the visual and verbal could be unified into a coherent image act,” and that this development was tied epistemologically to “the substitution of the esoteric characteristics for the material laws as foundational principles” for his myth (85-86). in chapter 4, “the symbolic form,” she reads the five books dated 1794–​95 “collectively as a five-act drama in which blake recognized the need for and ultimately generated his own symbolic form” (82). here is where spector addresses the vexed question of negations and contraries, concluding, key to blake’s symbolic form is his recognition that negation is not a symbol to be opposed in binary conflict, but an operation to be corrected. as an operation, negation projects a linear plot in which a dominant force will eliminate its opposition. its correction is effected through contraries, the cyclical process by which the supposed opponent is revealed to be a complementary value necessary for completion of the whole. (167) chapter 5, “the narrative (1): the logic of complementarity,” considers blake’s illustrations to edward young’s night thoughts in relation to the four zoas as the first phase in “transforming the symbolic form [developed in books of 1794–​95] into a concrete narrative” (82). in chapter 6, “the narrative (2): the function of self-annihilation,” spector argues that blake “would use milton a poem to work out the process by which self-annihilation could correct the primordial error and thereby effect cosmic restoration” (82). she concludes that instead of casting the plot as “a dualistic conflict, blake introduces merkavah mysticism [based on contemplation of ezekiel’s vision] as the archetypal pattern for neutralizing the negation. specifically, the plot consists of three parallel descents, contemplation of which is designed to elevate consciousness” (234). in “part iii: the implementation of blake’s esoteric myth,” spector contends that “blake used his myth not only to articulate his own vision, but for hermeneutical purposes as well” as he reread works by himself and others. she argues that he “mediated texts through the narrative consolidated in jerusalem” (254-55), and she provides a good summary of that consolidated narrative, now considered in light of its development across blake’s work before jerusalem: to reprise, in its final form, blake’s narrative is a revision of [francis mercury] van helmont’s four-part cycle: the primordial institution, the state of destitution, the modern constitution and the supreme restitution. in jerusalem, blake refocuses the phases. to begin with, he reduces the primordial institution to a kind of lost eden, indicated through allusion and flashbacks. to compensate, he divides the state of destitution into two distinct phases. the first, fragmentation, corresponds to the loss of the original unity; and the second, negation, redefines man’s error as the intellectual choice of reason over vision. this is followed by the negation of negation, the phase in which man corrects his error by transforming negations into contraries, so that, finally, in the fourth phase, cosmic restoration can be achieved. (255) the typical reader may well have found the terms of this summary baffling at the outset of spector’s book, and it is a measure of her success that by page 255 these statements not only make sense, but also seem comfortably familiar. chapter 7, “blake interpreting blake: the gates of paradise,” demonstrates “how blake used the consolidated myth as the basis for reinterpreting his own work” (255), in this case “to remediate his vision through what had become his own horizon of expectations, adding some mottos, a verbal apparatus and a concluding bimodal image act, all to create a new perspective from which to view the gates of paradise” (259). in chapter 8, “blake interpreting the bible: the book of job,” spector compares blake’s job watercolors of 1805–​06 with the job engravings of 1823–​26 to show how his reading of the biblical book changed in light of the esoteric narrative he developed in jerusalem. in the final chapter, “blake interpreting the visions of others: the divine comedy,” spector notes that blake “seems to have been fixated on [dante’s] count [ugolino] for most of his professional life,” and that he “seems to have used ugolino as the vehicle for developing his own esoteric christian doctrine” (295). she concludes that “although blake never completed the [dante] project, it seems likely … that he intended to follow the procedure established in revising the gates of paradise and the job illustrations, of mediating dante’s vision through his own esoteric myth, as consolidated in jerusalem” (296). in “conclusion: the truth of myth,” spector goes back to frye to consider how the exoteric approach gained dominance in blake studies. she summarizes her point, saying, if, as i argued in the introduction to this study, we familiarize ourselves with the canon of rejected knowledge, we will recognize the truth: blake did not simply rename already existing mythological figures. rather, he introduced new symbols to convey concepts either omitted from, or else distorted by the accepted canon, in order to convey meanings beyond the range of conventional hermeneutics. (330) not everyone will like this book, and not everyone will be persuaded by it. one of the things i like about it is that spector keeps her eye on her own argument, and refuses to engage in what she sees as pointless debates: finally, it is conventional to contextualize scholarship, indicating how one’s approach or interpretation conforms to or conflicts with current thought. however, because the purpose of this study is to place blake within a completely different intellectual milieu, whether or not my inferences agree with or differ from those of mainstream interpretations is not particularly relevant. therefore, while i will point out the general outlines of accepted opinions, i see little value in quibbling over minute particulars. (xiii) how one responds to her argument may well depend on how one responds to this attitude. spector is careful to refer the reader to the most mainstream readings of blake (usually the introductions and notes in the blake trust editions), but she is starting from a completely different set of assumptions and expectations. for her, the mainstream readings are like the encrustations protecting the selfhood that must be cast off in milton, so that the narrative of that casting off can be folded into blake criticism. she has been trying to get us to see this for years. this time she may actually succeed. william blake and his circle: a checklist of scholarship in 2017 william blake and his circle: a checklist of scholarship in 2017research for “william blake and his circle” in english was conducted at the krueger library at winona state university. research for works in romance languages was conducted in the universidad de alcalá library (madrid). research for japanese publications was carried out in cinii (national institute of informatics scholarly and academic information navigator), the national diet library online catalogue, komaba library and general library in the university of tokyo, and the national diet library. by wayne c. ripley with works in romance languages collected and compiled by fernando castanedo and works in japanese collected and compiled by hikari sato dedicated to g. e. bentley, jr. wayne c. ripley (wripley@winona.edu) is a professor of english at winona state university in minnesota. he is working on a project regarding blake’s broad street family, friends, and neighbors. table of contents: introductory essay symbols abbreviations division i: william blake part i: blake’s writings section a: original editions, facsimiles, reprints, and translations section b: collections and selections part ii: reproductions of drawings and paintings section a: illustrations of individual authors part iii: commercial engravings section a: illustrations of individual authors part iv: bibliographies and catalogues section a: bibliographies section b: catalogues part v: digital resources part vi: criticism, biography, and reviews division ii: william blake’s circle barry, james basire, james, ii boehme, jacob darwin, erasmus flaxman, ann flaxman, john fuseli, henry gibson, john johnson, joseph linnell, john marsh, john montgomery, james moravianism phillips, richard romney, george society of antiquaries stedman, john gabriel swedenborg, emmanuel thornton, robert john trusler, john introductory essay: transitions it is an intimidating prospect to follow the late g. e. bentley, jr., in compiling even a portion of this year’s checklist. as readers of this journal well know, bentley’s impact on the study of blake was profound and places him in the lofty empyrean inhabited by geoffrey keynes, s. foster damon, mona wilson, northrop frye, and david v. erdman. in the words of david worrall, “as bentley realized a long time ago, and the rest of us somewhat later, the study of blake is a uniquely complex activity because the abundance, technical complexity and material diversity of blake’s original artifacts is combined with a dearth of ‘literary’ information about his life.”david worrall, rev. of g. e. bentley, jr., blake books supplement, blake 32.2 (fall 1998): 47. in a blake bibliography (co-authored with martin k. nurmi), blake books, blake books supplement, and “william blake and his circle,” bentley brought bibliography on both blake and scholarship about him to its present state of precision and comprehensiveness. in blake records, he provided scholars with an easy means of accessing all the materially known facts of blake’s life and his contemporary reception. he edited important facsimiles that offered painstaking transcriptions of tiriel and vala, or the four zoas, and his william blake’s writings vied with erdman’s complete poetry and prose as the most authoritative letterpress edition of blake’s literary works. his scholarship was frightfully prolific, even toward the end of his life, and it covered not only blake but also a wide range of writers and publishers connected to him, including george cumberland, the edwardses of halifax, and thomas macklin. the highest praise may be the simplest: g. e. bentley, jr., helped us understand blake better. when bentley succeeded d. w. dörrbecker on the checklist in the summer 1994 issue of blake, it was simply a recognition of his status as the indispensable bibliographer of blake. for many years, however, the checklist had been a kind of countervoice to bentley’s work. the first appeared three years after bentley and nurmi’s 1964 a blake bibliography, and its purpose, then and now, was to provide scholars with a readily accessible list of recent publications on blake, a task for which bentley’s more ponderous print works were ill suited. in the first blake newsletter, amy tsuji compiled the initial list, appropriately entitled “recent blake publications,” which contained eleven articles, seven reviews, and one reproduction published between january 1966 and may 1967.amy tsuji, “recent blake publications,” blake 1.1 (june 1967): 2-4. morton paley, with the assistance of karen walowit, compiled the second list in 1968, altering the title to “a checklist of blake publications, june ’67 to may ’68”; it listed three bibliographies, twenty-four articles and reviews, and eleven books.morton d. paley, with the assistance of karen walowit, “a checklist of blake publications, june ’67 to may ’68,” blake 2.1 (june 1968): 6-8, 14. in the following eight years, both the number of works on blake and the number of scholars who contributed to, added to, or assisted with the checklist grew immensely. the latter included sharon flitterman, david v. erdman, charles ryskamp, roger r. easson, laura gorham, karen walowit, dolores jordan, gregory candela, marta field, foster foreman, susan grossman, david wyatt, roberta goetsch, kenji nakamura, andre le vot, michael a. keller, thomas connolly, and ron taylor. by the time thomas l. minnick began his tenure in 1976, the checklist had grown to include seven bibliographies and bibliographical essays; nine editions, facsimiles, and reproductions; ninety-seven critical studies; and thirty-six reviews. dörrbecker joined minnick the following year, and their collaboration lasted until 1984. they made many contributions to the shape of the list: formally adding blake’s “circle” to the title and scope of the checklist, providing increasingly detailed annotations, and consistently collaborating with scholars outside the english-speaking world,thomas l. minnick, with the assistance of detlef w. dörrbecker and kazumitsu watarai, “blake and his circle: a checklist of recent scholarship,” blake 13.2 (fall 1979): 91-99 (and 14.2 [fall 1980]: 85-93). which had been done sporadically before.kenji nakamura and andre le vot had contributed japanese and french items respectively to “a checklist of blake scholarship, october 1970–march 1972,” blake 5.3 (winter 1971–72): 214-19. after minnick departed the list, dörrbecker continued these developments, and his six checklists were amazing achievements of comprehensiveness (both in scope and in the detailed annotations) for a largely pre-digital age. as bentley himself described these efforts, detlef dörrbecker compiled this checklist with extraordinary generosity, and the checklists became more and more detailed, valuable, and extensive. the last one, for 1990–93, was almost 350 pages in typescript, and it provided mini-reviews, very extensive cross-references, and an enormous wealth of information about blake’s “circle” very broadly defined. we will not see this generous scale of coverage and mini-reviewing again.g. e. bentley, jr., with the assistance of keiko aoyama, “william blake and his circle: a checklist of publications and discoveries in 1992–1993,” blake 28.1 (summer 1994): 4. when bentley assumed the checklist, he continued minnick’s and dörrbecker’s practice of collaboration, working with scholars such as keiko aoyama, hikari sato, ching-erh chang, li-ping geng, and fernando castanedo. but he also made the checklist very much his own. he imported the organizational schema of blake books, including the focus on blake’s own productions and the books owned by blake, neither of which had been considered by previous lists, and he included additions and corrections to the historical material documented in his other work. this transformation of the checklist had the twofold benefit of standardizing blake bibliography across its two major platforms and of allowing bentley to keep his print work up to date with new discoveries and scholarship. the annual checklists became the basis, moreover, of what bentley would eventually entitle william blake and his circle: publications and discoveries from 1992. alongside his sale catalogues of blake’s works, it was published digitally in 2010 and housed on the g. e. bentley: blake collection site at the university of toronto’s e. j. pratt library. the digital medium allowed bentley to update these works periodically, further tightening the relationship between the checklist and his large bibliographical works. the format also enabled him to publish the whole of his bibliographical findings after the editors of blake were forced to concede in 2014 that “the invaluable bentley checklist has grown to the point where we are unable to publish it in its entirety.”g. e. bentley, jr., with the assistance of hikari sato and fernando castanedo, “william blake and his circle: a checklist of publications and discoveries in 2013,” blake 48.1 (summer 2014), editors’ notes. blake offered bentley similar options for the second edition of blake records. he initially published a series of addenda and corrigenda between 2004 and 2009 in the pages of the journal, after which his additions and corrections became part of a running list on the blake website. for almost a decade, then, these hybrid resources served as living repositories of knowledge about blake, allowing scholars to keep their fingers on the pulse of the latest discoveries and scholarship. with bentley’s passing, however, the closest things we have had to what worrall termed a “superbibliography”worrall 46. have come to a state of completion. the last update to william blake and his circle occurred in july 2017; the sale catalogues, may 2017; and blake records, june 2017. i have been assured by both the pratt library and blake that each remains committed to maintaining bentley’s works for the foreseeable future, but there are no plans, at least at present, to update them further. a threefold vision thus, blake bibliography enters a new era. envisioning this moment in his final checklist, dörrbecker gave warning to those who would follow bentley: if it was anyone other than gerald bentley who was now destined to take over as bibliographer, i should have advised the appointment of an entire team of compilers. such a team might have stood a better chance than i of reaching that elusive ideal of bibliographical completeness, and it may even have been able to present the well-balanced critical account that some readers (and authors) have found to be wanting in my annotations and short reviews.d. w. dörrbecker, “blake and his circle: an annotated checklist of recent publications,” blake 26.3 (winter 1992–93): 77. perhaps heeding this advice, the editors of blake have now divided the subjects of the checklist into three more manageable categories: editions, scholarship, and biography (this section); music; and art and exhibitions. in accordance with this new division of material, the list of works i have compiled with the generous assistance of fernando castanedo and hikari sato will not be as broad as bentley’s, but, for the sake of continuity, i have done my best to follow the organizational structure that he created, unless there was a clear reason not to. i am not noting references to blake in popular magazines (online or print), such as the huffington post, though i will include reviews found in publications such as the times literary supplement. i have followed bentley in including references to original editions, facsimiles, reprints, translations, collections, and selections; reproductions of drawings, paintings, and engravings; bibliographies and catalogues; and biographies, criticism (articles and monographs), and book reviews. if and when a new book owned by blake appears, i will note the article or book that describes it and highlight the discovery in the section “discoveries and major publications.” for this year’s checklist, at least, i have focused on contemporary scholarly work and have made no effort, as bentley did so tirelessly, to find undocumented material from the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, or to correct or emend his substantial bibliographical record. i have added a section entitled “digital resources,” which will include material unique to digital platforms (but not e-books or articles and reviews published in online journals, which are included under the more traditional heading of “criticism, biography, and reviews”). despite his comprehensiveness, bentley did not always engage with the content of some digital projects related to blake or the tools they offer. perhaps the most significant on this front are the postings on hell’s printing press (formerly the cynic sang), the blog of blake and the william blake archive. while the entries are usually short, they also contain many important reflections on digital editing, digital humanities, and blakeana. 2017 also saw the blake archive’s rerelease of its lightbox tool, originally created by william shaw, which provides a digital workspace for blake’s images. another digital resource that bentley acknowledged but did not engage with in detail is jason whittaker’s zoamorphosis, an important blog on blake’s contemporary reception. given the number of postings since the creation of these sites, for this year’s checklist i will simply highlight significant postings from 2017. also noteworthy in this year of transitions: mark lussier and ron broglio, with the technical assistance of jim o’donnell, transferred the digital concordance of david v. erdman’s the complete poetry and prose of william blake (1982, rev. 1988), originally created by nelson hilton at the university of georgia, to arizona state university, thus giving one of the oldest digital tools for the study of blake new life. a much newer digital resource is william blake’s cottage virtual tour, a delightful virtual tour of blake’s cottage in felpham, augmented with images of his art, biographical information, and music by lucien posman. this was created by rachel searle, with jason hedges and naomi billingsley, of the big blake project, based in bognor regis. my definition of blake’s circle will largely correspond to bentley’s. that said, for emmanuel swedenborg and the new jerusalem church, the joseph johnson circle (especially mary wollstonecraft and erasmus darwin), the royal academy, the society of antiquaries, the moravians known to have associated with blake’s mother, catherine, and her first husband, thomas armitage, the methodist leaders known to the relatives of thomas butts, and other figures or institutions that are themselves the subject of substantial research, i will record works focused only on the late-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in contexts relevant to blake. i have also included writing on blake scholars, such as geoffrey keynes, alfred kazin, and the gilchrist family. needless to say, ongoing historical scholarship, like martin myrone’s “william blake as a student of the royal academy: a prosopographical perspective,” with its “biographical dictionary of students of painting, sculpture, and engraving who attended the royal academy schools, 1774–85” (see blake 51.2), vastly expands our notion of blake’s circle. i have followed bentley’s practice of listing major issues of academic journals or collections of essays together under their titles, but to facilitate finding works by individual scholars i have, unlike bentley, cross-referenced these works under the names of the authors as well. i have followed a similar practice with regard to reviews of works focused primarily on blake. in a few cases, where a review appeared in a journal like blake, this has meant that it is referenced three times (under the reviewer’s name, the name of the author or editor of the book being reviewed, and the journal), but i think the redundancy can be excused by the ease of finding a review in its different contexts and categories. given the decline of author-based studies, i have also tried to include works that have substantial discussions of blake. of course, “substantial” is a subjective term, but i have referenced discussions that go beyond a passing reference or beyond including blake in a list of other authors. i have not included entries on blake found in general encyclopedias or wikipedia, but i will include entries from academic encyclopedias, dictionaries, handbooks, companions, and the like. i have not listed e-book versions of scholarly titles offered in other formats. reprints are included if they are offered by a publisher of note (such as routledge library editions or princeton legacy library, which this year reprinted david v. erdman and john e. grant’s important collection, blake’s visionary forms dramatic). i have noted exhibition catalogues when they contain scholarly essays, but i leave descriptions of their exhibitions to my colleague luisa calè. i have also discontinued bentley’s practice of marking works with illustrations by blake, since most studies today include relevant illustrations or point the reader to where such images may be seen. unlike bentley’s sometimes evaluative annotations, i have tried to limit my commentary to describing what aspect of blake is being discussed when it is not clear from the title. that said, i do think it appropriate to highlight major discoveries and publications, which i do in the section below. i apologize in advance to those scholars whose work i have either overlooked or mischaracterized in any way, and i welcome e-mails notifying me of scholarship or offering ideas to make this section of the checklist more useful to our community. for titles in romance languages, the annotations are those of fernando castanedo; for those in japanese, they are by hikari sato. i sincerely thank them both for their assistance and contributions. discoveries and major publications the authenticity of a newly discovered version of blake’s adam and eve asleep (held in a private collection) remains in dispute. martin butlin believes it to be by blake, while david bindman, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi dissent (see blake 51.1 and 51.2).butlin and bindman have seen the watercolor in person; essick and viscomi have seen a digital copy. the catalogue for the william blake and the age of aquarius exhibition at the block museum of art at northwestern university contains many essays on blake and his reception in the radical political and artistic communities in the 1960s and 1970s, and is lavishly illustrated. stephen eisenman sketches blake’s career and his influence on figures such as walt whitman, allen ginsberg, charles seliger, richard anuszkiewicz, jim morrison, kenneth patchen, and diane arbus. elizabeth ferrell examines blake’s influence on “san francisco’s alternative communities of the 1950s and 1960s”elizabeth ferrell, “william blake on the west coast,” william blake and the age of aquarius, ed. stephen f. eisenman (princeton: princeton university press and the block museum of art, 2017) 102. (michael mcclure, bruce conner, jay defeo, wallace berman, robert duncan and jess, and helen adam). mark crosby has two essays: the first situates blake among other millenarian prophets of his era, and the second examines maurice sendak’s enthusiasm for blake. jacob henry leveton argues that abstraction in both blake and artists like “jackson pollock, clyfford still, ad reinhardt, and sam francis”jacob henry leveton, “william blake and art against surveillance,” william blake and the age of aquarius, ed. stephen f. eisenman (princeton: princeton university press and the block museum of art, 2017) 141. worked against state surveillance. john p. murphy chronicles aethelred and alexandra eldridge’s church of william blake in golgonooza, ohio. w. j. t. mitchell closes the collection with a reflection on blake’s relationship to his own time and our own. mark crosby’s special issue of the huntington library quarterly comprises papers and other contributions from the 2013 symposium william blake’s manuscripts, held at the huntington library. joseph viscomi analyzes blake’s signature on the large color prints, arguing that he signed the prints when they were sold and not when they were created. alexander s. gourlay details blake’s relationship to writing engraving and his practice of writing backwards. angus whitehead delineates the importance of blake’s 25 november 1825 letter to john linnell in terms of both his printing practices and his relationship to linnell. fernando castanedo considers the allusions to samuel johnson for dating island and suggests the possibility that it was written for blake’s dying brother, robert. luisa calè gives a powerful account of the artistry and subversion of print stability in the engravings to night thoughts that blake put to multiple uses. wayne c. ripley shows how blake’s later mythological language in the four zoas manuscript drew on john gambold’s 1754 moravian hymnal. rachel lee offers an account of the blake archive’s efforts to edit the manuscript of vala, or the four zoas. finally, morris eaves ruminates on how editorial practices “help to reveal the broader outlines of perception, control, desire, and memory that make editing a paradigm of human effort.”morris eaves, “the editorial void: notes toward a study of oblivion,” huntington library quarterly 80.3 (autumn 2017): 517. there were many important articles on blake in 2017. in addition to his final additions to william blake and his circle, sale catalogues of blake’s works, and blake records, bentley published eleven of them. in the most noteworthy, he details the discovery of blake’s illuminated books in the 1820 sale catalogue of edward evans, first mentioned in last year’s checklist. he also wrote a series of articles about some of the major blake collections of the twentieth century (paul mellon, the rosenbach, and the rosenwald). his article on catherine blake includes a useful catalogue of works “‘possibly’ or ‘probably’” colored by her. paul miner, who also passed away in 2017 (see sarah jones’s remembrance at hell’s printing press), published two articles, analyzing blake’s rewritings of “wild” shakespeare and his references to joshua reynolds. as noted above, martin myrone offers a careful study of blake’s time as a student at the royal academy, and he includes a very useful biographical dictionary of blake’s contemporary students. in a series of articles, fernando castanedo presents an impressive body of evidence for dating an island in the moon. wayne c. ripley records two newspaper advertisements associated with blake’s father in the mid-1770s.see keri davies’s correction of ripley’s claim that they were posted by james blake himself and that they reveal information about blake’s family, and ripley’s response (both in blake 51.4). tom cohen and claire colebrook use blake’s concept of vortices in an examination of climate change, and colebrook references blake’s practices as an engraver in an essay on the anthropocene. in terms of pedagogical resources, brendan cooper’s william blake’s songs of innocence and of experience: a student guide has several short chapters (including one on the designs) aimed at introducing undergraduates to both blake and the songs that would work well in an introduction to literature course. listed briefly in last year’s checklist, kathryn s. freeman’s a guide to the cosmology of william blake is a new dictionary of blake’s mythology and his most important biographical connections that (unlike s. foster damon’s a blake dictionary) references key scholarly works for further reading, which should prove useful to students and scholars alike. finally, the “teaching romanticism” series at romantic textualities: literature and print culture, 1780–1840 includes three short articles on teaching blake’s relationship to milton. blake figured in one chapter or more of several newly recorded doctoral dissertations. among work on blake’s circle, adam komisaruk and allison dushane’s two-volume edition of erasmus darwin’s the botanic garden will be a very useful resource for blake scholars. it offers the “first lifetime editions” of the economy of vegetation and the loves of the plants, providing a detailed introduction to darwin and the production history of the text and engravings. it reproduces all the illustrations associated with the work, including, of course, blake’s two engravings after fuseli and his four engravings of the portland vase.see robert n. essick, william blake’s commercial book illustrations: a catalogue and study of the plates engraved by blake after designs by other artists (oxford: clarendon press, 1991) 45-49. claudia brink and lucinda martin have published two volumes in german on jacob boehme that are lavishly illustrated with images not only from boehme’s own books but also from the wider print and visual culture of seventeenth-century mysticism. in a 2013 essay noted only in passing in a previous checklist, keri davies recovers emmanuel swedenborg’s early relationship with moravianism and methodism in the 1740s. symbols § works preceded by a section mark are reported on second-hand authority. abbreviations bb g. e. bentley, jr., blake books (1977) bbs g. e. bentley, jr., blake books supplement (1995) blake blake/an illustrated quarterly <blake (year)> indicates the installment of “william blake and his circle” published in the year specified hlq 80.3 huntington library quarterly 80.3 (autumn 2017), ed. mark crosby wbaa william blake and the age of aquarius (2017), ed. stephen f. eisenman wbhc g. e. bentley, jr., william blake and his circle (2017) <http://​library.​vicu.​utoronto.​ca/​collections/​special_collections/​bentley_​blake_​collection/​blake_​circle/​2017/​william_​blake_​and_​his_​circle.​pdf> division i: william blake part i: blake’s writings section a: original editions, facsimiles, reprints, and translations the book of thel (1789) editions the book of thel [c]. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2017. the book of thel [e]. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2017. the book of thel [k]. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2017. the book of thel [m]. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2017. the book of thel [a]. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2017. jerusalem (c. 1804–20) edition jerusalem [f]. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2017. the marriage of heaven and hell (1790–93?) editions el matrimonio del cielo y el infierno [h]. edición bilingüe de fernando castanedo. 2002, 2007, 2010, 2012 (4th ed., revised), 2014. <blake (2003, 2014, 2017)> f. 2017. in spanish, with facing english for marriage. il matrimonio del paradiso e dell’inferno. traduzione e postfazione di maurizio costantino. trieste: asterios editore, 2013. 13 x 17 cm., 104 pp., isbn: 9788895146935. in italian, with facing english for marriage. songs of innocence and of experience (1794) edition canti dell’innocenza e dell’esperienza: che mostrano i due contrari stati dell’anima umana. a cura di roberto rossi testa con uno scritto di t. s. eliot. 1997, 2001. <blake (2007)> c. 2009. <wbhc> d. 2012. e. 2014. a color facsimile in english and italian. tiriel (c. 1789) edition tiriel. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2017. vala, or the four zoas (c. 1796–1807) editions i quattro zoa di william blake. i tormenti dell’amore e della gelosia nella morte e nel giudizio finale di albione, l’antico uomo. trans. salvo pitruzzella. capo d’orlando: fondazione famiglia piccolo di calanovella, 2007. 224 pp., isbn: 9788889783160. in italian. vala, or the four zoas. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2017. as of dec. 2017, “with enlargements and basic bibliographical information but without transcriptions or illustration descriptions.” section b: collections and selections § libri profetici. introduzione, traduzione e note di roberto sanesi. 1980, 1986, 1987, 1995, 1997, 1997 <bbs p. 157, blake (1999, 2007), compiled in wbhc> g. milano: bompiani, 2003. isbn: 9788845253591. h. milano: bompiani, 2005. i. milano: se, 2006. 180 pp., isbn: 9788877106810. j. milano: se, 2012. 180 pp., isbn: 9788877109552. in italian. § il matrimonio del cielo e dell’inferno. canti dell’innocenza e altri poemi. trans. e. dodsworth. lanciano: carabba, 2011. 150 pp., isbn: 9788863441741. in italian. § poesie. introduzione di sergio perosa, cura e traduzione di giacomo conserva. 1976, 1991, 2003 <bbs p. 162, blake (1999, 2007, 2011), compiled in wbhc> d. newton compton, 2005. grandi tascabili economici newton. e. de agostini, 2005.<blake (2011)> lists this as a separate work, but it is the newton collection reproduced in tiny format as part of a series called “i tesori della poesia in miniatura” (thanks to fernando castanedo for this information). f. newton compton, 2007. g. newton compton, 2012. grandi tascabili economici newton. in italian. § le porte del paradiso. introduzione di italo valent. traduzione e note di rosa tavelli. torino: aragno, 2005. isbn: 9788884190908. a collection including poetry and letters and reproducing engravings. in italian. william blake archive <http://​www.​blakearchive.​org> in 2017, the archive published editions of the book of thel (c, e, k, m, a), jerusalem (f), tiriel, vala, or the four zoas, and the watercolor illustrations for edward young’s night thoughts. it also released digitized back issues of blake (1970–79) and launched a new lightbox tool. review anon. “digital projects: the blake archive.” wordsworth circle 48.4 (autumn 2017): 230-34. includes excerpts from articles published in wordsworth circle 30.3 (summer 1999) <blake (2000)> by mary lynn johnson and karl kroeber, as well as from the archive’s own updates. part ii: reproductions of drawings and paintings § di giglio, carmen margherita. la porta alchemica—poemetto esoterico (con illustrazioni di william blake). milano: nemo editrice, 2015 (e-book). a poem with illustrations by blake. in italian. section a: illustrations of individual authors dante, divine comedy (1824–27) edition william blake: los dibujos para la divina comedia de dante. ed. sebastian schütze and maria antonietta terzoli. 2014. folio, 324 pp. <blake (2015, 2016)> in spanish. also available in german, english, french, and italian. b. william blake: les dessins pour la divine comédie de dante. 2017. 8º (17.2 x 24 cm.), 464 pp.; isbn: 9783836568623. in french. also available in english, german, italian, and spanish. reviews calè, luisa. see blake 51.3 in part vi. lapaque, sébastien. “william blake et dante: la rencontre de deux génies.” le figaro (le figaro litteraire) 14 dec. 2017: 8. in french. young, edward, night thoughts (1795–97) edition illustrations to edward young’s “night thoughts.” william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2017. the 537 watercolor illustrations. part iii: commercial engravings section a: illustrations of individual authors bible illustrations of the book of job (1826, 1874) edition il libro di giobbe: accompagnato da “the book of job” di william blake. milano: se, 2009. 178 pp., isbn: 9788877107770. in italian. part iv: bibliographies and catalogues section a: bibliographies [cross-listing articles with substantial bibliographical content] bentley, g. e., jr. addenda to g. e. bentley, jr., blake records, 2nd ed. final update june 2017. bentley, g. e., jr. “blake’s shadow at work. catherine blake’s assistance to her husband.” includes a list of works “‘possibly’ or ‘probably’” colored by catherine blake. see bentley, “blake’s shadow,” in part vi. bentley, g. e., jr. “colored copies of blair’s grave (1808, 1813): a census.” see blake 50.4. bentley, g. e., jr. “rosenbach and blake.” includes a catalogue of “every contemporary blake that rosenbach is known to have dealt with.” see blake 51.3. bentley, g. e., jr. sale catalogues of blake’s works, 1791–2017: a catalogue somewhat raisonné. final update may 2017. bentley, g. e., jr. william blake and his circle: publications and discoveries from 1992. final update july 2017. myrone, martin. “william blake as a student of the royal academy: a prosopographical perspective.” includes “a biographical dictionary of students of painting, sculpture, and engraving who attended the royal academy schools, 1774–85.” see blake 51.2. section b: catalogues eisenman, stephen f., ed. william blake and the age of aquarius. the catalogue for the exhibition at the block museum of art, northwestern university, 23 september 2017–11 march 2018. see eisenman, wbaa, in part vi. hastings, gerard. “the nineteenth century: the romantic vision of blake, palmer and calvert.” the romantic impulse: british neo-romantic artists at home and abroad, 1935–1959. london: osborne samuel, 2017. chapter in the catalogue for the exhibition at the osborne samuel gallery (london), 25 may–23 june 2017. windle, john. william blake: always in paradise: a catalogue of artwork and books by and about blake and his circle. san francisco: john windle, antiquarian bookseller, 2017. catalogue 65. windle, john. the william blake gallery: dreams and visions. san francisco: john windle, antiquarian bookseller, 2017. the catalogue for the exhibition that ran 8 september–22 december 2017. includes an image of blake’s unconfirmed signature on the title page of john quincy’s english dispensatory, 9th ed. (london, 1733). windle, john. the william blake gallery: william blake in color: plates from the illuminated books of william blake by the trianon press (1951–1987). san francisco: john windle, antiquarian bookseller, 2017. the catalogue for the exhibition that ran 11 may–28 july 2017. part v: digital resources concordance to the complete poetry and prose of william blake, ed. david v. erdman. originally created by nelson hilton at the university of georgia. in 2017, mark lussier and ron broglio, with the assistance of jim o’donnell, transferred it to arizona state university. hell’s printing press: the blog of the blake archive and blake quarterly [formerly the cynic sang]. posts on editing and technical issues: editing the images and text of the vala, or the four zoas manuscript (see also rachel lee, “editing in technicolor,” hlq 80.3 in part vi): eric loy. “four zoas: glimpsing the summit.” 3 may 2017. eric loy. “hacking [away at] four zoas.” 7 dec. 2017. editing and transcribing marginalia: oishani sengupta. “trouble in paradise: our divergent uses of the new marginalia schema.” 8 march 2017. alison harper. “where’s the marginalia?” 4 april 2017. alison harper. “blake’s divisive ‘lord’s prayer’ marginalia.” 9 nov. 2017. how tagging images creates interpretative meaning (in the cases of “emotions” and “lunging”): katherine calvin. “‘lunging’ and other bodily contortions: the textual tracking of visual motifs, part iii.” 30 march 2017. katherine calvin. “imaging ecstasy: tagging emotions in illustration markup.” 24 oct. 2017. problems of transcribing and coding materially damaged texts (in the case of the 23 sept. 1800 letter to butts): joey kingsley. “transcribing wear in the westminster letters in the william blake archive.” 26 oct. 2017. posts on blakeana: on the fortieth anniversary of blake books: sarah jones. “an anniversary letter to blake books.” 2 june 2017. posts on blake scholars: an interview with naomi billingsley: sarah jones. “q&a with naomi billingsley.” 4 april 2017. a remembrance of paul miner: sarah jones. “paul miner.” 3 nov. 2017. tools and resources: “archive update: virtual lightbox.” 31 oct. 2017. youtube tutorials: the reading view feature of the blake archive lightbox transcriptions and the color code accessing blake/an illustrated quarterly in the blake archive searle, rachel, with jason hedges and naomi billingsley. william blake’s cottage virtual tour. a virtual reality tour inside and outside blake’s cottage in felpham, augmented with images of his art and key biographical information. whittaker, jason. zoamorphosis/the blake 2.0 blog: william blake in art, music, film, and literature. significant postings include: a description of photographer joel peter witkin’s homage to blake, songs of innocence and experience (21st century editions, 2004). 28 oct. 2017. mark e. smith’s version of “jerusalem” on the 1988 album by the fall, i am kurious oranj. 18 nov. 2017. the anthologizing of “jerusalem” by henry charles beeching (1859–1919) in his lyra sacra: a book of religious verse (1895); he applied the title “the new jerusalem” to this excerpt from milton and one from jerusalem. 26 nov. 2017. a poignant webcomic adaptation of “a poison tree” by zen pencils. 2 dec. 2017. martha redbone roots project’s 2012 album, the garden of love: songs of william blake. 8 dec. 2017. a review of u2’s songs of experience. 16 dec. 2017. part vi: criticism, biography, and reviews a   b   c   d   e   f   g   h   i   j   k   l   m   n   o   p   r   s   t   v   w   y a altizer, thomas j. j. “the absolute heterodoxy of william blake.” satan and apocalypse and other essays in political theology. albany: suny press, 2017. isbn: 9781438466736. 47-56. b. reading heresy: religion and dissent in literature and art. ed. gregory erickson and bernard schweizer. berlin: de gruyter, 2017. isbn: 9783110555943. 51-60. an earlier version of the chapter, entitled “the revolutionary vision of william blake,” appeared in the journal of religious ethics 37.1 (2009) <blake (2010)>. anon. rev. of the william blake archive. see william blake archive in part i, section b. antonielli, arianna. “‘as all men are alike (tho’ infinitely various) so all religions’: on the philosophical and religious underpinnings of william blake’s cosmogony.” lea: lingue e letterature d’oriente e d’occidente 6 (2017): 329-43. apesos, anthony. “taking dictation: plates 5 and 10 of blake’s the marriage of heaven and hell.” huntington library quarterly 80.1 (2017): 159-72. b bates, brian. “milton’s satan, sin, death, and gothic romanticism.” see “teaching romanticism xviii: miltonic legacies.” bentley, g. e., jr. “blake and the paranormal.” notes and queries 64.1 (march 2017): 57-62. bentley, g. e., jr. “blake’s careless archers.” notes and queries 64.1 (march 2017): 52-57. bentley, g. e., jr. “blake’s shadow at work. catherine blake’s assistance to her husband.” notes and queries 64.1 (march 2017): 38-46. includes a list of works “‘possibly’ or ‘probably’” colored by catherine blake. bentley, g. e., jr. “colored copies of blair’s grave (1808, 1813): a census.” see blake 50.4. bentley, g. e., jr. the edwardses of halifax: the making and selling of beautiful books in london and halifax, 1749–1826. 2015. <blake (2016)> reviews graff, ann-barbara. university of toronto quarterly 86.3 (summer 2017): 232-33. rovira, james. see blake 51.1. bentley, g. e., jr. “good evans. william blake and the evans family of print sellers.” notes and queries 64.4 (dec. 2017): 572-83. bentley, g. e., jr. “the growth of the rosenwald blake collection.” notes and queries 64.4 (dec. 2017): 583-89. bentley, g. e., jr. “paul mellon as a blake collector.” notes and queries 64.1 (march 2017): 62-72. bentley, g. e., jr. “rosenbach and blake.” see blake 51.3. bentley, g. e., jr. “william blake and richard edwards as joint venturers in young’s night thoughts (1797).” notes and queries 64.4 (dec. 2017): 552-56. bentley, g. e., jr. “william blake and the sports of innocence.” notes and queries 64.1 (march 2017): 47-52. bentley, g. e., jr., with the assistance of hikari sato, li-ping geng, and fernando castanedo. “william blake and his circle: a checklist of publications and discoveries in 2016.” see blake 51.1. § berkebile, jennifer. “a study in songs: comparative analyses of twentieth-century settings of william blake’s songs of innocence and of experience: selections from vaughan williams’s ten blake songs, britten’s songs and proverbs of william blake, and rochberg’s blake songs: for soprano and chamber ensemble.” dma diss., university of west virginia, 2017. bermejo, álvaro. “william blake: apocalipsis tántrico.” qué leer no. 227 (2017): 38-43. in spanish. § billingsley, naomi. “citizens of ‘london’ as members of christ’s divine body in william blake’s biblical illustrations.” visualising a sacred city: london, art and religion. ed. ben quash, aaron rosen, and chloë reddaway. london: i. b. tauris & co. ltd., 2017. xxii, 314 pp., 32 plates, 23 cm., isbn: 9781784536619. 89-101. bindman, david. “adam and eve asleep: a dissent.” see blake 51.2. blake/an illustrated quarterly for the inclusion of back issues of the journal in the william blake archive in 2017, see william blake archive in part i, section b. blake/an illustrated quarterly volume 50, number 4 (spring 2017) article robert n. essick. “blake in the marketplace, 2016.” reviews marsha keith schuchard. paul peucker, a time of sifting: mystical marriage and the crisis of moravian piety in the eighteenth century. 8 pars. alexander s. gourlay. sarah haggarty and jon mee, william blake: songs of innocence and of experience: a reader’s guide to essential criticism. 6 pars. sibylle erle. roger lüdeke, zur schreibkunst von william blake: ästhetische souveränität und politische imagination. 19 pars. minute particular g. e. bentley, jr. “colored copies of blair’s grave (1808, 1813): a census.” blake/an illustrated quarterly volume 51, number 1 (summer 2017) article g. e. bentley, jr. “william blake and his circle: a checklist of publications and discoveries in 2016.” minute particulars martin butlin. “blake’s unfinished series of illustrations to paradise lost for john linnell: an addition.” 10 pars. wayne c. ripley. “two newly discovered advertisements posted by william blake’s father.” 8 pars. reviews james rovira. g. e. bentley, jr., the edwardses of halifax: the making and selling of beautiful books in london and halifax, 1749–1826. 7 pars. andrew lincoln. saree makdisi, reading william blake. 18 pars. blake/an illustrated quarterly volume 51, number 2 (fall 2017) remembrance karen mulhallen. “gerald eades bentley, jr., 23 august 1930–31 august 2017.” article martin myrone. “william blake as a student of the royal academy: a prosopographical perspective.” includes a very useful “biographical dictionary of students of painting, sculpture, and engraving who attended the royal academy schools, 1774–85.” discussion david bindman. “adam and eve asleep: a dissent.” 6 pars. robert n. essick. “a copy of blake’s adam and eve asleep.” 6 pars. joseph viscomi. “a newly discovered copy of blake’s adam and eve asleep. 6 pars. martin butlin. “the ‘linnell’ adam and eve asleep: the case for the defense.” 12 pars. blake/an illustrated quarterly volume 51, number 3 (winter 2017–18) news “changes to the masthead.” article g. e. bentley, jr. “rosenbach and blake.” bentley’s last article for blake. it includes a catalogue of “every contemporary blake that rosenbach is known to have dealt with.” reviews kristin m. girten. opera omaha and the great plains theatre conference, stranger from paradise. 8 pars. r. paul yoder. leo damrosch, eternity’s sunrise: the imaginative world of william blake. 9 pars. luisa calè. sebastian schütze and maria antonietta terzoli, william blake: the drawings for dante’s divine comedy. 8 pars. poem sharon portnoff. “my poison tree.” boyles, helen. romanticism and methodism: the problem of religious enthusiasm. abingdon: routledge, 2017. vii, 206 pp., 24 cm., isbn: 9781472485281. slight engagement with blake in the introduction and conclusion. brand, cassie. rev. of michael farrell, blake and the methodists. see farrell. browne, sharmaine eunice. “abject figures in the margins: the i of the other in william blake.” “ecologies of embodied minds embedded: radical romantic perspectives on architectures of technology.” phd diss., city university of new york, 2017. 94-146. bundock, chris. rev. of marilyn butler, mapping mythologies. see butler. butler, marilyn. “blake.” mapping mythologies: countercurrents in eighteenth-century british poetry and cultural history. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2015. xxv, 214 pp., 24 cm., isbn: 9781107116382. 162-88. review bundock, chris. bars review 49 (2017): 5 pars. butlin, martin. “blake’s unfinished series of illustrations to paradise lost for john linnell: an addition.” see blake 51.1. butlin, martin. “the ‘linnell’ adam and eve asleep: the case for the defense.” see blake 51.2. c calè, luisa. “blake, young, and the poetics of the composite page.” see hlq 80.3. calè, luisa. rev. of william blake: the drawings for dante’s divine comedy, ed. sebastian schütze and maria antonietta terzoli. see blake 51.3. calè, luisa. “william blakes nachtgedanken: zwischen buch, körper und kosmos.” see boehme in division ii. castanedo, fernando. “blake: milton had ‘odd feelings’—rather than none.” notes and queries 64.4 (dec. 2017): 549–50. castanedo, fernando. “‘mr jacko’: prince-riding in blake’s ‘an island in the moon.’” notes and queries 64.1 (march 2017): 27-29. castanedo, fernando. “on blinks and kisses, monkeys and bears: dating william blake’s an island in the moon.” see hlq 80.3. catană, adela livia. “songs of innocence and [sic] experience: a neoplatonic approach.” signs of identity: literary constructs and discursive practices. ed. emilia parpală. newcastle upon tyne: cambridge scholars publishing, 2017. isbn: 9781527503151. 55-65. chesterton, gilbert keith. william blake. 1910 …. <bb #1381, bbs p. 436, blake (2003, 2013, 2015), compiled in wbhc> p. traducción de victoria león varela, prólogo de antonio rivero taravillo. sevilla: ediciones espuela de plata, 2017. in spanish. previously published by ediciones espuela de plata in 2007 and 2010 (see wbhc). cohen, tom, and claire colebrook. “vortices: on ‘critical climate change’ as a project.” south atlantic quarterly 116.1 (jan. 2017): 129-43. uses blake’s concept of vortices to discuss climate change. colebrook, claire. “the twilight of the anthropocene: sustaining literature.” literature and sustainability: concept, text and culture. ed. adeline johns-putra, john parham, and louise squire. manchester: manchester university press, 2017. xvii, 253 pp., illus., 25 cm., isbn: 9780719099670. 115-36. uses blake’s practices as an engraver as a touchstone in her wider discussion of sustainability. cooper, brendan. william blake’s songs of innocence and of experience: a student’s guide. oxford: peter lang, 2017. xiv, 108 pp., 14 color illus., 30 b/w illus., isbn: 9781787072206. corrin, lisa g. “director’s foreword.” see eisenman, wbaa. corti, claudia. “l’onomastica visionaria di william blake, poeta e artista romantico.” il nome nel testo 18 (2016): 43-58. in italian (abstract in english). cotter, holland, roberta smith, and jason farago. rev. of william blake and the age of aquarius, ed. stephen f. eisenman. see eisenman, wbaa. crosby, mark. “introduction.” see hlq 80.3. crosby, mark. “prophets, madmen, and millenarians.” see eisenman, wbaa. crosby, mark. “sendak, blake, and the image of childhood.” see eisenman, wbaa. d damrosch, leo. eternity’s sunrise: the imaginative world of william blake. 2015. <blake (2016)> reviews oliver, michael. “william blake: a sketchy introduction.” antigonish review 48 (spring 2017): 85-88. piccitto, diane. modern philology 114.4 (may 2017): 266-68. rovira, james. european romantic review 28.4 (2017): 489-94. wolfson, susan. “popularizing blake/simplifying blake: reading leo damrosch’s eternity’s sunrise: the imaginative world of william blake.” journal of romanticism 2 (2017). yoder, r. paul. see blake 51.3. davies, keri. rev. of jennifer jesse, william blake’s religious vision. see jesse. de la barra van treek, erika. “simbolismo y extravío en el mundo lírico de beulah de william blake,” revista de humanidades 19-20 (june-dec. 2009): 51-63. in spanish (abstract in spanish and english). § de santis, silvia. blake and dante: a study of william blake’s illustrations of the divine comedy, including his critical notes. rome: gangemi editore, 2017. isbn: 9788849234497. *diniz, thaïs flores nogueira. “‘a rosa doente’ dos tempos modernos.” letras no. 51 (dec. 2015): 71-81. in portuguese (abstract in portuguese and english). <blake (2017)> b. “transmediating corruptive beauty: william blake’s ‘the sick rose’ of modern times.” cadernos de letras da uff 27, no. 54 (2017): 11-21. an english translation of the 2015 article. do canto, d. s., and a. p. alós. “a vida de william blake: a formaçao de um gravurista com poucos recursos.” dlcv: língua, linguística & literatura 12 (2017). in portuguese. dos santos, alcides cardoso. “o mal como gênio poético nas ilustrações do livro de jó, de william blake.” terra roxa e outras terras 6 (2005): 44-63. in portuguese. dos santos, andrio j. r. “a temível simetria do vampiro: interstício de significação entre william blake e anne rice.” literatura e autoritarismo, dossiê no. 20 (july 2017): 46-59. in portuguese (abstract in portuguese and english). dos santos, andrio j. r. “‘my evil, and my lusty little heart’: tradução intersemiótica de ‘the tyger,’ de william blake, em ‘the tale of the body thief,’ de anne rice.” literartes no. 7 (2017): 266-84. in portuguese (abstract also in english and spanish). dos santos, andrio j. r., and elenara quinhones. “o silêncio da filha sombria: o problema do desejo em america: a prophecy e europe: a prophecy, de william blake.” todas as musas 8.2 (2017): 170-82. in portuguese (abstract in portuguese and english). dos santos, andrio j. r., and enéias farias tavares. “blake e a voz profética do diabo: dualidade corpo e mente em paralelo a texto e imagem.” estaçao literária 19 (2017): 36-48. in portuguese. e earle, bo. “blake’s infant smile: facing materialism.” post-personal romanticism: democratic terror, prosthetic poetics, and the comedy of modern ethical life. columbus: ohio state university press, 2017. xiii, 212 pp., isbn: 9780814213520. 35-62. “the book of thel, visions of the daughters of albion, and beyond the pleasure principle anticipate wittgenstein’s ‘skeptical solution to the paradox of skepticism’saul a. kripke, wittgenstein on rules and private language: an elementary exposition (cambridge: harvard university press, 1984) 69. by liberating symptomology for visionary aesthetics without diagnostic pretense.” eaves, morris. “the editorial void: notes toward a study of oblivion.” see hlq 80.3. eisenman, stephen f. “black ops in art and history.” visual history 3 (2017): 25-56. examines the theatricality of contemporary paramilitary operations—black ops—in terms of romantic-era depictions of “inquisition, imprisonment and torture” (50) by artists and writers such as blake, goya, john hunter, and george romney. eisenman, stephen f., ed. william blake and the age of aquarius. princeton: princeton university press and the block museum of art, 2017. xi, 232 pp., color illus., 26 cm., isbn: 9780691175256. the catalogue for the exhibition. lisa g. corrin. “director’s foreword.” vii. corinne granof. “acknowledgments.” viii-xi. stephen f. eisenman. “william blake and the age of aquarius.” 1-77. mark crosby. “prophets, madmen, and millenarians.” 78-99. elizabeth ferrell. “william blake on the west coast.” 100-39. jacob henry leveton. “william blake and art against surveillance.” 140-59. john p. murphy. “building golgonooza in the age of aquarius.” 160-81. mark crosby. “sendak, blake, and the image of childhood.” 182-97. w. j. t. mitchell. “blake now and then.” 198-205. reviews cotter, holland, roberta smith, and jason farago. “the best art books (and books about art) of 2017.” new york times 15 dec. 2017: c20. hawbaker, k. t. “the feminist energies of william blake and faith wilding take over chicago.” chicago tribune 20 dec. 2017. eisenman, stephen f. “william blake and the age of aquarius.” see eisenman, wbaa. elliott, clare frances. “william blake’s american afterlives: transatlantic poetics in emerson and whitman.” transatlantic literature and transitivity, 1780–1850: subjects, texts, and print culture. ed. annika bautz and kathryn gray. new york: routledge, 2017. vi, 236 pp., illus., 24 cm., isbn: 9781138243422. 195-211. enright, nancy. “confront and forgive.” commonweal 144.15 (2017): 46-47. on “a poison tree.” § erdman, david v., and john e. grant, eds. blake’s visionary forms dramatic. 1971. <bb #1580> princeton: princeton university press, 2017. princeton legacy library. isbn: 9780691654423. reprint of the classic collection. erle, sibylle. “‘on the very verge of legitimate invention’: charles bonnet and william blake’s illustrations to robert blair’s the grave (1808).” the gothic and death. ed. carol margaret davison. manchester: manchester university press, 2017. xv, 240 pp., illus., 23 cm., isbn: 9781784992699. 34-47. erle, sibylle. rev. of roger lüdeke, zur schreibkunst von william blake: ästhetische souveränität und politische imagination. see blake 50.4. escobar, armando. “un camino a través del infierno: la presencia de william blake en dragón rojo.” ágora. revista estudiantil del centro de estudios internacionales de el colegio de méxico 7, no. 11 (2011). in spanish. essick, robert n. “blake in the marketplace, 2016.” see blake 50.4. essick, robert n. “a copy of blake’s adam and eve asleep.” see blake 51.2. f farrell, michael. blake and the methodists. 2014. <blake (2015)> review brand, cassie. methodist history 55.1 and 2 (oct. 2016 and jan. 2017): 131-32. fender, katherine. “milton, blake, and the sublime.” see “teaching romanticism xviii: miltonic legacies.” ferrell, elizabeth. “william blake on the west coast.” see eisenman, wbaa. fletcher, joseph. “leibniz, the infinite, and blake’s early metaphysics.” studies in romanticism 56.2 (summer 2017): 129-55. § freeman, curtis w. “apocalyptic dissent: william blake.” undomesticated dissent: democracy and the public virtue of religious nonconformity. waco: baylor university press, 2017. xviii, 269 pp., 23 cm., isbn: 9781481306881. g goldstein, amanda jo. “blake’s mundane egg: epigenesis and milieux.” sweet science: romantic materialism and the new logics of life. chicago: university of chicago press, 2017. viii, 330 pp., illus., 24 cm., isbn: 9780226458441. 35-71. gourlay, alexander s. “blake writes backward.” see hlq 80.3. gourlay, alexander s. rev. of martin priestman, the poetry of erasmus darwin: enlightened spaces, romantic times. see darwin in division ii. gourlay, alexander s. rev. of sarah haggarty and jon mee, william blake: songs of innocence and of experience: a reader’s guide to essential criticism. see blake 50.4. graff, ann-barbara. rev. of g. e. bentley, jr., the edwardses of halifax. see bentley, edwardses. granof, corinne. “acknowledgments.” see eisenman, wbaa. h haekel, ralf, ed. handbook of british romanticism. berlin: de gruyter, 2017. isbn: 9783110376364. handbooks of english and american studies series. ed. martin middeke, gabriele rippl, and hubert zapf. frequent references to blake in its essays on topics and genres related to romanticism. also includes an extended close reading of america—see lüdeke, “william blake, america (1793).” haggarty, sarah, and jon mee. william blake: songs of innocence and of experience: a reader’s guide to essential criticism. 2013.<blake (2015)> review gourlay, alexander s. see blake 50.4. harrington, emily. “time’s intervals, swinburne’s triumph.” studies in english literature, 1500–1900 57.4 (autumn 2017): 799-821. partly considers swinburne’s writings on blake. hawbaker, k. t. rev. of william blake and the age of aquarius, ed. stephen f. eisenman. see eisenman, wbaa. hellman, jesse m. “grace gilchrist’s childish jealousy and bernard shaw’s idiotic thoughtlessness.” shaw: journal of bernard shaw studies 37.2 (2017): 227-44. examines shaw’s relationship with grace gilchrist, the daughter of blake’s victorian biographers, alexander and anne gilchrist. hilton, nelson. rev. of saree makdisi, reading william blake. see makdisi. howard, w. scott. “milton and blake—the poetics and praxis of adaptation.” see “teaching romanticism xviii: miltonic legacies.” huntington library quarterly volume 80, number 3 (autumn 2017), ed. mark crosby william blake’s manuscripts mark crosby. “introduction.” 361-64. joseph viscomi. “signing large color prints: the significance of blake’s signatures.” 365-402. alexander s. gourlay. “blake writes backward.” 403-21. angus whitehead. “the uncollected letters of william blake.” 423-35. includes images of blake’s 10 and 25 nov. 1825 letters to john linnell. fernando castanedo. “on blinks and kisses, monkeys and bears: dating william blake’s an island in the moon.” 437-52. luisa calè. “blake, young, and the poetics of the composite page.” 453-79. wayne c. ripley. “the influence of the moravian collection of hymns on william blake’s later mythology.” 481-98. rachel lee. “editing in technicolor: the blake archive’s edition of the vala or the four zoas manuscript.” 499-515. morris eaves. “the editorial void: notes toward a study of oblivion.” 517-38. hurley, michael d. “william blake: destabilized particulars.” faith in poetry: verse style as a mode of religious belief. london: bloomsbury, 2017. 201 pp., 23 cm., isbn: 9781474234078. 9-38. i ikezawa, natsuki. “shi no nagusame (62): futatabi blake e [comfort in poetry (62): blake revisited].” tosho [book] 819 (2017): 60-63. in japanese. the essay includes the author’s own translations of “the school boy,” “the little vagabond,” and “the voice of the ancient bard.” j jesse, jennifer g. william blake’s religious vision: there’s a methodism in his madness. 2013. <blake (2014)> review davies, keri. bars review 49 (2017): 5 pars. jorge, letícia, and luiz o. q. peduzzi. “as pinceladas anti-newtonianas de william blake.” anais eletrônicos do 15o seminário nacional de história da ciência e da tecnologia, florianópolis, santa catarina, 16 a 18 de novembro de 2016. published in the online proceedings of a conference on the history of science. in portuguese. 15 pp. k kawasaki, misako. “william blake no ‘the lamb’ to ‘the tyger’ wo yomu (a reading of ‘the lamb’ and ‘the tyger’ by william blake).” toyo daigaku daigakuin kiyo (bulletin of the graduate school, toyo university) 53 (2016): 253-70. in japanese, with an english synopsis. kellett, lucy. “‘crooked roads without improvement’: rhyming and unrhyming in blake.” romanticism 23.2 (july 2017): 133-44. kodama, sanehide. rev. of hikari sato, yanagi muneyoshi to william blake: kanryu suru “kotei no shiso.” see sato, yanagi muneyoshi to william blake. kutcher, gerald. “geoffrey keynes’s two-fold vision: medical savant-connoisseur and literary bibliographer.” journal of the history of medicine and allied sciences 71.4 (oct. 2016): 377-99. l langham, kent. “transforming perspectives: the angel’s key in william blake’s ‘the chimney sweeper.’” explicator 75.2 (2017): 133-36. lapaque, sébastien. rev. of william blake: les dessins pour la divine comédie de dante, ed. sebastian schütze and maria antonietta terzoli. see dante in part ii, section a. le cudennec, rodney david. “william blake: from irony to the sublime.” a history of the lie of innocence in literature: sons who become orphans. newcastle upon tyne: cambridge scholars publishing, 2017. isbn: 9781443872867. 30-44. lee, rachel. “editing in technicolor: the blake archive’s edition of the vala or the four zoas manuscript.” see hlq 80.3. leveton, jacob henry. “william blake and art against surveillance.” see eisenman, wbaa. lincoln, andrew. rev. of saree makdisi, reading william blake. see blake 51.1. lüdeke, roger. “william blake, america (1793).” handbook of british romanticism. ed. ralf haekel. berlin: de gruyter, 2017. isbn: 9783110376364. 277-92. examines the relationship between the political and transcendent in america: a prophecy. lüdeke, roger. zur schreibkunst von william blake: ästhetische souveränität und politische imagination. 2013. <blake (2014)> review erle, sibylle. see blake 50.4. m maidment, brian. rev. of art versus industry? new perspectives on visual and industrial cultures in nineteenth-century britain, ed. kate nichols, rebecca wade, and gabriel williams. see trodd. makdisi, saree. reading william blake. 2015. <blake (2016)> reviews hilton, nelson. critical inquiry 43.3 (spring 2017): 757-58. lincoln, andrew. see blake 51.1. otto, peter. romanticism 23.3 (2017): 291-93. matsushima, shoichi. rev. of hikari sato, yanagi muneyoshi to william blake: kanryu suru “kotei no shiso.” see sato, yanagi muneyoshi to william blake. mazzeo, tilar j. “william blake and the decorative arts.” the regency revisited. ed. tim fulford and michael e. sinatra. new york: palgrave, 2016. vi, 207 pp., illus., 23 cm., isbn: 9781137543370. 63-80. mcalvage, katherine elizabeth. “blake and the strategic sympathies of movement in milton.” “romanticism’s moving bodies: literary embodiment and affect.” phd diss., university of oregon, 2017. 177-223. mcgann, jerome. “blake and byron; or, art and imagination after the second fall.” christianity and literature 66.4 (sept. 2017): 609-30. mclane, maureen. “ballads and bards: british romantic orality.” british romanticism: criticism and debates. ed. mark canuel. abingdon: routledge, 2015. routledge criticism and debates in literature. isbn: 9780415523813. 588-600. an abridged version originally published under the same title in modern philology (2001): 423-43 <blake (2003)>. miller, eric. “‘druid rocks’: restoration, originality, nature and authority in john dryden, titia brongersma and william blake’s visions of megalithic monuments.” lumen: selected proceedings from the canadian society for eighteenth-century studies/travaux choisis de la société canadienne d’étude du dix-huitième siècle 36 (2017): 143-59. miner, paul. “blake’s word-play and sir joshua.” notes and queries 64.1 (march 2017): 29-33. miner, paul. “wild blake’s rewriting of ‘wild’ shakespeare.” notes and queries 64.1 (march 2017): 33-38. mitchell, w. j. t. “blake now and then.” see eisenman, wbaa. miyamachi, seiichi. “honyaku william blake: the poems by nicholas marsh [translation, william blake: the poems by nicholas marsh].” sapporo gakuin daigaku jimbun gakkai kiyo (journal of the society of humanities, sapporo gakuin university) 100 (2016): 167-99. in japanese. translation of chapter 4. for his translations of other chapters in the same journal, see <blake (2014, 2015)>. miyamachi, seiichi. “honyaku william blake: the poems by nicholas marsh [translation, william blake: the poems by nicholas marsh].” sapporo gakuin daigaku jimbun gakkai kiyo (journal of the society of humanities, sapporo gakuin university) 102 (2017): 147-71. in japanese. translation of chapter 5. for his translations of other chapters in the same journal, see <blake (2014, 2015)>. mulhallen, karen. “gerald eades bentley, jr., 23 august 1930–31 august 2017.” see blake 51.2. murphy, john p. “building golgonooza in the age of aquarius.” see eisenman, wbaa. myrone, martin. “william blake as a student of the royal academy: a prosopographical perspective.” see blake 51.2. n nakayama, fumi. “the unity of contraries in william blake’s world of vegetation.” eibei bunka (studies in english language, literature, and culture) 47 (2017): 1-12. in english. neish, julie. “insights into an original ssaa choral work of donald patriquin: songs of innocence: on poems of william blake.” dma diss., arizona state university, 2017. o o’hear, natasha, and anthony o’hear. picturing the apocalypse: the book of revelation in the arts over two millennia. oxford: oxford university press, 2015. includes blake in its survey of visual depictions of the apocalypse. oliver, michael. rev. of leo damrosch, eternity’s sunrise. see damrosch. o’neill, morna. rev. of art versus industry? new perspectives on visual and industrial cultures in nineteenth-century britain, ed. kate nichols, rebecca wade, and gabriel williams. see trodd. otto, peter. rev. of saree makdisi, reading william blake. see makdisi. p § paris, andreea. “william blake’s ‘the tyger’ as an expression of the reader’s futile search for authorial intent.” east-west cultural passage 16.1 (july 2016): 110-19. paula cabrera, ana, and anselmo peres alós. “literatura comparada e outras mídias: uma visão de luz e sombras na poética inteartes de william blake.” fênix: revista de história e estudos culturais 13.2 (2016). in portuguese. 16 pp. piccitto, diane. rev. of leo damrosch, eternity’s sunrise. see damrosch. picón, daniela. “el libro como soporte de la experiencia visionaria en las profecías iluminadas de william blake y el libro rojo de carl gustav jung.” literatura: teoría, historia, crítica 19.1 (2017): 63-85. in spanish (abstracts also in portuguese and english). picón, daniela. visiones de william blake: itinerarios de su recepción en los siglos xix y xx. madrid: calambur editorial, 2017. 272 pp., isbn: 9788483593783. in spanish. r ripley, wayne c. “the influence of the moravian collection of hymns on william blake’s later mythology.” see hlq 80.3. ripley, wayne c. “two newly discovered advertisements posted by william blake’s father.” see blake 51.1. rix, robert william. “william blake’s ‘infant joy’ and the rhetoric of riddle.” anq: a quarterly journal of short articles, notes, and reviews 30.4 (oct.–dec. 2017): 216-18. roudaut, jean. le tigre de william blake. principes et ingrédients du roman policier noir. montpellier: presses universitaires de la méditerranée, 2017. 106 pp., isbn: 9782367812038. in french. suggests that detective stories and/or crime novels describe a confrontation of “symbolic equals such as the lamb and the tyger.” rovira, james. rev. of g. e. bentley, jr., the edwardses of halifax. see blake 51.1. rovira, james. rev. of leo damrosch, eternity’s sunrise. see damrosch. § rowland, christopher. “‘from impulse not from rules’: william blake’s apocalyptic pedagogy.” radical prophet: the mystics, subversives and visionaries who strove for heaven on earth. london: i. b. tauris, 2017. ix, 230 pp., isbn: 9781784532659. russett, margaret. “milton unbound.” british romanticism: criticism and debates. ed. mark canuel. abingdon: routledge, 2015. routledge criticism and debates in literature. isbn: 9780415523813. 222-41. s sato, hikari. “mushakoji saneatsu to william blake: kyosei to kyoso no hazama de (mushakoji [mushanokoji] saneatsu and william blake: between symbiotic cooperation and hierarchical competition).” choiki bunka kagaku kiyo (interdisciplinary cultural studies) 22 (2017): 23-47. in japanese. mushakoji is a japanese family name commonly also known as mushanokoji. sato, hikari. yanagi muneyoshi to william blake: kanryu suru “kotei no shiso” [yanagi muneyoshi and william blake: the philosophy of affirmation of life and its global circulation]. 2015. <blake (2016)> reviews kodama, sanehide. hikaku bungaku (journal of comparative literature) 59 (2016): 284-89. in english. matsushima, shoichi. igirisu romanha kenkyu (essays in english romanticism) 41 (2017): 121-24. in japanese. sato, michiko. “adam no sozo wo megutte: william blake adam wo sozo suru elohim no saiko (concerning the icon of the creation of adam: reconsideration of elohim creating adam by william blake).” joshi bijutsu daigaku kenkyu kiyo (bulletin of joshibi university of art and design) 47 (2017): 17-26. in japanese, with an english synopsis. schuchard, marsha keith. rev. of paul peucker, a time of sifting: mystical marriage and the crisis of moravian piety in the eighteenth century. see blake 50.4. smith, david a. “blake’s aesthetic messianism: multimodal art as the rhetoric of transformation.” phd diss., baylor university, 2017. soriya, anya. “le même et l’autre dans les œuvres de william blake et de friedrich hölderlin: la folie et la prophétie [the same and the other in the works of william blake and friedrich hölderlin: madness and prophecy].” doctoral diss., paris-sorbonne (paris 4), 2016. in french. steil, juliana, and vitória tassara costa silva. “william blake em espanhol.” belas infiéis 5.3 (2016): 191-212. in portuguese (abstract in english). the article gathers information “about translations of william blake’s works published in spanish, as well as an initial analysis of the author’s literary reputation in that language.” suzuki, masashi. “blake no system ko: koten sakuhin kaisetsu mokuroku (1809) wo chushin ni (blake’s ‘system’ in a descriptive catalogue [1809]).” igirisu romanha kenkyu (essays in english romanticism) 41 (2017): 27-40. in japanese. t “teaching romanticism xviii: miltonic legacies.” romantic textualities: literature and print culture, 1780–1840. it includes: brian bates. ”milton’s satan, sin, death, and gothic romanticism.” 6 pars. katherine fender. “milton, blake, and the sublime.” 4 pars. w. scott howard. “milton and blake—the poetics and praxis of adaptation.” 6 pars. tedeschi, stephen. urbanization and english romantic poetry. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2017. cambridge studies in romanticism 117. vi, 282 pp., 24 cm., isbn: 9781108416092. slight discussion of blake. thompson, mark. “some influences on philip larkin’s ‘cut grass.’” notes and queries 64.4 (dec. 2017): 669-71. blake, keats, and hubert parry. § trodd, colin. “william blake, the arts and crafts movement and the mythography of manufacture.” art versus industry? new perspectives on visual and industrial cultures in nineteenth-century britain. ed. kate nichols, rebecca wade, and gabriel williams. manchester: manchester university press, 2016. <blake (2017)> reviews brian maidment. victorian studies 59.4 (summer 2017): 716-18. morna o’neill. art bulletin 99.3 (2017): 173-75. v vanegas carrasco, carolina. “un trópico para el universo. reflexiones sobre un grabado de trajes de colombia de 1837 [a tropic for the universe. reflections on an engraving of colombian costumes of 1837].” nuevo mundo mundos nuevos (published online 11 dec. 2017). in spanish (abstracts in spanish and english). an article on the visual construction of a national identity in colombia. comments on how french magazines used engravings for that purpose, among them blake’s “a negro hung alive by the ribs to a gallows.” § vassallo, peter. “the illustrations of the paolo and francesca episode in dante’s inferno (canto v) by william blake and dante gabriel rossetti.” at home in art: essays in honour of mario buhagiar. ed. charlene vella. santa venera: midsea books, 2016. xxii, 730 pp., illus., 25 cm., isbn: 9789993275985. viscomi, joseph. “a newly discovered copy of blake’s adam and eve asleep.” see blake 51.2. viscomi, joseph. “signing large color prints: the significance of blake’s signatures.” see hlq 80.3. § vozdvizsenszkij, vagyim. “william blake and grigory skovoroda revisited.” across borders: the west looks east. ed. joanna ziobro-strzępek and władysław chłopicki. krosno: state higher vocational school stanisława pigonia, 2017. in english. 303-11. w wang, orrin n. c. “two pipers: romanticism, postmodernism, and the cliché.” british romanticism: criticism and debates. ed. mark canuel. abingdon: routledge, 2015. routledge criticism and debates in literature. isbn: 9780415523813. 518-26. whitehead, angus. “the uncollected letters of william blake.” see hlq 80.3. whitehead, james. madness and the romantic poet: a critical history. oxford: oxford university press, 2017. vi, 304 pp., illus., 24 cm., isbn: 9780198733706. brief discussion of blake, but frequently invoked as a touchstone. whitfield, stephen j. “alfred kazin and the holocaust.” society 54.5 (oct. 2017): 470-76. considers, in part, kazin’s use of “london” as part of his engagement with the holocaust. wilkinson, john. “stone thresholds.” textual practice 31.4 (2017): 631-59. discusses “the clod and the pebble.” wolff, tristram. “romantic stone speech and the appeal of the inorganic.” english literary history 84.3 (fall 2017): 617-47. analysis of “the clod and the pebble.” wolfson, susan. rev. of leo damrosch, eternity’s sunrise. see damrosch. wrethed, joakim. “the invisible apocalyptic city: the affectivity of urbanity, movement, and desire in william blake’s ‘london,’ don delillo’s cosmopolis, and ivan vladislavić’s the exploded view.” hungarian journal of english and american studies 22.2 (2016): 305-25. in english. y yamazaki, yusuke. “william blake ni okeru ‘rengoku’: contrary no gainen wo toshite dante no shinkyoku wo yomu (blakean ‘purgatory’: dante’s divine comedy through blake’s idea.” nagasaki wesleyan daigaku gendai shakai gakubu kiyo (bulletin of faculty of contemporary social studies, nagasaki wesleyan university) 15.1 (2017): 1-7. in japanese. § yau, john. the wild children of william blake. new york: autonomedia books, 2017. isbn: 9781570273247. collection of essays on “poets and artists” who are cast as heirs of blake’s cultural dissent. yoder, r. paul. rev. of leo damrosch, eternity’s sunrise. see blake 51.3. division ii: william blake’s circle barry, james (1741–1806) history painter lenihan, liam. the writings of james barry and the genre of history painting, 1775–1809. 2014. <blake (2015)> reviews hanson, craig ashley. “james barry on art, freedom, and history painting.” eighteenth century 58.2 (summer 2017): 259-63. rovee, christopher. bars review 49 (2017): 4 pars. basire, james, ii (1769–1822) engraver, son of blake’s master marshall, simone celine. “the exeter drawings of john carter: a rare book in a private collection in new zealand.” parergon 32.2 (2015): 177-206. examines john carter’s some account of the cathedral church of exeter (london, 1797), which was published for the society of antiquaries and includes engravings by james basire ii. boehme, jacob (1575–1624) mystic brink, claudia, and lucinda martin, eds. alles in allem: die gedankenwelt des mystischen philosophen jacob böhme: denken, kontext, wirkung. dresden: sandstein verlag für staatliche kunstsammlungen dresden, 2017. isbn: 9783954983285. the catalogue of the exhibition alles in allem: die gedankenwelt des mystischen philosophen jacob böhme, organized by the staatliche kunstsammlungen dresden, 26 august–19 november 2017. includes luisa calè, “william blakes nachtgedanken: zwischen buch, körper und kosmos” (151-65) (translated into german by helen jung). brink, claudia, and lucinda martin, eds. grund und ungrund: der kosmos des mystischen philosophen jacob böhme. dresden: sandstein verlag für staatliche kunstsammlungen dresden, 2017. isbn: 9783954983278. the companion volume to the exhibition catalogue above. darwin, erasmus (1731–1802) scientist and poet edition darwin, erasmus. the botanic garden. illus. by william blake et al. ed. adam komisaruk and allison dushane. 2 vols. abingdon: routledge, 2017. isbn: 9781848935655. vol. 1 contains the economy of vegetation and vol. 2 the loves of the plants. a long-needed and awaited edition. review edwall, christy. “evaporated in sound.” times literary supplement 4 oct. 2017. criticism bailes, melissa. “linnaeus’s botanical clocks: chronobiological mechanisms in the scientific poetry of erasmus darwin, charlotte smith, and felicia hemans.” studies in romanticism 56.2 (summer 2017): 223-52. fetz, marcelo. “negotiating boundaries: encyclopédie, romanticism, and the construction of science/​negociando fronteiras: encyclopédie, romantismo e a construção da ciência.” história, ciências, saúde—manguinhos 24.3 (july-sept. 2017): 645-63. in english (abstracts in english and portuguese). griffiths, devin. the age of analogy: science and literature between the darwins. baltimore: johns hopkins university press, 2016. review page, michael. journal of british studies 56.4 (oct. 2017): 915-16. kapler, bridget e. “gendering scientific discourse from 1790–1830: erasmus darwin, thomas beddoes, maria edgeworth, and jane marcet.” phd diss., marquette university, 2016. priestman, martin. the poetry of erasmus darwin: enlightened spaces, romantic times. farnham: ashgate, 2013. reviews gourlay, alexander s. blake 49.1 (summer 2015): 9 pars. somervell, tess. journal for eighteenth-century studies 40.1 (march 2017): 145-46. thomasen, laura søvsø. “showing and telling science—the integrated use of literature and images in the works of erasmus darwin and alexander von humboldt.” interdisciplinary science reviews 42.3 (2017): 227-40. flaxman, ann (1760–1820) letter writer, journalist, friend of the blakes edition flaxman, ann. an uninteresting detail of a journey to rome. ed. marie e. mcallister. romantic circles, 2014. a digital edition of ann (nancy) flaxman’s travel journal to italy (1787–89). includes a substantial introduction to one of the blakes’ most important friends and a “list of artists and architects mentioned in the text.” flaxman, john (1755–1826) sculptor, friend of blake marchand, eckart. “sculptor and tourist: john flaxman and his italian journals and sketchbooks (1787–1794).” rome, travel and the sculpture capital, c. 1770–1825. ed. tomas macsotay. abingdon: routledge, 2017. isbn: 9781472420350. 179-96. fuseli, henry (1741–1825) painter, friend of blake burden, michael. “a short article on a lively subject: geltruda rossi, sarah siddons, and shakespeare’s lady macbeth à la fuseli.” dance research journal 49.1 (april 2017): 55-69. de lima, cecilia nazaré, and thaïs flores nogueira diniz. “hamlet in two interpretations: fuseli and liszt.” todas as letras: revista de língua e literatura 19.1 (jan.-april 2017): 92-102. in english. poot, luke terlaak. “scott’s momentaneousness: bad timing in the bride of lammermoor.” nineteenth-century literature 72.3 (dec. 2017): 283-310. considers the influence of fuseli’s concept of “momentaneousness” on scott. gibson, john (1786–1866) sculptor ferrari, roberto c. “the sculptor, the duke, and queer art patronage: john gibson’s mars restrained by cupid and winckelmannian aesthetics.” rome, travel and the sculpture capital, c. 1770–1825. ed. tomas macsotay. abingdon: routledge, 2017. isbn: 9781472420350. 225-48. johnson, joseph (1738–1809) bookseller, blake’s sometime employer bugg, john, ed. the joseph johnson letterbook. 2016. <blake (2017)> reviews brown, meaghan j. modern language review 112.3 (july 2017): 700-01. mee, jon. nineteenth-century literature 72.2 (sept. 2017): 271-75. morris, james m. bars review 49 (2017): 5 pars. raven, james r. review of english studies 68, no. 284 (april 2017): 385-87. linnell, john (1792–1882) artist, blake’s friend and patron sperber, roxane. “the retouching practices of john linnell: technique, patronage and practice from two works in the yale center for british art.” a changing art: nineteenth-century painting, practice, and conservation. ed. nicola costaras et al. london: archetype, 2017. 116-22. marsh, john (1752–1828) musician, personal acquaintance of blake and william hayley renshaw, martin. john marsh: a most elegant and beautiful instrument: the organ. london: at the sign of the pipe, 2017. montgomery, james (1771–1854) moravian poet, blake knew at least his works ramsey, neil. “james montgomery’s waterloo: war and the poetics of history.” studies in romanticism 56.3 (fall 2017): 361-78. moravianism faull, katherine m., ed. speaking to body and soul: instructions for the moravian choir helpers, 1785–1786. university park: pennsylvania state university press, 2017. xi, 185 pp., illus., 24 cm., isbn: 9780271077673. peucker, paul. a time of sifting: mystical marriage and the crisis of moravian piety in the eighteenth century. university park: pennsylvania state university press, 2015. xiv, 248 pp., illus., 24 cm., isbn: 9780271066431. review schuchard, marsha keith. see blake 50.4. phillips, richard (1767–1840) publisher, known to blake hammerschmidt, sören. “print, proximity, and the marketing of richard phillips: mediating richardson.” eighteenth-century fiction 29.2 (winter 2016–17): 277-316. examines the production history of phillips’s edition of samuel richardson; also discusses anna letitia barbauld and caroline watson. romney, george (1734–1802) painter transactions of the romney society volume 20 (2015), ed. alex kidson kidson, alex. “the romney plaque on kendal town hall: philip chatfield in conversation with the editor.” 5-10. webb, richard. “sculpture and strawberries: the life of anne damer.” 11-18. andrew, vanessa, and david crombie. “secrets of a romney portrait revealed: the conservation and technical examination of the portrait of stratford canning.” 19-23. stevens, mary anne. “the brilliant and eccentric monsieur liotard, pastellist of distinction.” 24-32. society of antiquaries franklin, jill a., bernard nurse, and pamela tudor-craig. catalogue of paintings in the collection of the society of antiquaries of london. london: harvey miller for the society of antiquaries of london, 2015. review palliser, d. m. english historical review 132, no. 554 (feb. 2017): 215-17. stedman, john gabriel (1744–97) friend of blake lingold, mary caton. “peculiar animations: listening to afro-atlantic music in caribbean travel narratives.” early american literature 52.3 (2017): 623-50. examines stedman’s and others’ efforts to represent “early african diasporic musical life” in musical notation. swedenborg, emmanuel (1688–1772) mystic davies, keri. “‘the swedishman at brother brockmer’s’: moravians and swedenborgians in eighteenth-century london.” philosophy, literature, mysticism: an anthology of essays on the thought and influence of emmanuel swedenborg. ed. stephen mcneilly. london: swedenborg society, 2013. isbn: 9780854481613. 407-34. examines swedenborg’s early connections to london moravians and methodists. esterson, rebecca kline. “secrets of heaven: allegory, jews, the european enlightenment and the case of emanuel swedenborg.” phd diss., boston university, 2017. thornton, robert john (1768–1837) book collector fein, susanna, and michael johnston, eds. robert thornton and his books: essays on the lincoln and london thornton manuscripts. woodbridge, suffolk: york medieval press/boydell & brewer, 2014. isbn: 9781903153512. review boffey, julia. journal of english and germanic philology 116.1 (jan. 2017): 124-25. trusler, john (1735–1820) clergyman, friend of george cumberland selection trusler, john. the difference between words, esteemed synonymous, in the english language (1766). fixing babel: an historical anthology of applied english lexicography. ed. rebecca shapiro. lanham, md: bucknell university press, 2017. isbn: 9781611488098. 279-86. an excerpt. criticism monaghan, jessica. “authenticity and fashionable disease in eighteenth-century britain.” literature and medicine 35.2 (fall 2017): 387-408. discusses trusler’s novel modern times, or, the adventures of gabriel outcast (1785). shuttleton, david e. “the fashioning of fashionable diseases in the eighteenth century.” literature and medicine 35.2 (fall 2017): 270-91. likewise discusses trusler’s modern times, or, the adventures of gabriel outcast (1785). review: susan mitchell sommers, the siblys of london: a family on the esoteric fringes of georgian england susan mitchell sommers. the siblys of london: a family on the esoteric fringes of georgian england. new york: oxford university press, 2018. xx + 340 pp. $125.00/​£87.00, hardcover. reviewed by wayne c. ripley wayne c. ripley (wripley@winona.edu) is a professor of english at winona state university in minnesota. he is working on a project regarding blake’s broad street family, friends, and neighbors. even though william and catherine blake are mentioned on only a handful of pages, blakeans will be thoroughly intrigued by susan mitchell sommers’s the siblys of london: a family on the esoteric fringes of georgian london for its portrayal of groups and eclectic discourses close to, and sometimes touching, the blakes. the siblys were a family of booksellers who specialized in the occult, publishing on such topics as astrology, alchemy, witchcraft, and prophecy. the book focuses largely on the two oldest brothers, manoah (1757–​1840), a swedenborgian minister and bank of england employee, whom the blakes almost certainly met, and ebenezer (1750–​99), a bookseller, freemason, quack, astrologer, political operative, bigamist, and self-described male midwife and alchemist. as sommers points out, when the siblys have been considered at all, they have been examined from various disciplinary frames that often misconstrued their larger lives and work. accordingly, one of the real strengths of the book is sommers’s careful engagement with, and correction of, the existing scholarship, based on detailed, documented research. all of the sibly men were cobblers at one point before turning to bookselling sometime between 1779 and 1787. sommers demonstrates that despite claims that the family originated in bristol (where ebenezer lived for a time), it was from london, with its most recent roots in the parish of st. giles-without-cripplegate (9). the father, edmund sibly (d. 1799), was a particular baptist, and his bookshop was located on brick lane, spitalfields. he had three or four wives, and surviving children with the last three. the second wife, mary larkholm, was the mother of kezia (1748–​87) and ebenezer; the third, charity standard (d. 1768), was the mother of manoah and job (1760–​1815); and the fourth, elizabeth read, was the mother of charity (1772–​1847). while the men of the family receive the most attention, sommers tries to highlight what can be known about the women. after her father’s death, the younger charity and her first husband took over the brick lane bookshop, and charity later amassed a number of leasehold estates (10). the older daughter, kezia, died in labor; she was the subject of an astrologically rooted biographical sketch by her brother ebenezer, and manoah’s obituary states that she filled a maternal role after the death of his mother. the youngest and least studied brother, job, was a publisher of sermons that he transcribed and printed, in many cases, without the knowledge of the minister. two of these ministers were the quaker william savery, who left a record of his encounter with job at the latter’s bookshop, and the calvinist evangelical thomas wills. between 1807 and 1815, job was a stenographer for the old bailey, and he published the most sensational trials, as well as arguments for the rights of dissenters. sommers suggests that job was the most politically radical of all the brothers, and argues that none of the other sibly men was “particularly engaged in politics, radical or otherwise” (193), despite the efforts of some scholars to place them in the tradition of radical shoemakers that stretched from “jacob böhme to thomas holcroft” (192). sommers focuses much of the book on ebenezer. whereas previous scholars have assumed that his activities and writings were sincere, she characterizes him as more of an opportunist who was “intellectually and morally flexible” (75) and who “often misrepresented himself in print” (35). in 1779, ebenezer opened his first bookshop, in portsmouth, where he had moved with his second wife, even while the first wife was still living in london. (he would leave this first wife a £20 annuity in his 1799 will.) in portsmouth, he became a freemason, and he began using masonic imagery in his publications and advertisements and puffing up his connections with various orders and lodges (both real and invented). while ebenezer has been labeled a swedenborgian freemason, sommers clarifies that he was a freemason but not a swedenborgian, while manoah was a swedenborgian but not a freemason. (indeed, she points out that benedict chastanier was the only man named in the rolls of the minute book of the society for promoting the heavenly doctrines of the new jerusalem church eastcheap london between may 1787 and november 1791 who was both a swedenborgian and a freemason.) in 1784, ebenezer moved to bristol, where he probably saw the business potential of “electrical medicine, mesmerism, and animal magnetism” (70), but his medical endeavors were cut short when he was caught selling counterfeit lottery tickets in 1786 (67-69). around the same time, his wife died in childbirth, and he returned to london after remarrying (and fathering a bastard child in marlborough, wiltshire). in london, ebenezer showed interest in paracelsus, franz anton mesmer, and john bell (a practitioner of mesmerism, who lived in golden square). having already taken the name “e. sibly astro-philo” (80), he joined the college for instructing pupils in mesmer’s philosophy, alongside bell and stephen freeman, who himself was a freemason, rosicrucian, and a member of the jerusalem sols. in bristol and london, ebenezer’s publications were largely plagiarized compilations on astrology and medicine, and they were often reprinted as new editions or offered under new titles. these include an illustration of the celestial science of astrology (1784–​90?) and a key to physic, and the occult sciences (1792), and sommers notes how “some images were original; others were either copies or adaptations from earlier book illustrations” (163). ebenezer’s “use” of seventeenth-century sources has led some to consider him an important figure in counter-enlightenment thought, but sommers expresses skepticism that he ever had a coherent philosophy, writing instead that he “consistently chose the shortest route to a cash payoff” (103). this was particularly true of his activities as a medical quack. in bristol, he had become aware of the work of the society for the rescue of persons apparently drowned, which reflected wider interest in the reanimation of drowning victims and fear of the premature burial of people who were still alive. in 1792, he bought a medical degree from king’s college, aberdeen, and subsequently fashioning himself a doctor, he began selling his most famous and most lucrative product, dr. sibly’s reanimating solar tincture. the tincture was soon complemented by a lunar tincture for women, which was marketed along with his medical mirror: or treatise on the impregnation of the human female (1794), “the feminine pendant to a key to physic” (167). despite his various schemes for making money, ebenezer had to declare bankruptcy in 1794. he was, however, coincidentally robbed two weeks before the notice of the bankruptcy was published, and sommers strongly suspects he had a hand in the robbery (142-43). emerging from the bankruptcy later in that year, he went on publishing and selling his tinctures until his death in 1799. after his death, ebenezer’s daughter, urania, and his last business partner, charles saffell, fought over the patent rights to the solar tincture, and both urania and saffell’s daughter-in-law would independently sell the product through the 1870s (279). more important for the history of esoterism is ebenezer’s work in collecting and transcribing occult manuscripts between 1789 and 1795. (given that just one of these manuscripts was offered for 200 guineas in the morning herald in 1797 [246n26], sommers suggests that ebenezer’s passion for this material may have been behind his bankruptcy.) many of the items owned by ebenezer were listed in the early nineteenth-century sale catalogues of john denley, but later in the century, many legends would accrue around which items his library actually contained. sommers notes that saffell, who served as ebenezer’s executor, did not, strangely enough, note any books in his accounting of ebenezer’s estate. this fact leads her to argue that the library must have consisted exclusively of manuscripts, which saffell had described simply as “three sacks of old papers” (244). examining nineteenth-century sale catalogues and modern collections, sommers adds thirteen works to those offered by denley and provides in the appendix the most complete list of the items held by ebenezer. this bibliographical activity was easily his most substantial legacy. ebenezer’s half-brother manoah is the subject of only about a quarter of the book. in contrast to ebenezer, he seems staid, being “only” a swedenborgian minister and bookseller. like his father and brothers, manoah began as a shoemaker, but by the 1770s he had learned shorthand (sommers suggests it was thomas gurney’s popular method) and began publishing baptist sermons that he had transcribed. in 1779 he opened his bookshop at 35 goswell street (where it was to remain for his entire career), and it was soon known for having the largest supply in london of books on astrology, alchemy, and other occult subjects. he republished astrological works, and sometimes shared material with ebenezer (and vice versa). in the mid-1780s, manoah was exposed to swedenborgianism and quickly became a seller of swedenborg’s books. in 1787, he joined the new church, before it had officially separated from the established church. sommers highlights some of the tensions between manoah and robert hindmarsh, who is often seen as representing swedenborgian orthodoxy. as she points out, hindmarsh was critical of astrology (188), and this criticism, she suggests, led manoah to discontinue his astrological work. in turn, manoah rejected the idea that swedenborg’s conjugial love advocated concubinage; this debate tore apart the great east cheap society in 1789, with hindmarsh, carl wadström, augustus nordenskjöld, and others separating from the new denomination (218-19). by the 1790s, manoah was one of the chief ministers of, and apologists for, the new jerusalem church, a position he held for the remainder of his life. all the while, he continued his shorthand work, and from 1792 to 1795 he was the official transcriber at the old bailey. he also did other paid shorthand work, recording for the london corresponding society the trial of its founder, thomas hardy. in 1797, manoah began his career in the bank of england, which he maintained until just before his death in 1840. manoah was a leader of the april 1789 general conference that william and catherine attended, and sommers points out that one of the goals of the conference was to “affirm the separation of the new church from the old” (230). it was largely manoah’s work in establishing this new church along orthodox lines that, sommers suggests, laid the groundwork for blake’s rejection of swedenborg: william blake was driven away from swedenborg not just by his disenchantment with swedenborg’s writings, but also by his revulsion for the infant denomination founded upon swedenborg’s vision, and by at least one of its most notable leaders, manoah sibly, comfortable as he was with ritual, ceremonies, and social respectability. (234) what surely would have been another point of contention for blake was manoah’s belief that “swedenborg’s revelation was complete, and that it was unacceptable and fruitless for others to attempt to replicate the seer’s communication with spirits” (223); she also points out that at the 1791 general conference, ceremonial clerical robes were approved (232). much of sommers’s discussion of manoah centers on blake and on trying to justify her claim that manoah was behind blake’s rejection of swedenborg. while it is mostly persuasive, especially in her account of hindmarsh’s position in the church, she spends little time considering the role played by other orthodox swedenborgians, such as joseph proud, whose hymnbook, for example, was adopted at the same time as the new liturgy and who, according to henry crabb robinson, invited blake to join the church.g. e. bentley, jr., blake records, 2nd ed. (new haven: yale university press, 2004) 599. the focus on blake also shortchanges both manoah’s own relationship to these figures and his own work—​as a publisher, theologian, and leader of the new jerusalem church—​in comparison to the detailed account she provides for ebenezer. at the same time, many interesting parallels between blake and the two brothers go unnoticed. manoah, for example, adopted a new calendar in his swedenborgian pamphlet an answer to the most important question (1792) that designated the 1756 publication of swedenborg’s arcana coelestia as year 0. this practice must have been at play, then, when blake parodied the notion in the marriage of heaven and hell, and the fact that both blake and manoah were born in 1757 seems significant to the satire. (both men would also be buried in bunhill fields, with blake in an unmarked grave and manoah given a tombstone.) in her discussions of ebenezer, there are no references to blake, even though she observes that ebenezer believed that indian astrology was derived from british druids (38) and records how a reviewallgemeine literatur-zeitung (march 1798): col. 552. of a german translation of ebenezer’s medical mirror scoffed at his argument that “adam was a hermaphrodite, and translucent” (36). but recognizing and exploring these and other potential connections will delight most readers. the other few but real weaknesses in the book emanate from the overwhelming nature of its riches. given the focus on different generations of a family, it would have benefited from genealogical charts. likewise, while the chapters on ebenezer and manoah are ostensibly in chronological order, sommers often skips to later publications written on the same theme, so separate chronologies of each major family member would have been useful for tracing their activities and major publications. finally, though her record of the manuscripts in ebenezer’s library will be a vital resource for readers, a list of the known publications offered by each shop (including the different editions and titles of the same works) and related booksellers, printers, engravers, and the like would have helped to sketch out in full the publishing networks in which the siblys participated. review: mike goode, romantic capabilities: blake, scott, austen and the new messages of old media mike goode. romantic capabilities: blake, scott, austen, and the new messages of old media. oxford: oxford university press, 2020. xvi + 302 pp. £77.00/​$99.00, hardcover; also available as an e-book. reviewed by james rovira james rovira (jamesrovira@gmail.com) teaches literature and writing at keiser university and valencia college and is the founder of the anazoa educational project, a nonprofit. his most recent works include women in rock, women in romanticism (routledge, 2022), david bowie and romanticism (palgrave macmillan, 2022), reading as democracy in crisis: interpretation, theory, history (lexington books, 2019), the first-year writing text writing for college and beyond (lulu press, 2019), rock and romanticism: post-punk, goth, and metal as dark romanticisms (palgrave macmillan, 2018), and rock and romanticism: blake, wordsworth, and rock from dylan to u2 (lexington books, 2018). he is currently developing the collection heavy metal and romanticism with julian knox. mike goode’s romantic capabilities: blake, scott, austen, and the new messages of old media is an engaging and sophisticated extension of “blakespotting,” his 2006 pmla article in which he argues for texts’ “latent meaningfulness,” a latency that reveals their “potential energies in other times and places” (“blakespotting” 771). romantic capabilities further theorizes that core idea by bringing together insights from media studies with insights from literary studies to discuss a text’s “behavior” as it moves forward from its time and place of origin, interpreting its later behavior as a sign of its latent potentials at the time of composition. for this reason, goode’s analysis of a literary work’s future behavior differs from a reception history: reception histories usually emphasize human agency, what people do with texts in their afterlives, while goode emphasizes the agency of the text, which is why he frames his discussion in terms of the text’s latency or potential energies. in other words, inherent features of the text present at the time of composition influence, at least to an extent, how the text behaves in the future, outside of its original context. romantic capabilities does not reduce literary studies to media studies, or media studies to literary studies, but “seeks to open romantic studies and media studies out to one another in order to generate insights of interest to both fields” (5). this opening out includes a resistance to defining media behavior only in terms of the text’s new medium, a resistance that takes the form of a commitment to close reading: “this book is committed to the idea that techniques of close-reading language and form matter to any discussion of how a text behaves and how much its behavior in a particular case has to do with what it says” (14). goode elaborates three propositions that serve as “central methodological premises” for his work in this book: “hypermediacy tends to be meta-mediacy,” “media behaviors reopen archives,” and “media behaviors were once virtual” (18, 19, 22). he believes that these propositions contribute to the development of “a new historicism that more closely joins together literary and media studies” (18). this new historicism shouldn’t be understood as a continuation of, say, greenblatt, but as another new historicism that differs from work identified as such in the past. “hypermediacy tends to be meta-mediacy” describes a process by which media tend to reproduce themselves in other media (hypermediacy) that then leads to a consideration of the medium itself as media (meta-mediacy). according to goode, this process is important not only for understanding the behaviors of texts in different media, but also for understanding the text in its original context, which explains his view of his work as a new historicism. “media behaviors reopen archives” emphasizes the “portability … of forms” (19)—​in other words, once a work from the past is appropriated in the present, the formal nature of that work reactivates the features of that form in the present. a work’s formal structure encodes its latencies for future use. “media behaviors were once virtual” draws from “deleuze’s concept of the generative ‘virtual’ component that exists in and is a part of all that is real, including forms” (22). this concept eradicates the usual line between the “actual” and the “possible” by arguing that the possible must be in the realm of the real—​otherwise it could never become actual. rather than juxtaposing a nonexistent possible with an existent actual, deleuze bridges the gap between existence and nonexistence with the “virtual,” or a reality waiting to be actualized. for goode’s purposes, then, the key concept is that “things exist virtually for some period of time, or in isolated spots of time, before there is any actual historical manifestation of them” (24)—​hence, a justification for the latencies of texts. goode works out these propositions through two chapters on blake, one on scott, and two on austen. the two on blake are divided between written texts, specifically the proverbs of hell (chapter 2, “blakespotting”), and visual texts (chapter 3, “the joy of looking: what william blake’s pictures want”). chapter 4, “history in three dimensions: panorama, stereoscopy, and scott’s novel perspective,” elaborates on the way that the translation of scott’s visually oriented novels into panoramas and stereographs “offers insight into how scott’s writings formally generated, and lent themselves to, a sense of visual immersion” (102), so that the chapter examines how the new media provoke fertile examinations of their texts. chapter 5, “letters from austenland: the designs of fanfiction” explores the “truth universally acknowledged that every single person with the good fortune to recognize this line must be in want of its perpetual rewriting” (171). goode argues that austen’s fanfiction is different from other fanfiction because “these alternate universes are understood to have been actually present at some point, such that their cultural distance is historical rather than metaphysical or future-speculative” (176), in opposition to more common fanfiction about alternate universes that fans never believe existed. as a result, austenian fanfiction “actualizes potentials latent within the medial forms of the novels themselves” (181), potentials that wouldn’t be actualized until after the creation of austenian fanfiction. the sixth and final chapter, “capability jane: the ecological designs of austenian realism,” engages english landscape gardening as well as the relational ecosystems present in mansfield park, a culture that exists “not just within a discrete natural geography but as integral to that geography” (234, goode’s emphasis). his reading of blake’s proverbs and visual images focuses on “deleuzian ‘lines of flight’” (45), a metaphor that emphasizes the departure or even escape of textual elements from the original text. he engages the ways that fragments of blake’s texts and images reappear in later media and are verbally and visually quoted outside of, and often without regard for, their original context. chapter 2 begins with a correction of a claim of his from 2006 that blake’s proverbs appeared in trump tower. he had misread a new yorker article describing these proverbs in a luxury penthouse in the time warner building; since the article was reporting on a public relations feud between trump tower and the time warner building, it mentioned both. jennifer davis michael caught the mistake during the 2016 election cycle and pointed it out in “blake, trump, and the road of excess: an urban legend” (the millions, 16 june 2016), which was then taken up in a discussion on nassr-l on 18-19 june 2016. but goode’s larger point about the reinterpretation of the proverbs “the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom” and “you never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough” remains: whatever limitations they have in the proverbs of hell, in a manhattan luxury condo they sound like a “hedonist manifesto” (37). goode is not interested in a historicist correction of misreadings of these blake proverbs, but in how the proverbs function as “meaning engines seeking out end users,” given their propensity to go viral in the current sense of the term (40). in this case, the new contexts don’t activate new meanings in the proverbs; instead, the proverbs activate dormant potentials in new contexts. goode argues that this behavior belongs to the nature of proverbs as proverbs: they are written to be quoted outside their original context. the existence of blake’s proverbs as proverbs is particularly important: by calling them proverbs, he’s ascribing them to an unknown or anonymous source, as opposed to aphorisms, which are sayings by an individual author or speaker. since he calls these sayings proverbs, then says that they were “collected” by a narrator traveling through hell, blake subverts then-current legal systems dependent upon ascription to an author. in this way, he insulates himself from any charges of sedition in 1790s’ england while still saying what he wants to say. ultimately, blake’s proverbs function like “worms” in both the digital and earthly senses as they “circulate … more rhizomatically than can be mapped” (63). they are capable of “rewiring the thoughts and wants of the individual users who converge with them,” making “suddenly visible certain complexities of the world, a world made still-more-complex on account of their very passage through it” (63). while goode constructs his argument from a number of names familiar to romanticists and blake scholars, mentioning authors ranging from frye, erdman, worrall, raine, and mitchell to roger whitson, tilottama rajan, jason whittaker, andrew burkett, mark lussier, ron broglio, and marcel o’gorman, his readings of blake feel new and original. i feel like i’m learning a different way to read texts, almost backwards through the telescope, but the object is brought closer rather than pushed farther away. on the other hand, my inner literary historian is dying to have his say on two points. first, goode insists that no reader existed at the time of the production of blake’s works who could ever have “encounter[ed] more than a portion of his [blake’s] poetic output over the course of a lifetime” (44). he asserts more than once that the works were unavailable “as an oeuvre to any reader or set of readers” until very recently (44, his emphasis). he is right, given how limited blake’s print runs were, until he applies his observation to any single reader—​because he’s excluding blake himself as a reader of his own work. i don’t mean to invoke the author here as an authoritative arbiter of meaning, but as the only reader to whom the various repetitions within visual and verbal texts would be accessible, so that blake’s oeuvre was an oeuvre to blake himself while he was producing it. this point is worth making because goode is careful to make plausible, historicized, and well-argued claims about blake’s possible intent for the proverb form later in the chapter, and because he intends his reading practice to reflect not only on the form in its present use, but also on how the form’s present use sheds light on its potentials in its original context. according to goode’s own argument, blake himself matters, and for that reason, the proverbs’ lines of flight could be within blake’s corpus as well as an escape from it. my second quibble is very likely the result of the first: i wanted, as part of goode’s many close readings of a variety of blake’s proverbs, at least a mention of the bigger picture in which they are set. he does provide the narrative frame of an unknown author walking through hell, like dante, collecting the infernal wisdom of hell through its proverbs. but he ignores the larger conceptual frame that encompasses so many of blake’s works, a frame that blake refers to as the “two contrary states of the human soul” on the title page of songs of innocence and of experience and that appears in the marriage of heaven and hell as the juxtaposition of angelic with devilish subjectivity. one point that blake makes from beginning to end is that of individual point of view: it is not just a matter of what the proverb says, but of who is saying it. in other words, he calls them proverbs “of hell” for a reason. when goode reflects on the number of different ways that “the bird a nest, the spider a web, man friendship” can be interpreted (55), he focuses on unifying interpretations, as if the proverb were elucidating a single principle. but because it lacks a verb, it is open to a wide range of interpretations, all dependent not only upon the verb chosen but also on tense. perhaps the point of this proverb, and many others, is not to articulate a single principle, but to emphasize how different kinds of subjectivities can perceive the same object very differently? nests, webs, and friendships all enclose things, but a bird’s nest nurtures her young while a spider’s web catches victims. the difference is not necessarily in the object, but in the individual using it, so that when the proverb concludes “man friendship,” we’re encouraged to understand that friendship with some men can be like a nest, while with others it can be like a web. in the marriage of heaven and hell, this commentary culminates in an argument between an angel and a devil that results in the marriage promised on the title page: the angel and devil merge into one. that fusion of points of view exists outside the text in the person reading it, whether that person is the author of the text or another one of its readers. in these cases, i wanted a little more close reading from goode. these quibbles do not detract in any way from the strength of goode’s argument throughout the book or in this chapter. the proverbs’ various flights and ensuing behaviors outside the time and place of their composition still demand attention, as does his way of understanding them. i’m describing what i wish were added to the chapter, even if only in two or three qualifying sentences. i suspect that scott and austen scholars will find goode’s work on those figures similarly engaging and similarly challenging. goode provokes argument in the best possible way and, in the process, opens up the field of literary studies to new possible readings. works cited goode, mike. “blakespotting.” pmla 121.3 (2006): 769-86. michael, jennifer davis. “blake, trump, and the road of excess: an urban legend.” the millions 16 june 2016 <https://​themillions.​com/​2016/​06/​blake-​trump-​road-​excess-​urban-​legend.​html>. accessed 5 mar. 2022. review: farrell, blake and the methodists michael farrell. blake and the methodists. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, 2014. x + 259 pp. £58.00/​$95.00, hardcover; £55.00/​$90.00, softcover; £43.99/​$69.99, e-book. reviewed by andrew lincoln andrew lincoln is currently working on the culture of war in the long eighteenth century, a project which grew out of his researches on william blake and walter scott. he is an emeritus professor of the school of english and drama, queen mary university of london. at the heart of this study is a detailed and very informative comparison of blake and john wesley. the book needs its wider title because it includes a chapter on the moravians and glances at other eighteenth-century figures associated with methodism, including george whitefield and william cowper. some earlier studies have considered blake in relation to methodism, but this is the first comprehensive treatment. farrell suggests that critics have been put off exploring this subject more fully by e. p. thompson, who attributed his own disapproval of methodism to blake himself.e. p. thompson, the making of the english working class (harmondsworth: penguin, 1991) 44. against thompson, farrell points out that blake “undeniably held sympathies towards” methodism, as shown by the positive allusions to whitefield and wesley in milton and jerusalem (8). although blake’s hostility to state religion is obvious in much of his work, he seems always to have been sympathetic to sincerely held religious beliefs—even beliefs that many christians would dismiss as mere superstition. one of his early annotations, to lavater, declares “no man was ever truly superstitious who was not truly religious as far as he knew.”david v. erdman, ed., the complete poetry and prose of william blake, newly rev. ed. (new york: anchor-random house, 1988) 591. he would certainly have been sympathetic to those methodists who seemed to him “truly religious,” even if he didn’t share their beliefs. farrell invites us to consider blake’s attitude in relation to the wider religious developments of the eighteenth century. during the evangelical revival there was a “wide variety of dissenting religious groups” and, in farrell’s account, spiritual “seekers” would oscillate freely between them, “adopting a compound of doctrinal sympathies.” citing the example of francis okely, whose movement between different christian denominations during his lifetime “exemplifies the porosity between religious groups during the revival,” he suggests that “blake was a seeker and, as such, was less unusual in his own era than we have subsequently come to believe” (15). farrell finds a more specific context for blake’s own attitude in the moravians—a group that has become a familiar point of reference since the discovery, by marsha keith schuchard in collaboration with keri davies, that blake’s mother was at one stage a member of the moravian community in london’s fetter lane.keri davies and marsha keith schuchard, “recovering the lost moravian history of william blake’s family,” blake 38.1 (summer 2004): 36-43. he gives a clear, detailed account of the origin of the fetter lane society, wesley’s involvement in it, and of its doctrines and influence. the elaborate rituals and regulative practices would not have appealed to blake, but, as farrell suggests, the moravians’ openness to art and music, their recognition of the importance of sexual desire in the spiritual life of christians, their hymn singing, and the ecumenical spirit inspired by their leader, count zinzendorf, may have been an influential part of blake’s maternal inheritance. farrell’s detailed comparison of blake and wesley includes a chapter on hymnody, which builds on and extends the work of other scholars. here, his comments on “the discourse of the hymn” are particularly interesting, since he emphasizes “the negotiation and transaction of meaning” between hymns: “hymns interact with one another, comment upon, plagiarise and satirise one another; their form and function is adaptable to shifting ideological contexts” (93). he notes that wesley continued to publish moravian hymns after the hymns of his brother charles had become available. this practice was not simply an example of “shared speech” but also entailed “parody and transgression”: in 1749 wesley published anonymously a number of moravian hymns with a mocking preface, a procedure that, says farrell, “invites direct comparison with blake’s treatment of swedenborg in the marriage of heaven and hell ” (98-99). more generally, the intertextual nature of eighteenth-century hymn writing emphasized here provides an illuminating context for the allusive and parodic elements that generations of readers have found in blake’s songs. in other parts of his comparison of blake and wesley, farrell takes us into what may be for many readers less familiar territory. here the emphasis is less on doctrinal openness than on the struggle to establish, control, and defend doctrinal differences. farrell points out that during his lifetime wesley was responsible for 371 publications. putting things into print played a crucial role in his efforts to define and spread methodist doctrine and to control the meaning of other well-established christian texts. wesley not only published methodist hymns, sermons, and expository and polemical works, but also republished the works of others using “highly interventionist” editorial procedures (70). he modified the text of the king james bible, making around 12,000 changes, some of which subtly removed any suggestion of predestination. his qualified admiration of milton’s paradise lost inspired an attempt to make the poem intelligible “to persons of a common education” (wesley, quoted in farrell 133). this attempt involved not only adding explanatory notes, but also making stylistic simplifications, removing epic similes and passages deemed esoteric, mitigating the poem’s radical implications by cutting lines describing satan’s uprising, omitting the lines describing christ as the agent of god’s punishment, expurgating the “explicit accounts of the amorous exploits of adam and eve” (144), and removing all references to predestination. farrell says that “effectively every page has some abridgement or modification” (134). wesley made comparable alterations in an edition of edward young’s long christian poem night thoughts, taking out “explicit references to religious feeling that he feared could exacerbate anti-enthusiasm among rationalist readers” (116) and, among other changes, omitting the line “o for a telescope his throne to reach” in order to eliminate the suggestion that god might be known through scientific means or be perceived with the human eye (130). this detailed account of wesley’s appropriations and redactions makes fascinating reading. wesley’s engagement with hymns, the bible, paradise lost, and night thoughts offers plenty of scope for comparison with blake, who, as writer and/or illustrator, engaged with each of these areas himself. in the process of comparison farrell turns up many useful insights and draws interesting parallels. the discussion includes some thoughtful observations on blake’s illustrations, although unfortunately the book has no plates for the reader to look at. and farrell includes a brief but valuable discussion of blake’s attitude to cowper, a figure who is said to have shaped blake’s view of the “correlation between methodism and madness in milton” (159). it has to be said, though, that while farrell is sure footed as a historian, he is less so when it comes to detailed textual comparison. his approach commits him to emphasizing similarities, and while this works well at the general level where he can outline the allusive, parodic, and interventionist strategies in which blake and wesley engage, it can become more problematic at the level of textual particulars. here, the study might have benefited from more consideration of the problems involved. sacred texts can, obviously, give rise to a wide range of interpretative traditions and practices. the same words can acquire quite different meanings within different interpretative communities. what significance, then, can be attached to the presence of “similarities” between the practices and beliefs of different christian traditions? if one overlooks the differences, the anglican communion is “similar” to the roman catholic mass. the similarities may seem fundamental, but to believers they can appear incidental, while the differences seem all-important. the differences are the things to be fought over: why else would wesley expend so much effort on editing out of other christian texts things he didn’t agree with? we can expect to find all kinds of similarities between blake’s views and those of wesley and other christian writers, but at what point do such similarities become more than incidental? in the chapter on hymnody, when farrell compares wesleyan hymns prompted by the american revolutionary war with the prophetic rhetoric of blake’s america, the hunt for parallels brings this question into sharp focus. farrell understands that the wesleys’ hymns represent the authors’ “high church toryism” while blake’s rhetoric of revolution “subverts … temporal, regal, and clerical authority,” but he concludes: “the differences of opinion between the writers … are real but secondary. what links the two books is their common use of affective language and the prophetic stance to arouse and engage the reader’s political awareness” (110). if this means we should regard the similarities of language (which are in this case rather vague) as more significant than the opposed points of view, i think the reverse is true. the use of affective language or of a prophetic stance to arouse political awareness was in itself hardly unusual in eighteenth-century poetry: we can find such things in, for example, whig battle poems, patriotic odes, or songs to liberty. they were used in the fast-day services and sermons that were an important part of the official british response to the american crisis. this is reflected within blake’s america itself, where the authoritarian albion’s angel and the rebellious orc both adopt a highly charged prophetic rhetoric. such language can be adopted by both parties. that is why we have to look very closely at what is being said. the differences of opinion between blake and the wesleys in these works are hardly secondary—they are surely all-important. farrell is sometimes inclined to press the case for similarity harder than he needs to, and in ways that can blur the very real differences between blake and wesley. he claims, for example, that wesley, like blake, “opposed the idea of a punitive god, preaching instead forgiveness and christian fellowship as epitomised by christ” (139). this is simply misleading. wesley may have played down the punitive aspect of divinity—certainly compared with a calvinist writer like isaac watts—but he didn’t reject it: he took william law to task for claiming that “hell and damnation are nothing but the various operations of self” and he insisted on the scriptural authority for divine vengeance and future torments for the wicked.john wesley, a letter to the reverend mr. law (london, 1756) 95-96. on the other hand farrell follows robert ryan in claiming that “blake gives an account of the atonement entirely congruous with the mainstream protestant thought” (56) and in citing jerusalem plate 96 as evidence of blake’s orthodoxy,robert m. ryan, the romantic reformation: religious politics in english literature, 1789–1824 (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1997) 49. but he ignores the context in which the account appears and the ideas of “brotherhood,” “kindness,” and “divine image” through which the significance of blakean atonement is developed. he sometimes divorces lines from their dramatic context to illustrate blake’s “doctrine,” showing little concern for the interpretative problems this can raise. in the realms of particular similarities, farrell is most persuasive when he develops the idea, proposed by morton d. paley and others, that blake experienced a kind of spiritual conversion or “new birth” at felpham, and that blake refers to this experience in ways that draw upon methodist terminology.morton d. paley, apocalypse and millennium in english romantic poetry (oxford: clarendon press, 2003) 70. here farrell is guided securely by his understanding that methodist doctrine is “inherently eclectic” (163) and that “to assume that there was a single doctrine of spiritual rebirth that all held” is a mistake, because “there was no such doctrine” (179). thus in his letters blake can adopt the “language and tenor … typical of the evangelical revival” (162) and in his poems develop concepts of “regeneration” and “self-annihilation” that have parallels in wesleyan doctrine, without being “entirely assimilable to methodist notions of spiritual rebirth” (170). the general conclusion of the work is that “there was … a methodist influence on blake’s works, but it was combined with a number of other religious sympathies” (193). i doubt if anyone could disagree with that. this book’s careful survey of wesley’s engagement with religious writings that blake himself engaged with will make it a useful resource for all those with an interest in blake’s religious thought. it shows that we don’t always have to place blake among the radicals in order to illuminate his ideas. it is a pity that palgrave has published this study without illustrations and apparently without proper copyediting (given the running problems with formatting of quotations). it is nevertheless a book that every university library should have. the publisher not mad the publisher not mad by karen mulhallen karen mulhallen (karenmulhallen@rogers.com) has lectured on and published several articles and reviews on blake’s night thoughts, on which she completed her phd dissertation under g. e. bentley, jr. she is professor emeritus, ryerson university. the latest william blake exhibition at tate britain was a cause for celebration, beautifully installed and covering blake’s entire career, from the earliest pencil sketches to his grand engravings to the book of job and his illustrations to dante’s divine comedy. the accompanying catalogue is richly illustrated, with essays by the two curators for the exhibition, martin myrone and amy concannon. blake’s position in the art world of london as an engraver, his sense of lack of acknowledgement, and the wide range of his patrons are all admirably laid out. blake’s largest commission was undertaken in 1795 for a young bookseller-publisher named richard edwards. edwards had each page of edward young’s night thoughts laid into leaves of whatman paper, around which blake designed 537 watercolors. the paper is watermarked 1794. edwards’s plan was to select a number of images and then publish a large quarto edition of the night thoughts with designs engraved by blake. only volume 1 was published, in 1797. edwards then closed his business and took a government appointment in minorca. however, his relationship with blake continued after his return in 1803, since he was among the subscribers to cromek’s edition of blair’s grave, with designs by blake, in 1808. richard edwards had the original watercolors bound into two volumes by a london firm of german book binders, benedict, in red morocco with gilt lettering. he kept the books until 1821, when his surviving brother, thomas, offered them for sale. in the early twentieth century the watercolors were given to the british museum, where they can be viewed in the department of prints and drawings. the bindings are now lost, but the two gatherings are apparent, each with a frontispiece and each with the inscriptions “richard edwards” and “high elms,” his house. richard edwards’s will can be seen in the national archives, prob 11/1741/248, dated 16 july 1822. it does not of course mention the night thoughts, but he seems to have laid out his estate in an orderly fashion, leaving his own father’s gold watch to his eldest son, taking care of his beloved wife, mary, and including a codicil for a faithful servant. it is not surprising that thomas edwards should take over the sale of the night thoughts watercolors, since all the brothers were members of a distinguished family of booksellers and publishers, originally from halifax. apart from g. e. bentley, jr.’s recent study, the edwardses of halifax (university of toronto press, 2015), information on the family is to be found in the papers of t. w. hanson in the bodleian library, oxford. given the facts of richard edwards’s life, i was surprised to read in the tate britain exhibition catalogue (p. 105), “after edwards’s demise (he had become insane), blake seems to have acquired a stock of the night thoughts publication and hand-coloured these for patrons, creating a luxurious new version of the illustrations for them.” there is no record of richard going mad, nor of any issues with his bookshop and publishing activities. his brother james had a fashionable and immensely popular shop nearby and took over his stock when richard accepted a government appointment. it is possible that the uncolored night thoughts remainders were given to blake in part payment for his work with richard edwards at this time and not, as the tate catalogue states, after richard’s demise, since blake and edwards died in the same year, 1827, blake in august and richard in october. blake and music, 2020 jason whittaker (jwhittaker@lincoln.ac.uk) is head of the school of english and journalism at the university of lincoln. he is the author and editor of several works on william blake, including william blake and the myths of britain (palgrave, 1999), radical blake: influence and afterlife from 1827 (with shirley dent, palgrave, 2002), and, most recently, divine images: the life and works of william blake (reaktion books, 2021). his main research interests deal with the reception of blake, and his next work, jerusalem: blake, parry and the fight for englishness, will be published by oxford university press in 2022. while 2019 had been an incredibly productive year for settings of blake to music and original pieces inspired by his poetry, my initial assumption was that, with all the difficulties caused by covid, 2020 would be a much leaner year musically. somewhat surprisingly, the past twelve months were incredibly rich in terms of musical adaptations, not only in the number of new releases, which surpassed 2019, but also because several took the form of whole albums dedicated to blake’s work. it is clear that some releases—​those requiring full orchestras, for example—​were the products of months of preparation prior to the pandemic, and thus it may be that 2021 is the point at which we see an interruption in the flow of new recordings. in other instances, it is evident that artists used the time during lockdown to make recordings that were released via streaming, and the trend toward this means of distribution was only accelerated during 2020. of the twenty-five releases during 2020, some of the most significant are entire (or nearly entire) albums devoted to blake, including john sykes’s fearful symmetry. while working as a teacher at kingswood school in bath during the 1930s, sykes set nearly all of blake’s songs of innocence and of experience to music, yet did not seek to publish any during his lifetime. this album, published by albion, is the first recording of these songs and an important contribution to the œuvre of blakean music. while not as extensive as sykes’s set of compositions, two very different pop and rock albums—​almost blake’s songs of innocence and vespero’s the four zoas—​should receive honorable mentions, as should francisco chirinos’s beautiful folk-style settings of the songs. this list omits tracks that use only a single quotation or allusion to blake, although it does contain new releases of works—​most notably by benjamin britten and roger quilter—​that have been recorded previously. it also includes some half dozen additions from previous years that have not appeared in earlier lists. wherever possible, the country of the artist is given, as well as the work’s instrumentation, duration, publisher, copyright date, genre, and format. most entries include at least one link to a recording, usually amazon, apple, or spotify. almost blake — italy from songs of innocence; for voice, guitars, drums. 00:35:17. materiali sonori edizioni musicali, © 2020. rock/​pop. streaming. contents: 1. introduction [innocence]; 2. the smile; 3. on another’s sorrow; 4. a cradle song; 5. the angel; 6. the little black boy; 10. the human abstract. links: amazon, apple, spotify. billy blake and the vagabonds — usa billy blake and the vagabonds; for voices, guitars, keyboard, drums, accordion. 00:41:26. dame lurch enterprises, © 2013. rock/​pop. streaming. contents: 1. introduction [innocence]; 2. ecchoing green; 3. london; 4. a cradle song; 5. [the] little girl lost; 6. infant sorrow; 7. sick rose; 8. garden of love; 9. the fly; 10. clod and pebble; 11. little vagabond; 12. a poison tree; 13. the tyger; 14. [the] divine image; 15. chimney sweep [experience]. links: amazon, apple, spotify. brings, allen, and mara bonde — usa from allen brings: music for voices; for voice, piano. 00:59:46. capstone records, © 2004. classical. cd. (rereleased by navona records, © 2017, streaming.) contents: 9. three songs of blake and donne: no. 1, a cradle song; 10. three songs of blake and donne: no. 2, never seek to tell thy love. note: a recording of several of brings’s compositions by various artists, with the composer accompanying mara bonde on his settings of three songs of blake and donne. links: amazon, apple, spotify. britten, benjamin, anna prohaska, and julius drake— uk/​austria from paradise lost; for voice, piano. 01:04:00. alpha classics/​outhere music, © 2020. classical. cd. contents: 12. songs and proverbs of william blake, op. 74: a poison tree. links: amazon, apple, spotify. chirinos, francisco — peru a william blake album; for voice, guitars, drums. 00:24:38. vallejo records, © 2020. folk/​country. streaming. contents: 1. auguries of innocence; 2. the divine image; 3. the fly; 4. merlin’s prophecy; 5. the little boy lost & found; 6. the blossom; 7. nurse’s song [experience]; 8. the wild flower’s song; 9. the angel; 10. infant sorrow; 11. the little boy found. links: amazon, apple, spotify. the fervors — usa from the fervors ep ; for voice, guitars, drums. 00:12:38. dooley records, © 2020. rock/​pop. streaming. contents: 1. william blake, pt. 1; 2. william blake, pt. 2; 3. william blake, pt. 3. note: debut ep by this utah psych rock band, with three tracks loosely based on blakean themes in the style of hawkwind. links: amazon, spotify. iamthemorning — russia from counting the ghosts; for voice, guitar, keyboard. 00:14:02. iamthemorning, © 2020. rock/​pop. streaming. contents: 2. cradle song. note: this is not a setting of blake’s “a cradle song”; as vocalist marjana semkina has explained, “the lyrics are influenced by writings of william blake and stylised after him.” links: amazon, apple, spotify. jolliffe, edmund, and commotio [chamber choir] — uk from the oxford book of flexible choral songs; for voices, piano. 1:01:04. oxford university press, © 2019. choral. streaming. contents: 2. spring (sound the flute). note: this is an album released to accompany the book of the same title. links: amazon, spotify. karfagen — ukraine from birds of passage; for voice, guitars, keyboard, drums. 00:57:10. caerllysi music, © 2020. rock/​pop. cd. contents: 3. spring (birds delight). links: amazon, apple, spotify. lancaster, philip — uk the blake lamentations; for voices (satb), organ. 00:15:00. maker’s press, © 2020. choral. score. contents: 1. the blake lamentations. note: this is a series of easter lamentations drawn from the four zoas and jerusalem. lancaster, philip — uk into the tomb; for voices (satb). 00:03:30. stainer & bell, © 2019. choral. score. contents: 1. into the tomb. note: the text of this composition—​an easter hymn—​is taken from night the eighth of the four zoas, where los sees a vision of christ crucified on the tree of mystery. link: soundcloud. leigh, walter, elizabeth nash, and sarah down — uk from walter leigh: piano music & songs; for voice, piano. 00:58:51. tremula records, © 2020. classical. cd. contents: 14. how sweet i roamed. links: amazon, apple, spotify. lindberg, kristian ofstad — norway of innocence and experience; for piano. 01:15:00. 2l, © 2020. classical. cd. note: rather than settings of blake’s poetry to music, this release is a collection of recitals of liszt, schumann, and beethoven. according to lindberg’s liner notes: “the title of this recording is inspired by the painter and poet william blake’s collection of poems, songs of innocence and of experience. it is a title that lends itself well to the pieces presented here, exploring as they do themes of light and darkness, life and death, angelic purity and demonic passion.” links: amazon, apple, spotify. orlov, dmitry, sunny levi, and göran frölén — russia/​uk/​sweden symphonic blake; for voice, synthesized orchestra. 00:42:31. music garden, © 2014. classical. streaming. contents: 1. the garden of love; 2. earth’s answer; 3. holy thursday [experience]; 4. london; 5. the angel; 6. the fly; 7. a cradle song; 8. the schoolboy; 9. the human abstract; 10. ah sunflower; 11. the tiger. links: amazon, apple, spotify. phaze theory — uk from live at balabam; for voice, guitar, drums, tuba. 00:44:04. ptc, © 2020. jazz/​blues. streaming. contents: 2. the little girl lost; 3. the little girl found. links: amazon, apple, spotify, youtube. quilter, roger, daniel cabena, and stephen runge — uk/​canada from a sanctuary in song; for voice, piano. 01:16:00. daniel cabena and stephen runge, © 2020. classical. streaming. contents: 13. three songs of william blake, op. 20: 1. dream valley [“memory, hither come”]. links: amazon, apple, spotify. quilter, roger, and david keith jones — uk from crimson petal; for voice, keyboard. 00:36:05. david keith jones, © 2020. classical. streaming. contents: 14. three songs by william blake, op. 20: no. 1, dream valley. note: a recording by tenor david keith jones of songs by quilter, self-accompanied with synthesized orchestration and including quilter’s setting of “song: memory, hither come.” links: amazon, apple, spotify. reindeer — south korea william blake; for voice, guitars, drums. 00:05:29. reindeer, © 2020. rock/​pop. streaming. contents: 1. william blake. note: this is not a setting of blake’s work to music, but rather a korean pop song inspired by blake. link: spotify. república sonora — spain from fuego y diésel; for voice, guitars, drums. 00:41:40. república sonora, © 2020. rock/​pop. streaming. contents: 5. william blake. note: another original song inspired by blake, this time in spanish, rather than a setting of his poetry to music. links: amazon, apple, spotify. steve tyson and the train rex — australia blues for william blake; for voice, guitars, drums. 00:04:10. steve tyson, © 2020. jazz/​blues. streaming. contents: 1. blues for william blake. note: this is a blues setting of “a poison tree.” links: amazon, apple, spotify. sykes, john, rowan pierce, gareth brynmor john, and william vann — uk from fearful symmetry: songs and piano music by john sykes; for voice, piano. 01:22:00. albion, © 2020. classical. cd. contents: 1. piping down the valleys wild; 2. hear the voice of the bard; 3. earth’s answer; 4. the ecchoing green; 5. the garden of love; 6. holy thursday [innocence]; 7. holy thursday [experience]; 8. the divine image; 9. the human abstract; 10. the lamb; 11. the tyger; 12. infant joy; 13. infant sorrow; 14. the clod and the pebble; 15. the blossom; 16. a poison tree; 17. the sick rose; 18. the fly; 19. on another’s sorrow; 20. the schoolboy; 21. the shepherd; 22. the voice of the ancient bard; 29. london. note: the first recording of sykes’s songs of innocence and songs of experience, which were composed in the 1930s. links: amazon, apple, spotify. terashima, rikuya — japan a cradle song; for voices (satb), piano. 00:05:54. oxford university press, © 2009. choral. score. contents: a cradle song. note: the song was also performed by the oxford choir, conducted by christopher robinson, on the album christmas choral highlights 2009. link: spotify. três tristes tigres — portugal from mínima luz; for voice, guitar, keyboards. 00:43:11. branditmusic, © 2020. rock/​pop. streaming. contents: 6. tigre. note: this is a fairly free portuguese translation of “the tyger.” links: apple, spotify. van vugt, jean, and virpi räisänen — netherlands/​finland from trasparente; for voice, violin. 00:50:36. alba, © 2020. classical. cd. contents: 3. three william blake songs: no. 1, infant joy; 4. three william blake songs: no. 2, my pretty rose tree; 5. three william blake songs: no. 3, the fly. links: amazon, apple, spotify. vaughan williams, ralph, maddy prior, and the carnival band — uk from vaughan williams: carols, songs and hymns; for voice, violin. 00:48:29. park records, © 2010. folk/​country. cd. contents: 2. blake’s cradle song; 10. the divine image. note: this collection of songs by vaughan williams, which includes two of his settings of blake’s poems, was an opportunity for maddy prior and the folk group the carnival band to reprise an association with the composer that goes back to their first album, tapestry of carols. links: amazon, apple, spotify. vespero — russia the four zoas; for guitars, keyboards, drums, violin. 01:10:00. tonzonen records, © 2020. rock/​pop. vinyl. contents: 1. urizen; 2. tharmas; 3. beulah; 4. luvah; 5. urthona; 6. los; 7. the emanation of the giant albion. note: psychedelic prog rock/​space rock that takes its inspiration from the four zoas. links: amazon, apple, spotify. wallen, errollyn, golda schultz, and the bbc symphony orchestra — belize/​south africa/​uk jerusalem—our clouded hills; for voice, orchestra. 00:04:03. bbc, © 2020. classical. streaming. contents: jerusalem. note: this arrangement of parry’s hymn was premiered at the last night of the proms, 12 september 2020. link: youtube. wilson, kenny — uk from the romantic poets, pt. 1; for voice, accordion, clarinet. 00:08:24. kenny wilson records ltd., © 2020. folk/​country. streaming. contents: 1. a poison tree (william blake). links: amazon, apple, spotify. zippy kid — ukraine london; for voice, keyboards, drum machine. 00:02:57. ruslan troknyuk, © 2020. electronic/​dance. streaming. contents: 1. london. links: amazon, apple, spotify. zippy kid — ukraine love and harmony; for voice, keyboards, drum machine. 00:01:53. ruslan troknyuk, © 2020. electronic/​dance. streaming. contents: 1. love and harmony. links: amazon, apple, spotify. zippy kid — ukraine mad song; for voice, keyboards, drum machine. 00:02:36. ruslan troknyuk, © 2020. electronic/​dance. streaming. contents: 1. mad song. links: amazon, apple, spotify. zippy kid — ukraine the tyger ; for voice, keyboards, drum machine. 00:03:03. ruslan troknyuk, © 2020. electronic/​dance. streaming. contents: 1. the tyger. links: amazon, apple, spotify. zorn, john — usa in lambeth—​visions from the walled garden of william blake; for guitar, harp, vibraphone, bells, synthesizer. 00:43:00. tzadik, © 2013. new age. cd. contents: 1. tiriel; 2. a morning light; 3. america, a prophecy; 4. through the looking glass; 5. the ancient of days; 6. puck; 7. the minotaur; 8. the night of enitharmon’s joy; 9. the walled garden. note: an instrumental album that takes its inspiration primarily from blake’s images. links: amazon, apple. review: kathryn s. freeman, a guide to the cosmology of william blake kathryn s. freeman. a guide to the cosmology of william blake. abingdon: routledge, 2017. xii + 240 pp. £120.00/​$155.00, hardcover; £36.99/​$49.95, paperback/​e-book. reviewed by james rovira james rovira (jamesrovira@gmail.com) is the founder of the anazoa educational project, a nonprofit. his most recent works include reading as democracy in crisis: interpretation, theory, history (lexington books, 2019), the first-year writing text writing for college and beyond (lulu press, 2019), rock and romanticism: post-punk, goth, and metal as dark romanticisms (palgrave macmillan, 2018), and rock and romanticism: blake, wordsworth, and rock from dylan to u2 (lexington books, 2018). he is currently at work on the edited anthologies david bowie and romanticism: the chameleon poet and the changeling self and women in rock/​women in literature: the emancipation of female will. kathryn s. freeman’s a guide to the cosmology of william blake, like s. foster damon’s a blake dictionary, is an encyclopedia of terms, works, characters, and figures relevant to blake’s corpus, one especially useful to newcomers to blake’s works who are trying to find their way through the labyrinth of his mythology. supplements have been published since damon’s time, including alexander gourlay’s “a glossary of terms, names, and concepts in blake” in the cambridge companion to william blake (2003), which he republished in expanded form on the william blake archive website, but nothing has appeared until now on the scale of the 181 entries freeman has written. her guide is neither as comprehensive as damon’s dictionary nor limited only to entries strictly relevant to blake’s cosmology, so it is perhaps best understood as her own selective updating of damon’s entries and a correction of some omissions in damon, such as a much-needed separate entry for catherine blake. entries vary in length from about one-half page, such as that for all religions are one, to about three pages, such as that for milton. each entry is accompanied by a bibliography, and freeman’s bibliographies vary widely in quality and usefulness. some consist of excellent, selective lists of recent scholarship about their topics, while others cite only erdman’s edition of blake’s writings, or perhaps blake records, but that’s it. i would say the typical bibliographic entry doesn’t mention substantial scholarship after 2005 and could have been drawn from the reading list for my blake exam in graduate school. for example, her entry on “the ancients” cites only bentley’s biography of blake, while that for “auguries of innocence” cites only erdman’s complete poetry and prose. however, many are quite lengthy and draw from more recent scholarship, such as the bibliography for “america: a prophecy.” freeman’s entry on “blake, catherine” is everything i could hope for: objective, informed by recent scholarship up to the time of her writing, and as long as it needs to be for an encyclopedia-style entry. that for milton is similarly very good, but there’s no separate entry for illuminated books, which could discuss medieval influences on blake, among other things. instead, there is just a cross-reference to “engraving.” most of her entries present multiple points of view about their topics, but others present a pithy, satisfying thesis of their own, such as the entry on “loom; weaving; garment”: “the veil represents the delusion of the dualism between nature, or the objective world, and the human subject” (153), an argument that has implications for her reading of blake and gender, which she spells out in brief. i should add that damon has no equivalent entry on either weaving or engraving, while gourlay has a short entry on “weaving/​woven” that associates this concept with eve and contrasts it to blake’s version of the traditional work of adam, which is plowing. this example illustrates one of the book’s purposes beyond serving as a guide to blake’s terms, which is to promulgate freeman’s thesis about blake’s rejection of dualism articulated in blake’s nostos: fragmentation and nondualism in “the four zoas” (1997) and in her entry here on “contraries; binaries; dualism and nondualism,” a thread woven throughout many of these entries. i should confess to the biases informing this review, and in doing so commit the grave sin of reviewing the book freeman did not write instead of the book she did. i picked up the guide hoping for an exhaustive blake encyclopedia in which every entry was written in the form of a neutral presentation of each topic informed by all relevant scholarship in the field up to the last three years prior to publication. i didn’t want a supplement to damon’s work, but a replacement for it. in other words, i wanted her to have had nothing else to do but spend the last ten years continually writing and updating this guide. surely that’s not unreasonable? what we have instead is freeman daring to write what she wanted about what she wanted to the extent that she wanted, and no more. if your interests align with hers, her entries offer just the coverage that you want on the topics that you want. if they do not, you’ll be very gratified by some entries and hoping for more on others. in truth, the dictionary or encyclopedia i want would have to be written by numerous contributors guided by an editorial board, and that would be a completely different kind of work, one that does not yet exist. my suspicion is that all current blake encyclopedias are in effect publications of the reading notes of blake scholars, who are required by the complexities of blake’s mythology to write such extensive notes that they deserve publication credit for them. overall, while freeman did not write the one blake encyclopedia to rule them all, she has put together a very useful work that should be kept alongside damon’s dictionary and supplements to it available in blake scholarship. it serves as a useful guide for new readers of blake at all levels, including graduate students, as well as a compendium of reminders for experienced readers of blake. network theory and ecology in blake’s jerusalem network theory and ecology in blake’s jerusalem by jade hagan jade hagan (jlh20@rice.edu) is a postdoctoral fellow and instructor in the program in writing and communication at rice university. she has published or forthcoming articles on blake in configurations and the edited collection romantic weltliteratur of the western world. her current book project examines how blake’s twentieth-century reception in american popular culture recast him as an ecological poet. according toi would like to thank tristanne connolly, joseph campana, claire fanger, and the editors of this journal, morris eaves and morton paley, for their thoughtful suggestions in reading earlier versions of this article. david erdman’s concordance to the writings of william blake, the most frequently used word in blake’s poetry is “all.”excluding common conjunctive words like “and,” “the,” and “of.” “all” appears 1007 times—​almost double the number of his second most frequently used word, “o,” which appears 555 times (erdman, concordance 2181). the prevalence of this pithy word suggests that radical inclusivity and interconnection are essential aspects of blake’s thought, yet anyone familiar with his work knows that “all” cannot refer to an undifferentiated mass, because, as he makes clear, “to generalize is to be an idiot” (e 641). rather, blake continually emphasizes the importance of attention to “minute particulars”; as he writes in jerusalem, “general forms have their vitality in particulars” (91.29, e 251). blake’s respect for the interconnected yet sovereign identity of each and every thing resonates with recent scholarship that attempts to rethink our notions about materialism and agency. in particular, it accords with the cross-disciplinary turn to theories of the network, a form embraced in recent years for its capacity to expose otherwise hidden connections and patterns. the network form has proven especially useful to ecological theory and criticism as a nonbinary and nonanthropocentric model of description. its advocates argue that it avoids the totalizing tendency of categorical labels like “nature” and “culture,” and that it shifts attention to the agency of individual entities, both human and nonhuman. from gilles deleuze and félix guattari’s introduction of the rhizomatic network with the declaration “we’re tired of trees” (15) to manuel castells’s claim that the internet has ushered in an unparalleled epistemic revolution and bruno latour’s multi-book elaboration of actor-network theory (ant), everything about recent invocations of the network screams novelty and innovation.for examples of some of the most prominent network theories, see latour, reassembling the social; galloway and thacker; moretti; levine, forms; and jagoda. while each theory is different, all present the network as a model of nonlinear “connectivity” (levine, forms 112). latour argues that networks also allow us to avoid reductive causal explanations that rely on preexisting and separate domains of reality, such as “society” or “nature,” by tracing individual points of contact or lines of influence among entities that traverse and upend such domains (reassembling 107-10). scholars in disciplines across the humanities and social sciences have thus turned to the network for an “exchange model” that renders visible the cross-pollination of categories normally seen as separate, without reducing one to the other.for “exchange model,” see asprem. in “from nation to network,” levine writes, “scholars of print culture and communication and transportation have been pointing us to the importance of networks for quite some time, and the discussion has grown more vigorous recently” (656). see also felski for a discussion of how comparative literature might benefit from network theory. latour’s network theory emerged from science and technology studies (sts), an interdisciplinary field that draws on a wide array of disciplines, from anthropology and sociology to history and political science, and has been influential in these disciplines ever since. critics interested in new materialisms, object-oriented philosophy, and speculative realism have been eager to embrace the network, and especially latour’s ant, not only for its view of actors as discrete and irreducible individuals, but also because ant attributes agency to nonhuman, and nonliving, objects.see harman. for a recent application of latour, and speculative realism more broadly, to romanticism, see gottlieb, who devotes a chapter to each of the “big six” romantic poets—​except blake. seen in the light of network theory and its relation to ecology, blake’s preoccupation with “all” has great implications for how his work might be read differently. despite the historicist turn to the social and material contexts in romantic criticism, blake critics have, for the most part, continued to nurture an exclusionary image of blake that erects a rigid divide between the sorts of things he would have approved of and those he wouldn’t. such exclusions are particularly evident in critical treatment of his attitude toward nonhumans and “nature,” which has received far less attention than his political and religious views, for instance.in line with ecocritical critiques of the term, i place scare quotes around the word “nature” to emphasize its unnatural status. this is owing in part to the comparatively recent development of ecocritical approaches, and in part to some of blake’s own statements on the matter. but lines such as “i assert for my self that i do not behold the outward creation & that to me it is hindrance & not action” cannot be taken unequivocally when one considers that blake also wrote, “you certainly mistake when you say that the visions of fancy are not to be found in this world” (“a vision of the last judgment,” e 565; letter to dr. trusler, 23 august 1799, e 702). blake’s jerusalem offers a case in point for why such partial representations do blake readers a disservice. in what follows, i delineate an incipient theory of networks in this notoriously complex text that not only anticipates our current network theories in distinct ways, but also speaks directly to the network’s implications for ecological theory and criticism. i examine blake’s use in jerusalem of the premodern concept of a network of correspondences, a complex and versatile idea that expresses a unifying link between all things in the universe (faivre xxi-xxii). i argue that the network of correspondences has at least a twofold function in jerusalem. first, it serves as a textual and iconographic figure for representing ecological interconnection, as well as blake’s belief in the interconnection of the material and spiritual; secondly, it serves as a figure for the abuses of power enabled by this interconnection. both functions point to the way that the figure of the network entails an implicit aspiration to represent or access a totalizing system. the desire for transcendence and omnipotence that the network form invites is ultimately denied, however, by blake’s insistence that “all” can only be glimpsed by looking at “minute particulars.” as jerusalem makes clear, “he who wishes to see a vision; a perfect whole / must see it in its minute particulars” (91.20-21, e 251). in what follows, i examine blake’s representation of the network of correspondences, noting along the way its similarities to and differences from ecological criticism and recent theories of the network, especially latour’s ant and alexander galloway and eugene thacker’s network theory. i focus on these two theories in particular because they exemplify a celebratory and a critical view of networks, respectively. i argue that blake, like his present-day counterparts, sees in the network a way of expressing ecological interconnection that is nonbinary, nonlinear, and radically inclusive, but that this same “flat” ontology enables and even contributes to the desire for mastery and the possibility of tyranny. in drawing out such threads, i aim to demonstrate, first, that the figure of the network provides a novel way to read blake as an ecological poet; secondly, that blake’s specifically ambivalent ecological vision provides useful insights into the pitfalls and assumptions of current network theories; and thirdly, that networks have a premodern dimension that prefigures applications of the network we are familiar with today. network theory, ecology, and jerusalem’s ambivalence like the city of golgonooza, which blake depicts as “continually building & continually decaying” (53.19, e 203), jerusalem exhibits tendencies toward both integration and disintegration, interconnection and disconnection. thus, while blake critics tend to agree that jerusalem dramatizes the consequences of division, isolation, and abstraction—​robert essick describes it as indicative of blake’s “desire for everything to come to a grand unity” (257) and kevin hutchings has called it “the most powerful instance of blake’s critique of atomistic philosophy” (29) and a tale of albion’s “ultimate renovation as a fully integrated, resocialized” being (156), to cite two of the more forceful pronouncements on the poem’s integrative tendency—​many would also concur with donald ault’s assessment that the “process of integration” constituted a “crisis of vision” for blake (173). on a formal level, as numerous critics have pointed out, jerusalem resists its own thematic call for unity,see, for instance, youngquist, “reading the apocalypse.” in the continuing city, paley points out that early critical interpretations of jerusalem were united in their recognition of its “disjointedness” (27), and that frye alone “finds it a unified whole” (26). he returns to this point later in the book, where he discusses the “disunity which all readers notice in jerusalem” (281). for a helpful overview of critical interpretations of the poem, see paley, continuing city, especially 12-32 and 278-83. yet scholars have not yet connected these integrative and disintegrative impulses to the figure of the network and its implications for ecology. to be sure, a number of scholars have drawn attention to what jon saklofske calls the “network architecture” of blake’s illuminated books. saree makdisi notes the “wide virtual network of traces among different plates, different copies, different illuminated books” in blake’s work (166). roger whitson has commented on how the “network materiality” of blake’s work lends itself to digital platforms (46), and, more recently, andrew burkett has treated blake’s “network aesthetics” in relation to media theory (98). moreover, the work of hutchings and mark lussier has already begun to dismantle the once prevalent view of blake as an anti-nature poet—​the odd man out of romanticism.see, for instance, hutchings, imagining nature; lussier, “blake’s deep ecology, or the ethos of otherness,” and “blake, deleuze, and the emergence of ecological consciousness.” michael’s article on blake and mary oliver in the fall 2011 issue of this journal also stands out for its demonstration of the way that blake’s twentieth-century reception has contributed to efforts to recast his work in a more ecological light. but none has engaged directly with both networks and ecology, and none has sought a basis for such engagement in jerusalem. the generality associated with the term “nature” stands as one reason blake seemed to reject the concept outright, as he understood that universalizing claims made on behalf of “nature” tend to impose “one law” on the multiplicity of beings (the marriage of heaven and hell plate 24, e 44). as he writes in jerusalem, for instance, “general good is the plea of the scoundrel hypocrite & flatterer” (55.61, e 205). hutchings has persuasively argued that blake, perhaps more than any other romantic poet, grasped the violence and ideological difficulties inherent in the concept of “nature”—​a concept that, far from neutral, is always already implicated in human systems of power (17). lussier and louise economides have separately taken up this issue of the inseparability of “nature” and human consciousness in their work on the parallels between blake, buddhism, and deep ecology. lussier sees the dynamic interaction between mind and matter in blake’s work as part of an “ethos of otherness,” or an orientation toward the other that doesn’t so much privilege human consciousness as it asks us to see that “the most sublime act is to set another before you” (“blake’s deep ecology” 58; marriage 7.17, e 36). likewise, lussier has pointed out that blake’s commitment to self-annihilation intersects with both the buddhist view of the self as the seat of suffering and our current understanding of how ecological devastation is in part a product of egoistic suffering (romantic dharma 180). economides grapples with blake’s relation to deep ecology’s dual emphasis on the “intrinsic value” of nonhuman beings, which foregrounds their irreducible alterity, and “wide identification” with nonhumans, which tends to deemphasize individual differences in favor of focusing on commonalities (par. 5). such work has shown that blake’s attitude toward nonhumans and the material world is, far from simply disapproving, exceedingly nuanced and complex, and avoids easy conflations of subject and object, self and other. yet despite the inroads made by this ecocritical scholarship, blake critics have, for the most part, remained hesitant to claim blake for “green romanticism” or ecological criticism more broadly. but if blake finds “swelld & bloated general forms” (jerusalem 38 [43].19, e 185) like “nature” repugnant, the plot and tone of jerusalem should remind us that he finds the fall into division equally abhorrent. indeed, the poem suggests that divisions, isolation, and abstraction result from the illusion of separateness from the divine, all other beings, and even ourselves. the opening scene stages this fundamental error, as jesus declares, i am in you and you in me, mutual in love divine: fibres of love from man to man thro albions pleasant land. …………………………………………………… lo! we are one only to be met with but the perturbed man away turns down the valleys dark; [saying. we are not one: we are many, thou most simulative] phantom of the over heated brain! (4.7-8, 20, 22-24, e 146)i’ve placed line 23 in italics and brackets, as erdman does, to indicate that this line was deleted. each chapter in jerusalem revolves around this tension between the one and many, which blake exhorts his “giant forms” and readers alike to realize is merely a matter of perception, “for contracting our infinite senses / we behold multitude; or expanding: we behold as one” (34 [38].17-18, e 180). jerusalem also portrays the division of the world into distinct human and nonhuman realms, and the subjugation of nonhumans implied by such a division, as harmful to humans, nonhumans, and even god: “for not one sparrow can suffer, & the whole universe not suffer also, / in all its regions, & its father & saviour not pity and weep” (25.8-9, e 170). the nonlinear, nondual, and nonanthropocentric perspective that inheres in such a statement, and in the passages quoted above, requires us to take seriously blake’s engagement with premodern ideas about a universal network of correspondences, for i argue that it is precisely his familiarity with the notion of a network of correspondences linking the material and spiritual realms that provided him with a framework through which he could imagine “all” as interconnected and interdependent on earth. this notion of a network of correspondences linking all parts of the universe informs virtually every esoteric tradition, and arguably defined the renaissance episteme.for correspondences as the renaissance episteme, see foucault, especially 17-45. many of the ideas associated with the network of correspondences have also survived in present-day formulations of network theory. in theosophy, imagination, tradition, antoine faivre defines the network of correspondences as “a matter of symbolic correspondences—​but considered here as very real—​between all parts of the visible and invisible universe,” and likens it to the “idea of the macrocosm and the microcosm, or principle of universal interdependence,” in which “the principles of noncontradiction and excluded third middle, as of causal linearity, are replaced by those of synchronicity and included middle” (xxi-xxii). in particular, the network of correspondences serves to draw connections between the material and spiritual realms. likewise, we find these nonbinary, nonlinear, and radically inclusive aspects of the network of correspondences in latour’s ant and galloway and thacker’s network theory. for instance, the ability of the network of correspondences to unravel binaries accords with galloway and thacker’s definition of a network as “any system of interrelationality, whether biological or informatic, organic or inorganic, technical or natural—​with the ultimate goal of undoing the polar restrictiveness of these pairings” (28). even more striking is the similarity of the connections between the material and spiritual in the network of correspondences to latour’s justification for his use of the term “network” specifically to “avoid the cartesian divide between matter and spirit” (“on actor-network theory” 370). perhaps this similarity should not seem so surprising, considering that latour has openly professed that actor-network theory developed out of his training in biblical exegesis (“coming out” 600). although blake never used the phrase “network of correspondences,” his familiarity with swedenborg, boehme, and paracelsus, all of whom subscribed to a theory of correspondences, in itself virtually guarantees that he would have been aware of the concept. he confirms his awareness in a direct reference to the theory of “correspondence” in his annotations to swedenborg, where he opposes correspondence to demonstration and insists on the discreteness of corresponding domains: “is it not also evident that one degree will not open the other & that science will not open intellect but that they are discrete & not continuous so as to explain each other except by correspondence which has nothing to do with demonstration for you cannot demonstrate one degree by the other” (e 605-06). blake’s insistence here that each “degree” is “discrete & not continuous” relates to his views about individuality, which in turn inform his critique of atomism, as we find in a letter to george cumberland in 1827, where he disputes newton’s “doctrine of the fluxions of an atom”: for a line or lineament is not formed by chance a line is a line in its minutest subdivision[s] strait or crooked it is itself & not intermeasurable with or by any thing else such is job but since the french revolution englishmen are all intermeasurable one by another certainly a happy state of agreement to which i for one do not agree. god keep me from the divinity of yes & no too the yea nay creeping jesus from supposing up & down to be the same thing as all experimentalists must suppose. (e 783) blake’s objection to atomism, like his objection to swedenborg’s claim about demonstrating correspondences, hinges on his belief in the irreducibility of individual entities—​a belief that accords with latour’s emphasis on the irreducibility of actors in any given network, but that conflicts with latour’s fundamental premise that a network formed by these actors could be traced and represented without violence to the individual “minute particulars” that constitute it. blake’s insistence on the inscrutability of the network of correspondences to logical demonstration and the priority he grants to individuals and “minute particulars” represent two key critiques of the network in jerusalem, and point to his ambivalent attitude toward networks and “natural” philosophy, not to mention swedenborg. his ambivalence about networks and ecology is particularly apparent in the alternately apocalyptic and unitive vision of jerusalem. in serving as a figure for both interconnection—​in an ecological sense, as well as in the sense of the interpenetration of the material and spiritual—​and the abuses of power enabled by this interconnection, the network form provides an occasion to revalue blake’s attitude toward the material world, and how his ambivalence specifically could be brought to bear on ecological theory and criticism. rather than posing a challenge to his ecological value, blake’s ambivalent portrayal of the network of correspondences reflects the ambivalence of existing ecological discourses, as seen, for instance, in the seemingly irresolvable tension between individual autonomy and collective action that has long hampered ecological theory and activism. developed in response to the global ecological crisis, ecocriticism has, since its inception, been dominated by calls for greater recognition of humanity’s interconnection with “nature.” this sentiment is epitomized by cheryll glotfelty’s adoption of barry commoner’s “first law of ecology”—​the idea that “‘everything is connected to everything else’”—​as a foundational principle for ecocriticism (xix), and has led ecocritics to search for new concepts, particularly concepts pertaining to our collective existence—​as communities, as a species, as one form of life among others, and as a life form embedded in environments that include a host of nonliving entities. the figure of the network has emerged as a popular contender for just the sort of concept ecological theory needs, as both network theory and ecological theory destabilize broad categories like “society” and “nature” by refuting the notion that a nonhuman “nature” is somehow separate from human activity. others are not so certain that commoner’s laws of ecology don’t need amending.for commoner’s discussion of these laws, see the closing circle 33-46. more recently, ecological theorists have begun to recognize the limitations of a view of ecology that pays attention only to connections and harmonious relationships, since both the extent of connectedness between particular entities and the impact of particular connections vary widely, and are by no means always amicable. frédéric neyrat, for instance, has called for “an ecology of separation” that would recognize separation, distance, and difference as the “repressed content” of ecology (101). thus far, however, little attention has been explicitly given to the specific ways in which network theory recapitulates and reinforces the inherent tensions and repressions of ecological thought. these tensions become evident in the divergent attitudes toward interconnection in the network theories of latour on the one hand and galloway and thacker on the other. latour’s ant has proven especially useful to ecological criticism, as it shares ecocriticism’s aim to deconstruct the false dichotomy between humans and “nature” and the related notion that there is a fixed distinction between conscious, active “subjects” and brute, inert “objects.” in reassembling the social, latour goes about demonstrating the interpenetration of humans and nonhumans by defining the “social” not as a specific sphere or kind of thing, but rather as “a type of connection between things that are not themselves social” (5). this broadening of the meaning of “social” is central to ant, as it exposes the diversity of entities that can and do coalesce into concretized networks. it goes hand in hand with latour’s expansion of the meaning of “actor” to refer to quite literally “any thing” that modifies a set of circumstances, and his use of “network” to mean simply “what is traced” by following the effects of the actors linked by association (reassembling 71, 108). ant thus ostensibly allows anyone to trace the network of associations formed by something as basic as an atom or as complex as a nation. in the exploit, on the other hand, galloway and thacker emphasize the political, and often exploitative, implications of networked interconnection. they refer almost exclusively to technological, such as computer or informatic, networks, which for them are not so much a methodology or a thing that must be traced as a class of existing objects that are having a dramatic impact on human societies. they thus argue that networks are not as democratic as theorists such as latour portray them (140), but rather “exercise novel forms of control that operate at a level that is anonymous and nonhuman, which is to say material” (5). the problem with networks, then, is not simply their ability to exert influence over individuals, but also the material impact of specifically “anonymous and nonhuman” forces. this becomes particularly evident in galloway and thacker’s discussion of the swarm, a network form that exemplifies the conflation of biological and technical networks in their work: a “swarm attacks from all directions, and intermittently but consistently,” they write, “it has no ‘front,’ no battle line, no central point of vulnerability. it is dispersed, distributed, and yet in constant communication. in short, it is a faceless foe, or a foe stripped of ‘faciality’ as such” (66). the phenomenon of swarms thus demonstrates how, above and beyond concerns about influence and control, networks conjure up anxieties about the impersonality of aggregated individuality in a collective body, and the loss of individual agency and identity that accompanies any totalizing system. as galloway and thacker aver, “it is the very idea of ‘the total’ that is both promised and yet continually deferred in the ‘unhumanity’ of networks, netwars, and even the multitude” (154). while latour’s ant and galloway and thacker’s network theory are but two examples, they well represent the divide between defenders of the network, who emphasize its decentralized connectivity, attention to nonhuman agencies, and generally nonbinary nature, and critics, who point up its totalizing tendencies, anonymity, and enabling of a control society. thus, to latour’s claim that “dispersion, destruction, and deconstruction are not the goals to be achieved but what needs to be overcome. it’s much more important to check what are the new institutions, procedures, and concepts able to collect and to reconnect the social” (reassembling 11), we can imagine galloway and thacker replying, “connectivity is a threat. the network is a weapons system” (16). such drastically opposed attitudes point to the extent to which the network, as the exemplary figure of interconnection in our digital age, reveals the need for a politics of interconnection. indeed, although galloway and thacker’s work is also ecologically oriented, their differences with latour rehearse a common critique of ecological discourse: that it often fails to take political questions about identity, difference, and power into account. fortunately, these are the very sorts of topics that blake, and blake critics, excel at addressing. this means that historicist, formalist, and politically oriented approaches to blake, for instance, could in fact complement ecological approaches, and, in doing so, add to his ecological value. the alliance of these approaches with network and ecological theory is of particular relevance to blake’s jerusalem, an epic poem whose sheer complexity requires that we both trace connections between seemingly disparate events, characters, and formal elements and recognize how it defies such attempts at containment. on the one hand, blake’s emphatic vision of unity, connectivity, and coexistence in jerusalem suggests that the network form provides a useful analogue for thinking through the ontological, ethical, and political implications of his broader notion of the inseparability of the material and spiritual, and his paradoxical view of individuals as both “discrete & not continuous,” but also composed of, and a part of, other individuals. as he writes in milton, a work often seen as continuous with jerusalem (hutchings 153): “we are not individuals but states: combinations of individuals” (32 [35].10, e 131). blake’s portrayal of the interconnected and interdependent relationships that inhere within a single individual reveals a symbiotic view of individuality in his work. moreover, tracing these ideas in jerusalem through the lens of network theory supports an ecological reading of blake, as it reveals he had realized a basic but powerful insight: that, as ecologist bernard patten puts it, “ecology is networks” (343). on the other hand, blake’s realization that interconnection does not guarantee equality offers a corrective to ecological criticism that remains content to connect the dots between disparate entities without accounting for the dynamism and “force of things” (bennett). as patten also points out, the “key property of the network phenomenon is influence—​cause at a distance, or indirect determination” (292). ecological entanglement also means that no individual exists free of relations, but is rather always part of a larger system—​entangled in an environment or context that threatens to exert control or undue “influence” over individuals. thus, although blake insists that “contraries mutually exist” (jerusalem 17.33, e 162), the narrative of jerusalem does not betray an idle acceptance of this idea, but rather continually reinscribes the tension between individual liberty and outside influence. after all, blake more often writes of “two bleeding contraries equally true” or “two contraries war against each other in fury & blood ” (jerusalem 24.3, e 169; 58.15, e 207; emphasis mine). but he also never backs down from his contention that only an acceptance of the coexistence of both “contraries” will allow us to “live in perfect harmony in eden the land of life” (34 [38].21, e 180). building the “network fine” in jerusalem: blake’s dark ecology the word “network” appears only once throughout blake’s work—​in the third chapter of jerusalem—​but the presence and effects of networks are felt throughout the poem. in fact, the networked nature of textuality is a key feature of blake’s texts, as nelson hilton has pointed out in literal imagination (16). the words “text” and “network” are, moreover, etymologically related, as both refer to things that are woven (oed). “network” emerged in the sixteenth century out of the language used in metallurgy and textiles to describe objects made of fabric or metal fibers interlaced in a net or web (levine, forms 113). blake’s frequent recourse to the language and imagery of both textiles and metallurgy throughout jerusalem thus constitutes one way that he represents the network of correspondences in the poem. indeed, to the reader attentive to the material objects in jerusalem, the abundant looms, fibers, spindles, and webs—​like the many furnaces, anvils, and descriptions of melting, forging, and molding of metals and forms—​leap off the page.see plates 4, 56, 85, and 100 for examples of designs that evoke the network. a number of critics have commented on the extensive weaving imagery in jerusalem. erdman first noted the connection between the textile industry and the “daughters of albion” with their “needle work” (prophet 332; jerusalem 66.17, e 218). miner and paley have concentrated on specific aspects of this weaving theme, such as the figures of the veil and garment, respectively (miner; paley, “figure of the garment”). hilton devotes a chapter to weaving imagery in literal imagination (102-26). more recently, mazzeo has argued that the textile industry not only informed the verbal and visual content of jerusalem, but also may have informed blake’s very practice of illuminated printing, insofar as some of his printing techniques appear to be direct adaptations of calico printing (118). moreover, in identifying the winged figures on plates 2, 14, and 53 as silk moths—​in addition to a number of other visual allusions to silk farming scattered throughout jerusalem—​mazzeo adds to the archive of imagery associated with textiles in the poem. these scholars also note that textile imagery crops up in other works by blake, especially his longer works like milton and the four zoas. none has noted, however, the similarities between such imagery and the language that literary critics and network theorists alike tend to use to describe networks. hilton’s suggestion that blake’s representations of networks, webs, and fibrous materials are mostly negative (107) does not square, however, with blake’s depiction of networks in jerusalem. it’s true that present-day network theories tend to emphasize circulation and movement, while blake emphasizes more the mediumistic, or environmental, and entangling features of the network form. but if, for blake, “every thing that lives is holy” (marriage plate 27, e 45), the network form is what enables the animation of “every thing” in jerusalem. both of these dynamics, the entangling and enabling, are at play in his descriptions of the weaving of the network. for instance, in his most explicit reference to a network, blake portrays it as a medium of earthly existence characterized by breath and love: “[los’s] daughters weave on the cushion & pillow, network fine / that rahab & tirzah may exist & live & breathe & love” (59.42-43, e 209). in doing so, he casts the network as an ambient figure of environmentality—​a sustaining milieu.for an analysis of the etymological links between “environment,” “ambience,” and “milieu,” see spitzer. that he depicts the “network fine” as an analogue to what he elsewhere calls the “web of life” further suggests that the network in jerusalem should be read as an ecological trope, since the web of life is a central metaphor in ecology.see, for instance, capra. here again, blake’s description of this web, or network, is apparently positive, even joyful, as he writes of how los’s “emanation / joy’d in the many weaving threads in bright cathedrons dome / weaving the web of life for jerusalem” (83.71-73, e 242). his recurrent descriptions of the daughters of albion weaving a network to link together “the rocky stones” (a metaphor for physical forms) with “fibres of life” also reinforces this double association of textiles with the network, and the network with the ecological notion of a web of life: “and the twelve daughters of albion united in rahab & tirzah / a double female: and they drew out from the rocky stones / fibres of life to weave (67.2-4, e 220). as readers of blake know, nothing is ever really one sided, and his use of weaving imagery here (and elsewhere) is particularly fraught. for blake, to be woven into the web of life is as much about accepting a state of limitations, narrowed senses, mortality, and imposed order or bids for control as it is the means of communication, connection, exchange, and earthly existence. that his descriptions of the network quoted in the paragraph above feature rahab and tirzah specifically is another clear sign that the labor of weaving is not merely a labor of breath and love. although blake drew the names rahab and tirzah from the bible, where they are portrayed in more or less positive terms (sturrock 24-26), in his hands they are transformed into negative symbols of natural religion, and the cruelties, sacrifices, and delusions of the material world itself.see especially jerusalem plate 67, e 220-21; 73.39, e 228; and 89.2-5, e 248. thus, though blake depicts rahab and tirzah as the origin of “fibres of life to weave,” they are also described on the same plate as “denying eternity” (67.12, e 220). as jerusalem continually reminds us, this integrative tendency of the network is never separate from the looming threat of oppression. although today the word “network” tends to evoke fiber optics more than the fibers of clothes, the etymological link between networks and textiles that is on display in jerusalem resurfaces in latour’s treatment of the network. latour’s description of networks as “fibrous, thread-like, wiry, stringy, ropy, capillary” (“on actor-network theory” 370), for instance, recalls the fibers, threads, and strings of blake’s textile imagery. moreover, his last word, “capillary,” also points to the anatomical valence of “network” and recalls the correspondence between the network of veins and arteries in the body and the network crisscrossing the globe that we find in the relation between the design on plate 57 and the textual description on plate 83. tracing this relationship demonstrates how the network also manifests in jerusalem as a complex and nonlinear constellation of relations that link distinct plates, various scales, and different dimensions all at once. jerusalem copy e (c. 1821), plate 57. 21.0 x 14.9 cm. yale center for british art, paul mellon collection. b1992.8.1(57). image courtesy of the william blake archive. as with many instances of the verbal-visual relationship in blake’s work, the text that seems to correspond with the images on this plate appears on an entirely different plate—​in this case, plate 83: immingled, interwoven, glistening to the sickening sight. let cambel and her sisters sit within the mundane shell: forming the fluctuating globe according to their will. according as they weave the little embryon nerves & veins the eye, the little nostrils, & the delicate tongue & ears of labyrinthine intricacy: so shall they fold the world that whatever is seen upon the mundane shell, the same be seen upon the fluctuating earth woven by the sisters. (83.32-39, e 241) not only does this description of cambel and her sisters sitting “within the mundane shell: / forming the fluctuating globe” fit the image on plate 57 of three women in the act of covering earth with a network of “embryon nerves & veins,” but the imagery of being “immingled, interwoven” also evokes the entanglements and textiles associated with the term “network.” as latour’s description of networks as “capillary” suggests and as blake’s anatomical language here confirms, “network” also has a biological sense that refers to a structure with intersecting lines or interstices “forming part of animal or plant tissue” (oed). whereas in the image we see this network at a scale “above,” or greater than, that of earth, in the text it appears “below” the surface of the human body, on the anatomical scale of “nerves & veins.” moreover, another layer of connection inheres in the network of correspondences between “whatever is seen upon the mundane shell” and what is “seen upon the fluctuating earth woven by the sisters.” the network thus acts as a bridge between widely divergent scales, linking separate chapters and plates, and highlighting the “network architecture” of blake’s poem. indeed, the scale of action in jerusalem ranges from the cosmic to minute, from the infinite to the infinitesimal, in a way that gestures toward the constitutive role that networks play in an array of contexts. this fractal quality of the network—​its scalability and the self-similarity among the various scales—​also surfaces in more recent theorizations. in the final pages of the exploit, galloway and thacker call this quality the “elemental” nature of networks: networks are elemental, in the sense that their dynamics operate at levels ‘above’ and ‘below’ that of the human subject. the elemental is this ambient aspect of networks, this environmental aspect—​all the things that we as individuated human subjects or groups do not directly control or manipulate. the elemental is not ‘the natural,’ however (a concept that we do not understand). the elemental concerns the variables and variability of scaling, from the micro level to the macro. (157) galloway and thacker associate this notion of the elemental with “an ancient, even pre-socratic understanding of networks. the pre-socratic question is a question about the fabric of the world. of what is it made? what is it that stitches the world together, that links part to part in a larger whole?” (156). their language recalls the language of networks that we find in blake and in faivre’s description of the network of correspondences. for instance, “the fabric of the world,” or that which “stitches the world together” recalls blake’s portrayal of the network as an eminently scalable medium of existence—​a “network fine” that appears at once on the micro level of “the little embryon nerves & veins” and on the macro level as the “threads of vala & jerusalem running from mountain to mountain / over the whole earth” (67.28-29, e 220)—​while their claim that networks “operate at levels ‘above’ and ‘below,’” “from the micro level to the macro,” clearly echoes the “idea of the macrocosm and the microcosm, or principle of universal interdependence” that faivre associates with the network of correspondences. these verbal parallels provide an opening to read blake’s preoccupation with “variables and variability of scaling” as a concern with the “elemental,” and to connect this interest to the ecocritical turn to the elemental. this elemental turn, which jeffrey jerome cohen and lowell duckert describe in elemental ecocriticism as seeking to recover a view of matter as a “precarious system and dynamic entity” rather than a “reservoir of tractable commodities” (5), calls attention to the ways that the material elements themselves have agency. a focus on the “inhuman challenge” of the elemental can also activate fears about the potential loss of individuality and control associated with networks and ecological entanglement (cohen and duckert 6). it is this attention to the dangers of connectivity and corporatism that we tend to associate with blake, and jerusalem certainly provides a wealth of examples that demonstrate how attempts to assert or regain one’s autonomy can quickly escalate into ploys to gain dominion. likewise, blake shows how the same network of correspondences that represents a means of connection and intimacy can double as a tool of tyranny and war. for instance, when los complains that he will soon be “overgrown in roots,” and directs his emanation, enitharmon, to “draw out in pity” the “fibres” surrounding him and “let them run on the winds of thy bosom” (87.6, 8-9, e 246), she retorts: no! i will sieze thy fibres & weave them: not as thou wilt but as i will, for i will create a round womb beneath my bosom lest i also be overwoven with love; be thou assured i never will be thy slave let mans delight be love; but womans delight be pride in eden our loves were the same here they are opposite i have loves of my own. (87.12-18, e 246) here, we see how “fibres of brotherhood,” or interconnection, can be placed in the service of “fibres of dominion” (88.14, 13, e 246). this image of two beings linked by “fibres,” with both vying for control in increasingly grandiose ways, demonstrates how actions rooted in self-interest can play into the hands of instrumental reason and social control, potentially devolving into violence and tyranny. enitharmon’s reaction to los’s desire for independence—​her decision to fight fire with fire by responding to los’s desire with her own assertions of independence—​goes on to provoke los, on the next plate, to act in even more destructive and dictatorial ways. together, their interaction dramatizes the darker side of ecological or networked interconnection, as it not only shows how changes in one part of a networked or ecological system can create feedback loops that worsen the conditions of the system as a whole, but also demonstrates how networked and ecological interconnection can paradoxically lead to or deepen divisions. galloway and thacker appear to have recognized blake’s insight on this matter, as their admonition that “there exists today a fearful new symmetry of networks fighting networks” (15) points directly back to blake. “fearful new symmetry” at once alludes to how our increasingly networked world entails ever-higher levels of risk and raises the question of whether equality, or “symmetry,” in power relations is in fact always desirable. like the passage featuring los and enitharmon discussed in the previous paragraph, galloway and thacker’s line harnesses blake’s ambivalence toward “fearful symmetry” and helps to explain their and blake’s hesitance toward networked and ecological interconnection. to understand how the framework of the network adds to this blakean insight, we need only turn to the figure of the polypus in jerusalem, which not only could be usefully compared to galloway and thacker’s discussion of swarms and faceless enemies, but also illuminates how this “fearful new symmetry” relates to blake’s view of individuals as both discrete and yet constituted of and entangled with other individuals. envying stood the enormous form at variance with itself in all its members: in eternal torment of love & jealousy: drivn forth by los time after time from albions cliffy shore, drawing the free loves of jerusalem into infernal bondage; that they might be born in contentions of chastity & in deadly hate between leah & rachel, daughters of deceit & fraud bearing the images of various species of contention and jealousy & abhorrence & revenge & deadly murder. (69.6-13, e 223) blake’s depiction of the polypus, a form that he describes in the lines before these as “all the males combined into one male” such that “every one / became a ravening eating cancer growing in the female” (69.1-2, e 223), suggests that any “enormous form” that purports to encompass “all” can only do so with extreme violence. anything that connects and thus affects “all” will have to contend with the conflicts that inevitably arise from the vagaries of individual desires, agencies, and bids for control—​many of which oppose each other (and even themselves). here, blake rejects the illusion of harmony in any form of holism, and reminds us why, if the other romantics enjoin us to idealize a vast and grand image of “nature”—​“the one life within us and abroad” (coleridge 28)—​he prefers a “nature” of the minute and particular. much like galloway and thacker’s description of swarms, not only does the formation of the polypus involve “jealousy & abhorrence & revenge & deadly murder,” such a conglomerate form makes it nearly impossible to determine who is to blame, and even what constitutes an action (stout 3). as daniel stout argues in regard to a new awareness in the romantic period of the networks of information and affect that bind us together, “it may be that all action can be said to begin in self-interest,” but “no action can be said to stay that way” (4). in this light, the many lists of objects and proper names in jerusalem, which have memorably been described as a “wall of words” (de luca 89), form a counterpoint to the aggregated and anonymous form of the polypus. for instance, when, in a more metallurgical than textile depiction of the network that enables existence, blake describes los’s furnaces, anvil, and hammer in the process of creating life on earth, he does so by listing specific parts of the ecosystem: “howl[ing] loud; living: self-moving,” they range across the four corners of the earth “to create the lion & wolf the bear: the tyger & ounce: / to create the wooly lamb & downy fowl & scaly serpent / the summer & winter: day & night: the sun & moon & stars / the tree: the plant: the flower: the rock: the stone: the metal” (73.2, 17-20, e 228). blake’s frequent use of catalogues and his habit of using ampersands and colons to separate the terms within them have the effect of at once visually and verbally distinguishing these entities from one another and suggesting their likeness or analogy with one another. this combination of conjunction and distinction in blake’s catalogues recalls latour’s predilection for making lists—​“latour litanies” (bogost 38)—​and confirms object-oriented critics’ sense of the list as a useful ecological trope.see morton, “here comes everything” 173; bogost 49-59. another way that blake addresses the dangers of generalization is purposefully to avoid representing “all” at once. this is particularly evident in his visual depictions of network imagery, which figure prominently in the designs of jerusalem. for example, consider the three women shown in the act of weaving on plate 59, the same plate on which blake’s single instance of the word “network” appears. jerusalem copy e (c. 1821), plate 59. 22.4 x 14.6 cm. yale center for british art, paul mellon collection. b1992.8.1(59). image courtesy of the william blake archive. the fiery background of the design suggests that it corresponds to the lines on the plate that read, “and one daughter of los sat at the fiery reel & another / sat at the shining loom with her sisters attending round / … / and another daughter of los sat at the spinning wheel” (59.26-27, 29, e 209). the women are shown holding threads that extend beyond the plate’s borders, and they also seem to be looking behind them, toward what lies beyond the outer edge of the image’s frame. such details suggest that what they are weaving is far too vast to be contained within the confines of the plate, or even understood. the text confirms this point, as blake describes the daughters’ labor as “endless” and avers that “men understand not the distress & the labour & sorrow” (59.30, 50, e 209). in making the totality of what is being woven invisible and foregrounding its obscurity, blake succeeds in conveying a central feature of this network that connects all material and spiritual things: its potentially infinite, and incomprehensible, nature. while it’s worth recalling that, for blake, a thing’s invisibility does not mean that it isn’t real or can’t be felt and experienced, his refusal to depict “all” contrasts with the totalizing impulse and desire for mastery through visualization that we find in other deployments of network theory, such as franco moretti’s claim in “network theory, plot analysis”: “what i took from network theory were less concepts than visualization: the possibility of extracting characters and interactions from a dramatic structure, and turning them into a set of signs that i could see at a glance, in a two-dimensional space” (10). the abstraction and objectification implied by moretti’s statement would certainly be anathema to blake’s particularizing sensibility. in light of blake’s refusal to concede to such claims to mastery, it is worth taking stock of the instances in which he admits to his own dependencies and limitations. indeed, although critics have paid little attention to how blake was influenced by nonhuman, material entities,a few exceptions come to mind. fosso, perkins, and patenaude, for example, have examined the role of nonhuman animals in blake’s work, and, in patenaude’s case, geographical features as well, while viscomi has treated blake’s awareness of the important role of the materiality of his medium and artistic tools in his work (see especially viscomi 40-50). many have been more willing to take seriously the idea that he was subject to the dictates of spiritual beings. jerusalem begins on such a note, as blake writes in the preface to the first chapter: “we who dwell on earth can do nothing of ourselves, every thing is conducted by spirits, no less than digestion or sleep” (e 145). other instances drawn from his letters confirm this sense of blake as very much aware of his own submission to such spiritual dictates, as when he writes to thomas butts: “i am under the direction of messengers from heaven daily & nightly but the nature of such things is not as some suppose. without trouble or care. temptations are on the right hand & left behind the sea of time & space roars & follows swiftly he who keeps not right onward is lost & if our footsteps slide in clay how can we do otherwise than fear & tremble” (10 january 1803, e 724). in addition to its connection to theories of the network, blake’s awareness of his entanglement with material and spiritual beings accords with the notion of “trans-corporeality” developed by ecocritic stacy alaimo, which exposes how humans are always already entangled with nonhumans. “since ‘nature’ is always as close as one’s own skin—​perhaps even closer,” she writes, “thinking across bodies may catalyze the recognition that the environment, which is too often imagined as inert, empty space or as a resource for human use, is, in fact, a world of fleshy beings with their own needs, claims, and actions” (2). alphonso lingis delineates those “needs, claims, and actions” in the imperative, where his central premise is that “sensibility, sensuality, and perception [are] not reactions to physical causality nor adjustments to physical pressures, nor free and spontaneous impositions of order on amorphous data, but responses to directives” issued by the things in and of our environment (3)—​a claim analogous to the basic idea underlying ant, and one that has resonated with ecocritics and scholars interested in the new materialisms. lingis’s notion of “responses to directives” provides an illuminating parallel to blake’s descriptions of being “under the direction of messengers” and “conducted by spirits,” as it draws out the environmental, or atmospheric, connotations of the word “spirit” and allows us to see blake’s statements as evidence of his environmental awareness and responsivity. thus blake, and jerusalem in particular, have much to say about the importance of inclusion and relations with other, nonhuman beings. against the subject/object dualism implied by a mechanistic concept of “nature,” blake’s representation of the network of correspondences in jerusalem evinces his belief in the importance of the “minute particulars” of each individual actor, as well as an essential unity linking all kinds of beings, both spiritual and earthly. in the last lines, he posits a unity predicated on the shared divinity of all things: all human forms identified even tree metal earth & stone. all human forms identified, living going forth & returning wearied into the planetary lives of years months days & hours reposing and then awaking into his bosom in the life of immortality. and i heard the name of their emanations they are named jerusalem. (99.1-5, e 258-59) although this passage would seem to confirm the sentiment that the “only valid generalization one can make about blake’s overall attitude toward nature is that he almost never treats it apart from a human context” (lefcowitz 121), blake’s anthropomorphism here actually confers on all beings the powers normally reserved for “human forms.” for blake, a “human form” is one with a will, individual perspective, and the faculty of imagination. to say that trees, metal, earth, and stones are “human forms” is to say that they have their own kind of intelligence, point of view, and power in the world. rather than subjecting “nature,” blake endows both human and nonhuman entities with intrinsic value and agency in jerusalem. he is not so much opposed to nonhumans or the “unhumanity” of networks, then, as he is to the inhumane.hutchings makes a similar point in the coda to imagining nature about humanization being a process aimed at humans’ “anything but humane” treatment of nonhumans and other humans (217; see also 206-09). network form and its consequences the title of this concluding section is a reference to frances ferguson’s essay “organic form and its consequences.” therein, ferguson traces how the notion of organic form as a kind of model object developed in the romantic period into an organicist method, and how this organicism paradoxically led to a kind of mechanistic utilitarianism, in which descriptions of the particularities of unique objects are given up for the application of generalizing and universalizing assumptions (232). it is this understanding of utilitarianism—​not anything like “nature” or any individual organic or inorganic entities—​ferguson argues, that emphasized “the importance of environment in understanding what it was to make a choice” (234); that is, for figures such as bentham and hume, who epitomize this sort of “classical utilitarianism,” the making of a choice is not an assertion of belief or an exercise of self-interest, but merely a response to the narrowed range of options defined by one’s context or environment (234-35). in this utilitarian view, choices do not have to be conscious; they become “virtually automatic rather than expressive of free will or large-scale belief” (235). i mention this essay because it seems to me to provide an analogue to how, though it may not strike us as an organic metaphor, the network form constitutes a type of organicism akin to the mechanistic utilitarianism that ferguson describes—​that is, in the network theories explored in my essay, the network is imagined either, as in latour’s ant, as an abstract and effectively universal concept, or, as in galloway and thacker’s networks, as a “faceless” whole greater than the sum of its parts. both end up conveying more of the “mystery” of networks than confidence in their transparency. here, i use the word “mystery” with its specifically blakean inflections: “mystery” as that which obfuscates and disempowers, “mystery” as that which exploits the mystified.the word “mystery” (often, the “tree,” “root,” or “stem” of mystery) appears throughout blake’s work, beginning with the songs, and with greater frequency in jerusalem and especially the four zoas. in addition to its association with obscurity and exploitation, its close and frequent connection with vegetative imagery suggests that blake also associates “mystery” with the deceptions of natural religion, and with claims made on behalf of “nature” more generally. see “the human abstract” (e 27); jerusalem (75.19, e 231; 83.13, e 241; 93.25, e 254); and the numerous instances in the four zoas. in short, like blake’s notion of “mystery,” both network theories end up suggesting that to recognize that we live in an age of networks is to recognize how little we, as individuals, matter. indeed, blake understood that networks, in standing in for things we cannot fully conceptualize or accurately map, risk reinscribing “priesthood” by another name.the context of blake’s use of the term “priesthood” in marriage is also instructive, and clarifies the term’s connection to “mystery”: “till a system was formed, which some took advantage of & enslav’d the vulgar by attempting to realize or abstract the mental deities from their objects: thus began priesthood” (plate 11, e 38). only genuine ambivalence, it seems, comes close to abiding with the complexity that networks, ecological or otherwise, present, and it is precisely blake’s ambivalence toward networks in jerusalem that make the poem such a fitting text for understanding the impasses in both ecological and network theory. as we’ve seen, network theory can help us recognize the many examples of nonhuman agency at work in jerusalem, as in the active roles played by nonhumans in the recurrent battles that break out over the rightful possessors of albion, jerusalem, and their emanations: loud! loud! the mountains lifted up their voices, loud the forests rivers thunderd against their banks, loud winds furious fought cities & nations contended in fires & clouds & tempests. the seas raisd up their voices & lifted their hands on high the stars in their courses fought. the sun! moon! heaven! earth. contending for albion & for jerusalem his emanation and for shiloh, the emanation of france & for lovely vala. (55.23-29, e 204) scenes such as this, which emphasize the formidable sublimity of nonhumans’ power, challenge the assumption of blake’s belief in humans’ mastery over the nonhuman world. in fact, jerusalem depicts nonhumans rejecting human attempts to gain control: “they send the dove & raven: & in vain the serpent over the mountains. / and in vain the eagle & lion over the four-fold wilderness. / they return not: but generate in rocky places desolate. / they return not; but build a habitation separate from man” (66.70-73, e 219). blake’s implicit attribution of agency to discrete nonhuman actors in such passages, though not without ambivalence, anticipates ant’s attention to how, more than a mere backdrop to human action, nonhumans “authorize, allow, afford, encourage, permit, suggest, influence, block, render possible, [and] forbid” human action, and thus exercise agency in their own right (latour, reassembling 72). galloway and thacker’s network theory and jerusalem have also been mutually illuminating, especially in regard to blake’s crisis of integration. galloway and thacker’s insight that “it is the very idea of ‘the total’ that is both promised and yet continually deferred in the ‘unhumanity’ of networks, netwars, and even the multitude,” calls attention to the way that blake depicts totalizing gestures and figures in the poem as totalitarian—​and self-defeating. as he writes in his address “to the jews”: “and he who makes his law a curse, / by his own law shall surely die” (27.83-84, e 173). on the other hand, if the many sudden bodily “divisions and comminglings” in jerusalem are any indication, blake remains more open to the veering agencies and alliances—​human, nonhuman, and spiritual—​that surprise and upset galloway and thacker’s almost technological determinist account of networks.for “divisions and comminglings,” see connolly, especially chapters 5 and 6. it is for this reason that blake forecloses on the possibility of seeing “all,” and instead tends to rely on the catalogue as a mode of nontotalizing inclusivity. my reading of the various representations of the network in jerusalem thus suggests that blake’s ecology is best understood as a dark ecology. morton’s notion of a “dark ecology” proposes that “instead of perpetuating metaphors of depth and authenticity (as in deep ecology), we might aim for something profound yet ironic, neither nihilistic nor solipsistic, but aware like a character in a noir movie of her or his entanglement in and with life-forms” (“queer ecology” 279). the darkness of this dark ecology refers both to its openness to a universe of withdrawn beings—​a “nature” that exceeds human comprehension—​and to the epistemological and ethical implications of such a view. as ecocritics have recently begun to argue, although the ecological crisis has required that we rethink our collective existence, it has also made thinking a whole, totality, or world—​anything like a notion of “all”—​nearly impossible. timothy clark, for example, has critiqued a number of well-meaning but problematic ecological narratives that convey a sense that “reality itself is ‘continuous,’” such as the “whole earth” discourse that arose in the 1960s with nasa’s photographs of earth from space (17). clark’s point is that “the earth is not ‘one’ in the sense of an entity we can see, understand or read as a whole”; rather, we always perceive earth from “inside” it (15). morton’s dark ecology and clark’s critique of the desire for a totalizing view dovetail with the critiques of reductionism, absolutes, and holism that we find in blake’s jerusalem, as well as his broader disdain for generalization and tyranny. indeed, blake’s own depiction of earth from outer space on plate 57 of jerusalem purposefully refuses to provide us with a complete image of the globe. what, then, do blake’s continual recourse to “all” and his use of network imagery mean in light of such critiques, considering the close associations between networks and totalities? jerusalem suggests that he invokes words like “all” and the concept and imagery of the network to figure a mode of inclusivity and collectivity that can never be grasped “all” at once, as los reminds us: “and [los] saw every minute particular of albion degraded & murderd / but saw not by whom; they were hidden within the minute particulars” (45 [31].7-8, e 194). blake’s deployment and critique of the network of correspondences suggests that current interest in the network stems from the way that it tends to function as a placeholder for things we do not, and perhaps cannot, understand—​one of which is how we could be both individual and composite entities at the same time. learning how to accept, if not understand, such ideas is the desiderata of ecological criticism, too, as val plumwood argues in environmental culture: the ecological crisis of reason: “we need a concept of the other as interconnected with self, but as also a separate being in their own right, 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miner, paul. “william blake: two notes on sources.” bulletin of the new york public library 62 (1958): 203-07. moretti, franco. “network theory, plot analysis.” pamphlets of the stanford literary lab. 1 may 2011. <http://​litlab.​stanford.​edu/​literarylabpamphlet2a.​text.​pdf>. morton, timothy. “here comes everything: the promise of object-oriented ontology.” qui parle 19.2 (2011): 163-90. —​—​—​. “queer ecology.” pmla 125.2 (march 2010): 273-82. “network, n. and adj.” oxford english dictionary. june 2017. <https://​www.​oed.​com>. neyrat, frédéric. “elements for an ecology of separation: beyond ecological constructivism.” general ecology: the new ecological paradigm. ed. erich hörl with james burton. london: bloomsbury academic, 2017. 101-27. paley, morton d. the continuing city: william blake’s “jerusalem.” oxford: clarendon press, 1983. —​—​—​. “the figure of the garment in the four zoas, milton, and jerusalem.” blake’s sublime allegory: essays on “the four zoas,” “milton,” “jerusalem.” ed. stuart curran and joseph anthony wittreich, jr. madison: university of wisconsin press, 1973. 119-39. patenaude, troy. “‘nourished by the spirits of forests and floods’: blake, nature, and modern environmentalism.” re-envisioning blake. ed. mark crosby, patenaude, and angus whitehead. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, 2012. 180-206. patten, b. c. “network ecology: indirect determination of the life-environment relationship in ecosystems.” theoretical studies of ecosystems: the network perspective. ed. m. higashi and t. p. burns. cambridge: cambridge university press, 1991. 288-351. perkins, david. “animal rights and ‘auguries of innocence.’” blake 33.1 (summer 1999): 4-11. plumwood, val. environmental culture: the ecological crisis of reason. abingdon: routledge, 2002. saklofske, jon. “remediating william blake: unbinding the network architectures of blake’s songs.” european romantic review 22.3 (june 2011): 381-88. smith, mark trevor. ‘all nature is but art’: the coincidence of opposites in english romantic literature. west cornwall, ct: locust hill press, 1993. spitzer, leo. “milieu and ambiance: an essay in historical semantics.” philosophy and phenomenological research 3.1 (september 1942): 1-42, and 3.2 (december 1942): 169-218. stout, daniel m. corporate romanticism: liberalism, justice, and the novel. new york: fordham university press, 2017. sturrock, june. “blake and the women of the bible.” literature and theology 6.1 (march 1992): 22-32. “text, n.1.” oxford english dictionary. june 2017. <https://​www.​oed.​com>. viscomi, joseph. blake and the idea of the book. princeton: princeton university press, 1993. whitson, roger. “digital blake 2.0.” blake 2.0: william blake in twentieth-century art, music and culture. ed. steve clark, tristanne connolly, and jason whittaker. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, 2012. 41-55. youngquist, paul. madness and blake’s myth. university park, pa: pennsylvania state university press, 1989. —​—​—​. “reading the apocalypse: the narrativity of blake’s jerusalem.” studies in romanticism 32.4 (winter 1993): 601-25. review: john higgs, william blake now; john higgs, william blake vs. the world john higgs. william blake now: why he matters more than ever. london: weidenfeld & nicolson, 2019. 80 pp. £6.99, paperback and e-book; £5.99, audiobook. john higgs. william blake vs. the world. london: weidenfeld & nicolson, 2021. x + 390 pp. £20.00, hardcover; £10.99, paperback and e-book; £19.99, audiobook. reviewed by alexander s. gourlay alexander s. gourlay (agourlay@risd.edu) teaches at the rhode island school of design. john higgs is a versatile british essayist, television producer, journalist, and novelist (and more) who has written an odd but excellent general introduction to blake. a few years ago he began working on a big but amorphous (from the sound of it) blake project; shaken by the brexit vote and stirred by the size and diversity of the audience at the ceremony dedicating the blake memorial in bunhill fields, higgs published a short collection of essays considering causes and implications of the huge change in blake’s reputation in his home country since his death. in 2021 higgs presented a 400-page biographical blake-buster, part study guide, part self-help book, part manifesto—​here and there encompassing pop culture, counterculture, high culture, literary criticism, seventeenth-century theology and poetry, psychology, current and georgian politics, neuroscience, quantum mechanics, comparative theology, mysticism, and much else. higgs is a skilled writer, and his earnest enthusiasm for his subject is both evident and contagious. in many respects he might be the ideal reader of blake—​self-assured but not dogmatic, well and widely (but not always deeply) read in many disciplines far outside the usual areas of expertise with which academic critics are prepared, and shifting easily between the sensibilities that accompany current, earlier, and much earlier systems of thought. he is also therefore an appropriate guide for a very wide audience, blake’s envisioned future “public.” he starts from scratch as a reader and thinks for himself while encouraging his readers to do the same, responding to complete actual texts rather than manipulating the same old decontextualized blake snippets. and when he does use the familiar quotes, he often finds fresh insights in them. he gets important things right that are persistently missed, and though there are many things here with which i disagree, i would say that for every weak or doubtful observation i found two that clarified or changed my mind about something: his take on “beulah,” for instance, is much better than the one in my glossary in the william blake archive. he is more expert at reading texts than images, but he has taken the trouble to understand the most important technical aspects of blake’s art(s). several times we return to the familiar question: was blake crazy? higgs offers glimpses of a blake who more closely resembles the extravagant visionary of early victorian fantasy than the canny poetic painter who tapped his head when asked where he saw one of his visions. but higgs is a canny writer himself, starting with the one thing that many in his audience think they know about his subject and then working his way toward a version of the question that interests him more. he makes a case for associating certain of blake’s claims and eccentricities with recognized psychological phenomena, especially “hyperphantasia,” the ability to imagine things in exquisite detail, and points out episodes recognizable as mania, paranoia, and depression. but he also acknowledges that answering this question is not much help in understanding blake’s works, even if one accepts that blake’s extraordinary brain accounts for some features of them. blake apparently had an unusual ability to control and even to exploit his psychological peculiarities, and diagnosis of his condition does not make it any less interesting to try to figure out what he thought he meant, even if we should also attend to subconscious and unconscious mental phenomena in his head and those of his readers. higgs is ultimately as interested in what is going on in our brains when we pay attention to blake’s works as he is in what went on in blake’s, while at the same time leading us to think about how blake’s response to his world can help us to respond to ours. higgs’s procedure is to introduce a figure or phenomenon—​say swedenborg or romanticism or deism—​and then wander informatively around the topic, offering insights into it from various perspectives until an opportunity arises to connect it to some aspect of blake. whereas most conventional literary criticism martials the conclusions of subsidiary arguments to make a broader point, piling intellectually inert brick on brick, higgs usually ties the discussion to a narrative, especially one in which someone discovers something, such as swedenborg’s conversion, or allen ginsberg’s masturbatory apocalypse. it matters that blake did not regularly hear supernatural voices “in a finite organical perception,” write verse by recording what they said verbatim, or capture images of delusive hallucinations in his art. it is true that he (or his persona) claimed to operate in something like that way, as for example in the page of jerusalem addressed “to the public.” but just because blake was in charge of what he wrote most of the time does not mean that he always meant what he said, much less what his characters or narrators say. higgs tries to listen to all blake’s voices, taking all blake’s words seriously, not ignoring one voice to attend to its contrary. but i think irony is a central feature of blake’s form of prophecy, and only rarely do we hear from blake himself straightforwardly in his works. higgs presents songs of innocence as a confection, essentially dismissing “the chimney sweeper” of innocence as an error needing correction by the contrary song of experience. superficially, this characterization makes some sense: except for the dreadful rushing carnivores in “night” there are few explicit signs in innocence of the dark mechanisms that pervade experience. but even in innocence mothers die and winter mornings are cold, and both blake’s sweeps are aware of these realities. blake may have adjusted his strategy between writing the two books, but he didn’t write experience to correct blind spots in innocence. higgs’s imaginative, steady attentiveness pays off impressively in handling the even thornier works that follow. attending closely to what blake’s voices actually say while suspending the impulse to take sides, he introduces a hodgepodge of other authors’ metaphors and metaphorical systems that are variously complementary, contrary, or comparable to blake’s. readers who expect paratextual tact, as i do, may regard this with suspicion, as i did, but i now profess my conversion. after i submitted an earlier draft of this review i suddenly found myself an invalid with only higgs’s big book and the $1.00 e-book of blake’s illuminated works on my phone, so i decided to take a stab at reading jerusalem in the original format, without notes or editorial assistance other than the very assorted texts and ideas that higgs adduces as relevant. the result was not quite apocalyptic, but it was impressive. i won’t claim that higgs provides the key to all blake’s mythologies, but his approach brought me greater clarity than more conventional academic criticism. the guest list for this panel discussion is diverse, to say the least. timothy leary chats with lao tzu and carl jung in the green room, and pythagoras plays fantasy games with jim morrison. (i exaggerate.) higgs manages this unruly crowd deftly, but some figures, especially acquaintances who knew little about blake’s inner life or works, are allowed to speak for blake even when they haven’t much in the way of credentials. though he seems to have ignored most academic criticism, and is sometimes gently satirical about it, higgs might have been better off if he had read even less, sparing himself the influence of the persistent lazy misconceptions that teachers and students love to repeat. he is a good reader because he skips the scholarly introductions, trusting blake to sell himself to readers who are sympathetic, imaginative, and well read, but not necessarily steeped in esoteric traditions. his contextualized summaries of relevant ideas and controversies, both esoteric and exoteric, together with his lucid restatements of blakean principles, are good enough that one can imagine an autodidactically inclined reader concocting a serviceable blakean theory of everything using higgs’s intellectual sketches as a foundation. some aspects of these books are peculiarly local and ephemeral: in both, for instance, the brexit vote and the concomitant tension between jingoistic conservatism and leftish globalism appear to be haunting the discussion even when they are not explicitly the topic. in treating the relevance of blake to contemporary politics and social issues, higgs is careful to distinguish blake’s ideas from the tribal ideologies that have become attached to him, such as the british christian nationalism that some find in such works as parry’s setting of “jerusalem” or the ambiguous heroic portraits of the spiritual forms of pitt and nelson. for higgs, the large and heterogeneous crowds at blake’s memorial or the tate britain exhibition of 2019–​20 are evidence that his appeal is not only powerful and diverse, but that his work provides a perspective that can transcend orthodoxies within and without his green and pleasant homeland. wherever it goes, william blake vs. the world will make friends for blake. blake, methodism, and “christian perfection” blake, methodism, and “christian perfection” by christopher z. hobson christopher z. hobson (hobsonc@oldwestbury.edu), professor of english at suny old westbury, is the author of the chained boy: orc and blake’s idea of revolution, blake and homosexuality, and the mount of vision: african american prophetic tradition, 1800–​1950, among other works. this essay argues that blake rejected john wesley’s teaching of “christian perfection” and examines the implications of this rejection for blake’s ideas of morality, conduct, and social and sexual freedom. more specifically, it intervenes in discussions of blake’s relation to eighteenth-century evangelicalism by proposing, at least on the issue of perfectionism as opposed to the persistence of sin, his greater affinity with the methodism of george whitefield than with wesley’s. i maintain that blake’s sense of sin was close to whitefield’s, though distinct, and also that he rejected claims of perfectibility, such as wesley’s, on the basis of this sense and because they provided justification for self-appointed elites. these concerns first become prominent in milton and jerusalem, despite some earlier foreshadowing. they exist in a productive tension with blake’s belief in the holiness of the body, one correlating with his sense of the redeemed world as a cooperative society of imperfect beings. the importance of relating blake’s sense of sin and imperfection to evangelical debates on this topic goes beyond simply correcting one-sided views of his intellectual affiliations. wesley’s perfectionism contains—​seemingly paradoxically, given his relatively open-minded and experiential approach to theology—​a deep core that historically gave rise to arrogance, moral condemnation, and a pharisaical self-described sanctity in the religious culture of the next two centuries. blake’s opposition constitutes an early warning against these trends, as well as, implicitly, later secular perfectionisms. while my focus is on blake’s rejection of perfectionism, this larger context, to which i return in my conclusion, is the reason his stance has importance for general culture. in arguing for blake’s affinities with whitefield rather than wesley, i do not try to situate him biographically within a whitefieldian milieu, to demonstrate his extensive knowledge of whitefield’s or wesley’s works, or to show direct influences on his writing. i stress, indeed, that he probably had little such knowledge and took his ideas about both figures from general public awareness. rather, i examine blake’s theological ideas about sin, its persistence, and the impossibility of perfection, as expressed mainly in milton and jerusalem, and calibrate their basic similarities and differences with whitefield’s and wesley’s views. i first provide necessary background on each leader’s relevant beliefs, then examine key blake statements and narrative episodes. finally, after comparison and analysis, i look at the after-history of the perfection doctrine and assess the continuing significance of whitefield’s and blake’s opposition. my argument goes against a prevalent, though not consensual, view that blake’s main evangelical sympathies were with wesley’s methodism and that his touchstone issues were the related ones of predestination and of possible redemption rather than foredoomed damnation for sinners, ideas that interpreters link with wesley and whitefield respectively. morton paley, for example, comments about blake’s encomium to whitefield and wesley in milton (22[24].55-23[25].2, discussed later): “presumably, whitefield was raised up by rintrah (wrath) because he emphasized the calvinist belief in the predestination of some to grace and others to damnation, while palamabron (pity) raised up the mild arminian wesley. … whitefield’s calvinist predestinarianism would certainly have been unacceptable to blake” (apocalypse 76). similarly, mary lynn johnson believes that, theologically, the “bard’s song” in milton “revolves around” predestination, on which whitefield takes “the calvinist position” as against wesley’s view that predestination would be a “horrible decree” (138, partly quoting wesley’s sermon “free grace”). though neither makes these points as a general thesis, both paley and johnson plainly think blake closer to wesley than to whitefield and view predestination as the decisive issue.johnson relies partly on references to paradise lost book 3, as discussed later. neither her essay nor paley’s chapter covers jerusalem. two monographs on blake’s relation to methodism, by jennifer g. jesse and michael farrell, propose blake’s affinity with wesleyan methodism. farrell does so cautiously, noting differences as well as similarities and arguing only that “wesleyan methodism was a significant component” in blake’s theology (193). jesse believes that blake’s use of the category of the redeemed in milton, with other similarities, would have been taken at least by contemporaries as “advocacy of wesleyan theology” (191). in exceptions to this near consensus, jon mee posits whitefield’s primacy over wesley in blake’s imagination, though in the limited context of the hunt brothers’ attacks on both blake and whitefield for “enthusiasm” (270-82, 291). martha england, after establishing strong parallels between charles wesley’s hymns for children and blake’s songs, nonetheless finds their views opposed on most issues, and argues that the wesley brothers’ “doctrine of christian perfection [is] incompatible with blake’s theme” in jerusalem (106), an assessment similar to my own.this chapter of england’s study compares jerusalem and charles wesley’s short hymns on select passages of the holy scriptures (1762). her broader thesis is that while the two writers are at odds on the “normal middle ground” of reading—​for example, in opposing and accepting perfectionism—​they are similar in the “longer view of art and life” in their ability to accept contradictions and their own imperfections (43; see also 100). three weaknesses are notable in the prevalent view. one is overidentifying methodism or evangelicalism with wesley and so misreading resemblances between blake and general evangelical belief as affinities with wesley. farrell and jesse, for example, demonstrate several similarities they feel show blake’s closeness to wesley, such as beliefs in regeneration, in the centrality of faith, and in dedication to evangelical witness. these were common, however, to all sides of the evangelical development, not specific to wesleyan methodism, and jesse and farrell do not show that blake’s treatments were closer to wesley’s than to other evangelical views. they devote little space to whitefield or other non-wesleyans. in considering sanctification and christian perfection, they confine themselves largely to wesley’s views (though omitting important topics, such as his belief in a sudden or instantaneous “second blessing”), do not explain other evangelicals’ objections to them, and do not mention alternative calvinist and evangelical anglican ideas of sanctification.farrell includes eight brief references to whitefield and a few not indexed; jesse provides a good brief discussion of the calvinist and wesleyan wings of the revival (185-88), but here and elsewhere says little about whitefield. on wesley’s perfectionism, see farrell 173-79; jesse 225-28. see jesse 235-37 on blake and sin. further, discussions of whitefield often overstress the formal importance of predestination in his theology and miss an emphasis on jesus’s all-accepting mercy in his pastoral and preaching practice. we will see that whitefield’s views exist on at least these two partly contradictory levels. finally, many writers miss or underestimate the importance of rejecting perfectionism for whitefield, for others who could not agree with wesley, and for the later blake. this issue, we will see, stood in the forefront of whitefield’s differences with wesley and of blake’s late thought as a whole. blake and evangelicalism blake’s attitude toward the evangelical revival and its two main figures seems to have been an outgrowth of his own evolution toward a more spiritualized christianity rather than of any specific engagement with the movement itself or with these leaders’ writings. there is no record of blake’s attending wesleyan or whitefieldian meetings or reading either evangel’s tracts or sermons. the only work blake owned by either was a brief compilation, hymns for the national fast, feb. 8, 1782, by john and charles wesley, which he did not annotate (bentley 700), leaving his responses, or whether he read the book at all, open to speculation.the book is most notable for ostentatious loyalism in the context of the american war. several hymns focus on redemption for sin (especially nos. 3, 7, 12) and one on christian perfection (no. 6). his knowledge, then, most likely came from general culture. within overall public knowledge, whitefieldian and wesleyan methodism were the key branches of the evangelical revival, far more widely known than the small, though at times vibrant, society of moravians. of the two, wesley’s methodist societies numbered 72,376 members in england, wales, scotland, and ireland in 1791, the year of his death, and 272,157 forty years later (currie, gilbert, and horsley 139-40). but the major public face of evangelicalism was whitefield, whom mark noll calls “the acknowledged prototype of the evangelical preacher, the only early evangelical at home in scotland and america as well as england, and the prime mediator between evangelicals in established churches and those who were dissenters” (155). though he ceased building his own calvinistic methodist association in the early 1750s, whitefield routinely addressed audiences of twenty to thirty thousand in outdoor preaching throughout his career (illus. 1).on the credibility of these numbers, see boren; on the association and its discontinuance, see dallimore 2: 157-58, 248-51, 300-02; kidd 206-07. it was whitefield, equally famed on both sides of the atlantic, who, probably in savannah in 1765, impressed olaudah equiano, who had “often heard of this gentleman, and wished to see and hear him,” with the “fervour and earnestness” of his preaching (equiano 132, 277n363). such responses, and the power and attraction of his words, evidenced below, mark whitefield as one of the great eighteenth-century divines. 1. anonymous. “the rev.d m.r whitfield preaching at leeds, 1749” (see enlargement). 22.1 cm. x 27.5 cm. british museum. 1870,0514.2967. image © the trustees of the british museum. all rights reserved. whitefield and wesley’s rift over perfection, or, as wesley also termed it, entire sanctification, was one of their several theological disagreements. the two held distinct views of sanctification, the process of increasing devotion and goodness that evangelicals presumed would follow one’s religious awakening. either it was possible—​gradually or instantaneously—​to overcome sin fully and live without sinful acts or thoughts, as wesley believed, or it was not, but believers could pursue a gradual and imperfect sanctification through living by christ’s example and continually struggling against sin—​whitefield’s view. beginning in the 1730s, and especially after 1741, wesley increasingly preached, though with significant qualifications,the most important involve restricting sin to intentional violations of a known law; believers’ retention of infirmities (defects in understanding, information, and the like), so that they could commit wrong acts without sinful intent; and wesley’s abandonment of an early view that newly awakened believers intuitively understand all that god requires. (on these points, see chilcote 20-21.) these qualifications provide what might be called a defensive stance, useful in arguing against opponents, but wesley’s overall claims were more expansive. that true christians (meaning those who had experienced spiritual rebirth) could be “saved in this world from all sin, from all unrighteousness … [and] freed from evil thoughts and evil tempers,” as he argues in his 1741 sermon “christian perfection” (a plain account 150).i quote this sermon as condensed in a plain account of christian perfection (1766), wesley’s redacted compilation of his writings on the topic up to its publication, because this collection represents his evolved views, had a quasi-official character, and eventually became official doctrine when incorporated (in its 1777 edition, very slightly revised and identical in the quoted passages) into the 1789 methodist discipline (peters 33). for the original (1741) sermon text (identically worded here, but without a plain account ’s italics), see wesley, john wesley’s sermons 84. somewhat later, wesley began arguing that sanctification, rather than proceeding by degrees from one’s regeneration onward, as he had earlier stressed, could (though it did not always) occur through a second, conversion-like experience, an “instantaneous change [that] has been wrought in some believers.” through either modality, believers could live in “perfect love,” which to wesley was the “essence” of the doctrine. though conceding that sin might be “only suspended,” not “destroyed,” that perfection was never complete but might always be extended, and that it might be lost and even regained (was “amissible”), he insisted that presently these believers were “cleansed from all pollution both of flesh and spirit” (a plain account 187, 188, 190). the idea of an accomplishable perfection in holiness, including its possible attainment in an instantaneous “second blessing” distinct from regeneration, became a core wesleyan tenet—​in wesley’s eyes god’s “grand depositum” to the methodists (abelove 80) and, his best recent biographer judges, wesley’s “most distinctive contribution to the christianity of his day” (rack 552). nevertheless, perfectionism remained deeply divisive. many, especially calvinists, saw the teaching as not just mistaken, but productive of spiritual haughtiness, or what the anglican evangelical calvinist john berridge called “such pride! such boasting! such censoriousnes! such contempt of others!” (letter to john walsh, stark 151). then and later, the doctrine led to tensions with whitefieldian and other calvinists, among wesley’s own followers, and within wesleyan-influenced denominations.besides dissents such as berridge’s, perfectionism prompted extreme claims by some wesleyans, notably george bell’s (and possibly thomas maxfield’s) preaching of adamic innocence and imminent apocalypse in london, 1762–​63 (abelove 93, stark 126-27, newport). many wesleyans found the teaching difficult to accept or adhere to (abelove 90-93); see john walsh’s testimony of repeatedly experiencing but losing assurance of perfection, and finally rejecting the doctrine (stark 129-51). on nineteenthand twentieth-century sequelae, see briefly below; peters; synan. whitefield was committed to the common evangelical belief in sanctification. sin, he urged, could be “more and more weakened as the believer grows in grace, and the spirit of god gains a greater and greater ascendancy in his heart” (“walking with god,” works 5: 25). but he saw sanctification as gradual and not complete until the moments before death,besides the quoted sermon, see, for example, “on regeneration” (works 6: 264-66) and “christ, the believer’s wisdom, righteousness, sanctification, and redemption” (works 6: 191-93, 194, 198-99, 202). and he rejected wesley’s perfectionism on the basis of a core belief in what he termed “indwelling sin.”whitefield took the phrase from john owen’s the nature, power, deceit, and prevalency of the remainders of in-dwelling sin in believers (london, 1675). whitefield also used “in-being of sin” (for example, works 6: 194). whitefield’s repeated stress on this idea, with his overall calvinism, may seem to suggest that his preaching would emphasize “the wrath of god in condemning the reprobate” (farrell 9). in fact, indwelling sin acts as a humanizing element in his theology. believers’ continual buffeting by sinful thoughts, and perhaps acts, was for him a given and a fact of his own life: “i can say that i cannot pray but i sin,” he testifies in one sermon. “my dear friends, i have paid dear for backsliding” (the method of grace 14, 23). but, whitefield stressed repeatedly, this inevitability was countered by jesus’s boundless mercy to those who turned to him in fullness of heart. though he did not omit the dangers of hell, whitefield centered his teaching on the certainty of mercy once the sinner made this turn: “let indwelling sin be your daily burden; and not only bewail and lament, but see that you subdue it daily by the power of divine grace. … remember that … christ having once loved you, will love you to the end” (“christ, the believer’s wisdom, righteousness, sanctification, and redemption,” works 6: 202). he hammered at the arrogance of self-perceived holiness and the rightness of laying one’s sins before christ, as in “the pharisee and the publican,” in which he narrates the story from luke: “methinks i see him [the publican] standing afar off, pensive, oppressed, and even overwhelmed with sorrow; [until] with a broken and contrite spirit, he cries out, ‘god be merciful to me a sinner.’ [luke 18:13] this man came up to the temple to pray, and he prayed indeed. and a broken and contrite heart god will not despise” (works 6: 43-44). so, in a letter, whitefield advises a noble correspondent writing on behalf of her sister, “be pleased to inform her ladyship, that her saviour entreats and commands her to come just as she is, and to accept of salvation as a free-gift” (works 2: 237).quotations in this paragraph refer to different phases of salvation—​two to initial conversion or “justification” (“pharisee and publican,” letter) and the others to sanctification and final assurance, but the attitude toward jesus’s love is consistent for all. my attention was drawn to whitefield’s letter by its quotation in dallimore 2: 277. this was whitefield’s preaching and pastoral emphasis throughout his life. both wesley’s and whitefield’s views of sanctification interact with their basic theologies, though in somewhat divergent ways. for wesley, the connection is relatively direct. his arminian view of salvation rejected the calvinist tenets of god’s preselection of the elect and of irresistible grace (sinners have no power to come to christ, but are chosen). it was essential for wesley that all could potentially find grace and that all could freely choose or reject it, or later fall from it. there was, then, no ultimate surety of salvation except increasing sanctification, and so only entire sanctification provided an essential, though tentative, assurance of security. for whitefield, an evangelical moderate calvinist, the links to his general theology were more complex and partly contradictory. whitefield accepted the calvinist tenets of unconditional election, limited atonement, and irresistible grace—​god preselects only whom he pleases for grace, of all undeserving sinners, and without merit of their own; christ died only for these, the elect; and god’s selection falls on them without and even despite their will. these beliefs allowed him to affirm a certainty of final salvation (“the perseverance of the saints”) while recognizing what he felt was an essential element of human experience, our continual, only partly successful, struggle to overcome or minimize faults and be better than we were. yet these formal tenets clash, at least in part, with his preaching call to “come,” as stated in the letter just mentioned. whitefield could, indeed, in preaching approach something close to wesley’s idea of a prevenient grace that frees the sinner to choose. in “the good shepherd,” his last sermon in london (1769), the sheep are god’s because they are “enabled in a day of god’s power voluntarily to give themselves up unto him” (eighteen sermons 354-55; my emphasis). further, despite his acceptance of calvinist views in and after 1739–​40, whitefield retained through later life an early emphasis on free grace, in the sense of a sure response of grace to an appeal made in earnest.on whitefield’s doctrinal evolution, see olson; on “classical” and “moderate” calvinism and their wesleyan/​arminian alternatives, see pinson, chapters 1, 2, 4. addressing “all ye that have hitherto neglected to behold this lamb of god by faith” in a 1753 sermon, he exhorted, “look unto him and you shall yet be sav’d; his heart is open, and his arms stretch’d out ready to receive you” (the true nature 24-25). there was thus a considerable element of free choice in whitefield’s thought, despite his formal endorsement of unconditional election. whitefield’s 1740 rejoinder to wesley—​his only effort at a systematic treatment of their differences—​partly addresses this inconsistency through two considerations. first, we cannot know who is elected, and so must “preach promiscuously to all”; moreover, the evangelical revival itself is the means god has chosen to effectuate election and bring the elected to himself through grace (“a letter” 59). additionally, in several sermons whitefield stresses election without merit as an antidote to arrogance and self-righteousness: “to check therefore all suggestions to spiritual pride, let us consider, that we did not apprehend christ, but were apprehended of him” (“satan’s devices,” works 6: 247). nevertheless, these stipulations do not remove the difference between election by god’s sovereign choice and the voluntary giving whitefield stresses in preaching. elsewhere, in fact, he bends the stick toward irresistible grace—​a voluntary response is possible only if god “sweetly induces men’s wills to comply” (“the lord’s supper,” works 6: 31). such inconsistencies show a serious, if not systematic, grappling with the problem. finally, it is possible that whitefield’s adherence to unconditional election and limited atonement, as such, is unacknowledgedly experiential—​that is, we know in experience that not all do choose to “come.” but he never articulates such a point, which in any case does not remove the inconsistency noted here, one whitefield never fully resolves. this same inconsistency means, as well, that probably the greatest formal difference between whitefield and wesley, over accepting or rejecting calvinist election, blurs in whitefield’s preaching, with its stress on jesus’s acceptance of all who seek him truly. whitefield, indeed, seems to have felt that his and wesley’s views on election were compatible in practice, but those on perfection sharply at odds: “though i hold particular election, yet i offer jesus freely to every individual soul,” he wrote wesley in a 1741 letter proposing unity. “you may carry sanctification to what degrees you will, only i cannot agree that the in-being of sin is to be destroyed in this life” (works 1: 331). though blake may have had little detailed knowledge about either whitefield or wesley, he is likely to have had some awareness of wesley’s perfectionism, a doctrine widely known and controverted, including by an author blake admired, james hervey.a plain account went through five public editions in less than twenty-five years (editors’ headnote, works 13: 134-35; bibliographic stemma, works 13: 577). see below on hervey. besides any knowledge of others’ criticisms, two factors in blake’s own thinking would have predisposed him against this idea and toward identification with whitefield’s rejection of it. the first is his preoccupations in milton and jerusalem with deism and what he saw as its belief in “natural morality” (jerusalem 52), as well as with the “elect,” in milton, as perpetrators of social ills. i will argue that blake associates christian perfection with both of these perceived evils. additionally, blake’s view of perfectionism may have been influenced by its prominence in st. paul. paul’s condemnations of unconventional sex and view of the flesh as corrupt may have influenced blake’s formation of his counterposed ideas, as i have argued elsewhere.see hobson, “blake, paul, and sexual antinomianism,” for elaboration. perfection is an equally central tenet for paul, both overall and in opposition to what he sees as sins of the flesh. he exhorts his followers, “let us cleanse ourselves from all filthiness of the flesh and spirit, perfecting holiness in the fear of god” (2 cor. 7:1), and challenges backsliders, “having begun in the spirit, are ye now made perfect by the flesh?” (gal. 3:3).the context for gal. 3:3 is a contrast between faith (as of the spirit) and law (as of the flesh), so the warning does not directly concern sex or the body, but it assumes a spirit-flesh opposition, explicit elsewhere (for example, rom. 8:8-13, gal. 5:16), in which the flesh is the seat of sexual violation and general sin (gal. 5:16-21). more generally, the pauline epistles repeatedly raise the possibility of perfection in the spirit and, as repeatedly, condemn the flesh; even when not linked to it explicitly, bodily and sexual restraint is part of paul’s idea of perfection. wesley’s statements on perfection, indeed, frequently cite paul’s—​including 2 cor. 7:1, a favoritesee a plain account 138 (from a 1733 sermon), 161 (from 1741 methodist conference minutes), 191 (in the conclusion, original for this work). see also works 13: 65 (from “thoughts on christian perfection,” 1760); john wesley’s sermons 67, 84, 155, 182, 363 (sermons of 1741 [two], 1746, 1748, 1763).—​indicating both paul’s centrality in the case for perfectionism and, also, why blake might have questioned the idea based on his knowledge of paul. blake’s treatment of the issue does not target paul specifically; rather, his views of sex and the body, partly shaped in reaction to paul’s, form one of his main differences with both wesley and whitefield. blake’s repudiation of perfection and associated ideas develops gradually. perhaps implicit, the issue gets little emphasis at first. urizen, for example, later associated with the closely linked idea of self-proclaimed holiness, appears in early work as a general oppressor, a holder of “assum’d power” who claims, “i am god. … eldest of things,” and creator of the “net of religion” and “tree of mystery,” among other roles (urizen 2.1, e 70; ahania 3.38, e 86; urizen 25.22, e 82; ahania 4.6, e 87). he may imply aspiration to perfection in wishing “for a joy without pain, / for a solid without fluctuation” and pleading, “why will you die o eternals? / why live in unquenchable burnings?” (urizen 4.10-13, e 71), but blake does not pursue the idea. as late as 1804, indeed, blake could refer to perfection in a fairly conventional way, saying in a biblically based compliment to william hayley that his appreciation of hayley’s kindness “draws the soul towards … conjunction with spirits of just men made perfect by love & gratitude” (letter, 14 jan. 1804, e 740).for the context of blake’s statement, see the full letter (e 739-40). the biblical context is eschatological: the “spirits of just men made perfect” (heb. 12:23) are those of earlier witnesses of faith who become so at the eschaton (compare 11:39-40). the perfection of souls after death is standard doctrine, though blake’s idea that it might stem from “love & gratitude” is his own. the basic point remains that, at this stage, he is not attuned to the negatives he later sees in perfectionism. his criticism of perfection emerges with his espousal of christian fideism and his attraction to evangelicalism. it does so in two phases: as an attack on claimed holiness as self-righteousness in milton, with perfectionism implicated indirectly; and as direct opposition to and satire against perfectionism, and dramatization of its impossibility, in jerusalem. the evidence of direct references turning to blake’s late works with this background in mind, we should see that while his references to the two evangels are few, whitefield more than wesley fires his imagination. whitefield appears in three segments of milton and jerusalem, twice solo and once in company with wesley, who is not mentioned elsewhere.if we count individual references within these passages, whitefield is mentioned five times and wesley two. in the first episode, milton’s evocation of the evangelical revival as a spiritual apostleship, rintrah reports: but then i rais’d up whitefield, palamabron raisd up westley, and these are the cries of the churches before the two witnesses …………………………………………………………………………………………… no faith is in all the earth: the book of god is trodden under foot: he sent his two servants whitefield & westley; were they prophets or were they idiots or madmen? shew us miracles! can you have greater miracles than these? men who devote their lifes whole comfort to intire scorn & injury & death awake thou sleeper on the rock of eternity albion awake (22[24].55-23[25].3, e 118)the speech (22[24].29-23[25].20, e 117-18) is begun by rintrah and palamabron jointly, but in this section seamlessly shifts to rintrah, then to the churches, then apparently back to rintrah and palamabron. various interpreters identify the divisions differently. the two stand here for selfless steadfastness and sacrifice and for spiritual resistance to “self-righteousness” and “cruel virtue” that work “to perpetuate war & glory. to perpetuate the laws of sin” (22[24].43-45). if these specifics seem incongruous for the historical wesley and whitefield, who supported the crown (and whitefield slavery)see pestana 92-97 for a summary; dallimore 1: 207-08, 494-501 and 2: 219, 367-68, 520-21 for detail. and were morally restrictive, nonetheless blake sees these as any spiritual revival’s tasks. whitefield’s alignment with rintrah, the more uncompromising brother, should be read not just in personal or doctrinal terms, but in relation to the task of witnessing against “the abomination of desolation” (line 49), essentially the blasphemous nature of both church and state.on this symbolic entity, see rosso 18, 137-38 (on this speech), and 196-207 (on uses in jerusalem). in jerusalem, in the general framework of the need to respiritualize religion, whitefield, with “fenelon, guion, teresa, / … & hervey,” is among the ecumenically representative guardians of golgonooza’s “four-fold gate / towards beulah” (72.49-51, e 227).françois fénelon (1651–​1715), jeanne marie guyon (1648–​1717), and st. teresa of avila (1515–​82) were catholic, whitefield and james hervey (1714–​58) anglican. all favored a spiritualized christianity. the first three affirmed an ideal of christian perfection as full submission to or unity with god (rather than wesley’s idea of freedom from sin). hervey criticized wesley by implication in his pastoral dialogue with epistles theron and aspasio (1755), a work blake had some knowledge of, and explicitly in aspasio vindicated, published posthumously in 1765.in the first work, see particularly aspasio’s calvinist stipulation, “even sanctification, though it destroys the reigning, does not wholly supersede the polluting power of iniquity” (314; letter 7, aspasio to theron). in the second, hervey says of wesley’s “favourite tenet, ‘perfection in personal holiness,’” that “i know not any protestant writer that pretends to maintain [it], yourself only excepted” (562, 568, letter 9; see discussion in intervening pages). in an island in the moon, steelyard is satirized as unsure whether he has been reading theron and aspasio or meditations among the tombs (e 456), probably indicating blake’s awareness of the works’ differing emphases. blake lauds hervey in his watercolor based on the latter work (1820–​25). significantly, blake’s whitefield here acts along with “all the gentle souls / who guide the great wine-press of love” (lines 51-52), a specification perhaps related to what we will see as blake’s implied revision of the evangel’s ideas about sexual love. whitefield is present both by implication and explicitly in jerusalem’s chapter prefaces. while the first preface, in religious terms, is perhaps most familiar for stating blake’s idea of forgiveness—​“the spirit of jesus is continual forgiveness of sin” (plate 3, e 145)—​the words that follow, “he who waits to be righteous before he enters into the saviours kingdom, the divine body; will never enter there,” imply a rejection of achievable freedom from sin. further, while whitefield is not mentioned, blake’s next statements, “i am perhaps the most sinful of men! i pretend not to holiness! yet i pretend to love, to see, to converse with daily, as man with man, & the more to have an interest in the friend of sinners,” recall whitefield’s avowals (above) and show a certainty of jesus’s acceptance close to whitefield’s. taken together, the statements imply a view of sin as inborn and inescapable, not elaborated here, that blake holds in common with whitefield; these qualities are why one who waits to be righteous waits in vain and forgiveness is necessary. these pronouncements, in sum, replicate important parts of whitefield’s thinking, whether or not blake had knowledge of them—​though we will see that he did have some. chapter 3’s preface, “to the deists,” expands on these points, saying in part, “man is born a spectre or satan & is altogether an evil, & requires a new selfhood continually & must continually be changed into his direct contrary” (jerusalem 52, e 200). the three linked ideas here are that (1) what blake takes as a deist belief in natural goodness (“natural morality,” same plate) is wrong because humans by nature are only satans or spectres, “altogether an evil”; (2) goodness therefore is external to our nature and comes only from a change in this nature; and (3) “man” (humanity) “requires a new selfhood continually”—​that is, re-creates it continually—​so that we must “continually be changed” into our contraries—​continually reborn, in the evangelical sense of regeneration. with differences, these ideas are recognizably akin to whitefield’s beliefs in the continuation of indwelling sin, even in those reborn, and in a continuing struggle to counter it, and are opposed to wesley’s affirmation of a gradual or sudden release from all sin. the key difference between blake and both evangels to note at this stage is that while whitefield and wesley believe in the imputation of eve and adam’s sin to humanity, blake rejects prelapsarian innocence. in the four zoas he implies, instead, that love and hate coexisted in a state of nature or early society: we first see los and enitharmon as “a male & female naked & ruddy as the pride of summer / alternate love & hate his breast; hers scorn & jealousy” (9.23-24, e 305). but if love’s presence as a capability in nature might seem to create a route to increasing sanctity, in the perspective of jerusalem 52 it does not, because of the self-regeneration of selfhood, from which, blake implies on this plate, only “the religion of jesus” offers an escape. in other contexts, blake emphasizes not just religion, but also imagination and “expand[ed] senses” as ways to access the divine, but jerusalem 52 takes the stark stance just mentioned, for reasons examined later.see, for example, milton 41[48].3, e 142 (faith); jerusalem 5.20, e 147 (imagination); and jerusalem 34[38].17-20, e 180 (expanded senses). given the persistence of sin, it is logical that blake, later in this passage, admiringly cites whitefield’s frank admission of sins: “foote in calling whitefield, hypocrite: was himself one: for whitefield pretended not to be holier than others: but confessed his sins before all the world” (jerusalem 52, e 201).foote accused whitefield in a satirical play, the minor (1760). for details, see dallimore 2: 407-09. the comment shows both awareness of whitefield’s public persona and blake’s greater sympathy with whitefield’s attitude toward sinlessness than with wesley’s. by a different route, then—​sin by imputation is for him abhorrent—​blake arrives at a position close to whitefield’s continuance of indwelling sin.on jerusalem’s rejection of imputation, see jesse 236. the evidence of narrative episodes narrative sequences in both milton and jerusalem dramatize the attitudes and clashing ideas just mentioned. those considered here include the mary-joseph episode dealing with sin and forgiveness in jerusalem; the three classes schema and, more particularly, the milton-satan confrontation in milton, with some analogues in jerusalem; and aspects of los’s contestation with his spectre in jerusalem. all involve the persistence of or struggle against sin and the continued necessity of forgiveness, as well as a repudiation of achievable perfection. the first incident repeats and extends material from the chapter prefaces (jerusalem 3, 52) in joseph’s account of pronouncements by jehovah elohim’s angel, speaking in joseph’s dream: jehovahs salvation is without money & without price, in the continual forgiveness of sins in the perpetual mutual sacrifice in great eternity! for behold! there is none that liveth & sinneth not! and this is the covenant of jehovah: if you forgive one-another, so shall jehovah forgive you: that he himself may dwell among you. (61.21-26, e 212) despite a complex narrative context, the statement reads as authoritative both because of the reported speaker and because of the amount of emphatic capitalization, unusual even for blake. doctrinally, it argues the universality and inevitability of sin and makes explicit the link between these and forgiveness implied in chapter 1’s preface.see also “mutual forgiveness” as contrasted to “a heaven in which all shall be pure & holy” (erin’s speech, jerusalem 49.29, e 198) and as an aspect of jerusalem (jerusalem 54.4, e 203). at the same time, salvation is conferred by “perpetual mutual sacrifice”—​by human acts, which jehovah’s covenantal agreement ratifies. further, it is “without money & without price,” repudiating the standard view that christ’s death discharges the penalty for sin, as well as, indirectly, wesley’s belief that entire sanctification is necessary for assurance of salvation. mary’s question to joseph that prompts his dream narration implies the same point through biblical allusion: “art thou more pure / than thy maker who forgiveth sins & calls again her that is lost / … / … in the midst of his anger in furnace of fire” (61.6-13, e 211). blake alludes to god’s words to jerusalem in isaiah, a resonant passage for him: “for my name’s sake will i defer mine anger …. i have chosen thee in the furnace of affliction” (isa. 48:9-10).the phrase is as memorable for whitefield as for blake, though he gives it only a personal and not a social dimension; see his sermon on the topic (eighteen sermons 125-43). for jerusalem the city, forgiveness was not conditioned on purity but on suffering endured. individuals and communities, both mary’s question and the dream narration imply, enter jesus’s body without attaining sinlessness. these doctrinal points are only half the story of the mary-joseph vision; the other half is its narrative context. it occurs within a triple framework of vision. in the fused contemporary and biblical existences of the poem’s characters, the daughters of los and other unnamed daughters labor with “intoxicating delight” to create garments and furnishings “that rahab & tirzah may exist & live & breathe & love”—​to give form to our world of degradation and oppression. in parallel, jerusalem, though “her form was held by beulahs daughters,” is inwardly “closd in the dungeons of babylon / … all within unseen,” laboring at its “mills” while vala “triumphs in pride of holiness” at her despair (59.34, 43, e 209; 60.39-45, e 210). there, seen “faintly” (60.39) in a second level of vision, the divine lamb or divine voice tells jerusalem, “lo i am with thee always. / only believe in me that i have power to raise from death / thy brother who sleepeth in albion,” and continues, “behold joseph & mary / and be comforted o jerusalem” (60.67-61.2, e 211). the inmost vision that follows, then, is a type for comforting jerusalem and for raising albion from death. so, rather than involving personal salvation alone, and in parallel with mary’s echo of isaiah, the vision’s realizations of sin’s universality, the illusory nature of holiness, and the consequent need for mutual forgiveness are those necessary for jerusalem to endure and for the complex social being who is albion to return from death to life. that holiness and perfection are illusory, as implied in this episode, and that claims to them foster a spiritual pride that facilitates elite rule is one meaning of blake’s three classes categorization in milton and the more complex plot thread that supplants it in jerusalem. the “three classes” (milton 2.26, e 96, and later) are generally understood as an inversion of milton’s language of election in paradise lost. jesse and farrell regard blake’s use of the category of the redeemed, which broadens the calvinist duality between elect and reprobate and parallels wesley’s belief in a free choice of grace, as evidence for blake’s wesleyan affinities, as johnson also does by implication. this point is misconceived. the category of the redeemed is certainly effectually wesleyan, though wesley did not use this term, but it is also miltonic. in paradise lost books 3 and 11, the father speaks of repentance by persons to whom his “ear will not be slow, nor mine eye shut” and reserves damnation for those who refuse “my day of grace” (3.193, 198); the son twice calls the saved “my redeemed” (3.260; 11.43); and the narrator speaks of the son as “intercessor” and mentions “prevenient grace” softening adam and eve’s hearts, an arminian concept that wesley adopted in his own theology (3.219; 11.3, 19).johnson presents the father’s speech in paradise lost 3.168-216 as making a two-part division between the elect and obdurate “others” (johnson 238; her term). she omits milton’s discussion of repentance and acceptance in lines 185-97. farrell speaks of “calvin, milton, and whitefield’s essentially bipartite” view (152). see coppedge 111-13 for wesley’s understanding of prevenient grace. see farrell 149-53, jesse 185-94 for their overall views of the classes. there are thus effectively three categories in milton; blake’s three classes are miltonic in origin, not wesleyan; and his usage, rather than specific to whitefield and wesley’s disputes, is part of his overall critique of milton’s theology. in that critique, pertinently to the present topic, blake’s attack on election as satanic and linked to social evil also associates purity and holiness, qualities that recall wesley’s perfectionism, with the elect and satan. leutha, for example, though a not fully reliable witness, says satan acts “in selfish holiness demanding purity / being most impure” (milton 12[13].46-47, e 106). blake’s bard, similarly, foretells that the elect will testify to having been saved “of divine / mercy alone! of free gift and election” when “our virtues & cruel goodnesses, have deserv’d eternal death” (13[14].32-34, e 107). the statement affirms both that these elect qualities are satanic and that salvation comes through mercy and “free gift and election” (god’s choice), not merit—​a jointly calvinist-arminian tenet that wesley struggled to square with his impulses toward voluntarism. blake’s association of virtue, purity, and holiness with the elect identifies a major set of wesleyan ideas as among the evils of this class and inimical to (and their exemplars as saved by) forbearance and mercy. of interest here is milton’s face-off with satan late in the poem. among other purposes, milton announces: i come to discover [reveal] before heavn & hell the self righteousness in all its hypocritic turpitude, opening to every eye these wonders of satans holiness shewing to the earth the idol virtues of the natural heart …. (38[43].43-46, e 139) milton largely repeats leutha’s terms but adds self-righteousness as the concomitant to self-attested holiness. as “natural heart” indicates, blake’s proximate target is his bugbear “natural religion,” the attitudinal, if not doctrinal, outlook of the established church and the social elites it spoke for. but these are the manifestations of satan’s self-righteousness, not milton’s (as blake imagines him). the words milton begins with, “i know my power thee to annihilate / … & be thy tabernacle / a covering for thee to do thy will” (lines 29-31), point to the corollary: blake is also taking aim at claims of holiness within a religion that renounces the historical milton’s errors. satan, similarly, in response, hopes all things may join together “in holiness / oppos’d to mercy, and the divine delusion jesus be no more” (39[44].1-2, e 140). in light of the perfection debate, it is hard not to read such dramatizations as linking the illusion of perfection in holiness to an inner core of self-aggrandizing pride and to rejection of the mercy blake sees as jesus’s essence. one might, of course, read the criticized attitudes as an inversion of the humility wesley preached as part of christian perfection; then one would expect blake to link humility further with perfection, whereas he usually contrasts these qualities, as in his already quoted “i pretend not to holiness!” (jerusalem 3). we should note, finally, that in this exchange satan, as “satan! my spectre!” (38[43].29), is an aspect of milton himself; this point will be taken up in conjunction with the spectre of los. jerusalem, which drops the three classes categorization but uses the narrative thread of albion’s sons in part to replicate the roles of the elect,“elect” occurs thirteen times in blake, all in milton; “redeemed,” “reprobate,” and their derivatives occur largely there, and only there are the three linked in the machinery of three classes. joins pride and self-righteousness, already linked with holiness, directly to perfection. within the lengthy narrative sequence ending chapter 1, leading from the evocation of golgonooza through contemporary vistas of depredation to albion’s failed repentance and apparent death (14.16-25.16, e 158-71), hand and hyle, chief among the sons, speak to condemn “soft complacencies / with transgressors meeting in brotherhood around the table” and “sinful delights / of age and youth and boy and girl” (18.14-17). they demand instead chambers of trembling & suspition, hatreds of age & youth and boy & girl, & animal & herb, & river & mountain and city & village, and house & family. that the perfect, may live in glory, redeem’d by sacrifice of the lamb and of his children, before sinful jerusalem. to build babylon the city of vala, the goddess virgin-mother. (18.24-29, e 163) blake’s furious satire against hand and hyle—​amplified by the design including a nude couple sharing what may be an open-mouthed kiss (illus. 2)—​makes plain that debasement of forgiveness (that is, of “meeting in brotherhood” with transgressors)if the transgressors meet among themselves, not with others, then they are not necessarily forgiven, but certainly tolerated. and of everyday pleasures is the foundation for exalting “the perfect” as a group. it becomes clear, too, that both acts are based in the theology of substitutionary atonement; that in real-life terms, this theology also includes willing or unwilling sacrifice of the lamb’s “children,” ordinary humans; and that all this is necessary to the building of babylon, vala’s realm. finally, blake’s satire, unifying and extending milton’s discussions of the elect, implies that all these are facets of any idea of attained perfection. 2. william blake. jerusalem copy e (printed c. 1821), plate numbered 18, detail (see enlargement). yale center for british art, paul mellon collection. b1992.8.1(18). image courtesy of the william blake archive. a final key to blake’s treatment of perfectibility lies in jerusalem’s plot thread involving los and his spectre, as well as the fate of the “druid spectre” in the poem’s conclusion. these points require some elaboration. blake’s readers are familiar with his and his characters’ descriptions of spectres in milton and jerusalem as “the reasoning power in man” (milton 40[46].34, e 142);see similar phrasing at milton 39[44].10, e 140; jerusalem 10.13-15, e 153; jerusalem 54.7, e 203, etc. yet they are more than this. satan as milton’s spectre, in the speech discussed above, signifies—​besides the affinities to wesleyan holiness already noted—​“fear of death” and “abject selfishness” as against milton’s teaching of “fearless majesty annihilating self,” and represents, as well, the inner essence of milton’s own capacity to supplant satan and “be a greater in thy place” (milton 38[43].38-41, 30, e 139). albion’s spectre is similarly comprehensive. in its self-described role as “your rational power o albion,” it tells him that the “human form / you call divine, is but a worm seventy inches long,” but the narrator also says albion’s spectre is “the great selfhood / satan: worshipd as god by the mighty ones of the earth” and is “the devouring power” (jerusalem 29[33].5-24, e 175). spectres, then, are indeed naturalistic thought, but also fear, selfishness, thirst for power, worship of worldly power, malevolence, and more—​in fact, all the evils in blake’s universe. with these issues in mind, we can turn to los’s relations with his spectre. introduced in jerusalem’s opening narrative (5.66-11.7, e 148-54), los’s spectre represents much more than his or humanity’s “reasoning power.” it embodies, for example, the side of los that is “indignant” against the misdeeds of albion’s sons and that questions the need to “forgive.” it includes los’s “pride & self-righteousness,” even his temptations to justify god’s punishment of sin “upon his altar” and to believe that god is “righteous: … not a being of pity & compassion” (7.26-27, e 149; 8.30, e 151; 10.39, 47, e 153). spectres, then, are specific to the individual and represent whatever self-justifying thoughts and emotions—​including, we will see, the sense of holiness—​block the individual from the selfless dedication both milton and los affirm in confronting them. los’s spectre comprises these and other temptations to admitting the world’s ways of thinking into his own.among writers who treat blake’s spectres comprehensively, edward j. rose (1977) views them as doubles or doppelgängers, possessing multiple and varied negative aspects, and los’s spectre, specifically, as an aspect or estranged portion of los’s mentality: “the spectre’s fury, resentment, and indignation … [are], of course, his own objectified” (133). paley, in a 1968 essay, presents william cowper as a source analogue for los’s spectre, whom paley calls “a calvinist who believes himself irrevocably damned by a god of wrath” (“cowper” 236). as paley notes even in this article, the point does not apply to calvinism in general, which stressed god’s lasting acceptance of those who are saved. cowper, indeed, understood that his conviction of being damned after having fully accepted god violated calvinist teaching (king 69). in the continuing city (1983; see primarily 234, 244-55, 259-61, 264-66, 273), paley drops the calvinist designation and treats the spectre as an externalized portion of los. both writers, as discussed later, believe los fully subordinates or reintegrates his spectre in the poem’s climax, a view shared by many others. two facets of this presentation deserve notice, particularly in distinction to blake’s treatment of satan as milton’s spectre. first, los’s spectre appears as an aspect of los himself—​not simply because we see him extruding from los’s back (jerusalem 6.2-3, e 148-49), but also because we see the spectre “shuddring, & dark tears ran down his shadowy face / which los wiped off” (10.60-61, e 154). we realize that they are los’s own tears and that the spectre’s face, though externalized, is his own (see also rose 133). in contrast, while milton early states, “i in my selfhood am that satan … / he is my spectre!” and addresses satan as “my spectre!” (milton 14[15].30-31, e 108; 38[43].29, e 139), he and satan function as distinct beings with distinct histories. milton seems to recognize satanic qualities as potentialities in himself but not to see satan himself as a portion of his own being. secondly, and related to this point, in their confrontation milton appears as having decisively rejected and triumphed over all that the spectre/​satan represents. in this respect blake’s dramatization—​especially as reinforced by milton’s visual apotheosis in plate 13[16] (illus. 3)—​shares ground with wesley’s perfectionism. 3. william blake. milton copy d (printed 1818), plate numbered 16. 16.0 x 11.1 cm. library of congress, rare books and special collections, lessing j. rosenwald collection. catalogue number 1810. image courtesy of the william blake archive. in effect, while rejecting in satan wesley’s emphases on purity and holiness, blake upholds in milton something very like wesley’s perfectionism in an inverted blakean sense—​milton, not self-divided, is resolute in moral transgressiveness, majestic in self-sacrifice, ready to “put off / in self annihilation all that is not of god alone” (38[43].47-48, e 139). similarly, in his slightly later speech to ololon, milton declares, “the negation must be destroyd to redeem the contraries” and, as spectre, “must be put off & annihilated alway” (40[46].33, 36, e 142). these are perfectionist views so far as they suppose it possible to “destroy” or “annihilate” the spectre, though “alway” (all the time, always) may imply a repeated process.besides these thematic parallels, blake’s language is arguably closer to wesley’s in milton than elsewhere. farrell highlights, for example, wesley’s use of “self-annihilation” in a 1791 article as a parallel (175). similarly, wesley’s stress on “regaining the whole image of god … having all the mind that was in christ” (quoted by farrell 174) is at least similar to blake’s “put off / … all that is not of god alone.” these are general evangelically influenced ideas, however, rather than specifically wesleyan. whitefield speaks of our being “conformed to the divine image more and more” (works 5: 27); mee traces “self-annihilation” to david hartley’s 1749 observations on man (284-88); and coleridge uses “self-annihilated” in “religious musings” (1794–​96), line 43. sanctification, we remember, was general evangelical doctrine; wesley’s unique teaching was entire sanctification, or perfection. by contrast, the negative qualities that los’s spectre represents appear as parts of his “shadowy” twin and, we will see, are present throughout the narrative. in their initial confrontation, readers know, los subdues the spectre, apparently decisively: “groaning the spectre heavd the bellows, obeying los’s frowns; / till the spaces of erin were perfected” (jerusalem 9.33-34, e 152). yet the subordination is provisional. at times the spectre functions as los’s agent, acting in his stead, for example, toward the daughters of albion (17.1-47, e 161-62). at others, he seems ready to rebel against los, attack albion, or both, as when los feels his spectre “rising upon me” and fears that it will confine albion in a “sepulcher hewn out of a rock ready for thee” (33[37].1-10, e 179, at lines 2, 6).the speaker is first identified only as one among the divine family, but retrospectively as los (lines 1, 10). the most significant later incident, both in substance and in influence on further developments, is the spectre’s role in los and enitharmon’s quarrel over gender, female “pride,” and male “dominion” (87.16, 88.13, e 246; 87-88, 90-93 in general). though los and the spectre have very recently been working together—​“alternate they watch in night: alternate labour in day” (83.79, e 242)—​during the gender dispute the spectre smiles “in mockery & scorn / knowing himself the author of their divisions & shrinkings, gratified / at their contentions” (88.34-36, e 247). clearly, too, both enitharmon’s assertion of pride and los’s of dominion—​the latter highly problematic for interpreters of this episode—​reflect the spectre’s influence.on the quarrel and its significance, see hobson, blake and homosexuality 169-72; connolly 210-11, 215-17, 229-30n9, partly in response; rosso 182-92, including the larger context of plates 81-84 and 87-88 in relation to redemptive possibilities within generation. beyond its immediate importance, the episode leads to the fuller clarification of los’s relation to his spectre on plates 91-93. here the spectre, apparently feeling new power, builds “stupendous works,” including “the war by sea enormous & the war / by land astounding” and much else (91.32, 39-40, e 251; lines 32-41 generally). ultimately, los acts again against the spectre, smashing his works, “alter[ing]” him, “divid[ing] him into a separate space,” and commanding him to “put off holiness / and put on intellect” (91.50, 52, 55-56, e 252)—​a sign that holiness is one characteristic of the spectre (that is, of los). the episode has been read as showing that “by isolating the spectre, los keeps the divine vision” or that los has “completely subdued” the spectre, “integrat[ing]” it with his “imaginative self” (rose 137; paley, continuing city 265, 254, see also 244). yet in creating this “space,” los does not and, most probably, cannot separate entirely from or destroy his spectre’s influence. rather, he continues to struggle against, but also accepts, that influence as part of himself. this point becomes clearer in the two plates following the spectre’s reorganization, which immediately precede the poem’s closing events. though the spectre does not act overtly, enitharmon’s appeal to los against dissolution in the body of albion and her lament to rintrah and palamabron for her “little ones weeping along the valley” (92.8-12, e 252; 93.11, 15, e 253) reflect the ongoing effects of the spectre’s sowing of division and the social consequences of its “stupendous works” (91.32). thus, the impulses it represented persist despite its sequestering. los’s indirect response, made to rintrah and palamabron, recognizes this fact and addresses the spectre’s continuing presence in himself and the world, as well as the comfort and strength found, even in this state, in jesus: fear not my sons this waking death. he is become one with me behold him here! we shall not die! we shall be united in jesus. ………………………………………………………………………………………… if bacon, newton, locke, deny a conscience in man & the communion of saints & angels contemning the divine vision & fruition, worshiping the deus of the heathen, the god of this world, & the goddess nature mystery babylon the great, the druid dragon & hidden harlot is it not that signal of the morning which was told us in the beginning (93.18-19, 21-26, e 253-54) the lines contain a fruitful syntactic ambiguity, as so often in blake: does “he” in line 18 mean the “waking death” (spectre),besides continued influence, various text parallels to the spectre and others on plates 90-91 connect the “waking death” with los’s spectre. its identity as “body of doubt,” for example, parallels the spectre’s “refusing to believe without demonstration” (93.20, e 253; 91.35, e 251). more circuitously, the spectre’s “stupendous works” generalize the temple-building of “giants of albion,” while the giants’ private “mocking [of] god” and profession of “natural religion” correlate with the waking death as avatar of bacon, newton, and locke and its worship of the “goddess nature” (91.32, e 251; 90.58-66, e 250; 93.21-24, e 253-54). all three entities represent the same intellectual tendencies. as normal sentence order suggests, or does “he is become one with me” refer to jesus, otherwise not mentioned until the following line? in the latter case los would be saying we need not fear the spectre because of jesus’s presence. this reading is indeed possible. but both the spectre’s identity with los’s worst impulses throughout jerusalem and the ensuing litany of still-present evils show that this reading does not efface the first. rather, the crux opens up a more complex idea: the spectre is present in los and his sons and they can find help in jesus against its lasting power. the spectre, then, presently is and always has been part of los; each of the cultural entities referred to has been in him the whole time.compare the analogous episode in the four zoas, night viia, in which urthona’s spectre initiates reconciliation (vii.335-409, e 367-69). here, no reconciliation is effected, only recognition of the spectre’s continuing presence. these words, los’s last before brittannia’s and then albion’s awakenings—​indeed, los’s last in the poem—​accept the presence in his consciousness not only of deism, natural religion, and disregard of faith, but also of power worship, nature worship, and what revelation calls the “fornication” of false religion, “mystery, babylon the great,” with “the kings of the earth” (rev. 17:2-5). and, while los presents their presence as a sign of expected “morning,” the speech’s placement suggests that accepting them is a condition of the awakening, or morning, that follows; we must accept our spectres as parts of ourselves for the awakening to occur. we are now in a position to understand the meaning of the moment in which, when awakened albion confronts the zoas, urthona he beheld mighty labouring at his anvil, in the great spectre los unwearied labouring & weeping therefore the sons of eden praise urthonas spectre in songs because he kept the divine vision in time of trouble. (95.17-20, e 255)the diction may mean either that albion beholds urthona, “the great spectre,” within which los labors, or that albion beholds urthona as an inward essence in los, who himself is “the great spectre.” like paley (continuing city 271), i think the latter more probable, but the issue does not affect my argument. in the earlier passage with the same refrain lines, jerusalem 43[29].28-44[30].15, e 191-93 (partly based on the four zoas, night iii), the social and psychic evils enitharmon and los’s spectre have witnessed and their patience under insult explain the accolade. los’s spectre is called the spectre of urthona in the four zoas; in jerusalem, the term appears only at 10.32, e 153, in that sense, and in these two passages, where it seemingly means los himself. at 44[30].4, additionally, los’s spectre is “named urthona.” blake does not resolve these ambiguities. urthona, then, becomes the one zoa whom albion does not “compell” to resume his work (95.16) because los has continued it. los has been able to do this not through casting out or destroying the qualities his spectre embodies but by contending against them continuously; he has maintained prophecy while struggling against his own doubt and temptations, and this, in life experience, is what “[keeping] the divine vision in time of trouble” means. in the terms used by the two great eighteenth-century evangels, los has not “destroyed” or “suspended” sin, nor been “cleansed of all pollution both of flesh and spirit” (wesley, a plain account 188, 190), but, much more nearly, has “let indwelling sin be [his] daily burden,” yet “subdue[d] it daily by the power of divine grace” (whitefield, works 6: 202). consistently with this argument, jerusalem’s postapocalyptic coda raises the possibility, narratively and visually, that the ideas of sin, punishment, and (illusory) sanctity, seemingly overcome in the poem’s conclusion, may recur even within blake’s imagined state of social and psychic reintegration. narratively, we learn here that “the druid spectre was annihilate loud thundring rejoicing terrific vanishing” (98.6, e 257). on first reading, the destruction of this newly introduced entity—​roughly equivalent to a spectre of human sacrifice and punishmentthe word “druid” evokes such activities throughout the poem, in phrases such as “druid temples” (rocks, pillars, altars, etc.); in references to albion’s sons; in the repeated phrase “all things begin & end in albions ancient druid rocky shore” (27, e 171; 46[32].15, e 196); and, visually, in the triliths prominent in late sections (69, 70, 92, 94, 100).—​may suggest a destruction of sin, contradicting my whole argument. on reflection, we realize that spectres are not persons or actions (sins) but ways of thinking and feeling. the line therefore means, approximately, “the law and theology of sin and punishment are no more”—​that is, the beliefs that sin is checked by punishment, possibly eradicable through self-restraint and christian love, and, by implication, that some can live free from sin. the end of these ideas would mean accepting sin’s inevitability and embracing the mutual forgiveness that the entire poem has taught, as building blocks of a cooperative community of imperfect beings. these points also mean that the druid spectre’s end can only be provisional. it is intellectually inescapable that, given the free play of thought blake assumes in renewed existence (“they conversed together in visionary forms dramatic,” jerusalem 98.28, e 257), such conceptions can recur; and blake has only a tenuous trust in this postapocalyptic heteroglossia, together with mutual love and forgiveness, to rely on as bulwarks against those ideas’ gaining the upper hand. visual evidence, in fact, indirectly suggests this possibility. jerusalem’s final pictorial tableau, on plate 100, shows los’s spectre, in human form, obediently bearing los’s globe of fire, while los himself rests with his sledge and tongs (illus. 4). the image has been seen as showing los in harmony with his now-humanized spectre (rose 132). yet this humanized image also recalls the repeated prior occasions on which the spectre has acted at los’s behest while later again contending for dominance. any apparent victory over the ways of thinking that spectres represent, then, can only be tentative, won at the cost of continuing vigilance and perhaps renewed conflict. such are the lessons of blake’s prolonged consideration of christian perfection. 4. william blake. jerusalem copy e (printed c. 1821), plate numbered 100. 14.8 x 22.4 cm. yale center for british art, paul mellon collection. b1992.8.1(100). image courtesy of the william blake archive. conclusions and significance though i have stressed the resemblance between blake’s and whitefield’s views on sin, and their common rejection of perfectionism, blake’s differences with both whitefieldian and wesleyan methodism must be noted in fully assessing his late views of sin and renewed existence. among various divergences,those involving issues already touched on include, first, blake’s view of forgiveness as human centered and covenantal, as contrasted to whitefield’s and wesley’s views of effectual or prevenient grace as a sovereign divine act. blake’s attack on election, additionally, differs from both evangelical leaders’ endorsements of such a status, whether preselected or based on freely chosen grace and sanctification. the one nearest the core of blake’s thought concerns sexuality and, more broadly, everyday life; this issue will illuminate the paradoxes in blake’s ideas of sin and holiness that provide the key to his broad humanism. both whitefield and wesley share a pauline idea of sexuality, “the flesh,” as corrupting, and they view personal love and sexual attraction even in marriage as distractions from the holy life. wesley, for example, preferred unmarried converts to remain single and celibate, though later conceding that one might be “as holy” in a married as in a single state (abelove 49-52).wesley’s urging of celibacy was generally ignored; his “as holy” formula was a fallback position (abelove 58-66). both leaders regard sex and sexual desire outside marriage as “filthiness of the flesh and spirit” (wesley, referencing paul) or belonging to “the lusts of the flesh, the lusts of the eye, and the pride of life” that must be subdued to live by jesus’s example (whitefield, “the good shepherd,” eighteen sermons 356, paraphrasing 1 john 2:16).whitefield uses the phrase as a recurring motif—​see also works 5: 36, 6: 282; the true nature 9. both reject masturbation—​“satan will not cast out satan,” said wesley—​and avoid mentioning homosexuality.whitefield’s “short account” of his life mentions a youthful “abominable secret sin” (42) that, thomas s. kidd concludes, “we can be virtually certain” was masturbation. whitefield began but did not complete a condensation of the tract onania: or, the heinous sin of self-pollution (kidd 17-18). wesley adapted and published a similar pamphlet by samuel-auguste tissot (thoughts on the sin of onan, 1767). for wesley’s “satan” dictum, see abelove 53. for whitefield’s silence on homosexuality, see his version of paul’s list of types of offenders in 1 cor. 6:9-20, which omits the “effeminate” and “abusers of themselves with mankind” (works 6: 285; similar lists in works 6: 7, 298-99). both deplore such pastimes as card-playing and dicing; attending plays and other entertainments; patronizing taverns and alehouses; and reading novels and romances. “your friends and carnal acquaintances,” whitefield warns, “and, above all, your grand adversary the devil, will be persuading you … to see plays, play at cards, go to balls, and masquerades, and to make you the more willing … he calls sinful pleasures, innocent diversions” (“christ the only preservative against a reprobate spirit,” works 6: 296). wesley, somewhat more latitudinarian, rejects these activities, leaves those who practice them to “stand or fall” in god’s judgment, and recommends instead edifying reading, charitable works, and, above all, prayer (john wesley’s sermons 518-19).for similar whitefield passages, see works 6: 12, 14, 288. wesley’s discussion is in a 1787 sermon, “the more excellent way.” blake, we know, thinks differently on all, or almost all, issues of sexuality and quotidian life, in early and late work.the apparent exception, masturbation, may be viewed less negatively in milton than in earlier work (visions 7.3-9, e 50; urizen 10.19-23, e 75). here, the testicles appear as “two lovely heavens, / … each in the other sweet reflected!” (milton 19[21].60-20[22].1, e 113). the self-reflexivity of the “heavens” implies recognition, if not full validation, of autoerotic satisfaction. so, in jerusalem, “gardens” and “palaces” are found within “holy generation,” literally sexual reproduction and the female genitals (7.65-69, e 150), as, in “a little girl lost,” the lovers meet “in garden bright” amid “holy light” (lines 12-13, e 29). so, too, in “the little vagabond,” “ale-house” and “barrel” are preferred to “church” and “quarrel” (lines 2, 11, 15, e 26), as, in jerusalem, the “sinful delights / of age and youth and boy and girl”—​almost a riposte to whitefield’s words above—​are tacitly favored over the dominance of “the perfect” (18.16-17, 26, e 163). several of these points involve real paradoxes. the first concerns blake’s sense of sin. while counterposing a belief in sexual and bodily holiness to pauline ideas of bodily corruption and sexual sin, blake’s authorial pronouncements and narrative episodes repeatedly stress that sin is a basic feature of both our world and his imagined new existence. further, the parts of life that he apparently sees as holy—​sexual activity, the body in general, and everyday diversions (jerusalem 18)—​are indisputably parts of natural existence (as these terms are used in everyday speech), or, at least, customary parts of social existence, even though, in jerusalem 52, he describes our natural state (what we are “born” as) as a “spectre or satan” and “altogether an evil.” blake, we should realize, is dealing in milton and especially jerusalem with apparently contradictory attitudes that all have deep meaning for him: an idea of the holiness of ordinary life and the natural body, and of their condemnation as sinful being itself the foundation for elevating “the perfect” over common humanity; and, on the other hand, a root belief both in real sin and in mutual forgiveness as our only hope. when we probe further, we see a deeper-level paradox involving blake’s idea of the natural. while the sexual desires he sees as holy and, more broadly, the desire for diversion and enjoyment may be natural in everyday terms, he does not describe them as such. for sexuality, at least, the signature phrases “the human form divine” and “every thing that lives is holy” imply a divine component, which blake does not define beyond the use of these and similar images. this component, by implication, comes into play when the body is used in mutuality: “life delights in life” (america 8.13, e 54) as, also, the “delights” of “age and youth,” “house & family,” and more are mutual (jerusalem 18.16-18, e 163). in contrast, the body’s divinity is violated when it is used in acts of disrespect, exploitation, domination, cruelty, or mutual hate: “every thing that lives is holy” applies to oothoon’s acts and thoughts, not bromion’s (visions 8.10, e 51; 1.16-17, e 46). in late work, particularly jerusalem—​in contrast to the already-mentioned presentation in the four zoas of love and hate as coeval in a state of nature or early society, which makes no distinction of origin between the two—​blake treats sexual and other acts of mutuality as always inflected by the divine (“mutual in love divine,” jerusalem 4.7, e 146). such acts, for him, seem to share in the recognition of community and the acceptance of sinfulness and forgiveness that he sees as parts of the divine. atomization and division, power, status, exploitation, and devaluation of the body, in contrast, are the marks of the natural as “spectre or satan.” yet this is a somewhat strained definition of the natural, especially in view of blake’s previously noted allowance of access to the divine not only through faith, but also through imagination and expanded perception—​capabilities we have from birth, so that, for him, the natural body, what we are “born” as, is not in fact “altogether an evil” (jerusalem 52). if we ask why, nevertheless, blake omits these capabilities, maintains the latter position, and offers only “the religion of jesus” as a counterfactor in jerusalem 52, two reasons seem relevant. the first is to emphasize polemically his identification, despite differences, with the evangelical revival’s insistence on jesus’s presence and mercy, as against what he considers natural religion’s trust in self. here, blake is with all wings of the revival indiscriminately. the second and more basic reason is to define his sense of sin, and here he is with whitefield, hervey, and the calvinists against wesley. if blake’s distinction between the natural as only selfhood and the mutual as divine both seems and is arbitrary, excluding some of the body’s capabilities as he himself defines them, it still lets him maintain both his view of the body and common life and his conviction of the universality of sin, and so insist that the cooperative commonwealth can exist only through conscious love, awareness of our sinfulness, and forgiveness. with these ambiguities noted, blake’s opposition to christian perfection constitutes an early and significant stand against an ideology that, important in his own day, would become highly influential in the religious and secular thought of the next two centuries. in religious culture, wesley’s perfectionism developed, in the century after his death, into the holiness movement within methodism. holiness theology grew in response to an increasingly worldly mainstream methodism, and eventually formed independent holiness churches. these groups, “wesleyan in their view of sanctification” (synan 81), adopted a doctrinal statement at an 1885 conference, on the eve of their emergence as independent churches, that, in part, defined conversion (“justification”) as requiring “a full renunciation of sinful beliefs and associations,” while sanctification included “the entire extinction of the carnal mind, the total eradication of the birth principle of sin,” enabling one to manifest “perfect love.” a “gospel plainness” in dress, living arrangements, and business practices was mandated (“doctrinal statement”).peters’s commentary and partial quotation (137-38) alerted me to this source. my thanks to candace a. reilly, manager of special collections, drew university library, for assistance and responses to questions. these tenets bear obvious similarities to wesley’s entire sanctification and suspension of sin, as well as to his and whitefield’s strictures against commonplace activities they viewed as sinful. at one time or another, holiness churches attacked or banned practices as varied as attending theaters and ball games, consuming coca-cola or oyster stews, and, for women, practicing “extravagance of dress” or “needless ornamentation” (synan 47, 58, 64, 81), as well as all types of sex outside marriage.see anderson, chapter 1; peters, chapters 4-5; synan, chapters 2-7. later, many holiness leaders and churches gravitated to pentecostalism, the most influential strand of christian worship to emerge in the twentieth century, major sections of which shared wesley’s perfectionism. among both groups, sometimes referred to broadly as “holiness christianity,” an emphasis on sexual purity and “living holy” continues, with modifications, into the present. “despite its attention to matters of the spirit,” one scholar with personal experience of the movement notes, “holiness christianity encourages a meticulous attention to and monitoring of the body” (powers 788). in the absence of a permanent calvinist methodist church body, parallels to whitefield’s rejection of perfectionism can be found in the beliefs and practice of one of the denominations most receptive to his ministry, the baptist churches. most present-day baptist bodies follow the doctrines of increasing but incomplete sanctification and a continuing but conquerable tendency toward sin. one widely shared definition calls sanctification “a progressive work; … begun in regeneration; and … carried on in the hearts of believers by the presence and power of the holy spirit … [through] the word of god, self-examination, self-denial, watchfulness, and prayer” (national baptist convention, “what we believe”). avoidance of perfectionism and an assumption of continuing temptation and even sinful acts are clear in this formula.this wording is shared by the national baptist convention, the largest african-american baptist association, and several other baptist bodies. an article on the theologically conservative southern baptist theological seminary website similarly calls sanctification “a lifelong endeavor” that is “not about perfection, but persistence” (ford). opposition to wesleyan perfectionism, then, also continued, including a stress on the possibility of god’s merciful reception despite “backsliding” and imperfection. secular perfectionisms, as well, have exerted enormous intellectual and emotional drawing power. in the century and a half after blake’s death, marxism may have been the most potent. in a pertinent example, leon trotsky’s literature and revolution (1923–​24)—​written in the early years of a dictatorship far more horrible than the one it replaced, which trotsky himself did much to build—​envisioned a new world in which “the average human type will rise to the heights of an aristotle, a goethe, or a marx. and above this ridge new peaks will rise” (256). the cultural appeal of such projections on both mass and elite levels demonstrates, perhaps, the imaginative force of perfectionism in one of its main secular forms. while more exploration of this topic is beyond my scope, we should note that blake’s use of the perfection idea is directed not only against its religious forms but also against the elect, who “under pretence to benevolence … subdud all / from the foundation of the world” (milton 25[27].31-32, e 122). so viewed, blake’s antipathy to christian perfection is significant for more than the light it sheds on his relation to methodism. a key lesson of wesley and whitefield’s schism over perfectionism, as well as of blake’s response to it and the later history briefly sketched here, lies in that idea’s lasting imaginative magnetism and in blake’s perception of a need to struggle against it. in this fuller context, his response to the issue appears historically prescient, intellectually powerful in connecting the illusion of perfection to the reality of human oppression and degradation, and deeply insightful in presenting the alternative sin-forgiveness axis as fundamental to the sanctity of ordinary human lives. works cited abelove, henry. the evangelist of desire: john wesley and the methodists. stanford: stanford university press, 1990. anderson, robert mapes. vision of the disinherited: the making of american pentecostalism. new york: oxford university press, 1979. bentley, g. e., jr. blake books. oxford: clarendon press, 1977. blake, william. the complete poetry and prose of william blake. ed. david v. erdman. newly rev. ed. new york: anchor-random house, 1988. boren, braxton. “whitefield’s voice.” hammond and jones 167-89. chilcote, paul wesley. “introduction to wesley’s treatises on christian perfection.” wesley, works 13: 3-25. coleridge, samuel taylor. “religious musings.” samuel taylor coleridge. ed. h. j. jackson. the oxford authors. oxford: oxford university press, 1985. 13-23. connolly, tristanne j. william blake and the body. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, 2002. coppedge, allan. shaping the wesleyan message: john wesley in theological debate. nappanee, in: francis asbury press, 2003. currie, robert, alan gilbert, and lee horsley. churches and churchgoers: patterns of church growth in the british isles since 1700. oxford: clarendon press, 1977. dallimore, arnold a. george whitefield: the life and times of the great evangelist of the eighteenth-century revival. 2 vols. 1970, 1980. edinburgh: banner of truth trust, 2014, 2015. “doctrinal statement.” guide to holiness (july 1885): 27-28. england, martha winburn. “blake and the hymns of charles wesley.” hymns unbidden: donne, herbert, blake, emily dickinson and the hymnographers. by martha winburn england and john sparrow. new york: new york public library, 1966. 43-112. equiano, olaudah. the interesting narrative and other writings. ed. vincent carretta. rev. ed. new york: penguin, 2003. farrell, michael. blake and the methodists. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, 2014. ford, coleman. “six things every christian needs to know about sanctification.” southern equip. 27 march 2018. <https://​equip.​sbts.​edu​/article/​6-​things-​every-​christian-​needs-​know-​sanctification>. accessed 10 may 2021. hammond, geordan, and david ceri jones, eds. george whitefield: life, context, and legacy. oxford: oxford university press, 2016. hervey, james. theron and aspasio: or, a series of dialogues and letters upon the most interesting and important subjects. to which is added, aspasio vindicated, in eleven letters from mr. hervey to the rev. john wesley. london: printed for thomas tegg and son, 1837. hobson, christopher z. blake and homosexuality. new york: palgrave, 2000. —​—​—​. “blake, paul, and sexual antinomianism.” blake 52.3 (winter 2018–​19): 37 pars. jesse, jennifer g. william blake’s religious vision: there’s a methodism in his madness. lanham, md: lexington books, 2013. johnson, mary lynn. “milton and its contexts.” the cambridge companion to william blake. ed. morris eaves. 2003. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2007. 231-50. kidd, thomas s. george whitefield: america’s spiritual founding father. new haven: yale university press, 2014. king, james. william cowper: a biography. durham, nc: duke university press, 1986. mee, jon. romanticism, enthusiasm, and regulation: poetics and the policing of culture in the romantic period. oxford: oxford university press, 2003. national baptist convention, usa. “what we believe.” <https://​www.​nationalbaptist.​com/​about-​nbc​/what-​we-​believe>. accessed 10 may 2021. newport, kenneth g. c. “george bell, prophet and enthusiast.” methodist history 35.2 (1997): 95-105. noll, mark a. the rise of evangelicalism: the age of edwards, whitefield and the wesleys. downers grove, il: ivp academic, 2003. olson, mark k. “whitefield’s conversion and early theological formation.” hammond and jones 29-45. paley, morton d. apocalypse and millennium in english romantic poetry. 1999. oxford: clarendon press, 2003. —​—​—​. the continuing city: william blake’s “jerusalem.” oxford: clarendon press, 1983. —​—​—​. “cowper as blake’s spectre.” eighteenth-century studies 1.3 (spring 1968): 236-52. pestana, carla gardina. “whitefield and empire.” hammond and jones 82-97. peters, john l. christian perfection and american methodism. 1956. salem, oh: schmul publishing, 1995. pinson, j. matthew, ed. four views on eternal security. grand rapids, mi: zondervan, 2002. powers, peter kerry. “the treacherous body: isolation, confession, and community in james baldwin.” american literature 77.4 (2005): 787-813. rack, henry d. reasonable enthusiast: john wesley and the rise of methodism. 3rd ed. london: epworth, 2002. rose, edward j. “blake and the double: the spectre as doppelgänger.” colby library quarterly 13.2 (june 1977): 127-39. rosso, g. a. the religion of empire: political theology in blake’s prophetic symbolism. columbus: ohio state university press, 2016. stark, david. “beyond perfection: a redemptive reading of retracted holiness testimony in john walsh’s letter to charles wesley, 15 august 1762.” wesley and methodist studies 5 (2013): 123-51. synan, vinson. the holiness-pentecostal tradition: charismatic movements in the twentieth century. 2nd ed. grand rapids, mi: eerdmans, 1997. trotsky, leon. literature and revolution. 1923–​24. trans. rose strunsky. translation originally published 1925. ann arbor: university of michigan press, 1977. wesley, john. john wesley’s sermons: an anthology. ed. albert c. outler and richard p. heitzenrater. nashville: abingdon press, 1991. —​—​—​. a plain account of christian perfection (1766). wesley, works 13: 132-91. —​—​—​. the works of john wesley. vol. 13: doctrinal and controversial treatises ii. ed. paul wesley chilcote and kenneth j. collins. nashville: abingdon press, 2013. [wesley, john, and charles wesley]. hymns for the national fast, feb. 8, 1782. london: j. paramore, [1782]. whitefield, george. eighteen sermons preached by the late rev. george whitefield. taken in shorthand and transcribed by joseph gurney. revised by andrew gifford. newburyport, ma: edmund m. blunt, 1797. —​—​—​. “a letter to the reverend mr. john wesley in answer to his sermon, entitled, free grace” (1740). works 4: 55-73. —​—​—​. the method of grace. a sermon, preached on sabbath morning, september 13th, 1741. in the high-church-yard of glasgow. glasgow, 1741. —​—​—​. “a short account of god’s dealings with george whitefield … from the time of his infancy to the time of his entry into holy orders, 1714–​1736” (1740). george whitefield’s journals. edinburgh: banner of truth trust, 1992. 35-72. —​—​—​. the true nature of beholding the lamb of god, and peter’s denial of his lord, opened and explained, in two sermons. london, 1753. —​—​—​. the works of the reverend george whitefield, m.a. 6 vols. london and edinburgh, 1771–​72. review: peter otto, ed., william blake; nicholas shrimpton, ed., william blake: selected poems peter otto, ed. william blake. 21st-century oxford authors. oxford: oxford university press, 2018. xlix + 802 pp. £100.00/​$125.00, hardcover. nicholas shrimpton, ed. william blake: selected poems. oxford world’s classics. oxford: oxford university press, 2019. lxxii + 432 pp. £9.99/​$13.95, paperback. reviewed by alexander s. gourlay alexander s. gourlay (agourlay@risd.edu) teaches at the rhode island school of design. as one expects of oxford university press, these two new selected editions of works by blake are competently and thoughtfully executed. one also expects critical and editorial conservatism from oxford; although both editors have freshened the introductions and notes and organized the works in original ways, these editions offer few innovations even in comparison with bentley’s 1978 two-volume oxford edition.g. e. bentley, jr., ed., william blake’s writings, 2 vols. (oxford: clarendon press, 1978). indeed, it could be said that in presenting the visual aspects of blake’s work the new ones are even less adventurous, in that there appear to be fewer supplementary images of blake’s actual words and designs in the otto volume, and except for a detail image of a page on the cover, none at all in shrimpton’s. this apparent regression may be due to the advent of alternative means of promulgating blake’s work, which have made clear color images of illuminated pages widely available, especially in the sophisticated and fairly inexpensive princeton/​blake trust volumes, single-work facsimile editions, and, even more significantly, in the vast resources of the online william blake archive. given that incorporating monochromatic snippets or even whole pages from illuminated books increases the cost and complexity of publishing, distorts the reader’s experience of the blakean page, and provides only a small portion of blake’s visual component, it makes sense for conventional publishers to refer interested readers to the archive or facsimiles rather than trying to convey the full visual aspect of his work in a mostly typographic text. that said, the recent editions of blake works that combine thorough notes, full-size color images of all pages, and sophisticated transcriptions of the texts are much more satisfactory for most purposes than partially visual editions, and there is reason to wonder whether the world needs another collection that barely acknowledges the visual dimension. of the two new editions, shrimpton’s paperback assortment of mostly complete poems is, at a small fraction of the price of the more comprehensive hardcover-only otto edition, the more likely to be considered for classroom use. the choice of works will surprise those who order this edition without checking the contents: as a collection of the “selected poems,” it omits important works in verse (for instance, the book of thel, tiriel, and vala/​the four zoas), omits all prose (except some in jerusalem), and reduces the menippean marriage of heaven and hell to its two poems, only one of which is listed in the index by title. the texts are an eclectic amalgam of what shrimpton considers to be the “earliest reliable”both of these editorial criteria are somewhat problematic to apply. shrimpton argues that the earliest texts are best because “blake’s revisions further complicated what were already complex poems” (xxxvi). source texts combined with ostensibly authorial punctuation. they have “in practice, been made by removing the modernizing editorial interventions from the text established by geoffrey keynes in 1957 …” (xxxvii), restoring blake’s spelling and capitalization, then supplying punctuation based on several sources (but not, as far as i can tell, by examining actual copies of blake books). shrimpton’s illuminated texts resemble those of recent editors who follow one particular blakean source or another, but the punctuation marks don’t correspond to those in any specific existing or theoretically reconstructed authorial text. these edited texts aren’t seriously misleading or unreadable, but i don’t believe they represent blake’s intentions at any identifiable stage. annotating any text for classroom use requires both learning and discretion. most publishers suggest that editors should provide information not easily available in reference books and perhaps indicate where one might begin further research, but not do all the interpretive work for readers or trample on subtle ambiguities. even if one doesn’t explain everything, a few judiciously selected notes can indicate how readers can figure similar things out for themselves. many of shrimpton’s notes address matters that aren’t in a dictionary, such as explaining who “tom cooke” was (377; unfortunately, shrimpton follows blake’s misspelling of cook). but other notes seem to be provided only because the editor has spotted an unrecognized potential allusion or similar reference, one that may or may not be useful. for instance, rather than discussing greensickness in reference to the line “my face turns green and pale” in “nurse’s song” of experience, shrimpton’s note quotes iago on the “green-ey’d monster” jealousy, which is (i hope) a novel connection but is at most obliquely relevant. similarly, the very next note, the only one on “the sick rose,” cites an obscure and barely germane passage from edward young: the image [of a rose infected by an unseen worm] is taken from the account of philander’s tuberculosis in young’s night thoughts (1.355): “death’s subtle seed … beckon’d the worm to riot on that rose so red.” like tigers, malign bacteria are difficult to reconcile with the concept of a loving god. (356-57) the passage, though surely known to blake, is no more relevant than familiar references to cankerworms, buds, and roses in shakespeare, and far less interestingly resonant with “the sick rose” than my favorite intertext for this poem, matthew prior’s toxic jibe “a true maid,” which captures the themes of sexual secrecy and hypocrisy and would also have been familiar to blake and many in his adult audience: no, no; for my virginity, when i lose that, says rose, i’ll die: behind the elms, last night, cried dick, rose, were you not extremely sick? having prior’s poem in one’s head isn’t essential to reading “the sick rose,” and i’m not sure it belongs in the notes of a general edition, since its woman is literal and its flower is metaphorical, but i can’t see how the night thoughts quotation or shrimpton’s remark about “malign bacteria” (which are in young, not blake) would clarify anything at all to innocent or experienced readers. because the paradoxical logic of many of the “auguries of innocence” (77-81) is virtually enthymemic, requiring readers to supply additional information, the poem is a good place to measure an annotator’s performance. shrimpton’s guidance is uneven at best. in the two-part opening augury, he does not explain (or need to) that a robin caged against its will is an offense against heaven, or that by contrast a pigeon or dove eagerly enters a dovehouse, but most students could use help to see why the dovehouse “shudders hell.” an appropriate note might be “shudders hell: causes an earthquake like the one associated with the harrowing of hell,” which would give readers a start without spilling all the beans. shrimpton recognizes and helpfully untangles a few such allusions, but his note on “the game cock clipd & armd for fight /​ does the rising sun affright” (78) reports unhelpfully that “cockfighting was legal in england and wales until 1835 (and scotland until 1895)” (369). he does not mention that the gamecock’s wings were clipped so it couldn’t fly away and its talons augmented with steel blades, nor that in civilian life the gamecock would be a rooster, herald to the rising sun. for the couplet “he who torments the chafers sprite /​ weaves a bower in endless night,” shrimpton glosses “chafers” as “beetles” (369), which is true but actually interferes with understanding the poem. “beetles” not only makes a nominative plural of what is clearly a possessive singular, but it blurs the chafer into generic insectitude, discouraging further investigation. in blake, species matter: a little research shows that chafers (cockchafers) spend a long larval period underground before emerging as adults, at which stage they are famously attracted to lights at night; the torturer would atone in the prophetic dimension by enacting the chafer’s phototropic life cycle in reverse. through much of the epics milton and jerusalem (these are printed in full), the notes are comparatively plentiful and helpful, though there are still long stretches in which the editor seems to have wandered off to annotate some other text and left readers to their own devices. and yet, bacteria and chafers notwithstanding, when shrimpton is at his best he is an alert (if rather quirky) reader and explainer of blake; i suspect that those who don’t need his notes will find them more interesting than those who do. that is also true of his “chronology of william blake,” which is more thorough than most in placing blake and his works (including omitted ones) in the context of culture and politics of his time, but does not indicate to beginners which juxtapositions are significant or why. i wouldn’t use shrimpton’s edition to teach an introductory course on blake because i couldn’t do without the book of thel, vala/​the four zoas, or the marriage of heaven and hell, and even students in an advanced class focusing on milton and jerusalem would need to refer to these missing works. for other reasons, most notably price, i am also unlikely to choose peter otto’s much larger edition of blake’s writings, though it has virtues: its apparatus is more extensive and it is much more attentive to the visual aspects of blake’s work, in that the typographic text is supplemented by monochrome images of many important marginal illuminations, images of whole illuminated pages, and additional images, such as a close-up picture of the only remaining fragment of a blake relief plate. further, the notes discuss many of blake’s illuminations in considerable detail. whereas it is possible to read through all of shrimpton’s notes and headnotes at a single long sitting, otto’s edition offers 160 pages of scholarly elaboration in tiny type. even so, the explanations of potentially puzzling details are strangely fitful, often not much more thorough than those in shrimpton and sometimes less so. for instance, the farce known as “an island in the moon” has very thorough notes about allusions to contemporary events and persons, but those visionary couplets of “auguries of innocence” (480-83) are afforded a single note that identifies a parallel passage but clarifies very little (753). far from handing us the ends of blake’s golden strings, many of the annotations merely identify similar echoes and allusions, an empty simulacrum of scholarly assistance. further, the availability of a note is not signaled within the text, so readers must check the back of the book regularly to see if they are missing something. on the other hand, otto’s headnotes are often expansive and broadly interpretive, including not only longstanding consensus readings but also summaries of selected recent scholarship on particular works, representing an assortment of critical approaches of variable recentness, usefulness, and quality. all told, otto’s commentary is more helpful than harold bloom’s interpretive notes in the erdman editions ever were, but much of the discussion of recent material will seem very dated in a few years, and some already does. unlike shrimpton, who organizes his edition in such arbitrary categories as “narrative poems,” “brief epic,” and “diffuse epic,” otto arranges the texts semi-chronologically, lining up clusters of work from a given time period. i haven’t tried using this edition in a class, and probably won’t, but the arrangement has some appeal as a strategy for presenting blake to students, in that one can better appreciate blake’s various and ironic stances when one considers, say, songs of innocence, the marriage of heaven and hell, and the annotations to swedenborg together. but who reads a poetry textbook through in page order? for me the chronological organization is more confusing than edifying, and in an edition that omits so much it seems wasteful to print the songs of innocence once in the context of the late 1780s and then again a hundred pages later in conjunction with experience. it is always possible to construct a chronological presentation of texts by having students read them together (or apart), so the pedagogical advantages of this arrangement can be approximated without ordering the edition itself that way. otto’s texts of both the illuminated books and other textual categories are essentially touched-up versions of david v. erdman’s e. for illuminated books, otto appears to have extended erdman’s “largest printed mark” eclectic reconstruction of the text and punctuation that blake wrote backward on the plate, finding larger printed marks (or reading the same marks as larger). as a result, otto’s versions are more conventionally punctuated than those in e, with more commas and fewer full stops in mid-sentence. paradoxically, it seems that otto’s text, by following a reconstructed version of blake’s most deliberate punctuation, is easier to read in places than shrimpton’s more aggressively interventional text. although otto’s edition is much longer, it is by no means complete; many short works are omitted altogether, it abridges jerusalem, “a vision of the last judgment,” and vala, among others, and it includes only a few of blake’s letters and limited annotations of other authors. “the mental traveller” is present, while “blakes apology for his catalogue,” like much of his other pungent doggerel, is not (or at least i think it is not—​as a result of chronological ordering, this edition is difficult to navigate or survey in categorical terms). i have never tried to teach the parts of jerusalem or “a vision of the last judgment” omitted here, so i miss them less than the omitted works in shrimpton, but many of the abridgments could have been restored if the book were even fifty pages longer. perhaps those additional pages would have raised the price of the hardcover from exorbitant to ridiculous, but i wonder how many people will want to pay the current high price for a book that leaves out so much. the “linnell” adam and eve asleep: the case for the defense the “linnell” adam and eve asleep: the case for the defense by martin butlin martin butlin is the former keeper of the historic british collection at the tate gallery, london. he is the author of detailed catalogues of the paintings and drawings of william blake and, with evelyn joll, the paintings of j. m. w. turner. with the combined condemnation of three of the most visually sensitive of blake specialists, one is tempted to roll over and surrender. but doubts arrive, and a combination of misstatements, misunderstandings, and disputable arguments, to say nothing of actual contradictions of fact, has tempted me to return to the fray.references given in my article “blake’s unfinished series of illustrations to paradise lost for john linnell: an addition,” blake 51.1 (summer 2017) are not repeated here. references in the form “butlin 500” are to the catalogue numbers in martin butlin, the paintings and drawings of william blake, 2 vols. (new haven: yale university press, 1981). to begin with, there is the problem of “copying.” comparisons with the original watercolor from the butts collection are one thing, those with the copies done for linnell another. in the case of the first, as reflected in the relatively faint pencil drawing under the later work in pen and watercolor, it is hardly surprising, though not accurate, to talk of the copying as being “meticulous” or “slavish.” that is the usual intention when one copies another work. both robert essick and joseph viscomi go on to demonstrate details of where blake departs from the original, usually for the worse. it would be tedious to go through every example they quote, but one may suffice. this is the small twig bearing leaves apparently with no connection to any branch or tree, on the righthand side of the picture, more or less on the horizon. i myself find the freedom of this motif rather refreshing, and there are precedents in other blake works, in particular the first series of illustrations to the book of job (butlin 550 1 and 19; see also butlin 551 19). comparisons with the three works done for linnell are more relevant. these vary in finish from the more or less similar works in melbourne, satan watching the endearments of adam and eve and the creation of eve, to the miraculous reworking of michael foretells the crucifixion (fitzwilliam museum, cambridge). the new watercolor is clearly much closer to the two melbourne watercolors than to that in the fitzwilliam museum, although in both melbourne watercolors blake has begun, but only begun, to make changes such as those to the stars and halo noted by essick. however, the style of the new watercolor when compared to those in melbourne is, to my eyes, very similar indeed, despite the so-called differences pointed out by essick and viscomi. for instance, the coloring of the creation of eve is more or less precisely that of the new watercolor; in fact, they can be said to have been painted from the same palette. the handling of the sky, worked up in a relatively atmospheric way, is the same. the difference in the quality of the pen outlines is, to my mind, highly exaggerated by the critics, and blake is equally successful in both adam and eve asleep and the creation of eve in suggesting the modeling and the fall of light on the foremost reclining figure. this he does by defining the lower outline of the foremost reclining figure with a stronger line than that of the contour of the further thigh, in this case conveyed by the pencil underdrawing of the “copy.” in general we hope, with detailed illustrations from both the new watercolor and from a number of contemporary works, to convince our critics. for this reason we have, perhaps rather naughtily, asked the editors to place the caption for each detail where it cannot be seen at the same time as the illustration itself. 1 2 3 4 show caption.1. job and his family restored to prosperity, c. 1805–10 (detail). butlin 550 21. morgan library and museum, new york. 2001.83. 2. every man also gave him a piece of money, c. 1805–10 (detail). butlin 550 19. morgan library and museum, new york. 2001.81. 3. adam and eve asleep, c. 1822 (detail). no butlin number. private collection, london. 4. dante at the moment of entering the fire, c. 1824–27 (detail). butlin 812 85. national gallery of victoria, melbourne. felton bequest, 1920 (1018-3). hide caption. 5 6 show caption.5. adam and eve asleep, c. 1822 (detail). no butlin number. private collection, london. 6. job and his family restored to prosperity, c. 1821 (detail). butlin 551 21. courtesy national gallery of art, washington. rosenwald collection, 1943.3.9018. hide caption. 7 8 9 10 show caption.7. adam and eve asleep, c. 1822 (detail). no butlin number. private collection, london. 8. the inscription over the gate, c. 1824–27 (detail). butlin 812 4. © tate, london, 2017. n03352. 9. the inscription over the gate, c. 1824–27 (detail). butlin 812 4. © tate, london, 2017. n03352. 10. adam and eve asleep, c. 1822 (detail). no butlin number. private collection, london. hide caption. 11 12 13 14 show caption.11. job and his family restored to prosperity, c. 1821 (detail). butlin 551 21. courtesy national gallery of art, washington. rosenwald collection, 1943.3.9018. 12. job and his family restored to prosperity, c. 1821 (detail). butlin 551 21. courtesy national gallery of art, washington. rosenwald collection, 1943.3.9018. 13. adam and eve asleep, c. 1822 (detail). no butlin number. private collection, london. 14. job and his family restored to prosperity, c. 1821 (detail). butlin 551 21. courtesy national gallery of art, washington. rosenwald collection, 1943.3.9018. hide caption. 15 16 17 18 show caption.15. adam and eve asleep, c. 1822 (detail). no butlin number. private collection, london. 16. michael foretells the crucifixion, c. 1822 (detail). butlin 537 3. © fitzwilliam museum, cambridge. pd.49-1950. 17. adam and eve asleep, c. 1822 (detail). no butlin number. private collection, london. 18. michael foretells the crucifixion, c. 1822 (detail). butlin 537 3. © fitzwilliam museum, cambridge. pd.49-1950. hide caption. 19 20 21 show caption.19. angel of the divine presence bringing eve to adam, c. 1803–07 (detail). butlin 435. metropolitan museum of art, new york. rogers fund, 1906. 06.1322.2. 20. adam and eve asleep, c. 1822 (detail). no butlin number. private collection, london. 21. satan watching the endearments of adam and eve, c. 1822 (detail). butlin 537 1. national gallery of victoria, melbourne. felton bequest, 1920 (1025-3). hide caption. 22 23 show caption.22. adam and eve asleep, c. 1822 (detail). no butlin number. private collection, london. 23. satan watching the endearments of adam and eve, c. 1822 (detail). butlin 537 1. national gallery of victoria, melbourne. felton bequest, 1920 (1025-3). hide caption. moreover, while it is correct to say that the new watercolor and its putative melbourne companions do not reflect blake’s contemporary style as fully as his other late works, such as the second series of illustrations to the book of job or those to dante, there is a good reason for this: the overall size and the forcefulness of the figures of the models in the butts collection. among the watercolors these last are exceptional even for their date, c. 1808, even if compared to the largest of the illustrations to the bible or other contemporary works. (the large color prints of “1795” are of course another matter, being in a totally different, and weightier, medium.) this exceptional quality would have made the mellowing of blake’s late style and handling almost impossible to achieve without destroying the special attributes of the originals. the critics are worried by the total absence of any provenance for the new watercolor. as bindman says, “thanks to the list by the rossetti brothers [sic] in gilchrist’s life, a high proportion of blake’s drawings—even small scraps—are recorded by the middle of victoria’s reign.” however, certain highly important works did escape attention, including the main body of watercolor illustrations to the grave and the arlington court tempera painting. william michael rossetti’s lists depended very largely on what he had seen himself and what he was told about or learned from the sales that took place while he was preparing the lists. viscomi has analyzed this in his detailed untangling of the whole story of the mid-nineteenth-century sales of works from the butts collection.joseph viscomi, “blake in the marketplace 1852: thomas butts, jr. and other unknown nineteenth-century blake collectors,” blake 29.2 (fall 1995): 40-68, and “a ‘green house’ for butts? new information on thomas butts, his residences, and family,” blake 30.1 (summer 1996): 4-21. the scrappy drawings from the tatham collection were known to rossetti; the grave watercolors and the arlington court picture were hidden away in private collections far from london. similarly, single works escaped from the series for which they were originally designed. viscomi himself, in sorting out the history of the works in the butts collection, has shown how the butts series of illustrations to paradise lost was first of all split in half between two members of the family.viscomi, “‘green house’” 20. subsequently they were divided again, both by rossetti in his lists and in the saleroom. in the watercolor illustrations for the grave, two of what seem to have been originally intended as candidates for the planned twenty engravings have escaped from the main series: the widow embracing her husband’s grave,butlin 633, updated in william blake’s watercolour inventions in illustration of  the grave by robert blair, ed. martin butlin, essay by morton d. paley (lavenham, suffolk: william blake trust, 2009) 22-23, 68. one of the subjects included in cromek’s first prospectus of november 1805, and the companion to the grave personified.butlin 778 as a destroying deity (philadelphia museum of art), updated in butlin and paley 22, 54. this is to say nothing of the various finished watercolors for alternative title pages and the dedication (butlin 613, 616, 620). again, one of blake’s illustrations to the pilgrim’s progress, the watercolor of christian with the shield of faith (butlin 829 20), was given by blake to mrs. charles aders for her autograph album. as in the case of the collection of linnell, the multifarious descendants of whom accumulated a wide variety of surnames, as referred to in my article, viscomi has provided a list of surnames of those related to butts;viscomi, “‘green house’” 20. any of these could have inherited individual works from their father or grandfather. in the case of the works that descended from frederick tatham to his brother-in-law george richmond, there are the complexities of the purchase by dr. richard sisley (pace “dr. cicely” in the sale catalogue of 29 april 1897) of fifteen works.butlin 1: 29, under no. 77. if linnell and his family failed to sell any works publicly before the great sale of march 1918, it was not for want of trying. as well as helping to market the engraved illustrations of the book of job, linnell endeavored to dispose of the whole series of dante illustrations and those to paradise regained—perhaps partly in the interests of the artist’s widow. he also tried to dispose of a number of unspecified “drawings.”bentley, br(2) 484-509 passim. presumably viscomi’s confusion between which works were “copied” or “traced” is just a simple mistake. he makes a point about blake’s use of paper in his series of watercolors, so perhaps i should quote in full peter bower's account of those used for the finished watercolors for the grave, when blake used no fewer than three kinds of paper. (bower examined the works in london prior to their sale at sotheby’s new york on 2 may 2006.) blake was quite individual in his use of paper, not always using the same paper for a particular project and sometimes using a relatively old paper. for example the twenty watercolours for robert blair’s poem the grave, are executed on three different papers: the title page is on a drawing cartridge paper made by austen stace who ran horn street mill, a two vat mill on the seabrook stream in cheriton, kent, from 1781 until 1806. five of the works are on a white wove watercolour paper, similar to that used for adam and eve asleep, made by william balston and the hollingworth brothers at turkey mill, boxley, near maidstone, kent. the remaining 14 works are on a white wove writing paper made by robert edmeads and john pine at ivy mill, the loose valley, near maidstone, kent. david bindman’s objections are unique in that he alone, together with the owner, myself, and a few friends, has actually seen the work in the flesh. (despite this, he seems to have failed to notice the underdrawing.) bindman and i have also seen the three related works from the linnell collection, both that in cambridge and the two in melbourne. essick and viscomi accept that they have not seen the original and essick goes on to refer to his note on “attribution and reproduction” of 2011 to defend his reliance on photographs.see essick’s note 2. although modern reproduction techniques are getting more accurate by the minute, they are only just beginning to suggest the texture and three-dimensional quality of a work of art and cannot give a proper impression of the full physicality and, above all, the scale of a work. as already mentioned, the impact of the butts paradise lost watercolors and the “copies” made from them is striking; each time i have seen the new work i have been impressed again by the impact the watercolor makes by its sheer size (50.4 x 40.5 cm.) and the scale of the figures. the owner and i have also been able to look at it and discuss it (and again with bindman) under all sorts of conditions of light and setting. under artificial light and varying qualities of daylight the effect of the work is subtly changed. a change in the framing also made a difference. essick’s “attribution and reproduction” article certainly makes the point that photographs can assist in discovering details of handling that are barely distinguishable by the naked eye; they are also reminders of a work already seen in the flesh. however, there is far more than this that can be ascertained from seeing the work itself, in particular the impression the work makes as a whole and at its full size. a lot of connoisseurship depends upon recognition fueled by experience and a good visual memory and, as such, is bound to be to a considerable degree intuitive and subjective, however important photography, documentary evidence, and other material questions may be in contributing to a decision.for a detailed, if old-fashioned, account of aids to attribution, see m. j. friedländer, trans. t. borenius, on art and connoisseurship (london, n.d. [c. 1941]), in particular chapters 23-25, “on the value of the determination of authorship,” “on the objective criteria of authorship,” and “on intuition and the first impression.” interestingly, bindman was more impressed by the new watercolor when he actually saw it than he had been from a photograph, and his reactions were more to the general effect of the picture than the detailed criticisms of essick and viscomi. in particular, like everybody else, he is worried by the profile of the nearer angel—stern rather than sympathetic, somewhat ill proportioned, and with a great black splodge on the forehead. was this a mistake or a deliberate change of emphasis? he also pointed out that, unlike the butts prototype, the further angel is looking vaguely into space rather than at his companion. however, exactly the same occurs in one of the melbourne watercolors, the creation of eve, where eve, rather than looking up toward the outstretched hand of the creator as in the butts watercolor, again looks vaguely into space. he was also worried by the brightness of the white of the paper, but this may have been the result of the earlier cleaning mentioned by both bower and heather norville-day in their reports. to sum up, i respect bindman’s objections but beg to differ. perhaps the only way forward is to compare all the related works side by side in the flesh. a possible opportunity would be the rumored forthcoming exhibition to be devoted to blake at tate britain, provided that the organizers would agree and that the putative lenders would be agreeable. blake and exhibitions, 2021 blake and exhibitions, 2021 by luisa calè luisa calè (l.cale@bbk.ac.uk), birkbeck, university of london, works on practices of reading, viewing, and collecting in the romantic period. her publications include fuseli’s milton gallery: “turning readers into spectators”; co-edited volumes on dante on view: the reception of dante in the visual and performing arts and illustrations, optics and objects in nineteenth-century literary and visual cultures; and special issues on “the disorder of things” (eighteenth-century studies, 2011), “the nineteenth-century digital archive” (19: interdisciplinary studies in the long nineteenth century, 2015), “literature and sculpture at the fin de siècle” (word and image, 2018), and “sibylline leaves” (studies in romanticism, 2020). her current project, entitled the book unbound, explores practices of collecting and dismantling the book, with chapters on walpole, blake, and dickens. she is the exhibitions editor for blake. displays of blake in 2021 were still affected by the covid-19 pandemic, with many institutions closed, staff working from home, and moratoria on loans. some institutions had their own blakes on view, such as god judging adam at the metropolitan museum from october 2020 to mid-january 2021 and a plate from america a prophecy at the morgan library and museum in new york. william blake: visionary, building on the tate retrospective of 2019–​20 and planned by the getty museum in los angeles for 2020, is now scheduled for late 2023. the most significant event in the visual reception of blake in 2021 was the seventh centenary of the death of the medieval italian poet dante alighieri, to whom blake devoted 102 watercolors during the last years of his life. although there were plans to show some of them, such as the intended loan of melbourne dantes to the unfortunately canceled prado exhibition in madrid, the watercolors were not among the works featured in the main dante exhibitions of 2021. for conservation reasons, the ashmolean museum could not include watercolors from its own collection in dante: the invention of celebrity, since they had been on view too recently at the tate retrospective. instead, it chose to showcase blake’s engraving of “the circle of the lustful: francesca da rimini.” of the eighteen heads of poets that blake painted for the library of his patron william hayley at felpham in sussex, homer and dryden have been on display at manchester art gallery since 2006 to capture blake and hayley’s cosmopolitan canon, while the dante portrait traveled to the inferno exhibition at the scuderie del quirinale in rome. experimentation with digital facsimiles was a remarkable feature in 2021. the circle of the lustful is at the center of the contemporary artist melanie smith’s blakean tableau vivant and two-channel video work vortex, while other blake works are the basis for her pigment-on-wood absent leading role exercises. another dante centenary exhibition in rome, la biblioteca di dante at the accademia nazionale dei lincei, included reproductions of some of blake’s dante watercolors within a digital iconography room with camera-obscura style multisensorial projection holoboxes. 13 april–​10 july 2021 parafin gallery, london melanie smith, leave it to the amateurs the title of the exhibition captures a tableau vivant by mexico-based british artist melanie smith. smith’s encounter with blake was shaped by the scholarship of kathleen raine and william vaughan, the blake archive, and “the topographic sublime by iain sinclair, which i think, even without images conjures up brilliantly how blake sucks us into seeing pain, anguish, urban paranoia ….”communication with the artist. i am grateful to celia higson at parafin gallery for conveying my questions and smith’s responses via e-mail in june 2021. this tableau vivant, entitled vortex, was commissioned by muac, museo universitario arte contemporáneo at the universidad nacional autónoma de méxico, mexico city, and the museo amparo in puebla. the live action was performed at muac, directed from the museo amparo, and projected simultaneously in both locations from may to october 2019. smith worked with a choreographer, six cameramen, and twenty-eight dancers invited to participate in an unrehearsed (hence “amateur”) performance, in which they were called to take a random place on a swirling serpentine structure inspired by the circle of the lustful, blake’s response to inferno v in dante’s commedia. blake’s vortex was translated into a choreography captured by six security cameras and projected on a computer screen 875 meters away. blake acts as “a mentor of cobalt blue … conjuring a deranged cosmology of the future perfect tense, as visible as incorporeal beings on cctv monitors.”melanie smith, “leave it to the amateurs,” melanie smith: farsa y artificio/farce and artifice (mexico city: muac, museo universitario arte contemporáneo, 2019) 53 (exhibition catalogue: macba, museu d’art contemporani de barcelona [18 may–​7 october 2018]; muac, museo universitario arte contemporáneo, unam, universidad nacional autónoma de méxico, mexico city [25 may–​6 october 2019]; and museo amparo, puebla [25 may–​7 october 2019]). smith shares her response to blake in “melanie smith and the influence of blake,” hell’s printing press (28 june 2021): <https://​blog.​blakearchive.​org/​2021/​06/​28/​melanie-​smith-​and-​the-​influence-​of-​blake>. smith’s tableau vivant animates blake’s blue palette to produce a carefully constructed “symmetrical, multi-source illusion,” a “hallucination” that alludes to “bisexual lighting,” “the simultaneous use of blue, pink, and purple light—​the colors of the bisexual flag—​in nightclubs, film, and television.”alejandra labastida, “the symptoms of turbulence: or, if you peer into the vortex, you’ll see the spiral city,” melanie smith 15 and note 3. playing with the possibilities of still lives and moving pictures, the cctv footage “reveals fragments of the painting being constructed and deconstructed, but it never reaches a static conclusion.” the random permutations capture work in progress, activating and frustrating the expectation that they might be recomposed into a retroactive still frame, a pregnant moment “in which past, present, and future all collapse into a single gaze.”labastida (melanie smith 17), drawing on sean carney’s brecht and critical theory: dialectics and contemporary aesthetics (new york: routledge, 2005) 104. josé luis barrios teases out the deleuzian dimensions of smith’s tableaux vivants, from bruegel and bosch to blake: “becoming-shot (internal duration) … disassembled into several cameras … distending a single scene for two and a half hours.” for barrios, smith transforms “art and literature into the index of a sensation. at the point where the duration of a thing’s state, its affection, coincides with saturated physical framings and with a spatial unfolding across multiple channels, what obtains is a sensory bloc of pure time at the surface: a pure time-image of lustfulness.”josé luis barrios, “melanie smith, farce and artifice: when humor pierces the imaginary,” melanie smith 41-42. in the 2021 london exhibition, the route from the street was mediated by the filter of blue glass doors, which prepared visitors for the blue world of smith’s blakean dante. after passing a retro tv screen projecting a visual animation of a vortex algorithm, spectators entered the space of the circle of the lustful: a big-screen installation entitled vortex: two channel video work at the end of the room, marked by an expanded chromatic area defined by cobalt blue walls, carpeting, and cushions. the video work was supplemented by amateur leading role photographs taken on the same day as the performance. view of the vortex installation. photos of this exhibition are reproduced by permission of parafin gallery, london. images: peter mallet. while the mexican performative reenactment of the circle of the lustful was deterritorialized and fragmented by the cctv footage projected on the screen upstairs, downstairs smith’s multimedia chromatic experiments were documented by two walls of collages, including occasional small details of naked bodies and newspaper cutouts produced after the video was made. these collages connect smith’s multimedial explorations to the material culture of aby warburg’s mnemosyne atlas, a comparative method underpinned by photographic reproductions: in making the atlas, warburg believed that by juxtaposing symbolic images in different sequences the images themselves take on a different pathos or animated life, which he called “thought-image.” i think in this way by focusing on the fragment, background, brushstroke in (my) paintings and then zooming in facial expressions, body parts and “stillness” in the video, a strange space opens up. one medium very much depends on the other, because one comes from memory/​history (painting) and the other (video) comes from a virtual space where contemporary-mestizo bodies take on a performative role. … in my way i was very much thinking of the political context in mexico. more than taking a topographical approach, i focused on warburg’s “thought-image” and the bridging of imaginaries; the precariousness of life conditions in mexico, and blake’s capacity to portray dispossessed figures.communication with the artist, june 2021. smith’s analysis of blake’s infernal lovescape required a process of abstraction or decomposition in which the scene was emptied of its bodies so that the snake-shaped spiral that blake imagined in order to convey their vortex-like propulsion could be translated into a theatrical prop on which twenty-first-century mexican amateur actors would place themselves as they reenacted the scene as a tableau vivant. this process of decomposition is the governing principle of smith’s absent leading role exercises (2019), pigment-on-wood works exhibited downstairs at parafin gallery. these interventions deconstruct blake’s compositions by taking out the main figure(s), using photoshop to zoom in, “sometimes blowing out of proportion one detail or texture.”communication with the artist, june 2021. as a result, the paintings lose their narrative anchoring, leaving a void contour to mark the absent space that the main character used to inhabit: “the roles have been reversed and the melodrama of the paintings is presented as a series of abstract scenic backdrops.”from smith’s description at hell’s printing press (see note 2). smith’s interventions operate in the style of surrealist “outographs”—​photographs in which the subject has been cut out—​or sculptures that capture the empty space enveloping an object by transforming it into a mold and marking the object itself as negative space, as in rachel whiteread’s works. the process of disanchoring references the artwork by way of outlines marking absent forms. in addition to dante illustrations, including the numinous red clouds from dante and virgil approaching the angel who guards the entrance of purgatory (butlin #812.78) and the vortex in beatrice addressing dante from the car (butlin #812.88), smith practiced her art of decomposition on newton, the book of thel, “the ancient of days,” jacob’s ladder (butlin #438), and satan smiting job with sore boils (butlin #807). the display of these works as single paintings, diptychs, triptychs, or series is random: “this is a sort of loose jigsaw puzzle that is not established until the final hang of the paintings. none [is] specifically made to be the ‘other half ’ of another, but there are different visual compositions and strange juxtapositions that arise through different combinations.”communication with the artist, june 2021. melanie smith, blake: absent leading role exercise 6 and 23 (2019). see enlargement. each pigment on wood, 38 × 34 cm., pfn02323 and 02336. compare blake, the ghost of samuel appearing to saul, national gallery of art, washington, rosenwald collection, 1943.3.8996; and the agony in the garden, tate, n05894. melanie smith, blake: absent leading role exercise 16, 18, 17, and 9 (2019). see enlargement. each pigment on wood, 38 × 34 cm., pfn02332, 02334, 02333, and 02326. compare blake, beatrice addressing dante from the car, tate, n03369; newton, tate, n05058; beatrice addressing dante from the car; and the ghost of samuel appearing to saul, national gallery of art, washington, rosenwald collection, 1943.3.8996. melanie smith, blake: absent leading role exercise 26 (2019). pigment on wood, 38 × 34 cm., pfn02337. compare blake, the lord answering job out of the whirlwind, harvard art museums/​fogg museum, 1943.413. melanie smith, blake: absent leading role exercise 27 (2019). pigment on wood, 38 × 34 cm., pfn02338. compare blake, satan smiting job with sore boils, tate, n03340. 23 june–​15 december 2021 swedenborg house, london the story of swedenborg in 27 objects (curated by museum director stephen mcneilly) exhibition guide: stephen mcneilly. the story of swedenborg in 27 objects. london: swedenborg society, 2021. 32 pp. this display captured the life and legacy of emmanuel swedenborg through a collection of objects, including his walking stick and locks of his hair; a miniature wax bust by john flaxman; the correspondence of the suffragette josephine butler with swedenborg translator and blake scholar j. j. garth wilkinson; and manuscript notebooks for the japanese translation of swedenborg’s heaven and hell by d. t. suzuki, whose publications about zen buddhism had an impact on allen ginsberg, among others. “satan going forth from the presence of the lord and job’s charity” [plate numbered 5], illustrations of the book of job (1826). swedenborg society, purchased 2018. “the fall of satan” [plate numbered 16], illustrations of the book of job (1826). swedenborg society, purchased 2018. “job’s sacrifice” [plate numbered 18], illustrations of the book of job (1826). swedenborg society, purchased 2018. 6 july–​30 september 2021 strawberry hill house and garden, twickenham in focus: goldfish bowl (curated by silvia davoli) the exhibition included facsimiles of blake’s watercolors for thomas gray’s “ode on the death of a favourite cat. drowned in a tub of gold fishes,” part of an extra-illustrated copy of gray’s poems made for ann flaxman, now at the yale center for british art. the facsimiles were in a glass cabinet between the tribune and the great north bedchamber at strawberry hill. 17 september 2021–​9 january 2022 ashmolean museum, oxford dante: the invention of celebrity (curated by gervase rosser) exhibition catalogue: gervase rosser. dante: the invention of celebrity. oxford: ashmolean museum, 2021. the ashmolean dante exhibition started elegantly with salvador dalí’s first illustration to the commedia, showing dante tracing his steps through a metaphysically bare page. the reception of dante was documented from renaissance illustrated editions to tom phillips’s commedia (1983), l’inferno di lorenzo mattotti (1999), and geoff macewan’s 2010 etching “dante’s vision of divinity.” blake’s engraving “the circle of the lustful,” illustrating canto v of the inferno, was part of a vitrine dedicated to dante’s women and the theme of love. on one side was john flaxman’s line engraving of paolo and francesca (1793), and on the other a commemorative medal designed by luigi gori for the beatrice exhibition of 1890 (private collection) and a reproduction of henry holiday’s painting the meeting of dante and beatrice (1884; walker art gallery, liverpool). hanging behind them on the wall were early twentieth-century postcards of the meeting of dante and beatrice at santa trinita bridge in florence, inspired by holiday’s painting; an engraving of rachel and leah from dante’s dream in canto vii of the purgatorio; and an art-nouveau postcard by enzo anichini representing paolo and francesca. “the circle of the lustful: francesca da rimini” (“the whirlwind of lovers”), blake’s illustrations of dante (engraved 1826–​27). ashmolean museum, oxford, wa1941.27.1. 29 september 2021–​20 march 2022 bodleian library, oxford melancholy: a new anatomy (curated by kathryn murphy, john geddes, richard lawes, simon d. kyle, stephen puntis, gulamabbas lakha, kate saunders, phil burnet, and joseph butler) to mark the fourth centenary of robert burton’s anatomy of melancholy (1621), the exhibition brought together oxford experts in humanities and mental health to show “how burton’s holistic and multifaceted conception of cure finds surprising echoes in contemporary psychiatry and prescriptions for mental health.” “a cradle song” was presented in the section on “sleeping and waking” because it chimes with burton’s interest in the curative effects of sweet sounds and being “lulled into peaceful, restorative sleep.” “the lord answering job out of the whirlwind,” from illustrations of the book of job, was chosen for its “powerful connections with modern psychotherapy, empowering the individual through a renewed sense of self and reframing perspectives.”i am grateful to ellen hausner at the bodleian library for sharing the exhibition’s captions. “a cradle song,” songs of innocence copy l (composed and printed 1789). bodleian library, oxford, arch. g e.42. “the lord answering job out of the whirlwind” [plate numbered 13], illustrations of the book of job (1826). danson library, trinity college, oxford, blake print no. 13. 8 october 2021–​16 january 2022 accademia nazionale dei lincei, rome la biblioteca di dante [dante’s library] (curated by roberto antonelli, ebe antetomaso, marco guardo, and lorenzo mainini) exhibition catalogue: roberto antonelli and lorenzo mainini, eds. la biblioteca di dante. rome: bardi, 2021. 384 pp. this centenary exhibition included digital copies of blake’s dante illustrations in the final digital iconography section, entitled “paesaggi e personaggi della commedia. un’iconografia digitale” [“landscapes and characters from the commedia: a digital iconography”], curated by roberto andreotti and federico de melis, designed by openlab company, and coproduced with mic, istituto centrale per il patrimonio immateriale [cmi, central institute for immaterial heritage]. photos of this exhibition are reproduced by permission of francesco de melis. see enlargement. after a reconstruction of the medieval world of dante’s imagination—​exploring what he might have read through an extraordinary and extensive collection of medieval manuscripts in the splendid frescoed rooms of the academy’s library at the palazzo corsini—​the digital iconography section was enveloped in darkness, with light coming from a series of multisensorial “holoboxes.” see enlargement. these hologram projectors recreated the aesthetics of the camera obscura, while also referencing the tradition of the magic lantern and the theatrical ghost demonstrations of john henry pepper (1821–​1900). the displays were set up as “stations,” each complemented by a specific “phonosphere” of “contrapuntal” phonic effects produced by ethnomusicologist, video artist, and director francesco de melis, with stop-motion and 2d video animation by openlab. the digital iconography installation activated documentary anthropology techniques in consultation with cmi and the archivio di antropologia visiva [archive of visual anthropology]. this experiment in immersive technologies and virtual and augmented reality is part of the central institute for immaterial heritage’s plan for “contemporary visions of immateriality,” which aims to enhance italian culture through film and audiovisual expression, underpinned by a research strategy associated with the design, multimedia, and visual communication ma of the university of rome “la sapienza.” see enlargement. station 2, “pier della vigna e l’italia federiciana” [“pier della vigna and frederician italy”], was devoted to dante’s depiction of self-inflicted violence in canto xiii of the inferno. a digital file of blake’s the wood of the self-murderers: the harpies and the suicides (butlin #812.24) was projected alongside visual documentation of the frederician court of pier della vigna, with photographs of castel del monte in puglia, portraits and sculptural evidence of the emperor from the metropolitan museum, and visual responses to dante’s scene across the centuries, from priamo della quercia to pinelli, doré, dalí, and martini, accompanied by a dissonant soundtrack. station 3, “ulisse o la vertigine del conoscere” [“ulysses or the vertigo of knowing”], devoted to fraudulent counselors in inferno xxvi, projected ulysses and diomed swathed in the same flame (butlin #812.55), together with works by de groux, martini, böcklin, rothaug, flaxman, bauchant, cagli, and cambellotti. station 5, “manfredi, purgatorio e benevento” [“manfredi, purgatorio, and benevento”], marked the ascent of the mount of purgatory with two details from blake’s illustration from purgatorio iv (butlin #812.74), as well as objects that provided a historical mise-en-scène and works by doré, bronzino, botticelli, flaxman, zuccari, nattini, and martini. 15 october 2021–​23 january 2022 scuderie del quirinale, rome inferno (curated by jean clair) exhibition catalogue: jean clair and laura bossi, eds. inferno. milan: electa, 2021. 480 pp. includes michael edwards, “blake nell’inferno dantesco.” the portrait of dante that blake painted for william hayley’s library hung on the information wall of the section entitled “l’inferno di dante: il canone illustrato”/​“dante’s inferno: the illustrated canon,” in the middle of the lower floor of the exhibition. photos of this exhibition are reproduced by permission of the scuderie del quirinale, rome. images: alberto novelli. see enlargement. to the left and right of the portrait, two sculptural groups in bronze by auguste rodin (1882; musée rodin, paris) and jean-baptiste carpeaux (c. 1858; musée d’orsay, paris) registered the visual metamorphoses of the subject of ugolino and his sons, which blake himself immortalized in his depiction of the medieval italian poet. the wall text summarized the range of dante illustrations over the centuries: medieval illuminated manuscripts, some of which were exhibited in the previous room, botticelli’s “dante on vellum,” series of illustrations by federico zuccari and giovanni stradano, john flaxman’s “severe linear style” associated with “botticelli’s graphic purity,” and then blake, praised for “imagining, especially for the inferno, iconographies endowed with extraordinary fantastic-visionary impact.”“immaginando soprattutto per l’inferno iconografie di straordinario impatto fantastico-visionario.” the last artists mentioned in the wall text were gustave doré and the contemporary spanish artist miquel barceló: doré’s illustrations were documented by a watercolor representing dante and virgil in the eighth circle of hell, in the same room as the blake portrait; a copy of the illustrated edition; and the large oil on canvas dante et virgile dans le neuvième cercle de l'enfer (1861) in the following room, which also featured dante watercolors by barceló. upstairs, the exhibition explored allegorical inflections of dante’s hell in depictions of the horrors of war, including goya’s engraved series. finally, the way out was signaled by an arresting metal book of stars by anselm kiefer: just like dante, the viewer emerged from hell to see the stars again. michael edwards’s catalogue essay complements what was on view in the exhibition with a choice of watercolors (pp. 191-94): the vestibule of hell and the souls mustering to cross the acheron (butlin #812.5), the circle of the lustful: francesca da rimini (butlin #812.10), dante and virgil escaping from the devils (butlin #812.43 recto), and the stygian lake with the ireful sinners fighting (butlin #812.15). dante alighieri (c. 1800–03). butlin #343.4. manchester art gallery, 1885.16. reproduced in inferno 217, cat. no. 65. review: linda freedman, william blake and the myth of america: from the abolitionists to the counterculture linda freedman. william blake and the myth of america: from the abolitionists to the counterculture. oxford: oxford university press, 2018. xiii + 273 pp. £61.00/​$82.00, hardcover; also available as an e-book. reviewed by luke walker luke walker (luke77walker@hotmail.com) is the author of the forthcoming book william blake and allen ginsberg: romanticism, counterculture and radical reception (manchester university press), and he recently coedited a special issue of the bulletin of the john rylands library on “the artist of the future age: william blake, neo-romanticism, counterculture and now” (spring 2022). he has published widely on related topics, including articles in the journals romanticism and comparative american studies and chapters in the edited collections rock and romanticism: blake, wordsworth, and rock from dylan to u2 (2018), the routledge handbook of international beat literature (2018), and the beats, black mountain, and new modes in american poetry (2021). we seem to be living in a golden age of scholarship on blake’s reception, and linda freedman’s william blake and the myth of america is a welcome addition to this critical canon. as freedman notes, the recent scholarly antecedents of her study include the collections blake 2.0: william blake in twentieth-century art, music and culture (ed. steve clark, tristanne connolly, and jason whittaker, 2012), blake, modernity and popular culture (ed. clark and whittaker, 2007), and the reception of blake in the orient (ed. clark and masashi suzuki, 2006), as well as colin trodd’s monograph visions of blake: william blake in the art world, 1830–​1930 (2012) and edward larrissy’s blake and modern literature (2006). freedman’s book, which benefits from sixteen color illustrations embedded throughout the text, also follows hot on the heels of the even more lavishly illustrated william blake and the age of aquarius (ed. stephen f. eisenman, 2017).since the publication of freedman’s book, this burgeoning critical genre has been expanded further by the reception of william blake in europe, ed. sibylle erle and morton d. paley (2 vols., 2019). my own study, william blake and allen ginsberg: romanticism, counterculture and radical reception, is forthcoming from manchester university press. yet, as she acknowledges, the contents of william blake and the myth of america connect it more specifically to william blake and the moderns, the 1982 collection edited by robert j. bertholf and annette s. levitt, which prepared the ground for the current crop of blakean reception studies; figures from that book who reappear in freedman’s monograph include walt whitman, hart crane, t. s. eliot, theodore roethke, robert duncan, and allen ginsberg. a key strength of freedman’s work, as she revisits these reception contexts and introduces others, is that she weaves them into an ambitious overarching argument of her own, illuminating “a particularly american story, which spans both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and connects blake’s reception with mythopoeic visions of america” (14). looking back from the perspective of her conclusion, she is able to summarize “four interrelated areas in which blake’s american reception really matters to blake studies, transatlantic meanings of romanticism, and the idea of america” (251); these are “religion,” “readings of the body,” “the relationship between romanticism and modernity,” and lastly “the subject of america itself” (251-54). as freedman shows, this “myth of america” has a dark side, and her introductory chapter draws lines of connection from the rape of oothoon—​“the soft soul of america” in visions of the daughters of albion—​to blake’s horrific engravings after stedman for the latter’s surinam expedition, and onward via american wars in vietnam and iraq to the “endemic racism, persistent sexism, [and] violent nationalism” of the trump era (3), although, as she notes, mike goode’s story of trump’s direct appropriation of blake’s proverbs “turned out to be an irony that was indeed too good to be true” (14). a major argument in chapter 1, “spirit and society: blake’s early american appeal,” is that it was easier for interest in blake to take hold in america than it was in his native britain. this assertion should be evaluated in the context of a broader movement within recent blake scholarship to challenge the long-held idea that blake really was a “pictor [and poeta] ignotus” before gilchrist’s 1863 biography. nonetheless, freedman convincingly argues that “blake’s peculiar brand of religious enthusiasm was better suited to mid-nineteenth-century america than it was to victorian england,” making him a “kindred spirit” to figures such as ralph waldo emerson (17). in part, this was a result of the lively american interest in swedenborg, although freedman goes on to show how emerson, who first encountered blake’s poetry through j. j. g. wilkinson’s 1839 edition of songs, in fact shared blake’s own more critical approach to swedenborg, in marked contrast to wilkinson himself. partly drawing on the work of clare elliott, freedman explores the relationship between imagination and vision in blake and emerson, noting the american author’s particular fascination with blake’s observation that “the eye altering alters all,” which resonated with his own writing on this topic (although, oddly, freedman never refers directly to the famous image of the “transparent eye-ball,” which originated in emerson’s 1836 essay nature).elliott’s substantial body of work on blake’s nineteenth-century american reception is yet to be published in monograph form, so in places freedman draws (with due acknowledgment) on elliott’s doctoral dissertation. elliott’s published work includes “william blake’s american afterlives,” transatlantic literature and transitivity, 1780–​1850: subjects, texts, and print culture, ed. annika bautz and kathryn n. gray (new york: routledge, 2017) 195-211; “‘a backward glance o’er’ the (dis)united states: william blake, ralph waldo emerson and the ‘authentic american religion,’” european journal of american culture 28.1 (2009): 75-93; and “william blake and america: freedom and violence in the atlantic world,” comparative american studies 7.3 (2009): 209-24. the chapter then moves on to a subtle investigation of the complex contexts within which lydia maria child (like emerson and blake, a disillusioned swedenborgian) published blake’s “the little black boy” in the national anti-slavery standard in 1842. next, freedman uses her own research in the london archives of the swedenborg society to reveal the significance of the friendship between wilkinson and henry james, sr., which led directly to the publication in 1848 of several blake poems in the harbinger, the journal of the utopian brook farm movement. in the final section of this excellent chapter, freedman—​also the author of a monograph on emily dickinson—​shows how even though there is no evidence that dickinson read blake, he nonetheless had a significant impact on her reception, as evident, for example, in christina rossetti’s praise for dickinson’s “wonderful blakean gift” (38). this discussion of how dickinson was read through blakean eyes prepares the ground for chapter 2, on walt whitman. once again, the rossetti siblings and their wider circle play a major role, and freedman explores the complexities, ironies, and tensions within these transatlantic intersections, as a. c. swinburne’s influential comparison of blake and whitman not only americanizes blake, but also makes whitman subject to the english poet; this leads to “acute anxieties of nationalism and influence” (54). figures covered in the next chapter, “early twentieth-century america: new versions of the prophet,” include waldo frank, hart crane, t. s. eliot, marianne moore, stanley kunitz, and theodore roethke; freedman notes that for left-leaning “cultural nationalists” such as frank and crane, “blake’s hebraism and mysticism once again allowed him to be seen as a prophet who promised spiritual redemption and social rejuvenation” for america (63-64). this is contrasted with the conservatism of eliot, although, as freedman makes clear, eliot’s relationship to blake was more complex than he himself indicated. the highlights of this chapter are the extended close readings of works by crane and roethke, with roethke’s position between the modernists and the beats nicely illuminated: this is a literary and cultural boundary that is not as clear as is often assumed. the chapter also opens up several avenues for further research. for example, a fascinating figure only briefly mentioned here is the poet h. d. (hilda doolittle), who was first introduced to blake’s work by ezra pound; as freedman notes, the shared moravian family backgrounds of blake and h. d. provide a potentially rich area for future exploration. one interesting study that is not mentioned is tony trigilio, “strange prophecies anew”: rereading apocalypse in blake, h. d., and ginsberg (2000). it was written before the revelation of blake’s mother’s moravianism, but trigilio’s combination of subjects does provide further support for the idea that blake’s postwar countercultural identity needs to be considered in relation to the earlier american modernist interest in blake. chapters 4 to 8 consider various aspects of blake’s countercultural influence. given the centrality of blake to allen ginsberg’s life and poetics, and of ginsberg himself to american counterculture, it is appropriate that the first of these chapters should be given over to him. yet the sheer extent of ginsberg’s lifelong engagement with blake—​together with the ambitious scope of the book overall, with its large cast of characters and periods to be researched—​leads freedman to make several errors and missteps. for example, it is surprising to see her describe ginsberg’s famous 1948 “blake vision” as “drug-induced” (109), when ginsberg explicitly denied this on numerous occasions (including in sources cited by freedman); in fact, he wrote and spoke in detail about the complex relationship between this early “natural” vision and his later use of psychedelics, which he had not yet encountered in 1948. more broadly, the discussion of this key event is overly reductive; by relying entirely on the account given by ginsberg in his 1965 interview for the paris review (here misdated as 1967), freedman misses the way in which ginsberg’s perspective on this vision, and on blake’s work, developed over time, under the twin influences of buddhism and of his increasingly studious post-1960s engagement with blake scholarship. other questionable assumptions include the bland statement that, in contrast to ginsberg, “blake never took drugs” (91). a better phrasing would be that, with the exception of alcohol, there is no evidence that blake used any drugs recreationally, though it would not be surprising if he took tinctures of opium in a medicinal context. freedman probably also misjudges her readers when she somewhat laboriously explains the typical atmosphere of a 1950s san francisco poetry reading and spells out the meaning of timothy leary’s famous “turn on, tune in, drop out” dictum. despite occasional misjudgments, there is much that is valuable in this chapter, such as the astute close readings of several ginsberg poems; these are aided by the fact that, throughout the book, freedman is not afraid to quote at length from her subjects. the chapter also perceptively draws attention to the significance of the body for ginsberg’s reading of blake; this topic forms an important thematic link with the next two chapters, which cover ginsberg’s friends robert duncan, gary snyder, and michael mcclure. duncan was associated with the san francisco renaissance as well as the black mountain poets; both groups also intersected with the beat movement. this web of connections leads to a couple of minor errors, as freedman assumes that black mountain college (rather than san francisco) was the location of duncan’s momentous first encounter with blake’s poetry in 1953 and erroneously states that ginsberg also taught at the college (he never even visited), but overall “blake, duncan, and the politics of writing from myth” is an illuminating introduction to a fascinating figure.on the relationship between ginsberg and the black mountain poets, including shared interests in blake and other strands of western esotericism, see my “‘one physical-mental inspiration of thought’: allen ginsberg and black mountain poetics,” the beats, black mountain, and new modes in american poetry, ed. matt theado (clemson: clemson university press, 2021) 35-46. drawing on sources including duncan’s long 1968 essay the truth and life of myth and on her close readings of his poetry, she skillfully shows duncan’s familiarity with blake’s myth of america, as well as his self-consciously blakean struggle to reconcile “the relationship between revelation and revolution” in the context of the vietnam war (122). equally illuminating is chapter 6, in which freedman considers beat poets michael mcclure and gary snyder alongside the objectivist george oppen. it benefits from an interweaving of two strong thematic strands: first, a continuation of the theme of blakean embodiment, and second, a consideration of the practice of ecopoetics. as freedman notes, snyder’s and mcclure’s poetic styles differed significantly from one another, but their shared environmentalist approach to poetry was “ahead of the critical trend” (140). she mentions recent ecocritical scholarship on blake and romanticism, but the chapter is particularly notable for its close and productive engagement with tristanne connolly’s william blake and the body (2002). these critical sources assist in the exploration of the tensions between mcclure’s forceful co-option of the figure he described as “the great mammal william blake” into his poetic project and blake’s own ambivalent attitude to the natural world (147). the idea behind “‘break on through’: musical openings of the doors of perception” is promising: linking a range of 1960s and 1970s musicians who were influenced by blake, including bob dylan, ed sanders, jim morrison, and patti smith. unfortunately, this turns out to be the weakest chapter in the book, as freedman fails to provide the strong thematizing arguments that the previous chapter had used so well, and even the tone and language seem at variance with the tight expression of most of the rest of the book. given the close personal and professional ties between all these musicians and the beat poets (in particular ginsberg and mcclure), there is also a missed opportunity to investigate more fully these interwoven lines of blakean transmission. in contrast to freedman’s apparent difficulty in mustering scholarly enthusiasm for the musical side of blake’s countercultural appropriation, her chapter on blake’s influence on the radical 1960s theology of thomas j. j. altizer and norman o. brown is a triumph, and she seems aware that she is breaking new ground here. it begins with a succinct but insightful discussion of the complex question of blake’s theology and a summary of scholarship in this field, followed by some context on altizer’s and brown’s place in the history of american theology and culture. linking back to her opening chapters, freedman argues that the distinctive american response to blake had “always been theological as well as social, political, and literary” (193). we get a strong sense of the individual characters and literary oeuvres of altizer and brown, and of their relationship to the historical moment. the connection between revelation and revolution is once again at the heart of this chapter. freedman shows how the theology of both men involves an understanding of “america itself as satanic—​in its imperialism, its capitalism, its racism, and its war in vietnam” and also a celebration of the revolutionary energies of los and orc that are embodied in its arts and counterculture (202). if “romanticism after auschwitz: blake and bellow” lacks something of the verve of “the poetics of belief: blake and countercultural theology,” it nonetheless contains some interesting and original material. here, saul bellow’s brand of blakeanism is presented as a foil to what he saw (in freedman’s paraphrasing) as “the sham romanticism of the counterculture” (215). this makes a nice coda to the suite of chapters on countercultural blake, and freedman does uncover a number of blake references in bellow’s work, but she admits that his influence on bellow is “subtle” (215). the chapter could perhaps have been energized by an expansion of the short section where she makes comparisons with the work of ray bradbury and kurt vonnegut. the book’s conclusion is an effective restatement of freedman’s central argument, but prior to this she gives us “continuing visions,” which brings together ridley scott’s 1982 film blade runner, jim jarmusch’s 1995 “acid western” dead man, and a 2004 artwork by the activist paul chan, who belongs to a new york network called the friends of william blake. while freedman introduces the late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century period as being “long after the counterculture had diffused” (232), the influence of the 1960s on all three of these artworks is implicit throughout the chapter, and on occasion brought to the fore more explicitly, as at the end of the discussion of dead man. indeed, it is this text in particular that gives freedman the opportunity to return to the book’s powerful central thread, as she notes that “jarmusch implies that the frontier mentality is urizenic in its brutal colonization of land and genocide of native people. as the naive bill [blake’s namesake in the film] is told in no uncertain terms: ‘this is america’” (240). b l a k e volume 55 number 4 spring 2022 angela esterhammer, victoria college, university of toronto nelson hilton, university of georgia tilar j. mazzeo, colby college robert w. rix, university of copenhagen joseph viscomi, university of north carolina at chapel hill david worrall, the nottingham trent university martin butlin, tate gallery, london, retired tristanne j. connolly, university of waterloo detlef w. dörrbecker, university of trier sibylle erle, bishop grosseteste university robert n. essick, university of california, riverside a d v i s o r y b o a r d a n i l l u s t r a t e d q u a r t e r l y volume 55 number 4 spring 2022 c o n t e n t s www.blakequarterly.org articles blake in the marketplace, 2021 by robert n. essick “seen in my visions”: klüver form-constant visual hallucinations in william blake’s paintings and illuminated books by david worrall reviews linda freedman, william blake and the myth of america: from the abolitionists to the counterculture reviewed by luke walker adam komisaruk, sexual privatism in british romantic writing: a public of one reviewed by marsha keith schuchard erasmus darwin, the botanic garden, ed. adam komisaruk and allison dushane reviewed by alexander s. gourlay © 2022 copyright morris eaves and morton d. paley cover: america a prophecy copy q, plate 7 (composed 1793, printed c. 1829 by catherine blake, and hand tinted in the early twentieth century). special collections, princeton university library. image courtesy of the william blake archive. e d i t o r s editors: morris eaves and morton d. paley review editor: alexander s. gourlay exhibitions editor: luisa calè bibliographer (criticism): wayne c. ripley bibliographer (music): jason whittaker managing editor: sarah jones sarah.jones@rochester.edu production office: department of english, university of rochester, rochester ny 14627-0451 “re-mediatingˮ william blake in croatia and serbia “re-mediatingˮ william blake in croatia and serbia by tanja bakić tanja bakić is a published poet and literary translator from montenegro. she is pursuing her phd on william blake at the university of montenegro. in “‘the most obscure and most angelic of all the english lyrical poets,’” my essay for the reception of william blake in europe, i dealt with the works of one contemporary artist from croatia—​zdenka pozaić—​and two from serbia—​simonida rajčević and aleksandra m. jovanić—​who were influenced by blake. pozaić (b. 1940) is a graphic artist who in 2003 created the crystal cabinet, an artist’s book based on a croatian translation of blake’s poem of the same name. rajčević (b. 1974) is an artist specializing in drawings who in 2010 used two works by blake—​“the ancient of daysˮ and nebuchadnezzar—​as part of an atmospheric installation titled tamna zvezda (dark star), which also included quotations from blake and other artists. finally, jovanić (b. 1976), a digital artist, in 2011 created an internet-based form centered upon a serbian translation of “a poison tree.ˮ each project, although different, reflected blake’s practice of combining text and image. while my previous essay describes the works, relates their characteristics, and explains which of blake’s works these artists were influenced by, this article approaches the subject from another perspective; it tries to answer how the artists first perceived blake, how each of them understood him, and in what way the figure of blake guided them.in 2019, each artist completed a survey that i had devised. through these works, blake’s art and poetry have been transferred from a british setting into new cultural surroundings. in providing a more internal look at them, i intend to offer a detailed case study of the reception of blake’s visual art in serbia and croatia, and to argue that these cases are representative of linda hutcheon’s “cultural adaptationsˮ and “reformattingˮ (31, 16). and since these adaptationsaccording to hutcheon, adaptation can be described as: “1) an acknowledged transposition of a recognizable other work or works; 2) a creative and an interpretive act of appropriation/​salvaging; 3) an extended intertextual engagement with the adapted workˮ (8). are into different media, i further wish to argue that they can also theoretically be called “re-mediationsˮ (hutcheon 16). we live in a “postmodern age of cultural recyclingˮ (hutcheon 3), where “the mediation and reformulation of the canonˮ (hans robert jauss, as cited in holub 10), as traditional notions of textual autonomy, are challenged as musts for a successful literary and art paradigm (machor and goldstein ix). given that kind of reception context, my intention is to investigate whether blake’s reaching these croatian and serbian artists was indeed a reception process or perhaps a “(re-)interpretation and then (re-)creationˮ or “an extended intertextual engagement with the adapted workˮ (hutcheon 8). i also wish to explore how they most strongly experienced blake—​as a poet, as a painter, or as a creative person known for his “unique integration of words and pictures” (goode, “the joy of looking” 17). how did these three artists first discover blake? if they had read his poems, which editions did they use (the original english or translations)? the same question applies to his art: had they viewed his works in person, or in editions or monographs? did they manage to become a personalized audience as a consequence of personalizing the work by blake (eaves, “romantic expressive theoryˮ 790)? how much did they like or understand blake, “suspected of being a poet by painters, and of being a painter by the critics of poetryˮ (ross 167)? finally, in answering those questions, i would like to call upon wai chee dimock’s “theory of resonance,” which challenges a historicism now practiced and based upon semantic synchronism by proposing a diachronic historicism (1060-61) and asking an important question: “how does a literary text sound when it is read twenty years, two hundred years, or two thousand years after it was written?ˮ for jovanić, it was blake the poet who first reached her. while she was preparing for the belgrade arts academy entrance exam in 2002, a friend lent her a book of blake’s poetry translated by dragan purešić (1998) and told her that she should pay special attention to “a poison treeˮ (“otrovno drvo”), believing that she could use it to create an animation, which was one of the requirements of the exam. a key role in making the animation was played by sound, since jovanić browsed the internet to find a recording of “a poison treeˮ in english. (nowadays she cannot recall which website she visited.) the poem, its translation, and its sound were all important components in jovanić’s first perception of blake. a screenshot from “otrovno drvo” (“a poison tree“), aleksandra m. jovanić, 2011 (see enlargement). “otrovno drvo” is part of “bajt ima osam bitova” (“byte has eight bits”), eight short interactive pieces. by permission of the artist. jovanić used the “poison tree“ animation, in different forms, for both the ma entrance exam and this phd dissertation. the auditory aspect further chimes with dimock’s theory of resonance, which puts the centrality of the ear for literature against “the ‘ocularcentrism’ of western cultureˮ (jenks 16).largely drawing upon the work of w. j. t. mitchell, robert hughes, and norman bryson, chris jenks emphasizes vision as a skilled cultural practice, abstraction as a perspectival issue, and the role of the viewer as an interpreter. the key aural concept that dimock proposes is resonance, defined as “traveling frequencies of literary textsˮ or “the extent to which a text might be said to endureˮ (1061) or even “the experience of reading that lasts” (cristofovici 2). this is also in line with aural notions of romantic poetry, depicted by david perkins as “an art realized in time by the voiceˮ or “the interior performance of verse in solitary readingˮ (656, 655).in “how the romantics recited poetry,ˮ perkins argues that the romantics would have heard poetry more than most of us do today, in the ear of the mind: “[the romantic poets] stylized the delivery of poetry, widely differentiating it from natural speech and moving it closer to musicˮ (661). it was the sound of blake’s poem that “resonatedˮ with jovanić. in addition, there is the benjaminian role played by the serbian translation of “a poison tree,ˮ serving as a mode in itself that becomes an “echo,” which can produce “the reverberation of the work in the alien one.”the german jewish philosopher walter benjamin (1892–​1940) wrote his essay “the task of the translatorˮ (1923) to question the binary of original and translation and to conceive of translation as an art form. benjamin believes the task of the translator is in “finding the particular intention toward the target language which produces in that language the echo of the original” (258), which can create “the reverberation of the work in the alien one” (258-59). thanks to the translation, the original poem reverberated via the ear of jovanić. in the cases of pozaić and rajčević, it was blake the painter who first reached them. pozaić remembers that he was mentioned by a teacher during an art class at the school of applied arts in zagreb in the 1959–​60 school year. rajčević recalls that it was in 1992 that blake was seriously mentioned for the first time, during a conversation with nikola šuica, an art historian and the editor of the special issue of gradac (1990) dedicated to blake. on the other hand, she avidly read poems by blake that a friend lent her, not in the original english, but translated into serbian (she cannot recollect the edition).at that time, the only published edition of blake’s poetry in serbia was blejk, trans. ranka kuić (belgrade: narodni univerzitet svetozar marković, 1972). the only published croatian editions were william blake: vizije, trans. marko grčić (zagreb: centar za društvene djelatnosti omladine, 1972) and william blake: vječno evanđelje, trans. marko grčić (zagreb: grafički zavod hrvatske, 1980). she does remember her favorite quotations, from the marriage of heaven and hell: “he whose face gives no light, shall never become a star” (plate 7, e 35) and “the tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction” (plate 9, e 37). by and large, marriage is the most translated and most popular of blake’s works in serbia and croatia. in order to account for this, i will call upon john villalobos, who claims that “proverbs were considered as problems, vexing complicated questions for the intellect” (250). mike goode gives a broader explanation of the popularity of the form, asserting that “proverbs can only become recognizable as such by circulating in many different contexts, and they can remain proverbial only by continuing to be applied in new onesˮ (“blakespottingˮ 778). on top of the fact that proverbs can easily be adapted to different cultures and surroundings, both the serbian and croatian peoples like memorizing proverbial forms and have long been intrigued by them. a proverb has the “capacity to circulate apart from its original context without altering its lexical formˮ and the “ability to slip its context and circulate in this wayˮ (“blakespottingˮ 774). hence, this aspect of proverbs gets close to dimock’s “resonance” and her view of texts “as objects that do a lot of traveling: across space and especially across timeˮ (1061). as with jovanić’s first perception of blake, dimock’s theory serves to illuminate how rajčević experienced him. goode’s observation that blake’s poetry “works to resist the idealist abstractions of the categories of reader, text, and corpus altogether, in the service of producing reading formations that cannot be identified or mapped according to existing strategies and technologiesˮ (“blakespottingˮ 772) aligns well with both krebs’s “rewriting of textsˮ in readers’ heads (1) and modern reception study, which “examines the changing horizons of a text’s many readers” (machor and goldstein xi). goode refers to paul de man, who once observed that blake’s texts deconstruct themselves, and explains that blake’s proverbs prompt the reader “to appropriate and resituate [their] linesˮ—​they defy “distinctions between the text, its author, and its readerˮ (“blakespottingˮ 771, 776). those views reveal the constructive act of rajčević in her perception of blake’s proverbs from marriage—​she takes on the role of an audience that partakes in the making of meaning. since passing the arts academy entrance exam, jovanić has not extensively read or researched blake’s work. when she created a new animation of “a poison tree” for her phd project, she acquired izabrana dela (2007), translated by purešić and published by plato, which she likes because it contains the original english in parallel with the serbian translation, accompanied by blake’s illustrations. the illustrations, especially for songs of innocence and of experience, have helped her gain a better understanding of the way blake operated in “this hydra-headed scholarly areaˮ of interdisciplinary art (mulhallen 782). rajčević returned to blake in 2009, when preparing for her installation tamna zvezda, which contained lots of literary quotations (bakić 595-97; rajčević, “izgubljeni rajˮ). as with jovanić, blake’s work was recommended by a friend, in a handwritten note containing lines from marriage. the exhibition was a success; the employment of quotations from blakeа quotation from the notebook appears with a drawing of a portrait of arthur rimbaud: “if you have formd a circle to go into / go into it yourself & see how you would do” (e 516). see bakić 596. and other artists proved slethaug’s view of citation “as a discursive technique that revisits and critiques other works for structural and thematic purposes as well as formulating new discoursesˮ (30). rajčević’s constructive reading of blake’s proverbs, discussed earlier, prompted her to come up with a work of art that would formulate new discourses. that is why we can describe her work as discursive, but also postmodern in a barthesian and derridean way.both barthes and derrida pointed out that it was postmodernism that helped reconsider the concept of fidelity within adaptation. as slethaug argues, “the postmodern play and ‘pleasure’ of the literature-film intertext envisioned by barthes and derrida come from repetition with infinite variations that include numerous degrees of adaptation and citation. perhaps ‘pleasure’ … is even more exaggerated in citation because … the farther away from the original text the adaptation or citation strays, the more likely it is to share in postmodern play and indeterminacyˮ (31). in this respect, barthes’s “myth of filiationˮ is also important: “the quotations a text is made of are anonymous, irrecoverable, and yet already read: they are quotations without quotation marks” (barthes 60). this barthesian concept is something that writers and film directors are constantly interrogating as part of the postmodern venture (slethaug 30). from tamna zvezda (dark star), simonida rajčević, 2010 (see enlargement). the quotations are from r.e.m. and leonard cohen. oil-based marker pen on black plastic trash bag, 70 x 110 cm. by permission of the artist. from tamna zvezda (dark star), simonida rajčević, 2010 (see enlargement). the quotations are from courtney love and patti smith. oil-based marker pen on black plastic trash bag, 70 x 110 cm. by permission of the artist. pozaić, who first encountered blake the artist, read his poems as translated by luko paljetak: “i simply felt a closeness, an emotional excitement, as if the words were running through meˮ (pozaić, “blake and visual artˮ).this and other translations of non-english sources are mine. pozaić reveals that this was the translation published by konzor (zagreb, 2001). again, this may be said to resemble both dimock’s “resonanceˮ and her notion of texts “as objects that do a lot of traveling,ˮ as well as the traditional view of translation as a process implying the “moving or carrying across of the meaningˮ (boria and tomalin 14). the way that paljetak’s translation of “the crystal cabinetˮ influenced pozaić to create her artwork of the same name demonstrates susan bassnett and andré lefevere’s notion that “translation … is never innocent,ˮ because there is “always a history from which a text emerges and into which a text is transposed” (quoted in boria and tomalin 8): paljetak’s translation was transposed into pozaić’s woodcut. in gunther kress’s view, this transposition can also be classified as a “transductionˮ of the poem, “since the meaning-material has been moved from one mode to another”—​from writing to image. paljetak’s translation is a “transformation,ˮ because the original poem “has been moved from one mode into the same modeˮ—​from writing to writing (boria and tomalin 15). in this case, there is also a change of culture (english to croatian) involved, thus invoking terms such as “intraculturalˮ and “intercultural,” as eirlys davies argues (boria and tomalin 15). “kristalna soba” (“the crystal cabinet”), zdenka pozaić, 2003 (see enlargement). woodcut in colors, 12 x 12 cm. dimensions of the bibliophile edition, 19 x 25 cm. words and pictures series, printed in 45 copies. by permission of the artist. during her studies in zagreb, pozaić discovered an interest in creating bibliophile editions, which has remained the main characteristic of her work as a whole. these editions, specifically her representation of “the crystal cabinet,ˮ are reminiscent of blake’s illuminated books, which were produced in a limited number of copies. they thus show “the capacity of poetry to function across mediaˮ (langan and mclane 242), but also display blake’s world as “the world of the mediumˮ (viscomi 43). interestingly, those handmade books by blake “have been closely bound up with his posthumous fate” (eaves, “on blakes” 415), “almost as if william blake anticipated this and invented himself for the discipline [of the history of books and the nature of print culture], or at least for the ‘interdiscipline’ˮ (mulhallen 782). in croatia, pozaić’s works have been warmly received by critics, who have traced within them the presence of blake’s esotericism and whitman’s ecstasy (bakić 594). we have heard about the figure of blake the painter being present in the cases of pozaić and rajčević. but how familiar was each of the three artists with blake’s visual work? jovanić admits that she only “superficially knowsˮ his art: “the fact that he was both painter and poet was inspirational in terms of analyzing relations between the written and the visual, and through their mutual combinations” (jovanić, “blake and visual art”). in general, it is impossible to take blake’s pictures as translations of his poems; he was proficient in both media and “consciously used them as differing modes of expressionˮ (butlin 19). this interdisciplinarity (word and image) helped him to express “a single poetic or prophetic genius. only through this genius could eternal truths be apprehended by the artist and passed on to his fellow men, and this alone was the justification of artˮ (butlin 17). the interdisciplinary media that blake created may be taken as a way to challenge the audience “not to see the words or the pictures,ˮ thus achieving the “improvement of sensual enjoyment and revelation of the infinite to the imagination” (goode, “the joy of looking” 17). this multimedia aspect is what mainly attracted jovanić: “combining media—​text and illustrations—​is what had the greatest influence on me” (“blake and visual art”) and is where she finds connections between her work and blake’s. as noted, she cites songs of innocence and of experience as a complete artistic and poetic work that she particularly likes. engelstein observes that blake’s combination of words and images with his relief-etching method was “no marriage of opposites, but a recognition of semblance. he acknowledged and celebrated not only the materiality of language, but the multiplex nature of this materiality which exists in the visual form of the words, in their sound, and even in their feel on the tongue” (81). these aural aspects of his process make another point of connection with dimock’s resonance, previously discussed in our artists’ experiences of blake. rajčević is more familiar with blake’s art than with his poetry, claiming that when it comes to his art, “i have always been truly interested and impressed by him” (rajčević, “blake and visual art”). her favorite is nebuchadnezzar, which she had the opportunity to view at the tate in 1990. another work she especially likes is “the ancient of days,” which she has seen online. she admires these two pieces “because of their strength, fear, mysticism and expression, which are a very unusual combination of the feelings that a work of art can provoke,ˮ and also because of “his [blake’s] deep immersion into the universal themes.ˮ she finds blake’s art quite narrative, since, when transformed into the form of textual illustration, the narrative takes a small piece of blake’s visual strength and expression, and through drawing, image, and the palette communicates with the spectator on a level surpassing any simple analysis. (“blake and visual artˮ) this reveals that blake’s “expressionˮ is among the things that rajčević is most attracted to. in “romantic expressive theory and blake’s idea of the audience,” morris eaves describes that a face in a painting is “expressive” when it displays the emotion of the character it represents, but blake “identifies the expression of the characters in a work of art with the feelings of the artist,” even reaching the “extreme of subjectivity” (787) and internalizing the romantic concept of expression.“internalization” is the term adopted by harold bloom in, for example, his essay “the internalization of quest-romance,” where he takes romantic romance to be “internalized” (10), pointing out that “the hero of internalized quest is the poet himself” (8). eaves asserts that the ideal reader for both blake and wordsworth is someone with a fully developed mind and heart whose powers of intellect and passion are equal to those of the poet. the reader is not a passive receptacle or an impassive judge; the poem is not an instrument of stimulation or an object to be judged by a set of external standards. to judge a poem, the reader must enter into an intimate relationship with it. (793-94) accordingly, by applying the romantic expressive theory, blake identifies with the audience, for he, himself, is the ideal viewer and reader. rajčević claims that his expression “communicates with the spectator on a level surpassing any simple analysis” (especially via drawing, in her opinion) (“blake and visual art”). blake’s drawings are an integral part of his art; viscomi mentions the popular eighteenth-century opinion that “sketches and drawings exercised the viewer’s imagination more than finished works” (33). drawing represented both the “indeterminate and determinate,ˮ the “fundamental artistic actˮ (viscomi 40, partly quoting eaves, william blake’s theory of art). and rajčević’s view is that through this “fundamental artistic actˮ and “expressionˮ blake actively engages with his internalized audience, taking it beyond the level of the ordinary, hinting at the symbolic. that is why viscomi claims that the viewer’s task is to figure out “a work’s various symbolic meaningsˮ (34). the kind of symbolic meaning that rajčević feels in blake’s art is also sensed by pozaić, who admires his visionary and spiritual powers. those powers were intense, as butlin points out, and were “combined with a vocabulary coloured by the great religious writings of english literature” (butlin 20). this is further to accentuate the combination of the poetic and the visual, or “a unity of artistic purpose, or ‘poetic genius’” (butlin and hamlyn 12) present in these croatian and serbian cases of the reception of blake’s art. pozaić is most impressed by blake’s drawings and also by his watercolors, which further influenced her understanding of his peculiarity as a painter and his being set apart from other british artists of his time. as bindman explains, he refused from early in his career to paint in oils. he later rationalized this extraordinary decision as a moral preference for a clarity that could be achieved in line engraving and watercolor, but was impossible in the “blotting and blurring” medium of oil. (87) like rajčević, pozaić experienced blake’s works at the tate, but over twenty years before, during her long summer stays (1965–​69) in richmond, windsor, and london. prior to that, she had only been able to see reproductions of his works in enciklopedija likovnih umjetnosti (encyclopaedia of art), the edition published by leksikografski zavod fnrj in 1960. pozaić finds blake “grand in his mystical and visionary tranceˮ (pozaić, “blake and visual art”), thus hinting at the reasons why he was considered an outsider throughout his life: “his combination of lofty artistic ambition with mysticism and multimedia craft, … duly subordinated to his identity as a poet, could serve as yet another sign of his outsider statusˮ (eaves, “on blakesˮ 414). a further reason can be found in his possessing “creativity as a visionary thinker, with his own views on everything,” ranging from god to politics to art (butlin and hamlyn 12). rajčević believes it was “an issue of the contradictions in his work, and not just his individuality”: blake’s both prophetic and zen tone in literature is terribly strong and mythological, but at the same time the romantic notions in his artistic expression mirror the many contradictions in the work itself—​and not only in blake’s personality—​so that it could never manage to gain popularity or general acknowledgement. what people do not understand and what they cannot perceive continues to be unpopular. (rajčević, “blake and visual artˮ) so, to this outsider status of blake’s, rajčević adds some romantic undertones. but what exactly does it mean to call a writer a romantic? david simpson suggests that this would traditionally “signal an interest in such categories as genius, nature, childhood, and imagination, perhaps along with some assumed response to the french revolution” (170). but in the case of blake, it could mean “blake as (hegelian) romantic, the poet of modernity itself,” or as “both a romantic and an anti-romantic” (simpson 172), or as “a window into romanticism” (pozaić, “blake and visual artˮ), or as an artist thinking beyond the limits of time, who has “only by coincidence been placed within the context of romanticismˮ (rajčević, “blake and visual artˮ). in discussing romantic notions, edward larrissy says that blake’s qualities are “supposed to differentiate him from other romantics.ˮ larrissy argues that he was central in the retrospective construction of a romanticism that was acceptable to the twentieth century, … assisted in the gestation of innovative writing in the modern period, and … this kind of centrality is continuing into the twenty-first century. (1) rajčević further colors notions of blake by associating him with pop culture, mentioning jim jarmusch’s film dead man and blake’s influence on aldous huxley, thus explaining that the reason for his popularity today is the fact that he represents “the sign of something new about to happen” (eaves, “on blakes” 414). all of the cases above—​pozaić, rajčević, and jovanić—​give a more internal look at the reception of blake in serbia and croatia in terms of perceiving and understanding him. they are also representative of the process of cultural adaptation, involving “migration to favorable conditions: stories travel to different cultures and different mediaˮ (hutcheon 31). blake’s art and poems—​“storiesˮ—​traveled to croatia and serbia and were represented there via graphic art, drawing, and digital art. cultural adaptation is a process resembling biological adaptation.hutcheon (31) notes that in the selfish gene (1976), richard dawkins suggests “the existence of a cultural parallel to darwin’s biological theory: ‘cultural transmission is analogous to genetic transmission in that, although basically conservative, it can give rise to a form of evolution.’” as slethaug asserts, the term “adaptation” is commonly used in physiology to mean a sense organ adjusting to varying conditions or in biology to the species’ mutations in coping with changing circumstances as part of the evolutionary process. thus, whether in art, physiology, or biology, adaptation does not bear the stamp of originality, but of mutation and permutation of a preexisting original. (16) from this “biological” perspective, blake’s work served as a “preexisting original” that mutated and permutated within changing circumstances as part of its cultural adaptation. as hutcheon asserts, biology considers adaptation as “successful replication and change,ˮ and therefore cultural adaptation may work in a similar way (xxvi). and because the blake adaptations were into different media, they can also be called “re-mediations,ˮ whilst the process itself may be called “reformattingˮ (hutcheon 16). these “re-mediationsˮ of william blake in croatian and serbian art testify to the changes in the paradigm of literary and art scholarship. they display the ability to wrest works of art from the past by means of new interpretations, to translate them into a new present, to make the experiences preserved in past art accessible again; or, in other words, to ask the questions that are posed anew by every generation and to which the art of the past is able to speak and again to give us answers. (jauss, as quoted in holub 3-4) works cited bakić, tanja. “‘the most obscure and most angelic of all the english lyrical poets’: william blake in the former yugoslavia.ˮ the reception of william blake in europe. ed. sibylle erle and morton d. paley. 2 vols. london: bloomsbury, 2019. 2: 571-603. barthes, roland. the rustle of language. trans. richard howard. new york: hill and wang, 1986. benjamin, walter. “the task of the translator.” selected writings. vol. 1: 1913–​1926. ed. marcus bullock and michael w. jennings. 1996. cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 2002. 253-63. bindman, david. “blake as a painter.” the cambridge companion to william blake. ed. morris eaves. 2003. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2006. 85-109. bloom, harold. “the internalization of quest-romance.” romanticism and consciousness: essays in criticism. ed. harold bloom. new york: w. w. norton, 1970. 3-24. boria, monica, and marcus tomalin. “introduction.” translation and multimodality: beyond words. ed. monica boria et al. abingdon: routledge, 2020. 1-23. butlin, martin. william blake: 1757–​1827. london: tate gallery, 1990. butlin, martin, and robin hamlyn. william blake: paintings, watercolors and drawings. new york: salander-o’reilly galleries, 1992. cristofovici, anca. “preface: opening remarks: ‘there’s a long goodbye, and it happens everyday.’” adapting endings from book to screen: last pages, last shots. ed. armelle parey and shannon wells-lassagne. abingdon: routledge, 2020. 1-8. dimock, wai chee. “a theory of resonance.ˮ pmla 112.5 (1997): 1060-71. eaves, morris. “on blakes we want and blakes we don’t.” huntington library quarterly 58.3/4 (1995): 413-39. —​—​—​. “romantic expressive theory and blake’s idea of the audience.” pmla 95.5 (1980): 784-801. —​—​—​. william blake’s theory of art. princeton: princeton university press, 1982. engelstein, stefani. “the regenerative geography of the text in william blake.” modern language studies 30.2 (2000): 61-86. erdman, david v., ed. the complete poetry and prose of william blake. newly rev. ed. new york: anchor-random house, 1988. [abbreviated as e] goode, mike. “blakespotting.” pmla 121.3 (2006): 769-86. —​—​—​. “the joy of looking: what blake’s pictures want.” representations 119.1 (2012): 1-36. holub, robert c. reception theory: a critical introduction. 1984. abingdon: routledge, 2003. hutcheon, linda, with siobhan o’flynn. a theory of adaptation. 2nd ed. abingdon: routledge, 2013. jenks, chris. “the centrality of the eye in western culture: an introduction.ˮ visual culture. ed. chris jenks. london: routledge, 1995. 1-25. jovanić, aleksandra m. “bajt ima osam bitova.” phd diss., university of arts, belgrade, 2011. —​—​—​. “blake and visual art.ˮ survey. 14 feb. 2019. krebs, katja. “introduction: collisions, diversions and meeting points.” translation and adaptation in theatre and film. ed. katja krebs. new york: routledge, 2014. 1-10. langan, celeste, and maureen n. mclane. “the medium of romantic poetry.” the cambridge companion to british romantic poetry. ed. james chandler and maureen n. mclane. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2008. 239-62. larrissy, edward. blake and modern literature. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, 2006. machor, james l., and philip goldstein. “introduction.” reception study: from literary theory to cultural studies. ed. james l. machor and philip goldstein. new york: routledge, 2001. ix-xvii. mulhallen, karen. “the william blake project.ˮ university of toronto quarterly 80.4 (2011): 779-85. perkins, david. “how the romantics recited poetry.ˮ studies in english literature, 1500–​1900 31.4 (1991): 655-71. pozaić, zdenka. “blake and visual art.ˮ survey. 16 feb. 2019. —​—​—​. the crystal cabinet/​kristalna soba. zagreb: self-published, 2003. rajčević, simonida. “blake and visual art.ˮ survey. 14 feb. 2019. —​—​—​. “izgubljeni raj.” phd diss., university of arts, belgrade, 2015. —​—​—​. tamna zvezda/​dark star/​dunkler stern. belgrade: udruženje multimedijalnih umetnika auropolis, 2011. ross, robert. “the place of william blake in english art.” burlington magazine for connoisseurs 9.39 (1906): 150-51, 154-57, 160-63, 166-67. simpson, david. “blake and romanticism.” the cambridge companion to william blake. ed. morris eaves. 2003. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2006. 169-87. slethaug, gordon e. adaptation theory and criticism: postmodern literature and cinema in the usa. new york: bloomsbury, 2014. villalobos, john. “william blake’s ‘proverbs of hell’ and the tradition of wisdom literature.ˮ studies in philology 87.2 (1990): 246-59. viscomi, joseph. blake and the idea of the book. princeton: princeton university press, 1993. remembrance: dmitri smirnov dmitri smirnov, 1948–2020 by vera serdechnaia vera serdechnaia (rintra@yandex.ru), candidate of philology, krasnodar (russia), is academic editor at the analitika rodis publishing house and a theatre critic. it is hard to imagine that dmitri smirnov, an enthusiast and inspired man, a true connoisseur of william blake, has left our world. he passed away in watford hospital from covid-19 on 9 april 2020. throughout his life, smirnov translated blake into two languages: russian and the language of music. he was born in soviet minsk into a family of opera singers, and chose the profession of composer. together with his wife, elena firsova, he wrote diverse, sophisticated music, “not representative of the work of soviet composers.”“khrennikov’s seven,” wikipedia, quoting gerard mcburney quoting tikhon khrennikov. <https://​en.​wikipedia.​org/​w/​index.​php?​title=​khrennikov%27s_​seven​&oldid=941172738>, accessed 4 may 2020. as a result, they fell into the so-called “khrennikov’s seven,” a blacklist of seven composers that blocked their road in soviet music. however, smirnov diligently persevered with music, and it was blake who stretched a new horizon for him. in 1989, his operas on blake’s poems were staged abroad: tiriel in freiburg (germany) and thel in london. in 1991, he and his family moved to the uk. he set to music more than forty works of blake, which were performed all around the world. jason whittaker wrote that the work of smirnov “demonstrates one of the deepest and most impressive engagements with blake among the works of any composer.”“blake and music,” the reception of william blake in europe, ed. sibylle erle and morton d. paley (london: bloomsbury academic, 2019) 2: 674. smirnov began translating blake into russian in the 1970s. at that time he translated all the poetical sketches and made a handmade book. in the late 2010s he began issuing volumes with amazon publishing. by 2020, he had translated almost all of blake’s lyrics and poems; only vala remained unfinished. i worked with some of his manuscripts, as an editor and as a proofreader. we had creative debates about the meanings of this or that phrase, about transferring blakean concepts to russian, about capital letters (i often insisted on lowercase in the russian version). in these discussions, he showed himself a thoughtful and persistent person, attentive to other people’s opinions. smirnov took two crucial steps in translating blake into russian. first, he did not choose “the best” from blake, as translators often do, but interpreted books sequentially and as a whole, recreating complex figurative and semantic connections. secondly, as a musician, he was guided by the exact conveyance of the rhythms and melodies of the original; this allowed him to catch the musical component of blake’s works. he was a restless interpreter, always striving to improve. for example, he wrote five russian versions of “the tyger.” in his article “five tygers,” he notes: “the deep and ambiguous meaning of the poem here is in perfect harmony with its poetic embodiment, its incredibly vivid imagery, and special sound pattern: expressive verbal melody, clarity of the characteristic rhythm, sonorous roll calls of rhymes, and amazingly rich orchestration, which is immediately determined by the rolling rrrr in combination with solid ttt and bb of the first line.”“пять тигров [five tygers],” william blake, songs of innocence and of experience / песни невинности и опыта, trans. d. smirnov-sadovsky (st. albans: meladina book series, createspace independent publishing platform, 2016) 167 (in russian). smirnov also wrote a biography of blake. the first edition was published on amazon (2016); the second at the magreb publishing house in russia (2017). this is the first monographic biography of blake ever written in russian, very detailed, with lots of references, composed by a true connoisseur of the subject. translation experience gave smirnov a strong grounding, and the biography grew out of his deep knowledge of blake’s texts and paintings, as well as the historical situation. despite the fact that he translated almost all of blake and that his translations may be considered the best, he is not widely known among russian readers. on the one hand, this is because of the authority of soviet translations by marshak, sergeyev, and toporov, and on the other because smirnov wasn’t much published in russia. his large publishing project in the last years of his life was on the amazon platform and simply could not make its way into russian bookstores. in the late 2010s, however, he published with magreb a translation of jerusalem, which is accurate, clear, musical, and accompanied by an extensive commentary, as well as a dictionary of concepts and names. currently, magreb is preparing to publish his milton translation. these are the first complete translations of these prophetic books into russian. blake occupied a key position in smirnov’s life, but that wasn’t the only side of it. he wrote music and poetry, books and articles about music, taught young composers, translated other poets, raised children, and took care of his house in st. albans, where the family had found a new home in the uk. he was talented, cheerful, hospitable, and enthusiastic. the loss is irreparable. i will give a few phrases from his diaries, published in russian, letting us hear his voice again: when i was three years old, i used to go up to the piano, press the right pedal, and gently touch the keys in different places on the keyboard. at the same time, i imagined some fantastic pictures. sometimes i repeated the same combination of notes for a long time. mom and dad called it “dima’s song.” unfortunately, they did not bother to write it down or remember it, but i still wonder what it was. since april, my relationship with lena firsova has been developing so rapidly that i soon realized that i would not go anywhere, and that my place was next to her. from bulgakov’s master and margarita (her favorite book) i chose the most beautiful passage of “eternal shelter,” wrote music on it (op. 10), and presented lena with the dedication. … starting from this moment, almost everything that i did or wrote was connected with lena and dedicated to her. when i visited lena and dima in september 2019, i asked lena if she was homesick. she replied that she was not homesick at all, and that the house in st. albans reminded her of the eternal calm shelter that the master and margarita obtained at the end of bulgakov’s novel. i have long been convinced that creativity, creation, is almost the only thing that justifies our existence and gives it meaning. i establish my understanding of the essence of art and music on the simple idea that the destruction of the old and the abandonment of the achievements of the past carry little positive in themselves, and that the creator’s task is to create something new based on the synthesis of all that is valuable in the past. creativity is … a totally incomprehensible thing. why is it so important for a person? why is he ready to sacrifice everything for it? why is he so happy, creating his tiny illusions, dying often as quickly as they arise? he is already blind, and nevertheless paints his landscapes; he is already deaf, and composes quartet after quartet. why? how to compose music? you need to set yourself up so that you enter a mystical space, listen, try to understand and accept its laws, and then, trying not to violate them, use your careful steps to find your own path in it. if this succeeds, the music makes itself, and if you take the wrong step, the magic disappears and the music doesn’t work. midlife, when is this? when are you 30 or 40? but another week, and i’m 57—not a middle, but vice versa. i am quite an old man, and cursed death is just around the corner; but where does this calmness, joy, a feeling of youth and happiness, come from? еverything is fine, and there is no need to persuade yourself—life goes on, music is being composed! editors’ note: dmitri smirnov’s articles for the journal are “my blake part 1: in russia,” vol. 51, no. 4 (spring 2018) and “my blake part 2: in england,” vol. 52, no. 1 (summer 2018), from which the images here come. b l a k e an illustrated quarterly for morris volume 57 number 4 spring 2024 angela esterhammer, victoria college, university of toronto nelson hilton, university of georgia tilar j. mazzeo, colby college robert w. rix, university of copenhagen joseph viscomi, university of north carolina at chapel hill david worrall, the nottingham trent university martin butlin, tate gallery, london, retired tristanne j. connolly, university of waterloo detlef w. dörrbecker, university of trier sibylle erle, university of lincoln robert n. essick, university of california, riverside a d v i s o r y b o a r d a n i l l u s t r a t e d q u a r t e r l y volume 57 number 4 spring 2024 c o n t e n t s www.blakequarterly.org © 2024 copyright morton d. paley cover: adapted from blake’s illustration to night thoughts, night ii, page 36. © trustees of the british museum. all rights reserved. 1929,0713.35 verso. e d i t o r s editor: morton d. paley co-editor, 1970–2024: morris eaves book review editor: sibylle erle exhibitions editor: luisa calè bibliographer (criticism): wayne c. ripley bibliographers (music): camila oliveira, jason whittaker sales review editor: mark crosby managing editor: sarah jones sarah.jones@rochester.edu production office: department of english, university of rochester, rochester ny 14627-0451 remembrance morris eaves, 1944–2024 by morton d. paley a list of morris eaves’s publications compiled by wayne c. ripley article blake in the marketplace, 2023 by mark crosby review seen through the visions of young and old germans william blake’s the ancient britons: a book and a website (now vanished) reviewed by sibylle erle minute particular construing “har”: blake’s polyglot roots by alexander s. gourlay cartoon the ancient britons artwork by john riordan; introduction by sarah jones a copy of richard bentley’s edition of paradise lost in william hayley’s library c. 1802 a copy of richard bentley’s edition of paradise lost in william hayley’s library c. 1802 by mark crosby mark crosby (crosbym@ksu.edu), fsa, is an associate professor in the department of english at kansas state university. he has published on blake, hayley, william godwin, and thomas paine. in “william blake’s annotations to milton’s paradise lost: new evidence for attribution,”lisa sherlock, “william blake’s annotations to milton’s paradise lost: new evidence for attribution,” blake 57.2 (fall 2023): 17 pars. lisa sherlock refers to my unpublished research on william hayley’s correspondence with lady harriet hesketh that establishes the presence of a copy of richard bentley’s edition of paradise lost in hayley’s upper library at turret house in felpham during part of blake’s three-year residence on the sussex coast. i offer this research as an addendum to my 2008 book collector article proposing that blake consulted, and may have annotated, a copy of bentley’s notorious edition. mark crosby, “william blake’s annotations to milton’s paradise lost,” book collector 57.4 (winter 2008): 513-46. while i was unable to identify the exact copy, i speculated that it may have been one containing numerous manuscript annotations in different hands, including two signed “wb.” the evidence i offered in my 2008 article concerning the presence of a copy of bentley can be summarized as follows. after the death of william cowper in 1800, numerous items from his library at weston underwood in buckinghamshire were transmitted to hayley to serve two purposes: for hayley to write a biography of cowper and to edit cowper’s commentaries on, and translations of, milton’s latin and italian poems. the items included letters, various manuscripts relating to cowper’s translations, numerous books—​including an interleaved copy of thomas newton’s two-volume ninth edition of paradise lost (1790) containing cowper’s incomplete manuscript commentary—​and a copy of bentley’s edition of paradise lost. shortly after cowper’s death, william barker catalogued the poet’s library at weston underwood; the catalogue includes a copy of bentley.barker’s catalogue is reproduced in geoffrey keynes, “the library of william cowper,” transactions of the cambridge bibliographical society 3.1 (1959): 47-69. bentley’s edition of paradise lost is listed as no. 23. the catalogue also records the seventh edition of paradise lost published by newton in 1770 and the boydell three-volume folio edition of milton’s works published between 1794 and 1797, which includes the first six books of paradise lost in the first volume, along with hayley’s life of milton. see keynes, especially pp. 53 and 61. there is also a copy of bentley’s paradise lost at christ’s college, cambridge, that contains marginal annotations by cowper and his armorial bookplate.christ’s college library, shelfmark ee.2.8. this is probably the copy recorded in joseph mayer’s sale catalogue as “formerly belonging to cowper.” see catalogue of books, manuscripts, deeds and autograph letters, the property of the late joseph mayer, esq. f.s.a of liverpool (sotheby, wilkinson, and hodge, 19 july 1887), lot 275. these annotations are generally confined to bentley’s footnotes and include a satiric poem at the end of the preface attacking critics such as bentley.in a letter to the revd. john newton of 10 may 1780, cowper satirizes bentley’s editorial practices; see hayley, the life, and posthumous writings, of william cowper, esqr., vol. 3 (printed by j. seagrave, chichester, for j. johnson, london, 1804) 24. for a discussion of cowper’s attitude to bentley, see also hayley’s preface to latin and italian poems of milton translated into english verse … by the late william cowper (printed by j. seagrave, chichester, for j. johnson and r. h. evans, london, 1808) xix-xxi. in her article, sherlock suggests that the copy of bentley listed by barker is the same copy now at christ’s college. in what follows, i offer evidence that it was ashley cowper’s copy that was listed by barker as being in william cowper’s library in 1800.ashley cowper (1709–​88) was william cowper’s uncle and the father of theodora jane cowper and lady harriet hesketh. in the two editions of cowper’s translations of milton’s latin and italian poetry that hayley edited, published in 1808 and 1810, he remarks that cowper borrowed materials relating to milton from friends, including a copy of bentley’s edition: when cowper first thought of forming a commentary on milton, he felt the want of a proper collection of books for that purpose: but he had several friends, who took a pleasure in the hope of supplying him with every thing he could require. one sent him that rarity of italian literature, the adamo of andreini. another a copy of bentley’s milton, containing many very severe censures, in manuscript, against the presumptuous editor, written probably when the book was published in 1732.hayley’s comment appears on pp. xviii-xix of his preface to latin and italian poems of milton (1808), which is reprinted as an appendix to paradise lost and regained, with the latin and other poems, of john milton (london: h. washbourne, 1810) 4: 379-94 (on 387-88). hayley’s description of this copy as “containing many very severe censures, in manuscript, against the presumptuous editor” indicates familiarity with it and suggests that it was sent to felpham along with cowper’s other milton materials. his dating of the “severe censures“ to 1732 also suggests that this is a different copy from the one with cowper’s marginal annotations and bookplate, now at christ’s college. as no copy of bentley’s edition of paradise lost was listed in the sale of hayley’s library in 1821, i speculated in my 2008 article that the extensively annotated copy that hayley had consulted after cowper’s death remained in hayley’s possession and later passed to joseph mayer.in light of the evidence presented here, i now believe that the copy in the mayer sale is the copy currently at christ’s college, cambridge. see note 4. a hitherto unpublished letter from hayley concerning his biography of cowper, among other things, establishes that he had a copy of bentley in his library during blake’s residence in felpham. the letter is addressed to cowper’s cousin, lady harriet hesketh, and is dated 10 january 1802. hayley updates hesketh on arrangements for printing the biography in chichester, expresses his belief in the primacy of epigrams as the appropriate literary form for memorialization, and discusses their seemingly competing plans to memorialize cowper. it appears that these plans at one stage consisted of a monument designed and sculpted by john flaxman, bearing an epigram by hayley. toward the end of the letter hayley alludes to blake, who was working on the engravings to illustrate the biography, by comparing the patience required of a biographer to that of an engraver. there are also multiple references to a copy of bentley’s edition of paradise lost that was previously in cowper’s library at weston underwood. the letter is one of a series between hayley and lady hesketh written between the end of 1801 and the beginning of 1802, for the most part concerned with hayley’s biography of cowper and its illustrations. it contains references to hesketh’s older sister, theodora jane cowper; their father and cowper’s uncle, the late ashley cowper; and cowper’s cousin, john johnson (affectionately referred to by both cowper and hayley as johnny). hayley also refers to himself by his favored moniker, “hermit.” as you lecture the good trembling johnny, so unmercifully my dear lady, you must be lectur’d yrself by the old hermit, & i hope you have also the grace to tremble in yr turn. he did right to bring me the milton, as i directed, for the commands of a biographer at work ought to be paramount above all others, concerning m.s., that may, or may not be of use to him. — i knew well, that the verse & prose, inserted in that copy of milton, were not written by our dear bard, but by yr amiable father; but having inserted the epitaph on yr father, i wish’d to speak of him in a manner that might please his own gentle spirit, his nephew’s, & his daughters. — i am sure the feeling theodora will forgive me for thus ordering the book to take a circuitous road to her, for i never meant to detain it from her for any considerable time, but herself to revise the copy i had of yr father’s admirable epigram on the absurd & pedantic editor of that milton — a copy taken by my attendant at weston, with the permission of the dear bard! having begun to lecture you, heaven only knows when i may cease lecturing you; so i hope to continue to tremble, with a becoming degree of aweful submission. poets living & departed have acute feelings — you would not allow me, & some true friends of the dear deceas’d to raise such a monument to him at dereham, as we knew he would approve — no! you insisted on doing this yrself — yet, my dear lady — two years almost has this dear dol [sic] of ours rested in the earth, — & all norfolk (as johnny tells me) is wondering, why no monument appears to cowper — what, i think, you should have done (if you wish’d to stop us) was, to order immediately from the artist, that our dear bard particularly esteem’d (flaxman) an uncostly but graceful little monument, for which i had provided you with an epitaph, that i thought you once approv’d, & that i am sure the dear bard himself, could he speak from the stone, would not speak against, as a few of his most sympathetic friends have approv’d it highly. — but you strangely think of putting on his tombstone not an epitaph, but rather a motto — for any passage taken from his works (exquisitely fit as his verses are for most purposes) must yet appear rather like a motto for a book, that [sic] a proper inscription for a tombstone, & spectators, who survey such a motto, may naturally exclaim, “what! did cowper leave no friends attentive enough to his ashes, to supply them with an appropriate epitaph”? — there! have i not follow’d yr example in lecturing the good johnny? & lectur’d you also unmercifully? — in truth, i have told you what i, & a few more of yr friends (not so bold as the hermit in uttering their thoughts) really think, but having done so, my dear lady, as you are a woman, & a dear one — dear, in expressibly dear, to our angelic friend, & not a little so to his affectionate biographer, you shall have your own way in this little monumental affair, without further reproof: you shall raise any sort of tablet you like, & burn my epitaph into the bargain, if you please, & on this topic i will lecture you no more; so be as eccentric as you will, you have my plenary & affectionate indulgence. and now, my dear lady, having been a little rough with you (not according to my custom) i will be all gentleness & good humour, & tell you several things, that i believe you will be please’d to hear. first my reproof to the little man of st paul’s bought me a sort of penitential-submissive letter, as in truth all the persons, i take the trouble to reprove, ought to perceive, that my reproofs are dictated by a spirit of justice & kindness. —he allows, that i ought not to be oppos’d in regard to printing in the country — — & my firmness in resolving to do so, will, i trust, render my ingenuous & intelligent country printer peculiarly alert to guard against all unnecessary delays as much as possible; — yet to print so extensive a work, must be a business of labour & time. — thank heaven! i may consider my own arduous office in great measure accomplish’d & if i should follow the dear bard tomorrow to a better world, there is such a memorial of him now ready for the press, as i am confident his own affectionate spirit would applaud me for having prepar’d. — to criticize me all the good or bad critics, that like the occupation, my heart tells me, i have his angelic approbation; & so (to borrow & alter a little a verse from a certain beloved poet of yr acquaintance) “love shall be satisfied nor heed the rest” — thanks for yr pleasant history of mr owen! — i hope he is a son or grandson of a most worthy dr. owen, who was (as i have heard my mother say) a favourite friend of my fathers; but of whom i know not even whether he was single or married, being myself only a chit of two years, when my father died — to shew you how alert i have render’d the good johnny in yr service, he is at this moment copying the poem you wish to see & coy as it is, will send it you completely transcrib’d by the post of this day. — i am very confident that when you & mr owen have read the poem together, you will think exactly as i do on the propriety of it being reprinted in the appendix to his life. — but tell me soon if you think, as i must insert some mention of it in that case in an early part of the biography — when you want to teach any of yr friends patience my dear lady, persuade them to be either a biographer or an engraver — & if they do not acquire the virtue in those two instructive occupations, you may safely tell them they have no talents for it— adieu! — i have a million of things to dispatch, before the good johnny departs, & he is to depart on tuesday, for he is eager to rejoin his flock, like a good pastor as he is, & i, like a considerate hermit, as i am, have promis’d not to detain him here a single day beyond the time, that i really require his assistance in imparting to me the particulars, that it is my duty to collect from his faithful lips. — adieu — love us both as we really deserve yr love! — accept our untied benedictions! & believe me ever cordially tho now very hastily yr sincere & affectionate hermit jan 10 1802the transcription is taken from hayley’s autograph copy of the letter in the firestone library, rare books and special collections, princeton university (hannay collection, box 5, f. 19). hayley’s comparison of life-writing and engraving not only suggests his admiration for blake’s skill and temperament, but also may have been a subtle attempt to assuage any concerns that hesketh entertained about the illustrations. see also g. e. bentley, jr., blake records, 2nd ed. (new haven: yale university press, 2004) 109fn. hayley’s letter tells us that the copy of milton that he had asked johnson to bring to felpham was intended for theodora jane cowper, to whom it would be sent on at some point.in her responses dated 17, 23, and 28 january 1802, hesketh does not mention the edition of milton that he had borrowed. instead, she attempts to soothe his anxiety about the dereham memorial (princeton university library, hannay collection, box 5, f. 59). it further reveals that “the verse & prose, inserted in that copy …, were not written by our dear bard, but by yr amiable father”—​that is, not written by william cowper, but by his uncle, the late ashley cowper. hayley’s use of “inserted” could mean manuscript text written directly on the leaves of the book or on separate sheets of paper placed loosely or interleaved in the volume. he also uses “inserted” in connection with adding william cowper’s manuscript epigram on his uncle to the biography, which indicates that, for hayley in this context, the verb denotes supplementing the main text with additional text. he explains that the presence of the epigram is one of the reasons that he needed to consult this copy, because he wanted to add a sentence in the biography “to speak of him [ashley cowper] in a manner that might please his own gentle spirit, his nephew’s, & his daughters.”“lines composed for a memorial of ashley cowper, esqr. immediately after his death, by his nephew william of weston” appear in the second volume of hayley’s biography of cowper, with the following description: “the person whom these verses commemorate, was himself an elegant poet, and father of the lady [harriet hesketh], to whom so many of cowper’s letters are addressed in the preceding collection” (hayley, the life, and posthumous writings, of william cowper, esqr., vol. 2 [1803] 228). he also states that he wants theodora jane cowper to revise an epigram that her father, ashley cowper, had written on “the absurd & pedantic editor of that milton,” a transcript of which had been “taken by my attendant at weston, with the permission of the dear bard!” this makes clear that the copy of milton that hayley had requested and was consulting in early january 1802 was hitherto in the library of william cowper (“the dear bard”) at weston underwood and was the edition of paradise lost by bentley (“the absurd & pedantic editor”). as he observes, most of its annotations were written by ashley cowper, which indicates that this is not the copy containing william cowper’s marginal notes that is now at christ’s college. rather, it is highly probable that it is the copy listed by william barker shortly after cowper’s death as being part of the poet’s library.in his edition of barker’s catalogue, keynes includes information regarding bookplates and signatures. the copy of bentley is not described as having william cowper’s bookplate. on the other hand, the copy of bentley at christ’s college does contain his armorial bookplate. this further suggests that the copy recorded by barker is not the same as the one at christ’s college. see keynes, “the library of william cowper” 53. this copy, it appears, had originally belonged to ashley cowper before making its way to his nephew. hayley’s description of the copy as containing manuscript “verse & prose” by ashley cowper, including an “epigram on the absurd & pedantic editor of that milton,” seems to anticipate his statement in the 1808 preface to the latin and italian poems of milton about the copy of bentley’s edition of paradise lost “containing many very severe censures, in manuscript, against the presumptuous editor.” yet it is likely that hayley is referring to a different copy in the 1808 preface. as we have seen, he planned to return the copy with ashley cowper’s annotations to theodora jane cowper. there is no record of a copy of bentley in the sale of hayley’s library, which suggests that he kept his word and at some point after 10 january 1802 sent this copy to her, probably via johnson. furthermore, ashley cowper’s single “epigram on the absurd & pedantic editor” doesn’t accord with hayley’s 1808 description of a copy with “many very severe censures.” the evidence may be summarized as follows: for his biography of william cowper and to edit cowper’s translations of milton’s poems, hayley borrowed two copies of bentley’s edition of paradise lost. one, with manuscript “verse & prose” by ashley cowper and an epigram on his uncle by william cowper, was brought from weston underwood to felpham by john johnson and was present in hayley’s turret house in early 1802, according to the previously unpublished letter to lady hesketh of 10 january. this is almost certainly the copy that was listed by william barker as being in william cowper’s library in 1800; it is not the copy with william cowper’s annotations and bookplate at christ’s college, cambridge. the other copy that hayley consulted is described in his preface to the latin and italian poems of milton (1808) as “containing many very severe censures, in manuscript, against the presumptuous editor, written probably when the book was published in 1732.” his description and speculative dating distinguish this copy from both ashley cowper’s copy that was present in hayley’s library in january 1802 and the christ’s college copy with william cowper’s marginal annotations and bookplate. the copy of bentley’s edition with the two “wb” annotations also contains numerous annotations in another hand, many of which attack bentley’s editorial heavy-handedness, but none that corresponds with ashley cowper’s hand. the backwell bookplate the identification of the william backwell bookplate in the copy containing the “wb” annotations presents an opportunity to compare handwriting samples from the backwell family with those two annotations.the bookplate is listed in ellis’s catalogue of british and american book-plates (london, 1907) 11. it can also be consulted in the luis marino pérez collection, john rylands research institute and library, university of manchester. there are three william backwells who should be considered. the first is a london banker, who had two relations of the same name. as summarized by sherlock, william (and his brother barnabus) were clerks in the banking firm of messrs. child and co. around 1720 before being made partners in 1740. in 1756, the backwell brothers established their own banking house, devaynes and co., and in 1765 william was appointed high sheriff of buckinghamshire for a period of twelve months.see frederick george hilton price, a handbook of london bankers (london, 1876) 48 and the london gazette (10-13 november 1764). in 1775, barnabus backwell’s son tyringham backwell inherited tyringham manor in buckinghamshire, but died two years later without an heir. the manor then passed to his sister—​the niece of william backwell the london banker—​elizabeth tyringham backwell, who married william mackworth praed in 1778. in a letter of 1 may 1786, william cowper notes: “a mr. praed lives at a seat called tyringham, which is also about five miles hence; but i never saw, save once, when i saw him jump over a rail at weston.”the letters and prose writings of william cowper, ed. james king and charles ryskamp, 5 vols. (oxford: clarendon press, 1979–​86) 2: 533. by 17 november 1787, he appears to have met “mrs praed … and her sister, miss backwell.”king and ryskamp 3: 55. miss backwell is jane backwell (d. 1795). writing to lady hesketh on 30 june 1793, cowper refers to praed as “our” neighbor and compliments his landscaping endeavors: “after there [sic] laudable example i too am working wonders here, but on a smaller scale.”king and ryskamp 4: 361. praed had commissioned the architect john soane and the landscape gardener john haverfield to refurbish his property at tyringham. i have been unable to find any evidence directly connecting william backwell, the london banker and one-time owner of the copy of bentley containing the two “wb” annotations, to cowper. but both caldecot manor (william backwell’s residence) and, as cowper notes in his letter of may 1786, tyringham manor (elizabeth and jane backwell’s residence) were about five miles from cowper’s home in weston underwood.see sherlock pars. 2 and 3. were these backwells among the “several friends, who took a pleasure in the hope of supplying” cowper with materials relating to milton, including an extensively annotated copy of bentley’s edition of paradise lost? as a previous owner of the copy with the two “wb” annotations, william backwell appears the most immediate candidate for their authorship, but an analysis of his handwriting, including his signature, suggests a different hand to the hand responsible for the annotations.for a comparison of the hand of this william backwell, see sherlock illus. 5. the angle of his hand is consistently the standard 55 degrees from horizontal for roundhand, whereas the annotator is about 45 degrees. backwell is also a free capitalizer, and the annotator is an underliner. the “wb” who penned the annotations doesn’t appear to be the william backwell of the bookplate. after backwell’s death in 1770, one of the junior bankers at devaynes and co., william harwood, was granted the name and the coat of arms of backwell by an act of parliament.10 george iii, c. 15. see the national archives, hl/po/pb/1/1770/10g3n35. it is possible that harwood was backwell’s illegitimate son. harwood’s hand, however, is very similar to backwell senior’s (perhaps a case of imitation). harwood had a son, also called william. this william backwell, a captain in his majesty’s corps of royal engineers, was born in 1772 and died in 1808, at the beginning of the british involvement in the peninsular war. while captain backwell’s signature slopes 45 degrees from the horizontal, just as the “wb” annotations do, the letter formations—​such as the lowercase a, l, w, and k—​differ, suggesting that he is also not responsible for the annotations. the evidence put forward here, along with the identification of the backwell bookplate by anthony pincott of the bookplate society, indicates that the copy of bentley’s edition of paradise lost with the two “wb” annotations is not the copy that hayley, in his letter to lady hesketh of 10 january 1802, describes as formerly being in cowper’s library at weston underwood and presently in his library at felpham. the copy with the “wb” annotations originally belonged to william backwell, a london banker, whose buckinghamshire home at caldecot manor was within five miles of weston underwood. furthermore, backwell’s niece elizabeth lived nearby and knew cowper. the handwriting and signature samples of three generations of william backwells do not correspond to the hand responsible for these annotations. according to hayley, cowper’s borrowings from “several friends” included a copy of bentley’s edition “containing many very severe censures.” was hayley describing the copy once owned by cowper’s neighbor william backwell, containing the two “wb” annotations and almost eighty annotations by a different hand critical of bentley’s editorial changes to milton’s verse? blake in the marketplace, 2019 blake in the marketplace, 2019 by robert n. essick robert n. essick has been collecting and writing about blake for over fifty years. table of contents: introductory essay abbreviations blake: drawings and paintings manuscripts separate plates and plates in series letterpress books with engravings by and after blake, including prints extracted from such books interesting blakeana blake’s circle and followers: barry, james basire, james calvert, edward flaxman, john fuseli, henry linnell, john palmer, samuel richmond, george romney, george stothard, thomas the 2019 market began propitiously with the discovery, and offer for sale by the london dealer peter harrington, of a previously unrecorded copy of edward young’s night thoughts with blake’s engravings hand colored. see the entry below under letterpress books with engravings by and after blake and illus. 2-3. this january surprise was followed in the next month by the art institute of chicago’s acquisition of blake’s the day of judgment, a watercolor illustration to robert blair’s the grave. many copies of blake’s job engravings appeared throughout 2019 and one notable rarity among his commercial book illustrations, elizabeth blower’s maria: a novel (illus. 1), came to auction in december. a receipt written by thomas butts and signed by blake fetched a high price at a parisian auction. see the listings below for more information on these works. turning to blake’s circle and followers, i found only one major work that came to market in 2019, samuel palmer’s shoreham period painting landscape—twilight (illus. 9). two of palmer’s later paintings, the return from gleaning and a sheepfold at sunset, were given to the british museum in lieu of taxes. james barry’s prints and henry fuseli’s drawings continued to achieve strong prices. john windle’s 2019 blakean activities began with the offer of several works at rare books la, a book fair held in pasadena, california, 1-2 february, and at the california international antiquarian book fair, oakland, 8-10 february. with the exception of a copy of boydell’s graphic illustrations … of shakspeare (see below), all original blake items on offer appeared in windle’s 2017–18 catalogues or book-fair lists and are not repeated here. similarly, i have not listed the original works by blake and william muir facsimiles of blake’s illuminated books presented in windle’s lists for the new york international antiquarian book fair, 7-10 march, for the london international book fair, 7-9 june, and for the toronto antiquarian book fair, 1-3 november, because they have been offered in windle’s catalogues covered in my 2017–18 sales reviews or in other windle 2019 publications included here. i included in my 2018 sales review several important works by blake given to the fitzwilliam museum by the sir geoffrey keynes will trust (blake 52.4 [spring 2019]). in january the will trusts of two keynes family members proposed to arts council england a further gift of six works, inherited from sir geoffrey, to the fitzwilliam in lieu of estate taxes: europe plates 5 and 10 printed recto/​verso and plates 6 and 7 (lower half only of each plate) printed recto/verso, free version of the laocoön (monochrome wash drawing with slight touches of watercolor), “ezekiel” (separate plate, 2nd state), and two impressions of “job” (separate plate, 1st and 2nd states). i will report further details if and when the arts council approves these gifts and they are formally accepted into the fitzwilliam museum’s collection. the year of all sales, catalogues, and correspondence in the following lists is 2019, unless indicated otherwise. most reports about auction catalogues are based on the online versions. illustrations are in color, unless noted otherwise. coverage of regional auctions is selective. dates for dealers’ online catalogues are the dates accessed, not the dates of publication. works offered online by dealers and previously listed in any one of the last four sales reviews are not repeated here. most of the auction houses add their purchaser’s surcharge to the hammer price in their price lists. these net amounts are given here, following the official price lists. estimates in auction catalogues are usually for hammer prices. i am grateful for help in compiling this review to david bindman, mark crosby, pom harrington, tim heath, nicholas howell, nicholas lott, kevin salatino, justin schiller, and john windle. my special thanks go to jenijoy la belle for assistance in all matters. once again, sarah jones’s editorial expertise and john sullivan’s digital imaging have been invaluable. abbreviations acp andrew clayton-payne, london afb archives fine books, brisbane, australia ah abbott and holder, london bb g. e. bentley, jr., blake books (oxford: clarendon p, 1977). plate numbers and copy designations for blake’s illuminated books and commercial book illustrations follow bb. bbs g. e. bentley, jr., blake books supplement (oxford: clarendon p, 1995) bhl bonhams auctions, london br(2) g. e. bentley, jr., blake records, 2nd ed. (new haven: yale up, 2004) butlin martin butlin, the paintings and drawings of william blake, 2 vols. (new haven: yale up, 1981) cat(s). catalogue(s) cb robert n. essick, william blake’s commercial book illustrations (oxford: clarendon p, 1991) cl christie’s auctions, london cny christie’s auctions, new york dl david lay auctions, penzance dw dominic winter auctions, south cerney, gloucestershire eb ebay online auctions fm forum auctions, london ghh g. heywood hill, london grant william blake’s designs for edward young’s “night thoughts,” ed. john e. grant, edward j. rose, and michael j. tolley, coordinating ed. david v. erdman (oxford: clarendon p, 1980), vol. 1 illus. illustration(s), illustrated jn john nicholson auctions, haslemere, surrey lfa larkhall fine art, bath ll lowell libson, london pl(s). plate(s) sk skinner auctions, boston sl sotheby’s auctions, london sp robert n. essick, the separate plates of william blake: a catalogue (princeton: princeton up, 1983) st(s). state(s) of an engraving, etching, or lithograph sw swann auctions, new york windle john windle antiquarian bookseller, san francisco # auction lot or catalogue item number drawings and paintings the day of judgment, an illus. to blair’s the grave. watercolor, 27.0 x 22.2 cm., datable to 1805. not in butlin because not discovered until 2001. acquired feb. by the art institute of chicago from lowell libson & jonny yarker ltd., london (not priced; see their list of “recent sales” at <https://​www.​libson-yarker.​com/​recent-sales/​the-day-of-judgement>, accessed 2 may). previously offered sotheby’s auction, new york, 2 may 2006, #9, illus. (not sold on an estimate of $1,500,000-2,000,000; acquired by a private collector after the auction). art institute reference no. 2019.139. manuscripts receipt signed by blake, 5 july 1805, to thomas butts for £5.7s. aguttes auction, paris, 18 nov., #6, illus. (€22,500 to peter harrington acting for windle; estimate €4000-6000). previously sold from the a. e. newton collection, parke-bernet auction, new york, 17 april 1941, #173, tipped into a copy of geoffrey keynes, bibliography of william blake, 1921 ($75 to joseph holland); windle, dec. 1995 cat. 26, #9, black and white illus. (price on inquiry); sold by windle june 1996 to the autograph dealer kenneth rendell, who removed the receipt from the book; the receipt alone offered by rendell at the jan. 2005 new york antiques show ($45,000) and by windle, nov. 2005 cat. 40, #1 (price on inquiry); sold march 2009 by rendell to a french private collector. according to br(2) p. 764, this receipt repeats another of the same date and amount specifying that the payment was for 4 of blake’s large color-printed drawings, the good and evil angels, the house of death, god judging adam, and lamech and his two wives. separate plates and plates in series “chaucers canterbury pilgrims.” sw, 5 march, #164, 5th st., colnaghi impression on laid india, illus. ($4940). fm, 27 march, #9, “a good even impression of essick’s fourth state (of 5), with no trace of the drypoint verses to the left and right of the title” (hence 5th st.), “on heavy wove paper,” framed, illus. (£2340). doyle auction, new york, 30 april, #11, 5th st., leaf of “rives bfk paper” 41.9 x 99.7 cm., sessler printing of 1941, illus. ($4062 to windle for stock). “christ trampling on satan,” engraved by thomas butts, jr., after blake. jn, 2 oct., #18, title inscribed in pencil, from the collection of “e. j. shaw, together with a collection of various prints, engravings and watercolours by various hands,” illus. (£546; estimate £40-60). shaw owned the copperplate of “christ trampling,” now in the morgan library and museum, from c. 1903 to 1925. dante engravings. sims reed, jan. cat., #11, complete set on laid india, loose as issued, the set previously offered at the same price, july 2018 cat., no item #, illus. (£60,000). sk, 25 jan., #13, pl. 2, and #14, pl. 5, both on laid india and both illus. (pl. 2 sold for $643, pl. 5 sold for $832). afb, feb. online cat., pl. 6 only, 1968 printing, included in a copy of the deluxe issue of blake’s illustrations of dante (london: trianon p for the william blake trust, 1978), publisher’s half morocco folding case, illus. ($5222); another impression of pl. 6, probably the c. 1892 printing, small stains within the image, marginal foxing, illus. ($6341); pl. 2 only, probably the c. 1892 printing, large stain within the image, illus. ($8239); pl. 5 only, probably the c. 1892 printing, illus. ($8579). the pls. offered by afb were previously offered in windle’s march 2017 cat. 65, p. 17, #28, pl. 2 ($8500); p. 18, #30, pl. 5 ($8750); p. 18, #31, pl. 6 ($6500); and p. 85, #10, blake’s illustrations of dante, with pl. 6 ($5500). “the idle laundress,” after morland. tw gaze auction, diss, norfolk, 31 may, #483, color printed and hand colored with a palette suggesting that this is a 3rd st. impression of 1803, framed and apparently trimmed to the image, illus. (£56.64). eb, oct., 3rd st., with the companion print, “industrious cottager,” 4th st., both with the 1803 imprint, printed in black ink and with (later?) hand coloring, full platemarks present, scattered foxing on “industrious cottager,” each framed, illus. (withdrawn; required minimum bid £300); same impressions, sold oct. by the eb vendor for $1000 to windle for stock; acquired nov. by essick for $1500. the hand coloring in the windle/essick examples is close to the palette found in 1788 impressions and differs from the color scheme one usually finds in 1803 color-printed impressions with hand coloring. “industrious cottager,” after morland. see “the idle laundress,” above. job engravings. sw, 5 march, #161, pl. numbered 6 only, published “proof” impression on laid india, illus. ($2250); #162, pl. numbered 19 only, published “proof” impression on laid india, illus. ($2500); #163, complete set, published “proof” impressions on laid india, with the letterpress label, “bluish gray paste board covers, inscribed ‘blake’s job india proofs’ in pencil on the front cover (covers detached),” all pls. illus. ($87,500); 2 may, #155, pl. numbered 3 only, 1826 printing on wove, illus. ($1625); #156, pl. numbered 16 only, published “proof” impression on laid india, illus. (not sold; estimate $2000-3000); 19 sept., #1, pl. numbered 9 only, published “proof” impression on laid india, illus. (not sold; estimate $2500-3500); #2, pl. numbered 21 only, published “proof” impression on laid india, illus. (not sold; estimate $2500-3500); 10 oct., #453, complete set, published “proof” impressions on laid india, leaves 43.0 x 33.0 cm., “scattered, moderate, and mostly marginal foxing,” original label “tipped in,” contemporary three-quarter calf “scuffed,” all pls. illus. ($52,500). bruce mckittrick, march new york book fair, complete set, published “proof” impressions on laid india, leaves 42.4 x 31.5 cm., full morocco, all edges gilt ($75,000); same copy and price, july online cat. 67, #9, illus. eb, march, pl. numbered 3 only, published “proof” impression on laid india, stained and wrinkled, damage to india paper lower right, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £350 or “best offer”). sk, 10 may, #1, pl. numbered 7 only, published “proof” impression on wove, “pale foxing,” illus. ($1968). fm, 26 june, #29-30, pls. numbered 7 and 20 only, published “proof” impressions on laid india, illus. (neither sold; estimates £1500-2000 each). bhl, 26 june, #179, complete set, published “proof” impressions on laid india, “spotting (occasionally quite heavy),” leaves 43.0 x 33.5 cm., “publisher’s grey boards, printed title label on upper cover,” modern box, illus. (£27,562); 4 dec., #238, complete set, 1874 printing on laid india, leaves 51.0 x 34.5 cm., “loose in solander box,” illus. (£7650); 11 dec., #29, pls. numbered 7, 8, and 9 only, published “proof” impressions on laid india, illus. (not sold; estimate £3000-5000); #30, pls. numbered 17, 18, and 19 only, published “proof” impressions on laid india, illus. (not sold; estimate £3000-5000). sl online auction, 1-9 july, #67, complete set, published “proof” impressions on laid india, “foxing and browning throughout,” morocco worn, illus. (£20,000; estimate only £7000-9000 because of condition). chorley’s auction, prinknash abbey park, gloucestershire, 23 july, #460, pl. numbered 4 only, published “proof” impression on wove, lightly foxed, illus. (not sold; estimate £600-800); same impression, 18 sept., #927, illus. (£384). clark’s auction, scotts valley, california, 15 sept., #161, pl. numbered 11 only, 1874 printing on laid india, framed, illus. ($350). bonhams auction, los angeles, 15 oct., #20, pl. numbered 14 only, 1826 printing on wove, leaf 35.4 x 25.2 cm., illus. ($2422). butterscotch auction, bedford, new york, 3 nov., #9, pl. numbered 11 only, 1874 printing on laid india, illus. ($1586). roseberys auction, london, 21 nov., #73, pl. numbered 2 only, 1874 printing on laid india, illus. (£1000). lfa, nov. online cat., pls. numbered 9 and 19 only, 1874 printing on laid india, illus. (£1500 each). leland little auction, hillsborough, north carolina, 7 dec., #1374, pls. numbered 1 and 21 only, published “proof” impressions on laid india, pl. numbered 21 foxed, illus. ($1180). sl online auction, 3-10 dec., #91, complete set, 1826 printing on wove, “untrimmed with full margins” in “publisher’s boards with printed label, spotting to preliminary blanks and paper guards, spine lacking with textblock almost detached, soiling to boards, rubbed,” illus. (£20,000). windle, dec. online cat., title page and pl. numbered 8 only, 1826 printing on wove, illus. ($950 and $1950 respectively). “mrs q,” after villiers. smiths auction, newent, gloucestershire, 25 jan., #846, with the companion print, “windsor castle,” engraved by george maile after “i.b.,” both framed, illus. (not sold; estimate £150-200). eb, march, stained, framed, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of €99.99). duke’s avenue auction, dorchester, dorset, 22 oct., #767, lacking the ring (hand painted in finished impressions) on the woman’s finger, with “windsor castle,” both trimmed close to the image and framed, illus. (£250); sold dec. by the purchaser at the duke’s avenue auction to windle for stock. the smiths auction and eb examples may be the convincing lithographic facsimile. letterpress books with engravings by and after blake, including prints extracted from such books ariosto, orlando furioso, 1785. eb, july, vols. 2-5 only but with blake’s pl. in vol. 3, contemporary calf very worn, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £99.99 or “best offer”). bible. royal universal family bible, 1780–81. keogh’s books, march online cat., 2 vols., “leather” very worn (£350). blair, the grave. afb, feb. online cat., 1808 folio, scattered foxing, half morocco worn, the copy previously offered by windle, march 2017 cat. 65, p. 46, #99, for $8950, illus. ($7726). toovey’s auction, washington, west sussex, 21 may, #3098, 1808 quarto, “damp-stain to upper margin throughout,” 19th-century half morocco worn, illus. (£473.10). pba galleries, berkeley, california, 25 july, #20, [1870] ed., half calf worn, illus. ($312.50). quinn’s auction, falls church, virginia, 12 sept., #335, pls. 5 and 10 only from the 1813 quarto, framed, illus. ($396.50). fm, 26 sept., #159, 1808 quarto, “occasional light soiling,” bookplate of henry wilson (an original subscriber), original boards worn and rebacked, cover label, later slipcase, illus. (£2000); another copy, 3 oct., #73, letterpress title page detached, “occasional spotting,” lacking endpapers, original boards with cover label, worn and rebacked, illus. (£468). eb, sept.-oct., pl. 2 only, 1813 imprint, center fold, soiled, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of £30). [blower], maria: a novel, 1785. sl online auction, 3-10 dec., #34, 2 vols., 2nd st. of blake’s pl. (the frontispiece in vol. 1), “browning, small chip to inner margin of frontispiece,” no mention in the cat. description that the pl., the only one in the book, bears the signatures of stothard as the designer and blake as the engraver, “from the library of the earls of haddington,” contemporary calf, illus. (£6250 to windle acting for essick; estimate £1000-1500). not in bb, bbs, or cb. for illus. and the sts. of the pl., see “a lady embracing a bust” in sp 242-43, illus. 110. at the time of writing sp, i knew the pl. only as detached examples and thus included it in a section titled “book illustrations known only through separate impressions.” g. e. bentley, jr., later discovered that the pl. was published in blower’s novel; see bentley, “william blake and his circle: a checklist of publications and discoveries in 2000,” blake 34.4 (spring 2001): 131, 138-40, illus. 1. the only copy of the book with the pl. present i have ever seen on the market. see illus. 1. 1. frontispiece and title page of [elizabeth blower], maria: a novel (london: t. cadell, 1785), vol. 1 (see enlargement). the etching/engraving, 2nd st., is signed “stothard. d.” (lower left) and “blake. sc.” (lower right). image 12.9 x 8.1 cm. on leaf of laid paper 17.7 x 9.9 cm. the generous lower margin of the pl., extending 2.9 cm. below the image, shows that there is no imprint or other inscription below the signatures. essick collection. the pen and ink inscription on the title page, “g. baillie,” and the bookplate of the scottish politician george baillie pasted to the inside front cover of each vol. could not have been added by baillie himself, given his lifespan of 1664 to 1738. a different hand wrote a price of “£9.7.6,” presumably for both vols., in the top margin of the frontispiece. the design pictures the eponymous heroine of the novel, maria mordaunt, embracing a bust of aubrey, the man she loves. she hears his voice and momentarily believes that the statue is speaking. the actual source is the living aubrey, who enters the scene on the left (see 1: 130-32). a copy of the novel in the british library, lacking the frontispiece, is available in eighteenth century collections online. the copy in the bodleian library, with the frontispiece, is also available online, call nos. (oc) 250 q.196, 197. boydell’s graphic illustrations … of shakspeare, c. 1803. windle, feb. list for rare books la and the california international antiquarian book fair, #18, with blake’s pl., “large-paper copy” in “publisher’s deluxe morocco binding” ($9500); same copy and price, june short list 16 (new series), #5, illus. dw, 6 nov., #389, no mention of blake’s pl., marginal foxing, 20th-century half morocco worn, illus. (£1291). bryant, new system … of ancient mythology. eb, feb., 2nd ed., 1775–76, 3 vols., contemporary calf worn, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $595, reduced at the end of feb. to $480). antiquariaat arine van der steur, dec. online cat., 1st ed., 1774–76, 3 vols., foxed, “full leather … damaged” (€583). ecbooks, dec. online cat., 2nd ed., 1775–76, 3 vols., contemporary calf worn and rebacked, original backstrips retained, illus. (£1200). catullus, poems, 1795. biblioctopus, jan. online cat., 2 vols., pl. 1 foxed, contemporary calf repaired, binding illus. ($1250). cumberland, thoughts on outline, 1796. dw, 19 june, #351, “occasional light spotting and soiling, a few small marginal damp stains,” original boards rebacked with cloth (£336). darwin, botanic garden, both parts in 1 vol. unless noted otherwise. william bunch auction, chadds ford, pennsylvania, 22 jan., #595, “first edition” of the general title page, 1791, no indication of the ed. of each part, foxed, contemporary half calf very worn, covers detached, illus. ($324.50). dw, 30 jan., #71, 3rd ed. of part 1, 1795, 4th ed. of part 2, 1794, “light spotting and toning,” contemporary calf very worn, covers detached, illus. (£480); 11 sept., #215, 1st ed. of part 1, 3rd ed. of part 2, both 1791, some soiling, contemporary calf rebacked and worn, with the 1st ed. of part 2 only, 1789, lacking 3 pls., contemporary half calf worn, illus. (£408). eb, jan.-feb., 2nd ed. of part 1, 1791, 1st ed. of part 2, 1789, “lacks 2 plates,” apparently including blake’s pl. 3, “last 2 leaves of text are supplied in photocopy,” scattered light foxing, modern half morocco, illus. (£257); march-april, 1st ed. of part 1, 3rd ed. of part 2, both 1791, contemporary half calf worn, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $3250 or “best offer”); april, 1799 ed., 2 vols., 19th-century calf, illus. (£370); oct., 1st ed. of both parts, 1791 and 1789, lacking 2 pls. (not by blake) in part 2, marginal damp staining and scattered foxing, contemporary calf rebacked, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $2999); oct., 1st ed. of part 1, 3rd ed. of part 2, both 1791, contemporary calf rebacked, illus. (£287). b & l rootenberg, march online cat., 1st ed. of both parts, 1791 and 1789, “some leaves unopened,” half calf, illus. ($3500). nudelman rare books, march online cat., 1st ed. of part 1, 3rd ed. of part 2, both 1791, 2 vols., contemporary calf “strengthened,” illus. ($2750). windle, april short list 14 (new series), #8, 1799 ed., 2 vols., lacking 1 pl. not by blake, contemporary calf, binding illus. ($1250); #9, blake’s pl. 1 (“fertilization of egypt”) only from a quarto ed., “margins foxed,” previously offered online in aug. 2018 at the same price, illus. ($875). fm, 2 may, #43, ed. of part 1 not stated but either 1st or 2nd, 3rd ed. of part 2, both 1791, 2 vols., contemporary calf very worn, illus., with a copy of darwin’s phytologia not further described (£275). keel row bookshop, june online cat., 1791 general title page, “second edition with blake illustrations,” ed. of each part not indicated but probably 2nd and 3rd, later half calf worn, illus. (£500). earle, practical observations on the operation for the stone, 1793. forest books, dec. online cat., “later cloth” from “the library of the birmingham medical institute” (£165). enfield, the speaker, 1781. windle, march online cat., later calf worn ($675). european magazine, and london review, vol. 43 (jan.-june 1803). sheppard’s irish auction, durrow, ireland, 3 sept., #696, frontispiece only to the april issue, a portrait of george romney engraved by william ridley, probably based on a miniature portrait by blake, in turn based on romney’s self-portrait now in the national portrait gallery, london, “european magazine” inscription above the design either trimmed off or covered by the mat, framed, illus. (€36). not in bb or bbs; see mark crosby and robert n. essick, “‘the fiends of commerce’: blake’s letter to william hayley, 7 august 1804,” blake 44.2 (fall 2010): 62-63, illus. 6. flaxman, hesiod designs, 1817. keys auction, norwich, 5 dec., #172, 19th-century morocco, with the iliad and odyssey designs, both 1805, 2 vols. in “old” half calf, the aeschylus designs, 1795, “old” half calf, and the acts of mercy, 1831, contemporary quarter morocco, bindings illus. (£576). dw, 11 dec., #337, foxed, with the iliad and odyssey designs, both 1805, odyssey lacking the engraved title page, 3 vols. in contemporary morocco worn, illus. (£639.60). flaxman, iliad designs, 1805. see flaxman, hesiod designs, above. fuseli, lectures on painting, 1801. james cummins, dec. online cat., contemporary quarter morocco worn, illus. ($1250). gay, fables. eb, jan.-feb., [1811] ed., 2 vols., marginal foxing on some pls., contemporary half calf, the copy offered by black swan books, dec. 2018 online cat., for $600, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $675.50 or “best offer”); april, 1793 ed., 2 vols., foxed, contemporary calf worn, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $1069 or “best offer”); sept., 1793 ed., 2 vols., later calf, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £500 or “best offer”); same copy, sept., illus. (£123.21); dec., 1793 ed., 2 vols., foxed, marginal water stains, modern half calf, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $750 or “best offer”). black swan books, april online cat., same sept. eb copy of the 1793 ed. in later calf, illus. ($950). bonhams auction, new york, 13 june, #81, 1793 ed., 2 vols., later morocco, illus. ($1147). fm, 14 nov., #40, 1793 ed., 2 vols., foxed with water stains to lower margins, modern half calf, illus. (£260). third floor rare books, dec. online cat., 1793 ed., 2 vols., marginal stains and water damage, modern half calf, illus. ($700). hayley, ballads, 1805. dw, 30 jan., #409, lacking pl. 1, “light soiling,” contemporary quarter calf very worn, covers detached, with 3 other works with engravings by blake and 4 works about blake (£696). previously sold dw, 19 july 2017, #409, illus. (£239). for the other works with blake’s engravings in this group, see the 2017 sales review, blake 51.4 (spring 2018). this copy of the 1805 ballads with a copy of hayley, the triumphs of temper, 1803, contemporary calf worn, offered dw, 19 june, #296 (£480). afb, feb. online cat., 1st sts. of the pls., early 20th-century calf, the copy offered by windle, march 2017 cat. 65, p. 22, #35, for $5750, illus. ($5123). honey & wax booksellers, sept. online cat., 2nd sts. of pls. 1-3, later morocco, illus. ($5500). lfa, nov. online cat., pl. 3 only, 1st st., marginal stains, illus. (£350). hayley, essay on sculpture, 1800. eb, march, “plates toned,” modern marbled boards, the copy offered by royoung bookseller, april 2015 online cat., for $200, illus. ($220). hayley, life of cowper, 1803–04, complete copies only. adelaide’s pop-up bookshop, australia, 11 may auction, #136, 1st ed., 3 vols., 18th-century half calf worn, illus. (no bids on an estimate of $240-280 australian). hayley, life of romney, 1809. thomson roddick auction, carlisle, cumbria, 26 june, #204, large-paper copy “extra illustrated with 111 eng. plates” not further described, contemporary morocco “rubbed,” illus. (£188). hayley, triumphs of temper, 1803. richard smith, oct. online cat., pls. lightly foxed, contemporary calf rebacked (£200). ars libri, nov. online cat., contemporary calf rebacked ($900). see also hayley, ballads, above. hoare, inquiry, 1806. eb, june, blake’s pl. foxed, original boards worn with printed spine label, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $355.80). hogarth, the beggar’s opera by hogarth and blake, 1965. eb, may, blake’s pl. only, 7th (final) st., “paper slightly browned,” probably the same impression offered on eb at the same price in march 2018, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $125); same impression, may-june, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $95); july, another impression of blake’s pl. only, wrongly described as a “litho reproduction,” illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $149.95 or “best offer,” reduced at the end of july to $99.95); dec., another impression of blake’s pl. only, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $148). hogarth, works. freeman’s auction, philadelphia, 10 april, #470, undated baldwin and cradock ed., probably 5th st. of blake’s pl., contemporary half morocco, illus. (not sold; estimate $800-1200). charles russell, dec. online cat., undated boydell ed., dated to c. 1805 based on watermarks, contemporary calf worn, “upper board detached,” illus. (£4750). hunter, historical journal, 1793. eb, sept., blake’s pl. only from the quarto issue, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $1950). fm, 21 nov., #319, octavo issue, scattered foxing, uncut in original boards worn, illus. (£812.50). rare aviation books, dec. online cat., quarto issue, modern calf, illus. ($9900 australian). josephus, works, c. 1785–87. eb, march, bb issue a, contemporary calf very worn, the copy offered on eb in march 2018 for $1150, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $920 or “best offer”); another copy, june, same issue, modern cloth, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $250); july, blake’s 3 pls. only offered individually at the “buy it now” price of £27.99 each, illus. lavater, aphorisms, 1794. ghh, april online cat., 2nd st. of the pl., contemporary calf, illus. (£395). anybook, dec. online cat., contemporary half calf, no mention of the pl. (£200). lavater, essays on physiognomy. antiquariat peter kiefer auction, pforzheim, germany, 16 feb., #2479, 1810 ed., 3 vols. in 5, modern leather, illus. (not sold; estimate €500); same copy, 29 june, #1383, illus. (€295). dw, 19 june, #324, a mixed set, vols. 1-2 as designated in the printed text 1789 and 1792, vol. 3 as designated in the printed text 1810, 3 vols. in 5, some “light spotting,” later half morocco worn, illus. (£480). eb, aug., 1810 ed., 3 vols. in 5, “leather” bindings (but actually original boards with handwritten spine labels?), illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of £1900); same copy, dec., illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $3,145.08 or “best offer”); aug., blake’s pl. 2 only, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $299.99); blake’s pls. 1, 3-4 only, offered individually, illus. ($49.99 for pl. 1, $149.99 for pl. 3, no bids on a required minimum bid of $149.99 for pl. 4, later in aug. listed at the “buy it now” price of $180); sept., blake’s pl. 1 only, illus. ($49.99). sw, 24 oct., #220, 1789–98 ed., 3 vols. in 5, lacking 2 pls. not by blake, contemporary half russia very worn, some covers detached, illus. ($227.50). malkin, father’s memoirs of his child, 1806. eb, april, blake’s pl. lightly foxed, original boards rebacked with (original?) printed spine label retained, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $1515 or “best offer”). ghh, april online cat., later morocco, illus. (£1250). novelist’s magazine. toovey’s auction, washington, west sussex, 19 feb., #3070, vol. 8, don quixote, 1782, “14 engraved plates” (thus lacking 2 pls.?), contemporary calf, binding illus. (£112.05, but perhaps bought in); same copy, eb, april, blake’s pl. 1 present (but not blake’s pl. 2?), illus. (£54.05). eb, feb.-march, vol. 10, sir charles grandison, 1783, blake’s pl. 1 only, 1st st., illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of €4); aug., vols. 3, 5, and 9 with blake’s 3 pls. in vol. 9 (sentimental journey, david simple, launcelot greaves), 1782, contemporary quarter calf, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £180); aug., vols. 10-11 (sir charles grandison), 1783, contemporary calf, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of €120 or “best offer”). olivier, fencing familiarized, 1780. livres-émoi, march online cat., scattered foxing, modern cloth, illus. (€700). addison & sarova auction, macon, georgia, 30 march, #2, contemporary calf very worn, upper cover detached, slipcase, the copy offered eb, sept. 2018, at the “buy it now” price of $500 or “best offer,” illus. ($562.50). sw, 24 oct., #94, contemporary calf rebacked, illus. ($390). salzmann, elements of morality. tennants auction, leyburn, north yorkshire, 7 june, #50, 1791–92, 3 vols., “mixed edition of 2nd and 3rd english editions” not further described, contemporary calf very worn, vol. 1 covers detached, bindings illus. (£180); same copy, eb, june, 1791 (vols. 2-3) and 1792 (vol. 1), illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £750 or “best offer”); same copy, nov., illus. (£190). eb, aug., 13 pls. only, of which 12 are attributable to blake, 3rd sts. from the 1793 or later eds., marginal stains, inserted loose into a copy of archibald g. b. russell, the engravings of william blake (1912), illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $200); oct., 1792 ed., vols. 1-2 only, later calf, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $1375 or “best offer”). scott, poetical works, 1782. justin croft books, july online cat., contemporary calf, illus. (£600). previously offered at the same price by justin croft/simon beattie, nov. 2013 cat. of english verse 1751–1800, part iii: r-z, #45. shakespeare, dramatic works, 1802. peter harrington, may online cat., 9 vols., contemporary morocco, bindings illus. (£12,500). hindman auction, chicago, 6 nov., #222, 9 vols., no mention of blake’s pl., contemporary calf repaired, binding illus. (no bids on an estimate of $3000-4000). whitmore rare books, dec. online cat., 9 vols., no mention of blake’s pl., “scattered foxing,” contemporary morocco, bindings illus. ($22,500). staniland booksellers, dec. online cat., 9 vols., no mention of blake’s pl., contemporary morocco, illus. (£7850). some copies were issued without blake’s pl. after john opie, a “variation” (as indicated in the inscribed title) of a pl. engraved by peter simon, also after opie’s painting, illustrating the same passage in romeo and juliet. stedman, narrative. dw, 13 feb., #19, 1806 ed., 2 vols., “occasional spotting,” contemporary calf worn and repaired, illus. (£1800). sw, 28 march, #106, 1796 ed., 2 vols., “minor foxing,” modern calf, illus. ($3250). eb, march, blake’s pl. 1 only, marginal foxing, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $825 or “best offer”); june, 1796 ed., 2 vols., most pls. foxed, contemporary calf rebacked, illus. (£2414). bhl, 26 june, #93, 1796 ed., 2 vols., contemporary calf, illus. (£1020). ishtar auction, tel aviv, israel, 8 july, #274, 1796 ed., 2 vols., foxed, no description of binding, illus. ($1548). grosvenor prints, aug. online cat., blake’s pl. 3 only, “trimmed inside plate,” apparently with the imprint cut off, illus. (£120). stuart and revett, antiquities of athens, 1762–1816. cny, 25 oct., #120, 4 vols., contemporary calf, illus. ($16,250). blake’s 4 pls. are in vol. 3 (1794). virgil, pastorals, 3rd ed., 1821. windle, june short list 16 (new series), #3, 2 vols., “presentation copy inscribed by thornton to his daughter,” publisher’s sheep, modern box, illus. ($67,500). for earlier listings, see the 2018 sales review, blake 52.4 (spring 2019). aalders auction, camperdown, australia, 12 oct., #587, vol. 2 only, blake’s 2 engravings stained, contemporary half calf very worn, illus. (not sold; estimate $200-300 australian). lfa, nov. online cat., blake’s 4th and 9th wood engravings only, later printing by the linnell family on india paper, illus. (£950 each). bhl, 4 dec., #238, blake’s 17 wood engravings, “with 4 woodcuts on 2 sheets after blake” (apparently the 3 designed by blake and executed by an anonymous wood engraver plus “the giant polypheme” based on a drawing by blake after poussin), bound into a copy of the 2nd ed. of thornton, pastorals of virgil, 1814, all “with a few spots,” 19th-century calf, illus. (£7650). whitaker, the seraph, c. 1818–28? oxfam books, dec. online cat., 2 vols., bb issue a, marginal stains, contemporary (publisher’s?) cloth worn, illus. (£300). wollstonecraft, original stories, 1791. fm, 28 march, #52, 2nd st. of pl. 1, sts. of other pls. not recorded but probably 2nd, “a little foxed towards end,” later morocco, illus. (£3250). ghh, april online cat., 2nd sts. of the pls., additional pl. (not by blake) bound at the front, modern calf, the copy offered by windle, aug. 2018 online cat., for $8750, illus. (£6750). young, night thoughts, 1797, colored copy. peter harrington, jan. cat. 150, #14, a previously unrecorded copy with the 2nd published st. of pl. 11 (the fly-title to night the second), with the “explanation” leaf “bound at the end” and with a 2nd copy “loosely inserted,” leaves uncut, “finely bound by sangorski and sutcliffe for r. d. steedman (signed in gilt at foot of front turn-in) in full blue morocco, reddish-brown morocco label to front cover and two to spine,” housed in a modern “custom made box,” illus. (£150,000; acquired 1 feb. by windle at a 20% dealer’s discount and sold the same day to essick for $175,500). type i coloring, usually dated to c. 1797, as in the huntington library copy (bb copy i) available in the william blake archive, with oxidized lead white on the descending personification of disease on pl. 6 and on the face of the seated figure lower right on pl. 18.two types (or styles) of contemporary or near-contemporary hand coloring are described in grant 1: 53-72. type iii coloring, represented by only 1 copy, is probably later (see note 2). oxidation of lead white turns the color to black or gray. for the treatment of darkened lead white by art conservators, see <https://​cool.​conservation-us.​org/​coolaic/​sg/​bpg/​annual/​v16/​bp16-08.html>, accessed 1 feb. pl. 19 inscribed in pencil lower left “jc” (see the caption to illus. 3 for other copies with this inscription). see illus. 2-3. provenance: early history unknown; acquired in the 1950s by the british book dealer robert d. steedman; by inheritance to his son, david steedman; acquired by, or placed on consignment with, the london dealer peter harrington in 2018; to windle and thence essick in feb. as recorded above. there are now 28 recorded copies of the night thoughts engravings with contemporary or near-contemporary hand coloring. the census of colored copies in bb pp. 642-46, 956-57, lists copies a-t; bbs pp. 272-73 adds copies u-z. g. e. bentley, jr., adds copy aa (illus. 4) in “william blake and his circle: a checklist of publications and discoveries in 1999,” blake 33.4 (spring 2000): 149. accordingly, this newly discovered example can be designated as copy bb.this census does not include a colored copy in the houghton library designated as copy iii-1 in grant 1: 72, “bright atypical coloration applied after binding.” this is probably a one-off production colored at a later date. 2. edward young, night thoughts, 1797. pls. 33 (left) and 34 (right), etchings/engravings by blake, hand colored (see enlargement). both pls. on wove paper, leaves 42.6 x 32.4 cm. (left) and 41.8 x 32.4 cm. (right). colored copy bb, essick collection. see the caption to illus. 3 for some color comparisons with copy aa (illus. 4). 3. edward young, night thoughts, 1797. detail of pl. 34 (see illus. 2), area shown approximately 8.0 x 8.0 cm. (see enlargement). colored copy bb, essick collection. this detail of christ’s head shows the subtlety of the hand coloring, including the shading and modeling of the face through delicate washes not directed by the underlying printed image. note particularly the use of grayish blue around the eyes and below the lower lip and the light areas on the crown of thorns to create highlights. the five drops of blood on christ’s forehead are not present in the engraved design. either the colorist was working from a model with these additions indicated or she/he was given a good deal of freedom to invent additions to the design. such artistry is far beyond what one normally sees in commercially produced hand-colored book illustrations of the late 18th century—for example, in the colored pls. (17 engraved by blake) in large-paper copies of j. g. stedman’s narrative, of a five years’ expedition, against the revolted negroes of surinam, 1796. one of stedman’s co-publishers, james edwards, was the brother of richard edwards, the publisher of the 1797 night thoughts. variations in coloring among copies indicate that the artist was not restricted to the precise replication of a model, as in most commercial hand coloring. for example, the color tones in copy aa (illus. 4) are similar to those in copy bb (illus. 2) but on pl. 33 there is no reddish tinting on the foliage around the torsos of the figures lower left and the clothing of the figure lower right is blue rather than gray. the sky is uncolored in aa. on pl. 34, christ’s gown is colored blue in aa, whereas only hatched areas are shaded in gray watercolor in bb and the remainder of the costume is left uncolored. there are no drops of blood on his forehead, and no coloring on the crown of thorns, in aa. the coloring in bb is type i as defined by grant; the colors in aa do not accord with types i or ii. the pls. were almost certainly colored per pl., as was standard practice at the time, not per copy of the book—that is, the artist would color a number of impressions of 1 pl., then move on to color another batch of another pl., and so on. the collation of leaves into individual copies of the book would not necessarily maintain the order in which impressions of each pl. were colored. a copy of the book might contain the 1st impression colored of pl. 1, the 5th impression colored of pl. 2, the 2nd impression colored of pl. 3, etc. the relationship between coloring sequence and collation is random. the identity of the contemporary colorist(s) of blake’s night thoughts engravings has never been determined. six copies (bb and bbs copies a, o, r, s, u, and newly discovered bb) bear “jc” initials (or possibly a decorative “h”) in pencil on pls. in positions that might refer to the colorist. copies c and w include “as pattern” notations; the former is also inscribed “w. blake” lower left on pl. 4. copy s is inscribed “this will do as variation” on pl. 42.for discussion of the “jc” initials and other inscriptions, see grant 1: 56-57, 67. the writers of these inscriptions have not been identified. copies q and r contain annotations in contemporary hands stating that they were colored by blake; copy j is inscribed “coloured by / mrs blake” in pencil on the verso of the front free endpaper.the inscriptions in copies q and r are recorded in bb pp. 645-46. the inscription in copy j is illus. in edward young, the complaint, and the consolation; or, night thoughts … with illustrations by william blake, essay by nicolas barker, cd-rom by octavo editions, 2004. bentley has offered one of the more recent and intriguing speculations about the colorist(s). “when richard edwards was disposing of his stock, he is likely to have given some copies of night thoughts to blake in payment for his engraving work, and blake in turn coloured and sold several of them. copies with elaborate and sometimes wonderfully beautiful colouring were sold to blake’s contemporaries,” including thomas butts (copy a), mrs. bliss (copy d), thomas gaisford (copy g), and earl spencer (copy o). “the colouring in some examples may have been repeated from blake’s master copy by mrs blake or others, for copy c is signed ‘w. blake’ and identified ‘as pattern,’ presumably as the model for colouring other copies.”g. e. bentley, jr., the edwardses of halifax: the making and selling of beautiful books in london and halifax, 1749–1826 (toronto: u of toronto p, 2015) 188-89. the “as pattern” inscription in copy c (university of texas) may indicate that this copy follows a pattern rather than being the “master copy.” a few pls. in all copies with type i coloring, such as pl. 10, appear to be modeled on blake’s watercolors, but the coloring of most type i pls. does not accord with the watercolors. another possible scenario, given the evidence that a model was not strictly followed, is one in which wife and husband worked as a team, catherine laying in the broad washes and william adding the finishing touches such as those we see on christ’s face in copy bb. the less detailed coloring of many pls. in copy aa, exemplified by the washes in illus. 4, may represent catherine’s work without any additions by william. the acquisition of colored copies by members of blake’s circle of patrons, or patrons of his friends, buttresses the possibility that both the production and marketing of hand-colored copies of night thoughts were undertaken by catherine and william blake. 4. edward young, night thoughts, 1797. pls. 33 (left) and 34 (right), etchings/engravings by blake, hand colored (see enlargement). each pl. on a leaf of wove paper trimmed to 41.5 x 32.8 cm. colored copy aa, essick collection. see the caption to illus. 3 for some color comparisons with copy bb (illus. 2). young, night thoughts, 1797, uncolored copies. peter harrington, jan. online cat., lacking the “explanation” leaf, leaves “424 x 327 mm, with deckle edges,” the letterpress “title printed on laid paper watermarked with a fleur-de-lys” rather than the usual wove paper, book labels of the american collectors herschel v. jones and estelle doheny, “pencilled note dated 24 april 1934” by the los angeles book dealer jacob zeitlin, later full “morocco by ramage of london,” illus. (£10,000). previously sold anderson galleries auction, new york, 2 dec. 1918, #187 from the jones collection ($75); cny, 21 feb. 1989, #1707 from the doheny collection, illus. ($4950); cl, 30 nov. 2016, #281, illus. (£3750). benjamin spademan, feb. california international antiquarian book fair, oakland, with the “explanation” leaf, 2nd published st. of pl. 11, scattered foxing, uncut in later half calf (not priced). afb, feb. online cat., with the “explanation” leaf, later half morocco, the copy with the 1874 james bain prospectus offered by windle, feb. 2018 blake books online cat., no item #, for $15,000, illus. ($14,307). justin croft, feb. online cat., with the “explanation” leaf, letterpress title page printed on “laid paper watermarked with a fleur-de-lys,” later half calf (£8000). sophie schneideman rare books, march online cat., with the “explanation” leaf, a “generously-margined copy in handsome twentieth century brown half morocco,” the copy listed in schneideman’s nov. 2014 online william blake & his followers cat., no entry #, for £12,500, illus. (£6500). bhl, 26 june, #178, with the “explanation” leaf, “occasional off-setting and toning,” later half morocco rebacked, illus. (£4937); another copy, 4 dec., #237, lacking the “explanation” leaf, “4-inch repaired tear in margin of title,” modern half calf, illus. (£4462.50). eb, aug., 2nd published st. of pl. 11, no mention of the “explanation” leaf, “rebound [in] paper covered boards with leather spine in cloth covered slipcase,” illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $8500 or “best offer”). interesting blakeana a selection of original scots songs in three parts. the harmony by haydn dedicated by permission to her royal highness the duchess of york. vol. 2. london: william napier, [1792]. richard watkins, may private offer, title page inscribed in ink “london, apl. 30.th 1794,” 19th-century half calf worn (£210; acquired by windle in late may and sold immediately to the e. j. pratt library, victoria university, toronto, for $500). travis & emery music bookshop, may online cat., “some spotting,” disbound, frontispiece detached and damaged (£287). the list of “subscribers” includes “mr. william blake,” possibly the poet and artist. not in the lists of “books owned by blake” in bb and bbs. c. h. tatham, etchings, representing the best examples of ancient ornamental architecture. london: for the author, 1799. bhl, 4 dec., #14, contemporary russia, illus. (£1147). the list of subscribers includes blake; see bb #744. thomas butts, jr., “man on a drinking horse,” etching/engraving signed “t butts: sc” and dated “22 jany. 1806.” grant zahajko auction, davenport, washington, #184, c. 1942 printing, illus. ($37.50). blake gave engraving lessons to thomas butts, jr. (1788–1862), beginning no later than 1806 and continuing until at least 1808. for illus. and comments, see alexander s. gourlay, “‘man on a drinking horse’: a print by thomas butts, jr.,” blake 37.1 (summer 2003): 35-36. blake, songs of innocence and of experience. ed. j. j. g. wilkinson. london: w. pickering, 1839. mellors & kirk auction, nottingham, 11 april, #123, publisher’s cloth worn, “upper board and spine both very loose but still attached,” illus. (£806). the child’s gem, for 1845. ed. mrs. s. colman. boston: t. h. carter and company, [1844]. william reese co., june online cat., publisher’s cloth ($275). includes, p. 69, blake’s “the little boy lost” and “the little boy found.” bbs p. 157. for other publications by colman containing blake’s poems, see raymond h. deck, jr., “an american original: mrs. colman’s illustrated printings of blake’s poems, 1843–44,” blake 11.1 (summer 1977): 4-18. dante gabriel rossetti, autograph letter signed to “my dear butts” (probably frederick j. butts, 1833–1905, the grandson of blake’s patron thomas butts). argosy book store, feb. online cat., dated to “c. 1862,” both pp. illus. ($750). the 1st sentence reads “many thanks from my brother [william michael rossetti] & self for the 2 blakes which we shall prize.” the reference may be to 2 pencil sketches, the infant hercules throttling the serpents (butlin #253) and queen katharine, awakening from her dream, after fuseli (butlin #561). i think it less likely that one of these works was lot and his daughters (butlin #381), a tempera painting possibly once owned by d. g. rossetti. the only other drawings or paintings by blake known to have been acquired by d. g. rossetti, blake’s notebook (butlin #201), came from william palmer’s collection in 1847. it is of course possible that the “2 blakes” were engravings or etchings. blake, songs of innocence and experience with other poems by w. blake. london: b. m. pickering, 1866. the rare 1st issue before the deletion of the 5th stanza of “mary” (p. 90) and lines 113-14 of “auguries of innocence” (p. 100). windle, jan. private offer, rebound in morocco (sold for $800 to a private collector). these deletions are noted in the “preface”: “in one poem a stanza, and in another a couplet, have been suppressed [in the 2nd issue] for sufficient reasons, and asterisks substituted” (viii). the “sufficient reasons” are the appearances of the word “whore” in the deleted passages. only the 3rd copy of this issue i have ever seen on the market. works by william blake … reproduced in facsimile from the original editions. [london: possibly andrew chatto], 1876. bhl, 26 june, #147, “fully hand-coloured throughout,” modern half calf, illus. (£2550). bb #368, bbs p. 169 (dating the publication to 1878, based on chatto’s records). alexander gilchrist, life of william blake, 2nd ed., 1880. william reese co., april online cat., 2 vols., publisher’s cloth with “the rare pictorial dust wrappers,” later “fleece lined folding cloth slipcase,” illus. ($3500). only the 3rd copy i’ve seen with the dust jackets. w. muir, facsimiles of blake’s illuminated books, 1885–1927. windle, june short list 16 (new series), #2, songs of innocence and songs of experience, both 1885, both copies no. 20 bound together in contemporary half calf, original wrappers retained, illus. ($14,500); dec. short list 18 (new series), #6, songs of innocence no. 24 and songs of experience no. 11, both 1885, bound together in full morocco, original wrappers retained, illus. ($14,500). for earlier listings, see the 2018 sales review in blake 52.4 (spring 2019). bhl, 26 june, #144, milton a poem, 1886, copy no. 7, later morocco, illus. (£2040); #145, the marriage of heaven and hell, 1885, coloring based on copy i (most muir facsimiles are based on copy a), copy no. 2, bound with on homers poetry [and] on virgil, 1886, modern morocco, illus. (£2805 to windle for stock and listed by him online in july, illus., for $7500); #146, the book of thel, 1885, no copy no. recorded, later morocco, with the book of thel, 1920, copy no. 5, modern half calf, europe, 1887, no copy no. recorded, later half calf, visions of the daughters of albion, 1885, no copy no. recorded, modern half calf, and the book of ahania, facsimile by william griggs, 1892, later morocco, “original blue paper wrappers bound in,” illus. (£5062). eb, oct., songs of innocence, copy no. 25, and songs of experience, copy no. 28, both 1927, original wrappers housed in a half-calf folder, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $14,000); same copies, nov., illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $13,300). fm, 21 nov., #63, the marriage of heaven and hell, 1885, copy no. 20, coloring based on copy a, “lightly spotted and soiled,” original wrappers, later cloth folder, illus. (£2375). james cummins, nov. online cat., the book of thel, 1920, copy no. 21, original wrappers, modern folding case, illus. ($3000). blake, the book of ahania, william griggs facsimile, 1892. see under w. muir, above. letterbox decorated with blake’s job illus. eb, march, illus. (£175 to essick, who gave the box to jenijoy la belle in april). see illus. 5. 5. letterbox decorated with blake’s job illus. (see enlargement). wood with angled and hinged lid, 21.3 cm. high at back, 14.7 cm. at front, 24.6 cm. wide, 13.1 cm. deep. the inside of the lid is lined with cockerell marbled paper showing some age. difficult to date, but probably late 19th or early 20th century with recent varnishing and a new felt pad pasted to the bottom of the box. the decorations, apparently executed in pen and ink and watercolors, are copies of the central designs in blake’s job engravings, pls. numbered 21 (top of lid), 13 (front), 9 (right side), and 14 (left side). the lid and front of the box are shown in this illus. the intertwined vines in the borders may have been inspired by the twisting vines and flames in the side margins of the pl. numbered 5 among the job engravings. the quality of the work is better than what one usually encounters with blakean tchotchkes. collection of jenijoy la belle. amy joanna fry, william blake’s cottage, felpham. oil painting. dl, 31 jan., #215, framed, illus. (£53.10 to justin schiller, who generously gave the painting to essick in feb.). see illus. 6. 6. amy joanna fry (british artist, born 1884), william blake’s cottage, felpham (see enlargement). oil on canvas, 34.3 x 45.0 cm., signed lower left with a monogram, “a” over “f”, probably dating from the first 2 decades of the 20th century. the painting shows the south side of the cottage viewed from the garden. fry no doubt had permission to be on the grounds; she may have been commissioned by the owner to paint this picture. essick collection. little is known about fry. she attended the royal academy schools 1905–10 and exhibited her works c. 1908–14.according to the dl auction cat., 31 jan., #215, and the royal academy website at <https://​www.​royalacademy.​org.​uk/​art-​artists/​name/​amy-​joanna-​fry>, accessed 15 april. an old label on the back of the canvas is inscribed in ink “a joanna fry / 97a the grove / ealing. / w”. a handwritten label on the back of the frame, “sold to the blake society 2015,” prompted me to write to the society. in an e-mail reply of 20 feb., tim heath, chair of the blake cottage trust, states that neither the society nor the trust ever owned this painting. heath passed on my inquiry to nicholas howell, whose late mother, heather howell, owned and lived in blake’s cottage for many years. in his e-mail response to heath, howell explains that he wrote the “sold to …” label and meant it as a reference to the cottage itself, not fry’s painting. further, nicholas howell inherited the picture from his mother and was its vendor at the dl auction. howell states that “i have no idea whether mum, dad or gran bought the painting but it used to hang in the cottage and was painted before gran bought the place in 1928” (copy of howell’s e-mail included in heath’s e-mail of 20 feb.). mark crosby tells me that he recalls seeing the painting hanging in the main stairway of the cottage, left wall when ascending.e-mail, 6 april. for a detailed description of blake’s cottage and its modifications over the years, see crosby, “‘the sweetest spot on earth’: reconstructing blake’s cottage at felpham, sussex,” british art journal 7.3 (winter 2006–07): 46-53. henry john stock, blake’s cottage, felpham. watercolor. roseberys auction, london, 13 april, #305, framed, illus. (£62.50 to david bindman). see illus. 7. 7. henry john stock (british artist, 1853–1930), blake’s cottage, felpham (see enlargement). watercolor, 24.0 x 25.0 cm., signed and dated lower left “h. j. stock. 1917”. the west and south walls of the cottage are pictured as seen from the road. collection of david bindman. the brief biography of stock on the askart website states that he trained at the royal academy schools and exhibited at the academy and elsewhere for many years. he seems to have earned his living painting portraits, although his real interest lay in imaginative subjects expressed in a style which suggests the influence of william blake and g. f. watts. with blake he may have felt some special sense of identity. like blake, he was born in soho, and he lived latterly at felpham in sussex when [sic, for “where”] blake had spent the years 1800–03 under the patronage of william hayley.<http://​www.​askart.​com/​artist/​henry_​john_​stock/​11132239/​henry_​john_​stock.​aspx>, accessed 22 april. stock’s oil painting the uplifting of psyche “by the help of a divinity not our own”—virgil, 208.3 x 116.9 cm., signed and dated 1905, fetched £56,250 at cl, 16 june 2015, #71, illus. love’s secret. london: poetry bookshop, n.d. broadside, “rhyme sheet second series no. 13.” blake’s notebook poem, beginning “never seek to tell thy love,” with 2 illus. by claud lovat fraser (british artist, 1890–1921). bertram rota, dec. online cat. (£85). bbs p. 157, dating the work to “c. 1925,” but probably c. 1920, shortly before fraser’s death. the only copy i have ever seen on the market. poster for the 1939 philadelphia museum of art blake exhibition, reproducing jerusalem pl. 32 in reddish-brown ink. eb, july-aug., 43.8 x 28.6 cm., vertical and horizontal center folds, illus. (acquired at the “buy it now” price of $105.70 by windle and sold shortly thereafter to the e. j. pratt library, victoria university, toronto). only the 2nd copy i’ve ever seen on the market. leonard baskin (american artist, 1922–2000), head of blake. bronze, 17.5 cm. high, based on blake’s life mask. swan fine art auction, high wycombe, oxfordshire, 3 sept., #34, marked “lb,” dated by the auctioneer to 1954, from the collection of the british artist michael ayrton (1921–75), illus. (£1200). rago auction, lambertville, new jersey, 9 nov., #735, dated by the auctioneer to 1955, from the collection of the american artist ben shahn (1898–1969), illus. ($1500). jacob epstein (british sculptor, 1880–1959), william blake. bronze portrait bust, 54.0 cm. high, signed on back “epstein,” datable to 1956. brunk auction, asheville, north carolina, 17 may, #1210, from the “edition of 3 including the plaster” version, illus. ($26,400; estimate $10,000-15,000). the bronze in westminster abbey was unveiled on 24 nov. 1957. the original plaster version is in the israel museum, jerusalem. the wood engravings of william blake for thornton’s virgil 1821. introduction by martin butlin. otley, west yorkshire: smith settle, 1990. colophon: “these reproductions of original wood-engravings have been produced in a limited edition of 300 copies. they commemorate the british telecommunications sponsorship of the william blake exhibition in tokyo in september 1990. copy no: ”. endnote: “british telecommunications wishes to thank iain bain of the tate gallery, london, for providing the image origination for the plates. these have been made directly from impressions he and david chambers took from blake’s original woodblocks in the british museum, in 1976.” windle, sept. private offer, this copy not numbered, publisher’s wrappers and dust jacket ($50 to essick). not previously recorded. francis bacon (british artist, 1909–92), masque mortuaire de william blake. lithograph in colors from an ed. of 60, 1991, 60.0 x 50.2 cm., signed by bacon, after his oil painting of 1955 based on blake’s life mask. phillips auction, london, 12 sept., #155, illus. (£11,875; estimate £5000-7000). the painting, 61.0 x 50.8 cm., was acquired by the tate collection in 1979, reference no. t02414. blake’s circle and followers works are listed under artists’ names in the following order: paintings and drawings sold in groups, single paintings and drawings, letters and manuscripts, separate pls., book illus. barry, james drawings, paintings, and original graphics “the conversion of polemon,” engraving with aquatint, c. 1778–90. bhl, 11 dec., #27, 9th (final) st., “central vertical fold,” leaf of wove paper 63.0 x 81.8 cm., illus. (£6375). “the thames, or the triumph of navigation,” engraving, c. 1801–02. bhl, 11 dec., #28, 2nd st. (of 5), “laid paper backed onto linen, … trimmed to the plate on three sides with small margin at the lower edge,” illus. (£2295). basire, james engravings during blake’s apprenticeship, 1772–79 “le champ de drap d’or,” imprint dated 10 nov. 1774, engraved by basire after a watercolor by edward edwards of 1771, in turn based on the anonymous original painting now in the royal collection, hampton court. eb, june, framed, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $899). “the embarkation of henry viii at dover,” imprint dated 5 july 1781, engraved 1779–81 by basire after a watercolor by samuel hieronymus grimm of 1779, in turn based on the anonymous original painting now in the royal collection, hampton court. eb, june, framed, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $899). “the encampment of the english forces near portsmouth,” imprint dated 1778, engraved by basire after an anonymous painting then at cowdray house, sussex. fm, 25 july, #239, lower margin trimmed below title, “nicks and tears, some surface dirt,” illus. (£468). bryant, new system … of ancient mythology, 1774–76. see under letterpress books with engravings by and after blake. deluc, account of a new hygrometer, 1774. eb, jan., contemporary wrappers, modern folding box, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $3500 or “best offer”). one pl. signed by basire, 1st published in philosophical transactions of the royal society, vol. 63, part 1 (london, 1773), facing p. 460. calvert, edward early drawings, paintings, and original graphics “the bride,” engraving. sl, 5 feb., #14, leaf 11.3 x 16.5 cm., 3rd st. from the carfax portfolio, illus. (£1750). “the brook,” wood engraving. roseberys auction, london, 17 july, #152, 3rd st., with “the return home,” wood engraving, 2nd st., both from the memoir, illus. (£875). “the chamber idyll,” wood engraving. sl, 5 feb., #15, leaf 10.4 x 14.6 cm., 2nd st. from the carfax portfolio, illus. (£2750). dw, 7 march, #103, 2nd st. from the memoir, illus. (£3480). “the cyder feast,” wood engraving. dw, 7 march, #104, 3rd st. from the memoir, illus. (£552). lfa, nov. online cat., 3rd st. from the carfax portfolio, illus. (£2000). “the ploughman,” wood engraving. dw, 7 march, #105, 3rd st. from the memoir, illus. (£1152). “the return home,” wood engraving. lfa, nov. online cat., 2nd st. from the memoir, illus. (£650). see also “the brook,” above. s. calvert, memoir of edward calvert, 1893. bhl, 27 march, #9, copy no. 55 of 350, “occasional light spotting,” publisher’s buckram, illus. (£10,062; estimate £2000-4000); another copy, 4 dec., #242, copy no. 32 of 350, “occasional light spotting and toning,” publisher’s buckram, illus. (£7650). contains impressions of calvert’s copperplate and wood engravings but not his 2 lithographs. flaxman, john drawings and sculpture see also flaxman under letterpress books with engravings by and after blake, above. allegorical figures for music and literature, for the façade decoration, buckingham palace. pen and ink, 12.7 x 24.8 cm. ah, feb. online cat. 489, #35, illus. (£475). design for the façade decoration, buckingham palace. pen and brown ink, 12.1 x 9.5 cm. ah, feb. online cat. 489, #34, illus. (£300). design for the façade decoration, buckingham palace. pen and brown ink, 12.1 x 9.5 cm. ah, feb. online cat. 489, #36, illus. (£300). figure study. pencil, 15.2 x 17.2 cm. bakker online auction, provincetown, massachusetts, 15 june, #102, illus. (a bargain at $62.50). mother with children. pen and ink, 8.9 x 8.9 cm. jn, 1 may, #311, illus. (£250; estimate £20-40). a high price for a very slight drawing. portrait of catherine sharpe. pencil, 21.6 x 17.8 cm., inscribed “cath sharpe /1802 mr. flaxman.” butterscotch auction, bedford, new york, 3 nov., #6, illus. ($1220). “cath sharpe” might be a relation of the engraver william sharp (1749–1824). a scene of a flood. pen and ink, gray wash, 22.0 x 35.0 cm. sw, 5 nov., #251, illus. ($2000). a scholar, a cleric, and a soldier: three youths inscribing a monument. pencil, pen and brown ink, pale brown wash, 16.0 x 12.5 cm. acp, oct. cat. of “recent acquisitions,” #14, illus. (price on application). the shield of achilles. silver gilt circular shield, 89.7 cm. diameter, “maker’s mark of philip rundell for rundell, bridge & rundell,” inscribed “london, 1838” on the back of the shield. koopman rare art, jan. online cat., this casting created “for the king of hanover,” illus. (price on inquiry). fuseli, henry drawings, paintings, and separate plates the “psychostasia” of achilles and memnon (recto), a study of a man with outstretched arms (verso). gray, brown, and pink washes over pencil (recto), gray washes over black chalk (verso), 47.8 x 33.0 cm. sl, 3 july, #389, illus. (£30,000). previously offered cny, 29 jan. 2015, #90 (not sold); see the 2015 sales review, illus. 11 and 12, in blake 49.4 (spring 2016). a seated woman in an interior, a robed male figure beyond. pen and brown ink over pencil, gray, pink, and brown washes, 46.9 x 27.3 cm. sl, 3 july, #388, illus. (£35,000). study of a woman in a bonnet, probably mrs. fuseli. pen and brown ink, 22.0 x 18.7 cm., verso a draft of a letter and sketch of a hand. acp, oct. cat. of “recent acquisitions,” #7, illus. (not priced; “acquired by a private collector” according to the acp website, <https://​www.​clayton-payne.​com/​artworks>, accessed 24 nov.). previously sold cl, 14 april 1992, #10, illus. (£9350). study of a young woman, thought to be lavinia de iruja. pencil, 21.6 x 16.5 cm., inscribed “s. h. july—16.” acp, oct. cat. of “recent acquisitions,” #28, illus. (price on application). previously sold cl, 14 april 1992, #7, illus. (£4620). the subject’s name is generally recorded as “irujo,” not “iruja.” the 1992 auction cat. notes that “s. h.” refers to somerset house. autograph letter signed to james moore, 3 pp., dated “2 oct 1802.” wool house books, dec. online cat., “a humorous, chatty letter of three pages, where fuseli offers his opinions of some of the paintings he saw in paris during a stay there in september and october, 1802,” illus. (£2000). this letter is printed in the life and writings of henry fuseli, ed. john knowles (london: colburn and bentley, 1831) 1: 254-57. “the dream,” stipple engraving by robert sievier, 1820. eb, jan., color-printed proof impression, foxed and with other marginal stains, glued to a nasty backing board, illus. (€189; acquired, soaked off the backing board, and cleaned by essick). see illus. 8. 8. “the dream,” stipple engraving by robert sievier after moses haughton, probably based on a design by fuseli, 1820 (see enlargement). design 17.0 x 23.4 cm. color printed in black, brown, and blue on a leaf of laid paper 26.2 x 33.2 cm. with a curious watermark composed mostly of circles. a proof lacking finishing stipple work, particularly upper right surrounding cupid and on the shaft of his arrow, before signatures and imprint but with titles and verses in english and french. essick collection. weinglass states that this engraving is “after a miniature by moses haughton of a sleeping girl seen from the back,” the miniature in turn “based on fuseli’s painting, fairy mab appearing to two sleeping girls.”d. h. weinglass, prints and engraved illustrations by and after henry fuseli (aldershot: scolar p, 1994) 340-41, #297. the differences between this supposed model and the pl. are extensive, including the substitution of cupid for fairy mab. either haughton made many modifications in the design (at fuseli’s direction?) or he used a different model. two uncolored impressions in the published st., inscribed in the pl. “from a miniature painted by moses haughton” and without reference to fuseli, are in the british museum, registration nos. 1867,0309.1719 and 1867,1214.239. both impressions include an imprint, “london, published octr. 1. 1820 by w. j. white, brownlow street, holborn.” according to the inscriptions below the texts in english and french, the 2 lines are quoted from “talysen, od.xv.v.10” (scratched in drypoint and very lightly printed in this proof). this is probably a reference to the legendary 6th century ad welsh bard taliesin. neither weinglass nor i have been able to find the text quoted. perhaps fuseli (or, less likely, haughton) invented the lines and reference to an “od.” (ode) by taliesin to justify a design, replete with erotic implications, by providing the authority of a literary precedent. “satan pursued by death,” stipple engraving by moses haughton, 1804. mallams auction, abingdon, oxfordshire, 24 june, #19, with a pl. after a design by salvator rosa, illus. (£343). linnell, john early drawings, paintings, and original graphics changing pastures. watercolor, 12.7 x 19.3 cm., signed “j. linnell.” guy peppiatt/​stephen ongpin fine art, nov. winter catalogue 2019–2020, #71, illus. (£5500). probably an early work. from aberystwyth to machynlleth. monochrome wash, 20.0 x 28.0 cm., datable to c. 1813. cheffins auction, cambridge, 12 june, #111, illus. (£702). job’s sacrifice, attributed to linnell or one of his children. watercolor copy, 12.5 x 9.3 cm. on leaf 17.0 x 11.5 cm., of pl. numbered 18 from blake’s job engravings. nicholas lott of lfa, april private offer (£1450). for discussion and a black and white illus., with right and left mistakenly reversed, see john linnell: truth to nature (a centennial exhibition), introduction by katharine crouan, martyn gregory gallery, london, cat. 31, 8-20 nov. 1982, p. 51, #106. previously sold crow’s auction, dorking, 5 june 2014, #943, illus. (£1100). for a tentative attribution to linnell’s son james, see the 2014 sales review, blake 48.4 (spring 2015), entry for job’s sacrifice under linnell. llanberris, n. wales. watercolor, 19.5 x 28.5 cm., signed and dated 1813. dl, 2 may, #79, illus. (£495.60). previously sold dl, 15 jan. 2015, #49, illus. (£450). miss otway as st. cecilia. watercolor and gouache, 12.1 x 10.1 cm., signed and dated 1827. galerie bassenge auction, berlin, 30 may, #6576, illus. (€3024; estimate €600-800). previously sold sl, 27 nov. 1972, #165, titled a saint, illus. (£130 to “payne”); bhl, 21 march 1995, #66, titled a saint, illus. (no price information). the bassenge online cat. quotes daphne foskett’s dubious claim that “this miniature was no doubt inspired by blake.”foskett, miniatures: dictionary and guide (woodbridge: antique collectors’ club, 1987) 447, caption to pl. 135e. near windsor. black and white chalk on gray paper, 26.6 x 27.2 cm., titled, signed “j. linnell” and dated 1815. chiswick auction, london, 29 oct., #65, illus. (not sold; estimate £300-500). sketch of william mulready. pencil heightened with white, leaf 17.8 x 26.7 cm., signed, inscribed with title and dated 1808 on verso. jn, 29 may, #221, illus. (£425; estimate £80-120). a view near hampstead. oil on panel, 20.5 x 29.0 cm., exhibited at the british institution in 1827. sl, 5 feb., #35, illus. (£9375). previously sold cl, 7 june 2007, #101, illus. (£7800). view of a country house. watercolor, 10.0 x 17.0 cm., possibly an early work. keys auction, norwich, 26 april, #48, illus. (not sold; estimate £150-200); 25 oct., #16, illus. (£120). palmer, samuel drawings, paintings, and rare states of etchings abergavenny from sugar loaf, attributed to palmer. watercolor, 15.0 x 32.0 cm., datable to 1835–36 if indeed by palmer. bellmans auction, billingshurst, west sussex, 16 june, #1063, from the “coll. of julia richmond” (george richmond’s wife, née tatham) according to a printed label on the back of the frame, illus. (£366). the campagna and aqueducts of rome. watercolor, 14.6 x 40.2 cm., datable to 1843. guy peppiatt, april cat., #50, illus. (£16,000). previously offered sl, 10 july 1980, #178, titled campagna and aqueduct, rome—dusk, illus. (not sold; estimate £3500-5000), and guy peppiatt, may 2015 cat., #44, illus. (£16,000); previously sold cl, 20 nov. 1984, #116, titled sunset: the campagna and aqueducts of rome, illus. (£4968), bl, 14 nov. 2012, #661, titled an aqueduct in the roman campagna, illus. (£3500), and cl, 2 july 2013, #80, titled an aqueduct in the roman campagna, illus. (£8125). the end of the day. watercolor, 30.5 x 44.5 cm., signed, datable to the late 1850s or early 1860s. sl, 3 july, #423, illus. (£37,500). center right beneath trees, children play a game in a ring, possibly palmer’s recollection of blake’s design beneath the text of “nurse’s song” in songs of innocence. florence: a panoramic view taken from below the church of san miniato. watercolor, 42.0 x 61.0 cm. acp, oct. cat. of “recent acquisitions,” #30, illus. (price on application). previously sold sl, 21 march 2002, #195, illus. (£12,000); previously offered sl, 12 nov. 2013, #225, illus. (not sold; estimate £10,000-15,000). landscape—twilight. oil and tempera on panel, 26.5 x 38.0 cm. on consignment with guy peppiatt in june, illus. in an e-mail circular (price on request). exhibited and offered for sale by peppiatt at master drawings new york, 24 jan.-1 feb. 2020. previously offered sl, 12 nov. 1997, #102, illus. (not sold; estimate £300,000-400,000), ll, sept. 2014 private offer (£3,200,000), and ll, dec. 2014 online cat., illus. (not priced). see illus. 9. 9. samuel palmer, landscape—twilight (see enlargement). oil and tempera on panel, 26.5 x 38.0 cm. raymond lister, a catalogue raisonné of the works of samuel palmer (cambridge: cambridge up, 1988) #216, dated to 1835. lister comments that “this work combines elements from shoreham landscape with that of devon.” reproduced with permission of guy peppiatt fine art. the return from gleaning. watercolor, 26.0 x 44.0 cm., datable to c. 1864. allocated in 2019 to the british museum by arts council england in lieu of taxes. a sheepfold at sunset. watercolor, 24.0 x 44.0 cm., inscribed “s. palmer [18]71.” allocated in 2019 to the british museum by arts council england in lieu of taxes.for the allocation of this work and the return from gleaning, see cultural gifts scheme & acceptance in lieu (london: arts council, 2019) no. 34, both works illus. see <https://​www.​artscouncil.​org.​uk/​publication/​cultural-​gifts-​scheme-​acceptance-​lieu-​annual-​report-​201819>, accessed 13 sept. “the lonely tower,” etching. sl, 5 feb., #185, 5th st. inscribed in pencil “trial proof,” illus. (£11,250). richmond, george early drawings, paintings, and original graphics isaac going forth to meditate at the eventide. oil, 55.0 x 33.0 cm., datable to c. 1828. sl, 5 feb., #17, illus. (£6000). previously sold sl, 30 jan. 1985, #94, illus. black and white (£1430 to agnew’s); previously offered sl, 5 june 2008, #88, illus. (not sold; estimate £20,000-30,000) and sl, 28 oct. 2008, #148, illus. (not sold; estimate £3000-5000); sold lyon & turnbull auction, edinburgh, 2 dec. 2009, #22, illus. (£5250). london inferno or the burning of the pantechnicon. oil on panel, 44.0 x 81.3 cm., datable to 1874. exhibited (and offered for sale?) by the dealer james mackinnon during london art week, 28 june-5 july. see <https://​londonartweek.​co.​uk/​exhibitors/​james-​mackinnon>, accessed 24 june. beyond the usual chronological range of these lists, but this remarkable work, reminiscent of turner’s burning of the houses of lords and commons (1834–35) and john martin’s apocalyptic paintings, deserves mention here. sevenoaks, kent. black and colored chalks over traces of pencil, 19.7 x 25.3 cm., inscribed in pencil “sevenoakes gr.” sl online auction, 12-20 sept., #649, illus. (not sold; estimate £600-800). possibly an early work. study of soldiers. oil over pencil on paper, 24.0 x 16.0 cm., signed and dated 1838. sl, 5 feb., #16, illus. (not sold; estimate £2000-3000). previously sold sl, 21 march 2001, #226, illus. (£5040). a woman with two children in a hilly landscape. oil, 41.0 x 30.5 cm., signed and dated 1834. sl, 5 feb., #38, illus. (£3250). previously sold sotheby’s belgravia, 31 july 1973, #164 (no price record) and sl, 6 july 1977, #81 (£620 to agnew’s, from which acquired by raymond lister). romney, george drawings and paintings excluding portraits three pencil drawings, john howard visiting a lazaretto, john howard at a lazaretto, and a classical scene, all with verso figure studies. sw, 5 nov., #248, “various sizes,” illus. (not sold; estimate $1200-1800). double sided sheet of figure studies. pen and brown ink, brown wash, leaf 11.7 x 11.7 cm. igavel online auction, new york, 29 oct.-19 nov., #5580812, “probably studies of the banquet scene from shakespeare’s macbeth, act iii, scene iv,” illus. (no bids on an estimate of $1500-2500). a female figure standing, probably a study for the “initiation of a nymph” (recto), two studies of a seated female figure (verso). pencil, pen and brown ink (recto), pencil (verso), leaf 36.9 x 22.2 cm. cny, 31 jan., #107, recto illus. ($6250). figures in an interior (mythological subject). black chalk, 13.9 x 23.0 cm. sw, 5 nov., #247, illus. (not sold; estimate $1000-1500). figure studies (mythological subject). black chalk, 14.0 x 23.3 cm. sw, 5 nov., #246, illus. ($936). head of a man. pen and ink, 19.7 x 13.3 cm., datable to c. 1760. ah, jan. cat. 488, #72, “possibly a study for a shakespearean character,” illus. (£1950). head of a man (recto), composition study (verso). pencil, 15.2 x 20.3 cm. ah, aug. cat. 494, #70, illus. (£450); nov. cat. 497, #80, illus. (£475). iphigenia waking. pencil, pen and ink, gray wash, leaf 32.8 x 45.0 cm. cny, 31 jan., #108, illus. (not sold; estimate $20,000-30,000). john howard visiting a lazaretto. pen and brown ink over pencil, 35.0 x 49.7 cm. sl, 3 july, #387, illus. (£7500). shakespeare’s “tempest,” act v, scene i: miranda and ferdinand playing chess in prospero’s cell. pen and brown ink with gray wash, leaf 11.1 x 18.6 cm. fm, 26 june, #28, illus. (not sold; estimate £1500-2000). studies of dancing figures (recto), studies of standing figures (verso). pen and ink, brown wash (recto), pencil (verso), leaf 11.4 x 11.1 cm. cny, 31 jan., #105, “probably both [recto and verso] for the banquet scene from macbeth, act iii, scene iv,” both sides illus. (not sold; estimate $2500-3500). study for figures. pen and ink, 14.2 x 20.2 cm. bhl, 23 oct., #218, illus. (not sold; estimate £4000-6000). very slight. study for “the leveson-gower children”. pen and ink and brown wash, 26.0 x 27.0 cm., datable to c. 1776–77. acp, oct. cat. of “recent acquisitions,” #1, illus. (price on application). previously offered ll, jan. 2015 cat., pp. 36-38, size given as 23.8 x 24.1 cm., illus. (not priced). “troilus and cressida,” act iv, scene v—“the fight between hector and ajax ii.” pencil, pen and ink, gray wash, 40.0 x 54.6 cm. cl, 2 july, #146, illus. (not sold; estimate £6000-8000). previously sold cl, 10 jan. 1947, #106 (£41.2s. to “wingate” for this and one other); previously offered cl, 3 july 2018, #99, illus. (not sold; estimate £10,000-15,000). stothard, thomas drawings and paintings six drawings attributed to stothard. pencil, pen and ink, wash, number of leaves not recorded but 1 measured at 15.0 x 9.5 cm. swan fine art auction, high wycombe, oxfordshire, 6 sept., #644, “a group of tudor figures in a church, signed lower right, pen, ink and wash study, five putti with water vessels, brown wash watercolour, ‘sharing the meal’, pen and ink drawing, putti in a landscape, ink and wash watercolour, shepherd in a landscape, pencil drawing, six figures, bearing gallery label verso, framed and glazed,” from the collections of iolo williams and christopher powney, illus. (£228). four small figure studies on 4 leaves. pen and ink, sizes not recorded, 1 inscribed “stothard.” sworders auction, stansted mountfitchet, essex, 17 sept., #302, illus. (£110.70). one sketch is a preliminary drawing of the 2 figures in christian and hopeful escaping from doubting castle, one of stothard’s designs for john bunyan’s the pilgrim’s progress 1st engraved by joseph strutt and published in 1791. blind milton dictating “paradise lost” to the daughters. oil on panel, 38.1 x 30.5 cm. whitton and laing auction, exeter, 24 jan., #886, illus. (£109.25, but perhaps bought in); 19 sept., #792, titled blind man dictating “paradise lost,” illus. (£126.50). the design was engraved by abraham raimbach, published as the title-page vignette in milton, paradise lost (london: john sharpe, 1816), vol. 1; by john henry robinson, published as the title-page vignette in milton, paradise lost (london: john sharpe, 1822); and by augustus fox, published as the frontispiece to milton, paradise lost (london: william pickering, 1835). the county curate. oil on panel, 30.5 x 40.5 cm. sean eacrett auction, prosperous, kildare, ireland, 3 dec., #393, illus. (€648). katherine, petruchio, and the tailor (“the taming of the shrew,” act iv, scene 3), attributed to stothard. oil, 59.7 x 45.5 cm. doyle auction, new york, 30 jan., #84, illus. ($750); eb, dec., illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $2800). engraved by james heath and published in the plays of william shakspeare (london: john stockdale, 1807) 1: facing p. 91. merrymaking. oil, oval, 21.0 x 26.8 cm. woolley & wallis auction, salisbury, 6 march, #225, illus. (£937.50). a scene from laurence sterne’s sentimental journey similar to the design by stothard, engraved by andrew birrell, in the ed. of sentimental journey published in london by j. good and e. and s. harding in 1792. previously sold, with its companion painting, music, cl, 27 may 1988, #91 (£625), and sl, 7 oct. 1992, #46, music illus. (£1210); the pair previously offered sl, 13 july 2006, #14 (not sold; estimate £2000-3000). merrymaking alone sold woolley & wallis auction, salisbury, 2 april 2008, #517, illus. (£687.50). a monk in a landscape gazing to the heavens. monochrome wash, 9.5 x 7.0 cm., inscribed “t. stothard.” mallams auction, oxford, 27 feb., #233, with a sword fight in a woodland, monochrome wash, 11.5 x 7.0 cm., both illus. (£254). for earlier sales, see stothard, “two monochrome wash drawings,” in the 2015 sales review, blake 49.4 (spring 2016). a putto in an arabesque with a blue background. watercolor, 15.8 x 15.8 cm. chiswick auction, london, 27 nov., #44, “a design for the decoration of one of the lunettes for the staircase at buckingham palace,” illus. (£500). studies of putti. pen and ink, 15.2 x 25.4 cm. ah, july online cat. 493, #55, illus. (£400). ulysses and the sirens, attributed to stothard. oil, 39.0 x 50.0 cm. lion & tiger auction, great neck, new york, 19 jan., #94, illus. (not sold; estimate $2500-3500); 1 june, #94, illus. (not sold; estimate $3000-4000). previously offered sl, 4 july 2002, #48, illus. (no bids on an estimate of £2000-3000); previously sold sl, 3 dec. 2002, #17, illus. (£1175). blake and music, 2018 songs of innocence and of experience copy c, plate 2. lessing j. rosenwald collection, library of congress. image courtesy of the william blake archive. blake and music, 2018 by jason whittaker jason whittaker (jwhittaker@lincoln.ac.uk) is head of the school of english and journalism at the university of lincoln. he is the author of several works on william blake, including william blake and the myths of britain (palgrave, 1999), radical blake: influence and afterlife from 1827 (with shirley dent, palgrave, 2002), and blake 2.0: william blake in twentieth-​century art, music and culture (with steve clark and tristanne connolly, palgrave, 2012). his main research interests deal with the reception of blake, and he is currently working on two projects related to the artist: jerusalem: blake, parry and the fight for englishness and divine images: the life and works of william blake. last year’s listing of settings of william blake to music was relatively extensive. this was because of the addition of a considerable number of popular music settings that had been overlooked by donald fitch in his blake set to music: a bibliography of musical settings of the poems and prose of william blake and the later “blake set to music: supplement 2001” in blake 35.2 (fall 2001), and by ashanka kumari in “adding to blake set to music” in blake 49.4 (spring 2016). this year’s list adds settings that i had missed from the one drawn up for 2017—the majority, both popular and classical, were published or recorded from 2010 onwards—and of course includes settings that were released in 2018. as before, it avoids songs that mention blake only tangentially or provide short quotations, but it does incorporate those, such as michael price’s tender symmetry, that draw heavily on blake’s art and poetry. wherever possible, the originating country of the artist(s) is listed, as well as the work’s instrumentation, duration, publisher, copyright date, genre, and format. each entry also includes at least one link to a recording, usually amazon, apple, spotify, or youtube. bell, larry — usa from vocal music; for voices with orchestral accompaniment. 01:05:00. albany records, © 2005. classical. cd. contents: 13. songs of innocence: introduction; 14. songs of innocence: the lamb; 15. songs of innocence: nurse’s song; 16. songs of innocence: infant joy; 17. songs of innocence: spring; 18. songs of experience: introduction; 19. songs of experience: the garden of love; 20. songs of experience: the sick rose; 21. songs of experience: the tyger; 22. songs of experience: the voice of the ancient bard. links: allmusic, amazon, apple, spotify. clausen, rené — usa from life and breath: choral works by rené clausen; for voices. 01:02:20. chandos, © 2012. choral. cd. contents: 3. the tyger; 4. the lamb. notes: the two settings of blake were originally composed in 2009. links: amazon, apple, spotify. colvin, shawn — usa from the starlighter; for voice, guitar, strings. 00:39:04. slcrecordings, © 2018. folk/​country. cd. contents: 14. cradle song.for a review, see whittaker, zoamorphosis (9 june 2018). notes: the album is based on the children’s book lullabies and night songs. links: allmusic, amazon. cowan, jude — uk from lamb & tyger; for voice, organ. 00:36:08. ah! sunflower, © 2011. folk/​country. cd. contents: 1. the lamb; 2. london; 3. the sick rose; 4. a cradle song; 5. the garden of love; 6. the little vagabond; 7. the divine image; 8. the fly; 9. the ecchoing green; 10. infant sorrow; 11. the human abstract; 12. ah! sunflower; 13. the little black boy; 14. the blossom; 15. the clod & the pebble; 16. holy thursday; 17. the shepherd; 18. the tyger. links: amazon, apple, spotify. cuartz, yaq — usa from tyger! tyger!; for voice, guitars, percussion. 00:02:24. jacob curtis, © 2010. rock/​pop. streaming. contents: 1. tyger! tyger! links: amazon, apple, spotify. gazelle twin — uk from pastoral; for voice, synthesizers, percussion. 00:37:24. anti-ghost moon ray, © 2018. electronic/​dance. cd. contents: 11. dance of the peddlers. notes: “dance of the peddlers” draws upon “the tyger” for its lyrics. two other tracks on the album, “little lambs” and “jerusalem,” almost certainly take their titles from blake but do not use his poetry. links: allmusic, amazon, apple, spotify. glaza, johanna — lithuania/​uk from albion; for voice, keyboards, percussion. 00:15:36. inspired all kinds records, © 2018. avant-garde. cassette, streaming. contents: 1. albion.for a review, see whittaker, zoamorphosis (24 february 2019). notes: the title track sets part of blake’s jerusalem the emanation of the giant albion to music. links: apple, spotify, youtube. greif, olivier — france from lettres de westerbork—chants de l’âme; for voice, piano. 1:00:59. disques triton, © 1999. classical. cd. contents: 4. chants de l’âme: i. the tyger. links: amazon, apple, spotify. iqbal, nabihah — uk from weighing of the heart; for voice, keyboards, percussion. 00:39:24. ninja tune, © 2017. electronic/​dance. cd. contents: 6. zone 1 to 6000. notes: “zone 1 to 6000” takes its inspiration from the poem “london” and echoes its structure, as in the lines “in every class, in every school / at every desk where time’s well spent.” links: allmusic, amazon, apple, spotify, youtube. jóhannsson, jóhann — iceland from englabörn & variations; for voices. 01:34:43. deutsche grammaphon, © 2018. classical. cd. contents: b5. holy thursday (ég heyrði allt án þess að hlusta) (theatre of voices version).for a review, see whittaker, zoamorphosis (9 june 2018). links: allmusic, amazon, apple, spotify. martin, phil — uk from before we go to paradise; for voice, guitars, percussion. 00:34:13. brentford records, © 2012. rock/​pop. cd. contents: 6. tyger, tyger. links: amazon, apple, spotify. miller, andrew — usa from the lamb, for divisi mixed voices a cappella; for voices. 00:04:25. pavane publishing, © 2015. choral. score. contents: the lamb. link: youtube. miller, andrew — usa from the tyger, for divisi mixed voices a cappella; for voices. 00:04:29. pavane publishing, © 2015. choral. score. contents: the tyger. link: youtube. mitchell, brent — usa from brent mitchell; for voice, guitar. 00:47:48. dog trot, © 2005. folk/​country. cd. contents: 13. tyger, tyger. links: allmusic, apple, spotify. mortifee, ann — canada from journey to kairos; for voice and piano with orchestral accompaniment. 00:45:51. jabula records, © 1980. musical. vinyl. contents: a4. tyger! tyger! links: allmusic, amazon, apple, spotify. myers, tokio, and jazmin sawyers — uk from jerusalem (the official anthem of commonwealth games, team england, 2018); for voices with orchestral accompaniment. 00:02:34. simco limited, © 2018. rock/pop. streaming. contents: 1. jerusalem. notes: a new arrangement of parry’s hymn for the gold coast 2018 commonwealth games. links: amazon, apple, spotify, youtube. ockham’s razor — usa from wolves in the walls; for voice, guitars, percussion. 00:59:18. ockham’s razor, © 2010. rock/​pop. cd. contents: 9. part three, the tiger: the tyger. links: allmusic, amazon, apple, spotify. panufnik, roxanna — uk from celestial bird; for voices, piano. 00:56:27. signum classics, © 2018. classical. cd. contents: 8. a cradle song. links: allmusic, amazon, apple, spotify. parker, bo, and paul parker — usa from cheshire moon; for voice, guitars, percussion. 00:49:54. new weave records, © 2004. rock/​pop. cd. contents: 2. tyger tyger. links: allmusic, amazon, apple, spotify. pearson, guy — uk from glad day; for voice and piano with orchestral accompaniment. 00:55:37. issimo, © 2010. classical. cd. contents: 1. glad day (introduction); 2. a dream; 3. an island in the moon; 4. the angel; 5. a mundane shell; 6. newton; 7. ah! sun-flower; 8. glad day (reprise); 9. nurse’s song; 10. infant joy, infant sorrow; 11. the tyger; 12. the four zoas; 13. songs of experience (introduction); 14. lux nova [instrumental]; 15. night; 16. london; 17. the ecchoing green; 18. finale of the flowers [“the lily” and “ah! sun-flower”].for a review, see whittaker, zoamorphosis (20 march 2011). links: amazon, apple, spotify. price, michael — uk from tender symmetry; for voices, strings, electronics. 00:46:27. erased tapes, © 2018. classical. vinyl. contents: 2. speke [“the garden of love”]; 3. willow road [“ah! sun-flower”]; 5. fan bay [“holy thursday”]; 6. fountains [“the lily”]; 7. shade of dreams [“a cradle song”].for a review, see whittaker, zoamorphosis (18 april 2019). notes: this album, recorded in various national trust locations, does not offer direct settings of blake’s poems to music, but rather draws on them as inspiration for ambient pieces. links: allmusic, amazon, apple, spotify. raman, susheela — uk from ghost gamelan; for voices, keyboards, percussion. 00:40:30. naïve, © 2018. avant-garde. cd. contents: 8. rose (featuring samuel mills, gondrong gunarto).for a review, see whittaker, zoamorphosis (18 april 2019). notes: the album includes an original setting of blake’s “the sick rose.” links: allmusic, amazon, apple, spotify. rutter, john — uk from mass of the children; for voices with orchestral accompaniment. 01:06:37. collegium records, © 2003. classical. cd. contents: 4. agnus dei [“the lamb”]. links: allmusic, amazon, apple, spotify. sora — finland from fade to what; for voice, flute, double bass. 00:40:25. cymbidium records, © 2007. jazz/​blues. cd. contents: 4. tyger. links: amazon, apple, spotify. stubbs, harriet — uk from heaven & hell: the doors of perception; for voice, piano. 01:04:53. suite 28 records, © 2018. classical. cd. contents: 1. phrygian gates (john adams, featuring marianne faithfull).for a review, see whittaker, zoamorphosis (20 december 2018); see also the interview with stubbs on the podcast william blake: the man and the music. notes: this debut album by classical pianist harriet stubbs is a curated collection of performances of artists such as dmitry shostakovitch, johann sebastian bach, and johannes brahms, arranged to reflect themes selected from the marriage of heaven and hell. the opening track is an arrangement of adams’s phrygian gates with excerpts from blake’s marriage read by marianne faithfull. links: allmusic, amazon, apple, spotify. warblade — usa from seize the fire; for voice, guitars, percussion. 00:42:00. warblade, © 2010. heavy metal. cd. contents: 2. the tyger. links: amazon, apple, spotify. williams, chris — australia from a golden string; for solo and mixed voices. 00:05:45. australian music centre, © 2012. choral. score. contents: 1. a golden string. notes: winner of the 2012 blake society tithe grant, this was also performed by sansara at the unveiling of blake’s new gravestone in 2018. link: vimeo. william blake’s black bible as a spectacle of doom: a recent note to blakean reception in romania william blake’s black bible as a spectacle of doom: a recent note to blakean reception in romania by cătălin ghiță cătălin ghiță (catghita@hotmail.com) is professor of romanian, comparative literature, and cultural studies at the university of craiova, romania. he holds a dr. habil. title from the “alexandru ioan cuza” university of iaşi, romania (2014), a phd in romanian literature from the university of craiova (2003), and a phd in english literature from tohoku university, japan (2007). he has edited and published several books of literary criticism in great britain, the netherlands, poland, and romania. i having discussed on another occasion the vagaries of blakean critical reception in romania,see ghiță. i intend in this paper to focus on a lesser-known, yet highly significant, aspect of blake’s aesthetic reception in southeast europe. the radio play william blake’s black bible (biblia neagră a lui william blake) represents—​as one learns at the end—​a tribute to the victims of the colectiv club fire, which occurred in bucharest on 30 october 2015.in 2019, the romanian-born german director alexander nanau launched a powerful documentary on this tragedy, entitled colectiv. the film has garnered numerous awards. the site itself was a blast from the past: established as a private venture by a prominent bourgeois family, prodanof, between the two world wars, it became a successful footwear factory during the communist era and was left derelict after the demise of the ceaușescu regime in late 1989. it was subsequently rented by private businessmen and turned into a fashionable events club after 1990. it was this place (ironically, one that blake would promptly have labeled a “dark satanic mill”) that was meant to host a grand night for the native metalcore band goodbye to gravity (founded four years before, in 2011). they had prepared a musical feast for their fans to celebrate the release of their second album, mantras of war, thus seeking to capitalize on the fame acquired from their debut, the eponymously titled goodbye to gravity (2012). the five members of the bandtheir names were mihai alexandru, bogdan enache, andrei găluț, alex pascu, and vlad țelea. only găluț survived the ordeal. planned a grand finale, complete with fireworks. the concert was off to a good start at about 9 p.m. tragically, though, ninety minutes later, everything that could have gone wrong did: the pyrotechnics did not work well indoors and the bloody outcome was exacerbated by the fact that the polyurethane acoustic foam in the club, which was meant to enhance the sound, was itself highly flammable. the fire consumed the foam voraciously and caused the ceiling to collapse, thereby allowing the release of toxins, which eventually poisoned a great number of the people in attendance. panic ensued, with the few hundred people present desperately dashing to the exit doors, only to be caught in a stampede. the result was grim: twenty-seven people died on the spot and thirty-seven more died of injuries in various hospitals over the next days and weeks. almost 150 people were injured, the majority seriously (mostly severe burns and respiratory problems). barring an aviation catastrophe, it was the deadliest incident ever to occur in present-day romania. more than anything else, it led to massive social protests throughout the country, triggering the toppling of the government and the resignation of the prime minister, victor ponta.he led a strange political coalition, bringing together socialists and liberals. in fact, the colectiv club tragedy was the spark that kindled the fire of popular revolt against the political class in general, which ever since the fall of communism had been perceived as increasingly anachronistic, corrupt, and inefficient. corruption plagued all ex-communist countries in europe, but it was mainly in romania and bulgaria that the phenomenon was exacerbated by a lack of reform in the social and political system. the tragic event encapsulated and epitomized the impotence, neglect, and spiritual poverty of an age not unlike that of blake. ii biblia neagră a lui william blake was written and directed by the talented romanian artist ilinca stihi. the project coordinator was crenguța manea, the original musical score was composed by vlad pasencu, and some of the actors cast in the production included up-and-coming names, such as andrei huţuleac, george ivaşcu, and anca sigartău, as well as the mezzo-soprano georgiana mototolea. the play, which premiered in february 2016, has steadily gained national and even international recognition, obtaining prestigious nominations and prizes in romania, italy, and croatia. fragmentary and obsessive through its employment of musical and textual reiterations, it focuses on the development of nichita (a male name in romanian), a troubled teenager in whose life adolescent rebellion, drugs, and illicit sex revolve dizzyingly. constantly misunderstood by his dysfunctional family, he undergoes a series of spiritual crises, culminating with suicide. far from constituting a materialization of failure, nichita’s taking of his own life reifies a position of ultimate personal freedom. the title of the work is conspicuously uttered and displays a play on words, centered on the paronyms blake-black and intended to suggest that william black wrote a black bible. the implication is reiterated by nichita himself, who notes that his grandmother’s “face looks ever more like black william’s face” (3).“fața ei seamănă tot mai mult cu fața negrului william.” after the old woman dies, the protagonist again says that his grandmother “looked like black will” (4).“semăna cu negrul will.” another iconic character is the black dj, a sort of a protagonist’s double, if you will, voicing the latter’s thoughts—​sometimes explaining, at other times adding pathos—​and all the while engaging the audience at multiple semantic and philosophical levels. my critical intuition in this regard has been confirmed by stihi in a private letter. the preliminary material, which seeks to shape the public’s “horizon of expectation” (“erwartungshorizont,” as hans robert jauss so aptly puts it),see jauss passim. plays a very important role, as it constitutes a mix of phonic elements suggesting the crisis of our contemporary world, bringing together such heteroclite details as the original recording of the first atomic experiment in alamogordo, new mexico, a russian chorus, and a tyrolean song. the effect is at once a cacophony of absurdity and an unadulterated slice of life, meant to shed light on an otherwise untranslatable experience, much as blake’s prophetic books defy reason when approached with exclusively logical tools of interpretation. suddenly, the dj’s voice cuts in, uttering lines that crystallize the ideological marrow of the play. around these fundamental words gravitate the rest of the strange dramatic occurrences: “why should we see an opposition between life and life as a system? because systems will sometimes oppose one another. in this particular case, the system created by man opposes the system created by god” (2).“de ce să opunem viața sistemului? pentru că sistemele se opun unele altora. în cazul acesta, sistemul creat de om se opune sistemului creat de dumnezeu.” one may easily detect here a reference to los’s famous assertion whilst building golgonooza in chapter 1 of jerusalem: “i must create a system, or be enslav’d by another mans / i will not reason & compare: my business is to create” (e 153). system-creation, it seems, goes hand in hand with system-destruction, as is further made clear in chapter 3: “it is the spiritual fourfold / london: continually building & continually decaying desolate!” (e 203). iii as already alluded to, biblia neagră a lui william blake represents a convoluted yet exciting spiritual recasting of blake’s complex and often baffling mythological universe. this reworking is undertaken by means of deeply syncretic forms of expression: the fusion of rock and opera and the reconciliation of modern modes of expression with the alliterative tradition. the atmosphere acts as a sui generis catalyst of the plot, dictating the rhythm of the action, which slackens or accelerates accordingly. classical music is employed throughout to suggest an eighteenth-century mood. after the preliminaries, the dj recalls the story that, in june 1780, when blake was on his way to a shop, he joined a mob that laid siege to the infamous newgate prison with a view to releasing the prisoners, and the outcome of these protests and riots, which lasted several days, was the establishment of the police force in britain. the outcome provided by the play is not technically accurate. although the first constables appeared in the mid-eighteenth century (the bow street runners), it was not until 1829 that the then home secretary, robert peel, introduced the metropolitan police act, thus creating the first police force in britain. for additional details, see emsley. the fact that his voice mingles not only with the music but also with protesters’ voices emphasizes from the beginning the militant positioning of the play, committed to defending social autonomy as well as personal freedom and peace. blakean symbolism, enriched with late twentieth-century tropes, permeates the dramatic substance. for instance, toward the end, the stage directions indicate “metallica on the radio,” and one can distinctly hear “enter sandman” being played in the background. this is the title of the first single from the fifth studio album—​metallica (1991)—​of the american heavy-metal act. “enter sandman,” cowritten by the band’s front man, james hetfield, is a dark meditation on death and evil, sometimes from the perspective of a helpless child, left to fight the demons of the night all by itself. nichita’s musings while listening to the music, before setting himself free at last—​“i imagined there would be a day. a day when i meet god. and he wouldn’t have the face of buddhist monks, nor of woodstock suckers” (20)“mi-am imaginat că o să vină o zi. o zi în care o să-l întâlnesc pe dumnezeu. și el nu va avea fața călugărilor budiști, nici a fraierilor de la woodstock.”—​play upon the idea of contemplating god’s true face, which turns out to be “the face of a savage black man who has just shattered the chains of his slavery. the impetus of the battle and the light of victory blend on his face. he has blood on his hands and at his ankles, from the iron. he won’t recognize me” (20).“fața unui negru sălbatic care abia a smuls lanțurile sclaviei. pe fața lui se văd amestecate turbarea luptei și strălucirea victoriei. are mâinile mânjite cu sânge și în dreptul gleznelor, rănile făcute de fiare. el n-o să mă recunoască.” this image echoes, in a more positive manner, blake’s portrayal of the “black african” in “a song of liberty”—​“o african! black african! (go. winged thought widen his forehead.)” (e 44).david bindman notes that “the parenthetical aside implies the african's mental backwardness” (379). “enter sandman” also carries the very essence of pessimism, and that is the feeling that the romanian play seeks to render by indirect, if fuzzy, means. read as a postmodern insertion into a blakean prophetic pattern, the song anticipates the dramatic outcome of the play, as the protagonist confronts, and eventually overcomes, his demons. in true postmodern fashion, intertextual allusion and reference abound. for instance, as allen ginsberg’s voice is distinctly heard reciting blake’s “cradle song,” the voice of the dj utters ominously in the background, “on a summer day in ’48, allen ginsberg was 26 and blake appeared to him in person. then ginsberg told friends and family: wow! i have found god! ” (6).“era o zi de vară din ’48, allen ginsberg avea 26 de ani si atunci i-a apărut blake în persoană. apoi le-a zis prietenilor și familiei: oau! l-am găsit pe dumnezeu! ” the dj goes on to address the audience directly, “i am dj will. black will,” thereafter hastening to add, “we’re here to write together the black bible of william black.”“sunt dj will. negrul will. suntem aici să scriem împreună biblia neagră a lui william black.” the old postmodern trick of the narrator evincing his own metanarrative tools is at hand: “but william blake cannot see us. this is fiction. it’s a piece of fiction” (6; spoken in english). nichita also listens to rock icon marilyn manson, who quotes the first three lines of blake’s “proverbs of hell”: “in seed time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy. / drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead. / the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom” (e 35). based on blake’s denunciation of evil, the play offers a general indictment of war. when nichita’s mother tells him that “there’s been peace since the second world war,”“de la al doilea război mondial, e pace.” he painfully retorts, “peace? but africa? vietnam, iran, iraq, the ukraine?” (16-17).“pace? dar africa? vietnam, iran, irak, ucraina?” there is a clear indication that the son is lost, a sign promptly augmented by an anonymous voice reciting “the little boy lost”: “father, father, where are you going / o do not walk so fast” (e 11). it is an apt description of modern society’s typical dysfunctional family. this has to be paired with nichita’s lament that “men are the ones who leave first, as a rule. the true wars are carried on by women and children” (16),“bărbații pleacă mereu primii. războaiele adevărate sunt ținute de femei și copii.” the latter thus being depicted as heroic victims. this dichotomy between oppressors and oppressed hints at blake’s aphorism “one law for the lion & ox is oppression” from “a memorable fancy” at the end of the marriage of heaven and hell, which is subsequently quoted by the dj: “note: the angel who turned into a devil is my special friend. we’ve often read the bible together in its infernal, diabolical meaning. and that’s the sense that the world will receive, if they behave in the proper way. i have also the bible of hell, which the world shall have whether they will or no. one law for the lion & ox is oppression” (20).see e 44. the climax of the play is at hand. nichita fails to integrate into a world that has donned the garb of madness and decides to commit suicide by shooting. he gives voice to the putative question raised by his death: “why has this been done? why? that’s the only question i’m going to leave behind. it’s a question without an answer that i’ll ask fate. death cleans up. it doesn’t ask for your permission” (20).“de ce-a făcut asta? de ce? e singura întrebare pe care o las în urma mea. e întrebarea fără răspuns către fatalitate. moartea face curățenie. nu stă de vorbă.” a fitter requiem for a young man’s death could hardly be found. and everything ends, in true hamlet fashion, in silence. iv from an aristotelian perspective, does the play generate catharsis or does it merely reify, in a cold and detached fashion, a young man’s revenge upon a hostile universe? the disjunctive terms of the interrogation above are hard to separate. blake’s lasting influence on the work is not so much textual as intertextual, based therefore on allusion and cross-reference. redeeming and vindictive by turns, biblia neagră a lui william blake resists categorization and clear-cut distinctions. blending styles and manners and carefully revealing and exploiting current-day topoi (terrorism, social disintegration, lack of purpose in life, the ontological void), it is a powerful reminder that the english poet serves as an idiosyncratic source of inspiration for every age and culture. all in all, we are faced with a reinterpretation of order amid chaos, and i am certain that blake himself would have approved of the aesthetic result. in her letter to me, stihi notes that she perceived blake to be “a rock star” from the viewpoint of urban culture. in her opinion, biblia neagră a lui william blake is “about all of us in the here and now, about the way in which teenagers can define themselves in the context of the values brought forth by modern society.” thus, blake “comes to offer support and legitimacy to the choices made by the protagonist himself,” his function being that of a molder of character. stihi adds that “blake’s example, embodying at once artistic and social revolution, serves as a memento that history is accelerated by brave, passionate, and impudent characters.” these are the young people who, in the wake of the colectiv tragedy, took to the streets and triggered massive social change. the fact that the play is intended not only as a tribute to the oppressed and the victims but also as a eulogy of political courage and commitment is emphasized by the superposition of the credits and recordings of the antigovernment protests. further elaborating on her auctorial intentions, stihi points out that the idea for the work was a result of her trying to cope with terrorist violence throughout europe, from norway to great britain, belgium to france. as far as she is concerned, blake’s poetic creed “was the invisible ink which was used to reveal the genuine signature of our age,” an age marked by youth radicalization, aimlessness, and deafening outbursts of gun terror. in the final analysis, the audience is left to fend for itself as best it can, and perhaps this is the implicit message that the play strives to bring forth in a not too convoluted manner. just as in the case of the colectiv club tragedy, where the members of the crowd had to help one another in order to escape from a fiery hell, we must stick together to overcome sociohistorical hurdles, though the outlook remains uncertain. works cited bindman, david. “blake’s vision of slavery revisited.” huntington library quarterly 58.3/4 (1995): 373-82. accessed 19 feb. 2021. blake, william. the complete poetry and prose of william blake. ed. david v. erdman. newly rev. ed. new york: anchor-random house, 1988. [abbreviated as e] emsley, clive. the english police: a political and social history. 2nd ed. abingdon: routledge, 2014. ghiță, cătălin. “the reception of blake in romania: keeping a humane vision in times of trouble.” the reception of william blake in europe. ed. sibylle erle and morton d. paley. 2 vols. london: bloomsbury, 2019. 1: 215-27. jauss, hans robert. “literary history as a challenge to literary theory.” trans. elizabeth benzinger. new literary history 2.1 (1970): 7-37. accessed 20 feb. 2021. stihi, ilinca. biblia neagră a lui william blake. dir. ilinca stihi. radio performance. bucharest, feb. 2016. —​—​—​. “biblia neagră a lui william blake.” unpublished script. —​—​—​. letter to the author. 28 june 2019. blake’s “holy thursday” and “the martyrdom of st. paul’s” blake’s “holy thursday” and “the martyrdom of st. paul’s” by clare a. simmons clare a. simmons (simmons.9@osu.edu) is a professor of english at the ohio state university, columbus, the editor of prose studies, and the author of reversing the conquest: history and myth in nineteenth-century british literature; eyes across the channel: french revolutions, party history, and british writing 1830–1882; popular medievalism in romantic-era britain; and papers and articles on nineteenth-century british literature and medievalism. she also edited the clever woman of the family by charlotte mary yonge and an essay collection, medievalism and the quest for the “real” middle ages. the comic almanack of 1838 might seem an unusual place to find a writer thinking like william blake, but a poem for the month of june gives two views of the charity children who attended an annual service in st. paul’s cathedral that have some interesting similarities to those represented by blake’s two “holy thursday” poems. “the martyrdom of st. paul’s” and its background fill out the context for blake’s poems of innocence and experience, suggesting that he was not entirely alone in wondering whether the children involved were being exploited rather than assisted. the 1838 poem read in context helps us to see blake’s use of the title “holy thursday” as a calculated choice, and thus those who suggest that at the time of writing the first poem blake himself identified closely with his narrator’s aesthetic response to the sight may be reading overinnocently.e. d. hirsch, for example, makes no distinction between the narrator and blake (194-97). most commentators, however, tend toward david v. erdman’s description of the narrator’s “obtuse, roseate view” or heather glen’s account of the “benevolent observer” who receives the poet’s warning (see erdman, prophet against empire 119-22, glen 121-29). i will first outline what is known of the background to the “holy thursday” poems in blake’s time, then use the poem from the comic almanack to understand what would have been expected of the children. blake’s “holy thursday” poems depict a ceremony in which the children of the charity schools sponsored by the london parishes participated in a church service in st. paul’s. they are unusual among the songs of innocence and of experience in drawing inspiration from an actual place and occasion. in milton and jerusalem blake is very precise about locations in london and elsewhere, but even the poems from songs that feature an actual or implied london setting—​namely, “london” and “the chimney sweeper”—​do not name identifiable places. in “holy thursday” from innocence, the observer describes what he or she sees: thousands of well-washed children wearing uniforms representative of their parishes marching to st. paul’s in pairs, and then singing movingly in the church service. they are escorted by “wise guardians of the poor,” and readers, in a phrase that reminds them of their superior social standing, are urged, “then cherish pity, lest you drive an angel from your door.” the speaker in the experience poem is less sure of what is being observed: far from being spiritually reassured by the children’s singing, this observer detects anxiety in the form of a “trembling cry” that is quite possibly the result of coercion. this second poem does not mention the parade to st. paul’s but apparently relies on the innocence poem to establish the context. whereas the speaker in innocence observes the children marching to the cathedral and hears the performance, the speaker in experience refers only to the assembled children, and even then questions what he or she sees. this second speaker does not conclude that the scene emphasizes national pride—​if “so many children” are poor, britain must be “a land of poverty.” if the children are to escape from “eternal winter” into a natural, nurturing world where poverty cannot “the mind appall,” the performance at st. paul’s, which keeps them in the bonds of charity dependent on pity, is not the way to achieve it. the image shows no parade of children, but rather a harsh world in which not all children will survive. “holy thursday” from experience. 11.3 x 7.3 cm. songs of innocence and of experience copy c (1789, 1794). lessing j. rosenwald collection, library of congress. image courtesy of the william blake archive. a portion of the image has a link to another of blake’s 1794 works—​and also to “the martyrdom of st. paul’s.” above the experience text a woman stands over a small child apparently dead on the ground; a similar child appears in a design from europe that blake’s friend george cumberland linked to “famine” (erdman, illuminated blake 164). commentators have associated this image of women before a pot over a roaring fire as suggestive of cannibalism brought about by the desperation of famine,see the blake archive illustration description for europe copy d, object 8, at <http://​www.​blakearchive.​org/​copy/​europe.​d?descid=europe.​d.​illbk.​08>. and hence as figurative of the exploitation of the poor by the rich. europe copy e (1794), plate 9 [bentley]. 23.7 x 17.1 cm. lessing j. rosenwald collection, library of congress. image courtesy of the william blake archive. “holy thursday” depicts similar scenes of misery. beside the lines asking “is that trembling cry a song? / can it be a song of joy?” a thin boy stands with his hands to his face, seemingly not singing but weeping; two more small figures, one held by a woman and one outstretched on the ground, are naked.erdman points out the similarity between the spread-eagled figure in the bottom right corner and the figure of albion in jerusalem plate 9 (illuminated blake 75). if this pose implies a connection with albion—​associated with britain—​as early as 1794, then the weak naked child again challenges the national pride of the st. paul’s service. the images of misery and nakedness are particularly poignant in contrast with an event associated with celebration and a distinctive form of dress. as critics have noted, the “holy thursday” poems are meditations on a london tradition that started soon after the society for promoting christian knowledge began its patronage of charity schools in 1699.see, for example, erdman, prophet against empire, glen, and particularly the very useful article by david fairer, “experience reading innocence: contextualizing blake’s holy thursday.” the objective was to provide an anglican education to children aged between seven and sixteen, to prepare them for useful trades (rose 17). each school adopted a uniform color: the boys wore jackets of this color, along with leather breeches and round caps (sometimes called thrum-caps or muffin-caps), and the girls wore long dresses of the same cloth with white aprons, broad collars, and mob-caps. further to identify their respective schools, the boys wore a badge, usually made of pewter. the statues of a charity girl and boy at st. john of wapping show examples of the uniform, while the inscription simultaneously reminds viewers of the importance of “voluntary contributions.” statues of charity-school pupils at the former st. john of wapping school, scandrett street, london. photograph by the author. although the original goal of the charity schools may have been to help the indigent, by the later eighteenth century the majority of the attendees were not actually the poorest of the poor, but the sons and daughters of working families. the schools were expected to have local supporting subscribers and fundraising activities such as anniversary dinners, yet within a few years of the spck’s involvement organizers conceived the idea of a service bringing together children from all the london parishes to perform sacred music with the church choir as a collective charity event. stanley gardner is justified in noting that the charity schools were generally humane in their treatment of the children, but he ignores the pressures placed upon them as they rehearsed for and participated in the annual event (gardner 30-37). as fairer has pointed out, the schools were careful not to overeducate the children, the goal being to teach them anglican christianity and to prepare them for working life. fairer quotes the bishop of norwich in 1755: “these poor children are born to be daily labourers, for the most part to earn their bread by the sweat of their brows” (543). for one day in the year, and occasionally more if there was a particular reason for a church celebration, the form of service was to perform for the wealthier classes in society, and at least in theory to gain donations for the schools. according to m. g. jones, the first “joint procession and service for 2000 children” took place at st. andrew’s church, holborn, on 8 june 1704 (59-60). jones quotes from the innocence poem as an expression of “the pride and compassion aroused on these occasions” (60). at this time, st. paul’s was still unfinished; the service moved there in 1782. the vast space of st. paul’s was able to accommodate a reported 6000 children on tiered wooden seats under the dome. the plan was that all children from the london schools would take part; given that in 1799 the total number attending charity schools in the london area was just over 7000, almost all must have attended.jones (60) lists the number of attendees in the late eighteenth century as 12,000; later accounts suggest that half of these were children and half audience. many of the east london and southwark charity schools were little more than a mile from st. paul’s, although that would have been quite a challenge to walk with a group of thirty, forty, or even a hundred children of varying ages. others were several miles away, however: the cathedral is three miles from marylebone, four from kensington, seven from greenwich, and ten from richmond. how the children reached the ceremony and the morning rehearsal preceding it is unclear. possibly those from greenwich and richmond traveled by boat along the thames, or perhaps they did not attend. many children, nevertheless, must have had a long morning walk. by the nineteenth century, a church service that began as a fundraiser had evolved into a concert for the wealthy so well known that the comic almanack marked it as a significant london event; it was to last in largely unchanged form until after the establishment of universal education in 1870. the comic almanack was one of many christmas and new year gift books printed in the 1830s. the work of gilbert a. à beckett, the mayhew brothers, william makepeace thackeray, and the illustrator george cruikshank, among others, it initially purported to be an astrological almanac like old moore’s almanack, but soon became more of a yearbook, with stories and features tied to the months of the year. some gift books and annuals of this period were lavish productions, but the comic almanack was small and more affordable for those of modest incomes, such as tradespeople, office workers, and teachers. like punch in its early years, the comic almanack had articles and illustrations that were humorous but sometimes contained social criticism from a broadly “middle-class” perspective that assumed that its readership was neither the very rich nor the very poor. the anonymous poem “the martyrdom of st. paul’s” is typical in its satirical depiction of an event when the wealthy would view the poor, but those of middling incomes, who may have observed the parade but who did not have tickets to enter the building, could only watch and comment. for june 1838, the following lines appear under the titles “charity children’s jubilee” and, in gothic letters, “the martyrdom of st. paul’s”: oh, charity! celestial dame!—​i cannot call thee maid, while ev’ry year thy children dear make such a grand parade.— ah! ’tis a glorious sight to see thy little pauper brats parade the streets of babylon like demi-drowned rats. before the sun’s begun to run, they’re startled from their nest, and by their anxious mothers in the parish fin’ry drest; and how those mothers’ hearts must leap with gratitude to see their offspring all so nicely clothed in that smart livery! the girls all clad in worsted gowns, mob caps, and aprons white, like lilliputian grandmothers,—​a venerable sight: the boys in pretty blanket coats of green or brick-dust red, with tawny leather breeches, and a thrum cap on their head; and then that splendid pewter badge, worth all the rest beside; no medal worn by hero could inspire more honest pride. while to the neighbours they’re a mark of pleasant observation, how must their happy mothers bless a parish education! it is so very handy too, when in a crowd they’re brawling, to pick them out so easily, and save a world of bawling. oh! merry day of jubilee to every little sinner, when ev’ry one receives a bun and goes without a dinner. ah, happy england! thou’rt indeed a charitable nation, thy charities thou dost without the slightest ostentation; how proud it makes a briton feel to view this glorious sight, tho’ some there are too dull to share the exquisite delight. i heard a surly cynic once thus vent his angry spleen, as he with jaundic’d eye beheld the animated scene: “if this be christian charity, who loves abroad to roam, “i wish, instead of coming here, that she had stay’d at home. “i’m sure she has no feeling for those wretched little dears, “or she’d not make them into jam all in that place of tiers. “whate’er sir robert peel may say, or tory folks may shout, “i’m sure the ‘pressure’ from within is worse than that ‘without.’ “but little girls may swoon away, and little boys may bawl, “none, in this age of intellect, now care for a child’s call. “the cannibals, who eat up folks, have always made a point “to kill their two-legg’d animal before they dress’d a joint; “but christian anthropophagites possess a nicer goût, “and cook their flesh alive whene’er they make a human stew.” thus did he snarl and grumble at this glorious institution; some enemy he must have been to britain’s constitution, for he who’d seek to work a change by pleading for humanity, must either be disloyal or the victim of insanity. comic almanack for 1838, p. 23. image courtesy of the rare books and manuscripts library of the ohio state university libraries. these lines help supply context for blake’s “holy thursday” poems in some significant respects. first, the poem answers the question as to who the children are. even though the speaker calls them “pauper brats,” they are not orphans or from the workhouse, but have parents who have chosen to send them to school for a good education. for this ceremony—​to which parents would not have been invited—​their mothers have dressed them with considerable care and anxiety in their “parish fin’ry.” the children usually received new clothes for the occasion, although the garments were still in the antiquated style of the early eighteenth century: the speaker mentions the pewter badge, leather breeches, and “pretty blanket coats of green or brick-dust red.” second, by the position of this event in the june calendar, “the martyrdom of st. paul’s” suggests that the only reference to a distinctive day in the christian year found in the songs is not as straightforward as it initially appears. blake’s first poem begins “twas on a holy thursday,” but historically the thursday in question was not particularly holy, and nobody but blake seems to have named it in this way. the anniversary meeting of the charity children, as the event was more generally called, did not occur on either of the dates in the anglican calendar known as holy thursday. although both thomas e. connolly and gardner noted this some decades ago, standard student textbooks are still confused on this point. the first day traditionally described as holy thursday is alternatively known in england as maundy thursday, the day before good friday when jesus washed the disciples’ feet and shared the last supper with them.the editors of the norton anthology of english literature may be thinking of maundy thursday when they identify “holy thursday” as “a special day during the easter season” (122). in the church of england, as in the roman catholic church, this was a day associated with charity toward the poor. until the reign of james ii the monarch distributed alms and washed the feet of doubtless carefully selected poor people; the british monarch continues to give out symbolic coins to elderly men and women on this day.for example, the illustrated london almanack for 1855 identifies maundy thursday as “the day on which the royal bounty is distributed by the queen’s almoners, in the chapel at whitehall, to poor men and women, two for every year her majesty has attained” (61). the tradition associates maundy thursday with charity, but not with the month of june (the placement of “the martyrdom of st. paul’s” in the comic almanack), since maundy thursday falls in march or april. the other day often designated holy thursday in the anglican calendar is the thursday of ascension day, the fortieth day of easter, and many commentators have followed erdman in identifying blake’s poem with ascension day.erdman explains the charity-school event as taking place “every holy thursday (ascension day)” (prophet against empire 121); see also the longman anthology of british literature (184). duncan wu’s romanticism, an anthology identifies the date as “the first thursday in may from 1782 onwards” (192); according to connolly’s data, 1782 was the only year in the later eighteenth century on which the service was held on the first thursday in may (connolly 184-85), and ascension day was the following thursday. ascension day typically falls in may, however; it was a holy-day—​that is, a holiday in the form of a day off work—​for the inns of court, since trinity term began after it.vox stellarum, also known as old moore’s almanack, published continuously since the 1700s, sometimes marks this day as ascension day, sometimes as holy thursday, and sometimes both. on ascension day, charity children in at least some london parishes were involved in “beating the boundaries” marking their parishes, and sometimes received a celebratory meal. william hone’s every-day book records that it is “a common custom of established usage, for the minister of each parish, with the parochial officers and other inhabitants of the parish, followed by the boys of the parish school, headed by their master, to go in procession to the different parish boundaries; which boundaries the boys strike with peeled willow wands that they bear in their hands, and this is called ‘beating the bounds’” (1: col. 652). given the necessity of the children being in their own parishes on ascension day, the st. paul’s gathering must have been held on a different thursday. thursday was the usual day at st. paul’s for special events, such as the service for the sons of the clergy, probably because it was well removed from sunday, the cathedral’s busiest day of the week. the research of fairer and others suggests that in the later eighteenth century additional parades of charity-school children were sometimes organized to celebrate days of national thanksgiving; these too were generally on thursdays. the thursday for the anniversary meeting was, as the comic almanack suggests, usually a week or more after ascension day, in june. even in blake’s time the anniversary meeting was usually celebrated on a thursday early in june, and newspaper reports describe the event as an “annual meeting,” and sometimes as a “jubilee” or “festival,” but never as a holy thursday service. 1789, the year of the songs of innocence, was an exception, since the annual meeting was held on thursday, 28 may, a week after ascension day; very possibly, the earlier date was because some scaffolding had been left in place from the day of thanksgiving on thursday, 23 april, for the king’s recovery from illness, when the charity children had also participated (correspondents to the times frequently complained of the inconvenience of the scaffolding erected to accommodate the children). the date of the first thursday in june is also mentioned in peter george patmore’s mirror of the months, where the occasion is given the name of walking day; patmore’s account gained wide circulation, since hone reprinted it in his every-day book (2: 784). every description of the charity children mentions their clothing, and patmore is no exception, reminding his readers that in london during the first days in june, anyone crossing the street will encounter “whole regiments of little boys in leather breeches, and little girls in white aprons, going to church to practise their annual anthem singing” (patmore 143-44). the narrator is affected by the spectacle, noting that those who have seen and heard “the sounds of thanksgiving and adoration which they utter there [at st. paul’s], have seen and heard what is perhaps better calculated than any thing human ever was to convey to the imagination a faint notion of what we expect to witness hereafter, when the hosts of heaven shall utter, with one voice, hymns of adoration before the footstool of the most high.” the charity children may have made it difficult to cross the street, but en masse they reminded the writer of angels, just as blake’s first speaker suggests. by the 1830s, then, the anniversary meeting of the charity children was almost invariably scheduled for the first thursday in june. the illustration in the comic almanack shows the children accompanied by wand-bearing beadles and still wearing the traditional outfits—​even more out of date than they had been at the time of the “holy thursday” poems—​and the pewter badges of the individual schools that marked them as recipients of charity. in formation, they paraded to st. paul’s—​unless their parish was further away, in which case they might have taken the horse-drawn omnibus. under normal circumstances, charity children might have had difficulty obtaining admission to st. paul’s, which then as now required a fee,the times records in january 1838 a debate as to whether st. paul’s should remain open free of charge to the general public on sunday afternoons. in 1844, punch pointed out that the usual admission charge of twopence was more than for many carnival sideshows (punch 6: 84). but on this occasion they arrived in the morning in preparation for the afternoon service. they sang the old 100th psalm and also participated in other english church music, including handel’s “zadok the priest” and the “hallelujah chorus,” with the st. paul’s choir. a senior dignitary of the church gave the sermon. whereas other european cities had holy-days most often associated with saints, this was one of the few major parades in london. following the service on thursday, 4 june 1829, the times noted it approvingly as “an exhibition exclusively english” (5 june 1829, p. 4). word of this peculiar festival seems to have placed it on the itinerary of overseas visitors to london, since reports often mention “foreign” attendees who paid premiums for good seats and who sometimes remarked that they were deeply moved by the spectacle; these include joseph haydn and the czar of russia (jones 61; fairer 537). princess victoria and her mother attended in 1836 (allen and mcclure 149). on saturday, 3 june 1837, the times reported the events of the previous thursday, 1 june: on thursday the charity children belonging to the several schools within the bills of mortalitythe area covered by the london mortality reports, by the late 1700s encompassing the cities of london and westminster, east london, and the nearest parts of surrey and middlesex. visited the cathedral church of st. paul, attended by their rectors, beadles, masters, mistresses, and other parish functionaries, for the purpose of hearing the annual sermon which was preached by the lord bishop of chichester, in the presence of the marquis camden, the lord mayor, aldermen, sheriffs, and several of the nobility and gentry. many of the children belonging to distant parishes arrived in omnibuses, and, notwithstanding the weather in the early part of the morning was rather unfavourable, the numerous assemblage present far exceeded those of last year. among those that occupied the scarlet seats were many foreign ladies and gentlemen, who seemed to take a lively interest in the pleasant scene presented to their view. divine service concluded about half-past 2, after which the children proceeded to their separate schools, and were supplied with a good dinner of old english fare, plum-pudding and roast-beef. (6) this article claims that the children finally received a holiday lunch of a similar menu to christmas, but if they had arrived early in the morning, by the time that they walked back to their parishes after 2.30 p.m., they must have been desperately hungry. moreover, if the comic almanack is correct in describing their clothing as made of blanket material—worsted wool—many years they would also have been very hot. blake’s speakers implicitly have obtained entry to st. paul’s and have heard the children singing. by the victorian period, tickets were hard to obtain and advertisements in the times announced them for sale weeks in advance. detailed descriptions of the event, like those in the court circular in the times, enabled middle-income readers to know what the rich were doing. for example, on friday, 7 june 1839, the newspaper provided an account of the anniversary meeting that had taken place the previous day: the meeting was perhaps more numerous than on any former occasion. at an early hour the various groups of children and the numerous visitors began to arrive, and before 12 o’clock every seat in the cathedral was occupied. there were nearly 6,000 children from the various charity schools, and not many less than 6,000 or 8,000 visitors, including the lord mayor and the civic authorities, several of the bishops, the clergy of the cathedral, and a great number of dignitaries and other ecclesiastical persons. on the outside of the cathedral a great mob was collected to view the procession of the children; and in the inside, the whole extent of the nave of the building, from the great western doorway to the choir, was one mass of human beings, arranged on seats one above the other to a considerable elevation from the pavement of the edifice: there appeared to us to be about 17 or 18 tiers of seats. having made a clear distinction between the “dignitaries” inside the cathedral and the “mob” outside, the reporter goes on: the whole effect was grand and animating, and, as connected with national feelings, and the established religion of the realm, imposing and cheering. the service commenced with the singing of the 100th psalm, “all people that on earth do dwell.” the grandeur of the effect produced by the union of so many thousand voices must be almost inconceivable to those who have not heard it. the immense mass of sound, if such a term may be allowed, was sublime. (6) the service netted a charitable offering of £646.4s., around two shillings a child without accounting for expenses. two shillings would, of course, buy much more than a tenth of a pound would today, but would not have been enough to fund teachers even if the class size was large. many charity schools were therefore even more dependent on other fundraisers, such as annual dinners, to support their programs. on friday, 5 june 1846, the times reported on the anniversary meeting from the previous day; this year, the precise number of children was recorded—​not 6000 as claimed in other years, but 2053 boys and 2017 girls.the large number of children in attendance seems to have become legendary. in thackeray’s “snobs of england” series—​later to become the book of snobs—​in punch in 1846 a mention is made of “ten thousand red-cheeked charity-children in saint paul’s” (punch 10: 115). two possibilities arise for the drop in head count. the first is that the numbers in previous years had been overreported. the second is that by 1846, the old charity schools were in competition with the new ragged schools established by the charitable ladies and gentlemen of london to educate the poorest of the london street children.elizabeth barrett and robert browning, for instance, contributed two poems to be sold for the ragged schools fund in 1854: “a plea for the ragged schools of london” and “the twins (give and it shall be given unto you).” since only 300 copies were printed at sixpence each, even if all were sold at 100% profit the gross would have been only £7.10s., so presumably the ragged schools movement also had difficulties with effective fundraising. perhaps some children who might have otherwise attended the charity schools chose to attend the new schools, without the embarrassing badges and caps and need to memorize “zadok the priest.” the 1846 article concedes that the continued antiquated dress of the children is controversial, but adds that the sight would at once have dissipated from the mind of the most obstinate that common prejudice which exists against the shape of charity children’s habiliments. however old-fashioned and odd they may appear separately, when grouped in masses they are positively handsome. the quaint, snow-white caps, tied up with riband, and holding inside of them so many healthy faces and sparkling eyes, were, of course, the principal attraction—​then came the equally snow-white collar and apron, the smart-coloured frock, and the yellow, white, red, or black gloves to contrast. each school had its own colours and its own effects of dress, and the impression was not produced by the girls alone, for the boys, with their substantial clothing and shining metal buttons, had their share in it also. (6) moving on to the musical aspects of the service, the article records of the singing of the old 100th, “certainly the effect of their 4,000 voices was most startling. … there is something indescribably touching in the music of so many young vocalists, and the thrilling effect of it was heightened by the simple and beautiful tune which they sung.” on 6 june 1851, the times noted that “a large number of foreigners” had attended the service the day before, including the french composer hector berlioz. the children had performed the psalms to “thrilling effect,” but had less success with works such as the “hallelujah chorus” (8). following the meeting on 7 june 1855, the times feared that this might be the final year, owing to a lack of financial support (8 june 1855, p. 11). similar comments were made in 1856: “if, from nearly 15,000 persons, only a few hundred pounds can be obtained, the amount is barely sufficient to cover the outlay attendant on the preparations. it would indeed be humiliating if in a city so wealthy and populous as this such a celebration as the annual assembly of the charity schools should be allowed to die for lack of encouragement” (times 6 june 1856, p. 5). at least by this time, the spck seems to have been subsidizing the arrangements. the last years of the meeting included some disruptions in the schedule because of repair work on st. paul’s; in 1860, the children performed only at the crystal palace, but for a few years following they sang both at the annual meeting at st. paul’s in early june and in the crystal palace concert series in august, going down to sydenham by train. the latter may have seemed more like a true holy-day to the children; overall, the annual meetings of the charity children must have caused a great deal of discomfort and anxiety for very little financial or educational gain to the scholars themselves. in 1868 the spck discontinued a subsidy of £50 toward costs, and this lack of support, plus concerns about fire regulations, led to the end of the anniversary assemblies in 1877, by which time national schools had assumed much of the function of the charity schools (allen and mcclure 150). the title of the poem in the comic almanack, “the martyrdom of st. paul’s,” shows the author’s opinion of the spectacle. i do not know who wrote this poem, which as far as i can tell was never republished in its entirety except in later reprints of the comic almanack. one possibility is gilbert abbott à beckett, an adept verse writer who had published the burlesque the revolt of the workhouse in 1834. in the poem, it is clear that the martyrdom is not of st. paul, but a martyrdom taking place at st. paul’s, where the charity children are martyrs to the public gaze. it is improbable, although not impossible, that the author knew about blake’s songs; the marquee name on the comic almanack was the illustrator george cruikshank, who is likely to have known at least of blake as an engraver.copies of songs were very rare until 1839, when a letterpress edition was published by pickering without illustrations. “the martyrdom of st. paul’s” must have been composed no later than 1837 to ready the comic almanack to sell as a christmas 1837 and new year 1838 gift. “holy thursday” from innocence was printed in its entirety in benjamin heath malkin’s a father’s memoirs of his child (london, 1806) as an example of “the feelings of a benevolent mind.” an interesting similarity is that both “holy thursday” from innocence and “the martyrdom of st. paul’s” are written in fairly loose long couplets that embody the long parade of children walking in pairs; glen remarks of the blake poem that they are walking “in the rhythm of the verse, marching hobbledehoy through the streets of london” (121). the choice of the long lines, relatively rare for both blake and the comic almanack, seems deliberate, since the lines could be rearranged as traditional but not entirely regular four-line ballad stanzas. for example: oh, charity! celestial dame!—​ i cannot call thee maid, while ev’ry year thy children dear make such a grand parade.— and twas on a holy thursday their innocent faces clean the children walking two & two in red & blue & green.an illustrated london news article of 1866 mentions the same colors as blake: the girls had “dresses of scarlet, some of blue, some of green or more sombre tints” (48: 590). the accompanying illustration (585) reveals that the beadles had updated uniforms, the eighteenth-century tricorn hats having been replaced by top hats, but that the girls were still dressed in mob-caps and aprons. on blake’s plate, the long lines help reinforce the visual and mental image of the children. “holy thursday” from innocence. 11.4 x 7.7 cm. songs of innocence and of experience copy c (1789, 1794). lessing j. rosenwald collection, library of congress. image courtesy of the william blake archive. moreover, like blake’s poems when read as a pair, “the martyrdom of st. paul’s” represents two different views of the scene. both speakers, like blake’s, address the scene from a position of social superiority—​these are not their children, but the children of the working poor. the first speaker invokes a personified charity as a “celestial dame,” rather like “mercy pity peace and love” in blake’s “the divine image.” blake might have appreciated the reference to materialistic london as a modern babylon, although part of the purpose here is to pun on “baby.” heartlessly describing the children as “little pauper brats” and “like demi-drowned rats,” this speaker takes pleasure in seeing the old-fashioned garments that the children are compelled to wear “like lilliputian grandmothers.” if the wearers of antiquated mob-caps and “thrum cap[s]” are subject to “pleasant observation”—​presumably bullying and teasing—​by their neighbors, this speaker really does not care, since the scene can be justified as both picturesque and a source of national pride.although in oliver twist the charity boy noah claypole is an unpleasant character, the narration reveals that he has been ridiculed by “shop-boys” in the neighborhood, who label him with “the ignominious epithets of ‘leathers’, ‘charity’, and the like” (78). he or she is even flippant about the fact that the children will miss their “dinner” (that is, school lunch) and just receive a “bun.” even though this speaker would disagree with the view of the speaker in “holy thursday” from experience, the two are at least in agreement that the children are “fed with cold and usurous hand.” the second speaker, represented as overheard by the first, is less inspired with warm feelings about english charity. the first speaker interprets his grumbling about the “glorious institution” as unpatriotic: the “surly cynic” is “disloyal” and perhaps an “enemy” to “britain’s constitution.” yet, like the speaker in blake’s experience poem, this second speaker pays some attention to how the children might feel. whereas the first has laughed at the children, the second invites the reader to laugh at the attitudes expressed in the first speaker’s description. in the kind of pun that the comic almanack writers cannot resist, even on occasions when they are being socially critical, the children are described as in “that place of tiers” (tears). having already created a vaguely cannibalistic wordplay on jam into/into jam, the second speaker extends an image of the dinnerless children being cooked alive. tiers of thousands of children in st. paul’s might well have been very warm in june, causing little girls to “swoon away”: this adds an extra irony to the observation by the speaker in “holy thursday” from experience that the bleakness of the treatment of the poor makes their lives an “eternal winter.” the image of cooking “their flesh alive” suggests that the children are expendable commodities; an event intended to raise money for them makes them a spectacle for the rich. the similarity in thought to the plates from europe and experience featuring the dead children is disturbing. even though its tone appears to be humorous, “the martyrdom of st. paul’s” echoes the discomfort, if not outrage, of the experience question, “is this a holy thing to see[?]” “holy thursday” from experience raises the question, “is that trembling cry a song?” similarly, in the “martyrdom of st. paul’s” verses, the children are heard only collectively, not as individuals, even though this is a festival supposed to give them a voice: “none, in this age of intellect, now care for a child’s call.” the italics suggest a pun, possibly referring to the superstition that to be born partially or entirely with a caul, or amniotic membrane, was a sign of good fortune. here it adds to the irony, since the speaker of these lines remains unsure that the children were born lucky. blake would surely have agreed with these images of the exploitation of the poor that gave the rich the chance to be seen in public exercising pity for little financial outlay. the wordplay in “the martyrdom of st. paul’s” is (call/caul excepted) obvious; that in blake’s “holy thursday” poems is more subtle, to the extent that it seems to have escaped many commentators. in blake’s poems, “holy thursday” is not functioning as a date in the christian calendar, but does have multiple other meanings. first, it serves as an ironic reminder that an annual event held on a thursday merely for the convenience of st. paul’s and its patrons is now a substitute for true holiness and humility toward the poor that christ showed by example on the thursday before his death. second, something that might appear to be the children’s holy-day (holiday) from school in the tradition of ascension day and the saints’ days of old has become what must have seemed to many of them a nervewracking, uncomfortable, and even humiliating public display. and finally, it gives anglican london a loose equivalent of a “holy” religious spectacle, like saints’ days in roman catholic cities, in london’s most architecturally cosmopolitan building, st. paul’s. works cited à beckett, gilbert abbott, george cruikshank, et al. comic almanack for 1838. london: charles tilt, [1837]. allen, w. o. b., and edmund mcclure. two hundred years: the history of the society for promoting christian knowledge, 1698–1898. london: spck, 1898. connolly, thomas e. “the real ‘holy thursday’ of william blake.” blake studies 6.2 (1975): 179-87. damrosch, david, et al., eds. the longman anthology of british literature. vol. 2a. 5th ed. boston: pearson, 2012. dickens, charles. oliver twist. 1838. ed. peter fairclough. london: penguin, 1988. erdman, david v. blake, prophet against empire. 1954. 3rd ed. princeton: princeton university press, 1977. —​—​—​. the illuminated blake. 1974. new york: dover books, 1992. fairer, david. “experience reading innocence: contextualizing blake’s holy thursday.” eighteenth-century studies 35.4 (summer 2002): 535-62. gardner, stanley. blake’s “innocence” and “experience” retraced. 1986. london: bloomsbury academic, 2013. glen, heather. vision and disenchantment: blake’s “songs” and wordsworth’s “lyrical ballads.” cambridge: cambridge university press, 1983. greenblatt, stephen, et al., eds. the norton anthology of english literature. vol. d. 9th ed. new york: norton, 2012. hirsch, e. d. innocence and experience: an introduction to blake. 1964. chicago: university of chicago press, 1975. hone, william, ed. the every-day book. 2 vols. london: william tegg, 1826–27. jones, m. g. the charity school movement: a study of eighteenth century puritanism in action. 1938. hamden, ct: archon books, 1964. malkin, benjamin heath. a father’s memoirs of his child. london: longman, hurst, rees, and orme, 1806. patmore, p. g. mirror of the months. london: g. b. whittaker, 1826. rose, craig. “london’s charity schools, 1690–1730.” history today 40.3 (march 1990): 17-23. wu, duncan, ed. romanticism, an anthology. 4th ed. chichester: wiley-blackwell, 2012. 57.2 fall 2023 angela esterhammer, victoria college, university of toronto nelson hilton, university of georgia tilar j. mazzeo, colby college robert w. rix, university of copenhagen joseph viscomi, university of north carolina at chapel hill david worrall, the nottingham trent university martin butlin, tate gallery, london, retired tristanne j. connolly, university of waterloo detlef w. dörrbecker, university of trier sibylle erle, university of lincoln robert n. essick, university of california, riverside a d v i s o r y b o a r d a n i l l u s t r a t e d q u a r t e r l y volume 57 number 2 fall 2023 c o n t e n t s www.blakequarterly.org © 2023 copyright morris eaves and morton d. paley cover: blake, angel of the revelation (also known as “and the angel which i saw lifted up his hand to heaven” ) (c. 1805). watercolor, 39.4 x 26.3 cm. metropolitan museum of art. rogers fund, 1914. 14.81.1. e d i t o r s editors: morris eaves and morton d. paley review editor: alexander s. gourlay exhibitions editor: luisa calè bibliographer (criticism): wayne c. ripley bibliographer (music): jason whittaker managing editor: sarah jones sarah.jones@rochester.edu production office: department of english, university of rochester, rochester ny 14627-0451 interview a conversation with helen bruder elizabeth effinger and helen p. bruder articles william blake’s annotations to milton’s paradise lost : new evidence for attribution by lisa sherlock redefining apocalypse in blake studies by g. a. rosso william blake’s “introduction” to songs of innocence : the role of the pipe by ian thomson the mental travellers: on blake’s reception by nikolai gumilyov the mental travellers: on blake’s reception by nikolai gumilyov by vera serdechnaia vera serdechnaia (rintra@yandex.ru), candidate of philology, krasnodar (russia), is an assistant professor in the department of foreign literature and comparative cultural studies at kuban state university and a theatre critic. she has published a book on blake’s reception in russia and the former ussr: уильям блейк в русской культуре [william blake in russian culture], 1834–​2020 (moscow: gorodets publ., 2021). william blake drew the attention of the influential russian poet and literary critic nikolai gumilyov (1886–​1921). gumilyov was the first to translate “the mental traveller” into another language, in the period from 1918 to 1921, and his late poetry contains many traces of blakean influence. in russia, the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first two or three decades of the twentieth were an epoch of real poetical flourishing, later called the silver age. there were many artistic movements, the main being russian symbolism, acmeism, and russian futurism. gumilyov was a founder of the acmeist movement and became one of the most original poets of his time. the acmeists—​ossip mandelstam, mikhail kuzmin, anna akhmatova—​contrasted their ideal of apollonian clarity with the “dionysian drunkenness” propagated by the russian symbolist poets. gumilyov wrote of acmeism, “the unknowable, in a real sense of the word, cannot be known. … all the efforts in this direction are unchaste. … always mindful of the unknowable, but not offending our thought about it with more or less likely speculations—​that is the principle of acmeism” (polnoe sobranie sochinenii 7: 149).all translations are mine, except those from selected works, which are by burton raffel and alla burago. as a poet and as a leader of the guild of poets, gumilyov deeply influenced poetry in russia and among white émigrés. aleksandr perfilyevperfilyev (1895–​1973) was a “russian journalist, poet and writer” (wikipedia, <https://​en.​wikipedia.​org/​wiki/​aleksandr_​perfilyev>). wrote of him as “the last diamond of the purest water on a closed necklace of russian classical lyrics” (perfilyev 521). gumilyov was far from a mystic or visionary poet, at least in his early lyrics and theoretical works. he attached great importance to clarity of thought and excellent poetical form, stating in 1910: “poetry, written even by the true visionaries in a trance state, is of value only insofar as it is good enough. to think otherwise is to repeat the well-known mistake of the sparrows that tried to peck the painted fruits” (polnoe sobranie sochinenii 7: 55). later, after the 1917 revolution, he reconsidered this topic: “poetry and religion are two sides of the same coin. both require spiritual work from a man. not for the sake of a practical goal, as ethics and aesthetics, but for a higher goal unknown to a man” (polnoe sobranie sochinenii 7: 235). here, writing of the poet as a medium, gumilyov emphasizes the poet’s responsibility to the reader. some scholars have noted the growing metaphysical orientation of his late work. gleb struvestruve (1898–​1985) was a “russian poet and literary historian” (wikipedia, <https://​en.​wikipedia.​org/​wiki/​gleb_​struve>). observed in 1964 of gumilyov’s last book, ognennyi stolp (pillar of fire) (1921): there are a number of poems in ognennyi stolp in a completely new spirit for gumilyov, poems whose distinguishing feature is visionariness, those touches to the unknown, to the unknowable, which gumilyov the acmeist once condemned in symbolist poetry. … here we can already speak about the influence of … the english visionary poet william blake, whose poetry gumilyov undoubtedly encountered in his last stay in the west. (578) and vyacheslav v. ivanovvyacheslav vsevolodovich ivanov (1929–​2017) was a “russian philologist, semiotician and indo-europeanist” (wikipedia, <https://​en.​wikipedia.​org/​wiki/​vyacheslav_​ivanov_​(philologist)>). commented in 1988: gumilyov’s rejection of the rhetorical form of poetry bequeathed by the nineteenth century is not accidental: in fact, he wanted to disclaim much of the legacy of this century, therefore he was looking for new guides. perhaps one of them was blake … blake was akin to the new element of visions and insights that enveloped gumilyov at the time of perceiving “the light pouring therefrom.” (233-34) i think ivanov does not mean that gumilyov himself had visions—​he had too solid a reputation as a reasonable, extremely rational man and poet. but, despite the basic principles of acmeism, after 1918 he wrote some really visionary poems, such as “zabludivshiisia tramvai” (“the tram that lost its way”).the phrase quoted in the passage above from v. v. ivanov—​“the light pouring therefrom”—​is from this poem. gumilyov first mentioned blake in 1913—​he wrote in a review that blake couldn’t be seen as a contemporary poet, as he had lived much earlier (gumilyov, “antologiia sovremennoi poezii” 72). most likely, his deeper acquaintance with blake’s poems occurred in 1917–​18, during his two visits to london. russian émigré boris anrep,anrep (1883–​1969), a russian sculptor, mosaicist, and poet who lived in london from february 1917, was clearly fascinated by blake’s mythological imagery. he showed the influence of blake both in his epics and in his artistic style. before returning to russia in april 1918, gumilyov left some books and manuscripts with anrep. a close friend of akhmatova’s, introduced gumilyov to the literary circles of london and facilitated his acquaintance with william butler yeats.ellis and yeats’s edition of the works of william blake (1893) “‘started the blake reception in … russia’” (erle and paley 5, quoting klaus peter jochum). gumilyov visited yeats’s house from 16 to 18 june 1917 (kruzhkov 56-57). in a letter to akhmatova,gumilyov was akhmatova’s first husband. he wrote of yeats as the “english vyacheslav [ivanov]”vyacheslav ivanovich ivanov (1866–​1949) was a “russian poet and playwright associated with the russian symbolist movement. he was also a philosopher, translator, and literary critic” (wikipedia, <https://​en.​wikipedia.​org​wiki/​vyacheslav_​ivanov_​(poet)>). (polnoe sobranie sochinenii 8: 208), meaning a symbolist and mythographer. gumilyov began translating yeats’s play the countess cathleen (translation not preserved) and sent two poems by yeats to mikhail zenkevichzenkevich (1886–​1973) was a “russian … poet, writer, translator and journalist.” he was a “prominent figure in the acmeist movement” and “one of the founders of the soviet school of poetry translation” (wikipedia, <https://​en.​wikipedia.​org/​wiki/​mikhail_​zenkevich>). for translation (kruzhkov 50-51). i have good reason to believe gumilyov bought one or two blake editions during this european trip. despite advice to the contrary, gumilyov returned to petrograd in 1918 and tried to accustom himself to the new russian bolshevik reality. he actively read blake; georgy ivanov recalled how gumilyov “got up late, wandered half-dressed around the rooms, read either blake or mir prikliuchenii, sat down at the table, began to write …” (234).georgy ivanov (1894–​1958), a white émigré, was a poet and essayist. mir prikliuchenii (world of adventures) was an illustrated magazine, a collection of stories, published 1910–​18 and 1922–​30 in saint petersburg by petr soikin. the records of gumilyov’s contemporaries show that he was not only fond of blake’s lyrics, but also sought to read his prophecies. according to irina odoevtseva,odoevtseva (1895–​1990) was a “russian poet, novelist and memoirist …. she joined the second guild of poets, was tutored by … gumilyov, … and became his favorite student” (wikipedia, <https://​en.​wikipedia.​org/​wiki/​irina_​odoyevtseva>). gumilyov “took a volume of blake off the shelf,” but ignored her attempt to impress him with “the tyger.” he asked her to read aloud another work by blake, but she could not understand anything—“certain comprehensible words in incomprehensible collocations,” mixed with drawings. gumilyov seemed to be disappointed with her intellectual level (51-52). we cannot say for sure what blake editions gumilyov possessed. he was a passionate reader who bought many books in russia and abroad and tried to save them even in the years of famine after the revolution, although he had to use some for heating. after his execution in 1921, part of his collection was probably confiscated. the rest was sold by his widow, anna gumilyova-engelhardt, in part to the institute of russian literature in saint petersburg. in the latest published list of gumilyov’s collection, there are no blake books (see filicheva). he may well have had ellis and yeats’s the works of william blake (1893), which includes some facsimiles of the illuminated books—​if we believe that odoevtseva saw the facsimiles. he may also have had yeats’s edition of 1905. i had found one mention of the fact that gumilyov was translating blake’s poem “the mental traveller” (polnoe sobranie sochinenii 4: 309),this information is in the commentary to the volume (213-364), by michael basker, tamara vakhitova, yurii zobnin, aleksandr mikhailov, vladimir prokof'ev, and german filippov. but the text had never been published as either a translation or an original poem by gumilyov. in january 2019 i discovered that a handwritten translation of the first part of “the mental traveller” (without specifying the original author) is stored in the museum of anna akhmatova in the fountain house in saint petersburg (illus. 1). 1. a translation of blake’s “the mental traveller” by nikolai gumilyov: first seven quatrains (see enlargement). one page, in ink. 16.0 x 11.3 сm. museum of anna akhmatova in the fountain house, saint petersburg, russia. ma kp-12558, fonds 20, inventory 1, dossier 6. only one page of the translation is in the museum; nothing is known of the other pages. i have published a transcription in the journals russkaia literatura and scando-slavica. reconstructing the text was difficult because of the illegibility of gumilyov’s handwriting: i relied on both the manuscript and blake’s original. even with the risk of misreading some words, i considered it important to present this vivid (albeit clearly draft) translation to the russian reader for the first time, after almost a century. it is very probable that gumilyov, personally acquainted as he was with yeats, worked with yeats’s poems of william blake (1905), where the quatrains of “the mental traveller” are not numbered—​unlike gilchrist/​rossetti in 1863 and ellis/​yeats in 1893. also, there are no capitalized words in yeats’s edition,in sampson’s edition (1905), the quatrains are not numbered, but, unlike the other editions listed, words such as “land of men,” “babe,” and “woman old” are capitalized. just as there are none in gumilyov’s manuscript; the first seven quatrains of the poem occupy one page, as they do in gumilyov’s document. the manuscript is mentioned in the memoirs of pavel luknitskii,luknitskii (1902–​73) was a russian prose writer, poet, journalist, and collector of materials about akhmatova and gumilyov. where the record of 19 november 1925 states: aa [anna akhmatova] and puninnikolay punin (1888–​1953) was a “russian art scholar and writer. he edited several magazines” and was a “lifelong friend and common-law husband” of akhmatova (wikipedia, <https://​en.​wikipedia.​org/​wiki/​nikolay_​punin>). were sitting on the sofa. i began to sort out the autographs of nikolai stepanovich [gumilyov] and gave aa the autograph of “the mental traveller”, which i examined today. aa was not satisfied with my reading of one of the lines (“which sang in tears”), saying that it would be more accurate to read “which sowed in tears ….” one word remained unrecognized. punin turned the page in his hands for a long time, but even he did not make out this word. this diary entry implies that gumilyov’s version of “the mental traveller,” analyzed several years after his death, was perceived as an original poem (otherwise it would have been compared to blake’s poem, where the corresponding line reads “which we in bitter tears did sow”). perhaps akhmatova recognized the verse from the bible that blake rephrases here: “they who sow with tears will reap with joy” (psalm 126:5). although akhmatova herself mentioned blake in the 1940s and 1960s, she hardly knew his poetry well in the 1920s. but it is interesting to note that two of akhmatova’s lovers, anrep and gumilyov, were fond of blake. subsequently, the manuscript was acquired by a bibliophile, moisei lesman. in the description of his manuscript collection, this page is listed under gumilyov: “‘the mental traveller’ (‘i wandered among men …’). no date. clean autograph. 1 p.” (lesman 296). thus, lesman possessed only one page of the translation. it was not mentioned in dissertations devoted to gumilyov and was not recorded in the academic literature. blake’s “the mental traveller” and gumilyov’s translation therefore had similar fates, since blake’s poem also remained only in manuscript form for decades. why was gumilyov interested in this particular blake text? a leitmotif in gumilyov’s poetry is the spiritual pilgrimage, the return to the “india of the spirit”—​his special image of eden or a promised land in “zabludivshiisia tramvai.” after returning to bolshevik russia, he may have been interested in blake’s desire to generalize history epically, to draw a cyclic diagram of development and fall. the translation was probably made between 1918, when gumilyov returned to russia, and 1921, when he was executed. in 1919–​20 he actively engaged in a literary life: he gave lectures at poetry classes, was involved in translations from english—​poems by coleridge and southey, ballads about robin hood—​and was a member of a special collegium for poetry translations at the vsemirnaya literatura (world literature) publishing house. as noted above, this text is the first known translation of “the mental traveller.” the next was a french version by auguste morel and annie hervieu, published in navire in 1925; in 1935 a spanish translation by pablo neruda followed, and so on. the poem was not translated into russian again until 1975, when an anthology of english romantic poets was published in the ussr. the 1970s was a great decade in the russian reception of blake, a period when some poets, including brodsky, engaged in a dialogue with blake (serdechnaia and serdechnyi 517-24). in comparison with five later russian versions of “the mental traveller,” gumilyov’s is distinguished by special poetic integrity and power. he strives for maximum naturalness of style, along with preserving the details of the original. for example, he retains the image of the miser, while in many other translations it is lost. during the years when he was reading and translating blake, gumilyov was writing his “theory of integral poetics,” where we read: the poet must be the owner of some valuable sensation, previously not recognized. this gives rise to a sense of catastrophe in him; it seems to him that he is saying his last and most important thing, without comprehension of which the earth may as well not have been born. this is a very special feeling, sometimes filling you with such trepidation that it would hinder speech, if not for the related feeling of victory, the consciousness that you are creating perfect combinations of words, such as those that once raised the dead and destroyed walls. (polnoe sobranie sochinenii 7: 236) such a messianic understanding of the poet’s work seems truly blakean: after the revolution, gumilyov reevaluated the reality around him and moved closer to a tragic and prophetic view of the world. some of gumilyov’s late poems directly point to blake or to his prophetic generalization of reality. in “pamiat'” (“memory”), which begins ognennyi stolp, an allusion to “and did those feet in ancient time” appears in the twelfth quatrain (v. v. ivanov 234): flames roast my heart, will roast my heart until the new jerusalem’s clear, pure walls rise in russian fields. (selected works 110) for a more accurate insight into the meaning of this allusion, we need to expand the context. gumilyov’s poem is devoted to the spiritual evolution of a man throughout his life: a romantic child, an arrogant poet, a free traveler, a soldier, and an architect. this quatrain refers to the last stage of development, the “stubborn architect / of this dark temple” (selected works 109). poetry is considered here as the construction of the temple, the true abode of the spirit. this last stage of the lyric hero’s evolution largely coincides with blake’s “and did those feet”; blake’s images of burning and fire are reflected in gumilyov’s “flames roast my heart.” “and did those feet” ends with the desire to build the jerusalem of the spirit, but for gumilyov something apocalyptic happens after the construction of the new jerusalem—​the “sudden-blooming” milky way and the next strange “renewal,” a death of the hero’s soul: “my soul will die. / snakes shed their skins, we change / souls, not bodies” (selected works 110). the epic amplitude of prophecy can be heard in gumilyov’s poem “estestvo” (“nature”) (1919). the world here seems to be degrading; the cover taken off nature exposes its material and chthonic essence (blake uses similar images—​vala’s veil and the mundane shell). “in these slow, inert / transformations of nature,” you can hear an echo of the endless metamorphoses of blake’s titan heroes. gumilyov creates the image of the almighty poet who possesses a powerful and ancient language: poet, you alone have a power to comprehend the terrible language which sphinxes spoke in the circle of dragon lords. this image is also very close to blake’s understanding of poetry as prophecy. the lyric hero speaks to the poet: become a thing now, a former god, and speak the word to the thing, so that the globe that gave birth to you suddenly flinches on its axis. (polnoe sobranie sochinenii 4: 63) blake shows the globe of earth shaking in the book of ahania (e 86), a poem gumilyov could have read in ellis/​yeats or in yeats’s 1905 edition. gumilyov’s image of the poet-bard, who penetrates the essence of things and has a right to the original word, recalls the “introduction” to songs of experience, where a bard is able to hear the “holy word” and exclaims “o earth o earth return!” (e 18). the image of the “holy word, / that walk’d among the ancient trees” is very likely a source for gumilyov’s famous “slovo” (“word”) (1919), which begins: then, when god bent his face over the shining new world, then they stopped the sun with a word, a word burned cities to the ground. when a word floated across the sky like a rose-colored flame eagles closed their wings, frightened stars shrank against the moon. (selected works 107) blake’s motifs and images can also be seen in “dusha i telo” (“soul and body”) (1919). this mini-cycle of three poems refers both to the system of contrasts in songs of innocence and of experience and to the relation of body and soul in the marriage of heaven and hell. gumilyov offers an antithesis between a soul and a body, and shows that all oppositions are just the mind plays of someone great, the fruit of his imagination. the poet does not name him, but we understand that he is a kind of universal mind, having in itself everything—​a solipsistic sleeping god. the cycle ends with the words of this god answering the disputing soul and body: i sleep, and the endless depths cover my unutterable name— and you, you’re a feeble echo from the lowest level of my being! (selected works 106) gumilyov attached particular importance to the poems of the pickering manuscript. he was working on a new poetry book, poseredine stranstviya zemnogo. stikhi 1921– (midway upon the journey of life. verses 1921–),this title clearly refers to the opening of dante’s divine comedy. and he chose as an epigraph lines from “the land of dreams”: father, o father, what do we here, in this land of unbelief & fear?quoted from timenchik 1: 480. in august 1921, gumilyov was arrested and executed as part of the trumped-up tagantsev conspiracy, a crackdown on intellectuals. only in 1992 was he rehabilitated. works cited blake, william. the complete poetry and prose of william blake. ed. david v. erdman. newly rev. ed. new york: anchor-random house, 1988. [abbreviated as e] erle, sibylle, and morton d. paley. “introduction: ‘take thou these leaves from the tree of life’: william blake in europe.” the reception of william blake in europe. ed. sibylle erle and morton d. paley. 2 vols. london: bloomsbury, 2019. 1: 1-24. filicheva, vera. “k rekonstruktsii i opisaniiu bibliotek f. sologuba i n. s. gumileva.” chto i kak chitali russkie klassiki? (ot kruga chteniia k strategiiam pis'ma). ed. n. iu. griakalova. saint petersburg: pushkinskii dom publ., 2017. 405-50. gumilev, nikolai. selected works. trans. burton raffel and alla burago. albany: suny press, 1972. gumilyov, nikolai. “antologiia sovremennoi poezii. izdanie vtoroe pererabotal i dopolnil f. m. samonenko. kiev. 1912.” apollon 2 (1913): 71-72. —​—​—​. polnoe sobranie sochinenii. vol. 4: stikhotvoreniia. poemy (1918–​1921). moscow: voskresen'e publ., 2001. —​—​—​. polnoe sobranie sochinenii. vol. 7: stat'i o literature i iskusstve. obzory. retsenzii. moscow: voskresen'e publ., 2006. —​—​—​. polnoe sobranie sochinenii. vol. 8: pis'ma. moscow: voskresen'e publ., 2007. ivanov, georgy. stikhotvoreniia. tretii rim. peterburgskie zimy. kitaiskie teni. moscow: kniga publ., 1989. ivanov, vyacheslav vsevolodovich. “zvezdnaia vspyshka (poeticheskii mir n. s. gumileva).” izbrannye trudy po semiotike i istorii kul'tury. vol. 2: stat'i o russkoi literature. moscow: iazyki russkoi kul'tury publ., 2000. 220-45. kruzhkov, grigorii. veter s okeana: ieits i rossiia. moscow: progress-traditsiia publ., 2019. lesman, moisei, et al. knigi i rukopisi v sobranii m. s. lesmana. annotirovannyi katalog. moscow: kniga publ., 1989. luknitskii, pavel. acumiana: vstrechi s annoi akhmatovoi. vol. 1: 1924–​25. paris: ymca-press, 1991. <http://​lib.​ru/​proza/​louknitskiy_p/​a1_.​txt>. odoevtseva, irina. na beregakh nevy. moscow: khudozhestvennaia literatura publ., 1988. perfilyev, aleksandr. “pamiati n. gumileva.” istoriia kul'ta gumileva. ed. r. timenchik. moscow: mosty kul'tury publ., 2018. 521-22. serdechnaia, vera. “dukhovnye stranniki. maloizvestnye stranitsy tvorcheskogo nikolaia gumileva s uil'iamom bleikom.” russkaia literatura 3 (2019): 182-89. —​—​—​. “uil'iam bleik v dnevnikakh, perepiske i proizvedeniiakh russkikh pisatelei: 1900-e–​1950-e gody.” scando-slavica 65.2 (2019): 170-91. serdechnaia, vera, and evgenii serdechnyi. “the reception of blake in russia and the ussr.” erle and paley 2: 501-32. struve, gleb. “tvorcheskii put' gumileva.” n. s. gumilyov: pro et contra. ed. iu. v. zobnin. saint petersburg: russkii khristianskii gumanitarnyi institut publ., 2000. 555-82. timenchik, roman. poslednii poet. anna akhmatova v 1960-e gody. 2nd ed. 2 vols. moscow: mosty kul'tury​/​gesharim, 2014–​15. review: marsha keith schuchard, a concatenation of conspiracies: “irish” william blake and illuminist freemasonry in 1798 marsha keith schuchard. a concatenation of conspiracies: “irish” william blake and illuminist freemasonry in 1798. alexandria, va: plumbstone academic, 2021. x + 119 pp. $33.97, hardcover. reviewed by josephine a. mcquail josephine a. mcquail’s work has been published in blake/​an illustrated quarterly, vala, the human divine <thehumandivine.​org>, modern language studies, rupkatha journal, european romantic review, new review of children’s literature and librarianship, and elsewhere. she edited and contributed to the collection janet frame in focus (mcfarland) and is co-editing blake’s manuscripts with mark crosby (palgrave macmillan, forthcoming in 2023). she is professor of english at tennessee technological university. this readable and compelling study, focusing on the tempestuous 1790s in england, ireland, scotland, and europe and the culmination of events in the irish uprising of 1798, yields important new insights on blake and his historical context. schuchard’s research in moravian archives in 2001 (davies, “william blake in contexts” 4) (with subsequent collaboration with keri davies) resulted in the announcement in 2004 in these pages of her startling discovery that blake’s mother had attended the moravian church, and that the church took a decided interest in—​as it did with all church members—​catherine wright’s marriage to her first husband, thomas armitage. this, along with schuchard’s further research on blake and moravianism and other sects in william blake’s sexual path to spiritual vision, was sparked by the revelations in e. p. thompson’s witness against the beast (120-21) and subsequently in davies’s “william blake’s mother: a new identification” about that first marriage. a concatenation of conspiracies expands upon this groundbreaking work. schuchard’s preface to concatenation reveals that it began with the exhibition up in arms! the 1798 rebellion in ireland (ulster museum, belfast, 1998) and resultant public comment on the role of freemasonry (1-2). thus, her interest in blake and moravian and swedenborgian sexual and spiritual beliefs and practices was conjoined to her early work on freemasons and other groups (her dissertation had been on “freemasonry, secret societies, and the continuity of the occult traditions in english literature”). the book’s focus on 1798 provides a brilliant basis for her exploration of how the historical context of events, movements, and actions, which involved various lodges of freemasons as well as the brotherhood of united irishmen (bui), led to the irish rebellion and likely affected blake in london. her thesis is, basically, that acts of suppression—​including the unlawful societies act—​under william pitt’s increasingly paranoid government also influenced blake’s artistic works and the course of his life. separate publications in 1797 by the abbé augustin barruel and john robison convinced many of their contemporaries that freemasons, illuminati, and groups like the london corresponding society (lcs) fomented movements that led to the french revolution, and that these societies were determined to bring a revolution to england. inevitably, barruel’s and robison’s arguments only increased government paranoia. to establish her argument, schuchard offers many details from blake’s writings, both prose—​especially letters—​and poetry; cites his movements; and suggests links between activities of members of such organizations as the lcs and bui, who “often met in taverns in lambeth” (concatenation 39). in her earlier monograph, schuchard speculated as to why there is resistance to her contentions regarding blake and the esoteric and erotic background of the more radical swedenborgian and moravian sects, and why so many have shied away from the ideas she examines: “sensible academic critics have cautiously refrained from taking the plunge, for this kind of historical detective work must reject most academic conventional wisdom about the eighteenth century … and dig deep into the esoteric underground of the mystical counterculture” (william blake 10). also, because of attacks on such dissenting sects and secret societies by writers like barruel and robison, records were destroyed and connections denied and downplayed. since secrecy and subterfuge were necessary, how does one uncover the truth behind historical figures and their relationship to ideas that could have compromised their liberty, safety, or indeed lives? despite this hurdle, schuchard’s arguments are convincing on many levels. the possibility that blake’s very possession of a printing press (or more accurately, a star-wheel rolling press) endangered him so much after the sedition acts that he was virtually forced to leave london for felpham on the sussex coast is intriguing (72-73). if, as she contends, he was in danger of being turned in by neighbors or passersby who could see his press through the windows of hercules buildings in lambeth, clearly he might have had a compelling reason to leave. all the same, if blake was so paranoid, couldn’t he have hidden his activities behind a curtain, and what about the fact that he told john flaxman in a letter of 21 september 1800 that all of his and catherine’s worldy goods were transported in “seven different chaises … with sixteen heavy boxes & portfolios full of prints” for the full day’s move to felpham, including, presumably, the disassembled press (e 710)? also, in making this case, schuchard describes him as “in september 1800 writing of his ‘nervous fear’” (concatenation 73). it is always tempting to read between the lines when it comes to the compromising radical ideologies that blake clearly held and sympathized with, but this quotation (from a letter of 12 september to flaxman) appears not in a discursive form but in a poem—​perhaps deliberately set up this way to elude suspicion, but the context is different from that implied by schuchard: the american war began    all its dark horrors passed before my face across the atlantic to france. then the french revolution commencd in thick clouds and my angels have told me. that seeing such visions i could not subsist on the earth but by my conjunction with flaxman    who knows to forgive nervous fear (lines 9-12 of “to my dearest friend john flaxman,” e 708) blake’s reference to the historical events that so threatened the sovereignty of the british nation does stand out, but is this enough to establish that fear for his life and freedom on account of pitt’s repressive legislation caused him to leave london? earlier the same summer, he had explained to george cumberland that he was only beginning “to emerge from a deep pit of melancholy, melancholy without any real reason for it” (e 706). was it “melancholy” for no reason, or “nervous fear,” or both that made blake quit london? or was it simply opportunity? david erdman cites the very same letter to flaxman to support the centrality of the american revolution in blake’s intellectual development and core convictions, and contends that ignoring this crucial fact in his identity on the part of critics “comes … as much from a failure to enter imaginatively into blake’s times as it does from a failure to enter blake’s imagination” (prophet 5). martin price, in an early review of prophet against empire, accused erdman of a “‘conversion downwards’ that throughout the book seems in effect to invert blake’s figural method into political pamphleteering” (quoted in rose 48). schuchard’s tendency to quote blake’s poems, then, as “political pamphleteering” (as price would have it), or as statements of biographical fact, is also evident in erdman’s work and in bentley’s biography, stranger from paradise, and is perhaps unavoidable given the gaps in our knowledge of blake. would it be fair to dub all these studies “visionary history,” in which imagination is definitely and inevitably at play in the reconstruction of a milieu? schuchard’s ability to conjure up a vivid picture of blake’s physical surroundings and their influence on him—​for instance, the area around the royal academy and basire’s studio, where blake was apprenticed—​is striking. proximity to the freemasons was made much of in her earlier work: “young blake now moved into the engraver’s studio at 31 great queen street, where for the next seven years he was situated in the heart of london’s masonic world” (william blake 147). sometimes, with as much detail as is provided by schuchard, one can easily feel immersed in an approximation of the milieu that blake inhabited, which indeed yields material for promising speculation. in quoting an entry from joseph farington’s diary for 1797, in which he records a discussion about blake with fellow royal academicians thomas stothard and john hoppner, she notes that “the academicians often met at freemasons’ tavern on great queen street, next door to freemasons’ hall, where they had access to a great variety of initiates, both native and foreign” (concatenation 9-10), and she explains that “stothard was a master mason in a liberal ‘antient’ lodge, while john hoppner was an initiate of a conservative ‘modern’ lodge” and that “the volatile fuseli expressed radical notions and was in touch with illuminist freemasons from switzerland and germany” (10, 11). she contextualizes blake’s neighborhood by citing masonic groups sympathetic to the bui that met in lambeth’s oakley arms tavern (84) and pointing to his ties to the lambeth asylum for female orphans, asserting that he and his wife actually attended services at the chapel (concatenation 14). this is puzzling, though, for she specifies two sources for this information, erdman and clarke garrett. erdman certainly mentions the orphanage and blake’s possible connections to it, but according to him it was william hayley—​not blake—​who in “january 1793” visited the asylum (prophet 290n18). he does comment that a william blake in 1779 “appears in a list of subscribers to discourses on various subjects” by jacob duché,duché was an anglo-american minister who was chaplain of the asylum for several years and became a swedenborgian (erdman and garrett give conflicting dates for duché’s tenure at the asylum). but questions if this is “our” blake (11-12n19). in respectable folly, garrett says simply that “william blake may have been one of the mystically inclined artists and engravers” who attended duché’s meetings (158). it may be quite probable, but there is no definite proof in these sources, at least. still, schuchard shows that although edwin ellis and w. b. yeats were wrong in their famously absurd and inaccurate assertion that blake was irish, he may have been an irish sympathizer. weaving her tapestry of clues from the historical record, she contends that the many and diffuse connections between blake, swedenborgianism and moravianism, masonry, and the bui indicate that he did, at least in social discourse and in art, support the irish rebellion of 1798, and subtly displayed his sympathy with the irish cause by allusions to such charged symbols as the winged-maiden harp, a national emblem used by the bui. she cites catherine mcclenahan’s observation “that blake referred to ireland ‘only once before 1797 (in america), but 17 times afterward, 14 in jerusalem’” (concatenation 90, see n234), and, by juxtaposing a reproduction of the title page of jerusalem (80) with a spy report’s mention of a yorkshire “society … under the title of new jerusalemites” (second report of the committee of secrecy [1802], quoted in concatenation 81), she implies that blake’s poem alludes to such groups. furthermore, echoing mcclenahan’s contention that the female figure in the lower-right corner of the title page appears “in the form of an irish harp” (87, caption) and citing other “minute particulars,” schuchard bolsters her point that blake sympathized with the irish cause—​a dangerous opinion for him to hold. much careful and original archival work by schuchard provides support for her arguments, though, as indicated here, conclusions are sometimes overstated. the significance of the word “concatenation” (from a phrase in barruel’s memoirs illustrating the history of jacobinism, which serves as one of the epigraphs) as a controlling metaphor for her hypotheses becomes apparent; however, are all of the things she points out simply “occurring together,” or are they “linked together” (from the merriam-webster definition of the word)? each reader must ultimately decide, but perhaps we should remember, to quote blake’s marriage of heaven and hell, that “what is now proved was once, only imagin’d” (e 36). bibliography blake, william. the complete poetry and prose of william blake. ed. david v. erdman. newly rev. ed. new york: anchor-random house, 1988. [abbreviated as e] “concatenation.” merriam-webster.com dictionary. <https://​www.​merriam-​webster.​com/​dictionary/​concatenation>. crooke, elizabeth. “exhibiting 1798: three recent exhibitions.” history ireland 6.4 (1998). <https://​www.​historyireland.​com/​exhibiting-​1798-​three-​recent-​exhibitions>. davies, alan philip keri. “william blake in contexts: family, friendships, and some intellectual microcultures of eighteenthand nineteenth-century england.” phd diss., university of surrey, 2003. davies, keri. “william blake’s mother: a new identification.” blake 33.2 (fall 1999): 36-50. davies, keri, and marsha keith schuchard. “recovering the lost moravian history of william blake’s family.” blake 38.1 (summer 2004): 36-43. erdman, david v. blake: prophet against empire. 3rd ed. princeton: princeton university press, 1977. garrett, clarke. respectable folly: millenarians and the french revolution in france and england. 1975. baltimore: johns hopkins university press, 2019. <https://​muse.​jhu.​edu/​book/​67841>. accessed 5 jan. 2022. —​—​—​. “the spiritual odyssey of jacob duché.” proceedings of the american philosophical society 119.2 (1975): 143-55. maguire, william a. up in arms! the 1798 rebellion in ireland: a bicentenary exhibition. belfast: ulster museum, 1998. mcclenahan, catherine l. “blake’s erin, the united irish, and ‘sexual machines.’” prophetic character: essays on william blake in honor of john e. grant. ed. alexander s. gourlay. west cornwall, ct: locust hill press, 2002. 149-70. price, martin. “blake: pictures and politics.” review of blake: prophet against empire, by david v. erdman. yale review 43 (1953–​54): 629-33. rose, e. j. review of blake: prophet against empire, 2nd ed., by david v. erdman. blake 4.2 (fall 1970): 48-49. schuchard, marsha keith. william blake’s sexual path to spiritual vision. rochester, vt: inner traditions, 2008. thompson, e. p. witness against the beast: william blake and the moral law. new york: new press, 1993. review: lucy cogan, blake and the failure of prophecy lucy cogan. blake and the failure of prophecy. cham: palgrave macmillan-springer, 2021. xi + 225 pp. £89.99/​$119.99, hardcover; £59.99/​$84.99, softcover; £47.99/​$64.99, e-book. reviewed by g. a. rosso g. a. “tony” rosso (rossoga1@gmail.com) has written and co-edited many books and essays on blake, including the religion of empire: political theology in blake’s prophetic symbolism (2016). his essay “the lamb’s new song: apocalypse in early british hymnody” appeared in religion & literature 53.2 (summer 2021): 47-71. the central claim of lucy cogan’s blake and the failure of prophecy is that the defeat of blake’s eschatological hopes in the mid-1790s compelled him to reinvent his prophetic myth throughout his career. this claim hinges on the assumption that blake believed himself to be a prophet whose communication of inspired truths could help instigate social change. in cogan’s view, blake sees his role or “duty” through the lens of the pre-exilic hebrew prophets, whose pronouncements were “a kind of action designed to bring about the future” (v-vi), a future that was “to some extent negotiable between god, [the] prophet and [the] people” (18). cogan uses this lens to interpret the development of blake’s work in the 1790s. she argues that he moves from a politically nuanced approach in the french revolution, one in accord with the pre-exilic prophetic model, to a more deterministic mode in “a song of liberty” and america a prophecy, a mode she describes as “apocalyptic.” but when the revolution is engulfed in violence and the predetermined climax of history fails to arrive (a failure depicted in europe a prophecy), he shifts to a cosmological explanation in the so-called urizen books—​the first book of urizen, the book of ahania, and the book of los. these works feature los as a fallen prophet whose complicity with urizen in creating a flawed universe dooms prophecy to failure from the start. blake seeks to resolve this impasse in vala/​the four zoas, but his imposition of a christian providential scheme brings a “transcendent” solution incompatible with the original zoa-emanation narrative. he must then reinvent himself a final time, aligning the transcendent and immanent dimensions of prophecy through los’s merger with blake himself, as depicted in the 22 november 1802 letter to thomas butts and later incorporated into milton and jerusalem. the “introduction” (subtitled “prophetic failure”) lays out the context of the argument, isolating blake’s oft-cited comments on the book of jonah in the watson annotations as “his definitive statement on prophecy” (1).“prophets in the modern sense of the word have never existed jonah was no prophet in the modern sense for his prophecy of nineveh failed   every honest man is a prophet he utters his opinion both of private & public matters/​thus/​if you go on so/​the result is so/​he never says such a thing shall happen let you do what you will.   a prophet is a seer not an arbitrary dictator” (e 617). all citations are from the complete poetry and prose of william blake, ed. david v. erdman, newly rev. ed. (new york: anchor-random house, 1988). writing in 1798, when the “cause” of the french revolution was lost, blake experiences “a repudiation of the visionary role he had claimed for himself, an experience he shared with the biblical jonah” (2). but in jonah’s case, the failure of prophecy enhanced his credibility, for it “change[d] the fate of a people” (3), proving that his word had the power to affect the course of history. cogan features this “performative” capacity of prophecy as a touchstone, because it allows for a level of agency in the prophet. since … blake does not envisage an outside force guiding prophetic action, he ascribes to the prophet the powers … of one who partakes in the divine nature itself. the prophet’s demonstration of this divine power did, however, rely for legitimisation upon the success of the prophetic text in inducing action in the real world. (19) of course, blake’s work did not exert any influence on the events of his time. cogan clarifies the kind of action she means by stating that “if prophecy is action then the revelation of truth is the purpose of that action” (22). she draws on the hermeneutic approach of paul ricoeur, for whom literature does not simply express something about the world but also is “doing something” in it—​namely, expanding the reader’s self-understanding and thus enabling the text to convey “a transformative truth.” more specifically, blake’s prophetic works are said to enact change in the reader through the “subversive potential” (quoting susan wolfson) of his texts’ “formal experimentation” (22), especially through their use of multiple perspectives, which accords with ricoeur’s sense that “no single interpretation can uncover the truth” because it is conditioned by the exigencies of time and place (22-23). although she does not define “the truth,” cogan argues that it is not only “multivalent” within each work but must be rediscovered with the creation of each new work. from this position, each of blake’s efforts to perceive the truth is necessarily different since his perspective on the central problem of prophecy—​how to trigger a liberatory revelation that produces action—​evolves due to changing personal, professional and historical circumstances. failure is thus an integral part of this process. (24) cogan believes that in his major illuminated works, milton and jerusalem, blake learns to “integrate failure as the condition of prophetic action” (26). recognizing the “inability” of society to foster the development of prophets, he had continually to re-envision “the effect and significance of prophecy in the world” (26, 4). chapter 2, “calling all prophets,” is among the strongest in the book. it explores the key concept of “prophetic apotheosis,” the transformation of a person into a prophet, and examines the forces arrayed against it, especially for female characters. cogan presents one of the best readings of the lyca poems to date, arguing that blake uses the “familiar structure of the children’s tale of self-development to dramatise the process of revelatory liberation” (46). the call visions in isaiah 6 and ezekiel 1-3 are her model because these prophets undergo a personal transformation before they are commissioned. although neither isaiah nor ezekiel becomes divinized, as implied in the idea of apotheosis—​the oed defines it as the “glorification or exaltation of a person” and “elevation to divine status”—​cogan redefines the term to account for what she describes as “the precarious path from visionary to prophet” (24) or “the transition from immature to adult visionary” (50). in thel and visions of the daughters of albion, this transition overlaps with “a sexual awakening in the young visionary.” young women, particularly, are “vulnerable to corruption at the onset of sexual maturity” (24) because social institutions seek to “inoculate” themselves “against prophetic disruption” and female sexuality at once (24, 53). while “the little girl lost/​found” poems “express a confidence that prophetic power can bring about change” in “futurity,” initiated by lyca’s vision of independence from parental control, blake leaves it open whether she emerges from the cave and completes the transition to adult prophet (46-50). when they are combined with thel and visions, however, it becomes clear that blake expresses a “growing uncertainty” about a “positive outcome” for female figures, who “come to embody … some of the more problematic aspects of visionary and prophetic authority” (60-61, 12). cogan’s nuanced analysis of oothoon’s experience reveals the complex mix of visionary power and failure that comes to characterize blake’s conception of prophecy in the mid-1790s. in chapter 3, “prophetic action,” cogan identifies “a series of shifts in quick succession in blake’s prophetic strategy” (67) as he strives to keep pace with political changes triggered by the french revolution. while she continues to pursue sex-gender themes, particularly in relation to orc’s “sexual entitlement” and violent masculinity (83), her primary aim is to trace several “competing models of prophecy” that displace one another, beginning with the french revolution and moving through “a song of liberty,” america, and europe (67-68). echoing david erdman’s preference for the plain style of the french revolution (prophet against empire 152-53), cogan regards the poem as “unique among blake’s works” because it reveals “the prophetic potential inherent in the democratic process to turn vision into action” (70). she refers in particular to blake’s portrayal of the republican leader abbé sieyès, whose pamphlet what is the third estate? (1789) led to the formation of the french national assembly. this event represents for cogan “the successful transformation of a prophetic text into a collective revelation of prophetic action” (70-71), one that avoids the violent, “predestined future” of apocalyptic prophecy (68). while cogan provides an incisive reading of the french revolution, her account of blake’s shift to a different prophetic model in “a song of liberty” and america is less effective. the issue stems in part from her multiple uses of the term “apocalypse” and “apocalyptic.” in the chapter’s opening paragraph, we read that the french revolution employs “apocalyptic imagery to set out an oracular model of prophetic action”; “a song of liberty” expresses hope in “an explicitly apocalyptic conception of global change”; america “presents violent revolution as an apocalyptic convulsion that will bring an end to history itself,” while europe “subjects this claim to satirical subversion.” cogan states that these “divergent visions of apocalyptic transformation” reveal “the various ways in which blake responded to the shifting significance of the tumultuous … events of the early-1790s” (67-68). in these examples, the term “apocalyptic” takes on various meanings and referents, none of them clearly defined. most instances could be replaced with the term “eschatological” to improve clarity, since the primary referent is to history and the end-time rather than to “revelation.” the problem, however, is not only the semantic conflation of apocalypse and eschatology but also the conceptual reduction of “apocalypse” to a deterministic mode of prophecy, one said to be rooted in mythical rather than historical categories. this perspective, made popular by paul d. hanson’s widely influential book the dawn of apocalyptic (1975), is featured in cogan’s key source, samuel a. meier’s themes and transformations in old testament prophecy (2009), which offers a peculiar theory about the “deterioration” of hebrew prophecy in the second temple period (516 bce–​70 ce).in dawn of apocalyptic, hanson locates the roots of apocalyptic in the early second temple prophets—​third isaiah, zechariah, and haggai—​who lost power to the priestly faction and sought “a direct intervention from god as the only basis of hope,” gradually abandoning history “as the arena of divine activity” (194-95). cogan seems to accept meier’s thesis that old testament prophecy declined in the post-exilic era with the emergence of apocalyptic texts, which he says are marked by a loss of access to the “divine council” and thus a loss of intimacy with god. he asserts that “the distinguishing criterion for separating genuine prophets from their counterfeits” is participation in the divine council (meier 19-21), an assertion based on the view of jeremiah (23.16-22). meier contrasts jeremiah with the post-exilic prophet ezekiel, whose vision he downgrades because ezekiel “no longer sees nor participates in the deliberations of the council,” which reduces him to a mere spectator who receives god’s plan “as a fait accompli ” (23-24). the fact that the divine throne-chariot must swing low so that ezekiel can see it is, for meier, grounds to regard his unique visionary experience as a “deterioration” in the prophet’s relation to god. faring even worse are daniel and “later apocalyptic visionaries,” who may embark on heavenly journeys but who “do not appear in heaven … to assist, or even observe, the decision-making process” (26), and thus “regrettably” are “no more insightful than most humans” (46). indeed, they suffer a “decline” in their “ability to respond to divine questions” and must rely on angelic intermediaries to answer their own increasingly obtuse questions, which isaiah and jeremiah grasped intuitively because of access to the heavenly court. having lost the capacity to understand—​let alone negotiate with—​god, the apocalyptic prophet takes refuge in an “exceedingly predictable” view of history: “the future in apocalyptic is already determined in its entirety” (36). for meier, this recourse to the predictive element of prophecy is tantamount to “abdicating … responsibility to god and israel” (49). beside the odd bias against post-exilic literature, there are two fundamental problems with this devaluation of apocalyptic prophecy that bear on cogan’s study. one is meier’s lack of engagement with eschatology as a thread of continuity between pre-exilic and post-exilic prophecy, especially in relation to the “day of the lord” or day of judgment, a key motif shared by isaiah, amos, and jeremiah, as well as ezekiel, daniel, zechariah, and joel, as several major studies have shown (von rad 2: 112-25, 185-86, 288-300; petersen 2: 577-79; sweeney 216). the second is meier’s more traditional position that apocalyptic writing steers away from present history and politics and is defined by a deterministic eschatology. this view, a staple of early to mid-twentieth-century scholarship culminating in hanson, is now largely contested. a counter perspective emerged in the 1970s-80s with the publication of three key studies—​klaus koch’s the rediscovery of apocalyptic (1970), john j. collins’s the apocalyptic imagination (1984), and christopher rowland’s the open heaven: a study of apocalyptic in judaism and early christianity (1982).rowland’s scholarship is particularly applicable to blake, as evident in blake and the bible (2010), though his landmark study the open heaven and subsequent work are equally important. two points are especially salient. the first is rowland’s distinction between eschatology and apocalypse: the former refers primarily to “the future hope of judaism and christianity,” while the latter’s primary focus is “the unveiling of the counsels of god directly to the apocalyptic seer and thence to his readers.” rowland asserts that to “speak of apocalyptic … is to concentrate on the theme of the direct communication of the heavenly mysteries in all their diversity,” not to isolate eschatology as its main feature, as hanson and others tend to do (open heaven 2-14, 196). a related idea is rowland’s emphasis on the experiential dimension of apocalyptic writing, specifically the seer’s conviction that “the god who is revealed in … the sacred writings may be known too by vision and revelation” (mystery of god 22), a mode of accessing the divine that meier demotes. these texts have shaped the direction of subsequent scholarship and should be acknowledged as an alternative to meier’s view.see, for a recent example, the essays in john j. collins, ed., the oxford handbook of apocalyptic literature (oxford: oxford university press, 2014). i mention this scholarly history because blake’s work aligns with the counter perspective—​as the influence of ezekiel and daniel on him indicates—​and because it relates to several of cogan’s claims. one is that when blake shifts to “an explicitly apocalyptic model of prophecy,” he “align[s] his vision of revolution with an ideology” that ties salvation to “a violent and inevitable remaking of the world, and one within which the political process [is] largely irrelevant” (cogan 74-75). she acknowledges that in america, blake combines myth and history in “a hybrid mode in which the two sides seem, at times, to pull against one another.” but she adds that as orc comes to dominate, he “seems to draw the work ever further towards the mythic and [thus] to displace human agency within the historical narrative” (76-77). one wonders where in the text or designs blake draws the line between myth and political history. cogan is willing to grant that in orc’s millenarian speech that begins “the morning comes,” blake “gestures towards the model of old testament prophecy,” but she feels that the “prospect of the ultimate, final apocalyptic battle” allows for the “freeing [of] history to become myth” (78), as though myth were inherently ahistorical or not used in pre-exilic prophecy. one also wonders what cogan makes of saree makdisi’s argument in impossible history, which she cites in part, that revolutionary action in america is carried out by ordinary citizens inflamed with orc’s mythic rage, a collective action of democratic change that radically departs from the liberal model of abbé sieyès. is “the political process” confined to institutions of representative democracy? and when she contends that the final scene of the work “seems to leave the setting of the american revolution entirely behind” and is divorced from “any particular historical context” (78-79), what are we to make of the role of these same citizens in spreading orc’s fires across the atlantic to france twelve years later, linking the two revolutions? her theoretical model seems to block a consideration of these possibilities. fortunately, these drawbacks do not sabotage the entire chapter, as cogan returns to sex and gender themes in a discussion of the preludium to america. in an incisive analysis of orc’s disturbing relationship with the shadowy female, she argues that as blake printed and altered the various copies of the poem, he reassessed the role of orc, adding the preludium to suggest that “orc’s libidinous energy … is tainted from the beginning” (87). focusing on orc’s self-corruption through acts of war and violence, especially rape, cogan puts into question “blake’s equation of sexual energy and imaginative liberation as the twin signs of prophetic self-actualisation” (89). this insight about self-corruption leads into her treatment of los in the next chapter, for me the sharpest and most persuasive in the book. in chapter 4, “the origins of loss,” cogan leans into a pun on the possessive noun form of los’s name to emphasize that his origins are associated with loss, especially the loss of contact with eternity during his and urizen’s co-creation of the world. she begins with the astute point that the urizen books represent an “expansive exercise in introspection through which blake confronts the twin suspicions that were to reshape his prophetic vision”: first, that global revolution “had always been destined to fail” and, second, “that the prophet was implicated in that failure” (100). while continuing to posit a dichotomy between prophecy and apocalypse, and to conflate the latter with eschatology, cogan views the urizen books as blake’s admission of “the failure of his apocalyptic prophecy as prophecy” (101). more insightfully, she argues that by refocusing attention in these books “from eschatology to cosmogony,” blake effectively displaces eschatology from the center of his myth, “an important methodological innovation” (100). this innovation draws on developments in the historical-critical study of the bible, especially the two-source hypothesis applied to the genesis creation story by alexander geddes and others. blake utilizes the dual creation accounts to “scrutinize” what went wrong, exposing los’s complicity with urizen in creating a fallen universe in which prophecy can only fail. chapter 5, “delusive visions,” offers an informed and perceptive but ultimately limited reading of vala/​the four zoas. developing her analysis of blake’s “crisis of prophetic action” in the continental prophecies and urizen books, cogan argues that the problem “grows to encompass the visionary faculty itself” (135). she shows that the poem’s various “competing and contradictory” accounts of the fall present a more complex exploration of blake’s “visionary ontology” than earlier poems, culminating in the question, “if visionary experience is proof of the divine nature immanent in man,” then how and why did it fail? blake’s response is to “reconstitute” his concept of prophetic action and his visionary ontology by relocating the disjunctive narratives of the earlier illuminated books “within an overarching narrative of spiritual disorder and recuperation,” one that moves toward “a final … apocalypse” (138-39). but his misgivings about the viability of containing vision within “one grand mythic narrative” lead to a major revision of the manuscript, a “psycho-mythological reorganisation” in which the “fall of vision” is “resituated into the mind of albion” (140). the “deterioration” of vision dramatized in the conflicting accounts of the fall induces, however, a “pervasive uncertainty regarding the very possibility of a foundational truth,” which cannot arrest the “centrifugal force of fragmentation” (140-41). this uncertainty is likened to ricoeur’s “hermeneutics of suspicion” in that blake deploys it to uncover the “self-deception” of his characters, whose compromised visions are said to be “closely associated with a femininity that both figures and induces this state” (142). echoing feminist perspectives from the 1980s, cogan asserts that fallen vision in the poem is attributed to female rather than male characters. the emanations embody the “inimical relationship between visionary integrity and womanhood in the text” and represent “visionary subjects of a peculiarly debased and self-reflexive kind” (142). indeed, their versions of the fall infect the males with “a contagion” that is said to be “destructive of masculine vision and thereby, implicitly, of prophecy itself.” this narrative strand “comes to a head in the rival nights vii,” whose place and relationship in the manuscript blake left undecided (146). cogan provides a typically shrewd reading of the sexual dynamics in both viia and viib, developing her analysis of the america preludium. and she acknowledges that in night viia both los’s spectre and enitharmon’s shadow contribute to the low point in the narrative, when their “contrasting versions of the fall … crystallise the disastrous effect of the conjunction between deceptive female vision and masculine self-delusion” (153). but she does not pursue this crucial development, which is significant because the “disastrous effect” of the “conjunction” is the birth of the shadowy female form of vala, whose alliance with urizen against orc, los, and enitharmon becomes the major theme of night viii. further, this alliance morphs into the hermaphroditic union of satan and rahab, whose “triumph” in night viii can be viewed as the culmination of blake’s “hermeneutics of suspicion.” it is curious that cogan ignores this narrative strand in night viii, since she critiques its counternarrative concerning the “divine vision,” the jesus story that blake attempts to incorporate into the poem during a late phase of revision. in her view, blake’s insertion of the christian paradigm fails because it imposes “an external source of organisation onto the work,” one that offers a “new way of understanding visionary being” (140-41) but that replaces divine immanence with transcendence. while the jesus narrative enables him to traverse the “visionary impasse” of the previous decade (25), it forgoes the “active hermeneutic model of visionary apotheosis” for one based on “renunciation of the self and surrender to a higher power” (156-57). the result is a loss of the poem’s “hermeneutic drive” toward “a multivalent truth” discovered through “iterative” reinterpretations of the fallen creation. moreover, “since the divine vision is, by definition, pre-eminent,” it allows blake to “circumvent the strand concerning vala and false feminine vision,” “contain[ing] and neutralis[ing]” the “threat of rebellious visionary womanhood” and thus “re-centring … the masculine visionary experience” (157). this reading of the poem’s revisions and gender dynamics is skillfully crafted and shows a keen intellectual engagement with blake’s difficult manuscript, but it ultimately is limited by cogan’s neglect of developments in night viii—​namely, vala’s ritual metamorphosis into rahab and her collusion with urizen in the crucifixion and burial of jesus. though blake does not integrate this material successfully, it remains of fundamental narrative and thematic importance and complicates the use of gender as the primary lens for interpretation of the poem. at the end of the vala/​four zoas chapter, cogan transitions to chapter 6, “prophet of eternity,” by stating that blake’s late revisions to the poem sought to emphasize the “prominence” of los but that he “remains stubbornly outside the text’s centre of influence.” for blake to restore agency to “the prophetic subject,” he needed to “endow los with far greater power than he ever enjoyed before” (161). she traces this change to two visionary experiences at felpham that blake describes in poems that he sent to butts on 2 october 1800 and 22 november 1802. the first recounts a “‘vision of light’ [blake] had experienced while walking by the sea,” in which beams of sunlight expand into human form and become “one man,” giving him the impression of “yielding up of self to a higher power” (167). the second poem includes an account of blake’s merger with his prophetic persona los, from which he develops his concept of “fourfold vision” (e 722). cogan claims that this second vision serves as “a preview of an entirely new paradigm for … prophetic experience in blake’s ideology, one which is both more developed and more personalised” than previous models (174). this “personal apocalypse” is defined as a “parousia,” an individualized second coming in which los is said to displace jesus from the center of the “revelatory process” (173-74). rather than a “mere” epiphany in which a prophet passively witnesses the divine manifesting itself from above, parousia refers to a visionary experience “in which the prophet becomes one with the divine source of inspiration” (21, 167). while one might respond that witnessing a manifestation of the divine renders it present, as blake indicates in annotations to berkeley’s siris (e 663), cogan asserts that parousia is “at once divine and embodied, transcendent yet immanent” because christ returns “in the physical form of the ‘son of man’” (187). she finds this “embodied incarnation of divinity” not in the new testament but “by mapping it onto the old testament model of the prophetic encounter,” the model from which she takes her concept of “prophetic apotheosis.” she argues that by transferring the account of the merger with los in the butts letter to book 1 of milton, blake renews his sense of “divinely-ordained prophetic purpose” and recovers his “seemingly discarded … earlier construction of the prophet’s power as immanent.” this recovery allows for a “new understanding of prophetic apotheosis” (187). while the claims that los displaces jesus from the center of blake’s myth and that the “son of man” returns in a “physical” form of divinity are debatable, cogan’s analysis of the los-blake union in milton and the 1802 butts letter constitutes one of the book’s high points. the high point in effect. for despite the brilliance of her reading of the passage in which los descends to blake and becomes “one man” with him (22[24].5-14, e 116-17), the rest of milton receives only twelve pages and jerusalem three and a half, much of it qualifying her primary insight. beyond the account of blake’s merger with los, the chapter does not provide enough evidence or analysis to substantiate her central claim that the sublime experience at felpham “presages the coming tectonic shifts in blake’s imaginative landscape in the following decade” (174). and considering cogan’s nuanced treatment of los in the urizen books, one wonders why his failures get a pass in milton and jerusalem. his flawed behavior in the bard’s song leads to the ascendancy of satan and the birth of rahab, whose power is contained only by the visionary capacity of enitharmon, who creates an ontological “space” for the appearance of the seven eyes of god, the main eschatological framework in milton. finally, cogan downplays a key apocalyptic moment in the poem, ololon’s descent and appearance as “one man even jesus,” whose second coming is said to occur “in the clouds of ololon” (21[23].58-60, e 116). this pronouncement, a major innovation in messianic expectation, would seem to merit comment and analysis. but for cogan, while the descent-merger of ololon and milton may be, “strictly speaking, the climax of the narrative,” the “visionary union” of los and blake is “the most significant” (184-85). thus, even if the conclusion of milton presents the “glorious climax” of “the transformative power of parousia in the work”—​“the highpoint of blake’s hermeneutic reworking of the christological schema”—​it is disappointing because blake’s narrative persona does not participate or “share in this final revelatory joining” (189). this last point links cogan’s reading of milton with her brief but negative assessment of jerusalem, which, she claims, presents “a surprisingly conventional christological interpretation of the second coming” and thus “retreats … from the radical expansion of revelatory experience” in milton (190). focusing primarily on los’s relationship to jesus and albion in the last plates of the poem, she argues that the merger or “revelatory communion of los and jesus” also is disappointing, not just because it takes place “entirely off-screen,” but also because los becomes a “mere covering for jesus’ divine presence” (190-91). when albion encounters jesus and is “lost” in contemplation of his “creator & redeemer,” cogan feels that los has, in effect, lost contact with divine immanence and “passed beyond the veil” in “a pure transcendence of self.” as he “recedes into [the] background,” focus shifts to albion’s “final death,” which is said to initiate the “apocalypse” (191). from this truncated account of the poem, cogan concludes that “the connection between prophetic apotheosis and apocalypse” in jerusalem “differs from blake’s earlier portrayals of … universal liberation in that final, physical death is the ultimate cause of the rebirth of creation” (194). this is a remarkable statement. it seems to turn blake into edward young and jerusalem into night thoughts. it also suggests that, as in many studies of blake, his embrace of an overtly christian paradigm in the long poems induces a critical reaction that precludes the possibility of his developing a contrary or dialectical approach to christianity. this reaction stems in part from cogan’s decision to ground blake’s treatment of prophecy in the old rather than the new testament, whose traditions of eschatology and apocalypse are largely missing from her study. this omission may owe to her preference for the model of pre-exilic prophecy that she applies to blake. but it’s a problematic move, since blake deems los the “spirit of prophecy” and links him with “the testimony of jesus,” an association that he draws from the book of revelation (19.10), a text whose influence on blake is, arguably, second to none in either the old or new testament. revelation also is a key text in the radical protestant tradition that blake inherits, and its central motif of the two churches (jerusalem and babylon) underpins the dramatic confrontation that he stages in the penultimate scenes in each of his long poems. the difficulty that his characters experience in distinguishing the true “religion of jesus” from its false institutional simulacra, or state religion, suggests how deep the contraries of doubt and faith go in blake. his critique of christianity, his hermeneutics of suspicion, remains in creative tension with his hermeneutics of belief. despite these limitations, cogan’s book does an exceptional job of exploring such tensions across the range of blake’s corpus. none of the caveats above lessens my admiration for its daring and innovative engagement with blake’s treatment of prophecy. bibliography erdman, david v. blake: prophet against empire. 3rd ed. princeton: princeton university press, 1977. hanson, paul d. the dawn of apocalyptic: the historical and sociological roots of jewish apocalyptic eschatology. philadelphia: fortress press, 1975. meier, samuel a. themes and transformations in old testament prophecy. downers grove, il: intervarsity press, 2009. petersen, david l. “eschatology.” the anchor bible dictionary. ed. david noel freedman. vol. 2. new york: doubleday, 1992. 575-79. rowland, christopher. the open heaven: a study of apocalyptic in judaism and early christianity. new york: crossroad, 1982. rowland, christopher, and christopher r. a. morray-jones. the mystery of god: early jewish mysticism and the new testament. leiden: brill, 2009. sweeney, marvin a. the prophetic literature. nashville: abingdon press, 2005. von rad, gerhard. old testament theology. vol. 2, the theology of israel’s prophetic traditions. trans. d. g. m. stalker. new york: harper, 1965. the body in the line: “trasumanar” in blake’s dante the body in the line: “trasumanar” in blake’s dante by silvia riccardi silvia riccardi (silvia.riccardi@engelska.uu.se) is a postdoctoral researcher at the university of uppsala. she has written on the reception of dante in england and is currently working on blake’s graphic and textual forms of biomorphism as well as on a book project on the aesthetics of dark romanticism. this article honors the 700th anniversary of the death of dante alighieri. dante’s journey in the otherworld hasspecial thanks go to nick havely for his valuable comments on earlier versions of this essay. for their insightful advice, my appreciation also extends to the editors of this journal, morris eaves and morton paley, and the reader they chose. gratitude is due to tate britain (london) and the ashmolean museum (oxford) for permission to examine blake’s illustrations to the commedia.the numbering of blake’s dante illustrations follows the sequence in the william blake archive. references to blake’s writing are taken from erdman’s edition (blake, complete poetry and prose), abbreviated as e. introduced generations of readers to the consequences of the divine judgment, the architecture of sin and salvation, the moral condemnation of materialism, and the pilgrim’s encounter with god. god is the “somma luce” (par. 33.67) (“eternal beam,” cary 3: 293),quotations are from the petrocchi edition of the commedia (1966–​67). cary’s 1819 version is the reference edition for the translations.blake owned the 1564 landino and vellutello edition of the commedia and both henry boyd’s 1785 inferno and henry francis cary’s 1819 translation of the poem (tinkler-villani 344n27). according to john thomas smith, blake considered the vision to be “superior to all others” (bentley, records 625). while the artist’s familiarity with boyd’s translation is uncertain, his 1800 annotations in the introduction show his disapproval of its moralizing tone (keynes 150 and bentley, writings 2: 276). paley comes to the conclusion that blake “no doubt consulted vellutello from time to time, but his main source must have been the cary translation” (traveller 112). on the reception of dante in nineteenth-century england, see havely, pite. which cannot be grasped by means of human understanding. the blinding light of redemption thus remains a mystery untold in the commedia. toward the end of his life, the sixty-seven-year-old william blake approached dante’s incommunicable experience by revisiting his poetics of line versus color. for his illustrations to the poem,blake produced 72 illustrations for inferno, from which he derived 7 engravings (essick, printmaker 250-54, and “the printings”), 20 for purgatorio, and 10 for paradiso. the series was commissioned by john linnell in 1824 and kept in the linnell private collection until 1918. since then, it has been dispersed and never exhibited as a whole (tinkler-villani 261). today the series is divided among the following museums: melbourne, national gallery of victoria (36 pieces); cambridge, ma, harvard art museums (23); london, tate britain (20); london, british museum (13); birmingham, museum and art gallery (6); oxford, ashmolean museum (3); truro, royal institution of cornwall (1) (bindman et al. 31n34). a number of the designs were displayed during the blake exhibitions at the tate of 9 nov. 2000–​11 feb. 2001 and 11 sept. 2019–​2 feb. 2020.in his seminal contribution to the study of blake’s dante, paley points out that the hermeneutics of the watercolor series is “a contested subject,” referring to the views presented by albert roe and milton klonsky against david fuller, which see the illustrations as esoteric and literal respectively (traveller 116). valeria tinkler-villani both accepts and criticizes some aspects of roe’s and fuller’s methods (241-88). see also baine. paley does not attempt to impose coherence over the illustrations to dante and invites us to accept contradictions within the series (traveller 101-77). this essay develops from his insight. he worked back and forth on 102 designs, leaving them in various stages of development. from inferno to paradiso through purgatorio, blake captured the condition of the fallen against the purity of the redeemed. though the two are treated with the same medium, there is ambiguity in the conception of the human frame. are the density and articulation of colors and contours in the dante designs accidental modifications of form, or do they spell out the artist’s own judgment upon the souls? the unfinished nature of the designs and the “breathtaking freedom of pencilwork” are especially relevant in assessing the artist’s own response to the commedia (bindman, commedia 15). blake’s artistic maturity permeates his lines, which gain semantic relevance in his graphic translation of the poem. examining the artisanal aspects of representing the human form in its fallen and saved conditions may shed light on the way that the artist projected abstract meaning into line and color. central to both dante’s and blake’s work is the treatment of the human body,on dante and anatomy, see barnes and petrie, kirkpatrick. on blake and the body, see connolly, heppner, mellor, human form divine, and warner. which in relation to the illustrations to purgatorio and paradiso remains mostly underexplored. tristanne connolly notes that in blake we can see “the human body exceed its present capabilities in two opposite directions, toward the hell of pain and contortion, and the heavenly beauty of flexible grace” (24). while connolly refers to the illuminated books, her claim is also significant for the dante illustrations. a study of blake’s theory against his practice may define the unutterable phenomenon of “trasumanar,” the act of overcoming the mortal form of the body, in his pictorial lexicon. in paradiso 1 dante coins this term, interpretable as going beyond the humus (earth) and the homo (corporeality). the word appears only once in the entire poem, when the poet explains that such an experience is inexpressible through the medium of language: “trasumanar significar per verba / non si poria” (par. 1.70-71; italics in the original) (“words may not tell of that transhuman change,” cary 3: 8). what follows will examine the way that blake’s line and color evoke “trasumanar”—​what dante’s language fails to convey—​in the sense of a divine, beatific experience and discuss how blake’s artisanal aesthetics of the body enables such a phenomenon, in the commedia possible only in paradiso, to occur across the three cantiche. graphic lines are the most basic form through which blake’s own ideas are embodied in his style. in a descriptive catalogue,along with “a vision of the last judgment,” the annotations to reynolds’s discourses, and “public address,” a descriptive catalogue is a main source for blake’s thoughts on style. on blake’s aesthetic theory expressed in these works, see eaves, theory, which examines his statements in the context of the visual and the literary arts, discussing artistic and ethical principles in relation to his line, as well as the concept of identity. according to eaves, blake’s eighteenth-century advocacy of line (the language of the intellect) over color (the language of the senses) is romanticized in that imagination replaces reason as a measure of intellect (19). on blake’s theory and practice of line, see also bindman, artist 102-04, 125-31, et passim; butlin 14-17; essick, printmaker 5-7, 190, et passim; mitchell 44-53, 96-97; and paley, william blake 49-56. see also eaves, the counter-arts conspiracy, and rose. while rose does not test blake’s theory against his practice, eaves discusses, among other works, “public address” and a descriptive catalogue in light of the history of print technology and engraving techniques. the artist articulates his thoughts on artistic practice: how do we distinguish one face or countenance from another, but by the bounding line and its infinite inflexions and movements? … leave out this l[i]ne and you leave out life itself; all is chaos again, and the line of the almighty must be drawn out upon it before man or beast can exist. (e 550) through this analogy, blake urges us to focus on the very marks and lines that shape form and content out of the initial chaos of blurs of material execution. accordingly, in the watercolor series, the human body is distinguishable in both its fallen and transcended conditions. the graphic difference between the two states can be observed by comparing the outlining in the stygian lake, with the ireful sinners fighting (no. 16, illus. 1) against dante at the moment of entering the fire (no. 88, illus. 2). 1. (left) william blake. the stygian lake, with the ireful sinners fighting (see enlargement). pen and ink and watercolor over pencil and traces of black chalk with sponging, 1824–​27. 52.7 × 37.1 cm. national gallery of victoria, melbourne, felton bequest, 1920. 992-3. photo: national gallery of victoria, melbourne. 2. (right) william blake. dante at the moment of entering the fire (see enlargement). pen and ink and watercolor over black chalk and pencil, with sponging and touches of gum, 1824–​27. 52.6 × 36.8 cm. national gallery of victoria, melbourne, felton bequest, 1920. 1018-3. photo: national gallery of victoria, melbourne. in the first design, the sheer nudity of the sinners dominates the composition. limbs, feet, and hands are exposed in great detail and dramatically marked by thick and solid strokes. the expressions of anger and lineaments of the face substantiate what johann caspar lavater defines as “the relation between the exterior and the interior—​between the visible surface and the invisible spirit which it covers—​between the animated, perceptible matter, and the imperceptible principle which impresses this character of life upon it—​between the apparent effect, and the concealed cause which produces it” (1: 20).blake was familiar with late eighteenth-century theories of physiognomics and had some exposure to lavater, mostly through his friendship and artistic collaborations with henry fuseli. he engraved “head of a damned soul” after fuseli (c. 1788–​90) and produced a series of “visionary heads” for john varley, which eaves defines as “a species of imaginative physiognomy” (theory 66n). see also mellor, “physiognomy,” and erle. according to the swiss theologian and physiognomist, a person’s face could mirror the soul’s virtue and vice, a sentiment that is echoed by blake in “a vision of the last judgment”: every man has eyes nose & mouth this every idiot knows but he who enters into & discriminates most minutely the manners & intentions the [expression] characters in all their branches is the alone wise or sensible man & on this discrimination all art is founded. i intreat then that the spectator will attend to the hands & feet to the lineaments of the countenances they are all descriptive of character & not a line is drawn without intention & that most discriminate & particular <as poetry admits not a letter that is insignificant so painting admits not a grain of sand or a blade of grass <insignificant> much less an insignificant blur or mark>. (e 560) blake shows a particular affinity with the physiognomic tradition in his poetics of the bounding line, whose execution in the dante series achieves a clear distinction between the bodies of the damned and those of the saved. his use of watercolor further characterizes the condition of the souls through their bodily mass. the sinners in the stygian lake are densely colored and contrasted. in the second design, the same combination of media results in a different effect. as opposed to contortion and opaqueness, the continuity of thin lines merging the elongated bodies with veils and flames, combined with the mild blue and magenta tones, suggests an ethereal sense of translucency. the purity of the souls is directly proportionate to the transparency of their corporeal density and the gradual thinning of the body line. the female spirits free themselves from the bonds of sin and gravity in their ascent along the wall of purgatorial fire, performing their ritual of purification. the angrily contorted sinners, on the other hand, are immersed in marshy waters. christopher heppner notes that “blake, in inventing figures who explore and create a world of torment, drew support from michelangelo’s portrayal of contorted and weightless figures” (38). the bodies of the wrathful resemble one of those cases where “the schema of a floating torso and legs” was borrowed from the italian master (35).blake’s encounter with michelangelo occurred mainly through engravings, which often consisted of single, unidentified figures (heppner 25-27). though presented in “an aerial rather than terrestrial condition” (35), they are bound to their stagnant self-division at the bottom of the lake. the graphic appearance of the bodies in inferno seems to strengthen eric pyle’s claim that “the people in all the states of hell have lost their ability to see infinity of which they are a part, and they believe that the boundary of themselves stops at what they call the body” (123). blake refers to this condition as selfhood. selfhood is a question of perception rather than of morality. milton calls it both “a false body: an incrustation over my immortal / spirit” and “satan”—​“i in my selfhood am that satan: i am that evil one! / he is my spectre!” (milton 40[46].35-36, e 142; 14[15].30-31, e 108). selfhood prevents humans from seeing beyond material surfaces to the eternal world within. the bodies of the ones confined in their fallen condition appear thus enclosed in themselves by means of the soul, which is “the source for its own constriction and obstruction” (quinney 130). the closure of their senses is graphically reflected in their bodily outlines, dense materiality, and contracted postures, to the extent that it is difficult to discern human bodies from clusters of nonhuman matter. the body line resembles rock formations, as, for instance, in the stony bridge made of giant human fragments in the devils under the bridge (no. 39, illus. 3) and the body-compound column to the left side of the pit of disease: the falsifiers (no. 61, illus. 4). 3. william blake. the devils under the bridge (see enlargement). pen and ink and watercolor over black chalk and pencil, 1824–​27. 37.3 × 52.7 cm. national gallery of victoria, melbourne, felton bequest, 1920. 1000-3. photo: national gallery of victoria, melbourne. 4. william blake. the pit of disease: the falsifiers (see enlargement). ink and watercolor, 1824–​27. 37.2 × 52.7 cm. tate, purchased with the assistance of a special grant from the national gallery and donations from the art fund, lord duveen, and others, and presented through the the art fund, 1919. n03362. photo: tate. in dante, both bridges originate from a natural substance: luogo è in inferno detto malebolge, tutto di pietra di color ferrigno, come la cerchia che dintorno il volge. ……………………………………………… e come a tai fortezze da’ lor sogli a la ripa di fuor son ponticelli, così da imo de la roccia scogli movien che ricidien li argini e ’ fossi infino al pozzo che i tronca e raccogli. (inf. 18.1-3, 14-18; my emphasis) there is a place within the depths of hell call’d malebolge, all of rock dark-stain’d with hue ferruginous, e’en as the steep that round it circling winds. …………………………………………………………… and as like fortresses, e’en from their threshold to the brink without, are flank’d with bridges; from the rock’s low base thus flinty paths advanc’d, that ’cross the moles and dikes struck onward far as to the gulf, that in one bound collected cuts them off. (cary 1: 152-53; my emphasis) noi discendemmo in su l’ultima riva del lungo scoglio, pur da man sinistra; e allor fu la mia vista più viva giù ver’ lo fondo, là ’ve la ministra de l’alto sire infallibil giustizia punisce i falsador che qui registra. (inf. 29.52-57; my emphasis) we on the utmost shore of the long rock descended still to leftward. then my sight was livelier to explore the depth, wherein the minister of the most mighty lord, all-searching justice, dooms to punishment the forgers noted on her dread record. (cary 1: 254; my emphasis) in the designs, blake’s stone metaphors powerfully evoke in watercolor the apocalyptic imagery of satan’s degeneration to selfhood implied in milton: his bosom grew opake against the divine vision: the paved terraces of his bosom inwards shone with fires, but the stones becoming opake! hid him from sight, in an extreme blackness and darkness, and there a world of deeper ulro was open’d, in the midst of the assembly. (milton 9.30-35, e 103) the opacity of the stones obstructs satan’s sight of the divine the way color density characterizes the condition of the fallen and the rocky architecture in the illustrations to inferno. while dante describes the underworldly topography with peculiar realism, blake conceptualizes the geology of the first cantica around the human body. connolly comes to a similar conclusion when comparing the gothic door in the frontispiece of jerusalem with the infernal gate: “like dante’s, this is an entry into the world of the dead. while dante’s inferno is a terrain which culminates in the body of the devil as a place to be tortured, for blake the body plays a greater role in shaping the geography of hell” (21). the occurrence of anatomical parts amalgamated with rock formations is distinctive to blake’s imagery. the artist incorporates stone and flesh also in the primaeval giants sunk in the soil (no. 63, illus. 5), where the five figures possibly stand for the five senses (bindman, commedia 144), “the chief inlets of soul” (the marriage of heaven and hell plate 4, e 34). 5. william blake. the primaeval giants sunk in the soil (see enlargement). pencil, chalk, ink, and watercolor, 1824–​27. 37.2 × 52.7 cm. tate, purchased with the assistance of a special grant from the national gallery and donations from the art fund, lord duveen, and others, and presented through the the art fund, 1919. n03363. photo: tate. for blake, the senses are “windows, inlets, doors, gates, portals, or chinks in a body which is a wall, cave, shell, or building” (mitchell 62). they may be “cleansed, enlarged, opened, multiplied, decorated, even passed through” and become “avenues of vision” (62) revealing “portions of the eternal world” (europe iii.4, e 60). they may also be “locked and barred, bricked up, narrowed, or dirtied” (62), as in the encapsulation of the giants in the shape of a rock. the senses are “fluxile” (europe 10.11, e 63) and may be contracted or expanded: every word & every character was human according to the expansion or contraction, the translucence or opakeness of nervous fibres such was the variation of time & space which vary according as the organs of perception vary (jerusalem 98.35-38, e 258) blake shows the potential of the senses across the cantiche. on the one hand, the “contraction” and “opakeness of nervous fibres” regulate contracted perception, or the limited condition of the material body, constrained within the laws of time and space. on the other hand, the “expansion” and “translucence” of “nervous fibres” control expanded perception. such a difference is rendered through the earthy and opaque matter of stone against air and fire, the elements that blake combines instead with the cleansed souls. it also results in the predominance of bare and distorted frames in inferno as opposed to the veiled figures in purgatorio and paradiso, which evoke the medieval aesthetics of an ethereal body. figures merging with their thin garments mirror blake’s claim that “the drapery is formed alone by the shape of the naked [next word cut away in binding]” body (annotations to reynolds’s discourses, e 650). “eloquence and significance in drapery cannot exist except in relation to a body,” northrop frye observes. “this is why all the human figures in blake’s paintings are either naked or clad in the filmiest of nightdresses” (107). instead of a realistic rendering of a clothed human figure, where one can discern the lines of the body and those of the clothes, the overall impression is that of an “aesthetic whole” (lundeen 137). the line of the veiled body is especially pervasive in the illustrations to the second and third cantiche and acquires a semantic relevance in light of the entire poem. as opposed to confinement, it signifies transcendence of material form. this graphic phenomenon is noticeable even in sketchy drawings such as the angel in the boat departing after wafting over the souls for purgation (no. 75, illus. 6), where “figures are now graceful rather than contorted” (bindman et al. 164). from these barely penciled lines, we can infer the vertical development of veiled and elongated shapes, as we do in the terrace of envious souls (no. 86, illus. 7). 6. (left) william blake. the angel in the boat departing after wafting over the souls for purgation (see enlargement). pencil, pen and ink, with watercolor, 1824–​27. 52.1 × 36.5 cm. british museum. 1918,1012.6. photo: © the trustees of the british museum. all rights reserved. 7. (right) william blake. the terrace of envious souls (see enlargement). pencil and black chalk, 1824–​27. 52.7 × 37.0 cm. harvard art museums/​fogg museum, bequest of grenville l. winthrop. 1943.661. photo: © president and fellows of harvard college. the somatic difference between the fallen and the saved seems to be embedded in blake’s line from the early conception of his pieces. neither obscure nor unartistic, bodies that may appear puzzling are visual statements about his view of the condition of the soul. as eaves points out, “blake’s idea of the line in art is that it is the ultimate artistic act, an act with overtones of seeking the truth and making final judgments” (theory 22). it is precisely through the bodily contours that blake grants danteinstead of illustrating the historical dante, blake focuses on the allegorical aspect of the commedia and chooses the look of an ordinary man. as paley observes, “although in blake’s first design dante’s nose is rather pointed, this is not carried further” (traveller 120). blake was familiar with the traditional iconography of the italian poet. the portrait of dante for the “heads of the poets” series, commissioned by william hayley in 1800, includes the laurel crown, the aquiline nose, the red cap, and the severe expression. see, for comparison, the thomas stothard portrait of dante that appeared in henry boyd’s commedia (1802). william wells suggests that blake’s source of the poet in profile was an engraving by paolo fidanza of the portrait in raphael’s disputa (17-18, 32, 40). and his guide, virgil, the faculty of transcending their material forms prior to paradiso. the presence of the veiled line can accordingly be traced in inferno, where the two figures exhibit different strokes compared to the bulky mass of the sinners. in the inscription over the gate (no. 4, illus. 8), the lower part of their vestures becomes one with their legs and feet. the fading red and blue tints enhance a sense of translucence. dante and virgil appear as two light, elongated entities who are almost levitating as they approach the infernal gate. this quasi-ethereal effect signals a fundamental difference between the ways in which dante and blake envisioned the bodies of the two poets in inferno. while in the commedia “dante-personaggio possesses a body that is heavy and opaque (it cannot be penetrated by rays of sunlight) and whose members allow him to breathe and move objects” (gilson, “anatomy” 11),for a list of references to dante’s body in the commedia, see gilson, “anatomy” 11n1. in the watercolor series he appears to lose his material form even in some early designs. 8. william blake. the inscription over the gate (see enlargement). pencil, ink, and watercolor, 1824–​27. 52.7 x 37.4 cm. tate, purchased with the assistance of a special grant from the national gallery and donations from the art fund, lord duveen, and others, and presented through the the art fund, 1919. n03352. photo: tate. dante at the moment of entering the fire (no. 88, illus. 2) offers an example of this phenomenon from purgatorio. dante is urged by virgil and the angel above to enter the flames animated by female spirits. the sense of incorporeality is conveyed by graphic lines thinning gradually and merging with other forms, as if the figures were translucent. clothes, bodies, and flames flow harmoniously upward, evoking the sense of “trasumanar” introduced by dante in paradiso 1. in this canto, dante draws an analogy between the ovidian metamorphosis of glaucus and his own experience of elevation toward god: “tu ’l sai, che col tuo lume mi levasti” (par. 1.75) (“thou know’st, who by thy light didst bear me up,” cary 3: 8). the poet is unable to tell whether he is in or out of his body; the boundaries between the physical and the non-physical space are blurred. while for dante this phenomenon occurs only in paradiso and is incommunicable to the reader except through the mythical esemplo of glaucus (“l’essemplo basti / a cui esperïenza grazia serba” [par. 1.71-72] [“let the example serve, though weak, / for those whom grace hath better proof in store,” cary 3: 8]), blake envisions a transcendence of the material condition regardless of the place in the otherworld—​whether inferno, purgatorio, or paradiso—​and makes this phenomenon graphically visible. for blake, “hell is a state and not a place” (pyle 123), and his line embodies this view fully. dante’s belief in the absolute transcendence of god is the inherent reason for his poetic limitations. he cannot describe his vision experienced in the highest paradiso as, for him, it is beyond expression. for blake, vision is instead the active process of creation. in a passage referring to his painting of the last judgment, the artist invites us to immerse ourselves in the images rendered in this work to gain access to the divine vision of god: if the spectator could enter into these images in his imagination approaching them on the fiery chariot of his contemplative thought if he could enter into noahs rainbow or into his bosom or could make a friend & companion of one of these images of wonder which always intreats him to leave mortal things as he must know then would he arise from his grave then would he meet the lord in the air & then he would be happy. (e 560)as the spectator would enter these images “in his imagination,” the question remains whether blake is referring to the actual images in the painting or the mental images that the same evoke. according to gerda norvig, the passage can be interpreted in both ways; she points out that when we read “the spectator could enter into these images in his imagination,” blake “suggests that the imagination is on the one hand a place of origination (modifying the noun images) and on the other a vehicle of transformation (modifying the verb enter)” (15; italics in the original). for diane piccitto, “blake’s images and allusions point to an entrance that is a full-bodied, sensory act, as well as a mental one, occurring when the spectator shifts his/​her conventional understanding and use of perception to see the world of the imagination as something present to step into and inhabit fully” (63). this notion of entering a work of art may remind us of wallace stevens’s claim that a long poem “comes to possess the reader and … naturalizes him in its own imagination and liberates him there” (angel 50). this passage is crucial to understanding blake’s view of the great potential of his art and his belief that god is accessible via imagination. how, then, does his fundamental disagreement with dante on the absolute immanence of god take the form of a visual statement in the watercolor series? a comparative analysis of the two poets’ beliefs may help to define this line of inquiry. until dante’s entrance in paradiso, his experience in the afterlife is regulated by his senses. he is “the only living character in the commedia and the only one to possess a human body, a fleshy exterior that is liable to change and corruption” (gilson, “anatomy” 11). dante undergoes a journey through his material body and forms an understanding of his encounters on the basis of his sensory inputs, growing in awareness and learning to recognize his limits.the approach to crispin’s atlantic voyage in wallace stevens’s “the comedian as the letter c” has some interesting echoes of the voyage motif in the commedia and its allegorical intent. the poem’s concern with the process of dissolving or annulling the former self shows possible allusions to dante’s experience recounted in his epics (“just so an ancient crispin was dissolved. / the valet in the tempest was annulled,” lines 52-53, collected poems). stevens’s biographer joan richardson suggests that the author had an “epic desire to rival dante’s divine comedy,” which he manifests in the “attitude of the comedian” (29). according to jacqueline vaught brogan, stevens wanted to “write a modern and secular divine comedy, one which could relieve the anxiety about linguistic mutablity—​indeed, offer a sanction in life—​but without recourse to the absolute logos to which dante could appeal” (122). she calls up stevens’s aphorism: “after one has abandoned a belief in god, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life’s redemption” (opus posthumous 158). on dante’s influence in stevens’s work, see also cook (202-05, 273-76, 311) and wentersdorf. his conception of physical responses is consistent with the medieval aristotelian view that all human knowledge originates in sense perception (durling 116). sense perception is then developed in images through imagination, memory, and “possible intellect.” these images are turned into abstractions in order to be processed by the “active intellect” (116). according to dante, it is the combination of perception, imagination, and memory regulated by intellect that originates poetic ingegno (virtue), of which he avails himself in order to produce poetry. nevertheless, and closer to a neoplatonic view, poetic ingegno is regulated by the stars of gemini in paradiso 22.112-23, where he seeks their support to write about the “passo forte” (“hard emprize,” cary 3: 203). notably, dante also finds dreams (purgatorio 27) and supernatural inspiration (paradiso 33) to be sources of knowledge. eventually, he realizes that the body should be inhabited as a place of relationship and transition.dante accepts the medieval adaptation of aristotle’s doctrine, explained by robert durling as follows: “the soul is the form, the active shaping principle, of the body: every ‘physical’ aspect of the body … is not only governed by the soul but created and shaped by it, matter being in itself a completely neutral receptivity to form and essentially nonexistent until united with form. … though the body is good in itself, the body of fallen humanity is mortal, and its relation with the soul is infected and problematic” (115-16). it is under this condition that dante can witness various corporeal forms. the sinners he encounters in inferno appear to him as material bodies. the materiality of the souls relates to the notion of evil as immersion in matter in line with the neoplatonic tradition. according to this view, the human being is the result of the union between the body and the divine soul and represents a fall into materiality (durling 116-17). the bodies of the sinners are described as injured, deformed, and mutilated. in purgatorio, the reconciled, airy figures of the souls are described in their meekness and rediscovered communion, as statius explains in purgatorio 25.for a discussion of the adaptation of aristotelian (and averroist) doctrine about the soul in purgatorio 25, see boyde. in paradiso, the human outlines of the blessed, except for beatrice, initially recede from dante’s sight behind the spiritual lighton dante and light, simon gilson observes that the “interest in luminous and optical phenomena,” contemporary to dante’s time, is central in his work. it ranges “from his early lyric production which celebrates the lady’s luminosity to the convivio in which he outlines a theory of vision, and onto the paradiso with its references to optical lore and its vast proliferation of light imagery. … dante was not at the forefront of thirteenth-century thought on optics and light but … he relied instead on information which was available in more general medieval sources” (medieval optics 2). on dante’s representation of reality and instances of empirical evidence in the commedia, see “farinata and cavalcante” in auerbach (174-202). of their eternal joy. it is only in paradiso 33 that dante experiences the divine vision, after bernard asks the virgin mary to allow dante’s sight to see the divine light. note that the virgin mary intercedes through sight and not through actions. dante is able to gaze into the light but is unable to recount his experience, as words as well as memory are not sufficient to describe it: da quinci innanzi il mio veder fu maggio che ’l parlar mostra, ch’a tal vista cede, e cede la memoria a tanto oltraggio. (par. 33.55-57) thenceforward, what i saw, was not for words to speak, nor memory’s self to stand against such outrage on her skill. (cary 3: 293) blake was skeptical of dante’s mimetic approach to poetry and the assumptions of his poetic ingegno. imagination was not, as dante believed after aquinas, “like a treasure house of images received by the senses” (“est enim phantasia sive imaginatio quasi thesaurus quidam formarum per sensum acceptarum,” 1.78.4). according to blake, mere reflections of nature are devoid of creative effort. imagination is the artist’s tool in overcoming such pitfalls of creation, as he “could visualize things not actually before his eyes” (damon 436)on blake and eidetic images, see burke. and his “artistic line is the expression of personal identity … the direct expression of imagination” (eaves, theory 175). blake’s task as an artist is therefore to open the eternal worlds, to open the immortal eyes of man inwards into the worlds of thought: into eternity ever expanding in the bosom of god. the human imagination (jerusalem 5.18-20, e 147) he makes this process visible by rendering the phenomenon of expanded perception through bodily outlines that extend themselves out of the human frame and merge with other forms, such as veils and flames in dante at the moment of entering the fire (no. 88, illus. 2) and veils in the souls of those who only repented at the point of death (no. 78, illus. 9). 9. william blake. the souls of those who only repented at the point of death (see enlargement). pen and ink and watercolor over pencil and black chalk, 1824–​27. 37.2 × 52.7 cm. national gallery of victoria, melbourne, felton bequest, 1920. 1015-3. photo: national gallery of victoria, melbourne. this unfinished piece shows the souls of the late repentant as if they were clothed in their expanded aura of perception. the graphic treatment of the body creates material ambiguity, which results in a non-objective space. the third soul from the bottom left exhibits folds of tissue or fabric developing from the lower part of the body to the feet. the left hand is graphically connected to that of the next soul through thin lines. the visual continuity between the two figures is reinforced by the negative space created by the absence of blue wash. color highlights the perceptual aura of the soul on the bottom left, where we distinguish yellow threads of luminescence interlacing the anatomical lines and diffusing into the air. the function of color, “the language of the senses,” is here subordinate to the line, “the language of the intellect” (eaves, theory 12). as observed in the inscription over the gate (no. 4, illus. 8), traces of translucency may also be identified in the first cantica, inferno being a state rather than a place. in the circle of the lustful (no. 10, illus. 10), blake likewise grants paolo and francesca the capacity to transcend their material forms. 10. william blake. the circle of the lustful (see enlargement). watercolor, 1824–​27. birmingham museum & art gallery, presented by the trustees of the public picture gallery fund, with assistance from the national art collections fund and the john feeney charitable trust, 1919. 1919p2. photo: birmingham museums trust. unlike the other transgressors, the two souls are locked together. the lines of the lovers define two veiled figures blending together as they flutter in the air. their aura of expanded perception is suggested by wavy patterns developing from and into their limbs, torsos, and hair. a projection of the embracing couple is also represented in the shining sun above the two poets. this piece shows that blake was following the text closely—​a senseless dante on the ground, the gentle couple detached from the sinful crowd, the strong wind blowing across the circle of the lustfulpaley brings to our attention the similarities between blake’s piece and the third illustration in vellutello’s edition, suggesting that “although blake drew upon a number of sources in executing this series, 10 is one of the few instances in which he may have been indebted to another illustrator of dante” (traveller 127). david bindman observes that “the larger whirlwind apparently shows the progress of sexual desire as it passes from physical existence into higher union” (artist 217). both claudia corti and luisa calè discuss the infernal serpentine line of the lustful in relation to the analysis of beauty; corti uses hogarth’s theory as a way into the style of inferno, while calè refers to it in relation to the bodily transformation in the serpent metamorphoses.—​yet challenging it. the episode of paolo and francesca, along with that of ugolino, was well known in romantic england.on blake’s response to the episode of ugolino, see yates, tambling. on the romantic reception of francesca da rimini, see toynbee. in dante we read of his encounter with the noble couple in the second circle of inferno, where the sinners are incessantly tossed around in a whirlwind. in the celebrated passage, francesca recounts the moment of falling in love in stilnovistic terms:the condition of love that imposes itself upon the loved one and demands to be reciprocated is one of the two main precepts of andreas capellanus’s de amore (1185). the second precept states that authentic love should always take place out of wedlock. this treatise had a significant influence on provençal poetry and the sicilian school. some traces can also be found in the dolce stil novo. in inferno 5, dante introduces the concept of gentilezza as noble-mindedness and amore as love, according to the concepts of the dolce stil novo. the first expression is credited to guido guinizzelli and his poem “al cor gentil rempaira sempre amore,” which is echoed and recontextualized by dante in “amor, ch’al cor gentil ratto s’apprende” (inf. 5.100) (“love, that in gentle heart is quickly learnt,” cary 1: 45). in the seventh circle of purgatorio, dante meets his master guinizzelli and addresses him as “il padre / mio e de li altri miei miglior che mai / rime d’amor usar dolci e leggiadre” (purg. 26.97-99) (“a father to me, and to those / my betters, who have ever us’d the sweet / and pleasant rhymes of love,” cary 2: 238). amor, ch’al cor gentil ratto s’apprende, prese costui de la bella persona che mi fu tolta; e ’l modo ancor m’offende. amor, ch’a nullo amato amar perdona, mi prese del costui piacer sì forte, che, come vedi, ancor non m’abbandona. amor condusse noi ad una morte. caina attende chi a vita ci spense. (inf. 5.100-07) love, that in gentle heart is quickly learnt, entangled him by that fair form, from me ta’en in such cruel sort, as grieves me still: love, that denial takes from none belov’d, caught me with pleasing him so passing well, that, as thou see’st, he yet deserts me not. love brought us to one death: caina waits the soul, who split our life. (cary 1: 45-46) paolo’s “gentle” heart was enraptured by francesca, whose living characternote that the expression “bella persona” in inf. 5.101 has almost the sense of “body” and is translated by cary as “fair form.” was deprived of her noble heart when she could not deny love—​the same love leads paolo and francesca to death and eternal suffering. even though dante faints, overwhelmed by compassion—​“come corpo morto cade” (inf. 5.142) (“like a corse fell to the ground,” cary 1: 48)—​he sees no hope for the couple to be redeemed in accordance with the sentiment set by the inscription before the infernal gate: “lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate” (inf. 3.9) (“all hope abandon, ye who enter here,” cary 1: 21). regardless of the infernal dictum, blake allows paolo and francesca to leave their mortal bodies, since he sees the pleasures of the flesh as a means to overcome the fall of humankind and to make the world “appear infinite. and holy whereas it now appears finite & corrupt. this will come to pass by an improvement of sensual enjoyment” (marriage plate 14, e 39). blake disagreed with the system of punishments in inferno, as it did not reflect the doctrine of forgiveness preached by jesus, but rather an alignment with tyrannical attitudes. although he called dante “an emperors <a caesars> man,” he nevertheless appreciated the italian poet among the “men of genius” (e 634)the unfinished piece homer bearing the sword, and his companions (no. 7) reveals the underdrawing comments about the artist’s view of dante’s work: “every thing in dantes comedia shews that for tyrannical purposes he has made this world the foundation of all & the goddess nature & not the holy ghost” (e 689). in seeing dante as a follower of the goddess nature in his quest for beatrice, blake disliked the poet’s materialism and catholic veneration for the virgin mary (damrosch 225) and was critical of his perspectives on politics and theodicy. and remarked to henry crabb robinson that “dante (tho’ now with god) lived & died an atheist—​he was the slave of the world & time—​but dante & wordsw: in spight of their atheism were inspired by the holy ghost” (bentley, records 437). as paley comments, the circle of the lustful “reminds us that some of blake’s greatest achievements are as a straightforward illustrator, but one who interprets the text imaginatively and uses his own pictorial vocabulary” (traveller 128-29). the expanded perception rendered through graphic lines in the bodies of paolo and francesca pertains to his lexicon. perceptual contraction and expansion may thus occur at various stages in the watercolor series, as “trasumanar” is not locked within one dimension only. if we avail ourselves of our “infinite senses” by “expanding” our perception, “we behold as one” (jerusalem 34[38].16-18, e 180). we see one being or process in a multitude, we interconnect instead of disconnecting. in blake’s words: my eyes more & more like a sea without shore continue expanding the heavens commanding till the jewels of light heavenly men beaming bright appeard as one man (e 713) brightness and light characterize the “heavens,” where “men” appear “as one man.” the union between god and humans embodies blake’s idea of subjectivity, according to which the condition of the self is not individual in essence but rather a fluid state of being, or a version of what tim ingold terms “in-betweenness.” in-betweenness is “a movement of generation and dissolution in a world of becoming where things are not yet given … but on the way to being given. … where between is liminal, in-between is arterial; where between is intermediate, in-between is midstream. and the in-between is the realm of the life of lines” (147; italics in the original). by expanding the boundaries among living beings and making this process visible, blake seeks unity between “men” and god. for him, unlike for dante, god is thus immanent in all of us: “all things are comprehended in their eternal forms in the divine body of the saviour the true vine of eternity  the human imagination” (e 555). the fundamental difference between blake’s and dante’s approaches to “trasumanar” therefore lies in the two poets’ underlying assumptions and means of representation. while dante does not regard imagination as a divine power, blake believes that the eternal body of man is the imagination.  that is god himself } עשי jesus  we are hismembers the divine body (e 273) dante identifies the divine intervention necessary for “trasumanar” in god himself, whereas blake sees it in the divine power of imagination—​that is god. as a result, in dante’s allegory such an experience is only possible in paradiso, the realm where god dwells, and incommunicable outside of this place. in blake’s view, paradiso is a state rather than a place. via imagination, we may find god within us at any stage of our journey. blake’s pictorial “trasumanar” culminates in the highly evocative piece of dante adoring christ (no. 94, illus. 11). the fine work of line-making unifies the bodies of dante and christ with their veiled garments and dynamic auras. bindman accurately observes that the “‘glitterance of christ’ is wonderfully suggested by blake’s use of watercolour” (commedia 206). the artist skillfully combines pencil and watercolor to achieve a sense of immateriality, which stands in stark contrast to the corporeality of vanni fucci “making figs” against god (no. 52, illus. 12). 11. (left) william blake. dante adoring christ (see enlargement). pen and ink and watercolor over black chalk, with touches of gum, 1824–​27. 37.2 × 52.7 cm. national gallery of victoria, melbourne, felton bequest, 1920. 1020-3. photo: national gallery of victoria, melbourne. 12. (right) william blake. vanni fucci “making figs” against god (see enlargement). pen and ink and watercolor over pencil and traces of black chalk, with sponging, 1824–​27. 37.2 × 52.7 cm. national gallery of victoria, melbourne, felton bequest, 1920. 1005-3. photo: national gallery of victoria, melbourne. the outlines of the muscular physiques of vanni fucci and christ are strikingly different. with regard to engraving, connolly specifies that “if blake wished to make his representations of muscles more subtle, he could have done so, avoiding the hardness of printed lines by drawing or painting in musculature at a later stage” (29). blake’s practice of designing the musculature within the copperplate could not occur in the watercolor designs. nevertheless, the artist exposes his subjects by overmarking the internal muscles with pencil and watercolor, yet distinguishing bold contours for the damned versus light and flexible lineaments for the blessed. while the anatomy of christ becomes one with the veils developing from his torso in thin pencil strokes and touches of color, the body of the thief is heavily contrasted, rendering the effect of what blake refers to as “temptations and perturbations, labouring to destroy imaginative power, by means of that infernal machine, called chiaro oscuro, in the hands of venetian and flemish demons” (e 547). the use of color also matters in the respective backgrounds of the designs. inferno is rocky and clouded by clusters of dense, opaque matter exhibiting a dramatic juxtaposition of red and yellow, as opposed to the the airy, light-toned aura enveloping the body of christ in paradiso. both vanni fucci and christ are similarly depicted, in a standing position with outstretched arms. janet warner identifies in this posture and its variations an ambiguous archetype, which can be interpreted as a demonic impulse or its regenerative counterpart (87-105). vanni fucci and christ seem to substantiate this ambiguity—​while the former delivers a blasphemous gesture to the sky, the latter evokes the iconographic tradition of self-sacrifice and invites us to “enter blake’s paradiso with the worship of the human form divine” (paley, traveller 165). the two illustrations exhibit a noticeable difference in the use of the same medium. the opacity of vanni fucci’s body resembles the effect of those watercolor pieces described by anthony blunt as “almost as if he [blake] was painting in tempera” (89). christ’s translucency is, instead, about minimal touches of pigment. the artist seems to suggest a visual hierarchy among the inhabitants of dante’s otherworld in accordance with his advocacy for line over color. in the three years before his death, blake returned to his poetics of line versus color and defined it as a point of access into the experience of the beyond in his dante illustrations. he challenged the architecture of sin and salvation, “seeking to understand the poem by discovering his disagreements with it” (pite 62). the mystery of god, untold in the commedia, thus finds its graphic manifestation in the watercolor series. the artist achieved the ineffability of mystical experiences via his eidetic images, as “when the influence of the imagination is at its maximum, they [optical perceptual (or eidetic) images] are ideas that, like after-images, are projected outward and literally seen” (jaensch 2; italics in the original). in blake’s words, “he who does not imagine in stronger and better lineaments, and in stronger and better light than his perishing and mortal eye can see does not imagine at all” (e 541). he gave lineaments and form to dante’s linguistic impossibilities through a skillful articulation of the medium across the three cantiche. while high color density and solid contours may signify the condition of the fallen and the opacity of “a false body: an incrustation over my immortal / spirit; a selfhood” (milton 40[46].35-36, e 142), the veiled line and subtle strokes of color bring us closer to what dante’s “words may not tell”—​“trasumanar significar per verba / non si poria” (par. 1.70-71). the incorporated manifestations of the body in the line allow us to conceptualize the range of meanings generated by blake’s practice in light of his aesthetic theory. by acknowledging the semantic value of contours and color density, we move beyond anatomical discrepancies on a merely representational level and access the artist’s use of line and color as instruments for revealing the eternal world within. the soul’s journey toward god, in the poem achieved in the third cantica exclusively, becomes in blake’s designs a journey within ourselves, for inferno, purgatorio, and paradiso are not places but rather states where god, by means of imagination, is within us. works cited alighieri, dante. la commedia secondo l’antica vulgata. ed. giorgio petrocchi. 4 vols. milan: mondadori, 1966–​67. —​—​—​. the vision; or hell, purgatory, and paradise. trans. henry francis cary. 2nd ed. 3 vols. london: taylor and hessey, 1819. aquinas, thomas. summa theologiae [latin text and english translation]. 61 vols. cambridge: blackfriars; london: eyre and spottiswoode; new york: mcgraw-hill, 1964–​81. auerbach, erich. mimesis: the representation of reality in western literature. 1953 [english translation]. trans. willard r. trask. princeton: princeton university press, 2013. baine, rodney m. “blake’s dante in a different light.” dante studies 105 (1987): 113-36. barnes, john c., and jennifer petrie, ed. dante and the human body: eight essays. dublin: four courts press, 2007. bentley, g. e., jr. blake records. 2nd ed. new haven: yale university press, 2004. —​—​—​, ed. william blake’s writings. 2 vols. oxford: clarendon press, 1978. bindman, david. blake as an artist. oxford: phaidon, 1977. —​—​—​, ed. william blake, la divina commedia. paris: bibliothèque de l’image, 2000. bindman, david, stephen hebron, and michael o’neill, eds. dante rediscovered: from blake to rodin. grasmere: wordsworth trust, 2007. blake, william. the complete poetry and prose of william blake. ed. david v. erdman. newly rev. ed. new york: anchor-random house, 1988. blunt, anthony. the art of william blake. new york: columbia university press, 1959. boyde, patrick. dante: philomythes and philosopher: man in the cosmos. cambridge: cambridge university press, 1981. burke, joseph. “the eidetic and the borrowed image: an interpretation of blake’s theory and practice of art.” 1964. the visionary hand: essays for the study of william blake’s art and aesthetics. ed. robert n. essick. los angeles: hennessey & ingalls, 1973. 261-66. butlin, martin. william blake. london: tate gallery, 1978. calè, luisa. “bestial metamorphoses: blake’s variations on transhuman change in dante’s hell.” beastly blake. ed. helen p. bruder and tristanne connolly. cham: palgrave macmillan-springer, 2018. 153-81. connolly, tristanne j. william blake and the body. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, 2002. cook, eleanor. poetry, word-play, and word-war in wallace stevens. princeton: princeton university press, 1988. corti, claudia. “blake and dante: hellish serpents and devilish serpentines.” italomania(s): italy and the english speaking world from chaucer to seamus heaney. ed. giuseppe galigani. florence: pagliai, 2007. 27-43. damon, s. foster. a blake dictionary: the ideas and symbols of william blake. rev. ed., with a new foreword and annotated bibliography by morris eaves. hanover, nh: brown university press, 1988. damrosch, leo. eternity’s sunrise: the imaginative world of william blake. new haven: yale university press, 2015. durling, robert m. “body, human.” the dante encyclopedia. ed. richard lansing. new york: garland publishing, 2000. 115-18. eaves, morris. the counter-arts conspiracy: art and industry in the age of blake. ithaca: cornell university press, 1992. —​—​—​. william blake’s theory of art. princeton: princeton university press, 1982. eaves, morris, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi, eds. william blake archive. <http://​www.​blakearchive.​org>. accessed 21 october 2021. erle, sibylle. blake, lavater and physiognomy. 2010. london: routledge, 2020. essick, robert n. “the printings of blake’s dante engravings.” blake 24.3 (winter 1990–​91): 80-90. —​—​—​. william blake, printmaker. princeton: princeton university press, 1980. frye, northrop. fearful symmetry: a study of william blake. 1947. ed. nicholas halmi. collected works of northrop frye, vol. 14. toronto: university of toronto press, 2004. fuller, david. “blake and dante.” art history 11.3 (1988): 349-73. gilson, simon a. “the anatomy and physiology of the human body in the commedia.” barnes and petrie 11-42. —​—​—​. medieval optics and theories of light in the works of dante. lewiston: edwin mellen press, 2000. havely, nick, ed. dante in the nineteenth century: reception, canonicity, popularization. oxford: peter lang, 2011. heppner, christopher. reading blake’s designs. cambridge: cambridge university press, 1995. ingold, tim. the life of lines. abingdon: routledge, 2015. jaensch, e. r. eidetic imagery and typological methods of investigation. trans. oscar oeser. london: kegan paul, trench, trubner & co.; new york: harcourt brace & company, 1930. keynes, geoffrey. “blake’s copy of dante’s inferno.” blake studies. 2nd ed. oxford: clarendon press, 1971. 147-54. kirkpatrick, robin. “dante and the body.” framing medieval bodies. ed. sarah kay and miri rubin. manchester: manchester university press, 1994. 236-53. klonsky, milton. blake’s dante: the complete illustrations to the “divine comedy.” london: sidgwick and jackson, 1980. lavater, john caspar. essays on physiognomy, designed to promote the knowledge and the love of mankind. trans. henry hunter. 3 vols. london: john murray, 1789–​98. lundeen, kathleen. knight of the living dead: william blake and the problem of ontology. selinsgrove: susquehanna university press, 2000. mellor, anne k. blake’s human form divine. berkeley: university of california press, 1974. —​—​—​. “physiognomy, phrenology, and blake’s visionary heads.” blake in his time. ed. robert n. essick and donald pearce. bloomington: indiana university press, 1978. 53-74. mitchell, w. j. t. blake’s composite art: a study of the illuminated poetry. princeton: princeton university press, 1978. norvig, gerda s. dark figures in the desired country: blake’s illustrations to “the pilgrim’s progress.” berkeley: university of california press, 1993. paley, morton d. the traveller in the evening: the last works of william blake. oxford: oxford university press, 2003. —​—​—​. william blake. new york: e. p. dutton, 1978. piccitto, diane. blake’s drama: theatre, performance, and identity in the illuminated books. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, 2014. pite, ralph. the circle of our vision: dante’s presence in english romantic poetry. oxford: clarendon press, 1994. pyle, eric. william blake’s illustrations for dante’s “divine comedy”: a study of the engravings, pencil sketches and watercolors. jefferson, nc: mcfarland, 2015. quinney, laura. william blake on self and soul. cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 2009. richardson, joan. wallace stevens: the early years, 1879–​1923. new york: beech tree, 1986. roe, albert s. blake’s illustrations to the “divine comedy.” princeton: princeton university press, 1953. rose, edward j. “‘a most outrageous demon’: blake’s case against rubens.” 1969. the visionary hand: essays for the study of william blake’s art and aesthetics. ed. robert n. essick. los angeles: hennessey & ingalls, 1973. 311-36. stevens, wallace. collected poems. 1954. new york: knopf, 1971. —​—​—​. the necessary angel: essays on reality and the imagination. 1951. new york: vintage, 1965. —​—​—​. opus posthumous. 1957. ed. milton j. bates. new york: vintage, 1990. tambling, jeremy. “dante and blake: allegorizing the event.” dante’s modern afterlife: reception and response from blake to heaney. ed. nick havely. basingstoke: macmillan, 1998. 33-48. tinkler-villani, valeria. visions of dante in english poetry: translations of the “commedia” from jonathan richardson to william blake. amsterdam: rodopi, 1989. toynbee, paget. dante in english literature from chaucer to cary. 2 vols. london: methuen, 1909. vaught brogan, jacqueline. “it must be re-newed: dante’s comedy and stevens’ ‘notes toward a supreme fiction.’” lectura dantis 7 (1990): 122-32. warner, janet a. blake and the language of art. kingston and montreal: mcgill-queen’s university press, 1984. wells, william. william blake’s “heads of the poets.” manchester: manchester city art gallery, 1969. wentersdorf, karl p. “wallace stevens, dante alighieri, and the emperor.” twentieth century literature 13.4 (1968): 197-204. yates, frances a. “transformations of dante’s ugolino.” journal of the warburg and courtauld institutes 14 (1951): 92-117. b l a k e vo l . 5 8 no. 2 fa l l 2 024 angela esterhammer, victoria college, university of toronto nelson hilton, university of georgia tilar j. mazzeo, colby college robert w. rix, university of copenhagen joseph viscomi, university of north carolina at chapel hill david worrall, the nottingham trent university martin butlin, tate gallery, london, retired tristanne j. connolly, university of waterloo detlef w. dörrbecker, university of trier sibylle erle, university of lincoln robert n. essick, university of california, riverside a d v i s o r y b o a r d a n i l l u s t r a t e d q u a r t e r l y volume 58 number 2 fall 2024 c o n t e n t s www.blakequarterly.org © 2024 copyright blake/an illustrated quarterly cover: adapted detail of blake’s frontispiece (after fuseli) to j. c. lavater, aphorisms on man (1788). huntington library, san marino, california, call no. 57431 (blake’s copy). image courtesy of the william blake archive. e d i t o r s editor: morton d. paley co-editor, 1970–2024: morris eaves book review editor: sibylle erle exhibitions editor: luisa calè bibliographer (criticism): wayne c. ripley bibliographers (music): camila oliveira, jason whittaker sales review editor: mark crosby managing editor: sarah jones sarah.jones@rochester.edu production office: department of english, university of rochester, rochester ny 14627-0451 article the ambiguities of translation: fuseli, blake, and the making of aphorisms on man by sarah carter reviews andrew m. cooper, a bastard kind of reasoning: william blake and geometry reviewed by sharon choe matthew leporati, romantic epics and the mission of empire reviewed by jason whittaker matthew mauger, william blake and the visionary law: prophecy, legislation and constitution reviewed by david worrall review: joseph fletcher, william blake as natural philosopher, 1788–1795 joseph fletcher. william blake as natural philosopher, 1788–​1795. london: anthem press, 2022. viii + 264 pp. £80.00/​$125.00, hardcover; £25.00/​$40.00, e-book. reviewed by james rovira james rovira (jamesrovira@gmail.com) is program director of general education and of graduate studies at keiser university melbourne, florida. his most recent works include women in rock, women in romanticism (routledge, 2023), david bowie and romanticism (palgrave macmillan, 2022), reading as democracy in crisis: interpretation, theory, history (lexington books, 2019), the first-year writing text writing for college and beyond (lulu press, 2019), rock and romanticism: post-punk, goth, and metal as dark romanticisms (palgrave macmillan, 2018), and rock and romanticism: blake, wordsworth, and rock from dylan to u2 (lexington books, 2018). he is currently developing the collection heavy metal and romanticism with julian knox. joseph fletcher’s william blake as natural philosopher, 1788–​1795 dedicates itself to the task of defining blake’s position on a variety of questions asked by eighteenth-century natural science, which in contemporary terms consisted of a mixture of philosophy of science, philosophy of nature, and empirical study. because blake wrote poetry that at times appears simple while being very complex, and that at other times drops all pretenses to simplicity, i believe that this task is doomed to fail. apart from the inherent difficulties of translating literature into philosophy or science, blake often presents the added difficulty of juxtaposing a number of highly developed, varying subjectivities and points of view within the same work, so that it’s nearly impossible to identify any one point of view with the author’s own. does he adopt any one character’s point of view as his own, or does he occupy a third position located outside the text, only observing the interplay of these characters and their ideas, perhaps agreeing with some characters’ ideas but not others? additionally, blake writes in a mythological mode. are his characters even human? are they anthropomorphic representations of social or psychological forces? something else? how would we define the natural philosophy of a mythological figure, and what kind of evidence could we present to align that view with blake’s own? however difficult or even impossible the task, attempting it helps us more fully understand blake. an exposition of his relationship to eighteenth-century natural philosophy can (and certainly does in fletcher’s work) illuminate representations of the natural world in his works as well as larger questions about the nature and existence of god and the relationship of god to the material universe. it’s possible that one of the greatest insights into blake that fletcher offers is the interrelatedness of these two questions: what was blake’s religion or theology? where did he stand in terms of the natural philosophy of his day? fletcher’s monograph therefore yields significant insights, particularly in terms of the breadth of figures in natural philosophy that he covers and his care in reading them closely. he also mitigates some of the pitfalls inherent to analyzing a moving target such as blake by using two strategies. first, he deliberately limits the time frame of his study to a seven-year period, 1788 to 1795, which seems necessary both to the level of detail of his argument and to the fact that even within that limited time frame, according to fletcher’s argument, blake’s position continually evolves. presenting an evolving blake is fletcher’s second mitigating strategy: it keeps him from bluntly imposing a single thesis on his material as he registers changes in blake’s ideas over time, leading to some reversals by the end of the period under consideration. fletcher follows the evolution of blake’s natural philosophy in four chapters, followed by a coda, that pair blake’s works with european natural philosophers from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, each chapter focused on a different area of natural philosophy. chapter 1 juxtaposes all religions are one and there is no natural religion against locke’s “natural religion or deism” from a point of view close to leibniz’s “anti-lockean, anti-newtonian panpsychism,” aligning blake with panpsychism and a view of nature that is “dynamic” and “transformative” (15). in the process, fletcher strengthens his case for sympathy between blake and leibniz by contrasting blake’s views with berkeley’s. for example, he distinguishes blake from berkeley on the concept of “vision,” which for blake is a matter of insight provided by “the innate poetic genius” (23), while for berkeley vision is associated only with sensory organs. later in the chapter, he draws upon hume to better define blake’s critique of natural religion, and he ends with a discussion of how blake’s designs reinforce his claims. the position on which fletcher settles is that blake’s and leibniz’s “material universe is infinite and ensouled” (41). in this account, blake’s god is coextensive with the material universe, animating it and giving it mind (panpsychism), so that god and the material universe are in a state of continual and mutual becoming. if this reading is valid, then blake is a significant predecessor of process theology. chapter 2, “soul matter: the marriage of heaven and hell and monist pantheism,” “focuses on three sets of philosophical ‘contraries’ introduced in the marriage: soul/​body, god/​material world[,] and imagination (poetic genius)/​sensory perception” (45), reinforcing blake’s emphasis on the mutuality and interdependence of these contraries. this long, complex chapter integrates discussion of multiple figures, from plato to the eighteenth century, which is simultaneously its weakness and its strength. the close reading of these figures (and others throughout) by itself justifies the existence of the book and draws out a number of suggestive possibilities for future readings of blake. according to fletcher, blake’s goal is the “dissolution of dualistic metaphysics—​a marriage of contraries—​and a proclamation of monism” (45). he observes how early in marriage “the body is indistinguishable from the soul,” citing aristotle’s conception of the soul in de anima and other works “describing soul-body interfusion by plato, the neoplatonists and stoic and epicurean philosophers” (46) as background to blake. fletcher’s history of ideas proceeds through hobbes, descartes, locke, and newton, leading up to priestley. he then ends with a discussion of blake’s epistemology related to this subject, asking how we know what we know about the soul to draw attention to blake’s emphasis on imagination over the senses. fletcher associates blake with a “platonically derived pantheism” (49), so that blake identifies god not only with humanity but with the entire material universe. he associates blake’s identification of soul and body with “aristotelian hylomorphism” (53), which asserts that all of nature consists of a compound of matter and form, so that all beings are composite in nature. overall, blake’s position here locates “god solely in material beings” (95), so that we live in a “pantheistic universe of motile, energized bodies that, as hylomorphic entities, are themselves—​humans, animals, plants and all nonorganic forms—​inextricably infused with soul, or divinity” (100); fletcher elaborates later that this is a spinozan (monist), panpsychist pantheism (101). so far, fletcher’s first two chapters have described a transition in blake’s thought from “panpsychist panentheism to monist pantheism” (113). chapter 3, “breathing dust: erasmus darwin and blake’s regenerative materialism,” backgrounds blake’s monist pantheism (while still asserting it) to focus more on his critique of dualism, seeing that critique in darwin’s the botanic garden and the early tractates, marriage, and then thel, europe, and the song of los. regarding darwin, fletcher claims that his “poetic equating of plant and human sexual behavior in the loves of the plants is an early instance of the concept of flat ontology in his work” (116), a concept held contra the great chain of being. he draws interesting parallels between darwin and blake, associating darwin’s note on “central fires” and his ideas about “the sun’s fire as a vital principle inherent in matter: both poets draw on ancient ideas concerning this material celestial flame”; he even identifies darwin’s “second sun at the center of the earth” with blake’s title-page illustration for marriage (120). blake and darwin similarly personify flora (127). fletcher’s reading of the character of thel is that ultimately “her flight marks a failure to embrace the monist panpsychist/​pantheist philosophy that is described in the botanic garden and the marriage, and which is shared by thel ’s nonhuman characters” (143). he presents a europe that “illustrates, on a broader scale than does thel, the multiple ways in which a dualist metaphysics that removes divinity from the material world constitutes a binding of the infinite and the implementation of hierarchical power structures and the forms of oppression that follow therefrom” (166). similarly, the song of los “demonstrates affinities with darwin’s vital materialism,” and “blake makes his monist, pantheist argument in the poem’s conclusion, which, unlike the endings of thel and europe, conveys a hylozoist image of material regeneration” (167). chapter 3, overall, presents a view of blake’s natural philosophy that has not evolved from the one described in chapter 2—​blake is still a “monist pantheist”—​but rather that shows blake's elaboration on the implications of that position. in chapter 4, “‘horrible forms of deformity’: the urizen cycle and vitalist materialism,” fletcher pits “vitalist natural philosophies,” on the one hand, and newtonian science, on the other, against blake’s own position as articulated in the urizen books: the [first] book of urizen, the book of ahania, and the book of los. both vitalism and newtonian science, though opposed to one another, in fletcher’s opinion occlude “the living, intelligent, energetic flames that comprise the infinite, divine universe” (179). the urizen books in fact dramatize the opposition between vitalist natural philosophies and newtonian science and, additionally, mark blake’s “turn away from [his] early poetic and visual expressions of pantheistic monism” (180). in fletcher’s reading, when blake opposes “eternity and urizenic creation” he is not pitting immaterialism against materialism but “divisive, self-contemplating isolation” against “community and interdependence” (189). fletcher engages newton’s principia in this chapter as well as voltaire’s popularization of newton. he likens the imagery associated with urizen’s creation to the creation “of the earth and astral bodies in [plato’s] timaeus” (192), and curiously asserts that “the eternals, including urizen and los, are material,” so that blake is drawing from “epicurean metaphysics, which likewise does not posit a creator god, but rather argues that matter has always existed” (200). fletcher builds upon previous work comparing blake’s ideas in the urizen books to william harvey’s on animal generation and john hunter’s treatise on the blood to affirm that “blake … believed life not to depend on organization but rather to be a property of the globules of blood themselves” (202). he proposes a vitalism “not dependent upon a dualist metaphysics” (203). he casts his net wide in this chapter, examining the opinions of a variety of near contemporaries of blake’s, including la mettrie, pierre-louis de maupertuis, diderot, john needham, georges-louis leclerc (comte de buffon)—​as translated by j. s. barr in 1792—​and erasmus darwin’s zoonomia in the areas of vitalism and panpsychism and their relationship. most of these figures, however, are (or would be) unsatisfactory to blake because they either posit “a remote, deistic god” or “were explicitly atheistic” (219). it’s worth noting that fletcher argues that the urizen books dramatize debates among many of these figures as well. he asserts, most importantly, that “blake does not want a double vision, but rather a monist one: there is no spiritual world”; blake instead “conveys the flat ontology of his divine material monism” (225). flat ontology is the assertion that all beings exist equally: there are no gradations in “beingness,” even though beings have different degrees of influence in the world. the trajectory of the urizen cycle, fletcher argues in the book’s final section, “coda: the ghost of pantheism,” mutes blake’s monist materialism to the point that it is “eventually abandoned by the end of the urizen cycle” (229). if at any time fletcher has sounded contradictory in some readings of blake, it’s often because he’s describing a transformation of philosophical commitments over the course of these works. from this point, i’m going to address some shortcomings in fletcher’s argument that illuminate the general work that needs to be done when literary works are used to establish an author’s scientific or philosophical position. in chapter 1, he settles on specific positions implied or asserted by blake’s tractates. he also asserts, however, that in there is no natural religion blake is not “interested in constructing unassailable propositional proofs. rather, blake uses numbered premises and philosophical subheadings for satirical effect” (39). this claim seems to undo his argument: if blake is writing satire, what is left of fletcher’s claims about blake, which are dependent upon readings of blake that take him at face value? he says that the tractates “point to a metaphysical system and an intellectual tradition that other philosophers have elaborated in more rational detail” (39), but he doesn’t incorporate satirical intent into his close readings of blake to arrive at this conclusion. how do we account for blake’s satire, then? i believe that this facet of fletcher’s argument reflects the primary inherent difficulty of ascribing a scientific position to an author based on a literary work: scientific language requires specificity, ideally to the point of one term having one and only one meaning in any context. literary works are more often the opposite, capitalizing on polysemy and the playfulness and misdirection of genres such as satire. fletcher attempts to derive a natural philosophy from a satirical work. he may have set himself an impossible task, so he cannot be faulted for failing in this attempt. i think he could only be successful if the point of blake’s satire was to support a different natural philosophy. problems also arise in chapter 2, as fletcher navigates through his material figure by figure, attempting to locate blake’s position in relationship to each. the philosophic and early scientific texts that fletcher engages are extended, usually focused discussions of their subject. the marriage of heaven and hell, on the other hand, collects poetry, aphorisms, and apocryphal narrative in a diffuse discussion of a number of subjects, some of which represent the points of view of different characters. blake’s marginalia, also quoted in this chapter, comprise short, direct comments, written at the moment of his reading, in response to different texts. blake never works out a coherent position about any of the topics engaged in this chapter through an extended, systematic discussion, as fletcher acknowledges himself. as a result, interpretations of blake are consistently plagued with multiple possibilities, a common and even desirable feature of literary texts, but not a feature suitable for clearly establishing a single scientific position. fletcher presents a number of plausible, intriguing readings, but i’m unsure why a reader would accept his readings over others. for example, he points to the marriage of angel and devil at the end of marriage as well as the text’s assertion that man has “no body distinct from his soul” as signs of blake’s monism. but by associating blake both with hylomorphism and with pantheism, especially spinoza’s pantheism, he seems caught in a dilemma: it’s not clear how a view of an essentially compound nature can be reconciled with a view of nature as different modalities of a single substance. the two might be reconcilable, but fletcher doesn’t do this work. furthermore, the belief that there is no body distinct from the soul is an explicitly catholic belief, and has been for centuries. the current catechism asserts, citing the 1312 council of vienne, that the unity of soul and body is so profound that one has to consider the soul to be the “form” of the body: i.e., it is because of its spiritual soul that the body made of matter becomes a living, human body; spirit and matter, in man, are not two natures united, but rather their union forms a single nature.catechism of the catholic church, 2nd ed., #365 <http://​www.​scborromeo.​org/​ccc/​p1s2c1p6.​htm#ii>. i’m not asserting that blake was a catholic, or that we should prefer catholic readings of blake to others, but that the catholic church uses almost the same language without holding to spinoza’s monism. aquinas was aristotelian and assumed hylomorphism, but he probably would have been appalled at spinoza. the problem here is not that we ought to choose one reading or another, but that blake’s language can be taken more than one way, and fletcher can’t give us a reason to choose between these irreconcilable readings—​which we must if we’re going to make claims about blake’s own natural philosophy. an additional difficulty is posed by the word “pantheism” itself, a term whose definition was subject to debate during blake’s lifetime. it’s not just that fletcher’s reading of blake is one of several possible readings, but so is his reading of spinoza. for example, schelling’s 1809 philosophical investigations into the essence of human freedom and related mattersall quotations of schelling are from ernst behler, ed., philosophy of german idealism: fichte, jacobi, and schelling, the german library, vol. 23 (new york: continuum, 1987). includes an extended discussion of spinoza that considers a variety of definitions of pantheism. he begins with three: 1) the “immanence of things in god”; 2) “complete identification of god with all things” (222); and 3) a modification of the second definition that in spinoza’s philosophy “the individual object is equal to god” (223). schelling then goes on to consider pantheism as relating to substance and pantheism as relating to will, an idea that briefly comes up near the end of fletcher’s book in relationship to maupertuis and leibniz (fletcher 207). without going into further detail, while schelling departs from spinoza on some points, he believes that all three of these definitions of pantheism represent misunderstandings of spinoza. the important idea here is not a preference for one reading of spinoza over another, but the need to address these different possible readings. even though blake certainly did not read schelling, especially this specific text, during the period under consideration by the book, fletcher does consider other authors blake very likely didn’t read to establish a milieu, and schelling represents readings of spinoza contemporary with blake’s lifetime. i don’t believe that i have invalidated fletcher’s thesis, just that additional work needs to be done before he can be said to have supported his argument. a defense of pantheism in blake is key to fletcher’s claims, as this interpretation appears early in the book, where he refers to blake’s annotations to lavater: “it is the god in all that is our companion & friend. … every thing on earth is the word of god & in its essence is god” (6). fletcher emphasizes in this passage that “blake’s stress of ‘all ’ and ‘every thing’ implies a flat ontology whose essence he claims is divinity” (6). however, during this period, it was possible to embrace a flat ontology in which human beings are “instead among beings, entangled in beings, and implicated in other beings” (6, quoting levi bryant) without embracing pantheism. flat ontology in bryant’s (and fletcher’s) terms conforms to romantic/​organic philosophies as opposed to newtonian/​mechanistic philosophies with or without the support of pantheism. fletcher’s reading of blake as pantheist forms a substantial basis for the early chapters of his book, but it isn’t sufficiently defended against other possible readings. the essay by schelling that i mention above directly addresses different ideas that could be implied by the phrase “in … essence … god,” some of which do not support pantheism in fletcher's sense. because fletcher’s argument consists of an elaboration of blake’s beliefs in the area of natural philosophy, any one claim about this topic necessarily excludes other readings rather than stands alongside them. fletcher’s type of argument should reduce polysemy as much as possible. in the process, he should consider alternate readings to dispense with them, especially for such a key concept. eliminating polysemy to establish a scientific or philosophical position requires special care and attention, especially when the text itself relies on simultaneously active multiple meanings of even individual words to achieve its literary effect. when discussing the urizen books, fletcher is careful to say that his readings do not “discount readings of the urizen poems as instances of blake’s grotesque satire of the biblical and miltonic accounts of genesis” (181). since blake wasn’t writing scientific or philosophical tractates, fletcher’s work involves isolating scientific and philosophical positions in texts focused on other areas. as he says, “this chapter brackets the scriptural, political and miltonic approaches to the urizen poems in order to emphasize their relation to natural-philosophic discussions” (182). that is always the work that books like this must do. however, polysemy needs to be reduced or eliminated in relationship to this emphasis by carefully identifying a variety of scientific and philosophic positions possible and presenting an argument that eliminates all rivals as far as possible. while fletcher does consider a number of different natural-philosophic positions, his usual strategy is to quote blake, assert a reading, and then align blake with a position, but not to quote blake and then develop an argument for one reading of blake over another in the area of natural philosophy. he makes similar errors in his reading of scriptural material, saying that darwin’s conclusions are “anti-biblical [and] proto-evolutionary” (215), but scripture itself is also subject to numerous conflicting interpretations from the points of view of different traditions. perhaps blake is critical of anglican theology but more closely aligned with catholic? i believe that argument can be made in relationship to the bible itself. fletcher asserts that “we should not equate the eternals with blake’s perspective, as i do the devil” (186), which establishes a position late in the book, but again, he doesn’t present an argument to support this reading. blake’s position is very likely that of all the eternals combined, urizen included, in an unfallen state. if blake’s perspective is on the side of the devils in marriage, why is the marriage with the angel necessary? i think i have learned that scholarship establishing an author’s scientific or philosophical positions from literary works has to accomplish the following tasks: 1.  account for genre; 2. eliminate polysemy as far as possible in the area under inquiry; 3. establish authorial position in relationship to the text, supported with evidence. i don’t believe that fletcher fully performed those tasks, but i don’t believe that shortcoming invalidates his readings either. i just believe that more work needs to be carried out in order to fully support them. b l a k e v ol . 5 5, n o. 2 , f al l 2 02 1 angela esterhammer, victoria college, university of toronto nelson hilton, university of georgia tilar j. mazzeo, colby college robert w. rix, university of copenhagen joseph viscomi, university of north carolina at chapel hill david worrall, the nottingham trent university martin butlin, tate gallery, london, retired tristanne j. connolly, university of waterloo detlef w. dörrbecker, university of trier sibylle erle, bishop grosseteste university robert n. essick, university of california, riverside a d v i s o r y b o a r d a n i l l u s t r a t e d q u a r t e r l y volume 55 number 2 fall 2021 c o n t e n t s www.blakequarterly.org remembrance “all his neighbourhood bewail his loss”: bo ossian lindberg, 1937–2021 by morton d. paley articles the body in the line: “trasumanar” in blake’s dante by silvia riccardi blake, methodism, and “christian perfection” by christopher z. hobson reviews sheila a. spector, the evolution of blake’s myth reviewed by r. paul yoder susan mitchell sommers, the siblys of london: a family on the esoteric fringes of georgian england reviewed by wayne c. ripley © 2021 copyright morris eaves and morton d. paley cover: blake, dante adoring christ. watercolor, 1824–27. 52.7 × 37.2 cm. national gallery of victoria, melbourne, felton bequest, 1920. 1020-3. photo: national gallery of victoria, melbourne. e d i t o r s editors: morris eaves and morton d. paley review editor: alexander s. gourlay exhibitions editor: luisa calè bibliographer (criticism): wayne c. ripley bibliographer (music): jason whittaker managing editor: sarah jones sarah.jones@rochester.edu production office: department of english, university of rochester, rochester ny 14627-0451 william blake and his circle: a checklist of publications and discoveries in 2015 william blake and his circle: a checklist of publications and discoveries in 2015 by with the assistance of hikari sato for japanese publications, of li-ping geng 耿力平 for chinese publications, and of fernando castanedo for spanish publications g. e. bentley, jr.’s thomas macklin (1752–1800) picture-publisher and patron is in the press. editors’ notes: the invaluable bentley checklist has grown to the point where we are unable to publish it in its entirety. all the material will be incorporated into the cumulative “william blake and his circle” and “sale catalogues of william blake’s works” on the bentley blake collection site, victoria university in the university of toronto. the article below includes previously unrecorded copy, binding, and history information for the works of blake and his circle, catalogues and editions from the last ten years (2006 on), and criticism from the last ten years and prior to the publication of gilchrist’s life (1863). a number of entries have a link to an online article or catalogue. some such items are freely accessible, and others may be behind a subscription barrier, depending on your or your institution’s access. all are included on the ground that even those with restricted access often provide a freely available abstract or excerpt. addenda and corrigenda to blake records, 2nd ed. (2004), now appear online. they are updated yearly in conjunction with the publication of the checklist. table of contents: introductory essay symbols abbreviations division i: william blake part i: blake’s writings section a: original editions, facsimiles, reprints, and translations section b: collections and selections part ii: reproductions of drawings and paintings section a: illustrations of individual authors part iii: commercial engravings section a: illustrations of individual authors appendix: books improbably alleged to have blake engravings part iv: catalogues and bibliographies section a: individual catalogues part v: books owned by william blake the poet part vi: criticism, biography, and scholarly studies division ii: blake’s circle barry, james cumberland, george edwardses of halifax flaxman, john fuseli, john henry hayley, william palmer, samuel stothard, thomas watson, caroline blake publications and discoveries in 2015 the checklist of blake publications in 2015 includes works in chinese,note that publications in chinese are for china only, not for hong kong, singapore, or taiwan. note also that there was no edition of blake in chinese, only one book about blake (see ying, pengiu in part vi), and no essay on blake in books. czech, french, japanese, korean, portuguese, russian, spanish, swedish, and turkish, and there are newly recorded doctoral dissertations from beijing foreign studies university (china), california institute of integral studies (usa), houston (usa), karnatak (india), north carolina (chapel hill, usa), universidad nacional autónoma de méxico (mexico), western ontario (canada), and zhejiang (china). william blake in the library of congress some of the 2450 entries under william blake in the online catalogue of the library of congress are complicated by the presence of prolific publishers named william blake in bordeaux and boston. blake’s writings blake’s letter of 18 january 1808 (a) was sold. the copy of songs of innocence (w) with 22 prints was last traced in 1941 when it was acquired at sotheby’s by a dealer for £50, or about us $11.36 per print.in 1941, £1=$5. seventy-four years later the owner (still anonymous) walked into john windle’s san francisco bookshop and persuaded him to sell it print by print on consignment. the prices were not made public, but they are likely to have been in the neighborhood of us $50,000 per print, an increase of 4500%. for the new owners, see the table of collections, addenda, in part i, section a. songs of innocence (w) may be among the first pulls for works in illuminated printing by blake and catherine, and it exhibits many signs of inexpert printing. some prints are overor underor unevenly inked, the pressure on the plate is sometimes heavier on one side than another, and some are printed with too much pressure, so that ink is picked up from the recesses in the copper. new blake commercial engraving recorded? blake is said to have engraved a medal labeled “stone henge | 1796” for “the ancient druids universal brethren.” however, the allegation is mere assertion without supporting evidence. catalogues and bibliographies through the kindness of joseph viscomi, a significant number of dealers’ catalogues (1852–62) offering blakes are recorded here for the first time. in these catalogues, blake’s work is often described as “sublime.” among the most interesting offerings is æsop’s fables (stockdale, 1793) with “beautiful engravings by blake” and others, though no print bears his name. robert n. essick, “blake in the marketplace” in blake has grown since its modest beginning in 1974 to become an extraordinarily comprehensive and meticulous record of public and private sales of works by blake and his circle. his account of the rediscovery of songs of innocence (w) after its disappearance three quarters of a century ago is characteristic of his achievement. previously unknown copy of a book owned by blake a copy of rabbi leo modena’s the history of the present jews (1707) (illus. 4) appeared unexpectedly with a signature of “w.m blake” on the flyleaf (illus. 5) that is very similar to the signatures in blake’s letters. the work was discovered through the purest serendipity. i had gone into the fisher rare book library of the university of toronto for another purpose, and there i met an old friend, philip oldfield of the rare book department. he mentioned casually that some time before he had encountered a book, long in the library, that bore a signature of william blake. he did a little research on it with no conclusive result. he said he had long been meaning to get in touch with me about it. had i not happened to come in when he was on duty, i might never have heard of it. * * * * * * * * * the annual checklist concerning william blake and his circle records publications and discoveries for the current year (say, 2015) and those for previous years that are not recorded in blake books, blake books supplement, and “william blake and his circle.” installments of “william blake and his circle” are continuations of blake books and blake books supplement, with similar principles and conventions. i have made no systematic attempt to record audio books and magazines, blogs, broadcasts on radiotamsin rosewell, “the poet and the prophet” in three parts—“our jerusalem,” “charter’d streets,” and “burning bright”—on resonancefm, beginning nov. 2015. and television, broadsides, calendars, cards, cd-roms, chinaware, coffee mugs, comic books, computer printouts (unpublished), conferences, dvds, e-mails, festivalsa blake festival at felpham on 18 and 25 july 2015. and lecture series, flash cards, furniture, interactive multimedia, jewelry, lectures on audiocassettes, lipstick, manuscripts about blake, maps,andrea mclean and henry eliot, william blake’s life & visions in felpham’s vale [recto] and golgonooza: the spiritual fourfold london [verso] ([london]: blake society, 2015), map 58 cm. (23.25″) square; isbn: 9780993185007. microforms, mosaics, movies, murals, music, notebooks (blank), novels merely tangentially about blake, operas,in 2015 opera omaha is said to be developing an opera with the felicitous working title stranger from paradise. pageants, performances,jorge vidales, “songs of experience—five songs of william blake” (2011), premiered at mexico city’s palacio de bellas artes, manuel m. ponce hall, on 30 may 2015. the songs were performed by the ensamble tamayo and sung by soprano irasema terrazas. pillows, places named after blake, playing cards, plays, podcasts, poems about blake, portraits, postcards, posters and individual pictures, recorded readings and singings, refrigerator magnets, stained-glass windows, stamps (postage and rubber), stickers, sweatshirts, tapestries, t-shirts, tattoos (temporary and permanent), tiles, typescripts (unpublished), video recordings, and web sites. research for this checklist was carried out particularly in the libraries of the university of toronto and victoria university in the university of toronto, as well as with the electronic resources of copac, google, google books, google scholar, worldcat, jstor, and the mla international bibliography. works published in japan were found in cinii (national institute of informatics scholarly and academic information navigator), the national diet library online catalogue, komaba library and general library of the university of tokyo, and the national diet library. information for works published in china derives from the national library of china (beijing). research for works in spanish was carried out in the humanities library of the universidad carlos iii de madrid. i am grateful for assistance from robert n. essick (particularly for an early sight of his “blake in the marketplace, 2015” for blake), sarah jones (for superlative editing), jeff mertz (for reproductions of obscure essays), philip oldfield (for the discovery of the new book with blake’s signature), morton d. paley, and joseph viscomi (for drawing my attention to the willis and sotheran catalogues), as well as from my collaborators, hikari sato, li-ping geng, and fernando castanedo. symbols * works prefixed by an asterisk include one or more illustrations by blake or depicting him. if there are more than 19, the number is specified. if the illustrations include all those for a work by blake, say thel or his illustrations to l’ allegro, the work is identified. § works preceded by a section mark are reported on second-hand authority. abbreviations bb g. e. bentley, jr., blake books (1977) bbs g. e. bentley, jr., blake books supplement (1995) blake blake/an illustrated quarterly <blake ([year])> the installment of “william blake and his circle” published in blake in the year specified br(2) g. e. bentley, jr., blake records, 2nd ed. (2004) butlin martin butlin, the paintings and drawings of william blake (1981) essick, separate plates robert n. essick, the separate plates of william blake: a catalogue (1983) isbn international standard book number in the checklist, english translations of the titles of articles, books, and journals in other languages are often contained in either parentheses or brackets. parentheses indicate that the title is also included in english in the work; brackets that it is not. some journals, such as notes and queries, are published online several months before the hard copy appears. division i: william blake part i: blake’s writings section a: original editions, facsimiles, reprints, and translations editors’ note: please consult bentley, “sale catalogues of william blake’s works,” for further particulars of catalogues mentioned in this section. table of collections addenda robert n. essick illuminated work: songs of innocence (w) pls. 2, 5, 15, 25, 54 indiana university illuminated work: songs of innocence (w) pl. 8 morgan library and museum illuminated work: songs of innocence (w) pls. 6-7 university of north carolina, chapel hill illuminated work: songs of innocence (w) pls. 22-24 northwestern university illuminated work: songs of innocence (w) pls. 12, 20-21 alan parker illuminated work: songs of innocence (w) pls. 4, 27 victoria university in the university of toronto illuminated work: songs of innocence (w) pls. 3, 11, 16-17, 26 private owners and public institutions that have disposed of original blakes addenda anonymous illuminated work: songs of innocence (w)the remaining plate (pl. 19) is presumably still available from john windle. pls. 2-8, 11-12, 15-17, 20-27, 54 america (1793) copy h it is reproduced in vahiy kitapları (2015) (see part i, section b). the book of ahania (1795) it is reproduced in vahiy kitapları (2015) (see part i, section b). the book of los (1795) copy a it is reproduced in vahiy kitapları (2015) (see part i, section b). the book of thel (1789) copy d it is probably the copy reproduced in vahiy kitapları (2015) (see part i, section b). copy j history: sotheran bought it bound with visions of the daughters of albion (g) at christie’s sale of george smith, 1 april 1880, lot 165, £85, and offered it in sotheran catalogues (30 november 1881 and 1881) at £105. europe (1794) copy d it is probably the copy reproduced in vahiy kitapları (2015) (see part i, section b). copy h the leaf size is 24.8 x 35.8 cm., not 24.8 x 30.8 as in bb p. 142. the first book of urizen (1794) copy d it is probably the copy reproduced in vahiy kitapları (2015) (see part i, section b). an island in the moon (1784?) edition *una isla en la luna. edición bilingüe de fernando castanedo. traducción de fernando castanedo. 2014. <blake (2015)> reviews *ángel rupérez, “resucitar a los inmortales,” el país (babelia) [madrid] 21 march 2015: 6 (with others) (in spanish). *manuel de la fuente, “blake. el debut literario del artista antes de sentirse iluminado” [also online as “el debut literario del william blake antes de sentirse un poeta iluminado”], abc [madrid] 27 april 2015: 48-49 (in spanish). letters 18 january 1808 (a) blake’s letter to ozias humphry of 18 january 1808 (a) was sold (see 2015 18 march in part iv, section a). edition *william blake: první z mých andělů. dopisy. trans. pavel černovský. prague: malvern, 2014. 168 pp. isbn: 9788087580967. in czech. reviews, notices, etc. §josef rauvolf, “william blake intimnější,” lidové noviny 2 april 2015: 9. in czech. §anon., “william blake,” tvar 1 aug. 2015: 1. the marriage of heaven and hell (1790–93?) editions *the marriage of heaven and hell [b]. ed. michael phillips. 2011. <blake (2012)> review jonathan downing, bodleian library record 27.2 (oct. 2014): 126-28 (“a careful, rich, and engaging contextualisation of blake’s work”; “the book’s highlight” is “the commentary”). §the marriage of heaven and hell: romantic and revolutionary biblical prophecy. createspace independent publishing platform, 2015. 26 pp. the song of los (1795) copy a or d one of them is probably the copy reproduced in vahiy kitapları (2015) (see part i, section b). copy f it is reproduced in the william blake archive edition (2015), below. edition *the song of los [f]. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2015. songs of innocence (1789) table copy plates missing or added [a] leaves watermarks blake nos. leaf size in cm. printing color w (various owners) [b] -9-10, 13-14, 18, 34-36, 53 22 [c] j whatman vertical (pl. 23) — 11.8 x 20.2 black a. for innocence, the normal prints are 2-27, 34-36, 53-54. b. for the owners, see the table of collections, addenda, and private owners and public institutions that have disposed of original blakes, addenda, above. c. there was a blank leaf before the first print and another after the last one. order of the plates in songs of innocence copy w 3, 2, 4, 6-7, 25, 11-12, 19, 15, 8, 5, 20-21, 16-17, 22-23, 27, 24, 26, 54 copy i it is reproduced in the william blake archive edition (2015), below. copy w the information here derives from (1) reproductions of songs of innocence (w); (2) examination of pls. 3, 11, 16-17, 26, acquired by victoria university in the university of toronto; (3) robert n. essick’s description prepared for “blake in the marketplace, 2015” in blake, including reproductions of pls. 2-3 and 25; (4) descriptions (particularly the history) of songs of innocence (w) in bb pp. 366, 377, 411-12, and bentley, “sale catalogues of william blake’s works.” binding and description: the leaves, with fragments of thread, were glued (not sewn) into a thick paper wrapper apparently of a later date, split at the hinges, and inserted loose in a black morocco binding with a gilt frame lettered in the center “william blake.” there is no lettering on the spine. about a quarter of the backstrip is missing. the thick wrappers do not match the paper of the paste-down endpapers in the morocco binding. the blank leaf between the front wrapper and the first plate and a matching blank between the last plate and the back wrapper are 20.5 cm. in height, whereas the paste-downs are 19.9 cm. high. (the 1941 description of it as in “wrappers, loose in morocco binding” indicates that it was then in the state in which it was brought to john windle in 2015.) three stabholes, not part of the glued binding, 5.0 cm. from the top edge, are 3.7 and 3.7 cm. apart,no similar pattern of stabholes is recorded for any of blake’s other works (bb p. 55, bbs p. 31). with fragments of thread from a later binding (essick). the stabholes are very close to or on the inner margin, and in at least one case (pl. 3, the title page) there is no stabhole, as if the leaf had been torn out. the edges are a little dirty and ragged but not gilt or colored. the upper margins of a few leaves seem to show stains from a liquid, and a few others, for example pls. 22 and 27, have ragged right margins. the rectos of the prints have deckle edges on the right side and at either top or bottom. the versos of the prints exhibit show-through, and the verso of pl. 7 (the second plate of “the ecchoing green”) shows considerable oxidation from pl. 25 (“infant joy”). the borders are mostly wiped clean of ink (except for the bottom border of pl. 4), though posthumous copies printed by tatham show the dark borders, and the printing of pls. 3, 5, 19, 21, 25, 27, and 54 is a little faint or blurred. songs of innocence (u-w), printed on only one side of the leaves in brownish-black or black ink, u and w uncolored, with the borders wiped clean, are probably the earliest copies of songs of innocence and probably the earliest printing of any book in illuminated printing. no other copy of songs of innocence or of songs of innocence and of experience is bound in the order of songs of innocence (w). the prints in the recent order (before they were disbound) are numbered in pencil in a non-blakean hand 2, 1 (barely visible), 3-20, 25-26. the omission of numbers 21-24 may suggest that four of the missing nine prints were once present. perhaps they and the other missing prints were damaged and discarded. at the lower left of pl. 15, “laughing song,” in an unidentified hand is written “wb” overwritten in a different hand with “laughing”[?], and the verso of the front wrapper is inscribed “llh” (or possibly “££h”), perhaps a dealer’s code. history: sold by a “nobleman” at hodgson’s, 28 june 1940, lot 260, for £25 to “private”;“songs of innocence, 22 leaves including the title page, frontispiece, and ‘introduction’ [pls. 2-4], printed on one side only, uncoloured, watermark: j whatman, c. 8 x 4¾″ [20.32 x 12.065 cm.], uncut, in morocco cover.” sold at sotheby’s, 30 april 1941, lot 641, for £50 to b. f. stevens;“songs of innocence [w?], 22 pl. 7 15/16 x 4 9/16″ [19.72 x 11.875 cm.], printed in brown on one side only, watermark ‘whatman’ ‘on plate 18’ [i.e., pl. 23], lacks ‘school boy’ [pl. 53], ‘little black boy’ [pls. 9-10], ‘the divine image’ [pl. 18], ‘little girl lost’ and ‘little girl found’ [pls. 34-36], ‘little boy lost’ [pl. 13], and ‘little boy found’ [pl. 14], ‘wrappers, loose in morocco binding.’” acquired by a us collector; inherited by a us collector who in april 2015 brought it into the san francisco bookshop of john windle, left it with him on consignment, and directed that it should be disbound. for the current owners, see the table of collections, addenda, and private owners and public institutions that have disposed of original blakes, addenda, above. variant: in pl. 25 (“infant joy”), the first letter of “joy” in the title descends into the petal below, as in songs of innocence (u). copy x it is reproduced in the william blake archive edition (2015), below. copy z it is reproduced in the william blake archive edition (2015), below. editions *songs of innocence [i]. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2015. *songs of innocence [x]. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2015. *songs of innocence [z]. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2015. there is no natural religion (1788?) copy a it is reproduced in the william blake archive edition (2015), below. copy d it is reproduced in the william blake archive edition (2015), below. copy m it is reproduced in the william blake archive edition (2015), below. editions *there is no natural religion [a]. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2015. *there is no natural religion [d]. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2015. *there is no natural religion [m]. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2015. visions of the daughters of albion (1793) copy a history: once offered or sold for “1£/11s/6d” <superscripts above the numbers> on the verso of pl. 1; acquired by the printseller edward evans of great queen street and sold for £25.9.0 on 10 february 1847 as a “colln of etchings & engravings also a drawing by blake [the whore of babylon <butlin #523> (british museum: 1847,0318.123)]; 2 rare prints of prince rupert [and other works not by blake]” to the british museum department of prints and drawings.reports of trustees of the british museum 1802–47, vol. 2, note by w. h. carpenter (keeper of the department of prints and drawings); the purchase was approved on 13 feb. 1847 and registered in the department on 18 march 1847 (1847,0318.93 to 123), as i am told by kim sloan of the british museum central archives. letters from the evans firm to the british museum offer “all the works of blake we have at present” (edw evans, 27 may 1846), “i sent you the blakes” (j [or p] evans, 2 july 1846), and “i think the museum should not neglect the opportunity of poſseſsing the other works by blake i sent for your inspection … they are exceſsively scarce …. i have only sold one which i had had ordered for the last five years …. i have also found out another drawing by blake but have not purchased it yet” (edw evans, 24 feb. 1847), but the british museum bought none of them. a. e. evans & son, catalogue (1845), lot 719, offered visions [a], 11 pp., “beautifully coloured by blake himself,” at £4.4.0, and lot 723, “a very curious coloured drawing, illustrating the revelations by this original artist, signed and dated 1809, 4to. 2l.12s.6d.” [the whore of babylon]. i have a note that visions (a) is inscribed “1848 | 12 8th paid 70s | for this to | a evans & son | london | rt [or perhaps rl] | 4 guineas was asked for it.” however, the inscription cannot be seen today because the mount is pasted over it, the date cannot be reconciled with the undoubted date of acquisition (1847) by the british museum, and i can find no record of a work by blake sold in 1848. copy a, b, or o one of them is probably the copy reproduced in vahiy kitapları (2015) (see part i, section b). copy a the binding and history of copy a in 1910 (bb p. 477) apply rather to pl. 3 (see below). plate 3 binding: loose, framed. history: “a manuscript book, written by members of the chevalier family,” containing “a small framed print in monochrome, by w. blake, of the illustration to the ‘argument of the daughters of albion’—‘the soul stepping on a floweret takes its adieu of the flesh’”“the soul stepping on a floweret takes its adieu of the flesh” is perhaps an inscription on the print. the design represents a small naked figure rising from a flower to kiss a much larger nude woman. the visions reference was pointed out to me by robert n. essick. the reference was reported in bb p. 477 from keynes and wolf, who imply that all six prints (pls. 1-3, 7, 9-10) from visions (a) are described in the catalogue. and “an engraved portrait of thomas chevalier” [1 may 1825] were sold at sotheby’s, 1 dec. 1910, lot 125 [for £3.3.0]. section b: collections and selections *poems. selected and introduced by patti smith. 2007. <blake (2008)> review *richard holmes, “the greatness of william blake,” new york review of books 14 nov. 2015 (with 2 others) (one paragraph in a very long review). *vahiy kitapları. türkçeleştiren [translated by] kaan h. ökten. istanbul: pinhan yayıncılık, 2015. 16 x 24 cm., 233 pp.; isbn: 9786055302511. in turkish. it consists of color reproductions (not true size) with facing translations of thel’in kitabı [the book of thel] (14-29), albion’un kızlarının görüleri [visions of the daughters of albion] (31-53), amerika: bir vahiy [america: a prophecy] (55-91), avrupa: bir vahiy [europe: a prophecy] (93-129), los’un şarkısı [the song of los] (131-47), urizen’in birinci kitabı [the first book of urizen] (149-99), ahania’nın kitabı [the book of ahania] (201-17), los’un kitabı [the book of los] (219-33). the sources of the reproductions are not identified, but most are probably from copies in the british museum: america (h, showing the british museum 1856 stamp), the book of los (a, the only known copy), the book of thel (d), europe (d), the first book of urizen (d), the song of los (a or d), and visions of the daughters of albion (a, b, or o). the only sure exception is the book of ahania, the only known copy of which (a) is in the library of congress. all originals are colored except for america. william blake archive <http://​www.​blakearchive.​org> in 2015 the archive added the song of los (f), songs of innocence (i, x, z), there is no natural religion (a, d, m), 17 pen and ink drawings, the collection list for blake’s works in the society of antiquaries, and 45 back issues of blake, and republished blake’s watercolors to dante’s divine comedy with greater functionality. part ii: reproductions of drawings and paintings section a: illustrations of individual authors blake’s harpers and other drawingsnot in butlin because not discovered until 2010. with preliminary sketches for america and europe on the verso was acquired in october 2015 from lowell libson via john windle by robert n. essick. dante, divine comedy (1826–27) in 2015 the william blake archive republished blake’s watercolors with greater functionality (see william blake archive in part i, section b). edition *los dibujos para la divina comedia de dante. ed. sebastian schütze and maria antonietta terzoli. 2014. in spanish. also available in german, english, french, and italian. <blake (2015)> review §*tim smith-laing, “watery deeps: william blake drew out the poetic nuances of dante’s commedia in masterfully handled watercolour,” apollo 181.629 (march 2015): 208-09. part iii: commercial engravings section a: illustrations of individual authorsi no longer record post-1863 sales of unremarkable copies of books with blake’s commercial engravings. for voluminous records of these, see robert n. essick, “blake in the marketplace, 2015,” blake 49.4 (spring 2016), sent me in pre-publication draft. “carfax conduit, oxford” (1787?) “carfax conduit, oxford”, signed at lower left “blake sc”, no artist identified and no imprint. a copy was acquired in march 2015 by victoria university in the university of toronto (wove paper without watermark 22.0 x 28.2 cm.; the platemark in the essick copy is 26.4 x 35.8 cm.) (see illus. 1). 1. “carfax conduit, oxford” (leaf trimmed to 22.0 x 28.2 cm.), signed at lower left “blake sc”, no artist identified and no imprint (c. 1787) (see enlargement). the hat of the lady and the style of engraving are the best indicators of the date of the engraving. however, all copies known are probably from 1810 ff. image courtesy of victoria university in the university of toronto. the paper is trimmed (probably to make it fit into an album) at the top, eliminating the top of the spire and its weather vane, and at the bottom, eliminating the title below the design. it is pasted to a somewhat larger leaf (with a frame drawn round the printed leaf) slightly uneven on the right margin. the printed title is replaced in pencil by “carfax conduit oxford”.the first reference to the carfax conduit and william blake is in thomas dodd’s manuscript account of blake (c. 1832): blake “engraved … view of carfax conduit oxford” (br[2] 255fn). the basic details of the print are given in robert n. essick, “a ‘new’ william blake engraving?” print quarterly 2 (march 1985): 42-47. much of the description of the monument and its context is new here. i am grateful for advice from essick and carmen socknat. the carfax conduit was erected at the chief crossroad of oxford in 1610 at the initiative and expense of otho nicholson of christ church (which was visible from the conduit) by john clark, a yorkshire stone-carver, “with three several cocks fayerly set out to run water three several ways.” the whole structure is 40′ high, and the water tank is 18-20′ high (judging by the woman and man shown beside it). the woman is wearing a huge hat in the style of the 1780s, and the man is in mortarboard and academic gown. he is clearly explaining the structure to her. note that the shadows of the man and woman—who do not appear in the image in the gentleman’s magazine (see illus. 2)—are at a different angle from those of the conduit itself. on the shadowed side water runs onto the ground.this seems unlikely; surely the water flowed into a trough. the cistern also served several colleges. an elaborate but undated “account of carfax conduit, in oxford, was taken from a ms. paper in the poſſeſſion of a gentleman of the university” and printed in the gentleman’s magazine 41 (dec. 1771): 533-34, along with an engraving of the conduit that is remarkably like the one blake engraved (see illus. 2).the gentleman’s magazine print is pointed out in essick’s essay. it is smaller than blake’s engraving (platemark 17.5 x 31.1 cm. vs. 26.4 x 35.8 cm.). 2. “conduit at carfax in high street oxford”, engraving (platemark 17.5 x 31.1 cm.) from the gentleman’s magazine 41 (dec. 1771), at p. 534, a print remarkably like blake’s (see enlargement). image courtesy of indiana university libraries. i have used the account to identify features of the engravings.its details seem to be from the seventeenth century but its orthography from the eighteenth century. it describes all four sides, though only two sides can be seen in the engravings. some details in the description could not be represented in a mere engraving, such as coloring on the monument for gold crowns, silver wires, and blue escutcheons, even if they were still present in 1771. some of the details of the account that are not visible in the engravings may have disappeared by 1771 when the gentleman’s magazine engraving was made, and the artist did not read the account. near the top of the cistern are three escutcheons on each side. according to the account, they represent “the arms of the university, city, and the founder,” but no attempt was made in the engravings to represent the arms. above the cistern is a cubic sundial at each corner and between them the letters “o n o n” (the initials of the founder). the “o” and the “n” are separated by a bare-breasted mermaid, and between the “n” and the “o” is a sunburst face (“the sun in its glory” representing the “son” of nicholson), the whole forming “a rebus on the name of the founder.” the mermaids are holding “combs and looking-glaſſes,” which are scarcely identifiable in the engravings. above the letters are “figures of boys, obeliſks, flowers, and fruitage, interchangeably tranſpoſed.” the animals at the corners, “repreſent[ing] the royal ſupporters of king henry viii’s and q. elizabeth’s arms, as well as the preſent,” are an antelope at the north east, a dragon at the south west, a lion at the south east, and a unicorn at the north west. this does not correspond with the engravings, where the lion and unicorn are in adjacent corners (not opposite ones). the figure at the left that looks like a dog with wings is little like either an antelope or a dragon. the animals hold staffs with banners with “the ſeveral quarterings of the royal arms of england, scotland, france, and ireland,” but these quarterings are merely diagonal lines in blake’s engraving. in the center, behind the heraldic animals, is an ox ridden by a crowned figure representing “queen maud (the emperor’s ſiſter)” [matilda or maude (d. 1167), daughter of henry i]. according to a description of 1686, the water flowed “into the body of the carved ox … issuing from his pizzle, which continually pisses into the cistern underneath from whence proceeds a leaden pipe out of which runs wine on extraordinary days of rejoicing,” such as the restoration of the monarch in 1660. the bull’s pizzle is not visible in the engravings and probably could not be seen from ground level. the figures on plinths represent “the four cardinal virtues.” behind the lion is “fortitude, holding a broken pillar in her right arm, and in her left the capital thereof, of the corinthian order”; behind what looks like a winged dog is “prudence, holding in her left hand a ſerpent in a circular form [it is not circular in the engravings], ſignifying the revolution of time”; behind the unicorn is “temperance, pouring out wine from a large veſſel into a ſmall one, as a proper emblem of the ſame”; behind the antelope, not visible in the engravings, is “juſtice, holding a ſword in her right hand, and a pair of balances in her left, her eyes covered over, ſignifying her impartial adminiſtration of juſtice.” “over theſe ornaments ariſe four curved groins arched, ſupporting an octangular building having niches, in which are ſtone ſtatues of eight worthies” bearing elaborately decorated shields: (1) king david, (2) alexander the great, (3) “godfree of bullion, crowned with thorns,” (4) “atticus the grecian,” (5) charlemagne, (6) james the first, (7) hector of troy, and (8) julius caesar. they are so vaguely represented in the engravings that i can identify none of them. between the worthies are mermaids on “well-wrought pedeſtals, on which are imboſſed the royal badges of four kingdoms, viz. the roſe for england; the thiſtle for scotland; fleur de lis for france; and the harp for ireland,” but in blake’s engraving these are transformed into a human head above an animal head. perhaps the originals had been worn away and were replaced.of course the conduit had to be taken apart when it was moved in 1787, and some details in subsequent representations of it differ from the account and the engravings. today the unicorn lacks his horn, there is no staff or banner, the figure at the top is not two-faced janus but a bearded man facing one way and a person facing the other, and there is no weather vane or cross. “above theſe worthies are curious figures to repreſent ſome liberal arts and ſciences. here is orpheus with his harp, ſeveral youths as if ſinging, accompanied with different ſorts of muſical inſtruments, as trumpets, lutes, violins, and muſic-books, ſome wide open, others ſhut.” “at the top of all this rich ſtructure ſtands old janus, with his aged viſage to the weſt; the back part of his head is female-faced, looking to the eaſt.” however, in the engraving the figure is so vague that i cannot tell whether it represents the male head with a shield or the female head with a sceptre. above the stonework is a weather vane, “and at top of that a croſs directed to the four cardinal points of the compaſs,” but these are indecipherable to me. apparently they were later lost (see the painting by percy roberts of about 1850 at oxford history). the conduit formed an interruption to traffic (the anonymous 1775 painting at oxford history tactfully shows only people and dogs in the street beside it), and the mileways act of 1771 proposed its removal. in 1787 it was transported about six miles to nuneham park at nuneham courtenay,oliver goldsmith’s the deserted village (1770) may be in part about the relocation of the village by the first earl harcourt to create a vast garden. and it now belongs to the university of oxford. the decorated top resembles the eleanor crosses erected in the thirteenth century by edward i in memory of his wife, eleanor of castile. it has a distinct similarity to the martyrs’ memorial in oxford designed by gilbert scott in 1843 with effigies of cranmer, latimer, and ridley.the martyrs’ memorial was famous in my time for the temptation it offered to undergraduates to climb it illegally. flaxman, john, compositions from the works days and theogony of hesiod (1817, 1870, 1881) there was an announcement of the work as engraved by “j. blake” in new monthly magazine 2 (1 jan. 1815): 537. hayley, william, ballads (1805) according to random cloud [randall mcleod], g7 is a cancel in some copies (e.g., victoria university in the university of toronto), with “lo! his” on p. 109 and “boy who” on p. 110, which replace the version in some copies (e.g., mcmaster), with “lo his” on p. 109 and “boy, who” on p. 110. “joseph of arimathea among the rocks of albion” copy 2j in essick, separate plates acquired at auction in 1949 through agnew’s by brandon meredith rhys-williams (1927–88) and inherited in 1988 by his son.robert n. essick, “blake in the marketplace, 2014,” blake 48.4 (spring 2015). newly recorded [keble, john], the christian year (1875) [john keble]. the christian year. boston: lee and shepard; new york: lee, shepard, and dillingham, 1875. location: collection of robert n. essick. print: at p. 353 is an unsigned wood engraving of “burial of the dead” (8.5 x 14.0 cm.), silently copied from blake’s design of “death’s door” engraved by schiavonetti for blair’s grave (1808). keble’s christian year was first published in 1827 without illustration.robert n. essick, “blake in the marketplace, 2014,” blake 48.4 (spring 2015). newly recorded kitton, fred g., “william james linton, engraver, poet, and political writer,” english illustrated magazine vol. 8, no. 91 (april 1891) fred g. kitton. “william james linton, engraver, poet, and political writer.” english illustrated magazine 8, no. 91 (april 1891): 491-500. location: collection of robert n. essick. print: it “includes an impression of linton’s wood engraving of blake’s ‘death’s door,’ version with square top 1st published in thirty pictures by deceased british artists engraved expressly for the art-union of london by w. j. linton, 1860.”robert n. essick, “blake in the marketplace, 2014,” blake 48.4 (spring 2015). linton, w. j., thirty pictures by deceased british artists (1860) see kitton, above. “the man sweeping the interpreter’s parlour” copy 2o in essick, separate plates acquired c. 1949 by brandon meredith rhys-williams (1927–88) and inherited in 1988 by his daughter, miranda rhys-williams.robert n. essick, “blake in the marketplace, 2014,” blake 48.4 (spring 2015). stedman, j. g., narrative, of a five years’ expedition (1796, 1806, 1813) 1796 new location: exeter college (oxford). a colored set was offered in peter harrington’s online catalogue, april 2015, for £15,000. varley, john, a treatise on zodiacal physiognomy (1828) a copy inscribed “m. a. shee esq. with the author’s best respects” was offered privately by john windle in 2015 at $10,950 and acquired by robert n. essick. in the intrinsic “advertisement” for blair’s grave (1808), r. h. cromek listed eleven members of the royal academy, including “martin archer shee, esq.,” who bore the “most liberal testimonial” to the “excellence” of blake’s drawings for blair,br(2) 255-56. and shee subscribed for a copy. appendix: books improbably alleged to have blake engravings newly recorded stonehenge medal (1796) a round medal 5 cm. in diameter is inscribed at the top of the obverse “tantum potuit | religio” [“so great was the power of religion” (lucretius)] and at the bottom “stone henge | 1796”. seven hundred and fifty medals were ordered to be struck, 50 in gold, 250 in silver [the rest presumably in lead].copies in lead are in the british museum department of coins and medals (bnk,engm.247) and birmingham museum and art gallery; silver copies were offered in richard hatchwell, catalogue (april 1993), lot 99 (£1200) and at spink’s auction (24-25 sept. 2013), lot 811 (sold for £440). the medal was noticed in hatchwell’s catalogue by robert n. essick, “blake in the marketplace, 1993,” blake 27.4 (spring 1994): 116-17. it was issued by “the ancient druids universal brethren.”laurence a. brown, a catalogue of british historical medals, 1760–1960, 3 vols. (london: seaby publications, 1980) 1: 99, no. 417. brown says the medal was designed by william blake. b. h. cunnington, “a stonehenge medal,” wiltshire archaeological and natural history magazine 44 (1927): 8-9,cunnington and grinsell are cited here from stephen allen’s essay. “quotes mr t ireland, the corresponding councillor of ‘the druid universalist council,’” who claimed that the “engraver of the medal was william blake.” ireland said that “the medal was issued for the purpose of raising funds to help one of the martyrs of his movement, muir, of edinburgh,”the odnb describes thomas muir (1765–99) of edinburgh as an outspoken radical but says nothing of a druid context. the only muir i have found who was a druid is mentioned in mark coleman wallace, “scottish freemasonry 1725–1810: progress, power, and politics,” st. andrews phd, 2007: “william muir, a weaver in kilmarnock,” was a druid. masonry claimed to be descended from the druids.the odnb says of “thomas wyon the elder (1767–1830) … for his medal of stonehenge (1796) he engraved a design by william blake.” who was convicted for sedition and deported to australia. l. v. grinsell, the druids and stonehenge: the story of a myth (st. peter port: toucan press, 1978) says that the “engraver” was “blake after stukeley.” stephen allen, “william blake and the stonehenge medal 1796,” wiltshire archaeological and natural history magazine 98 (2005): 347-48, says that there is a “mirror image” of the “view of stonehenge” in camden’s britannia (1695) (see illus. 3); “they are identical,” though reversed. notice that allen says he has found the original of the design but does not say who “engraved” it. 3. stonehenge from william camden, britannia (1695). image courtesy of the thomas fisher rare book library, university of toronto: f-10 00177. in column 95 is a rectangular image (18.7 x 21.4 cm.) virtually identical to the 1796 circular medal (5 cm. in diameter) attributed to blake, though reversed and of course omitting “stone henge | 1796”. the details are remarkably similar. blake was not a medal carver, a highly specialized art that is quite distinct from copperplate etching or engraving, and there is no significant possibility that he made the physical medal. the significant questions are whether he designed the medal or made an engraving of it. the image derives from camden’s britannia (1695), and blake was not involved in that. the inscriptions on the medal are not in camden. and no print is known of a separate copperplate engraving of the image. blake therefore had no hand in the stonehenge 1796 medal. part iv: catalogues and bibliographies section a: individual catalogues editors’ note: please consult bentley, “sale catalogues of william blake’s works,” for full details of the 1852–81 catalogues and for other pre-2011 catalogues. 1852–1881 catalogues issued by george willis, willis and sotheran, and henry sotheran are in google books. they contain a number of works by blake or said to be by him, mainly commercial engravings. links to the catalogues are below, with notes on items of interest; full details of the listings will appear in the cumulative “sale catalogues of william blake’s works” on the bentley blake collection site, victoria university in the university of toronto. 1852 the catalogue of 25 february includes no. 705, “plays and poems, original editions, a collection of twenty separately published plays and poems by wordsworth, monk lewis, geo. colman, &c. with plates by blake, &c. 10s 1802, &c.” i have no other record of a collection like this. 1855 no. 62 in the catalogue of 25 july is “blake’s (w.) illustrations to young’s night thoughts, fine original impressions of these celebrated and highly imaginative compositions, with fine portrait by schiavonetti, imp. 4to. half morocco, uncut, scarce, £1. 18s 1797.” the portrait engraved by schiavonetti is in blair’s grave (1808), not young’s night thoughts. 1856 nos. 1-520 in the catalogue of 25 june are from the library of samuel rogers. the catalogue does not include rogers’s songs of innocence (c), which was sold by the family in 1875 (see bb p. 405). 1857 the catalogues for 1857 include entries for job (1826), gay’s fables (1793), young’s night thoughts (1797), blair’s grave (1808), and flaxman’s iliad and odyssey (1805). 1859 a catalogue of superior second-hand books (london, 1859) contains no. 46, “æsop’s fables, with life, stockdale’s fine edition, printed in large type, with 112 beautiful engravings by blake, stothard, landseer, &c. 2 vols impl. 8vo. hf. calf neat, scarce, £1. 1s, 1793.” an advertisement for stockdale’s edition listed “blake” among its 13 engravers, but no print in it is signed by him (see bb p. 566). 1861 entries include blair’s grave (1808 and 1813) and flaxman’s iliad and odyssey (1805). 1862 the catalogue of 25 june (nos. 116, 117) includes copies of blake’s illuminated books “from the library of john flaxman” previously recorded in <blake (2010)> p. 21. 1877 a catalogue of choice second-hand books contains gay, fables (1793), hayley, life of cowper (3 vols. and the supplement, 1803–06), lavater, essays on physiognomy (1810), and stedman, surinam (1813). 1881 no. 735 in the catalogue of 31 march is walton and cotton, complete angler, ed. john major (1835), “with 15 copper plates and 76 wood engravings, from drawings by f. chantrey, w. blake, esq., j. linnell, a. cooper, etc.,” 18s. william blake the poet-artist-engraver is not known to have any connection with the complete angler, and he was not normally referred to as “esq.” the catalogue of 30 november includes no. 742, thel (j) and visions (g), “exquisitely finished in colours by blake himself, very fine copy, olive morocco extra, gilt edges, by hering, extremely rare, £105. 1789–93.” 2011 12 march–28 june *born to endless night: paintings, drawings, and prints by william blake selected by john frame. huntington library, san marino, california. apparently there was no catalogue. 2013 *book of job: tennyson and blake. online exhibition of tennyson’s copy of blake’s job devised by sibylle erle with grace timmins. tennyson research centre, lincoln central library, lincoln, uk. 2014 4 april–31 august *cathy leahy. william blake. melbourne: national gallery of victoria, 2014. <blake (2015)> review *claire knowles (see blake 49.1 in part vi). 2014 19 may bloomsbury auctions. important books, manuscripts, & works on paper. london, 2014. 99 songs of innocence and of experience [ed. james john garth wilkinson] (london, 1839), preface dated 9 july 1839, second issue lacking “the little vagabond,” presentation inscription from w. m. wilkinson to elizabeth r. wilkinson dated 4 january 1839. estimate £1000-1500 [not sold]. 2014 10 july bloomsbury auctions. bibliophile sale. godalming, 2014. 452 songs of innocence and of experience, as in the 19 may sale [sold for £1054]. 2014 july sophie schneideman rare books. online catalogue for the melbourne book fair.   virgil, pastorals (1821), 2 vols., “original contemporary sheep, skilfully rebacked, great copy,” illustrated, £24,000.   young, night thoughts (1797), “generously-margined copy in 20th century brown half morocco by riviere,” £12,500. 2014 november sophie schneideman rare books. william blake & his followers [online catalogue].   virgil, pastorals (1821), as in the july catalogue, £25,000.   young, night thoughts (1797), as in the july catalogue, £12,500. 2014 22 november–2015 17 march *eccentric visions: drawings by henry fuseli, william blake, and their contemporaries. huntington library, san marino, california. apparently there was no catalogue. 2014 4 december–2015 1 march *michael phillips [with martin butlin and colin harrison]. william blake: apprentice & master. oxford: ashmolean museum, 2014. <blake (2015)> reviews §anon., “on show william blake: apprentice and master …,” daily mail 5 dec. 2014. §anon., “exhibition explores artistic roots of poet and artist william blake,” xinhua news agency 6 dec. 2014. §*tamara lucas, “william blake: the making of the man,” lancet vol. 385, no. 9964 (17 jan. 2015): 218 (a “fabulous exhibition”; “all the parts fit together beautifully”). §anon., “it’s blake heaven: the definitive exhibition of visionary poet and artist william blake: from humble engraver to romantic hero,” mail 18 jan. 2015. §*ammar kalia, “william blake’s composite art,” helicon: university of bristol creative arts magazine 24 jan. 2015. *t. j. clark, “a snake, a flame,” london review of books 37.3 (5 feb. 2015): 24-26 (earnest and learned but not much about the ashmolean exhibition). §*carl-johan malmberg, “en bildkonst med explosiv öppenhet,” svenska dagbladet 10 feb. 2015 (in swedish). *jenny uglow, “william blake: wonderful and strange,” new york review of books 23 feb. 2015 (the “exhibition … is at once didactic and very strange”; it “left me dazed by the technical detail but aware that i would never look at a blake work in the same way again”). §naomi billingsley, “william blake: apprentice and master,” art and christianity no. 81 (spring 2015): 9. 2015 9-30 january *sanders of oxford. william blake, printmaker. oxford, 2015. 1 “beggar’s opera” (hogarth-blake) (c. 1795), “trimmed to image an[d] laid to album page,” framed, £400. 2 darwin, botanic garden [1795], “fertilization of egypt” (fuseli-blake), “light foxing … to margins,” framed, £580. 3 darwin, botanic garden (1795), “tornado” (fuseli-blake), “light foxing … to margins,” framed, £580. 4 virgil, pastorals, ed. thornton (woodcut, 1892 reprint), “a fond desire strange lands and swains to know” only, £1250. 5 virgil, pastorals, ed. thornton (woodcut, 1892 reprint), “thine ewes will wander” only, £1250. 6 virgil, pastorals, ed. thornton (british museum, 1977, “numbered 20”), £3750. 7-17 job (1826), pls. “1,” “3”-“6,” “8,” “11,” “16”-“19,” framed, £2850 each. 18-22 dante (1968 impressions), pls. 2-3, 5-7, framed, £2650, 2300, 2650, 2300, 2300 respectively. 2015 january–3 may §*william blake, visionary/envisioning william blake. university of virginia library. apparently there was no printed catalogue. review, notice, etc. §*david whitesell, “william blake, visionary,” notes from under grounds: the blog of the albert and shirley small special collections library 22 jan. 2015 (from the sandra elizabeth olivier and raymond danowski reference collection of william blake, 275 titles in 400 volumes received in 2010). 2015 january *blackwell’s. william blake short list 30. oxford, 2015. sixty-seven items at £50-12,750, including 8 cumberland card, £12,750. 9-10 “chaucers canterbury pilgrims,” india paper, after 5 march 1881, £9000 each. 57 gilchrist, life of william blake, “pictor ignotus” (1863), extra-illustrated with 34 plates (list on request), £2250. 2015 2 march–21 august §illuminated printing: william blake and the book arts. robert b. haas family arts library, yale university. review, etc. finnegan schick, “new exhibition ‘illuminates’ artwork by william blake,” yale daily news 4 march 2015. 2015 18 march §*bonhams. fine books, manuscripts, atlases, & historical photographs. london, 2015. 91 blake’s letter to ozias humphry of 18 january 1808 (a) [sold almost certainly by roy davids]. estimate £10,000-15,000 [sold for £43,750 to the london dealer benjamin spademan]. 2015 28 march–5 july *surreal roots: from william blake to andré breton. scottish national gallery of modern art. review, notice, etc. §*anon., “rare books by blake, carroll and de sade emerge from edinburgh collection for surrealist display,” culture24 11 march 2015. 2015 15 may lion heart autographs. 100 important autographs in art, history, literature, music, & science. new york, 2015. 29 benjamin disraeli’s autograph letter to mrs. gilchrist of 5 november 1862 about the poet william blake [page reproduced, text of whole quoted]. estimate $1500-1800 [not sold]. 2015 [june] samuel gedge. catalogue xx. norwich, england, 2015. 68 letter from the artist john martin of 30 allsop terrace, new road, london, to “bernard barton esqr woodbridge suffolk,” 12 february 1830, 3 pp., 19 x 23 cm., with martin’s seal (a bust).not in br(2) or its addenda in blake. the reproduction of p. 1 is illegible. mr. gedge tells me that he purchased the manuscript in britain from a dealer who was selling off items taken out of a nineteenth-century album that contained letters mainly written by musical and artistic figures of the nineteenth century. he could find no sign of ownership in the album. he believes it was originally purchased at auction in britain by a different dealer. “he reports on his pleasure in discovering that barton’s opinion of the life of blake coincided with his own. he notes his recent reading of the biography of blake in allan cunningham’s the lives of the most eminent british painters, sculptors and architects … (london, 1829-1833), and offers his observations: ‘i had no conception that he would prove so especially interesting, he was indeed a most important character …’ martin offers his view of blake’s talents, also finding praise for his illustrations of young’s night thoughts (‘exceedingly good, indeed i like them better than any of his works that i have seen …’).” £750 [sold to victoria university in the university of toronto]. 2015 holiday john windle. catalogue 63. san francisco, 2015. 32 ritson, ed., select collection of english songs (1783), $975. part v: books owned by william blake the poet newly recorded modena, leo, the history of the present jews (1707) 4. leo modena, the history of the preſent jews (1707), title page. image courtesy of the thomas fisher rare book library, university of toronto. the | history | of the | preſent jews | throughout the world. | being | an ample tho succinct account | of their customs, ceremo| nies, and manner of liv| ing, at this time. | tranſlated from the italian, written by | leo modena, a venetian rabbi. | — | to which are subjoin’d | two supplements, | one concerning the samaritans, the | other of the sect of the carraites. | from the french of father simon, | with his explanatory notes. | — | by simon ockley, vicar | of swaveſey in cambridgeſhire. | — | london: printed and sold by edm. powell | in black-fryars near ludgate. 1707. thomas fisher rare book library, university of toronto: b-12 07568. it was made known to me by philip oldfield (see the introductory essay). 12mo (9 x 15.5 cm.), pp. [i-xxiv], 1-288. the recto of the front endpaper (see illus. 5) is inscribed in old brown ink in three eighteenth-century hands: (1) “j bryant | j bryant”, (2) “d arch whitehouse | 21 melville rd. | edgbaston”, and (3) at the top right corner “w.m blake” in a hand that is plausibly like the poet’s. (see blake’s letter of 14 january 1804 [harvard university], reproduced in the william blake archive among manuscript letters of 1800 to 1827 with similar signatures. the signature is strikingly similar to that on modena’s book. blake’s manuscript letters are signed w b, w blake, will blake, willm blake, and william blake.) there are no internal marks such as underlinings, sidelinings, inscriptions. 5. leo modena, the history of the preſent jews (1707), recto of the front endpaper. image courtesy of the thomas fisher rare book library, university of toronto. the work was first published in english in 1650. there were numerous editions in french and italian. blake was deeply interested in jewish laws and customs. he wrote an address “to the jews” in jerusalem pl. 27, he learned enough hebrew to write it somewhat uncertainly, he engraved plates for maynard’s josephus (1785–86), and he seems to have been deeply influenced by the kabbala (though modena does not mention the kabbala). modena’s work may be one of the sources of his information about judaism. reynolds, joshua, works (1798) edition discursos sobre arte. anotaciones de william blake. edición y estudio preliminar de josé luis palomares. traducción de josé luis palomares y blanca guinea. san lorenzo de el escorial: c. de langre, 2011. 4o, 197 pp.; isbn: 9788493974114. in spanish. a selection from reynolds’s discourses with william blake’s complete marginalia. “la controversia reynolds-blake (estudio preliminar).” 9-40. “nota a la presente edición.” 41. blake’s marginalia on side columns to reynolds’s discursos. 43-197. part vi: criticism, biography, and scholarly studies a   b   c   d   e   f   g   h   i   j   k   l   m   n   o   p   q   r   s   t   v   w   x   y   z a adachi, naoko. “kyusai no vision no tankyu: atarashii hito yo mezame yo niokeru blake inyo [an exploration of vision of salvation: the quotations from blake in rouse up o young men of the new age!].” kirisuto kyo bungei [christian literature] 31 (2015): 85-102. in japanese. blake and the novel by kenzaburo oe. allen, stephen. “william blake and the stonehenge medal 1796.” wiltshire archaeological and natural history magazine 98 (2005): 347-48. for the context, see part iii, appendix. an, ran. “bing zhi de yi shu—wei lian bu lai ke shi ji ‘tian zhen he jing yan zhi ge’ de kong jian meng tai qi xu shi [juxtaposed art—spatial montage narrative in william blake’s songs of innocence and of experience].” wen yi zheng ming [contended literature] 3 (2014): 190-95. in chinese. an, ran, shu-ying zhao, and wen-yi liu. “bu lai ke shi ge zou xiang kong jian wei du tan suo de ke xing xing yan jiu [a study on the possibility of spatial dimension interpretation in blake’s poems].” bian jiang jing ji yu wen hua [border economy and culture] 3 (2014): 90-91. in chinese. *anon. “21.09.2015 felpham, sussex.” times literary supplement 2 oct. 2015: 3. blake’s “felpham cottage has been saved for the nation by the blake society and its donors.” aoki, haruo. “william blake no muku to keiken no uta ningen seishin no ftatsu no tairitsu suru jotai josetsu: sono jidaiteki kojinteki haikei [an introduction to songs of innocence and of experience shewing the two contrary states of the human soul by william blake: its historical and personal background].” fumanisumu [humanism] 25 (2014): 20-30. in japanese. §apesos, anthony. “the poet in the poem: blake’s milton.” studies in philology 112.2 (spring 2015): 379-413. b §baburchenkova, i. o. “[features of metaphor in the individual style of william blake in his early works].” proceedings of smolensk state university 27 (2014): 82-89. in russian. bai, feng-xin, and chang liu. “wei lian bu lai ke shi ge de li shi wei du yan jiu [a study of william blake’s poetry from a historical dimension].” cangzhou shi fan xue yuan xue bao [journal of cangzhou normal university] 3 (2015): 5-8. in chinese. §barton, anna. “perverse forms: reading blake’s decadence.” decadent romanticism: 1780–1914. ed. kostas boyiopoulos and mark sandy. farnham: ashgate, 2015. 15-26. bentley, g. e., jr. “annals of philanthropy: william blake’s writings and pictures in public collections.” notes and queries, n.s., 62.3 (sept. 2015): 389-400. donations of works by blake to public collections, here given in detail, “provide interesting evidence about the annals of philanthropy” (389). bentley, g. e., jr. “richard edwards’s edition of young’s night thoughts (1797) with plates designed and engraved by william blake.” the edwardses of halifax: the making and selling of beautiful books in london and halifax, 1749–1826. 2 vols. toronto: university of toronto press, 2015. 1: 9-11 and *passim (especially 1: 5-10, 171-92, 235-40, 2: 390-96). *bentley, g. e., jr. william blake in the desolate market. 2014. <blake (2015)> reviews john b. pierce, english studies in canada 40.4 (dec. 2014): 140-42 (“an important supplement to essential works on blake produced by g. e. bentley jr.”). j. a. saklofske, choice (feb. 2015) (“required reading for william blake scholars and art historians,” an “exemplary volume” with “invaluable arguments”; chosen as an outstanding academic title for 2015). jason whittaker, literature and history 24.1 (spring 2015): 89-90 (“bentley’s book is not an easy read”; “i often wished for more commentary”). paul miner, notes and queries, n.s., 62.3 (sept. 2015): 479-80 (the work, “meticulously documented … well-organized and highly readable … is indispensable to the serious blakist. i view this book in awe”). jane stabler, “recent studies in the nineteenth century,” sel: studies in english literature 55.4 (autumn 2015): 925-83 (an “impressive work of scholarship”; “a vital supplement for teaching, criticism, and biographical work in the period” [934]). bergvall, åke. “the blake syndrome: the case of ‘jerusalem.’” literature/film quarterly 41.4 (2013): 254-65. it discusses the use of “jerusalem” in films. *blackstone, bernard. english blake. 1949, 1966. <bb #1212a-b> c. §cambridge: cambridge university press, 2015. blake/an illustrated quarterly for the inclusion of 45 back issues of the journal in the william blake archive in 2015, see william blake archive in part i, section b. blake/an illustrated quarterly volume 48, number 4 (spring 2015) articles *robert n. essick. “blake in the marketplace, 2014.” (it includes “interesting blakeana,” “blake’s circle and followers” [barry, basire, calvert, flaxman, fuseli, linnell, mortimer, palmer, parker, richmond, romney, sherman, and stothard], and “appendix: new information on blake’s engravings” for his separate plates and william blake’s commercial book illustrations.) *paul miner. “‘bad’ queens, ‘good’ queens, and george iii (as his satanic majesty).” 27 pars. (“blake’s condemnation of royalty” of england and france is shown in “miltonic and biblical allusions” [pars. 1, 2].) reviews *j. b. mertz. karl kroeber, blake in a post-secular era: early prophecies, ed. and with a foreword by joseph viscomi. 5 pars. (the book is “a fine memorial of kroeber’s enthusiasm as an educator,” but “a mere armature for what kroeber might have ultimately accomplished.”) joseph wittreich. “rediscovering william hayley: a review article.” paul foster, ed., with diana barsham, william hayley (1745–1820): poet, biographer, and libertarian: a reassessment and paul foster, ed., with diana barsham, william hayley (1745–1820): selected poetry. 22 pars. (both volumes suffer from “botched printing” [par. 2]; “what we may learn … is that, if in life hayley illustrated the blakean adage … ‘corporeal friends are spiritual enemies,’ in the aftermath of his death a forgiving blake … may have found in their erstwhile friendship grounds for accommodation” [par. 22].) blake/an illustrated quarterly volume 49, number 1 (summer 2015) article *g. e. bentley, jr., with the assistance of hikari sato for japanese publications, of li-ping geng for chinese publications, and of fernando castanedo for spanish publications. “william blake and his circle: a checklist of publications and discoveries in 2014.” reviews steve newman. martha redbone roots project, the garden of love: songs of william blake. 9 pars. (“‘appalachian folk and blues’ … punctuated by native american yips and chants” make “the listener feel as if these lyrics were somehow written with this music and this singer in mind.”) alexander s. gourlay. martin priestman, the poetry of erasmus darwin: enlightened spaces, romantic times. 9 pars. (priestman is “edifying and at least occasionally inspirational” but “less penetrating and original as a reader of blake.”) *claire knowles. william blake, national gallery of victoria international, melbourne, 4 april–31 august 2014 and its catalogue, cathy leahy, william blake. 8 pars. (the exhibition is rewarding, and “the catalogue … would be a welcome addition to any blakean’s library.”) james rovira. roderick tweedy, the god of the left hemisphere: blake, bolte taylor, and the myth of creation. 7 pars. (“an engaging, journalistic treatment” relying “almost exclusively on s. foster damon’s dictionary for his interpretation of blake ….”) blake/an illustrated quarterly volume 49, number 2 (fall 2015) articles *mei-ying sung. “new information about william blake’s pre-publication proofs of his job engravings.” 19 pars. (working proofs from the rosenbloom collection are at yale. the title page is in the published state on india paper, and pl. “19” is not in a new state. all the other prints are in new state 2 save for pls. “15” and “18” in new state 1, pls. “2,” “3,” and “16” in new state 3, and pls. “1,” “10,” and “14” in new state 5.) *sibylle erle. “lord tennyson’s copy of blake’s illustrations of the book of job (1826).” 9 pars. (tennyson’s copies of job, given him in 1856 by benjamin jowett, gilchrist (1863), and poetical sketches, ed. r. h. shepherd (1868) with blake-like sketches, are in the tennyson research centre, lincolnshire county council. according to a note by tennyson, job was one of the [28 or more] books “on round table in drawing room.”) blake/an illustrated quarterly volume 49, number 3 (winter 2015–16) article *joseph fletcher. “ocean growing: blake’s two versions of newton and the emerging polypus.” 38 pars. review *sibylle erle. colin trodd, visions of blake: william blake in the art world 1830–1930. 11 pars. minute particulars *robert n. essick and jenijoy la belle. “the blakes at their press.” 8 pars. *angus whitehead. “‘a bite’: the first published reference to blake’s ghost of a flea?” 7 pars. g. e. bentley, jr. “w. s. blake: new facts and engravings.” 24 pars. *blake society. calendar of events 2015–2016. london: blake society, [may] 2015. 15.0 x 21.8 cm., 20 pp.; no isbn. *boruch, marianne. “three blakes.” american poetry review 43.1 (jan.-feb. 2014): 41-45. about aspects of blake that inspire her. §brenkman, john. “a utopia concreta da poesia: ‘uma árvore de veneno’ de blake.” teresa: revista de literatura brasileira 12/13 (2013): 244-56. in portuguese. bruder, helen p., and tristanne j. connolly, eds. blake, gender and culture. 2012. <§blake (2013)> review §nicholas m. williams, bars review 45 (2015). bu, jing-ting. “lun xiao hong yu wei lian mu bu lai ke bi xia de er tong ming yun—bu tong shi jiao xiang tong zhui qiu [a discussion of the fate of children in xiao hong’s and william blake’s works—different perspective, same goal].” cai zhi [intelligence] 25 (2015): 243. in chinese. *bürger, m. w. [t. thoré]. “william blake: né en 1757.—mort en 1828 [1827].” histoire des peintres de toutes les écoles: école anglaise. paris: j. renouard, 1863. in french. <bb #1317, here amplified> b. §1865. c. §1867. d. §1868. e. §1871. f. §1883. g. §1884. h. §berlin, 1924. the reproductions are of the portrait of blake by thomas phillips for blair’s grave (signed “e. bocourt d.” and “j guillaume s.”), plus the design on the title page of blair’s grave and “death’s door” (all reversed). “blake est assurément le plus excentrique de tous les artistes de l’école anglaise.” blake is also noticed in a list of death dates (“blake, [mourut] à soixante et onze”) and under thomas phillips. §burkett, andrew. “william blake and the emergence of romantic media studies.” literature compass 12.9 (sept. 2015): 439-47. butlin, martin. “blake, linnell and varley and a treatise on zodiacal physiognomy.” burning bright: essays in honour of david bindman. ed. diana dethloff, tessa murdoch, and kim sloan, with caroline elam. london: ucl [university college london] press, 2015. chapter 13 (126-35). about the 27 varley drawings for the zodiacal physiognomy acquired by the tate in 1997. c chen, jian-hua. “bei mei shu shi yi wang de fan pan zhe—wei lian bu lai ke [the rebel forgotten by art history—william blake].” mei shu da guan [art panorama] 3 (2014): 52. in chinese. about the development of blake’s status in art history. chen, yang-bo. “wei lian bu lai ke shi ge lun dun de wen ti fen ti [stylistic analysis of william blake’s poem ‘london’].” hai wai ying yu [overseas english] 6 (2014): 170-71. in english. *churton, tobias. jerusalem: the real life of william blake. london: watkins, 2015. 8o, xxxix, 360 pp., 44 reproductions; isbn: 9781780287508. michael eavis. “foreword.” xi. frank van lamoen. “foreword.” xiii-xiv. what is new about this biography? there is a leitmotif of freemasonry as a context (“was blake a freemason? in short, we do not know” [70]) and a surprising amount from the papers of the author’s ancestor archdeacon ralph churton (1754–1831), which serves merely for context—trafalgar, waterloo, napoleon returns, and the like. the moravianism of blake’s mother (13-25)discovered in 2004 and therefore not included in bentley, the stranger from paradise: a biography of william blake (2001) and br(2), which is frequently cited here. the only works about blake dated after 1991 in the bibliography are the stranger from paradise, br(2), and marsha keith schuchard, william blake’s sexual path to spiritual vision (2006). there is no reference to thomas owen, whose apprenticeship to blake in 1788 was discovered in 2009. is properly emphasized. churton strongly disapproves of blake having become an engraver (“the awful truth” [62]), partly because engravers were not as well paid as the most fashionable painters—“as an engraver, he received scraps” (108) [but for blake’s engraving of “the fall of rosamond” (1783) thomas macklin paid £80, and for three other plates of the same size in 1782–83 he may have paid as much, or £320 in all].bentley, william blake in the desolate market (2014) 12-13. some of churton’s “facts” are curiously askew. poetical sketches is said to have “eleven quarto pages” (99) rather than 76 pages; “his songs of innocence [1789] … were not apparently available until 1794” (145); the “shadowy female” on europe pl. 4 is said to be “shameless” rather than “nameless” (212); for the sexes was issued “at an unknown date between 1806 and 1818” (336), though all copies are watermarked 1825–26 except for one watermarked 1818; fuseli is quoted as saying that the blakes “live together with a servant” (245), but fuseli said “with.t a servant” (br[2] 71). §cogan, lucy. “william blake’s the book of los and the female prophetic tradition.” romanticism 21.1 (april 2015): 48-58. “blake’s mythopoeia reveals an intimate familiarity” with the “distinct female prophetic tradition.” cooper, andrew m. william blake and the productions of time. 2013. <blake (2014)> reviews §james rovira, journal for eighteenth-century studies 38.3 (sept. 2015): 472-74. §steve vine, bars review 45 (2015) (with crosby, patenaude, and whitehead, eds., re-envisioning blake). cosby, charles carlyle, iii. “indo-tibetan buddhist perspectives on william blake’s songs of innocence and of experience.” california institute of integral studies phd, 2015. 190 pp. *crosby, mark, troy patenaude, and angus whitehead, eds. re-envisioning blake. 2012. <blake (2013)> review see vine under cooper, above. cunningham, peter. hand-book of london: past and present. 2 vols. london: john murray, 1849. b. 1850. <blake (2010)> in the first edition, newly recorded here, there are blake references in vol. 1 under bunhill fields (153) and fountain court (320) and in vol. 2 under molton street (565). d dai, xing-wei. “xiang yi de wen ming tu rang xiang tong de pu shi qing huai—zheng xie wei lian bu lai ke zhi bi jiao yan jiu [a comparative study of zheng xie and william blake].” ke ji chuang ye yue kan [pioneering with science and technology monthly] 5 (2014): 132-34. in chinese. *damrosch, leo. eternity’s sunrise: the imaginative world of william blake. new haven: yale university press, 2015. 17.8 x 22.9 cm., ix, 332 pp. plus 40 unpaginated color plates, 96 reproductions; isbn: 9780300200676. a critical study of blake’s literary works. reviews §erica wagner, publishers weekly 262.34 (24 aug. 2015): 76. *william pritchard, wall street journal 31 oct.-1 nov. 2015: c7. *richard holmes, “the greatness of william blake,” new york review of books 14 nov. 2015 (with 2 others) (a frequently accurate review concluding that the book is “admirable,” “part biography, part critical reflection, and part a scholar’s testimony to the experience of actually teaching blake over many years,” “with occasional wicked professorial sallies” and “a certain pedagogic earnestness”). §datry, pierre. “de ‘l’alliance inédite’ entre la poésie de william blake et ‘dead man’ de jim jarmusch.” cinémaction no. 157 (2015): 102-07. in french. §deane, john f. in dogged loyalty: the religion of poetry: the poetry of religion. blackrock, co. dublin: columba press, 2006. it contains an essay on blake. deligiannakis, panagiotis. “religiosidad y lírica: una lectura de friedrich hölderlin y de william blake en la perspectiva de dos humanistas griegos.” universidad nacional autónoma de méxico phd, 2008. in spanish. disraeli, benjamin. letter to mrs. gilchrist of 5 november 1862 [see br(2) 328fn] offered, transcribed, and reproduced in the lion heart autographs auction (see 2015 15 may in part iv, section a). there are some drawings, i believe a considerable number, by blake, in this collection. it is many years, since i have seen them, but my impreſsion is, that they are, in a great degree, rather his own etchings, colored by himself, than, strictly speaking, drawings. i leave this place tomorrow, for a fortnight, but, on my return, if m.r roſsetti care to examine them, i will give orders, that they[?] shall be prepared for his inspection— i am sorry to say, there is not the slightest foundation for any of the statements, contain’d in the letter, to which you refer. my father was not acquainted with mr blake, nor is there a single volume, in the hughendenhughenden was the name of benjamin disraeli’s house in high wycombe. library, enriched by his drawings. §duncan, robert. “variations on two dicta of william blake: mental things alone are real. the authors are in eternity [poem].” robert duncan: the collected later poems and plays. ed. peter quartermain. berkeley: university of california press, 2014. 141-45. e *eaves, morris, eric loy, hardeep sidhu, and laura whitebell. “prototyping an electronic edition of william blake’s manuscript of vala, or the four zoas: a progress report.” 19: interdisciplinary studies in the long nineteenth century 21 (2015). a very long progress report. §edwards dykehouse, carol. “an examination of the verbal and visual images of slavery in william blake’s jerusalem.” university of houston phd, 2013. 336 pp. §ellerström, jonas. “att öppna eller sluta till sinnena: nedslag hos hjalmar gullberg, william blake och meret oppenheim.” utopin i vardagen: sinnen, kvinnor, idéer: en vänbok till elisabeth mansén. ed. jenny-leontine olsson, ylva söderfeldt, anna ohlsson, and jonas ellerström. [lund]: ellerström, 2014. in swedish. f *fox, susan. poetic form in blake’s milton. 1976. <bbs pp. 474-75> b. §princeton: princeton university press, 2016. princeton legacy library. g §ghiţă, cătălin. “visionary bestiary: animal metaphors in the poetry of william blake.” annals of the university of craiova (series philology, english) [romania] 13.2 (2012): 56-65. §gil duarte, flavia maris. ““a cidade de londres nas canções da experiência de william blake: uma interpretação das transformações ocorridas na sociedade industrial inglesa nas últimas décadas do século xviii.” antíteses 7, no. 14 (2014): 469-91. in portuguese. §gilvan, behrouz aftabi. “a critical analysis of william blake’s ‘a poison tree’ and blakian stance on repression.” asian journal of multidisciplinary studies 3.3 (2015). §giordano, ravel paz. “o cânone, o errante e as demandas de comunidade: um recalque crítico na ‘desleitura’ de william blake por harold bloom.” revell: revista de estudos literários da uems 2.3 (2011). in portuguese. *goldsmith, steven. blake’s agitation: criticism and the emotions. 2013. <blake (2014)> review §reference and research book news 28.2 (april 2013). §goldstein, amanda jo. “reluctant ecology in blake and arendt: a response to robert mitchell and richard sha.” wordsworth circle 46.3 (summer 2015): 143-56. §gould, alan. “a quibble for william blake [poem].” quadrant 59.12 (dec. 2015): 39. griffiths, antony. “g. e. bentley jr. and william blake.” print quarterly 31.4 (dec. 2014): 437. “since the death of sir geoffrey keynes [in 1982], the unquestioned doyen of blake studies has been professor g. e. bentley, jr. we have to thank him for a succession of massive assemblages of documentation on all aspects of blake’s writings, publications and life.” one paragraph is about william blake in the desolate market (2014). §gunes, ali. “the deconstruction of the cartesian dichotomy of black and white in william blake’s ‘the little black boy.’” tarih kültür ve sanat araştırmaları dergisi [journal of history, culture, and art research] 4.2 (2015): 144-57. guo, xiao-qing. “bi jiao wei lian bu lai ke yu wei lian hua er hua zi bi xia de ‘lu dun’ [a comparison of the image of london in poems of william blake and william wordsworth].” su zhou xue yuan xue bao [journal of suzhou university] 2 (2014): 67-69. in chinese. guo, yong-li. “dui bi bu lai ke de ‘tian zhen zhi ge’ yu ‘jing yan zhi ge’ [a comparison of blake’s songs of innocence and songs of experience].” cai zhi [intelligence] 14 (2014): 253. in chinese. a comparison in terms of time, content, title, and writing style. h *haggarty, sarah. blake’s gifts: poetry and the politics of exchange. 2010, 2014. <blake (§2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015)> review rowan boyson, “gifts of scholarship,” cambridge quarterly 41.2 (2012): 272-79. han, yan-qin. “xian dai xing shi ye xia ying wen shi ge de shi hua yi shu—yi wei lian bu lai ke wei li [the art of poem and painting of english poem in modernity—william blake as example].” mang zhong [grain in ear] 3 (2014): 249-50. in chinese. §*harvey, john. “the unequal art of william blake.” the poetics of sight. bern: peter lang, 2015. hellwig, harold henry. “william blake’s jerusalem and the los angeles of film noir.” philosophy and literature 38.1 (april 2014): 223-41. i *ikegame, naoko. igirisu geijutsu kyoiku shiso niokeru dokusosei to kokyosei: reynolds, blake to romanshugi no kodomokan [the originality and publicness of the thoughts on arts education in britain: reynolds, blake, and views on children in romanticism]. 2014. <blake (2015)> review chikako ishikawa, bijutsu kyoiku kenkyu [studies in art education] 20 (2014): 58-64. in japanese. j *jackson, h. j. those who write for immortality: romantic reputations and the dream of lasting fame. new haven: yale university press, 2015. chapter 5, “raising the unread” (167-216) is divided into “blake’s obscurity” (168-74, 259-60), “gilchrist’s biography” (174-83, 260-61), “blake’s fame” (183-89, 261-62, stressing bronowski), “john clare” (189-96), “clare’s afterlife” (196-204), and “robert bloomfield” (204-16). review *richard holmes, “the greatness of william blake,” new york review of books 14 nov. 2015 (with 2 others) (a frequently accurate review concluding that heather jackson’s book is “fine”). *jordis, christine. william blake ou l’infini. 2014. <blake (2015)> review §*paul bennett, “le graveur william blake: l’imagination au service de la vie,” le devoir [montreal] 24 may 2014. in french. k §keaton, megan kathleen. “beyond the alphabetic: using william blake’s ‘the tyger’ as a way to teach modal affordances.” cea forum 44.2 (2015). *kettle, martin. “english radicalism needs to recapture the spirit of blake.” guardian [london] 2 jan. 2015. an essay “stimulated by a visit this week to the current william blake exhibition in oxford’s ashmolean museum.” *krneta, jelena. “william blake—new age mistical poet: who was the william blake—the poet of hymn jerusalem.” bašta balkana 22 sept. 2012. *kroeber, karl. blake in a post-secular era: early prophecies. 2012. <blake (2013)> review *j. b. mertz (see blake 48.4, above). l lan, chao-hui. “wen xue zuo pin de yu jing yu yi yi—yi bu lai ke de ‘gao yang’ yi shi wei li [context and meaning in literary works—blake’s ‘the lamb’ as example].” xiao zuo jia xuan kan [writer selective periodical] 24 (2015): 244-45. in chinese. §leader, carol. “evil, imagination and the unrepressed unconscious: the value of william blake’s satanic ‘error’ for clinical practice.” bjp: british journal of psychotherapy 31.3 (aug. 2015): 311-32. especially on illustrations of the book of job. lei, mu-ye. “qian tan wei lian bu lai ke de si xiang bian hua: cong ‘shen sheng de yi xiang’ dao ‘chou xiang de ren xing’ [a study of the change of william blake’s thought: from ‘the divine image’ to ‘the human abstract’].” hai wai ying yu [overseas english] 15 (2014): 198, 200. in chinese. li, chun-mei. “cong gai xie li lun de jiao du fen xi wei lian bu lai ke tian zhen de yu yan [analysis of william blake’s ‘auguries of innocence’ from the perspective of rewriting theory].” ke xue dao bao [science guide] 9 (2014): 97. in chinese. an analysis based on andré lefevere’s rewriting theory. li, yong-e. “wei lian bu lai ke ‘the fly’ de si ceng ci jie gou fen xi [analysis of the four structural dimensions of william blake’s ‘the fly’].” he tian shi fan zhuan ke xue xiao xue bao [journal of hotan teachers college] 1 (2014): 105-10. in chinese. an analysis according to the polish philosopher ingarden. lin, xiao-you. “bu lai ke yu ‘jie mei yi shu’ bu lai ke jing dian hua guo cheng zhong de ‘shi hua jie he’ chuang zuo yin su [blake and ‘sister art’—composite art as a creative factor in canonization of william blake].” zhe jiang chuan mei xue yuan xue bao [journal of zhejiang university of media and communications] 1 (2015): 90-94. in chinese. lin, xiao-you. “tu xiang wen zi wen ben yu ling shi shi xue—bu lai ke lan bei si shi qing zuo pin yan jiu [visual, verbal text and visionary poetics: a study of blake’s lambeth books].” zhejiang university (hangzhou, china) phd, 2014. 129 pp. in chinese. liu, hai-yi. “cong zi ran zhu yi he xian shi zhu yi dui bi fen xi wei lian hua zi hua si yu wei lian bu lai ke [a comparative analysis of william wordsworth and william blake: on the art of naturalism and realism].” qing chun sui yue [blooming season] 6 (2014): 18-20. in english. liu, xin-ya. “ji dong de xin—william blake ‘sao yan cong de nan hai’ ping xi [palpitant heart—an analysis of william blake’s ‘the chimney sweeper’].” da guan [grand sight] 7 (2015): 31. in chinese. “the chimney sweeper” is the one in songs of experience. m *makdisi, saree. reading william blake. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2015. 15.2 x 22.8 cm., xii, 137 pp., 31 black-and-white reproductions; isbn: 9780521128414. there are separate chapters on “image,” “text,” “desire,” “joy,” “power,” “time,” and “making,” “some of the most important concepts in blake’s work” (2), “each chapter [focused] on a reading of one of the songs of innocence and of experience” (5).note that in the quotation from marriage pl. 10, “improvent makes strait roads,” the word “improvent” is silently improved to “improvement.” *malmberg, carl-johan. “blake ville låta inbillningen virvla fritt.” svenska dagbladet 24 june 2006. in swedish. *malmberg, carl-johan. “blakes laokoon djärv förening av ord och bild.” svenska dagbladet 29 sept. 2007. in swedish. §*malmberg, carl-johan. “blakes mest älskade sjungs av tusenden.” svenska dagbladet 17 jan. 2014. in swedish. a close reading of “and did those feet in ancient time” from milton pl. 2. *malmberg, carl-johan. stjärnan i foten. dikt och bild, bok och tanke hos william blake [the star in the foot: poetry and image, book and thought in william blake]. 2013. <blake (2015)> review §*eric schüldt, “för blake var fantasin det verkliga,” svenska dagbladet 19 april 2013 (in swedish). §mancelos, joão de. “um tigre, dois tigres, três tigres: william blake e jorge luis borges num poema em prosa de eugénio de andrade.” máthesis no. 21 (2012): 57-70. in portuguese. §markos, louis. “the externalization of the internal: perception in blake’s songs of innocence and of experience.” the romantic poets: blake, wordsworth, and coleridge: with an introduction and contemporary criticism. ed. joseph pearce and robert asch. san francisco: ignatius press, 2014. 491-503. §marshall, nowell. romanticism, gender, and violence: blake to george sodini. lanham, maryland: bucknell university press, 2013. §mazzeo, tilar j. “william blake and the decorative arts.” the regency revisited. ed. tim fulford and michael e. sinatra. new york: palgrave macmillan, 2016. chapter 5 (63-80). mcgann, jerome. “reflections on textual and documentary media in a romantic and post-romantic horizon.” studies in romanticism 53.4 (winter 2014): 481-507. includes five pages on blake. *mcgilchrist, iain. the master and his emissary: the divided brain and the making of the western world. new haven: yale university press, 2009. b. 2010. c. 2012. passim. §messager, annette. “annette messager on william blake.” in my view: personal reflections on art by today’s leading artists. ed. simon grant. london: thames & hudson, 2012. §mezquita fernández, maría antonia. “lecturas de william blake, william wordsworth y dylan thomas en la poesía de claudio rodríguez.” anuario del instituto de estudios zamoranos florián de ocampo no. 26 (2009): 281-92. in spanish. *miao, zhi-min. “bu lai ke shi hua zuo ping de tu wen guan xi—jian xi zhong yi ben chu xian de wu du [the relation of image and text in blake’s poems and paintings—also on the misinterpretations in chinese translation].” shi shu hua [poem, calligraphy, and painting] 4 (2014): 111-38, 29 reproductions. in chinese. miner, paul. “blake’s beastly ‘spectre.’” notes and queries, n.s., 62.3 (sept. 2015): 379-89. “this study investigates aspects of blake’s allusive word-play as it relates to this mercurial beast” (379). miner, paul. “contemplations on iconography: blake’s frontispieces and tailpiece to songs of innocence and [of] experience.” notes and queries, n.s., 62.3 (sept. 2015): 378-79. the piper has his left food forward (songs pl. 2), the shepherd has his right foot forward (pl. 28), and one of the “cherubs of inspiration” has a cloven hoof (pl. a [copy c]). §moss, stanley. “on william blake’s drawing, ‘the ghost of a flea’ [poem].” american poetry review 40.6 (nov.-dec. 2011): 13. *myrone, martin. “william blake’s sodomites.” burning bright: essays in honour of david bindman. ed. diana dethloff, tessa murdoch, and kim sloan, with caroline elam. london: ucl [university college london] press, 2015. chapter 14 (136-45). about the defiant hand gesture of making “figs” in blake’s watercolors for dante’s inferno. n nayar, pramod k. “william blake’s ‘london’ as a surveillance poem.” explicator 72.4 (2014): 328-32. o §o’donoghue, heather. “preromantic responses: gray, blake, and the northern sublime.” english poetry and old norse myth: a history. oxford: oxford university press, 2014. §*otto, peter. “organizing the passions: minds, bodies, machines, and the sexes in blake and swedenborg.” european romantic review 26.3 (2015): 367-77. especially about milton pl. 32. p §paley, morton d. “george romney’s shipwrecks.” nature, politics, and the arts: essays on romantic culture for carl woodring. ed. hermione de almeida. newark, delaware: university of delaware press, 2015. 203-23. partly about blake. *paley, morton d., and mark crosby. “catherine blake and her marriage: two notes.” huntington library quarterly 78.3 (2015): 479-91. paley, “the torments of love and jealousy in william and catherine blake” (479-85) (“the 1790s saw strains in the blake marriage, perhaps over william’s interest in polygamy … and … these were reflected in visions of the daughters of albion”). crosby, “the lamentations of catherine blake” (485-91) (“catherine’s annotations [underlinings] of a work by hayley [triumphs of temper (1803)] imply that she shared his discontent” with their marriage). §patil, girish s. “mystical element in william blake and sri aurobindo ghosh: a study.” karnatak university phd, 2014. §pettersson, bo. “hypothetical action: poetry under erasure in blake, dickinson and eliot.” the ethics of literary communication. ed. roger d. sell, adam borch, and inna lindgren. amsterdam: john benjamins, 2013. 129-45. phillips, michael. gave 23 boxes of scholarly materials, mostly proofs, drafts, and letters about his publications (but no blake originals), to victoria university in the university of toronto. piccitto, diane. “dramatic forms and identity-formation in the works of william blake.” university of western ontario phd, 2010. 359 pp. §picón bruno, daniela. “william blake: la seducción de lo invisible.” culturas de la seducción. ed. patricia cifre wibrow and manuel gonzález de ávila. salamanca: ediciones universidad de salamanca, 2014. isbn: 9788490124475. 157-62. in spanish. §pollard, patrick. “when heaven meets hell: william blake and andré gide.” english: the journal of the english association 64, no. 245 (summer 2015): 99-115. gide’s reaction to the marriage of heaven and hell. §pressly, william l. “william blake and james barry as prophetic painters: ‘would, god, that all the lord’s people were prophets.’” james barry’s murals at the royal society of arts: envisioning a new public art. togher: cork university press, 2014. 283-90. q quinney, laura. “subjectivity and despair in blake and kierkegaard.” romanticism and philosophy: thinking with literature. ed. sophie laniel-musitelli and thomas constantinesco. new york: routledge, 2015. chapter 10 (179-93). r radford, andrew. mary butts and british neo-romanticism: the enchantment of place. london: bloomsbury, 2014. 95-102. blake is very tangential. §rajan, tilottama. “blake’s body without organs: the autogenesis of the system in the lambeth books.” european romantic review 26.3 (2015): 357-66. she “explores urizen’s body as a figure for blake’s own corpus” with reference to dr. john hunter. §redbone, martha. the garden of love: songs of william blake. blackfeet productions, 2012. cd/digital download. review steve newman (see blake 49.1, above). rispoli, stephanie adair. “anatomy, vitality, and the romantic body: blake, coleridge, and the hunter circle, 1750–1840.” university of north carolina (chapel hill) phd, 2013. about the circle of dr. william hunter (1718–83), his brother john, and john’s wife, anne home hunter (1742–1821). rong, xue-ying, and na wu. “shi ge ‘hei pi fu de xiao nan hai’ ping xi [analysis of the poem ‘the little black boy’].” hai wai ying yu [overseas english] 12 (2015): 165-66. in chinese. §*rosen, aaron. god song: a grieving simile. illustrations by william blake. rhinebeck, new york: sheep meadow press, 2013. 20 cm., xxiv pp.; isbn: 9781937679293. *rowland, christopher. blake and the bible. 2011. <blake (2012)> reviews §susanne sklar, journal of the american academy of religion 81.1 (march 2013): 304-07. §ryan, mark. “‘striving with systems to deliver individuals’: william blake’s psychic re-animation of greek myth.” working with english: medieval and modern language, literature and drama 7 (winter 2011): 46-58. s sato, hikari. “taisho ki niokeru william blake juyo to shakaishugi shiso: inoue masukichi, momota soji, shirotori seigo (the reception of william blake in the taisho period [1912–1926] and socialism in japan: inoue masukichi, momota soji, and shirotori seigo).” hikaku bungaku kenkyu (studies of comparative literature) 100 (2015): 6-32. in japanese, with a synopsis in english. *sato, hikari. yanagi muneyoshi to william blake: kanryu suru “kotei no shiso” [yanagi muneyoshi and william blake: the philosophy of affirmation of life and its global circulation]. tokyo: tokyo daigaku shuppan kai, 2015. 22 cm., 656 pp., 24 plates; isbn: 9784130860482. in japanese. summary by dr. sato: in 1914, yanagi muneyoshi (1889–1961), a religious philosopher and afterwards a founder of japan folk crafts museum, published william blake, the first academic book on blake in japanese. he argued that blake’s unique understanding of christianity had something in common with “oriental” philosophy, making reference to the upanishads translated by max müller and published by oxford university press in 1879. did yanagi misinterpret blake according to his own interests in indian philosophy? this book offers an account of the reception of blake by yanagi in the 1910s and 1920s, giving portrayals of early blake enthusiasts such as bernard leach, augustus john, john sampson, the rossetti brothers, and laurence binyon, all of whom had influence on yanagi. in the latter half of the book the author explores the relationship between blake and hinduism. although blake wrote in his letter to thomas butts that his stay in felpham was “three years slumber on the banks of the ocean,” it is highly probable that blake received inspiration from william hayley, who owned books on hinduism written by sir william jones and thomas maurice. above all indian motifs are prominently embedded in designs to a series of ballads (1802), an artistic collaboration of hayley the poet and blake the engraver. presumably hayley wrote it as an elegy for his son, thomas alphonso hayley, who had great interests in indian culture and who died a premature death in 1800. the author concludes that blake established his original version of christianity under the influence of neoplatonic interpretation of hinduism according to the books and essays by jones and maurice. the chapters about blake and hinduism are based on the author’s phd thesis, “william blake and multiculturalism: between christianity and heathen myths” (university of london, 2008) <blake (2009)>. *schock, peter a. “the marriage of heaven and hell: blake’s myth of satan and its cultural matrix.” elh 60 (1993): 441-70. <blake (1994)> b. §“el matrimonio del cielo y el infierno: el mito de satán en blake y su matriz cultural.” revolución y literatura en el siglo diecinueve: fuentes, documentos, textos críticos. ed. jerónimo ledesma and valeria castelló-joubert. buenos aires: editorial de la facultad de filosofía y letras, universidad de buenos aires, 2012. vol. 1. in spanish. §seul, tae-soo. “[william blake and the middle path of buddhism].” [east-west comparative literature journal] no. 29 (2013): 129-43. in korean, with an abstract in english. §shen, baoguo, yinxia liu, and junxia yang. “prophecy in william blake’s the marriage of heaven and hell.” theory and practice in language studies 4, no. 8 (aug. 2014): 1724-29. §shinder, jason. “the productions of time: kunitz on blake.” conversations with stanley kunitz. ed. kent p. ljungquist. jackson: university press of mississippi, 2013. 194-216. §smith, j. a. “telling love: twelfth night in samuel richardson, teresia constantia phillips, and william blake.” studies in philology 112.1 (winter 2015): 194-212. §steil, juliane. “questôes de terminologia na tradução de literatura: os casos de edith wharton e william blake.” caderno de letras [brazil] 23 (2014): 139-50. in portuguese. stelzig, eugene. bob dylan’s career as a blakean visionary and romantic. geneseo, new york: milne library, 2013. 36 pp., 15.2 x 23 cm.; isbn: 9781493564651. the work was intended in 1976 as part of a collection of scholarly essays on dylan, but the collection was never published. “the poetry of blake and dylan shares a cluster of fundamental ideas, themes, feelings, images, and modes of expression” (6). the essay often deals with blake. sun, ai-na. “jian dan yu fan fu de qiao miao rong he—wei lian bu lai ke shi ge zhong de xiang xiang li [clever blend of simplicity and complexity—imagination in william blake’s poetry].” xue shu tan jiu [academic exploration] 12 (2015): 127-31. in chinese. sun, cong-zong. “cong xiu ci xue jiao du kan wei lian bu lai ke lun dun zhong de ren lun bei ju [an analysis on the ethical tragedy in william blake’s ‘london’ from the rhetoric angle].” kuai le yue du [happy reading] 18 (2015): 128. in english. §swann, karen. “teaching jerusalem.” european romantic review 25.3 (2014): 397-402. t §teskey, gordon. “prophecy meets history: frye’s blake and frye’s milton.” educating the imagination: northrop frye past, present, and future. ed. alan bewell, neil ten kortenaar, and germaine warkentin. montreal: mcgill-queen’s university press, 2015. 48-64. *thomas, inigo. “in golgonooza.” lrb [london review of books] blog 16 sept. 2015. on the blake society walk through london led by henry eliot. *trodd, colin. visions of blake: william blake in the art world 1830–1930. 2012. <§blake (2013)> reviews §susan matthews, victorian studies 57.2 (winter 2015): 340-42. §jason whittaker, visual culture in britain 16.3 (2015): 362-64 (“thoroughly exhaustive” and “extremely sophisticated”). *sibylle erle (see blake 49.3, above). tutaş, nazan. “william blake’de masumiyet ve tecrübe: kuzu ve kaplan.” folklor/edebiyat 78 (2014): 83-90. in turkish, with a summary in english. *tweedy, roderick. the god of the left hemisphere: blake, bolte taylor and the myth of creation. 2012. <§blake (2014)> part i: the looking-glass: 1. “the origins of urizen.” 3-9. 2. “urizen and the left hemisphere.” 11-31. 3. “the myth of genesis.” 33-46. 4. “the marriage of heaven and hell.” 47-59. part ii: down the rabbit-hole: 5. “the god of reason.” 63-84. 6. “urizenic religion and urizenic reason: r1 and r2.” 85-107. 7. “the left hemisphere agenda.” 109-26. 8. “twilight of the psychopaths.” 127-200. 9. “more than man: the dragon urizen.” 201-31. 10. “the selfhood & the fires of los.” 233-82. conclusion. 283-96. appendix. 297-301. notes. 303-13. references. 315-20. index. reviews james rovira (see blake 49.1, above). robert mitchell, bars review 46 (2015) (with 1 other) (“a rather unorthodox book,” but “this is ultimately a good kind of heterodoxy”). v vaughan, william. see palmer in division ii. §vergnon, dominique. comment dire l’instant en peinture: de william blake à antoine watteau. paris: michel de maule, 2014. collection “le studiolo,” 23 cm., 331 pp.; isbn: 9782876235687. in french. viscomi, joseph. “in the caves of heaven and hell: swedenborg and printmaking in blake’s marriage.” blake in the nineties. ed. steve clark and david worrall. 1999. <blake (2000), under clark> b. “en las cuevas del cielo y el infierno: swedenborg y la impresión en el matrimonio de blake.” revolución y literatura en el siglo diecinueve: fuentes, documentos, textos críticos. ed. jerónimo ledesma and valeria castelló-joubert. buenos aires: editorial de la facultad de filosofía y letras, universidad de buenos aires, 2012. vol. 1. in spanish. w wang, li. “wei lian bu lai ke zao qi zuo pin zhong de duo yang hua shi jiao [diverse perspective in william blake’s early works].” hu bei jing ji xue yuan xue bao (ren wen she hui ke xue ban) [journal of hubei university of economics (humanities and social sciences)] 1 (2015): 100-01. in chinese. the early works are songs of innocence and songs of experience. wang, ming-lei. “wei lian bu lai ke shi ge zhong de yan se yi xiang jie du [an interpretation of the color images in william blake’s poems].” chang cheng [great wall] 12 (2014): 161-62. in chinese. wang, ting, dan zhu, and wei liu. “wei lian bu lai ke ‘lao hu’ zhong de yi xiang fen xi [imagery analysis of william blake’s ‘the tyger’].” an hui dian zi xin xi zhi ye ji shu xue yuan xue bao [journal of anhui vocational college of electronics and information technology] 1 (2014): 108-10. in chinese. §warner, sylvia townsend. “the inspired old bustard: william blake.” with the hunted: selected writings. ed. peter tolhurst. norwich: black dog books, 2012. wei, ming, and lin-lin zhang. “wei lian bu lai ke: cong tian zhen zou xiang jing yan—sao yan cong de hai zi dui bi yu shang xi [william blake: from ‘innocence’ to ‘experience’—comparison and analysis of the two poems called ‘the chimney sweeper’].” bei fang wen xue [northern literature] 5 (2015): 36-38. in chinese. whitson, roger, and jason whittaker. william blake and the digital humanities: collaboration, participation, and social media. 2013. <§blake (2014)> b. §2015 (paperback). reviews §reference and research book news 28.2 (april 2013). §*caio di palma, materialidades da literatura 3.1 (2015) (in portuguese). *windle, john. “meet mr. blake.” gazette of the grolier club, n.s., no. 64 (2013): 60-76. an engaging summary filled with superlatives. wolkowski, z. w. william blake: the spirit and the letter: a chirographic and semiotic study of his quotations. university of saigon, vietnam inauguration october 6, 2010. médiathèque musicale de paris, april 28, 2011. [lexington, kentucky: n.p.], 2014. 21.6 x 21.6 cm., [30 pp. printed on one side only] + 12-pp. list of similar publications; isbn: 9781507529317. it consists of 11 decorated quotations, four by blake (one with two different designs). there is no “study” here at all. *wu, duncan. “myth 7: blake was mad.” 30 great myths about the romantics. chichester: john wiley & sons, 2015. 58-65. “the argument of this essay is … that the epithet [mad] is too crude to do him justice” (59). *wu, duncan. “myth 8: blake wrote ‘jerusalem’ as an anthem to englishness.” 30 great myths about the romantics. chichester: john wiley & sons, 2015. 66-73. “this essay seeks to reconnect it [‘jerusalem’] to its sources”; “the appropriation of blake’s lyric as anthem for war or white english supremacy betrays its author’s most deeply held convictions” (68, 72). wu, you. “‘lun dun’ de wen ti xue fen xi [a stylistic analysis of ‘london’].” chong qing san xia xue yuan xue bao [journal of chongqing three gorges university] 1 (2015): 128-30. in chinese. an analysis from the angles of over-regularity, surface-structure and deep-structure deviation. x xie, qian. “hei an zhong de na han yu zheng zha—wei lian bu lai ke ‘lun dun’ ping xi [yell and struggle in the darkness—an analysis of william blake’s ‘london’].” qing nian wen xue jia [young litterateur] 2 (2014): 57, 59. in chinese. an analysis of rhyme, image, expression, and narrative perspective to illustrate the decay of english society and the suffering of english people. xie, qian. “wei lian bu lai ke shi ge zhong de ‘sheng yin’: ‘voices’ in william blake’s poetry.” qing chun sui yue [blooming season] 1 (2014): 11. in english. xie, qi-yuan. “bu lai ke shi ge zhong ‘tian zhen’ yu ‘jing yan’ de bei lun [the paradox of ‘innocence’ and ‘experience’ in blake’s poetry].” yu wen xue kan [journal of language and literature studies] 13 (2014): 90-91, 132 [sic]. in chinese. xu, ruo-wen. “cong w bu lai ke dui d jiang jian san lang de ying xiang kan da jiang de ‘xiao shuo di xing xue’ [a study of kenzaburo oe’s novel topography from william blake’s influence on kenzaburo oe].” dong wu xue shu [soochow academic] 3 (2015): 92-104. in chinese. the novel is oe’s rouse up o young men of the new age! y yi, xiao-ming. “lun fu lai de shi xiang li lun yu bu lai ke shi ge shi xiang zhi qi shi [a study of frye’s vision theory and the mythological images in blake’s poetry].” ying mei wen xue yan jiu lun cong [english and american literary studies] 1 (2014): 339-54. in chinese. §ying, pengiu. bulaike. [beijing, 2012]. 19 cm., 4, 83 pp. in chinese. *ying, yi-wen. “wei lian bu lai ke hua jing zhong de ‘tian zhen yu jing yan zhi ge’ [william blake’s songs of innocence and of experience in picturesque scene].” zhong wen xue shu qian yan [chinese frontier of language and literature] 1 (2014): 131-35. in chinese. concerned with drawing technique, style, artistic creation, and aesthetic images. z *zeng, jing. “sheng ming de ‘tao yi xian’—jing shen feng lie shi ye xia de bu lai ke shi ge [life’s ‘line of flight’—a schizoanalysis of william blake’s poetry].” beijing foreign studies university phd, 2015. in chinese. an extended interpretation and analysis of the unconventionality of blake’s tiriel, the four zoas, milton, and jerusalem, along with related shorter poems and engraved works, on the basis of blake’s schizophrenia. *zeng, jing. “xian de fan pan lun wei lian bu lai ke de yi shu tao yi xian [the revolt of the ‘line’—on william blake’s artistic ‘line of flight’].” wai guo yu wen yan jiu [foreign language and literature research] 6 (2015): 9-15. in chinese. zhang, jing-jun. “wei lian bu lai ke shi ge zhong de sheng tai si xiang he sheng tai yi shi [ecological thought and ecological consciousness in william blake’s poetry].” qing chun sui yue [youthful days] 15 (2015): 12-13. in chinese. zhang, lu-ying. “shen mi de jing shen li liang—bu lai ke ‘lao hu’ shi jian shang [mystical spiritual strength—appreciation of ‘the tyger’].” xi an wen li xue yuan xue bao (she hui ke xue ban) [journal of xi’an university (social sciences edition)] 4 (2014): 13-15. in chinese. concerned with mysticism, symbolism, and romanticism. zhang, shen-yan. “ying guo shi ge bing mei gui shang xi [an analysis of ‘the sick rose’].” bei fang wen xue [northern literature] 11 (2014): 46. in chinese. *zhang, yan. “lun bu lai ke shi hua he ti yi shu zhong de duo yuan hu dong guan xi—yi tian zhen yu jing yan zhi ge wei li [the multiple interactions in blake’s art of poetry and painting—songs of innocence and of experience as example].” wen yi yan jiu [literature and art studies] 9 (2014): 38-47. in chinese. zhou, rong. “bu lai ke ‘si tian shen’ he qu yuan ‘yuan you’ zhong de shen hua yi xiang bi jiao [a comparison of mythical images in blake’s vala or the four zoas and qu yuan’s yuan you].” hai wai ying yu [overseas english] 11 (2015): 186-89. in chinese. zhou, rong. “tian zhen yu xiang xiang wei lian bu lai ke shi ge zhong de tong zhen su qiu [innocence and imagination—appeals of children’s innocence in william blake’s poetry].” hai wai ying yu [overseas english] 15 (2015): 183-86. in chinese. division ii: blake’s circlei do not record sales of their works, which are very extensively reported in robert n. essick, “blake in the marketplace, 2015,” blake 49.4 (spring 2016), seen in prepublication draft. barry, james (1741–1806) painter §bindman, catherine. “a genius of first rank, lost to the world”: prints by james barry from the collection of william l. pressly. [new york]: c. g. boerner, 2014. §pressly, william l. james barry’s murals at the royal society of arts: envisioning a new public art. togher: cork university press, 2014. xviii, 395 pp.; isbn: 9781782051084. cumberland, george (1754–1848) artist, polymath, lifelong friend of blake george cumberland, jr. views in spain and portugal taken during the campaigns of his grace the duke of wellington. newly recorded copy: biblioteca nacional de portugal. §halkyard, stella. “pictures from a library 17: george cumberland.” pn review 41.2 (nov.-dec. 2014). apparently about a fossil. the edwardses of halifax bookbinders, publishers, antiquarian booksellers (1749–1826) bentley, g. e., jr. the edwardses of halifax: the making and selling of beautiful books in london and halifax, 1749–1826. 2 vols. toronto: university of toronto press, 2015. vol. 1, 4o, xxiv, 283 pp. [plus 5 blank pages] including index for vols. 1-2; vol. 2 (available only online <http://​www.​utppublishing.​com/​pdf/​bentley_edwardsesofhalifaxvol2.​pdf>) 396 pp.; 38 reproductions in vols. 1-2; isbn: 9781442645189. flaxman, john (1755–1826) sculptor, lifelong friend of blake jones, mark. “william wyon as a pupil and follower of flaxman.” burning bright: essays in honour of david bindman. ed. diana dethloff, tessa murdoch, and kim sloan, with caroline elam. london: ucl [university college london] press, 2015. chapter 9 (89-97). lemonedes, heather. “‘graceful in the extreme’: a neoclassical drawing by john flaxman.” nineteenth-century art worldwide 11.2 (summer 2012). she says that flaxman’s the judgment of paris in the cleveland museum of art illustrates paris and oenone. fuseli, john henry (1741–1825) swiss-born painter, friend of blake §pop, andrei. antiquity, theatre, and the painting of henry fuseli. oxford: oxford university press, 2015. hayley, william (1745–1820) man of letters, patron of blake and others §clucas, tom. “editing milton during the french revolution: cowper and hayley as ‘brother editor[s].’” review of english studies 65, no. 272 (2014): 866-87. foster, paul, ed., with diana barsham. william hayley (1745–1820): poet, biographer, and libertarian: a reassessment. 2013. <§blake (2014)> review joseph wittreich (see blake 48.4 in division i, part vi). foster, paul, ed., with diana barsham. william hayley (1745–1820): selected poetry. 2013. <§blake (2014)> review joseph wittreich (see blake 48.4 in division i, part vi). palmer, samuel (1805–81) painter and disciple vaughan, william. samuel palmer: shadows on the wall. new haven: published for the paul mellon centre for studies in british art by yale university press, 2015. 4o, 412 pp.; isbn: 9780300209853. *“the meeting with william blake [in 1824].” chapter 5 (71-86). *“the return of blake [in gilchrist’s book (1863)].” chapter 22 (323-30). stothard, thomas (1755–1834) painter, sometime friend of blake §jung, sandro. “print culture, marketing, and thomas stothard’s illustrations for the royal engagement pocket atlas, 1779–1826.” studies in eighteenth-century culture 41 (2012): 27-53. jung, sandro. “thomas stothard, milton and the illustrative vignette: the houghton library designs for the royal engagement pocket atlas.” yearbook of english studies 45, the history of the book (2015): 137-58. §jung, sandro. “thomas stothard’s illustrations for the royal engagement pocket atlas, 1779–1826.” library 12.1 (2011): 3-22. watson, caroline (1761?–1814) engraver, rival of blake 2014 23 september–2015 4 january david alexander. caroline watson and female printmaking in late georgian england. 2014. <blake (2015)> alexander prints a letter of 30 october 1805 from watson to william hayley, which mentions that on 5 july 1805 richard phillips (the publisher of hayley’s ballads [1805] with blake’s engravings) sent three copies to “m.r blake” (109). blake in the marketplace, 2021 blake in the marketplace, 2021 by robert n. essick robert n. essick has been collecting and writing about blake for over fifty years. table of contents: introductory essay abbreviations blake: illuminated books drawings and paintings separate plates and plates in series letterpress books with engravings by and after blake interesting blakeana blake’s circle and followers: calvert, edward flaxman, john fuseli, henry linnell, john palmer, samuel richmond, george appendix: new information on blake’s engravings the blake market, almost dormant in 2020, sprang to life early in 2021 with the appearance of blake’s drawing the death of ezekiel’s wife (illus. 2) in sotheby’s new york sale of old master drawings on 27 january. the estimate of $80,000-$120,000 undervalued one of blake’s most important monochrome wash drawings remaining in private hands. bidding paused for half a minute at the low estimate. as the auctioneer was about to knock down the lot, another bidder jumped in. two combatants drove the drawing to a hammer price of $230,000-$289,800 including the buyer’s premium charged by the house. i believe that this is an auction record for an uncolored drawing by blake, and a record for one of his pictures in any medium datable to the 1780s. i have not been able to discover the identity of the new owner, but i suspect a private collector. has bono struck again?the rock musician bono (paul david hewson) is rumored to have purchased both plates of “a cradle song” from copy y of songs of innocence. see the 2018 sales review in blake 52.4 (spring 2019), entry for songs of innocence copy y. other possible purchasers are florence rothman, owner of the finest collection of blake’s illuminated books remaining in private hands, and leon black, the billionaire collector of drawings who owns two watercolors by blake, god blessing the seventh day and the parable of the wise and foolish virgins (butlin #434, 481), and possibly the large color print the good and evil angels struggling for possession of a child (butlin #324). adam and eve asleep, a watercolor with a disputed attribution, was offered in sotheby’s next lot—​see under interesting blakeana. auction sales in january included samuel palmer’s c. 1835 watercolor the welsh cottage for $100,000, twenty times the high estimate. this is probably a one-off fluke rather than a new benchmark for palmer’s post-shoreham-period works. in may another palmer watercolor, sketch for a pastoral scene, datable to c. 1851, sold for a hammer price within the estimate range of $20,000-30,000. one of the very few privately owned shoreham-period drawings by palmer came to auction in july—​see the entry for a shepherd leading his flock under the full moon and illus. 9. two notable works came to market in march. on the 25th the london dealer peter harrington rare books offered a set of blake’s virgil wood engravings almost certainly printed by edward calvert after john linnell acquired the blocks in 1825 (illus. 7). henry fuseli’s rare soft-ground etching “chrysogone conceives, in a ray of sunshine, amoretta and belphoebe” achieved an extraordinary price at auction on the same day. for details, see the listings below. in may a hitherto unrecorded version of blake’s visionary head of boadicea appeared with little fanfare in an auction in maine. mistakenly offered as a work “after” blake with a modest estimate and no mention of the mysterious sketch on the verso, the pencil drawing fetched a bargain hammer price of $1300. see illus. 4 and 5 and the entry below for further comments on the visionary head of queen boadicea. the highlight—​lowlight?—​of the fall auction season was the sale on 14 october of the incubus leaving two young women, an oil painting stated by christie’s, without hesitation or caveat, to be by henry fuseli (illus. 8). if indeed by him, this is the most important work by the artist to be auctioned since the sale of satan starting from the touch of ithuriel’s lance from rudolf nureyev’s collection for £770,000 in 1995. see the caption to illus. 8 for some doubts about the attribution. the hammer price of $2,900,000, only $100,000 below the low estimate, suggests that at least one bidder (possibly bidding against the reserve price rather than another person) did not have any doubts. the online version of the catalogue states, however, that “christie’s has a direct financial interest” in the lot, and thus the auction house, or a third party backing the sale, may have acquired the work at an agreed-upon reserve price. the final month of the year provided blake collectors with several opportunities to make significant acquisitions. heritage auctions of dallas, texas, offered blake’s pencil sketch adam and eve expelled from eden on 3 december. the restrained estimate range of $8000-12,000 was probably owing to the sunburnt condition of the paper and questions about who added the pen and ink work and wash to the underlying pencil drawing. in spite of these issues, five bidders pushed the lot to a hammer price of $46,000 ($57,500 including the buyer’s premium). see the entry below and illus. 1 for details. six days later, christie’s in london brought to the auction block a previously unrecorded impression of blake’s “enoch” lithograph, only the fifth known example and one of only two remaining in private hands (illus. 6). the print sold for a hammer price at the low estimate of £100,000 (£125,000 with the buyer’s premium) to john windle acting for northwestern university library. sotheby’s offered three works by and after blake in its london online auction extending from 3 to 14 december: songs of innocence and of experience posthumous copy c, the camden hotten 1868 facsimile of the marriage of heaven and hell, and the pickering 1886 facsimile of there is no natural religion. all came from the collection of stopford a. brooke (1832–​1916) and thence by descent through the family to mrs. william drysdale.other important works by blake, including there is no natural religion copy e and a posthumous impression pl. 28 of jerusalem (upper design only), were sold from brooke’s collection, sotheby’s london, 27 july 1917, #788-95, 798-99. the most important is, of course, songs copy c, estimated at £50,000-70,000. this attracted only a single bidder, who acquired the work for a hammer price of £45,000, probably one step above the unpublished reserve price. the two facsimiles are listed under interesting blakeana. in my 2019 marketplace review i included six important works by blake that the estates of two descendants of geoffrey keynes intended to give to the fitzwilliam museum.blake 53.4 (spring 2020): par. 4. those gifts were made in 2020.arts council england, cultural gifts scheme & acceptance in lieu report 2020 (manchester: arts council, 2020) 47. i did not receive a copy of this publication until jan. 2021. each work is listed below for the record. the year of all sales, catalogues, and correspondence in the following lists is 2021, unless indicated otherwise. with a few exceptions, such as blake’s engraving after william hogarth and exceptionally rare items, only complete copies of plates in series and letterpress books with blake’s commercial illustrations are included. most reports about auction catalogues are based on the online versions. illustrations are in color, unless noted otherwise. coverage of regional auctions is selective. dates for dealers’ online catalogues are the dates accessed, not the dates of publication. works offered online by dealers and listed in previous sales reviews are not repeated here. most of the auction houses add their purchaser’s surcharge to the hammer price in their price lists. these net amounts are given here, following the official price lists. estimates in auction catalogues are usually for hammer prices. i am grateful for help in compiling this review to david bindman, julian brooks, mark crosby, adam douglas, harriet drummond, julian gascoigne, mark griffith-jones, pom harrington, sophie jensen, constance mcphee, raluca nastase, lambert peyton, françois de poortere, kevin salatino, joseph viscomi, and john windle. my special thanks go to jenijoy la belle for assistance in all matters. once again, sarah jones’s editorial expertise has been invaluable. abbreviations ah abbott and holder, london alc antiquarian online auctions, lakeville, connecticut bb g. e. bentley, jr., blake books (oxford: clarendon p, 1977). plate numbers and copy designations for blake’s illuminated books and commercial book illustrations follow bb. bhl bonhams auctions, london bhny bonhams auctions, new york br(2) g. e. bentley, jr., blake records, 2nd ed. (new haven: yale up, 2004) butlin martin butlin, the paintings and drawings of william blake, 2 vols. (new haven: yale up, 1981) cat(s). catalogue(s) cb robert n. essick, william blake’s commercial book illustrations (oxford: clarendon p, 1991) cl christie’s auctions, london cny christie’s auctions, new york drw dreweatts auctions, newbury, berkshire dw dominic winter auctions, south cerney, gloucestershire e the complete poetry and prose of william blake, ed. david v. erdman, newly rev. ed. (new york: anchor-random house, 1988) eb ebay online auctions fm forum auctions, london illus. illustration(s), illustrated lly lowell libson & jonny yarker, london nb neverland books, waalre, netherlands pba pba galleries auctions, berkeley, california phb peter harrington rare books, london pl(s). plate(s) sl sotheby’s auctions, london sny sotheby’s auctions, new york sp robert n. essick, the separate plates of william blake: a catalogue (princeton: princeton up, 1983) st(s). state(s) of an engraving, etching, or lithograph sw swann auctions, new york weinglass d. h. weinglass, prints and engraved illustrations by and after henry fuseli (aldershot: scolar p, 1994) windle john windle antiquarian bookseller, san francisco # auction lot or catalogue item number illuminated books europe, pls. 5 and 10 printed recto/​verso. given 2020 by the estate of mary cecilia keynes to the fitzwilliam museum, accession no. p.102-2020. europe, pls. 6 and 7 (lower half only of each pl.) printed recto/​verso. given 2020 by the estate of stephen keynes to the fitzwilliam museum, accession no. p.103-2020. songs of innocence and of experience, posthumous copy c, printed by frederick tatham. fifty-four pls. on 54 leaves of j whatman 1831 paper, lacking pl. 52, “to tirzah,” but with pl. b, “a divine image.” printed in sepia (reddish brown). sl online auction, 3-14 dec., #23, illus. (£56,700; estimate £50,000-70,000). the provenance in bb, p. 426, ends with “… stopford brooke, and inherited (according to the present owner) by his granddaughter … mrs. william drysdale.” the sl cat. adds the following information: “rev. stopford a. brooke (1832–​1916); his daughter, maud, m. [married] t. w. rolleston (1857–​1920), poet and founder member, with yeats and c. g. duffy, of the irish literary society; then by descent” to mrs. drysdale. the vendor at the sl auction was probably an heir of mrs. drysdale’s. the only impression of pl. b printed by blake appears in copy bb. all other impressions were printed c. 1831–​32 by tatham. drawings and paintings adam and eve expelled from eden. heritage auction, dallas, 3 dec., #69068, illus. ($57,500; estimate $8000-12,000). i do not know the identity of the new owner. see illus. 1. 1. adam and eve expelled from eden (see enlargement). pencil, pen and ink, touches of gray wash, 13.2 x 16.4 cm. on wove paper. butlin #781a, dating the work to “c. 1820-5 (?).” the paper toned yellow-brown through overexposure to light. photo courtesy of heritage auctions. the reproduction of this drawing in geoffrey keynes, drawings of william blake (new york: dover, 1970), illus. 45, shows 2 pencil inscriptions lower right, “w. blake.” and “17762”, neither in blake’s hand. according to butlin’s cat. entry, both were “removed in 1976.” the leaf still contains the following inscriptions, none by blake and none shown in the illus. here: the number “17762” repeated far lower right and, on the verso, “white 158 col h. | 8 vo w. grey” followed by an undecipherable word. the pencil drawing is undoubtedly by blake, but the pen and ink and wash additions to 2 figures are open to question. this work is skillfully executed but is unusual for a pencil sketch by blake. in some passages the ink lines do not follow underlying pencil work and thus, like the shading and modeling with wash, they add to the composition. butlin, in his cat. entry noted above, writes insightfully about this issue: “the underlying pencil drawing has been partly gone over in ink. in the actual drawing this is more convincing than in reproduction, but it is still possible that this could have been added by someone else such as john linnell.” unfortunately, the provenance record for this drawing begins with william a. white in the late 19th century; there is no evidence that linnell ever possessed the work. frederick tatham can also be added to the list of candidates for the execution of the pen and ink lines and the tinting with wash. white owned at least 3 drawings by blake once in tatham’s possession: butlin #92, 326, 568. we cannot rule out the possibility that william or catherine blake added this finishing work, but i remain skeptical. the title refers only to the subject of the right half of the drawing. adam and eve, their loins adorned with (fig?) leaves, stride to the left but look and reach back toward eden. at least 3 angels turn their backs on the couple. the bat-winged man and the 4(?) figures far left probably represent satan arousing his rebel angels. one devil holds aloft a spear; clouds rise to the left of satan and hellish flames appear between him and adam and eve. the expulsion could have been based on the bible, but the motifs on the left and the way adam and eve look back to eden indicate that the textual basis for this drawing is john milton’s paradise lost.book 12, line 641: “they looking back, all th’ eastern side beheld.” quoted from milton, complete poems and major prose, ed. merritt y. hughes (new york: odyssey p, 1957) 468. both the expulsion and satan arousing his fallen cohorts are pictured in separate designs in blake’s 2 completed series of paradise lost watercolors, butlin #529 and 536. the death of ezekiel’s wife. sny, 27 jan., #88, illus. ($289,800 to an art dealer probably acting on behalf of a private collector; estimate $80,000-120,000). see illus. 2. 2. the death of ezekiel’s wife (see enlargement). monochrome wash drawing, 33.9 x 47.7 cm. the 27 jan. sny cat. describes the medium as “pen and black ink with black and grey washes over pencil, heightened with scratching out.” to this can be added the white material (probably powdered chalk mixed with glue) on ezekiel’s beard and left hand. blake used this pigment to revise the drawing by covering black lines he wished to delete. butlin #165. photo courtesy of sotheby’s. this drawing can be dated to c. 1785 on stylistic grounds. the much more finished version of the design in the philadelphia museum of art is also dated to c. 1785 by butlin, #166, but i believe it is much later, the direct preliminary for the large separate etching/​engraving of 1794 (sp vi). all 3 works are about the same size. the companion print of 1793, “job” (sp v), follows a parallel history of development, first as a monochrome wash drawing of c. 1785 (the complaint of job, butlin #163, collection of robert bransten, san francisco), then as a highly finished drawing (fine art museums of san francisco, dated by butlin #164 to c. 1785 but i believe c. 1793), and finally as the separate pl. of 1793. for the job design there is also a variant preliminary, with differences in the postures and positions of job and his wife, of c. 1785 (butlin #162, tate collection).the tate drawing is probably the earliest. its verso includes a pencil sketch of job’s wife in the posture she assumes in all later versions. for a detailed consideration of these job designs, see martin butlin, william blake, 1757–​1827, tate gallery collections, volume 5 (london: tate gallery, 1990) 52-55. in this discussion butlin accepts the later dating of the job drawing in the fine art museums of san francisco, butlin #164. a small pencil drawing of the composition, datable to c. 1790–​93 and with several variants from the other versions, is in blake’s notebook, butlin #201.20. this last work is probably part of a series of emblems in the notebook and not directly related to the development of the large etching/​engraving. these ezekiel and job drawings are reproduced in butlin and in sp figs. 9-11, 13-14, with the exception of the drawing owned by bransten (butlin #163), for which see windle cat. 65, william blake: always in paradise, march 2017, p. 3, item 2. the work has an interesting provenance. the british critic, editor, and poet francis turner palgrave (1824–​97) gave it to the american author henry adams (1838–​1918) and his wife (née marian hooper) as a wedding present in 1872. butlin concludes the provenance information with george c. homans of boston. to this record i can add his daughter, susan homans elias, by descent in 1989, and then by descent in 2002 to her husband, archibald cameron elias, jr., of philadelphia. a. c. elias died in 2008; the vendor at sny on 27 jan. was probably one or more of his heirs. free version of the laocoön. given 2020 by the estate of stephen keynes to the fitzwilliam museum, accession no. pd.29-2020. see illus. 3. 3. free version of the laocoön (see enlargement). pencil, pen and ink, monochrome washes, and touches of watercolor on the central figure’s face, image 53.7 x 43.5 cm. on a leaf of wove paper 54.2 x 44.0 cm. inscribed “the laocoon” in pencil, lower left. butlin #681, dating the work to c. 1825 and tentatively attributing the inscription to frederick tatham. the hand does not look to me like tatham’s. the paper has darkened, due to overexposure to light, except for strips where the margins were formerly covered with a mat. the edges of the mat window are visible as lines at the top, along the right edge, and bottom left. fitzwilliam museum accession no. pd.29-2020. reproduced by permission, © fitzwilliam museum, cambridge. butlin’s dating places the execution of this drawing at about the same time that blake returned to his engraving of laocoön (bb #84, sp xix) to add the many inscriptions, including the identification of the figures as “יה [jehovah] & his two sons satan & adam”.e 273 (the bracketed “[jehovah]” is in the e text). for the engraving and its dating, see the william blake archive at <http://​www.​blakearchive.​org/​work/​laocoon> and rosamund a. paice, “encyclopaedic resistance: blake, rees’s cyclopædia, and the laocoön separate plate,” blake 37.2 (fall 2003): 44-62. blake’s engraving closely follows the classical statue, but in this drawing he has made many changes to the positions and postures of the three human figures and to the serpents. laocoön is now clothed rather than nude. he may be jehovah, as blake identifies him in the engraving, or perhaps a hebrew rather than a trojan priest. visionary head of queen boadicea (recto), sketch of geometric and architectural forms (verso). barridoff galleries auction, south portland, maine, 15 may, #58, no mention of the verso drawing, recto described as “after william blake” and from the “estate of donald brenwasser, new jersey,” paper browned by overexposure to light, illus. ($1651 to windle acting for a british private collector; estimate $500-700). see illus. 4 and 5 (digital images made after the leaf was cleaned by the new owner). 4. visionary head of queen boadicea (recto) (see enlargement). pencil, head approximately 19.0 x 14.6 cm. on a leaf of wove paper, 19.9 x 15.5 cm., inscribed “boadica” in pencil below the profile head facing to the left. the leaf is the same width as those in the smaller blake-varley sketchbook (butlin #692), datable to c. 1819. the height is about 0.6 cm. less than the leaves of the sketchbook, but cutting a leaf from a bound volume would normally mean some loss along the inner edge. it was probably removed from the sketchbook early in its history by either john varley or john linnell. boadicea, queen of the iceni, a celtic tribe in britain, led a revolt against roman rule c. 60 ad. see illus. 5 for the verso sketch. private collection, great britain; reproduced by permission. there are 2 other versions of this portrait, butlin #717, head facing to the right (formerly joseph holland collection, now in a private collection, san francisco) and #718, head facing to the left (morgan library and museum, new york). butlin describes the former as “possibly a counterproof, with the hair added,” of the latter. the pencil lines of butlin #718 are very faint. the version reproduced here would appear to be an original drawing rather than a counterproof. the spelling of “boadica” and formation of the letters (except for the “b”) follow the title inscription, attributed by butlin to linnell, on butlin #717. butlin traces the history of his #717 to the sale of linnell’s collection, cl, 15 march 1918, #165, “boadicea” and 16 other works by blake (£46.4s. to the dealer e. parsons & sons). this lot included “duplicates and impressions” according to the auction cat. butlin #699 identifies 13 of the 17 works in this lot, leaving “4 others” unidentified. this newly discovered drawing may have been among the “duplicates” in the linnell sale and 1 of the 4 that butlin was unable to identify. 5. sketch of geometric and architectural forms, the verso of illus. 4, the leaf turned to the horizontal format of the drawing attributable to blake (see enlargement). pencil, leaf of wove paper 15.5 x 19.9 cm. the largest motif consists of 3 (stone?) columns supporting a lintel. two triangular forms dominate the spaces between the columns. another lintel and at least 2 columns stand behind the triangles (note that the tops of the triangles overlap the horizontal beam). this sense of recessional space prompts one to view the sketch as a single composition dominated by the entry to an egyptian temple, such as karnak, in the foreground, with 2 pyramids and further temple structures behind it. the circle hovering over the pyramid on the left may be the sun; other rounded shapes, including 1 above the foreground lintel, might be clouds. david bindman has suggested to me, in an e-mail of 7 june, that there may be a connection between this verso sketch and the man who built the pyramids and related details in the smaller blake-varley sketchbook, butlin #692.102 (portrait of the man, now missing and known only as a replica in the tate collection, butlin #752) and #692.103 (details). reproduced by permission of the owner. separate plates and plates in series “enoch,” lithograph. cl, 9 dec., #154, “previously pasted into an amateur album of prints, which can be dated to the first quarter of the 19th century,” the album containing lithographs from georg jacob vollweiler’s issue of specimens of polyautography (1806), illus. (£125,000 to windle acting for the charles deering mccormick library of special collections, northwestern university library, evanston, illinois; estimate £100,000-150,000). see illus. 6. 6. “enoch” (see enlargement). lithograph, image 21.7 x 31.2 cm. on a leaf of buff (light beige) wove paper, 22.6 x 32.1 cm., showing a “c 1806” watermark. this is the only recorded impression with a watermark, one that supports the dating of the work to c. 1806–​07. reproduced by permission of christie’s, © 2021 christie’s images limited. provenance, according to the cl cat.: presumably buxton kenrick (1770–​1832) of lincolnshire and london; george cranmer kenrick (1806–​69), presumably by inheritance; wanda jill ferguson, nee forsyth-forrest (1934–​2021), by inheritance; “acquired locally by the present owner.” the cat. also points out that the watermark indicates that the paper was probably produced by joseph coles, somerset. “ezekiel,” 2nd st. sp vi, impression 2c. given 2020 by the estate of stephen keynes to the fitzwilliam museum, accession no. p.104-2020. “the idle laundress,” after george morland, 2nd st., 1788. eb, sept., trimmed to the image except at the bottom, imprint present, illus. (£620, a record auction price for either of blake’s pls. after morland). “industrious cottager,” after george morland, 3rd st., 1788. eb, sept., trimmed to the image except at the bottom, imprint present, illus. (£360). “job,” 2 impressions, 1st and 2nd sts. sp v, impressions 1a and 2d. given 2020 by the estate of stephen keynes to the fitzwilliam museum, accession nos. p.105-2020 (1st st.) and p.106-2020 (2nd st.). for an illus. of this impression of the 1st st., see the william blake archive, <http://​www.​blakearchive.​org/​copy/​esv.​1-​1a​?descid=​esv.​1-​1a.​spb.​01>. job engravings, complete sets. pom harrington of phb, private offer in an e-mail to windle of 26 march, published “proof” impressions on so-called “french” paper, “some foxing to sheets affecting engravings only very slightly,” from the collection of david lindsay, the 27th earl of crawford and 10th earl of balcarres (1871–​1940), later half morocco (£57,500); same copy and price, voewood rare books, “firsts” online book fair, 20-25 may, illus., and july online cat. 3, #3, illus.; same copy and price, phb, online cat. for the new york virtual book fair, 9-12 sept., illus. zucker art books, june online cat., published “proof” impressions on laid india, letterpress title label “with corrected address” pasted on a leaf, three-quarter morocco, illus. ($45,000). jf letenneur livres rares, online cat. for the new york virtual book fair, 9-12 sept., 1826 printing on wove paper after removal of the “proof” inscription, leaves 37.9 x 27.2 cm., 19th-century boards with leather spine, illus. (€68,250). letterpress books with engravings by and after blake allen, history of england, 1798. eb, april, contemporary calf very worn, illus. (£662 to the london dealer zantiques, which offered the vol. to windle for £1400; sold late april by zantiques to a private collector for £1250). allen, roman history, 1798. dw, 13 may, #355, “occasional light spotting,” contemporary sheep worn, with 2 unrelated vols., illus. (£360). ariosto, orlando furioso, 1799. andrew cox, feb. online cat., 5 vols., no mention of blake’s pl., scattered foxing, contemporary calf worn and partly repaired, covers of vol. 5 detached, illus. (£245). bible, the royal universal family bible, 1780–​81. eb, nov., contemporary calf worn (offered at the “buy it now” price of $589.99). blair, the grave. alc, 7-14 jan., #146, 1926 printing of pls. only by the phoenix press (bb #435j), publisher’s portfolio, illus. ($116). fm, 28 jan., #98, 1813 quarto, “occasional spotting,” later half roan worn, illus. (£650). nicholas goodyer, feb. online cat., 1808 quarto, scattered foxing on pls., later half calf, illus. (£1600). peter fennymore, feb. online cat., 1808 quarto, scattered foxing, half morocco worn (£1750). tippecanoe antiques trader, feb. online cat., “1813” (actually 1870) folio, publisher’s cloth very worn, illus. ($2400). hermitage bookshop, feb. online cat., 1808 quarto, light browning and foxing, calf rebacked ($2000, previously offered at $3000). potter & potter auction, chicago, 13 march, #150, [1870] ed., modern half morocco, illus. ($938). freeman’s auction, philadelphia, 23 sept., #35, 1808 quarto, foxed, three-quarter morocco, illus. ($1572). bhny, 15 oct., #115, 1808 quarto, “plates foxed,” modern morocco, illus. ($535.50). drw, 17 nov., #463, 1813 quarto, “morocco-backed boards” worn, illus. (£260). eb, nov., 1926 printing of the pls. only, publisher’s portfolio worn, illus. ($49.95). bryant, new system … of ancient mythology, 1773–​76. phb, april online cat., with a variant title page in vol. 1 dated “m dcc lxxiii” (1773), 3 vols., contemporary vellum, illus. (£2000). most copies of the 1st ed. of vol. 1 are dated 1774. catullus, poems, 1795. brick row book shop, aug. online cat., 2 vols., lacking pl. 2 but with a 2nd impression of pl. 1 bound as the frontispiece in vol. 2, foxed, contemporary calf rebacked, illus. ($500). darwin, botanic garden. kurt gippert, california virtual book fair, 4-6 march, 3rd ed. of part 1, 1795, 4th ed. of part 2, 1794, 2 vols. in 1, later half calf, illus. ($1250). eb, march, 1st ed. of both parts, 1791, 1789, 2 vols. in 1, vol. 2 “possibly” lacking 2 pls. (not by blake), “sporadic foxing throughout,” contemporary calf, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $1999.10); sept., 1st ed. of part 1, 3rd ed. of part 2, both 1791, 2 vols. in 1, some spotting, modern buckram, illus. ($555). the book squirrel, march online cat., 1st ed. of both parts, 1791, 1789, 2 vols. in 1, foxed, no description of binding other than “considerable wear” ($350). james hawkes, march online cat., 1st ed. of part 1, 3rd ed. of part 2, both 1791, 2 vols. in 1, “large paper copy,” contemporary calf rebacked, illus. (£1680). nb, march online cat., 4th ed., 1799, 2 vols., contemporary calf, illus. ($2000). mallams auction, oxford, 22 april, #734, 4th ed., 1799, 2 vols., scattered foxing on pls., contemporary half calf, illus. (£475). heritage auction, dallas, 10 june, #45663, 1st ed. of part 1, 3rd ed. of part 2, both 1791, 2 vols. in 1, contemporary calf rebacked, original backstrip retained, illus. ($562.50). lawrences auction, crewkerne, somerset, 23 sept., #106, 4th ed., 1799, 2 vols., contemporary calf worn, illus. (£195). fm, 23 sept., #262, 1st ed. of part 1, 3rd ed. of part 2, both 1791, 2 vols. in 1, 2 signatures in part 2 misbound, contemporary calf worn, illus. (£653). darwin, poetical works, 1806. eb, jan., 3 vols., contemporary calf worn, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £1750 or “best offer”). phb, april online cat., 3 vols., contemporary calf, illus. (£2250). flaxman, hesiod designs, 1817. windle, june online cat., bound with flaxman’s aeschylus designs, 1831, scattered stains, half morocco worn, illus. ($500). eb, july, water stains in the lower right margins of some pls., later morocco worn and water stained, illus. (£73). phb, dec. online cat., “a few plates bound out of sequence” and “initial 3 leaves remargined,” scattered foxing, half-title torn in left margin, “contemporary red half sheep, neatly rebacked and recornered,” illus. (£475). flaxman, iliad designs, 1805. eb, march, badly foxed, half calf very worn, illus. (£80); another copy, oct., scattered foxing, half calf very worn, “binding is loose,” illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of £79.99); same copy, oct., illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £79.99 or “best offer”). halls fine art auction, shrewsbury, shropshire, 6 oct., #115, title pl. badly foxed, scattered foxing elsewhere, 19th-century half calf very worn, illus. (£24). fuseli, lectures on painting, 1801. grand auction, folkestone, kent, 27 sept., #89, an anonymous watercolor copy, 15.0 x 10.0 cm., of blake’s pl., oddly described as a “self portrait” of fuseli, illus. (not sold; estimate £900-1200). previously offered grand auction, 17 feb. 2020, #114, illus. (no bids; estimate £100-150). gay, fables, 1793. pba, 7 jan., #0105, 2 vols., “scattered light foxing,” later calf, front cover of vol. 1 detached, illus. ($200); same copy, eb, july, hinges repaired, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $1500); same copy and price, burnside rare books, july online cat., illus. alc, 17-24 june, #306, 2 vols., 6 pls. partly hand colored, “general foxing throughout, some pages heavily,” three-quarter modern buckram, illus. (not sold; estimate $600-900); same copy, eb, july, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $500); same copy, eb, july, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $890.95 or “best offer”). butterscotch auction, bedford, new york, 11 july, #0188, 2 vols., contemporary calf, illus. ($476). fm, 18 nov., #127, 2 vols. in 1, “some foxing,” contemporary calf rebacked and worn, illus. (£459). j & s wilbraham, dec. online cat., 2 vols., three-quarter morocco, “both spines completely lacking,” illus. (£275). hayley, life of cowper, 1803–​04. eb, feb., 2nd ed., 3 vols., all but fragments of the imprint on pl. 3 trimmed off, contemporary half calf worn, back cover of vol. 2 detached, illus. (£154). subun-so books, april online cat., 1st ed., 3 vols., contemporary calf ($954). colin page, oct. online cat., 2nd ed., 3 vols., with the supplement of 1806 in a 4th vol., light foxing, contemporary calf, illus. (£775). hayley, life of romney, 1809. thomson roddick auction, carlisle, cumbria, 7 oct., #122, 19th-century morocco, “extra illustrated with portraits, views, etc.,” illus. (£118). hayley, triumphs of temper, 1803. alc, 1-3 sept., #353, large-paper copy uncut in original boards, illus. (not sold; estimate $300-400). hogarth, the beggar’s opera by hogarth and blake, 1965. eb, dec., lower quarter of blake’s pl. stained, publisher’s folding box, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $118.97). hogarth, works. eb, jan., ed. dated 1822 but “clearly a later issue,” blake’s pl. with a “tear across image,” 19th-century half calf repaired, the copy offered at the “buy it now” price of £2250 or “best offer” in nov. 2020, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £2250 or “best offer,” reduced to a “buy it now” price of £1950 or “best offer” in march); may, blake’s pl. only, a late st., probably 6th, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $350 or “best offer”); may, blake’s pl. only, an early st., probably 3rd, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $200 or “best offer”); july, blake’s pl. only, a later st., possibly 6th, hand colored, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £175); aug., blake’s pl. only, probably 5th st., illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $350 or “best offer”); oct., blake’s pl. only, possibly 6th st., illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £99.99); oct., 1790 ed., modern half calf, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $8500). dw, 11 aug., #129, blake’s pl. only, probably 3rd st., “some light spotting to lower margin, trimmed outside the plate mark, sheet size 45.5 x 66 cm,” illus. (£840; estimate £70-100. probably a record auction price for this pl.). mullen books, dec. online cat., 1822 ed., missing some pls. but with blake’s, “foxing throughout,” three-quarter “leather” worn with “covers not attached,” illus. ($4000). it is difficult to determine the sts. of impressions of this pl. based on low-resolution online images. hunter, historical journal, 1793, octavo issue. australian book auction, armadale, 22 march, #64, modern calf, binding illus. ($936 australian). josephus, works. pba, 21 jan., #190, bb issue a, c. 1785–​87, contemporary calf rebacked, illus. ($510). ryedale auction, kirkbymoorside, york, 23 sept., #2270, bb issue e, c. 1792–​93, contemporary calf worn, illus. (not sold; estimate £500-600); same copy, 1 oct., #33, illus. (£482). adam partridge auction, cheshire, 18 nov., #2697, bb issue e, c. 1792–​93, “rebound” in boards (£180). lavater, aphorisms. eb, march, 1789 ed., later calf, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £250); june, 1794 ed., 2nd st. of blake’s pl., slight marginal foxing, contemporary calf, illus. ($105.50); nov., 1794 ed., 1st st. of blake’s pl., modern faux leather, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £40 or “best offer”). addison & sarova auction, social circle, georgia, 3 april, #5, 1789 ed., contemporary calf very worn, front cover detached, illus. ($218.75). mcnaughtan’s bookshop, oct. online cat., 1794 ed., 3rd st. of blake’s pl., “a print of a blake drawing pasted to flyleaf,” contemporary calf worn, illus. (£200; acquired by windle for stock); same copy, windle, nov. online cat., binding illus. ($395). lavater, essays on physiognomy. schilb antiquarian, june online cat., “1792” (c. 1818) ed., 3 vols. in 4, contemporary calf worn, illus. ($1250). novelist’s magazine, vols. 10-11 (sir charles grandison), 1783. eb, sept., 2 vols., 19th-century half calf, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $403 or “best offer”). remember me!, [1824], for 1825. eb, dec., a french binding, red morocco (?) worn, gilt and blind-stamped covers, “remember | me” stamped in gold on the spine (offered at the “buy it now” price of €7500 or “best offer”; acquired by windle for stock). shakespeare, dramatic works, 1802. eb, feb., 9 vols., no mention of blake’s pl., “all copperplates are foxed and dampstained, some heavily,” contemporary morocco worn, 2 vols. rebacked with parts of backstrips missing, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $1250). some copies do not include blake’s pl., inscribed as a “variation” of peter simon’s pl. after a painting by john opie. for the relationship between the 2 pls., see cb p. 83. shakespeare, plays, 1805. abell auction, los angeles, 21 jan., #0303, 10 vol. issue, contemporary calf rebacked, bindings illus. ($687.50). eb, april, 10 vol. issue, badly foxed, contemporary calf very worn, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $199); may, 9 vol. issue, scattered foxing, 19th-century calf repaired, illus. (£97). windle, july online cat., 10 vol. issue, contemporary russia, illus. ($5750). freeman’s auction, philadelphia, 23 sept., #77, 10 vol. issue, contemporary morocco, bindings illus. ($1113.50). stedman, narrative, 1796, colored copy. bubb > kuyper auction, haarlem, netherlands, 24 nov., #3339, 2 vols., lacking 1 map (not by blake), slight foxing, 1 pl. damp stained, contemporary half calf, illus. (€14,344). stedman, narrative, uncolored copies. eb, feb., 1796 ed., 2 vols., soiling in margins of some pls., contemporary calf rebacked and worn, illus. ($1825). aardvark books, july online cat., 1796 ed., 2 vols., pls. lightly foxed, contemporary calf rebacked with new spines, illus. ($3500). henry sotheran, july online cat., 1813 ed., 2 vols., scattered foxing, 19th-century half morocco, bindings illus. (£2450). subun-so books, july online cat., 1813 ed., 2 vols., scattered stains, contemporary calf ($2971). wittenborn art books, july online cat., 1806 ed., 2 vols., “slightly foxed,” calf rebacked, illus. ($2250). vashon island books, july online cat., 1813 ed., 2 vols., title page to vol. 1 missing, some leaves repaired, modern three-quarter “leather” ($2250). stuart and revett, antiquities of athens, vols. 1-4, 1762–​1816. cny online auction, 1-15 oct., #42, with the supplement of 1830, vols. 1-3 in contemporary morocco, vol. 4 and the supplement in half calf, all uniformly rebacked in morocco, illus. ($11,875). blake’s 4 pls. are in vol. 3. vetusta monumenta, vols. 1-5, 1747–​1835. lawrences auction, crewkerne, somerset, 23 sept., #87, 5 vols., 19th-century half calf, illus. (£1430). the illus. for an essay by joseph ayloffe in vol. 2 are signed by james basire and are based on drawings by blake (butlin #3-11). “blake’s name appears on none of the plates in vetusta monumenta, but it is very likely that he had a hand in some of them” (bb #503). see also cb p. 118. virgil, pastorals, 1821. battledoor books, california virtual book fair, 4-6 march, 2 vols., 19th-century calf with original sheep backstrips, illus. ($35,000); same copy and price, online cat. for the new york virtual book fair, 9-12 sept., illus. previously offered cny online auction, 2-18 june 2020, #68 (no bids; estimate $15,000-25,000). virgil wood engravings, the 17 blocks designed and engraved by blake, separately printed. pom harrington of phb, private offer in an e-mail to windle of 25 march, the prints mounted in an oblong album, extensively described and with all 17 prints, the binding, and the inside front cover illus. (£75,000; acquired by windle at a 20% dealer’s discount and sold early april to essick for $94,500). see illus. 7. 7. blake’s 1st wood engraving illustrating r. j. thornton’s pastorals of virgil, 1821 (see enlargement). image 6.2 x 8.4 cm. on a leaf of white wove paper 6.4 x 8.7 cm. illus. cropped close to the leaf of white wove paper. this impression almost certainly printed by edward calvert, possibly in 1828, and mounted a few years later in the boddington album described in the entry. an exceptionally fine impression, although over-inking on the tree’s foliage at the top obscures a few white lines. the strong contrast between black ink and white paper is probably due in part to cleaning the printed leaf with bleach. most of the impressions in the album are of equivalent quality. the slightly granular ink imparts to printed surfaces a pleasingly tactile dimension. essick collection. the album contains 18 leaves of ivory wove paper, each leaf 11.4 x 19.2 cm. the 1st leaf is blank; the virgil wood engravings, printed on thin white wove paper, are pasted to the rectos of leaves 2 through 18. album leaves 7 and 16 show a watermark that is very difficult to read. my best guess is “mss” or “m&s” followed, on a second line, by a year possibly beginning with “18”. the album leaves are glued to thin white paper stubs, which are in turn bound into early to mid-19th-century half morocco over marbled paper boards, stamped in gilt “virgil. by w. blake.” on the spine.in an e-mail to me of 29 march, windle states that he “would tentatively date the binding 1830–​35 (after 1825 and most likely well before 1845).” the bookplate of samuel boddington (1766–​1843) is glued to the front pastedown endpaper, also inscribed in pencil by a later owner, david lindsay, the 27th earl of crawford and 10th earl of balcarres (1871–​1940), “given me by | d. y. cameron. | c[rawford].”, the scottish painter and etcher sir david young cameron (1865–​1945). this is probably the album sold from the collection of thomas boddington (samuel boddington’s nephew, who inherited his uncle’s library, according to harrington’s e-mail to windle), sl, 4 nov. 1895, #95, “blake, (wm.) seventeen small woodcuts, original impressions mounted—​calvert (edward) sixteen small designs in the manner of blake, mounted, in 2 small scrap-books” (£3.6s. to the dealer bernard quaritch). in addition to the thin paper stubs to which the album’s leaves are attached, there are 29 stubs in the gutter of the binding, without any attachments, scattered at odd intervals between the album’s full, reattached leaves. fifteen of these stubs are the tails of the thin white paper stubs to which the album’s leaves are attached; 14 stubs are remnants of the album’s ivory leaves. the remnants of the ivory leaves and the use of stubs to attach the 18 full leaves to the spine clearly indicate that the album’s leaves were cut out of, and then returned to, their original binding. given the number of each type of stub, 3 of the thin white paper stubs with album leaves attached have no visible tails and 4 of the album’s ivory leaves were removed without leaving any visible stubs in the binding. the whiteness of the paper on which the blocks are printed is in part due to cleaning, possibly by quaritch, after its acquisition of the album in nov. 1895, or in more recent years.adam douglas of phb tells me, in an e-mail of 12 april, that the cleaning was not done by his firm. this cleaning explains why the album’s ivory leaves were taken out of their binding: it was necessary to soak each leaf in water to lift off the print for cleaning. bleach was probably used to remove glue stains and other defects. not every print was reattached precisely in its original position, with the result that, in a few cases, brown stains from the original mounting glue are visible on the backing leaves, outside the edges of the prints. john linnell acquired the woodblocks on which blake had engraved his 17 virgil illus. for “two guineas” (£2.2s.) on 16 sept. 1825 from “mr. [william] harrison,” one of the booksellers who published robert john thornton’s 1821 ed. of virgil’s pastorals.br(2) 775, quoting from catalogue of an exhibition of drawings, etchings & woodcuts by samuel palmer and other disciples of william blake, with an introduction and notes by a. h. palmer, victoria and albert museum, 20 oct.–​31 dec. 1926 (london: board of education, 1926). palmer states that this information about the sale of the blocks was written by robert john thornton on the back of an advertisement card for his publication: “received of mr. linnell for the wood-blocks executed by mr. blake two guineas (i.e., about 2/6 each) for mr. mr. mr. (sic) harrison. r. i. thornton m. d.” (28). the parenthetical interjections were added by palmer. linnell’s eldest son, john linnell, jr., writing at an unknown date years later, recorded the subsequent printing history of the blocks: “these blocks after the publisher had used them, (j. l. bought of him for 2 guineas) e calvert printed them for j. l. & self, &c (certain number of imprints of the set) (j. l. jun. & brother printed a few of the blocks, but did not finish the set)” (bb p. 630, excluding bentley’s bracketed comments). linnell senior recorded in his journal that “calvert came & brought impressions of blake’s wood cuts” on 8 sept. 1828 (br[2] 488). given the quality of the impressions and the provenance of the album, we can be confident that they were printed by “e[dward] calvert” and were probably among the group that he delivered to linnell in 1828. samuel boddington acquired several works by blake in the 1830s. he probably purchased america copy p and a descriptive catalogue copy e from frederick tatham (bb pp. 105, 137). he purchased impressions of blake’s “chaucers canterbury pilgrims” and job engravings from john linnell on 30 march 1835 (br[2] 793-94). it is likely that boddington acquired his virgil prints from linnell at around the same time, with a terminus ad quem of boddington’s death in 1843. up to that year the only available impressions were very probably those printed by calvert. john linnell, jr., was born in 1821; his next brother, james, in 1823.see the biographical outline in john linnell: a centennial exhibition, selected and catalogued by katharine crouan (cambridge: cambridge up and fitzwilliam museum, 1982) xxii. it is highly unlikely that a teenager and one of his younger brothers were printing from the virgil blocks in the mid-1830s. further, the comment by john linnell, jr., quoted above, that he “printed a few of the blocks, but did not finish the set” implies that any complete and uniformly printed set of blake’s 17 wood engravings, such as the one described here, could not have been from this later printing by the linnell brothers. a complete set with a mixture of impressions printed by calvert and the linnell brothers would no doubt reveal itself as such due to at least slight differences in inking or other aspects of presswork. i suspect that john linnell, jr., and his brother did not attempt printing the blocks until the 1860s, after alexander gilchrist or his representative acquired electrotypes of 3 of blake’s virgil wood engravings for publication in gilchrist’s 1863 life of william blake.see robert n. essick, “the virgil wood engravings in alexander gilchrist’s life of william blake,” book collector 40.4 (winter 1991): 579-81. the publication of the biography greatly increased the attention paid to blake’s works. consequently, the linnell family may have believed that there would be a reinvigorated market for original impressions of blake’s only wood engravings. thomas boddington may have owned another album of blake’s virgil wood engravings, one also containing some of calvert’s prints of his own designs. in a brief article published in 1930, the art historian a. j. finberg refers to such an album, “whose first owner’s name was t. boddington.”finberg, “a note on edward calvert,” print collector’s quarterly 17.3 (july 1930): [302]. in his e-mail to windle of 25 march, harrington speculates that the album mentioned by finberg is the same as the one described here, but with calvert’s works removed. finberg indicates that the source of his information is “a volume published in 1913 by mr. thomas bird mosher”—​that is, mosher’s edward calvert: ten spiritual designs. mosher’s cryptic comments on the album of prints from which he derived his calvert reproductions include a description of what is clearly a different album from the one offered by harrington and now in my collection. for example, the volume referenced by finberg and mosher is “bound in dark green cloth,” measures “7 x 8 inches” (17.8 x 20.3 cm.), and contains “a neat manuscript hand written on its first blank leaf: eleven subjects | by | edward calvert | and | seventeen woodcuts | by william blake.”mosher, “foreword” in edward calvert: ten spiritual designs (portland, maine: thomas bird mosher, 1913) viii. mosher implies, but does not explicitly state, that t. boddington once owned the volume. mosher’s account of the characteristics of that album accords with neither of the “2 small scrap-books” described in the 1895 sl auction. summary provenance: edward calvert, who printed the impressions after 1825; john linnell, probably in 1828; samuel boddington, probably in the mid-1830s and certainly no later than 1843, who had the prints mounted in the album in which he added his bookplate; his nephew, thomas boddington, by bequest in 1843; sold from t. boddington’s collection, sotheby’s, 4 nov. 1895 (as noted above); the london dealer bernard quaritch; the artist sir david young cameron; david lindsay, the 27th earl of crawford and 10th earl of balcarres, probably until 1940; an heir of lindsay’s, probably a family member, who sold the album to (or placed it on consignment with) phb no later than march 2021; windle in late march 2021; sold april 2021 to essick. virgil, the wood engravings of william blake for thornton’s virgil, 1977. dw, 16 dec., #727, publisher’s box, illus. (£2952 to windle for stock). wollstonecraft, original stories. windle, april online cat., 1796 ed., 3rd (final) sts. of the pls., contemporary calf, illus. (“sold”). rob zanger books, april online cat., 1791 ed., 2nd st. of pl. 1, sts. of other pls. not indicated, “a little foxed towards end,” later morocco, the copy sold fm, 28 march 2019, #52, for £3250, illus. ($10,000). young, night thoughts, 1797. warren zimmermann, march online cat., with the “explanation” leaf and a manuscript “explication des gravures” in french, “pages are untrimmed,” modern half calf, illus. ($12,000). pom harrington of phb, private offer in an e-mail to windle of 26 march, with the “explanation” leaf, “light foxing in a few places,” from the collection of david lindsay, the 27th earl of crawford and 10th earl of balcarres (1871–​1940), later morocco with “all edges gilt” (£17,500); same copy and price, voewood rare books, july online cat. 3, #6, illus. windle, april online cat., with the “explanation” leaf, later half morocco, illus. ($15,000). interesting blakeana royal academy exhibition cats. eb, jan., cats. of 1784, 1798, 1799, 1801, 1802, and 1804, 6 pamphlets in all, unbound, illus. (acquired by windle for stock at the “buy it now” price of £250). windle, jan. private offer of the 1784 cat. ($250, acquired by essick); feb. private offer of the 1799 cat. (acquired by the e. j. pratt library, victoria university, toronto). the 1784 and 1799 cats. include works by blake; see bb #520, 525. dante, a translation of the inferno of dante alighieri … by henry boyd, 1785. phb, april online cat., 2 vols., contemporary calf, illus. (£5000). blake owned and annotated a copy of this work (bb #721, e 633-35). w. [paulet] carey, critical description of the procession of chaucer’s pilgrims to canterbury, painted by thomas stothard, 1808. bb #1338a. eb, march, presentation inscription by carey to the earl of kinnaird, contemporary half calf worn (offered at the “buy it now” price of $500 or “best offer”). includes a brief reference to robert h. cromek’s commissioning blake to illustrate robert blair’s the grave (pp. 10-11, footnote). an advertisement for cromek’s 1808 ed. of the grave with designs engraved by “l. schiavonetti, v. a. executed from the classical compositions of william blake” is included at the end of carey’s pamphlet on 2 unnumbered pages. adam and eve asleep. a copy of adam and eve asleep (butlin #536.5) in the series of paradise lost illus. blake executed for thomas butts in 1808. watercolor with pen and black ink over traces of pencil, 50.6 x 40.3 cm., date uncertain. sny, 27 jan., #89, offered as “attributed to william blake,” illus. ($37,800; estimate $30,000-50,000). previously offered privately by the london dealer andrew clayton-payne, sept. 2018 (price on request). for illus. and an attribution to blake, see martin butlin, “blake’s unfinished series of illustrations to paradise lost for john linnell: an addition,” blake 51.1 (summer 2017), and butlin, “the ‘linnell’ adam and eve asleep: the case for the defense,” blake 51.2 (fall 2017). for arguments against this attribution, see the essays by david bindman, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi in blake 51.2 (fall 2017). all 5 essays are cited in the sny cat. auction lots described as “attributed to” an artist indicate that the attribution is uncertain or disputed. the light blue: a cambridge university magazine, vols. 1-5, 1866–​70. nudelman rare books, aug. online cat., 5 vols. in 4, 19th-century half calf worn, illus. ($275 to windle for stock). vol. 2 (1867) includes an essay on blake signed “p. m.” the essay contains “the first publication of three poems from the island in the moon” (bb #2155). blake, the marriage of heaven and hell, camden hotten facsimile [1868]. sl online auction, 3-14 dec., #24, foxed, “quarter vellum over boards,” from the collection of stopford a. brooke, illus. (£756). walt whitman, autograph letter signed to “my dear swinton” (john swinton, managing editor of the new york times), dated 31 march 1868, 1 p. university archives auction, wilton, connecticut, 14 april, #0345, with whitman’s signed carte de visite, illus. ($8125). the letter alone previously sold cny, 16 june 2016, #143, illus. ($3750). see the 2016 sales review in blake 50.4 (spring 2017) for details about this letter, in which whitman requests a copy of a review of a. c. swinburne’s william blake published in the times. blake, job engravings, [1875]. eb, oct., reproductions of the pls. only loose as issued in a faux leather portfolio stamped in blind on the front cover “the book of job | blake ” and “heliotype | james r. osgood & co.”, with a duplicate of the pl. numbered 4, the portfolio worn, illus. (acquired by essick at the “buy it now” price of $143.99). the same heliotypes published in bb #422, william blake’s illustrations of the book of job, ed. charles eliot norton (boston: james r. osgood, 1875), this separate issue of the pls. only not previously recorded. a “heliotype” is an early form of collotype patented by ernest edwards in 1869; see geoffrey wakeman, victorian book illustration: the technical revolution (detroit: gale research co., 1973) 116. blake, the book of thel, william muir facsimile, 1885. windle, dec. online cat., no copy no. but inscribed “academy”, original wrappers, illus. ($3500). blake, the marriage of heaven and hell, william muir facsimile, 1885. windle, march online cat., the rare issue with coloring based on copy i, with an “appendix” containing reproductions of the manuscript “order in which the songs of innocence and experience ought to be paged” (bb #125) and the relief etching of “a divine image” from songs of experience (bb #139 pl. b), “once badly stained in the margins now washed and cleaned by court benson,” the leaves trimmed close to the images, recent cloth, illus. ($5750). this copy, unrestored, sold addison & sarova auction, macon, georgia, 5 nov. 2016, #195, illus. ($522.75 to windle acting for essick). blake, songs of innocence, with songs of experience, william muir facsimiles, 1885. bhl, 24 june, #231, 2 vols. in 1, “william muir’s proof copy” with “several trial tracings pasted in margins, muir’s manuscript notes, 2 autograph letters signed by bernard quaritch to muir, quaritch’s 4 pp. 1888 prospectus for works by blake and muir, and other ephemera bound in,” original wrappers marked in pencil “mr muir’s master copy”, contemporary “limp boards,” half morocco slipcase (£6375; estimate £1000-2000); same copy, lucius books, online transatlantic book fair, 22-27 july, illus. (£14,750). blake, visions of the daughters of albion, william muir facsimile, 1885. windle, dec. online cat., on hodgkinson wove paper, lacking printed wrappers and limitation statement, modern half calf, illus. ($3500). blake, milton, william muir facsimile, 1886, with a facsimile of blake’s letter of 16 march 1804 to william hayley. nb, july online cat., copy no. 7, later morocco, illus. ($6800). windle, dec. online cat., no copy no. but inscribed “builder”, modern buckram, original wrappers bound in, illus. ($9500); another copy, no copy no. recorded, contemporary half calf, original wrappers bound in, illus. ($9500). blake, there is no natural religion, pickering facsimile, 1886. sl online auction, 3-14 dec., #25, large paper copy, from the collection of stopford a. brooke, “some plates hand coloured, original blue wrappers bound in, contemporary blind-tooled calf, rear cover detached, loss of calf to lower edges, joints worn,” illus. (no bids; estimate £500-700). blake, europe, william muir facsimile, 1887. nb, july online cat., no copy no. recorded, later half calf, illus. ($12,500). blake, poetical sketches, w. griggs facsimile, 1890. james cummins, nov. online cat., mistakenly described as published by “w. briggs,” no. 24 of 50 copies, “morocco spine and boards, spine perished,” illus. ($350). bb #130; the only copy i’ve seen on the market since 1990. w. b. yeats. autograph letters signed, 1 to john linnell, jr. (1821–​1906, son of blake’s friend and patron john linnell), 3 to william linnell (1826–​1906, son of blake’s friend), and 1 typed and signed letter to katherine riches (w. linnell’s daughter), 7 pp. in all. none dated, but all probably written 1895 and/​or 1896. fm, 25 march, #69, “discussing the reproductions of william blake’s drawing for yeats’s articles in the savoy magazine” published in 1896 (bb #3051a), illus. (£4760). a. c. swinburne, william blake: a critical essay, new edition, 1906. bhny, 15 dec., #204, signature y1-8 of the text missing, inscribed on the half-title to “william michael rossetti | from | algernon charles swinburne | sept. 16th 1906”, with a further presentation inscription by rossetti to his daughter mary explaining why the half-title was inserted from another copy, illus. ($1020). blake, songs of innocence, william muir facsimile, 1927. eb, aug., copy no. 47, original wrappers, illus. ($1199 to windle for stock); same copy, windle, sept. online cat., illus. ($5750). g. l. lambert. autograph manuscript handlist of the blake collection formed by grace lansing lambert (1899–​1993) written in black ink in a half-calf album. eleven pp., including title reading “william blake | owned by grace l. lambert | pink house, province line road, | princeton, new jersey. | 1945—​1949—​”. includes songs of innocence and of experience copy g1, visions of the daughters of albion copy l, america copy q, night thoughts colored copy d, and the manuscript of i asked a thief, now all at princeton university library. given 1 jan. by windle to essick as a new year’s gift. leonard baskin (american artist, 1922–​2000). head of william blake (after life mask). bronze, 18.0 cm. high, initialed and dated “[19]54.” drw, 12 oct., #285, illus. (£1500; estimate £400-600). blake, poems from william blake’s “songs of innocence,” illus. by maurice sendak, 1967. reader’s books, may online cat., publisher’s wrappers, “very slight marks to front cover,” illus. (£3500). battledore ltd., online cat. for the new york virtual book fair, 9-12 sept., presentation inscription by sendak, original wrappers, illus. ($4500). blake, songs of innocence and of experience (manchester: manchester etching workshop, 1983). windle, feb. online cat., 56 works of bibliography, #16, issue limited to 40 copies with the pls. hand colored, with joseph viscomi’s essay, “the art of william blake’s illuminated prints,” as issued, publisher’s morocco album and cloth folding box, illus. ($6750). blake, illustrations of the book of job, ed. david bindman (paris: trianon press for the blake trust, 1987). windle, feb. online cat., 56 works of bibliography, #15, deluxe issue limited to 22 sets, 3 vols., publisher’s boards trimmed with morocco, slipcases, illus. ($16,500). bhny, 15 oct., #237, deluxe issue limited to 22 sets, 3 vols. bound as in the windle set, illus. ($7650). blake’s circle and followers works are listed under artists’ names in the following order: paintings and drawings sold in groups, single paintings and drawings, letters and manuscripts, separate pls., book illus. calvert, edward early drawings, paintings, and original graphics hamadryades sketch (so inscribed), with nymphs & satyrs, both pen and ink, 4.6 x 5.8 cm. and 3.6 x 8.4 cm. respectively. dw, 23 july, #358, illus. (£900). david bindman suggests to me (e-mail, 18 aug.) that the hamadryades may be an early work. “the lady with the rooks,” wood engraving. parker fine art auction, farnham, surrey, 21 jan., #1, 3rd st., framed, illus. (£625). “the ploughman,” wood engraving. parker fine art auction, farnham, surrey, 21 jan., #2, 3rd st., framed, illus. (£938). larkhall fine art, feb. online cat., 3rd st. from the memoir, illus. (£975). “the return home,” wood engraving. larkhall fine art, feb. online cat., 2nd st. from the memoir, illus. (£825). flaxman, john drawings and sculpture see also flaxman under letterpress books with engravings by and after blake, above. antony’s oration over the dead caesar. pencil, ink, and wash, 22.2 x 33.7 cm. lly, nov. list of “recent sales,” illus. (not priced). the bard. pencil, pen and ink, 27.7 x 28.7 cm., probably dating from the mid-1780s. guy peppiatt fine art, oct. private offer (£4500); same price, guy peppiatt and harry moore-gwyn, dec. cat., #12, claiming that the “drawing relates to william blake’s poem ‘the voice of the ancient bard,’” illus. previously offered sl, 31 march 1999, #6, illus. (not sold; estimate £2000-3000), and ah, march 2020 online cat. 501, #40, illus. (£4250). if a text prompted flaxman’s drawing, it is probably thomas gray’s poem “the bard: a pindaric ode” (1757), not blake’s poem 1st published in songs of innocence, 1789. classical figures, attributed to flaxman. pencil, 11.4 x 17.8 cm. burstow & hewett auction, battle, east sussex, 25 march, #313, “tear on bottom edge running halfway up the sheet near bottom left-hand corner,” illus. (£144). this would appear to be a preliminary drawing for several figures in pl. 17, “the good race,” among flaxman’s hesiod designs engraved by blake and published in 1817 (bb #456), but david bindman believes that this is a copy based on the engraving (e-mail, 10 april). peace keeping war out of the temple of janus. pen and ink, gray wash, 25.0 x 34.0 cm., inscribed “peace & war” in pencil lower left, “no 4” in pencil lower right, and with “john flaxman r. a.” and the title inscribed in pencil lower right on the backing leaf, datable to c. 1787. semley auction, shaftesbury, dorset, 23 jan., #286, illus. (£2125 to a british private collector). david bindman has informed me that this is a variant preliminary study for a wedgwood plaque of 1787, peace preventing mars opening the gates of janus (e-mail, 24 jan.). for illus. of the plaque and comments, see john flaxman, ed. bindman (london: thames & hudson, 1979) 63, no. 51. study of figures on a frieze. pen and brown ink, pencil, gray wash, 16.7 x 19.3 cm. woolley & wallis auction, salisbury, 11 aug., #399, illus. (£875). study of oriental figures. pencil, 12.4 x 16.7 cm. woolley & wallis auction, salisbury, 11 aug., #398, illus. (£600). fuseli, henry drawings, paintings, manuscripts, and separate pls. the incubus leaving two young women. cny, 14 oct., #57, described as a “recent discovery,” illus. ($3,510,000; estimate $3,000,000-5,000,000). see illus. 8. 8. the incubus leaving two young women (see enlargement). stated to be by henry fuseli in the cny auction cat. (14 oct., #57). oil on canvas, 86.4 x 110.5 cm., not dated. the extensive cat. entry compares the iconography of this composition with fuseli’s most famous painting, the nightmare. another version of the incubus, datable to the early 1790s, is a slightly larger oil painting in the muraltengut, zürich. an engraving of the design by theodor falckeisen (or falckeysen, 1765–​1814) is not dated but must have been produced after 1794 (weinglass #135). photo courtesy of christie’s. david bindman (e-mail, 1 oct.), joseph viscomi (e-mail, 8 oct.), and i share some doubts that this work is by fuseli. the painting illus. here is identical in its placement of major motifs and their outlines to the muraltengut version. did an artist as imaginative as fuseli repeat himself this studiously? the colors are subdued in a way uncharacteristic of an artist notorious in his own time for his unconventional, even lurid, palette. the right arm of the woman behind her companion is evenly washed in a single color with a highlight on her forearm; the same arm in the muraltengut painting shows shaded and vigorously articulated folds of cloth that hint at underlying musculature. in comparison to that version, this newly discovered work lacks fuseli’s spirited brushwork and seems more than a little lifeless. might it be a careful but blandly executed copy by another hand? for the muraltengut version, see <https://​commons.​wikimedia.​org/​wiki/​file:​johann_​heinrich_​füssli_​014.​jpg>. indications of the cloth folds noted above also appear in falckeisen’s print. thus, the suggestion in christie’s cat. that their version might have been the one copied by the engraver is probably wrong. this leaves the work at christie’s bereft of an early provenance record. study of one of the quirinal dioscuri. pencil, pen and brown ink, 16.5 x 13.4 cm., datable to c. 1775–​78. cl, 6 july, #76, illus. (£11,875). previously sold cl, 14 april 1992, #47, illus. (£2420), and cl, 8 june 2000, #84, illus. (£4935). the 1992 auction cat. notes that the same subject appears on both recto and verso, but no verso drawing is recorded in either the 2000 or 2021 auction cats. study of “prometheus” (recto), study of “jonah” (verso), both after michelangelo. pen and ink over pencil (recto), pencil (verso), leaf 19.0 x 26.7 cm., recto inscribed in ink “m. a. b.” (michael angelo buonarroti) and “feb. ’89” (feb. 1789) in pencil lower right. clars auction, oakland, california, 17 jan., #2293, recto and verso illus. ($8320). autograph receipt signed “h. fusely” and dated 23 oct. 1788. issued to “m.r alderman boydell” for “fifty guineas [£52.10s.] on account of a picture of hamlet delivered.” james cummins, nov. online cat., illus. ($2000). one of fuseli’s paintings for boydell’s shakespeare gallery. “chrysogone conceives, in a ray of sunshine, amoretta and belphoebe,” soft-ground etching by fuseli after his own design, dated by weinglass #154 to c. 1800–​10. dw, 25 march, #339, “on heavy cream wove paper,” leaf 21.5 x 29.2 cm., illus. (£6448; estimate £300-500). joseph viscomi tells me that fuseli appears to have strengthened the dark hatching strokes by going over them with a needle after etching the pl. (e-mail, 7 march). the subject is based on edmund spenser’s the faerie queene, book 3, canto 6. the only impression i’ve ever seen on the market. a soft-ground etching is made by covering a copperplate with an etching ground (acid-resistant material) to which a substance (such as tallow) is added to prevent the ground from fully hardening. a leaf of paper is placed over the copperplate and the artist uses a sharp instrument, such as a pencil, to draw the image on the paper. when carefully removed, the paper lifts the ground from the pl. wherever the artist has inscribed the lines delineating the design, thereby exposing the metal. the pl. is then etched in the usual way for intaglio printmaking. “lycidas,” stipple etching/​engraving by moses haughton after fuseli with aquatint by f. c. lewis, 1803. ewbank’s auction, woking, surrey, 2 dec., #2208, leaf approximately 39.0 x 30.0 cm., illus. (£45.50). weinglass #178, titled “solitude, twilight.” linnell, john early drawings, paintings, and original graphics a baby seated. pencil, 12.5 x 9.5 cm., signed and dated april 1822. sworders auction, stansted mountfitchet, essex, 15 sept., #566, illus. (£325). previously sold sl, 6 june 2007, #172, titled study of a young child (£960). possibly linnell’s first son, also john, born in 1821. see also study of a sleeping baby, below. fence posts. pencil on gray paper, leaf 25.4 x 20.3 cm., initialed and dated “1806–​7”. eb, june, illus. ($75). gleaning before the storm. oil, 30.0 x 37.0 cm., initialed and dated “1834”. stroud auction, stroud, gloucestershire, 7 july, #97, illus. (£590). landscape with a large tree. watercolor, 49.0 x 54.0 cm. auction antiques auction, hele, devon, 22 april, #25, “signed and inscribed under mount, dated 1817,” illus. (£250). difficult to tell from the illus., but there may be condition problems with this work. milking time. oil, 19.1 x 22.9 cm., signed. minster auction, leominster, herefordshire, 7 july, #249, illus. (£371.20). probably a very early work. the barn in this painting would appear to be the same as the one in study of buildings (tate collection), dated on a label “1806”. portrait of dr. thomas monro. pen and brown ink, watercolor, 19.7 x 14.2 cm., signed and dated 1827. sl online auction, 2-8 july, #188, illus. (£1386). portrait of john varley. oil, 20.2 x 15.8 cm., signed and dated 1823. parker fine art auction, farnham, surrey, 8 july, #68, with a “companion piece,” an oil portrait of an unidentified woman, apparently the same size as the portrait of varley, both illus. (£4250). the woman is probably varley’s first wife, née esther gisborne, who died in 1824. her nose and chin are very similar to those features in a pencil drawing of mrs. varley by john flaxman illus. in adrian bury, john varley of the “old society” (leigh-on-sea: f. lewis, 1946) pl. 76. portrait of mrs. william wilberforce and child. oil, 32.5 x 26.5 cm., signed and dated 1824. sl online auction, 7-14 july, #46, illus. (£10,710). william wilberforce (1759–​1833) was a leader of the anti-slave-trade movement in the british parliament. by 1824 wilberforce’s six children were considerably older than the child pictured here; he may be a grandchild. the youthful woman may not be the parliamentarian’s wife, born in 1777, but the wife of his eldest son, also william (born 1798). shepherds. oil, 16.5 x 22.2 cm., signed, datable to the late 1820s. lly, june online cat., illus. (£28,000). study of a sleeping baby. pencil, leaf 19.5 x 24.5 cm., signed. dw, 13 oct., #145, dated to “circa 1820,” illus. (not sold; estimate £150-200). possibly linnell’s first son, also john, born in 1821. see also a baby seated, above. view towards the woods. watercolor, signed lower left, 13.3 x 19.1 cm. potomack company auction, alexandria, virginia, 10 june, #54, illus. ($1187.50). probably an early work. “sheep at noon,” etching, 1818. jones & jacob auction, watlington, oxfordshire, 13 jan., #321, oddly described as “after [rather than by] john linnell” and as a “reprint,” with “six other topographical prints” not further described, illus. (£50). palmer, samuel drawings, paintings, and letters hope, or the lifting of the cloud. watercolor, 26.0 x 38.0 cm., signed, datable to 1865. given 2020 by the estate of stephen keynes to the fitzwilliam museum, accession no. pd.30-2020.arts council england, 2020 report (see note 4) 81. porta di posillipo and the bay of baiae, italy, ischia and misenum beyond. watercolor, 19.0 x 41.0 cm., datable to c. 1838. bhl, 22 sept., #10, illus. (£8287.50). previously offered sl, 28 nov. 2002, #269, illus. (not sold; estimate £10,000-15,000); sl, 1 july 2004, #234, illus. (not sold; estimate £8000-12,000); and cl, 5 july 2011, #180, illus. (not sold; estimate £7000-10,000). a shepherd leading his flock under the full moon. sl, 7 july, #10, “from the collection of the late cyril and shirley fry,” illus. (£1,588,000; estimate £700,000-900,000). i have not been able to identify the new owner, probably a private collector. see illus. 9. 9. samuel palmer, a shepherd leading his flock under the full moon (see enlargement). black watercolor over black chalk, heightened with scratching out, 14.8 x 17.8 cm., datable to c. 1829–​30. palmer executed 3 similar pastoral scenes also featuring a full moon and mammatus clouds: a kentish idyll (victoria and albert museum), moonlight landscape (or moonlit landscape, princeton university art museum), and shepherds under a full moon (ashmolean museum). the £1,588,000 ($2,191,440) fetched by the present drawing is the 2nd highest price ever paid at auction for a work by palmer, exceeded only by the $2,415,000 paid for a church with a boat and sheep at sny, 31 jan. 2018, #13. for illus. and comments on the latter, see the 2018 sales review in blake 52.4 (spring 2019): illus. 7. photo courtesy of sotheby’s. sketch for a pastoral scene. watercolor, 15.5 x 22.9 cm., datable to c. 1851. hindman auction, chicago, 3 may, #112, illus. ($34,375). previously sold sl, 7 july 1983, #112, titled a shepherd and his flock resting beneath a spreading tree, illus. (£1980); previously offered martyn gregory gallery, feb. 1984 cat. 35, #102, titled sketch for “sheep in the shade,” illus. (£5500). the welsh cottage (recto), small sketch of an old man sitting surrounded by 2 children and a woman (verso). recto pencil and watercolor, verso pencil, leaf 44.5 x 33.0 cm., datable to c. 1835. cny online auction, 14-28 jan., #86, illus. ($100,000; estimate $3000-5000). a woodland study—​possibly clovelly park, devon. watercolor, 19.1 x 27.5 cm., datable to the 1830s or 1840s. sl, 4 dec. 2020, #213, illus. (£10,710). autograph letters signed, 4 to john linnell, jr. (1821–​1906, son of blake’s friend and patron john linnell), undated but datable to c. 1860–​64, 1 to william linnell (1826–​1906, son of blake’s friend) dated aug. 1861. fm, 25 march, #62, mostly concerning palmer’s lease of furze hill house from john linnell, jr., these letters “apparently unpublished,” illus. (not sold; estimate £2000-2500); same group, 15 july, #226, illus. (£4352). autograph letter signed to henry mogford, 2 pp., n.d. lion heart autographs, california virtual book fair, 4-6 march, illus. ($1600); same letter, university archives auction, wilton, connecticut, 29 sept., #112, illus. (not sold; estimate $1500-1800). richmond, george early drawings, paintings, and original graphics portrait of theodor matthias von holst. pen and ink over pencil, inscribed with the subject’s name, signed “gr” and dated “decr 29 1827”. sl online auction, 2-8 july, #193, illus. (£6,930; estimate £1000-1500). the artist theodor von holst (1810–​44) was a student of henry fuseli’s. study of a nude man. pencil, squared, 22.2 x 19.0 cm., indistinctly inscribed in ink. parker fine art auction, farnham, surrey, 18 feb., #35, copied after a sculpture, illus. (£375). probably an early work extracted from a sketchbook and inscribed by richmond at a later date. my best guess at the inscription: “drawn by richmond after volteize.” study of soldiers. watercolor and gouache, 24.0 x 16.0 cm., signed and dated 1838. drw, 27 may, #321, illus. (£2375). previously sold sl, 21 march 2001, #226, illus. (£5040). previously offered fine art society, may-june 2012 “samuel palmer [and] his friends and his followers” cat., #28, illus. (£12,000), and sl, 5 feb. 2019, #16, illus. (not sold; estimate £2000-3000). study of the prophet daniel, after michelangelo. watercolor, 63.5 x 49.2 cm., signed “gr” and datable to c. 1838. roseberys auction, london, 20 july, #136, illus. (£1000). appendix: new information on blake’s engravings listed below are substantive additions or corrections to essick, the separate plates of william blake: a catalogue (1983). pp. 55-59, “enoch.” for a previously unrecorded impression, only the 5th known, see the listing under separate plates and plates in series and illus. 6. blake and bloom, a memorial note blake and bloom, a memorial note by kenneth gross kenneth gross’s books include spenserian poetics: idolatry, iconoclasm, and magic ; the dream of the moving statue ; shakespeare’s noise ; shylock is shakespeare ; and puppet: an essay on uncanny life. he teaches english at the university of rochester. the poetry of william blake was wrought deeply into the bones of harold bloom’s thinking about literature. northrop frye’s fearful symmetry, which he discovered as a young classics major at cornell, gave him both blake as a poet and something in his own vocation as critic. frye’s book “ravished my heart away,” he said in an interview with imre salusinzky published in 1986. “i thought it was the best book i’d ever read about anything. i must have read it a hundred times between 1947 and 1950, probably intuitively memorized it, and will never escape the effect of it.” bloom’s third book was blake’s apocalypse: a study in poetic argument (1963), an ambitious attempt to map the conceptual and imaginative shape of blake’s whole body of work, from the early lyrics to the late prophecies—​a project carried into his brilliant and idiosyncratic commentaries to david erdman’s groundbreaking edition of blake’s poetry and prose (1965). bloom was always alive to blake’s way of joining visionary, esoteric wildness and blunt, skeptical, satirical rage. he treasured blake’s cheerful independence, his dark sense of humor, his willingness to think through for himself all ideas and traditions, his hatred of the mind’s capacity to accept and forge limitations for itself and others, and his ambition of “opening up the reader’s own buried capacity for imaginative self-liberation.” blake was also crucial to bloom’s radical account of poetic influence. on a basic level, he looked to the example of blake’s naked struggles to make his own the legacies of the bible and of milton, combining violent critique with imaginative transformation. the prose of the marriage of heaven and hell also provided one model for bloom’s experiments with gnomic fable and aphorism in the anxiety of influence (1973). more particularly, bloom’s central image of the precursor poet not as benign source but as darkly powerful “covering cherub” derives from blake’s reading of ezekiel’s vision of “the … cherub that covereth” in ezekiel 28.14. the covering cherub appears in milton as “miltons shadow … / the spectre of albion,” a shape in which are seen “the dragon forms / religion hid in war, a dragon red & hidden harlot” (plate 37). the cherub appears later in jerusalem as a “reveald majestic image / of selfhood … / … a human dragon terrible / and bright” (plate 89). it’s worth noting that bloom first deployed this figure in his 1970 study of yeats, where he mapped the irish poet’s emergent struggle with the necessary if also deforming influences of blake and shelley. for myself, when i try to imagine the uncanny, agonistic work of poetic revision as bloom described it, to give it physical form, what comes to mind is always blake’s description of the silent striving between urizen and milton on the shores of the river arnon in milton (plate 19). here the jealous father-god, with his cold hand, pours an icy baptismal water into milton’s brain, while the poet circles urizen, taking up “red clay” from the shore, “moulding it with care / between his palms: and filling up the furrows of many years,” pressing it into and around urizen’s dead skeletal form, trying to bring that demon-god, and himself, back to life, “building him, / as with new clay a human form.” it’s a scene that offers blake’s own wild revision and intertwining of two moments in genesis, yahweh’s forming the body of adam from red clay and jacob’s nightlong struggle with a nameless spirit, “some man,” at the ford of the jabbok—​a spirit that bloom thought not a messenger of god but “the angel of death.” jacob’s is a wrestling match that leaves the exiled trickster and patriarch limping, but with a new name and a new future, a blessing of “more life.” bloom as a critic said, with blake, “i must create a system, or be enslav’d by another mans” (jerusalem, plate 10). bloom wrote much less about blake in his later work. blake has no substantive section of his own in the western canon: the books and school of the ages (1994), nor in where shall wisdom be found? (2004)—​though he wonderfully shares a chapter of genius: a mosaic of one hundred exemplary creative minds (2002) with d. h. lawrence, tennessee williams, rainer maria rilke, and eugenio montale. and bloom never failed to honor blake’s urgency and originality. as he wrote in 2010, in a note in his anthology till i end my song: a gathering of last poems, “in my judgment, only william shakespeare and emily dickinson, among the poets, were as conceptually independent and powerful as blake, who held to the inner light tradition of radical protestantism.” a last, curious note: i and others among his former students and friends often observed that in blake’s watercolor michael binding satan the human face that appears on the serpentine body of satan, a face that is powerful and full of dismay, looks very like the face of harold bloom. perhaps that’s because, as is apparent from contemporary portraits and caricatures, bloom bore an uncanny resemblance to the radical whig charles james fox. humorist that bloom was, he himself might have relished appearing in a blake painting under the guise of the enemy. the angel michael binding satan, c. 1805. 35.9 x 32.5 cm. harvard art museums/​fogg museum. gift of w. a. white. 1915.8. b l a k e vol. 58 no. 1 summer 2024 angela esterhammer, victoria college, university of toronto nelson hilton, university of georgia tilar j. mazzeo, colby college robert w. rix, university of copenhagen joseph viscomi, university of north carolina at chapel hill david worrall, the nottingham trent university martin butlin, tate gallery, london, retired tristanne j. connolly, university of waterloo detlef w. dörrbecker, university of trier sibylle erle, university of lincoln robert n. essick, university of california, riverside a d v i s o r y b o a r d a n i l l u s t r a t e d q u a r t e r l y volume 58 number 1 summer 2024 c o n t e n t s www.blakequarterly.org © 2024 copyright morton d. paley cover: detail of pietro antonio martini (after johann heinrich ramberg), “the exhibition of the royal academy, 1787.” yale center for british art, paul mellon collection. b1977.14.12779. e d i t o r s editor: morton d. paley co-editor, 1970–2024: morris eaves book review editor: sibylle erle exhibitions editor: luisa calè bibliographer (criticism): wayne c. ripley bibliographers (music): camila oliveira, jason whittaker sales review editor: mark crosby managing editor: sarah jones sarah.jones@rochester.edu production office: department of english, university of rochester, rochester ny 14627-0451 articles william blake and his circle: a checklist of scholarship in 2023 by wayne c. ripley, with works in romance languages contributed by fernando castanedo, works in japanese contributed by hikari sato, works in turkish contributed by hüseyin alhas, and works in russian contributed by vera serdechnaia blake and exhibitions, 2023 by luisa calè blake and music, 2023 by camila oliveira and jason whittaker reading revolutions: corrado costa’s william blake in beulah, a visionary cartoon essay in 1977 italy reading revolutions: corrado costa’s william blake in beulah, a visionary cartoon essay in 1977 italy by luisa calè luisa calè (l.cale@bbk.ac.uk), birkbeck, university of london, works on practices of reading, viewing, and collecting in the romantic period. her publications include fuseli’s milton gallery: “turning readers into spectators”; co-edited volumes on dante on view: the reception of dante in the visual and performing arts and illustrations, optics and objects in nineteenth-century literary and visual cultures; and special issues on “the disorder of things” (eighteenth-century studies, 2011), “the nineteenth-century digital archive” (19: interdisciplinary studies in the long nineteenth century, 2015), “literature and sculpture at the fin de siècle” (word and image, 2018), and “sibylline leaves” (studies in romanticism, 2020). her current project, entitled the book unbound, explores practices of collecting and dismantling the book, with chapters on walpole, blake, and dickens. she is the exhibitions editor for blake. under what conditions might blake’s beulah offer a script for a revolutionary present? this essay explores an episode in the visual reception of blake as a letterpress poet from a time of civil unrest in italy. corrado costa’s william blake in beulah: saggio visionario su un poeta a fumetti (william blake in beulah: a visionary essay on a poet in comic strips, 1977) is an avant-garde experiment in visual adaptation inspired by lettrism, dada, and neo-avant-garde critiques of typography. their analysis of the loss of the visual elements of writing certainly applies to the textual transmission of blake’s works, which separated the poet from the artist in order to publish his poetry in typographical layouts. abstracted from the visual form of the illuminated book, blake’s poetry offered an ideal testing ground for costa’s “visionary essay” in the sense of a creative-critical attempt to turn poetry into comic-strip captions. in fragmenting, resegmenting, repeating, and distributing blake’s words across comic-strip panels, costa releases them from the constraints of language and genre, testing how blake might fare as a comic-strip poet. in what follows, i will explore how costa’s comic-strip blake subverts the orders of language, genre, and the medium of the book. i will focus on the most experimental section of blake in beulah, in which costa reinvents the french revolution as a prophetic cue for the 1977 movement. corrado costa (1929–​91) divided his time between his day job as a lawyer and his activities as an avant-garde poet and artist. his legal practice included working for soccorso rosso (red aid), a militant left-wing organization founded in 1968 to provide legal representation to political activists and detainees. he became known for defending the red brigades, including the founding member alberto franceschini, in trials against terrorist cells in liguria and emilia in the 1970s.i am grateful to eugenio gazzola for details on costa’s profile as a lawyer. on the interchange between his legal and poetic experience, see gazzola, “l’uomo di legge e il poeta” and “le altre posizioni”; for a biographical sketch, see gazzola, “the one you prefer of the two.” his creative work developed in the milieu of gruppo 63, an avant-garde literary movement of the 1960s involving artists, poets, and theorists associated with the literary periodical il verri. a short biography on the back of the contents page of blake in beulah indicates that costa began composing comics only in 1977, but documents the publication of drawings in magazines, his collections of poems pseudobaudelaire (scheiwiller, 1964) and le nostre posizioni (our positions, geiger, 1972), the collection of essays inferno provvisorio (provisional hell, feltrinelli, 1971), and the short story/​essay la sadisfazione letteraria (literary sade-sfaction, cooperativa scrittori, 1976). if this publication record locates costa in élite avant-garde intellectual circles, his commitment to the 1977 political movement is suggested by the choice to publish his visionary blake essay with squi/​libri, a small publishing house founded in milan in 1976 by dario fiori and radical political theorist and media activist franco berardi (“bifo”). it was part of a project, promoted by nanni balestrini and gianni sassi, to create a federation of editorial collectives under the name “ar&a, strumenti per la produzione editoriale” (“editorial publishing tools”). the name squi/​libri plays with the words “libri” (“books”) and “squilibrati” (“unbalanced”), a term used negatively to connote activists as mentally unstable.see gandus. squi/​libri was known for championing first-person proletarian narratives, as well as writings that relate to the tension between sex and politics, such as the anonymously published stalin loves (1977), which exhibits “the drama of the exasperated separation of the personal from the political,” and paolo bertetto’s interview with félix guattari, desiderio e rivoluzione (desire and revolution, 1977).“il dramma della separazione esasperata tra politico e personale” (cover blurb); see <https://​www.​culturedeldissenso.​com/​squilibri>, accessed 20 july 2020. costa’s comic-book blake should be read in the context of avant-garde experiments with the possibilities of language and the artist-book phenomenon. in 1972 costa participated in the exhibition i denti del drago: le trasformazioni della pagina e del libro nell’era post-gutenberghiana (the dragon’s teeth: the transformations of the page and the book in the post-gutenberg era), which related contemporary experiments in concrete and visual poetry to a genealogy of disruptions of the page, from stéphane mallarmé’s un coup de dés to apollinaire’s calligrammes, futurist “parole in libertà,” and surrealist book objects. blake in beulah takes up their invitation to explore how “the page explodes, conquering new dimensions that seemed closed to poetry.”“la pagina dunque esplode conquistando nuove dimensioni che sembravano precluse alla poesia” (from the information sheet for the exhibition, which was curated by daniela palazzoli at the centro d’arte contemporanea e primitiva, milan, 1972). costa’s reproduction of handwriting in blake in beulah responds to gruppo 63’s critique of typography as an oppressive agent alienating writers from the means of production and constraining the freedom of directionality and the visual possibilities of writing within the rectangular format of letterpress. the italian word for the typographer’s chase, “gabbia,” also used to denote an animal’s cage and a prison cell, strengthens the association of letterpress with a “prison-house of language.”barilli, “iper-segmenti” 9; i take the term “prison-house of language” from fredric jameson, the prison-house of language: a critical account of structuralism and russian formalism (princeton: princeton university press, 1972). renato barilli hailed the photocopier as an attempt to bypass print by adopting new means of technical reproducibility, “a technical revolution in the material means of writing and reading” that held the promise of a return to handwriting.“rivoluzione tecnica nei mezzi materiali di scrittura e di lettura” (barilli, “iper-segmenti” 18). while blake, as a printmaker, embraced relief etching in order to bypass the letterpress paradigm and emulate a medieval aesthetic of the illuminated manuscript, the invention of the photocopier enabled poets to bypass the mediation and constraints of the compositor’s frames and carry out their own experiments with the layout of the page. the handwriting prominently featured on the title pages and back covers of squi/​libri editions invites us to imagine autographic writing and political emancipation from systems of control associated with commercial publishing and distribution. for barilli, costa breaks out of the prison-house of typography through the medium of biro and felt pen, which enables him to “reconcile words with images on the same page, after the brutal separation inflicted on them by the typographic ‘book.’”“riconciliazione delle parole e delle immagini su uno stesso foglio, dopo la brutale separazione inflitta loro dal ‘libro’ tipografico” (barilli, “poesura e pittria” 9). blake in beulah starts with a handwritten contents page, followed by a one-page handwritten manifesto, then a handwritten dedication, inscribed above the first comic panel, which locates the original in the hands of “giovanna” and a copy with “luigi,” suggesting a restricted economy of circulation. the book represents a stage in the reception of blake that is shaped by the abstraction of the poetry from its medium and the divorce of texts from images. encountering blake’s poems as typographical texts rather than in facsimiles reproducing his illuminated printing offered costa a visionary prompt to invent a new visual idiom around the words. apart from appropriating and integrating the design of the druidic stone on plate 70 of jerusalem, costa’s visual language is completely different from blake’s. his adaptation relies on the selections and translations of blake’s texts published by the poet giuseppe ungaretti in his visioni di william blake (1965). on the contents page costa promises excerpts from “il sorriso del viaggiatore mentale” (“the smile of the mental traveller” [sic]), “la rivoluzione francese” (the french revolution), “un canto di libertà” (“a song of liberty”), and “jerusalem,” but this order is reversed in the actual sequencing of the texts. costa’s blake begins “in beulah” with short excerpts tagged jerusalem 69.14-15, 69.23-31, and 70.19-20, then proceeds with five pages devoted to “a song of liberty,” twenty-four to the french revolution, twelve to plates 69-70 of jerusalem, and finally twenty-nine reproducing the text of “the mental traveller” from the pickering manuscript. his decision to start at the end, from the beulah of jerusalem, and finish with what he considered the core of blake’s imaginary world, “the mental traveller,” can be explained in terms of 1970s semiotics and genetic criticism, which sought to identify the “deep structures” that reverberate across the poet’s oeuvre. costa discusses his reverse reading and writing method in the poetic manifesto that prefaces the comic book: “this critical essay on william blake proceeds in the opposite direction to the reading method that it seems to propose.”“questo saggio critico su william blake procede in senso contrario al metodo di lettura che sembrerebbe proporre” (blake in beulah, manifesto; the work is unpaginated). while the reader’s eye moves from left to right, the poet moves from right to left: “the direction of reading is in this direction →. the direction of writing (the road of the poet) is in this direction ←.while the reader departs, w. b. arrives. the reader knows nothing yet, w. b. knows everything. as the story proceeds, w. b. seems to return backwards.”“il senso di lettura è in questa direzione →. il senso di scrittura (la strada del poeta) è in questo senso ←.mentre il lettore parte, w. b. arriva. il lettore non sa ancora niente, w. b. sa tutto. man mano che il racconto procede, w. b. sembra tornare indietro.” the different directions of writing and reading might also allude to the engraver’s practice of mirror writing on copperplates, but the italian formulation suggests an infraction of the highway code: going in the “wrong” direction on a “one-way” street is an example of situationist détournement—​it means refusing to follow prescribed forms of circulation. the double meaning of the italian word “senso,” as both “direction” and “sense,” or “meaning,” supports the revolutionary artist’s perception of linear prose as the expression of a wider ideological framing. taking opposite directions in the same lane is a way of rejecting the imposition of a one-way street, going against the received sense, multiplying directions of interpretation. costa’s multidirectional reading is part of his attack on the linear structure of prose: “imagination that tells its own story needs no narrative.”“l’immaginazione che si racconta non ha bisogno del racconto.” the aim of his creative-critical intervention is to release blake’s sexual and political revolution. “poetic experience,” costa claims, “is the destruction of narrative, of political practice, of the french revolution, of all we have imagined.”“l’esperienza poetica è la distruzione del racconto, della pratica politica, della rivoluzione francese, di tutto ciò che ci siamo immaginati.” his liberation is achieved through the medium of the visionary comic book. in addition to criticizing linear narrative, costa’s “revolution in poetic language” takes up blake’s claim that “‘poetry fetters the human race.’ the imagination shackles us, ankles and wrists, to the image the more it purports to free us.”“‘la poesia ha legato con catene la specie umana.’ l’immaginazione ci lega caviglie e polsi all’immagine in più che vuole liberarci” (blake in beulah, manifesto, quoting from plate 3 of jerusalem); see also julia kristeva’s analysis in la révolution du langage poétique (1974) of poetry’s capacity to subvert the transcendental subject predicated on logic, syntax, and the symbolic order. blake’s critique of the “modern bondage of rhyming” (jerusalem 3, e 145) suits costa’s neo-avant-garde challenge to the limitations of poetry. if ungaretti valued translating blake as a laboratory that freed the poet from the constraints of the hendecasyllable and other traditional italian verse structures,see calè; i discuss ungaretti’s thoughts about translating blake on pp. 135-36, and his visioni di william blake on p. 143. costa uses the structure of comics to fragment, space out, and redistribute the words of the poet on the page. applying techniques advocated by the gruppo 63 avant-garde, such as the cut-up method pioneered by dada and theorized by william burroughs,barilli mentions mallarmé and “various experiments that aimed to break away from conventional typographical alignments or to disjoin the body of words in their elementary components” (“sperimentazioni varie volte a uscir fuori dagli allineamenti tipografici consueti, o a sciogliere il corpo delle parole in componimenti elementari”) in “iper-segmenti” p. 9; burroughs on p. 13. he decomposes sentence and verse units into their minimal components. he then resegments and rearranges them as isolated word clusters redeployed as comic-strip captions, and repeats them in different lettering styles and sizes over a number of pages. in so doing, he activates a poetics of difference in repetition, spacing, and dissemination, which shows the avant-garde’s links to french deconstruction.discussing the 1965 gathering of gruppo 63 in palermo, barilli indicates that their experiments preceded derrida’s and deleuze’s publications on difference, spacing, and dissemination, which defined the field in the late 1960s and 1970s; see “iper-segmenti” 10. in repeating and redistributing clusters of words across the page, costa produces a new work, challenges the reader’s expectations, and subverts the typographic elements and partitions of the book. the first portion of the comic book explores the sexual possibilities of beulah. costa’s reading of jerusalem focuses on the utopian possibilities of the “free loves” that blake contains within the dystopian image of a composite collective body presented as a “ravening eating cancer,” a multiform “polypus,” an “enormous form at variance with itself” (69.2-3, 6, e 223). costa’s selective act of quotation uncouples “the free loves of jerusalem” from their being drawn “into infernal bondage” (69.9). the opening words of the comic book—​“in beulah”—​act as a mise-en-scène and a motto: inscribed on the first page, they locate the action and signal the comic strip’s potential for sexual utopia. after this page introduces word-less sexual scenes, a female figure extends across the following double-page spread, forming an arch that frames the world of beulah as a female space around a male figure reclining on the bottom central panels across the pages, their bodies fragmented by the superimposition of the comic grid. the following page starts under the heading “jerusalem,” with an epigraph from isaiah in which a woman is addressed in the second person and her names—​hephzibah and beulah—​are substituted with their meanings: “sarai chiamata: ‘il mio piacere è dentro di lei’ e la tua terra sarà chiamata ‘maritata’” (“you will be called ‘my pleasure is inside her’ and your land will be called ‘married’”).“you will be called hephzibah, and your land beulah; for the lord will take delight in you, and your land will be married” (isaiah 62.4). in the first two comic panels under the heading “jerusalem,” the words “in beulah” return, this time preceded by a negation; the phrase is cut up and redistributed across the panels by the limits of the frames, with “non come in” (“not like in”) at the top of the first panel and “beulah!!?!” completing the scene in the second (“not like beulah,” 69.14). in other words, the comic-strip gutter takes on the function of an enjambment. the interruption makes us see the negation, but also the visual dispensation offered by the comic-book panel, which frees women’s pleasure from the negative conditions imposed by the order of discourse. costa’s art of spacing releases a free-love utopia from the control of blake’s syntax. costa’s framing of the sexual revolution in beulah inflects the only visual element from blake’s illuminated works to be referenced in the book. the first sex scene under the “jerusalem” heading shows a multibreasted female figure being pleasured by a man lying below her, with the comic-panel gutter splitting the grouping just past her genital area. the third panel shows the same scene in a panoramic view, placing the lovers under the druidic stones depicted by blake on plate 70 of jerusalem, undoubtedly sourced from one among a handful of plates reproduced in ungaretti’s 1965 edition. above the scene costa inscribes, twice, the continuation of the beulah excerpt from jerusalem 69.14-15, “dove ogni femmina gode dove ogni femmina gode” (“where every female delights [to give her maiden to her husband]”), though the italian verb is intransitive: the pleasure his woman feels is all her own. while in blake’s text pleasure means pleasing the husband, costa excludes mention of the husband from the erotic scene of his comic strip. the text proceeds to the woman’s creation of space while the man “gives a time & revolution to her space” (69.23-31). this scene of bliss is followed by six pages in which male figures in different attire exclaim “aha.” some of them wear formal suits, presumably representing figures of the establishment, the forces of reaction and repression. these figures are tagged jerusalem 70.19 and 70.20, but without quotations, though they possibly visualize “brooding abstract philosophy” bent on “destroy[ing] imagination” (70.19, e 224). this section is followed by an excerpt from “a song of liberty,” labeled nos. 11-13, featuring the flaming agency of “the hand of jealousy.” the comic book then seamlessly turns to an excerpt from the french revolution. costa’s engagement with the french revolution is the most experimental part of the comic book, an avant-garde intervention on the limits of the medium. the comic grid, the material properties of the page, and the book as a cultural form represent the symbolic order to be tested and subverted in his revolution of poetic language. the french revolution. a poem, in seven books (1791) was planned as a typographic work to be published by the radical publisher joseph johnson, but probably withdrawn after the proofs of the first book were printed. the action covers the months leading up to, but not including, the fall of the bastille. costa’s script selects narrative segments and fragments marked by emotional climax and impending action, breaks them up, and rearranges and repeats them in his comic grids. his french revolution starts with the duke of burgundy: “il decano dei pari, allora a destra del re, si alzò. il duca di burgogna | alzò le sue braccia rosse in vesti colore di fiamma” (“the ancientest peer, duke of burgundy, rose from the monarch’s right hand” and “stretch’d his red limbs, / cloth’d in flames of crimson,” french revolution 83, 85-86, e 289-90) (illus. 1, right).the forward slash marks line breaks in blake quotations; in quotations from costa, the vertical slash represents breaks effected by comic-panel gutters when a sentence is split by distributing the words between different comic panels. a comic grid is superimposed over half of his body, but his upper torso seems to peep through a burn in the page. 1. all illustrations are from corrado costa, william blake in beulah: saggio visionario su un poeta a fumetti (milan: squi/libri, 1977). the photos are by permission of the archivio corrado costa, biblioteca panizzi, comune di reggio emilia. see an enlargement of this illustration. see the sequence in book format. the top part of the composition is repeated on the verso, while the bottom half of the verso shows an incendiary revolutionary act by a naked, bearded figure brandishing a torch lit to burn the upper portion (illus. 2, left). 2. see enlargement. while this scene self-reflexively represents the physical properties of the recto and verso, the portion of the paper surface that has been burned fails to conform to the expectation that upon turning the page we should see the back of the duke. instead, his face pierces through both recto and verso, repeating an action that represents a physical impossibility. costa’s handling of the duke suggests the alarm and agitation of the old order frantically calling out to “necker,” the king’s finance minister. the duke’s defiance of the physics of the page indicates his status as a metaphysical entity, but his place on the page is being burned out of existence by revolutionary action. to represent the revolutionaries, costa updates a classical heroic idiom. while the revolutionary torchbearer is transposed into the graphic conventions of comic outlines, a more radical contemporary appropriation is involved in updating poses associated with helmeted warriors from classical warfare to the everyday clothing and symbols of the workers’ movement. for this new segment (illus. 2, right) he fragments one of blake’s sentences, separating subject from verb, isolating the all-capital heading, “i mietitori con la falce” (“the mowers with the sickle”), from the action detailed in smaller capital letters in the following panel in the row beneath: “abbatteranno dalle montagne atlantiche tutta questa grande messe di stelle di seimila anni? tutta questa grande messe di stelle di seimila anni?” (“shall … these mowers / from the atlantic mountains, mow down all this great starry harvest of six thousand years?” french revolution 89-90, e 290). the grid is superimposed over the bodies of two mowers, who occupy two and four panels respectively. one brandishes the sickle as if about to mow the stars in the sky; the other, presented in profile, seems to translate a pose of attack taken from depictions of warriors on classical vases or bas-reliefs. the heroic encoding of the mowers with the sickles alludes to the workers’ movement.a symbol of the workers’ movement, the hammer and sickle was harnessed as a soviet logo in 1918, and then adopted by socialist and communist parties across the world. the version adopted by the pci (italian communist party) was designed by the artist renato guttuso in 1953, under party leader palmiro togliatti. in the early 1970s, the designer enzo mari (1932–​2020) developed a graphic-design project on the symbol’s permutations in art and print culture, which formed the basis of an exhibition entitled hammer and sickle: three of the ways an artist can contribute to the class struggle (falce e martello: tre dei modi con cui un artista può contribuire alla lotta di classe) at the galleria milano in 1973. andy warhol’s hammer and sickle series was inspired by seeing electoral posters on a trip to italy during the administrative elections of 1975; the symbol was an omnipresent feature in the general election of 1976. the two rows of panels beneath them show an establishment figure looking up to the sky. from the classical idiom of the mowers, costa switches to a western movie trope to shift from workers to leaders in what seems to be an intervention in contemporary politics. the rest of the narrative segment from blake’s text is moved to the top row of panels in the following spread (illus. 3) and repeated four times as a sort of refrain or chorus, in which blake’s words are turned from the third to the second person: “necker! bovaro di ginevra, curverai la tua falce, sui campi fertili della francia?” (“and shall necker, the hind of geneva, stretch out his crook’d sickle o’er fertile france,” french revolution 91). the name necker occupies the following row of panels across the spread, and beneath it four rows are taken up by his figure. 3. see enlargement. the spread shows two identical pages left and right, in which necker features as a cowboy who has come to the rescue; his body is fragmented by the superimposition of eighteen frames, and the composition doubled as in a mirror image. blake’s words are repeated four times, in panels left and right of necker’s head: “come nube nera esitò necker! & il suo volto era pieno | di nuvole” (“like a dark cloud necker paus’d … / … and his visage was cover’d with clouds,” french revolution 117, 120, e 291). costa reads the words through a filmic analogy, translating necker’s hesitation into a typical cliff-hanger scene in a western, where the cowboy shows up at the saloon and pauses before the shooting starts. his choice to cast the mild reformer necker in the unlikely heroic role of a pistolero might be read as a coded denunciation of the italian communist party, which at the time was attempting a mediation between incompatible political forces by supporting the government of the right in what has been termed “compromesso storico.”“compromesso storico” (“historical compromise,” 1973–​79) defines a period of italian history in which the communist party sought to negotiate a shared political strategy with the christian democrats, who were in government. it was inspired by salvador allende’s unidad popular coalition government in chile; after the chilean military coup of 11 september 1973, it was theorized as a “democratic alternative” to reactionary violence by the italian communist party leader, enrico berlinguer, in a three-part essay entitled “riflessioni sull’italia dopo i fatti del cile” (“reflections on italy after the events in chile”), published in rinascita nos. 38 (28 sept.), 39 (5 oct.), and 40 (12 oct. 1973). plans for such a strategic alliance between communist and catholic forces were shelved, however, after the kidnapping and execution of former christian democrat prime minister aldo moro by the red brigades in 1978. from the standpoint of the radical, extraparliamentary wings of the left that costa sided with, this meant betraying the revolutionary cause, while also failing to be seen as a force fit for government. the failure of this political strategy is effectively conveyed through a parodic, mock-epic allusion to a commercial american genre. the scene of stalling in the saloon is amplified by the repetition of blake’s words, which offers a visual analogue of the pause and enhances the emotional impact. this experiment in repetition tests the possibilities of the spread as a compositional unit, subverting the sequence from left to right. the duplication of the composition disrupts the expectation that a book’s pages should follow one another and thus support the linear development of the plot. costa’s use of repetition subverts the bibliographic encoding of the book as a medium. the reader’s expectation of change upon turning the page is disrupted by the repetition of the recto, because title and design remain unchanged over two spreads in a narrative sequence that extends over five pages: “si chinò sulle montagne” appears as a title for the left page, and the quotation continues as a title on the right after the page gutter, “poi rialzò la testa” (“[the king] lean’d on his mountains, then lifted his head,” french revolution 105, e 290) (illus. 4). the whole quotation is repeated on the right margin of the recto, positioned to look like an epigraph. 4. see enlargement. “poi rialzò la testa” appears again as a title on the following recto, which reproduces a similar drawing but changes the epigraph and the design of the left page (illus. 5). 5. see enlargement. while blake identifies the subject as the king, the more ambiguous italian sentence needs neither to specify the subject through a noun nor to anchor him to a political identity, so his role shifts, following the freedom of the graphic lines. the figure’s head peers through what seems to be a burn in the page, thus occupying a hole in representation. who is he? has the head of the body politic been substituted? we see him sitting on the grid of the comic panel, holding its bounding lines, as if in control of visual representation, a modern-day comic-book version of the parcae, the classical figures of destiny who weave, measure, or cut the threads of life. in costa’s context, the contours of the human form become coterminous with the comic grid. acting as a puppeteer, the central figure pulls the threads of life. his boot reactivates the western mode, inviting us to see the dynamic lines undoing the grid at the top as a lasso, though its rhomboid shape suggests a kite. while the figure on the left captures a black hole burned into the page, the figure on the right throws it up into the sky, perhaps to evoke a symbol of looming freedom. in another act of metaphysical defiance, costa subverts the spatial coordinates of the book and the order of discourse. while the reader might expect to see the face and then the back of the same figure upon turning the page, the same head peering through the leaf is repeated on the recto (illus. 5, right) and verso (illus. 6, left). 6. see enlargement. this time the rest of the scene changes, as he helps a figure trapped in a comic grid to escape from the boundaries of representation. who is he? whom is he freeing? the minimalist design is open to possibilities, and the grammar of italian allows the action to proceed without specifying a subject, who is missing from the quotation penned in the right margin to anchor the narrative to the rest of blake’s sentence: “e guardò le sue armate, che splendevano tingendo il mattino attraverso il cielo” (“[the king lean’d on his mountains, then lifted his head] and look’d on his armies, that shone / through heaven,” french revolution 105-06, e 290). historical coordinates are reintroduced by the composition of the page to the right in the same spread (illus. 6, right), which shows the duke of burgundy in eighteenth-century clothes, advancing between the reader and the grids behind him on the page and holding a hammer as if ready to strike, though his position of power seems in doubt, miniaturized as he is as a lonely character within a page populated by an empty comic grid. instead of providing narrative rhythm, stability, and continuity, costa’s comic-panel grids challenge the expectation of sequential action subdivided in discrete spatiotemporal units. the disruption of narrative extends to playing havoc with its physical support by evoking and subverting bibliographic codes that normally ensure the sequencing of book parts. their disorderly gathering is another sign of the breakup of representation and its symbolic order. a textual segment from an earlier portion of blake’s text is repeated over four pages: “l’impeto del duca stava sospeso nel consiglio” (“the fierce duke hung over the council,” french revolution 87, e 290). in three of these repetitions (illus. 6, right; illus. 7, left and right) the quotation is written above the comic grid, in the position usually occupied by a running title. this typographical feature normally supports the integrity of a book’s sequence, but costa evokes this bibliographical device in order to subvert it. the perfect geometrical grid overseen by the duke of burgundy hanging over the council gives way to a page spread occupied by two empty grids that begin to show signs of dissymmetry (illus. 7). 7. see enlargement. while the quotation at the top suggests cohesion, its function is destabilized by another bibliographical code entered at the bottom of the spread, a misplaced “errata corrige” positioned in the middle, rather than at the end, of the book. upon turning the page again, we find that the quotation has moved to a different position in the layout: it has migrated to the bottom-left margin of the right-hand page, near the page gutter (illus. 8, right). just as the quotation has lost its typographical function as a running head, the frames of the comic panels fall apart. the revolution takes a bibliographic form in which the duke and the grid are edited out of the page. 8. see enlargement. costa’s reading of the french revolution is informed by italian politics of the time. blake in beulah was published in october 1977, in a context of escalating students’ and workers’ demonstrations, civil unrest, and police repression. over the course of the year the comic strip became a preferred medium of the underground student movement. the most explicit evocation of this political context appears in the juxtaposition of a contemporary text to a passage from the french revolution. in the expanded space freed from the comic grid, signs of erasure suggest a redacted text, irregular blotches evoke bloodstains, and a mower looks on, while another figure lying on the ground seems to be holding a guitar (illus. 9, right). 9. see enlargement. the bottom part of the page is occupied by a comic strip bearing lines from the french revolution distributed at the top of its three panels: “buia nebbia intorno a me,” “buia nebbia rulla,” “rulla oscurando la scrittura sacra oscurando la scrittura” (“dark mists roll round me and blot the writing of god,” french revolution 108, e 291). in blake’s text “the writing of god / written in my bosom” that is being blotted out refers to the king, whose divine right is endangered by the revolutionary process. in costa’s script the “sacred writing” is detached from the possessive that attributes it to the king and inscribed around a double-chinned head wearing a tie, which evokes a reactionary figure. the three views of the man’s head suggest the identifying protocols of a police file, with a frontal view in the central panel and profiles in the left and right panels. the character’s eyes are obscured by black rectangles, as if blindfolded by what looks like a redaction, just like the markings that seem to redact text at the top of the page. what is the sacred scripture that is being obscured? in the context of this page the answer might be found on the following recto (illus. 10, right), which seems to be a duplicate of this scene, apart from a new element in place of the redacted text. 10. see enlargement. this new element stands out for being the only instance of typographical text in the comic book. it looks like a newspaper cutting, which appears to have been pasted at the top of the page and then turned into a speech bubble uttered by a speaking head suspended in midair. the quotation reads “‘la pratica della felicità è sovversiva, e la sua rappresentazione è istigazione a commettere reato, a sovvertire l’ordine di cose presenti’” (“‘the practice of happiness is subversive, and its representation is an incitement to commit a crime, to subvert the order of things at hand’”). the source is identified in a handwritten footnote as “‘chi ha ucciso majakovskij’ di f. berardi (bifo).”see berardi 89. published by squi/libri a few months earlier, in june 1977, berardi’s novel, subtitled “romanzo rivoluzionario” (“revolutionary novel”), juxtaposes different historical characters and layers: a factory worker, a 1968 activist, and the revolutionary russian poet vladimir majakovskij, who enjoyed a range of appearances in the political comic-book scene of 1977.see castaldi. these different historical moments are alternated in the novel as if in parallel montage, working toward an escalation from strikes to violence. the speech bubble added to the newspaper clipping evokes the parodic cut-up style of the repurposed newspaper clippings published in a/traverso (1975–​81), a maoist-dadaist militant avant-garde journal cofounded by berardi and dedicated to subverting the orders of discourse. costa’s alignment with a/traverso is expressed in his prefatory statement to blake in beulah: “w. b. a/traversa la rivoluzione francese. ne stermina i fantasmi” (my italics; “w. b. crosses the french revolution. exterminates its phantoms”). the a/traverso collective also issued the volume alice è il diavolo. sulla strada di majakovskij: testi per una pratica di comunicazione sovversiva (1976) (alice is the devil. following in the footsteps of majakovskij: texts for a subversive communication practice), which reproduces a statement that berardi made from prison in march 1976 after being arrested—​under the erroneous apprehension that he was a member of the red brigades—​on the charges of participation in an illegal armed formation and incitement to commit a crime. his statement includes the claim that “the practice of happiness is subversive when it becomes collective.”la pratica della felicità è sovversiva quando la si collettivizza la nostra volontà di felicità e di liberazione è il loro terrore, e reagiscono terrorizzandoci con il carcere, quando la repressione del lavoro, della famiglia patriarcale e del sessismo non bastano più. this statement was issued from prison, 20 march 1976, presented at writers’ conferences by the a/traverso collective, and published in alice è il diavolo 45. the practice of happiness is subversive when it becomes collective. our will for happiness and liberation is their terror, and they react by terrorizing us with prison, when the repression of work, of the patriarchal family, and of sexism is not enough. (“radio alice—​free radio” 133) the first part is repeated in berardi’s novel and quoted by costa, but the subversive practice of happiness is shifted from utopia to praxis: happiness requires joining the personal with the political, subverting the order of things. in the dystopian context of state repression, its representation leads to a criminal offense. alice è il diavolo looked to majakovskij to document and theorize the “subversive” practice of its associated radio alice (1976–​77), also cofounded by berardi. established after the end of the state monopoly of the airwaves, which had been declared illegal by the constitutional court in december 1974, radio alice was a local free radio station advocating “comunicazione liberata” (“freed communication”) or “comunicazione diretta” (“direct communication”). it pioneered the practice of airing spontaneous interventions from people calling in, as opposed to delegated forms associated with representative democracy. on 11 march 1977 it aired witness accounts of the conflict between demonstrators and police and covered the death of student francesco lorusso, shot dead by police that day. the police held radio alice responsible for the organization of the mass demonstrations that followed in bologna and rome on 11 and 12 march, arrested its collective, and shut down the station. in this context, the italian translation of blake’s words—​“oscurando la scrittura sacra” (“blot[ting] the writing of god,” french revolution 108, e 291)—​activates a technical reference to the legal initiative that takes a radio or television station off the air (“oscuramento” [“blackout”]). because berardi was en route to the rome demonstration, he escaped and eventually managed to reach paris, where guattari welcomed him into his home until march 1978, though he was briefly arrested there in july 1977 in conjunction with the publication of chi ha ucciso majakovskij.  costa’s acknowledgement of berardi while he was a fugitive in paris was a risky gesture. costa’s left-leaning bibliographic acts inflect the physiological operations of the book, using the eye’s movement from right to left to produce left-wing acts of revision and resistance to public versions of history. turning the pages means turning the eyes from right to left, reading backwards, against the grain. consider the pages on the left of the two spreads devoted to the redacted and possibly bloodstained scene. on the left-hand side of the first spread (illus. 9, left), the incendiary agent of revolution is depicted walking outward, with an arrow inviting him to exit the empty page. a heading at the bottom of the page reads “disse: ‘parti.’ non rispondere. perchè la tempesta deve sciogliersi” (“depart, answer not, for the tempest must fall,” french revolution 115, e 291). blake’s words are spoken by the king to burgundy, but in costa’s page spread they take on a different meaning in the context of berardi’s predicament as a fugitive. to draw a speaking head voicing an excerpt from berardi’s work above what look like bloodstains and redacted police-style identity photos (illus. 10, right) meant to invite the reader to apply blake’s words about the french revolution to contemporary politics. the “bloodstains” on the first recto (illus. 9, right) are, upon turning the page, revealed to be holes burned by two incendiary naked figures on the verso (illus. 10, left): there is no crime scene after all. the mower and the guitar player are peaceful bystanders, illustrating berardi’s claim that the practice of happiness is subversive, and suggesting how its representation can be demonized as a criminal act. costa’s political bibliography exploits the operations of the book format as a physical object to lead the reader’s eye from left to right and from right to left, across the double time of the french revolution and the revolutionary present. the association of happiness, subversion, and crime activates another blakean context: “and thence in beulah they are stolen by secret amorous theft, / till they have had punishment enough to make them commit crimes” (jerusalem 69.26-27, e 223). these lines are represented later in blake in beulah in a scene escalating from sex to violence, illustrated with a shooting pistol. the motif of the pistol had already been deployed by costa in another cartoon strip published in the same year in the periodical alter alter, under the title “western mode retro.” there he drew holes in the page to mark the trajectories and effects of gunshots, an ironic pop-art allusion to lucio fontana’s spatial concepts.for a discussion of “western mode retro,” see anceschi. for a very different association, consider the metaphysical depth that ungaretti’s hermetic apocalissi e sedici traduzioni (1965) gains from inserting a spatial concept by fontana in the middle of the blake section (see calè 142-43). while fontana experimented with the infinite opened up by holes that he ripped through the sides of the canvas and the page as part of a metaphysical investigation of his media, costa’s gunshot holes take on other meanings in the context of the escalation of political violence in 1977. in evoking the violent associations of the hole through the page, his play with the materiality of the medium is part of a wider revolutionary aesthetics. in a review of nanni balestrini’s novel la violenza illustrata published in the newspaper il corriere della sera in 1976, umberto eco presents balestrini as “a red terrorist of literature” (“un terrorista rosso della letteratura”). balestrini’s avant-garde experiments include newspaper collages that dislocate the layout of letterpress printing. his novel relays episodes of civil unrest in which molotov cocktails are thrown through the windows of the teletype room of il corriere della sera. in italian, the sentence “scompigliate le righe di piombo”balestrini 29. can be read as both a description of a past action (“the lines of lead were disrupted”) and an imperative to “disrupt the lines of lead,” no longer locked in the prison-house of typography. balestrini’s “lead,” in other words, refers to the materiality of type in newspaper print and also evokes terrorist lines of fire. according to eco, balestrini’s self-reflexive politics of the medium was thus “a technique of cultural terrorism” (“una tecnica di terrorismo culturale”). in one of his 1977 diaries, pablo echaurren advocates “trespassing the borders imposed by the order of discourse which is always discourse of order” “tracimiamo oltre gli argini dei margini imposti dall’ordine del discorso che è sempre discorso dell’ordine.” in the name of a rhizomatic horizontal art that disrupts the concept of the author, the classic, and the commercial world of literary property associated with them.notebook, images 6 and 8, in the pablo echaurren papers, beinecke library, yale university, <https://​www.​postwarcultureatbeinecke.​org/​pabloechaurren​?lightbox=​imagea2k> and <https://​www.​postwarcultureatbeinecke.​org/​pabloechaurren​?lightbox=​image1o7v>. while the author is “the principle of unity in writing,” as michel foucault argues, the parodic and subversive citational practice of the avant-garde plays with interruption, dissemination, and proliferation. the name of the author might be used to limit the proliferation of meaning, but it can also identify “the possibility and the rules of formation of other texts.”foucault 128, 131. foucault’s essay was delivered as a lecture at the collège de france and published in 1969; it was translated into italian and published with foucault’s literary writings by feltrinelli in 1971. blake’s name in costa’s title stands for a visionary sexual and political utopia. costa’s intervention abstracts excerpts from their original grammatical and syntactical cohesion, and from the spatiotemporal coordinates of blake’s works. as blake’s sentences shift from english to italian, from the more defined subject positions required by english to the more abstract possibilities of italian, verbs become detached from their subjects and open to shifting subject positions. sentences that blake attributes to the king float free, ready to be appropriated by different historical figures enacting new visionary possibilities for a new time and space of revolution. in so doing, costa’s italian blake produces a visionary encoding for an open-ended history of the present. works cited anceschi, giovanni. “diafane dietrologie choc.” il verri 52 (2013): 167-72. balestrini, nanni. la violenza illustrata. turin: einaudi, 1976. barilli, renato. “corrado costa. tra poesura e pittria.” corrado costa. tra poesura e pittria [exhibition catalogue, reggio emilia, 8 apr.–​7 may 1995]. ed. renato barilli. milan: mazzotta, 1995. 7-13. —​—​—​. “iper-segmenti e ipo-segmenti: due ipotesi sulla ricerca letteraria di oggi.” il verri 6 (1977): 9-23. berardi, franco. chi ha ucciso majakovskij. romanzo rivoluzionario. milan: squi/libri, 1977. calè, luisa. “the reception of blake in italy.” the reception of william blake in europe. ed. sibylle erle and morton d. paley. 2 vols. london: bloomsbury, 2019. 1: 125-54. castaldi, simone. drawn and dangerous: italian comics of the 1970s and 1980s. jackson: university press of mississippi, 2010. collettivo a/traverso. alice è il diavolo. sulla strada di majakovskij: testi per una pratica di comunicazione sovversiva. ed. luciano capelli and stefano saviotti. milan: l’erba voglio, 1976. —​—​—​. “radio alice—​free radio.” special issue, “autonomia: post-political politics.” ed. sylvère lotringer and christian marazzi. semiotext(e) 30.3 (1980): 130-35. costa, corrado. “western mode retro: letteratura in trasparenza.” alter alter 6 and 8 (june and aug. 1977). reprinted in il verri 52 (2013): 161-67. —​—​—​. william blake in beulah: saggio visionario su un poeta a fumetti. milan: squi/libri, 1977. eco, umberto. “quando dire è fare: la violenza illustrante.” il corriere della sera 7 mar. 1976: 3. foucault, michel. “what is an author?” language, counter-memory, practice. ed. donald f. bouchard. trans. donald f. bouchard and sherry simon. ithaca: cornell university press, 1977. 113-38. gandus, valeria. “squilibrati.” panorama 26 july 1977: 69. gazzola, eugenio. “le altre posizioni, società e politica nell’opera di corrado costa e adriano spatola.” l’ulisse 22 (oct. 2019): 265-68. —​—​—​. “corrado costa, the one you prefer of the two.” trans. heather sottong. those who from afar look like flies: an anthology of italian poetry from pasolini to the present. tome 1, 1956–​1975. ed. luigi ballerini and beppe cavatorta. toronto: university of toronto press, 2017. 852-58. —​—​—​. “l’uomo di legge e il poeta.” il verri 52 (2013): 94-102. kristeva, julia. la révolution du langage poétique. l’avant-garde à la fin du xixe siècle: lautréamont et mallarmé. paris: éditions du seuil, 1974. ungaretti, giuseppe. apocalissi e sedici traduzioni. ancona: bucciarelli, 1965. —​—​—​. visioni di william blake. milan: mondadori, 1965. blake’s lawgiver, newton’s system, reynolds’s justice blake’s lawgiver, newton’s system, reynolds’s justice by simon schaffer simon schaffer is emeritus professor of history of science at the university of cambridge. the lawgiver all the while sat delighted to see them in such a serious humour ( an island in the moon, chapter 11) the figure of the lawgiver plays a significant role in william blake’s carnivalesque early text, now known to scholarship as an island in the moon. offered here are documentary and iconographic materials principally drawn from metropolitan sources of the 1780s that bear both on the identity of this character and, at more length, on the contemporary meanings of the epithet blake chose: “steelyard the lawgiver.” the initial section of this note presents some biographical information that might help reinforce what is now the common identification with john flaxman, an artist then blake’s close friend and benevolent supporter, resident in soho on wardour street near the broad street house blake occupied in 1784–​85. following the influential proposal of david erdman, circumstantial textual and iconographic evidence has often been used to bolster the decoding of steelyard as flaxman: the character’s citations of currently modish texts of literature and philosophy; his errant study of works such as edward young’s night thoughts; the songs he offers to the company; the “merry meeting” at steelyard’s own house in chapter 11. something has been made, too, of the juxtaposition of the scenes from joseph addison’s cato, evoked in chapter 8 of island, with flaxman’s 1779 self-portrait at his table, furnished with a pile of books and a human skull. considerations are also offered here that tell against at least one alternative reading, which sees instead the character inflammable gass as a representation of flaxman.erdman, prophet 109-13; blake, island, edited by phillips, 10, 80; castanedo 261-63. see blake, island, edited by phillips, 40-41 (ch. 8, line 1) and e 456. however, it is certainly not to be assumed that each of the figures in blake’s satire corresponds exactly to a single encrypted, if playfully transfigured, individual. some commentators have urged that the cast of island should not best be seen as detailed portraits of particular members of blake’s coterie, but rather as subversive and playful conceits through which complex ethical and material roles could be explored. on this showing, the text is to be read as a precociously sophisticated satire, its ingenious plot development inhabited by composite moralized figures.campbell; rawlinson 104-07. so the balance of this discussion reflects on the somewhat more telling issue of the symbolic meanings of the steelyard in 1780s london. the links between this literally and figuratively ambiguous device and law and lawgiving could have possessed an important set of contemporary connotations for blake and his circle. of special interest is the display of the steelyard as an emblem linked immediately to two of blake’s principal imaginative interlocutors and opponents, the supreme natural philosopher isaac newton and the dominant academician joshua reynolds.for london’s geography and newton and reynolds as blake’s “great mental antagonists,” see michael 29. these figurations of the device might not bear so directly on the identification of steelyard as a specific individual, yet they do add to the significance to be attributed to blake’s use of the term in the aesthetic, religious, and political contexts of the period. that issue of the steelyard’s resonances and its links with law occupies the latter and somewhat more substantial section here. consider first the key term “lawgiver.” erdman reckons that the artist and statuary flaxman might well be seen as a lawgiver, concerned at one point with his “parish business,” because, as the engraver and memoirist john thomas smith briefly recalls, flaxman’s fellow parishioners of st. anne’s, soho, had elected him collector of the watch rate, the local contributory charge for street watchmen. in that westminster parish, unusually, all ratepayers, male and female, were entitled to vote in an open vestry poll for parochial officers. the cost of the team of watchmen who patrolled the streets every night dressed in white coats and caps was substantial, prompting a new public subscription in 1791 to meet the charges. eminent local residents, including reynolds nearby at leicester square, were among these contributors.smith 2: 436-37; rimbault 202-07. like much of the material with which blake experimented in island, details of the political and social networks of 1780s london in the fraught conjuncture of postwar reform and urban crisis informed and may be illuminated by these jokey references. the role of the parish watchman was a focus of considerable legislative concern in this period. during the fiercely contested westminster election of spring 1784, the opposition leader charles james fox was portrayed in graphic print as a parish watchman resistant to the regime’s tyrannies. the following year, the government sought unsuccessfully to pass an act to overhaul metropolitan policing and centralize its surveillance, against which london lobbyists protested as an infringement of their freedoms. blake himself would later turn in considerable force to such issues of metropolitan order, satan’s “watch fiends,” and their relation to legal authority. steelyard’s opening line in island—​“it was a shameful thing that acts of parliament should be in a free state”—​reflects on the relation between law and liberty.beattie 154-59; michael 31; elliott 551, 556; e 451. on the assumption that steelyard the lawgiver corresponds to a single known individual, and if the identification with flaxman be accepted, there is a little more biographical evidence available to prompt connections between his affairs and those of the system of the law. in the 1784 westminster election he voted for the government candidates, against fox. in the election six years later, by contrast, blake backed fox. erdman has noted how many radical artists, such as george cumberland and james barry, addressed their dedications to fox and his cause. flaxman did not. named a “good and lawful man,” an established westminster resident of standing, flaxman served on a coroner’s inquest into a death by fire in st. anne’s parish in january 1784 and as a member of the middlesex jury at the old bailey in december 1782 and again in january 1785, when he sat in no fewer than fifteen cases. some of these details might have become a common reference about legal affairs in blake’s circle, especially in a milieu much concerned with the powers and authority of law in art, polity, and creation.westminster pollbooks, 1784, www.​londonlives.​org/​browse.​jsp?div=pollbook_265-26593​&terms=​flaxman#highlight; coroners’ inquests into suspicious deaths, 1784, www.​londonlives.​org/​browse.​jsp?id=wacwic65224_n20-3​&div=​wacwic65224ic652240007​#highlight; proceedings of the old bailey, 4 dec. 1782, www.​oldbaileyonline.​org/​record/​f17821204-1​?text=flaxman; proceedings of the old bailey, 12 jan. 1785, www.​oldbaileyonline.​org/​record/​f17850112-1​?text=flaxman. for dedications to fox, see erdman, prophet 162n40. a few scholars have, however, queried the identification of the lawgiver with flaxman.blackstone, for example, reckons that steelyard must be the “humourless” radical philosopher william godwin (23-24). in a study of blake’s intellectual milieux, keri davies denies that a parish rate collector could properly be labeled a lawgiver, and asserts instead that flaxman is represented in island under the figure of the antiquarian etruscan column, not least because of the sculptor’s work for the preeminent merchant of so-called etruscan designs, josiah wedgwood, whose london home and showroom were round the corner in greek street. it was flaxman, too, who in 1784 convinced wedgwood to launch his scheme to copy the celebrated portland vase, and in the same year sought to aid blake in winning a commission for allegorical ceiling paintings of “etruscan” design for wedgwood’s etruria hall.davies 231; irwin 22-23; uglow 328; bentley, stranger 86. it has been pointed out that the reevaluation of the provenance of these antiquities informed the extensive burlesques of antiquarianism and patrician taste in island.brylowe 96-97. even the fact that flaxman held such a post as parish watch-rate collector has not always been accepted. g. e. bentley, jr., cited a passage from flaxman’s sister-in-law maria denman, who in 1835 annotated allan cunningham’s lives of the most eminent british painters, sculptors, and architects with the cautionary note that “he scrupulously avoided all parish business throughout his life.”peter cunningham 60; bentley, “blake’s engravings” 162n5. bentley did later locate archival evidence in the westminster rate books that flaxman was indeed made collector of the watch rate for the king square (soho square) division of the parish in may 1782. but this simply prompted bentley to conjecture that flaxman appears in island under quite a different guise, inflammable gass the windfinder, since this character, portrayed as natural philosopher and chaotic showman, has “a place of profit that forces [him] to go to church.”bentley, stranger 82 un. see blake, island, edited by phillips, 35 (ch. 4, line 10) and e 452. these ingenious views can be countered. the claim that inflammable gass the windfinder not be identified as flaxman, but rather be matched with the chemist and entrepreneur william nicholson, has attracted some scholarly attention. wedgwood’s business representative from 1777, nicholson spent the years from 1782 at warwick street in soho and then nearby on oxford street. it is known that blake engraved the vignette for his successful natural philosophy textbook in 1782.baine and baine; heppner. heppner (196) cites the three rules of philosophizing that nicholson prefaces to his introduction to natural philosophy (1: 6), comparing them with the principles that blake denies in there is no natural religion. nicholson’s rules are in fact copied directly from the first three rules of reasoning at the start of book 3 of newton’s principia (794-95). in late 1783 nicholson became secretary of a coffee house philosophical society based near st. paul’s, and subsequently on chancery lane, a group of chemists, natural philosophers, medics, and manufacturers, the records of whose discussions on current chemistry, electricity, steam engineering, and commerce he conscientiously kept. furthermore, in 1785 he briefly gained profitable employment as secretary to wedgwood’s commercial lobby group, the general chamber of manufacturers of great britain. the minute books of the philosophical society and the biography composed by nicholson’s son, both now published, confirm his interests in just the range of topics satirically associated with the activities of inflammable gass: pneumatic and chemical phenomena, optical and thermal experiments, and, in december 1784, complex theories about the cause and directions of the winds. it may also be telling that just as in the opening chapter of island, immediately before steelyard’s appearance, inflammable gass defends voltaire, who “found out a number of queries in philosophy” and “was the glory of france,” so it is possible that nicholson translated voltaire’s writings on newton at the suggestion of the radical bookseller joseph johnson.levere and turner 87; nicholson jr. 45; nicholson 2: 63-71. many thanks to sue durrell for her expert help on this topic. the concern here is rather less in matching exotic names to defined persons. yet, blake’s choice of epithets throughout island must be taken as deliberate and pointed. the scatological opportunities offered by the nickname inflammable gass were evidently plentiful. in his close reading of blake’s satirical text, nick rawlinson claims that “inflammable air” was a “common comic term.”rawlinson 107. this is so, but the different term “inflammable gas” was itself at that moment very new indeed. contemporary chemists, including nicholson, typically wrote of “airs.” the chemical expression “gas” as reference to some of these airs, taken over in translation from french pneumatics, first appeared only during the later 1770s, and “inflammable gas” was then almost always used in the press solely for the artificial air (our hydrogen gas) with which from 1783 first the french, then the british, filled their aerostatic balloons.robbins; levere and turner 92. the earliest use of the term “inflammable gas” in the press seems to be the reprint of antoine deparcieux’s letter on balloon ascents in the morning herald, 17 sept. 1783, 3. compare the morning herald, 23 feb. 1784, 1, on the display of montgolfier’s balloon at the lyceum on the strand: “this brilliant and most magnificent spectacle … contains about 2000 gallons of inflammable gas, … and the whole exhibits the appearance of a huge world, invisibly suspended by omnipotence.…” it has often been remarked how signally the contemporary fashionable balloon craze is registered in island.england 452-53; blake, island, edited by phillips, 14. reflection on the hardware and practices of natural philosophy in london in the period of island also decisively aids interpretation of the comparably significant term “steelyard,” where resonances might seem at first less clear. commentators have hazarded that blake’s term might suggest “not only strength but harshness and inflexibility”; or else that the name embodies the oxymoronic juxtaposition of law and theft.webster 18-19; rawlinson 133. in fact, expositions of newtonian mechanics in successive eighteenth-century textbooks in metropolitan natural philosophy, certainly including that of nicholson, give details of how steelyards worked and the principles that they were supposed to embody. chemists also often used these instruments in their cabinets and laboratories.whiston 2; desaguliers 1: 92; nicholson 1: 55; beretta and brenni 194-95. the design and use of steelyards arose from very ancient devices in both eastern asia and the mediterranean, of significantly broad and ambiguous functions. in the imperial roman statera, the direct precedent for the more recent steelyard, the principle of the familiar two-armed balance was reversed, keeping the instrument’s axis fixed and making the arms unequal. the object to be assayed was hung from the shorter beam. a standard counterweight was then moved along the graduated longer beam until balance was struck. the known and unknown were somehow brought into equilibrium by reading a scale. thus, instead of the need to provide a set of standardized weights, as in one use of the common balance, here it was necessary to calibrate the instrument itself. steelyards’ reliability demanded extensive legally imposed collective regulation of their production and use. whereas the common balance might indeed be taken to symbolize itself, a device representing equality of judgment through an instrument of decision, the uncertain inequalities on which the steelyard relied tended to complicate or even frustrate its symbolic use.kisch 77; büttner and renn 767-70; biagoli 301. steelyards were notable because they deliberately relied on the indispensable agency of the human performing the act of weighing. this stress on ingenious deliberation seems to have been their symbolic sense throughout their history, during which equal-arm balances were, in contrast, often taken to embody the more inhuman and mechanical act of judgment.leone 49-51; vankeerberghen. furthermore, steelyards of different designs were used in eighteenth-century europe both for bulk commodities, such as grain or coal, and for the most exquisite judgments, such as coins or jewels. they belonged both to markets and to cabinets. devices startlingly capable of correcting and of fomenting deceit, these tools were thus objects of major concern for commercial regulators. when their accuracy was doubted, steelyards were subject to public trial in the marketplace, their values witnessed and testified. newspaper readers were assured that the very best means to check the true metal value of a coin, often altered by clipping and forgery in the georgian monetary system, was to use a steelyard.ipswich journal, 11 aug. 1764, 4; kentish gazette, 13 sept. 1774, 4. in exact contrast, ipswich surveyors declared that customers “who buy goods weighed by steelyards may blame themselves” if they have been cheated, “that manner of weighing goods being not warranted by law,” while in 1779 birmingham bailiffs scoured the city confiscating steelyards, “they being an unlawful weight by which many frauds are committed.”ipswich journal, 23 jan. 1768, 2; aris’s birmingham gazette, 15 feb. 1779, 3, and 11 oct. 1779, 3. ambiguous in use and in design, steelyards were also highly valued objects of judgment and connoisseurship. soon after the young monarch’s accession, the eminent fleet street instrument maker george adams provided george iii with a well-made replica of a roman steelyard for the royal apparatus collections (see illus. 1). 1. steelyard at court. model of a roman statera: a steelyard made for george iii by george adams in 1762. science museum, london, object number 1927-1205. image © the board of trustees of the science museum. in 1782 the fashionable hanover square mechanic and designer john joseph merlin supplied a fine steelyard to samuel johnson to be used as a coin balance. thomas gainsborough’s portrait of merlin, exhibited at the royal academy the same year, shows the elegantly dressed instrument maker with the steelyard in his hands. horace walpole collected a chinese steelyard for his strawberry hill cabinets, as documented in his published inventory of the house. the cunning merchants’ device had become a commodity of polite taste.adams pl. 9, fig. 42; walpole 107; french et al. 43, 71-72. during the 1780s blake would have known of at least two important symbolic uses of the steelyard on show in london, one eloquently associated with newton and the other with reynolds. both figures are named in island. newton appears in the song of the “mathematician” obtuse angle in the ninth chapter, where he is wittily associated with other protagonists of philosophical and theological controversy in the epoch of the glorious revolution and its aftermath.blake, island, edited by phillips, 51 (ch. 9, line 108) and e 460; rawlinson 146-47. the president of the royal academy is briefly mentioned in the satire’s seventh chapter—​blake’s earliest reference to reynolds—​through reynolds’s peremptory advice to artistic tyros, in a passage inserted just before steelyard’s appearance “at his table.” in blake’s cosmology newton and reynolds were unusually singled out as figures of tyrannic power. these were two of the most important protagonists of forms of lawgivers’ rule against which he would rebel, a system of power inimical to antinomian principles. blake ultimately reckoned the sources of the aesthetic program espoused by reynolds sprang from newton’s philosophy.blake, island, edited by phillips, 40 (ch. 7, line 10) and e 456. for blake on newton and reynolds, see e 660; postle, “‘sir joshua and his gang’” 113, 119; thompson 113-14. in both the specific cases of the steelyard’s symbolism described below, the monumental designs associated with newton and with reynolds, the figure of this instrument was authoritatively imposed as part of a commemoration of reason’s virtues within a preexisting gothic structure—​westminster abbey and an oxford college chapel, respectively. on newton’s death in 1727, his nephew and successor as head of the royal mint, john conduitt, began preparing plans for a suitable memorial for a man he judged a saint worthy of canonization. newton had in fact immodestly made erection of the memorial a condition of conduitt’s inheritance. the great man’s heir corresponded with the augustan arbiter of taste, alexander pope, about the choice of an epitaph, and convinced the authorities to erect a massive monument visible to all in westminster abbey, to be set in the choir screen then under reconstruction by the architect nicholas hawksmoor. conduitt sketched the outlines of a complex allegorical structure, ornamented below with a dramatic bas-relief displaying a series of putti employing a range of instruments to evoke newton’s achievements in optics, chemistry, astronomy, and the minting of coin. “in the mainground,” conduitt proposed be set “a boy weighing in a stillyard … the sun against all the other planets” (see illus. 2).conduitt; haskell 2-3; keynes 97. 2. steelyard and the newtonian system. relief on the monument to isaac newton, westminster abbey. from right to left, putti manipulate a chemical furnace, molds for coins, an optical prism, a steelyard balancing the sun against the planets, and a newtonian reflecting telescope. designed by john conduitt 1727–​28, carved by john michael rysbrack 1730–​31. by kind permission of the dean and chapter of westminster. it had become common in the decorative imagery of natural philosophical and mathematical works to represent such cherubic figures at play with the hardware of experiment and calculation. part of the point was to link natural philosophy with domestic familiarity; part, more directly, was to draw attention to the equipment rather than the personnel of practical and experimental forms of knowledge. in 1711, for example, the crucial publication of a selection of newton’s writings on analysis was ornamented with images of putti at work on geometrical construction and a range of architectural and practical trades linked to newton’s own program.heilbron; bellhouse 104-08. in the case of the abbey monument, the reference of this specific use by the putto of the steelyard as balance between the sun and its system was to the decisive proposition 8 of the third book of newton’s principia mathematica, on the infinite extent of the inverse square law of gravitation. this is the passage where newton most powerfully seeks to demonstrate that his laws of weight and gravity govern all matter in the universe. in a remarkable corollary, he sets out to show that (as he puts it in the first edition of his work) “god placed the planets at different distances from the sun so that each one might, according to the degree of its density, enjoy a greater or lesser amount of heat from the sun.” this is, significantly, the sole passage in the first edition of principia that mentions god.newton 219, 814; whiteside 131. the brief for monument and relief, which were funded by conduitt himself, was given to the architect william kent, then also occupied with the construction for the queen at richmond of a gallery of worthies, including newton. association with the prince of philosophers was a commonplace in the commemorative and aggressive georgian state. the abbey project was completed by the leading sculptor michael rysbrack. kent’s initial sketch for the memorial included the layout of the relief with the steelyard at its center, and while rysbrack then altered some details of this scheme, he preserved this figure in pride of place beneath the reclining figure of newton himself.bryant 12-23. unveiled in 1731, the newton monument drew admiring comments from the london press: “another boy is weighing the sun and planets with a stilliard, the sun being near the centre on one side, and the planets on the other, alluding to a celebrated proposition in his principia.”grub-street journal no. 68, 22 apr. 1731, copied in gentleman’s magazine 1, apr. 1731, 159. the newtonian relief, including its representation of steelyard and other apparatus, was likely copied at once for conduitt’s own residence, shown there above the fireplace and beneath newton’s bust in william hogarth’s celebrated 1732 conversation piece, a representation of a theatrical performance for visiting royalty at conduitt’s house. a further plaster copy of the relief survives above one of the doors of the fine georgian entrance hall at saltram house in devon, where it was installed by the parker family, close allies of reynolds, as an emblem of the elementary powers of air. indeed, the iconography was distributed well into the century. in 1792, as part of his vast hogarth project to which he also recruited blake, the london publisher and businessman john boydell arranged the reproduction of the conduitt family painting, with its image of putti at play with a steelyard.craske; asfour. guidebooks and prints kept these details of the newtonian apotheosis in public view. a 1761 guide to the abbey, much plagiarized in subsequent decades, recorded that “the device of weighing the sun by the steelyard has been thought at once bold and striking.”henry 180, copied in thornton 114, which is cited in rawlinson 119. between 1774 and 1778, blake worked in the abbey as apprentice to james basire on the preparation of images for richard gough’s sepulchral monuments of the tombs in edward the confessor’s chapel, with scaffolding put up in the space behind the altar so as to complete his drawings. blake’s way to his strenuous work passed the choir screen and its spectacular monument to newton. there was a telling contrast between the gothic tombs that preoccupied the young apprentice and the classical idiom of that sepulchre erected in honor of the master of astronomical law.crosby; brylowe 92. an even more direct link between figures of steelyard and lawgiver was evident in the work of reynolds from exactly the same period. in summer 1777 new college, oxford commissioned the successful glass painter thomas jervais to produce a new set of windows for its chapel. the designs were assigned to reynolds, who by early 1778 had set out a scheme with the figures of faith, hope, and charity and the four cardinal virtues laid out across the west window’s lower divisions as “a proper rustic base of foundation for the support of the christian religion.” just as in the monumental schemes at westminster abbey that involved considerable changes to the medieval structure, so in the new college project the scheme demanded the removal of much of the gothic tracery from the window and its replacement with modern painted glass. by october that year reynolds had begun to compose the original figures of the virtues, justice among them.postle, sir joshua reynolds 168-73. it has often been remarked that reynolds’s image of justice for new college was startling and original, a dramatic break with the canonical form set out in such handbooks as cesare ripa’s iconologia, a new version of which appeared with reynolds as subscriber in 1779. reynolds’s justice is, for example, not blindfolded, a marked departure from the emblem tradition that blinded justice to represent impartiality. much attention has been directed to his decision to show her instead as shading her eyes, a gesture matching that in which he portrayed himself in his remarkable self-portrait painted three decades earlier, and plausibly to be interpreted as a sign of vision’s judgmental discrimination.resnik and curtis 98; manderson and martinez 250-52. 3. steelyard and the law. figure of justice for the west window of the chapel of new college, oxford. stipple engraving by georg siegmund facius and johann facius after josiah boydell after joshua reynolds, june 1782. credit: artokoloro/​superstock. it has also been noted that reynolds decided to replace the conventional pair of balance scales in the figure’s hand with a steelyard, the design of which closely matches that of the model roman statera made by adams for the monarch (see illus. 3). in the discourse reynolds delivered to the royal academy students in december 1778, a text blake would later annotate with fury, the president insists that “an artist is obliged for ever to hold a balance in his hand by which he must determine the value of different qualities.”reynolds 278. reynolds completed the depiction of justice in 1779 and it was rapidly transferred to glass, along with images of the other virtues. in april 1780, jervais opened an exhibition of his stained glass at the celebrated showroom in cockspur street run by the entrepreneurial clockmaker and engineer christopher pinchbeck, where floors were stocked with novel machines, curios, and instruments. alongside “an extensive variety of agreeable subjects,” featuring the effects of light and fire in dark galleries illuminated by concealed lamps, reynolds’s figures of justice and prudence, now transferred to glass, went on show “large as life.” journalists commented that these figures “go far beyond any thing ever attempted before by any artist whatever, far surpassing even the old glass painting in our gothick cathedrals.”morning post, 12 apr. 1780, 1; morning chronicle, 1 june 1780, 2. for pinchbeck’s repository, see pérez 31. immediately afterwards, on 1 may 1780, the annual exhibition at reynolds’s own royal academy in the newly rebuilt somerset house also hosted his original painting of justice as part of the display. the work attracted considerable comment in the metropolitan press. some were admiring: “this is a most beautiful figure, elegantly composed, and finely described.” more were hostile, and it is significant that the strange choice of steelyard seemed to attract particular attention. even reynolds’s erstwhile supporters reckoned that the depiction of such an instrument as an attribute of justice revealed “the taste of a petit-maître.” his critics were harsher, claiming that the image “is emblematically repugnant to the antients’ ideas of justice, all of whom represent her holding scales equally poized; but sir joshua has, in violation of this, decked her hands with a pair of stilliards, in imitation no doubt of the wife of a clare-market butcher weighing out a leg of mutton to her dainty customer!” clare market, just across the strand from the royal academy, housed a major meat market, its surroundings unambiguously associated with plebeian commerce. the marks of class and judgment in reynolds’s image, in what might well be taken to be a lawgiver with her steelyard, were seemingly unmistakable.mannings no. 2120; postle, sir joshua reynolds 180; morning post, 2 may 1780, 3. the glass painting of justice was installed in its place in the new college chapel during august 1780. reynolds’s figure stayed in public notice: in june 1782, the german emigré engravers georg and johann facius completed a fine published version on the basis of a drawing by josiah boydell. the print was then distributed by josiah’s uncle john boydell as part of a 1785 collection of reynolds’s images for the west window of the chapel.west window, print 6. observers commented on the apparent contradiction between the “gothic taste” of the ancient chapel and what they judged the “half-dress’d languishing harlots” that reynolds and jervais had introduced into the building. guidebooks to the city’s monuments expressed what had become a characteristically ambivalent view: in the chapel visitors could see the figure of justice holding “in her left hand the steelyard, a kind of balance less cumbrous, if not less vulgar, than the scales which are usually given her.”postle, sir joshua reynolds 183-84; new oxford guide 48. the steelyard carried by reynolds’s justice evidently became a public topic of debate and wit, attending to its commercial and its moral value. blake and his closest colleagues were part of the milieux in which these values were at stake. the link between justice and the steelyard could easily become a standing joke. blake joined the royal academy schools in october 1779, and his first exhibit, death of earl goodwin, was shown the following year, where it appeared in the very same display as reynolds’s figure. also in the 1780 exhibition was flaxman’s extraordinary sketch for a gothicized monument to thomas chatterton, a work then judged as “of infinite merit.”erdman, prophet 45-46; irwin 14; candid review 32. the controversy about the authenticity of chatterton’s rowley poems, which preoccupied the public press in the 1777–​80 period, corresponded with flaxman’s production of this commemorative scheme, shown in the same rooms as reynolds’s painting of justice with her steelyard. the chatterton debate makes a crucial appearance in blake’s satire, and important connections have been detected between the respective visions of blake and flaxman of the death of the bristol poet and its spiritual sense.england 534; blake, island, edited by phillips, 5, 76, 79-81; pressly 178-82. as the text of an island in the moon begins to reveal, blake’s own sense of place at the academy was at least complex, and his hostility to reynolds’s judgment increasingly intense and unforgiving. blake stopped display at the academy’s exhibition from 1785 for fourteen years. this conjuncture has been described as a “creative moratorium,” for which island might be read as an experimental and jocular exploration.ward 81; campbell 147. the figure of the steelyard, with accompanying meanings linking monumental virtue and active judgment, played its role in this set of associations. not the least of blake’s virtues was his precocious skill at balancing law and laughter. works cited adams, george, sr. “a description of an apparatus for explaining the principles of mechanicks made for his majesty king george the third.” 1762. science museum, london, ms/0203/1. asfour, amal. “hogarth’s post-newtonian universe.” journal of the history of ideas, vol. 60, no. 4, 1999, pp. 693-716. baine, rodney m., and mary r. baine. “blake’s inflammable gass.” blake, vol. 10, no. 2, fall 1976, pp. 51-52. https://​bq.​blakearchive.org/​10.2.baine. beattie, j. m. the first english detectives: the bow street runners and the policing of london, 1750–​1840. oxford up, 2012. bellhouse, david r. “the deification of newton in 1711.” bshm bulletin, vol. 29, no. 2, 2014, pp. 98-110. bentley, g. e., jr. “blake’s engravings and his friendship with flaxman.” studies in bibliography, vol. 12, 1959, pp. 161-88. ———. the stranger from paradise: a biography of william blake. yale up, 2001. beretta, marco, and paolo brenni. the arsenal of eighteenth-century chemistry: the laboratories of antoine-laurent lavoisier. brill, 2022. biagioli, mario. “justice out of balance.” critical inquiry, vol. 45, no. 2, 2019, pp. 280-306. blackstone, bernard. english blake. cambridge up, 1949. blake, william. the complete poetry and prose of william blake. edited by david v. erdman, with commentary by harold bloom, newly rev. ed., anchor books, 1988. [abbreviated as e] ———. william blake: an island in the moon. a facsimile of the manuscript. edited by michael phillips. cambridge up, 1987. bryant, julius. “exempla vertutis: designs for sculpture.” william kent: designing georgian britain, edited by susan weber, yale up, 2013. a&aeportal, https://​doi.​org/​10.37862/​aaeportal.​00218.020. brylowe, thora. “of gothic architects and grecian rods: william blake, antiquarianism and the history of art.” romanticism, vol. 18, no. 1, 2012, pp. 89-104. büttner, jochen, and jürgen renn. “the early history of weighing technology from the perspective of a theory of innovation.” etopoi: journal of ancient studies, vol. 6, 2016, pp. 757-76. campbell, william royce. “the aesthetic integrity of blake’s island in the moon.” blake studies, vol. 3, no. 2, 1970, pp. 137-47. a candid review of the exhibition (being the twelfth) of the royal academy mdcclxxx. reynell, 1780. castanedo, fernando. “‘o what a scene is here’: visual references in blake’s island in the moon.” william blake’s manuscripts, edited by mark crosby and josephine mcquail, palgrave macmillan, 2024, pp. 257-78. conduitt, john. “for the relievo.” king’s college, cambridge, keynes ms 131.5f. craske, matthew. “conversations and chimneypieces: the imagery of the hearth in eighteenth-century english family portraiture.” british art studies, vol. 2, 2016, https://​doi.​org/​10.17658/​issn.​2058-5462/​issue-02/​mcraske. crosby, mark. “william blake in westminster abbey, 1774–​1777.” bodleian library quarterly, vol. 22, no. 2, 2009, pp. 162-80. cunningham, peter. “new materials for the life of john flaxman.” the builder, vol. 21, 1863, pp. 37-38, 60. davies, alan philip keri. william blake in contexts: family friendships, and some intellectual microcultures of eighteenthand nineteenth-century england. 2003. u of surrey, phd dissertation. desaguliers, john theophilus. a course of experimental philosophy. vol. 1, john senex, 1734. elliott, jake. “blake’s ‘watchman’: los and the london police.” european romantic review, vol. 35, no. 3, 2024, pp. 545-61. england, martha w. “the satiric blake: apprenticeship at the haymarket?” bulletin of the new york public library, vol. 73, 1969, pp. 440-64 (part 1), 531-50 (part 2). erdman, david v. blake: prophet against empire. 3rd ed., princeton up, 1977. french, anne, et al. john joseph merlin: the ingenious mechanick. greater london council, 1985. haskell, francis. past and present in art and taste: selected essays. yale up, 1987. heilbron, john l. “domesticating science in the eighteenth century.” science and the visual imagination in the enlightenment, edited by william r. shea, science history publications, 2000, pp. 1-24. henry, david. an historical description of westminster abbey, its monuments and curiosities. john newbery, 1767. heppner, christopher. “another ‘new’ blake engraving: more about blake and william nicholson.” blake, vol. 12, no. 3, winter 1978–​79, pp. 193-97. https://​bq.​blakearchive.​org/​12.3.heppner. irwin, david. john flaxman, 1755–​1826: sculptor, illustrator, designer. studio vista/​christie’s, 1979. keynes, milo. the iconography of sir isaac newton to 1800. boydell and brewer, 2005. kisch, bruno. scales and weights: a historical outline. yale up, 1965. leone, massimo. “the frowning balance: semiotic insinuations on the visual rhetoric of justice.” semiotica, issue 216, 2017, pp. 41-62. levere, trevor, and gerard l’e. turner, editors. discussing chemistry and steam: the minutes of a coffee house philosophical society, 1780–​1787. oxford up, 2002. manderson, desmond, and cristina s. martinez. “justice and art, face to face.” yale journal of law and the humanities, vol. 28, no. 2, 2016, pp. 241-64. mannings, david. sir joshua reynolds: a complete catalogue of his paintings. yale up, 2000. michael, jennifer davis. blake and the city. bucknell up, 2006. new oxford guide. 7th ed., fletcher, 1785. newton, isaac. the principia: mathematical principles of natural philosophy. edited by i. bernard cohen and anne whitman, u of california p, 1999. nicholson, william. an introduction to natural philosophy. joseph johnson, 1782. 2 vols. nicholson, william, jr. the life of william nicholson, 1753–​1815. edited by sue durrell, peter owen, 2018. pérez, liliane. “technology, curiosity and utility in france and in england in the eighteenth century.” science and spectacle in the european enlightenment, edited by bernadette bensaude-vincent and christine blondel, routledge, 2008, pp. 25-42. postle, martin. “‘sir joshua and his gang’: blake, reynolds and the royal academy.” interfaces. image-texte-langage, vol. 30, 2010, pp. 111-23. ———. sir joshua reynolds: the subject pictures. cambridge up, 1995. pressly, william l. the artist as original genius: shakespeare’s ‘fine frenzy’ in late-eighteenth-century british art. u of delaware p, 2007. rawlinson, nick. william blake’s comic vision. palgrave macmillan, 2003. resnik, judith, and dennis curtis. representing justice: invention, controversy, and rights in city-states and democratic courtrooms. octoberworks, 2022. reynolds, joshua. “discourse viii.” the works of sir joshua reynolds, 2nd ed., vol. 1, cadell, 1798, pp. 245-88. rimbault, e. f. soho and its associations: historical, literary, and artistic. edited by george clinch, dulau and co., 1895. robbins, john. “up in the air: balloonomania and scientific performance.” eighteenth-century studies, vol. 48, no. 4, 2015, pp. 521-38. smith, john thomas. nollekens and his times. vol. 2, henry colburn, 1828. thompson, e. p. witness against the beast: william blake and the moral law. cambridge up, 1993. thornton, william. the new, complete, and universal history, description, and survey of the cities of london and westminster. alex hogg, 1784. uglow, jenny. the lunar men: the friends who made the future, 1730–​1810. faber and faber, 2002. vankeerberghen, griet. “choosing balance: weighing as a metaphor for action in early chinese texts.” early china, vol. 30, 2006, pp. 47-89. walpole, horace. a description of the villa of horace walpole … at strawberry-hill. thomas kirgate, 1774. ward, aileen. “‘sr joshua and his gang’: william blake and the royal academy.” huntington library quarterly, vol. 52, no. 1, 1989, pp. 75-95. webster, brenda s. blake’s prophetic psychology. macmillan, 1983. the west window of the chapel, new college, oxford. boydell, 1785. whiston, william. a course of mechanical, magnetical, optical, hydrostatical, and pneumatical experiments. 1713. whiteside, d. t. “the mathematical principles underlying newton’s principia mathematica.” journal for the history of astronomy, vol. 1, no. 2, 1970, pp. 116-38. review: edina adam with julian brooks, william blake: visionary; lives of william blake: henry crabb robinson, john thomas smith, alexander gilchrist, introduced by martin myrone edina adam with julian brooks, and an essay by matthew hargraves. william blake: visionary. los angeles: j. paul getty museum, 2020. lives of william blake: henry crabb robinson, john thomas smith, alexander gilchrist. introduced by martin myrone. los angeles: j. paul getty museum, 2020. reviewed by luisa calè luisa calè (l.cale@bbk.ac.uk), birkbeck, university of london, works on practices of reading, viewing, and collecting in the romantic period. her publications include fuseli’s milton gallery: “turning readers into spectators”; co-edited volumes on dante on view: the reception of dante in the visual and performing arts and illustrations, optics and objects in nineteenth-century literary and visual cultures; and special issues on “the disorder of things” (eighteenth-century studies, 2011), “the nineteenth-century digital archive” (19: interdisciplinary studies in the long nineteenth century, 2015), “literature and sculpture at the fin de siècle” (word and image, 2018), and “sibylline leaves” (studies in romanticism, 2020). her current project, entitled the book unbound, explores practices of collecting and dismantling the book, with chapters on walpole, blake, and dickens. she is the exhibitions editor for blake. a figure seen from the back kneels at an altar before the glaring, darkened form of a numinous planet. as a frontispiece this image marks the entrance to the song of los, and now it also leads us into william blake: visionary, the stunning catalogue of the getty exhibition that was due to open from 21 july to 11 october 2020, but has been postponed to fall 2023 because of the covid-19 pandemic. the back cover fulfills the allusion to the book as a prophetic space with another rückenfigur: the heroic naked form of milton, hand upraised, whether to close the catalogue or carve its way through the binding, tracing a reverse infernal route through the back. the preliminary pages guiding our first steps into the getty blake start with the three maries—​a detail from the entombment, a watercolor from the tate’s robertson bequest—​followed by the title page, superimposed on the mysterious chicken-headed figure brooding over the setting sun in jerusalem plate 78. this interleaving of pagan and christian images shapes the syncretic imaginary of blake’s visionary worlds. splendid full-page illustrations mark the partitions of this handsome book: a detail from laocoön faces the foreword, the night of enitharmon’s joy, or hecate, the acknowledgments, the star hitting william’s left foot the introduction, and plate 25 of jerusalem edina adam’s essay on “william blake’s ‘bounding outline’: on the sources of artistic originality,” while the frontispiece to jerusalem opens the door to matthew hargraves’s essay, “america’s blake.” hargraves’s argument is illustrated with some of the arresting acquisitions by american collectors, beginning with an impression of nebuchadnezzar, bought by henry adams from francis turner palgrave and now in the collection of the museum of fine arts, boston, and the virgin hushing the young john the baptist, acquired by edward william hooper. the getty exhibition results from a collaboration with tate britain, which suggests a traveling exhibition adapting the 2019–​20 blake retrospective for an american public. yet a comparison between their respective blakes reveals different local dynamics. while the tate’s blake roots the poet’s work within its london neighborhoods and communities, the getty exhibition aims to bring “the artist and his works to a wider us audience” (11). timothy potts, director of the j. paul getty museum, indicates that apart from displays at the huntington supplemented by the collection of robert n. essick, this is the first loan exhibition of blake’s works on the west coast since 1936, when a selection from lessing j. rosenwald’s collection was exhibited by alice millard at the little museum of la miniatura, her pasadena home designed by frank lloyd wright (7). the getty catalogue is dedicated to essick, the team’s “blake helpline” through “deep, dark, and often mysterious waters” (9). hargraves’s essay reconstructs “america’s blake” with a fascinating account of bostonian acquisitions, from adams in contact with richard monckton milnes and palgrave in london in the 1860s to an alternative, transcendentalist route of appreciation that dates back to the correspondence of anne gilchrist, who brought blakes on her move to concord and boston in 1878. the mediation of book dealer bernard quaritch enabled hooper, the treasurer of harvard, to acquire jerusalem copy d. in 1880 the museum of fine arts in boston exhibited blakes loaned from gilchrist, together with recent american purchases: horace scudder’s job, hooper’s the virgin hushing the young john the baptist, and adams’s nebuchadnezzar. in 1891 the museum held a second exhibition, showcasing its own recently acquired watercolors—​the first institutional blake acquisitions by an american collection—​alongside loans from some of the contributors in 1880 and other private collectors.museum of fine arts, print department, “introductory note,” exhibition of books, water colors, engravings, etc. by william blake, 7 february–​15 march 1891 (boston: museum of fine arts, 1891) iii. this bostonian context is also relevant to the trajectory of the greatest blake collector, the harvard graduate and unitarian banker william augustus white, who started collecting rare books in the 1880s, first focusing on renaissance emblem books. between 1890 and 1908 he acquired nineteen copies of blake’s illuminated books, as well as the series illustrating milton’s l’allegro and il penseroso and the 537 watercolors drawn around the pages of first and second editions of edward young’s night thoughts.robert n. essick, “collecting blake,” blake in our time: essays in honour of g. e. bentley jr, ed. karen mulhallen (toronto: university of toronto press, 2010) 19-34, on 23. at this point, hargraves’s account enters territory carefully charted by essick on the collecting of white and pierpont morgan in new york, henry huntington in california, chicago-born rosenwald in philadelphia, and yale graduate paul mellon. the tension between blake’s transnational appeal and impulses to preserve british masterpieces for the nation is captured through an evocative quotation from an article by robert ross in the burlington magazine in 1909. ross elegantly undermines impulses to preserve blake for the nation through a counterfactual comparison of his widow, catherine blake, to the goddess isis trying to recover and piece together the fragments of osiris, thereby underlining the absurdity of an impossible task that goes against the spirit of blake’s “scattered identity”: “no one would have resented more than he the attempts of any national art-collections fund to stay the tide of his prophetic books ebbing to america.”robert ross, “a recent criticism of blake,” burlington magazine for connoisseurs 16.80 (november 1909): 84-87, on 84. in other words, ross’s intervention harnesses blake to the transnational position of the art dealer in a discussion about national art policies among dealers, private collectors, and those who advocated a concerted national effort in the pages of the journal, whose editorial board included founders of the national art collections fund, established six months after the journal itself in 1903.on the national art collections fund, see helen rees leahy, “‘for connoisseurs’: the burlington magazine 1903–​11,” art history and its institutions: foundations of a discipline, ed. elizabeth mansfield (london: routledge, 2002) 231-45, on 240-45; and barbara pezzini, “the burlington magazine, the burlington gazette, and the connoisseur: the art periodical and the market for old master paintings in edwardian london,” visual resources 29.3 (2013): 154-83, on 164-66. contrast ross’s argument to the proposal to levy a sales tax on art purchases “with the view of placing our national purchasing powers on an equality with our national prestige” in order to curb the power of american and german buyers (“the national art-collections fund,” burlington magazine for connoisseurs 10.45 [december 1906]: 141). an editorial published four months before ross’s intervention supported the king’s suggestion “of a reserve fund, for the immediate purchase of indispensable works of art if they should ever come into the market,” and dismissed “any scheme of registration and restriction after the italian fashion” (“a purchase fund for works of art,” burlington magazine for connoisseurs 15.76 [july 1909]: 201-02, on 201). in 1917 ross was appointed london adviser to the felton bequest at the national gallery of victoria in melbourne. when the linnell collection came up for sale at christie’s in 1918, he partnered with the national art collections fund in the purchase of blake’s dante watercolors. arguably, this partnership prevented an american bid to buy the entire set.hargraves 32; on ross’s appointment and dealings with the national art collections fund, see irena zdanowicz, “introduction: the melbourne blakes—​their acquisition and critical fortunes in australia,” martin butlin and ted gott, william blake in the collection of the national gallery of victoria (melbourne: national gallery of victoria, 1989) 10-19, including ross’s letter to the national gallery of victoria, 30 june 1918, on 11-12. hargraves also details the nationalist impulse animating american collecting, evident in the 1939 exhibition at the philadelphia museum of art, which was curated by elizabeth mongan, the keeper of the rosenwald collection: “no loans were invited from europe, one object of the exhibition being to show what a great wealth of blake material is now in america.”henry p. mcilhenny, “note of acknowledgment,” william blake, 1757–​1827: a descriptive catalogue of an exhibition of the works of william blake selected from collections in the united states (philadelphia: philadelphia museum of art, 1939) xix, quoted in hargraves 33. this ambition was crystallized in rosenwald’s bequest to the nation, distributed between the library of congress and the national gallery of art between 1941 and 1943.the collection was housed at alverthorpe, rosenwald’s estate in jenkintown, pennsylvania, until his death in 1979. hargraves’s account also pays attention to the women who shaped ways of reading and collecting blake in america, from the transcendentalist route associated with anne gilchrist and hooper’s mother, the poet ellen sturgis, to julia atterbury thorne, whose collection was gifted to the morgan library in 1973, and the psychoanalytical interests of mary conover mellon, who introduced paul mellon to the work of carl jung. he traces the mellons’ turn to collecting to their acquaintance with jung through repeated visits to switzerland between 1938 and 1940, and shared interests with jung in blake, alchemical books, and collective archetypes, before they bought their first blake in 1941.hargraves 33; for a more extensive discussion of this point, see hargraves, “william blake and paul mellon: the life of the mind,” public domain review (7 october 2014), <https://​publicdomainreview.​org/​essay/​william-​blake-​and-​paul-​mellon-​the-​life-​of-​the-​mind>, accessed 3 may 2021. edina adam’s “william blake’s ‘bounding outline’: on the sources of artistic originality” expertly guides the reader through a formalist introduction to blake’s corpus from the standpoint of artistic traditions, techniques, and materials. the curatorial imprint shapes the partitions of the book, with three of the six sections roughly divided according to different types of production, as printmaker, painter-illustrator, and the painter-poet of the illuminated books. each is introduced with a splendid full-page illustration, captioned with a topical quotation. “the professional printmaker” is captured by the emblematic choice of a tearful, kneeling job from “the just upright man is laughed to scorn,” the plate numbered 10 of illustrations of the book of job: “engraving is the profession i was apprenticed to, & should never have attempted to live by any thing else if orders had not come in for my designs & paintings ….”letter to the reverend trusler, 23 august 1799 (e 703). this section tracks the phases of blake’s printmaking: his apprenticeship to james basire, exemplified by a plate from richard gough’s sepulchral monuments in great britain (1796); his engraving after hogarth’s the beggar’s opera for john boydell; a series of etchings and engravings from the essick collection—​blake’s engraving of michelangelo after henry fuseli for fuseli’s lectures on painting, his white-line etching of deaths door, compared to schiavonetti’s version published in 1808, the narcissa title page from young’s night thoughts, and relief-etched and wood-engraved illustrations to thornton’s the pastorals of virgil; and the huntington’s illustrations of the book of job. so far the section has traced different phases and printing techniques; the watercolor dante illustrations at the end seem out of place. it might have made more sense to have arranged the watercolor and the engraving of the pit of disease: the falsifiers on a page spread for ease of comparison, and to have placed the others in a section specifically devoted to watercolor, documenting illuminating remarks on the medium in adam’s essay. a reproduction of the tate’s impression of the color print nebuchadnezzar, above a quotation from another letter to trusler, earlier in august 1799—​“i find more & more that my style of designing is a species by itself”—​marks the beginning of the section on “the painter-illustrator.” julian brooks rightly comments that “sometimes his [blake’s] illustrations seem akin to adaptive theatrical performances of texts, or personal commentaries; often they are deeply spiritual meditations, intrigued explorations, or free associations” (67). at the tate retrospective, this point was beautifully borne out by the wall dedicated to the biblical watercolors that blake painted for thomas butts. this section of the book encompasses a broad range of biblical, shakespearean, and miltonic subjects in different media: watercolor, tempera, and the large color prints, but also blake’s watercolor illustrations to his late illuminated manuscript of genesis and a partly hand-colored impression of the etching/​engraving of “chaucers canterbury pilgrims.” the selection gives much to think through, though the logic of the sequence is hard to discern, since the plates are not arranged in chronological sequence, nor thematically. a magnified detail of “the tyger,” including the last two stanzas and the tail vignette, sets the terms of “the painter-poet,” along with words from blake’s address to the public: “if a method of printing which combines the painter and the poet is a phenomenon worthy of public attention, provided that it exceeds in elegance all former methods, the author is sure of his reward” (e 692). after a helpful and clear account of the relief-etching method, this section is divided between songs—​title page, “laughing song,” “the sick rose,” “the fly” (huntington), “the tyger” (yale center for british art), and “the shepherd” (essick collection)—​and impressions from the tate of the so-called small book of designs copy b, a selection of plates reprinted from the illuminated books without the accompanying text. while blake repurposed these plates with emblematic lines penned in as captions, the catalogue entries follow the tate’s practice of referencing the illuminated books the designs were first composed for, obliterating their new identities as separate works in their own right. the section devoted to “blake’s contemporaries” is introduced by a detail from john flaxman’s ink, watercolor, and graphite drawing alcestis and admetus, captioned with words that blake directed to flaxman: “it is to you i owe all my present happiness it is to you i owe perhaps the principal happiness of my life” (e 707). this arresting emblem invites the reader to make myriad connections. the “friend & companion from eternity” (e 710) certainly was a key figure for blake from the time of his first steps out of his apprenticeship with basire, providing friends, patrons, and commissions. the introductory text could have fleshed out how important flaxman and his network were for blake, from the mathews, who helped publish poetical sketches, to george romney and william hayley, who was the prompt for blake’s only experience outside london. identifying specific connections between blake and fuseli would also have been helpful in situating blake’s work in relation to other artists. granted, this is hard to accomplish in the one-page format of the introductions to the sections, with so much to cover here, from the classicizing idiom of late eighteenth-century cosmopolitan art (represented in the plates by benjamin west, james barry, fuseli, and flaxman), to the royal academy, romney (whose context is unexplained), and james gillray, who exemplifies satirical ways of seeing “outside the art establishment,” which again raises more questions than it can answer. “see visions, dream dreams, & prophecy & speak parables unobserv’d & at liberty from the doubts of other mortals” (e 728): blake’s words to his patron butts, inscribed below an enlarged detail showing orc emerging from the flames, his arms thrust outwards, measuring the space of the page, prepare the reader for “the visionary.” this section reproduces yale’s copy of america in its entirety, as well as the frontispieces of europe a prophecy, visions of the daughters of albion, and the song of los, followed by a portrait by john linnell of john varley as a way into the visionary heads series—​merlin and queen eleanor from the collections of essick and the huntington, joined by the tate’s the head of the ghost of a flea and the famous tempera. heroic forms wielding hammer and compasses from the last plate of jerusalem inaugurate the final section, “the mythmaker,” captioned with los’s words “i must create a system, or be enslav’d by another mans / i will not reason & compare: my business is to create” (jerusalem 10.20-21, e 153). blake’s watercolor landscape near felpham (c. 1800), loaned from the tate, signals his sussex period, though instead of introducing his relationship with hayley and the role of hayley’s milton scholarship in blake’s prophetic poetry, it is oddly placed between plates from the huntington’s milton and yale’s jerusalem. “joseph of arimathea among the rocks of albion” (c. 1820) and laocoön (1826–​27) conclude the volume. there is no discussion of “joseph of arimathea” and its reworking. both the tate and the getty chose to exhibit the second state, from impressions from the fitzwilliam and essick respectively. this seminal work might have been discussed in “the professional printmaker”; alternatively, it might have been explored in the introduction here, either as part of blake’s christian myth of britain in relation to “jerusalem” from the preface to milton or in connection with blake’s mythical genealogy of gothic art, given that his inscription presents joseph as “one of the gothic artists who built the cathedrals.” laocoön is also rearticulated through time: the graphite copy of the sculpture that blake produced for the engraving illustrating flaxman’s entry on sculpture in rees’s cyclopædia is in the exhibition checklist, but neither reproduced nor discussed in the catalogue, a missed opportunity to think of reproductive engraving as a mythmaking process of invention. articulating these connections in the introductory text would have clarified why these two works are such an effective ending to the volume. the choice of two works from the essick collection is another means by which the visual apparatus honors the volume’s dedicatee. the book comes full circle, then, celebrating the blake collections in california through visionary specimens from the huntington on the book covers, replicated by the disposition of plates inside, where laocoön marks the end by going back to the beginning, since a detail from it acts as a full-page illustration facing the foreword. this is bibliographic design at its best. in view of the exhibition, getty publications accompanied the catalogue with a small volume, lives of william blake, which “offers an intimate portrait of the passions, pursuits, and mind of the enigmatic artist william blake.”back cover blurb. this handsome book, originally published by pallas athene in london in 2019, is introduced by martin myrone, who curated the 2019–​20 tate exhibition with amy concannon. in his introduction he points out that the image of “the cockney visionary, wild-eyed soho eccentric” is “a modern fabrication, crafted to match our complacent myths of creative self-fulfillment and social mobility” (24). the “anachronistic possibility” of artists looking back to “the old world of the medieval workshop and early renaissance print studio” (16) is set against the contemporary field of art defined by academies, galleries, and dealers. building on the scholarship of g. e. bentley, jr., about blake in the marketplace, myrone’s historicizing approach to blake’s life as an artist draws on benjamin malkin’s account of his apprenticeship and royal academy training. the selection reprinted in the volume documents the image of the artist emerging from early accounts. henry crabb robinson’s “william blake, künstler, dichter und religiöser schwärmer” (“artist, poet, and religious mystic”), published in german in the second volume of vaterländisches museum in 1811 and here reproduced from a revised translation originally published in 1914, demonstrates how blake was introduced to german readers. crabb robinson’s “reminiscences” supplement that account with personal recollections of “the wild and strange rhapsodies uttered by this insane man of genius,” afflicted by “monomania,” fueled by the “theosophic dreams” (29) of the religious mystic. j. t. smith’s “biographical sketch of blake,” first published in nollekens and his times (1828), shows blake laboring against the “stigma of eccentricity” (121) and follows him through his professional development, “manly firmness of opinion” (124), and “frugal” attitude to money (132). blake’s artistic networks are detailed through specimens of letters that smith obtained as a collector of autographs, including blake’s address to flaxman as “dear sculptor of eternity” (137). smith’s sketch shows a fellow engraver’s sense of the difficult juggling of commissions and the need for patronage, detailing blake’s falling out with thomas stothard over the canterbury pilgrims and suggesting how hard it was for someone whose “effusions were not generally felt” by the “uninitiated eye” to find work (141-46, 149). smith adds descriptions by the antiquarian richard thomson of blake’s works in the collection of ozias humphry’s son, william upcott. their coming together documents the circulation of blake’s works in the 1820s among engravers, antiquarians, and autograph collectors, who straddled private networks and emerging cultural institutions: smith was keeper of prints and drawings at the british museum, upcott sub-librarian of the london institution, and thomson a longtime user of the london institution before he became one of its joint librarians in 1834. going against the early biographic evidence of blake’s networks, alexander gilchrist’s “preliminary” to life of william blake, “pictor ignotus” (1863) crystallizes the victorian view of the unpublished, unknown, “solitary, self-taught, and as an artist, semi-taught dreamer, ‘delivering the burning messages of prophecy by the stammering lips of infancy,’ as mr. ruskin has said of cimabue and giotto” (181). such is the poet’s “semi-utterance snatched from the depths of the vague and unspeakable” (187). blake’s lives are complemented by a stunning selection of color reproductions detailing his work—​at the start his prophetic portrait, urizen holding the open book of prophecy, and the entrance to dante’s hell; at the end the bearded figure leaning on his staff and leaving the picture through a door in the bark of a tree, from america. the postponement of the exhibition separates the books from the displays, but in the absence of the accompanying experience of the originals, both catalogue and lives eloquently activate the reader’s imagination, raising the hope that this splendid selection of works will be offered at a safer time in the future. review: brian russell graham, speech acts in blake’s milton brian russell graham. speech acts in blake’s “milton.” new york: routledge, 2023. 128 pp. $61.99/​£45.99, hardcover; $26.99/​£19.99, paperback; also available as an e-book. reviewed by annise rogers annise rogers (arogers@lincoln.ac.uk) is an ecr whose doctoral thesis explored vala, or the four zoas in connection to biblical poetic forms, as well as reexamining the role of urizen. her most recent research pursuit examined the links between the visual art of william blake and j. r. r. tolkien. brian russell graham expertly examines milton a poem through a close reading that engages with performative speech act theory, using it to demonstrate the importance of the characters’ spoken lines and also to explain how the lack of any direct speech can help to bring about, or forestall, the impending apocalypse. it is this apocalypse that graham makes the center of his argument, rather than, as one might expect, the overall value of the speech acts themselves. by structuring his theoretical approach around the observation that “everything that happens in blake’s prophetic books either results in progress towards apocalypse or serves to frustrate that process” (1), he is able to create a clear boundary, one that he sticks to throughout. building on the work of susan fox (poetic form in blake’s “milton” ) and angela esterhammer (creating states: studies in the performative language of john milton and william blake), he devotes a separate section in his introduction to each, detailing what his argument shares with, and how it differs from, their criticism. for any reader unfamiliar with blakean scholarship on the performative, this is informative and easily comprehensible. by contrast, it is almost shocking that there is no section on j. l. austin, whose work is not only the cornerstone of performative speech theory, but whose terms and ideas are used throughout the book. indeed, while it might be understandable for austin not to appear in the bibliography, for he is never directly quoted from, his value to graham’s argument cannot be overstated. the endnote explaining austin’s vocabulary and theory is exceptional (16n3), but i did feel that it should have been included in the main body of the text. the advice on “how to use this book” at the end of the introduction (15) is refreshingly honest in suggesting that “blake scholars may happily ignore” the contextual sections of the chapters, which give an overview of what is happening at that point in the poem. i, however, urge all blake scholars to read those parts, for they also elucidate graham’s formulation of the close readings that follow. in fact, the contextual sections are as much a part of his overall argument as the close readings, helping the reader to explore how the speech(es) discussed relate to the three areas or “subcategories of speech act in milton” (5): agonistic speech, non-combative speech, and the soliloquy. that “everything is achieved through speech” (7) is perhaps the best way to express graham’s use of these categories to demonstrate that blake’s prophetic books are about producing, or trying to stop, the apocalypse. in the first two chapters he examines the role of the bard’s song, exploring multiple close readings that engage with ideas regarding “speech acts integral to the story of los and his sons” (19). chapter 1 looks at what happens before milton’s introduction to those characters, covering the fall and the creation of time and space—​all of which, as graham reveals, come about through performative speech acts. chapter 2 expands on this and has milton’s response. graham’s examination in the first chapter of the three-way relationship between los, satan, and palamabron is perhaps the most extensive, as it deals with all three of the subcategories, explaining how a speech act can be just as important even when “it does not have the perlocutionary effect … wanted” (25). furthermore, chapter 1 discusses many speeches for which blake gives the aftermath alone, with the words often “only alluded to” (27); the reported speeches are treated as being as important as those that are spoken, with the causes and effects of the non-spoken words seen as crucial to this interpretation of the poem. graham does not give a poststructuralist reading and instead focuses on the “perlocutionary” outcome of the missing words, rather than the words themselves. in this way it is obvious that he is exceptionally knowledgeable in speech act theory, because he does not feel the need to defend his position, and also that he is confident that his argument stands together without a detour into explanation. the third and fourth chapters follow the chronology of milton. each character that milton engages with—​whether helping or hindering him—​is examined in terms of the outcome of that encounter and what it means in the context of graham’s overarching argument about the apocalypse. his discussion of rahab and tirzah, following one about orc and the shadowy female, identifies that milton is being given an “invitation” (64) to join them; graham follows northrop frye’s idea that “natural religion is symbolically female” (61), and thus “the two think they have a fighting chance of tempting milton … because his puritanism was marked by a strong admixture of natural religion” (62). this is a good assessment of such a speech act, and yet, like many others in the book, it relies almost entirely on frye’s analysis of the poem’s plot and meaning, with much less space given to any other critic. in chapter 5 graham breaks away from the chronology of the poem and instead focuses on ololon. in this way he is able to examine the character as a whole and help the reader to recognize that her descent into ulro is caused by her own soliloquy, in what he calls “the perlocutionary effect of the speech” (92). however, what makes the chapter so interesting is that although ololon remains the central figure, graham explores how more than this one event is “rendered an effect of ololon’s words” (94). when combined with his analysis of ololon’s interaction with the polypus and her later “non-combative statement” to blake (the character in the poem), this illustrates the strength of his ideas about performative speech acts and demonstrates why this book was so needed. further depth is added in chapter 6, when the character of “milton secures the instant before apocalypse” (106), which was graham’s argument from the very first page. that ultimately the poem’s “finale is non-verbal” (116) allows him to move away from speeches and instead look at the words of milton as a whole, and in “coda: milton as speech act,” we are given a sweeping overview of the power of words, and also where and why the reader fits into blake’s use of performative language. some readers might be surprised that most of the critics discussed are not those who would be considered contemporary, and it would be easy to disregard this book as the work of someone who is not up to date, as it were. to do so would be a great disservice to both the writer and his argument. graham himself acknowledges the point, explaining that “three of the four monographs about blake’s milton … were written in the seventies, and they are fine works of literary criticism” (8). added to this is what he calls “substantial use of ” frye, making the book to some degree a strange read. it has the structure of those earlier works, with its dense close reading and engagement with the scholars, and yet it is also refreshingly modern, with a clear and easy to understand literary style. graham’s vocabulary is perfectly chosen; each word is the precise and correct choice, and he does not overwhelm with overly complicated words for no reason, although the reader may wish to consult a dictionary for the linguistic terms. do not think because this is a short book that it is an easy read. graham presents a dense and invigorative argument that needs to be followed both carefully and slowly. readers who are interested in either milton or performative speech acts will find it a perfect example of how to do a very thorough analysis of blake’s poem, whether or not they fully agree with everything that graham argues. b l a k e volume 57 number 3 winter 2023–24 angela esterhammer, victoria college, university of toronto nelson hilton, university of georgia tilar j. mazzeo, colby college robert w. rix, university of copenhagen joseph viscomi, university of north carolina at chapel hill david worrall, the nottingham trent university martin butlin, tate gallery, london, retired tristanne j. connolly, university of waterloo detlef w. dörrbecker, university of trier sibylle erle, university of lincoln robert n. essick, university of california, riverside a d v i s o r y b o a r d a n i l l u s t r a t e d q u a r t e r l y volume 57 number 3 winter 2023–24 c o n t e n t s www.blakequarterly.org © 2024 copyright morris eaves and morton d. paley cover: blake, “when the morning stars sang together.” collection of robert n. essick; image courtesy of the william blake archive. philipp otto runge, “night” (“die nacht”). metropolitan museum of art. janet lee kadesky ruttenberg fund, 2007. 2007.131. e d i t o r s editors: morris eaves and morton d. paley book review editor: sibylle erle exhibitions editor: luisa calè bibliographer (criticism): wayne c. ripley bibliographer (music): jason whittaker managing editor: sarah jones sarah.jones@rochester.edu production office: department of english, university of rochester, rochester ny 14627-0451 news book review editor by morris eaves and morton d. paley article blake’s hervey, thomas butts, and methodism by dennis m. read interview william blake’s universe: an interview with david bindman and esther chadwick by luisa calè discussion a copy of richard bentley’s edition of paradise lost in william hayley’s library c. 1802 by mark crosby posthumous blake: the roles of catherine blake, c. h. tatham, and frederick tatham in blake’s afterlife posthumous blake: the roles of catherine blake, c. h. tatham, and frederick tatham in blake’s afterlife by joseph viscomi joseph viscomi is the james g. kenan distinguished professor of english literature at the university of north carolina at chapel hill. he is the author of blake and the idea of the book and co-editor, with robert essick and morris eaves, of the william blake archive. his current project, “printed paintings,” examines the techniques, histories, and meanings of blake’s large monoprints. 1. blake, posthumously printed 2. 1827–28: catherine blake resides in john linnell’s studio and prints blake’s etchings and engravings 3. 1828: catherine blake leaves linnell’s studio under the auspices of frederick tatham 4. 1828–29: catherine blake resides in mayfair at the office and studio of c. h. tatham 5. 1829: catherine blake prints copies of america and europe in mayfair after moving to her apartment 6. 1831–32: frederick tatham prints illuminated books in the mayfair studio 7. 1831–32: posthumous songs reexamined 8. 1832: posthumous printing stops 9. 1832: financial troubles at 34 alpha road, 1 queen street, and 20 lisson grove north 10. 1833: c. h. tatham’s auction and sale and letters to sir john soane 11. 1829–31 revisited: catherine blake’s apartment and her role in posthumous productions 12. 1788–1827 revisited and prices for works in 1827–31 13. summary of argument 1. blake, posthumously printed my wife is like a flame of many colours of precious jewels …. (blake, letter to william hayley, 16 september 1800; erdman [hereafter e] 709) his widow, an estimable woman, saw blake frequently after his decease: he used to come and sit with her two or three hours every day. these hallowed visitations were her only comforts. … he advised with her as to the best mode of selling his engravings. (anon., “bits of biography,” monthly magazine [march 1833]: 245) the following essay,i am pleased to dedicate this essay to my friend g. e. bentley, jr., the better bibliographer whose many works on blake made this one—​and so many others—​possible. i am grateful to bob essick for reading numerous versions of each section over the past six years, for his patience, suggestions, and insights. i am also grateful to elizabeth shand for copyediting, grant glass for securing images for reproduction, and, especially, to sarah jones for her many queries and corrections. what errors remain are mine alone. though long, detailed, and comprising thirteen parts, focuses on just seven basic questions: which of blake’s illuminated works were produced after his death? who produced them? where and when were they produced? how were they sold? why do so many posthumous copies of songs of innocence and of experience seem incomplete? why did posthumous production stop? answering these questions requires examining closely and thoroughly the bibliographical evidence provided by posthumous prints as well as new biographical facts about catherine blake, charles heathcote tatham, and his son frederick tatham. it also requires tracing the probable location and movement between 1827 and 1832 of the rolling press used to print blake’s plates. frederick tatham cared for the widowed catherine and came to possess all of blake’s effects after she died in october 1831. he did not inherit blake’s works in a legal sense; no will written by catherine giving the works to him is extant. he claimed in his “life of blake” manuscript that she had “bequeathed” to him the copperplates “as well as all of [blake’s] works that remained unsold at [her] death being writings, paintings” (bentley, blake records, 2nd ed. [hereafter br(2)] 688).john linnell, blake’s last patron (1818–27), contested tatham’s claims and believed blake’s effects should have gone to blake’s sister, catherine. for an overview of mrs. blake’s death and what transpired immediately afterwards, see br(2) 545-47, 551-56. the exact size of tatham’s bounty is unknown, but it must have been substantial, given blake’s claim to have “written more than voltaire or rousseau—​six or seven epic poems as long as homer and 20 tragedies as long as macbeth” (br[2] 496). in addition to blake’s manuscripts, catherine appears to have inherited over 350 drawings and sketches and at least eighteen copies of poetical sketches and descriptive catalogue (bentley, desolate market 65-66, 81). because, as will be demonstrated, she sold relatively few items, “tatham came into possession of so large a stock of designs and engraved books, that he has, by his own confession, been selling them ‘for thirty years’ and at ‘good prices’” (anne gilchrist; see h. h. gilchrist 130). mrs. gilchrist was grossly mistaken, however, if she thought that tatham had been selling blake’s illuminated books, as though blake’s stock of them was so large that it took thirty years to deplete.anne gilchrist’s idea that tatham had inherited numerous illuminated books may have come from allan cunningham, who stated in 1830 that blake still had “many copies” at the end of his life (br[2] 654). from the known provenances of blake’s illuminated books and the patterns of production of his late copies from c. 1818 to 1827 and of the copies printed posthumously from c. 1827 through 1832, we can safely infer that blake left very few complete copies. catherine inherited visions of the daughters of albion copy n, songs of innocence and of experience copy w, the small book of designs copy b, the highly finished jerusalem copy e, over fifty loose impressions of there is no natural religion, a copy of all religions are one, loose impressions of the ghost of abel and on homers poetry, three copies of for the sexes: the gates of paradise and many loose impressions, and at least one copy of for children: the gates of paradise.plate numbers and copy designations for blake’s illuminated books follow bentley’s blake books. she would have necessarily inherited the nearly 100 miscellaneous proofs and discarded impressions of illuminated plates from 1789 to 1827 that tatham sold in volumes of blakeana (see section 10). blake appears to have left no copies of the book of thel, the marriage of heaven and hell, america a prophecy, europe a prophecy, the book of urizen, the book of ahania, the book of los, the song of los, or milton a poem. surely linnell was not exaggerating when he told george cumberland on 18 march 1833 that not even blake had copies of all the titles (br[2] 554). catherine sold blake’s last copies of visions and songs in 1829 and 1830 respectively, leaving tatham with many loose prints but very few illuminated books. indeed, tatham’s stock of “engraved books” consisted almost exclusively of posthumously printed impressions, which, in terms of the number of individual images or leaves, came to compose the bulk of his “inheritance.” as we will see, america, europe, and jerusalem were each printed posthumously three times; for the sexes was printed to produce enough impressions for four copies; and songs was printed at least ten times—​possibly eleven—​in three printing sessions. these works account for around 1150 extant posthumous relief etchings, etchings, and engravings. the presence of intaglio impressions and of blemishes in the shallows of relief-etched impressions demonstrates the use of a rolling press—​presumably blake’s. the sheer number of impressions represents much time and labor and raises critical questions: who printed them and why? when and where? because most posthumously printed copies of illuminated books contain leaves watermarked 1831 or 1832, or both, tatham, who took possession of the copperplates in the fall of 1831, appears responsible for printing most of them. but because catherine was still alive during much of 1831, g. e. bentley, jr., suspects that she and tatham collaborated on printing the “copperplates of america, europe, jerusalem, and the songs” (stranger 442). angus whitehead agrees, suspecting that she “may have printed plates of america …, of jerusalem copies h, i, j …, and of songs of innocence and of experience copies a, b, c, d, f, g1, g2, i, j, k, l, [and] o” (“last years” 79n35). his research into catherine’s last residences has led him to suggest that, in the two-room apartment in which she resided for the last two years of her life, she “continued her husband’s trade, printing, coloring, and selling works up until her death” (89). in another essay, whitehead and mark crosby portray her as an independent artisan who continued the “firm” of “wm blake” (crosby and whitehead 106). identifying which works are posthumous and who printed them affects our understanding of blake, catherine blake, and frederick tatham. did the widow blake print and color illuminated plates up until her death? if so, was she, as this would imply, the primary posthumous printer? or did she collaborate with tatham in producing posthumous works? or did tatham produce the majority of posthumous prints after catherine died? 2. 1827–28: catherine blake resides in john linnell’s studio and prints blake’s etchings and engravings blake died on 12 august 1827 and was buried five days later. on 18 august, linnell contacted james lahee, the printer of the job engravings, about blake’s rolling press. according to bentley, linnell asked lahee “if he wanted to buy blake’s press” (br[2] 467). he presumably intended to raise money for catherine blake. according to whitehead, however, linnell sought to trade the press for a smaller one (“last years” 77). lahee’s letter to linnell supports the idea of a trade: sir in answer to your note as to mrs blakes press i beg to say that i am not in want of a very large press at this moment, but if it happens not to be larger than grand eagle, and it is a good one in other respects i have one idle which would answer mrs b’s purpose, and which i would exchange with her for but the fact is that wooden presses are quite gone by now & it would not answer me to give much if any cash; notwithstanding the circumstances you mention would prevent my attempting to drive a hard bargain …. (br[2] 467) the phrases “would answer mrs b’s purpose” and “i would exchange with her” do suggest that catherine “appeared intent on continuing to print from a rolling press, presumably in an effort to market her husband’s works and support herself” (whitehead 77). george cumberland, jr., thinking that was her intention, wrote his father c. 16 january 1828 that mrs. blake “intends to prin[t] with her own hands [her late husband’s works] and trust to their sal[e] for a livelihood” (br[2] 482). before we can ascertain how much of her intent she realized in practice and how realistic it was, we need to locate where she set up her printing press. lahee informed linnell that “wooden presses are quite gone by now.” after sending an assistant to evaluate blake’s press, he declined linnell’s offer. on 30 august 1827, linnell moved the old press, not a trade-in, from the blakes’ residence at 3 fountain court, the strand, to his studio at 6 cirencester place, fitzroy square (br[2] 468). catherine followed two weeks later, on 11 september (br[2] 471), presumably with her belongings and all of blake’s books, manuscripts, copperplates, large color prints and their matrices, portfolios of sketches and drawings, temperas and watercolors, frames, canvases, and stretchers, the large painting blake was working on at the end of his life, and printing and painting supplies, materials, and tools. the move no doubt involved “a great deal of luggage,” as blake termed their worldly possessions when, in 1800, they moved from lambeth to a cottage in felpham to be near his then-patron william hayley. but this time, given that blake had sold his print collection to colnaghi in 1821, catherine’s move—​in addition to the rolling press—​probably involved fewer than the “sixteen heavy boxes & portfolios full of prints” that she and blake took to felpham (e 710, br[2] 99). at linnell’s studio, she was to be granted a nominal income as housekeeper (br[2] 538-39). these arrangements were, according to alexander gilchrist, “in part fulfilment of the old friendly scheme” (1: 365).the historical record regarding catherine’s finances at the time of blake’s death is confusing. she appears to have needed to borrow £5 from linnell to help with the burial costs, though having just received from william young ottley through linnell £5.5s. for jerusalem copy f (viscomi, blake and the idea of the book [hereafter bib] 357). she is reputed to have received a gift of £100 from the king’s sister princess sophia, which she returned, claiming others were more in need than she. yet in mid-august 1827, encouraged by john constable, linnell had taken up her cause with the royal academy, which proved unsuccessful (br[2] 460-63). returning princess sophia’s gift seems unlikely if it had actually been given—​or an extraordinary and inexplicable rejection. the source of the story about the princess was seymour kirkup, who was in italy at the time; that linnell does not mention the gift makes its existence doubtful. catherine did withdraw an application for assistance from the artists’ general benevolent institution in early 1830, but appears to have done so because by then she felt financially secure (see section 5). linnell had been actively trying to help william and catherine blake financially since june 1818, when he hired blake to assist him in engraving the portrait of james upton, pastor of the baptist church, church street. in addition to being a portrait and landscape painter (preferring the latter but needing the former to support his growing family), linnell was an accomplished, albeit self-taught, graphic artist. he exhibited regularly at the royal academy’s annual exhibitions and was recorded in its catalogues as “painter and engraver” (graves, royal academy 5: 64). by the time he met blake in 1818, he had already etched or engraved twenty-one portraits and landscapes after his own designs.linnell’s first engraving, in 1813, was after his portrait of john martin, pastor of the baptist church, keppel street, bloomsbury, which he had joined in 1812. this is where he met charles heathcote tatham, father of frederick (story 1: 73). the engraving of martin, according to alfred story, sold “upwards of seven hundred copies” (1: 71). linnell collected old master prints and had examples of dürer, holbein, raimondi, and bonasone. blake’s examining “ancient” engravings with linnell eventually led to his adopting some of linnell’s burnishing techniques (see essick, printmaker 223) and to the pure engravings of the job illustrations (see viscomi, blake and his followers 10-11). linnell was thirty-five years younger than blake and not in a position to provide charity, but apparently he quickly realized blake’s precarious financial situation and soon took on the role of agent and, eventually, patron. over the next several years, he found blake customers for his illuminated books and designs, bought copies of the illuminated books (including songs, marriage, america, and europe) and designs (including those for milton’s paradise regained), and commissioned works (including designs from paradise lost, a second copy of the job watercolors and the engravings after them, and 102 dante watercolor illustrations and seven engravings after them). by 1826, he was concerned for blake’s physical wellbeing. that summer, linnell had begun urging the blakes to move closer to him, first near his cottage in hampstead and then, when that failed, to cirencester place (a. gilchrist 1: 350-55). on 7 february 1827, he wrote in his journal, “to mr blake. to speak to him @ living at c. p” (br[2] 455), which was at fitzroy square, the neighborhood of blake’s brother james and former patron thomas butts.butts lived at 17 grafton street, fitzroy square, between 1808 and 1845 (viscomi, “green house” 10-11). as bentley notes, “the reference does not make clear whether the blakes were to move into linnell’s studio, into independent lodgings, or into the building where blake’s brother james lived” (br[2] 455n). exactly where probably did not matter to blake, because moving required changes and that alone elicited terror and terrible anxiety. he wrote to linnell a few days later, “i have thought & thought of the removal. & cannot get my mind out of a state of terrible fear at such a step. the more i think the more i feel terror at what i wishd at first & thought it a thing of benefit & good hope” (e 782). instead, the blakes spent blake’s last year in their two-room apartment at fountain court, where they had lived since 1821. the cirencester place residence appears to have been used as linnell’s studio. catherine’s housekeeping would have been less demanding here than at the family’s hampstead residence, where linnell and his wife were raising five children between the ages of one and nine—​a brood that would eventually become nine by 1835.william, james, john, elizabeth, and hannah, ages one, four, six, seven, and nine (crouan xxii-xxiii). whitehead also notes that there is no evidence that catherine took care of linnell’s children (“last years” 77n15). a working rolling press in the studio would certainly have been to linnell’s advantage—​as would a tenant who was a skilled printer. catherine knew how to print both intaglio plates, like blake’s etchings and engravings, and relief-etched plates, like those making up illuminated books. according to blake, in 1803 she had “undertaken to print the whole number of the plates” for hayley’s the life, and posthumous writings, of william cowper, which she did “to admiration & being under my own eye the prints are as fine as the french prints & please every one” (e 726-27). the print-run for the first edition was 500 copies, indicating that catherine pulled 2000 impressions of four engravings, which earned her “twenty guineas” (e 727)—2.5 pence per impression.hayley recognized the labor involved, noting that blake “and his good industrious wife together take all the impressions from the various engravings in their own domestic press” (br[2] 151). that, however, is not quite accurate. blake executed six plates in hayley’s three-volume cowper and designed one of them, the second plate in volume 2. catherine printed the four plates in volumes 1 and 2 of the first edition. according to crosby and whitehead, she may have printed the second edition as well. the “plates in the first edition are poorly inked and wiped compared with the second edition,” which they read as “suggesting that catherine improved her techniques with practice” (99) rather than as the work of another printer, which, as robert n. essick notes, “may indeed be the case” (commercial book illustrations 86). crosby and whitehead also suggest that catherine may have printed other commercial engravings after 1800 (99). printing intaglio plates well took skill and experience in both inking the plate and wiping the ink from the plate, first with muslin rags and then with the palm of the hand covered with whiting. printing intaglio plates without an assistant, as catherine appears to have done, is especially daunting, because in addition to inking plates, the printer has to cut sheets into leaves and dampen them for printing, to deliver leaves to plates using paper or metal tongs to keep from touching the leaves with inky fingers, to register leaves to plates correctly, to pull plates through the press with the right pressure, and to arrange impressions to dry without offsetting one onto another. blake told hayley that catherine printed the relief-etched broadside little tom the sailor, “a few in colours and some in black which i hope will be no less favour’d tho’ they are rough like rough sailors. we mean to begin printing again to-morrow” (26 november 1800, e 714). even with an assistant, this was no easy task, because the work comprised four plates: headand tailpieces etched in white line, long text plate etched in relief, and a narrow, wide colophon (3.5 x 12 cm.) etched in relief. these needed to be inked, aligned on the press bed, and printed on a sheet of paper to reconstruct the composition.because illuminated plates were not uniform in size, a uniform bottom sheet for the series marking the alignment of plate to paper could not be used. consequently, paper had to be registered to the plate by eye to create proper and pleasing margins. the quality of plate registration in the early copies of illuminated books is uneven, with plates tilted left and right, off center, or falling or rising on the page with too much top or bottom margin (the blakes apparently gave themselves a very wide margin of error). these visual effects are obscured when the leaves are presented in mats or cropped to the image. they are also obscured in reproductions, even in the blake archive, because designs are cropped for economic and aesthetic reasons: showing entire leaves requires more paper or creates larger files and reduces the size of the printed image (see viscomi, “digital facsimiles”). while catherine was staying in linnell’s studio, linnell was probably still etching—​or proofing—​eight heads for john varley’s treatise on zodiacal physiognomy and/or six facsimile copies of old line engravings after figures in the sistine chapel, both published in 1828. she may have helped linnell proof or print some of his plates, and/or he may have helped her print some of blake’s intaglio plates, including impressions of the dante engravings and “canterbury pilgrims” that he recorded in his general accounting book for 5 september 1827 (br[2] 790).the 5 september entry is after the press arrived but before catherine was in residence. the impressions may have been printed to test the set-up of the press. seven entries in linnell’s general accounting book between september 1827 and march 1828 are “to mrs blake.” these range from £1 to £5, which could account for her assisting him at the press (br[2] 791). the latter impressions may have included the three she sold on 8 january 1828 to henry crabb robinson and barron field (br[2] 480, 705-06). with her press (and linnell’s studio) set up for intaglio printing, catherine seems likely to have also printed copies of for the sexes: the gates of paradise, blake’s emblem book comprising twenty-one small etchings. blake had first executed the work in 1793 as for children: the gates of paradise, which he advertised in his prospectus of 1793 as “a small book of engravings” (e 693). for children has eighteen plates in two states; five copies are extant (a-e; bentley, blake books [hereafter bb] 186). around 1818, blake brought all but plate 11 to a third state and added three text plates (19, 20, and 21), transforming the work into for the sexes. he appears to have printed for the sexes copies a and b together, on paper approximately 16 x 11 cm., watermarked j whatman / 1818, possibly a ninth of a foolscap sheet (42.5 x 34.5 cm.).copy a is untraced, but its recorded leaf size matches the leaf size of copy b (bb 194), three of whose leaves are watermarked j whatman / 1818. linnell acquired both copies, probably directly from blake, though when and how are not known.linnell’s general accounting book for the period has an entry “for prints” on 10 december 1820, for £1 (br[2] 780), which has no accompanying receipt and may account for the sale. blake apparently put for the sexes away until at least 1825, the date of the j whatman paper in copies c and d—​whose plates 1-10 and 13-18 are in their fourth states, with plates 11, 19, and 21 in their second states, plate 12 in its third state, and plate 20 in its first state. the 22.8 x 14.3 cm. leaves are most likely quarter sheets of printing demy (56 x 45.6 cm.). he returned to the plates one more time, bringing all of them to a new state. copy e appears to have been the first copy printed with the plates in their final states, presumably c. 1826–27.plate 12 is in four states; plates 11, 19, and 21 are in three states; plate 20 is in two states; the rest are in five states. for a detailed description of all five states of plate 7 (“fire”), see essick, “marketplace, 2016,” illus. 2. the unmarked leaves are 26.2 x 18.8 cm., possibly quarters of crown sheets (approximately 51 x 38 cm.). bentley suspects that copies f, g, h, i, j/n, k, and l were all printed posthumously by either catherine or tatham because they are incomplete, larger than copies a-e, and many of them “can be traced to tatham” (bb 196-97).recently rediscovered copy n (blake books supplement [hereafter bbs] 79) clearly completes copy j, hereafter referred to as copy j/n. materially, though, these seven copies form two different groups. the seventy-one impressions forming copies f, g, h, and i were printed on leaves approximately 34 x 24 cm.—​apparently quarters of super royal paper (68 x 48 cm.)—​watermarked j whatman / 1826. copies g and i are missing plate 19 (“the keys of the gates”) and copy f is missing plates 19 and 20. copy h is missing plate 19 and eight other plates, which, on one hand, suggests that the twelve impressions in what we call copy h may be duplicate impressions from the printing session responsible for the three near-complete copies. on the other hand, the leaves of copy h were stabbed, as were those forming copies f, i, j/n, and d, which suggests that copy h was once complete. if so, then its printing session produced around eighty impressions, four per plate minus plate 19, enough to form copies f, g, h, and i, with copy h now missing eight other plates. the impressions making up copies j/n, k, and l appear also to have been printed per plate, not per copy. the plates were printed cleanly on unmarked leaves approximately 37 x 26 cm., quarters of imperial sheets (74 x 54 cm.). the two groups’ different sizes and types of paper strongly suggest different printing sessions; the absence of plate 19 in copies f, g, h, and i and its presence in copies j/n, k, and l suggest two different printers.copy l’s plates 2, 19, and 20 were added to for children copy d by tatham. at first glance, catherine appears responsible for copies f, g, h, and i and tatham for copies j/n, k, and l. but this division is highly unlikely because of what the two groups share. as noted, copies f, h, and i from the first group and copy j/n from the second group were stabbed. this mode of binding was used for illuminated books and possibly undertaken by catherine; it was certainly known to her as blake’s assistant in the printing and compiling of illuminated books (bib 102-05). stabbing signals her hand in the production of copies f, g, h, and i and excludes tatham’s from them and from copies j/n, k, and l because none of the illuminated books that he is certain to have printed was stabbed (see section 6).in blake and the idea of the book i missed the significance of these bibliographical facts and recorded the posthumous impressions of for the sexes as the work of catherine and/or tatham (367). i believe now that blake produced the assortment of proofs and impressions making up copies j/n, k, and l, that catherine produced copies f, g, h, and i, possibly with the assistance of linnell, and that tatham did not print any of blake’s intaglio plates. the grey and black washes in copy f impressions also support the idea that catherine was responsible for printing and compiling copy f and, presumably, its sister copies, g, h, and i. similar washes are in “joseph of arimathea” 2f, an impression printed on paper watermarked 1828 (essick, separate plates 5).this impression was “very probably acquired by george richmond (from mrs. blake or frederick tatham?)” (essick, separate plates 5). america copy n and europe copy i, which she appears certainly to have printed (see section 5), were also touched up in black and grey washes throughout. washes, like stabholes, are absent in the illuminated books that tatham printed. washes are also absent in for the sexes copies a-e, the known lifetime copies that blake printed, as well as in copies j/n, k, and l, which aligns the production of this second group of copies with blake. the unmarked leaves of copies j/n, k, and l are similar in texture to the unmarked leaves of copy e, raising the possibility that blake printed copies e, j/n, k, and l in the same printing session, proofing and printing enough impressions of his plates in their final states to form three or four copies.all fourteen leaves in copy k are approximately 37 x 26 cm.; six of the ten leaves in copy j are also this size. the impressions in for the sexes copies e, l, and n were trimmed (bb 194-95, bbs 78). the idea that copies j/n, k, and l were printed by blake is also supported by the order in which the two groups were produced, which can be determined by two scratches on plate 2. neither is present in copies a through d, one of them is present in e, j/n, k, l, g, h, and i, and both of them are present in copy f, indicating that the group to which copy f belongs—​f, g, h, and i—​was printed after copies e, j/n, k, and l.the shared scratch is across the “s” in “paradise”; the unique scratch is across the “p” in “paradise,” which apparently occurred when the plate was printed for copy f. plate 2 has other scratches, most noticeably three at the top left corner under the “f” in “for” of the title; these scratches first appear in copy e and remain in all subsequent copies. blake apparently did not find the accidental scratches at the top of plate 2—​or the scratches in other plates—​troublesome. bentley is right to trace many copies of for the sexes to tatham. indeed, the number of copies that tatham inherited also supports the idea that blake, not tatham, printed copies j/n, k, and l. he inherited for children copy d and for the sexes copies c, d, e, and f, and probably copies g and h (bb 201-03).according to a 1929 sotheby’s sales catalogue, copy i was “believed” to have been given to joseph dinham (bb 203), who was one of six people at catherine’s funeral (br[2] 547). he was a sculptor and protégé of the sculptor sir francis chantrey, who knew blake and had acquired a copy of the job engravings in 1826. dinham may have learned of blake through chantrey and acquired copy i directly from catherine, whom family tradition had assumed to be blake. as we will see, america copy n and europe copy i were also printed by catherine but thought by late owners to have come directly from blake. he gave copy f as a gift “to mr. bird on his attendance at the funeral oct 23r.d. 1831—​being the day on which the widow of the author was buried in bunhill fields church yard” (bb 202). he sold copies c and d c. 1833 to samuel and thomas boddington, respectively. he sold for children copy d with plates 2, 19, and 20 from for the sexes copy l to frederick locker (bb 192); he also sold locker for the sexes copy e (bb 202). tatham’s possession of four or more copies in late 1831 probably would have removed his incentive to print more copies during this time—​between 1831 and 1833. moreover, the illuminated books he did print are all on j whatman paper dated 1831 and 1832, and the press needed to print them was no longer accessible after 1832 (see section 9). the dates of exchanges—​copy f followed by copies c, d, and e—​also rule out tatham as having extracted plate 19 from catherine’s copies (f, g, h, and i) because he did not extract plate 19 from the other copies he obtained from her. plate 19 is probably missing from copies f-i for the reason proposed by bentley: “pl. 19 was engraved on the verso of pl. 20 and was thus easy to overlook” (bb 196).bentley deduces that plates 19 and 20 share one piece of copper from their shared plate sizes. blake’s relief-etched plates provide many precedents: the plates for experience, europe, and urizen, for example, are on the versos of the plates for innocence, america, and marriage, respectively. etching on both sides of an intaglio plate, however, was extremely unorthodox. printers would assume the verso of an etching, engraving, or stipple was blank, because a design on the verso could be easily scratched while the plate was on the work bench or brazier, where the recto was inked. scratches would show up in the verso’s printed design as thin black lines across white paper. blake could relief-etch both sides of plates because such scratches across the relief line system were filled in by ink and/or hidden in finishing. plate 19, in other words, was not printed. this mistake in production makes it probable that copies f–i were printed apart from copies j/n, k, and l, that the two groups were produced by different printers, and that one of the printers knew the work better than the other. in addition to the copies mentioned above, tatham also sold loose impressions from copies j/n and l as part of volumes of prints and proofs that he put together for sale (bb 131, 203, bbs 79). for tatham to have sold lifetime copies and impressions means that blake printed most—​if not all—​of his late copies of for the sexes on speculation, not commission. catherine appears to have done the same, adding four copies to the copies and pile of impressions that she had inherited, presumably hoping to build up her stock of this title in preparation for selling. she appears not to have realized that objective: the monies from the sales of the copies that she and blake printed went to tatham. that cold economic reality casts doubt on the assumption that catherine had succeeded in supporting herself by printing blake’s works. as we will see in section 12, the market she needed for blake’s work to provide a viable income did not yet exist; the prices that his illuminated books were fetching were not sufficient to make her or anyone financially independent—​including tatham, who sold blake’s works for thirty or more years to supplement his main income, which came from portraits in pastels and watercolors. one copy of for the sexes that did not pass through tatham’s hands was copy k. linnell owned it and almost assuredly acquired it either from blake or catherine blake, because by early 1831 linnell was on litigious rather than speaking terms with tatham, who accused linnell of owing catherine money for the dante designs and later claimed them as his own (br[2] 537ff., h. h. gilchrist 130). linnell’s owning copy k is interesting because he already owned copies a and b. as noted, plates 1-18 in copies a and b were in their second and third states, c. 1818, with plates 19-21 in their first states. the copy k impressions were in their final states, c. 1826–27, which included visual effects created by burnishing that blake learned from linnell (essick, printmaker 223). perhaps blake made a gift of the loose impressions to show his patron the latest versions of these designs, or catherine gave them in thanks for his hospitality. however linnell obtained them, they are from a larger assortment of prints and proofs that have been mistakenly identified as posthumous. removing this late assortment of prints—​copies k, j/n, and l—​increases the number of lifetime proofs and impressions of for the sexes and leaves only copies f, g, h, and i as posthumously printed. this latter group was printed by catherine, presumably at the cirencester place studio, when she and linnell were printing and proofing various intaglio plates. 3. 1828: catherine blake leaves linnell’s studio under the auspices of frederick tatham when catherine blake left linnell’s, she appears to have printed intaglio works but not yet any of the relief-etched illuminated books. at the very least, cumberland jr.’s comment about her intending to print her husband’s works—​by which he appears to have meant the relief etchings, but perhaps also blake’s book of emblems—​suggests that she hadn’t done so as of mid-january 1828. she apparently moved to tatham’s with all of her and blake’s belongings, including the press. although the press’s presence at tatham’s is not documented textually, it is evinced materially, as we will see, in the form of copies of america and europe that can be traced back to catherine during the period she was under his care. the exact lengths of her residencies with linnell and tatham are not clear, however, nor is the location of the latter residency, because alexander gilchrist is mistaken about when she left linnell’s and silent on the location of tatham’s “chambers.” according to gilchrist, catherine remained at linnell’s for some nine months; quitting in the summer of 1828, to take charge of mr. tatham’s chambers. finally, she removed into humble lodgings at no. 17, upper charlotte street, fitzroy square, in which she continued till her death; still under the wing, as it were, of this last-named friend. the occasional sale to such as had a regard for blake’s memory, or were recommended by staunch friends like mr. richmond, nollekens smith and others, of single drawings, of the jerusalem, of the songs of innocence and experience, secured for her moderate wants a decent, if stinted and precarious competence. (1: 365) catherine sold songs copy w in march 1830 for £10.10s. to john jebb, bishop of limerick (bb 423). jerusalem copy e, elaborately colored and valued by blake at “twenty guineas” (e 784), certainly one of catherine’s most valuable single artifacts, was sold by tatham (bb 259-60). but this oversight is less troublesome than the many confusions and ambiguities in this oft-quoted passage. whitehead dates catherine’s departure from linnell’s studio as “c. march 1828” (“last years” 80), noting that linnell’s poor health because of overwork may have figured into her decision to move to tatham’s (80n42). an entry in linnell’s accounting book for april 1828 reads, “to mrs blake (furniture sold) [£]1 10” (br[2] 791). with either a march or an early april departure, she appears to have stayed with linnell less than seven months, not nine. and rather than staying with tatham for two years, as is generally thought, she appears to have resided with him for only one year, arriving by april 1828 and leaving by early april 1829. tatham implies a one-year residency with these parameters in a letter of 11 april 1829,bentley dates the letter as 11 april (br[2] 755) and as 1 april (br[2] 495). in blake records supplement [hereafter brs], he dates it 11 april 1829 (90n178). in private conversations, he confirmed the date as 11 april 1829. in which he states that catherine had already moved to her own apartment. writing to an unknown patron who had inquired about blake’s books (see section 5), he apologized for his delayed response, explaining that as a “consequence of mrs. blake’s removal from fountain court to no. 17. upper charlotte st fitzroy square, a wrong address was put on the letter at fountain court and it was only received by her the day before yesterday” (br[2] 495).tatham does not mention catherine’s yearlong stay with him (or the almost seven months she stayed with linnell), implying, intentionally or not, that she had been living independently since the death of her husband. her first forwarding address from fountain court was linnell’s studio at 6 cirencester place, but linnell is unlikely to have forwarded the 1829 letter to tatham, as bentley suggests (br[2] 495n), because catherine had left linnell’s studio in spring 1828. the letter was presumably forwarded from fountain court to one of the tathams’ residences, either 1 queen street, mayfair, or 34 alpha road. bentley correctly records that catherine left tatham’s residence in spring 1829, but he also dates her stay with tatham as 1828–30—that is to say, as being concurrent with her lodgings at 17 upper charlotte street (br[2] 754-55). he notes that catherine’s address is in doubt, because in tatham’s letter of 18 october 1831 and in the documents for her burial of 20 october 1831 the address is recorded as “upper charlton street” (br[2] 754n). whitehead’s impressive detective work has confirmed that catherine moved directly from tatham’s to 17 upper charlton street, where she stayed from april 1829 until her death on 18 october 1831.for a summary of the confusion over catherine’s last address, see whitehead, “last years” 86-87. this was a two-room apartment (whitehead, “last years” 89) in the fitzroy square neighborhood, where cirencester place was located and where catherine presumably had friends. she did not maintain concurrent residencies but, as we will see, probably had access to tatham’s residence during this period. whitehead also discovered that in early 1829 catherine had inherited £20, along with some furniture, from her brother-in-law henry banes, which enabled her to move and to begin living independently.banes, who died in january 1829, was the husband of catherine’s sister and the blakes’ landlord at 3 fountain court. see whitehead, “the will of henry banes.” according to bentley, catherine “moved in with the tathams in lisson grove to look after them” (br[2] 755). but recently discovered information reveals that frederick tatham and louisa keen viney, of essex, were married 25 april 1831—​by which time catherine had been in her own place at 17 upper charlton a full two years.the marriage register can be accessed at the tatham family history website, under frederick tatham <http://​www.​saxonlodge.​net/​showmedia.​php?​mediaid=109&​medialinkid=155>. this resource came online in the past decade and continues to grow. she never “look[ed] after” tatham and his wife; the idea that she had done so and took an apartment of her own only after tatham married appears to have originated with tatham himself. in his “life of blake” manuscript, written c. 1832, he states: after the death of her husband she resided for some time with the author of this[,] whose domestic arrangements were entirely undertaken by her; until such changes took place that rendered it impossible for her strength to continue in this voluntary office of sincere affection & regard. she then returned to the lodging in which she had lived previously to this act of maternal loveliness—​in which she continued until she was decayed by fretting & devoured with the silent worm of grief …. (br[2] 690) bentley’s understanding of the phrase “domestic arrangements” to mean marriage appears to have been widespread. according to henry curtis, the historian of the tatham family, “it would appear, from the facts recorded by gilchrist, therefore, that mrs. blake removed from fredk. tatham’s chambers on his marriage, and to lodgings almost certainly near at hand.”quoted in the entry for frederick tatham at the tatham family history site <http://​www.​saxonlodge.​net/​getperson.​php?​personid=i0840&​tree=tatham>. curtis’s typescript, “notes for a pedigree of the tathams of co. durham, england,” is the basis of much of the genealogy in the site, as well as the current odnb entries for tatham, c. h. tatham, and richmond (c. h. tatham’s son-in-law). curtis presumably read tatham’s “life of blake” as first reproduced in a. g. b. russell’s the letters of william blake (1906). tatham’s explanation for catherine’s departure is ambiguous. she took care of his domestic arrangements, he says, “until such changes took place that rendered it impossible for her strength to continue in this voluntary office,” adding that she “returned to the lodging in which she had lived previously to this act of maternal loveliness—​in which she continued until she was decayed by fretting & devoured with the silent worm of grief” (emphasis added). as noted, catherine did not have an apartment concurrent with her residency with tatham—​and she did not return to linnell’s studio. tatham presumably meant that she returned to her previous fitzroy square neighborhood. the “changes” that “took place” were most likely in catherine’s physical condition in 1830 and 1831. the phrase “in which she continued” appears to modify the “act of maternal” kindness in the form of housekeeping, implying that she remained “still under the wing” of tatham, as gilchrist states. but tatham is clear that catherine’s declining strength ended her caregiving, which means that she continued to live (and to decline physically) in her own lodgings for the last two years of her life. by mid-1830, as we will see, tatham appears to have moved to 20 lisson grove north. the distance between her fitzroy square residence and 20 lisson grove north was three miles round-trip, which seems unlikely to have been routinely undertaken by the increasingly frail catherine.bentley implies that she may have walked from her lodgings to grosvenor place with lord egremont’s painting under her arm in august 1829 (br[2] 498). this distance was about three and a half miles round-trip. if she did walk it over, that does not mean she was in equally spry shape in 1830 or 1831. 4. 1828–29: catherine blake resides in mayfair at the office and studio of c. h. tatham catherine blake moved to linnell’s studio on 11 september 1827; her printing press preceded her by about two weeks. by march or early april 1828, she had moved out, presumably with all her belongings, including the press. at the time, frederick tatham, twenty-two years old, was still living with his parents, harriet and charles heathcote tatham, at 34 alpha road, lisson grove, a relatively new development in marylebone, west of regent’s park. the alpha road residence also housed seven of frederick’s younger brothers and sisters: robert, edmund, georgiana, maria, augusta, harriet, and julia, all between the ages of three and sixteen.c. h. tatham’s first child, charles howard, born 11 december 1802, died seventeen days later; lydia, the fourth child, born 27 february 1807, died 22 march 1808. the last seven of his twelve children, starting with julia, born 24 may 1811, and stopping with robert bristow, born 30 may 1824, were born at alpha road, suggesting that it had become his main residence by 1811 (tatham family history site). frederick’s unmarried twenty-four-year-old sister caroline (b. 1803) was possibly still in residence. their brother arthur (b. 1808), the future clergyman, was away at magdalene college, cambridge, from 1827 to 1831.arthur tatham (1808–74) was for more than forty years rector of broadoak and boconnoc in cornwall and, from 1860, prebendary of exeter cathedral. this large house belonged to his father, an important neoclassical designer of ornaments, furniture, and silverware, as well as a successful architect.c. h. tatham was “very involved with the family firm of tatham bailey & sanders” (galinou 478). his brother thomas (1762–1818) was apprenticed to john linnell, the great eighteenth-century cabinetmaker and a distant relative of the tathams. his brother john was a solicitor, who “dealt with the legal side of tatham’s transactions” (galinou 478). in cottages and villas: the birth of the garden suburb, mireille galinou explains how alpha road was developed from the eyre estate. c. h. tatham bought the lease of a house on 2 may 1808 from alexander birnie, the leaseholder; the architect and builder was probably thomas martin (449, 478).galinou discusses tatham’s influence “in the early days of the st. john’s wood estate” in chapters 3 and 8. birnie was his neighbor, at 35 alpha road. galinou reproduces an illustration of tatham’s house (fig. 56, p. 118), which reveals that it was two floors with an attic and commanded a “vast expanse of ground” (158). it was not a small dwelling. the tate’s description of linnell’s watercolor tatham’s garden, alpha road, at evening (illus. 1) gives an accurate idea of the size and grandeur of the “cottage,” though it supposes that tatham, not martin, was the architect: the scene is in the garden or grounds of linnell’s friend charles heathcote tatham’s house, 34 alpha cottages, alpha road, marylebone, london. alpha road ran between park road and lisson grove, to the west of regent’s park. houses on either side of it, designated alpha cottages, began to be built c. 1808 (the first year in which they were rated), in what had formerly been open fields. charles heathcote tatham (1772–1842), at this period a flourishing architect with a practise in queen street, mayfair, designed and built 34 alpha cottages for himself; but his house was no cottage in the ordinary sense. marylebone parish rate books (marylebone library, archives department) show that it had the highest rateable value in alpha road (£120 p.a.; most of the other houses were rated below £50); street plans show 34 alpha cottages as a sizable detached house, set at an oblique angle to the road in large grounds.“see r. horwood, plan of the cities of london and westminster, 3rd ed., 1813; peter potter, map of the parish of st. marylebone, 2nd ed., c.1824. it should be noted that some renumbering of alpha cottages took place between 1812 and 1826, in the course of the development of the road, and possibly because one or more of its semi-detached houses came under single ownership; rate books at the beginning of that period number tatham’s house first as 36, then as 35 and finally as 34. the street was styled alpha cottages until 1826, when it became known as alpha road” (the tate gallery 1984–86: illustrated catalogue of acquisitions including supplement to catalogue of acquisitions 1982–84 [london, 1988] 74-75, quoted at <http://​www.​tate.​org.​uk/​art/​artworks/​linnell-​tathams-​garden-​alpha-​road-​at-​evening-​t04139>). the house was already renumbered 35 alpha road by 1824 (see boyle’s directory for 1824), and the location was already then known as alpha road. 1. john linnell. tatham’s garden, alpha road, at evening (1812). watercolor, 10.2 x 12.5 cm. reproduced courtesy of the tate. photo © tate. t04139. the property can be seen in the 1819 horwood map (illus. 2, circled in blue), the 1834 mogg’s map (illus. 3, marked with the number 1), and the 1834 st. marylebone map (illus. 4, shaded in pink). 2. william faden’s fourth edition of horwood’s plan, 1819. detail of lisson grove: c. h. tatham’s house, 34 alpha road, is circled in blue; j. c. f. rossi’s house is circled in green; rossi’s gallery is circled in red; rev. cockburn’s house, lisson lodge, is circled in cyan. © london metropolitan archives, city of london. sc/​pm/​lc/​01/​04/​123. 3. mogg’s strangers guide to london and westminster, 1834. detail of lisson grove: c. h. tatham’s property, 34 alpha road, is numbered 1; j. c. f. rossi’s house and gallery are numbered 2 and 3; rev. cockburn’s house, lisson lodge, is numbered 4. courtesy of mapco: map and plan collection online <http://mapco.net>. 4. topographical survey of the borough of st. marylebone, 1834. detail of lisson grove: c. h. tatham’s property, 34 alpha road, is shaded in pink. courtesy of mapco: map and plan collection online <http://mapco.net>. c. h. tatham also had a house at 1 queen street, curzon square, in mayfair.tatham sr. was recorded in the royal blue book for 1825 as “charles heathcote tatham esq., 1 queen st., mayfair, and 35 alpha road, regents park.” in clayton’s court guide to the environs of london, 1830, frederick tatham appears as “f. tatham esq., alpha road, paddington.” because all of tatham’s correspondence with the eyre estate went to this address until 1831, galinou believes the house at “alpha road was a second residence (his main address being in mayfair)” (478).galinou notes that c. h. tatham “may have relied on hackney coaches (the taxis of the day) or his own two feet for travelling back and forth, as he does not appear to have added stables and a coach house to the alpha road property” (251). however, the alpha road residence had a coach house and stables by 1828, and probably earlier (marylebone rate books [hereafter mrb] 1828, reel 55). the house in mayfair was rated at £66, however—​about half that of the other houses on the street and half that of his “cottage.” it appears never to have been a family residence, since none of tatham’s children was born there. his first child, charles howard, was born at park street, mayfair, as was frederick, his third child, in july 1805. this was the address c. h. tatham recorded in the 1802 royal academy exhibition catalogue. his fourth child, lydia, was born at york place, marylebone, as was his fifth, arthur, in september 1808. he used the york place address for the 1807 royal academy exhibition. he appears to have moved from york place to alpha road by 1811. by 1809, while living at york place, he began to use the 1 queen street house as his office and studio; he is listed there in the royal academy exhibitors’ catalogues from 1809 until 1831 (graves, royal academy 7: 324-25).the park street and york place residences appear to have been family residences as well. no births are recorded at the queen street address, suggesting it was used exclusively as his work space from 1809 onward. frederick tatham listed the same address for the royal academy exhibition in 1825 (graves, royal academy 7: 325), for the british institution exhibitions in 1828 and 1829 (graves, british institution 528), and for the royal society of british artists in 1829 (whitehead, “last years” 83). he used 20 lisson grove for the royal academy shows from 1830 to 1832. whitehead has reasonably proposed that catherine lodged in rooms above the mayfair office, rather than at alpha road, with frederick tatham spending weekends with his family and most weekdays in the studio in mayfair, presumably one of the rooms upstairs, and thus a relatively limited amount of time with her (“last years” 82-83). though smaller than neighboring houses, the mayfair office was certainly large enough for a tenant and her belongings, which included a press and many copperplates. tatham sr. had known catherine since at least 1799, when he acquired blake’s america copy b (bb 100).on the verso of the frontispiece, tatham inscribed: “from the author / to c h tatham octr. 7 /1799.” the signature matches those in letters c. h. tatham wrote to sir john soane, which are in the soane museum. blake owned copies of tatham’s three designs for the national monument (1802) and etchings, representing the best examples of ancient ornamental architecture (1799[–1800]), neoclassical line drawings that tatham had etched himself and that had become an important and influential sourcebook for architects and designers (bb 697).c. h. tatham “spent two years working on the 102 plates showing the best examples from [henry] holland’s collection, and published in 1799 etchings of ancient ornamental architecture drawn from the originals in rome and other parts of italy during the years 1795 and 1796. of the 210 subscribers, almost a third were architects and craftsmen.” a second edition, containing more than 100 plates, appeared in 1803, and a german translation was published at weimar in 1805. a third edition was published in london in 1810, and often reprinted. in 1806 tatham published the companion etchings representing fragments of antique grecian and roman architectural ornament; in 1826 the two works were issued together (odnb). on 15 march 1827, blake wrote linnell to tell him that he “saw mr tatham senr yesterday he sat with me above an hour & lookd over the dante he expressd himself very much pleasd with the designs as well as the engravings” (e 782-83). the visit, which appears to have taken place at fountain court, is further testimony of c. h. tatham’s regard for blake. after blake’s death, he appears to have been one of the “staunch friends like mr. richmond, nollekens smith and others” that alexander gilchrist claims wanted to help mrs. blake (1: 365). c. h. tatham, only fifty-six years old in 1828, would presumably have welcomed the opportunity to provide living and studio space to the widow of an old friend. and like his friend linnell, he knew how to use and value a rolling press. he had been trained in drawing—​and presumably etching—​by the engraver john landseer, and had been collecting prints since late 1796, after he returned from rome and inherited “a valuable collection of prints.”a transcription of c. h. tatham’s unpublished autobiography, written in 1826, is online at the tatham family history site. he was an active designer, still exhibiting at the royal academy (fifty-three designs between 1797 and 1836).c. h. tatham did not exhibit in 1832, 1833, or 1834, for good reasons (see sections 9 and 10), but he returned in 1835 and again in 1836. at his alpha road home, he hosted many gatherings of artists; indeed, it had become “a focus of artistic activity” (odnb). blake met the sixteen-year-old richmond at the alpha road home (a. gilchrist 1: 297). other visitors included samuel palmer, edward calvert, benjamin haydon, and possibly welby sherman, a member of the ancients.haydon boarded at the house of tatham’s friend john charles felix rossi at 21 lisson grove north, an adjacent neighborhood that frederick tatham would move to c. 1830. by 1817, rossi’s prosperity had declined, and he rented rooms in his house to haydon, who remained a tenant until 1822. haydon executed a pastel portrait of c. h. tatham in 1823 (said to be “remarkably similar to a painting ascribed to linnell”) <http://​www.​saxonlodge.​net/​showmedia.​php​?mediaid=279​&medialinkid=375>. several of these, including calvert and sherman, were influenced by blake to try their hands at engraving and wood engraving; in 1827, richmond had engraved “the shepherd” and “the fatal bellman.” catherine stayed in mayfair for about a year, from april 1828 until late march or early april 1829. this is apparently where frederick tatham drew her portrait, which is dated “septr. 1828” (illus. 5). 5. frederick tatham. mrs. blake. graphite, inscribed “mrs. blake” and dated “septr. 1828.” 22.5 x 17.4 cm. © trustees of the british museum. all rights reserved. 1894,0612.19. linnell’s pencil drawing of tatham (illus. 6) may also have been executed there, or at 34 alpha road, around this time, when linnell and tatham were still on friendly terms (see note 116). 6. john linnell. frederick tatham (c. 1830). graphite, 19 x 14.4 cm. © fitzwilliam museum, cambridge. pd.18-1987. while in residence, catherine appears to have spent little time at the press. she probably printed an impression of “the man sweeping the interpreter’s parlour” (c. 1822), which evans listed as “a stereotype design for pilgrim’s progress, presented by mrs. blake to mrs. tatham, 1828, rare.”this impression is listed in a. e. evans & son, [after 1844] catalogue (bentley, sale catalogues). it is not recorded in essick’s separate plates and is presumably untraced. its date suggests that she may have printed it—​and not just given it—​while at mayfair, because the only “mrs. tatham” at the time was frederick tatham’s mother, harriet. catherine may have expressed her gratitude to tatham’s parents for their assistance in providing her a clean place to stay—​perhaps humorously or ironically alluding to her “sweeping” house and thus to her assistance in keeping it that way. this white-line etching, printed from the plate’s surface like a relief etching, may have been her first printing of a relief plate since the death of blake. her gift to c. h. tatham—​blake’s engraving of the rev. robert hawker, inscribed “mr c tatham / the humble is formed to adore; / the loving to associate / with eternal love / c blake” (br[2] 398)—​may have been printed while she was at linnell’s, along with other intaglio works.essick thinks the note was written during her widowhood (separate plates 189); the impression itself may have been new, as whitehead notes (“last years” 84). in effect, frederick tatham arranged for catherine’s lodging rather than providing it. the person responsible for providing it was c. h. tatham, who paid the rates where she appears to have resided. frederick tatham seems to have intentionally concealed the details of these arrangements, presumably because he wanted to appear as her only gracious benefactor; in his “life of blake,” he also conceals linnell’s generosity in helping catherine immediately after blake’s death (br[2] 495n). he has not been alone in omitting c. h. tatham’s role in blake’s biography. the 1896 dnb entry for richmond records his meeting blake at linnell’s house, despite gilchrist’s account. richmond’s son, however, verified gilchrist’s claim: “the home of mr tatham the architect, was a centre for the visits of remarkable men, and prominent among them was william blake at the period when he was living at 3, fountain court. my father met him for the first time at mr tatham’s house in alpha road, st john’s wood” (stirling 24).linnell introduced richmond to c. h. tatham as a potential drawing teacher for tatham’s daughter julia (whom richmond married in january 1831). linnell introduced palmer to c. h. tatham as well as to frederick, who, like richmond and palmer, was then training to be a painter (in addition to being a sculptor). nevertheless, the 2004 odnb does not mention the place of their meeting. tatham sr.’s hand in helping frederick tatham help catherine blake appears to have gone unrecognized in modern blake studies, except by whitehead. 5. 1829: catherine blake prints copies of america and europe in mayfair after moving to her apartment catherine blake moved from curzon square to fitzroy square in early spring 1829, around the time she printed america copies n and q and europe copies i and l. these were probably the first posthumously printed relief-etched illuminated books, with one pair possibly commissioned and the other printed on speculation. they appear to have been printed after she moved to her apartment in fitzroy square. she presumably retained access to the studio and brought blake’s other works—​the drawings, manuscripts, paintings, sketches, and books—​with her to the new apartment, where she set herself up as blake’s agent and made “the occasional sale” (a. gilchrist 1: 365). crosby and whitehead suspect that she also set up her press in her apartment and that she “had enough room here to print as well as colour and sell her husband’s works” (104; see also whitehead, “last years” 89 and n137). the technical, material, and circumstantial evidence examined below suggests, however, that the press remained in tatham’s mayfair studio until the end of 1832 and that catherine did not print any copies of jerusalem or songs. she did print two copies of america and two copies of europe at mayfair in spring 1829, which tatham helped her sell, as is revealed by his letter of 11 april 1829. as noted, tatham was responding to an inquiry that arrived shortly after catherine left. the unknown person tatham addresses had read in john thomas smith’s nollekens that catherine was alive, needed to sell copies of blake’s books, and was doing so “at the original price of publication” (br[2] 494-95, 626). tatham replies: in behalf of the widow of the late william blake, i have to inform you that her circumstances render her glad to embrace your kind offer for the purchase of some of the works of her departed husband. … this elevated widow is now seeking a support during the remainder of her exemplary course, through the medium of the enlightened and the generous with no other hope than that she will ultimately be joined to that partner once more …. i can only add, that, should you, sir, be inclined to possess, for the embellishment of your own collection, and the benefit of the widow, any of the enumerated works, they shall be carefully sent to you upon your remitting the payment, and i will take proper care that your kindness shall be rewarded with the best impressions …. (br[2] 495-96, emphasis added) tatham’s letter is known only as transcribed by thomas hartley cromek in his “recollections of conversations with mr. john pye, london 1863–4” (br[2] 871n37). bentley suggests the engraver pye may have been the recipient (brs 90n178), but he also states that the recipient “may have been james ferguson or the earl of egremont” (br[2] 496). both bought blake works from catherine around this time. lord egremont bought blake’s painting of spenser’s the fairie queene (butlin #811), delivered that august; ferguson bought illuminated books, presumably what tatham meant by “impressions.” the letter was presumably the kind tatham sent to ferguson (and may have been the one he did send) and to other potential patrons. the phrase “enumerated works” implies an accompanying list; tatham’s letter to ferguson, which alluded to seven large color prints, included a “list of works” (br[2] 497, a. gilchrist 2: 262). according to gilchrist, ferguson (1791–1871) was “an artist … from tynemouth” who wrote and “took copies of three or four of the engraved books” (1: 366). according to bentley, ferguson was in tynemouth between 1824 and 1830, with a stay in london in 1827, though where in london and exactly when he does not say (“peripatetic” 19). “in a list of works by blake, offered for sale by his widow, to mr. ferguson … occurs the following item:—​a work called outhoun. 12 plates, 6 inches more or less. price, £2 2s. 0d.” (a. gilchrist 2: 262). the “list of works,” like ferguson’s letter, is not extant, nor is a work called outhoun. blake did, however, create a character named oothoon, the main character of his visions of the daughters of albion, apparently listed by tatham from memory.visions has eleven plates, though in his letter to dawson turner blake advertised it as “folio” with “8” designs for £3.3s. (e 771). in his 1827 letter to cumberland, blake priced it at £5.5s. (e 784). ferguson’s copy of visions was in a. g. dew-smith’s collection that sold at sotheby’s in 1878 (viscomi, “two fake blakes” 60). dew-smith of cambridge or his agent may have acquired the work at the 1871 sale of the effects of ferguson. ferguson’s copy of visions appears certainly to have been one of the three beautiful copies (n, o, and p) printed c. 1818, the last copies of visions that blake printed. the process of elimination indicates ferguson acquired copy n because copies o and p had been sold by this time.visions copy p, thel copy n, and marriage copy g were printed and finished in the same style and bound together; they were likely commissioned by an unknown collector and possibly initiated the c. 1818 printings of illuminated books (see bib chapter 33). visions copies o and n were printed on speculation, the former acquired by crabb robinson for £1.1s. (bb 477), presumably between 10 december 1825, when he met blake (br[2] 419), and august 1827, when blake died. ferguson’s other “engraved books” almost certainly included america copy n and europe copy i, both posthumously printed.america was initially designed as a monochrome work, with white-line hatching creating textures and tones; so, too, was its sister work, europe, but the latter was finished in 1794, after blake had begun printing his books in colors. europe copy h is the only lifetime monochrome copy. their owner, sir george grey (1799–1882), inscribed on the front flyleaf of america copy n: i purchased this book at the sale of the effects of a deceased artist, (i now forget his name), who had obtained it direct from blake. the paper bears the paper mark of 1812. this copy therefore although purporting to be printed in 1793 and 1794—​was probably printed after 1812, when he was living in south molton street.grey’s inscription is transcribed from a digital image of the flyleaf, as shown in the auckland libraries online digital gallery. there are three distinct passages on the flyleaf, and it is clear that grey and subsequent owners and curators thought these copies of america and europe were lifetime copies. although grey clearly thought his copies were lifetime impressions, they came from catherine, presumably through ferguson, who died in middleton-in-teesdale (in the general vicinity of grey, of falloden, northumberland) in 1871 (bentley, “peripatetic” 13). the sale to ferguson of three “engraved books”—​visions, america, and europe—​was likely facilitated by tatham, acting “in behalf” of blake’s widow and rewarding patrons “with the best impressions.” america copy n and europe copy i were printed as a matching pair on the same size and type of laid paper in the same printing session and were similarly stabbed through three holes. they were produced with america copy q and europe copy l, which were also printed as a pair, though on wove paper (see below). for catherine to print copies of america and europe as matching pairs implies that one or both titles were no longer in stock. both pairs were printed in black ink with full borders on quarto-size leaves: 32.6 x 23.6 cm. for america copy n and europe copy i and 29.5 x 22.1 cm. for america copy q and europe copy l. blake advertised america as folio in the 1793 prospectus and both america and europe as folio in his 1818 letter to dawson turner (e 771), and all lifetime copies were printed with leaves that size—​approximately 37 x 27 cm., which are quarters of imperial sheets. however, the last copies of america and europe that blake printed, copies o and k respectively, for linnell in 1821, were 30 x 24 cm., closer in size to those printed by catherine. the paper and ink of america copies n and q and europe copies i and l are unlike the paper and ink used in the sixteen copies of four illuminated books printed on paper watermarked j whatman / 1831 and j whatman / 1832. moreover, the copies with these j whatman watermarks were all printed differently from the two pairs of america and europe. the different materials and modes of printing point to different printers. first, consider the paper catherine used. all eighteen leaves of america copy n and all seventeen leaves of europe copy i are marked either r & t or ruse & turners / 1812 (bb 89, 142). the eighteen leaves of america copy q and sixteen of the seventeen leaves of europe copy l are marked either t stains or t stains / 1813 (bb 89, 142). because printing papers did not come this size (turner 209ff.), the leaves for both pairs of copies had to have been cut from larger sheets. for all but one of the leaves to be watermarked is unique among the illuminated books. normally, an illuminated book has at most twenty-five percent of its leaves marked because blake routinely produced his leaves by quartering large sheets. for example, america copy o and europe copy k have thirty-six quarto-size leaves (trimmed to 30.3 x 24.0 cm.) of j whatman / 1818, 1819, 1820 paper, but just ten watermarks, indicating that blake probably quartered ten sheets of royal paper (approximately 63.5 x 50.8 cm.) to produce forty leaves. the ten copies of six illuminated books that blake printed c. 1818 reveal the same pattern of paper preparation. the leaves in these copies, about twenty-five percent marked ruse & turners / 1815, appear to have been quarter sheets, with some quarters halved to produce the leaves for songs copies t and u.the sheet size was possibly medium, approximately 58.4 x 45.7 cm. the leaves for visions copies n, o, and p, milton copy d, marriage copy g, urizen copy g, and thel copies n and o were approximately 28 x 23 cm. untrimmed. that leaf size halved (or the sheet cut into eighths) produced leaves of 22 x 14 cm. for songs copies t and u. catherine appears to have continued this practice when she prepared the leaves for for the sexes copies f, g, h, and i, quartering eighteen or so super royal sheets of j whatman / 1826. blake had used j whatman papers almost exclusively for books produced around and after 1818, which strongly suggests that these sheets were part of blake’s stock, possibly acquired to print new copies of for the sexes. the ruse & turners / 1812 and t stains / 1813 papers were most likely not part of that stock. blake never printed on t stains papers, and the ruse & turners papers were laid, whereas blake printed on wove paper (including the ruse & turners / 1815 paper used c. 1818)—​and he emphasized that he did so in the 1793 prospectus.blake wrote in his prospectus, “the illuminated books are printed in colours, and on the most beautiful wove paper that could be procured” (e 693). before this, however, he printed marriage copy l (plates 25-27, “a song of liberty”) on laid paper (with a c ball watermark). this, the only illuminated book printed by blake on laid paper, was etched in relief and printed c. 1790 in dark brown ink on a single sheet folded to make a pamphlet of two leaves, each leaf 21.2 x 17.3 cm., with plate 25 in the first of two states (see viscomi, “evolution,” 296 and n22). nearly all the leaves are watermarked, indicating that the leaves of both stacks were almost certainly quarters cut from larger sheets. catherine is very unlikely to have purchased from a stationer just the sections of the sheets with the visible watermark, or, for that matter, 1812 and 1813 paper c. 1829. someone, perhaps c. h. tatham, frederick tatham, or linnell, may have given her remnants of sheets from his studio.the r & t and ruse & turners / 1812 papers are from different moulds and were possibly quarters of royal sheets (63.5 x 50.8 cm.); the t stains and t stains / 1813 papers are probably from the same mould, possibly medium sheets (58.4 x 45.7 cm.), with the date cut from the former. both papers are thinner than the j whatman blake used more often. the marked quarters may have been set aside for aesthetic reasons because the marks were visible in wash and watercolor drawings—​even without back lighting. 7. europe a prophecy copy l, plate 7. detail of watermark t stains. huntington library, san marino, california. rare books, call no. 57435. the t stains watermark, for example, runs the width of the leaf, along the top (illus. 7) or bottom margin; its “t” and “s” are 2.5 cm. high, and the other letters are 1.7 cm. high. the oddity here is not the use of old paper. blake used a ruse & turners / 1810 writing paper for sixteen of his last twenty extant letters between 31 january 1826 and 3 july 1827 (bb 273, 274n27).only three of these late letters have the watermark, suggesting that blake had three sheets of laid writing paper that he cut to produce leaves. the leaf size of the 25 april 1827 letter to linnell is 20.9 x 16.8 cm., which is one-sixth of royal paper (63.5 x 50.8 cm.). he may have used the same 1810 paper for a pencil drawing from 1820 (butlin #748). what was unusual, in fact unique, was printing on t stains paper, printing on laid paper, and printing exclusively on watermarked leaves. while the stacks of t stains / 1813 and ruse & turners / 1812 papers were unlikely to have belonged to blake, the leaves were prepared and printed in a manner that connects them to blake and mrs. blake and differentiates them from impressions on the j whatman / 1831 and 1832 papers. the 1812 and 1813 papers, like all of blake’s papers, were printed damp. consequently, lifetime impressions, which shrank upon drying, are slightly smaller than the impressions on j whatman / 1831 and 1832 papers, which reveal no shrinkage in the image, making it clear that leaves were printed dry. the america and europe impressions on t stains / 1813 and ruse & turners / 1812 papers are the size of lifetime impressions and are consistently 2 to 4 or 5 mm. smaller than those printed in the copies of america and europe on j whatman / 1832 papers.dampened papers, wove and laid, shrink about two to four percent. for example, the experience title plate in songs copies a, t, and aa is 12.5 x 7.2 cm. (left x top). in posthumous copies a and l, which were printed on heavy and thinner j whatman paper respectively, it is 12.7 x 7.4 cm. (left x top). larger images reveal the difference between plates printed on damp and dry paper more readily. for example, impressions of america plate 1 in copies f, h, and o range between 23.3 to 23.4 x 16.9 cm. (left x bottom); in america copy p, printed on j whatman / 1832 paper, plate 1 is 23.9 x 17.3 cm. europe plate 1 in proofs and in copies k and l ranges from 23.5 to 23.6 x 16.9 cm. (right x top); in europe copy m, printed on j whatman / 1832 paper, plate 1 is 23.9 x 17.2 cm. jerusalem plate 45 in copy a is 22.55 x 16.25 cm. (right x top); in copy h, printed on j whatman / 1831, it is 22.9 x 16.5 cm. catherine knew how blake printed his books because she assisted him in printing them. like blake, she dampened the leaves for her copies of america and europe. she also appears to have printed the plates in an intaglio ink. this is the kind of ink blake used in illuminated printing, the sign of which is a more reticulated and less smooth or flat surface than is produced by relief ink (bib 98-100). reticulation, usually most noticeable in flat relief areas, can be obscured by washes. in monochrome works, such as jerusalem copies a and f, america copies b and e, and europe copy h, blake brushed over the printed ink in black water-based washes, deepening the black outlines and plate borders and smoothing out splotchy areas. catherine strengthened the plate borders in america copy n (illus. 8) and europe copy i (illus. 9) in grey and black washes. 8. america a prophecy copy n, plate 4. detail of border strengthened in a grey wash. auckland libraries heritage collections 1794 blak. 9. europe a prophecy copy i, plate 4. detail of border strengthened in a grey wash. auckland libraries heritage collections 1794 blak. america copy q and europe copy l, which were printed with copies n and i, were posthumously colored in the early twentieth century (bb 105, 160), which covered up most of her touch-ups. the repetition of light grey lines delineating clouds in plate 5 of america copies n and q (illus. 10, 11) reveals her hand, however, and shared accidentals among impressions in the two copies indicate that they were printed in the same session. 10. america a prophecy copy n, plate 5. detail of cloud forms in a light grey wash. auckland libraries heritage collections 1794 blak. 11. america a prophecy copy q, plate 5. detail of cloud forms in a light grey wash. courtesy of princeton university library. rare book division, department of rare books and special collections, oversize ex 3631.3.312q. the numbers in black ink at the top right corner of the plates, where blake usually placed his numbers, also appear to have been her work in all four copies. the number “14” on europe copy i (illus. 12) is similar enough to the “14” in copy l (illus. 13), the posthumously colored copy, to strongly suggest one hand responsible for both.bentley notes that the plate numbers in europe copies i and l “have little authority” (bb 144n9). he also records, however, that their binding order is the same as linnell’s europe copy k (bb 146). as noted, catherine may have had linnell’s america copy o and europe copy k—​the last copies of these books that blake printed—​in mind when she printed her copies. the plate order in copy i, though, has a variant. the order of copy k is 1-5, 10, 9, 6-8, 11-18; it is the same in copy l (which is missing plate 3); in copy i (also missing plate 3), plate 5 follows 9. if the plate numbers in copies i and l are by catherine, then copy i’s unique plate order was her doing. europe copy m, printed by tatham, follows the plate order of copies d, e, f, and g. 12. europe a prophecy copy i, plate 15. detail of number 14, top right corner of plate. auckland libraries heritage collections 1794 blak. 13. europe a prophecy copy l, plate 15. detail of number 14, top right corner of plate. huntington library, san marino, california. rare books, call no. 57435. the variation among the shapes of numbers (for example, the bottom loop of the “3” or slant of the “6”) within these four copies is no greater than the variations within lifetime copies of illuminated books, where nip, brush, or ink could make for slight differences. in fact, the numbers on these posthumous copies, presumably made by catherine, resemble the numbers on lifetime copies as closely as do the numbers in blake’s letters and receipts (for instance, the butts account of 1805). note, for example, the “14” in america copy o (illus. 14). this is curious, but not necessarily surprising; if catherine was responsible for numbering the plates, then her emulating the style of blake’s numbers would be expected. 14. america a prophecy copy o, plate 14. detail of number 14, top right corner of plate. © fitzwilliam museum, cambridge. pd.127-1950(14). although catherine printed america copy n and europe copy i on laid paper and america copy q and europe copy l on wove paper, she appears to have printed the four copies in the same session. printing books in different sizes in the same printing session is to print per copy rather than per plate. from 1789 through 1795, blake printed per plate, which yields many impressions that are then compiled into copies (bib 153-57). he began to print per copy after 1800, when he returned to printing a few copies of innocence and experience (bib 377-78), often one copy by commission and another for stock. by printing leaves from different piles, he was able to create copies of the same book in different sizes during the same session. blake appears to have used this method to print songs copies w and y at the same time on quarto and octavo leaves respectively.calvert owned songs copy y, presumably ordering it directly from blake; catherine owned songs copy w, presumably printed on speculation. that visions copies n and o also sold long after they had been printed with copy p indicates that they were produced on speculation. the mode in which america copies n and q and europe copies i and l were produced suggests catherine’s hand because it resembles what she and her husband had done previously. that they were printed in black intaglio ink on dampened paper and touched up in grey and black washes differentiates them from jerusalem copies h, i, and j, america copy p, europe copy m, songs copies a, b, c, d, e, f/j, g, h, i, and p, and loose impressions, and innocence copy t—​that is, from all the books printed on j whatman / 1831 and 1832 papers. these were printed in sepia, a hue never used by blake, or black. these inks transferred more solidly because they were designed for relief rather than intaglio printing; they were not touched up with added washes; and they were printed on dry paper. catherine seems to have produced her copies of america and europe to fill an order by ferguson, probably in spring 1829, but no later than 1 august 1829, when her fortunes changed dramatically and removed the need for her to print copies of illuminated books (see below). at any rate, america copy n and europe copy i were sold together, presumably with visions copy n and apparently to ferguson. the sister copies—​america copy q and europe copy l—​were probably printed on speculation. they appear to be the copies palmer claimed belonged to robert peel (bb 105), whose brother-in-law, the rev. cockburn, lived in frederick tatham’s lisson grove neighborhood (though, as we will see in section 9, not as tatham’s neighbor, pace whitehead, “last years” 82n64).rev. cockburn married elizabeth peel, daughter of sir robert peel and sister to robert peel, the future prime minister. according to the records of the cockburn family, she “brought him some forty or fifty thousand pounds” (cockburn and cockburn 67). according to galinou, cockburn’s house, known as lisson lodge, was not listed among the eyre developments, so it is probable that it was outside the eyre estate (private correspondence). tatham apparently made the sale, but whether he did so for himself or for catherine is not known. on 1 august 1829, catherine delivered blake’s large watercolor of spenser’s the faerie queene to lord egremont (br[2] 498), whose wife had much earlier commissioned the vision of the last judgment and satan calling up his legions (butlin #642, 662). lord egremont’s payment of £84 was probably enough “to have kept catherine out of want for the rest of her life” (br[2] 499). this was a goodly sum, considering that “blake’s yearly income does not seem to have gone much above £100, and sometimes it was probably not much more than £50” (br[2] 812). this gift, combined with the £20 she received in early 1829 from her brother-in-law henry banes (along with some furniture) and, as we will see, the monies she made from sales by the end of 1829, improved catherine’s financial situation enough that she withdrew her application for assistance from the artists’ general benevolent institution, 5 january 1830 (br[2] 501-02). with “the widow of the late william blake” now having some financial security, the incentive to print more monochrome copies of the books—​which could earn at most only a pound or two (see section 12)—​apparently disappeared. the first period of posthumous printing appears to have ended in spring 1829, but no later than midsummer 1829, by which time catherine produced four copies of for the sexes (f-i), two copies of america (n and q), two copies of europe (i and l), a few impressions of “canterbury pilgrims” and the dante engravings, and at least single impressions (though possibly more) from “joseph of arimathea,” “the interpreter’s parlour,” and the rev. hawker portrait. 6. 1831–32: frederick tatham prints illuminated books in the mayfair studio there are no further signs of posthumous printing until 1831, at the earliest. j whatman / 1831 paper was used in jerusalem copies h, i, and j and in ten copies of the songs, which also include a few leaves watermarked 1832. jerusalem copies h and i also have eight leaves watermarked j whatman / 1832 of the same weight and texture as their 1831 leaves. america copy p and europe copy m are exclusively on j whatman / 1832 paper, the same weight and texture as the 1832 leaves in copies of jerusalem.the vivian gallery proofs of europe plates 6, 7, and 12 are in reddish-brown ink on unmarked paper; their proofs of america plates 2, 5, and 15 are in the same ink on j whatman / 1831 paper (bb 143, 89). innocence copy t is on j whatman / 1831 paper.blake books records innocence copy t as possibly having a “4” in its watermarks (bb 366); with that information, i speculated that posthumous impressions may have been printed as late as 1840 (bib 426n10). further study of posthumous productions made me doubt this date. in 2013, i checked the watermarks with the assistance of stephen ferguson, curator of rare books at princeton, and ascertained that the number in question is a “1.” a heavier weight j whatman / 1831 paper was used in songs copies a, g, and i. catherine blake died in october 1831, so an 1831 watermark in a book does not rule out her participation in that book’s production—​but an 1832 watermark does. her participation is similarly ruled out in books with leaves of 1831 and 1832 paper, and in books whose leaves were printed dry in either black or sepia relief ink—​which includes all impressions on 1831 and 1832 papers. books sharing these material characteristics appear to share the same printer, and that printer was not the person who printed copies of america and europe in black intaglio ink on damp leaves of t stains and r & t papers. the technical and material evidence points to at least two distinct printers, whom i believe to be catherine blake and frederick tatham. most of the posthumous songs impressions printed in black, with few exceptions, are on 1831 paper; most of the sepia impressions are on 1832 paper and, with few exceptions (specifically the light sepia impressions in copies a and h), were better, more professionally printed than those in black inks. image quality and watermarks suggest that the black impressions of songs were tatham’s first attempts at printing illuminated plates and that he improved as a printer with experience.the difference in print quality in posthumous copies of songs between the black and most sepia impressions and the different leaf size for the latter (6 to 9 cm. shorter than the black impressions), along with the higher quality printing in posthumous copies of jerusalem, america, and europe, also raise the possibility of more than one posthumous printer. someone other than tatham, perhaps, printed either the black or sepia impressions. he appears certainly to have begun his posthumous productions after the death of catherine. as noted, she used blake’s printing method, and tatham is very unlikely to have used a different printing method if he were collaborating with her. moreover, he is also unlikely to have printed the books at the scale he did while the plates and press were her property. indeed, producing sixteen or more copies of four illuminated books (songs, america, europe, and jerusalem) reflects a commitment in time, money, and labor that dwarfs catherine’s project and that would not have been in her physical or financial best interests. the amount of paper that tatham used—​over 200 large sheets—​reflects different motivations and objectives from the first round of posthumous printing. he was now acting “in behalf of” himself and presumably supplementing catherine’s “list of works” for sale with posthumous copies of the books. posthumous printing, in other words, appears to have begun in earnest only after catherine died—​when he took possession of press, plates, and all of her and blake’s effects and used different printing materials and practices with different objectives. given the dates of his paper, tatham may have started printing in late 1831 and continued in 1832 with new sheets of j whatman paper; he may also, however, have started in 1832 with different stacks of the same size j whatman paper purchased in that year. no posthumously printed impression has a watermark later than 1832, the year tatham appears to have lost the use of the rolling press (see section 8). tatham used j whatman / 1831 papers of different weights to print songs and jerusalem; he used both weights for songs but only the lighter weight for jerusalem. the j whatman / 1832 sheets were the same size and weight that he used for jerusalem, which enabled him to continue printing jerusalem and to print america and europe. a few sheets of the 1832 paper were also used in copies of songs. the untrimmed leaves of jerusalem copy j, all on j whatman / 1831 paper, have seventeen watermarks among them. jerusalem copies h and i, with 1831 and 1832 papers, have twenty-two and fifteen watermarks respectively. one expects, however, twenty-five watermarks per copy, as in blake’s copy a of jerusalem (bb 226), which signifies twenty-five sheets quartered to produce 100 leaves.the leaves of jerusalem copy a were trimmed to 32.7 x 26.5 cm. the other four complete copies of jerusalem printed by blake have either twenty-three or twenty-four watermarks, indicating that their leaves were quarters of large sheets. where are the missing watermarks in these copies of jerusalem? they are in songs. the sheets appear to have been royal in size (63.5 x 50.8 cm.), which tatham cut in fours to produce leaves for jerusalem, america, and europe, and in sixes, nines, and twelves to produce the leaves for songs. tatham printed america copy p, europe copy m, and jerusalem copies h, i, and j in a dark sepia (reddish-brown) ink (illus. 15). 15. jerusalem the emanation of the giant albion copy i, plate 2. sepia ink color. library of congress, lessing j. rosenwald collection, pr4144.j4 1832. the first three of these works were acquired from tatham by samuel boddington by 1833.samuel boddington also owned for the sexes copy c, descriptive catalogue copy e, and a colored copy of young’s night thoughts, presumably all purchased from tatham. from linnell he acquired copies of illustrations of the book of job and “canterbury pilgrims,” 30 march 1835 (br[2] 793-94). earlier that month, boddington wrote linnell about wanting to show him “my small blakes coloured by himself” (10 march 1835, br[2] 793n). he may be referring to there is no natural religion copy c or d; their earliest provenances do not rule this out. if so, he probably acquired it from tatham; numerous impressions of this work were inherited by tatham and sold with other works once belonging to him by an unknown collector at sotheby’s, 29 april 1862 (see viscomi, “printed paintings,” appendix 4).  jerusalem copy i apparently was sold—​or went through an intermediary—​to butts, from whose collection it sold at sotheby’s in 1852 with his other illuminated books (four bought from the cumberland sale in 1835, bb 158). jerusalem copy j, which appears to have been printed exclusively on j whatman / 1831 paper and perhaps finished before the others, was acquired by james vine, who met blake through linnell, possibly as early as 1818. this was the year linnell met blake and, as cumberland jr. wrote, “promised to get him some work” (br[2] 340-42). vine bought milton copy d and thel copy o, both printed c. 1818, songs copy v, printed c. 1821, and illustrations of the book of job, printed in 1826. he bought the posthumous jerusalem copy j from tatham between 1832—​when it appears to have been printed, along with copies i and h—​and 1838, when it sold at auction with vine’s other illuminated books (bb 261). because of his litigious relation with tatham, linnell seems unlikely to have steered vine or anyone else to tatham after catherine died. somehow, though, blake’s former patrons learned of tatham’s project, or perhaps tatham sought butts, vine, and other collectors out, surmising (correctly) that they would want to add a copy of jerusalem, blake’s masterpiece, to their collections of illuminated books. posthumous copies of the songs vary widely in paper size, image quality, and ink color. as recorded in blake books, they were printed in “grey,” “black,” “brown,” “red,” “reddish-brown,” “yellowish-brown,” and “orangish-brown.” keynes and wolf describe the ink colors as “grey,” “dark grey,” “light brown,” “red-brown,” “sepia,” “dark brown,” and “orange-brown” (66-69). the colors of ink are less diverse than recorded, however. color is to a great extent subjective and its saturation (that is, intensity) is affected by various factors: the quality and amount of pigment in the ink, the thinness of the ink layer, the type and condition of the paper when printed (damp or dry), the amount of pressure used to transfer the ink, and the kind and amount of oil in the ink. moreover, hues can vary within a copy depending on when and how the ink was replenished and applied during the session. what bentley and keynes and wolf refer to as “grey,” for example, splotches black where the ink builds up (for instance, along the plate’s sides), revealing that it was a black ink applied thinly. brown runs along a continuum of dark reddish brown (sepia) to a lighter, slightly more saturated reddish to orangish brown. some copies of songs, such as copies e and h, have several shades of “brown.” the colors in posthumous copies of songs appear to have been various hues of black and sepia.blemishes from the shallows combined with light and uneven printed relief lines are common among the posthumous impressions. these visual effects suggest second pulls—​that is, impressions printed from plates that were heavily printed but not reinked between pulls. blake used second pulls to great effect in many of his color prints, large and small. they were fainter and consequently needed more finishing and touching up—​of which he took full creative advantage. tatham took second pulls but did not touch up. for tatham, pulling second impressions was an occasional gamble. tatham printed posthumous songs copies b, c, e, and f on j whatman / 1831 paper in the same reddish-brown ink used in jerusalem, america, and europe. he sold copy b to hannah boddington (bb 426)—​presumably sometime in the early 1830s when he was selling works by blake to her brothers (bb 260)—​and copy c to her brother samuel around the same time. copy f was bound by 1869, with an inscription on a flyleaf noting that an early owner “dated the book 1836”; it was last seen in 1919, but seems to have reappeared in 1925 as copy j, colored in blake’s late style and sold as an original copy (bb 427-28). tatham printed songs copies d and p in black ink and copies a, g, and i in pale black ink.the impressions in songs copy d are mistakenly recorded as “sepia,” “brown,” “brownish black,” and “dark sepia” (keynes and wolf 67, bb 370, bbs 112, and rutter and gallup 330, respectively). copy h comprises impressions from various printings, but may have been initially printed in black ink (see section 7). the first owners of copies e and f/j and the black copies are not known.copy d was cut down and bound at the back of a copy of j. j. g. wilkinson’s edition of songs of innocence and of experience (london: w. pickering, 1839) and owned by the editor william odell elwell by 1840 (bb 426). elwell introduced wilkinson to tatham in 1838 (br[2] 557) and was presumably songs copy d’s first owner. songs copies a, g, and i were printed lightly and unevenly on leaves watermarked j whatman / 1831 that are heavier, with a rougher surface, than the j whatman / 1831 paper in jerusalem and other copies of songs. these heavier leaves, approximately 24.4 x 19.3 cm. with uneven edges (as though torn from sheets along a ruler rather than cut), appear to be sixths of approximately twenty-seven royal sheets.this thicker paper was also used for a few leaves in copies m and k and plates 1 and 52 in copy h, which measure 0.34 mm. thick. all other leaves in copy h are 0.18-0.20 mm. thick, according to essick, who measured them with a brown & sharpe blade micrometer calibrated to 0.01 mm. the images are more heavily embossed on the thicker leaves than thinner paper but are also slightly larger than lifetime impressions, signaling that they, too, were printed dry. despite the different type of paper, the manner in which copies a, g, and i were printed suggests that tatham was the printer and that he printed these copies in a separate session. plate 23 (second plate of “spring”) of songs copy i was washed very simply (illus. 16), reminiscent of the first copies of innocence (1789), and thus superficially resembles catherine’s work. 16. songs of innocence and of experience copy i, plate 23. victoria university library (university of toronto), blake suppl. no. 653. as essick notes, he and i were doubtful but entertained the possibility that catherine had been the colorist, although “com[ing] to no firm conclusions” (“marketplace, 2014,” illus. 3).bentley has speculated that “the somewhat simplistic coloring could … have been added before 1831 by catherine blake … or by an anonymous hand before or after 1831” (“checklist, 2014,” illus. 1a). now, after spending much time and effort analyzing the materials, practices, and styles of the posthumous printers, i am convinced the coloring is not by her—​nor could it be. i agree with essick that it is not colored by either of the different hands responsible for washing plates 38, 40 (illus. 17), and 45 in his songs copy h. the copies h and i impressions, representing three or four different colorists, are not up to the standards of catherine’s coloring—​or tatham’s.tatham was primarily a portrait painter and miniaturist, working in watercolors and pastels, specializing in portraits of children. he had exhibited two portraits at the royal academy in 1825 and a study of orphans for a monument in 1831 (graves, royal academy 7: 325); he also exhibited drawings at the british institution in 1828 and 1829 (graves, british institution 528). he began his career as a sculptor but exhibited works only in 1830, 1831, and 1832. in 1830, he exhibited a marble bust of c. h. tatham; in 1831, a marble bust of the earl of eldon as chancellor; in 1832, the same and a marble bust of john coley (graves, royal academy 7: 325). 17. songs of innocence and of experience copy h, plate 40. collection of robert n. essick. first, the coloring of plate 23 was essentially washing within the lines (blue, pink, and yellow) and over the lines (tendrils, in green). a grey wash of diluted ink was placed over the figure’s neck and chin and on the chest to define the arm, which merely follows the printed hatching. while the dark wash hides and distorts the child’s face, the faces of the sheep lack the fine pen and ink outlining that is required of their forms—​and that is present in all copies colored by the blakes. this lack of outlining eliminates details of chin, nose, ears, and eyes, and, in the case of the sheep on the left, the head itself. the colorist may have had a very early copy in mind, or simply allowed the printed lines and masses to define the forms, but he or she clearly did not know the design or have a feel for it. indeed, the plate 23 impression in songs copy c (illus. 18) reveals the kinds of subtle touches necessary to pull out the printed design’s forms and facial features—​which in turn reveal the difference between a colorist who knows the drawing and one who merely colors it in. 18. songs of innocence and of experience copy c, plate 23. library of congress, lessing j. rosenwald collection, pr4144.s6 1794. second, it is extremely unlikely that catherine would have collaborated with tatham only to color one of the 165 or so impressions printed on these heavier leaves. it seems equally unlikely that she would have allowed or tolerated tatham to print so heavily (and poorly) on dry paper—​or that he would have considered doing so in her presence. third, it is nearly inconceivable that catherine would have resorted to a style of coloring that she hadn’t used in thirty-five years in place of the more sophisticated style that blake had evolved and practiced in the last decade of illuminated printing. finally, the material evidence demonstrates that the posthumous impressions and copies of illuminated books divide into two coherent but sequential and mutually exclusive groups. hence, it is safe to conclude that tatham printed copy i, but its plate 23 was colored by an unknown hand.the coloring of illuminated books always falls into one of three categories: blake, catherine blake, and posthumous. these hands are not difficult to identify or differentiate. if the coloring is not by one of the first two colorists, then it is necessarily posthumous. there are at least ten different posthumous colorists that i know of: innocence copy t; songs copy j; songs copy m; two different ones in songs copy e/k; the same one in america copy q and europe copy l; plate 23 in songs copy i; different colorists in plates 38 and 40 (and possibly in the very slight washes in plate 45) in songs copy h; and one colorist in plates 7, 10, and 33 in the juel-jensen cluster. catherine appears to have played no part in producing any of the posthumous copies of songs. these copies were printed by tatham and advertised in his “life of blake” manuscript. at first, he seems to have written his biographical sketch, at least in part, “to recommend the sale of jerusalem (e)” (bb 259-60). as noted, jerusalem copy e was certainly one of the most valuable works that he inherited from catherine; the three monochrome copies of jerusalem that he printed were also valuable assets. tatham could have relied, however, on the biographies of smith (1828) or cunningham (1830) to introduce blake to jerusalem’s purchasers. he appears to have intended to publish his “life of blake” manuscript, because in it he advertises the songs and himself as the source of new copies of them and more. he states that he has the “type plates” of songs from catherine herself, “as well as all of [blake’s] works that remained unsold,” which included “writings, paintings, & a very great number of copper plates, of whom impressions may be obtained” (br[2] 688). tatham had apparently taken full ownership of all the copperplates, which in turn implicates him as the person who altered at least four of the plate designs in songs. in plate 9, the first plate of “the little black boy,” about 1 mm. of the mother’s hair and back have been trimmed away, presumably with a burin (illus. 19)—​easily detected when compared to a lifetime impression (illus. 20). 19. songs of innocence and of experience copy h, plate 9. collection of robert n. essick. 20. songs of innocence copy u, plate 9. houghton library, harvard university. typ 6500.34u. the bag of the chimney sweeper in experience (plate 37) has also been trimmed back about 1 mm. essick has pointed out similar tool work in the general title plate, where “some of the relief surfaces left of the upper figure’s left upper arm, above his head (thereby eliminating part of his left hand), and along the lower edge of his left leg and foot” have been cut away (“marketplace, 2013,” illus. 3). he has also found white-line work on the adult figure’s left leg in the experience frontispiece in copy h. these alterations place the plates in new states. essick has speculated that these “2nd st. alterations” may have been made by catherine or tatham “after blake’s death” (“marketplace, 2013,” illus. 3). since altering an artist’s original design is such a drastic thing to do, and since catherine appears to have had no hand in printing the songs and thus no hand in preparing the plates for printing, the revisions were made either by blake at the very end of his life, perhaps in preparation for copies of songs he hoped to print in 1827, or, more likely, by tatham.if blake made these revisions, then they are in songs copy x, printed for thomas griffiths wainewright in 1827 and the last copy blake is known to have printed. i have not examined this copy, which is in a private collection. on one hand, blake’s revising images he let stand for over thirty years seems as odd as tatham’s touching only four of fifty-four plates. on the other hand—​and from an aesthetic point of view—​tatham, the portraitist specializing in children, may have thought he was improving the proportions of the figures, not unlike d. g. rossetti’s smoothing out the rough outlines of blake’s verse in his edition of blake’s poetry in gilchrist’s life of blake. the illuminated plates were now fully his, and he was prepared to print them on speculation and on order. such behavior further supports the idea that posthumous printing began in earnest after catherine died. 7. 1831–32: posthumous songs reexamined complete copies of songs of innocence and of experience have fifty-four plates. songs of innocence, produced in 1789, originally had thirty-one plates. in october 1793, blake printed his prospectus to describe and advertise illuminated books and some other original graphic works he had for sale. he listed innocence as having “25 designs” and experience, which was forthcoming, as also having “25 designs” (e 693). he counted illustrations and vignettes, not copperplates, and advertised the two sections as separate works. over time, blake would move four poems comprising five plates (34-36, 53, 54) from innocence to experience, but he was never to have the same number of poems, plates, or “designs” in the two parts. he executed plate 1, the general title plate, in 1794 to announce “songs of innocence and of experience / shewing the two contrary states of the human soul.” this new title plate enabled him to combine autonomous books into a unified whole. copies of innocence and songs had varied plate orders until about 1818 (see bib 335-36). songs copies t, u, w, x, y, z, and aa, seven of the last eight copies blake produced (between 1818 and 1827), have the same order. this plate order, recorded as plates 1-54, is the standard order used by editors today and provides the numbers used to identify the copperplates and the poems/pages/designs in copies of innocence, experience, and songs. blake also produced a plate a, a design of five winged cherubs carrying a naked man, which he included only in songs copies b, c, and d as a tailpiece, and a plate b, “a divine image,” included by blake only in songs copy bb. tatham did not print plate a as part of his copies, but he did occasionally print and include plate b.blake books records only one impression of plate a printed posthumously, in the joseph holland collection (bb 372). in addition to variations in ink color and leaf size and weight, posthumous copies of songs vary in their number of plates. songs copies d, e, g, and p have only forty to forty-two of songs’ fifty-four plates and copy i has forty-four (but see below), while half a dozen or more “copies” are really just clusters of ten or more plates from experience, or scatterings of loose impressions named after owners or institutions.in blake books supplement, bentley adds ten more posthumously printed impressions that have recently been rediscovered (112); in sale catalogues for march 1871, he records what appears to be an untraced posthumous copy of innocence, which he refers to as copy q, speculating that it comprised twenty-five plates on twenty-five leaves. he also records an untraced copy of songs for november 1885, listed as copy dd in sale catalogues and as copy cc in his “checklist, 2013.” i suspect copy cc, which appears to be uncolored and missing four plates, one of which is “the sick rose”—​a posthumous impression that is loose and part of the miscellaneous copy o (bb 371)—​is an untraced set of posthumous impressions. essick adds an impression of the “introduction” to experience (plate 30) to the list of known posthumous pulls and provides a detailed description of the forty-two plate songs copy p (“marketplace, 2006” and “marketplace, 2013” respectively). only copies a, b, c, and f/j have fifty-four plates. copy h has fifty-seven impressions. given their diversity, tatham’s ten posthumous copies appear to have been carelessly printed and indifferently compiled from stacks of impressions. in fact, while tatham printed impressions per plate, he intended, as i will demonstrate below, that each copy comprise fifty-three or fifty-four plates arranged in the standard order. why, then, are five copies either incomplete or completed by someone other than tatham? why do some copies have more than one ink color and one copy has more than fifty-four plates? why are two copies not in the standard order? an examination of songs copy a provides the answers. songs copy a originally consisted of fifty-three plates printed in light black ink on heavy paper watermarked j whatman / 1831; the leaves are 24.5 x 19.3 cm.; the printing quality is uneven throughout; and the heavy paper is the same as that in songs copies g and i. songs copy a included plate b, but not plates 15 and 45 (“laughing song” and “the little vagabond”), which blake had etched on the recto and verso of the same copperplate (bb 382). plates 15 and 45 are also missing from songs copies d, g, i, and p—​that is, from all copies printed in light or dark black ink. plate 15 is also missing from songs copy h, whose plate 45 is in sepia and thus possibly a replacement for a missing black impression.copy h has twenty-one of its twenty-five innocence plates in black ink; plates 18, 19, 24, and 26 are in light sepia. plate 15 is missing from innocence copy t, a posthumous copy also printed in black ink and later finished to resemble innocence copy b (bib 247-49). the consistent absence of one or both of these poems from posthumous copies of innocence and songs printed in black ink suggests that their shared copperplate was not present when these copies were printed. plates 15 and 45 are present, however, in copies b, c, f/j, and e, all printed in dark and light sepia inks. the different inks, paper weights and sizes, and the absence and presence of plates 15 and 45 among the copies indicate possibly three different printing sessions. in 1864, b. m. pickering, son of the publisher william pickering, sold songs copy a to the british museum. it comprised fifty-four plates in two parts: forty of the original black impressions were stitched together and fourteen impressions were then stitched to them to complete the copy.bentley records copy a (before the addition of plates) as having forty-two plates, sequenced as follows: 1-14, 16-29, 33-36, 38-43, 46, 49, 52, 53 (bb 378, 380). plates 52 and 53 appear to have been added with plates 48 and 54, however, and these four plates come between the first forty and the last ten plates. the fourteen impressions included plates 45 and b, but not plate 15, and they may have been added in two stages. plates 52, 53, 48, and 54 (in this order) were added first. plate 53 (24.4 x 19.4 cm.) was printed in the same light black ink on the same shorter and thick j whatman / 1831 paper as the first forty leaves; plates 52, 48, and 54, however, were printed in a darker black ink on the longer, thinner j whatman / 1832 paper (approximately 28 x 19.4 cm.). following plates 52, 53, 48, and 54 are plates 30, 31, 47, 37, 32, b, 51, 50, 44, and 45, all printed on the thinner, longer j whatman paper in light reddish to orangish-brown ink.bentley records the last eleven impressions as “brown” (bb 426n1), but also records the last ten impressions as “brown” (bb 370), which is correct. plate 54 is in black ink, though on the same paper as the orangish-brown impressions. plate b is in a darkish sepia (reddish brown), very similar to the ink in posthumous songs copies b, c, f/j, and e and posthumous copies of jerusalem. these specific impressions were never part of copy a; they did, however, replace thirteen prints that were once part of songs copy a’s original fifty-three plates. the evidence that songs copy a originally contained all of these plates except plate 45 and that all thirteen were deliberately extracted—​not missing in part or by accident—​becomes clear when the added plates are returned to the group of forty impressions:   15,       30, 31, 32,         37,             44, 45,   47, 48,   50, 51, 52, 53, 54, b 1-14,   16-27, 28, 29,       33, 34, 35, 36,   38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43,     46,     49             so aligned, the two sets of impressions reveal that songs copy a was originally arranged in blake’s standard order. for the core group of forty impressions to retain this plate order reveals that songs copy a initially had a complement of fifty-three plates and that the added impressions are replacements for impressions that were once present. tatham appears certainly responsible for songs copy a’s plate order, given that copies b, c, and f/j are in the same order.copy c is in the standard order despite also having plate b and no plate 52. the consistent pattern of plate sequencing in these copies strongly suggests that a single person did it—​that is, it is difficult to imagine that multiple later owners of these copies would all order their copies in the same way, independently. the only owner common to all these copies was tatham, and thus he must have been the original collator. for the plates of these copies to have been sequenced according to blake’s standard order—​long before editors recognized that there was such an order—​indicates that tatham was familiar with one of the late copies t, u, w, x, y, z, or aa and used it as a model. as noted, copy y belonged to calvert (bb 424), his friend and fellow ancient, and would probably have been available for him to examine. tatham abridged at least five (and possibly seven) other copies of songs and ordered the plates in the same manner as copy a. songs copy i, for example, was probably fifty-three plates, minus plates 15/45 but possibly with plate b, all heavily printed in light black ink on the same approximately 24 x 19 cm. leaves of the thick j whatman / 1831 paper used for copies a and g. with the extraction of a cluster of ten experience plates, it was reduced to forty-three impressions. bentley records the innocence plate order for songs copy i as 1-14, 16-25, 48, 26-27. he records the experience plate order as 28, 33, 29, 34-36, 38-43, 46, 49, 52-54, which he notes corresponds to no known order (bb 378, 380).plate 48 was printed on thinner, narrower paper (bb 374n47) and appears to have been added to the copy at a later date. blake books excludes plate 29 and includes plate 30 in the list of copy i plates (bb 371, 380), but includes plate 29 in the list of plates with the watermark (bb 371). the copy was recently sold to victoria university library, university of toronto, and essick records that plate 29 is present and plate 30 is absent. he also notes that blake books supplement states that copy i is in the keynes collection, fitzwilliam museum (bbs 129), but this is an error for copy l (lowercase l) (“marketplace, 2014”). blake books describes the ink color as “grey” (bb 371), but, as with copies a and g, the ink looks to me like a pale black ink thinly applied. if, however, we reinsert the extracted experience plates and the missing plates 15 and 45 into the group of forty-three, then the number and order of the plates in copy i can be recovered:   15,     30,     31, 32,       37,             44, 45,   47, [48],   50, 51,       b 1-14,   16-27, 28,   33, 29,     34, 35, 36,   38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43,     46,     49,     52, 53, 54   plate 48 was added at a later date and plates 33 (“holy thursday”) and 29 (experience title page) were transposed—​presumably by accident. initially complete with fifty-three plates sequenced in the standard plate order, songs copy i was abridged to forty-three plates, its size when sold at sotheby’s on 29 april 1862, lot 195, as “songs of innocence and experience 43” for £4.6.0 to james toovey (bb 428). songs copy e was sold in the same 1862 auction with forty plates (lot 196): “another set, wanting three plates 40.” it was also acquired by toovey, for £1.6.0.songs copies i and e were both sold uncolored; copy i, however, sold for more than three times the price of copy e, perhaps because the impressions were bound.  copy e was printed in both dark and light reddish-brown inks—​which is to say, the same basic ink, diluted and replenished over the course of the printing session, used in copies b, c, and f/j. like these copies, it probably had fifty-four plates, including plates 15 and 45 but excluding plate b. of course, the idea that it was missing only “three plates” when sold was relative to the forty-three plate copy i in lot 195. it was actually missing fourteen impressions, all of which had been extracted from experience and match the cluster of experience plates missing from copies a and i.copy e has a very intriguing history. it was posthumously colored in imitation of songs copy y after it was sold in 1862; it was later completed by the addition of thirteen plates extracted from blake’s songs copy k, which were also colored posthumously but not to match the forty copy e impressions. for the history of songs copies e/k, see bib 299-302. as chart i demonstrates, the same cluster of plates extracted from songs copies a, i, and e are also missing from copies d, g, and p. chart ii demonstrates that the same cluster of experience plates missing from songs copies a, i, e, d, g, and p are present in small clusters of impressions now widely distributed. chart iii records extant loose impressions from posthumous songs of innocence. 79. songs copy g1–2 has plate 44, but it was printed in orangish-brown ink and not with the other impressions making up the copy; its plate 31 was printed on a smaller leaf of paper, different from the other leaves (bb 374n48). both plates appear to have been added to the copy later than the other impressions. plates 1, 2, and 11 from innocence appear to have been extracted by a dealer or owner, not by tatham. chart i: impressions missing from posthumous copies of songs [plate numbers printed in red are absent because they were not originally printed as part of these copies; plate numbers highlighted in yellow are present now but were added to the copy later by someone other than tatham.] a   15,   30, 31, 32,         37,             44, 45,   47, 48,   50, 51, 52, 53, 54,  b d   15,   30, 31, 32,         37,             44, 45,   47, 48,   50, 51,     54,  b g1-2 1, 2,   11,  15,   30, 31, 32,         37,     40,       44, 45,   47, 48,   50, 51,        b i   15,   30, 31, 32,         37,             44, 45,   47, 48,   50, 51,        b p   15,   30, 31, 32,         37,             44, 45,   47, 48,   50, 51,        b e       30, 31, 32, 33,       37,       41,     44, 45, 46, 47,     50, 51, 52, 53      chart ii: extant loose experience impressions from posthumous copies of songs impressions in black l     29,       33,         38, 39,   41, 42, 43,     46,     49,   51, 52        m     54    n       30, 31,           37,             44,     47,     50,          b lc       30, 31, 32,         37,             44,     47                  victoria u. 30,   48  these impressions from songs copy p were from the blake collection of g. e. bentley, jr. they, along with the rest of bentley’s collection, are now housed in the library of victoria university of the university of toronto. keynes   b juel-jensen/danson 44   harvard 29, 30,   37   tate 48 (2 impressions) beinecke 50,   b dartmouth 36   wesleyan 46,   49   browns k (reddish brown) 30,   43,   45,   48,   52   victoria u. 28,   40,   44, 45, 46,   48  see note 80. juel-jensen/danson 33   victoria u. 38,   53(orangish brown) o (victoria u. [bentley])     39 (orangish brown) o (untraced) 31 (yellowish brown), 38 (reddish brown), +14 others untraced 42,   51 chart iii: extant loose impressions from posthumous songs of innocence grey/light black                                                     victoria u.                                             24   tate     3 (2 impressions),                       22       morgan (from copy n) 2,                     13                         fitzwilliam (from copy m) 3,             10, 11,               19,     22       victoria u. [bentley]                                           22       n   2                                               untraced                                   18               browns juel-jensen/danson 7,     10                               brown u.                         13,             20, 21         n                         13                         because the same cluster of experience plates was extracted from six copies of songs, more loose impressions of experience plates than innocence plates are extant. the overlap between extant loose experience impressions and the cluster of experience plates extracted is not one to one. nor could it be, since nine or ten of the extracted experience plates from one of the abridged copies of songs (probably copy e) provided the plates used to complete songs copy a. also, loose impressions extracted from clusters by later owners and sold separately are likely to be missing, perhaps one day to be found in extra-illustrated copies of life of blake or nollekens and his times.george a. smith had extra-illustrated copies of gilchrist’s life of blake and swinburne’s critical essay in his april 1880 auction at christie’s (see note 125). both volumes are unrecorded in bentley’s blake books and sale catalogues and appear to be untraced. for other extra-illustrated copies of gilchrist’s life, see bib 207. even without a one-to-one mapping, the missing experience impressions are too well represented among the extant loose impressions to be coincidental; the extensive overlap reveals that the plates missing from copies a, d, e, g, i, and p were indeed printed and were once part of these copies. they were deliberately extracted from completed copies to form subsets of experience plates. for six complete copies to have been similarly abridged reveals a shared location for the copies and a single owner. that owner was necessarily tatham. for all the copies to have been initially in standard order reveals the same. this last bibliographical feature is not apparent, however, because copy g is now in a curious variant of that order. an examination shows that it was almost certainly reordered by a later owner. songs copy g (now divided into innocence and experience, or copies g1 and g2, with twenty-three and eighteen plates respectively) was printed in black ink on the thicker (shorter) leaves used for songs copies a and i. the following experience plates appear to have been extracted: 30, [31], 32, 37, 40, [44], 47, 48, 50, 51, b (see chart i). how long songs copy g—​or any of the abridged copies—​remained as initially printed is not known. but at some point a cluster of eleven experience plates was extracted, reducing copy g from presumably fifty-three plates (-15/45, +b) to forty-two plates.copy g2 has eighteen plates, but plates 31 and 44 appear to have been added at a later date, which suggests that the original impressions of plates 31 and 44 were among the initially extracted plates. plates 15 and 45 were not printed for this copy; plate b was presumably printed and included, implying that songs copy g initially had fifty-three plates. reinserting the extracted experience plates into the experience section of copy g’s impressions reveals the copy’s initial number and order of plates. surprisingly, the plate order is the one blake recorded in the “order of the songs” manuscript:     30, [31,]   40,         32, 45,               [44,] 50, 48,     51, 37, 47, b 28, 29,   [31], 38,   42, 34, 35, 36,     33, 49, 41, 39, 52, 54, 43, [44],     53, 46         tatham had inherited this manuscript and bundled it as part of a volume of blakeana comprising mostly illuminated prints and proofs and posthumous prints. the volume was acquired at an unknown date by george a. smith, who had it bound by 1853. only songs copy v, produced c. 1821, follows the manuscript’s plate order. as noted, vine, who owned copy v, bought the posthumous jerusalem copy j from tatham between 1832 and 1838. technically, tatham could have borrowed songs copy v from vine or used the manuscript in his possession to arrange the plates in songs copy g.songs copy v was sold posthumously for vine at christie’s on 24 april 1838 to henry george bohn for £7.15s.; he offered it in his 1841 catalogue without a price; john bohn offered it in his 1843 catalogue for £5.5s. (bentley, sale catalogues). if songs copy v, instead of the manuscript, was used as the model, then the modeling, if done by tatham, was done before 1838. tatham seems more likely, however, to have followed the plate order of his own posthumous copies. a far more likely suspect is h. buxton forman (1842–1917), a bibliophile, editor of shelley and keats, and, with t. j. wise, literary forger of nineteenth-century “first” editions.for a brilliant unmasking of forman and wise, see john carter and graham pollard’s an enquiry into the nature of certain nineteenth century pamphlets (1934). forman owned copy g and had the impressions mounted on linen stubs and bound in two volumes no earlier than 1880 and most likely after 1885.an inscription stamped in gilt on the inside of the front covers identifies that the two volumes were “bound by riviere & son for h. buxton forman.” riviere took his grandson as a partner in 1880. he could sequence the unbound impressions as he pleased. he would have known of blake’s “order of the songs” either from bernard quaritch, who acquired the manuscript in 1880 as part of smith’s blakeana volume (bb 339), or from william muir, who bought the volume and sequenced the plates in his 1885 facsimiles of songs according to this order. muir also reproduced the manuscript as an appendix to his hand-colored lithographic facsimile of the marriage of heaven and hell (1885). forman, a book collector with a fine blake collection (bb 666), knew quaritch and owned a facsimile copy of marriage that may have been muir’s.forman’s library sold at anderson galleries, 15-17 march 1920 (part 1) and 26 april 1920 (part 2); the blake items were in lots 35-72 and 46-65 respectively. the sale included early editions of blake’s songs edited by richard herne shepherd (1868) and by w. m. rossetti (1874), neither of which arranged the songs in the plate order used in songs copy g. unfortunately, the description of the “reprint” of marriage (lot 64 in part 1) does not identify the publication, which could also have been camden hotten’s chromolithographic facsimile (1868). the circumstantial evidence for suspecting forman of reordering songs copy g is strong because he had a second copy of songs, copy h, bound in the same manner by the same binder and, with one variant, in the same plate order.in songs copy h, plates 2 and 3 are transposed (that is, the order runs “1, 1, 3, 2, 4, 6, 7, 8 …”). the odds of tatham’s sequencing only two of ten copies in this plate order and forman’s acquiring both of them are very small. forman seems more likely to have acquired both copies unbound and, because they are different sizes, as distinctly self-evident volumes. the copy g impressions are approximately 24.2 x 19.4 cm. and the copy h impressions are 28.0 x 19.3 cm. (width varies slightly). songs copy h comprises plates 1-14, 16-54, and b, and duplicates of plates 1, 52, and 53, for a total of fifty-seven plates. the duplicates of plates 1 and 52 are the size of the copy g impressions, which suggests that forman was unlikely to have compiled the two copies himself from a stack of loose impressions, because had he done so the black duplicate plates, given their size, would presumably have gone into copy g, not h. he appears to have acquired copies g and h already defined as copies, probably at separate times. copy h is numbered 1-57 in pencil just below the lower left corner of the plates, presumably by or for the binder, who could use copy h to order the plates of copy g.the histories of copies g and h before forman are not known. it is also a possibility that forman acquired copy h already numbered and used it to resequence the plates of copy g. forman seems to have acquired two unbound and different size copies most likely in the standard order, which he then resequenced to follow what he presumably thought was blake’s “first” or intended order. as originally printed by tatham, copy h probably comprised fifty-four plates, like his other posthumous copies; he seems unlikely to have added duplicate plates at a time when he was extracting plates from his other copies, which suggests they were added by an owner. moreover, like copy a, copy h contains black and sepia plates. among its impressions in sepia are plates 30, 31, 32, 37, 44, 48, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, b—​plates extracted from copy a and the basic cluster of plates extracted from copies d, e, g, i, and p—​suggesting that tatham may have printed copy h in black ink, as he had copies a, d, g, i, and p, and extracted the same cluster of experience plates that he had from these copies.copy h has thirty-one plates in light and dark black inks, twenty-five impressions in light and dark orangish-brown inks, and its last plate is in reddish-brown ink, the color used in songs copies b, c, f/j, and e. songs copy a has black and sepia impressions because an owner (presumably pickering) completed it with plates originally extracted from songs copy e; these extracted plates were sold separately and became part of “copy” o, which is not really a copy at all but a miscellany of posthumous impressions that pickering also owned (bb 429). pickering, in other words, cannibalized his incomplete set of impressions (copy o) to complete copy a. songs copy e was also completed by an owner, but with thirteen lifetime impressions, all taken from songs copy k and posthumously colored (see note 78). copy h may have followed a similar path, from being printed as a complete copy to being abridged to being completed by dealers or owners with loose sepia and black impressions and embellished with three duplicate impressions in black ink. innocence copy t appears to have followed a similar path, only in reverse. it is the only posthumous copy of innocence and as such is an anomaly. it follows the plate order of innocence copy b, the coloring of which it copies exactly. in other words, it is a forgery—​but not by tatham. its transformation must have occurred between c. 1832 and 1910, when it sold anonymously at hodgson’s already bound and colored. whoever owned innocence copy t had access to innocence copy b, because coloring the copy t impressions required borrowing copy b and copying its impressions carefully.the early provenance of innocence copy b is unknown. it was acquired by r. h. clarke, the son of hayley’s friend j. s. clarke, and bound after 1825 (bb 404-05). it resurfaced in 1906 when sold anonymously at sotheby’s. the early provenance of copy t is also unknown; it sold anonymously at hodgson’s in 1910, colored and bound (lot 246). it was listed in maggs brothers’ catalogue in 1911 as “brilliantly coloured by william blake” and “including the little girl lost, and the little girl found, from the songs of experience” (cat. no. 268, p. 14, lot 35). hodgson’s listed it as having 27 plates and maggs brothers listed it as having 29 plates. the volume remains in its original binding but shows no evidence of two plates’ having been inserted or added after the binding, which suggests that the cataloguer for hodgson’s may have miscounted. innocence copy t has all the markings of a once abridged (incomplete) copy of songs that was revised to be a complete copy of innocence. it has twenty-nine impressions and is missing plates 15 and 53. as noted, these two plates are missing in songs copy a, also printed in black ink, plate 15 because it was not printed and plate 53 because it was extracted along with other experience plates. had innocence copy t been printed initially as a complete copy of songs and abridged to forty or forty-three plates, it would have had plates 34, 35, 36, and 54 in black ink but no plates 15 and 53. in other words, copy t would have needed an additional eleven to fourteen plates to be a complete copy of songs, or to have had all the experience plates removed except for plates 34, 35, 36, and 54 (plates first published in innocence) to be a convincing early copy of innocence. the latter option was taken and the volume was deliberately transformed to look original by being colored in imitation of innocence copy b. the person responsible for its transformation knew that it was financially more lucrative as an original colored copy of innocence than an incomplete and uncolored copy of songs—​let alone as a posthumous copy. songs copies a, d, e, g, i, and p appear either incomplete or haphazardly compiled and reassembled until examined in the context of their production. from this context, patterns emerge revealing tatham’s intentions. these copies, and probably copy h and innocence copy t, were all initially complete, with fifty-three or fifty-four plates, but abridged to between forty and forty-three plates by the extraction of the same cluster of experience plates. the abridged copies were coherent, comprising one general title plate, two section title plates, two full-page frontispieces, twenty-three innocence and twelve to fifteen experience plates. the subsets were also coherent, in that they comprised only experience plates and equaled the number of experience text plates left in the abridged copies. cannibalizing complete copies was a drastic act. i read it as a sign that tatham could no longer produce new impressions. his rationale for which experience plates to extract eludes me, but the absence of technical and aesthetic reasons for their extraction suggests the same, that he had lost the use of the rolling press. by abridging copies and creating independent clusters of experience prints, tatham could increase his stock without having to print more copies. in effect, cannibalizing what he had on hand compensated for the loss of the press. he appears to have sold the experience clusters as autonomous subsets, as is revealed by songs copy e plates in miscellanies like copy o, as well as in volumes of blakeana, and by the presence of experience plates from songs copies a, g, n, p, and/or i in volumes of blakeana once owned by george a. smith and robert arthington (bb 337, 131). new information about the tatham family strongly supports the hypothesis that tatham lost the use of the rolling press by the end of 1832. 8. 1832: posthumous printing stops tatham appears to have started printing blake’s works in late 1831, at the earliest, and stopped printing them just a year later. no posthumously printed impression has a watermark later than 1832. dated paper, though, does not date the cessation of posthumous printing. however, three significant events occurred in tatham’s life at this time and all are worth examining carefully, because each could have contributed to the cessation of the posthumous printing of blake’s illuminated books. one was the negative influence of a millenarian sect led by edward irving; one was the financial problems of c. h. tatham; and one was frederick tatham’s vacating his house and studio. anne gilchrist described frederick tatham as “the son of an architect of some repute … and [he] was himself originally a sculptor. he abandoned that early, and took to portraits in crayons” (h. h. gilchrist 129). although most biographies refer to him only as a sculptor, his first exhibited works were portraits and sketches, after which he exhibited marble busts at the royal academy 1830–32, when his studio was in lisson grove (see note 67). he returned to the royal academy in 1835 and continued to exhibit works there until 1854—​in all, slightly more than sixty sketches and drawings in watercolors and pastels. mrs. gilchrist was right about his being “originally a sculptor” and having “abandoned that early”; she appears also to have been right about his having “enacted the holocaust of blake manuscripts—​not designs, i think, as i have heard from his own lips.” she says that he “was at that time a zealous irvingite and says he was instigated to it by some very influential members of the sect on the ground that blake was inspired; but quite from a wrong quarter—​by satan himself—​and was to be cast out as an ‘unclean spirit.’ carlyle says he is quite certain irving himself never had anything at all to do with this” (h. h. gilchrist 129, 131). edward irving (1792–1834) was a presbyterian minister from scotland who gained fame and notoriety in london as a fiery preacher and for his conviction that he had prophetic and healing powers. he was excommunicated by the presbytery of london in 1830 and established the irvingite or holy catholic apostolic church in 1832. he and thomas carlyle, an early friend who wrote an article on irving after he died for fraser’s magazine, became estranged after the preacher embraced speaking in tongues. still, carlyle believed irving could not have influenced tatham to behave so destructively. bentley collects the pertinent evidence and makes a convincing case that, unfortunately, a holocaust did occur (br[2] 558-60). the evidence, such as it is, does not reveal exactly when the conflagration occurred, how long it lasted, or how much or what it consumed. were the cremation of manuscripts and the cessation of posthumous printing chronologically overlapping but causally exclusive events? or did tatham’s reasons for burning manuscripts influence his decision to stop producing blake’s “printed manuscripts”? did he burn manuscripts upon reading them, or did he make a pile for one giant bonfire? in other words, was the conflagration an ongoing or a single event? could such a conflagration explain the absence of illuminated plates—​the metal manuscripts, as it were—​only ten of which were extant by 1861 (see below)? as noted, blake told crabb robinson in february 1826 that he had “written more than voltaire or rousseau—​six or seven epic poems as long as homer and 20 tragedies as long as macbeth” (br[2] 496). ironically, he also told him that he had “been tempted to burn my mss but my wife wont let me” (br[2] 435).blake also credited catherine for the completion of ugolino and his sons in prison, a tempera from about 1826. its final version followed “the unfinished pencil drawing from the dante series, which was begun in 1824 and left unfinished at blake’s death in 1827” (butlin #805). blake mentions this work in a letter to linnell, 25 april 1827: “as to ugolino &c i never supposed that i should sell them my wife alone is answerable for their having existed in any finishd state” (e 784). tatham avoided the subject of manuscripts in his “life of blake,” but in his 11 april 1829 letter to the unknown patron he describes blake as being as productive—​in diverse media—​as blake had proclaimed to robinson: “mr. blake’s industry was such that i have often heard him say that he has written more than milton and shakspeare put together; he has engraved large quantities of plates, and has painted an immense number of elaborate and laborious fresco-pictures, highly finished as miniatures” (br[2] 495). tatham knew blake’s comments on fresco from the descriptive catalogue, if not also directly from blake, and he knew what catherine blake had brought with her to the mayfair studio in spring 1828. among blake’s effects were many copperplates and presumably the large painting that he was working on when he died—​a version of the last judgment, mentioned in nollekens as having over a thousand figures (br[2] 617) and estimated to be 7 x 5 feet (butlin #648). however, tatham probably had not read blake’s manuscripts or taken inventory of them, since they were not yet his property. the many witnesses of tatham’s admission that he had burned manuscripts are corroborated by the survival of relatively few blake manuscripts. calvert’s son raises the possibility that copperplates may also have been destroyed. he says his father went “to tatham and implored him to reconsider the matter, and spare ‘the good man’s precious work;’ notwithstanding which, blocks, plates, drawings, and mss, i understand, were destroyed” (br[2] 559). the artist and collector john deffett francis (1815–1901) claims to have witnessed the destruction and is clear as to who instigated it. in his copy of gilchrist’s life of blake, where gilchrist describes blake’s considerable stock of works as having “since been widely dispersed; some destroyed” (1: 367), francis wrote, “why not tell the truth! f t burnt hundreds of them at the desire of edward irving who said ‘they were done under the instigation of the devil’[;] this i know for i saw it done[.] j d francis” (br[2] 559). he made a similar comment in his copy of w. m. rossetti’s the poetical works of william blake (london, 1874). rossetti repeats gilchrist’s claim, noting that “swedenborgians, irvingites, or other extreme sectaries, beset the then youthful custodian of these priceless relics [blake manuscripts], and persuaded him to make a holocaust of them” (lvii). francis commented, “fredk. tatham. why he was a married man! old enough to leave sculpture for water colr portraiture,” underlining “irvingites” to affirm “that it was this sect in particular which had spurred tatham to a mass burning of blake’s writings” (skretkowicz 53). whether or not francis actually witnessed such horror, his knowledge and memories of tatham appear more reliable than carlyle’s disbelief that irving could have had such a negative influence. francis left swansea in 1834, at the age of nineteen, to pursue a painting career in london, where he “immediately befriended frederick tatham, from whom he acquired a number of blake’s works” (skretkowicz 53). works that appear to have been acquired that year include eight posthumous prints: america plates 2, 5, 7, and 15, europe plates 6, 7, and 12, and jerusalem plate 35 (essick, “marketplace, 1987,” illus. 1; bb 107, 163, 263-64).francis inscribed “1834” on the versos of america plate 7 and europe plate 6. by 1878, he had donated around 1500 pieces to the british museum, including sixty by blake (skretkowicz 53). francis’s notes increase the probability that a holocaust did occur and that whatever its contents and duration it may have occurred in or continued until 1834, while irving, who died on 7 december 1834, was still alive. richmond, tatham’s friend, fellow ancient, and brother-in-law, implies that the destruction may have begun as early as c. 1832, the approximate date of tatham’s “life of blake” manuscript. nearly thirty years after the fact, he told j. c. strange of a conflagration and alluded to the mind capable of it: “some years ago 4 of us who knew blake well resolved to write down all the particulars we knew concerning him—​which was done, & formed a considerable number of pages, when one of us who had the acct fell into some fanatical notions and destroyed the papers, flung them on the fire, unhappily” (br[2] 723). while “some years ago” does not explicitly date the biography, “4 of us” implies the inclusion of tatham and probably calvert and palmer—​and the “lisson grove” address on tatham’s manuscript supports a c. 1832 date, because this is where he lived in 1831 and 1832 (see section 9). perhaps tatham destroyed his colleagues’ biographical sketches because they deviated heretically from his idea and image of blake, possibly honestly addressing blake’s religious unorthodoxy and ideas of “gratified desire” (e 474). whatever the reason, by this time—​shortly after catherine died and while he was printing illuminated books—​tatham possessed blake’s images and texts and styled himself as blake’s agent. he was indeed positioned to destroy the blake manuscripts that he considered deviant. did irving’s “fanatical notions” also guide tatham to repress or even burn blake’s “printed manuscripts”? tatham did not print the marriage of heaven and hell, visions of the daughters of albion, or the book of urizen, the books that overtly attack conventional morality or religion.bentley correctly notes that tatham avoided printing blake’s books that attack conventional morality and religion, but he is mistaken about “tatham’s authenticating signature on many surviving drawings indicat[ing] that he thought these were less satanic—​or perhaps more saleable” (br[2] 560). the works that tatham “vouched” for were sketches and scraps that he sold after 1863, when the life of blake expanded blake’s market (see viscomi, “signing large color prints” 402n52). but he did print america, europe, and jerusalem, books filled with sexually explicit imagery and themes. indeed, images from jerusalem prepared by w. j. linton in the early 1860s for reproduction in gilchrist’s life of blake were excluded by d. g. rossetti and macmillan, the publisher, for being pornographic (see viscomi, “blake after blake” 233-38).regarding blake’s visions, anne gilchrist said: “it would be perfectly useless to attempt to handle this side of blake’s writings—​ … mr. macmillan is far more inexorable against any shade of heterodoxy in morals than in religion—​and … in fact, poor ‘flustered propriety’ would have to be most tenderly and indulgently dealt with …” (h. h. gilchrist 128). tatham may have chosen to print these titles because, being large and more pictorial, they seemed more saleable—​or because they were commissioned, as may have been the case with jerusalem, copies of which he sold to samuel boddington, butts, and vine. the printing of these works also stopped, however. just as there were illuminated books that tatham presumably chose not to print, were there also illuminated plates that he either objected to printing or extracted from what he printed? as discussed in the previous section, he systematically and deliberately extracted the same cluster of experience plates from songs copies a, d, e, g, i, and p, and possibly from copy h and the copy transformed into innocence copy t. this cluster included “the chimney sweeper” from experience, “the garden of love,” “the little vagabond,” and “a little boy lost.” could the extraction of these and the other plates signify tatham’s objections to their content? “the chimney sweeper” is overtly subversive: and because i am happy, & dance & sing, they think they have done me no injury: and are gone to praise god & his priest & king who make up a heaven of our misery. (9-12) “the garden of love” is anti-clerical: and priests in black gowns, were walking their rounds, and binding with briars, my joys & desires. (11-12) “the little vagabond” is devilishly clever—​or just devilish: but if at the church they would give us some ale. …………………………………………………… and god like a father rejoicing to see, his children as pleasant and happy as he: would have no more quarrel with the devil or the barrel but kiss him & give him both drink and apparel. (5, 13-16)essick informs me that these lines were the probable cause for “the little vagabond” being excluded from the second printing of the pickering edition of the songs, 1839 (private correspondence). and “a little boy lost” fails to recognize the “glories” of old or new church: the priest sat by and heard the child. in trembling zeal he siez’d his hair: …………………………………………… and bound him in an iron chain. and burn’d him in a holy place. (9-10, 20-21) if tatham found these texts heretical, is it possible that he not only extracted the impressions from their copies but also destroyed their plates? by 1861, alexander gilchrist had requested original illuminated plates from tatham, hoping to reproduce a selection as electrotypes for his biography, but by then only ten plates—​all from songs—​were extant. according to gilchrist, “the gentleman [tatham] from whom they were obtained had once the entire series in his possession; but all save these ten were stolen by an ungrateful black he had befriended, who sold them to a smith as old metal” (1: 126). however, given the probable destruction of blake manuscripts by tatham, one must wonder if the “ungrateful black” was a fiction to cover up his destruction—​or sale—​of these copperplates, worth more at the time as metal than as art. moreover, one must wonder if the paucity of proofs for marriage, visions, and urizen, in comparison to those for america, europe, jerusalem, and songs (the books printed by tatham), is due to their having met a fiery fate. the posthumous production of songs, with ten or eleven copies in different inks and on different papers all presumably printed in 1831 and 1832, appears to have tapered off over time. with jerusalem, america, and europe, on the other hand, production appears to have suddenly stopped. the apparent concurrence of burning blake’s manuscripts and halting posthumous printing—​or, chronologically, vice versa—​seems unlikely to have been a coincidence. but were the cessation of posthumous printing and “fanatical notions” causally linked? at first glance, that appears to be the case, but looking further into the production and reception of the posthumous copies of songs suggests otherwise, because the experience impressions extracted were not destroyed; they were sold as separate subsets of songs and as loose impressions in volumes of blakeana. tatham extracted them as a salesman, not as a censor. by extracting the same cluster six or more times, tatham was able to extend and diversify his stock of saleable blake artifacts without printing more plates. generally speaking, stock is produced in anticipation of demand, and production is stopped when demand is wanting. perhaps, then, with ten to eleven copies of songs in hand from three different printings, tatham had more supply than demand and stopped production as a business decision. that kind of stoppage, though, does not explain a permanent cessation in production—​or, more importantly, the abridgement of copies of songs. it only raises other questions: why didn’t tatham resume printing after having sold books to samuel, hannah, and thomas boddington, butts, vine, peel, ferguson, and, apparently, elwell? why didn’t he print subsets of experience plates instead of extracting them from completed copies? the failure to resume printing suggests either a loss of interest or an inability to do so—​that tatham either deliberately relinquished or inadvertently lost his means of production. extracting impressions and abridging copies of songs appear to reflect his desire to continue selling blake’s prints, which in turn suggests that the loss of the press—​the only means by which he could continue producing new copies of blake’s books—​was due to events beyond his control. in addition to falling under the influence of irving, tatham experienced two other events in 1832 that altered his life. the first was his father’s vacating the mayfair office where the press was presumably housed, and the second was his vacating his residence in lisson grove. 9. 1832: financial troubles at 34 alpha road, 1 queen street, and 20 lisson grove north by hosting catherine blake at his mayfair office from spring 1828 to early spring 1829 and, as i will argue below, probably retaining the press there until he vacated the premises, c. h. tatham enabled blake’s widow and, afterwards, his son to print illuminated works. his hospitality makes his life, home, and office worth examining. unfortunately, most descriptions of the man and his residence are inaccurate. according to lowell libson, tatham was uncompromising and litigious and this tended to alienate patrons and, in spite of his prodigious talent, his career was on the wane by the time that linnell met him. linnell wrote that tatham was “naturally a proud man which appeared unhappily the case in the latter part of his career, for had he but been wise enough to accept commissions for works of inferior size he might have been fully employed, but he stood out for large jobs from the titled great and would not undertake jobs from builders.” the result was that tatham had to abandon his mayfair house for the more modest alpha cottage, alpha road, marylebone, where blake, haydon, palmer and linnell were frequent visitors. tatham finally ended his days as warden of the holy trinity hospital, greenwich.lowell libson ltd. british art online catalogue for linnell’s 1812 drawing of c. h. tatham and his daughter julia <http://​www.​lowell-libson.​com/​pictures/​charles-​heathcote-​tatham-​with-​subsidiary-​sketches-​of-​julia-​tatham>. these descriptions, drawn from the entries in the dnb of 1898 and odnb of 2004 and repeated in both the wikipedia entry on c. h. tatham and at the tatham family history site, are mistaken. they conflate events from different periods and connect others that are unrelated. linnell met tatham sr. in 1812 (see note 5), when linnell joined the rev. john martin’s baptist church, which c. h. tatham, a member of the congregation, had designed. linnell’s letter, written after tatham’s death in 1842, is quoted only in part. he also wrote that “tatham was much among the great, had large works in hand for them, had been in italy, and was a man of cultivated taste, and naturally a proud man, … and would not undertake jobs from builders and others. the consequence was he mortgaged his property, and ended by being only the overseer of twenty poor men for some charity” (story 1: 74–75). libson apparently conflates tatham’s mayfair office (1 queen street) with his earlier mayfair house (103 park street) and misinterprets “cottage” as denoting smallness and as such signifying tatham’s career as failing; however, the move to alpha road by 1811 actually signified success. c. h. tatham’s financial problems did not begin to surface till the end of the decade or appear to have become disruptive till the mid-1820s. the dnb describes him as simultaneously “masterful and litigious in professional matters, and engaged in lawsuits most unwisely with more than one of his employers.” the odnb expands on this, noting that in 1819 he was accused of negligence concerning repairs at castle howard, and although the arbitrator found in his favour, he incurred great expense. on several other occasions he was involved in litigation, and the consequent desertion by his wealthy and noble patrons and his refusal to work for builders led ultimately to the ruin of his practice. between 1820 and 1836, when his architectural career ended, tatham’s work comprised interior decorations in a sumptuous neo-classical style for the fourth earl of albemarle at quidenham hall, norfolk (c.1820), and in hampshire a porticoed house, rookesbury (1821–5) … for the revd w. garnier, alterations and additions for william sloane-stanley at paultons (1826–8) …. one clear sign of tatham’s diminishing income was his inability to help frederick in his budding artistic career. he wrote linnell: “i wish i could get him abroad; but my hands are tied and bound—​my large family and my decreasing occupations threaten straitened circumstances. i am the milch cow to fifteen living souls—​think of that, johnny!” (story 1: 153). whitehead dates the letter late 1828 (“last years” 83 and n74). the math here—​ten children and two parents—​​suggests that tatham may have considered other relatives, or perhaps servants, and/​or his lodger, catherine, then staying at the mayfair studio, as dependents. by mid-1830, around the time frederick tatham moved to 20 lisson grove north, signs of his father’s insolvency were present not only in the reduced number and type of commissions the paterfamilias was now receiving, but also in the withdrawal of consent for julia to marry richmond. whereas story believed c. h. tatham worried about the financial prospects of the young artist (1: 74), raymond lister, in his odnb entry for richmond, believes that tatham’s own financial concerns played a role: about 1826 richmond fell in love with julia (1811–1881), the beautiful fourteen-year-old sister of the tatham brothers, whose father had engaged richmond to give her drawing lessons. although old tatham had encouraged the romance, his diminishing fortune brought a change of mind when a rich and elderly suitor expressed interest in julia. learning of this, the young couple—​encouraged by palmer, who loaned richmond £40—​eloped to gretna green, where they were married on 24 january 1831. back in london, richmond set up home at 27 northumberland street, new road, sending julia to stay for the time being with palmer’s father at shoreham. meanwhile john linnell persuaded tatham that richmond had a promising future. tatham forgave them, and within three weeks george and julia were reunited: their marriage proved to be long and happy.richmond became one of the most successful portrait painters of the period, leaving £77,000 when he died (morning post 20 january 1922). his miniature (8.7 x 6.9 cm.) portrait of c. h. tatham, c. 1830, can be found at <http://​www.​radnorshire-​fine-​arts.​co.​uk/​product/​george-​richmond-​portrait-​c-​h-​tatham-​1772-​1842>. on 13 january 1834, three years after julia’s marriage, harriet tatham died. that same year, according to the dnb, c. h. tatham “fell into pecuniary difficulties; his house and his collection of objects of interest were sold,” and “much of the latter went to sir john soane’s museum, where it has since remained” (odnb). the dnb and odnb statements are incorrect: his “pecuniary difficulties,” which, as noted, had been building throughout the 1820s, culminated in 1832, not 1834; his collections and household furniture were auctioned in july 1833, not 1834; and soane acquired only four lots (see section 10). what concerns us here is when c. h. tatham vacated his house. according to the marylebone rate books (c/73, reel 62), he vacated 34 alpha road between 29 september and christmas 1832. he is not listed in the rate book for 1833; in place of his name is an “e,” signifying empty, and a note “xs/33,” signifying that the house was still empty at christmas 1833 (mrb 1833, reel 66). the same marks appear in the 1834 rate books, and the house appears to have remained empty until sold in 1835. according to galinou, “despite this downsizing tatham built up rent arrears. an 1835 rent account shows that tatham’s premises were back in the hands of [alexander] birnie, the original developer of this part of the [eyre] estate” (478). the st. george, hanover square rate book records tatham as vacating his mayfair office in 1832. his name, “tatham ch heathcote,” is crossed out and “day, william” written over it (c/651, reel 503). it is not clear, however, when in 1832 this alteration to the rate book occurred; the earliest would have been 25 march, and the latest christmas.the rates were collected on 25 march (lady day), 24 june (midsummer), 29 september (michaelmas), and 25 december (christmas). the duration of his residence in 1832 is also unknown because the rates were being paid throughout the year and no arrears had accrued. he was, however, certainly out of the office and studio by the end of the year.whitehead states that he left the mayfair office in 1833 (“last years” 83). tatham may have carried on some architectural work after 1832, and he is listed in pigot and co.’s commercial directory, 5th ed., for 1832–33–34, as an architect at the mayfair address, but, according to the rate books, he had vacated the premises by the end of 1832 and possibly earlier. the correspondence with the eyre estate, which had been going to 1 queen street, was redirected to 34 alpha road in 1831 (galinou 478). because it appears to have housed the printing press, the mayfair studio is particularly significant in the narrative of posthumous printing; its closing could have deprived frederick tatham of his means of production. or did he move the press to his lisson grove studio? as noted, frederick tatham is recorded at 20 lisson grove in the royal academy exhibition catalogues for 1830, 1831, and 1832.his residences in the 1830s can be traced using the addresses in the royal academy exhibitors’ lists, return addresses on his letters, and, if used cautiously, the tatham family history site. the 11 april 1829 letter that he wrote on behalf of catherine places him at 34 alpha road (br[2] 495). this was near his father’s house and in an area with a high concentration of artists, what galinou refers to as an “artists’ colony” (270). for example, the portrait painter and watercolorist thomas heaphy (1775–1835), founder and first president of the society of british artists, lived just a few houses down alpha road and “devoted much of his fortune to utilising the land in the neighbourhood” (dnb).a double portrait of c. h. tatham and harriet tatham, aged forty-three and thirty-five, painted by heaphy in 1815, can be found at the tatham family history site <http://​www.​saxonlodge.​net/​showmedia.​php?mediaid=1231​&medialinkid=1559>. between him and tatham was robert brown, the first artist to build a “purpose-built painter’s studio on the estate” (galinou 457). james hakewill, architect and watercolorist of picturesque views, lived in st. john’s wood; his wife, maria catherine, was a well-known portrait painter. another artist in the neighborhood was his father’s friend rossi, the well-known sculptor, who acquired enough land from the eyre estate in 1809 to build a gallery to show his works and shops to make terracotta bricks. in 1821, “charles rossi and shops” occupied 21 lisson grove north (mrb 1821, reel 41); haydon, renting rooms from rossi, lived at 21 lisson grove north “between 1817 and 1822” (galinou 268). tatham may have trained with rossi, but the sculptor’s studio was not next to tatham’s. in 1822, street numbers were apparently changed and rossi was recorded in the rate books at 41 lisson grove north; from 1823 to 1833, he was recorded at 1, 2, and 3 st. john’s place, which was the same as grove street and was across from his gallery. his premises, located “at the corner of lisson grove and the future grove street” (see illus. 2, with house and gallery circled in green and red respectively, and illus. 3, with house and gallery numbered 2 and 3 respectively), were sold in 1834, “presumably to avoid bankruptcy” (galinou 267, 268).another supposed neighbor was the dean of york. an unnumbered house between numbers 19 and 20 lisson grove north is recorded as inhabited by “rev.d wm. cockburne / dean of york.” whitehead describes this property as “the ‘lodge,’ which appears to have been a more recently built adjoining property,” and as “grander, with a rateable value of £120” (“last years” 82n64). the rate books, however, show that cockburn was not tatham’s adjoining neighbor. number 21 was a house occupied by joshua nunn and rated at £20. number 19 was a house occupied by john rooke and rated at £12. number 18a was a house (probably a shop or studio) occupied by jacob gaby and rated at £6, and number 18 was a house occupied by benjamin darke and rated at £40. but lisson lodge, as cockburn’s house was known, was rated at £200 (not £120), higher than any in the vicinity. nor was the property new. cockburn was cited as “the rev. william cockburn, lisson lodge, lisson grove, marylebone—​honorary governor” in the index of w. m. thiselton’s report of the state of the northern dispensary, &c., 1814. cockburn’s property was recorded as “lisson lodge, 20 lisson grove north” in boyle’s court guide for april, 1824, but lisson lodge was not given the number 20 in the rate books until 1831, when it was also recorded, this one time only, as “lisson lodge,” in pen over “house.” it had been included in the rate books unnumbered, among the numbered houses, on lisson grove north between 1822 and 1830. before then, it was recorded independently as grove lodge, at the end of the house numbers of lisson grove north and before those of grove place (mrb 1821, reel 41). this was also its position in the 1821 census. lisson lodge appears to be the detached house on the horwood map of 1819 (illus. 2, circled in cyan); in illus. 3 it is indicated by the number 4. it appears among the lisson grove north properties presumably for the convenience of recordkeeping for the marylebone ward. whatever the reason, the dean of york was not frederick tatham’s adjoining neighbor, and tatham’s neighborhood was a good deal humbler than such a neighbor would suggest. 20 lisson grove north comprised two dwellings. in the 1830 marylebone rate book, it is recorded in the preprinted ledger book as a “house,” with “& shops” penned in, and rated at £45. william eales, a carpenter, is recorded in the column of “inhabitants’ names.” eales apparently occupied the premises for only two years, because between 1822 and 1828 it was occupied by edward seward (?sewell). although recorded at 20 lisson grove in the royal academy exhibition catalogue of 1830, tatham first entered the marylebone rate books at that address in 1831, when the property (“house,” with “& shops” penned in) was renumbered as 20a. in 1832, the property became 20a and 20b, but was recorded as “house” only, with tatham as inhabitant. in 1833, the distinct units were acknowledged as such, with 20a referring to “shops” (penned in) and 20b referring to “house,” rated at £16 and £28 respectively. in the “inhabitants’ names” column for shops is “fredk tatham,” and in the next space for the house is an “e,” for empty. tatham’s residence (20b), in other words, appears to have been vacated in the latter part of 1832—​or early 1833 before the rate collectors came calling.there are no signs of tatham’s living at 20b lisson grove in 1833. to the right of the “e,” across the columns for rates—​which were left blank—​is “henry oliver mids[umme]r.” rates appear to have been collected only twice in 1833, on 24 june (midsummer) and 25 december. apparently when the collector came knocking on 24 june, he found oliver and recorded his name as inhabiting the house—​though this appears to have been after recording the “e.” oliver did not stay long, however, because the house was recorded as empty by christmas 1833 and no monies were collected for the year. the house remained empty for all of 1834 as well. the “shop” was recorded as empty by christmas 1833 and remained so all of the following year. it seems to have been vacated no later than 24 june 1833—​and probably months earlier—​because tatham was £3.2.8 in arrears for community rates (monies for the poor, cleaning, repairs, and lighting streets and highways). these rates were collected on 24 june, but tatham’s total was recorded in the column “unreceived on account of / empty houses,” which indicates that he vacated his studio before the monies were collected—​that is, by 24 june (midsummer) 1833. his last known letters from lisson grove were on 1 march 1833 to linnell, both from 20 lisson grove north.he wrote linnell asking to meet so they could “come to some settlement concerning the dante &c,” and, presumably, the legal ownership of blake’s effects; he followed up with a second letter that day asking for their lawyers to meet and for linnell to pay for the lawyers, since linnell had refused to meet in person (br[2] 552-53). given the information provided by the rate books, tatham appears to have written from the studio (20a), which he was in the process of vacating, and not from the house (20b). tatham presumably knew sometime in 1832 exactly when his father was going to vacate the mayfair and alpha road premises. for him to have moved the press to lisson grove for so short a period was impractical and seems unlikely. as with many large, old, heavy objects, selling or leaving instead of moving them is the best, or only, option. after lisson grove, tatham appears next at 3 grove terrace, the address on his undated letter to soane, presumably written after his father wrote soane on 23 july 1833 (see section 10). grove terrace was just north on lisson grove north (the street), across from alpha road, and was part of a new row of houses, each rated at £40. the grove terrace address, however, may not have been a residence; it was recorded in the rate books as empty in 1833 (mrb 1833, reel 66) and remained empty until 25 march (lady day) 1834, when william banks is recorded as the ratepayer (mrb 1834, reel 68).the address 3 grove terrace is not recorded at the tatham family history site. as noted, tatham exhibited marble busts in the royal academy exhibitions of 1830, 1831, and 1832, but no sculpture before or after these dates. these are the years he had his own separate art studio in lisson grove, a space that presumably enabled him to work in ways that the office/studio in mayfair may not have been suitable for (plaster and marble dust, for example). he did not exhibit in 1833 or 1834, and he appears not to have had a separate work space after lisson grove until c. 1835, when he and his father resumed exhibiting at the royal academy. both architect and portraitist gave their address that year as 18 charles street (graves, royal academy 7: 325), which was probably not a residence.according to curtis, quoted in the entry for frederick tatham at the tatham family history site, tatham moved “sometime before [his] marriage” in 1831 to “12 [later renumbered 18] charles street” from alpha road. this, however, is the wrong date for the move. from alpha road, he moved to 20b lisson grove. c. h. tatham apparently knew the charles street neighborhood from an earlier residency; he is listed at 6 charles street in the 1800 royal academy exhibition list. charles street runs along middlesex hospital, and to avoid confusion with other streets named charles, frederick tatham anchored his address with “middlesex hospital,” while his father used “berners street,” which was perpendicular to charles street and is how a few other artists living in that neighborhood differentiated their addresses. c. h. tatham was residing at the time at 19 montpelier square, so he apparently used charles street only as a studio address and only for this one exhibition; in 1836, the last year he exhibited at the royal academy, he is recorded at 4 elizabeth street, hans place. frederick tatham, on the other hand, is recorded at 18 charles street from 1835 until 1839. he appears to have been renting from john wilson, the person recorded as paying the rates. in 1838, he exhibited “portraits of the children of mr. john wilson” at the royal academy (graves, royal academy 7: 325). all twenty-two works tatham exhibited from this address seem to have been portraits, which implies that he was now working primarily in pastels, graphite, and watercolors—​as anne gilchrist and francis acknowledge him doing after abandoning sculpture. these media are less demanding (and disruptive) than printmaking, oil painting, and sculpture, which raises the possibility that the apartment at 18 charles street was also his residence. but previous tenants at that address and on that street strongly suggest otherwise. in 1831 and 1832, 18 charles street was the address for thomas allom, an architect and topographical artist (graves, royal academy 1: 27). in the 1820s and 1830s, painters (many of them miniaturists) occupied numbers 4, 7, 8, 9, 12, 13, 14, 15, 18, 19, 20, 22, 24, 26, and 27 charles street, which indicates a neighborhood of artists’ studios—​and supports the hypothesis that frederick tatham did not have a separate work space after lisson grove until c. 1835.addresses are culled from graves’s dictionaries of the royal academy and the british institution. that painter succeeded painter in many of these apartments suggests the spaces were used as studios, not residences. for example, the painter michael sharp was at number 19 between 1825 and 1828 and was succeeded by the painter william fisk between 1830 and 1833; the painter william willes was at number 20 in 1831 and was succeeded by the painter john lucas between 1832 and 1837; the painter g. leslie was at number 27 between 1832 and 1835 and was succeeded by the miniaturist samuel lover between 1835 and 1843. the losses of the tatham family’s financial security and alpha road home by 1832, coupled with the losses of frederick tatham’s own lisson grove residence and studio shortly after his marriage, his estrangement from linnell, and catherine’s death, may have contributed to his susceptibility to irving’s influence. how long that influence manifested itself to the detriment of blake’s works is not known, but it seems to have begun as early as 1832 and in effect at least through 1834. i have asked whether irving’s influence might also have been somehow responsible for the cessation of posthumous printing, because that appears to have stopped c. 1832, and for tatham’s extracting experience plates from copies of songs. the extracted experience impressions were not destroyed, however; they were sold separately and in volumes and scrapbooks of prints, a mode of bundling works possibly influenced by his father (see section 10). abridged copies and clusters of extracted impressions increased the number of saleable objects and signify that tatham lost his press, not his desire to print blake. if, as argued here, catherine’s press entered c. h. tatham’s mayfair studio in spring 1828 and remained there after she moved to her small apartment in spring 1829, then c. h. tatham’s closing his mayfair office in 1832 seems the most likely reason posthumous printing stopped. these two events—​the closing of the mayfair office/studio and the cessation of printing—​appear causally, not coincidentally, related. c. h. tatham’s vacating the mayfair studio forced frederick tatham to either let the press go or relocate it. with the charles street studio not yet in place, he appears to have had nowhere to put the press other than his new living space, presumably 3 grove terrace; wherever he lived in 1833, bringing in a rolling press would have compromised domestic tranquillity. indeed, i think it is safe to say that his spouse, like most and unlike mrs. blake, was not going to pass her “days and nights” with her artist husband and his large printing press, oily inks, solvents, stacks of paper, copperplates, and muslin rags, all “in the same room where they grilled, boiled, stewed, and slept” (nollekens, br[2] 624-25). he chose to let the press go. “fanatical notions” may have caused tatham to destroy manuscripts and possibly influenced what or what not to print, but they do not appear to have stopped him from printing. nor did posthumous printing end because tatham lost interest in blake or his illuminated books. it ended because he could not replicate the working conditions he had at his father’s mayfair office/studio and, most of all, because he lost the means of production. 10. 1833: c. h. tatham’s auction and sale and letters to sir john soane by the end of 1832, c. h. tatham appears to have moved the family temporarily to 5 montague street, the return address on a letter to soane that the soane museum dates 5 july 1833. this house, rated at £80, belonged to his friend “signor raymondo campanile” (mrb 1833, reel 64), an italian painter of architectural views with a studio at 7 charles street, middlesex hospital (graves, british institution 85, for 1829). this was next to the studio c. h. tatham had in 1800, 6 charles street (graves, royal academy 7: 324), and down the street from the studio he and his son began using in 1835. by the end of july 1833, c. h. tatham had moved to 19 montpelier square, brompton. he had auctioned his collections and furniture at christie’s on 9-10 july 1833. soane, contrary to the odnb’s claim, acquired only four lots from the auction. george bailey, soane’s assistant and first curator of his museum, attended the sale on soane’s behalf and purchased lot 37, “a design for a ceiling in the borghese palace by asprucci; the mosaic pavement in the vatican; and the entrance to the borghese palace”; lot 122*, “the original drawings for the work of the pilasters of the vatican”; and lot 122, a large scrapbook with leaves. bailey also purchased from priestley, a book dealer, lot 87, the presentation copy from the duke of bedford of outline engravings and descriptions of the woburn abbey marbles, 1822. soane asked tatham to withdraw lot 6, proofs of a portrait of him after lawrence, and tatham complied.the letter, dated 8 july 1833, was dictated by soane to bailey (soane museum, department of manuscripts). soane, almost blind by this time, relied on bailey, who annotated his copy of the tatham auction catalogue. i am grateful for this information from stephen astley, the curator of drawings at the soane museum at the time of my inquiry. he also withdrew lot 117, the portfolio of architectural drawings and plans of the royal naval hospital at greenwich that he had traced after the originals of christopher wren and nicholas hawksmoor. he presented it to soane on 23 july 1833 as a gift: dear sir john i beg leave to send a portfolio which contains my original studies made at rome i also send some original drawings & designs made by nicholas hawkesmoor for greenwich hospital—​who you know was pupil to sir john vanbrugh—​i also send tracings from the first design of sir christopher wren from the originals at all souls oxford—​if you will not do me the honour to accept them, i will accept anything for them—​i passed the whole of the day yesterday with rossi & took account of the state of his affairsrossi, the sculptor, was c. h. tatham’s friend and former neighbor. in 1834, the last year he exhibited at the academy, rossi was financially distressed and soon afterward applied for a royal academy pension. which i will report whenever you may please to appoint better than i can do in the compass of this note most respectfully i ever am dear sir john yr faithful & obliged charles heathcote tathamtranscribed from the original letter in the soane museum. “the ‘greenwich hospital’ album, containing survey drawings and designs for the royal naval hospital, greenwich, designs for blenheim, copies of designs for st paul’s cathedral, and measured drawings by c. h. tatham of ancient buildings in italy (69 leaves). grey boards, leather spine insc: original drawings of greenwich/hospital (745 x 530). … prov: presented to soane by c. h. tatham, 1833” (soane museum concise catalogue, vol. 109 <http://​collections.​soane.​org/​thes83489>). “i will accept anything for them” reflects the seriousness of his financial distress. nevertheless, he had intended to make a gift of them, but suspected, correctly, that soane would prefer to pay. on 27 november 1833, he wrote again, in response to a letter dictated by soane: dear sir john, i beg leave honestly to declare that when i took the liberty to deposit my roman drawings and those of sir john vanbrugh etc in your possession, i did so with the feeling only of gratification that they might be found in a corner of your invaluable museum—​but, as you so generously desire me to affix a price to them, subject to your approval, under my present case, i would say that seven pounds or less than that sum, would suffice in addition to the gratification i hope to be indulged in ….transcribed from the original letter in the soane museum. holy trinity hospital, greenwich, is where c. h. tatham “ended his days.” as noted, linnell described him there as “only the overseer of twenty poor men for some charity” (story 1: 74–75). his situation and position, however, were not as dismal as linnell apparently assumed. tatham’s friends “the right hon. thomas grenville, the duchess of sutherland, and others—​rallied round him, and in 1837 obtained for him the post of warden of holy trinity hospital …” (dnb). some of his children are recorded living there with him in the 1841 census. this is “where he ended his days happily and usefully. he died on 10 april 1842” (dnb).a full-length portrait of c. h. tatham in his uniform as warden, painted in watercolors by frederick tatham, can be found at the tatham family history site <http://​www.​saxonlodge.​net/​histories/​charlesheathcotetatham_​portrait_​byfredericktatham_​story.php>. c. h. tatham’s auction at christie’s was a sad affair, filled with the kinds of objects characteristic of an estate sale, items acquired over a long and successful life and usually sold only upon the owner’s death. it is worth examining because it provides clues as to how his son organized his blake collection for sale. the catalogue’s title—​a catalogue of the valuable and interesting collection of architectural and other drawings, books, and books of prints, bronzes, marbles, greek pottery, and some furniture, of c. h. tatham, esq.—​is misleading.soane museum, sale catalogue 1833:07:09-10; lugt 13374. “in total soane paid £37 for ‘sundries at mr tatham’s sale’. (ledger e, 11 july 1833)” (soane museum catalogue description). “some” furniture is a misnomer; tatham, who designed furniture for the family firm of tatham, bailey & sanders, had put up enough furniture (a great deal of it in mahogany and presumably from both the office and house) to take up the auction’s entire first day. among the 134 lots were presses, but not the printing type. a mahogany “press with folding doors” was listed (lot 83), as was a “painted press, with folding-doors” (108), which was a large cupboard, often “placed in a recess in the wall, for holding linen, clothes, books, etc., or food, plates, dishes, and other kitchen items” (oed). lot 129 was a “large oak table with flaps, and an oak linen-press.” the forms of “a fine-toned upright piano-forte by hutton, in a rosewood case” (52) and “two mahogany music-stands” and stool (57) are evidence of music in the salons that blake may have attended at the alpha road home.mahogany appears to have been the favorite wood: “a pair of mahogany book-cases, with glazed folding-doors and marble slabs” (54), “a set of mahogany dining tables, with two extra leaves” (75), “eight mahogany dining-room chairs with leather seats” (76), “a mahogany circular table, on richly carved pillar and claw” (77), and “a mahogany four-post bedstead, and paillasse” (85). the house and office/​studio were systematically emptied of chandeliers, candleholders, copper pans, brass kettles, skillets, bidets, “six blankets and a rug” (88), “a feather bed, bolster, and two pillows” (87), and “two wool mattresses” (86). no blake work was for sale in the auction, but many of tatham’s architectural drawings and prints were. lots 123-33 consisted of “architectural designs by charles h. tatham, esq. framed and glazed” and lots 117-22 were portfolios and “scrap books”: “a volume, containing 180 drawings from antiquities in rome, by c. h. tatham, esq.” (117); a volume of ninety of his “original drawings” (118); a volume with “163 drawings and prints of antiquities” (119); “a scrap book, containing 138 sketches made in italy, etc. by c. h. tatham, esq.” (120); “a scrap book, containing 39 drawings from antique fragments in the collection of mr. holland, by c. h. tatham, esq.” (121); and the “large scrap book with leaves” purchased by soane (122). the auction may not have been c. h. tatham’s only sale. sixteen days later, linnell recorded in a journal entry for friday, 26 july 1833, “to lisson grove to look at f. tatham’s effects. on sale” (br[2] 556). on its face, this entry is odd, given that frederick tatham had vacated both his lisson grove residence and studio by this time. moreover, linnell had stopped talking and writing to frederick tatham two years earlier, after tatham claimed that linnell owed catherine blake more money for the dante watercolor designs (story 1: 241, h. h. gilchrist 130). writing george cumberland on 18 march 1833 about the whereabouts of blake’s works, linnell refused to acknowledge tatham by name: “as to mr blake’s works i do not think any person ever possessed a complete set—​not even blake himself—​what has become of his plates i know not—​as mrs. blake left all she had not sold to a person who has since that [time] become a bankrupt or something like it and i suppose has disposed of what he had ” (br[2] 554, emphasis added).linnell had been friends with c. h. tatham since 1812 and tried to help his son. his relationship with the younger tatham had become estranged over the dante drawings and only became more contentious after catherine died. he never accepted frederick tatham’s claim of ownership of blake’s effects. linnell clearly knows more than he tells cumberland; he deliberately avoids naming names, presumably to protect the tatham family’s reputation. linnell acknowledges that catherine left all of blake’s effects, which would include the press and “plates”—​copperplates and prints—​to frederick tatham. he also, however, conflates tatham with his father. linnell had heard rumors of c. h. tatham’s insolvency—​of his having to “mortgage his property,” as linnell was to say later (story 1: 75). no evidence exists that frederick tatham was insolvent.according to the tatham family history site, “no evidence” has yet been located that c. h. tatham “was legally bankrupt or insolvent,” despite rumors of his financial problems. the wikipedia article (n2) refers to the times digital archive regarding possible bankruptcy, but i have not been able to locate any document there or elsewhere to prove that he filed for bankruptcy. i have not come across any such rumors for the son until later in his life, when anne gilchrist told w. m. rossetti that he had “gradually lost all his practice” (h. h. gilchrist 129). in effect, linnell conflates the owner of blake’s effects with the owner of the mayfair studio, implying that the studio was the place mrs. blake last “left” them. linnell may have actually seen the press in mayfair. he consulted with c. h. tatham in 1829, presumably at the mayfair office, about his plans for his new house.linnell consulted with c. h. tatham about the plans he drew up for his porchester terrace home, and he probably would have done so at tatham’s mayfair office rather than in hampstead. see john linnell’s building book <https://​www.​fitzmuseum.​cam.​ac.​uk/​gallery/​linnell/​exhibitionnotes.​htm> (item 52). moreover, in supposing that the tathams “disposed of what [they] had,” linnell appears (disturbingly) not only to be identifying the last location of the illuminated plates, but also to be suggesting that catherine sold some of them and the tathams sold the rest—​that is, “all she had not sold.” no material evidence in the form of posthumous prints proves that catherine printed illuminated plates in her apartment, or even that she took the hundreds of copperplates to her apartment—​let alone the rolling press. the two-year hiatus in posthumous printing between the four copies of illuminated books that she appears to have printed in spring 1829 and the sixteen or so copies printed by tatham starting in late 1831 coincides with the two and a half years she resided at 17 upper charlton street. linnell’s comment to cumberland appears to imply that catherine left blake’s plates at c. h. tatham’s office before he became “a bankrupt or something like it” and thus in the literal (if not legal) hands of frederick tatham. one must wonder whether the illuminated plates (minus the ten remaining c. 1861) were sold by catherine, “stolen by an ungrateful black” and “sold … to a smith as old metal” (a. gilchrist 1: 126), or “disposed of” by tatham or his father when emptying the mayfair studio. both father and son, after all, had a financial incentive to dispose of objects worth more as metal than as art. if they were sold or stolen, then we have our answer to why posthumous printing stopped: without plates there was nothing to print. if, on the other hand, the plates were neither stolen nor sold—​at least at this time—​then, as argued, the probable cause for the cessation of posthumous printing was the vacating of the mayfair studio, and, with it, the loss of the machine needed to print the plates. linnell’s note in his journal—​“to lisson grove to look at f. tatham’s effects. on sale”—​presumably records what he had done that day and not what he intended to do. if so, he appears not to have acquired anything from the sale, for nothing is listed after the note. the sale itself may have been motivated by frederick tatham’s vacating his house at 20b lisson grove north by the end of 1832 or early 1833 and his studio at 20a lisson grove north by 24 june 1833. because “lisson grove” is not just a street but an area (like soho or bloomsbury), which includes alpha road (see illus. 2, 3, 4), the sale of “tatham’s effects” may have been held a few blocks away, at 34 alpha road, the lease of which c. h. tatham apparently retained in 1833. at the very least, a few circumstantial facts suggest that the items on sale were drawn from the households of both father and son. blake’s copy of swedenborg’s the wisdom of angels, concerning divine love and divine wisdom appears likely to have been at the sale. an inscription on the flyleaf reads: the ms. notes by blake the artist—​acc s[ ]le mr. tatham (an architect) a friend of blake, from whose possession the volume came.jan. 1. 1839.in blake books, bentley transcribes “acc s[ ]le” as “accg to [?],” meaning “according to” mr. tatham (bb 696); in the second edition of blake records, he transcribes it as “acc[?] sale[?] [i.e., acquired at the sale of?]” mr. tatham (br[2] 556). upon examining the original inscription, i read it to mean “acquired at the sale of.” bentley is probably right about the inscription’s date referring to the note itself and not the purchase (br[2] 556n). he may be mistaken, however, to assume that the book’s new owner meant frederick, not c. h. tatham, who owned other works by blake, including a vision of hercules, a drawing from a sketchbook that contained “calvert’s signature, a sketch by palmer, and notes and drawings by richmond.” it also “contained c. h. tatham’s book-plate” (butlin #802a). as noted, tatham sr. owned america copy b, which was acquired by dew-smith, who also owned the swedenborg volume by 1878.the swedenborg volume was sold as part of dew-smith’s collection at sotheby’s on 29-30 january 1878 (lot 15); america copy b sold in lot 247 and, according to the sotheby’s catalogue, came from an unknown source in 1874 (viscomi, “two fake blakes” 50), which may also have been dew-smith’s source of the swedenborg volume. the entrance of both america copy b and the swedenborg volume into the same collection supports the idea that the two books once shared a provenance in c. h. tatham, or at the very least a combined sale at 34 alpha road. swedenborg’s companion volume, the wisdom of angels concerning the divine providence, was acquired by palmer, the very “scholarly artist” and son of a bookseller, who signed it with his monogram. palmer owned at least seven other books from blake’s library, two of which he signed and dated 1833.anne gilchrist described palmer as “the genial, scholarly artist … the last of the long line of english painters to possess and to cherish poetic-landscape art” (h. h. gilchrist 57). of the fifty books recorded in blake books (six on p. 681 plus nos. 711-54), twenty-seven are untraced. three went to linnell (two as gifts, one as purchase); eight were owned by palmer, who inscribed no. 711 as “samuel palmer 1833” and no. 712 as “samuel palmer / 1833”; he also owned nos. 715, 718, 721, 743 (the swedenborg), 749, and 735 (see bbs 322). palmer’s date suggests this sale was the source for these two books, for the wisdom of angels, concerning divine love and divine wisdom, and probably for his other books as well. the sale of “mr. tatham” came an opportune sixteen days after the christie’s auction, giving c. h. tatham an opportunity to sell what was bought in, did not sell, or was too small to fit the auction. whether the sale was held at frederick tatham’s empty studio or c. h. tatham’s empty house, “f. tatham’s effects” seem likely to have included works belonging to father and son. as we have seen, the convergence of bibliographical and biographical facts supports the idea that by this time the press was no longer accessible. an undated letter from frederick tatham to soane suggests the same. the letter, presumably written after his father’s on 23 july 1833, reveals his father’s influence and reads like a response to the loss of the press and whatever revenue stream it may have represented. it appears also to confirm tatham’s inability to replenish that specific stock: 3 grove terrace lisson grove sir, may i take the liberty to inform you that at the demise of the widow of the celebrated william blake the engraver & fresco painter (whose life has been written by cunningham in the lives of painters and by smith in the latter volume of the life of nollekens), i became possessed of all the residue of his works being drawings sketches & copper plates of a very extraordinary description. hearing that your collection is deservedly celebrated i beg to say that should you wish to add any of this very great mans productions to it i shall be happy to offer any portion of them to you at a reasonable rate. there are none now for sale nor is it likely there will be but these in my possession should you wish to see any of his very beautiful drawings i should be happy of the honour of yr commands for that purpose—​ i have the honour to be sir yr very obedient & humble servant frederick tatham —​—​—​—​—​—​—​—​—​—​—​—​—​—​—​—​—​—​ sculptortranscribed from the original letter in the soane museum. for a partial transcription, see br(2) 552. tatham wisely emphasized drawings, which soane collected in very large quantities (for example, almost 9000 drawings from the office of robert and james adam entered soane’s collection in 1833). he correctly noted that the blake drawings that he had, unlike illuminated books and commercial engravings, were not for sale elsewhere. his comment “nor is it likely there will be but these in my possession” refers explicitly to his stock of drawings. however, it may also reference the prints from the “copper plates,” which he implies were also never to be replenished, in which case the comment appears to acknowledge his recent loss of the press. the loss of the press, coupled, perhaps, with the realization of how little money the books could bring in relative to the effort required to produce them (see below), forced tatham to rethink how best to sell his blakes. he does not mention illuminated books to soane, expressing instead his desire to sell his blake collection in “portion[s],” which may represent a change in sales strategy from single or paired illuminated books and single finished drawings—​the strategy favored by catherine (a. gilchrist 1: 366)—​to “volumes” or “scrap books” of prints and drawings, the terms used by his father and others for groups of miscellaneous drawings and prints not highly valuable or saleable individually. tatham implies that he could assemble a volume or scrapbook of miscellaneous drawings, presumably of the size soane had acquired from c. h. tatham. he did not do so for soane, but he did for other collectors and at least one printseller. by 1843, he had sold joseph hogarth, a printseller, a “portfolio of blake’s drawings,” which appears to have comprised over 100 drawings and sketches, including “larger drawings”—​that is, large color prints (viscomi, “signing large color prints” 401). john ruskin bought this portfolio c. 1843 for £100 (initially priced at £150), a sale that richmond helped to negotiate (ruskin 32-33).wilkinson, who met tatham through elwell in early november 1838 (see note 64), described tatham as possessing “all the drawings left by blake” (br[2] 557). this implies that tatham sold the portfolio of blake’s drawings to hogarth between late 1838 and c. 1843. for richmond to have directed ruskin to hogarth for works by blake, instead of to his brother-in-law, implies that tatham’s blake collection was much depleted and that the finest works by blake, such as the large color prints, were no longer in tatham’s possession by 1843. ruskin returned the portfolio and hogarth appears to have reconfigured it and sold it to an unknown collector, whose collection sold at sotheby’s on 29 april 1862 (see section 11). tatham also compiled scrapbooks or portfolios for collectors. one extensive scrapbook of blake items included 122 prints and proofs and the manuscript of the “order of the songs,” which george a. smith acquired by 1853 (bb 337) and which puttick and simpson in 1863 (and then quaritch in 1864) referred to as “blakiana.”the volume with blake’s “order of the songs” manuscript was in the puttick and simpson sale, 3-4 july 1863, as “blakiana, the life of william blake in ms., extracted from allan cunningham, with curious plates, drawings, and scraps [£15.15.0]” (bentley, sale catalogues). it was also listed in quaritch’s 1864 a catalogue of books, lot 6521, as “blakiana” with a lengthy description of its contents and a “list of original drawings and sketches sold by auction in 1862 with the prices realised, etc. … £21.” the “list” is almost certainly smith’s copy of the 29 april 1862 sotheby auction of a valuable collection of engravings, drawings and pictures, chiefly from the cabinet of an amateur; comprising … original drawings and sketches by w. blake ….” smith, who owned the “order of the songs” manuscript, was at this auction and bought lots 159, 160, 162, 168, and 194. the blakeana volume shows up again in smith’s own auction at christie’s, 1-5 april 1880, lot 168, sold to quaritch for £66. the vendors in 1863 and 1864 were presumably listing it for smith. arthington acquired a volume with sixty-seven impressions and proofs, including proofs of thel (bb 131). an extra-illustrated volume of gilchrist’s life of blake used a core of 100 or more prints that john pearson had acquired, most likely en masse in a scrapbook from tatham (bb 205). the prints used in what appear to have been extra-illustrated copies of gilchrist’s life and swinburne’s critical essay in the smith sale at christie’s in 1880 may also have come from a blakeana volume.lot 78 (not recorded in bentley’s blake books or sale catalogues) of the 1-5 april 1880 auction: “blake (w.) life, by a. gilchrist, illustrated, 2 vol. 1863—swinburne (a. c.) w. blake, a critical essay, illustrations, 1868, 3 vols. 1.17 to pickering.” swinburne’s essay was published in one volume, hence its reformatting into three volumes indicates extra illustrations. gilchrist’s life was published in two volumes, but may also have been extra illustrated in the manner of a copy in the beinecke library, two volumes rebound on large paper. dew-smith owned a “scrap book … containing illustrations by stothard, w. blake” that sold in his 27-30 june 1906 sotheby auction (viscomi, “two fake blakes” 60). despite cumberland’s friends thinking blake’s prices were too high (br[2] 458), prices for illuminated books were too low to have made uncolored posthumous copies profitable for catherine. as noted below, the colored songs copy p sold at auction in 1826 for £1; the uncolored songs copy bb sold in 1830 for £1. tatham, a fine watercolorist in his own right, did not color the blake plates he printed. the increased time, labor, and materials required to produce such finished copies were apparently not worth the investment, nor could he have equaled what blake had done. in this regard, he may not have long regretted the loss of the press or his changed relation to blake’s works, from producer and seller to seller exclusively. the money to be made was in selling groups of prints and drawings rather than in printing and selling single copies of the books. 11. 1829–31 revisited: catherine blake’s apartment and her role in posthumous productions whitehead traces catherine blake’s residences in her last years with great precision. he is cautious, though, about locating her press, even questioning its existence: “whether by early 1829 catherine still possessed her husband’s press, had replaced it with a smaller one …, or had no press, has yet to be established conclusively” (“last years” 89n137, emphasis added). yet throughout his essay he portrays catherine as printing blake’s illuminated plates during the last two years of her life in her two-room apartment: “for the majority of her widowhood (spring 1829–october 1831) catherine lived independently. with her financial security ensured by the bequest from banes and the gift purchase from lord egremont, she was able to support herself by printing, coloring, and selling her husband’s works, not merely for a few months but for approximately two and a half years” (86). an examination of the extant posthumous prints, however, reveals that she did not print or have a hand in printing any of the posthumous copies of jerusalem or songs. whitehead suggests that “she also appears to have colored and finished blake’s prints, drawings, and other works from stock” (“last years” 79). according to alexander gilchrist, “aided by mr. tatham she also filled in, within blake’s lines, the colour of the engraved books; and even finished some of the drawings—​rather against mr. linnell’s judgment” (1: 366). gilchrist’s statements appear to be the primary sources for thinking that catherine colored posthumous impressions and illuminated prints from stock. either gilchrist is conflating her earlier assistance and practices in the production of illuminated books with her posthumous printing of a few books, or there are many untraced posthumous books and impressions. no coloring of posthumous impressions—​or of lifetime impressions after blake’s death—​can be traced to catherine. on a smaller scale, however, according to richmond, she seems to have added the decorative scrolls to songs copy w after blake died (bb 423). she described this copy as being “especially precious from having been ‘blake’s own’” (a. gilchrist 1: 365-66) and sold it in march 1830. the framing devices here, though, are not as inventive or fine as those in songs copy y, which she may also have executed, albeit five years earlier. the “drawings” that gilchrist mentions her coloring were almost certainly the twenty-nine illustrations to pilgrim’s progress, and her hand is suspected in the finishing because it is not as fine as blake’s usual work (butlin #829; w. m. rossetti in a. gilchrist 2: 235-36). moreover, the sale of pilgrim’s progress benefited frederick tatham, not catherine; it appears to have been part of the “portfolio of blake’s drawings” that tatham sold to hogarth and that ruskin acquired but returned c. 1843. that portfolio, or much of its original contents, seems to have been subsequently owned by an unknown collector who acquired other prints and drawings from hogarth and possibly posthumous copies e and i of songs from tatham. this collection, including the blake works, sold at sotheby’s on 29 april 1862.this auction’s vendor of the blakes is usually identified as—​or implied to be—​tatham (skretkowicz 53; br[2] 795n; butlin, “william rossetti” 40). the argument as to why this is not possible is given in appendix 4 of my “printed paintings.” twenty-eight of the twenty-nine illustrations of pilgrim’s progress sold in lot 187 for £13.10s. to r. m. milnes. according to whitehead, “it is possible” that blake had copies of night thoughts in stock and “that some of these copies could have been colored by catherine after blake’s death” (“last years” 79n37). this seems highly unlikely. twenty-eight hand-colored copies are extant and all were finished in one of “two distinct styles, the first of about 1797, and the second of about 1805” (bb 642, crediting martin butlin for the information; see also butlin #330, p. 180, and grant et al. 1: 52-72, where they are defined as “type i” and “type ii”). blake is thought to have provided the models for both styles, but even that is in question because the supposed models (what grant et al. identify as i.1 [bb copy q] and ii.1 [bb copy b]) do not follow blake’s watercolor designs (grant et al. 1: 60). if he provided the models, it could have been for “professional colorists” or “journeyman colorists” (grant et al. 1: 53, 60, 55) in the employ of the publisher, richard edwards. the phrase “as pattern” on some copies suggests the coloring repeated that of a master copy. blake appears not to have been one of the colorists; catherine may—​or may not—​have been. if she was, it would not have been during her widowhood.according to joseph farington, edwards “had the letter press of each page laid down on a large half sheet of paper. there are abt. 900 pages” (br[2] 71). while not responsible for preparing the night thoughts texts, catherine may have prepared the texts for the 116 illustrations to gray’s poems, which blake executed in 1797 for john flaxman’s wife in the same style as night thoughts. moreover, no provenance of an extant copy indicates late coloring or sale by catherine. copy j, however, belonged to samuel boddington, who acquired america copy p, europe copy m, and jerusalem copy h, all posthumous copies, from tatham by 1833. from tatham he also acquired for the sexes copy c, descriptive catalogue copy e, and possibly there is no natural religion copy c or d (see note 61). boddington most likely procured his copy of night thoughts after tatham inherited blake’s effects. if catherine had a colored copy in stock, then, as with pilgrim’s progress and most of the other works she inherited, tatham was the one who benefited financially.bentley raises the possibility that blake’s outline style of engraving was designed for hand coloring and that colored copies of night thoughts were part of the original plan (edwardses 179). he also acknowledges that the colorists may have been professionals, of the kind who colored commercial engravings for the publishers (237n66), and that the blakes would have had a difficult time “accommodating” so many half sheets in their c. 1805 living quarters (189). despite questioning the press’s existence in 1829 (or afterwards), whitehead, as noted, believes that catherine probably moved a press (blake’s or a smaller one) from tatham’s mayfair studio to her new apartment, that she wanted full-time access to it, and that she used it over the next two and a half years: “on an upper floor at 17 upper charlton street, she appears to have continued her husband’s trade, printing, coloring, and selling works up until her death” (“last years” 89). the technical, material, and bibliographical evidence provided by the extant copies of posthumously printed illuminated books, etchings, and engravings does not support the claim that she printed many of blake’s plates or that she colored any prints or other works from stock aside from pilgrim’s progress. the evidence indicates that a press was available between 1827 and 1832 for both her and tatham, but that catherine was not the primary posthumous printer. it also indicates a hiatus in posthumous production from the spring of 1829 to the fall of 1831, which corresponds with catherine’s residency at 17 upper charlton street. she printed four copies of for the sexes, possibly with the assistance of linnell, and produced impressions of “canterbury pilgrims,” “joseph of arimathea,” the dante engravings, and the portrait of rev. hawker, probably while staying at linnell’s studio. she also printed “the interpreter’s parlour,” possibly in a few copies, two copies of america, and two copies of europe, presumably in tatham’s mayfair studio. she printed approximately 150 to 160 intaglio and relief impressions between fall 1827 and spring 1829. tatham appears to have printed slightly more than 1000 posthumous impressions and proofs to form at least sixteen copies of four illuminated books. he produced his stock of blake’s “engraved books,” which constituted the bulk of his inheritance; he printed more plates, sold more works, and almost certainly made more money off blake’s works than catherine. nor is there evidence that catherine moved the press to her apartment. the press appears to have remained idle after she printed copies of america and europe and was not used again until she died, when tatham began printing copies of the illuminated books. she more likely left it and the copperplates in tatham’s care at the mayfair studio, treating this space as her work space. the idea that catherine continued to print blake’s works from her apartment, which whitehead refers to as her “studio,” is based on precedent and analogies, not extant works printed in this period. she was indeed blake’s assistant in the production of early illuminated books and knew how to print and color impressions. tatham notes that “she even laboured upon his works[,] those parts of them where powers of drawing & form were not necessary, which from her excellent idea of colouring, was of no small use in the completion of his labourious designs. this she did to a much greater extent than is usually credited” (br[2] 690). like alexander gilchrist, tatham was referring to skills used earlier in her life and perhaps to her touching up and strengthening lines in grey and black washes in the copies of america and europe that she printed c. 1829 and adding decorative frames to songs copy w. whitehead summarizes the case that catherine knew how to color and print illuminated plates (“last years” 78-79). having made that case myself on her behalf in blake and the idea of the book, i am not contesting it—​though, unlike tatham, i would not refer to her coloring as “excellent.” i am contesting, however, the idea that because she “could print, color, and finish her husband’s works” (whitehead 80), she did so after blake died. the intention—​perhaps even the potential—​for her doing so may have existed, but the evidence demonstrating that she did on any meaningful scale does not.keynes and wolf describe untraced songs copy f as having its “first seven plates touched with water-colours, possibly by mrs. blake” (68). the description from the sotheby’s auction catalogue, 19 december 1919, however, does not mention colors (bentley, sale catalogues). moreover, copy f was printed in the reddish-brown ink of the other posthumous copies and colored between 1919 and 1925, at which time it reemerged as copy j (bb 428). whitehead imagines catherine wanting her last living arrangement to mirror hers and blake’s, where studio and living quarters were, as noted, one and the same: “their days and nights were passed in each other’s company, for he always painted, drew, engraved and studied, in the same room where they grilled, boiled, stewed, and slept” (nollekens, br[2] 624-25).bentley adds: “this was only true in their last residence, 3 fountain court, strand (1821–27), where the space seems to have been painfully restricted. it was clearly not true, for instance, of their house in hercules buildings (1790–1800), which tatham said … had eight or ten rooms and a maid” (br[2] 625n). because catherine’s new apartment was similar in size to what she had with blake, whitehead imagines that she “may have organized her space, almost certainly an upper-floor apartment, along the lines of her and her husband’s rooms at 17 south molton street and 3 fountain court” (“last years” 89). again, the potential is there: in the front room, with tatham’s assistance, she may have printed posthumous copies of blake’s illuminated books. the scaled representation of the footprint of no. 17 on the 1872 survey map reveals that the front rooms on the upper floors measured approximately 5.49 meters (18 feet) in width and 3.66 meters (12 feet) in depth. this means that for over two years, catherine, living independently, had space to color and sell her late husband’s works and could also resume her role in printing copies of his illuminated books. (whitehead, “last years” 89)for floor plans of the last two apartments occupied by blake and catherine blake, see also hamlyn 16-20. but again, the physical evidence in the form of extant posthumously printed and colored works does not support this image or level of productivity. the copies of for the sexes that she appears to have printed were uncolored and probably produced in linnell’s studio along with other intaglio works—​with copy f, and possibly copies g, h, and i, inherited by tatham. the two pairs of america and europe that she seems to have printed in tatham’s mayfair studio in spring 1829 may have benefited her only in part; one pair appears to have been sold to ferguson, but the other pair may have been sold to peel, in which case the sale would most likely have been after tatham moved to lisson grove and was possibly made on his behalf, not hers. she is known to have executed a drawing of a head in the fire (c. 1830), which tatham inherited (butlin #c2), and, possibly, the portrait of the young blake (c. 1827–31), which appears “to have been given by mrs. blake to a friend” (butlin #c3). as noted, she also finished coloring the pilgrim’s progress illustrations—​which tatham inherited and sold. whitehead seeks to “revise our view of catherine. she was not a dependent blake relict, reliant upon his old friends and passed from ancient to ancient” (“last years” 89). rather, in his view, she was an active artisan independent of blake, resembling more closely the woman j. t. smith describes, who, in addition to proofing and printing blake’s plates, “became a draughtswoman” and “possessed a similar power of imbibing ideas, and has produced drawings equally original, and, in some respects, interesting” (nollekens, br [2] 608). whitehead wishes to show that catherine was more than the “excellent saleswoman” that alexander gilchrist called her (1: 366) and to counter gilchrist’s view that “some of the characteristics of an originally uneducated mind had clung to her … an exaggerated suspiciousness, for instance, and even jealousy of his friends” (1: 317).gilchrist may be alluding to her suspicion that linnell did not pay blake enough for the dante watercolors and engravings, an idea that may have originated with tatham, who made that claim on her behalf and then on his own after she died (br[2] 537ff., story 1: 241, h. h. gilchrist 130). anne gilchrist notes the same, that she “retained one trait of an uneducated mind—​an unreasonable suspiciousness” (h. h. gilchrist 130-31). hogarth, who knew tatham and bought many of his blake works that were once catherine’s, appears to reflect tatham’s view that she was often unreasonably difficult in sales transactions and not always appreciative of genuine assistance. responding to smith’s portrayal of catherine in nollekens, he wrote at the back of his copy: mrs blake was hardly the passive cre[a]ture here described—​at all events tatham did not find her so for she was opposed to everything he did for her benefit and when she submitted to his views it was always with the words she “had no help for it”—​that at last tatham tired with her opposition threw the will behind the fire and burnt it saying [“]there now you can do as you like for the will no longer exists[”] and left her. early the following morning she called upon [him] saying william had been with her all night and required her to come to him and renew the will which was done and never after did she offer any objection to tatham’s proceedings. (br[2] 493-94)according to bentley, “this account of blake’s will is very odd, for no such will was ever registered, and wills cannot be ‘renewed’ as casually as catherine or hogarth thought they could. this sounds like a nuncupative will” (br[2] 494). still, some kind of dramatic gesture was made and some kind of contract that tatham and catherine apparently took seriously was thrown into the fire. linnell annotated his copy of nollekens, “there is very little evidence left that mrs blake produced drawings equally original with her husbands[.] the only one they ever shewed me which they affirmed to be her design & execution is in my possession & is certainly so like one of blake’s own that it is difficult to believe it to be the production of any other mind” (br[2] 608n). this drawing is not among the three that butlin records as being attributed to catherine (butlin #c1, c2, and c3). we do not, however, need to counter the recollections of gilchrist, hogarth, and others—​by transforming catherine in her widowhood into a full-time artisan or exaggerating her solo productivity—​to see that she was a remarkable woman. whitehead’s meticulous research into the last residences of blake and catherine blake has indeed reminded us of her crucial roles in the production of some of blake’s works and, in the context of how other artists lived and worked, how truly supportive, understanding, and inspiring she must have been.in “craft and care: the maker movement, catherine blake, and the digital humanities,” ashley reed demonstrates original and insightful criteria for evaluating catherine’s value to blake that are not based on her being either “artisan” or “assistant.” she moves beyond these binaries to “refocus our attention away from the fixed point of the material object and toward a network of relations that brought it into being” (33). she recognizes that catherine’s contributions as a care worker were “crucial to the creation of a finished artistic product” (32) and that “catherine’s care is part of william’s craft, and vice versa” (35). for example, whitehead discovered that catherine blake’s apartment at 17 upper charlton street was similar to—​and may have actually been—​the studio space in 1807 of the painter william mulready, linnell’s friend and former mentor. according to crosby and whitehead, “the fact that mulready could use a floor of this residence as a painting studio suggests that catherine had enough room here to print as well as colour and sell her husband’s works.” they reassert whitehead’s claims: “from spring 1829 until her death in october 1831, catherine, living independently, coloured and sold her late husband’s works, also printing copies of blake’s illuminated books and other works” (104-05). whitehead, citing the address recorded in the royal academy exhibition catalogue (graves, royal academy 5: 323), claims that mulready used the space as “lodgings and studio” (“last years” 88). graves, however, records addresses given by the artists, which in most cases were their studio spaces, presumably for the benefit of prospective buyers or clients. as noted, c. h. tatham gave as his address queen street while living at alpha road, and in 1835 he gave charles street while living at montpelier square; linnell gave cirencester place while living in hampstead; and frederick tatham gave queen street while living at alpha road. c. h. tatham had lots of children at home and needed an office, as did linnell, palmer, and richmond. in 1807, mulready was still (unhappily) married to the elder of john varley’s two sisters—​who was herself an accomplished watercolorist—​with twin two-year-old boys and an infant son. he almost certainly used his two rooms as work space, not living quarters, which, between 1806 and 1809, appear to have been located at 9 upper cleveland street.according to frederic g. stephens, author of memorials of william mulready, r.a. (1890), mulready moved in 1806 to live at 9 upper cleveland street, which is the address recorded in the royal academy exhibition catalogue for that year (graves, royal academy 5: 323). this apartment apparently doubled as studio and living space—​at least for a short while. in 1807, he is listed at 17 upper charlton street while still residing at upper cleveland street, from which he moved in 1809 to 25 frederick place, hampstead road. he was at 17 upper charlton for just 1807; he rented a room for painting with linnell at 30 francis street, bedford square, 1808–09 (stephens 56-57, story 1: 58). artists need specialized spaces and are not easy to live with. the use of studios outside the home or separate from living and eating space was, and still is, the norm. painting studios are marked by smells: linseed and walnut oils; mastic, damar, and other varnishes; gums and animal, vegetable, and fish glues; turpentine, alcohol, and other solvents; earth and other pigments. they are stocked with mortars and pestles; whiting and other chalks; canvases, wooden stretchers, papers, sketchbooks, panels, millboards, and rags; folders and portfolios; bladders, shells, glass and ceramic jars; knives, quills, and brushes; easels and palettes; bins, tables, stools, cabinets, benches, shelves, and plaster casts and models. add printmaking to this mix, as linnell and blake did, and there were also waxes, etching grounds, asphaltum, rosins, acids, sharp metal tools, dabbers, whetstones, pumice stones, leather pads, tabors, vises, files, copperplates, braziers, coals, smoke, anvils, hammers, marble slabs, presses, etc. any assortment of these materials, let alone all of them, could easily compromise domestic tranquillity. and, of course, artists at work do not want children under foot or spousal interruptions, and few spouses would accept such encroachment on their and their children’s private living space—​or tolerate the accidental but inevitable oily stains and colors that do not wash out of clothes.when printing and painting, one wears an apron or smock to protect clothing from ink and oil stains. the complications created by oils, varnishes, and solvents contributed to why oil painting and printmaking remained in the hands of professionals and occurred in special areas, unlike sketching and drawing, or working with pastels, watercolors, or washes. the late eighteenth-century invention of watercolors in solid cakes led to the medium’s popularity among amateurs, the ranks of which swelled due to ease of use and interest in the picturesque and drawing as a means of recording one’s views/​memories of nature. mrs. and mr. blake were devoted to—​and dependent upon—​one another, and she no doubt believed in his genius, but their living arrangements centered almost exclusively around his needs, a precarious situation made only more so by his not having a separate studio. in addition to his being a painter and a printmaker, he was, of course, a poet who heard voices and wrote from dictation. according to alexander gilchrist, quoting j. t. smith, “[mrs. blake] would get up in the night, when ‘he was under his very fierce inspirations, which were as if they would tear him asunder, while he was yielding himself to the muse, or whatever else it could be called, sketching and writing. and so terrible a task did this seem to be, that she had to sit motionless and silent; only to stay him mentally, without moving hand or foot: this for hours, and night after night’” (1: 316). she had, occasionally, the help of a servant (br[2] 676), but mostly not; according to hayley, “the good woman not only does all the work of the house, but she even makes the greatest part of her husbands dress, & assists him in his art—​she draws, she engraves, & sings delightfully” (br[2] 140).by “engraves,” hayley presumably meant that she printed blake’s engravings; there is no evidence that she knew how to engrave. in addition to her own talents, she must have been extraordinarily tolerant, loving, empathetic, and accepting—​must have believed in blake’s gifts and participated in his life and works in ways too deep and profound for most of us to understand. living with mr. blake and his rolling press—​especially in just two rooms between 1803 and 1827—​as assistant, friend, manager, and wife made mrs. blake remarkable indeed. hayley was surely right in telling lady hesketh that she was “perhaps the only female on earth, who could have suited him exactly” (br[2] 140).he adds: “they have been married more than 17 years & are as fond of each other, as if their honey moon were still shining.” for an examination of visual and verbal expressions and evidence of possible discord between husband and wife, at least in the early 1790s and after their return to london from felpham, see paley and crosby’s “catherine blake and her marriage: two notes.” for an exploration of catherine’s sexuality, real and very much imagined, see whitehead and gwynne’s “the sexual life of catherine b.: women novelists, blake scholars and contemporary fabulations of catherine blake.” catherine sold a mere fraction of the designs she had inherited from her husband. her inheritance included twelve large color prints, which blake had priced in 1818 at £5.5s. each; jerusalem copy e, which he had estimated at £21; the beautiful songs copy w finished in gold leaf and priced by blake in 1827 at £10.10s.; the equally beautiful late copy n of visions; the tiriel drawings; the twenty-three color prints of the small book of designs copy b; a reduced drawing of the canterbury pilgrims (butlin #654); the death of ezekiel’s wife (butlin #166); the penance of jane shore in st. paul’s church (butlin #69); designs for the last judgment (butlin #643, 644, 647); the fresco version of the last judgment (butlin #648) that blake was working on when he died and valued at “twenty-five guineas” (a. gilchrist 1: 358); and so much more. indeed, all the works that would later fill tatham’s “portfolio of blake’s drawings” that ruskin acquired from hogarth once belonged to her. the portfolio included upward of 100 drawings and sketches and was only a portion of what tatham inherited.blake produced thirty-three large color prints in three printings and appears to have sold twenty-one of them to butts and two collectors unknown to us, leaving catherine twelve large color prints when he died. at least five, probably more, were in the portfolio (see viscomi, “signing large color prints” 401 and “printed paintings,” appendix 4). catherine appears to have eventually recognized that she could secure a livelihood from blake’s works without adding to them. she used her apartment at 17 upper charlton to live and to store and sell his works. she did not use it as a studio to print and color prints or, possibly, other than pilgrim’s progress, to color works from stock. that does not diminish her or render her an appendage of blake’s. as whitehead discovered, she lived independently for the last thirty-one months of her life. she was able to do so, however, as an “excellent saleswoman,” not artisan. the evidence, in the form of posthumous prints and works that catherine is known to have sold, indicates that she earned at least £93.15.0 between august 1827 and april 1829—​in addition to her brother-in-law’s gift in early 1829 of £20 and some furniture. these monies came from proofing plates for linnell and the sales of copies of “canterbury pilgrims,” jerusalem copy f, “ancient of days” copy f, cumberland’s greeting card, a copy of the grave, the watercolor lear and cordelia in prison (butlin #53), the watercolor the good and evil angels (butlin #257), and “a drawing of heads by mr. b. & two by fuseli” (br[2] 479-84, 538, 620, 790-92). this sum includes £20 from linnell for housekeeping—​though this may not have been paid (br[2] 538)—​and £17 from tatham through linnell in two payments for unspecified reasons (br[2] 792); it does not include the unknown amount henry francis cary paid in 1829 for blake’s watercolor oberon, titania, and puck with fairies dancing (br[2] 481n, butlin #161). from her new apartment, between april 1829 and october 1831, she earned at least £106.16.6 from the sales of “homer’s illiad & oddessey trans by chapman” in may 1829 to tatham for £1.11.6 (br[2] 792); the characters in spenser’s “fairie queene” in august 1829 to lord egremont for £84; songs copy w, christ showing the print of the nails to the apostles (butlin #329), the body of abel found by adam and eve (butlin #666), and two prints in march 1830 to bishop jebb for £21;this sum assumes that songs copy w sold for ten guineas, as understood by bentley (br[2] 509), and not twenty guineas, as understood by butlin (#329). and descriptive catalogue copy k and poetical sketches copy t in august 1831 to linnell for 5s. this sum does not include the sale of visions copy n, america copy n, and europe copy i in spring 1829, presumably to ferguson. nor does it include sales she may have made on her own without linnell or tatham collecting the money; the unknown first provenances of numerous works once hers that did not pass through tatham’s hands cannot rule this out. tatham benefited financially from blake’s works far more than did catherine, but she benefited enough to support herself in her last years. during the fifty months of her widowhood, she appears to have had an income of at least £250—​and almost certainly more—​which averages to a little more than £60 a year, not bad considering that she lived for nineteen of those months rent free, first at linnell’s studio and then at c. h. tatham’s studio, and that as a couple the blakes’ “yearly income,” as noted, did “not seem to have gone much above £100, and sometimes it was probably not much more than £50” (br[2] 812). the evidence examined here indicates not only that she printed only a few illuminated works after blake died, but also that she did not need to print them or color works from the stock she had inherited. by fall 1829, she had become financially independent through her own efforts as an “excellent saleswoman” and the largesse of lord egremont. in effect, in 1829, two years before tatham began printing the lion’s share of the posthumous books, catherine was able to retire from the business of printing. 12. 1788–1827 revisited and prices for works in 1827–31 the idea that printing copies of blake’s illuminated books would have secured catherine blake’s financial independence is itself suspect and recalls theories about blake inventing illuminated printing to become financially independent.for a review of the critical theories attempting to explain the genesis and objectives of illuminated printing, see bib chapters 1-4 and 18. financial independence was impossible, however, at the prices blake was asking in 1793. this reality was still true late in his life when he began asking far more per copy (and producing far fewer copies), pricing illuminated books not as poetry but as books of colored prints and miniature paintings. he admits as much to dawson turner in 1818, acknowledging that his books were “unprofitable enough to me tho expensive to the buyer” and that “the few i have printed & sold are sufficient to have gained me great reputation as an artist which was the chief thing intended” (e 771). at the inception of illuminated books, blake presumably hoped that he might reach a larger audience with unique hand-colored and color-printed works that were also multiples than he could with one-off watercolor designs. putting his works in more hands did not, however, mean a substantial increase in income. the ideas that “blake clearly had high hopes that illuminated printing would make his fortune” (mitchell 42) and believed “he could achieve personal independence as both poet and painter at a single blow” (frye 120) merely echo alexander gilchrist’s mistaken belief that the prospectus of 1793 was a financial turning point and that the illuminated books provided blake with “a principal means of support through his future life” (1: 69). by the time of the prospectus, blake had produced twenty-two copies of innocence, which he priced at five shillings. had he sold them all, he would have realized £5.10s., minus the approximately £1.11s. in copperplates, paper, oils, gum arabic, and pigments. “the income from the forty or so copies of the other five books advertised in the prospectus would have realized another seventeen pounds” (bib 174).“in 1793 blake knew the strengths and weaknesses of his method, he knew the size of his stock, and he knew how to add. while he no doubt hoped to earn some money as well as reputation, he must also have realized that illuminated printing, no matter how large and varied the stock, even after the costs of copper plates were recouped, could never have provided a dependable source of income at the prices he was charging, that its profits would always be supplemental to income derived from painting, designing, and engraving” (bib 174; see also 250). in other words, blake could have sold all the copies of his illuminated books printed over a four-year period and would have earned less than engraving one medium-size plate for bowyer, boydell, macklin, or any of the other london book and print publishers.blake told rev. trusler in 1799 that the size of the engraving trusler requested would cost “thirty guineas & i cannot afford to do it for less. i had twelve for the head i sent you as a specimen” (e 703). he was receiving similar amounts from publishers and hayley for engraved designs. according to bentley, “from 1780 to 1799, more than 90 per cent of his income derived from his commercial engravings” (desolate market 103). had blake gained financial independence through illuminated printing, what would he have wanted to do? write lyrical and narrative poems? design, illustrate, or print his own books that incorporated calligraphy, drawing, printing, and painting? paint visionary pictures? illustrate the bible, milton, dante, or other literary texts? experiment with new print and color-printing technologies? create new kinds of paint and painting surfaces? besides forgoing copy engraving and executing more of his own inventions in various media, what exactly would he have done differently had he been financially independent? he tells us he would have painted large frescos, the size of walls (e 527), though robin hamlyn comments astutely that his doing so would not have been in his best interests aesthetically (23). blake had the eye of the miniaturist, honed no doubt by the attention to details required of engraving, but aided, as hamlyn notes, by his being “moderately” myopic: with “his near vision … much sharper than his distance vision … close work would have come more naturally to him” (24). his frescos, which he likened to miniatures and enamels, were indeed miniatures writ large, some with many hundreds of figures and objects, as versions of the last judgment, hervey’s “meditations among the tombs,” and spiritual condition of man attest. had he not given engraving so much of his time and effort, he would have denied the world the job masterpieces. blake did what he wanted, thanks to his tenacity, skills, talents, inspiration—​and, of course, to catherine. but his innate abilities, coupled with loving support, assistance, and inspiration, would have gone for naught had he not also been a good engraver. he had a trade he was good at and that earned him money, enough during the first part of his career to support himself and his wife. his attitude toward his trade, at least in the 1790s, was healthy; he told trusler that he had “no objection to engraving after another artist. engraving is the profession i was apprenticed to, & should never have attempted to live by any thing else if orders had not come in for my designs & paintings …. thus if i am a painter it is not to be attributed to seeking after. but i am contented whether i live by painting or engraving” (e 703).blake recorded in his notebook (117) that “mr b … during a period of forty years never suspended his labours on copper for a single day” (e 568). he started his apprenticeship in 1772; by 1809, commissions for engravings had dried up (br[2] 821), but he was still working on his own designs, including “canterbury pilgrims” (1810). his fight with the publisher robert cromek, who commissioned schiavonetti to engrave blake’s designs for the grave (1806–08) and whom blake accused of stealing his idea for the canterbury pilgrims design, appears to have soured him on the print trade. on 19 december 1808, blake told cumberland that it was “impossible” for him to return to his “former pursuits of printing” without “destroying” his “present course,” and that his “future must <alone> be devoted to designing & painting” (e 769-70). engraving never disappeared from his life, though: between 1815 and 1827, he executed 103 commercial engravings and thirty original engravings (br[2] 822-23) and earned approximately £1000 from engraving during that period (bentley, desolate market 105). blake was certainly not alone among his peers in having to earn a living doing one thing when he much preferred doing another. like blake, george romney preferred “history” paintings but painted portraits to survive, as did thomas gainsborough and linnell, who both preferred landscapes. though it took time away from his own work, engraving for the book and print publishers appears not to have stifled or impaired blake’s imagination, vision, or inspiration. resorting to engraving to pay the rent may have been less stressful and burdensome to him than portraiture was to so many other creative artists. indeed, he certainly resisted hayley, who wanted “to turn me into a portrait painter as he did poor romney, but this he nor all the devils in hell will never do” (e 725). for all her skills, the widowed catherine could not rely on a trade, not even printing. london publishers who were not also patrons like hayley were likely to require print runs larger than he did for cowper and were likely to balk altogether at hiring a small sixty-six-year-old female printer. she did not continue printing blake’s illuminated books in any significant quantity, despite her initial intentions, and her not doing so is no more a mark against her than any of blake’s unrealized intentions are marks against him.in january 1803, blake told his brother james that “the profits arising from publications are immense & i now have it in my power to commence publication with many very formidable works, which i have finishd & ready.” he felt confident that he had learned hayley’s “connexions & his method of managing” and that it would “be folly not to venture publishing” if he could substitute one of hayley’s illustrated works with “one of my own & i mean to try many” (e 726). in december 1808, he told cumberland that he was too busy with “new vanities” and the prospect of “new profits” to return to illuminated printing and that he had “begun to print an account of my various inventions in art <for> which i have procured a publisher” (e 770). after blake died, she was more agent than artisan, but while she was with him, she was unquestionably the best printing “devil” he could have had—​or, as he said on his deathbed, she was forever his “angel” (br[2] 655). living with him and a large rolling press in two-room apartments for twenty-four years of her life—​from 1803 to 1827—​was evidence of that and so much more. cumberland wrote to catherine on 25 november 1827 to offer advice on selling blake’s works. he noted that his bristol friends thought the job engravings were priced too high at £3.3s. and were not ordering illuminated books “on account … of the prices.” the book prices that blake quoted him in 1827 were between £3.3s. and £10.10s. (e 784). he recommended that she “fix a place in london where all [blake’s] works may be disposed of offering a complete set for sale to the bmpr [british museum print room], as that will make them best known” (br[2] 476, emphasis added). cumberland was already pointing to the flaw in catherine’s aspirations: there was very little money to be made from blake’s printed works without his being better known. the necessity of a good reputation is something cumberland made explicit to his son, telling him that he wanted to use the calling card blake had engraved for him “to spread my old friends fame and promote his wifes interest—​by making him thus the subject of conversation” (br[2] 483). j. t. smith also knew the importance of reputation and believed he addressed it in nollekens and his times. in november 1828, shortly after nollekens was published, he wrote to linnell: “what i have said of your worthy friend blake i am fully aware has been servisable [sic] to his widow” (br[2] 490). or so he intended and hoped. making blake’s books better known, however, required a “complete set,” which she did not have and would have been at a loss to produce.as noted, blake did not have a complete set of his books when he died (br[2] 554). he appears, however, to have had one in 1795, when he printed multiple copies of ten titles on folio-size leaves to form a deluxe set of his canon to that date (see bib 289-94). the economic value of the kind of respected reputation that cumberland and smith had in mind was on full display on 1 july 1828 at the flaxman auction at christie’s, where blake’s 116 large watercolor illustrations to gray’s poems—​which blake had executed for flaxman’s wife—​sold for a mere £8.8s. (or 1.4 shillings a drawing). flaxman’s much smaller portfolio of thirty-seven drawings from hesiod, “handsomely bound in morocco, lettered, &c.,” sold for £210—​seventy-five times more per drawing than blake’s drawings. outline engravings after flaxman were, of course, famous throughout europe. blake’s works were only fairly well known in london. his reputation was growing, slowly, and his works were selling and reselling, but not at high prices. when he was producing his last copies of songs, painting them elaborately and using gold leaf, copies twenty and more years old were entering the market through auctions and printseller’s sales catalogues. in 1818, blake priced songs at £6.6s. (e 771); in 1827, he priced it at £10.10s. (e 784). songs copy u, printed c. 1818, was offered in 1824 at rivington and cochran for £8.8s. in 1828, it sold with the property of thomas edwards at stewart, wheatley, & adlard for just £2.13s. (bb 422). songs copy p, printed c. 1802, sold in april 1826 in two volumes in red morocco and gilt leaves as part of the bibliotheca splendidissima: a catalogue of a select portion of the library of mrs. bliss for just £1. in july 1833, it sold with the property of p. a. hanrott for £2.1s. copy a of for children: the gates of paradise sold for a mere eight shillings in the bliss sale. songs copy bb, an uncolored copy printed in black ink similar in appearance to posthumous copies, sold with fifty-five plates for just £1 (a mere 4.3 pence per plate) in january 1830 (bbs 127). catherine’s posthumously printed copies of illuminated books were uncolored and could not have realized the prices of blake’s last books, which blake knew were “expensive to the buyer” because of his elaborate coloring and use of shell gold that recast the pages of poetry as miniature paintings. he appears to have sold to collectors of prints and paintings as much as to collectors of rare books. nevertheless, they were, blake says, “unprofitable enough” to him (e 771). had catherine printed copies of songs, she could have expected only a few pounds at most for monochrome copies, as is corroborated by the auction and sale catalogues at the time. granted, she would have had the advantage of supply had there been demand, but cumberland’s note about the books’ high prices, as well as the low resale price of songs copy bb—​and the fact that she did not color any of the books she did print—​must give pause. given how much of blake’s “stock of designs” tatham inherited, one must also wonder how many works catherine actually sold—​or how many she needed to sell—​to survive. 13. summary of argument catherine blake moved her and blake’s rolling press to linnell’s studio at 6 cirencester place on 30 august 1827 (br[2] 468) and, presumably, by early april 1828 to c. h. tatham’s mayfair studio at 1 queen street, where she lodged at least until the end of march 1829. she had already moved to her apartment at 17 upper charlton street when frederick tatham wrote to an unknown customer on 11 april 1829. she appears to have printed only eight copies of three titles of intaglio and relief-etched books between september 1827 and spring 1829, along with some individual engravings and a white-line etching, for a total of at most 150 to 160 impressions. whitehead believes that she moved the press with all of her and blake’s effects to her fitzroy square apartment, yet no evidence of her using the press there is extant. at first, the hiatus in printing between ferguson’s copies of america and europe c. spring 1829 and the resumption of printing in late 1831 by frederick tatham may seem to suggest that catherine moved the press to her apartment—​and thus out of tatham’s hands. but even if the press remained at the studio in mayfair, as i believe to be the case, tatham is unlikely to have printed the books in the manner and at the scale he did while the plates were still catherine’s property. in other words, it is possible, and it seems likely to me, that she left the press at the mayfair studio and used it when she needed to. linnell’s application in 1827 to the royal academy for catherine noted that blake lived “in perfect harmony with his wife. never had but small prices for his works, & so though he lived with the utmost economy, he could not save anything—​& has left nothing for his widow but a few plates & drawings which if sold would produce nothing adequate to defray even present expenses” (br[2] 463). cumberland explained the highs and lows of demand, despite supplies: “for blake i have spared no pains but have no success. they seem to think his prices above their reach, yet they seemed very anxious to have his works. … his job i have placed with a third bookseller mr lewis of clifton” (br[2] 458). although blake left catherine more saleable goods than linnell let on, linnell and cumberland were right about blake’s works selling for “small prices” and about the need to increase blake’s reputation. catherine’s own reputation “as needy, deserving, and grateful widow,” which is how she was portrayed “in blake’s obituary in the literary gazette (1827), and later by smith … and cunningham,” “probably incrementally enhanced” her “potential customer base” (crosby and whitehead 105). whitehead’s excellent detective work has corrected the historical record in numerous places. he located and confirmed the last two residences of catherine blake, discovered the date of frederick tatham’s marriage, helped clarify the relation between catherine and tatham, and recognized c. h. tatham’s role in helping her. she did not spend her last years keeping house or caring for the tathams, nor did she spend them in abject poverty. she was actually stable financially, but not because she continued what crosby and whitehead term the “firm” of “wm blake.” the firm, they believe, “would continue to trade for another two and a half years,” between 1829 and 1831, “through the efforts and improved material circumstances of blake’s widow” (106). this implication of her equal partnership in the firm of blake is suspect. it appears predicated on a false equivalence of the acts of printing with the things printed—​the texts, designs, objects, and ideas expressed—​and on the failure to recognize differences in painting abilities. crosby and whitehead state, for example, that “it is extremely difficult, although perhaps not impossible, to identify accurately any specific illuminated books or indeed individual plates coloured by catherine during blake’s lifetime, largely due to the fact that their palettes are extremely similar, if not identical” (100). but this is not true—​it is not difficult to tell the hands apart when the artifacts are side by side, nor is it difficult when using high-resolution digital images of impressions set up for comparison. if we examine two versions of visions using the blake archive’s compare feature, “objects from the same matrix,” located under the image, we can view the evidence of different hands in their creation. looking at copies i and j, plates 7, 9, and 10, we see that i is following j generally, not note for note, and that j is the better colored of the two. identifying the hand does not rely on the palettes, which are similar though not identical, but on how the colors are laid in. catherine’s washes (in copy i and elsewhere) are flat and one-dimensional—​that is, laid in without underlying tones that make modeling possible, and rarely with translucent washes or stippling brushwork over the basic washes (bib 133-42). blake’s touch, as this sensitivity to one’s tools and medium is called, and his skills as a colorist were finer than catherine’s, as one would expect of a professionally trained and very experienced artist. she appears to have had little to no hand in finishing the color-printed impressions of 1794 and 1795, with their surfaces and textures of indistinct “blots & blurs” of colors necessitating the “powers of drawing & form”—​in other words, the creator’s eye and hand to find, pull out, and delineate forms. her hand also seems absent in late copies of illuminated books, though their frame lines, decorative borders, plate numbers, and collation may have been her work. the extant posthumous prints do not support the idea that catherine was blake’s equal partner or was continuing the “firm.” they do not support the claim that catherine, “on an upper floor at 17 upper charlton street … continued her husband’s trade, printing, coloring, and selling works up until her death” (whitehead, “last years” 89). she printed fine copies of for the sexes, america, and europe, but she was not the primary printer of blake’s posthumous illuminated books. the list of works she is known to have sold supports the idea that she was blake’s sales agent in london. her last years seem closer to the portrait provided by j. t. smith and alexander gilchrist of a woman having no debts and surviving on a small inheritance, the care of friends, money from lord egremont, and an “occasional sale” of a few of blake’s designs. she appears not only to have retired from printing in 1829, but for the first time in twenty-six years to have had a bit of space to herself—​to have had living quarters uncluttered by a large, old-fashioned wooden rolling press. crosby and whitehead begin their essay with the astute observation that james joyce’s comments about catherine reveal more about joyce than they do about her. no doubt our comments about her reveal much about ourselves and our times. the critical pendulum has swung from joyce’s day, when considering information about her was thought to be unnecessary, to using her as a screen for our own projections, desires, and politics (crosby and whitehead 83-86). their attempt to recalibrate the pendulum, to “reclaim the historical catherine,” required them to focus “closely on the few hard facts and contemporaneous accounts” and to jettison “the unreliable mythology and sentimental accretions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.” their “digging harder and further into the archives” has indeed yielded “new material information concerning catherine’s final years” and enabled them to present her “as a talented and loyal, as well as willful and complex woman” (86). to understand catherine more fully in her own right, as well as in her many roles in blake’s life, we must continue to excavate the archives. we need more information about blake’s market, about his earliest patrons and collectors and the collectors who acquired his works from catherine blake and frederick tatham, to understand blake’s reception in his lifetime and immediately afterward. we need to examine his entire canon of commercial and original works of art thoroughly, honestly, and in detail to identify the works on which catherine assisted and the nature and extent of that assistance. in this context, the recent discovery by david alexander that blake took on thomas owen as an apprentice in 1788 requires the utmost attention and rigorous investigation (see alexander; also bentley, desolate market 37-40). did owen live with the blakes at 28 poland street (1788–90) and/​or 13 hercules buildings (1790–95)? if he served the full seven years of the apprenticeship, his assistance would have corresponded with a particularly busy time for blake as an engraver. could he have engraved the less accomplished plates in c. g. salzmann’s elements of morality, for the use of children (1791), as essick suggests (“marketplace 2010,” 141)? more important, could he have been on hand, a “devil” in the studio, during the first period of illuminated printing? if so, did his assistance affect how blake divided labor in the production of illuminated prints and books—​and thus our understanding of catherine’s assistance during this period?  such information will enable us to estimate accurately catherine’s activities during and after blake’s life and income during her widowhood. moreover, it will provide a portrait of catherine that reflects the facts and not our need to burnish her image—​or our discomfort with the ideas of “wife” and “assistant.” whatever awaits discovery, we know one thing for sure: we do not need to make catherine blake more interesting or creative to make her significant and important. she already is significant and important and interesting. we need a critical vocabulary that recognizes her as such and recognizes why, a vocabulary we can use without distortion or discomfort. perhaps then, like hayley, we too could value and embrace catherine “as an invaluable helpmate, perhaps the only woman on earth, who could have perfectly suited [blake] as a wife … to watch over this singularly endangered mortal, unfit in truth to take care of himself in a world like this!” (br[2] 205-06). mona wilson, blake’s only female biographer, appears to have intuitively grasped the meaning of hayley’s observation, noting that “no one can understand blake’s life without being aware of the significance of [catherine’s] helpful and faithful figure, nor is it possible to think of him with a different type of wife without loss, even without the utter destruction of the fabric of his life” (303). blake understood catherine’s significance and expressed it concisely: “peace & plenty & domestic happiness is the source of sublime art” (e 700). works cited alexander, david. “william blake, graveur d’interprétation.” william blake (1757–1827): le génie visionnaire du romantisme anglais. ed. michael phillips. paris: petit palais/paris-musées, 2009. 79-81. bentley, g. e., jr. blake books: annotated catalogues of william blake’s writings in illuminated printing …. oxford: clarendon press, 1977. [abbreviated as bb.] —​—​—​. blake books supplement. oxford: clarendon press, 1995. [abbreviated as bbs.] —​—​—​. blake records. 2nd ed. new haven: yale university press, 2004. [abbreviated as br(2).] —​—​—​. blake records supplement. oxford: clarendon press, 1988. [abbreviated as brs.] —​—​—​. the edwardses of halifax. toronto: university of toronto press, 2015. —​—​—​. “the peripatetic painter and the stroke of genius: james ferguson (1790–1871) as a patron of william blake.” blake journal 5 (2000): 7-22. —​—​—​. sale catalogues of blake’s works, 1791–2017. g. e. bentley: blake collection. e. j. pratt library, victoria university, university of toronto. <http://​library.​vicu.​utoronto.​ca/​collections/​​special_​collections/​bentley_​blake_​collection/​pdf/​may_2017/​may_​2017_​sale_​catalogue_​blake.​pdf>. —​—​—​. the stranger from paradise. new haven: yale university press, 2001. —​—​—​. “william blake and his circle: a checklist of publications and discoveries in 2013.” blake 48.1 (summer 2014). —​—​—​. “william blake and his circle: a checklist of publications and discoveries in 2014.” blake 49.1 (summer 2015). —​—​—​. “william blake and his circle: a checklist of publications and discoveries in 2016.” blake 51.1 (summer 2017). —​—​—​. william blake in the desolate market. montreal: mcgill-queen’s university press, 2014. butlin, martin. the paintings and drawings of william blake. 2 vols. new haven: yale university press, 1981. [abbreviated as butlin plus catalogue number.] —​—​—​. “william rossetti’s annotations to gilchrist’s life of william blake.” blake 2.3 (dec. 1968): 39-40. carter, john, and graham pollard. an enquiry into the nature of certain nineteenth century pamphlets. london: constable, 1934. “charles heathcote tatham.” wikipedia. <https://​en.​wikipedia.​org/​wiki/​charles_​heathcote_​tatham>. cockburn, sir robert, and harry a. cockburn. the records of the cockburn family. london: t. n. foulis, 1913. digitized by the internet archive in 2012 with funding from the university of toronto. crosby, mark, and angus whitehead. “georgian superwoman or ‘the maddest of the two’? recovering the historical catherine blake, 1762–1831.” re-envisioning blake. ed. crosby, troy patenaude, and whitehead. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, 2012. 83-107. crouan, katharine. john linnell: a centennial exhibition. cambridge: cambridge university press, 1982. cunningham, allan. the lives of the most eminent british painters, sculptors, and architects. 2nd ed. vol. 2. london: john murray, 1830. 143-88. reproduced in br(2) 627-60. curtis, henry. “notes for a pedigree of the tathams of co. durham, england.” london, 1921 (rev. 1927). <https://​www.​saxonlodge.​net/​histories/​curtistranscription_5.0.pdf>. erdman, david v., ed. the complete poetry and prose of william blake. newly rev. ed. new york: anchor-random house, 1988. [abbreviated as e.] essick, robert n. “blake in the marketplace, 1987.” blake 22.1 (summer 1988): 4-15. —​—​—​. “blake in the marketplace, 2006.” blake 40.4 (spring 2007): 116-46. —​—​—​. “blake in the marketplace, 2010.” blake 44.4 (spring 2011): 116-42. —​—​—​. “blake in the marketplace, 2013.” blake 47.4 (spring 2014). —​—​—​. “blake in the marketplace, 2014.” blake 48.4 (spring 2015). —​—​—​. “blake in the marketplace, 2016.” blake 50.4 (spring 2017). —​—​—​. the separate plates of william blake: a catalogue. princeton: princeton university press, 1983. —​—​—​. william blake, printmaker. princeton: princeton university press, 1980. —​—​—​. william blake’s commercial book illustrations: a catalogue of the plates engraved by blake after designs by other artists. oxford: clarendon press, 1991. frye, northrop. “poetry and design in william blake.” blake: a collection of critical essays. ed. frye. englewood cliffs, nj: prentice-hall, 1966. 119-26. galinou, mireille. cottages and villas: the birth of the garden suburb. new haven: yale university press, 2010. gilchrist, alexander. life of william blake, “pictor ignotus.” 2 vols. london: macmillan, 1863. gilchrist, herbert harlakenden, ed. anne gilchrist: her life and writings. 2nd ed. london: t. fisher unwin, 1887. grant, john e., edward j. rose, and michael j. tolley, eds.; david v. erdman, co-ordinating ed. william blake’s designs for edward young’s “night thoughts.” 2 vols. oxford: clarendon press, 1980. graves, algernon. the british institution, 1806–1867: a complete dictionary of contributors and their work from the foundation of the institution. london: george bell and sons, 1908. —​—​—​. the royal academy of arts: a complete dictionary of contributors and their work from its foundation in 1769 to 1904. 8 vols. london: h. graves, 1905–06. hamlyn, robin. “william blake at work: ‘every thing which is in harmony.’” william blake: the painter at work. ed. joyce h. townsend. london: tate publishing, 2003. 12-39. hodgman, v. w. “wainewright, thomas griffiths (1794–1847).” australian dictionary of biography. national centre of biography, australian national university. <http://​adb.​anu.​edu.​au/​biography/​wainewright-​thomas-​griffiths-​2762/​text3919>. keynes, geoffrey, and edwin wolf, 2nd. william blake’s illuminated books: a census. new york: grolier club, 1953. lister, raymond. “richmond, george.” oxford dictionary of national biography. 23 september 2004. oxford university press. <https://​www.​oxforddnb.​com/​view/​10.​1093/​ref:odnb/​9780198614128.​001.​0001/​odnb-​9780198614128-​e-​23594/​version/​0>. mitchell, w. j. t. blake’s composite art. princeton: princeton university press, 1978. monkhouse, cosmo. “richmond, george.” dictionary of national biography. vol. 48. ed. sidney lee. london: smith, elder, & co., 1896. 255-57. o’donoghue, f. m. “heaphy, thomas, the elder.” dictionary of national biography. vol. 25. ed. leslie stephen and sidney lee. london: smith, elder, & co., 1891. 332-33. paley, morton d., and mark crosby. “catherine blake and her marriage: two notes.” huntington library quarterly 78.3 (2015): 479-91. reed, ashley. “craft and care: the maker movement, catherine blake, and the digital humanities.” essays in romanticism 23.1 (2016): 23-38. richmond, t. k. “tatham, charles heathcote.” dictionary of national biography. vol. 55. ed. sidney lee. london: smith, elder, & co., 1898. 381-82. riddell, richard. “tatham, charles heathcote.” oxford dictionary of national biography. 23 september 2004. oxford university press. <https://​www.​oxforddnb.​com/​view/​10.​1093/​ref:odnb/​9780198614128.​001.​0001/​odnb-​9780198614128-​e-​26990/​version/​0>. rossetti, william michael, ed. the poetical works of william blake, lyrical and miscellaneous. london: george bell and sons, 1874. —​—​—​, comp. rossetti papers, 1862 to 1870. london: sands & co., 1903. ruskin, john. the letters of john ruskin, 1827–1869. the works of john ruskin. ed. e. t. cook and alexander wedderburn. vol. 36. london: george allen, 1909. russell, archibald g. b. the letters of william blake. london: methuen, 1906. rutter, suzanne, and donald gallup. “a check-list of the [rosenbloom] bequest.” yale university library gazette 49.4 (april 1975): 311-43. skretkowicz, victor, jr. “j. deffett francis: the swansea blakes.” blake 3.3 (dec. 1969): 52-54. smith, john thomas. nollekens and his times. vol. 2. london: henry colburn, 1828. 454-88. reproduced in br(2) 604-26. stephens, frederic g. memorials of william mulready, r.a. new york: scribner and welford, 1890. stirling, a. m. w. the richmond papers from the correspondence and manuscripts of george richmond … and his son sir william richmond …. london: william heinemann, 1926. story, alfred t. the life of john linnell. 2 vols. london: richard bentley and son, 1892. tatham family history: the tathams of county durham. ed. robert collingwood. <http://​www.​saxonlodge.​net>. tatham, frederick. “life of blake.” manuscript, c. 1832. transcribed in br(2) 661-91. turner, silvie. the book of fine paper. london: thames and hudson, 1998. viscomi, joseph. “blake after blake: a nation discovers genius.” blake, nation and empire. ed. steve clark and david worrall. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, 2006. 214-50. —​—​—​. blake and the idea of the book. princeton: princeton university press, 1993. [abbreviated as bib.] —​—​—​. “digital facsimiles: reading the william blake archive.” computers and the humanities 36.1 (2002): 27-48. —​—​—​. “the evolution of the marriage of heaven and hell [part i].” huntington library quarterly 58.3/4 (1995): 281-344. —​—​—​. “a ‘green house’ for butts? new information on thomas butts, his residences, and family.” blake 30.1 (summer 1996): 4-21. —​—​—​. prints by william blake and his followers. ithaca, ny: herbert f. johnson museum of art, 1983. —​—​—​. “signing large color prints: the significance of blake’s signatures.” huntington library quarterly 80.3 (2017): 365-402. —​—​—​. “two fake blakes revisited; one dew-smith revealed.” blake in our time: essays in honour of g. e. bentley jr. ed. karen mulhallen. toronto: university of toronto press, 2010. 35-78. —​—​—​. “william blake’s printed paintings: methods, origins, meanings of blake’s 1795 monoprints.” manuscript; publication forthcoming. whitehead, angus. “‘an excellent saleswoman’: the last years of catherine blake.” blake 45.3 (winter 2011–12): 76-90. —​—​—​. “‘i also beg mr blakes acceptance of my wearing apparel ’: the will of henry banes, landlord of 3 fountain court, strand, the last residence of william and catherine blake.” blake 39.2 (fall 2005): 78-99. whitehead, angus, and joel gwynne. “the sexual life of catherine b.: women novelists, blake scholars and contemporary fabulations of catherine blake.”  sexy blake. ed. helen p. bruder and tristanne connolly. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, 2013. 193-210. the william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. <http://www.​blakearchive.​org>. wilson, mona. the life of william blake. london: nonesuch press, 1927. review: matthew leporati, romantic epics and the mission of empire matthew leporati. romantic epics and the mission of empire. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2024. ix + 295 pp. £85.00/​$110.00, hardcover; also available as an e-book. reviewed by jason whittaker jason whittaker (jwhittaker@lincoln.ac.uk) works in the college of arts, social sciences, and humanities at the university of lincoln. he is the author and editor of several works on blake, including william blake and the myths of britain (palgrave, 1999), radical blake: influence and afterlife from 1827 (with shirley dent, palgrave, 2002), divine images: the life and work of william blake (reaktion books, 2021), and jerusalem: blake, parry, and the fight for englishness (oxford university press, 2022). his main research interests deal with the reception of blake, and he is the editor of the site zoamorphosis and one of the editors for global blake. matthew leporati’s wide-ranging and compelling study considers two features of the romantic era that are rarely contemplated side by side: the explosion of epic poetry at the turn of the nineteenth century and the turn toward a more evangelical and proselytizing form of christian missionary activity. the latter is, as leporati observes, often in opposition to the demands of empire in the early stages of colonization, but then is effectively co-opted into colonial activities as the century progresses. his book deals only tangentially with blake, the subject of one of its chapters, but in many respects blake’s writing in general and milton a poem in particular fuel several of the more critical conclusions. romantic epics and the mission of empire is divided into two main parts, beginning with an overview that bounds through a series of epic poems—​some of them famous, or relatively so, such as keats’s hyperion and henry james pye’s alfred, but many more obscure even at the time of their composition. on a general note, what is astonishing in this first section of the book is how many epic poems were written during the romantic period. as the author observes in his introduction, the “vast and unprecedented production of epics suggests that writers found in this ancient genre unique tools to speak to the tensions of the historical moment” (1). in the following chapter, “epic conversions,” leporati provides one of the most succinct and useful definitions of that metamorphic genre, and demonstrates that this prodigious production gave the lie to the notion that epic declined with the end of aristocratic patronage and the rise of the novel. by contrast, he suggests that it was a suitably elevated means to engage with the aspirations—​both lofty and, inevitably, often degrading—​of empire. in this, it paralleled the revival of history painting at the end of the eighteenth century. a core theme of the book is how romantic-era epics frequently interact with evangelical enterprises, something dealt with in considerable detail in the second and third chapters, which explore the revival of the missionary enterprise and the links between epic and heroic conversion narratives. if epic is a means to lift up national consciousness (for, as leporati demonstrates, epic is, with only a few exceptions, both implicitly and explicitly a genre of the nation), its coincidence with missionary activity is also no historical accident, being prompted in part by a change in focus in anglican theology from administering to the elect to achieving salvation through faith. and yet this combination of heroic epic and evangelical missionary activity was not always a happy, nor even a necessary, one. as leporati points out, early missionaries were frequently at odds with the activities of empire, not only in the south americas, where catholic priests saw the depredations of slavery as distinctly un-christian, but also in india, where the mercantile and mercenary perspective of the east india company frequently viewed any attempt to save souls as a hindrance to the more prosperous activity of exploiting bodies. nonetheless, within a generation the activities of missionaries increasingly harmonized with those of temporal imperial powers and, through detailed readings of largely neglected epics such as thomas beck’s the mission (1796) and thomas williams’s the missionary (1795), leporati explores with considerable nuance the shifting tensions that existed between empire and christianity. despite our opening observation that this is a text that deals with blake only in a minor explicit role, many writers discussed in romantic epics would have been read by him. what is more, leporati draws attention to the significant role played by william hayley in the revival of epic, through both his essay on epic poetry and, more valuably, his important work as a biographer and editor of milton. whatever their other differences, conservatives and the liberal inheritors of the whig tradition were keen to use epic to buttress national identity. leporati’s dictum that by “seeking to fix a stable british protestant national and imperial identity” epic poets “posit[ed] an ‘other’ that possesses both savage elements and uncanny resemblances to the british” (80) is a familiar one now, although few other writers have waded through the glut of long narrative poems that appeared from the 1790s onward. as he points out in chapter 3, “heroes of conquest and conversion,” many epics were deliberately and openly instructive—​dogmatic, even—​following the model laid down by archbishop fénelon’s les aventures de télémaque (1699). at their most overt, narratives such as pye’s alfred (1801) or sarah leigh pike’s israel (1795) celebrated a god-given hero as an emblem of the chosen nation, leading through divine right, subtly elided from absolutism to a more delicate form of constitutional monarchy. yet even progressive poems such as john thelwall’s fragmentary the hope of albion tended to rely on the opposition of the christian and the other, even as they eschewed imperial violence. of the chapters dealing with individual authors and their epics in the second part, those other than blake will be dealt with briefly here insofar as they demonstrate differences from or similarities to him. this is by no means a comment on the value of the individual readings: in at least three instances—​byron’s don juan, wordsworth’s the prelude, and equiano’s interesting narrative—​these are perhaps more popular (or, at least, more frequently read) works than milton, while ann yearsley’s brutus and robert southey’s madoc deserve to be better known than they are. yearsley’s “abbreviated epic” (108) and southey’s poem demonstrate more of the concerns of the middle classes toward burgeoning empire, exploring the belief that britain did indeed possess some divine manifesto to convert the nations. yet, argues leporati, these two poems also exhibit considerable tension toward the practice of slavery and the subjugation of indigenous peoples. equiano and byron are included as examples of “more transgressive understandings of identity” (161) that could be pursued within the epic form; equiano incorporated epic elements into his text to reconfigure himself as a hybrid figure, while byron subverted not merely the themes but also the form of epic in his incomplete poem, features that leporati suggests he shares with blake. turning to blake, the subject of chapter 7, leporati suggests that blake’s purpose in his poetry follows what saree makdisi points to as humanity founded in heterogeneity, as in the invocation “and all must love the human form, / in heathen, turk or jew” in “the divine image.” such an approach denies a basis of self-identity formed from the tired binary of self/​other, a subversion matched by blake’s radical approach to epic, which undermines a genre based on themes of war and conquest. while milton may appear to be a teleological epic, leading up to a crescendo where milton confronts his own creation, satan, the actual experience of reading the poem undermines the sense of cohesion that such narratives typically require. rather, suggests leporati, “the character of satan spreads over the globe a punishment-obsessed interpretation of christianity that attempts to assimilate all people into a single model of duty conducive to imperial oppression” (187). while blake’s version of satan presents the devil as seeking to unite the world in submission, milton becomes a counter-missionary who recognizes how he unwittingly promoted such a satanic and imperial ideology. while leporati seeks to engage with a critique of blake’s co-option by colonial and evangelical orthodoxy, the strain of critical work over the past two decades that reconsiders blake as a prophet for empire sometimes seems contrarian for its own sake. certainly, blake was frequently affected by a spreading colonial worldview where britain saw itself beholden to its own form of manifest destiny, but, as leporati points out, blake’s anti-classicist position is almost unique among his contemporaries and resists a neoclassical cult of self-sacrifice. as such, blake opposes both the content of classical epics and their style. likewise, while milton had become subsumed during the eighteenth century as an icon of the british protestant self in service to the state as a greater good, so blake’s milton has to save that poet who was unknowingly of the devil’s party from himself. ultimately, while blake, like many of his contemporaries, may have wished to restore christianity in britain, his view of what such faith meant was very different from theirs. blake and music, 2022 blake and music, 2022 by camila oliveira and jason whittaker camila oliveira (camila.querino@edu.ulisboa.pt) is assistant research fellow at the university of lisbon. she holds a phd in english literature from the federal university of rio de janeiro and king’s college london on the translation of blake’s jerusalem into portuguese and biblical intertextuality. she is currently working on romanticism and music reception and writing a monograph on william blake and contemporary music. jason whittaker (jwhittaker@lincoln.ac.uk) works in the college of arts at the university of lincoln. he is the author and editor of several works on blake, including william blake and the myths of britain (palgrave, 1999), radical blake: influence and afterlife from 1827 (with shirley dent, palgrave, 2002), divine images: the life and work of william blake (reaktion books, 2021), and jerusalem: blake, parry, and the fight for englishness (oxford university press, 2022). his main research interests deal with the reception of blake, and he is the editor of the site zoamorphosis and one of the editors for global blake. if 2021 saw a considerable addition to the corpus of blake settings and tracks inspired by his poetry, 2022 witnessed something of an explosion, with almost a hundred releases recorded from this year alone. as has been evident for some time, this rapid acceleration is due to the growth of streaming services, with almost every track in the listings below being offered by amazon, apple, spotify or—​increasingly popular with artists—​bandcamp. as the barriers to entry decline, more and more independent artists are making their music available. this, of course, is true of all music, but it is significant that blake’s hold on the musical imagination is growing (and not just in terms of new versions of old favorites, such as “jerusalem” or “the tyger”). one notable effect of this flourishing of blakean music is that nearly every example listed here is some form of pop or alternative music. while classical music has abundant outlets for streaming (not least apple’s new classical music app), as cd sales have declined and concerts become more expensive to perform, far fewer settings of blake’s poems have been issued. those few included this year, such as brian demaris or carl vollrath, also tend to be simpler arrangements for piano or a small group of performers. the majority of items listed below are, unsurprisingly, single tracks, but 2022 did see some complete albums dedicated mostly or completely to blake’s work. as well as vollrath’s old & new poetry, which combines blake’s poetry with that of sara teasdale, byron bartlett and benjamin blower released longer recordings based on songs of innocence and of experience, while mukenai created an ambient work that draws heavily on blake’s mythology for its inspiration. in addition, it’s worth noting that in 2022 marianne faithfull released a compilation of songs recorded between 1965 and 1995 that she fittingly named songs of innocence and experience. as in previous versions, this list omits tracks that are based on a single quotation from or allusion to blake’s work. wherever possible, the country of the artist is given, as well as the work’s instrumentation, duration, publisher, copyright date, genre, and format. most entries include at least one link to a recording. all that and a bag of fritos — unknown from all that and a bag of fritos 1 ; for voice, drums, synthesizers. independent, © 2022. electronic. streaming. track: poison tree (09:21). links: amazon, spotify. alter mayster — unknown jerusalem ; for synthesizers. door 7, © 2022. classical/​crossover. streaming. track: jerusalem (02:14). links: amazon, apple, spotify. andy brown’s victorian karaoke — uk from andy brown’s victorian karaoke ; for voice, guitar. independent, © 2022. folk. streaming. track: the clod and the pebble (01:26). link: bandcamp. angels, chris [chris engels] — germany from tesla ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, synthesizers. independent, © 2022. heavy metal. streaming. track: a poison tree (06:48). links: amazon, bandcamp. aries projectum orchestra — unknown from impressions ; for piano. apo music, © 2022. classical. streaming. track: a little boy lost (02:24). links: amazon, apple, spotify. atkinson, ellis — unknown tyger tyger ; for synthesizers. aida zhao, © 2022. electronic. streaming. track: tyger tyger (02:15). links: amazon, apple, spotify. balkan second squad — hungary william blake ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums. independent, © 2022. rock. streaming. tracks: az emberi lényeg [“the human abstract”] (04:07); london (04:38). note: both settings are translated into hungarian. links: apple, spotify. banjo metal nation — france from resonator ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums. tambours du bronx productions, © 2022. rock. streaming. track: ah! sunflower (01:36). links: apple, spotify. bartlett, byron — usa songs of experience ep ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, keyboards. independent, © 2022. folk/​indie. streaming. tracks: the sick rose (00:54); the tyger (02:07); ah! sun-flower (01:14); london (01:38). link: bandcamp. bartlett, byron — usa songs of innocence ep ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, keyboards. independent, © 2022. folk/​rock. streaming. tracks: the blossom (02:18); laughing song (01:46); holy thursday (01:39); spring (01:09); nurse’s song (01:39); infant joy (00:50). link: bandcamp. bell, steve — canada the divine image ; for voice, flute, guitar. signpost music, © 2022. folk. streaming. track: the divine image (03:04). links: amazon, apple, spotify. bernd — netherlands the tyger ; for voice, guitar, harp, synthesizers. independent, © 2022. pop/​rock. streaming. track: the tyger (04:24). links: amazon, apple, spotify. the black buoy project — switzerland from the birds know things ; for voice, bass, drums, saxophone, synthesizers. anchor hill records, © 2022. jazz/​experimental. streaming. tracks: the tyger (07:41); the little girl found (06:32). link: bandcamp. blower, david benjamin — uk innocence & experience ; for voice, guitar. independent, © 2022. folk/​indie. streaming. tracks: piping down the valleys (03:13); the ecchoing green (04:29); the blossom (01:39); the bard & earth’s answer (03:46); the angel (02:55); a dream/​on another’s sorrow (06:49); the ancient bard (02:14); a divine image (06:52). links: amazon, apple, spotify. brillanti, serafini — usa from new works for soprano, trumpet, and piano ; for voice, trumpet, piano. centaur records, © 2022. classical. streaming. tracks: of innocence and experience: no. 1, spring (01:14); no. 2, cradle song (03:40); no. 3, the sick rose (02:07). links: amazon, apple, spotify. callahan, david lance — uk from english primitive ii ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums. independent, © 2022. pop/​rock. streaming. track: london by blakelight (04:33). link: bandcamp. caveira — spain the tyger ; for guitar, bass, drums, synthesizers. independent, © 2022. rock/​ambient. streaming. track: the tyger (05:14). links: apple, spotify. clark, tom — uk from meteor im eis ; for synthesizers. independent, © 2022. electronic. streaming. track: the sick rose (07:17). links: amazon, apple, spotify. collateral nature — italy from morning mars ; for guitar, bass, drums, keyboards. flower of sound, © 2022. electronic/​jazz. lp/​streaming. track: tyger! tyger! burning bright (03:08). links: apple, deezer, spotify. cultor noctis — belgium from reveries of hatred ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, keyboards. independent, © 2022. black metal. streaming. track: urizen (08:22). link: bandcamp. dante’s inferno — canada from shadow of ideas ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, keyboards. nataraja records india, © 2022. ambient. streaming. track: urizen (08:48). link: bandcamp. darkoustix — switzerland from 7 ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums. independent, © 2022. goth metal. streaming. track: a poison tree (01:59). link: bandcamp. demaris, brian — usa from gratitude ; for voice, piano. independent, © 2022. classical. streaming. tracks: songs of innocence: introduction (01:53); the shepherd (01:38); the ecchoing green (02:30). links: amazon, apple, spotify. diary of madness — germany cradle song ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, keyboards. independent, © 2022. heavy metal. streaming. track: cradle song (03:41). links: amazon, apple, spotify. diary of madness — germany poison tree ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums. independent, © 2022. heavy metal. streaming. track: poison tree (04:43). links: amazon, apple, spotify. die — italy a dream ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, harmonica. argonauta records, © 2022. bluegrass/​folk. cd/​streaming. tracks: the echoing green (03:33); a dream (04:29); the fly (04:41); mad song (04:25); the angel (03:39); a poison tree (04:28); laughing song (05:15); a little girl lost (03:36); infant sorrow (03:25); a cradle song (04:38). link: spotify. dk & the hoop snakes — usa from alchemical infusion ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums. independent, © 2022. folk/​rock. streaming. track: song (how sweet i roam’d) (01:47). links: apple, spotify. faithful — spain from affixt enactivist ; for synthesizers. independent, © 2022. avant garde. streaming. tracks: urizen (02:40); urizen ii (04:52). link: bandcamp. faulkner, luke — uk from the scepter’d isle ; for piano. halidon, © 2022. classical. streaming. track: jerusalem (02:16). links: amazon, apple, spotify. fortnam, craig — uk from lunar one a-sides ; for voice, guitar. independent, © 2022. folk. streaming. track: sweet dreams form a shade (03:46). links: apple, spotify. frater zyzphez — new zealand from teasers ; for guitar, synthesizers. independent, © 2022. jazz/​experimental. streaming. track: the clod and the pebble (02:32). link: bandcamp. gaap kvlt — morocco from mitra ; for synthesizers. independent, © 2022. dark ambient. streaming. track: urizen (07:30). links: apple, bandcamp. givens, edward — usa from eleventh hour ; for voice, guitar, harp, synthesizers. independent, © 2022. experimental. streaming. tracks: to the evening star (04:20); ahania weeps upon the void (03:15); a dream (03:53); for the gentle wind [“never pain to tell thy love”] (02:15); steps of the sun [“ah! sun-flower”] (01:59). link: bandcamp. goldman, j. j. — uk jerusalem ; for piano. onslow park records, © 2022. classical. streaming. track: jerusalem (02:28). links: amazon, spotify. goresleeps — russia from and the voice from legend will proclaim ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, keyboards. independent, © 2022. black metal. streaming. track: gwin, king of norway (04:18). link: bandcamp. hammer king — germany from kingdemonium ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, keyboards. napalm records, © 2022. heavy metal. cd/​streaming. track: age of urizen (07:38). links: amazon, apple, bandcamp, spotify. the hoods — usa from throwback ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums. independent, © 2022. hardcore/​funk. cd/​streaming. track: tyger (03:53). link: spotify. hudson, frank — usa the tyger ; for voice, guitar. independent, © 2022. folk. streaming. track: the tyger (05:38). link: frankhudson.org. jäger & hypius + verstärkung — germany from masterplan ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, trumpet, keyboards. timezone, © 2022. folk/​rock. cd/​streaming. track: the garden of love (04:05). note: the poem has been translated into german. links: amazon, spotify. jahrmusch — russia from чудесаунд 22 ; for voice, guitar, bass, drum. чудесаунд/​союз мьюзик, © 2022. indie. streaming. track: poison tree (02:14). links: amazon, apple, spotify. karfagen — ukraine from land of green ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, keyboards. caerllysi, © 2022. progressive rock. cd/​streaming. track: the blossom (02:26). links: amazon, apple, spotify. klaguesch — germany a song of innocence ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, keyboards. independent, © 2022. folk. streaming. track: a song of innocence [“introduction” to innocence] (03:15). links: apple, spotify. kratt, mørk — russia from winterbourne ; for guitar, bass, drums. independent, © 2022. indie. streaming. track: tyger tyger (04:38). links: amazon, apple, spotify. krull, kay — usa from saturn in love ; for voice, guitar. a peppermint future, © 2022. folk. streaming. track: how sweet i roamed from field to field (03:26). note: this version is inspired by the setting by the fugs. links: amazon, apple, spotify. loadbang/​jeffrey gavett — usa from quiver ; for voice, trumpet, trombone. new focus recordings, © 2022. classical/​experimental. streaming. track: proverbial [proverbs of hell] (05:19). links: apple, bandcamp. the local moon — germany from the local moon ; for voice, synthesizers. aufnahme + wiedergabe, © 2022. darkwave. cd/​streaming. track: the tyger (03:35). links: amazon, apple, bandcamp, spotify. lumor — switzerland from flock of birds ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, keyboards. independent, © 2022. jazz/​ambient. streaming. track: earth’s answer (03:04). links: amazon, apple, spotify. mahalia — italy from in concerto ; for voice, guitar, percussion, violin. dar soltane, © 2022. pop. streaming. tracks: the little boy lost (02:41); the little boy found (02:07). links: amazon, apple, spotify. mann of seasons — france from the songs of innocence ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, keyboards. unknown pleasures records, © 2022. goth rock/​neofolk. cd/​streaming. tracks: the little boy lost (04:24); poison tree (04:25); the garden of love (02:30). link: bandcamp. mealor, paul, and st. salvator’s chapel choir — uk from the tyger and the lamb: a christmas dance ; for voices, strings. university of st. andrews, © 2022. classical. cd/​streaming. track: the tyger (06:08). links: amazon, apple, spotify. melul — usa from the sleep of devils ; for voice, synthesizers. independent, © 2022. experimental. streaming. track: enitharmon, mother of satan (02:58). links: amazon, apple, spotify. moyno — france from nothing gold can stay ; for voice, piano. independent, © 2022. pop. streaming. track: the poison tree (03:32). link: bandcamp. mukenai — russia urthona ; for voice, piano, guitar, bass, drums, synthesizers. independent, © 2022. ambient/​new age. streaming. tracks: urthona (utrecht) (04:32); enitharmon (aruit) (04:51); luvah (fenot) (04:59); vala (everya) (05:09); urizen (boa, the great serpent) (05:10); ahania (geten) (03:25); tharmas (wonder-gal ouverture) (03:05); enion (vesuvius coda) (01:44). link: bandcamp. musiques nouvelles/​benjamin sauzereau — belgium/​france from coffret des 60 ans ; for piano, clarinet, violin, cello, synthesizers. kastafior, © 2022. classical/​jazz. cd/​streaming. track: a poison tree (10:26). links: apple, bandcamp, spotify. neon noodle — usa from opiate rebel ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, synthesizers. independent, © 2022. heavy metal. streaming. track: poison tree (07:36). link: bandcamp. nerfox — spain from theseus paradox ep ; for synthesizers. foxture, © 2022. electronic. streaming. track: the tyger and the lamb (05:36). links: bandcamp, spotify. no fun — usa from snivel ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, keyboards. atomic werewolf, © 2022. rock. cd/​streaming. track: tyger (02:41). links: amazon, apple, bandcamp, spotify. nothing sounds — new zealand from industrial mass no. 01: requiem; visions of vengeance ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, synthesizers. independent, © 2022. dark/​electronic. streaming. track: interlude: a poison tree (05:32). link: bandcamp. oldfield, sally — uk from mystique (remastered); for voice, guitar, bass, drums, synthesizers. independent, © 2022. pop/​electronic. cd/​streaming. track: the tyger (03:46). links: amazon, apple, spotify. orlando & die unerlösten — germany from gates wide open ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, keyboards. roland kunz, © 2022. pop. cd/​streaming. tracks: angel [inverted stanzas] (06:23); garden of love (04:22); london (04:57). links: apple, spotify. orlova, alina — lithuania from laumžirgiai ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums. uab creative industries, © 2022. pop. cd/​streaming. tracks: i laid me down (02:07); the garden of love (03:50). links: amazon, apple, spotify. otto, james joshua, and richard hills — uk from the voice of jupiter, vol. 3 ; for organ. extreme music, © 2022. classical. streaming. track: jerusalem (02:28). links: amazon, apple, spotify. oxskin — germany from healing the brokenhearted ; for voice, synthesizers. independent, © 2022. experimental. streaming. track: auguries of innocence (02:40). link: bandcamp. pair of dust — usa from poems ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, keyboards. plummeat, © 2022. folk/​ambient. cd/​streaming. track: the tyger (02:52). links: amazon, apple, spotify. perigon — germany from crushed pearls ; for voice, bass, guitars, drums, synthesizers. independent, © 2022. pop/​avant garde. streaming. track: sick rose (03:07). links: apple, bandcamp, spotify. poston, elizabeth, and st. salvator’s chapel choir — uk from the tyger and the lamb: a christmas dance ; for voices, strings. university of st. andrews, © 2022. classical. cd/​streaming. track: the lamb (02:20). links: amazon, apple, spotify. rain, david — canada the lamb ; for voices. independent, © 2022. choral. sheet music. track: the lamb (william blake) (03:58). link: davidrainchoralcomposer.ca. real-krabbtree twins — usa from tres masks of t. k. and other folklore ; for voice, synthesizer, percussion. perez-robinson and sons, © 2022. electronic. streaming. track: los entering the grave (fomo) (03:24). links: amazon, apple, spotify. revitskiy, vladimir — russia from plastic art ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, synthesizers. 7 pm radio, © 2022. indie. streaming. track: nurses song (02:55). link: spotify. rising sons & falling moons — usa from essentials, vol. 1 ; for voice, synthesizer, percussion. perez-robinson and sons, © 2022. electronic. streaming. tracks: the night of enitharmon’s joy (we got the real love) (feat. real-krabbtree twins) (real-k. remix) (03:05); retrograde (robin in a cage) (feat. real-krabbtree twins) (t. d. remix) (04:16). links: amazon, apple, spotify. rutter, john — uk from sacred and christmas choral music 2022 ; for voices, organ. oxford university press, © 2022. choral. sheet music/​streaming. track: blake’s lullaby (04:32). links: amazon, spotify. serpent-peste — france from inner monologues ; for voice, synthesizers. independent, © 2022. dark ambient. streaming. track: 1. poison tree (05:24). link: bandcamp. shallow rivers — russia from the tales told under the willow ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, keyboards. independent, © 2022. goth metal. streaming. track: mad song (10:29). links: amazon, apple, spotify. sísifo rest — spain from sísifo rest ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, saxophone. independent, © 2022. jazz. streaming. track: human abstract (04:20). links: amazon, apple, spotify. slowlick — slovakia from mare liberum apertum ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums. slnko records, © 2022. pop/​indie. cd/​streaming. track: blake tyger (04:45). links: apple, spotify. sono — uk from misery ; for voice, piano, synthesizers. independent, © 2022. ambient/​avant garde. streaming. tracks: the sick rose (02:17); london (03:11); infant sorrow (05:04). links: amazon, apple, spotify. the sordid sentinel — uk sick rose ; for voice, drums, synthesizers. independent, © 2022. ambient. streaming. track: sick rose (02:05). link: bandcamp. sovereign citizen — uk from forgotten english rebel spirit ; for voice, guitars, percussion. independent, © 2022. folk. streaming. track: jerusalem (07:55). links: amazon, apple, spotify. spencer, louise — uk from classical favourites ; for harp. pretty decent music publishing, © 2022. classical. streaming. track: jerusalem (02:36). links: amazon, apple, spotify. swaffer — unknown the poison tree ; for piano. independent, © 2022. classical. streaming. track: the poison tree (03:43). link: spotify. symbolical — poland from natura ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, keyboards. independent, © 2022. black metal. streaming. track: dark urizen (06:49). links: apple, bandcamp, spotify. vanek, john — uk hear the voice of the bard ; for voice, guitar. independent, © 2022. folk. streaming. track: hear the voice of the bard (04:46). links: amazon, apple, spotify. vishal — unknown tyger ; for voice, synthesizers. independent, © 2022. electronic. streaming. track: tyger (03:01). links: amazon, spotify. vollrath, carl — usa from old & new poetry, vol. 2 ; for voice, piano. navona, © 2022. classical. cd/​streaming. tracks: songs of innocence: the shepherd (02:15); the ecchoing green (02:04); the lamb (02:49); the little black boy (04:32); nurse’s song (01:45). songs of experience: my pretty rose-tree (01:27); ah! sun-flower (01:58); the garden of love (02:38); the little vagabond (03:49); the schoolboy (02:40). links: apple, spotify. vronski — poland from ephemeral; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, keyboards. independent, © 2022. black metal. streaming. track: mad song (03:58). links: bandcamp, spotify. the vultures — uk from the vultures ; for voice, guitars, percussion. rubber connection records, © 2022. rock/​alternative. streaming. track: jerusalem (01:47). links: amazon, spotify. white, nicholas — usa from songs of innocence; the raven ; for voice, piano. msr classics, © 2022. classical. cd/​streaming. tracks: piping (02:11); the shepherd (04:09); the echoing green (02:55); little lamb (03:08); heaven’s light [“the little black boy”] (06:48); the blossom (01:33); the chimney-sweeper (04:30); lost and found (05:03); laughing song (02:07); a cradle song (04:23); the divine image (04:03); holy thursday (03:26); night (06:02); spring (02:16); nurse’s song (03:15); infant joy (01:34); a dream song (02:59); sorrow and piping (06:18). links: amazon, apple, spotify. yearwood, kathleen — canada from folk songs ; for voice, guitar. independent, © 2022. rock/​folk. streaming. tracks: ah! sun-flower (02:58); the sick rose (02:20); the garden of love (01:50). link: bandcamp. yesaki, isao — unknown from explorations, vol. 1 ; for guitar, bass, drums, keyboards. independent, © 2022. ambient/​electronic. streaming. track: the marriage of heaven and hell (02:48). link: spotify. review: adam komisaruk, sexual privatism in british romantic writing: a public of one adam komisaruk. sexual privatism in british romantic writing: a public of one. new york: routledge, 2019. xii + 216 pp. $160.00/​£120.00, hardcover; $48.95/​£36.99, paperback; $44.05/​£33.29, e-book. reviewed by marsha keith schuchard marsha keith schuchard is an independent literary historian who has recently published the books masonic rivalries and literary politics: from jonathan swift to henry fielding (amazon/​gauthier pierozak editeur, 2018) and a concatenation of conspiracies: “irish” william blake and illuminist freemasonry in 1798 (plumbstone academic press, 2021). adam komisaruk examines “the varieties of erotic experience in an age of revolution” (1), covering british writings from c. 1780 to 1830. he posits an overriding theme of the relation between “sexual privatism” and “the public sphere,” and he cites most of the theorists (habermas, derrida, foucault, lacan, laqueur, sedgwick, etc.) whose ideas have long dominated such discourse. he organizes his study “according to some different sexual ‘publics’ in the period: legal treatments of rape, sodomy and adultery; high-profile sex scandal; population theory; and club culture” (7). while a large part of his narration focuses on these modern theoreticians, he also includes thematic readings of imaginative literature by mary hays, william beckford, mary wollstonecraft, william godwin, percy bysshe shelley, erasmus darwin, and finally william blake. though the early chapters contain much (sometimes too much) background information on the laws of rape, land enclosure, criminal conversation, and malthusian economics, the later chapters provide readings of literary texts that are more relevant to blake studies (wollstonecraft’s maria, shelley’s swellfoot the tyrant, and darwin’s the botanic garden). in chapter 6, “love among the ruins,” he argues that richard payne knight and his “erotic antiquarianism” emerged within a “province of polite connoisseurs” who maintained a “strangely orthodox agenda” (154-58). though blake was familiar with their work, he differed from their “anti-populist bent” (159). placing the supposedly radical darwin in this conservative province, komisaruk discusses blake’s illustrations to the portland vase in the botanic garden in the context of the exploitative capitalism of darwin and josiah wedgwood (170-75). characterizing the economy of vegetation as an “encomium to industrialization,” he interprets darwin’s “erotic cosmology” as an attempt to “sublimate the ontologically and socially destabilizing effects of sexuality itself.” of most interest to blakeans will be komisaruk’s analyses of the erotic drawings in the four zoas, in which he draws upon and argues with the earlier explications of peter otto’s blake’s critique of transcendence: love, jealousy, and the sublime in “the four zoas” (2000) and “a pompous high priest: urizen’s ancient phallic religion in the four zoas” (2001), and of christopher hobson’s blake and homosexuality (2000). though he finds blake’s eccentric and religious complexity especially difficult to define within his private-public thesis, his willingness to confront the intellectual contradictions and gender confusions in the artist’s controversial (and often effaced) erotic images is provocative: “priapus should not be conflated with jesus, even in blake’s syncretic myth; but in a sense he serves as a trial run for jesus, in that he is both necessarily embodied and a staunch reminder of bodily limitations” (185). komisaruk’s subtitle, “a public of one,” sums up both the possibilities and reductiveness of placing such an iconoclastic visionary as blake within a modern theoretical framework, but he earnestly takes on the challenge. remembrance morris eaves, 1944–2024 by morton d. paley like morris’s other friends, i find it hard to believe that his wonderful intelligence, energy, and humor are gone. like any other close partnership, co-editing involves problems in decision-making that must be worked out. a journal, however modest its beginnings, develops an ethos beyond the separate identities of its editors. one issue we had to address was whether our publication ought to have a particular view about the type of work we wanted to publish, or whether it should welcome all takes on blake. by temperament, both of us wanted it to be open to all comers. we also agreed on especially encouraging junior scholars so that the editorial comments we sent would be helpful to them, and we wanted to keep a relatively low backlog so our authors would not regard their published work as dating from some past life. morris had some typical locutions. i can hear him now. “paley, if you don’t vote for jimmy carter, our friendship is at an end.” fortunately, i had already decided to vote for him. “paley, your best self didn’t write this letter.” it hadn’t. i wrote a new one. a brilliant scholar and critic, morris presented the new as if it were familiar and the familiar as if it were new. who else would expound the epistemology and aesthetics of printmaking with a projection of a dollar bill? morris and georgia were wonderful cooks and intrepid explorers of restaurants, and they engaged their friends deeply in the sublime of food. they also led us to watch plays in theaters high and low. i remember watching one with them from the floor of a pub in london that was so far west it was literally off the map. morris knowingly gave free rein to his soft louisiana accent, and his discourse was densely laced with language of a kind i hadn’t heard since my schoolyard days in the bronx. but i wasn’t taken in. did i somehow know that he was going to enrich my life for the next fifty-three years? blake and music, 2023 detail of conquering a chromatic passage, attributed to nathaniel dance (n.d.). yale center for british art, paul mellon collection. b1977.14.4997. blake and music, 2023 by camila oliveira and jason whittakerfor the funding for camila oliveira’s research, see <https://​doi.​org/​10.​54499/​2022.​00978.​ceecind/​cp1762/​ct0006>. camila oliveira (camila.querino@edu.ulisboa.pt) is a research fellow at the university of lisbon. she holds a phd in english literature from the federal university of rio de janeiro and king’s college london on the translation of blake’s jerusalem into portuguese and biblical intertextuality. she is currently working on romanticism and music reception and writing a monograph on blake and contemporary music. jason whittaker (jwhittaker@lincoln.ac.uk) works in the college of arts at the university of lincoln. he is the author and editor of several works on blake, including william blake and the myths of britain (palgrave, 1999), radical blake: influence and afterlife from 1827 (with shirley dent, palgrave, 2002), divine images: the life and work of william blake (reaktion books, 2021), and jerusalem: blake, parry, and the fight for englishness (oxford university press, 2022). his main research interests deal with the reception of blake, and he is the editor of the site zoamorphosis and one of the editors for global blake. as has been evident since the pandemic, settings of blake’s poetry to music and songs inspired by his art more generally have been enjoying something of a golden age, with the number of individual tracks and albums increasing steadily each year. following trends set during the pandemic, streaming services—​whether large companies such as apple and spotify, or smaller ones such as bandcamp—​have lowered the barriers to entry for many composers and musicians. more than fifty percent of the works that we list for 2023 were self-released, and many others were published or released by independent labels. in addition, the range of countries represented continues to grow, with entries from asia, south america, and eastern europe alongside those from the uk, usa, and western europe. settings of blake’s music have long appealed to composers in russia and brazil, for instance, but the relative ease with which artists can now present their music to a global audience makes it much easier to discover such compositions. pop and alternative forms of music dominate, as they did in last year’s list, but in contrast to 2022 there has been a significant rise in classical settings, such as mark bowler and marianna suri’s excellent fragments of experience or morten poulsen’s a clear midnight, which includes beautiful renditions of various poems from songs of innocence. among those settings is “a cradle song,” one of the most popular poems for composers in 2023, with five versions. “the angel” and various compositions based on the marriage of heaven and hell also appear several times, and there are a dozen recordings of “a poison tree.” by far the favorite, however, is “the tyger,” which was set to music twenty-five times, in versions as radically different as nikholas anderson’s darkly ambient “in the forests of the night,” esd melo’s brazilian afrobeats, or andrew miller’s complex choral arrangement performed by the dordt university choir. we omit here any songs based on a single quotation or phrase from blake’s poetry or art. wherever possible, the country of the artist is given, as well as the work’s instrumentation, duration, publisher, copyright date, and genre. so prevalent is streaming now, however, that we no longer record the format, with nearly every release being available only through streaming services or as a digital download. as such, all entries include at least one link to a recording. adlington, lucy — uk from daughters of albion ; for voice, guitar, bass, and synthesizers. independent, © 2023. ambient. tracks: daughters of albion (01:55); los (00:57). link: bandcamp. airey, peter — uk the smile ; for voice and guitar. independent, © 2023. folk. track: the smile (02:19). link: bandcamp. alighieri — unknown from innocence ; for voice, drums, and synthesizers. insights records, © 2023. electronic. track: infant joy (05:41). links: amazon, apple, spotify. ame with vitanova — japan from あくびの空 ; for voice and guitar. independent, © 2023. folk. track: a cradle song (02:41). links: apple, bandcamp. amora, roy, manuel arcamo, arnold cespon, and jeffrey malanog — unknown the divine image ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, and keyboards. independent, © 2023. gospel. track: the divine image (03:13). link: youtube. anderson, nikholas — usa piping down the valleys wild ; for synthesizers. 1946529 records dk, © 2023. ambient/electronic. tracks: sweet joy befall thee (04:22); hear the wren with sorrows small (03:35); piping down the valleys wild (06:22); in the forests of the night (04:50); sunflower (05:45); and his dark secret love (10:44); little wanderer hie thee home (04:01). links: amazon, apple, spotify. another black autumn — usa from resplendent apparitions at the dawn ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, and keyboards. independent, © 2023. black metal. track: to the muses (10:04). links: bandcamp, youtube. antichües — czech republic from death walks among us ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, and keyboards. independent, © 2023. black metal. track: infant sorrow (01:10). link: bandcamp. antognini, ivo — switzerland from ivo antognini: come to me in the silence of the night—​choral works ; for satb choir. hyperion records, © 2023. classical. track: the angel (05:29). links: amazon, apple, spotify. apellion — mexico the marriage of heaven and hell ; for synthesizers. apellion records, © 2023. dark electronic. track: the marriage of heaven and hell (08:13). links: amazon, apple, spotify. asshole — unknown from 11 songs in alphabetical order ; for voice, bass, drums, and synthesizers. asshole, © 2023. electronic. track: the garden of love (03:48). links: amazon, spotify, youtube. atmrio — brazil from humano, demasiado humano ; for voice, guitar, bass, and drums. atmrio, © 2023. rock. track: a divine image (02:42). links: amazon, apple, spotify. attercop — usa from blake brautigan ; for voice and mandolin. independent, © 2023. folk. tracks: the chimney sweeper [experience] (01:52); song 3d of a shepherd (02:10); the human abstract (02:03). link: bandcamp. atzori, luca — italy from iperrealismo magico ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, and synthesizers. radiobluenote records, © 2023. hip-hop/​electronic. track: the garden of love (02:18). links: amazon, apple, spotify. babin, david — france the little boy lost ; for voice and synthesizers. bisonbison, © 2023. pop/​musical. track: the little boy lost (04:42). links: spotify, youtube. baron jägermasoch — italy from trilogia del corpo ; for synthesizers. independent, © 2023. electronic. track: ahania (13:57). link: bandcamp. bedless bones — estonia a poison tree ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, and synthesizers. bedless bones, © 2023. dark electronic. track: a poison tree (04:12). links: amazon, apple, spotify. the bittersweet christmas band — usa from dance in the dark of the year ; for voice and guitar. independent, © 2023. folk. track: [the] divine image (02:54). link: bandcamp. bolzani, dario — unknown from stanzas for music ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, and synthesizers. 3303184 records dk, © 2023. rock. track: the tyger (03:35). links: amazon, apple, spotify. bowler, mark, and marianna suri — uk/​cyprus fragments of experience ; for voice, piano, harp, winds, and strings. one glass eye records, © 2023. classical. tracks: folly is an endless maze (01:21); the fly (03:52); earth raised up her head (01:01); the sick rose (04:40); oh earth, oh earth, return (01:22); the voice of the ancient bard (04:24); youth of delight (01:37). links: amazon, apple, spotify. british blues boys — uk from hot night in harry’s bar ; for voice, guitar, bass, and drums. british blues boys, © 2023. rock. track: the poison tree [adapted] (04:33). links: amazon, spotify. buhne, lorenzo — italy the shepherd ; for voice, guitar, drums, and flute. nocturnalsol, © 2023. folk. track: the shepherd (04:13). links: amazon, apple, spotify. coffee shop chronicles — france from ya fundera ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, and keyboards. coffee shop chronicles, © 2023. rock. track: the chimney sweeper [experience] (04:29). links: amazon, apple, spotify. crafts, daniel steven, and brian cheney — usa bright star ; for voice, strings, and piano. brian cheney, © 2023. classical. track: the tyger (05:29). links: amazon, apple, spotify. death verified — poland from baksbat ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, and synthesizers. independent, © 2023. experimental. track: systematic destruction of the individual [“and did those feet”] (04:16). links: amazon, apple, youtube. decosta, richard — usa from quills and quavers ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, and synthesizers. 4636563 records dk, © 2023. dark ambient. track: o rose thou art sick (04:50). links: amazon, apple, spotify. dizzards of woz — germany from 2022-2 essays on analogue/​digital reflections ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, and keyboards. independent, © 2023. rock/​heavy metal. track: night (04:04). link: bandcamp. dom fine music — australia the tyger ; for clarinet quartet. independent, © 2023. classical. track: the tyger (03:11). links: bandcamp, youtube. douglas, bill — canada from choral & piano: peaceful melodies ; for choir and piano. hearts of space records, © 2023. classical. track: o earth, o earth, return (04:18). links: amazon, apple, spotify. dove, jonathan — uk perihelion ; for choir and piano. imperial college chamber choir, © 2023. classical. track: ah, sun-flower! (02:11). link: spotify. du pré, arnesen — france the garden ; for flute and piano. p.art1, © 2023. classical. tracks: the garden of love (04:19); infant sorrow (04:25); mad song (03:53); soft snow (02:55); the tyger (04:02); to the evening star (04:44); spring (05:37); jerusalem (07:55). links: amazon, apple, spotify. emmanuel, michael — usa piping down the valleys wild ; for voice and small ensemble. independent, © 2023. folk. track: piping down the valleys wild (02:35). link: youtube. eneit — usa laments from “visions of the daughters of albion” ; for piano. independent, © 2023. classical. tracks: oothoon’s lament (03:04); theotormon’s lament (05:28). link: bandcamp. esd melo — brazil tyger ; for synthesizers. estl, © 2023. afrobeat. track: tyger (02:45). links: apple, spotify. e.v.e — uzbekistan from instincts ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, and keyboards. e.v.e music, © 2023. rock. track: nurse’s song [innocence] (03:39). links: apple, spotify, youtube. exocet — mexico from aviatrix ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, and synthesizers. diego benlliure, © 2023. pop. track: the tyger (03:49). links: amazon, apple, spotify. expulsion disorder — belarus from dead snow 2 ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, and synthesizers. independent, © 2023. ambient. track: love and harmony combine (02:59). links: amazon, apple, youtube. fake native — usa from third axis ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, and synthesizers. vincent heyn, © 2023. rock. track: the tyger (03:56). links: amazon, apple, spotify. false indigo — usa from timbuktu ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, and keyboards. independent, © 2023. rock. track: tyger tyger (03:53). link: spotify. feder, rachel — unknown the divine image ; for voice and piano. independent, © 2023. classical. track: the divine image (02:52). link: youtube. flash cut ltd. — germany from reloaded at the musquash studios ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, and keyboards. 5699609 records dk, © 2023. rock. track: poison tree (03:02). links: amazon, apple, spotify. flaxhubzzy — new zealand from notes from f.h. ; for voice, drums, and synthesizers. flergins house, © 2023. electronic. track: poison tree (03:12). links: amazon, apple, spotify. flowerbender — usa from mines of minolta ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, and keyboards. independent, © 2023. folk. track: the clod and the pebble (05:14). link: bandcamp. freshappleslices — unknown luvah ; for synthesizers. 3710856 records dk, © 2023. electronic. track: luvah (03:13). links: apple, spotify, youtube. gardner, drew — usa from the return ; for bass, drums, and saxophone. astral spirits, © 2023. jazz. track: the human abstract (09:48). links: apple, spotify, youtube. the glorious shocking — usa from news from the spirit world ; for voice, synthesizers, and mandolin. independent, © 2023. folk/​avant-garde. track: book of ahania (05:40). link: bandcamp. gokurakujodo — japan from minna no kokugo ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, and synthesizers. gokurakujodo, © 2023. heavy metal. tracks: tyger, tyger, burning bright [instrumental] (00:59); poem tiger richo (04:33). links: amazon, apple, spotify. note: “the tyger” is translated into japanese. gribbles — uk from digressions ; for voice and synthesizers. independent, © 2023. ambient. track: the echoing green (04:54). links: bandcamp, youtube. gula — netherlands from birds of the apocalypse ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, and keyboards. independent, © 2023. heavy metal. track: laughing song (07:01). links: bandcamp, youtube. harp — usa from albion ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, and synthesizers. bella union, © 2023. folk/indie. track: daughters of albion (03:02). links: amazon, apple, spotify. hejwowski, czcibor — poland from the perfect frame (original soundtrack); for guitar and synthesizers. studio groch, © 2023. ambient. track: the tyger (00:59). links: amazon, apple, spotify. henderson, derek — scotland piping down the valleys wild ; for voice, piano, and recorder. independent, © 2023. classical. track: piping down the valleys wild (02:48). link: youtube. hyperaustra — argentina from the fall of all pride ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, and synthesizers. interstellar pulse, © 2023. post-black metal. track: lustful starvation [“auguries of innocence”] (06:36). links: amazon, apple, youtube. iacob — bulgaria from ars longa, vita brevis ; for voice and synthesizers. independent, © 2023. dark ambient. track: a divine image (09:06). link: bandcamp. jayy babyy — usa from shadows ; for synthesizers. jayy babyy music production, © 2023. electronic. track: tyger (02:28). links: amazon, spotify. jesters-oxford — uk from since ancient times ; for voice, guitar, bass, and violin. 4926623 records dk, © 2023. folk. track: the angel (03:47). links: amazon, apple, spotify. jōra — latvia from tatata ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, and synthesizers. juura un ezeri, © 2023. folk. track: a poison tree (03:31). links: amazon, apple, spotify. karfagen — ukraine from passage to the forest of mysterious ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, and keyboards. antony kalugin, © 2023. experimental. tracks: mysterious forest, pt. 1 (14:04); mysterious forest, pt. 2 (04:21); to those who dwell in realms of day (02:19); mysterious forest, pt. 3 (04:16) [all “auguries of innocence”]. links: amazon, apple, spotify. kireya, viktor — russia how sweet i roam’d ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, and synthesizers. independent, © 2023. pop/​electronic. track: how sweet i roam’d (03:29). link: bandcamp. kobori, nobuya — japan from 100000 original piano songs vol. 115 ; for piano. independent, © 2023. classical. tracks: tharmas (01:30); urizen (01:28); urthona (01:31). link: bandcamp. kostecki, radoslaw — unknown from madame’s untold tale ; for piano. radoslaw kostecki, © 2023. classical. tracks: cradle song (01:00); night (01:52); a poison tree (01:18); the tyger (02:14); london (02:10); auguries of innocence (00:49); and did those feet in ancient time (jerusalem) (01:10). links: amazon, apple, spotify. kovač, boris — serbia from garden of love ; for voice, piano, and synthesizers. 702237 records dk, © 2023. rock/​pop. track: garden of love (02:46). links: apple, youtube. loopsel — sweden from öga för öga ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, and synthesizers. mamma’s mysteriska jukebox, © 2023. folk/​pop. track: poison tree (03:07). links: amazon, spotify. lord misery — uk 2023-09-07  ; for voice and synthesizers. independent, © 2023. experimental/​electronic. tracks: introduction + earth’s answer (08:30); the human abstract (03:09); night (20:04). link: bandcamp. the lost poets band — sweden from the artillery man ; for voice, guitar, and keyboards. poetvox, © 2023. folk/​rock. track: to thomas butts (04:37). links: apple, spotify, youtube. the lost poets band — sweden from the bluebird ; for voice, guitar, and keyboards. poetvox, © 2023. folk/​rock. track: the little girl found (04:54). links: apple, spotify, youtube. the lost poets band — sweden from an enigma ; for voice, guitar, and keyboards. poetvox, © 2023. folk/​rock. track: london (02:11). links: apple, spotify, youtube. the lost poets band — sweden from the little girl lost ; for voice, guitar, and keyboards. poetvox, © 2023. folk/​rock. track: the little girl lost (04:46). links: apple, spotify, youtube. the lost poets band — sweden from the night wind ; for voice, guitar, and keyboards. poetvox, © 2023. folk/​rock. track: long john brown and little mary bell (02:15). links: spotify, youtube. the lost poets band — sweden from proverbs of hell ; for voice, guitar, and keyboards. poetvox, © 2023. folk/​rock. tracks: echoing green (02:18); the smile (01:39). links: amazon, spotify, youtube. the lost poets band — sweden from the raven ; for voice, guitar, and keyboards. poetvox, © 2023. folk/​rock. track: on another’s sorrow (04:16). links: apple, spotify, youtube. the lost poets band — sweden from to a withered rose ; for voice, guitar, and keyboards. poetvox, © 2023. folk/​rock. track: the voice of the ancient bard (00:45). links: apple, spotify, youtube. the lost poets band — sweden from where my boats go ; for voice, guitar, and keyboards. poetvox, © 2023. folk/​rock. track: all religions are one (03:53). links: apple, spotify, youtube. the lost poets band — sweden from the wolf at the door ; for voice, guitar, and keyboards. poetvox, © 2023. folk/​rock. tracks: the lamb (02:25); the tyger (02:59). links: apple, youtube. luce, ismaele — unknown from away ; for synthesizers. always record, © 2023. new age. tracks: the tyger (02:34); burning bright (02:49). links: amazon, apple, spotify. luo, chuyi — usa earth’s answer ; for voice and piano. independent, © 2023. classical. track: earth’s answer (04:51). link: youtube. marinheiro porre — brazil chimney sweeper ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, and keyboards. nightbird records, © 2023. heavy metal. track: chimney sweeper [experience] (07:11). links: amazon, apple, spotify. mark-23 — russia wilhelm blake ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, and keyboards. mark-23, © 2023. rock. tracks: весна [“spring”] (03:00); сон [“a dream”] (02:31); древо яда [“a poison tree”] (02:28); mуха [“the fly”] (03:20); little black boy (03:31); ангел [“the angel”] (02:59); song of innocence [“introduction”] (02:13); сад любви [“the garden of love”] (02:03). links: amazon, apple, spotify. note: all the songs are sung in russian, including those with english titles. martyrxxs ft. benyam seifu — mexico from narraciones del derrumbe ; for voice and synthesizers. independent, © 2023. electronic/​avant-garde. track: el libro de urizen de william blake (04:53). link: bandcamp. mast year — usa from knife ; for voice, guitar, bass, and drums. grimoire records, © 2023. black metal. track: urizen (01:03). links: apple, bandcamp, youtube. mathew, diya, and delvin antony — unknown ah sunflower ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, and keyboards. musically touched, © 2023. folk/​pop. track: ah sunflower (02:23). links: amazon, apple, spotify. matriarch — australia from medusa ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, and keyboards. independent, © 2023. rock. track: garden of love (02:45). links: amazon, apple, spotify. mehldau, brad, and ian bostridge — us/​uk from the folly of desire ; for voice and piano. pentatone music, © 2023. classical. track: the sick rose (01:43). links: amazon, apple, spotify. memory lane — france from memory lane ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, and keyboards. catapulte records, © 2023. folk. track: the pride of the peacock (04:36). links: amazon, spotify. miller, andrew — usa from soli deo gloria ; for satb choir. mark masters, © 2023. classical. tracks: the tyger (03:35); the lamb (03:37). links: amazon, apple, spotify. milonaut — germany poison tree ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, and keyboards. milonaut, © 2023. rock/​jazz. track: poison tree (05:48). links: amazon, apple, spotify. moorshead, jem — uk an island in the moon ; for synthesizers. independent, © 2023. ambient/​electronic. track: an island in the moon (08:41). link: soundcloud. murray, jesse — canada the tyger ; for voice, guitar, bass, and drums. jesse murray, © 2023. pop. track: the tyger (03:19). links: amazon, apple, spotify. mutantes melancólicos — argentina from a partir del silencio de un paraíso artificial ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, and synthesizers. gustavo madrid, © 2023. indie. track: el tigre (05:52). links: amazon, apple, spotify. note: “the tyger” is translated into spanish. nieto, moisés — spain from genshin impact: piano constellations ; for piano. independent, © 2023. classical. track: a memorable fancy (03:16). links: amazon, apple. nuvfr — unknown zoas ; for synthesizers. nvvv, © 2023. electronic. track: zoas (03:20). links: amazon, apple, spotify. okechukwu, innocent ndubuisi (innocentorum) — nigeria from journey to africa (2); for satb choir. 3549881 records dk, © 2023. classical. track: a cradle song (05:36). links: spotify, youtube. parry, gareth — uk from dreaming music ; for voice, guitar, bass, and drums. 3031940 records dk, © 2023. pop/​indie. track: little boy lost (04:15). links: amazon, apple, spotify. penitent — bulgaria from songs of despair (remastered); for voice, guitar, bass, drums, and keyboards. independent, © 2023. dark/​electronic. track: on another’s sorrow (03:50). links: amazon, apple, spotify. pitts, william — usa from w. t. woodson high school, 2023 band assessment performance ; for wind ensemble. kane media group, © 2023. experimental. track: auguries of innocence (12:49). link: spotify. plumas, xavier — france from rose-amère ; for voice, guitar, bass, and drums. la lézarde, © 2023. rock. track: the tyger (04:01). links: amazon, apple, spotify. podkayne, fille de mars — france from podkayne, fille de mars ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, and accordion. talweg, © 2023. folk. track: echoing green (03:01). link: bandcamp. the poe underground — usa from neptune (dreams of venus); for guitar, bass, drums, and synthesizers. seven muses media, © 2023. rock. track: the tyger (02:21). links: amazon, apple, spotify. poppa dupree and one hot momma — usa a poison tree ; for voice and guitar. 4258798 records dk, © 2023. folk. track: a poison tree (02:51). link: spotify. poulsen, morten — denmark from a clear midnight, choral works i ; for satb choir. morten poulsen, © 2023. classical. tracks: laughing song (03:05); a cradle song (04:36); the lamb (03:54). links: amazon, apple, spotify. quantum prana — finland the tyger xxiii ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, and synthesizers. quantum prana, © 2023. rock. track: the tyger (04:28). links: amazon, apple, spotify. ratatosk — uk from detachment; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, and synthesizers. 1191301 records dk, © 2023. folk. track: some are born to sweet delight (04:40). links: amazon, apple, bandcamp. rejoice o death! — poland from the struggle ; for guitar, bass, drums, and synthesizers. rejoice-records, © 2023. dark ambient. track: a marriage of heaven and hell (10:11). links: amazon, apple, spotify. the revenants — usa from the new colossus ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, and keyboards. night harvest recordings, © 2023. rock/​indie. track: a poison tree (05:17). links: amazon, apple, spotify. richmont — unknown from the poison tree ; for voice, drums, and synthesizers. montefiore enterprises, © 2023. rock. track: a poison tree (03:43). links: amazon, spotify, youtube. rodriguez, rodrigo — argentina/​spain from ambient sketches ; for synthesizers. 2279945 records dk, © 2023. ambient. track: auguries of innocence (06:59). links: amazon, apple, spotify. rope river blues band — usa from some song(s) ; for voice, guitar, and drums. independent, © 2023. folk. track: the divine image (02:56). link: bandcamp. sablo, pablo — usa from it’s the poetry, man! ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, and synthesizers. independent, © 2023. pop/​electronic. tracks: eternity/​the question answered (05:45); an ancient proverb (04:17). links: amazon, apple, spotify. sakellariou, peny — greece tyger ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, and synthesizers. peny sak records, © 2023. rock. track: tyger (03:01). links: apple, spotify, youtube. sandosa, adam — poland from alraune ; for synthesizers. independent, © 2023. dark ambient. track: the marriage of heaven and hell (03:52). link: bandcamp. schwarzer tag — germany from remains ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, and synthesizers. schwarzer tag, © 2023. dark ambient. tracks: mad song (04:27); the sick rose (04:04). links: amazon, apple, spotify. the second nature — italy from masaic ; for guitar, bass, drums, and violin. walkin’, © 2023. jazz/​folk. track: the garden of love (04:31). links: amazon, apple, spotify. sedlacek, carla n. — usa from memories: art songs of youth and nature ; for voice, piano, and flute. carla n. sedlacek, © 2023. classical. track: piping down the valleys wild (02:40). links: amazon, apple, spotify. silent melancholy — ukraine memory, hither come ; for voice and synthesizers. independent, © 2023. pop/​electronic. track: memory, hither come (03:37). link: bandcamp. the singing loins — uk from jazzy angels ; for voice, banjo, and keyboards. spinout music, © 2023. folk. track: some are born (03:36). links: amazon, apple, spotify. slusaw, blake — usa from illusionism ; for bass, drums, piano, and saxophone. 4842716 records dk, © 2023. jazz. track: the sick rose (05:53). links: amazon, apple, spotify. smirnov, andrey — russia from роз шум ; for voice, guitar, bass, and drums. independent, © 2023. folk. track: ангел [“the angel”] (03:41). links: amazon, apple. note: “the angel” is translated into russian. sneed, ryan — usa from beef honey ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, and keyboards. sneedless music, © 2023. pop/​rock. track: little fly (03:47). links: amazon, apple, spotify. solidities — australia correspondences #1; for guitar. independent, © 2023. folk. track: the ecchoing green (02:35). link: bandcamp. sound allowed — australia auguries of innocence ; for guitar, bass, drums, and synthesizers. independent, © 2023. electronic/​jazz. track: auguries of innocence (03:31). links: amazon, apple, spotify. superglam — belgium hear the voice of the bard ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, and synthesizers. superglam, © 2023. synth pop. track: hear the voice of the bard (04:53). links: bandcamp, youtube. super hero/​super villain — usa from we won’t forget ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, and synthesizers. gitmo music, © 2023. rock. track: the tyger (04:22). links: apple, spotify. swaffer — unknown tyger ; for piano. swaffer, © 2023. classical. track: tyger (03:19). links: amazon, apple, spotify. talamana — usa from cloud call ; for voice, guitar, bass, and drums. independent, © 2023. folk. track: america a prophecy (07:09). links: amazon, apple, spotify. taylor, nestor — australia from children’s garden ; for satb choir. stichting donemus beheer, © 2023. classical. tracks: cradle song (02:53); oh! sunflower (01:58). links: apple, spotify, youtube. tc — uk from hard times ; for voice and guitar. independent, © 2023. folk. track: the chimney sweeper [experience] (07:07). link: bandcamp. temple ov saturn — usa from the soul’s prism ; for synthesizers. independent, © 2023. dark electronic. track: infant joy (05:20). link: bandcamp. this is tomorrow — luxembourg the human abstract ; for bass, drums, and synthesizers. vinyl digital gmbh, © 2023. hip-hop/​electronic. track: the human abstract (02:41). links: amazon, apple, spotify. tiessen, zac — canada auguries of innocence ; for orchestra. independent, © 2023. classical. track: auguries of innocence (02:49). links: amazon, apple, spotify. togges band — sweden from to the muses ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, saxophone, and synthesizers. bioquest records, © 2023. pop/​indie. track: to the muses (05:31). links: amazon, apple, spotify. troppo, lennon — spain the tyger (choir music); for satb choir. lennon troppo, © 2023. classical. track: the tyger (02:10). links: amazon, apple, spotify. trowland, morgan — unknown to the evening star ; for voice and synthesizers. independent, © 2023. ambient. track: to the evening star (05:53). link: soundcloud. vespero — russia from insomnia liventure ; for voice, guitar, bass, violin, and synthesizers. independent, © 2023. folk/​indie. track: tharmas (08:20). link: bandcamp. via kosmische — poland the marriage of heaven and hell ; for synthesizers. independent, © 2023. dark ambient. track: the marriage of heaven and hell (03:52). link: soundcloud. weldon, sam — uk the human abstract ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, and keyboards. 731753 records dk, © 2023. rock. track: the human abstract (03:10). links: amazon, apple, spotify. the winter tree — usa from earth below ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, and synthesizers. andrew john laitres, © 2023. pop. track: the garden of love (03:11). links: amazon, apple, spotify. wisborg — germany from seconds to the void—the remixes ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, and synthesizers. danse macabre records, © 2023. gothic rock. track: the sick rose (05:43). links: amazon, apple, spotify. withington, grant — usa how sweet i roam’d ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, and synthesizers. independent, © 2023. pop/​electronic. track: how sweet i roam’d (02:41). links: amazon, apple, spotify. yu, man-ching donald — hong kong from recalling from dreams ; for voice and strings. stichting donemus beheer, © 2023. classical. track: [the] divine image (07:14). links: amazon, apple, spotify. remembrance memories of david bindman by morton d. paley david bindman and i first met during the summer of 1966. i was then doing research at the british museum on blake’s watercolors for young’s night thoughts, and i went to hear a presentation by david at the courtauld institute. the subject was part of david’s doctoral dissertation on blake’s art, then in progress under the sponsorship of the courtauld’s director, anthony blunt, and his paper had to do with symmetry in blake’s art c. 1800. while a graduate student at columbia university in 1959, i had attended professor blunt’s bampton lectures (published as the art of william blake), and this had made me aware that i needed to study art history further to continue to do the work that i intended. david’s luminous presentation reinforced that conviction. david’s blake as an artist was published by phaidon in 1977. only the second general study of blake’s art by a professional art historian (the first having been blunt’s own), it was widely recognized as expanding and deepening its subject. much of the blake scholarship from the mid-twentieth century on was conducted by professors of english like myself, and our literary training in the analysis of symbolism led us to find iconography the most congenial part of art history. david’s approach included such elements as structure, style, color relations, and materials. in this instance it was revolutionary to apply traditional methods. the revelation that blunt had spied for the soviet union occurred during one of my research periods in london. it had been rumored that he was the “fourth man” in addition to the cambridge spies guy burgess, donald maclean, and kim philby, known to have been russian agents. in 1979, violating an agreement made fifteen years previously, the british government revealed his identity. david filled me in: british intelligence had obtained military secrets about the invading nazis’ battle plans against britain’s russian ally but would not share them with the soviet government, and blunt had provided the information the russians needed. i got an idea of what the public reaction was like when on a flight to london after a trip to paris i saw a tabloid rag with a headline screaming that anthony blunt had caused the execution of some fifty dutch radio operators! it turned out that mi6 had, coincidentally, given a dutch network the name “operation blunt,” and that this venture had been discovered by the nazis, with murderous consequences. it had nothing at all to do with an art historian who was in the process of being ostracized by his profession. blunt was stripped of his knighthood, deprived of his cambridge fellowship, and expelled from the british academy. in consultation with a young scholar to whom david had introduced me, i wrote a letter to the times warning that the attempt to punish scholars through their academic institutions rather than courts of law was likely to go as badly in britain as it had in my own country, but a times editor informed me that no further correspondence on the subject would be published. in 1982–​83 david organized the exhibition william blake: his art and times at the yale center for british art and the art gallery of ontario, with an impressive 192-page catalogue that gave due attention to the cultural and sociopolitical backgrounds of blake’s art. david and i spent considerable time together at the ensuing conference in toronto with our friends bob essick and bo lindberg, and what i most remember is how much fun it was. a poster advertising the conference displayed plate 7 of urizen copy a (beginning “los howld in a dismal stupor”), showing a contorted naked figure in flames, with bulging eyes and a mouth forming a horrified o. we pretended to imitate this facial expression and bodily posture in a group photograph that we gave to some of our colleagues. sophomoric humor maybe, but a reminder that friendship with david always involved a lot of laughter. david’s long association with the william blake trust culminated in his massive 1987 edition william blake’s illustrations of the book of job, to which he contributed a substantial essay. in 2024 he produced his final exhibition and catalogue, william blake’s universe, in collaboration with esther chadwick, at the fitzwilliam museum and the hamburger kunsthalle. like his hamburg exhibition almost fifty years previously, william blake’s universe gave considerable regard to german cultural connections, including displays and texts relating to jacob boehme, illustrator dionysius freher, and an artist on whom boehme’s influence was profound, philipp otto runge. interested in sculpture as well as painting, david published studies of the sculptors roubiliac, canova, and thorvaldsen, as well as the introductory european sculpture from bernini to rodin. his john flaxman exhibitions and catalogues (royal academy 1979, sir john soane’s museum 2006) led me to a greater appreciation of flaxman’s brilliance as a designer, and he also introduced me to university college’s marvelous collection of plaster casts of flaxman sculptures and drawings. this short account has hardly done justice to david’s profound work on blake and his contemporaries, let alone to his extensive other scholarly interests, but it should at least be mentioned that he collaborated with henry louis gates, jr., on the multivolume image of the black in western art, published from 2010 on, expanding on the volumes published previously from 1976 to 1989. just a month before he died, david had been putting finishing touches to his final volume, the image of nubia, co-edited with rita freed. the diversity and depth of his research made him a great scholar. nothing could have made him a greater friend. review: jason whittaker, divine images: the life and work of william blake jason whittaker. divine images: the life and work of william blake. london: reaktion books, 2021. 392 pp. £30.00, hardcover or e-book. reviewed by matthew leporati matthew leporati is associate professor of english at the university of mount saint vincent. he is the author of romantic epics and the mission of empire (cambridge university press, 2024). one of the challenges of reading blake is acquiring the contextual knowledge that illuminates his work and that is often necessary to understand him at all. academics and enthusiasts can easily take for granted their familiarity with the culture and politics of blake’s day, the major events of his personal life, and the details of his idiosyncratic mythology as it develops across his poems, but newcomers are faced with a daunting task. while gaining contextual knowledge is important in understanding all artists, it is both indispensable and more difficult in blake’s case because of his method: on top of his obscure style, his poetry and visual art exist in a state of dynamic conversation with the romantic period and with his other works. frequently, he takes discourse from the world around him and presents it in strange, defamiliarizing ways that often resonate with other aspects of his corpus, works written sometimes decades earlier or later. jason whittaker’s impressive divine images: the life and work of william blake opens with an examination of a deceptively familiar image, one of blake’s most famous: “the ancient of days.” whittaker discusses how it uncannily remains both recognizable and alien. what seems on the surface a straightforward depiction of the christian god in fact engages not just with the bible (daniel 7:13), but with ideas as diverse as deism, the work of isaac newton, milton’s paradise lost, and blake’s own character urizen, as developed throughout his work. “the ancient of days,” whittaker concludes, “is an image that demonstrates blake’s highly idiosyncratic reading of the religious and political events of his day, showing his wide-ranging knowledge of other writers and artists” (12). those without a working knowledge of this context will miss important layers of meaning. divine images is a thorough introduction to blake’s work and a guide to understanding it, written for an audience unfamiliar with the necessary context. students will find it immensely useful, and even seasoned readers of blake will appreciate the succinct survey of his life, poetry, and visual art. the balance between his life, the relevant history around him, and an overview of all of his major works marks divine images as distinct from biographies, such as tobias churton’s jerusalem! the real life of william blake (2014), and guides to reading blake, such as saree makdisi’s reading william blake (2015) and kathryn s. freeman’s a guide to the cosmology of william blake (2017). whittaker’s book is neither an account of minute details of blake’s life nor a survey of themes that his work addresses nor a dictionary of his symbols. this exploration of blake in context perhaps most distinguishes itself by heavily emphasizing the visual aspects of his career. whittaker’s book moves chronologically across blake’s biography and the surrounding history and culture, and it succeeds in weaving these elements into the discussion of the works without overwhelming the reader or oversimplifying the subject. this is quite an achievement, given the wide array of topics that need to be covered in short order. the introduction and first chapter alone introduce deism, locke’s philosophy, the established church and dissent, london’s urbanization, the beginning of the french revolution, blake’s possible participation in the gordon riots, a description of his work as an engraver, his method of producing texts, his belief that all religions have their origin in the imagination, and more. where possible, whittaker refers to the work of scholars who deepen the discussion of blake, but the book is not overly “scholarly” in the pejorative sense: the prose is very readable for an audience of non-academics, and it engagingly explores how blake’s poems “contain multitudes.” one of the first things a reader will notice about the book is, appropriate to its title, the generous use of images. at least once every few pages, and often more frequently, blake’s divine images illustrate whittaker’s discussion—​in full color in the e-book, which is the edition i read, and many times occupying an entire page. a discussion of blake without a strong visual component is incomplete. readers need to see eve tempted by the serpent (1799–​1800) in order to appreciate whittaker’s comment that the use of gold highlights, as in jerusalem, “make[s] this image shine,” and his observation that eve is not “revelling in the act of taking the forbidden fruit,” but that her expression is “calm and peaceful,” a reflection of “mankind at the final moment before the fall” (219-20). similarly, it is necessary to see abraham and isaac (1799–​1800) to note how the former resembles a druid—​that important figure in blake’s work—​while the latter is “naked and dynamic … innocent and unafraid,” possessing a “childlike perception that sees more clearly the way to reconcile god and man as opposed to the false religion followed by his father” (222). another example is whittaker’s examination of satan, sin, and death: satan comes to the gates of hell (1807) from paradise lost, which is followed on the next page by james gillray’s “sin, death, and the devil” of 1792 (279-80). i would have loved for whittaker to elaborate on this connection and explain how blake responds to gillray, but in this one instance, he oddly does not remark on the resemblance between the images. i suspect that this point was one that had to be cut for space. no doubt much material ended up on the cutting-room floor in writing this book, but what remains is a treasure trove of information and insights, beautifully and helpfully illustrated. these divine images are more than ornamentation: whittaker consistently shows how images are important to blake’s meaning. for instance, in discussing america a prophecy, he introduces frye’s concept of the orc cycle with reference to the similar poses of urizen and orc on plates 10 and 12 (139). as another example, he points out that the illustrations of edward young’s night thoughts reflect aspects of blake’s mythology that he had developed in the lambeth prophecies (196). as whittaker notes, “illustration was a means for blake to explore fertile dialogues with those works that inspired him” (274), and this is especially true of the bible and john milton. in discussing the 1799 paintings of biblical subjects for thomas butts, whittaker draws on the work of naomi billingsley to contrast blake’s depictions with those of contemporaries, indicating how blake’s “renounce any form of naturalism: they are intended to inspire the viewer to consider the nature of christ rather than to seek out the historical jesus” (218). indeed, whittaker is sure to note that in the illustrations to paradise lost and especially paradise regained, it is christ’s humanity that is central for blake (282-83). in fact, the devil appears as an old, bearded man in the illustrations to paradise regained, connecting blake’s conception of the ultimate enemy with orthodox notions of god, as depicted in “the ancient of days” and blake’s character urizen (284). whittaker observes throughout the book how blake’s work emerges from his relationships with others, his economic circumstances, and the political realities of his age. given the cooperative spirit of his ethos (“i am in you and you in me, mutual in love divine,” jerusalem 4.7, e 146), a study of his works needs to appreciate, for instance, the importance of the johnson circle and friends/​patrons like butts and john linnell. further, the four zoas needs to be understood in the context of the failure of the night thoughts project, and the book helpfully situates the poem alongside this failure. whittaker treats at length the conflicted relationship with william hayley and the circumstances surrounding blake’s trial for sedition, which directly influenced milton and jerusalem and almost certainly contributed to blake’s increasingly obscure style. blake’s relationships with others continue beyond his death; in the final chapter, whittaker covers a detailed reception history spanning nearly two centuries. the book will also help students to grasp the development of blake’s characters and ideas, and his presentation of those ideas over the course of his career. the book of thel, for instance, appears as a step toward blake’s later prophecies, both by employing the fourteener and by giving the “first indication that blake was considering a new style of mythological thinking in his work” (83). whittaker traces los from the “agonized individual” of the book of urizen—​“full of terror and apparently resentful of his task”—​to the “quietly heroic figure who guides albion from death in jerusalem” (168). and he nicely shows how, even as the use of symbols can change from work to work, blake consistently tends to attribute “demonic aspects to the traditional conception of god” (249). blake could align himself with the “devils party” in the marriage of heaven and hell, but the “devil” of that work is distinct from the satanic, urizenic figure worshipped by many people under the name of god. whittaker presents blake (correctly, in my estimation) as never having abandoned his early radicalism. as he notes, blake was already well aware of social injustice before the french revolution, and was not “suddenly radicalized” by it (122); later in life, he never renounced his support for the revolution, even as his opinion of it changed after the reign of terror. where others saw it as the product of irreligion, blake “gradually came to view its failures as the inability to rise above the corrupting influence of power, best exemplified as priestcraft” (161). ironically, blake saw the french revolution as too religious: the “cult of reason” and rationalism were not the negation of religion but another form of it. to the end of his career, his work remains deeply radical, as whittaker shows with a discussion of the heretical ideas of the everlasting gospel and their relation to earlier works, especially marriage. as whittaker indicates, the later blake continues to believe that god is “entirely internal,” and he opposes the “common misconception of a god out there.” his unorthodox stances are reflected in his illustrations to the book of job and to dante’s divine comedy (321). there is little a reader could criticize. while i naturally found myself wanting the analysis of blake’s works to be extended, and for even more illustrations to appear (in support of every single detail referenced), this would have been impractical. further, it would have undermined the purpose of the book as a launching pad for readers to explore blake on their own. the only aspect of blake’s work that would have benefited from greater examination is the concept of emanations. this key idea is explained only on one page, where emanations are described as female aspects of fallen zoas who are “somehow intrinsically inferior to the male zoas,” a presentation that “introduces an increasingly misogynistic tone to parts of blake’s later prophecies” (213). while this is not exactly inaccurate, there is much more to say, as several passages in blake complicate the concept. though all of these details are not necessary for beginners to understand blake, it would have been good to gesture toward this greater complexity here, as whittaker does elsewhere so well. critiques like these are quibbles at best. divine images is overall an enjoyable, thorough, and useful guide to blake, especially for students, that pays particular and much-needed attention to the visual aspects of his work. frequently while reading the book, i thought how excellent it would be as a text for an undergraduate or graduate seminar. when i teach blake to undergraduates, i often find myself overwhelmed with the amount of groundwork i need to lay so that they can make sense of even the most apparently simple texts. a book like divine images would greatly enrich the classroom, as well as any reader’s understanding of blake’s art. b l a k eb l a k e an ill ustrated quarterlyan ill ustrated quarterly vol. 59 — no. 2 — fall 2 02 5vol. 59 — no. 2 — fall 2 02 5 a n i l l u s t r a t e d q u a r t e r l y volume 59 number 2 fall 2025 c o n t e n t s www.blakequarterly.org © 2025 copyright blake/an illustrated quarterly cover: color-modified detail of jerusalem copy i, frontispiece, printed c. 1832. original held by the library of congress, rare book and special collections division, lessing j. rosenwald collection, catalogue number 1811. original photo courtesy of the william blake archive . cover design by dina garber. rebecca marks, independent scholar josephine a. mcquail, independent scholar silvia riccardi, umeå university robert w. rix, university of copenhagen joseph viscomi, university of north carolina at chapel hill david worrall, the nottingham trent university martin butlin, tate gallery, london, retired tristanne j. connolly, university of waterloo detlef w. dörrbecker, university of trier, retired sibylle erle, philipps-universität marburg robert n. essick, university of california, riverside angela esterhammer, victoria college, university of toronto nelson hilton, university of georgia a d v i s o r y b o a r d e d i t o r s editors: morton d. paley, tilar j. mazzeo co-editor, 1970–2024: morris eaves book review editor: sibylle erle exhibitions editor: luisa calè bibliographer (criticism): wayne c. ripley bibliographer (music): camila oliveira sales review editor: mark crosby managing editor: sarah jones sarah.jones@rochester.edu production office: department of english, university of rochester, rochester ny 14627-0451 articles who are blake’s eternals? by christopher z. hobson blake and exhibitions, 2024 by luisa calè blake’s lawgiver, newton’s system, reynolds’s justice by simon schaffer a newly discovered copy of blake’s adam and eve asleep a newly discovered copy of blake’s adam and eve asleep by joseph viscomi joseph viscomi is the james g. kenan distinguished professor of english literature at the university of north carolina at chapel hill. he is the author of blake and the idea of the book and co-editor, with robert essick and morris eaves, of the william blake archive. his current project, printed paintings, examines the techniques, histories, and meanings of blake’s large monoprints. when i first saw adam and eve asleep, i was excited, thinking it may be evidence that the linnell paradise lost designs were not a selection of just three designs but were once part of a full set of twelve, like the thomas and butts sets of 1807 and 1808, and that other designs from the set were waiting to be discovered. but when i looked more closely at the drawing and coloring, that idea and the idea that this design was by blake began to fade. the nose, chin, lips, and eyes of the angel in profile looked wrong, wrong enough for me to enlarge and enhance the high-resolution image and compare the copy to its model in the butts series (illus. 1). 1. left: adam and eve asleep, detail of angels’ heads. private collection, uk. right: adam and eve asleep, butts set (butlin 536.5), detail of angels’ heads. image courtesy of the william blake archive. © 2017 museum of fine arts, boston. accession number 90.102. see enlargement. comparing the foliage at the bottom of the design against its model (illus. 2) reveals a similar hesitancy and indeterminacy not present in the model and in blake’s late finished designs in general. 2. left: adam and eve asleep, detail of foliage, bottom left corner. private collection, uk. right: adam and eve asleep, butts set (butlin 536.5), detail of foliage, bottom left corner. image courtesy of the william blake archive. © 2017 museum of fine arts, boston. accession number 90.102. see enlargement. the copyist did not understand the underlying structure of the foliage as plants or design any more than he did the finer features of the face. like the three drawings in the linnell paradise lost set, adam and eve asleep was worked up from a tracing of the butts version; however, it adhered slavishly to its model, whereas all three linnell designs display numerous variants and greater freedom in drawing and coloring. for example, compare the three versions of michael foretells the crucifixion (illus. 3) or the creation of eve (illus. 4) or satan watching the endearments of adam and eve (illus. 5) and you see that in the linnell versions blake improvised, taking the kinds of liberties that an original artist takes when copying his own inventions. 3. left: michael foretells the crucifixion, thomas set (butlin 529.11). 25.2 x 20.3 cm. image courtesy of the william blake archive. © courtesy of the huntington art collections, san marino, california. object number 000.12. center: michael foretells the crucifixion, butts set (butlin 536.11). 50.2 x 38.1 cm. image courtesy of the william blake archive. © 2017 museum of fine arts, boston. accession number 90.101. right: michael foretells the crucifixion, linnell set (butlin 537.3). 50.2 x 38.5 cm. image courtesy of the william blake archive. © fitzwilliam museum, cambridge. object number pd.49-1950. see enlargement. 4. left: the creation of eve, thomas set (butlin 529.8). 25.3 x 20.8 cm. image courtesy of the william blake archive. © courtesy of the huntington art collections, san marino, california. object number 000.9. center: the creation of eve, butts set (butlin 536.8). 50.3 x 40 cm. image courtesy of the william blake archive. © 2017 museum of fine arts, boston. accession number 90.95. right: the creation of eve, linnell set (butlin 537.2). 50.4 × 40.7 cm. image courtesy of the william blake archive. national gallery of victoria, melbourne. accession number 1024-3. see enlargement. 5. left: satan watching the endearments of adam and eve, thomas set (butlin 529.5). 25.7 x 21.8 cm. image courtesy of the william blake archive. © courtesy of the huntington art collections, san marino, california. object number 000.6. center: satan watching the endearments of adam and eve, butts set (butlin 536.4). 50.5 x 38 cm. image courtesy of the william blake archive. © 2017 museum of fine arts, boston. accession number 90.96. right: satan watching the endearments of adam and eve, linnell set (butlin 537.1). 52.8 × 39 cm. image courtesy of the william blake archive. national gallery of victoria, melbourne. accession number 1025-3. see enlargement. i can think of no other work in which blake copied himself—even when using a tracing as opposed to redrawing freehand—that does not show significant variants. while blake often copied himself, copying himself so slavishly was uncharacteristic. indeed, adam and eve asleep brings to mind the insight of jonathan richardson: “every man will naturally, and unavoidably mix something of himself in all he does if he coppies with any degree of liberty: if he attempts to follow his original servilely, and exactly, that cannot but have a stiffness which will easily distinguish what is so done from what is performed naturally, easily, and without restraint” (quoted in charles rogers, a collection of prints in imitation of drawings [1778] 1: 72).richardson’s insight is used to detect forgeries: an original design increased in size retains its integrity, but a copy or fake, when enlarged, begins to break down and reveals a stiffness and hesitancy in the lines. linnell’s three paradise lost designs are coherent in drawing and coloring styles and differ from their models in similar ways; michael foretells expresses the greatest “degree of liberty,” the most dramatic departure, and satan watching the least, but in each we see blake improvising quite literally in a higher key. adam and eve asleep does not fit into the trio of linnell designs, not in drawing or coloring style, the latter of which is flat and similar to its model but is a style that blake hadn’t practiced in over a decade. its many differences in drawing and coloring styles indicate that it was not part of linnell’s set and that his set is complete as it is, comprising related but nonsequential illustrations presented as autonomous designs. adding the copy to this coherent set of three designs is like inserting into a well-composed song a section whose voicings and textures disrupt the harmonious whole. if we assume that adam and eve asleep is by blake, an example of his unevenness as a draftsman, and that it was executed for linnell in 1822 along with linnell’s three known designs, then we are assuming that blake behaved uncharacteristically: he overtly improvised with three of four designs but adhered slavishly to the model in one; he colored three in a similar style and palette characteristic of the period but colored one in flat washes applied in a manner he had abandoned years earlier. equally unsettling is his using a sheet of wove paper when the other three are on laid paper. the paper in blake’s other watercolor designs to milton’s works is uniform in type and stock, as it is in the illustrations to the book of job that blake executed for linnell in 1821 and in the illustrations to dante’s divine comedy that he executed for linnell in the last two and a half years of his life. why would blake use different kinds of paper when executing four paradise lost designs for linnell? different surfaces and weights of paper affect the finished look of designs. where different papers in the same project do exist, they signal different periods of execution. butts’s set of twenty-one illustrations to the book of job, c. 1805, has two leaves of laid paper among nineteen leaves of wove paper (550.17 and 20), but, as butlin has argued conclusively, the different papers, along with different (early and late) coloring styles, prove that the two designs were not executed with the other nineteen. both leaves show traces of “another hand,” possibly “mrs. blake’s” (catalogue entries for 550.17, 20). arguing that the copy of adam and eve asleep was added to the linnell designs after the three designs on laid paper were executed, like the two leaves in butts’s book of job, might seem to explain the presence of different papers, but it makes the early style of laying in washes all the more incongruous and uncharacteristic. another factor that concerns me is the near absence of the kind of pen and ink outlining present in blake’s other finished illustrations as well as late illuminated prints. this kind of outlining is exceedingly difficult to do and requires a master’s hand. cennini was right about keeping pen and ink from art students for at least the first year of their training! adam and eve asleep looks like the work of a student who knew how to trace a model and lay in flat washes (though the black shadowing in the foliage at the bottom is a bit heavy handed—see illus. 2) but was not able to finish it in the style that required more expertise. as a result, the drawing looks slightly out of focus compared to the three linnell designs—indeed, to other finished drawings by blake. taken together, the material facts of the newly discovered copy of blake’s adam and eve asleep—its lack of variants, its awkwardly drawn facial and other details, its different style of laying in washes, its absence of pen and ink outlining, its different support—lead me to believe that we are looking at a copy of a blake drawing and not a design poorly drawn by blake. our new co-editor we are very happy to welcome as our co-editor tilar j. mazzeo. before she left academics to pursue writing full time, tilar was clara c. piper associate professor (and a former chair) of the english department at colby college. for more than a decade she was editor of scholarly editions at romantic circles, and more recently part of a digital humanities research group at the university of montreal. among her books are plagiarism and literary property in the romantic period and the bestseller the widow clicquot. she is currently working on a book about blake and the decorative arts. morton d. paley introduction introduction by sarah jones the ancient britons is not hiding in my attic—​i’ve checked—​and it may not be in anyone else’s attic either, which leaves us with blake’s descriptions, contemporary reactions, and the canvas of our imaginations. as sibylle discusses in her review essay in this issue, morris wrote about how the blake archive might handle this lost work in the editorial sense. some time ago i wondered how blake would have handled the painting in the literal sense, as it was very large and must have been unwieldy. from my speculation came the idea for a cartoon that john riordan has brilliantly brought to life. it was originally destined for the cover, but morris passed away and another image seemed more appropriate there. i can’t remember if i told him that i was planning a cartoon for the issue, but in a way that’s the point: if you worked with him, he let you run with your ideas and trusted you not to burn the house down. i know i was looking forward to his reaction; he would undoubtedly have had something pithy to say. now, i can only let my imagination fill in the blanks. prophet against empire? william blake in australia prophet against empire? william blake in australia by alexis harley, claire knowles, and chris murray alexis harley (a.harley@latrobe.edu.au) is the author of autobiologies: charles darwin and the natural history of the self, and lectures in literary studies at la trobe university. recent research asks how romantic aesthetic and literary culture was transformed in the natural-history writing of the nineteenth century and beyond, and how literary aesthetics materially impacted colonial environments. claire knowles (c.knowles@latrobe.edu.au) is a senior lecturer at la trobe university. she is the author of sensibility and female poetic tradition, 1780–​1860: the legacy of charlotte smith, and the editor, with ingrid horrocks, of charlotte smith: major poetic works. she has published widely on the female poets of the romantic period, and is currently finishing a book on women, della cruscan poetry, and the fashionable newspaper in the eighteenth century. chris murray (chris.murray@monash.edu) is senior lecturer in literary studies at monash university. he has published extensively on aspects of transcultural exchange in romantic literature, including his books tragic coleridge (2013) and china from the ruins of athens and rome (2020). he has also published a memoir, crippled immortals (2018). since the posthumous revival of william blake (beginning in the 1860s, consolidated in the twentieth century), his identification with england, and more particularly with london, has been complicated by his appeal to cultural groups that are themselves ambivalent, at best, in their relationship to empire. while scholarship has increasingly attended to blake’s dialogues with and receptions outside the anglosphere,significant attention to blake and the non-english-speaking world is evident, for example, in the range of studies at the 2022 global blake conference, <https://​globalblake.​zoamorphosis.​com>, but this attention has a long history (see, for instance, malmqvist). the radically countercultural artist and son of a hosier has simultaneously been assimilated into the iconography of mainstream englishness. this has been nowhere more evident than in england itself, where he is quoted by politicians of all political persuasions and has been made the subject of blockbuster exhibitions in major institutional venues. for example, the trailer for the 2019–​20 tate exhibition projects blakean imagery onto iconic scenes and sites of contemporary london, updating and appropriating golgonooza for the age of the london eye.see <https://​www.​youtube.​com/​watch?​v=​z7epxc5k7da>. at the same time, and in ways somewhat truer to his own practices, blake has been celebrated as a kind of patron saint by london-based small presses and outsider artists and writers. beyond england, complex and sometimes inapposite ideological allegiances have been contracted on his behalf from the nineteenth century onwards. in this essay, we turn to the reception, reproduction, and revisioning of blake in the settler colonies of australia, and we find a blake whose work, mediated through a range of editorial and curatorial lenses, proves unexpectedly amenable to conflicting australian desires both to affirm cultural fealty to england and empire and to refuse it. blake’s posthumous allegiances and mésalliances are complicated not only by his fluctuating reputation but also by what england and london themselves signify at any given moment. david erdman’s 1954 study positions him as a prophet against empire. yet for commonwealth (and before 1931, imperial) subjects outside of england, blake was, among other things, cartographer of the empire’s center, a status that problematizes his self-avowed anti-imperial stance. many commonwealth subjects, governed by anglophone institutions working uphill to naturalize english culture in colonized places, know this revolutionary romantic outsider-artist because of, and often in terms of, his englishness. but though the colonies of australia were under english rule, and its colonial institutions—​such as its first universities—​participated actively in an ideological program of anglicization, these colonies were not populated solely by english-born subjects. far from it: first peoples outnumbered european colonists until the mid-nineteenth century, by which point forced transportees from ireland became a substantial minority. they were joined by voluntary migrants from all continents, along with other coerced migrants, like the south sea islanders abducted for farm work from the 1860s. by the end of the nineteenth century the most vocal proponents against empire and for australian nationhood were mostly not english identifying at all. for them, an anti-imperial blake who could be by any means detached from his englishness had significant appeal. the alignment of blake both with and against empire plays out in the context of australia’s first (long) century as a nation. this is a period in which the entanglement of english and australian identities was profoundly transformed. in the final decades of the nineteenth century, white inhabitants of the six british colonies in australia, many of whom were now native born, intensified a movement for federation and nationhood. this movement coincided with the publication of the late-victorian books that began to bring blake to a wider audience: william muir’s facsimiles of 1884–​90, the second edition of alexander gilchrist’s life of william blake (1880), and, crucially, edwin john ellis and william butler yeats’s the works of william blake (1893). it is merely a coincidence that the first positive signs of blake’s canonization took place just as a new nation was doing the initial work of curating its cultural identity, discussing republicanism, reckoning with (which meant largely disavowing) the existence of indigenous landowners, and renegotiating its relationship to empire. blake was not yet erdman’s prophet against empire, but had been interpreted influentially by yeats as the arch-symbolist, “content to express every beautiful feeling that came into his head without troubling about its utility or chaining it to any utility” (yeats 113). yet the coincidence of blake’s rehabilitation and australian nation-building meant that the radical figure who also stood for england and “englishness” became available to “australians” (a word that only came to be widely used to refer to non-aboriginal inhabitants in the period of heightened nationalism from the 1880s), and particularly to australians meditating on their ambivalent feelings about empire and englishness. moreover, precisely because of blake’s implication in the very empire that he prophesied against, attempts to deploy him as a token of englishness—​in order to bring about changes in the arts, or to promote an imperial patriotism—​tended to produce unexpected consequences. toward federation (1901) with english colonization came english books. given the number of commercial commissions undertaken by blake between the 1780s and 1820s, it is not surprising that among these english books were some to which he had contributed engravings. the first of these, indeed, began trickling into the colonies of australia from as early as the 1830s. by the 1850s, australia’s first public libraries and universities were being established, and blake’s commercial illustrations were finding their way onto publicly accessible shelves. we know, for instance, that the melbourne public library acquired the 1805 edition of john flaxman’s iliad of homer, including three prints by blake, and the 1817 edition of flaxman’s compositions from the works days and theogony of hesiod, with all thirty-seven engravings by blake (see gregory). blake does not seem to have become much recognized in australia as an artist in his own right until later in the century, in a trend consistent with his revival in england. but once his reputation was in full bud, around the 1890s, he was conscripted into discussions underscored by anxiety about national identity. the motives behind these appropriations of blake’s name can be elusive. in may 1897, a review reprinted in the literature-focused “red page” of the bulletin, then a highly influential nationalist journal, wended its way to the idea of edward gibbon as a visionary architect of history by throwing out this casual and apparently superfluous allusion to blake: “among the visionary persons who presented themselves to william blake was the man who built the pyramids” (dowden). while it seems highly unlikely that any australian reader would have seen the man who built the pyramids, one of the drawings from the visionary heads series, quite a number would have encountered the reproduction in gilchrist’s life (300), the 1880 edition of which was by now lodged in public institutions including the library of the university of sydney, the public library of new south wales (now state library of new south wales), and the melbourne public library (now state library victoria). by 1897, the bulletin had reached a particularly heady point in what was essentially a “debate about the nature of australia and the role of literature in shaping a colonial society” (nesbitt). on 27 february, storywriter and bush poet henry lawson had published an untitled column in the red page attacking other australian writers for their failure to render realistically the hellscapes of the so-called “out-back,” a failure that he felt retarded the development of a national identity. lawson, who by march had given up on australia and moved to new zealand, had fired a shot that would see the red page overrun by responses for months. the aforementioned review by edward dowden of new editions of gibbon’s autobiography and letters, which begins with the reference to the english blake, took up precious column inches in what seems at first a pointed diversion from the red page’s all-dominating debate about the emerging nation and its homegrown literature. readers about to divest themselves of british colonial government may well have perceived an allegorical edge to gibbon’s decline and fall of the roman empire; gibbon could be read—​as blake later would be—​as a prophet, if not against empire, then certainly warning of its vulnerabilities. the review was perhaps not so entirely off topic for an avowedly nationalist periodical just four years before federation. nor was its web of connections to countercultural english figures (with blake foregrounded in the first sentence) irrelevant to the bulletin’s advocacy of an australianism at the center of which was a population of antiauthoritarian ex-britons and irish (see moore). blake was a topic of considerable interest in post-federation australia. discussion of the artist and his works often accorded with trends in his reception elsewhere in the english-speaking world at that time. texts from songs of innocence and songs of experience were reprinted frequently in australian newspapers, journals, and magazines in the early twentieth century. his supposed madness was the subject of much debate in the papers, with the wonderfully named cumberland argus and fruitgrowers’ advocate devoting a paragraph to the topic “was blake eccentric?” in 1907. “the reasons put forward for considering william blake, poet, painter, and engraver, a literary eccentric,” it concludes, “do not appear to us so well founded.” commentators expounded upon william and catherine blake’s happy relationship. the maitland daily mercury followed the victorian adoption of the blakes as a paradigm of domestic harmony when it claimed that catherine “was capable of so ardent a worship for her husband that all the longings of her warm nature seemed to become fused at once into a desire for his good.” public lectures on the poet also seem to have been popular. william mitchell, for example, adopted a yeatsian perspective in a lecture on blake’s “symbolic style which taxed the understanding of the keenest intellect” to a large (and, it seems, rather bemused) audience at glen’s hall in melbourne on 26 november 1908 (“the mystical blake”). a defrocked church of england priest, douglas price, offered a lecture on “blake and other visionaries” to the modernist society of brisbane in 1916. in the first two decades of the twentieth century, blake was in the air and in the libraries of australia, and in 1918 he would make his way to one of the wealthiest art galleries in the world, more than ten thousand miles from london. the felton bequest in 1989, the national gallery of victoria (ngv) acquired what might seem a rather obscure piece of blakeana, a colored copy of edward young’s night thoughts (1797).see g. e. bentley, jr., blake books supplement (oxford: clarendon press, 1995) p. 273 (copy y). according to michael j. tolley, these engravings were probably the first blake work to be brought to the colony of new south wales, when their owner, the jurist william à beckett, arrived in 1837. à beckett later became the chief justice of victoria, and his copy of night thoughts accompanied him to melbourne, where it remained when he returned to england. its next recorded owner was alfred felton (1831–​1904), from whose estate it was sold to another private interest (see tolley for further details). meanwhile, felton had done something that would profoundly transform the relationship between blake and the melbourne public. a pharmaceutical mogul, felton left a will that dedicated £383,163 “to art and charity, with half of the interest earned to be used in perpetuity to buy works for the national gallery of victoria.”fittingly, funds from the bequest contributed to the purchase eighty-five years later of the copy of night thoughts owned by à beckett and felton. the felton bequest “transformed the ngv into one of the most lavishly endowed public galleries in the british empire with greater funds at its disposal than london’s national gallery and the tate combined” (mangan). the immensely wealthy ngv was thus armed to make the first major attempt to bring blake to australia, in 1918. felton’s bequest was motivated, allegedly, by his desire to bring culture to a rapidly growing british outpost: “he believed australians had more than their share of material comforts; what they lacked, in his opinion, were the refining influences of the old world. in his lifetime there was not one great masterpiece in the whole country” (flowers 8). much of the ngv’s impressive collection of australian and international art is a direct result of the generosity of the bequest; the blake purchases in 1918 included thirty-six of 102 watercolors illustrating the divine comedy, two watercolors illustrating milton’s paradise lost, the set of twenty-two engravings to the book of job, and three prints from blake’s prophetic books. the purchase in 1989 of night thoughts, and, the previous year, of a copy of songs of innocence, reaffirmed the commitment to blake. as detailed in a useful essay by irena zdanowicz, the ngv’s first blake purchase was a cooperative venture. the wartime economy meant that no british bidder could afford the entire dante set, part of the blake holdings being sold by christie’s on behalf of the linnell family. melbourne was considered to be an acceptable destination for some of the watercolors, at the expense of american bidders. it is striking that the collector charles ricketts equated the purchases for the tate and the ngv when he wrote, shortly after the sale, that “it would have been a scandal and a disaster had the set left the country” (quoted in zdanowicz 13). krzysztof cieszkowski’s article on the dispersal of the illustrations emphasizes herbert linnell’s anxiety about the loss of the linnell collection to america, in particular (166). yet ricketts was also agitated about the possibility that some of the dante series might make its way to liverpool, which had, he wrote ambiguously, “behaved badly” (quoted in cieszkowski 167). hence the ngv was able to purchase twelve of the thirty shares in the set, and the felton bequest’s agent, robert ross, had first pick of the drawings (most of the remainder went to the national gallery of british art—​later the tate—​the british museum, and galleries at birmingham and oxford), a total purchase of 7300 guineas. the division of the set indicates melbourne’s wealth (built up in the nineteenth-century gold rush) and its significance to the empire at the turn of the century; it was the capital of australia until 1927. one blake scholar congratulated charles aitken of the tate on the outcome of the dispersal, which would benefit “the nation—​and empire” (quoted in cieszkowski 169). the blake purchases heralded the ngv’s entrance on the scene as a gallery of world-class significance, with melburnians able to study the artist’s illustrations in all of their deeply saturated beauty just as they might have done in london. no longer did you need to be at the center of the empire to have direct access to its treasures. blake’s twentieth-century acolytes while the ngv’s major purchases can be read as statements that asserted melbourne’s cultural significance on the international scene, ann galbally notes that they also served a domestic purpose: there was in australia a general recognition that public museums, libraries and art galleries formed cornerstones of civic endeavour and were active conductors of sound civic values. no 19th-century city of reasonable size could be considered worthy of the name unless it had these institutions and through them was seen to be an active patron of science and the liberal arts. (10) felton’s original intentions for the bequest accord with such a philosophy of cultural influence. twentieth-century commentators explicitly identified the educative possibilities of the blake collection with the propagation of a recognizably british form of art in australia. in a 1941 essay, daryl lindsay (1889–​1976)—​then a curator at the ngv—​emphasizes blake’s nationality as if it was his most important characteristic. “he [blake] is essentially english,” he writes, “and i doubt if any other country could have produced him” (44). the same year, the ngv loaned forty of its blake works to the national art gallery of new south wales, as it was then called, enabling the collection to exert an influence beyond melbourne. in her recent comments on blake’s european reception, sibylle erle introduces a discussion of the translations and of types of individual creative responses that occur when an aspect of the original work resonates with a foreign culture. from lindsay’s assessment of blake’s essential englishness and the ngv’s strategy as outlined by galbally, one might infer that the ngv hoped that the blake collection would perpetuate a particular kind of art in australia. felton himself, as noted, appears to have wanted a ventriloquism of english art to occur in australian art. it is unclear how he supposed this influence would manifest itself: whether a set of australian works would arise that encoded imperial identity, celebrated english themes, or perpetuated a recognizably english aesthetic; or whether he felt simply that a display of critically acclaimed art would inspire the production of more critically acclaimed art. but the critical acclaim of blake was not universal in the early twentieth century and—​long prior to the ngv’s acquisition of its first blake holdings—​some australian commentators opined that he was ill suited to instrumentalist purposes. a 1902 essay in the bulletin queries how he would have viewed the new century: “what [would blake behold] in england and throughout the british empire, but a recrudescence of all the throne-worship and consequent tyrannous suppression of human right and national spirit which bore him down, too, in his own time?” (f. m.) implying that dissent is the true blakean inheritance, the author discusses walt whitman as blake’s “soul son and heir [sic].” in a 1929 article, ethel anderson implies that any attempt to use blake as a model for imitation—​particularly with jingoistic undertones—​is inevitably self-defeating because of his oblique relation to subject matter. she may have felton in mind when she distinguishes between the minds of “an artist … able to give material being to the unconscious” and “an art-patron … without the creative faculty.” if the patron is to influence australian art, she writes, it cannot result in innovation, but can only “keep art in familiar and merely national grooves.” hence, anderson complains that australian art has become “a dialect” of english art rather than “a language” of its own. response to blake within the ngv was ambivalent too. as zdanowicz notes, the gallery declined to purchase more of blake’s work when sotheby’s sold the macgeorge collection in 1924. amid the early mixed critical reception of the blake collection, a contingent of ngv trustees regretted the freedom afforded to their agent, ross, in london in 1918 (zdanowicz 14-15). coinciding with lindsay’s curatorship and then directorship of the ngv, opinion on the blake collection became more consistently favorable during the 1940s, both in australia generally and within the gallery itself. diverse kinds of blakean influence are evident in australian art, many examples of which appear to defy the hopes of the felton bequest to inculcate the conservative values of the old world. such artists often respond instead to blake’s spirituality and radicalism. for example, margaret preston (1875–​1963) introduces her monotypes as influenced by blake’s printing procedure, but not by any other elements of his work: “the monotypes … do not presume to have any relation to his work; it is the principle in the method that is the connection.” she explains that she has used her blakean method to portray subjects derived from “a general study of australian aboriginal art” (10). perhaps inevitably, blakean tropes occur in preston’s work, despite her suggestion to the contrary here. in the expulsion (1952) (illus. 1), for example, a white angel clutching a scourge in one hand and a sword in the other oversees the dismissal of two aboriginal figures, an image that alludes to the expulsion scene from paradise lost. preston’s “adam” and “eve” (smiling lovingly at her nursing baby) have been cast out of a padlocked enclosure. 1. margaret preston, the expulsion (1952). color stencil, gouache on thin black card with gouache hand coloring, 60.5 x 48.5 cm. art gallery of new south wales, gift of mr. w. g. preston, 1967. image © art gallery of new south wales. da64.1967. © copyright agency. licensed by artists rights society (ars), new york, 2023. interestingly, the image more closely resembles blake’s satan watching the endearments of adam and eve (illus. 2), one of the illustrations to paradise lost housed in the ngv’s blake collection, than it does his expulsion, not part of the ngv’s collection. 2. william blake, satan watching the endearments of adam and eve (1822). pen and ink and watercolor over traces of black chalk, with gum and stippling and sponging, 52.8 × 39.0 cm. (sheet). national gallery of victoria, melbourne, felton bequest, 1920. 1025-3. photo: national gallery of victoria, melbourne. blake’s presiding white-winged angel is the antinomian satan, who inhabits a similar position of oversight in relation to blake’s adam and eve figures as preston’s authoritarian angel does to the two people driven from their traditional home. michael griffith identifies arthur boyd (1920–​99) as blakean in “daring to connect religious themes to contemporary social realities” (81). boyd, like blake, frequently adopts old testament subjects in relation to his social critiques. his painting titled the expulsion (1947–​48) (illus. 3) portrays the disruption of domestic privacy under the tyranny of a looming authoritarian figure, with adam and eve’s expulsion from eden typically read as an image of family life lost during world war ii. 3. arthur boyd, the expulsion (1947–​48). oil on hardboard, 101.6 x 122.0 cm. art gallery of new south wales, purchased 1986. image © art gallery of new south wales. 38.1986. arthur boyd’s work reproduced with the permission of bundanon trust, <https://​www.​bundanon.​com.​au>. peter otto identifies more specific dialogues with blake in boyd’s series of nebuchadnezzar illustrations. here boyd responds to portrayals of nebuchadnezzar ii (c. 642–​562 bce) in blake’s notebook, the large color print, the marriage of heaven and hell, there is no natural religion, and the night thoughts illustrations. as a western presence on a recognizably australian landscape, boyd’s nebuchadnezzar evokes the intent—​both of british colonialism and of america’s war in vietnam—​to order the other. otto reminds us that the conventional tropes of an enlightened europe and a sensuous orient could represent, respectively, the opposition of mind and body; he finds that, “for both blake and boyd, escape from the cycle that enslaves nebuchadnezzar and that holds the west in agonistic struggle with its imagined others involves embrace rather than division” (270). other australian artists are comparably syncretic rather than singular in their responses to blake. like boyd’s work, the william ricketts sanctuary exemplifies the assimilation of blakean influence into an eclectic—​and eccentric—​vision. an appraisal from 1949 is appreciative of the sculpture garden that ricketts (1898–​1993) established in rural victoria: he combines … mythical figures with reproductions of aborigines …, and displays them in their natural bushland settings. … all his works are in white clay and are kiln-dried in his own furnace. although he is self-taught, ricketts’ art has obviously been strongly influenced by the english mystic and artist william blake. there is poesy in his creations. (“art gallery” 22) the writer portrays ricketts as a crusader who wishes to save the environment and its indigenous peoples: “he thinks these fast-diminishing people could be induced to settle there and encouraged to perpetuate their native crafts and culture” (22). later critiques intimate misdirected blakean influences in ricketts’s derivation of a philosophy—​one centered on romantic preoccupations of nature, childhood, and the noble savage paradigm—​that he projected onto a generalized vision of aboriginal peoples. marcia langton and bruno david argue that “ricketts’ vision of a world at peace and in balance with nature is presented allegorically as an imagined world of variously, the pitjantjatjara, luritja and ‘arunta’ [a term for the arrernte peoples], conflating, appropriating and denying aboriginality in the process.” at heart, they write, his is a “highly personal religious statement” (153). comparably, mitchell rolls, lamenting ricketts’s condescending attitudes and sense of heroism while acknowledging his well-intentioned advocacy for aboriginal peoples, paints a picture of a blakean persona who spent most of his life as a solitary artist, only tenuously connected to contemporary debate on art. such artists implicitly reject the imperial ideologies behind the ngv’s blake acquisitions; englishness is objectionable in such works. it is clear that few artists were interested in blake’s national identity and more found interest in his social critiques, his spirituality, and his artistic method. this understanding of blake as somehow transcending national identity seems to persist in the blake prize for religious art, founded in sydney in 1949 by richard morley, a jewish migrant, lawyer, artist, and art dealer, and michael scott, a jesuit priest, theologian, and then principal of a preparatory school. in an australia in which catholicism was still associated with irishness and protestantism with englishness, the founders’ religious affiliations suggest a distinct lack of concern for blake’s connection with england, their ecumenicism perhaps invigorated by a reading of all religions are one, which places judaism and christianity (apparently in all its guises) on an even footing. in offering an account of religion as poetic genius, all religions are one supplies the rationale for a religious art revival. according to rosemary crumlin, the founding committee of the blake prize located their model for such a revival in the little church of notre-dame de toute grâce at assy in the french alps, where artists “disparate in style and religious allegiance” offered a welcome alternative to the kitsch, mass-produced “art of saint sulpice” that had come to dominate churches of all denominations in australia (3). quite what constituted “religious art” proved a source of tension from the prize’s first iteration, in 1951. few of the entrants, as crumlin notes, “created their entries to function either as adjuncts to liturgical worship or as devotional objects even in the years when they hoped for sales and commissions in the churches” (4). in 2009, the socially conservative cardinal george pell attacked the prize, describing individual entries as “kitsch,” “anti-religious,” “gross,” and “only vestigially connected with religious understanding” (schwartzkoff). zoe alderton notes that although blake should be well known as a critic of religious institutions, “many outraged respondents to the blake prize’s contentious entries complain that incendiary imagery is offensive to blake and his legacy” (68n8). she quotes a commenter named “marg” who weighed in on a catholic news site’s account of 2011’s batch of “offensive” entries; marg mourned that “blake must be turning in his grave over and over again” at the association of his name with depictions of queer christ figures. the new jerusalem for many white australians, as for many in england, the most common access point to blake for the first half of the twentieth century was “jerusalem,” hubert parry’s anthem of 1916, which transformed two little-known verses from blake’s milton a poem into a staple of hymnals. regardless of parry’s intentions (he was, jim drury claims, both antiwar and “a left-leaning liberal humanist”), and certainly regardless of blake’s intentions, “jerusalem” was rapidly co-opted to do ideological work for englishness and english institutions—​both politically progressive (after it was sung at a women’s suffrage demonstration concert in 1918, parry agreed that it could become the anthem of the national union of women’s suffrage societies; see dibble 485) and less so (it keeps company at the bbc proms, annually aired by abc—​the australian national broadcaster—​with “rule, britannia!,” “land of hope and glory,” and the british national anthem). if parry’s version of blake’s verses was eventually reclaimed to its radical origins by billy bragg’s immensely popular 1990 cover, its association with this essex-born activist musician, with his distinctive, rough-around-the-edges london accent, does nothing to detach it from the idea of england and englishness. indeed, for bragg, blake is one of england’s radical glories, standing alongside “thomas paine, george orwell and the sex pistols” (quoted in hargreaves 16). jason whittaker observes that, in the twenty-first century, “jerusalem” is still being used for political purposes, whether these be “spectacular and liberal,” as in the case of the london olympics opening ceremony, or “private and reactionary,” as in some of the responses “seen on social media following the eu referendum” (382). blake’s demand that we not rest “till we have built jerusalem, / in englands green & pleasant land” might be heard as a call to arms against labor exploitation in the “dark satanic mills” of the industrial revolution, and it undoubtedly draws on the distinctive connotations of the “new jerusalem” for swedenborgians. but it is also, despite some of the uses to which parry’s hymn has been put, entirely apiece with blake’s anti-imperialism. the new jerusalem was a recurring trope among english colonists. the puritan figuring of “new england” as the new jerusalem (see richmann), from the seventeenth century on, gave a kind of theological imprimatur to english appropriation of algonquin lands, an appropriation that would eventually lead to the production of slave-grown cotton to feed the mills of england. to build jerusalem in england, on the other hand, meant sparing the existing jerusalem, then under ottoman rule. it also meant not taking charge of america (the british colonization of which blake attacks repeatedly in his work), or indeed of the nascent colony of new south wales. the often violent dispossession of indigenous people in new south wales does not figure in blake’s work (unlike the plight of enslaved and indigenous people in america). however, his engraving of four aboriginal people—​“a family of new south wales,” based on a sketch by philip gidley king, the lieutenant-governor of norfolk island, and published in john hunter’s an historical journal of the transactions at port jackson and norfolk island (1793)—​portrays them sympathetically. cathy leahy notes that blake “introduced a number of changes in his engraving” of king’s sketch, “altering the positioning and gait of the figures to create a more harmonious design and reworking the figural and facial features of the group, classicising them according to the eighteenth-century ideal of the ‘noble savage’” (12-13). white australians’ disavowal of aboriginal sovereignty over the land they came to claim as their own was further entrenched in the early decades of federation. the immigration restriction act of 1901 (later the white australia policy), coinciding with the year of federation, officially obtained until 1958. aboriginal people were excluded from the national census until 1971, and not until 1984 were indigenous australians required to enroll to vote and vote in elections, signifying full australian citizenship (voting is mandatory in australia). the white australia policy was, as the name indicates, a system of institutional racism that denied citizenship to indigenous people and excluded migrants on the basis of race. it was strenuously supported by labor activists, partly in response to the use of low-wage (and often bonded) pacific islanders to undercut working conditions in queensland. by the middle of the twentieth century, this kind of white nationalism was increasingly irrelevant to the national agenda, and the immigration restriction act was accordingly repealed. the bulletin took a few years to catch up. its banner, initially “australia for australians,” had been changed in 1907 to “australia for the white man,” and it would not be ditched until 1961. in 1957, the bicentenary of blake’s birth, the bulletin published a poem by noel macainsh, “william blake in australia.”see the national library of australia’s digitized version of the 27 november 1957 issue of the bulletin, <https://​nla.​gov.​au/​nla.​obj-​681770678/​view?​sectionid=​nla.​obj-​697691711​&partid=​nla.​obj-​681906743​#page/​n1/​mode/​1up>, for the poem in full. macainsh was a young returned soldier and engineer, then en route to his doctorate in germanic literature at the university of melbourne. he had perhaps just seen the ngv’s blake collection, brought out of storage for the bicentennial exhibition (see hoff); this would certainly account for his alertness to the visuality of blake’s work. the poem seems to gesture to the popular association of blake—​via “green & pleasant land”—​with a pastoral picturesque. macainsh catalogues the riches of this colonized landscape—​its “broad-hewn valley,” hills, and “lakes / of shade”—​and effects a visionary sensibility in which he can perceive (as blake would, he suggests) “the ranks of god on every hill,” the “angels slowly moving” across the sky (casting what more prosaic minds would see as cloud shadows), the blazing light of the eastern sun as uriel (the angel from book 3 of paradise lost), and, in all this, the transcendence of “immense albion, a world’s vast glory.” the vast glory of albion, as manifested in australia, is picked up again in the image of the “prince of glory / hung upon his [australian] bough.” those of “dull imagination” would see christ’s hair only as “the sad and sun-graced mistletoe,” probably muellerina eucalyptoides, a semiparasitic canopy dweller endemic to mainland southeastern australia, and, confusingly for this poem’s allegory, surprisingly adept at colonizing exotic trees as well as its traditional eucalypt hosts. the “nimble cherubim there [above the christ-hair/​mistletoe] piping / bird-sweet hosannahs” perhaps recall the many indigenous birds that take advantage of mistletoe’s flowering in periods of nectar dearth. they are, surely, about to lose their food source as “the axeman” above whom they sing makes progress, “bending his way in a nimb of glory.” the conflation of albion, christ, and axeman (all manifestations of a supposedly blakean “glory”) reveals a fairly blatant conscription of blake for the cause of empire, christianity, and extractive colonialism in the form of timber-getting. macainsh’s poem looks to england for its cultural reference points, a gesture remarkably of a piece with the local mood. the previous year, when melbourne had been required to host an olympic arts festival along with the olympic games, the governor of victoria had stood in the ngv, which, as we have seen, housed one of the richest blake collections in the world, and offered an embarrassed apology for australian culture: “australia is only a young country and we are very proud of our achievements. but we are also fully conscious of our shortcomings. so we hope you will find something to enjoy and admire in the exhibitions and we all look forward to learning something from your friendly criticism” (dallas brooks, quoted in richardson). hippie blake in the 1970s and 1980s australia shook off the shackles of some twenty-two years of liberal-country party coalition government in 1972 with the swearing-in of labor leader gough whitlam as prime minister. the social revolutions of the 1960s did not reach australia until the 1970s. in the shadow of the immensely unpopular vietnam war, in which australians were conscripted to fight alongside their american allies, and the rise of hippie youth culture all over the world, the time was ripe for a reengagement with the radical blake. in 1971, john edwards, writing in tharunka, the student newspaper of the university of new south wales, noted, the appeal of blake to the young mind is couched in his revolutionary attitudes towards social tyrannies, in his championship of sex as a “gateway to paradise,” in his impatience with legalism and strategies, but, most of all, in his most important trait—​a red-blooded advocacy of the instinctual in life. this is the same blake celebrated by poets and musicians such as jim morrison, allen ginsberg, and patti smith as a radical, a revolutionary, a challenger of laws and conventions; pretty much the antithesis of the blake celebrated in “william blake in australia.” around the same time (march 1971), the new theatre in sydney was celebrating radical thinkers with its production of tom paine, complete with quotations from blake (see zubrycki), and in march 1982 an education and english student, grant hehir, wrote and directed a biographical comedy, blake, a play, at the adelaide fringe festival. the publicity characterized blake as “poet, artist, rebel and dreamer,” and as a contemporary of “coleridge, wordsworth, wollstonecraft and george iii.” a fellow student, bruce stewart, composed an accompanying suite, mostly settings to poems from songs of innocence and of experience; the composer had intended the score to be performed by a string quartet, but the musicians couldn’t be recruited and he was pressed into service on the fender rhodes electric piano instead. the fact that such a play flourished for an eleven-night run at the fringe suggests that the radical blake remained a popular topic well into the 1980s. much as thomas frank—​in the conquest of cool: business culture, counterculture, and the rise of hip consumerism—​finds that countercultural impulses preceded the youth culture of 1960s america, blake had been a source and influence for australian writers since as early as the 1930s. a young james mcauley (1917–​76), for one, declared in a university of sydney student newspaper of 1937 that blake was “‘centuries ahead of his time,’ anticipating freud, bertrand russell, a. s. neill, aldous huxley, and the surrealists.” blake, he continued, “took as his subject the human soul and entered into regions which no man before him had explored” (quoted in coleman 5). in 1943, mcauley co-authored what has been described as “the literary hoax of the twentieth century” (hughes xvii) with harold stewart (1916–​95). stewart and mcauley penned sixteen poems (plus a prose preface) that they attributed to a fictitious mechanic, ern malley, who had purportedly died at the age of twenty-five. the poems were a tissue of misquotation and “false allusions,” calculated to be “bad verse,” as their authors later wrote, that would expose the inability of australia’s avant-garde litterateurs to discriminate between “humorless nonsense” and “great poetry” (mcauley and stewart 378). these surrealist poems are heavy with slantwise references to canonical writers, blake among them. “sweet william,” for instance, borrows vocabulary from visions of the daughters of albion.“sweet william” and the other poems can be viewed in their entirety at <http://​jacketmagazine.​com/​17/​ern-​poems.​html>. its allusions are, characteristically, opaque, but the reader might find theotormon’s and bromion’s opposing incarnations of sexual violence in the description of how, “in a shuddering embrace / my toppling opposites commit / the obscene, the unforgivable rape.” in the final lines, in which tearing cries give way to a “white swan of quietness” that “lies / sanctified on my black swan’s breast,” a reader might see oothoon’s appeal to the eagles to “rend away this defiled bosom.” mcauley’s co-orchestration of the ern malley hoax positioned him as both the author of some of australia’s most experimental verse and as an arch-literary conservative. the conservatism would only become more entrenched, as he aligned himself with australia’s cia-funded cultural affairs publication, quadrant. by the 1960s, and now at the university of tasmania, mcauley “equivocat[ed] over blake,” according to a former student (pierce 23). in “soundings” (1969), he dismisses the blakean visionary impulse as childish: as a sixteen-year-old, he wondered, “could i have visions, like william blake?” he recalls how “at dusk i lingered in the yard,” as the chickens went up to their roosts, “pressing my five senses hard / for revelation self-induced”—​the marriage of heaven and hell in a prosaic suburban sydney backyard (mcauley, surprises 9). while mcauley retreated from his undergraduate enthusiasm for blake, for radical poets of the so-called “generation of ’68,” blake was a crucial figure. john tranter canonized this generation in the new australian poetry (1979) and produced a poetic genealogy that saw the australian hippie poets inspired not only by the americans—​william carlos williams, robert duncan, frank o’hara, john ashbery, ginsberg, the beats—​but also by blake and percy shelley, and finally by a trio of european symbolistes, baudelaire, rimbaud, and mallarmé. the poems in new australian poetry evidence these influences. bruce beaver’s “letters to live poets (xii),” for instance, recalls “the day i walked on hands and knees / like blake’s nebuchadnezzar, scenting the pit” (tranter 5). robert adamson (1943–​2022) elegized poet michael dransfield, dead at the age of twenty-four in 1973 of a possible heroin overdose: beautiful, ineffectual rebels of an imagined sky, we searched among the long dead for the living: shelley, blake: they were the harder stuff. that idea of ourselves as poets was an addiction more terminal than any opiate the chemists could refine. (“for michael dransfield”) adamson’s description of shelley and blake as “harder stuff” implies not only their heady addictiveness, but perhaps also their lawlessness: these were idols for an age of rebellion. the extent of blake’s influence on the generation of ’68 might be measured by his presence in the later writing of its key poets. in 2015, adamson published “poem beginning with a line from william blake” (net needle 45). beginning “i was in a printing house in hell & saw the method in which knowledge is transmitted from generation to generation,” the poem ventures into a series of nine tercets (gig ryan has suggested that these resemble the nine levels of hell). also in 2015, joe dolce (not one of tranter’s poets of ’68, but a scion of a parallel american counterculture, migrating to australia in 1978), who is famous for his paean to/​parody of suburban multicultural identity, “shaddap you face,” published “the tyger.” this rumination on the extinct marsupial thylacine, or “tasmanian tiger,” references blake’s “the tyger” in both its diction and its trochaic tetrameter. conclusion in 1927, 100 years after blake’s death, australian-born leslie holdsworth allen gave a lecture on his “mind and myth” to the australian english association in sydney. the english association had been founded in 1923, primarily (as the editor of its magazine, southerly, would declare) “to maintain the [english] language in australia and encourage its right use,” and it was therefore “the servant and assistant of all who speak the language and read or contribute to the literature” (howarth 3). although it professed to be free from “propaganda” and “politics,” the group was part of a systematic project of cultural anglicization that had been at work in the colonies of australia—​and now the nation of australia—​since at least the 1880s. allen was a prominent member, a sometime war poet and lecturer in english at the royal military college, duntroon. his lecture, published as a thirty-eight-page booklet, william blake: a centenary address, was followed in 1928 by a similar lecture on “english qualities in shakespeare.” the appreciation of blake and other english-born authors that allen practiced and propagated had become one of the modes via which “cultural good relations between the mother and daughter countries” (as howarth put it) could be maintained. but while blake was being put to these ultimately imperialist and fundamentally conservative purposes, he was also standing in the australian imagination for political radicalism. for example, while daryl lindsay wrote that blake “is essentially english,” his nationality was an indifferent matter to lindsay’s nephew jack lindsay, who in 1927 published william blake: creative will and the poetic image and contributed an essay to an edition of poetical sketches. for jack lindsay, blake was attractive precisely because of his “political radicalism, his heretical antinomianism, his prophetical revolutionarism, his imaginative humanism, his pre-marxian dialectics and the strong … materialistic element in his thought” (lindberg 164). these profound differences in how blake was received in australia are not localizable to any particular moment in national history. as we have shown in this essay, for more than a century, blake’s work has prompted wildly conflicting responses and interpretations among australian audiences. in part this is a result of blake’s own complex relation to english patriotism, but in larger part it reflects the complex lines of the artist and poet’s transmission to a new setting in which feelings about england are anything but agreed upon. works cited adamson, robert. “(for michael dransfield).” swamp riddles. sydney: island press, 1974. —​—​—​. net needle. collingwood: black inc., 2015. alderton, zoe. “the limits of taste: politics, aesthetics, and christ in contemporary australia.” literature and aesthetics 21.2 (2011): 65-93. anderson, ethel. “subject in art.” art in australia, 3rd ser., 29 (1929). 5 pp. “art gallery in the bush.” pix 22.6 (1949): 22-23. bindman, david. “artists discover dante.” david bindman, stephen hebron, and michael o’neill. dante rediscovered: from blake to rodin. grasmere: wordsworth trust, 2007. 23-43. “catherine blake.” maitland daily mercury (4 september 1905): 6. cieszkowski, krzysztof z. “‘they murmuring divide; while the wind sleeps beneath, and the numbers are counted in silence’: the dispersal of the illustrations to dante’s divine comedy.” blake 23.3 (winter 1989–​90): 166-71. coleman, peter. the heart of james mcauley: life and work of the australian poet. sydney: wildcat press, 1980. crumlin, rosemary. the blake prize for religious art: the first twenty-five years. clayton: monash university gallery, 1984. dibble, jeremy. c. hubert h. parry: his life and music. oxford: clarendon press, 1992. dolce, joe. “the tyger.” australian poetry journal 5.2 (2015). <http://​apj.​australianpoetry.​org/​issues/​apj-​5-​2/​poem-​the-​tyger-​by-​joe-​dolce>. dowden, edward. “gibbon and his history.” red page, bulletin 17, no. 900 (15 may 1897). drury, jim. “parry’s jerusalem: an inspirational anthem forged in ww1 britain.” west end at war (1 september 2019). <http://​www.​westendatwar.​org.​uk/​page/​parrys_​jerusalem?​path=​0p29p>. edwards, john. “blake and the spiritual revolution.” tharunka (16 march 1971): 11. ellis, edwin john, and william butler yeats. the works of william blake. 3 vols. london: bernard quaritch, 1893. erle, sibylle. “to see the worlds of a grain of sand: blake and reception.” blake 55.3 (winter 2021–​22): 29 pars. flowers, fred. “the story of alfred felton: why melbourne can spend a million on art.” abc weekly 13, no. 28 (14 july 1951): 8-9. f. m. “two voices: william blake. walt whitman.” red page, bulletin 23, no. 1161 (17 may 1902). frank, thomas. the conquest of cool: business culture, counterculture, and the rise of hip consumerism. chicago: university of chicago press, 1997. galbally, ann. “‘for the instruction and amusement of the inhabitants’: the development of public museums, libraries and art galleries in colonial australia.” the first collections: the public library and the national gallery of victoria in the 1850s and 1860s. ed. ann galbally and alison inglis. melbourne: university of melbourne museum of art, 1992. 8-29. gilchrist, alexander. life of william blake, with selections from his poems and other writings. 2nd ed. 2 vols. london: macmillan and co, 1880. gregory, john. before felton: the collections of the national gallery of victoria to 1904. 2020. <https://​www.​beforefelton.​com>. griffith, michael. “william blake and his impact on the literary, artistic and religious imagination of australia: report on a research project in progress.” religion, literature and the arts project: australian international conference, 1996: conference proceedings. ed. michael griffith and james tulip. sydney: university of sydney, 1996. 80-87. hargreaves, ian. “interview: billy bragg.” new statesman 9, no. 420 (13 september 1996): 16-18. hoff, ursula. “the bi-centenary of william blake.” quarterly bulletin of the national gallery of victoria 11.4 (1957): 4-6. howarth, r. g. “foreword by the editor.” southerly 1.1 (1939): 3-4. hughes, robert. “introduction: the well-wrought ern.” michael heyward. the ern malley affair. st. lucia, queensland: university of queensland press, 1993. xv-xx. langton, marcia, and bruno david. “william ricketts sanctuary, victoria (australia): sculpting nature and culture in a primitivist theme park.” journal of material culture 8.2 (2003): 145-68. leahy, cathy. william blake. melbourne: national gallery of victoria, 2014. lindberg, bo ossian. review of william blake: his life and work, by jack lindsay. blake 14.3 (winter 1980–​81): 164-74. lindsay, daryl. “william blake.” art in australia, 4th ser., 1 (1941): 38-46. lindsay, jack. “the metric of william blake.” william blake, poetical sketches. ed. eric partridge. london: scholartis press, 1927. 1-20. —​—​—​. william blake: creative will and the poetic image. london: fanfrolico press, 1927. macainsh, noel. “william blake in australia.” red page, bulletin 78, no. 4059 (27 november 1957). “malley, ern.” “sweet william.” the penguin book of modern australian poetry. ed. john tranter and philip mead. ringwood: penguin books, 1991. 87. malmqvist, n. g. d. “blake in china.” blake 13.1 (summer 1979): 24-28. mangan, john. “the bequest of a century.” age (11 january 2004). <http://​www.​theage.​com.​au/​articles/​2004/​01/​11/​1073769451690.​html>. mcauley, james. surprises of the sun. sydney: angus and robertson, 1969. mcauley, james, and harold stewart. “ern malley, poet of debunk: full story from the two authors.” 1944. global modernists on modernism: an anthology. ed. alys moody and stephen j. ross. london: bloomsbury academic, 2020. 377-81. moore, tony. “romancing the city—​australia’s bohemian tradition: take one.” journal of australian studies 22 (1998): 172-83. “the mystical blake.” herald [melbourne] (27 november 1908): 5. nesbitt, bruce. “literary nationalism and the 1890s.” australian literary studies 5.1 (1971). otto, peter. “nebuchadnezzar’s sublime torments: william blake, arthur boyd and the east.” the reception of blake in the orient. ed. steve clark and masashi suzuki. london: continuum, 2006. 260-71. pierce, peter. “recalling mcauley.” eureka street 11.5 (june 2001): 22-24. preston, margaret. margaret preston’s monotypes: 27 plates in colour. sydney: ure smith, 1951. richardson, nick. “the 1956 olympic arts festival.” meanjin quarterly (autumn 2019). <https://​meanjin.​com.​au/​essays/​the-​1956-​olympic-​arts-​festival>. richmann, christopher j. “america as new jerusalem.” word & world 40.2 (2020): 150-61. rolls, mitchell. “friday essay: william ricketts sanctuary is a racist anachronism but can it foster empathy?” conversation (24 may 2018). <https://​theconversation.​com/​friday-​essay-​william-​ricketts-​sanctuary-​is-​a-​racist-​anachronism-​but-​can-​it-​foster-​empathy-​96274>. ryan, gig. “catcher and sifter: net needle by robert adamson.” sydney review of books (24 november 2015). <https://​sydneyreviewofbooks.​com/​review/​net-​needle-​robert-​adamson>. schwartzkoff, louise. “blake prize art anti-religious, says pell.” sydney morning herald (22 august 2009). <https://​www.​smh.​com.​au/​national/​blake-​prize-​art-​antireligious-​says-​pell-​20090821-​etst.​html>. “studies in eccentricity.” cumberland argus and fruitgrowers’ advocate (3 april 1907): 4. tolley, michael j. “william à beckett’s copy of young’s night thoughts.” art journal 30 (2014). <https://​www.​ngv.​vic.​gov.​au/​essay/​william-​a-​becketts-​copy-​of-​youngs-​night-​thoughts>. tranter, john, ed. the new australian poetry. st. lucia, queensland: makar press, 1979. whittaker, jason. jerusalem: blake, parry, and the fight for englishness. oxford: oxford university press, 2022. yeats, w. b. “william blake and the imagination.” essays and introductions. new york: macmillan, 1961. 111-15. zdanowicz, irena. “introduction: the melbourne blakes—​their acquisition and critical fortunes in australia.” martin butlin and ted gott. william blake in the collection of the national gallery of victoria. melbourne: national gallery of victoria, 1989. 10-19. zubrycki, tom. “tom paine: a review.” tharunka (30 march 1971): 14. the house of aumont and blake’s french revolution the house of aumont and blake’s french revolution by matthew m. davis matthew m. davis (mmd6w@virginia.edu) teaches english at the university of virginia. he is currently at work on a play set during the french revolution, which involves some of the historical figures treated in this article. in william blake’s french revolution (1791)for assistance with this paper, i am indebted to blake scholars david fallon and e. d. hirsch, french historians william doyle and lynn hunt, university of virginia librarians sherri brown and miguel valladares-llata, uva-based (and uva-funded) research assistants kathryn webb-destefano and caitlin taphorn, undergraduates in a seminar i taught on blake at uva in the spring of 2019, and several readers at blake. there is a minor character who is identified only as “aumont.”the french revolution may have been “a poem, in seven books,” as the proofs state, but only the first book has survived. book 1 was issued in page proofs, dated 1791, by the radical printer joseph johnson, but it was never published. it consists of 306 verses.except as noted, all citations of blake’s poetry are to the erdman edition. i cite the french revolution (pp. 285-300) by line number. for other works, i give plate and line numbers, as well as erdman page numbers using the shorthand e. he makes his first appearance in lines 159-67, where he informs king louis xvi and the nobles that the abbé de seyes has left the assembly hall and is making his way to the palace to speak to them.although the king and the assembly were based at versailles in july 1789, blake locates both in paris. he refers to emmanuel-joseph sieyès (1748–​1836), the abbé de sieyès, using an alternative spelling, seyes. in this article, i use sieyès for the historical figure and seyes for the character in blake’s poem. aumont is mentioned a second time in lines 198-201, when seyes actually arrives. in w. h. stevenson’s annotated edition of blake’s poetry, a footnote identifies this character as “the duke of aumont, later a commander of the national guard in paris, and in charge of the troops leading louis from versailles to paris on 5 october [1789]—​which b[lake] probably saw as a pro-revolutionary act, contradicting aumont’s earlier membership in the second estate of nobility.”see blake, complete poems, ed. stevenson, 140, note on line 159. alicia ostriker has a similar note in her edition (896). “5 october” in stevenson’s edition is an error: the king’s forced journey from versailles to paris was actually undertaken the next day, 6 october 1789. stevenson’s notes have been of great use to me over the years, but i have doubts about the usefulness of this particular note. for starters, i am not convinced that stevenson has identified the right member of the house of aumont, and even if he has identified the right individual, i feel confident that he has not selected the most relevant episode from that person’s life to highlight. the brothers aumont there were actually two members of the house of aumont who were active in french political affairs during the early years of the revolution—​louis-marie guy d’aumont (1732–​99) and louis-alexandre-céleste d’aumont (1736–​1814). these men were both sons of louis marie augustin d’aumont de rochebaron, fifth duke of aumont (1709–​82).for substantial biographical accounts of the fifth duke, see hamy 203-19; woelmont de brumagne 18-22; and levantal 426-28. although all members of the family used the name aumont de rochebaron, i have omitted de rochebaron in subsequent mentions to avoid needless repetition. the elder son, louis-marie guy, succeeded his father as duke of aumont, supported the revolution, commanded a unit of the national guard, and led soldiers loyal to the french republic. the younger son, louis-alexandre-céleste, succeeded his father as premier gentilhomme de la chambre du roi (first gentleman of the king’s bedchamber) and was given a ducal title of his own, duke of villequier aumont; he opposed the revolution, remained unswervingly loyal to louis xvi, and eventually served in the court in exile of louis xviii. the former is the person identified by stevenson; the latter is a rival candidate i wish to bring forward for consideration in this essay. these two men have confusingly similar names, and they held many of the same noble titles at different times in their lives. it is therefore difficult to write about them without causing confusion. i will attempt to minimize that confusion by using either their full names or the ducal titles that they held and chiefly used in 1789 and early 1790, when louis-marie guy d’aumont was the duke of aumont and louis-alexandre-céleste d’aumont was the duke of villequier aumont. louis-marie guy d’aumont (1732–​99) as the elder surviving son of a peer of the realm, louis-marie guy d’aumont was raised in wealth and splendor.biographical information on the duke of aumont comes from various reference works listed in the works cited under “aumont, louis-marie guy” and “aumont, jacques,” and also from sellier 230-31; hamy 219; woelmont de brumagne 23-25; levantal 428-29; and the website les premiers seigneurs d’aumont. he was married at the age of fifteen to a thirteen-year-old cousin, louise-jeanne de durfort de duras, duchess of mazarin, and thus became the duke of mazarin. as a young man, he served in the army, frequented the theatre, and gained some notoriety for his extramarital liaisons with actresses and opera singers. he was also known for walking with a pronounced limp and for imitating the manners, speech, and dress of the “patriot king,” henri iv.the dictionnaire de la conversation et de la lecture has this to say about his imitation of henri iv: “il était boiteux et contrefait, ce qui ne l’empêchait pas de pousser jusqu’au ridicule la prétention d’imiter, sinon la démarche, du moins les manières, les bons mots et le costume du roi henri iv, avec lequel on lui avait persuadé qu’il avait quelque ressemblance” (54: 302). according to the biographie nouvelle des contemporains, the duke of aumont was “[un] imitateur puéril de la démarche et des habitudes de henri iv, telles que la tradition nous les a transmises, il répétait jusqu’à ses mots consacrés, qui accompagneront toujours la mémoire de ce prince” (1: 317). see also sellier 231; biographie universelle et portative 1: 171; grand dictionnaire universel du xixe siècle 1: 946; and woelmont de brumagne 24. louis-marie guy d’aumont’s first wife died in 1781, and his father passed away in 1782. he succeeded his father as duke of aumont, but not as premier gentilhomme de la chambre du roi. that honor, which would typically have passed to him as the elder son, went instead (along with some others) to his younger brother.hamy 7. this led to a situation in which the elder son was the duke of aumont and titular head of the family, but the younger son was premier gentilhomme, with vastly superior access to the monarch. the unusual division of honors between the brothers seems to foreshadow—​and may have contributed to—​a subsequent division between the two on political issues. in the late 1780s, the duke of aumont was a prominent member of a group of nobles who were at odds with louis xvi and the royal court. the central figure in this group was the king’s cousin, the duke of orléans. in the spring of 1789, the duke of aumont was one of a handful of peers who enthusiastically supported the unification of the three estates and the reforming initiatives of the newly formed national constituent assembly. during the summer of that year, while the assembly was still meeting at versailles, he hosted a series of soirées for members at his country house in viroflay, a mile or two away. reform-minded representatives would gather there in the evenings to discuss the events of the day and make plans for the next day’s session. some of the regular attendees began referring to themselves as the society of viroflay, and this society eventually evolved into the breton club, which, in turn, became the jacobin club.for an up-to-date general history of the french revolution, revisionist in its intellectual orientation but reliable for dates and basic facts, see simon schama’s citizens. for the duke of orléans and the opposition to the court, see ambrose. for the meetings at the duke of aumont’s house and the society of viroflay, see tackett, becoming a revolutionary 133; wick 94-95; espinchal 5, 230; woelmont de brumagne 24; and les premiers seigneurs d’aumont. in july 1789, louis xvi dismissed his reform-minded prime minister jacques necker and began to mass troops on the outskirts of paris. many parisians were convinced that the king was preparing to use force to disperse the assembly and declare martial law. some decided to arm themselves in anticipation of an attack. they poured out onto the streets, seizing weapons and ammunition and capturing the bastille. the duke of aumont supported the people in these actions and so became a favorite of the revolutionary party.for an interesting report on the duke of aumont’s response to the famous “aux armes!” speech delivered by camille desmoulins at the palais royal on 12 july 1789, see la marle 257-58. when the assembly called for the formation of a new, bourgeois militia—​the national guard—​the duke of aumont was offered the command. he hesitated and, as a result, was passed over in favor of the marquis de salle, who was himself soon replaced by the marquis de lafayette.some reports indicate that the duke of aumont declined the position; others say that he merely requested twenty-four hours to consider and was then passed over, since the matter was felt to be extremely urgent. see annales parisiennes 23; woelmont de brumagne 24; sellier 231; and révolutions de paris 18. extracts from the last of these were translated and printed in british papers, including the weekly entertainer for 27 june 1791. although the duke of aumont was not given supreme command of the national guard, he did lead the sixth division, a reserve unit that was called into service only in times of crisis.see biographie universelle et portative 1: 170-71; english chronicle for 12-15 september 1789. he and the men who served under him played a role in several important events. for example, they supported the parisian protestors during the women’s march on versailles in october 1789, accompanying the citizens on 5 october and escorting the king back to the capital the next day, in accordance with the will of the people.for the duke of aumont’s role in the events of 5-6 october 1789, see gottschalk 1: 340-47; lamartine 2: 453; sellier 231; montjoie 2: 9-10; poisson 1: 136; le roi 2: 84; and pièces justificatives 22-23. throughout 1789 and 1790, the duke of aumont consistently displayed loyalty to the people and the assembly. on 4 august 1789, the assembly passed a set of laws known as the august decrees, abolishing many traditional privileges of the nobility.for a discussion of legislation against the nobility, see doyle 204-36. louis-marie guy d’aumont supported the decrees and declared that he wished to be known simply as “citoyen jacques aumont.”on citoyen jacques, see mazas 4: 259n2; woelmont de brumagne 24. when the assembly went one step further on 19 june 1790, doing away with all titles and orders of hereditary nobility, he became a ci-devant (former) duke.a list of demoted nobles, with the duke of aumont second and the duke of villequier fifth, was printed in several london papers, including the public advertiser for 9 july 1790. villequier’s name is misspelled and the name of his paternal family is wrongly reported as le tellier (his wife’s family name). during the same year, the periodical lanterne magique nationale published vignettes of some remarkable scenes in the progress of the revolution. in one, the ci-devant duke of aumont is described, walking with a limp and vowing “death to all aristocrats.”lanterne magique nationale no. 3 (1790): 4. the viscount de mirabeau (1754–​92), editor of this journal, was the brother of the revolutionary politician honoré mirabeau. in may 1791, louis-marie guy d’aumont was appointed to a new position as a lieutenant general in the army (a separate entity from the national guard).for his military career, see the dictionnaire … des généraux français 1: 245-46; les premiers seigneurs d’aumont. he happened to be in paris on 21 june, preparing to report to his new commanding officer, when he was caught up in the riots provoked by the flight of the royal family and seized by an angry mob who believed that a unit of the national guard under his command had stood guard at the tuileries palace the previous night and allowed the royal family to escape. as an english paper reported, “the populace had got hold of him in his way to the hotel de ville [city hall], and had already prepared the fatal lanthorn [the lantern on which he would be hanged]; nor was he rescued till the greatest part of his hair was torn from his head, and he had received several wounds.”the account is from woodfall’s register (london), 28 june 1791. see also the whitehall evening post for 27 june 1791; lenotre, the flight of marie antoinette 108 and n1; godechot 137; lenotre, le drame de varennes 132-33; hamilton 21; compte 185; tackett, when the king took flight 98 and n22; vaissière 292; and les premiers seigneurs d’aumont. saved by the timely arrival of a unit of the national guard with lafayette at its head, he wrote a statement in his own defense,déclaration de m. d’aumont 1-5; archives parlementaires 27: 406. in which he declared that he had not been guarding the king the previous night and had in fact been near the king’s person on only two occasions in the past several months, on days when his division was called up for active service. he signed the statement on 21 june, lafayette certified the truth of its contents the same day, and the next day it was presented to the mayor of paris and the city council. louis-marie guy d’aumont appeared before the assembly a few days later and swore an oath of loyalty to that body. his declarations were accepted, and he went on to serve in the army, retiring from military service in 1793. he was arrested during the terror and held in jail for a few weeks in 1794; he secured his release, however, in the early days of the thermidorian reaction by representing himself as citoyen jacques, a simple farmer.his arrest was reported in english papers, including the sun for 8 february 1794; for his release, see woelmont de brumagne 24; gendron 8; poisson 4: 6; and les premiers seigneurs d’aumont. in november 1794, he remarried, joining himself to a member of the third estate who is referred to in contemporary documents as “citoyenne marie-louise klein,”on this marriage, see levantal 438; woelmont de brumagne 25; turquan 1: 10; and the account in the dictionnaire de biographie française. and he lived out his last few years in the country, playing no further role in military or political affairs. louis-alexandre-céleste d’aumont (1736–​1814) louis-alexandre-céleste d’aumont was the younger brother of louis-marie guy d’aumont.biographical information on the duke of villequier comes from various reference works listed in the works cited under “aumont, louis-alexandre-céleste” (with spelling variations, and with and without certain hyphens) and “villequier”; see also sellier 231-32; woelmont de brumagne 24-29; annuaire de la pairie 93; bouchet 15-16; and “maison de villequier-aumont.” his name is sometimes given as louis-marie alexandre d’aumont; i suspect that this is a result of confusion between him and his son, louis-marie céleste d’aumont (1762–​1831), who was the duke of piennes during the period under examination in this article. from 1774 until the death of his brother in 1799, he was known mainly as the duke of villequier, but also as the duke of villequier aumont.although not the firstborn, louis-alexandre-céleste appears to have been a favorite, both of his father—​who arranged for him to succeed as premier gentilhomme de la chambre du roi—​and of the bourbon kings. louis xv established a hereditary duchy for him in 1774, renaming the town of genlis as villequier aumont and making him the duke of villequier aumont. villequier aumont was the official form—​and the one he used when signing documents—​but villequier was much more widely used, perhaps in part because it helped to distinguish him from his brother. in this paper i will refer to him, as his contemporaries did, mostly as the duke of villequier but occasionally as the duke of villequier aumont.after the death of louis-marie guy d’aumont in 1799, louis-alexandre-céleste d’aumont succeeded his brother as duke of aumont. to minimize confusion, i do not connect him with this title at any other point in this essay. as a young man, louis-alexandre-céleste d’aumont served in the military, fighting in the american war of independence and rising to the rank of lieutenant general.for details of villequier’s military career, see the entry in the dictionnaire … des généraux français. during the first few years of the revolution, he was known as a courtier and one of the closest advisors of louis xvi; as we have seen, he followed in his father’s footsteps as one of the premiers gentilshommes de la chambre du roi. in 1789, the duke of villequier accompanied louis xvi on two occasions when the king believed that his life might be in danger. he rode in the coach with the king on 17 july, when louis felt that it was his duty to leave versailles and travel to paris to try to calm the riotous mobs, and again on 6 october, when the women’s march and storming of the palace at versailles compelled the king and queen to abandon versailles and take up permanent residence at the tuileries in paris.for villequier’s trip to paris with the king on 17 july, see hue 70; hézecques 301; lamartine 2: 110; and english press coverage in the london gazette, 18-21 july 1789, and the english chronicle, 23-25 july 1789. for his role on 6 october, see montjoie 2: 31. the journey of 6 october is a moment of particular interest as far as this paper is concerned, since both brothers traveled from versailles to paris: the duke of villequier inside the coach with the nervous king, and the duke of aumont on horseback outside, in the company of the revolutionaries who had broken into the palace the night before. some of the “escorts” who marched alongside were waving pikes decorated with the heads of royal guards who had been decapitated. while these revolutionary events were occurring, louis-alexandre-céleste d’aumont was also serving as a member of the assembly. he was elected to the estates general in 1789 as a representative of the nobility of the boulonnais region. as a legislator, he took a very different line from his brother, opposing the merging of the three estates and most of the initiatives of the constituent assembly after the merger. he resigned on 15 december 1789, nominally for health reasons, but perhaps mainly because he disagreed with the assembly’s revolutionary reforms and wished to serve the king without distractions or conflicts of interest.for villequier’s resignation, see archives parlementaires 10: 574; woelmont de brumagne 27. during the last months of 1790 and the first few months of 1791, the duke of villequier was involved in a series of incidents that contributed to a deterioration of relations between the court and the people. in september 1790, jean sylvain bailly, the mayor of paris, received an anonymous letter from rouen warning him of a plot to carry away the king from paris to rouen and launch a counterrevolution. the writer reported that the duke of villequier and his sister, the duchess of villeroy, were two of the main architects.the duchess of villeroy (or villeroi), jeanne-louise-constance d’aumont, was the elder sister of the duke of aumont and the duke of villequier. some account of her is given in the biographie universelle ancienne et moderne, under “villeroi (jeanne-louise-constance d’aumont de villequier, duchesse de).” see also oberkirch 1: 238-39. villequier was said to have persuaded marie-antoinette that louis xvi would be dethroned if he did not flee the capital. it was alleged that the conspirators had assembled a “flying camp” of 3000 royalists to defend the king and had made arrangements to hang jacques thouret, the president of the national constituent assembly, and display both lafayette and bailly in iron cages. this plot was known as the villeroy conspiracy.extrait d’une lettre écrite de rouen, published in paris in late september or early october 1790. the conspiracy was discussed in various french newspapers and at least four english papers. see, for example, “the french king’s intended flight to rouen,” times, 11 october 1790; public advertiser, 11 october 1790. on 28 february 1791, the duke of villequier played a leading role in a mysterious event that supporters of the revolution dubbed “la journée des poignards” (the day of daggers). he gave admission tickets to several hundred nobles who flooded into the tuileries, armed with pistols and daggers. they claimed that they had come to the palace because the national guard had left the king unprotected, but many people speculated that they had mobilized to help the king escape and/​or to launch some sort of counterrevolution. the episode ended when lafayette and his unit of national guardsmen returned and, with the king’s cooperation, persuaded the nobles to hand over their weapons. at the close of the day, lafayette spoke sharply to villequier and made it clear that he was suspicious of the duke’s motives.on the day of daggers, see rossi; charavay 228ff.; imbert de saint-amand 93-98; montjoie 2: 527-29; hézecques 343ff.; carlyle 2: 66-68; caiani, louis xvi and the french revolution 94-95; and tackett, when the king took flight 42ff. for coverage in the british press, see the general evening post, 5-8 march 1791, and the gentleman’s magazine 61.3 (march 1791): 269. accounts of the events of this day differ on several important points. villequier responded by writing an indignant open letter to lafayette, which was printed and discussed in the papers.lettre de messieurs alexandre d’aumont, ci-devant duc de villequier, et amédée de durfort, ci-devant marquis de duras (paris, 1791). less than two months later, on 18 april, villequier was embroiled in another incident, when the royal family attempted to leave the tuileries to celebrate easter week at the château de saint cloud. the king was eager to quit paris because of religious scruples related to the newly implemented civil constitution of the clergy. if he stayed, he would be forced to recognize priests who had sworn an oath of loyalty to the government and were considered schismatics by the pope. by contrast, if he went to saint cloud, he would be able to attend holy week services performed by priests who had declined the oath and were acknowledged by the pope. his intentions were understood, however, and he and other members of the family were prevented from leaving by a mob. the ensuing standoff lasted for the better part of two hours and led to a physical altercation in which villequier and another of the premiers gentilshommes, m. de duras, were assaulted and nearly lynched by the crowd. the king was compelled to abandon his plan and came to understand that he was in fact a prisoner at the tuileries.on the aborted excursion to saint cloud, see hue 188-91; imbert de saint-amand 121-26; charavay 230-32; tackett, when the king took flight 44ff.; doyle 252-53; schama 549-50; caiani, louis xvi and the french revolution 95; and caiani, “louis xvi and marie antoinette” 322. some accounts say that duras was assaulted; others say villequier. for english press coverage, see (among others) the st. james’s chronicle and the general evening post for 23 april 1791. after the events of 18 april, louis xvi seems to have committed himself wholeheartedly to escaping from the capital. he accepted the resignations of villequier, duras, and several other prominent courtiers. outwardly this was done to comply with the wishes of the increasingly vocal citizens, many of whom believed that he was being led astray by his aristocratic advisors. in fact, the king seems to have urged his closest supporters to leave paris (and perhaps also the country) because he was concerned about their safety.on the dismissal of villequier and duras, see hue 193-94; bombelles 5: 108; carlyle 2: 68n3; woelmont de brumagne 27. for the english press, see the whitehall evening post for 23 april 1791. villequier moved out of his rooms at the tuileries and paid a visit to england in late april and early may 1791.for his trip to england, see berry 1: 303; vinot; general evening post, 26 april 1791; northampton mercury, 30 april 1791; lloyd’s evening post, 6 may 1791; evening mail, 3-6 june 1791. his absence proved to be a material benefit to the king and queen, because it provided them with a new and unsuspected means of egress. on the night of 20 june, members of the royal family used the recently vacated chamber of villequier to evade the national guard and slip out of the tuileries unnoticed. arrangements had been made for a series of carriages to convey them to an army outpost at montmédy, but the fugitives made it only to the little town of varennes, where they were apprehended. the flight of the royals and their subsequent apprehension proved to be an important turning point in the revolution; the debacle led to an uptick in radicalism and increased hostility toward the royal family and the monarchy as an institution.on the flight of the royal family, see charavay 239-40; tackett, when the king took flight 57ff.; schama 550ff.; dumas 28-29. for reports in the english papers, see the general evening post, st. james’s chronicle, and whitehall evening post for 2-5 july 1791. as noted, some angry parisians imagined that the duke of aumont had helped the royal family to escape. the documentary record suggests that they were wrong, but there can be no doubt where the duke of villequier’s sympathies lay. he had made it abundantly clear that he was the king’s man, and, after the flight of the royals, he was denounced in the assembly. he emigrated and settled in brussels, where he helped to organize the royalist community. in 1792, his holdings in france were sequestrated and sold. he went on to serve louis xviii, the king in exile, in offices civil and military for almost two decades, and did not return to france until shortly before his death in 1814.villequier’s post-1791 life is discussed in vinot. for the seizure of his property, see “maison de villequier-aumont.” aumont in blake’s french revolution if we turn from these historical figures to the fictional aumont in blake’s semihistorical poem, one of the first things we notice is that blake describes this character in a remarkably negative way: he is described as a “pale” figure with a “chaos-born soul / eternally wand’ring” and he is compared to “a comet”for early modern ideas about meteors and comets, see genuth 20-22, 99-114, et passim. blake connects comets with disaster in his early poem “gwin, king of norway,” where he describes the king’s men as “like blazing comets, scattering death” (line 83, e 419). and “swift-falling fire” (lines 159-60). a few lines later, we are told that “a cold orb of disdain revolv’d round him, and covered his soul with snows eternal” (line 199). it would be too strong to say that aumont is the prototype or inspiration for urizen, but it is undeniable that many of the negative terms that blake would use to characterize urizen in his poems of 1793 and later are brought together and used to describe aumont in this 1791 poem.words and concepts used for both aumont and urizen are pale, ice, snow, orb, comet, meteor, chaos, and disdain. for examples of urizen’s paleness, see urizen 4.41 (e 72); ahania 3.2 (e 85); and the four zoas p. 23, lines 11-15 (e 313). for passages where he is associated with frigidity, ice, or snow, see america 16.2-11 (e 57); urizen 3.27-33, 7.5, 10.19-24 (e 71, 74, 75); the four zoas p. 61, line 4, 69.1-6, 73.26-29, 75.25-26, 78.1-3 (e 341, 346, 350, 352, 353); and milton 18.51 (e 112). the phrase “snows eternal” occurs in the four zoas p. 74, line 20 (e 351), but it is not clear to me whether it refers to urizen or tharmas. in blake’s works, orbs, caverns, and similar spaces are often related to the fallen state of man and the limits of fallen man’s perception. albion’s angel, a reactionary ally of urizen, is described as a “scale bound orb” (america c.11, e 59); urizen’s brain is gradually “inclos’d / in an orb” (urizen 10.33-34, e 75; cf. the four zoas p. 54, lines 9-10, e 336); and the eye of fallen man is “a little narrow orb, closd up & dark, / scarcely beholding the great light” (jerusalem 49.34-35, e 198; cf. milton 5.21-22, e 99). urizen sends forth comets in the four zoas p. 75, lines 28-30 (e 352); he glows “like a meteor” in europe 3.11-12 (e 61); he is associated with chaos in urizen 3.26 (e 71); and he is characterized as disdainful in the four zoas p. 106 (second portion), lines 35-40 (e 382). perhaps the most startling aspect of the description of aumont is the effect that he has on another character. when seyes makes his way from the assembly hall to the palace, he is accompanied by “king henry the fourth” (lines 163-66)—​or rather, by the spirit of henri iv (1553–​1610). comparisons between henri iv and louis xvi were quite common in france from the inauguration of the latter in 1774 until the second half of 1791, when affection for the monarch began to decline. during the early years of louis’s reign, it was widely hoped that he would show himself to be a patriot king, a kindhearted ruler who took an interest in the well-being of his people, as henri iv had done. the two kings were often depicted in tandem in engravings, statues, and other works of art; for example, several engravers produced allegorical scenes in which the spirit of henri iv appears to louis xvi to offer guidance.on louis xvi and henri iv, see schama 423; chéry; and reinhard. for examples of the parallel in the visual arts, see “allégorie du compte rendu au roi, par m. necker en 1781” (1781); “apparition d’henri iv à louis xvi, ou la vérité découverte” (1789); “projet d’un monument à ériger pour le roi” (1790); and “époque de la liberté françoise” (1789). the last engraving is of particular interest, as it illustrates precisely the historical moment that blake dramatizes in the french revolution—​the point when louis xvi reinstated necker and decided against using military force to break up the assembly. it is possible that blake saw one or more of these prints when he was planning or writing his poem. this historical and iconographic tradition would seem to explain henri iv’s presence in the poem, but it is interesting to note what precipitates his departure. when seyes and the ghost of henri reach the palace and catch sight of aumont, the old king promptly leaves: aumont went out and stood in the hollow porch, his ivory wand in his hand; a cold orb of disdain revolv’d round him, and covered his soul with snows eternal. great henry’s soul shuddered, a whirlwind and fire tore furious from his angry bosom; he indignant departed on horses of heav’n. (lines 198-201) s. foster damon writes that the spirit of henri iv “sweeps into the council” (78). this is incorrect; the old king never actually enters the palace and never catches sight of the reigning king. in fact, he never comes face to face with any member of the court except aumont, yet this encounter has dramatic consequences. the disdainfulness, coldness, and “snows eternal” of aumont cause henri to “shudder” and depart in indignation and disgust.of the critics who have written at some length on the french revolution (including butter, damon, erdman, fallon, halliburton, halloran, hobday, and ritz), few have had much to say about aumont. a notable exception is david fallon, who argues that aumont represents the forces of reaction that threaten seyes and his revolutionary coadjutors. he also suggests that aumont can be seen as an eighteenth-century parallel to françois ravaillac, the catholic extremist who assassinated the benevolent, consensus-seeking henri iv. see fallon 78. aumont is cold, disdainful, and “chaos-born.” the mere sight of him is sufficient to make the old king “furious,” “angry,” and “indignant.” this is strongly negative language, and we ought to ask ourselves what might account for all of the hostility. if we focus on what is in the poem, we won’t find many clues. aumont is clearly a courtier, but he doesn’t speak out against the revolution or urge the king to take military action against the assembly, as the duke of burgundy and the archbishop of paris do. he doesn’t take a position on any of the political questions debated. in fact, he hardly speaks at all. his only actions in the poem (at least in the part that has survived) are to announce that the abbé de seyes is coming to the palace, step out of the room to welcome seyes, and escort the visitor inside. why would blake heap so much angry editorial judgment on a figure who seems to be nothing more than a royal chamberlain? since the poem itself does not supply an answer, we should consider the possibility that there was an external impetus. aumont may be a mostly historical character (like necker, lafayette, sieyès, orléans, and louis xvi) rather than a mostly fictional character (like the duke of burgundy and the archbishop of paris), and blake may have lashed out because there was an actual historical individual whose actions had irritated him greatly. as i have already noted, there are two candidates for this individual—​the duke of aumont and the duke of villequier. in the next two sections, i will set out the case for the duke of villequier and then consider some objections that can be raised against this theory. the case for villequier as i mentioned at the beginning of this article, w. h. stevenson concluded that blake based his character aumont on the duke of aumont. it is certainly understandable why stevenson reached this conclusion, since this was the man who bore the ducal title aumont in 1789. nevertheless, there are some problems with this identification. first and foremost, it is difficult to fathom why blake, who supported the revolution in its early phases and even wore a bonnet-rouge on the streets of london (gilchrist 1: 94), would have been angry at the duke of aumont. as we have seen, the duke of aumont was a champion of the revolution. he was never a courtier or an advisor to louis xvi; on the contrary, he was a member of the opposition, a supporter of the assembly and the people of paris, a leader of the national guard who served under lafayette, and an ally of the duke of orléans. thus he was closely associated with two of the heroes of blake’s poem.seyes and orléans are the main spokesmen for the revolutionary party in the french revolution. erdman goes so far as to describe the speech of orléans in lines 179-94 as a speech by “blake-orléans” (prophet against empire 170). in other words, the duke of aumont was on the same side as blake, and it therefore seems highly unlikely that this friend of the revolution could have been the inspiration for the courtly, reactionary, proto-urizenic character that we find in the poem.at this point, it may be worthwhile to present a summary of the differences between the two aumont brothers given by madame campan, a friend of marie-antoinette and a committed royalist. she describes the duke of aumont as “a brother of the duc de villequier, who … joined the revolutionary party; a man of no weight or respectability, who desired he might be called jacques aumont; a far different man from his brave brother, who always proved himself entirely devoted to the cause of his king” (fortescue 2: 57n3). that is why i believe we need to consider the duke of villequier as a rival candidate. villequier was not just a courtier; he was one of the most powerful courtiers in the country, a premier gentilhomme de la chambre du roi. he was a prominent and controversial supporter of the king who played an important role in the villeroy conspiracy, the day of daggers, the attempted excursion to saint cloud, and the unsuccessful flight of the royal family. from blake’s point of view, villequier was on the wrong side of all of these events: he was a man who sided with the king and the nobles against the people, a man who was trying to impede the inexorable advance of history. this is a man whom blake would have disliked—​someone who could have inspired the poem’s very negative description of aumont. the french revolution contains some details that might point directly at villequier. blake describes his aumont as carrying an “ivory wand” (line 198), which is perhaps a way of identifying him as a royal chamberlain or gentleman of the bedchamber. it does not seem that a white wand or staff was a symbol of office for the premiers gentilshommes under the old regime in france, but it unquestionably was for the royal chamberlains of england. according to kimber’s peerage of england (1766), the lord chamberlain of the royal household carries “a white staff in his hand, as a badge of his office, and wears a gold key,” which declare that he has authority to admit visitors to the court—​or turn them away. the lord chamberlain was (and still is) the second-ranking dignitary of the british royal court and the man responsible for all state ceremonies. “all invitations to court are sent out in his name by the command of the sovereign, and at drawing rooms and levees he stands next to the sovereign and announces the persons who are approaching the throne. it is also part of his duty to conduct the sovereign to and from his carriage.”details about the lord chamberlain and the symbols of his office come from kimber 244-45 and the “royal household” entry in the encyclopedia britannica. blake might have learned about the white staff of the lord chamberlain from his reading, or by perusing paintings or engravings. godfrey kneller’s portrait of charles sackville, sixth earl of dorset (see illus. 1), shows a lord chamberlain with a white staff, but so do many other period portraits.a google image search will produce many examples of lords chamberlain with white staves. i will mention only a few here: robert bruce, first earl of ailesbury, who was lord chamberlain in 1685, as depicted in a mezzotint by john smith after sir peter lely (1687); charles fitzroy, second duke of grafton, lord chamberlain from 1724 to 1757, as depicted in a mezzotint by john faber the younger after jean-baptiste van loo (1740); and george montagu, fourth duke of manchester, lord chamberlain from 1782 to 1783, as depicted in a mezzotint by john jones after gilbert stuart (1790). see also a 1795 political cartoon by james gillray titled “polonius.” white staves appear in several places in blake’s works. one is mentioned in the french revolution, lines 144-45, where the archbishop of paris imagines (with horror) a future in which the “ivory staff / of the ruler wither[s] among bones of death.” the beadles in blake’s “holy thursday” poem (songs of innocence) also carry white staves, which seem to be badges of authority in general rather than symbols of royal authority in particular. 1. charles sackville, sixth earl of dorset, holding the staff of the lord chamberlain of great britain. he held the office from 1689 to 1697. undated mezzotint by john simon after sir godfrey kneller, 35.7 × 25.4 cm. yale center for british art, paul mellon collection. b1977.14.9891. although it is certainly possible that blake gave aumont a white staff by mistake because he had only limited knowledge of the french court, it is also possible that he did so deliberately in order to communicate with english readers, who would have been more likely to recognize and understand english symbols of office. if this is in fact the case, it would be a strong indication that blake was thinking of the duke of villequier. it is worth noting that the aumont of blake’s poem not only carries the staff of a lord chamberlain, but also performs the duties of that office. when seyes makes his way to the palace, it is aumont who goes to the door to welcome him and escort him inside. it would not be plausible for a character based on the duke of aumont to announce visitors, for the duke of aumont had been unwelcome at the court of louis xvi for several years, even before he agreed to serve in the national guard. on the other hand, it would be perfectly plausible for a character modeled on the duke of villequier aumont to act in this way. furthermore, blake’s description of aumont as a cold, disdainful man would not make much sense if he were trying to create a version of the duke of aumont, a passionate revolutionary and an ardent (if unlikely) democrat who cheerfully set aside his titles and wished to be known as citoyen jacques. the word “disdain” would make a lot more sense in relation to citoyen jacques’s brother, the duke of villequier, who stood in unrepentant solidarity with his fellow nobles and viewed both the assembly and the new-fangled principles of equality with traditional aristocratic hauteur. louis-alexandre-céleste d’aumont was clearly proud of his ducal title and continued to use it even after such titles were officially abolished. although he dutifully referred to himself as alexandre d’aumont, ci-devant duke of villequier, on several occasions in 1790 and 1791, he dropped the prefix and reverted to calling himself the duke of villequier when he visited london in april and may 1791, thus tacitly rejecting the authority of the assembly. he continued to use this abolished title (as well as others) throughout his years of exile, right up to his death.british papers, including lloyd’s evening post for 6 may 1791, note the duke of villequier among visitors to court. by way of summary, i would say that the case for the duke of villequier rests mainly on what statisticians call goodness of fit. the fit between this historical figure and the character in blake’s poem is certainly much better than the fit between the duke of aumont and the character. objections and replies some readers may find the arguments in the previous section convincing; others may not. in this section, i would like to set out four objections that might be raised by the unconvinced, and then do my best to reply to those objections. objection 1: if it was villequier that blake was reading about in the newspapers and it was villequier who angered him, why, when he picked up his pen, did he complain about aumont? reply: to answer this question, it is necessary to say a few words about a massive change in naming and nomenclature that was taking place in france at this time, as a result of the revolution. the abolition of hereditary titles in june 1790 led to a new situation, in which the name aumont could be applied to several persons as opposed to just one. prior to the abolition of hereditary titles, there was really only one person in france who could appropriately be called aumont—​the duke of aumont. subsequently, aumont became what it is today—​a name that can be shared and used simultaneously by many members of a family. thus, a situation was created in which the duke of aumont was an aumont, but so too was the duke of villequier. while blake was working on and thinking about his poem, the people of france were transitioning between two systems of nomenclature. some frenchmen were eager to adopt the new system, while others dragged their feet and clung to the old system—​though as the revolution gained momentum, it became increasingly dangerous for nobles to do so. revolutionary journalists like marat enjoyed calling out aristocrats, including the duke of villequier, who persisted in using their hereditary titles.marat complained about villequier in particular in l’ ami du peuple no. 395 (10 march 1791). in march 1791, after his confrontation with lafayette during the day of daggers, villequier signed the letter in his own defense “alexandre d’aumont, ci-devant le duc de villequier,” in the style of the new regime (although, i suspect, with little enthusiasm). thus he was placing more emphasis on his family name, aumont. the ducal title was yielding, under political pressure, to the family name at the very time that blake was writing. in fact, for many people with revolutionary sympathies, the old title had already given way: the duke of villequier had ceased to exist and had been replaced by citoyen alexandre d’aumont. we know that blake adopted the new, more democratic system of nomenclature in some of his writings. in both the french revolution and his manuscript verses on lafayette’s defection (e 499, written late 1792 or early 1793), he refers to the general by the abbreviated form fayette rather than the traditional la fayette, as david erdman has noted.erdman (prophet against empire 172) describes fayette as a “republican” form, but i think democratic is more appropriate. with the deletion of the definite article, the general is no longer the fayette; he is only a fayette. in the same way, after 1790, the duke of aumont was no longer the aumont, only an aumont. in short, it seems likely that blake elected to call the ci-devant duke of villequier by his family name, aumont, for the same political reason he chose to refer to the ci-devant marquis de lafayette as fayette. objection 2: if the duke of aumont was suspected of allowing the royal family to escape from the tuileries in june 1791, couldn’t blake have been angry with him for that reason? reply: yes, blake could certainly have been angry with him for that reason. the accusations against the duke of aumont were reprinted in several british papers and, although they were probably false, they were never (so far as i can see) corrected or retracted.though the duke of aumont was quickly cleared in france of involvement in the flight of the royal family, he was evidently not as quickly exonerated in the english press, which reported that he had been suspected of collusion and roughly treated by the mob (see note 18). the public advertiser even divulged “on the best authority” that he had been hanged (28 june 1791). i have not discovered any vindications in the english papers. my searches of proquest’s british periodicals database and gale’s burney newspapers collection turned up a flurry of mentions of the duke of aumont in late june 1791, but nothing relevant for the remainder of the year. so this was one moment when an englishman, following events in the papers, could have concluded that the duke of aumont was an enemy of the revolution. we should not forget, however, that the same reader would have had many more occasions—​the villeroy conspiracy, the day of daggers, the attempted excursion to saint cloud, the flight of the royal family—​to reach the same conclusion about the duke of villequier. there is a scenario in which we can imagine blake getting angry with the duke of aumont, but there are numerous scenarios in which we can imagine him getting angry at the duke of villequier. objection 3: since the duke of aumont imitated the speech and manners of henri iv, doesn’t the appearance of henri iv in the poem suggest that blake probably had the duke of aumont in mind? reply: that would be one way of explaining why henri iv is in the poem, but there is another—​and i think a better—​way of explaining this. as i mentioned earlier, henri iv was frequently invoked as an exemplary king and a model for louis xvi. this would seem to be a sufficient explanation for his appearance in the poem. the presence of “good king henry” and his indignant departure in lines 200-01 still make perfectly good sense if we imagine that blake had villequier in mind when he was writing his poem. henri iv helped repair catholic-protestant divisions in france; in blake’s poem he stands for the spirit of peacefulness and non-polarization. he seems to have come to the tuileries to advise louis xvi because he thinks that louis intends to follow his example in bringing peace and building consensus. once he sees the reactionary villequier controlling access to the monarch, however, henri iv realizes that louis xvi is not, in fact, going to be a patriot king and healer of national wounds—​and so he departs in indignation. in interpreting this aspect of the poem, we are forced to choose between two situations that seem somewhat surprising. we may find it hard to believe that blake knew about the connections that frenchmen made between louis xvi and henri iv, but it would be even harder to believe that he knew about the duke of aumont’s tendency to imitate henri iv. objection 4: isn’t it unlikely that blake would have known so much about these french aristocrats? and, specifically, isn’t it unlikely that he would have known that the duke of villequier was a member of the aumont family? reply: it is certainly rather surprising. we don’t know how much french language ability blake had at this time—​perhaps very little. in addition, there is no evidence—​at least none that i am aware of—​that he read french newspapers. given his non-noble upbringing, dissenting religious background, and democratic worldview, it seems very unlikely that he would have been interested in french noblemen. nevertheless, he could have learned a fair amount about the main movers in the french revolution by reading the english press; the london papers carried quite detailed accounts of events in paris, which frequently refer to villequier.references to villequier-aumont (with and without a hyphen) appear in numerous french sources, though villequier alone is much more common. instances of villequier are fairly common in the british press for 1789 to 1791, but i have not discovered any examples of the combined villequier-aumont form, nor have i found any english writer explaining that the duke of villequier was a member of the aumont family. blake was versed enough in french politics to mention in his poem not only major figures, like necker, orléans, sieyès, lafayette, and mirabeau, but also less prominent individuals, like bailly, target, and clermont-tonnerre. since he knew of these men, he might well have known of villequier. summing up the possibilities it seems to me quite likely that stevenson identified the wrong man in his footnote. the evidence suggests that blake was angered by some action of the duke of villequier and added aumont to his poem as a result, choosing to criticize the ci-devant duke under his family name. i believe that this scenario meets the preponderance of evidence standard; whether it meets the more demanding beyond a reasonable doubt standard is a difficult question. by way of summation, i will set out three possibilities and the most important problems i see with each: it is possible that blake was not thinking of anybody in particular when he created the character of aumont; but, if so, why does he pile so many judgmental epithets and proto-urizenic traits on this character? and why does he have the patriot king, henri iv, turn and flee at the sight of aumont? it is possible that blake had louis-marie guy d’aumont, the duke of aumont, in mind; but, if so, why would he have been angry with a man who was a supporter of the revolution? and why does he depict aumont as a courtier and lord chamberlain, when the duke of aumont was neither? it is possible that blake had louis-alexandre-céleste d’aumont, the duke of villequier, in mind; but, if so, why does he refer to him as aumont instead of villequier? and how did he come to understand that a man usually referred to as the duke of villequier was in fact a member of the aumont family? some thoughts on the development of the poem before closing, i would like to say a few words about chronology and the ways in which the french revolution may have developed. it is generally recognized that blake began working on the poem during the period of optimism that followed the unification of the three estates and the storming of the bastille in the summer of 1789, when it seemed to many observers that the revolution was a fait accompli, which had secured permanent reform with minimal bloodshed. many critics have also inferred that blake eventually abandoned the poem, probably at some point in 1791, because he came to believe that the revolution was not going to be an unproblematic, almost unresisted, triumph of reform after all. in other words, most scholars accept a two-phase model that links both of blake’s decisions—​to commence and to abandon the poem—​to the political events in france. i too accept this model, but i would like to propose an additional, intermediate stage. it seems to me that blake started work during the initial phase of hopefulness, but became increasingly conscious of resistance to the revolution. the inclusion of aumont may be an early attempt to respond to evolving events, and the abandonment of the poem at some later point a more drastic reaction to subsequent developments. it would then be possible to distinguish three rough phases in blake’s thinking, each based on the situation in france: i. period of unqualified optimism, inspired and sustained by: merging of the three estates (june 1789); storming of the bastille (july 1789); women’s march on versailles (october 1789); abolition of hereditary titles (june 1790); festival of the federation (july 1790) ii. period of more qualified optimism, leading to local modifications of the poem, provoked by: villeroy conspiracy (september 1790)? … day of daggers (february 1791)? … attempted excursion to saint cloud (april 1791)? iii. loss of optimism and abandonment of the poem, provoked by: flight of the royal family (june 1791)? … massacre on the champ de mars (july 1791)? i have placed question marks in the second and third phases to acknowledge that i am not certain which incidents blake was responding to. i cannot point to textual evidence to prove that there was an intermediate stage, but i think that this hypothesis is consistent with (and grows out of) the evidence rehearsed in this essay. blake clearly conceived the poem during the stage of optimism, which began with the triumphs of 1789 and continued through much of 1790. in the early months of 1790, many observers, both in france and abroad, assumed that the revolution had more or less run its course; the king had recalled necker and accepted the national assembly, the national guard, and the declaration of the rights of man and of the citizen, and it looked like he was prepared to accept the role of constitutional monarch as well. it seemed that the main goals of the revolution had been achieved—​and with only a little bloodshed. so it appeared to richard price when he wrote his famous sermon in november 1789 (price, discourse); to helen maria williams when she attended the festival of the federation in july 1790 (williams, letters); and to blake as well, i think, when he began and wrote much of the french revolution. many passages reflect blake’s initial confidence: the defenders of the old order are shown to be anxious and dismayed, troubled by nightmares, while seyes is all confidence. in his speech to the king and court (lines 206-40), he assumes that the revolution is going to happen, no matter what the king or the nobles might decide: a new france is sure to replace the old france, just as morning drives away the darkness of night. the victory is presented as inevitable, presumably because blake believed that it had already been achieved. as 1790 wore on and gave way to 1791, some of this optimism started to wear off. a series of events, including the exposure of the villeroy conspiracy, the day of daggers, and the attempted excursion to saint cloud, made it clear that not everyone was enthusiastic about the revolution. there were nobles who disliked the new political arrangements, opposed the initiatives of the assembly, lamented the abolition of hereditary titles, and deplored the civil constitution of the clergy. it seems likely that blake became aware of this opposition and added the character of aumont during this period, probably because of something that the duke of villequier had done. it is impossible to say which incident was the trigger, but i believe that a strong case can be made for the villeroy conspiracy.at an earlier point in my research, i thought that the flight of the royals in june 1791 might have led blake to add aumont, but i now believe that event is more likely to have been one of the episodes that spurred him to abandon the poem. the exposure of the villeroy conspiracy occurred earlier, at a time when most observers were still buoyant about the outcome of the revolution. the plot was described in the english press, so blake might well have known about it, and it revealed villequier to be (at least according to the anonymous informant) actively involved in conspiring against the revolution, as opposed to indirectly involved, as in the attempted excursion to saint cloud, or ambiguously involved, as in the day of daggers. a few months later, something else happened—​something even more serious—​that made blake realize that the revolution was facing not just minor but major resistance. it might have been the flight of the royals in june 1791, or the shooting of protesters on the champ de mars in july.in “blake and lafayette,” charles hobday argues that blake intended to make lafayette his hero, but decided to abandon the poem after lafayette ordered his national guardsmen to fire on republican protesters on the champ de mars. i find hobday’s claim quite plausible, but i take a slightly less lafayette-o-centric view and think that the flight of the royals should also be considered as a possible cause for the abandonment of the poem. it could also have been the breakdown of agreement among the revolutionaries themselves that began to be visible about this time.by july 1791, the coalition of revolutionaries that blake praises in the french revolution was falling apart. lafayette and bailly were blamed by many for the champ de mars massacre. there was tension between lafayette and orléans. clermont-tonnerre had become a moderate and was already widely regarded as a traitor to the revolution. sieyès had opposed an absolute veto for the king, which honoré mirabeau had supported—​and mirabeau had died in april. at any rate, blake seems to have concluded that the french revolution was not going to turn out as he had initially imagined, and, as a result, he decided not to print the poem.see ritz 374. an alternative theory is that it was the printer, joseph johnson, who pulled the plug, but this seems unlikely. there was no reason for johnson to panic at this point; pitt did not crack down on seditious writing in earnest until mid-1792. therefore, it was probably blake himself who gave up on the poem, and he probably did so because he realized that, however the french revolution evolved, it was not going to be the easy victory announced with such supreme confidence by seyes. works cited ambrose, tom. godfather of 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charles, baron. l’armée et la garde nationale. 4 vols. paris, 1858–​62. les premiers seigneurs d’aumont. <http://​users.​skynet.​be/​am035431/​pages/​ 1%20​les%20​premiers%20​seigneurs%20​d%27aumont​/aumont.​html>. accessed 24 oct. 2020; site inactive in july 2022. price, richard. a discourse on the love of our country. london, 1789. récit exact de ce qui s’est passé au château des tuileries, le 28 février. paris, 1791. reinhard, marcel. la légende de henri iv. paris: librairie hachette, [1936]. révolutions de paris, ou récit exact de ce qui s’est passé dans la capitale, & particulièrement de la prise de la bastille, depuis le 11 juillet 1789 jusqu’au 23 du même mois. paris, 1789. ritz, régis. “vision poétique du peuple révolutionnaire dans the french revolution de william blake.” revue française d’histoire du livre 68-69 (1990): 369-75. rossi, joseph de. journée du 28 février, au chateau des tuileries. paris, 1791. “royal household.” encyclopedia britannica. 9th ed. vol. 21. london, 1886. 35-38. schama, simon. citizens: a chronicle of the french revolution. new york: vintage, 1989. sellier, charles. anciens hôtels de paris. paris: h. champion, 1910. tackett, timothy. becoming a revolutionary: the deputies of the french national assembly and the emergence of a revolutionary culture (1789–​1790). princeton: princeton university press, 1996. —​—​—​. when the king took flight. cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 2003. turquan, joseph. les femmes de l’émigration, 1789–​1815. 2 vols. paris: émile-paul, 1911–​12. vaissière, pierre de. lettres d’ “aristocrates”: la révolution racontée par des correspondances privées, 1789–​1794. paris: perrin, 1907. “villequier (alex. d’aumont, duc de).” biographie moderne. 2nd ed. vol. 3. paris, 1816. 335. “villequier (louis-alexandre-céleste d’aumont, duc de).” dictionnaire des parlementaires français. vol. 5. paris, 1891. 530-31. “villequier (louis-alexandre-céleste d’aumont, duc de).” dictionnaire historique et biographique de la révolution et de l’empire. vol. 2. paris, 1898. 821-22. “villeroi (jeanne-louise-constance d’aumont de villequier, duchesse de).” biographie universelle ancienne et moderne. vol. 43. paris: ch. delagrave et cie, 1870. 504. vinot, françoise. “louis-alexandre céleste, duc de villequier puis d’aumont: 23 ans d’émigration à travers l’europe (1791–​1814).” les noblesses françaises dans l’europe de la révolution. ed. philippe bourdin. rennes: presses universitaires de rennes, 2010. 413-28. wick, daniel lewis. “a conspiracy of well-intentioned men: the society of thirty and the french revolution.” phd diss., university of california, davis, 1977. williams, helen maria. letters written in france, in the summer 1790. 4th ed. london: t. cadell, 1794. woelmont de brumagne, baron de. notices généalogiques. vol. 1. paris: librairie ancienne édouard champion, 1923. review: g. e. bentley, jr., boondoggles: travels of a restless professor g. e. bentley, jr. boondoggles: travels of a restless professor. victoria, bc: friesenpress, 2018. xxiv + 297 pp. $24.72, hardcover; $17.09, paperback; $4.99, e-book. reviewed by sarah jones sarah jones (sarah.jones@rochester.edu) is the managing editor of blake. when jerry bentley’s article on the blake dealings of a. s. w. rosenbach appeared posthumously in the winter 2017–18 issue of the journal, i assumed that it was his last work to be published. i should have known better. boondoggles are his tales of a lifetime’s travels, a memoir begun with the editing assistance of his daughters and completed by them after his death. that sarah and julia brought the project to fruition is appropriate, as the stories revolve around family and derive from the many letters that jerry wrote to family and friends. his pride in and love for them shine through, as they do for his wife, beth, who presides throughout as a benevolent facilitator of all things: “for fifty-nine years beth managed my life firmly and inconspicuously. hurricanes, revolutions, poverty, respectability—nothing fazed her. beth could always manage” (6). jerry relieves boondoggle of its negative connotations, except in the most innocuous sense; for him it is “being paid to do something you want to do anyway” (teaching), with a boondoggle in the highest degree “going to interesting places en famille under the guise of serious academic work at someone else’s expense” (xv). thus, while the book is not a blake book in any formal sense (a final section on blake collecting and scholarship, “academic joys,” is adapted from previously published material),“the temerity of innocence” and “bibliographical discoveries, mostly blakean,” language. philology. culture. 3 (2015); “bibliomania,” papers of the bibliographical society of canada 45.1 (2007). it is definitely a product of his blake studies, seen from a personal rather than professional point of view. just as jerry’s scholarly output was prodigious, so were his travels, divided here into adventures in north america, then “year-long boondoggles” (england, algeria, india, china), “shorter boondoggles” (france, japan, taiwan, afghanistan, australia, italy, russia, tanzania, singapore, thailand, and indonesia) and “other boondoggles.” many of these roads were less traveled by western academics—he taught as a fulbright scholar in algiers during a period of political instability in 1967–68, in poona in 1975–76, and in shanghai in 1982–83, exploring each country extensively. travel by its nature can be trying, but there are few merely petty hassles here, unless you consider marauding black bears or armed soldiers of no consequence; still, no matter the danger or absurdity of the situation, the bentleys navigate it with charm, persistence, or luck, acquiring friends and interesting experiences in equal measure. which isn’t to say that it is all plain sailing: in england they discover that manoeuvring a narrowboat through locks for a week is not exactly the restful time jerry had imagined for reading the proofs of his edition of blake’s writings. the prevailing sentiments are joy at the opportunities that a lifetime of scholarship provided and generosity toward others, almost invariably reciprocated. only occasionally does a less complimentary note creep in (“i thought then, and still do, that california is god’s country, except for the people” [xix]; the us state department does not emerge unscathed from jerry’s account of its handling of his fulbright in algeria). there are several illustrations, including maps and photos of treasures acquired (paintings, busts, and bowls), but my favorite is of beth and jerry looking impossibly young in 1952 (6). beth and jerry in 1952 (from p. 6 of the book). reproduced courtesy of julia and sarah bentley. just as the world was a smaller place for much of the time covered (1950 to the early 2000s), so the book reflects the sensibilities of that period. for instance, i was struck by the fact that it’s a long time since i’ve read about polar bears in churchill, manitoba, without a mention of climate change. as jerry tells it, when his dissertation supervisor professes that he “should not know what to say” to people he doesn’t know in a letter of support for job applications, jerry ends up with permission to draft the letter himself. as a white male academic, he was of course accorded a respect and precedence on his travels that others may not have received. a footnote in “the temerity of innocence” mentions three rising male scholars, all deserving; it would have been more generous to include deserving female scholars too. for me, the lasting image of the book is of an incident on the family’s second visit to the floating palace house boat on dal lake in kashmir: in 1976 we carried in a kind of bowling bag the twenty thousand slips of paper for the index to blake books …. one morning, as the sun was just gilding the far peaks, julia and sarah bounced into the room and said “good morning, daddy”—and the draft from the opened door blew a dusting of blake books index-slips for the letter b gracefully out onto dal lake, where they drifted like goose-feathers and sank. i’ve never been sure how much of the letter b perished thus forever in dal lake, and i’ve never found a gap in the bs of the printed index of blake books, but when i do i’ll know the cause of the lacuna. (109) once, when i asked jerry about a speculation regarding blake in one of his articles, he replied that it would have been agreeable had it been so. full of quintessential bentley humor, this book is an agreeable memoir, rendered poignant by his passing, that will resonate with everyone who knew jerry in person or through his writings. review: erasmus darwin, the botanic garden, ed. adam komisaruk and allison dushane erasmus darwin. the botanic garden. ed. adam komisaruk and allison dushane. 2 vols. abingdon: routledge, 2017. vol. 1, xiv + 404 pp.; vol. 2,  x + 236 pp. £270.00/​$350.00, hardcover; £243.00/​$315.00, e-book. reviewed by alexander s. gourlay alexander s. gourlay (agourlay@risd.edu) teaches at the rhode island school of design. blake evidently read parts of the botanic garden by erasmus darwin, grandfather of charles, and certainly helped to illustrate it. the most striking verbal and pictorial responses in blake are found in the songs, the book of thel, and other early works, but if we count faint echoes of darwin’s peculiar hybrid of natural science and poetry, his influence can be detected even in late projects, like jerusalem. in blake’s distinctive appropriative procedure, images were often derived from verbal sources and vice versa, as in the title page of thel, in which he draws on darwin’s ovid-based account of the apparent sexual destruction of anemone, the windflower, by zephyr, the west wind.see my appendix. darwin, who represented his philosophical garden as a war zone in which the competition between good and evil powers is mediated by vegetable eroticism, kept his moral, erotic, scientific, and poetic sensibilities segregated, even while deploying them simultaneously. as a result, it is difficult to read the loves of the plants as an expression of a coherent worldview, much less as an updated book of nature; whereas that medieval doctrine held that the natural world encodes christian truths, for darwin the mechanisms of natural phenomena are the tenor, not the vehicle. blake seems to have rejected some implications of darwin’s multivalent metaphors, but he was clearly taken by the erotically charged neomythic elaborations on natural phenomena. other writers and thinkers found and transmuted this material in their own ways; darwin’s influence pervaded the intellectual life of his times, turning up in unexpected forms and in surprising contexts. positive and negative references and reactions to his (originally anonymous) poetic works appear in the public and/​or private writings of many other notable intellectuals. it’s not surprising that he was a friend of benjamin franklin, or a founder of the lunar society, but he was also a teetotaler, a feminist of sorts, an ardent abolitionist, and claimed to be an m.d. (he had a substantial practice, if not a degree). further, he dabbled in both liberal and radical politics, befriended and advised technologists and industrialists, and contributed significantly to most domains of scientific inquiry in his day (and, of course, he provided much of the groundwork for his grandson’s theories). the most basic function of a scholarly edition is to make an uncommon text more available. early printings (“editions” doesn’t quite apply—​see below) of the botanic garden are not particularly rare: my unsystematic impression of the market is that copies of the two volumes are widely offered, and further, that most surviving volumes are in good condition (both suggesting that the work’s initial explosive popularity was short lived). if blake owned a copy, it has not turned up, so he may have read it to tatters, or, more likely, he simply remembered broad outlines of a prepublication manuscript or borrowed a copy of the published work (most of the recognizable echoes in blake of darwin’s forgettable verse are general, and none is a direct quotation).  furthermore, there is a very good one-volume facsimile edition with an introductory essay by the monarch of darwin studies, desmond king-hele, that is nearly as satisfactory for readability as the original (scolar press, 1973). and for those who aren’t fussy, book-search sites are glutted with offers of abominable print-on-demand “editions” of one or both volumes; these are derived from assemblages of digital page images that vary in quality and completeness. perhaps because darwin’s verse is clogged with multisyllabic latinity and insipid even when it is trying hard to be sublime, much of the literary scholarship to date has dwelt on contemporary reactions to him by actual poets. the apparatus in this edition is more focused on identifying darwin’s diverse sources (his borrowings range from subtle allusion to shameless plagiarism) and somewhat less on revealing overarching themes and ideas. as one might expect, darwin’s literary appropriations are predominantly from the usual classical authors (especially virgil and ovid) or their more recent neoclassical imitators, even while alluding to phenomena far outside the customary domain of literary reference. as a physical presentation of darwin’s work, this edition is more difficult to read than most of the originals or the scolar facsimile: the two new volumes are considerably smaller; the “eclectic reading text” (based on the first printings) is set in smaller type; and the images, though good, are reduced in scale. but there are many other reasons why a scholarly edition is welcome, especially one that adroitly navigates the many editorial pitfalls and dilemmas. the publication history of the botanic garden is complicated, to say the least, but if one is patient one can determine from the bibliography that, say, three editions of volume 2, the loves of the plants, were published anonymously before volume 1, the economy of vegetation, appeared, which ensured mismatched pairs in the libraries of those who bought loves first. further, booksellers apparently sold arbitrary combinations of volumes 1 and 2, some bound together, even when copies with matching dates were available. early copies of the botanic garden are handsome quartos with large type for the verse, profusely (and variously) illustrated with images ranging from emblematic frontispieces and visionary scenes by fuseli and others to dry botanical prints, scientific illustrations, diagrams, and charts. (blake’s chalcographic contributions to the book are not his greatest commercial work; he probably didn’t engrave any of the technical illustrations, but he collaborated with fuseli on a memorably sublime vision of the “fertilization of egypt,” and also drew and engraved faithful images of the reliefs on the portland vase, the subject of a major excursion in volume 1.) in addition to the images, the selection of which varies from one printing to another, darwin’s obsessive-digressive intellect led him to stuff the poetic text with ludicrously thorough “philosophical notes” cross-correlated with other notes, appendices, indexes, and tables, along with “argument” and “interlude” sections. these notes and other adjunctive material are so plentiful and so much more spirited than the precious pseudo-popean couplets of his verse that it is clear where his greatest interest and talent lay. editorial presentation of a text is usually governed by an implicit or explicit rationale that determines the level of sophistication in the notes and other guides, as well as the aspects of the text that are mapped in the apparatus. as editors, komisaruk and dushane are careful, thoughtful, and evidently well informed in the many fields of knowledge that the text demands, but darwin’s own array of supplemental materials is so diverse, unpredictable, and extensive that the whole defies the kind of systematic editorial supplementation that a particular audience could count on to supply a particular kind of information. the introductory biographical and contextual matter provided here is efficient, if not very adventurous. because neither textual nor editorial notes are signaled in the text, readers should be in the habit of checking for both species (as well as darwin’s supplementals), lest they miss important unsought information. it would be beyond the power of editing to make such a warren of versified, illustrated, and annotated biopoetic miscellanea easy to manage, but the komisaruk/​dushane edition is nevertheless a thoroughly creditable performance. appendix: darwin’s anemone and blake’s thel recognizing elements of darwin in blake’s work is not usually essential to understanding the latter; even when his debt was substantial, blake often changed so much that familiarity with his source adds little to the reader’s experience, and by shifting from textual to pictorial imagery and vice versa, he further obscured the appropriation. in some cases blake appears to have treated darwin’s works as repositories of raw semiotic material, rather than coherent cultural artifacts. even though it seems likely that both parody and irony are involved in his responses to darwin, there are no explicit mentions of darwin or the botanic garden anywhere in blake’s writings that could help readers to recognize references.for an attempt at characterizing blake’s view of darwin, see ya-feng wu, “blake’s critique of erasmus darwin’s botanic garden,” wordsworth circle 50.1 (2019): 55-73. the passage in the loves of the plants (canto 1, lines 283-312) relating the love life of the anemone was especially rich for blake. anemones, like other plants with showy flowers, are actually pollinated by insects, but ovid and other classical sources describe spring winds opening and then destroying the anemone blossom (the name means “windflower”). darwin’s primary narrative begins with images of cold and lonely anemone as a virgin female, associated with tears, paleness, and pearls, pining limply for the warmth of the spring air: all wan and shivering in the leafless glade the sad anemonea footnote (beginning “many males, many females”) describes the botanical properties of the anemone blossom and provides a relatively unpoetic account of its relationship with the wind. reclin’d her head; grief on her cheeks had paled the roseate hue, and her sweet eye-lids drop’d with pearly dew. her lament, which follows, represents a garden world poised between the cold, heavy, evil fiend of frost, who is associated with earth and water, and hot, spirited zephyr, aligned with air, fire, and such phenomena as amorous aggression, poetic seduction, and cherubic inspiration: “—​see from bright regions, borne on odorous gales, “the swallow,at this point darwin provides an extensive note about the “conformity” of the advent of the swallow and the flowering of the anemone, together with a long list of similar relationships. herald of the summer, sails; “breathe gentle air, from cherub-lips impart “thy balmy influence to my anguish’d heart “thou, whose soft voice calls forth the tender blooms, “whose pencila small paintbrush. paints them, and whose breath perfumes; “o chase the fiend of frost, whose leaden mace “in death-like slumbers seals my hapless race; “melt his hard heart, release his iron hand, “and give my ivory petals to expand “so may each bud that decks the brow of spring, “shed all its incense on thy wafting wing!”—​ to her fond prayer propitious zephyr yields, sweeps on his sliding shell through azure fields, o’er her fair mansion waves his whispering wand, and gives her ivory petals to expand: gives with new life her filial train to rise, and hail with kindling smiles the genial skies. at first the attentions of zephyr seem straightforwardly benign, but shortly after “fond” anemone achieves the pinnacle of beauty and sexual maturity, the “rude” wind tears away her beautiful petals and apparently destroys her: so shines the nymph in beauty’s blushing pride, when zephyr wafts her deep calasha large hood. aside; tears with rude kiss her bosoms gauzy veil, and flings the fluttering kerchief to the gale. darwin’s narrator doesn’t miss a beat, and blithely compares the exposed sexual structures that remain—​stamens and pistils—​to fashionable revelers crowded in a carriage with the top down: so bright, the folding canopy undrawn, glides the gilt landau o’er the velvet lawn, of beaux and belles displays the glittering throng; and soft airs fan them, as they roll along. the book of thel copy e (composed 1789 and printed c. 1789), title page. 15.5 x 10.7 cm. beinecke rare book and manuscript library, yale university. tinker +271. some evidence of blake’s debt to this text is distributed throughout the book of thel: like miss anemone, thel is a pale and pearly virgin in a universe divided between seductive, fiery sky-males and cold, damp, terrestrial females, for instance. the most substantial borrowing is in the image on the title page, even if there are many turns in the road from one to the other. many of the botanical narratives in the loves of the plants include accurate, detailed engravings of floral specimens, but the anemone is not among those depicted. blake must have done some independent research on the appearance of anemone pulsatilla, the species he chose for his image: it is scrupulously correct in leaves and blossoms, though the plant as a whole is artificially “posed.” in creating his picture, he paid careful attention to darwin, but revised the two-level narrative into a single story. he then combined the emblem he had derived from darwin with another, more familiar pictorial motif, the subject known as “et in arcadia ego,” in which a shocked arcadian (often a shepherdess) contemplates a newly discovered tomb, skull, or other emblem of mortality.see alexander s. gourlay and john e. grant, “the melancholy shepherdess in prospect of love and death in reynolds and blake,” bulletin of research in the humanities 85 (1982): 169-89, and gourlay, “iphigenia in england: a postscript to ‘the melancholy shepherdess,’” bulletin of research in the humanities 86 (1983): 223-26. the anemone that replaces the usual reminder of death in blake’s title page is an ingenious invention in the darwinian ero-botanical idiom, even if it follows the story of darwin’s flower maiden only loosely. blake omitted from his emblem the chilly fiend of frost and warm humanoid zephyr (who may have inspired luvah elsewhere in the poem), but the image shows the effect of the powerful wind rippling blossoms and blowing some of the leaves of the anemone from right to left, even while indicating by the other leaves that the plant is passive unless externally motivated. he also consolidated the anemone maiden and the “many males, many females” in darwin’s landau into two anemone spirits, one male and one female. the nude male, presumably representing windborne pollen, rides the breeze impetuously out of the right-hand flower (his left toes are inside the petals) to strip the static flower maiden, who throws up her arms in the gesture associated in art with rape victims. these two active flowers are “opened” (to use a term from swedenborg), or “expanded” in darwinese, in contrast with the limp, unopened bud next to thel.the buds and flowers recall a similar device in many copies of the title page of songs of innocence, where four unpicked apples on the large tree appear to correspond to the four most prominent virgins: the two children, the maid (a sort of shepherdess), and the lonely shepherd in the foliage/​lettering who blows his horn in another geographical dimension. in combining “et in arcadia ego” with the new pictorial subject, “love and death among the anemones,” adapted from darwin, blake created an emblematic title page that introduces the epistemological thematics of the poem: innocent quasi-arcadian thel sees the flowers, but her morose attitude indicates that she discerns only examples of evanescent beauty, not the agitated sexual encounter enacted by the flower spirits.compare her listless posture here to her depicted reactions to human forms of other entities. the division of awareness inverts that of the arcadians of “et in arcadia ego,” for whom sex is old hat but the thought of death, and concomitant guilt, are novelties. by adapting darwin’s verbal images and incorporating them in a familiar visual context, blake assembled a richly articulate compound emblem that silently suggests that at this point thel sees the beautiful beings around her dying gently and pointlessly, but is oblivious to both the vicissitudes of sex and the reward of an afterlife. william blake’s universe: an interview with david bindman and esther chadwick william blake’s universe: an interview with david bindman and esther chadwick by luisa calè luisa calè (l.cale@bbk.ac.uk), birkbeck, university of london, writes about practices of reading, viewing, and collecting in the romantic period. she is completing a monograph entitled the book unbound: the material culture of reading and collecting, ca. 1750–​1850, with chapters on walpole, blake, and dickens, funded by the leverhulme trust. she is the exhibitions editor for blake. david bindman is emeritus professor of the history of art, university college london. he is the author of blake as an artist (phaidon, 1977) and books on hogarth and roubiliac. in recent years he has worked on questions of art and race. he recently published “race is everything”: art and human difference (reaktion books, 2023). esther chadwick is lecturer in art history at the courtauld institute of art, london. her book, the radical print: art and politics in late eighteenth-century britain, including a chapter on blake, will be published by the paul mellon centre for studies in british art in spring 2024. in this interview, the curators david bindman and esther chadwick discuss the upcoming exhibition william blake’s universe, which opens at the fitzwilliam museum, cambridge (23 february–​19 may) and then moves to the hamburger kunsthalle (14 june–​8 september). the interview has been very lightly edited for style. can you tell us about the original idea for this exhibition? db: the exhibition began originally as a response to hamburg’s continuing interest in british art, which reached its high point in the 1970s with the kunsthalle’s legendary director werner hofmann, who put on a series of exhibitions, kunst um 1800, mainly on northern european art, in which he included blake (1975), john flaxman (1979), and turner. at the time it was astonishingly prescient to include both blake and flaxman among the central artists of the romantic era in europe. as it happens, i was the curator of those two exhibitions, and it was an unforgettable experience. the blake exhibition opened up the possibility of seeing blake in a european context. particularly intriguing was the comparison with philipp otto runge, almost all of whose work is in the kunsthalle. ec: we felt that, by initiating a collaboration between the fitzwilliam and the hamburger kunsthalle, there was an opportunity to pick up where kunst um 1800 had left off. we were particularly intrigued by the possibilities of bringing runge’s work to the uk, where runge is not well known, and seeing what would happen when his work was placed in the same physical space as blake’s. the two have often been linked in scholarship on the romantic period, but rarely—​if at all—​exhibited together. was there an element of cultural diplomacy? db: not at all in the present exhibition, but in 1975, after the entry of britain into the european union, the british council had ample funds to promote british culture. though it was never stated, i feel the choice of british artists in the series may well have been influenced by that fact. it is also the case that the idea for the present exhibition (whose original working title was blake in europe) came about partly as a reaction against the decision in 2016 to leave europe. ec: working in collaboration with a german museum in the aftermath of the brexit referendum seemed to give the project added significance. one could see kunst um 1800 and blake’s universe as bracketing the uk’s membership of the eu, which is an interesting thought to ponder. how is blake redefined by the collaboration between the hamburger kunsthalle and the fitzwilliam? db: the fitzwilliam was the obvious partner, not only because of its superb blake collection, but because it had only recently received the final tranche of the geoffrey keynes collection, including superb proof prints and the great laocoön watercolour, which have very rarely been seen in public before. the kunsthalle brings the definitive collection of runge and works by caspar david friedrich, who are relatively little known in britain. there is also the fascinating linkage between blake and runge through the journalist henry crabb robinson, who essentially saw the former as possessed of the spirit of german romanticism. ec: crabb robinson’s essay on blake appeared in the patriotic journal vaterländisches museum, published by runge’s friend friedrich perthes, in 1811. alas, this was too late for runge, who had died the previous year. but what the essay shows is that contemporaries considered there to be an interest in and potential audience for blake in germany. this link helps us to draw out the ways in which themes of societal and spiritual regeneration, so central to blake, were shared by other artists across europe, and it enables blake to be loosened from what has arguably been an overly monographic framework. blake, frontispiece to jerusalem. relief etching, 26 x 19.5 cm. fitzwilliam museum, cambridge. from the collection of sir geoffrey keynes; accepted in lieu of inheritance tax by hm government from the estate of anne pinsent keynes and allocated to the fitzwilliam museum, 2018. p.24-2018. picture credit: © fitzwilliam museum, cambridge. philipp otto runge (1777–​1810), the large morning (der grosse morgen), 1808–​09. oil on canvas, 152 x 113 cm. hamburger kunsthalle. gift of conrad meißner, 1894. hk-1022. picture credit: © hamburger kunsthalle/​bpk photo: elke walford. how is the exhibition structured? db & ec: the exhibition is divided into three parts, with an introductory section of portraits of the main artists involved. the first part is devoted to the past, italy and antiquity, showing the common education in northern countries and britain in the classical world; the second to the present, france and revolution, showing blake and other artists reacting urgently to the political revolutions of their age; and the third to the future, the powerful spirituality and hope of redemption in england and germany. this thematic presentation means we are not strictly chronological, but the final section, “the future,” is really concerned with blake’s work after 1800, at which point we highlight changes of emphases in his work and his varied connections to jacob böhme, runge, friedrich, and samuel palmer. does exposure to german material articulate a different kind of visionary art, compared to the millenarian public sphere discussed in blake studies? db: there are obvious similarities and differences between blake and runge and other contemporaries. what blake and runge have in common is, firstly, an admiration of the seventeenth-century german mystic jacob böhme or behmen, whose ideas were illustrated by the extraordinary interactive images of an eighteenth-century edition of his works, and, secondly, a deep desire to produce works that integrate all the arts in the service of christian redemption. they are of slightly different generations (runge died young in 1810), and they differ in their attitudes to nature; runge was a pantheist and blake was vocally opposed to pantheism. the ability to see the two artists side by side and in the company of friedrich and palmer should be a marvelous opportunity for reflection on their relationship. ec: it’s also possible, thanks in particular to böhme, to consider overlaps between these two spheres. garnet terry, the millenarian engraver to the bank of england whose hieroglyphic print of “daniel’s great image” (1793) will be on display in the central section of the exhibition, sold the works of böhme from his bookshop in paternoster row, london, for example. despite his official position at the bank, terry easily counts as a member of london’s culture of “dangerous enthusiasm,” to borrow jon mee’s phrase. runge and friedrich have usually been framed in terms of the development of romantic landscape painting. on the surface, that is where they most differ from blake. yet we’re keen to bring out the deeper commonalities, stemming from similarities in their artistic training at the royal academies in london and copenhagen and their shared experiences of a war-torn europe in the aftermath of the french revolution. blake, free version of the laocoön, c. 1825. graphite, pen and watercolor, 53.7 x 43.5 cm. fitzwilliam museum, cambridge. from the collection of sir geoffrey keynes; accepted in lieu of inheritance tax by hm government from the estate of stephen keynes, obe, and allocated to the fitzwilliam museum, 2020. pd.29-2020. picture credit: © fitzwilliam museum, cambridge. garnet terry, “prophetic vision: daniel’s great image,” 1793. engraving with hand coloring on paper, 55 × 41 cm. master and fellows of trinity college, cambridge. estc, t483535. picture credit: reproduced with the permission of the master and fellows of trinity college, cambridge. tate britain’s william blake exhibition in 2019–​20 offered different modes of engagement with works in illuminated printing (bound books, unbound plates placed one beside the other along a wall, standing stations in the centre of the room to see both sides of pages printed recto-verso, book openings lying horizontally in glass vitrines). how will you present blake’s books in a gallery setting? db & ec: there is no one way of showing the illuminated books, because some of them have been separately mounted, like america, europe, and jerusalem, and so will be on a wall. working with the london-based, hamburg-raised german designer gitta gschwendtner, we have devised concertina-like walls that allow the separate plates to be mounted vertically, while still retaining echoes of the book format. the fitzwilliam copies of the illuminated books are very strongly coloured, so will have a big presence in this exhibition. visions of the daughters of albion is still bound, so will be shown in a case. walter benjamin contrasts the vertical format of painting with the horizontal experience of sheets of paper, books, and the acts of reading and writing.walter benjamin, “painting and the graphic arts” (1917), trans. rodney livingstone, in walter benjamin, the work of art in the age of its technological reproducibility, and other writings on media, ed. michael w. jennings, brigid doherty, and thomas y. levin (cambridge, ma: belknap press of harvard university press, 2008) 219. what considerations determine the choice to present works in horizontal or vertical displays? is there an ethics of horizontality? db & ec: to be clear, curators do not necessarily have a choice, because of a museum’s conditions. the most problematic exhibits are select plates from stedman’s surinam, which is represented by one open volume, borrowed from cambridge university library, and framed illustrations of a racially offensive nature showing cruelty toward the enslaved, borrowed from the british museum. these separate plates have to be framed (according to the rules of their lender) but still we have insisted that these objects be placed flat in a case. there is certainly an ethics of horizontality in play here. in the history of art, the vertical is associated with the honorific, and by taking these works off the wall we hope to signal a difference of approach. still, one could argue that placing them within a display case produces problems of another nature, by making them into specimens for examination, for example. there are no easy answers. perhaps the best way to deal with these works, short of not exhibiting them at all, is to concentrate on framing them properly through interpretative texts. elsewhere in the exhibition, another compromise is the display of two flaxman plaster models for church monuments, which for conservation and design reasons have to be mounted at an angle rather than placed fully vertically on a wall, as they would have been intended within a church context. the exhibition will feature the same copy of jerusalem that was displayed in hamburg in 1975; what does it gain from the dialogue with german works? db & ec: we are showing a selection from the same coloured copy of jerusalem that was shown in 1975 (on long-term loan to the fitzwilliam from a private collection), with the addition of proof impressions of the frontispiece and plate 51 (“vala, hyle, and skofeld”) from the keynes bequest. the latter will be reunited with a closely related drawing from hamburg, showing vala, hyle, and skofeld plus an additional figure who is probably hand, standing in for war and brutality. these jerusalem selections will appear in the same room as engravings, painted fragments, and select preparatory drawings for runge’s major project, the times of day, which he undertook from 1802 to 1810, the same period when blake was at work on jerusalem. we highlight shared themes of spiritual regeneration in these works, which may both be seen as the culmination of their makers’ vision for the role of art in redeeming humanity. for all their apparent differences (in style and format), both works are underpinned by an apocalyptic understanding of the world. the selection highlights the idea of romantic nationalism, through albion, and this is implicitly compared with the attitudes of runge on the one hand, but also palmer and friedrich, examining the sacramental nature of nationalism in both england and germany in the napoleonic and post-napoleonic period. blake, plate numbered 14, “when the morning stars,” from illustrations of the book of job, 1826. engraving, 37.9 x 27.1 cm. fitzwilliam museum, cambridge. from the collection of sir geoffrey keynes; allocated by h.m. treasury through the minister of the arts after acceptance in lieu of capital taxes, 1985. p.454-1985 (15). picture credit: © fitzwilliam museum, cambridge. philipp otto runge, “night” (“die nacht”), 1807 (second printing). etching and engraving on paper, 76.6 x 53.5 cm. private collection, devon. picture credit: booth-clibborn collection. what are the implications of revisiting in 2024 the international field of art fleshed out in the kunst um 1800 series? how does blake’s european context in 2024 differ from the german blake of 1975? db: the political landscape after brexit is very different, but british academics are frankly appalled by its potential effects, which have been without exception negative. but it is also true that many of those who voted for it are full of regret. in 1975 the kunst um 1800 exhibitions were not entirely unproblematic. one of hofmann’s motives in setting up the exhibitions was to deal with friedrich, who was then, thirty years after the end of the second world war, still seriously tainted by his connections with german nationalism, so the range of the series was a way of taking him out of that context. this is no longer a problem, though friedrich was undoubtedly an extreme nationalist. it will be really interesting to see the response in the uk to runge’s art, which will be entirely new to almost everyone. ec: there have been great strides in blake scholarship since 1975, not least in understanding blake in global as well as european contexts. but, as jason whittaker has discussed, blake is still susceptible to comprehension in a narrowly nationalistic way, as the spokesperson for “englands green & pleasant land.” if kunst um 1800 was inflected by concerns local to german politics in 1975, there is no escaping the new political landscape that informs our interest, in 2024, in the wider context of romantic nationalism in which blake can, at least partially, be situated. what i hope we show is that blake’s words and images cannot be confined to any one ideological reading. by inviting dialogue with works by his german contemporaries (and by emphasizing how deeply he was informed by european art-historical and intellectual trends more broadly), we hope to open fresh avenues for thinking about the meanings of his work, both in the past and now. “remarkable both for genius, & extravagance”: amelia opie and blake’s illustrations of the book of job “remarkable both for genius, & extravagance”: amelia opie and blake’s illustrations of the book of job by shelley king and john b. pierce shelley king is professor in the department of english language and literature at queen’s university, kingston. she is the author of articles on opie in journals including romanticism on the net, studies in eighteenth-century culture, and eighteenth-century studies. john b. pierce is vice-provost (teaching and learning) at queen’s university, kingston, and professor in the department of english language and literature. he is the author of flexible design: revisionary poetics in blake’s “vala” or “the four zoas” (mcgill-queen’s university press, 1998) and the wond’rous art: william blake and writing (fairleigh dickinson university press, 2003), as well as articles on blake and shelley. they are co-editors of the collected poems of amelia alderson opie (oxford university press, 2009) and of four of opie’s novels. in 1986 william w. heath announced a most exciting acquisition for the mead art museum at amherst college, the gift of dr. and mrs. k. frank austen (class of 1950): a copy of blake’s illustrations of the book of job (1826) that had been known earlier in the twentieth century but whose location had proved elusive for a number of years. it is readily identifiable by its inscription: “this work remarkable both for genius, & extravagance, is the gift of amelia opie to her friend david, whose own genius will make him prize the former, while his excellent taste makes it impossible for him to imitate the latter—​paris—​4me mo 22me 1831” (see illus. 1).blake’s plates can be viewed online at <https://​museums.​fivecolleges.​edu/​detail.​php?​museum=all​&record=0​&v=2​&s=ac+1983.44​&type=all​&t=objects​>. the location of this copy was unknown to bentley when he prepared the first edition of blake records, though he knew of the inscription through a catalogue description from a clipping in the mellon collection. his transcription gives the presentation date as “paris, 14me. mo. 22me. [i.e. nov. 22nd?] 1831” (602n3). he corrects the date to 22 april 1831 in the second edition (544 and n74), presumably on the authority of heath. 1. pen and ink inscription by opie in a copy of blake’s illustrations of the book of job (see enlargement). mead art museum, amherst college. ac 1983.44. gift of dr. and mrs. k. frank austen (class of 1950). photo: miloslava hruba. in the first edition of blake records (1969), g. e. bentley, jr., speculates that this copy is among those listed in the job accounts of john linnell. he notes with regard to an 1831 entry—​“1 copy plain to miss:—​—​ friend of mrs austin”—​that “[sarah austin’s] friend … may have been amelia opie (1769–​1853), the novelist, whom she had known from childhood. … this would explain reasonably how mrs. opie came into possession of a set of job at such an early period when she does not appear in the job accounts” (602n3). in the second edition (2004), he retains opie as the possible purchaser in his record of linnell’s general accounts for 1831 (793), but another candidate—​mrs. anna brownell jameson—​emerges in the discussion of the job accounts (803fn¶). while bentley draws a plausible connection between opie and this purchase, certain elements remain troubling: by 1831 “the celebrated mrs. opie” (our italics), as dr. chalmers and others called her,cecilia brightwell quotes the memoirs of dr. chalmers: “‘last of all, i must mention another lady, who dined and spent the night—​one who, in early life, was one of the most distinguished of our literary women, whose works, thirty years ago, i read with great delight—​no less a person than the celebrated mrs. opie, authoress of the most exquisite feminine tales, and for which i used to place her by the side of miss edgeworth’” (brightwell 304). the new monthly magazine (1826) notes that “the celebrated mrs. opie was a great favourite of dr. parr, who highly praised her pathetic tale of ‘the father and daughter,’ and delighted in her society” (167). was one of the best-known literary celebrities in britain and the widow of a key figure in the late eighteenth-century art world of london, and it seems unlikely that linnell would have noted “miss —​—​” as the ultimate recipient of the volume if sarah austin had identified her friend as amelia opie. nor is it entirely likely that opie would have sought anonymity in making the purchase—​she continued to cultivate her acquaintances in artistic circles even after she became a member of the society of friends in 1825. given these complications, it is worth reexamining the narrative of the copy given to david, especially in light of evidence emerging from renewed interest in opie’s life and works. in transcribing letters from the extensive opie correspondence held in the huntington library, we have located three references to her purchase of a work by blake as a gift for the french sculptor pierre-jean david d’angers (1788–​1856). they suggest that the artist henry perronet briggs (1793–​1844), her cousin, is a more likely candidate than her friend sarah austin for the role of her agent in this endeavor. although briggs does not appear in linnell’s ledger, according to the accounts copies of job were also available at select booksellers in london, offering an alternative means of acquiring the work. opie had met david, who had been awarded the cross of the légion d’honneur in 1825 and elected a member of the académie des beaux-arts the following year, on her visit to paris in 1829, and the two quickly became friends. she writes to her friend sarah rose describing her social circle, and after offering a detailed account of her meeting with lafayette, continues: my next hero is no general but a sculpteur libéral—​the first man of his class here; who before i saw him was desirous of making a medal of me for having made him cry his eyes out by my writing. malgré moi, he has made me en medaille, me and my petit bonnet which the artists here say looks like a phrygian helmet, and has un air classique; but though young and flattered, the thing is like and david satisfied. (24 july 1829) opie and david spent time together in paris, later entering into correspondence, and she subsequently sent him a gift with an accompanying poem, “to a prism sent from london to my friend david.” her choice was inspired by a glass ornament that she had previously been given by briggs, and a letter to eliza alderson (also a cousin, on her father’s side of the family, who would marry briggs the following year) expresses the pleasure it gave her: “tell henry briggs his prism is the delight of my eyes! & of all beholders! if david’s does as well, my end is fully answered” (13 november 1829). further letters confirm that opie also had a more substantial gift in mind for her friend. david had sent her a number of items as well as the medallion, and she was duly flattered by this homage. in early 1830 she writes to briggs: “i have had a very nice letter from david—​he detains the bust [of lafayette] to send me a model of his condé—​canst thou dear henry procure for me two, or three (if not very dear,) prints, or something of blake’s queer drawings or sketches? i used to see them & i want them much” (28 april 1830). eight months later she writes again to eliza, enumerating a long list of items that she would like sent to her in paris, reminding her, “i want something of blake’s if procurable,” but “if not, some print from a picture, or portrait of my husband’s that henry would chuse” (20 december 1830). opie’s familiarity with blake’s work is perhaps not unexpected, given both her radical connections as a young woman in the 1790s and her ties to london’s art world through her marriage to john opie (1761–​1807) in 1798. one likely site for viewing blake’s work would have been joseph johnson’s bookshop. keri davies argues persuasively in “mrs. bliss: a blake collector of 1794” that blake’s productions were displayed at the premises of the radical bookseller, quoting a letter dated 13 september 1794 in which richard twiss informs his correspondent, francis douce, that “you will see several more of blake’s books at johnsons in st ps. ch. yd.” (216). as the radically inclined miss alderson, opie is likely to have frequented the bookshop in the 1790s, when her friends william godwin and mary wollstonecraft were part of johnson’s circle. a letter to her friend susannah taylor of norwich confirms her interest in such booksellers and describes an encounter at the shop of daniel isaac eaton: “a very genteel looking young man came in—​he examined us and we him, and suspicion being the order of the day, i dared not talk to mrs. eaton, till the stranger was engaged in conversation with boddington—​i then told her that curiosity led me to her shop, and that i came from that city of sedition, norwich” ([26 august] 1794). the stranger, who later engages them in conversation, reveals himself to be charles sinclair, one of a group of scottish and english radicals who had been charged with sedition.one of five charged with sedition in late 1793, sinclair subsequently emerged as a controversial figure. a december 1794 letter from godwin to sinclair outlines john horne tooke’s reasons—​accepted by godwin—​for believing sinclair had betrayed his colleagues. modern historians remain divided, some accepting the accusation that he turned king’s evidence against his colleagues, while others regard him as a steadfast supporter of the jacobin cause. jon mee, print, publicity, and popular radicalism in the 1790s (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2016) discusses the bookshop episode (58-59) and sinclair’s politics (96). the young woman who so eagerly made herself at home in eaton’s shop—​“at last we became so fraternized, that mrs. eaton shut the shop door, and gave us chairs”—​and who was close friends with godwin and wollstonecraft would surely have visited johnson’s shop as well. opie’s own ties to twiss could have provided an avenue through which she “used to see” “blake’s queer drawings or sketches.” in 1804 she wrote to samuel pratt, who had solicited contributions for a benefit, explaining her financial circumstances: but most of what i am able to spare from my own wants to those of others, i have already given to some dear friends of my infancy, who have been latterly reduced from opulence to beggary—​amongst these is mr. twiss, the traveler, who is at this time soliciting subscriptions to a quarto volume which he is going to publishpresumably the two-volume miscellanies, published in 1805. & who has claimed and received all the little assistance which my exertions amongst my acquaintance have been able to procure for him. (4 june 1804) as his letter to douce indicates, twiss had an awareness of blake and was a link to early collectors of blake’s works, and it is not unreasonable to imagine him sharing this interest with opie. another potential means of seeing blake’s designs came through her nine-year marriage to john opie, a noted creator of both history paintings and portraits. elected an associate member of the royal academy in 1786 and a full member the following year, he promoted art as a public good, advocating in 1800 for the creation of a national gallery; he also delivered the royal academy lectures on painting in 1806.in the memoir published in lectures on painting … by the late john opie (1809), amelia opie writes, “he next published a letter in a daily paper [the true briton] (since re-published in ‘an inquiry into the requisite cultivation of the arts of design in england,’) in which he proposed a distinct plan for the formation of a national gallery …” (66). by 1799, the year following his marriage, john opie would have been aware of blake’s work as an engraver, as boydell commissioned blake to produce a new engraving of opie’s painting of romeo and juliet act 4, scene 5.see chandler 78n14. this plate, dated 25 march 1799 in the imprint, was published in boydell’s the dramatic works of shakspeare (1802) and in boydell’s graphic illustrations of the dramatic works, of shakspeare (c. 1803). in addition, as bentley notes in william blake: the critical heritage, “the blake designs best known to his contemporaries were those etched by louis schiavonetti for robert blair’s the grave” (109), and in 1805 john opie was one of the distinguished subscribers and patrons listed by cromek in the prospectuses for that volume. finally, as the wife of an academician, amelia opie would have attended the annual royal academy exhibitions, at which she might have encountered blake’s work. amelia opie was also a correspondent and friend of william hayley for a number of years. she quoted from hayley’s the triumphs of temper in her novel temper, or domestic scenes (1812): flattered, hayley reciprocated by revising the reading of serena, his heroine, in subsequent editions of the poem to include opie’s novel. their correspondence until hayley’s death in 1820 abounds with expressions of affection—​he is her “caro padre” and she is his “carissima figlia.” although there is no mention of blake in the letters, opie did visit hayley in 1814 and could well have seen works by blake. whatever the source(s) of her awareness of blake’s artistry, by 1830 she has a vivid memory of his works. though she characterizes them as “queer drawings or sketches,” she clearly regards them as suitable gifts for a valued artist friend and places them ahead of a more personal gift of a print based on her husband’s work. job makes its next appearance in opie’s correspondence the following year, when she is in paris. on 18 april 1831 she writes again to her cousin eliza, wife of henry briggs, “the job for david is not arrived! tho’ i am told it left london on the 1st. if henry or tom or someone could call at baldwin’s & craddock, paternoster row, to enquire concerning it they would greatly oblige me. it is too precious to be lost.” invoking the aid of briggs and another cousin, tom alderson, in tracing the shipment suggests that they might also have been her agents in the purchase. baldwin, cradock, and joy had previously been associated with two works for which blake was an engraver, and as a prominent british publishing house had international connections for distribution.they were among the publishers of abraham rees’s cyclopædia; or, universal dictionary of arts, sciences, and literature (1820), for which blake produced designs and engraved seven plates (see butlin 1: 488-89 for an account of the drawings). two years later they published the works of william hogarth, from the original plates restored by james heath … with the addition of many subjects not before collected: to which are prefixed, a biographical essay on the genius and productions of hogarth, and explanations of the subjects of the plates, by john nichols …, which included one plate engraved by blake. the letter concludes happily, with news of the arrival of blake’s work: in a sentence partially obscured by the seal opie writes, “from what i hear job is arrived at galignani’s.” galignani’s was reputed to be the oldest english-language bookstore in europe, and its reading rooms were a gathering place for english tourists: “in 1801, at 18 rue vivienne, between the palais royale which was crowded with booksellers and the théâtre feydeau, [giovanni antonio galignani] opened a bookshop and a reading-room specialized in english books.” he also established a courier service ensuring that the “english daily press arrived at nine o’clock every morning” (cooper-richet and borgeaud), which could have provided a convenient means of transporting the copy of job from london to paris. we know that opie left paris for rouen by 10 may (letter to eliza briggs, 9 may 1831), so her imminent departure provides some explanation for the urgency of her letter to eliza. as the inscription records, she presented blake’s job to david on 22 april 1831, within a week of its arrival on 18 april and just prior to her departure from the city. the work is also inscribed “j’ai acheté ce livre à la vente de feu david le statuaire. h. de t. 1856” and bears the bookplate of h. de triqueti (see illus. 2-3). henri, baron de triqueti (1803–​74), was a sculptor and a contemporary of david; his inscription presumably records a sale that took place following david’s death in january 1856. both triqueti and the architect ambrose poynter (1796–​1886), father of the painter and designer sir edward j. poynter (1836–​1919), had married granddaughters of the british sculptor thomas banks, the sisters julia and emma forster. the younger poynter, whose bookplate appears below triqueti’s (illus. 3), was director of the national gallery from 1894 to 1904 and president of the royal academy from 1896 to 1918. the copy next appears in an anderson galleries catalogue of may 1920, purchases in london and paris of the late george d. smith sold by order of his estate (lot 743, p. 95).smith, a noted new york rare books dealer who worked closely with henry huntington from 1911, died in march 1920 (thorpe 442). heath supplements the account of the provenance: “a further inscription indicates that the volume was subsequently purchased (in 1957) from the e. weyhe gallery in new york city. dr. and mrs. k. frank austen ’50 presented it to [amherst] college in 1983” (59).according to the inscription, dr. austen’s father, noted aeronautical engineer and collector dr. karl arnstein (1887–​1974), “acquired this through weyhe gallery … and akron art institute july 10th 1957 for $400” (see illus. 2). 2. pen and ink inscription by triqueti (beneath opie’s, shown in illus. 1), and pencil inscriptions recording the acquisition of the work by arnstein and then austen (see enlargement). mead art museum, amherst college. ac 1983.44. gift of dr. and mrs. k. frank austen (class of 1950). photo: miloslava hruba. 3. bookplates of triqueti, poynter, and austen (see enlargement). mead art museum, amherst college. ac 1983.44. gift of dr. and mrs. k. frank austen (class of 1950). photo: miloslava hruba. thus for almost a century this copy of blake’s job retained its strong connection with artists: it was purchased by a celebrated author (the widow of an equally celebrated british artist), who enlisted the aid of a cousin who was also a painter, to present as a gift to a leading french sculptor; it was subsequently purchased by another well-regarded sculptor, then acquired by a painter and designer who would become director of the national gallery. four decades after his death it entered the hands of private art collectors before coming to rest in the mead art museum in 1983. amelia opie’s connection with david extended many years after she presented him with blake’s job. they remained in correspondence, with letters from 1836 and 1845 suggesting ongoing conversations regarding subjects of mutual concern. opie also continued to express keen interest in the world of british art. she was delighted when briggs was elected a full member of the royal academy in 1832, and her correspondence with him often touched on gossip from the world of painting. she also traveled to london to attend the annual royal academy exhibitions for many years. as opie’s correspondence illustrates and the inscriptions and bookplates found in this copy of job confirm, blake’s works were highly valued by this group of writers and artists, who formed a complex social and commercial network in the nineteenth century. bibliography bentley, g. e., jr. blake records. oxford: clarendon press, 1969. —​—​—​. blake records. 2nd ed. new haven: yale university press, 2004. —​—​—​, ed. william blake: the critical heritage. london: routledge, 1975. brightwell, cecilia lucy. memorials of the life of amelia opie, selected and arranged from her letters, diaries, and other manuscripts. norwich: fletcher and alexander; london: longman, brown, & co., 1854. butlin, martin. the paintings and drawings of william blake. 2 vols. new haven: yale university press, 1981. chandler, eric v. “the anxiety of production: blake’s shift from collective hope to writing self.” blake, politics, and history. ed. jackie disalvo, g. a. rosso, and christopher z. hobson. 1998. abingdon: routledge, 2016. 53-79. cooper-richet, diana, and emily borgeaud, with an english version by iain watson. galignani. [paris]: librairie galignani, 1999. <http://​iframe.​galignani.​com/​assets/​livre_​galignani.​pdf>. davies, keri. “mrs. bliss: a blake collector of 1794.” blake in the nineties. ed. steve clark and david worrall. basingstoke: macmillan, 1999. 212-30. farrant, ann. amelia opie: the quaker celebrity. hindringham: jjg publishing, 2014. heath, william w. “william blake’s book of job.” british art. ed. frank trapp. amherst: mead art museum monographs, 1986. 58-59. opie, amelia. letter, amelia alderson [opie] to susannah taylor. [26 august] 1794. the correspondence of amelia alderson opie: a digital archive. ed. roxanne eberle. <http://​ameliaopieletters.​com/​aostletters/​aost1.​html​#note4>. —​—​—​. letter, amelia opie to samuel pratt. 4 june 1804. the amelia alderson opie archive. ed. shelley king and john b. pierce. <https://​ameliaopiearchive.​com/​miscellaneous-​letters-​king-​pierce/​amelia-​opie-​to-​pratt-​4-​june-​1804>. —​—​—​. letter, amelia opie to sarah rose. 24 july 1829. amelia alderson opie correspondence, 1794–​1854. huntington library, art museum, and botanical gardens. —​—​—​. letter, amelia opie to eliza alderson. 13 november 1829. amelia alderson opie correspondence, 1794–​1854. huntington library, art museum, and botanical gardens. —​—​—​. letter, amelia opie to h. p. briggs. 28 april 1830. amelia alderson opie correspondence, 1794–​1854. huntington library, art museum, and botanical gardens. —​—​—​. letter, amelia opie to eliza briggs, 20 december 1830. amelia alderson opie correspondence, 1794–​1854. huntington library, art museum, and botanical gardens. —​—​—​. letter, amelia opie to eliza briggs, 18 april 1831. amelia alderson opie correspondence, 1794–​1854. huntington library, art museum, and botanical gardens. —​—​—​. letter, amelia opie to eliza briggs, 9 may 1831. amelia alderson opie correspondence, 1794–​1854. huntington library, art museum, and botanical gardens. —​—​—​. “to prince hoare, esq.” lectures on painting … by the late john opie, esq. professor in painting to the royal academy. to which are prefixed, a memoir by mrs. opie, and other accounts of mr. opie’s talents and character. london: longman, hurst, rees and orme, 1809. 1-54. purchases in london and paris of the late george d. smith [part one]. new york: anderson galleries, 1920. <https://​archive.​org/​details/​bub_​gb_​zfhqaaaamaaj/​page/​n111/​mode/​2up>. “recollections of dr. parr, by a pupil—​no. ii.” new monthly magazine and literary journal vol. 17, no. 68 (august 1826): 165-72. thompson, lawrance. “the boydell shakspeare: an english monument to graphic arts.” princeton university library chronicle 1.2 (february 1940): 17-24. thorpe, james. henry edwards huntington: a biography. berkeley: university of california press, 1994. portuguese readings of william blake: fernando pessoa, a national poet, and três tristes tigres, a pop-rock band portuguese readings of william blake: fernando pessoa, a national poet, and três tristes tigres, a pop-rock band by alcinda pinheiro de sousa, cláudia franco souza, and joão carlos callixto alcinda pinheiro de sousa (alcindapinheiro@netcabo.pt) is a researcher at ulices (university of lisbon centre for english studies). she was an associate professor of english literature at the university of lisbon, school of arts and humanities. she received her doctoral degree from the university of lisbon, with a dissertation entitled “‘as the eye—​such the object’: da arte e da ciência em [on art and science in] william blake.” for the reception of william blake in europe (2019), she coauthored the chapter “‘enough! or too much’: the reception of blake in portugal.” in december 2020, she was a keynote speaker at the virtual conference from manuscript to digital: worldwide english literature and worldwide literatures in english (universidad de jaén, spain), where she presented “urizen now: a preliminary rereading of blake’s reading of our world”; she has also spoken on “john keats: o ‘poeta sensuoso’ de fernando pessoa [fernando pessoa’s ‘sensuous poet’]” at john keats 200 (biblioteca nacional de portugal, may 2021) and “visual blake in brazil: in memoriam donald ault” at the virtual conference global blake: afterlives in art, literature, and music (university of lincoln/​bishop grosseteste university, uk, january 2022). cláudia franco souza (claudiasouzzza@hotmail.com) is a researcher at cful (centre of philosophy of the university of lisbon), specializing in the pessoa archive. she was awarded her doctoral degree from the pontifical university of minas gerais, brazil, for which she submitted the dissertation “ciências do psiquismo humano, política e criação literária no espólio de fernando pessoa (1905–​1914)” (“sciences of the human psyche, politics, and literary creation in fernando pessoa’s archive [1905–​1914]”). her book fernando pessoa e os romantismos: inglês, francês, português e alemão (fernando pessoa and romanticism: english, french, portuguese, and german) appeared in 2019, and she has coedited pessoa’s história da literatura inglesa (history of english literature) (2021), as well as two other volumes of his works, the transformation book—​or book of tasks (2014) and writings on art and poetical theory (2022), both published in the us. joão carlos callixto (joaocarloscallixto@gmail.com) is a researcher at ulices (university of lisbon centre for english studies) and an author of programs for rtp (portuguese radio and television). he has a postgraduate degree in archive sciences and is currently doing his phd on the musical reception of william blake. a collaborator on magazines on music and literature since 1996, he has written books on music and notes for the rereleases of many historical portuguese records. some of his most recent publications are canta, amigo, canta—​nova canção portuguesa (1960–​1974) (sing, friend, sing—​new portuguese song [1960–​1974]) (2014); portugal 12 pts—​festival da canção (portugal 12 pts—​song festival) (2018); and festival rtp da canção—​1964–​2018 (portuguese song festival—​1964–​2018) (3 vols., 2018), the last two coauthored. in his radio and tv programs on music, he has privileged subjects such as memory, history, and the relations between music and literature, with special programs about fernando pessoa (2019) and amália rodrigues (2021). he coauthored the chapter about the portuguese reception of blake in the reception of william blake in europe (2019). in a post published 1 april 2020this article is financed by portuguese funds through the fct (foundation for science and technology), i.p., under the projects uidb/00114/2020 and uidp/00114/2020. we wish to acknowledge the assistance of ana deus, morris eaves, sibylle erle, regina guimarães, sarah jones, morton d. paley, nuno ribeiro, alexandre soares, and jason whittaker. on his personal blog, john mcgowan declared that “[a] student learns how to ‘do’ close reading by immersion in various examples of the practice, not by learning a set of rules or ‘a’ method.” in the present case, we are indeed bringing to the fore two radically different, although both inspired and inspiring, examples of readings of william blake’s poetry and poetic principles, one by fernando pessoa and the other by três tristes tigres (three sad tigers).the rhythm and linguistic play of the tongue-twisting name are thus lost in translation. all translations are ours, unless otherwise attributed. pessoa (1888–​1935) is the modernist writer now acclaimed, in both elite and popular cultural circles, as portugal’s twentieth-century national poet; aware of blake since at least 1903–​04, he openly acknowledged his influence c. 1915: “in my intellectual ancestry i find blake and walt whitman.”for the quoted acknowledgment of blake’s influence, see illus. 1. for pessoa’s first reference to blake (not discussed until now, as far as we know), see illus. 2. três tristes tigres is a portuguese pop-rock band from the 1990s, currently comprising the singer ana deus, the guitar player alexandre soares, and the poet regina guimarães; almost twenty years after their first albums (1993–​98), the group released mínima luz (minimum light, 2020), which includes the track “tigre,” the first musical adaptation of a poem by blake to be sung in a portuguese translation. “in my intellectual ancestry i find blake and walt whitman” fernando pessoa (c. 1915) 1. fernando pessoa, “rascunho de uma carta escrita a marinetti” (“draft of a letter written to marinetti”), lisbon, c. 1915 (see enlargement). biblioteca nacional de portugal. bnp e3/21-123v-122v.key to references in the pessoa archive: bnp: biblioteca nacional de portugal (national library of portugal) e3: espólio 3—​espólio de fernando pessoa (archive 3—​pessoa archive) arabic numerals: folder and document numbers in the pessoa archive r: recto v: verso it is published in pessoa, sensacionismo e outros ismos 377. the acknowledgment of blake’s influence reads, in french, “dans mon ascendance intellectuelle je trouve blake et walt whitman” (left side, bottom third, seventh to fifth lines from the end). pessoa may have sent a letter to marinetti, for there is a second in the pessoa archive (bnp e3/19-35-37) in which he thanks marinetti for having sent him some futurist manifestos; this seems to imply that marinetti had responded to an earlier letter. the second letter is published in pessoa, páginas de estética e de teoria e crítica literárias 164-69 and in the arquivo fernando pessoa in modern!smo—​arquivo virtual da geração de orpheu, <https://​modernismo.​pt/​index.​php/​arquivo-​fernando-​pessoa/​details/​33/​2474>. we thank nuno ribeiro for calling our attention to it (personal communication, 25 july 2020). as already noted, pessoa is portugal’s twentieth-century national poet, a position to which he was elevated through a highly successful process of canonization, which is clearly elucidated by darlene j. sadlier’s “text versus work: constructing and deconstructing a national poet”: “after his death he became a symbol of the nation’s culture, and his authorship conferred a kind of dignity on the salazar regime. … he was studied in schools, and he was somehow linked to the identity of the nation itself” (127). this is certainly not unrelated to the appearance of mensagem (message) in 1934, the first and only book of poetry in portuguese he ever published. implicitly concurring with these explanations, but refining them, irene ramalho santos argues: “of course, mensagem, by its conception, structure, thematics, and major source of imagery, is also a nationalistic poem” (41).the typescript of mensagem can be read in the biblioteca nacional digital, <http://​purl.​pt/​13965/​1>. pessoa himself agrees, in a letter to adolfo casais monteiro dated 13 january 1935 and known as “carta sobre a génese dos heterónimos” (“letter on the genesis of the heteronyms”) (bnp e3/72-31r-38r), that mensagem manifests his nationalism, although he classifies it as a facet of his personality that is “em certo modo secundária” (“somewhat secondary”). the letter is published in pessoa, correspondência 1923–​1935 337-48; pessoa, selected prose 251-61; and in the arquivo fernando pessoa in modern!smo—​arquivo virtual da geração de orpheu, <https://​modernismo.​pt/​index.​php/​arquivo-​fernando-​pessoa/​details/​33/​2245>. sadlier’s analysis of pessoa’s long, intricate process of canonization is an indispensable prerequisite to further inquiries into the reasons why the strong influence of the english romantics—​and of blake in a particularly labyrinthine manner—​was not a main focus of pessoan criticism until the turn of the twenty-first century. in fact, after the 25 april 1974 military coup (popularly known as the carnation revolution), which at last overthrew the salazar-caetano dictatorial regime estado novo (new state, 1933–​74), the context of pessoa’s reception radically changed. sadlier emphasizes that, in 1980, when “portugal celebrated the four hundredth anniversary of … the death of camões [the author of os lusíadas (the lusiads)] … , the postrevolutionary government was disinclined to adopt the poet of the empire as its literary symbol.” but “pessoa … was a modern writer who could represent a new leadership and its hope to transform portugal. one sign of pessoa’s importance to the government was the establishment of a center for pessoa studies in oporto shortly after the revolution.” moreover, the center began producing a journal, persona (1977–​85), which “became an important source of postrevolutionary scholarship on the poet,” initiating “the full-scale academic industry that exists today” (128). we would qualify sadlier’s conclusions by saying that the foundation of centro de estudos pessoanos at the university of porto (opening on 26 april 1976, the day after the elections for the first post-1974 democratic parliament) was certainly not a top priority of portugal’s sixth provisional government, which was dealing with a huge economic, social, and political crisis; it was undeniably one of the feats of a new generation of academics, along with those not so young professors who had been expelled from the universities for political reasons and were then resuming their academic careers. in this case, it was mainly the achievement of arnaldo saraiva, among others, as can be inferred from his very brief history of the center, which he read on its opening day and is now included in the facsimile edition (2019) of its journal.it should be noted that margarida l. losa had already (1975) published, in english, “fernando pessoa, the saudosista,” where she addresses the question of the poet’s political ideas, concluding: “pessoa … is … in his political prose writings usually closer to a mild conservative stand” (204). 2 santos’s atlantic poets starts with the premise that “pessoa has now [2003] been ‘discovered’ by english-speaking readers as one of the finest poets of western modernism”; michael hamburger’s the truth of poetry (1969) is aptly referred to in her study as a “path-breaking critical interpretation” of pessoa (3). in fact, the tradition that pessoa wrote in and built on was that of modern poetry, its modernity consisting, from hamburger’s perspective, in “an international phenomenon” (hamburger vii) fathered by baudelaire, “the prototype of the modern poet whose vision is at once sharpened and limited by a high degree of critical self-awareness” (hamburger 1). this “critical self-awareness” is further illuminated: “the ‘self’ written about becomes no more than a multiplicity of alternatives, possibilities and potentialities,” the conclusion being that after the end of the romantic period, “a poet’s self was what he chose to make it, his identity to be found only in the bodies that he chose to fill” (50). in the case of pessoa, the end of hamburger’s statement should be rephrased: the poet’s identity is to be found only in the bodies that he chose to engender—​that is, in his heteronyms, which are characterized by anna m. klobucka and mark sabine as “fully developed dramatis personae”—​alberto caeiro, álvaro de campos, and ricardo reis—​“realized textually as existentially independent individuals, with biographic trajectories and interpersonal relationships of their own” (3-4). a study of the type of modernity defined by hamburger would benefit from a comparative analysis of, on the one hand, blake’s well-known description of how he had written a “long poem” (milton, but maybe jerusalem, or even the four zoas)—​“i have written this poem from immediate dictation twelve or sometimes twenty or thirty lines at a time without premeditation & even against my will” (letter to thomas butts, 25 apr. 1803, e 728-29)—​and, on the other hand, pessoa’s explanation in “aspectos” (“aspects”), from about a century later (c. 1918), of the authors he would later call his heteronyms: “nem esta obra, nem as que se lhe seguirão têm nada que ver com quem as escreve. ele nem concorda com o que nelas vai escrito, nem discorda. como se lhe fosse ditado, escreve” (bnp e3/20-70r-71r-72r; pessoa, livro do desasocego 449) (“neither this work nor those to follow have anything to do with the man who writes them. he doesn’t agree or disagree with what’s in them. he writes as if he were being dictated to”; translation from pessoa, selected prose 2). since the publication of atlantic poets in 2003, it has indeed become less and less difficult for english-speaking readers to discover pessoa. in 2015, an issue of portuguese literary & cultural studies devoted to him was introduced by joão cezar de castro rocha, the editor-in-chief of the journal: the title of this issue [“fernando pessoa as english reader and writer”] … may intrigue the reader. does it mean that patricio ferrari and jerónimo pizarro [the guest editors] are concerned mainly with the reception of the portuguese author in english-speaking countries? does it convey the importance of literature written in english in fernando pessoa’s own works? does the title stress the overlapping of reading and writing as a key element in understanding the fascination provoked by pessoa’s … literature? (xi) it could be said that the title conveys all three meanings interrelatedly, the second and third being the ones privileged in our essay. plus, the guest editors themselves classify that issue as “the first publication devoted exclusively to pessoa as an english reader and writer” (ferrari and pizarro 4). “inside the mask: the english poetry of fernando pessoa,” the fall 2016 special issue of pessoa plural: a journal of fernando pessoa studies, was “conceived and organized” in the “pioneering spirit” of the october 1977 brown university international symposium on fernando pessoa and of george monteiro’s “ground breaking fernando pessoa and nineteenth-century anglo-american literature (2000)” (ferrari 1-2).monteiro had already edited the man who never was (1982), a collection of essays presented at the 1977 symposium. in fernando pessoa and nineteenth-century anglo-american literature, he refers to maria da encarnação monteiro, incidências inglesas na poesia de fernando pessoa (1956) as a “pioneering study” (67). in 2020, jerónimo pizarro published fernando pessoa: a critical introduction, in which he sums up his own reading of the portuguese writer: i believe fernando pessoa was and was not one, no one and a hundred thousand. i think that, historically, he was a man who was born in 1888 and died in 1935, and in this period of time he lived many lives; and i think that, literarily, he was one and no one, because he chose to lessen his identity as an author, in order to assume the ones of his characters; and i believe that posthumously he is now one hundred thousand, and maybe millions or hundreds of millions if we take into account, particularly, his massive dimension and presence on the internet. (9) jonardon ganeri’s virtual subjects, fugitive selves: fernando pessoa and his philosophy was published in 2020 and deals with what hamburger had termed the type of modernity built, from romanticism through modernism, by various poets’ critical self-awareness. we can thus be sure that pessoa, a “forgotten voice in twentieth-century modernism,” to quote ganeri’s hyperbolic formula, is “now finally taking his rightful place alongside giants such as c. p. cavafy [sic], franz kafka, t. s. eliot, james joyce, and jorge luis borges (ganeri vii). what seems to be currently emerging as a priority is the need for a systematic historical analysis of the unfolding cornucopia of pessoan studies, in both portuguese and english, along with a series of specific analyses of the network of interconnected influences on pessoa. although much needed, these analyses are still arduous tasks, since his writings in the espólio pessoa, housed in the biblioteca nacional de portugal since 1979, still have to be fully collected, transcribed, dated, contextualized, and translated. 3 in any case, back in 2003, santos agreed that there was still much to explore and to discover: “substantial pessoan scholarship and critical interpretation in english are not yet abundant” (1). therefore, her first purpose was “to shed new light on pessoa’s poetry and poetics by placing them in the context of the anglo-american tradition, with which they have so many affinities, and thus reconfirm his place in the broader context of western modernism” (3). our purpose here has to be much more limited. we are not dealing with the affinities between pessoa’s poetry and english romanticism in general, but focusing upon a single example of how he proved to be a superbly inspired reader of blake, and of how his readings may work as a kind of key to both the english artist’s complex composite creations and the exquisite world of “multiple personality and self-division” (hamburger 138) that pessoa himself progressively constructed. it has long been recognized that pessoa was strongly influenced by “the elizabethans and the romantics he so much admired,” as emphasized in monteiro’s fernando pessoa and nineteenth-century anglo-american literature (45), which opens with a chapter on wordsworth, followed by one on gray and keats, and a third dealing with byron; we find blake’s name merely in a note to the introduction, as the first on a list of poets also deemed advisable to study: “other nineteenth-century writers who particularly interested pessoa and are therefore deserving of close study include blake, coleridge, shelley …” (149n23).  although pizarro’s fernando pessoa: a critical introduction provides us with particularly suggestive clues as to why pessoa chose to confront blake’s influence, blake is likewise referred to only twice, in both cases in quotations from pessoa himself. first, in “the keeper of sheep: a great portuguese book of poems,” a text written in english on alberto caeiro as a perfect representative of “modern portuguese poetry”—​caeiro being pessoa’s heteronym and the author of o guardador de rebanhos (the keeper of sheep)—​pessoa says: “he [caeiro] belongs to a species of poet of which there are only some examples, such as blake, whitman, francis jammes. but, though possibly he cannot be set besides [sic] the first of these—​we have, however, no right to compare his one book to blake’s total work—​he certainly possesses the quality of being, though of other species, remarkable too in the shaping of his poetry” (pizarro 151, 152). secondly, blake is pointed out by pessoa in a letter to an english editor (1916) with respect to the definition of the portuguese contemporary literary movement known as saudosismo: “if you can conceive a william blake put into the soul of shelley and writing through that, you will perhaps have a nearer idea of what i mean [by saudosismo]” (pizarro 180n17).santos discusses “saudade” (the noun from which the adjective “saudoso” and the noun “saudosismo” derive) in connection with her reading of pessoa’s mensagem, mentioning “its language of unresolved paradoxes, sorrowful tones, and backward-looking nostalgia for the past and forward-looking desire for the future (the feeling best expressed in one word by the portuguese saudade) …” (106). in fact, the systematic, detailed study or interrelated studies of the interactions between pessoa and blake still remain to be done, in spite of an attempt by patrícia oliveira silva in “fernando pessoa’s the mad fiddler: sensationism in english,” whose abstract reads: “particular attention is paid to the impact of romantic poets from the pantheist lineage of shelley and blake on pessoa’s emergent poetics and poetry, as well as to the hitherto little-known details of his reception of blake’s poetry mediated through yeats” (89). she had previously (publishing as mcneill, 2010) made some references to blake in her yeats and pessoa: parallel poetic styles, but she could not have expanded, in either of these works, the study of the extremely complex literary relationships among the triad pessoa, yeats, and blake, which have yet to be fully detected, organized, and described. the decisive role played by yeats in pessoa’s reception of blake should be neither ignored nor overestimated.pessoa owned poems of william blake, edited by yeats (n.d. [1905]), <https://​bibliotecaparticular.​casafernandopessoa.​pt/​8-44>, and the letters of william blake together with a life by frederick tatham (1906), <https://​bibliotecaparticular.​casafernandopessoa.​pt/​8-43>. both volumes have been fully digitized as part of the biblioteca particular de fernando pessoa (fernando pessoa private library) and can be accessed online and on site at the casa fernando pessoa in lisbon. english books or books translated into english are preponderant in his private library. 4 fernando pessoa e os romantismos: inglês, francês, português e alemão (fernando pessoa and romanticism: english, french, portuguese, and german, 2019) is cláudia franco souza’s collection of diverse bibliographic specimens that document the strong english romantic literary influence, among others, on pessoa since the formative years he spent in durban. classified by hamburger as a transplanté (138-39), he sailed from lisbon with his mother in january 1896, at the age of seven, to join his stepfather, the portuguese consul in durban, a major town in natal. natal remained a british colony until 1910, when the union of south africa was established. with the interruption of about a year, from august 1901 to september 1902 (owing to his family’s stay in portugal on extended leave), pessoa lived and studied in durban until august 1905, when he returned to lisbon, never to leave his native country again—​a flâneur strolling through his own hometown, his mythical lisbon. during the durban years (from ages seven to seventeen), he acquired a perfect command of english language and literature. the extreme complexity and originality of his linguistic and cultural identity are analyzed in hubert jennings, fernando pessoa, the poet with many faces: a biography and anthology, written in the early 1970s and finally published in 2019. jennings records that pessoa was first enrolled in “the convent school of st. joseph’s,” where he stayed for “three years under the gentle irish nuns,” and afterwards transferred to “durban high school (dhs) … a large school for those days, having some two hundred boys ranging in age from 9 to 20” (41). at dhs, he was taught by “young graduates from oxford or cambridge” (43). in 1903, he received the “newly instituted … queen victoria memorial prize,” given for the best english essay, his being on the victorian historian and politician thomas babington macaulay; the fifteen-year-old pessoa, “who during the year had drawn up several lists of ‘books wanted’ with careful calculations of their costs, was now granted the princely sum (to him) of £7 to purchase books of his own choice. he chose keats, tennyson, ben jonson, and edgar allan poe” (47-48).on the importance of jennings’s contribution to pessoan studies, carlos pittella, guest editor of the 2015 special jennings issue of pessoa plural, declares: jennings was born in england in 1896 …. in 1923, [he] moved to south africa, where he worked as a teacher at the durban high school (dhs), the same institution where the young pessoa had studied while in south africa. when jennings was invited to write the history of the dhs, he became interested in the famous portuguese poet who had attended the school between 1899 and 1904. … jennings became one of the first biographers of fernando pessoa and one of the first scholars to be interested in both pessoa’s english and portuguese poetry …. (2-3) those lists included, most probably, the one with his first reference to blake (illus. 2). 2. fernando pessoa, “lista de livros para ler ou adquirir” (“list of books to read or buy”), included in “caderno de notas de fernando pessoa” (“fernando pessoa’s notebook”), datable to 1903–​04 (see enlargement). biblioteca nacional de portugal. bnp e3/153-42v. it is published in pessoa, fernando pessoa e os romantismos 64 and in the biblioteca nacional digital, <http://​purl.​pt/​13901/​1/​p102.​html>. this is a list of poets in the aldine edition of the british poets, which includes the poetical works of william blake, lyrical and miscellaneous, ed. william michael rossetti (1874; 3rd ed., 1880). fernando pessoa e os romantismos collects, for the first time, the very large number of complete and incomplete manuscripts, typescripts, and printed documents—​lists of books to read or buy, reading notes from notebooks, literary and theoretical fragments, letters, and published articles—​produced by the writer with reference to romanticism and found by souza after a thorough investigation in the espólio pessoa, supplemented by her research in the biblioteca particular de fernando pessoa, in hemeroteca digital (digital newspaper and magazine archive), and in other bibliographical resources stored in the biblioteca nacional de portugal. the documents prove beyond any doubt that pessoa’s knowledge and understanding of romanticism in general, and particularly of english romanticism, were remarkably extensive and deep. souza’s book is organized around six topics; under the title of the first, “o romantismo inglês,” the documents are arranged around the names of the six canonical english male poets, with nineteen on blake, compared with nine on wordsworth, eight on coleridge, thirty on shelley, fourteen on byron, and eight on keats. from the documents relating to blake, we have selected no. 17 (fernando pessoa e os romantismos 80-81) and, from its first page (illus. 3), a most representative passage of pessoa’s ingenious, well-informed, theoretical, and critical readings of blake. 3. fernando pessoa, “elementos da nova poesia portuguesa” (“elements of the new portuguese poetry”), lisbon, c. 1912 (see enlargement). biblioteca nacional de portugal. bnp e3/103-47. it is published in the arquivo fernando pessoa in modern!smo—​arquivo virtual da geração de orpheu, <https://​modernismo.​pt/​index.​php/​arquivo-​fernando-​pessoa/​details/​33/​2324>. the document is a manuscript consisting of two pages, titled by pessoa “elementos da nova poesia portuguesa” (“elements of the new portuguese poetry”). the well-known difficulties encountered by any editor of pessoa are explained by richard zenith in his “notes on the selection, editing, and translation” of his edition of pessoa’s poems: “the majority of pessoa’s unpublished writings (and he published relatively little) was left in an unfinished state”; his work was of a “rough and fragmentary nature,” and “the handwriting on the manuscripts sometimes verges on the hieroglyphic” (a little larger than the entire universe xli-xlii). confirming beyond any doubt zenith’s characterization, “elementos da nova poesia portuguesa” is a preparatory note for “a nova poesia portuguesa” (“the new portuguese poetry”), a “three-part essay” published in 1912 in a águia (the eagle), which had become “the official journal of renascença portuguesa [portuguese renaissance], a literary association then just founded in oporto” (santos 35). it should be added that as the economic, social, cultural, and political crises had been accumulating in portugal in the late-nineteenth to early twentieth century, the idea had been germinating in the country that a sorely needed change and renaissance had to be brought to it. this culminated in the assassination of king carlos i and his son and heir apparent, prince luís filipe, in 1908, and the fall of the constitutional monarchy and the proclamation of the first portuguese republic in 1910. in this situation, the poet teixeira de pascoaes (1877–​1952) “believed he was destined to become the philosopher-leader of the cultural reformation of the portuguese republic” and was the “main inspirer and spiritual mentor” of the literary association renascença portuguesa; as to pessoa, he too “must have felt the urgency to intervene in the renewal of portuguese letters” (santos 35) when, in 1912, he decided to publish “a nova poesia portuguesa” in a águia. although they are neither quoted nor referred to in the published essay, blake’s poems and poetics—​specifically the marriage of heaven and hell—​constitute an obvious influence on “a nova poesia portuguesa,” as a comparative analysis of the published version and its preparatory note, “elementos da nova poesia portuguesa,” attests. at present, we will ponder only a brief, indicative passage from the preparatory note: a matéria é como que a definição do espírito, mas é espírito: precisamente como o gelo é a definição da água, mas é água. é precisamente, inteiramente assim. compreender de modo material é compreender de modo baixamente espiritual. a maravilhosa intuição de william blake: “o corpo é a parte da alma que os sentidos □” é quase □, é mesmo a característica da □ de que william blake (spiritualist). a matéria é espírito visto irreal. a compreensão material é a espiritual ainda em nebulosa.italics indicate underlined phrases, and □ a blank space in a phrase. the note is badly scrambled, a new problem to add to zenith’s list of difficulties with which editors have to deal. we propose the following translation: matter is a sort of definition of spirit, but it is spirit: just like ice is the definition of water, but it is water. it is precisely, entirely so. to understand in a material manner is to understand in a low spiritual manner. the wonderful intuition of william blake: “the body is the portion of the soul that the senses □” it is almost □, it is the very characteristic of the □ about which william blake (spiritualist). the matter is spirit seen as unreal. material understanding is spiritual understanding, but still in nebulous form. in this excerpt pessoa is beginning to develop his definition of the central characteristic of the new poetry that, in his view, was already breaking forth in portugal—​an original, accomplished form of interrelating the two contrary manners of understanding the world around us, the material and the spiritual. the draft undeniably echoes marriage, specifically lines from “the voice of the devil,” although they are loosely quoted: all bibles or sacred codes. have been the causes of the following errors. 1. that man has two real existing principles viz: a body & a soul. 2. that energy. calld evil. is alone from the body. & that reason. calld good. is alone from the soul. 3. that god will torment man in eternity for following his energies. but the following contraries to these are true 1 man has no body distinct from his soul for that calld body is a portion of soul discernd by the five senses. the chief inlets of soul in this age 2. energy is the only life and is from the body and reason is the bound or outward circumference of energy. 3 energy is eternal delight (marriage 4, e 34; our emphasis) when we compare these lines with the paragraph from “elementos da nova poesia portuguesa” quoted above, what immediately stands out is the echo of blake’s first “contrary” in pessoa’s truncated quotation from marriage: “the wonderful intuition of william blake: ‘the body is the portion of the soul that the senses □’ it is almost □, it is the very characteristic of the □ about which william blake (spiritualist).” though we were able to develop here our first approach to how pessoa dealt with blake’s influence on him, included in our chapter for the reception of william blake in europe, this is only an initial and obvious conclusion from the comparative analysis of the much more complex web of blakean influences on pessoa, beginning with blake’s appearance on his list of works to purchase in 1903–​04. we would certainly have to enlarge the scope of that analysis to include at least “a nova poesia portuguesa.” the highly intelligent form in which the influence of blake’s marriage is enmeshed in pessoa’s essay would make the study even more extended and require far more time and space than we have here. as noted above, the essay is divided into three—​“a nova poesia portuguesa sociologicamente considerada” (“the new portuguese poetry sociologically considered”), “reincidindo” (“relapsing”), and “a nova poesia portuguesa no seu aspecto psicológico” (“the new portuguese poetry in its psychological aspect”)—​with the first part published in the april 1912 issue of a águia, the second in may, and the third in the september, november, and december issues. we will mention only a relatively brief but telling passage from “a nova poesia portuguesa no seu aspecto psicológico”: [a nossa nova poesia] … sendo ao mesmo tempo, e com quase igual intensidade, poesia subjectiva e objectiva, poesia da alma e da natureza, cada um destes elementos penetra o outro; de modo que produz essa estranha e nítida originalidade da nossa actual poesia—​a espiritualização da natureza e, ao mesmo tempo, a materialização do espírito, a sua comunhão humilde no todo, comunhão que é, já não puramente panteísta, mas, por essa citada espiritualização da natureza, superpanteísta, dispersão do ser num exterior que não é natureza, mas alma. the translation will offer us the opportunity to note the deeply ingrained influence of blake’s marriage, and particularly “the voice of the devil”; unlike in “elementos da nova poesia portuguesa,” its preparatory note, such an influence is never acknowledged by pessoa in “a nova poesia portuguesa”: [our new poetry] … being at the same time, and with almost equal intensity, subjective and objective poetry, poetry of soul and nature, each of these elements penetrates the other; and in this way that strange and clear originality of our current poetry is produced—​the spiritualization of nature and, at the same time, the materialization of the spirit, its humble communion with the whole, a communion which is no longer purely pantheistic but, because of that aforesaid spiritualization of nature, super-pantheistic, dispersion of the being in an exterior which is not nature, but soul. “jorge luis borges said … , and this is the greatest eulogy that can be given to anyone: ‘blake is no one’s contemporary’” alexandre soares (guitarist of três tristes tigres, 2020) in 2020, the pop-rock band três tristes tigres released the album mínima luz (minimum light), which includes the most recent portuguese musical adaptation of a poem by blake—​“tigre”—​and the first to be sung in portuguese.the song can be heard at <https://​tresttigres.​bandcamp.​com/​track/​tigre>. around the time of the 25 april 1974 coup, “the tyger” was the first of blake’s poems to be commercially recorded in portugal, without music and in english (see sousa and callixto 197). the translation of “the tyger” was created by regina guimarães, a visual artist and a poet herself; when we asked where she had seen blake’s poem, she sent the link to a post on the blog chimera poetry, where there is a poor reproduction of “the tyger” (illus. 4) and a transcription of the poem, with no further information. 4. the image of “the tyger” on the chimera poetry blog, post of 21 february 2015. <https://​chimerapoetry.​wordpress.​com/​2015/​02/​21/​the-​tyger-​by-​william-​blake>. after careful research in the william blake archive, we were able to identify the reproduction as from songs of innocence and of experience copy z (illus. 5). 5. william blake, “the tyger,” songs of innocence and of experience copy z (composed 1789, 1794; printed 1826). library of congress, lessing j. rosenwald collection. catalogue no. 1801a. image courtesy of the william blake archive. given this, the abstractly shaped, intermingling, blurred colors of the album’s cover (illus. 6) may easily lead those with knowledge of blake’s works to imagine that there is some kind of relationship between that image and “tigre.” guimarães had, after all, seen a reproduction of “the tyger” before translating the poem, and might have been influenced by its colors, which play an axial performative role in blake’s works: because every copy of every blake book presents a new performance, blake resists the stasis of mechanistic reproduction through the variations he inscribes via illuminated printing. in songs, those variations occur foremost through the extraordinary palette of colors blake uses to differentiate the designs of each iteration over a period of thirty-eight years, which range from the soft pastels of si copy i to the rich, intensely vibrant shades of sie copy z. (linkin 36) 6. catarina coelho, cover for três tristes tigres, mínima luz (2020). those “rich, intensely vibrant shades of sie copy z”—​although poorly reproduced in the digital image of “the tyger” seen by guimarães—​may indeed have impressed her; we believe, however, that the equally rich, intensely vibrant, but darker shades of blue, yellow, and ochre and the thick stripes of black on the animal’s body in “the tyger” from copy t (illus. 7) are the ones that will immediately come to the minds of blake fans/​scholars as they look at the cover of the album. 7. william blake, “the tyger,” songs of innocence and of experience copy t (composed 1789, 1794; printed 1789, 1794, 1818). british museum. 1856,0209.378. photo: © the trustees of the british museum. all rights reserved. the fact is that guimarães had nothing whatsoever to do with the cover art; as explained by the band’s vocalist, ana deus,information given in a personal communication to joão carlos callixto. the cover is the work of catarina coelho, who took an anonymous illustration scrap of the beginning of the world from an old encyclopedia (sent by the singer) and inverted and blurred the image in order to conceive her own depiction of it. this is just another little puzzling coincidence, since “the tyger” and blake’s creation myth are inextricable. 2 before putting the focus on três tristes tigres’ adaptation of “the tyger,” we will briefly characterize the musical context from which the group’s songs stem. portuguese popular music of the first half of the 1990s appears at the crossroads of mainstream and alternative artists arising in the previous decade; the 1980s brought forth a boom of portuguese rock, as it was dubbed by the national music industry, with some major international labels, such as polygram and cbs, opening offices in lisbon and signing many portuguese artists. in the 1960s and 1970s, rock music was already being made in portugal, with labels like rádio triunfo (radio triumph), orfeu (orpheus), and valentim de carvalho releasing a significant number of records. at that time, “antónio de oliveira salazar (1889–​1970) and his authoritarian regime … were at last falling apart, and marcello caetano (1906–​1980) had already been appointed (1968) … to replace the old dictator”; caetano’s “first years as president of the council of ministers became known as ‘primavera marcelista’ (marcelista spring), a name expressing the hope that dictatorship would yield to a free circulation of fresh, new ideas between portugal and europe, and the world at large” (sousa and callixto 193-94). one of the peculiarities of the portuguese recording industry was that, until the mid-1970s, the lp was not a very common format for releasing material, which was usually issued on eps.lp, long play, most commonly with a twelve-inch diameter; ep, extended play, with a seven-inch diameter and usually four songs. as a result, the first three portuguese studio albums did not appear until the end of 1969 and the beginning of 1970: a peça (the play, 1969) by pop five music incorporated; epopeia (epic, 1969) by filarmónica fraude (fraud philharmonic); and quarteto 1111 (1970) by the rock band of the same name. quarteto 1111 was the only one of these bands to release a second album, after the 25 april 1974 coup. the latter half of the 1970s paved the way for the changes that were to occur after 1980, such as the growing number of rock-music adaptations of portuguese poems and later of some foreign ones, a crucial development that can be traced back to the heyday of psychedelic rock in the late 1960s. quarteto 1111, led by the singer/​songwriter josé cid, adapted medieval, romantic, and contemporary poems.in 2019, cid was awarded the latin grammy for “musical excellence.” subsequently, in 1999, cid would record “o poeta é um fingidor” (“the poet is a feigner”), his adaptation of pessoa’s “autopsicografia” (“autopsychography,” 1932). as noted in the first part of our essay, pessoa’s was a long, intricate, although highly successful, process of canonization, partly propelled by the fact that his poems had begun to be set to music by pop-rock bands and singers by the end of the 1960s. in may 1984, the very popular singer antónio variações chose pessoa’s “canção” (“song”), originally published in 1924 in the magazine folhas de arte (art leaves), and recorded a musical adaptation in his second and last album, dar & receber (to give and to receive). in the years since, pessoa’s have been the most selected poems for musical settings, interpreted by popular singers like the 2017 eurovision song contest winner, salvador sobral, or the two internationally best-known fado singers, ana moura and mariza. indeed, all reductive assumptions about the complex relations between so-called popular and elite types of culture, let alone the opposition between high and low kinds of art, are called into question by variações’s, sobral’s, moura’s, and mariza’s songs, which may very well illustrate this observation from steve clark and jason whittaker’s introduction to blake, modernity and popular culture: “any simplistic view of popular culture that posits implicit resistance to elite culture is, of course, to be viewed sceptically” (4). gnr (new rock group) was a band hailing from porto that gradually built a cult following during the first half of the 1980s, with some of its members working closely with portuguese artistic and literary avant-garde circles. alexandre soares, the guitar player, had previously joined the progressive rockers pesquisa (search), a group from the late 1970s. in early 1988, after leaving gnr, he recorded his first solo album, um projecto global (a global project), and thereafter briefly played with ban, another quite successful pop-rock group from porto. finally, with some members of ban, he founded zero, which released just one album, in 1992. it was in ban that two core members of três tristes tigres—​soares and deus—​worked together for the first time. deus rose to prominence on ban’s debut album, surrealizar (surrealizing, 1988). later, she was given a coauthorship credit for the title song of their third album, mundo de aventuras (world of adventures), which is still a popular portuguese radio song today. it was 1990, and três tristes tigres came next in their careers. 3 the first lineup of três tristes tigres consisted of three female members: ana deus, paula sousa, and regina guimarães. sousa, a pianist, had her first recording experience in antologia da mulher poeta portuguesa (anthology of the portuguese female poet, 1981), which contained poems from the renaissance to contemporaneity, read by the renowned actress eunice muñoz.among those poets was sophia de mello breyner andresen (1919–​2004), the sole portuguese female writer included by harold bloom in appendix d, “the chaotic age: a canonical prophecy,” to his the western canon (550). in the second half of the 1980s, sousa had collaborated with ban too, and afterwards she took part in the first lineup of the experimental electronic pop group repórter estrábico (cockeyed news reporter). she participated only in três tristes tigres’ first record, but she wrote or cowrote the music for five of its songs. the lyrics of eleven of the fourteen songs were originals by guimarães; the other three were portuguese adaptations of songs from the repertoires of brigitte fontaine and greta garbo. concerning the band’s name, deus explained: “the origin of the name has to do with the tongue twister and with the sympathy toward the mammal [the tiger] itself, which was then already endangered. … it was a difficult name to pronounce and therefore it would stick in people’s memories.”“a origem do nome tem a ver com o trava-línguas e com a simpatia animal com o verdadeiro mamífero, que já na altura estava em perigo de extinção. … era difícil de dizer e ficaria na memória” (personal communication, 19 july 2020). in their debut album, released in 1993, the song “o mundo a meus pés” (“the world at my feet”) became a mainstream success. there were two more albums—​guia espiritual (spiritual guide, 1996) and comum (common, 1998)—​and then a very long silence until mínima luz was released in 2020. none of the artists had abandoned the musical scene; they had continued to work together in another group, osso vaidoso (vain bone). in animal, osso vaidoso’s 2011 debut album, they sang mainly guimarães’s poems, along with other contemporary portuguese poems; five years later, miopia (myopia) included two foreign poets, rainer maria rilke and jesús lizano. their way, and that of the pop-rock scene in portugal, were thus paved for their adaptation of “the tyger.” soares had previously interacted with blake’s poems in very special circumstances. the actress and director maria hengge—​who had seen him playing live in lisbon in 2009—​invited him to participate in a series of multimedia performances, titled “william blake session,” in vienna the next year. hengge recited from blake’s songs of innocence and of experience and the marriage of heaven and hell, while soares accompanied her onstage, alongside video artist miro mastropasqua. soares evokes his unique experience: “a curious detail about this project is that, for more than half of the show, i am playing the portuguese guitar. i tried to find out when the english guitar, which originated ‘our’ portuguese guitar, came into portugal, and concluded that it was about fifteen to twenty years after william blake’s birth. i invented a connection between these two facts, and created all the work based on this delirium of mine.” further asked by joão carlos callixto about his interest in blake, he said: “i’ve always enjoyed william blake. jorge luis borges said about him, and this is the greatest eulogy that can be given to anyone: ‘blake is no one’s contemporary.’”“um detalhe curioso é que, em mais de metade do espectáculo, estou a tocar guitarra portuguesa. fui ver a época em que a guitarra inglesa, que deu origem à ‘nossa’ guitarra portuguesa, chegou a portugal, e é cerca de quinze a vinte anos depois do william blake nascer. inventei para mim que havia uma ligação entre as duas coisas, e criei o trabalho baseado neste meu delírio.” “sempre gostei do william blake. o jorge luis borges disse dele o maior elogio que, para mim, se pode dizer de alguém: ‘o blake não é contemporâneo de ninguém.’” both quotations are from personal communication, 20 july 2020. for more on hengge’s “william blake session,” see <https://​esel.​at/​termin/​39406/​william-​blake-​session>. the album mínima luz also includes “à tona” (“on top”), a musical adaptation of the poem “life is fine” by langston hughes, about whom maria popova has declared: “[he] was in a sense the william blake of his generation—​like blake, he was endowed with a rare poetic genius that incurred merciless ridicule by the era’s critics and was often wholly ignored by the public.” guimarães created the portuguese version of hughes’s poem, as well as that of “the tyger,” both of which were musically adapted by deus and soares. according to deus, in a radio interview with joão carlos callixto, there was an earlier version of blake’s poem by guimarães, but the group thought that it did not fit any of their previous albums. when at last they decided that it would be part of their new album, they could not find that first version, and guimarães had to start all over again.for the complete interview (done in portuguese), see callixto. 4 in the introduction to william blake and the digital humanities, roger whitson and jason whittaker briefly reconfigure the definitions of the two tightly interrelated concepts of literary reception and adaptation in terms of flat ontology: for us, flat ontology reconfigures the hierarchical and epistemological model that dominates reception studies where the author’s original expression is compared with his or her adaptation in other contexts and interpreted by the critic. by contrast, we imagine the entity “william blake” as an ontologically democratic network or society made up of everything from the ideas that inspired blake to the material objects he used in his artwork, the animals and plants he ate, and the individuals who were influenced by his work. by creating new work, artists who adapt william blake are actively adding to and transforming his network. (12-13) adding to and transforming “the entity ‘william blake’ as an ontologically democratic network” is precisely what guimarães’s version of “the tyger” and its musical adaptation by deus and soares have accomplished.according to whitson and whittaker, “the tyger” “is probably second only to ‘jerusalem’ in terms of the number of [musical] versions that have been released in the last century” (65). this 2020 portuguese “tigre” is indeed an inspired and inspiring example of a close musical reading of the poem.this evokes the adding to and transforming of the blake network in “who be kind to,” a poem by allen ginsberg: while in england with dylan in 1965, ginsberg heard dylan’s new song “gates of eden,” and instantly noted its blakean title and lyrics, which he drew attention to in his own poem “who be kind to” (1965). in ginsberg’s poem, the music of dylan and the beatles is seen as heralding the arrival of the 1960s in britain, which ginsberg represents as a re-awakening of blake’s mythical figures of jerusalem and albion: “liverpool minstrels … / raise up their joyful voices and guitars in electric afric hurrah for jerusalem—​ / … and gates of eden are named in albion again.” (walker 4) in reference to our concept of close musical reading, edward t. cone offers the best definition that we could possibly find: “to a composer like schubert, a poem is only raw material. what he deals with is not the poem but his reading of it. he appropriates that reading and makes it a component in another work, entirely his own—​a larger form created by the musical setting” (20-21; our emphasis). translating from one language and culture into another is basically a question of choice, and guimarães made truly exemplary choices; she was able to continue to privilege the rhythm of the english poem and simultaneously to keep the strength of its mental images.for the complete text of the translation, see <https://​www.​facebook.​com/​113755945779016/​photos/​a.​422308678257073/​514169049071035/​?type=3​&theater>. let us compare the first lines: tyger tyger, burning bright, in the forests of the night                              (“the tyger” 1-2, e 24) tigre, tigre, brilho e brasa que a selva da noite arrasa in both cases, the tiger is metaphorically characterized as glowing fire—​“burning bright” and “brilho e brasa” (“brightness and ember”)—​a violently purifying fire “que a selva da noite arrasa” (“which destroys the jungle of the night”), his violence being, in the portuguese case, hyperbolized through the perfect end rhyme—​“brasa” [bɾazɐ] / “arrasa” [ɐʀazɐ]. the band decided that deus would start with the second, not the first, quatrain. moreover, apparently by mistake, the fifth quatrain, which introduces the lamb, was not sung at all, although it had been translated by guimarães. as such, the song begins not with the characterization of the tiger, but rather with the questions about who his creator is—​that is, quatrains 2 and 3 are the first to be sung, followed by quatrain 1, then quatrain 4, and 1 again (as guimarães didn’t translate quatrain 6 in a different form), quatrain 5 being absent. nevertheless, it can be said that the lamb is reintroduced into the song through the childlike, wailing voice of deus as she sings and then repeats quatrain 1, intertwining her voice in an eloquent form with the musical arrangement, which, initially driven by the electric guitar, grows into a hypnotic musical loop that shows the particular use of the synthesizer by soares. all this confers a most original blakean character on “tigre.” now that we are coming to the end of this journey through blake’s reception in portugal, we wish to remind our readers of soares’s appraisal of blake through borges: “‘blake is no one’s contemporary.’” borges’s statement seems to resonate in pessoa, who wrote about “the problem of celebrity, both occasional and permanent” almost a century ago, in “erostratus” (c. 1925): “a blake or a shelley can never appeal to the generality of any age; they have the beauty of rarities rather than the beauty of perfect things” (bnp e3/19-47-49; pessoa, páginas de estética 165, 179). by considering two examples of readings of blake’s poems and poetic principles—​pessoa’s passage from “elementos da nova poesia portuguesa” and três tristes tigres’ song “tigre”—​we hope to have contributed to exploring (like clark and whittaker in blake, modernity and popular culture) “both some of [the] diverse and unpredictable trajectories [of blake’s works] and the broader issues of the relation of elite and popular culture posed by their reception history” (11). works cited blake, william. the complete poetry and prose of william blake. ed. david v. erdman. newly rev. ed. new york: anchor-random house, 1988. [abbreviated as e] —​—​—​. the poetical works of william blake, lyrical and miscellaneous. ed. william michael rossetti. aldine edition of the british poets. london: george bell and sons, 1874. —​—​—​. the william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. <http://​www.​blakearchive.​org>. accessed 21 july 2020. bloom, harold. the western canon: the books and school of the ages. new york: harcourt brace, 1994. callixto, joão carlos. “passado ao presente.” rdp internacional. 4 july 2020. <https://​www.​rtp.​pt/​play/​p1401/​e480853/​passado-​ao-​presente>. accessed 23 july 2020. chimerapoet. “the tyger ~ by william blake.” chimera poetry. 21 feb. 2015. <https://​chimerapoetry.​wordpress.​com/​2015/​02/​21/​the-​tyger-​by-​william-​blake>. accessed 24 feb. 2021. clark, steve, and jason whittaker. “introduction: blake, modernity and popular culture.” blake, modernity and popular culture. ed. steve clark and jason whittaker. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, 2007. 1-11. cone, edward t. the composer’s voice. berkeley: university of california press, 1982. ferrari, patricio. “introductory note.” special issue, “inside the mask: the english poetry of fernando pessoa.” pessoa plural: a journal of fernando pessoa studies 10 (fall 2016): 1-15. <https://​www.​brown.​edu/​departments/​portuguese_​brazilian_​studies/​ejph/​pessoaplural/​issue10/​pdf/​i10a01.​pdf>. ferrari, patricio, and jerónimo pizarro. “introduction.” special issue, “fernando pessoa as english reader and writer.” portuguese literary & cultural studies 28 (2015): 1-11. <https://​ojs.​lib.​umassd.​edu/​index.​php/​plcs/​issue/​view/​plcs28>. accessed 10 july 2020. ganeri, jonardon. virtual subjects, fugitive selves: fernando pessoa and his philosophy. oxford: oxford university press, 2020. hamburger, michael. the truth of poetry: tensions in modern poetry from baudelaire to the 1960s. london: weidenfeld & nicolson, 1969. jennings, hubert. fernando pessoa, the poet with many faces: a biography and anthology. ed. carlos pittella. lisbon: tinta da china, 2019. klobucka, anna m., and mark sabine. “introduction: pessoa’s bodies.” embodying pessoa: corporeality, gender, sexuality. ed. anna m. klobucka and mark sabine. toronto: university of toronto press, 2007. 3-36. linkin, harriet kramer. “the destabilizing materiality of the autograph for blake, coleridge, and tighe.” material transgressions: beyond romantic bodies, genders, things. ed. kate singer, ashley cross, and suzanne l. barnett. liverpool: liverpool university press, 2020. 31-52. losa, margarida l. “fernando pessoa, the saudosista.” luso-brazilian review 12.2 (winter 1975): 186-212. mcgowan, john. “joseph north two—​rigor and memory (oh my!).” john mcgowan’s blog: reflections on literature, politics, and culture. 1 apr. 2020. <https://​jzmcgowan.​com/​2020/​04/​01/​joseph-​north-​two-​rigor-​and-​memory-​oh-​my>. accessed 14 july 2020. mcneill, patricia silva. yeats and pessoa: parallel poetic styles. abingdon: legenda, 2010. monteiro, george. fernando pessoa and nineteenth-century anglo-american literature. lexington: university press of kentucky, 2000. —​—​—​, ed. the man who never was: essays on fernando pessoa. providence: gávea-brown, 1982. pessoa, fernando. “a nova poesia portuguesa no seu aspecto psicológico.” a águia 2nd series, nos. 9, 11, 12 (sept., nov., dec. 1912). transcribed in the arquivo pessoa in multipessoa, dir. leonor areal, <http://​arquivopessoa.​net/​textos/​3101>, accessed 17 mar. 2021. —​—​—​. arquivo fernando pessoa. ed. nuno ribeiro. modern!smo—​arquivo virtual da geração de orpheu. <https://​modernismo.​pt/​index.​php/​arquivo-​fernando-​pessoa>. accessed 25, 26, 29 july 2020. —​—​—​. “autopsicografia.” presença no. 36 (nov. 1932): 9. reproduced and transcribed in the edição digital de fernando pessoa projetos e publicações, ed. pedro sepúlveda, ulrike henny-krahmer, and jorge uribe, <http://​www.​pessoadigital.​pt/​pub/​pessoa_​autopsicografia>, accessed 30 july 2020. —​—​—​. “canção.” folhas de arte no. 1 (1924): 17. reproduced and transcribed in the edição digital de fernando pessoa projetos e publicações, ed. pedro sepúlveda, ulrike henny-krahmer, and jorge uribe, <http://​www.​pessoadigital.​pt/​pub/​pessoa_​cancao>, accessed 30 july 2020. —​—​—​. correspondência 1923–​1935. ed. manuela parreira da silva. lisbon: assírio & alvim, 1999. —​—​—​. fernando pessoa e os romantismos: inglês, francês, português e alemão. ed. with an introduction by cláudia franco souza. lisbon: apenas livros, 2019. —​—​—​. a little larger than the entire universe: selected poems. ed. and trans. richard zenith. new york: penguin books, 2006. —​—​—​. livro do desasocego. ed. jerónimo pizarro. lisbon: imprensa nacional—​casa da moeda, 2010. —​—​—​. páginas de estética e de teoria e crítica literárias. ed. georg rudolf lind and jacinto do prado coelho. lisbon: edições ática, 1966. —​—​—​. the selected prose of fernando pessoa. ed. and trans. richard zenith. new york: grove press, 2001. —​—​—​. sensacionismo e outros ismos. ed. jerónimo pizarro. lisbon: imprensa nacional—​casa da moeda, 2009. pittella, carlos. “the contribution of hubert jennings to pessoan studies.” special jennings issue. pessoa plural: a journal of fernando pessoa studies 8 (fall 2015): 1-17. <https://​www.​brown.​edu/​departments/​portuguese_​brazilian_​studies/​ejph/​pessoaplural/​issue8/​pdf/​i8a01.​pdf>. pizarro, jerónimo. fernando pessoa: a critical introduction. eastbourne: sussex academic press, 2020. popova, maria. “we are the american heartbreak: langston hughes on race in a rare recording.” the marginalian (formerly brain pickings). 23 sept. 2016. <https://​www.​brainpickings.​org/​2016/​09/​23/​american-​heartbreak-​langston-​hughes-​reads>. accessed 24 july 2020. rocha, joão cezar de castro. “a note from the editor-in-chief: ‘a very original issue.’” special issue, “fernando pessoa as english reader and writer.” portuguese literary & cultural studies 28 (2015): xi-xii. <https://​ojs.​lib.​umassd.​edu/​index.​php/​plcs/​issue/​view/​plcs28>. accessed 10 july 2020. sadlier, darlene j. an introduction to fernando pessoa: modernism and the paradoxes of authorship. gainesville: university press of florida, 1998. santos, irene ramalho. atlantic poets: fernando pessoa’s turn in anglo-american modernism. hanover: university press of new england, 2003. silva, patrícia oliveira. “fernando pessoa’s the mad fiddler: sensationism in english.” special issue, “inside the mask: the english poetry of fernando pessoa.” pessoa plural: a journal of fernando pessoa studies 10 (fall 2016): 89-105. <https://​www.​brown.​edu/​departments/​portuguese_​brazilian_​studies/​ejph/​pessoaplural/​issue10/​pdf/​i10a06.​pdf>. sousa, alcinda pinheiro de, and joão carlos callixto. “‘enough! or too much’: the reception of blake in portugal.” the reception of william blake in europe. ed. sibylle erle and morton d. paley. 2 vols. london: bloomsbury, 2019. 1: 185-213. três tristes tigres. mínima luz. self-released, 2020. walker, luke. “tangled up in blake: the triangular relationship among dylan, blake, and the beats.” rock and romanticism: blake, wordsworth, and rock from dylan to u2. ed. james rovira. lanham: lexington books, 2018. 1-18. whitson, roger, and jason whittaker. william blake and the digital humanities: collaboration, participation, and social media. new york: routledge, 2013. the ambiguities of translation: fuseli, blake, and the making of aphorisms on man the ambiguities of translation: fuseli, blake, and the making of aphorisms on man by sarah carter sarah carter (carter.sphd@gmail.com) is a postdoctoral fellow at the university of chicago. her research is funded by the social sciences and humanities research council of canada (sshrc) and the fonds de recherche du québec (frqsc). sarah holds a phd in art history from mcgill university. johann caspar lavater’si would like to thank matthew c. hunter, andrei pop, colin jones, and my peer reviewer for their thoughtful feedback on this paper. i would also like to thank sarah jones for her editorial expertise and robert n. essick for sharing the fuseli drawing for the frontispiece to aphorisms on man with me. i am grateful to the huntington library in san marino, california, for supporting research for this article through a short-term fellowship and the newberry library in chicago for providing research space and resources while i was a scholar in residence. i also benefited from the expertise and help of the staff at mcgill rare books and special collections. all translations are mine, unless otherwise indicated. vermischte unphysiognomische regeln zur selbstund menschenkenntnis (1787) is a classic work of enlightenment thinking that entered english circulation with a split identity. published as aphorisms on man in 1788,aphorisms on man also included regeln from a second work, vermischte unphysiognomische regeln zur menschenund selbstkenntnis (1788). it was brought before an english audience through the printmaking skills of william blake and the agency of lavater’s childhood friend henry fuseli. however, lavater might well have recalled the saying “traduttore, traditore” (translator, traitor). fuseli had not failed to close the lexical gaps between the german and the english. rather, his ideas had transformed the work, from its ambiguous frontispiece through to its concluding lines—​interventions that challenged lavater’s claim to authorship of the book. if the usual stories told about aphorisms on man describe the volume as a “product of friendship” or a “labour of love,” i turn this convivial alliance on its head to suggest that a closer look at its behind-the-scenes production reveals a different narrative, one that pivots on rivalry as much as collaboration.see erle, blake, lavater and physiognomy 99; ackroyd 107. daisy hay has likewise called the book a “celebration of friendship” (174). translation, broadly conceived as a cultural transference, has long been a topic of debate. the german romantics, for example, qualified it as an impossible feat, arguing that no perfect equivalence could be achieved between an original text and a foreign variant. still, some translations were better than others. lavater could therefore malign the “bungling translator who disfigures an excellent original, and who fails to convey the spirit of his author.”lavater, essays on physiognomy 2: 241. more recently, scholars investigating the “devious side” of translation have shown that translators can do more harm than frustrating a savvy reader or undermining authorial voice.italiano 4. as federico italiano argues, translation can enact cultural violence, becoming “an instrument of concealment, silencing and misdirection—​ … something that darkens and obscures.”italiano 1. these assessments, although rooted in radically different contexts, share the idea that translation is always conflictual. the reason, to borrow from homi bhabha, is that as classic intermediate spaces, translations “provide the terrain for elaborating strategies of selfhood—​singular or communal—​that initiate new signs of identity, and innovative sites of collaboration, and contestation, in the act of defining the idea of society itself.”bhabha 2; italiano 3. put another way, they are personal and political. bhabha’s particular emphasis on indeterminacy is helpful for approaching aphorisms on man since, as this article will demonstrate, the book liaised between not only distinct linguistic milieu but also the ideas of the author, translator, and engraver. although conceptualized as an introduction to forthcoming books on physiognomy, it pursued a different agenda to serve as one such innovative site of collaboration, contestation, and social definition. to illuminate these complexities, i begin with the modification of the original german manuscript to show that fuseli approached the book as a co-author. the second section brings aphorisms on man into conversation with lavater’s second english title, essays on physiognomy (1789–​98), to reveal how the same opposing priorities shaped both. the third section looks at the frontispiece. by comparing the preliminary drawing that fuseli gave to blake with the final engraving, i pursue the possibility that their partnership deviated from industry standards—​an arrangement that invites us to rethink the work that the frontispiece does. finally, i turn to the reception of the book to explore how it involved readers and what their participation can tell us about changing identity regimes in the late eighteenth century. aphorisms on man emerges from my analysis a composite creation—​one that registers the competing visions of its several authors and constitutes the idea of self emerging in tandem with romanticism. translating: the aphorisms fuseli was first drawn to aphorisms on man as a friend. his translation, for which he declined compensation, has been interpreted as a favor to his childhood classmate lavater, who supported him financially while he was studying to become a painter in rome.erle, blake, lavater and physiognomy 99. it has also been understood as fulfilling a commitment to become an informal cultural emissary between england and the german-speaking world. fuseli’s former mentors at the collegium carolinum in zürich, johann jakob bodmer and johann jakob breitinger, hoped that he would introduce german authors to english readers while keeping themselves and other literati abreast of literary news in london.fuseli’s biographer john knowles reports that “some of the literati of germany and switzerland had it in contemplation to establish a regular channel of literary communication between those countries and england. fuseli’s tutors and friends, bodmer, breitinger, and sulzer, felt a lively interest in this project, and took an active part in carrying the design to execution” (1: 27). see also regier 97. fuseli did well; by the late 1780s, he had already successfully translated several important essays by johann joachim winckelmann, including gedanken über die nachahmung der griechischen werke in der malerei und bildhauerkunst (published as reflections on the painting and sculpture of the greeks in 1765).johann joachim winckelmann, reflections on the painting and sculpture of the greeks: with instructions for the connoisseur, and an essay on grace in works of art, trans. henry fuseli (london: printed for the translator, and sold by a. millar, 1765). with these translations in mind, scholars have advanced fuseli as a robust cultural force—​not only a visual artist but a mediator of ideas.for more on fuseli’s role as a cultural mediator, see regier; pop, antiquity; and hall. they have also shown that he was not an impartial transcriber; for one, his english diction, as exemplified in reflections, contained its own theoretical arguments.allentuck, “fuseli’s translations” 181; see also pop, “henry fuseli” 83. aphorisms on man is consistent with these titles insofar as something of the same “unique fuseliesque orientation” that marcia allentuck identifies in his winckelmann is also present in his lavater.allentuck, “fuseli’s translations” 178. put simply, the book sounds as though fuseli wrote it, modeling the same obscure “epigrammatic style” as his letters.quoted in weinglass, collected english letters x. the quotation, attributed to thomas lawrence, is given by joseph farington (the farington diary, ed. james greig, vol. 3 [london: hutchinson & co., 1924] 60). perhaps more importantly, it also worked for him by advancing his literary career. fuseli began translating in 1787, working from a manuscript that combined regeln (rules) from lavater’s aforementioned texts.schroyer’s timeline has fuseli translating lavater’s manuscript between october 1787 and may 1788. according to schroyer, the manuscript contained regeln that appeared in lavater’s 1787 and 1788 volumes. see “the 1788 publication date of lavater’s aphorisms on man” 24; the introduction to the reproduction of blake’s copy of aphorisms (xi); and erle, “leaving their mark” 349. although this manuscript is now lost, there is evidence to suggest that he did not faithfully adhere to the “original, … composed … during the autumn of 1787, and transmitted in the author’s own manuscript to the publisher,” as claimed in the advertisement (aphorisms vii). a letter to lavater from his friend gottfried heisch reveals that fuseli had selected only 700 from the original 1000 regeln.letter from heisch to lavater, 16 may 1788 (fa lav ms 512.138, zentralbibliothek zürich): “your rules / aphorism of men / are translated, from the 1000 about 700 were selected. i really liked what i saw of it.” (deine regeln / aphorism of men / sind übersetzt, aus der 1000 ungefehr 700 ausgesucht. was ich davon sah gefiel mir sehr.) further evidence that the original manuscript contained 1000 rules (compared to fuseli’s 633) is found in a letter of 19 august 1788 from sophia hoffham to lavater (fa lav ms 512.143, zentralbibliothek zürich). she requests that an “exemplar der 1000 unphisiognomishe regeln” be sent to london with lavater’s son, johann heinrich. this abridgment was not unwarranted; lavater had written to fuseli in 1787, giving him the authority to omit what he thought “false or unimportant” and to “make improvements” where needed.letter from lavater to fuseli, 13 october 1787 (weinglass, collected english letters 38-39). as if to forestall an accusation that he had exceeded the limits of translation, fuseli printed this letter in the frontmatter to aphorisms on man. but in addition to abridging the manuscript and condensing the original german phrases, he also divorced and combined sentence elements to alter meanings or advance new ideas altogether.erle, blake, lavater and physiognomy 98; hall 132. carol louise hall has underscored the differences between the original and the translation through comparative analysis. one example will suffice here: die menschenkenntnis soll dir das zeigen, was in andern vereinbares und unvereinbares ist mit dir selbst. sie zeigt dir das in dem andern, was dich existenter und harmonischer mit dir selbst und mit allem guten um dich her, macht. selbstkenntniss zeigt dir, was dich andern geniessbar und ungeniessbar macht.this is rule 18 in lavater, vermischte unphysiognomische regeln zur selbstund menschenkenntnis (zürich, 1787) 15. see hall 134. (knowledge of human nature will allow you to see where you are compatible and incompatible with others. it shows you in the other, that which makes you more real and more harmonious with yourself and with everything good around you. self-awareness shows you what makes you either pleasant or unpleasant to others.) fuseli renders this long passage as “the study of man is the doctrine of unisons and discords between ourselves and others” (aphorisms 9). the synoptic brevity of his translation is undeniably more impactful.hall 133. but if translators continued, well into the eighteenth century, to see themselves as co-authors, permitted to omit, add, or modify as they saw fit, the scale of revision found in aphorisms on man deviates from standard practice.burke 34. knowing that fuseli had been given permission to edit freely allows us to see how he may have envisioned the translation as advancing his literary reputation without compromising his service to lavater. certainly, one way to read the dedication to fuseli that opens the volume (the same one in which lavater gives him permission to edit freely) is as an implicit argument rooted in like-mindedness.erle, blake, lavater and physiognomy 98. it assured the reader from the outset that fuseli’s modifications were “natural,” since the translator was of the same mind as the original author—​at least when it came to the content of the book: “all the world know that this is no flattery; for, in an hundred things, i am not of your opinion; but, in what concerns the knowledge of mankind, we are nearer to one another than any two in ten thousand” (aphorisms v). however, if this proverbial passing of the authorial torch signals an exceptional trust between friends with shared values, the fact that the pair were in near constant disagreement on numerous fronts during this period challenges this assumption. fuseli had his own priorities. aphorisms on man was clearly not piracy, but like the translations and reprints that did circulate without the consent or input of the original author, it participated in what one scholar has termed the “culture of the upgrade.” where one rival author “might silently abridge; another might translate creatively; a third might add material or critical comments.”johns 49. fuseli engaged in all three to refine and enhance the original, adding his own material while also trimming and polishing lavater’s. the originality of the translation was not lost on readers. joseph johnson’s analytical review printed the following praise in july 1788: “many of the aphorisms are so well expressed in the translation, that they have all the merit of an original thought almost intuitively struck off.”analytical review 1 (may-august 1788): 286-89 (on 287). this compliment to linguistic proficiency is of interest because it anticipates the fact that some of the ideas had been formulated in english. comparative research reveals that over sixty of the aphorisms are exclusive to the translation.see shroyer’s introduction to the reproduction of blake’s copy of aphorisms (xi-xii). crucially, one appears on the frontispiece engraving—​“γνωθι σεαυτον” (know thyself)—​while another concludes the book: “if you mean to know yourself, interline such of these aphorisms as affected you agreeably in reading, and set a mark to such as left a sense of uneasiness with you; and then shew your copy to whom you please” (aphorisms 224).recent studies credit the final aphorism to fuseli. see, for example, erle, blake, lavater and physiognomy 98. i will return to these aphorisms in more detail later, but their placement is of importance here. as literary bookends, they frame the contents while highlighting the authorial intervention that gave the translator the essential first and last words. in addition to his loose translations, fuseli also commandeered the concept. anticipating the book’s commercial success (the letter of 19 august 1788 from sophia hoffham to lavater notes that aphorisms on man had already sold 800 copies at three shillings apiece in its first edition),fa lav ms 512.143, zentralbibliothek zürich: “heisch hatt mir gebeten ihnen mein lieber zu sagen das er sie unrecht gesagt hatt von dem preis des buches die aphorisms of man—​ anstatt 5 shillings so sinds nur 3—​ sind schon ungefähr 8 hundred davon verkauft von die erste edition.” fuseli took full advantage of his strategic position as translator, contributor, editor, and designer. he used the advertisement to communicate a plan to turn the book into a series: “it is the intention of the editor to add another volume of aphorisms on art, with characters and examples, not indeed by the same author, which the reader may expect in the course of the year” (aphorisms viii). this second volume would focus on his area of expertise—​art theory and practice. fuseli even inserted “end of vol. 1” on the final page as a reminder of the forthcoming sequel. although aphorisms on art would not materialize until 1831, there is a strong sense of authorial continuity between the works; the aphorisms share structural similarities and turns of phrase.this delay has been attributed to the loss of the corrected proofs in a fire at johnson’s publishing house, but fuseli’s letters reveal a distracted but persistent effort to refine the material over time. though admitting that the aphorisms had been “neglected, for milton’s sake,” his letter to william roscoe dated 15 january 1795 makes mention of roscoe’s recent comments on them, suggesting an ongoing writing and revision process. in that letter, he admits the benefits of deferral: “yet by the delay what they have lost in time they may have gained in value” (weinglass, collected english letters 125). these parallels support the idea that aphorisms on man was a double primer. it functioned not only as an english introduction to lavater, but also to fuseli. the following section brings this authorial appropriation into conversation with a second venture seeking to import lavater into england, essays on physiognomy. as we will see, although fuseli assisted in its production, disagreements caused more than minor hiccups. the pair may have been good friends, but they were seldom on the same page—​a fact that helps to elucidate why fuseli made the changes that he did. editing: rival texts published in four volumes between 1775 and 1778, physiognomische fragmente, zur beförderung der menschenkenntnis und menschenliebe reclaimed the truth of physiognomy.see graham; percival and tytler; porter; graczyk; and o’rourke. it stated that a correlation between “the visible surface” of the body and its “invisible spirit” not only existed but could be measured and studied to improve society. what set physiognomische fragmente apart from other, older physiognomic texts was its impressive visuals and their evidentiary promise. more than mere illustrations, the book’s many engravings allowed lavater to realign his physiognomic “art” with empirical sensibilities. during the 1770s, when he was preparing the work for publication, he invited fuseli to provide designs. this is not surprising, given their enduring friendship and the latter’s novel painterly enterprise in rome. but where the pair should have had much to agree on, since both physiognomy and visual art “read” the human body as an indexical sign, fuseli found himself constantly at odds with his compatriot. as stephanie o’rourke has compellingly shown, lavater was exceptionally particular about his visual aids.o’rourke 67-69. concerned that his draftsmen and engravers would deviate from their instructions, he personally oversaw each commission.johnson 56. predictably, fuseli did not respond well to demands for revisions.johnson 56; allentuck, “fuseli and lavater” 93-94. an impassioned letter of 1771 laid out his grievances while also expressing an emerging sense of artistic identity: the biggest mistake that you commit towards me is presenting me with subjects that have been already formed in advance. know that invention is the soul of a painter, and a painter without it may as well be in the shoemakers’ guild. your imagination and mine may be the same, but if i am to execute your images they must flame up in my head and not in yours.letter from fuseli, in rome, to lavater, may 1771 (füssli, briefe 165-66, 234). (der größte fehler, den du in allen deinen mir vorgelegten sujets begangen, ist, daß du mir immer vormunzest. wisse, daß invention die seele des malers, und ein maler ohne sie auf der schuhmacherzunft ist. deine und meine imagination mögen dieselbe sein; aber um ihre bilder auszuführen, muß sie in meinem und nicht in deinem kopf aufflammen.) muschg suggests that vormunzen means prechewed, as if for an infant (vorkäuen [für säuglinge]). this interpretation of the word is strengthened by the entry for munzen in franz joseph stalder’s swiss dictionary published in 1812. it lists vormunzen under munzen as a synonym for vorkauen. see stalder, versuch eines schweizerischen idiotikon, 2 vols. (aarau: heinrich remigius sauerländer, 1812) 2: 221. i thank andrei pop for calling my attention to this definition. although the brief had been simple—​“the painter must forget himself and give his undivided attention to nature alone”—​fuseli was loath to comply.lavater, essays on physiognomy 2: 280. there is a certain irony to this statement insofar as it appears in the text in relation to a portrait of fuseli, whom lavater accused of not following nature. as he put it, he had neither the desire nor the ability to “shrink [his] great thoughts and noble lines” to fit the desired specifications.füssli, briefe 161. (die lust und vielleicht das vermögen, große gedanken und edle linien so, daß sie auch einem hölzernen stecher in die augen leuchten mögen, innert drei zolle zu bringen, habe ich verloren.) with both parties bristling, only one of fuseli’s illustrations appeared in the fragmente.“head of a dying man” is in vol. 4, p. 415. see weinglass, prints and engraved illustrations, nos. 36 and 37. fuseli commanded more space in the english edition that followed. translated by henry hunter, essays on physiognomy was published in fascicles between 1789 and 1799 with instructions for binding into three quarto volumes (divided into five parts). the book was one of three hopeful ventures to capitalize on lavater’s growing popularity. in 1787, joseph johnson began preparations for an edition, having enlisted mary wollstonecraft to translate from the french adaptation, essai sur la physiognomonie, destiné à faire connoître l’homme et à le faire aimer (1781–​1803). however, as mary lynn johnson has shown, he soon abandoned the work to become a financier of the hunter translation, published by john murray.johnson 70-71. writing to lavater in july 1787, his friend luder hoffham explained that the decision was a good one from a business perspective, since hunter was already ahead and the market could likely support only one english edition: [hunter] has been occupied for some time with the translation of your french physiognomic work, which is to appear here in print next year with beautiful engravings. the price of each copy is £24 for subscribers, and, as i hear, there are several subscriptions already. i fear this will do johnson harm if he publishes a new physiognomic work of yours, for many of those who have subscribed to that work will hardly subscribe again to this one.letter from luder hoffham to lavater, dated london, 27 july 1787 (fa lav ms 513.288, zentralbibliothek zürich). (dieser doctor hunter wünschet sehr, ihnen persönlich kennen zu lernen, er hat sich seit einiger zeit mit der übersetzung ihres französischen physiognomischen werkes beschäftiget, welches hier nechstes jahr mit schönen kupfern im druck erscheinen soll, der preis von jedem exemplar für prenumeranten ist £24, wie ich höre sollen schon verschiedene prenumerirt haben, ich fürchte dieses wird johnson großen schaden thun, wenn er das neue physiognomische werck von ihnen heraus-giebt, denn viele die auf jenes werck prenumerit haben, werden schwerlich auf dieses wieder prenumeriren.) but if competition discouraged johnson, it does not appear to have been much of a concern for murray, whose translation already had a rival—​an abridged version in octavo published by thomas holcroft in 1789. murray, it seems, was confident that the superiority of his own edition was sufficiently obvious to ensure its success. in a letter to william creech, his bookseller in edinburgh, he stated: “the greatest service you can render us is to let the two editions be seen at the same time.”quoted in zachs 83. murray believed that the abundance of plates after designs by important english artists would sell the book. the plates were an advantage in terms of desirability, but they also made the book expensive to produce. in fact, its price tag—​an astounding £10,000—​required joint financing.erle, blake, lavater and physiognomy 135. william zachs describes murray’s long-standing partnership with johnson, including johnson’s becoming his “silent partner” for essays on physiognomy (83). profits from the 809 copies sold to 795 subscribers were to be divided between publishers and makers (the publishers john murray and joseph johnson, the translator henry hunter, and the head engraver thomas holloway).erle, blake, lavater and physiognomy 134. the sheer expense of publishing the essays made certain that profitability was prioritized over lavish presentation. writing to lavater from london in may 1788, gottfried heisch warned him not to ask too much of his english publishers, especially if his demands incurred further costs. the letter communicates a rather harsh assessment of the physiognomist’s position, seemingly in an effort to temper his unrealistic expectations: between you, fuseli, and johnson there are the most dreadful misunderstandings. god knows how they arose—​i won’t and can’t investigate. you think johnson will use english money and expend english generosity for your physiognomy? [i]t does not seem to me to be the case. the first word, which has been repeated continuously until now, is this: lavater incurs a lot of expenses, outlays, which we don’t know anything about. we don’t want anything except two sections of outline drawings and his text. what’s the purpose of all the rest, all these draftsmen, etc.? [w]ho asked him for them? incidentally, he changes his mind every day, starts new projects that we simply can’t get involved in, and if we write to him about it, he doesn’t answer, doesn’t stay to the point that we want him to, and always gives answers that we don’t want to know.letter from heisch to lavater, 16 may 1788 (fa lav ms 512.138, zentralbibliothek zürich). transcribed in finsler 20; translation modified from johnson 71. (zwischen dir, füessli und johnson sind die schrecklichsten missverständnisse. gott weiss, wie sie entstanden, ich will und kann‘s nicht untersuchen. du glaubst, johnson wolle für deine physiognomik englisch geld verwenden und englisch generös zahlen? dies scheint mir nicht zu sein. denn das erste wort, was ich hörte und was mir bisher ununterbrochen wiederholt worden ist, war dies: lavater macht eine menge unkosten, auslagen, von denen wir nichts wißen wollen. wir wollen nichts als 2 theile umriße u. seinen text. zu was dies alles, alle die zeichner &? wer hat’s von ihm begehrt? uebrigens verändert er alle tage seine meinung, macht neue projekten, in die wir uns schlechterdings nicht einlassen können, und wenn wir ihm darüber schreiben, so antwortet er nicht, bleibt nie auf dem punkt, auf dem wir ihn festhalten wollen und gibt immer atwort auf das, was wir nicht wißen wollen.) sophia hoffham agreed that the problems facing lavater were due to misunderstandings and not enmity with either fuseli or johnson (letter to lavater, 2 september 1788, fa lav ms 513.291, zentralbibliothek zürich): “i believe, my dear friend, that there is more of a misunderstanding between you than that the local party is mocking you. fuseli, whom heisch praised to me the other day, said that he certainly meant well with you and thinks very highly of johnson. heisch asked me again to tell you that you should try to stay on good terms with fuseli as much as possible.” (ich glaube mein lieber freund das es mehr misverständniß zwischen ihnen ist; als das die hiesige partie ihnen spotte. fusli dem mir heisch noch den letzten tag gerühm hatt, und sagte daß er es gewiß recht gut mit ihnen meine, hält sehr viel auf johnson. heisch bath mir nochmals ihnen zu bitten sagen daß sie so viel wie möglich trachten möchten auf ein guten fuß mit fusli zu bleiben. diss war der raht von einem der lavater glücklich sehen muß.) whether for his own benefit, or with a view to a future reader, lavater expressed his disbelief directly on the page: “this, by god, is not true” (ist, bey gott, nicht wahr). heisch may have discouraged his grand ambitions—​lavater wanted to include new material, publish the work in folio, and have the drawings remade for the new format—​but it ultimately fell to fuseli to mediate. lavater’s proposals were quickly dismissed for being economically impractical, but fuseli framed the smaller format as good marketing. he convinced lavater that a quarto edition would better “[please] the british public.”knowles 1: 79. if the publishers thought only of the profits that essays on physiognomy might generate, heisch offered an altogether more optimistic assessment of aphorisms on man. in the same letter, he wrote of fuseli, “as far as i can see, a very uninterested man has acted here, for he has not taken a penny for the translation of the rules and says he did it to put the money in your hands.” this was despite the fact that distance and lingering discord had created a feeling of mutual distrust. however, this is not to say that fuseli acted altruistically. as with johnson and murray, whose collaboration proceeded from “principles of reciprocity,” fuseli had demands of his own.murray’s words, quoted in zachs 83. we learn from heisch that fuseli wanted lavater to make changes to the essays in return for his translation of the regeln. he demands the following from you as he is dissatisfied with what you have written about him in the french physiognomy. since he claims that something like this could ruin his reputation as an artist, he will provide new drawings for hunter’s translation and the article concerning him, and you should then also make a new text for it.(er fordert von dir folgendes. da er unzufrieden ist, mit dem, was du über ihn in die franz phisiögnomische hast setzen laßen, und da er behauptet, daß so etwas ihm seinen ganzen künstlerruf allhier zu grunde richten könnte, so wird er für hunters uebersetzung u. d. artikel, der ihn betrift neue zeichnungen geben und du sollest als dann auch einen neuen text dazu machen.) it is unclear why the solicited text failed to materialize. there are no surviving letters between fuseli and lavater from the late 1780s or thereafter, barring a cursory note concerning lavater’s son, heinrich, who lived with fuseli for five or six months while visiting london.see füssli, briefe 202. we do, however, learn from sophia hoffham that something was amiss between fuseli, lavater, and johnson. she wrote the following to heinrich in july 1792: we recently met fuseli, and he seems to be very annoyed that he has not heard from you or your dear father. i cannot judge why they are not good to you, so i cannot comment on the matter—​only i fear that it might harm your father, for fuseli and johnson are very good friends—​the latter, when my husband was with him recently, said that he was very surprised that he did not receive anything from your father, the work is now at a stand still, and johnson says that he will not send your father any more money until he receives the work from him—​please let us know, my dearest, how it all fits together—​there must be a misunderstanding somewhere.letter from sophia hoffham to heinrich lavater, 10 july 1792 (fa lav ms 513.292, zentralbibliothek zürich). (wir haben kürzlich die bekantshaft von fußli gemacht, er scheinet sehr belendiget zu seyn, daß er nicht von ihnen, noch ihren lieben vater gehört. ich kann nicht urtheilen warum sie ihnen nicht gut sind—kann daher von dem puncte gar nichts mittheilen sagen—​nur allein fürchte ich, es könte ihren vater schaden, den fußli und johnson sind sehr grose freunde—​der letztere als mein mann kurzlich bey ihm war, sagte daß er sich sehr wunderte nichts von ihren vater erhalten zu haben, daß werk liegt nun gans stille, und johnson sagt er wird ihren vatter kein mehr gelt schicken, bis er daß werk von ihm erhält—​. lassen sie uns doch mein bester wißen wie es zuzammen hängt—​es muß irgend wo ein misverständniß seyn.) as late as may 1793, sophia was still attempting to mediate between fuseli and lavater, albeit without knowing what had caused the fissure between them.sophia wrote again to lavater on 31 may 1793 (fa lav ms 513.293, zentralbibliothek zürich), asking to know what had happened between him and fuseli, emphasizing once again that their conflict must be a product of misunderstanding and not irreconcilable differences. in any case, the missing text for essays on physiognomy presented challenges. to redress the engravers’ errors in the french edition, fuseli used his position as consulting editor to commission new engravings based on his old designs.for more on the publishing history of the hunter edition of essays and fuseli’s interventions, see erle, blake, lavater and physiognomy 149-58. however, without the new texts from lavater (those that he had requested), the illustrations created a glaring discrepancy: the physiognomic analysis that lavater had originally written applied to faces that now looked different.percival 86; o’rourke 70. to compensate, copies of the old french engravings were printed alongside the new english additions. when confronted with both versions, one is sympathetic to fuseli. considered together, thomas holloway’s “mary sister of martha” (illus. 1) is more accomplished than the copy of johann heinrich lips’s engraving of the same figure (illus. 2). 1. thomas holloway (after henry fuseli), “mary sister of martha,” from j. c. lavater, essays on physiognomy (london: printed for john murray et al., 1789–​98), vol. 2, facing p. 283. e. j. pratt library, victoria university, university of toronto, bentley blake collection, blake no. 750. 2. unsigned, “mary sister of martha,” from j. c. lavater, essays on physiognomy (london: printed for john murray et al., 1789–​98), vol. 2, between pp. 282-83. e. j. pratt library, victoria university, university of toronto, bentley blake collection, blake no. 750. the differences are indeed striking. while each depicts the woman in profile, lips renders mary in strong, harsh lines that elongate and enlarge her features. one fascinating aspect of this intertextual dialogue is the fact that the copy is not a true reproduction of the engraving in the french edition (illus. 3). 3. johann heinrich lips (after henry fuseli), “marie soeur de marthe,” from j. c. lavater, essai sur la physiognomonie (la haye, 1781–​1803), vol. 2, facing p. 253. zentralbibliothek zürich, pas 2302, mappe 1, 592, <https://doi.org/10.3931/e-rara-36352>. instead of printing from the french plates, too difficult logistically, fuseli had new line engravings made after them. incidentally, these further emphasize the supposed errors of their referents. the strong chiaroscuro of the french engraving of mary accents already distorted features—​an oversized hand, a bulging neck, and a liquid eye—​but the copy further impoverishes the likeness through pictorial reduction. this, in turn, makes holloway’s mary appear exceptionally delicate in comparison. the shading, which uses a dot and lozenge technique, softens her facial contours. her hand and eye have been redrawn in more natural proportions, and her parted lips create a sense of momentary pause, as if she is preparing to articulate her thoughts. fuseli sets up a dramatic confrontation between the “french” mary, shown with parted lips and exposed teeth (an expression that reads more like a grimace than a smile), and her far more enchanting “english” twin.as colin jones has argued, the smile itself was associated with french culture and, for some viewers, might have recalled “hypocrisy, untrustworthiness, and artificiality” (91). predictably, this printing ruse complicated interpretation, since the reader now had to negotiate between different versions of the same figure. in a footnote, fuseli offered the rationale for his interventions: the painter has been consulted, with respect to this subject, and has endeavored to regain what was lost or disfigured by the engraver of the head in the french edition. it is left to the reader to determine, whether the criticisms of the author, on spurious deformities, were worth retaining at the expense of propriety and beauty?lavater, essays on physiognomy 2: 283. evidently, fuseli was not afraid to subordinate physiognomy to his primary concern: the presentation and reception of his art.erle (blake, lavater and physiognomy 153-58), percival (85), and o’rourke (70-73) discuss some of the other strategies that fuseli employed. percival notes that he rearranged his engravings from their placement in the french edition to form a “gallery” in the english—​one that assumed greater importance through its proximity to the chapter on raphael. this was important, since subscribers to the essays were not only consumers of expensive books, but also potential patrons of fuseli’s art. erle discusses a new portrait of fuseli by thomas lawrence engraved by holloway for aphorisms on man. she argues that it, together with its greek inscription, presents fuseli as if ready for literary combat with lavater. as heisch put it in the letter quoted above, fuseli claimed the intervention as a necessity. maintaining the status quo could put his reputation at risk. fuseli’s interference also countered the criticism that lavater advanced against the alleged weaknesses of his drawing. to preserve the gloss of impartial empiricism that supported his system, lavater was not above highlighting instances where fuseli or other contributors had exercised undue artistic license—​that is, artists who had deviated from their models (nature for draftsmen and original drawings for engravers). but neither was fuseli immune from challenging lavater in this arena. a head of satan (illus. 4) sits on a protuberant neck resembling nothing so much as the fleshy lower torso of a venus anadyomene (illus. 5).i thank matthew c. hunter for this observation. the strange combination of satan’s physiognomic portrait with the lower half of a female body is perhaps suggestive of lines from milton’s paradise lost (book 2, lines 757-58) in which sin describes her birth from satan’s head: “then shining heav’nly fair, a goddess arm’d, / out of thy head i sprung” (john milton, paradise lost. a poem in twelve books [london: printed for w. strahan et al., 1778] 46). 4. thomas holloway (after henry fuseli), “satan,” from j. c. lavater, essays on physiognomy (london: printed for john murray et al., 1789–​98), vol. 2, facing p. 285. e. j. pratt library, victoria university, university of toronto, bentley blake collection, blake no. 750. 5. titian, venus rising from the sea (venus anadyomene), c. 1520. 74 x 56.2 cm. national galleries of scotland, ng 2751. accepted in lieu of inheritance tax by hm government (hybrid arrangement) and allocated to the scottish national gallery, with additional funding from the national lottery heritage fund, art fund (with a contribution from the wolfson foundation), and the scottish executive, 2003. was this visual double entendre a response to the condescending prose of the author? it certainly appears to indulge ironically in the wild imagination that lavater accused him of. meanwhile, “the daughter of herodias” (also engraved by holloway; illus. 6) similarly looks out of place in the english edition. 6. thomas holloway (after henry fuseli), “the daughter of herodias,” from j. c. lavater, essays on physiognomy (london: printed for john murray et al., 1789–​98), vol. 2, facing p. 291. e. j. pratt library, victoria university, university of toronto, bentley blake collection, blake no. 750. 7. unsigned, “salome,” from j. c. lavater, essays on physiognomy (london: printed for john murray et al., 1789–​98), vol. 2, between pp. 290-91. e. j. pratt library, victoria university, university of toronto, bentley blake collection, blake no. 750. its beguiling narrative infringes upon the scientific paradigm, offering more to the art critic than the physiognomist. lavater could analyze fantasy portraits of historical or biblical figures, but the severed head of saint john the baptist presented a stern hermeneutic challenge. the copy of the french engraving (illus. 7) delivers deathly stillness, presenting an upright profile that clearly articulates the slant of the forehead and the shape of the nose, but the same cannot be said of the holloway engraving. one could mistake the head, radically foreshortened and partially hidden within loose curls, for a leafy cabbage! it would be difficult to read, even for lavater, and quixotic for an amateur physiognomist using the book as a manual.o’rourke argues that the four heads from dante’s inferno (holloway after fuseli) in essays on physiognomy similarly render physiognomic analysis impossible (76-83). to make matters worse, the new engraving has neither of the subsidiary figures found in the original. fuseli exchanges the older male attendant for a female form. her twisting body, although beautifully curvilinear, is illegible. having turned her face away from the reader/​viewer, she resists the physiognomic gaze. the troubled relationship between the hard truth of physiognomy and its mutable evidence is vibrantly expressed by fuseli in a review of holcroft’s version of essays on physiognomy, translated from johann michael armbruster’s abridged edition. it bears quoting at length: the same sympathies with external appearances, pervade the cottage and the palace intuitively and without instruction; whatever is within or beyond this great outline, as it becomes merely a matter of taste, must forever fluctuate on conjecture, confined to the few who have leisure, sagacity, or whim, to follow its minute ramifications, to trace its more refined and fugitive forms, and to dispute for ever: their observations must be individual, mere aperçus, incapable of settled rules, and recommended only by the ingenuity that perceived them, the wit that sparkles through them, the ornaments that surround them: to strip them of these, to reduce them to naked substance, is to annihilate, not to abridge them.see henry fuseli’s unsigned review in analytical review 5 (september-december 1789): 454-62 (on 456). while the criticism functioned to promote the hunter translation over and above its rival, it also illuminates a crucial difference between fuseli’s thinking and lavater’s. fuseli, for one, stressed the merits of the work that did not depend on its empirical claims.pop, “henry fuseli” 79. a concise format, free from distraction, was ideal for a scientific treatise, but the value in the hunter edition was to be found in its ornaments—​the wit of the author and the novelty of the engravings. incidentally, these were the very things that the abridged edition omitted. as john graham rightly notes, prospective buyers of the book were likely less concerned with the infallibility of the evidence presented than with its visual appeal. what one essentially “acquired in such a purchase [was] a picture gallery executed by some of the leading painters and engravers of the century.”graham 45. this debate over the nature of the hunter version underscores physiognomy’s indivisibility from visual culture as well as the role of collaboration in a book that became a vehicle for different authorial priorities. the synchronous production of aphorisms on man with early fascicles of essays on physiognomy has led some scholars to interpret it as a soft launch—​an inexpensive introduction to physiognomic thinking.the first fascicle was available in january 1788 (johnson 54); for more on the relationship between the essays and aphorisms, see allentuck, “fuseli and lavater” 97. however, when the engravings for essays on physiognomy are read in conversation with disagreements unfolding on and off its pages, we become attentive to the fact that it allowed fuseli to support lavater while also promoting himself. knowing this, we can appreciate that aphorisms on man is not a singular instance of a translator gone rogue, but rather one example of the ways in which early modern translations functioned as highly contested spaces. engraving: the frontispiece 8. william blake, frontispiece to j. c. lavater, aphorisms on man (london: printed for j. johnson, 1788). huntington library, san marino, california, call no. 57431 (blake’s copy). image courtesy of the william blake archive. it is important to remember that fuseli and lavater were not the only collaborators in the production of aphorisms on man. bringing the book into the hands of english readers required a small team of skilled laborers. the radical publisher joseph johnson directed the enterprise, which relied on different trades, including papermakers, printers, binders, and engravers, among others. the focus of this section is on one such engraver, william blake, for whom the book unusually collapsed divisions between the personal and the professional. he was already a peripheral member of the johnson circle when he was commissioned to engrave the frontispiece (illus. 8), having received his first contract from the publisher in 1780.this commissioned plate was for the fifth edition of william enfield’s the speaker (1780). there is no record of when or where he and fuseli first met, but they probably crossed paths around that time, when fuseli moved to no. 1 broad street, close to blake’s family residence at no. 28.for more on the artistic community living in the vicinity of broad street, see martin myrone, “‘blake be an artist!,’” william blake, ed. martin myrone and amy concannon (london: tate publishing, 2019) 27-28. we do know that they did not begin working together until the late 1780s, a moment that blake later qualified poetically as a time when fuseli had been given to him for a season.letter from blake to john flaxman, 12 september 1800 (e 707). scholars have long been fascinated with their relationship. upon discovering the preliminary drawing for the frontispiece to aphorisms on man (illus. 9), ruthven todd wondered why fuseli had left “so much to the imagination of the engraver” in a book to which he had given “so much of himself.”todd 174. todd was describing the “liberties” that fuseli had taken in the process of translation. mirroring his own free negotiations with the original manuscript, fuseli invited blake to rework his drawing. why allow a man then known only as a commercial engraver to perform his own transformation? the question is a good one, especially given how inimical fuseli could be to engravers who worked on his designs during this period. in a biting letter to william roscoe penned in 1796, for example, he voices his displeasure with “one mr. thomson,” an engraver to whom a painting of his had been assigned without his consent: he may be a man of talents, and if he is not, i care not, for as your friend politian says, the length of the shadow makes no alteration in the hig[h]th of the man. nor will i say any thing about the credit they force me to give them. … all, the best engraver can do, is, to mar your work and empty your pocket.letter from fuseli to roscoe, 14 september 1796 (weinglass, collected english letters 160-62). fuseli casts engravers as inconvenient middlemen who not only profit from but actually render a disservice to artists. in 1798, it was the engraver moses haughton who troubled him. fuseli suggested that haughton might have done more justice to his drawing the nurse, designed as the frontispiece to roscoe’s translation of a poem by luigi tansillo. “it is done with more freedom than taste,” he complained, “and with more assurance than penetration or amore …. it wants much more finishing to front your work with propriety—​or to be intitled to the pompous fecit under it.”letter from fuseli to roscoe, 17 august 1798 (weinglass, collected english letters 187); weinglass corrects his original attribution from matthew haughton to moses haughton in his prints and engraved illustrations 186-87. in both cases, fuseli questioned whether engravers deserved credit for their efforts.in another dramatic disavowal, fuseli renounced authorship of the engravings after his work that appeared in the german and french editions of essays on physiognomy. advising his cousin, who wanted to publish a book after his work in the style of flaxman’s outline drawings, he bade him avoid republishing those “disgusting things in lavater’s physiognomies that he claims are copies after me.” the only designs that he acknowledged as his own were those that he personally reworked and saw printed in the english edition of essays. see the letter from fuseli to heinrich füssli (his cousin) dated 1805, quoted in weinglass, prints and engraved illustrations 320. haughton, it seems, failed to appease. roscoe printed his translation without the engraving, a choice that fuseli later thanked him for, since haughton had “travestied” his figures.weinglass, collected english letters 192. haughton would later win fuseli’s approval, managing to balance those qualities that his employer valued most in an engraver, “fidelity, diligence and taste,” but only, it seems, when he began working under close supervision.letter from fuseli to roscoe, 20 august 1802 (weinglass, collected english letters 250, 263-64). as robert essick has argued, this hierarchical dynamic between artists and engravers was predetermined by the market: certainly it was an activity demanding disciplined skill, but reproductive engraving was dependent upon a rigorous division of labour and the subordination of individual expression to uniformity and repeatability. all illustrations in a book had to conform to its format, and this mechanical unity was extended to graphic style. if more than one engraver was employed, all had to practise compatible techniques. in spite of an engraver’s prerogative to “sign” his plates, the truly autographic tended to be submerged beneath the anonymity of a corporate and systematic enterprise.essick, commercial book illustrations 5. essick, like fuseli, pinpoints a tension between engravers’ signatures and their claim to authorship. they may have signed their work, but they were rarely given much freedom of expression. working with fuseli and johnson thus provided blake with a rare opportunity to contribute his own ideas.for more on johnson and blake, see erdman, prophet against empire 156-57. see also hay 183-234 and mee 16. blake may not have been able to pursue his ambition to become a professional painter, assuming full membership of the royal academy as both john flaxman and fuseli had done once they had returned from italy, but johnson did support blake as an author. he exhibited his illuminated books in his shop and later printed proofs of his poem the french revolution (1791), although it was never formally published. moreover, comparisons between fuseli’s original drawings and blake’s final engravings suggest that blake had more input than one would expect of an engraver. exactly how much of the detail he worked out on his own is difficult to determine in any of their several collaborative plates. this is especially true for the frontispiece to aphorisms on man, for which there is no extant intermediate drawing. however, visual analysis can provide important clues toward determining his artistic agency. 9. henry fuseli, preliminary drawing for the frontispiece to aphorisms on man. collection of robert n. essick. fuseli’s drawing illustrates a moment of contemplation and composition. the seated male figure rests his right hand on his writing table and supports his head with his left. with one index finger extending across his temple, he turns to look up. there, a winged cherub holds aloft a tablet inscribed with the greek letter γ (gamma). in the left margin, independent of this composition, two profiles have been delineated, each with a measured line that reaches from expansive forehead to pointed chin. these heads contend with physiognomy in its most basic form. challenging our confidence in the power of an image to communicate anatomical precision, however, is the fact that neither of the faces is distinctly recognizable. impeding our efforts further, their resemblance and the intervening lines invite comparison. is this the same individual shown in different life stages, or is one the author and the other the translator?essick speculates as to the identities of the heads and their physiognomic relationship to the seated figure (whose ambiguous identity he remains open to). he writes, “thus, the seated figure represents lavater composing his aphorisms—​and perhaps also fuseli in the act of translating and editing his friend’s words” (commercial book illustrations 40). scholars have wondered if the older profile could be lavater and the younger fuseli. meanwhile, sibylle erle has suggested that the similarities between them—​made explicit through the addition of triangulating lines—​indicate their shared vision.erle, blake, lavater and physiognomy 102. but a closer look at the hooked nose of the lower profile discloses an important difference. if compared with a portrait of lavater that blake was working on around the same time, it does not coincide with the “almost imperceptible arch” of the “ferret nose” for which he was known (illus. 10).essick dates the first state of this engraving to 1787 (separate plates 150). it should be noted that blake never met lavater and would have been working from a likeness. the letter from heisch to lavater in which he mentions fuseli’s choice of aphorisms (see note 15) suggests that the engraving might have been intended for the book, or otherwise as promotional material: “your rules / aphorism of men / are translated, from the 1000 about 700 were selected. i really liked what i saw of it. this also applies to the copperplate engraving of you, for which the drawing at hofham served as the original.” (deine regeln / aphorism of men / sind übersetzt, aus der 1000 ungefehr 700 ausgesucht. was ich davon sah gefiel mir sehr. so auch der kupferstich von dir, wozu die zeichnung bei hofham als original gedient hat.) neither does the angularity of the chin match the squareness of his jaw. these small departures may seem insignificant, but attention to minutiae was the basis of physiognomy. in any case, blake selects a younger model for the frontispiece, who, even if he shares features with the upper profile, nonetheless resists easy identification. 10. william blake, “rev. john caspar lavater” (3rd state, 1801). collection of robert n. essick. image courtesy of the william blake archive. reading the figure in the frontispiece as one of the profiles assumes that physiognomy is at work in the final engraving. given the use of measured lines (a physiognomic method), this seems right, but what if the design has been leading us in the wrong direction? as the debates over the essays show, physiognomy occupied a middle ground between the empirical demands of science and the aesthetic concerns of art. what if blake opted for the latter, choosing to emphasize artistic quirks instead of facial ones? put another way, what if blake “pictures” one of the authors, in this case fuseli, through means other than portraiture? the composition, for example, recalls a series of paintings and drawings that fuseli made in the late 1770s and early 1780s featuring male figures in pensive postures.both weinglass and hall have noted these similarities. see schiff nos. 560-63. while the rough drawing provided the basic compositional structure, blake may have drawn details from other sources, including fuseli’s dispute between hotspur, glendower, mortimer, and worcester (illus. 11). 11. henry fuseli, dispute between hotspur, glendower, mortimer, and worcester (1784). 211 x 180 cm. birmingham museums trust/​birmingham museum & art gallery, 1947p6. photo by birmingham museums trust, licensed under cc0. this canvas, shown and sold at the exhibition of the society for promoting painting and design in liverpool in 1784, depicts a scene from shakespeare’s henry iv, part 1.for more on this painting and the sources that fuseli draws on, see messina 80. hotspur, the figure at left, boasts loose curls, pointed shoes, a square neckline, puffed, slashed garments, and tight leggings that show off his leg musculature—​elements that reappear in blake’s frontispiece engraving.morton paley has commented more broadly on this formal similitude: “indeed, blake so assimilated certain aspects of fuseli’s style that at times it is hard to tell conscious from unconscious imitation” (12). if blake did not have access to the original painting, he could have seen preliminary drawings for it in fuseli’s collection. certainly, richard rhodes had access to the materials he needed to engrave it for the 1805 edition of george steevens’s plays of shakespeare. the brooding figure and the hourglass also find precedent in ezzelin bracciaferro musing over meduna, destroyed by him, for disloyalty, during his absence in the holy land, exhibited in 1780 at the royal academy and published as an engraving in 1781 (illus. 12).lavater, for one, was drawn to this composition. in october 1781, fuseli responded to his request for prints (see füssli, briefe 200): “the twenty-five impressions of ‘ezzelin’ that you asked for come to a little less than half a guinea apiece. but since the plate is not mine, but smith’s, who made it, i wish that you would write to him yourself or have him write to you—​in order to avoid all suspicion that i was trying to gain something in the process.” (fünfundzwanzig abdrücke von “ezzelin,” wie du sie verlangest, kommen etwas weniger als eine halbe guinee das stück. weil aber die platte nicht mir, sonder der smithe, der sie geschabet, angehöret, so wünsche ich, daß du ihm selber schreibest oder schreiben lassen könntest—​um allem argwohne auszuweichen, als ob ich dabei zu gewinnen suchte.) he is referring to the mezzotint engraved by john raphael smith and published in march 1781. the composition reappeared as an engraving by thomas holloway in the second volume of essays on physiognomy. 12. john raphael smith (after henry fuseli), “ezzelin count of ravenna surnamed bracciaferro or iron arm, musing over the body of meduna, slain by him for infidelity during his absence in the holy land” (1781). wellcome collection, 46766i, <https://​wellcomecollection.​org/​works/​c8srwvev>. it is perhaps also worth noting that the hollow of the table in “ezzelin count of ravenna” contains a singular human skull, resembling the faces crowded in the hollow of the bench in fuseli’s original drawing for the frontispiece to aphorisms on man. but whether or not blake had a specific work in mind is not as important as the fact that the engraving is familiar because of its fuselian idiosyncrasies. readers noticed this correspondence. in addition to commenting on the superior quality of blake’s engraving compared to the “general run of frontispieces” found in most books, one reviewer stated that “the drawing seems to be in the style of fuseli.”english review; or, an abstract of english and foreign literature 13 (1789): 121-23 (on 123). this observation would be remarkable if blake had worked up the final engraving from the drawing alone. of course, it is possible that fuseli made a second, more finished drawing that is now lost, or otherwise gave blake detailed instructions. however, further collaborations do suggest that the pair worked on more equal terms than was usual for the industry.todd 175. todd makes the same case for blake’s engraving of michelangelo after fuseli, which, he argues, was based on a rough sketch and worked up by blake. there is, however, evidence to suggest that fuseli may have made equally rough drawings for other engravers. weinglass points out that he gave john june a very rudimentary drawing for the plate of david and goliath as published in willoughby’s practical family bible (1772). the drawing, now preserved in the swedish national museum, is significantly different from the final plate. see weinglass, prints and engraved illustrations 90-91. take, for example, blake’s wash drawing of fertilization of egypt, now in the collection of the british museum, which appears to mediate between a very rough line drawing by fuseli and his own polished engraving as published in erasmus darwin’s the botanic garden (1791). this evidence is especially telling, since the figure of the rain god, barely discernible in the fuseli, assumes urizenic features in the print.roe 160, 174. more recently, martin priestman has suggested that fuseli’s role remained “embryonic” and that “a great deal of the final picture’s detail is purely the work of … william blake” (105). essick and rosamund a. paice survey the debate over the artists’ respective contributions and propose that the sketch of a sistrum on the verso of fuseli’s drawing was added by blake (88). john beer and susan matthews have convincingly taken the middle path and argued that the engraving reflects an active dialogue between the artists (beer 35, 38; matthews 45-47). it suggests, at the very least, a reciprocity of ideas (between blake and fuseli as well as blake in his different professional roles), even if it cannot confirm that the designer and engraver were creative partners. one final clue that blake may have shaped the design for aphorisms on man is found further afield, in his own work. he had at least enough claim to the composition to repurpose it for the frontispiece to his collection of poems songs of innocence (illus. 13), a work dated only one year later.essick, commercial book illustrations 41. 13. william blake, frontispiece to songs of innocence copy b (composed and printed 1789). 11 x 7 cm. library of congress, lessing j. rosenwald collection, call no. pr4144.s6 1789b. image courtesy of the william blake archive. here, the male figure is not quietly withdrawn from the world but framed within a lively pastoral setting. poised in contrapposto, he cuts a graceful, classicizing figure as he looks up toward the source of interruption—​a buoyant child above his left shoulder. if we read the first poem of the book alongside the image, we find that he has paused momentarily from piping to listen to the laughing child, which leads to further merry music. but the closing stanzas describe the transformation of the piper from a rustic musician to an author of books: “piper sit thee down and write / in a book that all may read.” the divine origin of the message suggests a prophecy, an association that returns us to blake and his authorial motivations.mitchell 128-29. the intertextual dialogue between aphorisms on man and songs of innocence strengthens a partial claim to authorship. like fuseli penning his aphorisms on art, blake made the work his own. this position, which i share with todd and others, means that the engraving traverses the same murky waters between fidelity and originality that fuseli had to navigate in his role as translator. just as we cannot be sure to what extent we read fuseli or lavater, neither can we confidently demarcate the boundary between fuseli and his engraver. moreover, it seems to me that blake relishes the opportunity to outdo his colleague—​challenging fuseli using a borrowed visual vernacular. but how should this shape our reading of the image, or indeed the book? one enticing path forward is to embrace the authorial ambiguity that the frontispiece supports visually. for this reading to work, we must first attend to the established frontispiece conventions that blake subverts. his singular male protagonist, for example, is strongly reminiscent of an evangelist shown in the act of penning his gospel. caravaggio’s the inspiration of saint matthew or michelangelo’s prophet isaiah on the sistine chapel ceiling are familiar early modern variations of the medieval iconographic formula that usually also featured an “angel as a spectacular apparition emerging from heaven at a distance above and behind.”lavin 79. fuseli made a drawing after michelangelo’s prophet between 1776 and 1778. see schiff no. 672. such portraits visualized divine intervention in the creative act. the angel in the frontispiece, together with the epigraph on the title page (“è cœlo descendit  γνωθι σεαυτον” [it descended from heaven  know thyself]), confirms that divine power is operative here too. but thereafter blake departs from canonical sources by depicting his “author” without a quill or pen. the male figure lays his free hand flat on the surface before him. if we take into consideration the collaborative nature of aphorisms on man, it is perhaps intentional that the frontispiece is equivocal. the figure could be the author, the translator, the engraver, or all three at once, since each had a hand in the making of the book. in this way, the frontispiece can be said to welcome the same intellectual exercise required of the aphorisms themselves.fuseli explained to his biographer knowles “that an aphorism … ought not to contain its own explication” (knowles 1: 160). it encourages the reader/​viewer to pause and reassess initial assumptions. with these frames in place, we can return to the details of the final engraving that blake would have us consider more carefully. the hollow space below the seated figure is no longer filled with an assortment of artifacts resembling masks, cranial casts, or real human skulls, as in the drawing. instead, it boasts the accoutrements of a library—​a collection of tomes and an overturned hourglass. if the discarded accessories resemble the death masks that lavater privileged as ideal evidence for physiognomic inquiry, blake pursues a different theme. the books connote knowledge, but the blank page of the open volume insists on a specific kind: self-definition. one learns something of oneself, as per the inaugural maxim, through the active and introspective practices of close reading and thoughtful annotation. remember that the final aphorism explicitly emboldens the reader to put pen or pencil to paper: “if you mean to know yourself, interline such of these aphorisms as affected you agreeably in reading, and set a mark to such as left a sense of uneasiness with you.” the importance placed on making known one’s ideas evokes the autobiographical practice of the swiss-french philosophe jean-jacques rousseau, whose work fuseli admired. it also shifts emphasis from the legible surfaces of the body to the invisible contours of the mind. whereas lavater argued that the profile portrait offered unmediated access to the sitter it represented, rousseau conceptualized it as a tool of concealment.maccannell 286; rousseau, “préambule du manuscrit de neufchâtel,” œuvres complètes 1: 1149-50. profiles, after all, reveal only one half of the face. instead, rousseau believed in bringing a true and distinct self into focus through a conscious exploration of his thoughts in writing. the reader/​viewers of aphorisms on man were similarly equipped to emerge from the experience knowing their own minds.both erdman (e 883) and erle (blake, lavater and physiognomy 116) note the emphasis that the book places on self-awareness. this interpretation opens up another possibility for the pensive youth. as a neoclassical ideal, he is a candidate for the superlative anonym—​an allegory of the self. he is the very self that readers discovered through their intimate engagement with the book. reading: dissenting in the margins the material nature of aphorisms on man supports the idea that the book functioned as an exercise in self-discovery. its wide margins and the generous space between aphorisms allowed not only for simple marks but also for the kind of discursive annotation contained in blake’s personal copy, now in the collection of the huntington library. its small format (octavo) made it exceptionally mobile; it could be set on a bedside table or carried in a pocket. as one contemporary reviewer asserted, it was also a book that wanted to be read more than once.critical review: or, annals of literature 66 (july-december 1788): 141-43. we know that blake returned to it several times, since his annotations cross-reference each other.earlier notes that address later ones could only have been written during secondary readings. see erle, “leaving their mark” 358. other evidence, such as staining and damage, implies that it was well loved by him, if not also lent to friends.a note written by a subsequent owner, robert hoe, is pasted on the front flyleaf: “this copy which was blake’s, had to be rebound; it was in broken sheepskin, & more than dirty.” the book was rebound in ochre morocco by r. w. smith and finished by f. mansell (essick, huntington collections 182; e 883). the latter is speculative, but taking seriously the prospect that he shared his copy returns us to the question of self-presentation. blake was not alone in responding to the book as instructed; many copies of aphorisms on man contain marks.see, for example, copies held at rare books and special collections at mcgill university, the hanna holborn gray special collections research center at the university of chicago, harvard university library, the getty research institute, and the wellcome collection. the copy at mcgill (blake 2.1 l3a6 1789), which belonged to john sherwen (m.d., member of the royal college of physicians, also of the royal college of surgeons and corresponding member of the medical society of london), contains underlined words, lines, curly brackets (braces), x notations, and notes written in pencil and black pen by different hands. it should be noted that no other copy that i have encountered is as wonderfully discursive as blake’s. neither was this unusual. writing marginalia was common in the eighteenth century, and as one scholar has demonstrated, handwritten notes were “identified with named individuals (normally the owners of the books) and understood to reflect their personal views.”jackson 60. this is consistent with aphorisms on man. blake inscribed his name twice (once below that of lavater and once on the flyleaf); other copies of the book, including many of those listed above, contain the names of their owners. see also bloom 84-85. thus scholars have increasingly turned to blake’s annotations as a means to access his ideas. scott juengel, for example, compellingly argues that the marginalia register “the minute calibrations of his [blake’s] critical sympathy and retreat as if annotation were a viable substitute for the conversable world” (707). crucial here is the fact that blake addresses a reader or a community of readers. the implication of the command “and then shew your copy to whom you please” (aphorisms 224) is that once complete with manuscript notes, aphorisms on man became a “portrait” of its owner—​intelligible to others.hall makes a similar observation, stating that the book functioned as a vade-mecum that provided “an instant psychological profile of the reader” (135). apprehending the book as a literary equivalent of a self-portrait reminds us that the image is mediated—​that it cannot provide perfect “access to a ‘real’ blake” or any reader.snart, “recentering” 137. nonetheless, it is fair to assume that the marginalia illuminate something of blake’s thought, especially concerning social relations. insofar as the book allows us to better understand blake, we can also invert the lens and use blake to further explore the authorial complexities of aphorisms on man.see snart, the torn book 22-23. there is evidence to suggest that blake invited others to contribute to his unfolding conversation with fuseli and lavater on its pages. he wrote most of his annotations horizontally in black ink, prompting speculation that notes written otherwise may be those of another reader. for example, the word “admirable!” is written vertically in pencil in the margin on page 10 beside aphorism 20, a deviation that could indicate a different hand. similarly, “no fumbler kisses” next to aphorism 503 on page 169 is written clumsily with a dull pencil, suggesting the same. the pencil lines through aphorism 287 on page 101, the word “unsophisticated” underneath, and the ochre ink that appears next to aphorisms 21 (“see 384”) and 384 (“see 20 & 21”) pose more difficulty. the handwriting is like blake’s elsewhere in the book, so it may be that he wrote these later using a different pen (or pencil).e 883. for a discussion of blake’s annotating practices, see snart, “recentering” 141, 145-46. although we are not able to determine who may have read the book and when, these clues substantiate the theory that he extended the call to annotate among friends; in other words, that he solicited new voices—​new authorial rivals.erle stresses the collaborative nature of reading (“leaving their mark” 358). blake is likely to have received his copy between may and july 1788 (e 883). he must have begun annotating it in its unbound state, since his notes run deep into the inner margins and appear as offsets on pages remote from their original placement. while he finds many of the aphorisms agreeable, underlining liberally and praising those that strike him as true using exclamations such as “most excellent” and “pure gold,” he also asserts himself when he disagrees, judging specific aphorisms “false” or observing that they make him feel “very uneasy.” some of the aphorisms produce more complex responses, especially those that make him uncomfortable because he finds them to be true, such as no. 518, “you may have hot enemies without having a warm friend; but not a fervid friend without a bitter enemy. the qualities of your friends will be those of your enemies: cold friends, cold enemies—​half friends, half enemies—​fervid enemies, warm friends,” to which he responds with an x and “very uneasy indeed but truth.” he had learned this from personal experience; his enmities burned as brightly as his friendships. in addition to his discursive engagement, blake also read with an editorial eye. he corrects small typographical errors, like those noted on the errata page, and revises aphorisms based on his own ideas. an interesting example is no. 549, where he substitutes antonyms: “he, who hates [loves] the wisest and best of men, hates [loves] the father of men; for where is the father of men to be seen but in the most perfect of his children?” reinforcing his position, he responds in the margin with “this is true worship.” although the meaning remains unchanged—​that we find god in the best of humankind irrespective of whether we love or hate our fellow mortals—​it is love that makes the recognition of the divine in man the basis of true worship. the change is subtle, but it encapsulates what blake seeks to accomplish with his marginalia. transforming the page into “a site of contestable authority,” as jason snart has argued, he critiques fuseli’s lavater while at the same time establishing common philosophical ground.snart, “recentering” 137. one must locate unisons and discords with others in order to know and better oneself. finally, blake’s thoughts are not limited by what appears on the page, since he engages with his own ideas as expressed in other annotations and external sources. these intraand intertextual connections create a rich countertext that leads the reader in directions that only blake could determine. one annotation that speaks directly to his relationship with the book as a collaborator is found on page 7. here, he underlines the concluding line of aphorism 14, “the object of your love is your god,” to which he responds, “this should be written in gold letters on our temples.” erle has offered several interpretative pathways for the ambiguous line. the word “temple,” she ventures, “could mean church, in which case it would be a critique of the institution which neglected to tell believers [of the true nature of their religion], or it could mean forehead, in which case it would be an expression of moral character.”erle, blake, lavater and physiognomy 117. i find the former reading more compelling for its intertextual specificity. pliny tells us that “know thyself” was one of a series of maxims inscribed on the temple of apollo at delphi, “written in letters of gold.” blake may be suggesting that “the object of your love is your god” is the modern equivalent of that ancient aphorism and should be carved on christian churches in the same manner as the oracular truths on the temple of apollo. if this is correct, he is also nodding to the greek aphorism itself, which he could not but have discussed with fuseli while engraving the frontispiece. fuseli likely chose γνωθι σεαυτον, since he provides the first letter in his drawing, but neither should we rule out the possibility that blake proposed the idea.we should also consider the fact that fuseli often chose greek inscriptions to embellish his drawings (and, notably, for portraits of himself). todd ventures that fuseli provided the inscription, since blake had no knowledge of greek at this time (174). in any case, his annotations suggest more than a casual engagement with the aphorisms. in many ways, blake assumes the responsibility of the ideal reader, modeling the critical engagement that fuseli envisioned when he wrote his concluding aphorism as a command. finally, it is important to emphasize that blake’s revisions and critical comments do not indicate that he found aphorisms on man to be unsuccessful. rather, they suggest that, like fuseli, he thought to improve it.like fuseli, blake exceeded his revisions and went on to pen his own aphorisms, “proverbs of hell.” see essick, commercial book illustrations 41; erle, “leaving their mark” 351; hall 136. on the last printed page, he justified his comments in these exact terms: “i hope no one will call what i have written cavilling because he may think my remarks of small consequence for i write from the warmth of my heart. & cannot resist the impulse i feel to rectify what i think false in a book i love so much. & approve so generally” (p. 224). he expressed his admiration even further by inscribing his name on the title page below that of lavater, enclosing them together inside a heart (illus. 14). 14. title page of blake’s copy of j. c. lavater, aphorisms on man (london: printed for j. johnson, 1788). huntington library, san marino, california, call no. 57431. image courtesy of the william blake archive. i think it is safe to conclude that this is a gesture of friendship, although we should be careful to distinguish what kind.erle, blake, lavater and physiognomy 100. whereas lavater stressed like-mindedness between friends, blake rebuffed william hayley’s concept of companionship as a “sweet subduer of all mental strife.”william hayley, poems and plays, by william hayley, esq., 6 vols. (london: printed for t. cadell, 1785) 3: 25. instead, he pressed upon the important role of conflict in maintaining worthwhile interpersonal relationships. on plate 20 of the marriage of heaven and hell, in the raging surf below an awful vision of leviathian, he declares unequivocally that “opposition is true friendship.”see, for example, marriage copy a. for more on blake and opposition, see mee and haggarty 5. this declaration returns us to the proposition that i dismissed in the introduction—​the idea that the book is a “product of friendship.” erle may be correct after all. however, we must acknowledge that this friendship, with its openness toward rivalry, is of a blakean sort—​one that embraces conflict as a precondition for progress. conclusion in calling upon its reader/​viewers to focus on their thoughts in the private act of reading, aphorisms on man may be understood as participating in a broader psychosociological shift. as dror wahrman has argued, those once predisposed to resist self-scrutiny began to look inward at exactly this moment in the late eighteenth century. aphorisms on man aligns with the new identity regime that wahrman describes as emerging in tandem with romanticism to the degree that it privileges “the characterization of self in terms of psychological depth; the emphasis on human difference and individuality; the rekindled interest in innate, intuitive, and instinctive traits or behaviors, [and] the developmental perspective on human growth.”wahrman 290. as a novel interface between the self and others, the book functioned as an ideal terrain for elaborating modern selfhood. but, as i have argued, this was true not only for its reader/​viewers, but also for its authors. it is only when we look closer at the working relationships behind aphorisms on man and other early modern translations like essays on physiognomy that we see the importance of rivalry as well as friendship. shifting emphasis away from physiognomy, fuseli used his translations as platforms to assert an authorial identity that complemented his artistic ambitions and rising professional stature. and, as if recognizing the authorial ambiguity already operative in his loose translation, he invited blake to do the same with the frontispiece design. although not radical in the usual political sense associated with books published under the auspices of joseph johnson, aphorisms on man bred its own critical form of dissent. its contributors—​author, translator, engraver, and readers—​wrote or rewrote the book in their own images. while “designed to promote the knowledge and the love of mankind” in a similar spirit to the essays, aphorisms on man ultimately pursued a different goal. instead of proving formal relationships between internal and external traits, it invited readers to learn about themselves through the practices of reading and writing. it created, as it were, a portrait of the mind. indeed, according to alexander gilchrist, “blake showed his notes to fuseli; who said one assuredly could read their writer’s character in them.”gilchrist 1: 62. while i agree that the marginalia allow us to glimpse something of blake’s philosophy, i propose that we examine his copy with the same prudence as rousseau when faced with a profile—​mindful of the fact that while it reproduces a likeness, it shows us only one side. finally, a book as clever as aphorisms on man similarly prompts us to reconsider the limits of our own methodological frameworks. turning it inside out to consider how it was made, as i have done, prompts new thinking about authorship in light of the ambiguities of translation. works cited ackroyd, peter. blake: a biography. 1995. new york: ballantine books, 1997. allentuck, marcia. “fuseli and lavater: physiognomical theory and the enlightenment.” studies on voltaire and the eighteenth century 55 (1967): 89-112. —​—​—​. “fuseli’s translations of winckelmann: a phase in the rise of british hellenism with an aside on william blake.” studies in the eighteenth century ii. ed. r. f. brissenden. toronto: university of toronto press, 1973. 163-86. beer, john. romantic influences: contemporary—​victorian—​modern. basingstoke: macmillan, 1993. bhabha, homi k. the location of culture. 1994. abingdon: routledge, 2004. bloom, harold. blake’s apocalypse. garden city, ny: doubleday, 1963. burke, peter. “cultures of translation in early modern europe.” cultural translation in early modern europe. ed. peter burke and r. po-chia hsia. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2007. 7-38. erdman, david v. blake: prophet against empire. 2nd ed. princeton: princeton university press, 1969. —​—​—​, ed. the complete poetry and prose of william blake. newly rev. ed. new york: anchor-random house, 1988. [abbreviated as e] erle, sibylle. blake, lavater and physiognomy. london: legenda-modern humanities research association/​maney publishing, 2010. —​—​—​. “leaving their mark: lavater, fuseli and blake’s imprint on aphorisms on man.” comparative critical studies 3.3 (2006): 347-69. essick, robert n. the separate plates of william blake: a catalogue. princeton: princeton university press, 1983. —​—​—​. william blake’s commercial book illustrations. oxford: clarendon press, 1991. —​—​—​. the works of william blake in the huntington collections. san marino: huntington library, 1985. essick, robert n., and rosamund a. paice. “newly uncovered blake drawings in the british museum.” blake 37.3 (winter 2003–​04): 84-100. federmann, arnold. johann heinrich füssli: dichter und maler, 1741–​1825. zürich: orell füssli verlag, 1927. finsler, georg. “lavater in amt und privatleben.” johann caspar lavater, 1741–​1801: denkschrift zur hundertsten wiederkehr seines todestages. zürich: stiftung von schnyder von wartensee/​commissionsverlag von alb. müller, 1902. 1-56. füssli, heinrich. briefe. ed. walter muschg. basel: verlag benno schwabe, 1942. gilchrist, alexander. life of william blake, with selections from his poems and other writings. 2nd ed. 2 vols. london: macmillan and co., 1880. graczyk, annette. “constructs of life forms in lavater’s physiognomy.” life forms in the thinking of the long eighteenth century. ed. keith michael baker and jenna m. gibbs. toronto: university of toronto press, 2016. 153-78. graham, john. lavater’s “essays on physiognomy”: a study in the history of ideas. bern: lang, 1979. hall, carol louise. blake and fuseli: a study in the transmission of ideas. new york: garland publishing, 1985. hay, daisy. dinner with joseph johnson: books and friendship in a revolutionary age. princeton: princeton university press, 2022. italiano, federico. “the dark side: an introduction.” the dark side of translation. ed. federico italiano. london: routledge, 2020. 1-15. jackson, h. j. marginalia: readers writing in books. new haven: yale university press, 2001. johns, adrian. piracy: the intellectual property wars from gutenberg to gates. chicago: university of chicago press, 2009. johnson, mary lynn. “blake’s engravings for lavater’s physiognomy: overdue credit to chodowiecki, schellenberg, and lips.” blake 38.2 (fall 2004): 52-74. jones, colin. the smile revolution in eighteenth-century paris. oxford: oxford university press, 2014. juengel, scott j. “william blake’s enemies.” sel: studies in english literature, 1500–​1900 58.3 (2018): 703-29. knowles, john. the life and writings of henry fuseli. 3 vols. london: henry colburn and richard bentley, 1831. lavater, johann caspar. aphorisms on man (1788 ): a facsimile reproduction of william blake’s copy of the first english edition. intro. r. j. shroyer. delmar, ny: scholars’ facsimiles, 1980. —​—​—​. aphorisms on man. trans. henry fuseli. 2nd ed. london: printed for j. johnson, 1789. —​—​—​. essays on physiognomy, designed to promote the knowledge and the love of mankind. 5 vols. london: printed for john murray, h. hunter, and t. holloway, 1789–​98. lavin, irving. “divine inspiration in caravaggio’s two st. matthews.” art bulletin 56.1 (1974): 59-81. maccannell, juliet flower. “history and self-portrait in rousseau’s autobiography.” studies in romanticism 13.4 (1974): 279-98. matthews, susan. blake, sexuality and bourgeois politeness. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2011. mee, jon. “networks.” william blake in context. ed. sarah haggarty. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2019. 15-22. mee, jon, and sarah haggarty. “introduction.” blake and conflict. ed. sarah haggarty and jon mee. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, 2009. 1-11. messina, maria grazia. “shakespeare and the sublime.” shakespeare in art. by jane martineau et al. london: merrell, 2003. 61-95. mitchell, w. j. t. picture theory: essays on verbal and visual representation. chicago: university of chicago press, 1994. o’rourke, stephanie. “fuseli’s physiognomic impressions.” art, science, and the body in early romanticism. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2022. 60-103. paley, morton d. william blake. oxford: phaidon press; new york: e. p. dutton, 1978. percival, melissa. “johann caspar lavater: physiognomy and connoisseurship.” journal for eighteenth-century studies 26.1 (2003): 77-90. percival, melissa, and graeme tytler. physiognomy in profile: lavater’s impact on european culture. newark: university of delaware press, 2005. pop, andrei. antiquity, theatre, and the painting of henry fuseli. oxford: oxford university press, 2015. —​—​—​. “henry fuseli: greek tragedy and cultural pluralism.” art bulletin 94.1 (2012): 78-98. porter, martin. windows of the soul: the art of physiognomy in european culture, 1470–​1780. oxford: oxford university press, 2005. priestman, martin. “‘fuseli’s poetic eye’: prints and impressions in fuseli and erasmus darwin.” romanticism and illustration. ed. ian haywood, susan matthews, and mary l. shannon. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2019. regier, alexander. exorbitant enlightenment. oxford: oxford university press, 2018. roe, albert s. “the thunder of egypt.” william blake: essays for s. foster damon. ed. alvin h. rosenfeld. providence: brown university press, 1969. 158-95. rousseau, jean-jacques. œuvres complètes. ed. bernard gagnebin and marcel raymond. vol. 1. paris: gallimard, 1959. schiff, gert. johann heinrich füssli, 1741–​1825. 2 vols. zürich: berichthaus, 1973. schroyer, richard j. “the 1788 publication date of lavater’s aphorisms on man.” blake 11.1 (summer 1977): 23-26. snart, jason. “recentering blake’s marginalia.” huntington library quarterly 66.1-2 (2003): 134-53. —​—​—​. the torn book: unreading william blake’s marginalia. selinsgrove: susquehanna university press, 2006. todd, ruthven. “two blake prints and two fuseli drawings, with some possibly pertinent speculations.” blake 5.3 (winter 1971–​72): 173-81. wahrman, dror. the making of the modern self: identity and culture in eighteenth-century england. new haven: yale university press, 2004. weinglass, david h., ed. the collected english letters of henry fuseli. millwood, ny: kraus international, 1982. —​—​—​. prints and engraved illustrations by and after henry fuseli: a catalogue raisonné. aldershot: scolar press, 1994. zachs, william. the first john murray and the late eighteenth-century london book trade. oxford: oxford university press/​british academy, 1998. vol. 58 | no. 3 | winter 2024–25 blake an illustrated quarterly nelson hilton, university of georgia tilar j. mazzeo, colby college josephine a. mcquail, independent scholar robert w. rix, university of copenhagen joseph viscomi, university of north carolina at chapel hill david worrall, the nottingham trent university martin butlin, tate gallery, london, retired tristanne j. connolly, university of waterloo detlef w. dörrbecker, university of trier, retired sibylle erle, university of lincoln robert n. essick, university of california, riverside angela esterhammer, victoria college, university of toronto a d v i s o r y b o a r d a n i l l u s t r a t e d q u a r t e r l y volume 58 number 3 winter 2024–25 c o n t e n t s www.blakequarterly.org © 2025 copyright blake/an illustrated quarterly cover: side view of “albion rose” in the room of the future at the exhibition william blake’s universe, fitzwilliam museum, 2024. photograph by thomas adank, reproduced by kind permission of the fitzwilliam museum. e d i t o r s editor: morton d. paley co-editor, 1970–2024: morris eaves book review editor: sibylle erle exhibitions editor: luisa calè bibliographer (criticism): wayne c. ripley bibliographers (music): camila oliveira, jason whittaker sales review editor: mark crosby managing editor: sarah jones sarah.jones@rochester.edu production office: department of english, university of rochester, rochester ny 14627-0451 articles “symbols of embodied agency”: the reception of william blake’s engravings for john gabriel stedman’s narrative (1796) in contemporary art and visual culture by caroline anjali ritchie “unentangled in the intricate windings of modern practice”: william blake’s apprentice copperplates and engravings by mark crosby reviews brian russell graham, speech acts in blake’s “milton” reviewed by annise rogers william blake’s universe, fitzwilliam museum, 23 february–19 may 2024 william blake’s universe, ed. david bindman and esther chadwick reviewed by luisa calè review: timothy morton, hell: in search of a christian ecology timothy morton. hell: in search of a christian ecology. new york: columbia university press, 2024. liii + 257 pp. $110.00/​£92.00, hardcover; $26.95/​£22.00, paperback; $25.99/​£22.00, e-book. reviewed by william ilan rubel william ilan rubel (golgonoozans@gmail.com) is a vancouver-based writer and professor, active in eco-theater, ecophilosophy, and postsecular studies. in hell: in search of a christian ecology, timothy morton takes the question of our future coexistence with each other and with nonhumans into the “absolute contingency of a genuinely future future” (lii). a self-professed “dark ecologist” who grew up in the 1980s on a combination of acid house, star wars, monty python, and william blake, they bring the counterepistemological sensibility of the marriage of heaven and hell and songs of innocence and of experience to bear on our situation. it is high time. blake has often been celebrated as an inimitable poet and painter whose vision of “a heaven in a wild flower” (e 490) expands as much out of quantum-tangled indeterminacy as enraptured beauty, but hell is perhaps the first book to apply that vision to the climate emergency, inviting us to see beyond the iron jaws of the future closing around us. fortunately, it accomplishes this without didacticism. written in a wildly engaging and improvisatory style, the book brims with scintillating puns, winks, and synchronicities. from the outset, it is clear that hell engages with blake because what blake means by imagination is difficult, in the way that ecophilosophy is difficult, undoing “the ratio” (e 3) or the modern optics that circumscribes ecosophical or haptic attention. scarcely using the word imagination, hell opens imagination’s doors in the “infernal or diabolical sense” (e 44), as a mode not of mere problem-solving or pastiche but of attention. in this haptic sense, imagination is the permeable perception that the earthly is the divine, the spiritual is the ecological, and “every thing that lives is holy” (e 45). an oxford-trained romanticist, morton has helped awaken environmentalism from its dogmatic slumbers with works such as the ecological thought (2010) and hyperobjects (2013). written “in the form of a violently beautiful conversion” (244n18), hell arrives as a more personal testament. its hyperpersonal tenor generates “affect … a transpersonal vibe-like thing” (121) in response to the reality that we are madly, frenetically working against ourselves as we careen toward three-plus degrees celsius by the mid-twenty-first century. like los carrying a “red globe of fire,” “putting on his golden sandals,” and entering the “door of death for albions sake inspired” (e 244, 242, 144), morton steps into the fiery milieu of marriage to write about our ecological hell. although hell makes only indirect reference to it, blake’s famed design of los entering the caverns of the grave offers a curiously fitting image for what it feels like to read a book that ventures where mainstream environmental discourse does not go: a radically ecosophical descent into accident, mutation, anomaly, and miracle.hell seems to allude to the image in the context of an invitation into the phenomenological “feel ” of the “not-yet subjunctivity shimmering in the very realness of the real” (xxix): “a primordial uncertainty, a lovely hiddenness, a ‘selva oscura’ (dante), a gate to a secret garden slightly open, stairs down into the darkness of a beautiful underworld” (210). imagination, in this context, is haptic; it depends on an active effort to pay attention in ways that precede and exceed the optic, “melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid” (e 39). admirers of the decentering critical streak in morton’s dark ecology may be dismayed by hell  ’s evangelical direction, but the emphasis on the awareness of strange entanglement (“the ecological thought”) remains sharp. embracing indeterminacy and comedy, they eschew tired words like nature and imagination for the “feel ” (xxix) of life as the “possibility of abortion,” the “pulsation” of a “miraculous stupidity” or “basic peristaltic wave” of “thumos” with “nothing ‘underneath’” (151-52). the point is not to know, with einstein, but to not know, with bohr. mutation and symbiosis may be how the world weaves itself, “but actualizing this truth must be a perpetual act of decolonial, liberating love” (183). in that sense, hell ’s christian ecology could well adopt blake’s motto “the eye altering alters all” (e 485). morton emphasizes that this alteration is not about tearing away, but about taking the risk of being open and attentive to indeterminate aesthetic interrelations. its mode is tenderness or “mercy” (xviii), which releases us from a vision of life as the “endless wheels within wheels of revenge” (110). indeed, the immediate context for hell ’s reconnection with the works of blake is morton’s own unexpected bodily experience, after decades as a buddhist, of receiving a “massive … dose” (228) of christian mercy, felt as “snakes of golden energy” (244n18). yet their reasons for taking dark ecology into christian ecology, via blake, are more practical than esoteric and evangelical. what may look like a sales pitch to the cult of personality proves to be a brilliant exploration of blake’s relevance to the climate emergency. blake appears as a kind of psychopomp, our guide in a descent that inverts transcendentalism and flips gnosticism, emphasizing imagination as an active, affective force that can break open the tacit modern sense of deterministic entrapment in the ecosphere.in crossing the threshold: etheric imagination in the post-kantian process philosophy of schelling and whitehead (olympia, wa: revelore press, 2023), matthew david segall likewise links imagination to an active force and “descendental aesthetic ontology” that can heal the rift that kant, and modernity, opened between cognition and reality. an underlying “liberation phenomenology” (l), flowing more from poiesis than formal logic, leads morton to connect blake with martin luther king, offering a vision of climate action as the courage to open the possibility of imagining together a future without fossil fuels: “‘i have a dream’ gave everyone a stunning ‘reason to buy’ antiracism. one bought it as soon as one did the thing that the phrase makes one do—​open one’s mind to the future” (xxix). in this sense, hell is not another book intended to compel the reader to feel the closing grip of climate doom, but one that dwells in possibility: “right here and now, one can sense the affective power, the surging sonority, the outrageous poetry, of i have a dream” (210). morton is not only interested in the increasingly common comparisons of our ecological reality to hell; they insist that the subtitle, “in search of a christian ecology,” is as important as the title. hell is, in these respects, a deeply romantic book. a model of poiesis as counterepistemological medicine is central to morton’s notion of a “christian ecology.” the point is less to critique romantic “aesthetic ideology” (eagleton) than to register how the live aesthetic current facilitates a shift to a universe that feels entangled rather than pure, intimately open ended rather than deterministic. they repeatedly offer the book as the “blue pill,” not the “red pill” (10). in this view, blake’s rejection of “nature,”“i fear wordsworth loves nature” (as reported by crabb robinson; see g. e. bentley, jr., blake records, 2nd ed. [new haven: yale university press, 2004] 429). like his rejection of “bad art” (e 565), is not an expression of puritanical recalcitrance but an affirmation of more-than-materialist modes of attention. as morton might put it, blake flips the modern idea of nature because it is intensely anti-ecological. an aim, then, of their disarming blakean style is to convert evangelism from “transphobia, misogyny, white supremacy” to an embrace of love and art: “i can’t help talking about it. … it’s called gospel. … i feel like dancing” (226). hell draws on blake to invite daring rethinking of the role that christianity can play in a landscape where liberated love and art have been demonized as threats to the nation. morton is perhaps the first blake scholar to all but invite us to come and pet the “plushy tyger” (85). part of this call to play is also an uncomfortable invitation into their personal life. their decision to say “what the hell” and lay it all bare might be greeted as a catastrophe for dark ecology—​a capitulation to salvationism and the caving in of a critical thinker to climate anxiety. their epiphany can easily be read as a nervous breakdown. yet blake too was suspected by his contemporaries of being someone whose tendency to care too much—​“sweetness of … countenance” and “gentility of … manner” (crabb robinson)—​was the corollary of a presumed excitability or nervous instability.see bentley, blake records, 2nd ed., 698. today one is more likely to link his enthusiasm to his remarkable ability to transmit haptic insights. by anchoring hell in blake, a “sacred, blazing artist of liberation” (45), morton not only gives us a context for understanding their intensely personal approach but also deepens the grounding of dark ecology in art rather than intellectual trends. if alfred north whitehead’s assessment of the romantics is of any relevance, then the “testimony of great poets” endures precisely because it replies to optic abstractions with haptic aesthetics, expressing “deep intuitions of mankind penetrating into what is universal in concrete fact.”alfred north whitehead, science and the modern world (1925; new york: free press, 1967) 122. marriage, in particular, is vital to morton’s efforts to draw on the enduring haptic intuition that the ecological is “sacred,” but not in the usual optic (anthropocentric, colonizing) transcendental or teleological ways: in blake’s hell, the sacred comes down off a high horse, a “horse of instruction” …. after a very messy divorce, the sacred is getting hitched again to the biosphere it comes out of. … the human form grew out of the biosphere: a beauteous, disturbing, blissful thing made of lifeforms messily and incompletely glued together without rhyme or reason, without a telos. (41) using the word sacred in its heretical sense, explaining that it “feels wrong, but … it’s at least a quality or a feeling or a feel” (1-2), they link it to the feel of the biosphere, and, further, to their phenomenological feeling that the “biosphere is the body of christ” (liii): the sacred is the feel of biology, its phenomenology. by “feel” (and by “phenomenology”) i absolutely do not mean “subjective experience of,” and in particular i absolutely do not mean “human subjective experience of.” … the basic slogan of phenomenology is, “the how is the what.” (4) maintaining that “blake understood that the sacred belongs to the body” (31), they emphasize immanence or “subscendence” (112) rather than transcendence: “what is best about the sacred is its immanence to the physical world, and what is worst about religion are its horrified and violent attempts to achieve escape velocity from this immanence” (44-45). in rethinking the sacred as the ecological, hell engages in the distinctly blakean strategy of inviting us, with compassion and humor, to look at the “deadly terrors” (e 25) of modern optics. in blake’s work, these terrors are on awful display, from the hammering doubts of the speaker in “the tyger” to the hoary anguish of manacled urizen. yet, as the infernal narrator tells the officious angel in marriage, “all that we saw was owing to your metaphysics … & it is but lost time to converse with you whose works are only analytics” (e 42). contemporary speculative thinker isabelle stengers might be writing about blake when (discussing the relevance of whitehead’s haptic metaphysics for our “times of collapse”) she pinpoints the germ of ecocide and suicide implicit in what blake might call modern epistemic “doubt” (e 142): his [whitehead’s] call is: “we are children of the universe.” we have become so accustomed to thinking that the universe is indifferent to what makes us thrill that we recognize any thesis whatsoever as “undoubtedly objective” so long as it has the allure of a “truth that hurts,” a truth translatable into the defeat of commonsense.isabelle stengers, making sense in common: a reading of whitehead in times of collapse, trans. thomas lamarre (minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 2023) 32. throughout hell, blake appears as a “glad day” figure—​that is, not as an apocalyptic one but as a counterepistemological one, radiating the joy that comes with undoing epistemic and perceptual regimes, or with relaxing the optic circumscription of the haptic. in that sense, morton contributes to an ongoing intervention into blake studies. northrop frye cast blake as an apocalyptic visionary who, like jesus, met with trials and consolidated the “whole body of error in his society into a resolve to destroy him,”northrop frye, fearful symmetry: a study of william blake (princeton: princeton university press, 1947) 403. yet numerous scholars after frye (including steven goldsmith, mark lussier, and peter otto) have qualified this assessment, emphasizing blake’s counterapocalypse: a moment of attention that, rather than announcing a pure discourse at the end of historical time, opens into the promiscuous event.arguably, this liberation occurs in the world and not in the text of jerusalem, despite its initial call to expand the senses into the awareness that “i am in you and you in me, mutual in love divine” (e 146) and its marvelously condensed concluding lines: all human forms identified even tree metal earth & stone. all human forms identified, living going forth & returning wearied into the planetary lives of years months days & hours reposing and then awaking into his bosom in the life of immortality. (e 258) that conveying the event of ecological attention is exceedingly difficult is evidenced as much in the lucid yet elusive philosophical recursions of hell as in blake’s intimation that all things are “human forms” going forth and returning into “planetary lives.” morton’s use of the word “biosphere” resonates, at least, with blake’s word “bosom,” a kind of virtual fold of infinite interrelation. one of the great appeals of morton’s dark ecology has been its ability to disrupt essentialist (protofascist) notions of the “sacred” and “natural.” in ecology without nature: rethinking environmental aesthetics (2009), they insist on critical theory as an antidote to ecocriticism’s “petty, small-minded, anti-‘theory’ vibe” (hell xxxvi). dark ecology: for a logic of future coexistence (2018) pushes even further, suggesting that ecological awareness and ecological phenomenon share the form of a möbius strip: our coexistence with nonhumans, which looks like a tragedy, may flip into a comedy. in hell, the most wild and unexpected part of the comedy, “where someone cries just after they smile as they notice the other guy is their long-lost brother” (9), turns out to be morton’s sudden recognition that jesus is the biosphere: i had a weird experience while serving vegan meatballs to my son simon (fourteen). i palpably “saw” that my whole life had been a prodigal-son-style cosmic joke. it was as if i had made my way around a thirty-seven-year-long moebius strip. i thought i had been transcending christianity in the most decisive ways possible, only to find that the last thirty-seven years had been training me to receive a massive (i mean, massive) dose of it. (228) in hell, there is certainly the sense that a massive joke is being played, with the cry of “holy holy holy” (e 566) even as “earth is burning, as if becoming hell” (xxviii), but humor is its vital strategy to shake up the ponderous and violent “ontotheology” of “beautiful soul[s]” (32, 7). arguably, hell focuses on marriage and songs because the satirical, playful blake of the revolutionary 1790s offers expedient antidotes to our climate doomism, even if, in the blake of later texts too, the full-blown visions of the “mighty polypus growing / from albion over the whole earth” (e 159) or “the great red dragon with seven heads & ten horns” (e 558) prove puffs of air. “error” is “burnt up the moment men cease to behold it” (e 565). climate doom fails to recognize that the apocalyptic image of the “green & purple” streaked leviathan rushing “toward us with all the fury of a spiritual existence” is one of the “reptiles of the mind” (e 41-42). in songs and marriage, the whole game is to laugh at the ecocidal ego: charlie chaplin declared that tragedy is about close-ups, whereas the wide shot is comedic: tragedy is a small distorted region of comedy space. … i want a biodiversity of emotional responses to our plight; that we see our plight not as some tragic destiny of the human race but as the necessarily awful part of a comedy when actual violence might break out. wouldn’t it be great if global warming gave us the chance to see that humans are interrelated and that humans are interrelated with nonhumans? that being the devil’s body parts isn’t so bad? (65) when the monstrous reptile of the mind vanishes, the biosphere appears (in haptic, intensive form) as the “divine body of the lord jesus” or the “imagination” (e 148), and seeing this leads to relationship, not sanctimony: if there’s no way out of hell, because every way out drills me down further into it, because i am a physical being, then there’s less than no point trying to scorch my way out. i might (as well) get on with it. do my best to be kind. smile. (70) in brief, morton emphasizes the lighter sides of blake’s christian wrath. their sensibility remains that of a dj, remixing speculative realism and poststructuralism as salutary acid tabs. like the “plushy” image and “willful misspelling” (85, 192) that belie “the tyger,” their wrath is meant to melt the cold secular rationality of the horses of instruction. through their relentlessly playful emphasis on wrath as rhythm or haptics, morton makes marriage and songs as relevant to our times of collapse as to our times of edm festivals: palpitating in greek is thumos, which we hear in the last syllable of rhythm. (the rhy comes from rhein, “to flow,” as in body fluids.) this is the “life” that blake means when he writes “every thing that lives is holy.” everything that palpitates is holy. everything means … everything. (149) hell is their way of stepping out as the fool, less climate crusader than scandalous lover of the biosphere, a naked young rainbow figure: one of my favorite blakes is glad day …. a good alternative title would be vitruvian man goes to the disco. … glad day is vitruvian man stepping out of the square and the circle, putting his best foot forward. he’s gotten on the good foot and there’s rainbow light exploding behind him. glad day is the visual equivalent of “the divine image” with its line “love, the human form divine” …. the human form—​the human body, part of the biosphere. (63-64) with lucid contemporary references, they make blake’s counterapocalypse relevant to our moment. in short, morton offers brilliant insights into the blakean links between wrath, enjoyment, and imaginative energy. speculative metaphysics clarifies these links. for blake, as for whitehead, “enjoyment” is wild in the sense that it is more primary to experience, and to the universe, than consciousness: “the term ‘enjoyment’ refers to the fact that what is felt is an element contributory to the real internal constitution of its subject.”alfred north whitehead, process and reality, corrected ed., ed. david ray griffin and donald w. sherburne (new york: free press, 1978) 220. arguably, enjoyment is essential to what blake means by imagination: the etho-ecological intensity that escapes the “watch fiends” (e 136) of mechanical time. wrath is the release of aesthetic enjoyment. in a vivid passage, morton hints that the key to shifting from an ecocidal to a multispecies christianity is to intensify the aesthetic, not vaporize it. a growing problem with grim climate discourses is the tendency, in the name of stark realism, to subordinate imagination (which opens into new narratives, the future) to the logic and arithmetic of the past: how to see global warming as part of the human drama, not as the end of it? how to rebuild the play when there is a fourth wall collapse, and when this collapse coincides with the actual theater on fire? when being on fire is what causes this collapse, what happens? the play was shit. we need another play. (220) against moralistic, abstract climate ethics, morton emphasizes the aesthetic. ethics is “about being a body” (14) with “sensual enjoyment.” blake’s tygers of wrath set loose a joyous haptics that dissolves the optic circumscription that makes the world appear “finite & corrupt” (e 39): it makes one think about “wrath.” that’s the chemical composition of these tigers. wrath is not destructive anger that is acted out in the master-slave duality. … wrath is wise because it creates in the form of acknowledgment. seeing slavery for what it is, really seeing it, not slavishly, and not masterfully, would be seeing with the burning eyes of the tyger in the distant deeps or skies of the imagination. (107) hell picks out blake’s deeply spiritual theme: friendship. what seems so simple, coexistence, requires an altering of the eye, a shift from optic (frozen) to haptic (flowing) attention. yet we are “angelic demons” (42). self-centered optics is our default mode. to see that is, itself, to melt the freeze: “friendship cannot exist without forgiveness of sins continually” (e 201). where the didactic horses of instruction have failed, morton’s act of friendship is to risk writing with passion to spark “the shared transpersonal rush that would actually motivate people to get out of bed thinking that ending fossil fuels was … exciting, even sexy” (xxviii). they choose, likewise, to focus on exciting—​even sexy—​poems, such as “the tyger,” a song of experience that asks devastating irresolvable questions. for them, the poem is, more than a work of art, a work of wrath or living creature. to many, it may seem to have lost its claws, but morton’s reading makes playing with “the tyger” exhilarating precisely because its claws are bright and sharp, highlighting blake’s use of ambiguity to unsettle binary optics: conceptual rigidity is the enemy. ambiguity is how to defeat it. “the tyger” hinges around the ambiguous border between person (wise) and machine (idiot)—​there’s no way to decide whether the singer and the tyger are either of these. (68) what is the tyger’s symmetry, which optics finds fearful, other than ecopoiesis? “i can never be sure that i am done with it. that damn tyger is still burning bright somewhere. it is as if blake had created life” (198-99). marvelous resonances bounce between morton’s reading and their point that the ecological cannot be tamed: “i am the tyger. don’t frame my symmetry, baby” (198). from start to end, hell throws blakean wrenches into the mills that might domesticate ecological literary criticism or constrain it to the merely formal or impersonal. this argument for wrath, as the tyger’s play, bookends hell and is vibrantly expressed in its exordium and in its closing pages. profoundly personal, the exordium opens with a vigorous rejection of the conversion of “and did those feet” into a patriotic anthem: “i never did understand that poem. but i always understood the hymn … only too well.” in response to the questions of whether christ’s merciful countenance shone forth, and whether jerusalem was built, in england, morton answers, unequivocally, “no, it didn’t. no it wasn’t” (xvii). but, in response to the call to build jerusalem, they reply, “yes, we can. we will” (xviii). with this radical affirmation, they recline, like albion on the analyst’s couch (e 114), and deliver a free associative account of the dark ecologist as a young man, recounting the traumas of sexual abuse, poverty, and patriotic education alongside the lifelines provided by dj david dorrell’s love records, acid house, and blake. their recollections of being saved by lsd, mdma, and raves are as important to hell as their recollections of finding refuge “almost every week from the ages of thirteen to eighteen” in room 7 of the tate gallery, “a smoked glass paradise in the middle of the ground floor, where the blake paintings were” (45). toward the end of the book, morton once again addresses their refusal to be framed, or to allow professional embarrassment to inhibit their coming out as “born again”: conversion? being born again? i like the latter. it has the right kind of absurd, abject, embarrassingly-worst-thing-that-could-possibly-have-happened-to-me, definitely-not-a-professor-thing vibe: why i trust it. (225) as if morton had not already taken enough risks, they press on, sharing intimate details of the “flowing and rippling” sensations of their ecotheological awakening. far from riding these currents above the world, they ride them deeper into the world, taking them as prehensions of a “future future”: it’s really quite obvious, isn’t it? the past sucked. just look around you. so we had better make a future world. jesus is all about the future being better than the past. … that’s what mercy and forgiveness mean. trust me, i have only just learned that, after fifty years of unforgiving revenge. (xviii) consciously written “with” blake (45), hell is daring on many levels. its move closer to the “feel” of a different ecological future is also a move closer to the feeling of blake’s friendship, at a time when we need it most. blake in the marketplace, 2022 blake in the marketplace, 2022 by robert n. essick robert n. essick has been collecting and writing about blake for over fifty years. table of contents: introductory essay abbreviations blake: illuminated books drawings and paintings manuscripts first editions of blake’s writings first published in letterpress in blake’s lifetime separate plates and plates in series letterpress books with engravings by and after blake interesting blakeana blake’s circle and followers: calvert, edward flaxman, john fuseli, henry linnell, john palmer, samuel richmond, george appendix: new information on blake’s engravings john windle provided an auspicious beginning for the 2022 blake market with his february publication of catalogue 70, present joy. at 160 pages offering 809 items, this is the second-largest sale catalogue devoted to blake and his circle, exceeded only by windle’s october 2009 catalogue 46. the organization of present joy is unusual for its genre. the main section is arranged chronologically, with works listed by the year they were originally created, even for later reproductions. thus, a 1955 facsimile of songs of innocence and of experience appears in the subsection on blake’s productions of 1789–​94. the catalogue includes three drawings from the smaller blake-varley sketchbook, separate plates including “chaucers canterbury pilgrims,” print series such as the job and dante engravings, a large group of blake’s commercial book illustrations, ranging from his apprentice work in jacob bryant’s a new system, or, an analysis of ancient mythology (1774–​76) to john varley’s treatise on zodiacal physiognomy (1828), and most of the william muir and blake trust/​trianon press facsimiles of blake’s illuminated books. all but a few works by blake are illustrated. many items are recorded as “sold,” including “holy thursday” from songs of innocence copy w and “a cradle song” (both plates) from songs of innocence copy y, and have been listed in earlier installments of these sales reviews. in the listings below, i have included all original materials for the record.an exception to my usual practice of not including individual plates extracted from letterpress books or incomplete sets of the job and dante engravings. the muir and blake trust facsimiles are not included. a pdf version of the catalogue is available at <https://​www.​johnwindle.​com/​catalogues.​php> (accessed 17 december). windle continued at the forefront of the blake market when in late february he received on consignment for sale an unrecorded posthumous copy of songs of innocence and of experience. printed by frederick tatham c. 1831–​32, the volume contains the full complement of 54 plates plus an impression of plate b, “a divine image.” see the entry below and illus. 1-2. in partnership with the london dealer sims reed rare books, windle acquired one of the sixteen traced impressions of blake’s white-line metal cut “the man sweeping the interpreter’s parlour” in april—​see under separate plates and plates in series and illus. 3. finally, in august windle purchased for stock, and promptly sold, a manuscript signed by blake concerning the prevention of banknote forgeries—​see alexander tilloch under manuscripts. the summer auction market included three notable works by blake: his separate plate of “the fall of rosamond,” engraved after a design by thomas stothard; a copy of edward young’s night thoughts with seventeen of blake’s illustrations hand colored (illus. 5); and a copy of william hayley’s “the eagle” among the designs to a series of ballads (1802), with blake’s three engravings after his own designs (see the entries below). a letter by dante gabriel rossetti with a draft of his poem on blake’s workroom and death room was auctioned in june—​see the entry for 1880 under interesting blakeana and illus. 6. the run of books with blake’s commercial engravings continued during the fall and early winter in its usual tireless and unexciting way, but no drawings, paintings, or plates from the illuminated books made an appearance. the year of all sales, catalogues, and correspondence in the following lists is 2022, unless indicated otherwise. with a few exceptions, such as blake’s engraving after william hogarth, rare items such as prepublication proofs, and original works in windle’s present joy catalogue noted above, only complete copies of plates in series and letterpress books with blake’s commercial illustrations are included. most reports about auction catalogues are based on the online versions. illustrations are in color, unless noted otherwise. coverage of regional auctions is selective. dates for dealers’ online catalogues are the dates accessed, not the dates of publication. works offered online by dealers and listed in previous sales reviews are not repeated here. most of the auction houses add their purchaser’s surcharge to the hammer price in their price lists. these net amounts are given here, following the official price lists. estimates in auction catalogues are usually for hammer prices. i am grateful for help in compiling this review to sidney berger, david bindman, mark crosby, detlef w. dörrbecker, rachel eley, annika green, john holmes, morton paley, justin schiller, joseph viscomi, and john windle. my special thanks go to jenijoy la belle for assistance in all matters. once again, sarah jones’s editorial expertise has been invaluable. abbreviations ah abbott and holder, london bb g. e. bentley, jr., blake books (oxford: clarendon p, 1977). plate numbers and copy designations for blake’s illuminated books and commercial book illustrations follow bb. bbs g. e. bentley, jr., blake books supplement (oxford: clarendon p, 1995) bhl bonhams auctions, london br(2) g. e. bentley, jr., blake records, 2nd ed. (new haven: yale up, 2004) butlin martin butlin, the paintings and drawings of william blake, 2 vols. (new haven: yale up, 1981) cat(s). catalogue(s) cb robert n. essick, william blake’s commercial book illustrations (oxford: clarendon p, 1991) cl christie’s auctions, london cw chiswick auctions, london dw dominic winter auctions, south cerney, gloucestershire eb ebay online auctions ew ewbank’s auctions, woking, surrey fm forum auctions, london grant william blake’s designs for edward young’s “night thoughts,” ed. john e. grant, edward j. rose, and michael j. tolley, 2 vols. (oxford: clarendon p, 1980) illus. illustration(s), illustrated jcb james cummins bookseller, new york lly lowell libson & jonny yarker, london nybf new york international antiquarian book fair, 21-24 april phb peter harrington rare books, london pl(s). plate(s) sbs subun-so book store, tokyo sl sotheby’s auctions, london sny sotheby’s auctions, new york sp robert n. essick, the separate plates of william blake: a catalogue (princeton: princeton up, 1983) srb sims reed rare books, london st(s). state(s) of an engraving, etching, or lithograph swd sworders auctions, stansted mountfitchet, essex windle john windle antiquarian bookseller, san francisco # auction lot or catalogue item number illuminated books songs of innocence, copy w, pl. 19 (“holy thursday”) only. windle, feb. cat. 70, #49, illus. (“sold” in jan. 2020 to a canadian private collector). for illus. and comments, see the 2016 sales review, blake 50.4 (spring 2017): illus. 4. songs of innocence, copy y, pls. 16 and 17 (“a cradle song”) only. windle, feb. cat. 70, #50, both pls. illus. (“sold” in april 2018 to a private collector). for earlier sales and illus. of pl. 16, see the 2007 sales review, blake 41.4 (spring 2008): illus. 5. for earlier sales and illus. of pl. 17, see the 2017 sales review, blake 51.4 (spring 2018): illus. 1, and the 2018 sales review, blake 52.4 (spring 2019). songs of innocence and of experience. a posthumous copy printed by frederick tatham c. 1831–​32, previously unrecorded. windle, feb. private offer, illus. (price on request). see illus. 1-2. i have not inspected this copy. the information given here is based on high-resolution digital images of all pls. and a detailed description of the volume provided by annika green and rachel eley of john windle antiquarian bookseller. the description below covers the same details provided for illuminated books in bb and bbs; it is intended as a supplement to those 2 bibliographies. copy designation: the last posthumous copy listed in bbs is copy p. in 2014 bentley designated an untraced volume as copy q.“william blake and his circle: a checklist of publications and discoveries in 2013,” blake 48.1 (summer 2014): entry for “copy q.” apparently a posthumous copy, known only from its listing in 2 quaritch cats., march 1871 and april 1873. in both cats., the vol. is titled “songs of innocence” and described as “a series of 20 poems” (1871) and “a series of 20 plates” (1873). i suspect that “20 plates” is the more accurate description. perhaps bentley added the vol. to his census of the combined songs, rather than songs of innocence, on the off-chance that it contained 1 or more pls. from experience. accordingly, this copy can be designated as copy r. plates in order bound and number of leaves: b, 1-54 (55 pls. on the rectos of 55 leaves). the binding order of pls. 1-54, often considered the standard arrangement, is also found in posthumous copies b, c, and j. this sequence was established by tatham.see joseph viscomi, “posthumous blake: the roles of catherine blake, c. h. tatham, and frederick tatham in blake’s afterlife,” blake 53.2 (fall 2019): pars. 61-65. viscomi demonstrates that posthumous copies a, i, and possibly copy e were originally arranged in the standard order. indeed, “all the [posthumous] copies” may have “been initially in standard order” (par. 65). the placement of pl. b, “a divine image,” at the beginning of the volume, rather than as an appendix at the end, is both odd and unique. ink: dark sepia (dark reddish brown). no hand coloring other than some slight touches of gray wash on pl. 28, the frontispiece to songs of experience (see illus. 2 and its caption for details). numbering: 0-54 in pencil above the top right corner of each pl. in an unidentified hand. although tatham established the sequence of pls. 1-54, the numbering is probably not his. the “0” on “a divine image” appears to be in a different hand from all the other numbers. many leaves show evidence of erased or partly erased numbers in pencil; these indicate a different, earlier sequencing of the pls. for example, pl. 38 includes a partly erased “48” below and to the right of its number “38”. paper: wove. leaf size: ranging between 19.0 x 15.4 cm. and 20.0 x 16.0 cm. fourteen leaves show deckle edges. watermark: j whatman | 1831. parts of the watermark appear on the leaves numbered 0, 6, 19, 21, 23, 26, 32, 34, 37, 38, and 47. stabholes: none visible. binding: full red morocco by riviere & son, probably c. 1900–​20, top edges gilt. covers tooled in blind, backstrip with 5 raised bands, compartments with decorations and title (“songs of innocence”) in gilt. provenance: frederick tatham, who printed this copy; acquired, probably c. 1831–​32, by tatham’s friend isaac faulkner bird (1803–​84), a portrait artist; his nephew, f. faulkner white, probably by inheritance in 1884 but no later than early 1885; the exeter book dealer j. g. commin by feb. 1885; sold at an unrecorded date to the present owner’s great-great-grandfather, a member of a distinguished american family; by descent to the present american owner; on consignment with windle feb. 2022. i have not received permission to publish the name of the first american owner or the present owner. the provenance to 1885 is based on a brief letter by white, addressed to commin and dated “26th july 1886”, kept with the volume: “the copy of blakes songs of innocence & experience which i sold you at cowper place, leeds on 12th feby 1885 was the property of my uncle i. faulkner bird who was an intimate friend of the blakes.” i. f. bird is very probably the “mr. bird” who on 23 oct. 1831 attended catherine blake’s funeral, according to tatham’s “life of blake” (br[2] 691), and on that occasion was given copy f of blake’s for the sexes: the gates of paradise by tatham (bb pp. 202-03). i. f. bird may also be the “mr bird” who acquired a copy of blake’s job engravings from john linnell on 27 dec. 1830 (br[2] 793, 801). other than white’s letter, there is no record of an “intimate” friendship between bird and the blakes. 1. title page to songs of innocence and of experience, posthumous copy r. bb pl. 1. relief etching printed in dark sepia (dark reddish brown) ink, image and platemark 11.4 x 7.1 cm. on leaf of whatman wove paper 20.0 x 16.0 cm. second st. (of 2), found only in posthumous copies. numbered “1” in pencil upper right. photo courtesy of john windle. 2. frontispiece to songs of experience, posthumous copy r. bb pl. 28. relief etching and white-line engraving printed in dark sepia (dark reddish brown) ink with touches of gray wash, image and platemark 11.1 x 7.1 cm. on leaf of whatman wove paper 20.0 x 16.0 cm. this illus. trimmed close to the print. second st. (of 2), found only in posthumous copies. numbered “28” in pencil upper right with fragments of an erased pencil number further to the right. photo courtesy of john windle. slight touches of gray wash appear on the standing figure’s lower torso just above his right leg and extending to his right hip, on his upper left leg, and on his right inner thigh. very small patches of wash are on his right upper arm, left arm just above his left armpit, left elbow, and left wrist, below his left breast, left of his right eye, and on and to the right of his throat. perhaps the tinting on his lower torso and legs was intended to complement the white-line work in the same or adjacent areas added to the pl. in this 2nd st. similar shading has been added to the winged child on the right side of his chest (from the viewer’s standpoint) and on his genital area. there are also small patches of gray wash left and right of the standing figure’s left knee, right of his left lower foot, on and around his right foot, and on the back of the frontmost sheep on the left. these additions, like the conversion of the 1st into the 2nd st., were presumably executed by tatham. part of the platemaker’s mark prints in blind upper left, above and to the left of the standing figure’s raised right hand. drawings and paintings a girl full-face with bare breasts. pencil sketch from the smaller blake-varley sketchbook, leaf approximately 15.5 x 20.5 cm., c. 1819. butlin #692.82. windle, feb. cat. 70, #223, illus. ($19,500). previously sold cl, 15 june 1971, #148 (£147 to alfred essex, london); previously offered by the london dealer jonny yarker, nov. 2018 private offer ($10,000). a seated monarch with an agonized expression. pencil sketch from the smaller blake-varley sketchbook, leaf approximately 15.5 x 20.5 cm., c. 1819, inscribed in pencil by blake “crimson” on the man’s shirt or cloak and “green” on his breeches. butlin #692.64. windle, feb. cat. 70, #222, illus. ($19,500). previously sold cl, 15 june 1971, #158, illus. black and white (£252 to alfred essex, london); previously offered by the london art dealer jonny yarker, nov. 2018 private offer ($10,000). visionary head of queen boadicea (recto), sketch of geometric and architectural forms (verso). pencil, leaf of wove paper 20.5 x 15.5 cm. (previously recorded as 19.9 x 15.5 cm.). probably removed from the smaller blake-varley sketchbook of c. 1819 at an early date. not in butlin because not discovered until 2021. windle, feb. cat. 70, #221, recto illus. (“sold” in 2021 to a british private collector). for earlier sales, comments, and illus. of recto and verso, see the 2021 sales review, blake 55.4 (spring 2022): illus. 4 and 5. whilst surfeited upon thy damask cheek, an illus. to robert blair’s the grave. watercolor, 19.6 x 13.3 cm., datable to 1805. not in butlin because not discovered until 2001. windle, feb. cat. 70, #184, illus. (“sold” in oct. 2020 by marburg ltd. to essick, windle acting as his agent). previously offered sny, 2 may 2006, #5, illus. (not sold; highest bid $520,000 on an estimate of $700,000-$1,000,000), and sny, 25 jan. 2017, #108, illus. (not sold; highest bid $160,000 on an estimate of $180,000-240,000). for illus. and comments, see the 2006 sales review, blake 40.4 (spring 2007): 122 and illus. 3. manuscripts alexander tilloch (scottish inventor and engraver, 1759–​1825). manuscript testimonial, dated “5th april 1797”, indicating that tilloch’s invention of a way of engraving banknotes created bills that could not be forged by any of the 12 engravers who signed the document, including “willm blake” (the poet and artist), the engraver “willm staden blake” (1748–​1814), and “james basire” (blake’s engraving master, 1730–​1802, or his son and successor of the same name). windle, aug. private offer (price on inquiry; sold sept. to the e. j. pratt library, victoria university, toronto). for a description of the manuscript, complete transcription, early printed versions of the testimonial, and discussion of the historical context of tilloch’s invention, see mark crosby, “blake and the banknote crises of 1797, 1800, and 1818,” university of toronto quarterly 80.4 (fall 2011): 815-36. a printed version of the testimonial at mcmaster university library, hamilton, ontario, canada, is quoted in part in br(2) 78. engravings by w. s. blake have sometimes been misattributed to blake the poet and artist. receipt signed by blake, 5 july 1805, to thomas butts for £5.7s. windle, feb. cat. 70, #171, illus. ($150,000); same price, april online cat. for the nybf, #1, illus. for earlier sales and comments, see the 2019 sales review, blake 53.4 (spring 2020). according to br(2) 764, this receipt repeats another of the same date and amount specifying that the payment was for 4 of blake’s large color-printed drawings, the good and evil angels, the house of death, god judging adam, and lamech and his two wives. first editions of blake’s writings first published in letterpress in blake’s lifetime poetical sketches, 1783, bb and bbs copy e. windle, feb. cat. 70, #11, full morocco, quarter morocco box (“sold” in 2019 to the charles deering mccormick library, northwestern university, evanston, illinois). for earlier sales, see the 2007 sales review, blake 41.4 (spring 2008): 147, the 2017 sales review, blake 51.4 (spring 2018), and the 2018 sales review, blake 52.4 (spring 2019). for a black-and-white illus. of the title page, including john flaxman’s presentation inscription, see blake 40.4 (spring 2007): back cover. separate plates and plates in series “chaucers canterbury pilgrims.” windle, feb. cat. 70, #217, 5th st., colnaghi impression on laid india, framed ($35,000); another impression, #218, 5th st., colnaghi impression on laid india, illus. ($25,000). srb, feb. private offer to windle, 3rd st., with repaired tears into the image, framed, illus. ($40,000); same impression, sept. online cat., illus. (£40,000). dante engravings. windle, feb. cat. 70, #248, complete set, an early printing on laid paper, the set sold from the doheny memorial library, 21 feb. 1989, #1713, foxed ($60,500 to the dealer donald heald), now cleaned, illus. ($350,000); #249-52, pls. 2, 4-6 only offered individually, impressions on laid india, illus. ($8500 for pl. 2, $12,500 for pl. 4, $8750 for pl. 5, $6500 for pl. 6); #253, pl. 1 only, 1954 printing “on hand-made paper,” illus. ($7500). “the fall of rosamond,” after stothard, 2nd st., 1783. leaf of wove paper trimmed on the platemark to 39.5 x 33.3 cm. cw, 15 july, #223, illus. (£3250 to windle acting for essick; estimate £100-200). this impression not recorded in sp. according to anon., “monthly retrospect of the fine arts,” monthly magazine 11.3 (april 1801): 246, thomas macklin, the publisher of “the fall of rosamond,” paid blake £80 to engrave this work. briefly noted in br(2) 758. “george cumberland’s card.” windle, feb. cat. 70, #258, “printed in black ink on thick card,” trimmed close to the image on the left and right margins, illus. ($20,000). “the idle laundress,” after morland, 1788. windle, feb. cat. 70, #38, 2nd st. of “the idle laundress” with the 3rd st. of “industrious cottager,” both printed in brown, titles and imprints cut off and pasted to the backing mats, illus. (“sold”). for earlier sales, see the 2018 sales review, blake 52.4 (spring 2019). ew, 23 june, #2057, 3rd st., illus. (£625 to windle for stock). “industrious cottager,” after morland. see “the idle laundress,” above. job engravings. windle, feb. cat. 70, #232, complete set, published “proof” impressions on laid india, with the letterpress label, individually matted, illus. ($125,000); #233, complete set, published “proof” impressions on laid india, bound in morocco, illus. ($89,500); #234, pl. numbered 8 only, published “proof” impression on so-called “french” paper, illus. ($2950); #235, pl. numbered 9 only, published “proof” impression on laid india, illus. ($3250); #236-39, pls. numbered 4, 7, 8, and 12 only, impressions on whatman paper after removal of the “proof” inscription, offered individually, illus. ($1950 each); #240, complete set, 1874 printing on laid india, loose in a morocco box “slightly worn,” illus. ($47,500). phb, june online cat., complete set, published “proof” impressions on “french paper,” later 19th-century half morocco, illus. (£57,500). interencheres auction, lyon, france, 16 sept., #261, complete set, impressions on whatman paper after removal of the “proof” inscription, leaves 37.5 x 26.7 cm., bookplate of henri focillon (art historian and poet, 1881–​1943), early boards with calf spine, binding illus. (€19,000); same copy, srb, dec. cat., #8, illus. (£60,000). “the man sweeping the interpreter’s parlour,” 2nd st., sp impression 2l. windle, april private offer (acquired by essick). see illus. 3 and compare to illus. 4. provenance: as in sp to 1998; offered by the london dealer andrew edmunds in march 1998 (price on inquiry); offered sl, 11 dec. 1998, #111, illus. in black and white (not sold; estimate £30,000-40,000); acquired by windle, feb. 1999; offered by windle, nov. 1999 online cat. 31, #16 (price on inquiry), april 2001 cat. 32, #19, illus. (price on inquiry), and sept. 2003 cat. 36, #11, illus. (price on inquiry); sold july 2006 by windle, in partnership with maggs bros., to a british private collector; acquired by windle, in partnership with srb, april 2022; acquired by essick as above. 3. “the man sweeping the interpreter’s parlour.” white-line metal cut, datable to c. 1822 (see enlargement). second st., sp impression 2l. image and platemark 8.0 x 16.1 cm. on leaf of wove paper 9.3 x 17.6 cm. essick collection. according to sp p. 106, the leaf has a “[jw]hatm[an] | 1821” watermark running “vertically on the right, cut by the edge of the sheet.” this information was supplied by michael phillips, a previous owner of this impression. although i can see part of the letter “m” of this watermark, i am unable to confirm phillips’s reading. this impression shows dramatic contrasts between black and white areas because of heavy inking of the relief surface of the metal pl. a comparison with a lightly inked example (illus. 4) demonstrates how management of the inking ball can determine the visual impact of a printed design. heavy inking almost inevitably brings with it a tendency to clog—​and thus mask—​fine white-line work in a pl. such as “the man sweeping.” for example, the rectangular bar of solid black ink extending diagonally from the top center edge of the print in illus. 3 obscures the wavy, vertical white lines present in illus. 4. similarly, most of the horizontal white lines defining the floor right of the large bat-winged figure’s broom in illus. 4 are not visible in illus. 3. collectors would probably prefer this richly inked impression to one that is lightly inked, but a full consideration of what blake executed on the metal pl. requires attention to the latter. 4. “the man sweeping the interpreter’s parlour.” white-line metal cut, datable to c. 1822 (see enlargement). second st., sp impression 2e. image and platemark 8.0 x 16.1 cm. on leaf of wove paper 12.2 x 19.0 cm. inscribed below the image in pencil “w. blake” in an unknown hand. blake’s pencil sketch samson pulling down the pillars of the temple on verso (not illus. here). this illus. cropped inside the edges of the leaf. essick collection. for some comparisons of this lightly inked impression with one that is darkly inked, see illus. 3 and its caption. “mrs q,” after villiers. grosvenor prints, sept. online cat., with the companion print, “windsor castle,” engraved by maile after “i. b.” (j. barrow?), “both plates trimmed just within platemark, some creasing on ‘mrs q,’” only “windsor castle” illus. (£1650 the pair). possibly the convincing lithographic facsimiles. letterpress books with engravings by and after blake allen, roman history, 1798. windle, feb. cat. 70, #147, blake’s 4 pls. only, imprints present, illus. ($1250). ariosto, orlando furioso. windle, feb. cat. 70, #16, 1783 ed., 5 vols., contemporary calf worn and repaired, illus. ($975); #18, 1799 ed., 5 vols., contemporary calf worn, illus. ($500). zubal books, feb. online cat., 1799 ed., 5 vols., 19th-century half calf worn, illus. (not priced; “no longer available”). addison & sarova auction, social circle, georgia, 16 july, #24, 1783 ed., 5 vols., “occasional foxing,” contemporary calf repaired, illus. ($500). rodger friedman, sept. online cat., 1783 ed., 5 vols., scattered foxing, contemporary calf, illus. ($725). bible, the protestant’s family bible, [1780–​81]. windle, feb. cat. 70, #6, 19th-century calf worn, new endpapers, illus. (“sold”); #7-10, blake’s pls. 1-3, 5 only, illus. ($675 each). bible, the royal universal family bible, 1780–​81. windle, feb. cat. 70, #4, 2 vols. in 1, early calf very worn, illus. ($7950). blair, the grave. whitmore rare books, jan. online cat., 1808 quarto, imprint trimmed off blake’s pl. 1, early 20th-century calf, slipcase, illus. ($3950). cw, 27 jan., #120, 1808 quarto, “light soiling,” later half calf worn, illus. (£600). windle, feb. cat. 70, #185, 1808 folio, 19th-century half morocco worn, illus. ($8950); #186, 1808 quarto, uncut in original boards, cloth box worn, illus. ($9750); #187-99, complete group of pls. only (including the frontispiece portrait of blake) from the 1808 quarto offered individually, all illus. (ranging between $275 and $675 each); #200, 1813 folio, modern boards with morocco backstrip, illus. ($9750); #201-11, blake’s pls. 1-5, 7, 8-12 only from the 1813 quarto offered individually, all illus. (ranging between $395 and $875 each); #212, [1870] “4to” (actually a folio), publisher’s cloth ($1975). cotswold auction company auction, cheltenham, 8 feb., #343, [1870] folio, publisher’s cloth, bookplate of osbert sitwell, with songs of innocence and experience with other poems, pub. pickering, 1866, publisher’s cloth worn, illus. (£187.50). potter & potter auction, chicago, 26 feb., #248, 1813 quarto, modern quarter goatskin, illus. ($1250). eb, april, 1808 quarto, “stain to 4 plates at fore-edges,” modern half calf, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $1800); same copy and price, d & d galleries, april online cat., illus. bloomsbury auction, london, 27 april, #30, “1813” ed., pls. foxed, “original black cloth” (and thus probably the [1870] issue), illus. (not sold; estimate £200-300). fm, 5 july, #213, [1870] ed., some pls. badly foxed, publisher’s cloth very worn, illus. (£162.50); 14 july, #172, 1808 quarto, scattered foxing, “modern morocco-backed cloth,” illus. (£1250). dw, 20 july, #316, 1813 quarto, marginal stains on some pls., later buckram worn, illus. (£204). swd, 23 aug., #192, 1808 quarto, later quarter calf, with a copy of alexander gilchrist, life of william blake, 1863, 2 vols., publisher’s cloth worn, illus. (£687.50). blair, the grave, prepublication proof of blake’s pl. 7, “the descent of man into the vale of death.” with drypoint signatures, as in the 1st published st., but before all other letters. leaf of wove paper 27.5 x 16.7 cm. lacking many hatching strokes in the design, particularly evident on the path, on the rocks (for example behind the woman holding a child, upper right), on the head of the figure immediately adjacent to the center right edge of the design, on the left knee and lower left leg of the man holding his hands in prayer (lower center), on the right upper leg of the woman holding a baby to her breast (lower right), and on the child farthest right in the group of children at the bottom of the design. a so-called “touched” proof, with diagonal pencil strokes over the rocks in several areas, particularly evident lower right and left. this pencil work very probably executed by luigi schiavonetti as a way of indicating further work to be done on the copperplate. generously given oct. by detlef w. dörrbecker to essick on the occasion of his 80th birthday. blower, maria: a novel, 1785. windle, feb. cat. 70, #24, pl. only, illus. (“sold”). boydell’s graphic illustrations … of shakspeare, c. 1803. windle, feb. cat. 70, #157, publisher’s morocco worn and repaired, binding illus. ($9500). bryant, new system … of ancient mythology. windle, feb. cat. 70, #1, 1st ed., 1774–​76, 3 vols., contemporary calf rebacked, illus. (“sold”); #2, 2nd ed., 1775–​76, 3 vols., contemporary calf worn, illus. ($1250). bürger, leonora, 1796. windle, feb. cat. 70, #119, bound with 7 other eds. of the poem, including the 1796 ed. with illus. by diana beauclerk, “old calf, very worn, covers detached, preserved in a new box,” illus. ($29,750). mallams auction, oxford, 24 feb., #481, later morocco, with kálidása, the megha dúta, trans. h. h. wilson, 1843, in a separate vol., illus. (£676 to windle for stock); same copy (without kálidása), windle, april online cat. for the nybf, #5, illus. ($19,750). fm, 26 may, #219, lacking the half title, “10mm tear to lower margin” of pl. 1, contemporary calf, illus. (£2176). catullus, poems, 1795. windle, feb. cat. 70, #108, 2 vols. in 1, early boards with modern calf backstrip, illus. (“sold”). cumberland, attempt to describe hafod, 1796. madoc books, may online cat., several brown stains on the pl., original boards worn, illus. (£995; acquired by windle on behalf of an american private collector). windle, june private offer, pl. “slightly browned as usual,” recent morocco ($4950). darwin, botanic garden. windle, feb. cat. 70, #77, 3rd ed. of part 1, 1795, 4th ed. of part 2, 1794, 2 vols. in 1, “occasional foxing,” contemporary calf rebacked (“sold”); #78, blake’s pl. 1 only, “margins foxed,” illus. ($875). fm, 10 march, #165, 3rd ed. of part 1, 1795, 4th ed. of part 2, 1794, 2 vols. in 1, “some foxing,” inscribed in ink on the title page, “harriet duchess of st albans septr 6 1829 this book was given to the duchess when mrs. coutts by mr fuseli,” contemporary calf very worn, upper cover detached, illus. (£687.50 to windle for stock); same copy, windle, june online cat., recent acquisitions, #3, “covers rehinged,” illus. ($2950). eb, july, 2nd ed. of part 1, 1791, 4th ed. of part 2, 1794, 2 vols. in 1, contemporary calf very worn, illus. (£328); nov., 3rd ed. of part 1, 1795, 4th ed. of part 2, 1794, 2 vols. in 1, lacking frontispiece (not by blake) to part 2, modern calf, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £650). forest books, sept. online cat., 1st ed. of part 1, 3rd ed. of part 2, both 1791, 2 vols. in 1, contemporary morocco, illus. (£1200). fm, 6 oct., #128, 3rd ed. of part 1, 1795, 4th ed. of part 2, 1794, 2 vols. in 1, pls. in vol. 1 foxed, contemporary calf worn and rebacked, blake’s pl. 6 illus. (£314.40 to windle for stock). darwin, poetical works, 1806. eb, feb., 3 vols., “lacking covers,” illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $325). enfield, the speaker. windle, feb. cat. 70, #3, 1781 ed., later calf worn, illus. (“sold”). eb, march, 1797 ed., contemporary calf very worn, “both boards almost completely detached,” illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of £34.99); same copy, march, illus. (£34.99). jcb, oct. online cat., the romantics, no entry no., 1785 ed., contemporary morocco, available at the same price since 2012, binding illus. ($750). flaxman, hesiod designs, 1817. windle, feb. cat. 70, #220, bound with flaxman’s aeschylus designs, 1831, early half morocco worn, binding illus. ($500). phb, april online cat., half calf, illus. (£750); another copy, original boards with cover label, inscribed by flaxman to his friend william gunn, illus., the copy sold at swd, 11 sept. 2018, #59, with flaxman’s iliad and odyssey designs, 1793, and the dante designs, 1807, in 4 vols., for £516.50 (£2000). mallams auction, oxford, 23 sept., #700, bound with flaxman’s iliad designs, 1805, odyssey designs, 1805, and aeschylus designs, 1831, later calf, illus. (£125). flaxman, iliad designs, 1805. windle, feb. cat. 70, #178, “some foxing throughout,” contemporary half morocco worn, illus. (“sold”). eb, april, bound with flaxman’s odyssey designs, 1805, later half calf worn, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of €400); another copy, oct.-nov., scattered foxing, large water stain on cover and blake’s pl. 1, original boards with title label, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of £119.99); same copy, nov. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £119.99). see also the hesiod designs, above. gay, fables, 1793. windle, feb. cat. 70, #91, 2 vols. in 1, contemporary calf worn and rebacked, illus. ($1500). dw, 2 march, #229, 2 vols., “light spotting,” contemporary calf worn, illus. (£480). jcb, oct. online cat., the romantics, no entry no., 2 vols., contemporary morocco, available at the same price since 2012, illus. ($1750). gough, sepulchral monuments, 1786. windle, feb. cat. 70, #25, contemporary calf worn (“sold”); #26, proof of blake’s pl. 10, “portrait of queen philippa from her monument,” illus. (“sold” 2020 to the e. j. pratt library, victoria university, toronto). for the proof, see the 2020 sales review, blake 54.4 (spring 2021): illus. 4. hartley, observations on man, 1791. windle, feb. cat. 70, #79, pl. only, “a little soiled,” illus. ($750). hayley, ballads, 1805. windle, feb. cat. 70, #172, 1st sts. of pls. 1-3, contemporary calf rebacked, illus. ($6500); #173, pl. 3 only, 1st st., stain in lower margin, illus. ($975); #174, pl. 4 only, only st., illus. ($975); another copy of the book, #175, 2nd sts. of pls. 1-3, bound with salomon gessner, the death of abel, 1803, contemporary calf rebacked, binding illus. ($4250). sbs, march cat., #10, 2nd sts. of pls. 1-3, presentation inscription from george cumberland to his daughter eliza martha cumberland, modern calf, illus. ($4517). leland little auction, hillsborough, north carolina, 5 may, #271, 2nd sts. of pls. 1-3, 19th-century calf worn, illus. ($1187.50). jcb, oct. online cat., the romantics, no entry no., sts. of pls. not recorded, contemporary half calf, binding illus. ($4500). hayley, designs to a series of ballads, 1802. windle, feb. cat. 70, #156, pl. 1 only, illus. ($49,500). dw, 21 july, #330, “the eagle” only, the 2nd ballad issued, “original tissue guard to each plate, light paper toning, untrimmed, stitched as issued in pale blue paper wrappers, with printed title on upper cover,” illus. (£23,370 to windle acting for a private american collector; estimate £1500-2000). hayley, essay on sculpture, 1800. windle, feb. cat. 70, #152-54, the 3 pls. only offered individually, “a little browned around the edges,” illus. (pl. 1 $375, pl. 2 $495, pl. 3 $595). eb, oct., pls. foxed, contemporary calf repaired, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $375). hayley, life of cowper, 1803–​04. aldridges of bath online auction, 25 jan., #253, ed. not specified, 3 vols., contemporary half calf worn, illus. (£48, a price suggesting that there are condition problems with this copy not mentioned in the brief cat. entry). windle, feb. cat. 70, #161, 1st ed., 3 vols. with the supplement of 1806 bound in vol. 3, pl. 4 in the 2nd st., contemporary calf worn, illus. ($1250); #162, 2nd ed., 3 vols., pl. 4 in the 4th (final) st., contemporary half calf worn, illus. ($1250). eb, april, 1st ed., 3 vols., with the supplement of 1806 in a 4th vol., uncut in original boards, printed spine labels, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £357.50); another copy, aug., 1st ed., 3 vols., scattered foxing on pls., contemporary calf rebacked with modern calf, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of £1485); same copy, rooke books, aug. online cat., illus. (£1350). hayley, life of romney, 1809. windle, feb. cat. 70, #214, “large paper copy,” later half calf, illus. ($3250); #215, apparently the small-paper issue, half calf worn, illus. ($575); #216, blake’s pl. only, illus. ($450). hayley, triumphs of temper, 1803. windle, feb. cat. 70, #158, large-paper copy, later morocco, illus. ($2750); #159, large-paper copy, contemporary calf, illus. ($2750); #160, small-paper copy, scattered foxing to the pls., “signed at the front by w. m. rossetti in ink and dated 1868,” early calf worn, illus. ($975). besleys books, july online cat., scattered foxing, contemporary morocco worn, illus. (£260). addison & sarova auction, social circle, georgia, 22 oct., #268, large-paper copy, original boards, illus. ($500). see also c. a. tulk (1786–​1849) under interesting blakeana. hoare, inquiry, 1806. windle, feb. cat. 70, #179, original boards worn, illus. ($2750); #180, blake’s pl. only, “a little soiled,” illus. ($875). hogarth, the beggar’s opera by hogarth and blake, 1965. eb, jan., blake’s pl. only, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $125); july, publisher’s cloth box damaged, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $118.97 or “best offer”). windle, feb. cat. 70, #110, publisher’s cloth box, illus. ($975). hogarth, works. windle, feb. cat. 70, #109, blake’s pl. only, 3rd st., illus. ($3500). eb, april-may, 1790 ed., the copy offered on eb in oct. 2021 (no bids on a required minimum bid of $8500), with the 2nd st. of blake’s pl., modern half calf, illus. ($4500); aug., blake’s pl. only, probably 4th st., illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of €58.99). david lay auction, penzance, 22 july, #572, blake’s pl. only, 3rd st., margins badly foxed, illus. (no bids on an estimate of £80-120). westport auction, norwalk, connecticut, 15 nov., #394, possibly 4th st., framed, illus. ($112.50). it is difficult to determine the sts. of impressions of this pl. based on low-resolution online images. hunter, historical journal, 1793, quarto issue. tennants auction, leyburn, north yorkshire, 18 may, #2189, contemporary calf, illus. (£1037). australian book auction, armadale, 23 nov., #16, 19th-century half calf, illus. ($3556 australian). josephus, genuine and complete works, c. 1785–​87. dw, 17 aug., #47, bb issue a, contemporary calf worn, illus. (£60). eb, nov., bb issue a, contemporary calf worn, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $702 or “best offer”). lavater, aphorisms. windle, feb. cat. 70, #47, 1789 ed., 1st st. of blake’s pl., contemporary calf worn, illus. ($595); #48, 1794 ed., 2nd st. of blake’s pl., contemporary calf worn, illus. ($295). alex alec-smith, nov. online cat., 1794 ed., st. of the pl. not recorded, contemporary calf, binding illus. (£85). lavater, essays on physiognomy, 1810. eb, sept., 3 vols. in 5, original(?) boards very worn, leaves loose, scattered foxing, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $550). malkin, father’s memoirs of his child, 1806. windle, feb. cat. 70, #181, george goyder’s copy with his bookplate, original boards worn with “later spine,” illus. ($3000); #182, contemporary morocco worn, illus. ($1875); #183, blake’s pl. only, “trimmed to the image, recently cleaned,” illus. ($200). jcb, oct. online cat., the romantics, no entry no., original boards rebacked with cloth, available at the same price since 2012, binding illus. ($1500). novelist’s magazine, vols. 10-11 (sir charles grandison), 1783. eb, oct., 2 vols., contemporary calf, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £350); another copy, nov., 2 vols., 19th-century half calf worn, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $412 or “best offer”). olivier, fencing familiarized, 1780. windle, feb. cat. 70, #5, uncut in original boards worn, modern clamshell box, illus. (“sold”). stride & son auction, chichester, 7 april, #192, “scattered foxing,” half calf with “boards detached,” illus. (£177). bhl, 22 june, #85, modern pigskin worn, illus. (£609.60). remember me! windle, feb. cat. 70, #247, [1825] for “1826,” blake’s pl. lightly foxed and with a water stain in the right margin, “publisher’s original printed yellow paper boards, no backstrip,” illus. ($29,500); another copy, april online cat. for the nybf, #2, [1824] for “1825,” publisher’s “original full brown calf” a little worn, illus. ($30,000). sl, 12-19 july online auction, #118, [1824] for “1825,” blake’s pl. browned, half calf worn, illus. (no bids on an estimate of £1000-1500). the issue for 1826 is considerably rarer than the issue for 1825. ritson, select collection of english songs, 1783. windle, feb. cat. 70, #19, 3 vols., contemporary calf rebacked, illus. (“sold”). salzmann, elements of morality, 1792. eb, feb., 3 vols., lacking 2 unidentified pls., some pls. partly hand colored, contemporary half calf very worn, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £390); same copy, july, illus. (£402). scott, poetical works, 1782. more booksellers, june online cat., 19th-century calf worn, illus. ($315.45, but “no longer available”). raptis rare books, aug. online cat., 19th-century calf, illus. ($375). shakespeare, dramatic works, 1802. hindman auction, west palm beach, florida, 8 dec., 9 vols., “extensive foxing,” later calf, bindings illus. (not sold; estimate $600-800). shakespeare, plays, 1805. windle, feb. cat. 70, #176, 10 vol. issue, contemporary russia, illus. ($5750); #177, blake’s pl. 1 only, “some toning and spotting,” illus. ($500). lucius books, feb. online cat., 9 vol. issue, contemporary russia, illus. (£1500). eb, march, 9 vol. issue, apparently lacking blake’s pl. 2, later calf very worn, some backstrips missing, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of £399.99); same copy, march, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £399.99 or “best offer”); another copy, nov., 9 vols., contemporary calf worn, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £252). shakespeare, plays, 1805, prepublication proof of blake’s pl. 2. alessandro borgato, online cat. for firsts: london’s rare book fair, 15-18 sept., #10, with signatures but before all other letters on a leaf of wove paper 21.1 x 12.3 cm. (€1800; acquired by windle and generously given to essick on the occasion of his 80th birthday). stedman, narrative, colored copies. windle, feb. cat. 70, #111, 1796 ed., vol. 1 only, contemporary calf, illus. ($12,500); #113, 1806 ed., 2 vols., contemporary calf repaired, illus. ($19,500); #115, 1813 ed., blake’s pls. 1, 3-5, 7, 12, 13, and 15 only, illus. ($2500). east bristol online auction, 21-24 may, #4, 1806 ed., 2 vols., contemporary russia worn, illus. (£6545). swd, 23 aug., #261, 1806 ed., 2 vols. in 1, modern half calf, illus. (£8125). van de wiele auction, 1 oct., #1031, 1806 ed., 2 vols. in 1, colored pls. probably remainders from the 1796 printing, vellum binding, illus. (€10,400). stedman, narrative, uncolored copies. windle, feb. cat. 70, #112, 1796 ed., 2 vols., contemporary calf rebacked, bindings illus. ($7500); #114, 1813 ed., 2 vols. in 1, early boards rebacked in calf, illus. ($6750); #116, blake’s pls. 8, 9, and 11 only, illus. ($500). potter & potter auction, chicago, 20 oct., #0217, 1796 ed., 2 vols., “uncut” but with “some browning or spotting to plates” and marginal “dampstain” on a few pls. in vol. 1, contemporary half morocco, illus. ($3250). eb, nov., 1806 ed., 2 vols., “some light toning and marginal staining,” modern half calf, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £3950). quinn’s auction, falls church, virginia, 29 nov., #269, 1796 ed., 2 vols., some pls. heavily foxed, contemporary calf, illus. ($1524). varley, zodiacal physiognomy, 1828. windle, feb. cat. 70, #259, 1st sts. of blake’s pls. 2-3, presentation inscription from varley to martin archer shee (1769–​1850), “original boards, covers re-attached, plates cleaned,” folding box, illus. (“sold” in feb. 2016 to essick); #260, blake’s pl. 1 only, “cleaned,” illus. ($1500). virgil, pastorals, 1821. windle, feb. cat. 70, #227, 2 vols., with a presentation inscription by the editor, robert john thornton, to his daughter, publisher’s sheep a bit worn, modern box, illus. ($67,500); #228, 2 vols., modern calf, illus. ($47,500); #229, blake’s 17 wood engravings only, mounted in an album, bookplate of samuel boddington (1766–​1843), very probably printed by edward calvert and sold to boddington by john linnell, illus. (“sold” in 2021 by phb to essick, windle acting as his agent); #520, blake’s 2nd wood engraving only, inserted in essick and windle, a troubled paradise, 1999, no. 2 of 13 copies with original prints, paper wrappers, cloth box ($3500). dw, 9 march, #181, vol. 1 only (containing blake’s 17 wood engravings), contemporary calf worn, illus. (£6480); same copy, srb, sept. online cat., illus. (£14,000); same copy and price, srb, dec. cat., #7, illus. windle, april online cat. for the nybf, #6, the copy with a presentation inscription to thornton’s daughter (see 1st entry above), illus. ($67,500). for further information about the calvert impressions from boddington’s collection and illus., see the 2021 sales review, blake 55.4 (spring 2022): entry for virgil wood engravings and illus. 7. virgil, the wood engravings of william blake for thornton’s virgil, 1977. windle, feb. cat. 70, #230, publisher’s box, illus. ($12,500); same copy and price, april online cat. for the nybf, #7, illus. sbs, march cat., #12, publisher’s box, illus. ($7529). whitaker, the seraph, c. 1818–​28. windle, feb. cat. 70, #139, blake’s pl. only, 1st st., oddly described as being published in the “third edition,” but the st. of the pl. indicates 1st ed. (bb #512a), illus. ($225). wit’s magazine, 1784–​85. cw, 27 jan., #41, 2 vols. in 1, with the 2nd version of blake’s frontispiece in the jan. 1784 issue (bb pl. 2, cb pl. 1b), some worm damage to text but not pls., contemporary boards rebacked, illus. (£625). windle, feb. cat. 70, #20, 2 vols., with the 2nd version of blake’s frontispiece in the jan. 1784 issue, contemporary calf worn, illus. ($3750); #21, 2 vols. in 1, with the 2nd version of blake’s frontispiece in the jan. 1784 issue, contemporary boards with modern calf backstrip, illus. ($3750). wollstonecraft, original stories. windle, feb. cat. 70, #74, 1791 ed., 2nd sts. of all pls., modern calf, illus. ($8750); #75, blake’s 6 pls. only, imprints trimmed off, 2nd sts. of pls. 1 and 2, 1st sts. of pls. 3-6, illus. ($3000); #76, 1796 ed., 3rd (final) sts. of all pls., contemporary calf worn, illus. (“sold”). fm, 10 feb., #138, 1791 ed., 2nd st. of pl. 1, sts. of other pls. not recorded but probably 2nd, modern calf, illus. (£2992). sbs, march cat., #9, 1791 ed., 2nd st. of pl. 1, sts. of other pls. not recorded but probably 2nd, full calf, “front cover repaired,” slipcase, illus. ($5646). young, night thoughts, 1797, colored copy. sl, 12-19 july online auction, #117, hand coloring added to 17 pls. (bb pls. 1-6, 8, 9, 12-20), pl. 11 in the 2nd st. of 2, lacking pp. 73-74 (and thus pl. 34) and the “explanation” leaf, leaves 42.7 x 33.8 cm., short tears and repairs in some leaves, margins browned on most leaves, “19th century half black russia” worn, illus. (£25,200 to windle in partnership with srb). shortly after acquisition, srb disbound the vol., had the colored pls. professionally cleaned, and began offering them for sale individually. in aug. i acquired pls. 3 and 12 from windle before cleaning (see illus. 5). not recorded in the census of colored copies in bb or bbs; recorded in grant 1: 69, copy i-15. 5. edward young, night thoughts, 1797. detail of pl. 12, area shown approximately 10.5 x 16.0 cm. colored copy i-15 in grant 1: 69. essick collection. this detail of the skeleton in the bottom right corner of the pl. shows the fine hand tinting typical of this copy. the bones are enhanced, in both color and volume, with touches of gray, black, and blue tints, the last perhaps hinting at lichens or moss. we might ask, “can these bones live?” (ezekiel 37:3). the trumpet (only its bell shown here) held by a descending angel of the resurrection offers an answer. according to grant, if one were to suppose that quality of colour were the surest evidence of blake’s own responsibility for the tinting of a particular copy, this copy [i-15] would be judged the equal of i-1 [yale center for british art, bb copy q] and superior to any other type i copy. it could indeed be theorized that blake himself began colouring these sheets, then laid them aside where they were treated carelessly. (1: 55; see 1: 53-54 for the 2 “types” of hand coloring). these statements lie behind the contention in the sl auction cat. that the coloring in this copy is “widely thought to be the work of blake himself.” based on digital images of all colored pls., i agree that the coloring on some pls. in copy i-15 is “superior” to that displayed in other type i copies, but the palette is the same, many colors are similarly placed on the same motifs, and the style in which the washes are applied is within the range of other type i copies. if indeed this copy was colored by blake, then all type i copies could be attributed to him. for type i copies with all pls. hand colored, see the william blake archive, <http://​www.​blakearchive.​org/​copy/​bb515.​2?​descid=​bb515.​2.​comb.​01> (huntington library, bb copy i), and <https://​collections.​britishart.​yale.​edu/​?utf8=​%e2%9c%93​&​search_​field=​all_​fields​&​q=​blake+​young+​night+​thoughts> (yale center, bb copies n and q). for a tentative attribution of the coloring in type i copies to blake and his wife, catherine, see the 2019 sales review, blake 53.4 (spring 2020): illus. 2-4 and their captions. provenance of copy i-15: as in grant 1: 69 to 1953; by descent to the vendor at sl from the english private collector who purchased the vol. from the london book dealer e. seligman in 1953. in early nov. windle provided me with the following prices and purchasers for individual pls. (6 pls. printed recto/verso): pls. price 1 $50,000, sold to a private collector 2 $35,000 3 sold to essick 4/5 $55,000, sold to a private french collector 6 $23,000, sold to a private collector 8 $37,500 9 $35,000, sold to the e. j. pratt library, victoria university, toronto 12 sold to essick 13/14 $75,000 15/16 $55,000, sold to a private french collector 17 $45,000, sold to the e. j. pratt library, victoria university, toronto 18 $35,000 19 $35,000 20 $15,000 in a dec. update, windle reported that the e. j. pratt library had acquired pl. 8. young, night thoughts, 1797, uncolored copies. windle, feb. cat. 70, #120, with the “explanation” leaf, “very occasional toning and offsetting,” later half morocco slightly worn, illus. ($15,000); #121-38, a selection of night thoughts pls. offered individually, all illus. ($1250 each). w. c. baker rare books, may online cat., lacking the “explanation” leaf, “scattered foxing,” contemporary calf with modern morocco spine labels, illus. ($9000). pierre bergé & associés auction, paris, 20 june, #133, with the “explanation” leaf and the bookplate of paul éluard (french poet, 1895–​1952), “brown russian leather,” illus. (€5852; estimate €800-1200); same copy, srb, dec. cat., #6, illus. (£12,500). cl, 21 oct., #81, with the “explanation” leaf, some minor defects, contemporary calf, illus. (£2750). interesting blakeana john quincy, pharmacopœia officinalis & extemporanea; or, a complete english dispensatory, london, 1733. windle, feb. cat. 70, #403, inscribed in brown ink on the title page “william blake | his book” ($49,500). possibly a copy owned by blake. for discussion and illus., see blake 34.4 (spring 2001): 109, illus. 2 and its caption. jakob böhme, works, the so-called “law edition,” 1764–​81. windle, feb. cat. 70, #402, 4 vols., modern half calf ($22,500). eb, june, 4 vols., 19th-century half calf, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $23,125 or “best offer”). the ed. of böhme known to blake and perhaps owned by him—​see his comment to henry crabb robinson on the beauty of the “figures” (i.e., illus.) in “law’s transl.n” (br[2] 423). charles augustus tulk (1786–​1849), friend and patron of blake and john flaxman. cheffins auction, cambridge, england, 13 oct., #336, a collection of materials assembled by tulk and other members of his family, including published engravings of j. flaxman’s designs and serena viewing herself in the glass, 1 of 2 versions of a watercolor by maria flaxman illustrating w. hayley’s triumphs of temper, many items illus. (£1369.50 to justin schiller of battledore ltd. for stock). apparently the same tulk family archive offered privately to victoria university library, toronto, in nov. 2018; see the 2018 sales review, blake 52.4 (spring 2019). the design by m. flaxman is not among blake’s engravings for the 1803 ed. of hayley’s poem. for further information on the unengraved illus., see cb p. 84 and mark crosby, “‘a ladys book’: blake’s engravings for hayley’s the triumphs of temper,” blake in our time: essays in honour of g. e. bentley jr., ed. karen mulhallen (toronto: u of toronto p, 2010) 105-30. george crabbe, tales. london: j. hatchard, 1812. eb, march, signed in ink “wblake” on the front free endpaper, contemporary quarter calf worn, illus. (no bids on a required minimum bid of $2000; “ended” 1 day after initial listing). not the signature of the poet and artist. blake, songs of innocence and of experience, pub. w. pickering, ed. wilkinson, 1839. windle, feb. cat. 70, #51, issue lacking “the little vagabond,” publisher’s cloth worn, illus. ($17,500). blake, songs of innocence and experience with other poems, pub. b. pickering, ed. shepherd, 1866. windle, april online cat. for the nybf, #3, printing before the suppression of the fifth stanza of “mary” (p. 90) and lines 113-14 of “auguries of innocence” (p. 100), full morocco, illus. ($1750). blake, the marriage of heaven and hell, camden hotten facsimile, [1868]. windle, feb. cat. 70, #67, “original quarter green morocco …, good with occasional pages foxed or spotted as usual,” illus. ($1750). phb, march online cat., the copy “owned by the pre-raphaelite artist ford madox brown (1821–​1893),” scattered foxing, rebound in full calf, illus. (£2750). blake, works by william blake … reproduced in facsimile from the original editions. [london: possibly andrew chatto], 1876. bb #368, bbs p. 169 (dating the publication to 1878, based on chatto’s records). manhattan rare book company, march online cat., with later hand coloring, “later calf with cloth centre panel,” illus. ($25,000). the hand coloring of songs of innocence and of experience is based on copy z; the coloring of the book of thel may be based on copy j. previously sold bhl, 26 june 2019, #147, “hand-coloured throughout,” illus. (£2550). dante gabriel rossetti, autograph letter signed to frederic james shields, 2 pp., datable to 21 may 1880. duke’s auction, dorchester, 17 june, #92, with a reprint of shields, “blake’s work room and death room and rossetti’s sonnet,” 1st published in manchester quarterly 29 (1910), both formerly in the collections of kerrison preston (1884–​1974) and his son david christopher preston (1918–​2014), illus. (£9259 to windle acting for essick; estimate £1000-2000). see illus. 6. 6. dante gabriel rossetti, autograph letter signed to frederic james shields, 2 pp. on 2 leaves, datable to 21 may 1880 (see enlargement). laid paper, each leaf 18.0 x 11.5 cm. the letter includes a “revised copy” of rossetti’s sonnet “william blake,” a response to shields’s “sketch of blake’s work-room and death-room.” essick collection; photo courtesy of duke’s fine art auctioneers. transcription:   [page 1, the recto of the 1st leaf]   friday [21 may 1880]   my dear shields thanks for your loving words on the sonnet, and thanks most of all for the chance of writing it. i subjoin a revised copy. i write this line because i expect mrs gilchrist & her son abt 5 tomorrow (saturday) & thought i shd tell you so. but i dare say you wont think this forbids work. hopi[n]g to see you     your ever affect: d g r   [page 2, the verso of the 2nd leaf]   william blake (to frederick shields, on his sketch of blake’s work-room and death-room, 3 fountain court, strand.)   this is the place. even here the dauntless soul, the unflinching hand, wrought on; till in that nook, as on that very bed, his life partook new birth, and passed. ‘yon river’s distant shoal, whereto the close-built coiling lanes unroll, faced his work-window, whence his eyes would stare, thought-wandering, unto nought that met them there, but to the unfettered irreversible goal.   this cupboard, holy of holies, held the cloud of his soul writ & limned; this other one, his true wife’s charge, full oft to their abode yielded for daily bread the martyr’s stone, ere yet their food might be that bread alone, the words now home-speech of the mouth of god. d g rossetti, 20th may 1880   the only substantive difference between the version of the poem in this letter and the one published by rossetti in 1881 is the substitution of “dusky shoal” for “distant shoal” in the 4th line.ballads and sonnets (london: ellis and white, 1881) 314. the standard edition of rossetti’s letters includes an error in the final line of the poem: “in the mouth of god” rather than “of the mouth of god.”the correspondence of dante gabriel rossetti, vol. 9, ed. william e. fredeman, completed by roger c. lewis, jane cowan, and anthony h. harrison (cambridge: d. s. brewer, 2010) 184. for the textual history of the sonnet, see the complete writings and pictures of dante gabriel rossetti, ed. jerome j. mcgann, at <http://​www.​rossettiarchive.​org/​docs/​6-​1880.​raw.​html> (accessed 19 june). for a study of the relationship between rossetti’s sonnet and the 5 traced versions of shields’s picture, see essick, “dante gabriel rossetti, frederic shields, and the spirit of william blake,” victorian poetry 24.2 (summer 1986): 163-72. blake, poems, ed. w. b. yeats, 1893. between the covers, jan. online cat., small-paper issue, publisher’s cloth worn, binding illus. ($400). windle, feb. cat. 70, #266, large-paper issue, publisher’s quarter parchment ($650). blake, works, ed. e. j. ellis and w. b. yeats, 1893. windle, feb. cat. 70, #265, 3 vols., small-paper issue in publisher’s “original green cloth with extensive gilt stampings” ($3750). blake, the book of thel, songs of innocence and songs of experience, 1897. phb, may online cat., with blake, poetical sketches, 1899, both illus. charles ricketts, publisher’s boards, illus. (£2500). blake, songs of innocence and of experience. liverpool: henry young and sons, 1923. windle, april online cat. for the nybf, #4, hand-colored issue of this facsimile, modern half morocco, illus. ($5500). laurence binyon, autograph letter signed to “dear sir,” 16 april 1925, 2 pp. lasting words, jan. online cat., both pp. illus. (£225). discusses blake’s virgil wood engravings. jorge luis borges, autograph notebook about blake, including quotations from his writings. quarto, 4 pp., wrappers, datable to c. 1950. james cummins, jan. private offer ($40,000). leonard baskin, blake and the youthful ancients, wood engravings by baskin, 1956. windle, feb. cat. 70, #407, “stapled into wrappers” ($3750). blake, auguries of innocence, wood engravings by baskin, 1959. windle, feb. cat. 70, #406, publisher’s wrappers ($1195). blake, a cradle song. iowa city: roberta press, 1959. eb, march-april, publisher’s wrappers, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of $200 or “best offer”; reduced to $160 or “best offer” and sold for $120 to essick). colophon, verso of 2nd (final) leaf: “ninety copies of this pamphlet, handset in arrighi italic type, have been printed on okawara and venezia papers, with covers of omi, by n.r.k., at the typographic laboratory in the school of journalism, state university of iowa.” bbs p. 151, listed as not seen. blake, poems from william blake’s “songs of innocence,” illus. maurice sendak, 1967. windle, feb. cat. 70, #429, publisher’s wrappers ($4250). phb, feb. online cat., publisher’s wrappers, illus. (£1750). bellmans auction, billingshurst, west sussex, 11 oct., #212, publisher’s wrappers, illus. (not sold; estimate £400-600). allen ginsberg, songs of innocence and of experience by william blake, tuned by allen ginsberg, vinyl record, 1969. windle, feb. cat. 70, #416, “folding paper sleeve with extra paper leaf, 4 interior pages of commentary and poetry. signed ‘allen ginsberg n.y.c. 12/11/87… allen ginsberg dec 14-15 1969 new york city — returned again from chicago as defense wittness (sic), conspiracy trial,’” sleeve slightly worn ($500). blake, illustrations of the book of job. london: blake trust, 1987. bow windows bookshop, nov. online cat. 214, #193, 4 portfolio boxes, john commander’s copy, 1 of 5 copies “containing extra material … specifically made up for those most closely concerned with bringing the publication to completion,” half morocco (£13,500). blake, the tyger, with 16 linocuts by tiziana romanin printed in colors. milan: il buon tempo, 2017. windle, feb. online cat., “oblong small folio,” 1 of 30 copies, publisher’s boards and slipcase, illus. ($1500). blake, america and europe. “a limited edition of 16 plates of william blake’s america a prophecy and europe a prophecy printed by michael phillips.” online cat., illus., at <https://​www.​williamblakeprints.​co.​uk/​america-​a-​prophecy-​europe-​a-​prophecy>, accessed 16 march 2023 (price on request). the pls. printed in “shades of blue ink” (america) and “shades of charcoal green ink” (europe) from “replica relief-etched copper plates” on “hand made” paper, “each sheet … watermarked with blake’s initials.” each set in a “drop-back box containing … a bound pamphlet.” “limited to ten sets only,” but “any one or more of the plates that have been made to print the limited edition sets can be printed separately to order.” blake’s circle and followers works are listed under artists’ names in the following order: paintings and drawings sold in groups, single paintings and drawings, letters and manuscripts, separate pls., book illus. calvert, edward early drawings, paintings, and original graphics “the sheep of his pasture,” engraving, 2nd st. catherine burns fine art, june online cat., from the memoir, 1893, illus. ($2900). flaxman, john drawings and sculpture see also flaxman under letterpress books with engravings by and after blake, above. antony’s oration over the dead caesar. pencil, ink, and wash, 22.2 x 33.7 cm., inscribed “j. flaxman” and “death of jul: caesar” lower right, “anthonys oration” lower left, datable to c. 1768. lly, march online cat., illus. (sold to a “private collection, usa”). for more information on this important early work, see the 2018 sales review, blake 52.4 (spring 2019). fuseli, henry drawings, paintings, and separate pls. a naked warrior repelling soldiers. pen and brown ink over pencil, 15.0 x 16.6 cm. sl, 6 july, #40, “a preliminary study for … percival delivering belisane from the enchantment of urma (tate britain, london),” illus. (£7560). a nude male figure, seated on a step. pencil, 19.3 x 19.3 cm., numbered “108”. cl online auction, 10-24 march, #80, illus. (£12,600). previously offered martyn gregory gallery, may 2012 online cat., no item #, illus. (price on request). study of a lady, perhaps lavinia de irujo. pencil, 20.9 x 17.0 cm., inscribed “s. h. july — 16”. sny, 26 jan., #41, illus. ($39,375). previously sold cl, 14 april 1992, #7, illus. (£4620); previously offered by andrew clayton-payne, oct. 2019 cat., #28, illus. (price on application). the 1992 auction cat. notes that “s. h.” refers to somerset house. “the dream,” stipple engraving by robert william sievier of a miniature by moses haughton based on a painting by fuseli, 1820. eb, july, color-printed proof before signatures and imprint but with the title and quoted verses in english and french, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of €150). for illus. of a proof with more limited color printing, see the 2019 sales review, blake 53.4 (spring 2020): illus. 8. “queen katharine’s dream,” stipple engraving by francesco bartolozzi, 1788. eb, dec., hand colored, title and imprint trimmed off, illus. (offered at the “buy it now” price of £295). “sin pursued by death,” stipple engraving by moses haughton with aquatint by f. c. lewis, 1804. bhl, 29 june, #395, with 3 engravings after fuseli illustrating macbeth, hamlet, and the tempest from a collection of prints … illustrating … shakspeare, pub. boydell, 1803, all framed and illus. (£637.50). linnell, john early drawings, paintings, letters, and original graphics a child in a smock and bare feet. watercolor, 12.7 x 10.2 cm., signed and dated 1815. ah, oct. online cat. 530, #31, illus. (£225). head studies, attributed to linnell. pencil and white chalk, 17.0 x 11.0 cm. ew, 23 june, #2013, “the sitter is thought to be … samuel palmer,” framed, illus. (£750). i believe that the attribution is correct; probably an early work. picnic on primrose hill. watercolor, 10.2 x 14.7 cm., initialed and dated “[18]14”. semley auction, shaftesbury, dorset, 17 sept., #109, with an unattributed pen-and-ink drawing “of a ruined castle” that might also be an early work by linnell, illus. (£158.60). portrait of thomas chevalier, attributed to linnell. watercolor, 20.3 x 15.9 cm., signed and dated dec. 1816, in an elaborate frame. henry aldridge & son auction, devizes, wiltshire, 17 sept., #171, illus. (£216). i believe that the attribution is correct. linnell engraved this portrait in 1825. blake probably knew chevalier—​see br(2) 68, 398n. self-portrait of the artist. pencil, 17.0 x 5.5 cm. dreweatts auction, newbury, berkshire, 26 may, #91, illus. (£1000). the subject would appear to be in his 20s. shepherds. oil, 16.5 x 22.2 cm. lly, march online cat., dating the work to “c.1820s,” illus. (not priced). southampton from the river near netley abbey. oil, 38.1 x 97.8 cm., signed and dated 1825. cl online auction, 1-15 dec., #133, illus. (£20,160). one of linnell’s most important early paintings. see also the watercolor study for this work, below. studies of a wheelbarrow. black and white chalk on blue paper, 10.4 x 16.0 cm., inscribed “1805”. guy peppiatt fine art, june cat., #36, illus. (£750). study of a shed. black and white chalk on gray paper, 20.0 x 26.7 cm., signed, datable to c. 1805–​10. guy peppiatt fine art, june cat., #37, illus. (£1200). study of a sleeping baby. pencil, leaf 19.5 x 24.5 cm., signed. dw, 9 march, #160, dated to “circa 1820,” illus. (£144). previously offered dw, 13 oct. 2021, #145, illus. (not sold; estimate £150-200). possibly linnell’s first son, also john, born in 1821. study of southampton from the river near netley abbey. watercolor, 16.2 x 49.3 cm., signed and dated 1814. cl, online auction, 1-15 dec., #135, illus. (£4032). see also the oil painting of southampton, above. trees by a river (possibly the thames at millbank). black chalk heightened with white on blue paper, 15.0 x 23.0 cm., inscribed “john linnell” on the verso in pencil. ew, 9 dec., #4079, illus. (not sold; estimate £100-200); 5 jan. 2023, #371, illus. (£26). probably an early work. view of a country house. watercolor, 10.0 x 17.0 cm. keys fine art auction, aylsham, norfolk, 18 feb., #369, illus. (not sold; estimate £10-20). probably an early work. wales; “in the old road from beddgelert to ffestiniog.” chalk drawing on brown paper, 20.3 x 14.0 cm. ah, march cat. 524, #27, illus. (£275). probably drawn while on a tour of north wales in 1813. autograph letter signed. two pp., dated 6 dec. 1869 to “dear sir”. eureka books, feb. online cat., illus. ($75). discusses linnell’s engraving “the journey to emmaus,” published in 1839. “thomas robert malthus,” portrait of. mezzotint, 1834. cw, 15 july, #224, illus. (not sold; estimate £150-250). palmer, samuel drawings, paintings, and manuscripts. with the exception of a view of redhill, the attributions to palmer of drawings sold at ew on 23 june are questionable. back of the post office, trevenna, cornwall. pencil, 7.0 x 15.0 cm., dated “sep. 1875”. ew, 23 june, #2012, with a drawing “depicting egloshayle church,” also dated “1875” and attributed to palmer, 4.2 x 16.2 cm., both illus. (£650). lynton. charcoal drawing, 17.0 x 25.5 cm., inscribed with the title and dated “september 17th 1850”, verso study of a bridge, pencil. ew, 23 june, #2032, both illus. (£780). a view of redhill. pencil, 10.0 x 20.0 cm., inscribed “redhill” and dated “june 24th 1872”. ew, 23 june, #2033, illus. (£2470). illus. in carlos peacock, samuel palmer: shoreham and after (london: john baker, 1968) 67. a watermill. watercolor, 11.0 x 19.0 cm. ew, 23 june, #2024, with view of a stream, pencil and chalk, 16.5 x 25.0 cm., both inscribed “samuel palmer” on verso, both illus. (£546). palmer, notebook, 1865–​66. ew, 23 june, #2035, “contains extensive diary notes with approximately 12 accompanying graphite drawings,” illus. (£3900; estimate £600-800). charles dickens, autograph letter signed to palmer, 22 april 1846, 1 p. fm, 10 feb., #60, the body of the letter reads, “if you can spare me the little work containing the published letters i shall be much obliged to you, as i wish to refer to it,” illus. (£1632). this brief letter is probably associated with palmer’s work illustrating dickens’s pictures from italy, 1846. richmond, george early drawings, paintings, and original graphics figures kneeling over a child. pen and ink, 21.0 x 17.8 cm. parker fine art online auction, farnham, surrey, 8 sept., #25, illus. (not sold; estimate £120-180); 15 dec., #608, illus. (£100). probably an early drawing. portrait sketch of a little girl standing by a piano, attributed to richmond. pen and ink, 11.0 x 7.0 cm. ew, 23 june, #2034, framed, illus. (£525). i believe that the attribution is correct; possibly an early work. a sleeping wayfarer. watercolor, 13.2 x 11.4 cm., signed with monogram and dated 1830. dw, 19 oct., #245, illus. (£11,400). appendix: new information on blake’s engravings listed below are substantive additions or corrections to essick, the separate plates of william blake: a catalogue (1983). p. 106, “the man sweeping the interpreter’s parlour,” impression 2l. for updated provenance information and illus., see under separate plates and plates in series, above, and illus. 3. pp. 134-35, “the fall of rosamond,” 2nd st. for a previously unrecorded impression, see under separate plates and plates in series, above. construing “har”: blake’s polyglot roots the blind tiriel departing from har and heva (c. 1789). 18.2 x 27.0 cm. collection of robert n. essick. image courtesy of the william blake archive. construing “har”: blake’s polyglot roots by alexander s. gourlay alexander s. gourlay (agourlay@risd.edu) teaches at the rhode island school of design. of those commentators who try to explain the name of the senescent patriarch har in blake’s early (unpublished) illustrated poem tiriel (late 1780s), most offer that “har” is the hebrew word for “mountain,” as blake could have learned from any number of etymological discussions of such familiar biblical names as “ararat” or “armageddon.”see harold bloom, e 946, or g. e. bentley, jr., ed., william blake’s writings (oxford: clarendon press, 1978) 2: 904, or, more recently, sheila a. spector, “wonders divine”: the development of blake’s kabbalistic myth (lewisburg: bucknell university press, 2001) 49-53. some scholars note that har is also the name of an ambiguously identified frame character in snorri sturlusun’s prose edda, which blake knew through paul henri mallet’s northern antiquities, but even these emphasize “mountain” in construing the name, perhaps because there does not seem to be much connection between blake’s character and his scandinavian namesake.for example, g. e. bentley, jr., ed., william blake: tiriel (oxford: clarendon press, 1967) 3-4. in tiriel har presides feebly (an aged adam with his equally feeble consort heva) over a paradise that resembles a pickled garden of eden, and his territory is bordered by the “mountains of har” (e 284), but he is much more closely associated with the garden than the mountains. indeed, harold bloom (e 946) has noted that it is ironic that although har’s name seems to mean “mountain,” it is regularly linked with valleys in the phrase “the vales of har,” which occurs once in tiriel and four more times in the book of thel (1789). in the latter poem, which blake did publish, there is no indication at all of who or what har might be, but because the heroine is repeatedly described by epithets like “mistress” or “beauty” or “queen” “of the vales of har,” the name seems potentially important. the character har (linked again with heva) also comes up in the song of los (1795; e 67-70) as the name of a being something like the character in tiriel, and is mentioned in the four zoas (c. 1796–​1807; e 380). if blake ever expected readers of any of his works to associate the name har with “mountain,” he did little or nothing to confirm or exploit that connection. the character in tiriel doesn’t dwell in the mountains (even if his garden realm is isolated by them) and doesn’t talk about them, and he isn’t notably mountainous himself. in the book of thel har is just a name associated with a place, “the vales of har,” perhaps comparable to “dales of arcady,” in which case har is not necessarily a sentient being. we don’t get much even if we push hard on the stray phrases delineating the geography inhabited by thel and her sheep-herding sisters: thel, “the youngest” (e 3), leaves the others and mopes “down by the river of adona,” which indirectly suggests that the elders are happily battening their flocks on the high lawns of a mountain while she is down in the vales, sheeplessly wondering what to do with her life. that might mean that her older, higher sisters have learned something that she doesn’t know yet, and thus that there is something high up that thel is missing, but it isn’t clear what distinguishes the valleys and mountains of har from those of other regions. the song of los is similarly tantalizing: many of the prophetic figures in the poem are explicitly assigned a lofty mountain perch (noah, mount ararat; moses, mount sinai; orc, mount atlas; rousseau and voltaire, the alps), but har has none: he is simply said to flee from somewhere to somewhere else without any mention of altitude. we should thus consider what else, if anything, blake might have hoped careful readers of tiriel and later thel and the song of los would associate with the name har. in the edda as presented by mallet, a king goes in disguise to asgard, the seat of newly arrived “asiatic” deities/​rulers whose popular appeal, the king suspects, threatens his kingdom. the disguised king catechizes the one called har, who sits on the lowest of three thrones, although he is the most exalted of three king-like beings; collectively these may or may not be a manifestation of odin, who, according to mallet’s notes, is a magician/​king, not really a god.paul henri mallet, northern antiquities, 2 vols. (london, 1770) 2: 1-12. the edda suggests that har’s name means “the lofty one” (3), which might seem to line up with reading “har” as “mountain,” but in context his loftiness is a matter of prestige, intellect, and/​or divine pretension rather than altitude, much less mountainousness. snorri’s wily king har is definitely not senile, and not at all like simple-hearted unpretentious adam, innocent or fallen, even if we imagine him grown old and querulous:  if blake remembered the god/​king har when he named the character in tiriel, he must have forgotten what har was like in the edda. it is certainly possible that in imagining har blake dredged up an exotic name from somewhere in his consciousness and intended no literary or linguistic allusion at all. but the name might have meant something other than “mountain” to him, and he could have supposed that more perspicacious readers could figure it out as well. har’s most notable characteristics in tiriel are his ancientness and fadedness, so blake might have sought a name that could evoke these qualities. “hoar” and “hoary,” words that come up often in blake’s descriptions of ancient persons, are more obviously denotative than his meaningful names tend to be, but if he consulted an etymological dictionarysuch as john ash, the new and complete dictionary of the english language, 2 vols. (london, 1775) 1: s.v. “hoar.” in search of alternative forms of “hoar,” he would have been led immediately to the anglo-saxon word “har,” which means gray, old and gray, and pale. in every image of har in the illustrations to tiriel the character is white haired, white skinned, and white clad. thel’s clothing is variously colored and her complexion varies, but she is also associated with “paleness” (e 3). speculative etymology contributes little to elucidating the word beyond confirming what is established in the pictures and texts associated with it. but even this largely negative result can help us by eliminating a source of obfuscation, one of many stubborn canards in the literature on the book of thel. because tiriel and thel represent successive early stages in the development of blake’s composite art, it may be that by the time he moved from tiriel, which appears to have been conceived as a letterpress text conventionally illustrated with engravings, to thel, a picto-textual illuminated book, he thought of “har” as just one of many defamiliarized english words in his alternative mythos, rather than a symbolic name that could be traced through conventional references. who are blake’s eternals? who are blake’s eternals? by christopher z. hobson christopher z. hobson (hobsonc@oldwestbury.edu), professor of english at suny old westbury, is the author of the chained boy: orc and blake’s idea of revolution, blake and homosexuality, and james baldwin and the heavenly city: prophecy, apocalypse, and doubt, among other works. and they conversed together in visionary forms dramatic … .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . creating space, creating time according to the wonders divine of human imagination, throughout all the three regions immense of childhood, manhood & old age[;] & the all tremendous unfathomable non ens of death was seen in regenerations terrific or complacent … (jerusalem 98.28, 31-34, e 257-58) this essay answers the question in its title by analyzing blake’s differing presentations of eternal beings from their introduction in the first book of urizen (1794) through his culminating long poem jerusalem (1804–​20).blake’s writings are cited from erdman’s complete poetry and prose; artwork from the william blake archive. the essay proposes, as well, a meaning for this evolution. it argues that the limitation of eternal awareness to immortals and the conception of a sharp divide between the eternal and material worlds, in urizen’s dominant narrative, clashed with earlier blake presentations of similar issues, but that he turned back to his earlier conceptualizations in late work. in doing so, he came to present mortal humans, not only immortals, as able to inhabit eternity, a possibility all but excluded in urizen. blake’s initial presentation of eternal beings, usually called the eternals in urizen and by this and other designations later, is divided. in the dominant narrative within urizen, eternals appear as immortal and assumedly immaterial but, in a subordinate view, they are mortal and material even as they inhabit eternity. as it develops, the poem places the eternals in the divided cosmos already mentioned, a construct that becomes explicit in blake’s works around this time. the four zoas (1797–​1807) then develops urizen’s dominant presentation to its logical conclusion, presenting the zoas as suprahuman entities who remake the world in an apparently benevolent way. but in time blake reverses course, arguably regarding the four zoas as having taken a wrong path, and uses previously marginalized ideas, including the alternative view in urizen, to suggest new relations between eternal and mortal beings. in milton (1804–​21) and jerusalem, he redefines the distinctions between the two levels of his universe and their inhabitants: immortals descend to and labor in the material world, and that world’s mortal inhabitants participate in divine gatherings and can access eternity mentally and imaginatively. these changes make the barrier between the levels of blake’s cosmos more permeable without fully removing it or the distinction between eternal and material beings. finally, in the eschaton he envisions at the end of biblical-historical time, narrated in jerusalem’s conclusion, blake shows eternity as containing both immortals and mortal, material humans with eternal capabilities. based on these changes, the essay proposes a major and a minor arc in his work, in order to determine which ideas were core convictions he returned to throughout life and which proved transient, and ventures an answer to the question it began with.several ancillary aspects of blake’s treatment are not discussed in detail here in order to maintain a more focused approach. these include a premundane eternity, sexual differentiation in eternity, and how eschatological change may occur. the essay also does not consider possible sources for blake’s ideas of the eternals. contradictory views and a divided cosmos: the first book of urizen who, then, are blake’s eternal beings? milton o. percival, in william blake’s circle of destiny (1938), answers intriguingly, “who these eternals are it is impossible to say. are they those who never fell, those who have fallen, died, and reascended, or those who, though alive in the flesh, participate in immortality by their visionary powers? or are they all three? to the writer, this last seems the most likely answer to this highly speculative problem” (45-46).for percival’s brief elaboration, see 142-44. percival’s suggestion, in common with his general synchronic approach to blake, presents these possibilities as existing simultaneously in all blake’s works. in fact, blake did not begin with a finished conception nor get to one easily. as suggested, urizen is where blake introduces the eternals as a specific class of beings, as distinct from other supernatural actors in earlier works.“eternals” first appears in urizen. “eternal” (lowercase or capital) appears earlier in various senses, but not as denoting a class of beings. the eternals are mentioned once in ahania, in reference to urizen’s division from them in urizen (3.55-56, e 86), and not at all in the song of los or the book of los. at the start of chapter 2, the narrator establishes eternals’ immortality and flexile perceptions—​a consistent part of all blake’s descriptions of full humanity—​together with the prematerial eternity that blake assumes in this and subsequent works: “earth was not: nor globes of attraction / the will of the immortal expanded / or contracted his all flexible senses. / death was not, but eternal life sprung” (3.36-39, e 71). eternals’ immateriality is established by implication as urizen and then los acquire bodily form and lose eternal awareness (chs. 3-6, e 72-80).see connolly 78 on blake’s nonspecification of the form of eternal bodies. finally, the two-level cosmos emerges partly in urizen’s formation of a womb/​globe and definitively through the eternals’ creation and closure of the “tent” around the los-enitharmon-orc family, suggested in the (usually) preceding image of several figures viewing a planetary orb from above (5.28-34, e 73; 19.2-20.2, e 78-80; see illus. 1).copy f, blake archive object 15, same in erdman’s numbering. copy g has four figures, all others three. 1. blake, the first book of urizen copy f, object 15. 14.8 x 10.9 cm. houghton library, harvard university, typ 6500.42 f. image courtesy of the william blake archive. the alternative view of eternals becomes explicit only in urizen’s two questions to them in his sole speech, on plate 4: “why will you die o eternals? / why live in unquenchable burnings?” (4.12-13, e 71). this plate is included in three copies (a-c), printed alongside or after others without it; hence, neither version is a definitive revision.copies a and c were printed in 1794 alongside others lacking plate 4, and copy b separately in 1795 (viscomi 280). additionally, robert n. essick argues that plate 4 was produced for copy g (1818), but dropped because of misalignment (essick). joseph viscomi believes plate 4 was, however, excluded as overfavorable to urizen (283-84). it has not been suggested that lines 12-13 were a reason for omission. since the lines exist in three copies and were intended for a fourth, they are, in any case, a real but not dominant part of blake’s conception. if taken seriously, as they should be, urizen’s questions present eternals as beings who are willing to die, assumedly do die at some point, and are also subject, like other mortals, to physical and psychic “burnings”—​passions and emotional turmoil of such kinds as rage, jealousy, adoration, obsession, and sexual hunger. the interpretive record on urizen provides little discussion of this possibility, or of the divided presentation argued here. northrop frye and s. foster damon, in other contexts, see eternal beings and groups as including living humans, as parts of blake’s all-encompassing jesus (frye 125) or of the divine family, “consisting of all the elect, dead or alive” (damon 105). thus, some aspects of the present analysis are already familiar. however, neither applies the cited points to urizen. most discussions of the eternals in urizen either pass over urizen’s questions in silence or explain them as a mental or perspectival error, a misapprehension of eternal life. such discussions usually treat 3.36-39 as ontologically true in this poem, and many also slide nonexplicitly from the eternals’ relation to death to issues of order and regularity. as an example, a thoughtful analysis by robert e. simmons implicitly responds to urizen’s questions in commenting on the “earth was not …” passage. noting that the “key components” of eternal life are “flux,” a “creatively sensual existence,” and unification of “all men’s experience into one man’s,” simmons asserts: “such an existence makes all abstract notions, including that of the shape and motion of the planets, irrelevant. similarly irrelevant, and thus nonexistent, is the abstract notion of death” (171). simmons, then, sees urizen’s questions as a misconstrual of eternal reality. among current writers, lucy cogan goes further than most in observing that urizen “absurdly” queries eternals on death since “it is he who has introduced temporality and thus made death possible” (113). this formulation admits death for them, but as a new reality, not as an aspect of basic eternal existence. in general, reading both questions as urizenic miscomprehension remains the dominant critical response.on urizen’s second question, see andrew m. cooper’s exegesis that eternals’ “kindlings and consummations of … desire” are felt by urizen “as an agony of ungratified craving” (216). for omission of the questions while referring to the eternals, see articles/​chapters by choe, goss, fletcher, and rajan. an exception is donald ault, who accepts that urizen’s attribution of death to the eternals (4.12) “conflicts with the narrator’s explicit exclusion of death from eternity” and sees this polarity as basic to the poem’s staging of contending viewpoints (“blake’s de-formation” 126; see also 124, 131). this point, for ault, is the poem’s main meaning, and so he does not further explore the idea of the eternals as mortal. the general approach just summarized has two weaknesses: it fails to adequately explain urizen’s concerns, and it neglects to contextualize his questions in relation to blake’s other works or even urizen’s full text. simmons’s essay exemplifies the first problem. if urizen asks, “why will you die o eternals?,” it is, most logically, because he believes they do die, and not because he thinks they find death as an abstraction unimportant. further, urizen’s preceding statement, “i have sought for a joy without pain, / for a solid without fluctuation” (4.10-11, e 71), would not express only his desire for order and dominance, the usual reading. rather, behind and helping to explain this desire, it would reveal dread of discontinuance and extinction and a hope for endless bliss, elements in most views of an afterlife and heaven. in this case, urizen’s error is not one of supposing that flux equals death, but one of imagining that hierarchy, rigidity, and an ordered universe under his control can somehow negate his mortality. contextualizing the possibility of the eternals’ mortality shows that some features of their description in urizen are ascribed to mortals in earlier and contemporaneous works. specifically, the “ancient poets” of marriage (1790) possessed variable perceptions, seeing gods in “whatever their enlarged & numerous senses could percieve,” contrary to urizen’s reserving of this faculty for immortals (marriage 11, e 38; urizen 3.37-38, e 71). similarly, enitharmon’s dream in europe (1794) places the loss of flexible perceptions in a mortal human society, either within the dream’s 1,800-year timespan or at the time of the biblical flood (10.10-31, e 63-64). moreover, within urizen itself, elements of blake’s earlier conceptions appear largely unchanged except for the defining context of 3.36-39. the preludium’s reference to “the primeval priests assum’d power,” if construed to mean power over mortal populations, recalls marriage’s point that abstracting “the mental deities from their objects” was what “began priesthood” (urizen 2.1, e 70; marriage 11, e 38), and this process of abstraction correlates with urizen’s abstractive reasoning in urizen 4.34-40 (e 72). in the framework of the whole poem, the final segment—​from urizen’s awakening to fuzon’s exodus, including the net of religion and the loss of perception of eternity—​is consistent with the focus on priesthood from the preludium to plate 4. it is also compatible, with differences, with marriage’s elevation of priesthood over a society of mortals originally having expansive senses.in urizen, urizen’s earthly descendants complete their mortalization and lose eternal awareness as they become enmeshed in the net of religion (25.23-42, e 82-83). ideas of mortals with something akin to eternal understanding, then, and of usurpations of power over them, are not new in blake. the new element in urizen is the occlusion of such possibilities in the dominant narrative. placing this occlusion in its own context, urizen stands at a crossroads in blake’s development. here, an earlier concept in which mortals have elements of eternal awareness and knowledge of eternity is revised into one reserving both abilities solely to immortals. the latter idea, dominant in urizen, will become the only one in the four zoas. the second major issue we must consider, urizen’s two-level cosmos whose levels are closed off from each other, emerges as a plot development within the dominant narrative. the idea of a tiered cosmos, in general, can perhaps be interpreted as a mental or perspectival misconception, a false belief reflecting eternal humanity’s imperfect awareness. (we have already encountered a similar approach in relation to urizen’s questions.) this interpretive tack, however, is too abstract. blake’s narratives are centered within the span of biblical-historical time and treat such divisions as real conditions within—​and, we will see, beyond—​it. in any case, a differentiation between earthly and higher existence is an explicit or tacit feature of both earlier and later blake works. a division between “eternal” and “material” worlds, for example, is explicit in the fairy’s song in europe (iii.4, 13, e 60, copies h and k). while earlier works do not state such a division directly, some innocence poems imply an upper or spiritual world in references to angels and guardian spirits (1789; for example, “night,” “a dream”). in these and other early poems, contact between the two spheres is frequent and knowledge of god seems innate (“the little boy found” line 3, e 11; thel [1789] 1.19, 5.1, e 4-5). however, the contrasted experience poems (1794) show a material existence almost devoid of contact with or even awareness of a spiritual or divine realm, or direct awareness of god (for example, “holy thursday,” “london,” “the chimney sweeper”). in what must be considered a brilliant and fateful fusion, urizen combines these attributes, presenting a two-level cosmos without contact between mortal and eternal beings. in effect, urizen theorizes the world of experience as the sole condition of mortal humanity, with no “contrary” state of innocence and over a timespan from material creation onward. the vehicle for this shift in blake’s ideas is the eternals’ erecting and closing the “tent” hiding the los-enitharmon-orc family in chapters 5-6 (19.2-20.2, e 78-80). this, as well as earlier actions by the eternals, such as pouring fire on urizen in chapter 3, has been seen as defensive and inadequate. andrew lincoln, for example, in his study of the four zoas, observes that the eternals in urizen “do not represent a foreknowing providence,” and so share responsibility for “the terrible progress of history” (24-25).for criticisms similar to lincoln’s, see goss 96, 101, 106-07; rajan 68-70. lincoln’s larger concern, to which we will return, is blake’s need “to retain in some capacity a supervisory providence” (25). these points, however, do not get to the core issue of relations between the levels in blake’s universe. on this issue, g. a. rosso notes that a two-level division is basic to the human accession of divine knowledge, which he defines as the fundamental meaning of “apocalypse” (“redefining,” especially pars. 1-5, 34-35). the possibility of this accession is what urizen appears to bar within its own context of primordial-biblical time. in imagery and plot, completing and closing the tent signify both that eternals turn away from the lower world and that those in that world are deprived of eternal perception: “‘spread a tent … / … / that eternals may no more behold them’”; “no more los beheld eternity” (urizen 19.2-4, 20.2, e 78, 80). those so blocked include urizen (5.39-41, e 73); the los-enitharmon-orc family; and, ultimately, mortal populations, initially urizen’s human descendants, who “forgot their eternal life” (25.42, e 83). analytically, the eternals’ action is arbitrary; there is no necessary reason why the advent of human reproduction must close both worlds to each other, and in innocence and thel it does not. evidently, though, this plot device fits blake’s sense at the time of how eternal-mortal relations did develop. closing the tent begins a largely abstentionist role for eternal beings, starting with their absence from later events in urizen and continuing with modifications in the four zoas, that leaves non-eternal immortals and mortal humanity to shift for themselves. both sides of this development are momentous. for mortals, inability to access or view eternity will come to mean, for blake, inability to save themselves. in the four zoas, this inability will produce the need for a supernal agency to save them through its own acts. for those immortals no longer in contact with eternity (urizen and los in urizen, the zoas later), the eternals’ continuing, though modified, abstention will mean that the zoas—​formally, collective aspects of “the human brain,” yet functioning poetically as agents over and above humanity—​act as substitutes for eternal beings in their relations with humanity, and do so without full eternal awareness. intensifying and offsetting the division: the four zoas in the four zoas, blake intensifies but offsets urizen’s account of separation between mortal and immortal beings. the zoas emerge in this poem as supernal actors of potentially overbearing power who, in the end, purge and remold a passive human population. this role becomes a predominant theme in the poem. its logic seems clear: if mortal humanity is cut off from transcendent or eternal understanding, human renovation can occur only through some suprahuman entity. countering this focus somewhat, blake also portrays eternal beings, no longer fully absent from mundane affairs, acting at certain junctures as a “supervisory providence” (lincoln 25), though in limited ways. finally, in one scene, blake implies new possible relations between eternal and mortal beings that point to his future work. dramatically, the zoas function largely on a suprahuman level, intermediate between eternal beings and mortal humanity. in doing so, they become the poem’s main driving force, immortal, immensely powerful, and yet, with the partial exception of los and enitharmon, acting without eternal understanding or contact with eternal entities.the dividing line between levels is one of many points in his schema that blake never defines precisely. in practice, it runs between mortal humans and both zoas and eternal beings in regard to immortality, but, with regard to awareness of eternity and the divine, between eternals and both zoas and mortals. the two-level dualism becomes most pronounced in night 9, examined briefly here as the endpoint of the poem’s treatment of the zoas’ development. an interpretive crux in study of the poem, night 9 has been read variously as an intentionally disturbing but largely positive portrayal of human reformation (wilkie and johnson; lincoln); as a culpable endorsement of elite terror (aers); as enacting “counter-apocalyptic resistances” (ault, narrative); as a failed attempt to transcend the physical body (otto); and in other ways.see wilkie and johnson 228-37, especially 231-32 on the vintage; lincoln 214-19 on the vintage; aers 253-70; ault, narrative 347-465; otto ch. 12, especially 331-35 on the vintage and 337-39 on the conclusion. its political-cultural dimensions are seen here as linked to the night’s role as a major, though later abandoned, development in blake’s view of the relation between immortal and mortal beings. in structure, following an introduction covering some major events of the night in overview,117-119.23, e 386-88. lincoln characterizes this section, added on new pages and over the erased original night heading, as an “overture or ‘preludium’ which summarizes some of the central issues of the night” (193). night 9 presents a series of segments shifting from actions by mortals to those by zoas done to mortals, initially in distinct episodes but later in two-level actions, and marked by contrasting “above” and “below” images that are first implied and later explicit.ault first noted the “above/​below” figuration; see narrative 414, 430, 431, 434-35, 437-39 for analyses. these elements form a double pattern of imagery and action. the night’s above/​below imagery begins at the juncture between the self-undertaken renovations of the eternal man and urizen and the following explosion of the universe, as urizen asks the eternal man, “where shall we take our stand … / or where are human feet for lo our eyes are in the heavens” (122.24-25, e 391).erdman suggests two possible emendations (e 844). neither changes the implied location of the feet. the two parts of urizen’s question represent, topologically and sequentially, the remaining action of night 9. after the universe explodes (122.26, e 392), the implied earthly locale of the feet appears, as dead and living mortals take violent revenge against past and present tyrants, priests, merchants, warriors, and judges, ending as the prisoner’s foot “dashd” his father’s judge (123.32, e 393). these pages are the only part of the night’s main action in which mortals act on their own. the next pages move back to action by zoas: urizen’s sons plow on the earth (124.8 and following, e 393); urizen sows “immortal souls” that “fall like stars / into their own appointed places” (125.4-7, e 394). finally, on ground level, souls of “naked warriors” and “kings & princes” fall on or are driven upon seashores, rocks, and “unproducing sands,” as “flames of orc” and “the trump of tharmas” reenact the prior human uprising as a zoic purification (125.8-13, e 394). above/​below imagery fuses with active/​passive action in the night’s harvest-vintage sections. as harvest commences, luvah sits “above in the bright heavens in peace” as “the spirits of men beneath / cried out to be deliverd” (131.37-38, e 400); at the threshing, urizen “rose” and the sound of his flail is “heard terrible by all beneath the heavens” (133.34-35, e 402). and at the vintage, “thro all the golden rooms / heaven rang with winged exultation    all beneath howld loud” (137.14-15, e 405; all emphases added). similar imagery appears visually on page 135 (see illus. 2), a night thoughts design originally signifying time that shows a huge figure with a scythe striding before cowering mortals, some already dead. here, the image may refer to the scything by urizen’s sons (page 132), or may anticipate violence to come (otto 327). 2. blake, the four zoas, object 135. 40.5 cm. x 32.8 cm. british library collection, add ms 39764. image courtesy of the william blake archive. following these episodes, topological imagery and active/​passive plot events become tacit in the closing episode of urthona’s milling and baking. we read that “los who is urthona rose in all his regenerate power”; that “terrible [was] the distress / of all the nations of earth ground in the mills of urthona”; and that, as the bread bakes (inferably on earth), those “bound to sullen contemplations in the night / … turn on beds of sorrow” and then “they rise they write the bitter words / of stern philosophy & knead the bread of knowledge …” (137.34, 138.2-3, 138.12-15, e 405-06). if turning, rising, and writing indicate counteractivity and, possibly, the bread of knowledge represents an opposing form of urthona’s “bread of ages” (138.17, e 406), these are responses of a small fraction of earth’s people. earlier, following the vintage, the narrator stated that once the “lees” were discarded (and how many human souls were those?), “the human wine stood wondering in all their delightful expanses” (137.23, 32, e 405). about the great majority of human souls who are ground and baked in the bread episode, we learn nothing at all. what to make of such a narration? in earlier work, the present writer related night 9 historically to events during the french revolution, with the extended torture episode of the wine presses representing and perhaps rationalizing the 1793–​94 terror (135.34-137.4, e 404-05; chained boy 200-05). focusing differently, david aers critiques night 9 as justifying elite dictatorship based on an ahistorical denial of lower-class capacity for self-liberation (253-70). in either case, or both, the “human grapes” crushed in the vintage (136.21, e 404) and the grain ground in urthona’s mills represent whole human populations. during urizen’s sowing (above), the warriors, kings, and princes fell or were driven to barren land where they would not grow; it is those who lived under their rule who are planted and ultimately harvested, implying the need for purification before they can be fully human. they are the ones—​shopkeepers, farmers, farm laborers, housewives, scullery maids, draymen, miners, country parsons, chimney sweepers, beggars, thieves—​who, living in a satanic system, have tried to get by, get a little ahead, and leave something to those they love. their poetic fate has been determined by blake’s treatment of the zoas as the actuating force in human restoration. much later, he will draw up a balance sheet on this portrayal. the four zoas only partly tempers this presentation in its main treatments of eternal beings and, under various designations, jesus as savior. eternal beings act in several parts of the work. at the council of god in night 1, consisting of “those in great eternity,” the family divine designates the seven eyes of god (both first introduced here). the council meets again in night 4, when the saviour finds (that is, establishes) the limits of opacity and contraction, and at the start of night 8, to “fix” the limit of contraction, allowing the fallen man to stir. later in night 8, “the sons of eden” or “they in eternity” (before/after speech designations) sing their recognition of the lamb in jerusalem’s bosom, and “those in eden” or “the eternals” nominate the specific forms of god assumedly constituting the “eyes” (not so named here).21.1-21 [19].11, e 310-12; 55.10-56.27, e 337-38; 99.1-14, e 371-72; 104.5-18, incorporating 113.1-37, e 376-77; 107 [115].42-50, e 381 (also discussed below). the composition of the family divine, mentioned only here in the four zoas, is not specified. it seems cognate with “those in great eternity” meeting as the council and beholding “as one man all the universal family” (21.1, 4, e 310-11). hence, it would include only eternal beings; despite damon’s general suggestion that the family includes mortals, there is no text indication of their presence. these and other elements, many introduced in what lincoln calls the “major revisions,” add what he terms “a christian vision” to the poem (223). their significance is enhanced by lamb imagery that becomes prominent in nights 7a and 8, and by artwork such as night 8’s large images of jesus on the final three pages (objects 114-16, blake archive). these eternal or divine appearances are relatively ineffective, however, in imparting such a christian vision to the zoas themselves. their main plot impact is on los and enitharmon (nights 4, 7a extension, and 8); they do not similarly affect the other zoas, and los and enitharmon themselves are absent from the zoas’ main actions in night 9. the “major revisions,” in fact, largely end on page 123, after the first third of night 9.see lincoln 222 for a list of “major revisions”; 223-79 for discussion. equally, these acts are limited in scope. they take place within eternal beings’ upper tier in blake’s cosmos, as indicated at the end of the night 1 conclave, when the family divine draws “up the universal tent / … / till the time of the end,” and in the song by the sons of eden/they in eternity in night 8, who “look down into ulro” from eden, without going there (21 [19].7-9, e 312; 113.22, e 377). blake has not yet taken the steps of providing for eternal beings’ descent to the material world or mortal beings’ access to eternity. blake suggests further possibilities in one of three passages concerning the eternals under that name. the earliest, already mentioned, specifies the individual “eyes” of god. in the third, in night 9, the eternals rise “to labour at the vintage / beneath,” confirming their complicity in the zoas’ vintage actions as well as their position above humanity (133.31-32, e 402). between these, however, in an appearance at the harvest feast, the eternals grapple with issues of eternal status and their relation to mortals in ways that imply shifts in blake’s view of both. these emerge when, shocked at enion’s presence at the feast, “many eternal men,” seeing “[t]he female form now separate,” weep “to see their shadows” and say, “this is the generative world” (133.5-9, e 401). the immediate focus, then, is on sexual division and generation, and the response, by “one of the eternals,” serves to reconcile eternals to the presence of both in eternity. its relevance to the present analysis lies in its implications for eternals’ responsibilities and for correspondences between eternal and mortal existence. the speaker asserts that inclosd around in walls of gold we cast him [man] like a seed into the earth till times & spaces have passd over him duly every morn we visit him covering with a veil the immortal seed with windows from the inclement sky we cover him & with walls and hearths protect the selfish terror till divided all in families we see our shadows born. & thence we know that man subsists by brotherhood & universal love we fall on one anothers necks more closely we embrace not for ourselves but for the eternal family we live man liveth not by self alone but in his brothers face (133.15-25, e 401-02) the speech enlarges eternal responsibility for mortal life to include providing care and protection to mortals—​the veil, windows, walls, and hearths of lines 18-20. equally new is the passage’s implied correspondence between eternal and mortal existence. the crucial words here are “families”/“family” (lines 21, 24) and “thence” (line 21). the echo of “families” in “the eternal family” links human families with the eternal one; the similar repetition of the eternal men’s “shadows” as part of the response (lines 8, 21) reinforces the link. “[t]hence” connects these points to the broad statement that follows, “man subsists by brotherhood & universal love”—​probably using “man” for mortal and eternal beings jointly. the implication is that eternals know this truth both from their own work (“duly every morn / we visit him”) and from the growth of human families, who embody these qualities, if imperfectly.see otto 325-26 for a reading contrasting the human and eternal families. finally, beyond its immediate purpose and meaning, the speaker’s linkage of “families” with “the eternal family” implies a modified view of mortal existence. in an obvious but crucial way, generation gives families and communities a literal continuity, a kind of immortality outlasting individual death. additionally, the possibilities of selfless conduct within families and communities, though limited and crosscut by negatives, provide partial and provisional access to the divine, a way “man” can live “not by self alone but in his brothers face” (line 25). all these implied changes in blake’s view of eternals and mortals, though not realized in plot action in the four zoas, play out in the two poems that follow. descent and linkage: milton and jerusalem in milton and jerusalem, blake revises his presentation of eternal beings and their relations with mortal humanity in two pivotal ways. first, he expands eternal beings’ duties to require involvement with and care for mortals. (he also broadens his terms, referring to “eternals” or an individual “eternal” only twice in each poem.)see milton 11 [12].16 and 27, e 105 (repeated speech attribution), and 20 [22].43, e 114. in jerusalem, see albion’s brief reference, 23.18, e 168, and eternals’ mockery of the zoas, 32 [36].43, e 179, discussed below. there are also a few ambiguous uses of “eternal” as an adjective. in particular, to discharge their mission, eternal beings must descend from eden to labor in the material world, creating a link between these levels in blake’s cosmos. simultaneously, blake opens the membership of divine groupings so that mortals can be part of them, and he proposes that mortals may mentally and imaginatively access eternity. with these revisions in action and imagery, discussed in this and the following section, blake maintains his core conception of a two-level universe, but qualitatively redefines the relation between the levels and the permeability of the divide between them. the best context for understanding these changes is blake’s identification, in milton and jerusalem, with evangelical and pietistic christianity, based on and reinforcing his increasing sense of humanity’s sinfulness, imperfection, and inability to save itself without divine contact. these affinities and concerns are emphasized in doctrinal expositions in jerusalem, such as the apothegm “[h]e who waits to be righteous before he enters into the saviours kingdom, the divine body; will never enter there” (3, prose, e 145) and the preface to chapter 3, and in lyric and dramatic passages in both poems, including references to prominent figures in both traditions.besides jerusalem 3, see jerusalem 52, prose, on sin, the need for religion, and monks and methodists as “[w]e,” and verse, “i saw a monk of charlemaine” (e 200-02). on individuals, see milton 22 [24].55, 61 (e 118) on whitefield and wesley; jerusalem 52, prose, on whitefield; jerusalem 72.50-51 (e 227) on fenelon, guion, teresa, whitefield, and hervey. for discussion, see this writer’s “blake, methodism, and ‘christian perfection.’” blake’s expanding the responsibility of eternal beings can be illustrated in a preliminary way through his successive accounts of selecting the “seven eyes of god.” in the four zoas, they are chosen by the “family divine,” and possess an apparently overseeing function as the “seven lamps of the almighty” (21 [19].7, 10, e 312). in milton’s bard’s song, they are appointed by the “great solemn assembly,” consisting of “all eden,” which has been “called down” by palamabron and has “descended into palamabrons tent” (8.46, 9.1, e 102), an instance of the descent idea. the assembly settles disputes between rintrah and palamabron and successively appoints the eyes, but does not otherwise engage long term in the material world (9.9-10, e 103; 13 [14].12-29, e 107). in jerusalem, finally, the focus is on descent and service; the eyes are not the main point in the episode in which they are chosen. this episode chiefly concerns involvement in or abstention from the material world. it recounts an “assembly” formed among “those who disregard all mortal things,” when, observing events in the material world, “many … / … said, let us go down / and see these changes!” they are opposed by others asking, “[w]hat have we to do with the dead?”—​one of several examples of eternal beings urging abstention in earthly matters, and ultimately a minority position (55.1, 3-6, e 204). as discussion proceeds, at first “far the greatest number” are “about to make a separation,” and they designate both the seven eyes and an unnamed “eighth” (55.30-33, e 205). the “separation” would, most logically, be between themselves and the mortal realm, leaving the eyes to watch over the latter. if so, the separation is aborted. the narrator relates that “first they” (this majority) decide that whether they “sit down within / the plowed furrow, listning to the weeping clods” or rise “upon the chariots of the morning,” they remain “one family! one man blessed for ever” (lines 34-46), and then that “many” say: it is better to prevent error, than to forgive the criminal: labour well the minute particulars, attend to the little-ones: and those who are in misery cannot remain so long if we do but our duty: labour well the teeming earth. (55.50-53, e 205) thus, a major portion of those “who disregard all mortal things”—​a group whose self-description as “one family! one man blessed for ever” bespeaks eternal status (line 46)—​accept, against their first inclination, a “duty” to involve themselves in mortal things (“labour well the teeming earth”). this acceptance is the significant result of the assembly. no more is heard of the eyes; this is the only reference to them in jerusalem. the full meaning of descent, including its implications for mortal humans, can best be approached through milton’s plot thread involving ololon, a plural, sexually mixed population living by the river of that name in eden.eugenie freed, mary lynn johnson, and others recognize ololon’s initially plural character. few note their being sexually mixed, but see elfenbein (for example, 16, 153, 166) and rosso, religion 141-56. rosso calls ololon’s descent “arguably the most significant event in the poem” (“redefining” par. 41). their descent is, of course, paralleled in milton by those of los and milton; and, in jerusalem, los’s laboring in earthly locales extends through the whole work. yet these plot threads do not share the full range of meaning seen in ololon’s descent, for immortals’ relationship to mortals and for mortals themselves. unlike earlier bodies of eternals, such as the council of god in the four zoas and the great solemn assembly in milton, ololon does not set “limits” or act as arbiter or judge, but descends in atonement and sacrifice—​that is, in self-annihilation. they leave their riverine dwelling place to right a wrong—​their having driven milton into ulro—​and to give themselves for others. further, they go not to an intermediate locale, but to the depths of human existence. first purposing to descend to “give / ourselves to death in ulro among the transgressors,” they are advised by the divine family to halt in beulah: “watch over this world, and with your brooding wings, / renew it to eternal life,” an allusion to paradise lost 1.20-21 (milton 21 [23].45-46, 55-56, e 116.) ololon, however, rejects this passive stance. as the account continues in book 2, they “[seek] the or-ulro & its fiery gates,” described as the most “dreadful” among four sub-edenic “states of humanity in its repose” (34 [38].19, 13, 8, e 134).the other three states are beulah, alla, and al-ulro (lines 9-12, e 134). previously, beulah was called the place of “rest” or “repose” (30 [33].14, 31 [34].7, e 129-30). provision of four sub-edenic states with this function, and of a two-level ulro, is unique to this passage and seems done to emphasize the extremity of ololon’s descent. alla substitutes for generation, the usual state below beulah, and is mentioned also in jerusalem 89.58, e 249; al-ulro and or-ulro are not named elsewhere. there, “before the gates of the dead / … ololon looked down into the heavens of ulro in fear” (lines 48-49), seeing, amid much else, that [l]oud roll the weights & spindles over the whole earth let down on all sides round to the four quarters of the world, eastward on europe to euphrates & hindu, to nile & back in clouds of death across the atlantic to america north & south (35 [39].14-17, e 135) or-ulro, then, represents evils spread across blake’s contemporary society. ololon’s descent there to prostrate themselves before the “starry eight” and to ask “with tears forgiveness / confessing their crime with humiliation and sorrow” (35 [39].29-33, e 135) is an act of moral heroism paralleling milton’s own, perhaps more significant as indicating the new role of eternal beings giving themselves in sacrifice in mortal realms. the effects of their action are equally important. ololon’s descent has opened “a wide road … to eternity,” for “mighty were the multitudes of ololon, vast the extent / of their great sway, reaching from ulro to eternity” (35 [39].35-38, e 135). this last phrase implies more than a “road” for those specifically mentioned (los and enitharmon). ololon’s “sway” over this whole span suggests a road for all under the “heavens of ulro,” including their extent “eastward on / europe to euphrates & hindu, to nile & back … / … to america north & south.” while it is not said that these others can take the “road,” neither is it stated that mortals cannot perceive or participate in eternity while in their mortal bodies.as, in reverse, it is stated that ololon cannot view golgonooza while in immortal form (35 [39].18-25, e 135). a further indication that mortals may travel the “road” opened by ololon lies in the evocative passage on the lark and wild thyme that immediately follows (35 [39].42-36 [40].12, e 136). narratively describing ololon’s point of transition into the material world, the passage also defines at least one form of mortal access to eternity. its details are well known: the wild thyme as “los’s messenger to eden,” the lark’s nest “at the gate of los,” the lark as los’s “messenger” (35 [39].54, 66, 67). the symbolic values of thyme and lark are established earlier: the mundane shell “finishes where the lark mounts,” the lark’s song reechoes “against the lovely blue & shining heavenly shell,” and each flower, including the wild thyme, is a “center” within which “eternity expands.”see 17 [19].27, e 111; 31 [34].33, 48, 51, e 130-31. but we miss the passage’s full meaning if we read its nature imagery only in these symbolic terms. rather, if the description is “concerned with each day, and not a particular day of blake’s experience,” as harold bloom’s commentary rightly emphasizes (e 925), so also it does not concern only los’s or blake’s access to eternity, but anyone’s. the ascending lark’s song or the smell of the thyme provides a kind of ascent to heaven, or a glimpse of a different life on earth—​which is what blake’s eternity, in the end, means—​and this moment is available for ordinary untutored children, men, and women, not only for bards and prophets. milton does not further explore the ideas of a double road, from eden to or-ulro and ulro to eden, but blake returns to the idea, using different narrative devices and imagery, in jerusalem. membership and access: jerusalem in jerusalem, blake introduces two further changes not considered so far. first, he broadens his descriptions of eternal assemblies such that, while mortals’ actual presence in eternity remains unclear, it becomes impossible to deny their presence in these gatherings, and so of death in them. second, he makes clear that mortals may intellectually and imaginatively enter the eternal world. together, these changes amplify and develop the possibilities suggested by the “wide road” image in milton. blake establishes both points in an extended series of episodes in chapter 2, beginning with a debate among eternals and ending with his descriptions, as author, of the four chief cathedral cities and, as narrator, of the twenty-four cities associated with them (32 [36].43-36 [40].57, e 179-83). these episodes lead from an assertion of the eternals’ aloof existence to a recognition of humans as part of the divine family and as conscious of the eternal realm. the section opens with a dispute among eternal beings, essentially on judgment versus mercy. as with the dispute at the four zoas’s harvest feast, which it recalls, the immediate topic is gender among the zoas but the underlying issue is rejection or acceptance of mortal humans and their lives as lived in generation. “[m]any of the eternal ones,” we are told, satirize the “zoa’s of albion” for deferring to their “daughters,” who “are vegetable only fit for burning.” the terms, of course, apply to mortal humans as well as to the zoas. in response, “those in great eternity who contemplate on death / said thus. what seems to be: is: to those to whom / it seems to be,” producing torments and “eternal death,” but “the divine mercy / steps beyond and redeems man in the body of jesus amen” (32 [36].43-55, e 179). beyond the overt issue of acceptance or rejection of dismissive judgment, the salient point is that these eternals accept death and sexuality, the defining qualities of mortal human life, as no bar to “the divine mercy,” although still remaining aloof themselves from mortal life. the argument now takes a turn, moving from mercy to active sympathy and engagement. “one” of the divine family, soon revealed as los, first berates albion because he “forbid[s] with laws / our emanations” (probably referring to albion’s imposition of moral law), but “when he saw blue death in albions feet, / again he join’d the divine body, following merciful; / while albion fled more indignant! revengeful” (33 [37].1-12, e 179). the significant points are that los is counted as one of the “divine family” or “divine body,” though he is gendered as well as divided from his spectre, and that he and the divine family do not extend mercy but follow albion to help and appeal to him. the accompanying images of albion in the saviour’s arms and the spectre hovering over jerusalem (see illus. 3) do not show the plate’s events directly but, rather, the consequences for the whole poem of the choice between aloofness and care.on cultural contexts and those in jerusalem, see the paley edition of jerusalem (188). 3. blake, jerusalem copy e, object 37. 22.6 x 16.3 cm. yale center for british art, paul mellon collection, b1992.8.1(37). image courtesy of the william blake archive. the ensuing evocation of the saviour or divine family who attend albion (34 [38].10-13, e 179-80) states that he/​they display “eternal vision! the divine similitude! / in loves and tears of brothers, sisters, sons, fathers, and friends” (lines 11-12). those mentioned can with difficulty be imagined as unembodied immortals, but more naturally (in both senses) as living humans, a point underlined by the similarity of this passage to the comparable list of those who call to albion at the poem’s start (4.11-12, e 146). if those loves and tears are expressions of the divine similitude (“in loves and tears …”; emphasis added), then so too are those who show them, at least in this state of exalted empathy, and blake is saying that humans in their mortal, “vegetable” forms, scorned by “many of the eternal ones,” are among those in this family, parts of blake’s divine but also immanent jesus. this is the person/​group who appeal to albion as “one man all the universal family” (34 [38].19, e 180). blake now further expands his account of mortal participation in the divine family. appearing as author, he testifies to his own “vision of god upon my pleasant valleys”: “i behold london; a human awful wonder of god! / he says: return, albion, return! i give myself for thee” (34 [38].28-30, e 180). london’s ensuing self-defining description—​“my streets are my, ideas of imagination,” “my inhabitants; affections, / the children of my thoughts, walking within my blood-vessels” (34 [38].31, 33-34, e 180)—​makes clear that london’s components are the ideas and affections of mortal human individuals, families, and groups. (“[s]treets” and, by parallelism, “inhabitants” are literal.) these human thoughts and emotions are equivalent to the “loves and tears” of families and friends presented as the saviour or divine family, and, therefore, london as such, in this state of awareness, is part of that family. london’s speech, blake states, still in his own voice, is the meaning of three decades of his work: so spoke london, immortal guardian! i heard in lambeths shades: in felpham i heard and saw the visions of albion i write in south molton street, what i both see and hear in regions of humanity, in londons opening streets. (34 [38].40-43, e 180) blake’s descriptions of london’s companion cities, starting with the remaining chief cities, continue his emphasis on their mortal inhabitants. alongside london stand “canterbury! venerable parent of men,” “york, crown’d with loving kindness,” and “edinburgh, cloth’d / with fortitude” and marked by those “who give themselves, in golgotha, victims to justice”—​most likely, as david erdman argues, an allusion to the 1793–​94 treason trials there (lines 45, 51-52, 54, e 180-81; erdman, prophet 476). each phrase suggests not simply the city as spiritual entity, but its relation to its human occupants and their activities. blake’s explanatory description, “for cities / are men, fathers of multitudes” (lines 46-47, e 180), makes clear that the cities’ membership in the divine family includes their mortal occupants. their participation, as the example of edinburgh implies, may be as courageous and terrifying as ololon’s descent from eden to or-ulro, and it is undertaken in their mortal bodies. finally, blake underlines the human component of the divine family with the introduction of the remaining twenty-four cathedral cities, who act sometimes with and sometimes separately from the four chief cities, in a major episode starting on plate 36 [40]: and these the twenty-four in whom the divine family appear’d; and they were one in him. a human vision! human divine, jesus the saviour, blessed for ever and ever. (36 [40].45-47, e 182) as part of the divine family and of blake’s composite jesus, the twenty-four are spiritual entities. yet blake’s wording leaves unclear whether the divine family is manifested “in” (as a part or aspect of) the cities as entities, “in” (within) them in those who live there, or both. the ambiguity is also inherent in the earlier presentation of london and its sister cities (“my inhabitants; affections, / the children of my thoughts, walking within my blood-vessels”), and so both meanings seem valid. almost immediately, in fact, the example of winchester, the second named among the twenty-four, indicates that zoic figures can act as members of the divine family when incarnate as mortal, sexual bodies. as winchester stands “devoting himself for albion,” his “emanations / submi[t] to be call’d enitharmons daughters, and be born / in vegetable mould: created by the hammer and loom / in bowlahoola & allamanda where the dead wail” (36 [40].53, 54-57, e 182-83). winchester’s emanations, then, participate in the family in mortal, sexual form. overall, descriptions of the family consistently imply that mortals form part of it. besides establishing that mortals may act within divine assemblies, blake makes clear their awareness of and participation in eternity. the living persons who act as part of the saviour/​divine family’s attendance on and appeal to albion (34 [38], above) share in the family’s “eternal vision” and its “contracting” and “expanding” senses (lines 11, 17-19, e 180). here, as always for blake, such “infinite” senses (line 17) are a marker of full, or eternal, humanity. further, in the incarnation of winchester’s emanations in “vegetable” form, it is not suggested that, having become mortal and sexual, they “no more … beheld eternity” or “forgot their eternal life,” as urizen stipulated for los when sexually divided and for urizen’s mortal descendants (20.2, 25.42, e 80, 83). most comprehensively, blake’s description of the four chief cities asserts that within them, “in every bosom a universe expands, as wings / let down at will around, and call’d the universal tent” (34 [38].49-50, e 180). as “every bosom” shows, blake means not simply the spiritual cities, but the individuals, families, and groups within them. the use of “tent” reverses prior accounts of the tent as excluding non-eternals (urizen chs. 5-6, the four zoas night 1). moreover, the key description, “in every bosom a universe expands,” echoes an earlier one of los’s sons and daughters as having qualities like those of eternal beings, including that “every one [is] a translucent wonder: a universe within, / increasing inwards” (14.17-18, e 158). in both cases, the inner “universe” bespeaks eternal awareness—​within themselves, they perceive everything, which is what eternal perception sees.while not calling the sons and daughters eternal beings, blake gives them several other qualities similar to those of such beings, such as translucence (above) and “gate[s]” to the vegetable world—​that is, they are non-vegetable outside the gates (14.19-24, e 158). all who take part in the saviour/​divine family, then, can view eternity. blake thus has opened his two-level cosmos to contact and communication in both directions—​from the eternal to the mortal world and from that to the eternal. logically, it would seem, this is the furthest the relationship can develop prior to an eschatological change to a new reality; that is, until this event, the great majority of earth’s people do not develop eternal awareness, and those who do are a minority. eternity: jerusalem at the end of jerusalem, blake does present such a change, and further shows the renovated, eternal humanity he imagines as brought into being by it. this is the only place, other than urizen 3.36-39, where he describes the defining life conditions of eternity. here, he modifies that earlier description, maintaining one of its terms, flexible senses; jettisoning a second, the limitation of eternal beings to an immaterial world; and correcting and adding to the third, “death was not, but eternal life sprung” (urizen 3.39). the overview of eternal existence in jerusalem’s final text plates (98-99) is brief but comprehensive, covering life, death, and afterlife, and it reaches from earth to interplanetary space (99.3), yet it is most focused on the eschatological new earth. we see this, first, in the prominence, for those who “convers[e] together in visionary forms dramatic,” of “creating space, creating time”—​preeminently the domains of materiality and mortal life. we see it also in the humanization of the natural world and the abolition of human tyranny and exploitation, forming a mutualist human society without government of any kind (98.28, 31, 42-44, 46-54, e 257-58). we see this earthly focus, finally, in blake’s picture of eternal life. this reading proposes that, in this eschatological existence, those blake sees as eternals include both mortal and immortal beings. the former—​infinite and flexible in perception and possessing eternal powers—​live, age, die, and are reborn. after death and regeneration, they assumedly are immortal and immaterial, alongside other such eternals. about the latter, less is said. blake certainly does not suggest that they cease to exist, nor that they become incarnate or are regenerated in material form (reincarnated), yet they may participate imaginatively in the life-death-regeneration sequence just mentioned, since they share a collective existence with those who undergo it directly. these immortal eternals, again assumedly, occupy an immaterial plane, and, therefore, this remains a two-level, or at least two-sector, cosmos. the relevant texts for our analysis are, first: and every man stood fourfold. each four faces had. one to the west one toward the east one to the south one to the north. … .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . south stood the nerves of the eye. east in rivers of bliss the nerves of the expansive nostrils west, flowd the parent sense the tongue. north stood the labyrinthine ear. (98.12-13, 16-18, e 257) second: creating space, creating time according to the wonders divine of human imagination, throughout all the three regions immense of childhood, manhood & old age[;] & the all tremendous unfathomable non ens of death was seen in regenerations terrific or complacent … (lines 31-34, e 258) last: all human forms identified, living going forth & returning wearied into the planetary lives of years months days & hours reposing and then awaking into his bosom in the life of immortality. (99.1-4, e 258) though these are familiar texts, we should examine them afresh, in a purposefully “naïve” reading that views them without the preconception that eternal life must be only immortal and immaterial. the first segment clearly presents an eternal form of “man,” using blake’s later imagery of fourfold existence and referring to the senses as flexile (“expansive,” “labyrinthine”), as also implied by the later reference to “the expansion or contraction, the translucence or / opakeness of nervous fibres” (lines 36-37, e 258). importantly, though the senses’ directional markers identify them with zoas, the senses appear as those of all eternal beings, the zoas having resumed their roles as aspects of collective humanity. the second segment, part of the “visionary forms dramatic” section (lines 28-40), on its face suggests that eternal beings live through the life stages (“regions”) of youth, maturity, and age; die into nonentity; and undergo regeneration. if directly compared with the first segment, as has rarely been done, these provisions further suggest that such beings may possess infinite senses within a mortal body. it is not necessary to assume that these mortals—​or immortals, for that matter—​factually possess four faces and senses oriented to the compass points, any more than to make similar assumptions about the “enlarged & numerous” senses of marriage’s “ancient poets.” blake is speaking imaginatively, indicating the all-inclusive quality of eternal perception and literalizing its fourfold character. the last segment shares the same implied meaning, that “human forms” live through some span in which they may explore eternity—​since they then “return” (line 2) to the planetary world of time—​and then die (“repos[e]”) and wake as immortals. as just noted, the segment further specifies a framework of material creation and measurable time (line 3), as “creating space, creating time” in the prior passage (98.31) also does. finally, this segment, by considering death or “repos[e]” and regeneration or “awaking … in the life of immortality,” confirms the continuing two-sector nature of blake’s cosmos. the “three regions,” specifically, have proven problematic for interpreters, who have either related them to aspects of jerusalem not otherwise mentioned in these plates, such as “regions” of ulro or the chapters of the poem (doskow 167; kiralis 147) or have omitted analysis (paley 64, 282). morton paley may regard the whole “visionary forms” passage simply as discourse, since he approaches it in terms of jerusalem’s language.karl kiralis was the first to read lines 28-40 as reviewing the contents of jerusalem. this approach may have influenced paley’s, although he disputes kiralis’s particulars (282). see spector 18 and 27n29 for references to jerusalem 98.32-34 and 99.1-4 without or with partial discussion. however, the overall context suggests that the forms of “man” and their visionary conversation are creating the conditions of their own eternal life, and that, besides immortal existence, these include, for mortals, childhood, maturity, age, death as non-being, and regeneration. the present reading thus accounts comprehensively for the texts discussed. conclusions and assessment the ending to jerusalem serves to complete both its own and milton’s revisions of the four zoas and urizen. we should now understand that the division between views of eternal beings in urizen is real, and that urizen’s questions on mortality and “burnings” reflect blake’s portrayal of mortal lives with something like eternal vision in earlier and concurrent works. we should also understand that the presence of this view of eternal beings in urizen is spectral (in the ordinary sense), since blake was in the process of altering his former approach to argue that only immortal beings have such powers and that they are separated from mortals by barriers of their own creation (the “tent”). we should see further that in the four zoas blake developed his sense of the intermediate beings, the zoas—​immortal but no longer with eternal awareness—​to what could be called a grotesque extreme, one that in any case involves dramatizing an assumedly rectifying slaughter of human populations. in this presentation, mortal beings are passive and indeed helpless, whether as victims of the zoas’ actions or as beneficiaries (the “wine”). finally, we should understand that in milton and jerusalem (with a few suggestions in the four zoas), blake dismantles much of what he built in urizen and the four zoas. while maintaining his two-level universe, he places eternal beings under a duty of care for and aid to mortal humans (“duly every morn / we visit him”; “labour well the teeming earth”) and he specifies the presence of living human beings in divine assemblies and their ability to view eternal reality (“in every bosom a universe expands”). and in jerusalem’s conclusion, he revises his view of eternal reality so that eternal beings on earth, with fourfold senses and eternal awareness, live, die, and are reborn—​also as eternal beings. we now need to clarify how the sequence of blake’s works dealing with these issues fits together. two sets of comparisons will help, one backwards from jerusalem to songs of innocence, the second forwards from the four zoas to jerusalem. if we ask, first, what life in the material eschatological world of jerusalem 98-99 might look like, we realize that blake has already given part of the answer: old john with white hair does laugh away care, sitting under the oak, among the old folk, they laugh at our play, and soon they all say. such such were the joys. when we all girls & boys, in our youth-time were seen, on the ecchoing green. (“the ecchoing green” lines 11-20, e 8) to live in such a world, whether as child or as “old folk,” would be much like living in the world of mutuality presupposed in jerusalem’s last plates. in the poem’s vision, one may grow old and die as part of a continuing community, one that existed before, and will assumedly remain long after, one’s own life. to do this, in mutuality with its other inhabitants, is at least a part of blake’s idea of eternity (see illus. 4.) 4. blake, “the ecchoing green,” second plate, from songs of innocence and of experience copy z, object 7. 10.9 x 6.8 cm. library of congress, lessing j. rosenwald collection, pr4144.s6 1826. image courtesy of the william blake archive. although “the ecchoing green” is an idealization, we should realize that, in songs of innocence, blake already had communicated an essential component of what he would later see as the earthly life of eternity. heather glen, in her study of innocence as “blake’s fullest imaginative expression of the ‘divine vision’ of human potentia” (129), seems right in her judgment of the poem: “[j]oys” here lie not in individual pleasure but in an “ecchoing” sense of mutual recognition—​a sense which the old, having in their time received … are able, unenviously, to give.… and the unresentful recognition of it as an “ecchoing” place—​one which has been occupied by others before … affirms the possibility of a mutually created “world of imagination” which “is infinite & eternal ….” (138-40, partly quoting a vision of the last judgment p. 69, e 555)glen quotes keynes’s edition, p. 605, identically worded and without erdman’s angle brackets around “of imagination.” a second aspect of blake’s later sense of eternity is visible in the innocence poem “night,” in which an upper world is not closed from, but intimately in touch with, ours. the scenario is of shepherds facing night in the fields, where “silent moves / the feet of angels bright.” the shepherd speaker knows the angels cannot save their lambs from predators, but can “recieve each mild spirit, / new worlds to inherit.” there, they meet the comforter-lion, whose “ruddy eyes, / shall flow with tears of gold,” and whose “bright mane for ever, / shall shine like the gold, / as i guard o’er the fold” (e 13-14). this comforter is not (as he might first seem) a figure for blake’s savior, present in many of these songs. rather, this extraordinary poem portrays the comforter, or paraclete, of john 14-16, sent to sustain the faithful in the darkness of this world. such contact with the divine—​pervasive in innocence—​provides the same fluidity of access to eternity that is partly restored in the main plots of milton and jerusalem, and restored fully in jerusalem’s ending. in “night,” then, as in “the ecchoing green,” we see a similarity in poetic content and vision of reality linking blake’s early and later works, one differing from those governing his works from urizen to the four zoas. turning to these works, a second comparison is in order: between the poetic and cultural vision of the four zoas and blake’s later view of it, described earlier as recognition of a wrong path. in a sense, the whole development of blake’s work analyzed here constitutes such a recognition. but more concrete evidence, at least regarding night 9, lies in two episodes in jerusalem chapter 2. the first narrates the twenty-eight cities’ attempt “with kindest violence to bear him [albion] back / against his will thro los’s gate to eden,” only to have albion resist, the earth grow dark, and the family divine intervene to safeguard albion (39 [44].1-20, e 186).prior plates specify the cities as actors—​bristol and bath, sixth and seventh of those previously named among the twenty-four, then the other seventeen (e 182-85), and, conjecturally, the four leading cities, bring the total to the “twenty-eight” mentioned at 37 [41].23, e 183. the zoas are also active here (37 [41].26 and following, e 183-84); los appeals first to them and then to the cities, but “they” is used confusingly for both groups. the second incident is los’s long walk through london or “the interiors of albions / bosom,” during which he sees “every minute particular of albion degraded & murderd / but saw not by whom; they were hidden within in the minute particulars / of which they had possessd themselves” (45 [31].3-4, 7-9, e 194) and asks: what shall i do! what could i do, if i could find these criminals i could not dare to take vengeance; for all things are so constructed and builded by the divine hand, that the sinner shall always escape, and he who takes vengeance alone is the criminal of providence … (45 [31].29-32, e 194) despite the differences between the episodes—​forcing albion against his will, los considering vengeance—​and between both episodes and the four zoas night 9, the two jerusalem sequences recognizably reject and repudiate the core of the earlier work’s harvest-vintage narration. specifically, the first rejects the zoas’ claim of force, the second the presumption that those cut down are the deserving. these two comparisons reveal distinct developmental arcs in blake’s work. the first runs from early work forward, is interrupted for a major period (1794 to 1804–​07), and is resumed and completed in milton and jerusalem. in this arc, awareness of eternity, and intellectual-imaginative participation in it, are common to mortal and immortal beings, and these groups interact closely. in this developmental trajectory belong the non-dominant view of eternals in urizen and blake’s presentations in milton and jerusalem, including jerusalem 98-99. the second arc is shorter. it reaches from urizen to the four zoas and then breaks off. it draws not only on songs of experience’s portrayal of an absence of awareness of eternity, as discussed earlier, but also on its elements of defiance and of envisioned future or alternative existence (for example, “holy thursday” lines 13-16; proems to “the little girl lost” and “a little girl lost”). these feed into urizen’s awakening of “all things … / … to life” in response to orc’s cries (20.28-29, e 80), and become the rebellious principle in the four zoas. in essence, then, this poem constituted blake’s effort to show how oppression can spark rebellion and an ultimate reformation of humanity, based entirely on human processes undertaken by a humanity lacking awareness of eternity or the divine. this situation, we have seen, impelled blake’s presentation of the zoas as supernal actors accomplishing what humanity could not. arguably, the four zoas retains the stamp of these origins even in its later, revised form. we can conclude, however, that in blake’s own eyes the attempt to show human renovation on these premises finally failed. blake, we know, made an incomplete effort to introduce ideas of providence and divine inspiration into the poem, apparently feeling the inadequacy of a schema based only on human faculties, and then left the poem unfinalized. further, if the argument above is correct, jerusalem chapter 2 rejects and critiques key aspects of the four zoas night 9. these considerations identify the second arc as abortive and point to the first as the main direction of blake’s work. blake did not find it easy to relinquish the four zoas’s paradigm, as his ten-year struggle to make the poem work shows. in some way, then, he must have believed mortal humans were indeed barred by their materiality from perceiving eternity. there are aspects of his final synthesis, too, that he probably could not have formulated or admitted at the time of urizen, including its sequences, in eternal life, of childhood, maturity, old age, death, and regeneration and of return, repose, and awaking to immortality (jerusalem 98-99). nonetheless, his growing sense of the urgency of divine awareness for human renovation pushed toward that synthesis; once accepted, the need to communicate calls out for breaching the barriers between mortals and eternals, as milton and jerusalem do with their treatments of descent and mortal access. from that point, the further affirmation of earthly eternals’ life-death-regeneration cycles, though no small step, becomes possible and even unavoidable. who, then, are blake’s eternals? if this study’s major points are right, we can say with some certainty that urizen’s dominant view is one blake later largely overturned, and that milton’s and jerusalem’s return to the two-level, permeable cosmos of early works, including in jerusalem 98-99, represents the final form of his consideration of the nature of eternal beings. further, the conception of mortal humans with “enlarged” or “expansive” perceptions, begun in early work, remains at the end, a seed idea retained over his lifetime (marriage 11, jerusalem 98.17, e 38, 257). percival, then, was basically right, long ago, in his three-part schema (45-46, quoted earlier). approached from the standpoint of eternity—​as in percival’s study—​the groups named have always existed. from blake’s more complex eternal and historical perspective, access to eternity has always been possible for some mortals; for the whole of earthly humanity, it takes the full span of history to reclaim what was theirs all along. works cited aers, david. “representations of revolution: from the french revolution to the four zoas.” critical paths: blake and the argument of method, edited by dan miller, mark bracher, and donald ault, duke up, 1987, pp. 244-70. ault, donald. “blake’s de-formation of neo-aristotelianism.” critical paths: blake and the argument of method, edited by dan miller, mark bracher, and donald ault, duke up, 1987, pp. 111-38. —​—​—​. narrative unbound: re-visioning william blake’s the four zoas. station hill press, 1987. blake, william. the complete poetry and prose of william blake. edited by david v. erdman, with commentary by harold bloom, newly rev. ed., anchor books, 1988. [abbreviated as e] ———. jerusalem. edited by morton d. paley, william blake trust/​princeton up, 1991. choe, sharon. “deformed bodies and norse origins in william blake.” sel, vol. 60, no. 3, summer 2020, pp. 529-49. cogan, lucy. blake and the failure of prophecy. palgrave macmillan, 2021. connolly, tristanne. william blake and the body. palgrave, 2002. cooper, andrew m. “freedom from blake’s book of urizen.” studies in romanticism, vol. 48, no. 2, summer 2009, pp. 187-218. damon, s. foster. a blake dictionary: the ideas and symbols of william blake. 1965. rev. ed., with foreword and annotated bibliography by morris eaves, up of new england, 1988. doskow, minna. william blake’s jerusalem: structure and meaning in poetry and picture. fairleigh dickinson up, 1982. elfenbein, andrew. romantic genius: the prehistory of a homosexual role. columbia up, 1999. erdman, david v. blake: prophet against empire: a poet’s interpretation of the history of his own times. 1954. 3rd ed., princeton up, 1977. essick, robert n. “variation, accident, and intention in william blake’s the book of urizen.” studies in bibliography, vol. 39, 1986, pp. 230-35. essick, robert n., and joseph viscomi, editors. the william blake archive. www.blakearchive.org. fletcher, joseph. “unruly children: blake’s book of urizen and embryology’s break from newtonian law.” essays in romanticism, vol. 23, no. 1, apr. 2016, pp. 113-32. freed, eugenie. “a portion of his life”: william blake’s miltonic vision of woman. bucknell up, 1994. frye, northrop. fearful symmetry: a study of william blake. 1947. princeton up, 1974. glen, heather. vision and disenchantment: blake’s songs and wordsworth’s lyrical ballads. cambridge up, 1983. goss, erin m. revealing bodies: anatomy, allegory, and the grounds of knowledge in the long eighteenth century. bucknell up, 2013. hobson, christopher z. “blake, methodism, and ‘christian perfection.’” blake, vol. 55, no. 2, fall 2021, https://doi.org/10.47761/biq.290. ———. the chained boy: orc and blake’s idea of revolution. bucknell up, 1999. johnson, mary lynn. “milton and its contexts.” the cambridge companion to william blake, edited by morris eaves, cambridge up, 2003, pp. 231-50. kiralis, karl. “the theme and structure of william blake’s jerusalem.” the divine vision: studies in the poetry and art of william blake, edited by vivian de sola pinto, gollancz, 1957, pp. 141-62. lincoln, andrew. spiritual history: a reading of william blake’s vala or the four zoas. clarendon press, 1995. otto, peter. blake’s critique of transcendence: love, jealousy, and the sublime in the four zoas. oxford up, 2000. paley, morton d. the continuing city: william blake’s jerusalem. clarendon press, 1983. percival, milton o. william blake’s circle of destiny. 1938. octagon books, 1970. rajan, tilottama. “system(s), body, corpus: the autogenesis of blake’s lambeth books.” william blake: modernity and disaster, edited by tilottama rajan and joel faflak, u of toronto p, 2020, pp. 54-76. rosso, g. a. “redefining apocalypse in blake studies.” blake, vol. 57, no. 2, fall 2023, https://doi.org/10.47761/biq.344. ———. the religion of empire: political theology in blake’s prophetic symbolism. ohio state up, 2016. simmons, robert e. “urizen: the symmetry of fear.” blake’s visionary forms dramatic, edited by david v. erdman and john e. grant, princeton up, 1971, pp. 146-73. spector, sheila a. “death in blake’s major prophecies.” studia mystica, vol. 7, no. 3, 1984, pp. 1-28. viscomi, joseph. blake and the idea of the book. princeton up, 1993. wilkie, brian, and mary lynn johnson. blake’s four zoas: the design of a dream. harvard up, 1978. blake and exhibitions, 2020 blake and exhibitions, 2020 by luisa calè luisa calè (l.cale@bbk.ac.uk), birkbeck, university of london, works on practices of reading, viewing, and collecting in the romantic period. her publications include fuseli’s milton gallery: “turning readers into spectators”; co-edited volumes on dante on view: the reception of dante in the visual and performing arts and illustrations, optics and objects in nineteenth-century literary and visual cultures; and special issues on “the disorder of things” (eighteenth-century studies, 2011), “the nineteenth-century digital archive” (19: interdisciplinary studies in the long nineteenth century, 2015), “literature and sculpture at the fin de siècle” (word and image, 2018), and “sibylline leaves” (studies in romanticism, 2020). her current project, entitled the book unbound, explores practices of collecting and dismantling the book, with chapters on walpole, blake, and dickens. she is the exhibitions editor for blake. the year started with the blake retrospective at tate britain still open until 2 february,the tate retrospective is reviewed in blake 53.4 (spring 2020). but the covid-19 pandemic thwarted, shortened, or postponed other plans to exhibit blake. among them, william blake: visionary at the j. paul getty museum, originally scheduled for july to october 2020 but now postponed to fall 2023, was “born of a collaboration with tate britain,”edina adam and julian brooks, “acknowledgments,” william blake: visionary, ed. adam with brooks (los angeles: j. paul getty museum, 2020) 9. supplemented with additional materials from the getty and loans from the yale center for british art, the huntington library and art museum, and the collection of robert n. essick. the entirely new catalogue, dedicated to essick and published in 2020 in time for the planned opening, is reviewed in this issue. because of the pandemic, the museo nacional del prado canceled its planned exhibition of dante watercolors loaned from the national gallery of victoria in melbourne, which was due to open in madrid in october 2020 to mark the seventh centenary (in 2021) of dante’s death.i am grateful to wayne c. ripley and fernando castanedo for information about the dante exhibition planned at the prado. the few exhibitions that managed to have short openings in the intervals between lockdown closures are listed below. 2020 exhibitions placed blake within artistic traditions of drawing in the artful line at the harris and of wood engraving in scene through wood at the ashmolean. his role within a surrealist genealogy was reinterpreted in british surrealism at dulwich picture gallery, which took the international surrealist exhibition of 1936 as a starting point and measured its impact on british surrealists since then. facsimiles of his gray watercolors were the inspiration for contemporary poets in the bard: william blake at flat time house. while the tate retrospective reconstructed blake’s coordinates through a very detailed account of the artisanal, artistic, and commercial communities around him in his several london locations, the bard rooted blake in peckham, reenergizing creative and critical psychogeographic approaches. trianon press facsimiles were put to different uses, prompting reflection on the role of reproduction as a medium that can extend the circulation of blake and bypassing the conservation restrictions that limit the exposure of works and require intervals between loans, as well as other conditions relating to the loan of originals. as noted, unbound trianon facsimiles facilitated a dialogue with contemporary poetic practice at flat time house. the national gallery of canada’s william blake, 1757–​1827: illustrated books used them to juxtapose originals and copies, enabling comparisons between monochrome and color versions and between technologies of print and reproduction, while also documenting the archival practice of complementing originals with reproductions. quotation practices in the exhibition space are an important case in the pragmatics of fragmentation and reception in pieces that mike goode discusses, since blake’s texts “have a recent history of becoming unmoored from their multi-medium and circulating virally.”mike goode, romantic capabilities: blake, scott, austen, and the new messages of old media (oxford: oxford university press, 2020) 10. the british surrealism exhibition made particularly creative use of quotations as part of a surrealist curatorial poetics by disseminating lines from “auguries of innocence” like modern sibyl’s leaves scattered by the wind, playfully entering the exhibition space through the air vent. 14 january–​26 april 2020 (closed because of covid in mid-march, left installed until mid-september) national gallery of canada, library and archives, ottawa william blake, 1757–​1827: illustrated books exhibition brochure: william blake, 1757–​1827: illustrated books. intro. philip dombowsky. ottawa: national gallery of canada, 2020. the national gallery of canada exhibited blake’s art of illustration through a selection from songs, young’s night thoughts, thornton’s pastorals of virgil, illustrations of the book of job, and the dante engravings. the collection is complemented by trianon press facsimiles, several of which were also displayed. title page, songs of innocence [facsimile of copy b] (trianon press/​blake trust, 1954). national gallery of canada, n0 .b636so. “the lamb,” songs of innocence and of experience [facsimile of copy z] (trianon press/​blake trust, 1955). national gallery of canada, n0 .b636s. title page, songs of innocence and of experience copy t1-2. national gallery of canada, accession number 2971. “the angel,” songs of innocence and of experience copy t1-2. national gallery of canada, accession number 2981. frontispiece, jerusalem [facsimile of copy e] (trianon press/​blake trust, 1951). national gallery of canada, n0 .b636j. “what do i see!” [plate 92], jerusalem [facsimile of copy e] (trianon press/​blake trust, 1951). national gallery of canada, n0 .b636j. title page, the book of thel [facsimile of copy o] (trianon press/​blake trust, 1965). national gallery of canada, n0 .b636b. frontispiece and title page, visions of the daughters of albion [facsimile of copy c] (trianon press/​blake trust, 1959). national gallery of canada, n0 .b636v. “fiery the angels rose” [bentley plate 13], america a prophecy [facsimile of copy m] (trianon press/​blake trust, 1963). national gallery of canada, n0 .b636a. “preludium” [plate 2], the book of urizen [facsimile of copy g] (trianon press/​blake trust, 1958). national gallery of canada, n0 .b636bo. edward young, the complaint, and the consolation; or night thoughts (london: r. edwards, 1797). national gallery of canada, n0 b636 y71 1797. robert john thornton, the pastorals of virgil, 3rd ed. (london: f. c. & j. rivingtons et al., 1821). national gallery of canada, n0 b636 v47 1921. “and i only am escaped alone to tell thee” [plate numbered 4], illustrations of the book of job (1826). national gallery of canada, accession number 1900. “and i only am escaped alone to tell thee” [plate numbered 4], william blake’s illustrations of the book of job. colour versions of william blake’s book of job designs from the circle of john linnell (blake trust, 1987). national gallery of canada, n0 b636 b56 1987. “behold now behemoth which i made with thee” [plate numbered 15], illustrations of the book of job (1826). national gallery of canada, accession number 1911. “behold now behemoth which i made with thee” [plate numbered 15], william blake’s illustrations of the book of job. colour versions of william blake’s book of job designs from the circle of john linnell (blake trust, 1987). national gallery of canada, n0 b636 b56 1987. “agnello and cianfa merging into a single body” [“the six-footed serpent attacking agnolo brunelleschi”], blake’s illustrations of dante (1838 or c. 1892). national gallery of canada, accession number 1920. “the circle of the lustful: paolo and francesca,” blake’s illustrations of dante (1838 or c. 1892). national gallery of canada, accession number 1917. 30 january–​8 march 2020 flat time house, peckham, london the bard: william blake at flat time house exhibition catalogue: the bard: william blake at flat time house. london: flat time house, 2020. 28 pp. chris mccabe, “the commission as vision” (3-9); poems by keith jarrett, chris mccabe, niall mcdevitt, robert montgomery, karen shandhu, iain sinclair, and tamar yoseloff; magnus rena, “the bard and the fatal sisters” (19-23). this exhibition was a collaboration between the john latham foundation and the sir denis mahon foundation, which had already joined forces to display trianon facsimiles of blake’s watercolor illustrations to thomas gray’s “the bard” and “the fatal sisters” at the visions and visionaries exhibition in the guildhall art gallery in 2018–​19.for more information about the guildhall exhibition, see “blake and exhibitions, 2018,” blake 53.1 (summer 2019). in the dark interior of the guildhall, the gray poems illustrated by blake were part of a visionary dialogue with the middle ages, the pre-raphaelites, and latham and other artists representing the “age of future.” by contrast, in latham’s flat time house the facsimiles participated in a very different, top-lit, white cube aesthetic, where the unbound illuminated pages hanging next to one another on the wall articulated a dialogue with latham’s own disruptions of time and the codex form. the display was complemented by contemporary poets commissioned to respond to blake’s and latham’s work. flat time house was latham’s home and studio, designated by him as an artwork and conceived as a living sculpture or living organism. the façade, or “the face,” features an installation titled how the univoice is still unheard. suspended in midair, half outside and half inside the house, this cantilevered book sculpture is made up of two bound books whose pages are interleaved into each other, intersected by the glass windowpane. blake’s illustrations to “the fatal sisters” were hung in a space called “the mind.” photos of the bard: william blake at flat time house are by mark blower. his illustrations to “the bard” were in the part of the house known as “the hand,” which used to be latham’s studio. the responses by contemporary poets took place in this space; their typescripts were hung in the corridor connecting “the hand” to “the brain” (where latham wrote, now housing the john latham archive).the poetry readings were on 19 and 26 february 2020; see <https://​www.​youtube.​com/​watch?​v=rorcyqmeqiq>, <https://​www.​youtube.​com/​watch?​v=yss1i70pusg>. the house also includes “the body event,” “where the sitting, lying, sleeping, eating and ‘plumbing’ take place.”<http://​flattimeho.​org.​uk/​exhibitions/​flat-time>; flat time house handout. flat time house is now an experimental institute, with a gallery space, an artists’ residency scheme, and an exhibition and education programme. the exhibition was “an opportunity to bring blake back to peckham, at a site close to the rye where, as a young boy, he had his vision of ‘a tree filled with angels, bright angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars.’”flat time house handout, quoting alexander gilchrist. in the accompanying publication, the bard, chris mccabe identifies blake’s “instinct … to walk the five miles from soho to peckham” with his later impulse “to explode the boundaries between word/​image, mind/​body, private/​public,” but regrets that despite being an early source of visionary inspiration, peckham itself does not feature in blake’s poetic corpus. magnus rena indicates that hanging the illustrations that blake drew around gray’s poems emphasizes the aural and visual medium of poetry “in an exhibition of live readings and poetry performances,”the bard 4-5, 23. registering blake’s own sung performances. the poetic responses to blake and latham took a psychogeographic approach: keith jarrett contributed “a basic diagram (or, on alternate time signatures, two incidental persons converge upon frameworks of cosmology),” seeing “lesser-spotted angels / circulate from the upper deck of the number 12 bus / for is not this the source of all miracles and visions?” mccabe, whose engagement with blake is registered in cenotaph south, supplied an extract from “civic.” niall mcdevitt’s “edward i” projects his “blood shadow” and “bloody geography.” in robert montgomery’s extract from “poem in lights to be scattered in the square mile,” “the city is a magical sculpture we live inside.” karen shandu’s passage from “the oak tree wears a dress” responds to the vision of the tree in an asphalted cityscape. psychogeographer and novelist iain sinclair contributed an extract from “mental travailers: or, the battle of the books” in which he claims that “spectral latham pre-deceases william blake.” tamar yoseloff exhibited lines from “belief systems.” the programming also included a “blake walk of peckham,” with mccabe and mcdevitt, from flat time house to “the goose green mural which depicts blake’s boyhood vision of an angel on peckham rye,” then in search of the tree, then along the river peck and ending at nunhead hill for a blake reading.for a description and a recording of the walk, held on 23 february 2020, see <https://​www.​youtube.​com/​watch?​v=7qlpb3zasjs>. “the bard,” page bearing manuscript list of titles plus 13 pages, unbound, collotype and hand coloring on wove paper with separately printed text on laid paper, from william blake’s water-colour designs for the poems of thomas gray (trianon press/​blake trust, 1972). collection of the sir denis mahon foundation. “the fatal sisters,” page bearing manuscript list of titles plus 10 pages, unbound, collotype and hand coloring on wove paper with separately printed text on laid paper, from william blake’s water-colour designs for the poems of thomas gray (trianon press/​blake trust, 1972). collection of the sir denis mahon foundation. 15 february–​31 may 2020 (disrupted by covid; reopened 3 august 2020–​3 january 2021, but disrupted again) harris museum, art gallery, and library, preston the artful line the exhibition celebrated the courtauld’s shared heritage with the harris museum through courtaulds textiles, on the fortieth anniversary of the closure of the factory in preston. featuring a selection of works from the harris and the courtauld institute of art, it examined “drawing in all its forms”: copies from the antique, preparatory sketches, and finished compositions from the seventeenth century to the present. blake’s visionary heads of pindar and lais hung next to henry fuseli’s man with two dead women (c. 1772). at the other end of the room, in a flat vitrine, were sketches and the manuscript for “instructions for drawing” by john varley (c. 1818). varley’s manuscript offers landscape painting skills to artists along the lines of his publication precepts of landscape drawing (1818). other works from blake’s contemporaries included angelica kauffman’s and joseph nollekens’s drawings after the first-century roman fresco the aldobrandini wedding, nollekens’s drawing of the monument to mrs. henry howard, a sketch of the destruction of pharaoh’s host by john martin, and sketches by george cruikshank on a letter. visionary heads (pindar and lais) (1820). butlin #711. harris museum, accession number prsmg: p44. 26 february–​17 may 2020 dulwich picture gallery, london british surrealism exhibition catalogue: david boyd haycock, sacha llewellyn, and kirstie meehan. british surrealism. london: dulwich picture gallery, 2020. 159 pp. in 1936 herbert read introduced the international surrealist exhibition at the new burlington galleries in london, celebrating “the english contribution” to superrealism, “the romantic principle in art,” contrasted to “the art of the intellect, the so-called classical art, … carefully preserved in museums and academies”: a nation which has produced two such superrealists as william blake and lewis carroll is to the manner born. because our art and literature is the most romantic in the world, it is likely to become the most superrealistic. the english contribution to this exhibition is comparatively tentative, but our poets and painters have scarcely become conscious of this international movement. now that it has been revealed in all its range and irrationality, they may recover, shall we say, the courage of their instincts.herbert read, “introduction,” the international surrealist exhibition (london: new burlington galleries, 1936) 12, 13. read was a member of the exhibition’s english committee, with hugh sykes davies, david gascoyne, humphrey jennings, henry moore, paul nash, and others, joining an international exhibition featuring salvador dalí, giorgio de chirico, marcel duchamp, max ernst, alberto giacometti, joan miró, and rené magritte. the significance for the reception of blake can be measured by a group photograph that includes ruthven todd,<http://​www.​luxonline.​org.​uk/​history/​1900-1949/​the_​surrealist_​exhibition.​html>, accessed 1 may 2021, reproducing a photo from the picture library of the royal academy of arts, london. who would become a key contributor to blake studies, involving miró in the ruthven todd portfolio, a pioneering attempt to reconstruct blake’s relief-etching method with stanley william hayter in 1947. read’s prophetic words were retrospectively tested in british surrealism at dulwich picture gallery, which associated blake with fuseli, carroll, and shakespeare among the “so-called ‘ancestors of surrealism’—​writers and artists whose work prefigured the movement’s fascination with the absurd, the marvellous and the wildly imaginative.”introductory text; showcase panel. while blake’s impact on surrealism is now well documented,mei-ying sung, “blake and surrealism,” blake 2.0: william blake in twentieth-century art, music and culture, ed. steve clark, tristanne connolly, and jason whittaker (basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, 2012) 102-19; david hopkins, “william blake and british surrealism: humphrey jennings, the impact of machines and the case for dada,” visual culture in britain 19.3 (2018): 305-20. surrealism’s european coordinates are explored in sibylle erle and morton d. paley’s the reception of william blake in europe (london: bloomsbury, 2019)—​surprisingly minimized in the french chapter by gilles soubigou and yann tholoniat (1: 63) and extensively documented in the belgian context by franca bellarsi and gregory watson (1: 102-16), while the exhibition surreal roots: from william blake to andré breton at the scottish national gallery of modern art in 2015 is discussed by cristina flores in “the reception of blake in spain” in relation to the role of surrealism in connecting blake to dalí and miró (1: 177-78). the exhibition catalogue tracks blake’s association with surrealism to gascoyne’s analysis of the surrealist element in english literature and documents the reception of the 1936 exhibition.david gascoyne, a short survey of surrealism (london: cobden-sanderson, 1935) 132; hugh sykes davies, “surrealism at this time and place,” surrealism, ed. herbert read (london: faber, 1936) 119-68. anthony blunt claimed that it was “‘a stone cold fish’ that mixed william blake, samuel taylor coleridge, rimbaud and freud; it was ‘now thrilling, horrifying, puzzling, scandalizing or just boring.’”british surrealism 18. commenting on the 1936 exhibition’s encouragement to read the art of ernst and miró in the context of carroll, eric newton argued, “if the spectator is one who can tolerate nothing without a precedent, cannot the surrealist reply by pointing to hieronymus bosch and william blake?”british surrealism 19. another element aligning blake with surrealism is the world of dreams that he captures through his illustrations to edward young’s night thoughts; andré breton saw young as a forerunner of surrealism, though he deprecated young’s priestly moralism in his first surrealist manifesto.andré breton, manifeste du surréalisme. poisson soluble, 14th ed. (paris: éditions kra, 1929) 47; see also british surrealism 44. to document blake’s surrealist imagination, the curators displayed the edition of night thoughts that he illustrated; they also requested the manuscript of the four zoas, which could not be included for conservation reasons. in the exhibition, blake stood as a model for the surrealists’ “forbidden desires” and “sexual freedom”: “fired by fantasy they broke social taboos and rejected polite customs.”room text. i am grateful to hannah edwards for information about the loan request of the manuscript of the four zoas and about the exhibition. the exhibition experimented with surrealist methods of juxtaposition and disorientation, combining seeing blake as an ancestor of surrealism with pairings intended to generate new associations. his “head of a damned soul in dante’s inferno” was captioned: “breton believed that dante ‘might well have passed’ for a surrealist. for the british surrealists, blake was their ancestor par excellence. here the two combine in depicting the terrors of hell.”wall caption. this idea was tested by an inspired, haunting pairing with leonora carrington’s head (1940–​41). photos of british surrealism are by hannah edwards. curatorial techniques of quotation activated blake’s works as part of a surrealist poetics of chance. playfully alluding by means of modern technology to the mode of transmission of the ancient sibyl, flying leaves or gusts of wind painted on the wall seemed to enter the room through the air vent, each carrying a prophetic line from “auguries of innocence.” where might such visionary hopes land? on the walls of the exhibition they alighted underneath sam haile’s watercolor and collage hitler must be overcome (1939).british surrealism 99. captured in a corner in which “head of a damned soul” was activated in the context of the second world war, blake’s visionary lines planted seeds of renewal. the catalogue concludes with words from the marriage of heaven and hell: “if the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. for man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.” in 2017–​18 this statement was inscribed on the wall above richard anuszkiewicz’s optical screen print series inward eye in william blake and the age of aquarius (northwestern university).for more information about william blake and the age of aquarius, see jennifer davis michael’s review in blake 52.3 (winter 2018–​19). placed at the end of the british surrealism catalogue, blake’s words invite us out of the world of the book with the enhanced perception of new surrealist ways of seeing. “head of a damned soul in dante’s inferno” (c. 1789). british museum, museum number 1856,0712.209. songs of innocence and of experience [facsimile of copy t] (liverpool: h. young & sons, 1923). british library, c.71.d.19. edward young, the complaint, and the consolation; or night thoughts (london: r. edwards, 1797). national galleries of scotland. 28 march–​15 november 2020 (delayed opening on 10 august because of covid lockdown in mid-march) ashmolean museum, oxford scene through wood exhibition catalogue: anne desmet, scene through wood: a century of modern wood engraving. oxford: ashmolean museum publications, 2020. 256 pp. externally curated by anne desmet, the third wood engraver to be an elected member of the royal academy, this exhibition celebrated the centenary of the society of wood engravers, showcasing specimens from the collection of the ashmolean, supplemented by private lenders, including a series from the diploma collection of the royal society of painter-printmakers. in the accompanying catalogue, desmet indicates that the exhibition’s title was inspired by one of the society of wood engravers’ founding members, wood engraver and theatre set designer edward gordon craig, who asserted the medium’s power to capture an image of epic proportions: “on a sheet of paper which is but two inches square you can make a line which seems to tower in the air, and you can do the same on your stage, for it is all a matter of proportion and nothing to do with actuality.” desmet argues that “within a tiny rectangle a skilled artist can convey both epic panorama and intimate spaces of illusionistic depth.”scene through wood 25; desmet quotes craig from janet leeper, edward gordon craig: designs for the theatre (harmondsworth: penguin, 1948) 29. this is certainly borne out by blake’s engraved illustrations for the pastorals of virgil. albrecht dürer’s “christ in limbo” (c. 1510), thomas bewick, and blake marked the beginning of the exhibition as the artists who were most influential to engravers in the first half of the twentieth century, pointing out a genealogy by noting blake’s admiration for dürer, whose “melencolia i” used to hang in his studio. bewick is credited with adapting end-grain boxwood from fabric printing to illustration because of “its potential for creating images of immense detail and subtle tonal differentiations, as opposed to the long-grain of softer woods used for the woodcut technique.”scene through wood 43. blake was placed alongside samuel palmer and edward calvert to represent the 1820s and 30s, as well as identified as a key influence on dante gabriel rossetti, edward burne-jones, and william morris.scene through wood 45. after “beginnings,” the exhibition showed the role of wood engraving in newspaper illustrations, commercial advertising, fine lettering, ex-libris, and books without words, with sections devoted to “the theatre of life,” “storytelling,” “the natural world,” “the built environment,” and “abstraction and detail.” featured artists included paul nash, henry moore, and m. c. escher; craig, eric gill, lucien pissarro, and gwen raverat, founding members of the society of wood engravers; iain mcnab, founder of the grosvenor school of modern art, which specialized in linocuts; eric ravilious, clare leighton, gertrude hermes, and geoffrey wales; simon brett and hilary paynter, who were instrumental in the society’s revival in the 1980s; and contemporary practitioners chris pig and desmet herself. “illustrations of imitation of eclogue i.” bentley #504.6-9, 10-13, 14-17, 21-24. illustrations to robert john thornton, the pastorals of virgil, 3rd ed. (london: f. c. & j. rivingtons et al., 1821). ashmolean museum, accession numbers wa1941.30.2, wa1941.30.6, wa1941.30.10, wa1941.30.14. blake in the marketplace, 2024 blake in the marketplace, 2024 by mark crosby mark crosby (crosbym@ksu.edu), fsa, is an associate professor in the department of english at kansas state university. he has published on blake, hayley, william godwin, and thomas paine. table of contents: introductory essay abbreviations blake: illuminated books drawings and paintings manuscripts separate plates and plates in series letterpress books with engravings by and after blake interesting blakeana blake’s circle and followers: basire, james flaxman, john fuseli, henry linnell, john palmer, samuel richmond, george appendix: new information on blake’s engravings after the excitement surrounding the surprising discovery of the deaths door wash drawing in 2023, the blake market was relatively quiet in 2024 until late june, when songs of innocence and of experience copy j came to the auction block at sotheby’s in new york. also known as the tulk/​rothschild/​blunt copy, it was the first of only three lots in an auction titled “three poets,” with the other lots comprising manuscripts and published works by a. e. housman and robert frost. at the start of the auction, there were three parties interested in songs copy j, with bidding beginning at the low estimate of $1,200,000 before surpassing $3,000,000. the bidders continued to compete until the winning bid of $3,600,000 ($4,320,000 inclusive of buyer’s premium) came from stephan loewentheil, founder and president of the 19th century rare book and photograph shop in new york. this was a record sum for an illuminated book sold at auction. songs of innocence and of experience copy d fetched $1,200,000 ($1,320,000 inclusive of buyer’s premium) in 1989 (see blake 24.1) and songs of innocence copy a fetched $550,000 in 1990 (blake 24.4), while the book of urizen copy e was sold for a then record $2,300,000 ($2,532,500 inclusive of buyer’s premium) in 1999 (blake 33.4). songs copy j also surpassed the $3,500,000 ($3,928,000 inclusive of buyer’s premium) realized by the good and evil angels struggling for possession of a child, from the betsey cushing whitney estate, on 5 may 2004 at sotheby’s, new york (blake 38.4). at the time, this color-printed drawing established the record for any blake work sold at auction. as of 26 june 2024, songs copy j holds that distinction. loewentheil was present at the auction and, in a post-sale interview, described songs j as “a manifestation of both artistic and poetical genius at a level that few in the history of literature and art have achieved,” adding, “it was too much for me to resist—​and almost too much to pay for.”joe dziemianowicz, “‘extraordinary’ poetry book by william blake sold by sotheby’s for record $4.3m,” penta (28 june 2024): <https://​www.​barrons.​com/​articles/​extraordinary-​poetry-​book-​by-​william-​blake-​sold-​by-​sothebys-​for-​record-​4-​3m-​9698427c>. as discussed below, copy j comprises fifty-four plates, with all but one plate trimmed within millimeters of the images and mounted on larger sheets that create the illusion of platemarks. the only plate that has not been trimmed and mounted in this way is pl. 28 (see illus. 2), the frontispiece to experience, which is matted separately, originates from another copy, and was added “by 1927” (bb 417). another possible reason for such a staggering purchase price may be the copy’s provenance and the accompanying manuscript commentary on blake’s poems and relief-etched designs by samuel taylor coleridge. the first owner of copy j was charles augustus tulk, a swedenborgian and close friend of the flaxmans (br[2] 335). tulk may have purchased the book directly from blake;see joseph viscomi, “the myth of commissioned illuminated books: george romney, isaac d’israeli, and ‘one hundred and sixty designs … of blake’s,’” blake 23.2 (fall 1989): 67n2, 70n26. he also owned a copy of poetical sketches with the inscription “to charles tulk esqre / from william blake” (see william blake archive), as well as no natural religion copy m and all religions are one pl. 1 (bb 82n4; br[2] 383n). at the beginning of 1818, tulk lent songs copy j to coleridge. in a postscript to his letter to h. f. cary of 6 february, coleridge describes reading “a strange publication—​viz. poems with very wild and interesting pictures,” before stating that their creator “is a man of genius—​and i apprehend, a swedenborgian—​certainly, a mystic emphatically.” addressing the irony in his identification of blake as a “mystic,” he concludes: “you perhaps smile at my calling another poet, a mystic; but verily i am in the very mire of common-place commonsense compared with mr blake, apo– or rather ana-calyptic poet, and painter” (br[2] 336). when coleridge returned the work to tulk in mid-february, he included an analysis of “blake’s poesies, metrical and graphic.” his criticism ranks the poems according to the amount of pleasure that he experienced in reading them, from “the divine image,” “the little black boy,” and “night” “in the highest degree” to “the chimney sweeper” and others “in the lowest.” he notes that he “would have had [“a little girl lost”] omitted—​not for the want of innocence in the poem, but for the too probable want of it in many readers” (br[2] 337). coleridge also suggests revising the final lines of “infant joy” to “when wilt thou smile, or—​o smile, o smile! i’ll sing the while,” with the rationale that “a babe two days old does not, cannot smile—​and innocence and the very truth of nature must go together. infancy is too holy a thing to be ornamented.” in 1838 tulk lent his copy of songs to j. j. garth wilkinson to produce an edition of the poems that was published by william pickering in 1839. presumably along with coleridge’s manuscript, it was bought by the bookseller james bain in 1870, “from a member of tulk’s family then resident in australia.”geoffrey keynes and edwin wolf 2nd, william blake’s illuminated books: a census (new york: grolier club, 1953) 59. it was subsequently acquired by albert george dew-smith, co-founder of the cambridge scientific instrument company, “rebought by bain about 1900,” and then sold to nathaniel mayer de rothschild, first baron rothschild. after his death, copy j passed to his wife, emma louise von rothschild, who in 1933 gave the work to her grandson, victor rothschild, third baron rothschild.victor also owned poetical sketches copy l (see bb 350-51). in 1949, victor apparently entrusted it, together with coleridge’s manuscript, to the art historian anthony blunt, who was later revealed to be the so-called “fourth man” in the cambridge spy ring. as david worrall notes, blunt kept copy j “in an office safe at the courtauld institute” and often consulted it in his private apartment on the top floor of the courtauld building in portman square.david worrall, “the ‘secret’ life of william blake’s songs of innocence and of experience, copy j: anthony blunt, the rothschilds and mi5 in the cold war,” visual culture in britain (published online 18 mar. 2025): 1-15 (especially 1 and 6). worrall also shows how blunt was a temporary custodian of songs j and, after his spying activities had been revealed to the rothschilds in the mid-1960s, was convinced by victor and his second wife, teresa, to give it to their daughter emma rothschild in 1969.worrall 9-10. presumably emma rothschild was responsible for putting copy j and coleridge’s commentary up for auction in 2024. in april there was activity with blake’s drawings, when the visionary head of solomon that was previously in the collection of edwin wolf 2nd came to auction. there is another version of this drawing in the courtauld institute of art and a counterproof in the huntington library. the existence of two left-facing originals and a single counterproof is curious and suggests that blake may have sketched two versions, one of which was used for the counterproof, or that john linnell may have been responsible for one of the originals. this year’s review also contains an entry for a recent discovery: a preparatory drawing (illus. 4), auctioned in 2022, for blake’s frontispiece to thomas commins’s an elegy, set to music (1786). the frontispiece adorns a pamphlet comprising five pages of sheet music composed by commins, the organist of penzance, cornwall, with lyrics from anne home hunter’s “elegy.”for bibliographical information on this pamphlet, see roger r. easson and robert n. essick, william blake, book illustrator, vol. 1 (normal, il: american blake foundation, 1972) 8. this drawing was listed in the auction house’s online catalogue as “in the manner of william blake,” although the subject was not identified until december 2024. it depicts the figures of a mother and child and appears to be an intermediate stage between an earlier, smaller, very loose sketch (illus. 3) and the published engraving (illus. 5). this new drawing probably dates to c. 1786 and may relate to butlin #98. a comparison between the early sketch, the intermediate drawing, and the frontispiece shows blake developing the positions of the arms, hands, and heads of the figures. a comparison of the chain lines and watermarks suggests that the earlier sketch and the intermediate drawing once belonged to the same sheet or same batch of paper. unfortunately, the auction house could not provide information regarding the provenance of the drawing beyond reporting that it came “from a deceased estate.”glen charman, saleroom manager, eastbourne auctions, e-mails of 10 and 12 feb. 2025. last year also saw the re-emergence and private sale of blake’s letter to linnell of 2 july 1826, one of a series that he composed during the summer of 1826 in which he reports on the various ailments that prevent him from visiting linnell in hampstead. it was originally sold in the linnell auction at christie’s on 15 march 1918 (#210) and became part of the estelle doheny collection from the edward laurence doheny memorial library at st. john’s seminary, camarillo, california. on 21 february 1989, it was sold on behalf of the archdiocese of los angeles to a private collector in california. the letter is transcribed in both editions of gilchrist and by erdman. there are some minor differences between these transcriptions and the actual letter; of particular note is the mistranscription of “mrs hards” as “mrs hurds” in gilchrist’s and erdman’s versions. a new transcription is offered below (see illus. 6). of the engravings that appeared on the market in 2024, perhaps the most significant was a proof before signatures and title of “robin hood & clorinda” after meheux (1783). hitherto there had been only one recorded state (see essick, sp xxiv). the market for commercial books with blake’s engravings was buoyant, with copies of the grave, the botanic garden, and gay’s fables regularly appearing at auction or in bookseller listings. a fine copy of josé joaquín de mora’s exceedingly rare meditaciones poéticas (1826) came to auction in bogota, colombia, at the beginning of the year. as detailed in the “advertencia,” mora’s verses were inspired by blake’s designs for blair’s grave, engraved by schiavonetti.see bb 596. the “advertencia” refers to the author of the designs as “guillermo black” (josé joaquín de mora, meditaciones poéticas [londres: lo publica r. ackermann, 1826] ii). the anglo-german publisher and bookseller rudolph ackermann purchased schiavonetti’s plates after blake’s designs, publishing the 1813 edition of the grave (bb 526) before reusing the plates in meditaciones poéticas. following previous sales reviews, there is a blakeana section recording blake-related materials such as muir facsimiles and copies of gilchrist and of ellis and yeats. one notable item sold in 2024 was a copy of john quincy, pharmacopœia officinalis & extemporanea; or, a complete english dispensatory (1733) that may have belonged to blake. as with last year’s sales review, the section covering blake’s circle includes works by james basire that may be dated to the period of blake’s apprenticeship, including richard gough’s sepulchral monuments, in great britain (1786–​96). the year of all sales, catalogues, and correspondence in the following lists is 2024, unless otherwise indicated. with a few exceptions, such as blake’s engraving after william hogarth and rare items such as prepublication proofs, only complete copies of plates in series and letterpress books with blake’s commercial illustrations are included. most reports about auction catalogues are based on the online versions. coverage of regional auctions is necessarily selective. dates for dealers’ online catalogues are the dates accessed, not the dates of publication. works offered online by dealers and listed in previous sales reviews are not repeated here. most of the auction houses add their purchaser’s surcharge to the hammer price in their price lists; where possible, these net amounts are given here, following the official price lists. estimates in auction catalogues are usually for hammer prices. i am grateful for help in compiling this review to david bindman, glen charman, robert n. essick, stephan loewentheil, michael phillips, nicholas shrimpton, joseph viscomi, and john windle. sarah jones’s editorial expertise has, as always, been invaluable. abbreviations bb g. e. bentley, jr., blake books (oxford: clarendon press, 1977). plate numbers and copy designations for blake’s illuminated books and commercial book illustrations follow bb. bbs g. e. bentley, jr., blake books supplement (oxford: clarendon press, 1995) bhl bonhams, london br(2) g. e. bentley, jr., blake records, 2nd ed. (new haven: yale university press, 2004) butlin martin butlin, the paintings and drawings of william blake, 2 vols. (new haven: yale university press, 1981) cat(s). catalogue(s) cb robert n. essick, william blake’s commercial book illustrations (oxford: clarendon press, 1991) cheffins cheffins, cambridge, uk cl christie’s, london cw chiswick auctions, london dw dominic winter auctioneers, south cerney, gloucestershire e david v. erdman, ed., the complete poetry and prose of william blake, newly rev. ed. (new york: anchor-random house, 1988) eb ebay online auctions fh freeman’s-hindman, philadelphia fm forum auctions, london gilchrist alexander gilchrist, life of william blake, 2 vols. (london: macmillan, 1863 [1st ed.]; 1880 [2nd ed.]) illus. illustration(s), illustrated lister raymond lister, catalogue raisonné of the works of samuel palmer (cambridge: cambridge university press, 1988) lly lowell libson & jonny yarker ltd., london pba pba galleries, berkeley pl(s). plate(s) roseberys roseberys, london sl sotheby’s, london sp robert n. essick, the separate plates of william blake: a catalogue (princeton: princeton university press, 1983) swann swann galleries, new york windle john windle antiquarian bookseller, san francisco # auction lot or catalogue item number illuminated books 1. songs of innocence and of experience copy j, 1795, general title page. reproduced with the kind permission of stephan loewentheil, 19th century rare book and photograph shop, new york. blake, or perhaps catherine, used gray wash on the lettering, interlinear flourishes, and the figures of adam and eve. the wash was probably applied with a finely pointed brush (also known as a pencil in blake’s time), particularly on the faces. unlike other copies that were printed around same time—​such as b and c, which depict eve with her head bowed and face hidden—​copy j shows eve’s full face. the use of gray wash and the orientation of her face is consistent with copy l, also printed c. 1795. the delineation of eve’s nose in copy j, however, is extremely delicate, with two thin parallel lines joining the nostrils and inner eyebrows. songs of innocence and of experience copy j, 1795. sotheby’s, new york, 26 june, #1 ($4,320,000). fifty-four plates printed in black and brown inks, with watercolor washes and pen and ink handwork on fifty-four leaves of unwatermarked wove paper. fifty-three plates have been trimmed to within 0.5-0.2 cm. of the relief etching; they measure approximately 11 x 7 cm. the trimmed wove paper is inlaid on larger sheets of unwatermarked, late nineteenth-century wove paper, measuring 19.7 x 11.7 cm. as bentley notes, there is “careful indent[ing] at the join of the inner and outer leaves … to look like platemarks” (bb 416). keynes and wolf indicate that these “artificial plate-marks” were made “by putting each print, damped, in press with blank plate” (59). bentley describes the remaining plate, pl. 28—​the frontispiece to experience—​as “loosely inserted by 1927” (bb 417). this plate measures 16.2 x 12.4 cm. and is now matted separately. the fifty-three trimmed plates are bound in honey-brown morocco, possibly by riviere (see bb 416-17), with marbled endpapers and linings. the cover is decorated with a border of gilt fillets; a gilt-ruled spine comprises six compartments, with the second containing the title with gilt-edge letters. the volume is housed in a blue cloth slipcase. the order of the plates—​using bentley’s numbering—​and descriptions of the textual emendations made by blake in this copy are: 1) combined title page (illus. 1) 2) innocence, frontispiece 3) innocence, title page 4) “introduction” 5) “the shepherd” 22) “spring” 23) “spring,” second plate 19) “holy thursday” 15) “laughing song” 24) “nurse’s song” 18) “the divine image” 8) “the lamb” 9) “the little black boy” 10) “the little black boy,” second plate 25) “infant joy” 6) “the ecchoing green” 7) “the ecchoing green,” second plate: the first word of the third line—​“such such were the joys.”—​is printed indistinctly 16) “a cradle song” 17) “a cradle song,” second plate: in the last two lines, the terminal s’s in the second “smiles” and in “beguiles” have been overpainted in brown; the word “are” has been overpainted in brown, with “like” interlined as a substitute above 53) “the school boy” 20) “night”: overpainting obscures the catchword, “when”, at the foot of the plate 21) “night,” second plate 27) “on anothers sorrow” 26) “a dream” 13) “the little boy lost” 14) “the little boy found” 11) “the blossom” 12) “the chimney sweeper” 54) “the voice of the ancient bard” 29) experience, title page 30) “introduction” 31) “earth’s answer” 48) “infant sorrow” 32) “the clod & the pebble” 44) “the garden of love” 40) “the fly” 42) “the tyger” 50) “a little boy lost” 33) “holy thursday” 43) “my pretty rose tree” / “ah! sun-flower” / “the lilly” 41) “the angel” 38) “nurses song” 34) “the little girl lost” 35) “the little girl lost,” second plate / “the little girl found” 36) “the little girl found,” second plate 47) “the human abstract” 37) “the chimney sweeper” 52) “to tirzah” 49) “a poison tree” 51) “a little girl lost” 46) “london” 39) “the sick rose” 45) “the little vagabond” 28) experience, frontispiece: the plate is numbered 29 (illus. 2) the coloring in copy j is consistent with some other copies that blake produced during the mid-1790s, including pen and ink outlining on many of the plates (songs copy a and copy n [experience only], for example).see <https://​www.​blakearchive.​org/​copy/​songsie.​a> and <https://​www.​blakearchive.​org/​copy/​songsie.​n>. gray wash has also been used on some plates (see illus. 1). accompanying the volume is an autograph manuscript signed “s.t.c.” (samuel taylor coleridge), comprising an address leaf and two pages on a single leaf of unwatermarked wove paper, 22.2 x 18.2 cm. the address leaf bears the following in coleridge’s hand: “c. a. tulk, esqre / (or mrs tulk)  st john’s lodge / regent’s park”. in early 1818 tulk lent his copy of songs to coleridge, who drafted a commentary on the poems and illustrations (see br[2] 336-38). as bentley notes, coleridge’s commentary follows “the order [the poems] are found” in copy j (br[2] 337n), with no mention of the experience frontispiece (pl. 28).bentley infers the existence of the experience frontispiece from coleridge’s labeling of the plates between “holy thursday” and “nurses song” as “p. 13” (br[2] 337n). the two leaves between these poems include “my pretty rose tree” / “ah! sun-flower” / “the lilly” on one leaf and “the angel” on the other. these two leaves, according to bentley, would be pages 12 and 13 if the frontispiece was present when coleridge examined copy j. coleridge does not refer to “my pretty rose tree” / “ah! sun-flower” / “the lilly” and “the angel” by name in his commentary. in 1838 tulk allowed wilkinson to use copy j for the 1839 pickering edition of songs, which makes no mention of the frontispiece to experience. as both keynes and wolf and bentley note, the current pl. 28 is not original to copy j. 2. songs of innocence and of experience copy j, 1795, frontispiece to experience. reproduced with the kind permission of stephan loewentheil, 19th century rare book and photograph shop, new york. this plate is matted separately and is not original to copy j. bentley speculates that the original “may be the one belonging” to robert n. essick (bbs 125n). while there is some consistency in ink color and hand coloring between the frontispiece to experience in essick’s collection and the plates in copy j, the former has the number “2” written in pen and ink on the upper right of the plate in what appears to be blake’s hand. there are no such pen and ink plate designations in copy j, apart from the “29” in the top right corner of the frontispiece to experience. it is possible that any plate numbers were removed when the plates were trimmed and inlaid. drawings and paintings solomon, c. 1819–​20. pencil on paper, 25.4 x 20.3 cm. fh, 17 apr., #16 ($30,000). inscribed on the bottom right “j linnell from mr blake” and in the center “solomon”. this drawing was previously in the collection of edwin wolf 2nd (butlin #701). there are two other versions of this visionary head: the drawing in the witt collection, courtauld institute of art (butlin #700) has the same left-facing orientation, and there is a counterproof in the huntington library with lines that have been “heavily pencilled over” and some alterations to the neck (butlin #702). the pencil lines in #701 are darker than in #700, with details of the hair more firmly delineated. as butlin notes, the lettering in #700 is “probably by linnell,” although this does not necessarily mean that linnell was also responsible for the visionary head. rossetti has a single entry for a drawing of solomon in his lists (gilchrist [1863] 2: 244, list 2, no. 43; [1880] 2: 260, list 2, no. 35). study of two figures for the frontispiece to thomas commins’s “an elegy, set to music,” c. 1786. pencil on laid paper, 27 x 20.5 cm. eastbourne auctions, 7 sept. 2022, #771 (£90). according to the auction house, the drawing came “from a deceased estate”see note 8. in eastbourne, east sussex, uk. on the verso are the remains of trimmed brown mounting tape on or near the top corners. inscribed on the right-hand-side tape in blue ink is the number “87” and on the lower portion of the verso in pencil is “william blake attr,”. there is a james whatman watermark comprising a double-banded shield (also known as bend in shield) adorned with fleur-de-lis above and partial “gr” initials below.we find the same watermark on several of blake’s apprenticeship drawings in the gough collection, bodleian libraries, university of oxford, such as the children of edward iii (1777) (see gough maps 225, f. 160, and butlin #37). for examples of this watermark, see edward heawood, watermarks, mainly of the 17th and 18th centuries (hilversum, netherlands: paper publications society, 1986) pl. 16, nos. 103, 105; pl. 17, nos. 107-08, 111; pl. 18, nos. 113-14. the chain lines are 3 cm. apart. this drawing (illus. 4) appears to be preparatory to blake’s engraved frontispiece to commins, which is inscribed “w. blake delt. & sculpt.”; it may be related to butlin #98, sketch for thomas commins’s “an elegy.” both bentley (bb 540) and butlin follow geoffrey keynes’s description of a drawing for the frontispiece being “in the hands of messrs. robson” in 1913.geoffrey keynes, a bibliography of william blake (1921; new york: kraus reprint co., 1969) 198. see also easson and essick 8. that drawing was thought untraced until the early 1990s, when a series of pencil sketches and pen and ink wash drawings relating to commins (and other subjects) appeared on the market.martin butlin, “two newly identified sketches for thomas commins’s an elegy and further rediscovered drawings of the 1780s,” blake 26.1 (summer 1992): 21-26, and “two newly identified sketches for thomas commins’s an elegy: a postscript,” blake 27.2 (fall 1993): 42-44. in his account of these drawings, butlin identifies a sheet that includes a “summarily executed” oval composition (illus. 3) corresponding “closely to” blake’s frontispiece (illus. 5) as a candidate for the work in the possession of messrs. robson in 1913.butlin, “a postscript” 43-44. the newly discovered drawing is a larger, more detailed rendering of two of the three figures from the oval sketch. the watermark and chain lines are the same in both, suggesting that these two drawings were sketched on the same batch of paper around the same time, or may have been part of the same sheet when originally sketched. 3. (top) sketches for thomas commins’s “an elegy,” c. 1786, verso. pencil on laid paper, 30.7 x 46 cm. reproduced with the kind permission of robert n. essick. (bottom) enlarged detail of the verso. this composition was drawn within an oval frame over an earlier design of a figure that is inverted in this image. the looseness of the pencil lines, the partially delineated figures, and the landscape suggest that blake worked quickly as he developed his ideas for the frontispiece. within the frame, he depicts the outlines of the father, mother, and child that we see in the published engraving (illus. 5). to the left, the father is stepping from a boat with arms extended to greet his wife and child on the shoreline. at this stage of development, blake was still working on the positioning of the father’s arms, with three different placements, and, unlike in the engraving, the father’s left leg extends beyond the prow of the boat. the figures on the right occupy a similarly proximate compositional arrangement to the engraving, with the child’s right arm raised and right foot extending forward. the mother is slightly less defined than the child, with head, torso, and legs loosely drawn. the darker pencil on her extended left foot, like that of the child’s foot and head, suggests that blake had a clear idea of where each figure would be situated within the composition and had yet to work out details such as clothing, hair, and, in the case of the mother, arm positions. 4. study of two figures for the frontispiece to thomas commins’s “an elegy, set to music,” c. 1786. pencil on laid paper, 27 x 20.5 cm. reproduced with the permission of the owner. with this drawing, blake has developed the positioning, arm gestures, and clothing of the mother and child. to the left is the lightly sketched outline of the father’s head and arms, which extend above the child’s head. below the mother and child, blake has sketched the outline of the shore. he has used firm pencil lines to delineate the forms of the mother and child, with looser and lighter lines depicting clothing and hair. like the compositional arrangement in the engraving, the child is situated beside, yet slightly behind, the mother. we see evidence of pentimenti in the positions of the mother’s limbs, particularly evident with the two different positions of the left hand and extended left foot. the position of the toes on the mother’s foot, including the prominent gap between the big toe and the index toe, is similar to the engraving. while the more detailed figures of the mother and child are closer to the engraving, there are some differences here in the mother’s hair and dress, which billows out behind her, and the child’s bent right leg, revealing that blake made revisions in either another drawing, now untraced, or during the engraving process. this newly discovered drawing was probably executed after the oval sketch (illus. 3). 5. thomas commins, an elegy, set to music, 1786, frontispiece, colored. the color in this print was probably added later. reproduced with the kind permission of robert n. essick. for an uncolored impression, see <https://​www.​themorgan.​org/​collection/​william-​blakes-​world/​4>. commins was the “organist of penzance, cornwall,” according to the pamphlet; anne home hunter, the author of the “elegy,” is not mentioned in the pamphlet.hunter was a member of the bluestockings, hosted and attended salons, and counted hester thrale, elizabeth carter, and elizabeth montagu as friends. at these salons, she developed a reputation for composing lyrics set to music. in the early 1790s, haydn composed settings of several of her poems, most famously with his six original canzonettas (1794). for hunter’s “elegy,” see poems, by mrs. john hunter (london: printed for t. payne, mews gate, by t. bensley, 1802) 91. see also jane m. oppenheimer, “anne home hunter and her friends,” journal of the history of medicine and allied sciences 1.3 (july 1946): 434-45, the odnb entry, and caroline grigson, the life and poems of anne hunter: haydn’s tuneful voice (liverpool: liverpool university press, 2009). the inscription below the leafy oval frame (“w. blake delt. & sculpt.”) indicates that blake was responsible for the original design and the engraving. the design illustrates the third stanza of the “elegy,” inscribed beneath the oval: the shatter’d bark from adverse winds rest in this peaceful haven finds and when the storms of life are past hope drops her anchor here at last hunter’s verse is separated by a serpentine flourish that anticipates similar interlinear devices in blake’s illuminated books.blake regularly deployed these spiral motifs vertically and horizontally, often as vegetative tendrils that border or separate his relief-etched text. for vertical examples, see “my pretty rose tree” and “ah! sun-flower,” visions of the daughters of albion pl. 8, and jerusalem pls. 27, 52, 71, 77, and 90. for horizontal examples, see the marriage of heaven and hell pl. 22, milton pls. 6, 9, and 27, and the ghost of abel pl. 1. given his extensive use of this motif in his later work, it is possible that he was responsible for the decorative flourish on the commins frontispiece, along with the lettering of the signature, hunter’s verse, and the imprint. the design follows the compositional arrangement we see in both preparatory drawings (illus. 3 and 4). for the engraving, blake altered the position of the man’s foot, which is placed on the prow, and added the left leg of the child. he created the oval with two leaves and filled out the scene with details of the boat, including the arm, fluke, and line of the anchor, and the addition of clouds, trees, sky, horizon, and water. manuscripts autograph letter, blake to linnell, postmarked 2 july 1826. james s. jaffe rare books, apr. cat., #3 ($225,000). sold to robert n. essick via windle (for a reduced price). one page, small quarto, 16.5 x 20.3 cm., edges uncut, verso addressed by blake in black ink and with original postal markings. transcribed in gilchrist ([1863] 1: 350-51; [1880] 1: 393-94) and erdman (e 778). this letter was previously auctioned in 1989; see the 1989 sales review, blake 24.1 (summer 1990). see illus. 6. 6. letter from blake to linnell, 2 july 1826. reproduced with the kind permission of robert n. essick. there are some minor differences in the gilchrist and erdman transcriptions of the letter, including punctuation, line breaks, and spelling. a revised transcription that preserves blake’s lineation is as follows: my dearest friend this sudden cold weather has cut up all my hopes by the roots. every one who knows of our intended flight into your delightful country . concur in saying do not venture till summer appears again. i also feel myself weaker than i was aware. being not able as yet to sat [sic] up longer than six hours at a time & also feel the cold too much to dare venture beyond my present precincts —​ my heartiest thanks for your care in my accomodation & the trouble you will yet have with me but i get better & stronger every day tho weaker in muscle & bone than i supposed. —​ as to pleasantness of prospect it is all pleasant prospect at north end. mrs hards i should like as well as any —​ but think of the expense & how it may be spared & never mind appearances i intend to bring with me besides our necessary change of apparel. only my book of drawings from dante & one plate shut up in the book. all will go very well in the coach which at present would be a rumble i fear i could not go thro. so that i conclude another week must pass before i dare venture upon what i ardently desire the seeing you with your happy family once again & that for a longer period than i had ever hoped in my health—​ full hoursi am dear sir yours most gratefully william blake this is one of a number of letters that refer to linnell’s attempts to relocate the blakes to hampstead or 6 cirencester place, fitzroy square. blake’s deteriorating health meant that he was not always able to visit linnell in hampstead, let alone “venture” far from fountain court, so linnell proposed that the blakes instead lodge at cirencester place. “mrs hards” appears to be the “m.rs hard” mentioned by linnell in the ivimy manuscripts; she was his neighbor in hampstead, whom he lodged with in june 1822 (br[2] 754n). in stranger from paradise, bentley follows gilchrist’s and erdman’s mistranscription of “mrs hurds” for “mrs hards”, identifying her as linnell’s housekeeper at the cirencester place residence.g. e. bentley, jr., the stranger from paradise: a biography of william blake (new haven: yale university press, 2001) 433, 515. after blake’s death, catherine briefly moved to cirencester place until spring 1828 (br[2] 754). the “plate” that blake mentions was likely one of the dante engravings after his watercolors. receipt signed by blake, 5 july 1805, to thomas butts for £5.7s. purchased by the university of victoria library from windle. previously listed in windle’s apr. 2023 cat. for the new york book fair ($150,000); see the 2023 sales review, blake 57.4 (spring 2024). for earlier sales and comments, see the 2019 sales review, blake 53.4 (spring 2020), and 2022 sales review, blake 56.4 (spring 2023). separate plates and plates in series “chaucers canterbury pilgrims,” c. 1820–​23. fm, 28 mar., #322, 4th state (of 5), apparently a few small nicks to extremities, printer’s creases visible in the lower-right quadrant, framed (£6000). windle to private collector, 5th (final) state ($15,000). for states, see sp xvi. “the idle laundress,” after george morland, 1788. anderson and garland, 25 apr., #12, together with “industrious cottager,” both framed and colored (£480). see sp xxx-xxxi. “industrious cottager,” after george morland, 1788. see “the idle laundress,” above. “mrs q,” after françois huet villiers, 1820. grosvenor prints, two impressions from the collection of c. a. lennox-boyd, acquired by windle nov. and sold to a private collector (price not disclosed). these impressions are 1a and 2f as listed in sp xlii. impression 1a has signatures and imprint but lacks the title. see corrections in the appendix, below. “robin hood & clorinda,” after j. meheux, 1783. campbell fine art, proof before signatures and title (and probably all lettering) printed in black ink on a leaf of laid paper trimmed to a circle with a diameter of 24.5 cm., acquired by robert n. essick in oct. see sp xxiv, this impression not recorded. see illus. 7 and corrections in the appendix, below. 7. “robin hood & clorinda,” engraved by blake after j. meheux, 1783. reproduced with the kind permission of robert n. essick. printed in black ink on laid paper that has been trimmed in a circle. part of the platemark appears on the right and left sides of the image. for information on meheux, see vincent carretta, “blake’s meheux?,” blake 31.3 (winter 1997–​98): 84. letterpress books with engravings by and after blake ariosto, orlando furioso. william george online auctions, 17 jan., #17, 1783 ed., 5 vols., including vol. 3 with blake’s frontispiece, illus. (price not disclosed). galerie du louvre, canada, 9 mar., #20, blake’s frontispiece only, glued on cardboard (passed). pba, 25 july, #191, 1799 ed., 5 vols., 3rd state of blake’s plate, illus. (passed). blair, the grave. fm, 11 jan., #142, 1808 quarto, containing modern bookplate of w. & p. j. kupfer, illus. (£600). fm, 28 mar., #318 (same lot as hayley, life of cowper ; see below), “1813” [1870] ed., illus. (£500); #321, 1808 quarto, illus. (£900); #326, “1813” [1870] ed., original blind-stamped black cloth, illus. (£320). eb, 2 may, 1808 ed., bound in dark-brown calf, ribbed gilt-decorated spine, panels tooled in blind, gilt-lettered green morocco spine label, illus. ($1800). fm, 23 may, #145, [1870] portfolio of plates only, illus. (£320). fh, 7 june, #129, 1808 quarto, illus. ($476). eb, 20 aug., [1870] portfolio of plates only ($299). cheffins, 10 oct., #299, “1813” [1870] ed. (£140). eb, 16 oct., 1808 ed., illus. (£599.99). cw, 27 nov., #78, 1808 quarto, brown staining on five plates, illus. (£120). fm, 28 nov., #266, “1813” [1870] ed., marginal staining, illus. (£170). eb, 17 dec., 1808 ed., original boards ($2999). windle to private collector, 1808 folio, untrimmed copy ($9750). windle to private collector, 1813 folio, containing signature of horace scudder, dated may 1864 ($9750). boydell’s graphic illustrations … of shakspeare, c. 1803. dw, 6 mar., #147, 90 plates, no mention of blake’s plate, illus. (£1400). catullus, poems, 1795. eb, 20 may, 2 vols., scuffed leather boards, illus. (offered for $600). cumberland, an attempt to describe hafod, 1796. windle to private collector ($4500). darwin. dw, 7 mar., #554, the botanic garden, 2 vols., 1st ed. of part 1, 1791, 2nd ed. of part 2, 1790, with darwin, zoonomia, 2 vols., 1796, illus. (£260); #558, the botanic garden, 2 parts in 1 vol., 1st ed. of part 1, 1791, 4th ed. of part 2, 1794, with darwin, phytologia, 1800 (passed). pba, 4 apr., #117, the botanic garden, 2 parts in 1 vol., 1st ed. of part 1, 1791, 3rd ed. of part 2, 1791, illus. (passed); same copy, 25 july, #224 (passed). eb, 9 apr., poetical works, 1806, vol. 1 only, lacking covers, illus. ($295). eb, apr., poetical works, 1806, 3 vols., with some of the non-blake plates colored, each vol. containing the armorial bookplate of michael pepper, illus. (£1750). mallams, 22 may, #511, the botanic garden, 2 parts in 1 vol., 1795 general title page, presumably 3rd ed. of part 1, 1795, ed. of part 2 not specified, boards loose, illus. (£480). pba, 25 july, #225, the botanic garden, 2 parts in 1 vol., 3rd ed. of part 1, 1795, 3rd ed. of part 2, 1791, illus. ($375). dw, 11 sept., #89, the botanic garden, 2 parts in 1 vol., 1st ed. of part 1, 1791, 1st ed. of part 2, 1789, illus. (£260). eb, 16 oct., the botanic garden, 4th ed., 1799, vol. 1 only, illus. ($168.50). eb, 20 oct., the botanic garden, 2 parts in 1 vol., ed. of part 1 not specified, 1st ed. of part 2, 1789, illus. (£850). bubb kuyper, 20 nov., #2089, the botanic garden, 4th ed., 1799, illus. (€130). pba, 21 nov., #27, the botanic garden, 2 parts in 1 vol., 1st ed. of part 1, 1791, 3rd ed. of part 2, 1791, illus. ($281.25). flaxman, hesiod designs, 1817. pba, 25 july, #227, quarter calf, paper label, illus. ($187.50). new england book auctions, 22 oct., #146, illus. ($40). flaxman, iliad, 1805. eb, 3 june, extensive foxing, containing blake’s plates, illus. (offered for $225). gay, fables, 1793. quinn’s auction galleries, 26 mar., #27, 2 vols. in 1, illus. ($100); #28, 2 vols. in 1, illus. ($150). pba, 4 apr., #69, 2 vols., illus. ($250). rug life auctions, 23 apr., #64, 2 vols. in 1, half calf with marbled boards, illus. (passed); same copy, relisted may-dec. (passed). bhl, 7 june, #72, 2 vols., contemporary red straight-grained morocco gilt, illus. (£1024). fm, 13 june, #118, 2 vols., illus. (£400). bonhams, new york, 15-25 june, #139, 2 vols., illus. ($768). dw, 24 july, #346, 2 vols., illus. (passed); another copy, 11 sept., #34 (£200). potter & potter, 26 oct., #325, illus. ($390). pba, 21 nov., #275, 2 vols., bayntun binding, illus. ($687.50). hayley, ballads, 1805. fm, 28 mar., #319, bound with gessner, the death of abel, trans. mary collyer, illus. (£400). hayley, life of cowper, 1803–​04. fm, 28 mar., #318 (same lot as blair, the grave ; see above), 4 vols. in 3, including the 1806 supplement, with the 2nd state (of 4) of the weatherhouse plate, illus. (£500). auctioneum, 8 may, #102, 3 vols., including the 2nd state of the weatherhouse plate (2: 415) misbound vertically, illus. (£240). pba, 25 july, #265 (passed). for the four states of the weatherhouse plate, see cb 88-89. hayley, life of romney, 1809. mellors & kirk, 6 feb., #14, containing the armorial bookplate of john bolton (1756–​1837), merchant and slave trader and owner, illus. (£45). hayley, triumphs of temper, 1803. eb, 29 apr., illus. (£500). hogarth, works. windle to private collector, blake’s plate only, 3rd state (of 7) ($500). hunter, historical journal, 1793. eb, 6 feb., calf binding with marbled boards, scuffed and worn, illus. ($1600). australian book auctions, 21 aug., #16, contemporary binding with cracked hinges, illus. (aud 3200). michael treloar antiquarian booksellers, 9 dec., #81, full morocco binding, extensively decorated in gilt, illus. (aud 850). josephus, works. eb, 8 nov., apparently missing the title page (passed). according to the vendor, the copy was printed by c. cooke, so it is probably the d or e issue. see bb 586-87. lavater, aphorisms, 1794. eb, 6 feb., loose boards and detached frontispiece, illus. (£99.99). lavater, essays on physiognomy, 1789–​98. dw, 19 june, #307, 3 vols., front board of vol. 3 nearly cracked and nearly detached, illus. (£300). malkin, a father’s memoirs, 1806. fm, 28 mar., #320, illus. (£350). mora, meditaciones poéticas, 1826. bogota auctions, 25 jan., #176 (cop 15,000,000). remember me!, 1826. fm, 28 mar., #325, foxing and water staining, including blake’s plate, lightly foxed, illus. (£1800). ritson, select collection of english songs, 1783. bassenge auctions, 16 apr., #575, 3 vols., illus. (passed). salzmann, elements of morality, 1805. eb, 1 dec., vol. 1 only, illus. (£115 or nearest offer); same copy, 11 dec. (£85 or nearest offer). shakespeare, dramatic works, 1802. fh, 7 june, #282, 9 vols., 91 plates, no mention of blake’s plate, illus. ($2159). fm, 18 july, #60, 9 vols., 96 plates, no mention of blake’s plate, illus. (£800). shakespeare, plays, 1805. fh, 14 nov., #184, 10 vols., including blake’s plates, illus. ($1300). stedman, narrative, uncolored copies. fm, 28 mar., #323, 1813 ed., 2 vols. in 1, contemporary ink signature and extensive notes on the author to front free endpaper, bookplate of william monson, illus. (£1000). alde auctions, 16 apr., #184, 1806 ed., 2 vols., illus. (€900). eb (aardvark rare books), 7 aug., 1813 ed., 2 vols., illus. ($3000). virgil, pastorals. fm, 28 mar., #324, 1821 ed., rubbed and scuffed, rebacked, spines ruled in gilt with blue morocco labels, corners repaired, illus. (£5500). fh, 14 nov., #259, 2nd ed., 1814, extra illustrated with blake’s woodcuts, inscribed by thornton on the front flyleaf “presented by the author to the rev: dr. goodall as a testimony of respect, esteem & gratitude”, illus. ($6500). fh, 5 dec., #28, 1821 ed., from the collection of justin schiller ($7500). whitaker, the seraph, 1818–​28. eb, 23 apr., 2 vols. ($154.14). the title page for vol. 2 contains the inscription “drawn by the late w. blake esqr. r.a.” wit’s magazine. fm, 28 mar., #316, seventeen issues in 2 vols., including blake’s plates, illus. (£420). young, night thoughts, 1797. bonhams skinner, 22 jan., #1, nineteenth-century black pebble-grain morocco, top edge gilt, rebacked (price not disclosed). fm, 28 mar., #317, letterpress “explanation” leaf tipped into blank leaf following title page, 1874 prospectus for a reproduction set of original watercolors bound at the end, bookplate of william t. moore, illus. (£2800). pba, 4 apr., #67, rare 1st state of the second title page inserted into illustrations to young’s “night thoughts” (cambridge, ma: fogg museum of art, 1927), illus. ($350). this is not a prepublication proof since the state appears in a few copies of the 1797 night thoughts. interesting blakeana john quincy, pharmacopœia officinalis & extemporanea; or, a complete english dispensatory, london, 1733. purchased by the university of victoria library from windle (price not disclosed). possibly a copy owned by blake. see illus. 2 and its caption in the 2000 sales review, blake 34.4 (spring 2001). an album of materials compiled by caroline tulk, daughter of charles augustus tulk (1786–​1849), including six miniatures attributed to samuel prout and three drawings after flaxman’s designs for hesiod pl. 15 (“the evil race”) and the odyssey pls. 7 (“penelope’s dream”) and 16 (“ulysses at the table of circe”). cw, 14 may, #185 (together with an unrelated album) (passed). this is a different album from the one sold at cheffins on 13 oct. 2022; see the 2022 sales review, blake 56.4 (spring 2023). george cumberland, jr., [views in spain and portugal], c. 1818. toovey’s, 24 apr., #3064 (£180). one of only thirty copies, printed on whatman paper, comprising ten soft-ground etched plates by the son of blake’s friend george cumberland. the views were taken during the peninsular war. cumberland jr. exhibited at the royal academy in 1816–​18. in 1823 he reworked these images and added a further seven, which were published by william nicol in an edition of 100. death of john flaxman, 1826. commemorative medal by a. j. stothard after e. h. baily. noonans mayfair, 9 may, #135 (£150). blake, songs of innocence and of experience, london: w. pickering and w. newberry, 1839. windle to private collector, original pebbled plum cloth, upper cover lettered in gilt (partly worn away), enclosed in a modern protective box ($17,000). alexander gilchrist, life of william blake (1st ed. 1863, 2nd ed. 1880). quinn’s auction galleries, 26 mar., #4, 1880 ed., 2 vols., illus. ($80). eb, 2 may, 1880 ed., 2 vols. ($587). fm, 5 july, #126, 1880 ed., 2 vols. (£340). dw, 11 sept., #397, 1863 ed., 2 vols., illus. (£420). fm, 31 oct., #234, 1863 ed., 2 vols., illus. (passed). works by william blake, 1876. pba, 8 feb., #10, a rare colored copy, illus. ($5625). william muir, facsimile of blake’s little tom the sailor, 1886. fm, 28 mar., #328, a few small spots and light soiling, some creases from folding and across the lower-right corner of the lower illustration, short tear and traces of mounting tape to verso of left edge (£260). william muir, facsimile of blake’s milton, 1886. manhattan rare book company, online cat., formerly the copy of the collector john quinn (1870–​1924) ($9000). e. j. ellis and w. b. yeats, works, 1893. pba, 25 july, #223, 3 vols. ($875). swann, 24 oct., #195, 3 vols., with inscriptions by ellis’s widow: “this is my husband & mine copy & give it with kind / memory of my dear husband to you & f[?] / dr. völker” and “to our own selves from william blake” ($3000). another copy, windle to private collector, 3 vols., original green cloth ($13,700). this copy is unique as four of the facsimile illuminated books (urizen, ahania, europe, and milton) are colored in ways that correspond to the originals colored by blake and catherine. a manuscript note in pencil at the front of vol. 3 states: “edward shaw—​the coloured pages have been specially tinted for this volume. complete and with the pages 3, 8*, 17, & 32 not in index which follows the ‘death of abel’ [sic].”shaw owned several blake works, including songs of innocence copy j (bb 407) and pl. 3 from for the sexes (bb 204). his collection was auctioned at sl, 29-31 july 1925 (bb 668). the colorist (possibly a muir family member or friend) appears to have been familiar with blake’s original coloring and may have seen originals of the four books or at least the muir facsimiles. leonard baskin, head of william blake (after life mask), 1955. fh, 5 dec., #22, from the collection of justin schiller ($3493). leonard baskin, wood engravings of blake’s “auguries of innocence,” northampton, ma: gehenna press, 1959. windle to private collector ($1195). baskin is recognized as one of the greatest american artists of the twentieth century; ted hughes was a close friend. the beggar’s opera by hogarth and blake, 1965. john nicholson’s, 4 june, #32 (passed). fm, 31 oct., #230 (£140). maurice sendak, poems from william blake’s “songs of innocence,” 1967. eb, 21 aug. (£750). fh, 5 dec., #223, with an inscription by sendak: “for mrs. kane—​all superb best wishes! i’m feeling fine—​& am spending my time happily & slowly illustrating another little bear book—​feels like old times! almost. wishing you a marvelous new year! and love to dear martha—​maurice sendak” ($1397). another copy, windle to private collector ($4250). trianon press, facsimile of blake’s the song of los, 1975. windle to private collector ($1750). the wood engravings of william blake for thornton’s virgil, 1821, 1977. seventeen wood engravings on japanese hosho paper, reprinted by iain bain and david chambers from the original woodblocks in the british museum. fm, 21 nov., #374, #127 of 150 sets (£2800). william blake’s watercolour inventions in illustration of “the grave” by robert blair, ed. with essays and commentary by martin butlin and an essay on the poem by morton d. paley, lavenham, suffolk: william blake trust, 2009. windle to private collector ($5950). blake’s circle and followers works are listed under artists’ names in the following order: paintings and drawings sold in groups, single paintings and drawings, letters and manuscripts, separate plates, book illustrations. basire, james engravings between 1770 and 1780 “man in christmas sound, tierra del fuego,” after william hodges, 1777. cheffins, 18 sept., #142 (£130). this print was published in james cook, a voyage towards the south pole (london: strahan and cadell, 1777). richard gough, sepulchral monuments, in great britain, 1786–​96. cheffins, 10 oct., #123, 2 vols. in 5 (£220). as an apprentice, blake made a series of preparatory drawings of the tombs and effigies in westminster abbey. according to malkin, he engraved some of these drawings, which were published in gough’s sepulchral monuments. for blake’s apprenticeship engravings, see cb 115-20. flaxman, john drawings and manuscripts see also flaxman under letterpress books with engravings by and after blake. athena attempts to prevent hercules from murdering iphtius, c. 1790. pen and ink and wash on laid paper, 35 x 44 cm., titled and dated on the verso in an unknown hand. waddington’s, 12 dec., #41 (cad 11,250). this drawing was part of the collection of christopher powney, who was a dealer in, among other things, flaxman drawings. classical relief, n.d. pen and gray ink on paper, 17.5 x 25.5 cm., signed lower right. olympia auctions, 2 oct., #74, together with a pair of designs by biagio rebecca (£3200). the drawing contains three panels of designs; the central panel is a variant of the preliminary design for the iliad (1805) pl. 1, engraved by blake. design for a monument: possibly the duke of dorset, c. 1815. pen and ink and wash, 18.5 x 15.7 cm. lly, paper monuments: designs for sculpture in britain, 1720–​1820 exhibition, apr.-june 2024. the drawing depicts “a marble monument, crowned with a triangular pediment, with acroteria at the corners and containing a roundel with a ducal coronet framed by laurel leaves. the central part … contains two mourning female figures clutching an urn.” design for the monument of george ellis, 1818. pen and ink and wash, 14.5 x 11.3 cm. lly, paper monuments: designs for sculpture in britain, 1720–​1820 exhibition, apr.-june 2024. the flaxman account book now at columbia university reveals that the monument was ordered for ellis—​a poet, antiquary, and mp—​on 18 sept. 1818 and erected on 6 july 1820 at sunninghill, berkshire. hercules, 1797. pen and ink on paper, 32 x 22 cm., signed and dated “j. flaxman, 1797”. reeman dansie, 19 jan., #9 (£250). life studies for the nelson monument, st. paul’s cathedral (recto), study of a veiled woman (verso), c. 1807. pencil on paper, 17 x 20.7 cm. lly, paper monuments: designs for sculpture in britain, 1720–​1820 exhibition, apr.-june 2024. flaxman was commissioned in 1807 to execute a monument to commemorate nelson. this drawing “shows him experimenting with the pose of the younge[r] of the two midshipmen” who appear on the finished monument. lord mansfield’s monument, westminster abbey, c. 1801. pencil and brown wash, 27.9 x 21.6 cm., signed and inscribed on the recto “lord mansfield’s monument. westminster abbey. j. flaxman ra.”, inscribed in pencil on the verso “ld mansfield’s monument / westminster abbey / flaxman ra”. lly, paper monuments: designs for sculpture in britain, 1720–​1820 exhibition, apr.-june 2024. autograph receipt, 13 mar. 1784. one p., with the date and inscription “received of sir john sebright five guineas the remainder of miss. sebright’s statue a bust of mercury &c in full”. international autograph auctions, 24 sept., #887 (€90). see also the 2023 sales review, blake 57.4 (spring 2024). fuseli, henry drawings a captive woman, c. 1781. black chalks on buff-colored paper, 45.9 x 31.5 cm., stamped on verso “baroness norths collection / of drawings by h fuseli esq.” lly, 4 nov. (price on request). linnell, john early drawings, paintings, and graphics a collection of drawings. sl, 4 july, #274 (£15,600). these drawings were the property of the late mrs. hugh linnell (1938–​2023) and comprise a linnell self-portrait (1815); an 1819 portrait of james linnell (1759–​1836), the artist’s father; three drawings of workmen in russell square, bloomsbury (1806); and a study of collins’s farm, hampstead. six watercolor sketches of contemporary figures mounted in a single frame, variously inscribed, with one signed and dated 1841. lawrences, bletchingley, 30 jan., #767 (£520). two drawings: a woman collecting water below a wooden bridge, 1858. pencil with white chalk on paper, 35 x 24.5 cm., signed lower left, inscribed lower right “near heavitree devon 1858”. a fisherman casting in a woodland pond, n.d. pencil on paper, no dimensions given. bearnes hampton & littlewood, 17 july, #605 (£90). two paintings: eel pie house, twickenham, 1806. oil on board, 16.5 x 25.5 cm., inscribed on the verso “eel pye house, twickenham / 1806 / by john linnell”. the willow, 1806. oil on board, 25.5 x 16.5 cm., inscribed on the verso “study from nature / by john linnell / 1806”. sl, 4 july, #273 (£18,000). driving cattle at sunset, n.d. oil on paper, 21.3 x 33.4 cm. sl, 4 july, #271 (£3120). full-length portrait of a lady in a black dress with her small dog in a parlour, 1844. oil on canvas, 92.7 x 71.1 cm., signed and dated lower left “j linnell f. 1844”. nadeau’s auction gallery, 27 apr., #267 ($2750). hay cart with rainbow, n.d. oil on panel, 46.5 x 31 cm., signed lower left “j linnell”. bhl, 13 mar., #12 (passed). james thomas linnell, n.d. watercolor and pen, 25 x 20 cm., signed “john linnell fecit” and inscribed on the verso “james thos. linnell’s given to him by his father john linnell 1879”. dawson auctioneers, 25 jan., #96 (£5500). reminiscent of the famous miniature on ivory of some of the linnell children, the “little ancients”: the favourite, a group, with portraits of the artist’s children, as it was titled when linnell showed it at the royal academy in 1825. james thomas was linnell’s second son; he became a successful landscape artist, exhibiting at the ra from 1850 to 1888. mrs. robert hudleston with her children, robert and annette, 1838. watercolor and colored chalks on paper, 46.5 x 59 cm., signed and dated “j. linnell fc 1838”. bellmans, 28 mar., #1257 (passed); 16 oct., #1070 (passed). previously sold cl, 12 apr. 1994, #29 (£2185); see the 1994 sales review, blake 28.4 (spring 1995): 135. portrait of arthur heywood, 1842. charcoal and white chalk on paper, 57 x 44 cm., signed lower left “j. linnell 1842”. busby, 7 nov., #752 (£45). portrait of william russell, n.d. pencil and colored chalks on brown paper, 52 x 41 cm. elstob auctions, 11 sept., #599 (£140). studies of a herdsman, 1820. black and white chalk on blue-green wove paper, 27 x 34.9 cm., inscribed and dated in black ink, bottom right, “j. linnell cirenr place 1820”. lly, recent acquisitions 2024 cat., pp. 44-45. the drawing consists of two studies of a herdsman leaning on a crook or stick. study of a girl reading, n.d. pencil on paper, 19 x 14 cm., signed lower right “j. linnell”. sworders, 28 aug., #352 (£100). study of miss bogle, 1820. pencil, 22 x 17 cm., signed and dated “march 21 1820”. dawson auctioneers, 25 jan., #91 (£400). twilight, n.d. oil on board, 14 x 11 cm. sl, 4 july, #272 (£31,200). this painting was the property of the late mrs. hugh linnell. it was exhibited (no. 50) at the linnell centennial exhibition shown at the fitzwilliam museum and at the yale center for british art, 1982–​83. it may relate to linnell’s journal entry for mar. 1819: “small picture of twilight 5 x 4 (tiny sketch showing trees and crescent moon). upright and low horizon”.sl cat. entry, following john linnell: a centennial exhibition, selected and catalogued by katharine crouan (cambridge: cambridge university press and fitzwilliam museum, 1982) 19. if so, he executed this work less than a year after he first met blake. untitled landscape with a group of figures and a dog, n.d. oil on canvas, 61 x 91 cm., signed lower left “j linnell”. rago arts and auction center, 10 may, #176 (passed); 14 nov., #162 ($2400). the woodcutters, n.d. oil on board, 32 x 36 cm., signed lower right. dore & rees, 21 feb., #68 (£2100). exhibited at the samuel palmer and john linnell exhibition for the reigate centenary, july-aug. 1963. [ michael angelo’s frescoes in the sistine chapel ], 1833–​35. engravings. doyle, new york, 1 may, #33, illus. ($640). the album was originally issued in parts. “the plates are based on a set of original drawings that had been in the collection first of sir peter lely, then sir joshua reynolds, and subsequently samuel rogers, who gave linnell permission to produce these prints.” palmer, samuel drawings, paintings, and graphics eventide, 1841. pencil, watercolor, and body color with gum arabic on artist’s board, 20 x 43 cm., signed and dated lower right “s. palmer 1841”. cl, 4 dec., #231 (£22,680). see lister #364. a landscape at sunset; a cloud study; a landscape, n.d. pencil and watercolor on paper, 9.5 x 19 cm., somewhat discolored, watercolor has faded, pencil notes run along the bottom regarding details of the sketches, original label for colnaghi & co. gorringe’s, 12 mar., #208 (£5000). formerly in the collection of a. h. palmer. la vocatella near corpo di cava, italy, datable to 1838. pencil and watercolor with scratching on paper, 26.7 x 37.8 cm. bhl, 3 july, #56 (passed). previously sold cl, 10 july 2012, #147, illus. (£13,750), and sl, 23 sept. 2021, #148 (£11,340); see the 2012 sales review, blake 46.4 (spring 2013). another view of la vocatella by palmer (lister #311) is in the collection of the graves gallery, sheffield; for another (lister #392), see the 2023 sales review, blake 57.4 (spring 2024). four etchings from eclogues of virgil, 1883. millea bros., 15 oct., #1182 ($550). “the bellman,” 1879. roseberys, 9 july, #240, 4th state (of 7) (£236). swann, 17 oct., #125, 5th state, signed in pencil, lower left ($7500). “christmas (folding the last sheep),” 1850. swann, 17 oct., #123, 3rd state (of 5) ($4600). “the early ploughman,” c. 1861. cw, 17 jan., #176, 5th state (of 9) (£440). “the herdsman’s cottage (sunset),” 1850. dw, 16 oct., #224, 2nd (final) state, with printed initials “sp” lower left indicating that this state of the print was first published in the portfolio (1872) (£360). “the sleeping shepherd,” 1857. roseberys, 4 sept., #4, 4th (final) state, signed in pencil (passed); same impression, 21 nov., #1 (£1968). “the weary ploughman,” 1858. swann, 17 oct., #124, 5th state (of 8) ($1375). eclogues of virgil (1st ed. 1883, 2nd ed. 1884). bearnes hampton & littlewood, 14 may, #64, 1884 ed., illus. (passed); another copy, 29 oct., #85 (£350). mellors & kirk, 20 sept., #261, 1883 ed., illus. (£500). etchings for the art-union of london by the etching club, 1872. bhl, 22-31 jan., #122 (£704). includes palmer’s “the morning of life.” richmond, george drawings and paintings portrait of a gentleman, 1853. black, white, and colored chalks on paper, 59.8 x 46.5 cm., signed lower left “george richmond delit 1853”. roseberys, 9 july, #212 (£446). a similar drawing by richmond of william benson, dated to 1855, sold cl, 16 june 2015, #34 (£4500). portrait of a gentleman in blue, n.d. blue, black, white, and red chalks on buff paper, 55.8 x 42 cm. sloan street auctions, 23 oct., #240 (£400). portrait of a young boy, 1846. pencil and watercolor, 41 x 30 cm., signed and dated lower left “geor. richmond del.t 1846”. bearnes hampton & littlewood, 16 apr., #852 (£700). portrait of a young lady, n.d. pencil and colored chalks on paper, 27 x 18 cm., unsigned. david duggleby, 21 june, #180 (£2600). it has been speculated that the subject of the portrait is charlotte bronte. portrait of hugh seymour tremenheere, n.d. black, white, and red chalks on canvas, 44 x 35.5 cm. roseberys, 9 july, #211 (£656). portrait of mr. ormroid, n.d. black, white, and colored chalks on paper, 58.5 x 44.2 cm., inscribed lower left “mr. ormroid / study for pictures / gr”. roseberys, 20 nov., #176 (£340). previously offered cl, 23 apr. 1974, #155. study after a portrait by parmigianino, n.d. pencil on paper, 25 x 18 cm., initialed lower right. bamfords, 10 oct., #293 (£50). study of a woman’s hand, n.d. pencil and crayon on paper, 15 x 24 cm. clarke’s, 12 july, #222 (£140). the same work was included in a group of richmond drawings sold cl, 18 july 2012; see the 2012 sales review, blake 46.4 (spring 2013). appendix: new information on blake’s engravings listed below are substantive additions or corrections to essick, the separate plates of william blake: a catalogue (1983). xxiv: “robin hood & clorinda.” for a proof before letters (a previously unrecorded impression), see illus. 7, above. xlii: “mrs q,” impression 1a. this impression was originally listed as a proof before title and imprint (p. 191); it has signatures and imprint, lacking only the title. “seen in my visions”: klüver form-constant visual hallucinations in william blake’s paintings and illuminated books “seen in my visions”: klüver form-constant visual hallucinations in william blake’s paintings and illuminated books by david worrall david worrall (david.worrall@ntu.ac.uk) is emeritus professor of english at nottingham trent university. he is editor of the urizen books (1995), and (with steve clark) coeditor of historicizing blake (1994), blake in the nineties (1999), and blake, nation and empire (2006). he was principal investigator (2004–​06), with keri davies, on the ahrc project that helped uncover blake’s moravian heritage and (with nancy jiwon cho) on a charity-funded project (2010–​12) identifying dorothy gott, the prophetic author who—​like the blakes—​attended the 1789 swedenborg conference. he has published book chapters and journal articles on blake, including, most recently, the section on the illuminated books in sarah haggarty, ed., william blake in context (2019). this essay introduces a novel method for assigning the incidence of klüver form-constants, one type of visual hallucination, to their occurrence in blake’s visual art. it also outlines a specific neurophysiology for some of the events that blake referred to as “visions.” in short, i will argue that blake’s paintings, including the designs in the illuminated books, suggest that he experienced klüver form-constant visual hallucinations beginning no later than 1793 and possibly as early as c. 1780. these entoptic percepts were first described and classified in 1926 by the biological psychologist heinrich klüver (1897–​1979).heinrich klüver, “mescal visions and eidetic vision,” american journal of psychology 37 (1926): 502-15; william a. hunt, “heinrich klüver: 1897–​1979,” american journal of psychology 93 (1980): 159-61. klüver form-constants have neural correlates. they would have appeared to blake, with his eyes open or closed, as self-luminous geometric patterns on his retina. their distinctive geometric patterns enable the identification of their presence in blake’s art and allow an association to be made between their occurrence and the origins of his creative processes. form-constants were one of several visual and auditory phenomena he called “visions.” the methodology employed here, when used in conjunction with martin butlin’s catalogue raisonné and other scholarship on the materiality of blake’s art, holds out the potential of charting the incidence, prevalence, and distribution of this specific type of “visionary” creative origin in blake’s artistic output. it offers the possibility of disaggregating the neural basis of blake’s “visions” and analyzing their individual phenomenological characteristics. that blake was a “visionary” who had “visions” is a claim that he made about himself and that his contemporaries repeated; it has also become a description routinely included in the discourses of museum curators and literary critics, and in communications to the reading and gallery-going public. the idea that his “visions” had a neurophysiological origin, with an identifiable pathology and phenomenology, has not been considered. blake experienced “visions” throughout his life, although, as i argue below, their phenomenology suggests several different modalities. three data points help catalogue their childhood onset and persistence into late life. his earliest visual hallucination, recorded in 1863 as a third-party anecdote by alexander gilchrist, occurred on peckham rye, london, when he was about eight or ten years old (“sauntering along, the boy looks up, and sees a tree filled with angels, bright angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars”).g. e. bentley, jr., blake records, 2nd ed. (new haven: yale university press, 2004) [hereafter br(2)] 10, quoting gilchrist. samuel palmer’s account is simpler: “when very young blake used to go out for walks in the country & would frequently come home & describe the angels he had seen in the trees” (br[2] 10). this “vision” of bright, shimmering or glittering points of light is likely to have been migraine aura. about 7-11% of children and adolescents experience migraine, with about 25% of those having migraine with aura.a. a. gelfand, h. j. fullerton, and p. j. goadsby, “child neurology: migraine with aura in children,” neurology 75.5 (2010): e16-19; i. petrusic, v. pavlovski, d. vucinic, and j. jancic, “features of migraine aura in teenagers,” journal of headache and pain 15 (2014): 87. in 1809, when he was about fifty-two, blake wrote in a descriptive catalogue that some of the pictures were painted from the “wonderful originals seen in my visions” (e 531; my italics). less than two years before blake’s death, henry crabb robinson, visiting him at fountain court, strand, recorded how “he reverted soon to his favorite expression … my visions—.”17 dec. 1825; see br(2) 427. ignored by art historians and literary critics alike, the possibility of a neural origin for blake’s “visions” was the subject of a short but significant exchange of correspondence initiated by bristol surgeon george munro smith (1856–​1917) in 1909 in the british medical journal (bmj).george munro smith, “literary notes,” bmj 2541 (11 sept. 1909): 710, and “william blake’s drawings,” bmj 2544 (2 oct. 1909): 1012. they are not included in bentley’s blake books (1977) or blake books supplement (1995), but appear in “william blake and his circle: a checklist of publications and discoveries in 2012,” blake 47.1 (summer 2013). munro smith made an explicit connection between blake’s “visions” and migraine aura at a time when the disorder’s neural basis was only just beginning to be understood. migraine is one of several inducers of klüver-type visual hallucinations. his insight was missed by subsequent generations of scholars. blake’s imputed insanity had already become academically institutionalized, as evidenced in the 1895 verdict of richard garnett, the british museum’s keeper of printed books, that blake was “mentally warped.”colin trodd, visions of blake: william blake in the art world, 1830–​1930 (liverpool: liverpool university press, 2012) 375-78, quoting richard garnett, william blake: painter and poet (1895) 75. research parameters and methodology there are several caveats and critical parameters that need to be stated in order to avoid misunderstanding about what is (and is not) being claimed. this essay covers only one type of blake’s visual hallucinations. it is likely that he experienced several other hallucinatory types, some of which occurred in both visual and auditory modalities. the essay is confined to studying klüver form-constant visual hallucinations. these are self-luminous geometric percepts that would have appeared to blake within his visual field (both exoptic and entoptic)—​that is, with eyes open or eyes closed, whatever the level of ambient light, including complete darkness. they were percepts propagated along blake’s neural pathways, originating in the primary visual cortex (v1) and signaled to his retina. it is not claimed that “visions” were the only experiences or influences affecting blake’s creativity, his concept of self-identity, or his aesthetic preferences. there is abundant scholarship on environmental factors influencing his creativity, some of which, where relevant, is repeated here. environment, for the purposes of this essay, means all aspects of nurture and the determination of selfand social identity (for example, nativity, social and political culture, race, class, aesthetics, and religion). the perception of klüver form-constant hallucinations, as the outcome of neural networks, occurs in homo sapiens as a species, without regard to historical time or environment (although different cultural attitudes, historical and contemporary, affect its reporting). i am not aware that klüver-type visual hallucinations are physiologically different across genders. this essay has little to say about connections between blake’s neural pathways and his mind or consciousness (for example, the state of his psychological health). nevertheless, v1 is an area of cortex. the clinical neuroscientist dominic h. ffytche makes a helpful suggestion for more easily conceptualizing v1’s cognitive status: “if we use the folk terminology of a mind’s eye (the inner space in which we consciously experience visual imagery), activity in specialized visual cortex could be conceived as the eye’s mind. in the eye’s mind, visual experience becomes related to mind.”dominic h. ffytche, “the hallucinating brain: neurobiological insights into the nature of hallucinations,” hallucination: philosophy and psychology, ed. fiona macpherson and dimitris platchias (cambridge, ma: mit press, 2013) 45-63 (on 53). as ffytche states elsewhere, there is evidence of “co-localization of perceptual and non-perceptual activity within individual cortical areas.”dominic h. ffytche, “neural codes for conscious vision,” trends in cognitive sciences 6 (2002): 493-95. the essay’s working assumption is that blake incorporated klüver form-constants into his visual art by copying and creatively developing the percepts he saw in his visual field—​see (ii). klüver geometric patterns originating in v1 created a hallucinatory image directly onto his retina through retinocortical mapping.s. w. wilson, “on the retino-cortical mapping,” international journal of man-machine studies 18.4 (1983): 361-89. v1, as described in (v), is a cognitive area of cortex, “the eye’s mind,” as ffytche puts it. the physiology and phenomenology of blake’s “visions” blake’s “visions” persisted throughout his life. today they would be called hallucinations, a term not available clinically until jean étienne dominique esquirol’s des maladies mentales, considérées sous les rapports médical, hygiénique et médico-légal (paris, 1838). because blake lacked such a conceptual vocabulary, his ability to self-diagnose (or be diagnosed) and articulate his experiences was limited. that he copied his entoptic percepts, as remarked in (vi) above, should not be controversial. on account of the absence of external stimuli, hand-drawn illustrations have always played an important part in understanding the phenomenology of visual hallucinations.g. d. schott, “exploring the visual hallucinations of migraine aura: the tacit contribution of illustration,” brain 130 (2007): 1690-1703. although this essay is limited to the presence of klüver form-constants, it is important to note that this type of visual hallucination is only one modality among several that blake encountered. most are common, or reasonably common, hallucinatory phenomena, the majority with a neural foundation. that blake in midto late life experienced hypnagogicand hypnopompic-induced auditory and visual hallucinations is most clearly evidenced in jerusalem (written no earlier than 1804): “this theme calls me in sleep night after night, & ev’ry morn / awakes me at sun-rise, then i see the saviour over me / spreading his beams of love, & dictating the words of this mild song” (4.3-5, e 146). in this example, expressed through the figure of albion, hypnagogic triggers of hallucination occur in the phrase “this theme calls me in sleep night after night” and hypnopompic in “& ev’ry morn / awakes me.” even this short passage contains complexities. auditory verbal hallucinations in command mode (“this theme calls me,” “dictating the words”; my italics) sometimes indicate psychosis, but in blake’s case, in the absence of any social dysfunction, they are more likely to have been misattributed inner speech. this is congruent with the normal subvocalized inner speech that most of us practice as a cognitive aid for encountering our environment.sam wilkinson, “accounting for the phenomenology and varieties of auditory verbal hallucination within a predictive processing framework,” consciousness and cognition 30 (2014): 142-55. another possibility is that this was one of the variants of synaesthesia, a topic beyond the scope of this essay. blake hears “words,” which are specifically in grapheme mode (not hallucinations experienced as other types of sound or as colors). his seeing “the saviour over me / spreading his beams of love” may also imply a felt-presence experience, a phenomenologically distinct third modality of hallucination, in addition to visual and auditory. felt-presence hallucinations have been recorded in cases of migraine aura.klaus podoll and derek robinson, migraine art: the experience from within (berkeley: north atlantic books, 2008) 123. blake’s experience of several hallucinatory types, possibly concurrently—​as jerusalem suggests—​is consistent with a hodological model. ffytche has argued that hallucinations originate not from changed activities within specific brain areas (a brain “topology” argument) but from altered connections between brain areas (a brain “hodology” argument).dominic h. ffytche, “the hodology of hallucinations,” cortex 44 (2008): 1067-83; rowena carter and dominic h. ffytche, “on visual hallucinations and cortical networks: a trans-diagnostic review,” journal of neurology 262 (2015): 1780-90. in order to understand the physiological background and the phenomenology of blake’s visual hallucinations, it is important to set out, as far as possible, the status of his general health, particularly where this might have a bearing on his susceptibility to hallucinations, illusions, or delusions. apart from the possibility of childhood migraine (a condition that may have persisted into adulthood), indicated by the description of the peckham rye “vision,” he was in good neurological health. the clarity of his perception of klüver patterns, which form the basic building blocks of vision, suggests that he had a neurologically healthy v1. he appears to have avoided the motor and neurological damage caused by lead poisoning from pigments, despite the high probability of its presence in similarly prolific artists, such as michelangelo and blake’s contemporary goya.julio montes-santiago, “the lead-poisoned genius: saturnism in famous artists across five centuries,” the fine arts, neurology, and neuroscience: neuro-historical dimensions, progress in brain research vol. 203, ed. stanley finger, dahlia w. zaidel, françois boller, and julien bogousslavsky (amsterdam: elsevier, 2013) 223-40. bartlomiej piechowski-jozwiak and bogousslavsky consider migraine in the same volume, but their chapter, “neurological diseases in famous painters,” makes no reference to blake. dangers to watercolorists from lead and copper poisoning were understood in britain by 1784.john fothergill, “observations on disorders to which painters in water-colours are exposed,” the works of john fothergill, m.d. … with some account of his life by john coakley lettsom, 3 vols. (1784) 3: 377-81; margaret delacy, “fothergill, john (1712–​1780),” oxford dictionary of national biography (oxford: oxford university press, 2004; online ed., oct. 2007) <http://​www.​oxforddnb.​com/​view/​article/​9979>, accessed 3 march 2015. blake may have taken steps to avoid the worst dangers. a modern retropathology of his physical morbidity did not note any cognitive impairment.lane robson and joseph viscomi, “blake’s death,” blake 30.2 (fall 1996): 36-49. the astonishing manual dexterity and visual acuity of illustrations of the book of job (1826), produced by engraving (a method requiring much greater motor control than etching), evidence no decline in late life. beyond the possibility of intermittent migraine with aura, the occurrence of hallucinations in visual modalities does not imply any unusual disorder, impairment, or deterioration in blake’s normal visual field. he may have introduced measures to correct his sight for aging. seymour stocker kirkup recalled blake’s copying (the copy of) the laocoön statue at the royal academy, wearing “his spectacles up side down & he says they were made on purpose to be worn so. … reversing the spectacles assisted him, as it raised them, the convexity resting upon his nose—​he said it was better so than a double concave as they sometimes are.”br(2) 290. his eccentric appearance notwithstanding, blake was quite reasonably modifying his sight with adjustments he could easily implement. a pair of contemporary iron-framed spectacles (fitzwilliam museum, cambridge), traditionally associated with blake at the time of his death, was dispensed within a normal prescription range for correcting short sight.g. e. bentley, jr., with the assistance of keiko aoyama, “william blake and his circle: a checklist of publications and discoveries in 1995,” blake 29.4 (spring 1996): 140-41. robin hamlyn, referencing the spectacles and the close work required for engraving, suggests that blake “was ‘moderately’ myopic … his near vision was much sharper than his distance vision, so close work would have come more naturally to him.” incidentally, hamlyn provides a useful examination of the direction of natural light in the houses that blake worked in (also comparing it to light preferences among his more successful contemporaries). he notes that “during his working life blake’s studio or workroom light came from all points of the compass.”robin hamlyn, “william blake at work: ‘every thing which is in harmony,’” william blake: the painter at work, ed. joyce h. townsend and robin hamlyn (london: tate publishing, 2003) 12-39 (on 24-25). these factors reduce the possibility that his “visions” were visual illusions or delusions arising from the misinterpretation of shadows or unusual light sources. a visual delusion hypothesis was rejected no later than 1964 by nobel prize cowinner sir john eccles: “the optical reality of the visions involved no act of credence on blake’s part, because the eidetic image is actually seen. nor did he confuse his visions with the appearance of material objects.”joseph burke, “the eidetic and the borrowed image: an interpretation of blake’s theory and practice of art,” in honour of daryl lindsay: essays and studies, ed. franz philipp and june stewart (melbourne: oxford university press, 1964) 110-27 (on 116). blake would fail many modern tests for visual delusion, mainly on the grounds that he functioned normally on a day-to-day basis (no face recognition problems, for example).p. r. corlett, “delusions,” encyclopedia of human behavior, 2nd ed., ed. v. s. ramachandran (san diego: academic press, 2012) 667-73. for a wider discussion, see richard dub, “delusions, acceptances, and cognitive feelings,” philosophy and phenomenological research 94 (2017): 27-60. p. r. corlett, j. r. taylor, x. j. wang, p. c. fletcher, and j. h. krystal cite some of the more common pathologies of delusion in “toward a neurobiology of delusions,” progress in neurobiology 92 (2010): 345-69. his auditory hallucinations, including the “visionary heads” (c. 1819–​25), which were triggered by responses to speech, have pathologies beyond the scope of the present essay. of the testimonies of contemporaries as to the subjective or phenomenological nature of blake’s “visions,” perhaps the most interesting is an anecdote by the painter samuel palmer, who met blake for the first time in the early 1820s, no later than may 1824. on 11 may 1859, j. c. strange noted, “i had a lengthy discussion with mr. p. on the nature of blakes visions—​mr. p. on the whole thought they were seen as real objects by his outward eyes and as such painted.”br(2) 729. palmer gave the impression that blake’s “visions” were usually tangible “objects”; this is consonant with the nature of klüver form-constants, which are projections from v1 onto the retina and would have been “seen as real objects by his outward eyes.” palmer’s report is significant because of his close friendship with blake;g. e. bentley, jr., the stranger from paradise: a biography of william blake (new haven: yale university press, 2001) 404-09. his testimony accords with the understanding of crabb robinson, who wrote to dorothy wordsworth in 1826 that blake’s “paintings are copies of what he sees in his visions.”br(2) 437. yet it is important to realize that blake’s klüver form-constant “visions” were not passive retinal events. he says that “vision is seen by the [imaginative eye] of every one” (e 554; italics and square brackets in e, indicating a deletion), which is consistent with ffytche’s comments about the “eye’s mind” (noted in [v] above). “vision,” based on visual hallucinations propagating from v1, is a cognitive event—​or, as blake tentatively describes it, it is “imaginative,” using a term with a high cultural valency in european romanticism. as he may have suspected, without being aware of the physiological basis, it is “seen by … every one” because all members of the species homo sapiens have the same neurological wiring. klüver form-constants as noted, klüver form-constants are the percepts of a specific type of visual hallucination originating in v1. they are geometric-patterned phosphenes perceived as self-luminous entoptic hallucinations in the visual field.phosphenes (from the greek phos, light, and phainein, to show) are entoptic flashes of light propagated from v1. klüver defines four form-constant patterns: tunnel, spiral, net or lattice, and cobweb or concentric circles (see illus. 1): the author’s analysis of the hallucinatory phenomena appearing chiefly during the first stages of mescaline intoxication yielded the following form-constants: (a) grating, lattice, fretwork, filigree, honeycomb, or chessboard; (b) cobweb; (c) tunnel, funnel, alley, cone, or vessel; (d) spiral. many [hallucinatory] phenomena are, on close examination, nothing but modifications and transformations of these basic forms.heinrich klüver, “mechanisms of hallucinations,” studies in personality, ed. q. mcnemar and m. a. merrill (new york: mcgraw-hill, 1942) 175-207. these shapes occur repeatedly in blake’s paintings and in the designs to the illuminated books. 1. hallucinatory form-constants: (i) tunnel/​funnel; (ii) spiral; (iii) lattice/​honeycomb; (iv) cobweb. figure 1 in paul c. bressloff, jack d. cowan, martin golubitsky, peter j. thomas, and matthew c. wiener, “what geometric visual hallucinations tell us about the visual cortex,” neural computation 14.3 (march 2002): 473-91. © 2002, massachusetts institute of technology. bressloff et al. redrew (i), (ii), and (iii) from representations of drug-induced hallucinations by david sheridan in ronald k. siegel and murray e. jarvik, “drug-induced hallucinations in animals and man,” hallucinations: behavior, experience, and theory, ed. r. k. siegel and l. j. west (new york: john wiley & sons, 1975) 81-161. they redrew (iv) from alex patterson, a field guide to rock art symbols of the greater southwest (boulder: johnson books, 1992). there are no other patterns associated with klüver form-constants, although all four may appear, wholly or in part, in amalgamation, overlaying each other. klüver’s categories have been validated by two key sets of mathematical proof, by ermentrout and cowan (1979) and bressloff, cowan, et al. (2001).g. b. ermentrout and j. d. cowan, “a mathematical theory of visual hallucination patterns,” biological cybernetics 34 (1979): 137-50; paul c. bressloff, j. d. cowan, m. golubitsky, p. j. thomas, and m. wiener, “geometric visual hallucinations, euclidean symmetry and the functional architecture of striate cortex,” philosophical transactions of the royal society of london b: biological sciences 356 (2001): 299-330. these two studies, foundational to this essay, establish that the four form-constants have neural correlates in v1—​that is, the neural architecture of v1 is configured so as to produce those four patterns as the basic elements of vision. the enduring importance of klüver form-constants lies in their stability (on account of their occurring in only these patterns), which affords the opportunity to study the neural architecture of v1. klüver form-constant hallucinations are propagated by neural activity in v1 projecting onto the retina through retinocortical mapping (see [vi]). in normal exoptic vision, stimuli in the external visual field (a tree, a horse, etc.) are signaled from the retina to v1; in the case of klüver form-constants, the signaling of stimuli or neural activity moves in the opposite direction, propagating from v1 but perceived on the retina. as bressloff and cowan state, “any spontaneously generated or stimulus-evoked cortical activity pattern in v1 maps to a corresponding real or hallucinatory image on the retina.”paul c. bressloff and jack d. cowan, “the functional geometry of local and horizontal connections in a model of v1,” journal of physiology—​paris 97 (2003): 221-36. or, as cowan puts it, this model of exoptic and entoptic perception “treats v1 as a cortical retina.”jack d. cowan, “geometric visual hallucinations and the structure of the visual cortex,” the neuroscience of visual hallucinations, ed. daniel collerton, urs peter mosimann, and elaine perry (london: john wiley & sons ltd., 2014) 217-53 (on 228). the four klüver patterns enable v1 to process the basic contours of images that homo sapiens has most urgently needed to prioritize (v2, v3, etc.—​later visual cortex—​process less frequently encountered shapes). in this sense, v1 has had a primary evolutionary role in the development of homo sapiens. discovering the neural correlates of visual hallucination has also had a profound impact on understanding the relationship between vision and cortical function. crucially, v1’s role as cortex means that it is not just a passive signaler of percepts. this may have been something that blake was trying to grasp when he referred to the “imaginative eye.” agents inducing klüver form-constants the physiological mechanisms producing klüver geometric-pattern formations arise from inhibition and activation series in neurons on v1, with activated neurons suppressing inhibited neurons and reinforcing their own activations.h. henke, p. a. robinson, p. m. drysdale, et al., “spatiotemporal dynamics of pattern formation in the primary visual cortex and hallucinations,” biological cybernetics 101 (2009): 3-18. there are multiple agents known to bring about these hallucinations. klüver gave mescaline (which, of course, would not have been available to blake) to his volunteer subjects (and took it himself) in order to induce visual hallucinations for controlled experiments. tobacco with high concentrations of nicotine is also known to give rise to klüver-pattern hallucinations (it is not known whether blake smoked).ronald k. siegel, “hallucinations,” scientific american 237 (1977): 132-41. there are also several naturally occurring agents of induction, the most basic of which is probably digital pressure on the eyeballs (although, in this case, there are vascular as well as neural elements).christopher w. tyler, “some new entoptic phenomena,” vision research 18 (1978): 1633-39. one of the earliest records of the incidence of klüver form-constants, suggesting light deprivation as the agent, comes from the philosopher thomas hobbes (1588–​1679), who wrote that “a man shall in the dark, (though awake) have the images of lines, and angles before his eyes.”thomas hobbes, leviathan, or the matter, forme and power of a commonwealth ecclesiasticall and civill (1651) 6. light deprivation during sleep may be implicit in the hypnagogic and hypnopompic hallucinations referred to in plate 4 of jerusalem. as mentioned earlier, klüver form-constants are also a comodality of migraine aura. propagated from v1, they are perceived by the retina as networks and patterns of phosphenes, self-luminous entoptic percepts caused by the migraine’s cortical spreading depression (csd), which crosses the visual field at a rate coincident with the period of the migraine attack. the shimmering arc of the csd’s phosphenes (often referred to as fortification spectra) replicates the shape of the depression’s transit. in the words of vincent a. billock and brian h. tsou, “simple hallucinations (phosphenes and fortification auras) are linked to the klüver forms and to pattern-forming cortical mechanisms.”vincent a. billock and brian h. tsou, “elementary visual hallucinations and their relationships to neural pattern-forming mechanisms,” psychological bulletin 138 (2012): 744-74. the combination of migraine aura with “chequered” or lattice klüver form-constants was observed in forty-six of 397 paintings made by anonymous artists who drew their migraine percepts in surveys conducted in the 1980s.podoll and robinson 176, 201-12, table 7.5. light flickering at a frequency above 3hz (just enough to feel uncomfortable) induces a variety of phosphenes, including klüver-type percepts. when twenty modern german graphic-design students were subjected to flickering light, they identified a large range of entoptic percepts, including ripples, tunnels, suns, rasters, honeycombs, cracks, drains, bows, clouds, spots, stars, crosses, spirals, and wheels, some of which seem to include klüver elements.carsten allefeld, peter pütz, kristina kastner, and jiří wackermann, “flicker-light induced visual phenomena: frequency dependence and specificity of whole percepts and percept features,” consciousness and cognition 20 (2011): 1344-62, figure 9. although it is unlikely that blake would have encountered the research, flickering-light hallucinations, together with hallucinations caused by the close work required by printmaking, were the subject of important investigations in the late 1810s. this is the groundbreaking work of the bohemian anatomist and physiologist jan evangelista purkinje (purkinĕ) (1787–​1869).p. schweitzer, “profiles in cardiology: jan evangelista purkinje (purkinĕ),” clinical cardiology 14 (1991): 85-86; andrzej grzybowski and krzysztof pietrzak, “jan evangelista purkynje (1787–​1869),” journal of neurology 261 (2014): 2048-50. in his doctoral dissertation at the university of prague in 1819, republished in 1823, purkinje recorded the first scientific observations of flicker-light and electrically induced visual hallucinations.jan purkinje, beobachtungen und versuche zur physiologie der sinne (observations and experiments investigating the physiology of senses) (prague, 1823). an english translation is included in nicholas j. wade and josef brožek, purkinje’s vision: the dawning of neuroscience (mahwah, nj: lawrence erlbaum associates, 2001). subsequent references to purkinje use wade and brožek’s edition. his experiments produced patterned hallucinatory phenomena (although apparently not klüver-type percepts) cognate with phosphenes or photopsias.ffytche, “the hodology of hallucinations.” sometimes they were induced by digital pressure on the eyes; at other times waving his spread-out fingers in front of his eyes while looking at the sun resulted in flickering light. other experiments involved looking closely and fixedly at the parallel printed lines produced by copperplate etchings and engravings (“parallellinienfeld in einem kupferstiche”). this is how purkinje describes one experiment: xv. for some time i have noted an unclear glimmering when i looked steadily at a field of parallel lines precisely engraved on a copper plate [print]. when i move the page forward or backward or around a central point, the vision reveals blurry streaks and the individual lines become undistinguishable. when the lines are horizontal, the streaks are also horizontal but somewhat irregular. the vertical lines remain vertical, whereas in a field of concentric lines the shadowy segments move in a circle. for a long time i was unable to interpret the phenomenon.wade and brožek 87. purkinje’s “unclear glimmering,” “blurry streaks,” and “shadowy segments mov[ing] in a circle” were flicker-light-induced afterimages caused by “mov[ing] the page forward or backward or around a central point.” it is possible that blake, while etching or engraving, slowly rotated the “engraver’s boss,” the sand-filled leather pillow that helped embed the copperplates as he worked on them, altering their orientation to his line of sight (although it seems unlikely that he did this with any rapidity).david drakard and paul holdway, spode: transfer printed ware 1784–​1833, rev. ed. (woodbridge, suffolk: antique collectors’ club, 2002) 45. although the single illustrative etching that accompanies purkinje’s book (based on his sketches of the percepts) does not show klüver shapes, billock and tsou remind us of “the blurry distinction between phosphenes and klüver forms”—​that is, phosphenes scaled up into clusters appear to adopt the same symmetries of shape as form-constants.vincent a. billock and brian h. tsou, “neural interactions between flicker-induced self-organized visual hallucinations and physical stimuli,” proceedings of the national academy of sciences 104 (2007): 8490-95; “elementary visual hallucinations and their relationships to neural pattern-forming mechanisms,” psychological bulletin 138 (2012): 744-74. purkinje deliberately set out to induce hallucinations, but we cannot rule out the possibility that, on occasion, blake hallucinated some types of percept during his professional practice as an engraver. in such a case, apart from the peckham rye episode of his childhood, this might date his hallucinatory experiences back to 1772 and the beginning of his apprenticeship to james basire. example 1: jacob’s ladder, c. 1805 those with even a cursory knowledge of the range of blake’s images will probably know his pen and watercolor drawing jacob’s dream (c. 1805, british museum) (illus. 2), exhibited first at the royal academy in 1808.blake inscribed “genesis xxviii c.12v”, which reads: “and he dreamed, and behold a ladder set up on the earth, and the top of it reached to heaven: and behold the angels of god ascending and descending on it”; martin butlin, the paintings and drawings of william blake, 2 vols. (new haven: yale university press, 1981) [hereafter butlin] #438. a year after the royal academy exhibition (where it remained unsold), blake retitled it jacob’s ladder, a “drawing,” and showed it at his private exhibition off oxford street in 1809. at some point, probably during his lifetime, it was acquired by his long-term patron thomas butts. its status as one of blake’s rare royal academy pictures, its place in the 1809 exhibition, and the reliability of its provenance make it a significant composition. 2. william blake, jacob’s ladder (c. 1805). 39.8 x 30.6 cm. british museum. 1949,1112.2. photo: © the trustees of the british museum. all rights reserved. the picture has attracted limited critical attention, although a recent essay by jonathan roberts (see below) is an exception. it is not discussed in david bindman’s blake as an artist (1977) or christopher heppner’s reading blake’s designs (1995), still the two most substantial monographs on blake’s visual art. perhaps the most pertinent comment is that of anthony blunt, who describes it as “a complete novelty in the iconography of this subject.”anthony blunt, the art of william blake (new york: columbia university press, 1959) 37. as the subject is blake’s visualization of a biblical figure’s dream, it would be difficult to argue that it is anything other than a representation of an experience known to lack external stimuli. jacob’s ladder is dominated by an image of a symmetrical spiral staircase, apparently made of stone, on which are seen “the angels of god ascending and descending.” the stairs rise in at least two vertical revolutions. near the top, they disappear into a circle radiating spoke-like bars of light, representing the entrance into heaven. the two compositional structures in the picture are a spiral and a funnel or tunnel, conforming to two of the four form-constants described by klüver. there are good neurophysiological reasons why a spiral form was adopted by blake for this work. the perception of the orientation of optical objects, principally through their edges or contours, is a crucial function of cortex. spirals, lattices, and cobwebs have distinct edges and contours, facilitating fluent visual perception. the process of decoding these signals by the cortex is only beginning to be understood, offering the theoretical prospect of being able to “read out the detailed contents of a person’s mental state.”y. kamitani and f. tong, “decoding the visual subject and subjective contents of the human brain,” nature neuroscience 8 (2005): 679-85. the discrimination of spiral and radial forms, two of klüver’s form-constants, is foundational to visual perception on account of their structural role in v1. recent research has detected a radial orientation bias in early visual cortex, including v1—​that is, radial edges (such as those represented by the spokes of light in jacob’s ladder) are processed by the cortex more fluently than other shapes. one paper claims that there is “evidence for an enhanced sensitivity to radial orientations in human perception,” arguing that the evidence is so “robust” that “a radial bias may be neurally fundamental.”yuka sasaki, reza rajimehr, byoung woo kim, leeland b. ekstrom, wim vanduffel, and roger b. h. tootell, “the radial bias: a different slant on visual orientation sensitivity in human and nonhuman primate,” neuron 51 (2006): 661-70. such a neurophysiology appears to be consistent with ffytche’s observation that there is “co-localization of perceptual and non-perceptual activity within individual cortical areas” (see [v] above). i believe that the choice of dominant klüver-pattern spiral and radial structures in jacob’s ladder provides a good demonstration of v1’s cognitive role and implies that blake had insight into his visual hallucinations. spiral forms are important in blake’s art and poetry.for spirals derived from religious and scientific texts that blake might have known, see marsha newman, “‘milton’s track’ revisited: visual analogues to blake’s vortex in the ‘law edition’ of boehme,” interdisciplinary literary studies 5.2 (2004): 73-93. as part of an explanation of “the hermeneutic of his [blake’s] christological ‘fourfold vision,’” jonathan roberts offers an elegant discussion of jacob’s ladder by setting it in the context of poems that blake sent to friends upon his arrival in felpham in september 1800. he makes an important connection between imagery in “to my dear friend mrs anna flaxman” and the spiral structure of jacob’s ladder.jonathan roberts, “william blake’s visionary landscape near felpham,” blake 47.2 (fall 2013): 39 pars. blake refers to “sweet felpham,” where “the ladder of angels descends thro the air / on the turret its spiral does softly descend / thro’ the village then winds at my cot i[t] does end” (e 709; my italics). the emphasis on the descent of a kind of spiral divine creativity in this poetic image provides an important correlate for the role of the klüver form-constant patterns at what was a significant moment in blake’s artistic life. for the first time, jacob’s ladder and one of blake’s poetic images can reliably be associated with the cognitive outcome of a specific type of visual hallucination (klüver spiral form-constants), or what blake later called, in an attempt to describe the experience of v1’s cognitive capacity, a “vision … seen by the [imaginative eye].” example 2: milton’s mysterious dream, c. 1816–​20 no later than 1816–​20 and his watercolor milton’s mysterious dream (morgan library, butlin #543.11) (illus. 3), blake had identified, named, and discriminated three out of the four form-constant hallucinatory types. 3. william blake, milton’s mysterious dream (c. 1816–​20) (see enlargement). 16.3 x 12.4 cm. morgan library & museum. 1949.4:11. purchased with the assistance of the fellows with the special support of mrs. landon k. thorne and mr. paul mellon. image courtesy of the william blake archive. in a brief commentary written to accompany the picture, he refers to “scrolls & nets & webs” (e 685); these are the spiral, lattice, and cobweb percepts defined by klüver a hundred years later. there is no conceivably relevant textual origin for scrolls, nets, or webs in milton’s poetic corpus.the only matches are: “the lord shall write it in a scrowle,” psalm 87; “rove without rein, till in the amorous net,” paradise lost 11.586; “part good, part bad, of bad the longer scrowle,” paradise lost 12.336; “hearts after them tangl’d in amorous nets,” paradise regained 2.162. for webs or its synonyms, there are no matches. scrolls always end in a spiral, even if it is truncated. it is easy to see that, within the visual grammar that blake used throughout his work, scrolls and spirals fitted in with convenient iconographies he could frequently redeploy. of course, the spiral’s appearance in milton’s mysterious dream is consistent with blake’s lifetime assertion of his experience of “visions” and how they formed the basis of his “visionary” art. the naming of three klüver form-constants is a significant contribution toward understanding the cultural history of visual hallucinations, confirming that blake had cognitive insight into those events and was able to provide an accurate nomenclature and taxonomy. milton’s mysterious dream is the eleventh in a set of twelve particularly magnificent watercolors that blake produced to illustrate milton’s poems l’ allegro and il penseroso (1645). according to his commentary, the milton passage he chose to illustrate is “entice the dewy featherd sleep / and let some strange mysterous dream / wave on his wings in airy stream.” as with jacob’s ladder, his selection of a “strange mysterous dream” may suggest that his klüver-type percepts were the outcome of hypnagogic or hypnopompic hallucinations, similar to those he refers to in jerusalem. the l’ allegro and il penseroso watercolors demonstrate blake’s art at the height of his creativity. they are of special interest because they relate to milton, the poet whose dominant poetic presence had already been the subject of the illuminated book milton (1804–​11). some of the drawings bear the watermark “m & j lay 1816”, indicating the earliest possible date for their execution (assuming, as looks stylistically likely, that blake painted them as a group). their provenance is fully traceable: they were acquired and probably commissioned by thomas butts, sold in 1853 as one lot by his son thomas, and then passed through several hands before arriving at the morgan in 1949. it is conceivable that butts requested the unusual set of descriptive commentaries (also held at the morgan), written in blake’s hand on a separate piece of paper for each picture in the series (e 682-86). critical opinion has not been particularly helpful in determining either the compositional contents of milton’s mysterious dream or its meaning. butlin lists the already considerable body of critical literature on the set by 1981, commenting that it contains “contradictory” interpretations.the most detailed treatment after 1981 is j. m. q. davies, blake’s milton designs: the dynamics of meaning (west cornwall, ct: locust hill press, 1993) 113-52. in relation to the details considered here, john e. grant obliquely notices the netting; bette charlene werner suggests the presence of a wider—​if vaguer—​symbolism (“the waters and nets of materiality”); and stephen c. behrendt, offering one of the more nuanced perspectives on the series, simply characterizes milton’s mysterious dream as “far more intense, far less conventional” than the rest.john e. grant, “blake’s designs for l’ allegro and il penseroso, with special attention to l’ allegro 1, ‘mirth and her companions,’” blake 4.4 (spring 1971): 117-34; bette charlene werner, blake’s vision of the poetry of milton (lewisburg: bucknell university press, 1986) 162; stephen c. behrendt, “bright pilgrimage: william blake’s designs for l’ allegro and il penseroso,” milton studies 8 (1975): 123-47. it is blake’s short additional descriptive commentary that is so remarkable: “milton sleeping on a bank. sleep descending with a strange mysterious dream upon his wings of scrolls & nets & webs unfolded by spirits in the air & in the brook around milton are six spirits or fairies hovering on the air with instruments of music” (e 685; my italics). in the picture, winged sleep swoops around the supine and sleeping milton, bearing on its wings “scrolls & nets & webs.” the nets, klüver’s lattice percepts, are the hardest to discern, but their meshes (highlighted by blake in black ink) reach from two small soaring figures to a single huddled figure in the lower section of the picture, all borne on the back of sleep’s right wing.the nets in blake’s pictorial narrative (which departs in this detail from il penseroso) seem to be associated with figures living in the “brook” and “waters murmuring” mentioned in milton’s poem. on the same wing are scrolls, klüver’s spiral percepts. they are represented as the ends of what seems to be a parchment, which is associated with a robed figure who touches it with both hands, its folds enclosing an embracing man and woman. scrolled ends of garments also feature in the group encircled in spokes of light at the top of the picture. the third and final klüver pattern in this composition, a lattice or cobweb form-constant borne on the back of sleep’s left wing, dominates the upper portion of the design. describing it as a “rainbow sphere,” j. m. q. davies notes that “it is a highly unusual motif.”davies 146. its status as apparently a depiction of radiant light is, of course, consistent with the self-luminous qualities of klüver percepts. instead of being a conventional symbol of radiance, it forms a set of very distinct concentric circles, differentiated by color but noticeably radially segmented. this fits blake’s description of “webs.” it is also a reminder, as with the spokes of light in jacob’s ladder, that “a radial bias may be neurally fundamental” to visual perception.sasaki, rajimehr, et al. that milton’s mysterious dream contains three out of the four klüver form-constants brings it into phenomenological unity with the details described in blake’s commentary. these three elements in the painting can now be assigned with a precise neurophysiology based on the traces in the composition of the exact type of visual hallucination that blake had experienced in one of the “visions” that inspired it. indeed, blake’s text could hardly be less ambiguous: “sleep” has “a strange mysterious dream upon” its “wings,” explicitly made up of “scrolls & nets & webs,” percepts that blake had experienced no later than c. 1805 (as suggested by jacob’s ladder) and now, apparently, associated with milton. although it is not certain that the image of milton depicted here refers to the period after he lost his sight (he was completely blind by the age of about forty-four), blake may have surmised that klüver’s patterns could be perceived by the blind (in the same way that milton’s contemporary, hobbes, knew that they were visible in the dark).a. e. krill, h. j. alpert, and a. m. ostfield, “effects of a hallucinogenic agent in totally blind subjects,” archives of opthalmology 69 (1963): 180-85. one might speculate that self-luminous hallucinations held a special fascination for an artist who held the blind milton in such high esteem. whether this is the case or not, “scrolls & nets & webs” make little other narrative sense in what was clearly a complex response to il penseroso except for their phenomenological unity within the range of the klüver hallucinations that likely inspired blake’s design—​that is, klüver spiral, lattice, and cobweb percepts are deposited in the picture as distinct markers of one of blake’s “visions,” perhaps the true medium through which he felt continuing affinity with milton. example 3: the illuminated books (up to 1794) because the illuminated books were enterprises exploiting blake’s printmaking skills for the admiration of affluent, socially and politically progressive bibliophiles,rebekah bliss (1749–​1819), who may have bought copies of songs and for children: the gates of paradise by the end of the 1790s, was affluent enough to have acquired an extensive library of fine printed books and manuscripts; see keri davies, “mrs. bliss: a blake collector of 1794,” blake in the nineties, ed. steve clark and david worrall (basingstoke: macmillan, 1999) 212-30. it is perhaps not surprising that klüver form-constant patterns occur frequently in works less open to scrutiny than those that might have been exhibited in domestic or public spaces. they proliferate to such a degree that the discussion here is limited to just three of the works up to 1794. that blake used recurrent patterns in the illuminated books is not a new idea. in 1978, w. j. t. mitchell observed that “abstract linear forms such as the vortex or the circle … are repeated so systematically that they suggest a kind of pantomimic body-language, a repertoire of motifs.”w. j. t. mitchell, blake’s composite art: a study of the illuminated poetry (princeton: princeton university press, 1978) 37. the vortex and circle (although they are not assigned by mitchell to neurological causes) approximate to two of the four klüver form-constants. of course, sometimes they appear decoratively, although in such cases they may still be aesthetically selected echoes of entoptic percepts first seen in the “visions” that blake claimed as integral to his art. until c. 2015 it was possible to quickly collect a range of results for klüver-type shapes in the illuminated books by means of the visual motif search engine in the william blake archive. the feature is currently slightly less useful for this type of exercise because it appears not to gather tagged hits into totals in quite the same way as it did when the original research was done for this article. its principal virtue for the present study was that the archive had independently deliberated and agreed descriptors to match the images they decided blake’s works presented. by checking a box, a user could find out how often, for example, spiral shapes had been tagged in blake’s visual art and collate them with the image search function. the results are both complicated and, perhaps, surprising. the number of distinct spirals logged by the archive, when restricted to the illuminated books produced between c. 1788 and 1795, is sixty-seven.blake archive image search, 6 nov. 2015. the definition of these features (as well as the three other form-constant shapes), together with their locations in blake’s work, is not my determination, but rests on the editorial decisions of the archive. in america a prophecy (1793) there are at least eight spirals, each potentially capable of being designated as a klüver form-constant. perhaps the most striking is on plate 7 (illus. 4), which has a cone-shaped, spiraling serpent, standing on its tail, and also includes an apparent revolutionary tribunal condemning a hunched-up human figure to be forced through the tunnel of the serpent’s folds. 4. william blake, america copy e, bentley plate 7 [erdman plate 5] (composed and printed 1793). 23.3 x 16.6 cm. library of congress, lessing j. rosenwald collection. catalogue no. 1804. image courtesy of the william blake archive. the judicial ensemble and serpent spiral are fairly baffling. they possibly allude to political fractures in british society and national identity that occurred as a result of the american war of independence; equally, they may refer to the terror of the french revolution. reprising critical debate up to 1995 about the plate’s meaning, detlef dörrbecker rightly remarks on its “reduction of the conventional pictorial pattern which has given rise to the contradictory interpretations in modern blake criticism.” in this particular detail, a “tormented figure is plunging headlong into a funnel or vortex that is formed by the seven coils … of a hissing serpent that rises from the flames.”detlef w. dörrbecker, ed., william blake: the continental prophecies (london: william blake trust/​tate gallery, 1995) 55-57 (commentary on this plate). dörrbecker’s description of “coils” in a “funnel or vortex” shape invokes two of klüver’s form-constants. quoting verbatim from reports in his survey sample, klüver writes that “a third important form-constant is the spiral. … ‘there appears a brown spiral, a wide band, revolving madly around its vertical axis.’”heinrich klüver, mescal and mechanisms of hallucinations (chicago: university of chicago press, 1966) 23 (klüver’s italics). this account is certainly consistent with blake’s unusual image in plate 7. the human figure, described by dörrbecker as “plunging headlong into a funnel or vortex,” corresponds with what klüver (incorporating feedback from his volunteers) describes as a second form-constant … designated by terms [such] as tunnel, funnel, alley, cone or vessel. to illustrate: “sometimes i seemed to be gazing into a vast hollow revolving vessel …”; “the field of vision is similar to the interior of a cone the vertex of which is lying in the center of the field directly before the eyes (or vice versa)” … ; [a] “vision of a tunnel in copper-brown color … lines seem to converge in the infinite”; … “deep beautiful perspectives … growing into the infinite …”; … “i was standing in a very long and wide tunnel.”klüver, mescal and mechanisms of hallucinations 23 (klüver’s italics). in contrast to the complexities of plate 7, america plate 4 (illus. 5) has merely a spiral-shaped piece of foliage (with its vegetable roots visible) edging the left-hand side of the page. of course, it may be argued that while the spiral on plate 7 is meaningful, the other is simply decorative, but whatever the intention, the basic shape is dominant—​that is, a limited range of motifs (here spiral and funnel forms) are visually modulated or repeated within the work. 5. william blake, america copy e, bentley plate 4 [erdman plate 2] (composed and printed 1793). 23.8 x 16.6 cm. library of congress, lessing j. rosenwald collection. catalogue no. 1804. image courtesy of the william blake archive. europe a prophecy (1794) presents another series of klüver form-constants. although blake lived over a hundred years before klüver, form-constants are the products of neural activity common to homo sapiens as a species (see [iv] above). the neurophysiology of their triggers might be experienced differently, but their geometric patterning is identical. their presence is so clear in europe that it is best to identify them briefly before offering a discussion. predating klüver’s work, munro smith’s 1909 bmj article drew attention to the phenomenological similarities of migraine aura fortification spectra, which are known to include form-constants, and the frontispiece, “the ancient of days.” while i do not claim that klüver patterns necessarily influenced “the ancient of days,” i will argue that the title page and plate 13 are based upon spiral form-constants, and plate 15 on cobweb form-constants. consonant with munro smith’s claim about “the ancient of days,” the known phenomenological variants of migraine aura would certainly provide a plausible neurophysiological basis for the klüver form-constants in europe. the blake archive tagged nine europe plates for spiral and web features and their synonyms.blake archive image search, 8 nov. 2015. some, such as the calligraphic flourish at the end of the “y” of “prophecy” (europe plate 6), appear functionally decorative, although, of course, this is because their decorative role reproduces the klüver patterns of blake’s original visual hallucination. the incidence of decorative features suggests that the cognitive input experienced through v1 was processed by blake both during and after what can now be recognized as a “vision.” the first klüver form-constant is the title page (plate 2) (illus. 6), which is dominated by a single motif of a coiled serpent. only a piece of foliage in the foreground and the suggestion of low rising hills in the background provide other visual elements in a starkness of composition best seen in copy h, the uncolored houghton library copy.in most copies, this plate is preceded by “the ancient of days,” which acts as a frontispiece. in copy h, however, a “fairy” plate (plate 3) starts the book, followed by the title page, which is then followed by “the ancient of days.” as to the iconographic tradition in which this plate might be said to stand, dörrbecker concludes that “not just in blake, but in british late eighteenth-century culture in general the meaning of all serpent imagery was nothing if not ambiguous.”for commentary on this plate, see dörrbecker 168-74. 6. william blake, europe copy h, plate 2 [erdman plate ii] (composed 1794, printed 1795). 23.9 x 17.3 cm. houghton library, harvard university. typ 6500.41h. image courtesy of the william blake archive. the explanation for its meaning comes in the next example, plate 13 (illus. 7), which shows a spiral-shaped serpent, standing on its tail, taking up the entire left-hand margin of the page and ending with a crested head radiating fire.for commentary on this plate, see dörrbecker 194-96. 7. william blake, europe copy h, plate 13 [erdman plate 10] (composed 1794, printed 1795). 23.4 x 16.7 cm. houghton library, harvard university. typ 6500.41h. image courtesy of the william blake archive. plate 13 is concerned with a loss of revelation replaced through the intermedial presence of an “ancient temple serpent-form’d” (e 63). the spiral form-constant, accessed by blake through one of his “visions,” may in this guise indicate a distortion or corruption of his own founding hallucinatory revelation. yet, as dörrbecker hints, much of the serpent symbolism in blake is a communicative dead end. in an analogous fashion, humankind’s synaesthesia-like powers of perception are exalted in there is no natural religion (series b), but then described as oppressively narrowed in the [first] book of urizen when blake wants to comment on a different set of contexts. the serpent’s connection to the biblical story of satan and its pervasiveness among the cultures of the eastern mediterranean, as jacob bryant discovered, made it a cumbersome symbol. another form-constant in europe is not only much clearer, it would be taken up by blake with some vigor, and rather more successfully, as a continuum of images and symbols referring to concepts at the heart of his cultural and ideological positions about contemporary society. pictured across much of plate 15 (illus. 8) is a large cobweb, fairly naturalistically rendered, accompanied by at least five spiders and several other insects. 8. william blake, europe copy h, plate 15 [erdman plate 12] (composed 1794, printed 1795). 23.4 x 17.3 cm. houghton library, harvard university. typ 6500.41h. image courtesy of the william blake archive. this is the cobweb hallucinatory percept identified by klüver, which, as discussed above, is also a prominent feature of milton’s mysterious dream. “web shapes” and “spiderwebs” motifs show up as eight examples defined and categorized in klaus podoll and derek robinson’s migraine art, with their case history of sources identifying such percepts dating as far back as w. r. gowers’s paper of 1895.podoll and robinson 201-04, figs. 242, 244, 245. the reference is to w. r. gowers, “subjective visual sensations,” transactions of the ophthalmological societies of the united kingdom 15 (1895): 1-38. like the editorial team of the blake archive, podoll and robinson were independent assessors of the images presented to them. cobwebs are percepts associated in some forms of epileptic hallucination with a neural disturbance of the cortex (although, as noted above, there is no evidence that blake had this disorder).p. tass, “cortical pattern formation during visual hallucinations,” journal of biological physics 21 (1995): 177-210. in the late twentieth century, klüver’s lattice and cobweb form-constants proved particularly difficult to correlate mathematically with v1; cowan states that it took him and his colleagues from 1979 to 1993 to work out the mathematics of their geometry.cowan, “geometric visual hallucinations and the structure of the visual cortex.” one of the more striking things about europe plate 15 is blake’s willingness to give dramatic articulation to the cobweb percept. in addition to the web with spiders, a reclining, huddled human figure, hands together in prayer or entreaty and tightly bound or wrapped in a net, is clearly pictured at the bottom right of the plate. the uncolored (save for touches of gray wash) copy h demonstrates that these shapes were made as relief-etched outlines on the plate and not added later (although in most copies of europe blake strengthened with ink the lines binding the netted human). as a decorative echo, the lattices of a fragmentary cobweb with spider form an interlinear design on plate 16. this detail is probably meant simply to enrich the depiction of the jailed and manacled figure in the prison scene, which may allude to the suspension of habeas corpus between may 1794 and july 1795. the presence in plate 15 of both the cobweb and the netted human provides a significant example of blake’s creative use of hallucinatory percepts. moreover, these designs have a bearing on a specific strand of his poetics. their incidence marks a distinction between the neural correlates of visual hallucination and the role of the cognitive environment of v1. “the net of religion” develops as a particularly effective metaphor in blake’s work, graspable as a symbol of repression yet also directly linked to a characteristic visual percept experienced in his “visions.” from cobweb to net, the allusive symbolism is easily capable of extension. as referenced above, klüver points out that the four form-constants may appear in amalgamation, occurring as “modifications and transformations of these basic forms.” indeed, as one traces blake’s development of these images from their original klüver patterns, it is not hard to see how adapting the net of his lattice form-constant percept solved the expressive problem of following up the spiral images that america had explored. the serpent-like meaning of the spiral form-constants that blake labored with elsewhere had become, as dörrbecker argues, confusingly embedded in eighteenth-century mythological lore, and not readily translatable into commonplace activities. nets of religion, on the other hand, are much more memorable, on account of their association with snares and traps. for the first time, it is possible to trace how some of blake’s “visions,” in their original visual hallucinatory modes, promoted the development of a particular poetics; in this example, they are strikingly linked to his perspective on contemporary religion. this strand of imagery appears to reach a heightened stage of evolution and cultural valency in the poetic narrative of the [first] book of urizen (1794). enitharmon’s strategy in europe (and european history) to “spread nets in every secret path” (5.2-10, e 62) is implicit in blake’s use of the cobweb and lattice form-constants in that book, but in urizen blake provides a much more challenging direction in projecting an alternative to the genesis story of creation. the incorporation of klüver form-constants into its poetics makes urizen not only an alternative narrative but also one that alludes to an alternative basis for revelation. for blake, these alternatives were validated by his experience of visual hallucinations, or what he preferred to call “my visions.” urizen ends with a created material world held captive, self-enslaved by “narrowing perceptions,” as memorably pictured on plate 28. although one cannot be sure of priority, the cobweb and netted figure of europe plate 15 appear to have developed into the “spiders web” and “net of religion” of urizen. these provide fascinating examples of blake’s cognitive processing of klüver’s hallucinatory percepts and their transformation into poetry. it is worth tracing how he attaches poetic meaning to these entoptic visual images: [6.] a cold shadow follow’d behind him [urizen] like a spiders web, moist, cold, & dim drawing out from his sorrowing soul the dungeon-like heaven dividing. where ever the footsteps of urizen walk’d over the cities in sorrow. 7. till a web dark & cold, throughout all the tormented element stretch’d from the sorrows of urizens soul and the web is a female in embrio none could break the web, no wings of fire. 8. so twisted the cords, & so knotted the meshes: twisted like to the human brain 9. and all calld it, the net of religion. (25.9-22, e 82) blake’s utilization of klüver form-constants in his poetics does not celebrate visual hallucinations but, on the contrary, describes their debasement, an insight perhaps prompted by the “dark & cold” environment of wartime britain in the 1790s. in a remarkable development of the entoptic images he had experienced, the “spiders web,” a “web dark & cold,” becomes a “net” of “narrowing perceptions.”podoll and robinson treat nets as a subgroup of web forms, suggesting their close alliance within v1’s architecture (see 203-04). still retaining symmetrical stability, one percept (a klüver cobweb) changes into a “web,” or “a female in embrio,” and another (a klüver lattice) into a “net of religion.” although the visual hallucinations—​“the dark visions of los” (urizen 15.12, e 78)—​have become acculturated (gendered and assigned a religion), they maintain the integrity of their form-constant patterns. in urizen, the klüver cobweb and lattice form-constants of blake’s original “visions” are modified into their abstractions, offering a vivid example of how, in the 1790s, he developed a poetics based upon visual hallucination. what makes urizen particularly noteworthy is the sophistication with which, by 1794, blake has aligned the corruption (“the dark visions”) of klüver form-constants with the “narrowing perceptions” he experienced in the repressive atmosphere of contemporary britain. the degree of his cognitive insight into his visual hallucinations is remarkable, probably unparalleled. tracing the developmental route of his transformation of the percepts of visual hallucination into literary poetics is challenging. perhaps the most striking feature of these developing poetics, however, is their unswerving fidelity to the hallucinatory origins of blake’s “visions.” conclusion the neural correlates of klüver form-constants have been validated by ermentrout and cowan (1979) and bressloff, cowan, et al. (2001), who have successfully traced their source to v1. klüver form-constant visual hallucinations are one of several types of “visions” that blake claimed to have experienced. he would have perceived their distinctive patterns within his visual field through retinocortical mapping. their propagation from v1, an area of cortex, means that each episode was a cognitive event. the evidence presented here suggests that blake had insight into these episodes and reflected and responded to them creatively. his discrimination, categorization, and, above all, accurate naming of three of the four form-constant patterns in the commentary accompanying milton’s mysterious dream revise the history of visual hallucinations, not only because they substantially precede klüver but on account of his degree of cognitive insight into his experiences. blake’s status as a healthy, well-educated, socially integrated individual who claimed a lifelong experience of hallucinations has the potential to provide a high-value point of reference for clinicians working with disorders such as psychosis, eye disease, dementia, and parkinson’s disease.renaud jardri et al., “hallucination research: into the future, and beyond,” schizophrenia bulletin 45, supplement 1 (2019): s1-s4. i am not suggesting that the majority, or even a large fraction, of blake’s paintings and designs are founded on klüver form-constant visual hallucinations. for most of the time, and in most of his works, he was not a “visionary” artist painting from “originals seen in my visions.” nevertheless, the designs originating from klüver percepts are not trivial in number or significance. distinguishing between the form-constants and similar shapes in blake’s art is, of course, a matter of judgment. it may be that what originated as a form-constant in one of his “visions” then got used decoratively. on balance, since blake was so insistent on the role of “visions” in his creativity, their identification should take hermeneutical precedence where, as in the case of the traces of klüver visual hallucinatory patterns in his work, his “visions” can be shown to have had neural correlates. doing so necessitates honoring the origins of “visions,” something that ought to be uncontroversial for a poet who declared himself to be a “visionary.” blake’s corpus needs reevaluation, not simply to look for evidence of hallucinatory types but also to revise our understanding of his contemporary and modern reception now that his “visions” can often be attributed with neural, rather than psychotic, correlates. for example, a good case could be made that the very early watercolor an allegory of the bible (c. 1780–​85, tate britain, butlin #127) (illus. 9) is composed around klüver’s lattice and tunnel/​funnel form-constants. its curious composition of curving tracery panels, black-and-white square tiles or flagstones, and receding and approaching figures is brought into phenomenological unity by the two form-constants structuring it. the picture (without the figures, of course) readily maps over a much-reproduced drawing used as a standard reference for klüver percepts (illus. 10). 9. william blake, an allegory of the bible (c. 1780–​85). 61.5 x 34.9 cm. tate. t01128. bequeathed by miss rachel m. dyer, 1969. photo: tate. 10. david sheridan, representation of lattice-tunnel from reports of drug-induced hallucinations. figure 6 in ronald k. siegel and murray e. jarvik, “drug-induced hallucinations in animals and man,” hallucinations: behavior, experience, and theory, ed. r. k. siegel and l. j. west (new york: john wiley & sons, 1975) 81-161 (following 146). reproduced by permission of john wiley & sons; permission conveyed through copyright clearance center, inc. that blake painted from his visual hallucinations as early as c. 1780–​85 would be consistent with his first “vision,” on peckham rye, with migraine perhaps being the agent of induction and klüver percepts a comodality of the aura. as far as identifying the phenomenological characteristics of blake’s other “visions” is concerned, there are many traps for the unwary. his only written account of a “vision,” in the poem “to my friend butts i write / my first vision of light” (e 712-13), composed in october 1800 on his arrival in felpham, almost certainly describes scheerer's phenomenon. scheerer’s (or blue field entoptic) phenomenon was first reported by richard scheerer in 1924. it is essentially a vasogenic-induced perception of moving points or stars of light caused by white blood cells visible against a blue background.richard scheerer, “die entoptische sichtbarkeit der blutbewegungen im auge und ihre klinische bedeutung,” klinische monatsblätter für augenheilkunde 73 (1924): 67-107; s. h. sinclair, m. azar-cavanagh, k. a. soper, r. f. tuma, and h. n. mayrovitz, “investigation of the source of the blue field entoptic phenomenon,” investigative ophthalmology and visual science 30 (1989): 668-73. this would have been a fleeting, chance experience (blake never repeated its description) probably induced by felpham’s unfamiliar expanses of early autumn blue sky, blue sea, and smoke-free sunlight. his classification of it as a “vision” is immensely revealing of how, by 1800, he readily pathologized such events, placing them on a continuum of “visions,” both visual and auditory, that he had experienced since the incident on peckham rye. a lot has been missed over the years. a humble starting point might be to return to george munro smith’s long-forgotten correspondence with the bmj in 1909. blake and exhibitions, 2024 installation view, william blakes universum, hamburger kunsthalle. photo: christoph irrgang, hamburg. blake and exhibitions, 2024 by luisa calè luisa calè (l.cale@bbk.ac.uk) is professor of romantic and nineteenth-century literature and visual culture in the faculty of humanities and social sciences at birkbeck, university of london. she writes about practices of reading, viewing, and collecting in the romantic period. her monograph, entitled the book unbound: material cultures of reading and collecting, 1750–​1850, funded by the leverhulme trust, is forthcoming from cambridge university press. she is the exhibitions editor for blake. in 2024 blake’s work was exposed in british, european, and global settings. his role as a foundational artist in the british school was explored in two different directions in london. the rehang of tate britain included a recentering and reenvisioning of british art, including the commissioning of a mural by chris ofili and his dialogue with blake (17 april 2023–​2 june 2024).reviewed in luisa calè, “blake and exhibitions, 2023,” blake, vol. 58, no. 1, summer 2024, https://​doi.​org/​10.​47761/​biq.​366. for a contrast with blake’s previous location, adjacent to turner, see michael glover, “william blake, our contemporary,” hyperallergic, 26 sept. 2023, hyperallergic.​com/​847018/​william-​blake-​our-​contemporary-​tate-​britain. while the fitzwilliam copy of blake’s life mask was on display in the british and german instantiations of william blake’s universe, the national portrait gallery copy marked his role among old master precedents and inspirations in francis bacon: human presence. blake’s european dimensions were tested through two major initiatives: william blake’s universe explored the european roots and resonances of his work through a dialogue with german art, thanks to a partnership between the fitzwilliam museum and the hamburger kunsthalle. the exhibitions in cambridge and hamburg identified european traditions in academic training underpinning neoclassical art as an approach to the past, set blake’s continental prophecies in the revolutionary present, and captured understandings of the future by tracing a mystical vein in european romantic art with shared roots in the work of jacob böhme. the tate partnered with the reggia di venaria outside turin and chose the theme of dreams to present its collection of blakes and british romantic art in a grandiose european palace setting. a focus on the underworld featured blake within domestic and grand-tour settings in which the geological imagination is informed by folk, religious, and scientific lore. at the reggia di venaria, a section titled “satan and the underworld” displayed a range of works by blake and his contemporaries, including james barry’s miltonic “satan, sin, and death.” however, the exhibition could not include blake’s two watercolors specifically depicting that subject from paradise lost, since all loans were from the tate, which does not own blake’s versions. by contrast, satan arousing the rebel angels, illustrating paradise lost book 1, was loaned from the victoria and albert museum to document interest in the vertical axis of travel to the underworld in the louvre-lens exhibition about subterranean worlds. blake’s illustrations to john gabriel stedman’s narrative, of a five years’ expedition, against the revolted negroes of surinam (1796) continued to exercise creative, critical, and curatorial practice in 2024. after his representations of the inhuman treatment of slaves were included in reinventing the américas: construct. erase. repeat at the getty center, los angeles (23 august 2022–​8 january 2023) as part of a colonial archive of european encounters with america, this corpus was on view in the uk and germany, where approaches ranged from the use of a trigger warning about the book at the fitzwilliam to the decolonial aesthetics of self-reflection informing the display in hamburg. shanghai-born artist hu yun widened the scope of blake’s stedman compositions within the global legacies of colonial exploration in his retrospective at rockbund art museum, in a building that had formerly housed the natural history collection of the royal asiatic society. william blake’s universe curated by david bindman and esther chadwick fitzwilliam museum, cambridge 23 february–​19 may 2024 catalogue: bindman, david, and esther chadwick, editors. william blake’s universe. fitzwilliam museum/​philip wilson publishers, 2024. photo by thomas adank; reproduced by kind permission of the fitzwilliam museum. this exhibition brought the fitzwilliam blake collection into dialogue with german mysticism, documenting a shared mystical source in the corpus of jacob böhme—​evidenced by cambridge copies of the law edition illustrated by dionysius andreas freher—​and the parallel development of british and german millenarian romantic visions in the corpuses of blake, caspar david friedrich, and philipp otto runge. this comparative european approach brought into view a classical idiom rooted in the artists’ academic training in london, copenhagen, and dresden.see cat. no. 15, p. 43, for runge’s studying in copenhagen; p. 44, no. 18, for the academy in dresden. comparisons between individual works and shared themes produced bold and illuminating juxtapositions. blake’s mediated encounter with michelangelo was evidenced by a wall hang bringing together three versions of the subject of joseph of arimathea (an engraving attributed to nicolas beatrizet, and two by blake, dated 1773 and 1810–​25). on the wall at the other end of the room were versions of the laocoön as an encyclopædia plate, an engraving surrounded by blake’s aphoristic marginalia, and a drawing. the exhibition featured two copies of “albion rose,” one placed next to jacques-louis perée’s “droits de l’homme” (“rights of man”) (1795–​96) and another in dialogue with friedrich’s lebensalter (ages of life, but translated as the ages of man in the exhibition) (c. 1826).for a full review, see luisa calè, “william blake’s universe, fitzwilliam museum, 23 february–​19 may 2024; william blake’s universe, edited by david bindman and esther chadwick,” blake, vol. 58, no. 3, winter 2024–​25, https://​doi.​org/​10.​47761/​biq.​376. james s. deville, head of william blake, 1823 fitzwilliam museum, m.7-1947 catherine blake, portrait of the young william blake, c. 1830? (butlin #c3) fitzwilliam museum, pd.14-1953 john flaxman, portrait of william blake, 1804 fitzwilliam museum, 828.f.37 john linnell, william blake, 1821 fitzwilliam museum, pd.61-1950 john linnell, head and shoulders of william blake, 1820 fitzwilliam museum, pd.57-1950 john linnell, portrait of blake at hampstead, c. 1825 fitzwilliam museum, pd.58-1950 the past: antiquity and the gothic “joseph of arimathea among the rocks of albion”: first state, 1773 second state, c. 1810–​25 fitzwilliam museum, p.391-1985, p.392-1985 aminadab, called “the reposing traveller,” after michelangelo and adamo scultori, c. 1785 (butlin #170 verso) british museum, 1867,1012.205 the apotheosis of bacchus, after d’hancarville, c. 1779–​85 (butlin #174) british museum, 1867,1012.207 joseph’s brethren bowing down before him, c. 1784–​85 (butlin #155) fitzwilliam museum, 456a joseph ordering simeon to be bound, c. 1784–​85 (butlin #156) fitzwilliam museum, 456b joseph making himself known to his brethren, c. 1784–​85 (butlin #157) fitzwilliam museum, 456c “homer invoking the muse,” after flaxman, for flaxman, iliad, 1805 fitzwilliam museum “head of a damned soul,” after fuseli, c. 1789–​90 fitzwilliam museum, p.423-1985 “tornado,” after fuseli, for darwin, the botanic garden, 1795 fitzwilliam museum, p.546-1985 hyperion (“the bowman” ), late 1790s (butlin #336) fitzwilliam museum, pd.167-1985 ugolino and his sons in prison, wash drawing, c. 1780–​85 (butlin #208) hamburger kunsthalle, 1980-128 ugolino and his sons in prison, tempera, 1826–​27 (butlin #805) fitzwilliam museum, pd.5-1978 engravings for the divine comedy, 1826–27: “the circle of the corrupt officials: the devils mauling each other” “the circle of the lustful: paolo and francesca” fitzwilliam museum, p.812-r, p.810-r on homer’s poetry [and] on virgil, c. 1822 fitzwilliam museum, p.711-1985 יה & his two sons satan & adam (laocoön), c. 1826–​27 fitzwilliam museum, p.398-1985 for rees’s cyclopædia, 1820: “sculpture” (venus de medici, apollo belvedere, laocoön) “sculpture” (durga slaying mahishasura, an etruscan patera, a colossal statue at thebes, persian sculpture at persepolis, a chinese statue) fitzwilliam museum, p.579-1985, p.739-1985 free version of the laocoön, c. 1825 (butlin #681) fitzwilliam museum, pd.29-2020 the present: europe in flames america, a prophecy copy o, composed 1793, printed c. 1821: frontispiece title page “a prophecy” “the morning comes” “the terror answerd” “thus wept the angel voice” “over the hills” fitzwilliam museum, p.127-1950 (1, 2, 5, 8, 10, 12, 18) for stedman, narrative, 1796: “europe supported by africa and america,” hand colored “group imported to be sold for slaves” cambridge university library, keynes.h.4.12; british museum, 2006,0830.49 “the little black boy,” printed recto/​verso fitzwilliam museum, p.679-1985 visions of the daughters of albion copy p, composed 1793, printed c. 1818, open to the title page fitzwilliam museum, p.126-1950 the song of los copy a, composed and printed 1795: frontispiece title page king and queen on a lily los rests from his labours british museum, 1856,0209.409, 410, 413, 416 europe copy k, composed 1794, printed c. 1821, all eighteen prints on display fitzwilliam museum, p.127-1950 (19-36) “f[rench] revolution,” after ryley, for bellamy’s picturesque magazine, 1793 fitzwilliam museum, p.544-1985 death on a pale horse, c. 1800 (butlin #517) fitzwilliam museum, 765 the house of death, c. 1795 (butlin #322) fitzwilliam museum, 1769 “albion rose,” from the so-called large book of designs, 1794–​96 (butlin #262.1) british museum, 1856,0209.417 the future: spiritual renewal the soldiers casting lots for christ’s garments, 1800 (butlin #495) fitzwilliam museum, pd.30-1949 the angel of the divine presence clothing adam and eve with coats of skins, 1803 (butlin #436) fitzwilliam museum, pd.29-1949 the ascension, c. 1805–​06 (butlin #505) fitzwilliam museum, pd.32-1949 watercolors for paradise regained, c. 1816–​18, all twelve on display (butlin #544) fitzwilliam museum, pd.14-1950 to pd.25-1950 an allegory of the spiritual condition of man, 1811? (butlin #673) fitzwilliam museum, pd.27-1949 illustrations of the book of job, 1823–​26: “job and his family” “job’s evil dreams” “when the morning stars sang together” “job and his daughters” “job and his family restored to prosperity” fitzwilliam museum, p.454-1985 (2, 12, 15, 21, 22) samuel palmer, the magic apple tree, c. 1830 fitzwilliam museum, 1490 samuel palmer, coming from evening church, 1830 tate, n03697 jerusalem copy b, composed 1804–20, printed 1821, frontispiece private collection jerusalem, frontispiece, proof impression fitzwilliam museum, p.24-2018 jerusalem copy b, composed 1804–20, printed 1821: title page pl. 6, “his spectre driv’n by the starry wheels” pl. 11, “to labours mighty, with vast strength” pl. 14, “one hair nor particle of dust” pl. 25, “and there was heard a great lamenting in beulah” private collection jerusalem copy h, composed 1804–20, printed c. 1832, pl. 28, “every ornament of perfection” fitzwilliam museum, p.5054-r jerusalem, pl. 37, “and one stood forth” fitzwilliam museum, p.708-1985 jerusalem, pl. 51, vala, hyle, and skofeld fitzwilliam museum, p.709-1985 vala, hyle, and skofeld, and another figure, c. 1810 hamburger kunsthalle, 1976-258 jerusalem, pl. 100 fitzwilliam museum, p.710-1985 “albion rose,” second state british museum, 1894,0612.27 胡昀: 远山 / ​hu yun: mount analogue rockbund art museum, shanghai 23 march–​25 august 2024 all rockbund art museum installation views: hu yun, mount analogue, 23 march–​25 august 2024. © rockbund art museum, shanghai. photo: yan tao. untitled ( from the narrative of a five years expedition) (2016–​17), a creative intervention on blake’s illustrations to stedman’s narrative by shanghai-born artist hu yun, featured in the first chapter, “china journal,” of the project “complex geographies” at the rockbund art museum, “which in 1933 served as the location for china’s first natural history museum—​the royal asiatic society museum.”www.​rockbundartmuseum.​org/​exhibition/​hu-​yun-​mount-​analogue. the exhibition was titled after rené daumal’s le mont analogue (1952), originally subtitled in translation “an authentic narrative,” then retranslated under the title mount analogue: a tale of non-euclidian and symbolically authentic mountaineering adventures, which generalizes the french “alpine adventures” for a global public.rené daumal, le mont analogue: récit véridique, gallimard, 1952, translated into english by roger shattuck in 1959. subsequent editions bear the subtitle roman d’aventures alpines, non euclidiennes et symboliquement authentiques, reflected in the changed english title mount analogue: a tale of non-euclidian and symbolically authentic mountaineering adventures, translated by carol cosman, overlook press, 2004. the ascension narrative, arranged over three floors, was given continuity by the hollow-men, a site-specific installation of sails mounted in the hollow in the middle of the floors of the building, evoking the colonial travel that brought the natural history collection together. in this context of colonial exploration and encounter, hu yun’s engagement with blake became part of a wider study, exposing official histories, taxonomies, archives, and foundational figures in colonial natural history.for the exhibition’s engagement with colonial natural history and disciplinary formations, see jennifer piejko, “hu yun turns to the unfinished novel,” frieze, no. 245, 11 june 2024, www.​frieze.​com/​article/​hu-​yun-​mount-​analogue-​2024-​review. hu yun’s reenvisioning of blake was placed on a mezzanine above the hollow-men. the seven works framed on the wall are obtained by an art of deletion or redaction, which takes out the colonial bodies from blake’s compositions for stedman’s narrative: “taking out certain elements in the original drawings by blake, hu yun intentionally leaves viewers with plenty of blankness. such abstraction points directly to the violence behind taxonomy and selective recording.”aike gallery, photos of rockbund art museum installation, instagram, 26 may 2024, www.​instagram.​com/​p/​c7brmvsrcnj. untitled ( from the narrative of a five years expedition), 2016–​17 ink on tracing paper, 7 pieces, 26.5 × 19 cm. (image), 52 × 36 cm. (framed) wallpaper dimensions variable mondes souterrains: 20,000 lieux sous la terre / ​subterranean worlds: 20,000 leagues under the earth curated by alexandre estaquet-legrand, jean-jacques terrin, and gautier verbeke musée du louvre-lens 27 march–​22 july 2024 photo: © musée du louvre-lens/emmanuel watteau. the exhibition was conceived as a “path of initiation,” a “physical experience” for visitors, who, “cut off from the world,” “discover[ed] chasms and caves.” it used the fall of the titans (anonymous copy, retouched by peter paul rubens, of a drawing by pieter coecke van aelst) to document the underworld described in hesiod’s theogony (eighth century bce). satan arousing the rebel angels, one of twelve watercolors commissioned by thomas butts, was displayed in a section named “descent into the world beyond” to capture the association of the underworld with hell: “civilizations have conceived the abyss as the realm of death where the dead hope to find eternal life or resurrection. reflecting the hierarchies of mortal worlds, these infra-worlds have their divinities, but, braving the rules of life and death, some gods and heroes have tried to trespass their doors to travel in subterranean worlds.”quoted from the visitor guide; the translation is mine. blake’s muscular satan exemplifies the heroic decision to renew the onslaught of the rebel angels. watercolors for paradise lost, butts set, 1808: satan arousing the rebel angels (butlin #536.1) victoria and albert museum, fa.697 william blakes universum curated by andreas stolzenburg in collaboration with david bindman and esther chadwick hamburger kunsthalle 14 june–​8 september 2024 catalogue: stolzenburg, andreas, in collaboration with david bindman and esther chadwick, editors. william blakes universum. hamburger kunsthalle/​hatje cantz, 2024. all hamburger kunsthalle photos: christoph irrgang, hamburg. the collaboration between the fitzwilliam and the hamburger kunsthalle served a mutual interest in establishing a dialogue between blake and german romantic art. almost fifty years since a groundbreaking blake exhibition commissioned by the kunsthalle’s then director werner hofmann as part of a cycle on british romantic art and curated by david bindman (1975), bindman joined forces with esther chadwick and andreas stolzenburg to reinvent blake in a german and european context for a different generation, after brexit. the fitzwilliam took the partnership as an opportunity to present the work of philipp otto runge to the british public, whereas fewer runge works were exhibited in hamburg. conversely, despite the pioneering work of henry crabb robinson in introducing blake to the german reading public in an article published in vaterländisches museum (1811), the kunsthalle claimed that “[blake’s] work is still little known outside of england.”www.​hamburger-​kunsthalle.​de/​en/​william-​blakes-​universe, accessed 10 sept. 2025. this claim is surprising, given the evidence discussed in the reception of william blake in europe, edited by sibylle erle and morton d. paley, 2 vols., bloomsbury academic, 2019. both exhibitions prided themselves on the display of objects from sir geoffrey keynes’s bequest to the fitzwilliam; for the kunsthalle, “this exhibition will be the first public showing of the entire blake collection of the fitzwilliam museum in cambridge together with the bequest of the well-known blake collector geoffrey keynes.”www.​hamburger-​kunsthalle.​de/​en/​william-​blakes-​universe, accessed 10 sept. 2025. german reception of william blakes universum noted the coincidence with the 250th anniversary of caspar david friedrich’s birthnicola kuhn, “ausstellung über william blake; die götter treten gegeneinander an,” der tagesspiegel, 21 june 2024. the friedrich anniversary was celebrated with a retrospective at the hamburger kunsthalle (15 dec. 2023–​1 april 2024, www.​hamburger-​kunsthalle.​de/​de/​caspar-​david-​friedrich), preceding william blakes universum but overlapping with the fitzwilliam’s william blake’s universe. the metropolitan museum of art also marked the occasion with caspar david friedrich: the soul of nature, “organized in cooperation with the alte nationalgalerie of the staatliche museen zu berlin, staatliche kunstsammlungen dresden, and hamburger kunsthalle …” (8 feb.–​11 may 2025, www.​metmuseum.​org/​exhibitions/​caspar-​david-​friedrich-​the-​soul-​of-​nature). and applauded the exhibition’s dialogue with german art to claim blake as a “true european,”vera fengler, “‘ich sehe was, was du nicht siehst’; das kunstspiel zum mitmachen—​jeden montag im abendblatt. heute: william blake, ‘der alte der tage; europa, eine prophezeiung,’” hamburger abendblatt, 15 july 2024. despite his never having traveled outside england. yet reviewers also expected an explicit engagement with blake’s contemporary legacy as a “painter, poet, mystic, proto-hippie,”peter richter, “william blake in hamburg; beim propheten der bärte; die hamburger kunsthalle entdeckt schon zum zweiten mal den maler, dichter, mystiker und proto-hippie william blake,” süddeutsche zeitung, 7 aug. 2024. and “anarchistic rebel.”wolfgang krischke, “anarchistischer rebell und künder esoterischer visionen,” frankfurter allgemeine zeitung, 3 july 2024. a number of reviews wanted the exhibition to engage with his significance in pop culture, “from aldous huxley to the doors, from patti smith to ridley scott.”see krischke. if it “lacked the thunderous sound of rock music,”see kuhn. its vibes were activated by an iconic use of “the ancient of days,” “reminiscent of an album by a heavy metal band.”see fengler. one review contrasted the status of blake’s “jerusalem” hymn as an “unofficial national anthem” to his countercultural power in music, film, and book arts: “the doors also set his verses to music, jim jarmusch created a cinematic monument to him with dead man. his poetry also influenced allen ginsberg and bob dylan, and blake pioneered the graphic novel genre.”see kuhn. to bring blake’s world to a contemporary audience, hamburg’s initiatives included commissioning a delightful graphic novel about blake’s life by local comic-book artist noëlle kröger, who centered the narrative around blake’s collaboration with his wife, catherine, remediating some of his visual inventions within the comic-book panels. while the fitzwilliam familiarized blake’s character by means of short glosses and an abridgment of the action in the captions below the plates of the continental prophecies, the kunsthalle produced a glossary on one of the exhibition’s walls. “a note on gender images” acknowledged blake’s “queer potentials and interpretations,” yet claimed that [t]he characteristics of the allegorical figures in blake’s mythology are based on ideas of masculinity and femininity that appear stereotypical—​or even sexist and misogynistic—​from today’s perspective.… the allegories employed by blake in his mythical worlds always present contemporary variations of the historically evolved binary system of gender. hopefully, the upcoming bicentenary will be an opportunity to translate recent research on queer blake into curatorial initiatives that revisit the gender dynamics and queer sensibilities to be found and reinvented in his corpus. the kunsthalle’s most original intervention consisted in its approach to the illustrations to stedman’s narrative. both in cambridge and in hamburg, how to mediate blake’s engagement with slavery was a curatorial problem that raised questions in contemporary decolonial aesthetics. the fitzwilliam opted for a trigger warning written on the wall above the glass vitrine with the stedman plates, which were deliberately placed horizontally, activating an “ethics of horizontality” to deny such subjects the honor of verticality, echoing the deposition and then horizontal display of statues associated with slavery.on the “ethics of horizontality,” see luisa calè, “william blake’s universe: an interview with david bindman and esther chadwick,” blake, vol. 57, no. 3, winter 2023–​24, https://​doi.​org/​10.​47761/​biq.​352. the statue of bristol slave-trader edward colston was toppled in 2020, went on temporary display in the horizontal rather than the vertical position until january 2022, and that solution was made permanent in spring 2024 after bristol inhabitants were surveyed about and approved this decolonial curatorial strategy: see chloe harcombe and alice bouverie, “edward colston statue goes on permanent display in bristol museum,” bbc news, bristol, 14 mar. 2024, www.​bbc.​co.​uk/​news/​uk-​england-​bristol-​68569148. in hamburg the vitrine with the stedman prints was placed beneath protective cloths, under a wall text: the images in this display case are concealed as they contain racist depictions that are directed against black people. we have not made them directly visible for this reason, but the fabric can be lifted to view them. how does this change the way we see? what impact does this intervention have on the way you view the depiction? in addition, there are racial epithets on the sheets. these are terms introduced by white people to devalue and exclude groups and people by emphasising supposed inequality and producing inequality. while this concealment might appear to restrict, sibylle erle argues that the choice to lift the cloths activated the viewer’s participation.see sibylle erle, “blake in hamburg,” vala, no. 5, 2024, pp. 134-36. the glass vitrine is a museological device that isolates and protects the object from spectators, yet the reflective interference of the glass adds the spectators’ faces to the display. at the kunsthalle this interference was enhanced by a radical intervention that brought the most original and creative curatorial practice in decolonial aesthetics to blake studies. the decision to add a mirror to the stedman display was the product of a process of consultation involving the gallery’s education department in collaboration with freelance curator christopher nixon,curator of the colonial past and postcolonial present at the stiftung historische museen hamburg, 2020–​21 (zugang-​gestalten.​org/​sprecherinnen/​christopher-​nixon); author of den blick erwidern. epiphanie und ästhetik postkolonial, passagen verlag, 2023. who suggested pedro lasch’s black mirror experiments.for mention of lasch’s black mirror, see also erle, “blake in hamburg.” for details of the process, i am grateful to julia kersting, curatorial assistant at the hamburger kunsthalle, who was responsible for the organization and implementation of this display. the decolonial introduction of mirrors into the exhibition space magnifies viewers’ discomfort, making them see themselves reflected in scenes of colonial violence and exploitation, addressing them as participants rather than detached observers. to support such a practice of self-reflection in william blakes universum, the gallery added this label to the stedman display: we don’t just look at the images through the mirror in this display case. we see ourselves. the mirror throws our gaze back at us. it is intended to encourage us to become aware of our voyeuristic, eager, curious gaze at these depictions and invite us to reflect on our own gaze. who is looking at whom here? who is the subject, who is the object of observation? because the way people and bodies are depicted here is also the result of a constructed and culturally learnt colonial point of view, a colonial regime of looking. (integrating a mirror here was inspired by the complex project black mirror by the artist pedro lasch, ongoing since 2007.) this invitation to decolonize the gaze exposed, interrogated, and subverted subject positions and ways of seeing in “a colonial regime of looking.” lasch argues that black mirror/​espejo negro, “with its play of transparencies and reflections, makes impossible any clear separation between past-present, artwork-viewer-environment.…”quoted from pedrolasch.​com/​blackmirror.​html​#en; for further information, see black mirror/​espejo negro, edited by pedro lasch, john hope franklin humanities institute/​nasher museum of art at duke university, 2010. lifting the protective cloths brought viewers in contact with the display, implicating them in the cruelties of slavery captured by blake. slow looking samek art museum, bucknell university, lewisburg 4 september–​8 december 2024 showcasing a bequest from bucknell alum stuart coyne, this exhibition advocated slow looking by trying to evoke the wall hangs of coyne’s san francisco apartment. “christ descending into the grave” and “the soul hovering over the body,” two etchings by louis schiavonetti after blake’s inventions for robert blair’s the grave, featured at the center of a hang including hogarth’s “the sleeping congregation.” photo: © samek art museum, bucknell university. schiavonetti after blake, published in blair, the grave, 1813: “christ descending into the grave” “the soul hovering over the body, reluctantly parting with life” samek art museum, 2023.5.19, 2023.5.20 dürer to matisse: 400 years of european prints curated by dana cowen ackland art museum, university of north carolina at chapel hill 27 september 2024–​5 january 2025 photo: ackland art museum, university of north carolina at chapel hill. this exhibition selected samples from illustrations of the book of job for a survey of printmaking and “art historical movements from the renaissance to cubism and beyond.”ackland.​org/​exhibition/​durer-​to-​matisse-​400-​years-​of-​european-​prints. blake’s engravings were put into conversation with dürer’s and works in various print media by rembrandt van rijn, giovanni battista piranesi, francisco de goya, edgar degas, mary cassatt, vincent van gogh, käthe kollwitz, edvard munch, and pablo picasso. illustrations of the book of job, 1823–​26: “satan going forth from the presence of the lord”thirty-six prints from the museum, including “satan going forth,” were displayed at other north carolina universities in 2023, as documented in calè, “blake and exhibitions, 2023.” “job and his wife restored to prosperity” ackland art museum, 58.1.1067.1, 58.1.1067.14 francis bacon: human presence curated by rosie broadley national portrait gallery, london 10 october 2024–​19 january 2025 catalogue: broadley, rosie, editor. francis bacon: human presence. national portrait gallery, 2024. francis bacon: human presence documented bacon’s encounter with old masters. the impact of blake was signaled by his life mask, made by james deville in 1823, owned by john linnell, and acquired by the national portrait gallery in 1918. in the exhibition, the life mask complemented study for portrait ii (after the life mask of william blake) (1955), which bacon painted in response to a commission from the composer gerard schurmann.exhibit labels, www.​npg.​org.​uk/​assets/​uploads/​files/​francis-​bacon_​large%20print_​guide.​pdf, p. 39. bacon kept a plaster cast purchased from the museum shop in his studio, but preferred to work from a photograph. james s. deville, head of william blake, 1823 national portrait gallery, npg 1809 francis bacon, study for portrait ii (after the life mask of william blake), 1955 tate, t02414 belle da costa greene: a librarian’s legacy curated by philip s. palmer and erica ciallela morgan library and museum, new york 25 october 2024–​4 may 2025 catalogue: ciallela, erica, and philip s. palmer, editors. belle da costa greene: a librarian’s legacy. morgan library and museum/​delmonico books, 2024. photo: © morgan library and museum. photography by carmen gonzález fraile, 2024. blake’s watercolor the lord answering job out of the whirlwindafter three months, the library substituted when the morning stars sang together. many thanks to sheelagh bevan, andrew w. mellon curator of printed books and bindings at the morgan, for this information. featured among the acquisitions of the morgan’s inaugural librarian, belle da costa greene (1879–​1950), daughter of the first black graduate of harvard college, whose family changed their name “to pass as white in a racist and segregated america.”www.​themorgan.​org/​exhibitions/​belle-​da-​costa-​greene. greene joined the library in 1905 and oversaw its development after j. p. morgan’s death in 1913, working as director after j. p. morgan, jr., turned the library into a public institution in 1924. in a letter to morgan sr. in 1909, the same year in which she acquired the blake prints, she announced the acquisition of the only surviving manuscript of edgar allan poe’s “the raven” and went on to articulate her ambition for the morgan library. she viewed the british museum and the bibliothèque nationale de france as her only rivals when it came to purchasing incunables, bindings, and the classics.exhibition audio stop 11, “belle greene builds the collection,” www.​themorgan.​org/​exhibitions/​online/​belle-​da-​costa-​greene/​11. watercolors for the book of job, butts set: the lord answering job out of the whirlwind, c. 1805–​06 (butlin #550.13) when the morning stars sang together, c. 1805–​06 (butlin #550.14) morgan library and museum, 2001.75, 2001.76 blake e la sua epoca. viaggi nel tempo del sogno / ​in the age of william blake. visionary journeys curated by alice insley reggia di venaria, turin 31 october 2024–​2 february 2025 catalogue: insley, alice, editor. blake e la sua epoca. viaggi nel tempo del sogno. hopefulmonster, 2024. this first italian blake retrospective invited the viewer to envision blake’s art in a european palace built to embody the royal ambition of the savoy family before the unification of italy, emulating some architectonic features of versailles. in stark contrast with blake’s politics and the viewing conditions of blake’s works in his own time, this bold contrafactual setting afforded yet another opportunity to think about the role he might have had in public art: it projected the spiritual form of pitt on a flimsy fabric fluttering from above, a ghostly haunting presence for a european dwelling. drawing on the tate collection, the exhibition introduced blake through british romantic art and british romantic art through blake.for a full review, see luisa calè, “blake e la sua epoca. viaggi nel tempo del sogno, la reggia di venaria, 31 october 2024–​2 february 2025; blake e la sua epoca, edited by alice insley,” blake, vol. 59, no. 1, summer 2025, https://​doi.​org/​10.​47761/​biq.​391. it subsequently moved to the museum of fine arts in budapest in september 2025 in what amounts to the first exhibition of blake originals in hungary,see calè, “blake e la sua epoca” n4. and will next be shown at the national gallery of ireland, dublin, in 2026. introduction blake, the house of death, 1795–​c. 1805 (butlin #320) tate, n05060 blake, the night of enitharmon’s joy, formerly hecate, c. 1795 (butlin #316) tate, n05056 blake, satan exulting over eve, c. 1795 (butlin #291) tate, t07213 horror and peril john hamilton mortimer, banditti going out in the morning, 1773 tate, t08277 philip james de loutherbourg, travellers attacked by banditti, 1781 tate, t00921 in the style of john hamilton mortimer, rocky landscape with banditti, c. 1770–​80 tate, t00342 nathaniel dance, two women in a dungeon tate, t08444 john hamilton mortimer, the captive tate, t10125 attributed to george richmond, fettered nude figure reclining by a rock, c. 1825 tate, a00838 james barry, study for philoctetes on the island of lemnos, 1770 tate, t08127 george romney, john howard visiting a lazaretto, c. 1791–​92 tate, t03547 blake, the house of death, c. 1790 (butlin #259) tate, n05192 henry fuseli, lady macbeth seizing the daggers, exhibited 1812? tate, t00733 blake, the blasphemer, c. 1800 (butlin #446) tate, n05195 blake, watercolor for the divine comedy, 1824–​27: the punishment of the thieves (butlin #812.102) tate, n03364 blake, the body of abel found by adam and eve, c. 1826 (butlin #806) tate, n05888 samuel colman, the death of amelia, 1804? tate, t02109 william westall, the commencement of the deluge, exhibited 1848 tate, n01877 philip james de loutherbourg, an avalanche in the alps, 1803 tate, t00772 francis danby, the deluge, c. 1840? tate, n06134 alexander cozens, a shipwreck fantasy: inscrutable tate, t08772 françois louis thomas francia, a shipwreck tate, t08915 jacob more, the deluge, 1787 tate, t12758 samuel colman, the destruction of the temple, c. 1830–​40 tate, t01980 fantastical creatures john hamilton mortimer, caliban?, 1770s tate, t09101 john hamilton mortimer, caricature heads tate, t09097 john hamilton mortimer, fish devouring shell food tate, t09124 john hamilton mortimer, a sea monster with fish tate, t10131 attributed to master of the giants, unknown mythological subject tate, t01843 john varley, sketch for treatise on zodiacal physiognomy, 1828 tate, t07251 blake, the head of the ghost of a flea, c. 1819 (butlin #692.98) tate, n05184 john linnell, the man who built the pyramids (after william blake), c. 1825 tate, n05185 blake, the ghost of a flea, c. 1819–​20 (butlin #750) tate, n05889 thomas rowlandson, the judge tate, t08531 thomas rowlandson, queen anne’s bounty tate, t09201 blake, illustrations of the book of job, 1823–​26, reprinted 1874: “behemoth and leviathan” tate, a00026 susanna duncombe, the ghost scene from the castle of otranto tate, t04244 john hamilton mortimer, three skeletons tate, t10127 british school, lord william and the ghost of his nephew tate, t09855 nathaniel dance, the ghost of mrs. swellenberg’s uncle tate, t08415 nathaniel dance, a monster emerging from a cave tate, t08436 nathaniel dance, a dog-headed monster in a cave, a lilliputian figure below tate, t08437 enchantments henry fuseli, the shepherd’s dream, from paradise lost, 1793 tate, t00876 george romney, tom hayley as robin goodfellow, 1789–​92 tate, n05850 george romney, lady hamilton as cassandra, c. 1785–​86 tate, n01668 henry fuseli, the debutante, 1807 tate, n03396 henry fuseli, charis phykomené, 1791 tate, t10440 henry singleton, ariel on a bat’s back, exhibited 1819 tate, n01027 blake, oberon, titania, and puck with fairies dancing, c. 1786 (butlin #161) tate, n02686 blake, design from visions of the daughters of albion, pl. 7 [bentley; erdman pl. 4], c. 1795 (butlin #265) tate, n03374 blake, design from the book of urizen, pl. 2, “‘teach these souls to fly,’” 1796, c. 1818 (butlin #261.5) tate, n03696 william young ottley, a flight of angels tate, t09144 j. m. w. turner, a subject from the runic superstitions, exhibited 1808 tate, n00464 theodor von holst, the fairy lovers, c. 1840 tate, t01518 theodor von holst, fantasy based on goethe’s faust, 1834 tate, t05747 william etty, the fairy of the fountain, 1845 tate, n04108 blake, design from the book of thel, pl. 7 [bentley; erdman pl. 5], “‘doth god take care of these,’” 1796, c. 1818 tate, t13000 blake, design from the book of urizen, pl. 19, “‘is the female death’” / “‘become new life,’” 1796, c. 1818 tate, t12998 after joshua reynolds, puck or robin goodfellow tate, n05384 romanticizing the past benjamin west, the bard, 1778 tate, t01900 blake, the bard, from gray, 1809? (butlin #655) tate, n03551 blake, lear and cordelia in prison, c. 1779 (butlin #53) tate, n05189 robert blake, the preaching of warning, c. 1785? (butlin #r6 recto) tate, a00003 richard westall, a gaelic warrior pointing to a vision tate, t08653 nathaniel dance, macbeth entering the witches’ cavern tate, t08445 thomas girtin, a subject from ossian tate, t08935 j. m. w. turner, from spenser’s fairie queene, c. 1807–​08 tate, d08139 william james müller, stonehenge tate, n02385 samuel palmer, tintagel castle, 1848 tate, t13441 edward calvert, “the bride,” 1828 tate, a00157 samuel palmer, a hilly scene, c. 1826–​28 tate, n05805 the gothic thomas girtin, guisborough priory, yorkshire, 1801 tate, t00993 edward hawke locker, riveaulx abbey, 1802 tate, t08202 francis towne, netley abbey, 1809 tate, t08194 j. m. w. turner, salisbury: a gothic porch in a garden, 1798? tate, d02350 alexander cozens, the enchanted castle tate, t08042 robert ker porter, an ancient castle, c. 1799–​1800 tate, t08532 john sell cotman, an ancient castle tate, t08122 george cuitt, jr., window in conway castle, 1807 tate, t08756 circle of dr. thomas monro, a ruin and trees by a pool: moonlight tate, d00856 blake, detailed drawings for a figure standing in a gothic apse, c. 1819 (butlin #692.22) tate, t01335 blake, judas betrays him, c. 1803–​05 (butlin #491) tate, t06606 blake, the entombment, c. 1805 (butlin #498) tate, n05896 blake, bathsheba at the bath, c. 1799–​1800 (butlin #390) tate, n03007 satan and the underworld nathaniel dance, a devil with torch and spear tate, t08433 nathaniel dance, a devil with a spear tate, t08434 blake, satan smiting job with sore boils, c. 1826 (butlin #807) tate, n03340 james barry, “satan, sin, and death,” c. 1792–​95 tate, t06578 blake, satan in his original glory, c. 1805 (butlin #469) tate, n05892 john robert cozens, satan summoning his legions, c. 1776 tate, t08231 john robert cozens, a milton subject, unfinished tate, t08232 john charles denham, a haystack resembling a devil tate, t10448 george cumberland, inside the peak cavern, castleton, derbyshire, c. 1820 tate, t02304 blake, the spiritual form of pitt guiding behemoth, 1805? (butlin #651) tate, n01110 blake, watercolors for the divine comedy, 1824–​27: plutus (butlin #812.14) the primaeval giants sunk in the soil (butlin #812.60) the wood of the self-murderers: the harpies and the suicides (butlin #812.24) the devils, with dante and virgil by the side of the pool (butlin #812.40) the inscription over the gate (butlin #812.4) tate, n03355, n03363, n03356, n03358, n03352 john st. john long, the temptation in the wilderness, 1824 tate, t04169 theodor von holst, charon, c. 1837 tate, t15482 j. m. w. turner, the cave of despair, c. 1835 tate, n05522 formerly attributed to john martin, the fallen angels entering pandemonium, from paradise lost book 1, exhibited 1841? tate, n05435 blake, design from the book of urizen, pl. 11, “‘every thing is an attempt’” / “‘to be human,’” 1796, c. 1818 tate, t13003 blake, engravings for the divine comedy, 1826–27, reprinted 1892: “ciampolo the barrator tormented by the devils” “the six-footed serpent attacking agnolo brunelleschi” “the pit of disease: the falsifiers” “the serpent attacking buoso donati” “the baffled devils fighting” tate, a00006, a00008, a00010, a00009, a00007 blake, illustrations of the book of job, 1823–​26, reprinted 1874: “the fall of satan” tate, a00027 david scott, “the by-way to hell” tate, n02405 edward dayes, the fall of the rebel angels, 1798 tate, t05210 consorzio delle residenze reali sabaude/​fotografo andrea guermani. volume 52 number 2 fall 2018 sheila a. spector on reading jerusalem: the horizon of expectations a n i l l u s t r a t e d q u a r t e r l y angela esterhammer, victoria college, university of toronto nelson hilton, university of georgia tilar j. mazzeo, colby college anne k. mellor, university of california, los angeles joseph viscomi, university of north carolina at chapel hill david worrall, the nottingham trent university martin butlin, tate gallery, london, retired tristanne j. connolly, university of waterloo detlef w. dörrbecker, university of trier sibylle erle, bishop grosseteste university robert n. essick, university of california, riverside a d v i s o r y b o a r d a n i l l u s t r a t e d q u a r t e r l y volume 52 number 2 fall 2018 c o n t e n t s www.blakequarterly.org article reading jerusalem: the horizon of expectations by sheila a. spector reviews daniela picón, visiones de william blake: itinerarios de su recepción en los siglos xix y xx reviewed by andrés ferrada aguilar allen ginsberg, the complete songs of innocence and experience reviewed by luke walker william blake in sussex: visions of albion, petworth house (national trust), 13 january–25 march 2018; andrew loukes, ed., william blake in sussex: visions of albion reviewed by luisa calè © 2018 copyright morris eaves and morton d. paley cover: adapted from jerusalem copy e, plate 92. yale center for british art, paul mellon collection, b1992.8.1(92). image courtesy of the william blake archive. e d i t o r s editors: morris eaves and morton d. paley review editor: alexander s. gourlay exhibitions editor: luisa calè bibliographer (criticism): wayne c. ripley bibliographer (music): jason whittaker managing editor: sarah jones sarah.jones@rochester.edu production office: department of english, university of rochester, rochester ny 14627-0451 blake and exhibitions, 2022 a reinstallation at the rosenbach on 27 february 2022, featuring (left to right) jen tanglao, collections stewardship assistant; blake, the number of the beast is 666; and jobi zink, registrar. image: judy m. guston, curator and senior director of collections. blake and exhibitions, 2022 by luisa calè luisa calè (l.cale@bbk.ac.uk), birkbeck, university of london, works on practices of reading, viewing, and collecting in the romantic period. her publications include fuseli’s milton gallery: “turning readers into spectators”; co-edited volumes on dante on view: the reception of dante in the visual and performing arts and illustrations, optics and objects in nineteenth-century literary and visual cultures; and special issues on “the disorder of things” (eighteenth-century studies, 2011), “the nineteenth-century digital archive” (19: interdisciplinary studies in the long nineteenth century, 2015), “literature and sculpture at the fin de siècle” (word and image, 2018), and “sibylline leaves” (studies in romanticism, 2020). her current project, entitled the book unbound, explores practices of collecting and dismantling the book, with chapters on walpole, blake, and dickens. she is the exhibitions editor for blake. continuing effects of covid-19 disruption included delayed and sometimes reduced displays to mark the 700th anniversary of dante’s death (fogg art museum; simon fraser university; university of melbourne) and delayed rehangs of works kept in storage after exhibitions or during renovations. in february 2022 the rosenbach celebrated the rehang of the number of the beast is 666 after a period of rest since its loan to the blake retrospective at tate britain in 2019–​20. in may glasgow museums reinstalled eve naming the birds and adam naming the beasts in the main corridor of pollok house following storage to protect the works from environmental conditions. displays featuring treasures from permanent collections included the incipit of vala, or the four zoas at the british library and milton at the new york public library. building the bookman’s paradise, an exhibition reconstructing plans and showcasing treasures at the morgan library, included two job watercolors among early medieval and renaissance illuminations and modern treasures. the world of stonehenge at the british museum gave blake pride of place as the only non-ancient presence chosen to illuminate the continuing fascination with stone circles and early druidic subject matter, generating a series of formal and thematic associations between his inventions and ancient items and prompting speculation about how ancient objects activate utopian or dystopian visions for the present and the future at different times in history. formalist approaches considered blake’s works in the histories of different media. huntington curator melinda mccurdy made a case for including the color print hecate, or the night of enitharmon’s joy among 100 great british drawings, while saint paul preaching at athens featured in the rhode island school of design’s exploration of 400 years of drawing. in addition to scene through wood, on tour from the ashmolean, blake’s position in a lineage of wood engraving was explored in bethan stevens’s exhibition about nineteenth-century commercial illustration: the woodpecking factory: victorian illustrations by the brothers dalziel. through the juxtaposition of the cincinnati copy of the book of thel to a tolkien drawing, blake’s illuminated printing appeared as a source in j. r. r. tolkien: the art of the manuscript at marquette university. a bequest of maurice sendak designs to the morgan library & museum prompted a reconsideration of sendak’s engagement with blake. while previous exhibitions concentrated on illustrations, drawing the curtain: maurice sendak’s designs for opera and ballet showed blake and a range of other sources, including mantegna, as inspirations for sendak’s intermedial invention, from his children’s book outside over there to his stage sets and costume designs. blake’s place among his contemporaries included a consideration—​in tate britain’s poetical bodies—​of how academic training was tested by visionary subjects, while his engraving after fuseli of “head of a damned soul in dante’s inferno” featured in füssli, entre rêve et fantastique, a parisian exhibition that inflected fuseli’s demonic imagination through victor hugo’s focus on blindness and darkness. the tasmanian museum and art gallery focused on thomas griffiths wainewright, reconstructing the aesthetic world of the critic, collector, artist, and convict and setting examples of blake works he is known to have owned next to old master prints and contemporary painters. the getty center's reinventing the américas: construct. erase. repeat brought blake’s engravings for stedman’s narrative, of a five years’ expedition, against the revolted negroes of surinam, in guiana into dialogue with a colonial archive of european encounters with america. treasures of the british library, literature display sir john ritblat gallery, british library, london summer 2018–​january 2023 vala, or the four zoas was displayed among highlights from the british library literary collections with a caption presenting vala as “the female counterpart of luvah” and explaining that night the first “opens with ‘the song of the aged mother which shook the heavens with wrath.’ the power of women, love and jealousy are key themes in this work which blake ultimately abandoned after a period of depression.” vala, or the four zoas (c. 1797–​1807) british library, add ms 39764, f. 2 drawing the curtain: maurice sendak’s designs for opera and ballet (curated by rachel federman) morgan library & museum, new york, 14 june–​6 october 2019 isabella stewart gardner museum, boston, 16 june–​11 september 2022 memphis brooks museum of art, memphis, 7 october 2022–​8 january 2023 catalogue: federman, rachel. drawing the curtain: maurice sendak’s designs for opera and ballet. new york: morgan library & museum, 2019. this touring exhibition documented sendak’s corpus as an opera, ballet set, and costume designer through over 100 studies, storyboards, dioramas, and costumes for mozart’s magic flute (1978–​80), prokofiev’s love for three oranges (1982), tchaikovsky’s the nutcraker (1983–​2013), and where the wild things are (1980, 1984), and displayed some of the works that inspired him. it celebrated the sendak bequest to the morgan, where it was first mounted, from june to october 2019. in a talk delivered at the gardner museum in 1991, sendak mentioned andrea mantegna’s the virgin and child with infant saint john the baptist and six female saints (1497–​1500) as a source for the rock formations in his designs for the magic flute.wall caption, gardner museum. tiepolo’s drawings inspired designs for the love for three oranges. the morgan catalogue also documents sendak’s eclectic sources, including philipp otto runge’s “times of day” (1805) and the piccolomini breviary (c. 1475) for the magic flute and caspar david friedrich and samuel palmer for janáček’s the cunning little vixen, which are not included in the gardner list of exhibits.rachel federman, drawing the curtain 64-65, 127-28. federman’s contributions to the catalogue associate blake with sendak’s outside over there, suggesting an analogy between the girl playing her wonder-horn to subdue goblins and his contemporary work on mozart’s magic flute as a point of transition from children’s books to the world of the opera.federman, drawing the curtain 15. sendak acknowledged going to the morgan and perusing blake’s illustrations to milton’s “l’allegro” and “il penseroso” through a magnifying glass in search of color inspiration. federman argues that blake’s influence can be detected in “the sinuous forms and overt sensuality of several early drawings for the magic flute.”federman, drawing the curtain 62, citing sendak from jonathan cott, pipers at the gates of dawn: the wisdom of children’s literature (new york: mcgraw-hill, 1985) 73-74. in blake’s job watercolor of behemoth and leviathan she identifies a source for the costume design for the serpent pursuing tamino, and she associates milton’s mysterious dream with sendak’s rainbow in the backdrop of the temple of the sun. this line of influence was explored in an exhibition of drawings from outside over there and the magic flute at the morgan in 1981, which “coincided with exhibitions of blake’s watercolours and mozart’s manuscripts.”federman, drawing the curtain 65. the 2022 display at the gardner museum made its case about blake in a wall hang titled “sendak and the old masters,” where milton’s mysterious dream and behemoth and leviathan were juxtaposed to tamino’s serpent and scene design for arrival of queen of the night from the magic flute, followed by mantegna. sendak and the old masters (see enlargement): blake, milton’s mysterious dream and behemoth and leviathan (both morgan library & museum); sendak, scene design for arrival of queen of the night, act 1, scene 1 and the serpent (both 1980, for mozart’s magic flute; morgan library & museum); and mantegna, the virgin and child with infant saint john the baptist and six female saints (c. 1497–​1500; isabella stewart gardner museum). image: © isabella stewart gardner museum. the sendak works are © the maurice sendak foundation. the goblin (c. 1816–​20) morgan library & museum, 1949.4:5 milton’s mysterious dream (c. 1816–​20) morgan library & museum, 1949.4:11 behemoth and leviathan (c. 1805–​06) morgan library & museum, 2001.77 paradise lost: thomas griffiths wainewright (curated by jane stewart) tasmanian museum and art gallery, hobart 11 june–​3 october 2021 catalogue: stewart, jane, with peter hughes and jacobus van breda. paradise lost: thomas griffiths wainewright. hobart: tasmanian museum and art gallery, 2021. dandy, art critic, collector, forger, poisoner, and convict thomas griffiths wainewright (1794–​1847) was a great contemporary collector of blake.on wainewright’s collection, which included songs, the marriage of heaven and hell, for children: the gates of paradise, america, europe, jerusalem, edward young’s night thoughts, and robert blair’s the grave, see a catalogue of the valuable and extensive library of the late george edward griffiths … the property of a well known amateur of the fine arts (london: wheatley, 1831); marc vaulbert de chantilly, “property of a distinguished poisoner: thomas griffiths wainewright and the griffiths family library,” under the hammer: book auctions since the seventeenth century, ed. robin myers, michael harris, and giles mandelbrote (new castle, de: oak knoll press, 2001) 111-42. this exhibition situated examples of some of the blake works that he owned within his wider aesthetic world, reconstructing their site-specific inflections in what used to be the penal colony of van diemen’s land. wainewright published essays in the london magazine under the pseudonyms cornelius van vinkbooms and janus weathercock, including an early mention of jerusalem in “mr. weathercock’s private correspondence” in 1820.“mr. weathercock’s private correspondence,” london magazine (sept. 1820): 300: “talking of articles, my learned friend dr. tobias ruddicombe, m. d. is, at my earnest entreaty, casting a tremendous piece of ordnance,—​an eighty-eight pounder! which he proposeth to fire off in your next. it is an account of an ancient, newly discovered, illuminated manuscript, which has to name ‘jerusalem the emanation of the giant albion!!!’ it contains a good deal anent one ‘los,’ who, it appears, is now, and hath been, from the creation, the sole and fourfold dominator of the celebrated city of golgonooza! the doctor assures me that the redemption of mankind hangs on the universal diffusion of the doctrines broached in this m.s.” wainewright owned jerusalem copy b; see g. e. bentley, jr., “william blake and his circle: a checklist of publications and discoveries in 2001,” blake 36.1 (summer 2002): 6. the tasmanian museum and art gallery took one of van vinkbooms’s dogmas for dilettanti, entitled “the amateur’s boudoir, or a visit to janus,” describing “his boudoir, the argument of his collection,” as a point of departure for their reconstruction of the room, “an octagon of about thirteen feet diameter, and full sixteen in height; into which the light streams through rosy panes in the dome top—​other windows it hath none. … two doors hath it, concealed with bright blue silk drapery, bordered with crimson velvet and barbaric fringe.” the exhibition’s version of the room included details taken from his description of the adjoining small conservatory, “covered with a very rich crimson french paper, formed into pannels [sic] and compartments with gold mouldings.”“c. van vinkbooms, his dogmas for dilettanti. no. iii. the amateur’s boudoir, or a visit to janus,” london magazine (dec. 1821): 656, 658-59. prized treasures in the amateur’s boudoir were evoked through objects sourced from the museum’s collection: armor, stone fragments, cameos, and intaglios placed in a vitrine at the center of the room. instead of specimens from the thousands of prints by italian and flemish old masters that wainewright owned, the museum decided to hang blake’s engravings of dante. wainewright’s relationship with blake was in focus in an adjacent room titled “the collector, connoisseur and critic.” this section included the job engravings from the tyler collection (university of tasmania) and a colored copy of blake’s book illustrations to edward young’s the complaint, and the consolation; or, night thoughts (1797), on loan from the national gallery of victoria. (other items in the exhibition were from south australia, new south wales, and auckland; loans from the uk could not be fulfilled because of covid.) the same room also featured engravings after old masters that wainewright wrote about (correggio, titian, rembrandt, michelangelo). the source of wainewright’s family wealth was presented in a smaller gallery, off limits to minors, featuring a series of 1880 illustrations to john cleland’s memoirs of a woman of pleasure (1748–​49), a work published by wainewright’s grandfather ralph griffiths and his brother fenton griffiths. the exhibition also included portraits of wainewright’s cousins henry and edward foss, a dealer in historic books and manuscripts and a solicitor, respectively; edward was one of the trustees of a trust from which wainewright forged checks in 1822 and 1824. the discovery of those crimes years later precipitated his arrest and removal from england to the penal colony. wainewright’s change in fortune was conveyed through the changing color scheme of the rooms. dark violet and gray tones set off his own paintings placed next to those of royal academy professor of painting and keeper henry fuseli, whom wainewright described as “the god of my worship.”“listen to jane stewart speak about the life of convict artist, thomas griffiths wainewright,” friendsoftmag.org.au (1 july 2021), accessed 29 june 2023. his debt to fuseli was documented through juxtapositions such as fuseli’s eve from the milton gallery next to wainewright’s watercolors depicting lothaire of bourgogne (from barante’s histoire des ducs de bourgogne) and the reunion of eros and psyche, which he painted in 1843—​themes from the 1820s recreated in smaller scale when he was a convict in the 1840s. the space of the convict’s cell was recreated as an octagonal form that mirrored the shape of the boudoir, a source for the octagonal room in which dorian gray sleeps in oscar wilde’s the picture of dorian gray. the final gallery exhibited portraits that wainewright painted as a convict in hobart, where he was deported in 1837 and died in 1847. like a previous display of artworks by another convict, thomas bock (c. 1793–​1855), this exhibition reconstructed the legacies and art-historical genealogies of early nineteenth-century convicts in van diemen’s land, tracing the global trajectories of works in the museum’s collection. blake’s illustrations of dante (seven engravings) (1826–​27, printed 1955) national gallery of victoria, 614.1-5 to 614.7-5 illustrations of the book of job (1826) university of tasmania, tyler collection the complaint, and the consolation; or, night thoughts (1797), colored copy y national gallery of victoria, p183-1989 “queen katherine’s dream,” proof for the plays of william shakespeare (1805) national gallery of victoria, p49-1992 light: works from tate’s collection museum of art pudong, shanghai, 8 july–​14 november 2021 buk-seoul museum of art, seoul, 21 december 2021–​8 may 2022 acmi, melbourne, 16 june–​13 november 2022 a survey of 200 years of artistic experimentation with light in drawing, printing, painting, photography, sculpture, the moving image, and contemporary immersive environments through more than seventy works, including turner, constable, monet, pissarro, sisley, kandinsky, albers, eliasson, kusama, dean, and lijn. the good and evil angels (1795) tate, n05057 god judging adam (1795) tate, n05063 polonsky exhibition of the new york public library’s treasures new york public library the polonsky exhibition showcases treasures from the library’s 125 years of collecting. in 2022 blake’s milton was exhibited in the section dedicated to “the written word.” milton copy c (c. 1804–​11, printed c. 1811) new york public library, rare book division, *kl (blake, w. milton, a poem in 2 books) depicting dante: the divine comedy in book art and illustration bennett library, simon fraser university, burnaby, british columbia 4 january–​31 march 2022 this exhibition, planned for dante 700, was delayed to 2022 by the pandemic. it explored the commedia’s impact on artists and writers over the centuries and was sourced from special collections and rare books at sfu, setting blake’s designs within a canon including botticelli, doré, contemporary african artists, and a video game from the games collection at sfu surrey. milton klonsky, blake’s dante: the complete illustrations to the divine comedy (new york: harmony books, 1980) dante fogg art museum, harvard university 22 january–​2 may 2022 these watercolors are a selection from plans to mark the seventh centenary of dante’s death (2021) with a display, which was delayed because of the covid-19 pandemic. image: © harvard art museums (see enlargement) the complaint of the giant nimrod (1824–​27) harvard art museums/​fogg museum, 1943.431 dante and virgil among the blasphemers (1824–​27) harvard art museums/​fogg museum, 1943.433 dante and virgil in the skiff of phlegyas are hailed by filippo argenti (1824–​27) harvard art museums/​fogg museum, 1943.439 the punishment of rusticucci and his companions (1824–​27) harvard art museums/​fogg museum, 1943.447 poetical bodies: works on paper by blake and his contemporaries (curated by david blayney brown, amy concannon, and caroline anjali ritchie) tate britain, london 1 february–​10 april 2022 this exhibition situated blake’s work among poetical bodies visualized by romantic-period artists trained to copy from sculpture and draw live models at the royal academy of arts. through a selection of artworks by james barry, john hamilton mortimer, edward dayes, henry fuseli, george romney, thomas rowlandson, and j. m. w. turner, poetical bodies explored how artists’ anatomical skills were applied to “unconventional, visionary scenes” and “intense emotional states,” capturing “gods, heroes, demons and monsters” as subjects of studies of “human form, movement, character and expression.”information panel. image: © tate (see enlargement) next to barry’s etching “the temptation of adam” hung blake’s large color prints elohim creating adam and the house of death, followed by dayes’s watercolor the fall of the rebel angels and barry’s “satan, sin, and death.” the adjoining wall featured biblical watercolors that blake painted for thomas butts: christ in the carpenter’s shop: the humility of the saviour (luke 2:51); the river of life (rev. 22:1-2); david delivered out of many waters (ps. 18:4, 10, 16); satan in his original glory: “thou wast perfect till iniquity was found in thee” (ezek. 28:14-15); and the four and twenty elders casting their crowns before the divine throne (rev. 4:2-11). two designs from the [first] book of urizen without the accompanying text hung in the center of a wall inaugurated by barry’s etching “philoctetes in the island of lemnos,” turner’s a kneeling male nude with upraised head and arm in a landscape setting, and two drawings by mortimer, monstrous male figure, caliban? and study of a classical statue. while these works provided context for the male form in “oh! flames of furious desires” (from urizen plate 3), “teach these souls to fly” (urizen plate 2) was set against depictions of female subjects: romney’s serena in the boat of apathy, inspired by william hayley’s triumphs of temper (1781), and fuseli’s the debutante. the wall hang then proceeded with subjects that blake engraved after fuseli for charles allen’s history of england (1798). taken together, the poetical corpus selected for this exhibition contributed to continuing investigations into blake and fuseli and his circle, the heroic in modernity, and the idioms of academic training that tate britain explored in gothic nightmares (2006) and in the first room of the blake retrospective of 2019–​20, and that are documented in martin myrone’s bodybuilding (2005) and making the modern artist (2020). david delivered out of many waters (c. 1805) tate, n02230 “teach these souls to fly,” urizen plate 2 (?1796) tate, n03696 elohim creating adam (1795–​c. 1805) tate, n05055 the house of death (1795–​c. 1805) tate, n05060 “oh! flames of furious desires,” urizen plate 3 (watercolor) tate, n05190 christ in the carpenter’s shop: the humility of the saviour (copy of the original at the new art gallery walsall) tate, n05193 the soul hovering over the body reluctantly parting with life (c. 1805) tate, n05300 satan in his original glory: “thou wast perfect till iniquity was found in thee” (c. 1805) tate, n05892 the four and twenty elders casting their crowns before the divine throne (c. 1803–​05) tate, n05897 “alfred and the neat-herd’s wife,” charles allen, history of england (1798) tate, t06586 “wat tyler and the tax-gatherer,” charles allen, history of england (1798) tate, t06588 scene through wood: a century of modern wood engraving dorset museum, dorchester, 9 february–​2 may 2022 scene through wood heath robinson museum, pinner, 10 september–​11 december 2022 scene through wood: a century of wood engraving st. barbe museum and art gallery, lymington, 25 february–​22 april 2023 this touring exhibition curated by anne desmet ra for display at the ashmolean in 2020 was discussed in “blake and exhibitions, 2020,” blake 55.1 (summer 2021). the world of stonehenge (curated by jennifer wexler and neil wilkin) british museum, london 17 february–​17 july 2022 catalogue: garrow, duncan, and neil wilkin. the world of stonehenge. london: british museum, 2022. blake’s works were the only non-ancient objects in this exhibition featuring the timber columns of seahenge from the norfolk shore (2049 bce), axes, idols, the nebra sky disc on loan from germany, a carved standing stone from italy (c. 2500 bce), and human remains and other relics of combat from germany and salisbury plain.jonathan jones, “the world of stonehenge review—​even the stone axes amaze,” guardian (14 feb. 2022); jennifer wexler, “an introduction to stonehenge,” british museum blog (7 dec. 2021), accessed 5 june 2023. image: © trustees of the british museum (see enlargement) blake was placed at the end, in a section titled “the last of the light,” as testimony that “stonehenge stands not for a landscape, region or even country, but for the generations of people who have made meaning from an enduring place in a changing world.”section introduction panel. this display included two gold pendants from 1000–​800 bce: one from county kildare, ireland, and another from the shropshire marches with a sun image that “gathers and shimmers with reflected light.” a wall label, “reimagining stonehenge,” presented blake’s takes on the stone circle in “‘england’s green and pleasant land’ … once connected with peoples of the biblical old testament”: “both a temple of rationality and religious cruelty” and evidence of “the determination and belief needed to achieve idealistic social change and spiritual renewal in a new jerusalem.” “albion rose” was represented by the color-printed version produced for ozias humphry around 1794–​96, which is one of the loose plates associated with the so-called large book of designs, but the exhibition took its caption heading from an inscription on a later state of the plate: “albion rose from where he labourd at the mill with slaves / giving himself for the nations he danc’d the dance of eternal death.” the inscription is from c. 1803–​10,national gallery of art catalogue entry, following david bindman, assisted by deirdre toomey, the complete graphic works of william blake (new york: g. p. putnam’s sons, 1978) no. 400; the blake archive dates this state to c. 1820–​25. though blake himself signed “wb inv 1780”, an act of backdating that marks his recurrent engagement with the design. the wall text explained that “ancient albion represents humanity and britain breaking free of the bonds of corruption, imperialism and social injustices, and returning the country to its ancient glory.” plate 100 of jerusalem came next, captioned with the claim that “blake connects monuments of the deep past with a fair and just society, by imagining the building of a new jerusalem in ‘england’s green and pleasant land,’”referring to blake’s preface to milton (e 96). while plate 70 marked the use of stonehenge “to condemn cruel religious practices and the rationalism of francis bacon, isaac newton and john locke for undermining an older and simpler christian faith.”explaining blake’s words “sons of albion … combine into three forms, named bacon & newton & locke” (e 224). the last exhibit, “a bearded nude male (probably urizen) crouching in a heavenly sphere, 1794,” known under the title “the ancient of days,” chimed with the sun pendants displayed earlier to articulate the cosmic coordinates of stonehenge. the caption explained that “in blake’s alternative to the bible’s book of genesis, an account of the creation of the world, stonehenge is built by urizen, a god-like character associated with the evil of reason and the banishment of the original chaos of eden. the sun was equated with the blazing power of the imagination to create a fairer, better world.” at the end of the exhibition, writing on the wall invited visitors to take on the legacy of stonehenge through the words of archaeologist jacquetta hawkes: “every age has the stonehenge it deserves—​or desires.”jacquetta hawkes, “god in the machine,” antiquity 41, no. 163 (1967): 174-80, on 174. image: © trustees of the british museum (see enlargement) “albion rose” (1794–​96),the blake archive dates this impression to 1795 (see the copy information for large book copy a), following joseph viscomi, “blake’s ‘annus mirabilis’: the productions of 1795,” blake 41.2 (fall 2007): 52-83. identified as plate 1 in the series a large book of designs copy a british museum, 1856,0209.417 jerusalem copy a (1804–​c. 1820, printed c. 1820), plate 100 british museum, 1847,0318.93.100 jerusalem copy a (1804–​c. 1820, printed c. 1820), plate 70 british museum, 1847,0318.93.70 “the ancient of days,” europe copy d (1794), frontispiece british museum, 1859,0625.72 paesaggi e personaggi della commedia: un’iconografia digitale [landscapes and characters from the commedia: a digital iconography] piccole cisterne romane, fermo 25 february–​27 march 2022 this installation restaged the “ghost of the commedia” in an immersive digital experience within the roman cisterns in fermo, marche, italy. the ancient setting shifted the terms of a digital iconography experiment originally designed as a conclusion to the exhibition la biblioteca di dante [dante’s library] in the library of the accademia nazionale dei lincei in rome in 2021–​22.the accademia nazionale dei lincei exhibition was reviewed in “blake and exhibitions, 2021,” blake 56.1 (summer 2022). this multisensorial and multimedial adaptation animated digital facsimiles of historic illustrations to the commedia, including some of blake’s designs—​the wood of the self-murderers: the harpies and the suicides; ulysses and diomed swathed in the same flame; ugolino relating his death; and purgatorio iv. moving the projections from the library to the roman vaults enhanced both the ghostly effects of dante’s journey to the world of the dead and the use of contemporary technology as a portal to other times. viewers were invited to put their heads inside black boxes to experience the commedia through visual dramaturgy as a series of digital sight and sound stations, a contemporary take on theatrical ghost displays. the stations were turned into immersive “phonospheres” with the addition of music and sounds directed by ethnomusicologist and video artist francesco de melis. translating episodes from dante into sight and sound was part of the widening participation strategy of the central institute for immaterial heritage of the culture ministry (icpi), in collaboration with openlab company, for the accademia nazionale dei lincei.see “in mostra a fermo dante in versione immersiva,” laprovinciadifermo.com (25 feb. 2022), accessed 29 june 2023. epic and divine: dante’s world noel shaw gallery, baillieu library, university of melbourne 3 march–​26 june 2022 a display to mark the dante septuacentennial, featuring works by botticelli, blake, doré, dalì, and local artists sydney nolan, bruno leti, and angela cavalieri. the inscription over hell-gate (facsimile) illustrations to the divine comedy of dante by william blake (national art-collections fund, 1922) university of melbourne library, special collections, 769.942 b636 “the six-footed serpent attacking agnolo brunelleschi” (facsimile) blake’s illustrations of dante: seven plates designed and engraved by w. blake (trianon press for the william blake trust, 1978) university of melbourne library, special collections, 37e/1 “the circle of the lustful: francesca da rimini” (facsimile) blake’s illustrations of dante: seven plates designed and engraved by w. blake (trianon press for the william blake trust, 1978) university of melbourne library, special collections, 37e/1 drawing closer: four hundred years of drawing from the risd museum (curated by jamie gabbarelli) rhode island school of design museum, providence 12 march–​4 september 2022 catalogue: bate, dominic. “cat. 65 william blake.” drawing closer: four hundred years of drawing from the risd museum. ed. jamie gabbarelli. providence: risd museum, 2021. last modified 1 march 2022. this exhibition presented works from the risd museum collection, which was gathered “to teach and inspire the next generations of artists and makers,” in order to focus on materials and techniques “during [the] first 400 years of drawing on paper” in europe, 1500s–​1800s. dominic bate’s catalogue entry references blake’s biblical source (acts 17:22-34), notes the raphael cartoon as potential inspiration, and compares the pose of st. paul with blake’s wash drawing moses receiving the law. in the formal analysis of the painting, bate contrasts how color is applied to the garments with the stippling technique used for the rays of light and the saint’s complexion. saint paul preaching at athens (1803) rhode island school of design museum, 31.280 the greats: masterpieces from the national galleries of scotland tokyo metropolitan art museum, 22 april–​3 july 2022 kobe city museum, 16 july–​25 september 2022 kitakyushu municipal museum of art, 4 october–​20 november 2022 catalogue: the greats: masterpieces from the national galleries of scotland. tokyo, 2022. 264 pp. god writing upon the tables of the covenant (c. 1805) national galleries of scotland, d 2281 exhibition cat., p. 149 the woodpecking factory: victorian illustrations by the brothers dalziel (curated by bethan stevens) british museum, london 17 may–​4 september 2022 the brothers dalziel was the most successful wood-engraving firm of the victorian period, c. 1839–​93. its corpus encompassed commercial advertisements, newspaper illustrations, and scientific and literary illustrations ranging from dickens to tennyson’s poems (1857), lewis carroll’s alice (1865, 1871), and trollope. the dalziel firm employed the most successful artists of the time, including the pre-raphaelites dante gabriel rossetti, john everett millais, arthur hughes, frederic leighton, and john tenniel. this exhibition presented the findings of bethan stevens’s research on the dalziel albums, an archive containing 54,000 proof wood engravings, catalogued thanks to funding from the arts and humanities research council. the title of the project associates wood engraving with the organic activity of the woodpecker, a term captured by walter crane to reflect on his apprenticeship to w. j. linton.walter crane, an artist’s reminiscences (new york: macmillan, 1907) 48, cited in bethan stevens, the wood engravers’ self-portrait: the dalziel archive and victorian illustration (manchester: manchester university press, 2022). blake’s title page to songs of innocence was selected as a point of comparison for arthur hughes’s frontispiece for christina rossetti’s sing-song: a nursery rhyme book (routledge, 1872). the caption noted the blakean iconography of hughes’s composition, featuring a “nurse or maternal figure teaching under a tree,”exhibition label; see also stevens, the wood engravers’ self-portrait, drawing on lorraine janzen kooistra, christina rossetti and illustration: a publishing history (athens, oh: ohio university press, 2002) 102-04. and the contrast between rossetti’s mass-produced book and the rarity of songs, printed in a very small print run. the exhibition therefore shed light on victorian inflections of blake’s corpus and on his place in the context of victorian wood engraving. songs of innocence and of experience copy b (1789, 1794), plate 3 british museum, 1932,1210.4 j. pierpont morgan’s library: building the bookman’s paradise (curated by christine nelson and jennifer tonkovich) morgan library & museum, new york 10 june–​18 september 2022 the morgan displayed sketches and plans documenting the building of its mckim library, as well as photographs of the collector and highlights from the collection. in addition to blake’s job watercolors, items included the manuscript of walter scott’s guy mannering (1814–​15), the eliot bible (1663), the golden gospels of henry viii (977–​93), the lindau gospels (c. 880–​90), a gutenberg and fust bible (1454–​55), and the manuscript of george sand’s les dames vertes (c. 1859). job’s sons and daughters overwhelmed by satan (c. 1805–​06) morgan library & museum, 2001.65 when the morning stars sang together (c. 1805–​06) morgan library & museum, 2001.76 100 great british drawings (curated by melinda mccurdy) huntington library, art museum, and botanical gardens, san marino 18 june–​5 september 2022 catalogue: excursions of imagination: 100 great british drawings from the huntington’s collection. san marino, ca: huntington library, art museum, and botanical gardens, 2022. this exhibition included blake’s color print hecate, or the night of enitharmon’s joy. curator melinda mccurdy explains in the catalogue that although it “is not technically a drawing … it belongs to a group of twelve large color prints that … have been called ‘color-printed drawings.’”quoting robert n. essick, the works of william blake in the huntington collections: a complete catalogue (san marino, ca: huntington library, art collections, and botanical gardens, 1985) 201. for a discussion of blake’s monoprints as color-printed paintings rather than color-printed drawings, see joseph viscomi, william blake’s printed paintings: methods, origins, meanings (london: paul mellon centre for studies in british art, 2021) 2-3, 24, 26, 44. hecate, or the night of enitharmon’s joy (1795) huntington library, art museum, and botanical gardens, 000.126 exhibition cat., pp. 112-13 j. r. r. tolkien: the art of the manuscript (curated by william m. fliss and sarah c. schaefer) haggerty museum of art, marquette university 19 august–​23 december 2022 catalogue: fliss, william m., sarah c. schaefer, et al. j. r. r. tolkien: the art of the manuscript. milwaukee: haggerty museum of art, 2022. image: m. von haselberg (see enlargement). the tolkien works are © the tolkien trust. the book of thel featured in a section entitled “glimpsing other-worlds,” which exhibited works in which tolkien is seen to work “in a primarily visual mode …. the images he crafted represent both connections to and divergences from familiar sources (medieval and modern).” blake’s work exemplified the use of watercolor in a modern reinvention of a medium “used in medieval manuscript illumination, and which enjoyed renewed popularity in the nineteenth century with the industrial manufacturing of pigments and other painting tools.”wall panel. in blake, tolkien found a model for the integration of text and image on the page. image: m. von haselberg (see enlargement) a late copy of thel, on loan from the cincinnati art museum, was displayed in a vitrine open to plate 4 to document tolkien’s inspiration for the tree-framing motif in the shores of faery (1915) hanging next to the case.j. r. r. tolkien, the shores of faery (10 may 1915), watercolor, ink, and pencil on paper (bodleian libraries, university of oxford, ms. tolkien drawings 87, fol. 22r). the book of thel copy n (composed 1789, printed c. 1818), plate 4 [bentley; erdman plate 2] cincinnati art museum, 1969.510.3 reinventing the américas: construct. erase. repeat. (curated by idurre alonso with denilson baniwa) getty center, los angeles 23 august 2022–​8 january 2023 building on edmundo o’gorman’s la invención de america (1958), the exhibition explored america as a european invention, “refram[ing] the colonial and nineteenth-century materials in the getty research institute collections” and “counter[ing] the views of european chroniclers, illustrators, and printmakers from the 16th to 19th centuries by offering a multi-perspectival approach.” contemporary responses to the collection’s colonial corpus included digital interventions on historic objects, video artworks, and a mural by indigenous artist denilson baniwa from the amazonas state in brazil, and commentary by “latinx and indigenous members of the los angeles community.” among the themes explored were the allegory of america embodied as an indigenous naked woman, exotic wonders of nature, abundance and exploitation, and extraction resulting in forced labor and slavery.information and quotations are from the wall panels and website introduction. john gabriel stedman’s narrative, of a five years’ expedition, against the revolted negroes of surinam, in guiana featured because its engravings “became some of the most widely reproduced pieces of antislavery art.”gallery label. “inhuman treatment of a wounded rebel negro,”according to the gallery label, the two blake prints are from stedman, but this impression lacks blake’s signature and the inscription reads “inhuman treatment of a wounded rebel negro” rather than “flagellation of a female samboe slave.” curator idurre alonso reports that the prints “are part of the tonatiúh and electra gutiérrez collection,” which “was built by acquiring maps and prints at flea markets and from antiquarians mostly in méxico. there is nothing in the collection that can help identify what book [they were] taken from” (personal correspondence). john gabriel stedman, narrative, of a five years’ expedition, against the revolted negroes of surinam, in guiana (?) getty research institute, p840001.80 “a negro hung alive by the ribs to a gallows,” john gabriel stedman, narrative, of a five years’ expedition, against the revolted negroes of surinam, in guiana (?) getty research institute, p840001.81 füssli, entre rêve et fantastique [fuseli, the realm of dreams and the fantastic] (curated by christopher baker, andreas beyer, and pierre curie, with scenography by hubert le gall) musée jacquemart-andré, paris 16 september 2022–​23 january 2023 catalogue: baker, christopher, andreas beyer, and pierre curie. füssli, entre rêve et fantastique [fuseli, the realm of dreams and the fantastic]. paris: musée jacquemart-andré, 2022. blake’s engraving of “head of a damned soul in dante’s inferno” (1789) reproduces an oil painting that fuseli created in rome (1770–​78). a smaller version of this head was engraved in reverse by thomas holloway as one of four heads from dante’s inferno for johann caspar lavater’s essays on physiognomy (1789–​98). the catalogue entry suggests that blake’s much larger plate, on view in the exhibition, “was probably destined for a de luxe edition in large format, which is mentioned in the correspondence between lavater and the publisher joseph johnson in 1788, but which was never published.”christopher baker, andreas beyer, and pierre curie, füssli, entre rêve et fantastique, cat. nos. 49-50 (my translation). placed next to a watercolor and opposite a version of the nightmare, it exemplified fuseli’s demonic and supernatural art of darkness. on the adjoining wall hung fuseli’s lapland orgies, a painting that he developed from a simile that milton used to convey the horror of the encounter with sin and death in hell in book 2 of paradise lost.for a review that analyzes the choice of blackness—​whether it means being blinded or meditating in a burkean obscurity—​in the context of victor hugo’s “bouche d’ombre” (les contemplations, 1856), inner cinema, and psychoanalysis, see marc porée, “au musée jacquemart-andré, explorer notre part d’ombre avec füssli,” conversation (2 oct. 2022), accessed 28 june 2023. “head of a damned soul in dante’s inferno” (1789) british museum, 1874,0711.149 peter booth (curated by anthony fitzpatrick) tarrawarra museum of art, healesville, victoria, australia 26 november 2022–​13 march 2023 catalogue: fitzpatrick, anthony, and kirsty grant. peter booth. healesville: tarrawarra museum of art, 2022. an exhibition of works by the painter peter booth (1940–), who imagines “an apocalyptic world characterised by grotesque, unsettling, and at times absurd scenes of human and hybrid figures in varying states of apprehension, aggression and conflict.”exhibition website. prints by blake, james ensor, francisco goya, and samuel palmer represented artists who have influenced him: “the intensity and determined individuality of blake’s approach to art and life resonated with booth, and he reportedly pinned blake’s aphorisms to his studio wall.”fitzpatrick and grant, peter booth 9. wood engravings for robert john thornton, the pastorals of virgil (1821): “thenot remonstrates with colinet” “thenot under a fruit tree” “thenot remonstrates with colinet, lightfoot in the distance” “colinet departs in sorrow, a thunder-scarred tree on the right” “blasted tree and blighted crops” “the good shepherd chases away the wolf” “sabrina’s silvery flood” “colinet’s fond desire strange lands to know” national gallery of victoria, 1873-5 to 1880-5 “job’s evil dreams” [plate numbered 11], illustrations of the book of job (printed 1874) art gallery of south australia, 545g25 “unentangled in the intricate windings of modern practice”: william blake’s apprentice copperplates and engravings “unentangled in the intricate windings of modern practice”: william blake’s apprentice copperplates and engravings by mark crosby mark crosby (crosbym@ksu.edu), fsa, is an associate professor in the department of english at kansas state university. he recently co-edited william blake’s manuscripts: praxis, puzzles, and palimpsests (palgrave macmillan, 2024) and has written on hayley, paine, and godwin. engraving is drawing on copper & nothing elseblake, public address, c. 1810 (e 574) in 1809 i am indebted to john barrett, archiox technical lead and senior photographer at the bodleian library, and adam lowe, director of factum arte and founder of the factum foundation for digital technology in preservation, for their assistance with the research for this article. michael phillips, ad stijnman, and joseph viscomi kindly read and commented on early drafts and robert n. essick offered generous advice on the minute particulars of line engraving. any infelicities are entirely my own.the antiquarian richard gough (1735–​1809) bequeathed a substantial collection of preparatory drawings, copperplates, and proof impressions to the bodleian library. this material relates to his publications on british history and topography and medieval funerary monuments, as well as his work as the first director of the society of antiquaries, which included supervising the publication of both its journal and the occasional papers vetusta monumenta, along with other projects. during his time as director, gough also worked on his self-published study sepulchral monuments, in great britain (1786–​96). illustrated with engravings by james basire, engraver to the society of antiquaries and the royal society, sepulchral monuments was conceived as a comprehensive visual and textual account of british royal tombs “from the norman conquest to the seventeenth century.”richard gough, sepulchral monuments, in great britain, 2 vols. (london, 1786–​96), vol. 1, part 1, title page. while the title page of the first volume indicates that it is “part i,” as the work took shape gough split the volume into two parts: part 1, covering the eleventh to thirteenth centuries, and part 2, covering the fourteenth century. volume 1, part 1 was published in 1786; volume 1, part 2 was published in 1796. the majority of the engravings after blake’s drawings are in volume 1, parts 1 and 2. volume 2, referred to on the title page as “part ii,” deals with the fifteenth century, and was also published in 1796. gough didn’t complete a third volume, but published an introduction in 1799. there are, of course, examples of bibliographic variations in some copies. although none of the work was published until 1786, basire’s studio had begun the engraving project in the 1770s, a period that coincided with william blake’s apprenticeship (1772–​79). among the materials in the gough collection are the copperplates after blake’s preparatory drawings.martin butlin, the paintings and drawings of william blake, 2 vols. (new haven: yale university press, 1981) #12-47 (for preparatory drawings in the gough collection), but see also note 14. on the versos of three of the copperplates are incised linear patterns and motifs made with burins, a drypoint needle, and a compass, suggesting that these plates were used by an apprentice to practice and develop the techniques of line engraving. this article revisits basire’s studio at 31 great queen street and blake’s apprenticeship period before describing the markings on these plates and offering evidence for their attribution to blake. blake’s apprenticeship with basire when blake began his apprenticeship in 1772, he overlapped with thomas ryder for a short timeg. e. bentley, jr., blake records, 2nd ed. (new haven: yale university press, 2004) [hereafter br(2)] claims that ryder’s term concluded on 16 august 1772 (16), two weeks after blake began his apprenticeship, whereas michael phillips, william blake: apprentice and master (oxford: ashmolean museum, 2014) says that there was an overlap of three months (30). and then was basire’s only apprentice until james parker joined the studio in august 1773. the stationers’ company records and the register of duties reveal that basire did not take on another apprentice until 1779, when blake completed his term and was released from his indenture.stationers’ company apprentice register, 1 february 1763 to 5 december 1786, p. 15 (national archives, kew, inl 1/27, f. 133). blake’s indenture has not survived; for a re-creation, see br(2) 12-14, and for a contemporaneous example, see phillips 28 (illus. 14 and caption). the prints issuing from basire’s studio during blake’s time were mainly line engravings executed using the mixed method of preliminary etching followed by engraving. unlike the fashionable aesthetic produced by stipple engraving or mezzotint, line engraving used a variety of linear patterns to represent form and tone. it was an extremely time-consuming technique that took patience and skill to master and ensured that for architectural illustration the print was faithful to the original.line engravings produce more impressions before needing to be reworked than mezzotints, which are limited to between 100 and 200 impressions. gough frequently praised basire for his ability to create accurate reproductions, observing that “mr. james basire[’s] … burin will do credit to every individual or body of men who employ it.”john nichols, literary anecdotes of the eighteenth century, 9 vols. (london, 1812–​15) 2: 586. while much of basire’s work came from the society of antiquaries and the royal society—​particularly the illustrations for their respective journals, archaeologia and transactions of the royal society—​his workshop also produced a range of prints to illustrate popular journals like the european magazine, as well as portrait engravings of aristocrats and notable literary figures, including andrew marvell, john dryden, and james thomson. many of these portrait engravings were exhibited at the free society of artists.see algernon graves, the society of artists of great britain, 1760–​1791; the free society of artists, 1761–​1783: a complete dictionary of contributors and their work from the foundation of the societies to 1791 (london: george bell and sons, 1907) 24-26. basire was also a specialist in executing large-scale prints, such as “the stoning of st. stephen” (1753) after raphael and “pylades and orestes” (1771) after benjamin west’s famous painting. beginning in the early 1770s, the society of antiquaries commissioned from him a series of large engravings of paintings depicting scenes from the lives of henry viii and edward vi. his studio illustrated several popular travel narratives during the same period, such as james cook’s hugely successful a voyage towards the south pole, and round the world (1777). in addition to the frontispiece, basire contributed six engravings, including the large fold-out plate “the landing at mallicolo, one of the new hebrides,” which was exhibited to much acclaim at the free society of artists in 1778.see a catalogue of the pictures, sculptures, &c. by the society of artists (london, 1778) 4 (#16). in the same year, charles rogers’s collection of prints in imitation of drawings was published. this was a series of finely etched prints with mezzotint borders after the drawings of renaissance masters, executed to replicate the aesthetic of the originals.many of these prints were produced in the 1760s and evince a range of techniques that imitate the autographic gestures associated with sketching on paper. these techniques give, as viscomi observes, “the illusion of spontaneity” (e-mail correspondence, 1 october 2024). basire contributed eighteen engravings after raphael and caravaggio, among others, using stippling in combination with lines and other illusionistic effects.see charles rogers, a collection of prints in imitation of drawings, 2 vols. (london, 1778) 1: 46, 57, 71, 105, 111, 114, 136, 151; and 2: 27, 32, 33, 34, 99, 134, 166, 182, 187, 228. william wynne ryland engraved most of the plates in this publication. according to alexander gilchrist, james blake first approached ryland, “a more famous man than basire,” to take his son william as an apprentice (see life of william blake, 2 vols. [london: macmillan and co., 1863] 1: 13). when taken with his other work, these prints demonstrate the breadth of his technical skill as an engraver utilizing a specific range of tools to create a visual language capable of reproducing original images on copper. he could employ firmly etched lines and simple hatching patterns to illustrate antiquarian and architectural subjects, or take a more sophisticated approach with the large historical plates that required smoother lines and intensely detailed hatching and cross-hatching. he was equally capable of creating the loosely and heavily etched lines typical of popular caricatures such as “the farmer’s return” after hogarth (1762) and the forceful curved lines, careful stippling, and elaborate cross-hatching necessary for portrait engravings. basire passed on these techniques, enigmatically described in the records of the stationers’ company as the “art and mystery” of engraving, to his apprentices.br(2) 13. two years into his apprenticeship, blake was sent to westminster abbey by his master to make preparatory drawings of the medieval royal tombs to illustrate gough’s sepulchral monuments. the main source for our knowledge about his time in the abbey is benjamin heath malkin, who almost certainly gathered the information directly from blake: he was employed in making drawings from old buildings and monuments, and occasionally, especially in winter, in engraving from those drawings. this occupation led him to an acquaintance with those neglected works of art, called gothic monuments. there he found a treasure, which he knew how to value. he saw the simple and plain road to the style of art at which he aimed, unentangled in the intricate windings of modern practice. the monuments of kings and queens in westminster abbey, which surround the chapel of edward the confessor, particularly that of king henry the third, the beautiful monument and figure of queen elinor, queen philippa, king edward the third, king richard the second and his queen, were among his first studies. all these he drew in every point he could catch, frequently standing on the monument, and viewing the figures from the top. the heads he considered as portraits; and all the ornaments appeared as miracles of art, to his gothicised imagination. he then drew aymer de valence’s monument, with his fine figure on the top. those exquisite little figures which surround it, though dreadfully mutilated, are still models for the study of drapery. but i do not mean to enumerate all his drawings, since they would lead me over all the old monuments in westminster abbey.br(2) 563. the painter j. t. smith recalls a conversation with thomas stothard that goes some way toward corroborating malkin’s earlier account. according to smith, stothard considered that “blake made a remarkably correct and fine drawing of the head of queen philippa” (illus. 1) from her effigy.br(2) 615. 1. queen philippa (c. 1773–​77). pencil on paper, sheet 48.8 x 30.5 cm. gough maps 225, f. 205. archiox / © bodleian libraries, university of oxford. malkin’s account has been taken as the primary authority for attributing to blake some of the preparatory drawings of the royal tombs in the collections of the bodleian library and the society of antiquaries, although most of the drawings are, by convention, signed “basire.” based on malkin’s description, blake started sketching the tombs in 1774. over a span of three to four years, he produced more than fifty drawings.forty-seven are in the gough collection at the bodleian. there are also nine, of effigies, wall paintings, and tombs, at the society of antiquaries. my figure for the bodleian differs from butlin partly because it includes works hitherto not attributed to blake. for these new attributions, see crosby, “the gothic artist: william blake’s apprentice drawings and copperplates in the bodleian library,” bodleian library record (forthcoming). the society of antiquaries drawings are highly finished and were displayed during joseph ayloffe’s lecture to the society on 12 march 1778. his account of some ancient monuments in westminster abbey was published with illustrations after blake’s preparatory drawings in 1780 and reissued in the second volume of vetusta monumenta in 1789. malkin’s observation that blake spent time, “especially in winter, … engraving from those drawings” has been used to attribute to him some, but not all, of the engravings after his sketches. for instance, roger easson and essick ascribe twenty-three engravings in sepulchral monuments to blake, although only those of the six oval portraits of kings and queens have been widely accepted as his work.roger r. easson and robert n. essick, william blake, book illustrator, vol. 2 (memphis: american blake foundation, 1979) 57-61; robert n. essick, william blake’s commercial book illustrations (oxford: clarendon press, 1991) 118-20. question marks hover over the attribution of the rest of the engravings after his drawings. this is partly because volume 1, part 1 of sepulchral monuments was published in 1786, seven years after blake completed his apprenticeship, and volume 1, part 2 appeared in 1796.see also robert n. essick, william blake, printmaker (princeton: princeton university press, 1980) 30-32. one of the engravings, of the monument of queen eleanor after his drawing, is dated 1783, which appears to preclude him as the engraver of this print. like the preparatory drawings, all the engravings after blake’s sketches bear basire’s signature, using variations of the formulation “basire del & sc” to denote authorship or delineation (del) of the drawing and the engraving (sc). it was common practice for the master engraver to sign all the work coming from his studio, and in the case of the engravings for sepulchral monuments, basire’s signature was an imprimatur of accuracy. according to gough, the undertaking would not have been feasible without basire. recalling his conception of the project in 1772, gough relates in his manuscript autobiography that “mr. basire’s specimens of drawing & engraving gave me so much satisfaction th it was impossible to resist t impulse of carrying such a design into executi” [sic].bodleian library, gough middlesex 11, ff. 25-26. for gough’s inception of sepulchral monuments, see nichols 6: 622. in sepulchral monuments, gough praises him for being “faithful in his transcripts and modest in his prices.”gough, sepulchral monuments vol. 1, part 1, p. 9. as engraver to the society of antiquaries and the royal society, basire was considered one of britain’s foremost practitioners of intaglio graphics at the time and, as such, would have appealed to the connoisseur collectors and antiquarians who were members of the societies, or subscribed to their publications. the gough correspondence in the bodleian reveals that drawings of tombs to illustrate sepulchral monuments were being prepared for engraving by basire’s studio as early as october 1773.writing to rev. michael tyson on 27 october 1773, gough mentions having the drawings of the “essex monuments” prepared for engraving (nichols 8: 608). the essex monuments refer to the tombs of robert and thomas de vere; there is an unsigned and undated preparatory drawing by tyson of the robert de vere tomb and effigy (gough maps 225, f. 131). both monuments were engraved and published (sepulchral monuments vol. 1, part 1, p. 68, pl. 24; vol. 1, part 2, p. 130, pl. 52). also see tyson to gough, november 1773, about having tyson’s preparatory drawing of the hawkwood tomb (nichols 8: 609) engraved for sepulchral monuments (vol. 1, part 2, p. 153, pl. 59). for gough’s correspondence with tyson, including discussions of drawings and engravings for sepulchral monuments, see bodleian libraries, ms. gough gen. top. 44, ff. 477-532. by 1773, blake had learned the basic techniques of line engraving, to judge from the first of two states of “joseph of arimathea among the rocks of albion,” his engraving after a figure from francesco rossi salviati’s copy of michelangelo’s the crucifixion of saint peter (1549). 2. “joseph of arimathea among the rocks of albion,” first state (c. 1773). line engraving, sheet 26.6 x 15.6 cm. fitzwilliam museum, p.391-1985. photo: © fitzwilliam museum, university of cambridge. the first state (illus. 2) is undated but contains a manuscript inscription in blake’s hand: “engraved when i was a beginner at basires”. on the second, he has incised “engraved by w blake 1773 from an old italian drawing”. there are differences in the linear patterns between the states, but the first shows that he was able to execute dense webs of hatching and cross-hatching.for differences between the two states, see essick, printmaker 185-86. blake covered the entire surface of the plate with various hatching systems to represent different features, such as rock, water, clothing, hair, and skin. the coherence between these systems is inconsistent and, as such, the tonal scale is limited compared with the second state.some of the darker areas in the first state, such as the folds of clothing, may have been made by touching up the plate with a burin; that is, blake etched the first state and may have added some engraving work to deepen lines so that they would hold ink and print more darkly. i’m indebted to ad stijnman for this observation. nevertheless, the first state demonstrates that he had learned the basic methods of hatching to create form and tone as early as the year following the start of his apprenticeship. three copperplates as noted, on the versos of three copperplates after blake’s westminster abbey drawings there are hatching and cross-hatching patterns and other incised markings that suggest the hand of an apprentice. to make these incised markings, apprentice engravers had a range of tools available, such as burins, needles, scrapers, and burnishers (illus. 3).on blake’s engraving techniques, see <https://​www.​blakearchive.​org/​exhibit/​illuminated​printing>. 3. antonio baratta after a.-j. de fehrt, “gravure en taille-douce: pl. i,” encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, ed. denis diderot and jean le rond d’alembert. sheet 40.2 x 26.3 cm. national gallery of art, washington, dc, 1996.20.1. 4. antonio baratta after benoît-louis prévost and a.-j. de fehrt, “gravure en taille douce: suite de la pl. i,” encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, ed. denis diderot and jean le rond d’alembert. sheet 40.2 x 26.3 cm. national gallery of art, washington, dc, 1996.20.2. fig. 12 in this print depicts the ballpoint hammer. many of the copperplates after his preparatory drawings also contain evidence of repoussage, a technique that uses a small ballpoint hammer (illus. 4) on the verso of the plate to rework or correct areas on the recto.for discussion of repoussage in blake’s extant copperplates, see mei-ying sung, william blake and the art of engraving (london: pickering and chatto, 2009) 73-118. much of this reworking corresponds to decorative details of the tombs, including latin inscriptions, or the titles of the images. while it is tempting to attribute repoussage to the hand of an apprentice rather than a master engraver, it was common practice for plates to be corrected.see ad stijnman, engraving and etching, 1400–​2000: a history of the development of manual intaglio printmaking processes (london: archetype publications, 2012) 172-73. proof impressions in the gough collection of engravings published in sepulchral monuments reveal that prior to the addition of titles and page and plate numbers, gough inspected and annotated the prints. most of these annotations are of titles and page numbers and, in some cases, basire’s signature as author of the original drawings and the engravings (see bodleian library, gough maps 227, f. 68; gough maps 228, ff. 68, 118).  repoussage is discernible with the naked eye, but the incised linear patterns and markings are difficult to see without the assistance of magnification. in early 2022, the bodleian established a collaborative research and development partnership with the factum foundation—​archiox (analysis and recording of cultural heritage in oxford)—​to trial a prototype three-dimensional imaging system that records the microtopography of copperplates. the selene photometric stereo system captures both color and surface data simultaneously at over one million pixels per square inch. recordings map the surface of the copperplate, making it possible to measure not only the width but also the depth of an etched or engraved feature by examining a cross-section. for example, selene enabled the analysis of line depths from the copperplates of the six oval portraits of monarchs after blake’s sketches. for each portrait, measurements were taken through the lines forming the eyebrows, cheek, and hair; they revealed a uniform depth of approximately 40 microns,a micron is a unit of measurement equating to 1/1000 mm. indicating a consistency of technique and application. to offer some context, the indentations made by a rocker from a selection of mezzotint plates held at the bodleian measure approximately 20 microns, while the lines on basire’s engraved facsimile of the gough map of great britain measure between 90 and 150 microns in depth. aymer de valence and john of eltham selene also mapped the incised patterns and markings on the versos of the three copperplates under consideration. most of the lines have tapered ends and a uniform depth of 250 microns, suggesting the use of a burin, although this finding doesn’t rule out the possibility that there was an initial drypoint stage. the versos of these plates were never intended to be printed and appear to have been practice spaces for an apprentice to learn the basics of intaglio graphics. one of the first lessons was, as stijnman observes, “to engrave straight and curved lines.”stijnman 87. the linear patterns on these versos are consistent with those on the rectos of the copperplates (and printed impressions) of the six oval portraits and the first state of “joseph of arimathea.” for instance, on the verso of the copperplate of the figures on the tombs of aymer de valence and john of eltham, there is a small area of dense cross-hatching approximately 5-10 mm. in length, with lines 250 microns deep and 170 microns wide (visible in illus. 6). there is also a cluster of seven lines with tapered ends, some of which overlap, approximately 30 mm. long and the same depth and width as the cross-hatching. more centrally, an ovoid shape 14 mm. in length, with lines 130 microns deep and 250 microns wide, could be a quill or the fletching of an arrow (illus. 5). 5. copperplate of the tombs of aymer de valence and john of eltham, magnified detail of the verso, showing fletching. to the left is a cluster of repoussage. gough copperplate d. 86. archiox / © bodleian libraries, university of oxford. the microtopography of the printing plate was recorded with a method of three-dimensional acquisition called photometric stereo. this technique involves the capture of four aligned images, each lit at intervals of ninety degrees. software is used to calculate the position and intensity of the shadows cast over the surface of the plate. 6. copperplate of the tombs of aymer de valence and john of eltham, magnified detail of the verso, showing an area of cross-hatching on the left and a rectilinear shape on the right. gough copperplate d. 86. archiox / © bodleian libraries, university of oxford. the shading scale has been adjusted in this image so that the incised markings are visible. to create the shading scale, depth maps were generated to encode relative height at each pixel, storing three-dimensional data within two-dimensional image files. using these depth maps reveals the shallow etching. such renders can be made either in the absence of the printing plate’s color or with some of the color added to the shading. a rectilinear shape that possibly represents a classical column, approximately 33 mm. high by 23 mm. wide, is delineated with vertical and horizontal parallel lines with squared ends, some curved lines, and areas of cross-hatching (illus. 6).basire’s studio engraved plates depicting classical columns for both ionian antiquities and james stuart and nicholas revett’s antiquities of athens. see ionian antiquities part 1 (1769), chap. 1, pls. 5-6, and chap. 3, pls. 3-6; antiquities of athens vol. 1 (1762), chap. 1, pls. 2-4, and chap. 2, pls. 6-7. these lines are shallowly incised, 35 microns deep and 170 microns wide. as with the other linear patterns on this plate, there is no burring.when a burin incises lines into the surface of a copperplate, it pushes the copper up on either side of the line to create burring. when a line is incised with a drypoint needle, a burr is formed on one side. all burring on this plate has been removed, probably by burnishing, scraping, or during the etching and printing of the recto. it was common practice for eighteenth-century printmakers to create clean lines by removing burring during the final stages of engraving. evidence of burr in a print was considered a defect. areas of the rectilinear shape are worn, with some lines closed up and flattened. this could reflect deliberate reworking of the plate by an apprentice using a burnisher or be the result of work on, and printing from, the recto.for discussion of the burnisher as a method of correction, see stijnman 172. three abbots 7. clockwise from top left: drawing (gough maps 225, f. 56), detail of the recto of the copperplate (gough copperplate d. 57), and print (sepulchral monuments vol. 1, part 1, p. 10, pl. 1) of the tombs of three abbots. archiox / © bodleian libraries, university of oxford. extensive evidence of an apprentice’s using a copperplate to hone techniques is on the verso of the plate depicting the three abbots in westminster abbey (illus. 7 and 8),for the attribution of the preparatory drawing to blake, see crosby, “the gothic artist.” which is filled with a variety of patterns, including hatching, cross-hatching, curved lines, semicircles, and round holes. 8. copperplate of the tombs of three abbots, verso. gough copperplate d. 57. archiox / © bodleian libraries, university of oxford. many of the lines have tapered or squared ends, indicating the use of a burin.there is no evidence of burring. each pattern is accorded a distinct area of the plate, with occasional overlap; multiple areas of hatching and cross-hatching show that this was an intentional practice space for an engraver to learn through repetition.there is no evidence of ink in any of the incised lines, suggesting that the verso was never printed. specks of white chalk can be seen in the deeper hatched lines. chalk would have been used to transfer the image from the preparatory drawing to the copperplate or to clean the plate. for transfer and counterproving methods, see essick, printmaker 12-15. with data from the three-dimensional recording made by selene, adam lowe created a functional facsimile of the verso of this plate (illus. 9). 9. adam lowe, facsimile of the verso of gough copperplate d. 57. factum foundation. 10. adam lowe, print from the facsimile of the verso of gough copperplate d. 57. factum foundation. the facsimile plate was created with uv-cured elevated printing, a process involving hundreds of layers of uv-cured ink, each layer 8 microns thick. it was then inked and printed on a traditional copperplate rolling press; the resulting print (illus. 10) has a marginally stronger plate tone because of the slight stipple on the surface of the uv-cured material.if the plate was rematerialized in copper and the surface polished, this plate tone could be removed. the images generated by selene, in concert with the facsimile of the verso and prints pulled from it, yield more details than are discernible with traditional forms of magnification. the most conspicuous incised markings are horizontal and vertical parallel lines and hatching (illus. 11). 11. copperplate of the tombs of three abbots, magnified detail of the verso, showing horizontal and vertical parallel lines. gough copperplate d. 57. archiox / © bodleian libraries, university of oxford. the majority of the lines are equidistant and form distinct rectilinear areas, with each area incised to line depths of 250-70 microns and widths of 250 microns. the consistency of depth indicates that the engraver was practicing applying uniform pressure; the consistency of width we see in the lines and in the space between them suggests that the engraver was attempting to create an even tonal effect. there is one cluster of sharp-pointed parallel lines varying in length, creating the illusion of a circle (illus. 12). 12. copperplate of the tombs of three abbots, magnified detail of the verso, showing parallel lines creating a circle. gough copperplate d. 57. archiox / © bodleian libraries, university of oxford. this cluster is approximately 27 mm. in diameter, with lines that are 270 microns deep and 300 microns wide; it reveals that the engraver was perfecting line lengths with uniform depth and width to form a circular shape with consistent tone. for an engraving studio such as basire’s, where lines and linear patterns were the foundation of the house style—​and would become for blake a tenet of his artistic theory—​incising equidistant parallel lines into the surface of a copperplate would have been one of the first skills an apprentice needed to acquire. the copperplates after blake’s drawings, particularly the images of the tombs, are circumscribed with double or triple line borders, and there is extensive use of parallel lines and hatching in the engraved oval portraits to delineate, for instance, areas of edward iii’s beard and clothing (illus. 13). 13. copperplate of the portrait of edward iii from his monument, magnified detail of the recto, showing his beard. the shading scale has been adjusted in this image so that the etched markings are visible. gough copperplate d. 107. archiox / © bodleian libraries, university of oxford. in his earliest attributed engraving, blake employed parallel lines in combination with dense webs of hatching and cross-hatching to represent the figure and background of joseph of arimathea. there are two rectangular areas of cross-hatching (illus. 14), as well as some smaller areas similar in size to the cross-hatching on the verso of the copperplate depicting the tombs of aymer de valence and john of eltham (see the cross-hatched area on the left of illus. 6). 14. copperplate of the tombs of three abbots, magnified detail of the verso, showing (left) two rectangular areas of cross-hatching and (right) a detail of the larger. gough copperplate d. 57. archiox / © bodleian libraries, university of oxford. the smaller rectangle is a grid of horizontal and vertical parallel lines 250 microns apart and 170 microns deep; over most of it the engraver added diagonal lines of the same dimensions. he followed a similar approach with the larger area. some of the horizontal and diagonal lines extend beyond this rectangle, suggesting that he was less concerned with creating the illusion of the rectangular shape than with maintaining consistency in the depth and width of the cross-hatched lines. such consistency was crucial, as we have seen, to achieve an even tonal effect. in the case of the cross-hatched rectilinear shape shown in illus. 15, the shallow depth of the lines indicates that a drypoint needle was utilized to score the lozenges. 15. copperplate of the tombs of three abbots, magnified detail of the verso, showing area of cross-hatching. gough copperplate d. 57. archiox / © bodleian libraries, university of oxford. the copperplates of the oval portraits after blake’s sketches all display extensive use of cross-hatching to create form and tone. and, like blake’s “joseph of arimathea” print, the dot and lozenge technique is employed on the facial features and clothing on those copperplates. while there are no examples of dot and lozenge on this practice plate, there is a cluster of round holes with slightly raised edges that are connected with shallow scratches made with a drypoint needle (illus. 16). 16. copperplate of the tombs of three abbots, magnified detail of the verso, showing a cluster of dots or flicks. gough copperplate d. 57. archiox / © bodleian libraries, university of oxford. this verso contains curved lines approximately 300 microns deep and 200 microns wide (illus. 17), some of which appear to form vegetative shapes (illus. 18). 17. copperplate of the tombs of three abbots, magnified detail of the verso, showing curved lines. gough copperplate d. 57. archiox / © bodleian libraries, university of oxford. 18. copperplate of the tombs of three abbots, magnified detail of the verso, showing vegetative shapes. gough copperplate d. 57. archiox / © bodleian libraries, university of oxford. in the copperplates of the oval portraits, such lines delineate hair (illus. 19); the moustaches and beards of richard ii and edward iii, for example, consist of a series of curved lines augmented with cross-hatching. 19. left: copperplate of the tombs of three abbots, magnified detail of the verso, showing vegetative shapes. gough copperplate d. 57. right: copperplate of the portrait of richard ii from his monument, magnified detail of the recto, showing his moustache. gough copperplate d. 111. archiox / © bodleian libraries, university of oxford. in “joseph of arimathea,” blake uses curved lines for the beard and to depict the lips and eyes. the vegetative shapes on the practice plate, including what seems to be a frond (illus. 20), could also relate to some of the plant decorations on the tombs sketched by blake, such as queen eleanor’s monument (illus. 21),leafy oak branches extend above the decorative shields on the monument of queen eleanor (bodleian library, gough maps 225, f. 126) and decorate the trefoil arches above countess aveline’s and aymer de valence’s tombs (gough maps 225, ff. 134, 145); on the monument of elinor of bohun (see crosby, “the gothic artist,” for the attribution of the drawing to blake), tiny flowers and other vegetation are inscribed into the copper (gough maps 225, f. 210; sepulchral monuments vol. 1, part 2, p. 159, pl. 60). and anticipate the tendrils in the illuminated books, such as on the title page of songs of innocence. 20. copperplate of the tombs of three abbots, magnified detail of the verso, showing frond. gough copperplate d. 57. archiox / © bodleian libraries, university of oxford. 21. clockwise from bottom left: drawing (gough maps 225, f. 126) and the recto of the copperplate (gough copperplate d. 12), plus details, of the monument of queen eleanor (side view). archiox / © bodleian libraries, university of oxford. in the drawing, to the left of the upper plinth of the tomb, is an outline in pen and ink of a heraldic cross that enlarges the minute shaded heraldic cross prefacing a latin inscription on the upper plinth. the outline cross gestures to the high degree of accuracy that basire (and gough) expected for these preparatory drawings. semicircles with puncture holes on their central axes indicate the use of a compass (illus. 22). 22. copperplate of the tombs of three abbots, magnified detail of the verso, showing semicircles. gough copperplate d. 57. archiox / © bodleian libraries, university of oxford. your browser does not support the video tag. gough copperplate d. 57. archiox / © bodleian libraries, university of oxford. the selene system calculates the relative height of each pixel, which allows images to be viewed from any angle. this new way of navigating the surface of a copperplate enables the viewer to discern between intentional markings and those that can be attributed to the materiality of the plate. they are shallowly incised to a depth of 15-25 microns and are uniformly 24 mm. in diameter. the ability to create semicircles and circles would have been important in basire’s studio; a number of the engravings for publications sponsored by the society of antiquaries were of architectural plans and roman coinage.see, for instance, archaeologia vol 2. (1773), pls. 1-2, 18; vol. 4 (1777), pls. 3-5, 20-21. for other publications, not sponsored by the society, containing architectural prints produced by basire’s studio of classical monuments and cross-sections of columns, see note 27. we can also see the utilization of semicircles in the six oval portraits, particularly for the swirls and curls of the hair of henry iii (illus. 23). 23. left: copperplate of the tombs of three abbots, magnified detail of the verso, showing semicircles. gough copperplate d. 57. right: copperplate of the portrait of henry iii from his monument, magnified detail of the recto, showing his hair. gough copperplate d. 77. archiox / © bodleian libraries, university of oxford. circles are a decorative feature of some of the tombs that blake sketched, such as the roundels containing trefoil motifs adorning the sedilia.bodleian library, gough maps 225, ff. 49, 117, 125. his preparatory drawing of aymer de valence’s effigy, for example, includes a trefoil containing a knight riding a horse (illus. 24); there is evidence of pentimento in the outline, with faint pencil semicircles discernible under magnification to the left of the lower left lobe, indicating that he made an initial attempt at drawing this part of the trefoil. 24. drawing of aymer de valence’s tomb, detail of the trefoil, showing pentimento semicircles (lower left). gough maps 225, f. 144. archiox / © bodleian libraries, university of oxford. blake used a compass in some of his post-apprenticeship commissions; for instance, he incised semicircles on his plate for henry emlyn’s proposition for a new order in architecture (1781) (illus. 25).for emlyn, see essick, commercial book illustrations 22-23. 25. pl. 2 in henry emlyn, a proposition for a new order in architecture (london: printed by j. dixwell, 1781). blake used a compass to inscribe the shallow semicircles at the top and bottom of the design. collection of robert n. essick. in his illuminated books, he frequently employs circles as motifs of light and containment structures, and, indeed, the compass became a pictorial motif in his work.the frontispiece to europe a prophecy (1794) depicts the white-bearded urizen circumscribed in a circle, possibly the sun, wielding a golden compass; in jerusalem (c. 1804–​20) pl. 12, an inverted figure holds a compass against a globe. see also his watercolor designs for edward young’s night thoughts (1795–​97), night vii, p. 21 and night viii, p. 14; ode to adversity, p. 4 from his watercolors illustrating thomas gray’s poems (1797–​98); and his color-printed drawing newton (c. 1795–​1805), in which the titular figure uses a compass to draw an arc within a triangle. richard ii and queen anne the verso of the copperplate after blake’s sketch depicting the monument of richard ii and queen anne (side view) also contains markings suggestive of apprentice work. 26. copperplate of richard ii and queen anne, magnified detail of the verso, showing the letters “i x b”, a loose-looped spiral, and the number “1” (the number “2” is not shown in this image). gough copperplate d. 109. archiox / © bodleian libraries, university of oxford. there are the letters “i x b” (probably the latinate formula for the initials of james basire), a loose-looped spiral, and the numbers “1” and “2” (illus. 26) incised by a burin with a round or oval tip, called a scorper. to achieve the zigzag effect, the engraver placed the tip of the scorper at an angle against the surface of the plate and wiggled from left to right (known as “trembling”), slowly moving forward to create rows of semicircular grooves.see stijnman 164 and n327. in addition, there are incised lines with tapered ends and a group of small holes made with a drypoint needle, similar to the cluster on the verso of the three abbots plate. a faint drypoint inscription reads “richard x his queen” (illus. 27). 27. copperplate of richard ii and queen anne, magnified detail of the verso, showing the scratched inscription “richard x his queen”. the shading scale has been adjusted in this image so that the drypoint markings are visible. gough copperplate d. 109. archiox / © bodleian libraries, university of oxford. running left to right and in the normal orientation (as opposed to reverse, or mirror, writing), the inscription was never intended to be printed but served simply as a label to identify the subject on the recto. with lines approximately 35 microns deep and 170 microns wide, it was scratched to the same depth and width as the rectilinear shape that appears to represent a classical column on the verso of the plate illustrating the tombs of aymer de valence and john of eltham. the inscription is less controlled than the rectilinear shape and was almost certainly done quickly.a less likely scenario is that it was made prior to etching to denote the intended subject for the plate. no other example of such an inscription is evident in the copperplates after blake’s preparatory drawings. there are two proof impressions of this plate in the gough collection (illus. 28). 28. proof impressions of the monument of richard ii and queen anne (side view). gough maps 228, ff. 190-91. archiox / © bodleian libraries, university of oxford. one is an early state with the effigies partially etched and before any lettering; the other is a later state with the effigies fully etched and the border and lettering of the title in place. based on these proofs, the scratched inscription would most likely have been made after the initial etching stage. the first proof allowed the engraver to check his work against the original drawing before finishing the effigies and adding the border and letters. blake’s preparatory sketches of richard and anne were, according to malkin, “among his first studies” and were part of the initial tranche of drawings (c. 1774–​75) comprising the monuments in the chapel of edward the confessor.for malkin, see br(2) 563. blake made four sketches of the monument of richard and anne, including two oval portraits from the effigies (bodleian library, gough maps 225, ff. 211-13, 215). for the dating of these drawings, see crosby, “the gothic artist.” after he drew these tombs, he moved to the area before the high altar to record the wall paintings and monuments that were revealed when the wainscot and tapestries were removed in 1775.as documented in joseph ayloffe, an account of some ancient monuments in westminster abbey … read at the society of antiquaries march 12, 1778 (london: j. nichols, 1780) 1. the existence of the two proof states and the inscription suggests an apprentice carefully checking his work during the etching process. as blake was responsible for the drawing of richard and anne’s tomb, he may have been, if we believe malkin, the engraver of the etching on the recto of this plate. if so, then he was likely also behind the scratched inscription and the other incised markings on the verso. some small areas of hatching, most notably in the first o of “london” on the platemaker’s mark stamped in the center, appear on this verso (illus. 29).while some of the copperplates bear the platemaker’s stamp, they are all undated. for copperplate suppliers during blake’s time, see g. e. bentley, jr., “blake’s heavy metal: the history, weight, uses, cost, and makers of his copper plates,” university of toronto quarterly 76.2 (spring 2007): 714-70; and sung, chap. 4. 29. copperplate of richard ii and queen anne, magnified detail of the verso, showing the platemaker’s mark. gough copperplate d. 109. archiox / © bodleian libraries, university of oxford. the o is 1.5 mm. in diameter and contains tightly hatched lines 50 microns deep created with a sharp-tipped burin. incising lines in confined spaces allowed practice with engraving tools in a controlled way. these marks are also suggestive of an apprentice practicing patterns spontaneously and playfully. such playfulness is further hinted at by two incised motifs, the first of which is a short-shafted arrow or dart with extensive fletching and a triangular tip (illus. 30). 30. copperplate of richard ii and queen anne, magnified detail of the verso, showing arrow. gough copperplate d. 109. archiox / © bodleian libraries, university of oxford. your browser does not support the video tag. gough copperplate d. 109. archiox / © bodleian libraries, university of oxford. approximately 18 mm. in length, the lines have been incised to a depth of 350-80 microns. the lower area of fletching is flat, indicating that a burin with a straight end at the tip was used. arrows or darts are a recurring pictorial and textual element in blake’s work.they feature in two watercolors illustrating episodes from milton’s paradise lost (1807): satan, sin, and death: satan comes to the gates of hell, in which satan is confronted by his son, death, wielding a flaming dart, and the rout of the rebel angels, in which the son draws back a large bow armed with seven arrows. in his watercolor designs for night thoughts, blake depicts christ armed with a bow, drawing an arrow from a quiver (night vii, p. 53); the figure of death with short-shafted arrows or darts (see night i, p. 15, which he engraved for the 1797 edition; night v, pp. 38, 45, 47, 51); and a bearded soldier with a spear (night ix, p. 63). he incorporated arrows or arrow-headed darts in other engravings after his own designs, such as “my son! my son!” from the emblem book for children: the gates of paradise (1793), which shows a male youth raising a dart at a bearded older male, and two illustrations for hayley’s 1802 ballad “the lion.” arrows appear frequently in blake’s poetry, including some of his most famous lines—​“bring me my bow of burning gold: / bring me my arrows of desire” (e 95)—​and one of his earliest poems, “a war song to englishmen” from poetical sketches: “the arrows of almighty god are drawn!” (e 440). according to the advertisement for poetical sketches, blake “commenced” the poems and dramatic fragments in his “twelfth” year and “occasionally resumed” work on them “till his twentieth year,” indicating that some composition occurred during his apprenticeship. “a war song to englishmen” was probably intended to be included in the dramatic fragment “king edward the third.” blake made three sketches of the effigy of edward iii in the chapel of the confessor between 1774 and 1777, including a large oval portrait (bodleian library, gough maps 225, ff. 202-04). if he produced the incised markings on the verso of this plate, then the arrow may be considered one of the earliest documented instances of this motif. the second motif is almost impossible to see with the naked eye because of substantial repoussage. selene revealed two drypoint lines, 30-40 microns in depth, that run across the verso of the plate as a guide for the repoussage. either side of these lines is a series of curved incisions or arcs,there are overlapping arcs 17.5 and 10 mm. in length above the eyebrows, together with a curved line that extends to the right beyond the uppermost arc. a slightly offset arc 10 mm. in length is below the mouth area. the tapered ends of which indicate that they were made with a burin. hidden among this cluster of lines and repoussage is a miniature face approximately 18 mm. high, with uniform line depths of 100 microns (illus. 31). 31. copperplate of richard ii and queen anne, magnified detail of the verso, showing tiny face. gough copperplate d. 109. archiox / © bodleian libraries, university of oxford. the short double arcs that form the upper lids of both eyes are suggestive of the almond eye shape that we see in blake’s self-portrait and in his 1810 tempera adam naming the beasts. all three portraits also convey a degree of intensity, with eyes framed by arched eyebrows staring directly at the viewer. i am indebted to robert n. essick for this observation. your browser does not support the video tag. gough copperplate d. 109. archiox / © bodleian libraries, university of oxford. the face is a simplistic representation, delineated with the patterns familiar from the versos of these plates: for instance, three curved lines above the eyes denote eyelids and eyebrows, with an area of cross-hatching above the right eye, between the second and third lines. hatched lines, consistently 92 microns deep, depict the right eye, while cross-hatching, consistently 96 microns deep, represents the left; the use of hatching for one and cross-hatching for the other imbues the face with an expressive character. around the nose there is considerable cross-hatching,this is consistent with the equidistant cross-hatching around the nose areas in the six oval portraits and the “joseph of arimathea” print. averaging 95 microns in depth; beneath the nose, three slightly curved lines denote an upper lip or closed lips. below, at least two shorter, shallower lines 40 microns deep, as well as a third, slightly longer line 90 microns deep, may represent the bottom lip or chin. repoussage covers and distorts much of the nose, indicating that the face was incised first and therefore before the recto of the plate was finished. unlike the more finished oval portraits, the miniature face does not represent a specific model or individual; the lack of a continuous circle around the features reveals that the curved lines preceded the face, which was possibly added as a doodle by a young apprentice. its minute size, like the hatched o of london in the platemaker’s mark, indicates an engraver capable of working in a controlled manner at a miniscule scale, possibly with the aid of magnification.in four of his preparatory sketches in the abbey, blake drew figures and faces on a similar scale as he copied the decorative features of the tombs of aymer de valence, john of eltham, and countess aveline (bodleian library, gough maps 225, ff. 54, 146, 156, 157). he often employed pen-and-ink handwork in his illuminated books to delineate facial features, including those of the tiny figures that lounge among vegetation or populate interlinear areas, and at the turn of the nineteenth century he embarked on a brief career as a miniaturist under the guidance of his then-patron, william hayley (see crosby, “a minute skirmish: blake, hayley and the art of miniature painting,” blake and conflict, ed. sarah haggarty and jon mee [basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, 2009] 164-84; and “william blake’s miniature portraits of the butts family,” blake 42.4 [spring 2009]: 147-52). conclusion incised markings on the versos of these three copperplates suggest that an apprentice engraver initially used the plates as practice spaces to learn and hone the linear patterns of his profession. the plates were then reused to etch images after blake’s preparatory drawings to illustrate gough’s sepulchral monuments. was the apprentice who made the preparatory drawings also responsible for the practice work? the evidence presented above encourages the tentative attribution of the markings on the versos to blake. it is important to note, however, that they could have been the work of one or more of basire’s other apprentices, or basire himself.it is improbable, although perhaps not impossible, that a master engraver such as basire would have needed to spend time practicing basic patterns. copper was expensive, so utilizing the versos of plates to train apprentices prior to etching the rectos was likely encouraged. because of that expense, an engraving studio such as basire’s would buy copper from a platemaker when it was required for specific commissions, which reduces the possibility that the markings pre-date the period of blake’s apprenticeship.for the cost of copperplates, see note 43. it is likely that basire’s studio would also have scraped and polished the surface of already etched plates so that they could be reused. on blake’s preparation of copperplates for etching, see joseph viscomi, blake and the idea of the book (princeton: princeton university press, 1993) 47-49. we know that blake began sketching in westminster abbey in 1774 and, according to malkin, engraved some of his drawings, “especially in winter.” before he could engrave the drawings, he needed to practice the techniques of line engraving. the work on the verso of the three abbots plate is methodical and structured, with specific areas dedicated to different hatching systems, curved lines, circles, and semicircles. the area of dense cross-hatching on the verso of the plate with the tombs of aymer de valence and john of eltham likewise reveals an apprentice deliberately practicing one of the foundational techniques of line engraving, while the nearby fletching seems to be a more spontaneous attempt at a specific motif. playful designs (or motifs) on the verso of the copperplate depicting the monument of richard ii and queen anne are also indicative of an apprentice; the miniature face appears to be a doodle that was, to quote blake’s own phrase, drawn “on copper” (e 574). the engraver who incised the markings on the versos of these plates did so not with the intention that the shapes, patterns, and motifs would be printed. the repetition on the three abbots plate gestures to the nature of reproductive engraving, which uses a series of repeating linear patterns to reproduce accurately an original image. in the case of the arrow and the tiny face on the richard and anne plate, the minute scale is suggestive of private and personal art created to experiment with motifs or for amusement during the long hours of an apprentice’s day. if this is the work of a young blake refining his craft, the versos of these copperplates grant us access to a privileged space that sheds light on how an eighteenth-century apprentice learned the techniques of his profession. the doodles reveal more personal, intimate moments that were not meant to be seen by anyone other than the artist. for the first time since they were made, we can now see the practice work and doodling of an apprentice responsible for, among other things, the tiny visionary face that emerges from the copperplate to return our gaze across two and half centuries. blake, lucretius, and prophecy: the book of los blake, lucretius, and prophecy: the book of los by andrew lincoln andrew lincoln is an emeritus professor of the english department, queen mary university of london. his latest book, imagining war and peace in eighteenth-century britain, 1690–​1820, is forthcoming from cambridge university press. in recent years historians of the renaissance and enlightenment have paid increasing attention to the influence of epicureanism upon european thought.see leddy and lifschitz; greenblatt; linker; johnson; kors; vicario; and mitsis. as a result, lucretius, the roman who expounded epicurean philosophy in his epic poem de rerum natura, has come to assume a foundational role in accounts of the development of modern science and philosophy. this change has been reflected within the world of blake criticism, where, as scholars have become more interested in blake’s complex response to materialism, so the presence of lucretius, as both a focus for blake’s hostility and as a shaping influence on his mythology, has become a subject of detailed scholarly investigation. we now have two studies specifically devoted to blake and lucretius. stephanie codsi has considered how blake’s hostility to epicurean deism could help to explain his depiction of absent fathers in songs of innocence and of experience. joshua schouten de jel, in a book-length study, develops a comprehensive account of the sources from which blake could have learned about lucretius and a detailed view of particular areas of his response (focused upon figures that he associated with epicurean atheism, francis bacon and isaac newton, and on specific areas of thought, including epistemology and cosmology). since these studies have shed much light on this area, i need to explain why we need another discussion of blake and lucretius. in focusing upon the grounds of blake’s hostility it is easy to overlook or underestimate the ambivalence that haunts his understanding of error and of prophecy. in this essay i shall argue that blake saw in lucretius not only a materialistic cosmology that he felt compelled to attack, but also a form of prophecy that represented an alluring alternative to his own prophetic mission, one whose malign influence could embroil those who tried to contain or oppose it—​including john milton. the work that deals with this issue most directly is blake’s creation myth, the book of los—​a work that seems to be nobody’s favorite, and that can appear frustratingly obscure. as codsi and schouten de jel note, references to epicureanism are scattered through blake’s works: the portrait of suction the epicurean in an island in the moon; annotations scornfully associating bacon, newton, and sir joshua reynolds with epicureanism; lines in jerusalem denouncing the “atheistical epicurean philosophy” and the theory of the “atomic origins of existence.”blake’s writings are quoted from erdman, hereafter abbreviated as e. see e 450-54, 620, 626, 645, 659, 660, 220. these references confirm that blake saw epicureanism not as a curious relict of the classical past but as a powerful influence within the thought of his own age. he undoubtedly saw this influence as dangerous, but his recurring condemnations suggest a kind of fascination. as northrop frye observes, blake never mentioned hobbes, with whom he would have profoundly disagreed, but angrily attacked writers with whom he found some grounds for agreement, because “truth in a false context is worse than outspoken falsehood.”frye 188. in the epicurean philosophy expounded by lucretius, blake would have found libertarian aims with which he had some sympathy, but represented in a context of profound error. lucretius presented epicurus as a revolutionary figure who attempted to liberate humanity from the blight of superstition, priestcraft, warfare, and political tyranny and to promote pleasure and well-being. in his account (as represented in the translation first published by thomas creech in 1682), the active mind of epicurus “was hurl’d / beyond the flaming limits of this world” into the liberating experience of “mighty space”—​hurled not by a punishing deity but by his own force of will, by his own refusal to accept the constraints of “religion’s tyranny,” and by his own love of “natural liberty” (1.96-98, 85, 89).creech 4, 3. in the 1790s, in the context of the french revolution, such a conception would have resonated with the ambitions of contemporary radicals, including blake himself. in de rerum natura epicurus, aspiring to liberate desire from error and religious tyranny, assumes the role that blake attributes to the prophet who rages against disabling constraints. but these aspirations appear in a context that blake would have seen as utterly false. in epicurean philosophy sensuous enjoyment does not lead to a perception of the infinite, nor to any participation in the divine vision. when epicurus casts himself beyond the flaming limits of the world, he not only separates human life completely from divine interference but finds a world that emerges from the chance interactions of atoms falling through a void—​the atomism that blake consistently attacked and associated with atheism. where blake creates dramatic myths, lucretius develops a reasoning, philosophical discourse. where blake humanizes plants and animals to suggest their spiritual form, lucretius makes the human body begin to lose its distinctive form and to merge with the deep structure of other organisms as “blood, humour, nerves, and vein, and bone” (2.627), to which the mind, another material entity, is “knit” (3.659).creech 53, 88. epicurus is a figure of the prophet trapped within a false vision, whose urge for freedom remains bound by what blake sees as deep forms of error. lucretius, that is, presents a key example of an archetypal problem—​the tendency of prophets to reinforce urizenic error even when they struggle to escape it. he illustrates a central insight in blake’s work: that prophets can become instruments of tyranny “without knowing it,” as milton did, according to blake’s devil in the marriage of heaven and hell (e 35). and, as we shall see, lucretius contributes to, and helps to explain, some of the errors that blake finds in milton’s paradise lost. it was easy to see de rerum natura as a work of mixed potential, since the moral and scientific aspects of lucretius’s vision were received quite differently within different reading communities in britain. by the second half of the seventeenth century, in the wake of the publication of a translation of pierre gassendi’s work on epicurus (in thomas stanley’s history of philosophy, vol. 3, 1660), those parts of epicurean thought concerned with pleasure became fashionable within aristocratic circles associated with the restoration court, circles that had little interest in epicurean cosmology, which they sometimes linked with the supposedly futile activities of experimenters associated with the royal society.hopkins 255. christian moralists, on the other hand, tended to reject the epicurean endorsement of sensuous enjoyment as unchristian. in milton’s paradise regain’d, for example, when satan tries to tempt the saviour to embrace epicureanism, the dismissive reply is that epicurus promotes only “corporal pleasure … and careless ease” (4.299).carey 1151. but not all christians took such a disapproving view. corporeal pleasure assumed a significant place in the theory and practice of the “heart religion” that developed in the eighteenth century, and was celebrated, for example, in the moravian church, to which blake’s mother had belonged, and in the writings of liberal theologians such as johann caspar lavater.for a discussion of sexual practices in the moravian church attended by blake’s mother, see schuchard. when lavater declares in his aphorisms on man that “the purest religion is the most refined epicurism,” and then aligns it with “the most religious and the most voluptuous of men,” blake writes in response, “true christian philosophy” (e 591). epicurus, who, as schouten de jel shows so clearly, fed into blake’s negative accounts of the selfhood, could also be associated with what blake resoundingly approves, as codsi points out. lucretius’s approach to pleasure is certainly more complex that the libertine image of epicureanism might suggest. his poem begins with a vision of a transcendent, transformative pleasure associated with the goddess venus, whose arrival, in the words of the creech translation, stimulates “luxury” and “amorous fire” so that “each beast forgets his rage” (1.15, 21, 25-27).creech 1-2. this invocation to the inspiring goddess is, of course, a device formally at odds with the poem’s account of a world beyond divine influence, and suggests an alternative to it. elsewhere the poem examines severe constraints upon desire, showing them as arising not from some original transgression of divine law but from a social development that leads from primitive life to the inequalities and repressions of civilization (book 5). this male-dominated social history is set against a natural history featuring a female earth that declines from an original state of abundant fertility into degenerate old age, a process that creates further constraints for humanity (2.1165-74). the common association of epicureanism with the promotion of “corporal pleasure” developed in spite of lucretius’s visions of historical limitation. but the conflict between transformative pleasure and entrenched constraint becomes a central issue in blake’s work and, as we shall see, it assumes a striking form in the introduction to a work that seems particularly concerned with lucretius and his influence, the book of los. those parts of lucretius that deal with the nature of the universe and the origins of life eventually had a wider influence than the parts concerned with pleasure. by the second half of the seventeenth century many scientists were assimilating forms of atomism into their thinking in ways that helped to authorize it more widely.niblett 154-55. the evolutionary approach of lucretius could seem relevant to the study of the earth, its organisms, and the heavenly bodies. but it was not only the cosmography that proved influential: lucretius’s attempt to explain the basis of the universe in a poetic epic proved liberating to many poets, whether or not they shared his philosophy, since it encouraged a movement away from the epic tradition of noble martial heroism (more completely than milton had moved in paradise lost), and it helped to authorize the inclusion in poetry of those interests that aristocratic epicurean libertines disdained: the findings of naturalists, geologists, and astronomers. a key example of this tendency is richard blackmore’s epic creation, a work praised by joseph addison and samuel johnson that was reprinted many times in the eighteenth century. the poem was intended specifically to oppose the claims of epicureans and fatalists, an aim that moves blackmore away from the mythical mode he had adopted in political epics such as prince arthur (1695) and away from his deep personal commitment to the bible, toward a reasoning, philosophical, and moral discourse, a counterpart to de rerum natura. in adopting this kind of reasoning mode, blackmore set a trend for the long philosophical poem that would be followed in the eighteenth century by james thomson, alexander pope, edward young, and william cowper, among many others.see bergstrom. in opposing lucretius, blackmore is paradoxically drawn to the kind of evidence cited by the latin poet. he views the human body, for example, with a physician’s interest, surveying its internal structures, its “mazy intricacies” and “complicated parts,” itemizing organs, sinews, veins, and bones—​elements that, since they function beyond the human will or seem completely inert, are remote from issues of moral responsibility or spiritual experience, and (since other animals have comparable features) lose their distinctively human significance.blackmore 6.689, 307, 283, 218. the study of organic forms flourished through the eighteenth century with the aid of the microscope, linnean classification, voyages of discovery, and increasing attention to habitat, and while naturalists, poets, and divines eagerly related the findings of such work to the idea of divine creation, some findings appeared to resist assimilation to this idea. abraham trembley’s observations of the polypus were a controversial and well-publicized example of this problem.hilton 86. the polypus looked like a water plant but had arm-like limbs with which it could seize prey; it seemed to blur the distinction between animal and vegetable life. when it was cut up, each fragment grew a new whole organism, a phenomenon that challenged traditional ideas about the indivisibility of the soul and that appeared to support materialist arguments that matter had the capacity to organize itself without the need of a divine creator or a divine plan. as aram vartanian observes, it could imply that “the animal-soul is merely a function of matter” and “could easily suggest a dangerous analogy applicable to the human soul.”vartanian 264. as others have noted, blake’s repeated references to the polypus suggest his awareness of trembley’s observations.see effinger 175-76. schouten de jel points out the similarities between the eighteenth-century dissections of the polypus and lucretius’s conception of the relationship between body and soul (72). in contrast to such perplexing observations, isaac newton appeared to have reconciled atomism triumphantly with divine creation, since the complex mechanical universe he described in principia mathematica, in which material bodies were composed of particles, was seen as the work of god. for example, in the light of newton’s work, a lecture by richard bentley in the boyle lecture series conceded the atomistic nature of matter, but reconciled it with christian teaching about divine creation.bentley, confutation 4. but this reconciliation was secured most clearly not in the terrestial world of organic life, but in the heavens. from the outset newton’s achievement was celebrated as a kind of answer to epicurean philosophy.see fabian. edmund halley’s latin ode to newton, which introduced the first edition of principia, presented newton as the new epicurus, a figure greater than epicurus, one who by demonstrating the truths of science had allowed humanity to enter the realm of the gods.albury 36. throughout the eighteenth century, in sermons, books, encyclopædias, and poems, newton was routinely coupled with lucretius and epicurus, sometimes to suggest the classical precedents for newtonian ideas of matter and gravity, or to claim that newton had brought clarity and certainty to what was once mere speculation, or to emphasize that, in contrast to epicurean thought, newton’s theories had demonstrated the creative power of the deity.edwards 75; chambers, entry on “hardness”; hall, entry on “newton”; bentley, eight sermons 221; martin 59; dunkin 2: 474; wesley 5: 97; arno 257; sulivan 1: 113. if newton was sometimes seen as a new epicurus, he was often clearly distinguished from him as “anti-atheistic.”fabian 536. where lucretius describes epicurus as hurling himself into the vacuum of space in defiance of religion, newton was typically celebrated by poets as “mounting” or “soaring” into the heavens to reveal divine order.bentley, “a reply”; ramsay. like his classical predecessor, he was seen as a revolutionary, but a revolutionary who secured rather than challenged divine authority. in this way, epicurean philosophy contributed to a dichotomy in enlightenment thought between views that implicitly or explicitly challenged ideas of intelligent design in creation and views that reinforced such ideas. what is at issue here is somewhat obscured in schouten de jel’s study because he claims that lucretius conceives the universe as “a giant mechanism” or a “world machine” (207). this argument is based partly on the single occurrence of the term “machina mundi ” in de rerum natura (5.96) and partly on selective quotations from cyril bailey’s prose translation (1948 ed.), which are used to argue that lucretius “utilises a quasi-industrial context” and “the semiotics of mechanisation” when describing the combination of the elements (211). the argument allows schouten de jel to link de rerum natura directly with “the conception of the mechanised man common in enlightenment discourses” (226). but, as sylvia berryman has pointed out, there is little to support the assumption that the atomism of the ancients “is motivated by a machine analogy.”berryman 38-39. lucretius may evoke principles of matter, force, and motion, phenomena that we have come to associate with the realm of mechanics, but these can be evoked, as popa points out, “when no explicit technological models come into play.”popa 15. in fact the phrase “machina mundi ” does not appear at all in the creech translation of lucretius, nor in the translation by john mason good of 1805, which schouten de jel also cites. this is important because the conflation of epicurean atomism with later ideas of the world machine obscures a distinction that blake is sometimes concerned to make, between a materialistic world in which all forms and motions develop without a controlling design, and one that is shaped by an intelligent creator. as we shall see, the distinction has an important place in the book of los. william powell jones observes that “the growing conflict between the scientist and the man of genuine religious convictions did not affect the orthodox views of newton or of many scientists of his day, and certainly not those of the theologians and poets who followed him and made of his demonstrations of an orderly universe a sort of new religion.”jones 9-10. by 1795, the date on the title page of the book of los, blake would have been aware of both the cosmological theories drawing on herschel’s observations and the theories of buffon that challenged newton’s orderly view of the universe. as david worrall has noted, in the botanic garden blake would have found darwin’s description of a process in which heavenly bodies are ejected from each other through violent explosions, a process that seems to influence some of blake’s own descriptions of creation in the book of urizen and elsewhere.worrall, “botanic garden” 410. but as marilyn gaull observes, in spite of the circulation of these new scientific ideas, the newtonian universe still dominated the public imagination at the end of the eighteenth century, and was reinforced in demonstrations of the orrery, poetic celebrations of newton, and other ways.gaull 35. the situation would begin to change in the nineteenth century, but in the 1790s the order of the heavenly bodies still provided an antidote to prospects opened up by materialist theories of a world without design or premeditated order. donald ault has argued that blake “visualizes newton’s system as providing a usurpation of and substitution for the very vision he himself is trying to communicate.”ault 2. this is true in that all systems that seek totalizing explanations of the world are seen by blake as competing. but blake is a kind of historian who tries to visualize the fundamental or spiritual causes that motivate the production of such systems, and to show why the newtonian kind proves so powerful. the book of los the book of los, like all of blake’s illuminated works, draws on a wide range of writings—​mythical, theological, philosophical, and others. it appears to engage with lucretius and his influence in several different ways. even the gendered division of the work between an introduction centered upon eno, an “aged mother,” and the violent, masculine creation myth of the main narrative parallels the division within the british reception of lucretius between two kinds of interest, pleasure and cosmography. in what follows i shall consider each of these parts in turn. in lucretius, there is a necessary disconnect between female generative nature in its old age and the transformative desire figured as a goddess venus: they belong to two kinds of vision that cannot be reconciled.see betensky. blake reimagines this kind of disconnect as itself an effect of history. his poem begins with eno, an “aged mother” who sits beneath an “eternal oak” and shakes the “stedfast earth” speaking of “times remote” (3.1-7, e 90). her association with motherhood, earth, and tree identifies her with (among other things) generative nature—​now, as in lucretius, in old age. like ahania in the book of ahania (also issued in 1795, and in the same format—​intaglio etched, color printed, near-identical plate sizes) eno appeals to memory rather than to visions of futurity, but in contrast to the epicurean precedent, eno’s vision of “times remote” brings transformative desire directly into the realm of social history. the constraints of civilization in the past were, we are assured, overcome by a turn to excess; if all were allowed to fulfill their desires instead of repressing them, there would be no vices. if eno represents a feminine alternative to the dominant patriarchal ideology, her vision still bears the imprint of that ideology in its positioning of the female as passive object of male desire. but in the context of the 1790s, it would certainly have been seen as revolutionary.worrall, urizen books 196-97. the rest of the poem reflects upon the absorption of revolutionary desire within an illusory vision of creation, in a way that seems designed to reveal the spiritual basis of the errors afflicting blake’s contemporaries. as we have seen, within the realm of cosmography in eighteenth-century britain two rather different figures of epicurean transformation had appeared. there was epicurus himself, impatient of constraint, hurling himself into mighty space where he confronted the chaotic atomic basis of reality; and there was newton, the new epicurus, who constructed a stable vision of creation upon the unstable realms of matter. in the book of los blake derives from these figures two cycles in the history of prophecy, which together constitute a single development showing how the chaotic vision of atheistic materialism makes the idea of divine creation necessary. blake’s account of this history is based in part upon an infernal reading of paradise lost, like that referred to in the marriage of heaven and hell where, according to blake’s devil, “[milton’s] messiah fell. & formed a heaven of what he stole from the abyss” (plates 5-6, e 34-35). blake reinterprets the parallels and contrasts that milton creates between satan and the son of god as they descend from heaven, enter the realm of chaos, and contemplate creation. milton’s satan falls from heaven and makes a difficult journey through chaos to the world newly created for humanity. the son voluntarily descends from heaven and, having calmed the disorder of chaos, rides into it to begin the task of creation. satan’s experience of chaos is immersive, and he is at times passively at the mercy of its unstable conditions. the son’s relationship with chaos is commanding and controlling, as he fixes set limits within it and draws the materials of creation from it. in milton’s chronology the son’s entry into chaos precedes satan’s, but in the narrative sequence satan’s appears first. blake’s compressed allusions to these narratives in the book of los indicate that for him, the satan-son sequence is the work of the “true poet” (e 35): satan’s challenging experience of chaos prepares for the mastery of chaos attributed to the son. where milton thinks that the two narratives illustrate a contrast between evil and good, blake suggests that they illustrate the progress of the same error, the false dichotomy between chaos and fixed order. taken together, they suggest a learning process that culminates in an act of creation. in blake’s version, the narrative describes two cycles because los encounters, and appears to escape from, two complementary forms of stifling constraint. the first arises from religious tyranny (symbolized by black marble); the second arises from the materialistic reaction to such tyranny (symbolized by water). los’s emergence from the waters of materialism leads him into a new form of error, involving the forging of the sun and the binding of urizen: a hybrid vision of creation founded upon a materialistic basis. blake may have been prompted to use paradise lost as a model for this reflection upon materialism because while milton dismisses epicurean ideas of pleasure in paradise regain’d, he finds a place for elements of epicurean cosmology in paradise lost. milton’s inclusion of chaos, a concept derived from classical tradition rather than the bible, facilitates this attempt. milton’s god assures his angelic listeners that space is not “vacuous” (paradise lost 7.169), but nevertheless the poet tells us that the created world was “won from the void and formless infinite” (3.12), and when satan journeys through chaos he falls into a seemingly infinite “vacuity” from which he only escapes by chance (2.932-38). satan’s passage through chaos involves taking an “oblique” course (3.564, 9.510), an apparent allusion to lucretius, who describes matter becoming organized merely because atoms “decline” (de rerum natura 2.280) from the vertical as they fall through the void.creech 41. milton’s chaos is said to harbor “embryon atoms” (paradise lost 2.891-92, 900), so that creation can be seen as the triumph of divine order over a materialistic confusion. his account of the process of divine creation itself is also influenced by lucretius. he elaborates the references in genesis to the division of waters and land (genesis 1:6-7, 10), showing how the elements separate according to their weight; and he uses precedents in lucretius to expand the genesis account of the generation of plants and animal life from the earth and waters (genesis 1:12, 20-24). what appear in lucretius as self-generating processes are, in paradise lost, shown to be initiated by the spirit of god, who infuses his vital virtue and vital warmth into the elements. in paradise lost, they stand in contrast to the activities of the son of god, who “made” the stars, sun, and moon, and who formed adam from “dust” (corresponding to the actions of god in genesis 1:16 and 2:7). black marble the narrative of the book of los intersects with that of the book of urizen, beginning at a point after urizen, the “primeval priest,” has withdrawn from the fluid life of eternity, craving the stability of a “solid without fluctuation” and attempting to impose his laws on the other eternals. urizen, having been expelled from eternity, is rent from los’s side and is “laid in a stony sleep” while los watches over him (the book of urizen 2.1, 4.11, 6.7, e 70-74). the first cycle of the narrative of the book of los begins at this point. the effect of urizen’s fall is to alienate los from his own desires, leaving him stifled in a stony bondage (the title page includes an illustration of a body trapped within massive solid forms). at this point he is in the position of a rebel struggling against the deadly constraints of imposed orthodoxy. the “vast rock of eternity” (the book of los 4.12, e 92) that freezes around him seems akin to the “stone of night” used by the tyrannical albion’s angel to ground his repressive authority in america (7.2, e 53) and europe (11.1, e 64); los, “stamping furious to dust” (4.20, e 92) the bondage that oppresses him, resembles the rebellious orc in america, who threatens to “stamp to dust” (8.5, e 54) the stony law of urizen. the “black marble” (4.22, e 92) that los smashes is specifically associated with egypt, which at the conclusion of urizen symbolizes the bondage of tyrannical state religion (and alludes to exodus, in which moses strives to deliver his people from their egyptian captivity: urizen 28.21-22, e 83). the design on plate 3 shows urizen with his tablets of stone, presiding over a net of religion like the one mentioned in urizen 25.22, a net in which two naked figures are helplessly trapped. los’s rebellion at this point follows the path of the epicurean revolutionary, whose revolt against religious tyranny leads to a materialist conception of the infinite as an indefinite, void space—​through which los falls. in this void, humanity does not emerge fully formed from the hand of a creator as the biblical adam does, but must go through the stages of a natural development, in an sequence that, like that in lucretius 5.894-1539creech 165-85. and in some eighteenth-century accounts of human progress, initially involves an age of helpless ignorance before humanity begins to acquire, through increasing knowledge, a measure of control over the external world. out of this state of helpless ignorance a kind of progress emerges as los passes through a state of infancy into “contemplative thoughts” (4.40, e 92), at which point the narrative becomes increasingly focused on how the fallen mind tries to explain its own condition. waters milton’s account of creation begins with a classical and atomistic conception of chaos, whereas the genesis story begins with “waters” (genesis 1:2). milton imagines a transition from one to the other in terms of the son’s calming influence upon chaotic disorder (paradise lost 7.216ff.). blake presents the transition as a learning process. as los habituates to his condition and develops contemplative thought, “the vacuum / became element” (2.50-51, e 92). the element, which at first seems “pliant,” a medium that assists exploration, soon becomes exhausting, a “stifling black fluid” (4.62, e 93). this is the counterpart of the stifling black solid of religious tyranny that los escaped earlier. the new constraints are not external, like the tyrannical black marble that once restricted los’s movements. the watery medium is pliant and apparently limitless, but constraints now appear in the “finite” (4.45, e 92) physical and temporal condition of bodily existence itself, bound to the activity of the lungs, the pattern of sleeping and waking, recurrent weariness, and the random, uncontrollable limits of growth. in taking away the limits of tyrannical religion, epicurean materialism submerges humanity in an indefinite realm of matter where complex “branchy forms” (4.44) are simply random adaptations and variations passively “driv’n by waves” (4.58, e 93)—​by the meaningless, accidental motions of matter. no longer imprisoned by religious tyranny, los is constrained instead by merely physical and temporal limits, which are “finite” but random, since atoms are always in motion and have no preordained limit to contain them. blake’s references to “branchy forms. organizing the human / into finite inflexible organs” in this watery element, and to the laboring mind “organizing itself” (4.44-45, 50, e 92), keep in mind the idea of autonomous organization, an idea reinforced by the reference to the polypus (4.57, e 93). in the book of los, then, in order to escape his wearying submergence in the waters of materialism, los once again becomes like moses, whose smiting of the waters at exodus 7:20 and whose parting of the red sea at exodus 14:21 are preludes to the israelites’ escape from egypt. as los smites the “wild deep” (5.4, e 93) he also becomes like milton’s god the son, triumphing over the waters of the abyss (paradise lost 7.262ff.), and like newton as an “anti-atheistic” lucretius (the “particles” that condense into an orb at 5.30, e 94, allude to newton’s theories of light in the opticks). los creates, as newton does, a hybrid order, binding together a materialist vision of the natural world with an astronomical vision of created order, figured in the chaining of urizen’s randomly whirling spine to the “self-balanc’d” orb that los has framed on his anvil (5.45). here, creation does indeed come out of chaos, because the confrontation with materialism makes the idea of purposeful creation a psychological necessity. in lucretius the bounding form of human beings seems arbitrary and porous, given the perpetual motion of atoms and the absence of preordained limits. in biblical tradition the bounding form of human beings is determined from above, and is linked directly to the creation of the heavenly bodies as part of the same system—​made by and subject to the same creator. the account of los’s creation in the book of los, like the creations described in genesis and milton, proceeds from the making of order in the heavens to the creation of human form. it combines the top-down vision of creation, as an expression of a designing will, with a bottom-up materialist view, in which the basis of the human being is not the spirit or genius but physical components such as atoms and the skeleton (the latter prefigured in the so-called jahwist account of genesis 2:4b-23, where human beings emerge from dust and bone—​a rib). we may note that in each of blake’s urizen books there is a reference to “hurtling” bones, the epithet denoting noise as well as movement, as samuel johnson’s dictionary indicates.see, for example, urizen 8.1-2 (e 74), ahania 4.24 (e 87); johnson illustrates the term with a reference to the “noise of battle” in shakespeare. blake would have encountered a skeleton at the royal academy, where students were taught anatomy using a suspended skeleton—​which no doubt rattled when it was moved about. in this myth blake begins to distinguish between degrees of error—​a process that will assume more systematic form in later works. los finds the constraints with which he binds urizen preferable to the stony constraint he once suffered when trying to escape his own desires. at the end of the narrative the flames of desire are no longer something to be escaped, but something to harness purposefully. there is even some pleasure in the act of creation: los smiles in contemplating his work (5.45, e 94). los’s act of creation is at least a step up from the stifling chaos of materialism, since it introduces a creative agency that can be imagined in human form. blake would later describe creation as an “act of mercy” (e 563). the act of creation is assigned to los, the prophet and blacksmith, rather than to urizen, the reasoner, who in urizen comes to make and wield mathematical instruments. for blake, what is ultimately at issue in the realm of lucretius and in newton’s vision of an orderly universe is not scientific measurement nor mathematical calculation nor the abstract principles that typically concern urizen. the basis of the epicurean vision, the world of atomic matter and void space, did not arise directly from empirical observation; it was imagined. and blake understands—​as many of his contemporaries apparently did not—​that scientific instruments, observations, and calculations cannot prove that the world is a divine creation. the idea that the sun is the work of a creator is a poetic idea. los creates an “illusion” (5.47, e 94), part of an imagined order that urizen will inherit and explore with his measuring instruments in the book of urizen. the prophet provides the paradigm within which the reasoning scientist must work. the urizenic figure who turns the pair of compasses in the famous frontispiece to europe is standing on a disc or globe that has already been made, and whose form he echoes with his instrument. blake needs to show the prophet as both deeply mired in error and as able to do the truly liberating work that he, blake himself, is doing, of seeing through history from an eternal perspective. in the song of los—​the work designed to frame blake’s “prophecies” america and europe—​los the eternal prophet appears both inside and outside the realm of fallen history, as agent of error and (having assumed a place in eternity) as exposer of it. he is depicted with his hammer and globe on plate 8, while his children are described as instrumental in handing down urizen’s laws (3.9, e 67); he sings his prophetic song of liberation in eternity (3.1-2). the assigning of the work of both error and redemption to los is central to blake’s mythology, because he sees that the imagination usually works within the illusory constraints created by urizen’s fall from eternity, although it can assume an “eternal” perspective. since, within the fallen world, it provides the paradigm for urizen’s errors, its creations may be more difficult to escape than the works of the reasoning scientist. this is why lucretius is such a challenging figure for blake, since the vision he presents has such a powerful and enduring influence. in a fascinating discussion of blake’s assault on the eighteenth-century philosophy of science, harry white has suggested that blake “might very well have loved much that [charles] darwin achieved after he returned from his momentous voyage [on the beagle]. darwin destroyed not only the creator god, but also ‘conceptions that had reigned in the philosophy of nature and knowledge for two thousand years [which] … rested on the assumption of the fixed and final ….’”white 121, quoting john dewey, the influence of darwin on philosophy (amherst, ny: prometheus books, 1997) 1-2. yet the assumption of the fixed and final had been challenged since at least the time of the ancient greeks, and blake would probably have recognized darwin as a revolutionary of the epicurean kind, one who appears to stamp to dust the stifling religious orthodoxy that seeks to constrain human liberty, only to fall into the materialistic element in which the polypus dwells, where all life is subject to random environmental adaptations. and while darwin may have imagined a narrative of evolution more compatible with his own observations, he did not and could not finally destroy the poetic idea of a created universe. there is abundant evidence that this idea is still current, not only sustaining the belief of creationists, who, in reacting to the vision of a world without design, wish to endow it with “scientific” status, but also celebrated by hymn singers, who may accept darwinian principles but find the poetic idea of creation more compatible with worship, or with their aesthetic response to the world around them.see stewart. works cited albury, w. r. “halley’s ode on the principia of newton and the epicurean revival in england.” journal of the history of ideas 39.1 (1978): 24-43. arno. the fruits of faction. london, 1791. ault, donald. visionary physics: blake’s response to newton. chicago: university of chicago press, 1974. bentley, richard. a confutation of atheism from the origin and frame of the world. part 2. london, 1692. —​—​—​. eight sermons preach’d at the honourable robert boyle’s lecture, in the first year mdcxcii. 6th ed. cambridge, 1735. —​—​—​. “a reply to a copy of verses made in imitation of book iii. ode 2. of horace.” a collection of poems in six volumes. by several hands. london, 1766. 6: 160-61. bergstrom, carson. “richard blackmore, james thomson, alexander pope, and the creation of the eighteenth-century long poem.” the genres of thomson’s “the seasons.” ed. sandro jung and kwinten van de walle. bethlehem: lehigh university press, 2018. 3-21. berryman, sylvia. the mechanical hypothesis in ancient greek natural philosophy. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2009. betensky, aya. “lucretius and love.” classical world 73.5 (1980): 291-99. blackmore, richard. creation: a philosophical poem. in seven books. london, 1712. carey, john, and alastair fowler, eds. the poems of john milton. london: longmans, green and co., 1968. chambers, e. cyclopædia. 2 vols. london, 1738. codsi, stephanie. “‘father, father, where are you going?’: epicurean deism and absent fathers in blake’s songs of innocence and of experience.” literature and theology 33.4 (2019): 357-75. [creech, thomas, trans.] t. lucretius carus. the epicurean philosopher, his six books “de natura rerum” done into english verse, with notes. 2nd ed. oxford, 1683. dunkin, william. the poetical works of the late william dunkin. 2 vols. london, 1774. edwards, john. some new discoveries of the uncertainty, deficiency, and corruptions of human knowledge and learning. london, 1714. effinger, elizabeth. “forgiving blake’s disaster: the changing face(s) of science and ‘govern-mentalized’ bodies of knowledge.” william blake: modernity and disaster. ed. tilottama rajan and joel faflak. toronto: university of toronto press, 2020. 172-93. erdman, david v., ed. the complete poetry and prose of william blake. newly rev. ed. new york: anchor-random house, 1988. [abbreviated as e] fabian, bernard. “pope and lucretius: observations on an essay on man.” modern language review 74.3 (1979): 524-37. frye, northrop. fearful symmetry: a study of william blake. 1947. 4th ed. princeton: princeton university press, 1969. gaull, marilyn. “under romantic skies: astronomy and the poets.” wordsworth circle 21.1 (1990): 34-41. greenblatt, stephen. the swerve: how the renaissance began. london: bodley head, 2011. hall, william henry. the new royal encyclopædia. 3 vols. london, n.d. hilton, nelson. literal imagination: blake’s vision of words. berkeley: university of california press, 1983. hopkins, david. “the english voices of lucretius from lucy hutchinson to john mason good.” the cambridge companion to lucretius. ed. stuart gillespie and philip hardie. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2007. 254-73. johnson, w. r. lucretius and the modern world. 2000. london: bloomsbury academic, 2015. jones, william powell. the rhetoric of science: a study of scientific ideas and imagery in eighteenth-century english poetry. london: routledge and kegan paul, 1966. kors, alan charles. epicureans and atheists in france, 1650–​1729. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2016. leddy, neven, and avi s. lifschitz, eds. epicurus in the enlightenment. oxford: voltaire foundation, 2009. linker, laura. lucretian thought in late stuart england: debates about the nature of the soul. new york: palgrave macmillan, 2013. martin, b. a panegyrick on the newtonian philosophy, shewing the nature and dignity of the science. 2nd ed. london, 1754. mitsis, phillip, ed. the oxford handbook of epicurus and epicureanism. new york: oxford university press, 2020. niblett, matthew. “man, morals and matter: epicurus and materialist thought in england from john toland to joseph priestley.” leddy and lifschitz 137-59. popa, tiberiu. “mechanisms: ancient sources.” the routledge handbook of mechanisms and mechanical philosophy. ed. stuart glennan and phyllis illari. london: routledge, 2018. 13-25. ramsay, allan. an ode to the memory of sir isaac newton, inscribed to the royal society of london, for the improving of natural knowledge. edinburgh, 1727. schouten de jel, joshua. blake and lucretius: the atomistic materialism of the selfhood. cham: palgrave macmillan-springer, 2021. schuchard, marsha keith. why mrs. blake cried: william blake and the sexual basis of spiritual vision. london: century-random house, 2006. stewart, robert b., ed. intelligent design: william a. dembski and michael ruse in dialogue. minneapolis: fortress press, 2007. sul[l]ivan, richard joseph. a view of nature, in letters to a traveller among the alps. 6 vols. london, 1794. vartanian, aram. “trembley’s polyp, la mettrie, and eighteenth-century french materialism.” journal of the history of ideas 11.3 (1950): 259-86. vicario, michael a. shelley’s intellectual system and its epicurean background. new york: routledge, 2007. wesley, john. a survey of the wisdom of god in the creation. 3rd ed. 5 vols. london, 1777. white, harry. “blake’s resolution to the war between science and philosophy.” blake 39.3 (winter 2005–​06): 108-25. worrall, david. “william blake and erasmus darwin’s botanic garden.” bulletin of the new york public library 78 (1975): 397-417. —​—​—​, ed. william blake: the urizen books. london: william blake trust/​tate gallery, 1995. blake s u m m e r 2 0 2 5 an illustrated quarterly vol. 59, no. 1 nelson hilton, university of georgia josephine a. mcquail, independent scholar silvia riccardi, umeå university robert w. rix, university of copenhagen joseph viscomi, university of north carolina at chapel hill david worrall, the nottingham trent university martin butlin, tate gallery, london, retired tristanne j. connolly, university of waterloo detlef w. dörrbecker, university of trier, retired sibylle erle, university of lincoln robert n. essick, university of california, riverside angela esterhammer, victoria college, university of toronto a d v i s o r y b o a r d a n i l l u s t r a t e d q u a r t e r l y volume 59 number 1 summer 2025 c o n t e n t s www.blakequarterly.org © 2025 copyright blake/an illustrated quarterly cover: (top) detail of the virgin and child. yale center for british art, paul mellon collection, b1977.14.91. image courtesy of the william blake archive ; (bottom) detail of the great red dragon and the woman clothed with the sun. national gallery of art, rosenwald collection, 1943.3.8999. cover design by sonia irakoze. e d i t o r s editors: morton d. paley, tilar j. mazzeo editor, 1970–2024: morris eaves book review editor: sibylle erle exhibitions editor: luisa calè bibliographer (criticism): wayne c. ripley bibliographer (music): camila oliveira sales review editor: mark crosby managing editor: sarah jones sarah.jones@rochester.edu production office: department of english, university of rochester, rochester ny 14627-0451 articles william blake and his circle: a checklist of scholarship in 2024 by wayne c. ripley, with works in romance languages contributed by fernando castanedo, works in japanese contributed by hikari sato, works in turkish contributed by hüseyin alhas, and works in russian contributed by vera serdechnaia blake and music, 2024 by camila oliveira review blake e la sua epoca, la reggia di venaria, 31 october 2024–2 february 2025 blake e la sua epoca, ed. alice insley reviewed by luisa calè “symbols of embodied agency”: the reception of william blake’s engravings for john gabriel stedman’s narrative (1796) in contemporary art and visual culture “symbols of embodied agency”: the reception of william blake’s engravings for john gabriel stedman’s narrative (1796) in contemporary art and visual culture by caroline anjali ritchie caroline anjali ritchie (caroline.ritchie@exeter.ox.ac.uk) is a research fellow at exeter college, university of oxford. she is the author of artists series: william blake (tate publishing, 2024) and william blake and the cartographic imagination: maps, diagrams, networks (forthcoming from palgrave macmillan, february 2025). introduction a great deal of scholarly debate has centered on william blake’s attitudes toward racial difference and racial oppression. since the time of david erdman, scholars have endeavored to characterize blake’s views on the transatlantic slave trade—​endeavors that often reveal their own attachments to and disavowals of what morris eaves once aptly termed “blakes we want and blakes we don’t.” many claim that blake’s stance was one of radical abolitionism, even if it was not always stated in the plainest terms (for example, erdman, “blake’s vision of slavery” and prophet against empire; simon), while others argue that his abolitionism has been overstated and focus instead on the exoticizing, whitewashing, and otherwise racist leanings in his poetry and visual art (for example, thiong’o; mellor; bindman). for david bindman, those leanings do not necessarily negate the “sincerity” of blake’s abolitionism outright, but they do “suggest that blake was unable to free himself—​no more than anyone else at the time—​from the complex and often contradictory web of ancient and modern beliefs that had settled around africa and africans in the late eighteenth century” (382). these discussions have concentrated particularly on “the little black boy” from songs of innocence (1789), the illuminated book visions of the daughters of albion (1793), and the title-page vignette and further sixteen plates either signed by or attributed to blake (after now-lost designs by stedman) in john gabriel stedman’s narrative, of a five years’ expedition, against the revolted negroes of surinam (1796).the scholarship on these texts is vast, and i offer here a nonexhaustive list of examples. on “the little black boy”: in his 1924 study, s. foster damon suggests that it evinces a negative view of african people (233). in “blake’s vision of slavery” and prophet against empire, erdman regards the poem as anti-imperialistic; alan richardson similarly argues that it endorses emancipation. anne k. mellor makes the counterargument that “blake here affirms the ideological construction of the african as one who finally benefits from christianity” (359). by contrast, morris eaves contends that “ironic exposure, not advocacy, of the mother’s apology for racism seems far more likely to be the aim of ‘the little black boy’”; a similar position has recently been taken by jonathan perris. saree makdisi also questions, briefly, the assumption of racism in the poem (252). on visions of the daughters of albion: see, again, erdman’s optimistic reading in “blake’s vision of slavery” and prophet against empire. mellor is more skeptical (359-70), as is bindman, who finds “the references to physical slavery” in the poem to “add up to little more than a metaphor” (382). on the blake-stedman engravings: anne rubenstein and camilla townsend identify an abolitionist agenda; see also marcus wood (181-94). for a less sympathetic reading, see mellor’s argument that blake and stedman were both complicit in a wider cultural practice of erasing racial “difference” (358). many of these arguments are revisited by richard and sally price, who suggest, for their part, that the engravings can be understood in terms of “black stoicism” and “resistance” (price and price 296), a point to which i shall return later in this article. the older scholarly orthodoxy regarding blake’s antislavery sentiments has also been echoed in art exhibitions. in 2007, mind-forg’d manacles: william blake and slavery (ferens art gallery, burrell collection, and whitworth art gallery, 2007–​08) was held in commemoration of the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the british slave trade and the 250th anniversary of blake’s birth. in the catalogue, bindman writes that blake was “strongly opposed to slavery” (bindman and pinckney 11), though, as noted in the first paragraph of the present article, in his other writings bindman has observed the coexistence of this stance with blake’s recourse to particular english and european racial prejudices. in a review, jeremy tambling nuances the notion of blake’s opposition to the enslavement of black people by questioning the exhibition’s “oversimplifying” conflation of blake’s ideas about “mental slavery” with historical, physical slavery. meanwhile, the celebration of the antislavery blake was also upheld in a press release for 1807: blake, slavery and the radical mind (tate britain, 2007), which described his engravings for stedman as “among the most powerful and shocking anti-slavery images.” it is on the engravings for stedman, and their recent reception in britain and the us, that this article will focus. stedman, it should be noted from the outset, was certainly no abolitionist. he seems to have fallen more on the side of the reform, rather than the elimination, of slavery in the west indies. a dutch-scottish soldier, he had voluntarily served in surinam in the 1770s as part of the scots brigade tasked with suppressing the maroons, the groups of africans who had escaped enslavement and lived in the surrounding forests, regularly engaging in guerrilla warfare against the dutch planters. his narrative records in vivid detail the soldiers’ and planters’ cruel punishment of the enslaved and escapee people for their disobedience. while in surinam, stedman had also “married” an enslaved girl named joanna, who was just fifteen at the time and whom he abandoned, along with their son, when he left for the dutch republic in 1777. as natalie zemon davis records, many subsequent abolitionist readers criticized him for his treatment of joanna as well as his apology for slavery. the manuscript that stedman composed upon his return to europe and completed in 1790 differs in important ways from the text published in 1796. in the intervening years, joseph johnson asked an editor named william thomson, an author of proslavery tracts, to revise the manuscript for publication. stedman was outraged by the alterations and ordered all copies of the work to be destroyed, but the finalized 1796 version still bears clear traces of thomson’s interventions (stedman xlviii-lv). according to price and price, thomson’s views distorted stedman’s original “ameliorationist” intentions; for instance, the 1796 text, in pursuit of “a rigid proslavery ideology,” lacks passages in which stedman had emphasized the humanity and dignity of enslaved people (stedman lxii). yet, as gert j. oostindie points out, this distinction may be overstated, for “other passages, notably those carrying antislavery messages, were rephrased without substantial changes” (142). in any case, the fact remains that stedman’s descriptions of african people in the manuscript version of the text are often highly derogatory, relying on eighteenth-century european paradigms of racial classification (oostindie 142). apparently, for stedman and many of his contemporaries, there was little contradiction in simultaneously disparaging black men and women and expressing horror at acts of cruelty and violence toward them. in designs that echo the vivid descriptions of violence in the narrative, blake—​along with several other artists, including thomas conder, inigo barlow, and francesco bartolozzi—​engraved plates for the quarto edition. blake began this work in 1791. he and his fellow artists would have based their engravings on paintings and drawings made by stedman himself, as well as, presumably, the 1790 manuscript. only one of stedman’s watercolors that were engraved for the work survives.however, there is also a surviving reproduction of a pen-and-ink sketch by stedman depicting his house at plantation l’esperance, which provided the basis for barlow’s engraving of the half-plate entitled “rural retreat—​the cottage”; see stedman lxxxix, note 35, #2, and white 186. this illustration was engraved by barlow, rather than blake, but it is nevertheless possible to extrapolate from barlow’s print that the artists had opportunities to introduce their own imaginative spin; scholars have noted several disparities between “manner of sleeping &c. in the forest” and the watercolor by stedman, so blake’s contributions may also contain artistic innovations suggestive of his own reactions to the narrative and his views on slavery and the transatlantic slave trade (stedman xliii-xlvi). the narrative and its accompanying designs have had a long afterlife in translations, reproductions, adaptations, and scholarly discussions. in an unpublished phd thesis, landeg white documents in detail the reception (via translations and creative adaptations) of the text and illustrations during the late-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in britain and abroad, when the work was often read through an abolitionist lens (white 233-70; rubenstein and townsend 273, 296n2). shirley dent and jason whittaker discuss david dabydeen’s reuse of plates from the narrative in his 1984 poetry collection slave song (dent and whittaker 113-16). when it comes to scholarly responses to the engravings, blake’s plates have received by far the most attention. they have been variously construed as persuasively abolitionist and (sometimes concurrently) as highly suspect representations relying on sexualizing and dehumanizing tropes (see note 1). recently revisiting these matters, price and price have argued “that the stedman-blake depictions of the deaths of neptune (on the rack) and the anonymous black man (on the gallows) involve more than a trope, and that we can legitimately read in these representations … something of value about the actors’ mindsets, and not just those of the observers”; they find in the depiction of “black stoicism in the face of being tortured by white oppressors” an “extreme case of resistance” (price and price 296). if there is a measure of wishful thinking in such scholarly interpretations, the impulse is shared to some extent in the pop-cultural and artistic legacy of the blake-stedman images, which has often sought to locate a sense of resistance or “agency” in them, despite their inherent historical and representational limitations. indeed, blake’s engravings have had a little-examined legacy within the recent visual culture of protest and counterculture, as well as in contemporary works of art that are overtly identifiable with affirming black rights and other activist causes. mike goode has fruitfully characterized the curious tendency of blake’s pictures to resurface in unexpected places as a “viral capability” inherent to the visual-verbal medium that he employed in his illuminated books. although the blake-stedman engravings present a slightly different case, belonging to blake’s body of commercial book engravings, they typify a much wider phenomenon of the reuse, remediation, and adaptation of his artworks: “his pictures and portions of his pictures have proven no less capable than his words of adapting themselves to live and evolve in the world’s ever-altering media ecologies” (goode 69). whatever viral capability we might, with goode, ascribe to blake’s works on the basis of their formal affordances, part of that capability is surely also attributable to the fact that, in our day, his works undeniably belong to a canon of british art, despite his obscurity in his own lifetime. that status, curiously, both clashes and overlaps with his special posthumous association with counterculture and the political left, and both statuses in their own ways afford the images themselves a degree of authority or cultural capital. in other words, there is a fine line between the democratized virality that goode seems to have in mind and a more conservative model of canonicity, within or adjacent to which blake’s work admittedly sits uneasily. but this canonical or near-canonical status also makes the images eminently suited to the critical response or subversive rewiring that can be witnessed in the works of the british and american contemporary artists sokari douglas camp, jazzmen lee-johnson, and hew locke. indeed, their reuse of the blake-stedman engravings tends to be less a case of elevating or celebrating blake himself than of evoking the spectre of the transatlantic slave trade and prompting critical modes of thought and action in the present. i do not intend to characterize the work of these artists solely in terms of a homogenizing category of “black art.” in practice, taking the blake-stedman engravings as an organizing principle or lens for this study runs the risk of perpetuating precisely this misconception, but my intention is not to present this slender vista as a key giving access to, or as a phenomenon generalizable to, all instances of “black art.” rather, in studying this grouping of artworks for the first time, i seek to attend, with darby english, to “a historical vision of black art that assays the disproportionate influence of a past which creeps forward to speak in the present’s voice; a vision that understands this past in terms both of limitations imposed and freedoms won” (english 31). the “past” that resurfaces in this cluster of artworks “speaks” with multiple voices, for it must be understood both as a real historical past and, simultaneously, as an art-historical past, resulting in a layering of mediations that resists unitary meaning. it is in part the very ambiguity of the engravings, and their accrued status as something of an emblem of or dubious proxy for the “past,” that allow creative possibilities to multiply. douglas camp, lee-johnson, and locke pick up on the engravings’ almost emblematic cultural function as spectres of historical violence and its painful legacies and often interrogate the legitimacy of this accumulated authority. yet the images’ visceral forms also occasionally appear to afford a vitality, a life force of sorts, through which artists might access “symbols of embodied agency in the context of global slavery,” as stated in the information page for re{volt}ing, a series by lee-johnson, which was specifically “created in response to john gabriel stedman’s narrative of a five years expedition against the revolted negroes of surinam” (sehgal). in this article, i argue that these contemporary artists have responded to the blake-stedman engravings in ways that simultaneously keep in view the designs’ historical context and circumstances of production and seek to dislocate them creatively from their original conception by reappropriating, remediating, and recontextualizing the images to model possibilities for ongoing emancipation and social change. in the process, they raise crucial questions about the politics of visual representation and especially the reproduction of or creative response to historical artworks representing slavery and colonial violence. i close with a discussion of these broader concepts. counterculture and protest the recurrent reproduction of the blake-stedman images in the late twentiethand early twenty-first-century visual culture of protest represents a critical phase in the history of their afterlives. tracing this part of the images’ history will help to set the scene for the political charge that continues to animate the highly complex forms of adaptation found in more recent contemporary art. as rubenstein and townsend have written, “from its first publication to the present, its [the narrative’s] illustrations by blake have been used as if they were photographs of the horrors of slavery in works ranging from student textbooks to act up billboards” (273). the act up billboard to which they refer was designed by julie carson and aaron keppel and mounted in 1991 in new york city. the design featured three pictures, one of which was a depiction by blake of a tortured enslaved man, along with the text “for 200 years the government has thought of us as expendable” (atkins). the curious way in which these images have taken on the stature of documentary evidence as if they were photographs is not dissimilar, in some senses, from their reuse in contemporary art. however, generally speaking, when they do appear in protest graphics, the intention seems not so much to be the interrogation of the more ethically problematic aspects of the designs, nor the ethics of representation itself, in the manner of the artworks that i discuss later in this article. rather, these uses arguably seek above all to elicit shock and to mobilize social and political action. they seem also to presuppose a relatively straightforward reading of the original engravings as unproblematic and laudably abolitionist in force, which is therefore taken as investing the images with continued political force in the present. on the other hand, these instances bring the engravings out from the cloistered space of the book or gallery, affording them distinctive potentialities for doing their own work in the world. whether through creative works like dabydeen’s slave song, blake scholarship, exhibitions, or some other means, blake’s engravings for stedman were evidently in circulation among countercultural networks in 1990s america. the act up billboard attests to this fact, but the images also popped up in the commercial paraphernalia of popular counterculture: the silhouette of the engraving originally entitled “a negro hung alive by the ribs to a gallows” appears in miniature in an advertisement, of all things, for t-shirts manufactured by a company called the neverending vegetable, which was printed in issue 8 (1993) of the countercultural zine infinite onion, produced by dave fischer in colorado springs.i would like to thank the archivists in the chapin library at williams college for generously giving me access to their zine collection. the tiny silhouette of the torture victim hangs within a border comprising eight narrow shapes that seem to be based on the much-reproduced eighteenth-century print showing cross-sections of the liverpool slave ship brooks. underneath the blake design is another small vignette, the source for which i have not been able to identify, seemingly depicting an execution or murder by rifle. above the two are the words “manifest destiny”; beneath is the phrase “white makes right?” viewers are apparently being asked to weigh up these racist slogans against the emblematic depictions of historical violence constellated within the graphic. the blake image is surrounded by other graphics featuring symbols of resistance, including a fist crushing a swastika and antigovernment proclamations such as “only sheep need a leader.” the unmistakable presence of blake’s engraving in this advertisement for anarchist and antiracist paraphernalia suggests the persistent association between the designs and the legacies of slavery and the slave trade within american cultural consciousness: the image appears as a document of historical harm and as a convenient, ready-made shorthand for the prospective wearer’s sociopolitical leanings. this reuse in a commercial context seems a far cry indeed from the examples i will discuss below, but it both demonstrates the prevalence of the blake-stedman engravings in activist popular culture and prompts, perhaps despite itself, questions about the ethico-political freight of reproducing them, particularly in decontextualized form. jumping next to tate britain in the year 2001, we find a reproduction of the same image in a poster pinned up outside the gallery. it was created by one of a group of protestors who had congregated on the final day of the blake exhibition (11 february) to oppose the show’s sponsorship by the pharmaceutical company glaxosmithkline.this event is also discussed by dent and whittaker in the introduction to radical blake (2-3). beneath the quotation “cruelty has a human heart” sat a reproduction of the engraving depicting the brutalized black man being hung by the ribs to the gallows, along with the following lines: 18th century: william blake protests against the enslavement of africans 21st century: glaxosmithkline deny millions of african people access to life-saving medicines protestors handed out a leaflet further detailing the company’s failure to license the production of affordable hiv medications for use among badly affected populations in african countries. the leaflet featured a quotation from “holy thursday” (experience) and lines from america in which blake imagines the emancipation of enslaved peoples. “while blake railed against poverty and oppression,” it stated, “glaxosmithkline is denying millions of african people with hiv access to drugs that could save their lives” (“spassmaschine”). here we have evidence of an unequivocal belief in blake’s antislavery motivations: the same cannot always straightforwardly be said of the artists whose work i will examine next, who often call into question the representational conventions on which the engravings rely, as well as blake’s and stedman’s positionalities as white chroniclers and creators. still, a common thread between the adoptions in activist visual culture and in contemporary art can be traced in the frequent association of blake’s engravings with ongoing discursive agitation for black rights in the present, a continuing legacy that scholars have not yet studied in detail. these responses perform a double transformation, as the black bodies given form by blake’s graver are first detached from their original context as plates in a printed book and then, in their new contexts, come to stand in, however inadequately, for the real bodies of enslaved peoples. in the artworks to which i now turn, the images’ quasi-documentary function and the silences that they nonetheless mask are foregrounded and thematized. in the process, the works raise important questions about the cultural role of images and the limits and possibilities of their reclamation and adaptation. artistic afterlives: the blake-stedman engravings for the twenty-first century in their various ways, sokari douglas camp, jazzmen lee-johnson, and hew locke have deployed blake’s engravings as a kind of pivot point through which to pursue both revisionist and utopian imagining. like the engravings themselves, these simulacra resist any simple resolution or interpretation. each iteration seems actively to herald its own status as a copy of a copy of a copy. their all too familiar shapes signal both presence and absence, evoking at once the vitality of flesh and the loss of human life and liberty, the reality of historical violence and the erasure of its sufferers’ voices and perspectives from the historical record. yet in some senses, what blake or stedman meant by the original images is no longer of primary concern: the images take on a life of their own and feature prominently in these artists’ depictions of the transatlantic slave trade, its legacies, and ongoing racial inequality in the present. in the catalogue for a 2016 exhibition entitled primavera (october gallery, london, 7 april–​14 may), we find mention of sokari douglas camp’s steel sculpture europe supported by africa and america (2015; illus. 1). the text states the work’s revisionist aims: the abolitionist blake’s allegorical etching presents the white figure of europe supported by two darker figures personifying the continents of africa and america. … sokari’s main revision is to clothe these figures in a variety of fabrics that denote the material styles of the different continents. the inspiration for these changes came from an image of three nigerian women sumptuously outfitted for a wedding, each wearing a distinctive combination of wrap, bodice and headdress. … sokari’s figures dressed in identifying clothing are less vulnerable to misinterpretation than their predecessors, and in her modernised version of the “exchange” that occurs between the three continents, subtle shifts have been introduced to imply that the imbalance and exploitation of former times is at last, finally beginning to be redressed. (houghton 6) 1. sokari douglas camp, europe supported by africa and america (2015). © sokari douglas camp. all rights reserved, dacs 2024. photo: jonathan greet. houghton clearly positions blake as an abolitionist; however, the figures’ dress and the “subtle shifts” in their relative positions are framed as revisionist corrections to the original design’s europeanization and sexualization of the women and the implied hierarchy between them, which are presumably the elements seen as making the engraving “vulnerable to misinterpretation.” on her website, douglas camp connects her sculptural group to european iconographic traditions, especially the prototype of the three graces, often depicted (for instance, in antonio canova’s marble sculpture) as naked, classically idealized women. as mellor writes, blake’s engraving had in the first place channeled this tradition, in ways that whitewashed and homogenized the women, erasing racial and cultural differences: “all three women are represented in a european body type, with the same facial features and physiognomy: all three conform to eighteenth-century neoclassical prototypes of female beauty derived from the venus of medici and the three graces.” for mellor, this assimilation to a european sexual ideal demonstrates how “both blake and stedman participated in a cultural erasure of difference between races and individuals that gave priority to western, white models” (358). for her part, douglas camp represents a sense of the “exploitation of former times” being literally and figuratively “redressed.” charles omuaru notes that her “fusion” of european and nigerian cultural models enables her to express “universal concerns” (131-32). yet, as he also emphasizes (130), she goes to great lengths in her artistic practice to represent “endangered” elements of kalabari culture, particularly masks and headpieces, thus working against the “erasure of difference” described by mellor. omuaru highlights how douglas camp reintroduces difference through dress as something to be asserted and respected. the hierarchical imbalance at work in the engraving has also been identified by kara walker. one of the drawings from the series tate fountain with venus, made in preparation for walker’s tate modern-commissioned sculpture fons americanus (2019), bears the inscription columbia and europa being supported (somewhat reluctantly) by an allegorical but nameless african goddess surrounded on all sides by a history of capitalism and exploitation upheld and beautified in the arts—or—“the impossibility of blackness in the mind of someone white.” (quoted in foster) the composition of the blake-stedman engraving was not prominently echoed in the finished sculpture, but this inscriptional framing in a preparatory drawing indicates the artist’s deep and critical engagement with the image and its representational premises. crucially, walker foregrounds its white authorship in a manner that, as we shall see, resonates with lee-johnson’s examination of perspectives, subjectivity, and positionality. an article on the victoria and albert museum’s website on the occasion of the display of douglas camp’s europe supported by africa and america in 2022 (coinciding with the exhibition africa fashion, 2 july 2022–​16 april 2023) further details the artwork’s revisionism: the figures’ outfits denote the material style of each continent: europe wears a mondrian-like pattern; africa a west african kente cloth; but the artist adds to the reading of her work by dressing america in paisley—​a textile whose patterns are of persian and indian origins, but whose name derives from the scottish town and centre of production of that fabric. in doing so, she reminds us that cloth carries within itself interwoven narratives of trade, often complicated by geopolitics. this historical revisionism goes hand in hand with present-day activist intent. the wreath that the three figures hold terminates in petroleum nozzles, alluding both to “the environmental and human impact of fossil fuel extraction, an economic colonialism perpetuated by multinational oil companies” and to humanity’s “shared responsibility to care for the environment” (victoria and albert museum). the multimedia series re{volt}ing (2018) by jazzmen lee-johnson is similarly poised between past and future, revisionism and utopian potentiality. as i noted in the introduction, re{volt}ing was conceived in direct response to stedman’s narrative and its engravings, specifically those produced by blake. it comprises animations and linocut prints and was accompanied by a visual essay, the critical fables of captives: sketches in potentiality. lee-johnson works here “under the aliases of twin selves: academia graphít and discourse jockey—​one a revisionist, the other a futurist seer” (sehgal). the title re{volt}ing, sehgal continues, “signals not only a visceral reaction to the disgusting violence perpetrated under racial slavery, but also the insurgent potential of revolution, the energy of the volt.” despite this abundant “energy,” in conceptualizing re{volt}ing lee-johnson seems to have gone to great lengths to foreground the epistemic gaps and impossibilities of recovering the perspectives of enslaved peoples. in critical fables, she outlines her debt to saidiya hartman’s influential notion of “critical fabulation” and views as her task the “reshaping and rectifying” of blake’s engravings. she “surveyed eleven editions of the [narrative], concentrating primarily on the engravings created by william blake in concert with the text based on stedman’s sketches and descriptions of what he witnessed.” throughout the essay, she reproduces her sketches of those engravings, including “europe supported by africa and america,” “a negro hung alive by the ribs to a gallows,” “the celebrated graman quacy,” and “the execution of breaking on the rack” (illus. 2). 2. pages from jazzmen lee-johnson, the critical fables of captives: sketches in potentiality (2018). © jazzmen lee-johnson. recognizing the sexualizing and dehumanizing tendencies of the engravings and dissatisfied with her own reproductive sketches alone, lee-johnson, “as an artist, as a descendant of slaves,” produced in the final series what she calls “sketches of potentiality” to draw out “the imagined perspective of the slave.” her efforts to do so were, she recognizes, inherently limited from the outset: “my error lies in perspective. i attempt to represent a culture of slavery on its own terms without having access to any accounts from those enslaved, rather i rely on the accounts of a white outsider.” this essential fact is the cause, it seems, of her frustration: “i am still left wanting,” she writes toward the conclusion of the essay, “wanting to treat and heal the wounds of a whipped woman, a hanging man and a bashed man. … i am not satisfied. i want to see what they saw and understand what they felt. all i can do is imagine.” lee-johnson’s works reconfigure the tortured bodies of blake’s engravings, exploring different perspectival angles to encourage new ways of looking and to problematize the very act of looking. the lurching perspectives and contorted forms of the bodies in her sketches and prints create visual paradoxes, exemplified by the work entitled “the onlookers” (illus. 3), in which the tortured figure’s extremities are enlarged to the point of incongruity, and we the onlookers are drawn into a struggle between subject and object, reality and imaginative distortion. 3. jazzmen lee-johnson, “the onlookers” (2018). linocut print with oil-based ink on bfk rives paper. 45 x 24 in. © jazzmen lee-johnson. but the forms are also energized by resilience and rapture, as in the jarring animated loop joanna twerk left, in which a naked, dancing woman faces a gallows, “twerking” with her back to the viewer (illus. 4). your browser does not support the video tag. 4. jazzmen lee-johnson, joanna twerk left (2018). hand-drawn animated loop, chalk on construction paper. © jazzmen lee-johnson. as sehgal suggests, “we don’t know if joanna (stedman’s long-time sexual partner, an enslaved black woman), dancing at the gallows, is rejoicing [in] her newfound independence or twerking for her life.” in these moments, lee-johnson pushes into the potential for individual agency and power in the present, generating “symbols of embodied agency in the context of global slavery” (sehgal) through her artistic responses to the engravings, whose corporeality somehow affords a vital force that might be channeled into new forms and possibilities. a kindred duality presents itself in hew locke’s works washington, federal hall (2018) and the procession (2022), both of which incorporate details from blake’s engravings for stedman. 5. hew locke, washington, federal hall (2018). mixed media (fabric, metal, etc.) collaged on aluminium-mounted c-type photograph. 183 x 122 x 6.5 cm. © hew locke. all rights reserved, dacs/​artimage 2024. washington (illus. 5) is part of a series entitled patriots, based on statues of historical figures (george washington, j. marion sims, alexander hamilton, christopher columbus, a pilgrim father, and two of peter stuyvesant) on display in public spaces in new york, many of which have since sparked debate over potential removal. locke mounted enlarged photographs of the statues on aluminium and “dressed” them with chains and other accoutrements, including, in the case of washington, metal figures of enslaved people—​one of which is based on a blake engraving—​which dangle from the likeness of the slaveholder. the exaggerated pomp and ceremony of the works travesty the pedestalization of these perpetrators of violence in the name of empire, while the use of chains and the borrowing from blake-stedman bluntly proclaim the misguided impulse of this kind of hero worship. similarly, the procession, produced by commission for tate britain and installed in the duveen galleries from march 2022 to january 2023, includes 140 figures embodying the legacies of british and european colonial oppression, adorned with reproductions of benin bronzes, further colonial spoils, newspaper articles, and other historical artifacts and documents (illus. 6). 6. hew locke, the procession (2022), detail. mixed media, including cardboard, fabric, glue gun, pva, plastic, fibreglass, wood, metal, resin, and paint. © hew locke. all rights reserved, dacs/​artimage 2024. one of the figures wears a headdress that features laser-cut wood reproductions of the tortured figure from “a negro hung alive by the ribs to a gallows” (illus. 7), while an etched brass version of the same image is attached to the back of a different figure’s clothing. 7. hew locke, the procession (2022), detail of figure 42. © hew locke. all rights reserved, dacs/​artimage 2024. in addition to washington, locke had already visually “cited” this particular engraving in cui bono? (2017), which was originally installed at rathaus bremen, germany, as part of the exhibition the blind spot: bremen and art in the colonial era; a version also appears in a recent fabric piece, raw materials 24. his exhibition at the british museum, hew locke: what have we here? (17 october 2024–​9 february 2025), includes a display of three prints from the stedman series: blake’s “an armed coromantyn free ranger” and “the skinning of the aboma snake,” as well as bartolozzi’s frontispiece for the narrative. overall, the exhibition comprises written and sculptural interventions focusing on the colonial histories underpinning the museum’s methods of collecting and displaying objects. at tate, the procession likewise sought to mediate visitor encounters with the cultural institution. drawing on a wide range of visual materials, it actively thematizes the historical relationship between art and empire. in addition to the echoes of the blake-stedman engravings, locke includes a reproduction of john singleton copley’s the death of major peirson, 6 january 1781 (1783), which romanticizes the unity and loyalty of peoples subjected to british rule by depicting the major’s servant, a black man, shooting a french soldier who has just killed peirson. the reproduction is printed on the fabric of a palanquin carried by two figures representative of haiti’s colonization and the haitian revolution (illus. 8). this visual citation of a painting from tate’s own collection foregrounded the space of the gallery itself—​the institution from which locke received the commission and also a repository for works of art associated with colonialism, slavery, and empire. 8. hew locke, the procession (2022), detail. © hew locke. all rights reserved, dacs 2024. photo: © tate (joe humphrys). both the assemblage technique and the depth and eclecticism of locke’s engagement with historic art and visual culture recall other important british and american works of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, many of which have similarly used the “master’s tools” within the “master’s house” of the cultural institution as a mode of critique, to adopt the terms of audre lorde’s seminal 1979 lecture. fred wilson’s mining the museum (1992–​93) at the maryland historical society provides a particularly striking point of comparison, insofar as wilson’s onsite intervention took its substance from the objects and artworks housed in the society’s collection, bringing out for display artifacts that had previously been invisibilized, consigned to storage and hence preservation in undisturbed obscurity—​including justus engelhardt kuhn’s portrait of henry darnall iii (c. 1710), which depicts an enslaved, metal-collared black child stooping behind the young darnall, his enslaver. locke’s work can also be likened to the collages of romare bearden. bearden’s projections (1964) comprises twenty-one large-scale photographs of collages made from “fragmented images culled from magazines and [his] vast store of art-historical reproductions” (glazer 413). according to lee stephens glazer, “this technique, combined with narratives of black life, allowed bearden to acknowledge the significance of the art-historical past even as he revised its forms to accommodate new representations of african american identity” (411). in contrast to locke’s reuse of historic artworks depicting black people, bearden’s works tend to register their relative absence in the vast majority of celebrated western art. his intention was, he explained, to “establish a world through art in which the validity of my negro experience could live and make its own logic” (quoted in childs 62). although differing in kind and cultural moment, bearden’s and locke’s engagement with historic artworks points to a shared impulse to revise and remediate canonical art-historical images as a fundamental aspect of their practice and its driving sociopolitical critique. speaking of the procession in a short promotional film produced by tate, locke reflects that “the piece of work has a life of its own. so how this work is perceived over time will change and evolve.” this statement also seems eminently applicable to locke’s (and, indeed, to douglas camp’s and lee-johnson’s) incorporation of elements from the blake-stedman engravings—​the engravings very much take on a life of their own, and function as emblems for the human pain and suffering that were foundational to european colonialism and slavery. however, locke’s installation is not solely oriented toward the past; its mysterious, carnivalesque explosion of matter is also intended to look to the future: “there’s an energy there which is about hope—​the future—​let’s make something positive,” he muses at the end of the film. yet his hope for “something positive” seems to exist in uneasy tension with the tokens of violence that he harnesses toward that hope—​the detritus of colonialism could only ever be positioned as positively generative in spite of itself, only through radical disruption and toil. like lee-johnson’s frustration with the limits of imagination alone, locke appears to dramatize a kind of imaginative toil, along with the ongoing struggle both to recover what has been lost and to body forth something new. in the artworks that i have examined in this article, the spectres of the blake-stedman engravings are poised precisely on that fault-line, disclosing violence that is at once unimaginable and impossible to forget. coda: on reproduction reproduction is central to this article’s thematic emphasis on the reuse, adaptation, and circulation of images. as such, a consideration has been whether i ought to reproduce the engravings themselves as illustrative figures. this practice has certainly been prevalent in blake scholarship that discusses them—​and, of course, it is also enacted in a different context in the visual culture and works of art that i describe above. i have decided to follow nicholas mirzoeff’s principle that “placing racist imagery in circulation yet again in order to criticize it … perpetuates harm” (mirzoeff viii-ix). in his british museum exhibition what have we here?, locke comments on his firsthand experience of harm when viewing reproductions of the stedman engravings. alongside the prints, he has inserted a text panel that reads, “i’ve chosen not to pick the most violent images of torture because i’m tired of seeing images of broken black bodies”; however, he decided to include bartolozzi’s frontispiece engraving showing “a dead enslaved person” on the grounds that this “is an image of somebody who fought back.” whether or not we laud blake as an abolitionist, the blake-stedman engravings ultimately cleave to a tendency within british art of the eighteenth century to routinely represent black people in positions of degradation and subjugation. reproducing the images merely for the purpose of illustration would perpetuate these representational conventions. however, there is, i think, a difference between the creative reappropriations being enacted by the contemporary artists considered here and the casual reuse of the images in contexts wherein their formal integrity, cultural authority, or ethical premises are neither primarily nor ultimately called into question. for this reason, as well as omitting figures of the engravings, i have also excluded illustrations of the t-shirt graphic and the protest poster mentioned earlier in this article. while these reuses undoubtedly came with strongly politicized, antiracist agendas, which i certainly do not wish to dismiss, in those contexts the blake-stedman images retained a certain moral and quasi-documentary authority—​indeed, their force relied in part on that authority—​such that, i believe, reproducing them would in its own way uphold that status. my decision not to reproduce the engravings may well seem redundant: clearly, as we have seen, the images are well and truly alive and circulating in various pockets of popular culture and in the art world in britain and america. moreover, i have, although indirectly, reproduced them in some sense by including photographs of contemporary artworks that respond to or visually “cite” them in the first place. indeed, removing the images from circulation entirely would also remove the ability of artists to create new works responding to them. but, since the task of this study has primarily been to trace the engravings’ legacies and the important work being done by artists to interrogate, remediate, and rethink the images critically, it is not necessary to reproduce the originals. that absence is also, i think, fitting for images that have well and truly taken on lives of their own, leaping beyond the confines of their conception as plates designed to illustrate an eighteenth-century book. the contemporary artworks discussed here rehearse a vexed, dialectical relation to the blake-stedman engravings and to the representational and symbolic authority that has accrued to them since their initial production. rather than simply reproducing the images wholesale, the artists have radically altered their formal and material composition—​from paper to steel, fabric, or animated film; from their originally idealized, congruous proportions to the “impossible,” to quote lee-johnson, perspectives of her sketches. these artists refuse to eradicate the blake-stedman images, the physical violence that they emblematize, and the discursive violence that they both embody and perpetuate, but the artists also refuse to grant the images gratuitous entry into their expressive, eclectic assemblages. pace mirzoeff, then, it seems that for them there is something to be said for reproducing such images in certain contexts—​but certainly not uncritically, and certainly not without significant intervention. the results are uneven, searching, necessarily irresolvable: douglas camp’s rendition of “europe supported by africa and america” is hopeful yet cast in the mold of oppressive western standards of beauty and embodiment; lee-johnson takes the images apart, holds their bodies up to the microscope, listens for their subjects’ voices, and still finds herself “wanting”; and locke’s emanations are joyous as much as elegiac, seeking novelty as much as they reject complete rupture with the colonial “past,” its enduring artifacts, and its present-day reincarnations. whether or not we need them to be—​whether or not we want them to be—​the images, as the artists well know, are already there, lodged in a collective imaginary. but the continuation of their presence as cultural actants is far from guaranteed or automatic. they continue to be recycled and remediated—​as spectres of violence that they could only ever approximate, and as substitutes for perspectives that are unlikely ever to be recoverable. yet, as their creative adaptors have amply demonstrated, they are just as meaningful to engage with precisely because of their deficiencies and ethical problems. moreover, they appear at times to afford a space, even if only aporetically, for the kind of “potentiality” or vitality that lee-johnson, for her part, seeks out. as much as reproducing the images might allow them to retain their authority, so might removing them from view without direct and serious critique: the arguments for both sides are approximately familiar from recent debates over the memorialization of colonizers and slave traders, including those whose statues have been travestied by locke. the case is far from closed. whatever work the blake-stedman engravings go on to do in the world, the course of their afterlives seems to have taken a distinctive, and compelling, turn in recent works of art from both sides of the atlantic. above all, these artworks represent a phase in the images’ afterlives in which their emblematic, quasi-documentary, and canonical authority, which has for so long characterized the nature of their reception and reuse, is no longer being taken for granted. works cited atkins, robert. “scene and heard: connecting aids—​phobia, racism and sexism—​‘expendable,’ julie carson & aaron keppel’s billboard for act-up.” village voice (1 october 1991): 100. bindman, david. “blake’s vision of slavery 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“blake’s vision of slavery.” journal of the warburg and courtauld institutes 15.3-4 (1952): 242-52. fischer, dave. infinite onion 8 (1993). foster, sally. “kara walker.” national gallery of australia. 27 july 2022. <https://​nga.​gov.​au/​stories-​ideas/​kara-​walker>. accessed 24 january 2024. glazer, lee stephens. “signifying identity: art and race in romare bearden’s projections.” art bulletin 76.3 (1994): 411-26. goode, mike. romantic capabilities: blake, scott, austen, and the new messages of old media. oxford: oxford university press, 2020. houghton, gerard. “sokari douglas camp c.b.e.: a new allegory for spring.” primavera: sokari douglas camp c.b.e. london: october gallery, 2016. 3-7. lee-johnson, jazzmen. the critical fables of captives: sketches in potentiality. jazzmen lee-johnson, 2018. lorde, audre. “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” this bridge called my back: writings by radical women of color. ed. cherríe moraga and gloria anzaldúa. 2nd ed. new york: kitchen table/​women of color press, 1983. 94-101. makdisi, saree. william blake and the impossible history of the 1790s. chicago: university of chicago press, 2003. mellor, anne k. “sex, violence, and slavery: blake and wollstonecraft.” huntington library quarterly 58.3-4 (1995): 345-70. mirzoeff, nicholas. white sight: visual politics and practices of whiteness. cambridge, ma: mit press, 2023. omuaru, charles g. t. “sculptures of sokari douglas camp, ‘alali aru’ and ‘primavera’: recipe for national development.” international journal of education, humanities and multidisciplinary research 10.1 (2020): 124-38. oostindie, gert j. “on stedman’s narrative, suriname slavery, and editing.” bijdragen tot de taal-, landen volkenkunde 147.1 (1991): 140-45. perris, jonathan. “god lives in the sun: the critique of evangelical abolitionism in william blake’s ‘the little black boy.’” european romantic review 34.6 (2023): 629-45. price, richard, and sally price. “art of the dutch caribbean.” the image of the black in latin american and caribbean art, book 1: from colony to nation. ed. david bindman, alejandro de la fuente, and henry louis gates, jr. cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 2023. 281-319. richardson, alan. “colonialism, race, and lyric irony in blake’s ‘the little black boy.’” papers on language and literature 26 (1990): 233-48. rubenstein, anne, and camilla townsend. “revolted negroes and the devilish principle: william blake and conflicting visions of boni’s wars in surinam, 1772–​1796.” blake, politics, and history. ed. jackie disalvo, g. a. rosso, and christopher z. hobson. new york: garland, 1998. 273-98. sehgal, reya. “re{volt}ing.” jazzmen lee-johnson. <https://​www.​jazzmenleejohnson.​com/​new-​page>. accessed 18 january 2024. simon, ed. “william blake, radical abolitionist.” jstor daily. 5 june 2019. <https://​daily.​jstor.​org/​william-​blake-​radical-​abolitionist>. accessed 23 january 2024. “spassmaschine” [submitter of a piece originally published on the practical history site]. “william blake takes on glaxosmithkline—​practical history.” libcom.org. 27 july 2009. <https://libcom.org/article/william-blake-takes-glaxosmithkline-practical-history>. accessed 12 january 2024. stedman, john gabriel. “narrative of a five years expedition against the revolted negroes of surinam,” transcribed for the first time from the original 1790 manuscript. ed. richard price and sally price. baltimore: johns hopkins university press, 1988. tambling, jeremy. “mind-forg’d manacles: william blake and slavery, whitworth art gallery, university of manchester, 26 january–​6 april 2008; blake’s shadow: william blake and his artistic legacy, whitworth gallery, 26 january–​20 april 2008.” blake 44.4 (spring 2011): 142-43. tate. “1807: blake, slavery and the radical mind.” tate. 3 april 2007. <https://​www.​tate.​org.​uk/​press/​press-​releases/​1807-​blake-​slavery-​and-​radical-​mind>. accessed 17 june 2024. —​—​—​. “hew locke—​‘let’s make something positive.’” dir. jérome monnot. youtube. 2 may 2022. <https://​www.​youtube.​com/​watch?​v=11d64_f-m6u>. accessed 12 january 2024. thiong’o, ngũgĩ wa. writers in politics: essays. london: heinemann, 1981. victoria and albert museum. “europe supported by africa and america by sokari douglas camp.” victoria and albert museum. 2022. <https://​www.​vam.​ac.​uk/​articles/​europe-​supported-​by-​africa-​and-​america-​by-​sokari-​douglas-​camp>. accessed 12 january 2024. white, landeg. “stedman’s narrative: its origins and transformations.” phd diss., universidade aberta, 2001. wood, marcus. slavery, empathy, and pornography. oxford: oxford university press, 2002. zemon davis, natalie. “joanna.” oxford african american studies center. 31 may 2017. <https://​doi.​org/​10.​1093/​acref/​9780195301731.​013.​74237>. accessed 23 january 2024. a conversation with helen bruder “europe supported by africa and america,” from john gabriel stedman, narrative, of a five years' expedition (1796). huntington library, art collections, and botanical gardens. library division, rare books, call no. 23654. image courtesy of the william blake archive. a conversation with helen bruder this interview was conducted by elizabeth effinger, who has edited and condensed it for publication. the year 2022 marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of helen p. bruder’s william blake and the daughters of albion (macmillan, 1997) (hereafter wbda), the first book that brought feminist criticism to bear on blake studies. bruder’s wbda wrestles with blake’s complex representations of gender and sexuality. while earlier essays brought much-needed critical focus to blake’s representations of women (see susan fox and anne mellor),susan fox, “the female as metaphor in william blake’s poetry,” critical inquiry 3.3 (spring 1977): 507-19; anne k. mellor, “blake’s portrayal of women,” blake 16.3 (winter 1982–83): 148-55. bruder’s book-length study argued for a radical feminist spirit in his works. this strident call to arms would advance blake scholarship in exciting new directions, and wbda has been widely cited ever since. bruder is also the editor of women reading william blake (palgrave macmillan, 2007) and prolific co-editor with tristanne connolly of four collections: queer blake (palgrave macmillan, 2010), blake, gender and culture (pickering & chatto, 2012), sexy blake (palgrave macmillan, 2013), and beastly blake (palgrave macmillan, 2018). currently, she is an independent scholar living in oxfordshire. i met with her on 3 october 2022 at st. james’s church, piccadilly, in london, where we talked in the vestibule near the font where blake was baptized in 1757. in the interview that follows, bruder reflects on wbda and what has changed in blake scholarship since then. ee: how did you come to blake? do you have an earliest memory of blake? hb: i had a very religious upbringing. the thing that got me into blake was i wanted to continue being a christian but adult life buffeted my basic faith. … my early education was woefully bad but when i read my first blake poem at brookes university, i liked it so much. i was just seized immediately. we did all of songs. it was probably the whole experience of studying that collection of poems. i had two fantastic teachers. and then i just knew. first songs and then marriage of heaven and hell. ee: i think those texts are still the gateway drugs into blake. hb: marriage of heaven and hell is the text that just gets you. it’s because you can understand it, or you think you can understand it. there are some bits where there aren’t weird characters immediately. the narrative is so important—​that’s the incentive of the proverbs. … i was lucky because the two people that taught me blake, one of them was a marxist, so he wasn’t interested in religion, and the other one had been a priest. so, i had two good influences, each taking me in completely different directions with blake. ee: what was it about blake that seized you? hb: initially, it was the idea that you could have a very vibrant religious faith, but it didn’t have to be attached to moralizing, or judgmentalism or salvation in the sense of sorting the sheep from the goats, and an incredibly inflated sense of what it is to be human and divine in yourself at the same time, but for that to mean something completely different from what it might mean in the church. that’s what seized me emotionally, but that isn’t what i wrote about ever. until now. that’s the latest project. that’s what tristanne connolly and i are doing now: a book called blake sees jesus. and i see it as a kind of a completion of or being a little bit more honest about what my actual initial attachment was to blake. it feels like coming full circle. ee: i’ll loop back to your new project later, but first let’s talk about the book that started your long career in blake studies. your widely cited first book, william blake and the daughters of albion, celebrates the twenty-fifth anniversary of its publication this year, and is the occasion for us sitting down and having this conversation. why do you think that this book was considered such a game changer in blake scholarship? hb: i think it’s because of the timing. wbda was published in 1997, but, like i say in the book, feminist blake studies came a bit late. so, i think somebody had to write this book. it wouldn’t have to be written particularly in this way, but i was full of this sense that there was something terribly unjust and wrong in blake scholarship, and i wanted to sort it out. i put that down to my religious upbringing. it’s a bit like what jeanette winterson says: once you’ve preached inside the tent, whatever you do, you’re still preaching. i wouldn’t take such an emphatic tone now. i think the broad stroke of saying that feminists can be really good blake scholars and we’re going to illuminate things that you’ve ignored is a fair point, and one that is really well proven. ee: personally, i enjoyed your choice of voice; it felt charged, like blake’s “awake! awake! awake! / jerusalem thy sister calls!” (jerusalem 77.1-2, e 233). your criticism of misogynistic interpretations of the book of thel was especially eye-opening for me. hb: i really didn’t feel like it was a choice. when i wrote the chapter about the book of thel, i felt that femininity shouldn’t be so despised, because that’s what motivated so much of that criticism that had grown up around it. it was obvious once you plunged into it; it’s not just one person, it’s like fifty people. sometimes you must point out the obvious. i don’t know if i’d come down on the same side in my interpretation of the poem now. maybe i wouldn’t. but then, critics seemed to hate this character [thel] and really, all she’s doing is saying “i’m not sure.” i took the same sense of indignation because i sort of felt it. ee: that sense of indignation comes through! i’d say your writing in wbda has teeth. it also strikes me that your rhetoric echoes the way you see blake’s voice as socially engaged with his world, a direct rebuttal to those critics who see blake as someone speaking only to himself. i think that’s what i really enjoyed about your book, that sense of how affected you were by the material. it’s one that resonates with my own encounter with blake’s work, that it just gets under your skin. something else i appreciated was your methodology of paying attention to the “cultural effluvia” of blake’s day, as you put it. what’s the attraction to these sources? hb: traditionally, there’s a lot of talk about blake as a genius. the idea that he wasn’t affected by the time of his writing is obviously profoundly wrong. you can be both, which is what he is, because he’s a genius, giving us a genius sense of history and of his own time. but that seems obvious, doesn’t it? there were all these things that are happening around him. everybody’s interested in political history, and i’d just like to say, well, there’s other history too. so, let’s go back to the basic things. take blake’s europe, for example. i mean, you’re in the middle of a european war, and a queen [marie antoinette] has been guillotined and very close to the production of this poem. could there be a connection? there were loads of pornographic cartoons of the queen. do you think it’s possible this man [blake], living in london, looking at pictures, may have seen one of them? it was not hard to find. you might not be interested in it, but it’s literally not hard; there’s loads of political pamphlets. do you think you might have read any of them? there are loads of political cartoons, and they’re obscene some of them. do you think that could have anything to do with the bodies as they appear in europe? in wbda i ran out of energy and space. i would have liked to get on to the urizen books because they’re more complicated. but also, the argument about what’s human or not human in blake, about what embodiment is and how that affects identity, that’s everywhere in blake’s work and i didn’t get to it. ee: what do you think has changed most in your own work, or in blake scholarship, since the publication of wbda? hb: in thinking about how things progressed after this book, i think the most striking thing is the collaborations. in looking back at the end of wbda, it’s a little bit sad when i’m saying i feel like i’m speaking into a void, and there’s not a big conversation of it. there genuinely wasn’t. that’s probably the biggest difference now. i think there’s more collaboration now, and different kinds of collaboration. back then, i think there was much more of a sense of there being an establishment, a genuine establishment that really wasn’t open. it was the prescribed readings, and that some things were appropriate, and some things weren’t, and some works more important than others. and we all know what the important ones are and which ones aren’t. and the visual must be separated from the poetry. and if you’re an expert on this, you can’t write about that. it’s different now. i think i always start with the most obvious things and work out from that. i’m never going to have the same kind of insights as somebody who knows a great deal about christian iconography. i just come at it with my own eyes and am informed by at least my relatively wide knowledge of blake. i’m quite pleased with collections that i’ve done since wbda. with women reading william blake, i wanted to get as many of these women that haven’t necessarily been seen together as part of a critical landscape. and then it brought me to meet other people. tristanne connolly and i have collaborated multiple times, which has been fantastic. i think collaboration is a very good way of seeing directions open up. because when you ask people what they want to write about, beyond offering them the broad theme, you’re asking “what would you like to say?” and you, you’re learning; you’re not prescribing. if you invite people under a broad theme to write something, you don’t know what you’re going to get. with beastly blake, tristanne and i thought that might be one kind of book, and it turned out to be another kind of book. but then also, you’ve got to be careful that you don’t become part of the problem, and just keep on asking the same people, or people that you know you’re going to agree with. ee: it’s just as blake says: “without contraries is no progression” (marriage 3, e 34). it sounds like your ongoing interest in collaboration, as a concept and as part of your own scholarly practice, folds back into some of the ideas about what you were pushing against in this book, around the gatekeeping and policing in blake studies at the time. hb: that’s exactly right. i think the sense is that blake is this genius, and then he’s taught to us by these other genius characters, these “great fathers” of blake studies. but i don’t think so. i think we probably learn a lot more if we are all toiling in the field together. ee: how would you feel if you were called one of the great mothers of blake studies? hb: (laughing) i don’t know. i guess that would be nice, but only in the sense that that’s just the beginning. i think there was a good point to be made in wbda, but i could have done it without quite swinging the hammer so much. and i think it needed to be followed by all these things that have proliferated into these multiple voices. that’s the way it needs to be. ee: collaboration is a form of partnership, and that also makes me think about the connections with the public and forms of public scholarship. not only do we have these multiple collaborative voices in blake scholarship, but we also have public engagements with blake. i’m thinking even beyond the widely recognized scholarly resources that make blake’s work freely available (e.g., the blake archive)—for example, jason whittaker’s zoamorphosis blog, the free online journal vala from the blake society, and even books on blake aimed at a wider audience. these all potentially shape the image of blake in the popular imagination. is there anything about blake that you think still needs to be reshaped in the popular imagination? hb: going back to first principles and things that are obvious is important. take the role of catherine blake. how can it possibly be that this person who collaborated with blake, who helped produce his creative work for his entire life, is cut out? for many years, catherine’s role has only been acknowledged in a minor way, as having done the printing and a bit of coloring. but that is clearly not going to be the only way that this partner influenced blake’s genius. it’s just another bit of the mythology which still lingers, but it can be changed. and then there’s also the generic hierarchy within blake’s own work. for example, the thomas gray watercolours for ann flaxman, why are they not taken more seriously when people are trying to have a whole sense of blake’s visual progression? i think that is because they see the watercolours in some broad sense of feminine aesthetic. these are just things that are obvious, but still, we could do something about it. ee: let’s talk about what’s changed in the last twenty-five years—​or maybe what hasn’t. do the kinds of critiques you make about blake studies still hold true today? are gender and sexuality still neglected in this discourse? are there other areas that you consider to be neglected in blake scholarship? hb: i haven’t reached a fixed position about that. in many ways i’m not the right person to ask. i’ve been an outsider, a passionate and interested amateur, for years now and i genuinely feel others are in a much better position to answer this question. perhaps also because my thinking about gender and identity refuses to catch up with the virtual world, and future directions now can only be envisaged, i think, by digital natives. i would have liked to see some more book-length studies on blake and gender and sexuality. there’s lots of articles. loads of people have written great things, and the issue of gender doesn’t tend to stay entirely on the margins now, which is good. i’d also like to see something like this on the longer poems. i think what vala, the blake society journal, is doing is fantastic; its first issue was about women and gender. that was great. ee: do you think there’s something about blake’s treatment of gender and sexuality that makes it resistant or inhospitable? why are people not writing these books? hb: i wonder if academics are not writing these bigger books because maybe academics think it [blake’s treatment of gender and sexuality] is too simple, or it’s too obvious or it’s too abundant. because it’s absolutely in everything that he writes or draws. i know it’s clever to find something that’s hidden, that nobody else has found, but this is hiding in plain sight. it’s not just in these obvious poems—​the book of thel, visions of the daughters of albion—it’s in every poem, in every artwork, and in probably every annotation, and in every bit of biography, and i feel like it should be woven into the mix of whatever. … whatever your interest is, you must have an interest in this too, because that’s what blake puts at the centre of everything he speculated about, whether it’s aesthetic, or religion, or politics. it’s never on the margins of his thought, even if it is on the margins of his interpreters’. ee: one of the things that wbda does is boldly call out scholarship for the absence of feminist readings of blake’s work. what was it about the fact that it was the 1990s that struck you as part of the scandal? hb: the work that was going on in literary criticism was just part of a bigger women’s movement. i think we all kind of thought the revolution was about to occur. and once you explained how appalling or dreadful this sexism was, of which these men interpreting blake were just a tiny example, that everything would change. also, it wasn’t just about feminism; it was about that larger sort of radical politics at the time. and blake was obviously, as he still is, a bit of a totemic figure for all revolutionaries. ee: so, you felt like you were part of a revolution? hb: yes, and i was both right and wrong. history has been different. there’s been a gender revolution, maybe without the sexual revolution, without those kinds of changes more broadly in society. … it was definitely a motor for writing this book. ee: looking back at this book, i was wondering how your own cultural political moment might have been shaping the tone and your focus here. were you involved in any kind of political activism at the time? hb: yes. but it was generally kind of depressing. i don’t think anybody i ever voted for was ever elected, and then we got tony blair! so, we carried on, going on numerous marches, trying to end violence against women, to reclaim the night, to obtain affordable childcare, and so on. i had this sense that the women’s movement wasn’t changing society quite as quickly as we wanted, but the academic world was the one place where actual change was happening, and it was very positive. it doesn’t sound like much now, maybe, but once women’s history started to be taken seriously, and there were whole conferences just about women’s history, this was very exciting. there was the feminist academic network, and this was very exciting. ee: you were building that new jerusalem. hb: it was a real stark change, and it took off in the 1990s. personally, it was very exciting. i felt part of it, that there was a real cultural activity that was gathering steam. ee: it seems like your work has run parallel to other movements of change. do you see a through line with what you’re doing here in your first book running into those subsequent projects? hb: if you had walked up to the person that wrote this book [wbda], i would never have believed we’d be where we are now. this is really great, you know? i wouldn’t have believed that there’d be so many women writing about blake that you could pitch to a publisher, “i want to do this book, women reading william blake,” and they would say, “that’s good.” or that then you go back and say, “i want to do one called queer blake,” and they would say, “that’s great!” this person wouldn’t have believed that. ee: i’m glad you bring up queer blake (2010), your edited collection with tristanne connolly, which i think stands as another landmark in blake studies. building on the important work begun a decade earlier by christopher hobson in blake and homosexuality (palgrave, 2000), your book brings the insights of queer theory, rooted in gay and lesbian studies scholarship, to bear on blake. like hobson’s book, we can see queer blake as a key event that helps fold blake into a larger queer intellectual history. but perhaps even more importantly, this collection created a space that fostered new lines of thought and queer ways of engaging with blake’s work that continue to energize queer approaches to blake today. what struck you as “queer” about blake? what kind of new intellectual work was afforded by queering blake? hb: oh, come on, what isn’t queer about blake!? i’ve always specialized in revealing the screamingly obvious and blake’s queerness is surely more apparent than even his, what shall we call it, proto-feminism. his visual art is a pride parade of gaping garments, sly gestures, naked audacity. if you can name it, i feel blake gives us a glimpse of it—often from some very alarming angles. and more seriously, i think blake’s obsessional belief that he “must create a system, or be enslav’d by another mans” (jerusalem 10.20, e 153) is especially true and urgent when he confronts and creates gender systems. perhaps surprisingly, i’ve never been very bothered by the seemingly tedious heterosexist inequality of his zoas and emanations. because, yes, they are gendered asymmetrical pairings, but they erupt and fragment and dissolve and re-form in queer ways, almost as soon as the concept emerges. i’ve also not really been troubled by the “four mighty ones” which there “are in every man” (four zoas 3.4, e 300) because there’s a good chance this refers to a universal human condition, which creates infinite possibilities for interpersonal connections between infinite identities. of course, albion in blake’s lifetime was not a gender-fluid utopia any more than it was a feminist one—and sexual power always matters—which i guess is why much of the early scholarship rightly focused on the political and criminal aspects of same-sex relationships, in a historical context, and so on. yet again, blake studies was a bit late to this party, the queer party, and i still remember how surprised and delighted i was seeing chris hobson’s book on the shelf in blackwell’s in oxford around the year 2000. there probably should have been other people working to forward this direction in blake studies but after women reading william blake (2007) i thought, why not? so, i pitched queer blake to tristanne connolly, she embraced it wholeheartedly and our wonderful co-editing relationship began. i love what that collection represents: an eclectic, open-minded, thoughtful, and imaginative first flourish. now, i’m very content to sit back and see where newer, younger writers and artists go with queer blake! ee: pandemic aside, i was really struck this particular year, 2022, with how we are living in a very scary time. politically, in america, we’ve just witnessed the shock of the historic supreme court overturning of roe v. wade, which declares that the constitutional right to abortion no longer exists. throughout your work, and especially foregrounded in your first book [wbda], you’re showing us that blake is somebody who is thoroughly interested in those relations between sexual politics and political power. is there something about blake that can help us in this moment where it does seem like gender and sexuality are coming into all sorts of trouble with power? if so, what kind of lessons? hb: that’s very profound, isn’t it? because in some senses, there is infinitely more freedom—​for some people clearly more than others. and that’s great, but that’s often at an individual level. and if political structures can change a law of that kind, identity politics are hitting up against the end of a boot. it’s frightening. i think blake could help us navigate every contemporary issue. if everyone who was making the laws had read blake’s comments about laws, our current systems might be better. ee: tell me about which of blake’s texts are most on your mind these days. is there something that you keep coming back to? hb: the urizen books, because i don’t understand them. i’m not sure i understand any of the epic epics; i’ve read them many times, and i’m not sure i do. but for some reason, the urizen books i understand the least. i do find that there’s some of the most disturbing visual images in those three poems. maybe that is partly because of the times we’re in. also, for the blake and jesus project, i’m just enjoying looking at endless pictures of jesus. because they are absolutely fantastic and really surprising. i’m really interested in where there’ll be a gospel story and then blake will step just outside of the text, just beyond the narrative margin and imagine, and then picture, things about jesus which aren’t quite stated but which he uniquely sees. these are very embryonic ideas now, but i guess i’m trying to get a glimpse of what it means to have divine visions in times of trouble. that’s the other thing that’s obvious: just how much blake did. now that i’m fifty-five years old, that feels quite old, i like to see how much somebody [blake] managed to produce out of their human years and days. you know, it’s kind of a wellspring. i think i have a more free and ecstatic enjoyment of blake now than i did when i was writing wbda. now, i think there’s a lot to be had just from the experience of the encounter with blake. especially with the visual art; it’s transformative as an object, as an encounter, and not just for the ideas. ee: tell me more about this new project on blake and jesus, and any other projects on the horizon. hb: it started as an idea ages ago, but it’s now resurrected as a proper project, and i think it is very timely. i think jason whittaker’s book divine images (reaktion, 2021) is really good and needed to be published. i think that when people who are not experts pick up a book on blake, they should be able to understand at least some of it, and that’s a great introduction, and very richly illustrated. for many years i’ve wished tristanne [connolly] and i could produce a coffee-table format book of blake’s gospel pictures along with gospel texts. i spend lots of time in church bookshops and dream of something like that, blake’s gospel, or even blake’s everlasting gospel. so far, though, that’s not been practical, so until it is, we’re editing another diverse collection called blake sees jesus. each contributor focuses on a single image, which is reproduced, so it’s the beginning of a larger “seeing jesus” project. in the future, i’d like to continue the dialogue with people outside academia who’re interested in that mission, vocation, faith—not least because i’ve been spending a lot more time inside churches lately—​but for now it’s a scholarly foray and seeking to see in that way is wonderful too. ee: it sounds like your new project promises to reach out across the aisle, as it were, and break down some of the disciplined ways of thinking about blake. and what a fitting place we are in [st. james’s church, piccadilly] to be hearing about this direction in your work. hb: once you start something with blake, something else always emerges from this, and not just in terms of a new idea. it always leads to new experiences, just like this encounter we’re having here. i don’t think that blake is a supernatural force that is changing the universe—​(laughing) i’m not one of those people. but blake is still very abundant and protean once you start to engage, so that’s kind of hopeful. and i do think it is interesting that the person that wrote this book [wbda] would never have ever thought that this would be where we are now. i find that quite hopeful. thanks to rev. lucy winkett and rev. dr. ayla lepine of st. james’s church for granting us access to the space. all references to blake’s text are taken from david erdman, ed., the complete poetry and prose of william blake. william blake and his circle: a checklist of scholarship in 2021 william blake and his circle: a checklist of scholarship in 2021 by wayne c. ripley works in romance languages contributed by fernando castanedo works in japanese contributed by hikari sato works in turkish contributed by hüseyin alhas works in russian contributed by vera serdechnaia wayne c. ripley (wripley@winona.edu) is a professorresearch for “william blake and his circle” was conducted in: krueger library at winona state university (for works in english); the universidad de alcalá library, madrid (for works in romance languages); cinii and the national diet library online catalogue, komaba library and general library of the university of tokyo, and the national diet library (for works in japanese); the general library at social sciences university of ankara and i̇hsan doğramacı bilkent university library (for works in turkish); and kuban state university (for works in russian). of english at winona state university in minnesota. he is working on a project regarding blake’s broad street family, friends, and neighbors, and creating a new bibliography for the william blake archive. fernando castanedo (fernando.castanedo@uah.es) is a professor of english at the universidad de alcalá (madrid). hikari sato (hikari@g.ecc.u-tokyo.ac.jp) is a professor of comparative literature and culture at the university of tokyo. he has been a member of the “william blake and his circle” team since summer 2003. hüseyin alhas (huseyin.alhas@asbu.edu.tr) is a research assistant in the department of english language and literature, social sciences university of ankara. he is currently working on his dissertation, which focuses on the evolution of epic heroes in the seventeenth century. vera serdechnaia (rintra@yandex.ru), doctor of philology, krasnodar (russia), is an assistant professor in the department of foreign literature and comparative cultural studies at kuban state university and a theatre critic. she is working on the theme of blake reception in russia and the former ussr. table of contents: introductory essay symbols abbreviations division i: william blake part i: blake’s writings section a: original editions, facsimiles, reprints, and translations section b: collections and selections part ii: reproductions of drawings and paintings section a: illustrations of individual authors section b: collections and selections part iii: commercial engravings section a: illustrations of individual authors part iv: bibliographies and catalogues section a: bibliographies part v: digital resources part vi: criticism, biography, and reviews division ii: william blake’s circle banks, joseph banks, thomas boydell, john constable, john cosway, richard cowper, william cultures and technologies of display and exhibition cumberland, george cunningham, allan darwin, erasmus flaxman, john hayley, william hervey, james hogarth, william howard, john hunter, william kauffman, angelica macpherson, james mortimer, john hamilton palmer, samuel priestley, joseph pughe, william owen reynolds, joshua robinson, henry crabb royal academy of arts sandby, paul sibly, ebenezer, and manoah sibly stedman, john gabriel swedenborg, emanuel taylor, thomas winckelmann, johann joachim wollstonecraft, mary introductory essay my deep thanks as always to my kind and generous collaborators, whose contributions reveal william blake’s truly global reach. as will be seen, this was a central concern of much of the scholarship produced over the last year. they have provided the annotations to entries from their respective areas. thanks also to joseph viscomi and jason whittaker for their assistance in elucidating their work; to the editors of blake for their assistance in finding material; and to sarah jones for her editorial assistance and general expertise. blake discoveries outside of the numerous studies that trace in detail the many unrecorded lines of blake’s reception, the major factual discoveries of the past year emanate largely from joseph viscomi’s william blake’s printed paintings: methods, origins, meanings and its two appendices; the latter are accessible from the related sites page of the blake archive. editions, translations, and catalogues the blake archive offered several new editions of blake’s work in 2021. in terms of his literary works, the most significant publication was the archive’s first copy of poetical sketches (1783), a typeset collection of juvenilia. the edition contains a diplomatic transcription of the text, as well as editorial notes that reference blake’s sometimes contradictory corrections and emendations. (for more on this point, see meaghan green at hell’s printing press.) from the illuminated books, the archive published posthumously printed copies of america (n, p, and q) and europe (i, l, and m).catherine blake printed and colored america copies n and q and europe copies i and l (an anonymous colorist later made additions to america q and europe l), while frederick tatham printed america p and europe m. from blake’s visual designs, it published the watercolor illustrations to john bunyan’s pilgrim’s progress, most of which were probably colored and/​or finished by catherine blake. finally, in its new “works in preview” wing, the archive has made available major paintings and drawings associated with the last judgment and selected paintings from the 1809 exhibition, such as sir jeffery chaucer and the nine and twenty pilgrims on their journey to canterbury. new blake translations published in 2021 include javier calvo’s spanish translation of blake’s prose, which attempts to offer a kind of biography; haruna ikezawa and natsuki ikezawa’s japanese translation of and commentary on the songs of innocence; an italian edition of a descriptive catalogue; and the late dmitrii smirnov’s edition of milton, which is the first russian translation of the poem and contains reproductions, commentary, and a dictionary of blake’s concepts and terms. (in his article in russian, d. kozyrev compares different translations of “the fly,” while eliza borkowska and camila oliveira’s presentation at the blake society reflects on the difficulty of translating jerusalem.) jacques darras’s french translation of the marriage of heaven and hell and other works and alain suied’s edition of songs were published before 2021, but are recorded here for the first time. digital resources i have attempted to document material intentionally produced for the digital environment, including webpages, blogs, videos posted on youtube or other sites, podcasts, and other digital projects, but not references on twitter, instagram, facebook, pinterest, tiktok, or reddit. a website that offers multiple articles related to blake can be found under its title or the name of the host organization (e.g., the blake society) or the last name of the major contributor or editor (e.g., keri davies for index rerum, jason whittaker for zoamorphosis). a single entry on blake at a blog or website is listed by the author’s last name, if given. books (monographs, collections of essays, or chapters within either) and articles in newspapers or scholarly journals are listed in criticism, biography, and reviews, but i have also cross-listed in that category significant scholarship produced in the digital environment. one of the few positive consequences of the pandemic has been the dramatic increase in digitally available presentations and conferences that can be attended through zoom and viewed subsequently on youtube. i have done my best, then, to note these and other videos tied to blake that were posted over the last year, with the exception of videos reciting particular poems or explicating them for students (these seem to have proliferated with the increase in distance learning). interpretative works, like alex robinson’s animated version of “london” from 2012, have been listed, however. i have also documented presentations by or interviews with authors that were conducted on podcasts and/​or posted to youtube, and i have cross-listed them with the related works. this material includes talks by and interviews with john higgs in relationship to his new book, william blake vs. the world; those with jason whittaker about divine images: the life and work of william blake; and an interview with martin myrone about his lives of william blake. outside of this material, the most significant talks available on youtube are the monthly events of the blake society, which typically feature a blake scholar or an artist inspired by blake, and “blake now,” a discussion by five contemporary poets, which was organized by st. james’s, piccadilly, and the poetry society. jason whittaker launched a redesigned version of his website, zoamorphosis, in late 2021/​early 2022. in addition to continuing its work of recording sightings of blake in popular culture and offering reviews of creative and scholarly works, the site links to vala, the new journal of the blake society, now in its second issue, and to whittaker’s youtube channel, zoavision, which contains both longer videos and short talks called “blake bites”; offers whittaker’s biography of blake, divine images; and hosts videos and related material from global blake, the january 2022 virtual conference. organized by whittaker and sibylle erle, the conference featured no fewer than five keynote speakers and thirty-seven presentations that examined blake’s reception in a multitude of contexts. as whittaker and erle lay out in their discussion with the keynote speakers, “global blake: round table,” the event was a sequel of sorts to erle and morton d. paley’s two-volume collection, the reception of william blake in europe, and has a companion piece in the special issue of blake/​an illustrated quarterly, “blake in europe.” the conference will lead, the organizers hope, to new work on blake’s reception. (to that end, i have included it in the 2021 checklist, even though it occurred in 2022.) for its part, the blake archive expanded into new areas as well in 2021, launching, as noted above, a wing called “works in preview.” it presents visual designs before all the editorial and coding work has been completed, but users will still be able to enlarge images, access editorial notes and work information, and utilize the lightbox. the archive’s new exhibition, william blake’s biblical illustrations, differs significantly from the three preceding ones in that it offers short essays by different scholars, with links to images from both within and without the archive. at hell’s printing press, the blog of the blake archive and blake quarterly, meaghan green reflects on the problem of how to represent blake’s corrections in poetical sketches when they do not agree in all copies; ada wofford has a post on allen ginsberg and another on the artist melanie smith; and julian s. whitney analyzes the blakean imagery in the video game devil may cry 5. two new youtube tutorials were posted, addressing what is available through the archive’s preview mode and the copy information tab. significant scholarship on other blogs includes sibylle erle on the visionary heads at the bars blog; keri davies on blake’s cat, benjamin heath malkin, blake’s cottage, and the title page of milton at index rerum; pete yeo on using blake to envision our possible relationships to the environment at finding blake; and caroline anjali ritchie’s interviews with poets and artists at zoamorphosis. blake was referenced on two blogs in russian. the poet alexander del'finov expresses how he translated “london” for leonid fedorov’s musical project blake, while kristina manucharyan notes sarah burton’s tribute to blake in the recent alexander mcqueen collection of fashion designs. on the spanish-language website portal de historia de la traducción en españa, cristina flores documents the history of translations of blake into spanish. blake scholarship despite the travails of the global pandemic, blake scholars have proven themselves to be indefatigable, with eight monographs published in 2021. the most significant is joseph viscomi’s william blake’s printed paintings: methods, origins, meanings, which provides the new standard account of how the “printing paintings” (the color-printed drawings, or monoprints) were produced and how the works should be interpreted. key arguments are that the “printed paintings” should be recognized as a technical innovation on a par with the relief-etching method of the illuminated books, and that the monoprints were created as autonomous designs, are independent of the illuminated books, and have no intended viewing order. importantly, viscomi also illustrates the relationship between the printed paintings and blake’s evolving concept of fresco. in the two appendices, which are not in the book itself but available online, viscomi develops in detail both how blake understood the term “fresco” and how the printed paintings circulated among collectors and dealers after his death. the former sheds much light on the 1809 exhibition and what blake was attempting to do in his experimental pictures, while the latter provides new information about frederick tatham (including a 5 nov. 1862 unpublished letter to dante gabriel rossetti), the printseller and publisher joseph hogarth, and john ruskin. viscomi’s approach to blake’s works from the perspective of the studio, and within their historical and technical contexts, is also apparent in a new article that reads blake’s 9 june 1818 letter to dawson turner in great detail, using it to flesh out a pivotal period in blake’s life and to explore blake’s relationship to patronage and the marketplace. ultimately, viscomi suggests that both color printing and “monoprinting [had fallen] into disfavor with blake” by this time, and that he sought, instead, to return to illuminated printing. as was the case with blake and the idea of the book, the implications of viscomi’s scholarship will resonate for years to come. (in terms of blake and the marketplace, denise m. vultee, todd h. chiles, and sara r. s. t. a. elias use blake to “provide fresh insights into the creative process of entrepreneuring” [abstract]). lucy cogan’s blake and the failure of prophecy is an innovative look at the much-examined idea of prophecy in blake, stressing how his claims of prophecy were rooted in the trauma spurred by the failures of the french revolution. her original argument is that the early blake was full of prophetic confidence, while the later blake’s more explicit prophetic modes were grounded in uncertainties. (cogan answers five questions about her book at the bars blog.) similar to cogan’s reappraisal of prophecy, two books on blake and science revisit well-established topics in new ways. joseph fletcher’s william blake as natural philosopher, 1788–​1795 examines blake’s relationship to science and philosophy in his early illuminated books, making the case that he was a pantheist who rejected vitalism. fletcher discusses platonism, bacon, descartes, newton, locke, priestley, and darwin to suggest that blake’s critique of their thought was ultimately tied to their dualism. joshua schouten de jel’s blake and lucretius: the atomistic materialism of the selfhood revisits an older idea of science, looking more carefully at the reception of lucretius and epicurean thought and its association with figures such as bacon, newton, and locke. (science is also a key topic in rosalind powell’s perception and analogy: poetry, science, and religion in the eighteenth century, which contains a section on blake and edward young, while the print culture of mathematics is important in sarah haggarty’s revisionary article on the newton print, which references blake’s reputed argument with the neoplatonist thomas taylor over geometry.) marsha keith schuchard’s a concatenation of conspiracies: “irish” william blake and illuminist freemasonry in 1798 positions blake in a “radical irish-international masonic context” (8), which encompasses, inter alia, the anti-jacobin controversies of the late 1790s, the “ancient” and “modern” branches of freemasonry (10), the illuminés of avignon, the london corresponding society, politically radical swedenborgians, and irish radicals, like francis dobbs and william drennan. schuchard ties these figures and groups not only to blake, but also to members of his circle, such as george cumberland, richard cosway, and thomas stothard. for all this sometimes dizzying array of connections, schuchard ultimately and importantly argues that ireland was far more central to blake’s millenarian and radical vision than is typically thought. aimed at a popular audience, john higgs’s william blake vs. the world is an interesting explication of blake’s ideas that avoids simply summarizing his works. instead, higgs analyzes different aspects of his thought, often tying them to contemporary concerns or discoveries. in many ways, the book’s title is a misnomer, then, since higgs is continuing the thesis of his last work—​william blake now—​that the world needs blake more than ever, a case he eloquently makes in his many talks and interviews related to the book. jason whittaker’s divine images: the life and work of william blake is a biography intended for a popular audience. it is the best of its kind, and it excels at synthesizing blake’s complex ideas and historical contexts for the uninitiated (or for the classroom). while it breaks no new ground in its facts, it spends much more time than other popular biographies on blake’s career as a visual artist, so that readers come away with a better sense of where blake placed his energies and what his accomplishments were in the visual arts. given whittaker’s past work, it is not surprising that the closing chapter on blake’s reception (largely in the anglo-american context) is particularly rich. vera serdechnaia’s book uil'yam bleik v russkoi kul'ture (1834–​2020) [william blake in russian culture (1834–​2020)] is a major study of blake’s reception in russia, encompassing criticism, literature, music, and translation. her examples include many modernist russian poets, the composers dmitrii smirnov and leonid fedorov, and forgotten and newly discovered translations. the book represents just one aspect of serdechnaia’s prolific work on this topic. her articles in russian consider smirnov, the poet andrei tavrov, blake as a romantic poet, and blake’s reception in the post-soviet period and in the twenty-first century. her work in english includes an article in blake on nikolai gumilyov and “the mental traveller,” and her global blake presentation on smirnov, tavrov, and the composer and director alexander belousov. three collections of essays on blake appeared in 2021, though none was in book form. in the blake archive’s exhibition, six essays on the biblical illustrations grew out of a list compiled by sheila a. spector. jared n. powell discusses the influence of westminster abbey on the works that illustrate the bible; jennifer davis michael highlights how blake drew on apocryphal accounts of jesus; naomi billingsley examines the portrayal of jesus’s ministry in the butts designs; sarah jones traces the evolution of the plate numbered 13 in illustrations of the book of job; spector considers how blake’s paintings reveal his esoteric readings of the bible, thus providing a very useful corollary to her 2020 book, the evolution of blake’s myth; and kendall deboer examines blake’s depiction of women. (other significant work on religion includes christopher z. hobson on blake’s relationship to john wesley’s notion of “christian perfection”; christopher rowland’s essays on blake in relationship to new testament prophecy and on blake as a leitourgos, a new testament term for a public minister; and silvia riccardi’s examination of the color and lines of the dante illustrations for their aesthetic and spiritual significance for blake.) contributors to the second issue of the blake society’s journal, vala, which is edited by sibylle erle, “were asked to think about ‘invisible women’ and gender in blake” (5). the result is many thoughtful articles and creative works. to name just a few, helen p. bruder’s essay on male blindness within blake’s work and blake criticism is a good overview of what feminism and queer studies have brought to blake, and it contains a reflection on bruder’s own career. similarly, cecilia marchetto highlights invisible women both in blake and in the academy. distilling a central point of her book blake, sexuality and bourgeois politeness (2011), susan matthews asks how we can understand “gender in a poet and artist born in the mid-eighteenth century” (63). both jodie marley and elizabeth effinger reflect on blake and covid, with amy weldon pondering how to teach when the world seems to be falling apart. susanne sklar, harriet stubbs, sharon choe, caroline anjali ritchie, and annise rogers all consider female characters or the presentation of women in the illuminated and prophetic books. louisa albani, the author and illustrator of william blake’s mystic map of london, offers three paintings that depict catherine blake working alongside william, and john riordan shows, in comic-strip form, catherine reflecting on her life. (elsewhere, lucy cogan has a thought-provoking essay on how and why blake represented rape, and małgorzata łuczyńska-hołdys examines visions of the daughters of albion through the lens of female embodiment.) the last collection of essays appeared in a special issue of blake/​an illustrated quarterly, which was also edited by sibylle erle. it contains eight articles on blake’s reception in europe, in addition to erle’s useful introduction on both blake’s reception and the wider theory and practice of reception studies. some of the essays build on chapters published in erle and paley’s the reception of william blake in europe or relate to presentations delivered at whittaker and erle’s global blake conference. in addition to serdechnaia’s essay on gumilyov, mentioned above, cătălin ghiță examines the 2016 romanian radio play biblia neagră a lui william blake [william blake’s black bible]; eliza borkowska considers czesław miłosz’s ziemia ulro [the land of ulro] and miłosz’s difficulties in translating blake; luisa calè reads corrado costa’s italian graphic novel william blake in beulah; tanja bakić considers blake’s influence on one croatian and two serbian artists; cristina flores examines blakean motifs in the spanish poet leopoldo maría panero; alcinda pinheiro de sousa, cláudia franco souza, and joão carlos callixto compare the blakean influence on the portuguese poet fernando pessoa and on a rock band, três tristes tigres; and erle herself considers blake’s influence on the german painter ludwig meidner and critical discussions surrounding him. in addition to that issue of the blake quarterly, the global blake conference, and serdechnaia’s book and articles, there were many other works that discuss blake’s reception or his relationship to other figures. in english, emilia halton-hernandez writes on blake and the british psychoanalyst marion milner; francesca cauchi examines blake, nietzsche, and the moral law; and the iranian scholar muhammad hussein oroskhan compares blake and the fourteenth-century persian poet hafez-e shirazi. in japanese, hikari sato considers the influence of blake on the japanese philosopher and artist muneyoshi yanagi and the japanese folk craft movement, while masahiro sakamoto analyzes how blake inspired masaharu maehara. hanjin yan examines what zhou zuoren’s translations of blake’s poetry on love and sexuality suggest about reforming the relationship between the sexes. in portuguese, andrio j. r. dos santos considers blake and anne rice, the late author of interview with the vampire, and in spanish, jaime puig guisado compares blake and the spanish poet and nobel prize winner juan ramón jiménez. apart from reception studies, there are two chapters on blake in tobias churton’s the lost pillars of enoch: when science and religion were one, which offers a history of (and a plea for) esoteric thought and spiritual practices. the first examines the antiquarian william stukeley and his influence on blake, with references to isaac newton, while the second explicates blake’s hermetic thought and offers a close reading of all religions are one. in romanticism and the rule of law: coleridge, blake, and the autonomous reader, mark l. barr has two chapters that together consider blake’s ideas of law and subjectivity between the marriage of heaven and hell and jerusalem. in his study oriental wells: the early romantic poets and their eastern muse, md. monirul islam devotes a chapter to blake and his views of hinduism, india, islam, and muhammad. philip smallwood revisits blake’s relationship to augustan poetry, while isabela ferreira loures makes the case that blake’s work was “a turning point in early modern aesthetics.” body, affect, and cognition are considered in haram lee’s article on biopolitics in the four zoas and in richard c. sha’s reading of “london” through the idea of distributed cognition in a collection of essays on the topic. mark lussier examines the physical consequences of “rhythmic operations” in blake, byron, and percy shelley. richard ness’s dissertation on the ecological implication of experimental meters contains a chapter on milton. jacob henry leveton, whose dissertation is also on blake and the environment, published an article on how pollination in the book of thel offers an alternative model to that in adam smith’s theory of political economy. passings in vala, josephine a. mcquail offers an overdue remembrance of the canadian blake and yeats scholar rachel v. billigheimer, who passed away in 2013. billigheimer was the author of wheels of eternity: a comparative study of william blake and william butler yeats (1990), and mcquail records her other significant work. at hell’s printing press and in the blake quarterly, morton d. paley remembers bo ossian lindberg, who contributed plate-by-plate commentary on illustrations of the book of job to the 1987 blake trust edition. at zoamorphosis, jason whittaker notes the passing of the beat poet and proprietor of the city lights bookstore, lawrence ferlinghetti. in work on blake scholars, michael kirwan reflects on fearful symmetry and frye’s reading of blake, an issue also at stake in r. paul yoder’s review of sheila a. spector’s the evolution of blake’s myth. a french article by michèle duclos seeks to explicate what kathleen raine meant when she identified herself as a symbolist. blakeana the viol consort parthenia and the morgan library and museum held an event titled “‘exuberance is beauty’: william blake, the viol, and the book” on 17 february 2021. it included “an introduction to the morgan’s exceptional holdings of blake’s illuminated printing,” a performance of will ayton’s a reliquary for william blake, and a discussion with the morgan curators and the performers. five dissertations completed in 2021 had at least a chapter on blake. blake’s circle this year i have added to the traditional listings of blake’s circle a category titled “cultures and technologies of display and exhibition” in order to capture studies of blake’s artistic milieu, which are not easily reducible to an individual person or an institution. for example, cora gilroy-ware’s the classical body in romantic britain examines how the classical body was conceived and displayed in the romantic era.  blake and many members of his circle are referenced throughout, but thomas banks and john flaxman are considered at length in their own chapters. i also list here jennifer germann’s essay examining how black women were depicted in visual art; catherine roach on the exhibiting of race; susan jenkins on public monuments in westminster abbey in 1798; t. c. lee’s essay comparing the teaching of anatomy at the royal academy of arts (london) and the royal hibernian academy of arts (dublin); paris amanda spies-gans’s essay documenting women who displayed their art in london or paris; molly farrell’s reading of cowper’s “verses subjoined to the bill of mortality of northampton”; and nicholas robbins’s study of new visual representations of climate in the romantic era. in addition to figuring significantly in both gilroy-ware and jenkins, flaxman is the subject of josé luis pellicer mor’s article in spanish that considers his revision of the homeric epic, while matthew greg sullivan’s essay on allan cunningham’s use of the anecdote discusses maria denman’s “brief memoir” of flaxman. also in spanish, daniela picón examines the reception of alonso de ercilla y zúñiga’s la araucana in robert southey and william hayley. peter mcneil’s book pretty gentlemen: macaroni men and the eighteenth-century fashion world (2018) contains extended sections on joseph banks and richard cosway and their portrayal as macaronis, along with many less developed references to members of blake’s circle. two articles consider works related to john boydell’s shakspeare gallery, including two rediscovered paintings by julius caesar ibbetson (1759–​1817) for the taming of the shrew. john howard, the prison reformer, is the subject of two essays, one of which focuses on his public image and the other on the tension between his assertions of a common humanity with prisoners and his patrician benevolence. the influence of swedenborg on kant (or lack thereof) is also considered in a pair of essays. while hogarth has not traditionally been included as a member of blake’s circle, two major works published in 2021 deserve notice. caroline patey, cynthia e. roman, and georges letissier’s enduring presence: william hogarth’s british and european afterlives is a two-volume collection of essays on hogarth’s reception, complementing much of the work done recently on blake. alice insley and martin myrone’s hogarth and europe is the catalogue for the tate britain exhibition with the same title, held from 3 november 2021 to 20 march 2022. the catalogue contains many chapters connecting hogarth to different european cities or examining his imagery in different geographic contexts. separate articles consider the sociologies of hogarth’s art and his depiction of bedlam. bettina baumgärtel’s angelica kauffman is another catalogue worth examining; it was for the exhibition at the kunstpalast in düsseldorf from 30 january to 20 september 2020. the exhibition was originally scheduled to be shown at the royal academy from 28 june to 20 september 2020, but it was canceled because of covid. in addition to its reproductions, the catalogue includes essays on kauffman’s contemporary reputation; her design for the ceiling at somerset house; her friendship with antonio canova; and an overview of her work, method, and technologies. in an article elsewhere, amanda vickery considers kauffman’s eighteenth-century reputation. work on wollstonecraft in 2021 was quite substantial. zoya shunina published two articles in russian, one containing a translation of a letter from wollstonecraft to gilbert imlay and the other considering her historical and moral view of the origin and progress of the french revolution. in a discovery that adds to the understanding of wollstonecraft’s transatlantic influence and may resonate in subsequent readings of visions of the daughters of albion, eileen hunt botting has found that an excerpt from a vindication of the rights of men, calling for the abolition of slavery, was published in a jamaican paper in february 1791, shortly before the haitian revolution. articles by samantha botz and catherine packham revisit a vindication of the rights of men as a response to edmund burke’s reflections. sylvana tomaselli’s book wollstonecraft: philosophy, passion, and politics lucidly distills wollstonecraft’s thought in relationship to her biography and context. mark philp’s radical conduct: politics, sociability and equality in london, 1789–​1815 considers political radicalism in the romantic era (largely in the godwin-wollstonecraft circle) from the perspective of conduct and the relationship of the private and the public. karen green makes the case that modern notions of human rights are rooted and defined in eighteenth-century arguments for women’s rights. intentionally misreading thomas taylor’s parody of a vindication of the rights of woman—​a vindication of the rights of brutes (1792)—​s. marek muller contends that the work lays out key arguments for animal rights. in a study of wollstonecraft’s statements on air, rowan boyson argues that “air was both a metaphor for freedom and also a literal condition for its development” (abstract). sandra sokowski compares wollstonecraft’s novel maria: or, the wrongs of woman with denis diderot’s the nun. finally, wollstonecraft’s influence on the late romantic feminist and owenite anna doyle wheeler is considered by ophélie siméon. symbols § works preceded by a section mark are reported on secondhand authority. abbreviations blake blake/an illustrated quarterly <blake ([year])> indicates the installment of “william blake and his circle” published in the year specified. diss. dissertation wbhc g. e. bentley, jr., william blake and his circle (2017) <http://​library.​vicu.​utoronto.​ca/​collections/​special_collections/​bentley_​blake_​collection/​blake_​circle/​2017/​william_​blake_​and_​his_​circle.​pdf> division i: william blake part i: blake’s writings section a: original editions, facsimiles, reprints, and translations america a prophecy (1793) america a prophecy [n]. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2021. america a prophecy [p]. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2021. america a prophecy [q]. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2021. a descriptive catalogue (1809) § i miei quadri. william blake. madrid: casimiro, 2021. 96 pp. isbn: 9788417930936. in italian. illustrated with the extant works presented by blake in his 1809–​10 exhibition above his brother’s shop in soho. europe a prophecy (1794) europe a prophecy [i]. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2021. europe a prophecy [l]. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2021. europe a prophecy [m]. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2021. the marriage of heaven and hell (1790–93?) le mariage du ciel et de l’enfer. trans. alain suied. paris: arfuyen, 1996. isbn: 9782908825497. in french and english. <wbhc p. 296> see section b for suied’s translation of marriage with other works by blake. el matrimonio del cielo y el infierno [h]. ed. and trans. fernando castanedo. 2002, 2007, 2010, 2012 (4th ed., revised), 2014, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020. in spanish, with facing english for marriage. <blake (2003, 2014, 2017, 2018, 2020, 2021)> j. 10th ed., 2021. le mariage du ciel et de l’enfer. ed. and trans. jacques darras. paris: gallimard, 2018. collection papeterie, les carnets carrés. 18 x 14 cm. 208 pp. isbn: 3260050891950. in french and english. see section b for darras’s translation of marriage with other works by blake. milton a poem (c. 1804–11) mil'ton/​milton. trans. dmitrii smirnov(-sadovskii). moscow: magreb, 2021. isbn: 9785950049897. in russian and english. dmitrii smirnov (1948–​2020), a poet and composer, was one of the best translators of blake into russian. this bilingual edition contains the first translation of milton into russian, along with its original text, some plates, a substantial commentary, and a dictionary of blake’s concepts. poetical sketches (1783; composed c. 1769–77) poetical sketches [c]. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2021. this is the copy that was owned by charles augustus tulk. songs of innocence and of experience (1794) chants d’innocence et d’expérience. trans. marie-louise soupault and philippe soupault. toulouse: éditions les cahiers libres, 1927. b. paris: éditions charlot, 1947. collection “poésie et théâtre.” <wbhc p. 407> c. bilingual edition with a preface by sylvie doizelet. paris: éditions la table ronde, 2007. collection quai voltaire. 19 x 11.5 cm. 160 pp. isbn: 9782710329541. d. prologue by jean-yves masson. paris: les belles lettres, 2021. 19.2 x 12.6 cm. 134 pp. isbn: 9782251452104. reproduces in full copy z of songs (1826; library of congress). in french, with blake’s plates on facing pages. les chants de l’innocence et de l’expérience. trans. alain suied. paris: arfuyen, 2002. 22.5 x 16.5 cm. 140 pp. isbn: 9782845900042. in french and english. section b: collections and selections “the chimney sweeper” (innocence), “london,” excerpts from visions of the daughters of albion and milton, and “mock on mock on voltaire rousseau.” romanticism: 100 poems. ed. michael ferber. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2021. 12-16. § l’évangile éternel. trans. alain suied. paris: arfuyen, 1999. 20.5 x 13.5 cm. 80 pp. isbn: 9782908825732. in french and english. it includes the everlasting gospel and also the book of thel. “introduction” (innocence), “introduction” (experience), “i saw a chapel all of gold,” “the little black boy,” “the tyger,” “the divine image,” “ah! sun-flower,” “the clod and the pebble,” “never seek to tell thy love,” “the chimney sweeper” (experience), and “proverbs of hell.” akinori takase. coleridge kenkyu (eibun): furoku blake, wordsworth coleridge shi senshu [a coleridge study (english): with selected poems of blake, wordsworth, and coleridge]. okayama: fukuro shuppan, 2021. 109 pp. isbn: 9784861868337. in english. le mariage du ciel et de l’enfer, accompagné du livre de thel et de l’évangile éternel. trans. alain suied. paris: arfuyen, 2004. 172 pp. isbn: 9782845900424. in french and english. le mariage du ciel et de l’enfer et autres poèmes. ed. and trans. jacques darras. paris: gallimard, 2013. collection poésie no. 481. 17.8 x 10.8 cm. 412 pp. isbn: 9782070448944. in french and english. muku no uta [songs of innocence]. trans. haruna ikezawa and natsuki ikezawa. tokyo: mainichi shimbun shuppan, 2021. 110 pp. 3 plates (full) and 20 plates (partial) of blake’s. isbn: 9784620326665. in japanese. the innocence section of songs of innocence and of experience and “the little vagabond,” “the school boy,” and “the voice of the ancient bard” are translated into japanese, with commentary. in the commentary, natsuki ikezawanatsuki ikezawa is a novelist and poet, also known as the editor of world literature collection natsuki ikezawa edition (2007–​11, 30 vols.) and japanese literature collection natsuki ikezawa edition (2014–​17, 30 vols.). haruna ikezawa, his daughter, is a voice actress, singer, and essayist who has been the president of the science fiction and fantasy writers of japan since 2020. succinctly mentions eighteenth-century london, the slave trade, charles kingsley, christianity, r. l. stevenson, and charles dickens. at the end, he briefly discusses the concept of innocence in blake—​referring to mark twain, j. d. salinger, mary mccarthy, thomas pynchon, kenji miyazawa, and fyodor dostoevsky—​from the viewpoint of comparative literature. “nurse’s song” [innocence]. bright poems for dark days: an anthology of hope. ed. julie sutherland. london: frances lincoln, 2021. a poison tree. trans. kambiz manouchehrian. tehran: cheshmeh publishing, 2021. a selection of blake’s poetry translated into persian. “the tyger.” trans. eri kubota. “honyaku griff rhys jones cho igirisu meishi sen [a japanese translation of the nation’s favorite poems by griff rhys jones].” ryutsu keizai daigaku ronshu [journal of ryutsu keizai university] 56.2 (2021): 177-85. in japanese. la visión eterna. cartas, manifiestos y ensayos. ed. and trans. javier calvo. madrid: editorial la felguera, 2021. colección artefactos. 352 pp. isbn: 9788412261059. in spanish. the volume seeks to compile “blake’s major texts in prose, in order to provide readers with the closest possible approximation to what might be a biography written by blake himself” (20). it includes a note from the publishers and a prologue by calvo, “blake y la gente del futuro.” four sections follow: “primera parte. lambeth y felpham (1793–​1803). visión” (25-108); “segunda parte. south molton (1803–​1808). purgatorio” (109-90); “tercera parte. golden square (1809). revelación” (191-284); “cuarta parte. fountain court (1810–​1827). ascensión” (285-344). the guiding line for this chronological account is found for the most part in blake’s letters, which are translated from one of the keynes editions (not specified), along with various material from the notebook, a descriptive catalogue, erdman’s complete poetry and prose, and information drawn from biographies by alexander gilchrist, arthur symons, mona wilson, kathleen raine, and peter ackroyd. as calvo himself states, it is not an academic work, and only this may explain why g. e. bentley, jr.’s colossal contributions to our understanding of blake’s life are absent. rather, the volume is an expressionist portrait, beginning somewhat late (in 1793), that essentially coincides with pop culture’s image of blake as maudit (the poet’s was “a voice drenched with bitterness”). william blake: selected works. ed. peter otto. oxford: oxford university press, 2018. <blake (2019, 2021)> review womersley, david. “recent studies in the restoration and eighteenth century.” sel 60.3 (2020): 597-645 (blake section 602-05). “an attractive, generous, and useful volume, and better than any rival selection of blake’s poetry” (602). part ii: reproductions of drawings and paintings section a: illustrations of individual authors bunyan, john illustrations to john bunyan’s the pilgrim’s progress. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2021. section b: collections and selections satan calling up his legions, an experiment picture (c. 1799–​1805) [preview mode]. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2021. satan calling up his legions (c. 1800–​05) [preview mode]. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2021. the spiritual form of pitt guiding behemoth (c. 1805) [preview mode]. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2021. the spiritual form of nelson guiding leviathan (c. 1805–​09) [preview mode]. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2021. a vision of the last judgment (pollok house) (1806) [preview mode]. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2021. the fall of man (1807) [preview mode]. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2021. sir jeffery chaucer and the nine and twenty pilgrims on their journey to canterbury (1808) [preview mode]. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2021. the vision of the last judgment (petworth house) (1808) [preview mode]. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2021. the bard, from gray (c. 1809) [preview mode]. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2021. the last judgment (ransom center) (c. 1809) [preview mode]. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2021. the last judgment (national gallery of art) (c. 1809) [preview mode]. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2021. the last judgment—​tracing (c. 1809 or later) [preview mode]. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2021. part iii: commercial engravings section a: illustrations of individual authors blair, robert the grave (1808, 1813) § robert bler. grob. trans. milena dasukidis. smederevo, serbia: gavran, 2015. 122 pp. isbn: 9788680060002. in english and serbian.thanks to tanja bakić for this information. review ivkov, slobodan. fantastikologija (30 aug. 2016). in serbian. part iv: bibliographies and catalogues section a: bibliographies [cross-listing articles with substantial bibliographical content] calè, luisa. “blake and exhibitions, 2020.” see blake 55.1 in part vi. davies, keri. “benjamin heath malkin, 1769–​1842: a bio-bibliography.” see index rerum in part v. a very useful chronology of malkin’s life, combined with a list of his publications. mcquail, josephine a. “rachel v. billigheimer: dancing toward eternity.” see vala in part vi. a remembrance of the blake and yeats scholar, whose major work is a study of the two poets, wheels of eternity (1990); includes a list of her other significant work. paley, morton d. “‘all his neighbourhood bewail his loss’: bo ossian lindberg, 1937–​2021.” see blake 55.2 in part vi. a remembrance of lindberg, with a select bibliography. ripley, wayne c., with fernando castanedo, hikari sato, hüseyin alhas, and vera serdechnaia. “william blake and his circle: a checklist of scholarship in 2020.” see blake 55.1 in part vi. spector, sheila a., with the assistance of kendall deboer and sarah jones. “list of biblical illustrations.” see william blake archive in part v. the list includes: “1) biblical reference; 2) title of work; 3) most commonly accepted date of composition; 4) medium; 5) major catalogue reference; 6) comments, including initial provenance; and 7) link to image in the blake archive if published there.” whittaker, jason. “blake and music, 2020.” see blake 55.1 in part vi. part v: digital resources allen ginsberg project the posting of the transcription and audio of ginsberg’s 1979 course on blake continues. the latest entry, as of 25 jan. 2022, is “ginsberg on blake continues—​98.” “william blake’s birthday.” 28 nov. 2021. bbc select. “rapper recites william blake’s ‘london’ poem/​simon schama’s the romantic revolution.” youtube. 30 mar. 2021. testament recites “london” and reflects on blake. beacham, frank. “william blake, english poet, painter, and printmaker, was born 264 years ago today.” frank beacham’s journal: stories about music, culture, technology, and history (28 nov. 2021): 11 pars. an overview. blake society events: diane eagles. “the lamb at the gate.” 20 jan. 2021. “a presentation by the ceramicist diane eagles talking about the making of the lamb at the gate,” a ceramic statue created from materials found in lambeth, felpham, and bunhill fields. jason whittaker. “images of the divine in the work of william blake.” 17 feb. 2021. an overview of the divine in blake’s work, with some remarks on his new book, divine images: the life and work of william blake. eliza borkowska and camila oliveira. “blake’s jerusalem in translation.” 17 mar. 2021. two translators of jerusalem discuss how “blake’s ‘english’ myth is a text of an inter/transnational character and universal application”; they also reflect on “the job of a translator of such a demanding poem.” “the frontispiece.” 28 apr. 2021. a discussion among the zoom attendees about blake’s use of frontispieces. luisa calè. “blake and dante.” 18 may 2021. a substantial presentation on blake’s illustrations. john higgs. “william blake vs. the world.” 16 june 2021. a presentation on his new book. carol leader. “satanic error and the curse of single vision.” 13 july 2021. on blake’s psychological insights and application to the everyday. iain sinclair. “blake’s ‘mental traveller’ and the gold machine.” 15 sept. 2021. describes how “the mental traveller” became an unacknowledged model for the journey chronicled in his book the gold machine. “milton and the cottage.” 20 oct. 2021. a follow-up discussion of blake’s frontispieces, focusing on “the frontispiece to milton and its connection to the cottage in felpham.” “the birth of vala ii.” 28 nov. 2021. several contributors speak on the launch of the second issue of the blake society’s new journal, vala. for its contents, see vala in part vi. brian catling. “avoiding blake, defeated by a flea in the ear.” 15 dec. 2021. artist and writer brian catling uses blake to consider the sources of creativity. british association for romantic studies bars blog: matthew sangster. “five questions: lucy cogan on blake and the failure of prophecy.” 7 june 2021. “in the book i wanted to try to capture how this trauma plays out across his [blake’s] career, as he tries to recover that unity of action and purpose he had felt in the immediate aftermath of the outbreak of the french revolution.” sibylle erle. “on this day in 1820: william blake draws pindar the greek poet and lais the courtesan (visionary heads) for john varley (part i).” 18 sept. 2020. sibylle erle. “on this day in 1820: the visionary heads and william blake’s attitude towards death (part ii).” 19 sept. 2020. “discusses blake’s visionary heads not as a spiritual phenomenon but as an expression of continuing bonds and blake’s attitude towards death.” british library. “william blake vs. the world: why he matters more than ever.” see higgs in part vi. caplan, walker. “this digital humanities project gives users free access to william blake’s printed work.” literary hub (12 aug. 2021): 3 pars. a brief description of the blake archive and sarah weston’s blaketint. clark, john henry. “william blake on the lords [sic] prayer.” youtube. 15 mar. 2021. according to the audio, the copyright of the talk is 2014. davies, keri. index rerum: a blog about books, book-collecting, william blake, and lots of other things. scholarship: “william blake’s cat.” 29 mar. 2021. on blake’s white cat in felpham and his depictions of cats. “benjamin heath malkin, 1769–​1842: a bio-bibliography.” 26 may 2021. a very useful chronology of malkin’s life, combined with a list of his publications. “blake’s cottage at felpham.” 5 nov. 2021. shows that blake’s depiction of his cottage in milton is modeled on francis tolson’s hermathenae (1740), and suggests that for his landscape at felpham, blake used a camera obscura. “milton: titlepage or frontispiece.” 21 nov. 2021. notes responding to the oct. 2021 blake society meeting on “milton and the cottage,” suggesting that the title page draws on a plate in balthazard solvyns’s les hindous (paris, 1808), which was in the library of rebekah bliss. del'finov, alexander. “kak ya perevodil ‘london’ bleika [how i translated blake’s ‘london’].” colta (16 apr. 2021). in russian. the poet alexander del'finov details how he translated “london” for leonid fedorov’s musical project blake, and compares different translations. dukes, hunter. “william blake’s the gates of paradise (1787–​93) [sic].” public domain review (21 apr. 2021): 5 pars. an analysis of for children: the gates of paradise, with digital images from the yale center for british art. european romanticisms in association posts dated 1 june 2020 regarding items at the cowper and newton museum in olney: “william hayley’s tribute tea-caddy.” “cowper’s letter cabinet.” “cowper’s windowpane.” “william cowper’s pocket watch.” flores, cristina. “blake, william.” diccionario histórico de la traducción en españa. portal de historia de la traducción en españa. 13 pars. in spanish. on the history of blake translations into spanish. forbes, mia. “angels in the poetry of william blake.” wordsworth editions (4 june 2021). a publisher’s blog. getty museum. “william blake’s eccentric arts.” see myrone, lives of william blake, in part vi. hanson, marilee. “william blake.” english history (18 nov. 2021). a biographical sketch. history extra. “william blake: ‘artist or genius, or mystic, or madman.’” see higgs in part vi. how to academy. “john higgs—​william blake vs. the world.” see higgs in part vi. kneipp, jessica. “‘a cradle song’: beautiful sounds from the eternal poem by william blake.” nspirement (15 june 2021). reflections on the poem by a mother. literary theory and criticism nasrullah mambrol. “analysis of william blake’s ‘the chimney sweeper.’” 16 feb. 2021. nasrullah mambrol. “analysis of william blake’s ‘london.’” 17 feb. 2021. “magic, covid-19 and william blake’s hope.” glitch bottle (29 may 2021). a blog post invoking blake to counter fears of covid: “let’s hear from … wil[l]iam blake, who became deathly ill in 1825, and continued to work on and on and on despite the illness, [b]y delving his gnostic and esoteric spade deep into what he called the realm of the imagination.” manucharyan, kristina. “kak sara berton otdala dan' khudozhniku uil'yamu bleiku v novoi kollektsii alexander mcqueen [sarah burton paid tribute to william blake in the new collection of alexander mcqueen].” vogue (22 july 2021). in russian. murray-white, james. finding blake: reimagining william blake for the 21st century. pete yeo. “an evergreen and pleasant land?” 17 feb. 2021. uses “jerusalem” to highlight “the importance of responsibility and choice” regarding the environment. pete yeo. “‘auguries of innocence’: the connected and consequential cosmos.” 22 mar. 2021. might the popularity of blake’s “auguries of innocence” “yet still augur well for our necessary reconciliation with the web of life”? tamsin rosewell. “the tygers of wrath—​a lesson in dissent.” 25 oct. 2021. “blake’s biggest influence on my world is probably his permission. permission to dissent? permission to be unorthodox? permission to challenge authority? permission to defend others from injustice? permission to subvert tradition?” ritchie, caroline. “the radical imagery of william blake.” culture matters (2 mar. 2021): 15 pars. “blake’s radical imagery—​his imagery of roots—​shows him to be deeply concerned with the kind of traditions and systems that need to be weeded out in order to promote real regeneration, real liberty” (par. 15). robinson, alex. “‘london’—​william blake.” vimeo. [2012]. sack, harald. “william blake—​poet, painter, visionary.” scihi blog: daily blog on science, tech and art in history (28 nov. 2021). an overview on blake’s birthday. st. james’s, piccadilly. “blake now.” five poets (sophie herxheimer, joseph coelho, ankita saxena, ruth awolola, and natalie linh bolderston) discuss blake. organized by st. james’s, piccadilly, and the poetry society. stuart, jon. “[talk gnosis] william blake, poet of the gnosis w/ jason whittaker.” talk gnosis (20 june 2021). a discussion with jason whittaker. townsend, chris. “words overheard: on the acrostic in william blake’s ‘london.’” wordsworth grasmere (18 may 2021). tunney, james. “the legacy of william blake with james tunney.” youtube. 28 oct. 2021. “james tunney, llm, is an irish barrister who has lectured on legal matters throughout the world. he is a poet, a scholar, and author” (video description). vernon, mark. “‘i give you the end of a golden string’: blake, the gita and god.” youtube. 18 june 2021. a video talk on blake, the divine, and the bhagavad gita. whittaker, jason. zoamorphosis. the site was redesigned in late 2021. whittaker reflects on its history and explains the updates in his post “zoamorphosis: 2010–​2022,” 1 jan. 2022. among the changes are a new set of postings on his youtube channel, zoavision. these include short excerpts from his new book, divine images, called “blake bites”; longer videos, including his interview with john higgs; and the recordings of global blake, the large international conference held online in jan. 2022. scholarship: caroline anjali ritchie. “blake, zines, and gouda cheese: an interview with max reeves.” 15 mar. 2021. reeves is a “photographer, publisher, and activist,” and a member of the blake bloc, “an activist collective.” caroline anjali ritchie. “psychic pull: an interview with tamar yoseloff.” 23 mar. 2021. yoseloff is a poet. caroline anjali ritchie. “a conversation with david suff.” 6 apr. 2021. suff is the author of the pamphlet a conversation with wm. blake (uppingham: goldmark, 2019). katharina hagen. “the rose in a perfect circle.” 17 apr. 2021. an analysis of the 2000 song “rose” by the rock band a perfect circle. caroline anjali ritchie. “mental travel: an interview with iain sinclair.” 19 apr. 2021. sinclair is a publisher and writer. caroline anjali ritchie. “walking in blake’s footsteps: an interview with louisa amelia albani.” 26 apr. 2021. albani is the author of william blake’s mystic map of london <blake (2020)>. caroline anjali ritchie. “william blake, urban shaman: an interview with niall mcdevitt (ft. a bonus blakean poem).” 13 may 2021. mcdevitt is a poet who leads blake walks.see the entry “a thank you letter to my fellow blake walkers” (9 dec. 2019) at mcdevitt’s blog, poetopography. caroline anjali ritchie. “ghost-conversations with william blake: an interview with sophie herxheimer.” 18 june 2021. herxheimer is a multimedia artist and poet, and a native of lambeth. caroline anjali ritchie. “blakean coordinates: an interview with chris mccabe.” 9 nov. 2021. an interview with the poet and artist chris mccabe, who was a co-curator of the exhibition the bard, held at flat time house in peckham from jan. to mar. 2020. reviews: jason whittaker. “visions of saint maud.” 28 mar. 2021. rev. of rose glass’s directorial debut, saint maud. jason whittaker. “william blake’s printed paintings: review.” 13 aug. 2021. rev. of joseph viscomi, william blake’s printed paintings: methods, origins, meanings. “an important intervention in the study of blake as an artist.” blakeana: jason whittaker. “blakespotting, january 2021.” 7 feb. 2021. notes patti smith’s performances of “the divine image” and “the tyger,” which were streamed in jan. 2021 at piccadilly circus; the publication of poetical sketches at the blake archive; and paul grist’s comic book satire on brexit, the union. jason whittaker. “blakespotting, february 2021.” 13 mar. 2021. includes reflections on the passing of lawrence ferlinghetti and notices of richard ayodeji ikhide’s exhibition future past; the film saint maud; and pete yeo’s ecocritical essay at finding blake (see murray-white). jason whittaker. “blakespotting, march and april 2021.” 23 may 2021. notes the uffizi gallery’s online presentation commemorating the 700th anniversary of dante’s death; the short film “blake now”; and kambiz manouchehrian’s persian translation of blake. hephzibah yohannan. “‘opposition is true friendship.’” 24 may 2021. on blake and eugene halliday (1911–​87), “artist, writer and psychotherapist.” caroline anjali ritchie. “five august blake walks 2021.” 2 july 2021. describes walks to be led by niall mcdevitt to places frequented by blake (see ritchie’s interview with mcdevitt). jason whittaker. “blakespotting: inside no. 9, ‘last night of the proms.’” 11 july 2021. on the allusions to blake, mostly to the hymn “jerusalem,” in an episode of a british comedy. jason whittaker. “vala and global blake.” 28 nov. 2021. an announcement of both the publication of the second issue of vala, the journal of the blake society, and global blake, a virtual conference. leslie wilber. “a moving illustration of william blake’s mythology.” 9 dec. 2021. describes wilber’s illustration depicting blake’s mythology. jason whittaker. “from the collection: blake and science fiction and fantasy.” 21 dec. 2021. on some of the books inspired by or influenced by blake in whittaker’s collection. global blake: afterlives in art, literature and music. 11-13 jan. 2022. an online conference sponsored by the university of lincoln and bishop grosseteste university, organized by whittaker and sibylle erle.the dates given below are when the recordings of the talks were posted in the global blake section of zoamorphosis. descriptions of the presentations can be found at the links in the titles. “global blake: round table.” 7 feb. 2022. a discussion among the conference organizers and keynote speakers. whittaker and erle also usefully lay out their vision for global blake, both for the conference and for the future. keynote addresses luisa calè. “the mental traveller, italy 1977: corrado costa’s revolutionary psychoerotic comic strip, william blake in beulah.” not posted. see her article on the same work in blake 55.3. stephen f. eisenman. “blake and abolitionism.” 13 jan. 2022. linda freedman. “blake, duncan and the politics of writing from myth.” 13 jan. 2022. mike goode. “viral blake.” 13 jan. 2022. harriet stubbs. “harriet stubbs in conversation with sibylle erle and jason whittaker.” 17 jan. 2022. a piano performance and discussion. presentations alexander abichou. “textual spirituality and analogical imagination: a transhistorical investigation of william blake and ibn arabi’s mysticism.” 15 jan. 2022. camille adnot. “‘blake le voyant’: the lasting impact of the french surrealists’ reading of blake.” 25 jan. 2022. tanja bakić. “example from a serbian blog: from ‘a poison tree’ to ‘a poison fruit,’ or producing literary meanings.” 17 jan. 2022. franca bellarsi. “from blake to buddha, biology, and beyond: the renewal of ‘prophetic labour’ amidst the beats and affiliates.” 5 feb. 2022. eliza borkowska. “polish blake: william blake: dzieła zebrane (wydanie krytyczne).” 17 jan. 2022. clare broome saunders. “‘wild glances of the poetical faculty’: blake’s afterlives in illustrations to e[lizabeth] b[arrett] b[rowning]’s sonnets.” 15 jan. 2022. steve clark. “blake’s asia, asia’s blake.” 17 jan. 2022. elizabeth effinger. “queer family resemblances: between joel-peter witkin and william blake.” 6 feb. 2022. adriano ercolani. “the influence of william blake on pop culture.” 7 feb. 2022. marta fabi. “‘you are a slave, neo. like everyone else you were born into bondage. into a prison that you cannot taste or see or touch. a prison for your mind.’ tracking down william blake’s wor(l)ds into the matrix.” 25 jan. 2022. eugenie freed. “blake in nieu bethesda.” 18 jan. 2022. jonathan gross. “blake’s influence on orozco: prophecy, mexican murals, and nyc graffiti.” 6 feb. 2022. mark lussier. “blake at the event horizon: strange attractors, visionary physics, and quantum textualities.” 5 feb. 2022. m. cecilia marchetto-santorun. “william blake in galician literature and art.” 5 feb. 2022. jodie marley. “what the yeatses partly learned: a vision, blake’s mysticism, and spiritual collaboration.” 15 jan. 2022. james murray-white. “finding blake: an interview with james murray-white.” 19 feb. 2022. tom nisse. “le film canoë—​dead man de jim jarmusch.” 5 feb. 2022. camila oliveira. “global blake: afterlives in musical settings.” 1 feb. 2022. christoph reinfandt. “musical settings of william blake: implications of genre.” 1 feb. 2022. silvia riccardi. “‘a pure linear undulation’: blakean inflections in stile liberty.” 18 jan. 2022. caroline anjali ritchie. “local blake: london-based small presses, urban topography, and the afterlives of golgonooza.” 18 jan. 2022. ramazan saral. “lost in translation: the problem of translating blake into turkish.” 16 jan. 2022. vera serdechnaia. “crying, singing and directing on blake in russia (2017–​2021).” 5 feb. 2020. suellen cordovil da silva. “william blake, the ghost of a flea and visions of the daughters of albion in from hell.” 7 feb. 2022. susanne sklar. “blake’s global vision.” 25 jan. 2022. david smith. “‘when i see his work, my soul is taken to a world of stars’: blake as an influence on manga.” 7 feb. 2022. alcinda pinheiro de sousa. “visual blake in brazil: in memoriam donald ault.” 5 feb. 2022. juliana steil. “blake in brazil: translations.” 16 jan. 2022. mei-ying sung. “blake’s orc and the taiwanese deity nezha.” 17 jan. 2022. masashi suzuki. “swedenborgian ‘science of correspondences’: william blake and d. t. suzuki.” 17 jan. 2022. ines tebourski. “poetry/​image/​music: multimodal inscriptions on william blake’s ‘london.’” 1 feb. 2022. tatiana tiutvinova. “a harmony of form and idea: illustrations by the modern russian artists to blake’s poetry.” 5 feb. 2022. colin trodd. “william blake and the spiritual forms of citizenship and hospitality.” 15 jan. 2022. annalisa volpone. “‘along red network of his veins/​what fires run, what craving wakes?’: plath (re)verses blake.” 6 feb. 2022. luke walker. “‘visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies!’: allen ginsberg’s retellings of his ‘blake vision.’” 5 feb. 2022. david worrall. “neural blake: blake’s ‘visions’ as universal entoptic phenomena.” 15 jan. 2022. zhongxing zeng. “a song adaptation of ‘the ecchoing green.’” 1 feb. 2022. zoavision: jason whittaker. “the unveiling of william blake’s grave.” 15 aug. 2018. jason whittaker. “talk to the blake society: jason whittaker, author of divine images: the life and work of william blake.” 21 feb. 2021. an edited version of the talk listed above (see blake society). jason whittaker. “jason whittaker, john higgs: in conversation.” 9 june 2021. blake bites: “who is the ancient of days?” 29 dec. 2021. “what are the ‘mind-forg’d manacles’?” 29 dec. 2021. “who made the tyger?” 29 dec. 2021. “why does newton hold a compass?” 30 dec. 2021. “what are the ‘dark satanic mills’?” 3 jan. 2022. “william blake (poet) (earth-616).” marvel database. n.d. william blake archive exhibition: william blake’s biblical illustrations. 27 apr. 2021. a series of six digital galleries, with commentary highlighting different dimensions of blake’s engagement with the bible. sarah jones. introduction. contains a link to sheila a. spector’s “list of biblical illustrations.” jared n. powell. “the influence of blake’s westminster abbey assignment on his biblical illustrations.” jennifer davis michael. “blake’s apocryphal scenes of the infant jesus.” naomi billingsley. “the public ministry of jesus in the butts biblical designs.” sarah jones. “the evolution of a plate for illustrations of the book of job.” sheila a. spector. “blake’s anagogical interpretation of the bible.” kendall deboer. “blake’s biblical women and the virgin-vixen axis.” hell’s printing press: the blog of the blake archive and blake quarterly. editing and technical issues: meaghan green. “the emendations in poetical sketches.” 19 mar. 2021. on how to represent the corrections in poetical sketches, which are not consistent in all copies. scholarship: ada wofford. “ginsberg’s memories of blake’s sunflower.” 8 apr. 2021. a reading of “sunflower sutra” and “ah! sun-flower.” sarah jones. “the development of the biblical illustrations exhibition.” 27 apr. 2021. on the origins of the new biblical illustrations exhibition from sheila a. spector’s list of the biblical paintings. ada wofford. “melanie smith and the influence of blake.” 28 june 2021. melanie smith, a visual artist, reflects on blake. julian s. whitney. “slaying the demon king: william blake and urizen in devil may cry 5.” 7 july 2021. on the blakean imagery in the video game. blakeana: kate soules. “an evening with william blake … and a glass of wine.” 12 mar. 2021. “a menu of blake works and wine pairings.” morton d. paley. “‘all his neighbourhood bewail his loss’: bo ossian lindberg, 1937–​2021.” 12 aug. 2021. a remembrance of lindberg, with a select bibliography of his works. also appears in blake 55.2. meaghan green. “a blakean jack-o’-lantern.” 29 oct. 2021. a jack-o’-lantern design of the ghost of a flea. esther ben ami. “reflections.” 18 nov. 2021. on the connections facilitated by working for the blake archive; it includes a mini-exhibition on blake in dialogue with child labor and the industrial revolution as depicted in elizabeth gaskell’s novel north and south. youtube tutorials: eric loy. “publication: works in preview.” 10 mar. 2021. robert rich. “video tutorial: copy information tab.” 13 apr. 2021. robert rich. “blake archive video tutorials: where have we come from and where are we going?” 19 aug. 2021. part vi: criticism, biography, and reviews a   b   c   d   e   f   g   h   i   j   k   l   m   n   o   p   r   s   t   v   w   y   z a adam, edina, with julian brooks, and an essay by matthew hargraves. william blake: visionary. los angeles: j. paul getty museum, 2020. <blake (2021)> reviews calè, luisa. see blake 55.1. schierenbeck, daniel d. choice 58.5 (jan. 2021): 1 par. albani, louisa. “catherine.” see vala. aman, yasser k. r. “the apocalyptic image of the beast in william blake’s ‘the tyger’ and w. b. yeats’ ‘the second coming.’” critical survey 33.3-4 (2021): 47-61. “the apocalyptic theory in christianity has an impact on the development of the image of the beast in both poems” (abstract). ansari, humayun. “islam.” see barbeau. b bakić, tanja. “‘re-mediating’ william blake in croatia and serbia.” see blake 55.3. barbeau, jeffrey w. the cambridge companion to british romanticism and religion. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2021. isbn: 9781108711050. an interesting collection of essays, many of which make brief references to blake. the most substantial discussions are found in: ansari, humayun. “islam.” 86-104. “blake was positive, even sympathetic, in his reevaluation of islam” (95). priestman, martin. “atheism.” 121-38. considers the annotations to watson to illustrate “how complex and unorthodox some positions we might still broadly describe as ‘christian’ could be” (127). einboden, jeffrey. “poetry.” 141-60. blake’s use of hebrew and hebrew poetics is considered in the section “rintrah’s abyss—​hebraic blake” (144-48), which focuses on the biblical source of rintrah in marriage and giora leshem’s hebrew translation of marriage (1967–​68). there is also a short discussion of the ghost of abel at the end of the chapter. myrone, martin. “painting.” 311-30. rather than exploring blake’s accomplishments, myrone highlights the relative neglect of blake in art history and ends the essay calling for “recovering some of the lost histories of religious painting” (329). barbour, andrew john. “blake’s industrial revolutions.” “mechanical powers: engineering and romantic poetics in the early anthropocene.” phd diss., university of california, berkeley, 2021. 21-52. barr, mark l. “blake’s perpetual revolution” and “the gospel of minute particulars.” romanticism and the rule of law: coleridge, blake, and the autonomous reader. cham: palgrave macmillan-springer nature, 2021. isbn: 9783030748777. 153-84 and 185-224. “i would suggest then that romantic literary production, born in a formative moment for the rule of law, works to uphold that rule or at least attempts to formulate an ideal expression of it by framing its poetic subject in a particular way” (9). barrett, david v. rev. of jason whittaker, divine images: the life and work of william blake. see whittaker, divine images. bayoğlu kina, filiz. “william blake’in eserlerinde i̇nsan [human in william blake’s works].” atatürk üniversitesi edebiyat fakültesi dergisi 66 (24 june 2021): 66-80. in turkish. blake/an illustrated quarterly volume 54, number 4 (spring 2021) articles robert n. essick. “blake in the marketplace, 2020.” 5 pars., plus listings. caroline anjali ritchie. “diagrammatic blake: tracing the critical reception of ‘the mental traveller.’” 30 pars. considers and critiques the tradition of using diagrams to understand “the mental traveller.” volume 55, number 1 (summer 2021) articles wayne c. ripley, with fernando castanedo, hikari sato, hüseyin alhas, and vera serdechnaia. “william blake and his circle: a checklist of scholarship in 2020.” 38 pars., plus listings. jason whittaker. “blake and music, 2020.” 3 pars., plus listings. luisa calè. “blake and exhibitions, 2020.” 4 pars., plus listings. review luisa calè. edina adam, with julian brooks, and an essay by matthew hargraves, william blake: visionary; lives of william blake: henry crabb robinson, john thomas smith, alexander gilchrist, introduced by martin myrone. 14 pars. “in the absence of the accompanying experience of the originals, both catalogue and lives eloquently activate the reader’s imagination” (par. 14). volume 55, number 2 (fall 2021) remembrance morton d. paley. “‘all his neighbourhood bewail his loss’: bo ossian lindberg, 1937–​2021.” 3 pars. a remembrance of lindberg, with a select bibliography. articles silvia riccardi. “the body in the line: ‘trasumanar’ in blake’s dante.” 15 pars. “are the density and articulation of colors and contours in the dante designs accidental modifications of form, or do they spell out the artist’s own judgment upon the souls?” (par. 1). christopher z. hobson. “blake, methodism, and ‘christian perfection.’” 47 pars. “this essay argues that blake rejected john wesley’s teaching of ‘christian perfection’ and examines the implications of this rejection for blake’s ideas of morality, conduct, and social and sexual freedom” (par. 1). reviews r. paul yoder. sheila a. spector, the evolution of blake’s myth. 16 pars. “for her [spector], the mainstream readings are like the encrustations protecting the selfhood that must be cast off in milton, so that the narrative of that casting off can be folded into blake criticism” (par. 16). wayne c. ripley. susan mitchell sommers, the siblys of london: a family on the esoteric fringes of georgian england. 14 pars. “blakeans will be thoroughly intrigued” (par. 1). volume 55, number 3 (winter 2021–22) “blake in europe,” ed. sibylle erle introduction sibylle erle. “to see the worlds of a grain of sand: blake and reception.” 29 pars. in addition to introducing the collection of essays, erle provides a cogent theoretical groundwork for reception studies and blake’s place therein. part i cătălin ghiță. “william blake’s black bible as a spectacle of doom: a recent note to blakean reception in romania.” 18 pars. on the 2016 romanian radio play biblia neagră a lui william blake [william blake’s black bible]. eliza borkowska. “‘i inhabited the land of ulro long before blake taught me its proper name’: czesław miłosz’s ziemia ulro/​the land of ulro.” 19 pars. on blake’s influence on miłosz and the limits of translation and language. luisa calè. “reading revolutions: corrado costa’s william blake in beulah, a visionary cartoon essay in 1977 italy.” 21 pars. costa’s william blake in beulah is a dadaist graphic novel. vera serdechnaia. “the mental travellers: on blake’s reception by nikolai gumilyov.” 17 pars. the russian writer gumilyov (1886–​1921) was the first to translate “the mental traveller.” part ii tanja bakić. “‘re-mediating’ william blake in croatia and serbia.” 24 pars. the essay “tries to answer how the artists [zdenka pozaić, simonida rajčević, and aleksandra m. jovanić] first perceived blake, how each of them understood him, and in what way the figure of blake guided them” (par. 2). cristina flores. “‘sick as a rose’: william blake in leopoldo maría panero’s poetry of experience.” 11 pars. how panero (1948–​2014) used blakean motifs. alcinda pinheiro de sousa, cláudia franco souza, and joão carlos callixto. “portuguese readings of william blake: fernando pessoa, a national poet, and três tristes tigres, a pop-rock band.” 27 pars. examines the influence of blake on pessoa (1888–​1935) and discusses a musical adaptation of “the tyger.” sibylle erle. “‘blake was a phenomenon’: artistic, domestic, and blakean visions in joseph paul hodin’s writing on else and ludwig meidner.” 36 pars. on blake’s influence on the painter and writer ludwig meidner (1884–​1966). bloom, harold. “milton and william blake: the human form divine.” take arms against a sea of troubles: the power of the reader’s mind over a universe of death. new haven: yale university press, 2020. <blake (2021)> review hunt, eileen m. “everything an allusion: wisdom gleaned from a lifetime of reading poems and novels.” times literary supplement (2 july 2021): 4-5. slight reference to blake. bois, catherine. un langage investi: rhétorique et poésie lyrique dans le long xviiie siècle britannique. lyon: presses universitaires de lyon, 2020. <blake (2021)> review tholoniat, yann. revue de la société d’études anglo-américaines des xviie et xviiie siècles 77 (2020): 3 pars. in french. bölükmeşe, engin, and halil özdemir. “william blake’in ‘yankıyan yeşillik’ adlı eserinde romantik öğeler [romantic elements in william blake’s ‘the ecchoing green’].” rumelide dil ve edebiyat araştırmaları dergisi 25 (dec. 2021): 1120-29. in turkish. borkowska, eliza. “‘i inhabited the land of ulro long before blake taught me its proper name’: czesław miłosz’s ziemia ulro/​the land of ulro.” see blake 55.3. bowden, betsy. “audiovisual oneness: the wife of bath by william blake (1809).” the wife of bath in afterlife: ballads to blake. bethlehem, pa: lehigh university press, 2017. <blake (2019)> review turner, marion. speculum 96.1 (jan. 2021): 183-84. “the fact that equal space is given to visual and textual responses in the book is itself striking and speaks to the author’s interest in working in interdisciplinary ways and with diverse material to uncover the huge variety of responses to the same text” (184). bruder, helen p. “guys wide shut.” see vala. brylowe, thora. romantic art in practice: cultural work and the sister arts, 1760–1820. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2019. <blake (2019)> review wootton, sarah. review of english studies 71.298 (feb. 2020): 181-83. butler, marilyn. mapping mythologies: countercurrents in eighteenth-century british poetry and cultural history. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2015. <blake (2018, 2019)> review zimmerman, sarah. romanticism 27.1 (2021): 109-10. “mapping mythologies also offers an intriguing approach to blake as ‘the culmination and the end of the tradition of popular national myth-making’ (162)” (110). c calè, luisa. “blake and dante.” see blake society in part v. calè, luisa. “blake and exhibitions, 2020.” see blake 55.1. calè, luisa. “reading revolutions: corrado costa’s william blake in beulah, a visionary cartoon essay in 1977 italy.” see blake 55.3. calè, luisa. rev. of edina adam, with julian brooks, and an essay by matthew hargraves, william blake: visionary; lives of william blake: henry crabb robinson, john thomas smith, alexander gilchrist, introduced by martin myrone. see blake 55.1. campbell-johnston, rachel. rev. of john higgs, william blake vs. the world. see higgs. canto, daniela schwarcke do, anselmo peres alós, and juliana prestes de oliveira. “os irmãos rossetti e suas colaborações na biografia de william blake, de gilchrist.” sociopoética 22.2 (2020): 64-79. in portuguese (abstract and keywords in portuguese, english, and spanish). traces the contributions of dante gabriel rossetti and william michael rossetti to alexander gilchrist’s life of william blake, “pictor ignotus.” cardoso, josé arlei. “entre a inocência e a experiência: intermidialidade e representação na arte de william blake [between innocence and experience: intermediality and representation in william blake’s art].” letras & letras 37.1 (2021): 191-206. in portuguese (abstract in portuguese and english). cauchi, francesca. “blake and nietzsche on self-slaughter and the moral law: a reading of jerusalem.” journal of european studies 45.1 (2015): 3-20. “this essay examines the specific mechanism of moral coercion—​a process of sublimation and condensation whereby the agonistic contraries within man are fixed into negating absolutes—​and the extent to which such a process shapes the symbolic landscape of blake’s final prophetic work, jerusalem” (abstract). choe, sharon. “reading the swan-headed riddle.” see vala. churton, tobias. “antiquarianism: stukeley and blake” and “blake and the original religion.” the lost pillars of enoch: when science and religion were one. rochester, vt: inner traditions, 2021. isbn: 9781644110430. 230-53. cogan, lucy. blake and the failure of prophecy. cham: palgrave macmillan-springer nature, 2021. isbn: 9783030676872. “there was never any one stable model of prophecy animating blake’s work, which was instead motivated by a continual urge to reinterpret the effect and significance of prophecy in the world” (4). cogan, lucy. “rending the ‘soft plains’ of america: rape and liberation in the poetry of william blake.” european romantic review 32.4 (2021): 377-97. “the representations of sexual assault in blake’s work are neither an endorsement nor an evasion of the gendered dynamics of forced sex, but are instead evidence of his efforts to work through his own uncertainty regarding what limits, if any, the drive for personal liberty should observe” (abstract). d davies, keri. “benjamin heath malkin, 1769–​1842: a bio-bibliography.” see index rerum in part v. davies, keri. “blake’s cottage at felpham.” see index rerum in part v. davies, keri. “milton: titlepage or frontispiece.” see index rerum in part v. davies, keri. “william blake’s cat.” see index rerum in part v. dearing, todd. “daimonic art: mediating text and imagery in blake’s jerusalem.” journal of romanticism 4 (2021). digby, joan, with illustration by sally kindberg. “is that you, grandma?” see vala. duclos, michèle. “‘le langage de l’imagination est symbolique’: le symbolisme et l’imagination selon kathleen raine.” revue européenne de recherches sur la poésie 7 (2021): 155-65. in french. “when raine declared herself a symbolist, with no hint to french symbolism, she was referring to how her own corpus of works is permanently linked to her understanding of the twin concept of the imagination, with a timeless link to oriental creativity.”english translation by fernando castanedo. dzhumaylo, ol'ga. rev. of vera serdechnaia, uil'yam bleik v russkoi kul'ture (1834–​2020). see serdechnaia, uil'yam bleik. e eagles, diane. “the lamb at the gate.” see vala. effinger, elizabeth. “the agon of blake.” see vala. einboden, jeffrey. “poetry.” see barbeau. eisenman, stephen f., ed. william blake and the age of aquarius. princeton: princeton university press and the block museum of art, 2017. <blake (2018)> review hagan, jade. magic, ritual, and witchcraft 15.3 (2021): 433-40. erle, sibylle. “‘blake was a phenomenon’: artistic, domestic, and blakean visions in joseph paul hodin’s writing on else and ludwig meidner.” see blake 55.3. erle, sibylle. “on this day in 1820: the visionary heads and william blake’s attitude towards death (part ii).” see bars blog in part v. erle, sibylle. “on this day in 1820: william blake draws pindar the greek poet and lais the courtesan (visionary heads) for john varley (part i).” see bars blog in part v. erle, sibylle. “some things need to be seen to exist: what’s in a name?” see vala. erle, sibylle. “to see the worlds of a grain of sand: blake and reception.” see blake 55.3. erle, sibylle, and morton d. paley, eds. the reception of william blake in europe. 2 vols. london: bloomsbury academic, 2019. <blake (2020, 2021)> reviews walker, luke. recherche littéraire/​literary research 37 (automne/​fall 2021): 277-86. in english. “a monumental work of scholarship” (286). womersley, david. “recent studies in the restoration and eighteenth century.” sel 60.3 (2020): 597-645 (blake section 602-05). erle, sibylle, with illustration by john riordan. “mary wollstonecraft’s lost letter, found.” see vala. essick, robert n. “blake in the marketplace, 2020.” see blake 54.4. f ferrer-ventosa, roger. “el eterno deleite de la imaginación. idea de la imaginación en el romanticismo, especialmente en william blake.” aisthesis 68 (2020): 139-59. in spanish (abstract and keywords in spanish and english). fletcher, joseph. william blake as natural philosopher, 1788–​1795. london: anthem press, 2021. isbn: 9781785279515. flores, cristina. “‘sick as a rose’: william blake in leopoldo maría panero’s poetry of experience.” see blake 55.3. franceschini, marcele aires. “now the sneaking serpent walks: diabolic as a creation force in the marriage of heaven and hell, by william blake.” ilha do desterro 74.1 (2021): 147-61. in english. freed, eugenie. “‘the watry shore’: blake and the platonic ideal.” see vala. g ghiță, cătălin. “william blake’s black bible as a spectacle of doom: a recent note to blakean reception in romania.” see blake 55.3. gilroy-ware, cora. the classical body in romantic britain. see gilroy-ware under cultures and technologies of display and exhibition in division ii. glynn, paul. rev. of john higgs, william blake vs. the world. see higgs. goode, mike. “blakespotting” and “the joy of looking: what william blake’s pictures want.” romantic capabilities: blake, scott, austen, and the new messages of old media. oxford: oxford university press, 2020. <blake (2021)> review whitson, roger. review of english studies 73.308 (feb. 2022): 185-87. graber, sheila, sam gainsborough, and john riordan. “animating blake.” see vala. groom, nick. rev. of john higgs, william blake vs. the world. see higgs. h hagan, jade. rev. of william blake and the age of aquarius, ed. stephen f. eisenman. see eisenman. hagen, katharina. “the rose in a perfect circle.” see zoamorphosis in part v. haggarty, sarah. “blake’s newton, line-drawing, and geometry.” studies in romanticism 60.2 (2021): 123-51. proposes two new sources for the newton print and positions “him [blake] for the first time in his contemporary mathematical-cultural context” (127), with references to his supposed argument with thomas taylor over geometry. haggarty, sarah, ed. william blake in context. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2019. <blake (2020, 2021)> review womersley, david. “recent studies in the restoration and eighteenth century.” sel 60.3 (2020): 597-645 (blake section 602-05). “the quality is uneven” (604). halton-hernandez, emilia. “‘a poet of human nature’: marion milner’s william blake.” critical quarterly 63.4 (dec. 2021): 111-25. milner (1900–​98) was a british psychoanalyst who wrote on blake (e.g., wbhc p. 2407). hamilton, paul. “future restoration.” romanticism and time: literary temporalities. ed. sophie laniel-musitelli and céline sabiron. cambridge, uk: open book publishers, 2021. isbn: 9781800640726. on the use of time by romantic writers, including blake. (blake is touched on very slightly in the introduction and a few of the other chapters.) helsinger, elizabeth. rev. of jonah siegel, material inspirations. see siegel. higgs, john. “visionaries across time: the shared magic of prince and william blake.” quietus (2 june 2021): 9 pars. “both men were compelled to create, regardless of whether there was an audience for the art being made” (par. 3). higgs, john. “william blake vs. ai.” big issue north (20 aug. 2021): 14 pars. on eric drass’s use of ai to create “a variety of strange and oddly beautiful images which clearly do have a blakean aesthetic” (par. 3) and the limitations of the images in relationship to human creativity. higgs, john. william blake vs. the world. london: weidenfeld & nicolson, 2021. isbn: 9781474614351. a study of blake’s ideas, aimed at a popular audience.an extract on the 1809 exhibition was published in the art newspaper (9 july 2021). reviews campbell-johnston, rachel. “william blake vs. the world by john higgs review—​a trip through blake’s multiverse.” times (30 apr. 2021). behind a paywall. glynn, paul. “william blake: biography offers glimpse into artist and poet’s visionary mind.” bbc news (26 june 2021). pace glynn, higgs’s book is not a biography. groom, nick. “not from our world: the genius and modern resonance of william blake.” times literary supplement (30 july 2021): 11. higgs “handles the complexities of blake, particularly the later blake, with adroit confidence.” simmons, ian. “blake’s heaven.” fortean times (1 dec. 2021): 61. “higgs grasps the essence of blake and makes it as comprehensible as it is ever likely to be for a non-specialist audience.” wilson, andy. “blake in beulah: a review of john higgs’s william blake vs. the world.” the traveller in the evening (24 may 2021). wilson, frances. “we’ve embraced william blake without having any idea of what he was on about.” spectator (3 july 2021): 7 pars. “higgs compares blake to the chinese philosopher lao tzu; also to leonard cohen, david bowie and lennon and mccartney: ‘to judge blake by songs of innocence is like judging the beatles by the song “yellow submarine.”’ i grew weary of these analogies—​further misreadings, perhaps, which do little to explain blake’s sublime strangeness” (par. 7). talks brand, russell. “episode #201: finding light.” facebook. 5 sept. 2021. a preview of higgs’s appearance on brand’s podcast, under the skin. british library. “william blake vs. the world: why he matters more than ever.” youtube. 23 june 2021. an interview with higgs juxtaposed with readings of blake’s works and examinations of the british library blake holdings. cox, nick. “campfire presents: william blake vs. the world (highlights).” youtube. 2 aug. 2021. higgs, john. “john higgs on william blake vs. the world.” youtube. 18 june 2021. a talk for the london philosophy club. higgs, john. “william blake vs. the world.” see blake society in part v. history extra. “william blake: ‘artist or genius, or mystic, or madman.’” 2 june 2021. how to academy. “john higgs—​william blake vs. the world.” n.d. kostick, conor. “2021-06-25 andy & conor: william blake vs. the world.” youtube. 26 june 2021. kostick interviews andy wilson about “blake in beulah,” his review of higgs’s book (see the review). ramsey, william. “author john higgs discusses his new book william blake vs. the world.” youtube. 28 may 2021. stone, aug. “john higgs on the etcetera etc with aug stone podcast.” youtube. 9 aug. 2021. whittaker, jason. “jason whittaker, john higgs: in conversation.” see zoamorphosis in part v. hobson, christopher z. “blake, methodism, and ‘christian perfection.’” see blake 55.2. hunnekuhl, philipp. “‘matters of religion & morality’: herder, wordsworth, and blake.” henry crabb robinson: romantic comparatist, 1790–​1811. liverpool: liverpool university press, 2020. <blake (2021)> review marshall, tom. wordsworth circle 52.4 (2021): 516-20. i islam, md. monirul. “‘for the darkness of asia was startled’: blake and the east.” oriental wells: the early romantic poets and their eastern muse. new delhi: bloomsbury indian, 2021. isbn: 9789389165203. 73-105. considers the influence of orientalist “scholars, travelers, and painters” (14) on blake and his views of hinduism, india, islam, and muhammad in light of his own “anglo-centric and christo-centric conception of the world” (15). j jones, sarah. “the development of the biblical illustrations exhibition.” see william blake archive in part v. k kayaaltı, mahmut. “controversial representation of god and christianity in william blake’s songs of innocence and of experience.” ma thesis, kütahya dumlupınar university, 2021. in english (abstract in english and turkish). kirwan, michael. “fearful symmetry, seventy years on: northrop frye on william blake.” prophetic witness and the reimagining of the world: poetry, theology and philosophy in dialogue—​power of the word v. ed. mark s. burrows, hilary davies, and josephine von zitzewitz. abingdon: routledge, 2021. 13 pp. on frye, blake, and james joyce. kowalczyk, joanna natalia. “the invisibility of the female body.” see vala. kozyrev, d. “sravnitel'nyi analiz russkikh perevodov stikhotvoreniya uil'yama bleika ‘the fly’ [comparative analysis of russian translations of william blake’s ‘the fly’].” problemy effektivnogo ispol'zovaniya nauchnogo potentsiala obshchestva [problems of efficient use of the scientific potential of society]. ufa, 2021. isbn: 9785907369313. 7-12. in russian. the author compares six translations of “the fly” into russian, by s. marshak, t. stamova, a. kudryavitskii, s. neshcheretova, s. stepanov, and m. ankudinov. l leader, carol. “reflections on the dark feminine in blake and jung.” see vala. lee, haram. “the critique of reason and biopolitics in william blake’s the four zoas.” texas studies in literature and language 63.1 (spring 2021): 53-77. “for blake, the liberal radicals such as thomas paine, john thelwall, and joseph priestley paved the way for a technology of biopolitical governance on the rise in the late 1790s because, not unlike malthus, they embraced the misconceived notion of reason as a mere instrument for the mastery of self and nature” (55). lesso, rosie. “william blake: poet, artist, prophet.” collector (16 aug. 2021): 15 pars. an overview of blake’s life. leveton, jacob henry. “seeing ecology: pollination and the resistance to adam smith’s theory of political economy in william blake’s book of thel (1789).” nineteenth-century contexts 42.5 (2020): 537-52. leveton, jacob henry. “william blake’s radical ecology.” phd diss., northwestern university, 2021. lewis, roger. “was william blake a genius, or just a sex-obsessed madman?” telegraph (23 may 2021). thankfully behind a paywall. loures, isabela ferreira. “william blake contra os ‘moinhos satânicos’ da racionalidade moderna [william blake against the ‘satanic mills’ of modern rationality; william blake contra los ‘molinos satánicos’ de la racionalidad moderna].” ars 19.43 (2021): 462-507. in portuguese (abstract in portuguese, english, and spanish). blake’s work “should be acknowledged as a turning point in early modern aesthetics” (abstract). loydell, rupert. rev. of jason whittaker, divine images: the life and work of william blake. see whittaker, divine images. łuczyńska-hołdys, małgorzata. “the experience of female embodiment in william blake’s visions of the daughters of albion.” nordic journal of english studies 19.1 (2020): 1-27. “i hope to demonstrate that through his criticism of thinking that perceives the body as inferior in the gendered binary blake not only rehabilitates the body as equally important as the mind, but also succeeds in delivering the psychologically viable and progressive message that the divorce between the mind and the body can only create a virtually torn, unhappy subject” (3-4). lussier, mark. “beyond pure poetics: on the rhythmic impulse in romanticism.” wordsworth circle 52.1 (2021): 94-117. “in different ways, blake, byron, and shelley undertake rhythmic operations with affective aspirations and in the process express the literal spirit of the age, a rhythmic presence operative at all scales, active in every atom and cell, and manifest in material and mental processes” (113). m makdisi, saree. reading william blake. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2015. <blake (2016, 2018, 2019)> review marx, bill. “book review: divine images—​william blake’s imagination as mankind’s saving grace.” art fuse (6 july 2021): 8 pars. critical review of whittaker’s divine images that turns to makdisi’s book, calling it “one of the best introductions to blake’s unruly genius i have read” (par. 7). marchetto santorum, cecilia. “comparative study of william blake’s illuminated books and alan moore’s graphic novels.” phd diss., universidade de santiago de compostela (spain), 2021. in english (abstract in galician). “blake and moore have a similar idea of visionary imagination as the power that divinises the self and expands it beyond social convention. the aim of this thesis is to situate the authors in the different moments they occupy in the process of secularisation. … the comparative analysis reveals the ideas of transformation of nature and of the mind both authors propose, and the imaginative and visionary modes of perceptions that would lead to this change. finally, this thesis discovers the particular interpretation of blake moore creates and its key elements” (abstract). marchetto, cecilia. “embracing the unseen: (female) voices crying in the wilderness.” see vala. marley, jodie, with illustration by g. e. gallas. “on the book of thel and pandemic prophecies.” see vala. marshall, tom. rev. of philipp hunnekuhl, henry crabb robinson: romantic comparatist, 1790–​1811. see hunnekuhl. marx, bill. rev. of jason whittaker, divine images: the life and work of william blake. see whittaker, divine images, and makdisi. matthews, susan. “blake and gender.” see vala. mcdevitt, niall. “revolting romantics.” history today (14 apr. 2021): 13 pars. considers the story that blake warned thomas paine to flee to france. mcloughlin, dominic. rev. of david shaddock, poetry and psychoanalysis. see shaddock. mcquail, josephine a. “rachel v. billigheimer: dancing toward eternity.” see vala. myrone, martin, intro. lives of william blake. london: pallas athene, 2019. <blake (2020)> b. los angeles: j. paul getty museum, 2020. <blake (2021)> review calè, luisa. see blake 55.1. interview getty museum. “william blake’s eccentric arts.” 23 june 2021. a podcast hosted by jim cuno, president of the j. paul getty trust, in which myrone is interviewed. myrone, martin. “painting.” see barbeau. myrone, martin, and amy concannon, with an afterword by alan moore. william blake. london: tate publishing, 2019. catalogue for the 2019–20 tate britain exhibition. <blake (2020, 2021)> review schierenbeck, daniel d. choice 57.10 (june 2020): 1 par. n ness, richard. “vibrant meter: periods, pulsations, and prosody in blake’s milton.” “ecological prosodies: rhythmic environments and experimental meters in british romantic poetry.” phd diss., university of wisconsin, madison, 2021. 27-68. o oroskhan, muhammad hussein. “devotional mysticism: an analogical study of hafez-e shirazi and william blake.” theory and practice in language studies 11.5 (may 2021): 475-80. hafez-e shirazi was a fourteenth-century persian poet. p paley, morton d. “‘all his neighbourhood bewail his loss’: bo ossian lindberg, 1937–​2021.” see blake 55.2. pierce, robyn. “unity in ‘the divine image.’” see vala. powell, rosalind. “perception and the body.” perception and analogy: poetry, science, and religion in the eighteenth century. manchester: manchester university press, 2021. isbn: 9781526157041. 209-55. discusses blake and edward young in a section of the chapter titled “the material body and spiritual perception” (219-28). priestman, martin. “atheism.” see barbeau. puig guisado, jaime. “lecturas, traducciones, cosmogonías y otros viajes poéticos: un estudio comparado de william blake y juan ramón jiménez.” artifara 21.1 (2021): 245-57. in spanish (abstract in spanish and english). traces how juan ramón jiménez came to read blake and analyzes the latter’s influence on the spanish poet. r rajan, tilottama, and joel faflak, eds. william blake: modernity and disaster. toronto: university of toronto press, 2020. <blake (2021)> review schierenbeck, daniel d. choice 59.2 (oct. 2021): 1 par. raven, marina white. “invisible female bodies.” see vala. riccardi, silvia. “the body in the line: ‘trasumanar’ in blake’s dante.” see blake 55.2. riccardi, silvia. “‘desires of ancient times’: feminine metamorphoses in ovid and blake.” see vala. riordan, john. “the female will.” see vala. riordan, john. “st. maud—​review.” see vala. ripley, wayne c. rev. of susan mitchell sommers, the siblys of london: a family on the esoteric fringes of georgian england. see blake 55.2. ripley, wayne c., with fernando castanedo, hikari sato, hüseyin alhas, and vera serdechnaia. “william blake and his circle: a checklist of scholarship in 2020.” see blake 55.1. ritchie, caroline anjali. “blake, zines, and gouda cheese: an interview with max reeves.” see zoamorphosis in part v. ritchie, caroline anjali. “blakean coordinates: an interview with chris mccabe.” see zoamorphosis in part v. ritchie, caroline anjali. “a conversation with david suff.” see zoamorphosis in part v. ritchie, caroline anjali. “diagrammatic blake: tracing the critical reception of ‘the mental traveller.’” see blake 54.4. ritchie, caroline anjali. “‘forming the fluctuating globe’: weaving women and corporeal cartography in blake’s jerusalem.” see vala. ritchie, caroline anjali. “ghost-conversations with william blake: an interview with sophie herxheimer.” see zoamorphosis in part v. ritchie, caroline anjali. “mental travel: an interview with iain sinclair.” see zoamorphosis in part v. ritchie, caroline anjali. “psychic pull: an interview with tamar yoseloff.” see zoamorphosis in part v. ritchie, caroline anjali. “walking in blake’s footsteps: an interview with louisa amelia albani.” see zoamorphosis in part v. ritchie, caroline anjali. “william blake, urban shaman: an interview with niall mcdevitt (ft. a bonus blakean poem).” see zoamorphosis in part v. rogers, annise. “vala and metamorphosis: is a picture worth 4,000 lines?” see vala. rosewell, tamsin. “the unknown warriors.” see vala. rowland, christopher. “‘diversely and in many ways god spoke by the prophets’: new testament perspectives and the texts and images of william blake on the ‘prophetic word.’” prophetic witness and the reimagining of the world: poetry, theology and philosophy in dialogue—​power of the word v. ed. mark s. burrows, hilary davies, and josephine von zitzewitz. abingdon: routledge, 2021. 15 pp. on blake and the prophetic tradition: “the consideration of william blake’s work and his sense of vocation are an important component of the history of prophecy in christianity, not least because he stressed the ethical dimension of the life of those with a prophetic vocation as key to their message” (abstract). rowland, christopher. “william blake and the king james bible.” modern believing 53.2 (2012): 131-39. analyzes blake’s engagement with the king james bible largely through the letters to trusler and illustrations of the book of job. rowland, christopher. “william blake as leitourgos.” sacred modes of being in a postsecular world. ed. andrew w. hass. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2021. 164-82. “explores blake’s vocation to a public role and his exploration of creativity and conformity in his engagement with the bible, literature and art” (abstract). ryan, james emmett. rev. of devin p. zuber, a language of things. see zuber. s sakamoto, masahiro. “heisoku suru muku, kaisei suru sozoryoku: maehara masaharu blake no kodomo no shi karano shokuhatsu [innocence choked, imagination regenerated: masaharu maehara inspired by blake’s poetry for children].” tohoku bungaku no sekai [world of tohoku literature] 29 (2021): 1-20. in japanese. an article about blake and masaharu maehara, a poet and a high-school teacher of english in the tohoku (northeast) region of japan. sánchez tierraseca, mónica. “un proyecto cosmogónico con forma humana. nociones de swedenborg en william blake [a cosmogonic project with a human form. notions of swedenborg in william blake].” revista eviterna 9 (2021): 79-91. in spanish (abstract and keywords in spanish and english). santos, andrio j. r. dos. “‘a bloodless creation’: sangue, corpo e apocalipse em anne rice and william blake [“‘a bloodless creation’: blood, body, and apocalypse in anne rice and william blake].” todas as musas 12.2 (2021): 164-76. in portuguese (abstract and keywords in portuguese and english). santos, andrio j. r. dos. “o corpo como acesso ao divino na arte iluminada de william blake [the body as access to the divine in william blake’s illuminated art].” estudos avançados 35.103 (2021): 141-54. in portuguese (abstract and keywords in portuguese and english). saral, ramazan. “poems.” see vala. sato, hikari. “‘miru me wa shiru kokoro yorimo masaru’: yanagi muneyoshi no mingei to blake kenkyu [‘the eye sees more than the heart knows’: the folk crafts and blake studies of muneyoshi yanagi].” yanagi muneyoshi: mingei utsukushisa wo motomete [muneyoshi yanagi: folk crafts seeking for beauty]. tokyo: heibonsha, 2021. isbn: 9784582922943. 24-25. in japanese. 2 plates by blake. schierenbeck, daniel d. rev. of edina adam, with julian brooks, and an essay by matthew hargraves, william blake: visionary. see adam with brooks. schierenbeck, daniel d. rev. of martin myrone and amy concannon, with an afterword by alan moore, william blake. see myrone and concannon. schierenbeck, daniel d. rev. of william blake: modernity and disaster, ed. tilottama rajan and joel faflak. see rajan and faflak. schouten de jel, joshua. blake and lucretius: the atomistic materialism of the selfhood. cham: palgrave macmillan-springer nature, 2021. isbn: 9783030888879. “explores the epicurean legacy in william blake’s work” (abstract) by examining the reception history of epicurus and lucretius in seventeenthand eighteenth-century scientific writings and religious polemics. schouten de jel, joshua. “william blake’s selfhood and the atomistic materialism of lucretius’ de rerum natura.” phd diss., university of plymouth, 2021. schuchard, marsha keith. a concatenation of conspiracies: “irish” william blake and illuminist freemasonry in 1798. alexandria, va: plumbstone academic, 2021. isbn: 9781603020565. highlights the centrality of ireland to blake’s thought and his religious and political milieu. sedlmayr, gerold. rev. of james whitehead, madness and the romantic poet: a critical history. see whitehead. serdechnaia, vera. “dmitrii smirnov kak perevodchik i biograf uil'yama bleika [dmitrii smirnov as william blake’s translator and biographer].” voprosy literatury 5 (2021): 233-45. in russian (abstract in russian and english). serdechnaia, vera. “the mental travellers: on blake’s reception by nikolai gumilyov.” see blake 55.3. serdechnaia, vera. “odin iz ‘bol'shoi shesterki’: uil'yam bleik kak predstavitel' angliiskogo romantizma [one of the ‘big six’: william blake as the representative of english romanticism].” uchenye zapiski orlovskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta [scientific notes of orel state university] 2.91 (2021): 104-08. in russian (abstract in russian and english). serdechnaia, vera. “pochemu geroi andreya tavrova plachet po bleiku? [why does andrei tavrov’s hero lament over blake?].” novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 169 (2021): 309-21. in russian (abstract in russian and english). the author analyzes the influence of blake on the poetry book platch po bleiku [сrying on blake], written by russian poet andrei tavrov (2018), which shows many interesting ways of re-creating blake’s myth and biography in the context of russian and world poetry. serdechnaia, vera. “tvorchestvo uil'yama bleika v russkoi literaturovedcheskoi retseptsii postsovetskogo perioda [the reception of william blake in russian literary criticism of the post-soviet period].” uchenye zapiski orlovskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta [scientific notes of orel state university] 2.91 (2021): 100-03. in russian (abstract in russian and english). serdechnaia, vera. “uil'yam bleik v angloyazychnom literaturovedenii xxi v. [blake studies in the twenty-first century].” studia litterarum 6.2 (2021): 456-77. in russian (abstract in russian and english). serdechnaia, vera. uil'yam bleik v russkoi kul'ture (1834–​2020) [william blake in russian culture (1834–​2020)]. moscow: gorodets, 2021. isbn: 9785907220829. in russian (abstract in english). this book offers the story of blake’s reception in russian criticism, literature, and music. it covers translations, including the forgotten (vladimir elsner, 1912) and the newly discovered (nikolai gumilyov, 1919–​21, and serafima remizova, 1920s–​30s), and the way that blake’s poetry influenced such russian poets as konstantin balmont, jurgis baltrušaitis, daniil kharms, gumilyov, joseph brodsky, veniamin blazhenny, yuri stefanov, and andrei tavrov. blake also caught the attention of a few russian composers: dmitrii smirnov wrote about forty symphonic works on blake; in 2020 leonid fedorov recorded an album, blake, and alexander belousov created an opera, the book of seraphim, based on the book of thel, at the stanislavsky electrotheatre, moscow. review dzhumaylo, ol'ga. “fenomen bleika v rossii i ego istorizatsiya. retsenziya na knigu: serdechnaya v. uil'yam bleik v russkoi kul'ture (1834–​2020). moskva: id “gorodets,” 2021. 416 s. [the blake phenomenon in russia and its historicization. book review: serdechnaia v. william blake in russian culture (1834–​2020). moscow: id “gorodets,” 2021. 416 pp.].” novoe proshloe/​the new past 3 (2021): 268-74. “the evidence of blake’s influence on the cultural landscape of russia (including the soviet and post-soviet stages) is considered in the monograph and covers a significant array of translations, personal writings, anthologies, and artistic and documentary facts. at the same time, various evidence of the influence of western reading traditions on blake’s russian reception in literature, intellectual culture, and creativity in general (poetry, graphics, ballet, etc.) is also introduced.” serdechnaia, vera. “uil'yam bleik v sovremennoi russkoi literature i kul'ture [william blake in contemporary russian literature and culture].” imagologiya i komparativistika [imagology and comparative studies] 15 (2021): 71-88. in russian (abstract in russian and english). sha, richard c. “blake and the mark of the cognitive: notes towards the appearance of the sceptical subject.” distributed cognition in enlightenment and romantic culture. ed. miranda anderson, george rousseau, and michael wheeler. edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2019. isbn: 9781474442282. 204-18. uses distributed cognition to analyze “london.” shaddock, david. “mind-forg’d manacles: william blake and the emancipation of consciousness.” poetry and psychoanalysis: the opening of the field. abingdon: routledge, 2020. <blake (2021)> review mcloughlin, dominic. psychodynamic practice 28.1 (2022): 94-99. “occasionally, david shaddock’s assertions in the critical commentary become too sweeping.” shah, lena. “discovering william blake: how blake inspired my first book of prose and poetry.” see vala. sherwood, harriet. “william blake cottage at risk of being lost, says historic england.” guardian (4 nov. 2021): 11 pars. on the dire need to repair blake’s felpham cottage. shrimpton, nicholas. “‘to tirzah,’ or william blake’s changes of mind.” essays in criticism 71.1 (2021): 20-45. siegel, jonah. “blake.” material inspirations: the interests of the art object in the nineteenth century and after. oxford: oxford university press, 2020. <blake (2021)> review helsinger, elizabeth. review 19 (19 mar. 2021): 12 pars. simmons, ian. rev. of john higgs, william blake vs. the world. see higgs. sklar, susanne. “jerusalem: feminine divine!” see vala. smallwood, philip. “tension, contraries, and blake’s augustan values.” paper, ink, and achievement: gabriel hornstein and the revival of eighteenth-century scholarship. ed. kevin l. cope and cedric d. reverand ii. lewisburg, pa: bucknell university press, 2021. isbn: 9781684482528. 176-91. on blake’s use of augustan-era writers and conventions, from dryden to johnson. (the wider collection is an interesting festschrift commemorating the publisher gabriel hornstein, who transformed ams press and created many venues for eighteenth-century scholarship.) sommers, susan mitchell. the siblys of london: a family on the esoteric fringes of georgian england. see sibly in division ii. şorop, aloysia. “‘si j’ai tort, j’ai tort en belle compagnie.’ william blake et ses expériences intimes de la spiritualité.” au plus profond de soi: quand le spirituel se fait intime. ed. sylvie crinquand and paloma bravo. louvain-la-neuve, belgium: éditions eme, 2016. isbn: 9782806635068. 57-68. in french. sousa, alcinda pinheiro de, cláudia franco souza, and joão carlos callixto. “portuguese readings of william blake: fernando pessoa, a national poet, and três tristes tigres, a pop-rock band.” see blake 55.3. spector, sheila a. the evolution of blake’s myth. new york: routledge, 2020. <blake (2021)> review yoder, r. paul. see blake 55.2. stubbs, harriet. “invisible women in blake’s mythology.” see vala. t tholoniat, yann. rev. of catherine bois, un langage investi: rhétorique et poésie lyrique dans le long xviiie siècle britannique. see bois. thomas, sarah. “unmasking ‘simple truth.’” witnessing slavery: art and travel in the age of abolition. new haven: yale university press, 2019. <blake (2020, 2021)> review young, allison. slavery and abolition 42.2 (2021): 402-04. v vala: the journal of the blake society issue 2 (nov. 2021) articles erle, sibylle. “some things need to be seen to exist: what’s in a name?” 4-5. reflections on oothoon and vala as the background for introducing an issue focused on “‘invisible women’ and gender in blake” (5). rosewell, tamsin. “the unknown warriors.” 6-7. a description of her original art “about the hidden pain and lasting damage caused to women’s bodies, and often to their minds too, while trying to create new life” (6). albani, louisa. “catherine.” 8-9. reflections on her original art presenting “catherine’s rightful ‘place’ next to blake in the printing process” (8). digby, joan, with illustration by sally kindberg. “is that you, grandma?” 10-13. on the book of thel and her grandmother. marley, jodie, with illustration by g. e. gallas. “on the book of thel and pandemic prophecies.” 14-16. “an introduction to the poem and a meditation on its relevance to collective anxieties at this moment in time” (14). riordan, john. “the female will.” 17-21. a comic strip in which catherine reflects on her life with william. raven, marina white. “invisible female bodies.” 22-27. “reflections on the experience of encountering william blake, a live-streamed performance during lockdown 2020” (23). weldon, amy. “people’s faces, in a world upside down.” 28-30. on teaching blake and kae tempest when the world is falling apart. bruder, helen p. “guys wide shut.” 31-37. on male blindness in blake’s work and scholarship, with reflections on bruder’s own early work and what feminist and queer perspectives can bring and have brought to blake studies. marchetto, cecilia. “embracing the unseen: (female) voices crying in the wilderness.” 38-41. on invisible women in blake and in the academy. sklar, susanne. “jerusalem: feminine divine!” 42-45. argues for jerusalem’s centrality to the plot of jerusalem. leader, carol. “reflections on the dark feminine in blake and jung.” 46-51. “both men’s visions of the dark aspects of the feminine are skewed in the direction of a male view” (46). stubbs, harriet. “invisible women in blake’s mythology.” 52-61. “within blake’s mythology, i believe that there are invisible women from blake’s life that inform and influence his female characters” (54). matthews, susan. “blake and gender.” 62-67. “why do we think that we can read gender in a poet and artist born in the mid-eighteenth century?” (63). pierce, robyn. “unity in ‘the divine image.’” 68-71. on “the divine image” and community in the pandemic world. kowalczyk, joanna natalia. “the invisibility of the female body.” 72-73. on her illustration, inspired by “the sick rose.” riccardi, silvia. “‘desires of ancient times’: feminine metamorphoses in ovid and blake.” 74-76. “in william blake’s america (1793), one cannot overlook the similarities between the iconography of daphne and the female figure morphing into a plant on the left margin of plate 15” (74). eagles, diane. “the lamb at the gate.” 77-81. on her ceramic figure made partly “from the earth removed during the setting of [blake’s] new grave marker in bunhill fields” (79). choe, sharon. “reading the swan-headed riddle.” 82-84. on women and the “swan-headed girl” in jerusalem. saral, ramazan. “poems.” 85-86. shah, lena. “discovering william blake: how blake inspired my first book of prose and poetry.” 87-90. about being inspired by both the petworth house and tate britain exhibitions. graber, sheila, sam gainsborough, and john riordan. “animating blake.” 91-103. riordan interviews the artists who created animation pieces for the 1978 and 2019–​20 tate exhibitions, respectively.for links to the pieces, see ayun halliday, “william blake’s paintings come to life in two animations” <blake (2021)>. ritchie, caroline anjali. “‘forming the fluctuating globe’: weaving women and corporeal cartography in blake’s jerusalem.” 104-07. “much can be gained, i think, from reading these female figures as potentially legitimate participants in a wider project of bodying forth maps for the emergent future” (107). effinger, elizabeth. “the agon of blake.” 108-11. “more than one year into the pandemic in a time that feels violent, oppressive, and isolating, i also see the laocoön engraving as a call for hope, the challenge to continue wrestling and ‘not cease from mental fight’” (111). freed, eugenie. “‘the watry shore’: blake and the platonic ideal.” 112-18. on the “introduction” of songs of experience. rogers, annise. “vala and metamorphosis: is a picture worth 4,000 lines?” 119-21. on the dragon-woman illustration from page 26 of the vala, or the four zoas manuscript. reviews and notices erle, sibylle, with illustration by john riordan. “mary wollstonecraft’s lost letter, found.” 122-23. a fictional 13 dec. 1792 letter to william godwin on fuseli’s nightmare. riordan, john. “st. maud—​review.” 124-25. mcquail, josephine a. “rachel v. billigheimer: dancing toward eternity.” 126-27. a remembrance of the blake and yeats scholar, whose major work is a study of the two poets, wheels of eternity (1990). viscomi, joseph. “william blake’s 1818 letter to dawson turner and later career as graphic artist.” branch: britain, representation, and nineteenth-century history. ed. dino franco felluga. extension of romanticism and victorianism on the net. mar. 2022. an examination of blake’s 9 june 1818 letter to turner that aims “to reveal why [blake] refused turner’s request [to produce a new copy of the large book and small book of designs], had stopped printing most of his illuminated books, and stopped color printing and monoprinting altogether” (abstract). viscomi, joseph. william blake’s printed paintings: methods, origins, meanings. london: paul mellon centre for studies in british art, 2021. isbn: 9781913107208. a definitive reappraisal of blake’s “printed paintings” (his large color prints, or monoprints) that reconsiders his method of producing them, positions them in the context of his artistic career and of romantic-era art, and articulates the proper fields for interpreting them.an excerpt was published as “impressions of colors: on william blake’s monoprints,” lapham’s quarterly (20 july 2021). the two appendices (“blake redefines fresco” and “monoprints after blake’s death, 1827–​1863”) are not included in the printed text, but the link is given in the book’s list of abbreviations (vi) and at the related sites page of the blake archive. review jason whittaker. see zoamorphosis in part v. vultee, denise m., todd h. chiles, and sara r. s. t. a. elias. “entrepreneurial imagination: a blakean perspective.” world scientific encyclopedia of business sustainability, ethics and entrepreneurship. vol. 3, spirituality, entrepreneurship and social change. ed. kathryn pavlovich and gideon markman. singapore: world scientific, 2022. 25-55. uses blake as a model for creative entrepreneurship. w walker, luke. rev. of the reception of william blake in europe, ed. sibylle erle and morton d. paley. see erle and paley. wanderlinde, william weber. “the contraries’ progression: romantic irony in the introductory poems of william blake’s songs of innocence and of experience.” ilha do desterro 74.1 (2021): 163-82. in english. “this paper is an attempt to understand the ironies present in some poems of songs of innocence and of experience” (abstract). weldon, amy. “people’s faces, in a world upside down.” see vala. whitehead, james. madness and the romantic poet: a critical history. oxford: oxford university press, 2017. <blake (2018)> review sedlmayr, gerold. review of english studies 69.292 (nov. 2018): 998–1000. whitney, julian s. “slaying the demon king: william blake and urizen in devil may cry 5.” see william blake archive in part v. whitson, roger. rev. of mike goode, romantic capabilities: blake, scott, austen, and the new messages of old media. see goode. whittaker, jason. “blake and music, 2020.” see blake 55.1. whittaker, jason. divine images: the life and work of william blake. london: reaktion books, 2021. isbn: 9781789142877. a popular biography and study of blake’s works. reviews barrett, david v. “blake’s heaven.” fortean times (1 dec. 2021): 61. “his concentration on political rather than religious influences on blake’s unique mythology seems a blind spot.” loydell, rupert. “london calling.” international times (24 apr. 2021): 8 pars. “whittaker’s divine images is a fantastic mix of biography, art criticism and literary engagement which serves as a wonderful introduction to this complex and confusing artist” (par. 5). marx, bill. “book review: divine images—​william blake’s imagination as mankind’s saving grace.” art fuse (6 july 2021): 8 pars. “presents a disappointingly conventional overview of the artist’s achievement” (par. 4). whittaker, jason. rev. of joseph viscomi, william blake’s printed paintings. see zoamorphosis in part v. whittaker, jason. “william blake: prophet of hell.” prospect (11 mar. 2021): 10 pars. asks why so many atheists identify with blake. “william blake: poet, painter, indie zine maker.” liber ludorum (17 may 2021). an overview of blake’s life and works that compares the illuminated books with role-playing games. § wills, bernard newman. “william blake: neo-platonist and sexual radical?” international journal of the platonic tradition 16.1 (apr. 2022): 29-47. wilson, andy. rev. of john higgs, william blake vs. the world. see higgs. wilson, frances. rev. of john higgs, william blake vs. the world. see higgs. wofford, ada. “ginsberg’s memories of blake’s sunflower.” see william blake archive in part v. wofford, ada. “melanie smith and the influence of blake.” see william blake archive in part v. womersley, david. rev. of william blake: selected works, ed. peter otto; the reception of william blake in europe, ed. sibylle erle and morton d. paley; and william blake in context, ed. sarah haggarty. see william blake: selected works in part i, section b; erle and paley; and haggarty, william blake in context. wootton, sarah. rev. of thora brylowe, romantic art in practice: cultural work and the sister arts, 1760–1820. see brylowe. § worrall, david. “les relations de william blake et de ses mécènes, vues sous l’angle de la neurologie.” le mécénat littéraire aux xix e et xxe siècles. ed. anne struve-debeaux. paris: éditions hermann, 2019. isbn: 9791037000842. 119-40. in french. y yan, hanjin. “reforming the relations of the sexes: zhou zuoren’s translation and imitation of william blake’s poems about love and sexuality.” nan nü: men, women, and gender in china 22.2 (2020): 313-41. “probes into the motivation behind zhou zuoren’s (1885–​1967) translation and imitation of the english poet william blake’s (1757–​1827) poems about love and sexuality in the may fourth era” (abstract). § yeats, william butler. william blake. la imaginación y el simbolismo. madrid: archivos vola, 2019. 20 cm. 84 pp. isbn: 9788412089707. in spanish. yoder, r. paul. rev. of sheila a. spector, the evolution of blake’s myth. see blake 55.2. young, allison. rev. of sarah thomas, witnessing slavery: art and travel in the age of abolition. see thomas. z zimmerman, sarah. rev. of marilyn butler, mapping mythologies: countercurrents in eighteenth-century british poetry and cultural history. see butler. zuber, devin p. “planetary pictures.” a language of things: emanuel swedenborg and the american environmental imagination. charlottesville: university of virginia press, 2019. <blake (2020)> review ryan, james emmett. journal of american history 108.2 (2021): 356. division ii: william blake’s circle banks, joseph (1743–​1820) scientist mcneil, peter. “sir joseph banks: ‘the fly catching macaroni’” and “richard cosway: ‘the macaroni painter.’” pretty gentlemen: macaroni men and the eighteenth-century fashion world. new haven: yale university press, 2018. 101-05 and 105-14. sections on depictions of banks and cosway as macaronis. the book contains passing references to angelica kauffman and john caspar lavater. review wiehe, jarred. eighteenth-century studies 54.2 (2021): 449-52. banks, thomas (1735–​1805) sculptor gilroy-ware, cora. the classical body in romantic britain. see gilroy-ware under cultures and technologies of display and exhibition. boydell, john (1720–​1804) engraver, printseller goring, paul. “john opie’s portrait of charles macklin and the shakespeare gallery.” source: notes in the history of art 39.3 (2020): 184-93. on opie’s portrait of the actor that was exhibited at boydell’s shakspeare gallery. mitchell, james. “julius caesar ibbetson (1759–​1817) and boydell’s shakspeare gallery.” british art journal 20.3 (2019–​20): 116-18. on two rediscovered paintings by ibbetson from the taming of the shrew for boydell’s shakspeare gallery. constable, john (1776–​1837) painter robbins, nicholas. “john constable, luke howard, and the aesthetics of climate.” see robbins under cultures and technologies of display and exhibition. cosway, richard (1742–1821) miniaturist, blake’s acquaintance mcneil, peter. “richard cosway: ‘the macaroni painter.’” see mcneil under joseph banks. cowper, william (1731–1800) poet, friend of william hayley farrell, molly. “data as poetry in cowper’s statistical ‘effusions.’” elh 87.4 (2020): 1025-54. in a thoughtful article examining poetry’s relationship to statistics, farrell argues that cowper’s “verses subjoined to the bill of mortality of northampton” “take the foundational documents of biopolitical governmentality as a source of inspiration and even a model for creative innovation” (1027-28). cultures and technologies of display and exhibition carlson, julia s. “historical poetics, poetics of history: priestley’s time charts and the visualization of meter.” wordsworth circle 52.1 (2021): 1-33. argues that joseph priestley’s innovative use of charts “facilitated a new way of representing time in poetry and scanning it on the page” (13). farrell, molly. “data as poetry in cowper’s statistical ‘effusions.’” see farrell under cowper. germann, jennifer. “‘other women were present’: seeing black women in georgian london.” eighteenth-century studies 54.3 (2021): 535-53. considers the representation in visual art of black women, including dido elizabeth davinier (c. 1760/1–​1804), elizabeth sancho (1766–​1837), and jane harry thresher (c. 1758–​84), with a substantial focus on joshua reynolds and slight mention of joseph nollekens. gilroy-ware, cora. the classical body in romantic britain. new haven: yale university press, 2020. isbn: 9781913107062. an important reexamination of notions and displays of the classical body that engages with religion and race. blake and many members of his artistic milieu (george cumberland, joseph farington, henry fuseli, john gibson, thomas lawrence, joshua reynolds, william sharp, benjamin west, and johann joachim winckelmann) are referenced throughout, but thomas banks (“hidden dreams,” 31-67) and john flaxman (“poetic departures,” 69-113) receive extended, detailed analysis. reviews ferrari, roberto c. nineteenth-century art worldwide: a journal of nineteenth-century visual culture 19.2 (2020): 14 pars. “offers new ways of thinking about art in late eighteenthand early nineteenth-century britain” (par. 12). ives, lucy. “monumental invisibility.” art in america (nov.-dec. 2020): 74-75. available online in an article of the same title, dated 7 oct. 2020. senior, rebecca. sculpture journal 30.1 (2021): 93-95. jenkins, susan. “the politics of public monuments: parliamentary commissions of monuments for westminster abbey in 1798.” sculpture journal 30.1 (2021): 9-29. considers john flaxman’s monument (1798–​1804) to captain james montagu and john bacon’s monument (1798–​1804) to captains john harvey and john hutt “as case studies in the politics of commissioning and installation” (11). the appendix includes “unpublished documents relating to the commissioning of the monument to captain james montagu at westminster abbey” (26) that relate to flaxman. there are also passing references to allan cunningham, joseph farington, thomas banks, joseph nollekens, and prince hoare, but none to flaxman’s letter to the committee for raising the naval pillar (1799) and blake’s engravings for it. lee, t. c. “anatomy and academies of art ii—​a tale of two cities.” journal of anatomy 236.4 (2020): 577-87. on the teaching of anatomy at both the royal academy of arts (london) and the royal hibernian academy of arts (dublin), with substantial discussion of william hunter, the first professor of anatomy at the royal academy. roach, catherine. “‘the higher branches’: genre and race on display at the british institution, london, 1806.” art history 44.2 (2021): 312-40. an important article that digitally reconstructs the 1806 exhibition of the british institution for promoting the fine arts to examine its arguments regarding race and “the ranking of various peoples from throughout the british imperial sphere” (313). robbins, nicholas. “john constable, luke howard, and the aesthetics of climate.” art bulletin 103.2 (june 2021): 50-76. “in the early decades of the nineteenth century, artists and scientists fashioned new modes of visual representation adequate to climate’s elusive forms” (50). spies-gans, paris amanda. “exceptional, but not exceptions: public exhibitions and the rise of the woman artist in london and paris, 1760–​1830.” eighteenth-century studies 51.4 (2018): 393-416. documents women who exhibited their art in london and paris, with references to individual artists, such as mary moser (1744–​1819), angelica kauffman (1741–​1807), and mary ann flaxman (1768–​1833), and to the practices of the royal academy, associated artists in water-colours, and the society of british artists regarding female artists. cumberland, george (1754–1848) dilettante, polymath, friend of blake gilroy-ware, cora. the classical body in romantic britain. see gilroy-ware under cultures and technologies of display and exhibition. cunningham, allan (1784–1842) biographer sullivan, matthew greg. “‘vivid presentiments of action and character’: allan cunningham’s anecdotes of british sculptors.” journal of art historiography 23 (dec. 2020): 23 pp. discusses cunningham’s use of the anecdote, touching on the “brief memoir” of john flaxman by maria denman. darwin, erasmus (1731–1802) scientist, poet § elliott, paul a. erasmus darwin’s gardens: medicine, agriculture and the sciences in the eighteenth century. woodbridge: boydell press, 2021. isbn: 9781783276103. porter, dahlia. “erasmus darwin’s prose of the world: induction and the philosophical poem.” science, form, and the problem of induction in british romanticism. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2018. <blake (2021)> review heringman, noah. eighteenth-century studies 54.2 (2021): 469-72. “one of porter’s most valuable contributions within this context is to harness the power of media history to the analysis of issues in the history of science and its interaction with literature” (472). flaxman, john (1755–1826) sculptor, friend of blake gilroy-ware, cora. the classical body in romantic britain. see gilroy-ware under cultures and technologies of display and exhibition. jenkins, susan. “the politics of public monuments: parliamentary commissions of monuments for westminster abbey in 1798.” see jenkins under cultures and technologies of display and exhibition. pellicer mor, josé luis. “homero y john flaxman. la reinterpretación de los poemas homéricos a través del dibujo neoclásico.” saguntina 17 (2021): 11-51. in spanish. on flaxman’s revision of homeric epic through drawing. sullivan, matthew greg. “‘vivid presentiments of action and character’: allan cunningham’s anecdotes of british sculptors.” see sullivan under cunningham. hayley, william (1745–​1820) man of letters, patron of blake picón, daniela. “recepción de la araucana en el romanticismo inglés: william hayley y robert southey.” bulletin of hispanic studies 98.3 (2021): 249-67. in spanish. on the reception by hayley and southey of alonso de ercilla y zúñiga’s sixteenth-century epic poem, la araucana, with special reference to romantic and anticolonial readings. hervey, james (1714–​58) clergyman, writer § meditaciones entre los sepulcros [meditations among the tombs]. ed. and trans. mariano gonzález campo. madrid: miraguano ediciones, 2016. 109 pp. isbn: 9788478134533. in spanish. review cámara-arenas, enrique. hermēneus 22 (2020): 497-501. in spanish. hogarth, william (1697–​1764) artist carrabine, eamonn. “low life: william hogarth, visual culture and sociologies of art.” british journal of sociology 72.4 (2021): 909-29. examines “how hogarth’s work conjures up a new vision of the world, providing shape and meaning to the nation’s changing understandings of morality, society, and the city” (abstract). guthrie, neil. “another pass for vauxhall gardens by william hogarth?” medal 78 (2021): 13-19. insley, alice, and martin myrone, eds. hogarth and europe. london: tate publishing, 2021. isbn: 9781849767682. a catalogue for the tate britain exhibition of the same name, held from 3 nov. 2021 to 20 mar. 2022. insley, alice, and martin myrone. “preface.” 9-11. insley, alice, and martin myrone. “painting modern life, making the modern world.” 13-23. sloboda, stacey. “london.” 25-31. knolle, paul. “amsterdam.” 33-39. williams, hannah. “paris.” 41-47. yarker, jonny. “venice.” 49-53. insley, alice, and martin myrone. “modern painters.” 55. de fouw, josephina. “‘the dutch hogarth’: cornelis troost.” 60-69. insley, alice, and martin myrone. “artist and cities.” 71. insley, alice, and martin myrone. “modern moral narratives.” 97. tharp, lars. “pots in hogarth.” 102-07. de kok, gerhard. “an american party in a dutch colony.” 128-31. gilroy-ware, cora, and temi odumosu. “between the sheets.” 134-37. insley, alice, and martin myrone. “high life.” 139. barrett, sonia e. “performing furniture.” 156-59. himid, lubaina. “a fashionable marriage.” 164-67. gamer, meredith. “sexuality and seduction.” 172-75. insley, alice, and martin myrone. “the new europeans.” 177. “artist biographies.” 200-06. mindham, r. h. s. “william hogarth’s depiction of bedlam—​psychiatry in pictures.” british journal of psychiatry 219.4 (2021): 569. uses hogarth’s “scene in bedlam” to give a history of the hospital. patey, caroline, cynthia e. roman, and georges letissier, eds. enduring presence: william hogarth’s british and european afterlives. 2 vols. oxford: peter lang, 2021. cultural interactions: studies in the relationship between the arts, vol 46. isbn: 9781800791558. volume i ogée, frédéric. “foreword.” patey, caroline. “introduction. hogarth everywhere.” 1-27. part i: the politics of taste mazza, emilio. “ships, hunters and anatomists. hogarth and hume.” 31-53. franzini, elio. “aesthetic variations on the line of beauty.” 55-65. roman, cynthia e. “james gillray’s hogarthian ‘ridicule.’ the contest of graphic satire and the academy.” 67-82. rossi, laura. “from pavel fedotov to viktor shklovsky. the turbulent fortunes of william hogarth in russia and the ussr.” 83-97. consonni, stefania. “a note on hogarth’s serpentine beauty. geometry and hermeneutics, intelligence and eroticism.” 99-109. part ii: hogarth’s stages cambiaghi, mariagabriella. “hogarth and garrick. or, the british model for the nineteenth-century actor in italy.” 127-41. castellari, marco. “a threepenny hogarth. brecht, benjamin, and a friendship, with hogarthian traces between weimar and exile.” 143-61. soncini, sara. “hogarth in drag. acts of transvestism in the grace of mary traverse and mother clap’s molly house.” 163-82. cavecchi, mariachristina. “hogarth’s progress in nick dear’s the art of success.” 183-204. part iii: in other media gueden, marie. “‘the knight of the organic line of beauty’ and film. or, william hogarth and sergei m. eisenstein.” 227-47. greenup, sylvia. “an even lower before and after. homage, presentism and strategy in two tv adaptations of a harlot’s progress.” 249-71. capoferro, riccardo. “hogarth and the history of graphic novels.” 273-85. croci, daniele. “ripping yarns. william hogarth in alan moore and eddie campbell’s from hell.” 287-97. passing mention of blake. laudando, c. maria. “hogarth between london and johannesburg. a serpentine progress through the metropolis of past and present.” 299-320. volume ii part i: the hogarth effect on prose loretelli, rosamaria. “the analysis of beauty and the new eighteenth-century narrative paradigm.” 3-24. ferrari, roberta. “the drama of real life. charles lamb and ‘tragic’ hogarth.” 25-39. bugliani, paolo. “the comedy of artistic bathos. william hazlitt’s familiarity with hogarth.” 41-56. orestano, francesca. “hogarth, dickens, and the progress of vision.” 57-79. part ii: proto-modernist and modernist offshoots modenesi, marco. “‘a wholly popular name.’ william hogarth in french fin-de-siècle literature.” 97-108. saunders, max. “hogarth, ford madox brown and ford madox ford.” 109-29. ascari, maurizio. “the present is the only time. mansfield’s ‘marriage à la mode’ and the inability to change.” 131-42. guerra, lia. “joyce’s giacomo joyce and hogarth’s aesthetics.” 143-54. reynier, christine. “rebecca west’s and david low’s intermedial dialogue with william hogarth in the modern ‘rake’s progress’ (1934).” 155-69. part iii: dialogues with contemporary novelists cimarosti, roberta. “creole britain in hogarth and david dabydeen’s hogarthian books.” 183-205. grazzini, serena. “the line of grace in peter handke’s essay on the successful day. with an excursus on hogarth’s reception in german-speaking areas.” 207-26. rose, margaret. “william hogarth and thomas coram’s foundling hospital. the institution’s afterlife in fiction and onstage.” 227-37. crotti, alessandra. “a rake’s progress of stamford hill? howard jacobson meets william hogarth.” 239-56. letissier, georges. “william hogarth’s serpentine line in alan hollinghurst’s ‘variety composed’ literary aesthetics.” 257-75. howard, john (1726–90) prison reformer cervantes, gabriel, and dahlia porter. “extreme empiricism: john howard, poetry, and the thermometrics of reform.” eighteenth century 57.1 (spring 2016): 95-119. “examines an outpouring of printed poems and biographical publications in the 1780s and 1790s that sought to shape the public image of the celebrated prison reformer john howard” (abstract), including an engraving by francesco bartolozzi after george romney. cervantes, gabriel, and dahlia porter. “walking with john howard: itineracy and romantic reform.” romanticism 27.1 (2021): 4-15. examines how howard’s the state of the prisons (1777) “presents a tension between asserting common humanity with prisoners and exercising patrician benevolence” (abstract). hunter, william (1718–83) physician, anatomist lee, t. c. “anatomy and academies of art ii—​a tale of two cities.” see lee under cultures and technologies of display and exhibition. kauffman, angelica [angelika kauffmann] (1741–​1807) painter barker, emma. “she reinvented history painting from a female perspective.” apollo 193.693 (jan. 2021): 25-26. an appreciation of kauffman in relation to the exhibition at the royal academy that had to be canceled (see baumgärtel). baumgärtel, bettina, ed. angelica kauffman. munich: hirmer, 2020. isbn: 9783777434629. the catalogue for the exhibition held at the kunstpalast in düsseldorf from 30 jan. to 20 sept. 2020. it was originally scheduled to be exhibited at the royal academy from 28 june to 20 sept., but was canceled because of covid. baumgärtel, bettina. “‘the whole world is angelicamad.’” 10-17. valentine, helen. “‘the elements of art’: four ceiling roundels for the royal academy of arts at somerset house.” 18-23. myssok, johannes. “angelica kauffman and antonio canova: a friendship between two artists in rome.” 24-29. holubec, inken maria. “angelica kauffman and the neoclassical picture: material, technology and painting process.” 30-35. baumgärtel, bettina. catalogue. 36-199. review roworth, wendy wassyng. woman’s art journal 42.1 (2021): 46. vickery, amanda. “branding angelica: reputation management in late eighteenth-century england.” journal for eighteenth-century studies 43.1 (2020): 3-24. macpherson, james (1736–96) writer davis, leith. “transnational articulations in james macpherson’s poems of ossian and the history and management of the east-india company.” eighteenth century 60.4 (winter 2019): 441-60. considers “how both the poems of ossian and the history problematize the construction of the nation in relation to its colonies” (442). mortimer, john hamilton (1740–79) painter roach, catherine. “‘the higher branches’: genre and race on display at the british institution, london, 1806.” see roach under cultures and technologies of display and exhibition. palmer, samuel (1805–81) painter, blake’s disciple § harrison, colin. the works of samuel palmer. oxford: ashmolean museum, 2021. isbn: 9781910807460. according to the publication information available online, “revised and updated from the original 1999 edition.” priestley, joseph (1733–1804) theologian, scientist carlson, julia s. “historical poetics, poetics of history: priestley’s time charts and the visualization of meter.” see carlson under cultures and technologies of display and exhibition. pughe, william owen (1759–1835) welsh antiquarian kaminski-jones, rhys. “william owen pughe and romantic rewritings of the poetry of llywarch hen.” review of english studies 73.308 (feb. 2022): 100-20. chronicles pughe’s translation of llywarch hen’s bardic poetry. reynolds, joshua (1723–92) painter germann, jennifer. “‘other women were present’: seeing black women in georgian london.” see germann under cultures and technologies of display and exhibition. hunter, matthew c. painting with fire: sir joshua reynolds, photography, and the temporally evolving chemical object. chicago: university of chicago press, 2019. <blake (2020)> review ambrosio, chiara. ambix 69.1 (2022): 85-87. robinson, henry crabb (1775–1867) writer hunnekuhl, philipp. henry crabb robinson: romantic comparatist, 1790–​1811. see hunnekuhl in division i, part vi. stelzig, eugene. “henry crabb robinson’s reminiscences as autobiography.” wordsworth circle 52.1 (2021): 134-53. anticipating the oxford university press publication of robinson’s manuscripts, stelzig suggests that the reminiscences “add up to a significant autobiographical and literary achievement” (134). (no references in the article to robinson’s encounters with blake.) royal academy of arts lee, t. c. “anatomy and academies of art ii—​a tale of two cities.” see lee under cultures and technologies of display and exhibition. spies-gans, paris amanda. “exceptional, but not exceptions: public exhibitions and the rise of the woman artist in london and paris, 1760–​1830.” see spies-gans under cultures and technologies of display and exhibition. sandby, paul (1731–​1809) painter prodger, michael. “how paul sandby painted britain as he saw it.” new statesman (10 sept. 2021): 60-61. sibly, ebenezer (1750–99), and manoah sibly (1757–1840) esoteric booksellers sommers, susan mitchell. the siblys of london: a family on the esoteric fringes of georgian england. oxford: oxford university press, 2018. <blake (2021)> review ripley, wayne c. see blake 55.2 in division i, part vi. stedman, john gabriel (1744–97) soldier, writer, friend of blake senior, emily. “skin, textuality and colonial feeling.” the caribbean and the medical imagination, 1764–1834: slavery, disease and colonial modernity. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2018. <blake (2020, 2021)> reviews bohls, elizabeth a. eighteenth-century studies 54.3 (2021): 707-12. “it’s impossible to do justice to senior’s sophisticated and nuanced analysis” (711). lau, travis chi wing. modern philology 118.4 (2021): e257-59. thomas, sarah. “unmasking ‘simple truth.’” witnessing slavery: art and travel in the age of abolition. new haven: yale university press, 2019. <blake (2020, 2021)> see thomas in division i, part vi. swedenborg, emanuel (1688–1772) mystic follesa, laura. “a comparison of wolff ’s and kant’s receptions of emanuel swedenborg.” kant-studien 112.1 (2021): 1-22. “i juxtapose kant’s and [christian] wolff’ s evaluations of swedenborg’s work at the origins of their different attitudes towards fundamental problems such as the nature of the soul and immortality” (abstract). mcquillan, j. colin. “dreams of a spirit-seer and kant’s critical method: comments on stephen r. palmquist’s kant and mysticism.” kantian review 26.1 (2021): 113-17. “i conclude that kant’s critical method was not well-formed during the 1760s and did not emerge from kant’s reflections on swedenborg” (abstract). taylor, thomas (1758–1835) neoplatonist haggarty, sarah. “blake’s newton, line-drawing, and geometry.” see haggarty, “blake’s newton,” in division i, part vi. muller, s. marek. “archival mocking as feminist praxis: a rhetorical repurposing of a vindication of the rights of brutes.” women’s studies in communication 44.1 (2021): 23-43. an ironic reading of a vindication of the rights of brutes, taylor’s parody of mary wollstonecraft’s a vindication of the rights of woman, that transforms it into “a solid defense of animal liberation based on vegan ecofeminist principles of empathy, care, and the interconnectedness of the human and more-than-human worlds” (40). winckelmann, johann joachim (1717–68) aesthetic theorist betzer, sarah. “patch, walpole, and queer complicity.” art history 43.5 (2020): 1038-64. “faced with the powerful antinomy of (winckelmann’s) queer classical and (walpole’s) queer gothic, i propose here that we reconsider our approach to thinking the queer eighteenth century” by examining “the work of artist thomas patch (1725–​82)” (1039). wollstonecraft, mary (1759–97) author, radical, known in blake’s circle botting, eileen hunt. “wollstonecraft in jamaica: the international reception of a vindication of the rights of men in the kingston daily advertiser in 1791.” history of european ideas 47.8 (2021): 1304-14. “the reception of wollstonecraft’s a vindication of the rights of men (1790) in the kingston daily advertiser helped to spread abolitionist and revolutionary discourse on rights in the british colony of jamaica—​due west of saint-domingue—​during the first three months of 1791” (1304). botz, samantha. “reorienting sympathy: rereading mary wollstonecraft’s vindication of the rights of men.” studies in romanticism 60.3 (2021): 331-52. develops the vindication’s response to burke. boyson, rowan. “mary wollstonecraft and the right to air.” romanticism 27.2 (2021): 173-86. “this article situates her numerous remarks on air alongside medical sources, racialized climatological theory, slavery cases, and the pneumatic chemistry of the 1790s” (abstract). clery, e. j. “revising the professional woman writer: mary wollstonecraft and precarious income.” huntington library quarterly 84.1 (spring 2021): 27-38. green, karen. “the rights of woman and the equal rights of men.” political theory 49.3 (2021): 403-30. some mention of wollstonecraft in relationship to mary astell and catharine macaulay. johnson, nancy e., and paul keen, eds. mary wollstonecraft in context. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2020. <blake (2021)> review wolfson, susan j. wordsworth circle 52.4 (2021): 572-79. “i find the sum somewhat uneven” (574). muller, s. marek. “archival mocking as feminist praxis: a rhetorical repurposing of a vindication of the rights of brutes.” see muller under taylor. packham, catherine. “genre and the mediation of political economy in edmund burke’s reflections on the revolution in france and mary wollstonecraft’s a vindication of the rights of men.” eighteenth century 60.3 (fall 2019): 249-68. “burke rewrites recent historical events as fiction or theater; wollstonecraft exposes the contradictions of his text like an exasperated literary critic, inviting generic comparison to a commentary” (250). philp, mark. radical conduct: politics, sociability and equality in london, 1789–​1815. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2020. isbn: 9781108842181. considers political radicalism from the perspective of conduct and the relationship of the private and the public, with a major focus on william godwin and mary wollstonecraft throughout (including godwin’s memoirs) and only a few passing references to joseph johnson. shunina, zoya. “istoricheskii i pouchitel'nyi obzor proiskhozhdeniya i razvitiya frantsuzskoi revolyutsii i ee vliyaniya na evropu meri uolstonkraft kak istoricheskii istochnik [an historical and moral view of the origin and progress of the french revolution and the effect it has produced in europe by mary wollstonecraft as a historical source].” mir i pandemii: transformatsii, kommunikatsii, strategii: materialy vserossiiskoi nauchnoi konferentsii studentov-stipendiatov oksfordskogo rossiiskogo fonda (ekaterinburg, 25 noyabrya 2020 g.) [world and pandemics: transformations, communications, strategies: proceedings of the all-russian scientific conference of students-fellows of the oxford russian foundation (yekaterinburg, 25 november 2020)]. yekaterinburg, 2021. isbn: 9785799632465. 324-26. in russian. shunina, zoya. “‘ostavlyayu vas s mirom … ,’ pis'mo m. uolstonkraft g. imleyu [‘i leave you in peace … ,’ a letter by mary wollstonecraft to gilbert imlay].” imagines mundi 5.11 (2021): 39-44. in russian (abstract in russian and english). the article includes the first russian translation of a letter from wollstonecraft to her lover imlay, and a commentary. siméon, ophélie. “‘goddess of reason’: anna doyle wheeler, owenism and the rights of women.” history of european ideas 47.2 (2021): 285-98. focuses on anna doyle wheeler, who “fused [robert] owen’s co-operative ideals with calls for women’s emancipation” (abstract); includes references to wollstonecraft. slegers, roos. “the ethics and economics of middle class romance: wollstonecraft and smith on love in commercial society.” journal of ethics 25.4 (dec. 2021): 525-42. “this article shows the philosophical kinship between adam smith and mary wollstonecraft on the subject of love” (abstract). sokowski, sandra. “disciplining desire and the problems of authorship in denis diderot’s the nun and mary wollstonecraft’s maria: or, the wrongs of woman.” comparatist 45 (oct. 2021): 324-46. “these two novels pose important questions regarding the assumptions at this time about women’s writing: what it means for one to write her experience, and how her readers may misinterpret (either willfully or not) her self-representation” (324). tomaselli, sylvana. wollstonecraft: philosophy, passion, and politics. princeton: princeton university press, 2021. isbn: 9780691169033. offers a lucid distillation of wollstonecraft’s thought, with some biographical and historical context. slight references to william roscoe, henry fuseli, joseph johnson, and blake. reviews bergès, sandrine. international journal of philosophical studies 29.2 (2021): 251-53. tomaselli “approaches [wollstonecraft’s] life and work from unusual angles, casting an altogether different light on what we thought we knew about her subject” (251). clare, isobel. lse review of books (28 may 2021): 12 pars. “tomaselli presents wollstonecraft as many readers will not know her—​as a whole person, with passions and flaws, deeply critical philosophies and radical politics” (par. 12). william blake and his circle: a checklist of scholarship in 2018 william blake and his circle: a checklist of scholarship in 2018 by wayne c. ripley works in romance languages collected and compiled by fernando castanedo works in japanese collected and compiled by hikari satoresearch for “william blake and his circle” in english was conducted at the krueger library at winona state university. research for works in romance languages was conducted in the universidad de alcalá library (madrid). research for japanese publications was carried out in cinii (national institute of informatics scholarly and academic information navigator), the national diet library online catalogue, komaba library and general library in the university of tokyo, and the national diet library. wayne c. ripley (wripley@winona.edu) is a professor of english at winona state university in minnesota. he is working on a project regarding blake’s broad street family, friends, and neighbors. table of contents: introductory essay symbols abbreviations division i: william blake part i: blake’s writings section a: original editions, facsimiles, reprints, and translations section b: collections and selections part ii: reproductions of drawings and paintings section a: illustrations of individual authors section b: collections and selections part iii: commercial engravings section a: illustrations of individual authors part iv: bibliographies and catalogues section a: bibliographies section b: catalogues part v: digital resources part vi: criticism, biography, and reviews division ii: william blake’s circle the ancients barry, james böhme, jakob cumberland, george cunningham, allan darwin, erasmus douce, francis flaxman, john füssli, johann heinrich gibson, john hayley, william johnson, joseph lizars, william home macklin, thomas marsh, john moravians mortimer, john hamilton palmer, samuel reynolds, joshua robinson, henry crabb romney, george royal academy of arts stedman, john gabriel stothard, thomas swedenborg, emanuel tatham, charles heathcote wollstonecraft, mary introductory essay i want to begin my second checklist by thanking my collaborators, fernando castanedo and hikari sato, for their assistance with non-english material. with the exception of works in german, russian, and arabic, the annotations for non-english works are theirs. i also want to thank those kind scholars who sent me appreciative notes after last year’s checklist, recognizing the very large shoes left to be filled by the late g. e. bentley, jr. i welcome e-mails notifying me of any published or forthcoming work on blake or his circle, especially if it is not listed in the standard databases by the end of the respective year, or of any errors or mischaracterization of a work. as i did last year, i have added to the categories of bentley’s blake books one on digital resources to capture material produced for the digital environment, and have not included his category of books owned by blake. i have cross-listed authors and reviewers who appear either in collections of essays or in blake and other special issues of journals devoted to blake both under the collection or journal and their names. (reviewers are also listed under the books they review.) this year i have added an appendix that includes digitally available historic scholarship (with links to title pages), reprints of this material by on-demand publishers, and questionable editions, reprints, and scholarship that is plagiarized and/or commercially exploitative. these categories and their rationales are described below. 2018 saw a new edition of blake’s selected works, the william blake in sussex: visions of albion exhibition at petworth house and its catalogue, four monographs, four collections of essays, and six dissertations that are either exclusively about blake or feature him prominently, and scores of insightful articles, to say nothing of the ongoing work of the william blake archive and jason whittaker’s zoamorphosis. in the mass media, there was also much coverage of the new tombstone at blake’s rediscovered gravesite at bunhill fields that was dedicated by the blake society on 12 august 2018 (see whittaker’s firsthand account at zoamorphosis). discoveries significant discoveries include a hand-colored impression of little tom the sailor and previously unrecorded states of the engravings of william cowper after george romney and of johann kaspar lavater (see robert n. essick’s “blake in the marketplace, 2017,” blake 51.4). castanedo has important articles on the inscription and watermarks of an island in the moon (see blake 52.1 and 52.3), and new minute details about blake’s work continue to emerge through the editorial work of the blake archive (see the postings in hell’s printing press). finally, keri davies tempered wayne c. ripley’s too-easy association of two newspaper advertisements from the 1770s linked to james blake with the material existence of blake’s family (see blake 51.4). major publications peter otto’s william blake (oxford, 2018) presents the latest edition of blake’s selected works. part of the 21st-century oxford authors series, the book runs over 800 pages, and is rich with both textual and explanatory annotations and 120 black-and-white images. the works are arranged chronologically rather than generically, even to the point of offering songs of innocence alone and again with songs of experience. in 2018, the blake archive offered seven new copies of or materials related to the illuminated books: copy j of the first book of urizen, copies a and i and miscellaneous prints and impressions (the new archive abbreviation “mpi”) of jerusalem, and copy r, plate 6 from proof copy a, and miscellaneous prints and impressions of visions of the daughters of albion. outside of the illuminated books, the archive offered its first copy of a descriptive catalogue, the notebook, forty-three pencil sketches from 1779 to 1790, and five additional monochrome wash drawings for thornton’s virgil. its evolving editorial vision is covered well both in several entries at its blog, hell’s printing press, and in michael fox and joseph fletcher’s recent article, “‘all relate to art’: the william blake archive and its web of relations,” in digital humanities quarterly. three new youtube tutorials were also produced: on the archive’s digital erdman, searching, and object relation tabs. there were translations of blake into portuguese, spanish, japanese, french, and russian, and scholarship in portuguese, spanish, japanese, german, and arabic. these include ismael belda’s new spanish translation of a descriptive catalogue, a vision of the last judgment, and the letters, seiichi miyamachi’s ongoing translation of william blake: the poems by nicholas marsh into japanese, and dmitri nikolaevich smirnov’s russian translation of an island in the moon and early prophecies (see also smirnov’s reflections on blake and the catalogue of his settings of blake to music in blake 51.4 and 52.1). the book of thel: opera and graphic novel (black earth books, 2017) includes a black-and-white facsimile of copy d(?), an edited english transcription, the operatic score and libretto (in english) by rolando macrini, and a graphic novel (in italian) by jacopo maran. richard quesnel’s neuf vies pour un chat (in french) is a “cycle of nine songs for a chorus, soloists, and an ensemble” with “texts by william blake and henri monnier.” the catalogue of the 2018 petworth house exhibition, william blake in sussex: visions of albion, is edited by the exhibition’s curator, andrew loukes. it includes beautiful reproductions of many of blake’s works dating from around his time in felpham and of two historical documents relating to his trial. essays by martin butlin, mark crosby, naomi billingsley, hayley flynn, and loukes illuminate this crucial period of blake’s life and its long-lasting impact. recent monographs treat distinct aspects of blake’s life and work. billingsley’s the visionary art of william blake: christianity, romanticism and the pictorial imagination (i. b. tauris, 2018) discusses blake’s depictions of christ between the night thoughts watercolors and the illustrations of the book of job, considering the intersection of blake’s “religious thought, his aesthetic theories, and his pictorial works and methods” (3). alexander regier’s exorbitant enlightenment: blake, hamann, and anglo-german constellations (oxford, 2018) positions blake and johann georg hamann against a backdrop of unrecognized anglo-german networks; in addition to blake and hamann, it includes chapters on johann heinrich füssli, lavater, and the london moravians. thora brylowe’s technically and materially informed romantic art in practice: cultural work and the sister arts, 1760–1820 (cambridge, 2019) considers romantic conceptions of the sister-arts tradition in works ranging from verbal and visual representations of the portland vase to engravings after the shakspeare gallery. while blake is the explicit subject of only one chapter, he figures significantly throughout. reception was a major theme of blake scholarship in 2018. linda freedman’s comprehensive history of blake’s reception in america, william blake and the myth of america: from the abolitionists to the counterculture (oxford, 2018), was the most substantial, and her introduction is an accessible overview of his american reception that would work well in the classroom. freedman’s book is complemented well by new articles, notably dominique zino’s examination of how blake’s materiality helped to mediate emily dickinson’s initial reception, daniel clinton’s analysis of the use of a blakean theory of outline by herman melville in pierre (1852) and timoleon (1891) (with references to george cumberland, john flaxman, and john ruskin), and patricia c. willis’s survey of blake’s influence on marianne moore. reception is also the approach of two new collections. james rovira’s rock and romanticism: blake, wordsworth, and rock from dylan to u2 (lexington books, 2018) traces blake’s influence on contemporary or recent musicians, including martha redbone (nicole lobdell), jackson browne (gary l. tandy), and leonard cohen and u2 (lisa crafton). luke walker’s chapter on blake, bob dylan, and the beats (who are also referenced in walker’s review in blake 52.2 of the rerelease on cd of allen ginsberg’s songs of innocence and experience) would be well read alongside both freedman’s later chapters on the counterculture and the essays in the catalogue for last year’s exhibition at the block museum, william blake and the age of aquarius. (for those wanting more of blake and ginsberg, the allen ginsberg project has now posted a transcription and audio recording of ginsberg’s 25 january 1979 class on blake at the naropa institute, and andrio j. r. dos santos has an article in portuguese on ginsberg’s vision of blake.) colin trodd and whittaker’s issue of visual culture in britain, “william blake: the man from the future?” (19.3, 2018) examines blake in contexts that include how his notion of universal religion influenced the australian blake prize for religious art (billingsley), the twenty-first-century reception of hubert parry’s “jerusalem” hymn (whittaker), and blake’s influence on nietzsche and cultural criticism in britain (trodd), on humphrey jennings and dada (david hopkins), on ludwig meidner and expressionism (sibylle erle), and on ray davies and the kinks (michael sanders). martin myrone chronicles the exhibitions and displays of blake between 1904 and 2014, and, appropriately, the issue also includes reviews of william blake and the age of aquarius and of leo damrosch’s biography, eternity’s sunrise. a host of individual articles consider blake’s reception outside of the american context. elizabeth helsinger traces the influence of blake’s notion of song on the pre-raphaelites and yeats. caron barry looks at blake and dante as “spiritual mentors” (145) of yeats. donovan irven examines stephen dedalus’s view of blake in james joyce’s ulysses. michael black recounts blake’s role in shaping how the woolfs’ hogarth press envisioned its hand-printed books. cristina flores examines blake’s early reception in spain. finally, in the introduction to her translation of yanagi sōetsu’s chōsen no bijutsu, penny bailey chronicles blake’s influence on critiques of japanese colonial expansion. beyond work primarily concerned with reception, chris bundock and elizabeth effinger’s collection, william blake’s gothic imagination: bodies of horror (manchester, 2018), seeks “to recognise aspects of blake’s art that … productively intersect with the gothic horror taking shape contemporaneously with blake’s career” (1). the essays provide careful and illuminating readings of blake’s texts in a context shaped by the gothic, as in david baulch’s explication of benjamin heath malkin’s and blake’s ideas of the gothic and in tristanne connolly’s reading of visions in relationship to james graham’s celestial bed. more formally, both kiel shaub and claire colebrook position blake’s notion of the gothic in a wider context of eighteenth-century aesthetics. essays by lucy cogan, stephanie codsi, otto, mark lussier, and ana elena gonzález-treviño all touch on issues of gender, birth, and anatomy, and, pedagogically, such works will help tie blake more firmly to gothic novels like frankenstein or gothic elements of modern film, as suggested by whittaker’s chapter on the use of blake and milton in ridley scott’s prometheus. 2018 also saw the latest in helen p. bruder’s and connolly’s line of commanding collections, beastly blake (palgrave macmillan, 2018). the essays in beastly blake focus on both real and symbolic animals, and are important contributions to the exploding fields of ecocriticism, animal studies, and posthuman studies. kurt fosso treats blake’s relationship to real horses, particularly william hayley’s pony bruno. anne milne positions blake within romantic discussions of animal rights. diane piccitto analyzes what it means to put off the human in milton. david worrall likens blake’s visions of birds in the same poem to the /xam cave painters. bethan stevens juxtaposes news accounts from blake’s era with blake’s images, suggesting how the relationship between human and animal informs the border between fact and fiction. other essays examine blake’s representations of animals in various works, with luisa calè considering the illustrations to dante, flynn the virgil woodcuts, crosby the animal ballads by hayley, and erle the ghost of a flea. (for more on the topic of real animals in blake’s life, see davies’s and ripley’s discussions in blake 51.4.) while every checklist has listed earlier works that were missed, i want to call attention to three major works overlooked in last year’s unexpected transition. steve clark and connolly’s collection, british romanticism in european perspective: into the eurozone (palgrave macmillan, 2015), has essays on both blake and his circle. bundock’s romantic prophecy and the resistance to historicism (toronto, 2016) reenvisions the use of prophecy by romantics from herder to mary shelley in relationship to secularism and enlightenment historiography, with references to blake throughout much of the book. kathryn r. barush’s art and the sacred journey in britain, 1790–1850 (routledge, 2016) has one chapter devoted to blake’s canterbury pilgrims, as recorded in an earlier checklist—see also betsy bowden’s chapter on blake’s wife of bath in her book—and also extended sections on thomas stothard, francis douce, james barry, antiquarianism, and the ancients. in terms of new work on blake scholars, bentley’s last book is a memoir, boondoggles: travels of a restless professor (friesenpress, 2018), which includes reflections on his travels, bibliography, and blake. peter main’s biography of ruthven todd, a fervent mind: the life of ruthven todd (lomax press, 2018), includes selections of todd’s published and unpublished poetry. martha nell smith and julie r. enszer have published a collection of essays on, and a new interview with, alicia ostriker, everywoman her own theology: on the poetry of alicia suskin ostriker (michigan, 2018), which includes an essay dedicated to blake’s influence. glenn r. wittig’s thomas j. j. altizer, america’s 20th-century religious heretic: an analytic bibliography of the writings of altizer and the death of god theme (peter lang, 2018) has a substantial section devoted to altizer’s writings on blake and their reception. in shorter pieces, cathrael kazin has a reflection on her father, alfred kazin, which includes his thoughts on blake, and benjamin d. carson refers to harold bloom’s blake criticism in his appreciation of bloom. recently published work on blake’s circle includes an issue devoted to the sculptor john gibson (1786–1866) in tate papers, the tate’s online research journal. studia swedenborgiana is now an online journal that publishes occasional articles. matthew rukgaber has considered swedenborg’s place in immanuel kant’s dreams of a spirit-seer. as might be expected, there is much work on mary wollstonecraft. two monographs look at her as a female philosopher and her impact after death as organized around the idea of the female philosopher and romantic feminism. in articles, somi ahn examines wollstonecraft’s original stories from real life, fiore sireci treats her literary criticism, and elizabeth fay considers blake’s and wollstonecraft’s depictions of bodies and the enlightenment subject. john bugg, editor of the recent joseph johnson letterbook, has an important article reexamining the question of johnson’s radicalism, and daisy hay looks at how home and homelessness figured in the johnson circle. regier’s exorbitant enlightenment might be well read alongside two articles on henry crabb robinson’s place as a mediator between england and germany. david clarke considers john hamilton mortimer’s portrait of the chinese artist chitqua, whose work, as chronicled by natasha eaton, was displayed at the 1770 royal academy exhibition. harriet kramer linkin examines hayley’s unsuccessful efforts to get mary tighe to publish an illustrated edition of her psyche with the cartoons of romney. appendix: historic editions and scholarship digitally available; reprints by on-demand publishers; questionable editions in last year’s checklist, i stated that i would forgo listing the output of on-demand publishing companies that reprint works whose copyrights have expired, many of which are digitally available on multiple platforms. these companies produce work of varying quality, typically with little or no editorial oversight. worse still, they often market this material as though it were new, sometimes without reference to the original author or publication date. as a result, those who look for the most recent work on blake on amazon or other e-retailers often find themselves awash in dated material in dubious editions. despite the shortcomings of these reprints, bentley began listing them in the checklist for 2010, with the following commentary: there is a flourishing industry of republishing works related to blake whose chief virtue is that they are (deservedly) out of print. the chief practitioners seem to be kessinger publishing, nabu press, and general books. note that the kessinger editions are mere digital reprints, with, as they admit, frequent defects. i have seen none of these reprints and confess my initial incredulity about some, such as the four separate publications of 18-44 pages into which emily hamblen’s on the minor prophecies of william blake (1930) has been divided. however, as each has an isbn assigned, i take it that they were not only advertised but published.g. e. bentley, jr., “william blake and his circle: a checklist of publications and discoveries in 2010,” blake 45.1 (summer 2011): 4. since bentley wrote these words, many other publishers have entered this sphere. the blog the digital reader describes well the claims, products, and business model of one of them: forgotten books supports a website where it claims to publish public domain works. it then puts adverts up next to the (poor quality) ebooks, and tries to entice you into signing up for a paid membership. while fb claims to have a half million titles in its catalog, there’s nothing here worth paying for. if you haven’t heard of this “publisher” before (i had not), forgotten books says that it was founded in 2007 with the goal of “rediscovering and republishing formerly out of print books” (it’s rediscovered 484,473 titles so far, and plans to discover another half million). to put it another way, forgotten books scrapes books uploaded to project gutenberg, and titles posted to google books, and republishes them under its own imprint.nate hoffelder, “forgotten books buys 500,000 isbns, makes bid for title of world’s largest spam and scam book publisher,” the digital reader 7 july 2015 (accessed 1 jan. 2019). given the number of titles, these publishers reprint works clearly without forethought or intention. e-books form another category, about which bentley wrote: “in january 2009 worldcat reported hundreds of blake ‘ebooks’ dating as far back as malkin (1806). i have usually ignored ‘ebooks’; the space to record them would be prodigious and the advance in knowledge trifling.”wbhc p. 31. this material, of course, can be produced even more easily than physical reprints, and the errors many of these titles contain can be particularly egregious. for example, a kindle edition of songs of innocence, and songs of experience [sic],<https://​www.​amazon.​com/​songs-​innocence-​experience-​william-​blake-​ebook/​dp/​b07l6wqd18>. which reproduces dante running from the three beasts on its cover, claims to come “with the autobiography of the author.” but instead of being the greatest blake find of the twenty-first century, the “autobiography” is a syntactically incoherent cribbing of wikipedia: “blake commenced engraving copies of drawings of greek antiquities purchased for him via his father, a exercise that became desired to actual drawing.” perhaps even more offensively, amazon’s “editorial reviews” cite the reviews of essick’s 2008 facsimile edition of songs. these include alexander s. gourlay’s rightfully high praise of essick’s book as “an intellectual and critical gem,”alexander s. gourlay, rev. of william blake, “songs of innocence and of experience,” ed. robert n. essick, blake 46.1 (summer 2012): par. 1. but these words should have no relationship to this kindle “edition” and others like it. with all these shortcomings recognized, on-demand publishers can provide a useful service by offering cheap reprints of out-of-print scholarly sources, while e-books and digital editions may be the forms in which some readers of blake encounter him. to square this circle, then, what i have done in the appendix is first to document (with links to the title pages) the open-source material on blake that these publishers likely used as the basis for their reprints.methodologically, i went back and forth between amazon and the internet archive, hathitrust, and google books, searching for “william blake” at each to find both reprints and the files they may be based on. no doubt there is far more material than i discovered, but that material will be documented in updates to the appendix. i have given these works the heading “historic editions,” and i have labeled each entry with its appropriate number from blake books or, if the work is recorded in blake books supplement, william blake and his circle, or another source, the relevant page number(s). if i could distinguish significant bibliographical differences between the digital copies available, i made more than one entry. oftentimes, the same copy would be available on several platforms, in which case i included the first i encountered. in my entries for the commercial book illustrations, i have also noted the holding institution (as far as it could be gleaned from either the platform or the information available in the images themselves), whether the images are in color or black and white, and whether the digital file is found on another platform. even though this scholarship is dated, there is much that is useful, including cunningham’s lives, each edition of gilchrist, damon’s philosophy and symbols, wilson’s life, lowery’s windows of the morning, and keynes and wolf’s william blake’s illuminated books. moreover, given the current interest in reception, there are many reasons to consult the material. secondly, beneath these entries, under the heading of “reprint(s),” i give the print and digital reprints i could find on amazon, including those listed previously by bentley. i have included the letter designations given by bentley in blake books,as seen, for example, in his listing of william michael rossetti’s the poetical works of william blake, lyrical and miscellaneous (bb #299): “a. the poetical works of william blake, lyrical and miscellaneous. ed., with a prefatory memoir, by william michael rossetti. london, 1874. … b. london, 1875. c. third edition. london, 1880. d. london, 1890. e. london, 1911. f. london, 1914.” but i have discontinued adding new letters, given the proliferation of these reprints. in some cases, moreover, i have found reprints published before those with bentley’s letter designations, creating a confusing system. where the cover of the reprint or the digital preview provided enough information, i listed the reprint under the file, edition, and/or volume it is based on. far too often, however, there was no preview available, or the digital preview linked to another edition altogether. for works published in several editions and/or volumes, it could often be difficult to determine which edition and volume had, in fact, been reprinted. if there is no indication in my listing about edition or volume, then it can be assumed that this information is unclear. for e-books, i have listed the amazon standard identification number (asin), and i have listed all the isbns offered by a publisher in a single year. for reprints of the commercial book illustrations, it was frequently difficult to judge if blake’s engravings were actually reprinted. even if a digital preview is available, the number of pages that can be viewed is very limited, and there are many digitally available copies that have had the prints removed. when blake’s engravings did not appear in all editions of a work (such as the triumphs of temper or the life … of william cowper), i have listed reprints of only the editions that blake worked on. when the edition of the reprint was not clear, i did not document it. when a university library or ecco is listed as the publisher of a reprint without any editorial attribution or date other than the date of the original publication, i assume that the title is a reprint that reproduces files taken from this institution, rather than one produced by it. by pairing the reprint with the digital material that it was likely based on, the list will, i hope, give scholars some sense of the material used in a reprint if they choose to purchase it or provide an alternative source if they do not. works reprinted by established presses (including dover) will continue to appear in the main checklist. finally, the third category is “questionable editions and reprints,” which includes items such as the kindle edition of the songs that i described above and other low-quality material. much of this work appears to have been lifted from the images available at the blake archive, its digital edition of erdman, or other digital versions of blake’s works circulating on the internet. if this work has any “scholarly” apparatus, it is commonly drawn from, if not directly cut and pasted from, wikipedia or other online encyclopedias or webpages. usually, this work is anonymous. if there is an editor or author listed, my practice will be to list the work in the main section of the checklist, without regard to the quality of the work, unless the person’s other publications suggest a pattern of exploitive commercial reprints and plagiarized scholarly material (for example, iacob adrian). i was sometimes uncertain if a title was a reprint or a new edition; in such a case, i usually listed it as a questionable edition. while the checklist has not, traditionally, made any distinction in the quality of a work on blake, the ability of publishers to produce these books mechanically in a way that floods the marketplace and overshadows the work of active scholars demands, i think, a division. bentley recorded 114 of these reprints or low-quality editions between 2010 and 2017 (not counting translations or works by blake’s circle); i have listed nearly 700 more. the appendix will be included among the bonus material on the blake website, where it will be periodically updated. the format of the appendix follows that of blake books, with no distinct category for digital resources. with few exceptions, i have not documented historic reviews, non-english work, or works on blake’s circle (outside of the commercial engravings). symbols § works preceded by a section mark are reported on secondhand authority. abbreviations asin amazon standard identification number bb g. e. bentley, jr., blake books (1977) bbs g. e. bentley, jr., blake books supplement (1995) blake blake/an illustrated quarterly <blake (year)> indicates the installment of “william blake and his circle” published in the year specified butlin martin butlin, the paintings and drawings of william blake (1981) diss. dissertation isbn international standard book number wbhc g. e. bentley, jr., william blake and his circle (2017) <http://​library.​vicu.​utoronto.​ca/​collections/​special_collections/​bentley_​blake_​collection/​blake_​circle/​2017/​william_​blake_​and_​his_​circle.​pdf> division i: william blake part i: blake’s writings section a: original editions, facsimiles, reprints, and translations the book of thel (1789) edition the book of thel: opera and graphic novel. intro. peter s. case. music by rolando macrini. graphic novel by jacopo maran. london: black earth books, 2017. isbn: 9781910740040. in addition to the graphic novel adaptation (in italian) and the sheet music for the opera (in english), it also includes black-and-white reproductions of copy d(?) (with a reduced color reproduction of the prints on the back cover) and an edited transcription of the text. a descriptive catalogue (1809) edition a descriptive catalogue [d]. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2018. the [first] book of urizen (1794) edition the first book of urizen [j]. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2018. jerusalem (c. 1804–20) editions § jerusalém. trans. saulo alencastre. são paulo: hedra, 2010. 11.5 x 17.5 cm., 256 pp. isbn: 9788577151554. in portuguese. jerusalem [a]. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2018. jerusalem [i]. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2018. jerusalem [mpi].“mpi” is a new abbreviation at the blake archive for “miscellaneous plates and impressions,” which describes “a work’s proofs, impressions in different states, posthumous impressions, and lifetime impressions not used or extracted from copies.” william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2018. the marriage of heaven and hell (1790–93?) edition § o casamento do céu e do inferno. trans. ivo barroso. são paulo: hedra, 2008. 11 x 17.6 cm., 96 pp. isbn: 9788577151059. in portuguese. milton (c. 1804–11) edition § milton. prologue, trans., and notes manuel portela. lisbon: antígona, 2009. 294 pp., with full reproduction of the work in illuminated printing. isbn: 9789726082095. in portuguese. notebook (c. 1787–1818) edition blake’s notebook. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2018. songs of innocence and of experience (1794) editions § cantigas da inocência e da experiência. trans. manuel portela. lisbon: antígona, 1994. 8o, 137 pp. isbn: 9726080835. <wbhc pp. 414-15> b. trans., intro., and notes manuel portela. 2nd ed. 2007. 220 pp. isbn: 9789726081937. in portuguese and english. § chansons d’innocence et d’expérience: songs of innocence and of experience. trans. armand sedaine, illus. sam jones. perros-guirec [france]: la tilv, 1996. 26 cm., 86 pp. isbn: 2909159191. in french. <wbhc p. 415> b. perros-guirec: anagrammes, 2007. 15 cm., 47 pp. isbn: 2847190481. the cover says “morceaux choisis,” i.e., selections. bilingual french-english edition. § canções da inocência e canções da experiência: os dois estados contrários da alma humana. trans., introductory essays, and commentary gilberto sorbini and weimar de carvalho. são paulo: disal, 2005. 157 pp. isbn: 8589533395. in portuguese, with facing english. § canções da inocência e da experiência: revelando os dois estados opostos da alma humana. trans., prologue, and notes mário alves coutinho and leonardo gonçalves. belo horizonte [brazil]: crisálida, 2005. 147 pp. isbn: 9788587961174. in portuguese. review steil, juliana. cadernos de tradução 1.15 (2005): 271-80. in portuguese. § canções da inocência e da experiência. trans. renato suttana. natal [brazil]: sol negro edições (coleção fúrias de orfeu), 2005. b. rev. ed. 2012 (coleção cinzas do sol). 13.5 x 20 cm., 128 pp., with color reproductions of frontispieces to songs of innocence and songs of innocence and of experience. in portuguese, with facing english. canções de inocência e de experiência. trans. jorge vaz de carvalho. lisbon: assírio & alvim, 2009. isbn: 9789723714579. b. 2nd ed. 2017. 12.5 x 18.7 cm., 128 pp. isbn: 9789723719888. in portuguese, with facing color reproductions of blake’s plates. visions of the daughters of albion (1793) editions § visões das filhas de albion. trans. márcio simões. natal [brazil]: sol negro edições (coleção cinzas do sol), 2012. 14 x 18 cm., 56 pp. in portuguese, with facing english for visions. visions of the daughters of albion [r]. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2018. visions of the daughters of albion [plate 6 from proof copy a]. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2018. visions of the daughters of albion [mpi]. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2018. section b: collections and selections antonielli, arianna, and mark nixon, eds. edwin john ellis’s and william butler yeats’s “the works of william blake: poetic, symbolic and critical”: a manuscript edition, with critical analysis. preface by warwick gould. florence: firenze university press, 2016. xvi, 746 pp. isbn: 9788864533407. bentley, g. e., jr., ed. william blake’s writings. 2 vols. oxford: clarendon press, 1978. <bbs p. 169>. b. 2018. digital ed. eisbn: (vol. 1) 9780191867736, (vol. 2) 9780191867743. § o casamento do céu e do inferno e outros escritos. trans., selection, and prologue alberto marsicano. porto alegre [brazil]: l&pm pocket plus, 2007. 144 pp. isbn: 9788525416285. in portuguese, with facing english. <wbhc p. 478> review steil, juliana. cadernos de tradução 2.22 (2008): 275-78. in portuguese. § o matrimônio do céu e do inferno. o livro de thel. trans. josé antônio arantes. são paulo: iluminuras, 1987. b. 2001. c. 2007. 14 x 21 cm., 88 pp. isbn: 9788573212792. in portuguese. otto, peter, ed. william blake: selected works. oxford: oxford university press, 2018. 8.5 x 5.4 in., xlix, 802 pp., 120 black-and-white illus. isbn: 9780199644230. § quatro visões memoráveis. trans. manuel portela. lisbon: antígona, 2006. 168 pp., 32 color illus. isbn: 9726081858. gathers the marriage of heaven and hell, visions of the daughters of albion, the first book of urizen, and the book of ahania. in portuguese, with facing english. § quesnel, richard. neuf vies pour un chat. lyon: à coeur joie, 2015. 30 cm., 73 pp., color illus. music score. “cycle of nine songs for a chorus, soloists, and an ensemble.” “includes texts by william blake and henri monnier.” in french. “the sick rose.” the death of the hat: a brief history of poetry in fifty objects. ed. paul b. janeczko, illus. chris raschka. 25 cm., 77 pp., illus. isbn: 9780763699680. somerville, ma: candlewick press, 2015. b. 2018. smirnov-sadovsky, d. [pseudonym of dmitri nikolaevich smirnov]. уильям блейк: “остров на луне” и ранние пророчества. william blake: “an island in the moon” and early prophecies. meladina book series (bilingual ed.). complete works of william blake (1757–1827), vol. 2. charleston: createspace independent publishing platform, 2016. isbn: 9781535123631. in russian and english. § tudo que vive é sagrado. william blake & d. h. lawrence. selected works by blake and lawrence. trans. and essays mário alves coutinho. 2nd ed. belo horizonte [brazil]: crisálida, 2010. 14 x 21 cm., 256 pp. isbn: 9788587961501. in portuguese.  “the tyger.” friday’s child: poems of suffering and redemption. ed. brian mountford. alresford, hampshire: christian alternative books, 2018. isbn: 9781785357411. 4-5. una visión del juicio final y otros textos. prologue and trans. ismael belda. madrid: estática libros, 2018. 13 x 20 cm., 130 pp. isbn: 9788494933219. contents: prólogo (ix-xxvi), catálogo descriptivo [a descriptive catalogue] (1-45), una visión del juicio final [a vision of the last judgment] (47-71), cartas [letters] (73-127). in spanish. wilkie, brian. blake’s thel and oothoon. see wilkie in part vi. part ii: reproductions of drawings and paintings section a: illustrations of individual authors dante, divine comedy (1824–27) editions william blake: los dibujos para la divina comedia de dante. ed. sebastian schütze and maria antonietta terzoli. cologne: taschen, 2014. in spanish. also available in german, english, french, and italian. <blake (2015, 2016)> b. william blake: les dessins pour la divine comédie de dante. 2017. in french. also available in english, german, italian, and spanish. <blake (2018)> review yoder, rick. first things: a monthly journal of religion and public life 282 (apr. 2018): 63. dante alighieri. the divine comedy. illus. william blake. ed. and intro. anna amari-parker. london: sirius-arcturus, 2017. isbn: 9781784289201. milton, john, paradise lost (1807, 1808, 1822) edition john milton. paradise lost. illus. william blake. london: arcturus, 2017. isbn: 9781784286453. reproduces the butts series. virgil, pastorals (1821) edition drawings for “the pastorals of virgil.” william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2018. new objects added: object 3: colinet and thenot, with shepherds’ crooks, leaning against trees. (butlin 769.3), c. 1820. object 6: “nor fox, nor wolf, nor rat among our sheep.” (butlin 769.7), c. 1820. object 7: sabrina’s silvery flood. (butlin 769.8), c. 1820. object 8: colinet passing a milestone. (butlin 769.9), c. 1820. object 11: first comparison, birds flying over a cornfield. (butlin 769.14), c. 1820. section b: collections and selections pencil sketches 1779–1790. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2018. includes: object 1: academy study: a naked youth seen from the side, perhaps robert blake. (butlin 71), c. 1779–80. object 2: academy study: standing male nude seen from behind. (butlin 72 recto), c. 1779–80. object 3: standing and seated(?) figures, possibly a drawing class in the royal academy. (butlin 72 verso), c. 1779–80. object 4: copy of the belvedere torso. (butlin 115 verso), c. 1779–80? object 5: part of a face. (butlin 178 verso), c. 1779. object 6: study for “glad day,” “albion rose,” or “the dance of albion.” (butlin 73 recto), c. 1780. object 7: study for “glad day,” “albion rose,” or “the dance of albion”: the same figure seen from behind. (butlin 73 verso), c. 1780. object 8: a warring angel. (butlin 78 recto), c. 1780. object 9: man with arms upraised, perhaps the resurrection. (butlin 78 verso), c. 1780. object 10: the resurrection of the dead. (butlin 79 recto), c. 1780–85. object 11: two sketches of a swordsman standing over his defeated opponent. (butlin 80 recto), c. 1780–85. object 12: two sketches of a swordsman standing over his defeated opponent. (butlin 80 verso), c. 1780–85. object 13: sketch of figures under a yoke. (butlin 82 verso), c. 1780–85. object 14: madonna and child enthroned and other sketches. (butlin 83), c. 1780–85. object 15: samuel presenting saul to the people. (butlin 117), c. 1780–85. object 16: rough sketch of two or three figures in a landscape. (butlin 123 verso), c. 1780–85. object 17: anatomical sketch of lower legs. (butlin 127 verso), c. 1780–85. object 18: old man sitting. (butlin 133 verso), c. 1780–85. object 19: sketch of two or three figures. (butlin 148 verso), c. 1780–85. object 20: a warrior in armour kneeling before a bearded elder. (butlin 154 verso), c. 1780. object 21: ugolino in prison. (butlin 207 recto), c. 1780–85. object 22: head of a man and small head of ugolino. (butlin 207 verso), c. 1780–85. object 23: a group of figures round a table and a seated old man. (butlin 223 verso), c. 1780. object 24: pestilence. (butwba 8),butwba is the blake archive designation for a work that would have appeared in butlin had it been known or known as attributable to blake. c. 1784. object 25: woman playing a harp. (butlin 76 verso), c. 1785. object 26: lower half of a woman playing a harp. (butlin 77 verso), c. 1785. object 27: a pastoral figure and other sketches. (butlin 81 recto), c. 1780–85. object 28: a harper and other figures. (butlin 81 verso), c. 1780–85. object 29: anubis. (butlin 87 verso), c. 1785–90. object 30: macbeth and the ghost of banquo. (butlin 154 recto), c. 1785. object 31: job’s wife and other sketches. (butlin 162 verso), c. 1785. object 32: alternative designs for commins’s “elegy.” (butwba 3), c. 1786. object 33: sketch for engraving of michelangelo after fuseli, on a drawing by fuseli. (butlin 172), c. 1788. object 34: sketch for “tiriel denouncing his sons and daughters.” (butlin 199 recto), c. 1789. object 35: sketch for “tiriel supporting the dying myratana” (?). (butlin 200 recto), c. 1789. object 36: sketch for “tiriel supporting the dying myratana” (?). (butlin 200 verso), c. 1789. object 37: sketches for “the book of thel”: thel and the clod of clay, and thel fleeing from the house of clay. (butlin 218 recto), c. 1789. object 38: sketch for “the book of thel,” plate 6. (butlin 218 verso), c. 1789. object 39: a standing and a recumbent figure, both with attendant genii, possibly for “the book of thel.” (butlin 219), c. 1789. object 40: an old man seated leaning on a pile of books; a young man approaches. (butlin 235 recto), c. 1789. object 41: a seated man. (butlin 235 verso), c. 1789. object 42: a female with a horse’s head, perhaps hippa. (butlin 88 verso), c. 1790? object 43: three figures in a decorative border. (butlin 220), c. 1790. part iii: commercial engravings section a: illustrations of individual authors hayley, william the life … of william cowper, esqr. (1803–04) plate 1 (frontispiece): a previously unrecorded prepublication proof state.see essick, “blake in the marketplace, 2017,” blake 51.4. location: essick collection. little tom the sailor (1800) previously unrecorded copy: hand colored by blake.see essick, “blake in the marketplace, 2017,” blake 51.4. location: deposited in the wren library, trinity college, cambridge. lavater, johann kaspar “rev. john caspar lavater” (c. 1787) previously unrecorded state: probably a working proof before the previously recorded first state.see essick, “blake in the marketplace, 2017,” blake 51.4. location: essick collection. part iv: bibliographies and catalogues section a: bibliographies [cross-listing articles with substantial bibliographical content] calè, luisa. “blake and exhibitions, 2017.” see blake 52.1 in part vi. myrone, martin. “blake in exhibition and on display, 1904–2014.” see visual culture in britain in part vi. ripley, wayne c., with fernando castanedo and hikari sato. “william blake and his circle: a checklist of scholarship in 2017.” see blake 52.1 in part vi. smirnov, dmitri nikolaevich. “my blake (part 1: in russia).” see blake 51.4 in part vi. smirnov, dmitri nikolaevich. “my blake (part 2: in england).” see blake 52.1 in part vi. whittaker, jason. “blake and music, 2017.” see blake 52.1 in part vi. section b: catalogues loukes, andrew, ed. william blake in sussex: visions of albion. the catalogue for the exhibition of the same name at petworth house, 13 january–25 march 2018. see loukes, william blake in sussex, in part vi. § sendak and blake: illustrating “songs of innocence.” see essick, “introduction,” in part vi. windle, john. blake blowout. san francisco: john windle, antiquarian bookseller, 2018. catalogue 69. windle, john. blake books: the commercial engravings of william blake. a tribute to gerald e. bentley, jr. san francisco: john windle, antiquarian bookseller, 2018. part v: digital resources the allen ginsberg project audio files and transcriptions of ginsberg’s 25 jan. 1979 class on blake at the naropa institute, which includes a discussion of the french revolution and many other works and issues related to blake. these are found under a series of posts entitled “the three estates (french revolution),” “background to the french revolution,” and three posts numbered “french revolution” 1-3. the title then shifts to “blake continues” in eleven posts numbered 1-11. hell’s printing press: the blog of the blake archive and blake quarterly [formerly the cynic sang]. editing and technical issues: robert rich. “the thornier sections of tiriel and what i found there.” 8 feb. 2018. a good explanation of how the tags <substspan>, <delspan>, and <addspan> are used to mark up heavily revised manuscripts like tiriel and the letters. mary learner. “do you see what i see?” 15 feb. 2018. a discussion of how her interpretation of america, copy o, object 6, differed from the preexisting image description. alison harper. “mirror-writing marginalia—how did it happen and what do we do with it?” 1 mar. 2018. an engagement with the problem of whether to and how to transcribe the reverse text on page 82 of lavater’s aphorisms on man that bled over, somehow, from page 135. rachael isom. “over-reading overwriting? a textual anomaly in songs of innocence, copy q.” 9 mar. 2018. an examination of the textual variation in blake’s overwriting of the last line of “night” in songs of innocence copy q, object 28. sarah jones. “serendipity and difficulty.” 15 mar. 2018. an update on the publication of the separate plates and a description of the editorial difficulties presented by the partly legible text on the national gallery of art’s impression of “a dream of thiralatha” (the cancelled plate d of america). oishani sengupta. “reconciling the four zoas and marginalia encoding schemas.” 23 mar. 2018. an explanation of why the <layer> tag won’t be used for the marginalia. robert rich. “a new guide to choice tags.” 4 apr. 2018. rich’s latest reflection on <choice> tags, which allow users to search diplomatic transcriptions even if blake’s words are misspelled, abbreviated, or split over two lines. camden burd. “from william seward to william blake—and back again: lessons learned from the william blake archive.” 3 may 2018. a description of how the blake archive’s tei practices could carry over to the seward family digital archive. robert rich. “the diffusion of blake letters.” 20 july 2018. an anticipation of the forthcoming publication of another 28 blake letters and a reflection on the number of letters, what constitutes a letter, what blake’s relationship to the letter must be to be included in the archive, and what to do with untraced letters. oishani sengupta. “a few (small) hiccups with the receipts.” 16 nov. 2018. an update on the “receipts project” and the problems with using a single bad [blake archive descriptor] with all the receipts. meaghan green. “the artist, the poet, and the proofreader.” 30 nov. 2018. on the combination of art and language when transcribing a receipt. teaching with the blake archive: eric loy. “teaching with the archive.” 12 apr. 2018. a description of using the blake archive to teach remediation to a digital media studies class. blakeana: katherine calvin. “urizen, bound and unbound.” 31 jan. 2018. a reflection on urizen in and outside of blake’s works. sarah jones. “blake in sussex.” 21 mar. 2018. information about matt wilmshurst’s film blake in sussex. matthew skwiat. “reimagining william blake in the great war.” 20 apr. 2018. an examination of blake’s influence on poets and artists of the world war i era. sarah jones. “q&a with roger whitson.” 6 sept. 2018. an interview with whitson on his @autoblake project. robert rich. “what i learned from blake’s account of the scofield incident.” 4 oct. 2018. a close reading of blake’s 16 aug. 1803 letter to thomas butts. marcie woehl. “‘i heard a devil curse’: blake and halloween.” 26 oct. 2018. reflections on blake and halloween, including the gambols of ghosts (1805). sarah jones. “that every child may joy to hear: a musical adaptation of ‘a poison tree.’” 7 dec. 2018. joseph a. thompson of astralingua on his setting of “a poison tree” for their album safe passage. kendall deboer. “visual poetics & blake’s afterlife: florine stettheimer.” 14 dec. 2018. parallels between blake and the american artist florine stettheimer (1871–1944). new youtube tutorials: eric loy. “finding and using digital erdman.” 15 feb. 2018. joey kingsley. “introduction to search.” 29 apr. 2018. eric loy. “object relation tabs.” 21 sept. 2018. sewell, elizabeth, and ann dickinson beal. a blake primer. the digital publication (2010?) by lehigh university press of a typescript (with manuscript corrections) from the 1970s. the work focuses on urizen and milton. as beal explains in her introduction, the original images have been replaced by color reproductions from various sources. whittaker, jason. zoamorphosis/the blake 2.0 blog: william blake in art, music, film, and literature. significant postings include: scholarship: “‘jerusalem’ as a media text.” 12 may 2018. an “edited version” of whittaker’s “blake and big data” talk delivered at the university of lisbon. “blake and data—searches and twitter, may 2018.” 12 june 2018. an analysis of the trends for blake on twitter and google search/news for may 2018. “blake and data: william blake on twitter and the web, june 2018.” 11 july 2018. an analysis of the trends for blake on twitter and google search/news for june 2018. “from the collection: blake’s progress—r. f. nelson.” 12 july 2018. discusses nelson’s science-fiction novel blake’s progress, in which william and catherine blake “struggle against the time traveller urizen throughout alternate universes.” “nelson suggests that she [catherine] was the real talent behind the partnership: as her husband worked on crazy illuminated books that no one wished to read, catherine produced the more commercially viable prints that kept body and soul together.” reviews: “review: philip pullman—la belle sauvage and daemon voices.” 10 jan. 2018. review of pullman’s la belle sauvage (the first volume of the book of dust) and his collection of essays, daemon voices, which includes “soft beulah’s night: william blake and vision” and “i must create a system: a moth’s-eye view of william blake.” “william blake in sussex: visions of albion—review.” 10 mar. 2018. a review of the exhibition. “review: red white & blake.” 15 apr. 2018. a review of will franken and scott ambrose’s documentary, red white & blake (2018). “review: her infernal descent #1.” 20 apr. 2018. a review of the comic book wherein william blake is the heroine’s spirit guide. “review: daniel kidane—songs of illumination.” 22 apr. 2018. a review of the composer’s songs of illumination, a new setting of three of blake’s poems, including “the land of dreams.” “review: fernand péna, ode to william blake, vol. 2; shawn colvin, ‘cradle song’; jóhann jóhannsson, ‘holy thursday.’” 9 june 2018. a review of three pieces: péna’s ode to william blake, volume 2, colvin’s “cradle song” on the album the starlighter, and jóhannsson’s “holy thursday” on the album englabörn & variations. “review: rock and romanticism, edited by james rovira.” 16 june 2018. “review: patti smith—the new jerusalem.” 15 july 2018. a review of smith’s collection. “reviews: john yau—the wild children of william blake; eric g. wilson—polaris ghost.” 21 july 2018. “review: visions of the daughters of urizon—what should be wild, julia fine.” 28 oct. 2018. a review of fine’s novel, which features “william blakely’s masterpiece, urizon [a house].” “review: olga tokarczuk, drive your plow over the bones of the dead.” 25 nov. 2018. a review of the english translation of the polish author’s novel: “drive your plow is one of the most blakean novels ever written, and i would number it among a small handful, including joyce cary’s the horse’s mouth, kenzaburo oe’s rouse up o young men of the new age! and j. g. ballard’s the unlimited dream company, that are suffused throughout with blake’s ideas and words.” “review: harriet stubbs—heaven & hell: the doors of perception.” 20 dec. 2018. a review of the debut album of the classical pianist harriet stubbs. blakeana: “apocalypse: the unveiling of william blake’s new gravestone.” 13 aug. 2018. “william blake: the man and the music.” 11 nov. 2018. links to whittaker’s radio programs: “the aim for each programme is to take either a work by blake and discuss how it has been adapted to music by various later composers and songwriters, or to concentrate on a single artist who set a number of blake’s works to music.” “astralingua: ‘a poison tree.’” 8 dec. 2018. joseph andrew thompson and anne rose thompson share the ways that blake has influenced their music. part vi: criticism, biography, and reviews a   b   c   d   e   f   g   h   i   j   k   l   m   o   p   r   s   t   v   w   y   z a ando, kiyoshi. “blake no meishi saidoku: ‘sanka jerusalem,’ ‘shinsei naru sugata,’ ‘muku no yocho,’ ‘mary’ (rereading blake’s celebrated poems: ‘jerusalem: hymn,’ ‘the divine image,’ ‘auguries of innocence,’ and ‘mary’).” kanto gakuin daigaku jimbun gakkai kiyo (bulletin of the society of humanities, kanto gakuin university) 137 (2017): 13-43. in japanese. 15 pls. andré, catherine m. “oppositional christian symbolism and salvation in blake’s america: a prophecy.” lumen 37 (2018): 199-213. apostolos-cappadona, d. rev. of visualising a sacred city: london, art and religion, ed. ben quash, aaron rosen, and chloë reddaway. see billingsley, “citizens.” b bailey, penny. “the aestheticization of korean suffering in the colonial period: a translation of yanagi sōetsu’s chōsen no bijutsu.” monumenta nipponica 73.1 (2018): 27-85. an introduction to and a translation of yanagi sōetsu’s chōsen no bijutsu that includes a substantial discussion of blake’s influence on critiques of japanese colonial expansion between 1919 and 1923. barry, caron. “yeats’s ideal others: william blake and dante alighieri.” new hibernia review 22.2 (summer 2018): 128-45. barush, kathryn r. “‘every age is a canterbury pilgrimage’: william blake as pilgrim and painter.” art and the sacred journey in britain, 1790–1850. abingdon: routledge, 2016. 99-146. <blake (2017)> in addition to this chapter, there are substantial discussions of blake in relationship to thomas stothard, the ancients, and devotional art. review mcevansoneya, philip. material religion 14.3 (2018): 429-31. baulch, david. “‘living form’: william blake’s gothic relations.” see bundock and effinger. bećirović, senad. see dedović-atilla, elma, and senad bećirović. bentley, g. e., jr. boondoggles: travels of a restless professor. victoria: friesenpress, 2018. isbn: 9781525513510. bentley’s last book and memoir. billingsley, naomi. “an ‘apostle of futurity’: william blake as herald of a universal religious worldview.” see visual culture in britain. billingsley, naomi. “citizens of ‘london’ as members of christ’s divine body in william blake’s biblical illustrations.” visualising a sacred city: london, art and religion. ed. ben quash, aaron rosen, and chloë reddaway. london: i. b. tauris & co. ltd., 2017. 89-101. <blake (2018)> reviews (of the book) apostolos-cappadona, d. choice 55.1 (sept. 2017): 57. ferguson, christopher. urban history 44.4 (nov. 2017): 718-20. spalding, frances. “holy ground: recognizing the spirituality of a capital city.” times literary supplement 9 june 2017: 10. billingsley, naomi. “‘on the stocks’: biblical watercolours from the felpham period.” see loukes, william blake in sussex. billingsley, naomi. “re-viewing william blake’s paradise regained (c. 1816–1820).” religion and the arts 22.1-2 (2018): 16-39. billingsley, naomi. the visionary art of william blake: christianity, romanticism and the pictorial imagination. london: i. b. tauris, 2018. xxiv, 246 pp. isbn: 9781784539832. billingsley, naomi. rev. of william blake and the age of aquarius, ed. stephen f. eisenman. see colin trodd, naomi billingsley, douglas field, and jason whittaker in visual culture in britain. black, michael. “‘wood is a pleasant thing to think about’: william blake and the hand-printed books of the hogarth press.” virginia woolf and the world of books: the centenary of the hogarth press. ed. nicola wilson and claire battershill. clemson, sc: clemson university press, 2018. 40-49. blake/an illustrated quarterly volume 51, number 4 (spring 2018) articles robert n. essick. “blake in the marketplace, 2017.” 8 pars., plus listings. dmitri nikolaevich smirnov. “my blake (part 1: in russia).” 19 pars., plus “blake set to music by dmitri n. smirnov: works written in russia.” review alexander s. gourlay. g. e. bentley, jr., thomas macklin (1752–1800), picture-publisher and patron: creator of the macklin bible (1791–1800). 7 pars. discussion keri davies. “‘two newly discovered advertisements’: a response to wayne c. ripley.” 19 pars. wayne c. ripley. “properly cowed: an answer to keri davies.” 17 pars. volume 52, number 1 (summer 2018) articles dmitri nikolaevich smirnov. “my blake (part 2: in england).” 25 pars., plus “blake set to music by dmitri n. smirnov: works written in england.” fernando castanedo. “a blake riddle: the diagonal pencil inscription in an island in the moon.” 25 pars. wayne c. ripley, with fernando castanedo and hikari sato. “william blake and his circle: a checklist of scholarship in 2017.” 18 pars., plus listings. luisa calè. “blake and exhibitions, 2017.” 1 par., plus listings. jason whittaker. “blake and music, 2017.” 3 pars., plus listings. volume 52, number 2 (fall 2018) article sheila a. spector. “reading jerusalem: the horizon of expectations.” 39 pars. builds on her “glorious incomprehensible”: the development of blake’s kabbalistic language and “wonders divine”: the development of blake’s kabbalistic myth “to provide the foundation for more coherent readings of blake’s final prophecy” (par. 2). reviews andrés ferrada aguilar. daniela picón, visiones de william blake: itinerarios de su recepción en los siglos xix y xx. 13 pars. luke walker. allen ginsberg, the complete songs of innocence and experience. 13 pars. luisa calè. william blake in sussex: visions of albion, petworth house (national trust), 13 january–25 march 2018; william blake in sussex: visions of albion, ed. andrew loukes. 11 pars. volume 52, number 3 (winter 2018–19) articles christopher z. hobson. “blake, paul, and sexual antinomianism.” 37 pars. “the development of blake’s ideas on sexuality and moral law centers on a sustained appropriative and revisionary, sometimes polemical, engagement with biblical texts” (par. 1). fernando castanedo. “paper and watermarks in blake’s an island in the moon.” 15 pars. a detailed description and comparative study of the watermarks. reviews john patrick james. christopher m. bundock, romantic prophecy and the resistance to historicism. 6 pars. sibylle erle. tracey emin and william blake in focus, tate liverpool, 16 september 2016–3 september 2017. 13 pars. jennifer davis michael. william blake and the age of aquarius, mary and leigh block museum of art, northwestern university, 23 september 2017–11 march 2018; william blake and the age of aquarius, ed. stephen f. eisenman. 16 pars. “a golgonoozic moment indeed” (par. 16). bourrier, karen. rev. of disabling romanticism, ed. michael bradshaw. see lorenz. bowden, betsy. “audiovisual oneness: the wife of bath by william blake (1809).” the wife of bath in afterlife: ballads to blake. bethlehem, pa: lehigh university press, 2017. 275-99. bowden connects blake’s depiction of the wife of bath to his portrayal of the whore of babylon, rahab, and mystery. boyle, david. jerusalem: england’s national anthem. kindle ed. sharpe books, 2018. asin: b07b44sgdc. boyles, helen. romanticism and methodism: the problem of religious enthusiasm. abingdon: routledge, 2017. <blake (2018)> review schofield, robin. literature and theology (20 oct. 2018): 8 pars. bruder, helen p., and tristanne connolly, eds. beastly blake. cham: palgrave macmillan-springer, 2018. isbn: 9783319897875. helen p. bruder and tristanne connolly. “introduction: ‘conversing with the animal forms of wisdom.’” 1-35. kurt fosso. “blake’s ‘horses of instruction.’” 37-63. anne milne. “blake’s ‘auguries of innocence’ as/in radical animal politics, c. 1800.” 65-85. elizabeth effinger. “in the company of wolves: blake’s lyca poems as political fable.” 87-110. diane piccitto. “apocalyptic visions, heroism, and intersections of the human and ‘the not human’ in blake’s milton.” 111-33. david worrall. “blake as shaman: the neuroscience of hallucinations and milton’s lark.” 135-52. luisa calè. “bestial metamorphoses: blake’s variations on transhuman change in dante’s hell.” 153-81. hayley flynn. “‘how sweet is the shepherds sweet lot’? sheep in blake’s designs.” 183-202. mark crosby. “‘train of elephants’: blake’s (un)tamed beasts and hayley’s animal ballads.” 203-23. sibylle erle. “from vampire to apollo: william blake’s ghosts of the flea, c. 1819–1820.” 225-52. bethan stevens. “news from the thames (blake! there’s something in the water).” 253-91. bruder, helen p., and tristanne connolly. “introduction: ‘conversing with the animal forms of wisdom.’” see bruder and connolly, beastly blake. bruder, helen p., and tristanne connolly, eds. sexy blake. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, 2013. <blake (2014)> review rovira, james. romantic circles (24 may 2016): 6 pars. brylowe, thora. romantic art in practice: cultural work and the sister arts, 1760–1820. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2019. isbn: 9781108426404. includes discussion of the portland vase, the hunts, john landseer, and the shakspeare gallery. bundock, christopher m. romantic prophecy and the resistance to historicism. toronto: university of toronto press, 2016. 23 cm., 261 pp. isbn: 9781442630703. references to blake throughout, intensifying in the last few chapters. review james, john patrick. see blake 52.3. bundock, chris, and elizabeth effinger. “introduction.” see bundock and effinger. bundock, chris, and elizabeth effinger, eds. william blake’s gothic imagination: bodies of horror. manchester: manchester university press, 2018. 312 pp. isbn: 9781526121943. chris bundock and elizabeth effinger. “introduction.” 1-29. david baulch. “‘living form’: william blake’s gothic relations.” 33-63. kiel shaub. “the horror of rahab: towards an aesthetic context for william blake’s ‘gothic’ form.” 64-84. claire colebrook. “the gothic sublime.” 85-106. jason whittaker. “dark angels: blake, milton, and lovecraft in ridley scott’s prometheus.” 109-28. lucy cogan. “william blake’s monstrous progeny: anatomy and the birth of horror in the [first] book of urizen.” 129-49. stephanie codsi. “blake’s gothic humour: the spectacle of dissection.” 150-62. peter otto. “the horrors of creation: globes, englobing powers, and blake’s archaeologies of the present.” 165-88. ana elena gonzález-treviño. “female spaces and the gothic imagination in the book of thel and visions of the daughters of albion.” 189-209. mark lussier. “the horrors of subjectivity/the jouissance of immanence.” 213-34. tristanne connolly. “‘terrible thunders’ and ‘enormous joys’: potency and degeneracy in blake’s visions and james graham’s celestial bed.” 235-64. burkett, andrew. romantic mediations: media theory and british romanticism. albany: state university of new york press, 2016. <blake (2017)> reviews haekel, ralf. bars review 51 (2018): 3 pars. purinton, marjean d. european romantic review 29.1 (2018): 134-39. sessler, randall. review 19 (8 dec. 2017): 12 pars. butler, marilyn. mapping mythologies: countercurrents in eighteenth-century british poetry and cultural history. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2015. <blake (2018)> reviews cook, daniel. review of english studies 67 (2016): 597-99. rawson, claude. common knowledge 24.1 (jan. 2018): 169-70. butlin, martin. “vision and frustration: blake’s sussex in the context of his life and art.” see loukes, william blake in sussex. c cahoon, claire. “the william blake archive’s pencil drawings highlight access for all.” triangle digital humanities network (14 dec. 2018): 4 pars. an appreciative review of the pencil drawings published at the blake archive. caines, michael. rev. of linda freedman, william blake and the myth of america: from the abolitionists to the counterculture. see freedman. calè, luisa. “bestial metamorphoses: blake’s variations on transhuman change in dante’s hell.” see bruder and connolly, beastly blake. calè, luisa. “blake and exhibitions, 2017.” see blake 52.1. calè, luisa. rev. of william blake in sussex: visions of albion, petworth house (national trust), 13 january–25 march 2018; william blake in sussex: visions of albion, ed. andrew loukes. see blake 52.2. carson, benjamin d. “how to read harold bloom and why.” cea critic 80.1 (mar. 2018): 3-20. some references to bloom’s criticism of blake. castanedo, fernando. “a blake riddle: the diagonal pencil inscription in an island in the moon.” see blake 52.1. castanedo, fernando. “paper and watermarks in blake’s an island in the moon.” see blake 52.3. clark, steve, and tristanne connolly, eds. british romanticism in european perspective: into the eurozone. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, 2015. isbn: 9781137461957. includes: tristanne connolly. “‘mistaken for natives of the soil’: translation and erasmus darwin’s loves of the plants.” 133-54. peter otto. “from the english to the french revolution: the body, the world and experience in locke’s essay, bentley’s ‘a prospect of vapourland’ and blake’s songs.” 210-29. diane piccitto. “blake and the european (pre)history of melodrama: beyond the borders of time and stage.” 193-209. reviews timár, andrea. romanticism 24.2 (2018): 216-18. watson, alex. essays in english romanticism 41 (2017): 134-39. clinton, daniel. “line and lineage: visual form in herman melville’s pierre and timoleon.” nineteenth-century literature 73.1 (2018): 1-29. considers melville’s idea of form and outline in relationship to blake, george cumberland, john flaxman, and john ruskin. codsi, stephanie. “blake’s gothic humour: the spectacle of dissection.” see bundock and effinger. cogan, lucy. “william blake’s monstrous progeny: anatomy and the birth of horror in the [first] book of urizen.” see bundock and effinger. colebrook, claire. “the gothic sublime.” see bundock and effinger. connolly, tristanne. “‘mistaken for natives of the soil’: translation and erasmus darwin’s loves of the plants.” see clark and connolly. connolly, tristanne. “‘terrible thunders’ and ‘enormous joys’: potency and degeneracy in blake’s visions and james graham’s celestial bed.” see bundock and effinger. connolly, tristanne. see also bruder and connolly, beastly blake and sexy blake. cook, daniel. rev. of marilyn butler, mapping mythologies: countercurrents in eighteenth-century british poetry and cultural history. see butler. cook, peter. the romantic legacy of charles dickens. cham: palgrave macmillan-springer, 2018. isbn: 9783319967905. includes discussion of blake. cooper, l. j. “william blake’s aesthetic reclamation: newton, newtonianism, and absolute space in the book of urizen and milton.” european romantic review 29.2 (2018): 247-69. corsino, thaís de sousa. “william blake: um ensaio biográfico.” a margem 13.2 (2017): 42-65. follows thompson: “o trabalho de e. p. thompson, por exemplo, é relevante por não apresentar uma interpretação simplista do poeta.” in portuguese (abstracts in portuguese and spanish). crafton, lisa. “‘tangle of matter and ghost’: u2, leonard cohen, and blakean romanticism.” see rovira, rock and romanticism. crosby, mark. “‘three years herculean labours at felpham’: blake’s sussex experience.” see loukes, william blake in sussex. crosby, mark. “‘train of elephants’: blake’s (un)tamed beasts and hayley’s animal ballads.” see bruder and connolly, beastly blake. d damrosch, leo. eternity’s sunrise: the imaginative world of william blake. new haven: yale university press, 2015. <blake (2016, 2017, 2018)> review harvey, grace. see visual culture in britain. da silva, suellen cordovil, and teófilo augusto da silva. “a tradução intersemiótica em frankenstein, de mary shelley, the little girl lost, de william blake, e a série the frankenstein chronicles [the intersemiotic translation in frankenstein by mary shelley, ‘the little girl lost’ by william blake, and the frankenstein chronicles series].” tabuleiro de letras 11.2 (dec. 2017): 140-57. in portuguese (abstract in portuguese and english). da silva, teófilo augusto. see da silva, suellen cordovil, and teófilo augusto da silva. davies, keri. “‘two newly discovered advertisements’: a response to wayne c. ripley.” see blake 51.4. § dedović-atilla, elma, and senad bećirović. “human image in blake’s poetry.” european researcher 9.4 (dec. 2018): 284-90. douglas, aileen. “printing the author’s hand.” work in hand: script, print, and writing, 1690–1840. oxford: oxford university press, 2017. isbn: 9780198789185. 123-51. while not exclusively about blake, the chapter has a substantial discussion of blake’s work in relationship to script and print. e earle, bo. “blake’s infant smile: facing materialism.” post-personal romanticism: democratic terror, prosthetic poetics, and the comedy of modern ethical life. columbus: ohio state university press, 2017. 35-62. <blake (2018)> review scheer, liz. review 19 (6 aug. 2018): 8 pars. “for teachers of romantic-era literature, earle supplies brilliant new ways to frame its relevance to contemporary life—a project that feels more urgent than ever in the university classroom” (par. 8). eaves, morris, robert n. essick, joseph viscomi, joseph fletcher, and michael fox. “the william blake archive.” wordsworth circle 49.2 (spring 2018): 94-95. a reprint of the march 2018 publication notice for visions copies r, mpi, a (plate 6), and additional drawings for thornton’s virgil. eaves, morris, robert n. essick, joseph viscomi, joseph fletcher, and michael fox. “william blake archive: blake’s notebook.” wordsworth circle 49.3 (summer 2018): 177-78. a reprint of the august 2018 publication notice for blake’s notebook. effinger, elizabeth. “in the company of wolves: blake’s lyca poems as political fable.” see bruder and connolly, beastly blake. effinger, elizabeth. see also bundock and effinger. eisenman, stephen f., ed. william blake and the age of aquarius. princeton: princeton university press and the block museum of art, 2017. <blake (2018)> reviews green, dominic. “what do walt whitman, jackson pollock and jimi hendrix have in common? they were all devotees of william blake—whose visionary voice continues to inspire each new generation.” spectator [london] 13 jan. 2018: 9 pars. “william blake and the age of aquarius is the most intriguing book on blake since marsha keith schuchard’s exposé of him as a swinger, why mrs blake cried (2006)” (par. 6). hoberman, j. artforum international 56.1 (sept. 2017): 164. michael, jennifer davis. see blake 52.3. mosher, michael. leonardo (feb. 2018): 10 pars. § rivero, albert. “cleansing the doors of perception.” times literary supplement 29 may 2018. trodd, colin, naomi billingsley, douglas field, and jason whittaker. see visual culture in britain. turner, nancy b. library journal 142.20 (dec. 2017): 97. el-hage, george nicolas. “william blake and kahlil gibran: poets of prophetic vision.” phd diss., state university of new york (binghamton), 1981. <bbs p. 461> b. william blake and kahlil gibran: poets of prophetic vision. louaize [lebanon]: ndu [notre dame university], 2002. <blake (2006)> c. § gibran kahlil gibran wa william blake: sha’ira al-ru’ya [gibran kahlil gibran and william blake: poets of prophetic vision]. createspace independent publishing platform, 2018. isbn: 9781729537268. in arabic. erle, sibylle. “blake, ludwig meidner and expressionism.” see visual culture in britain. erle, sibylle. “from vampire to apollo: william blake’s ghosts of the flea, c. 1819–1820.” see bruder and connolly, beastly blake. erle, sibylle. “‘was ward ich geboren mit anderm gesicht’: meidner und blake (‘o why was i born with a different face’: meidner and blake).” ludwig meidner: expressionismus, ekstase, exil/exile, ecstasy, expressionism]. ed. erik riedel and mirjam wenzel. berlin: gebr. mann verlag, 2018. isbn: 9783786127840. 233-56. in german and english. erle, sibylle. rev. of tracey emin and william blake in focus, tate liverpool, 16 september 2016–3 september 2017. see blake 52.3. essick, robert n. “blake in the marketplace, 2017.” see blake 51.4. § essick, robert n. “introduction.” sendak and blake: illustrating “songs of innocence.” new york: society of illustrators, 2018. an introduction to the catalogue for the exhibition of sendak’s work at the society of illustrators, 23 oct.–3 nov. 2018. f factor, jenny. “alicia ostriker, world-builder: the imaginary lover, green age, and other points of fusion with william blake.” see smith and enszer. fay, elizabeth. “blake’s wollstonecraft’s girls.” wordsworth circle 49.1 (winter 2018): 32-40. fender, katherine. rev. of saree makdisi, reading william blake. see makdisi. ferguson, christopher. rev. of visualising a sacred city: london, art and religion, ed. ben quash, aaron rosen, and chloë reddaway. see billingsley, “citizens.” ferrada aguilar, andrés. rev. of daniela picón, visiones de william blake: itinerarios de su recepción en los siglos xix y xx. see blake 52.2. field, douglas. rev. of william blake and the age of aquarius, ed. stephen f. eisenman. see colin trodd, naomi billingsley, douglas field, and jason whittaker in visual culture in britain. fischer, kevin. “imagination and experience: jacob boehme and william blake.” temenos academy review 20 (2017): 98-117. fletcher, joseph. see fox, michael, and joseph fletcher. flores, cristina. “william blake translated: the creation of blake’s literary fame in spain.” comparative critical studies 15 (supplement) (2018): 117-29. flynn, hayley. “‘how sweet is the shepherds sweet lot’? sheep in blake’s designs.” see bruder and connolly, beastly blake. flynn, hayley. “the influence of felpham: blake’s pastoral experience.” see loukes, william blake in sussex. fosso, kurt. “blake’s ‘horses of instruction.’” see bruder and connolly, beastly blake. foster, hal. hal foster’s “the marriage of heaven and hell” by william blake. london: marginalia books, 2018. isbn: 9781999798178. publishes the annotations to the marriage of heaven and hell by art critic and historian hal foster. review rivero, albert. “cleansing the doors of perception.” times literary supplement 29 may 2018. fox, michael, and joseph fletcher. “‘all relate to art’: the william blake archive and its web of relations.” digital humanities quarterly 12.1 (2018): 51 pars. franta, andrew. rev. of lily gurton-wachter, watchwords: romanticism and the poetics of attention. see gurton-wachter. freedman, linda. william blake and the myth of america: from the abolitionists to the counterculture. oxford: oxford university press, 2018. isbn: 9780198813279. review caines, michael. “a natural ally.” times literary supplement 8 june 2018: 13 pars. freeman, kathryn s. a guide to the cosmology of william blake. abingdon: routledge, 2017. <blake (2017)> review schaffer, talia. “recent studies in the nineteenth century.” studies in english literature 1500–1900 57.4 (autumn 2017): 887-922. touches on freeman (898). g ghosal, sukriti. “space, border, identity: through a poetic lens.” border, globalization and identity. ed. sukanta das et al. newcastle upon tyne: cambridge scholars, 2018. ix, 222 pp. isbn: 9781527503601. 12-22. slight mention of blake in a wider reflection on borders. gilchrist, alexander. the life of william blake. ed. and intro. w. graham robertson. london: john lane, 1907. <bb #1680c, wbhc pp. 2061-62> … mineola, ny: dover publications, 2017. isbn: 9780486400051. a reprint (first reprinted by dover in 1998). goldstein, amanda jo. “william blake and the time of ontogeny.” systems of life: biopolitics, economics, and literature on the cusp of modernity. ed. richard a. barney and warren montag. new york: fordham university press, 2018. isbn: 9780823281725. 162-200. gonzález-treviño, ana elena. “female spaces and the gothic imagination in the book of thel and visions of the daughters of albion.” see bundock and effinger. gourlay, alexander s. rev. of g. e. bentley, jr., thomas macklin (1752–1800), picture-publisher and patron: creator of the macklin bible (1791–1800). see blake 51.4. green, dominic. rev. of william blake and the age of aquarius, ed. stephen f. eisenman. see eisenman. gurton-wachter, lily. watchwords: romanticism and the poetics of attention. stanford: stanford university press, 2016. <blake (2017)> review franta, andrew. bars review 51 (2018): 4 pars. h hadley, karen. “blake’s visions of the daughters of albion and the biopolitical unconscious.” pmla 133.2 (mar. 2018): 314-28. haekel, ralf. rev. of andrew burkett, romantic mediations: media theory and british romanticism. see burkett. harvey, grace. rev. of leo damrosch, eternity’s sunrise: the imaginative world of william blake. see visual culture in britain. harvey, jonathan lynn. “william blake: from antinomian rebel to prophet of healing and wholeness.” see swedenborg in division ii. helsinger, elizabeth. “what is this thing called song?” modern language quarterly 79.4 (2018): 397-419. discusses the impact of thomas percy, joseph ritson, and blake on the pre-raphaelites and yeats. hoberman, j. rev. of william blake and the age of aquarius, ed. stephen f. eisenman. see eisenman. hobson, christopher z. “blake, paul, and sexual antinomianism.” see blake 52.3. hopkins, david. “william blake and british surrealism: humphrey jennings, the impact of machines and the case for dada.” see visual culture in britain. i irven, donovan. “joyce and heidegger: appropriations of the past toward a new philosophy of transcendence.” college literature 45.3 (summer 2018): 487-515. a study of aristotle’s and blake’s influence on stephen dedalus in ulysses: “like two cartoon angels on either shoulder, aristotle and william blake serve as competitive models for stephen” (490). j james, john patrick. rev. of christopher m. bundock, romantic prophecy and the resistance to historicism. see blake 52.3. jesse, jennifer g. rev. of g. a. rosso, the religion of empire: political theology in blake’s prophetic symbolism. see rosso. joy, louise. “the laughing child: children’s poetry and the comic mode.” the aesthetics of children’s poetry: a study of children’s verse in english. ed. katherine wakely-mulroney and louise joy. abingdon: routledge, 2018. 24 cm., xi, 264 pp., illus. isbn: 9781472438317. 111-26. blake also figures slightly in the introduction and other chapters. juengel, scott j. “william blake’s enemies.” studies in english literature 1500–1900 58.3 (summer 2018): 703-29. with substantial reference to lavater, this is more an explication of blake’s theory of enemies than a historical consideration of individual enemies. k kazin, cathrael. “alfred kazin and poetry.” society 55.6 (dec. 2018): 529-30. a reflection on kazin by his daughter that references his thought on blake. kerr, jonathan. “‘immense worlds’: blake’s infinite human form.” “natures of alterity in british romanticism.” phd diss., university of toronto, 2017. 29-60. kerr, jonathan. “‘immense worlds’: blake’s infinite human form.” philological quarterly 97.1 (winter 2018): 55-72. khalip, jacques. “the last animal at the end of the world.” european romantic review 29.3 (2018): 321-32. the ghost of a flea. l lara, mathusha. sam., and k. vijila. “juxtaposing the metaphorical depiction of kamala das’ ‘words’ and william blake’s ‘a poison tree.’” language in india 18.11 (nov. 2018): 131-34. kamala surrayya das is “an indian english poet, novelist and a short story writer … born in kerala, 1934” (132). leveton, jacob henry. “william blake’s חנוך (“enoch”) lithograph (1806–7): producing the theme of self-annihilation, resisting the politics of the napoleonic wars.” essays in romanticism 25.2 (2018): 161-86. li, guijun. see luo, jun, and guijun li. livingston, ira. “blake magic.” magic science religion. leiden: brill, 2018. isbn: 9789004357105. 138-63. lobdell, nicole. “digging at the roots: martha redbone’s the garden of love: songs of william blake.” see rovira, rock and romanticism. lorenz, matt. “blakean wonder and the unfallen tharmas: health, wholeness, and holarchy in the four zoas.” disabling romanticism. ed. michael bradshaw. london: palgrave macmillan, 2016. 127-45. <blake (2017)> reviews (of the book) bourrier, karen. review 19 (29 oct. 2017): 9 pars. “one of the challenges of disability studies has been figures of speech that make the absence of particular senses signify a lack of knowledge or intelligence, as in ‘he is blind/deaf to our concerns.’ as literary critics we cannot ignore these metaphors, but we also need to acknowledge how problematic they are. matt lorenz does so with sensitivity even while unpacking blake’s metaphoric use of blindness in the four zoas” (par. 6). schaffer, talia. “recent studies in the nineteenth century.” studies in english literature 1500–1900 57.4 (autumn 2017): 887-922. for bradshaw, see 897. wang, fuson. european romantic review 29.4 (2018): 551-56. loukes, andrew. “catalogue.” see loukes, william blake in sussex. loukes, andrew. “foreword and acknowledgements.” see loukes, william blake in sussex. loukes, andrew. “‘under a fortunate star’: the petworth blakes in context.” see loukes, william blake in sussex. loukes, andrew, ed. william blake in sussex: visions of albion. london: paul holberton publishing, 2018. 21 cm., 120 pp., illus. isbn: 9781911300298. the catalogue for the exhibition. andrew loukes. “foreword and acknowledgements.” 7. martin butlin. “vision and frustration: blake’s sussex in the context of his life and art.” 8-19. mark crosby. “‘three years herculean labours at felpham’: blake’s sussex experience.” 20-31. naomi billingsley. “‘on the stocks’: biblical watercolours from the felpham period.” 32-45. andrew loukes. “‘under a fortunate star’: the petworth blakes in context.” 46-61. hayley flynn. “the influence of felpham: blake’s pastoral experience.” 62-75. andrew loukes. “catalogue.” 76-118. review calè, luisa. see blake 52.2. luo, jun, and guijun li. “on the accusative weapon of the poetic image of london in william blake’s “london” against the brutalities of english realities.” advances in literary study 6.2 (apr. 2018): 69-108. lussier, mark. “affective textualities: restructuring subjectivity in blake’s marriage.” romanticism and affect studies. ed. seth t. reno. romantic circles (may 2018): 30 pars. lussier, mark. “the horrors of subjectivity/the jouissance of immanence.” see bundock and effinger. m main, peter. a fervent mind: the life of ruthven todd. stirling: lomax press, 2018. isbn: 9780992916060. a biography of ruthven todd that also includes a selection of his published and unpublished poetry. makdisi, saree. reading william blake. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2015. <blake (2016, 2018)> review fender, katherine. bars review 51 (2018): 6 pars. mcevansoneya, philip. rev. of kathryn r. barush, art and the sacred journey in britain, 1790–1850. see barush. michael, jennifer davis. rev. of william blake and the age of aquarius, mary and leigh block museum of art, northwestern university, 23 september 2017–11 march 2018; william blake and the age of aquarius, ed. stephen f. eisenman. see blake 52.3. milne, anne. “blake’s ‘auguries of innocence’ as/in radical animal politics, c. 1800.” see bruder and connolly, beastly blake. miyamachi, seiichi. “honyaku william blake: the poems by nicholas marsh [translation, william blake: the poems by nicholas marsh].” sapporo gakuin daigaku jimbun gakkai kiyo (journal of the society of humanities, sapporo gakuin university) 104 (2018): 79-109. in japanese. translation of chapter 6. for his translations of other chapters, see <blake (2014, 2015, 2018)>. montoya, alicia c. “des chenilles aux papillons: une scène primitive de la littérature de jeunesse au xviiie siècle.” jeux de mots—enjeux littéraires, de françois rabelais à richard millet. ed. annelies schulte nordholt and paul j. smith. leiden: brill, 2018. 241-60. isbn: 9789004352629. in french. uses blake’s frontispiece to the gates of paradise as visual evidence for eighteenth-century views on education as metamorphosis. mosher, michael. rev. of william blake and the age of aquarius, ed. stephen f. eisenman. see eisenman. myrone, martin. “blake in exhibition and on display, 1904–2014.” see visual culture in britain. o onodera, reiko. “soshoku no yorokobi—william blake to chusei shahon [the delight of ornament—william blake and illuminated manuscripts in the middle ages].” yuko arakawa, reiko onodera, kazusa kume, akiko kato, and masayuki tanaka. design to decoration—william blake kara edward m. kauffer e (designatio et ornamentum: ex william blake ad edward m. kauffer) [design and decoration—from william blake to edward m. kauffer].a note from hikari sato: the book has a title in latin, which is shown in parentheses. it does not have the title in english. i have chosen “decoration” in the english translation because they use the transliteration of the english word “decoration” in the title in japanese. split between “decoration” and “ornamentum,” i followed their japanese title. tokyo: arina shobo, 2018. 13-50. in japanese. 14 pls. o’regan, keith. “towards a productive aesthetics: history and now-time in blake and brecht.” phd diss., york university, 2017. otto, peter. “from the english to the french revolution: the body, the world and experience in locke’s essay, bentley’s ‘a prospect of vapourland’ and blake’s songs.” see clark and connolly. otto, peter. “the horrors of creation: globes, englobing powers, and blake’s archaeologies of the present.” see bundock and effinger. p paice, rosamund. “william blake and the napoleon factor: rethinking empire and the laocoön separate plate.” romanticism on the net 65 (2014–15): 38 pars. paley, morton. “john beer on william blake.” coleridge bulletin 51 (summer 2018): 4-5. panda, aditya kumar. william blake: a preliminary stylistic study. riga: lambert academic publishing, 2016. isbn: 9783659863103. paris-popa, andreea. “breaking the contract between god and the visual-literary fusion: illuminated manuscripts, william blake and the graphic novel.” american, british and canadian studies 30.1 (june 2018): 133-52. in english (published in romania). phillips, michael. “‘printing in the infernal method’: william blake’s method of ‘illuminated printing.’” interfaces: image—texte—language 39 (2018): 30 pars. piccitto, diane. “apocalyptic visions, heroism, and intersections of the human and ‘the not human’ in blake’s milton.” see bruder and connolly, beastly blake. piccitto, diane. “blake and the european (pre)history of melodrama: beyond the borders of time and stage.” see clark and connolly. picón, daniela. visiones de william blake: itinerarios de su recepción en los siglos xix y xx. madrid: calambur editorial, 2017. <blake (2018)> review ferrada aguilar, andrés. see blake 52.2. procházka, martin. “senses against proportions: visuality and vision in the czech modernist reception of william blake.” hradec králové journal of anglophone studies 4.2 (2017): 12-23. r radford, andrew. mary butts and british neo-romanticism: the enchantment of place. london: bloomsbury, 2014. <blake (2016)> review wiseman, sam. bars review 51 (2018): 4 pars. rawson, claude. rev. of marilyn butler, mapping mythologies: countercurrents in eighteenth-century british poetry and cultural history. see butler. regier, alexander. exorbitant enlightenment: blake, hamann, and anglo-german constellations. oxford: oxford university press, 2018. isbn: 9780198827122. ripley, wayne c. “properly cowed: an answer to keri davies.” see blake 51.4. ripley, wayne c., with fernando castanedo and hikari sato. “william blake and his circle: a checklist of scholarship in 2017.” see blake 52.1. rivero, albert. rev. of hal foster’s “the marriage of heaven and hell” by william blake; william blake and the age of aquarius, ed. stephen f. eisenman. see foster and eisenman. romaine, james. “themes of paradise in contemporary british and american art.” religion and the arts 22.1-2 (2018): 218-28. slight reference to blake. root, douglas t. “william blake: the romantic alternative.” see rovira, rock and romanticism. rosso, g. a. the religion of empire: political theology in blake’s prophetic symbolism. columbus: ohio state university press, 2016. <blake (2017)> reviews jesse, jennifer g. reading religion (30 aug. 2017): 6 pars. schaffer, talia. “recent studies in the nineteenth century.” studies in english literature 1500–1900 57.4 (autumn 2017): 887-922. touches on rosso (898). rovira, james. “introduction: rock and romanticism.” see rovira, rock and romanticism. rovira, james. “the moravian origins of kierkegaard’s and blake’s socratic literature.” kierkegaard, literature, and the arts. ed. eric ziolkowski. evanston: northwestern university press, 2018. 239-60. a fascinating look at the parallels between kierkegaard’s and blake’s moravian heritage and its impact on their conception of socrates. rovira, james. rev. of sexy blake, ed. helen p. bruder and tristanne connolly. see bruder and connolly, sexy blake. rovira, james, ed. rock and romanticism: blake, wordsworth, and rock from dylan to u2. lanham: lexington books, 2018. 24 cm., xxiv, 174 pp. isbn: 9781498553834. substantial discussion of blake found in: james rovira. “introduction: rock and romanticism.” xi-xxiv. luke walker. “tangled up in blake: the triangular relationship among dylan, blake, and the beats.” 1-18. douglas t. root. “william blake: the romantic alternative.” 35-50. nicole lobdell. “digging at the roots: martha redbone’s the garden of love: songs of william blake.” 51-64. lisa crafton. “‘tangle of matter and ghost’: u2, leonard cohen, and blakean romanticism.” 65-82. gary l. tandy. “‘when the light that’s lost within us reaches the sky’: jackson browne’s romantic vision.” 95-110. review whittaker, jason. see zoamorphosis in part v. § rowland, christopher. “anticipating postsecularity.” the routledge handbook of postsecularity. ed. justin beaumont. abingdon: routledge, 2018. isbn: 9781138234147. examines how gerrard winstanley and william blake anticipated “elements of postsecularity today” (abstract). russell, corinna. “free play revisited: the poetics of repetition in blake’s songs of innocence.” the aesthetics of children’s poetry: a study of children’s verse in english. ed. katherine wakely-mulroney and louise joy. abingdon: routledge, 2018. 24 cm., xi, 264 pp., illus. isbn: 9781472438317. 47-58. blake also figures slightly in the introduction and other chapters. ryu, son-moo. “from god as gift to the giving subject: william blake and god talk.” journal of english language and literature 63.4 (dec. 2017): 709-27. s salahi moghaddam, sohila. “daghoghi in mathnavi and blake in the marriage of heaven and hell.” comparative literature research journal 6.1 (2018): 84-107. in arabic (abstract in english). sanders, michael. “god save the ecchoing green: the uses of imaginary nostalgia in william blake and ray davies.” see visual culture in britain. santos, andrio j. r. dos. “allen ginsberg e as visões de william blake.” travessias interativas 14 (2017): 187-206. in portuguese (abstracts in portuguese and english). santos, andrio j. r. dos. “william blake e a questão do mal na literatura contemporânea.” todas as musas 9.2 (jan.–june 2018): 226-38. in portuguese (abstracts in portuguese and english). saylor, kevin m. “future founding: the romantic transformation of epic.” transgressive romanticism. ed. larry h. peer. newcastle upon tyne: cambridge scholars publishing, 2018. viii, 207 pp. isbn: 9781527503618. 115-32. schaffer, talia. rev. of disabling romanticism, ed. michael bradshaw; kathryn s. freeman, a guide to the cosmology of william blake; g. a. rosso, the religion of empire: political theology in blake’s prophetic symbolism. see lorenz, freeman, and rosso. scheer, liz. rev. of bo earle, post-personal romanticism: democratic terror, prosthetic poetics, and the comedy of modern ethical life. see earle. schofield, robin. rev. of helen boyles, romanticism and methodism: the problem of religious enthusiasm. see boyles. sessler, randall. rev. of andrew burkett, romantic mediations: media theory and british romanticism. see burkett. sha, richard c. “william blake and the neurological imagination: romantic science, nerves, and the emergent self.” imagination and science in romanticism. baltimore: john hopkins university press, 2018. isbn: 9781421425788. 96-143. shaub, kiel. “the horror of rahab: towards an aesthetic context for william blake’s ‘gothic’ form.” see bundock and effinger. smirnov, dmitri nikolaevich. “my blake (part 1: in russia).” see blake 51.4. smirnov, dmitri nikolaevich. “my blake (part 2: in england).” see blake 52.1. smith, martha nell, and julie r. enszer, eds. everywoman her own theology: on the poetry of alicia suskin ostriker. ann arbor: university of michigan press, 2018. isbn: 9780472124404. a collection of essays on ostriker, with many references to blake throughout, most directly in: jenny factor. “alicia ostriker, world-builder: the imaginary lover, green age, and other points of fusion with william blake.” 23-39. soler, jordi. “la pesadilla de william blake.” el país [madrid] 16 june 2018: 13. in spanish. a full-page article on how blake predicted the coming of an age where machines would also debase communications, as in today’s social media. spalding, frances. rev. of visualising a sacred city: london, art and religion, ed. ben quash, aaron rosen, and chloë reddaway. see billingsley, “citizens.” spector, sheila a. “reading jerusalem: the horizon of expectations.” see blake 52.2. steil, juliana. rev. of canções da inocência e da experiência: revelando os dois estados opostos da alma humana, trans., prologue, and notes mário alves coutinho and leonardo gonçalves. see songs of innocence and of experience in part i, section a. steil, juliana. rev. of o casamento do céu e do inferno e outros escritos, trans., selection, and prologue alberto marsicano. see o casamento do céu e do inferno e outros escritos in part i, section b. steil, juliana. “traduções de william blake no brasil / translations of the works of william blake in brazil.” revista letras raras 7.2 (2018): 58-66. in portuguese (abstracts in portuguese and english). stein, sarah b. “the jewish marriage contract in blake’s job.” wordsworth circle 49.1 (winter 2018): 41-46. stevens, bethan. “news from the thames (blake! there’s something in the water).” see bruder and connolly, beastly blake. stevens, david. “teaching and learning from william blake through the lens of critical literacy.” international perspectives on the teaching of literature in schools: global principles and practices. ed. andrew goodwyn et al. abingdon: routledge, 2018. 24 cm., xvi, 248 pp. isbn: 9781138227194. 153-63. sultan, muthanna mohammed. “colonialism revisited: reading in selected poems of the nineteenth century.” al-ustath 224.1 (2018): 165-78. in english (abstracts in english and arabic). a reading of blake’s, coleridge’s, tennyson’s, and kipling’s views of colonialism, focusing on, for blake, “the tyger” and “the little black boy.” blake “does his best in revealing and portraying the status quo of his colonial society” (170). t tandy, gary l. “‘when the light that’s lost within us reaches the sky’: jackson browne’s romantic vision.” see rovira, rock and romanticism. timár, andrea. rev. of british romanticism in european perspective: into the eurozone, ed. steve clark and tristanne connolly. see clark and connolly. topor, ruxanda. “mad prophets in a mad world: william blake’s apocalyptic vision and the revival of british millenarianism.” the sense and sensibility of madness: disrupting normalcy in literature and the arts. ed. doreen bauschke and anna klambauer. leiden: brill, 2018. isbn: 9789004382374. 64-86. trodd, colin. “the energy man: blake, nietzscheanism and cultural criticism in britain, 1890–1920.” see visual culture in britain. trodd, colin, naomi billingsley, douglas field, and jason whittaker. rev. of william blake and the age of aquarius, ed. stephen f. eisenman. see visual culture in britain. trodd, colin, and jason whittaker. “introduction: william blake: the man from the future.” see visual culture in britain. turner, nancy b. rev. of william blake and the age of aquarius, ed. stephen f. eisenman. see eisenman. v van houdt, jennifer a. “there can be no final apocalypse.” “delenda est: world and belief in apocalyptic thought.” phd diss., university of washington, 2018. 127-69. largely a reading of the marriage of heaven and hell and jerusalem. vassiliadis, stefanos. an analysis of william blake’s “the marriage of heaven and hell.” munich: grin verlag, 2010. asin: b013vni46o. an e-publication of the author’s ma thesis from the university of hannover. vijila, k. see lara, mathusha. sam., and k. vijila. viscomi, joseph. “on not reading william blake’s large color prints.” wordsworth circle 49.1 (winter 2018): 3-9. visual culture in britain  volume 19, issue 3 (2018) “william blake: the man from the future?,” ed. colin trodd and jason whittaker colin trodd and jason whittaker. “introduction: william blake: the man from the future.” 285-88. colin trodd. “the energy man: blake, nietzscheanism and cultural criticism in britain, 1890–1920.” 289-304. david hopkins. “william blake and british surrealism: humphrey jennings, the impact of machines and the case for dada.” 305-20. naomi billingsley. “an ‘apostle of futurity’: william blake as herald of a universal religious worldview.” 321-34. sibylle erle. “blake, ludwig meidner and expressionism.” 335-49. michael sanders. “god save the ecchoing green: the uses of imaginary nostalgia in william blake and ray davies.” 350-64. martin myrone. “blake in exhibition and on display, 1904–2014.” 365-79. jason whittaker. “blake and the new jerusalem: art and english nationalism into the twenty-first century.” 380-92. reviews colin trodd, naomi billingsley, douglas field, and jason whittaker. william blake and the age of aquarius, ed. stephen f. eisenman. 393-400. grace harvey. leo damrosch, eternity’s sunrise: the imaginative world of william blake. 404-06. w walker, luke. rev. of allen ginsberg, the complete songs of innocence and experience. see blake 52.2. walker, luke. “tangled up in blake: the triangular relationship among dylan, blake, and the beats.” see rovira, rock and romanticism. wang, fuson. rev. of disabling romanticism, ed. michael bradshaw. see lorenz. watson, alex. rev. of british romanticism in european perspective: into the eurozone, ed. steve clark and tristanne connolly. see clark and connolly. § whitney, julian. “the mistrials of reading: reimagining law in british literature, 1787–1819.” phd diss., emory university, 2018. includes “readings of william blake” (abstract). whittaker, jason. “blake and music, 2017.” see blake 52.1. whittaker, jason. “blake and the new jerusalem: art and english nationalism into the twenty-first century.” see visual culture in britain. whittaker, jason. “dark angels: blake, milton, and lovecraft in ridley scott’s prometheus.” see bundock and effinger. whittaker, jason. rev. of rock and romanticism, ed. james rovira.” see zoamorphosis in part v. whittaker, jason. rev. of william blake and the age of aquarius, ed. stephen f. eisenman. see colin trodd, naomi billingsley, douglas field, and jason whittaker in visual culture in britain. whittaker, jason. rev. of john yau, the wild children of william blake. see zoamorphosis in part v. whittaker, jason. see also trodd, colin, and jason whittaker. whittaker, jason. see also zoamorphosis in part v. wilkie, brian. blake’s thel and oothoon. victoria: els, 1990. <bbs p. 678> b. victoria: els, 2018. it includes black-and-white images of thel copy g and visions copy p, with facing transcriptions. willis, patricia c. “‘contrarieties equally true’: marianne moore and william blake.” twenty-first century marianne moore: essays from a critical renaissance. ed. elizabeth gregory and stacy carson hubbard. cham: palgrave macmillan-springer, 2018. isbn: 9783319651095. 89-111. wiseman, sam. rev. of andrew radford, mary butts and british neo-romanticism: the enchantment of place. see radford. wittig, glenn r. thomas j. j. altizer, america’s 20th-century religious heretic: an analytic bibliography of the writings of altizer and the death of god theme. new york: peter lang, 2018. isbn: 9781433150845. the book both examines altizer’s relationship to blake and documents his writing on blake and its reception. worrall, david. “blake as shaman: the neuroscience of hallucinations and milton’s lark.” see bruder and connolly, beastly blake. y yamaguchi, eriko. “‘kodaijin tachi’ kara raphael zempa, soshite d. g. rossetti e: a. gilchrist william blake no shogai wo baikai toshite (the ancients, the pre-raphaelites, and d. g. rossetti: a relationship mediated by alexander gilchrist’s life of william blake, ‘pictor ignotus’ ).” ronso gendaigo gendaibunka (journal of modern languages and cultures) 19 (2018): 53-86. in japanese. 7 pls. of blake works, with 13 pls. of samuel palmer, 2 of edward calvert, 1 of george richmond, and some others. yau, john. the wild children of william blake. new york: autonomedia books, 2017. <blake (2018)> reviews colvin, rob. bomb (17 jan. 2018): 8 pars. whittaker, jason. see zoamorphosis in part v. yoder, rick. rev. of william blake: the drawings for dante’s divine comedy, ed. sebastian schütze and maria antonietta terzoli. see dante in part ii. youansamouth, edward. “‘two congenial beings of another sphere’: peter sterry as a theological precursor to william blake.” dphil diss., university of oxford, 2018. yukevich, henry quentin. “‘prophets of violence’: religious enthusiasm and natural disaster in the works of heinrich von kleist and william blake.” “apocalyptic vision and philosophical optimism in eighteenth-century literature and philosophy.” phd diss., indiana university of pennsylvania, 2018. 194-228. also contains a chapter on richard brothers and joanna southcott. z zino, dominique. “the invisible hand of the lyric: emily dickinson’s hypermediated manuscripts and the debate over genre.” textual cultures 10.1 (2016): 1-36. includes a substantial discussion of blake’s american reception and its impact on dickinson’s own: “by looking at the complexities dickinson’s first editor and critics faced when classifying her work, we can see the way the allusions to blake were both efforts at lending a material and informational body to dickinson’s texts, while also burying them deeper in a lyric tradition” (25). division ii: william blake’s circle the ancients barush, kathryn r. “pilgrimage and the art of ‘the ancients.’” art and the sacred journey in britain, 1790–1850. abingdon: routledge, 2016. isbn: 9781472466624. 147-99. yamaguchi, eriko. “‘kodaijin tachi’ kara raphael zempa, soshite d. g. rossetti e: a. gilchrist william blake no shogai wo baikai toshite (the ancients, the pre-raphaelites, and d. g. rossetti: a relationship mediated by alexander gilchrist’s life of william blake, ‘pictor ignotus’).” see yamaguchi in division i, part vi. barry, james (1741–1806) history painter barush, kathryn r. “the catholic case for art and religion: james barry, david wilkie, and ann agnes trail.” art and the sacred journey in britain, 1790–1850. abingdon: routledge, 2016. isbn: 9781472466624. 62-77. subsection of chapter 2, “saints and symbols: pilgrimage and the theology of ‘things.’” böhme, jakob (1575–1624) mystic andersson, bo, lucinda martin, leigh penman, and andrew weeks, eds. jacob böhme and his world. leiden: brill, 2019. isbn: 9789004385092. while largely on böhme’s seventeenth-century contexts, the collection does include essays on paracelsus, the kabbalah, and his english translator john sparrow (1615–70). cumberland, george (1754–1848) dilettante, polymath, friend of blake clinton, daniel. “line and lineage: visual form in herman melville’s pierre and timoleon.” see clinton in division i, part vi. cunningham, allan (1784–1842) biographer turnbull, michael t. r. b. “bishop john geddes, robert burns and dr. alexander geddes.” innes review 67.1 (2016): 55-61. explores the relationship between john geddes and robert burns and cunningham’s confusion of john and alexander geddes. darwin, erasmus (1731–1802) scientist and poet edition darwin, erasmus. the botanic garden. illus. william blake et al. ed. adam komisaruk and allison dushane. 2 vols. abingdon: routledge, 2017. <blake (2018)> review fulford, tim. european romantic review 29.1 (2018): 131-34. criticism connolly, tristanne. “‘mistaken for natives of the soil’: translation and erasmus darwin’s loves of the plants.” see clark and connolly in division i, part vi. porter, dahlia. “epistemic images and vital nature: darwin’s botanic garden as image text book.” european romantic review 29.3 (2018): 295-308. douce, francis (1757–1834) antiquarian, blake collector barush, kathryn r. “mendicants and manuscripts: the antiquarian revival of pilgrimage texts and objects, with a focus on the collection of francis douce.” art and the sacred journey in britain, 1790–1850. abingdon: routledge, 2016. isbn: 9781472466624. 19-55. flaxman, john (1755–1826) sculptor, friend of blake clinton, daniel. “line and lineage: visual form in herman melville’s pierre and timoleon.” see clinton in division i, part vi. füssli, johann heinrich (1741–1825) painter, friend of blake lupton, julia reinhard. “patience on a monument: prophetic time in shakespeare, fuseli, and michelangelo.” political theology 19.7 (2018): 653-61. porter, dahlia. “epistemic images and vital nature: darwin’s botanic garden as image text book.” see darwin. regier, alexander. “crossing channels: fuseli, hamann, and lavater.” exorbitant enlightenment: blake, hamann, and anglo-german constellations. oxford: oxford university press, 2018. isbn: 9780198827122. 93-124. tambar, jaspreet s. “hazlitt and the tradition of the characteristic.” studies in philology 115.4 (fall 2018): 835-56. claims hazlitt is an heir of “the swiss-german theory of the characteristic” (abstract). gibson, john (1786–1866) sculptor tate papers number 29 (spring 2018) includes: susanna avery-quash. “john gibson’s friendship with charles eastlake and its importance in securing gibson’s reputation in london.” 44 pars. roberto c. ferrari and m. g. sullivan. “‘men thinking, and women tranquil’: john gibson’s portraiture practice.” 46 pars. anna frasca-rath. “via della fontanella 4: john gibson’s workshop in rome.” 30 pars. alison yarrington. “john gibson and the anglo-italian sculpture market in rome: letters, sketches and marble.” 26 pars. hayley, william (1745–1820) man of letters and patron leporati, matthew. “ann yearsley’s ‘brutus’ and the evangelical epic poem.” studies in romanticism 57.2 (summer 2018): 265-300. includes a discussion of hayley’s an essay on epic poetry (1782). linkin, harriet kramer. “mary tighe’s psyche, william hayley’s psyche, and george romney’s cupid and psyche.” romanticism 24.1 (apr. 2018): 1-21. johnson, joseph (1738–1809) bookseller, blake’s sometime employer edition bugg, john, ed. the joseph johnson letterbook. oxford: oxford university press, 2016. <blake (2017)> reviews johnston, kenneth r. romanticism 24.1 (apr. 2018): 99-101. nielsen, wendy c. european romantic review 29.1 (2018): 110-15. criticism bugg, john. “how radical was joseph johnson and why does radicalism matter?” studies in romanticism 57.2 (summer 2018): 173-95. hay, daisy. “‘wanderers without a home’: houses and houselessness in the johnson circle.” european romantic review 29.5 (2018): 557-78. lizars, william home (1788–1859) painter, engraver wiles, kate. “the principal mountains and rivers of the world, 1829.” history today 67.5 (may 2017): 4-5. macklin, thomas (d. 1800) picture publisher bentley, g. e., jr. thomas macklin (1752–1800), picture-publisher and patron: creator of the macklin bible (1791–1800). lewiston, ny: edwin mellen press, 2016. <blake (2017)> review gourlay, alexander s. see blake 51.4 in division i, part vi. marsh, john (1752–1828) musician editions patrick, david, and john collins, eds. george frideric handel: select airs and choruses taken from his oratorios, adapted by john marsh. n.p.: fitzjohn music publications, n.d. patrick, david, and john collins, eds. john marsh: a third set of voluntaries. n.p.: fitzjohn music publications, n.d. review matthew-walker, robert. organ 385 (summer 2018): 50. patrick, david, and john collins, eds. john marsh: twenty voluntaries (set 2). n.p.: fitzjohn music publications, n.d. in addition to the sheet music, it includes introduction, notes, and marsh’s own preface. review watkins, duncan. “reviews of organ music, december 2017.” royal school of church music [webpage that collects reviews from their print journals] dec. 2017. “these 20 wide-ranging pieces, dating from the last decade of the 18th century, are well worth exploring.” criticism shuker, david. “lost and found.” organists’ review (sept. 2016): 38-41. gives information on a chamber organ owned by marsh and built in 1783. moravians § kröger, rüdiger. “zinzendorf und die reformation.” unitas fratrum 76 (2018): 9-23. in german. peucker, paul. a time of sifting: mystical marriage and the crisis of moravian piety in the eighteenth century. university park: pennsylvania state university press, 2015. <blake (2018)> review douma, kelly. journal of religious history 42.2 (2018): 295-96. “peucker is himself actively reshaping the moravian church archives in a way that will provide a more complete explanation for the realignment of the moravian church and the loss of their original pietist leanings” (296). regier, alexander. “the polyglot moravians in eighteenth-century london.” exorbitant enlightenment: blake, hamann, and anglo-german constellations. oxford: oxford university press, 2018. isbn: 9780198827122. 151-66. mortimer, john hamilton (1740–79) painter clarke, david. “chinese visitors to 18th-century britain and their contribution to its cultural and intellectual life.” curtis’s botantical magazine 34.4 (dec. 2017): 498-521. includes a discussion of mortimer’s portrait of the chinese artist chitqua (c. 1771). for more on chitqua, see eaton under royal academy of arts. palmer, samuel (1805–81) painter, friend of blake nixon, lance. “icons of the land: places of worship on the road to iron nation.” touchstone: a journal of mere christianity 31.4 (july–aug. 2018): 28-31. stuart, kathleen. “samuel palmer, john martin, and john sell cotman: visions of paradise in the eye of the beholder?” religion and the arts 22.1-2 (2018): 40-57. reynolds, joshua (1723–92) painter fay, jessica. “sketching and the acquisition of taste: wordsworth, reynolds, and sir george beaumont.” review of english studies 69 (sept. 2018): 706-24. hunter, matthew c. “the cunning of sir sloshua: reynolds, the sea, and risk.” grey room 69 (fall 2017): 80-107. mcpherson, heather. “tragic pallor and siddons.” eighteenth-century studies 48.4 (summer 2015): 479-502. includes a discussion of siddons’s portrait by reynolds and his effort representing her skin’s pallor. o’quinn, daniel. “sir joshua reynolds, decolonization, and the pictorial dialectics of crisis.” studies in english literature 1500–1900 58.3 (summer 2018): 673-701. robinson, henry crabb (1775–1867) writer hunnekuhl, philipp. “constituting knowledge: german literature and philosophy between coleridge and crabb robinson.” european romantic review 28.1 (2017): 51-63. vigus, james. “‘you surely don’t wish to cure anglomania with anglophobia.’” angermion 9.1 (dec. 2016): 43-70. an examination of robinson’s role as mediator between england and germany. romney, george (1734–1802) painter linkin, harriet kramer. “mary tighe’s psyche, william hayley’s psyche, and george romney’s cupid and psyche.” see linkin under hayley. royal academy of arts eaton, natasha. “glimmer of empire: academy, ‘alchemy,’ exotic.” eighteenth-century studies 52.1 (fall 2018): 13-18. discusses the idea of exhibiting empire through the example of the work of the chinese artist chitqua, which was shown at the royal academy’s exhibition of 1770. stedman, john gabriel (1744–97) soldier, writer, friend of blake bressler, malkah. “resistant specimens: caribbean nature and slavery in eighteenth-century british literature.” phd diss., fordham university, 2018. includes a chapter on stedman’s narrative of a five years’ expedition. stothard, thomas (1755–1834) painter barush, kathryn r. “mendicants and manuscripts: the antiquarian revival of pilgrimage texts and objects, with a focus on the collection of francis douce.” see barush under douce. swedenborg, emanuel (1688–1772) mystic rukgaber, matthew. “immaterial spirits and the reform of first philosophy: the compatibility of kant’s pre-critical metaphysics with the arguments in dreams of a spirit-seer.” journal of the history of ideas 79.3 (july 2018): 363-83. studia swedenborgianaback issues of the print journal (published between jan. 1974 and dec. 2005) are available digitally at <http://​www.​baysidechurch.​org/​studia>. [2018?] includes: colin amato. “swedenborg’s puzzling codicil on islam and muslims.” 22 pars. jonathan lynn harvey. “william blake: from antinomian rebel to prophet of healing and wholeness.” 242 pars. francesca mccrossan and james f. lawrence. “the first george bush: philosopher, minister, and swedenborgian ancestor of american presidents.” 17 pars. an essay on the swedenborgian george bush (1796–1859), the great grand-uncle of george h. w. bush. tatham, charles heathcote (1772–1842) architect doyle, noreen. “the earliest known uses of ‘l'égyptomanie’/‘egyptomania’ in french and english.” journal of ancient egyptian interconnections 8 (mar. 2016): 122-25. wollstonecraft, mary (1759–97) author, radical, known in blake’s circle ahn, somi. “the metropolis and female citizenship in mary wollstonecraft’s original stories from real life.” women’s writing 25.1 (2018): 21-34. mcinnes, andrew. wollstonecraft’s ghost: the fate of the female philosopher in the romantic period. abingdon: routledge, 2017. isbn: 9781138696334. review nielsen, wendy c. european romantic review 29.1 (2018): 110-15. reuter, martina. “jean-jacques rousseau and mary wollstonecraft on the imagination.” british journal for the history of philosophy 25.6 (dec. 2017): 1138-60. sireci, fiore. “‘writers who have rendered women objects of pity’: mary wollstonecraft’s literary criticism in the analytical review and a vindication of the rights of woman.” journal of the history of ideas 79.2 (apr. 2018): 243-65. temple, kathryn. “heart of agitation: mary wollstonecraft, emotion, and legal subjectivity.” eighteenth century 58.3 (fall 2017): 371-82. weiss, deborah. the female philosopher and her afterlives: mary wollstonecraft, the british novel, and the transformations of feminism, 1796–1811. cham: palgrave macmillan-springer, 2017. isbn: 9783319553627. review: andrew m. cooper, a bastard kind of reasoning: william blake and geometry andrew m. cooper. a bastard kind of reasoning: william blake and geometry. albany: suny press, 2023. xvi + 323 pp. $99.00, hardcover; also available in paperback and as an e-book. reviewed by sharon choe sharon choe (sharon.choe@hum.ku.dk) is a marie curie postdoctoral fellow at the university of copenhagen, where she researches representations of norse death and ritual in eighteenth-century british literature, and british cultural politics. her doctoral research examined blake’s engagement with old norse myth and culture in his development of a disabled body politic. her broad interests include the medical humanities, disability studies, and political theories. andrew cooper’s a bastard kind of reasoning: william blake and geometry is a thorough and complex examination of the illuminated books alongside geometry, enlightenment science, and phenomenology. it claims that “blake did not simply reject newton, geometry, and science” (2) and positions itself alongside donald ault’s visionary physics: blake’s response to newton (1974). cooper, with his provocatively tongue-in-cheek title, is eager to differentiate his views from ault’s and offers “a less binary, more interinvolved, yin-yang or blakean-contrary view of the relation of eternity to three-dimensional existence” (12). his main argument hinges on the suggestion that geometry is in fact “cosmology,” a term that will be familiar to scholars working on the illuminated books. cooper establishes that “blake’s engagements with geometry were not incidental but key to how he understood the workings of the universe” (6), and that prophecy is a transmission of a geometric vision (235). the opening discussion on blake’s newton print acknowledges the general consensus that blake is anti-newtonian, before boldly shifting gears. while musing over the design’s paradoxical nature, cooper claims that newton reveals a post-newtonian mindset. the rest of the book extends into a steady revision of the illuminated books with enlightenment (meta)physics and math. of course, a bastard kind of reasoning does not aim to cover the breadth of blake’s repertoire, but what cooper offers is a thought-provoking—​and sometimes challenging—​reconsideration of blake’s relationship with science, and its impact on his visionary universe. geometry as cosmology this is perhaps the most interesting claim, and it is indeed the driving force of the argument. to support this assertion, cooper centers most of his discussion around space-time and a careful reassessment of perception. while the majority of the book pivots around enlightenment science—​thus further contextualizing blake’s imagery—​cooper does not shy away from using modern mathematical theorems and hypotheses to conceptualize the paradoxes within blake’s universe. for example, he reexamines the frontispiece to visions of the daughters of albion in light of the klein bottle—​a higher-dimensional möbius strip—​and phenomenology to conclude that the design is illusory and representative of “how the natural order exceeds all human conceptual systems for imagining it, so allowing new concepts to emerge, inexhaustibly” (19). in some ways, what a bastard kind of reasoning does is not to offer brand new revelations about the source material. what it provides is a scientifically driven guide to these poems and their designs; in an incisive manner, cooper recenters discussions concerning the (im)materiality of blake’s vision around scientific hypotheses. as such, the book moves from poem to poem, trope to trope, to confirm that “blake himself … wanted to exploit the imaginative reach of formal abstractions to generate a model of how the physical world extends beyond ordinary human sense” (41). there is a nice balance between close readings of the illuminated books, summaries of eighteenth-century scientific output, and mathematics. the novelty of cooper’s discussion lies in the way that he deftly transitions between all three, with the help of visuals. a bastard kind of reasoning is heavily illustrated throughout, as one might expect, but the smattering of mathematical illustrations between blake’s designs is a pleasant surprise. they alleviate the sheer volume of scientific terminology and theory that directs the argument and, as a result, they clarify the connections between geometry and blake’s universe building. geometrical perception and visions a question that a bastard kind of reasoning tries to answer is “how, if the perception of matter’s immateriality is natural and innocent … it somehow gave way to the prevailing belief of matter’s impenetrable hardness and solidity” (82). discussions on perception and vision augment the overarching argument about space-time, as demonstrated in cooper’s examination of blake’s mundane soul. here, he suggests that the mundane soul is exploited to develop a cosmology of space-time that is plastic—​where creation, fall, and apocalypse are ongoing events. he further relates this to prophecy and the way that albion “houses the prophet’s reluctant acknowledgment of the past’s necessary drag on the present, without which the future would lack any real connection to time and passage” (186). the book gently builds on each chapter to push our understanding of how blake collapses time, space, and perception. while the density of the points can be daunting, the argument is always clear: blake gleans from an array of sources a fourth dimension that can “impart depth, space, and freedom of motion to the rigid euclidean geometry of the new science” (117). cooper does not just consider perception and vision within the illuminated books; he also addresses our own critical purview as scholars. he invites readers to separate their analysis of blake from the sociopolitical issues that many scholars are prone to rely on. while he does not deny the importance of historical context, he boldly states that we should not cling to the historicist underpinnings to blake’s work. in doing so, he draws attention once more to the book’s raison d’être: visualizing blake’s fourth-dimensional vision. cooper is careful not to return to the structuralism and systemization of blake’s works, most visible in northrop frye and s. foster damon, but he suggests that thinking about space-time as a physical field will naturally contribute to our understanding of how blake’s work addresses sociopolitical issues (20-21). this is a refreshing take on the relevance of blake’s prophetic power across history, which, he argues, is due to blake’s ability to think about inheritors—​which we, in turn, can use to consider his vision within present-day analogues (21). the book’s argument, then, is also a self-reflexive exercise where we confront our own perceptions of blake so that we may independently see his vision. a bastard kind of reasoning takes some of the contradictions found within the illuminated books and offers an answer through geometry. the title itself is a playful double entendre of what one might find within the book: a reconstituted view of blake and enlightenment that begins with prior work on the subject and then ends with an alternative analysis that seeks to unite reason and imagination within blake’s work. cooper reinforces what is already known, such as blake’s knowledge of joseph priestley and erasmus darwin through joseph johnson, before revising blake’s world through ideas like fractals (61-83), cartesian space (128-32), neoplatonism (chapter 5), and the works of r. j. boscovich, george berkeley, and david hartley, to name a few. the book is a valuable addition to the field and would be of interest to many who work on blake, science, and theories of objectivity, like phenomenology. the depth of knowledge that it demands may make it a challenging read for those who are not theoretically inclined, so it is perhaps not an introductory text to blake and science. nevertheless, a bastard kind of reasoning is an engaging read and a surprisingly succinct exploration of how enlightenment science and geometry contribute to blake’s vision of the universe. review: william blake’s “the ancient britons” seen through the visions of young and old germans william blake’s the ancient britons: a book and a website (now vanished) reviewed arbeitsgruppe ancient britons/​ancient britons team: clemens baiker, hendrik fleck, dimitra gatsiou, dana kast, mizi lee, janosch mueller, theresa mueller, julius naegele, alexander roob, and ansgar schwarzer. william blake’s “ the ancient britons”: erscheinungen eines verschollenen bildes/​appearances of a vanished picture. hamburg: textem-verlag, 2022. 120 pp. €20, hard copy; pdf (open access) at <https://​doi.​org/​10.​11588/​artdok.​00007875>. reviewed by sibylle erle sibylle erle (serle@lincoln.ac.uk), frsa, fhea, is a visiting scholar at the university of lincoln and a researcher at the university of lisbon. she is the author of blake, lavater and physiognomy (2010) and she co-edited with morton paley the two-volume reception of william blake in europe (2019). she also co-edited “science, technology and the senses” (2008), panoramas, 1787–​1900: texts and contexts (2012), and “monsters: interdisciplinary explorations in monstrosity” (2019–​20), and edited “blake in europe” (2022). sibylle is chair of the blake society, and edits vala: the journal of the blake society. she is the editorial director of global blake and the book review editor of blake. apart from blake and reception, her current research is on monsters and death in literature written for young readers. while robert southey thought that the ancient britons was a massive disappointment (“one of his worst pictures”),g. e. bentley, jr., blake records, 2nd ed. (new haven: yale university press, 2004) [hereafter br(2)] 300. for seymour stocker kirkup, blake’s fame rested entirely on this painting (14 x 10 feet). reported as lost not long after the exhibition of 1809, it may have been accidentally destroyed. for kirkup, however, the picture persisted through memory: “it made so great an impression on me that i made a drawing of it fifty years afterwards” (br[2] 294). the sketch demonstrated the “idea of the composition of the heroes of camlan” (br[2] 289)—​that is, the three survivors of arthur’s last battle, famous for its bloodshed. these heroes were welsh warriors, described by blake as the “most beautiful,” “most strong,” and “most ugly” in a descriptive catalogue (e 542). they fought alongside arthur until the bitter end. the battle, which is legendary, as relevant historical facts have been difficult to ascertain, played an important role in the formation of the british nation. kirkup passed his sketch on to algernon charles swinburne, who was working on william blake: a critical essay (1868).in 1866, when writing to swinburne, kirkup said: “i thought it his master-piece as an academic work—​i was then a student … i now think it too greek—​i would have avoided the hercules & apollo at least in the heads—​he did so in the action of the figures as you will see” (br[2] 289). kirkup may have been thinking of sir jeffery chaucer and the nine and twenty pilgrims on their journey to canterbury, another prominent picture from the 1809 exhibition, in which blake definitely used the heads but not the figures of hercules and apollo, mentioned in the description of the ancient britons (see e 544). utterly convinced of the accuracy of his reconstruction, he told william michael rossetti: “i can answer for the truth of my sketch, as will be proved if the picture is ever found” (br[2] 292). unfortunately, the sketch has not survived either. g. e. bentley, jr., who gathered accounts of the lost painting, tells us that blake was worried about the reception of his exhibition. in the advertisement, for example, he implores viewers to keep an open mind. they will not see “a madman’s scrawls”: “i demand of them to do me the justice to examine before they decide” (e 528). nonetheless, robert hunt wrote a damning review for the examiner, singling out the ancient britons because of its unusual coloration: this picture is a complete caricature: one of the bards is singing to his harp in the pangs of death; and though the colouring of the flesh is exactly like hung beef, the artist modestly observes—​“the flush of health in flesh … cannot be like the sickly daubs of titian or rubens.” (br[2] 284-85) hunt quotes from blake’s catalogue, and the sarcasm is unmistakable. bentley argues that hunt took issue with the description rather than the painting (285fn). kirkup, by comparison, seems to have been unaware of blake’s description (289fn). put simply, he was awed by what he saw. there is no evidence that he visited the exhibition; he claimed that the painting etched itself into his mind and left an indelible trace. the trail of the ancient britons goes cold in wales. little is known about the painting’s provenance; the assumption is that william owen pughe commissioned it, and took it sometime after the exhibition was dismounted.g. e. bentley, jr., the stranger from paradise: a biography of william blake (new haven: yale university press, 2001) 329. it can be imagined only through the description in a descriptive catalogue, written to accompany the exhibition. the ancient britons is a painting that has a special relationship with the narratives about blake’s artistic achievements. that it is inaccessible is intriguing; it is as if this painting were hiding indefinitely, avoiding scrutinizing eyes. it is everything and nothing. if we were to measure blake against his collected works, we could never establish with certainty how great an artist he really was. kirkup, perhaps responding to southey or hunt, felt compelled not only to talk about the painting but also to re-create it on paper. would our notions of blake change, if we were able to view it? given blake’s color experiments, what condition would it be in, had it survived, rolled up, in a dark corner of a welsh attic or cellar? most likely, what would be left of this massive painting would no longer resemble kirkup’s sketch, should it ever be rediscovered. yet kirkup’s singling out of the ancient britons resonates with the goals of the ancient britons team, as well as morris eaves’s views on editing. eaves uses this painting as a test case and speculates about its representation in the blake archive : “is it helpful to provide a proportional space for the missing object and embed it in the verbal-visual web of scholarly apparatus that supports other works in the archive”?morris eaves, “the editorial void: notes toward a study of oblivion,” huntington library quarterly 80.3 (autumn 2017): 517-38 (on 535). this review explores the most recent artistic and scholarly responses to blake’s lost painting in order to argue that such preoccupations, in eaves’s sense, enable us to understand blake, as well as ourselves, better: “we human beings are, utterly, editorial beings. our inclinations for sorting the more from the less relevant, for obsessive pattern recognition, and for the decision-making processes fed by such inclinations, are the constituents of core editorial acts” (eaves 531). why does the ancient britons appeal? perhaps the attraction is the fundamental disagreement about the artistic merit of the largest picture that blake ever painted. the artworks created by the ancient britons team are the result of critically informed readings and imaginings of the painting as it is described by blake in a descriptive catalogue. these works were first exhibited in stuttgart from 29 october 2020, with the exhibition temporarily closed in november and extended to 4 december. its centerpiece, the ancient britons, is heralded a success: the team “has succeeded to re-imagine this largest of blake’s works, using old and new artistic techniques.” the announcement acknowledges the challenges of lockdown, but only to align the situation with blake’s: “with covid-19, the exhibition will now take place under similarly poor conditions as the original presentation. everyone who will not see it will contribute to its success.”see <https://​www.​abk-​stuttgart.​de/​aktuell/​veranstaltung/​the-​ancient-​britons-​die-​erscheinung-​eines-​verschollenen-​bilds-​the-​ancient-​britons-​the-​appearance-​of-​a-​vanished-​picture.​html>. the project of the ancient britons team was in three parts. after the exhibition, presented as an ironic inversion of blake’s failure to connect with his audiences in 1809, came the website, launched in july 2021, with images, clips, and texts that were hard to read on account of dark color combinations.<https://​ancientbritons.​org> (no longer active when checked in january 2024). the exercise culminated in a book, which synthesizes the materials and experiences shared via the website and also frames them with a scholarly essay. with this combination, or rather succession, of materials, the team offers what eaves has termed “authentic editorial responses that might at least create useful opportunities to ponder once again what it takes to transmit information from generation to generation” (522). however, if the painting is truly lost, what can the ancient britons team transmit? this review, moving between all aspects of the project, will discuss the aspirations of the exhibition and its afterlife online and in book form. this undertaking points to the value of the ancient britons; the readings and imaginings grounded in blake’s verbal description set in motion a creative process, one that connects to popular themes in the wider context of blake studies. the lost painting works as a catalyst; its qualities have inspired new art. what the team offers exists in a different medium; the members do not restore the painting or even evoke its presence, but transform and translate it into something that will not be easily forgotten, while adding to the achievements of blake’s german reception. there is a tradition in the german reception—​following in the footsteps of yeats—​that has always engaged with the effect of blake’s visions. this project is a response to the occult leanings that have long been seen in blake’s art. so, if we think of this strand as the esoteric tradition, then once again blake has found his place in the academic and popular spheres of germany. the book starts with an extract from henry crabb robinson’s article on blake, published anonymously in german in friedrich perthes’s short-lived vaterländisches museum (1811). robinson introduces the ancient britons as “blakes grösstes und vollendetstes werk” (“blake’s biggest and most accomplished work”) and identifies the qualities of the three ancient britons (strong, beautiful, ugly) with blake’s descriptions translated into german (7). the ancient britons team accept the painting as lost and anticipate the expectations we might have by proposing that their work is not an act of restoration but a cure for the painful absence of blake’s masterpiece. the book’s subtitle announces the team’s creative task and artistic conceit: erscheinungen eines verschollenen bildes/​appearances of a vanished picture. the words are carefully chosen—​it is impossible for the lost painting to “manifest”; “appear” suggests that what “vanished” still exists but is not visible (“verschollen”); it can be returned to sight. among the team, who are listed in alphabetical order, is alexander roob, professor of graphic design and painting at the state academy of fine arts, stuttgart. roob has various blake-related works and performances to his name, blake’s poetry being one of his main interests.for details, see my chapter “the reception of blake’s art in germany and in austria: after 1900,” the reception of william blake in europe, ed. sibylle erle and morton d. paley, 2 vols. (london: bloomsbury academic, 2019) 1: 294-96. this most recent project was with his students. the free and experimental collaboration on the ancient britons started in the autumn of 2019; in the book, there is no assembling of missing pieces—​only hints, in footnotes, at the sources and contexts.the book includes the relevant part of blake’s descriptive catalogue (german version first), with punctuation and paragraphs adjusted to make the text more readerly, as well as long explanatory or interpretative footnotes. in the introduction (“imagine”) we are invited to consider blake’s “remarkable, sculptural power of imagination” and “quasi holographic visions” (15).in the book each chapter is presented first in german and second in english. for this review i have used their english text. here, the team delineate how they “succeeded … in letting this … largest work by blake reappear using old and new techniques.” they write, “we attempted to gain access to the lost painting via inner visualizations, facilitated during a seminar week at the bodensee by a group trance guided by the hypnosis researcher and mesmer specialist walter bongartz” (14-15).this process was captured on the website, where viewers were invited to look at slowly turning clay models while entering a 12:20 min. trance-meditation: “and what happens when the observer allows it [the trance-meditation] to have an effect on him?” the goal, it seems, was to become like the strong, the ugly, and the beautiful. there were also works included on the website that were ongoing, though i could not detect any activity or changes when i examined them. the group trance was complemented by a “phase of joint reconstruction,” where “individual ideas were compared with the details of blake’s description of the picture.” they explain the notion of shared vision in terms of “archetypes available in limited numbers in an eternal storage” or “platonic ‘cloud’” (15). borrowing charles lamb’s term “retro-visions,” the team propose that blake’s painting “must still exist and can be ‘loaded’ using techniques similar to those that blake employed for his visualization” (16). thinking about these visions in terms of self-hypnosis, “trance literature,” and inspiration from paracelsus and böhme, if not mesmer himself, they offer new interpretations of blake’s working practice. in “reimagination/​reimagination” and “rekonstruktion/​reconstruction” they share photographs to document their creative trance process. this section dates the various experiments to 28 october to 2 november 2019; these were developed “via video teleconference” (20) and the lockdowns of 2020. the goal was to feel and to embody blake’s strong, beautiful, and ugly men (27). the results of the experiments were figures in clay and 3d, as seen on screenshares in the book. the book then turns to address the failure of the exhibition in 2020: “hardly anyone saw it. after two days the exhibition had to close again” (38). the circumstances of an unseen exhibition—​a space deserted on account of covid-19 precautions—​and the situation of the artists resonate strongly with the disappointment that blake must have felt at the response to his own show. the exhibition included dana kast and julius naegele’s bard. photographs in the book show a figure who is narrowly missed by an arrow (40-41); a caption describes this construction as a “mechanical box.” dimitra gatsiou’s theremin performance of “jerusalem,” parry’s tune of blake’s rallying lyrics, would have made an eerie accompaniment for the centerpiece of the exhibition: the projections of an “appeared” and “vanished” painting. two photographs reveal a canvas with and without the reconstruction of the ancient britons, which is a digital montage of drawing, painting, and sculpture, also displayed as a fold-out (60-61). this montage shows three figures, with the young and beautiful man leading the way, flanked by the ugly (to his right) and the strong (to his left). the figures, walking through—​no, over—​heaps of corpses, are against a red sun setting in a red landscape. in the right-hand corner (from the viewer’s position), we see the bard underneath his harp, pierced with a long spear; the figure is inspiration for the body in kast and naegele’s mechanical box. another work of art is hendrik fleck’s etching “the ancient britons” (94-95). its subtitle, “einzelvision/​single vision,” indicates that it is one of a series in the exhibition.the website included a video (1:04:30) that offered a viewing experience of an evolving plate: three figures emerged against the shape of a cloaked, faceless figure. lines and textures appeared, accompanied by a heavily distorted bass line washed with delay and reverb, built of random notes. there is much to say about roob’s essay, “when klopstock defied blake and ancient britons were suddenly germans. a revision of the large blake exhibition in hamburg in 1975.” roob, like the book as a whole, starts with robinson’s contribution to perthes’s patriotic periodical vaterländisches museum. he zooms in on a comment about blake’s work containing phrases “which one would have expected from a german rather than an englishman” to ask, “how german was this blake really?” (97). what he proposes is a playful approach to identity and themes that can be harnessed in national crises to articulate a message. blake, in other words, is still speaking to his german audiences. roob alludes to the “mass appeal” (97) that robinson was predicting, and looks toward werner hofmann’s triumph of 1975, but only to claim that the first major blake exhibition abroad was a failure. hofmann (and david bindman) did not sufficiently explore blake’s thwarted relations with klopstock: “the second bridge that werner hofmann had expected from the hamburg exhibition could only end in a construction site without the knowledge of this radical pietistic interconnection [blake’s moravian upbringing through his mother] and without an interpretation of the klopstock context” (113-14). roob seems to imply that this context, and especially “the bardic competition” (102) between klopstock and milton, explain blake’s ambitions for the epic forms of the late illuminated books milton and jerusalem. consequently, he picks up the trail of research on the significance of the popular german poet friedrich gottlieb klopstock, reminding us that perthes dedicated vaterländisches museum to klopstock, whose messiah blake ridiculed in his notebook. blake, for roob, is an unacknowledged forerunner of both the german and the english national movements: during blake’s period of education, the national-mythical “bard roaring” of the klopstockians had become so loud that it could be clearly heard in england as well. many years before people started staging themselves on the island as new druids, members of the german hainbund came together, crowned with oak leaves, as celtic-germanic poet-singers, fantasizing under power-bestowing trees about being in a pseudohistorical counterworld whose emotional depth stood in programmatic opposition to the rationality of enlightenment. (100-01) the short run of vaterländisches museum included not only robinson’s essay on blake but also “excerpts of klopstock’s unpublished writings” (101). anglo-german relations, then and now, are important for understanding blake as an artist and thinker. roob follows alexander regier’s exorbitant enlightenment (2018),alexander regier, exorbitant enlightenment: blake, hamann, and anglo-german constellations (oxford: oxford university press, 2018). which argues that blake “does not fit into our normal account of the enlightenment or british romanticism” (regier 9). for roob’s reading of anglo-german relations, the business and activities of the german printseller and publisher rudolph ackermann are crucial, because ackermann completely ignored blake’s contribution when he reprinted cromek’s edition of blair’s grave; the lack of recognition “must have hurt blake tremendously” (roob 105). this strand of the argument also engages with the patriotic struggle of the german states and their emerging cultural consciousness: “the propagandistic potentials of works such as … the ancient britons … must have evoked, even in the face of reservations regarding the artist’s idiosyncrasies, the idea of a robust national art, as it began to emerge in germany only decades later with the new foundation of the reich” (108). roob contends that blake came across klopstock in his younger days.this circumstance (blake’s early awareness of klopstock) would explain the sharp satirical tone of the klopstock verses in the notebook; they sound like lines from an island in the moon (1784?). he writes that “there were no translations of [klopstock’s] popular odes …. yet it can be assumed that [blake] was also sufficiently informed of this part of klopstock’s production, at least well enough to gauge how massive the challenge posed by the germanic milton was” (100). on the whole, roob’s often fierce argument is a little hostile toward “anglo-centric blake research,” excepting the work of keri davies, colin podmore, and marsha keith schuchard on the moravians (112-14). in considering the influence of the moravians, he notes, “zinzendorf was the rousing theological advocate of bodily energies, whose presence blake had missed in klopstock’s messiah” (114). at the same time, roob is sometimes vague on the parameters of blake’s reception: is what he describes as a “loose connection” between blake and runge, cemented by hofmann’s exhibition cycle kunst um 1800, a matter of influence or of similarity and confluence perceived by those undertaking “blake research”? the latter, of course, chimes with what the ancient britons team set out to do. roob, i think, wills this connection into existence. he makes it appear; there is no concrete evidence for it. conversely, the confluence of klopstock and blake invites us to think about process and collaboration more broadly. roob determines that blake knew about klopstock through his friends, such as henry fuseli (“who, like most of the sturm und drang adherents from the circle of the zurich milton translator jakob bodmer, was a great admirer of klopstock”),see regier 100-18. or even thomas holcroft, “a befriended republican poet, publisher and translator, who had visited klopstock in hamburg in 1799” (100). ultimately, roob—​much like regier, who argues fervently for how blake can be “unlocked through multilingualism” and “polyglot criticism” that “allows us to see different relations” (regier 27)—​simplifies some of blake’s working contexts. blake was a commercial engraver who developed his own graphic technique and printed his own works while pursuing his dream of finding recognition as a painter. in line with the esoteric tradition, roob appears to think, perhaps unfortunately, that anglo-german relations reinforced blake’s artistic process through some kind of channeling.roob traces blake’s knowledge of klopstock through fuseli back to lavater (100), claiming that blake “admired” lavater (114). this assumption originates in regier, who, writing about lavater’s aphorisms on man, not only discards the possibility that fuseli authored the final aphorism, which has no precursor in either of the german source texts and could only ever be verified if the specially prepared manuscript were found, but also states: “blake’s annotations to the volume show us that he understood lavater’s book as a hermeneutics and as a study in friendship” (regier 120). lavater did believe that good friends looked alike. in physiognomical terms, physical resemblance suggested shared interests or moral disposition. however, communicating those “views on the immanence of language” (regier 119) was not devoid of challenges. mary lynn johnson’s important scholarship on blake and lavater delineates the milestones in the financial negotiations between and practical challenges for lavater and his english publishers, translators, and engravers. see “blake’s engravings for lavater’s physiognomy: overdue credit to chodowiecki, schellenberg, and lips,” blake 38.2 (fall 2004): 52-74. he is almost too eager to provide proof for his idea. this may be a result of wanting—​like robinson—​to see blake as symptomatically “german.” what is missing from roob’s account is blake’s life and collaboration with william hayley, the well-connected gentleman poet then famous for his mock epic the triumphs of temper (1781) and biography of milton (1794). we know that blake did not like klopstock, an opinion that was diametrically opposite to that of hayley, his patron, who thought that klopstock was milton’s equal. the men sat together and discussed klopstock’s messiah,hayley owned several editions of der messias (1748–​73). he may have read to blake in german and certainly translated the verse into english on 26 and 27 march 1803 to mark klopstock’s death. mark crosby and robert n. essick write about this, as well as a rediscovered letter from blake to hayley that may allude to klopstock’s first wife, margaret. they hint at the possibility that the conversations between hayley and blake about klopstock were extensive, and suggest that hayley had paid catherine blake a compliment for being, like mrs. klopstock, a devoted wife, muse, and critic in one. this engagement with klopstock is why crosby and essick date the satirical verse in the notebook to the years in felpham. if this is the case, blake’s attack on klopstock is more complex than roob makes it out to be. see mark crosby and robert n. essick, “‘the fiends of commerce’: blake’s letter to william hayley, 7 august 1804,” blake 44.2 (fall 2010): 52-72 (on 71). and it was hayley who commissioned blake to paint a portrait of klopstock as part of a series of eighteen poets for his new library in felpham (butlin #343.16). instead, roob traces blake’s resentment of klopstock through the notebook, back to the versions of “london” where he “writes about german forged links in whose power the desperate residents of the english capital find themselves” (102). narrow though this interpretation is, it is fascinating, as it ties artistic and aesthetic explorations to political domination. the idea is substantiated with an insightful delineation of the german resistance against napoleon’s advancing army (106-12). roob does much to make blake relevant: robinson discerned in blake the “potential of resistance” (109) for german politics, much needed also in britain, whose response to napoleon is likened to cold war tactics—​“a cultural political move comparable with the cia’s launching of ‘liberal’-abstract trends” (110). it comes as no surprise that roob then aligns the efforts of robinson and ackermann in rescuing blake from obscurity for “the anti-napoleonic cause”: “it is not improbable that the former times correspondent [robinson] was involved in ackermann’s covert activities due to his strategic knowledge, and also that ackermann was aware of the planned contribution to the vaterländisches museum” (111). more generally, in connection with the destruction of the cities and landscapes of ukraine, for example, the post-battle scene of the ancient britons no doubt resonates with modern audiences. another unexpected but noteworthy move is roob’s association of john varley with the circle around ackermann (115-16). when it comes to the visionary heads, roob talks about blake’s “dialogue with the dead” (“totengespräche”) and blake and varley’s “spiritistic séances” (116), thus once again oversimplifying the complexity of collaboration and, in this case, opinions about the spiritual world. this world, for blake at least, was inhabited with creatures that had never lived in a conventional sense, such as the ghost of a flea, or were characters in the bible and in legends, such as job and robin hood. we don’t know if any of blake’s choices and portraits thereof baffled varley, who accepted the flea as the perfect embodiment of gemini. varley took an interest in astrology, hence the title of the work that the visionary heads were for (zodiacal physiognomy), and blake in his drawings was also responding to the popular practice of phrenology. roob seems to draw and rely on robinson, who wrote: “our author lives, like swedenborg, in communication with the angels” (br[2] 599). while swedenborg, for robinson, is part of the history of blake’s varied religious background, roob must have decided to ignore swedenborg, which, given the group’s focus on vision, is an astonishing omission. perhaps roob and the team wanted to believe that blake did not just have visions but had a trance practice that followed mesmer’s. robinson struggled to comprehend the nature of blake’s visions. he was also not impressed with a descriptive catalogue: “the original consists of a complete mish-mash of fragmentary utterances on art and religion, without plan or arrangement, and the artist’s idiosyncrasies will in this way be most clearly shown” (br[2] 596). still, as roob emphasizes, he put his finger on why blake appeals and matters today. blake’s singular originality, which once pushed him into isolation in his homeland, spoke and speaks to his german audiences. maybe, to export blake, robinson had to overstate that blake was an outsider: “although he afterwards studied at the royal academy, he had already shown his bent to an art so original that, isolated from his fellow-students, he was far removed from all usual, ordinary employment” (br[2] 595). robinson’s article for perthes is no doubt a key text of blake’s early reception, but roob’s essay ends teasingly and with a gesture toward patriotic struggles: in the end, blake’s legend was not perpetuated where crabb robinson saw it, in the continental culture of the old empire, but was instead oriented to where blake had dreamed of his transatlantic giant, albion, in a globally republican way, in the direction in which the red-skinned ancient britons had also pointed, of whom crabb robinson in his reminiscences had assumed that they were actually not britons but american natives. (117) we cannot ever establish what blake’s ancient britons looked like. roob here offers an interesting twist on robinson’s interpretation of blake’s coloring, while ignoring comments on color experiments in the descriptive catalogue itself. blake’s purpose was to do a retrospective but also to show off his rediscovery of “the lost art of fresco” (br[2] 596). in this passage, roob is not only incorporating robinson’s declaration of blake’s difference, the aesthetic boldness of his color experiments, but also gesturing toward blake’s subsequent thriving american reception. in the end, this exercise says and shows much about the ingenuity of blake’s ongoing german reception. like blake’s exhibition of 1809, the exhibition curated by the ancient britons team presented the absence of visitors as a test case for greatness. even though covid regulations rather than lack of interest prevented audiences from attending, non-attendance and ignorance were counted as contributions to this show’s success. the tone of defiance in the announcement is all too familiar; blake, too, despite everything, would not be deterred. the exhibition of 2020 has vanished; it reappeared on the website and endures in the book. the creation of the website and publication of the book perpetuated and propelled the project’s momentum, but one fact remains: hardly anyone saw the exhibition and, since the website has vanished, hardly anyone will be able to imagine it, unless another kirkup comes along. nevertheless, the ancient britons team has left us, in my opinion, with a “surrogate” for blake’s lost painting (eaves 533). granted, the digital montage can never replace the ancient britons, but the space that has been left deliberately empty in the past has been temporarily filled. will other “surrogate” paintings follow? this undertaking highlights, beyond any doubt, something fundamental about blake: how productive “mis-readings” of his art and poetry can be, especially in a wider european, if not global as well as transhistorical, conversation about blake. blake in the marketplace, 2023 blake in the marketplace, 2023 by mark crosby mark crosby (crosbym@ksu.edu), fsa, is an associate professor in the department of english at kansas state university. he has published on blake, hayley, william godwin, and thomas paine. table of contents: introductory essay abbreviations blake: illuminated books drawings and paintings manuscripts separate plates and plates in series letterpress books with engravings by and after blake interesting blakeana blake’s circle and followers: basire, james calvert, edward flaxman, john fuseli, henry linnell, john palmer, samuel richmond, george appendix: new information on blake’s engravings readers will note the change of author for this iteration of the annual sales review. for just over half a century, robert n. essick provided this journal with an invaluable survey of blake’s works, and those of his circle, as they appeared at the auction block and in the catalogues and print drawers of rare-book and art dealers. drawing on both his scholarly appreciation of blake and his instincts, honed by a lifetime of collecting, essick marshaled a wealth of information from an inestimable number of diverse sources, recording and painstakingly cross-referencing blake’s creative and professional productions as they were advertised, auctioned, bought, sold, or exchanged in any given year. in some instances, his annual review has been the first venue for recording discoveries or previously untraced works. for his initial foray into the marketplace, the young essick provided a couple of entries noting the breakup of the blake-varley sketchbook and the auction of a preliminary drawing for joseph ordering simeon to be bound (butlin #156),see blake 4.4 (spring 1971): 112. noting that the sale price of the latter was “considerably below the estimates.” for readers of the sales reviews, such a phrase has rarely been used in recent times, as the economic and cultural value of blake seemingly increases. in these first entries, essick established a format and, over time, developed a structure that included members of blake’s circle. in the following review, i have attempted to preserve his format and structure. compared to the significant works that appeared at auction over the last couple of years, the blake market in 2023 was somewhat quiet. no illuminated books—​either whole, in parts, or as individual plates—​or major pictorial works were auctioned in 2023. a handful of drawings—​two from the smaller blake-varley sketchbook and a hitherto unrecorded double-sided sketch of acrobatic figures and body parts—​were placed on the market. there was one important discovery at the beginning of the year, when a pen and ink and wash drawing of blake’s deaths door motif on laid paper was found tipped into an 1808 copy of the grave. on the verso there is a sketch of a group of trumpeters standing back to back, which seems to be related to blake’s depiction of angelic trumpeters in works such as the day of judgment (1805). the copy of the grave containing these drawings was given to the university of british columbia library; the gift also included a copy of night thoughts. two notable separate plates came to auction in 2023. the final state of “chaucers canterbury pilgrims” sold in new york during the spring, and a previously unknown and hence unrecorded first-state impression of “the fall of rosamond,” after thomas stothard, was offered in november. it is printed in reddish-brown ink, the only known copy in this color. the print includes an imprint but not a title, which is unusual for a first state. individual job plates continued to appear at auction throughout the year, and while i do not record sales of individual plates, it is worth noting that an 1874 impression of plate 15, “behemoth and leviathan,” sold at swann auction galleries in new york for $14,000 hammer price ($17,500 with the buyer’s premium) on 11 may. throughout the year, books with blake’s commercial engravings showed up at a steady rate on the market. of particular note was a copy of george cumberland’s an attempt to describe hafod (1796), which includes a map attributed to blake. copies of this publication are rare. two works by blake’s patron william hayley are worth mentioning: a copy in original boards of the 1805 ballads and a copy of the thirteenth edition of the triumphs of temper (1807) with blake’s engravings after maria flaxman’s designs. in this edition, blake’s rather worn plates were exchanged at some point during the printing process for the plates after stothard’s designs that originally appeared in the sixth edition (1788). as such, copies of the thirteenth edition with blake’s plates are noteworthy finds. as with previous sales reviews, there is a blakeana section to record artifacts related to but not by blake. this year saw the sale of a copy of the first prospectus for the edition of blair’s grave illustrated by blake. it is rare, with a few copies in institutional repositories and private hands. this particular copy contains manuscript annotations, including a double strike-through of the words identifying blake as the engraver, and, below blake’s name, the following addition: “and to be engraved by l. schiavonetti”.in blake 20.1 (summer 1986), illus. 8, cromek is identified as the author of the annotations. it sold at christie’s online auction in december for £23,940. a handful of notable works by blake’s circle appeared in 2023, including a first state of edward calvert’s wood engraving “the sheep of his pasture” with some hand work possibly by samuel palmer. this print sold in may for £4400. john flaxman’s pen and ink and wash drawing a frieze designed for edward knight (1791) was listed in lowell libson and jonny yarker’s recent acquisitions catalogue. this drawing, on two joined sheets, was commissioned by knight and is one of ten large studies of bas-reliefs made by flaxman during his time in rome. another libson and yarker catalogue, night thoughts: romantic drawings from the brandt collection, contained an earlier flaxman drawing, hannah presenting samuel to eli (1783), described as “previously unknown and unpublished,” as well as henry fuseli’s black chalk drawing satan summoning his legions, which shares compositional elements with blake’s engraving after fuseli of the “fertilization of egypt” in erasmus darwin’s botanic garden. under blake’s circle and his followers, i have also included works clearly attributed to john linnell, samuel palmer, and george richmond. the year of all sales, catalogues, and correspondence in the following lists is 2023, unless otherwise indicated. with a few exceptions, such as blake’s engraving after william hogarth and rare items such as prepublication proofs, only complete copies of plates in series and letterpress books with blake’s commercial illustrations are included. entries from auction catalogues are based on the online versions; my coverage of regional auctions is necessarily selective. dates for dealers’ online catalogues are the dates accessed, not the dates of publication. unless otherwise indicated, the price given is the hammer price. i am grateful for help in compiling this review to david bindman, lowell libson, gregory mackie, morton paley, michael phillips, nicholas shrimpton, joseph viscomi, and john windle. sarah jones’s editorial expertise has been invaluable. i am indebted to robert n. essick for his knowledge, advice, and friendship. my special thanks go to shirley, aurelia, and elodie for their love, patience, and humor. abbreviations bb g. e. bentley, jr., blake books (oxford: clarendon p, 1977). plate numbers and copy designations for blake’s illuminated books and commercial book illustrations follow bb. bbs g. e. bentley, jr., blake books supplement (oxford: clarendon p, 1995) bhe bonhams auctions, edinburgh bhl bonhams auctions, london bhny bonhams auctions, new york bma bishop & miller auctions, stowmarket, suffolk br(2) g. e. bentley, jr., blake records, 2nd ed. (new haven: yale up, 2004) butlin martin butlin, the paintings and drawings of william blake, 2 vols. (new haven: yale up, 1981) cag crow’s auction gallery, dorking, surrey cat(s). catalogue(s) cb robert n. essick, william blake’s commercial book illustrations (oxford: clarendon p, 1991) cl christie’s auctions, london cny christie’s auctions, new york co christie’s online auctions cw chiswick auctions, london dny doyle auctions, new york dw dominic winter auctions, south cerney, gloucestershire eb ebay online auctions ew ewbank’s auctions, woking, surrey fm forum auctions, london freeman’s freeman’s auctions, philadelphia guy peppiatt guy peppiatt fine art, british drawings and watercolours and a collection of oils from a private collection catalogue (june 2023) illus. illustration(s), illustrated jn john nicholson’s auctions, haslemere, surrey kmar killens, mendip auction rooms, binegar, somerset lawrences lawrences auctions, crewkerne, somerset lly lowell libson & jonny yarker, london lt lyon & turnbull auctions, edinburgh mka mellors & kirk auctions, nottingham mo mallams auctions, oxford nybf new york book fair parker parker fine art auctions, farnham, surrey pba pba galleries auctions, berkeley, california pl(s). plate(s) ppa potter & potter auctions, chicago rf riverfront auctions, cincinnati rw richard winterton auctions, lichfield, staffordshire sl sotheby’s auctions, london sny sotheby’s auctions, new york sp robert n. essick, the separate plates of william blake: a catalogue (princeton: princeton up, 1983) srrb sims reed rare books, london swd sworders auctions, stansted mountfitchet, essex windle john windle antiquarian bookseller, san francisco ww woolley & wallis auctions, salisbury, wiltshire # auction lot or catalogue item number illuminated books songs of innocence and of experience. a posthumous copy printed by frederick tatham c. 1831–​32. windle, apr. cat. for the nybf, #11 (price on request). recorded by essick in the 2022 sales review, blake 56.4 (spring 2023). drawings and paintings deaths door (recto), pen and ink and wash; trumpeters (verso), pencil. laid paper with visible chain lines, 23.5 x 16.9 cm. tipped, between the frontispiece and title page, into a copy of robert blair’s the grave (1808) that was given to the university of british columbia library. on the verso there are inscriptions in pencil and ink: “by blake” is at the top right; “the young man entering deaths door from blair’s grave” is located above the sketch of the trumpeters; and a price, “10/6”, is recorded below the sketch. see illus. 1 and 2. there is also a pencil sketch on wove paper of christ carrying keys, with the pencil annotation “in the grave”; it is tipped into the copy opposite pl. 2, schiavonetti’s engraving “christ descending into the grave” after blake’s watercolor. this pencil sketch is a copy of schiavonetti’s engraving by a hand other than blake’s. this copy of the grave contains the bookplates of alexander copland and henry a. bright. william michael rossetti’s “annotated catalogue of blake’s pictures and drawings” includes a work in “indian ink” titled a young man entering death’s door that he lists as being owned by “mr. harvey” (gilchrist [1863] 2: 241). in his own copy, rossetti annotated his catalogue to replace “mr. harvey” with h. a. bright of liverpool. he also added bright as the owner of another blake sketch (butlin #621). when rossetti updated his catalogue for the second edition of gilchrist (1880), he omitted the ownership details of both drawings (2: 256-57). butlin speculates that a young man entering death’s door (#630) may have been the untraced drawing referred to as “death’s door. drawing for the frontispiece to blair’s grave, indian ink, fine” that was sold from william bell scott’s collection in 1885. with the appearance of this pen and ink and wash drawing, and its early provenance indicated by the bright bookplate and rossetti’s 1863 annotation denoting bright’s ownership, the untraced work sold from scott’s collection in 1885 cannot be a young man entering death’s door. rather, the drawing tipped into the front of bright’s copy of the grave seems to be the hitherto untraced butlin #630. 1. william blake, deaths door. pen and ink and wash. laid paper with visible chain lines, 23.5 x 16.9 cm. university of british columbia, rare books and special collections. reproduced with permission. at some point the sheet was, and remains, attached with adhesive to the inner gutter of the title page of a copy of the grave. based on the provenance of the copy, the drawing on the recto is probably a young man entering death’s door (butlin #630), recorded by butlin as untraced “since c. 1870 or 1885.” stylistically, the wash drawing appears to be earlier than the grave designs and may be related to the pen and ink and wash drawings that blake executed during the 1780s. the figure entering the gothic-style doorway wears a broad-brimmed hat and holds a walking stick in his right hand. the door is ajar; one foot has crossed the threshold. beyond the door, to the left of the left leg of the man, there seems to be furniture, perhaps a bed with pillows, a table, or a chair. in his notebook, blake sketched a similar figure sporting a broad-brimmed hat and holding a walking stick in his right hand who enters a rectangular doorway and confronts a skeletal reaper, presumably death (notebook 19). in another emblem drawing, he depicts a striding figure with walking stick and broad-brimmed hat (notebook 17) that was etched for for children and for the sexes. the emblems in the notebook are generally dated c. 1790, with some etched and printed in for children three years later. the wash drawing also offers evidence of pentimenti, or artistic second thoughts, with a few lines sketched over the man’s garment to indicate movement to the right, which is similar to the white-line etched version of “deaths door,” while the fuller treatment of the garment follows the movement of the figure’s body to the left. there are also brush (and/​or pencil) strokes forming a circle over the top half of the walking stick that, if this is an earlier work, anticipates the frontispiece to jerusalem, which shares the same compositional arrangement of figure and doorway. two diagonal lines descend from the circle to the right-ankle area of the man entering the doorway. together with the circle, these could be part of a body of a figure loosely sketched out and then abandoned. blake’s creative practice involved reusing and developing ideas. variations of the deaths door motif can be seen in the headpiece of “london”; america a prophecy pl. 14; a watercolor design for night iv of night thoughts (where blake offers a literal depiction of young’s lines “and soon as man, expert from time, has found / the key of life, it opes the gates of death”); one of the illustrations to the grave that was engraved by schiavonetti, and blake’s white-line etched version of this illustration; and christian knocks at the wicket gate from the illustrations to john bunyan’s the pilgrim’s progress. the watercolors for night thoughts and the pilgrim’s progress also share the same motif of a gothic door with the jerusalem frontispiece and the hitherto untraced wash drawing. this rediscovered drawing is not an exact copy of any of the extant deaths door designs by blake. it does contain variations on motifs—​such as the gothic-style door, the broad-hatted figure, and the walking stick—​and could be an earlier version, or perhaps the earliest extant version, of the deaths door design that blake returned to and modified at various times. the pencil sketch of trumpeters on the verso of the wash drawing could be a later work and, as such, may be related to blake’s inverted trumpeter on the title page of the four zoas, the gray and brown wash drawing an angel awakening the dead with a trumpet (1805), and, more clearly, the three angelic trumpeters in the day of judgment (1805), albeit differently arranged. in the newly discovered pencil sketch, there appear to be two trumpeters back to back, with a possible third facing the viewer. if this is a later work than the wash drawing on its verso, it suggests that blake’s creative practice involved returning to earlier works and sketching pensieri, or first thoughts, as he was developing ideas for the grave designs. alternatively, the wash drawing and pencil sketch could date from the same period (c. 1805) as blake was working on the grave designs and jerusalem. 2. william blake, trumpeters (verso of illus. 1). pencil. laid paper with visible chain lines, 23.5 x 16.9 cm. university of british columbia, rare books and special collections. reproduced with permission. this sketch does not appear to have been recorded before and is therefore a new attribution to blake. it may be a later work than the wash drawing on the recto and could relate to similar designs of trumpeters that blake made c. 1805. if the sketch is a later work, its presence on the verso of the wash drawing corresponds with blake’s practice of reusing paper to sketch out designs. double-sided sheet of nude studies, c. 1810. pencil on paper, 23.2 x 18.7 cm. lly, july night thoughts cat., pp. 39-41 (£118,000). on the recto are depictions of men somersaulting, performing headstands, and reclining, with studies of limbs. the verso depicts a kneeling man clutching his head, a torso seen from above, a head in profile, and limbs. these seem to be preparatory studies by the same hand and are not directly related to extant designs by blake. while the musculature of the acrobatic figures appears similar to blake’s rendering of nudes and the contracted pose of the figure clutching his head is blakean in conception, there remain questions about a definitive attribution. perhaps the strongest evidence for attribution derives from the provenance. according to the cat. entry, this sheet is listed in william michael rossetti’s “annotated catalogue of blake’s pictures and drawings” (gilchrist [1863] list 2, no. 148; [1880] list 2, no. 177). it was exhibited at the burlington fine arts club in 1876 (lent by w. m. rossetti). from rossetti, it passed to his daughter helen maria madox (rossetti), then to the maas gallery, where it was exhibited in 1963 as a work by fuseli before being acquired by the collector walter a. brandt for £450. it is listed as a work by blake in the lly cat. the empress maud in bed, c. 1819. pencil on paper, leaf 15.7 x 20.2 cm. p. 25 from the smaller blake-varley sketchbook, butlin #692.25. ww, 5 sept., #185 (£3800). there are two other maud drawings in the smaller blake-varley sketchbook (see butlin #692.23 and 27). a girl in profile, perhaps corinna, c. 1819. pencil on paper, leaf approximately 15.5 x 20.5 cm. p. 80 from the smaller blake-varley sketchbook, butlin #692.80. srrb, 20 june ($40,000). this drawing was previously advertised in the maas gallery jan. 2018 online cat. as head of a woman; see the 2018 sales review, blake 52.4 (spring 2019). manuscripts receipt signed by blake, 5 july 1805, to thomas butts for £5.7s. windle, apr. cat. for the nybf, #9, illus. ($150,000)—​same price as windle apr. 2022 cat. for the nybf, #1, illus. for earlier sales and comments, see the 2019 sales review, blake 53.4 (spring 2020), and 2022 sales review, blake 56.4 (spring 2023). as essick notes, following br(2) 764, “this receipt repeats another of the same date and amount specifying that the payment was for 4 of blake’s large color-printed drawings, the good and evil angels, the house of death, god judging adam, and lamech and his two wives.” see illus. 3. 3. receipt signed by blake, 5 july 1805, to thomas butts for £5.7s. john windle. reproduced with permission. this receipt records butts’s payment for the following large color prints: the good and evil angels, the house of death, god judging adam, and lamech and his two wives. the characteristics of all four suggest that they were created in 1795, which indicates that blake retained them in his possession for a decade before butts purchased them. all are now in the collection of tate britain. separate plates and plates in series “chaucers canterbury pilgrims.” dny, 25 apr., #0006, final state, colnaghi impression on laid india ($4250). “the fall of rosamond,” after thomas stothard. bma, 1 nov., #239, 1st state (c. 1783), before engraved title and quotation from thomas hull’s play (£130). the impression is printed in reddish ink on laid paper that has been trimmed on the platemark to 39.5 x 33.5 cm. see illus. 4. 4. “the fall of rosamond,” after thomas stothard. 1st state (c. 1783), before engraved title and quotation from thomas hull’s play. collection of robert n. essick. reproduced with permission. this is the only recorded example of the engraving in any known state printed in this color. other examples of the 1st state are in black ink (see sp #xxv). it is unusual for the 1st state to include an imprint but no title. the publisher of the print, thomas macklin, paid blake £80 to engrave the pl., according to the anonymous author of “monthly retrospect of the fine arts,” monthly magazine 11.3 (apr. 1801): 246 (noted in br[2] 758). “george cumberland’s card.” windle, apr. cat. for the nybf, #10, “printed in black ink on thick card,” trimmed close to the image on the left and right margins, illus. ($20,000). recorded in the 2022 sales review, blake 56.4 (spring 2023). job engravings. windle, apr. cat. for the nybf, #13, complete set, impressions on whatman paper after removal of the “proof” inscription, leaves 37.5 x 26.7 cm., bound in mid-nineteenth-century russian calf-backed glazed green and black flexible marble boards, illus. ($74,950). contains the bookplate of henri focillon, director of the musée des beaux-arts in lyon from 1913 to 1924. recorded by essick as being sold at interencheres auction, lyon, france, 16 sept. 2022, for €19,000 and then listed in srrb dec. 2022 cat., #8, for £60,000 (see blake 56.4 [spring 2023]). letterpress books with engravings by and after blake ariosto, orlando furioso, 1791. dw, 14 june, #234, contemporary calf (same lot as hayley, life of cowper, and lavater, aphorisms; see entries below) (£360). blair, the grave. eb, jan., 1808, dark-brown calf, ribbed gilt spine and gilt-lettered green-morocco spine label, including 4-pp. prospectus for “the procession of chaucer’s pilgrims to canterbury” by thomas stothard, stains to 4 pls., illus. ($1800). windle, apr. cat. for the nybf, #14, 1808, original drab gray boards as issued, illus. ($9750). ppa, 1 june, #0329, 1808 large-paper copy, contemporary boards rebacked with original red-morocco gilt lettering (passed). dw, 14 june, #238, 1808 quarto (£320). freeman’s, 27 sept., #5, 1813 contemporary three-quarter black morocco over marbled paper-covered boards (passed). galerie bassenge, berlin, 11 oct., #2005, 1813, illus. (passed). cheffins, 12 oct., #166, 1813 (£360). fm, 30 nov., #239, 1808 (passed) and #240, 1813 (passed). bürger, leonora, 1796. windle, apr. cat. for the nybf, #19, full red straight-grain morocco with gilt-lettering backstrip, illus. ($19,750). there is a faded manuscript inscription on the title page, “sophia baillie”. elizabeth sophia baillie was the subject of a portrait by william beechey, now in the frick collection, new york. the portrait was executed in 1795 and was attributed to john hoppner until recently. cumberland, an attempt to describe hafod, 1796. fm, 13 dec., #84, calf, illus. (£850). darwin. eb, jan., poetical works, 1806, 3 vols., illus. ($1750). fm, 30 mar., #431, the botanic garden, 2 parts in 1 vol., 1st ed. of part 1, 3rd ed. of part 2, both 1791, illus. (£400). eb, 27 apr., the botanic garden, part 1 only, 1st ed., 1791, quarto, leather spine and corners, marbled boards and endpapers, top edge gilt, restoration to front joint and hinge, leather corners of front board replaced, several pls. with damp staining at lower margin, occasional light foxing, illus. ($800 or best offer). windle, apr. cat. for the nybf, #20, the botanic garden, 2 parts in 1 vol., 3rd ed. of part 1, 1795, 4th ed. of part 2, 1794, marbled boards, recorded by essick as sold at fm, 6 oct. 2022, #128 (see blake 56.4 [spring 2023]), illus. ($2950). eb, 22 may, the botanic garden, part 1 only, 3rd ed., 1795, illus. ($1200). eb, 17 july, the botanic garden, 2 parts in 1 vol., 3rd ed. of part 1, 1795, 4th ed. of part 2, 1794, full tree calf, rebacked with original spine laid down, black morocco spine label, stamped in gilt, boards rubbed and scratched, illus. (£700). freeman’s, 27 sept., #52, the botanic garden, 2 parts in 1 vol., 3rd ed. of part 1, 1795, 4th ed. of part 2, 1794, contemporary full tree calf, with the paul revere-designed armorial bookplate of john-lyon gardiner (1770–​1816), illus. ($900). flaxman, iliad (and odyssey), 1805. fm, 23 feb., #264, 2 vols., original boards, covers detached, illus. (£55). kmar, 28 apr., illus. (£40). bma, 31 may, #160, original boards, illus. (£85). adam partridge auctioneers, 6 sept., #715 (price not given). fuseli, lectures on painting, 1801. eb, 27 apr., illus. ($2800). gay, fables, 1793. eb, jan., 2 vols., contemporary calf worn, boards detached, illus. (£500). eb, jan., vol. 2 only, illus. (£325). lawrences, 16 mar., #270, 2 vols., illus. (passed). schilb antiquarian rare books, 24 sept., #14, 2 vols. in 1, illus. ($140). freeman’s, 27 sept., #53, 2 vols., illus. ($600). pba, 5 oct., #144, illus. (sold; price not disclosed). cw, 29 nov., #314 (sold; price not disclosed). fm, 30 nov., #238, 2 vols. in 1 (£320). hayley, ballads, 1805. freeman’s, 27 sept., #54, original buff paper-covered boards, illus. ($1400). hayley, life of cowper, 1803–​04. jn, 24 jan., probably vols. 1 and 2 only, #269, recent quarter calf, illus. (£65). dw, 14 june, #234, 1st ed., 3 vols., contemporary uniform sprinkled full calf (same lot as ariosto and lavater, aphorisms; see entries above and below) (£360). rooke books online cat., 16 june, 3 vols., illus. (£1350). hayley, life of romney, 1809. cheffins, 12 oct., #207, contemporary calf (£180). hayley, triumphs of temper, 12th ed., 1803. mka, 19 jan., #1049, original boards, small-paper copy with defective title and upper cover almost disbound (same lot as 13th ed.; see below), illus. (£120). eb, jan., contemporary oxford binding, small-paper copy without the half-title, illus. (£500). fm, 13 apr., #76, small-paper copy, water staining to some pls., contemporary calf, gilt (same lot as ritson; see below), illus. (£320). fm, 21 sept., #104, contemporary half calf, illus. (passed). hayley, triumphs of temper, 13th ed., 1807. mka, 19 jan., #1049, rare copy of this edition with blake’s worn engravings after maria flaxman’s designs (same lot as 12th ed.; see above), contemporary quarter calf, small-paper copy with soiled leaves, torn margin, and disbound cover, illus. (£120). hogarth, works, blake’s pl. only. cag, 2 aug., #886 (price not listed by auctioneer), probably 6th or 7th state. sanders of oxford online cat., 20 sept. (£900). hunter, historical journal, 1793. australian book auctions, 15 mar., #50, modern calf, illus. (passed); the same copy was offered on 7 june, #26 (passed). pba, 10 aug., #343 and 344, two copies, illus. (#343, $500; #344, $800). lavater, aphorisms, 1789. dw, 14 june, #234, modern full calf gilt (same lot as ariosto and hayley, life of cowper ; see entries above), illus. (£360). lavater, essays on physiognomy, 1810. bhny, 23 june, #112 (online only), 3 vols., illus. ($1920). malkin, a father’s memoirs, 1806. fm, 25 may, #63, illus. (£850). maynard, josephus, n.d., c. 1785–​94. freeman’s, 27 sept., #55, contemporary full brown calf, rebacked, illus. ($225). the book merchant jenkins, brisbane, 7 dec., #93, occasional foxing, first preliminary leaf (on different paper of uncertain date) with the letterpress ownership imprint of william and margaret mansel and the later armorial bookplate of [sir] ernest salter wills (1869–​1958), verso of frontispiece with gift inscription of thomas westbrook for the rev. arden davis, dated 1890, illus. (aud 420). olivier, fencing familiarized, 1780. peter arnold, 9 july, #387, illus. (aud 550). aste bolaffi, italy, 13 july, #550, illus. (€475). ritson, select collection of english songs, 1783. fm, 13 apr., #76 (same lot as 12th ed. of hayley, triumphs; see above), illus. (£320). shakespeare, plays, 1805. eb, 24 sept., 10 vols., bound in contemporary calf and gilt, illus. (£675). hotlotz, singapore, 26 oct., #129, illus. (sgd 400). stedman, narrative, colored copy. freeman’s, 27 sept., #150, large-paper 1st ed. with hand coloring (almost certainly not by blake), 2 vols., illus. ($8190). stedman, narrative, uncolored copies. eb, feb., 1813 ed., 2 vols., rebound in quarter leather over cloth boards, illus. ($2875); relisted in sept. ($3000). fm, 28 sept., #181, 1806 ed., 2 vols., ex-library copy with a few ink and embossed stamps, modern half calf over marbled boards, illus. (£1200). stuart and revett, antiquities, 1762–​1816. lt, 21 sept., #49, first 3 vols., vol. 1 without the list of subscribers, 230 (of 231) pls. and maps (lacking pl. 29 in section 1 of vol. 2), contemporary half calf, blake’s pls. present in vol. 3, illus. (£1500). freeman’s, 27 sept., #151, 4 vols., including vol. 3 with blake’s pls., contemporary brown calf, decoratively stamped in blind and in gilt, illus. ($3500). dreweatts, 6 oct., #756, 3 vols., including vol. 3 with blake’s engravings, vol. 2 lacking 1 pl., some foxing and soiling, vol. 3 badly water stained, mixed contemporary bindings, worn, covers detached, vol. 3 lacking upper cover, illus. (£1300). sl, 12 nov., #206, 4 vols., including vol. 3 with blake’s pls., illus. (£12,500). virgil, pastorals, 1821. windle, apr. cat. for the nybf, #21, retrospective early nineteenth-century calf with red labels by courtland benson, illus. ($47,500). wollstonecraft, original stories, 1791. fm, 25 may, #62, pls. very lightly offset, a few scattered light spots, contemporary paneled calf, illus. (£3000). young, night thoughts, 1797. an uncolored copy bound in leather and marbled boards was given to the university of british columbia library at the beginning of the year (merivale .y686 1797). eb, jan., uncolored copy, contemporary rowan backed marbled paper covered boards, missing pp. 13/​14 and 33/​34, title page of night ii apparently a rare 1st state, illus. (£4250). windle, apr. cat. for the nybf, #22, large quarto, half brown morocco, with “explanation” leaf bound at the back, illus. ($15,000). freeman’s, 27 sept., #56, uncolored copy, modern crimson niger, black morocco spine labels, stamped in blind and in gilt, illus. ($5000). interesting blakeana john quincy, pharmacopœia officinalis & extemporanea; or, a complete english dispensatory, london, 1733. windle, apr. cat. for the nybf, #24, inscribed in brown ink on the title page “william blake | his book” ($49,500). recorded by essick as being in windle, feb. 2022 cat. 70, #403; see blake 56.4 (spring 2023). for discussion and illus., see the 2000 sales review, blake 34.4 (spring 2001), illus. 2 and its caption. prospectus of a new and elegant edition of blair’s grave, printed by t. bensley, nov. 1805. pamphlet, letterpress, quarto, 3 pp., 23.9 x 13.5 cm. co, 1-15 dec., #2, with manuscript inscriptions identifying “l. schiavonetti” as the engraver of blake’s designs, integral address panel to “mr tomkinson, dean street, soho”, remains of seal, on wove paper watermarked “j. whatman 1804” (folded for delivery as a letter) (£23,940). provenance: “mr tomkinson, dean street, soho” (probably thomas tomkison, c. 1764–​1853, piano maker and art collector who operated from dean street between 1799 and 1851); possibly forwarded by him to john towneley; sold as part of the towneley papers, sotheby’s, 22-23 july 1985, #550 (£5500, to a dealer?). see the 1985 sales review, blake 20.1 (summer 1986). blake, songs of innocence and of experience, london: w. pickering and w. newberry, 1839. dw, 14 june, #245, original chalk-glazed yellow endpapers, ownership signature of s. judd, jr. dated 1843, original blind-stamped cloth, lettered in gilt to center of upper cover “blake’s poems” (£320). rossetti, william michael, autograph letter to swinburne, 29 apr. 1867, containing a reference to kirkup’s story about mrs. blake and princess sophia. eb, 19 sept. (£450). recorded in br(2) 463fn. century guild hobby horse, 1884, 1886–​94. lt, 21 june, #181, 3 vols. (1886–​87), with the first containing muir’s facsimile of little tom the sailor and the second containing the first printing in conventional typography of the marriage of heaven and hell and muir’s facsimile of on homers poetry [and] on virgil, from the library of the glasgow art club, illus. (£400). blake, songs of innocence, wells, gardner, 1899. miniature edition. eb, jan. (£8). blake, songs of innocence and of experience and jerusalem, printed by michael phillips. online cat., illus., at <http://​www.​williamblakeprints.​co.​uk/​songs-​of-​innocence-​and-​of-​experience> and <http://​www.​williamblakeprints.​co.​uk/​jerusalem> (accessed 20 july) (price on request).  for songs, phillips created a selection of 45 pls. that were printed on a replica of blake’s wooden star-wheel rolling press (see illus. 5) that he researched and had built for the ashmolean museum blake exhibition (2014–​15). the songs are limited to 20 sets. for jerusalem, limited to 10 sets, he created and printed a selection of 28 pls. of “arguably blake’s masterwork in the techniques he developed in relief etching” (see illus. 6 and 7). “by re-creating blake’s original relief-etched copper plates, lost in the nineteenth century, it is possible to print impressions from the illuminated books exactly as blake did, and that compare with the excessively rare originals.” in other words, the sets printed by phillips are not facsimiles of an existing original copy. just like blake’s originals, no two impressions are, or can be, exactly the same. every impression is unique. the replica star-wheel rolling press was relocated to rice university in feb. and opened to the public in mar.: <https://​news.​rice.​edu/​news/​2023/​rice-​acquires-​rare-​replica-​william-​blake-​printing-​press>. 5. wooden star-wheel rolling press. michael phillips had it built for the william blake: apprentice and master exhibition at the ashmolean museum, oxford (2014–​15). the exhibition catalogue did not reproduce an image of the press. it remained in oxford after the exhibition and was located in the library of christ church college. in february 2023, the press was relocated to rice university and opened to the public in march. 6. michael phillips, a proof state of the frontispiece to william blake’s jerusalem. printed in burnt sienna, image 22.3 x 16.2 cm. on paper 38.7 x 28.3 cm. reproduced with permission. printed on paper handmade by gangolf ulbricht, werkstatt für papier, to match the off-white wove papers that blake used, each leaf with the watermark “wb”. 7. michael phillips, frontispiece to william blake’s jerusalem. printed in charcoal black, image 22.3 x 16.2 cm. on paper 38.7 x 28.3 cm. reproduced with permission. printed on paper handmade by gangolf ulbricht, werkstatt für papier. blake’s circle and followers works are listed under artists’ names in the following order: paintings and drawings sold in groups, single paintings and drawings, letters and manuscripts, separate pls., book illus. basire, james engravings between 1770 and 1780 “le champ de drap d’or,” 1774. line engraving, 63.1 x 115.2 cm. ww, 5 sept., #50 (£300). “the encampment of the english forces near portsmouth,” 1778. line engraving, 48.4 x 177 cm. ww, 5 sept., #49 (£1500). another impression, rf auctions, 17 dec., #168, one section detached and water stained ($50). “pylades and orestes,” after benjamin west, 1771. line engraving, 45.4 x 56.2 cm. jasper52, 28 mar., #55 ($300). calvert, edward paintings and original graphics vision of youth, n.d. oil on paper, 16 x 24 cm. jn, 12 june, #349 (£800). “the bride,” 1828. engraving, 3rd state, sepia ink on cream paper, from the memoir, 1893, leaf 11.4 x 16.5 cm. bhl, 20 sept., #7 (£750). “the sheep of his pasture,” n.d. wood engraving, 1st state with some gray wash hand work, 5 x 8.5 cm. mo, #134, 17-18 may (£4400). the gray wash was used to add a small figure, possibly the shepherd watching the flock, leaning or sitting on a fold or stone wall. a note on the verso of the frame indicates that this impression came from samuel palmer, which suggests that the gray wash may have been palmer’s addition. flaxman, john drawings and manuscripts see also flaxman under letterpress books with engravings by and after blake, above. a frieze designed for edward knight, 1791. pen and ink and wash on two pieces of conjoined paper, 23.5 x 76.7 cm., inscribed in flaxman’s hand on the verso, “the horses for the chariot of the sun, the front of an sarcophagus lately purchased by the pope / figures about 22 inches high of a grand character of sculpture best in correct, the heads of apollo, diana, autumn, & summer as well as some of the most projecting limbs being broken are restored by me in the drawing”. lly, jan. recent acquisitions 2023, pp. 38-41 (price on request). this is one of ten drawings after bas-reliefs that flaxman created for his patron edward knight during his time in rome. according to the lly cat., “this is the most significant roman drawing by flaxman to appear on the market in a generation” (41). hannah presenting samuel to eli, 1783. pen and ink and wash on paper, 34 x 47 cm. lly, july night thoughts cat., pp. 28-31 (price on request): “previously unknown and unpublished, the sheet belongs to a group of large, finished drawings made before flaxman travelled to italy.” lady in contemplation, n.d. pen and gray wash on paper, 22 x 16.5 cm. semley auctioneers, 16 sept., #113 (price not published). original design for the interior of buckingham palace, 1824. pencil with brush and ink on whatman wove paper, 21.5 x 34 cm., inscribed with scale in ink and titled “love and harmony” with date “1824”. fm, 23 mar., #334 (£340). rienzi, c. 1825. pencil, ink, and wash, 22.8 x 13.8 cm., inscribed below the drawing: “ ’tis rumoured yet his spell had pow’r / to summon to that ruin’d tower / spirits, that to his eye of flame / rome’s arm’d avengers—nightly came: / metellus—either scipio—there— / and either brutus wav’d in air / his blade—’mid these, rienzi stood, / and grasp’d each dagger dark with blood.” lly, july night thoughts cat., pp. 46-47 (price on request). the drawing illustrates eight lines of william sotheby’s gothic poem “on the ruined palace of rienzi,” 1825. thetis entreating jupiter to honor achilles, c. 1805. pencil on pale-cream wove paper, sheet 20 x 25 cm., contemporary (or near-contemporary) pencil inscription to upper margin verso: “iliad pl. 5 part of, ‘thetis entreating jupiter to honor achilles’”. dw, 8 mar., #95 (£1200). the original drawing for pl. 5 of the iliad of homer, 1805 (see above). according to the cat. entry, “the line engraving is one of three compositions engraved by william blake from flaxman’s design. flaxman’s first series of original drawings for the iliad was commissioned by georgiana hare-maylor, a painter and scholar who was living in rome at the same time as flaxman, and were published in rome in 1793, and in london in 1795. a second set of drawings on the same subject were made by flaxman for robert fullaton-udney.” provenance: james stewart hodgson (1827–​99); the hodgson bequest, sold cl, june 1893; lady brabourne (1896–​1979); sir ronald ian campbell (1890–​1983); robin campbell, director, arts council of great britain (1912–​85); lawrence gowing (1918–​91) by 1964. two seated figures reading, n.d. wash drawing mounted on card, 24.8 x 34.4 cm. semley auctioneers, 8 july, #84 (price not published). autograph receipt, 13 mar. 1784. 1 p., slim oblong octavo, “received of sir john sebright five guineas the remainder of miss. sebright’s statue a bust of mercury &c in full”. international autograph auctions, 14 sept., #494 (€170). autograph letter, 22 jan. 1818. 2 pp. swann auction galleries, 26 oct., #114 (passed). a description of flaxman’s proposed monument for lord nelson. autograph manuscript, n.d. pen on paper, unsigned, 2 pp., quarto. international autograph auctions, 10 may, #271 (€180). the manuscript offers a summary of a lecture on sculpture—​“the treasures of ancient art & literature possessed by the moderns notwithstanding the destruction of time & war”—​and states, in part, that it “shewed those remains were in general sufficient for our information concerning the state of knowledge in different periods of antiquity … the argonautic expedition, the theban & trojan wars produced no great alteration in the manners or polity of the greeks—​but the contest with xerxes which struck the first fatal blow to the persian power & made way for the 3d. great monarchy of the world (the grecian) stimulated the spirit of greece to the greatest efforts—​then in the constellation of illustrious characters, socrates, plato … euripides & sophocles, phidias appeared & superint[end]ed the buildings of pericles, temple of minerva, described, her statue of ivory & gold 30 feet high … the venus, cupid … by praxiteles were particularly noticed …. the schools of sculpture were athenian, sicyonion, & rhodian. the lecture was illustrated by a number of drawings & casts.” fuseli, henry drawings and paintings design for erasmus darwin’s “the temple of nature” : in dreams (recto), with a study of embracing lovers (verso), n.d. pencil, pen and gray ink, gray, blue, and pink wash, heightened with white pencil, 37.8 x 26.7 cm. cl, 4 july, #105 (£44,100). a kneeling figure with a spirit leaving his body, n.d. pencil, pen and ink, gray and yellow washes over black chalk, 9.7 x 18.2 cm. sny, 25 jan., #248 (passed). inscribed lower left “q.e. sept 3 11.” there is a latin inscription on the recto and “a subsidiary figure study in chalk” on the verso. this drawing came up for auction at cl on 5 july 2016, #74 (£6250), as recorded in the 2016 sales review, blake 50.4 (spring 2017). an old prophet preaching, n.d. pencil, gray and pale-green wash, 16 x 13 cm. cny, 25 jan., #62, with seven other drawings by j. r. schellenberg, s. granicher, and others, from the collection of j. c. lavater, illus. (estimate $8000-12,000; passed). these same drawings came up for auction on 9 july 1991, with a winning bid of £3300 on an estimate of £3000-5000. in his entry, essick cautions that “the attribution to fuseli is very doubtful. this is probably a work by one of the other artists represented in this group of 8 works related to lavater’s physiognomic studies” (see blake 25.4 [spring 1992]). satan summoning his legions, n.d. black chalk on paper, 29.8 x 18.4 cm. lly, july night thoughts cat., pp. 36-38 (price on request). according to the cat. entry, this is a late drawing. woman sitting by candlelight, n.d. black chalk, pen and gray ink, gray and pink watercolor wash, 16.8 x 9.1 cm. koller auctions, 22 sept., #3440 (chf 19,000). linnell, john drawings and paintings effie deans and madge wildfire in the churchyard, 1835. oil on canvas, 39.4 x 48.9 cm., signed lower right. bhl, 4 july, #58 (passed); relisted bhe, 14 sept., #221 (£850). the painting illustrates a scene from walter scott’s heart of midlothian (first published 1818). gateshead windmill, 1843. oil on canvas, 31.5 x 43.5 cm., signed and dated lower right. ripley auctions, 3 aug., #55 ($1700). hampstead, c. 1825–​27. pencil on paper, 25 x 30 cm., signed and dated “1825 — 7 ”. rw, 10 july, #339 (£280). landscape sketch with figures. kensington gravel pits (recto), study of a cow (verso), 1811. pencil and watercolor on oatmeal paper, 10.8 x 14.6 cm., signed, inscribed, and dated “1811 paddington j.l.” cl, 4 july, #132 (£6930). the recto sketch relates to linnell’s oil painting kensington gravel pits (1811–​12), now at tate britain. landscape with farmer and cattle, n.d. oil on canvas, 72.4 x 90.1 cm., initialed “jl”. helmuth stone, 24 sept., #87 ($1400). miss fanny sheppard playing a guitar, 1825. pencil on gray paper heightened with red and white chalk, 27.3 x 38.1 cm., signed. parker, 8 june, #7 (£180). this sketch was in the centennial linnell exhibition at martyn gregory in 1982. see illus. 8. 8. john linnell, miss fanny sheppard playing a guitar, 1825. pencil on gray paper heightened with red and white chalk, 27.3 x 38.1 cm. collection of dr. nicholas shrimpton, charlbury, oxfordshire. reproduced with permission. in 1825 linnell made three trips to gloucestershire to paint portraits of the sheppard and kingscote families. between the first and second, he and blake took trial proof impressions of the job pls. (br[2] 410); between the second and third, they went to the royal academy exhibition together (br[2] 411). linnell gave this portrait to fanny. portrait of a gentleman seated by a table, 1837. oil on canvas, 46.5 x 39 cm., signed and dated. jn, 22 mar., #335 (£800). portrait of his daughter, 1820. pencil on paper, 14.5 x 9.5 cm., initialed, titled, and dated. rw, 24 apr., #306 (£120). a sketch of elizabeth linnell as a young child. portrait of the reverend charles gower boyles, n.d. oil on panel, 32.3 x 24.5 cm., signed “j linnell. f ” upper left. roseberys, london, 22 nov., #138 (£1000). shepherds, c. 1830–​35. oil on paper laid down on panel, 16.5 x 22.2 cm., inscribed on a label on the verso “shepherds by john linnel fecit / lent by james orrock / 8 links up right of fireplace”. lly, jan. recent acquisitions 2023, pp. 68-69 (price on request). this is probably the same painting listed in lly, mar. 2022 online cat., and dated as “c. 1820s” (blake 56.4 [spring 2023]). studies of a shepherd, 1820. chalk on paper, 26.9 x 35 cm., and in the same lot, portrait of the reverend thomas thomas, chalk on paper, 18.4 x 13.7 cm. galerie bassenge, berlin, 9 june, #6798 (price not given). both drawings were previously sold sny, 25 jan. 2011, #71, from the collection of charles ryskamp ($12,500). two pencil sketches of trees, 1813 and 1814. pencil on blue paper, 15 x 17.5 cm., signed and dated 1814, and pencil on cream paper, 12 x 30 cm., signed and dated 1813. rw, 18 sept., #332 (£100). the 1814 sketch depicts bentley brook in derbyshire; the 1813 sketch is a view of llanberis in wales. this lot also included an unsigned sketch of a tree and an unsigned sheet of paper with rough sketches. the wold of kent, 1853. oil on canvas, 66 x 94 cm., signed and dated “j linnell 1853”. cl, 13 july, #67 (£5040). palmer, samuel drawings, paintings, manuscripts, and original graphics bright cloud, shepherd, and windmill, c. 1831–​32. black, gray, and brown wash, 8.8 x 11.1 cm. swan fine art, 13 july, #493 (£27,000). there are inscriptions on a separate sheet of paper pasted to the backing mat, possibly by a. h. palmer. this work, entitled a heath with a shepherd and his flock, was exhibited at the victoria and albert museum in 1926, no. 78 in the cat. in vintage time, 1861. watercolor over pencil, 19.6 x 42.9 cm., signed “s. palmer 1861” lower left. guy peppiatt, british drawings and watercolours, #53 (£35,000). the lane side, c. 1834–​35. oil and tempera on canvas, 29.8 x 45.7 cm. sl, 6 july, #144 (estimate £100,000-150,000; passed). previously offered by sl on 5 dec. 2018 with an estimate of £300,000–500,000. sold as a work by john linnell, sl, 11 mar. 1987, #82, titled passing the orchard (£4400), and sl, 30 nov. 2000, #151, titled the orchard (£8400), then sold as attributed to “circle of john linnell,” cl, 10 july 2012, #150, titled figures on a wooded track (£2500). the confusing attribution history of this painting suggests that the attribution to palmer is not yet settled. portrait of george richmond, 1831. graphite on wove paper, 21.8 x 17.3 cm., stamped with the blind stamp of dobbs, london, and signed and dated “s. palmer 1831” on the lower left of the sheet. bhl, 6 dec., #44 (£28,000). the potato shed, n.d. pencil on laid paper, 11.2 x 18.2 cm., inscribed on the verso “potatoe [sic] shed, tottenham marches — s. palmer.” sl, 27 oct., #315 (£3180). la vocatella: a chapel built by a hermit near corpo de cava, in the neighbourhood of salerno and naples, 1844. pencil and watercolor heightened with gum arabic, with some scratching out, 38.7 x 50.5 cm., signed, inscribed, and dated “samuel palmer 1844 / 4 grove st. lisson gro[ve]”. cl, 5 july, #133 (price not given). it appears to be related to a drawing from 1838 now in the graves gallery, sheffield. letter to henry mogford, n.d. lion heart autographs, new york, 10 may, #123 (passed). it reads: “if mr. gambard [sic: gambart] comes to the gallery, will you have the goodness to give him the accompanying drawing and the note directed to him. i had nothing to send but the above drawing which belongs to mr. gambard & i should not like it to be exhibited unless mr. gambard wishes it”. four etchings, mounted and framed: “the skylark,” 9.5 x 7.5 cm.; “the morning of life,” 13 x 20.5 cm.; “the early ploughman,” 13 x 19.5 cm.; and “the lonely tower,” 16.5 x 23.5 cm. ew, 23 mar., #1235 (estimate £200-300; passed). four etchings: “the herdsman’s cottage,” 1850, 2nd and final state; “the willow,” 1850, 2nd state (of 3), as published in the large-paper edition of a. h. palmer’s the life and letters of samuel palmer (1892); and two impressions of “the early ploughman,” 1861, possibly 5th and 8th states. bhl, 6 dec., #13 (£600). “the morning of life,” n.d. etching on paper, 14.5 x 21.2 cm., titled and signed on the pl. cw, 12 sept., #154 (£525). “opening the fold,” 1880. etching on laid paper, 8th state (of 10), 15.3 x 21.5 cm. swann auction galleries, 11 may, #233 ($800). this was palmer’s last finished etching, completed just a year before his death. he had planned a series of ten to accompany the publication of his translation of the eclogues of virgil as his last major career project (see below). an english version of the eclogues of virgil, london: seeley & company, 1883. ppa, 1 june, #465 (passed). fourteen pls. by palmer, including five original etchings, original full parchment vellum stamped and lettered in gilt. another copy, bound in publisher’s green cloth, gilt spine lettering, mo, 28 june, #30 (£500). richmond, george drawings and paintings a copse seen across a meadow, n.d. pen and ink and brown wash, 7.2 x 20.7 cm. guy peppiatt, british drawings and watercolours, #35 (£2800). hagar lamenting and hagar and ishmael in the wilderness, 1829. pen and brown ink with graphite border lines, 33.5 x 21.3 cm. bhl, 6 dec., #45 (£14,000). two drawings on one sheet, each signed in graphite with the initials “gr” and each dated 1829 on the lower left. the sheet is also dated on the lower right: “jany 30th 1829”. landscape near walton, 1864. watercolor, 13.5 x 21.3 cm., signed with initials on the lower right. guy peppiatt, british drawings and watercolours, #37 (£3500). portrait of a man, n.d. pencil, gray ink, and wash on paper, 19.8 x 14.3 cm., signed “g. richmond” lower left of the sheet. roseberys, london, 22 nov., #241 (£341). portrait of the artist’s son, 1846. pencil and white chalk, 20 x 17.5 cm., inscribed and dated lower center “willie . oct.r 13. 1846”. cheffins, 20 sept., #104 (£600). a portrait of sir william blake richmond (1842–​1921), aged four. portrait study of a gentleman, n.d. pencil, crayon, and watercolor on paper, 20 x 18 cm. cheffins, 20 sept., #105 (£440). study of an archbishop, n.d. pen and ink and pencil on paper, 23 x 17 cm., initialed. rw, 24 apr., #319 (£300). the drawing depicts a seated male figure reading from a book. a verdant valley, n.d. pencil, pen and brown ink, and watercolor, 29.8 x 21.8 cm. guy peppiatt, british drawings and watercolours, #36 (£2200). this sketch relates to a view at shoreham drawn by samuel palmer (c. 1827) now in the yale center for british art (b1977.14.4666). richmond visited palmer at shoreham in 1827. appendix: new information on blake’s engravings listed below are substantive additions or corrections to essick, the separate plates of william blake: a catalogue (1983). #xxv: “the fall of rosamond,” 1st state. for the first known impression to be printed in reddish ink on laid paper, see under separate plates and plates in series, above. blake and music, 2024 illustrations to gray’s poems (c. 1797–​98), “the progress of poesy,” page 3. yale center for british art, paul mellon collection. b1992.8.11(22). blake and music, 2024 by camila oliveirafor the funding for camila oliveira’s research, see <https://​doi.​org/​10.​54499/​2022.​00978.​ceecind/​cp1762/​ct0006>. camila oliveira (camila.querino@edu.ulisboa.pt) is a research fellow at the university of lisbon. she holds a phd in english literature from the federal university of rio de janeiro and king’s college london on the translation of blake’s jerusalem into portuguese and biblical intertextuality. she is currently working on romanticism and music reception and writing a monograph on blake and contemporary music. in the past few years we have tried to keep more regular track of blake’s reception in music with our annual checklist of classical and popular settings. every new inventory reveals the minute particulars of each year and reflects in one way or another the transformations and trends in the music industry. the ascending curve of settings between 2021 and 2023 was steady (152 tracks in 2021, 168 in 2022, and 192 in 2023), but in 2024 the number of tracks jumped to 303, representing an increase of almost 60% in relation to the previous year. unfortunately, the reason for such dramatic growth cannot simply be explained by blake’s soaring popularity in recent years; it also hinges on the pervasive (and pernicious) influence of an old new “friend”: artificial intelligence. there has been much debate about the threat of ai to the art world, and music seems to be the most affected of all. an article in the guardiankelly burke, “music sector workers to lose nearly a quarter of income to ai in next four years, global study finds,” guardian (4 dec. 2024). reported the results of an economic study that predicts that “by 2028, exponential growth in generative ai music [will] account for about 20% of traditional music streaming platforms’ revenues.” to make matters worse, “people working in the music sector will lose almost a quarter of their income to artificial intelligence within the next four years.” the checklist below raises concerns about the accuracy of the survey’s projections, revealing a bleaker reality: 20% of the blake settings last year were already created by ai programs. since the regulation of the space is still incipient and insufficient, a great deal of what has been generated by ai is not clearly labeled as such, meaning that its negative impact on the creative industry must be higher than we think. the visionary scholar morris eaves somehow anticipated the discussion in his 1977 essay “blake and the artistic machine.”morris eaves, “blake and the artistic machine: an essay in decorum and technology,” pmla 92.5 (1977): 903-27. articulating blake’s views on art and technology, eaves reflects on the establishment of a system of technological and economic intermediaries between the artist and the audience and on the limits imposed by mechanical execution upon human conception. blake refers to those intermediaries as “vile tricks,” which he sees as ultimately created and developed to alienate the artist and deceive the audience by offering an artifact that is nothing but a reproduction or simulacrum of a genuine work of art, devoid of soul, imagination, and creativity. in his public address, he writes, “a machine is not a man nor a work of art it is destructive of humanity & of art.” that certainly shows how much he would disapprove of what generative ai programs have been doing to his poems. besides ai, another remarkable phenomenon observed in the 2024 checklist is the number of albums (eps and singles not included) solely focused on settings of blake. unsurprisingly, most of them are based on songs of innocence and of experience. nonetheless, a much less popular work, the gates of paradise, inspired the homonymous album by the brazilian project io. the blake-only albums come from the four corners of the world, from the usa to italy, new zealand, and thailand. as in previous lists, i omit here any songs based on a single quotation or phrase from blake’s poetry or art. wherever possible, the country of the artist is given, as well as the work’s instrumentation, duration, publisher, copyright date, and genre. so prevalent is streaming now, however, that i no longer record the format, with nearly every release being available only through streaming services or as a digital download. as such, all entries include at least one link to a recording. abyss of the senses —​ switzerland from an anthropology of hell ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, and keyboards. off, © 2024. progressive metal. tracks: william blake’s journey in hell [marriage] (33:43); william blake’s ascension to earth (11:33); earth’s answer (05:39). links: apple, spotify, youtube. adler, immo —​ germany tyger! tyger! burning bright! ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, and keyboards. aimp records, © 2024. pop. track: tyger! tyger! burning bright! (03:09). links: apple, spotify, youtube. allfader —​ norway from call of the void ; for voice, guitar, bass, and drums. throw horns, © 2024. heavy metal. track: broken love [ “my spectre around me night & day” ] (09:05). links: apple, spotify, youtube. andriessen, louis —​ netherlands from tales of song and sadness ; for voice. attacca, © 2024. classical. track: ahania weeping [fragments from chapter 5] (02:59). links: apple, spotify, youtube. arnold, malcolm —​ uk from malcolm arnold: the complete songs ; for voice and piano. malcolm arnold society, © 2024. classical. tracks: five william blake songs: o holy virgin (01:43); memory, hither come (02:08); how sweet i roam’d (02:27); my silks and fine array (03:25); thou fair-haired angel of the evening (02:21). links: apple, spotify, youtube. babx —​ france from la marche des enfants ; for voice, cello, and piano. buda musique, © 2024. pop. tracks: i have no name [ “infant joy” ] (03:51); the little boy lost (04:42); a cradle song (02:31); o earth [ “introduction” to experience] (04:56); joy is my name [ “infant joy” ] (01:48). links: apple, spotify, youtube. baccillieri, paolo —​ italy london ; for voice and piano. independent, © 2024. folk. track: london (01:40). link: youtube. note: produced with ai. bass, colin, and daniel biro —​ uk from more ; for voice, guitar, bass, and drums. independent, © 2024. progressive rock. track: ghost of a flea (05:13). link: bandcamp. bassbossa kids —​ unknown tiger tiger burning bright ; for voice and synthesizers. independent, © 2024. pop / ​electronic. track: the tyger (02:57). link: youtube. note: produced with ai. bell, steve —​ canada from the glad surprise ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, and flute. signpost music, © 2024. folk. track: the divine image (03:04). links: apple, spotify, youtube. bing, zuzana —​ slovakia from twentysomething ; for voice and synthesizers. independent, © 2024. pop / ​electronic. track: the sick rose (02:49). links: apple, spotify, youtube. {blake} —​ france from iv. here & now ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, and keyboards. independent, © 2024. rock. tracks: introduction [experience] (04:05); the chimney sweeper [experience] (02:17); ah! sun-flower (03:17); earth’s answer (03:22); laughing song (03:23); holy thursday [innocence] (03:44); the shepherd (02:34); the sick rose (03:51); the schoolboy (03:30); a dream (04:34); my pretty rose tree / the lilly (03:38). links: apple, spotify, youtube. blue aeroplanes —​ uk from staring at the future ; for voice, guitar, bass, and drums. art star, © 2024. rock. track: tyger! tyger! (04:31). link: discogs. bovine productions —​ unknown the tyger ; for voice, piano, guitar, bass, drums, and synthesizers. independent, © 2024. pop. track: the tyger (03:22). link: soundcloud. note: produced with ai. boynton, tommy —​ usa from riches ; for voice and guitar. tombobboy, © 2024. folk. tracks: infant joy (01:49); the shepherd (00:59); the ecchoing green (02:03); spring (02:43). links: apple, spotify, youtube. bren’s twin —​ usa from distance ; for voice and synthesizers. bren again, © 2024. indie. track: ah sunflower (01:36). links: apple, spotify, youtube. buhne, lorenzo —​ new zealand william blake: songs ; for voice, guitar, bass, flute, and drums. nocturnalsol, © 2024. folk. tracks: songs of innocence [ “introduction” ] (05:57); the shepherd (04:13); the echoing green (03:38); the little black boy (04:12); the blossom (01:38); the chimney sweeper [innocence] (04:36); the laughing song (02:01); a cradle song (03:37); the divine image (05:45); holy thursday [innocence] (02:47); night (03:51); spring (03:59); nurse’s song [innocence] (02:55); infant joy (02:31); on another’s sorrow (03:42); the fly (01:14); the little vagabond (02:04); london (01:10); poet’s motto [ “i must create a system” ] (02:53); on another’s sorrow (reprise) (04:50). links: apple, spotify, youtube. campbell, matthew rice —​ usa from tyger tyger ; for voice, guitar, bass, percussion, and keyboards. almond blossom recordings, © 2024. folk. track: tyger tyger (05:15). links: apple, spotify, youtube. carollo, john a. —​ usa from awake humanity to nature’s beauty ; for voice, piano, cello, and violin. independent, © 2024. classical. tracks: to morning (04:46); memory, hither come (01:48); innocence and virtue meet (07:28); a cradle song (03:51); to the evening star (08:27); true love doth pass away (06:42). links: apple, spotify, youtube. chromoplastic —​ switzerland from chromoplastic ; for voice, guitar, bass, and drums. independent, © 2024. heavy metal. tracks: ah! sun-flower (03:43); proverbs of hell (02:50). links: apple, spotify, youtube. copper matriarch —​ unknown from deriverance ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, and synthesizers. labeling theory of deviance, © 2024. alternative. track: the tyger (03:53). links: apple, spotify, youtube. note: produced with ai. corvian —​ unknown from our time here is precious ; for synthesizers. independent, © 2024. experimental. track: auguries of innocence (13:06). link: bandcamp. dai, vasha —​ thailand vasha dai sings the songs of w. blake ; for voice and guitar. independent, © 2024. folk. tracks: the clod and the pebble (03:59); a poison tree (04:19); laughing song (04:09); the chimney sweeper [experience] (03:10); the divine image (04:18); the garden of love (03:57); the little vagabond (04:13); the nurse’s song [experience] (03:02); a dream (03:41); the night (05:35); london (05:50); the shepherd (03:07). links: apple, spotify, youtube. day, victory, and merrin torpy —​ australia from like ribbons she did wear ; for voice. independent, © 2024. classical. track: the divine image (02:49). links: apple, spotify, youtube. dead poets symphony —​ unknown the angel ; for voice, guitar, bass, and drums. independent, © 2024. blues. track: the angel (03:30). link: youtube. note: produced with ai. dead poets symphony —​ unknown the argument [marriage] ; for voice and synthesizers. independent, © 2024. pop. track: the argument (02:57). link: youtube. note: produced with ai. dead poets symphony —​ unknown the argument [marriage] [another version] ; for voice and synthesizers. independent, © 2024. pop. track: the argument (03:39). link: youtube. note: produced with ai. dead poets symphony —​ unknown the chapel ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, and keyboards. independent, © 2024. pop. track: the chapel [ “i saw a chapel all of gold” ] (02:25). link: youtube. note: produced with ai. dead poets symphony —​ unknown the chimney sweeper ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, and piano. independent, © 2024. blues. track: the chimney sweeper [innocence] (02:27). link: youtube. note: produced with ai. dead poets symphony —​ unknown a dream ; for voice and piano. independent, © 2024. pop. track: a dream (02:46). link: youtube. note: produced with ai. dead poets symphony —​ unknown earth’s answer ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, and synthesizers. independent, © 2024. rock. track: earth’s answer (02:56). link: youtube. note: produced with ai. dead poets symphony —​ unknown the echoing green / the little black boy medley ; for voice and guitar. independent, © 2024. folk. track: the echoing green / the little black boy (03:48). link: youtube. note: produced with ai. dead poets symphony —​ unknown excerpts from auguries of innocence ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, and synthesizers. independent, © 2024. pop. track: excerpts from auguries of innocence (03:58). link: youtube. note: produced with ai. dead poets symphony —​ unknown the garden of love ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, brass, and piano. independent, © 2024. jazz. track: the garden of love (02:55). link: youtube. note: produced with ai. dead poets symphony —​ unknown the garden of love [another version] ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, and piano. independent, © 2024. jazz. track: the garden of love (01:38). link: youtube. note: produced with ai. dead poets symphony —​ unknown the garden of love [another version] ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, and synthesizers. independent, © 2024. pop. track: the garden of love (03:16). link: youtube. note: produced with ai. dead poets symphony —​ unknown the human abstract ; for voice, guitar, bass, and drums. independent, © 2024. blues. track: the human abstract (03:25). link: youtube. note: produced with ai. dead poets symphony —​ unknown infant sorrow / infant joy medley ; for voice and orchestra. independent, © 2024. pop. track: infant sorrow / infant joy (02:32). link: youtube. note: produced with ai. dead poets symphony —​ unknown infant sorrow / infant joy medley [another version] ; for voice and synthesizers. independent, © 2024. pop. track: infant sorrow / infant joy (02:18). link: youtube. note: produced with ai. dead poets symphony —​ unknown introduction to the songs of experience ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, and brass. independent, © 2024. jazz. track: introduction (02:16). link: youtube. note: produced with ai. dead poets symphony —​ unknown introduction to the songs of experience [another version] ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, and piano. independent, © 2024. pop. track: introduction (03:28). link: youtube. note: produced with ai. dead poets symphony —​ unknown introduction to the songs of innocence ; for voice, banjo, bass, and drums. independent, © 2024. folk. track: introduction (02:08). link: youtube. note: produced with ai. dead poets symphony —​ unknown i saw a chapel [another version—​see the chapel, above] ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, and synthesizers. independent, © 2024. pop. track: i saw a chapel (02:28). link: youtube. note: produced with ai. dead poets symphony —​ unknown the lamb ; for voice, cello, violin, and brass. independent, © 2024. pop. track: the lamb (02:55). link: youtube. note: produced with ai. dead poets symphony —​ unknown laughing song ; for voice, banjo, bass, drums, and violin. independent, © 2024. folk. track: laughing song (02:26). link: youtube. note: produced with ai. dead poets symphony —​ unknown the little black boy ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, and saxophone. independent, © 2024. blues. track: the little black boy (03:47). link: youtube. note: produced with ai. dead poets symphony —​ unknown little boy lost / ​little boy found ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, and synthesizers. independent, © 2024. pop. track: little boy lost / ​little boy found (04:00). link: youtube. note: produced with ai. dead poets symphony —​ unknown little girl found ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, and piano. independent, © 2024. motown. track: little girl found (01:59). link: youtube. note: produced with ai. dead poets symphony —​ unknown little girl lost ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, and synthesizers. independent, © 2024. motown. track: little girl lost (03:58). link: youtube. note: produced with ai. dead poets symphony —​ unknown london ; for voice and synthesizers. independent, © 2024. pop. track: london (02:34). link: youtube. note: produced with ai. dead poets symphony —​ unknown london [another version] ; for voice, drums, and synthesizers. independent, © 2024. pop. track: london (02:12). link: youtube. note: produced with ai. dead poets symphony —​ unknown mad song ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, and synthesizers. independent, © 2024. pop. track: mad song (03:02). link: youtube. note: produced with ai. dead poets symphony —​ unknown mad song [another version] ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, and synthesizers. independent, © 2024. pop. track: mad song (02:39). link: youtube. note: produced with ai. dead poets symphony —​ unknown mary ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, and synthesizers. independent, © 2024. pop. track: mary (03:52). link: youtube. note: produced with ai. dead poets symphony —​ unknown memory, hither come ; for voice, saxophone, drums, bass, and piano. independent, © 2024. jazz. track: memory, hither come (02:05). link: youtube. note: produced with ai. dead poets symphony —​ unknown memory, hither come [another version] ; for voice, saxophone, drums, bass, and piano. independent, © 2024. jazz. track: memory, hither come (02:34). link: youtube. note: produced with ai. dead poets symphony —​ unknown never seek to tell thy love ; for voice, brass, bass, drums, and piano. independent, © 2024. jazz. track: never seek to tell thy love (03:07). link: youtube. note: produced with ai. dead poets symphony —​ unknown on another’s sorrow ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, and strings. independent, © 2024. guajira. track: on another’s sorrow (03:57). link: youtube. note: produced with ai. dead poets symphony —​ unknown the schoolboy ; for voice, piano, and strings. independent, © 2024. pop. track: the schoolboy (03:05). link: youtube. note: produced with ai. dead poets symphony —​ unknown the smile ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, and piano. independent, © 2024. pop. track: the smile (02:47). link: youtube. note: produced with ai. dead poets symphony —​ unknown a song ; for voice and synthesizers. independent, © 2024. folk. track: a song [ “a cradle song” ] (03:52). link: youtube. note: produced with ai. dead poets symphony —​ unknown song: how sweet i roam’d from field to field ; for voice and piano. independent, © 2024. pop. track: song: how sweet i roam’d from field to field (03:54). link: youtube. note: produced with ai. dead poets symphony —​ unknown song: how sweet i roam’d from field to field [another version] ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, brass, and piano. independent, © 2024. jazz. track: song: how sweet i roam’d from field to field (02:05). link: youtube. note: produced with ai. dead poets symphony —​ unknown song: my silks and fine array ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, and synthesizers. independent, © 2024. pop. track: song: my silks and fine array (02:12). link: youtube. note: produced with ai. dead poets symphony —​ unknown song: my silks and fine array [another version] ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, and piano. independent, © 2024. pop. track: song: my silks and fine array (01:37). link: youtube. note: produced with ai. dead poets symphony —​ unknown spring ; for voice. independent, © 2024. classical. track: spring (02:36). link: youtube. note: produced with ai. dead poets symphony —​ unknown to autumn ; for voice and piano. independent, © 2024. classical. track: to autumn (02:29). link: youtube. note: produced with ai. dead poets symphony —​ unknown to spring ; for voice, piano, and strings. independent, © 2024. classical. track: to spring (02:33). link: youtube. note: produced with ai. dead poets symphony —​ unknown to summer ; for voice and orchestra. independent, © 2024. classical. track: to summer (03:58). link: youtube. note: produced with ai. dead poets symphony —​ unknown to winter ; for voice and piano. independent, © 2024. classical. track: to winter (02:53). link: youtube. note: produced with ai. dead poets symphony —​ unknown the tyger ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, and keyboards. independent, © 2024. rock. track: the tyger (03:48). link: youtube. note: produced with ai. dead poets symphony —​ unknown the vagabond ; for voice and strings. independent, © 2024. pop. track: the vagabond (02:24). link: youtube. note: produced with ai. dead poets symphony —​ unknown the vagabond [another version] ; for voice and strings. independent, © 2024. classical. track: the vagabond (02:54). link: youtube. note: produced with ai. d.l zero —​ unknown from echoes of eternity: volume 1 ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, and synthesizers. independent, © 2024. pop. tracks: laughing song (02:20); the echoing green (03:03). links: amazon, apple, spotify. note: produced with ai. d.l zero —​ unknown the tyger ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, and synthesizers. independent, © 2024. pop. track: the tyger (02:36). links: amazon, apple, spotify. note: produced with ai. dm king —​ unknown from songs close to home and heart ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, and synthesizers. dm king music, © 2024. alternative rock. track: tyger tyger (03:19). links: apple, spotify, youtube. dora, delphine, and anaïs tuerlinckx —​ france / ​belgium from l’oeil de la tigresse ; for voice, percussion, and synthesizers. possible motive, © 2024. dark electronic. tracks: tyger tyger (01:36); tyger tyger—​outro (03:40). links: bandcamp, spotify. dübel —​ unknown from kismedence ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, and synthesizers. independent, © 2024. alternative rock. track: the tyger (04:42). links: apple, spotify, youtube. duo blickwechsel —​ switzerland from hänge ich, zwischen zeiten ; for voice and piano. ars produktion, © 2024. classical. track: infant joy (01:03). links: amazon, spotify, youtube. note: the setting is by rebecca clarke. electric party —​ netherlands auguries of innocence ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, and synthesizers. set free entertainment, © 2024. alternative rock. track: auguries of innocence (04:45). links: apple, spotify, youtube. engle, laila, and merlyn quaife —​ australia from march of the women, 2024: connecting australia, volume 1 ; for voice and flute. independent, © 2024. classical. tracks: the lily (02:04); the wildflower’s song (01:35). links: amazon, spotify, youtube. note: the settings are by esther rofe. feth —​ uk from aviator ; for synthesizers. independent, © 2024. alternative. track: auguries of innocence (01:05). links: apple, spotify, youtube. frantzolas, george, and anna frantzola —​ greece a cradle song ; for voice, guitar, bass, cello, drums, and flute. independent, © 2024. folk. track: a cradle song (02:52). link: youtube. friedman, joel phillip —​ usa the angel ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, and keyboards. independent, © 2024. classical. track: the angel (04:21). link: soundcloud. friedt, thomas —​ switzerland love and harmony ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, and keyboards. independent, © 2024. folk. track: love and harmony (03:25). link: youtube. guerra, christophe —​ unknown from hiphopscur2 ; for synthesizers. independent, © 2024. rap / ​hardcore. track: urizen (01:29). link: bandcamp. hagen, daron —​ usa from the art of song: lyric fest ; for voice and piano. naxos, © 2024. classical. track: the lamb (02:58). links: apple, spotify, youtube. hawkshaw, anna —​ unknown benjamin ; for voice and harp. independent, © 2024. folk. track: benjamin (01:51). links: apple, spotify. note: inspired by “the tyger.” hawkshaw, anna —​ unknown is this a cry? ; for voice and harp. independent, © 2024. folk. track: is this a cry? (02:55). links: apple, spotify, youtube. note: an adaptation of “holy thursday” (experience). io —​ brazil for children: the gates of paradise ; for synthesizers. independent, © 2024. experimental. tracks: frontispiece, “what is man!” (10:28); for children: the gates of paradise, title page (10:16); i found him beneath a tree (12:12); water (11:24); earth (13:20); air (11:41); fire (10:20); at length for hatching ripe he breaks the shell (10:48); alas! (13:04); my son! my son! (12:08); i want! i want! (11:32); help! help! (12:37); aged ignorance (13:47); does thy god o priest take such vengeance as this? (14:16); fear and hope are—​vision (13:19); the traveller hasteth in the evening (12:32); death’s door (11:43); i have said to the worm: thou art my mother and my sister (14:41). link: bandcamp. note: all tracks are instrumental. johnson, liz dilnot —​ uk from gentle flame ; for voice, orchestra, and sitar. divine art ltd., © 2024. classical / indian. track: blake reimagined (02:59). links: apple, spotify, youtube. note: an adaptation of “jerusalem.” kamos —​ türkiye from the entity ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, and keyboards. independent, © 2024. death / ​black metal. track: the angel (03:33). links: apple, spotify, youtube. kilsby, laurence, and ella o’neill —​ uk from awakenings ; for voice and piano. deutsche grammophon, © 2024. classical. track: tiger, tiger (04:21). links: apple, spotify, youtube. note: the setting is by rebecca clarke. kirkpatrick, seamus —​ australia from extinction of animals: left, down, right, up ; for voice and synthesizers. independent, © 2024. spoken word / ​instrumental. track: to winter! (02:34). links: amazon, apple, spotify. koundourakis, antonios —​ greece / ​uk echoes of innocence ; for voice. independent, © 2024. classical. track: echoes of innocence [fragments from “auguries of innocence” ] (02:56). link: youtube. krom, james —​ usa from cua senior year in concert ; for voice and orchestra. independent, © 2024. classical. track: to a sick rose (04:20). links: amazon, spotify, youtube. lake, caelius —​ uk tyger ; for synthesizers. facilitone, © 2024. electronic. track: tyger (02:58). links: apple, spotify, youtube. levy, hagar —​ israel the tyger ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, and synthesizers. nana disc, © 2024. pop. track: the tyger (04:47). links: amazon, apple, spotify. mad song —​ switzerland blake ; for voice, guitar, and synthesizers. independent, © 2024. experimental post-rock. tracks: night (03:36); sorrow (01:35); winds (02:18); mad (04:42); song (03:55); memory (05:37); day (06:45). link: soundcloud. note: the tracks are based on “mad song” and “memory, hither come.” mcintosh, daniel j., and marci jackson —​ usa songs of innocence ; for voice and piano. independent, © 2024. classical. tracks: introduction (02:08); the shepherd (02:00); the ecchoing green (02:27); the lamb (03:56); the little black boy (04:59); the blossom (00:58); the chimney sweeper (06:44); the little boy lost (01:31); the little boy found (01:31); laughing song (01:21); a cradle song (05:17); the divine image (03:13); holy thursday (04:05); night (07:25); spring (01:11); nurse’s song (01:47); infant joy (01:31); a dream (03:28); on another’s sorrow (05:14). links: apple, spotify, youtube. miglianti, clizia, and angelo petraglia —​ italy visions—​homage to william blake ; for strings, percussion, and piano. miglianti / ​petraglia / ​aut records, © 2024. jazz / ​experimental. tracks: infant sorrow (01:22); the fly (04:49); the voice of the ancient bard (02:00); the smile (05:15); never seek to tell thy love (03:06); the song of los (02:12); infant sorrow (ii) (03:08); the reunion of the soul and the body (01:26); infant sorrow (iii) (03:01); the garden of love (02:44); i fear’d the fury of my wind (06:21); ah! sun-flower (07:46). links: amazon, bandcamp, spotify. note: all tracks are instrumental. moore, david michael —​ usa from lunch is having lunch ; for voice and guitar. ulyssa, © 2024. alternative. track: rosie [ “the sick rose” ] (04:27). link: bandcamp. nanna kids music —​ unknown the tyger ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, and synthesizers. shahzaib ahmed, © 2024. pop / ​kids. track: the tyger (02:45). links: amazon, spotify, youtube. note: produced with ai. noroi, stet —​ germany tyger ; for synthesizers. independent, © 2024. alternative rock. track: tyger (07:51). links: apple, bandcamp, spotify. our symphony —​ unknown from echoes of eternity ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, and keyboards. independent, © 2024. alternative rock. tracks: the chimney sweeper [innocence] (03:59); london (02:58). links: amazon, apple, spotify. note: produced with ai. our symphony —​ unknown the tyger ; for voice and synthesizers. independent, © 2024. alternative rock. track: the tyger (02:20). link: youtube. note: produced with ai. paper dragon —​ new zealand from album 3 ; for voice, guitar, bass, and drums. independent, © 2024. alternative rock. track: tyger (03:44). links: apple, spotify, youtube. pappacena & vezzani —​ italy blake ; for voice, guitar, mandolin, bass, drums, and keyboards. independent, © 2024. alternative. tracks: auguries of innocence (00:17); introduction [innocence] (03:33); the imagination (00:08); laughing song (03:43); the chimney sweeper [innocence] (02:49); the tigers of worth [sic] (00:08); the tyger (04:48); the mental traveller (01:06); on another’s sorrow (04:17); the sick rose (02:31); never sick [sic] to tell thy love (03:52); proverbs of hell (02:53); the human abstract (04:41); the doors of perception (00:11); the smile (05:08); stay kate! (00:13); the angel (03:30); night (04:33); the sick rose, pt. 2 (02:44). links: apple, spotify, youtube. penn, the bard of stanzania —​ unknown the chimney sweeper ; for voice, guitar, and synthesizers. independent, © 2024. indie. track: the chimney sweeper [innocence] (03:29). link: youtube. note: produced with ai. penn, the bard of stanzania —​ unknown song: how sweet i roamed from field to field ; for voice, guitar, and synthesizers. independent, © 2024. indie. track: song: how sweet i roamed from field to field (02:47). link: youtube. note: produced with ai. penn, the bard of stanzania —​ unknown song: memory, hither come ; for voice, guitar, and synthesizers. independent, © 2024. indie. track: song: memory, hither come (02:16). link: youtube. note: produced with ai. penn, the bard of stanzania —​ unknown the tyger ; for voice and synthesizers. independent, © 2024. hip hop. track: the tyger (01:33). link: youtube. note: produced with ai. poe, eydie allen —​ usa the tyger ; for voice, drums, and synthesizers. mind city productions, © 2024. new age. track: the tyger (02:56). links: apple, spotify, youtube. prinz in town —​ unknown tyger! tyger! ; for voice, guitar, bass, and synthesizers. independent, © 2024. pop. track: tyger! tyger! (02:22). link: soundcloud. race, hugo, and michelangelo russo —​ australia from 100 years ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, and synthesizers. independent, © 2024. alternative rock. track: earths answer (04:58). link: bandcamp. rogers, lesley-jane, and john turner —​ uk from thomas pitfield: his friends and contemporaries ; for voice, strings, recorder, oboe, and harp. divine art ltd., © 2024. classical. tracks: ah! sunflower (01:46); the lilly (01:11); infant joy (01:24). links: apple, spotify, youtube. note: the settings are by stuart scott. seatbelt tourniquet —​ unknown from longinus ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, and keyboards. noise bleed, © 2024. death metal. track: the clod and the pebble (02:34). links: amazon, apple, spotify. shaw, caroline, and sō percussion —​ usa from rectangles and circumstance ; for voice, vibraphone, bass, drums, and synthesizers. nonesuch records, © 2024. folk. track: silently invisibly [ “never seek to tell thy love” ] (04:08). links: apple, spotify, youtube. siekmann, henning —​ germany from don’t push the river ; for guitar. timezone, © 2024. pop. tracks: the ecchoing green (02:17); the smile (04:06); the human abstract (02:40). links: apple, spotify, youtube. skulld —​ italy from the portal is open ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, and keyboards. independent, © 2024. death metal. track: to misery are born (04:09). link: bandcamp. note: the lyrics are based on “on anothers sorrow,” “to the queen,” the proverbs of hell, and “auguries of innocence.” smart, jim, and sue smart —​ usa little lamb ; for voice and guitar. independent, © 2024. folk. track: little lamb (04:07). link: youtube. songlion —​ unknown sick rose ; for voice and synthesizers. dal studio, © 2024. electronic. track: sick rose (02:51). links: apple, spotify, youtube. note: produced with ai. sons of the silent age —​ uk from the gravity of dragons ; for guitar, bass, drums, and keyboards. jonathan whittle and jacob whittle, © 2024. rock. track: the tyger (02:27). links: apple, spotify, youtube. st. peter, bryce —​ usa from the four classical elements: fire ( 1 ) ; for voice, guitar, bass, saxophone, and synthesizers. the foundation of harmony, © 2024. indie. track: the tyger (02:20). links: amazon, spotify, youtube. sysmik —​ france from live sessions 2023 ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, and keyboards. independent, © 2024. alternative rock. track: tyger tyger (04:19). links: apple, spotify, youtube. theoeust —​ poland from obdurate void ; for voice and synthesizers. independent, © 2024. electronic. track: the little black boy (06:45). links: apple, spotify, youtube. three cane whale —​ uk from hibernacula ; for guitar, mandolin, and trumpet. independent, © 2024. folk. track: the lost traveller’s dream under the hill (02:39). link: bandcamp. note: an instrumental inspired by “to the accuser who is the god of this world.” tymon dogg and the dacoits —​ spain from the granada sessions ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, and keyboards. tiny global productions, © 2024. alternative rock. track: chimney sweep [experience] (01:59). links: apple, spotify, youtube. voktett hannover and yoonjee kim —​ germany from the passing of the year ; for voice and piano. independent, © 2024. classical. track: ah, sun-flower! (01:55). links: apple, spotify, youtube. note: the setting is by jonathan dove. westbury people’s gallery —​ uk ah! sun-flower ; for voice, piano, and strings. independent, © 2024. classical / ​pop. track: ah! sun-flower (02:34). link: soundcloud. westbury people’s gallery —​ uk the clod and the pebble ; for voice, piano, and strings. independent, © 2024. classical / ​pop. track: the clod and the pebble (03:10). link: soundcloud. westbury people’s gallery —​ uk london ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, and synthesizers. independent, © 2024. reggae / ​ska. track: london (07:12). link: soundcloud. westbury people’s gallery —​ uk love and harmony ; for voice, piano, and strings. independent, © 2024. classical. track: love and harmony (02:48). link: soundcloud. westbury people’s gallery —​ uk nurse’s song ; for voice, piano, and strings. independent, © 2024. classical / ​pop. track: nurse’s song [experience] (02:46). link: soundcloud. westbury people’s gallery —​ uk piping down the valleys wild ; for voice, harmonica, piano, and strings. independent, © 2024. folk / ​classical. track: piping down the valleys wild (03:41). link: soundcloud. westbury people’s gallery —​ uk a poison tree ; for voice, piano, and strings. independent, © 2024. classical. track: a poison tree (02:37). link: soundcloud. westbury people’s gallery —​ uk tyger tyger ; for voice, piano, and strings. independent, © 2024. classical. track: tyger tyger (03:00). link: soundcloud. who played the bass —​ unknown the tyger ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, and synthesizers. basso records, © 2024. jazz. track: the tyger (02:28). links: apple, spotify, youtube. wicke, stuart —​ usa from rubáiyát of omar khayyám ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, and synthesizers. independent, © 2024. progressive rock. track: song on the end of the world (15:59). link: bandcamp. note: parts 1 and 3 of the track are based on the text of america. williams, evan, kate wakefield, james meade, and all of the above —​ usa songs of innocence | songs of experience ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, piano, flute, and synthesizers. independent, © 2024. classical crossover. tracks: introduction [innocence] (04:39); a cradle song (03:48); the divine image (07:53); spring (02:18); introduction [experience] (03:17); holy thursday [experience] (03:21); nurse’s song [experience] (01:35); the sick rose / my pretty rose tree (02:54); the angel (03:23); the tiger (02:15); a divine image (02:20); the voice of the ancient bard (06:15); youth of delight (edm remix) (04:18). links: apple, spotify, youtube. williams, roderick —​ uk from the essential roderick williams ; for voice and orchestra. naxos records, © 2024. classical. track: the lamb (02:31). links: amazon, spotify, youtube. note: the setting is by kenneth fuchs. wilson, siobhan —​ uk from flowercore, vol. 3 ; for voice and synthesizers. sufrecs, © 2024. folk. track: auguries of innocence lines 1-4 (01:31). links: apple, spotify, youtube. wing, tina —​ usa the wildflower’s song ; for voice, guitar, and piano. independent, © 2024. folk. track: the wildflower’s song (02:33). link: youtube. withington, grant —​ usa little wanderer ( a collection of william blake’s poems set to music ) ; for voice, guitar, bass, drums, strings, and synthesizers. independent, © 2024. alternative rock. tracks: to the muses (01:20); how sweet i roam’d (02:41); cupid (03:05); nurse’s song [experience] (02:45); london / day (04:25); never seek to tell thy love (01:56); the garden of love (03:32); a dream (03:15); the smile (02:21); nurse’s song [innocence] (04:33). links: apple, spotify, youtube. xo, aurelius —​ usa from nothing new ; for voice and synthesizers. independent, © 2024. alternative rock. track: auguries of innocence (01:52). links: apple, spotify, youtube. b l a k e volume 52, number 4, spring 2019 angela esterhammer, victoria college, university of toronto nelson hilton, university of georgia tilar j. mazzeo, colby college robert w. rix, university of copenhagen joseph viscomi, university of north carolina at chapel hill david worrall, the nottingham trent university martin butlin, tate gallery, london, retired tristanne j. connolly, university of waterloo detlef w. dörrbecker, university of trier sibylle erle, bishop grosseteste university robert n. essick, university of california, riverside a d v i s o r y b o a r d a n i l l u s t r a t e d q u a r t e r l y volume 52 number 4 spring 2019 c o n t e n t s www.blakequarterly.org articles blake in the marketplace, 2018 by robert n. essick “jerusalem” set to music: a selected discography by jason whittaker reviews mark crosby, ed., “william blake’s manuscripts,” huntington library quarterly 80.3 (autumn 2017) reviewed by bruce graver g. a. rosso, the religion of empire: political theology in blake’s prophetic symbolism reviewed by r. paul yoder © 2019 copyright morris eaves and morton d. paley cover: detail of “christie’s auction room,” aquatint by j. bluck after a. c. pugin and t. rowlandson (ackermann, 1808). image from the metropolitan museum of art. harris brisbane dick fund, 1917. accession number 17.3.1167-146. e d i t o r s editors: morris eaves and morton d. paley review editor: alexander s. gourlay exhibitions editor: luisa calè bibliographer (criticism): wayne c. ripley bibliographer (music): jason whittaker managing editor: sarah jones sarah.jones@rochester.edu production office: department of english, university of rochester, rochester ny 14627-0451 angela esterhammer, victoria college, university of toronto nelson hilton, university of georgia tilar j. mazzeo, colby college robert w. rix, university of copenhagen joseph viscomi, university of north carolina at chapel hill david worrall, the nottingham trent university martin butlin, tate gallery, london, retired tristanne j. connolly, university of waterloo detlef w. dörrbecker, university of trier sibylle erle, bishop grosseteste university robert n. essick, university of california, riverside a d v i s o r y b o a r d a n i l l u s t r a t e d q u a r t e r l y volume 54 number 3 winter 2020–21 c o n t e n t s www.blakequarterly.org remembrance john e. grant, 1925–2020 by alexander s. gourlay articles violence, death, and autoeroticism: the alternative self-annihilation in visions of the daughters of albion by kang-po chen “if you want to learn the secrets, close your eyes”: bruce dickinson’s “gates of urizen” as contrary version of the [first] book of urizen by katharina hagen minute particular “remarkable both for genius, & extravagance”: amelia opie and blake’s illustrations of the book of job by shelley king and john b. pierce © 2021 copyright morris eaves and morton d. paley cover: design based on blake, visions of the daughters of albion (1793), copy j. lessing j. rosenwald collection, library of congress. rosenwald no. 1803. images courtesy of the william blake archive. e d i t o r s editors: morris eaves and morton d. paley review editor: alexander s. gourlay exhibitions editor: luisa calè bibliographer (criticism): wayne c. ripley bibliographer (music): jason whittaker managing editor: sarah jones sarah.jones@rochester.edu production office: department of english, university of rochester, rochester ny 14627-0451 william blake and his circle: a checklist of scholarship in 2019 william blake and his circle: a checklist of scholarship in 2019 by wayne c. ripley works in romance languages collected and compiled by fernando castanedo works in japanese collected and compiled by hikari sato works in turkish collected and compiled by hüseyin alhasresearch for “william blake and his circle” in english was conducted at the krueger library at winona state university. research for works in romance languages was conducted at the universidad de alcalá library (madrid). research for japanese publications was carried out in cinii (national institute of informatics scholarly and academic information navigator) and the national diet library online catalogue and at komaba library and general library in the university of tokyo and the national diet library. research for turkish publications was carried out at the general library at social sciences university of ankara and at i̇hsan doğramacı bilkent university library. wayne c. ripley (wripley@winona.edu) is a professor of english at winona state university in minnesota. he is working on a project regarding blake’s broad street family, friends, and neighbors. table of contents: introductory essay symbols abbreviations division i: william blake part i: blake’s writings section a: original editions, facsimiles, reprints, and translations section b: collections and selections part ii: reproductions of drawings and paintings section a: illustrations of individual authors section b: collections and selections part iii: commercial engravings section a: illustrations of individual authors part iv: bibliographies and catalogues section a: bibliographies section b: catalogues part v: digital resources part vi: criticism, biography, and reviews division ii: william blake’s circle barry, james böhme, jakob bowyer, robert cosway, maria cromek, robert hartley darwin, erasmus flaxman, john fuseli, henry hayley, william johnes, thomas linnell, john macklin, thomas montgomery, james morganwg, iolo reynolds, joshua robinson, henry crabb royal academy of arts smith, john thomas stedman, john gabriel stothard, thomas swedenborg, emanuel tatham, charles heathcote tatham, frederick taylor, thomas trusler, john wadström, carl bernhard wainewright, thomas griffiths west, benjamin wilkinson, james john garth wollstonecraft, mary introductory essay i’d like to begin the annual checklist by welcoming hüseyin alhas, who will be collecting material produced in turkish. hüseyin is a research assistant at social sciences university of ankara and is currently working on his phd in the department of english language and literature at hacettepe university. i thank him and, as always, fernando castanedo and hikari sato for their contributions. any notes on entries from their respective areas should be recognized as theirs. this year i did not update the list of out-of-copyright editions of and scholarship on blake offered by on-demand publishers, which flood the digital book market. these works through 2018 can be found in the appendix to last year’s checklist, which is available in the “bonus content” section of the blake website. the appendix also lists and links to scans of this material at sites such as hathitrust, the internet archive, and google books, and includes (perhaps most usefully) different editions of books with blake’s commercial engravings. the tate britain exhibition and related works 2019 was a very active year in blake studies. in popular discussions, at least, it was dominated by the tate britain exhibition, william blake, curated by martin myrone and amy concannon. the retrospective boasted over 300 works, making it by far the largest blake exhibition of the twenty-first century. its catalogue, which was named one of the twenty-six most beautiful art books of 2019 by the new york times,cotter et al. under myrone and concannon in part vi. articulates the exhibition’s “determinedly historicist and materialist”martin myrone and amy concannon, with an afterword by alan moore, william blake (london: tate publishing, 2019) 14. approach and includes an afterword by alan moore, reflecting on blakean places and his graphic novel from hell. while i leave a full description to luisa calè (whose review appeared in blake 53.4), the exhibition spurred many announcements, reviews, and reflections in forums ranging from academic journals to chatrooms. these sometimes focused on the curators and exhibition but more often on blake himself. i have done my best to document them beneath the entry for the catalogue, even though most do not reference the catalogue per se. given the vast number of these responses, i have cross-listed only authors who are blake scholars and whose names might be sought out in these pages (for example, billingsley and whittaker). the reviews of the exhibition itself were largely positive. jason whittaker praised it as “quite simply, the best exhibition of blake’s work that i have seen in my lifetime.” for the london magazine, robert greer wrote, “for its demonstration of blake’s craftsmanship and true insight into his life, the exhibition is a must-see.” emily spicer advised, “spend as much time as you can in these galleries; read the poetry and drink in the colours. in fact, spend an afternoon in this exhibition. it would be an afternoon well spent.” steve dinneen remarked, “tate britain wisely avoids psychoanalysing blake, [a]lthough it’s hard not to do so yourself. this is the work of a special, troubled mind—​an absolute must-see.”zoamorphosis in part v and greer, spicer, and dinneen under myrone and concannon in part vi. still, a significant minority of reviewers complained that the historical and technical aspects of blake’s career overshadowed his poetry, mysticism, and/​or social commitments. at the bbc, will gompertz bristled at the historical contextualization: “the curators’ desire to contextualise every last part of blake’s output by introducing his patrons, his business practices, the work of his contemporaries—​because there’s plenty of space in those big rooms to fill—​means the mystical, magical nature of the work is usurped.” a blog review likewise praised and damned the exhibition’s comprehensiveness: “this exhibition feels like a big, elaborately assembled, beautifully curated and presented catalogue of all blake’s visual works. a list. a documentation of his works. but somehow, with all the fiery life, rebellion and pride of the imagination taken out.” my favorite line in such critiques came from eddy frankel at time out london, who asked, “who gives a rat’s ass about a guy called thomas butts commissioning blake?”gompertz, simon, and frankel under myrone and concannon in part vi. many works were published in conjunction with the exhibition. myrone compiled lives of william blake, a new collection of early lives stretching from henry crabb robinson’s “william blake, künstler, dichter und religiöser schwärmer” to the “preliminary” of alexander gilchrist’s biography, and myrone’s introduction itself is an efficient and interesting biographical sketch. (gilchrist’s use of his sources is also the subject of an article in portuguese by anselmo peres alós and daniela schwarcke do canto.) published by pallas athene, the collection is beautifully illustrated, and the same press also issued glossy facsimiles of illustrations of the book of job and the illustrations for l’allegro and il penseroso. richard holmes’s edition of songs of innocence and of experience was also reprinted by tate publishing. william blake’s mystic map of london by louisa amelia albani, with contributions by simon cole, presents both blake’s and contemporary london through whimsical illustrations and prose reflections. working in a similar spirit, sam gainsborough’s trailer for the tate exhibition shows animated images from blake’s works against london buildings. tate etc. magazine included a set of essays organized by artist mark leckey, whose exhibition at the tate ran concurrently with blake’s. finally, more than a handful of writers responding to the exhibition tried to make hay out of the sign at the entrance that read: content warning   the art of william blake contains strong and sometimes challenging imagery, including some depictions of violence and suffering.   please ask a member of the staff if you would like more information. personally, i overlooked the sign completely in my excitement to get into the gallery, and as someone who found himself teaching visions of the daughters of albion during the brett kavanaugh supreme court hearing, i think the sign is a fair acknowledgment that the words and images blake used can be disturbing in a way some people may not be ready to deal with on a particular day for a host of valid reasons. but for others, it was tantamount to censoring blake, with profound implications for western culture. writing for the telegraph, for example, frank furedi asked, “do visitors need to be told at the william blake exhibition at tate britain that his art contains ‘strong and sometimes challenging imagery’ and ‘depictions of violence and suffering’?” he answered his question with another: “since when has it been the business of public institutions in a free society to instruct its citizens how they should react to an exhibition and what they should think?” the art scholar in each of us begins in response, “well …,” but, as in the book of job, it seems that furedi’s questions are not posed to be answered. perhaps not surprisingly, for its part the daily mail magnified the sign to iconoclastic vandalism in its headline: “beware of the art! tate britain slaps trigger warning for ‘violent’ and ‘challenging’ images at entrance to their exhibition of 200-year-old william blake masterpieces.”furedi and keay under myrone and concannon in part vi. whatever the merit of the sign, neither these two articles nor any article or blog post of this type discussed or showed “a negro hung alive by the ribs to a gallows” or other images from the stedman engravings that might, indeed, have given people pause before they decided to enter the “open debate” of the exhibition. instead, somewhat underhandedly, if they showed any examples of blake’s imagery, they offered his most anodyne depictions of christ as typical of his work.for example, “snowflake madness” under myrone and concannon in part vi. the most extreme responses, moreover, seem to have been the work of hirelings more charged with generating online outrage than with really defending unmediated access to blake’s work, and the very worst of these occurred in anonymous postings that contained strange grammatical errors, heavily plagiarized one another, and were replicated in part or whole on several different webpages.“‘trigger warnings’” under myrone and concannon in part vi. tellingly, perhaps, no defenders of free speech mentioned the £18 entry fee, which was, undoubtedly, the biggest barrier to any open viewing and free discussion. but these defenses of blake against snowflakes and social justice warriors were heavily outweighed by those who aligned blake with social justice and the resistance to reactionary political forces.for example, collings and haworth under myrone and concannon in part vi. the new york times described him as “the revolutionary poet, artist and prophet-saint of what we now call social justice.” (echoing this, david aberbach’s book literature and poverty: from the hebrew bible to the second world war includes a section entitled “william blake and the struggle for social justice.”) the poet danny hayward exclaimed: “tate’s comprehensive display of three hundred works from across blake’s life should serve as a historical reminder that these thick, sensuous outlines of the body still have better fucking things to do than stand sentry in the metaphorical imagination of this or that fascist regime.“hayward under myrone and concannon in part vi. not addressing the exhibition, a blog writer put blake on the level of scripture: “some people would look to the bible, the koran, or similar religious texts at those times when they need to contemplate serious matters … for me william blake’s songs of innocence and of experience (1794) is that book.”dean in part vi. work on blake’s reception this view of blake as inspiration, model, and almost savior for contemporary art and society is found in most work on blake’s reception. it is embodied in both james murray-white’s website, finding blake: reimagining william blake for the 21st century, filled with interviews and reflections in video and prose regarding blake’s current influence, and in john higgs’s wonderful book william blake now: why he matters more than ever, a passionate argument for blake’s contemporary relevance. s. yarberry’s interviews with poets at hell’s printing press work in this vein as well, and even in outside forums blake represents humanistic connection, with a 2019 article for pediatric radiology holding up the “chimney sweeper” poems as an ethical model of doctor-patient interaction.gunderman in part vi. blake as savior and model is also a theme that emerges in sibylle erle and morton d. paley’s magnificent two-volume collection of essays, the reception of william blake in europe, which offers a wealth of historic and bibliographical information regarding blake’s reception in several national traditions, in music, and in major exhibitions (i have cross-listed chapters with extensive bibliographical content in part iv below). blake emerges again and again as a model for writers and scholars in dark times across the european continent who were “keeping a humane vision in times of trouble” or “‘like prometheus on the rock.’”see the chapters by ghiţă and schoina under erle and paley, the reception of william blake in europe, in part vi. while the times depicted in the collection weren’t always bleak, that it was published in the year the uk turned from europe seems to lay out a counterargument to the contemporary political and social winds. with hüseyin alhas joining the checklist contributors, it is worth noting the overdue attention blake’s reception in turkey received this year. in addition to william coker’s chapter in the reception of william blake in europe, it was discussed in sarah jones’s interview with ramazan saral at hell’s printing press and saral’s review of kaan h. ökten’s translation of blake’s prophetic works (blake 53.1). see also the works documented here by alhas. blake’s reception in asia also received attention, featuring prominently in three chapters of alex watson and laurence williams’s new collection, british romanticism in asia: the reception, translation, and transformation of romantic literature in india and east asia. as rosalind atkinson writes in her chapter on blake and tezuka osamu’s phoenix, taken outside his immediate historical context, blake can function as “a free-floating figure” who “can also facilitate creative appropriation in cultures outside the one of origin” (356). peter otto considers blake’s place in ōe’s rouse up o young men of the new age! for steve clark, “the future-directed emancipatory quality of romanticism is stressed by both [essays]” (390). a selection of lectures on blake by lafcadio hearn (koizumi yakumo) that were delivered from 1896 to 1903 at tokyo imperial university were published this year in japan. james watt’s british orientalisms, 1759–1835 touches briefly on blake, william hayley, and erasmus darwin in the context of his discussion of william jones. the john rylands research institute held a one-day conference on blake’s reception, the artist of the future age: william blake, neo-romanticism, counterculture and now. the conference seems to have synthesized the concerns found in major work on blake’s reception over the last few years—the 2017–18 block museum exhibition, william blake and the age of aquarius; colin trodd and jason whittaker’s 2018 issue of visual culture in britain, “william blake: the man from the future?”; and linda freedman’s william blake and the myth of america: from the abolitionists to the counterculture (2018). at least as described by francesca bradley at the john rylands research institute blog, the participants discussed the image of blake as a “rebel figure” in “20th century counterculture,” but found it difficult to answer why “women did not appear to be inspired by blake in the same way as their male counterparts.” on the topic of the counterculture, new articles by andreea paris-popa and alexandre ferrere further examine allen ginsberg’s relationship to blake. ginsberg’s thoughts can be found at the allen ginsberg project, which has continued to post both audio files and transcriptions of his 1979 course on blake at the naropa institute. jacob rabinowitz’s independently published and wonderfully titled blame it on blake: a memoir of dead languages, gender vagrancy, burroughs, ginsberg, corso & carr touches on blake in a memoir detailing rabinowitz’s relationship with the beats. posthumous lives in the wake of harold bloom’s 2019 passing, the struggle over blake’s legacy and influence is perhaps appropriate. kenneth gross, a former student of bloom’s, wrote a remembrance of bloom and blake that appeared both in blake 53.3 and at hell’s printing press. other obituaries typically noted that bloom had memorized the whole of blake (one wonders which edition), had written the commentary to david v. erdman’s edition, or had been heavily influenced by fearful symmetry, but as none considered his relationship to blake beyond these points, i have not listed them. by contrast, timothy sandefur’s new biography of jacob bronowksi (author of william blake, 1757–1827: a man without a mask [1943]), the ascent of jacob bronowski: the life and ideas of a popular science icon, devotes a chapter to bronowski’s relationship to blake. in blake 53.1, sarah jones reviews g. e. bentley, jr.’s memoir, boondoggles: travels of a restless professor, and keri davies reflects on bentley at his blog, index rerum. in true blakean fashion, bentley is not going to let a little thing like residing in the continuing city stand in the way of writing on blake, and, with the assistance of his daughters, he published three new articles in 2019, with additional articles promised for 2020. among those published in 2019 was a bibliography of sale catalogues between 1997 and 2016 listing blake’s work. this list should be added to his sale catalogues of blake’s works, 1791–2017, which is available in the g. e. bentley: blake collection at the e. j. pratt library site. to this record should also be appended a listing for an unknown copy of the book of thel that was found in an 1803 auction catalogue for a bankruptcy (essick, blake 52.4). blake’s own afterlife is considered in joseph viscomi’s “posthumous blake: the roles of catherine blake, c. h. tatham, and frederick tatham in blake’s afterlife” (blake 53.2), a major study on catherine blake and the posthumous printing of blake’s works that pays special attention to who was producing the prints, where they were produced, and why. it seeks to temper recent claims surrounding catherine’s continuation of the blake “business.” editions for all the focus on blake as an artist in 2019, nicholas shrimpton’s new edition of the poetry, william blake: selected poems, stresses blake’s accomplishments as a poet. almost heretically, the edition lacks any illustration apart from the cover, and whereas peter otto organized his 2018 collection of the poetry and prose (also published by oxford) in chronological order, shrimpton arranges his by poetic genre: lyrics, ballads, narrative poems, descriptive and discursive poetry, comic and satirical poetry, verse epistles and dedications, brief epic, and diffuse epic. as he explains, “the stress is on the formal categories which help us to sense the ways in which [blake] was possessed of literary, as well as visual, artistry” (xv). this defense of blake’s literary artistry surely indicates the degree to which the center of gravity has shifted from the time when he was considered worthy only as a poet. the edition includes a biographical introduction, a selected bibliography, a chronology, and explanatory notes, which are especially interesting coming so soon after otto’s. (see myrone’s response to shrimpton’s edition in relationship to the tate exhibition in his interview with calè in blake 53.1.) the william blake archive published several new works in 2019. works in illuminated printing include for the sexes: the gates of paradise (copies b, f, and k) and miscellaneous impressions of visions of the daughters of albion. twenty-three objects have been added to blake’s separate plates. there are twenty-eight new letters (bringing the grand total in the archive to eighty-one), as well as receipts from 1805 to 1829, a landmark for considerations of blake’s commercial activities. the archive also opened a new wing, “archive exhibitions.” in many ways this wing answers critics of the archive’s diplomatic editorial policy, as the exhibitions are essentially mini digital projects that weave together contextual information about blake. while two of the exhibitions are viscomi’s illuminated printing and denise vultee’s biography, both of which had long been part of the archive’s “about blake” section, their effective utilization of the verbal and visual appears to have offered the model for presenting different aspects of blake’s work, its context, and its reception more in line with what one might see at the rossetti archive. thus the new exhibition, william blake’s canterbury pilgrims, not only presents blake’s painting and engraving, but those of thomas stothard as well, explaining the controversy between blake and stothard and offering contemporary responses to it. major essays, collections, and monographs interestingly, it is stothard who often takes center stage in ian haywood, susan matthews, and mary l. shannon’s very strong collection of essays, romanticism and illustration. in addition to chapters on stothard, the volume contains two on blake, by peter otto and sophie thomas, and the other essays focus on members of blake’s circle or his contemporaries, including henry fuseli, thomas macklin, maria cosway, and robert cromek. (blake and cromek’s dispute received a popular retelling in clayton schuster’s bad blood: rivalry and art history.) blake and edmund burke are treated together in three new publications. j. b. mertz considers blake’s french revolution (but not blake’s response to bishop watson) in “teaching the revolution debate: edmund burke, his radical respondents, and william blake,” which appeared in the collection teaching representations of the french revolution. a chapter of annika mann’s reading contagion: the hazards of reading in the age of print addresses the book of urizen and metaphors of contagion within the context of the revolution debates. in the challenge of the sublime: from burke’s “philosophical enquiry” to british romantic art, hélène ibata considers the legacy of burke’s concept of the sublime in late eighteenth-century british art. the book includes a chapter on blake as well as extended discussions of joshua reynolds, james barry, benjamin west, and fuseli, and it would complement the essays in romanticism and illustration quite well. sarah haggarty’s excellent new collection, william blake in context, offers many short chapters by established scholars on blake in various contexts or in relationship to different topics. the chapters are accessible, with bibliographies that are substantial but not overwhelming, making the work, as alexander gourlay suggests in his review in blake 53.3, an ideal resource for beginning writers on blake or experienced ones striking out on new topics. in other reference works, blake features in two essays in the oxford handbook of british romanticism, ed. david duff, and a bit more substantially in a history of romantic literature by frederick burwick. liza bauer’s new book, “am not i / a fly like thee?”: human-animal relations in william blake’s “songs of innocence and experience” [sic], positions blake within contemporary ecocriticism debates and considers his depictions of animals and their relationship to humans. another ecocritical approach to blake is found in jade hagan’s article in blake 53.3, “network theory and ecology in blake’s jerusalem,” which compares blake’s “network of correspondences” in jerusalem to recent network theory. abraham samuel shiff has written a fascinating book on blake’s use of hebrew in milton. it argues for two elaborate puns in plates 15 and 32★ based on eighteenth-century christian knowledge of hebrew. in plate 15, shiff extends an argument first offered by eugenie r. freed on blake’s play with hebrew in the name ololon. in plate 32★, he argues for blake’s use of hebrew to pun on john milton’s famously skillful poetic application of elision in the composition of paradise lost. the monograph also discusses the influence of joseph addison, fuseli, hayley, and william cowper on blake’s comprehension of paradise lost. the book is not for sale; it is in the holdings of many university and museum libraries (see worldcat and library hub discover), making it readily accessible to the community of blake scholars. the author invites comments: abe.sam.shiff@gmail.com. princeton university press’s princeton legacy library series has added two classic studies of blake that remain very useful: w. j. t. mitchell’s blake’s composite art (1978) and leslie tannenbaum’s biblical tradition in blake’s early prophecies (1982). the series has also reissued kathleen raine and george mills’s edition of thomas taylor’s writings (1969). thames & hudson has reprinted raine’s equally classic william blake (1970). philip pullman reprints a 2005 talk and a 2015 essay on blake in his collection of essays, daemon voices. digital resources at hell’s printing press, some of the more significant posts on editing and technical issues consider how to identify watermarks when visible, how to say a work is bound, not bound, or never bound, how to use computational color analysis, and how editing the four zoas (still ongoing behind the scenes at the archive) will eventually drive you mad. illustrations to shakespeare by blake, his circle, and many more artists can now be found in a massive new meta-archive, shakespeariana, an italian digital humanities project headed by sandra pietrini that brings together illustrations and photographs from different digital repositories. blake’s illustrations feature in an article on the archive by pietrini and enrico piergiacomi. keri davies’s blog, index rerum, has a series of interesting posts tied in some way to bunhill fields, where blake is buried. in the most recent, he discusses the french prophets, the moravians, and blake’s family. i have also listed his obituary for g. e. bentley, jr. for readers unaware, he has a series of posts from march 2014 that include information on rebekah bliss’s book collection, william muir, the century guild hobby horse, and frederic shields. at zoamorphosis, jason whittaker has created a useful checklist of the music reviews in davies’s blog. in addition to whittaker’s reviews of scholarship and music, liz potter reviews the blakean influence on the video game devil may cry 5, katharina hagen considers blake and bruce dickinson’s 1998 album the chemical wedding, robert dickins writes on blake and liminography, and whittaker himself on blake and alasdair gray. (if any scholar has a blog that posts substantial content of interest to readers of this journal and would like it listed, please let me know.) in significant blakeana, “jerusalem” was voted the uk’s favorite song of praise, according to the times. the art newspaper has a revealing article documenting the efforts of the tate to acquire the watercolors of the grave in the early 2000s, based on documents acquired under the freedom of information act. eleven dissertations dealt substantially with blake or members of his circle. finally, a new children’s book, fear the bunny by richard t. morris and priscilla burris, plays on “the tyger,” with a young tiger trying to correct a group of animals singing “bunnies, bunnies burning bright, in the forests of the night” before he is ultimately trampled by a mob of headlight-wearing bunnies. blake’s circle much scholarship was published in 2019, and this follows an active year in the marketplace for members of the circle, as essick notes in blake 52.4. in contrast to those who were outraged over the tate signage but studiously eschewed the engravings for stedman, recent books by martha j. cutter and sarah thomas both have chapters that examine blake’s and stedman’s problematic representations of slavery. the books are finely attuned to the horrific nature of these images and provide illuminating contexts for both blake’s images and stedman’s words. in a similar vein, elizabeth polcha’s essay, which does not address blake, focuses on stedman’s depiction of joanna, arguing what is crucial in the narrative and its production “is the metahistory … in which the contingent particularities of stedman’s acts of sexual domination and exploitation in suriname are stripped away to produce scientific writing” (674). emily senior’s article treats stedman’s relationship to joanna and the representation of her skin. finally, stedman is the subject of a new biography in dutch, dichter in de jungle: john gabriel stedman (1744–1797) by roelof van gelder, and i cite a review in english below. devin p. zuber’s a language of things: emanuel swedenborg and the american environmental imagination discusses how swedenborg influenced the early american environmental imagination. zuber touches on blake, but his main focus is early american writers, which may make the work an interesting read alongside freedman’s 2018 study of blake’s american reception. many articles consider swedenborg in relationship to other writers: allen dunn compares how blake and kant read and critiqued swedenborg; james f. lawrence argues that thomas aquinas’s coinage of “correspondentia” shaped western hermetic thought and ultimately swedenborg; rebecca esterson compares swedenborg’s visions with those of a contemporary polish rabbi, baal shem tov; and tiina mahlamäki argues for swedenborg’s impact on kersti bergroth’s novel the living and the dead. the swedenborgian, doctor, and blake editor j. j. garth wilkinson is the subject of malcom peet’s new study, medicine, mysticism and mythology: garth wilkinson, swedenborg and nineteenth-century esoteric culture. peet references blake as well as john clowes, charles a. tulk, robert hindmarsh, and other swedenborgians from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. carl bernhard wadström is the subject of a book edited by anders hallengren, the moment is now: carl bernhard wadström’s revolutionary voice on human trafficking and the abolition of the african slave trade. there has been much work on mary wollstonecraft and especially her relationship to philosophy, politics, and the enlightenment. the chapters in sandrine bergès and alan coffee’s collection, the social and political philosophy of mary wollstonecraft, explicate her views on a host of topics that are often found in discussions of visions of the daughters of albion and blake’s illustrations to wollstonecraft. the journal of gender studies published a special issue, “mary wollstonecraft, feminist pioneer: life, work and contemporary importance,” edited by kathleen lennon and rachel alsop. these essays include katherine o’donnell on wollstonecraft’s gendered engagement with burke and victoria browne on wollstonecraft’s religiosity. janet todd treats godwin’s memoirs and angela malone provides a history of wollstonecraft’s reception. brenda ayres’s interesting new book, betwixt and between: the biographies of mary wollstonecraft, does not collect these biographies à la bentley or myrone, but analyzes how each reflects the values of the author and the times. finally, emily dumler-winckler’s article examines wollstonecraft in terms of religious dissent, and ann brooks has an article on wollstonecraft and catherine macaulay in a book on women and the public sphere. symbols § works preceded by a section mark are reported on secondhand authority. abbreviations bb g. e. bentley, jr., blake books (1977) bbs g. e. bentley, jr., blake books supplement (1995) blake blake/an illustrated quarterly <blake ([year])> indicates the installment of “william blake and his circle” published in the year specified. butlin martin butlin, the paintings and drawings of william blake (1981) diss. dissertation essick robert n. essick, the separate plates of william blake: a catalogue (1983) wbhc g. e. bentley, jr., william blake and his circle (2017) <http://​library.​vicu.​utoronto.​ca/​collections/​special_collections/​bentley_​blake_​collection/​blake_​circle/​2017/​william_​blake_​and_​his_​circle.​pdf> division i: william blake part i: blake’s writings section a: original editions, facsimiles, reprints, and translations for the sexes: the gates of paradise (1818?) for the sexes: the gates of paradise [b]. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2019. for the sexes: the gates of paradise [f]. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2019. for the sexes: the gates of paradise [k]. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2019. letters (1791–1827) letters 1791–1827. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2019. 28 letters join the 53 already at the archive. 12 mar. 1804 to william hayley. artists’ letters: leonardo da vinci to david hockney. ed. michael bird. london: white lion, 2019. 37. the marriage of heaven and hell (1790–93?) el matrimonio del cielo y el infierno [h]. ed. and trans. fernando castanedo. 2002, 2007, 2010, 2012 (4th ed., revised), 2014, 2017. <blake (2003, 2014, 2017, 2018)> g. 2018. h. 2019. in spanish, with facing english for marriage. muñoz garcía, adrián. los versos satánicos de blake. “el matrimonio del cielo y el infierno” con exégesis. méxico: ediciones de educación y cultura, 2012. 238 pp. isbn: 9786078022601. in spanish. includes a preface and sections on “poesía y profecía,” “romanticismo y furor religioso,” “el estilo de mhh,” and “the marriage of heaven and hell y la traducción.” seeks on one hand to “analyze the relationship between blake’s ideology and the doctrines derived from biblical wisdom” and, on the other, to “suggest the affinity between blake and nietzsche; and blake and hinduist systems of thought” (19). receipts (1805–29) receipts 1805–29. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2019. songs of innocence and of experience (1794) songs of innocence and of experience [w]. intro. richard holmes. london: tate publishing, 2007. <blake (2008)> b. 2019. songs of innocence and of experience [w]. foreword by peter harness. london: macmillan collector’s library, 2012. <wbhc p. 421> b. 2019. isbn: 9781529025859. kuzudan kaplana: masumiyet ve tecrübe şiirleri [from the lamb to the tyger: songs of innocence and of experience]. trans. osman tuğlu. ankara: klaros yayınları, 2019. isbn: 9786057655998. in turkish. osman tuğlu is a poet himself, and this translation, though it sometimes distorts the content, is one of the best translations of blake in turkish. visions of the daughters of albion (1793) visions of the daughters of albion [mpi (miscellaneous plates and impressions)]. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2019. the archive added impressions of plates 1 (object 2) and 7 (object 5). section b: collections and selections “marks of woe” [“london”]. an anthology of london in literature, 1558–1914: “flower of cities all.” ed. geoffrey g. hiller, peter l. groves, and alan f. dilnot. cham: palgrave macmillan-springer, 2019. poems: the tyger, auguries of innocence, jerusalem. new york: grolier club, 2019. 8 pp. printed by jerry kelly and issued by john windle for a poetry reading at the grolier club. “song: memory, hither come.” journal of singing 75.4 (mar.-apr. 2019): 442. “to the christians,” “the divine image,” and “auguries of innocence.” teachings of the christian mystics. ed. andrew harvey. boulder, co: shambhala publications, 2019. isbn: 9781611806908. “the tyger.” richard t. morris and priscilla burris. fear the bunny. new york: atheneum books, 2019. includes the text of “the tyger” on its back cover. vala/​the four zoas p. 3. § “románticos, realistas y visionarios: de blake a rimbaud.” litoral: revista de la poesía y el pensamiento 248 (2009): 92. in spanish. a reproduction of one page of the manuscript in a series of reproductions of manuscript pages and translations of letters by many authors. william blake. dos obras. [visions of the daughters of albion and the marriage of heaven and hell]. traducción y notas, jordi doce. prólogo y notas a las ilustraciones, tomás garcía lavín. ilustraciones, ral veroni. buenos aires-madrid: mochuelo libros, 2017. 91 pp. in spanish. includes “las mil caras de william blake,” an interview with jordi doce by marta agudo, 9-23; tomás garcía lavín, “después de blake, el teatrito rioplatense de entidades,” 25-36; “visiones de las hijas de albión,” 41-61; “el matrimonio del cielo y el infierno,” 63-88. william blake: selected poems. ed. nicholas shrimpton. oxford: oxford university press, 2019. 20 cm., lxxi, 432 pp. isbn: 9780198804468. a new paperback selection. william blake, vahiy kitapları [prophetic works]. trans. kaan h. ökten. i̇stanbul: pinhan publications, 2015. 233 pp. review saral, ramazan. see blake 53.1 in part vi. “winter.” journal of singing 76.2 (nov.-dec. 2019): 226. part ii: reproductions of drawings and paintings section a: illustrations of individual authors milton, john “l’allegro” and “il penseroso.” illus. william blake. london: pallas athene, 2019. isbn: 9781843681892. section b: collections and selections the art of the devil: an illustrated history. ed. demetrio paparoni. paris: cernunnos, 2019. in a collection of art featuring the devil, blake’s the great red dragon and the woman clothed with the sun (166-67) and satan smiting job with sore boils (257) are included. separate plates. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2019. the archive added twenty-three impressions of plates designed and etched or engraved by blake: “the accusers of theft adultery murder” (essick viii) copy 1 (essick 1a), 1793. copy 2 (essick 2c), 1796. copy 3 (essick 3d), c. 1820–25. “albion rose” (essick vii) copy 1 (essick 1b), 1795. copy 2 (essick 2d), c. 1820–25. “the approach of doom” (essick iii) copy 1, c. 1787–88. “the chaining of orc” (essick xvii) copy 1 (essick 1a), c. 1812–13. “chaucers canterbury pilgrims” (essick xvi) copy 1 (essick 1a), 1810. copy 2 (“blake in the marketplace, 1991”), 1810. copy 3 (“blake in the marketplace, 1982–83”), c. 1810–25. copy 4 (“blake in the marketplace, 2010”), c. 1820–25. “a dream of thiralatha” (essick ix) copy 1 (essick 1b; butlin #267), 1796.the archive also holds america pl. d, part of ozias humphry’s a large book of designs copy a. “enoch” (essick xv) copy 1 (essick 1a), c. 1806–07. “ezekiel” (essick vi) copy 1 (essick 2b), c. 1820–25.as essick notes, “there are no recorded impressions of the hypothetical first published state” (separate plates 21). “job” (essick v) copy 1 (essick 1a), 1793. copy 2 (essick 2c), c. 1820–25. “joseph of arimathea among the rocks of albion” (essick i) copy 1 (essick 1a), c. 1773. copy 2 (essick 2d), c. 1820–25. “joseph of arimathea preaching to the inhabitants of britain” (essick xi) copy 1 (essick 1b), 1796. “lucifer and the pope in hell” (essick x) copy 1 (“blake in the marketplace, 1997”), c. 1794. copy 2 (essick 1a), c. 1794. copy 3 (essick 1b, butlin #287), 1796. “virgil relief etching” (bbwba 504)bbwba is the blake archive designation for a work that would have appeared in bb had it been known at the time. copy 1, 1820. part iii: commercial engravings section a: illustrations of individual authors bible, job illustrations of the book of job. london: pallas athene, 2019. isbn: 9781843681878. reproduces the engravings. part iv: bibliographies and catalogues section a: bibliographies [cross-listing articles with substantial bibliographical content] bentley, g. e., jr. “blake on sale: blake’s watercolours, temperas, works in illuminated printing, commercial engravings, and manuscripts in catalogues of 1997–2016.” see bentley, “blake on sale,” in part vi. you can’t keep a good bibliographer down. bindman, david. “blake in germany: the william blake exhibition at the hamburg kunsthalle and städel museum, frankfurt, 1975.” see erle and paley, the reception of william blake in europe, in part vi. calè, luisa. “blake and exhibitions, 2018.” see blake 53.1 in part vi. hagen, katharina. “digesting blake.” see zoamorphosis in part v. references to blake in the nbc series hannibal (2013–15). myrone, martin. “blake the artist: at tate and abroad.” see erle and paley, the reception of william blake in europe, in part vi. includes a list of the tate exhibitions of blake and “a checklist of art exhibitions in europe where blake was represented as a visual artist.” ripley, wayne c., with fernando castanedo and hikari sato. “william blake and his circle: a checklist of scholarship in 2018.” see blake 53.1 in part vi. schmid, susanne. “the reception of blake in germany and austria in the nineteenth century.” see erle and paley, the reception of william blake in europe, in part vi. includes an appendix of editions of blake published in germany. whittaker, jason. “blake and music, 2018.” see blake 53.1 in part vi. whittaker, jason. “blake and music on index rerum.” see zoamorphosis in part v. a checklist of the music reviews found at keri davies’s blog, index rerum. whittaker, jason. “‘jerusalem’ set to music: a selected discography.” see blake 52.4 in part vi. section b: catalogues endless enigma: eight centuries of fantastic art. dawn ades, olivier berggruen, and j. patrice marandel. new york: david zwirner books, 2019. isbn: 9781941701881. catalogue of exhibition at david zwirner’s gallery, 537 west 20th street, new york, 12 sept.-27 oct. 2018. according to its press release, the exhibition “takes as its point of departure alfred h. barr jr.’s legendary 1936 exhibition at the museum of modern art, new york, fantastic art, dada, surrealism.”<https://​d6jcg90g7mpvu.​cloudfront.​net/​s3fs-​public/​dz_​endlessenigma_​pressrelease_​2018_​1.​pdf>. reproduces the engraving of “the circle of the lustful: francesca da rimini” and the grave personified. § fire: flashes to ashes in british art, 1692–2019. gemma brace, rachael nee, and christiana payne. bristol: sansom and co., 2019. for further details of the exhibition, see luisa calè, “blake and exhibitions, 2019.” william blake. ed. martin myrone and amy concannon, with an afterword by alan moore. london: tate publishing, 2019. isbn: 9781849766449. see myrone and concannon in part vi. part v: digital resources the allen ginsberg project the site has continued to post both recordings and transcriptions of ginsberg’s 1979 naropa lectures on blake. the easiest way to access them is by searching for “blake,” but note that the homepage lacks a search bar, which seems available on every other page. blake also occurs frequently in other postings. davies, keri. index rerum: a blog about books, book-collecting, william blake, and lots of other things. scholarship: “the artillery ground and the long continuities of london life.” 24 dec. 2018. a history of the artillery ground adjacent to bunhill fields burial ground. “bunhill fields—​the long continuities of london life and death.” 22 jan. 2019. a history of bunhill fields. “bunhill fields—​3 september 1688.” 17 feb. 2019. on the burial of john bunyan at bunhill fields. “bunhill fields—​25 may 1708.” 27 nov. 2019. on the french prophets, moravians, and blake’s family. “gerald eades bentley, jr (23 august 1930–31 august 2017).” 12 sept. 2017. gainsborough, sam. “tate—​william blake exhibition trailer.” blake’s images animated on buildings in london, including broadwick (formerly broad) street. “in william blake’s london.” spitalfields life (27 nov. 2019). an article on blake and lambeth that includes photographs of the blake-inspired mosaics by the london school of mosaic. john rylands research institute blog francesca bradley. “the artist of the future age: what was blake’s influence in counterculture?” 22 oct. 2019. an overview of the conference the artist of the future age: william blake, neo-romanticism, counterculture and now, held at the john rylands library on 11 oct. 2019. murray-white, james. finding blake: reimagining william blake for the 21st century. a site dedicated to blake’s contemporary reception. it is related to efforts aimed at “creating a three[-]part film, blending documentary, recreations of blake’s imagery, and a series of interviews with contemporary creatives, doers and scholars from all walks of life who can situate blake here and now.” includes lists of upcoming blake events in the uk, many interviews, and reflections on blake. shakespeariana. an italian digital humanities project headed by sandra pietrini that describes itself as “a meta-archive of iconographical and textual materials, from paintings loosely inspired by drama, to stage photos. documents available in the database cover the chronological span ranging from 1700 to the present time.” in addition to blake’s works, it includes almost every member of blake’s circle who illustrated shakespeare in paintings, drawings, and engravings. in italian and english. see also pietrini and enrico piergiacomi’s article in part vi, which discusses blake as an example of how to use the meta-archive. whittaker, jason. zoamorphosis/the blake 2.0 blog: william blake in art, music, film, and literature. significant postings include: scholarship: “blake and music on index rerum.” 21 july 2019. a checklist of the music reviews found at keri davies’s blog, index rerum. katharina hagen. “alchemy, rosicrucianism, and the grail—​bruce dickinson’s take on ‘jerusalem.’” 9 sept. 2019. on bruce dickinson’s reinterpretation of “jerusalem” on his 1998 album, the chemical wedding: “i say that dickinson’s reading of ‘jerusalem’ as representing the true artists’ minds is closer to blake’s original text when compared with the context they originate in than every attempt to use “jerusalem” as a second national anthem” (par. 14). robert dickins. “william blake and liminography.” 27 oct. 2019. on blake’s use of writing as ritual. “blake was an important practitioner in a trajectory of people who undertook mark-making in a ritual context; a liminography in which a chasm is temporarily created by rupturing the functions of writer and author” (par. 3). katharina hagen. “what if thel was male?—​bruce dickinson’s ‘book of thel.’” 17 nov. 2019. another reading of a track from the chemical wedding: “dickinson has turned the hapless thel into a monstrous female, monstrous in the meaning that she is an evil seductress who intends and brings doom, but also in the meaning that she is linked to death and gives birth to evil” (par. 15). “the prophet of lanark: alasdair gray and william blake.” 29 dec. 2019. blake and the scottish writer and artist alasdair gray. reviews: “review: naomi billingsley—​the visionary art of william blake.” 6 jan. 2019. “a compelling and scholarly contribution to blake studies, which draws attention to often overlooked paintings and also reiterates the importance of christ to his art, while avoiding the temptation to provide some kind of systematising tendency to his christology” (par. 8). “review: johanna glaza—​albion.” 24 feb. 2019. a review of the album, a track of which uses pl. 43 of jerusalem. “review: astralingua—​safe passage.” 27 mar. 2019. a review of the album, which includes the band’s adaptation of “a poison tree.” “music reviews: tender symmetry, ghost gamelan, an attempt to draw aside the veil.” 18 apr. 2019. a review of these three new albums. “review: [linda freedman], william blake and the myth of america.” 28 apr. 2019. “what her excellent work does for me is to demonstrate what other work needs to be done on blake in america” (par. 11). liz potter. “review: devil may cry 5.” 14 may 2019. a review of the blakean influence on the video game. “review: william blake’s mystic map of london.” 8 july 2019. “taking her cue from blake, louisa albani has created her own psychic projections onto blake’s city and her london” (par. 5). “review: music roundup for early 2019.” 15 july 2019. a review of the blake-inspired releases psychopomp & circumstance, fearful symmetry: the songs of william mac davis, light mind rising, visions of william blake, and english /​jerusalem. “review: william blake, tate britain.” 22 sept. 2019. “it is, quite simply, the best exhibition of blake’s work that i have seen in my lifetime, and that appreciation has only grown with each visit” (par. 14). blakeana: “blakespotting: the divine essence of things—​nick cave and william blake.” 5 oct. 2019. cave’s “interest in william blake is both very longstanding and far from superficial” (par. 10). katharina hagen. “digesting blake.” 11 oct. 2019. references to blake in the nbc series hannibal (2013–15). the william blake archive exhibitions william blake’s canterbury pilgrims. jan. 2019. denise vultee with the editors [morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi]. biography. apr. 2019. joseph viscomi. illuminated printing. apr. 2019. instagram see kendall deboer’s post, “instagram as archive,” below. hell’s printing press: the blog of the blake archive and blake quarterly. [formerly the cynic sang.] posts on editing and technical issues: jared powell. “‘the invisible worm’ of jerusalem mpi.” 1 mar. 2019. a discussion of how the mpi [miscellaneous plates and impressions] of jerusalem pl. 28 allow one to see the plate’s development through its different versions and the presence of a worm. kendall deboer. “instagram as archive: blake and digital art culture.” 19 mar. 2019. an announcement of and rationale for the archive’s new instagram account. meaghan green. “a watermark mystery.” 24 apr. 2019. a consideration of when to note visible watermarks and how to identify them. robert rich. “how to say that a work lacks binding.” 10 may 2019. a reflection on the terms the archive has used to refer to works not bound, never bound, or formerly bound. madeline rose. “evaluating color in heaven and hell.” 14 aug. 2019. using computational color analysis for different copies of marriage. eric loy. “in the mouth of madness.” 20 sept. 2019. “the four zoas manuscript still presents an incredible challenge for any who dare to approach and attempt to define and contain—​through editing—​this unwieldy monster. it will drive you mad, eventually” (par. 1). robert rich. “why the magnifying glass is awesome!” 27 sept. 2019. an appreciation of the usefulness of the archive’s magnifying-glass tool when transcribing blake’s works. madeline rose. “color-to-character relationships in america a prophecy.” 30 oct. 2019. a computational color analysis of urizen, orc, and albion in america a prophecy copies a, m, and o. dan gorman. “songs of innocent xml.” 6 nov. 2019. relearning tei for the blake archive. teaching with the blake archive: meaghan green. “all fun and games.” 26 nov. 2019. teaching “the ecchoing green” to sixth graders. blakeana: sarah jones. “q&a with helen bruder.” 29 jan. 2019. an interview with helen bruder, co-editor of beastly blake (palgrave macmillan, 2018). sarah jones. “q&a with chris hobson: baldwin and blake.” 18 mar. 2019. an interview with christopher z. hobson about his new book, james baldwin and the heavenly city: prophecy, apocalypse, and doubt (michigan state university press, 2018), and baldwin’s and blake’s overlapping ideas. sarah jones. “q&a with ramazan saral.” 21 may 2019. an interview with ramazan saral, who is a phd candidate at ege university in i̇zmir, turkey. he describes his first encounters with blake. marcie woehl. “songs of instruments and entrancement: band’s summer hits.” 12 aug. 2019. blakean tunes recommended by band [the university of rochester division of the archive] members. jared powell. “exploring blake’s satanic serpents.” 26 aug. 2019. comparing blake’s different representations of satan. marcie woehl. “insights from a doubly digital humanist.” 8 nov. 2019. “i’ve quickly learned that a lot goes into creating digital projects” and “a lot goes into maintaining digital projects” (par. 10). kendall deboer. “blake’s afterlife: howard finster, the backwoods blake.” 11 nov. 2019. compares blake with the “self-taught artist” howard finster (1916–2001). kenneth gross. “blake and bloom, a memorial note.” 26 nov. 2019. a reflection on bloom’s love of blake and blake’s influence on his thought. also published in blake 53.3. s. yarberry interviews: “guest post/poet: s. yarberry interviews aditi machado.” 21 feb. 2019. an interview with the poet aditi machado about blake’s influence on her collection some beheadings (nightboat, 2018). “guest post/poet: s. yarberry interviews s. brook corfman.” 14 may 2019. an interview with the poet s. brook corfman. “guest post/poet: s. yarberry interviews kiki petrosino.” 2 oct. 2019. an interview with the poet kiki petrosino. part vi: criticism, biography, and reviews a   b   c   d   e   f   g   h   i   j   k   l   m   n   o   p   q   r   s   t   v   w   y   z a aberbach, david. “william blake and the struggle for social justice.” literature and poverty: from the hebrew bible to the second world war. abingdon: routledge, 2019. 94-99. albani, louisa amelia, with contributions by simon cole. william blake’s mystic map of london. london: night bird press, 2019. isbn: 9780993016547. review whittaker, jason. see zoamorphosis in part v. al-omoush, ishraq bassam. “contraries in william blake’s poetry.” european journal of scientific research 154.2 (oct. 2019): 213-19. altizer, thomas j. j. “the absolute heterodoxy of william blake.” satan and apocalypse and other essays in political theology. albany: suny press, 2017. isbn: 9781438466736. 47-56. an earlier version of the chapter, entitled “the revolutionary vision of william blake,” appeared in the journal of religious ethics 37.1 (2009). <blake (2010, 2018)> review § cristaudo, wayne. european legacy (published online 20 nov. 2019). antrobus, raymond. “poets and prophets.” see tate etc. atkinson, rosalind. “a japanese blake: embodied visions in william blake’s the marriage of heaven and hell (1790) and tezuka osamu’s phoenix (1967–88).” see watson and williams. atreides, bel. “traducción semántica y traducción holística: el caso blake.” ínsula: revista de letras y ciencias humanas 717 (sept. 2006): 13-15. in spanish. on translating blake. attridge, derek. “rhythm.” see haggarty, william blake in context. b badshah, nadeem. “what a score: rugby hymn jerusalem is britain’s no 1.” times (30 sept. 2019): 3. “jerusalem” voted the uk’s favorite song of praise. bailey, martin. “the william blakes that got away—​and why.” art newspaper (9 sept. 2019): 11 pars. a story based on documents from the tate, released under the freedom of information act, pertaining to its fight to acquire the watercolors for the grave. bakić, tanja. “‘the most obscure and most angelic of all the english lyrical poets’: william blake in the former yugoslavia.” see erle and paley, the reception of william blake in europe. balfour, ian. “prophecy.” see haggarty, william blake in context. balgradean, ioana. “the angel and the foot: on dealing with time and cultural transmission.” journal18: a journal of eighteenth-century art and culture (feb. 2017): 13 pars. in english. on how blake dealt with artistic transmission—​and how his art is now transmitted through the blake archive. bauer, liza. “am not i / a fly like thee?”: human-animal relations in william blake’s “songs of innocence and experience” [sic]. marburg: büchner-verlag, 2019. isbn: 9783963171598. baulch, david. “sublimity.” see haggarty, william blake in context. bellarsi, franca, with the research assistance of gregory watson. “the reception of blake in belgium.” see erle and paley, the reception of william blake in europe. bentley, g. e., jr. “blake as inebriate.” notes and queries 66.2 (june 2019): 243-51. bentley, g. e., jr. “blake’s living creatures: depictions of zoas.” notes and queries 66.2 (june 2019): 234-43. bentley, g. e., jr. “blake on sale: blake’s watercolours, temperas, works in illuminated printing, commercial engravings, and manuscripts in catalogues of 1997–2016.” notes and queries 66.2 (june 2019): 251-68. bentley, g. e., jr. boondoggles: travels of a restless professor. victoria: friesenpress, 2018. <blake (2019)> review jones, sarah. see blake 53.1. billingsley, naomi. “review: william blake, tate britain.” see myrone and concannon. billingsley, naomi. the visionary art of william blake: christianity, romanticism and the pictorial imagination. london: i. b. tauris, 2018. <blake (2019)> reviews o’hear, natasha. art and christianity 98 (2019): 12. prickett, stephen. theology 122.6 (2019): 465. whittaker, jason. see zoamorphosis in part v. § billingsley, naomi. “william blake, tate britain, london, 11 september 2019–2 february 2020.” see myrone and concannon. billingsley, naomi. “william blake, visionary artist.” seventy-second aldeburgh festival of music and the arts. snape: snape maltings, 2019. 35-38. bindman, david. “blake in germany: the william blake exhibition at the hamburg kunsthalle and städel museum, frankfurt, 1975.” see erle and paley, the reception of william blake in europe. blake/an illustrated quarterly volume 52, number 4 (spring 2019) articles robert n. essick. “blake in the marketplace, 2018.” 9 pars., plus listings. biggest blake news was the discovery of a listing for the book of thel in an 1803 auction catalogue for a bankruptcy. jason whittaker. “‘jerusalem’ set to music: a selected discography.” 5 pars., plus 50 items, sortable by date or artist. reviews bruce graver. mark crosby, ed., “william blake’s manuscripts,” huntington library quarterly 80.3 (autumn 2017). 9 pars. “as fine a collection of essays on blake as i have read” (par. 9). r. paul yoder. g. a. rosso, the religion of empire: political theology in blake’s prophetic symbolism. 10 pars. “perhaps rosso’s boldest move for blake’s readers is to replace vala with rahab in our thinking about blake’s later prophecies” (par. 3). volume 53, number 1 (summer 2019) articles wayne c. ripley, with fernando castanedo and hikari sato. “william blake and his circle: a checklist of scholarship in 2018.” 29 pars., plus listings and ripley’s appendix, “historic editions and scholarship digitally available; reprints by on-demand publishers; questionable editions.” jason whittaker. “blake and music, 2018.” 2 pars., plus listings. luisa calè. “blake and exhibitions, 2018.” 1 par., plus listings. interview luisa calè. “william blake: the artist (tate britain, 11 september 2019–2 february 2020): an interview with martin myrone.” reviews ramazan saral. william blake, vahiy kitapları [prophetic works], trans. kaan h. ökten. 5 pars. sarah jones. g. e. bentley, jr., boondoggles: travels of a restless professor. 7 pars. “full of quintessential bentley humor, this book is an agreeable memoir, rendered poignant by his passing, that will resonate with everyone who knew jerry in person or through his writings” (par. 7). volume 53, number 2 (fall 2019) article joseph viscomi. “posthumous blake: the roles of catherine blake, c. h. tatham, and frederick tatham in blake’s afterlife.” 141 pars. a major examination of catherine blake after blake’s death, with special attention to who was producing the posthumous impressions of blake’s works, where they were likely produced, and why. volume 53, number 3 (winter 2019–20) articles jade hagan. “network theory and ecology in blake’s jerusalem.” 38 pars. “in what follows, i examine blake’s representation of the network of correspondences, noting along the way its similarities to and differences from ecological criticism and recent theories of the network, especially latour’s ant and alexander galloway and eugene thacker’s network theory” (par. 5). clare a. simmons. “blake’s ‘holy thursday’ and ‘the martyrdom of st. paul’s.’” 24 pars. interesting contextual reading of the “holy thursday” poems. remembrance kenneth gross. “blake and bloom, a memorial note.” 5 pars. reviews james rovira. kathryn s. freeman, a guide to the cosmology of william blake. 5 pars. freeman “has put together a very useful work that should be kept alongside damon’s dictionary and supplements to it available in blake scholarship” (par. 5). silvia riccardi. sibylle erle and morton d. paley, eds., the reception of william blake in europe. 12 pars. “one of the most attractive features of erle and paley’s collection is the extensive exploration of blake’s protean nature and the way in which the development of its varied discovery abroad has unfolded” (par. 11). alexander s. gourlay. sarah haggarty, ed., william blake in context. 6 pars. “this book will be useful to scholars, but the reader for whom it will be most appropriate is one who needs a well-informed answer to the question, ‘what do i absolutely need to know about this, or what’s the consensus on this?’” (par. 6). borkowska, eliza. “the reception of blake in poland: from voices in the night to ‘the choir of the day!’” see erle and paley, the reception of william blake in europe. bossi, emanuela. “william blake: the engraver and the poet.” nuova secondaria 36.5 (jan. 2019): 91-94. in italian. botoso, altamir. “solidão, evasão e revolta do eu-lírico no poema ‘london,’ de william blake (solitude, evasion, and revolt of the liric [sic] self in the poem ‘london,’ by william blake).” interfaces 10.2 (2019): 76-87. in portuguese (abstract in portuguese and english). bruder, helen p., and tristanne connolly, eds. beastly blake. cham: palgrave macmillan-springer, 2018. <blake (2019)> review lewis, jayne. “recent studies in the restoration and eighteenth century.” studies in english literature, 1500–1900 59.3 (summer 2019): 667-706. “beastly blake stands out even in a banner year for essay collections” (668). bundock, christopher m. romantic prophecy and the resistance to historicism. toronto: university of toronto press, 2016. <blake (2019)> review dick, alexander. european romantic review 29.4 (2018): 504-09. bundock, chris, and elizabeth effinger, eds. william blake’s gothic imagination: bodies of horror. manchester: manchester university press, 2018. <blake (2019)> review erle, sibylle. rev. of g. a. rosso, the religion of empire: political theology in blake’s prophetic symbolism, and william blake’s gothic imagination: bodies of horror, ed. chris bundock and elizabeth effinger. bars review 52 (2018): 10 pars. “william blake’s gothic imagination is more than it promises to be—​a ‘major scholarly study focused on blake’s intersections with the gothic’—​it is a landmark in blake scholarship” (par. 10). burwick, frederick. “william blake” and “william blake: vision and prophecy.” a history of romantic literature. hoboken, nj: wiley-blackwell, 2019. isbn: 9781119044352. 54-63, 78-81. overview of the french revolution, the mythic system, and depictions of ergotism in works such as the good farmer. c calè, luisa. “blake and exhibitions, 2018.” see blake 53.1. calè, luisa. “book illustration.” see haggarty, william blake in context. calè, luisa. “the reception of blake in italy.” see erle and paley, the reception of william blake in europe. calè, luisa. “william blake: the artist (tate britain, 11 september 2019–2 february 2020): an interview with martin myrone.” see blake 53.1. callixto, joão carlos. see de sousa, alcinda pinheiro, and joão carlos callixto. canli, mustafa. “william blake’s ‘songs of innocence and experience [sic]’ as a practice and manifestation of the english romantic movement.” eurasian journal of english language and literature 1.1 (2019): 15-22. cass, jeffrey. rev. of amanda jo goldstein, sweet science: romantic materialism and the new logics of life. see goldstein. chadwick, esther. rev. of william blake in sussex: visions of albion, ed. andrew loukes. see loukes. cheshire, paul. “classical elements: darwin, gilbert, blake, and coleridge.” wordsworth circle 50.2 (spring 2019): 147-65. considers how these writers (william gilbert wrote the hurricane: a theosophical and western eclogue [1796]) and swedenborg used the elements of fire, earth, water, and air. clark, steve. “asian romanticism: construction of the comparable.” see watson and williams. codsi, stephanie. “‘father, father, where are you going?’: epicurean deism and absent fathers in blake’s songs of innocence and of experience.” literature and theology 33.4 (dec. 2019): 357-75. coker, william. “the reception of blake in turkey: mental travellers.” see erle and paley, the reception of william blake in europe. concannon, amy. “‘a new kind of man.’” see myrone and concannon. concannon, amy. “independence and despair.” see myrone and concannon. § corti, claudia. “orti apocalittici. erasmus darwin e william blake tra poesia, arte e scienze naturali.” rivista di letterature moderne e comparate 71.4 (2018): 349-63. in italian. crosby, mark. “engraving.” see haggarty, william blake in context. crosby, mark. see also huntington library quarterly. cutter, martha j. “apotropaic images and pornotroping in stedman’s narrative of a five years’ expedition to surinam.” the illustrated slave: empathy, graphic narrative, and the visual culture of the transatlantic abolition movement, 1800–1852. athens, ga: university of georgia press, 2017. 32-47. includes a discussion of both stedman’s text and blake’s engravings. d damrosch, leo. “life.” see haggarty, william blake in context. davies, keri. “the artillery ground and the long continuities of london life.” see index rerum in part v. davies, keri. “bunhill fields—​the long continuities of london life and death.” see index rerum in part v. davies, keri. “bunhill fields—​3 september 1688.” see index rerum in part v. davies, keri. “bunhill fields—​25 may 1708.” see index rerum in part v. davies, keri. see also erle, sibylle, and keri davies. dean, remy. “the wisdom of william blake.” medium.com (7 sept. 2019): 11 pars. “some people would look to the bible, the koran, or similar religious texts at those times when they need to contemplate serious matters … for me william blake’s songs of innocence and of experience (1794) is that book” (par. 1). del gizzo, luciana. “imágenes de la revolución heterogénea. tensiones entre texto e imagen en the marriage of heaven and hell de william blake (pictures of a heterogeneous revolution. tensions between text and image in the marriage of heaven and hell of william blake).” cuadernos de ilustración y romanticismo 24 (2018): 619-35. in spanish (abstract in spanish and english). § de santis, silvia. blake and dante: a study of william blake’s illustrations of the “divine comedy,” including his critical notes. rome: gangemi editore, 2017. <blake (2018)> review font, carme. dante e l’arte 5 (2018): 343-46. in english. de sousa, alcinda pinheiro, and joão carlos callixto. “‘enough! or too much’: the reception of blake in portugal.” see erle and paley, the reception of william blake in europe. dick, alexander. rev. of christopher m. bundock, romantic prophecy and the resistance to historicism. see bundock. dickins, robert. “william blake and liminography.” see zoamorphosis in part v. do canto, daniela schwarcke. see also peres alós, anselmo, and daniela schwarcke do canto. do canto, daniela schwarcke, and anselmo peres alós. “life of william blake, pictor ignotus: o casal gilchrist e a biografia de um pintor desconhecido.” sociopoética 1.21 (2019): 103-13. in portuguese (abstract in portuguese, english, and spanish). duff, david. “the eighteenth century and romanticism.” see haggarty, william blake in context. duff, david, ed. the oxford handbook of british romanticism. oxford: oxford university press, 2018. isbn: 9780199660896. slight references to blake in many chapters, with the most substantial treatments found in: manly, susan. “literature for children.” 217-30. thomas, sophie. “word and image.” 625-42. dunn, allen. “the spirits of satire: kant and blake read emanuel swedenborg.” soundings: an interdisciplinary journal 102.4 (2019): 325-44. dushane, allison. “speculative enthusiasm: william blake’s jerusalem and quentin meillassoux’s divine ethics.” romanticism and speculative realism. ed. chris washington and anne c. mccarthy. new york: bloomsbury academic, 2019. isbn: 9781501336386. 93-109. “blake’s speculative enthusiasm encourages an affective stance that operates through openness to and reciprocal exchange with the other in order to embrace radical contingency” (105). e eaves, morris. “editing and editions.” see haggarty, william blake in context. eblen, trudy diane. “jerusalem’s song: william blake as forerunner to jung’s feminist psychology.” phd diss., university of nebraska, 2019. erle, sibylle. “the reception of blake’s art in germany and austria after 1900.” see erle and paley, the reception of william blake in europe. erle, sibylle. rev. of g. a. rosso, the religion of empire: political theology in blake’s prophetic symbolism, and william blake’s gothic imagination: bodies of horror, ed. chris bundock and elizabeth effinger. see rosso, the religion of empire, and bundock and effinger. erle, sibylle, and keri davies. “early reception.” see haggarty, william blake in context. erle, sibylle, and morton d. paley. “introduction: ‘take thou these leaves from the tree of life’: william blake in europe.” see erle and paley, the reception of william blake in europe. erle, sibylle, and morton d. paley, eds. the reception of william blake in europe. 2 vols. london: bloomsbury academic, 2019. 24 cm., lxv, 768 pp. isbn: 9781472507457 (set); 9781350097636 (vol. 1); 9781350097674 (vol. 2). volume i paley, morton d. “timeline of the european reception of william blake, 1789–2016.” xxviii-lxv. erle, sibylle, and morton d. paley. “introduction: ‘take thou these leaves from the tree of life’: william blake in europe.” 1-24. paley, morton d. “editing blake.” 25-34. larrissy, edward. “the reception of blake in ireland.” 35-45. soubigou, gilles, and yann tholoniat. “the reception of blake in france: literature and the visual arts.” 47-82. bellarsi, franca, with the research assistance of gregory watson. “the reception of blake in belgium.” 83-124. calè, luisa. “the reception of blake in italy.” 125-54. flores, cristina. “the reception of blake in spain.” 155-84. de sousa, alcinda pinheiro, and joão carlos callixto. “‘enough! or too much’: the reception of blake in portugal.” 185-213. ghiţă, cătălin. “the reception of blake in romania: keeping a humane vision in times of trouble.” 217-27. schmid, susanne. “the reception of blake in germany and austria in the nineteenth century.” 229-53. includes an appendix of editions of blake published in germany. bindman, david. “blake in germany: the william blake exhibition at the hamburg kunsthalle and städel museum, frankfurt, 1975.” 255-59. erle, sibylle. “the reception of blake’s art in germany and austria after 1900.” 261-97. includes an appendix on blake and rudolf steiner (1861–1925), the philosopher and founder of anthroposophy. esterhammer, angela. “the reception of blake in switzerland.” 299-309. volume ii kalmthout, ton van. “the reception of blake in the netherlands.” 385-413. rix, robert w. “the reception of blake in denmark and norway.” 415-36. lindberg, bo ossian. “blake’s reception in sweden and finland.” 437-51. procházka, martin. “the czech reception of blake: from catholic modernism to alternative culture.” 453-72. borkowska, eliza. “the reception of blake in poland: from voices in the night to ‘the choir of the day!’” 473-99. serdechnaia, vera, and evgenii serdechnyi. “the reception of blake in russia and the ussr.” 501-32. tiutvinova, tatiana. “the reception of blake’s art in russia: an echo of blake’s universe.” 533-46. péter, ágnes. “the reception of blake in hungary.” 547-70. bakić, tanja. “‘the most obscure and most angelic of all the english lyrical poets’: william blake in the former yugoslavia.” 571-603. kostova, ludmilla, and lubomir terziev. “the reception of blake in bulgaria.” 605-34. schoina, maria. “‘like prometheus on the rock’: william blake in greece.” 635-47. coker, william. “the reception of blake in turkey: mental travellers.” 649-66. whittaker, jason. “blake and music.” 667-78. myrone, martin. “blake the artist: at tate and abroad.” 679-92. includes a list of the tate exhibitions of blake and “a checklist of art exhibitions in europe where blake was represented as a visual artist” (689). reviews öwre, john. romantik: journal for the study of romanticisms 8 (2019): 159-62. “the reception of william blake in europe performs an important task in expanding blake’s afterlife to better encompass its true reach and complexity, and in doing so, opens up foundations for new research that will surely be built upon in many years to come” (162). riccardi, silvia. see blake 53.3. essick, robert n. “blake in the marketplace, 2018.” see blake 52.4. esterhammer, angela. “the reception of blake in switzerland.” see erle and paley, the reception of william blake in europe. f faflak, joel. “blake’s milton and the nonlife of affect.” wordsworth circle 50.1 (winter 2019): 36-54. farley, paul. see leckey, mark, and paul farley. ferrere, alexandre. “visions, symbols, and intertextuality: an overview of william blake’s influence on allen ginsberg.” empty mirror (7 june 2019). flores, cristina. “the reception of blake in spain.” see erle and paley, the reception of william blake in europe. font, carme. rev. of silvia de santis, blake and dante: a study of william blake’s illustrations of the “divine comedy,” including his critical notes. see de santis. fosso, kurt. “animals.” see haggarty, william blake in context. freedman, linda. “whitman, crane, and the beats.” see haggarty, william blake in context. freedman, linda. william blake and the myth of america: from the abolitionists to the counterculture. oxford: oxford university press, 2018. <blake (2019)> reviews gilbert, pamela k. “recent studies in the nineteenth century.” studies in english literature, 1500–1900 59.4 (autumn 2019): 913-54. “wonderful” (939). lincoln, andrew. review 19 (15 aug. 2019): 13 pars. “freedman … has managed to map out succinctly a wide range of american cultural activities, offering clear explanations and sharp critical insights” (par. 13). whittaker, jason. see zoamorphosis in part v. freeman, curtis w. “apocalyptic dissent: william blake.” undomesticated dissent: democracy and the public virtue of religious nonconformity. waco: baylor university press, 2017. <blake (2018)> review werntz, myles. review and expositor 115.4 (2018): 626-27. freeman, kathryn s. a guide to the cosmology of william blake. abingdon: routledge, 2017. <blake (2017)> review rovira, james. see blake 53.3. fry, roger. vision to design (vision and design). trans. izumi hachisu and reiko horikawa. tokyo: suiseisha, 2019. 336 pp. isbn: 9784801004276. in japanese. 1 plate. it includes a chapter entitled “william blake ni yoru santen no tempera ga [three pictures in tempera by william blake],” 217-23. fuller, david. “chaucer, spenser, and shakespeare.” see haggarty, william blake in context. g ghiţă, cătălin. “the reception of blake in romania: keeping a humane vision in times of trouble.” see erle and paley, the reception of william blake in europe. gigante, denise. “life sciences.” see haggarty, william blake in context. gilbert, pamela k. rev. of linda freedman, william blake and the myth of america. see freedman. gilchrist, alexander. “preliminary” from life of william blake (1863). <bb #1680a> see myrone, lives. goldsmith, steven. “(without) sympathy.” see haggarty, william blake in context. goldstein, amanda jo. “blake’s mundane egg: epigenesis and milieux.” sweet science: romantic materialism and the new logics of life. chicago: university of chicago press, 2017. <blake (2018)> review cass, jeffrey. european romantic review 30.1 (2019): 85-91. gourlay, alexander s. rev. of william blake in context, ed. sarah haggarty. see blake 53.3. § gowler, david b. “the afterlives of jesus’s parables in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.” the parables after jesus: their imaginative receptions across two millennia. grand rapids, mi: baker academic, 2017. isbn: 9780801049996. discusses the parable of the wise and foolish virgins. review urban, david v. christianity and literature 68.4 (2019): 691-94. “gowler here demonstrates keen attention to detail and skillfully articulates his observations to nonspecialists. but gowler sadly does not mention references to parables in blake’s poetry” (693). graver, bruce. rev. of “william blake’s manuscripts,” huntington library quarterly 80.3 (autumn 2017), ed. mark crosby. see blake 52.4. gross, kenneth. “blake and bloom, a memorial note.” see blake 53.3. gunderman, richard b. “the heart of pediatric radiology.” pediatric radiology 49.13 (dec. 2019): 1707-09. “a person who knew much less about medicine but far more about the human heart was the poet william blake, whose masterpieces ‘songs of innocence’ (1789) and ‘songs of experience’ (1794) each contain a poem titled ‘the chimney sweeper.’ … most significantly, he gives the chimney sweeps proper names—​tom dacre, dick, joe, ned and jack. … blake implicates us in justifying tom’s suffering, both to him and especially to ourselves. … only if we know the plight of tom, dick, joe, ned and jack can we call others to witness it, and only insofar as we ourselves are moved to action can we call others to do the same.” h hagan, jade. “network theory and ecology in blake’s jerusalem.” see blake 53.3. hagan, jade. “new age romanticism and the afterlives of william blake.” phd diss., rice university, 2019. hagen, katharina. “alchemy, rosicrucianism, and the grail—​bruce dickinson’s take on ‘jerusalem.’” see zoamorphosis in part v. hagen, katharina. “what if thel was male?—​bruce dickinson’s ‘book of thel.’” see zoamorphosis in part v. haggarty, sarah. “introduction.” see haggarty, william blake in context. haggarty, sarah. “manuscripts.” see haggarty, william blake in context. haggarty, sarah, ed. william blake in context. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2019. isbn: 9781107144910. a wonderfully concise and informative introduction to blake in various contexts and in relationship to certain topics. haggarty, sarah. “introduction.” 1-4. part i: life, works, and reception damrosch, leo. “life.” 7-14. mee, jon. “networks.” 15-22. crosby, mark. “engraving.” 23-34. worrall, david. “illuminated books.” 35-42. haggarty, sarah. “manuscripts.” 43-55. calè, luisa. “book illustration.” 56-69. myrone, martin. “painting.” 70-78. erle, sibylle, and keri davies. “early reception.” 79-86. whittaker, jason. “late reception.” 87-93. eaves, morris. “editing and editions.” 94-101. part ii: form, genre, and mode parker, fred. “comedy.” 105-12. balfour, ian. “prophecy.” 113-19. attridge, derek. “rhythm.” 120-28. newman, steve. “songs.” 129-38. hurley, michael d. “sound.” 139-46. baulch, david. “sublimity.” 147-54. rajan, tilottama. “system, myth, and symbol.” 155-62. part iii: creative cross-currents prickett, stephen. “the bible.” 165-72. fuller, david. “chaucer, spenser, and shakespeare.” 173-83. rosso, g. a. “milton.” 184-91. duff, david. “the eighteenth century and romanticism.” 192-99. mcgann, jerome. “byron.” 200-10. helsinger, elizabeth. “pre-raphaelites and aesthetes.” 211-18. larrissy, edward. “yeats, eliot, and auden.” 219-26. freedman, linda. “whitman, crane, and the beats.” 227-34. part iv: history, society, and culture fosso, kurt. “animals.” 237-44. heringman, noah. “antiquarianism.” 245-53. joy, louise. “education and childhood.” 254-61. williams, nicholas m. “empiricism.” 262-69. gigante, denise. “life sciences.” 270-76. makdisi, saree. “london.” 277-85. rowlinson, matthew. “money.” 286-92. regier, alexander. “moravianism.” 293-300. quinney, laura. “mysticism.” 301-08. wright, julia m. “nationalism and imperialism.” 309-16. matthews, susan. “sex, sexuality, and gender.” 317-24. lincoln, andrew. “war and revolution.” 325-32. goldsmith, steven. “(without) sympathy.” 333-44. reviews gourlay, alexander s. see blake 53.3. schierenbeck, daniel. choice 57.4 (dec. 2019): 433. hamelman, steve. rev. of rock and romanticism: blake, wordsworth, and rock from dylan to u2, ed. james rovira. see rovira, rock and romanticism. haywood, ian, susan matthews, and mary l. shannon. “editor’s introduction.” see haywood, matthews, and shannon. haywood, ian, susan matthews, and mary l. shannon, eds. romanticism and illustration. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2019. isbn: 9781108425711. great collection. haywood, ian, susan matthews, and mary l. shannon. “editors’ introduction.” 1-21. part i: illustrating poetry otto, peter. “the ends of illustration: explanation, critique, and the political imagination in blake’s title-pages for genesis.” 25-46. thomas, sophie. “‘with a master’s hand and prophet’s fire’: blake, gray, and the bard.” 47-69. frazier wood, dustin m. “seeing history: illustration, poetic drama, and the national past.” 70-93. priestman, martin. “‘fuseli’s poetic eye’: prints and impressions in fuseli and erasmus darwin.” 94-118. matthews, susan. “henry fuseli’s accommodations: ‘attempting the domestic’ in the illustrations to cowper.” 119-42. jung, sandro. “reading the romantic vignette: stothard illustrates bloomfield, byron, and crabbe for the royal engagement pocket atlas.” 143-70. mccue, maureen. “intimate distance: thomas stothard’s and j. m. w. turner’s illustrations of samuel rogers’s italy.” 171-95. part ii: the business of illustration haywood, ian. “illustration, terror, and female agency: thomas macklin’s poets gallery in a revolutionary decade.” 199-220. calè, luisa. “maria cosway’s hours: cosmopolitan and classical visual culture in thomas macklin’s poets gallery.” 221-42. shannon, mary l. “artists’ street: thomas stothard, r. h. cromek, and literary illustration on london’s newman street.” 243-66. maidment, brian. “the development of magazine illustration in regency britain—​the example of arliss’s pocket magazine 1818–1833.” 267-87. myrone, martin. “coda: romantic illustration and the privatization of history painting.” 288-301. review scott, grant f. review 19 (23 aug. 2019): 12 pars. hearn, lafcadio. koizumi yakumo todai kogi-roku: nihon bungaku no mirai no tameni [lectures in tokyo imperial university by koizumi yakumo: for the future of japanese literature]. trans. masayuki ikeda. tokyo: kadokawa shoten, 2019. 400 pp. isbn: 9784044004866. in japanese. a selection of lectures given by lafcadio hearn (koizumi yakumo) for the students of tokyo imperial university between 1896 and 1903. it includes a lecture entitled “igirisu saisho no shimpika blake [blake: the first english mystic],” 262-312. this is a much-revised version of the japanese translation of hearn’s lectures, which were originally published by the same translator in samayoeru tamashii no uta [a song of a wandering soul] (tokyo: chikuma shobo, 2004). helsinger, elizabeth. “pre-raphaelites and aesthetes.” see haggarty, william blake in context. heringman, noah. “antiquarianism.” see haggarty, william blake in context. higgs, john. “psychedelic odin: william blake’s gift to musicians.” the quietus (14 sept. 2019): 26 pars. includes youtube clips of blake-inspired music. higgs, john. william blake now: why he matters more than ever. weidenfeld & nicolson, 2019. isbn: 9781474614337. hsu, kan-lin, and pang-li liu. “[the voice of the anachronic bard: ‘satanic mill’ and market society].” [journal for philosophical study of public affairs] 70 (2019): 109–67. in chinese. abstract in chinese and english. huntington library quarterly volume 80, number 3 (autumn 2017) “william blake’s manuscripts,” ed. mark crosby. <blake (2018)> review graver, bruce. see blake 52.4. hurley, michael d. “sound.” see haggarty, william blake in context. hurley, michael d. “theologies of inspiration: william blake and gerard manley hopkins.” constructing nineteenth-century religion. ed. joshua king and winter jade werner. columbus: ohio state university press, 2019. isbn: 9780814213971. 262-80. hushagen, sam. “formal prospects: the long poem after milton.” phd diss., university of washington, 2019. examines vala, or the four zoas alongside paradise regained, the seasons, and the task and discusses how they “approach aesthetic experience as kinesthetic and embodied” (abstract). i § ibata, hélène. “‘blotting and blurring demons’? the paradoxical place of colour printing in blake’s theory of art.” xvii-xviii: revue de la société d’études anglo-américaines des xviie et xviiie siècles 75 (2018): 42 pars. in english (abstract in french and english). ibata, hélène. the challenge of the sublime: from burke’s “philosophical enquiry” to british romantic art. manchester: manchester university press, 2018. isbn: 9781526117397. many relevant chapters on blake and his circle, including reynolds, barry, west, and fuseli. the chapter on blake is titled “against and beyond burke: blake’s ‘sublime labours’” (235-66). j jasper, david. rev. of alexander regier, exorbitant enlightenment. see regier. § jiménez heffernan, julián. “butterfly on rock: blake, frye, layton and the canadian imagination.” canadística canaria (1991–2000): ensayos literarios anglocanadienses. ed. juan ignacio oliva cruz et al. la laguna: universidad de la laguna, 2002. isbn: 847756504x. 103-20. in english. § jobert, barthélémy. “william blake et la question du monotype.” nouvelles de l’estampe 191-92 (2003–04): 13-16. in french. this entry is incomplete in wbhc p. 2210 but more accurate in blake (2013). jones, sarah. rev. of g. e. bentley, jr., boondoggles: travels of a restless professor. see blake 53.1. joy, louise. “education and childhood.” see haggarty, william blake in context. k kalmthout, ton van. “the reception of blake in the netherlands.” see erle and paley, the reception of william blake in europe. kang, christopher taekwan. “zero ecology: a study of british romantic poetry.” phd diss., university of california, irvine, 2019. a chapter “disputes critical conceptions that william blake dismisses and reviles the natural world” (abstract). komisaruk, adam. “love among the ruins.” sexual privatism in british romantic writing: a public of one. new york: routledge, 2019. isbn: 9780815363682. 175-87. significant discussion of blake and darwin’s the botanic garden. blake also figures significantly in the coda (188-96). konishi, hironobu. “william blake no ‘kohitsuji no uta’ niokeru danwa bunseki (discourse analysis of william blake’s ‘the lamb’).” hiroshima bunkyo global 3 (2019): 33-46. in japanese. kostova, ludmilla, and lubomir terziev. “the reception of blake in bulgaria.” see erle and paley, the reception of william blake in europe. l lafarge, daisy. “a company of fools.” see tate etc. larrissy, edward. “the reception of blake in ireland.” see erle and paley, the reception of william blake in europe. larrissy, edward. “yeats, eliot, and auden.” see haggarty, william blake in context. leckey, mark, and paul farley. “under the bridge.” see tate etc. lee, haram. “the politics of subjectivity: biopolitics and british romanticism.” phd diss., brandeis university, 2019. considers blake alongside william wordsworth, mary shelley, and james hogg. leporati, matthew. “new formalism in the classroom: re-forming epic poetry in wordsworth and blake.” humanities 8.2 (june 2019). 16 pp. lewis, jayne. rev. of beastly blake, ed. helen p. bruder and tristanne connolly, and alexander regier, exorbitant enlightenment. see bruder and connolly and regier. lincoln, andrew. rev. of linda freedman, william blake and the myth of america. see freedman. lincoln, andrew. “war and revolution.” see haggarty, william blake in context. lindberg, bo ossian. “blake’s reception in sweden and finland.” see erle and paley, the reception of william blake in europe. liu, pang-li. see hsu, kan-lin, and pang-li liu. loukes, andrew, ed. william blake in sussex: visions of albion. london: paul holberton publishing, 2018. <blake (2019)> review chadwick, esther. “heaven’s gate: esther chadwick wonders what william blake really saw when he looked at the sussex landscape.” apollo 187.662 (1 mar. 2018): 188-89. lucas, john, ed. william blake. london: longman, 1998. <blake (1999)> b. abingdon: routledge, 2013. m maejima, kento. “blake shiso kara mita shihonshugi (capitalism as blake’s idea sees it).” dokkyo keizai (dokkyo university studies of economics) 105 (2019): 43-50. in japanese. maidment, brian. “the development of magazine illustration in regency britain—​the example of arliss’s pocket magazine 1818–1833.” see haywood, matthews, and shannon. makdisi, saree. “london.” see haggarty, william blake in context. manly, susan. “literature for children.” see duff, the oxford handbook of british romanticism. mann, annika. “propagation: regeneration and william blake’s ‘visible form.’” reading contagion: the hazards of reading in the age of print. charlottesville: university of virginia press, 2018. isbn: 9780813941776. 109-49. considers the book of urizen within the political contexts of contagion in the 1790s. § marchetto santorun, maría cecilia. “desire in william blake’s there is no natural religion.” broadening horizons: a peak panorama of english studies in spain. ed. maría beatriz hernández pérez, manuel brito marrero, and josé tomás monterrey rodríguez. la laguna: universidad de la laguna, 2018. isbn: 9788415939665. 171-77. in english. marchetto santorun, maría cecilia. “‘the war ‘twixt sun and moon’: evil and gender in william blake’s early illuminated books and alan moore’s from hell.” english studies 100.4 (june 2019): 387-406. marshall, peter. bir anarşist olarak william blake [william blake: visionary anarchist]. trans. ege acar. i̇stanbul: sub basın yayım, 2019. isbn: 9786059486781. matsushita, tetsuya. henry fuseli no gaho: monogatari to character hyogen no kakushin [the painting method of henry fuseli: a revolution in expression of stories and characters]. tokyo: sangensha, 2018. 288 pp. isbn: 9784883034505. in japanese. 4 plates by blake and a lot of plates by other artists. matsushita, tetsuya. “mushakoji saneatsu saku, kishida ryusei ga kachi kachi yama to hanasakajiji no soga ni mirareru william blake no kansogakuteki jintaizokei no eikyo [the physiognomic influence of william blake on the modeling of a human body in kishida ryusei’s illustrations for mt. kachi kachi and an old man who made the dead trees blossom written by mushakoji saneatsu].” bigaku (aesthetics) 68.2 (2017): 148. in japanese. matthews, susan. “sex, sexuality, and gender.” see haggarty, william blake in context. matthews, susan. see also haywood, ian, susan matthews, and mary l. shannon. mcgann, jerome. “byron.” see haggarty, william blake in context. mee, jon. “networks.” see haggarty, william blake in context. menneteau, patrick. “ecritures hétérogènes et vision une dans l’œuvre poétique de william blake.” babel 3 (1999): 113-29. in french (abstract in french, english, and spanish). menneteau, patrick. “langage et culture dans la poésie de william blake.” babel 1 (1996): 73-84. in french (abstract in french, english, and spanish). menneteau, patrick. “la voix prophétique de william blake.” babel 4 (2000): 125-39. in french (abstract in french and english). mertz, j. b. “teaching the revolution debate: edmund burke, his radical respondents, and william blake.” teaching representations of the french revolution. ed. julia douthwaite viglione, antoinette sol, and catriona seth. new york: mla, 2019. isbn: 9781603294652. 241-52. mezquita fernández, maría antonia. william blake y claudio rodríguez: visiones luminosas. zamora: instituto de estudios zamoranos ‘florián de ocampo,’ 2006. 76 pp. isbn: 8496100197. in spanish. a volume on the poetry of claudio rodríguez and blake. in spanish. this is a book, not to be confused with the article in wbhc p. 2403 with a similar title: § mezquita fernández, maría antonia. “dos poetas visionarios: william blake y claudio rodríguez.” anuario del instituto de estudios zamoranos florián de ocampo 22 (2005): 399-408. mitchell, w. j. t. blake’s composite art: a study of the illuminated poetry. princeton: princeton university press, 1978. <bbs pp. 575-76> b. 2019. princeton legacy library. another useful reprint from princeton university press. moore, alan. “afterword: heaven, hell, and the hallway at hercules buildings.” see myrone and concannon. b. “alan moore on william blake and the supernatural poetry of place: the painter was haunted by more than a few spirits.” literary hub (4 nov. 2019). c. “welcome to the lambeth angel whisperer.” see tate etc. § mourão-ferreira, david. “william blake, poeta e visionário.” colóquio: letras 168-69 (2004): 371-76. in portuguese. script from the television show by the author. mutis, guido. “visión sistémica de la poesía de william blake.” revista documentos lingüísticos y literarios uach 37 (jan. 2019): 169-84. in spanish (abstract in spanish and english). originally published in estudios filológicos 25 (1990): 85-100. <see d. w. dörrbecker, “blake and his circle: an annotated checklist of recent publications,” blake 26.3 (winter 1992–93): 103.> myrone, martin. “‘blake be an artist!’” see myrone and concannon. myrone, martin. “blake the artist: at tate and abroad.” see erle and paley, the reception of william blake in europe. myrone, martin. “coda: romantic illustration and privatization of history painting.” see haywood, matthews, and shannon. myrone, martin. “introduction: the making of a modern artist.” see myrone and concannon. myrone, martin, intro. lives of william blake. london: pallas athene, 2019. isbn: 9781843681786. reprint of henry crabb robinson’s “reminiscences” and “william blake, künstler, dichter und religiöser schwärmer,” j. t. smith’s “biographical sketch of blake,” and alexander gilchrist’s “preliminary” from life of william blake. 63 glossy illustrations. myrone, martin. “making prints, making a living.” see myrone and concannon. myrone, martin. “painting.” see haggarty, william blake in context. myrone, martin. “patronage and independence.” see myrone and concannon. myrone, martin, and amy concannon, with an afterword by alan moore. william blake. london: tate publishing, 2019. isbn: 9781849766449. catalogue for the 2019–20 tate britain exhibition. farquharson, alex. “director’s foreword.” 6-7. myrone, martin. “introduction: the making of a modern artist.” 9-21. myrone, martin. “‘blake be an artist!’” 25-35. myrone, martin. “making prints, making a living.” 51-83. myrone, martin. “patronage and independence.” 85-124. concannon, amy. “independence and despair.” 133-55. concannon, amy. “‘a new kind of man.’” 161-97. moore, alan. “afterword: heaven, hell, and the hallway at hercules buildings.” 199-202. “notes.” 204-07. “selected bibliography.” 207-08. “list of exhibited works.” 209-15. “image credits.” 216. “index.” 217-19. previews, reviews, and reactionsthanks to leigh mark for her assistance in finding references. [aleksander, weronika]. “william blake at tate britain.” ground impressions (4 oct. 2019): 8 pars. atkinson, william. “william blake.” cherwell (15 oct. 2019): 11 pars. attard, joe. “william blake: breaking the mind-forg’d manacles.” socialist appeal (5 dec. 2019): 13 pars. “aside from being an artistic genius, blake was a political radical whose art was directly inspired by the horrors of burgeoning english capitalism” (par. 1). barrett, david v. “william blake review: a strangely utilitarian portrait of a visionary.” catholic herald (19 sept. 2019): 7 pars. “oddly, the visionary aspect of his work is barely mentioned in this exhibition” (par. 4). billingsley, naomi. “review: william blake, tate britain.” censamm (19 nov. 2019): 12 pars. “if you go to this exhibition expecting a narrative about blake’s apocalyptic vision you will be disappointed. what you will encounter, however, is a rich display of blake’s works that engage with that theme, many of which may not be shown again in the uk for decades. plenty has been written on blake’s apocalyptic vision elsewhere, so do your homework, and then enjoy this opportunity to encounter some of blake’s most powerful works” (par. 12). § billingsley, naomi. “william blake, tate britain, london, 11 september 2019–2 february 2020.” art and christianity 100 (2019): 16-17. blythe, finn. “tyger tyger: william blake at tate britain: five key works explained.” hero (7 sept. 2019): 13 pars. martin myrone and amy concannon discuss “albion rose,” the ghost of a flea, newton, the 1802 portrait of blake, and “the tyger.” boyadzhieva, deya. “exhibition review: william blake at tate britain.” pi magazine (14 nov. 2019): 7 pars. brewer, james. “william blake: visionary exhibition at tate britain.” allaboutshipping.co.uk (15 sept. 2019): 47 pars. c., j. “william blake, tate britain.” london living large (n.d.): 1 par. c., k. s. “the doors of perception: a blockbuster show at tate britain gives william blake his due.” economist (17 sept. 2019). caldwell, ian. “the mythical, mysterious and magical images of william blake at tate britain.” ian the architect (2 nov. 2019): 5 pars. § campbell-johnston, rachel. “william blake at tate britain: into the wild world of the poet, painter and visionary.” times (31 aug. 2019). § campbell-johnston, rachel. “william blake review—​the artist at his most magnificently ambitious.” times (9 sept. 2019). chadwick, esther. “william blake. tate britain, london.” burlington magazine 161.1400 (nov. 2019): 6 pars. “the tate’s objective is to offer a sense of how blake’s contemporaries experienced his work. but where it is most successful is in providing something none of them could have enjoyed: a retrospective overview in which we can see how forms and themes appearing early on recur and are reiterated throughout the artist’s career” (par. 6). collings, matthew. “william blake review: be drawn into a weird and wonderful fantasy universe.” evening standard (9 sept. 2019): 11 pars. “seems like a commentary on modern times” (par. 11). colvin, zoë. “william blake—​tate britain.” zmkc (13 nov. 2019): 21 pars. cotter, holland, et al. “best art books of 2019.” new york times (5 dec. 2019, updated 17 dec. 2019): 1 par. on blake. names the catalogue as one of the best art books of the year: “this beautiful book distills the spirit of the revolutionary poet, artist and prophet-saint of what we now call social justice.” cranfield, nicholas. “exhibition review: william blake at tate britain.” church times (15 nov. 2019): 13 pars. “this exhibition offers much to marvel over, but perhaps little that is truly remarkable” (par. 13). cumming, laura. “william blake review—​a rousing call to arms.” guardian (15 sept. 2019): 28 pars. cunningham, kieran james. “william blake was once ridiculed for his art honoring britain—​now, a different perspective.” observer (11 sept. 2019): 8 pars. dinneen, steve. “william blake at tate britain review: a trip into the mind of a true revolutionary artist.” city a.m. (13 sept. 2019): 9 pars. “tate britain wisely avoids psychoanalysing blake, [a]lthough it’s hard not to do so yourself. this is the work of a special, troubled mind—​an absolute must-see” (par. 9). “everything you need to know about william blake at tate britain.” whistles (n.d.): 6 pars. § faktorovich, anna. “inspiration for artists: blake’s life and works.” pennsylvania literary journal 11.3 (fall 2019): 100-02. fensom, sarah e. “william blake: what immortal hand or eye.” art and antiques (aug. 2019): 15 pars. “blake’s [1809] exhibition sounds like a pretty hip scene” (par. 1). flor, t. k. “william blake in the twenty first century.” t. k. flor’s blog (21 sept. 2019): 11 pars. includes excerpts from reviews. “four people on the wonder of william blake.” another man (12 sept. 2019): 15 pars. “bobby gillespie, genesis p-orridge, jack barnett, and sébastien meunier tell us how the romantic artist inspires them” (par. 1). frankel, eddy. “william blake review.” time out london (n.d.): 7 pars. “who gives a rat’s ass about a guy called thomas butts commissioning blake or how many shillings were in a pound? i want to know about how much blake hated slavery, how he fought for feminism, a[d]vocated for free love, saw satan as a rebel against the evils of dogmatic religion and saw each individual as a god in themselves. all those stories are here, in these works, but they stay hidden” (par. 6). freeman, laura. “the many faces of william ‘slasher’ blake.” spectator (14 sept. 2019): 10 pars. furedi, frank. “our right to free expression is in crisis—​can we call ourselves a democracy if we don’t encourage open debate?” telegraph (30 dec. 2019). girard, tommy. “william blake: rebel radical revolutionary at tate britain.” tommy girard (n.d.): 19 pars. glover, michael. “the tumultuous times of william blake.” hyperallergic (21 sept. 2019): 15 pars. gompertz, will. “william blake: will gompertz reviews ‘imperfect’ tate britain blockbuster.” bbc (14 sept. 2019): 17 pars. “but the curators’ desire to contextualise every last part of blake’s output by introducing his patrons, his business practices, the work of his contemporaries—​because there’s plenty of space in those big rooms to fill—​means the mystical, magical nature of the work is usurped” (par. 11). grant, don. “william blake at tate britain.” kcwlondon (4 oct. 2019): 3 pars. greer, robert. “review | william blake at tate britain.” london magazine (12 sept. 2019): 10 pars. “for its demonstration of blake’s craftsmanship and true insight into his life, the exhibition is a must-see” (par. 10). grey, tobias. “mythic images on a grand scale.” wall street journal (15 aug. 2019): 12 pars. grovier, kelly. “william blake: the greatest visionary in 200 years.” bbc (10 sept. 2019): 15 pars. guyver, figgy. “william blake’s baffling, tempestuous visions at london’s tate britain.” frieze (13 sept. 2019): 4 pars. halion, conor. “is william blake still relevant?” university observer [university college dublin] (2 dec. 2019): 7 pars. “ultimately, i believe blake will always remain relevant to society” (par. 7). haworth, bryn. “what’s so big about william blake?” majalla (19 oct. 2019): 45 pars. “it has become a conventional observation that these are dark times in the english-speaking world. an atmosphere of unrest and division has prevailed on both sides of the atlantic, and britain has become polarised in a manner that william blake would immediately recognise. we are in the throes of a full-blown political nightmare, as if the incubus from a painting by fuseli (one of blake’s friends) sits on the country, disturbing its sleep. the identity of this incubus is in some doubt. it looks like cummings, but it’s acting exactly like boris. let’s call it boris cummings, then, or dominic johnson” (par. 34). hayward, danny. “william blake.” artforum (sept. 2019): 1 par. “tate’s comprehensive display of three hundred works from across blake’s life should serve as a historical reminder that these thick, sensuous outlines of the body still have better fucking things to do than stand sentry in the metaphorical imagination of this or that fascist regime.” hensher, philip. “the big review: william blake at tate britain.” art newspaper (1 oct. 2019): 9 pars. hoole, georgie. “the largest william blake exhibition in 20 years is now open in london.” secret london (18 sept. 2019): 8 pars. januszczak, waldemar. “william blake at tate britain review—​viewing it is like being drunk.” sunday times (15 sept. 2019): 19 pars. also available at januszczak’s blog, waldemar.tv. jones, jonathan. “william blake review—​blazing heresies from the artist who blows constable and turner away.” guardian (9 sept. 2019): 11 pars. “tate britain defies the snobs and sceptics by showing blake as a straight artist, with only the barest nod to his writings. blake fans, too, may be enraged at this disavowal of his poetic genius. but it’s worth the loss to get such a stupendous revelation that he is also a genius of art” (par. 6). judah, hettie. “william blake at tate britain offers an entirely new picture of the artist.” inews (9 sept. 2019): 21 pars. “like a by-the-book hollywood drama, blake’s darkest hour is here followed by redemption and triumph” (par. 18). kantrowitz, jonathan. “william blake—​tate britain.” art history news (23 aug. 2019): 9 pars. keay, lara. “beware of the art! tate britain slaps trigger warning for ‘violent’ and ‘challenging’ images at entrance to their exhibition of 200-year-old william blake masterpieces.” daily mail (1 oct. 2019): 14 pars. linked to at the alt-right chatroom free republic. keener, katherine. “‘william blake’ at tate britain is unique, wonderful, sometimes odd, and a must see.” art critique (17 sept. 2019): 7 pars. king, hannah joy. “william blake at the tate britain.” inquire (15 oct. 2019): 11 pars. larman, alexander. “is it art—​or a trigger warning?” critic (26 feb. 2020): 13 pars. lerner, edwin. “william blake in london—​largest exhibition opens at tate britain.” guide london (23 sept. 2019): 8 pars. lewis, barbara. “william blake/​venue: tate britain, london, until february 2/​curated by martin myrone and amy concannon.” londongrip.co.uk (2019): 27 pars. lindey, christine. “exhibition: obscured vision.” morning star (24 sept. 2019): 21 pars. “tate britain’s enthusiastic curators have produced a fascinating catalogue full of sociopolitical and cultural contexts but by focusing on blake’s image-making they overrate him as a visual artist” (par. 20). “the londoner: humphrys: from bulldog to bullfrogs.” evening standard (10 oct. 2019). one paragraph on the sign, with a quote from david bindman, and concluding “talk about the snowblake generation.” lucie-smith, edward. “william blake: personal realms of fantasy.” artlyst (14 sept. 2019): 9 pars. maddox, georgina. “tate britain presents the largest survey show of work by william blake, in the uk.” stir (14 oct. 2019): 12 pars. mcdonagh, melanie. “naked genius! he was a nudist obsessed by sex who talked to angels for inspiration, but for all his madness, william blake was one of our greatest artists—​as a new exhibition reveals.” daily mail (19 sept. 2019): 45 pars. includes photographs of the installation. michael, mark. “advent’s radical prophet.” living church (19 nov. 2019): 13 pars. the only review i saw to reference (in both word and image) “a negro hung alive by the ribs to a gallows.” mulhallen, jacqueline. “william blake: prophet and seditionary.” counterfire (27 sept. 2019): 13 pars. “since blake’s day, work has become more and more alienating and the capitalism which he resisted has become completely dominant. to go back to blake’s work, and, although it is not always easy to understand, appreciate his distaste for slavery and penury, and for mass production and the working conditions it brings is very rewarding” (par. 12). noble, will. “the biggest william blake exhibition in 20 years is coming to london.” londonist (4 apr. 2019): 11 pars. noble, will. “the tate’s massive william blake exhibition is here … and this is what we thought of it.” londonist (25 oct. 2019): 7 pars. ooi, yang-may, and anna sayburn lane. “william blake at tate britain review.” tiger spirit (10 sept. 2019). a podcast conversation on the exhibit. “over 300 artworks to reveal blake’s inspiring and complex vision ….” kooness (29 oct. 2019): 7 pars. “what it displays, above all, is how blake’s intensity of concentration lasted his entire career. it also shows that despite how timeless blake’s work is and how eccentric he might have been, his work is in fact rooted in the social and artistic agendas of his time” (par. 7). perry, seamus. “william blake’s second life.” prospect (9 oct. 2019): 15 pars. “the centrepiece of this exhibition is a partial reconstruction of the golden square show, an excellent curatorial idea” (par. 8). phillips, tom. “always in paradise.” times literary supplement (18 oct. 2019): 22 pars. polemis, cindy. “william blake: method and madness.” standpoint (23 oct. 2019): 12 pars. “the genius of this tate show lies in highlighting blake the artist, who happened to write poetry on the side” (par. 12). “preview: william blake: the artist, tate britain.” lovelondonloveculture.com (14 apr. 2019): 6 pars. prodger, michael. “william blake’s design innovations.” new statesman (18 sept. 2019): 21 pars. roy, amit. “blake ‘almost anticipated the turmoil over brexit.’” eastern eye (8 nov. 2019): 26. sala, bartolomeo. “william blake.” brooklyn rail (dec. 2019): 7 pars. schama, simon. “schama on blake.” bbc radio 4 (9 sept. 2019). an audio review of blake and the exhibition. simon. “william blake @ tate britain.” books & boots: reflections on books and art (20 oct. 2019): 41 pars. “this exhibition feels like a big, elaborately assembled, beautifully curated and presented catalogue of all blake’s visual works. a list. a documentation of his works. but somehow, with all the fiery life, rebellion and pride of the imagination taken out” (par. 40). singh, anita. “tate britain to show william blake’s wife at the heart of new exhibition.” telegraph (4 apr. 2019): 16 pars. “snowflake madness: tate britain felt 200-year-old william blake paintings needed trigger warning for ‘violence & suffering.’” wake up uk: the free speech community (n.d.): 12 pars. “‘are we really so surrounded by snowflakes and wilting lilies who take offense at everything that such labels are necessary in art museums for artists like william blake?’” sooke, alastair. “william blake review, tate britain: an incandescent imagination smothered by dull curating.” telegraph (9 sept. 2019): 17 pars. souter, anna. “william blake at the tate britain.” the upcoming (10 sept. 2019): 8 pars. “unfortunately, relatively little of blake’s fascinating personal philosophy comes through in the tate britain exhibition, which fails to fully convey the revolutionary nature of his words and images. for instance, it almost completely ignores the anti-establishment mythology he created over the course of his life—​perhaps understandably due to its complexity, but those who know more of blake’s poetry than his songs of innocence and [of] experience may find there’s an essential element missing” (par. 4). spicer, emily. “william blake exhibition, tate britain review.” culture whisper (9 sept. 2019): 6 pars. “spend as much time as you can in these galleries; read the poetry and drink in the colours. in fact, spend an afternoon in this exhibition. it would be an afternoon well spent” (par. 6). spranklen, annabelle. “the largest exhibition of william blake’s work in 20 years opens in london this month.” tatler (6 sept. 2019): 8 pars. stainer, hazel. “blake: rebel, radical, revolutionary.” hazel stainer (22 nov. 2019): 49 pars. stanford, eleanor. “william blake at tate britain.” new york times (22 dec. 2019): ar 4. stone, christopher james. “review: the william blake exhibition at tate britain.” whitstable views (17 oct. 2019): 20 pars. “tate britain holding new exhibition dedicated to william blake this fall.” philippines tatler (9 sept. 2019): 12 pars. also printed in malaymail.com on same date. “tate britain presents the largest survey of work by william blake.” artdependence magazine (30 sept. 2019): 7 pars. “tate britain. william blake.” arte por excelencias (6 aug. 2019): 3 pars. thorpe, vanessa. “how william blake’s wife brought colour to his works of genius; catherine blake’s unacknowledged contribution to the artist’s work is celebrated in a new show at tate britain.” observer (7 sept. 2019): 13 pars. “‘trigger warnings’ for 19th century art?—​boson [sic] museum of find [sic] art features william blake (arts boson [sic]).” bosonmassachusetts.blogspot.com (2 oct. 2019): 19 pars. particularly incoherent plagiarism. uglow, jenny. “‘to particularize is the alone distinction of merit’: blake’s visionary imagination.” new york review of books (19 oct. 2019): 13 pars. vergnon, dominique. “quand blake unit les anges aux démons.” l’oeil: revue d’art mensuelle 727 (oct. 2019). in french. vernon, mark. “blake’s vision of liberty.” idler (18 sept. 2019): 22 pars. “the tate exhibition is a chance to feel the fuller energy. i’d advise ignoring the tendency amongst some critics to say blake is unfathomable or incomprehensible. rather, allow yourself just to dwell in the show” (par. 13). vignolli, david jesus. “william blake’s visionary art—​tate britain.” jesusvignolli.com (16 sept. 2019): 10 pars. “the visionary art of william blake.” art & object (30 sept. 2019): 6 pars. waters, katherine. “william blake, tate britain—​sympathy for the rebel: vast and satisfying show for a visionary and iconic artist.” theartsdesk.com (29 sept. 2019): 5 pars. whittaker, jason. “review: william blake, tate britain.” see zoamorphosis in part v. “who’s afraid of william blake? art lovers vexed tate britain felt 200-year-old paintings needed ‘violence & suffering’ warning.” russia today (2 oct. 2019): 11 pars. who’s afraid of authorial attribution? “william blake.” apollo (n.d.): 5 pars. “william blake.” wall street international (8 july 2019): 4 pars. “william blake exhibition at tate britain—​sonja jessup reports.” bbc (9 sept. 2019). youtube clip. “william blake, tate britain.” cellophaneland (20 dec. 2019): 8 pars. § wood, gaby. “mad, muse, lost master: the mystery of william blake’s wife.” telegraph (26 aug. 2019). n narita, fumi. rev. of yuko arakawa, reiko onodera, kazusa kume, akiko kato, and masayuki tanaka, design to decoration—​william blake kara edward m. kauffer e (designatio et ornamentum: ex william blake ad edward m. kauffer) [design and decoration—​from william blake to edward m. kauffer]. see onodera. nesvet, rebecca. rev. of rock and romanticism, ed. james rovira. see rovira, rock and romanticism. newman, steve. “songs.” see haggarty, william blake in context. nishimura, akie. “gide niokeru akuma: william blake kaishaku wo fumaete [the devil in gide: on the basis of his interpretation of william blake].” stella 37 (2018): 267-80. in japanese. o ocaranza páez, luisa. rev. of daniela picón, visiones de william blake: itinerarios de su recepción en los siglos xix y xx. see picón. oh, sein. “blake’s (a)po(ca)lyps(e).” “the betrayal of romantic utopia.” phd diss., university of illinois at chicago, 2018. 16-44. o’hear, natasha. rev. of naomi billingsley, the visionary art of william blake. see billingsley, the visionary art of william blake. onodera, reiko. “soshoku no yorokobi—​william blake to chusei shahon [the delight of ornament—​william blake and illuminated manuscripts in the middle ages].” yuko arakawa, reiko onodera, kazusa kume, akiko kato, and masayuki tanaka. design to decoration—​william blake kara edward m. kauffer e (designatio et ornamentum: ex william blake ad edward m. kauffer) [design and decoration—​from william blake to edward m. kauffer]. tokyo: arina shobo, 2018. <blake (2019)> review narita, fumi. victoria-cho bunka kenkyu (studies in victorian culture) 17 (2019): 137-42. in japanese. otto, peter. “the ends of illustration: explanation, critique, and the political imagination in blake’s title-pages for genesis.” see haywood, matthews, and shannon. otto, peter. “‘rouse up o young men of the new age!’: ōe kenzaburō and william blake on bodies, biopolitics, and the imagination.” see watson and williams. otto, peter. “william blake, the ancient gnostics, and the birth of modern gnosticism.” the gnostic world. ed. garry w. trompf, in collaboration with gunner b. mikkelsen and jay johnston. abingdon: routledge, 2019. isbn: 9781138673939. 464-74. revisits and updates blake’s relationship with the gnostics. otto, peter. “william blake, the secularization of religious categories, and the history of imagination.” constructing nineteenth-century religion. ed. joshua king and winter jade werner. columbus: ohio state university press, 2019. isbn: 9780814213971. 281-302. interesting essay in a wider collection built around the fluidity of our notion of nineteenth-century religion. öwre, john. rev. of the reception of william blake in europe, ed. sibylle erle and morton d. paley. see erle and paley, the reception of william blake in europe. p paley, morton d. “editing blake.” see erle and paley, the reception of william blake in europe. paley, morton d. “timeline of the european reception of william blake, 1789–2016.” see erle and paley, the reception of william blake in europe. paley, morton d. see also erle, sibylle, and morton d. paley. paris-popa, andreea. “the madmen of allen ginsberg’s ‘howl’ and their blakean roots.” british and american studies/​revista de studii britanice şi americane 25 (2019): 161-71. in english. parker, fred. “comedy.” see haggarty, william blake in context. penn, alexandra. “‘perception of the object’: toward a material-discursive poetics.” phd diss., indiana university, 2019. substantial references to blake in a dissertation on “a series of interconnected problems in science and poetry studies” (abstract). peres alós, anselmo. see also do canto, daniela schwarcke, and anselmo peres alós. peres alós, anselmo, and daniela schwarcke do canto. “alexander gilchrist e a criação do personagem blake (alexander gilchrist and the invention of the character blake).” fênix—​revista de história e estudos culturais 15.2 (2018): 48 pars. in portuguese (abstract in portuguese and english). comparing passages in gilchrist to the accounts in malkin, robinson, tatham, j. t. smith, and cunningham. péter, ágnes. “the reception of blake in hungary.” see erle and paley, the reception of william blake in europe. picón, daniela. visiones de william blake: itinerarios de su recepción en los siglos xix y xx. madrid: calambur editorial, 2017. <blake (2018)> review ocaranza páez, luisa. revista chilena de literatura 99 (apr. 2019): 423-27. piergiacomi, enrico. see pietrini, sandra, and enrico piergiacomi. pietrini, sandra, and enrico piergiacomi. “analysing the meta-archive arianna—​‘shakespeariana’: research and teaching opportunities with the iconographical database.” humanities 8.2 (june 2019). 16 pp. some treatment of blake’s illustrations to shakespeare, particularly as if an angel dropped down from the clouds (1809) and pity (1795), in a wider discussion regarding shakespeariana in the database. porée, marc. “le romantisme (anglais) est un enthousiasme.” l’atelier 10.2 (2018): 15-39. in french. on the english romantic poets’, and particularly blake’s, defense of enthusiasm. prickett, stephen. “the bible.” see haggarty, william blake in context. prickett, stephen. rev. of naomi billingsley, the visionary art of william blake. see billingsley, the visionary art of william blake. procházka, martin. “the czech reception of blake: from catholic modernism to alternative culture.” see erle and paley, the reception of william blake in europe. pullman, philip. “soft beulah’s night: william blake and vision” and “‘i must create a system …’: a moth’s-eye view of william blake.” daemon voices: on stories and storytelling. new york: knopf, 2018. 317-23 and 353-72. the first essay was originally published in the guardian on 26 jan. 2015, and the second was delivered to the blake society on 25 oct. 2005. q quinney, laura. “mysticism.” see haggarty, william blake in context. r rabinowitz, jacob. blame it on blake: a memoir of dead languages, gender vagrancy, burroughs, ginsberg, corso & carr. independently published, 2019. isbn: 9781095139059. some references to blake in a memoir rife with memories of the beat poets. raine, kathleen. william blake. london: thames & hudson, 1970. <wbhc p. 2568> … intro. colin trodd. new ed. 2019. isbn: 9780500204573. rajan, tilottama. “blake, hegel, and the sciences.” wordsworth circle 50.1 (winter 2019): 20-35. rajan, tilottama. “system, myth, and symbol.” see haggarty, william blake in context. regier, alexander. exorbitant enlightenment: blake, hamann, and anglo-german constellations. oxford: oxford university press, 2018. <blake (2019)> reviews jasper, david. review 19 (15 july 2019): 9 pars. “it deserves to be read and taken with the utmost seriousness not only by scholars of blake, hamann, fuseli, and lavater, but also by anyone interested in the shift from enlightenment to romantic thought in literature, philosophy, theology, and culture in eighteenth century england” (par. 9). lewis, jayne. “recent studies in the restoration and eighteenth century.” studies in english literature, 1500–1900 59.3 (summer 2019): 667-706. “while this wondrous book gauges long unrecognized eighteenth-century transactions between british and german writers, its intellectual and imaginative scope is indeed ‘exorbitant’—​a word that regier takes literally as he explores poetic and philosophical dialogues that ventured outside conventional discursive orbits to reveal radically new linguistic and imaginative ‘constellations’” (677). regier, alexander. “moravianism.” see haggarty, william blake in context. riccardi, silvia. rev. of the reception of william blake in europe, ed. sibylle erle and morton d. paley. see blake 53.3. rix, robert w. “‘the little black boy’: william blake, carl bernhard wadström, and swedenborg’s africa.” the moment is now: carl bernhard wadström’s revolutionary voice on human trafficking and the abolition of the african slave trade. ed. anders hallengren. west chester, pa: swedenborg foundation, 2019. 129-45. rix, robert w. “the reception of blake in denmark and norway.” see erle and paley, the reception of william blake in europe. rodríguez, francisco. “job, blake, chagall: lenguaje de piedra, lenguaje de ladrillo.” revista de occidente 442 (2018): 33-43. in spanish. on suffering. rosso, g. a. “milton.” see haggarty, william blake in context. rosso, g. a. the religion of empire: political theology in blake’s prophetic symbolism. columbus: ohio state university press, 2016. <blake (2017)> reviews erle, sibylle. rev. of g. a. rosso, the religion of empire: political theology in blake’s prophetic symbolism, and william blake’s gothic imagination: bodies of horror, ed. chris bundock and elizabeth effinger. bars review 52 (2018): 10 pars. “this beautifully written, very confident and accessible book gives substance to the fact that blake grew up reading the bible” (par. 4). yoder, r. paul. see blake 52.4. rovira, james. rev. of kathryn s. freeman, a guide to the cosmology of william blake. see blake 53.3. rovira, james, ed. rock and romanticism: blake, wordsworth, and rock from dylan to u2. lanham: lexington books, 2018. <blake (2019)> reviews hamelman, steve. rock music studies 6.2 (2019): 153-56. nesvet, rebecca. review 19 (21 jan. 2019): 16 pars. rowlinson, matthew. “money.” see haggarty, william blake in context. s sainz rofes, tomás. “blake is blake.” visual: magazine de diseño, creatividad gráfica y comunicación 187 (2017): 30-37. reproduces 9 plates from the yale center for british art’s copy of jerusalem. in spanish. sandefur, timothy. the ascent of jacob bronowski: the life and ideas of a popular science icon. amherst, ny: prometheus, 2019. isbn: 9781633885264. santos, andrio j. r. dos. “‘amante de selvagem rebelião’: a figuração satânica nas profecias continentais de william blake (‘lover of a wild rebellion’: the satanic figuration in william blake’s continental prophecies).” fronteiraz 19 (dec. 2017): 272-90. in portuguese (abstract in portuguese and english). saral, ramazan. rev. of william blake, vahiy kitapları [prophetic works], trans. kaan h. ökten. see blake 53.1. sato, hikari. “chokkan towa nandarouka: william blake kara yanagi muneyoshi e [what is immediate perception?: from william blake to yanagi muneyoshi].” mingei [folkcraft] 793 (2018): 11-15. in japanese. 1 plate. sato, hikari. “jugaku bunsho to william blake kenkyu: nichijo seikatsu no shisoka (jugaku bunsho and his blake studies: a philosopher of everyday life).” choiki bunka kagaku kiyo (interdisciplinary cultural studies) 24 (2019): 5-37. in japanese. 1 plate. schierenbeck, daniel. rev. of william blake in context, ed. sarah haggarty. see haggarty, william blake in context. schmid, susanne. “the reception of blake in germany and austria in the nineteenth century.” see erle and paley, the reception of william blake in europe. schoina, maria. “‘like prometheus on the rock’: william blake in greece.” see erle and paley, the reception of william blake in europe. schöpflin, karin. “die person des propheten: william blake, the marriage of heaven and hell (circa 1790–94)” in “prophet, gottesthron, steinernes menschenherz, totenfeld und quelle des lebens—​aspekte der rezeption des ezechielbuches.” das buch ezechiel: komposition, redaktion und rezeption. ed. jan christian gertz, corinna körting, and markus witte. berlin: de gruyter, 2020. 299-303. in german. schouten de jel, joshua. “fathers, sons, and monsters: rousseau, blake, and mary shelley.” palgrave communications 5.78 (2019): 1-9. schuster, clayton. “william blake v. robert hartley cromek.” bad blood: rivalry and art history. atglen, pa: schiffer publishing, 2019. isbn: 9780764357305. 125-30. a popular retelling of their controversy, based largely on the scholarship of g. e. bentley, jr., and dennis read. there are also chapters on the rivalries between john singleton copley and benjamin west and between john constable and j. m. w. turner. scott, grant f. rev. of romanticism and illustration, ed. ian haywood, susan matthews, and mary l. shannon. see haywood, matthews, and shannon. serdechnaia, vera, and evgenii serdechnyi. “the reception of blake in russia and the ussr.” see erle and paley, the reception of william blake in europe. serdechnyi, evgenii. see serdechnaia, vera, and evgenii serdechnyi. shannon, mary l. see haywood, ian, susan matthews, and mary l. shannon. shiff, abraham samuel. william blake’s hebrew in “milton” and ololon. wilton, me: liongrass editions, 2019. isbn: 9781733709002. an illuminating deciphering of the hebrew on plates 15 and 32★ of milton that argues that blake used hebrew to make complex puns. simmons, clare a. “blake’s ‘holy thursday’ and ‘the martyrdom of st. paul’s.’” see blake 53.3. simon, ed. “political theology and the alternate enlightenment: from the war of the three kingdoms to the american revolution.” beyond 1776: globalizing the cultures of the american revolution. ed. maria o’malley and denys van renen. charlottesville: university of virginia press, 2018. isbn: 9780813941752. 105-21. simon, ed. “william blake, radical abolitionist.” jstor daily (5 june 2019): 19 pars. soubigou, gilles, and yann tholoniat. “the reception of blake in france: literature and the visual arts.” see erle and paley, the reception of william blake in europe. spila, cristiano. “escatologia della luce: il girasole in blake e montale.” otto/​novecento: rivista quadrimestrale di critica letteraria 31.3 (2007): 115-25. in italian. on how montale and blake use the sunflower as symbol. steil, juliana. “autenticidade e intermidialidade nos livros iluminados de william blake: um impasse para a tradução (authenticity and intermediality in william blake’s illuminated books: a translatorial impasse).” cadernos de tradução 39.2 (2019): 32-47. in portuguese (abstract in portuguese and english). steil, juliana. “william blake e as vozes proféticas da tradição dissidente (william blake and the prophetic voices of dissident tradition).” revista da anpoll 1.47 (sept.-dec. 2018): 37-45. in portuguese (abstract in portuguese and english). suzuki, masashi. “‘kigen’ no fuzai: blake no kodai briton-jin wo yomu (the absence of ‘origin’: a reading of blake’s the ancient britons).” tohoku roman-shugi kenkyu (tohoku romantic studies) 5 (2018): 35-50. in japanese. t tannenbaum, leslie. biblical tradition in blake’s early prophecies: the great code of art. princeton: princeton university press, 1982. <bbs p. 657> b. 2017. princeton legacy library. tarr, clayton carlyle. “the loss of maidenhead: rape and the revolutionary novel.” eighteenth-century fiction 31.3 (spring 2019): 549-74. interesting reading of rape in novels by mary wollstonecraft, mary hays, and charles brockden brown, but no evidence is presented that they “followed blake’s example” (550) in visions of the daughters of albion. tate etc. issue 47 (autumn 2019): 71-112. “william blake and mark leckey at tate britain: william blake and beyond.” a special section organized by artist mark leckey, whose exhibit at tate britain ran concurrently with the blake exhibition. moore, alan. “welcome to the lambeth angel whisperer.” 76-85. reprints moore’s afterword to the william blake catalogue. “chronology of william blake.” 86-87. antrobus, raymond. “poets and prophets.” 88-91. antrobus reflects on blake and bob marley: “both blake and marley, poets and prophets, meeting somewhere inside me, their songs of innocence and experience, their emancipation from ‘mental slavery’” (91). leckey, mark, and paul farley. “under the bridge.” 92-99. a conversation between leckey and farley, a poet, about blake and their work. fox, charlie. “a codex of bewitched goodies.” 100-03. a parody of a sales catalogue showing how consumer products are “close to witchcraft or narcotics” (100). with illustrations by robert beatty. lafarge, daisy. “a company of fools.” 104-07. considers artist cecil collins’s fools, which “strike much closer to blake’s dialectical use of characters and symbols” (107). mellor, dawn. “cut-foot-pupil-uprisings.” 108-09. a reflection on chila kumari burman’s “cut-foot-pupil-uprisings,” “made in direct response to the uprisings across england in the summer of 1981” (108). perretta, imran. “nurull islam.” 110-11. praise for the work of nurull islam and the mile end community project. tavares, enéias farias. “blake e a discussão ‘ut pictura poesis’ no seu laocoonte: lendo a imagem e observando o texto (blake and [the] ‘ut pictura poesis’ discussion in his laocoonte: reading image and observing text).” todas as musas 2.1 (july-dec. 2010): 236-58. in portuguese (abstract in portuguese and english). includes blake’s laocoön with a portuguese translation of the texts (258). terziev, lubomir. see kostova, ludmilla, and lubomir terziev. tholoniat, yann. see soubigou, gilles, and yann tholoniat. thomas, sarah. “unmasking ‘simple truth.’” witnessing slavery: art and travel in the age of abolition. new haven: yale university press, 2019. isbn: 9781913107055. 99-123. a very engaging analysis of both stedman’s text and blake’s engravings within the context of the late eighteenth-century abolition movement and visual culture in a wider book on visual representations of slavery. thomas, sophie. “‘with a master’s hand and prophet’s fire’: blake, gray, and the bard.” see haywood, matthews, and shannon. thomas, sophie. “word and image.” see duff, the oxford handbook of british romanticism. tiutvinova, tatiana. “the reception of blake’s art in russia: an echo of blake’s universe.” see erle and paley, the reception of william blake in europe. topor, ruxanda. “mad prophets in a mad world: william blake’s apocalyptic vision and the revival of british millenarianism.” the sense and sensibility of madness: disrupting normalcy in literature and the arts. ed. anna klambauer and doreen bauschke. leiden: brill, 2019. 64-86. examines blake’s place in a late eighteenth-century resurgence of millenarianism. townsend, chris. “visionary immaterialism: berkeleian empiricism in blake’s poetry.” studies in romanticism 58.3 (fall 2019): 357-82. tsai, li-hui. “enlightenment mythology and the politics of romanticism: blake’s archetypal myth revisited.” huntington library quarterly 81.1 (spring 2018): 161-69. v vergnon, dominique. “quand blake unit les anges aux démons.” see myrone and concannon. viscomi, joseph. “posthumous blake: the roles of catherine blake, c. h. tatham, and frederick tatham in blake’s afterlife.” see blake 53.2. w wat, pierre. “le jour où … william blake a peint ‘l’esprit d’une puce.’” l’oeil: revue d’art mensuelle 726 (sept. 2019): 130. in french. watson, alex, and laurence williams, eds. british romanticism in asia: the reception, translation, and transformation of romantic literature in india and east asia. singapore: palgave macmillan-springer, 2019. isbn: 9789811330001. atkinson, rosalind. “a japanese blake: embodied visions in william blake’s the marriage of heaven and hell (1790) and tezuka osamu’s phoenix (1967–88).” 341-60. otto, peter. “‘rouse up o young men of the new age!’: ōe kenzaburō and william blake on bodies, biopolitics, and the imagination.” 361-83. clark, steve. “asian romanticism: construction of the comparable.” 387-94. watson, gregory. see bellarsi, franca, with the research assistance of gregory watson. watt, james. british orientalisms, 1759–1835. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2019. slight references to blake, hayley, and darwin. werntz, myles. rev. of curtis w. freeman, undomesticated dissent: democracy and the public virtue of religious nonconformity. see curtis w. freeman. white, elizabeth porterfield. “the progress of pilgrimage: site, route, and spirit in nineteenth-century britain.” phd diss., harvard university, 2019. table of contents unavailable, but the abstract reads: “the project’s final chapter explores the tensions between the secular and the religious, the life-long and the episodic, through william blake, whose revival in the 1860s demonstrated the ascendance of secular pilgrimage within the british nation.” white, simon. “the blakean imagination and the land in jez butterworth’s jerusalem.” journal of contemporary drama in english 7.2 (nov. 2019): 259-80. “the shadow of william blake hangs heavily over the play” (abstract). § whitney, julian. “the mistrials of reading: reimagining law in british literature, 1787–1819.” phd diss., emory university, 2018. “i provide readings of william blake, william godwin, quobna ottobah cugoano, mary wollstonecraft, and percy shelley, as they challenge the systems of marriage law, masculinist authority, the death penalty, and the transatlantic slave trade” (abstract). whittaker, jason. “blake and music.” see erle and paley, the reception of william blake in europe. whittaker, jason. “blake and music, 2018.” see blake 53.1. whittaker, jason. “‘jerusalem’ set to music: a selected discography.” see blake 52.4. whittaker, jason. “late reception.” see haggarty, william blake in context. whittaker, jason. “the prophet of lanark: alasdair gray and william blake.” see zoamorphosis in part v. whittaker, jason. rev. of linda freedman, william blake and the myth of america: from the abolitionists to the counterculture. see zoamorphosis in part v. whittaker, jason. rev. of louisa albani, william blake’s mystic map of london. see zoamorphosis in part v. whittaker, jason. rev. of naomi billingsley, the visionary art of william blake: christianity, romanticism and the pictorial imagination. see zoamorphosis in part v. whittaker, jason. rev. of william blake, tate britain. see zoamorphosis in part v. williams, nicholas m. “empiricism.” see haggarty, william blake in context. wolff, tristram. “being several: reading blake with ed roberson.” new literary history 49.4 (autumn 2018): 553-78. uses “the tyger” “to think about forms of rhythmic and rhetorical self-difference in the poetry of william blake” (abstract). worrall, david. “illuminated books.” see haggarty, william blake in context. wright, julia m. “nationalism and imperialism.” see haggarty, william blake in context. wu, ya-feng. “blake’s critique of erasmus darwin’s botanic garden.” wordsworth circle 50.1 (winter 2019): 55-73. y yılmaz, t. “the preincarnated romantic: the concept of redeemer poet in the works of william blake and nef ’î.” journal of narrative and language studies 7.13 (2019): 171-81. yoder, r. paul. rev. of g. a. rosso, the religion of empire: political theology in blake’s prophetic symbolism. see blake 52.4. z zuber, devin p. “planetary pictures.” a language of things: emanuel swedenborg and the american environmental imagination. charlottesville: university of virginia press, 2019. 23-55. touches on blake in a wider introduction to swedenborg. division ii: william blake’s circle barry, james (1741–1806) history painter ibata, hélène. “the sublime contained: academic compromises.” the challenge of the sublime: from burke’s “philosophical enquiry” to british romantic art. manchester: manchester university press, 2018. isbn: 9781526117397. 109-43. the chapter discusses barry, west, and fuseli. pollitt, ben. “sympathy, magnetism, and immoderate laughter: the feather in cook’s last voyage.” art bulletin 101.4 (2019): 70-94. discussion of barry’s the thames, or the triumph of navigation panel in his progress of human knowledge and culture (1777–1801). böhme, jakob (1575–1624) mystic cross, stephen. “jacob boehme: a christian mystic with a buddhist insight?” middle way 93.3 (2018): 191-201. “from a public lecture given at the buddhist society, july 2018.” bowyer, robert (1758–1834) print impresario peltz, lucy. facing the text: extra-illustration, print culture, and society in britain, 1769–1840. san marino, ca: huntington library, 2017. 1-4. takes bowyer’s extra-illustrated bible as its point of departure. passing references to macklin, boydell, blake, and lavater throughout. review pelling, madeleine l. abo: interactive journal for women in the arts, 1640–1830 8.2 (fall 2018): 10 pars. cosway, maria (1760–1838) painter, acquaintance of blake boucher, diane. “maria cosway (1760–1838): a commentator on modern life.” british art journal 18.3 (winter 2017–18): 78-86. largely a biographical sketch. calè, luisa. “maria cosway’s hours: cosmopolitan and classical visual culture in thomas macklin’s poets gallery.” see haywood, matthews, and shannon in division i, part vi. cromek, robert hartley (1770–1812) entrepreneur, engraver, friend-enemy of blake shannon, mary l. “artists’ street: thomas stothard, r. h. cromek, and literary illustration on london’s newman street.” see haywood, matthews, and shannon in division i, part vi. darwin, erasmus (1731–1802) scientist and poet bailes, melissa. “transformations of gender and race in maria riddell’s transatlantic biopolitics.” eighteenth-century fiction 32.1 (fall 2019): 123-44. reads maria riddell’s voyages to the madeira, and leeward caribbean isles (1792) in relation to darwin and other naturalists. cheshire, paul. “classical elements: darwin, gilbert, blake, and coleridge.” see cheshire in division i, part vi. § corti, claudia. “orti apocalittici. erasmus darwin e william blake tra poesia, arte e scienze naturali.” see corti in division i, part vi. couch, daniel diez. “poe, sympathetic ink, and chemical landscapes in nineteenth-century america.” arizona quarterly: a journal of american literature, culture, and theory 75.3 (fall 2019): 1-26. includes discussion of darwin’s depiction of sympathetic ink in the economy of vegetation (6-7). komisaruk, adam. “love among the ruins.” see komisaruk in division i, part vi. morillo, john. “the other darwin: posthumanism’s dignified pantomime, eleusinian mysteries of evolution, and the descent of man in erasmus darwin’s temple of nature.” the rise of animals and descent of man, 1660–1800: toward posthumanism in british literature between descartes and darwin. newark: university of delaware press, 2018. 155-91. priestman, martin. “‘fuseli’s poetic eye’: prints and impressions in fuseli and erasmus darwin.” see haywood, matthews, and shannon in division i, part vi. watt, james. british orientalisms, 1759–1835. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2019. see watt in division i, part vi. wu, ya-feng. “blake’s critique of erasmus darwin’s botanic garden.” see wu in division i, part vi. flaxman, john (1755–1826) sculptor, friend of blake evans, mark. “whigs and primitives: dante and botticelli in england from jonathan richardson to john flaxman.” botticelli past and present. ed. ana debenedetti and caroline elam. london: ucl press, 2019. 94-115. largest focus on flaxman, but with references also to blake, romney, and hayley. hodgkinson, thomas. “john flaxman is the missing link between superhero movies and homer.” rev. of storylines: illustrations to homer’s iliad and odyssey by john flaxman ra, exhibition at the royal academy from 10 aug. 2019 to 5 jan. 2020. spectator (9 nov. 2019): 9 pars. liu, deming. “aspects of the history of sculpture copyright in england.” british art journal 17.2 (autumn 2016): 58-67. an examination of the sculpture copyright acts of 1798 and 1814, with flaxman as a major example. prodger, michael. “gods and monsters: how john flaxman’s drawings made antiquity modern.” rev. of storylines: illustrations to homer’s iliad and odyssey by john flaxman ra, exhibition at the royal academy from 10 aug. 2019 to 5 jan. 2020. new statesman (14 aug. 2019): 9 pars. sienkewicz, julia a. “john flaxman (1755–1826) redux: copying, homage, and allusion in the sketches of benjamin henry latrobe (1764–1820).” british art journal 19.3 (winter 2018–19): 106-13. fuseli, henry [johann heinrich füssli] (1741–1825) painter, friend of blake busch, werner, and petra maisak, eds. füsslis nachtmahr. traum und wahnsinn. petersberg: michael imhof verlag, 2017. isbn: 9783731904458. in german. the catalogue for the exhibition held at the freies deutsches hochstift, goethe museum, frankfurt, from 19 mar. to 18 june 2017, and at the wilhelm busch-deutsches museum für karikatur und zeichenkunst, hanover, from 22 july to 15 oct. 2017. considers the creation and reception of fuseli’s nightmare. ibata, hélène. “the sublime contained: academic compromises.” see ibata under barry. matsushita, tetsuya. henry fuseli no gaho: monogatari to character hyogen no kakushin [the painting method of henry fuseli: a revolution in expression of stories and characters]. tokyo: sangensha, 2018. see matsushita, henry fuseli no gaho, in division i, part vi. matthews, susan. “henry fuseli’s accommodations: ‘attempting the domestic’ in the illustrations to cowper.” see haywood, matthews, and shannon in division i, part vi. parrino, maria. “gothic and earlier painting: nightmares and premature burials in fuseli and wiertz.” the edinburgh companion to gothic and the arts. ed. david punter. edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2019. 107-21. priestman, martin. “‘fuseli’s poetic eye’: prints and impressions in fuseli and erasmus darwin.” see haywood, matthews, and shannon in division i, part vi. pullins, david. “henry fuseli.” burlington magazine 160.1380 (mar. 2018): 243-44. a review of the exhibition shockingly mad: henry fuseli and the art of drawing, held at the art institute of chicago from 16 nov. 2017 to 1 apr. 2018. while there is no catalogue, the institute’s website has many photographs of the exhibition. the review mentions blake’s reference to fuseli in his annotations to reynolds. reifert, eva, ed., with claudia blank. fuseli: drama and theatre. munich: prestel, 2018. isbn: 9783791357584. an english translation of the german catalogue for the exhibition füssli: drama und theater at the kunstmuseum basel, which ran from 20 oct. 2018 to 17 feb. 2019 and was curated by eva reifert. hayley, william (1745–1820) man of letters and patron gee, lisa. “hayleyworld: a zoeography of william hayley (1745–1820).” phd diss., bath spa university, 2018. spencer, mark g., ed. “hume, the idol of historic taste.” hume’s reception in early america: expanded edition. london: bloomsbury academic, 2017. isbn: 9781474269018. 587-90. reprints “character of rapin, hume, and littleton’s histories,” an extract from hayley’s an essay on history published in the boston magazine in 1784. watt, james. british orientalisms, 1759–1835. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2019. see watt in division i, part vi. johnes, thomas (1748–1816) patron of hafod, wales edition johnes, thomas, trans. a mission to the medieval middle east: the travels of bertrandon de la brocquière to jerusalem and constantinople. intro. morris rossabi. london: i. b. tauris, 2019. isbn: 9781780764320. johnes’s translation of the work by bertrandon de la brocquière (c. 1400–59). linnell, john (1792–1882) artist, blake’s friend and patron pezzini, barbara. “the ‘art’ and the ‘market’ elements of the art market: john linnell, william agnew and artist-dealer relationships in nineteenth-century britain.” journal for art market studies 2.4 (2018): 1-18. macklin, thomas (1752/53–1800) print connoisseur, publisher, employer of blake calè, luisa. “maria cosway’s hours: cosmopolitan and classical visual culture in thomas macklin’s poets gallery.” see haywood, matthews, and shannon in division i, part vi. haywood, ian. “illustration, terror, and female agency: thomas macklin’s poets gallery in a revolutionary decade.” see haywood, matthews, and shannon in division i, part vi. montgomery, james (1771–1854) moravian poet, blake knew at least his works ford, thomas h. “echohistoricism: aristotle, dryden, montgomery, conrad.” romanticism 24.3 (2018): 278-93. how these writers figure a classical scene in different contexts. morganwg, iolo [edward williams] (1747–1826) welsh poet, lexicographer grande, james. “london songs, glamorgan hymns: iolo morganwg and the music of dissent.” studies in romanticism 58.4 (winter 2019): 481-503. reynolds, joshua (1723–92) painter esposito, donato. “artist in residence: joshua reynolds at no 47, leicester fields.” the georgian london town house: building, collecting and display. ed. susanna avery-quash and kate retford. new york: bloomsbury publishing, 2019. isbn: 9781501337291. 191-210. folesani, giovanna perini. “sir joshua reynolds in rome, 1750–1752: the debut of an artist, an art collector or an art dealer?” the art market in rome in the eighteenth century: a study in the social history of art. ed. paolo coen. leiden: brill, 2019. isbn: 9789004336995. 131-45. “i still do not believe that he was engaged in a systematic activity of trade and possibly forgery of graphic works, although this was more financially viable, but also somehow trickier than the trade in paintings. i rather believe that on occasions he may have earned some money this way as well” (144). hunter, matthew c. painting with fire: sir joshua reynolds, photography, and the temporally evolving chemical object. chicago: university of chicago press, 2019. isbn: 9780226390253. ibata, hélène. “reynolds, the great style and the burkean sublime.” the challenge of the sublime: from burke’s “philosophical enquiry” to british romantic art. manchester: manchester university press, 2018. isbn: 9781526117397. 85-108. robinson, henry crabb (1775–1867) writer robinson, henry crabb. “reminiscences” <bb #2535> and “william blake, künstler, dichter und religiöser schwärmer” <bb #2538>. see myrone, lives, in division i, part vi. royal academy of arts watson, sheila. “the british museum and the royal academy: the nation state, english and british identities, and the constitution in the eighteenth century.” museum and society 17.1 (2019): 66-82. “during the mid-eighteenth century two museum institutions the british museum and the royal academy of arts were established, the former by parliament, the latter by artists under the patronage of the crown. in their origins and their early development they illustrate and help shape ideas relating to the growth of the notion of britishness and english national identity. they were the theatres in which ideas about the kind of political nation britain imagined itself to be were played out between loyalists (supporters of a reformed monarchy) and whigs (mistrustful of the crown and jealous of the hard won rights of parliament)” (abstract). smith, john thomas (1766–1833) friend and biographer of blake smith, j. t. “biographical sketch of blake.” <bb #2723> see myrone, lives, in division i, part vi. wein, toni. monstrous fellowship: “pagan, turk and jew” in english popular culture, 1780–1845. oxford: peter lang, 2018. shows that the phrase that blake applied to fuseli originated as early as 1548. takes the gordon riots as its point of historical departure for an examination of the treatment of irish catholics, muslims, and jews in literature (including the work of smith) and society. stedman, john gabriel (1744–97) soldier, writer, friend of blake cutter, martha j. “apotropaic images and pornotroping in stedman’s narrative of a five years’ expedition to surinam.” see cutter in division i, part vi. polcha, elizabeth. “voyeur in the torrid zone: john gabriel stedman’s narrative of a five years expedition against the revolted negroes of surinam, 1773–1838.” early american literature 54.3 (2019): 673-710. senior, emily. “skin, textuality and colonial feeling.” the caribbean and the medical imagination, 1764–1834: slavery, disease and colonial modernity. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2018. 89-121. discussion of stedman and joanna. passing reference to blake. thomas, sarah. “unmasking ‘simple truth.’” see thomas, sarah, in division i, part vi. van gelder, roelof. dichter in de jungle: john gabriel stedman (1744–1797). amsterdam: atlas contact, 2018. in dutch. a new biography of stedman. review van velzen, h. thoden. new west indian guide/​nieuwe west-indische gids 93.3-4 (dec. 2019): 301-02. in english. “roelof van gelder discusses all phases of stedman’s life: his youth and the first years of service in the scottish brigade of the dutch republic (1744–72); his four years in suriname (1773–77); the resumption of his military career in the republic (1777–82); and his final years in england (1784–97). the book is the work of a scholar who has a profound knowledge of eighteenth-century european history and is cognizant of the relevant literature on suriname” (301). stothard, thomas (1755–1834) painter, illustrator, blake’s friend/​enemy frazier wood, dustin m. “seeing history: illustration, poetic drama, and the national past.” see haywood, matthews, and shannon in division i, part vi. jung, sandro. “reading the romantic vignette: stothard illustrates bloomfield, byron and crabbe for the royal engagement pocket atlas.” see haywood, matthews, and shannon in division i, part vi. mccue, maureen. “intimate distance: thomas stothard’s and j. m. w. turner’s illustrations of samuel rogers’s italy.” see haywood, matthews, and shannon in division i, part vi. myrone, martin. “coda: romantic illustration and privatization of history painting.” see haywood, matthews, and shannon in division i, part vi. shannon, mary l. “artists’ street: thomas stothard, r. h. cromek, and literary illustration on london’s newman street.” see haywood, matthews, and shannon in division i, part vi. swedenborg, emanuel (1688–1772) mystic cheshire, paul. “classical elements: darwin, gilbert, blake, and coleridge.” see cheshire in division i, part vi. dunn, allen. “the spirits of satire: kant and blake read emanuel swedenborg.” see dunn in division i, part vi. esterson, rebecca. “what do the angels say? alterity and the ascents of emanuel swedenborg and the baal shem tov.” open theology 4.1 (2018): 414-21. “two men, a swedish lutheran natural philosopher and a charismatic polish rabbi, give their accounts of ascents to the heavens, both in the 1740s” (abstract). lawrence, james f. “correspondentia: a neologism by aquinas attains its zenith in swedenborg.” correspondences 5 (2017): 41-63. traces how thomas aquinas’s coinage “correspondentia” “performs a crucial role in shaping correspondence theory in early modern hermetic thought” leading to swedenborg (abstract). mahlamäki, tiina. “a relation of swedenborgianism and anthroposophy: the case of the finnish author kersti bergroth and her novel the living and the dead.” approaching religion 8.1 (apr. 2018): 69-78. zuber, devin p. a language of things: emanuel swedenborg and the american environmental imagination. charlottesville: university of virginia press, 2019. isbn: 9780813943503. tatham, charles heathcote (1772–1842) architect, blake patron casola, tiziano. “etchings of ancient ornamental architecture (1800) e designs for cottages (1805): l’esperienza romana nelle pubblicazioni ottocentesche di charles heathcote tatham e joseph michael gandy.” mccc 1800 7 (2018): 25-36. in italian (abstract in english). discusses the differences in the two artists’ representations of their italian experiences. moser, stephanie. “reconstructing ancient worlds: reception studies, archaeological representation and the interpretation of ancient egypt.” journal of archaeological method and theory 22.4 (dec. 2015): 1263-1308. also includes the work of thomas hope. viscomi, joseph. “posthumous blake: the roles of catherine blake, c. h. tatham, and frederick tatham in blake’s afterlife.” see blake 53.2 in division i, part vi. tatham, frederick (1805–78) follower of blake viscomi, joseph. “posthumous blake: the roles of catherine blake, c. h. tatham, and frederick tatham in blake’s afterlife.” see blake 53.2 in division i, part vi. taylor, thomas (1758–1835) platonist, blake’s acquaintance raine, kathleen, and george mills, eds. thomas taylor, the platonist: selected writings. princeton: princeton university press, 1969. b. 2019. princeton legacy library. a reprint of the valuable edition. trusler, john (1735–1820) clergyman, friend of george cumberland § thomson, ellen mazur. “the graphics of carving.” visual communication (9 dec. 2019). in a wider article on graphic representations of meat carving, some discussion of trusler’s views on the topic. wadström, carl bernhard (1746–99) swedenborgian, abolitionist hallengren, anders, ed. the moment is now: carl bernhard wadström’s revolutionary voice on human trafficking and the abolition of the african slave trade. west chester, pa: swedenborg foundation, 2019. 24 cm., 284 pp. isbn: 9780877853176. proceedings of the international carl bernhard wadström conference on human rights and the abolition of slavery, london, june 2015. wainewright, thomas griffiths (1794–1847) dilettante, forger, patron of blake williams, john price. the fatal cup: thomas griffiths wainewright and the strange deaths of his relations. barnet: markosia enterprises, 2018. isbn: 9781911243694. claims to have uncovered new evidence to bring into question wainewright’s guilt. west, benjamin (1738–1820) painter, president of royal academy ibata, hélène. “the sublime contained: academic compromises.” see ibata under barry. wilkinson, james john garth (1812–99) swedenborgian, doctor, blake editor peet, malcolm. medicine, mysticism and mythology: garth wilkinson, swedenborg and nineteenth-century esoteric culture. foreword by robert rix. london: swedenborg society, 2018. isbn: 9780854482054. discusses the rise of swedenborg and wilkinson’s role in publishing blake’s poetry. wollstonecraft, mary (1759–97) author, radical, known in blake’s circle ayres, brenda. betwixt and between: the biographies of mary wollstonecraft. london: anthem press, 2017. rather than an anthology of different lives, an “analysis of the diverse biographical representations of wollstonecraft” (4). bergès, sandrine, and alan coffee, eds. the social and political philosophy of mary wollstonecraft. oxford: oxford university press, 2016. bergès, sandrine, and alan coffee. “introduction.” 1-13. tomaselli, sylvana. “reflections on inequality, respect, and love in the political writings of mary wollstonecraft.” 14-33. kendrick, nancy. “wollstonecraft on marriage as virtue friendship.” 34-49. reuter, martina. “the role of the passions in mary wollstonecraft’s notion of virtue.” 50-66. mackenzie, catriona. “mary wollstonecraft: an early relational autonomy theorist?” 67-91. botting, eileen hunt. “mary wollstonecraft, children’s human rights, and animal ethics.” 92-116. brace, laura. “wollstonecraft and the properties of (anti-) slavery.” 117-34. pettit, philip. “republican elements in the thought of mary wollstonecraft.” 135-47. james, susan. “mary wollstonecraft’s conception of rights.” 148-65. halldenius, lena. “representation in mary wollstonecraft’s political philosophy.” 166-82. coffee, alan. “mary wollstonecraft, public reason, and the virtuous republic.” 183-200. bergès, sandrine. “wet-nursing and political participation: the republican approaches to motherhood of mary wollstonecraft and sophie de grouchy.” 201-17. taylor, barbara. “mary wollstonecraft and modern philosophy.” 218-25. borham-puyal, miriam. “jemima’s wrongs: reading the female body in mary wollstonecraft’s prostitute biography.” international journal of english studies 19.1 (2019): 97-112. brooks, ann. “‘uncompromising politics’: mary wollstonecraft and catherine macaulay.” women, politics and the public sphere. bristol: policy press, 2019. 23-48. compares wollstonecraft and macaulay in a wider context that stretches from the bluestockings to hillary clinton. civale, susan. “‘a man in love’: revealing the unseen mary wollstonecraft.” romantic women’s life writing: reputation and afterlife. manchester: manchester university press, 2019. 73-140. cronin, madeline ahmed. “mary wollstonecraft’s conception of ‘true taste” and its role in egalitarian education and citizenship.” european journal of political theory 18.4 (2019): 508-28. dumler-winckler, emily. “protestant political theology and pluralism: from a politics of refusal to tending and organizing for common goods.” religions 10.9 (2019). 18 pp. considers wollstonecraft within the context of religious dissent. horrocks, ingrid. “‘take, o world! thy much indebted tear!’: mary wollstonecraft travels.” women wanderers and the writing of mobility, 1784–1814. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2017. 140-68. hudson, linda s. “‘the power will be only for her daughter’s daughter’: religion, melancholia, and patriarchy.” phd diss., university of tulsa, 2019. includes a chapter on wollstonecraft. journal of gender studies volume 28, issue 7 (2019) “mary wollstonecraft, feminist pioneer: life, work and contemporary importance,” ed. kathleen lennon and rachel alsop. special issue on mary wollstonecraft that includes papers from the 2017 university of hull conference mary wollstonecraft: life, work and legacy. lennon, kathleen, and rachel alsop. “editorial.” 755-57. todd, janet. “the first life of mary wollstonecraft: godwin’s perplexing memoirs.” 759-65. browne, victoria. “the forgetting of mary wollstonecraft’s religiosity: teleological secularism within feminist historiography.” 766-76. maione, angela. “over the centuries: a history of wollstonecraft reception.” 777-88. o’donnell, katherine. “effeminate edmund burke and the masculine voice of mary wollstonecraft.” 789-801. niknam, arman teymouri. “mary wollstonecraft’s divergent attitudes towards trust.” 802-13. hague, ros. “autonomy as a disposition to non-domination in the work of mary wollstonecraft.” 814-25. hartman, matthew h. “an aristotelian paradox: wollstonecraft and the implications of marriage as friendship.” 826-36. pramaggiore, valentina. “deconstructing the boundaries: gender and genre in mary wollstonecraft’s letters written during a short residence in sweden, norway and denmark.” 837-45. alsop, rachel, and suzanne clisby. “a vindication of the rights of girls: surviving girlhood in the 21st century.” 846-55. lefebvre, alexandre. “the juridical subject as ethical subject: wollstonecraft on the rights of man.” human rights and the care of the self. durham: duke university press, 2018. 25-46. parker, deven m. “epistolary form in the age of the post office.” studies in english literature, 1500–1900 59.3 (summer 2019): 625-45. “examines the 1790s epistolary novels of radical women writers mary wollstonecraft and mary hays in light of the british post office’s rise to power under the pitt administration” (abstract). steiner, enit karafili. “mary wollstonecraft’s ‘love of mankind’ and cosmopolitan suffering in letters written during a short residence in sweden, norway and denmark.” studies in romanticism 58.1 (spring 2019): 3-26. tarr, clayton carlyle. “the loss of maidenhead: rape and the revolutionary novel.” see tarr in division i, part vi. weiss, deborah. the female philosopher and her afterlives: mary wollstonecraft, the british novel, and the transformations of feminism, 1796–1811. cham: palgrave macmillan-springer, 2017. <blake (2019)> review smith, orianne. wordsworth circle 49.4 (fall 2018): 237-39. review: joshua schouten de jel, william blake’s divine love: visions of oothoon joshua schouten de jel. william blake’s divine love: visions of oothoon. new york: routledge, 2024. 290 pp. $180.00/​£135.00, hardcover; $56.99/​£42.99, e-book. reviewed by ramazan saral ramazan saral works as a research assistant at ege university, türkiye. he recently completed his phd on blake and mythopoeia. apart from blake, his academic interests include romantic poetry, mythology, and creative writing. with its stunning frontispiece, shocking themes—​even for our time, let alone blake’s—​of sexuality, rape, and possession, and its erotic imagery and provocative advocacy of free love through one of blake’s most interesting heroines, visions of the daughters of albion is an outstanding and controversial poem. critics such as josephine mcquail, irene tayler, and kathryn freeman celebrate oothoon’s feminism as triumphant as she manages to refuse being branded a harlot by the patriarchal morality. others—​such as lucy cogan, v. a. de luca, brenda webster, michelle leigh gompf, and, most notably, helen bruder—​claim that her short-lived sexual freedom is a failure; they contend that despite her revelation, her inability to make her triumph over urizenic reasoning heard by the male characters of the poem makes her a tragic heroine whose initial achievement deteriorates into patriarchal standards. joshua schouten de jel’s book is an extensive study of visions that celebrates and defends oothoon’s transcendent acceptance of free love as visionary and argues further that even when her words fall on deaf ears, the significance of her visionary attitude is not diminished. in this very detailed and well-researched work, schouten de jel analyzes oothoon’s spiritual transformation as an expression of divine love through self-annihilation. against claims that reduce her sexual liberation to “merely an expansion of senses” (4, quoting gompf), he asserts that “by reclaiming her body, oothoon attains a prophetic power that undermines the patriarchal injunctions of her former existence” (5). his well-articulated argument is supported by extensive research of the literature not only on visions and blake, but also on the expression of divine love through different media. the introductory first chapter provides an outline of the book and delineates the scope of the research. the main argument here is a compelling one: “blakean salvation is an intellectual recovery of the whole man as a body of vision, which includes the restoration of man’s sexual being as a prolific emanative force” (16). accordingly, schouten de jel considers oothoon’s self-annihilation not as a defeat,he gives a detailed exegesis of the scholarly debate in his notes (27-28). but as a triumphant spiritual exaltation that places her “within a female-centred ecstatic tradition in european painting, sculpture, and literature” (6). he carefully draws parallels between blake’s designs and representations of this tradition. the consideration of oothoon’s self-annihilation is not only based on the verbal component of the poem; the pictorial component is thoroughly analyzed too. the second chapter, “‘the nakedness of women is the work of god,’” focuses mainly on discussions concerning nakedness in art. unlike those with more orthodox tendencies, blake believed nakedness to be a celebration of the human form divine. as schouten de jel asserts, “blake’s artwork was an expression of spiritual truth and the naked body could be manoeuvred as a semiotic vehicle for telling this truth” (42). he deftly engages with discussions of the erotic nature of the depictions of oothoon, and argues strongly against claims that “blake uses rhetoric to mask ‘aggressive or selfish … sexual fantasies’” (53, quoting webster). he maintains that by focusing not on the pornographic but on the transformative nature of the sexual act, blake highlights the significance of sensual gratification of desire for spiritual enlightenment. with a well-rounded argument and a very clear outline, the chapter concludes that “these scenes imbue the biological body with the potential for spiritual transformation and thus map the socio-somatic revolutionary flames of the marriage of heaven and hell (1790–​3) onto oothoon’s narrative of sexual liberation” (53). chapter 3, “the tityus tradition after michaelangelo,” contains the strongest and most original argument of the book. since blake believed michelangelo to be one of the masters of true art, along with raphael and albrecht dürer, michelangelo’s influence on blake’s art cannot be ignored. schouten de jel draws parallels between michelangelo’s tityus drawing and blake’s depiction of oothoon, especially on plate 6, claiming that “such a model transposed a ‘core artistic vocabulary’ which imbues oothoon’s self-annihilation in visions with eschatological signification” (95, quoting edina adam and julian brooks). he believes that the tityus drawing is a representation of “not the weakness but the fortitude of the spirit facing adversity” (104), since michelangelo drew not the gory moment of punishment but right before it, thus focusing on the wholeness of the body as tityus unwaveringly accepts his punishment. after delineating the significance of blake’s drawing, comparing it to other renditions of the myth both pictorially and in literature, he claims that “blake, by feminising tityus … as the rape victim oothoon, meaningfully reinvigorates the iconography of tityus (and christ) so that somatic suffering becomes not the punishment for sensuality but a spiritual redemption from those urges” (95). the discussion turns the perspective toward the moral and sociosomatic dimensions of rape by highlighting the social and political structures that tolerate it. chapter 4, “divine love: the transverberation,” places oothoon within the european female mystic tradition. concentrating especially on teresa of ávila’s idea of transverberation, schouten de jel claims that oothoon’s self-annihilation “draws upon the violence of divine love (such as the pleasurable pain of the transverberation), the social abandonment of those female mystics who give themselves to divine love, and the eroticised language of divine love as it was communicated through the song of songs” (174). the fourth section of the chapter focuses on the theatricality of oothoon’s experience, and is the most striking part. highlighting the performativity of the images and lines to direct the reader’s gaze to form a controlled narrative, schouten de jel contends that “theatricality becomes a mode of revelation … [employed to] explain to us … spiritual meaning by offering us ways of seeing, visioning, the poetic action” (189-90). the final chapter, “l’estasi di santa teresa,” introduces unique and really interesting ideas of spectatorship, voyeurism, and jouissance; however, most of these intriguing ideas are quickly glossed over, with the result that they fail to deliver the expected effect. schouten de jel here recapitulates most of the arguments of the other chapters and loses the promise of the questions posed. this also leads the book to end abruptly, without a conclusion that wraps up the argument as a whole. despite this shortcoming, the chapter still offers exceptional questions relevant to discussions of oothoon’s transformative revelation. overall, william blake’s divine love offers a potentially significant argument; however, it fails to fully realize that potential, perhaps because of too many questions that surpass the scope of the book. schouten de jel shows that he excels at his field, but his ambitious agenda sometimes hinders his otherwise excellent research. nevertheless, with its unique perspective on visions and clear arguments, the book is a significant addition to scholarship on sexual freedom and emancipation in terms of blake’s ideas of free love and sexuality and on blake’s attitude toward women. a list of morris eaves’s publications a list of morris eaves’s publications compiled by wayne c. ripley articles, chapters, and books “editing and editions.” william blake in context. ed. sarah haggarty. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2019. 94-101. “the editorial void: notes toward a study of oblivion.” huntington library quarterly 80.3 (autumn 2017): 517-38. special issue, “william blake’s manuscripts,” ed. mark crosby. with eric loy, hardeep sidhu, and laura whitebell. “prototyping an electronic edition of william blake’s manuscript of vala, or the four zoas: a progress report.” 19: interdisciplinary studies in the long nineteenth century 21 (2015): 28 pp. “afterword: the end? remember me!” re-envisioning blake. ed. mark crosby, troy patenaude, and angus whitehead. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, 2012. 225-31. “picture problems: x-editing images 1992–​2010.” digital humanities quarterly 3.3 (2009): 42 pars. with domna c. stanton, michael bérubé, leonard cassuto, john guillory, donald e. hall, and sean latham. “report of the mla task force on evaluating scholarship for tenure and promotion.” profession (2007): 9-71. “crafting editorial settlements.” ron: romanticism on the net 41-42 (feb.-may 2006): 33 pars. “multimedia body plans: a self-assessment.” electronic textual editing. ed. lou burnard, katherine o’brien o’keeffe, and john unsworth. new york: mla, 2006. 210-23. “national arts and disruptive technologies in blake’s prospectus of 1793.” blake, nation and empire. ed. steve clark and david worrall. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, 2006. 119-35. “introduction: to paradise the hard way.” the cambridge companion to william blake. ed. morris eaves. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2003. 1-16. “graphicality: multimedia fables for ‘textual’ critics.” reimagining textuality: textual studies in the late age of print. ed. elizabeth bergmann loizeaux and neil fraistat. madison: university of wisconsin press, 2002. 99-122. with robert n. essick and joseph viscomi. “the william blake archive: the medium when the millennium is the message.” romanticism and millenarianism. ed. tim fulford. new york: palgrave, 2002. 219-33. with robert n. essick, joseph viscomi, and matthew kirschenbaum. “standards, methods, and objectives in the william blake archive: a response.” wordsworth circle 30.3 (summer 1999): 135-44. “behind the scenes at the william blake archive: collaboration takes more than e-mail.” journal of electronic publishing 3.2 (dec. 1997). “on blakes we want and blakes we don’t.” huntington library quarterly 58.3-4 (1995): 413-39. the counter-arts conspiracy: art and industry in the age of blake. ithaca: cornell university press, 1992. “inquiry into the real and imaginary obstructions to the acquisition of the arts in england: the comedy of the english school of painting.” huntington library quarterly 52.1 (1989): 125-38. “blake as conceived: the endurance of s. foster damon.” blake/an illustrated quarterly 21.4 (spring 1988): 132-37. s. foster damon. a blake dictionary: the ideas and symbols of william blake. 1965. rev. ed., with a new foreword and annotated bibliography by morris eaves. hanover, nh: university press of new england, 1988. “blake’s illuminated books and criticism: a sometimes annotated documentary history of an old story.” blake and criticism: [proceedings of a conference at] santa cruz [ca]: may 20-21-22, 1982. 104-18. “bread, politics, and poetry: morris eaves interviews david and virginia erdman.” studies in romanticism 21.3 (fall 1982): 277-302. special issue, “romantic texts, romantic times: homage to david v. erdman, and inside the blake industry: past, present, and future,” ed. morris eaves. “introduction [to “inside the blake industry”]. studies in romanticism 21.3 (fall 1982): 389-90. special issue, “romantic texts, romantic times: homage to david v. erdman, and inside the blake industry: past, present, and future,” ed. morris eaves. william blake’s theory of art. princeton: princeton university press, 1982. “romantic expressive theory and blake’s idea of the audience.” pmla 95.5 (1980): 784-801. “teaching blake’s relief etching.” blake/an illustrated quarterly 13.3 (winter 1979–​80): 140-47. “blake and the artistic machine: an essay in decorum and technology.” pmla 92.5 (1977): 903-27. “reproducing the characters of spenser’s ‘faerie queene.’” blake/an illustrated quarterly 8.3 (winter 1974–​75): 86-87. “the title-page of the book of urizen.” william blake: essays in honour of sir geoffrey keynes. ed. morton d. paley and michael phillips. oxford: clarendon press, 1973. 225-30. “a reading of blake’s marriage of heaven and hell, plates 17-20: on and under the estate of the west.” blake studies 4.2 (spring 1972): 81-116. “decision and revision in james merrill’s (diblos) notebook.” contemporary literature 12.2 (1971): 156-65. “the real thing: a plan for producing shakespeare in the classroom.” college english 31.5 (1970): 463-72. print edition the early illuminated books. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. blake’s illuminated books, vol. 3. london: tate gallery publications for the william blake trust, 1993. digital editions the william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 1996–. edited collections the cambridge companion to william blake. ed. morris eaves. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2003. romanticism and contemporary criticism. ed. morris eaves and michael fischer. ithaca: cornell university press, 1986. “romantic texts, romantic times: homage to david v. erdman, and inside the blake industry: past, present, and future.” special issue, studies in romanticism 21.3 (fall 1982), ed. morris eaves. interviews mcgarvey, kathleen. “an ‘immortal hand.’” university of rochester. 13 apr. 2017. kraus, kari. “‘once only imagined’: an interview with morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi.” studies in romanticism 41.2 (summer 2002): 143-99. reviews susan eilenberg, strange power of speech: wordsworth, coleridge, and literary possession (oxford university press, 1992), and jack stillinger, multiple authorship and the myth of the solitary genius (oxford university press, 1991). studies in romanticism 33.3 (fall 1994): 503-10. marjorie levinson, keats’s life of allegory: the origins of a style (basil blackwell, 1988). studies in romanticism 29.3 (fall 1990): 491-95. john barrell, the political theory of painting from reynolds to hazlitt: “the body of the public” (yale university press, 1986). studies in romanticism 27.3 (fall 1988): 429-42. jean h. hagstrum, the romantic body: love and sexuality in keats, wordsworth, and blake (university of tennessee press, 1985). modern philology 86.1 (1988): 94-97. abby robinson, the dick and jane (dell, 1985). blake/an illustrated quarterly 21.1 (summer 1987): 37-41. martin butlin, the paintings and drawings of william blake (yale university press, 1981). studies in romanticism 25.1 (spring 1986): 147-54. leopold damrosch, jr., symbol and truth in blake’s myth (princeton university press, 1980). journal of english and germanic philology 81.3 (1982): 438-41. w. j. t. mitchell, blake’s composite art: a study of the illuminated poetry (princeton university press, 1978). wordsworth circle 10.3 (summer 1979): 275-78. john howard, blake’s “milton”: a study in the selfhood (fairleigh dickinson/​associated university presses, 1976). studies in romanticism 16.2 (spring 1977): 251-60. “what is the ‘history of publishing’?” publishing history 2 (1977): 57-77. a review of raymond lister, infernal methods: a study of william blake’s art techniques (g. bell & sons, 1975). on reflection: adrian mitchell on william blake [film] (london weekend television); catharine hughes, ed., the clouded hills: selections from william blake (sheed & ward, 1973). blake/an illustrated quarterly 8.4 (spring 1975): 139-40. “blake’s job.” eighteenth-century studies 7.2 (1973–​74): 226-33. a review of andrew wright, blake’s job: a commentary (clarendon press, 1972). janet warner, john sutherland, and robert wallace, prod. and dir., blake’s “america” and blake’s “visions of the daughters of albion” [videotapes] (1970, 1971). blake/an illustrated quarterly 7.1 (summer 1973): 20-23. benjamin demott, blake and manchild [tape recording] (1968). blake/an illustrated quarterly 6.1 (summer 1972): 25-26. allen ginsberg/​william blake: “songs of innocence and experience” by william blake, tuned by allen ginsberg, with peter orlovsky, variously accompanied [recording] (mgm “verve,” 1970). blake/an illustrated quarterly 4.3 (winter 1970–​71): 90-97. dissertation “blake’s artistic strategy.” phd diss., tulane university, 1972. review: william l. pressly, james barry’s murals at the royal society of arts william l. pressly. james barry’s murals at the royal society of arts: envisioning a new public art. togher: cork university press, 2014. xx + 396 pp. €49.00, hardcover. reviewed by alexander s. gourlay alexander s. gourlay (agourlay@risd.edu) teaches at the rhode island school of design. editors’ note: this book won the prestigious berger prize for british art history in december 2015. this book inspires grandiosity. i am moved to prophesy that james barry’s greatest exponent will always be william pressly. articulate, learned, and judicious, profoundly sympathetic with his subject, appreciative of barry’s genius and yet clear-eyed about his limitations, pressly has taken barry as seriously as the artist could have hoped, and persuasively argues that we should do so as well. with this huge, lavishly illustrated volume, pressly crowns a stack of books and essays on barry and his contemporaries,pressly’s books on barry are james barry, 1741–1806: history painter (with tom dunne, 2010), james barry: the artist as hero (1983), and the life and art of james barry (1981). most of pressly’s articles on barry are incorporated into his books. fully elucidating for the first time the spectacularly ambitious (and covertly seditious) program underlying barry’s masterpiece, the suite of monumental paintings he created to decorate (and consecrate) the great room in the adelphi, the building that houses the royal society for the encouragement of arts, manufactures, and commerce. this is a grand book in every way except price (a bargain at €49.00). it’s a hefty folio (nearly 14″ by 10″ by 1.5″), its 416 pages of heavy-coated stock weighing almost seven pounds. if the contents were any less engaging, its very magnitude would constitute a severe challenge to reading it. fortunately, most readers will be happy to wrestle with the book in order to follow pressly’s crisp, efficient prose and to consider the glorious color images: most of the barry murals are reproduced twice in their entirety, once in a single page and once in a two-page spread, and then supplemented with large detail images, including the art-book designer’s current favorite, huge bleed details at the start of every chapter. in addition to the primary images of paintings and engravings, many generously scaled supplemental images of all kinds are conveniently arranged for immediate consultation throughout the book, and relevant primary texts, such as barry’s extensive explanations and contemporary descriptions, are reproduced verbatim. aside from the challenges posed by sheer scale (and the regrettable expedient of massed endnotes), this handsome book appears to have been designed and laid out with the careful reader’s convenience as a priority. pressly opens with a brisk introduction to barry and to the adelphi, sketches the context of relevant architectural mural projects in england and elsewhere, and then plunges into exegesis. perhaps because this book is his swan song on british art, and because comprehensive discussion of these pictures was for various reasons deferred when he wrote his two major studies of barry in the 1980s, pressly evidently felt some urgency about explaining all of barry’s audacious allegory this time. there is little hemming or hawing anywhere in this long book, though the discussion of barry’s covert promotion of a version of roman catholicism is saved for the later chapters. the program of the adelphi series as a whole is multifaceted and evolved over decades, sprawling off the walls into ekphrastic manifestos, impolitic political digressions, apologiae, and large and small annotated (and serially revised) engravings related to the murals. at its most obvious level barry’s subject was both simple and inevitable, given the venue: representing the critical stages in the progress, good and bad, of civilization, focusing on the arts and sciences that the society was supposed to promote, and celebrating (and subtly criticizing) the part britain played and was playing in that progression. it is not clear how much of it all was grasped even by discerning observers like blake, but these ambitious paintings undoubtedly influenced the younger artist’s conception of what public art could be and how it might be practiced. pressly’s analysis of each picture builds upon an extended exegetical selection from barry’s writings, especially the 1783 account of a series of pictures, in the great room of the society of arts, manufactures, and commerce, at the adelphi (a copy of which blake owned). this core text is supplemented by other explanatory and descriptive writings by barry and others, together with an overview of the significant features of the engravings that he issued at various stages in the development of each subject. the first picture, orpheus, represents the most basic stage of civilization. rather than beginning with adam and eve as they made the best of the fallen world or a golden age derived from hesiod, barry chose a scene inspired by lucretius via thomson’s seasons, a world in which humans live independently, eating acorns, and have no more—and perhaps less—fellow feeling than the roving lions that prey on them. barry’s picture focuses on the role of orpheus in leading this brutish, selfish, primitive humanity to the beginnings of a simple, pious, family-based society. he represents the critical civilizing contribution of orpheus not as gently benign neoplatonic harmonization effected by musical prowess, but as an artistic work, an “enthusiastic” song communicating to his auditors the essence of barry’s true religion, recognition of sin and ritual expiation through sacrifice. the choice of the quasi-lucretian proto-civilization in combination with a modified representation of orpheus’s gift exemplifies the way barry asserts his cultural/ideological independence. a picture based on adam and eve, for instance, would carry with it an ineradicable theology that could at most be nudged in one direction or another. instead, barry appropriated, conflated, and adjusted less familiar classical material, then invited allegoresis in christian terms, a process that must have greatly interested blake, as would barry’s focus on social governance through the leadership of an inspired artist/prophet. although it represents the earliest stage of civilization, orpheus also foreshadows, in its emphasis on ceremony and a powerful spiritual leader, the very un-blakean (and un-lucretian) crypto-catholic allegorical program that pressly uncovers in the subsequent pictures. barry’s murals also suggest that prophetic wisdom should be shared in degrees with the public at large. in, for instance, crowning the victors at olympia, the picture celebrating the high achievements of the classical era, the pythagorean philosopher, later specified as philolaus, muses silently, thumb to mouth, though he holds a scroll revealing the solar system to be heliocentric. in the same painting barry inserted a portrait of himself as the artist timanthes, famous for representing the cyclops. timanthes sits in the shadow of a sculpture of hercules trampling the serpent of envy, displaying barry’s re-creation of the cyclops picture. elsewhere barry had portrayed himself as a companion being hushed by odysseus as they escape from polyphemus’s cave, representing the relationship between him and his more discreet mentor, edmund burke. this somewhat paradoxical situation, in which the artist/prophet addresses the audience on two levels, one public and one private, applies as well to barry’s practice in these pictures, in that he was creating public art to communicate ideas whose most important components could not be expressed forthrightly. this too, as pressly points out, must have greatly interested blake, whose own exhibition featuring public art was promoted by materials that bore the envoy “fit audience find tho’ few,” and who told his baffled patron trusler, “that which can be made explicit to the idiot is not worth my care.” pressly argues that barry’s classicism is not a mere smokescreen for a catholic program, but part of the message, in that barry saw the hierarchy of roman catholicism as the ideal universal government because it adds christian revelation to the greek/roman civilizational foundation. in the first picture orpheus, for instance, represents both john the baptist and jesus, and arguably the pope, while the sacred rituals of the olympic games and the assessment and rewarding of the athletes in the third mural provide an allegorical model for the relationship between the state, the church, and the arts in a reformed christian culture (pressly suggests, for instance, that barry’s three olympic judges represent the trinity). obviously, blake and barry would have differed on the virtues of theocracy and papal patronage, but they might have seen eye to eye on the potential glory of a cultural structure in which rewards were allotted by christian wisdom rather than the whims of the gods of commerce. and barry was hardly an advocate for the status quo. for instance, his triumph of the thames, which at first glance celebrates the nautical/commercial accomplishments of the nation, also criticizes the slave trade and, less overtly, the commercial/sexual exploitation of women, both of which are major issues in such subversive blake works as visions of the daughters of albion. pressly devotes most of a late chapter to blake’s artistic relationship with barry (there was only limited personal contact, as far as we know), describing blake as both an admirer of barry and his most sophisticated and ambitious successor in the realm of ideologically original art. whatever he grasped of barry’s more recondite themes, blake must have found in the adelphi paintings and other works a model for exploiting a rich body of malleable mythic material, as well as pathways to sophisticated allegorical appropriation from such authors as hesiod, ovid, virgil, and others. pressly sketches both strategic and thematic parallels between the two: both combined painting, prints, and text, supplementing visual with verbal and unique artifacts with mass-produced (or at least multiple) artifacts, and both were concerned about the treatment of the poor, women, slaves, and children. and, perhaps most importantly, both saw art as the potential salvation of british society. but many blake aficionados will find the most exciting ideas and information in the parts of the book that aren’t explicitly connected to blake’s works. i am still ruminating about the implications for considering blake’s exhibition of 1809, which seems to me now to have been as much an unsatirical emulation in little rooms of barry’s project in the great room as it was a parodic reaction to the promotional schemes of stothard and cromek. others will want to rethink relationships between the recognizable references to classical literature in blake’s works and the ways in which barry had earlier appropriated and reconfigured the same materials. blake starts to look a lot less nutty if we recognize that some of his mystifying referential leaps have precedents in the multicultural multimedia devices with which barry attempted to communicate with the same audience. the book concludes with a pair of fascinating appendices, the first of which describes the series of prints by means of which barry augmented, “corrected,” and sharpened the focus of the images in his finished murals, crowding in new figures, changing features of existing figures, and adding captions, notes, labels, and other texts, often making more explicit the import of original or otherwise obscure iconographic or emblematic devices but never telling the whole story. blake followed a very similar pattern in his chaucer tempera and the subsequent multi-state print, which revealed a modern set of celebrated physiognomies aligned with the layers of ancient and medieval identities delineated in the painting and described (almost) explicitly in blake’s prose accounts. in addition to the reenvisioning of his subjects through prints and pamphlets, in 1798 and again in 1801 barry planned and to some extent executed changes to the murals themselves, some of them substantial and programmatically significant, others perhaps primarily aesthetic. at least two of these changes were undone by officious restoration late in the twentieth century, just as hogarth’s revisions to paul before felix at lincoln’s inn were cleaned away forever about the same time; let’s hope that art conservation is never again conceived as requiring the removal of all discernable layers of paint above the artist’s first varnish. in terms of intellectual content, editorial polish, and quantity and quality of visual matter, this is the most impressive scholarly art book i have seen in some time, and it is all the more impressive for its exceptionally low price. at a time when many academic publishers are charging extortionate prices for poorly written, underedited, and cheaply illustrated books, this one is a virtuous prodigy, heartening in every way. “sick as a rose”: william blake in leopoldo maría panero’s poetry of experience “sick as a rose”: william blake in leopoldo maría panero’s poetry of experience by cristina flores cristina flores (cristina.flores@unirioja.es) is a senior lecturer at the university of la rioja, specializing in anglo-spanish literary and cultural exchanges during the romantic period. the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. the marriage of heaven and hell (e 35) william blake’s songs of experience foundthis research was carried out within the framework of the research project “lhibro. hispanic literature in the british romantic periodical press (1802–​1832): appropriating and rewriting the canon,” funded by the spanish ministry of science, innovation, and universities (ref. rti2018-097450-b-i00). a powerful response in the spanish author leopoldo maría panero (1948–​2014). in his work, which is crowded with echoes of the blakean images of the sick rose and the tiger, he offers a reinterpretation of some of blake’s most popular motifs. panero was a major figure in modern spanish poetry, whose literary production ranged from poetry and essays to short stories. he was one of the nine poets who featured in the anthology nueve novísimos poetas españoles (the nine newest spanish poets), edited by josé maría castellet in 1970, which served to establish a new generation of authors.the nine novísimos were manuel vázquez montalbán (1939–​2003), antonio martínez sarrión (b. 1939), josé maría álvarez (b. 1942), félix de azúa (b. 1944), pere gimferrer (b. 1945), vicente molina foix (b. 1946), guillermo carnero (b. 1947), ana maría moix (1947–​2014), and panero. these authors, barely known at the time, were writing in the last years of francisco franco’s regime, when the decline of the dictator’s health brought some hope for a new era to come.the death of franco in november 1975 brought the dictatorial regime to an end. in this context, the novísimos, although not a coherent group, shared a rejection of social realism and a common indifference to the dictatorship. among them, the most difficult to classify is panero. he was a complex, indefinable, self-destructive poet who said—​in a clear allusion to walt whitman—​“i celebrate and i hate myself … while the poem is written against me.”“me celebro y me odio a mí mismo … mientras el poema se escribe contra mí” (guarida de un animal 12). all translations are my own. as joaquín ruano notes, panero’s poetry bears witness to a life that was lived by different rules, to a radical individuality that rejected established dogmas, both in life and in literature (13). through his subversive writings panero transmits a message of transgression and madness, infringing limits and denouncing injustices, always trying to “situate himself in the territory of excess.”“busca situarse en el territorio del exceso” (agujero llamado nevermore 48). in his prologue to félix j. caballero’s treinta noches (thirty nights), he writes, “peter pan has died; there is nothing else but the consciousness of excess: ‘the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom’ (w. blake),”“peter pan ha muerto; no queda sino la conciencia del exceso: ‘el camino del exceso conduce al palacio de la sabiduría’ (w. blake)” (acerca de un posible testamento 153). quoting in translation the well-known line from the marriage of heaven and hell. panero lost his innocence and took the road of excess very early. he spent some time in prison and much of his life in different psychiatric hospitals, as he suffered from severe alcoholism, drug addiction, and insanity. his last thirty years were passed in a mental institution in las palmas, on the canary islands, where he died in 2014. leopoldo maría panero. photo by thomas canet. from his early childhood, he was haunted by visions: “the hallucinations of the madman are in the infant the natural form of perception.”“las alucinaciones del loco son en el niño una forma natural de la percepción” (quoted in blesa 9). he recounts one of these experiences in the preface to los señores del alma (the lords of the soul): “i decided to follow someone i thought was a child. besides alcohol i had taken some drugs and, hallucinating, i saw that the child had the wings of an angel,”“decidí seguir a alguien que creí un niño. había tomado además de alcohol algo de drogas, y alucinatoriamente vi que el niño tenía alas de ángel” (poesía completa [2000–​2010] 166). an image that recalls the frontispiece to blake’s songs of experience. in a study of panero’s mental illness in relation to his literary production, sergio a. sánchez concludes that both panero and blake suffered from the same type of visions (87-89). hence, it is no surprise that the spanish poet found in blake a kindred soul. panero grew up in a domestic context conducive to the reception of english romantic poetry, since his father, leopoldo panero (1909–​62), himself a poet, translated works by william wordsworth and percy bysshe shelley, among others.some of his translations can be found in the best-known anthology of english romantic verse in spain, edited by valverde (1989). his untamable son was nonetheless most attracted by blake, whose works would be a pervading, lifelong presence in his thought and verse. in the preface to el último hombre (the last man), panero points to blake, gérard de nerval, and edgar allan poe as his main influences: blake, nerval, and poe are my main sources, as they are supreme epitomes of disturbing strangeness, of madness made verse: because art, after all, as deleuze would say, only consists in giving madness a third sense: pushing the limits of madness, standing on its borders, playing with it … : a dangerous profession, delightfully dangerous.“blake, nerval o poe serán mis fuentes, como emblemas que son al máximo de la inquietante extrañeza, de la locura llevada al verso: porque el arte en definitiva, como diría deleuze, no consiste sino en dar a la locura un tercer sentido: en rozar la locura, ubicarse en sus bordes, jugar con ella … : un oficio peligroso, deliciosamente peligroso” (poesía completa [1970–​2000] 287). some scholars (quinto, saldaña sagredo) have underlined the romantic character of panero’s personality and work, grounded in his rebelliousness and marginality, his cult of the self, and the dreams and nightmares that populate his poetry. he seems to have felt a connection to some authors on the basis of shared biographical experiences and related literary production, identifying more with blake, poe, nerval, thomas de quincey, and scardanelli (the alter ego created by friedrich hölderlin after a severe mental breakdown) than with the rest of the romantic authors. he aligned himself with les poètes maudits and became a reference point for contemporary literary malditismo. darkness, madness, and hallucinations are the main elements of his poetry, which is at times fragmentary and incoherent, and always provocative. in addition, panero’s work is highly intertextual; it is itself a literary ecosystem, in a permanent dialogue with literary texts from the past (see rodríguez de arce). his literary discourse is not, however, merely an amalgam of quotations; rather, he appropriates, re-creates, and elaborates. ruano notes that panero’s work is a sort of library where “poisonous texts” are preserved, reworked, and pondered over again and again in an endless process of work in progress (10). according to panero, literature … takes its referent not from reality but within literature itself—​that is, in itself, its past …. posthumous literature … that literature that will not account either for any reality or epistemological statute external to itself that is not given in the game … of literature, multiplied only by itself.“la literatura … tome su referente no en la realidad sino en la literatura misma—​es decir, en su ser, su pasado …. la literatura póstuma … esa literatura ya no dará cuenta de ninguna realidad ni de ningún estatuto epistemológico exterior a ella que no sea el dado en el juego … de la literatura, multiplicada sólo por sí misma” (visión de la literatura 23). his work is thus riddled with names of authors and allusions to and quotations from previous literary discourses. a good number of referents have been identified and listed, blake among them.for a full list, see blesa 13-14. for an introductory note on blake’s presence in panero’s work, see flores 175-76, of which this article is a continuation. panero was a polyglot, who mastered both english and french. his linguistic competence allowed him to enjoy english literary works and thus gain an unmediated knowledge of the texts. moreover, he wrote some original poems in english and translated into his mother tongue james m. barrie’s play peter pan, as well as poems by john clare, robert browning, edward lear, and lewis carroll.all of panero’s translations of english poetry have been gathered in the collection traducciones/​perversiones. he got acquainted with blake’s verse early. in 1972, while living for some months in tangier, panero wrote to ask his mother to send him a volume of blake’s poetry. in the letter he emulates blake’s proverbs of hell: you could send me … the edition of blake by plaza janés (which is also bilingual). i send you the two first aphorisms. i “the man is son of a dead god” variant “the man is a dead god” ii “law, limit, morality and justice are epithets of the devil. seth’s chains are the laws (modifiable by his suicide) of matter.” they could be entitled, in remembrance of blake, hellish proverbs.podrías mandarme … la edición de plaza janés de blake (que es también bilingüe). te mando los dos primeros aforismos. i “el hombre es hijo de un dios muerto” variante “el hombre es un dios muerto” ii “la ley, el límite, la moral y la justicia son epítetos del diablo. las cadenas de seth son las leyes (modificables por su suicidio) de la materia.” se podrían llamar, en recuerdo de blake, proverbios infernales. (quoted in benito fernández 166) he is referring to the 1971 bilingual edition of poemas, translated by agustí bartra and published in barcelona by plaza and janés. it includes “the lamb,” “the blossom,” “infant joy,” “spring,” and “laughing song” from songs of innocence; “introduction,” “earth’s answer,” “the sick rose,” “the fly,” “the tyger,” and “london” from songs of experience; the book of thel; the marriage of heaven and hell; visions of the daughters of albion; america; and the [first] book of urizen. even though panero would be a lifelong reader of blake’s poetry, and his knowledge of blake’s work was by no means limited to this selection, the early and powerful influence of this group of poems, especially those from songs of experience, was remarkable. panero’s verse has been described by antonio m. albalate, in his introduction to rosa enferma (9), as poetry of experience. to this i would add that his is a poetry of experience in the blakean sense. paley rightly notes that blake’s innocence and experience are two “perennial ways of looking at the world” (2), the childlike and the experienced conceptions of reality. panero adopts the experienced perspective, in which innocence is lost, corrupted by institutions. references to blake and motifs from songs of experience are numerous: the idea of childhood’s destroyed innocence and imagery of the sick rose and the tiger populate his work. they clothed me in the clothes of death, and taught me to sing the notes of woe. “the chimney sweeper” (e 23) a recurrent and central topic in panero’s work is childhood. far from presenting infancy as a state of innocence, he conceives it from the viewpoint of experience: “a whole human rhetoric exists that considers the child as sweet, soft, paradisiac …. nobody knows that the child is friend to the animals and the … devil.”“existe, en efecto, toda una retórica humana que considera al niño como dulce, suave, paradisiaco …. nadie sabe que el niño es amigo de los animales y del … diablo” (acerca de un posible testamento 91-92). this statement is arguably inspired by blake’s “the little girl lost,” where the child lives with predatory animals in the wild: “leopards, tygers play, / round her as she lay” (e 21). among the animals she befriends is the tiger, which panero identifies with the devil, as we will see. he explores infancy from different perspectives, but always considering childhood as a lost paradise, destroyed by institutions; all children are little girls and boys lost. for him, “school is a penal institution where we are taught to forget infancy” by means of “the cruel words of schooling”“el colegio es una institución penal en la que lo que nos enseñan es a olvidar la infancia” (el desencanto); “las palabras crueles del colegio” (poesía completa [1970–​2000] 184).—​an idea that recalls “the school boy” or even “nurse’s song” in songs of experience. his images of infancy are shadowed by bad omens and cruelty. suffering and weeping boys abound in panero’s verse, where the reader can hear “the sobbing of a boy / wounded by the shadows.”“el llanto de un niño / herido por las sombras” (poesía completa [2000–​2010] 401). “the child,” he writes, “is the slave of the man / and infancy is only / a ruin on my lips / on my lips that are closed to life.”“el niño es el esclavo del hombre / y la infancia es sólo / una ruina en mis labios / en mis labios cerrados a la vida” (el ciervo aplaudido 33). the world of panero’s children is much like that depicted in “holy thursday,” an “eternal winter” (e 19) marked by pain—​“oh boy who wakes, boy / used to pain / as if life were made up / only of pain”—​and death—​“life is an incurable disease, as is infancy.”“oh niño que despierta, niño / acostumbrado al dolor / como si la vida fuera inventada / sólo por el dolor” (poesía completa [2000–​2010] 220); “la vida que es también una enfermedad incurable, lo mismo que la infancia” (acerca de un posible testamento 169). infancy anticipates and participates in death in both songs of experience and panero’s poetry. this dialectical relationship between childhood and death can be seen in panero’s “pavane pour un enfant défunt” (“pavane for a dead child”): “even on earth, you are a dead child / … / we are all / dead children / … / we all carry inside a dead child, crying.”“eres aún en la tierra un niño difunto / … / todos nosotros somos / niños muertos / … / todos llevamos dentro un niño muerto, llorando” (poesía completa [1970–​2000] 144, 146). they attain total identification in “el beso de buenas noches” (“goodnight kiss”), where a dead child addresses his father: “father, i am dead, and the tomb is / a much better cradle.”“padre, estoy muerto, y es la tumba / una cuna mucho mejor” (poesía completa [1970–​2000] 260). o rose thou art sick. “the sick rose” (e 23) panero, who claimed to feel “sick as a rose,”“enfermo como una rosa” (rosa enferma 81). found in blake’s “the sick rose” a powerful metaphor for mental illness, another of the central concerns in his poetry. from his early youth to his death, this image helped him depict his own madness and drug addiction. in 1998, he wrote an essay entitled “mi cerebro es una rosa” (“my brain is a rose”), and his last collection of poems, published posthumously in 2014, is rosa enferma (sick rose). its preface opens with a full transcription of blake’s poem (9) and continues with the famous lines from panero’s 1992 poem “heroína” (“heroin”): “when the venom enters my blood / my brain is a rose.”“cuando el veneno entra en sangre / mi cerebro es una rosa” (poesía completa [1970–​2000] 415). rosa enferma (madrid: huerga y fierro, 2014), cover. the rose appears frequently in his verse as a symbol of hopelessness—​the recognition that his life is in ruins: “the rose is withering today / … / you are a rose / you are less than nothing.”“la rosa hoy se marchita / … / tú eres una rosa / tú eres menos que nada” (poesía completa [2000–​2010] 106). the image is always related to sickness, madness, emptiness, hell, and fear, as can be seen in the following phrases: “perfect rose of delirium,” “weeping rose,” “rose of emptiness,” “rose of hell,” “rose of mental hospital,” “rose of death,” “cannibal rose,” “rose of terror,” “sick rose,” “rose in the shadow of tears.”“rosa perfecta del delirio,” “rosa húmeda del llanto,” “rosa de la nada,” “rosa del infierno,” “rosa de sanatorio,” “la rosa de la muerte,” “rosa caníbal,” “rosa del espanto,” “rosa enferma,” “la rosa en tinieblas del llanto” (poesía completa [2000–​2010] 313 [2], 264, 352, 351, 199, 152, 151, 430, 441). it is a symbol of decay and death: “now that you ask about the future, you must understand / that life is a rose burnt / … / by the mortal wound that does not heal / by the endless evil in life.”“ya que preguntas por el futuro, comprende / que la vida es una rosa quemada / … / de la herida vital que no se cura / del mal incansable de la vida” (rosa enferma 43). in a powerful transformation of blake’s idea, panero goes beyond the symbolic relation of the rose with death, only suggested in “the sick rose,” to identify them overtly. this is clearly seen in “la rosa desciende hasta mi nombre” (“the rose descends to my name”)—​which opens with a translation of the closing line of “i saw a chapel all of gold” (“and laid me down among the swine,” e 468)—​where the “macabre” and “sad” rose is said to be “like death.”“y me tendí entre los cerdos” william blake ………………………………… rosa macabra del poema rosa triste de la tarde ………………………………… la rosa es el símbolo del poema rosa cúbica que es como la muerte (poesía completa [2000–​2010] 44-45) the total identification of the rose with death is attained in the poem “dead flower to a worm,” which he wrote in english: blind worm that slips in the desert that i am thinking of green meadows in which disappear thinking of merry fields whilst i am dead blind worm that is like water falling on my skull who knows, who knows if you must move forever through my bones who knows, who knows if you will move forever through my bones, forever disbelieving of the dead flowers falling over you. (poesía completa [1970–​2000] 153-54) this poem can be read as a clever response to blake’s “the sick rose,” in which the spanish poet places the focus on the worm instead of the flower. the invisible worm that kills the rose from inside in blake is in panero a blind worm that enters a flower that is already dead. panero’s poem represents the certainty of the flower’s death, the inevitable destiny of the sick rose—​only implied in the closing line of blake’s poem—​and, by extension, the fatal destruction of his self: “the rose, the rose, the rose / that i am.”“la rosa, la rosa, la rosa / que soy yo” (poesía completa [1970–​2000] 471). tyger tyger, burning bright, in the forests of the night; what immortal hand or eye, could frame thy fearful symmetry? “the tyger” (e 24) in panero’s imagery the rose and the tiger are often associated—​“febrile rose of the devil, / tiger carved on steel”—​as the tiger also represents his insanity: “perfect symmetry of the poem where the tiger stalks, / the tiger of madness that still roars against thought.”“rosa febril del diablo, / tigre sobre el acero inscrito”; “perfecta simetría del poema donde acecha el tigre, / el tigre de la locura que ruge aún contra el pensamiento” (poesía completa [2000–​2010] 264, 187). panero lived in a personal hell and recognized himself to be on the devil’s side. in sombra (shadow) he writes, “and only the devil is the lord of the page ‘every real poet is in love with the devil,’ blake said, worshipping the wind.”“y sólo el diablo es el señor de la página ‘todo verdadero poeta está enamorado del diablo’ blake lo dijo adorándole al viento” (quoted in sánchez 87). here the poet is probably recalling blake’s comment on milton in marriage: “he was a true poet and of the devils party without knowing it” (e 35). moreover, panero identifies himself with the devil and the tiger simultaneously, as in “al infierno” (“to hell”): “i am the tiger / the most beautiful animal in the night: i am the devil.”“yo soy el tigre / el animal más bello de la noche: yo soy el diablo” (guarida de un animal 39). he adopts the widespread interpretation of blake’s poem according to which the tiger is made in the likeness of his creator and both are identified as the devil. this he clearly expresses in the following poem, which opens with a quotation in translation from “the tyger”: “what immortal hand or eye could frame thy fearful symmetry?” hymn to the devil by william blake how perfect is the symmetry of disaster hand of the devil and of ruin ………………………………… oh ivory of cruelty perfect cruelty of the shadow in which man disappears“qué inmortal mano o qué ojo pudo crear tu aterradora simetría” himno al diablo de william blake cuán perfecta es la silueta del desastre mano del diablo y de la ruina ………………………………… oh marfil de la crueldad perfecta crueldad de la sombra en que desaparece el hombre (poesía completa [2000–​2010] 194-95) “the tyger” is the poem most often quoted by panero, and the tiger is a motif in his verse, as can be seen in “en el ojo del huracán” (“in the eye of the storm”)—​“the rainforest, trapped in the tiger’s eye, / shines in the perfect symmetry of the poem / —​in the tiger of my eyes”“la selva, atrapada en el ojo del tigre, / resplandece en la perfecta simetría del poema / —​en el tigre de mis ojos” (guarida de un animal 13).—​or in “abra cadavre” (“abracadaver”)—​“oh you, feline animal / … / perfect tiger, i don’t know whether hand or foot / ‘what a hand or what an eye?’”“oh tú, animal felino / … / tigre perfecto, no sé si mano o pie / ‘what a hand or what an eye?’” (poesía completa [2000–​2010] 153). it is also the central image in “cantata del miedo” (“cantata of fear”), dedicated to the poet claudio rodríguez: i searched his name, his name of dread and perdition his name that makes a man go pale that is the dark name of the tiger —tiger, tiger burning bright in the forests of the sky— who, what word, or what hand created your fearful symmetry ……………………………… for only evil is a mystery, and the dark enigma of life, which was always dark because the devil created it, and made it similar to the word life.busque su nombre, su nombre de miedo y de perdición su nombre que hace palidecer al hombre que es el tenebroso nombre del tigre —tiger, tiger burning bright in the forests of the sky— quién creó, qué palabra o qué mano tu aterradora simetría ……………………………… porque sólo el mal es un misterio, y el oscuro enigma de la vida, que fue siempre oscura porque el diablo la creó, y la hizo parecerse a la palabra vida. (poesía completa [2000–​2010] 238-39) leopoldo maría panero, who has been described as a blakean angel (“ángel blakeano” [arnao]), found in blake images that perfectly matched his life and embodied his most profound feelings and disturbing thoughts. growing as a poet in the 1970s, at the very end of franco’s dictatorship, he broke with the rules and the limits imposed by conservatism and censorship. he didn’t conform to the “mind-forg’d manacles,” to the external suppression and repression; he conceived a reality different from that universally established. early in his life panero took the road of excess and never left it; he always looked at reality from the perspective of experience, blakean experience, as his poetry shows. unlike blake’s songs of experience, in panero’s literary realm there is no room for the potential triumph of innocence. the spanish poet does not confront experience, but admits, fully conscious of his madness and mortality, “i carry / a secret rose in my bosom.”“llevo / una rosa secreta en el pecho” (poesía completa [2000–​2010] 42). works cited arnao, emilio. “leopoldo maría panero: ‘yo te mato; ¿quieres, te vienes?’” citizen (12 aug. 2018). <http://​thecitizen.​es/​dominical/​leopoldo-​maria-​panero-​yo-​te-​mato-​quieres-​te-​vienes>. benito fernández, j. el contorno del abismo. vida y leyenda de leopoldo maría panero. barcelona: tusquets, 1999. blake, william. the complete poetry and prose of william blake. ed. david v. erdman. newly rev. ed. new york: anchor-random house, 1988. [abbreviated as e] —​—​—​. poemas. trans. agustí bartra. barcelona: plaza and janés, 1971. blesa, túa. leopoldo maría panero, el último poeta. madrid: valdemar, 1995. castellet, josé maría, ed. nueve novísimos poetas españoles. 1970. barcelona: península, 2001. el desencanto. dir. jaime chávarri. elías querejeta producciones cinematográficas, 1976. flores, cristina. “the reception of blake in spain.” the reception of william blake in europe. ed. sibylle erle and morton d. paley. 2 vols. london: bloomsbury, 2019. 1: 155-84. paley, morton d., ed. twentieth century interpretations of “songs of innocence and of experience.” englewood cliffs, nj: prentice-hall, 1969. panero, leopoldo maría. acerca de un posible testamento. ed. ángel l. prieto de paula. madrid: huerga y fierro, 2016. —​—​—​. agujero llamado nevermore. selección poética, 1968–​1999. ed. jenaro talens. madrid: cátedra, 2000. —​—​—​. el ciervo aplaudido. prologue by ianus pravo. las palmas: el ángel caído, 2016. —​—​—​. guarida de un animal que no existe. madrid: visor, 1998. —​—​—​. poesía completa (1970–​2000). ed. túa blesa. 5th ed. madrid: visor, 2013. —​—​—​. poesía completa (2000–​2010). ed. túa blesa. 2nd ed. madrid: visor, 2014. —​—​—​. rosa enferma. ed. antonio marín albalate. madrid: huerga y fierro, 2014. —​—​—​. traducciones/​perversiones. ed. túa blesa. madrid: visor, 2011. —​—​—​. visión de la literatura de terror anglo-americana. madrid: felmar, 1977. quinto, raúl. “la herencia maldita (leopoldo maría panero y el virus del romanticismo).” quimera 372 (2014): 16-19. rodríguez de arce, ignacio. “poética de la intertextualidad en leopoldo maría panero.” ogigia. revista electrónica de estudios hispánicos 6 (2009): 27-37. ruano, joaquín. “la oscura biblioteca de leopoldo maría panero.” quimera 372 (2014): 10-15. saldaña sagredo, alfredo. “leopoldo maría panero, poeta vitalista.” turia. revista cultural 11 (1989): 36-52. sánchez bustos, sergio augusto. “leopoldo maría panero: enfermedad mental y literatura.” phd diss., universidad complutense de madrid, 2012. <http://​eprints.​ucm.​es/​17323/​1/​t34068.​pdf>. valverde, josé maría, ed. poetas románticos ingleses: byron, shelley, keats, coleridge, wordsworth. trans. leopoldo panero and josé maría valverde. barcelona: planeta, 1989. publications exhibitions music b 57.1 a e kl angela esterhammer, victoria college, university of toronto nelson hilton, university of georgia tilar j. mazzeo, colby college robert w. rix, university of copenhagen joseph viscomi, university of north carolina at chapel hill david worrall, the nottingham trent university martin butlin, tate gallery, london, retired tristanne j. connolly, university of waterloo detlef w. dörrbecker, university of trier sibylle erle, university of lincoln robert n. essick, university of california, riverside a d v i s o r y b o a r d a n i l l u s t r a t e d q u a r t e r l y volume 57 number 1 summer 2023 c o n t e n t s www.blakequarterly.org © 2023 copyright morris eaves and morton d. paley cover: detail of thomas rowlandson, “dr. syntax and bookseller” (1815). minneapolis institute of art, minnich collection, ethel morrison van derlip fund, 1966. p.17,414. e d i t o r s editors: morris eaves and morton d. paley review editor: alexander s. gourlay exhibitions editor: luisa calè bibliographer (criticism): wayne c. ripley bibliographer (music): jason whittaker managing editor: sarah jones sarah.jones@rochester.edu production office: department of english, university of rochester, rochester ny 14627-0451 articles william blake and his circle: a checklist of scholarship in 2022 by wayne c. ripley, with works in romance languages contributed by fernando castanedo, works in japanese contributed by hikari sato, works in turkish contributed by hüseyin alhas, and works in russian contributed by vera serdechnaia blake and exhibitions, 2022 by luisa calè blake and music, 2022 by camila oliveira and jason whittaker review: matthew mauger, william blake and the visionary law: prophecy, legislation and constitution matthew mauger. william blake and the visionary law: prophecy, legislation and constitution. cham, switzerland: palgrave macmillan-springer nature, 2023. xiii + 231 pp. £99.99/​$119.99, hardcover; also available in paperback and as an e-book. reviewed by david worrall david worrall (david.worrall@ntu.ac.uk) is emeritus professor of english at nottingham trent university. he is editor of the urizen books (1995), and (with steve clark) co-editor of historicizing blake (1994), blake in the nineties (1999), and blake, nation and empire (2006). he was principal investigator (2004–​06), with keri davies, on the ahrc project that helped uncover blake’s moravian heritage and (with nancy jiwon cho) on a charity-funded project (2010–​12) identifying dorothy gott, the prophetic author who—​like the blakes—​attended the 1789 swedenborg conference. his monograph, william blake’s visions: art, hallucinations, synaesthesia (palgrave studies in literature, science, and medicine), was published by palgrave macmillan in 2024. it is perhaps a bit disconcerting to find “antinomianism” resurfacing in the mid-2020s. matthew mauger’s william blake and the visionary law: prophecy, legislation and constitution presents the thesis that “sustained interest in the antinomian resonances of blake’s corpus effectively distracts us from his consistent aspiration for the law as a framework which affords protection for humanity against incoherence, dissolution, and despair” (8). this modification signals his point of departure from jon mee’s dangerous enthusiasm: william blake and the culture of radicalism in the 1790s (1992), saree makdisi’s william blake and the impossible history of the 1790s (2003), and g. a. rosso’s the religion of empire: political theology in blake’s prophetic symbolism (2016), the leading exponents of tracing antinomian ideologies in blake. although mauger proposes a distinctive path, these critics are referenced so frequently in william blake and the visionary law that the book seems almost in constant dialogue with them. an immediate problem, however, is to work out exactly what antinomianism was (or was not). mauger elects not to use citations such as one in the oed (from david hume), “antinomians … insisted, that the obligations of morality and natural law were suspended,” a quotation that provides the gist of the term’s meaning. of course, for some scholars, antinomianism’s original sin is that it is not a word that blake ever used in his extant writings. the concept’s ultimate critical progenitor in modern times was a. l. morton’s the everlasting gospel: a study in the sources of william blake (1958), a work founded on tracing similarities between blake’s rhetorical stances and english seventeenth-century levellers, ranters, and muggletonians. morton was part of a wave of british postwar marxist critics that included the historians christopher hill and e. p. thompson. as mauger comments, however, morton “was unable to establish direct connections between these groups and blake’s own world” (4). and neither has anyone else. the journalist henry crabb robinson, the only person known to have interviewed blake face to face about his religious beliefs, told dorothy wordsworth in 1826 that his were “a strange compound of christianity spinosism [sic] & platonism.” crabb robinson knew what an antinomian was but apparently did not think that the description applied to blake. mauger’s consideration of blake’s degree of proximity to “antinomian dissent,” “dissenting culture,” and “radical dissenters,” terms used frequently in the book, takes no account of the possible relevance of his mother’s connection to the moravians, a belief community that had austere dress codes and restrictions on marrying out. mauger provides a significant clarification of his own position with respect to antinomianism by recognizing an important insight in jeanne moskal’s often overlooked study blake, ethics, and forgiveness (1994). moskal writes that “antinomianism, interwoven with law, consistently re-presents the obverse image of the system it seeks to escape” (quoted on p. 8), a crucial corrective providing mauger with “critical authority” for his own study. in one of her essays—​pre-dating mee’s influential usage of the term—​moskal describes even more provocatively the central conundrum that “antinomianism remains a parasite on the host of law.”jeanne moskal, “forgiveness, love, and pride in blake’s the everlasting gospel,” religion and literature 20.2 (1988): 19-39 (on 26). for the reader of william blake and the visionary law, moskal’s vivid analogy of 1988 may help to grasp the idea that blake’s impulse toward antinomian radicalism was tempered by the necessity of having laws stable and flexible enough to protect the human form divine. blake’s paintings are largely missing from mauger’s account, although there is a fascinating exploration of the biblical theme of adultery that includes a discussion (with a black-and-white plate) of the butts watercolor the woman taken in adultery (c. 1805). one would have loved to have had a systematic interrogation of how blake handles figures such as moses or solomon, not to mention the notorious lawbreakers who crop up in the visionary heads. otherwise, the book follows a straightforward chronology of blake’s writings, from an island in the moon to jerusalem and covering just about everything else in between, including the ever-daunting terrain of the four zoas. chapters 1 and 2 are largely introductory, contrasting the case for antinomian rebelliousness against the bedrock legal constitutionalism embodied in william blackstone’s four-volume commentaries on the laws of england (1765–​69). mauger returns several times to one of blackstone’s striking analogies for english law, “we inherit an old gothic castle, erected in the days of chivalry, but fitted up for a modern inhabitant. the moated ramparts, the embattled towers, and the trophied halls, are magnificent and venerable, but useless” (quoted on p. 21). these gothic edifices are “moated” and “embattled” by legal, statutory, and constitutional challenges that antinomianism spurns yet depends upon for ideological focus. or, as mauger puts it in what one might call law’s eternal existential conundrum, the gothic castle “might have been erected ‘in days of chivalry,’” but it is now “‘fitted up for a modern inhabitant’” (23). his strategy throughout is to chart blake’s relationship to religious, legal, and legislative codes, guided by the poet’s “innate antinomian suspicion of constraining legal frameworks that ordain limits for behaviour, knowledge, sensory engagement, and imaginative potential” (210). the book’s principal hermeneutic technique is close reading, involving a myriad of elegant nuances largely beyond the scope of this review. sometimes, however, mauger provides a helpfully panoramic sweep: “in the book of urizen, the book of ahania, and the book of los, the mythology that blake has introduced in the book of thel, visions of the daughters of albion and the marriage of heaven and hell develops into a cosmology, an account of the development of a human world called into being through an act of legal definition” (92). at a more detailed level, according to mauger, the symptomatic antinomian “stony law” that orc “stamp[s] to dust” in america a prophecy is considered something less than a positive revolutionary activity: “orc’s fires burn down the ancient constitutions, his violent attacks will ‘stamp the stony law to dust,’ but they propose no apparent alternative, no basis upon which the ‘right’ of a new social organisation might be based” (101). drawing on a later period of blake’s writings in analyzing the closing plates of jerusalem, mauger argues that the poem’s culminating “covenant of jehovah” is “a dispensation based on community and shared humanity rather than self-indulgent individual antinomian sovereignty” (196). both examples seem to imply reversions toward a civic mean of harmony, but without blake’s having identified any “new social organisation” to maintain community survival. if the specifics of the visionary law subtitle may prove elusive to some readers, the mythological layers of london in jerusalem are tantalizingly described: “the london that coalesces within the poem is nevertheless inconstant and evolving, a space over which the core protagonists fight for constitutional control in their desire to build—​or to corrupt—​jerusalem” (197). as mauger points out, “it is clear that the city that has taken shape within london is very far from the elegant symmetry of jerusalem” (198). in this amalgamation, london as jerusalem/​babylon/​golgonooza is a city whose “core protagonists fight” in spiritual—​and perhaps borderline civil—​war, although without the constitutional or legislative center that visionary law might require. instead, as he concedes, “amid the prophetic exuberance of the poem’s account of humanity’s recovery, the poem pointedly withholds any kind of ‘legislative programme’ for this visionary law. to do so would be to contradict blake’s vision of prophetic legislation, to lay down a set of architectural drawings for jerusalem which would lead humanity back to the destructive cycles which are so compelling in his long poems” (210). after so much strenuous close reading, some might be disappointed with the flatness of the conclusion: “as we have seen, law is a broad and flexible category for blake, and he moves sometimes dizzyingly between associations with constitutional texts, moral frameworks, the laws established through natural philosophical enquiry, secular laws established across centuries of customary practice, parliamentary statute, and biblical law” (210). mauger’s references to “secular laws …, parliamentary statute, and biblical law,” approximated through the example of blackstone’s commentaries, are not without their own problems. some of the demarcations that he makes are difficult to recognize. the book does not always sufficiently simplify the basics. the major challenge that the eighteenth-century legal system faced was that, while there existed a body of english common law that had coped quite well in less sophisticated ages—​for example, when adjudicating property theft or crimes of violence—​it was geared much less well toward things such as promissory notes on contracts or cases where natural and civil rights were not self-evidently tangible. trying their best, judges attempted to identify what they called the equity in the case—​that is, they sought to find the principle of justice residing in common law that could be legitimately extrapolated to cover the challenge of novel legal cases coming to the courts as by-products of britain’s imperial and commercial expansion. blake was both directly and indirectly affected by developments in contemporary legislation aimed at surmounting the limitations of the ancient common law. one such issue was the copyright of visual images. the engraving copyright act (1735; 8 george 2 c.13), originally promoted by william hogarth, meant that all blake’s commercial engravings had to be “truly engraved, with the name of the proprietor on each plate, and printed on every such print or prints.” this included his independently issued plates, such as “ezekiel” (c. 1794/​1825). hogarth’s act affected him throughout his working life. when in 1826 he sold “the plates & copy-right of job” (e 779) to john linnell he would have needed to understand both the benefits of retaining copyright title and the implications of selling it. however, eighteenth-century english case history encompassed matters of much greater significance than copyright. arguably, the case of the century was somerset v. stewart (1772), the decision on a habeas corpus brought to king’s bench concerning james somerset, a black man living in london whom charles stewart alleged was his slave. william murray, lord mansfield, found in somerset’s favor: “the black must be discharged,” he ruled. presumably, when blake wrote “the little black boy” (1789) or engraved stedman’s narrative, of a five years’ expedition (1796), the somerset judgment was somewhere in the back of his mind. by contrast, struggling to find the equity of slavery in common law, blackstone changed his opinion several times in successive editions of the commentaries. it is difficult to conceive of any historical version of blake in which he would not have been interested in copyright law or the implications of the somerset judgment. the issue is not that mauger does not refer to these cases but, rather, that their presence in the legal record illustrates the challenges that blake, along with the rest of the population, faced in trying to absorb their implications. indeed, mauger is even a bit hard on himself in his conclusion about jerusalem: “the narrative of law constitutes, in my view, a tenuous fabric that connects blake’s cosmology with that of early nineteenth-century britain, and instruments [sic] the psychogeographic layering of golgonooza, babylon, jerusalem, and london which is a striking feature of blake’s final long poem” (211). as his book overwhelmingly persuades us, law is not merely “a tenuous fabric” but a concern that was a constant presence in blake’s consciousness, possibly somewhat diaphanous in its tangibility but certainly encompassing. the strengths of mauger’s considerable sensitivity and insight into blake’s writings are perhaps best seen in his account of the final two chapters of jerusalem, where the emergence of a continuously rebuilding golgonooza, almost as if it were a parliamentary legislative assembly constituted by the human form divine, seems a possibility blake was reaching toward. in all these arguments, the book is thoroughly up to date in its critical sources. indeed, this secondary scholarship, and mauger’s use of it, are wonderful reminders of the continuing attractiveness of blake to scholars of outstanding critical caliber. as a challenging excursion tracing a single theme across virtually the totality of blake’s writings, mauger’s william blake and the visionary law: prophecy, legislation and constitution is an invigorating exploration of a significant subject viewed from an entirely unfamiliar perspective. review: william blake’s universe (fitzwilliam museum, 2024) all installation photographs are by thomas adank and are reproduced by kind permission of the fitzwilliam museum. william blake’s universe. curated by david bindman and esther chadwick. fitzwilliam museum, 23 february–19 may 2024. william blake’s universe. ed. david bindman and esther chadwick. cambridge: fitzwilliam museum in association with philip wilson publishers, 2024. reviewed by luisa calè luisa calè (l.cale@bbk.ac.uk), birkbeck, university of london, writes about practices of reading, viewing, and collecting in the romantic period. her monograph, entitled the book unbound: material cultures of reading and collecting, 1750–​1850, funded by the leverhulme trust, is forthcoming from cambridge university press. she is the exhibitions editor for blake. william blake’s universe at the fitzwilliam museum in cambridge was structured as a three-colored path through a blue-coded classical past, a fiery present, and a radiant-yellow future. the vision for the exhibition had been gestating for years as a way of rethinking blake as a european artist by positioning him in dialogue with german art through a collaboration with the hamburger kunsthalle. this partnership revived an earlier collaboration with the kunsthalle’s former director werner hofmann, curator of kunst um 1800, a series of exhibitions including blake (1975) and john flaxman (1979), both curated by david bindman.on kunst um 1800, see david bindman, “blake in germany: the william blake exhibition at the hamburg kunsthalle and städel museum, frankfurt, 1975,” the reception of william blake in europe, ed. sibylle erle and morton d. paley, 2 vols. (london: bloomsbury academic, 2019) 1: 255-59. the 2024 exhibition stemmed, partly, from a reaction to the brexit referendum in 2016, with bindman joining forces with esther chadwick when she was working at the british museum.luisa calè, “william blake’s universe: an interview with david bindman and esther chadwick,” blake 57.3 (winter 2023–​24). hamburg was the central point of reference not just because of this museum partnership and its curatorial tradition, but also because of the seminal role that the port city had as a nodal point for european romanticism, and for the reception of blake in germany in particular. through important shared sources, inspiration, and affinities, the exhibition invited comparisons and outlined a story of parallel trajectories and missed encounters: the mysticism of jacob böhme; a classical idiom taking shape through similar academic training and the international style of line engraving associated with flaxman’s outlines; henry crabb robinson’s essay on “william blake: artist, poet, and religious enthusiast” appearing in the hamburg-based vaterländisches museum, which published some covers illustrated by philipp otto runge. yet blake and runge never met. this exhibition brought them together at the fitzwilliam, offering a unique opportunity to introduce runge to the british public. the vestibule announced the fundamental point of the exhibition by means of a partition wall structured as a slightly open book, with james s. deville’s life mask of blake (1823), his eyes closed to suggest the visionary power of his inner world, on a pedestal to the right and runge’s self-portrait to the left. around them, on the two side walls, self-portraits of james barry, flaxman, henry fuseli, samuel palmer, asmus jakob carstens, and caspar david friedrich, along with portraits of blake by john linnell, flaxman, and catherine blake, announced the cast of characters that made up blake’s universe within a european context.william blake’s universe, ed. david bindman and esther chadwick (cambridge: fitzwilliam museum in association with philip wilson publishers, 2024) 26-35, nos. 1-11. catalogue numbers will hereafter be cited in the text. openings to the side of the introductory presentation wall led through an intimate space where viewers could watch an informative animation about blake’s work by laurie avon and peter chownsmith,to learn about and view the animation commissioned by the museum, illustrated and directed by laurie avon, animated by peter chownsmith, and produced by brilliant artists in conjunction with the exhibition william blake’s universe, see <https://​brilliantartists.​co.​uk/​laurie-​avon-​x-​william-​blakes-​universe>. before entering the gallery representing the past. the past: antiquity and the gothic to compare academic training milieus, practices, and models at the royal academy in london and at the copenhagen academy, the wall to the left featured edward francis burney’s watercolor of the antique room at new somerset house (c. 1780; no. 13) and christoffer wilhelm eckersberg’s satire on the life class at the royal academy of fine arts in copenhagen (1805; no. 14); runge’s drawings of the head of antinous and belvedere torso from classical casts in the copenhagen academy, and his heads from raphael; blake’s the reposing traveller from michelangelo’s sistine chapel mediated by an engraving by adamo “ghisi” scultori; blake’s and runge’s drawings from the hamilton vases set against johann heinrich wilhelm tischbein’s and pierre-françois hugues d’hancarville’s reproductive volumes open in a vitrine beneath them; and barry’s “sacra familia christi” after raphael and giulio romano (no. 24). how that practice of copying translates into new classical and biblical subjects was documented by benjamin west’s christ healing the sick (no. 25), blake’s watercolors of the story of joseph (nos. 26a-c), runge’s diomedes and odysseus (no. 27) and achilles and scamander (no. 28), and carstens’s night and her children, sleep and death (no. 29). flaxman’s central role in european neoclassicism was documented by a slightly oblique long vitrine at the center of the long gallery, which enabled comparisons with the works on view on the walls. in the same line of sight as the classical apprenticeship works were his pen and ink and gray wash drawings, including two subjects from chatterton: queen kenewalcha and a massacre of britons at stonehenge (nos. 31a-b); next to them was the swedenborgian subject the ascension of the soul (no. 32). on the other side, the flaxman vitrine featured a series of graphite drawings and plaster models for funerary relief monuments, and his dante illustrations and dante notebook. a viewer facing flaxman’s funerary and medieval subjects could also see a wall hang starting with a more muscular engagement with the human form characteristic of blake’s relationship with fuseli, from fuseli’s drawing of the back of a woman’s torso to blake’s hyperion (“the bowman” ), which is a study toward an extra-illustration for the altered copy of thomas gray’s poems that he produced for flaxman’s wife (nos. 41, 8). blake’s engravings after fuseli were documented by “tornado” for erasmus darwin’s the botanic garden and the spectacular, oversized “satan, or head of a damned soul,” which blake engraved, after an oil sketch by fuseli, in a format that was too big to fit the dimensions of johann caspar lavater’s essays on physiognomy (1789–​98). at this point, a window-shaped opening through the wall offered a glimpse into a radiant-yellow future. this architectural feature remediated blake’s a vision: the inspiration of the poet (elisha in the chamber on the wall ) (c. 1819–​20, tate britain), yet the view of plates from jerusalem also evoked the use of holes in walls to offer city dwellers a view of the celestial jerusalem.anthony bale, “from nidaros to jerusalem; from feginsbrekka to mount joy,” tracing the jerusalem code, volume 1: the holy city: christian cultures in medieval scandinavia (ca. 1100–1536), ed. kristin b. aavitsland and line m. bonde (berlin: de gruyter, 2021) 191-97. depending on their orientation, viewers peering through the hole cut through the gallery of the past could see one of two numinous relief etchings from jerusalem: either “los at the forge,” his spectre hovering bat winged above him and “suggesting murderous thoughts against albion” (jerusalem 6.7, e 149; no. 93d), or “a dying swan and a fish-like spirit,” positioned as head and tail vignettes with text in between, an impression of plate 11 of jerusalem, which the curators titled “the river spirits” (no. 93e). beyond the window hung two of blake’s seven engravings from dante, “the circle of the corrupt officials: the devils mauling each other” (inferno 22; no. 45) and “the circle of the lustful” (inferno 5; no. 46), and versions of the subject of ugolino and his sons (inferno 33) from the 1780s, as well as a late tempera (1826–​27). the transition between the past and the present was taken up by blake’s engagement with the sculptural group of the laocoön, documented through commissions to illustrate flaxman’s essay on sculpture for abraham rees’s cyclopædia (1815–​16) and the large etching “יה & his two sons satan & adam as they were copied from the cherubim of solomons temple by three rhodians & applied to natural fact. or history of ilium,” blake’s own image-text laocoön invention. his graphite and watercolor drawing of the laocoön next to the door to the present represents a free version capturing the vehement passions and power of pain in laocoön’s predicament, in radical contrast to theories of beauty advocating containment of emotion and the composure of the classical ideal associated with winckelmann. this drawing (no. 50) was one of the works that the fitzwilliam was proud to display as items from the collection of geoffrey keynes that have recently come into the possession of the museum.other such works mentioned by luke syson and alexander klar in their “directors’ foreword” (william blake’s universe 6) are the first state of “joseph of arimathea” (no. 12b) and the first state of the frontispiece to jerusalem (no. 93b). blake’s contrast between “grecian … mathematic form” and gothic’s “living form” in the single-sheet relief etching on homers poetry [and] on virgil (1822) on the same wall cued the reader to look back to the opposite wall, which documented a longue-durée engagement with the subject of “joseph of arimathea,” developed from the figure of a soldier in michelangelo’s fresco the crucifixion of st. peter in the cappella paolina in the vatican. this composition was represented by three versions: a renaissance print of the single figure abstracted from michelangelo’s work, attributed to nicolas beatrizet, which is the likely source; an engraving (1773) with blake’s caption “engraved when i was a beginner at basires from a drawing by salviati after michel angelo” proudly entered in black ink in the lower margin; and a later version (1810–​25) with the following lettering beneath the printed area: “engraved by w blake 1773 from an old italian drawing | this is one of the gothic artists who built the cathedrals in what we call the dark ages | wandering about in sheep skins & goat skins of whom the world was not worthy | such were the christians | in all ages,” and the authorship of the composition proclaimed in larger letters below: “michael angelo pinxit.” these two wall displays synoptically captured phases and processes of copying and invention at the heart of blake’s relationship with classical and gothic forms. the present: europe in flames the idea of the present as europe in flames was powerfully conveyed by a fiery-colored room with a thunderbolt-shaped partition wall in the middle hosting a disbound copy of blake’s europe a prophecy. printed on rectos only, copy k achieved an architectural rebinding of sorts through the structure of the concertina wall that made it possible to pair plates placed one next to the other in a format that evoked book openings. this late copy, printed in 1821, is one of only two that include “five windows light,” a text setting up a fairytale scene of inspiration reminiscent of shakespeare’s midsummer night’s dream, which is a source for blake’s choice of a dreamscape timescale revolving around the sleep of enitharmon. the first half of the poem faced a selection of plates from america a prophecy copy o on the left wall. both illuminated books have been in the fitzwilliam collection since 1950, thanks to the bequest of t. h. riches, whose blakes constitute one of the nuclei of the museum’s blake collection represented in the exhibition, alongside keynes’s. the next section in the display of the present featured blake’s relationship with race. america’s hopes for the end of empire—​“let the slave grinding at the mill, run out into the field” (6.6, e 53)—​are complicated by the treatment of race and slavery in his corpus. “the little black boy,” placed on a vertical stand, acted as a partition, making both recto and verso visible and thus capturing problematic constructions of race that contrast blackness of skin complexion with whiteness of soul, evidenced in this fitzwilliam copy by the black boy turning white in contact with jesus on the second page. the racial power dynamic of the poem and its illustrations is carefully identified in the catalogue (no. 54), as is the “objectification and eroticization of the enslaved” in blake’s illustrations to john gabriel stedman’s narrative, of a five years’ expedition, against the revolted negroes of surinam (1796), on which blake worked in 1792–​93 (nos. 53a-c). the fitzwilliam’s own entanglement with capital deriving from the slave trade translated in the adoption of the decolonial practice of the trigger warning: “the objects in this case include outdated racist and derogatory terminology.”wall caption above the stedman vitrine. the museum’s association with slavery stems from the wealth that the founder, richard fitzwilliam, derived from his maternal grandfather, sir matthew decker, director of the royal africa and east india company. this connection was the motivation behind the exhibition black atlantic: power, people, resistance (8 september 2023–​7 january 2024): see <https://​www.​museumsassociation.​org/​museums-​journal/​news/​2023/​06/​fitzwilliam-​museum-​explores-​founders-​links-​to-​slavery-​in-​new-​exhibition>. what is achieved by this trigger-warning caption is questionable. by contrast, recent decolonial engagements with the stedman plates articulated a poetics of appropriation and dissemination through practices of remixing in the black atlantic exhibition that closed the month before the opening of william blake’s universe.regular visitors to the fitzwilliam would remember an installation by jacqueline bishop in the black atlantic exhibition. her history at the dinner table features dinner plates illustrated with “beautiful botanical images overlaid with … very traumatic images,” detailing a “history of enslavement and violence against women”: see jacqueline bishop and victoria avery (keeper of european sculpture and decorative arts at the fitzwilliam), <https://​www.​youtube.​com/​watch?v=tiw-vhuf9l0>. yet the empty space in this part of the wall was a powerful curatorial decision: placing these plates in a vitrine, rather than hanging on the wall, reflected not only the materiality of the work as a bound book, but also the curators’ ethics of horizontality. in line with recent decolonial interventions to topple statues of people involved in slavery, including the decision to institutionalize the horizontal ruination of the statue of edward colston in bristol, the stedman illustrations were denied the verticality associated with the heroic form.see “figure 13: the toppled edward colston statue on public display at m shed, bristol, 7 june 2021,” in edwin coomasaru et al., “monuments must fall,” british art studies 24 (2023). on the curators’ ethics of horizontality, see calè, “william blake’s universe: an interview.” blake’s engravings for stedman offer a powerful window on the work of the commercial engraver. while the vitrine stated that they “were based on stedman’s original drawings, which are now lost,” some stedman watercolors are available at a click through the digitization of the stedman archive at the university of minnesota. although these designs are not the basis for blake’s engravings, noting their existence could open up questions about the impulse to eroticize slave bodies. the intersection between visionary and commercial invention in blake’s engagement with slavery is explored in richard price and sally price’s edition of stedman’s manuscript, which sheds light on competing interests within the publishing world of joseph johnson, evidenced by the deletion of criticism of plantation brutality and the insertion of a position against immediate abolition in the 1796 preface.“narrative of a five years expedition against the revolted negroes of surinam,” transcribed for the first time from the original 1790 manuscript, ed. with introduction and notes by richard price and sally price (baltimore: johns hopkins university press, 1988) xlix, l. digital reproductions of stedman’s watercolors are available at <https://​umedia.​lib.​umn.​edu/​item/​p16022coll187:968>. yet this powerful record of the ideologies of publishing was not distilled in the exhibition display, nor in the catalogue. more resonances with blake’s engagement with slavery in the continental prophecies might have articulated the relationship between commercial commissions and prophetic invention by placing visions of the daughters of albion closer to the stedman plates and by displaying the africa section of the song of los, represented by the title page and full-plate designs of copy a, on loan from the british museum. instead of opting for paraphrases, whose summaries are often debatable in themselves, captions to individual plates could have drawn out revolutionary connections in the preludium to europe. christine gallant points out that the figure about to knife the traveller is racialized and blake’s reference to “dark and desolate mountains / in forests of eternal death” (europe 2.5-6, e 61) is “curiously close to the guerrilla techniques of warfare employed by surinam maroons that stedman describes,” as are the fires, while the signet is a well-known tool of slave ownership.christine gallant, “blake’s coded designs of slave revolts,” wordsworth circle 42.3 (2011): 211–17. the entangled economy of slavery in the global eighteenth century might have been more in focus in the shift from blake’s europe to the continental prophecies and blake’s universe. blake’s millenarian approach to the revolutionary process is explained in bindman’s catalogue essay, which provides a broader understanding and evidence of further works treating subjects appearing in the prophetic books, such as the plagues in europe, in relation to longer histories of natural and political cataclysms within which to situate “the destroying angels’ work” in the present moment.david bindman, “blake’s continental prophecies: apocalypse and revolution,” william blake’s universe 84-89. the revolutionary process in the making was captured through competing commercial, satirical, and apocalyptic encodings of the history of the present. blake’s commercial illustration of the french revolution after charles reuben ryley for bellamy’s picturesque magazine (1793; no. 58) represents the royalist trope of marie antoinette as a damsel in distress to be protected from the mob attacking versailles in october 1789. evidence of the changing resonances of the horsemen of the apocalypse was provided through a gouache by west (1783–​1803; no. 60) that documented a commission for the chapel of revealed religion at windsor castle, conceived in the late 1770s, whose millenarian composition came to be felt so close to the revolutionary process as to be shelved. the apocalyptic subject’s potential application to contemporary events was evident in james gillray’s satire “presages of the millennium” (1795; no. 59). both images provide a spectrum of possibilities for the number of figures and their grouping, conveying the kinetic and catastrophic energy of biblical and historical painting and its satire. by contrast, the concentrated, pared-down composition of blake’s watercolor death on a pale horse (1800; no. 61) stood out for its dramatic and meditative depth. garnet terry adopted a different approach in his diagrammatic “prophetic vision: daniel’s great image,” a large allegorical image folded into twelve to fit the size of the accompanying open pamphlet: such is the scale required for “daniel’s great image of the mystical body of babylon, shewing the destruction of antichrist, the beast, the whore, and the false prophet; according to rev. xix:20” (1793; no. 62). the final mise-en-scène for the present featured a selection of prison images, starting with george romney’s drawings of howard visiting prisons and lazarettos (1790–​95; nos. 63a-b). a stipple engraving by moses haughton (1813; no. 64) documented fuseli’s lost painting the vision of the lazar house, inspired by one of the scenes of futurity that the archangel michael reveals to adam in milton’s paradise lost (11.477-90), which was ready by january 1795 and on view as picture 24 at fuseli’s milton gallery at james christie’s auction rooms in 1799 and 1800, one of the literary gallery schemes that blake was originally associated with. although, oddly, neither paradise lost nor the milton gallery is referenced in the catalogue, this is the context in which blake produced three versions of the large color monotype the house of death (1795), one of the twelve large color prints from “historical and poetical subjects” (1795/​1805), here represented by the extraordinary version owned by the fitzwilliam, from the same bequest that brought the late europe and america. after following the path through “europe in flames” around the central partition, viewers saw the dividing wall between the present and the galleries of the past and the future, which were parallel to each other. it displayed two arresting approaches to mediate the genealogies and prospects of the present. the first, barry’s etching and aquatint “the phoenix, or the resurrection of freedom” (1776; no. 51), draws on a classical idiom to visualize the rebirth of revolutionary time embodied in the temple of american liberty beyond the waters, hailed by a transhistorical group of “friends of liberty” gathered by the tomb of britannia, including algernon sidney, john milton, andrew marvell, john locke, and a self-portrait of barry himself. the radical caption marks out the publisher john almon, known for his radical whig network and as a publisher of newspapers and pamphlets, including thomas paine’s common sense. the bust of an oddly hovering, winged allegorical figure of old father time, scythe in hand, comes into the composition from the top-left corner, a tuft of hair on his bald head identifying his association with kairos and the need to seize the moment to secure this ephemeral moment of fugitive freedom. the cross-atlantic poetics and politics of this fascinating print are magisterially researched by co-curator esther chadwick in her book the radical print; sarah haggarty’s essay in the exhibition catalogue integrates the print’s reference to kairos within a wider discussion of temporality in blake’s corpus.esther chadwick, the radical print: art and politics in late eighteenth-century britain (new haven: yale university press, 2024); sarah haggarty, “blake, time and the present moment,” william blake’s universe 18-25. a different, future-oriented image of man’s revolutionary resurrection was represented by a bold pairing architecturally structured as a diptych to the left of the entrance to the future: jacques-louis perée’s “droits de l’homme” (rights of man) (1795–​96; no. 122), featuring a male nude that the curators associated with the apollo belvedere, one arm holding a pickaxe, the other thrust upwards with a scroll inscribed “droits de l’homme,” in dialogue with blake’s “albion rose” (“glad day” or “the dance of albion”) (1794–​96). placed next to perée’s revolutionary icon, blake’s albion stood as a more abstract image of transcendence, the dawn of a new world, ushering the viewer into the future. while perée was the only non-british element of the revolutionary present, the future was anglo-german. the future: spiritual renewal the radiant-yellow future began with a room devoted to “blake’s new religious style” in a range of formats, from poetical and biblical series to compositions toward public works. the first works to meet the eye of the viewer entering the future were three new testament watercolors selected from the eighty biblical subjects that blake painted for butts in the early 1800s: the soldiers casting lots for christ’s garments (no. 68), the angel of the divine presence clothing adam and eve with coats of skins (1803), and the ascension (1805–​06). on the right-hand side of the room hung an allegory of the spiritual condition of man (1811?), from graham robertson’s collection, blake’s largest extant composition. bindman’s catalogue entry presents this work “as an exercise in public art,” citing blake’s descriptive catalogue (1809), in which he compares his paintings of the “spiritual forms” of nelson and of pitt to “those apotheoses of persian, hindoo, and egyptian antiquity” and envisages producing works “on a scale that is suitable to the grandeur of the nation … [with] the figures … one hundred feet in height.” blake was also working on a lost painting of the last judgement, for which a number of watercolors survive. this suggests some kind of sistine chapel-like structure, adorned with large ‘fresco’ paintings that would act as a permanent public reminder of the nation’s true path to redemption.david bindman, william blake’s universe 135 (no. 72), citing a descriptive catalogue of pictures, poetical and historical inventions, painted by william blake (london, 1809) 3, e 530; 5, e 531. while the tate britain blake retrospective in 2019–​20 focused on the contrast between the “originals seen in my visions” and the space blake had available by reproducing the dimensions of the actual display of 1809, the focus at the fitzwilliam was on religious iconography across formats and genres. the opposite wall featured twelve watercolors from milton’s paradise regained (1816–​18), perhaps originally intended for butts, but bought by linnell in 1825. a selection from illustrations of the book of job (1825–​26) captured a different engagement with the biblical canon, which the curators put into dialogue with “runge’s ambitions for a gesamtkunstwerk,” especially connecting plate 14, “when the morning stars sang together,” with runge’s depiction of “night” in tageszeiten (times of day, 1802–​10; nos. 73c, 79b). the second room of the future concentrated on the mystical print and visual culture produced by the corpus of the seventeenth-century german cobbler turned christian philosopher jacob böhme. his work was introduced by an allegorical portrait by nicolaus häublin, which “presents böhme as a prophet of christ’s second coming,” first published in 1677, then used as a frontispiece to mysterium magnum in 1679 (no. 74). cecilia muratori’s fascinating and beautifully illustrated catalogue essay illuminates the visual appeal of artisanal material culture mediating böhme’s philosophy by means of the three-dimensional, movable-flap engineering of dionysius andreas freher (1649–​1728). to represent “man in his different three-fold state,” freher produced three tables—​which the catalogue reproduces through photographs featuring closed and open flaps (no. 75 and figs. 15-18)—​accompanied by “an extensive unpublished treatise, which freher titled an explication of three very different tables.” however, as muratori notes, the tables also circulated as independent works: “holes at the top of these three cardboard sheets suggest they may have been pinned to a wall and viewed as devotional images,” but they were “best known through their inclusion as spectacular engraved flap-prints in the law edition of böhme” (1764–​81).cecilia muratori, “‘michel angelo could not have done better’: dionysius andreas freher and the visual transmission of german mysticism in eighteenth-century england,” william blake’s universe 146-52 (on 149). crabb robinson noted that blake commented on “the figures in law’s translation as being very beautiful. michael angelo could not have done better.”reporting a dinner that took place at the london home of the german collectors karl and elizabeth aders on 10 december 1825; see henry crabb robinson, diary, reminiscences, and correspondence, ed. thomas sadler, 3 vols. (london, 1869) 2: 305; william blake’s universe 142. copies of this edition from the cambridge university library and from trinity college, cambridge, were open to the title page and to diagrams of “the tree of the soul” and “the true principles of all things,” which invited comparisons to the diagram of the four zoas in blake’s milton. “the third table”, with its slightly raised flaps, held the promise of layers designed to be lifted to reveal the threefold state of man from macrocosm to the body’s interior. although this potential could not be fulfilled within museum conditions, the mobile engineering of the illustrations was demonstrated on a copy of the law edition owned by the ritman library in amsterdam in a video projected on the opposite wall.this animation was produced for the böhme exhibition alles in allem, curated by claudia brink, lucinda martin, and cecilia muratori at the staatliche kunstsammlungen dresden in 2017. this material culture of mysticism was the shared source underpinning the next and final move in this fascinating exhibition, the comparison between blake and german mysticism in the long gallery of the future. chadwick’s catalogue essay sheds light on visionary experiences of nature in response to the predicaments of the present: “when blake imagined heaven in a wildflower, europe had been at war for over a decade.”esther chadwick, “introduction: blake, runge and visionary art in europe c. 1800,” william blake’s universe 10-17 (on 11). a view from the future opened a window onto classical training through the wall shared with the parallel gallery of the past, reversing the view from the past, which set the expectation of seeing the heavenly jerusalem in the jerusalem plates hanging in the room of the future. the connections made in this section of the exhibition are underpinned by james vigus’s catalogue essay on crabb robinson’s role in introducing blake to the german reading public. vigus reconstructs crabb robinson’s anglo-german cultural ties, going back to his studies at the university of jena, then detailing his connections with hamburg, including with the bookshop of friedrich christoph perthes in 1805. crabb robinson’s blake essay was published in the second volume of perthes’s vaterländishes museum (1810–​11), a periodical “dedicated to cultivating german patriotism as an anti-napoleonic weapon.” to make a case for “blake as a european artist,” crabb robinson noted the influence of albrecht dürer, moravian hymns, and emanuel swedenborg.james vigus, “henry crabb robinson, william blake, and anglo-german cultural relations,” william blake’s universe 153-55. a wall devoted to runge’s work on times of day activated a productive dialogue of forms with blake’s job plates. in addition to the connection made in the catalogue between runge’s “night” and blake’s engraving of the morning of creation in illustrations of the book of job, runge’s naked female personification of aurora in preparatory studies for and paintings of the morning (nos. 81-85) recalls a design for edward young’s night thoughts (1797). blake illustrates the asterisked line “where sense runs savage broke from reason’s chain” (night iii, line 22), visualizing sense through a female personification of sensory mysticism, thus working against the negative connotations that young’s text emphasizes in the following line, “and sings false peace, till smother’d by the pall.”edward young, the complaint, and the consolation; or, night thoughts (london: edwards, 1797) 46. consider runge’s versions of aurora: jan steinke notes associations with both venus and mary in the first version (1808; no. 81); in a construction drawing from 1808, “several lines … intersect at her groin” (164, no. 82b); a composition study dated 1809 positions aurora on a vertical central axis, using triangulation to relate elements of the composition by means of lines converging in her womb (no. 85). for a technical description of this drawing, see peter prange’s entry in the hamburger kunsthalle’s online collection, <https://​online-sammlung.​hamburger-kunsthalle.de/​de/​objekt/​34194>. runge’s iconography and geometry of composition suggest an embodied mysticism that can be compared with blake’s approach to bodily organs as mystical gates to transcendence. actual points of contact between the two artists are not known, nor whether runge had a chance to see a copy of the night thoughts engravings, although the volume was among blake’s best-known works. on the basis of similarities with the framing borders of the job engravings, sibylle erle wonders whether blake saw engravings of runge’s times of day, given that the german collectors karl and elizabeth aders owned a copy, which he might have seen when he dined at their house in london in december 1825.sibylle erle, “blake in hamburg,” vala 5 (november 2024) 135-36 (on 136); see note 16 for evidence of blake’s visit to their home. in bringing such a rich apparatus of works associated with times of day in dialogue with blake, the exhibition raised questions that will nourish research to come. joseph leo koerner’s catalogue essay on “runge’s times” illustrates the convergence of botanical, folk, mystical, and craft engagement with plants, from scissor-work and silhouettes to drawing, in the attempt to capture images of becoming and epochs, and “portray the experience of time in the medium of images.”joseph leo koerner, “runge’s times,” william blake’s universe 178-85 (on 182). runge’s botanical vision of the hours differs from neoclassical personifications drawing on classical mythology visualized by flaxman, while both also translated into motifs for interior decoration, as they did in goethe’s house in weimar. in runge’s botanical symbolism koerner observes the phases of the plant cycle compressed in the image of the plant “radically reimagining” lessing’s notion of the point in time or “fruitful moment.” in its theorization of experiential, natural, and mystical time, koerner’s reading of runge offers a fascinating counterpoint to haggarty’s essay about kairos, or the fugitive, climactic moment in blake. while runge’s mysticism of the lily peopled with diminutive allegorical human forms is quite different from blake’s dynamic darwinian loves of the plants, comparison between the two artists invites renewed attention to the mysterious full-plate illustration to the song of los retitled “king and queen on a lily” in the room of the present, and to “lovers in the water lily,” the head vignette to chapter 2 of jerusalem, positioned on the other side of the dividing wall of the future. to look back from the end of the future was to see a new dawn, embodied in the engraving, etching, and drypoint print of “albion rose” (c. 1804, but captioned “wb inv 1780”; no. 94) hanging on the end of the partition wall. blake’s iconic image is often used as a framing device for his corpus: while tate britain positioned it at the entrance of their 2019–​20 retrospective, the curators of william blake’s universe used two versions to mark the beginning and ending of the room of the future. the transition from political to mystical inflections of the composition was told through a contrast with the earlier, color-printed version, juxtaposed with perée’s “droits de l’homme” at the threshold from the revolutionary present to the future. at the end of the future room, by contrast, the curatorial line of sight invited a comparison between runge’s female body of aurora and blake’s male personification of “albion rose” as a different kind of “glad day,” with a newly added bat-like moth and worm indicating resurrection from the physical world of mortality. the penultimate four lines of jerusalem provided an evocative wall inscription to capture the mysticism of natural history: “all human forms identified even tree metal earth & stone. all / human forms identified, living going forth & returning wearied / into the planetary lives of years months days & hours reposing / and then awaking into his bosom in the life of immortality” (jerusalem 99.1-4, e 258). the choice to have blake’s jerusalem facing caspar david friedrich’s lebensalter, literally “ages of life” but translated as the ages of man in the exhibition and catalogue (c. 1826; no. 86), produced a startling contrast in modes of attention. friedrich’s seven sepia sketches were received as “dream images”: such “riddles or artistic hieroglyphs … exercise the imagination far more than they satisfy the eye,” said a contemporary reviewer.cited by andreas stolzenburg in his catalogue entry for friedrich in william blake’s universe (172). these essential elemental compositions in which the human form is diminutive, almost accessory, could not be more different from the compressed intensity of the jerusalem plates. positioned in a section on romantic nationalism, jerusalem was also in dialogue with other approaches to national identity. william vaughan’s catalogue essay offers a helpful comparative framing for converging and diverging ways of seeing the nation refracted in the elements of nature featured in the exhibition, from iconographies of the fatherland that runge produced for perthes’s vaterländishes museum, and friedrich’s patriotic and obliquely anti-french german landscapes, to samuel palmer’s conservative organic rural idylls.william vaughan, “romantic nationalism in germany and britain,” william blake’s universe 204-11. while blake’s engagement with böhme and swedenborg is often discussed, in drawing german connections within blake’s universe, this bold, imaginative, original, and elegant exhibition offered new ways of seeing and stimulated formal, historical, and metaphysical questions about romantic art in a millenarian european art world. “if you want to learn the secrets, close your eyes”: bruce dickinson’s “gates of urizen” as contrary version of the [first] book of urizen “if you want to learn the secrets, close your eyes”: bruce dickinson’s “gates of urizen” as contrary version of the [first] book of urizen by katharina hagen katharina hagen (katharina.hagen@ruhr-uni-bochum.de), ma, is a phd student of english literary and cultural studies at the university of saarland. her research interests are intertextuality and intermediality with a strong focus on popular culture. she is also a guest author for zoamorphosis, the blake 2.0 blog—​william blake in art, music, film, and literature. urizen, the protagonist of william blake’s the [first] book of urizen (1794), is a dark character who represents tyranny, suppression, and reason. while urizen retells events in the form of a book, depicting an unchangeable past, bruce dickinson’s song “gates of urizen” (the chemical wedding, 1998) concentrates on enlightenment and the escape from urizenic restrictions. both focus on contrasts—​imagination and reason, open space and enclosure, mind and body, mobility and fixture, success and failure. whereas the separation of contraries los and urizen leads to misery and chaos in urizen, it produces positive results in “gates”: dickinson’s adaptation changes the outcome of urizen and turns the plot into practical advice on how to pass the gates of urizen. by comparing metaphors of imprisonment and freedom in both texts, such as impaired vision and prophetic sight or the contrast between being earthbound and airborne, i shed light on how “gates” turns a dystopic mythology into a philosophy of life. the mysticism of blake: dickinson’s concept album the chemical wedding is a concept album governed by two major themes and their interrelation, the work of blake and the occult. as dickinson explains in what does this button do? an autobiography: most of the album was heavily influenced by blake—​not just in a literal sense, but in a spiritual one. blake was almost certainly an alchemist or a member of a group relating to the occult or magical philosophy. at the same time, i was struck by his two characters “los” and “urizen.” los (or sol backwards) was creative and doomed forever to have his head buried in a bucket of fire, symbolising the torture of the endlessly creative soul. urizen was the cold repository of logic, chained to a rock, dismal and brooding. to me they seemed like characters in blake’s subconscious, acting out the drama in his soul, expressed as art and poetry. i had some inkling of what it felt like to love the creativity but be held back by the grim realities of the commercial and the fear of change. i could relate to blake. (269) although this essay shows that dickinson clearly dismantles this popular yet simplified characterization of urizen, the dichotomy between los and urizen is still a major theme of the album, which not only retells their narratives but also uses their characters as archetypes representing the inner struggle of the artist. los and urizen as embodiments of creativity and commerce represent a dilemma that questions, in the long run, the very nature of art. the use of blakean references and ideas inspired by blake, combined with occultist thought, results in a complex conglomerate of allusions. the album is thus not a simple musical adaptation of blake’s work. as one might expect, it features “jerusalem”—​the best known and most frequently set to music of blake’s poemswhittaker’s recent discography mentions 406 recordings/​scores.—​but dickinson has added lyrics to expose, as he says, “the pagan-alchemical verse i thought represented its true meaning” (what does this button do? 269), and slightly changed the blakean lines. blake, the temptation and fall of eve, from illustrations to milton’s paradise lost, thomas set (1807). 25.4 x 20.8 cm. courtesy of the huntington art museum, san marino, california. 000.10. in the song “book of thel” he refers to blake’s art: the image of a snake coiled around a body in a kiss is reminiscent of the pencil sketch eve tempted by the serpent (butlin #589 recto) and watercolor illustrations to milton’s paradise lost, satan watching the endearments of adam and eve and the temptation and fall of eve. “gates” and “book” both include blakean characters, but frame them into new story arcs. references to the occult are numerous and various, covering fictional representations as well as occultist knowledge itself. “book,” for instance, quotes one of the witches from shakespeare’s macbeth, “return of the king” evokes arthurian legend by mentioning uther pendragon, hinting at mystic (or druid) britain, and “the tower” incorporates tarot imagery into the lyrics: the chorus enumerates archetypes of the major arcana, such as the tower, the lovers, and the moon.the major arcana are the twenty-two mostly numbered archetypes in a tarot deck, in contrast to the minor arcana, which are organized like ordinary playing cards. for more detail on how a tarot deck fit for divination is structured, see “tarot” in the encyclopedia britannica, <https://​www.​britannica.​com/​topic/​tarot>. the blakean references are thus firmly embedded in a framework of occultist thought. strengthening this connection between blake’s work and the occult, the album is linked to several schools of mysticism. the title, the chemical wedding, refers to one of the manifestos of the rosicrucian order, chymische hochzeit christiani rosencreutz anno 1459 (1616; the chymical wedding of christian rosenkreutz),dickinson explains that his script for the film chemical wedding (2008) was inspired by the manifesto and that he used the same title for this album (what does this button do? 268). thus, by logical extension, the album too was inspired by the manifesto. a text strongly rooted in alchemy.the maiden who accompanies the guests during the wedding preparations and ceremonies is called alchemia (andreae, notes, 175). see also steiner. the title is also reminiscent of practices of sex magic as proclaimed by several groups seeking spiritual enlightenment that blake was familiar with (such as the moravians), emanuel swedenborg’s teachings about the enhancement of spiritual vision by the means of what he calls conjugial love, and blake’s own infusion of his poetry and art with references to sex magic (see schuchard). one such example is the sketch eve tempted by the serpent (schuchard 63), one of the works that apparently served as inspiration for “book.” in sum, by combining allusions to the occult, the album traces different schools of mysticism at whose center sit blake’s prophetic sight and understanding of religion. the song “gates” is an open text that contains references to several of blake’s works and brings them into relation with each other, thereby forming a new and independent narrative. it retells the beginning of urizen, but later parts way with the hypotext. as above, so below all things come from the one now you are the victim carried by the wind, rooted in the ground if you want to learn the secrets close your eyes the ladder falls away at the gates of urizen fallen eagles blaze at the gates of urizen eternal twins are damned at the gates of urizen separate lives begin in every woman is a man from the moon come silver ghosts spectres of the blood from my spirit comes the darkness from the void, the crimson fortress rises at the gates of urizen the ladder falls away at the gates of urizen fallen eagles blaze at the gates of urizen eternal twins are damned at the gates of urizen separate lives begin at the gates of urizen the ladder falls away at the gates of urizen fallen eagles blaze at the gates of urizen eternal twins are damned at the gates of urizen separate lives begin at the gates of urizen the gates of urizen the gates of urizen at the gatesthe lyrics reflect the recorded versions. those in the booklet (the chemical wedding, expanded ed., 2005) differ slightly: “gathered by the wind” for “carried by the wind”; “then rooted in the ground” for “rooted in the ground”; and, in the first use of the line, “separate lives began” for “separate lives begin.” “gates of urizen” words and music by paul dickinson and roger ramirez. © copyright 1998 rumba zealous music/​duellist enterprises ltd. bmg rights management (uk) ltd., a bmg company. all rights reserved. international copyright secured. used by permission of hal leonard europe limited. although the song is informed by blakean imagery and thought, it must be seen as part of the larger framework of the concept album. it adds as much to this framework as it is informed by it. the tarot imagery in “tower,” for example, emphasizes the references to occultist knowledge in “gates.” “gates,” in turn, connects the concept of tarot cards to blakean thought. the nature of tarot cards—​secret visual symbols that can be decoded only by the adept and that enable spiritual vision or divination—​informs the reading of the advice in “gates”: “if you want to learn the secrets / close your eyes.” secret knowledge, physical and spiritual vision, and understanding are concepts that are intertwined in both tarot and the work of blake. as another instance of the dense web of interconnections, the first line of the chorus of “tower” describes the resurrection of the king and queen, who are bridegroom and bride, in the tower in chymische hochzeit (andreae 76-91), thus alluding not only to the manifesto but also to tarot, the title of the album, and the title song. chymische hochzeit is the description of a spiritual experience, which is not reliant on the physical senses, but spiritual vision (steiner 135-37), so this reference adds another layer to the conceptual context. dickinson’s reinterpretation of urizen: “the dark power hid” dickinson introduces this suppressive character as a threat. he begins his narrative with a direct quotation from urizen, but shapes his version by the choice and placement of the quotation. “gates” is preceded by a spoken introduction on the previous track, “book of thel” (or, in the case of the live album scream for me brazil [1999], “chemical wedding”), which is taken from the first chapter of urizen: “what demon / hath form’d this abominable void / this soul-shudd’ring vacuum? some / said / ‘it is urizen’, but unknown, abstracted / brooding secret, the dark power hid” (object 3, lines 5-10).all quotations from blake are taken from the william blake archive. quotations from urizen are from its latest realization, copy g. urizen is introduced as a “dark power” that has hidden in obscurity, a lurking threat. “gates” mirrors this disappearance by placing the introduction not as part of the track itself, but at the end of the track before, so that urizen is concealed for the moment a cd or mp3 player skips from one to the next. he hides even more if the listener separates the titles, be it by shuffling or picking songs. in the age of streaming and download purchases, a customer might decide to listen to “gates” in isolation, a scenario in which the first appearance of the “dark power” would remain “unknown” and “hid[den]” forever.in scream for me brazil, the introduction of urizen is even more complex. the quotation from chapter 1 at the end of “chemical wedding” is preceded by part of the preludium, which appears at the end of “king in crimson” (which in turn precedes “chemical wedding”): “of the primeval priests assum’d power, / when eternals spurnd back his religion; / and gave him a place in the north, / obscure, shadowy, void, solitary” (object 2, lines 7-10). in this case, the introduction of urizen is given more detail, and he hides twice before he reappears in “gates.” the misplacement of urizen into the wrong track (wrong in the sense that he does not belong in the world of blake’s thel or dickinson’s thel) adds even more to the eerie atmosphere and anticipated danger created by his sudden appearance/​disappearance. blake, europe copy a (composed 1794, printed 1795), object 1. 23.4 x 16.9 cm. yale center for british art, paul mellon collection. b1992.8.4(1). image courtesy of the william blake archive. to strengthen his reading of urizen as a threat, dickinson pronounces the name to rhyme with “horizon” rather than “reason.”the pronunciation differs in the spoken introduction on the studio album. on the live album scream for me brazil, the introduction corresponds to the song. this choice places more emphasis on urizen as one who restricts, confines space, creates boundaries, and expects others to submit to his rule(s). urizen sets up or measures the horizon as a boundary, as can be seen in his depiction as “the ancient of days.” as he is a character who imprisons, the “gates of urizen” are the one element to break his power—​passing the gates means entering or escaping his realm and his influence. they are the gates to another world, one not ruled by reason and the bodily senses, and they thus resemble blake’s “doors of perception,” which enable man to see “every thing … as it is, infinite” (marriage copy g, object 13, a memorable fancy). incarceration in a physical body, imperfect eyesight, and the ability to see the gates are the chance to escape the urizenic world of logic, reason, and impaired vision. blake’s work deals extensively with the concepts of eyesight and vision, as sarah eron argues: blake’s preoccupation with sight extends beyond his biblical poems. in turning to an analysis of urizen, we might recall the opening epigraph on the title page of visions of the daughters of albion, “the eye sees more than the heart knows.” here, blake plays with our concept of vision by destabilizing the traditional association of sight with knowledge. if the language of prophecy is dependent upon foresight, a knowledge that stems from visionary perception, then the eye’s perceptions might dictate the knowledge of the mind or heart. however, in visions blake suggests that we see more than we know, or, in other words, we never internalize all of our perceptions. this is a phenomenon that can be explained through the narrative of urizenic genesis, a myth that seeks to unfold the story of man’s emergence into a world of “narrowing perceptions.” (par. 2, emphasis in original) blake presents eyesight either as too broad for the mind to understand, as in visions, or as limited by the body, as in urizen. reduction of the visual sense is a central and repeated theme of the poem—​urizen “creates a world of single vision, where reason and the shrunken physical senses become the narrow windows of perception, the ‘narrow chinks’ of man’s ‘cavern’ as blake puts it in the marriage of heaven and hell ” (ibata par. 14). but urizen not only reduces eyesight; physically his eyesight too is reduced. los, appalled by what has become of him, gives him a physical body, including eyes: “his [urizen’s] nervous brain shot branches / round the branches of his heart / on high into two little orbs / and fixed in two little caves” (object 13, lines 13-16). yet these eyes do not expand urizen’s vision; they diminish it. he cannot perceive his surroundings, “except what his little orbs / of sight by degrees unfold” (object 15, lines 35-36).leonard argues that urizen has induced his state of reduced (eye)sight by himself. as a consequence, he has very little “optical consciousness,” while “the ‘optical unconscious,’ what he might see if his ‘doors of perception’ were cleansed, rolls like a sea around him” (921-22). while i agree that urizen refrains from relying on spiritual sight instead of physical sight, i argue that the impaired vision of his physical eyes is caused by los, who has created urizen’s body. in another example of the reduction of sight, urizen creates the net of religion, with disastrous results: “the remaining sons of urizen / beheld their brethren shrink together / beneath the net of urizen / … / and their eyes could not discern, / their brethren of other cities” (object 27, lines 14-16, 20-21). mollyanne marks illustrates that the effects of the net on the inhabitants of this world imitate the previous descriptions of the creation (fall) of the world and of los’s “organization” of urizen into human form. the shrinking inward, the hardening, the closing off of the senses, are all repeated and extensive verbal echoes appear. (588) the reduction of sight thus happens threefold, firstly by the creation of the world by urizen, secondly by the creation of urizen’s body by los, and thirdly by the creation of the net of religion. in “gates,” urizen becomes a prisoner too, confined to his body by los: “all things come from the one / now you are the victim.” the one from whom all things come can be either urizen or los, as both are creators, but “now you are the victim” can only refer to urizen, who has become a prisoner himself. the embodiment of horizon, the creator of boundaries and limits, is incarcerated in a body and chained up. the line that follows—​“carried by the wind, rooted in the ground”—​reinforces my reading that the song retells the narrative of urizen at this point, since it hints at the creation process of urizen’s body. his body parts are repeatedly exposed to wind: “upon the winds” (object 12, line 43), “hiding carefully from the wind” (object 13, line 17), and “hanging upon the wind” (object 13, line 29). the roots in “gates” may be seen as extensions of the branches in urizen: “his nervous brain shot branches / round the branches of his heart” (object 13, lines 13-14). “rooted in the ground” also describes the full-page design on object 11, which shows urizen chained, firmly fixed to the ground. blake, the [first] book of urizen copy g (composed 1794, printed c. 1818), object 11. 15.6 x 10.1 cm. library of congress, lessing j. rosenwald collection. catalogue number 1807. image courtesy of the william blake archive. “rooted in the ground” sums up a central plot element and key idea of urizen, the binding and fixation of urizen by los. yet dickinson’s text does not merely describe the plate and retell the event—​it also interprets the narrative. urizen’s fixation is open to two readings, either as mental incarceration or as bodily incarceration. ibata interprets object 11, the depiction of the chained-up urizen, as mental incarceration: “this state of closure and petrifaction is heightened by the figure’s closed eyes (from which tears are rolling down in some versions), which suggest that his imprisonment is primarily mental” (par. 22). harald kittel’s observation is along the same lines: “according to urizen’s own report, the ‘fire’ pertaining to eternals forced him to retreat into his innermost self ” (119). dickinson’s description of urizen as “now … the victim / … rooted in the ground” implies, however, that his incarceration is of a physical nature, forced upon him. in the following lines, the narrator offers practical advice on how to escape—​“if you want to learn the secrets / close your eyes”—​which may be directed at urizen, since closing his imperfect, earthbound eyes would give way to the imagination. according to this reading, his predicament is partly caused by his reduced ability to perceive, by the imperfection of his senses. the inadequacy of his eyesight is a major factor of his imprisonment: he is confined by his “little orbs / … fixed in two little caves” as much as the inhabitants are incarcerated by the net of religion, which takes away their ability to see and recognize. the loss of the ability to see, which is here identical to the ability to understand, is the true incarceration. this interpretation harks back to the epigraph of visions, “the eye sees more than the heart knows,” in that the branches have connected the “little orbs” to the heart and their perceptions have become one. urizen’s eyes are either imperfect or, like the inhabitants, he cannot understand what he sees. on a mental level, he stands for logic and everything that is bound to the body; his eyesight is limited because he cannot see the realms of imagination. closed eyes do not imprison urizen—​open eyes do. but taking urizen’s rational character into account, closing his eyes will not open the gates to freedom for him—​his very nature does not allow for this solution. as ibata notes, in some versions of the full-page design where urizen is chained, his closed eyes produce tears. these are signs of woe, not freedom. since the song is still close to the hypotext at this point, i argue that the advice given in “gates” is not aimed at urizen, but at the recipient. s/​he is supposed to close her/​his eyes to learn the secrets. as paradoxical as it seems, here closing one’s eyes is the way to perfect sight.this reading is in the same vein as peter ackroyd’s observations that blake may have looked inward instead of outward and that “one of the great emblems of the spiritual life is of course the visionary who sees with closed eyes” (152). yet it is exactly this advice that changes the narrative of the song. it recalls another text by blake, jerusalem: “i rest not from my great task! / to open the eternal worlds, to open the immortal eyes / of man inwards into the worlds of thought: into eternity / ever expanding in the bosom of god, the human imagination” (copy f, object 5, lines 18-21).dickinson presented this quotation, as well as excerpts from “gates,” at the unveiling of blake’s gravestone on 12 august 2018, thereby relating the two texts (see the video on the blake society facebook page, <https://​www.​facebook.​com/​208774852588428/​videos/​1360006100798625>, from 54′45″). by combining ideas from urizen and jerusalem, dickinson creates a new text, which differs significantly from urizen: the inclusion of the idea of “immortal eyes” into his urizenic narrative makes for a different outcome. in the new narrative, earthbound eyes have to be exchanged for “immortal eyes,” which can see “inwards into the worlds of thought.” while eternity, as described in jerusalem, is lost at the end of urizen as the inhabitants become mortal, it is still accessible in the realm of imagination in “gates”—​at least the narrator can advise how to reach it. to achieve it, earthbound eyes must be closed, because all they produce is impaired vision, and immortal eyes must be opened. contrast and separation as solution: how to pass the “gates of urizen” closing earthly eyes and opening immortal eyes means nothing less than separating reason and imagination, as embodied in urizen and los respectively. the lines of the chorus “at the gates of urizen / separate lives begin” illustrate that the gates force a life-changing decision—​two parties will be permanently split. i argue that this separation refers to urizen and los, as expressed in “eternal twins are damned.” on the narrative level, both characters are damned because urizen finds himself trapped in a human body and los succumbs to a state of madness after the loss of urizen. if we take them as embodiments of parts of the human mind, however—​reason and imagination—​this split may be fruitful. the gates are thus a place of no return. this idea is strengthened by “the ladder falls away,” an action that erases the redeeming way out. they are also a place where the carcasses lie of those who have failed: “fallen eagles blaze.” the eagle is another blakean metaphor that has been added to the new narrative. in blake, it represents genius: “when thou seest an eagle, thou seest a portion of genius” (marriage copy g, object 9, proverbs of hell). in the song, the eagle can be seen as a metaphor for the genius and flying represents the power of the imagination. significantly, these (human) eagles are unable to fly; when the ladder falls away, they can no longer move because of their lack of imagination and instead fall and blaze. the failed eagles plummet to the earthbound state of urizen, who is not only chained to the ground himself, but also sets up the horizon as a boundary. crossing the “gates of urizen” means traversing the borders of reason and the horizon. dickinson combines both aspects and both interpretations of urizen. the phrase “carried by the wind” can also be applied to the genius, the eagle. passing the gates means being “carried by the wind,” passing the earthbound horizon and thus defeating urizen. the eagles must fly to succeed, fly to cross the horizon, fly to use their imagination. the genius has to pass through the gates to survive—​her/​his freedom and well-being are threatened by the boundaries of urizen. the true genius must enter the realm of imagination; the fallen genius, or fallen artist, goes up in flames. since dickinson has interpreted los and urizen as embodiments of creativity and commerce, this indicates that the artist is supposed to focus on creativity alone and leave the demands of the art industry aside. the separation refers not only to the materialistic world of commerce, but also to the mind of the artist. the genius must separate los from urizen, keeping them apart as contrary powers. thus, s/​he must decide whether to be “carried by the wind” or “rooted in the ground,” an antagonism that describes the basic natures of los (the wind that carries the eagles) and urizen (the roots that bind them to the ground). in other words, the imagination helps the genius to fly, whereas reason will chain her/​him to the ground. to be able to fly, the genius must rely on los alone, parting the “eternal twins” so that “separate lives begin.” the separation of los and urizen arguably points to a division of the inner self: from now on, the genius is ruled either by los or by urizen, leaving the other part of her/his personality behind. “if you want to learn the secrets / close your eyes” sums up the antagonism between incarceration through impaired, physical vision and freedom gained by spiritual sight. the genius, the eagle, has to fly, which means that s/​he must loosen both the branches that connect her/​him to the ground and those that link the “little orbs” to the heart. as the heart cannot understand what the eye perceives, it is necessary to close the physical eyes and rely on another kind of sight. in other words, the heart cannot gain knowledge by earthly perceptions; it needs to see “eternity / ever expanding in the bosom of god, the human imagination.” the genius needs to pass the boundaries of reason and bodily senses and learn to rely on her/​his spiritual sight. the reward is something that resides in “the bosom of god,” true inspiration and true enlightenment. passing the gates of urizen thus opens the way to self-development. spiritual sight is crucial for cartomancy, obligatory for the context of chymische hochzeit, and a constitutive element of a large part of blakean thought. the spiritual sight described in “gates” connects the tarot cards mentioned in “tower” with the rosicrucian manifesto and blakean ideas; in the advice offered, occultist teachings and blakean ideas coincide. since the contrast between los and urizen represents the inner struggle of the artist, the eagle, this advice forms a concise poetic. it describes what an artist ought to do: close the physical eyes and learn the secrets offered by spiritual sight and the imagination. “gates of urizen” is a contrary version of urizen. the metafictional appeal “close your eyes,” aimed at the listener of the song, serves as guidance on how to pass the gates of the horizon and secure a happy ending or positive outcome. if the adept can find “the bosom of god,” s/​he will be immune to the blinding effect of the net of religion. in urizen, this blindness has dire consequences; the inhabitants are, in dickinson’s words, “rooted in the ground” and thus become mortal: “no more could they rise at will / in the infinite void, but bound down / to earth by their narrowing perceptions / they lived a period of years / then left a noisom body” (object 25, lines 52-54; object 27, lines 3-4). they cannot access the “eternal worlds” that lie behind the gates, as they have lost the ability to see and to “rise at will”; they are “bound down / to earth” and then leave a “noisom body.” “gates,” however, proclaims contrast, earthbound urizen versus airborne los, and dickinson provides an alternative ending to blake’s text. passing the gates of urizen leads to the “eternal worlds” and disempowers the net of religion, reversing the narrative. a dystopia has been turned into a guide on how to achieve enlightenment and move from reason to imagination, enclosure to open space, fixture to mobility, and failure to success. sources ackroyd, peter. blake. london: vintage books, 1999. andreae, johann valentin. die chymische hochzeit des christian rosenkreuz anno 1459. trans. walter weber. stuttgart: freies geistesleben, 1957. blake, william. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. <http://​www.​blakearchive.​org>. butlin, martin. the paintings and drawings of william blake. 2 vols. new haven: yale university press, 1981. dickinson, bruce [paul bruce dickinson]. what does this button do? an autobiography. london: harpercollins, 2018. dickinson, bruce [paul bruce dickinson], and julian doyle, screenwriters. the chemical wedding. bill and ben productions, focus films, 2008. dickinson, bruce [paul bruce dickinson], and adrian smith. “return of the king.” bruce dickinson, the chemical wedding. expanded ed. bmg, sanctuary, 2005. cd. dickinson, bruce [paul bruce dickinson], and roy z [roger ramirez]. “chemical wedding.” bruce dickinson, scream for me brazil. bmg, sanctuary, 1999. mp3. —​—​—​. “chemical wedding.” bruce dickinson, the chemical wedding. expanded ed. bmg, sanctuary, 2005. cd. —​—​—​. “gates of urizen.” bruce dickinson, scream for me brazil. bmg, sanctuary, 1999. mp3. —​—​—​. “gates of urizen.” bruce dickinson, the chemical wedding. expanded ed. bmg, sanctuary, 2005. cd. —​—​—​. “jerusalem.” bruce dickinson, the chemical wedding. expanded ed. bmg, sanctuary, 2005. cd. —​—​—​. “king in crimson.” bruce dickinson, scream for me brazil. bmg, sanctuary, 1999. mp3. —​—​—​. “the tower.” bruce dickinson, the chemical wedding. expanded ed. bmg, sanctuary, 2005. cd. dickinson, bruce [paul bruce dickinson], roy z [roger ramirez], and eddie casillas. “book of thel.” bruce dickinson, the chemical wedding. expanded ed. bmg, sanctuary, 2005. cd. eron, sarah. “bound … by their narrowing perceptions”: sympathetic bondage and perverse pity in blake’s the book of urizen.” blake 46.3 (winter 2012–13): 27 pars. ibata, hélène. “parody, terror and the making of forms: blake’s aesthetics of the sublime in  the book of urizen.” romanticism and victorianism on the net 59-60 (2011): 52 pars. <https://​doi.​org/​10.​7202/​1013275ar>. kittel, harald a. “the book of urizen and an essay concerning human understanding.”  interpreting blake. ed. michael phillips. cambridge: cambridge university press, 1978. 111-44. leonard, garry. “‘without contraries there is no progression’: cinematic montage and the relationship of illustration to text in william blake’s the [first] book of urizen.” university of toronto quarterly 80.4 (2011): 918-34. marks, mollyanne. “structure and irony in blake’s ‘the book of urizen.’” studies in english literature, 1500–1900 15.4 (1975): 579-90. <https://​doi​.org/​10.​2307/​450012>. schuchard, marsha keith. “why mrs. blake cried: swedenborg, blake, and the sexual basis of spiritual vision.” esoterica: the journal of esoteric studies 2 (2000): 45-93. steiner, rudolf. “die chymische hochzeit des christian rosenkreuz.” andreae 135-74. whittaker, jason. “‘jerusalem’ set to music: a selected discography.” blake 52.4 (spring 2019). redefining apocalypse in blake studies redefining apocalypse in blake studies by g. a. rosso g. a. “tony” rosso (rossoga1@gmail.com) has written and co-edited many books and essays on blake, including the religion of empire: political theology in blake’s prophetic symbolism (2016). his essay “the lamb’s new song: apocalypse in early british hymnody” appeared in religion & literature 53.2 (summer 2021): 47-71. it must be stated at the outset that a great deal of the current discussion of apocalypticism and of the apocalypses is being carried on in the midst of a semantic confusion of the first order.michael e. stone, “lists of revealed things” michael stone argues that biblical scholars sow confusion by defining the ancient apocalypses in terms of the eschatological content or worldview that many contain (their “apocalypticism”) at the expense of other defining features. this conflation of apocalypse with eschatology emerged with the first comprehensive study of the apocalypses, by the german theologian friedrich lücke in 1832.according to richard sturm, lücke set himself two goals in the book, a study of john’s revelation: to provide a history of apocalyptic literature and to determine its “concept and character.” but in addressing the latter goal, he introduced an “ambiguity” that persists into our time: “theoretically the concept and character … are presented as a unity, but they are approached as though they were independent of one another” (sturm 18). lücke took revelation as his primary example and identified eschatology as its core feature. thereafter, while scholars continued to debate which characteristics define the genre, they treated apocalypse and eschatology as synonymous. the problem has been exacerbated in our time by the ubiquitous use of the term “apocalypse” in the media, popular culture, the churches, the arts, academe, and environmental studies, which has all but emptied the term of its core meaning as “revelation” or “disclosure.” when “the apocalypse” is invoked, it most often refers to a large-scale catastrophe or cataclysm, usually involving the collapse of civilization or the end of the world. such references comport better with the concept of eschatology, the study of last things or the “end” of history, than with apocalypse. the terminological confusion appears in the history of blake criticism as well, from s. foster damon, through northrop frye, harold bloom, and morton paley, to more recent work by steven goldsmith and lucy cogan. it is marked by an uncritical and inconsistent use of “apocalyptic” or “the apocalypse” to refer primarily to an end-time judgment. a scholar who has resisted this critical conflation in both biblical and blake criticism is christopher rowland, who wrote the landmark book the open heaven: a study of apocalyptic in judaism and early christianity (1982), as well as blake and the bible (2010). rowland, along with a burgeoning cadre of biblical scholars who address the issue, can help bring more precision to the way these concepts are used in blake studies. though the word “eschatology” does not appear in english until the mid-nineteenth century (oed), most christian writers viewed the two concepts as parts of a single phenomenon, mainly because the two biblical apocalypses (daniel and revelation) combine them, with revelation serving as the capstone of an entire tradition. the concepts do overlap, insofar as both derive from biblical prophecy.for the continuity of prophecy and apocalypse, see barton 122-32; rowley 13-14; j. j. collins, “from prophecy” 139; and najman 36-48. rowland and stone show that wisdom traditions and esotericism also are central to the apocalypses (rowland, open heaven 245-47; rowland and morray-jones 3-12; stone, “apocalyptic literature” 388-91, 431-32). eschatology, which emerges in the eighth century bce, is rooted in the belief that god acts “purposefully in history, guiding events toward the fulfillment of [his] promises” (bright 265). as a theology of history, it carries both a temporal and a teleological meaning, with the goal of establishing god’s kingdom on earth, including a final judgment against evil and salvation for the just. it is concerned with both the sweep of history and god’s power to do “a new thing” (isaiah 43:19), to bring a “decisive turning-point” in the present (barton 218-20; see also von rad 112-15). in this sense, eschatology plays a defining role in the emergence of christianity and the new testament. early christians believed that jesus inaugurated the kingdom during his ministry and that his resurrection foretold a general resurrection at his return (1 corinthians 15:20-28). apocalypse, which appears later (c. 250 bce-150 ce), is a mode of communication in which god reveals his secret knowledge to a human recipient through vision or angelic mediation, with an emphasis on the present relevance of what the seer or prophet experiences. the revealed secrets or mysteries are often but not always eschatological. they also contain revealed cosmology and speculative wisdom, which suggests that apocalypse is not reducible to its eschatological content. such content appears in other genres and modes of expression beside apocalypses. if john’s revelation offers a definitive account of eschatological mysteries, that does not make those types of mysteries “apocalyptic,” any more than the cosmological ones would be inherently apocalyptic. more determinant are the means of communication and the transformative experience in the present that the seer undergoes, an experience that authenticates the work. while congruent with the usage of “apocalyptic” in the jewish context, new testament use of the adjective refers primarily to the manner or mode of communication that is authenticated by its source in christ. i want to acknowledge at the outset that i am treating the conflation of a pair of concepts in modern theological exposition and in blake studies, not covering the entire vast phenomenon. nor do i assume that blake scholars should have “known better,” since explicit distinctions between apocalypse and eschatology did not emerge until the 1970s-80s. also, in the sections below, i emphasize apocalypse over eschatology not because it is more important, but to highlight the problem of conflating them. the first section provides an overview of the term “apocalypse” as used in biblical scholarship since 1900; it is followed in section ii by an extended discussion of “apocalypse” and “apocalyptic” in blake criticism over roughly the same period. a final section analyzes a specific blake work to show the heuristic value of recent studies for understanding his approach to apocalypse and eschatology. i focus on milton a poem because it foregrounds these concepts, in both structural and thematic terms, and does so without conflating or confusing them. narrative setting and action take place both in heaven and on earth, organized around three major descents from the eternal world to blake’s dwelling in felpham. the first is by milton, the eponymous hero; the second by ololon, his divine counterpart; and the third by los, blake’s prophetic persona. although these descents appear sequentially, blake presents them as occurring simultaneously, in the same apocalyptic moment. also, los and ololon announce the end of 6000 years of history, the traditional time frame of judeo-christian eschatology, though the last judgment does not occur in the space of the poem. this section argues that while blake maintains a strong sense of the future hope and its pending fulfillment in history, he emphasizes the primacy of revelatory experience (apocalypse) and its capacity to open eternity within time. i. “apocalypse” in biblical scholarship (1900–​2020)the most helpful overviews of modern apocalypse studies are by sturm, ditomasso, a. y. collins (“apocalypse now”), fletcher-louis, and henze. at the beginning of the twentieth century, albert schweitzer and r. h. charles helped revolutionize new testament studies by establishing the eschatological foundation of early christianity. schweitzer’s epochal quest of the historical jesus (1906) showed that, contrary to orthodox and liberal views, jesus did not preach about an internal kingdom of repentance but about an imminent end to the reigning world order (224).in schweitzer’s view, jesus failed as a prophet because the kingdom never materialized. for his impact on new testament studies, see a. y. collins (“apocalypticism” 327-31) and rowland (“immediate revelation” 449-60). drawing on the ancient apocalypses available—​1 enoch, 4 ezra, 2 baruch, psalms of solomon—​he demonstrated their close similarities to new testament texts (367-87). his use of the word “apocalyptic” to designate the eschatological form of these texts, however, sealed the conflation of the concepts through most of the twentieth century. alongside schweitzer, charles was equally important, mainly through his textual editions and translations of extrabiblical apocalypses, especially his two-volume apocrypha and pseudepigrapha of the old testament (1913), the standard reference for the first half of the century.on charles, see j. j. collins (apocalyptic imagination 14-16). he also wrote the oft-reprinted critical history of the doctrine of a future life (2nd ed., 1913), retitled eschatology in 1963. in a chapter on “the eschatology of … apocalyptic literature,” charles made several points that gained wide currency; namely, that the apocalyptic writer “despairs of the present,” that “his main interests are supramundane,” and that he offers a “deterministic view of history” (174-75). these views were extended in two major studies at mid-century, h. h. rowley’s the relevance of apocalyptic (1944) and d. s. russell’s the message and method of jewish apocalyptic (1964), which similarly rooted discussion of apocalypse in old testament eschatology. it was not until the 1970s and early 1980s that biblical scholars began to make a distinction between the two concepts. four scholarly texts appeared that shaped subsequent debate: klaus koch’s the rediscovery of apocalyptic (1972), paul d. hanson’s the dawn of apocalyptic (1975), christopher rowland’s the open heaven (1982), and john j. collins’s the apocalyptic imagination (1984).henze comments that while apocalypse studies continue to make substantial advances, the “basic framework” established in the 1970s and 1980s “has remained largely intact and continues to set the terms for discussion” (407). koch outlines a set of conceptual features typical of apocalypses, though he distinguishes these from “apocalyptic as a historical movement” and ideology, which, he says, are “dominated by an urgent expectation of the impending overthrow of all earthly conditions in the immediate future” (28). he asserts that, in addition to “cosmic catastrophe,” apocalyptic texts express a fundamental “pessimism” and “predetermined” view of history, though individual behavior is not predestined (28-29). similarly, in his widely influential book, hanson argues that the “matrix” of apocalyptic prophecy emerged in the post-exilic era (sixth-fifth centuries bce) as prophecy fell into distrust and declined. having gradually abandoned a realistic hope in history as the theatre of divine activity, a group of “hierocratic” writers developed a mythical vision “transcending all mundane institutions and structures, a vision which constantly calls those institutions and structures into judgment” (30-31). hanson’s primary texts antedate the appearance of actual apocalypses, limiting his theory’s effectiveness, but he also published an article on “apocalypticism” that made three enduring distinctions: between apocalypse as a literary genre, apocalypticism as a symbolic worldview, and prophetic and apocalyptic eschatology (30). of the four studies, collins’s the apocalyptic imagination has gained the most traction, and his definition of an apocalypse is the most frequently cited to this day. developed in concert with a group of scholars at the society of biblical literature (sbl) in the mid-1970s, it first appeared in the journal semeia under the title apocalypse: the morphology of a genre (1979): an apocalypse is defined as: “a genre of revelatory literature with a narrative framework, in which a revelation is mediated by an otherworldly being to a human recipient, disclosing a transcendent reality which is both temporal, insofar as it envisages eschatological salvation, and spatial insofar as it involves another, supernatural world.” (apocalyptic imagination 5) collins recycled this definition in subsequent works, including an introductory essay to volume 1 of the encyclopedia of apocalypticism (1998), a standard overview of the subject, and in the more recent essay “what is apocalyptic literature?” that opens the oxford handbook of apocalyptic literature (2014), which he edited. it advances study by uniting form and content, linking the “spatial” or vertical dimension that discloses transcendent reality with the “temporal” or horizontal dimension of history with which it corresponds. the revelation is mediated by an otherworldly figure, which for collins distinguishes apocalypses from traditional prophecies. in the apocalyptic imagination, he makes a further distinction between two kinds or “strands” of apocalypses: the “historical” and the “otherworldly” (6-9). the former—​typified by daniel and 4 ezra (2 esdras)—​largely concern themselves with eschatology, while the latter—​typified by 2 enoch and 3 baruch—​are characterized by otherworldly journeys and focus on cosmological speculation, showing “no interest in the development of history” (7).the standard edition of jewish apocalypses is charlesworth, the old testament pseudepigrapha, vol. 1. while the latter type of apocalypse suggests that eschatology is not central to its definition, collins insists that the cosmological feature alone is incomplete, since “the distinctive conceptual structure” of apocalyptic writing is defined by its worldview or “shared presuppositions” about reality. “most crucially,” he writes in “what is apocalyptic literature?,” “the apocalypses are distinguished by the belief in the resurrection and judgment of the individual dead,” a feature “sometimes missed by critics who think of ‘eschatology’ only in historical terms” (5). collins thus loosens the formal boundaries of the genre to allow for the inclusion of eschatology as the defining feature of the “apocalyptic” worldview.in his “introduction” to vol. 1 of the encyclopedia of apocalypticism, collins writes: “the genre apocalypse provides the focal point,” but “the focus … is on a worldview … and the objective is to be as inclusive as possible” (xiv). despite its usefulness and staying power, this definition has not gone uncontested, as scholars, most forcefully rowland and michael stone, have questioned the stress on eschatology in the semeia approach. in a pioneering essay, “lists of revealed things in the apocalyptic literature” (1976), stone argues that the lists or catalogues of subject matter “stand at the center of the revelatory experience” and thus “form an integral part” of the definition of apocalypse (414). the subjects, which are often cosmological and oriented toward nature, are connected with the wisdom tradition as well as prophecy, and contain aspects of esotericism. in “apocalyptic literature,” stone insists on a clear distinction between “apocalypticism as a pattern of thought, primarily eschatological in character,” and apocalypse as “a literary genre” (388-94). building on the discovery of fragments from the book of enoch among the dead sea scrolls, his definition of apocalypse begins with 1 enoch rather than daniel; he states that “the content and character of these oldest fragments of apocalyptic literature are far from exclusively or even predominantly eschatological” (391). he asserts further that eschatology cannot account for “the presence or absence of a real experiential basis of the visionary form” (433-37; “lists” 452n79), a central component of rowland’s approach as well.see also stone’s “a reconsideration of apocalyptic visions.” as rowland’s work on blake is discussed in the section that follows, my focus here is on his broader account of apocalypse and apocalypticism.rowland’s many essays on apocalypse and apocalypticism have been collected in the volume “by an immediate revelation,” which includes a section on blake. it is important to state that rowland recognizes the relevance of eschatology to the apocalypses and to the origins of christianity and the new testament.in christian origins (1985), he traces the development of ancient jewish eschatology as the defining context for the emergence of christianity. his main objection is to making eschatology, or “the future hope of israel,” the core element in a theory of apocalypse. rowland hews close to the etymological roots of apocalypse as revelation or disclosure. acknowledging that apocalypses offer hope for the future, he insists that the temporal horizon is not the most distinctive feature of apocalyptic texts. the primary feature is their “mode of revelation” or the “direct communication of the heavenly mysteries in all their diversity” (open heaven 13-14, 26). for him, apocalyptic texts concentrate on the “vertical” dimension of revelation, on the fact that divine knowledge exists in heaven before it manifests itself on earth, making heaven a “kind of repository” of hidden knowledge in which “the whole spectrum of human history,” not simply its future culmination, is available to the seer. the “unveiling of the counsels of god directly to the apocalyptic seer” through “dreams, visions or angelic pronouncements” forms the “key to the whole movement” (9-11). rowland locates the origin of apocalyptic vision in biblical texts that offer glimpses of the divine court (1 kings 22:19; isaiah 6; ezekiel 1, 8-10; zechariah 1-6), focusing especially on ezekiel’s vision of the divine chariot-throne. he takes his title concept from ezekiel’s opening verse: “in the thirtieth year … as i was among the exiles by the river chebar, the heavens opened, and i saw visions of god” (1:1). for rowland, ezekiel’s extraordinary depiction of his encounter with god’s “glory” or presence shows the impact of “direct” experience on his vision. in an introductory “rationale and retrospect” for his collection of essays on apocalypticism, rowland states that study of early jewish mysticism rather than biblical scholarship informed his reading of apocalyptic writing. he credits the work of gershom scholem for inspiring a lifelong interest in the subject of “merkabah mysticism,” the tradition of creative exegesis stemming from engagement with the throne scene in chapter 1 of ezekiel (1:4-28).in scholem, this tradition stretches from the ancient jewish and christian apocalypses, through rabbinic mystical texts such as ma’aseh merkabah (“work of the chariot”) and the hekhalot (“heavenly palaces”) literature of late antiquity, to the early modern kabbalah. scholem convinced him that “there was a visionary experiential dimension to engaging with biblical visionary texts, which persisted for centuries” (“immediate revelation” 3-4). the revisionings of ezekiel’s vision in 1 enoch 14, daniel 7, revelation 4-5, and the apocalypse of abraham 18 are exemplary, as is the reinterpretation of daniel 7 in 4 ezra 12-13 (open heaven 214-32).in a letter of 12 sept. 1800 to john flaxman, blake identifies “ezra” as an important early influence, with isaiah (e 707). he knew 4 ezra as 2 esdras in the apocrypha of the authorized version. rather than a repetition of ezekiel or daniel, however, these interpretations involve “actually seeing again” (re-experiencing and re-creating) what the former writer saw (219, 226). rowland lays out specific borrowings and departures from ezekiel in these texts, but he finds that their lack of “precise biblical language” and the “variety” in their content suggest that “while ezekiel may have been the starting-point,” the “order and detail of the original have been left behind in favour of a more elaborate view” of god’s dwelling (226). in accentuating the psychological impact of the vision on the seer, these and similar texts can be taken as credible accounts of experiences in which “the imagination of the visionary enabled him to transcend the original,” producing “an entirely new view of the character of god and his world” (226-27). even as these texts include a significant amount of material concerning divine judgment and messianic expectation, rowland asserts that for the apocalyptic writer, “it was not the details of eschatology which most concerned him but the affirmation of their verisimilitude by means of heavenly authentication” (227). content remains central to a definition of apocalypse, but a key aspect of content is its mode of revelation, which enables access to “the innermost recesses of heaven,” where knowledge of the divine purposes is stored. such access empowers a writer to stand “in visionary continuity” with the text, not succumb to its scriptural authority (“common people” 155). a final aspect of rowland’s theory can serve as a transition to blake studies. he writes that it was scholem’s emphasis on the anthropomorphic form of ezekiel’s deity that “above all else” intrigued him to pursue it as a subject of study (“immediate revelation” 2). scholem declared that the essence of “throne-mysticism” was not oneness with or “absorbed contemplation of god’s true nature, but perception of his appearance on the throne” (major trends 43-44). referring to the human-like figure of fire and light in ezekiel 1:26-28, scholem writes that the “vision of the shape of god on the throne” manifested his hidden glory or kavod, “his transcendence bridged by revelation” (mystical shape 16). rowland develops the point by focusing on the reappearance in ezekiel 8 of this figure, now detached from the chariot-throne, who lifts the prophet “between the earth and heaven” and “in the visions of god” brings him to jerusalem (8:2-3). for rowland, this ascent and “separability” from the throne “enabled the figure to act as an agent of the divine purpose,” a “quasi-angelic mediator” (open heaven 96-97). he traces the evolution of this mediator in apocalyptic texts, notably to the “son of man” in daniel 7:13, who resembles ezekiel’s kavod figure but who functions more as a vice-regent of god’s power than as his human form (98). rowland then turns to the angelic vision, or “angelophany,” in daniel 10—​of a man in linen, with eyes of fire, arms and feet of brass, and the voice of a multitude (10:2-6)—​which, he says, develops ezekiel’s figure in terms that john applies to the risen christ in revelation (1:12-18). he asserts that daniel’s anthropomorphic figure is no “ordinary angelic being” but “an exalted angel” that john viewed as a “natural quarry for imagery to describe his lord.” he concludes that the traditions stemming from ezekiel helped to form the mystical-apocalyptic matrix of christianity, not least its language of mutual indwelling and being “clothed with the divine christ,” which he describes as “mystical in its intensity and conviction” (rowland and morray-jones 6). these connections have obvious relevance for blake, as s. foster damon was among the first to recognize, though his work came before scholem and the dead sea scrolls altered the direction of apocalypse study. ii. “apocalypse” in blake studies (1924–​2022) my aim in this section is to trace the scholarly views that have shaped critical discourse on blake’s use of apocalyptic traditions. this discourse tracks with developments in biblical studies, especially its merging of apocalypse with eschatology. northrop frye is treated at length because fearful symmetry (1947) is a foundational work, still cited in discussion. he exerted a strong influence on bloom, paley, altizer, abrams, and wittreich, though each developed his own emphases and insights. goldsmith’s unbuilding jerusalem (1993) offers a counterresponse to previous views from a post-structural approach, while cogan provides strong feminist readings of the prophecies and an innovative thesis about blake’s response to the eschatological “failure” of the french revolution. with the partial exception of wittreich, rowland is the one scholar who avoids conflating apocalypse with eschatology, though most scholars recognize that blake’s apocalypse highlights revelatory experience. damon and frye damon’s william blake: his philosophy and symbols (1924) appeared during a surge of interest in mystical, esoteric, and occult writings in england and the united states, led by two popular books, the varieties of religious experience (1902) by william james and mysticism (1911) by evelyn underhill. drawing especially on the latter’s more proselytizing approach, damon identifies her “five stages” of “the mystic way” with blake’s work, claiming that blake himself “passed through these identical five states” (2). while he explicitly uses the term “eschatology,” he refers only indirectly to “apocalypse,” as when he cites swedenborg’s phrase “influx from above” and speaks of “mystical revelation” as the “highest moment possible to the flesh” (152). in an exposition of blake’s “fourfold” myth, though, he cites a recent translation of the apocalypse of abraham, quoting a passage that builds on ezekiel’s chariot-throne vision: i saw under the fire a throne of fire, and round about it four all-seeing ones, reciting the song, and under the throne four fiery living creatures singing, and their appearance was one, each one of them with four faces. (quoted on 146) damon does not comment, moving on to discuss blake’s zoas and view of the last judgment. he associates this event with the traditional “six thousand years allotted to the created world,” though he makes a distinction between “a” last judgment and “the” last judgment: “there must be innumerable such last judgments, which will not end until the ultimate day terminating this continuous eschatology. no last judgment will be final until the six thousand years are completed” (151-52). finally, he speaks of the revelatory moment in milton, saying that the last judgment may appear either “in a mystical revelation” or “not until death,” depending on the person (152). but he does not pursue the insight. with the publication of frye’s fearful symmetry (1947), blake’s relation to mystical tradition was severed in one fell swoop. or so it seemed at the time.scholarship on blake’s mysticism continued to appear—​by g. m. harper, désirée hirst, and kathleen raine—​but it was disparaged by critics influenced by frye. more recently, sheila spector has explored blake’s relation to kabbalism, though without reference to apocalyptic tradition. this move helped turn blake into a canonical poet, but the break, coupled with frye’s persistent conflation of apocalypse with eschatology, cast a spell on blake scholarship for the next two generations. although frye’s complex and varied deployment of “apocalypse” and “apocalyptic” displays his vast erudition and ingenuity and has moments of vivid clarity, the sheer proliferation of these terms is dizzying and ultimately counterproductive. since fearful symmetry remains a fundamental text and continues to inform critical discourse on blake’s idea of apocalypse, a fresh assessment of frye’s approach is needed. an account of frye’s treatment of apocalypse cannot avoid his larger archetypal theory of literature that develops out of fearful symmetry. this theory is rooted in his typological reading of the bible, his view that the old testament culminates in the new testament figure of christ, forming what he calls “a total body of words” whose analogy is the “word of god” incarnate in jesus. this “anatomy” or “total body” becomes the governing idea in all of frye’s criticism. in a seminal chapter for his literary theory, “the word within the word,” he similarly states that “the universal visionary” mind or logos embodied in jesus “sees this world of time and space as a single creature in eternity and infinity,” a view that “works of inspired art” turn into a “gigantic myth” whose outlines are “creation, fall, redemption and apocalypse” (108). the use of “apocalypse” here refers mainly to its function of providing a narrative or thematic “ending.” he puts it most succinctly in anatomy of criticism when discussing his theory of symbols. in the archetypal phase, civilization builds “a total human form out of nature” (anatomy 105), but in the final or anagogic phase, nature itself disappears and becomes “apocalyptic.” “by an apocalypse,” he adds, “i mean primarily the imaginative conception of the whole of nature as the content of an infinite and eternal living body” (119). these statements indicate that in the first part of fearful symmetry, frye uses apocalypse and apocalyptic to refer to a narrative mythos, largely avoiding the confusion that comes with his treatment of orc and revolutionary history in part 2. in analyzing blake’s views of the american and french revolutions, frye continues to define apocalypse in narrative terms, but he also identifies it with eschatology. two central concepts in the book contribute to the confusion, the “orc cycle” and the “seven eyes of god,” which are intersecting eschatological constructs.hobson offers a critique of frye’s “myth” of the orc cycle (chained boy, chapter 2). scholarly discussion of the seven eyes of god also distorts or inflates its importance in blake, since it appears primarily in milton. frye associates the orc cycle with nature as well as history, making orc a symbol of both elemental energy and political revolution. but in his view, while revolutions can signal “apocalyptic” or “utopian” desire, “they cannot be the cause of an apocalypse” because they come in cycles (fearful symmetry 202-06). that is why orc cycles must be supplemented by the seven eyes of god, each of which contains an orc cycle but which evolves in a “seven times recurring” pattern, until jesus breaks the pattern and opens time and space into eternity (128-34, 207-18). frye argues that blake expected “a final apocalypse” with the spread of orc’s revolutionary energy around the world, but that he rejected orc “as an apocalyptic agent” because, bound to nature, he inherently “falls short of a complete apocalypse”—​meaning “a transfiguration of the world into paradise” (216-18). in frye’s account, only los as an eternal being can bring a “final” apocalypse, though he does not say if this means it is eschatological. in his interpretation of the long poems, frye contends that blake fully articulates his “central myth” only in milton and jerusalem, a view that persists among many to this day. it implies that we must read blake’s work backward, much as frye reads the entire bible from the perspective of john’s revelation, an approach that underpins his treatment of apocalypse (317). his influential analysis of the four zoas is a case in point. frye says that blake retains a place for orc’s redemptive capacity, but only when los shapes him into a “permanent form” and incorporates him into the larger body of the “one man” jesus. for frye, the problem is that in night ix (blake’s “apocalypse”) neither jesus nor los exerts agency over “the end of time,” so that the last judgment is basically “the old revolutionary doctrine of a spontaneous reappearance of orc” (308). in effect, blake has not brought the seven eyes of god construct to bear sufficiently on the orc cycle, as frye explains in the milton chapter that follows. he informs us that insofar as jesus was depicted as dying and rising in spring, he “was a rebirth of orc,” but as “the seventh ‘eye’ or vision of god” who fulfills the scriptural prophecies, “he was an incarnation of los” (322). this claim is based on los’s symbolic role as the “eternal prophet” who shapes time, including the historical jesus, into “a permanent eternal form” (323). frye adds that this “archetypal form” emerges when “any one visionary attains a final recreation of another’s vision” (323), so that by merging with los and milton in the poem, blake achieves “an apocalyptic restatement” of milton’s vision (323-37). this recasting of milton’s work into “a single human form” is also eschatological because it is “the labour of six thousand years” (339), but again frye does not distinguish between these concepts. in his account of blake’s “final synthesis,” frye declares that milton and jerusalem form a “double epic” in which the former serves as an “individual prologue” to the latter’s universal “last judgment” or “full apocalypse” (323-24). but when he finally comes to discuss this apocalypse on the final plates in jerusalem, he finds that “nothing very tangible” happens and that the poem ends in “an anticlimax” (358). to address this problem, he makes a virtue of it. he returns to his underlying premise, the body of the “god-man,” but he throws in a viconian ricorso to move beyond the impasse. he says that while all things “proceeded from a divine man … and will be reabsorbed into him,” this “total vision of life must have a circular form” (386). frye insists that he does not mean an eternal recurrence, for that implies a “closed circle,” like the orthodox christian view of the bible as canonically sealed. instead, he posits an approach in which the hermeneutical circle remains open and incomplete, requiring readers to make an “apocalyptic” or revelatory leap into the “gap” that follows revelation and precedes the return to genesis. the final comprehension of the bible’s meaning is in the spark of illumination between its closing anode and its opening cathode, and if that gap were not there the bible would not stimulate the imagination to the effort of comprehension which recreates instead of passively following the outline of a vision. (386) frye contends that within this gap a decision confronts the reader: to “remain inside the gap with the jesus of history” or to push through it “into eternity,” where the division between human creature and divine creator disappears—​if readers identify their own bodies with jesus’s eternal body (431). this last point is especially intriguing, not least because frye describes this identification as “the real apocalypse” in a general note on “blake’s mysticism” at the end of the book (431-32). there he restates his view that the word “mystic” only causes confusion in relation to blake, but he qualifies it by saying that he refers to the “conventional mystic,” adding that when readers come to experience “the identity of god and man,” then “the struggles of the mystics to describe the divine one … begin to have more relevance for blake” (431). this concluding volte-face suggests that frye ultimately recognized the link between apocalypse and mysticism that damon introduced and he initially denied. but he did not develop the point and in the decades following it was not pursued by most scholars. bloom and paley in blake’s apocalypse (1963), bloom adheres closely to frye and assumes throughout that readers know the meaning of apocalypse, obviating his need to define it. this results in an amorphous and inconsistent use of the term that comes to typify subsequent studies. in discussing the french revolution, he cites the phrase “slumbers of five thousand years” of fallen history as “an apocalyptic fog” and then speaks of “a world over-ripe for apocalypse” (63-64). in the first instance, he seems to mean “eschatological” fog; in the second, “eschatological transformation.” concerning the marriage of heaven and hell, he refers to the “improvement of sensual enjoyment” that will “precede the apocalypse” (capital a) and to the “time of troubles that must precede apocalypse” (small a), without explaining the difference. more confusions follow: the french revolution is “an outward apocalypse”; the memorable relations alternate with “groupings of apocalyptic reflections” (72-74); the bard’s dualistic separation of earth from heaven in the “introduction” to songs of experience echoes “orthodox christian accounts of apocalypse” (131); and night ix of vala/ the four zoas is a “visualization of apocalypse” (266). then, in milton, the seven angels “sound the trumpets of apocalypse” but the poem functions only as a “prelude to apocalypse” (360), which, as frye claimed, is not “revealed” until plate 96 of jerusalem (431). bloom is unique in showing the importance of ezekiel’s merkabah vision to jerusalem and to blake’s poetic myth overall, but he does not associate it with apocalyptic tradition, despite speaking of scholem’s influence on him. he observes that albion resembles the adam kadmon or “divine man” of the kabbalah (189), but he repeats frye’s caveat that blake is not a mystic, emphatically rejecting the idea in his commentary to the erdman edition (e 898). while also indebted to frye, paley’s understanding of apocalypse is clearer and more refined than bloom’s, exerting an influence that continues to shape discussion. paley tends to overrely, though, on the eschatological doctrine of millennialism. first alluded to in energy and the imagination (1970), the millennial focus is developed especially in the continuing city (1983) and apocalypse and millennium in english romantic poetry (1999).this focus is not prominent in the apocalyptic sublime (1986), which includes an illuminating chapter on blake. in energy and the imagination, paley’s approach seems to be an amalgam of frye’s theory of the seven eyes of god and orc cycles, mircea eliade’s “myth of the eternal return,” and r. h. charles’s distinction between prophecy and apocalypse. echoing charles, paley argues that in the four zoas, as opposed to his earlier prophecies, “blake, having abandoned his revolutionary hopes, no longer employs the eschatological conception of the hebrew prophets, who had looked for a fulfillment of god’s design in history.” instead, he “turned to revelation,” which presents “an apocalyptic view promising other-worldly fulfillment” (163-64). channeling frye, paley asserts that only with the “eighth eye” will the “apocalyptic” dawn arrive, a time when history will be “abrogated” and the “regeneration” of the cosmos will occur (140). his language closely mirrors eliade’s cosmos and history (129-30), drawing especially on the idea of an “apocalyptic syndrome,” which eliade says involves a “premonitory phase” of “cosmic and human deterioration” leading to destruction of the wicked, “followed by the millennium of bliss” (eliade 126-27). this sequence underpins paley’s treatment of apocalypse, making it virtually synonymous with eschatology. in the continuing city, his study of jerusalem, paley offers a concise overview of millennialism from the church fathers to blake’s contemporaries, but in apocalypse and millennium he most succinctly, and problematically, elaborates his argument. the opening sentence encapsulates the idea of a sequence: “a major topos in english romantic poetry is the imminence of an apocalypse that will be succeeded by a millennium” (1). while he states that it is important “to stress that the whole conception of apocalypse has to do with a revelation of ultimate truths” (2), adding the key point that the “apocalyptic mode … involves a seer who communicates his visions” (2-3), he does not emphasize these features in his analyses. he focuses more on apocalypse as a narrative that moves “from a revelation … of human history, usually characterized by great upheavals, to a society characterized by harmony and justice for a very long period of time” (4). paley asserts that while revelation is the “master prototype for the movement from apocalypse to millennium,” its details are less important than the transition from catastrophe to millennial peace (4-5). he finds examples of this narrative pattern in other biblical texts—​joel 2:28-32 and matthew 24:29-30—​and in thomas burnet’s sacred theory of the earth (1684). his handling of the pattern yields impressive insights, especially in the english romantic poets, including blake, who write in the prophetic mode. but it is important to recognize, as paley states, that his model of apocalypse prioritizes the eschatological over the revelatory element (3), for his influence has been extensive.see the volume dedicated to paley, romanticism and millenarianism, edited by tim fulford. the introductory essay foregrounds the eschatological aspect, as does beer’s essay on blake. abrams and altizer although m. h. abrams did not write on blake alone, his approach to apocalypse and eschatology in the romantic period influenced a generation of scholars.the key statements are in “english romanticism: the spirit of the age” (1963), natural supernaturalism (1971), and “apocalypse: theme and variations” (1984). he builds on frye’s work while being more grounded in contemporary biblical scholarship. his views are expressed most fully in the first chapter of natural supernaturalism (1971), which contains a succinct overview of biblical eschatology, using the book of revelation as its definitive example of an “apocalypse.” abrams takes unusual care in defining the term, though he does merge it with eschatology, referring to “the apocalypse of the world” or speaking of apocalypse as the “last act of the drama of history” (37-38). despite this conflation, he offers an illuminating account of the development of new testament eschatology, one that grasps both the gradual demise of its historical urgency and its present-oriented focus, changes that he closely relates. citing the passage in luke that speaks of the “kingdom of god within you” (17:20-21) and the passage in john on the last judgment that is both “coming, and now is” (5:24-25), he argues that they “internalize apocalypse by transferring the theatre of events from the outer earth and heaven to the inner spirit of the single believer” (47). of course, as a visionary experience, apocalypse already is internal or interior, even if it is attributable to a transcendental source. but if we take abrams to mean eschatology and not apocalypse, his insight stands: new testament writers individualize eschatology, displacing what in jewish tradition and early christianity was a collective concept involving the people of israel. in arguing that “the coming universal kingdom may achieve an immediate realization in the spirit of each believer,” he captures the already inaugurated aspect of christian eschatology. but unlike new testament writers (and blake), abrams interjects his own dualism, arguing that the “here and now” kingdom “all but displaces reference to an historical apocalypse” (47). his oft-quoted idea about an “apocalypse of imagination” that separates a “mental” from a “historical” mode of eschatology (334) does not accord with the new testament understanding, which maintains a dynamic tension between the “already” arrived aspect of the kingdom initiated by jesus and its “not yet” fulfilled promise in the future. it is a virtue of thomas altizer’s approach that he preserves this tension in his study of blake, the new apocalypse (1967), drawing on rudolf otto’s the kingdom of god and the son of man (1934), which helped to popularize the idea of inaugurated (“realized”) eschatology in biblical studies. otto maintains both the present and future aspects of eschatology but insists that the “supramundane, future” kingdom “already extends its operation into the present” (59). altizer adds another element to the discussion, asserting that, like “the mystical way,” the kingdom of god negates the “fallen form of history and the cosmos” (174-75). his idea of negation derives from the hegelian dialectic rather than apophatic mysticism, thus preserving a role for history. altizer’s theory pivots on a view of “kenosis” developed from paul’s letter to the philippians (2:6-11), in which the preexistent jesus is said to “empty” or divest himself of divine status to incarnate in human form. he interprets this emptying as the “death of god” because it leads, inexorably, to jesus’s suffering and death on the cross. he finds this process at work in blake’s long prophecies, which, he says, enact the negation of transcendence in the historical embodiment of god in jesus. what altizer finds most original in blake is that his jesus appears within albion, who “embodies the promise of … final things while simultaneously calling for a total identification with our neighbor,” defined as “the weak and broken ones about us.” this act is “a repetition of god’s eternal death” and it enables “participation even now in the end which he has promised” (134-35). while altizer often lumps apocalypse with eschatology and rivals frye’s profusion of meanings for the term, he joins the mystical and eschatological aspects in a unique way, asserting that “the function of an apocalypse” is to facilitate “an immediate and total participation in ultimate reality” (175). he also recognizes that the mystical eschaton, “even now becoming all in all,” is shadowed by the “totality of darkness” that is contemporary history (176; living 167-68). wittreich and goldsmith while joseph wittreich writes within the orbit of frye, paley, and abrams, his approach to apocalypse is unique in two main respects. one, he concentrates on its formal and epistemological rather than its eschatological aspects, foregrounding the relational dynamic between the prophet and precursor. two, he redefines its genre as a special mode of prophecy, tracing the emergence of its “new form” in reformation commentaries on the book of revelation and, concurrently, in the epic poems of spenser (the faerie queene) and milton (paradise lost and paradise regained). he presents his theory in the essay “opening the seals: blake’s epics and the milton tradition” (1973) and its programmatic sequel “‘a poet amongst poets’: milton and the tradition of prophecy” (1975), and in visionary poetics: milton’s tradition and his legacy (1979), especially the opening chapter, “revelation’s ‘new’ form.” we can focus on “revelation’s ‘new’ form,” since it encapsulates and develops the argument of the essays. wittreich describes revelation as both the “epitome” of biblical prophecy and the “prototype” of a new mode of prophecy, distinguished by its own set of literary features: visionary rhetorical strategies, synchronistic narrative structure, encyclopedic form, and antiestablishment ideology. “recognizing the encyclopedic character of john’s apocalypse,” he writes, “is an indispensable guide to understanding its genre; for that recognition unlocks the meaning of the fusion of epic and prophecy that, initiated by spenser, is completed by milton” (visionary poetics 9). while it evolved over centuries, the new genre, “epic-prophecy,” does not fully emerge until reformation exegetes discern revelation’s “inner workings” and codify its poetics, focusing especially on its “strategies of vision” and “the kind of revelation” that john experiences, which, they insist, is both visual and aural, “pictures together with words” (22). this feature is of obvious relevance to blake. the visionary strategies—​generic mixture, obscurity, allusiveness—​and the synchronistic structure both contribute to an “unmasking process,” one of gradual “revealment” that culminates in an “epiphany,” which is “marked by an unveiling, a sudden recognition of error—​an apocalypse” (29). the revelatory moment serves as the primary goal of the new genre, whose “motive force” is to “brighten the mind” and expand consciousness. this objective is facilitated by the strategy of allusion, which “turns prophecy into a literature of contexts,” “pushing the reader beyond the confines of any one prophecy,” thus enabling a view of all prophecy as “one central form” (30). this form, the hybrid genre of epic-prophecy, finds its fullest expression in milton, though it extends back through spenser to revelation and forward to the romantic poets, especially blake. though wittreich subsumes apocalypse under the “transcendental form” of prophecy, the target of steven goldsmith’s critique, his emphases on visionary experience, the process of revealment, and the creative relationship between prophet and precursor are his salient contributions. in unbuilding jerusalem: apocalypse and romantic representation (1993), goldsmith covers similar historical ground to wittreich but criticizes the idea of what he calls the “formal apocalypse” of revelation exegesis. like paley, he places eschatology, especially millenarianism, at the center of his definition of apocalypse—​the “idea that history can come to an end,” he writes, is “the most basic assumption of apocalyptic literature”—​but he claims that it “has often been bound up with the promise of an aesthetic space relieved of historical determinants” (xii, 2). he locates the model for this “formalist aesthetics” in both revelation and its exegetical history: “john’s apocalypse describes how the end of history and the appearance of an ideal form occur simultaneously, how time stops with the revelation of a utopian architectural space, the new jerusalem of monumental and perfect symmetry” (5). goldsmith argues that “formal apocalypse evolved as a means of suppressing social conflict and, more specifically, of containing millenarianism” (19). he finds this strategy in biblical scholarship from irenaeus, through joseph mede and richard hurd, to austin farrer and leonard thompson. it is said to operate through revelation’s “linguistic allegory” and canonical function. in his “linguistic model,” goldsmith asserts, john transmutes history into “a heavenly city and a book,” so that the end-time can “seem already to participate in a language beyond history” (56). this move enables john to silence rival voices in the name of the transcendental “logos” (67). goldsmith says that the strategy also underpins the text’s “canonical work,” which is “to create and even impose the universal and metaphysical consensus in christ that it claims to transcribe.” most importantly, he states that it aligns with “the incipient institutionalization of the church” (20), which sought to negate millenarianism, along with “the multiplicity of tongues” inherent in fallen history (61-62). goldsmith argues that blake adopts revelation’s millenarian politics while rejecting its “universalizing transcendentalism,” a feat he achieves through the “strategies of textual indeterminacy” that characterize his narratives (137-39). in emphasizing the “primacy of representation over apocalypse,” blake aligns himself with the “intrinsically counter-apocalyptic” discourse of democratic politics, especially as practiced by thomas paine, whose enlightened skepticism toward language and truth undercuts any claims to universal authority. identifying fallen human language with the “preapocalyptic condition” of existence, goldsmith contends that both blake and paine organize their discourse “around the counterapocalyptic resistance to the logos by babel” (180-81). blake’s primary symbol for this condition is the “whore of babylon” (rahab or female will), who has “a nearly ubiquitous presence in his work” (140). for goldsmith, “babel/​babylon” does not symbolize the empire-religion nexus or the ideology of nature but post-structural difference and heterogeneity, the “multiplicity of voices that is never [or can never be] subsumed into a commanding unity” (141). in an analysis of blake’s painting a vision of the last judgment, he reads the placement of the babylon harlot in the lower center of the design as countering the “absolute authority” of christ the logos enthroned above, her female body and sexual power refusing to succumb to the fires of consummation (142-52). in a deconstructive move, he inverts the two figures, saying that the “persistence of babylon …, her refusal to go easily,” is the “governing logic of the image” (147). in goldsmith’s view, blake’s portrayal of her is “a lesson in negation and critique,” the “subversion of apocalypse through representation” (141). while goldsmith sharply critiques the authoritarian and exclusivist tendencies in revelation, its patriarchalism, and the antimillenarian aims of its conservative exegetes, neither he nor other blake scholars have considered the main political theology in john’s text. it is not the millenarian eschatology of chapter 20 but the redefinition of “conquering” that appears throughout, from the letters to the seven churches (chapters 2-3) to the advent of new jerusalem (chapter 21).in the new revised standard version (nrsv), each letter ends with jesus urging members to conquer, “as i myself conquered” (2:7, 11, 17, 26; 3:5, 12, 21), and when the new jerusalem descends, he promises that if they “conquer,” they will become his son (21:7). see a. y. collins, “political perspective” 243-45, 254-56; blount 37-89. translated as “overcoming” in the kjv, john’s “conquering” (nrsv) refers to the act of witnessing or being “faithful unto death” practiced by early christian martyrs: antipas at pergamum (2:13), the slain witnesses under the altar (6:9), the two witnesses “conquered” by the beast (11:3-12), and the army of 144,000 whose robes are “washed … in the blood of the lamb” (7:1-14, 14:1-3). their model is the slain lamb of chapter 5, whose self-sacrifice exalts him to the throne of god and sets in motion the eschatological narrative events that follow. this political theology, rooted in the concept of passive resistance, has been displaced by the pyrotechnic violence of john’s imagery and the influence of millenarianism on subsequent interpretation. while the theology of passive resistance is not foregrounded in rowland’s approach, he is the only scholar to show the central importance of chapter 5 to blake’s idea of apocalypse (blake and the bible 224-25, 235-36). his work offers several counterpoints to goldsmith’s that can help clarify discussion of the concept. rowland and cogan first, rowland takes a hermeneutic rather than a formalist approach to apocalypse that places the “primacy of the interpreting subject’s experience” at the center of his method. like wittreich, he emphasizes the allusive nature of scripture and the “scope for exploration” that it affords, describing the “room” or “semantic space” of the text that, applied to revelation, refers not to the transcendental “building” exegetes construct but to its capacity to stimulate creative interpretation (“‘rouzing’” 542). second, he stresses blake’s own “mystical” experiences as crucial to the meaning of apocalypse in his work, highlighting the two well-known episodes at felpham that blake recounts in letters to thomas butts. in the first letter (2 oct. 1800), blake describes a visionary scene in which he is lifted into the sky and heavenly beings enfold his body as “one man.” rowland calls it “a moment of apocalypse, a disclosure, about the totality of blake’s life” and likens it to accounts of visionary transformation in ancient “apocalyptic ascent texts” (blake and the bible 135-36). in the second (22 nov. 1802), blake depicts a merger with his own prophetic persona los, from which he develops the concept of “fourfold vision” that becomes a central feature of his art and poetry (e 722). for rowland, this experience underpins blake’s appropriation of ezekiel’s chariot-throne vision, particularly as reenvisioned in revelation 4-5. he speaks of blake’s “creative fusion” with john’s vision, his conviction that john had “already seen what he, blake, had seen and was writing about,” as blake states explicitly at the end of night viii in the four zoas.blake and the bible 146-52. speaking of his own characters and events in the poem, blake says that “john saw these things reveald in heaven / on patmos isle” (115/111.4-5; e 385). in blake and the bible, rowland covers an array of blake’s texts and designs that reinvent john’s vision, including europe, milton, jerusalem, the watercolors on revelation and enoch, the dante illustrations, the commentary on a vision of the last judgment, and, especially, the job engravings. he views the job engravings as providing a unique lens on blake’s hermeneutic approach, one that stages the “visionary, or apocalyptic, theme” of the book as a prompt for the reader-viewer’s “personal revelation” (14). the revelatory response is not an end in and of itself, however, but leads, “above all,” to “a way of life, a practice demonstrated in universal brotherhood and forgiveness of sin” (62). this ethical emphasis offers a third counterpoint to goldsmith’s approach to revelation, and to apocalypse more broadly. in his reading of blake’s job, rowland highlights the contrast between the plates numbered 1-2, which present an image of the divine throne and its separation from earth, and plate 17, which depicts job and his wife in direct contact with christ. he argues that their experience removes “the division between heaven and earth” and thus “reflects a major theme of the book of revelation,” namely the descent of the new jerusalem in john’s final chapters (17). moreover, the caption below the image on plate 17, “but now my eye seeth thee,” and the quotation from the gospel of john about the mutual indwelling of jesus and his followers inscribe blake’s central theme. for actually “seeing” god, which rowland says is “the goal of the heavenly ascents in the apocalyptic seers,” is in john’s gospel “related to the revelation of god in jesus,” and particularly to jesus’s manifestation in his followers’ acts of love and self-giving. the last point is especially important, rowland argues, because job’s epiphany remains incomplete without an ethical transformation (64), which is depicted on plate 18 as job praying for the “friends” that have persecuted him. this inclusion of an ethical dimension in revelatory experience is a feature that blake shares with such radical christian forebears as gerrard winstanley and abiezer coppe (157-74). rowland’s theory has yet to take hold in blake studies, but he is cited in several recent books that engage with blake’s view of apocalypse—​susanne sklar’s blake’s “jerusalem” as visionary theatre (2011), naomi billingsley’s the visionary art of william blake (2018), and lucy cogan’s blake and the failure of prophecy (2021).my review of blake and the failure of prophecy is in blake 56.3 (winter 2022–​23). drawing widely on rowland’s work, sklar defines apocalypse as revelation, though she associates it more broadly with the transformative potential of reading and performing texts, applied to jerusalem in particular (19, 42). billingsley argues that in his “visual representations of christ,” blake develops an “apocalyptic religious aesthetic” (9), and she too defines “apocalyptic” as the viewer’s transformation or “regeneration” (14, 130); unlike sklar, she conflates it with eschatology throughout. cogan’s approach is similar. she argues that blake seeks to expand the reader’s self-understanding and to bring “a transformative truth.” his works enact change through the “subversive potential” of their “formal experimentation” (22), especially their use of multiple perspectives, a view that echoes both wittreich and rowland. although she curiously grounds her understanding of apocalypse in the old rather than the new testament, cogan offers a substantial account of blake’s relation to prophetic traditions that deserves further elaboration. cogan’s primary claim is that the defeat of blake’s eschatological hopes in the mid-1790s compelled him to reinterpret the meaning of prophecy throughout his career, incorporating failure as a key component. taking his comments on jonah in the watson annotations as “his definitive statement on prophecy,” she emphasizes the prophet’s agency in negotiating terms with god: the “paradox of prophecy as prognostication,” she writes, is that “the future it sees may be changed,” as jonah’s story demonstrates. however, cogan finds the “subcategory of prophecy, apocalyptic literature,” lacking in this respect because in it “the prophesied future cannot be changed” (3). echoing the views of charles and hanson, she defines apocalypse as a deterministic mode of eschatology, rooted in mythical rather than historical categories and thus “abstracted from practical reality” (75). she acknowledges that, in america, blake combines myth and history in “a hybrid mode in which the two sides seem … to pull against one another,” but she says that as orc comes to dominate, he “seems to draw the work ever further towards the mythic and [thus] to displace human agency within the historical narrative” (76-77). her reduction of apocalypse to a mode of eschatology, coupled with her disregard of christian apocalyptic tradition, limits her argument, which otherwise yields impressive insights about blake’s engagement with prophetic traditions. these include a robust treatment of gender and sexual themes and a lucid account of blake’s merger with los—​recorded in both the felpham letter and milton (22/24.5-14)—​which leads him to reenvision “the eschatology of apocalyptic,” creating a more personal “parousia” or return of christ. cogan argues insightfully that in this new vision, blake and his audience are “capable of accessing eternity within any individual moment but only as part of an intersubjective visionary experience” (167-68). in her view, however, only milton achieves this aim because jerusalem succumbs to “a surprisingly conventional” view of the parousia, one in which jesus displaces los as the primary agent of transformation (190-91). iii. apocalypse and eschatology in blake’s milton while indebted to each of the blake scholars discussed above, i want to show how recent biblical studies can help clarify blake’s treatment of apocalypse and eschatology. i have chosen to examine milton because it foregrounds these concepts without conflating them. it is especially valuable for the way it distinguishes the immediacy of the apocalyptic moment from the futurity of the end-time hope. as indicated in my opening section, the narrative reflects the two-tiered structure of apocalypse and is organized around the descents of the three major characters, milton, ololon, and los, who depart from heaven and arrive, simultaneously, in blake’s cottage garden at felpham. the readiest way to grasp this apocalyptic feature is through blake’s illustrations.blake’s watercolors also feature the vertical dimension of apocalypse: see especially ezekiel’s wheels (butlin #468), the four and twenty elders casting their crowns before the divine throne (#515), “and the angel which i saw lifted up his hand to heaven” (#518), the baptism of christ (#475), the magdalene at the sepulchre (#504), the conversion of saul (#506), jacob’s dream (#438), and epitome of james hervey’s “meditations among the tombs” (#770). 1. milton, as falling star. milton copy d (composed c. 1804–​11, printed 1818). 16.0 x 11.2 cm. library of congress, lessing j. rosenwald collection. pr4144.m6 1815. 2. los, in the sun. milton copy d (composed c. 1804–​11, printed 1818). 16.0 x 11.1 cm. library of congress, lessing j. rosenwald collection. pr4144.m6 1815. 3. ololon, descending. milton copy d (composed c. 1804–​11, printed 1818). 14.1 x 10.2 cm. library of congress, lessing j. rosenwald collection. pr4144.m6 1815. the vertical relationship is prominent in each design. and while each descent leads to discussions of eschatology, their simultaneity cuts across the visual frames as it does the textual sequences of the narrative, focusing attention on the revelatory moment itself. as he prepares to descend, milton prays for the last judgment and imminent return of jesus (14/15.18-23), and both ololon and los announce the completion of 6000 years of eschatological history (21/23.51-52; 22/24.15-17). at the same time, blake seeks to interrupt the temporal movement of the narrative, compressing history within the visionary moment, as shown in the following well-known passage: every time less than a pulsation of the artery is equal in its period & value to six thousand years. for in this period the poets work is done: and all the great events of time start forth & are concievd in such a period within a moment (28/30.62-29/31.3) blake asserts something more radical and innovative than the arrival of the end-time, saying that the experience of a time “less than” a human pulsation is equal in value to, not identical with, the 6000-year span of christian eschatology. he redefines the end-time as an apocalyptic or revelatory experience, albeit one that takes place within time. as a discussion of the three descents will show, blake maintains an urgent expectation of the last days while emphasizing the capacity of apocalypse to disrupt the linear movement of time, opening it to a perception of eternity. readers conversant with milton know that it begins with a long preamble, “a bards prophetic song,” which is set entirely in the heavenly world. it motivates milton to descend to earth, giving up immortal life to redeem his “sixfold emanation.” the identity of this figure is not revealed until the main narrative begins, when milton enters his “shadow … hermaphroditic,” a composite of the male satan and female rahab whose formation is one of the two principal subjects of the song (2.25-14/15.9). the other is satan’s conflict with los and his sons for control over the “harrow of the almighty,” the key eschatological symbol of the song. satan no longer is the heroic rebel celebrated in the marriage of heaven and hell, but an amalgam of milton’s god and newton’s pantocrator, the “supreme being” who governs his deistic cosmology. satan’s egoism and imperial ambition enable him to gain control of the harrow, but when he drives it “among the constellations,” a “third” of the stars fall from heaven like milton’s apostate angels (12/13.25-26). but rather than denounce satan, as milton did, the bard says that enitharmon (los’s counterpart) creates a “new space” or cosmos to “protect” him from punishment, to which an “assembly” of eternals adds a time frame, the “six thousand years” of traditional christian eschatology. a central feature of this construct is its division into seven periods, culminating in the appearance of jesus as the “lamb of god,” whose self-sacrifice on satan’s behalf inspires milton to both reclaim satan and redeem his posthumous emanation, rahab, born at the end of the bard’s song (13/14.12-42). when milton descends, he embraces satan as his “selfhood,” described as “twenty-seven-fold” (14/15.30-41), the dimensions of the fallen cosmos that blake names “the mundane shell” (17/19.21-26). at the same time, milton’s “real and immortal self” is guarded by “seven angels of the presence,” a group of eternals who enter the shadow with him, “journeying above” the mundane shell (15/17.9-12; 17/19.18-19). milton’s descent thus introduces the two-tiered narrative setting into the poem. he first appears to blake as a falling star that lands on the “tarsus” of his left foot (15/17.47-50), an image many scholars view as an allusion to paul of tarsus (essick and viscomi 27). this reference is bolstered by the small design above the passage, depicting the star trailing light and fire as blake’s body arcs backward in an ecstatic pose, echoing paul’s encounter with jesus on the road to damascus.blake illustrates this encounter in the conversion of saul (butlin #506). acts refers to paul’s experience as a “trance” (22:17); paul refers to it as a “revelation” (apokalýptō) (galatians 1:12). as wittreich observes, blake “magnifies” this interlinear design into a full-page illustration (illus. 1), showing its importance to “the underlying concept of the poem” (56). the underlying concept is the moment of milton’s descent, when los and ololon also descend, events whose simultaneity blake seeks to suggest by placing them in consecutive order (21/23.4-22/24.5).in book 1, blake inserts a passage on ololon’s descent in between the descents of milton and los (21/23.45-60), reserving its narration for book 2 (31/34.8). in describing the descent of los, blake writes that los appears just as he (blake) ties the “immortal” sandal onto the foot that milton enters: “and los behind me stood; a terrible flaming sun: just close / behind my back; i turned round in terror, and behold. / los … also stoop’d down / and bound my sandals on” (22/24.6-9). in the illustration of the passage (illus. 2), los appears within the flaming sun as blake kneels on the earth, turning to face los with his head directly in los’s groin, suggestive of sexual contact. the passage and design also allude to ezekiel’s second vision of god, in which the spirit lifts him “between the earth and the heaven” and he beholds “a likeness as the appearance of fire, from the appearance of his loins even downward … and from his loins, even upward” (8:1-3).rowland’s discussion of the ezekiel passage is included in my section 1 above; also see blake and the bible (75-76, 237). blake brings the apocalyptic and homoerotic aspects of the design into proximity, the image of physical intimacy conveying his merger and identification with los: “i became one man with him” (22/24.12). rowland observes that the image of los’s “potency” being “transmitted” to blake is an innovation that accords with the tradition of apocalypse, in which the vision and power of the former prophet serve as “the medium of a new form of creativity” (blake and the bible 237). the creative impact of their union is shown in los’s speech, which introduces the concept of the apocalyptic moment into the poem. i am that shadowy prophet who six thousand years ago fell from my station in the eternal bosom. six thousand years are finishd. i return! … i in six thousand years walk up and down: for not one moment of time is lost, nor one event of space unpermanent …………………………………………………………………………… they vanish not from me & mine, we guard them first & last (22/24.15-23) the traditional 6000-year framework presented at the end of the bard’s song takes on new meaning, as los announces both its completion and his capacity to render permanent each moment and event in history. while he transforms its meaning, los retains an essential feature of the bard’s song construct, the act of “guarding” each moment. this feature links the seven tutelary figures “sent” by the assembly to serve as “guard[s]” to protect satan with the other sevenfold entities in the poem: the seven angels of the presence who comfort milton and “guard round him” (15/17.14); the “seven ages” of providential history, each with its own angelic “guard” (28/30.58-61); and, most importantly, the “seven eyes of god” that los says “continually / guard round” the generations of time (24/26.7-9). though the seven eyes culminate in the “last vintage,” which becomes the main eschatological symbol in the narrative, they also are closely related to the apocalyptic moment, which both arrests and condenses time, dislocating its movement toward the eschaton. blake introduces the seven eyes of god in the first of los’s final two speeches, which offer an impassioned account of christian eschatology that dramatizes the tension between its already-not yet features (23/25-25/27). on the one hand, los hails milton as the “awakener” whose return is a “signal that the last vintage now approaches” (24/26.42), proclaiming that “the great vintage & harvest is now upon earth,” and adding that every living thing “now is flocking to the sound of the trumpet” (25/27.17-22; emphases added). on the other hand, he addresses the fear of his sons that milton will bring the eschatological violence associated with his support of the english revolution and regicide. los thus counsels the kind of patient endurance that john advocates in revelation, urging his sons to “be patient yet a little” (using variations on the phrase four times) until “the last vintage is over” (23/25.32-59).the phrase “patient endurance,” which occurs at several key places in revelation (1:9; 2:2-3; 14:12; nrsv), underpins the militant pacifism at the core of revelation’s political theology, discussed in my section 2 above. los’s explanation for the delay, “that the seven eyes of god may have space for redemption” (23/25.52), seems straightforward, referring simply to the “time” needed to prepare for redemption. but it also goes to the heart of blake’s redefinition of the end-time, which transforms time in a uniquely spatial way, as he reveals in the pulsation of an artery passage (29/31.4-26). blake delivers this passage himself, having turned abruptly from los’s last speech to a discussion of “the constellations,” showing his interest in the cosmological dimension of history, akin to the ancient apocalypses. as he narrates the actions of los’s sons, “labourers of the vintage,” he calls attention to their creation of the multiple divisions of time—​from moments and hours to ages and periods—​which he describes as “wondrous buildings,” a spatial metaphor. he adds that just as “seven ages” can contract into a moment “less than a pulsation of the artery,” so “every space smaller than a globule of mans blood. opens / into eternity” (29/31.21-22). this opening of space into eternity, correlated with the compression of time into the moment, provides the liminal path for ololon’s descent in book 2. the descent of ololon is arguably the most significant event in the poem. it enables milton to complete his journey, it manifests the second coming of jesus, and it situates the seven eyes of god within the apocalyptic moment, as conveyed through the figure of the lark, who symbolically enacts the extension of time into eternity. as soon as milton and the seven angels behold ololon, they rejoice to see that “a wide road was open to eternity,” making possible the fulfillment of los’s prophecy that milton would “up ascend / forwards” from felpham back to eden (35/39.34-35; 20/22.57-60). they also fall silent in awe, “for they saw the lord in the clouds of ololon” (35/39.41): christ’s second coming is associated with ololon throughout (21/23.60; 31/34.10-16; 42/49.10-12). an account of the apocalyptic moment follows, elaborating the descriptions in book 1. blake first identifies ololon’s descent with the “moment” that satan and his “watch fiends” cannot find and which, “if rightly placed,” can renovate “every moment” of the day. in a series of abrupt transitions, he adds that “just in this moment” a fountain appears and that “just at the place” where “the larks nest” is located, ololon sits beside the fountain. blake describes the lark as “a mighty angel” and as los’s “messenger,” whose purpose is to ensure that “the seven eyes of god who walk … / thro all the twenty-seven heavens may not slumber nor sleep” (35/39.48-65). the lark’s awakening function is especially important in shifting the eschatology of the seven eyes toward apocalypse. the lark performs this shift in a beautiful lyrical passage that appears early in book 2, just as ololon descends to earth. as it leads “the choir of day” in song, the lark mounts “upon the wings of light” and “vibrates with the effluence divine,” compelling all of nature to listen in silence; the sun “stands still upon the mountain” (31/34.31-37). the image of the motionless sun, which derives from the book of joshua (10:12), is used by augustine in the confessions to demonstrate god’s power not only to stop time but to distend it into eternity, blake’s meaning also.blake applies the image to the lark’s song rather than to joshua’s battle at gibeon. see augustine, confessions, book 11, chapter 23. similarly, when the lark mounts into the twenty-seven heavens, it interacts with a series of twenty-six other larks who “all night consult with angels / of providence & with the eyes of god,” until a twenty-eighth lark meets ololon “descending into [blake’s] garden,” and time and space are transcended altogether. … nor time nor space was to the perception of the virgin ololon but as the flash of lightning but more quick the virgin in my garden before my cottage stood for the satanic space is delusion (36/40.17-20) the hyper-quickness of ololon’s descent matches in speed the “less than a pulsation” moment described in book 1. both passages seek to convey the effect of simultaneity linking the three descents. what makes the experience of such an instantaneous moment possible is blake’s belief in the reality of the eternal world behind the “delusion” or epiphenomena of rationalist space and time. in concert with the activity of the lark and seven eyes, ololon’s descent opens a “space” for redemption that passes through the mundane shell into the world above, the “spatial” dimension of transcendence in j. j. collins’s definition of apocalypse. rather than a movement toward the end, the “more quick” moment creates an interval or duration that is discontinuous with chronology.i draw on agamben’s treatment of “messianic time” in paul’s letters (60-71). on the penultimate plate of milton, blake writes that the multiple events in the poem occur during a “moment” of ecstatic trance as he lay “outstretchd upon the path” of his garden at felpham. in this moment, ololon, milton, and the seven angels all merge with “jesus the saviour,” who returns in the clouds of ololon as the lark mounts and the four zoas sound their trumpets, heralding the imminent arrival of the last vintage (42/49.7-30). it is significant that the last vintage has not arrived. blake underscores the fact that eschatological history continues despite the apocalypse he records in the poem. this experience prepares him for an event that remains a future hope, one in which he ardently believes. even so, he shows that revelatory experience can facilitate what altizer views as “an immediate and total participation” in divine reality, distinguishing it from the horizontal movement toward the eschaton. as readers of blake know, such apocalyptic moments are fundamental to his art and theology, even as he situates or leverages them from within history. he is a deeply eschatological thinker and artist, but he recognizes the qualitative distinction between the future hope and the richness and depth that apocalypse unveils in the present moment. the unilinear direction of history remains the defining feature of eschatology, but apocalypse abridges and transforms time from within, creating what hannah arendt describes as “the small non-time space in the very heart of time.”arendt uses this description in defining the medieval concept of eternal time, citing blake’s aphorism about holding “eternity in an hour” (204, 210). what milton reveals more clearly than any other work in blake’s canon is how to keep the telos of eschatology open to further apocalypse. both concepts are essential to blake, but he does not confuse or conflate them. works cited/​bibliography abrams, m. h. natural supernaturalism: tradition and revolution in romantic literature. new york: norton, 1971. agamben, giorgio. the time that remains: a commentary on the letter to the romans. trans. patricia dailey. stanford: stanford up, 2005. altizer, thomas. living the death of god: a theological memoir. albany: suny p, 2006. —​—​—​. the new apocalypse: the radical christian vision of william blake. 1967. aurora, co: davies, 2000. arendt, hannah. the life of the mind. san diego: harvest, 1981. augustine. st. augustine’s confessions. trans. william watts. 2 vols. cambridge, ma: harvard up, 1960. barton, john. oracles of god: perceptions of ancient prophecy in israel after the exile. 1986. new york: oxford up, 1988. billingsley, naomi. the visionary art of william blake: christianity, romanticism and the 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[abbreviated as e] essick, robert n., and joseph viscomi, eds. “milton a poem” and the final illuminated works: “the ghost of abel,” “on homer’s poetry” [and] “on virgil,” “laocoön.” princeton: william blake trust/​princeton up, 1993. fletcher-louis, crispin. “jewish apocalyptic and apocalypticism.” handbook for the study of the historical jesus. 4 vols. ed. tom holmén and stanley e. porter. leiden: brill, 2011. 1: 1569-1607. frye, northrop. anatomy of criticism: four essays. princeton: princeton up, 1957. —​—​—​. fearful symmetry: a study of william blake. 1947. princeton: princeton up, 1969. goldsmith, steven. unbuilding jerusalem: apocalypse and romantic representation. ithaca, ny: cornell up, 1993. hanson, paul d. “apocalypticism.” the interpreter’s dictionary of the bible. supplementary vol. ed. keith crim. nashville: abingdon, 1976. 28-34. —​—​—​. the dawn of apocalyptic: the historical and sociological roots of jewish apocalyptic eschatology. philadelphia: fortress, 1975. henze, matthias. “apocalyptic literature.” early judaism and its modern interpreters. ed. matthias henze and rodney a. werline. 2nd ed. atlanta: sbl, 2020. 405-36. hobson, christopher z. the chained boy: orc and blake’s idea of revolution. lewisburg: bucknell up, 1999. koch, klaus. the rediscovery of apocalyptic. 1970. trans. margaret kohl. london: scm, 1972. mcginn, bernard, john j. collins, and stephen j. stein, eds. the encyclopedia of apocalypticism. vol. 1: the origins of apocalypticism in judaism and christianity. new york: continuum, 1998. najman, hindy. “the inheritance of prophecy in apocalypse.” j. j. collins, oxford handbook 36-51. otto, rudolf. the kingdom of god and the son of man. 1934. trans. floyd v. filson and bertram lee-woolf. rev. ed. london: lutterworth p, 1943. paley, morton d. apocalypse and millennium in english romantic poetry. oxford: clarendon p, 1999. —​—​—​. the continuing city: william blake’s “jerusalem.” oxford: clarendon p, 1983. —​—​—​. energy and the imagination: a study of the development of blake’s thought. oxford: clarendon p, 1970. rowland, christopher. blake and the bible. new haven: yale up, 2010. —​—​—​. “by an immediate revelation”: studies in apocalypticism, its origins and effects. tübingen: mohr siebeck, 2022. —​—​—​. christian origins: the setting and character of the most important messianic sect of judaism. 1985. 2nd ed. london: spck, 2002. —​—​—​. “the common people and the bible: winstanley, blake and liberation theology.” prose studies 22.2 (1999): 149-60. —​—​—​. “‘the heavens were opened and i saw visions of god’: the open heaven—​nearly four decades on.” rowland, “immediate revelation” 166-81. —​—​—​. the open heaven: a study of apocalyptic in judaism and early christianity. new york: crossroad, 1982. —​—​—​. “‘rouzing the faculties to act’: william blake, merkabah mysticism, the theology of liberation and the exegetical importance of experience.” biblical interpretation 11.3/4 (2003): 543-54. rowland, christopher, and christopher r. a. morray-jones. the mystery of god: early jewish mysticism and the new testament. leiden: brill, 2009. rowley, h. h. the relevance of apocalyptic: a study of jewish and christian apocalypses from daniel to the revelation. 1944. rev. ed. new york: harper, 1946. russell, d. s. apocalyptic: ancient and modern. philadelphia: fortress, 1978. scholem, gershom. major trends in jewish mysticism. 1941. new york: schocken, 1954. —​—​—​. on the mystical shape of the godhead: basic concepts in the kabbalah. 1962. trans. joachim neugroschel. new york: schocken, 1991. schweitzer, albert. the quest of the historical jesus. 1906. trans. w. montgomery. new york: macmillan, 1968. sklar, susanne m. blake’s “jerusalem” as visionary theatre: entering the divine body. oxford: oxford up, 2011. spector, sheila a. the evolution of blake’s myth. new york: routledge, 2020. stone, michael e. “apocalyptic literature.” jewish writings of the second temple period. ed. michael e. stone. philadelphia: fortress, 1984. 383-441. —​—​—​. “lists of revealed things in the apocalyptic literature.” magnalia dei: the mighty acts of god. ed. frank moore cross, werner e. lemke, and patrick d. miller, jr. garden city: doubleday, 1976. 414-52. —​—​—​. “a reconsideration of apocalyptic visions.” harvard theological review 96.2 (apr. 2003): 167-80. sturm, richard e. “defining the word ‘apocalyptic’: a problem in biblical criticism.” apocalyptic and the new testament. ed. joel marcus and marion l. soards. sheffield: sheffield academic p, 1989. 17-48. von rad, gerhard. old testament theology. vol. 2: the theology of israel’s prophetic traditions. 1960. trans. d. m. g. stalker. new york: harper & row, 1965. wittreich, joseph anthony, jr. “opening the seals: blake’s epics and the milton tradition.” curran and wittreich 23-58. —​—​—​. “‘a poet amongst poets’: milton and the tradition of prophecy.” milton and the line of vision. ed. joseph anthony wittreich, jr. madison: u of wisconsin p, 1975. 97-142. visionary poetics: milton’s tradition and his legacy. san marino: huntington library and art gallery, 1979. review: jason whittaker, jerusalem: blake, parry, and the fight for englishness jason whittaker. jerusalem: blake, parry, and the fight for englishness. oxford: oxford university press, 2022. 249 pp. £28.99/​$38.99, hardcover; £12.99/​$38.99, e-book. reviewed by camila oliveira camila oliveira (camila.querino@edu.ulisboa.pt) is a research fellow at the university of lisbon. she holds a phd in english literature from the federal university of rio de janeiro and king’s college london on the translation of blake’s “jerusalem” into portuguese and biblical intertextuality. she is currently working on romanticism and music reception and writing a monograph on blake and contemporary music. blake famously stated “without contraries is no progression,” and the history of the hymn “jerusalem” proves his dictum. elevated to the status of anthem, the opening lines of milton, set to music by hubert parry in 1916, have been adopted not only by national teams in sporting events but also by antagonistic political forces and by a diverse multitude of artists. such a phenomenon demonstrates that blake’s ode to england accommodates a polyphony of voices with different understandings of the meaning and implications of englishness. this is precisely the sum and substance of jason whittaker’s jerusalem: blake, parry, and the fight for englishness. by presenting a well-knit study of the hymn’s history and reception, whittaker examines in detail how “jerusalem” has been converted into an ambivalent and often problematic emblem of patriotism and nationalism, terms translated by george orwell as the “love of home” in opposition to the “fear of the other” (whittaker 19).see orwell’s essays “england your england” (1941) and “notes on nationalism” (1945). the opening chapter is dedicated to an account of the context in which the epic milton was produced. in order to shed light on the contrast between—​and irony of—​blake’s radical political stands and the conservative movement for which the hymn was initially composed, whittaker rightfully evokes blake’s trial for sedition, which took place around the time that the poem was penned. after an altercation with a soldier in the village of felpham in the first year of the napoleonic wars, blake was accused of treason for uttering seditious words against the king, an offense that could have landed him in prison. this episode reinforced his disapproval of war and violence, conveyed by the manifesto that opens milton and underlined by the oxymoronic appropriation of martial imagery in the stanzas of “and did those feet”: “mental fight” and “arrows of desire.” whittaker traces the genealogy and sources of the poem, demonstrating blake’s departure from the notion that western civilization is modeled on greek antiquity and calling attention to the judeo-christian influence to sustain, among other things, his view that the feet blake refers to are those of joseph of arimathea, the precursor of the christian faith in england, according to twelfth-century legends. chapter 2 discusses the circulation and reception of the opening stanzas of milton, placing emphasis on the difficulties found with the prophetic books by early critics such as blake’s biographer alexander gilchrist, algernon charles swinburne, and, most notably, w. b. yeats and edwin j. ellis, who published the controversial yet indispensable works of william blake in 1893, which offered an allegorical and overtly mystic interpretation of the english poet, but nonetheless helped to boost blake’s popularity in the twentieth century. whittaker highlights the pivotal role of anthologies in the dissemination of “and did those feet,” once the lines were detached from their original and rather cryptic context. he argues that anthologies, which are often thematic, were also responsible for the promotion of certain interpretations; the very early inclusion of the stanzas in nationalist-tinted collections fostered a perception of them as a defense of england’s supremacy, which appealed to the spirit of the time, although utterly disregarded what nationalism or englishness meant to blake. this was precisely the case for henry charles beeching’s a paradise of english poetry (1893)whittaker also mentions beeching’s anthology lyra sacra (1895), which puts together the lines of “and did those feet” and a fragment from jerusalem. the combined form is titled “the new jerusalem,” a detail that cannot go unnoticed, given the later title of the hymn. and robert bridges’s the spirit of man (1915, published 1916). the latter played a crucial role in the composition of parry’s famed setting, for bridges—​after a meeting of fight for right, a movement deeply connected to britain’s war propaganda bureau—​offered a copy to the composer and asked him to set milton’s opening lines to music as an endeavor to boost morale. whittaker assigns equal importance to the earliest musical rendering of “and did those feet” (1907, published 1908), by henry walford davies, parry’s former student, who set a handful of blake’s poems to music at a time when blake was still paving his way toward the english canon. the third chapter focuses on the context in which parry’s setting was produced and problematizes the intrinsic contradictions of the composition: for instance, parry wrote the music to support the war against germany while highly sympathetic toward german culture; on the political spectrum, he was some kind of moderate liberal, but composed the hymn for a rather conservative movement, under the influence of his comrades walford davies and bridges. after withdrawing his support from fight for right for its escalating jingoistic propaganda, parry found a more suitable home for the hymn with the national union of women’s suffrage societies (nuwss); a rearranged version, with “jerusalem” as its official name, was performed in support of the campaign for votes for women in 1918. significantly, parry left the copyright to the nuwss. in chapter 4, the book moves on to the interwar period, when the fluidity of “jerusalem” in the political spectrum becomes even more evident. whittaker argues that the new arrangement by edward elgar in 1922 not only secured parry’s setting in the canon but also elevated it to the status of anthem, while restoring its former nationalistic appeal and diluting its association with progressive causes. in the following decade, the anthem was readopted by the left in an attempt to resurrect blake’s revolutionary spirit. the political momentum embodied by the british labour party leader, clement attlee, added new layers of interpretation to the hymn. drawing attention to images once overlooked, the left underscored the perniciousness of industrialization by harnessing blake’s evocation of “dark satanic mills,” and converted it into a well-established expression. whittaker also highlights the recording in 1939 by the african-american actor and singer paul robeson, known for his political activism, which reinforced the anti-establishment appeal of “jerusalem.” the tide turned and the turbulent waters of the second world war awakened the nationalist spirit. the anthem was appropriated by the right once more, but the public response was less celebratory and more pragmatic, compared to the early days of the fight for right movement, because of concerns about the prospect of a catastrophic defeat. surprisingly, the allies’ victory in 1945 didn’t translate into a favorable result in the polls for the conservatives, and labour took power for the rest of the forties, adopting “jerusalem” as the hymn of the postwar welfare state. the conservative administration that followed in the fifties encouraged the singing of the anthem in schools as part of the propaganda of empire. in 1953, “jerusalem” featured in the film of the coronation of elizabeth ii and enjoyed patriotism’s heure de gloire when it was incorporated into the closing section of the last night of the proms. as whittaker demonstrates in chapter 5, in the next two decades the revolution that again changed the status of “jerusalem” was less political than cultural. defiant baby boomers sneered at the outdated and tacky symbols of a crumbled empire and parry’s hymn was deemed an obsolete reminder of the past. in desacralizing “jerusalem,” this new generation turned it into a rather ambivalent and profane symbol of englishness. neoteric visions of it began to emerge in popular culture as a reflection of the spirit and tastes of the time. whittaker duly stresses that the social backgrounds of the artists had a role to play; they were particularly keen to use blake’s words against the purposes to which parry’s hymn had often been put. in music, it was adapted to a variety of genres: don partridge’s folk, a bolero by the castells, and a progressive version by the trio emerson, lake & palmer. in the tv and film industry, “jerusalem” was largely used as an ironic or metaphorical trope, as in the case of monty python and the man who fell to earth, etc. while not particularly celebratory, the sixties and seventies indubitably imbued “jerusalem” with new life and secured its endurance for the next generation. when whittaker turns his eyes and ears to the eighties, he observes the ironic tone of the sixties and seventies giving way to hostility in the emerging and marginal punk scene in england. thatcherism resulted in an even more aggressive form of patriotism, stirred by the falklands war; an unprecedented antagonism toward unions and social movements; and a blind devotion to the “free-market god.” in chapter 6, whittaker offers a gloomy portrait of the gray and unpleasant land that england had become in the name of the so-called progress cemented in the nostalgic grandeur of the old and mouldy empire of the never-setting sun. as a more immediate result, parry’s anthem was reestablished as a trope of englishness. the end of the thatcher era in the 1990s represented an opening for more promising and inclusive forms of englishness to arise. the left was inspired by the socialist ideals of the postwar labour party, which were reechoed in the versions of “jerusalem” by billy bragg and test dept. the two decades from the height of punk to the fall of the conservative party from office in 1997 saw a remarkable transformation of the political, artistic, and cultural contexts in which “jerusalem” would henceforth be invoked. whittaker also remarks on the escalating influence of the opening lines of milton on writers such as kenzaburō ōe, angela carter, and j. g. ballard, to name a few. chapter 7 is devoted to the reception of “jerusalem” from the end of the 1990s into the 2000s, from the rise of tony blair to the controversial referendum in 2016 on whether the united kingdom should leave the european union. ingrained in the english collective unconscious, the imagery of “jerusalem” framed new myths, like that of diana, princess of wales, in elton john’s elegy “goodbye england’s rose” (1997). as a well-established emblem of the nation, the hymn featured in the royal wedding (2011), the diamond jubilee (2012), and the opening ceremony of the olympic games in london (2012). whittaker argues that the adoption of “jerusalem” as an anthem in the arena of sports is less ecumenical than in the aforementioned examples. by celebrating england and its green and pleasant fields alone, the stanzas inevitably stress the intrinsically fractured nature of the united kingdom. “jerusalem” was declared the official anthem of england for the 2010 commonwealth games, and has been sung by england supporters at cricket and rugby union matches, though less so at the football. in an analogous divisive spirit, in 2016 the right wing used the words as a rallying cry of the brexit campaign; the vote was, ironically enough, in the same year as the centennial of parry’s setting. as a counterweight to virulent jingoistic revivals in the 2000s, whittaker celebrates the last few decades as the golden age in terms of artistic responses to “jerusalem,” which bring a multiplicity of new perspectives. in music, innovative experiments such as bruce dickinson’s heavy-metal version, a new tune by bob davenport, and the musical collage of marc almond and john harle set the tone of the times. whittaker also offers examples of playwrights, poets, novelists, filmmakers, and painters who engage with “jerusalem” with a less sarcastic and more nonconformist attitude than that of the seventies. in addition, he emphasizes the pivotal role of multiculturalism in the expansion, problematization, and resignification of the stanzas and the hymn itself. in the epilogue, he reminds us that the one nation that england has become is constituted by an amalgamation of peoples and ethnicities, as blake makes explicit in his epic jerusalem. ultimately, the anthem “jerusalem” does nothing but celebrate those origins and rouse men of the new age to rebel against the ignorant hirelings who promote corporeal war and discord through a pernicious nationalist discourse. it epitomizes blake’s projection of the pleasant and welcoming land he hoped england would become one day. jerusalem: blake, parry, and the fight for englishness is, beyond doubt, an indispensable book for blake scholars and all those interested in understanding the recent history of england told through the reception of its most popular anthem. the book makes it evident that blake’s oeuvre encapsulates ideas that can be read in today’s world through antithetical lenses, and attests that the greatest works of art, for good and bad, are “self-living” and pay no heed to the artist’s motives. blake • volume 55 n um be r 1 • su m m er 20 21 angela esterhammer, victoria college, university of toronto nelson hilton, university of georgia tilar j. mazzeo, colby college robert w. rix, university of copenhagen joseph viscomi, university of north carolina at chapel hill david worrall, the nottingham trent university martin butlin, tate gallery, london, retired tristanne j. connolly, university of waterloo detlef w. dörrbecker, university of trier sibylle erle, bishop grosseteste university robert n. essick, university of california, riverside a d v i s o r y b o a r d a n i l l u s t r a t e d q u a r t e r l y volume 55 number 1 summer 2021 c o n t e n t s www.blakequarterly.org articles william blake and his circle: a checklist of scholarship in 2020 by wayne c. ripley, with works in romance languages contributed by fernando castanedo, works in japanese contributed by hikari sato, works in turkish contributed by hüseyin alhas, and works in russian and other cyrillic languages contributed by vera serdechnaia blake and music, 2020 by jason whittaker blake and exhibitions, 2020 by luisa calè review edina adam with julian brooks, and an essay by matthew hargraves, william blake: visionary lives of william blake: henry crabb robinson, john thomas smith, alexander gilchrist, introduced by martin myrone reviewed by luisa calè © 2021 copyright morris eaves and morton d. paley cover: the song of los, frontispiece from copy b (composed and printed 1795). library of congress, lessing j. rosenwald collection, catalogue number 1808. image courtesy of the william blake archive. e d i t o r s editors: morris eaves and morton d. paley review editor: alexander s. gourlay exhibitions editor: luisa calè bibliographer (criticism): wayne c. ripley bibliographer (music): jason whittaker managing editor: sarah jones sarah.jones@rochester.edu production office: department of english, university of rochester, rochester ny 14627-0451 nelson hilton, university of georgia josephine a. mcquail, independent scholar robert w. rix, university of copenhagen joseph viscomi, university of north carolina at chapel hill david worrall, the nottingham trent university martin butlin, tate gallery, london, retired tristanne j. connolly, university of waterloo detlef w. dörrbecker, university of trier, retired sibylle erle, university of lincoln robert n. essick, university of california, riverside angela esterhammer, victoria college, university of toronto a d v i s o r y b o a r d a n i l l u s t r a t e d q u a r t e r l y volume 58 number 4 spring 2025 c o n t e n t s www.blakequarterly.org © 2025 copyright blake/an illustrated quarterly cover: adapted from “a catalogue of curious and true original pictures, by the best italian and other masters,” broadside advertisement, 1712. yale center for british art, paul mellon collection. rare books and manuscripts, folio a 2011 9. e d i t o r s editors: morton d. paley, tilar j. mazzeo editor, 1970–2024: morris eaves book review editor: sibylle erle exhibitions editor: luisa calè bibliographer (criticism): wayne c. ripley bibliographer (music): camila oliveira sales review editor: mark crosby managing editor: sarah jones sarah.jones@rochester.edu production office: department of english, university of rochester, rochester ny 14627-0451 news our new co-editor by morton d. paley articles blake in the marketplace, 2024 by mark crosby blake’s juxtapositional prosodic method in “holy thursday” (innocence) by francesca cauchi reviews jason whittaker, jerusalem: blake, parry, and the fight for englishness reviewed by camila oliveira jason whittaker, divine images: the life and work of william blake reviewed by matthew leporati timothy morton, hell: in search of a christian ecology reviewed by william ilan rubel joshua schouten de jel, william blake’s divine love: visions of oothoon reviewed by ramazan saral blake and exhibitions, 2023 william blake: visionary at the getty center in los angeles. photo: © j. paul getty trust. see enlargement. blake and exhibitions, 2023 by luisa calè luisa calè (l.cale@bbk.ac.uk), birkbeck, university of london, writes about practices of reading, viewing, and collecting in the romantic period. she is completing a monograph entitled the book unbound: the material culture of reading and collecting, ca. 1750–​1850, with chapters on walpole, blake, and dickens, funded by the leverhulme trust. she is the exhibitions editor for blake. the landmark exhibition of 2023 was william blake: visionary at the getty, originally scheduled for summer 2020 as the american counterpart of the tate britain retrospective of 2019–​20, but postponed because of the covid-19 pandemic. meanwhile, in spring 2023 blake returned to the main gallery at tate as part of the rehang of the collections, which involved him in the dialogue between historic and contemporary art and politics through interventions within the chronological survey. themed exhibitions continued to be a significant feature of blake on view, with earth, the final installment of a cycle about elements at the royal west of england academy, bristol; light, a traveling exhibition in new zealand and japan; and innocence and experience, a selection from the permanent collections at the metropolitan museum in new york. poetry & magic at the italian cultural institute of london celebrated the transnational work of italian anthropologist anita seppilli by bringing together an international selection of artworks, including blake, within a psychogeographic and surrealist poetics of the city. blake’s place in survey exhibitions focused on technique put the spotlight on his temperas in method and material: tempera painting in focus at the huntington. a job engraving was included in a survey of printmaking from the ackland art museum at the university of north carolina. interventions on blake’s reception rearticulated his influence on the pre-raphaelites in the rossettis: radical romantics at tate britain. it featured the notebook, formerly known as the rossetti manuscript, which dante gabriel rossetti bought when he was a student at the royal academy. the second edition of alexander gilchrist’s life of william blake documented blake’s influence on protest song and street scenes in the mid-1800s through a reproduction of “london,” as well as his impact on arts-and-crafts bindings, evidenced by the cover art by frederic shields, which reworked the composition of oberon and titania on a lily, a subject identified by william michael rossetti in the same book. blake’s watercolor of this subject appeared in wild things are happening: the art of maurice sendak at the columbus museum of art. 2023 was a strong year for the large color prints, with more than half of the designs on display at home and around the world: newton and pity at tate in the blake room; the tate’s nebuchadnezzar and night of enitharmon’s joy with the getty’s satan exulting over eve in william blake: visionary; the tate’s good and evil angels and god judging adam in the traveling exhibition light; and the met’s own pulls of god judging adam and pity on display as part of the museum’s selection of prints and drawings around the blakean theme of innocence and experience. earth: digging deep in british art, 1781–​2022 curated by emma stibbon, christiana payne, and nathalie levi royal west of england academy, bristol 9 july–​11 september 2022 catalogue: payne, christiana, nathalie levi, and emma stibbon. earth: digging deep in british art, 1781–​2022. bristol: sansom and co., 2022. this was the final exhibition in a cycle dedicated to the elements at the royal west of england academy in bristol, starting with the power of the sea: making waves in british art, 1790–​2014 (2014); air: visualising the invisible in british art, 1768–​2017 (2017); and fire: flashes to ashes in british art, 1692–​2019 (2019). earth contrasted sublime and productive landscapes, from the experience or threat of natural disaster featured by gainsborough and de loutherbourg to nature as a site of good husbandry, situating blake’s more intimate small-scale wood-engraved illustrations to thornton’s pastorals of virgil in dialogue with calvert and palmer. the exhibition also considered nineteenthand twentieth-century depictions of rock formations and mining subjects. wood engravings for robert john thornton, the pastorals of virgil, 1821: “thenot remonstrates with colinet” “thenot under a fruit tree” “thenot remonstrates with colinet, lightfoot in the distance” “colinet departs in sorrow, a thunder-scarred tree on the right” “blasted tree and blighted crops” “the good shepherd chases away the wolf” “sabrina’s silvery flood” “colinet’s fond desire strange lands to know” “a rolling stone is ever bare of moss” “colinet resting at cambridge by night” “colinet mocked by two boys” “menalcas’s yearly wake” “thenot and colinet folding their flocks together at sunset” “thenot and colinet sup together” “with songs the jovial hinds return from plow” “unyoked heifers loitering homeward, low” victoria and albert museum, e.1976-1926 to e.1991-1926 wild things are happening: the art of maurice sendak curated by jonathan weinberg columbus museum of art 21 october 2022–​19 march 2023 catalogue: weinberg, jonathan, ed. wild things are happening: the art of maurice sendak. new york: delmonico books, 2022. this retrospective of sendak’s artworks displayed blake among influences ranging from george stubbs, philipp otto runge, and beatrix potter to walt disney and winsor mccay. a wall hang dedicated to enlightenment scenes and sendak’s re-creations included oberon and titania on a lily (c. 1790–​93), a watercolor that william michael rossetti identified as a subject inspired by shakespeare’s midsummer night’s dream.the watercolor was acquired by sendak at sotheby’s on 25 january 2006. for details and an in-depth discussion, see robert n. essick, “blake in the marketplace, 2006,” blake 40.4 (spring 2007): 116, 128-29. blake also printed the composition as a full-plate design for the song of los. wild things are happening: the art of maurice sendak at the columbus museum of art. photo: © columbus museum of art. sendak works: © the maurice sendak foundation. see enlargement. the first item in the wall hang, the shakespearean illustration “the death of cleopatra” (1804) engraved by robert hartley cromek after fuseli, set the violent tone of moods and animated gestures that characterized the sequence of exhibits. it was followed by a set of four sendak illustrations to joel agee’s translation of heinrich von kleist’s penthesilea: a tragic drama (1998); an engraving of fuseli’s the nightmare; sendak’s version of the same composition with an added owl; and plate 75 from goya’s caprichos, in which an owl lands on the head of a desperate bound woman, captioned “will no one untie us?” coming last in this sequence, oberon and titania on a lily felt haunted by the nightmarish disquiet of the aggressive scenes preceding it. above them, sendak’s hot-air balloon design for the magic flute (1979–​80) took flight from the penthesilea illustrations. the blake influences in sendak’s designs for the magic flute were documented with a different set of works in drawing the curtain: maurice sendak’s designs for opera and ballet, curated by rachel federman for the morgan library and museum, which featured milton’s mysterious dream and behemoth and leviathan as evidence of ideas for monster and cave elements.see “blake and exhibitions, 2022,” blake 57.1 (summer 2023). in columbus, the arrangement invited us to see blake’s delicate sleeping fairies immersed in a nocturnal enlightenment world of dreams and nightmares. oberon and titania on a lily, c. 1790–​93 (butlin #245) sendak foundation mlk: equity, justice, peace, and protest study room, yale center for british art 18 january 2023 in honor of martin luther king, jr., the yale center for british art produced a one-day display that included blake’s jerusalem alongside francis danby’s study for “the golden age” (1827) and anti-vietnam war rally photographs by lewis morley (1925–​2013). jerusalem copy e, composed 1804–​c. 1820, printed c. 1821, plate 97 yale center for british art, paul mellon collection, b1992.8.1(97) innocence and experience: selections from the department of drawings and prints metropolitan museum, new york 9 february–​16 may 2023 innocence and experience was a focused display of 100 works depicting motherhood and portraiture from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries from the permanent collections, built around a lavish late copy of blake’s songs of innocence and of experience acquired by edward calvert in 1825 and eventually by the metropolitan museum in 1917, “soon after the print department was established.” the impressions from songs were supplemented by biblical watercolors and large color prints. songs of innocence and of experience copy y, composed 1789, 1794, printed 1825: combined title page frontispiece, innocence title page, innocence “introduction,” innocence “the shepherd” “the ecchoing green” “the ecchoing green,” second plate “the lamb” “the blossom” “the little boy lost” “the little boy found” “laughing song” “a cradle song” “a cradle song,” second plate “the divine image” “spring” “spring,” second plate “infant joy” frontispiece, experience title page, experience “introduction,” experience “the clod & the pebble” “holy thursday” “the chimney sweeper” “nurses song” “the sick rose” “the fly” “the angel” “the tyger” “the garden of love” “the little vagabond” “london” “the human abstract” “infant sorrow” “a poison tree” “the voice of the ancient bard” metropolitan museum, 17.10.1-8, 11, 13-18, 22-23, 25, 28-30, 32-33, 37-42, 44-49, 54 pity, printed 1795 (butlin #311) metropolitan museum, 58.603 god judging adam, printed 1795 (butlin #295) metropolitan museum, 16.38 angel of the divine presence bringing eve to adam (the creation of eve: “and she shall be called woman” ), c. 1803 (butlin #435) metropolitan museum, 06.1322.2 angel of the revelation, c. 1803–​05 (butlin #518) metropolitan museum, 14.81.1 the parable of the wise and foolish virgins, c. 1799–​1800 (butlin #478) metropolitan museum, 14.81.2 collections spotlight, spring 2023 morgan library and museum, new york 14 february–​4 june 2023 in spring 2023 the morgan library and museum selected to “illustrat[e] colonialism” a blake plate in which the conventional use of female allegories to represent the continents becomes a political statement: in presenting “europe … being upheld by africa and america,” blake captures “how the wealth of european nations has been propped up by the global exploitation of colonized peoples.” “europe supported by africa and america,” published in john gabriel stedman, narrative, 1806 morgan library and museum, pml 151931 method and material: tempera painting in focus huntington art gallery, san marino, ca 26 february–​13 march 2023 taking portraits by the fifteenth-century italian master domenico ghirlandaio as a point of departure, this exhibition explored the legacy of tempera in britain and america. ghirlandaio’s works were followed by blake’s lot and his daughters, painted before the italian method was disseminated in english thanks to the translation of cennino cennini’s il libro dell’arte in 1844. the gallery label described blake’s experimental “fresco” technique. lot and his daughters, c. 1799–​1800 (butlin #381) huntington library, art museum, and botanical gardens, 000.55 light from tate: 1700s to now auckland art gallery 1 march–​25 june 2023 light: works from the tate collection nakanoshima museum of art, osaka 26 october 2023–​14 january 2024 this is a traveling exhibition, with 2021–​22 locations reviewed in the 2022 checklist. it is a survey of 200 years of artistic experimentation with light in drawing, printing, painting, photography, sculpture, the moving image, and contemporary immersive environments through more than seventy works, including turner, constable, monet, pissarro, sisley, kandinsky, albers, eliasson, kusama, dean, and lijn. the good and evil angels, printed 1795 (butlin #323) tate, n05057 god judging adam, printed 1795 (butlin #294) tate, n05063 the rossettis: radical romantics curated by carol jacobi and james finch tate britain, london, 6 april–​24 september 2023 delaware art museum, 21 october 2023–​28 january 2024 catalogue: jacobi, carol, and james finch, eds. the rossettis. london: tate publishing, 2023. in the rossettis: radical romantics, blake participated in an “anti-establishment” radical poetics, offering a model for artistic experiments and “anti-establishment personalities.” dante gabriel rossetti bought blake’s notebook in 1847, when he was enrolled at the royal academy and, like blake, reacted against academic protocols. a year later, he left the academy. the notebook was displayed in room 2, which was entitled modern raphael and devoted to dante gabriel’s formative influences as a painter: blake, delacroix, and “the satirical commentator of french modern life, paul gavarni.” blake was also mentioned elsewhere in connection with caricatural portraits of william holman hunt and john everett millais to flesh out pre-raphaelites’ criticism of academic rules and the academy’s founder, whom they called sir “sloshua” reynolds. although the commentary did not mention dante gabriel’s transcription of some of the prose and poetry from the notebook, dated around 1850, nor the edition of the poetical works of william blake (1874) by his brother, william michael, which demonstrate the depth of blake’s presence in the rossetti family, the display itself invited a series of associations between texts and images. the notebook was the central object in the vitrine. it was open to p. 82, featuring a drawing in the center, surrounded by apocalyptic writing announcing the “fiery gulph” opening between adam and eve, four angels descending “headlong with four trumpets to awake the dead,” and below the image “the great red dragon with seven heads and ten horns ….” to the exhibition goer who stopped to read this text scribbled around the drawing, such manifestations gave end-of-times urgency to the social critique articulated in the images around it. to the notebook’s right were two volumes of alexander gilchrist’s life of william blake, first published posthumously in 1863 thanks to the collaboration between his widow, anne gilchrist, and william and dante gabriel rossetti, and represented by the second edition (1880), one volume closed to show the spectacular blake-inspired binding design by frederic shields. the other was open to a reproduction of “london” from songs of innocence and of experience. blake’s london chimed with the theme of the dispossessed captured in one of gavarni’s compositions of “rough sleepers” in paris featured to the left of the notebook—​“a woman folded against a wall.” the commentary mentioned gavarni’s “modern-life prints for popular journals such as journal des gens du monde and le charivari,” and invited associations with dante gabriel rossetti’s painting found. blake’s notebook british library, add ms 49460 alexander gilchrist, life of william blake, 2 vols. (london: macmillan, 1880) tate britain, blake room tate britain, london 17 april 2023–​2 june 2024 tate britain displayed blake in dialogue with turner prize winner chris ofili, who was invited to “select a number of his own watercolours and sketches that resonate with the works of william blake.”see <https://​www.​tate.​org.​uk/​visit/​tate-​britain/​display/​historic-​early-​modern-​british-​art/​chris-​ofili>. this pairing was part of the politics of dialogue between historic collections and contemporary commissions that shaped the rehang of the gallery in spring 2023. blake has had his dedicated gallery space at tate since 1920, but his place has moved over the years: from 2013 until recently it was a dimly lit space at the top of a staircase in the clore wing;morton d. paley, “tate britain’s new blake room,” blake 48.3 (winter 2014–​15); martin myrone, “blake in exhibition and on display, 1904–​2014,” visual culture in britain 19.3 (2018): 365-79, on 372-73. in april 2023 he was brought back into the main gallery area, at the beginning of the permanent collections from the manton entrance. at the time of my visit, the blake-ofili pairing serendipitously followed from the ofili mural requiem, a site-specific commission for the north staircase leading from the manton entrance to the permanent collections, which was inaugurated in september 2023 to commemorate those who died in the fire at grenfell tower in 2017. after the brightly lit, vibrant contrasts of yellow and red dominating the dramatic firescape painted around the staircase, turning to the blake room and tuning the eye to its dark-blue interior, from the large-scale mural to the smaller scale of prints and watercolors, felt like entering a very different, contemplative experience. however, the mural’s informing presence was felt through two works on display in the ofili-blake room: k.s. (study) (2022), a portrait of the artist khadija saye, whose death at grenfell tower is ofili’s focus in the mural; and poolside magic (2017), where the bent pose of the central figure is echoed in the prophet figure bearing witness to the tower in flames in the mural. the red-yellow-blue palette of afternoon with la soufrière (2021), an unrelated disaster produced by a volcanic eruption on the caribbean island of st. vincent, shared the theme of death by fire. the powerful pairings suggested by the labels were embodied in the display on the wall to the right upon coming into the room from the staircase, which continued across the partition separating the ofili and blake sections: the two artists’ works were arranged in the form of a chiasmus from the corners to the center, starting with ofili’s poolside magic, which was oddly associated with blake’s simoniac pope from dante’s inferno, placed at the opposite end of the room. ofili’s questlove (2000), a portrait of ahmir thompson outlined in “afro heads” dots, was put into dialogue with the visionary head the man who built the pyramids, attributed to john linnell after blake. this series of pairings culminated with the two works hanging next to each other on either side of the partition wall between the ofili and blake areas, where ofili’s harvester (2021), featuring a dark figure floating above flowers, acquired demonic associations by its proximity to blake’s spectacular satan smiting job with sore boils (c. 1826). the blake room at tate britain, with blake’s satan smiting job with sore boils to the left of the opening in the partition and ofili’s harvester on the other side. photo: oli cowling; © tate. ofili work: © chris ofili. to compare the other ofilis with their blake counterparts required going back and forth between the two sections separated by the partition wall. we were invited to see “three figures whose bodies stretch across the length of the scene” in ofili’s charcoal untitled (2020) “echoing” the floating figure in blake’s the soul hovering over the body reluctantly parting with life. curatorial commentary noted “similar imagery” in ofili’s intaglio outline of the agony in the garden (2007) and blake’s very dark tempera of the same subject, which share the iconography of the embrace. in afternoon with la soufrière, “a figure can be viewed in profile within the volcano, much like in blake’s the spiritual form of pitt guiding behemoth.” the label for backcloth (study for diana and actaeon) (2012) included ofili’s statement about blake’s influence: “my interpretation of the entire story is told in the backdrop … the figures, the landscape and the symbolism all metamorphose fluidly into each other—​like they do in william blake’s imagery, which i love.” the human forms morphing into waves could certainly be connected with human bodies metamorphosing into tree branches in the margins of blake’s illuminated prophecies, for instance in milton, but the pairing proposed by the gallery label was less convincing: “we can see parallels between this sketch and blake’s painting, the good farmer.” blake’s much more static scene is very different from the animation of dynamic lines in ofili’s charcoal and pastel composition. frogs in the shade (paragon) (2014) is also an unlikely pairing with blake’s age teaching youth. at the time of the rehang of tate britain, the director, alex farquharson, argued that “art is not made in a vacuum. each room is curated as an example of storytelling. but we also wanted to provide different sides to a given era through the art created at the time.”tom seymour and gareth harris, “all change at tate britain after first rehang in a decade,” art newspaper (23 may 2023). there is a second entrance that leads to the room from the blake side of the blake-ofili pairing. from the millbank entrance the room sequence is organized as a chronological survey, placing blake after rooms 1, “exiles and dynasties, 1545–​1640,” to 6, “revolution and reform, 1776–​1833.” room 6 is devoted to “tumultuous times,” when “wars and revolutions, technology and trade transform[ed] lives across the globe,” from the american declaration of independence to the slavery abolition act. the first paragraph of the information panel in the blake room situated him in “a time of significant societal upheaval and global unrest,” and acknowledged that he “was politically radical, writing poetry that criticised empire, slavery and social inequality,” but then focused on his artistic commissions, working patterns, visions, personal mythologies, and techniques, acknowledging the contribution to coloring made by catherine, his wife. put together at a time when many blakes were on loan or resting after exhibitions,on the resting period, see sibylle erle, “william blake and tate britain’s rehang,” vala 4 (november 2023): 122-24. the display offered a representative sample of works in different media from the early to the late period, with the exception of the composite image-text art of the illuminated prophecies, a notable gap in the collection, which is sometimes documented through posthumously reprinted single leaves, sometimes through the separate plates from the so-called small book of designs acquired in 2009, unavailable at the time since they were on loan to the getty. viewers coming in from the millbank route first saw two of the twelve large color prints that blake produced using “an experimental hybrid of printing, drawing, and painting”: newton and pity. his more overtly political interventions were documented only through the spiritual form of pitt guiding behemoth. its placement at the center of the right-hand wall in that direction of travel, next to the agony in the garden, invited a formalist engagement with his work in tempera. to their right was the soul hovering over the body reluctantly parting with life, associated with the commission to illustrate robert blair’s the grave, and to their left two works from the 1780s: the good farmer and age teaching youth. the selection was dominated by the late blake, with five dante watercolors occupying two sides of the room, ending with satan smiting job with sore boils on the way out to the ofili section. none of the blake labels suggested the ofili comparisons, but as a visitor walked from that end of the room to the ofili area, the label for reclining nude (satyr 3) (2021) invited a comparison with newton, which hung in the exact same position on the other side of the partition wall, as if the scene inspired by sugar-cane fields in barbados acted as the reverse of blake’s composition: “the magical world shown here echoes the underwater setting of blake’s newton in the next room.” similarly, pity had a counterpart hanging as its reverse image on the other side of the partition: the sorceress’s mirror (2017), “inspired by the shoreline and rock formations of paria bay in trinidad as a basis for the cave.” a review in the financial times commented: “a superb room of william blake’s and chris ofili’s iridescent, mysterious watercolours absorbingly converges formal and intellectual concerns—​blending figure and background, popular culture segueing into classical and african-caribbean myth—​shared across different epochs.”jackie wullschläger, “tate britain’s rehang puts politics before art,” financial times (24 may 2023). “convergence” makes sense for the chiastic design of the wall hang that culminated in the juxtaposition of harvester and satan smiting job with sore boils. however, a different pattern of attention was produced by the constant “back and forth” movement across the partition required to “check … out” comparisons suggested in the other ofili labels, as erle noted.erle 124. from a formalist standpoint ofili’s work fulfills tate britain’s mission insofar as it demonstrates the gallery’s role in inspiring contemporary artists. yet the back and forth can be considered within a decolonizing practice that resituates the collection through acts of revisioning and recentering the visual canon: what ways of seeing newton and pity are being opened up in dialogue with reclining nude (satyr 3) and the sorceress’s mirror? the politics of seeing ofili’s sugar-cane plantation scene as the other side of the undersea imaginary of blake’s newton is left implicit. however, as blake argues, “the wisest of the ancients considerd what is not too explicit as the fittest for instruction because it rouzes the faculties to act” (e 702). the multidirectional position of the blake-ofili room recentered contemporary critique, whether one started or ended with the crescendo and conflagration of the grenfell tower mural in the manton staircase. jonathan jones dismissed the tate rehang, arguing that “this is now the museum where art goes to sleep.”jonathan jones, “tate britain rehang review—​this is now the museum where art goes to sleep,” guardian (23 may 2023). blake readers and viewers know that sleep is an apocalyptic state of “rest before labour” (e 300). newton, printed c. 1805 (butlin #306) tate, n05058 attributed to john linnell after blake, the man who built the pyramids, c. 1825 (butlin #752) tate, n05185 preliminary sketch for “christ girding himself with strength,” c. 1805 (butlin #465) tate, a00043 the spiritual form of pitt guiding behemoth, c. 1805 (butlin #651) tate, n01110 the soul hovering over the body reluctantly parting with life, c. 1805 (butlin #625) tate, n05300 age teaching youth, c. 1785–​90 (butlin #91) tate, n05183 the good farmer, c. 1780–​85 (butlin #123) tate, n05198 satan smiting job with sore boils, c. 1826 (butlin #807) tate, n03340 dante and virgil penetrating the forest, 1824–​27 (butlin #812.2) tate, n03351 homer and the ancient poets, 1824–​27 (butlin #812.8) tate, n03353 the simoniac pope, 1824–​27 (butlin #812.35) tate, n03357 virgil girding dante’s brow with a rush, 1824–​27 (butlin #812.70) tate, n03365 the rock sculptured with the recovery of the ark and the annunciation, 1824–​27 (butlin #812.80) tate, n03368 pity, printed 1795 (butlin #310) tate, n05062 the agony in the garden, c. 1799–​1800 (butlin #425) tate, n05894 dürer to picasso: 400 years of european prints from the ackland art museum curated by dana cowen fayetteville state university, nc, 25 august–​15 october 2023 elizabeth city state university, nc, 20 october–​10 december 2023 this exhibition displayed a plate from blake’s illustrations of the book of job within a survey of printmaking from the ackland art museum, a selection of thirty-six prints capturing historical movements from the late fifteenth to the early twentieth century and including works by rembrandt van rijn, francisco de goya, edgar degas, mary cassatt, käthe kollwitz, and vincent van gogh. “satan going forth from the presence of the lord,” illustrations of the book of job, printed 1826 ackland art museum, 58.1.1067.1 william blake: prophet against empire curated by adhithi ravikumar albert sloman library, university of essex, colchester 11 october–​17 november 2023 this exhibition of facsimiles from the blake trust in the sloman library took its inspiration from david erdman’s title to document blake’s critique of the enlightenment, science, and capitalism. william blake: visionary at the getty center in los angeles. photo: © j. paul getty trust. see enlargement. william blake: visionary curated by edina adam and julian brooks getty center, los angeles 17 october 2023–​14 january 2024 catalogue: adam, edina, with julian brooks, and an essay by matthew hargraves. william blake: visionary. los angeles: j. paul getty museum, 2020. william blake: visionary was originally planned in collaboration with tate britain as an american retrospective following the tate retrospective in 2019–​20, with the addition of loans from american collections including the yale center for british art, the huntington library, and robert n. essick.cat. pp. 7, 9; the catalogue is reviewed in blake 55.1 (summer 2021). however, because of the covid-19 pandemic the exhibition had to be postponed, the loans renegotiated, and the design revised in light of the introduction of bilingual labeling at the getty. the exhibition was divided into sections that documented blake’s trajectory: “professional printmaker,” “independent artist,” “inventor,” “visionary,” and another dedicated to “the british art world” that set programmatic works—​“joseph of arimathea among the rocks of albion” (1773, c. 1820–​25), laocoön (c. 1815, c. 1826–​27), and the illuminated manuscript of genesis (c. 1826–​27)—​in relation to flaxman, barry, fuseli, romney, west, and gillray’s spectacular visual satires “presages of the millennium” and “the death of the great wolf.” while the first room of the tate exhibition introduced blake with the imperative “blake: be an artist!,” situating his work firmly within the culture of the royal academy and then proceeding to printmaking as a professional outlet, the getty rooted his work within the productions of the printmaker, ranging from the early period, represented by “the temple of mirth,” to the late job engravings. also included were the engraved title page of “night the third: narcissa” (1797), two versions of “death’s door” in white and black etching from the essick collection, and—​oddly—​some dante watercolors. against tate’s sections on “patronage and independence” and “independence and despair,” the getty opted for “independent artist,” focusing the curatorial narrative on technique and style and featuring works in different media, including biblical subjects in tempera on wood and canvas, biblical watercolors, and three of the twelve large color prints. “inventor” introduced blake’s illuminated printing, sampling unbound and disbound pages from illuminated books from the huntington, the yale center for british art, and the essick collection. this approach privileged the artist against the bookmaker, whereas the tate’s more inclusive selection documented bound copies along with a disbound copy of songs of innocence in its entirety. on the other hand, the getty’s focus on the single sheet as independent artwork led to a better engagement with plates from the so-called small book of designs, in this case appropriately entered under the new captions that blake penned under each design around 1818, thus repurposing as individual emblems designs that had originally been produced for the illuminated books. this choice marks a significant step forward compared to the objects’ classification under the original illuminated books, as adopted by the tate. in “visionary,” the section that gave its title to the exhibition, the getty introduced blake’s characters through floor-to-ceiling reproductions of plates from jerusalem and america that singled out the character as superhero against an orange background: “albion / the giant albion represents england and its inhabitants. he is also the symbol of all humankind.” a full disbound copy of america, borrowed from the yale center for british art, had pride of place on a curved wall built at the center of the room. this section also displayed the title page, the “jerusalem” lyric, and two full-plate designs from milton; ten plates from jerusalem; the visionary watercolor landscape near felpham to document the site of creation; the frontispieces of the song of los and visions of the daughters of albion; the visionary head of merlin; and the ghost of a flea drawing and tempera. while the tate exhibition concluded with the last copy of “the ancient of days,” completed in watercolor by blake “a few days before he died” in 1827,the whitworth, d.1892.32; j. t. smith, nollekens and his times (london: colburn, 1828) 2: 479. the getty ended with another impression of the same plate, bound in a volume on loan from the yale center for british art. professional printmaker “job and his family,” illustrations of the book of job, printed 1826 huntington library, art museum, and botanical gardens, 72.62.53.1 “satan smiting job with boils,” illustrations of the book of job, printed 1826 huntington library, art museum, and botanical gardens, 72.62.53.6 “job’s despair,” illustrations of the book of job, printed 1826 huntington library, art museum, and botanical gardens, 72.62.53.8 “job rebuked by his friends,” illustrations of the book of job, printed 1826 huntington library, art museum, and botanical gardens, 72.62.53.10 “the lord answering job out of the whirlwind,” illustrations of the book of job, printed 1826 huntington library, art museum, and botanical gardens, 72.62.53.13 “when the morning stars sang together,” illustrations of the book of job, printed 1826 huntington library, art museum, and botanical gardens, 72.62.53.14 “behemoth and leviathan,” illustrations of the book of job, printed 1826 huntington library, art museum, and botanical gardens, 72.62.53.15 “the fall of satan,” illustrations of the book of job, printed 1826 huntington library, art museum, and botanical gardens, 72.62.53.16 plutus, 1824–​27 (butlin #812.14) tate, n03355 cerberus, 1824–​27 (butlin #812.12) tate, n03354 the punishment of the thieves, 1824–​27 (butlin #812.102) tate, n03364 the serpent attacking buoso donati, 1824–​27 (butlin #812.53) tate, n03361 the wood of the self-murderers: the harpies and the suicides, 1824–​27 (butlin #812.24) tate, n03356 the pit of disease: the falsifiers, 1824–​27 (butlin #812.58) tate, n03362 “the pit of disease: the falsifiers,” 1826–​27, printed c. 1892 collection of robert n. essick the primaeval giants sunk in the soil, 1824–​27 (butlin #812.60) tate, n03363 dante and virgil approaching the angel who guards the entrance of purgatory, 1824–​27 (butlin #812.78) tate, n03367 the ascent of the mountain of purgatory, 1824–​27 (butlin #812.74) tate, n03366 beatrice addressing dante from the car, 1824–​27 (butlin #812.88) tate, n03369 “deaths door,” white-line etching, 1805 collection of robert n. essick luigi schiavonetti after blake, “death’s door,” published in robert blair, the grave, 1808 collection of robert n. essick blake after thomas stothard, “the temple of mirth,” published in the wit’s magazine, 1784 tate, t07048 blake after william hogarth, “beggar’s opera, act iii,” probably third published state, c. 1795 tate, t06462 portrait of william blake, c. 1802 collection of robert n. essick henry fuseli, portrait sketch of michelangelo for fuseli’s “lectures on painting,” c. 1788 collection of robert n. essick blake after henry fuseli, “m: angelo bonarroti,” published in fuseli, lectures on painting, 1801 collection of robert n. essick “night the third: narcissa,” published in edward young, night thoughts, 1797 collection of robert n. essick independent artist the body of abel found by adam and eve, c. 1826 (butlin #806) tate, n05888 the body of christ borne to the tomb, c. 1799–1800 (butlin #426) tate, n01164 oberon, titania, and puck with fairies dancing, c. 1786 (butlin #161) tate, n02686 christ blessing the little children, 1799 (butlin #419) tate, n05893 winter, c. 1820–​25 (butlin #808) tate, t02387 the blasphemer, c. 1800 (butlin #446) tate, n05195 judas betrays him, c. 1803–​05 (butlin #491) tate, t06606 the crucifixion: “behold thy mother,” c. 1805 (butlin #497) tate, n05895 the entombment, c. 1805 (butlin #498) tate, n05896 the death of the virgin, 1803 (butlin #512) tate, n05899 the bard, from gray, 1809? (butlin #655) tate, n03551 the night of enitharmon’s joy, formerly hecate, printed c. 1795–​96 (butlin #316) tate, n05056 nebuchadnezzar, printed c. 1805 (butlin #301) tate, n05059 satan exulting over eve, printed 1795 (butlin #292) j. paul getty museum, 84.gc.49 christ appearing to the apostles after the resurrection, c. 1795 (butlin #327) tate, n05875 epitome of james hervey’s “meditations among the tombs,” c. 1820–25 (butlin #770) tate, n02231 inventor songs of innocence copy y, “the shepherd,” composed 1789, printed and colored c. 1802 collection of robert n. essick songs of innocence and of experience copy e, composed 1789, 1794, printed 1789, 1794, 1795, c. 1832, title page huntington library, art museum, and botanical gardens, drn 3515 songs of innocence and of experience copy e, “laughing song” huntington library, art museum, and botanical gardens, drn 3516 songs of innocence and of experience copy f, composed and printed 1789, 1794, “the tyger” yale center for british art, paul mellon collection, b1978.43.1573 songs of innocence and of experience copy e, “the sick rose” huntington library, art museum, and botanical gardens, drn 3521 songs of innocence and of experience copy e, “the fly” huntington library, art museum, and botanical gardens, drn 3522 “‘i sought pleasure & found pain’ / ‘unutterable’,” printed 1796, inscribed c. 1818 tate, t13002 “the floods overwhelmed me,” printed 1796, inscribed c. 1818 tate, t13004 “‘every thing is an attempt’ / ‘to be human’,” printed 1796, inscribed c. 1818 tate, t13003 “‘who shall set’ / ‘the prisoners free’,” printed 1796, inscribed c. 1818 tate, t13001 “‘vegetating in fibres of blood’,” printed 1796, inscribed c. 1818 tate, t12997 “‘fearless tho in pain’ / ‘i travel on’,” printed 1796, inscribed c. 1818 tate, t12999 catherine blake, c. 1805 (butlin #683) tate, n05188 the british art world john flaxman, alcestis and admetus, 1789 tate, t08234 george romney, the tempest, act 1, c. 1787 collection of robert n. essick henry fuseli, an old man murdered by three younger men, early 1770s j. paul getty museum, 84.gg.711 adam and eve in the garden of eden, genesis manuscript, c. 1826–​27 (butlin #828.6) huntington library, art museum, and botanical gardens, 000.37 the creation of adam, genesis manuscript (butlin #828.5) huntington library, art museum, and botanical gardens, 000.36 second title page, genesis manuscript (butlin #828.2) huntington library, art museum, and botanical gardens, 000.33 first title page, genesis manuscript (butlin #828.1) huntington library, art museum, and botanical gardens, 000.32 “chaucers canterbury pilgrims,” second state, partly hand colored, 1810 collection of robert n. essick laocoön, c. 1815, c. 1826–​27 collection of robert n. essick “joseph of arimathea among the rocks of albion,” 1773, c. 1820–​25 collection of robert n. essick james gillray, “presages of the millennium,” 1795 yale center for british art, paul mellon collection, b1981.25.916 james gillray, “the death of the great wolf,” 1795 yale center for british art, paul mellon collection, b1981.25.906 henry fuseli, siegfried about to deny on oath that brunhild had been his paramour, 1805 tate, t08133 james barry, study for “philoctetes on the island of lemnos,” 1770 tate, t08127 benjamin west, the fright of astyanax (hector bidding farewell to andromache), 1797 j. paul getty museum, 84.gg.722 visionary jerusalem copy e, composed 1804–​c. 1820, printed c. 1821, frontispiece yale center for british art, paul mellon collection, b1992.8.1(1) jerusalem copy e, title page yale center for british art, paul mellon collection, b1992.8.1(2) jerusalem copy e, plate 25 yale center for british art, paul mellon collection, b1992.8.1(25) jerusalem copy e, plate 26 yale center for british art, paul mellon collection, b1992.8.1(26) jerusalem copy e, plate 41 yale center for british art, paul mellon collection, b1992.8.1(41) jerusalem copy e, plate 78 yale center for british art, paul mellon collection, b1992.8.1(78) jerusalem copy e, plate 81 yale center for british art, paul mellon collection, b1992.8.1(81) jerusalem copy e, plate 84 yale center for british art, paul mellon collection, b1992.8.1(84) jerusalem copy e, plate 97 yale center for british art, paul mellon collection, b1992.8.1(97) jerusalem copy e, plate 100 yale center for british art, paul mellon collection, b1992.8.1(100) milton copy b, composed c. 1804–​11, printed c. 1811, “william,” plate 29 (bentley; erdman not numbered) huntington library, art museum, and botanical gardens, drn 3510 milton copy b, plate 15 (bentley; erdman plate 16 [18]) huntington library, art museum, and botanical gardens, drn 3509 milton copy b, “preface” huntington library, art museum, and botanical gardens, drn 3507 milton copy b, title page huntington library, art museum, and botanical gardens, drn 3506 landscape near felpham, c. 1800 (butlin #368) tate, a00041 the head of the ghost of a flea, c. 1819 (butlin #692.98) tate, n05184 the ghost of a flea, c. 1819–20 (butlin #750) tate, n05889 merlin, c. 1819–20 (butlin #757) collection of robert n. essick the song of los copy e, composed and printed 1795, frontispiece huntington library, art museum, and botanical gardens, dnr 3506 visions of the daughters of albion, composed 1793, printed 1796, frontispiece (butlin #264) tate, n03373 america copy m, composed 1793, printed c. 1807, frontispiece yale center for british art, paul mellon collection, b1992.8.2(1) america copy m, title page yale center for british art, paul mellon collection, b1992.8.2(2) america copy m, plate 3 (bentley; erdman plate 1) yale center for british art, paul mellon collection, b1992.8.2(3) america copy m, plate 4 (bentley; erdman plate 2) yale center for british art, paul mellon collection, b1992.8.2(4) america copy m, plate 5 (bentley; erdman plate 3) yale center for british art, paul mellon collection, b1992.8.2(5) america copy m, plate 6 (bentley; erdman plate 4) yale center for british art, paul mellon collection, b1992.8.2(6) america copy m, plate 7 (bentley; erdman plate 5) yale center for british art, paul mellon collection, b1992.8.2(7) america copy m, plate 8 (bentley; erdman plate 6) yale center for british art, paul mellon collection, b1992.8.2(8) america copy m, plate 9 (bentley; erdman plate 7) yale center for british art, paul mellon collection, b1992.8.2(9) america copy m, plate 10 (bentley; erdman plate 8) yale center for british art, paul mellon collection, b1992.8.2(10) america copy m, plate 11 (bentley; erdman plate 9) yale center for british art, paul mellon collection, b1992.8.2(11) america copy m, plate 12 (bentley; erdman plate 10) yale center for british art, paul mellon collection, b1992.8.2(12) america copy m, plate 13 (bentley; erdman plate 11) yale center for british art, paul mellon collection, b1992.8.2(13) america copy m, plate 14 (bentley; erdman plate 12) yale center for british art, paul mellon collection, b1992.8.2(14) america copy m, plate 15 (bentley; erdman plate 13) yale center for british art, paul mellon collection, b1992.8.2(15) america copy m, plate 16 (bentley; erdman plate 14) yale center for british art, paul mellon collection, b1992.8.2(16) america copy m, plate 17 (bentley; erdman plate 15) yale center for british art, paul mellon collection, b1992.8.2(17) america copy m, plate 18 (bentley; erdman plate 16) yale center for british art, paul mellon collection, b1992.8.2(18) europe copy a, composed 1794, printed 1795, frontispiece yale center for british art, paul mellon collection, b1992.8.4(1) william blake: visionary at the getty center in los angeles. photo: © j. paul getty trust. see enlargement. poesia e magia/​poetry & magic—​celebrating anita seppilli curated by katia pizzi and ben thomas istituto italiano di cultura di londra 7-30 november 2023 this exhibition placed blake among contemporary artworks selected to illustrate the italian cultural anthropologist anita seppilli’s poesia e magia, transforming the rooms of the italian cultural institute in london into a series of stages within an experience of initiation: responding to seppilli’s recurring interest in initiation rites in poesia e magia, the design of the “scenical” exhibition poetry & magic approximated a mystery: the visitor encounters the hierophantic figure of anita seppilli in the hall of 39 belgrave square, begins their journey in the reality of the city’s streets with the photography of the sacrilege of bridges in the lecture room, passes the monster caliban at the bottom of the stairs, is directed upwards and onwards by the inspired blake communing with the archangel gabriel at the top of the grand staircase, and emerges into the symbolic realm of the ball room—​a space of light, crystal chandeliers, antique mirrors and foliage glimpsed through large windows—​with the prints and paintings of marcelle hanselaar, stephen chambers and ana maria pacheco. looking into the mirror the visitor reads the label: poeta.bdht [ben thomas], “ah! sun-flower,” poetry & magic blog, university of kent (3 december 2023). blake’s inclusion emerged from an experiment with seppilli’s concept of the “super-real” as a starting point for ben thomas and the photographer theresa mikuriya, who revived surrealist experiments with chance in their drifting through the city, transposing to london the parisian walk in andré breton’s surrealist novel nadja (1928). their path through lost steps and lost souls started with chaucer’s pilgrims at talbot yard, southwark, but instead of following them on the way to canterbury, it took a different route back through the city, which included hercules buildings in lambeth, where blake lived and printed many of his illuminated prophetic works, and ended in fountain court in the strand, where he died: “this is how blake entered into the exhibition concept—​by objective chance—​and he became the presiding spirit of the art work consisting of texts and photographs called the sacrilege of bridges that theresa and i made.”i am grateful to ben thomas for sharing the genesis of the blake connection in e-mail conversation, 30 april 2024. the sacrilege of bridges takes its title from another work by seppilli. blake’s position at the top of the staircase marked his function as a “presiding spirit” inviting the visitor to the next stage of initiation. thomas phillips’s portrait captures the poet’s “rapt poetic expression” looking upward while recollecting an imaginary conversation with the archangel gabriel.for the anecdote, see allan cunningham, the cabinet gallery of pictures, selected from the splendid collections of art, public and private, which adorn great britain; with biographical and critical descriptions by allan cunningham (london: john major and george and william nicol, 1833) 1: 11-13. blake’s own engagement with rituals of initiation through the platonic and pythagorean teachings of thomas taylor about bacchic and eleusinian mysteries drove the selection of prints from songs of innocence and of experience, from “the shepherd” to “ah! sun-flower,” associated with the cosmic function of the heliotrope in kathleen raine’s esoteric interpretation.the blog post (see note 12) cites kathleen raine, blake and tradition (london: routledge & kegan paul, 1969) 1: 216-17, 129; george mills harper, “the source of blake’s ‘ah! sun-flower,’” modern language review 48.2 (1953): 139-42; and philip j. cardinale and joseph r. cardinale, “a newly discovered blake book: william blake’s copy of thomas taylor’s the mystical initiations; or, hymns of orpheus (1787),” blake 44.3 (winter 2010–​11): 84-102. upstairs, blake-inspired works by stephen chambers painted in oil on panels from a discarded wardrobe included two black angels, which reinvents the children from the frontispieces of songs of innocence and of experience, and compositions inspired by emblems from the gates of paradise: harvest, from “i found him beneath a tree”; scissors, and the motif of clipping wings, from “aged ignorance / perceptive organs closed their objects close”; and sword, from “my son! my son!”chambers’s blake paintings, from private collections, are reproduced at <https://​stephenchambers.​com/​the-​blake-​paintings>; for pictures of their installation at the istituto italiano di cultura, see <https://​blogs.​kent.​ac.​uk/​poetryandmagic/​2023/​11/​15/​installation-​photographs-​of-​works-​by-​stephen-​chambers-​ra>. impressions printed from replica relief-etched copperplates by michael phillips songs of innocence and of experience: “the shepherd” “my pretty rose tree”/​“ah! sun-flower”/​“the lilly” “london” “a poison tree” america a prophecy: plate 9 (bentley; erdman plate 7), “in thunders ends the voice” blake after george romney, “william cowper,” published in william hayley, the life, and posthumous writings, of william cowper, 1803–​04 ben thomas luigi schiavonetti after thomas phillips, “william blake,” published in robert blair, the grave, 1813 ben thomas exchanges the whitworth, university of manchester 21 november 2023–​24 november 2024 exchanges features a selection from the whitworth’s art and textile collection, 1490–​2021. blake’s the shrine of apollo is exhibited as a reference to the apollo belvedere sculpture within a display of classical constructions of male beauty sourced from mostly early acquisitions “connected through their use of gesture, movement and self-expression” to simeon barclay’s neon diptych as a precursor to folly. the shrine of apollo, illustration to milton’s “on the morning of christ’s nativity,” 1809 (butlin #538.4) the whitworth, d.29.1892 exchanges at the whitworth, university of manchester. clockwise from top left: works by ford madox brown, john linnell, william morris, chris steele-perkins, zoan andrea, marcantonio raimondi, blake, george romney, marco dente, william mulready, and (in the center) dante gabriel rossetti. photo: michael pollard; © the whitworth, university of manchester. steele-perkins work: © chris steele-perkins. see enlargement. the notebook, laocoön, and blake’s beauties of inflection the notebook, laocoön, and blake’s beauties of inflection by matthew martello matthew martello (mam2ax@virginia.edu) is a phd candidate in english and assistant director of the center for poetry & poetics at the university of virginia. he teaches and writes about british and american poetry from the romantic period to the present. his scholarship has also appeared in narrative. i. then i looked on all the works that my hands had wrought, and on the labour that i had laboured to do: and, behold … (ecclesiastes 2:11) though included among the articleswith thanks to the anonymous reader at blake, to morris eaves, sarah jones, and morton paley for their editorial guidance, and to jerome mcgann for his unsparing support. of his “genius” from the start (see dorfman 3-4), william blake’s notebook has received little scholarly treatment beyond the instrumental. it has functioned, for thematic readers, as another store of revealing epigrams; for editors, as a manuscript source for the public address and the everlasting gospel; for biographers, as a heartwarming keepsake from an intimate companion. in such cases the notebook is used to subsidize some offshore critical enterprise at the expense of its own discursive and material integrity. to be sure, a handful of important blakeans—​keynes, jugaku, bentley, erdman—​have outstripped instrumentality and, in a short series of facsimile editions and bibliographic studies, tended to the notebook per se.the introductory essay to geoffrey keynes’s 1935 facsimile—​later reprinted in blake studies—​briefly covers the notebook’s physical characteristics, composition history, and documentary afterlife. in 1953, bunsho jugaku’s a bibliographical study of william blake’s note-book adduced from keynes’s images a page-by-page description of the document’s contents. g. e. bentley, jr., then streamlined and augmented these earlier records for his blake books in 1977—​the same year in which david erdman produced a second edition of the notebook of william blake: a photographic and typographic facsimile, whose “improved photography” allowed erdman to pursue higher orders of critical business: collation and tabulation, repagination and revised chronology, and a look at how some notebook sketches “precipitated into” the series of emblems called the gates of paradise (erdman, notebook vii, 14). with transcription and description, collation and chronology, these efforts march toward a fuller and more faithful representation of the notebook as a literaryand art-historical artifact. but by design they stop short of the explanatory work of poetics—​that is, the disclosure of “the conditions of meaning” and the other “means by which literary works create their effects” (culler, structuralist poetics vii, xiv).at the end of his introduction, jugaku writes, “the study concluded will, i hope, form one section of a trilogy to be followed later by aesthetical and doctrinal studies of the note-book” (9). i can find no evidence that such a trilogy ever materialized. but there are reasons to worry that we would not know even if it had, not least because relatively few western scholars of british literature can read japanese; see also ima-izumi 85-87 on the narrow circulation of much japanese literary scholarship. for information about the japanese contribution to blake scholarship in particular, see bentley’s blake studies in japan. it remains to be asked how the notebook operates when subject to a thorough formal reading, and how, if at all, that operation might affect our understanding of blake more generally. geoffrey keynes encouraged this line of inquiry long ago when he praised the notebook as “a faithful representation of blake’s urgent genius” (blake studies [bs] 13). in our day the editors of the william blake archive—​morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi—​draw it out more directly in the headnote to their digitized notebook. there they observe that the document “makes potent demands on its readers” when “taken as a whole,” as if to say that the notebook exploits a complicated but ultimately scrutable set of organizational precepts. they assume, moreover, that “artists’ notebooks … declare their dynamic energies outright,” as if to make the notebook a perceptual door onto the structure of blake’s creative exertion. and, what has been sanctioned by the blake archive’s resources but so far unobserved by scholars, they insist that “blake’s notebook … can and should … be considered as an integral work, in this case the work of a lifetime, unlike any other that he left us” (my emphasis). this mandate petitions for exactly the detailed poetics that earlier studies of the notebook have left undeveloped—​and that the present essay seeks to deliver in full. indeed, the blake archive’s injunction prearranges my agenda at nearly every turn. the first two sections below (ii and iii) investigate the modus operandi of the notebook “as an integral work,” while the following pair (iv and v) attempt to situate it properly among the “other [works] that [blake] left us.” i begin with a narrative of blake’s acquisition and peculiar employment of the notebook because together they have determined the discursive condition of the document as we encounter it. in that condition there are four bibliographic species, four distinct arrangements of text and image, which i delineate and enumerate in section iii before closely “reading” two exemplary pages. by way of these readings i ascertain that the notebook cultivates a poetics of inflection—​where inflection refers to “the action of … bending in or towards,” “a mental or moral bending or turning,” “modification … to express … different grammatical relations” (oed 1a, 1c, 4a). in the notebook, semantic meaning results largely from the inflective forces of position (of discursive units on the page) and proximity (of one discursive unit to another). this conclusion acts as a bridge between the notebook and the rest of blake’s corpus. in section iv i undertake to show that the notebook, through the development of an inflective poetics, concisely models the signature instabilities of blake’s illuminated prints (disorienting juxtaposition, “repetition without duplication” [viscomi, in kraus 166], surrender to material determinants). here and throughout i draw extensively on existing blake scholarship, in part to demonstrate how well the notebook dovetails with so much of what we already know and value about blake. my penultimate section then formulates two hypotheses—​one cognitive, the other biographic—​about why blake might have used the notebook for as long and as variously as he did. both designate the document as a kind of material stimulant for blake’s working imagination. but ultimately, wherever our causal speculations lead, the heart of the argument is that the notebook “can and should … be” taken to typify blake’s creative habits across the whole of his career. there are logical reasons for scholars to have avoided the interpretive approach to the notebook that i pursue in sections iii through v. the liminal status of the notebook potentially bars it from the seal of intentional design that authorizes finished products as “integral.” and in the absence of such authorization, readers risk imposing their own ideas of order where, as swinburne said of the notebook, “there is absolutely no hint of order whatever” (130-31). so in my sixth and final section i turn to one of blake’s last engraved works, the laocoön separate plate, to showcase the uncanny (and apparently deliberate) use it makes of the notebook’s graphic architecture.morton d. paley has argued that we ought not to know the plate as “the laocoön,” since blake actually titled it יה & his two sons satan & adam as they were copied from the cherubim of solomons temple by three rhodians & applied to natural fact or history of ilium (81). i agree: the difference epitomizes one of the plate’s ideological ambitions, and its significance will feature prominently in my analysis below. but i retain “the laocoön plate” as an informal reference, largely for the sake of familiarity: in the blake archive, erdman’s complete poetry and prose, and almost every other critical publication, the plate is identified not as יה & his two sons (ad finem) but by some direct mention of laocoön. commentators have often seen the laocoön plate as “a kind of summary index” (tayler 72) of blake’s “interrelated opinions on money, empire, morality, christianity, and the arts,” which the expository aphorisms on the plate “set forth” candidly (blake archive headnote).commonly recording blake’s engagement with some zone of his immediate intellectual environment, these commentators have made for themselves a picture of great historical detail. irene tayler targets blake’s appeal to eighteenth-century mythographer jacob bryant. rosamund paice considers to what extent the separate plate resists the ideologies of rees’s cyclopædia, for which blake had first sketched the laocoön group. jerome mcgann argues that “one of [the laocoön plate’s] contemporary points of reference … would have been byron” and the “ekphrastic representation of the vatican statue” in childe harold’s pilgrimage (“blake and byron” 625). sarah stein examines the possible influence of hebrew micrography on the laocoön plate and illustrations of the book of job. paley (53-100) documents what art and philosophy relating to the laocoön group blake could have encountered, and to what effect, before and during composition. all such explorations are relevant, even essential, to the somewhat different one i organize in the final section below. but these “opinions” are centered in an anticlassical ideology whose fullest articulation emerges not from the aphorisms alone but from their inflective interaction with the classical image that they encircle. thus, spotlighting the formal resemblance of the laocoön plate to the most complex notebook pages, i contend that blake’s engraving and printing of the former ratifies—​and in fact advances—​the long-term construction of the latter. ii. it may be worked backwards and forwards without end, and last a man’s whole life (blake, blake’s chaucer, in erdman, complete poetry [e] 567-68) in february 1787, william blake’s beloved younger brother robert died at twenty-four, probably of tuberculosis (bentley, paradise 98).some engaging ambiguity surrounds the birthdate of robert blake and, therefore, his age at his time of death. early testimony (for example, from tatham [3]) listed him, as i have done here, as having died at twenty-four. bentley later speculated that he was born in 1767, which would have him dead at nineteen or twenty (peter ackroyd’s 1995 biography asserts nineteen [100]). current consensus—​now including bentley, as my citation suggests—​seems to rest on the former hypothesis, which carries with it the fascination of robert’s having been mistakenly called “richard,” but correctly assigned a birthdate of 19 june 1762 (the genealogy in bentley’s paradise says july instead), in the st. james’s parish register. for a summary of the puzzle and the rationale for its resolution, see ward. blake had nursed him without a falter “for a whole fortnight,” and after robert had gone for good blake reportedly slept for three days uninterrupted (ackroyd 100). as these tiny anecdotes alone suggest, the death of his “favourite brother” (bentley, blake records, 2nd ed. [br(2)] 10) was as devastating a loss as blake could have endured. but in the end robert left behind a threefold consolation (each fold of which we will return to in time): he continued to return to blake in visions (e 705); in one such vision, he revealed to blake what would become the method of illuminated printing (gilchrist 1: 69); and he handed down fifty-eight lightly trodden leaves, irregularly 19.5 x 15.7 cm. and sewn in (now mostly incomplete) gatherings of twelve (bentley, blake books [bb] 321-23)—​that is, the “not very large notebook” (erdman, notebook 1) that has come to concern us here. blake held the notebook close throughout his life, although he used it with varying degrees of frequency and devotion. his work in it probably began with a series of emblems tentatively titled “ideas of good & evil” (see n14 [in erdman’s numbering, which i cite throughout]) and datable, in the earliest case (that is, n75), to the year of robert’s death; prior markings were likely robert’s own (erdman, notebook 7). sometime before autumn 1792, these emblems reached the final pages of the notebook, and blake, unwilling (or unable) to part with its surfaces, turned the book around for reuse. a second trek through, back to front, then saw the drafting or copying in of various textual materials, including much of the poetry that would become the songs of experience (erdman, notebook 7).multiple notebook emblems, sketched between 1787 and 1792, also appear on illuminated songs plates, though often in revised or reworked forms; i discuss one, n65 and “the angel,” in my section iii. erdman writes that “work on all the illuminated prophecies from the marriage to europe was current and interfertile” with the notebook, by which he means that blake’s compositions inside the notebook influenced and were influenced by those outside it (notebook 12). this must be cognitively accurate no matter what, but, in addition to the songs carryover, graphic materials from several other illuminated books are technically traceable to blake’s first five years in the notebook. compare, for example, the penciled nebuchadnezzar on n44 to marriage plate 24; the frantic woman on n25 to europe plate 7 (erdman numbering; bentley plate 10); the “deaths door” emblem on n71 to america plate 12 (erdman numbering; bentley plate 14). the blake archive conveniently hyperlinks notebook pages to related images across blake’s digitized corpus. after 1793 blake’s use of the notebook slowed for a time, marking the first perceptible ebb in an undulating rhythm typical of his creative (though not his professional) practices.however continuously blake worked through commissioned or otherwise commercial projects, the illuminated books were conceived and executed in periods of concentrated invention, rather than in ongoing outputs on a smaller scale. see viscomi, “concept of difference” and “illuminated printing.” but the pivotal maneuver, the decision to turn and return to the document after marking most every page, had in some sense already been performed; and for almost all of his remaining years, blake would occasionally come back to the notebook, find available space on some leaf or other (or in rarer cases some old inscription that warranted erasure), and there work through whatever occupied his mind. the process forced him to write and draw at several angles, with several orientations, and with a diversity of bumps and contortions, into and out of and around previous inscriptions. as a result, the notebook contains (all told) hundreds of lines of verse, thousands of words of expository prose, dozens of pictorial illustrations, practical and professional lists, and remnants of technical exercises—​often with samples of each crammed and crowded onto individual pages. 1. the notebook of william blake. add ms 49460, f.11r (see enlargement). 19.5 x 15.7 cm. erdman, notebook n19; blake archive, notebook object 21. image courtesy of the william blake archive, © british library board. these autographic acrobatics (and the convoluted graphics they produced [see illus. 1]) already provoke a series of questions. most obviously, instead of going to all that inscriptive trouble, why not simply get another notebook—​another “standard stationer’s commodity” (erdman, notebook 2), as the unassuming original seems to be?  was it frugality, or rather scarcity, as damon assumes (128)?the years of highest notebook usage correlate with the years of blake’s highest earnings. he made less money in the 1780s than in the 1790s but still more in the 1780s than in any decade after 1800. thus 1787–​93, unquestionably blake’s most active period in the notebook, was a particularly comfortable financial period in his life. if it were frugality that drove him to reuse the notebook, we might expect the opposite correlation—​the less money he brings in, the more he is forced to recycle materials for composition. of course an alternate view might hold, that blake’s use becomes re-use only after the notebook has been filled, and that the relevant interval is therefore not 1787–​93 but 1794–​1818(?). while i shall not argue that frugality had nothing to do with blake’s keeping the notebook, it does not satisfy as a straightforward and comprehensive explanation of the document’s enduring centrality. for statistics regarding blake’s income, see bentley, desolate market 103-05. or sentimentality, as keynes infers?“the feeling that existed between [william and robert blake] was evidently very deep, and this provides the clue to the motive that made william use and treasure the notebook from the day of robert’s death until his own” (keynes, bs 9). it is worth saying that keeping the notebook would not have necessitated writing or drawing in it—​indeed, for around six years, blake left untouched the pages at the front that contain robert’s illustrations (erdman, notebook 7). in june 1793 he finally wrote on n4: “i say i shant live five years / and if i live one it will be a / wonder.” then, almost fourteen years later, just above: “tuesday janry. 20. 1807 between two & seven in the evening—​despair.” or some imaginative stimulation? consider that, “not earlier than 1818” (erdman, notebook 2), blake joined two leaves of deviant shape and color to the notebook’s end (bb 322-23): in other words, in the very final decade of his life, he was still seeking space in the notebook’s discursive world. after blake died in 1827, his wife, catherine, gave the notebook to william palmer, a painter and brother of blake’s friend samuel palmer and (according to dante gabriel rossetti) “an attendant in the antique gallery at the british museum” (bb 334; erdman, notebook 1). it is not clear what palmer did with it until 1847, but on 30 april of that year he sold the document to d. g. rossetti for ten shillings. rossetti tampered extensively with the notebook’s bibliographic code, binding it in half calf and appending to it thirty-three leaves of half-accurate transcription—​complete with an “unceremonious shaking up of blake’s rhymes” (hill 264-65) and a header of yet graver editorial sin: “all that is of any value in the foregoing pages has here been copied out” (erdman, notebook 1) (see illus. 2).rossetti would come to regret at least his stylistic emendations of blake’s verse. d. g. wrote to w. m. rossetti on 8 october 1874: “i know you would not quite have coincided with my method of treatment [of blake], nor should i now have adopted it to the same extent.” compare d. g. rossetti’s earlier remarks to gilchrist: “i am glad you approve of my rather unceremonious shaking up of blake’s rhymes. i really believe that is what ought to be done” (hill 264-65). between 1866 and 1874, richard herne shepherd edited three editions of blake that outwardly argued for “textual fidelity” against the aesthetic meddling of “the rossetti-gilchrist-swinburne circle” (dorfman 110). d. g. rossetti privately expressed his regret in the context of these public debates. see dorfman 106-14. on the verso of the document’s front flyleaf, rossetti penciled a note explaining his purchase and, in lines now mostly erased, conjecturing some commentary: “among the sketches, there are one or two profiles of blake himself. … illustrated div      ?… ation is by robt. blake but with neither his brother’s ease and vigour nor his ?heavenly spirit” (erdman, notebook 2) (see illus. 3). erdman speculates that the lacunae once bore rossetti’s commitment “to the observation that blake illustrated his works divinely” (notebook 2). seems so indeed. 2. the notebook of william blake. add ms 49460, f.62r (see enlargement). image courtesy of the british library, © british library board. 3. the notebook of william blake. add ms 49460, f.i-v (see enlargement). image courtesy of the british library, © british library board. in any event, and whatever our view of his methods, rossetti treated the notebook and the artist it depicts (“my manuscript by that genius”) as objects of great interest. feeling that “its contents really ought to be edited” but having “no time” himself (hill 237), he lent the manuscript in 1861 to alexander gilchrist, blake’s first proper biographer (keynes, bs 17). though he must have consulted the notebook for his life of william blake, gilchrist died suddenly before the year’s end, leaving the biography “substantially complete” but its accompanying selection and catalogue much less so (gilchrist 1: v-vi). editorial duties thus fell back into the lap of rossetti, who prepared notebook transcriptions—​well in excess of what he had originally deemed “of … value”—​for the two-volume life carried into publication by gilchrist’s widow in 1863.rossetti’s selections from the notebook are not presented together in volume 2 of gilchrist’s life—​not systematically, at least. they are instead distributed across sections of miscellanea such as “prose writings” and “poems hitherto unpublished.” rossetti acknowledges the source of these materials in sweeping prefatory notes but seems not to trust (or even suspect) the integrity of “the ms. note-book,” which makes him, in yet another sense, the forerunner of many subsequent blake editors (gilchrist 2: 76). back in 1847, d. g. rossetti had gotten the money for the notebook from his brother, william michael, who was also fascinated by blake and who may be responsible for the physical excision from notebook pages 71 and 72; we know that he offered in 1864 to “snip out” a piece for horace scudder, “just as a specimen of writing” (peattie 134; see also erdman, notebook 3). w. m. rossetti’s 1874 poetical works of william blake added to his brother’s notebook transcriptions, although, according to keynes, not with much stricter exactitude. meantime, algernon charles swinburne had extracted further from the notebook for his william blake: a critical essay of 1868, having presumably accessed the manuscript through the rossetti brothers, the younger of whom became the study’s dedicatee (keynes, bs 11). ultimately, the curation (and interference) of d. g. rossetti and his circle would dominate critical understanding of the notebook in subsequent years, as scholars and collectors settled on “the rossetti manuscript” for shorthand reference (bb 323). “the rossetti manuscript” was purchased for £110 by editor and bookseller f. s. ellis upon rossetti’s death in 1882, and by ellis and scrutton for £85 upon f. s. ellis’s retirement in 1885.a friend and publisher of d. g. rossetti and others in the rossetti circle, f. s. ellis was succeeded in business by his nephew g. i. ellis, who brought out the collected works of dante gabriel rossetti in 1886 under the london imprint ellis and scrutton. in other words, even though the notebook technically changed hands in 1882 and 1885, it remained within one tight-knit coterie until it was brought to the united states in 1887. the following year it was “traded” to the new york dealers dodd, mead & co., who in 1887 sold it to collector william augustus white of brooklyn for $825 (c. e. wright 89; bb 334). white entered his own bibliographic information below rossetti’s, in the footer of the front flyleaf (see illus. 3); numbered the pages 1-120 in the upper outer corners; sent the document back to london briefly in 1890 so that yeats and e. j. ellis could consult it for their three-volume works (1893); a decade later provided john sampson with notebook “materials” for the oxford editions of 1905 and after; and in 1924 had the manuscript comprehensively photographed for keynes, who prepared a “new and carefully revised text” for his 1925 writings (bb 323; keynes, bs 12). at his death in 1927, the notebook passed to his daughter frances hillard white emerson of cambridge, massachusetts. it was emerson who brought the document back to england for keynes to make its further acquaintance and, in collaboration with nonesuch press, to produce his 1935 collotype facsimile and transcription (keynes, bs 12-13). throughout her life emerson lent the notebook for exhibition at various american institutions, including the pierpont morgan library (now the morgan library & museum) in new york city, where erdman first encountered it; and at some point she also rebound the volume, with interleaves, in levant morocco (bb 334; erdman, notebook 2). before her death in 1957, emerson donated the notebook to the british museum, and when the british library moved from the museum’s plot on great russell street to euston road in 1997, our document went along with it. the notebook remains at the british library today, where it is catalogued as add ms 49460.note its steadily increasing market value: apparently free for palmer, 10s. for rossetti, £85-110 for the next buyers, $825 (or £154 [erdman, notebook 2]) for white, and worth around $40,000 by the time it reached emerson (c. e. wright 89). according to the relative consumer indexes and gbp-usd conversions on measuringworth.com, those values translate to the following in 2019 usd: $59; $11,400-14,400; $22,900; $589,000. these are complicated multivariate calculations and should be taken in every case as estimations. but the relevant trend nicely illustrates blake’s migration into the english canon, from the inaugural curations of rossetti, gilchrist, and swinburne, through the yeats/​ellis and sampson editions, and into the damon, keynes, and frye eras. i recapitulate this history at such length because it points up both the importance and the predicament of the notebook for scholars. inherited and occupied habitually by blake throughout his life, it comes to us preserved and—​inevitably—​annihilated, and always in uncertain proportion. “time,” writes eaves, “will do many things besides set things right,” and so will the well-meaning but perhaps overeager hands that guard documents against “oblivion” (“editorial void” 519). today the notebook flaunts its epistemological obstinance. we do not know, almost two-and-a-half centuries later, the whole of what robert drew in it before his death, nor can we tell when precisely blake began, stopped, resumed, and finished using it.the guesswork about robert’s contributions began with d. g. rossetti in 1847 (see illus. 3; erdman, notebook 2) but apparently dropped out thereafter, for keynes claims to have discovered (or discerned) robert’s hand himself: “on pages 5, 7, 9, 11, and 13 are sketches and drawings that have always, until recently, been assigned with the rest of the contents of the book to william blake. but their lines are such that this belief cannot any longer be held true” (bs 8). today the blake archive, with slightly different paginations and slightly less assurance, says that “the drawings on objects 5, 7, 8, 11, 13, and 15 are very probably [robert’s] work.” though keynes seemed quite confident in his chronological estimations, erdman has shown much of that initial timeline to be questionable at best (see keynes, bs 8-10; erdman, notebook 7-11). bentley’s chronology is dominated by ranges such as “1801–​3” and markers of uncertainty such as “about” and “?” (bb 322-23). the blake archive states that blake “may not have begun using [the notebook] until c. 1790.” that would be three years too late according to erdman, but three years too early according to bentley (erdman, notebook 7; bb 321). we do not know in exactly what order all the texts and drawings were inscribed, nor in exactly what order all the leaves ought to be arranged.the temporal sequence of composition and the sequential arrangement of leaves are related but not synonymous problems because blake does not seem to have used the notebook in a consistently linear manner. he not only doubled (and tripled and quadrupled) back on his own work but also left some pages rather bare while completely covering others (see, for example, the variation from n44 through n54): some other or additional logic determined what went where and when. “the leaves of this blank book were … originally bound in gatherings,” erdman writes, “but in rebinding they have been separated into individually mounted leaves no longer physically conjugate” (notebook 5). from white’s numbering (before 1927) at the latest, the notebook leaves lay in what the physical evidence (for instance, offprinted ink, textual continuation) proves to be an implausible (if not impossible) order. erdman’s two editions did much to establish a more accurate consensus, but his account is still ridden with qualification and uncertainty: “the evidence is inconclusive” as to whether his n22 and n23 really belong in succession; the leaf containing n5/​6 “bears no clear evidence of fitting against any of the ends of the confirmed sequences here or … anywhere else in the notebook”; etc. (notebook 4). we cannot restore w. m. rossetti’s excision, reverse his brother’s interventions, negate subsequent alterations, and rest assured that none other has slipped by undetected.“of the gatherings that comprise the extant book of 116 pages”—​not counting the added leaves—​“only three are complete …. there is no watermark in the paper, but top and bottom segments of a countermark, which has not been identified, occur at the inner centre edges of the leaves, each of which is now mounted separately. … at least four leaves are missing at the end of the book …. apparently two leaves are lacking from the broken gathering preceding [page 37]” (erdman, notebook 2, 6). “it seems likely … that the eight pages missing at the end were removed before william blake began using the notebook. by analogy, it seems likely that the four pages missing from pp. 17-24 and the unknown number probably missing from pp. 1-16 were also removed before the poet used the book” (bb 322). this material incompleteness also threatens to complicate our encounters with the manuscript. though relevant to most cultural artifacts, these sorts of uncertainties are especially troublesome with notebooks and manuscripts—​materials of what sally bushell would call “textual process,” which fascinate because of the spatiotemporally specific actions (the “dynamic energies” [blake archive notebook headnote]) encoded within them (“origins” 101). the analyst of such materials is less concerned with what than with how and under what circumstances an artist composed, but the clarity of the latter partly depends on the extent of the former’s preservation. “readers” (or “viewers”) of blake’s notebook confront tangled and fragmentary vestiges of creative action that withhold even as they evidence the details of their compositional origins. iii. that disclaimer done, i offer another. the following investigation emerges from work with david erdman’s print and the blake archive’s digital facsimiles of the notebook—​not with blake’s original manuscript.the british library classifies the notebook as a “highly restricted” manuscript that, even before covid-19 protocol adjustments, required “special permissions,” granted only in “exceptional circumstances” for “very specific reasons,” to access. at the time of writing “there is no chance at all” of my viewing the original manuscript and no indication of when—​if ever—​that absolute restriction might change. i quote here (with permission) from personal correspondence with reference staff at the british library. therefore, while the theoretical blueprint ought to hold fast, any fine-grained observations of shading and medium, for example, are particularly vulnerable to error: facsimile—​to say nothing of time—​might have missed or distorted blake’s inscriptions in any number of ways. because i am interested, too, in how “readers” or “viewers” encounter the notebook—​as they would encounter blake’s other “integral work[s],” with interpretive impulses and conventions at hand—​my commentary on specific pages necessarily reflects the rousing of my own subjective faculties. as multiple scholars have recently argued, interpretive engagement with drafts, manuscripts, marginalia, and other “unfinished” materials of “textual process” often requires the readerly to meet the writerly imagination halfway: only a “personally inflected critical method” (stauffer 13), one that generates “imaginative, even speculative, critical responses” (tyler 4), can enter the lacunae left by partialand provisionality. though i make no defense of freewheeling subjectivity, my readings proceed on the similar assumption that, if we are to access the aesthetico-semiotic “integr[ity]” of the notebook at all, it will be through an interpretive reciprocation of the “dynamic energies” that each page displays.from a scholarly perspective, the reasons to trade subjective report for a mind of winter are legion and fairly obvious. but as my citations to stauffer and tyler suggest, literary studies has also witnessed sophisticated defenses of the former in recent years. since the turn of the millennium, mcgann has produced a number of books and articles that attempt a “dramatic exposure of subjectivity as a live and highly informative option of interpretive commentary” (samuels and mcgann 36): see scholar’s art (2006), change it (2007), and inconsequent (2009), all of which build on the respect for subjectivity that he has been channeling into dialogic criticism since swinburne: an experiment in criticism (1972). the crucial qualification for mcgann is that, when responsibly conducted, subjective engagement follows from—​it does not replace—​intimate historical/​material/​structural familiarity. other contemporary paradigms, such as reader-response criticism (see bickman) and rhetorical poetics (see phelan), work with subjective reading in similar ways. for more, see also my note 52, below. of 120 total pages in the notebook, fifteen feature only handwritten text, whether prose or verse or both; thirteen feature pictorial drawing alone or pictorial drawing accompanied by handwritten text meant obviously to caption it; twenty-five are palimpsestic, with handwritten text predominating over erased or obscured pictorial drawing (the reverse does not occur); and sixty-seven feature both handwritten text and pictorial drawing without one either overriding (as in the palimpsests) or straightforwardly supplementing (as in the captioned drawings) the other. there are therefore four bibliographic species in the notebook—​four distinct arrangements of marks on the page: the textual, the pictorial, the palimpsestic, and what we might call (after w. j. t. mitchell) the composite (see also luisa calè). the boundaries between each species are conceptually stark but practically fuzzier because, for example, palimpsests exist in degrees, some original inscriptions may now be indecipherable (if not invisible), and deciding what counts as a caption will often involve some exegetical supposition. but even allowing for small-scale taxonomic variation, it would remain true that the majority of the pages in the notebook combine textual and pictorial components to form a sort of composite presentation. these composite pages are the primary interest of all that follows here. the cornerstones of the composite model are the emblems that blake presumably sketched on his first trip through the notebook, sometime between 1787 and 1792, when most of the pages would have been blank. consider n39 in erdman’s edition, object 41 in the blake archive (see illus. 4). 4. the notebook of william blake. add ms 49460, f.21r (see enlargement). 19.5 x 15.7 cm. erdman, notebook n39; blake archive, notebook object 41. image courtesy of the william blake archive, © british library board. in this paradigmatic form, the composite notebook page exhibits one centered emblem drawn in pencil, framed by a gentle, somewhat messily penciled rectangle. as inaugural inscriptions, the emblems set the terms of each composite page: their size, shape, and location parameterize the behavior of subsequent inscriptions, which run, as if respectful of their guard, around the emblems’ rectangular frames. the positional parameters set by each emblem divert the next inscription toward some open spot on the page, where, having zoned its own territory, it readies an additional set of positional parameters for upcoming inscriptions. after two or three rounds (or some blakean loquaciousness) the terms can become quite constraining, and units of text must resort to margins, nooks, and crannies, warp and malformation—​or, if especially late arriving, upside-down suspension from the biblio-rafters. in effect, every inscription responds to the total sum of material conditions set out before it: the emblem has free rein of the page but cannot run off it, just as the very final marking must muscle its way into whatever available space it can find. we—​every peruser of the notebook from blake’s death on—​encounter these accommodations woven into one static discursive composite, from whose visual display we infer their accrual. each composite page therefore bodies forth an image of blake’s complete notebook procedure. the blake archive researchers responsible for digitizing the four zoas have laid the conceptual ground for an outline of the notebook’s poetics. this concomitant benefit does not come as a surprise, given the textual condition of both documents; indeed, eaves et al. “anticipate” that the markup strategies devised to manage the four zoas “will [also] allow us to better describe blake’s densely revised notebook” (17). the multidimensional four zoas manuscript proves editorially challenging because its “vertical stacks of revision” and marginal and variously oriented inscriptions conflate “spatial and temporal data” and resist standard linear methods of description (10, 19). according to their field reports, the manuscript’s digital editors tested several preliminary solutions to these problems before realizing that their reliance on the “line” (or <line>), the blake archive’s bedrock descriptive unit, was limiting the complexity they could effectively represent. they needed an encoding tagset, and hence a set of “conceptual metaphors,” that could capture spatial relations between inscriptions that do not sit on “the same horizontal plane” (16-17). moreover (and more important for our purposes), they needed a way to articulate temporal distinctions between inscriptions, as implied by the manuscript’s “physical-textual evidence,” without committing to a particular genetic narrative or artifactual telos (5). thus they incorporated into their descriptive toolkit the “zone” (<zone>) and the “stage” (<stage>): the former locates an inscription or group of inscriptions on the page, while the latter marks without necessarily sequencing “a moment of composition or alteration.” with these supplements to the “line,” eaves et al. could “more precisely capture the relative location and extent of any given moment of writing or revision” (17). a general poetics of the composite notebook page would begin with the recognition of multiple “stages,” each indicated by the manuscript’s “physical-textual evidence,” even where a detailed genetic account is not desired or available. differences in shading (light or dark), medium (ink or pencil), orientation (left to right or footer to header), segmentation (versified or margin to margin), and penmanship (large or small script) all evince the eventual differences that lie behind the chaos of the page. in other words, each unique inscriptive disposition represents a discrete “moment of writing,” drawing, “or revision.” and because every “stage,” every moment of inscription, must feature a spatiotemporally specific inscriber, each composite notebook page hosts a meeting among the legion of blakes responsible for its ultimate arrangement. n39, for example, includes at least eight such blakes and points up how we might responsibly guess at their temporal relations based on “physical-textual” characteristics alone. if [1] the center emblem led the charge, then [2] the penciled couplet in the header (“the hebrew nation did not write it / avarice & chastity did shite it”) probably arrived soon after, given its visual obscurity and equally prominent positioning. then [3] the series of numbers and [4] the quatrain beneath the emblem appear to have had considerable elbow room at their origin—​enough for a fourfold numerical indecision (“26 26 14 25”) and for four perfectly tidy lines of verse. it seems, furthermore, that [5] the poem in the footer was begun shortly after the quatrain above it; that [6] the variously rubbed-out, rightside-up, and upside-down verse above the emblem arrived next; that [7] the vertically oriented prose commentary—​which sandwiches the emblem, dodges the poetry of [4-6], and continues upside down across the top margin—​filtered in thereafter; and finally that [8] the footer poem ([5]) was then revised to feature the dark-ink strikethrough, the couplet crammed into one line along the bottom edge, and the final couplet (with pronominal continuity) bent around the borders of [4] and [5] and [7]. each of these inferences is backed by the same evidentiary principle, namely that later inscriptions will respond in form to (somehow cover or avoid) earlier ones, and that the first inscriptions will show no sign of such pressures. sequential precision matters less at present than the cumulative composition process itself, in which blake [2] encounters blake [1], blake [3] encounters blakes [1] and [2], blake [4] encounters blakes [1] through [3], and so on. though we could probably continue dividing inscriptive “stages,” so many will do to model the notebook composites as records of incremental interactions among multiple spaceand time-specific blakes. what the notebook portrays, irrespective of its content, is a creative and creating mind working with and around various iterations of itself, each imposing on each. the document was literally the site and stock of such interaction (or intra-action?), one whose pages now present to us every iteration coiled into single static wholes. which we manage—​how? to start, the layout of any given page can activate reading conventions that attach certain semiotic functions to certain units of discourse.for an extended, practical implementation of this theoretical principle, see mcgann, new republic 168-98: “all texts are marked texts, i.e., algorithms—​coded sets of reading instructions” (169). in other words—​as the four zoas prototypers might have it—​the “zone” of an inscription can influence the kind (and to some extent the amount) of meaning it generates. centrality, for example, denoting both a middle position and a special salience, affords the notebook emblems a pride of place that jibes with their forerunning role in the compositional order: hubs, not satellites. once we grant that privilege to the emblems, the other inscriptions configure themselves formally and semiotically in relation to their established “centers.” take, again, n39, whose emblem depicts a sick figure (probably a child) lying on a bed or pallet before a kneeling attendant; a cloaked and turbaned man standing tallest on the right, bearing a doll like a gift; and another child standing farthest from the foreground, hands apparently to face, as if in mourning. a quatrain sits directly below the emblem—​ if i eer grow to mans estate o give to me a womans fate may i govern all both great & small have the last word & take the wall —​where we might expect to find an entitling or elucidative caption. and indeed, in the twofold act (most familiar to blake’s audiences) of reading-and-viewing, text and image, poem and emblem cannot help but act on each other in suggestive ways. “man” and “woman” call out to the two adult figures in the emblem, one whose “estate” includes the socioeconomic freedom to come and go (fully dressed, he appears to have entered off the street) bearing material gifts, and another whose “fate” consists in tending to the ailing child. “fate” rhymes here not only textually (aurally and visually) with “estate” but across media, with the death that presides thematically over the emblem and its scene. thus the first couplet rings out as supplication, a request that god—​fate’s programmer—​keep the speaker fastened to feeling for the vulnerable, even as he “grow[s]” into an invulnerable liberty to leave them behind. let to resonate similarly with the emblem, lines 3 and 4 then approach the metarepresentational: for while to “govern all both great & small” may be part of “mans estate,” it certainly is what blake has undertaken here in the design of men, women, and children. in the same way does blake “have the last word & take the wall,” where the former harks back to the order of composition (“word” debuting “last,” after image), and the latter lights up the open window in the upper right quadrant of the emblem—​the missing rectangle in the wall. subject to standard bibliographical conventions, such as that text “zoned” immediately below a centralized image serves a captioning function, the poetry on n39 initiates a dialogue with the emblem that leads (however circuitously) to a reflection on the making and the maker of the page itself. this process, unfolding in the mind of the reader-viewer to be sure, nonetheless depends on the specificities of both text and image—​and, equally important, on the frictional energy of their juxtaposition. the point is not that blake has deliberately “written the poems as a kind of commentary upon the central sketches” (jugaku 46) but that “the poems” and “the central sketches” are graphically arranged in a would-be expository relation whose “coded sets of … instructions” (mcgann, new republic 169) remain operative in the act of reading-and-viewing. and their operation ultimately works in both directions, allowing poem and emblem reciprocally to impart significance not otherwise available in either.compare viscomi, printed paintings 136: “[blake] paired these two initially separate notebook subjects [sketches of satan and elohim] specifically for his new monoprint project, which suggests that he enlarged and recomposed the elohim and satan drawings together, one in response to the other. doing so allowed each to contribute to the meaning of the other.” perhaps there are thematic similarities between the emblem on n39 and the poem beneath it—​death, gender, adultand childhood—​that predispose their conjunction to such interpretive readings as the one above. but the remainder of n39 shows how less consonant, even thematically discordant material behaves in the same way when configured in a composite fashion. consider the prose running vertically up either margin, in which blake theorizes art and method by antagonizing his usual cast of painters, poets, and engravers. he writes, “i do not condemn rubens rembrant or titian because they did not understand drawing but because they did not understand colouring.” nor, he continues, does he condemn robert strange or william woollett “because they did not understand drawing but because they did not understand graving.” there, at the upper left corner of the emblem, the diatribe breaks momentarily, to pick up at the bottom right corner with poets: i do not condemn pope or dryden because they did not understand imagination but because they did not understand verse their colouring graving & verse can never be applied to art that is not either colouring graving or verse which is unappropriate to the subject blake’s typical ponctuation libre suspends the final declaration between two meanings. on the one hand, he might say that the methods of rubens, rembrandt, titian, strange, woollett, pope, and dryden are all insufficiently universal: because they “can never be applied to art that is not either colouring graving or verse,” they are “unappropriate to the subject” of art as such. on the other hand, he might say that their methods apply only to art that is itself “unappropriate to the subject” of art—​which would be little art at all. the difference matters, since one critiques primarily execution, the other referential content or subject matter, but in either case the optical sandwiching effect (text | image | text) invites us to search the emblem for remnants of what (or how) the others “did not understand.” one set of discoveries, again freighted with metarepresentational significance, rewards even a provisional glance at the text | image | text design. first, so close to a condemnation of the rubens-rembrandt-titian approach(es) to “colouring,” the penciled sketch takes on a more starkly delineated self-conception, effectively announcing its own uniform constitution: outline. it has no color to speak for, which absent other talk of “colouring” may go unnoticed (or dismissed as endemic to sketching) but which paradoxically shines here in opposition to rubens and company, another emphatic statement of blake’s doctrinal “all depends on form or outline” (e 529-30). then, in a similar way, the mention of pope, dryden, and their misled verse reaches out to the poetical sketches nearby, where blake employs couplets more doggerel than heroic, light and monosyllabically rhymed. running into and around the verse below and above the emblem, the vertical prose appears to embrace these poems, or to pull them toward some propositional synthesis with itself: point (their bad verse), counterpoint (my alternative). finally, where blake’s censure of earlier artists seems to center on their narrow reach or applicability, it underscores the image-text interaction i have already sampled, stressing the transfer of relevance across artistic media. a subtler but at the same time more remarkable effect emerges from a conflict between the expository objective of the prose and the physical dimensions, or restrictions, of the notebook page. by the end of the passage excerpted above, blake has more or less exhausted the right margin: the prose can extend no further. but rather than proceed just yet to the following page, he continues his commentary along what is, for one reading linearly through the notebook, the top margin of the same n39: he who makes a design must know the effect & colouring proper to be put to that design & will never take that of rubens rembrant or titian to turn that which is soul & life into a mill or machine for the sake of discursive continuity, blake does not alter his autographic orientation—​writing, for example, left to right across the header—​but rotates the book again so that the end of the vertical lines (“… subject”) can link up to the start of the horizontal ones (“he who …”). what results, in relation to the page ut totum, is a banner of upside-down text that demands of the reader, as it would have demanded of the writer, an act of turning to return it to proper legibility. this when the sin for which blake chides rubens, rembrandt, and titian here is a “turn” of their own, one doubly apparent because, having first written “to put that which is soul,” blake has to raise that voltaic verb above the textual mainline. what’s more and most striking, the turn that we perform to finish reading, again like the turn that blake would have performed to finish writing, defamiliarizes the mimetic component of the central emblem: hung like stalactites from the roof of the rotated emblem, the gravity-defying figures have their artifice laid bare, their status as mere pencil and paper brought to front and center. this is to say (in blake’s own terms) that the protean prose, curling once about the image and again about the perimeter of the page, “turn[s] that which is soul & life into a mill or machine.”compare viscomi on the first plate of milton: “the naked poet as muscular youth walks into a vortex of clouds or smoke, splitting his name and the book’s title in half, forcing the reader to turn the plate in the circular motion of the vortex” (“illuminated word” sec. 2, par. 15). throughout i cite by section and paragraph the online open-access copies of viscomi’s “word” and “concept of difference” (“invention” and “illuminated printing” were born digital), though i also specify the original publications in my bibliography. thus, as an “integral work” for reading and viewing, the notebook operates on what might be called a poetics of inflection, one made up of both “spatial and temporal data.” i have said that the composite notebook pages represent blake’s working with and around various time-bound iterations of himself. this cooperation—​or contestation, depending—​involves bidirectional constraint, where blake at t2 must deal with the terms he set at t1 and simultaneously alter or add to the terms he will encounter at t3. but those terms and that constraint are expressed primarily in a spatial medium, in the vacant and occupied spaces on the page, which means that blake’s formal responses are in the first instance contortive and (re)locative. the temporal endurance of the notebook, in other words, directly sources the spatial parameters that drive inscriptions this way and that. then the resulting arrangement arbitrates how those inscriptions might signify wholesale. to recur again to the vocabulary of the four zoas prototypers, within the notebook’s semiotic system, “stage” dictates “zone” determines meaning, where meaning emerges at least in part from the “coded … instructions” that attach conventionally to each “zone” and from the juxtaposition of each inscription with other independent markings. my interpretation of n39 has focused on these two inflective forces, illuminating energies. they become, if not stronger necessarily, then even more perceptible on notebook pages whose contents (provisional, recycled, redrafted) also appear elsewhere, in similar or identical forms. n65 (see illus. 5) can start us toward a set of examples—​the first of which resides in that header: “chaucers canterbury pilgrims / being a complete index of human characters as / they appear age after age.” readers are most likely to know such language from the second prospectus for blake’s 1810 engraving “chaucers canterbury pilgrims.”blake included a tempera painting that he called sir jeffery chaucer and the nine and twenty pilgrims on their journey to canterbury in his 1809 broad street exhibition. the descriptive catalogue that accompanied that exhibition explained and championed the painting at length, often in terms similar to those expressed on n65. in the same year blake “propose[d]” to engrave the same picture for sale, which he did (without managing to sell it) in 1810. for the engraving, which the blake archive titles “chaucers canterbury pilgrims,” blake drafted briefer explanatory material (a “prospectus” [e 567-70]) in two iterations—​a significant portion of the second recycled from the original descriptive catalogue. 5. the notebook of william blake. add ms 49460, f.34r (see enlargement). 19.5 x 15.7 cm. erdman, notebook n65; blake archive, notebook object 67. image courtesy of the william blake archive, © british library board. a prose fair copy of that prospectus covers n117-19, where the lines from n65 reappear, revised, in the closing paragraph: “the characters of chaucers pilgrims are the characters that compose all ages & nations, as one age falls another rises” (see illus. 6). 6. the notebook of william blake. add ms 49460, f.61r (see enlargement). 14.8 x 14.7 cm. erdman, notebook n119; blake archive, notebook object 121. image courtesy of the william blake archive, © british library board. in the context of n117-19, as the topic sentence pivoting toward a benediction, the statement sounds entirely literary-critical, an archetypal or allegorical interpretation of the canterbury tales that justifies blake’s showing its dramatis personae on the basis of their transhistorical relevance. blake reading chaucer in the mode of frye. but on n65 the same idea surfaces not to close a larger critical disquisition but in the prominent zone of a title, and without the operative verb “are” that establishes the propositional grammar of n119. so positioned and so formulated, it seems less to advance a claim than to enact an angle of perception, a sort of “seeing-as” (in the mode of wittgenstein) that counsels us how to—​or becomes the assumption with which we—​view what falls below it.compare haggarty: “blake may mark a note as summary simply by virtue of its placement at the head of a page, something we need to see in order to understand that note’s significance” (44). what happens if we follow those instructions in earnest? under the sign of the archetype, the “complete index of human characters” as such, the central emblem on n65 (in which an “infant boy woos [a] big girl by tugging at her arm” [erdman, notebook 24]) solicits an allegorical reading of absolute generality. erdman has taken one step in the general direction already by positing that the image “explodes” the “romantic fiction” that “love is an angel who comes to a lovesick maiden among the tall shrubs, disguised as a naked little boy” (notebook 24). true as that may be, the chaucer title sends us out beyond “romantic fiction” to where, at the utmost bounds of such a story, there lies—​and the emblem comes to depict—​temptation, rejection, willpower, deception. (these, as blake knew, were all traceable in the “complete index” of the canterbury tales itself.) this modulation, a sort of swelling of significance, occurs even though blake would have drawn the emblem long before writing of chaucer in the header: the arrival of the text belatedly inflects the meaning of the preestablished image. before he had even conceived the chaucer prospectus, blake had adapted the emblem on n65 for “the angel,” an illuminated poem included in the songs of innocence and of experience (see illus. 7). 7. “the angel,” songs of innocence and of experience copy c (composed and printed 1789, 1794) (see enlargement). 11.1 x 6.8 cm. library of congress, rosenwald collection, catalogue number 1801. image courtesy of the william blake archive. there the boy and girl are flipped along the y-axis of the emblem; the boy has grown sizable wings, the girl a sadder countenance, and they appear more to caress each other than to push and to pull. plucked from the notebook, the nearly featureless (that is, not particularized, an “eternal principle” [e 536]) girl becomes a royal woman, the naked boy an angel, the scene itself a poet’s bewildering reverie. i dreamt a dream! what can it mean? and that i was a maiden queen: guarded by an angel mild: (lines 1-3) insofar as the boy (or “love”) “disguise[s]” himself in the notebook emblem, “the angel” seems committed to a tentative role-reversal. spoken by the poet-dreamer-queen, “i … / … hid from him my hearts delight” (lines 7-8) displaces disguise or deception from the male to the female figure; the former now “guard[s]” rather than “woos” or “tug[s],” a true “angel mild,” and on the same account wipes “away” the woman’s unending tears (my emphasis). as if privy to the “romantic fiction” “explode[d]” above (since she had been among the emblems), the queen has apparently insisted on remaining “ne’er beguil’d!” (line 4). but the final couplet, “for the time of youth was fled / and grey hairs were on my head,” carries more than a touch of regret, casting an ironical light back over the strength with which she buried her “delight” in former years. “sooner murder an infant in its cradle,” that ending might have read, “than nurse unacted desires” (e 38). “infant boy” and “big girl” could hardly have said as much in the notebook. adjoined to different textual counterparts, that is to say, the one image takes on entirely different significative functions. to experience that principle at work, we do not need to venture beyond the bounds of the notebook (as we have just done) or even beyond the bounds of n65, but only to observe the behavior of the verse on the same page. material pressures such as leaf dimensions overpower the poetry on n65 such that individual parts unfasten from the whole and seem liberated to move about as they please. given the slant-rhyming couplet (“while i looking up to my umbrella / resolvd to be a very contrary fellow”) that hitches one to the other, nose to tail, the fifteen horizontal lines below the emblem and the seven vertical lines in the right margin evidently constitute a single poem. but it makes quite the enjambment for a formal/​prosodic unit to be carried across not (or not only) a line break but a change in inscriptive orientation. if terminal rhyme can steel the link strained by that ninety-degree rotation, what prevents metrical regularity (rising pentameter) and a shared direction (verticality) from similarly linking the rightand left-marginal verses? this is my sweet apology to my friends that i may put them in mind of their latter ends … false friends fie fie our friendship you shant sever in spite we will be greater friends than ever they bear no less semantic relation to each other, their sequence is no more causally inevitable, than umbrellas do and are to contrarians: in fact, some echoes of theme and address—​friends and friendship, for example—​ring out across any close listening. taken, then, as one entity, the vertical verses on n65 sandwich the emblem much as did the condemnatory prose on n39; and, as on n39, the arrangement invites us to read for some expository image-text complementation. immediately new significative possibilities, suitably archetypal or allegorical, emerge from the representation: “friendship” between the boy and girl, offense (“false … fie fie”) given one to the other, “apology” offered to remedy, forgiveness (“shant sever”) in response to that apology. et cetera. i will not continue such probing, whose upshot is simply that, with nothing mandated by their unorthodox typography, the verse units on n65 let a reader govern them freely—​foregrounding one or another set of inflective associations, and seeing the rest of the page as one thing or another, accordingly. we should linger, however, on the fact that these semiotic freedoms have material causes. in his edition of the notebook, erdman explicitly designates the left-marginal verse on n65 as separate from the centered and right-marginal verse, which he groups together as a single poem. this editorial judgment has a strong, two-part rationale: in the first place, there are observable differences in ink-shading, with the left-marginal verse appearing in a paler ink than the others; and in the second place, the centered and right-marginal verses seem to be a fair-copy redrafting of several lines more roughly written on n62. that earlier version contains various lines omitted from the later but none of what runs up the left margin of n65. hence the centered and right-marginal verses belong to the same developing poetical structure, whereas the left-marginal verse must have developed elsewhere, in relative isolation. but the pivotal moment comes when blake moves to extract and recopy the former structure on the cleaner surface of n65. for there he promptly encounters the strict seniority of the center emblem, which will not accommodate the uninterrupted transcription of twenty-two consecutive lines. so, without a choice, he fractures the verse after line 15 (an awkward faultline in poetry built by twos) as he runs into the bottom of the page. his workaround, to resume vertically up the right margin, then initiates the unfastening, parts from whole, that i have described and examined above. it all would have unfolded rather differently on an emptier—​or indeed a fuller—​notebook page, or one, say, 22.5 x 18.7 cm. instead of 19.5 x 15.7 cm. and yet again the relevant variables are both spatial and temporal. for while the spatial restrictions of the notebook as a material object accrue in tandem with blake’s ongoing use of its surfaces, his returning to (or remaining in) the document over time also continually subjects him to those restrictions in their latest manifestation, at which point they shape his compositional experience anew. this is why inscribing the same poem or the same image at two different times literally forces the work to change. composition in the notebook becomes a recursive feedback loop, a collaboration and a competition, between blake and the material conditions he both confronts and creates. let me sum up the foregoing. blake’s notebook operates on an inflective poetics in which any one inscription signifies according to its interaction with other proximate inscriptions, where proximity is defined in graphic—​not semantic or otherwise grammatical—​terms. this modus operandi derives naturally from blake’s long-term commitment to the document, his protracted (and partly unrecoverable) series of miscellaneous engagements with its finite materiality. spatial limitations snowball across sustained usage, shoving marks into cracks and corners, bending and flipping and breaking them, and ultimately dropping them into charged but incongruous juxtapositions. despite that thematic incongruity, poems, pictures, and prose tirades gather on composite pages to form what mitchell has called “imagetexts” (science 39-47), specific aggregations of verbal and visual discourse that the reader-viewer encounters as total, even unified, displays. yet despite that unified totality, discursive units also remain free to wander into (to partake in the project of) other “imagetexts,” where—​circling back to the poetics of inflection—​they would in every case assume a new set of significative potentialities. this last observation broaches the critical upshot of everything i have shown so far, namely that, to recycle an old mainstay of the blakean lexicon, the notebook commands attention to “minute particulars” in their minutely particular contexts—​that is, to what something means next to and thanks to its discursive neighbor, and to what it might mean if and when it were subject to relocation. blake’s diachronic attachment to the notebook, in other words, mandates an interpretive practice devoted to synchronicity. “generalizing in every thing the man would soon be a fool” (e 649). iv. something, whose truth convinced at sight we find, that gives us back the image of our mind. (pope, essay on criticism lines 299-300) but the face of truth, like that of nature, is different and the same. (hazlitt, “on consistency of opinion”) so much for my consideration of the notebook “as an integral work.” i hope it will have challenged swinburne’s sense, representative of so many others, that “in the mass of floating verse and prose there is absolutely no hint of order whatever” (130-31). but i must now take issue with the second half of the blake archive’s injunction, its characterization of the notebook as a “work of a lifetime, unlike any other that [blake] left us.” for as both documentation and motivation, description and rationale, the remark seems to me exactly the wrong way around. really the notebook ought to be “considered as an integral work” because it is so much like the other integral works for which we know (and value) blake better. the notebook and the illuminated books, i will attempt to demonstrate here, take consonant approaches to the production, and enlist consonant approaches to the reception, of textual and pictorial meaning. no one would deny by now the unstable, even frankly random, elements of the illuminated books, nor of the processes via which blake brought them into being. “each ‘copy’ of [an illuminated] work differs from all others,” writes stephen leo carr (182), and that difference, as essick explains, has both “accidental” (“the viscosity of the ink, the pressure with which it is applied, the way it runs over the edges of relief plateaus”) and deliberate (coloration, pagination) causes (“graphic meaning” 839-40). one anthological work such as the songs of innocence and of experience may survive in several dozen color schemes and as many sequential arrangements, not all of them orchestrated by blake himself (bb 385-86).given their division into mostly oneand two-plate units, the songs are particularly conducive to rearrangement: by blake and by later owners, as well as by accident or happenstance. on the role of later owners, and of other hands more generally, in what survives of the songs, see viscomi, “posthumous blake.” an epic poem such as jerusalem may come to us not only both colored and uncolored but in multiple, irreconcilable narrative progressions (bb 224-35).on the particular case of narrative and graphic variation in jerusalem, see yoder. for a similar set of problems regarding plate 4 of the [first] book of urizen, see essick, “variation.” for obvious reasons—​they relate events in causal order—​narrative poems such as jerusalem and urizen are more fundamentally altered by sequential changes than are collections of stand-alone poems such as the songs. but i would argue that the difference is gradational, not categorical: consider how drastically wordsworth tempered lyrical ballads, as both a readerly experience and an organized literary event, by moving the rime of the ancient mariner from the beginning (as in 1798) to the middle (as in 1800) of the collection. these matters matter: the differences make a difference. they give the runaround to our search for blake’s intentions, disputing the authority of any one design, but they also alter—​even with, say, coloration alone—​the basic affect with which we receive the “verbal-visual sign system” (viscomi, “concept of difference” n7) of a given plate.see my comparative readings of “the sick rose,” below. but note also the affective language with which bentley describes the varying coloration of the songs: “the colours are bold in a … heavy in k, s … careful in e … and elaborate, extensive, and splendid in u, w-x. … t 2 is dull” (bb 385). these are subjective reports of colored resonance as well as objective descriptions of physical characteristics. for blake himself, according to some scholars, they mattered even more: pervasive and apparently welcome, “these differences … seemed definitive of the difference between one sort of art (free, creative) and another (commonplace, generalized)” (mcgann, “text” 276). on the other hand, as other scholars have argued, some constancies do temper the “radical variability” (carr 182) of the illuminated books. an “economy of similitude” partially counters the “economy of variation,” in essick’s keen phrases (“body” 203).blake was evidently tempted to stabilize the identity of the songs after all, for around 1821 he stipulated a sequence in a manuscript headed “the order in which the songs of innocence & of experience ought to be paged & placed.” only one copy (v [1821]) actually matches that order, of course. but as bentley has noted, there are some regularities among the many distinct arrangements anyway (for instance, several copies begin and/​or end in the same way [bb 386]). this balance characterizes, for example, the relation (formal, procedural, conceptual, thematic) throughout blake’s work and process of outline to color, the line to the shade. according to eaves, for blake “drawing is primary and coloring secondary,” a programmatic triage that has the consequence of stabilizing the former (relatively speaking) as it unsettles the latter (“expressive theory” 786). linear stability, much like colored instability, was in part a mandate of blake’s medium: the copperplate “embodied” a “resistance to change” in that once the acid had bitten it into relief, forming the outline of a design, it became enormously difficult to restore the bitten metal for linear addition or amendment (essick, “graphic meaning” 839). that acid pour sealed a sort of commitment, then, one broken back into “free, creative” “variability” only with subsequent processes such as inking, printing, and supplemental handwork. rather typically for blake, however, neither mechanical condition was permitted to remain mechanical—​not without doing double-duty as a trope in the representations themselves, where (as mitchell has argued) “outline is … linked with permanence and recurrence through time” and “coloring, drapery” and “space” “with impermanence and evanescence, the fleeting mutable world in which linear archetypes may be incarnated” (composite art 49-50).compare bentley: “characteristically, blake used his images archetypally, adapting them to new situations all his life” (paradise 92). committed but far from comprehensive, we might say, the “radical variability” of the illuminated books was only one part of their story, always apportioned against a countervailing sameness or “similitude.”viscomi has stressed blake’s “economy of similitude” on slightly different, though still relevant, grounds. rather than printing each copy of each book one by one (or one of one), blake printed largely in “editions”: that is, several copies in one run, then none for some time, then several more copies in another run, then none for some time, ad finem. this rhythm of production alone refutes the image of every copy as an island unto itself, equally demarcated and distinct from all the others. but viscomi also argues that within “editions” (or “printing sessions”) copies exhibit similarities more salient than their differences, frequently varying by color scheme but not by coloring style, by pagination but not by bibliographic distribution (for example, designs on recto and verso vs. designs on recto only), and so on. these latter variations, according to viscomi, occur mostly—​or only—​among different editions. see “concept of difference.” this very compressed survey, relying on the insights of several major blake scholars, intimates something like the broad semiotic order in which the illuminated books seem to operate across time. in short: some relatively stable units of discourse are subject to some destabilizing processes of random and deliberate variation. it would be unwise, i think, to cement (or taxonomize) exactly what changes and what remains the same in all cases: even the stable line/​unstable coloration model fails to obtain sometimes.see carr (178-89) on jerusalem plate 36 (erdman numbering; bentley plate 40), where a tree grows slowly in the left margin across the copies. more important is the overall implication that blake’s formal “economy” of “similitude” and “variation” generates meaning through the continual (re)contextualization of enduring signifiers, textual as well as pictorial. certain discursive units—​say, without committing unfailingly to, words or outlines—​retain unto themselves some baseline semiotic values that constitute their fixed autonomies. these baseline values are what carry over from copy to copy, signifying differently according to their concert with the particular contextual forces (for example, coloration or sequential arrangement) of each stop along the way.this semiotic breakdown derives from saussure’s foundational distinction between “value” and “signification,” where “value” refers to a signifier’s referential meaning within the stable “set of forms” that constitutes a given language (langue), and “signification” refers to a signifier’s communicated meaning within a live speech act ( parole). in saussure’s model, “signification” emerges from a meeting between a “value”-laden signifier and a particular discursive context. see culler, saussure 27-63. while we notice the fact of variability against the identical value that each unit holds, as it were, for all time, the outcomes of that variability itself must be measured by differences in actualized signification. one specific matrix of impermanent contextual details envelops one specific collection of transferable inscriptions to yield one copy of one plate, which is (at least for the reader-viewer) the basic unit of meaning in blake’s composite art. when another copy then comes along, and then another until the end, the same inscriptions are gradually proven capable of remarkable semiotic variation—​and the illuminated books themselves are shown to work, it seems fair to say, on another poetics of inflection. we have learned one method for dealing with such matters from the notebook: that is, thick description—​field reports, say—​of local encounters with uniquely signifying copies of individual pages (or prints). consider two roses (illus. 8 and 9). which one really looks “sick”? although the language conveys, consistently in both cases, the sad fact and furtive approach of death, each color scheme seriously influences the wholesale import of that semantic donnée. with its clear sky, pale pink rose, and angelically golden figures, “the sick rose” in copy v imparts a lightness that contrasts with the dreaded information of the poem, as if to stress the ambushing quality of an unexpected death. “the invisible worm, / that flies in the night” (my emphasis), in other words, remains “invisible” indeed but also imminent, a textual specter haunting a pictorial noon whose “life” blossoms on unaware. 8. “the sick rose,” songs of innocence and of experience copy v (composed 1789, 1794; printed 1821) (see enlargement). 11.1 x 6.8 cm. image © morgan library & museum, new york. pml 62442, gift of mrs. landon k. thorne, 1972. meanwhile, in copy r “the sick rose” takes on darker colors and heavier forms all around: the rose drops to blood red, the soil both darkens and deepens, the leaves show brown and orange patches of autumn. in the sky pink streaks preview dusk, the hour of death for day and rose alike; and so the conclusion of the poem (“and his dark secret love / does thy life destroy”; my emphasis) emerges as most salient, a real-time introduction of that—​all of a sudden—​very visible worm. constant as it may seem, then, the textual component of “the sick rose” communicates differently in different pictorial contexts, which is to say that only careful looks at each instantiation can gain any purchase on its “meaning.” 9. “the sick rose,” songs of innocence and of experience copy r (composed 1789, 1794; printed c. 1795, c. 1808) (see enlargement). 11.1 x 6.8 cm. image courtesy of the william blake archive, © fitzwilliam museum, cambridge. p.124-1950. but “the sick rose” of course does not begin and end with copies r and v. and as essick has pointed out, given the sheer number of books and plates and copies in the corpus, any absolute commitment to such hermeneutical synchronicity risks embroiling “the blake industry” in an impossibly long to-do list of individual analyses (“graphic meaning” 834). (this hazard is most serious of all where, as above, the analyses involve comparative juxtaposition.)not that comparative readings ought to be avoided as a rule. indeed, viscomi has discouraged them on grounds which i take, at least in part, actually to justify the procedure. he argues that to read plates comparatively would [1] bely the fact that very few of blake’s contemporaries could have seen more than one copy of any book; and [2] ascribe implausible acts of collative memory to blake himself. but in my view comparative juxtaposition, historically luxurious as it might be, serves only as an instrument to highlight the inflective forces already active within the bounds of the single page: comparison simply brings them to the fore. nor does it presuppose genetic intentionality (as viscomi also objects): in fact, that one copy does not in any definite sense improve upon another is exactly what would motivate a treatment of each in equal detail. finally, viscomi claims that the most capricious aspects of the illuminated books (for instance, “coloring”) “usually do not” “alter the reading experience” when changed (see “concept of difference” pars. 1, 5). though i have no empirical data (documenting readerly cognition vis-à-vis different copies, for example) with which to rebut it authoritatively, this objection seems to me straightforwardly inaccurate. whose “reading experience”? certainly (as my readings of “the sick rose” will have revealed) they “alter” mine. so other scholars have shown the way toward another method, not a replacement for but a supplement to synchronic readings, one that abstracts responsibly from the diachronic perception of variance to what ideology might underly its cultivation. both mcgann and mitchell, for example, derive epistemological frameworks from the idiosyncrasies of blake’s mode of production. for mitchell, who pursues an “embracing concept of style as epistemology,” “ways of showing” equal “ways of knowing,” which turns the illuminated books into “cognitive structures” whose instability corresponds to an equally unstable—​continually undermined and reformulated—​measure of intellection (“style” 148-50). similarly, according to mcgann, the capriciousness of the illuminated books embodies an absence-based “anatomy of truth” in which one plate or print, as a single possibility among many others, declares its own deficiency upon arrival. what guarantees that deficiency is “point of view”—​that is, partiality, which in each iteration logs a set of inclusions (what it sees) and exclusions (what it fails to see) that negatively “discover the limits” of its yield. “truth for blake,” mcgann writes, “does not exist, it has to be created,” and blake assents to variation (even where he does not actively procure it)“absolute control over relief etching was not possible. … blake’s idea of uniformity permitted variation; if variations were technically inevitable and aesthetically acceptable, then they could also be deliberately allowed to occur” (viscomi, “concept of difference” par. 4). in some cases blake seems to have leaned into that deliberate, if passive, allowance: for example, “subsequent handwork could have covered traces of the printing method and increased uniformity among impressions. it is notable that blake did not do this [on the song of los title page], or in many of his other color-printed designs, but allowed his graphic techniques to signify themselves” (essick, “graphic meaning” 855). to “create” fresher and further images of “truth” (knowledge 32-36). this would all be to posit a generalized logic for blake’s fixation on “minute particulars”—​paradoxically to be sure, but perhaps not (as blake might say) idiotically, since it retreats to and then issues from a higher order and vantage. particular or general, synchronic or diachronic: what changes in neither analytic method is the crucial necessity of reader-viewer involvement. because they modulate affect and salience and other phenomena bound up in the reception of meaning, the unique inflections of two sick roses, for instance, rely on interpretive attention to a fairly obvious extent. but by his own account, when mitchell refers more generally to “ways of knowing,” he also invokes the presence of a “knower” who is “both the artist who creates the form and the beholder who perceives it” (“style” 149). likewise, when mcgann construes “truth” as a dynamic creation rather than a static condition, he insists that “blake’s poetry … looks ‘toward,’ calls out ‘to,’ reciprocal forms of activity” (knowledge 31).compare essick: “the structure of the text is but the cue for an event wherein the reader realizes that the text is only one moment in a continuum of which he is himself a part” (“today and tomorrow” 398). see also eaves, “expressive theory.” these big-picture, longue durée responses to variation in short contend that blake strives both to dramatize and to facilitate the workings of what he called “poetic or prophetic character” (e 3). for by installing familiar forms within unfamiliar environs, or by devising frankly novel aggregates of verbal and visual signs,as mitchell and others have consistently observed, these aggregates sometimes feature “illustrations which do not illustrate,” texts and images that, although coupled on the same plate, do not explain or expand on each other in any straightforward fashion. such juxtapositions, by virtue of their spatial contiguity (and in a manner familiar to any notebook reader), invite the “creative participation” of the interpreting reader-viewer, whose imagination must step in to fill the semantic breach. see composite art 8-9. blake forces the reader-viewer [1] to re-envision the expressive possibilities of older, assimilated markings; and [2] to participate more broadly in an “imaginative, even speculative” (tyler 4) perceptual mode that by definition exceeds “bounded” “reason or the ratio of all we have already known” (e 2). this, to crib a phrase from tennyson, is a climb up a climbing wave, since fresh begins descending into stale the very moment it emerges: hence the urgency of variation. hence, too, blake’s famous defense of “obscure” art, containing not only “recondite meaning” (e 531) but unpredictable relations between text and image, as “the fittest for instruction because it rouzes the faculties to act.” “that which can be made explicit to the idiot,” he says, where “explicit” means roughly stable and familiar, “is not worth my care” (e 702). a diachronic view reveals blake’s various instabilities to be part and parcel of a long-term, reciprocally active pursuit of imaginative fecundity, one that implicates in equal parts the author, the audience, and the artwork at hand, past, present, and future. again we have seen as much in the notebook, and learned from that document how to think through the reciprocal process of meaning-making—​much as scholars such as essick and viscomi have already done—​in material as well as historical, rhetorical, and ideational terms. “graphic media,” writes essick vis-à-vis illuminated printing, “have an intentionality or telos of their own that establishes a dialectic between the artist’s will and the materials and procedures he uses (and that use him)” (“body” 206, my emphasis). hegel called the dialectic a “speculative mode of cognition” (philosophy of right §10), a sort of open exploration that would move, in the context of blake, from the thesis of “the artist’s will” through the antithesis of his “materials and procedures” to the synthesis of the finished object that marks the middle ground. in other words, the medium yields something to authorial intention (for example, takes on the ink of inscription) even as authorial intention yields something to the nature of the medium (for example, inscribes where the surface has space for it), and from that negotiation comes the artifact that we observe as “integral” in itself. here, i think, we can locate the epicenter of the wide-ranging overlap between the notebook and the illuminated books that i have been trying gradually to uncover. thanks in large part to the reconstructive work of viscomi, most blake scholars will know the ins and outs of illuminated printing already.the locus classicus of such work must be blake and the idea of the book (1993). but for a more recent walk-through of blake’s method, highly detailed but still efficient, see viscomi’s blake archive exhibition called “illuminated printing.” i have also benefited here from essick, “graphic meaning” passim, but especially 835-36. but the technical itinerary of the method bears repeating here, for it highlights how blake, under the dominion of his medium, had to work on a sort of contractual obligation with his past and future selves. rather than transferring his designs from separately drafted mockups, as others of his profession might have done, blake composed them directly on the copperplates. he wrote and drew on the metal (with pens, brushes, and ordinary autographic gestures) in an acid-resistant varnish, then he poured acid over the plate to eat away its unmarked surfaces.like most of his contemporaries, blake used diluted nitric acid for biting metal, and his acid-resistant “ink” was the “stop-out” varnish (made of resin and turpentine) commonly used by etchers to prevent unwanted corrosion. for details regarding medium and writing implements, see section 4 of viscomi’s exhibition, “chamber two: executing the design.” for details regarding acid and related substances, see section 5, “chamber three: etching with acid.” first and second, these two processes could be repeated to bite greater depth into certain areas while preserving plateaus elsewhere, but (as i have mentioned) they were in effect powerless to restore already bitten areas to old heights. what was once etched must remain etched, and be treated as such, forever. furthermore, although blake could technically add and rub out varnish any time before the initial acid pour, composing on the copper from start to finish would have raised the stakes of every inscriptive decision. the size and shape of even the most provisional markings would have determined, at least in part, what presented as feasible end-states for the materials at hand: for instance, how many plates one book might require; or how much poetry might one plate hold, and in what configuration; or how text and image might dovetail, or diverge.“the lettering style, letter size, spacing between word and line, number of lines, the text’s shape, the vignette’s placement are all determined when the text is rewritten on the plate, which means that the parts that form the page design are visually composed when executed. because the page design as such does not pre-exist its execution, relief etching produces rather than reproduces its designs” (viscomi, “illuminated printing”). in such circumstances, every extemporaneous move shades (or forecloses) some futures and illuminates (or activates) some others, in the same kind of give-and-take replicated on a larger scale by the movement of copperplate fixities into the coup de dés of ink and coloration.essick seems to understand the illuminated process as an oscillation between stages of freedom and instability and stages of constraint and stability. in the first, compositional stage, blake can apply and remove acid-resistant varnish from the plate with relative ease; in the second stage, blake fixes the design by etching the plate with acid; in the third, blake subjects the plate to the almost endless possibilities (and uncertainties) of inking, printing, coloring, and finishing handwork. then in the final stage, which is perhaps too obvious for essick to define, comes the finished copy, which can support further alteration (at blake’s hands) only in the form of another copy. see “graphic meaning” 836-40. basic principle: in designing and executing the illuminated books, blake composed such that each maneuver, itself partly a response to earlier maneuvers, established a set of rules by which he must play thereafter. in other words, he acts intentionally now (at t1) and simultaneously creates the conditions that will curb his intentional control later (at t2). as it relates to blake, then, the “dialectic” set going by “graphic media” unfolds not only between artist and medium but between the artist and his own prior manipulations of that medium. this reformulation has real, clarifying consequences, for it captures what viscomi has called blake’s “re-creational aesthetic,” where “returning to one of his own plates … provided opportunities for new invention” (“invention” sec. 4, par. 12).according to viscomi, one particularly salient product of the “re-creational aesthetic” is the marriage of heaven and hell, which “unfolded through its production, with the execution of one section inspiring the invention of the next section” (“invention” sec. 2, par. 14). more specifically, marriage began as plates 21-24 alone (the whole of copy k), with their “anti-swedenborgian” energies, and then developed over “four or more stages of production” according to blake’s gradual disillusionment with that initial set of propositions (viscomi, “evolution” 334-36). in other words, marriage as we know it presents a jumbled record of blake’s changing his mind in the midst—​not to say because—​of creative execution. elsewhere, viscomi has implied that a similar procedure obtains across impressions of blake’s illuminated plates: “the works at the end of the series differ significantly from those at the beginning but could not have been reached without all the intermediate work” (in kraus 166). but it also—​finally—​brings illuminated printing around full circle to the notebook, in which the parameters of the medium combined with the schedule of composition to generate, on the same contractual basis, a poetics of local inflection, “econom[ies]” of “similitude” and “variation,” and all the other quirks examined just above. if these make up what mcgann terms a blakean “anatomy of truth,” then in the notebook it would seem that blake assembles, part by part, the same truthful organism as everywhere. v. back to our central questions. why did blake keep and use the notebook for so long? what did he get out of its enduring partnership? what might he have lost by replacing it with another “standard stationer’s commodity” (erdman, notebook 2), another bundle of five-dozen leaves? we have been breaking these grounds implicitly all along, but i want to offer now two more direct hypotheses—​one cognitive scientific,at least three critics have discussed blake in relation to cognitive neuroscience. in the god of the left hemisphere (2012), roderick tweedy argues that “blake’s portrayal of urizenic dominance within the human psyche” anticipates later discoveries of brain lateralization, particularly the “rationalizing” and “law-making” functions of the left hemisphere (19, 25). in his 2016 blake society lecture “the infinite brain and the narrow circle” <https://​www.​youtube.​com/​watch?​v=ijg3htpekmi>, iain mcgilchrist observes that blake—​possessing an “intuitive awareness of the functioning of his own brain” (04:42-04:48)—​exhibits a “tendency towards the phenomenology of the right hemisphere, which is concrete, embodied, and contextual” (23:03-23:10). and in his new biography william blake vs. the world (2021), john higgs suggests that blake’s understanding of the liberatory potential of “self-annihilation” tracks with recent research into the “stubbornly practical and rational … default mode network” in the brain, which generates autobiographical memory and also (until deactivated by, for example, task-oriented focus or psychedelic drugs) hinders imaginative experience (31-37). the other historical biographical. i will set them forth in that order. in recent decades, researchers in the cognitive sciences have begun to theorize how mental operations such as memory and reasoning actually “lean … on environmental supports” that exist outside the brain (clark and chalmers 8). andy clark and david chalmers, whose pathfinding paper “the extended mind” generated much of the earliest enthusiasm for such ideas, argue that the human being often thinks as an “extended system,” which is to say a “biological organism” coupled with “external resources,” rather than merely as a vessel for internal neuropsychological processes (18). we “delegate” the labor of remembering commitments and contact information, for example, to calendars and address books (physical or digital), which come not only to assist but effectively to replace—​with regard to specific tasks—​the storage function of our “biological memory” (8, 12). or, somewhat more profoundly, in a case first presented by david kirsh, scrabble players customarily “shuffle” or rearrange their tiles before them in an effort (kirsh calls it “self cueing” [sic]) to stir their word-hoard into some productive epiphany (kirsh 64-65). these are “epistemic actions,” as opposed to “pragmatic actions,” in the lexicon of clark and chalmers, in that they are performed not for their own sake (because we desire the change they bring upon the environment) but in the interest of some mental consequence that they alone or most efficiently can effect. given that ultimate objective, through the performance of “epistemic actions,” “the mind extends into the world” (clark and chalmers 8, 12). expanded and grouped under the heading of “4e [embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended] cognition,” such research has already proven useful for some humanistic scholars and theorists.for an extensive treatment of 4e cognition, see newen et al. for humanistic applications, see caracciolo; caracciolo and kukkonen; and yuen-collingridge’s extraordinary essay “writing as thinking on papyrus.” little wonder, since (as my examples above suggest) it has kept linguistic and specifically written phenomena in its sights from the start. for instance, following the intervention of clark and chalmers, richard menary has construed writing (“the creation and manipulation of written vehicles”) as a kind of “thinking in action,” one that entails “a cognitive integration between neural, bodily, and manipulative processes” (622). at the tip of those “manipulative processes,” what both endure and facilitate manipulation, are the “media” or materials involved in writing: pen and paper, keyboard and word processor, copperplates and “not very large notebook[s],” what have you (erdman, notebook 1). according to menary, these tools and implements “enable processes that cannot be completed in the head alone”: “manipulations, transformations, reorderings, comparisons, and deletions,” and so on (629). but as qualitatively unique “representational systems” (624), where “representation” refers to both the process of turning thought to writing and the manifest written product that results, they also “enable processes that cannot be completed” via the other tools and implements on offer. finally and most important, it follows from there that to write in different media, to externalize and manipulate symbols with different material supports, is to open oneself to different modes of cognitive activity. blake knew as much himself, insisting that “invention depends altogether upon execution or organization,” that “execution is the chariot of genius,” that “thought is act” (e 626, 637, 623). and his scholars learned as much not from the cognitive sciences but from blake’s own working order, from his “dialectic[al]” approach (on full display in such remarks) to the alliance between action and cognition. “graphic activities were not posterior to invention and composition [for blake] but fully involved with them,” writes essick (“graphic meaning” 836), and the illuminated books appeared, as viscomi puts it, “in a graphic medium whose materiality and natural language were fully exploited” (“illuminated printing”). in broad methodological terms, the cognitive reality of “writing-as-thinking,” as well as the ante factum proximity of blake to such theories, would point critics to compositional machinery as influential for and therefore indexical of some aspects of authorial ideation. parts of my previous section have already sampled what that prioritization looks like in blake studies. in the immediate context, though, the “extended mind” licenses another supposition, namely that the used and reused notebook might have “enable[d]” some cognitive “processes” that were not accessible through, or at least were not so nurtured and encouraged by, the other bibliographic media at blake’s disposal. as we have seen, the material parameters of the document demanded autographic and ultimately compositional ingenuity, reconfiguring a first-order constraint as a sort of higher-order liberation.compare eaves: “they [all tools and materials, including pen, ink, and paper] allow you to do some things, they force you to do other things, and they keep you from doing yet other things. that is the price of admission—​we must pay to play” (in kraus 168). being made to break the chain of verse and write vertically up the margins, for example, could well reveal to a poet the possibilities of language portioned (as are proverbs and epigrams) into portable fragments. wrapping aesthetic philosophy around a central emblem like coating around a core could point up the subordination of theory to practice and expose the inflective potential of confounding juxtaposition. determining which earlier marks deserve erasure or effacement, and which call out for preservation, might train a revisionary spirit fit to overtake the “bounding line” (e 550) of the known. and so on. from an “extended mind” perspective, the notebook pages seem not only to model the inflective poetics of the illuminated prints but also to generate (at most) or to reinforce (at least) the states of mind that would be conducive to such composite productions. we do not need to deny the reciprocal effect—​of mind on matter—​to suppose that using the notebook as he used it must have shaped blake’s thinking in these ways. the notebook remained, at whatever level of awareness, a fertile soil from which blake could cultivate his creative singularity. essick talks of the “extended mind” avant la lettre when he says that blake “did not have to hear voices to have some of his poetry dictate to him” but “needed only to receive the messages of his medium” (“body” 216). but in a rather remarkable way, those two varieties of mediumship intersect at the notebook, forming the multivalent ground of my second guess at the why of that document. as biographers have more or less universally acknowledged, although he died in body in 1787, robert never exactly left william blake. in more than one instance, the poems and designs assert a sort of fraternal perpetuation straightaway, with each brother kept alive on the ongoing vitality of the other.in a letter of 15 may 1824—​by which time blake had passed out of whatever public presence he might have enjoyed—​charles lamb rather perfectly mistook one brother for the other: “blake is a real name, i assure you, and a most extraordinary man, if he be still living. he is the robert blake, whose wild designs accompany a splendid folio edition of the night thoughts …” (woodcock 154-55). william blake, author of those designs, was of course still living in 1824; but robert blake had been dead some thirty-seven years, ten of which had elapsed before the publication of the illustrated night thoughts to which lamb refers. “man liveth not by self alone but in his brothers face,” blake writes in the four zoas, for example, almost as if he were preparing a caption for the famous mirror images of milton plates 29 and 33 (see illus. 10). 10. milton copy b, plates 29 and 33 (bentley numbering; not numbered in erdman) (composed c. 1804–​11, printed c. 1811). (see enlargement of plate 29; see enlargement of plate 33.) 16.0 x 11.2 cm. and 16.9 x 11.3 cm. images courtesy of the william blake archive, © huntington library, art collections, and botanical gardens, san marino, ca. call no. 54041. according to blake himself, behind such memorial impulses in the art there lay a series of visionary consults with robert in posthumous shroud, events both frequent and pivotal, whose ramifications crept through the emotional into the aesthetic domain. —​i know that our deceased friends are more really with us than when they were apparent to our mortal part. thirteen years ago. i lost a brother & with his spirit i converse daily & hourly in the spirit. & see him in my remembrance in the regions of my imagination. i hear his advice & even now write from his dictate—​ (e 705) for behind these “daily & hourly” meetings, beneath their productive exercises in “dictat[ion],” lay one encounter of especial consequence—​one in which, after years of mulling over the sad captivities of standard media,the tenor of my remarks here follows bentley, who not only portrays blake as having “been thinking about such problems at least since 1784” but also asserts that blake “must have talked about them with his brother robert” (paradise 102). see viscomi, “invention,” for a stricter materialism that nonetheless remains compatible with the positions that blake sought “to make printable the autographic gestures of pen and ink and brush marks” and that, according to a long tradition, “blake credited his brother robert … as the method’s source” (sec. 3, pars. 2-3). blake was delivered the technical prospect of illuminated printing.the original source for this story is the detailed secondhand account of blake’s contemporary j. t. smith. gilchrist reiterated smith’s account matter-of-factly in the 1860s, and bentley treated it with similar confidence a century and a half later (see gilchrist 1: 69; bentley, paradise 102). ackroyd, while acknowledging the ineradicable chance of fabrication or embellishment, concludes that the story—​including catherine blake’s rushing out for the necessary supplies the morning after—​is “close to the truth” (111-12). i find little reason to dissent from these authorities—​bentley’s assurance most especially. the critical insight—​that is, “the simple solution to the problem of composing directly on copper” (bentley, paradise 102)—​came easily to the otherworldly eye of “brother robert” (e 721). in his version of the story, ackroyd ventures two naturalistic hypotheses about how robert might have “revealed” illuminated printing to blake in a vision, both of which also place the notebook at the center of the development. “it may be,” ackroyd muses first and most obviously, “that in thinking of [robert] and using his notebook, [blake] actually saw and heard him again” (112). in other words, because the notebook bore the trace of robert’s animated being, contact with it provided for blake the sense of an intimate encounter. reasonable enough. or, ackroyd then guesses (on equally firm footing), perhaps blake “hit upon the method” during his early trial-and-error period using one of robert’s drawings as a template, which in turn moved him to reflect that “robert had truly inspired him” (113). here blake would have narrativized the fortuitous integration of technique and prototype as the visitation, the hint and helping hand, of that prototype’s original purveyor. the notebook enters this retrofitted structure through a side door, for it never in fact contained the finished pen-and-wash drawing of robert’s upon which “the approach of doom,” commonly taken as “blake’s first relief etching” (viscomi, “invention” sec. 3, par. 3), was based. but it did feature several other drawings by robert, including some that show huddled figures (see illus. 11) not unlike those in another “doom”-related sketch, now held at tate britain; and in general, around 1787–​88, blake must have seen the notebook chiefly as a storehouse of these, his brother’s handwork. by either account, then, if robert was “present” and even active at the conception of illuminated printing, then the notebook—​itself a fraternal “memento” (ackroyd 84, 109), a pen-and-paper stand-in for the robert of flesh and blood—​should likewise have been party to that moment.compare bentley: “the death of his brother when william was twenty-nine years old marked … the end of his intellectual apprenticeship. … and the triumphs for which he is best known are due to the inspiration of robert blake” (paradise 99). 11. the notebook of william blake. add ms 49460, f.2v (see enlargement). 19.5 x 15.7 cm. erdman, notebook n10; blake archive, notebook object 8. image courtesy of the william blake archive, © british library board. not merely present from the beginning, the notebook seems moreover to have accompanied the technical maturation of illuminated printing. consider origins once more. in a fascinating retrospective at the very end of the ghost of abel and near the end of his very life, blake located his “original stereotype” somewhere in “1788” (e 272). this date refers almost certainly to one or both of the tiny tractates titled all religions are one and there is no natural religion, the true firstborn of which was all religions, whose concentric bull’s-eye layout takes closely after the emblem-only pages that would have dominated the notebook in the same year. indeed, the blake archive describes the images in all religions as “emblem-like designs” (all religions headnote), and ackroyd observes—​albeit without further explanation—​that they “are related to the emblems [blake] had been drawing in his brother’s notebook” (115). that relation extends beyond formal resemblance to embrace, for example, the carryover of content, as in the traveler silhouette that occupies both n15 (illus. 12) and all religions plate 7 (illus. 13). more obliquely, blake also seems to have cherished all religions in a private manner similar to the notebook’s enduring station, printing and storing the tractates (much as he recurred to the notebook pages) long after he could have seen any commercial incentive to do so (see bb 82; ackroyd 116). 12. the notebook of william blake. add ms 49460, f.9r (see enlargement). 19.5 x 15.7 cm. erdman, notebook n15; blake archive, notebook object 17. image courtesy of the william blake archive, © british library board. 13. all religions are one copy a, plate 7 (composed c. 1788, printed c. 1795) (see enlargement). 5.2 x 3.1 cm. image courtesy of the william blake archive, © huntington library, art collections, and botanical gardens, san marino, ca. call no. 57445. the stereotypic significance of all religions and no natural religion presumably rested in their being the earliest illuminated prints to incorporate both text and image—​a composite state that blake reached only after relief experiments (such as “doom”) with pictorial matter alone. still, the textual components of the tractates consisted in philosophical prose and not, as we may have come to expect, in the more formally intricate pursuits of lineated poetry. these blake worked into illuminated printing first with the songs of innocence and the book of thel in 1789. but however momentous was their graduation to verse, the earliest copies of innocence and thel, like the earliest copies of the marriage of heaven and hell (1790), remained otherwise plainly executed. like “printed manuscripts” (essick, adam 170), they were unor lightly (water)colored, starkly divided poem from picture, fit to recto and verso à la ordinary codices, and wiped clean of the border-impressions left behind by the plates (viscomi, “word” sec. 2, pars. 3, 8). after 1790 blake strayed from illuminated printing until 1793, by which time he had drafted in the notebook much of the poetry that would become the songs of experience and that began to bend the notebook pages toward the composite specimen, analyzed above (erdman, notebook 12). his return included provisional strides beyond the “printed manuscript”—​such as texts “more organically integrated with illustrations”—​which were then lengthened by the introduction of color printing to the books of 1794 (viscomi, “word” sec. 2, pars. 7, 10-11).these earliest steps beyond the “printed manuscript” coincided—​not coincidentally—​with blake’s prospectus to the public (published october 1793), which announced his new “method of printing which combines the painter and the poet” (e 692). it is telling, as well as consistent with the principle that execution generates invention, that blake reflects upon his innovation in expository prose only after confronting its material potentialities in the workshop—​and, as my interests go, only after having filled the notebook pages with both verse and image.color printing of illuminated books involved applying pigmented solution to the etched copper and pressing ink and colors simultaneously; it added thicker and more opaque shades to the lighter palette of blake’s watercoloring. the original-work venues for blake’s move to color printing in 1794 were experience, europe, and urizen—​though he also returned to and re(color)printed earlier books such as marriage and visions. this stage helpfully depicts the development of illuminated printing as coextensive with the printmaker’s accumulation of capacities, for blake also finished europe, experience, and urizen with watercolors after color printing them. the earlier technique is compounded with (not replaced by) the later. see viscomi, “word” sec. 2, pars. 10-11, and printed paintings 15-24, 78-81. commercial work again took over from 1796 to about 1804,for the significance of 1795, which i bypass in my primary narrative for purposes of brevity and clarity, see viscomi, printed paintings passim. in “‘annus mirabilis,’” a precursor essay to printed paintings, viscomi argues that the song of los (1795) carried blake closer to “fus[ing] poetry, painting, and printmaking” than he had ever managed before (59). when blake began to design milton, the touchstone epic that would occupy him for the better part of a decade. this period, through roughly 1811, saw the advent of new etching techniques that increased the number of tones and textures at the method’s ready (viscomi, “word” sec. 2, par. 15), as well as the entry of a motley lot of language, prosaic and poetical, into the notebook: the “satiric verses and epigrams” (as erdman terms them [e 499-517]), the public address, the chaucer prospectus, a vision of the last judgment (erdman, notebook 12-13). what space these writings left, from the late 1810s onward, blake stuffed overfull of the everlasting gospel, clinching the chaos that characterizes the notebook today. around the same time—​in 1820 to be exact—​jerusalem surfaced in full, with white-line etching, accentuated borders, and a steep price tag that together completed “a change in blake’s idea of the book” from “prints as” rudimentary “pages” to “prints as” elaborate miniature “paintings” (viscomi, “word” sec. 3, par. 4).as my citations in these paragraphs will have suggested, i—​like anyone now concerned with illuminated printing and its evolution—​am enormously indebted to the reconstructive work of joseph viscomi. particularly long-standing projects such as innocence and marriage, which blake printed during almost every stage of his technical evolution, demonstrate the same change (from rudimentary “pages” to elaborate “paintings”) across the course of their independent reproductions (see illus. 14). 14. “the shepherd” (11.1 x 6.9 cm.) from (top to bottom): songs of innocence copy u (printed 1789), houghton library, harvard university, typ 6500.34u (see enlargement); songs of innocence and of experience copy l (printed 1795), yale center for british art, paul mellon collection, b1992.8.13(14) (see enlargement); songs of innocence and of experience copy y (printed 1825), metropolitan museum of art, 17.10.5 (see enlargement). all images courtesy of the william blake archive. hence, both phylogenetically, as a species of printor bookmaking, and ontogenetically, as constituted by single art-organisms following developmental trajectories, illuminated printing tends from relative sparseness and simplicity toward extravagance and graphic complexity. i have attempted to suggest that the illuminated book had by its side a sympathetic partner, if not an outright cicerone, in the similarly maturated notebook. in material terms, the notebook and the illuminated book shared first steps in their interfertility with the “original stereotype” of all religions, and they amassed constituent elements, at coincident paces, from there. but in fact that timeline falls short of the relevant beginning, for they also seem to have shared a very source and fount of life: i mean beloved “brother robert.” this common origin ultimately distinguishes the notebook as both a sentimental “memento” and an extended-mind stimulant for the working imagination—​two functions that acted as one in the specter of robert blake. far from complicated, my broadest contention here is that, whatever etiology we settle upon, the notebook was all wrapped up in the founding and unfolding of blake’s illuminated method. as such—​and if for no other reason—​it deserves a prominent place in our talk of his artistic becoming. vi. … because seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand. (matthew 13:13) or had not men been fated to be blind, enough was said and done t’inspire a better mind. (aeneid [trans. dryden] 2.73-74) i found them blind i taught them how to see and now they know neither themselves nor me (blake, notebook n34) the laocoön separate plate forecloses one tempting objection to such treatments of the notebook as an “integral work.” it would be reasonable to assert that the notebook lacks the requisite stamp of authorial intention—​that blake assumed for it no audience, that the pages embody no deliberate design, and that the document’s apparent semiosis results more from chance and material stricture than from any expressive or communicative action. this position might imply that formal links drawn between the notebook and the illuminated books cannot finally succeed as critical insights, since they conflate two ontologically disparate phenomena: private trial and training ground on the one hand, public event and authorized object on the other. my earlier sections have argued, with the help of leading blake scholars, for the prevalence of provisionality and live experimentation even in blake’s ostensibly finalized printings.the underlying distinction—​between the final and the processual, the intentional and the incidental—​is itself spurious in relation to blake. if strictly upheld, it would blackball several blake works that have already rewarded careful and sustained attention: the four zoas manuscript, for example, would be considered an aesthetic abortion first and foremost, not “the artistic workshop in which [blake’s] myth could be fully imagined” (blake archive headnote). another essay might explore how blake’s writing the four zoas on discarded proofs from his night thoughts engravings generated inflective pages like the notebook composites but inverted: text enclosed in otherwise unrelated design. for two looks at night thoughts and the four zoas manuscript together, see whittaker 187-222 and calè. what is more, recent critical trends have complicated the assumption that notes and drafts and manuscripts are better conceived as subsidiary matter than “as ends in themselves” (reader 3).simon reader’s notework: victorian literature and nonlinear style (2021) was published too late to factor into my argument but nonetheless sets a standard for examining “the writer’s notebook” as an aesthetic object—​and indeed as “a genre equal in importance to the novel, poem, drama, or essay” (2). “revers[ing] the formal priority” of most studies—​that is, “treating the author’s notes as primary while still considering the achievements of [their] other works”—​reader defines “the genre of notework” by the “incremental collection” (within material bounds) of “seemingly insignificant and unordered observations.” this “nonlinear style,” a formal telos of non-teleology, expresses the “aestheticized inconsequentiality” of the late-victorian period even as it throws light on the circulation and organization of “personal data” in our own “digital age” (4-5, 8-11, 19). for similar “revers[als]” of “the formal priority,” and for the “personally inflected critical method” (stauffer 13)—​the “imaginative, even speculative, critical responses” (tyler 4)—​that they often require, see the following: on written correspondence, marta werner’s writing in time: emily dickinson’s master hours (2021); on marginalia, andrew m. stauffer’s book traces: nineteenth-century readers and the future of the library (2021) and (for a blake-centered counterpart) jason allen snart’s the torn book: unreading william blake’s marginalia (2006); on drafts and manuscripts, daniel tyler’s edited volume poetry in the making: creativity and composition in victorian poetic drafts (2021) and (for rigorous philosophical and methodological background) sally bushell’s text as process: creative composition in wordsworth, tennyson, and dickinson (2009). the moma exhibition cézanne drawing (6 june–​25 september 2021) and the associated catalogue of the same name (ed. jodi hauptman and samantha friedman) show how nearly identical interests have been playing out in art history and curatorial studies. but rather than deliver a theoretical—​or even a literary-historical—​defense of my method, i want to close by showing how the laocoön plate pulls the teeth from the intentionalist objection itself. in 1815 blake was commissioned to produce illustrative plates for articles in abraham rees’s the cyclopædia; or, universal dictionary of arts, sciences, and literature (bentley, paradise 358-59). ultimately the project required seven engravings from blake, one of which depicted what scholars generally call “the laocoön group,” or the father and two sons overcome by serpent-assassins in several classical narratives, lost and extant.we can say with confidence that laocoön appears in pseudo-apollodorus’s epitome and quintus smyrnaeus’s posthomerica, that he probably occupied center stage in sophocles’s lost tragedy laocoön, and that he stars in a particularly dramatic episode in book 2 of virgil’s aeneid. book 2 of virgil’s aeneid perhaps excepted, the flagship portrayal of the laocoön group, in blake’s day as in ours, would have been the ancient sculpture unearthed in rome in 1506 and stationed in the vatican from then to now.scholars attribute the statue to agesander, polydorus, and athenodorus of rhodes and date it conjecturally (and without consensus) to c. 40–​20 bc. see paley 68-70 and the headnote here: <http://​www.​museivaticani.​va/​content/​museivaticani/​en/​collezioni/​musei/​museo-​pio-​clementino/​cortile-​ottagono/​laocoonte.​html>. for an interactive look at the statue, visit the laocoön page at the digital sculpture project: <http://​www.​digitalsculpture.​org/​laocoon/​index.​html>. blake could not have seen that original sculpture because he never left england. but by the nineteenth century it had become around europe the subject and central image of numerous reproductions and high-profile treatises,for visual adaptations of the laocoön group, see paley 58-89. for expository commentaries on the sculpture, see richter. for a recent outpouring of responses to the best-known commentary, lessing’s laokoon: oder über die grenzen der malerie und poesie (1766), in particular, see lifschitz and squire.at times the sculpture has been taken to typify the principles of representational art tout court—​as it did for pliny the elder, who wrote in the first century ad that “the laocoön, in the palace of the emperor titus … may be looked upon as preferable to any other production of the art of painting or of statuary” (36.4). and the royal academy in london had acquired a cast from which blake could sketch as needed.paley runs a brief comparison between blake’s laocoön group and the cast currently held at the royal academy (53-55). though its consequences are difficult to determine, that move seems to me slightly misleading, for the current cast was acquired by the academy in 1816: the year of the publication of blake’s laocoön engraving, but not the year of his first copying down the sculpture. the cast that would have been there when blake went to sketch from it in 1815 is depicted in the background of henry singleton’s 1795 painting the royal academicians in general assembly. see eaves, counter-arts 15-16, and the royal academy’s headnote here: <https://​www.​royalacademy.​org.​uk/​art-​artists/​work-​of-​art/​laocoon-​and-​his-​sons-​roman-​version-​of-​a-​lost-​greek-​original>. for the cyclopædia commission, he made at least two drawings of the royal academy cast, one of which survives, and from these he executed one engraving of the laocoön group, published in the cyclopædia in 1816, for john flaxman’s “sculpture” article (paice 47; paley 53). that commercial assignment done, the laocoön group evidently lingered in blake’s imagination, for around 1825 he undertook (but probably never finished) a fairly large drawing that varies on the ancient theme: it dresses laocoön in a sort of gown, partially effaces the outline of the serpents, and partially conceals the sons behind the father (see paley 56). after that, in 1826–​27, blake returned to the original silhouette with more fundamental innovations in mind, engraving and (at least) twice printing the composite pièce de résistance he called יה [yah] & his two sons satan & adam as they were copied from the cherubim of solomons temple by three rhodians & applied to natural fact or history of ilium. or, as more economical scholars have taken to calling it, the laocoön separate plate (see illus. 15). 15. the laocoön separate plate (see enlargement). 26.6 x 21.6 cm. collection of robert n. essick. image courtesy of the william blake archive. this labor pattern prompts an analogous question to that prompted by blake’s long maintenance of the notebook: “why did he do it?” (paley 70). what about the laocoön sculpture made it not only an abiding fascination but also, eventually, a fit subject for blake’s own original work? with characteristic efficiency bentley pivots us toward an answer: within the next few years [after the cyclopædia illustrations] he evidently saw the relevance of the statue to his own beliefs and made another engraving of the subject, “drawn & engraved by william blake,” which he filled with aphorisms and observations, sideways, round the figures, and in almost every empty space. since the words are written higgledy-piggledy, it is difficult to establish the order in which they should be printed. (bb 268) before the “words … written higgledy-piggledy” (on which more below) comes the “relevance of the statue to his own beliefs,” an ideational impetus that—​according to bentley—​bridged commissioned to creative illustration. (presumably the same stimulating “relevance” underlies paley’s similar, if more restrained, statement some thirty years later: “doing [the cyclopædia] work evidently put [blake] in mind of the laocoön as a possible subject for one or more of his own creations” [55].) if we want to know why blake lingered on laocoön, then, we might start by asking what the statue represents that would have resonated with blake’s position(s) in his final years. blake knew dryden’s virgil well (he quotes from it on n89), and whatever else the ancient sculpture meant to him, book 2 of the aeneid must have touched his fascination with the laocoön group. in virgil’s rendition, laocoön advises his fellow trojans not to retrieve the horse left beyond the gates of troy, for suspicion that it partakes of some greek plot or ambush. “somewhat is sure design’d, by fraud or force,” he warns in dryden’s english, “trust not their presents, nor admit the horse” (lines 62-63). because “heav’n the fall of troy design’d” (line 72), and because laocoön’s shrewd counsel threatens to hinder that outcome, the gods then send a pair of serpents “along the swelling tide” (line 217) to avenge his so-thought interference with their will. with these snakes laocoön and his sons grapple and die. although the trojans remain naïve throughout the episode (“proclaim[ing] laocoon justly doom’d to die” [line 301]), aeneas concedes after the fall that laocoön had uttered a “portent” (line 264) that the others were unfortunate to ignore: or had not men been fated to be blind, enough was said and done t’inspire better mind. (lines 73-74) in other words, against spiteful gods and simple peers, laocoön had spoken in that “which is every where call’d the spirit of prophecy” (e 1). “a prophet is a seer,” blake says, “not an arbitrary dictator,” one who announces not “such a thing shall happen let you do what you will” but “thus/​if you go on so/​the result is so” (e 617). urgent and rhetorical, blakean prophecy—​like laocoön’s alarm—​articulates the future implied by the present, exposing it for active navigation (avoidance or pursuit) with clearer vision, or “better mind.” in the old testament, as for laocoön in the extreme, prophetic often entails both polemic and exilic, where the prophet admonishes a wayward people who repudiate him in turn as maniacal or apostatic or altogether not worth hearing.“to whom shall i speak, and give warning, that they may hear? behold, their ear is uncircumcised, and they cannot hearken: behold, the word of the lord is unto them a reproach; they have no delight in it” (jeremiah 6:10). compare abraham heschel: “the [hebrew] prophet is an iconoclast …. beliefs cherished as certainties, institutions endowed with supreme sanctity, he exposes as scandalous pretensions. … the prominent theme is exhortation, not mere prediction” (12, 14). this side of “prophetic character” (e 3) preoccupied blake in both his later workblake’s address of the ghost of abel “to lord byron in the wilderness” (like the dated signature [“1822 w blakes original stereotype was 1788”] that underlies the drama) recalls the isolating speaker-designation of all religions are one (“the voice of one crying in the wilderness”), the tractate where blake first theorized “the spirit of prophecy” (e 270, 272, 1). in allusive and direct (“what doest thou here elijah?”) ways, that dedication identifies byron with the prophet elijah, who was run repeatedly into “the wilderness” for his vocal (and eventually violent) rebellion against the idolatries of ahab and jezebel (see 1 kings 17–​2 kings 2). byron was similarly and famously castigated for the alleged blasphemy of cain: a mystery, whose hostility to orthodox notions of atonement blake would have endorsed (see robinson 2: 371)—​and to which the ghost of abel was a yes-and, or perhaps a yes-but, response. for more on the blake-byron-elijah connection, see mcgann, “blake and byron” 621-25; mckeever; and tannenbaum. and his later relation to the contemporary art world, which—​it must have been clear by 1815—​simply would not have his bible of hell. though “blake had always been handicapped in his attempts to show his pictures under the auspices of the institutions of his time” (bentley, br[2] 281), the decade leading up to the cyclopædia project was especially sullied by insult and disappointment. in 1805, for example, he was enlisted by robert cromek to illustrate a high-profile edition of robert blair’s the grave—​a job that, because blake was to design and engrave the pictures, promised both monetary and reputational reward. but it delivered neither. for while his designs were well received, blake executed his preliminary engraving in an unfashionable white-line method that displeased cromek, who rejected the plate and promptly demoted blake to the unremunerative position of designer only. in the descriptive catalogue to his 1809 broad street exhibition, blake—​incited in part by the cromek incident—​expressed both anger at those who had “neglected” or “cried down” his output and faith that “the works now exhibited” would at last teach the public to see the “recondite meaning” of his “visions” (e 538, 531).to avoid a controversy that i have no space to take up with care, i have omitted information about a second betrayal—​pertaining to the canterbury pilgrims design—​that cromek may have committed between the grave commission and the broad street exhibition. for a thorough commentary on it, see the blake archive exhibition “william blake’s canterbury pilgrims,” especially galleries i and ii. instead the exhibition earned a mixture of indifference and derision that accentuated blake’s “obscurity and isolation” (bentley, br[2] 229) with greater force than ever before.the event seems to have been poorly—​and not sympathetically—​attended (see the blake archive headnote to the descriptive catalogue). its one published review esteemed blake an “unfortunate lunatic” who had violated london with so much “nonsense, unintelligibleness, and egregious vanity” that his “personal inoffensiveness” alone “secure[d] him from confinement” (quoted in bentley, paradise 332-33). note how the vocabulary evokes both deviance (“lunatic”) and isolation (“confinement”).it makes a remarkable contrast with the unqualified praise elicited—​and the quarter of a million tickets sold—​by the william blake exhibition that ran at tate britain from 11 september 2019 to 2 february 2020. for sale statistics and a summary of published reviews, see higgs 6-11. dispirited, blake then withdrew into what bentley calls the “dark years,” an adamant retreat from public exchange that endured, to one degree or another, until at least 1818 (paradise 335-62). we should not overstate the extent to which blake “lived in a world which distrusted and despised him,” as ackroyd (369) flatly proclaims. blake was loved and supported at various times, in various ways, and by various people, however small their number.throughout blake’s life there were patrons (most supportively thomas butts); distant enthusiasts (wordsworth, coleridge); catherine boucher, wife and helpmeet, “ever … an angel” (bentley, br[2] 655) by his side; etc. but from 1818 there were also “the ancients,” a small group of “young admirers”—​john linnell and others—​who found in “the interpreter” blake “a serenity and an inspiration which transformed their lives.” the ancients heartened blake significantly but could not rescue him from “deep … obscurity” (bentley, paradise 363-64). still, it is tempting to suppose that blake may have noticed in them the prospect of his own wiser, analeptic aeneas—​the salvific philologist who would soon come doubly, triply, quadruply in rossetti, gilchrist, swinburne, yeats. but more perhaps than any other period in his life, the years surrounding the cyclopædia commission (which is to say the context for his early dealings with laocoön) seem really to sanction the title of john higgs’s recent biography: it was william blake vs. the world. in virgil’s laocoön, then, and in the rhodian statue that depicts the same scene, blake must have seen a compact reflection of himself: a “voice of one crying in the wilderness”—​one cast out, indeed castigated, by a powerful audience with no regard for his “sacred truth” (e 1, 270). alone among previous scholars (to my knowledge), irene tayler identified blake with the virgilian laocoön almost fifty years ago; but focusing on marriage and the 1790s, a period of lesser ostracism for blake, she could not see the special pertinence that laocoön would have taken on after roughly 1805.despite tayler’s differing time frame, the conceptual bases for her identification of blake with virgil’s laocoön are similar to my own: for example, “in the marriage of heaven and hell blake might be thought of as a kind of modern laocoön whose angelic contemporaries were busy appeasing goddesses, embracing deceptive images, and hypocritically trembling for blake himself, in view of the eternal lot they figured he deserved” (76). nor did she register the apparent paradox that both complicates and informs my own identification here: that around the same time (post-felpham unto death), blake was evolving a rather vitriolic aversion to the greek and roman cultures from which laocoön, rhodian and virgilian, most immediately derived (see paley 60-61 and eaves, counter-arts 133-35). in other words, while the cyclopædia encounter with laocoön came, on the one hand, amidst great “obscurity and isolation,” on the other it coincided with the fomenting of great contempt for laocoön’s classical pedigree. a direct result of “a series of [christian] conversionary experiences” “in the early years of the nineteenth century” (paley 60-61), the latter development persisted, even intensified, across several prose expositions—​for example, the “preface” to milton (c. 1804–​11), a descriptive catalogue (1809), on homers poetry [and] on virgil (1822)—​whose anticlassical terms are familiar by now and frequently quoted: “greece & rome” were not “parents of arts & sciences as they pretend” but “destroyers of all art,” “the stolen and perverted writings of homer & ovid: of plato & cicero … all men ought to contemn,” and so on (e 270, 95). (i will return to the conceptual significance of these remarks below.) if blake did recognize himself in laocoön, as i contend that he must have, it was through a glass darkened by such anticlassical scorn. far from rebutting or reneging on it, moreover, the laocoön plate issues perhaps the seminal expression of blake’s anticlassicism. eaves has called the plate “the most concentrated statement” of “what is unprecedented in blake’s [cultural] theory,” namely that “the narratives of religion and art go beyond convergence into coalescence” (counter-arts 133). “coalescence” not only with each other, in the case of the laocoön plate, but with the social and political praxes that express aesthetico-spiritual commitments on the ground. thus for blake, and all throughout the aphorisms on the laocoön plate, to practice imperial politics or (neo)classical aesthetics or “natural religion” (in pagan or enlightenment form) is necessarily—​and reprehensively—​to practice all three. there are states in which all visionary men are accounted mad men such are greece & rome such is empire or tax (e 274) each antagonist here maps tidily onto the others such that “empire” et alia become “interchangeable” (eaves, counter-arts 133), their common sins pooled in the group noun “states,” the simpler to condemn the lot at once. more: “christianity is art / & not money,” blake writes nearby, and “money” equals “caesar or empire or natural religion,” and “where any view of” these “exists art cannot be carried on. but war only” (a kind of death-in-life, since “the whole business of man is / the arts”) (e 273-75).  the “whole business” of the laocoön plate, meanwhile, or at least of its “textual surround” (paley 87), is to diagnose that manifold dereliction—​over and over, from as many angles as the open surface will accommodate. one anticlassical inscription, “empire against art     see virgils eneid. / lib. vi. v 848” (e 274), should be hung over every entrance into the laocoön plate, not because “empire against art” fairly summarizes the argument, nor because “see virgils eneid” summons virgil himself to trial, but because “lib. vi. v 848” takes the viewer to where, in dryden’s aeneid, blake would have found ample support for the coalescence of religion and art and politics outlined above. “virgils eneid. / lib. vi” famously relates the katabasis of aeneas, his descent into the underworld, which he organizes in order to meet again with his beloved father, anchises. traditionally a painful route to some prize or higher wisdom (whose value the text tends to uphold),compare the foreknowledge that odysseus receives from tiresias in the odyssey book 11; the drive, and ultimately the failure, of orpheus to retrieve eurydice from dis and proserpina in the metamorphoses book 10; the shocking but remedial perspective that dante attains throughout the inferno; and, more obliquely, the “ruins” “shored” by the sallow “fragments” that make up the waste land. that blake was illustrating dante at the same time that he was completing the laocoön plate should be noted on exactly these grounds. the katabasis rewards aeneas with knowledge of the rich and glorious future of rome, proleptically detailed by anchises over a long series of individual portraits. absent from that revelation, however, so sunk beneath land and power (“roma / imperium terris …” [lines 781-82]), is any emphasis on the flourishing of the artistic imagination. indeed, around “v 848,” where blake locates the sharpest offense, anchises commands aeneas to leave the verbal and the visual arts to those less heroically endowed. let others better mould the running mass of metals, and inform the breathing brass, and soften into flesh a marble face; plead better at the bar; describe the skies, and when the stars descend, and when they rise. but, rome, ’tis thine alone, with awful sway, to rule mankind, and make the world obey, disposing peace and war by thy own majestic way; to tame the proud, the fetter’d slave to free: these are imperial arts, and worthy thee. (aeneid [trans. dryden] 6.848-57)according to the fabulae of hyginus, anchises was the brother of laocoön—​which would make our spurned trojan priest the uncle of aeneas, founder of lavinium and hero of rome <https://​topostext.​org/​work/​206​#135>. in such light the “war & dominion” (e 270) of the roman empire appears in stark, contrastive juxtaposition with the prophetic character of laocoön’s alternate tradition. that blake had the dryden translation in mind we can infer from on virgil, which had aped the dictional and syntactic quirks of these lines some years prior: “let others study art: rome has somewhat better to do, namely war & dominion” (e 270, my emphasis). not necessitated by the original latin, these and other stylistic liberties invite a sort of synecdochic leap from “virgils eneid. / lib. vi. v 848” to the artless roman empire to the empire state of mind as such. “let others,” for instance, mandates a programmatic eschewal of sculpture and poetry where other translations opt for some version of the automatic “others will.” and where virgil had labeled the addressee “romane” (or “roman”: one token of a type), dryden substitutes the name of broadest “rome” itself. although the echoing “better” in dryden purports to describe the artistic acumen of “others,” the run-up to “thine alone” and “worthy thee” implies rather that aeneas-rome, in just the buried sense blake exhumes in on virgil, “has somewhat better to do” than they (my emphasis).compare all the above to, for example, mandelbaum: “for other peoples will, i do not doubt, / still cast their bronze … / … remember, roman, these will be your arts” (lines 1129-30, 1135); and heaney: “others, i have no doubt, with a more delicate touch / will beat bronze … / … but you, roman, / remember: to you will fall the exercise of power” (lines 1150-51, 1155-56). in the later lines, notice how mandelbaum uses a neutral predictive “will be,” while heaney even suggests, with the connotation of “to you will fall,” that “the exercise of power” may be no real prize or accolade after all. (paley [99] quotes from the fairclough translation, which similarly reads “others, i doubt not, shall … o roman.”) with “imperial arts” dryden then furnishes (for blake) an easy-target oxymoron whose internal contradiction had already been glossed in earlier lines: aeneas-rome will “free” “the fetter’d slave” and “make the world obey”? that would release bondage into bondage, the only condition possible (blake would add) once “war & dominion,” power and property, have undermined imaginative exertion. but at the same time the diction in dryden hints at how we might rescue the blake-laocoön pairing despite, or in fact on the basis of, the anticlassicism that emanates from the laocoön plate and the later blake in general. juxtaposed—​via blake’s citation of the aeneid—​with “empire against art,” the noun phrase “imperial arts” becomes self-subversive, and unravels until the noun (“arts”) can break free from the adjective (“imperial”) that neutralizes it. by a similar process, proximity to the literal fettering of laocoön collapses “the fetter’d slave to free” into either cluelessness or canny insincerity: from the greco-roman agenda itself “the fetter’d slave” waits to be “free[d].” the “spiritual war” delineated in the opposite corner of the plate, “israel deliverd from egypt / is art deliverd from / nature & imitation” (e 274), broaches the same liberatory deliverance in terms that link it to the broader “dialectical history” of art (eaves, counter-arts 136) that blake promulgated in the anticlassical period. in brief, blake believed that greek and roman artists were not “authors” but imitators “of … sublime conceptions”: working from “mnemosyne, or memory, and not … inspiration or imagination,” they copied (attenuated, bastardized) “wonderful originals” of earlier, christian-hebraic invention (e 531).compare the son of god’s denial of classical learning in paradise regained (4.334-39): all our law and story strewed with hymns, our psalms with artful terms inscribed, our hebrew songs and harps in babylon, that pleased so well our victors’ ear, declare that rather greece from us these arts derived; ill imitated … but the notion well predates milton. bede insists upon it in his eighth-century de schematibus et tropis (169), having learned it from even earlier church fathers; and eaves reminds us that blake probably took his “animosity toward the greeks and the romans” from the “new and old testaments” themselves (counter-arts 135). this was, as eaves explains (and as slurs such as “stolen and perverted” [e 95] suggest), a lapse or “fall into” mimesis, a “temporary victory” for classical imitation that blake trusted would “finally end in reconquest” by christian “inspiration or imagination” (counter-arts 136, my emphasis). just now i wrung out the specters of liberation and deliverance because for blake the laocoön group, “as … copied from the cherubim of solomons temple,” had clearly been trapped in that mid-lapsarian second phase. what it needed was a sympathetic latecomer who, recognizing the prophetic party line of laocoön, could “free” him from classical confinement, from the “states / in which all / visionary men / are accounted / mad men” (e 274). in both compositional process and semiotic display, the laocoön separate plate executes exactly that liberatory maneuver, restoring laocoön and his sons to the christian-hebraic station that (according to blake) was and shall be rightfully theirs. that restoration assumed an almost material quality across multiple stages of composition, as blake first duplicated (in the cyclopædia project) then repurposed (in the laocoön separate plate) what had become, by the early nineteenth century, a sacred vessel of the enemy “empire” itself. as paley has shown, the rhodian laocoön not only played exemplar in (neo)classical aesthetic theory but was seized from the vatican by napoleon in 1796, paraded noisily through paris in 1798, and displayed proudly in the louvre until the emperor’s fall in 1814–​15 (69-70). this is to say that, when blake began his sketches for the cyclopædia commission, the laocoön sculpture had recently undergone a sort of metaleptic recapitulation of its own scene: a neoclassical empire français detaining an icon of the classical cosmos detaining a prophet. what blake learned to draw at the royal academy, what he produced for the flaxman article shortly after, and (according to the common textual history) what he “almost certainly” (blake archive headnote) set down on the laocoön plate as many as ten years before the “textual surround” all would have sagged under the weight of such imperial baggage. but everything changes when blake builds around the classical incumbent a body of anticlassical, anti-imperial aphorisms that articulate an alternate ideology, a cognitive “state” in which laocoön might have been valued as “visionary,” not ousted as “mad.” in the long, composite transmutation of the cyclopædia sketches into the laocoön separate plate, language arrives like a deus ex machina, plucking laocoön and his sons from the virgilian gyre to score them new life in more hospitable environs. compositional sequence alone acts out this redemptive phase of blake’s art history in miniature. but from what paley calls the “complex series of tensions” (100) between text and image emerges a fuller conceptual analogue to that history, one that simultaneously reimagines the cultural-historical ancestry of laocoön and facilitates his contemporary (re)instatement to that lineage. all three phases—​hebraic origin, greco-roman fall, christian salvation—​are available in one leading contrivance, that elaborate redenomination of the statue as יה & his two sons (ad finem). because their “zone” beneath the image (associated with titles and captions) reserves a synoptic capacity, upon arrival the names “יה” (yah[weh]) and “satan” and “adam” actively bend the classical toward the biblical trio. but because laocoön and his sons are strapped with such cultural freight as classical, they never bend to the point of breaking. the central figure retains the narrative identity of laocoön, martyr for the “spirit of prophecy” (e 1), even as it transmigrates into a new, christian-hebraic framework—​where it urges us to calibrate the (dis)continuity between each character and his cognate, between greco-roman backslide and christian recovery.“character” appears here with some deliberation. in recent decades media theorists and narratologists have begun to think through the possibilities of “transtextual” and “transmedial” characterization—​that is, the movement of a single character between more than one textual representation (for example, odysseus in homer’s odyssey and in tennyson’s “ulysses”) and/​or more than one representational medium (for example, achilles in homer’s iliad and in the petersen/​benioff film troy). for a broad view of the subfield, see bertetti, richardson, and thon. how i treat laocoön/​yahweh as a transmedial and transtextual character has most in common with how kenneth burke theorizes “identification”: “in being identified with b, a is ‘substantially one’ with a person other than himself. yet at the same time he remains unique, an individual locus of motives. thus he is both joined and separate, at once a distinct substance and consubstantial with another” (21). art-historical denouement thus ushered in, the next titular detail then backfills the prelapsarian first term, retrojecting an ur-sculpture whose speculative existence in “solomons temple” installs the rhodian laocoön in a medial position between two christian-hebraic apotheoses.aside from literary/​scriptural precedents such as the philistines’ plundering of the ark of the covenant in 1 samuel 4-6, real empirical ambiguity regarding the provenance of the rhodian laocoön sculpture would have bolstered (if not legitimated) speculations such as blake’s here. see paley 83-84. a close viewer has no choice in response but to sample (as blake would have it) the full course of christian art history. yahweh-as-laocoön/​laocoön-as-yahweh. entertaining the thought experiment involves reading into the pair a “dependent relation” (eaves, counter-arts 135) that parallels the conceptual structure of blake’s wider anticlassicism. as eaves has demonstrated, however preeminent were christian aesthetic practices, blake could locate no “ready-made christian theory of art to oppose to the classical,” and so he “concocted” one on his own “from neoclassical theories viewed antagonistically.” “in a profound sense,” eaves writes, “christian art [for blake] is whatever neoclassical art is not,” which means—​because antithesis presupposes thesis—​that only a prior (neo)classical referent can organize christian self-definition (counter-arts 135-36, my emphasis). though not quite “antagonistic” in the sense of “actively opposed, hostile” (oed 1), laocoön and yahweh similarly derive from established assumptions about each other a set of new, emergent identities. as soon as blake slides “יה” under the laocoön statue, for example, every proximate mention of the judeo-christian god inevitably gathers the laocoön narrative into its propositional ambit. “jesus & his apostles & disciples were all artists their works were destroyd” translates the sharp foresight of laocoön into art, his assassination into fatal censorship, petty gods and shortsighted trojans into “the seven angels of the seven churches in asia. antichrist science” (e 274). with that foot in the door, an intricate network of such connections develops without difficulty—​beyond what explicitly mentions god or jesus, as each contact reaches out to other contacts in the same semantic field. once enrolled (via “jesus”) as an artist, for instance, laocoön goes (via “art”) for baptism under such inscriptions as “the old & new testaments are / the great code of art,” which assimilate his behavior into the scriptural teachings of christianity. that combinatory (or “coalesced”) religious and aesthetic affiliation in turn opposes laocoön, as both art and christianity are opposed throughout, to “money” and “empire” and “war and dominion” (e 274). a summative remark such as “empire against art” then comes implicitly to read as “empire against laocoön,” a fair circle back to square one, where what doomed laocoön was his valiant rebellion against the oppressive determinism of the classical cosmos. not only does the laocoön statue (and all it subsumes) act upon the aphorisms that surround it: the aphorisms act equally upon each other and, as my last interpretive turn above represents, upon the statue that beat them to the opening punch. from these loops of signification, later language feeding back into earlier image, proceed the most tactful and demonstrative strokes of blake’s anticlassical argument. notice how the injunctive allusion to genesis 12:1 (running up the left margin) interprets god’s sending abram “out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house” as a release into the isolated chaos of creativity: “you must leave fathers & mothers & houses & lands if they stand in the way of art.”“now the lord had said unto abram, get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house, unto a land that i will shew thee: and i will make of thee a great nation, and i will bless thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing” (genesis 12:1-2). blake almost certainly invoked these instructions as a judeo-christian counterpoint to the classical prolepsis delivered by anchises in aeneid book 6: abram’s canaan to aeneas’s latium. what “stand[s] in the way” of laocoön’s “art,” the full success of his prophetic warning, except the “fathers & mothers & houses & lands” of the greco-roman world? with that tyranny metonymically implied by the serpents that enforce it, the allusion ultimately orders laocoön to revise his own statue such that it depicts not an overthrow of his “voice of one” by the pagan gods but vice versa. that hypothetical clinamen sits on the imaginative horizon of the laocoön plate, an image of a productive future beyond classical constriction (“the unproductive man is not a christian” [e 274]), of the very transcendence of greece and rome that blake sought to secure for laocoön.“image” as opposed to “picture,” in mitchell’s technical sense: “pictures [are] the concrete, representational objects in which images appear.” “[it is] the difference between a constructed concrete object or ensemble … and the virtual, phenomenal appearance that it provides for a beholder” (picture theory 4 and n5). what should be clear by now is that, whatever the laocoön plate accomplishes ideationally, it exploits an inflective poetics all but identical to that of the composite notebook page. diverse aphorisms, debuting post factum, downplay, modulate, and accentuate certain aspects of laocoön’s significative potential. bends and charged proximities in the “textual surround” not only evidence incremental composition but catalyze semiotic chain reactions that—​in the ultimate object of the plate—​force classical authority to testify against itself: to admit, that is, to having hamstrung its own most perceptive individuals. in other, more properly antagonistic words, blake recruits laocoön and his sons to team christianity by enclosing them in language that, drawing on the energy of juxtaposition, teases out their implicit anticlassicism. so integral to such an integral (and well-defined) stance, the inflective method, however exploratory or even accidental in the notebook, gets authorized as deliberate between the metal and burin of the laocoön separate plate. thus when mcgann calls the laocoön plate an “aesthetic self-reflection,” presumably in reference to the “struggle” it envisions between institution and imagination, he goes right unwittingly in a second sense as well (“blake and byron” 625-26). for that identification with laocoön, the persecuted poet-prophet, partakes of a larger anticlassical polemic whose semiotic machinery blake had assembled and refined over four decades of practice in his most dutiful document. this straightforward observation surfaces here as my own, but in truth blake scholars have circled (without broaching) it for years, breaking down the notebook or the laocoön plate in terms that might serve the other as aptly. … the shape of the text, which must follow the outline of the [image], fill the spaces within the drawing, or accommodate itself to the areas left unoccupied. (james 228) blake’s non-linear assemblage offers a collation of loci that can be “hooked up” to other texts in ways that are not predetermined and so do not lock it into a causal frame that contains its signification. (j. wright 116) with such referential ambiguity even possible, how accurate can it be to say that “the design” of the laocoön plate is “unique even in blake’s corpus” (j. wright 103), or that “there is nothing even in blake” like the “textual surround” (paley 87), or—​in the blake archive headnote i have already fussed over—​that the notebook is “an integral work … unlike any other that [blake] left us”?nor can it be exactly correct to say that the laocoön plate is “the only example of [blake’s] featuring a substantial amount of his own text and an image not of his own invention” (paley 57), since some early pages in the notebook (for example, n1, n8-9) feature texts by blake written over, around, and among images drawn by his brother robert. like the twins in the comedy of errors, the notebook and the laocoön plate have seemed singular because, in the wide world of blake scholarship, they have been kept in nominal seclusion, too remote for recognition. but side by side at last they look like fated bookends, graphic and poetical doppelgangers, with the whole of blake unfurled between them. even with likeness, however, the story does not end. for as climax or culmination of what the notebook began, the laocoön plate also brings the poetics of inflection to a newly concretized fruition. revisit, for a first example, the opening, entitling gambit. if blake fastened his anticlassicism to the conviction that greek and roman artists remembered rather than created, that they stood on (and often obscured) a prior hebraic foundation, then the switch from “laocoön” to “יה” in the caption would give a solid body to that belief. i mean that blake exposes (what he takes to be) the christian ground beneath classical feet by quite literally laying it there, so that laocoön and his sons are shown to rest upon a measure of their derivation. not that they, with eyes vertically averted, discern it themselves; but nor can they apprehend what their sightlines aim toward instead. the rightmost son—​satan?—​is repelled in the hips from “all is not sin that satan calls so” and in the shoulders from “all that we see is vision,” but he cannot “see” past the haunting blunder that rolls with both evasions: “satans wife the goddess nature is war & misery & heroism a miser.” similarly, yahweh-laocoön appears to yearn upward but in vain, his gaze obstructed by the greek name ὀφιοῦχος or ophiuchus or “serpent-holder,” which curves just concave enough to cover his field of vision. on the other side hangs מלאך יהוה, hebrew for “angel of jehovah” (e 273)—​the proper, destined identity of laocoön, waiting to be reclaimed if he can get beyond the greek that denies him it. what blake has done here (with rather astonishing subtlety) is incorporate the material circumstances of composition, where one inscription imposes territorially on another, into the ontology of the laocoön plate’s represented world. as both signifiers (graphic forms) and signifieds (mental referents), the aphorisms behave as objects or entities, inhabiting the same empirical realm as the men portrayed in the pictorial center. hence, the leftmost son can sever the overhead sentence with his forearm, separating “tree of misery” from “propagating / generation & death” as if to claim the latter for himself: and indeed, his balletic bend traces the cyclical path of such propagation. an analogous precept encases the upstretched fist of yahweh-laocoön—​ without unceasing practise nothing can be done practise is art if you leave off you are lost —​to establish a polysemous relation that on the one hand describes his motivation against the serpents, who seek to cease his practice; and on the other guarantees that, were he finally to slip their hold, he would not lack an elastic obstacle to struggle (to “practise”) against. that would be the precept itself, with which yahweh-laocoön’s fist would promptly collide upon vanquishing the enemy de ses jours. therefore, despite its liberatory momentum, the language also traps yahweh-laocoön in the continuous expenditure of energy to which blake’s milton, standing in for blake himself, had earlier proudly committed: “i will not cease from mental fight” (e 95). such conceptual premises turn physical on the laocoön plate, into beings or articles or environments that others, in the above and similar ways, might approach or flee or embrace or combat or … the laocoön separate plate puts forth, then, not only a poetics but a drama of inflection, where the interaction of juxtaposed discursive units doubles as the stuff of plot, of mimetic action. unlike his brother, who dips and swerves around the language, yahweh-laocoön’s leftmost son leans into the stack of propositions behind him, at whose base is spread the sturdiest axiom on the plate: “the eternal body of man is the imagination. that is god himself.” maturing from a poetics into a drama of inflection moves blake’s art toward a realization of precisely that “etern[ity],” for it places corporeal “man” amongst the psychic and expressive agents who (for blake) always were his equal. or better. more than collecting a “statement of [blake’s] very late views” (tayler 72) on “art, the imagination, the divine and the human, and empire” (paley 57), more than authorizing by engraving the layout of the notebook, and more than repurposing the same to advance an anticlassical invective: the laocoön plate incarnates the principles of the inflective method to discover, on the far side of the notebook’s “vortex,”and when once a traveller thro eternity. has passd that vortex, he percieves it roll backward behind his path, into a globe itself infolding; like a sun: or like a moon, or like a universe of starry majesty, while he keeps onwards in his wondrous journey on the earth or like a human form, a friend with whom he livd benevolent. (milton plate 15 [erdman numbering, e 109; bentley plate 14]) a triumphant literality for “living form.” this “living form,” blake says after all, “is eternal existence,” perception cleansed of “grecian” or “mathematic … memory” (e 270). by locating in the laocoön plate a formal consummation of what the notebook had ventured before it, i hope to have shown that the main line of blake’s “unceasing practise” (e 274), however “higgledy-piggledy” (bb 268), runs exactly through the five-dozen leaves of that hand-me-down “stationer’s commodity” (erdman, notebook 2). or at any rate (to opt for a whimper) that we have done no good in assuming otherwise. works cited ackroyd, peter. blake. 1995. new york: knopf, 1996. bede. de arte metrica et de schematibus et tropis. ed. and trans. calvin b. kendall. saarbrücken: aq-verlag, 1991. bentley, g. e., jr. blake books: annotated catalogues of william blake’s writings in illuminated printing …. oxford: clarendon press, 1977. 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snart, jason allen. the torn book: unreading william blake’s marginalia. selinsgrove: susquehanna university press, 2006. stauffer, andrew m. book traces: nineteenth-century readers and the future of the library. philadelphia: university of pennsylvania press, 2021. stein, sarah b. “the laocoön and the book of job as micrography: the influence of miniature hebrew illumination on the work of william blake.” european romantic review 24.6 (2013): 623-44. swinburne, algernon charles. william blake: a critical essay. 1868. lincoln: university of nebraska press, 1970. tannenbaum, leslie. “lord byron in the wilderness: biblical tradition in byron’s cain and blake’s the ghost of abel.” modern philology 72.4 (may 1975): 350-64. tatham, frederick. “the life of william blake.” the letters of william blake together with a life by frederick tatham. ed. archibald g. b. russell. new york: charles scribner’s sons, 1906. 1-49. tayler, irene. “blake’s laocoön.” blake 10.3 (winter 1976–​77): 72-81. thon, jan-noël. “transmedia characters: theory and analysis.” frontiers of narrative studies 5.2 (2019): 176-99. tweedy, roderick. the god of the left hemisphere: blake, bolte taylor, and the myth of creation. 2012. new york: routledge, 2018. tyler, daniel, ed. poetry in the making: creativity and composition in victorian poetic drafts. oxford: oxford university press, 2021. virgil. the aeneid. trans. john dryden. 1697. project gutenberg. <https://​www.​gutenberg.​org/​cache/​epub/​228/​pg228-images.​html>. accessed 24 september 2021. —​—​—​. the aeneid. trans. allen mandelbaum. berkeley: university of california press, 1971. —​—​—​. aeneid book vi. trans. seamus heaney. new york: farrar, straus and giroux, 2016. viscomi, joseph. “archive exhibition: illuminated printing.” william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. <http://​www.​blakearchive.​org/​exhibit/​illuminatedprinting>. published april 2019, accessed 10 december 2020. —​—​—​. blake and the idea of the book. princeton: princeton university press, 1993. —​—​—​. “blake’s ‘annus mirabilis’: the productions of 1795.” blake 41.2 (fall 2007): 52-83. —​—​—​. “blake’s illuminated word.” art, word and image: two thousand years of visual/​textual interaction. ed. john dixon hunt, david lomas, and michael corris. london: reaktion books, 2010. 87-109. accessed at <http://​viscomi.​sites.​oasis.​unc.​edu/​viscomi/​illuminated_​word/​index.​html>. —​—​—​. “blake’s invention of illuminated printing, 1788.” branch: britain, representation and nineteenth-century history. ed. dino franco felluga. extension of romanticism and victorianism on the net. <https://​www.​branchcollective.​org/​?ps_articles=​joseph-​viscomi-​blakes-​invention-​of-​illuminated-​printing-​1788>. published march 2012, accessed 10 december 2020. —​—​—​. “the evolution of the marriage of heaven and hell [part i].” huntington library quarterly 58.3-4 (1995): 281-344. —​—​—​. “posthumous blake: the roles of catherine blake, c. h. tatham, and frederick tatham in blake’s afterlife.” blake 53.2 (fall 2019): 141 pars. —​—​—​. “william blake, illuminated books, and the concept of difference.” romantic poetry: recent revisionary criticism. ed. karl kroeber and gene w. ruoff. new brunswick: rutgers university press, 1993. 63-87. accessed at <http://​viscomi.​sites.​oasis.​unc.​edu/​viscomi/​illuminated_​books_​concept_​difference/​text.​html>. —​—​—​. william blake’s printed paintings: methods, origins, meanings. new haven: yale university press (paul mellon centre for studies in british art), 2021. ward, aileen. “who was robert blake?” blake 28.3 (winter 1994–​95): 84-89. werner, marta. writing in time: emily dickinson’s master hours. amherst: amherst college press, 2021. whittaker, jason. divine images: the life and work of william blake. london: reaktion books, 2021. woodcock, george, ed. the letters of charles lamb. london: grey walls press, 1950. wright, c. e. “william blake’s notebook.” british museum quarterly 21.4 (october 1959): 88-90. wright, julia m. “the medium, the message and the line in william blake’s laocoön.” mosaic: an interdisciplinary critical journal 33.2 (june 2000): 101-24. yoder, r. paul. “what happens when: narrative and the changing sequence of plates in blake’s jerusalem, chapter 2.” studies in romanticism 41.2 (summer 2002): 259-78. yuen-collingridge, rachel. “between autograph and copy: writing as thinking on papyrus.” book history 21 (2018): 1-28. volume 56 number 1 summer 2022 b l a k e angela esterhammer, victoria college, university of toronto nelson hilton, university of georgia tilar j. mazzeo, colby college robert w. rix, university of copenhagen joseph viscomi, university of north carolina at chapel hill david worrall, the nottingham trent university martin butlin, tate gallery, london, retired tristanne j. connolly, university of waterloo detlef w. dörrbecker, university of trier sibylle erle, university of lincoln robert n. essick, university of california, riverside a d v i s o r y b o a r d a n i l l u s t r a t e d q u a r t e r l y volume 56 number 1 summer 2022 c o n t e n t s www.blakequarterly.org articles william blake and his circle: a checklist of scholarship in 2021 by wayne c. ripley, with works in romance languages contributed by fernando castanedo, works in japanese contributed by hikari sato, works in turkish contributed by hüseyin alhas, and works in russian contributed by vera serdechnaia blake and music, 2021 by camila oliveira and jason whittaker blake and exhibitions, 2021 by luisa calè © 2022 copyright morris eaves and morton d. paley cover: detail of blake, the circle of the lustful: francesca da rimini (1824–27). birmingham museums trust/birmingham museum & art gallery, 1919p2. image courtesy of the william blake archive. e d i t o r s editors: morris eaves and morton d. paley review editor: alexander s. gourlay exhibitions editor: luisa calè bibliographer (criticism): wayne c. ripley bibliographer (music): jason whittaker managing editor: sarah jones sarah.jones@rochester.edu production office: department of english, university of rochester, rochester ny 14627-0451 william blake and his circle: a checklist of scholarship in 2023 william blake and his circle: a checklist of scholarship in 2023 sadly dedicated to the memory of morris eaves by wayne c. ripley works in romance languages contributed by fernando castanedo works in japanese contributed by hikari sato works in turkish contributed by hüseyin alhas works in russian contributed by vera serdechnaia wayne c. ripley (wripley@winona.edu) currently servesresearch for “william blake and his circle” was conducted in: krueger library at winona state university (for works in english); the universidad de alcalá library, madrid (for works in romance languages); cinii and the national diet library online catalogue, komaba library and general library of the university of tokyo, and the national diet library (for works in japanese); and the general library of the social sciences university of ankara, the beytepe library of hacettepe university, and the bill bryson library at durham university (for works in turkish). as the bibliographer for blake and the william blake archive. his projects include a selected annotated bibliography, which will update the “resources for further research” available at the blake archive, and his book manuscript, “‘where spectres of the dead wander’: new archival findings on blake, his family, neighbors, and circle.” fernando castanedo (fernando.castanedo@uah.es) is a professor of english at the universidad de alcalá (madrid). hikari sato (hikari@g.ecc.u-tokyo.ac.jp) is a professor of comparative literature and culture at the university of tokyo. he has been a member of the “william blake and his circle” team since summer 2003. hüseyin alhas (huseyin.alhas@asbu.edu.tr) recently received his phd from the department of english language and literature, hacettepe university. he teaches at the social sciences university of ankara. vera serdechnaia (rintra@yandex.ru), doctor of philology, krasnodar (russia), is an assistant professor in the department of foreign literature and comparative cultural studies at kuban state university and a theatre critic. she is working on the theme of blake reception in russia and the former ussr. table of contents: symbols and abbreviations introductory essay division i: william blake part i: blake’s writings section a: original editions, facsimiles, reprints, and translations section b: collections and selections part ii: reproductions of drawings and paintings section a: illustrations of individual authors section b: collections and selections part iii: commercial engravings section a: illustrations of individual authors part iv: bibliographies and catalogues section a: bibliographies section b: catalogues part v: digital resources part vi: criticism, biography, and reviews division ii: william blake’s circle astley, philip banks, thomas barry, james basire, james, sr. boehme, jacob bowyer, robert boydell, john calvert, edward cosway, maria cosway, richard cowper, william cultures and technologies of display and exhibition cumberland, george darwin, erasmus denman, maria d’éon, chevalier flaxman, john flaxman, mary ann fuseli, henry gibson, john hayley, william hoare, prince hope, thomas johnson, joseph kauffman, angelica lowth, robert macklin, thomas macpherson, james malkin, benjamin malkin, charlotte moravianism morganwg, iolo mortimer, john hamilton ottley, william young reynolds, joshua romney, george society of antiquaries stedman, john gabriel stothard, thomas swedenborg, emanuel tulk, charles augustus turner, dawson wedgwood, josiah winckelmann, johann joachim wollstonecraft, mary symbols § works preceded by a section mark are reported on secondhand authority abbreviations bb g. e. bentley, jr., blake books (1977) bbs g. e. bentley, jr., blake books supplement (1995) blake blake/an illustrated quarterly <blake ([year])> indicates the installment of “william blake and his circle” published in the year specified butlin martin butlin, the paintings and drawings of william blake (1981) diss. dissertation wbhc g. e. bentley, jr., william blake and his circle (2017) <http://​library.​vicu.​utoronto.​ca/​collections/​special_collections/​bentley_​blake_​collection/​blake_​circle/​2017/​william_​blake_​and_​his_​circle.​pdf> introductory essaythe annual checklist is a collaborative effort, and i’m indebted to my collaborators for their contributions. unless otherwise noted, all annotations for their respective language groups are theirs. i also wish to express my gratitude to david worrall, sibylle erle, and alexander regier for their sharing of sources with me, and to morton paley and sarah jones for their assistance and support at a difficult time for all associated with blake. passings given that this introduction is being written in the shadow of morris eaves’s unexpected death, i thought it only fitting to begin with the passings section. morris was a longtime co-editor of both blake and the william blake archive. that these two venues are essential parts of the infrastructure of blake scholarship is due in no small measure to morris’s numerous abilities as a colleague, collaborator, and, of course, a scholar. he takes with him a profound knowledge of blake, an unmatched ability to express this knowledge lucidly, and the affection and respect of all those who worked with him. hazard adams passed away in 2023. another pillar of scholarship, adams published on blake for more than sixty years, and his work on blake, yeats, joyce, cary, symbolism, and the practice of literary criticism in general was highly influential. also lost in 2023 was kenzaburo ōe, the nobel prize-winning japanese writer and author of the blakean novel rouse up o young men of the new age! (1983). in two articles, hikari sato discusses how ōe learned about blake and his use of blake in that work. editions and translations new copies of illuminated books now in the blake archive include copy a of europe (11 proof impressions); copies d, o, q, and s of innocence; and copies d, k, l, and m of visions. (copy w of songs, which was blake’s own copy, can be found in a new facsimile published by the folio society.) now accessible in the archive’s “manuscripts and typographic works” section are the manuscript sketches “then she bore pale desire” and “woe cried the muse” (both c. 1783); the poems “a fairy leapt” (c. 1793) and “the phoenix to mrs. butts” (c. 1794–​1803); a flyer for the 1809 exhibition sent to ozias humphry, “exhibition of paintings in fresco”; and two advertisements for blake’s engraving after his canterbury pilgrims painting. a full list of items in what the archive is terming the “chaucer omnibus” can be found in its 30 april 2023 publication announcement and is also enumerated below in division i, part v, under the william blake archive. jerusalem was partially translated in a french edition by romain mollard, and there is a new reproduction of for the sexes by a german publisher that lacks any scholarly apparatus other than transcriptions (the copy used is not noted). fernando castanedo’s recent bilingual edition of the ballads manuscript was favorably reviewed. new or reprinted collections of blake’s works in italian, japanese, portuguese, russian, and spanish are recorded. “a poison tree” was translated into both filipino and ilocano. drawings and paintings blake’s illustrations to pilgrim’s progress are reproduced in a book of letters to a new christian (see also mark vernon’s youtube presentation “jesus the imagination. taking william blake’s christianity seriously”), and the illustrations to dante were reproduced in full for the first time in russia, in an edition of the divine comedy. exhibitions and catalogues the blake exhibition at the getty museum, having been long delayed by covid-19, opened in october 2023, and i have listed several reviews under its catalogue (originally published in 2020) in part vi. (at hell’s printing press, sarah jones interviewed its curators, edina adam and julian brooks.) a plate from the book of thel copy n was reproduced in the catalogue for the exhibition j. r. r. tolkien: the art of the manuscript, held at marquette university, milwaukee, from august to december 2022. a pencil study of nudes (butlin #595) appeared in a sale catalogue of works from the collection of walter augustus brandt (1902–​78), along with drawings by members of blake’s circle. previously unrecorded exhibition catalogues that contain works by or essays on blake and his circle include l’âge d’or de la peinture anglaise: de reynolds à turner (paris, 2019) and british art: ancient landscapes (salisbury museum, 2017). bibliographies in addition to the annual checklists in blake, there is also a bibliography of scholarly works that address blake’s representations of animals, which appears in a previously unrecorded article by g. e. bentley, jr., “a blake bestiary … part i” (2020). digital resources the paul mellon centre for british art has a very useful digital project that compiles the royal academy summer exhibition catalogues from 1769 to 2018. in my annotation in division i, part v, i have linked to all the entries on blake, the exhibition of blake’s portrait by thomas phillips, and the major references to blake in later catalogues. in what might be a good model for undergraduates tasked with a similar assignment, timothy gress, the coordinator of the new york public library’s pforzheimer collection, posted a comparison of the differences between the two copies of innocence held by the library (e and k). the allen ginsberg project continued its posting of ginsberg’s 1979 naropa lectures on blake (including both audio files and transcriptions). stephen f. eisenman, the curator of the 2017 exhibition william blake and the age of aquarius, has an online article that addresses the question, “what’s the use of william blake?,” and a blog post at ucla similarly asks, “why does william blake’s work resonate today?” at the yale review, anahid nersessian has a short article, “william blake’s ‘laocoön’: why the poet’s engraving reads like a protest poster.” keri davies’s blog has an interesting post on the prostitutes listed as living on south molton street (where blake lived from 1803 to 1821) in harris’s list of covent-garden ladies (1760–​95). jason whittaker’s zoamorphosis continues to grow, develop, and reorganize. a redesign includes new menu options that greatly assist in accessing the wealth of material. in addition to the tiles announcing recent posts, the blog portion of the site can be accessed through the “arts & culture” option, which classifies the entries in the categories of “blake and art,” “blake and music,” “blake and poetry,” and “reviews.” (the monthly “blakespotting” article seems to have been discontinued in 2023.) under the adjacent menu option, “projects & publications,” are four categories: “zoavision,” “global blake,” “divine images,” and “vala.” zoavision is the site’s youtube channel, and it has four different series: blake bites, which are short (4-5 minute) explications of ideas or context; blake sound bites, which are musical settings or recitations, followed by an analysis; global blake, which comprises zoom presentations by scholars; and visionary, which consists of longer considerations or discussions. the videos are embedded on the zoavision page and are also available on youtube. the global blake category links to the global blake network, a center for information about blake studies. it includes recent news about blake, the global blake recordings, reviews, and, perhaps most importantly, “what’s on,” a list of upcoming events. there is a digital newsletter available. “divine images” and “vala” link to a description of whittaker’s recent biography and to a page about vala, the blake society’s annual journal. given whittaker’s 2022 book on the “jerusalem” hymn, it is not surprising that two of the longer visionary posts from 2023 are on the lyric and its setting by hubert parry; the third is a discussion by hannah mcauliffe, jon mee, and sharon choe on blake and the idea of the body. the blake sound bites post “‘jerusalem’ by mark stewart & the maffia” was originally recorded in 2010 but rereleased after stewart’s death. the blake society had fewer online events than in the years immediately after covid-19, but those available on youtube include carl gopalkrishnan’s discussion of using blake’s america as the basis for his own painting australia a prophecy (see his contribution to vala as well); annise rogers’s presentation on blake’s and tolkien’s art; mark bowler, dan norman, and marianna suri’s discussion of their project fragments of experience (a six-minute preview is at 47:30 of the video); and a conversation with employees of the folio society regarding the 2023 facsimile of songs copy w. also accessible is the online launch party for issue 4 of vala. other significant engagements on youtube are tat'yana levina’s series of seventeen lectures on blake in russian; steve dempsey, the creator of the role-playing game fearful symmetries, appearing on mage: the podcast to discuss blake’s cosmology; nerdwriter1’s explication of “london”; and comics and lit’s animation of that poem. (it turns out that animated recitations of “london” on youtube are enough of a genre that jane glennie reviews them in her “set texts, poetry film, & william blake.”) in conjunction with the 2022–​23 exhibition fuseli and the modern woman: fashion, fantasy, fetishism, the courtauld held a series of lectures entitled “fuseli and the graphic body,” which are now available on youtube. blake is addressed most substantially in sarah carter’s “the art of thinking through collaboration: fuseli, blake and darwin”; she suggests that the economic conditions of the early 1790s facilitated their collaboration. the other presentations (kevin saltino, “‘female trouble’: vamps, vixens and viragoes in the art of henry fuseli”; camilla smith, “fools, heroes and whores: henry fuseli’s switzerland”; and martin myrone, “fuseli’s mutable bodies”) focus in different ways on fuseli’s representations of the female body especially. scholarship discoveries in separate articles in blake, lisa sherlock—​who sadly passed away as this checklist was being prepared for publication—​and mark crosby discuss the copy of richard bentley’s 1732 edition of paradise lost, once owned by michael phillips and now at victoria university library (university of toronto), that contains two annotations signed “wb.” sherlock compares these annotations with the handwriting of a previous owner, william backwell, as well as blake’s. for his part, crosby distinguishes the provenances of three copies of bentley’s edition associated with william cowper. among his evidence is a previously unpublished letter from william hayley to lady harriet hesketh that is dated 10 jan. 1802 and contains an allusion to blake. in vala, angus whitehead and catherine kelly offer a concise but detailed history of 17 south molton street from the 1750s to the current day. in his presentation for global blake, wayne c. ripley provides new information about stephen horncastle and his family, neighbors of the blake family, who resided at 29 broad street and held the lease for 30 broad street. this information includes the fact that horncastle and his two wives originated from the same region of yorkshire as thomas armitage and that, as suspected by mark yates,mark yates, “illuminated instruction: a paratextual, intertextual, and iconotextual study of william blake,” phd diss., ghent university and university of salford, manchester, 2014 (27). horncastle sold paper. the twenty-fifth anniversary of helen p. bruder’s william blake and the daughters of albion was commemorated by elizabeth effinger’s interview with bruder, who reflects on the book’s and feminism’s impact on blake studies. (for important work on the female artists of blake’s era, see paris a. spies-gans’s a revolution on canvas: the rise of women artists in britain and france, 1760–​1830 [2022] and her article “why do we think there have been no great women artists? revisiting linda nochlin and the archive,” both described below.) with many references to the engagement of blake studies with the problem, alcinda pinheiro de sousa and jason whittaker take up the perennial question of how to read blake without imposing an authoritative meaning. songs marsha keith schuchard persuasively argues that moravian-swedenborgian education theory and practices should be seen as essential contexts for understanding blake’s songs. (see william blake’s circle for a description of her article on charles augustus tulk’s and john flaxman’s interest in alchemy.) among other new work on the songs, a section in elizabeth s. dodd’s the lyric voice in english theology reads the prophetic implications of the lyrical first person, while ian thomson analyzes the instrument held by the piper in the frontispiece to innocence, concluding that it is “an eighteenth-century clarinet.” wiebke katharina schäfer closely examines the designs in three companion poems in copy t of songs, and ines tebourski’s presentation for global blake explores the symmetrical and asymmetrical relationships of the companion poems. sun shuting reads “the little vagabond” as an attack on organized religion, while jonathan perris sees in “the little black boy” a critique of evangelical abolitionist writing (including olaudah equiano’s interesting narrative). milena stepanyan compares russian translations of “the little boy found” and “the little boy lost,” and harriet kramer linkin explores how blake’s handwritten songs disrupted late eighteenth-century print culture. finally, a new essay by sibylle erle considers “a poison tree” alongside urizen, marriage, and “the ancient of days” to examine blake’s depictions of creation and the fall. political and historical readings hüseyin alhas argues for the impact of newspaper accounts on the french revolution and “the tyger.” in contrast, tara lee, looking at the french revolution and urizen, contends that blake’s notion of “the body politic metaphor” stemmed from his “intimate dialogue with burke, [emmanuel joseph] sieyès, and other revolutionary and reactionary writers.” joey s. kim’s chapter on blake in her book romanticism and the poetics of orientation fruitfully utilizes the different meanings of orientate to capture his ambiguous and ambivalent relationship to empire and orientalism. (see matthew sangster’s “five questions: joey s. kim on romanticism and the poetics of orientation” at the bars blog in part v for kim’s explication of her argument.) li qi peh contends that stedman relied on blake’s engravings of his drawings to counter the editing of the narrative by the pro-slavery william thompson. collections of essays in a special issue of studies in romanticism devoted to romanticism and palestine, published before the hamas terror attack and the israeli decimation of gaza, saree makdisi distinguishes blake from other romantics who saw palestine as a blank slate, suggesting that “jerusalem” shows that blake’s true concerns were in england and not palestine. (the issue also contains an essay on volney.) as noted in sibylle erle’s introduction to vala, both gaza and ukraine offer heartbreaking backdrops to the theme of its latest issue, war and peace. many of the articles highlight blake’s (or the contributor’s) experiences with war or how art and poetry can heal the wounds caused by war, if not preclude it. the former approach is embodied by hugo larman’s and carl gopalkrishnan’s pieces, which both explain how war and its damage fuel their blakean art. the latter is represented by mark vernon’s explication of blake’s idea of forgiveness; rumyana hristova’s stress on “the invisible war for human consciousness”; perienne christian’s vision of a humanity either dominated by ai or enhanced by the organic; and much of the art and poetry in the issue. erle considers how blake’s lifetime was structured by a series of wars; stephen pritchard examines blake’s depictions of war and hunting in his works; and an excerpt from jason whittaker’s jerusalem: blake, parry, and the fight for englishness describes blake’s encounter with the soldier john scolfield in felpham. articles in vala outside of the topic of war and peace include david fallon’s experiments with getting ai to produce blakean poetry and images; john riordan’s examination of allusions to blake in the work of the comic book writer grant morrison; roger whitson’s experience of using the press now at rice university; and, as noted above, angus whitehead and catherine kelly’s history of 17 south molton street. andy wilson reviews the stage production of simon mcburney’s adaptation of olga tokarczuk’s drive your plow over the bones of the dead, and sibylle erle describes the rehanging of blakes at tate britain and reviews keith g. davies’s book on blake and newton. maureen mccue and sophie thomas’s edinburgh companion to romanticism and the arts, which focuses on the relationship between british romanticism and the visual arts, is a collection that every blake scholar will want to explore. the vast majority of the chapters deal at least in part with blake and/​or members of his circle, though only james grande’s examination of blake’s depictions of music and musical instruments considers blake exclusively. the chapters that discuss blake at any length are listed in division i, part vi, while any that discuss members of blake’s circle are listed under cultures and technologies of display and exhibition in division ii. chapters that touch on blake include katie garner’s discussion of his designs for the grave; martin myrone’s positioning of blake in terms of exhibition culture; susan matthews’s consideration of the illustrations for thomas gray and edward young in light of what she argues is a nascent idea of book illustration in the eighteenth century; laura engel’s comparison of diana beauclerk’s and blake’s illustrations for bürger’s leonora; and jason whittaker’s examination of blake’s depiction in comics. (on a similar topic, catherine spooner’s article for gothic studies considers the influence of blake on the graphic novel satania.) blake also figures significantly in several chapters of angelica duran and mario murgia’s 2021 collection, global milton and visual art. nathalie collé considers his portrait of milton for the eighteen heads of poets; joshua reid compares his illustrations of paradise lost with salvador dalí’s; and joseph wittreich surveys eighteenthand early nineteenth-century illustrations of paradise lost, with substantial reference to blake’s. art history rebecca marks’s presentation for global blake examines blake’s drawings after michelangelo’s sistine ceiling (butlin #167-70), pointing to the importance of fuseli’s description of the figures. emilia di rocco looks at “the relationship between literature and the arts” in eighteenthand early nineteenth-century artists and writers, including reynolds, blake, and byron, by examining their depictions of dante’s ugolino. sam solecki’s book on the modern reception of the etruscans contains a chapter on blake and his allusions to etruscans in island and a descriptive catalogue, with earlier chapters highlighting winckelmann’s descriptions, the collection of william hamilton, josiah wedgwood’s pottery, and erasmus darwin’s references to wedgwood’s etruria and the etruscans in the botanic garden. lissette lopez szwydky’s transmedia adaptation in the nineteenth century (2020) discusses blake’s engravings for stedman and his illustrations of young, gray, milton, and dante, as well as referencing boydell, macklin, and fuseli. tracing the british reception of friedrich august moritz retzsch’s illustrations to goethe’s faust, evanghelia stead highlights the role of henry crabb robinson, with references to flaxman (who saw the illustrations) and to blake. mónica sánchez tierraseca suggests “artistic cartography” as a way to represent blake’s golgonooza. finally, evan r. firestone’s mist and fog in british and european painting: fuseli, friedrich, turner, monet and their contemporaries has a chapter on blake and his circle (mostly fuseli) that focuses on the use of mist and haze in their depictions of the supernatural, with a reference to blake’s annotations to reynolds in the book’s conclusion. science two new books engage with blake’s relationship to science. andrew m. cooper’s a bastard kind of reasoning: william blake and geometry explicitly sets out to rewrite donald ault’s influential account of blake’s relationship to newton in visionary physics (1974). cooper reads most of the prophetic books, the newton color print, and the vision of the last judgment and refers to both late seventeenthand eighteenth-century figures—​including, in addition to newton, henry more, george berkeley, david hartley, and joseph priestley—​and to many contemporary scientists. suggesting that blake anticipates the insights of post-newtonian physics, cooper offers many (dare one say aultian?) diagrams to represent blake’s cosmological ideas. (in a similar vein, mark lussier’s presentation for global blake addresses the intersections of blake’s work with contemporary physics.) in terms of blake and the life sciences, gillian xu’s global blake presentation highlights the imagery of blood and circulation in the four zoas and jerusalem. david worrall argues that blake’s visions were rooted in his experience of migraine auras and synesthesia in an article published in a 2021 exhibition catalogue for the contemporary painter degard, whose works depict her own experiences of auras. milton a poem and religion a large number of scholarly works in the last year focused on milton. g. a. rosso seeks to correct the confusion between the eschatological and the apocalyptic common in blake studies since northrop frye, and he reads milton in light of contemporary biblical studies to illustrate blake’s ideas of the different concepts. tristanne connolly looks at what the imagery of the wine press crushing human grapes suggests about blake’s views of redemption and violence. revisiting and, at times, challenging angela esterhammer’s creating states: studies in the performative language of john milton and william blake (1994), brian russell graham’s speech acts in blake’s “milton” provides a book-length reading of the entire poem (which was not considered in esterhammer’s study). focusing on the prosody of milton, richard ness suggests that the poem’s “metrical experiments” explain its “strange temporal frameworks.” jared s. richman’s presentation for global blake also takes up the issue of time in milton, but considers it through blake’s “construction of non-normative embodiment and the senses.” a chapter in matthew leporati’s romantic epics and the mission of empire highlights how milton subverts the epic genre’s typical “imperial allegory.” works that consider milton and jerusalem include leporati’s “emanuel swedenborg’s conjugial love and the erotic politics of william blake’s epics,” which emphasizes the importance of swedenborg’s ideas of erotic love to the transformation of the epic, and zoe beenstock’s “jerusalem moves west: undoing the hebrew bible in blake’s milton and jerusalem,” which examines blake’s reconstruction of the bible and the biblical world. dar'ya tarabanova similarly considers “blake’s approach to the genre of vision” and his turn to “the prophetic books of the old testament.” (listed in division ii, yosefa raz’s article on robert lowth provides further context for blake’s rewriting of the bible, with raz suggesting that lowth’s influential fusing of classical genres with the hebrew bible continues to shape our own notion of biblical genres today.) the well-entrenched association of blake and antinomianism receives some pushback in matthew mauger’s interesting book william blake and the visionary law: prophecy, legislation and constitution. mauger seeks to determine the role that blake saw for law in eternity and to explore his understanding of and encounters with english law. (for a counterview, see duane williams, who makes the case that blake can be understood as a christian anarchist.) like other calvinist methodists, james hervey was accused of antinomianism, and dennis m. read examines blake’s painting epitome of james hervey’s “meditations among the tombs.” read contends that the painting is not an illustration of hervey’s work per se but, rather, a “strong suggestion of a common religious belief between blake and [thomas] butts, one that shows their bond of friendship and shared values, specifically allied with hervey’s methodism, following george whitefield’s belief in sanctification rather than john wesley’s doctrine of perfectionism.” ecological studies noah heringman’s deep time: a literary history has a chapter that looks at blake’s relationship to the romantic ballad revival and to johann gottfried herder, reading the “introduction” and “earth’s answer” from the songs of experience and geological imagery in milton and jerusalem. in an article, william ilan rubel argues that the climate emergency can only be solved by “a ‘haptic’ approach to nature” found in alfred north whitehead and earlier in blake and william wordsworth. written during the height of the covid-19 pandemic, joey s. kim’s article “a series of digital research discoveries” reflects on encountering the blake archive as an undergraduate and how it affected her teaching during the lockdown. fuson wang’s the smallpox report: vaccination and the romantic illness narrative, conceived during the pandemic, has related chapters on erasmus darwin and on blake, exploring their representations of vaccination and its related figures of the social body and disease. somehow, a two-part article by g. e. bentley, jr., published three years after his 2017 passing, was missed in previous checklists; it considers blake’s depictions of animals both real and fictitious. (as noted above, the first part includes a bibliography.) reception and influence complementing the recent attention to blake’s reception in america and europe,see, inter alia, the special issue “blake in europe,” blake 55.3 (winter 2021–​22), ed. sibylle erle; the reception of william blake in europe, ed. sibylle erle and morton d. paley, 2 vols. (2019); and linda freedman, william blake and the myth of america: from the abolitionists to the counterculture (2018). alexis harley, claire knowles, and chris murray provide an overview of his reception in australia in relationship to english identity and empire. m. cecilia marchetto santorun’s “william blake in spanish popular culture and literature” surveys his reception in spain and stresses how it was shaped by different communities and regions. reiko onodera has a chapter on blake and medieval manuscripts that examines the songs and the night thoughts illustrations. in addition to his two articles on kenzaburo ōe, mentioned above, hikari sato also published on bunsho jugaku, discussing his thesis on jerusalem and why he compared blake with buddhism. jerome mcgann’s book on byron contains a chapter comparing him and blake. isobel armstrong examines blake’s influence on the text and image combinations of christina rossetti. melih karakuzu and özlem sayar compare blake’s and elizabeth barrett browning’s depictions of child labor in the “chimney sweeper” poems and “the cry of the children.” clare broome saunders argues that phoebe anna traquair’s illustrations for barrett browning’s sonnets from the portuguese reveal “striking connections” with blake’s work. in a collection on the victorian critic walter pater, luisa calè contends that the influence of blake on pater was more substantial than most readers have assumed. andrés ferrada aguilar reads blake alongside emerson and whitman regarding protestant modernity. pijush bhadra analyzes how blake and yeats similarly utilized “symbols of materiality and spirituality,” while arianna antonielli considers the divergence of yeats’s and john ellis’s views of blake after their collaboration on the works of william blake (1893). (blake’s influence on james joyce is traced in matthew leporati’s presentation for global blake.) aimed at a more popular audience than jason whittaker’s jerusalem: blake, parry, and the fight for englishness, edwin john lerner’s jerusalem: the story of a song similarly recounts the origins and popularization of “jerusalem,” including its setting by hubert parry. (both books are reviewed by james murray-white at his blog, finding blake.) alla baeva looks at dmitri smirnov’s opera tiriel. becoming what you behold 2023 saw much work on blake scholars. dara barnat’s study of the response of jewish american poets to walt whitman includes alicia ostriker, with part of one chapter examining her relationship to whitman and part of another examining ginsberg’s. (ostriker is also the subject of a study by sean burt.) anne cranny-francis’s jack lindsay: writer, romantic, revolutionary has two chapters on lindsay’s writing on and relationship to blake. james crossley seeks to recover the importance of a. l. morton in the british marxist tradition, highlighting his english utopia (1952) as well as touching on his blake scholarship. writing in vala, david worrall has a fascinating account of anthony blunt’s career as a spy for the soviet union in britain during the cold war. michael davis’s william blake: a new kind of man, originally published in 1977, has been reprinted as part of the university of california press’s voices revived series. while blake is mentioned only once, laura cleaver’s article on the great blake collectors and dealers george d. smith and bernard alfred quaritch discusses their role in creating the collections of medieval manuscripts at the huntington, the morgan, and the walters. psychoanalytic and therapeutic uses of blake jason wright’s blake’s job: adventures in becoming is a book-length explication of the illustrations of the book of job as a therapeutic model. jeff mclaughlin suggests that blake’s works can be seen as models for educational psychology. the preface to mark edmundson’s the age of guilt: the super-ego in the online world ties the idea of the superego to blake’s nobodaddy, urizen, and spectre. lorenz hindrichsen has an article on aging that examines “the ecchoing green” and argues that it encourages the reader to laugh away old age. dissertations five recent dissertations have at least a chapter on blake. elizabeth giardina (uc davis) positions blake within “the poetics of earth system design”; rasheed martin hinds (cuny) considers representations of africans and revolution largely in the lambeth prophecies and the engravings for stedman; collin d. lam (suny binghamton) reads blake’s los and albion in relationship to rousseau’s social contract; jodie marley (university of nottingham) positions blake and yeats within the mystic communities of both their own times and those of their later reception history; and ramazan saral (ege university, türkiye) reads the minor prophecies “as a means to re-evaluate the perception of history through mythopoeia.” (saral’s poem “self-doubt” is in the latest issue of vala.) blakeana blakeans may be interested in william cook miller’s book the enthusiast: anatomy of the fanatic in seventeenth-century british culture, which has a chapter on john locke’s view of enthusiasm. because of the retirement of its editor, the british art journal’s last issue will be 24.3. mccormick templeman and rachel feder’s astrolit: a bibliophile’s guide to the stars analyzes blake and other literary figures and their work according to their signs (blake was a sagittarius). the japanese novelist sumito yamashita has a short story where the narrator recites parts of “the tyger”; the poet rita dove, who received a national book foundation award for lifetime achievement, cited a parody of “the tyger” in mad magazine as one of her influences. david r. ewbank’s the lamb cycle: what the great english poets would have written about mary and her lamb (had they thought of it first) contains a parody of blake entitled “the book of hell.” the 250th anniversary of blake’s becoming an apprentice was commemorated by the stationers’ company. blake’s circle several chapters in the edinburgh companion to romanticism and the arts consider members of blake’s circle. katharina boehm highlights james basire’s and george vertue’s engravings for the society of antiquaries; kacie l. wills discusses reynolds’s portrait of omai (1776); joan coutu surveys charles townley’s collecting and displaying of statues at his country house, with references to canova, flaxman, and richard cosway; peter funnell examines celebrity portraits by reynolds, lawrence, nollekens, and romney; heather mcpherson focuses on representations of the stage in paintings by fuseli, lawrence, and romney; thora brylowe presents an overview of angelica kauffman’s life, including her relationship to the royal academy and the boydell and macklin galleries; and alison chapman explores illustrated poetry, including stothard’s vignette in samuel rogers’s italy, a poem (1830). other chapters in the collection look at wider issues of display and exhibition. charlotte boyce discusses merchandise that commemorated nelson; susanna avery-quash charts the development of public art galleries; sarah zimmerman examines the space of the public lecture (including those given at the royal academy); peter otto traces the rise of technologies of illusion and the commercialization of spectacle; maureen mccue surveys the london print shop; jennie batchelor analyzes the role of illustrations in the lady’s magazine; samantha matthews explores the practice of compiling scrap albums; and hila shachar considers “cultural developments in the representation of romantic ideologies on screen.” late in 2022, the fondazione maria cosway in lodi, italy, held an exhibition of her works and produced a catalogue. on youtube, the cosway scholar stephen lloyd has a presentation on the exhibition and catalogue. cosway’s the duchess of devonshire as cynthia from spenser’s “the faerie queene” (c. 1782) is the cover illustration for paris a. spies-gans’s magnificent study of women artists, a revolution on canvas: the rise of women artists in britain and france, 1760–​1830. the book includes many charts, tables, and graphs quantifying the number of exhibitions in which women participated, the number of women artists, the genres in which they worked, and other useful facts. in addition to its lengthy treatment of cosway (most of pp. 129-45 and passim), it discusses angelica kauffman, mary moser, mary ann flaxman, maria denman, mary hoare, maria spilsbury, anne seymour damer, anne mee, and frances reynolds, with high-quality reproductions of their works. a related article by spies-gans provides a more detailed discussion of women artists in the field of art history, with many of the same artists examined. i have recorded more reviews for the 2022–​23 fuseli exhibition at the musée jacquemart-andré in paris, and fuseli’s paintings were featured in a new exhibition, götter, helden und verräter, held at the albertina museum. frederick antal’s classic fuseli studies (1956) was reprinted in 2022. stephanie o’rourke’s art, science, and the body in early romanticism has a chapter on fuseli, which argues that he intentionally drew and painted bodies that could not be read according to lavater’s physiognomic system. marsha keith schuchard documents the alchemical interests of charles augustus tulk and john flaxman, with references to many swedenborgian and masonic figures and slight mention of blake. caspar meyer and alexia petsalis-diomidis’s collection, drawing the greek vase, has one chapter on flaxman’s representation of greek vases and another on thomas hope’s. cassie, lise, and david mayer have an article on the early life of the circus owner philip astley, blake’s neighbor. 2023 marked the 300th anniversary of joshua reynolds’s birth, and he was the subject of two exhibitions. the first was held at the box in plymouth, uk, and, though no catalogue was produced, there is a video at the museum’s website. the second was at kenwood house, and, again, no catalogue was produced, though images of some of the works displayed can be found at its website. both had public lectures on reynolds, which were posted to youtube. interestingly, the reviews for the kenwood exhibition seem to reflect the tension between blake and reynolds, with the wall street journal and financial times praising the exhibition and reynolds, but with the guardian condemning reynolds, with explicit references to blake’s animosity. miriam al jamil highlights an etching of reynolds’s painting johnson arguing by mary dawson turner, the wife of blake’s would-be patron dawson turner. the influence of erasmus darwin on his grandson charles has long been debated. eva guadalupe hernández-avilez and rosaura ruiz-gutiérrez analyze charles’s annotations to erasmus’s the temple of nature (1803) to suggest affinities with charles’s the descent of man (1871). two chapters in melissa bailes’s regenerating romanticism: botany, sensibility, and originality in british literature, 1750–​1830 address erasmus darwin, with slight mention of blake and fuseli in relationship to the designs and engravings for the botanic garden. darwin also figures in stephen leach’s book on the lunar society member peter perez burdett. like blake, mary wollstonecraft is also being used for therapeutic purposes. in joanna biggs’s memoir of starting her life over, she retells the lives of nine women writers who did the same, beginning with wollstonecraft. for her part, regan penaluna uses wollstonecraft as one of four women philosophers who help her challenge the male-dominated traditions and profession of philosophy. in the journal of the history of philosophy, lauren kopajtic contends that adam smith was not a gender essentialist and that this fact was recognized by wollstonecraft herself. elena makarova has two articles on wollstonecraft, the first on helen maria williams’s and wollstonecraft’s lives in france during the french revolution and the second on wollstonecraft’s life in scandinavia. eileen m. hunt’s portraits of wollstonecraft: the making of a feminist icon, 1785 to 2020 records and analyzes artistic and written depictions. written in the wake of the overturning of roe vs. wade in the us, susan j. wolfson’s on mary wollstonecraft’s “a vindication of the rights of woman”: the first of a new genus is both a close reading and reception history of the work as well as a plea for not ignoring its lessons. division i: william blake part i: blake’s writings section a: original editions, facsimiles, reprints, and translations “albion rose” (1795) see morley in part vi. ballads (pickering) manuscript (1807?) augurios de inocencia. ed. and trans. fernando castanedo. madrid: cátedra, 2020. <blake (2021, 2023)> review sanz jiménez, miguel. hikma 22.1 (2023): 345-48. in spanish. “castanedo’s careful editing and translation offer a documented and rigorous reading that invites reflection and allows readers to solve, on their own, blake’s riddles” (348). “blake’s chaucer: an original engraving” (1810) “blake’s chaucer: an original engraving” [a]. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2023. “blake’s chaucer: the canterbury pilgrims” (1809) “blake’s chaucer: the canterbury pilgrims” [a]. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2023. europe a prophecy (1794) europe a prophecy [a]. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2023. “exhibition of paintings in fresco” (1809) “exhibition of paintings in fresco” [a]. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2023. “a fairy leapt” (c. 1793) “a fairy leapt.” william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2023. for the sexes: the gates of paradise (1793, c. 1818) for the sexes: the gates of paradise. obernkirchen [germany]: black letter press, [2023]. a reproduction without any scholarly apparatus. an island in the moon (1786?) una isla en la luna. ed. and trans. fernando castanedo. madrid: cátedra, 2014. <blake (2015)> b. 2nd ed., rev., 2020. <blake (2021)> c. 2023. jerusalem (c. 1804–​20) § jérusalem: l’émanation du géant albion. ed., trans., and pref. romain mollard. paris: arfuyen, 2023. 192 pp. isbn: 9782845903500. in french with english text. this bilingual edition is the first solo edition and translation of jerusalem into french. it does not, however, contain the full text of blake’s illuminated work. the four-volume edition of blake’s oeuvres (aubier/​flammarion, 1974–​83), directed by pierre leyris and translated by leyris and jacques blondel (for vol. 4, vala), did not include jerusalem. leyris did include “extracts from jerusalem (bilingual)” in his ecrits prophétiques des dernières années, suivis de lettres ([paris]: editions josé corti, 2000) <wbhc p. 495>. review porée, marc. “la forge de l’imagination.” en attendant nadeau 187 (13-26 dec. 2023). in french. whilst welcoming the publication, porée laments the fragmentary result of the gathered excerpts from jerusalem. he also regrets some typographical errors and “risky choices” in translation, even if “the breath, the power and the glory” remain of a jerusalem “cut apart, but nevertheless liberated.” laocoön (c. 1826–​27) § el laocoonte de william blake, el museo de la obra eterna. buenos aires-madrid: mochuelo libros, 2022. in spanish. a limited-edition handcrafted box (ten copies when launched, in aug. 2022) containing three items: a reproduction of blake’s annotated laocoön (c. 1826–​27); a leaflet with a bilingual edition (english and spanish) of blake’s engraved epigrams and maxims; and a separate pamphlet with an essay titled “el museo de la obra eterna,” “on blake’s work and complex symbols and their relation to this reproduction” (publisher’s webpage). laocoön [a]. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2023. “the phoenix to mrs. butts” (c. 1794–​1803) “the phoenix to mrs. butts.” william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2023. songs of innocence (1789) songs of innocence [d]. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2023. songs of innocence [o]. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2023. songs of innocence [q]. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2023. songs of innocence [s]. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2023. songs of innocence and of experience (1794) songs of innocence and of experience [w]. folio society, 2023.see the blake society interview with staff members of the folio society about this edition. “then she bore pale desire” and “woe cried the muse” “then she bore pale desire” and “woe cried the muse.” william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2023. visions of the daughters of albion (1793) visions of the daughters of albion [d]. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2023. visions of the daughters of albion [k]. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2023. visions of the daughters of albion [l]. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2023. visions of the daughters of albion [m]. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2023. section b: collections and selections dante rihaku ni au: yotsumoto yasuhiro honyakushu kotenshihen [dante meets li bai: a collection of classical poems translated by yasuhiro yotsumoto]. tokyo: shichosha, 2023. 267 pp. isbn: 9784783727934. in japanese. “infant joy,” “laughing song,” “the little boy lost,” “the clod & the pebble,” “the fly,” “auguries of innocence,” and “proverbs of hell” are translated into japanese in chapter 16, “yorokobi ga harami kanashimi ga umiotosu [joys impregnate. sorrows bring forth]” (231-48). kimi tachi wa shikashi futatabi koi [you, however, come again]. by sumito yamashita. tokyo: bungei shunju, 2022. 252 pp. isbn: 9784163915258. in japanese. sumito yamashita is a novelist and a winner of the akutagawa prize in 2017, and this is a collection of his short stories, which includes “hara no inu, ibun. neko no hara [a dog in the stomach, a variant. the stomach of a cat],” originally published in bungakukai [literary world] 75.6 (2021). in one scene, the narrator quotes the first, second, fifth, and sixth stanzas of “the tyger” in english, thinking of a tiger, a lamb, god, a dog, and a cat after he undergoes surgery and before he is shown a part of the sigmoid colon cut out by a man in white. libros proféticos. intro. patrick harpur; trans., prol., and glossary (in vol. 2) bernardo santano. 2 vols. vilaür [spain]: atalanta, 2013. in spanish. <wbhc pp. 519-21, blake (2014)> b. 2023. il matrimonio del cielo e dell’inferno. canti dell’innocenza e altri poemi. trans. and pref. edmondo m. dodsworth. lanciano, chieti: rocco carabba editore, 1923.this earliest translation of blake into italian is not listed in either wbhc or d. w. dörrbecker’s blake checklists (note by fernando castanedo). consists of “prefazione” (5-28), “canti dell’innocenza” (29-36), “canti dell’esperienza” (37-49), “versi del manoscritto di rossetti” (50-54), “squarci dal ‘milton’” (55-62), “il matrimonio del cielo e dell’inferno” (63-80), “il libro di thel” (81-87), “tiriel” (88-106), and “il primo libro di urizen” (107-25). in italian. b. 2011. isbn: 9788863441741. § o matrimônio do céu e do inferno. o livro de thel. trans. josé antônio arantes. são paulo: iluminuras, 1987. in portuguese. b. 2001. <blake (2019)> c. 2009. d. 2020. isbn: 9786555190663. tamashii no koe: eishi wo tanoshimu [voices of soul: enjoyable readings of poetry in english]. by shunsuke kamei. tokyo: nan’undo, 2021. 221 pp. 1 plate by blake and blake’s portrait by thomas phillips. isbn: 9784523293316. in japanese. an anthology of poetry in english with japanese translations, which includes “infant joy,” “infant sorrow,” “the tyger,” and “the lamb” (17-24, 78-85). “tigr, o tigr, svetlo goryashchiy …” [“tyger, tyger, burning bright …”]. trans. samuil marshak, grigoriy kruzhkov, viktor toporov, et al. moscow: azbuka-atticus, 2023. isbn: 9785389230491. in russian. this book contains translations of some of blake’s short poems, and the whole of songs of innocence and of experience. all the translations have been published earlier. § timeless: klasiko: classic poems, a trilingual edition: english-pilipino-ilocano. ed. and trans. norma b. hennessy. [clapham, south australia]: norma b. hennessy, 2023. isbn: 9780645442366. prints and translates “a poison tree.” § visões. ed., trans., pref., and notes josé antônio arantes. são paulo: iluminuras, 2020. 428 pp. isbn: 9786555190588. in portuguese, with facing english. includes eleven works: songs of innocence, thel, marriage, america, visions, europe, urizen, songs of experience, ahania, the song of los, and the book of los. part ii: reproductions of drawings and paintings section a: illustrations of individual authors bunyan, john freeman, curtis w. pilgrim journey: instruction in the mystery of the gospel. minneapolis: fortress press, 2023. a book of letters to a new christian, each accompanied by an illustration to pilgrim’s progress. there is also the frontispiece to jerusalem. freeman’s pilgrim letters: instruction in the basic teaching of christ (2021), from the same publisher, appears to have the same format. chaucer, geoffrey the canterbury pilgrims: sketch for the engraving. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2023. previously available in the archive’s digital exhibition on the chaucer painting and engraving; now also accessible under paintings and drawings, in preview mode. dante alighieri ‘bozhestvennaya komediya’ dante alig'eri v illyustratsiyakh uil'yama bleyka [the divine comedy by dante alighieri, illustrated by william blake]. trans. mikhail lozinskii. moscow: azbuka-atticus, 2023. isbn: 9785389230163. in russian. blake’s illustrations to dante, published in full for the first time in russia. the book contains the complete inferno and selected verses from purgatorio and paradiso, with comments by mikhail lozinskii (1950). section b: collections and selections eighteen heads of poets (c. 1800–​03) chaucer. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2023. part iii: commercial engravings section a: illustrations of individual authors chaucer, geoffrey the poetical works of geoffrey chaucer (1783). william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2023. the prologue and characters of chaucer’s pilgrims (1812). william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2023. part iv: bibliographies and catalogues section a: bibliographies [cross-listing articles with substantial bibliographical content] bentley, g. e., jr. “a blake bestiary: animals, birds, fish, insects, and supernatural beings in blake’s words and designs—​part i: blake’s acquaintance with animals.” see bentley, “a blake bestiary … part i,” in part vi. it contains a bibliography of scholarly works that address blake’s representations of animals. calè, luisa. “blake and exhibitions, 2022.” see blake 57.1 in part vi. oliveira, camila, and jason whittaker. “blake and music, 2022.” see blake 57.1 in part vi. ripley, wayne c., with fernando castanedo, hikari sato, hüseyin alhas, and vera serdechnaia. “william blake and his circle: a checklist of scholarship in 2022.” see blake 57.1 in part vi. section b: catalogues catalogue 70. william blake: present joy: a chronological catalogue of blake’s works. san francisco: john windle antiquarian bookseller, 2022. <blake (2023)> according to essick’s “blake in the marketplace, 2022,” “this is the second-largest sale catalogue devoted to blake and his circle, exceeded only by windle’s october 2009 catalogue 46” (par. 1). fliss, william m., sarah c. schaefer, et al.  j. r. r. tolkien: the art of the manuscript. milwaukee: haggerty museum of art, 2022. isbn: 9780945366362. the catalogue for the exhibition at the haggerty museum of art, marquette university, from 19 aug. to 23 dec. 2022. includes plate 4 (bentley; erdman plate 2) of the book of thel copy n. for images of the book’s display at the exhibition, see cincinnati art museum, blog in part v. grouhel-le tellec, anne-sophie, ed., with martin myrone and alice insley. l’âge d’or de la peinture anglaise: de reynolds à turner. paris: réunion des musées nationaux, 2019. isbn: 9782711874347. the catalogue for the exhibition at the musée du luxembourg, paris, from 11 sept. 2019 to 16 feb. 2020. it reproduces blake’s homer and the ancient poets and includes essays on romney, lawrence, fuseli, and blake. night thoughts: romantic drawings from the brandt collection. london: lowell libson & jonny yarker ltd., 2023. isbn: 9781999978365. includes a biographical overview of walter augustus brandt (1902–​78) and contains drawings by blake and members of his circle (fuseli, flaxman, romney, mortimer, ottley, and hoare) that brandt owned. blake is represented by a two-sided pencil sketch titled nude studies (c. 1810) (butlin #595). his fertilization of egypt sketch after fuseli (british museum) is reproduced alongside fuseli’s chalk sketch satan summoning his legions. the entry for flaxman’s design depicting a scene from william sotheby’s “rienzi” includes transcriptions of the lines illustrated and the accompanying letter. smiles, sam. british art: ancient landscapes. london: paul holberton publishing, 2017. isbn: 9781911300144. the catalogue for the exhibition at the salisbury museum from 8 apr. to 3 sept. 2017. it includes milton copy a, plate 4 (bentley; erdman plate 6) and jerusalem copy a, plate 100. “william blake.” epic and divine: dante’s world. epic and divine was an exhibition held in the noel shaw gallery at the university of melbourne from 3 mar. to 26 june 2022. the digital version of the exhibition includes images of the facsimiles created for the 1978 blake trust edition of blake’s dante engravings. part v: digital resources allen ginsberg project “william blake 1979 naropa lectures continue—​1.” 25 sept. 2023. the installments under this title continue, up to #15 on 2 nov. 2023. “william blake’s birthday.” 28 nov. 2023. with reference to vala 4 (see vala in part vi). “blake and the stationers.” stationers’ company (4 aug. 2022). commemorates the 250th anniversary of blake’s becoming an apprentice stationer and highlights his work for joseph johnson. blake society (see also vala in part vi) events: gopalkrishnan, carl. “australia a prophecy.” 25 jan. 2023. on “his experience of using william blake’s 1793 poem, america a prophecy, as a lens to explore the mythic, subconscious, and literary constructions of military interventions in the indo-pacific in his painting australia a prophecy.”see gopalkrishnan’s “an artists [sic] exploration of the mythic, subconscious and literary constructions of military interventions in the indo-pacific,” critical military studies 9.2 (2023): 279-83. <blake (2023)> harpur, patrick. “a conversation with patrick harpur.” 22 feb. 2023. “a conversation with patrick harpur on the subject of imagination and vision; blake and tradition, followed by a q&a with the author.” westbrook, mike, and kate westbrook. “a music celebration of william blake: mike and kate westbrook.” 19 apr. 2023. “hercules road—​blake’s old haunt.” 7 may 2023. “members of the blake society are invited to be involved in the ‘finale’ event of an exhibition of artworks, inspired by william and catherine’s years living in hercules road. the venue ‘hercules road’ is located inside a flat, next to the william blake estate, the site of the blakes’ former home from 1790–​1800.” no video is available, but images of some of the artworks are on the website. “auguries of innocence: first experiences with letterpress.” 22 may 2023. held at swedenborg house, london. “graphic design students at cambridge school of art turn their hands to letterpress in a five-year project celebrating william blake and ‘auguries of innocence.’” no video is available, but images from the book produced are on the website. “blake at bradford literature festival.” 24 june 2023. three events at the festival tied to blake. no video is available. “meeting at blake’s grave.” 12 aug. 2023. an announcement of the meeting at blake’s grave. no video is available. “blake talk at st. bartholomew the great.” 14 sept. 2023. announcing stephen pritchard’s talk on blake. no video is available. rogers, annise. “the edge of human experience: blake and tolkien’s art.” 11 oct. 2023. an examination of blake’s and tolkien’s art. bowler, mark, dan norman, and marianna suri. “fragments of experience.” 8 nov. 2023. “the team will talk about the inspiration behind the project and the years-long journey that began with a trip to petworth house and has culminated in a classical song cycle paired with electronic music, live film footage, 2d animation and cutting edge ai animation.” “vala 4 launch.” 29 nov. 2023. “the launch of issue 4 of vala, the journal of the blake society, with the sadly apposite theme of ‘war and peace.’” (see vala in part vi.) rosewell, tamsin. “a glimpse behind the scenes with the folio society.” 13 dec. 2023. “illustrator and blake society trustee, tamsin rosewell, will be talking to folio society art director, raquel leis allion, production director, kate grimwade, and senior designer, charlotte tate—​all of whom have worked on the creation of this new folio society edition [of songs of innocence and of experience].” the box, plymouth postle, martin. “reynolds 300: martin postle talk.” youtube. 29 sept. 2023. an account of reynolds’s life and career. british association for romantic studies bars blog: sangster, matthew. “five questions: joey s. kim on romanticism and the poetics of orientation.” 21 dec. 2023. on kim’s new book: “i argue that blake’s composite art—​printing technique, handwriting, and visual art—​offers a site of imaginative multimodality that moves romantic poetics toward new paradigms, contours, and shapes of relation. in doing so, blake’s works propose alternative aesthetic horizons beyond the lyric poem and an openness to new, shifting orientations beyond an east/​west binary.” bars digital events: “state of the arts: reframing the visual in romantic period studies.” 28 may 2021. “this roundtable was held on the 27th may 2021 and showcased some of the innovative work being undertaken in this field for the edinburgh companion to romanticism and the arts. each participant offered a five-minute presentation of their chapter, organized around a key image, allowing plenty of time for discussion about how visual studies have reshaped how we approach and understand the boundaries between print and visual culture in the period.” cincinnati art museum, blog conservation. “behind the scenes in conservation: the tyger still burns bright.” 3 oct. 2019. on the rebinding of copy s of songs by the cincinnati art museum before its display at the tate britain exhibition of 2019–​20. there is a photo of the rebinding. conservation. “behind the scenes in conservation: the book of thel.” 11 aug. 2022. describes the conservation efforts when the book of thel copy n was loaned to the marquette university exhibition j. r. r. tolkien: the art of the manuscript. there is a picture of the display case. comics and lit. “‘london’ by william blake—​illustrated poem.” youtube. 19 oct. 2023. animation of the poem. the courtauld frank davis memorial lecture series: fuseli and the graphic body. organized by ketty gottardo and david solkin: salatino, kevin. “‘female trouble’: vamps, vixens and viragoes in the art of henry fuseli.” 13 oct. 2022. “closely looking at what might be called his ‘private’ or ‘secret’ drawings, the vast number of which were of his wife, this lecture teases out the ways in which fuseli both succumbed to and defied fashion in a multi-decade exploration of the female form at its most fetishized and eroticized.” smith, camilla. “fools, heroes and whores: henry fuseli’s switzerland.” 22 nov. 2022. “this paper explores fuseli’s swiss roots. it focuses in particular on drawings taken from his jugendalbum (youth album) now housed in the kunsthaus zürich. it explores the type of place zürich was—​its cultural traditions, religious beliefs and social attitudes—​in order to explain why patriotic, religious and sexual themes feature prominently in the artist’s formative works.” carter, sarah. “the art of thinking through collaboration: fuseli, blake and darwin.” 29 nov. 2022. “bringing the fertilization of egypt into conversation with falsa ad coelum (c. 1790) and a series of erotic drawings that fuseli made between 1800–​1810, it contends that the bold virility first realised and later frustrated in these graphic works speaks to the economic climate that brought fuseli, blake and darwin into professional alliance.” myrone, martin. “fuseli’s mutable bodies.” 6 dec. 2022. “this lecture would explore the mutability of fuseli’s graphic bodies, and how they operate around but also defy distinctions between life and death, the sculpted and the fleshy, orderly and disorderly anatomies.” davies, keri. index rerum: a blog about books, book-collecting, william blake, and lots of other things. scholarship: “the whore next door: william blake’s neighbours in south molton street.” 17 aug. 2023. on the prostitutes listed on south molton street in harris’s list of covent-garden ladies (1760–​95). “another engraver in south molton street.” 23 aug. 2023. on john claude nattes (d. 1839). eisenman, stephen f. “what’s the use of william blake?” sheerpost (28 may 2023). “the first thing to know about blake, apart from his extraordinary skill, is that he was clued in to the exigencies of his time: war and revolution; immiseration of the masses and enrichment of the few; the rise of the fossil fuel economy; and grave threats to political and expressive freedom. to blake, what mattered in both art and politics, was radicalism, meaning getting to the heart of the matter, and imagination, freeing the mind to enable liberation.” fara, patricia. “glory or gravity?” history today (1 mar. 2023): 84-89. on john hutchinson’s criticism of isaac newton, with many references to blake and to eduardo paolozzi’s statue of newton. foolish fish. “for the sexes—​the gates of paradise by william blake [esoteric book review].” youtube. 16 mar. 2023. a puff for the black letter press reproduction (see part i, section a). friends of kenwood sunday lecture postle, martin. “joshua reynolds at 300: 1723–​2023.” youtube. 23 jan. 2023. an overview of reynolds’s life and career. esposito, donato. “the artist as collector: sir joshua reynolds and his collection of art.” youtube. 28 sept. 2023. on reynolds’s collecting and collection. glennie, jane. “set texts, poetry film, & william blake.” moving poems magazine (28 oct. 2023). an analysis of youtube recitations of “london”: “i think the poetry film community could create something infinitely more exciting and engaging than any of these.” global blake network “in conversation” series: marley, jodie. “in conversation with jodie marley—​reflection.” 27 jan. 2023. “jodie marley reflects on finishing her phd on william blake, and changing her mind (many times).” lussier, mark. “a return to william blake’s visionary physics: or what defines ‘sweet science’?” 10 mar. 2023. “this talk begins by addressing where contemporary physical theory meets physiological and psychological descriptions in several works by william blake which presage what has been termed ‘the new physics’ of quantum mechanics and relativity.” tebourski, ines. “symmetry/​assymetry in william blake’s companion poems.” 24 apr. 2023. “this presentation seeks to show how blake’s symmetry is coupled with hidden ‘asymmetrical’ features that are to be approached through the ‘companion poems’ which are in themselves part of blake’s ‘dualities.’ they are called ‘companion poems’ as a reference to the fact that selected poems in innocence have their counterpart in experience.” steil, juliana. “in conversation with juliana steil—​reflection.” 19 may 2023. steil discusses “josé antonio arantes’ translations of twelve books by william blake collected in visões (iluminuras, 2020), and on the translator’s role in the continuing life of blake’s work in the portuguese speaking context.” richman, jared s. “blake’s visionary temporalities: disability and form in milton a poem.” 2 june 2023. “the essay delineates blake’s alternative temporalities by interrogating his construction of non-normative embodiment and the senses in milton: a poem (1804). blake’s approach to time, i argue, opens new ontological possibilities for a critical disability framework of romantic production especially with regard to corporeal variability for both poet and reader.” xu, gillian. “the metamorphosis of blood: william blake’s chemical, circulatory poetics.” 21 july 2023. “in william blake’s the four zoas and jerusalem, a fallen world is regenerated into one filled with hope and potential. i argue that in these two texts blake is imagining a way in which bodies can learn to understand—​through the concept of flexible bloodlines—​nonhuman organisms and environments. blake may have been drawn to herman boerhaave, who was a seventeenth-century chemist and who emphasized that chemistry can allow for surprising combinations of existing elements.” marks, rebecca. “‘organs of embodied sentiment’: contextualising william blake’s sistine studies c. 1770–​1790.” 16 oct. 2023. “in this paper, i use fuseli’s description of michelangelo’s sistine figures as a frame for reading a series of little-known watercolours by blake, which he completed between 1770–​1790, and which indicate how michelangelo was increasingly being used as a source of affective, emblematic, visual language.” leporati, matthew. “there’s lots of blake in finnegans wake: james joyce’s adaptation of jerusalem.” 14 nov. 2023. “while ulysses is typically regarded as joyce’s major engagement with epic literature, i argue in this presentation that finnegans wake more radically engages it by adapting jerusalem into a postmodern, postcolonial reflection on empire’s fragmentation of the world and on the possibility of creating global unity.” ripley, wayne c. “‘how dye do neighbour?’: stephen horncastle in relationship to blake’s family, neighbours, and circle.” 11 dec. 2023. “despite living across the street from the blake family for thirty years, the stationer stephen horncastle has only been recognized as existing by blake criticism since 2005. this presentation will highlight key elements of horncastle’s biography, his professional life, and his place in blake’s social and commercial networks.” regier, alexander. “printing blake in texas: the story of a replica of william blake’s printing press.” 11 mar. 2024. discusses how and why michael phillips’s replica of blake’s press ended up at rice university, and its availability to scholars. see also phillips’s “william blake’s rolling press at christ church” for how the designs were created, and josh howard-saunders’s “building william blake’s printing press” for an account of its construction. glover, michael. “william blake, our contemporary.” hyperallergic (26 sept. 2023). on the rehang of blake’s works at the tate. gourley, bernie. “a quick & dirty guide for reading william blake’s prophetic poetry.” tiger riding for beginners (20 mar. 2023). offers a chart of blake’s mythology. gress, timothy. “illuminated blake: why multiple copies matter.” new york public library (5 july 2023). on innocence copies e and k and their differences. (gress is the coordinator of the nypl pforzheimer collection.) guite, malcolm. “‘the divine image’ by william blake.” malcolm guite (6 jan. 2023). a brief description and application of the poem. horio, emma. “why does william blake’s work resonate today? a ucla art historian [zirwat chowdhury] offers perspective.” ucla college humanities (19 dec. 2023). includes a photo of the drawing donald the hammerer (butlin #782). hudson, frank. “william blake’s ‘the [sic] poison tree.’” frank hudson: the parlando project—​where music and words meet (28 oct. 2023). an analysis and a musical setting. kennedy, áine kim. “jerusalem—​how william blake’s poem became an anthem for all causes.” financial times (1 may 2023). includes links to recordings of “jerusalem.” lennon, wendy. “‘the little black boy’ by william blake.” ten-minute book club, university of oxford (18 apr. 2023). levina, tat'yana. “uil'yam bleyk [william blake].” youtube. 2023. in russian. a set of lectures on blake’s life and works, read by tat'yana levina, senior lecturer in the department of pedagogy of psychology, kazakh-american free university. lucas, james. “william blake.” gallerythane (mar. 2023). a biographical sketch. mage: the podcast. “fearful symmetries: the cosmology of william blake with steve dempsey.” youtube. 8 apr. 2023. an interview with dempsey on his role-playing game fearful symmetries. murray, douglas. “things worth remembering: william blake’s ‘the lamb.’” the free press: for free people (2 apr. 2023). murray-white, james. finding blake: reimagining william blake for the 21st century. “alive and undead in the vegetable underworld.” 27 jan. 2023. on vala 3. “‘all things begin and end in albion’s ancient druid rocky shore.’” 27 july 2023. rev. of jason whittaker’s jerusalem: blake, parry, and the fight for englishness (2022) and edwin john lerner’s jerusalem: the story of a song (2022). nerdwriter1. “william blake’s dark vision of london.” youtube. 31 oct. 2023. a video explication of “london.” nersessian, anahid. “william blake’s ‘laocoön’: why the poet’s engraving reads like a protest poster.” yale review (15 nov. 2023). paul mellon centre hallett, mark, sarah victoria turner, and jessica feather, eds. the royal academy summer exhibition: a chronicle, 1769–​2018. paul mellon centre for studies in british art, 2018. a digital compilation of the royal academy catalogues, with essays and images. blake exhibited in 1780, 1784, 1785, 1799, 1800, and 1808. his portrait by thomas phillips was exhibited in 1807. other catalogues or articles about them that mention blake are 1947, 1974, and 1988. ravikumar, adhithi. “william blake: prophet against empire.” essex blogs, university of essex (11 oct. 2023). on blake and the exhibition at the albert sloman library at the university of essex, colchester campus, 11 oct. to 17 nov. 2023. no catalogue that i could find. rice university (and articles announcing its acquisition of michael phillips’s replica of blake’s press) bell, andrew. “rice acquires rare replica of william blake printing press.” rice university news and media relations (22 feb. 2023). “here to stay: rice showcases newly delivered william blake printing press replica.” youtube. 3 mar. 2023. a video about the press, with shots of phillips printing and daubing. “rice university acquires replica of william blake’s printing press.” glasstire (texas visual art) (13 mar. 2023). smith, brandi. “open studio sessions at woodson research center offer hands-on experience with one-of-a-kind printing press.” rice university news and media relations (13 feb. 2024). describes the uses being made of the replica of blake’s press. an embedded video shows the press in action. staveley-wadham, rose. “exploring evolving attitudes to the art of william blake.” british newspaper archive (5 apr. 2023). a blog post on blake’s reception using the british newspaper database. stevens, lenhardt. “william blake and the endurance of satan as hero in paradise lost.” medium (10 aug. 2023). “i want to introduce william blake’s interpretation of satan in this post. blake falls squarely in the satan as admirable camp and has, for better or worse, become one of the earliest ‘satanist’ critics.” vernon, mark. “jesus the imagination. taking william blake’s christianity seriously.” youtube. 29 nov. 2023. whittaker, jason. zoamorphosis: the william blake blog. reviews: “electronica and choral blake, 2022.” 14 may 2023. a review of new musical settings of blake. includes a spotify playlist. “simon avery’s sorrowmouth.” 8 july 2023. “skellig—​25th anniversary illustrated edition.” 17 aug. 2023. on the twenty-fifth anniversary edition of david almond’s novel, which is illustrated by tom de freston. “william blake—​visionary.” 5 jan. 2024. “this is a remarkable catalogue of an exhibition that i am, quite simply, very jealous i cannot see in los angeles.” blakeana: “one king, one god, one law: monarchy and dissent.” 8 may 2023. on the coronation of charles iii. “heaven in a wild flower: nick drake and william blake.” 19 june 2023. “on the anniversary of the birthday of nick drake (1948–​1974), this is a short appreciation of how the singer and poet’s work was shaped by his love of william blake.” zoavision (zoamorphosis’s youtube channel). in addition to the categories listed below, zoavision includes the recordings of global blake events. blake bites (short explications of blake’s ideas): “the role of the poetic form in william blake’s ‘holy thursday’ (innocence).” 13 jan. 2023. “this short video explores how william blake’s use of a particular poetic form in his poem ‘holy thursday’ in songs of innocence changes the way that we read his verses.” “what is meant by human form in william blake’s poem, ‘the divine image’?” 13 jan. 2023. “this short video explores some of william blake’s christian beliefs in contrast to those of his contemporaries, drawing upon his poem from songs of innocence, ‘the divine image.’” “swedenborg and the marriage of heaven and hell.” 23 apr. 2023. “this short video explains the importance of the philosopher, scientist and theologian, emanuel swedenborg, on william blake’s the marriage of heaven and hell.”“the origins of religion in the marriage of heaven and hell.” 30 apr. 2023. “this video looks at plate 11 of william blake’s the marriage of heaven and hell, in which he proposes that the religious impulse originates in the desire of poets to tell stories.” “i must create a system.” 28 may 2023. “hannah mcauliffe from the centre for eighteenth century studies, university of york, examines how blake’s famous epigram—​“i must create a system, or be enslav’d by another mans”—​is part of a much more complex relation with enlightenment thinking and system building than is often appreciated.” blake sound bites (on musical settings of blake’s works or recitations and short analyses): “‘jerusalem’ by mark stewart & the maffia.” 22 apr. 2023. “while william blake’s stanza has become one of his most famous poems since it was set to music as the hymn “jerusalem,” probably the most unique version is that recorded by mark stewart in 1982. this short podcast explores what makes stewart’s version so unusual and explains how it works to both appeal to—​and alienate—​its listeners. this was first recorded as an audio in 2010 and is now republished following the sad news of mark’s death.” “to spring.” 22 apr. 2023. “in this podcast, jason whittaker explores how james thomson’s the seasons influenced blake.” “jah wobble presents the inspiration of william blake.” 24 apr. 2023. “jah wobble’s 1996 setting of poems by william blake is one of the most inventive and enjoyable albums that takes blake as its inspiration. this podcast was first recorded in 2010.” “‘jerusalem’ by test dept.” 24 apr. 2023. on a setting of “jerusalem.” “the podcast was first recorded in 2010.” “john tavener and thelema.” 3 may 2023. “this audio podcast explores two radically different settings [of “the tyger”], one by the classical composer, john tavener, and another by a belorussian black metal band, thelema. this podcast was first published in 2010.” visionary (videos longer than blake bites, analyzing or discussing blake): “and did whose feet? william blake’s ‘jerusalem.’” 30 may 2023. “this podcast explores the circumstances in which [blake] wrote his stanzas, as well as answering questions as to the poem’s meaning.” “william blake and the idea of the body.” 16 june 2023. “in this podcast, hannah mcauliffe, jon mee, and sharon choe (centre for eighteenth century studies, university of york) discuss william blake’s changing conception of the body.” “‘jerusalem’: from blake to parry.” 3 july 2023. “for decades after his death, no one read william blake’s stanzas from milton a poem beginning ‘and did those feet in ancient time,’ and the lyric was nearly forgotten. this podcast explores how blake’s lines were rediscovered and reinterpreted as a nationalist celebration, how they came to be set to music by sir hubert parry as the hymn jerusalem, and how parry turned against their use in the nationalist cause and instead gave the copyright to millicent fawcett to become the hymn of the women voter[s].” william blake archive review johnson, wendell g. college & research libraries news 84.1 (2023): 44-45. a description for research librarians. chaucer omnibus (a publication announcement highlighting all the material tied to blake’s chaucer projects now available in the archive): william blake’s canterbury pilgrims. exhibition. notebook, objects 58, 67, 119-21. the frontispiece (a commercial engraving after stothard, 1783) to vol. 13 of the poetical works of geoffrey chaucer. chaucer. eighteen heads of poets (c. 1800–​03). sir jeffery chaucer and the nine and twenty pilgrims on their journey to canterbury (1808). a descriptive catalogue (1809). the canterbury pilgrims: sketch for the engraving (1809). “blake’s chaucer: the canterbury pilgrims” (1809). a prospectus for the engraving of his painting. “exhibition of paintings in fresco” (1809). an advertisement for the 1809 exhibition (recto) and his “invention of a portable fresco” (verso). “blake’s chaucer: an original engraving” (1810). an advertisement for and description of his engraving. “chaucers canterbury pilgrims” (1810). the prologue and characters of chaucer’s pilgrims (1812). “a companion and advertisement for blake's large engraving.” hell’s printing press: the blog of the blake archive and blake quarterly. seifert, celeste. “posture parallels in visions of the daughters of albion.” 3 mar. 2023. reflection on the illustrations on the title page and final plate. jones, sarah. “‘then patient wait a little while’: blake comes to the getty.” 15 sept. 2023. an interview with the curators of the getty center exhibition william blake: visionary. “william blake: between imagination and reason.” cocoa: the journal of cornwall contemporary art (25 aug. [2023?]). on the vision of the last judgment (petworth house). wilson, andy. “mike westbrook, phil minton & the lo-fi improvised music ensemble with sue lynch: intimations of a future for blake’s music.” traveller in the evening (5 jan. 2023). part vi: criticism, biography, and reviews a   b   c   d   e   f   g   h   j   k   l   m   n   o   p   r   s   t   v   w   x   y   a ackroyd, peter. blake. london: sinclair-stevenson, 1995. <wbhc pp. 1459-61> i. bir biyografi. trans. burcu alkan. i̇stanbul: alfa yayınları, 2023. isbn: 9786254497452. in turkish. adam, edina, with julian brooks, and an essay by matthew hargraves. william blake: visionary. los angeles: j. paul getty museum, 2020. <blake (2021, 2022, 2023)> after being delayed by covid, the exhibition ran from 17 oct. 2023 to 14 jan. 2024. reviews adamek, pauline. “william blake: visionary at the getty.” arts beat la (n.d.). cushing, james. “illuminations without limit: ‘william blake: visionary’ at the getty.” artillery (2 jan. 2024). friedman, julia. “blake reconsidered.” new criterion (22 dec. 2023). green, dominic. “‘william blake: visionary’ review: a poet and prophet’s exhibition.” wall street journal (18 nov. 2023). herlinger, chris. “william blake la art exhibit explores the boundaries of imagination.” national catholic reporter (30 dec. 2023). “in depicting a well-known biblical narrative of a man beset by suffering and despair, blake’s job is rendered with a cosmic backdrop—​both moving and stirring.” heuer, friderike. “surrealism and subversion at the getty.” oregon artswatch: arts & culture news (24 nov. 2023). many pictures of the blake designs outside of the getty, of the gallery space, and of the works displayed. knight, christopher. “william blake was called a ‘lunatic’ in his lifetime. the getty hails him as a visionary now.” los angeles times (12 dec. 2023). larman, hugo. “william blake: visionary.” blakesociety.org (4 jan. 2024). “impressions of the exhibition.” lutz, carson. “getty center opens ‘william blake: visionary.’” daily trojan (20 oct. 2023). “major william blake exhibition features his america a prophecy.” fine books & collections (26 oct. 2023). mimms, walker. “william blake’s prints tapped the power of a wild mind.” new york times (30 dec. 2023). poznanski, avery. “getty center unveils new exhibition, ‘william blake: visionary.’” daily bruin (17 oct. 2023). a few pictures of the exhibition space itself. rebeggiani, stefano. “getty exhibit reveals a christian visionary who saw art as prophecy.” angelus: always forward newsletter (4 jan. 2024). shepyer, rob. “transgressive transcendence at the getty’s latest exhibit: william blake: visionary.” jankysmooth: music, art and the physics of genre (27 oct. 2023). pictures of the exhibition space. skelley, jack. “revolutionary blake-splaining.” los angeles review of books (4 jan. 2024). “at the risk of blake-splaining, let’s state that the artist directly experienced the imagination (capitalization his) as the engine of this creative resistance: an individual/​universal resurrection rendered in illuminated books of epic prophecies within a vast mytho-system, which were cryptically codified to elude the authorities. experiencing them up close in the getty galleries is emotionally powerful and psychically charging.” smee, sebastian. “this fall, there’s a bounty of great art offerings.” washington post (7 sept. 2023). staff writer. “j. paul getty museum presents ‘william blake: visionary’ exhibition opening on october 17.” santa monica mirror (18 oct. 2023). sweeney, julia. “let’s go to the getty and see the william blake exhibit!” substack (10 nov. 2023). video of the exhibition shot by the actor julia sweeney. vargas, alejandro. “últimos días para ver la exposición william blake: visionary en el getty center.” sopitas (4 jan. 2024). whittaker, jason. “william blake—​visionary.” see whittaker, zoamorphosis, in part v. “william blake’s ghost of a flea.” los angeles county museum on fire (23 oct. 2023). “william blake’s visions on display at the getty.” beverly press park labrea news (18 oct. 2023). curator talks green, tyler. “dorothea lange portraits, william blake.” modern art notes podcast (14 dec. 2023). interview with julian brooks. the blake section begins at 40:25. jones, sarah. “‘then patient wait a little while’: blake comes to the getty.” see william blake archive in part v. § albani, louisa. in search of paradise: william blake at old wyldes, hampstead. london: night bird press, 2023. isbn: 9781739326814. albani, louisa amelia, and david mullin. “in search of paradise: william blake at old wyldes.” see vala. alexander, david. a biographical dictionary of british and irish engravers, 1714–​1820. new haven: yale university press, 2022. <blake (2023)> reviews clayton, tim. print quarterly 40.4 (dec. 2023): 442. jeffares, neil. “the essence of innumerable biographies ….” neil jeffares: fairness, candour & curiosity—​from finance to art history (30 nov. 2021). the review includes a list of entries whose details are contradicted by other sources—​“if [those sources are] wrong, d[avid] a[lexander] needs to say why.” mcevansoneya, philip. irish arts review 39.1 (2022): 126. alhas, hüseyin. “the impact of newspapers on william blake’s the french revolution and ‘tyger.’” hacettepe university journal of faculty of letters 40.1 (2023): 262-73. in english (abstract in turkish and english). alhas delves into the impact of newspapers on blake’s perception of the french revolution, drawing from archival materials. he indicates that the newspapers of the era profoundly influenced blake’s poetic output during the early stages of the french revolution, as evidenced in works such as the french revolution (1791) and “the tyger” (1792–​93). § ankarsjö, magnus. william blake and sex. jefferson, nc: mcfarland, 2023. isbn: 9781476692814. antonielli, arianna. “biografie rivisitate. il caso yeats-ellis.” lea: lingue e letterature d’oriente e d’occidente 12 (2023): 229-56. in italian (abstract in english). antonielli discusses how yeats’s and ellis’s stances toward blake diverged after their joint editorial venture in the works of william blake: poetic, symbolic, and critical (1893). the ensuing works produced by them individually “trace the contours of each editor’s unique approach to william blake’s works, revealing a fascinating tension between mysticism and scholarship” (abstract). armstrong, isobel. “christina rossetti’s sing-song: three illustrators, three readings of image and text.” victorian poetry 60.4 (2022): 547-80. “william blake solved the problem of image and text by attempting to imbricate image and text as nearly as possible so that one becomes the other. [christina] rossetti’s solution was blake-like: tiny images, in soft pencil with dashes of red, heading her handwritten poems and seemingly produced organically from them” (549-50). (the three illustrators of the title are christina rossetti, arthur hughes, and alice boyd.) b baeva, alla. “otechestvennaya opera poslednikh desyatiletiy xx veka v svete vagnerovskikh idey: ‘tiriel’ d. smirnova/​russian opera of the last decades of the twentieth century through wagner’s ideas: tiriel by dmitriy smirnov.” theater. painting. movie. music [theatre. fine arts. cinema. music] 4 (2023): 72-81. in russian (abstract in russian and english). “this work touches upon the issues of music dramaturgy, stylistic solutions, principles of composition, dmitriy smirnov’s work on the libretto, which was based on one of the early, prophetic poems by w. blake, as well as a number of other poems of the english poet and graphic artist” (abstract). baker, samuel, et al. “romanticism and consciousness, revisited : a roundtable discussion.” texas studies in literature and language 65.4 (2023): 422-45. blake is referenced. barnat, dara. “jewish american women poets respond to walt whitman: adrienne rich, alicia ostriker, and marge piercy.” walt whitman and the making of jewish american poetry. iowa city: university of iowa press, 2023. 108-38. there is also a chapter on allen ginsberg, and blake is mentioned in regard to both ostriker and ginsberg. beenstock, zoe. “jerusalem moves west: undoing the hebrew bible in blake’s milton and jerusalem.” european romantic review 34.5 (2023): 609-27. “in his prophetic poems, he undoes the temporal and spatial organization of the hebrew bible, a possibility first explored in milton and then fully achieved in jerusalem, where blake deconstructs the ancient biblical world to rebuild it in modern britain” (abstract). bentley, g. e., jr. “a blake bestiary: animals, birds, fish, insects, and supernatural beings in blake’s words and designs—​part i: blake’s acquaintance with animals.” notes and queries 67.1 (2020): 47-57. on blake’s experience with animals in his life, in the books he owned, and his own depictions of them. it contains a bibliography of scholarly works that address blake’s representations of animals. bentley, g. e., jr. “a blake bestiary—​part ii: blake’s hybrid monsters.” notes and queries 67.1 (2020): 57-71. details blake’s monsters, both animal hybrids and human-animal hybrids. bhadra, pijush. “myth and symbol in yeats and blake: traditional to individual.” journal of cultural research studies 2.2 (2023): 94-105. “both blake and yeats created a dichotomy between symbols of materiality and spirituality in a society which is torn between ‘mythos’ and ‘logos,’ between beliefs and logical proofs” (103). binning, sean, with illustration by sally kindberg. “in conflict with the mainstream: william blake considered as an outsider artist.” see vala. blake/an illustrated quarterly volume 56, number 4 (spring 2023) articles essick, robert n. “blake in the marketplace, 2022.” 4 pars., plus listings. harley, alexis, claire knowles, and chris murray. “prophet against empire? william blake in australia.” 32 pars. “in this essay, we turn to the reception, reproduction, and revisioning of blake in the settler colonies of australia, and we find a blake whose work, mediated through a range of editorial and curatorial lenses, proves unexpectedly amenable to conflicting australian desires both to affirm cultural fealty to england and empire and to refuse it” (par. 1). reviews rovira, james. joseph fletcher, william blake as natural philosopher, 1788–​1795. 14 pars. “i don’t believe that i have invalidated fletcher’s thesis, just that additional work needs to be done before he can be said to have supported his argument” (par. 12). gourlay, alexander s.  john higgs, william blake now; john higgs, william blake vs. the world. 8 pars. “wherever it goes, william blake vs. the world will make friends for blake” (par. 8). volume 57, number 1 (summer 2023) articles ripley, wayne c., with fernando castanedo, hikari sato, hüseyin alhas, and vera serdechnaia. “william blake and his circle: a checklist of scholarship in 2022.” 49 pars., plus listings. calè, luisa. “blake and exhibitions, 2022.” 6 pars., plus listings. oliveira, camila, and jason whittaker. “blake and music, 2022.” 3 pars., plus listings. “if 2021 saw a considerable addition to the corpus of blake settings and tracks inspired by his poetry, 2022 witnessed something of an explosion, with almost a hundred releases recorded from this year alone” (par. 1). volume 57, number 2 (fall 2023) interview effinger, elizabeth, and helen p. bruder. “a conversation with helen bruder.” on the twenty-fifth anniversary of bruder’s william blake and the daughters of albion (1997) and its (and feminism’s) impact on blake studies. articles sherlock, lisa. “william blake’s annotations to milton’s paradise lost: new evidence for attribution.” 17 pars. an important analysis of the handwriting in the victoria university library copy of richard bentley’s 1732 edition of paradise lost that makes a persuasive case that a set of the annotations in the book are by blake: “as shown here, some of blake’s letters to butts written from his cottage at felpham are in a style of handwriting, and signed with a monogram, that share characteristics, some idiosyncratic, with those of the two annotations signed ‘wb’ in the backwell copy of bentley’s edition” (par. 16). for a related article by mark crosby, see blake 57.3. rosso, g. a. “redefining apocalypse in blake studies.” 43 pars. on the confusion between eschatological and apocalyptic in blake studies, with a survey of the use of “apocalypse” in biblical studies and in blake criticism between northrop frye and lucy cogan. there is also a reading of milton in order “to show how recent biblical studies can help clarify blake’s treatment of apocalypse and eschatology” (par. 34). thomson, ian. “william blake’s ‘introduction’ to songs of innocence: the role of the pipe.” 21 pars. focuses on the pipe: “blake’s piper appears to be holding an eighteenth-century clarinet” (par. 10). volume 57, number 3 (winter 2023–24) news eaves, morris, and morton d. paley. “book review editor.” thanking sandy gourlay, the book review editor since 2006, and welcoming sibylle erle into the role. article read, dennis m. “blake’s hervey, thomas butts, and methodism.” 32 pars. on the painting epitome of james hervey’s “meditations among the tombs,” hervey, and butts’s methodism. interview calè, luisa. “william blake’s universe: an interview with david bindman and esther chadwick.” an interview with the curators of the 2024 fitzwilliam museum/​hamburger kunsthalle blake exhibition. discussion crosby, mark. “a copy of richard bentley’s edition of paradise lost in william hayley’s library c. 1802.” 14 pars. in addition to recording an allusion to blake in a previously unpublished 10 jan. 1802 letter from hayley to lady harriet hesketh, crosby distinguishes the provenance of three copies of richard bentley’s edition of paradise lost. the first, now at christ’s college, contains cowper’s bookplate and his annotations; it was never in hayley’s possession. the second had been annotated by ashley cowper (cowper’s uncle), was obtained by hayley through john [johnny] johnson (cowper’s cousin), and, at an unknown date, was passed by hayley to theodora jane cowper (cowper’s cousin). this is probably the copy recorded by william barker as being in cowper’s library in 1800; it is now untraced. the third, now at victoria university library (toronto), has many annotations, including two signed “wb.” it belonged to the banker william backwell and contains his bookplate. the backwell family may have loaned this copy to cowper; after his death it probably went to hayley, who describes a copy with annotations, supplied to cowper by friends, in his preface to cowper’s latin and italian poems of milton (1808). burgess, miranda. rev. of orrin n. c. wang, techno-magism: media, mediation, and the cut of romanticism. see wang, orrin n. c. burt, sean. “alicia suskin ostriker’s feminist poetics: reading biblical poetry as countertheology.” prooftexts 40.1 (2023): 227-47. “this article argues that ostriker’s work as a poet and literary scholar informs her engagement with biblical literature, particularly biblical poetry” (abstract). bushell, sally, julia s. carlson, and damian walford davies. “introduction: romantic cartographies.” romantic cartographies: mapping, literature, culture, 1789–​1832. ed. sally bushell, julia s. carlson, and damian walford davies. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2020. isbn: 9781108459419. 1-24. discusses both cumberland’s an attempt to describe hafod and malkin’s memoir, with references to blake. c calè, luisa. “blake and exhibitions, 2022.” see blake 57.1. calè, luisa. “‘spiritual form’: walter pater’s encounters with william blake.” walter pater and the beginnings of english studies. ed. charles martindale, elizabeth prettejohn, and lene østermark-johansen. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2023. 198-215. “blake is a subterranean presence” in pater (198). calè, luisa. “william blake’s universe: an interview with david bindman and esther chadwick.” see blake 57.3. cazeneuve, elsa. “de l’œil à l’étoile: poétiques du globe chez william blake, william wordsworth et samuel taylor coleridge/ celestial eyes: metaphors of the globe in the works of william blake, william wordsworth and samuel taylor coleridge.” études épistémé. revue de littérature et de civilisation (xvie-xviiie siècles) 43 (2023): 38 pars. in french (abstract in french and english). “this paper proposes the idea that astronomy contributed to structure the perceptive philosophy and poetics of the first romantic generation through the figure of the globe. indeed, celestial spheres came to serve as a metaphor for the eye globe, which in turn symbolized the possibility of renewed or expanded vision” (abstract). chamorro, daniel. “la imaginación y la naturaleza como base sustancial en la poesía del movimiento romántico/ imagination and nature as a substantial basis in the poetry of the romantic movement [sic].” revista hermeneutic 23 (2023): 84-99. in spanish (abstract in spanish and english). reads several romantic poems, including “the tyger,” from the standpoint of maurice bowra’s the romantic imagination. christian, perienne. “‘choicepoint 2023.’” see vala. clayton, tim. rev. of david alexander, a biographical dictionary of british and irish engravers, 1714–​1820. see alexander. cleaver, laura. “george d. smith (1870–​1920), bernard alfred quaritch (1871–​1913), and the trade in medieval european manuscripts in the united states ca. 1890–​1920.” manuscript studies: a journal of the schoenberg institute for manuscript studies 8.1 (2023): 61-94. compares the lives of smith and quaritch and their roles in shaping the holdings of medieval manuscripts in the huntington, morgan, and walters collections. there is only one mention of blake, though both were major blake dealers. collé, nathalie. “author portraits of milton, authorship, and canonization.” global milton and visual art. ed. angelica duran and mario murgia. lanham: lexington books, 2021. isbn: 9781793617064. 141-64. in a wider chapter on portraits of milton, touches on “john milton and his two daughters,” after romney, as well as blake’s portrait of milton for the eighteen heads of poets. colls, robert. rev. of jason whittaker, jerusalem: blake, parry, and the fight for englishness. see whittaker, jerusalem. connolly, tristanne. “human grapes in the wine-presses: vegetable life and the violence of cultivation in blake’s milton.” wild romanticism. ed. markus poetzsch and cassandra falke. abingdon: routledge, 2021. isbn: 9780367496722. 74-90. “in milton, blake purposely leaves unresolved whether the violence of the vintage leads to the transformation of the human grapes or to tragic disaster; he avoids justifying violence by a redeeming result, and recognizes the contingency of all work of cultivation” (76). cooke, stuart. rev. of kate rigby, reclaiming romanticism: towards an ecopoetics of decolonization. see rigby. cooper, andrew m. a bastard kind of reasoning: william blake and geometry. albany: state university of new york press, 2023.incorporates “two or three pages” of cooper’s “small room for judgment” (see next entry) and “material amounting to maybe ten pages” from his william blake and the productions of time (2013). isbn: 9781438493220. an ambitious study of blake and newton that seeks to challenge the relationship expressed in donald ault’s visionary physics (1974). cooper reads the newton print, the vision of the last judgment, and most of the illuminated books in relationship to joseph priestley, david hartley, henry more, george berkeley, and many twentieth-century scientists, providing diagrams to illustrate blake’s cosmological ideas. cooper, andrew m. “small room for judgment: geometry and prolepsis in blake’s ‘infant sorrow.’” european romantic review 31.2 (2020): 129-55. “the extensive typological allusions in blake’s ‘infant sorrow’ (songs of experience) associate swaddling with the establishment of traditional moral-materialist culture based on sacrifice. blake links his culture’s materialism to three-dimensional perspective, which the accompanying design overthrows in accordance with berkeley’s contention that distance exists only in the mind. by setting the poem’s aged speaker and the design’s infant at odds, blake undermines the received relation between these two ‘sister arts’ and enforces a cognitive dissonance that is of apocalyptic intensity. the supercharged political context of 1792–​93 adds further immediacy” (abstract). cranny-francis, anne. jack lindsay: writer, romantic, revolutionary. cham: palgrave macmillan-springer nature, 2024. isbn: 9783031396458. two chapters on lindsay’s work on blake: “william blake, visionary” (35-51) and “william blake, prophet” (297-319). crosby, mark. “a copy of richard bentley’s edition of paradise lost in william hayley’s library c. 1802.” see blake 57.3. crossley, james. “a. l. morton’s english utopia and the critical study of apocalypticism and millenarianism.” religions 14.11 (2023): 14 pp. “this article seeks to re-establish morton’s place in [the british marxist] scholarly tradition, using his work the english utopia as a starting point for understanding the important critical developments taking place in the 1950s” (abstract). some references to morton’s work on blake as well. d davies, keith g. william blake, the single vision, and newton’s sleep: a history of science, poetry, and progress. new york: routledge, 2024. isbn: 9781032459172. “by examining the views of william blake and other poets in the context of twentieth-century philosophers hannah arendt, jacob bronowski, martin heidegger, bruno latour and karl popper, amongst others, the book takes an eclectic approach drawing on examples from biology, history, literature, philosophy and economics, arguing for the reestablishment of imagination as a central attribute of science” (description). review erle, sibylle. see vala. davies, keri. “another engraver in south molton street.” see davies in part v. davies, keri. “the whore next door: william blake’s neighbours in south molton street.” see davies in part v. davis, michael. william blake: a new kind of man. berkeley: university of california press, 2023. uc press voices revived. a reprint of his 1977 biography <bbs p. 449, wbhc pp. 1929-30>. dodd, elizabeth s. “the voice of the lord—​the prophetic spirit in the lyric ‘i.’” the lyric voice in english theology. london: bloomsbury, 2023. t & t clark studies in english theology. isbn: 9780567670304. 95-124. the songs are discussed in the section “i love: the prophetic lyrics of blake’s songs of innocence and experience [sic]” (99-106). donley, kevin reed. “william blake: relief etching.” as if by chance: sketches of disruptive continuity in the age of print from johannes gutenberg to steve jobs. meadville, pa: fulton books, 2023. isbn: 9798889821526. despite the grandiose title, a set of superficial biographical sketches. e eckert, lindsey. rev. of orrin n. c. wang, techno-magism: media, mediation, and the cut of romanticism. see wang, orrin n. c. edmundson, mark. the age of guilt: the super-ego in the online world. new haven: yale university press, 2023. isbn: 9780300265811. the preface likens the superego to blake’s nobodaddy, urizen, and spectre. effinger, elizabeth, and helen p. bruder. “a conversation with helen bruder.” see blake 57.2. eisenman, stephen f. “what’s the use of william blake?” see eisenman in part v. erle, sibylle. “‘and i gave it to my foe’: deadly games of creation in blake’s the [first] book of urizen and ‘a poison tree.’” prudent crossings: from milton’s paradise to canada’s bush gardens. ed. alessandra boller et al. augsburg: wißner-verlag, 2023. 21-38. an important consideration of blake’s depiction of creation and the fall, his use of milton, and urizen’s relationship to satan, with commentary on marriage and “the ancient of days” as well as the poems mentioned in the title. erle, sibylle. “‘eternity is in love with the productions of time.’” see vala. erle, sibylle. rev. of keith g. davies, william blake, the single vision, and newton’s sleep: a history of science, poetry, and progress. see vala. erle, sibylle. “william blake and tate britain’s rehang.” see vala. essick, robert n. “blake in the marketplace, 2022.” see blake 56.4. f fabian, claudia, and béatrice hernad. “showcase—​showtime! künstlerbücher im mittelpunkt.” bibliotheksforum bayern 4 (nov. 2017): 234-37. reproduces the frontispiece and title page of the song of los copy f in an article about the exhibition of artist books at the bayerische staatsbibliothek from sept. 2017 to jan. 2018. fallon, david. “‘a machine is not a man nor a work of art’: adventures with blake and ai.” see vala. fay, elizabeth a. “blake’s mythical interval.” romantic immanence: interventions in alterity, 1780–​1840. albany: state university of new york press, 2023. isbn: 9781438494746. considers marriage, america, urizen, the book of los, milton, and jerusalem, and argues “that blake’s creation story takes place in the interval, a space in which a restless shuttle between egotistical resistance (division, embodied by urizen) and an opening up to realization (unity, figured by los) leads to the prophesied, awakened life (jerusalem).” ferrada aguilar, andrés. “imaginación visionaria y crisis modernas: blake, emerson y whitman.” revista chilena de literatura 103 (2021): 455-79. in spanish (abstract in spanish and english). the article “intends to articulate correspondences between the visionary imagination and the fissures produced by an industrial and protestant modernity in a selection of poems and referential writings by william blake, r. w. emerson, and walt whitman” (abstract). firestone, evan r. “mist and gothicism in british painting.” mist and fog in british and european painting: fuseli, friedrich, turner, monet and their contemporaries. london: lund humphries, 2023. isbn: 9781848225732. 19-57. a chapter on mist, obscurity, the supernatural, and the gothic in the romantic era reproduces blake’s the ghost of samuel appearing to saul, c. 1800 (butlin #458); the temptation and fall of eve, 1807 (butlin #536.9); and milton’s mysterious dream, c. 1816–​20 (butlin #543.11) (titled mysterious dream in the book). the chapter also discusses many members of blake’s circle, most prominently fuseli, but also mortimer, stothard, romney, and maria cosway. blake’s annotations to reynolds are discussed briefly in “conclusion: another look at the sublime” (148). fletcher, joseph. william blake as natural philosopher, 1788–​1795. london: anthem press, 2021. <blake (2022)> review rovira, james. see blake 56.4. freedman, linda. rev. of william blake: modernity and disaster, ed. tilottama rajan and joel faflak. see rajan and faflak. fry, paul h. rev. of chris townsend, george berkeley and romanticism: ghostly language. see townsend. g galperin, william. rev. of the edinburgh companion to romanticism and the arts, ed. maureen mccue and sophie thomas. see mccue and thomas. giardina, elizabeth. “the book of nature: eighteenthand nineteenth-century british poetry and the poetics of earth system design.” phd diss., uc davis, 2023. according to the abstract, there are chapters on erasmus darwin, charlotte smith, blake, and gerard manley hopkins. giorgio, simone. “tradurre la visione: celati, blake, michaux.” griseldaonline 22.1 (2023): 27-40. in italian (abstract in italian and english). the essay explores “gianni celati’s relationship with … william blake and henri michaux. starting from the reproposal of some excerpts of their works on ‘il semplice,’ it is exposed how celati’s interest in these writers is linked to themes such as vision and liberation from social constraints—​two topics variously treated by celati in his works” (abstract). gopalkrishnan, carl. “australia a prophecy.” see blake society in part v. gopalkrishnan, carl. “a field manual for a lost soldier.” see vala. gourlay, alexander s. rev. of john higgs, william blake now and william blake vs. the world. see blake 56.4. graham, brian russell. speech acts in blake’s “milton.” new york: routledge, 2023. isbn: 9781032379180. “a study of blake’s milton, informed by [j. l.] austin, which addresses blake’s poem and speech acts.” günçel, fatma büşra. “william blake’in cennet ile cehennemin evliliği eseri ve coincidentia oppositorum [coincidentia oppositorum in william blake’s the marriage of heaven and hell].” belgü 141 (2023): 141-52. in turkish. h hagberg, garry l. “visual metaphors: on the linguistic structure of hybrid creatures in art.” poetics today 44.4 (2023): 571-88. a section examines the great red dragon and the woman clothed in sun and the ghost of a flea. harley, alexis, claire knowles, and chris murray. “prophet against empire? william blake in australia.” see blake 56.4. hasegawa, akira. den’en toshi to sennen okoku: shukyo kaikaku kara bruno taut e [garden city and the millennium: from religious reformation to bruno taut]. tokyo: kosakusha, 2021. 613 pp. 1 plate by blake. isbn: 9784875025252. in japanese. chapter 4, “igirisu seikimatsu to sinrei shugi [british fin de siècle and spiritualism],” mentions blake and neoplatonism (98). hensher, philip. rev. of jason whittaker, jerusalem: blake, parry, and the fight for englishness. see whittaker, jerusalem. heringman, noah. “william blake, the ballad revival, and the deep past of poetry.” deep time: a literary history. princeton: princeton university press, 2023. isbn: 9780691235790. 120-75. considers blake’s notion of deep time in relationship to the eighteenth-century ballad revival and especially to joseph ritson’s a select collection of english songs (1783), with a focus on the “introduction” and “earth’s answer” from the songs of experience and on the “contact zone between geology and prehistory” (169) in milton and jerusalem. there are also comparisons between blake and herder. higgs, john. william blake vs. the world. london: weidenfeld & nicolson, 2021. <blake (2022, 2023)> reviews ayjay. “blake domesticated.” homebound symphony (11 feb. 2023). “john higgs’s william blake vs. the world is a real disappointment. higgs writes vividly and is a fine storyteller, but like most people who write about blake, he’s simply not willing to take blake seriously. he wants to like blake, and so he has to make him safe.” chatterjee, tayana. “poet, mystic, madman.” telegraph online (2 sept. 2022). “higgs manages to neatly place what was thought to be the frenzy of a madman into the realms of modern science and comparative religion.” gourlay, alexander s. see blake 56.4. scharper, diane. “what sort of visionary was william blake?” washington examiner (29 apr. 2022). a summary of the book and a short biography of blake. spinozablue. “william blake vs. the world, by john higgs.” spinozablue (13 jan. 2023). higuchi, hiroyuki. kyofu no bigaku: naze hito wa zokuzoku shitainoka [aesthetics of horror: why do people want to be frightened?]. tokyo: atelier third, 2022. 311 pp. 3 plates by blake. isbn: 9784883754823. in japanese. blake is briefly discussed in the context of gothic revivals in chapter 6, “kyofu no bijutsukan [a museum of horror]” (143-49). hindrichsen, lorenz. “‘when i’m 73 and in constant good tumour’: poetic responses to ageing from jenny joseph to fleur adcock.” polish journal of english studies 9.2 (2023): 108-27. includes a section on “the ecchoing green” (110-13): “text and image, then, promote a collective ‘laughing away’ of old age through echoes of spring associated with the young” (112). hinds, rasheed martin. “towards regeneration: william blake’s prophetic visions of black atlantic.” “kingdoms becoming: dialectic of black romanticism.” phd diss., city university of new york, 2023. 135-205. considers representations of africans and revolution in blake’s works. howard-saunders, josh. “building william blake’s printing press.” christ church library newsletter 11.1-3 (2019–​20): 11-14. an account of the construction of the replica of blake’s star-wheel rolling press, now at rice university, houston. see also michael phillips’s “william blake’s rolling press at christ church” for how the designs were created, and alexander regier’s global blake presentation for why and how the press was moved to rice. hristova, rumyana, with illustration by emanuela kovach. “blake’s divine vision and the mental fight.” see vala. hudson, jake. “augury of innocence.” see vala. j jeffares, neil. rev. of david alexander, a biographical dictionary of british and irish engravers, 1714–​1820. see alexander. jones, mark. rev. of jason whittaker, jerusalem: blake, parry, and the fight for englishness. see whittaker, jerusalem. k karakuzu, melih, and özlem sayar. “a comparative analysis of the conditions in the romantic and victorian ages and their reflection in the poems, ‘the chimney sweeper’ (1789, 1794), by william blake, and ‘the cry of the children’ by elizabeth barrett browning.” cogito 8.4 (2016): 105-09. “aims to compare the stated poems of these poets in terms of child labor, social and family relationships, and religion” (abstract). kim, joey s. “disorienting romanticism: william blake’s orientalist poetics.” romanticism and the poetics of orientation. edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2023. isbn: 9781399511254. author talk sangster, matthew. “five questions: joey s. kim on romanticism and the poetics of orientation.” see british association for romantic studies in part v. kim, joey s. “a series of digital research discoveries.” eighteenth-century fiction 33.1 (fall 2020): 107-09. describes encountering the blake archive as an undergraduate and how her experiences with it and digital resources like it affected teaching during the covid-19 pandemic. l la berge, leigh claire. “intermezzo 2. the tiger-tyger dialectic.” marx for cats: a radical bestiary. durham: duke university press, 2023. considers romantic-era tigers through a marxist lens. lachman, gary. dark muse: occult star retsuden [a dark muse: the lives of occultists]. trans. kazu tanigawa. tokyo: kokusho kankokai, 2023. 483 pp. isbn: 9784336075161. in japanese. a translation of the dedalus book of the occult: a dark muse (sawtry: dedalus, 2003). blake is discussed in the first section, “keimo jidai no occultism [occultism in the age of enlightenment]” (94-102). lahikainen, amanda. rev. of joseph monteyne, media critique in the age of gillray: scratches, scraps, and spectres. see monteyne. lam, collin d. “the melancholic collective: rousseau, blake, and the romantic community.” “sorrow worlds: romantic melancholy and the condition of history.” phd diss., state university of new york at binghamton, 2023. reads blake’s los and albion in relationship to rousseau’s social contract. larman, hugo. “drawing from william blake in a time of war.” see vala. lee, tara. “vital heat and the organized body: burke, blake, the french revolution and the [first] book of urizen.” european romantic review 34.5 (2023): 527-48. “this article puts blake in intimate dialogue with burke, sieyès, and other revolutionary and reactionary writers who evocatively updated the body politic metaphor to describe a radically changing political landscape” (abstract). leporati, matthew. “emanuel swedenborg’s conjugial love and the erotic politics of william blake’s epics.” european romantic review 34.4 (2023): 397-421. “situating milton and jerusalem in the epic revival of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, the article argues that blake’s incorporation and revision of swedenborgian ideas help him to challenge some forms of misogynistic, militaristic politics that writers of blake’s day were supporting with appeals to the classical and miltonic epic traditions” (abstract). leporati, matthew. “‘mark well my words! they are of your eternal salvation’: william blake’s milton as missionary against empire.” romantic epics and the mission of empire. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2023. isbn: 9781009285186. 183-224. “in exploring the power of art to promote a freedom from selfhood, blake is subverting the tendency of christian evangelism, along with the secular civilizing mission, to reify the dichotomy between self and other upon which imperialism is largely predicated” (219). leporati, matthew. “there’s lots of blake in finnegans wake: james joyce’s adaptation of jerusalem.” see global blake in part v. lerner, edwin john. jerusalem: the story of a song. alresford: chronos books-john hunt publishing, 2022. isbn: 9781803411040. an account of “jerusalem” and its reception. review murray-white, james. see murray-white in part v. lindsann, olchar e. two cities: on carcosa and golgonooza. monocle-lash anti-press, 2018. a rhapsodic comparison of blake’s golgonooza and carcosa, an ancient city in ambrose bierce’s story “an inhabitant of carcosa.” linkin, harriet kramer. “the destabilizing materiality of the autograph for blake, coleridge, and tighe.” material transgressions: beyond romantic bodies, genders, things. ed. kate singer, ashley cross, and suzanne l. barnett. liverpool: liverpool university press, 2020. 31-52. “blake, coleridge, and tighe deliberately disrupt the potential erasures effected by commercial print through the destabilizing materiality of their hand-imprinted signatures” (33). löchle, dieter. “warships into friendships.” see vala. § luckow, almuth. die gottesbilder des william blake: kunst und philosophie. darmstadt: wbg academic, 2021. isbn: 9783534405701. in german. on blake’s representation of god, according to the publisher’s description. lussier, mark. “a return to william blake’s visionary physics: or what defines ‘sweet science’?” see global blake in part v. m makdisi, saree. “afterword: palestine is everywhere.” studies in romanticism 62.2 (2023): 311-16. “blake’s vision of building jerusalem in england—​in lines that are repeated in song to this very day—​may be the best known of these references to palestine in romanticism, but they are in a sense the exception that proves the rule. for if most gestures to palestine at the time and through the nineteenth century see it as a blank space that could simply be appropriated, blake’s interests actually lie in england, not in palestine itself ” (312). mann, annika. rev. of rosalind powell, perception and analogy: poetry, science, and religion in the eighteenth century. see powell. manwaring, kevan. “drawing blake.” see vala. marchetto santorun, m. cecilia. “william blake in spanish popular culture and literature.” weaving tales: anglo-iberian encounters on literatures in english. ed. paula garcía-ramírez, beatriz valverde, angélica varandas, and jason whittaker. new york: routledge, 2023. isbn: 9781032447681. 18-31. an important overview of blake’s reception in different regions of spain. marks, rebecca. “‘organs of embodied sentiment’: contextualising william blake’s sistine studies c. 1770–​1790.” see global blake in part v. marland, pippa. rev. of kate rigby, reclaiming romanticism: towards an ecopoetics of decolonization. see rigby. marley, jodie lorna. “the mystic communities of william blake and w. b. yeats: shared spiritual influences and legacies.” phd diss., university of nottingham, 2023. “both william blake’s and w. b. yeats’ work is indebted to and driven by their spiritual convictions. their engagement with the mystic and the esoteric within their social circles is mirrored across time. my thesis aims to make the case that the sources of these authors’ mysticisms, and their engagement with mystic spirituality in a community context impacted both blake’s, and yeats’ critical and cultural reception” (abstract). there are also chapters on dorothy gott and joanna southcott. marley, jodie, with illustration by richard hemmings. “vegetable eyes.” see vala. mauger, matthew. william blake and the visionary law: prophecy, legislation and constitution. cham: palgrave macmillan-springer nature, 2023. isbn: 9783031377228. a study of blake’s notion of law in eternity that seeks to temper antinomian readings of blake. examines most of blake’s prophetic poetry, as well as marriage and the songs. mccue, maureen, and sophie thomas, eds. the edinburgh companion to romanticism and the arts. edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2023. isbn: 9781474484176. a collection of essays examining british romanticism and the visual arts. only the chapters that address blake directly are listed below. other essays related to blake’s circle or exhibition practices are listed in cultures and technologies of display and exhibition in division ii. garner, katie. “the gothic aesthetic: word and image.” 40-57. touches on blake’s illustrations to blair (52-54) in a discussion of the visual in the gothic. myrone, martin. “exhibitions culture, consumerism and the romantic artist.” 184-200. “i would propose that the phenomenon of exhibitions culture helped institute a structurally precarious, inherently competitive and individualist artistic field, revealing a still larger set of transformations accompanying social, economic and political modernization” (189). positions blake in this context (197-98), with references to the royal academy, reynolds, fuseli, boydell, macklin, bowyer, romney, and barry. grande, james. “sound and vision in blake’s london.” 237-54. considers “the relationship between the arts” (238) in blake’s works, highlighting depictions of music and musical instruments in his work and in biographical sketches of him. matthews, susan. “illustrated poetry in the romantic period.” 356-73. on the relative novelty of the idea of “illustrations” in the romantic period, with references to blake’s illustrations to gray and young, as well as stothard, fuseli, boydell, and charlotte malkin. engel, laura. “fashioning the female artist: allegory and celebrity in lady diana beauclerk’s watercolours of the faerie queene.” 374-90. in addition to analyzing beauclerk’s watercolors (c. 1781) and bartolozzi’s engraving of her portrait of the artist’s daughters, mary and elizabeth, reading a book (c. 1780), looks at the comparison by the british critic between beauclerk’s and blake’s illustrations for bürger’s leonora. whittaker, jason. “romantic caricature and comics.” 471-85. on romantic caricature’s contribution to modern comics, closing on blake’s depiction in comics (479-85). review galperin, william. review 19 (19 may 2023). author talk “state of the arts: reframing the visual in romantic period studies.” see british association for romantic studies in part v. mcevansoneya, philip. rev. of david alexander, a biographical dictionary of british and irish engravers, 1714–​1820. see alexander. mcgann, jerome. “byron, blake, and the adversity of poetics.” byron and the poetics of adversity. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2023. 119-53. “oddly but, as we shall see, truly, while each worked from a different english lexicon—​blake’s religious and even theological, byron’s secular and enlightened—​they shared certain important ideas that skewed them from what their age demanded” (119). mclaughlin, jeff. “the crooked roads of genius: william blake and educational psychology.” literary imagination and professional knowledge: using literature in teacher education. ed. jeff mclaughlin. gorham, me: myers education press, 2023. isbn: 9781975505301. “the writings of william blake contain many examples of poetry and prose that could be connected to concepts of educational psychology.” mezquita fernández, maría antonia. “análisis de los contrarios en la poesía de william blake y claudio rodríguez/​analysing contraries in the works of william blake and claudio rodríguez.” ogigia: revista electrónica de estudios hispánicos 34 (2023): 77-97. in spanish (abstract in spanish and english). milnes, timothy. rev. of chris townsend, george berkeley and romanticism: ghostly language. see townsend. moloney, francis j. rev. of christopher rowland, “by an immediate revelation”: studies in apocalypticism, its origins and effects. see rowland. monteyne, joseph. media critique in the age of gillray: scratches, scraps, and spectres. toronto: university of toronto press, 2022. <blake (2023)> review lahikainen, amanda. art bulletin 104 (2022): 123-26. “in his close reading of william blake’s the first book of urizen (1794), especially the end of the first chapter, monteyne argues that embedded media in two depictions of open books reclaim materiality and visual exploration, interpolating in a scholarly consensus largely dominated by investigations of word/​image relationships and spirituality” (125). morley, simon. modern painting: a concise history. london: thames & hudson, 2023. isbn: 9780500204894. considers “albion rose,” with some comparison to goya’s saturn devouring his son. mugleston, charles. “unity.” see vala. murray-white, james. rev. of jason whittaker, jerusalem: blake, parry, and the fight for englishness, and edwin john lerner, jerusalem: the story of a song. see murray-white in part v. n ness, richard. “vibrant meter: periods, pulsations, and prosody in blake’s milton.” european romantic review 34.6 (2023): 711-33. “this article argues that milton’s metrical experiments are essential for understanding the poem’s strange temporal frameworks” (abstract). newton, a. edward. “works of william blake.” the uncollected a. edward newton. ed. joseph rosenblum. new castle, de: oak knoll press, 2017. 50-52. rpt. of newton’s review of the 1926 philadelphia exhibition in the pennsylvania museum bulletin vol. 21, no. 103: 162-65 <bb #2284, wbhc p. 1099>. o onodera, reiko. kaiga wa shosetsu yorimo ki nari: 18 seiki to 19 seiki no igirisu kaiga wo yomu [paintings are stranger than fiction: a reading of british paintings in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries]. tokyo: arina shobo, 2022. 322 pp. 14 plates by blake. isbn: 9784756622822. in japanese. the author gives it another title, “pictura novior est quam fabula: legere picturas britannicas in saeculis xviii et xix.” chapter 2, “soshoku no yorokobi: william blake to chusei saishoku shahon [decorative joy: william blake and illuminated manuscripts in the middle ages],” discusses songs of innocence, illustrations to night thoughts, illuminated manuscripts, and the kelmscott press (43-80). p pacitti, diane, and antonio pacitti. “auguries of war and peace.” see vala. peh, li qi. “stedman’s horror, blake’s indifference.” elh 90.2 (2023): 367-91. argues that “stedman’s narrative both dramatizes and complicates” “readerly experiences of horror,” and that blake “dampens these emotions, making it such that the reader does not experience horror too intensely” so that “the reader retains the emotional space necessary to plot out future courses of political action.” perris, jonathan. “god lives in the sun: the critique of evangelical abolitionism in william blake’s ‘the little black boy.’” european romantic review 34.6 (2023): 629-45. “the essay argues that blake’s poem speaks not with conventional abolitionist rhetoric, nor with oft-suggested ambiguity, inconsistency, or racism, but rather with intense criticism of the eurocentric evangelical discourse that came to inform abolitionist campaigns and of the resultant african-european voice constructed in texts such as the interesting narrative [of olaudah equiano]” (abstract). phillips, michael. “william blake’s rolling press at christ church.” christ church library newsletter 11.1-3 (2019–​20): 8-11. an account of how the design for the replica of blake’s printing press was created. the press is now at rice university, houston. see also josh howard-saunders’s “building william blake’s printing press” for an account of its construction, and alexander regier’s global blake presentation for why and how the press was moved to rice. pinheiro de sousa, alcinda, and jason whittaker. “urizen now: reading anew william blake’s response to his times.” weaving tales: anglo-iberian encounters on literatures in english. ed. paula garcía-ramírez, beatriz valverde, angélica varandas, and jason whittaker. new york: routledge, 2023. isbn: 9781032447681. 1-17. on how to read blake’s works: “blake himself seems very strongly as an author to invite engaged and dialectical readings of his works” (13). powell, rosalind. “perception and the body.” perception and analogy: poetry, science, and religion in the eighteenth century. manchester: manchester university press, 2021. <blake (2022)> review mann, annika. eighteenth-century fiction 35.3 (2023): 428-31. pritchard, stephen, with illustration by john riordan. “just war?” see vala. r rajan, tilottama, and joel faflak, eds. william blake: modernity and disaster. toronto: university of toronto press, 2020. <blake (2021, 2022, 2023)> review freedman, linda. university of toronto quarterly 92.3 (2023): 338-40. “the reader might not agree with everything they find here, but this volume is provocative, wide ranging, and interesting: an intellectually curious and critically ambitious contribution to blake studies” (339-40). rauser, amelia. the age of undress: art, fashion, and the classical ideal in the 1790s. new haven: yale university press, 2020. in a book reading the white muslin dress of the 1790s as an embodiment of neoclassicism, there is discussion of blake’s engraving of george cumberland’s design of cupid and psyche in thoughts on outline (81-82); flaxman’s and cumberland’s neoclassical aesthetics (109-10); and many of romney’s portraits. read, dennis m. “blake’s hervey, thomas butts, and methodism.” see blake 57.3. regier, alexander. exorbitant enlightenment: blake, hamann, and anglo-german constellations. oxford: oxford university press, 2018. <blake (2019, 2020, 2023)> review spalovszky, csaba józsef. anachronist 21.2 (2023): 277-84. regier, alexander. “printing blake in texas: the story of a replica of william blake’s printing press.” see global blake in part v. reid, joshua. “gender, nature, and desire in dalí’s paradise lost.” global milton and visual art. ed. angelica duran and mario murgia. lanham: lexington books, 2021. isbn: 9781793617064. 199-223. some comparison of dalí’s illustrations of paradise lost with blake’s. richman, jared s. “blake’s visionary temporalities: disability and form in milton a poem.” see global blake in part v. rigby, kate. “‘the wrong dream’: prophetic ecopoetics.” reclaiming romanticism: towards an ecopoetics of decolonization. london: bloomsbury academic, 2020. <blake (2023)> reviews cooke, stuart. australian literary studies 36.1 (2021): 1-5. marland, pippa. worldviews: global religions, culture, and ecology 26.3 (2022): 281-84. “what makes rigby’s book so boldly original is the way in which she puts poetry from the late 18th and early 19th centuries into dialogue with 20th and 21st century works, the latter written in a post-colonial consciousness and in a time of increasing environmental crisis” (282). somervell, tess. european romantic review 33.1 (2022): 67-72. riordan, john. “blake/​morrison.” see vala. ripley, wayne c. “‘how dye do neighbour?’: stephen horncastle in relationship to blake’s family, neighbours, and circle.” see global blake in part v. ripley, wayne c. rev. of jason whittaker, divine images: the life and work of william blake. see whittaker, divine. ripley, wayne c., with fernando castanedo, hikari sato, hüseyin alhas, and vera serdechnaia. “william blake and his circle: a checklist of scholarship in 2022.” see blake 57.1. rocco, emilia di. “‘homer has nothing so sublime!’: ugolino tra illuminismo e romanticismo.” strumenti critici 38.1 (2023): 73-90. in italian (online abstract in english). “this article explores the reception history of the story of ugolino in dante’s inferno from the enlightenment to romanticism. the analysis focuses on the relationship between literature and the arts in the works of jonathan richardson, joshua reynolds, johann jakob bodmer, lord byron, and william blake” (abstract). rogers, annise. “the edge of human experience: blake and tolkien’s art.” see blake society in part v. rose, aimee. “augury of innocence.” see vala. rosso, g. a. “redefining apocalypse in blake studies.” see blake 57.2. rovira, james. rev. of joseph fletcher, william blake as natural philosopher, 1788–​1795. see blake 56.4. rowland, christopher. “william blake, apocalyptic poet and painter.” “by an immediate revelation”: studies in apocalypticism, its origins and effects. tübingen [germany]: mohr siebeck, 2022. <blake (2023)> review moloney, francis j. catholic biblical quarterly 85.2 (2023): 374-77. “the wide availability of this collection from a leading authority on the origins and effects of apocalypticism is a significant contribution to our understanding of early christianity, and a reminder to all who preach the gospel to listen to its call for the suffering and marginalized” (377). rubel, william ilan. “‘the eye altering alters all’: optics, haptics, and ecological modernity in alfred north whitehead and romanticism.” process studies 52.1 (2023): 9-27. “blake, more than shelley, strikes me as the poet who resonates with the idea everywhere implicit in whitehead’s writings: that social transformation is only possible in poiesis, or in a mode of attention that undoes the perceptual chains and ‘mind-forg’d manacles’ (blake, ‘london’) of modern epistemic regimes” (10). s sánchez tierraseca, mónica. “evocando golgonooza: representaciones contemporáneas de la ciudad mítica de william blake/​re-enacting golgonooza: contemporary representations of william blake’s mythical city.” ausart 10.2 (2022): 173-87. in spanish (abstract in spanish and english). “in contrast to the supposed objectivity that topographers try to determine, artistic cartography is a useful way to come closer to understanding the mythical universe of william blake and his archetypal city” (abstract). saral, ramazan. “mythopoeia as a means of reevaluating human history in the works of william blake.” phd diss., ege university, 2023. in english (abstract in english and turkish). “in this doctoral dissertation, the works called minor prophecies by william blake, one of the most important poets of the english romantic period, who left his mark on 18th and 19th century english literature will be read as a means to re-evaluate the perception of history through mythopoeia” (abstract). saral, ramazan. “self-doubt.” see vala. sato, hikari. “jugaku bunsho, ‘sotsugyo ronbun william blake no jerusalem kenkyu’ no haikei: naze blake wo bukkyo no kotoba de katattanoka [on the background of bunsho jugaku, ‘graduation thesis: a study of jerusalem by william blake’: why did he discuss blake in buddhist terms?]” kojitsuan [sunward cottage] 6 (2023): 1-9. in japanese. bunsho jugaku (1900–​92), a blake scholar, made a comparative study of blake and buddhism in his graduation thesis in 1923, inspired by muneyoshi yanagi and pierre berger. sato, hikari. “oe kenzaburo ‘atarashii hito yo mezameyo’ nioite saisozo sareru william blake/​william blake re-created in rouse up o young men of the new age by kenzaburo oe.” hikaku bungaku/​journal of comparative literature 65 (2023): 7-21. in japanese, with english synopsis. 1 plate by blake. the narrator (“i”) in rouse up o young men of the new age!, an enthusiastic reader of blake and the father of a brain-damaged son, discusses the sorrow of birth, referring to the book of thel and the third stanza from “to tirzah.” he also introduces the reader to the design on plate 76 of jerusalem, giving the text on plate 96 as though it were a dialogue between jesus and albion drawn on plate 76. comparing himself to the aged jesus and his son to young albion, the narrator reads blake, not in blake’s context but in the context of his own personal life. oe re-creates blake for his profound story of a father, his disabled son, family, and society. sato, hikari. “oe kenzaburo no william blake: manabi hogushi no katei wo saguru [william blake in kenzaburo oe: a process of unlearning].” yuriika: shi to hihyo: sotokushu oe kenzaburo 1935–​2023/​eureka: poetry and criticism: kenzaburo oe 1935–​2023 special issue 55.10 (2023): 594-603. in japanese. oe read blake under the guidance of the books by mona wilson, geoffrey keynes, kathleen raine, david v. erdman, e. p. thompson, and donald ault in the 1980s, although he did not have sufficient knowledge of blake in the 1960s. the argument on forgiveness in “‘tsumi no yurushi’ no aokusa [green grass for ‘forgiveness of sin’]” (1984), one of his short stories, is hinted at not only by blake’s text but also by the phrase “the indestructibility of human existence as epiphany,” which mircea eliade wrote in his diary and which oe says left a deep impression on him. oe learns and unlearns blake according to his own interpretation. saunders, clare broome. “‘a larger vision’: william blake, phoebe anna traquair, and the visual imagination in ebb’s sonnets from the portuguese.” victorian poetry 60.4 (2022): 521-45. “traquair’s illustrations for sonnets from the portuguese expose striking connections between blake’s work and [elizabeth barrett browning’s] sonnet sequence, illuminating the ways in which ebb develops and refines blake’s celebration of excess and the visual imagination” (522). schäfer, wiebke katharina. “text and picture in three pairs of william blake’s companion pieces in the song [sic] of innocence and of experience (copy t).” refractions. göttinger schriften zur englischen philologie. ed. frauke reitemeier. vol. 15. göttingen: universitätsverlag göttingen, 2022. 183-250. comparisons of the two “chimney sweeper” poems, the two “holy thursday” poems, and “infant joy” and “infant sorrow.” schierenbeck, daniel d. rev. of jason whittaker, jerusalem: blake, parry, and the fight for englishness. see whittaker, jerusalem. schuchard, marsha keith. “the peculiar alchemical research of john flaxman, charles augustus tulk, and fabian wrede ekenstam (1776–​1818).” heredom: the transactions of the scottish rite research society 29 (2021): 96-132. argues that “though flaxman’s biographers have been unaware of his alchemical involvement, evidence for his collaboration and that of his wife nancy survives in the unpublished correspondence and book marginalia of tulk and [fabian wrede] ekenstam” (96). in addition to these figures, there are references to blake, moravianism, swedenborg and later swedenborgians (particularly augustus nordenskjöld), and thomas taylor. schuchard, marsha keith. “text books for innocence: moravian-swedenborg infant education and william blake’s songs of innocence and experience [sic].” studies in romanticism 62.3 (fall 2023): 405-34. “in the 1780s and 90s, william blake and his wife catherine shared the radical, often esoteric theories of moravian-swedenborgian pedagogy with an international network of mystical freemasons, and he produced illustrated (illuminated) songs and poems to express their notions of infant education” (406). şentürk uzun, neslihan. “negative theology, random profanity, and subversive semiotics in william blake’s the marriage of heaven and hell.” world language studies 3.2 (2023): 131-49. in english (abstract in english and turkish). examines the marriage of heaven and hell within the context of its exploration of language and semiotic paradigms during the romantic period. it highlights blake’s deliberate subversion of traditional linguistic and religious norms, particularly through techniques such as “negative theology” and “random profanity,” which challenge conventional semiotic frameworks. drawing parallels with the semiotic theories of st. augustine and c. s. peirce, the paper emphasizes blake’s departure from fixed sign methodologies and his alignment with peirce’s dynamic triadic model of signification, ultimately demonstrating how blake’s disruptive linguistic position fosters interpretations that are profound and subversive. sherlock, lisa. “william blake’s annotations to milton’s paradise lost: new evidence for attribution.” see blake 57.2. shuting, sun. “william blake’s ‘the little vagabond’ and organized religion.” international journal of english literature and social sciences 5.2 (2020): 478-84. “an analysis of william blake’s poem ‘the little vagabond’ from the angle of blake’s views on organized religion” (abstract). § sly, gordon cameron. “songs and proverbs of william blake.” britten’s donne, hardy and blake songs: cyclic design and meaning. woodbridge: boydell press, 2023. isbn: 9781783277711. solecki, sam. “william blake: what is an ‘etruscan’ doing in ‘an island in the moon’ (1784–​85)?” the etruscans in the modern imagination. montreal and kingston: mcgill-queen’s university press, 2022. isbn: 9780228014638. 61-66. in a book on the reception of etruscans, the short chapter on blake highlights his work for josiah wedgwood’s etruria hall, etruscan column in island, and the “hetrurians” in a descriptive catalogue. there are also chapters on winckelmann’s discussion of the etruscans in his history of the art of antiquity (1764) and on william hamilton’s collection of etruscan, greek, and roman antiquities (1766–​77), wedgwood’s etruscan pottery, and erasmus darwin’s references to wedgwood’s etruria and the etruscans in the botanic garden. somervell, tess. rev. of kate rigby, reclaiming romanticism: towards an ecopoetics of decolonization. see rigby. spalovszky, csaba józsef. rev. of alexander regier, exorbitant enlightenment: blake, hamann, and anglo-german constellations. see regier. spooner, catherine. “my friend the devil: gothic comics, the whimsical macabre and rewriting william blake in vehlmann and kerascoët’s satania.” gothic studies 25.3 (2023): 318-34. “i propose that fabien vehlmann and kerascoët’s graphic novel satania (2016) extends the whimsical macabre in new directions, by drawing on the work of romantic poet and artist william blake, whose illustrated books are often cited as forerunners of modern comics” (abstract). stead, evanghelia. “first steps in britain.” goethe’s “faust i” outlined: moritz retzsch’s prints in circulation. leiden: brill, 2023. isbn: 9789004518551. on the british reception of friedrich august moritz retzsch’s illustrations to faust. the first section of the chapter highlights the role of henry crabb robinson in their dissemination (having been given the work by friedrich christoph perthes, the publisher of robinson’s german biographical sketch of blake), robinson’s comparison of the designs to john flaxman’s work, and flaxman’s own reaction to the designs, with references to blake. stepanova, angelina. “rodnye dushi: d. n. smirnov i u. bleyk (pamyati d. n. smirnova) [soul mates: d. n. smirnov and w. blake (in memory of d. n. smirnov)].” muzyka i vremya [music and time] 9 (2023): 37-41. in russian. the author considers the reception of blake by dmitri smirnov (1948–​2020), a translator and musician who created his first two operas based on blake’s poems and translated blake’s works into russian; smirnov created his own view of the works. stepanyan, milena. “perevody na russkiy yazyk stikhotvoreniy uil'yama bleyka ‘the little boy found,’ ‘the little boy lost’/​ translations of william blake’s verses ‘the little boy found’ and ‘the little boy lost’ into russian.” problemy yazyka i perevoda v trudakh molodykh uchenykh [language and translation issues in the works of young scientists] 22 (2023): 217-23. in russian (abstract in russian and english). the author considers strategies of such translators as s. marshak, v. toporov, and g. dashevsky, and comes to the conclusion that dashevsky’s translation is the most accurate one. sugimata, mihoko. irasuto de yomu kiso no gaka tachi [artists of fancy with illustrations]. 2014. b. new ed. tokyo: kawade shobo shinsha, 2023. 127 pp. 13 plates by blake. in japanese. chapter 2, “kiso no gaka tachi [artists of fancy],” gives a short introduction to blake (82-91). szwydky, lissette lopez. “visual and textual adaptations in literature and fine art forms.” transmedia adaptation in the nineteenth century. columbus: ohio state university press, 2020. isbn: 9780814214237. 97-137. discusses blake’s engravings for stedman and his illustrations of other authors (young, gray, milton, and dante). also addresses the literary galleries of boydell and macklin, with a few comments on fuseli’s illustrations of shakespeare. t tanaka, minne. “copy de original wo seisaku suru gijutsu: chohanshi william blake no kakushinteki romanshugi [the arts of creating the original by copying: revolutionary romanticism of william blake engraver].” igirisu romanha kenkyu/​essays in english romanticism 46 (2022): 41-45. in japanese. tarabanova, dar'ya. “‘kniga urizena’ u. bleyka kak videnie: traditsiya i novatorstvo/​william blake’s the book of urizen as a vision: tradition and innovation.” stephanos 2.58 (2023): 177-84. in russian (abstract in russian and english). “the article studies william blake’s approach to the genre of vision and its conventions, viewing blake as a romantic poet and the creator of his own mythopoetic universe. … blake rejects the traditional didactic pathos of visions …. in his poem blake rather condemns and warns,” turning instead to “the prophetic books of the old testament” (abstract). tebourski, ines. “symmetry/​assymetry in william blake’s companion poems.” see global blake in part v. thomson, ian. “william blake’s ‘introduction’ to songs of innocence: the role of the pipe.” see blake 57.2. townsend, chris. “spiritual bodies and mental reality in blake.” george berkeley and romanticism: ghostly language. oxford: oxford university press, 2022. <blake (2023)> reviews fry, paul h. wordsworth circle 54.4 (2023): 446-52. milnes, timothy. review of english studies 74 (2023): 575-77. “occasionally a monograph comes along that so adroitly fills a gap in our knowledge of romanticism that one’s first reaction is surprise that the gap was not noticed earlier. chris townsend’s fine study, george berkeley and romanticism: ghostly language, is such a book” (575). trucco, marco. “la idea de naturaleza en william blake.” saga. revista de letras 16 (2022): 22-51. in spanish (abstract in spanish and english). v vala: the journal of the blake society issue 4 (nov. 2023) articles erle, sibylle. “‘eternity is in love with the productions of time.’” 4-7. on moments in blake’s life and art tied to war and peace. larman, hugo. “drawing from william blake in a time of war.” 8-13. larman’s drawings and his reflections on them. gopalkrishnan, carl. “a field manual for a lost soldier.” 14-27. a “visual essay” inspired by the marriage of heaven and hell. fallon, david. “‘a machine is not a man nor a work of art’: adventures with blake and ai.” 28-33. experiments in getting ai to produce blakean poetry and images. albani, louisa amelia, and david mullin. “in search of paradise: william blake at old wyldes.” 34-39. about the new book in search of paradise: william blake at old wyldes, hampstead. worrall, david, with illustration by rob davis. “spying for blake: anthony blunt, war and cold war.” 40-47. on blunt’s activities as a soviet spy. löchle, dieter. “warships into friendships.” 48-53. on his drawings of battleships. manwaring, kevan. “drawing blake.” 54-58. on his blake comic. rose, aimee. “augury of innocence.” 59. artwork. vernon, mark. “‘wars of love’: william blake, christian idealism, and the way from despair to life.” 60-66. considers blake’s ideas of forgiveness, selfhood, and divinity. marley, jodie, with illustration by richard hemmings. “vegetable eyes.” 67. poem. christian, perienne. “‘choicepoint 2023.’” 68-69. “the drawing ‘choicepoint 2023’ describes a visionary state i entered into on a train journey up to london. i was shown two distinct ways forward for humanity. one organic and one ai” (69). saral, ramazan. “self-doubt.” 70-71. poem. hristova, rumyana, with illustration by emanuela kovach. “blake’s divine vision and the mental fight.” 72-74. “today, the main war we are confronted with is the invisible war for human consciousness” (74). hudson, jake. “augury of innocence.” 75. artwork. whittaker, jason, with illustration by tamsin rosewell. “ascend from felpham’s vale: blake, ‘jerusalem,’ and felpham.” 76-85. excerpted from jerusalem: blake, parry, and the fight for englishness (oxford university press, 2022). mugleston, charles. “unity.” 86-87. a tribute to peter brook (1925–​2022). riordan, john. “blake/​morrison.” 88-96. on blake in the work of comic book writer grant morrison. binning, sean, with illustration by sally kindberg. “in conflict with the mainstream: william blake considered as an outsider artist.” 97-99. “so my suggestion is, that blake was not always an outsider artist but that profound creative conflict forced him to become one” (99). whitson, roger. “blake reprinted.” 100-04. his experience of printing michael phillips’s replicas of blake’s copperplates on the press at rice university. whitehead, angus, and catherine kelly. “william blake’s last surviving london residence.” 105-09. a concise history of 17 south molton street and its present state. pacitti, diane, and antonio pacitti. “auguries of war and peace.” 110-15. poems and art. pritchard, stephen, with illustration by john riordan. “just war?” 116-19. reviews wilson, andy. “drive your plow over the bones of the dead.” 120-22. on simon mcburney’s play based on the novel, which ran at the barbican theatre in mar. 2023. erle, sibylle. “william blake and tate britain’s rehang.” 122-24. erle, sibylle. “blake and newton’s sleep.” 125. rev. of keith g. davies, william blake, the single vision, and newton’s sleep: a history of science, poetry, and progress. vernon, mark. “‘wars of love’: william blake, christian idealism, and the way from despair to life.” see vala. w wang, fuson. “blake’s revolutionary metaphor.” the smallpox report: vaccination and the romantic illness narrative. toronto: university of toronto press, 2023. isbn: 9781487546595. 86-119. in a wider book on romantic-era inoculation, wang reads “the medico-botanical metaphor” (88) of inoculation in thel, visions, and “the sick rose,” building on his previous chapter on erasmus darwin (see darwin in division ii). wang, orrin n. c. “two pipers and the cliché of romanticism.” techno-magism: media, mediation, and the cut of romanticism. new york: fordham university press, 2022. <blake (2023)> reviews burgess, miranda. studies in romanticism 62.4 (2023): 544-48. eckert, lindsey. eighteenth-century fiction 36.1 (2024): 190-92. whitehead, angus, and catherine kelly. “william blake’s last surviving london residence.” see vala. whitson, roger. “blake reprinted.” see vala. whittaker, jason. divine images: the life and work of william blake. london: reaktion books, 2021. <blake (2022, 2023)> review ripley, wayne c. journal of british studies 62.3 (2023): 813-14. “a solid overview of blake’s life and works” (813). whittaker, jason. jerusalem: blake, parry, and the fight for englishness. oxford: oxford university press, 2022. <blake (2023)> reviews, excerpts, etc. colls, robert. “o clouds unfold!” literary review (aug. 2022). hensher, philip. “‘jerusalem’ is a rousing anthem—​but who knows what the words mean?” spectator (9 july 2022). jones, mark. albion 19.1 (autumn 2022). murray-white, james. see murray-white in part v. schierenbeck, daniel d. choice 60.10 (june 2023). whittaker, jason. “anti-empire, anti-fascist, pro-suffragist: the stunning secret life of proms staple ‘jerusalem.’” guardian (5 sept. 2022). whittaker, jason, with illustration by tamsin rosewell. “ascend from felpham’s vale: blake, ‘jerusalem,’ and felpham.” see vala. wolf, benjamin. musica judaica online reviews (25 july 2023). “though whittaker may have felt that two hundred pages was sufficient length for a discussion of one poem and one song, these gaps mean that he has written a good and very useful work of cultural history, but he has not done as much as he could have to integrate ‘jerusalem’ into the wider sociology of music or musical culture.” williams, duane. “prisons of law and brothels of religion: william blake’s christian anarchism.” essays in anarchism and religion: volume ii. ed. alexandre christoyannopoulos and matthew s. adams. stockholm: stockholm university press, 2018. 232-77. “my aim in this essay is to show how blake can be understood as a christian anarchist,” which “is different from saying that he identified himself as one” (233). wilson, andy. “drive your plow over the bones of the dead.” see vala. wittreich, joseph. “‘more worlds … other worlds … new worlds’: translation/​illustration/​paradise lost.” global milton and visual art. ed. angelica duran and mario murgia. lanham: lexington books, 2021. isbn: 9781793617064. 21-71. on eighteenth-century illustrations of paradise lost, with references to blake’s illustrations and milton and to hayley’s life of milton. wolf, benjamin. rev. of jason whittaker, jerusalem: blake, parry, and the fight for englishness. see whittaker, jerusalem. wolff, tristram. “voices of the ground: blake’s language in deep time.” against the uprooted word: giving language time in transatlantic romanticism. stanford: stanford university press, 2022. <blake (2023)> review yousef, nancy. european romantic review 34.4 (2023): 468-70. worrall, david. “‘enlarged & numerous senses’: the neurobiology of auras and visions.” aura 2: exhibition of works by contemporary visionary artists degard and melissa alley. london: degard, 2021. 86-92. argues that blake’s visions were rooted in his experience of migraine auras and synesthesia. (the online version of the catalogue requires that its pages be flipped through, but there is a print version as well.) wright, jason. blake’s job: adventures in becoming. abingdon: routledge, 2023. isbn: 9781032389868. “in this book, i will use blake’s illustrations of the book of job (1825) to describe what i see as a move from a consciousness of exploitation to a consciousness of resonance.” x xu, gillian. “the metamorphosis of blood: william blake’s chemical, circulatory poetics.” see global blake in part v. y yamada, goro. kaibutsu: yami no seiyo kaigashi 3 [monster: a dark history of western paintings 3]. osaka: sogensha, 2021. 63 pp. 4 plates by blake. isbn: 9784422701332. in japanese. blake is briefly discussed in “iii gaka ga genshi shita kaibutsu [monsters of artists’ visions]” (54-55). yousef, nancy. rev. of tristram wolff, against the uprooted word: giving language time in transatlantic romanticism. see wolff. division ii: william blake’s circle astley, philip (1742–​1814) circus owner, blake’s neighbor in lambeth mayer, cassie, lise mayer, and david mayer. “astley before astley’s.” essays in romanticism 30.2 (2023): 147-63. an account of the young philip astley. banks, thomas (1735–​1805) sculptor bryant, julius. “‘the sister arts’: modern sculpture and its settings in britain, c. 1725–​1895.” phd diss., oxford brookes university, 2019. argues that banks was “a key link” in the “continuity between sculpture, furniture and interior design” (abstract). barry, james (1741–1806) history painter myrone, martin. “exhibitions culture, consumerism and the romantic artist.” see mccue and thomas in division i, part vi. basire, james, sr. (1730–​1802) engraver, blake’s master boehm, katharina. “‘the happiest vehicles of antiquarian knowledge’: the visual arts and romantic antiquarianism.” see mccue and thomas under cultures and technologies of display and exhibition. boehme, jacob [jakob böhme] (1575–1624) mystic dmitriev, nikita. “predstavlenie ob angel'skom mire u yakoba beme i emmanuila svedenborga [the image of the angel world in jacob böhme’s and emmanuel swedenborg’s works].” aktual'nye voprosy tserkovnoy nauki [current issues of religious studies] 1 (2023): 197-200. in russian. the author describes similarities and differences between böhme’s and swedenborg’s views of angels. bowyer, robert (1758–1834) print impresario myrone, martin. “exhibitions culture, consumerism and the romantic artist.” see mccue and thomas in division i, part vi. boydell, john (1720–​1804) engraver, printseller boyce, charlotte. “commemoration, domestic display and the decorative arts: romantic nelsonia.” see mccue and thomas under cultures and technologies of display and exhibition. brylowe, thora. “angelica kauffman and the sister arts.” see mccue and thomas under cultures and technologies of display and exhibition. matthews, susan. “illustrated poetry in the romantic period.” see mccue and thomas in division i, part vi. myrone, martin. “exhibitions culture, consumerism and the romantic artist.” see mccue and thomas in division i, part vi. szwydky, lissette lopez. “visual and textual adaptations in literature and fine art forms.” see szwydky in division i, part vi. calvert, edward (1799–​1883) painter, printmaker martindale, natalie t. “the art of edward calvert and neoplatonism in the nineteenth century.” phd diss., anglia ruskin university, 2019. cosway, maria (1760–1838) painter, acquaintance of blake faraoni, monja, laura facchin, massimiliano ferrario, and maria cristina loi, eds. maria hadfield cosway. lodi: fondazione maria cosway, 2022. 444 pp. isbn: 9791280950208. in italian and english. the catalogue for the exhibition at the fondazione maria cosway in lodi, italy, from 23 sept. to 27 nov. 2022. essays in the catalogue include: riberi, mario. “l’educazione in età napoleonica.” lloyd, stephen. “maria cosway in london, 1780–​1790 and 1794–​1801.” ferrario, massimiliano. “‘i am susceptible and everything that surrounds me has great power to magnetise me’: maria cosway e l’ambiente romantico.” facchin, laura. “maria cosway et l’ambiente artistico-letterario femminile fra la fine dell’antico regime e la restaurazione.” antonelli, rosalba. “maria cosway, leonardo e giuseppe bossi: fra teorie artistiche e appunti figurativi.” fiorio, patrizia. “la musica nella vita e nel progetto educativo di maria cosway.” laghezza, francesco, and beatrice porchera. “una storia ancora da raccontare: la biblioteca della fondazione maria cosway.” mira, silvia. “la moda nella parigi et nella milano di maria cosway.” facchin, laura, and massimiliano ferrario. “la vita di blevio.” marcarini, luca. “un titolo nobitare per maria cosway.” bolandrini, beatrice. “gaetano manfredini: ‘volente scultore pei quale l’ingiusta sorte non ha benigni sorris!’ e l’eterno volto di maria cosway.” loi, maria cristina. “‘but that immense sea, makes it a great distance’: note sui carteggio maria cosway-thomas jefferson.” stein, susan. “thomas jefferson and maria cosway in paris: art and affection.” amoriello, elena, et al. “l’allestimento della mostra maria hadfield cosway.” reviews leis, arlene. “shining a light on maria hadfield cosway.” “criticks reviews: fine and decorative art.” british society for eighteenth-century studies (2 dec. 2022). lloyd, stephen. “the maria hadfield cosway exhibition at the fondazione maria cosway, lodi.” youtube. 11 nov. 2022. firestone, evan r. “mist and gothicism in british painting.” see firestone in division i, part vi. spies-gans, paris a.  a revolution on canvas: the rise of women artists in britain and france, 1760–​1830. see spies-gans under cultures and technologies of display and exhibition. cosway, richard (1742–1821) miniaturist, blake’s acquaintance coutu, joan. “collecting and the country house, 1750–​1840.” see mccue and thomas under cultures and technologies of display and exhibition. cowper, william (1731–1800) poet, hymnist crosby, mark. “a copy of richard bentley’s edition of paradise lost in william hayley’s library c. 1802.” see blake 57.3 in division i, part vi. sherlock, lisa. “william blake’s annotations to milton’s paradise lost: new evidence for attribution.” see blake 57.2 in division i, part vi. cultures and technologies of display and exhibition mccue, maureen, and sophie thomas, eds. the edinburgh companion to romanticism and the arts. edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2023. isbn: 9781474484176. an important set of essays on romantic-era visual culture. those that directly address blake are listed under mccue and thomas in division i, part vi. boehm, katharina. “‘the happiest vehicles of antiquarian knowledge’: the visual arts and romantic antiquarianism.” 23-39. considers engraving’s importance for the work of the society of antiquaries, highlighting basire and george vertue. wills, kacie l. “visualising the indigenous pacific.” 77-94. highlights reynolds’s portrait of omai (1776) among different representations of mai and other pacific islanders. coutu, joan. “collecting and the country house, 1750–​1840.” 113-29. highlights mostly charles townley’s collecting and display of statues at his country house, with passing references to canova, flaxman, and richard cosway. boyce, charlotte. “commemoration, domestic display and the decorative arts: romantic nelsonia.” 146-64. “like the fine-art culture it emulated and adapted, nelsonia deployed a variety of representational modes, enabling consumers to articulate their personal, social and cultural identities through their aesthetic choices” (162). avery-quash, susanna. “building(s) for art: the evolution of public art galleries in england, 1780–​1840.” 165-83. charts how “britain’s cultural landscape … became increasingly populated with built spaces where art could be enjoyed ever-more publicly, by more diverse sections of society and on a permanent basis” (166). funnell, peter. “portraiture: commerce and celebrity.” 201-19. in an essay on portraits and celebrity, considers works by reynolds, lawrence, nollekens, and romney. mcpherson, heather. “convergence and dissonance: romantic theatre and the visual arts.” 220-36. examines representations of the stage in paintings by fuseli, lawrence, and romney. zimmerman, sarah. “taken by storm: multisensory learning in the lecture room.” 255-71. on the spaces of the public lecture, referencing the royal academy and other institutions. otto, peter. “romanticism, ‘real’ illusions and the transformation of experience in modernity.” 272-92. on “three developments” “which help shape the exchanges between the real, the actual and fiction/​illusion”: “the emergence of modern technologies of illusion; the proliferation and diversification of viewing/​exhibition spaces; and the multiplication, democratisation and commercialisation of spectacle” (272). mccue, maureen. “‘a point to aim at in a morning’s walk’: encounters at the print shop.” 335-55. no reference to blake and parker’s short-lived shop, but a good examination of the spaces, practices, and social significance of london print shops. brylowe, thora. “angelica kauffman and the sister arts.” 391-407. an overview of kauffman’s life, stressing the misogyny she faced and how her self-portraits invoked the themes of the sister arts. considers her relationship to the royal academy, the engraving of her designs by william wynne ryland and thomas burke, and her relationship to the boydell and macklin galleries. batchelor, jennie. “illustrated magazines and periodicals: visual genres and gendered aspirations.” 408-26. on the lady’s magazine, arguing that “illustrations could be powerful navigation aids for those who made use of them and fashion could prompt and orient readers’ critical faculties much more effectively than we have allowed” (424). matthews, samantha. “album culture: begging for scraps.” 429-49. “this chapter explores the valences of the ‘scrap’ in later romantic print and manuscript culture through the gendered construction and reception of albums and scrapbooks during 1820s and early 1830s ‘albo-mania’” (429-30). chapman, alison. “nineteenth-century illustrated poetry: mise-en-page and the visual rhythms of seriality.” 450-70. on the intersection of word and image, referencing stothard’s vignette in samuel rogers’s italy, a poem (1830) in addition to many other examples. shachar, hila. “cultural manifestations of romanticism on the contemporary screen.” 486-501. includes discussion of mary shelley (2017) and the nightmare. § myrone, martin. making the modern artist: culture, class and art-educational opportunity in romantic britain. new haven: yale university press, 2020. spies-gans, paris a.  a revolution on canvas: the rise of women artists in britain and france, 1760–​1830.incorporates spies-gans’s article “exceptional, but not exceptions: public exhibitions and the rise of the woman artist in london and paris, 1760–​1830,” eighteenth-century studies 51.4 (2018): 393-416. <blake (2022)> new haven: yale university press, 2022. isbn: 9781913107291. an important discussion of women artists in blake’s period, with quantitative analyses of their work, their presence in exhibitions, and the genres in which they worked. the female artists considered who were in or near blake’s circle include maria cosway, angelica kauffman, mary moser, mary ann flaxman, maria denman, mary hoare, maria spilsbury, anne seymour damer, anne mee, and frances reynolds. the royal academy, the free society of artists, and the society of artists of great britain are also referenced, as are male artists such as henry fuseli, richard cosway, john flaxman, george romney, and joshua reynolds. spies-gans, paris a. “why do we think there have been no great women artists? revisiting linda nochlin and the archive.” art bulletin 104.4 (2022): 70-94. engages with nochlin’s influential feminist essay “why have there been no great women artists?”nochlin, “why have there been no great women artists?,” artnews 69.9 (jan. 1971): 22-39, 67-71. spies-gans records other scholarly engagement with nochlin’s essay, including nochlin’s own, which was published in why have there been no great women artists? (new york: thames & hudson, 2021). and considers the response of feminist art historians since, before highlighting the impediments women artists faced and overcame in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. touches on maria cosway, angelica kauffman, mary moser, maria denman, and mary ann flaxman. cumberland, george (1754–1848) dilettante, polymath, friend of blake bushell, sally, julia s. carlson, and damian walford davies. “introduction: romantic cartographies.” see bushell et al. in division i, part vi. rauser, amelia. the age of undress: art, fashion, and the classical ideal in the 1790s. see rauser in division i, part vi. darwin, erasmus (1731–1802) scientist, poet bailes, melissa. regenerating romanticism: botany, sensibility, and originality in british literature, 1750–​1830. charlottesville: university of virginia press, 2023. isbn: 9780813949406. darwin figures in chapters 2 and 6. there is passing mention of blake and fuseli. giardina, elizabeth. “the book of nature: eighteenthand nineteenth-century british poetry and the poetics of earth system design.” see giardina in division i, part vi. hernández-avilez, eva guadalupe, and rosaura ruiz-gutiérrez. “from one darwin to another: charles darwin’s annotations to erasmus darwin’s ‘the temple of nature.’” humanities and social sciences communications 10 (2023): 11 pp. notes the markings of charles darwin in his copy of the temple of nature to suggest that his “annotations indicate his and his grandfather’s shared interest in the competition for reproduction (sexual selection) and point to a more remarkable resemblance between erasmus darwin’s the temple of nature and charles darwin’s the descent of man (1871) rather than to charles darwin’s theory of evolution by means of natural selection (the origin of species), to which erasmus’s ideas are more often compared” (abstract). leach, stephen. the adventures and speculations of the ingenious peter perez burdett. newcastle upon tyne: cambridge scholars publishing, 2023. isbn: 9781527592179. burdett was a cartographer, artist, and a member of the lunar society. solecki, sam. “sir william hamilton and josiah wedgwood: the indispensable connoisseur and the potter who made the etruscans visible, fashionable, and popular.” the etruscans in the modern imagination. montreal and kingston: mcgill-queen’s university press, 2022. 51-60. see also solecki in division i, part vi. wang, fuson. “darwin’s evolutionary metaphor.” the smallpox report: vaccination and the romantic illness narrative. toronto: university of toronto press, 2023. isbn: 9781487546595. 59-85. “darwin discovers strange metaphorical, political, philosophical, and scientific uses of the medico-botanical figures of inoculation” (61-62). this chapter leads to the one on blake (see wang, fuson, in division i, part vi). denman, maria (1776–1861) artist spies-gans, paris a.  a revolution on canvas: the rise of women artists in britain and france, 1760–​1830. see spies-gans under cultures and technologies of display and exhibition. d’éon, chevalier (1728–1810) spy ftacek, julia. “egg hatching; or, letting the eighteenth century be trans.” eighteenth-century fiction 33.4 (2021): 577-80. “in this essay, i offer examples [of a transgender eighteenth century], from the chevalier d’eon to lord byron, that foreground the transgender qualities present in many materials of that time” (abstract). vicente, marta v. “trans visual narratives: representing gender and nature in early modern europe.” journal of women’s history 35.4 (2023): 57-75. “this article studies the portraits of two gender-ambiguous individuals, the seventeenth-century spanish soldier antonio (née catalina) de erauso and the eighteenth-century french diplomat the chevalier (chevalière) d’eon, as they offer a window into early modern debates on the representation of nature through its wonders” (abstract). flaxman, john (1755–1826) sculptor, friend of blake coutu, joan. “collecting and the country house, 1750–​1840.” see mccue and thomas under cultures and technologies of display and exhibition. night thoughts: romantic drawings from the brandt collection. see night thoughts in division i, part iv, section b. rauser, amelia. the age of undress: art, fashion, and the classical ideal in the 1790s. see rauser in division i, part vi. schuchard, marsha keith. “the peculiar alchemical research of john flaxman, charles augustus tulk, and fabian wrede ekenstam (1776–​1818).” see schuchard, “the peculiar,” in division i, part vi. smith, amy c. “winckelmann’s elegant simplicity: from three to two dimensions and back again.” drawing the greek vase. ed. caspar meyer and alexia petsalis-diomidis. oxford: oxford university press, 2023. isbn: 9780192856128. 57-83. on flaxman’s drawings, with slight reference to george cumberland. stead, evanghelia. “first steps in britain.” see stead in division i, part vi. flaxman, mary ann (1768–1833) artist spies-gans, paris a.  a revolution on canvas: the rise of women artists in britain and france, 1760–​1830. see spies-gans under cultures and technologies of display and exhibition. fuseli, henry [johann heinrich füssli] (1741–1825) painter, friend of blake antal, frederick. fuseli studies. abingdon: routledge, 2022. routledge revivals. a reprint of a work first published in 1956. it is a good, albeit now dated, overview of fuseli’s career, with many references to blake and his circle and earlier artists who inspired both fuseli and blake. avery-quash, susanna. “building(s) for art: the evolution of public art galleries in england, 1780–​1840.” see mccue and thomas under cultures and technologies of display and exhibition. baker, christopher, andreas beyer, and pierre curie. füssli, entre rêve et fantastique [fuseli, the realm of dreams and the fantastic]. paris: musée jacquemart-andré, 2022. in french. the catalogue for the 2022–​23 paris exhibition. <blake (2023)> reviews capton, emma. “‘füssli, entre rêve et fantastique,’ des œuvres envoûtantes à découvrir au musée jacquemart-andré.” artistikrezo.com (7 nov. 2022): 11 pars. in french. de rouffignac, christian, and léa berroche. “füssli, entre rêve et fantastique/​exposition.” arts culture évasions (10 oct. 2022): 9 pars. in french. mathieu, méghane. “delightful horror: füssli à couper le souffle.” zone critique (7 oct. 2022): 10 pars. in french. sauvage, olivier. “compte rendu de l’exposition ‘füssli, entre rêve et fantastique’ au musée jacquemart-andré, 16 septembre 2022–​23 janvier 2023.” miranda 27 (2023): 10 pars. in french. carter, sarah. “the art of thinking through collaboration: fuseli, blake and darwin.” see the courtauld in division i, part v. firestone, evan r. “mist and gothicism in british painting.” see firestone in division i, part vi. furman-adams, wendy. “‘delectable to behold’: milton’s eve in the artist’s gaze.” global milton and visual art. ed. angelica duran and mario murgia. lanham: lexington books, 2021. isbn: 9781793617064. marks, rebecca. “‘organs of embodied sentiment’: contextualising william blake’s sistine studies c. 1770–​1790.” see global blake in division i, part v. matthews, susan. “illustrated poetry in the romantic period.” see mccue and thomas in division i, part vi. mcpherson, heather. “convergence and dissonance: romantic theatre and the visual arts.” see mccue and thomas under cultures and technologies of display and exhibition. metzger, christof, and julia zaunbauer, eds. götter, helden und verräter: das historienbild um 1800. berlin: hatje cantz verlag, 2023. isbn: 9783775754521. the catalogue for the exhibition at the albertina museum, vienna, from 2 june to 22 aug. 2023. includes work by fuseli and angelica kauffman. night thoughts: romantic drawings from the brandt collection. see night thoughts in division i, part iv, section b. myrone, martin. “exhibitions culture, consumerism and the romantic artist.” see mccue and thomas in division i, part vi. myrone, martin. “fuseli’s mutable bodies.” see the courtauld in division i, part v. o’rourke, stephanie. “fuseli’s physiognomic impressions.” art, science, and the body in early romanticism. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2022. isbn: 9781316519028. 60-103. “despite referring to physiognomy as ‘the mother of correctness,’ fuseli often represented bodies that could not be read according to the criteria of lavater’s system” (20). salatino, kevin. “‘female trouble’: vamps, vixens and viragoes in the art of henry fuseli.” see the courtauld in division i, part v. shachar, hila. “cultural manifestations of romanticism on the contemporary screen.” see mccue and thomas under cultures and technologies of display and exhibition. smith, camilla. “fools, heroes and whores: henry fuseli’s switzerland.” see the courtauld in division i, part v. solkin, david h., with jonas beyer, mechthild fend, and ketty gottardo. fuseli and the modern woman: fashion, fantasy, fetishism. london: paul holberton publishing, 2022. the catalogue for the 2022–​23 exhibition at the courtauld, london, and the kunsthaus zürich. review o’rourke, stephanie. european romantic review 34.4 (2023): 475-78. “an indispensable resource” (476). szwydky, lissette lopez. “visual and textual adaptations in literature and fine art forms.” see szwydky in division i, part vi. gibson, john (1786–1866) sculptor frasca-rath, anna. john gibson und antonio canova: rezeption, transfer, inszenierung. vienna: böhlau verlag, 2018. isbn: 9783205202967. in german. hayley, william (1745–​1820) man of letters, patron of blake crosby, mark. “a copy of richard bentley’s edition of paradise lost in william hayley’s library c. 1802.” see blake 57.3 in division i, part vi. sherlock, lisa. “william blake’s annotations to milton’s paradise lost: new evidence for attribution.” see blake 57.2 in division i, part vi. hoare, prince (1755–​1834) painter night thoughts: romantic drawings from the brandt collection. see night thoughts in division i, part iv, section b. hope, thomas (1769–​1831) collector, connoisseur petsalis-diomidis, alexia. “the graphic medium and artistic style: thomas hope (1769–​1831) and two-dimensional encounters with greek vases.” drawing the greek vase. ed. caspar meyer and alexia petsalis-diomidis. oxford: oxford university press, 2023. isbn: 9780192856128. 84-111. “the chapter investigates how [hope’s] graphic encounters with greek vases actively mediated between original artefacts and further twoor three-dimensional artwork” (84). johnson, joseph (1738–1809) bookseller, employer of blake hay, daisy. dinner with joseph johnson: books and friendship in a revolutionary age. princeton: princeton university press, 2022. <blake (2023)> reviews new yorker (16 jan. 2023). briefly noted. patey, d. l. choice 61.4 (2023): 446. seymour, miranda. “consider the publisher.” new york review of books 70.7 (20 apr. 2023): 37-39. kauffman, angelica [angelika kauffmann] (1741–​1807) painter brylowe, thora. “angelica kauffman and the sister arts.” see mccue and thomas under cultures and technologies of display and exhibition. metzger, christof, and julia zaunbauer, eds. götter, helden und verräter: das historienbild um 1800. see metzger and zaunbauer under fuseli. o’rourke, stephanie. “fuseli’s physiognomic impressions.” see o’rourke under fuseli. spies-gans, paris a.  a revolution on canvas: the rise of women artists in britain and france, 1760–​1830. see spies-gans under cultures and technologies of display and exhibition. lowth, robert (1710–87) bible scholar raz, yosefa. “imagining the hebrew ode: on robert lowth’s biblical species.” prooftexts 40.1 (2023): 85-109. “i argue that the seemingly neutral presentations of the genres of biblical poetry in the twentieth century, which we have learned to take for granted in our reading of the bible as a literature, are rooted in an eighteenth-century encounter: the english exegete robert lowth’s dramatic attempt to fit greek and roman generic models to the hebrew text” (86). macklin, thomas (1752/53–1800) publisher brylowe, thora. “angelica kauffman and the sister arts.” see mccue and thomas under cultures and technologies of display and exhibition. myrone, martin. “exhibitions culture, consumerism and the romantic artist.” see mccue and thomas in division i, part vi. szwydky, lissette lopez. “visual and textual adaptations in literature and fine art forms.” see szwydky in division i, part vi. macpherson, james (1736–96) writer buesking, renee k. “‘do ye sweep the lyre?’: romantic resonances in the poems of ossian.” european romantic review 34.5 (2023): 589-607. “my reading of the poems of ossian as a polyphonic text in which the elegiac voices join the songs of the epic bard helps us to reimagine texts influenced by ossian, and thus romanticism itself, as a kind of resonant echo chamber in which elegiac mourners emerge and simultaneously speak to the past and to the future” (abstract). malkin, benjamin (1769–1842) writer bushell, sally, julia s. carlson, and damian walford davies. “introduction: romantic cartographies.” see bushell et al. in division i, part vi. malkin, charlotte (1772–1859) artist, diarist matthews, susan. “illustrated poetry in the romantic period.” see mccue and thomas in division i, part vi. moravianism schuchard, marsha keith. “text books for innocence: moravian-swedenborg infant education and william blake’s songs of innocence and experience.” see schuchard, “text,” in division i, part vi. morganwg, iolo [edward williams] (1747–1826) welsh antiquarian domrachev, denis. “ivar osen i edvard uil'yams: sravnitel'nyy analiz proektov formirovaniya natsional'noy identichnosti norvegii i uel'sa/​ivar aasen and edward williams: a comparative analysis of the norwegian and welsh national identity construction projects.” kunstkamera 4.22 (2023): 213–28. in russian (abstract in russian and english). the author considers “some similarities between the processes of identity construction in norway and wales in the second half of the 18th-early 19th centuries” (abstract). mortimer, john hamilton (1740–79) painter firestone, evan r. “mist and gothicism in british painting.” see firestone in division i, part vi. night thoughts: romantic drawings from the brandt collection. see night thoughts in division i, part iv, section b. ottley, william young (1771–1836) painter night thoughts: romantic drawings from the brandt collection. see night thoughts in division i, part iv, section b. reynolds, joshua (1723–92) painter al jamil, miriam. “printed afterlives: joshua reynolds’ ‘johnson arguing’ portrait, 1769.” romantic illustration network (23 feb. 2022). in addition to reynolds, also discusses an etching of [samuel] johnson after ozias humphry by mary dawson turner, the wife of dawson turner, george cumberland’s friend and blake’s would-be patron. ditkovskaya, d. v., and elena kotlyar. “osobennosti paradnogo portreta v angliyskoy zhivopisi xviii veka/​peculiarities of the court portrait in english painting of the 18th century.” bonum initium 18.26 (2023): 29-35. in russian (abstract in russian and english). the authors consider the works of the main representatives of the english painting school, such as hogarth, reynolds, and gainsborough, in the genre of the formal ceremonial portrait. esposito, donato. “the artist as collector: sir joshua reynolds and his collection of art.” see friends of kenwood sunday lecture in division i, part v. firestone, evan r. “mist and gothicism in british painting.” see firestone in division i, part vi. funnell, peter. “portraiture: commerce and celebrity.” see mccue and thomas under cultures and technologies of display and exhibition. hunter, matthew c. painting with fire: sir joshua reynolds, photography, and the temporally evolving chemical object. chicago: university of chicago press, 2019. <blake (2020, 2022)> review marks, rebecca. eighteenth-century studies 57.1 (2023): 134-36. myrone, martin. “exhibitions culture, consumerism and the romantic artist.” see mccue and thomas in division i, part vi. postle, martin. “joshua reynolds at 300: 1723–​2023.” see friends of kenwood sunday lecture in division i, part v. postle, martin. “reynolds 300: martin postle talk.” see the box, plymouth, in division i, part v. reframing reynolds: a celebration. the box, plymouth. an exhibition to mark the 300th anniversary of reynolds’s birth, from 24 june to 29 oct. 2023. there was no catalogue produced, but a video is available. review cannon-brookes, caroline. “reframing reynolds: a celebration.” “criticks reviews: fine and decorative art.” british society for eighteenth-century studies (12 oct. 2023). spotlight on reynolds. kenwood house. an exhibition from 13 july to 19 nov. 2023. the website includes “17 paintings at kenwood” by louise cooling, curator of collections and interiors. reviews jones, jonathan. “spotlight on reynolds review—​superficial portraits by a well-connected hack.” guardian (13 july 2023). “as blake recognised, something in the bones of british culture is committed to the respectability of this minor talent.” norman, max. “‘spotlight on reynolds’ review: portraits of the roving mind.” wall street journal (19 aug. 2023): a13. wullschläger, jackie. “reynolds at kenwood—​how the chronicler of georgian england captured a changing country.” financial times (1 aug. 2023). wills, kacie l. “visualising the indigenous pacific.” see mccue and thomas under cultures and technologies of display and exhibition. romney, george (1734–1802) painter collé, nathalie. “author portraits of milton, authorship, and canonization.” see collé in division i, part vi. firestone, evan r. “mist and gothicism in british painting.” see firestone in division i, part vi. funnell, peter. “portraiture: commerce and celebrity.” see mccue and thomas under cultures and technologies of display and exhibition. mcpherson, heather. “convergence and dissonance: romantic theatre and the visual arts.” see mccue and thomas under cultures and technologies of display and exhibition. myrone, martin. “exhibitions culture, consumerism and the romantic artist.” see mccue and thomas in division i, part vi. night thoughts: romantic drawings from the brandt collection. see night thoughts in division i, part iv, section b. rauser, amelia. the age of undress: art, fashion, and the classical ideal in the 1790s. see rauser in division i, part vi. society of antiquaries boehm, katharina. “‘the happiest vehicles of antiquarian knowledge’: the visual arts and romantic antiquarianism.” see mccue and thomas under cultures and technologies of display and exhibition. stedman, john gabriel (1744–97) soldier, writer, friend of blake peh, li qi. “stedman’s horror, blake’s indifference.” see peh in division i, part vi. sinanan, kerry. “beryl gilroy, sylvia wynter, and unmaking romantic humanism.” keats-shelley journal 71 (2022): 169-87. includes a discussion of stedman’s narrative in relationship to gilroy’s novel stedman and joanna: a love in bondage (1991). szwydky, lissette lopez. “visual and textual adaptations in literature and fine art forms.” see szwydky in division i, part vi. stothard, thomas (1755–1834) painter, illustrator, blake’s friend/​enemy chapman, alison. “nineteenth-century illustrated poetry: mise-en-page and the visual rhythms of seriality.” see mccue and thomas under cultures and technologies of display and exhibition. firestone, evan r. “mist and gothicism in british painting.” see firestone in division i, part vi. lipski, jakub. “re-visioning robinson’s island: thomas stothard’s rousseauvian crusoe.” re-reading the eighteenth-century novel: studies in reception. new york: routledge, 2021. matthews, susan. “illustrated poetry in the romantic period.” see mccue and thomas in division i, part vi. swedenborg, emanuel (1688–1772) mystic dmitriev, nikita. “predstavlenie ob angel'skom mire u yakoba beme i emmanuila svedenborga [the image of the angel world in jacob böhme’s and emmanuel swedenborg’s works].” see dmitriev under boehme. leporati, matthew. “emanuel swedenborg’s conjugial love and the erotic politics of william blake’s epics.” see leporati, “conjugial love,” in division i, part vi. schuchard, marsha keith. “the peculiar alchemical research of john flaxman, charles augustus tulk, and fabian wrede ekenstam (1776–​1818).” see schuchard, “the peculiar,” in division i, part vi. schuchard, marsha keith. “text books for innocence: moravian-swedenborg infant education and william blake’s songs of innocence and experience.” see schuchard, “text,” in division i, part vi. ustimov, oleg. “dostoevskiy i spiritizm: k postanovke problemy/​dostoevsky and spiritualism: on the setting of the problem.” otechestvennaya filologiya [russian philology] 4 (2023): 103-09. in russian (abstract in russian and english). the author traces “the influence of swedenborgian and spiritualist ideas on certain characters of dostoevsky (svidrigailov), on the messages of entire works (bobok) and on poetics (epistemic doubt)” (abstract). tulk, charles augustus (1786–1849) swedenborgian, politician schuchard, marsha keith. “the peculiar alchemical research of john flaxman, charles augustus tulk, and fabian wrede ekenstam (1776–​1818).” see schuchard, “the peculiar,” in division i, part vi. turner, dawson (1775–1858) banker, collector al jamil, miriam. “printed afterlives: joshua reynolds’ ‘johnson arguing’ portrait, 1769.” see al jamil under reynolds. wedgwood, josiah (1730–95) blake’s employer solecki, sam. “sir william hamilton and josiah wedgwood: the indispensable connoisseur and the potter who made the etruscans visible, fashionable, and popular.” see solecki under darwin. winckelmann, johann joachim (1717–68) aesthetic theorist solecki, sam. “johann joachim winckelmann: the etruscan chapter in the history of the art of antiquity (1764).” the etruscans in the modern imagination. montreal and kingston: mcgill-queen’s university press, 2022. 41-50. see also solecki in division i, part vi. wollstonecraft, mary (1759–97) author, radical, known in blake’s circle biggs, joanna. “mary.” a life of one’s own: nine women writers begin again. london: weidenfeld & nicolson; new york: ecco, 2023.excerpted as “on mary wollstonecraft” in the blog of the paris review (3 apr. 2023). a biographical sketch of wollstonecraft interspersed with personal reflections as the writer starts her life over. dumler-winckler, emily. modern virtue: mary wollstonecraft and a tradition of dissent. oxford: oxford university press, 2022. <blake (2023)> reviews davis, james calvin. journal of theological studies 74.2 (2023): 826-28. fairclough, mary. political theology 25.1 (2024): 81-82. reuter, martina. jaar: journal of the american academy of religion 91.1 (2023): 246-48. strandlund, daniel p. anglican theological review 105.4 (2023): 539-41. “the book … is no doubt a major step in carving out for mary wollstonecraft a place in the canon of christian theological ethics” (541). ursic, elizabeth. crosscurrents 73.2 (2023): 241-43. grenby, m. o. “‘godwin versus godwin’: negotiating the war of ideas in charles lloyd’s isabel, a tale.” romanticism 29.3 (2023): 239-52. argues that lloyd’s novel isabel, published in 1820 but written in the late 1790s, was a response to wollstonecraft’s writing, noting that manuscripts of the novel have the subtitle “godwin versus godwin.” hunt, eileen m., ed. portraits of wollstonecraft: the making of a feminist icon, 1785 to 2020. london: bloomsbury academic, 2023. isbn: 9781350378711. documents with scholarly notes both visual portraits and verbal descriptions of wollstonecraft. kopajtic, lauren. “mary wollstonecraft and adam smith on gender and self-control.” journal of the history of philosophy 61.4 (2023): 627-48. “this paper revisits the scholarly debate over gender essentialism in smith [theory of moral sentiments], arguing that smith’s view of virtue is not gender essentialist, and that wollstonecraft saw this and did not target smith with her critique” (abstract). makarova, elena. “anglichanki v parizhe v gody frantsuzskoy revolyutsii: khelena mariya uil'yams i meri uolstonkraft/​english women in paris during the french revolution: helen maria williams and mary wollstonecraft.” politicheskaya zhizn' zapadnoy evropy: antichnost', srednie veka, novoe i noveyshee vremya [political life of western europe: antique, middle ages, modern and contemporary times]. arzamas: lobachevsky university, arzamas branch, 2023. isbn: 9785604949702. 108-16. in russian (abstract in russian and english). “the article attempts to examine the life and work of english women-writers helen maria williams and mary wollstonecraft during their stay in france at the course of the revolution. in letters written in france williams created a chronicle of the revolution, addressed to the english reader. wollstonecraft’s book an historical and moral view of the origin and progress of the french revolution reveals its causes” (abstract). makarova, elena. “obraz severnoy evropy v ‘pis'makh, napisannykh vo vremya kratkogo prebyvaniya v shvetsii, norvegii i danii’ (1796) meri uolstonkraft/​the image of northern europe in letters written during a short residence in sweden, norway, and denmark (1796) by mary wollstonecraft.” sankt-peterburg i strany severnoy evropy [st. petersburg and northern european countries] 24.1-2 (2023): 97-105. in russian (abstract in russian and english). “the author analyzes how this work characterizes the nature and society of the scandinavian countries” (abstract). “mary wollstonecraft by john opie.” national portrait gallery, schools hub (5 sept. 2023). an educational lesson on the portrait and wollstonecraft. penaluna, regan. how to think like a woman: four women philosophers who taught me how to love the life of the mind. new york: grove press, 2023. isbn: 9780802158802. péter, ágnes. “who is at the helm? mary wollstonecraft’s contribution to the romantic construct of the imagination.” neohelicon [budapest] 50.2 (2023): 613-34. wolfson, susan j. on mary wollstonecraft’s “a vindication of the rights of woman”: the first of a new genus. new york: columbia university press, 2023. isbn: 9780231206242. reviews, author talks, etc. delucia, joellen. tulsa studies in women’s literature 42.2 (2023): 386-88. “filled with dazzling close readings and offering an innovative reception history of wollstonecraft’s work, susan j. wolfson’s on mary wollstonecraft’s ‘a vindication of the rights of woman’: the first of a new genus proves to be an exciting supplement to the ever-growing list of books on wollstonecraft and her work” (386). “faculty author q&a: susan wolfson on on mary wollstonecraft’s ‘a vindication of the rights of woman.’ ” princeton university humanities council faculty bookshelf (15 apr. 2023). letters and politics. “mary wollstonecraft, the french revolution and the tyranny of men.” youtube. 20 apr. 2023. lost ladies of lit. “mary wollstonecraft—​a vindication of the rights of woman with susan j. wolfson.” showalter, elaine. “‘a hyena in petticoats’: feminist writers who fought against the masculine assumptions of their times.” tls (9 june 2023). book review editor we and every reader of blake/an illustrated quarterly are supremely grateful for the work and sheer endurance of alexander gourlay as our review editor since 2006. sandy, without complaint, did the hard and usually thankless work, almost all of it behind the scenes, of deciding what needs reviewing for our highly specialized audience; acquiring the books (usually if not always books) from publishers, a harder and harder job these days; finding the right reviewers; and working with the editors and managing editor to get the reviews into shape for publication. thanks so much for your wisdom, perseverance, and devotion, sandy. we welcome as our new book review editor sibylle erle, frsa, fhea, visiting scholar at the university of lincoln and a researcher at the university of lisbon. she is the author of blake, lavater and physiognomy (2010) and she co-edited with morton paley the two-volume reception of william blake in europe (2019). she also co-edited “science, technology and the senses” (2008), panoramas, 1787–​1900: texts and contexts (2012), and “monsters: interdisciplinary explorations in monstrosity” (2019–​20), and edited “blake in europe” (2022). sibylle is chair of the blake society, and edits vala: the journal of the blake society. she is the editorial director of global blake. apart from blake and reception, her current research is on monsters and death in literature written for young readers. morris eaves and morton d. paley, editors adapted from all religions are one copy a (c. 1788, printed c. 1795), plate 6. huntington library, san marino, ca. 57445. william blake and his circle: a checklist of scholarship in 2022 william blake and his circle: a checklist of scholarship in 2022 by wayne c. ripley works in romance languages contributed by fernando castanedo works in japanese contributed by hikari sato works in turkish contributed by hüseyin alhas works in russian contributed by vera serdechnaia wayne c. ripley (wripley@winona.edu) currently servesresearch for “william blake and his circle” was conducted in: krueger library at winona state university (for works in english); the universidad de alcalá library, madrid (for works in romance languages); cinii and the national diet library online catalogue, komaba library and general library of the university of tokyo, and the national diet library (for works in japanese); the general library of social sciences university in ankara, the beytepe library of hacettepe university, and the bill bryson library at durham university (for works in turkish); and kuban state university (for works in russian). as the bibliographer for blake and the william blake archive. his projects include a selected annotated bibliography, which will update the “resources for further research” available at the blake archive, and his book manuscript, “‘where spectres of the dead wander’: new archival findings on blake, his family, neighbors, and circle.” fernando castanedo (fernando.castanedo@uah.es) is a professor of english at the universidad de alcalá (madrid). hikari sato (hikari@g.ecc.u-tokyo.ac.jp) is a professor of comparative literature and culture at the university of tokyo. he has been a member of the “william blake and his circle” team since summer 2003. hüseyin alhas (huseyin.alhas@asbu.edu.tr) is a research assistant in the department of english language and literature, social sciences university of ankara. vera serdechnaia (rintra@yandex.ru), doctor of philology, krasnodar (russia), is an assistant professor in the department of foreign literature and comparative cultural studies at kuban state university and a theatre critic. she is working on the theme of blake reception in russia and the former ussr. table of contents: symbols and abbreviations introductory essay division i: william blake part i: blake’s writings section a: original editions, facsimiles, reprints, and translations section b: collections and selections part ii: reproductions of drawings and paintings section a: illustrations of individual authors section b: collections and selections part iii: commercial engravings section a: illustrations of individual authors part iv: bibliographies and catalogues section a: bibliographies section b: catalogues part v: digital resources part vi: criticism, biography, and reviews division ii: william blake’s circle banks, thomas barry, james basire, james blair, robert boehme, jacob bowyer, robert calvert, edward cosway, maria cowper, william cultures and technologies of display and exhibition darwin, erasmus d’éon, chevalier flaxman, john fuseli, henry gough, richard hayley, william johnson, joseph kauffman, angelica lamb, lady caroline lawrence, thomas linnell, john macklin, thomas mora, josé joaquín de mortimer, john hamilton reynolds, joshua romney, george society of antiquaries southcott, joanna stedman, john gabriel stothard, thomas swedenborg, emanuel wainewright, thomas griffiths west, benjamin winckelmann, johann joachim wollstonecraft, mary symbols § works preceded by a section mark are reported on secondhand authority abbreviations bb g. e. bentley, jr., blake books (1977) bbs g. e. bentley, jr., blake books supplement (1995) blake blake/an illustrated quarterly <blake ([year])> indicates the installment of “william blake and his circle” published in the year specified br(2) g. e. bentley, jr., blake records, 2nd ed. (2004) bsj g. e. bentley, jr., with keiko aoyama, blake studies in japan (1994) butlin martin butlin, the paintings and drawings of william blake (1981) diss. dissertation e david v. erdman, the complete poetry and prose of william blake (rev. ed., 1988) essick, cb robert n. essick, william blake’s commercial book illustrations (1991) essick, sp robert n. essick, the separate plates of william blake: a catalogue (1983) k geoffrey keynes and edwin wolf 2nd, william blake’s illuminated books: a census (1953) mpi miscellaneous prints and impressions wbhc g. e. bentley, jr., william blake and his circle (2017) <http://​library.​vicu.​utoronto.​ca/​collections/​special_collections/​bentley_​blake_​collection/​blake_​circle/​2017/​william_​blake_​and_​his_​circle.​pdf> introductory essay the annual blake checklist is an annotated bibliography that aims to compile the scholarly, and much of the popular, engagement with blake and members of his circle from the preceding year. given that it is always a substantial undertaking, i wish to express my deep gratitude to my collaborators for their assistance. the annotations in the citations for the relevant language groups are theirs, as are the translations of titles and abstracts into english (when not provided by the original). i am also indebted to sarah jones for her editorial work, morton d. paley for providing grist for the mill, luke walker for clarifying the status of his research, alex peachey for their invaluable assistance in compiling and annotating digital sources, and joy davis ripley for her help in copyediting and in so many other things this past year. discoveries an unrecorded version of the visionary head of queen boadicea (for other versions, see butlin #717 and #718) was sold at an auction in maine. its verso contains a new sketch by blake of an egyptian temple and pyramids. an unrecorded impression of blake’s “enoch” also came to auction, at christie’s in london.these discoveries are described in robert n. essick’s “blake in the marketplace, 2021,” blake 55.4 (spring 2022). arguing with a note in w. h. stevenson’s blake: the complete poems, matthew m. davis makes a persuasive case that the “aumont” in the french revolution was the royalist louis-alexandre-céleste d’aumont (1736–​1814) and not his revolution-supporting brother, louis-marie guy d’aumont (1732–​99). editions and translations in english, new editions of blake’s works were limited to the william blake archive. in 2022, the archive added copy u (printed 1818) and copy w (printed 1825) of songs of innocence and of experience; sixteen mpi from america a prophecy, including the one and only surviving fragment of blake’s illuminated copperplates (as well as the engraving on its verso by blake’s student thomas butts, jr.); and forty-one mpi from europe a prophecy, including different versions of the work’s title page. the archive has also made available blake’s autograph in the album of william upcott, and four new paintings that can be viewed in the works in preview section: an allegory of the spiritual condition of man (1811), epitome of james hervey’s “meditations among the tombs” (c. 1820), the sea of time and space (1821) (once referred to as the arlington court picture), and the characters in spenser’s “faerie queene” (c. 1825). curated by joseph viscomi, the archive’s new exhibition, fake blakes, displays illuminated books and prints that were not printed or colored by blake but were wrongly ascribed to him: songs of innocence copy t; songs of innocence and of experience copies e/k and f/j; america a prophecy copy q; and europe a prophecy copy l, in addition to various photolithographs and kerographs of the illuminated books. there are spanish and french editions of a descriptive catalogue, both put out by the same spanish publisher, casimiro, that issued the 2021 italian edition described in last year’s checklist. the 2022 spanish edition, william blake. invenciones, is translated with a prologue and notes by juan francisco pastor paris. the 2020 french edition, william blake. mes tableaux, is translated by jean-luc ben ayoun. jean-yves lacroix’s french translation of the marriage of heaven and hell (2011) has a new edition, and fernando castanedo’s english-spanish edition of marriage (2002; rev. 2012) has reached its eleventh edition. (alexander s. gourlay reviews castanedo’s 2020 translation and critical edition of the ballads manuscript in blake 56.2.) mesut küçükoğlu has a turkish translation of marriage, while kaan h. ökten’s turkish anthology has been reissued by a new publisher, everest yayınları, with minor changes. mihai a. stroe has produced a dual-language, english-romanian, edition of jerusalem. (in scholarship on translations, g. i. modina considers genre in russian translations of “auguries of innocence,” while a. yu. popova and n. g. smolina compare translations of “the tyger” by konstantin bal'mont and samuil marshak.) reproductions the thomas set of the paradise lost illustrations is reproduced in the limited-edition reprint of the manuscript of book 1 of paradise lost. “head of a damned soul in dante’s inferno” (essick, sp xxxii), blake’s unpublished engraving after henry fuseli, appears in the catalogue for the exhibition of fuseli’s works that was held at the musée jacquemart-andré in paris (described below). a digital edition of vetusta monumenta contains high-quality images of plates that are signed by james basire, sr., but that have long been attributed to blake (bb #503). the antiquarian bookseller john windle issued a new catalogue (#70) titled william blake: present joy. it reproduces an assortment of blake’s original works, facsimiles, and key print editions and studies. digital resources as noted in last year’s checklist, one of the few positive effects of the covid-19 pandemic has been the explosion in virtual events and the recording and posting of in-person events. i’ve endeavored to record as many of these as i could find, and i have also attempted to list various author or curator talks (loosely defined to include interviews, podcasts, formal in-person lectures, and essays by authors on their own work or its topic). these are cross-listed with the works themselves in part vi. this section also records more popular engagements with blake found on blogs, podcasts, and youtube channels (but not reddit, instagram, facebook, pinterest, or tiktok). i hope that this material documents blake’s wider reception and will be of use to future scholars. that said, given the sheer amount of such material, i have not listed readings of individual poems or works unless they are marked in some significant way, nor have i documented youtube videos that appear to be rote lessons on blake for online schooling or national exams. the paul mellon centre’s public lecture series georgian provocations, conducted on zoom in 2020, offered in 2022 a second set of talks, which were mostly in person but recorded and posted to youtube. i have documented and linked to both series. the second contains lectures on figures more typically associated with blake’s circle, such as angelica kauffman, henry fuseli, and george romney, but the first set includes talks on william hogarth and joshua reynolds. the allen ginsberg project concluded its posts of ginsberg’s 1978 class at naropa on the four zoas; users can access both a transcription and audio files. for blake’s birthday in 2022, the site posted a 10 july 1989 reading at naropa with steven taylor, who collaborated with ginsberg on music. taylor reflects on their relationship in one of the monthly events of the blake society, most of which are still conducted virtually and posted on youtube. other virtual events held by the blake society include keri davies discussing inoculation and blake; andy wilson and tim heath examining the blakean influence on blade runner for the film’s fortieth anniversary; the musician billy bragg talking about blake’s influence on his work; jason whittaker presenting on the libretto for hubert parry’s “jerusalem”; daisy hay speaking about her book dinner with joseph johnson; s. f. said discussing his new blakean novel, tyger ; and, finally, an online launch of the third issue of the society’s journal, vala. this issue highlights blake and nature, and it is freely available as a pdf at the society’s website. at keri davies’s blog, index rerum, there are several interesting posts on inoculation in relationship to catherine the great, blake’s illustrations of the book of job, and william hayley; he also discusses the content-warning signs at the blake and hogarth exhibitions at tate britain. james murray-white’s finding blake offers an interview with jason whittaker on blake’s reception and the january 2022 online conference global blake; two remembrances of the poet niall mcdevitt (1967–​2022); a discussion of blake’s the ghost of a flea by the poet helen moore; and a review of jez butterworth’s play jerusalem. both the redesign of whittaker’s zoamorphosis and the details of the global blake conference were described in last year’s checklist. complementing his new book on the “jerusalem” hymn, jerusalem: blake, parry, and the fight for englishness (2022), are posts by whittaker reflecting on why he wrote about the poem and on its potential role in the commonwealth games in representing a more diverse england. also at zoamorphosis, whittaker reviews lucy cogan’s blake and the failure of prophecy (2021); the blake archive exhibition fake blakes; butterworth’s play jerusalem; and said’s novel tyger. tied to the publication of john higgs’s william blake vs. the world (2021) was an in-person event on 31 august 2021 at the airy fairy garden, sheffield, titled blame blake. the celebration was filmed and posted to youtube, where one can also find many of the participants, including higgs, being interviewed. higgs, whose next book, on james bond and the beatles, is already out, still often talks about blake on his press tours, and i have listed discussions with relevant content. (in the same spirit as blame blake, tate britain’s in-person celebration of blake’s birthday is also available on youtube.) the psychotherapist and writer mark vernon made several appearances on podcasts, and his in-person lecture on blake and christianity, delivered on 12 july 2022 at st. matthew’s church in wimbledon, is on youtube. his blog, mark vernon, often posts on blake, and perhaps his most interesting post is from 9 september 2022, in which he sketches the role that the blake scholar kathleen raine played as a spiritual mentor to prince charles. in terms of blake’s popular reception, there are a number of youtube videos analyzing the video game devil may cry 5 (a use of blake previously noted by liz potter at zoamorphosis and julian s. whitney at hell’s printing press). one, by the pixel critic, makes extensive use of the [first] book of urizen, and a series by the gamingmuse archives has many images and videos from the game and blake’s works. the video game and blake are also treated in a russian article by andrey shteynbrekher and konstantin savel'ev (found in part vi). many online newspaper articles covered the virtual-reality app animating blake’s illustrations, a collaboration between apple and the getty museum. more impressive than the app, to me at least, is a charcoal-drawing animation by rune callewaert on youtube, “the marriage of heaven and hell.” less impressive are two videos that animate blake reciting poetry. finally, the e. j. pratt library at the university of toronto commemorated the seventy-fifth anniversary of northrop frye’s fearful symmetry with an in-person exhibition, a visionary symmetry: northrop frye & william blake, which ran from 20 october to 9 december 2022. a digital version of the exhibition features all the materials on display, as well as articles on frye; the reception and influence of fearful symmetry; blake and g. e. bentley, jr.; and remembrances of frye by his students. criticism, biography, and reviews jason whittaker’s jerusalem: blake, parry, and the fight for englishness (2022) shows that reception remains a dominant genre of blake studies. whittaker’s impressive work traces the “jerusalem” hymn from its production in milton to its circulation in the twenty-first century. the heart of the book focuses on the excerpting of the poem as a hymn, its setting by hubert parry, and its twentieth-century reception in nationalistic debates, which were often dominated by the right. whittaker is also one of the contributors to a new collection of essays on reception, “the artist of the future age: william blake, neo-romanticism, counterculture and now.” edited by douglas field and luke walker, it was published as a special issue of the bulletin of the john rylands library. the introduction seeks to highlight the importance of the british counterculture, which, it suggests, was passed over in stephen eisenman’s recent exhibition and catalogue, william blake and the age of aquarius (2017). to illustrate this point, the collection reprints michael horovitz’s 1958 essay “the blake renaissance” and includes a subsequent, new essay by horovitz (who passed away before publication) reflecting on blake’s influence on him and various artists, poets, and activists of the british counterculture. additionally, david hopkins traces how blake’s reception changed in artistic circles between the 1950s and 1970s; james riley explores blake’s impact on literary figures of the british counterculture, including horovitz and iain sinclair; and whittaker looks at blake and science-fiction novels of the late 1970s. jodie marley goes further back in time to consider the reception of yeats and ellis’s the works of william blake (1893) and how it impacted the poet george william russell (æ). colin trodd, in an interesting complement to the period covered in whittaker’s book on “jerusalem,” traces how notions of citizenship and hospitality shaped blake’s reception between the 1910s and 1940s. finally, franca bellarsi examines blake’s impact on maelström reevolution, a neo-romantic collective in brussels. in other work on the counterculture, david stephen calonne’s book the beats in mexico touches on blake’s influence on the beats but also, more originally, on his place in the anthology america a prophecy: a new reading of american poetry from pre-columbian times to the present (1973). dean sluyter’s popular account in the dharma bum’s guide to western literature highlights blake’s spiritual and visionary awakening. alicia carpenter’s chapter in james rovira’s collection women in rock, women in romanticism: the emancipation of female will focuses on blake and patti smith. blake’s relationship to other writers received much attention. keith o’regan has a study of blake and bertolt brecht, towards a productive aesthetics: contemporary and historical interventions in blake and brecht. leon conrad sees blake as one of the two major influences on the english polymath george spencer-brown. his impact on virginia woolf is the subject of a 2022 dissertation by michael william black, and a previously unrecorded chilean dissertation, from 2008, traces blake’s and john keats’s influences on jorge luis borges. a book by david hopkins and tom mason on geoffrey chaucer’s eighteenth-century reception references blake slightly, mostly with regard to dryden. in japanese, there was a good deal of work on reception or on blake’s relationship to other authors. hikari sato calls attention to the references to blake in the work of william henry hudson, an ornithologist. yuko akimoto traces blake’s influence on the japanese writer and activist yutaka haniya, and atsushi tanigawa considers how blake figures in the works of haruo sato, haniya, and sei ito. naoki isobe attempts to reconstruct the binding technique that the blake scholar bunsho jugaku used for blake and whitman. kiyoshi ando examines the religious stances of blake, coleridge, and wordsworth. similar works in spanish, portuguese, and russian include juan de dios torralbo’s consideration of translations of english romantics by the cordoban poet carlos clementson; arthur aroha kaminski da silva’s comparison of blake’s ideas of innocence and childhood with those of j. d. salinger in nine stories (1953); and yaroslava muratova’s analysis of byron’s cain and blake’s the ghost of abel. eco-criticism, the body, and disease the third issue of vala, the journal of the blake society of london, focuses on blake and nature; it contains essays, poems, drawings, and other creative work, much of which highlights blake’s relevance to our environmental crisis. as ines tebourski formulates this claim, “the ecological poetics of blake’s works aspired to foreground natural issues as a subject of utmost emergency” (74). hugo w. larman describes and reproduces the blueprints he designed for a “garden of the four zoas” dedicated to kathleen raine. sibylle erle gives a personal sketch of her relationship to blake. tristanne connolly examines blake’s and erasmus darwin’s use of plants and points to likely instances of darwin’s influence. outside of vala, alexander s. gourlay’s appendix to his review of adam komisaruk and allison dushane’s edition of the botanic garden traces darwin’s influence on the book of thel, and caroline dauphin’s 2021 dissertation in french also considers darwin and blake. emphasizing the importance of mary wollstonecraft rather than darwin, the jordanian scholars majd m. alkayid and murad m. al kayed examine blake’s use of flowers to represent women. steve clark’s essay in ve-yin tee’s new collection, romantic environmental sensibility, uses milton to sketch blake’s “environmental poetics” (212), with references to james thomson, mark akenside, and iolo morganwg. kate rigby’s 2020 essay suggests that blake’s work exemplifies “a specifically ecopoetic variant of the prophetic mode of romantic literature” (113), while jacob henry leveton connects the [first] book of urizen with the steam engines at albion mill and the pollution they produced. edward lee-six employs raymond williams’s concept of “structure of feeling” to read blake’s relationship to empiricism and capitalism. tara lee completed her dissertation on “william blake and the language of preformationist biology,” and she published articles on blake and the fibrous body in relationship to the german scientist lorenz oken (1779–​1851) and on vitalism in jerusalem. intentional misrepresentation of bodies is the subject of a 2021 essay by anthony apesos, who examines how blake diverged from the models of anatomical correctness offered by william hunter’s lectures on anatomy at the royal academy and compares blake’s practices with those of joshua reynolds and luigi schiavonetti. addressing neurodivergence, david worrall argues that blake experienced klüver form-constant visual hallucinations and suggests that the patterns created by these hallucinations can be seen in his works. art, language, and media studies a new reference book that every reader of this journal will want is david alexander’s a biographical dictionary of british and irish engravers, 1714–​1820. in addition to its biographical entries, which include blake and every member of his circle who worked as an engraver, it offers an introduction to eighteenth-century engraving and a list of known apprentices. louise wilson’s essay in blake examines the national gallery of victoria’s prints of blake’s virgil to reveal a “complex history” of its woodblocks and the artists who used them, including edward calvert and john linnell. a chapter in tristram wolff’s book against the uprooted word: giving language time in transatlantic romanticism (2022) considers blake’s sense of language in connection with discoveries in geology and scales of time. sarah weston has an interesting article looking at blake’s relief etching in relationship to the development of braille. matthew martello reads the notebook in toto and argues that its poetics inform the laocoön separate plate. in russian, galina kovalenko and il'ya smyvalov analyze the words and images of “the little boy lost” as a “creolized text,” while, also in russian, e. s. chunyak sees a “synthesis of the arts” in blake’s works. in a special issue of modern philology devoted to the society of antiquaries (fully described in division ii), luisa calè argues that blake’s “physiological aesthetics and his experience of ‘fourfold vision’” was shaped by his early experiences as an apprentice and engraver working as a “practical antiquary.” a special issue of european romantic review, “romanticism and vision” (also fully described in division ii), edited by terry f. robinson and john savarese, was inspired by work on blake and romantic visual culture. in the collection’s two essays on blake, stephanie o’rourke considers how fuseli, blake, banks, and other artists challenged both neoclassical and scientific ideas of the body, making “it more difficult to posit the self evident [white, male] body as a universal and stable category” (509), while calè, writing on blake’s watercolor pestilence (c. 1805), traces his connection between disease and moral sentiments. elsewhere, marta fabi, addressing blake’s notion of disease in songs of experience, concludes with the hopeful note that blake shows humanity that we can “use the knowledge acquired by dealing and coping with [the experience of disease], in order to start a change, which should always be for the better” (187). at his blog, mark vernon explicitly suggests that blake can help us learn from the ordeal of covid-19. joseph monteyne’s new book, media critique in the age of gillray: scratches, scraps, and spectres, devotes a chapter to the [first] book of urizen and its negation of the page and the book. esther alice chadwick’s previously unrecorded 2016 dissertation examines the relationship of “high art, printmaking and political radicalism,” discussing blake, james barry, john hamilton mortimer, james gillray, and thomas bewick. elizabeth potter’s dissertation focuses on blake’s marginalia to joshua reynolds, while trevor a. mcmichael’s dissertation on revenge and british romanticism touches on blake’s commercial engraving “tythe in kind; or the sow’s revenge” for the wit’s magazine (1784). mark lussier has an essay on the dante illustrations in a festschrift published as an issue of phoebus, arizona state university’s art history journal. writing in portuguese, thiago mota and fernanda s. murro look at representations of dante’s hell in blake, gustave doré, and helder rocha. religion and philosophy the bible scholar christopher rowland has an enormous book on apocalypticism, “by an immediate revelation”: studies in apocalypticism, its origins and effects, which draws together many of his previously published works, along with new essays. it has an entire section devoted to blake (as well as another essay on blake elsewhere in the volume). although none of his blake essays is new, the book makes them more readily available, and some of them have not been previously recorded in blake or wbhc. madeleine callaghan’s eternity in british romantic poetry (2022) includes a chapter looking at blake’s idea of eternity across many of his works. chris townsend has a book on romanticism and george berkeley, with a chapter on blake. focusing on the book of los and engaging with recent studies of blake and lucretius, andrew lincoln suggests that “blake saw in lucretius … a form of prophecy that represented an alluring alternative to his own prophetic mission, one whose malign influence could embroil those who tried to contain or oppose it.” blake’s visionary engagement with empiricism and the enlightenment is considered by sergio navarro ramírez. similarly, cătălin ghiţă analyzes the conflict between visionary art and experimental science. jesús david curbelo discusses blake’s rejection of “authoritarianism and orthodoxy,” and daniela picón suggests that the eagle-headed human in jerusalem pl. 78 was a prophetic figure with which blake identified. passings in addition to michael horovitz and niall mcdevitt, r. paul yoder (1955–​2022), likely best known to readers of this journal for his book the narrative structure of william blake’s poem “jerusalem”: a revisionist interpretation (2010), passed away. blakeana anne k. mellor’s classic 1974 study blake’s human form divine has been reissued by the university of california press’s voices revived series. as noted, s. f. said’s novel tyger, illustrated by dave mckean, was discussed by the author at a blake society event; it also features in the pages of vala and in a review by jason whittaker at zoamorphosis. there are reviews by whittaker, mark vernon, and james murray-white of the new run of jez butterworth’s play jerusalem (2009) at london’s apollo theatre. one of the strangest but most stimulating creative engagements with blake is found in alexander roob’s german-english dual-language book. it chronicles a group of contemporary german artists, followers of mesmer, who attempted to recreate blake’s lost painting the ancient britons while in hypnotic states. william blake’s “the ancient britons”: appearances of a vanished picture /​ william blake’s “the ancient britons”: erscheinungen eines verschollenen bildes (2022) documents the process and the art they created. blake’s circle there were many significant works on blake’s circle. the first is daisy hay’s eminently readable biography of joseph johnson, dinner with joseph johnson: books and friendship in a revolutionary age (2022). hay highlights johnson’s relationships, distinguishing her book from gerald p. tyson’s joseph johnson: a liberal publisher (1979) and helen braithwaite’s romanticism, publishing and dissent: joseph johnson and the cause of liberty (2003). dinner with joseph johnson spends a good deal of time on figures like erasmus darwin, henry fuseli, joseph priestley, anna laetitia barbauld, and mary wollstonecraft, sketching johnson’s important relationships with them. blake, william cowper, william hayley, and john gabriel stedman are minor characters, but hay details, for example, the tumultuous relationship between stedman and johnson, in which blake played a part, and the rise and fall of the milton gallery. in fuseli, johnson and blake shared at least one mutual friend, and he was the subject of two major exhibitions in 2022. the first—​füssli, entre rêve et fantastique [fuseli, the realm of dreams and the fantastic]—​was held at the musée jacquemart-andré, paris, from 16 september 2022 to 23 january 2023. curated by christopher baker, andreas beyer, and pierre curie, it highlighted fuseli’s paintings and drawings of the grotesque, gothic, and fantastical. the exhibited works included three versions of his nightmare; his paintings and illustrations of different authors, myths, and folklore; and his erotic drawings of his wife and other women. the other exhibition was fuseli and the modern woman: fashion, fantasy, fetishism, curated by david solkin and ketty gottardo. shown at the courtauld gallery, london, from 14 october 2022 to 8 january 2023 and at the kunsthaus zürich from 24 february to 21 may 2023, it focused largely on fuseli’s drawings of women, including courtesans and his wife, which show elaborate coiffures, dresses, and sexualized objects and poses. a video available on youtube, “open courtauld hour: the modern woman and fuseli,” features a discussion by the curators, with kate lister providing context about eighteenth-century sex workers. both exhibitions have beautifully produced catalogues with important scholarly essays. as with exhibitions of blake’s works, i have tried to record as many reviews as i could find. in addition, pieces by fuseli and blake were on display at paradise lost: thomas griffiths wainewright at the tasmanian museum and art gallery in 2021. in scholarship beyond the exhibitions, sharon choe’s dissertation explores fuseli’s use of northern antiquarianism, while manfred engel reads the nightmare as a gothic turn from classicist motifs. martin myrone has a chapter in french in the catalogue for füssli, entre rêve et fantastique, and an in-person talk on the nightmare in the paul mellon centre’s georgian provocations series. perry mcpartland contends that a fairy in titania and bottom is based on leonardo da vinci’s vitruvian fairy. catherine phillips discusses works owned by fuseli’s father that are now in the collection of the state hermitage museum in st. petersburg, russia. in other work on writers tied to johnson, lucy cogan considers erasmus darwin’s influence on maria edgeworth, while elliot patsoura suggests that “darwin gives expression to the incapacity of nature to be fully domesticated.” there is now an english translation of a dutch graphic novel that dramatizes the life of quaco, an enslaved boy whose life is described by john gabriel stedman, along with a teacher’s guide. scholarship on mary wollstonecraft includes a book on her ideas of virtue through a thomistic-aristotelian lens by emily dumler-winckler; an examination of the “feud” between wollstonecraft and elizabeth inchbald by willow white; the positioning of wollstonecraft in debates about fathers watching breastfeeding by virlana m. shchuka; a dissertation on wollstonecraft and “social reproduction pedagogy” by alex sibo; a critical survey of french and german rewritings of a vindication of the rights of woman by laura kirkley; an analysis of wollstonecraft’s use of “gothic violence” by megan gallagher; and an explication of wollstonecraft’s theory of tyranny by sandrine bergès and alan coffee. in terms of johnson’s competitors, naomi billingsley examines the grangerized copy of the macklin bible owned by robert bowyer. as regards the hayley circle, kaz oishi discusses william cowper in an environmental context (as does sean m. nolan’s dissertation), while matthew mcconkey looks at cowper’s idea of habit. a pilot project at the fitzwilliam museum offers digital images of william hayley’s correspondence with his wife, eliza hayley; with john flaxman; and with anna seward. ruth scobie suggests that hayley’s the triumphs of temper provided eighteenth-century fiction with the model of a young white woman reading about herself in the newspaper and becoming a celebrity. george romney was the subject of nicholas robbins’s talk at the paul mellon centre. romney’s lost painting the death of general wolfe features in a 2017 article by morton d. paley. (mairead horton’s article on benjamin west’s the death of general wolfe is worth reading for her recasting of west’s depiction of native american agency.) in the annual transactions of the romney society, one can find alex kidson’s edition of romney’s letters in volume 22 and a 2015–​20 supplement to his catalogue of romney’s paintings in volume 25. i’ve recorded the titles of other articles published in the journal since 2016, but i have not been able to access them for annotation. two articles on thomas stothard look at his illustrations for the seasons and walter scott’s ivanhoe, respectively. in the mellon centre’s georgian provocations series, paris spies-gans speaks on eliza trotter, angelica kauffman, and lady caroline lamb. diane boucher has a short article on maria cosway’s painting a persian going to adore the sun. clare siviter examines the chevalier d’éon’s celebrity as depicted in french and english newspapers. josé joaquín de mora is the subject of a collection of essays in spanish edited by salvador garcía castañeda and alberto romero ferrer, and a monograph in english by sara medina calzada. an article by alberto custodio romero vallejo discusses how mora used blake’s illustrations to the grave in his meditaciones poéticas. in addition to elizabeth potter’s dissertation on blake’s annotations, work on joshua reynolds includes a french dissertation by deborah waintraub; david hopkins’s examination of reynolds in the context of the eighteenth-century “clubbable man”; martin postle’s talk at the mellon centre on reynolds’s self-portraits; and thomas mcgeary’s article on british flautists in italy. noah heringman, crystal b. lake, and katharina boehm’s digital edition of vetusta monumenta is a superb scholarly accomplishment. on top of its high-quality digital reproductions and its transcriptions, translations, and commentary on each set of engravings, it offers illuminating contextual information about the society of antiquaries; a description of the long-running vetusta monumenta project itself; and biographies of major contributors, like james basire, richard gough, and william stukeley. the edition is well complemented by a special issue of modern philology, “ancient objects and new media.” in addition to luisa calè’s article on blake, described above, the issue includes bernard nurse’s detailed description of gough’s role in the publications of the society, with ample references to basire; dana arnold’s analysis of how the publications utilized ekphrasis in architecture; dustin frazier wood’s examination of “the distinction between image and text within antiquarian visual culture”; and boehm’s comparison of how novels by ann radcliffe and walter scott portrayed the past in light of the society’s projects. on a similar topic, william fitzgerald’s book the living death of antiquity: neoclassical aesthetics (2022) considers uses of the classical from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries; it has chapters on johann joachim winckelmann, john flaxman, and antonio canova. other work on eighteenth-century and romantic-era display and exhibition includes esther chadwick’s talk at the paul mellon centre, “a black king in georgian london: british art and postrevolutionary haiti.” leigh g. dillard considers intersections of image and text in commonplace books. amanda lahikainen’s money and materiality in the golden age of graphic satire is a fascinating study of how concerns over paper money manifested themselves in print satire. taking a broader approach, joseph monteyne’s media critique in the age of gillray, referenced above in relation to blake, considers how satire reflects anxieties over traditional concepts of subjective agency spurred by new reproductive print technologies. in addition to the articles on blake by calè and o’rourke in the european romantic review special issue “romanticism and vision,” terry f. robinson and john savarese’s introduction argues for the importance of visual culture in the romantic period, and david francis taylor considers william martin’s and james barry’s use of ekphrasis in their paintings of cymbeline. division i: william blake part i: blake’s writings section a: original editions, facsimiles, reprints, and translationsnote the publication of the spurious copies songs of innocence copy t, songs of innocence and of experience copies e/k and f/j, america a prophecy copy q, and europe a prophecy copy l in the blake archive exhibit fake blakes. america a prophecy (1793) america a prophecy [16 mpi and a copperplate fragment (recto and verso)]. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2022. 4 impressions of the frontispiece (bb pl. 1, e i, k i); 1 impression (bb pl. 3, e 1, k 1); 1 impression (bb pl. a, e a, k a); 1 impression (bb pl. b, e b, k b); 1 impression (bb pl. c, e c, k c); 3 impressions (bb pl. 4, e 2, k 2); 1 impression (bb pl. 10, e 8, k 8); 1 impression (bb pl. 11, e 9, k 9); 1 impression (bb pl. 12, e 10, k 10); 2 impressions (bb pl. 15, e 13, k 13); copperplate fragment, recto (bb pl. a, e a, k a) and verso (the head of a saint engraved by thomas butts, jr., the son of blake’s patron). ballads (pickering) manuscript (1807?) augurios de inocencia. edición bilingüe de fernando castanedo. traducción de fernando castanedo. madrid: cátedra, 2020. <blake (2021)> reviews gourlay, alexander s. see blake 56.2 in part vi. rodríguez rivero, manuel. “lanzando libros al vuelo.” el país, babelia (5 dec. 2020): 14-15. a descriptive catalogue (1809) william blake. invenciones. trans., prologue, and notes by juan francisco pastor paris. madrid: casimiro, 2022. 112 pp. isbn: 9788417930530. in spanish. “la materia del símbolo” (7-22); “catálogo descriptivo de cuadros, invenciones poéticas e históricas” (25-65, 81-99); “notas” (100-08). with 13 color images of the extant works presented by blake in his 1809–​10 exhibition above his brother’s shop in soho (68-80). <blake (2022), for italian ed.> § william blake. mes tableaux. trans. jean-luc ben ayoun. madrid: casimiro, 2020. 96 pp. isbn: 9788417930684. in french. illustrated with the extant works presented by blake in his 1809–​10 exhibition above his brother’s shop in soho. <blake (2022), for italian ed.> europe a prophecy (1794) europe a prophecy [41 mpi]. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2022. 6 impressions of the frontispiece (bb pl. 1, e i, k i); 5 impressions of the title page (bb pl. 2, e ii, k ii); 3 impressions of the preludium (bb pl. 4, e 1, k 1); 3 impressions (bb pl. 5, e 2, k 2); 2 impressions (bb pl. 6, e 3, k 3); 2 impressions (bb pl. 7, e 4, k 4); 2 impressions (bb pl. 9, e 6, k 6); 3 impressions (bb pl. 10, e 7, k 7); 4 impressions (bb pl. 11, e 8, k 8); 2 impressions (bb pl. 12, e 9, k 9); 2 impressions (bb pl. 13, e 10, k 10); 2 impressions (bb pl. 14, e 11, k 11); 1 impression (bb pl. 16, e 13, k 13); 2 impressions (bb pl. 17, e 14, k 14); 2 impressions (bb pl. 18, e 15, k 15). jerusalem (c. 1804–​20) § stroe, mihai a. “william blake in romanian translation: jerusalem—​a critical bilingual edition.” creativity 4.2 (2021): 247–552. “a romanian translation has long been due, and we offer it here, together with a critical apparatus (introductory study: some aspects of william blake’s cosmogony; and notes, clarifying both the literary, philosophical, historical, religious-spiritual and scientific context as well as matters of translation)” (abstract). letters 12 march 1804 to william hayley artists’ letters: leonardo da vinci to david hockney. ed. michael bird. london: white lion, 2019. <blake (2020)> b. artist no tegami: da vinci, goya, monet, rodin, warhol … hyakunin no kigakari [artists’ letters: da vinci, goya, monet, rodin, warhol … anxieties of a hundred people]. trans. kenji otsubo. tokyo: maar sha, 2020. 223 pp. isbn: 9784837306856. in japanese. the marriage of heaven and hell (1790–93?) § cennet ile cehennemin evliliği. trans. mesut küçükoğlu. türkiye: dedalus kitap, 2022. isbn: 9786054708352. in turkish. § le mariage du ciel et de l’enfer. trans. jean-yves lacroix. paris: editions allia, 2011. 14 cm., 69 pp. isbn: 9782844854124. <wbhc p. 301> b. 2nd ed. 2022. très petite collection. 80 pp. isbn: 9791030414950. in french (reproduces a copy of marriage). el matrimonio del cielo y el infierno [h]. ed. and trans. fernando castanedo. 2002, 2007, 2010, 2012 (4th ed., revised), 2014, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021. in spanish, with facing english for marriage. <blake (2003, 2014, 2017, 2018, 2020, 2021, 2022)> k. 11th ed., 2022. songs of innocence and of experience (1794) songs of innocence and of experience [u]. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2022. songs of innocence and of experience [w]. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2022. upcott’s autograph album (1826) blake’s autograph in the album of william upcott. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2022. section b: collections and selections § chansons et mythes: poèmes choisis. trans. and prologue by pierre boutang. paris: la différence, 1989. <blake (1992–​93)>recorded in blake 26.3 (winter 1992–​93) by d. w. dörrbecker. b. chansons et mythes. 2013. 186 pp. isbn: 9782729120344. english and french on facing pages. “a cradle song.” “weep you no more”: concert repertory shu: igirisu no ai to yume [“weep you no more”: a collection of concert repertoire: british love and dreams]. ed. hirohisa tsuji and akane nakanishi. tokyo: kawai shuppan, 2020. 91 pp. isbn: 9784760941865. in japanese. it reprints the first, second, third, and fourth stanzas of “a cradle song” with a musical score by gustav holst (34-35) and a translation into japanese (87). § poesie. introduction by sergio perosa. trans. giacomo conserva. 1976, 1991, 2003, 2005 [2 eds.], 2007. <wbhc p. 550, blake (2018)> g. with an essay by james joyce [“william blake”] and an introduction by sergio perosa. 2012. english and italian on facing pages.this supplements the information in <blake (2018)>. h. 2017. “the tyger.” the heavy bear who goes with me: 100 classic poems with commentary. ed. brendan kennelly and neil astley. hexham: bloodaxe books, 2022. isbn: 9781852244408. visiones. trans. enrique caracciolo trejo. mexico [city]: editorial era, 1974. b. antología bilingüe. ed. and trans. enrique caracciolo trejo. madrid: alianza editorial, 1987. 237 pp. isbn: 9788420602387. c. 1995. d. 1996. e. 1998. f. 2002. g. 2005. h. 2007. i. 2009. 262 pp. isbn: 9788420673264. j. 2012. 304 pp. isbn: 9788420658506. in all editions of the antología bilingüe, the text of visiones is slightly revised, and “por razones de espacio” vala, milton, and jerusalem are omitted. the 2012 edition consists of “índice” (7-10), “introducción” (11-21), “bibliografía sugerida” (23-24), “cronología de william blake” (25-27), “vocablos de sentido especial en la cosmogonía de blake” (291-96), “notas aclaratorias” (297-300), plus texts (english and spanish on facing pages) of poetical sketches, songs, thel, marriage, america, urizen, and the everlasting gospel (29-289).this entry supplements the information in wbhc pp. 462-63, 588-89. william blake, vahiy kitapları [prophetic works]. trans. kaan h. ökten. i̇stanbul: pinhan publications, 2015. <blake (2020)> b. everest yayınları, 2022. in turkish. new publisher and minor changes. part ii: reproductions of drawings and paintings section a: illustrations of individual authors milton, john paradise lost: manuscript. cambremer, france: sp books, 2022. isbn: 9791095457022. a fine print edition reproducing milton’s manuscript for book 1 of paradise lost and the thomas set of the paradise lost illustrations (1807). limited to 1000 copies. section b: collections and selections an allegory of the spiritual condition of man (1811) [preview mode]. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2022. epitome of james hervey’s “meditations among the tombs” (c. 1820) [preview mode]. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2022. the sea of time and space (1821) [preview mode]. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2022. the characters in spenser’s “faerie queene” (c. 1825) [preview mode]. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2022. part iii: commercial engravings section a: illustrations of individual authors dante “head of a damned soul in dante’s inferno” it is reproduced in füssli, entre rêve et fantastique (see fuseli in division ii). vetusta monumenta heringman, noah, crystal b. lake, and katharina boehm, eds. vetusta monumenta: ancient monuments, a digital edition. 2017–​22 (last update 18 june 2022). a wonderful digital edition of engravings in the first three volumes of this work, which was originally published as seven volumes by the society of antiquaries between 1747 and 1906. the edition offers an introduction; thematic essays: “about vetusta monumenta,” “vetusta monumenta and printmaking,” “kinds of monuments in vetusta monumenta,” “data visualizations of vetusta monumenta”; links to digital versions of the print copies; and a biographical register detailing prominent contributors, including james basire, sr. (with references to blake’s probable contributions), richard gough, william stukeley, and george vertue. for each set of designs, there are high-quality images; descriptions of the engraved plates; descriptions of the objects depicted in the engravings; a transcription of any text on the plates; a translation of any non-english text; a link to the explanatory account when the work was originally published; and an extended scholarly commentary. blake’s contributions (vol. 2, nos. 29-35) were executed while he was an apprentice to basire, and they are signed by basire.blake’s preliminary drawings can be found at the blake archive, under “pen and ink drawings (composed 1774-c. 1825)” and “water color drawings (composed 1775-c. 1790).” bernard nurse authored the commentary for the blake set. part iv: bibliographies and catalogues section a: bibliographies [cross-listing articles with substantial bibliographical content] calè, luisa. “blake and exhibitions, 2021.” see blake 56.1 in part vi. oliveira, camila, and jason whittaker. “blake and music, 2021.” see blake 56.1 in part vi. ripley, wayne c., with fernando castanedo, hikari sato, hüseyin alhas, and vera serdechnaia. “william blake and his circle: a checklist of scholarship in 2021.” see blake 56.1 in part vi. section b: catalogues catalogue 70. william blake: present joy: a chronological catalogue of blake’s works. san francisco: john windle antiquarian bookseller, 2022. a chronological arrangement of works by or connected to blake that are offered by windle. part v: digital resources akademia ignatianum w krakowie. “odc. 21 william blake, the lamb, the tiger, chimney sweeper (songs of innocence).” youtube. 9 dec. 2022. a short lesson on blake’s views on society and religion, and a reading of a few of his works. allen ginsberg project “ginsberg on blake continues—​106.” 17 feb. 2022. the concluding transcription and audio for ginsberg’s 1978 class at naropa on the four zoas. “luke walker on william blake & ginsberg’s visions.” 19 feb. 2022. highlights the recent work of walker on blake and ginsberg, including his talk at the global blake conference, “allen ginsberg’s retellings of his ‘blake vision,’” and his forthcoming book, william blake and allen ginsberg: romanticism, counterculture and radical reception. “franca bellarsi / william blake.” 20 feb. 2022. highlights bellarsi’s talk at the global blake conference, “from blake to buddha, biology, and beyond: the renewal of ‘prophetic labour’ amidst the beats and affiliates.” “steven taylor on blake.” 27 mar. 2022. highlights taylor’s conversation on blake and ginsberg at the 23 march 2022 blake society event (see blake society). “william blake’s birthday—​1.” 28 nov. 2022. posts the first part of a 10 july 1989 ginsberg reading at naropa with steven taylor; both audio and a transcription are provided. (see also an interview with taylor under the blake society.) “william blake’s birthday—​2.” 28 nov. 2022. posts the second part of the 1989 reading. andrews, susanna. “the 4 states of mind in william blake’s mythology.” collector (23 sept. 2022). a short biography, with an analysis of some of his works and their relation to four states of mind (ulro, generation, beulah, and eden/​eternity). art tourist. “know the artist: william blake revisited.” youtube. 9 dec. 2022. a biography of blake, with a focus on his art and poetry. bedworth, candy. “william blake’s demonic red dragon.” daily art magazine (16 jan. 2023). on blake’s life, highlighting the great red dragon and the woman clothed with the sun. blake society (see also vala in part vi) events: davies, keri. “‘inoculation should be common everywhere.’” 19 jan. 2022. wilson, andy, and tim heath. “blake or blade runner.”the title of the youtube video is “blake & blade runner.” 23 feb. 2022. “on the fortieth anniversary of the release of the film blade runner, we look at blake made manifest.” taylor, steven. “blake’s tyger and the lion of dharma: allen ginsberg’s innocence & experience.” 23 mar. 2022. “a conversation between steven taylor and camila oliveira querino about how allen ginsberg set blake’s songs of innocence and of experience to music, and then sang them.” (for more on taylor, see allen ginsberg project.) bragg, billy. “‘till we have built jerusalem’—​billy bragg on william blake.” 20 apr. 2022. “billy bragg talks about william blake.” visionary company. “albion, awake! william blake live on stage.” 20-22 may 2022. “the visionary theatre company presents the genius of william blake live on stage.” whittaker, jason. “visions of albion in felpham: blake, sussex, and the origins of the hymn ‘jerusalem.’” 29 june 2022. “professor jason whittaker talks about the origin of blake’s libretto for parry’s anthem jerusalem.” “another room.” 14 aug. 2022. an in-person gathering at bunhill fields burial ground “to celebrate the dance of eternal death of william blake who was buried in august 1827 in bunhill fields.” not recorded. hay, daisy. “dinner with joseph johnson.” 7 sept. 2022. hay discusses her book dinner with joseph johnson. said, s. f. “tyger—​sf said.” 19 oct. 2022. said discusses his new novel, tyger. “vala 3 online launch.” 30 nov. 2022. see vala in part vi. “the westbrook blake at st. james’s church, piccadilly.” 24 nov. 2022. “in collaboration with the blake society, st. james’s, piccadilly present[s] legendary jazz pianist and composer mike westbrook and band, performing his celebrated musical settings of blake’s verse.” in-person event; not recorded (but see richard williams’s description of the event, below). blame blake an in-person eventthe event’s schedule, according to its facebook page, included: “john higgs (the klf, watling st., stranger than we can imagine); david bramwell (the cult of water, odditorium, catalyst club); the buddhist punk (poet: new book ‘a tempting magic’); myra stuart (with puppet william blake); dave lee (chaos magician, author); lisa lovebucket (playwright, artist, poet, performer); claudia egypt (actor, writer, alternative theatre legend); ben graham (poet, author, quietus/​shindig writer); laura fives (dj); sheffield arts lab.” held on 31 august 2021 at the airy fairy garden, sheffield, uk, to celebrate blake and the publication of john higgs’s book william blake vs. the world. i’ve documented the youtube videos related to it here and cross-referenced the event under higgs in part vi. airy fairy. “blame blake.” youtube. 17 apr. 2021. a virtual discussion among the participants, including john higgs. airy fairy. “claudia boulton, writer, actor and creative spirit, talks about blame blake.” youtube. 31 oct. 2021. boulton discusses blake and her work as a performance artist. airy fairy. “john higgs, writer, talks about blame blake.” youtube. 2 nov. 2021. higgs discusses blake, sheffield, his book, and how the pandemic prevented him from doing a book tour, which led to blame blake. airy fairy. “ben graham, poet, talks about blame blake.” youtube. 8 feb. 2022. graham discusses blake and his involvement with the blame blake event. airy fairy. “dave lee, magick [sic] practitioner, breathwork coach & writer, talks about blame blake.” youtube. 8 feb. 2022. lee discusses blake. airy fairy. “myra stuart, puppeteer, talks about blame blake.” youtube. 8 feb. 2022. on the creation of her blake puppet and her thoughts on blake. airy fairy. “tim holmes, poet, talks about blame blake.” youtube. 8 feb. 2022. holmes discusses his experience with blake. airy fairy. “blame blake; a day inspired [by] and in celebration of william blake.” youtube. 9 feb. 2022. “the [video] highlight[s] performances from the blame blake event that took place in the airy fairy garden on 31st august 2021. contributing artists include john higgs, claudia boulton, tim holmes, ben graham, myra stuart, dave lee, geoff winde, david bramwell, tryptoman, sheffield arts lab. a day to celebrate the publication of william blake vs. the world by john higgs and use it as inspiration to create a day of bea[u]ty and wonder centred around the works, ideas and life of william blake” (description). books & bridges. “the profound poetic vision of william blake.” youtube. 23 nov. 2022. a discussion about blake by mark matheson. brand, betsy. “experience william blake in augmented reality.” getty (15 dec. 2022). a description of a project in collaboration with apple in london that created an app for consumers to view creatures from the ghost of a flea and satan exulting over eve in augmented reality. branwyn, gareth. “the unique etching and printing process of william blake.” boing boing (29 apr. 2022). slight explication of two michael phillips youtube videos on blake’s printing process and john higgs’s 23 june 2021 british library talk. british association for romantic studies bars blog: sangster, matthew. “five questions: madeleine callaghan on eternity in british romantic poetry.” 23 may 2022. “eternity and the relationship between poetry, theology, and religion, gained a new urgency in the romantic period.” paterson-morgan, emily. “william blake—​film season—​london.” 23 sept. 2022. “drawing inspiration from william blake’s songs of innocence and experience [sic], this film season focuses on contemporary filmmakers around the world who tell stories from the child’s perspective.” brown, matt. “spot these gorgeous william blake mosaics, hiding in lambeth.” londonist (3 oct. 2022). on the mosaics in lambeth modeled on blake’s works. callewaert, rune. “the marriage of heaven and hell—​william blake—​2023 charcoal animation.” youtube. 20 dec. 2022. an interpretive animation of the marriage of heaven and hell. interesting and creepy. carney, james. “tracing the legacy of william blake with british literary manuscripts online.” gale review (1 feb. 2022). a post by a “gale ambassador,” who examines some of blake’s manuscripts through the gale database british literary manuscripts online: c. 1660–​1900. chen, min. “william blake’s visions arrive in ar form via an app by getty museum and apple.” jing culture & crypto (28 july 2022). an article describing blake’s the ghost of a flea and its place in the new collaborative app between the getty museum and apple. “viewers can summon moving and morphing models of blake’s flea [sic], serpents, and eagle, created using motion capture. the animations are accompanied by a soundtrack by producer just blaze, who set blake’s poetry to beats.” davies, keri. index rerum: a blog about books, book-collecting, william blake, and lots of other things. scholarship: “‘inoculation should be common everywhere.’” 26 jan. 2022. a brief but illuminating note on catherine the great, whose portrait and letter proclaiming “inoculation should be common everywhere” were auctioned by macdougall arts of st. james’s square in december 2021. (see also davies’s lecture on the topic of inoculation under the blake society.) “blakespotting.” 5 june 2022. consideration of the controversies over the content-warning signs at both the william blake and the hogarth and europe exhibitions at tate britain, and the use of blake by the right. “william blake and smallpox: the disease in blake’s london and in blake’s art.” 5 june 2022. on smallpox inoculation and blake’s illustrations of the book of job, pl. numbered 6. “william hayley and smallpox.” 5 june 2022. traces the hayleys’ use of surrogate mothers, the impact of smallpox on the hayley family (including hayley’s son, thomas alphonso), and hayley’s friendship with edward jenner, who discovered the smallpox vaccine. donway, walter. “william blake, the romantic revolution, and liberty.” online library of liberty (8 nov. 2022). a short biography of blake with a focus on the french revolution and his thoughts on slavery, the workforce, and freedom. donway, walter. “william blake: romantic poet and enlightenment man?” online library of liberty (9 nov. 2022). an article discussing the influence that the enlightenment and revolutions had on blake, as well as an analysis of blake’s influence on the later romantic era. escalante-de mattei, shanti. “getty museum and apple bring william blake’s monsters to life for new ar project.” artnews (27 july 2022). an article describing the getty museum and apple’s augmented-reality project in london. eternalised. “the otherworldly art of william blake.” eternalised (11 apr. 2022). a post analyzing blake’s work and philosophy. eternalised. “the otherworldly art of william blake.” youtube. 11 apr. 2022. an overview of blake’s life and art. fedorenko, yuriy. “celebrating the birthday of william blake in tate britain.” youtube. 29 nov. 2022. an in-person gathering at tate britain to celebrate blake’s birthday. gamingmuse archives. youtube. 28-29 oct. 2022. a five-part series of livestreams playing the video game devil may cry 5 and analyzing blake’s works and life in conjunction with the game. “thegamingmuse archive: devil may cry 5 & william blake discussion | part 1 [2022].” “thegamingmuse archive: devil may cry 5 & william blake discussion | part 2 [2022].” “thegamingmuse archive: devil may cry 5 & william blake discussion | part 3 [2022].” “thegamingmuse archive: devil may cry 5 & william blake discussion | part 4 [2022].” “thegamingmuse archive: devil may cry 5 & william blake discussion | part 5 [2022].” gilchrist, cherry.i saw no indication at the blog that the author is related to alexander or anne gilchrist. “william blake and the moravians.” cherry’s cache (19 june 2022). an overview that draws on academic sources. golgonooza. “opening the doors: william blake, jack kerouac, allen ginsberg, and the beat generation.” thehumandivine.org (3 apr. 2022). synthesizes two previously published articles on blake and the beats: alexandre ferrere’s 2019 “visions, symbols and intertextuality: an overview of william blake’s influence on allen ginsberg” <blake (2020)>, and david wills’s “william blake and the beat generation,” beatdom (30 oct. 2012), not previously recorded in blake or wbhc. higgs, john. “author interview: john higgs’s william blake vs. the world.” see higgs in part vi. higgs, john. “divinely-inspired art: john higgs on william blake’s visions of the sublime.” see higgs in part vi. higgs, john. “god has a beautiful mansion for me elsewhere: the last days of william blake.” see higgs in part vi. hoakley, [howard?]. “painted stories in britain 9: william blake.” eclectic light company (26 oct. 2022). a survey of blake’s career. huntington. “a william blake hand-printed drawing (1795).” youtube. 7 july 2022. a defense of including blake’s hecate, or the night of enitharmon’s joy in the huntington’s exhibition 100 great british drawings, which ran from 18 june to 5 september 2022. idler. “on william blake and his mind-forg’d manacles | a drink with mark vernon.” youtube. 4 july 2022. a discussion of “london” between vernon and tom hodgkinson. jones, josh. “william blake: the remarkable printing process of the english poet, artist & visionary.” open culture (19 may 2022). highlights blake’s printing process, drawing on the youtube video featuring michael phillips that was made for the 2015 ashmolean exhibition william blake: apprentice and master. laing, michael. “william blake & the divinity of imagination.” synchronicity (27 may 2022). an analysis of blake and his “childlike sense of wonder.” lawson-tancred, jo. “apple has teamed up with the getty to unleash augmented-reality demons inspired by william blake at its new london store.” artnet news (28 july 2022). an article describing blake’s work featured in apple’s new augmented-reality app. lilian. “top 10 surprising facts about william blake” [as of 9 may 2023, “top 15 surprising facts about william blake”]. discover walks blog (28 mar. 2022). “list of william blake artworks.” history of art (13 dec. 2022). not a list. marshall, colin. “the otherworldly art of william blake: an introduction to the visionary poet and painter.” open culture (22 june 2022). a brief introduction to blake’s work, linking to the youtube video posted by eternalised. metzger, michael. “bono, william blake and c. s. lewis.” religion unplugged (15 nov. 2022). originally posted as “two peas in a pod” at the clapham institute (14 nov. 2022). michalska, magda. “the bible according to william blake.” daily art magazine (26 feb. 2023). a brief breakdown of four biblical subjects in blake’s work: jesus, satan, adam and eve, and cain and abel. michalska, magda. “william blake’s songs of innocence and of experience explained.” daily art magazine (28 nov. 2022). brief discussion of songs. miller, catriona. “masterpiece story: ‘the ancient of days’ by william blake.” daily art magazine (26 feb. 2023). modernpoetry1. “highly sensitive poetry | william blake—​ah! sun-flower (1794).” youtube. 6 feb. 2023. an animated blake reading “ah! sun-flower.” murray-white, james. finding blake: reimagining william blake for the 21st century. whittaker, jason. “going global—​blake’s afterlife.” 10 jan. 2022. whittaker reflects on his interest in blake’s reception, leading to the global blake conference of january 2022. murray-white, james. “on jez butterworth’s jerusalem & our fallacy of albion.” 4 aug. 2022. a review of the play. murray-white, james. “niall mcdevitt, 1967–​2022.” 1 oct. 2022. a remembrance of the poet mcdevitt, who devised “walking guides of blake’s london.” foyle, naomi. “niall mcdevitt (1967–​2022): entering the mystery.” 15 oct. 2022. another remembrance of mcdevitt. moore, helen. “the ghosts of fleas.” 29 oct. 2022. moore, a poet, discusses her poem inspired by the ghost of a flea, which is in her collection ecozoa (2015). owen, nick. “other people’s struggles.” paper-darts.com (19 dec. 2022). a reading of “the human abstract.” paul mellon centre public lecture course: georgian provocations (28 may to 2 july 2020): hallett, mark. “walking the street: william hogarth’s the four times of day (1736–​1738).” 28 may 2020. postle, martin. “variations on a theme: richard wilson’s the white monk (c. 1760–​65).” 4 june 2020. postle, martin. “all done from nature: george stubbs’s whistlejacket (1762).” 11 june 2020. postle, martin. “the artist as intellectual: joshua reynolds’s self-portrait as president of the royal academy (c. 1780).” 18 june 2020. hallett, mark. “displaying the hero: john singleton copley’s the death of major peirson (1784).” 25 june 2020. hallett, mark. “making an impact: thomas lawrence’s arthur atherley (1792).” 2 july 2020. public lecture course: georgian provocations ii (27 october to 8 december 2022): spies-gans, paris. “establishing a female lineage at the royal academy’s show: eliza trotter, angelica kauffman and the intrigues of lady caroline lamb.” 27 oct. 2022. myrone, martin. “the haunted eighteenth century: fuseli’s the nightmare.” 3 nov. 2022. chadwick, esther. “a black king in georgian london: british art and postrevolutionary haiti.” 10 nov. 2022. robbins, nicholas. “george romney in the prison-world of europe.” 17 nov. 2022. postle, martin. “joseph wright of derby: self-portrait as an experimental artist.” 1 dec. 2022. “georgian provocations ii: panel discussion.” 8 dec. 2022. pearce, j. m. s. “william blake.” hektoen international: a journal of medical humanities 14.4 (fall 2022). a biography of blake followed by an analysis of some of his most popular works and religious ideas. perry, william p. “tyger tyger burning bright … the poetical art of william blake.” berkshire edge (24 july 2022). a description of some of blake’s works. pixel critic. “devil may cry 5 poetry explained—​vergil/​v character analysis.” youtube. 23 july 2021. an analysis of the game using the [first] book of urizen. popova, maria. “the only valiant way to complain is to create: william blake and the stubborn courage of the unexampled.” marginalian (18 june 2022). a description of the method of printing that blake invented and how it changed his works. popova, maria. “what we keep in loss: william blake’s stirring letter to a bereaved father.” marginalian (16 july 2022). reflects upon blake’s perspective on loss and grief, excerpting his 6 may 1800 letter to william hayley. regeneration: mike sauter and michael martin. “introduction to william blake.” youtube. 23 sept. 2022. a podcast discussion of blake. regeneration: mike sauter and michael martin. “mark vernon on william blake.” youtube. 30 sept. 2022. a discussion with vernon about some of blake’s works. rice university. “fondren completes collection of william blake replica prints and plates.” youtube. 28 feb. 2022. on the acquisition of facsimiles of blake’s illuminated books created by michael phillips; the video features him working in the printing workshop. (see also shilcutt.) school of alchemy. “william blake: visionary by paul getty museum.” youtube. 28 june 2022. a look at the catalogue for the getty exhibition that was postponed because of covid-19. shilcutt, katharine. “fondren updates collection of william blake replica prints and plates.” rice university news and media relations (25 feb. 2022). details rice’s acquisition of facsimiles of blake’s illuminated books created by michael phillips and links to a youtube video, posted by the university, which shows phillips in the printing workshop. starkey, arun. “how william blake inspired a classic led zeppelin song.” far out magazine (27 dec. 2022). how blake’s print “the dance of albion” inspired the led zeppelin song “achilles last stand.” stripped cover lit. “and did those feet in ancient time by william blake summary, analysis, interpretation, theme, review.” youtube. 28 apr. 2022. a reading of “jerusalem.” stripped cover lit. “the sick rose by william blake summary, analysis, themes, review.” youtube. 14 apr. 2022. a reading of “the sick rose”: “prior to the internet, … all caps meant, probably, that you were going to shoot people, so ‘the sick rose’ reads as such.” stripped cover lit. “the tyger by william blake: summary, analysis, themes, review.” youtube. 7 apr. 2022. a reading of “the tyger” and “the lamb.” takac, balasz [vladimir bjelicic]. “visionary and mystical worlds in william blake paintings and prints.” widewalls (29 aug. 2022). an analysis of blake’s works that feature a mystical or fantastical setting. tyutvinova, tat'yana. “uil'yam bleyk i britanskie khudozhniki-vizionery [william blake and british visionary artists].” culture.ru (22 mar. 2022). in russian. a lecture on blake and his contemporaries read by the deputy head of the department of engraving and drawing, state museum of fine arts named after a. s. pushkin. vardell, sylvia. “a place for poetry.” horn book magazine (1 may 2022): 82-86. on the newbery award and poetry, with a discussion of nancy willard’s a visit to william blake’s inn (1981) <bbs p. 679, wbhc p. 2863>. vernon, mark. mark vernon. “easter according to william blake. resurrection is neither miracle nor mystery.” 10 apr. 2022. “forging golgonooza. william blake on how to do politics & religion.” 24 apr. 2022. “william blake and learning from covid. on dying before you die.” 8 may 2022. originally published in beshara magazine as “reflections: of the passage through eternal death and the awakening to eternal life” (6 may 2022). “the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. william blake on desire, attention and wanting it all.” 21 may 2022. “william blake and the psychedelic renaissance. seven facets of cultural transformation.” 24 may 2022. “jerusalem. lament, tragedy, invocation, cry? william blake and the play that forgets his name.” 28 june 2022. a review of jez butterworth’s jerusalem. “‘i have conversed with the spiritual sun. i saw him on primrose hill.’ william blake with mark vernon.” 4 july 2022. “awakening in a caroline age. king charles, william blake & kathleen raine.” 9 sept. 2022. on charles’s relationship to kathleen raine, who “had become a mentor to the then prince, a kind of spiritual director.” “the veiling of things. rishi sunak, william blake and the bhagavad gita.” 29 oct. 2022. “william blake on the last judgement, apocalypse & final things.” 27 nov. 2022. vernon, mark. “william blake and the future of christianity.” youtube. 16 july 2022. a 12 july 2022 lecture at st. matthew’s church, wimbledon, london. victoryxr. “experience william blake delivering his famous poem ‘london’ in vr on the victoryxr academy campus.” youtube. 1 sept. 2022. an animated version of blake reciting “london.” a visionary symmetry: northrop frye & william blake “an exhibition celebrating the seventy-fifth anniversary of the publication of fearful symmetry: a study of william blake,” held at the e. j. pratt library from 20 october to 9 december 2022 and curated by agatha barc, bailey chui, and lisa j. sherlock. the online exhibition offers digital images of the items in the physical display cases, including different editions of fearful symmetry; photographs of frye; manuscripts and other books by frye; key books on blake written by others; facsimiles and scholarly editions of blake’s works; and reflections on frye by former students. remarks delivered on the opening night of the exhibition are also available: angela esterhammer, “recollections on the 75th anniversary of the publication of fearful symmetry” and jean o’grady, “frye and fearful symmetry.” wakeling, kate. “william blake: how his poetry inspired composers.” classical music (9 jan. 2023). an overview. whittaker, jason. “the radical visions of william blake.” tribune magazine (28 nov. 2022). on blake’s political radicalism in contrast to the use of his poetry and images for commercial and nationalistic agendas. whittaker, jason. “upon clouded hills.” history today 72.8 (2022): 22-24. a concise popular account of the reception of “jerusalem.” whittaker, jason. zoamorphosis. for a description of and links to the online conference global blake, which took place in january 2022, see <blake (2022)>. for whittaker’s reflection on the conference, see his post “going global—​blake’s afterlife” at james murray-white’s finding blake. scholarship: “‘jerusalem’—​a personal history.” 12 june 2022. “with the publication of jerusalem: blake, parry and the fight for englishness in a month’s time, jason whittaker gives some of the reasons as to why he wrote about blake’s most famous poem.” “‘jerusalem’ and the commonwealth games.” 4 aug. 2022. “why do english athletes sing the blake-parry hymn ‘jerusalem’ at the commonwealth games? can it represent a more diverse england?” reviews: “review: lucy cogan—​blake and the failure of prophecy.” 12 mar. 2022. “blake is commonly described as a writer of prophecies and prophetic works but, as is evident throughout cogan’s insightful and clearly argued book, in many cases critics fail to be clear as to what they actually mean when they invoke this label” (par. 8). “review: fake blakes.” 18 may 2022. a review of the exhibition at the blake archive. “jez butterworth’s sons of albion.” 17 july 1022. on butterworth’s play jerusalem (2009). “‘and all must love the human form’: empire, london, and islam in s. f. said’s tyger.” 23 oct. 2022. a review of said’s novel tyger (2022). “if tyger shares many allusions with william blake’s poetry it also invokes his spirit in the art of the book” (par. 8). blakespotting: “blakespotting: new blake designs from alexander mcqueen.” 19 feb. 2022. “blakespotting: peaky blinders and william blake.” 8 mar. 2022. on allusions to blake, including “a poison tree,” in the bbc television series peaky blinders. “a blakean year: 2022.” 31 dec. 2022. a review of blake’s influence on the arts in 2022. blakeana: “from the collection: vaughan williams’s job a masque.” 2 may 2022. on ralph vaughan williams on the 150th anniversary of his birth, his job: a masque for dancing, and items related to it in whittaker’s collection. “the satanic verses and the marriage of heaven and hell.” 13 aug. 2022. after salman rushdie’s stabbing, thoughts on blake’s influence on rushdie and on the satanic verses. “a golden string: susheela raman and guests.” 17 nov. 2022. “listed below are a few videos from a new project i am involved with: called ‘a golden string: william blake in songs and words,’ which combines songs by susheela raman and sam mills with spoken word sections by me.” “william blake.” melt (n.d.). an analysis of some of blake’s works and philosophies. william blake archive exhibition: fake blakes. april 2022. “curated by joseph viscomi and designed by michael fox with the assistance of grant glass.” exhibition of “illuminated books and prints that were not printed or colored by william blake”: songs of innocence copy t; songs of innocence and of experience copies e/k and f/j; america a prophecy copy q; europe a prophecy copy l; and various photolithographs and kerographs. review whittaker, jason. see whittaker, zoamorphosis. hell’s printing press: the blog of the blake archive and blake quarterly. editing and technical issues: meaghan green. “the mystery and magic of photo processing.” 20 may 2022. on the use of photoshop to reveal details in blake’s works, with examples from his autograph in the album of william upcott and america a prophecy. “william blake: a rebel against the age of enlightenment: pauper, prophet and pre-romantic.” medium (19 apr. 2022). a brief article describing blake’s life, work, and thought. “william blake—​artist william blake’s paintings and illustrations.” art in context (7 sept. 2022). a biography of blake, with his accomplishments and influences. “william blake completes apprenticeship and starts independent career.” cove (n.d.). a paragraph on blake’s invention of illuminated printing, in the style of “on this day in history.” “william blake—​poet and painter of passion.” poetry changes lives (28 nov. 2022). a brief biography of blake, followed by “earth’s answer.” williams, richard. “william blake in piccadilly.” thebluemoment.com (25 nov. 2022). a review of mike westbrook’s concert, visions and voices: echoes of william blake, on 24 november 2022 at st. james’s church, piccadilly. you call that radio. “john higgs talks the klf, william blake, the beatles and more (reupload).” youtube. 20 may 2022. a discussion with higgs, author of william blake vs. the world, about blake and other topics. part vi: criticism, biography, and reviews a   b   c   d   e   f   g   h   i   j   k   l   m   n   o   p   r   s   t   v   w   z a § aberbach, david. “industry and the romantics: blake, wordsworth, and goethe.” the environment and literature of moral dilemmas: from adam to michael k. abingdon: routledge, 2022. isbn: 9780367770877. 126-32. adam, edina, with julian brooks, and an essay by matthew hargraves. william blake: visionary. los angeles: j. paul getty museum, 2020. <blake (2021, 2022)> reviews brylowe, thora. journal of british studies 61.4 (2022): 996-97. reesman, linda l. 1650–​1850: ideas, aesthetics, and inquiries in the early modern era 27 (2022): 304-07. akimoto, yuko. takiguchi shuzo kenkyu: eizo ningen no keifu [a study of shuzo takiguchi: a genealogy of a shadowy person]. osaka: izumi shoin, 2022. 398 pp. isbn: 9784757610354. in japanese. chapter 2, “his baptism of william blake: metaphysics of light,” discusses the influence of blake on yutaka haniya (107-46). alexander, david. a biographical dictionary of british and irish engravers, 1714–​1820. new haven: yale university press, 2022. isbn: 9781913107215. an exceedingly useful resource that, in addition to its biographies of engravers contemporary with blake (including most members of his circle), contains a historical overview of the profession and a list of apprentices. its entry on blake unfortunately misnames joseph johnson, john. alkayid, majd m., and murad m. al kayed. “the language of flowers in selected poems by william blake: a feminist reading.” theory and practice in language studies 12.4 (2022): 784-89. “blake talks about women symbolically using different kinds of flowers” (788). ando, kiyoshi. “igirisu romanha shijin no shukyoteki stance: blake, wordsworth, coleridge [religious stances of the english romantic poets: blake, wordsworth, and coleridge].” kanto gakuin daigaku jimbun gakkai kiyo [bulletin of the society of humanities, kanto gakuin university] 145 (2021): 33-46. apesos, anthony. “visionary anatomy: blake’s bodies.” romantik: journal for the study of romanticisms 10 (2021): 57-82. “i will explore the origin and significance of blake’s divergence from anatomical correctness” (abstract). also references william hunter, joshua reynolds, and luigi schiavonetti. b bakić, tanja. “william blake the designer: the reception of robert blair’s grave in serbia.” literature compass 19.7 (2022): 13 pp. “the aim of this article is to bring the figure of william blake the designer closer to the serbian reader, and to set it apart from the previously dominant figure of blake the poet, when it comes to his reception in that country” (abstract). barra van treek, erika de la. “desterritorialización y reterritorialización de ‘tyger’ de blake y ‘nightingale’ de keats en la obra de jorge luis borges.” phd diss., universidad de chile, 2008. 217 pp. in spanish. “a study of the intertextual and intercultural dialogue between borges and two english romantics, william blake and john keats, through the de-territorializing of the tyger and ode to a nightingale from the 19th century english romantic context and their re-territorializing in modern/​postmodern argentina of the 20th century” (abstract). bellarsi, franca. “a cosmopolitan case study: countercultural blake in the therapoetic practice of maelström reevolution.” see bulletin of the john rylands library. bellarsi, franca. “‘without contraries is no progression’: blake my teacher.” see vala. black, michael william. “‘mental fight’ and ‘seeing & writing’ in virginia woolf and william blake.” phd diss., university of glasgow, 2022. blake/an illustrated quarterly volume 55, number 4 (spring 2022) articles essick, robert n. “blake in the marketplace, 2021.” 9 pars., plus listings. worrall, david. “‘seen in my visions’: klüver form-constant visual hallucinations in william blake’s paintings and illuminated books.” 61 pars. suggests that blake experienced “geometric-patterned phosphenes perceived as self-luminous entoptic hallucinations in the visual field.” these hallucinations manifest in “four form-constant patterns: tunnel, spiral, net or lattice, and cobweb or concentric circles” (par. 14), and worrall finds examples in blake’s works. reviews walker, luke. linda freedman, william blake and the myth of america: from the abolitionists to the counterculture. 14 pars. “a welcome addition” (par. 1). schuchard, marsha keith. adam komisaruk, sexual privatism in british romantic writing: a public of one. 3 pars. komisaruk’s “willingness to confront the intellectual contradictions and gender confusions in [blake’s] controversial (and often effaced) erotic images is provocative” (par. 3). gourlay, alexander s. erasmus darwin, the botanic garden, ed. adam komisaruk and allison dushane. 9 pars. “a thoroughly creditable performance” (par. 6). includes a short appendix, “darwin’s anemone and blake’s thel,” which suggests darwin’s influence on the title page of the book of thel. volume 56, number 1 (summer 2022) articles ripley, wayne c., with fernando castanedo, hikari sato, hüseyin alhas, and vera serdechnaia. “william blake and his circle: a checklist of scholarship in 2021.” 40 pars., plus listings. includes a description of and links to the presentations at global blake: afterlives in art, literature and music, the 11-13 january 2022 online conference sponsored by the university of lincoln and bishop grosseteste university and organized by jason whittaker and sibylle erle. oliveira, camila, and jason whittaker. “blake and music, 2021.” 3 pars., plus listings. given the pandemic, focuses on “streaming settings of blake’s works,” and the list includes many 2020 productions released on “bandcamp and soundcloud ” (par. 1). calè, luisa. “blake and exhibitions, 2021.” 3 pars., plus listings. notes the continued impact of the pandemic on exhibitions; records which of blake’s works were part of exhibitions commemorating the 700th anniversary of dante’s death; and highlights “experimentation with digital facsimiles” (par. 3). volume 56, number 2 (fall 2022) articles davis, matthew m. “the house of aumont and blake’s french revolution.” 38 pars. argues persuasively that “aumont” in the french revolution was the royalist louis-alexandre-céleste d’aumont (1736–​1814) and not his revolution-supporting brother, louis-marie guy d’aumont (1732–​99), as was suggested in w. h. stevenson’s complete poems.blake: the complete poems, 3rd ed. (harlow: pearson, 2007) 140n. wilson, louise. “printing imperfections in william blake’s virgil wood engravings and what they reveal.” 20 pars. a technical examination of the national gallery of victoria’s prints from blake’s virgil woodblocks; their printing imperfections “provide a tangible commentary on the complex history of [the] woodblocks and the various artists who printed from them” (par. 1). reviews rovira, james. mike goode, romantic capabilities: blake, scott, austen, and the new messages of old media. 8 pars. “goode provokes argument in the best possible way and, in the process, opens up the field of literary studies to new possible readings” (par. 8). mcquail, josephine a. marsha keith schuchard, a concatenation of conspiracies: “irish” william blake and illuminist freemasonry in 1798. 8 pars. “a readable and compelling study” (par. 1). gourlay, alexander s. fernando castanedo, ed. and trans., william blake, augurios de inocencia. 4 pars. “castanedo writes clearly in both english and spanish, and is a judicious, thorough, and painstaking scholar as well as a gifted translator” (par. 2). volume 56, number 3 (winter 2022–23) articles martello, matthew. “the notebook, laocoön, and blake’s beauties of inflection.” 73 pars. a reading of the notebook as a whole, suggesting its form and poetics inform the laocoön separate plate. lincoln, andrew. “blake, lucretius, and prophecy: the book of los.” 23 pars. highlights the book of los: “blake saw in lucretius not only a materialistic cosmology that he felt compelled to attack, but also a form of prophecy that represented an alluring alternative to his own prophetic mission, one whose malign influence could embroil those who tried to contain or oppose it—​including john milton” (par. 1). review rosso, g. a. lucy cogan, blake and the failure of prophecy. 18 pars. bode, christoph. rev. of alexander regier, exorbitant enlightenment. see regier. brylowe, thora. rev. of edina adam, with julian brooks, and an essay by matthew hargraves, william blake: visionary. see adam with brooks. bulletin of the john rylands library volume 98, issue 1 (may 2022) “the artist of the future age: william blake, neo-romanticism, counterculture and now” ed. douglas field and luke walker field, douglas, and luke walker. “introduction.” 1-5. highlights the explosion of reception studies on blake and contrasts the collection’s focus on the british counterculture movement with stephen eisenman’s american focus in william blake and the age of aquarius. horovitz, michael. “the blake renaissance.” 7-15. reprints an article originally published in oxford opinion (1958) that helped to spur blake’s reception in the british counterculture movement. horovitz “argues that blake ‘evades appraisal because he was always working for a synthesis of creation far beyond outward forms and genres,’ which meant ‘he had to invent his own methods to express himself adequately’” (abstract). horovitz, michael. “william blake and (a few of) his friends in our time.” 17-22. “horovitz reflects on his longstanding fascination with william blake,” including “how the spirit of blake loomed large at the international poetry incarnation at the albert hall in the summer of 1965, where his fellow travellers, among them adrian mitchell, were driven by the nineteenth-century poet” (abstract). marley, jodie. “‘invisible gates would open’: w. b. yeats and william blake in the 1890s.” 23-38. “this article examines the works of william blake: poetic, symbolic, and critical (1893) and yeats’s 1890s reviews of his contemporary blake critics, as well as his relationship with the mystic poet and artist george william russell (æ), whom he repeatedly compared to blake” (abstract). trodd, colin. “william blake and the spiritual forms of citizenship and hospitality.” 39-54. a substantial examination of blake’s reception in britain between the 1910s and the 1940s. hopkins, david. “avant-garde blake: from francis bacon to oz magazine.” 55-73. examines “the way the artistic reception of william blake changed in britain between the 1950s and the early 1970s” (55). riley, james. “iain sinclair, william blake and the visionary poetry of the 1960s.” 75-92. “considers the use made of william blake by a range of writers associated with the ‘countercultural’ milieu of the 1960s, particularly those linked to its london-based literary context,” including iain sinclair, michael horovitz, and harry fainlight (abstract). whittaker, jason. “‘the place where contrarieties are equally true’: blake and the science-fiction counterculture.” 93-106. “explores the more detached and ironic view of blake that emerged in the 1970s compared to appropriations of him in the 1960s, as evident in three science-fiction novels: ray nelson’s blake’s progress (1977), angela carter’s the passion of new eve (1977), and j. g. ballard’s the unlimited dream company (1979)” (abstract). bellarsi, franca. “a cosmopolitan case study: countercultural blake in the therapoetic practice of maelström reevolution.” 107-26. “explores an instance of the reception and transformation of william blake’s countercultural legacy by focusing on the neo-romantic resurgences embodied by maelström reevolution, an experimental performance collective based in brussels but with marked transnational affiliations” (107). c calè, luisa. “blake and exhibitions, 2021.” see blake 56.1. calè, luisa. “william blake’s ‘fourfold vision’: a practical antiquary’s visionary contemplations among the ‘couches of the dead.’” see society of antiquaries in division ii. calè, luisa. “william blake’s pestilence, sympathy, and the politics of feeling.” see european romantic review under cultures and technologies of display and exhibition in division ii. callaghan, madeleine. “‘all is done as i have told’: blake’s eternal prophecy.” eternity in british romantic poetry. liverpool: liverpool university press, 2022. isbn: 9781800856066. 23-58. the chapter surveys blake’s idea of eternity in multiple works. author talk sangster, matthew [interviewer]. see bars blog in part v. calonne, david stephen. the beats in mexico. new brunswick: rutgers university press, 2022. isbn: 9781978828728. slight references to blake’s influence on ginsberg, but also, in terms of reception, blake’s place in the anthology america a prophecy: a new reading of american poetry from pre-columbian times to the present (1973) (12). carpenter, alicia. “‘there is no pure evil, nor pure good, only purity’: william blake’s and patti smith’s art as opposition to societal boundaries.” women in rock, women in romanticism: the emancipation of female will. ed. james rovira. new york: routledge, 2023. isbn: 9781032069845. 103-22. chadwick, esther alice. “the radical print: british art and graphic experiment in the paper age.” see chadwick under cultures and technologies of display and exhibition in division ii. choe, sharon. “deformed, dismembered, and disembodied: reinventing the body politic in william blake.” phd diss., university of york, 2022. with references to thomas gray, henry fuseli, and james macpherson, choe “proposes that northern antiquarianism provided blake with the necessary language and imagery to critique formations of british identity at the turn of the century” (abstract). chrimes, penny. “following blake’s paths: from menageries to brick pits.” see vala. chunyak, e. s. “sintez iskusstv v tvorchestve uil'yama bleyka (‘pervaya kniga urizena’) [the synthesis of the arts in the works of william blake (the first book of urizen)].” aktual'nye problemy gumanitarnogo obrazovaniya: materialy ikh mezhdunarodnoy nauchno-prakticheskoy konferentsii [current problems of humanitarian education: proceedings of the ix international scientific and practical conference]. minsk, belarus, 2022. isbn: 9789858814465. 209-14. in russian (abstract in russian and english). clark, steve. “blake and the pastoral-georgic tradition.” romantic environmental sensibility: nature, class and empire.romita ray’s essay in the same collection, “on the prowl: tigers and the tea planter in british india,” touches very briefly on “the tyger” (116). ed. ve-yin tee. edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2022. isbn: 9781474456470. 211-29. considers milton “from the perspective of a more historically engaged environmental poetics, drawing on its indebtedness to the tradition of sensibility and focusing in particular on james thomson, mark akenside, and iolo morganwg” (212-13). cogan, lucy. blake and the failure of prophecy. cham: palgrave macmillan-springer nature, 2021. <blake (2022)> reviews rosso, g. a. see blake 56.3. whittaker, jason. see whittaker, zoamorphosis, in part v. cogan, lucy. rev. of william blake: modernity and disaster, ed. tilottama rajan and joel faflak. see rajan and faflak. connolly, tristanne. “the eternal lettuce.” see vala. conrad, leon. “roots, shoots, fruits: william blake and j. m. robertson: two key influences on george spencer-brown’s work and the latter’s relationship to niklas luhmann’s work.” kybernetes 51.5 (2022): 1879-95. “this paper explores two key influences on george spencer-brown” (1923–​2016), an english polymath (abstract). curbelo, jesús david. “william blake: apuntes para tratar de visionar la voz del bardo.” agulha 67 (2009): 30 pars. 26 pp. in spanish. describes the strength and originality of blake’s ideas and discourse, while discussing his role as one in a group of “visionaries, individualists and revolutionaries thanks to whom thought has moved against all kinds of authoritarianism and orthodoxy.” d d’agata d’ottavi, stefania. la fucina della poesia. strutture del non finito in vala or the four zoas di william blake. venice: supernova, 2001. 253 pp. isbn: 9788886870801. in italian. “the author proposes here a study of william blake’s manuscript the four zoas” (publisher). dauphin, caroline. “éros et uranie: passions animales et végétales dans la poésie d’erasmus darwin et de william blake [eros and urania: the passions of animals and plants in the poetry of erasmus darwin and william blake].” phd diss., université de la sorbonne nouvelle, 2021. 476 pp. in french (abstract in french and english). “the present work aims at observing how a new vision of nature is imagined at the intersection of the enlightenment and romanticism from darwin to blake. this nature, teeming with passions, is in the wake of the age of sensibility of the long 18th century: plants and animals are endowed with emotions and sensations. it is also remodeled by the transition from the classical episteme to the modern episteme, according to michel foucault’s terminology: natural history becomes biology and opens itself to transformism, which arouses a mixture of terror and fascination in blake’s imagination” (abstract). davies, keri. “blakespotting.” see davies in part v. davies, keri. “‘inoculation should be common everywhere.’” see davies in part v. davies, keri. “william blake and smallpox: the disease in blake’s london and in blake’s art.” see davies in part v. davies, keri. “william hayley and smallpox.” see davies in part v. davis, howard. “stepping through the outdoors of perception.” see vala. davis, matthew m. “the house of aumont and blake’s french revolution.” see blake 56.2. dennis, ian. rev. of mike goode, romantic capabilities: blake, scott, austen, and the new messages of old media. see goode. dumont, montaine. rev. of john higgs, william blake vs. the world. see higgs. e eagles, diane. “shadow of delight and dance of eternal death.” see vala. erle, sibylle. “the bloody burden: blake’s flea and me.” see vala. erle, sibylle. “newton’s sleep.” see vala. essick, robert n. “blake in the marketplace, 2021.” see blake 55.4. f fabi, marta. “‘o rose thou art sick’: unravelling social implications of body and mind’s sickness in william blake’s poems of experience.” testo e senso 25 (2022): 177-89. abstract in italian and english. field, douglas, and luke walker. “introduction” [to “the artist of the future age: william blake, neo-romanticism, counterculture and now”]. see bulletin of the john rylands library. freedman, linda. william blake and the myth of america: from the abolitionists to the counterculture. oxford: oxford university press, 2018. <blake (2019, 2020)> review walker, luke. see blake 55.4. g § ghiţă, cătălin. “imaginaţia vizionară contra relativismului ştiinţific. lupta lui blake cu newton.” litere fără obstacole. ipostaze ale actului critic. bucharest: edítura ideea europeană, 2017. isbn: 9786065945623. 19-29. in romanian. a chapter on the conflict between experimental science and visionary art as represented by newton and blake. goldstein, amanda jo. “william blake and the time of ontogeny.” systems of life: biopolitics, economics, and literature on the cusp of modernity. ed. richard a. barney and warren montag. new york: fordham university press, 2018. <blake (2019, 2021)> review loar, christopher f. “eighteenth-century scholarship in the web of life.” eighteenth-century fiction 34, supplement 1 (fall 2022): 591-603 (with three other books). goode, mike. “blakespotting” and “the joy of looking: what william blake’s pictures want.” romantic capabilities: blake, scott, austen, and the new messages of old media. oxford: oxford university press, 2020. <blake (2021, 2022)> reviews dennis, ian. eighteenth-century fiction 34.4 (summer 2022): 488-90. offers “genuine interest to any students of the period and its heritage” (490). rovira, james. see blake 56.2. gopalkrishnan, carl. “an artists [sic] exploration of the mythic, subconscious and literary constructions of military interventions in the indo-pacific.” critical military studies (2022): 5 pp. “i share my experience of using william blake’s 1793 poem america a prophecy as a lens to explore the mythic, subconscious and literary constructions of military interventions in the indo-pacific for my painting australia a prophecy” (abstract). gorman, cliff. “blake beuys trees.” see vala. gourlay, alexander s. rev. of erasmus darwin, the botanic garden, ed. adam komisaruk and allison dushane. see blake 55.4. gourlay, alexander s. rev. of william blake, augurios de inocencia, ed. and trans. fernando castanedo. see blake 56.2. h harmancı, hasan. “ebu’l-alâ el-ma’arrî’nin el-lüzûmiyyât’ı ile william blake’in masumiyet ve tecrübe şarkıları adlı eserlerinde pesimizm [pessimism in ebu’l-alâ el-ma’arrî’s al-lüzûmiyyât and william blake’s songs of innocence and of experience].” rumelide dil ve edebiyat araştırmaları dergisi [rumelide journal of language and literature studies] 26 (feb. 2022): 825-40. in turkish (abstract in turkish and english). hay, daisy. dinner with joseph johnson: books and friendship in a revolutionary age. see johnson in division ii. higgs, john. william blake vs. the world. london: weidenfeld & nicolson, 2021. <blake (2022)> reviews dumont, montaine. “william blake vs. the world by john higgs: an invitation to blake’s artistic journey.” daily art magazine (28 nov. 2022). kate. “fantastic non-fiction.” the quick and the read (31 jan. 2023). “as an english teacher, i’ve often taught blake’s poetry—​‘london,’ blah blah, romantic poet, blah blah, ‘poison tree,’ blah blah, painter, and so on. still, i didn’t actually know much about the man himself—​and it is quite a life story!” schaap, rosie. “burning bright.” new york times book review (5 june 2022): 58. “to me, higgs often comes across as a bewilderingly innocent reader of blake, his ear untuned to the poet’s frequencies of irony and humor and to the interpretive and emotional possibilities they extend.” the review is titled “songs of innocence, experience and a galaxy far, far away,” in the new york times online. voves, ed. “art eyewitness book review: william blake vs. the world by john higgs.” art eyewitness (28 nov. 2022). “william blake vs. the world.” kirkus (2 feb. 2022). excerpts and author talks blame blake. see blame blake in part v. higgs, john. “author interview: john higgs’s william blake vs. the world.” artcurious (24 may 2022). an interview with higgs on a podcast. higgs, john. “divinely-inspired art: john higgs on william blake’s visions of the sublime.” lit hub (13 may 2022). an excerpt from higgs’s book, describing blake’s childhood. higgs, john. “god has a beautiful mansion for me elsewhere: the last days of william blake.” lapham’s quarterly (5 may 2022). an excerpt from higgs’s book, recounting blake’s final years, including his conversations with henry crabb robinson. higgs, john. “william blake vs. the world (with john higgs).” history of literature podcast (13 june 2022). tjump. “john higgs (journalist) william blake vs. the world.” youtube. 20 dec. 2022. hopkins, david. “avant-garde blake: from francis bacon to oz magazine.” see bulletin of the john rylands library. hopkins, david, and tom mason. chaucer in the eighteenth century: the father of english poetry. oxford: oxford university press, 2022. isbn: 9780192862624. slight references to blake’s use of chaucer in relationship to dryden’s translation of “the knight’s tale,” palamon and arcite, in bysshe’s art of english poetry (the source of “at length for hatching ripe he breaks the shell” in the gates of paradise) and how blake echoes dryden’s idea of the canterbury pilgrims as types in a descriptive catalogue. no discussion of blake’s canterbury pilgrims painting or engraving. horovitz, michael. “the blake renaissance.” see bulletin of the john rylands library. horovitz, michael. “william blake and (a few of) his friends in our time.” see bulletin of the john rylands library. hristova, rumyana. “man and nature in blake’s ‘proverbs of hell.’” see vala. i isobe, naoki. “jugaku bunsho no hondukuri to shisaku no seisei: blake to whitman no seihon giho saigen no kokoromi [bookbinding of bunsho jugaku and his generation of thought: an attempt at reconstruction of his technique for binding blake and whitman <bsj pp. 25-27>].” kojitsuan [sunward cottage] 5 (2022): 38-48. in japanese. ito, yuki. “toso no honoo to moetsukinu mono: blake to nietzsche wo tunagu mono tshiteno yeats no jacob böhme no juyo nitsuite [a flame of battle and something that never burns out: the reception of jacob böhme in yeats as a link between blake and nietzsche].” see ito under boehme in division ii. j james, john patrick. “blake’s debt: artisanship and the future of labor.” literature compass 19.3-4 (2022): 15 pp. “investigates william blake’s poetic response to the problems of religious and financial debt within the context of his own environmentally compromised era” (abstract). k kaminski da silva, arthur aroha. “as crianças de salinger: inocência e sacralização da infância em nine stories (1953) [salinger’s children: innocence and childhood sacredness in nine stories (1953)].” teoliterária 11.24 (2021): 242-69. in portuguese (abstract in portuguese and english). “there is a strong similarity between the way that the north american writer j. d. salinger built the various child-characters of nine stories (1953)—​specially the one named teddy—​and the romantic poetic of childhood, inaugurated by english authors like william blake and william wordsworth” (abstract). § king, william s. in the cause of liberty: william blake, thomas paine, jean-paul marat and revolution in the eighteenth century. atmosphere press, 2022. appears to be self-published. knott, sam. “on the inside-outline.” see vala. komisaruk, adam. “love among the ruins.” sexual privatism in british romantic writing: a public of one. new york: routledge, 2019. <blake (2020)> review schuchard, marsha keith. see blake 55.4. kovalenko, galina, and il'ya smyvalov. “interpretatsiya i perevod kreolizovannogo poeticheskogo teksta u. bleyka ‘the little boy lost’ v aspekte teorii kontseptual'noy integratsii [ιnterpretation and translation of w. blake’s creolized poetic text ‘the little boy lost’ in the aspect of the theory of conceptual integration].” molodoy uchenyy [young scientist] 21 (416) (2022): 236-40. in russian (abstract in russian and english). “the article deals with the concept of ‘creolized text,’ with the theory of conceptual integration, the interaction of meanings formed in the process of perception of the verbal and pictorial components of the illustrated poem by w. blake ‘the little boy lost.’” l larman, hugo w. “the garden of the four zoas.” see vala. lee, tara. “against self-organization: redefining vitality with william blake in jerusalem and the four zoas.” studies in romanticism 61.3 (fall 2022): 351-77. “blake, incorporating opposing scientific theories into one mythological framework, drew heavily on preformationist ideas and imagery to contrast the eternal forms of spiritual life against material, autopoietic semblances of vitality” (abstract). lee, tara. “fibres, globules, cells: william blake and the biological individual.” romanticism on the net 76 (2021). “this article argues that william blake’s critique of eighteenth-century medicine is grounded upon a romantic view of organic form shared by contemporary scientists such as lorenz oken” (abstract). lee, tara. “soul, seed, species: william blake and the language of preformationist biology.” phd diss., university of oxford, 2022. lee-six, edward. “blake’s compasses: materialist criticism and romanticism as a structure of feeling.” interdisciplinary literary studies 24.1 (2022): 54-79. a marxist reading of blake’s and romanticism’s relationship to empiricism and capitalism, using raymond williams’s term “structure of feeling.” leveton, jacob henry. “of ‘combustion, blast, vapour, and cloud’: william blake’s urizen as steam engine, albion mill, and notes towards a materialist method for the anthropocene.” essays in romanticism 29.2 (2022): 131-54. the depiction of pollution in the [first] book of urizen “invites readers to make connections with albion mill as a resonant site of industrial production where steam engines were first deployed in a process of mass manufacture in romantic-period london” (abstract). leveton, jacob henry. “blake’s gothic nature as spiritual exercise.” see vala. lincoln, andrew. “blake, lucretius, and prophecy: the book of los.” see blake 56.3. loar, christopher f. rev. of systems of life: biopolitics, economics, and literature on the cusp of modernity, ed. richard a. barney and warren montag. see goldstein. § lussier, mark. “the contra-dictions of design ii: william blake’s illustrations to dante’s divine comedy.” “the classroom as home: a festschrift in honor of anthony lacy gully (1938–​2021).” phoebus: a journal of art history 11 (2022). m marchetto, cecilia. “blake’s gothic nature versus the appeal-to-nature fallacy.” see vala. marley, jodie. “‘invisible gates would open’: w. b. yeats and william blake in the 1890s.” see bulletin of the john rylands library. martello, matthew. “the notebook, laocoön, and blake’s beauties of inflection.” see blake 56.3. mclean, andrea. “the making of a mythical shield.” see vala. mcmichael, trevor a. “everyday revenge and british romanticism.” phd diss., indiana university, 2022. touches on blake’s commercial engraving “tythe in kind; or the sow’s revenge,” which was published in the wit’s magazine (1784) (essick, cb xvi). mcquail, josephine a. rev. of marsha keith schuchard, a concatenation of conspiracies: “irish” william blake and illuminist freemasonry in 1798. see blake 56.2. mellor, anne kostelanetz. blake’s human form divine. berkeley: university of california press, 2022. uc press voices revived. a reprint of her 1974 study <bb a2211, wbhc pp. 2397-98>. modina, g. i. “zhanrovaya priroda ‘proritsaniy nevedeniya’ uil'yama bleyka v russkikh perevodakh [the genre essence of william blake’s ‘auguries of innocence’ in russian translations].” kazanskaya nauka [kazan science] 4 (2022): 23-26. in russian. monteyne, joseph. “form and formlessness in blake’s embedded media.” see monteyne under cultures and technologies of display and exhibition in division ii. morton, timothy. “dark ecology: for a logic of future coexistence.” see vala. mota, thiago, and fernanda s. murro. “o inferno de dante e suas representações: análise do inferno d’a divina comédia através das ilustrações de william blake (século xviii), gustave doré (século xix) e helder rocha (século xx) [dante’s hell and its representations: analyses of the divine comedy’s hell across the illustrations of william blake (eighteenth century), gustave doré (nineteenth century), and helder rocha (twentieth century)].” contemporâneos 5 (2010): 30-41. in portuguese (abstract in portuguese and english). muratova, yaroslava. “romanticheskiy diptikh: ‘kain’ lorda bayrona i ‘prizrak avelya’ uil'yama bleyka [romantic diptych: lord byron’s cain and the ghost of abel by william blake].” “v otvet na luchshie dary”: venok k 63-mu dnyu rozhdeniya aleksandra evgen'evicha makhova [“in response to the best gifts”: a wreath for the sixty-third birthday of alexander evgenievich makhov]. tula: akvarius, 2022. isbn: 9785604863541. 312-21. in russian. murray-white, james. “alive and undead in the vegetable world.” see vala. myrone, martin, and amy concannon, with an afterword by alan moore. william blake. london: tate publishing, 2019. catalogue for the 2019–20 tate britain exhibition. <blake (2020, 2021, 2022)> review taws, richard. print quarterly 38.4 (2021): 438-39. mzokova, violetta. “vokal'nyy tsikl desyat' pesen bleyka voana uil'yamsa [ten blake songs vocal cycle by vaughan williams].” internauka 25.1 (248) (2022): 29-30. in russian. n navarro ramírez, sergio. “la aporía de la profecía en william blake.” palabra y acción. el profetismo en la literatura moderna y contemporánea. ed. gabriel insausti and luis galván. zaragoza: universidad de zaragoza, 2022. isbn: 9788413404837. 45-59. in spanish. the essay “studies blake’s visionary poems, his overcoming of the empirical tradition and of enlightened thinking, his theory of the imagination and his attempt at a (re)mythologizing of the world” (prologue, p. 11). nicholson, eric. “the seductive trap of nature.” see vala. nurse, bernard. “commentary [to vol. 2, nos. 29-35].” see vetusta monumenta in part iii, section a. o oliveira, camila, and jason whittaker. “blake and music, 2021.” see blake 56.1. o’regan, keith. towards a productive aesthetics: contemporary and historical interventions in blake and brecht. leiden: brill, 2022. isbn: 9789004501843. “compare[s] the political-aesthetic strategies of william blake (1757–​1827) and bertolt brecht (1898–​1956)” (abstract). the chapters on blake focus on the songs and milton. o’rourke, stephanie. “art after self evidence: fuseli, blake, and banks.” see european romantic review under cultures and technologies of display and exhibition in division ii. o’sullivan, michael. “‘nature has no outline but imagination has.’” see vala. öztürk, zekiye aslıhan. “bir aydınlanma tartışması: blake & newton [an enlightenment argument: blake & newton].” uluslararası disiplinlerarası ve kültürlerarası sanat dergisi [international journal of interdisciplinary and intercultural art] 7.15 (dec. 2022): 156-66. in turkish (abstract in turkish and english). p pashchenko, maria. “vzaimosvyaz' slova i izobrazheniya v khudozhestvennykh proizvedeniyakh s avtorskimi illyustratsiyami na primere rabot u. bleyka [interrelation of word and image in literature works with author’s illustrations on the example of w. blake’s works].” nauchnye dostizheniya i innovatsionnye podkhody: teoriya, metodologiya, praktika: sbornik nauchnykh trudov po materialam v mezhdunarodnoy nauchno-prakticheskoy konferentsii [academic achievements and innovative approaches: theory, methodology, practice: a collection of scientific papers based on materials of the v international scientific and practical conference]. anapa, 2022. isbn: 9785952839182. 65-69. in russian (abstract in russian and english). the author analyzes text and image interaction using examples from “the clod and the pebble,” “the ecchoing green,” and “the fly.” paylor, david m. “the furnaces of william blake.” see vala. picón, daniela. “el águila y la visión profética en los libros iluminados de william blake.” remontar el vuelo. aves en la poesía británica y latinoamericana de los siglos xix y xx. ed. paula baldwin lind. santiago, chile: ril editores, 2021. isbn: 9788418982101. 133-45. in spanish. the chapter wishes to “inquire into the figure of the prophet with an eagle’s head in william blake’s jerusalem,” a figure that “had provided the visionary tradition with a powerful model in which blake also recognized himself” (abstract). popova, a. yu., and n. g. smolina. “trudnosti perevoda, ili o perevodcheskom stile i lichnosti perevodchika [difficulty of translation, or translator’s style and personality].” vektory razvitiya rusistiki i lingvodidaktiki v kontekste sovremennogo filologicheskogo obrazovaniya. materialy ii mezhdunarodnoy nauchno-prakticheskoy konferentsii, posvyashchennoy 90-letiyu universiteta [development vectors of russian studies and linguistic didactics in the context of modern philological education. materials of the ii international scientific-practical conference dedicated to the ninetieth anniversary of the university]. astrakhan, 2022. isbn: 9785992614039. 193-96. in russian (abstract in russian and english). this article makes a comparative analysis of translations of blake’s poem “the tyger” by konstantin bal'mont and samuil marshak. potter, elizabeth. “manuscript manifestations: reassessing william blake’s marginalia in the works of sir joshua reynolds (1798).” phd diss., university of york, 2022. pritchard, stephen. “human nature.” see vala. pritchard, stephen. rev. of jason whittaker, jerusalem: blake, parry, and the fight for englishness. see vala. r rajan, tilottama, and joel faflak, eds. william blake: modernity and disaster. toronto: university of toronto press, 2020. <blake (2021, 2022)> reviews cogan, lucy. bars review 56 (2021): 7 pars. “this volume brings together both established blake scholars and newer voices to form a provocative and often exciting collection” (par. 7). saklofske, jon. european romantic review 33.4 (2022): 573-78 (with jason whittaker, divine images). “it is a book by specialists, for specialists, and—​while offering unique and fresh insight into the ways that blake’s work resonates through a broad variety of ideas, theoretical concepts, and comparative illuminations—​ultimately requires a significant, nuanced, and exclusive knowledge of blake studies as a prerequisite to its comprehension and critical usefulness” (574). reesman, linda l. rev. of edina adam, with julian brooks, and an essay by matthew hargraves, william blake: visionary. see adam with brooks. regier, alexander. exorbitant enlightenment: blake, hamann, and anglo-german constellations. oxford: oxford university press, 2018. <blake (2019, 2020)> review bode, christoph. studies in romanticism 61.3 (fall 2022): 467-72. “this book deserves our attention” (467). rigby, kate. “‘the wrong dream’: prophetic ecopoetics.” reclaiming romanticism: towards an ecopoetics of decolonization. london: bloomsbury academic, 2020. isbn: 9781474290593. 113-47. “i identify a specifically ecopoetic variant of the prophetic mode of romantic literature, as exemplified above all by blake” (113). riley, james. “iain sinclair, william blake and the visionary poetry of the 1960s.” see bulletin of the john rylands library. ripley, wayne c., with fernando castanedo, hikari sato, hüseyin alhas, and vera serdechnaia. “william blake and his circle: a checklist of scholarship in 2021.” see blake 56.1. rodríguez rivero, manuel. rev. of william blake, augurios de inocencia, ed. and trans. fernando castanedo. see ballads manuscript in part i, section a. roob, alexander. william blake’s “the ancient britons”: appearances of a vanished picture ​/ ​william blake’s “the ancient britons”: erscheinungen eines verschollenen bildes. hamburg: textem verlag, 2022. isbn: 9783864852763. in english and german. contemporary german followers of mesmer document their efforts to use group hypnosis to recreate blake’s lost painting in various media. rosso, g. a. rev. of lucy cogan, blake and the failure of prophecy. see blake 56.3. rovira, james. rev. of mike goode, romantic capabilities: blake, scott, austen, and the new messages of old media. see blake 56.2. rowland, christopher. “william blake, apocalyptic poet and painter.” “by an immediate revelation”: studies in apocalypticism, its origins and effects. tübingen, germany: mohr siebeck, 2022. isbn: 9783161597862. 629-738. a massive study of apocalypticism from the hebrew bible to william blake that draws together many of rowland’s disparate publications as well as previously unpublished essays. the book includes a useful list detailing “particulars of first publication” (775-79), and i have recorded these references in the notes and whether the essays were previously recorded in blake or wbhc. blake has his own section, “william blake, apocalyptic poet and painter,” as well as an appearance earlier in the book. “william blake (1757–​1827): visionary, artist and poetic exegete.” 501-04.originally published as part of “english radicals and the exegesis of the apocalypse,” die prägende kraft der texte: hermeneutik und wirkungsgeschichte des neuen testaments. ein symposium zu ehren von ulrich luz, ed. moisés mayordomo (stuttgart: katholisches bibelwerk, 2005) 160-78. [not recorded in blake or wbhc.] “blake and the bible: biblical exegesis in the work of william blake.” 631-44.“an earlier version” (631) was published in biblical interpretation: the meanings of scripture—​past and present, ed. j. m. court (london: t&t clark, 2003) 168-84. it also appeared in international journal of systematic theology 7 (2005): 142-54. <wbhc p. 2616> as bentley notes, “the essay [also] seems to be silently reprinted from” the journal of the blake society at st. james’s 4 (1999): 3-19. “william blake and ezekiel’s merkabah.” 645-60.“an earlier form of this essay” was published as “wheels within wheels”: william blake and the ezekiel’s merkabah in text and image (milwaukee: marquette university press, 2007) and delivered as the père marquette lecture in theology in 2007. <wbhc p. 2619> “‘mr blake, apoor rather ana-calyptic poet, and painter’: apocalyptic hermeneutics in action.” 661-80.originally published in die johannesapokalypse: kontext—​konzepte—​rezeption, ed. jörg frey, james a. kelhoffer, and franz tóth (tübingen: mohr siebeck, 2012) 793-812. <wbhc p. 2618> “blake: text and image.” 681-702.originally published in the edinburgh companion to the bible and the arts, ed. stephen prickett (edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2014) 307-26. [not recorded in blake or wbhc.] “william blake and the apocalypse.” 703-19.originally published in oxford research encyclopedia of religion, ed. john barton (5 aug. 2016). <blake (2017)> “blake, enoch, and emerging biblical criticism.” 720-38.originally published in sibyls, scriptures, and scrolls: john collins at seventy, ed. joel baden, hindy najman, and eibert tigchelaar (leiden: brill, 2016) 1145-65. <blake (2017)> rubel, william ilan. “‘earth’s answer’: blake’s terran ecology.” see vala. s said, s. f. “tyger.” see vala. saklofske, jon. rev. of william blake: modernity and disaster, ed. tilottama rajan and joel faflak, and jason whittaker, divine images: the life and work of william blake. see rajan and faflak and whittaker, divine images. sánchez tierraseca, mónica. “la concepción de un dios antropomorfo eterno y universal en swedenborg y william blake.” la presencia del ausente. dios en literatos contemporáneos. ed. juan agustín mancebo roca, antonio barnés, and alicia nila martínez díaz. cuenca: ediciones de la universidad de castilla-la mancha, 2021. isbn: 9788490444498. 169-84. in spanish. the article seeks to explore swedenborg’s presence in blake’s idea of divinity. sato, hikari. “w. h. hudson no kyosei shiso to jugaku bunsho: william blake no keifu nouede [ecological consciousness of w. h. hudson and bunsho jugaku: following the tracks of william blake].” kojitsuan [sunward cottage] 5 (2022): 1-7. in japanese. the essay points out that w. h. hudson, an author and ornithologist, mentions “auguries of innocence” in birds in a village (london: chapman & hall, 1893, 124-25), birds in town & village (london: j. m. dent, 1919, 172), nature in downland, 2nd ed. (london: longmans, green, 1900, 272), and the land’s end: a naturalist’s impressions in west cornwall (london: hutchinson, 1908, 274), and “the tyger” in nature in downland (244-45) and birds and man (london: duckworth, 1915, 168-69). in w. h. hudson: a portrait (new york: e. p. dutton, 1924) morley roberts records their conversation as follows: “r. ‘what do you think of blake?’ / h. ‘i can’t read his long mystical stuff, but of course i like songs of innocence’” (192). schaap, rosie. rev. of john higgs, william blake vs. the world. see higgs. schuchard, marsha keith. a concatenation of conspiracies: “irish” william blake and illuminist freemasonry in 1798. alexandria, va: plumbstone academic, 2021. <blake (2022)> review mcquail, josephine a. see blake 56.2. schuchard, marsha keith. rev. of adam komisaruk, sexual privatism in british romantic writing: a public of one. see blake 55.4. sedgwick, julian. “fearful eye—​‘the tyger’ and tigers of my childhood.” see vala. shteynbrekher, andrey, and konstantin savel'ev. “bleykovskie motivy v sovremennom mediaprostranstve (na primere komp'yuternoy igry ‘devil may cry 5’ i animatsionnogo seriala ‘patriotizm moriarti’) [blake’s motives in the modern media space (the example of the computer game devil may cry 5 and the animated series patriotism of moriarty)].” mirovaya literatura glazami sovremennoy molodezhi. tsifrovaya epokha. sbornik materialov viii mezhdunarodnoy molodezhnoy nauchno-prakticheskoy konferentsii [world literature in the eyes of modern youth. the digital age. collection of materials of the viii international youth scientific and practical conference]. magnitogorsk, 2022. isbn: 9785996725472. 157-62. in russian (abstract in russian and english). the article examines the phenomenon of blake in the modern gaming and media space based on the material of the game project devil may cry 5 and the animated series patriotism of moriarty. it also analyzes the main layer of the poet’s texts and engravings appearing in the products of popular culture. sluyter, dean. “eternity’s sunrise: william blake.” the dharma bum’s guide to western literature: finding nirvana in the classics. novato, ca: new world library, 2022. isbn: 9781608687695. 7-10. the chapter is a popular celebration of blake’s spiritual and visionary awakening. suzuki, masashi. “‘gensoteki na mokuso’: blake no kojibutsu aiko shugiteki sozoryoku [‘visionary contemplations’: blake’s antiquarian imagination].” eibungaku kenkyu shibu togo go [studies in english literature. regional branches combined issue] 14 (2022): 139-47. 2 plates by blake. in japanese, with english synopsis. t takagi, masafumi. bijutsu de yomu chusei europe no seijin to eiyu no densetsu [legends of saints and heroes in medieval europe read through fine arts]. tokyo: miyai shoten, 2020. 263 pp. 1 plate by blake. isbn: 9784838233694. in japanese. blake is briefly discussed in part 3, “dante shinkyoku [dante, the divine comedy]” (193-94). tanigawa, atsushi. bungo tachi no seiyo bijutsu: natsume soseki kara matsumoto seicho made [western arts in great authors: from soseki natsume to seicho matsumoto]. tokyo: kawade shobo shinsha, 2020. 111 pp. 3 plates by blake. isbn: 9784309291222. in japanese. it includes sections such as “sato haruo no william blake [william blake in haruo sato]” (27-28), “haniya yutaka no blake [blake in yutaka haniya]” (84-86), and “ito sei no blake [blake in sei ito]” (100-02), where the author briefly discusses how these japanese novelists and poets appreciated blake the artist. taylor, david. “albion’s ancient druid rocky shore.” see vala. tebourski, ines. “william blake’s jerusalem and the rewriting of the future.” see vala. torralbo, juan de dios. “‘beauty is truth’: carlos clementson, traductor de los románticos ingleses” [‘beauty is truth’: carlos clementson, translator of the english romantic poets].” monteagudo 27 (2022): 379-407. in spanish (abstract in spanish and english). “examines the translations of the english romantics by the cordoban poet carlos clementson, who put works by these eight poets into spanish: william blake, robert burns, william wordsworth, samuel taylor coleridge, joseph blanco white, lord byron, percy bysshe shelley and john keats” (abstract). townsend, chris. “spiritual bodies and mental reality in blake.” george berkeley and romanticism: ghostly language. oxford: oxford university press, 2022. isbn: 9780192846785. 57-86. a long-needed reassessment of berkeley’s impact on romanticism. the chapter on blake incorporates material from townsend’s article “visionary immaterialism: berkeleian empiricism in blake’s poetry” <blake (2020)>. trodd, colin. “william blake and the spiritual forms of citizenship and hospitality.” see bulletin of the john rylands library. v vala: the journal of the blake society issue 3 (november 2022) articles erle, sibylle. “newton’s sleep.” 4-5. an introduction to the issue, which focuses on blake and nature: “blake … can help us to find a common language for the future, a language that pays equal respect to the environment and the human and non-human life within it” (5). anonymous, with illustration by richard hemmings. poem. 6. “we are part of the earth and it is part of us.” a note reads, “this poem is inspired and edited from ‘message to the modern world’ written by a native american chief in 1855” (6). knott, sam. “on the inside-outline.” 7-9. includes artwork. morley, helen. “creation matters.” 10-13. artwork from the artist’s “limited edition fine press book called creation matters” (13). eagles, diane. “shadow of delight and dance of eternal death.” 14-17. “i wanted to produce a work for catherine as a companion to my ceramic sculpture for blake’s grave, ‘the lamb at the gate’” (14). gorman, cliff. “blake beuys trees.” 18-19. “[joseph] beuys, just like blake, embedded social concerns into his art. art, he insisted, must have social value” (19). larman, hugo w. “the garden of the four zoas.” 20-23. an account and reproduction of a garden design dedicated to kathleen raine. erle, sibylle, with illustration by john riordan. “the bloody burden: blake’s flea and me.” 24-27. on erle’s encounters with newton and the ghost of a flea. verlaan, philomène. “are life and nature joined in delight? an exploration.” 28-29. on blake’s line “for every thing that lives is holy, life delights in life.” “blake’s line suggests that life may be omni-present, auto-catalytic, and self-reflecting” (28). said, s. f. “tyger.” 31-35. on his book tyger, which is illustrated by dave mckean. sedgwick, julian. “fearful eye—​‘the tyger’ and tigers of my childhood.” 36-39. an autobiographical sketch. chrimes, penny, with illustration by tamsin rosewell. “following blake’s paths: from menageries to brick pits.” 40-43. “the research i’ve done for my children’s novels—​tiger heart and the dragon and her boy—​[has] found me retracing blake’s footsteps, through the menageries and brick pits of eighteenth-century london, in search of escaped tigers and ancient beasts” (41). rice, benjamin. “wild cherry.” 44-45. photographs. saral, ramazan, with photography by nelin baykaldi. “nature is imagination itself.” 46. a poem. mullard, jonathan, with illustration by richard hemmings. “richard mabey and blake.” 47. a poem by mabey. o’sullivan, michael. “‘nature has no outline but imagination has.’” 48-50. “nature has a dual significance for blake” (50). murray-white, james. “alive and undead in the vegetable world.” 51-53. on his film finding blake (2021) and blake’s meaning: “my over-riding sense of blake is of a poet/​painter/​prophet of the imagination, directly connecting humanity (of all time) with the potential to live our greatest spiritual life: an artist of intellectual transcendence, rather than a grounded nature artist per se” (51). mclean, andrea. “the making of a mythical shield.” 54-57. on the making of the artwork (reproduced on pp. 54-55). wilson, andy. “ecology and blake’s visionary animism.” 58-59. “where, at the beginning of industrial society, the failure of the french revolution led coleridge and wordsworth to turn inwards to achieve reconciliation with nature in their thoughts, now, at the end, the threat of environmental catastrophe demands of us that we turn blake’s fourfold vision back outward, and make it into the programme for a revived counterculture” (59). davis, howard. “stepping through the outdoors of perception.” 60-61. “i spend my days walking in the footsteps of william blake. i am a gestalt therapist working experientially with clients in the wealth of open spaces london provides” (61). pritchard, stephen. “human nature.” 62-65. “our potential, in a moment, is to realise our shared humanity and our true nature” (65). paylor, david m. “the furnaces of william blake.” 66-67. on the importance of furnaces in “the tyger” and other poems. nicholson, eric. “the seductive trap of nature.” 68-69. “i’d like to briefly explore blake’s attitude to nature by considering one single image of blake’s illustrations of the book of job (1826)—​plate 15, a black-and-white print with border inscriptions” (69). taylor, david. “albion’s ancient druid rocky shore.” 70-71. “what could be more natural than nature? yet ‘nature’ is a construct of human thought” (70). tebourski, ines. “william blake’s jerusalem and the rewriting of the future.” 72-74. “the ecological poetics of blake’s works aspired to foreground natural issues as a subject of utmost emergency” (74). hristova, rumyana. “man and nature in blake’s ‘proverbs of hell.’” 75-76. “a natural consequence of the integration of rational thinking and imagination is the change in man’s attitude and relationship with nature” (76). marchetto, cecilia, with illustration by g. e. gallas. “blake’s gothic nature versus the appeal-to-nature fallacy.” 77-78. “it would be easy to get carried away by the rediscovery of a nature-loving blake and forget all the nuance, ambiguities and contradictions that complicated his idea of nature” (77). volpone, annalisa, with illustration by tamsin rosewell. “between maker meek & beasts of prey: lyca & the non-human world.” 79-81. “the powerful returning of the repressed recounted in the lyca poems also enacts an ecological crisis, a necessary change of paradigm, the access to a different realm” (81). leveton, jacob henry. “blake’s gothic nature as spiritual exercise.” 82-83. “blake’s ecological vision was capacious” (82). bellarsi, franca, with illustration by john riordan. “‘without contraries is no progression’: blake my teacher.” 84-88. “said differently, for the ecocritic engaging with blake, there is no comfortable, linear road to either clear-cut biocentrism or unqualified anthropocentrism” (88). connolly, tristanne, with illustration by sally kindberg. “the eternal lettuce.” 89-92. interesting considerations of blake, erasmus darwin, and “plant motility” (90). greasley, sam. “sunflower.” 93. artwork. rubel, william ilan. “‘earth’s answer’: blake’s terran ecology.” 94-99. “for ages, i have wanted to attempt an sf (speculative fabulist) reading of william blake. … i make this attempt now, with two footholds. the first is the image of earth raising her head in answer to the bard, in songs of experience. the second is a formula … : in blake, the optic equals purity and the haptic equals promiscuity” (95). morton, timothy, interviewed by george laver. “dark ecology: for a logic of future coexistence.” 100-03. an interview with morton about his forthcoming book hell on earth. reviews pritchard, stephen. rev. of jason whittaker, jerusalem: blake, parry, and the fight for englishness. 104. “this book combines a love of blake with years of research and is likely to be of great interest not only to blakeans, but also to a far wider readership.” whittaker, jason. rev. of s. f. said, tyger, illus. dave mckean. 104-05. “finally, this novel feels very blakean in terms of its design: the art of dave mckean—​and the layout of the novel as a whole—​makes this a particularly engrossing novel” (105). valtat, jean-christophe. “‘cabinets de cristal.’ modèles techniques de l’expérience visionnaire chez blake, nerval et baudelaire.” bulletin du centre de recherche français à jérusalem 24 (2013): 32 pars. 10 pp. in french (abstract in french and english). “if blake’s, nerval’s and baudelaire’s texts show a different approach to the visionary experience, they all resort to the use of a ‘crystal cabinet’—​an immersive optical machine which is half-diorama, half-panorama and which modelizes [sic] both the visual aspect and the psychological impact of the visionary experience” (abstract). verlaan, philomène. “are life and nature joined in delight? an exploration.” see vala. volpone, annalisa. “between maker meek & beasts of prey: lyca & the non-human world.” see vala. voves, ed. rev. of john higgs, william blake vs. the world. see higgs. w walker, luke. rev. of linda freedman, william blake and the myth of america: from the abolitionists to the counterculture. see blake 55.4. wang, orrin n. c. “two pipers and the cliché of romanticism.” techno-magism: media, mediation, and the cut of romanticism. new york: fordham university press, 2022. isbn: 9780823298471. briefly discusses the “introduction” from songs of innocence. (the chapter originally appeared in british romanticism: criticism and debates, ed. mark canuel <blake [2018]>.) weston, sarah t. “matrix, imprint, dot: romantic data by the fingertip.” wordsworth circle 53.3 (2022): 395-421. “this article unites book history, disability studies, and media studies, examining what blindness and sight meant to the early romantic poets (from poetic meditations on the subject to actual bodily struggles with vision) alongside emergent systems of writing invented for blind readers, from embossed typographies to braille. blake’s ‘infernal method’ of relief printing particularly yields fruitful juxtapositions with these book media for the blind” (395-96). whittaker, jason. divine images: the life and work of william blake. london: reaktion books, 2021. <blake (2022)> review saklofske, jon. european romantic review 33.4 (2022): 573-78 (with william blake: modernity and disaster, ed. tilottama rajan and joel faflak). “serves as an excellent introduction to the ways in which blake and his creative expressions are situated in and respond to the context of his particular cultural moment and would be at home equally in an undergraduate course on blake’s work and on the bookshelves of anyone interested in diving deeper into blake’s biographical and interpretative detail” (574). whittaker, jason. “going global—​blake’s afterlife.” see murray-white in part v. whittaker, jason. jerusalem: blake, parry, and the fight for englishness. oxford: oxford university press, 2022. isbn: 9780192845870. a definitive and detailed reception history of the “jerusalem” hymn and its setting by hubert parry in relationship to english identity from the poem’s composition in milton to the summer of 2020. review and author talk pritchard, stephen. see vala. whittaker, jason. “‘jerusalem’—​a personal history.” see whittaker, zoamorphosis, in part v. whittaker, jason. “‘the place where contrarieties are equally true’: blake and the science-fiction counterculture.” see bulletin of the john rylands library. whittaker, jason. rev. of fake blakes [blake archive exhibition]. see whittaker, zoamorphosis, in part v. whittaker, jason. rev. of lucy cogan, blake and the failure of prophecy. see whittaker, zoamorphosis, in part v. whittaker, jason. rev. of s. f. said, tyger, illus. dave mckean. see vala. whittaker, jason. “visions of albion in felpham: blake, sussex, and the origins of the hymn ‘jerusalem.’” see blake society in part v. willer, claudio. “william blake, poeta e profeta.” agulha 67 (2009): 32 pars. 15 pp. in portuguese. the article, following gershom scholem, sees blake as a revolutionary mystic, rather than a conservative one, given his refusal to accept a literal reading of scripture. likewise, in light of northrop frye’s descriptions of blake’s myths, it discusses the essential instability and delirious, oneiric character of his symbols. “william blake vs. the world.” an anonymous review. see higgs. wilson, andy. “ecology and blake’s visionary animism.” see vala. wilson, louise. “printing imperfections in william blake’s virgil wood engravings and what they reveal.” see blake 56.2. wolff, tristram. “voices of the ground: blake’s language in deep time.” against the uprooted word: giving language time in transatlantic romanticism. stanford: stanford university press, 2022. isbn: 9781503632769. 99-137. with some interesting comparisons to phillis wheatley, wolff argues that, “for blake, desire is configured as material constraint in the production of knowledge, often by way of a geological imaginary” (108). worrall, david. “‘seen in my visions’: klüver form-constant visual hallucinations in william blake’s paintings and illuminated books.” see blake 55.4. z zhigala, k. g. “tema bogoborchestva v tvorchestve u. bleyka [the theme of enmity against god in the works of w. blake].” chelovek i priroda: sbornik materialov studencheskoy nauchno-prakticheskoy konferentsii [man and nature: collection of materials of the student scientific-practical conference]. omsk, 2022. isbn: 9785826823330. 90-92. in russian. division ii: william blake’s circle banks, thomas (1735–​1805) sculptor o’rourke, stephanie. “art after self evidence: fuseli, blake, and banks.” see european romantic review under cultures and technologies of display and exhibition. barry, james (1741–1806) history painter chadwick, esther alice. “the radical print: british art and graphic experiment in the paper age.” see chadwick under cultures and technologies of display and exhibition. taylor, david francis. “picturing ekphrasis: image and text in shakespeare painting.” see european romantic review under cultures and technologies of display and exhibition. basire, james, sr. (1730–​1802) engraver, blake’s master goddard, richard. “basire sr., james (1730–​1802).” see vetusta monumenta in division i, part iii, section a. nurse, bernard. “commentary [to vol. 2, nos. 29-35].” see vetusta monumenta in division i, part iii, section a. nurse, bernard. “‘painful exactness’: the publications of the society of antiquaries of london during the directorship of richard gough (1771–​1797).” see modern philology under society of antiquaries. blair, robert (1699–​1746) poet romero vallejo, alberto custodio. “‘poetas que conocieron el secreto de la inspiración’: estudio comparativo de the grave de robert blair (1743) y meditaciones poéticas de josé joaquín de mora (1826).” cuadernos de ilustración y romanticismo 28 (2022): 423-53. in spanish. an essay on how mora assimilated blair’s the grave in his meditaciones poéticas, published in 1826 by rudolph ackermann with blake’s 1808 illustrations to the blair poem. boehme, jacob [jakob böhme] (1575–1624) mystic ito, yuki. “toso no honoo to moetsukinu mono: blake to nietzsche wo tunagu mono tshiteno yeats no jacob böhme no juyo nitsuite [a flame of battle and something that never burns out: the reception of jacob böhme in yeats as a link between blake and nietzsche].” josai daigaku gogaku kyoiku kenkyu center kenkyu nenpo [annual bulletin of the center for language education in josai university] 14 (2021): 29-50. in japanese. krasny, eric scott. “the archetypal shadow: the instinct of selfishness in the work of robert moore and jacob boehme.” phd diss., bangor university, 2021. bowyer, robert (1758–1834) print impresario billingsley, naomi. “‘the great bowyer bible’: robert bowyer and the macklin bible.” journal of illustration 8.1 (2021): 51-80. “this article examines an iconic example of grangerizing: the macklin bible extra-illustrated in 45 volumes by london artist and bookseller robert bowyer (1758–​1834) in the first quarter of the nineteenth century (bolton libraries and museums, bolton, united kingdom)” (abstract). calvert, edward (1799–​1883) painter, printmaker wilson, louise. “printing imperfections in william blake’s virgil wood engravings and what they reveal.” see blake 56.2 in division i, part vi. cosway, maria (1760–1838) painter, acquaintance of blake boucher, diane. “maria cosway’s a persian going to adore the sun.” burlington magazine 162, no. 1405 (2020): 300-05. “this article will set out what is known about the painting’s history and suggest a possible source for its unusual subject” (abstract). cowper, william (1731–1800) poet, hymnist mcconkey, matthew. “‘still repeated circles’: william cowper’s the task and the shape of habit.” cambridge quarterly 51.3 (2022): 242-57. “for cowper, then, the idea of habit is a means of weighing the oppositional demands of the embodied and the immaterial self” (abstract). nolan, sean m. “‘legs without the man’: georgic, acedia, and the topography of attention in william cowper’s the task.” “the lodge in the wilderness: ecologies of contemplation in british romantic poetry.” phd diss., city university of new york, 2021. 29-64. oishi, kaz. “william cowper and suburban environmental aesthetics.” romantic environmental sensibility: nature, class and empire. ed. ve-yin tee. edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2022. isbn: 9781474456470. 141-56. “taking two poems by william cowper, the task (1785) and ‘retirement’ (1782), this chapter situates their increasing awareness of the relationship between human well-being and the living environment in the context of eighteenthand nineteenth-century suburbanization” (141). cultures and technologies of display and exhibition chadwick, esther. “a black king in georgian london: british art and postrevolutionary haiti.” see paul mellon centre in division i, part v. chadwick, esther alice. “the radical print: british art and graphic experiment in the paper age.” phd diss., yale university, 2016. “this dissertation examines connections between high art, printmaking and political radicalism in late eighteenth-century britain to argue for the print as a formative site of artistic modernity” (abstract). it works from james barry’s “phoenix” to blake’s laocoön, and discusses john hamilton mortimer, james gillray, and thomas bewick as well. dillard, leigh g. “material intersections: image and text in the eighteenth-century commonplace.” journal of illustration 8.2 (2021): 221-50. “ranging from decorative flourishes and echoes of printers’ marks to richly scrolled title pages and evocative vignettes, the materiality of the commonplace book offered in these moments signals a heightened concern by readers to consider the visual potential of the text as part of their reading experience. this analysis looks at scattered remnants of eighteenth-century commonplace books for compelling examples of image and text relationships that reflect illustrative models from the print market” (abstract). european romantic review volume 33, issue 4 (2022) “romanticism and vision” ed. terry f. robinson and john savarese robinson, terry f., and john savarese. “introduction: romanticism and vision.” 451-60. “the essays in this issue catch sight of that variety [of scholarship on romanticism and vision] through their focus on acts of looking; on the production of visual art; on the imaginative landscapes pictured in maps and panoramas; on the affective impact of spectatorship; and on the visuality of race” (455). taylor, david francis. “picturing ekphrasis: image and text in shakespeare painting.” 461-78. on william martin’s and james barry’s paintings of shakespeare’s cymbeline: “martin and barry, i wish to suggest, show ekphrasis in order to interrogate and eschew both its rhetorical imperative (image as word) and its iconophobic implication (image as less than word)” (464). choi, tina young. “styles of cartographic vision: science, art, and labor in thomas hornor’s surveys.” 479-95. “this essay examines a number of works—​two surveys, a prospectus describing engravings of london, and the great panorama—​by thomas hornor, an early nineteenth-century surveyor based in london” (abstract). o’rourke, stephanie. “art after self evidence: fuseli, blake, and banks.” 497-513. “considers how models of artistic neoclassicism and scientific experimental procedures shared an investment in the evidentiary authority of an idealized male body” (abstract). calè, luisa. “william blake’s pestilence, sympathy, and the politics of feeling.” 515-33. “blake’s scene of pestilence becomes a virtual test of moral sentiments in which viewers confront an ethics of freedom built on sacrifice” (abstract). garcia, humberto. “the unsightly spectacle of ‘poor houseless wanderers’: de quincey’s confessions, the malaysian sailor, and vagrancy.” 535-54. “to show how these noncitizens [asian sailors] resisted their exclusion from civic life, this essay focuses on thomas de quincey’s confessions of an english opium-eater (1821), which narrates the author’s anxious encounter in grasmere with a dark-skinned malaysian sailor who appears as his vagrant double. this encounter sheds light on the way that british citizenship was racialized as white vis-à-vis concurrent philanthropic and governmental efforts to conceal abject migrant populations from public view” (abstract). fitzgerald, william. the living death of antiquity: neoclassical aesthetics. oxford: oxford university press, 2022. isbn: 9780192893963. “this book asks how the neoclassical value of simplicity serves to conjure up an epiphanic antiquity, and how whiteness, in both its literal and its metaphorical forms, acts as the ‘logo’ of neoclassical antiquity, and functions aesthetically in a variety of media” (description). “why neoclassicism?” 1-61. highlights johann joachim winckelmann’s influence on neoclassicism. “the iliad back-translated: john flaxman and alexander pope.” 62-119. “the two ‘homers’ of pope and flaxman provide a study in contrasting neoclassicisms that helps to site the distinctive neoclassical aesthetic that is my subject as it emerges from around the middle of the eighteenth century, and particularly in the wake of winckelmann’s writings” (66-67). there are less developed references to flaxman throughout the book, especially in relationship to antonio canova. lahikainen, amanda. money and materiality in the golden age of graphic satire. newark: university of delaware press, 2022. isbn: 9781644532690. considers the place of paper money in georgian print satire. slight reference to blake and his engravings of stedman (109), but it provides a useful context regarding the anxieties over paper money that spurred the need for alexander tilloch’s device preventing forgery of notes, for which blake and other engravers signed a testimonial (br[2] 78). monteyne, joseph. media critique in the age of gillray: scratches, scraps, and spectres. toronto: university of toronto press, 2022. isbn: 9781487527747. focused on printed, visual imagery from practitioners such as james gillray, blake, john thomas smith, and henry fuseli, the book addresses challenges posed by reproductive technologies to traditional concepts of subjective agency. “form and formlessness in blake’s embedded media.” 30-65. examines how the [first] book of urizen is “instructive in assessing how the artist and poet negates the page, the book, and vision itself ” (50). morales, helen. “bonnie honig’s a feminist theory of refusal with kehinde wiley’s after john raphael smith’s ‘a bacchante (after sir joshua reynolds).’” classical antiquity 41.2 (2022): 25-33. a review of honig’s book that references the artist kehinde wiley’s portrait, which invokes and is titled after the works by smith and reynolds. darwin, erasmus (1731–1802) scientist, poet edition the botanic garden. ed. adam komisaruk and allison dushane. 2 vols. abingdon: routledge, 2017. <blake (2018)> review gourlay, alexander s. see blake 55.4 in division i, part vi. criticism cogan, lucy. “drunkenness, compulsion, and the disintegration of the self: erasmus darwin’s theory of ebrietas in the writings of maria edgeworth.” life, death, and consciousness in the long nineteenth century. ed. lucy cogan and michelle o’connell. cham: palgrave macmillan, 2022. isbn: 9783031133626. blake is referenced slightly in the introduction to the book. connolly, tristanne. “the eternal lettuce.” see vala in division i, part vi. dauphin, caroline. “éros et uranie: passions animales et végétales dans la poésie d’erasmus darwin et de william blake [eros and urania: the passions of animals and plants in the poetry of erasmus darwin and william blake].” see dauphin in division i, part vi. patsoura, elliot. “toward a genealogy of geoengineering: erasmus darwin and the little ice age.” eighteenth-century environmental humanities. ed. jeremy chow. lewisburg: bucknell university press, 2023. isbn: 9781684484294. “i explore how darwin gives expression to the incapacity of nature to be fully domesticated, precisely in and among a proposal propounding the very necessity of its domestication.” d’éon, chevalier (1728–1810) spy siviter, clare. “celebrity across borders: the chevalier d’eon.” celebrity across the channel, 1750–​1850. ed. anaïs pédron and clare siviter. newark: university of delaware press, 2021. isbn: 9781644532126. 157-78. on the celebrity of the chevalier d’éon in the french and english press, including depictions of their gender. flaxman, john (1755–1826) sculptor, friend of blake bindman, david. “flaxman the accidental revolutionary.” see transactions of the romney society, vol. 23, under romney. fitzgerald, william. “the iliad back-translated: john flaxman and alexander pope.” see fitzgerald under cultures and technologies of display and exhibition. a museum of relationships: the correspondence of william hayley (1745–​1820). see museum of relationships under hayley. fuseli, henry [johann heinrich füssli] (1741–1825) painter, friend of blake exhibitions fuseli and the modern woman: fashion, fantasy, fetishism. courtauld gallery, london, 14 october 2022 to 8 january 2023; kunsthaus zürich, 24 february to 21 may 2023. curated by david solkin and ketty gottardo. the courtauld’s webpage includes three youtube videos showing the exhibition space and highlighting the works on display; see the catalogue under criticism, below. reviews and curator talk adams, alexander. “henry fuseli at the courtauld: between blue velvet and brothel.” whynow (n.d.): 12 pars. “the odours of ladies’ perfume and witches’ sulphur emanate from every battered sheet in this memorable exhibition” (par. 12). baker, christopher. “the fetishistic side of henry fuseli.” apollo (4 nov. 2022). borrelli-persson, laird. “how the eighteenth-century drawings of henry fuseli speak to our decadent age.” vogue (25 oct. 2022): 8 pars. ding, claire. “fuseli and the perceptions of womanhood.” argonaut (8 feb. 2023): 4 pars. “the exhibition ultimately opens a broader discussion of womanhood and who has the power to define it” (par. 4). donoghue, christina, and hetty mahlich. “the historical allure of the coiffure.” showstudio: the home of fashion film (2 dec. 2022): 6 pars. frankel, eddy. “fuseli and the modern woman: fashion, fantasy, fetishism.” timeout (21 oct. 2022): 7 pars. “fuseli and the modern woman: fashion, fantasy, fetishism.” all about women: a magazine for women and about women (n.d.): 7 pars. “fuseli and the modern woman: fashion, fantasy, fetishism.” salterton arts review (30 nov. 2022) (with helen saunders: modernist rebel, also at the courtauld gallery). “fuseli and the modern woman: fashion, fantasy, fetishism review—​small and select with very silly hairdos.” times (13 oct. 2022). behind a paywall. “fuseli and the modern woman review: a ‘charming oddity’ of an exhibition.” week (28 oct. 2022): 4 pars. ip, nigel. “fuseli and the modern woman: fashion, fantasy, fetishism—​courtauld gallery, london.” nigel ip | visual arts writer & art historian (4 jan. 2023): 8 pars. “i’m just going to say it; this was fuseli’s porn stash” (par. 3). jamil, miriam al. “fuseli and the modern woman: fashion, fantasy, fetishism.” british society for eighteenth-century studies (11 jan. 2023): 6 pars. “these drawings are as much about the artist as his subject, exploring his obsessions and insecurities” (par. 1). jones, jonathan. “fuseli and the modern woman review—​a dark, perverse mindset laid bare.” guardian (14 oct. 2022): 9 pars. “sex, suggests fuseli, is not a physical activity but pure brainwork” (par. 9). lloyd, joe. “fuseli and the modern woman: fashion, fantasy, fetishism.” studio international (11 nov. 2022): 10 pars. “it is almost as if, like many present-day conservatives, fuseli himself cannot comprehend what it is he fears” (par. 10). marchini, lucia. “shock and awe: the imaginative work of henry fuseli.” minerva magazine (13 dec. 2022): 22 pars. mcdonagh, melanie. “mesmerising and eye-opening: courtauld gallery’s fuseli and the modern woman reviewed.” spectator (3 dec. 2022): 9 pars. (with helen saunders: modernist rebel, also at the courtauld gallery). “much of this is high-class pornography—​and the way an earnest bespectacled young american girl was pointing out to her companion the detail of the filthiest drawing of three nymphs pleasuring a recumbent male (his face invisible) suggests that it retains its titillating effect. but it would be doing fuseli an injustice to see his work merely as erotic” (par. 6). mcewan, olivia. “the private passions of henry fuseli.” hyperallergic (29 dec. 2022): 7 pars. “undermining the display, however, is a fundamentally muddled thesis” (par. 1). mead, rebecca. “the swiss painter whose muse was his nightmare.” new yorker (5 jan. 2023): 6 pars. moss, richard. “fashion, fantasy, fetishism: the private sketches of henri fuseli.” museum crush (2 dec. 2022): 15 pars. “often featuring extraordinarily bizarre hairstyles, the exhibition reveals one of the finest romantic-period draughtsmen at his most innovative and exciting and unpicks fuseli’s fascination with female sexuality in the romantic period” (par. 6). “open courtauld hour: the modern woman and fuseli.” youtube. 6 dec. 2022. a zoom discussion of fuseli and the exhibition by the curators, david solkin and ketty gottardo, and of eighteenth-century sex workers by the scholar kate lister. portman, alfred. “the gothic erotica of henry fuseli at the courtauld gallery.” gowithyamo.com (23 nov. 2022): 7 pars. prodger, michael. “fashion and fetishism: the drawings of henry fuseli.” new statesman (26 oct. 2022). “the artist’s renderings of women’s hair depict both the chic and the suggestive” (subtitle). revely-calder, cal. “fuseli and the modern woman.” world of interiors (23 sept. 2022): 5 pars. ross-southall, mika. “complex, brilliant, unsettling works by an artist obsessed with sex.” telegraph (13 oct. 2022). behind a paywall. salatino, kevin. “fuseli and the modern woman: fashion, fantasy, fetishism.” burlington magazine 165, no. 1438 (jan. 2023): 11 pars. “of henry fuseli’s many ‘shockingly indelicate’ drawings, as john flaxman described them, none is more shocking or more indelicate than his study [not in the exhibition] of a dominatrix using an elaborate strap-on dildo on a figure bent over a chair (museo horne, florence)” (par. 1). stuart, eva. “fuseli and the modern woman: fashion, fantasy, fetishism.” isis magazine (7 feb. 2023): 7 pars. “the exhibition is unsettling but exceptional” (par. 7). füssli, entre rêve et fantastique [fuseli, the realm of dreams and the fantastic]. musée jacquemart-andré, paris, 16 september 2022 to 23 january 2023. curated by christopher baker, andreas beyer, and pierre curie. the museum’s webpage includes photos of the exhibition space and animations of works. see the press release; see the catalogue under criticism, below. reviews bellet, harry. “paris: at the musée jacquemart-andré, the dreamlike world of johann heinrich füssli.” le monde (22 oct. 2022). d., cécile, and laurent p. “füssli, the painting exhibition at the musée jacquemart-andré—​last days.” sortir à paris (30 dec. 2022): 7 pars. a last call for visitors, but it also includes photos of the exhibition. kozuchowska, agata ida. “review: füssli, entre rêve et fantastique at the musée jacquemart-andré.” dépaysants (23 nov. 2022): 7 pars. “the exhibition abounds in füssli’s enigmatic visions, theatrical scenes imbued with drama, ghostly pale faces in grimaces of shock, and arrays of twisting, stylized bodies. not for the faint-hearted, this retrospective focuses on a specific terrible beauty, tracing the origins of füssli’s uncanny compositions to various literary sources such as english folk tales, shakespearean tragedies, german epics, and scandinavian legends” (par. 2). platzer, david. “drafts of dreams.” new criterion (18 jan. 2023): 9 pars. “‘füssli: the realm of dreams and the fantastic’ is well presented, exploring not only the art itself, but also the cultural values and tastes that fuseli was so keenly aware of” (par. 9). poirier, simon. “derniers jours: füssli, le ‘peintre de l’étrange’ au musée jacquemart-andré.” l’objet d’art (26 dec. 2022): 3 pars. in french. criticism baker, christopher, andreas beyer, and pierre curie. füssli, entre rêve et fantastique [fuseli, the realm of dreams and the fantastic]. paris: musée jacquemart-andré, 2022. in french. the catalogue for the 2022–​23 paris exhibition (detailed above). baker, christopher. “füssli: une vie d’artiste tissé de rêves et de contradictions.” 21-34. beyer, andreas. “sublime pathos: l’antiquité de johann heinrich füssli.” 35-42. myrone, martin. “les spectres de füssli.” 43-50. brown, david blayney. “füssli dessinateur.” 51-60. curie, pierre. “un siècle de ténèbres.” 61-67. bucknell, clare. “how henry fuseli turned poems into paintings.” apollo (dec. 2022). choe, sharon. “deformed, dismembered, and disembodied: reinventing the body politic in william blake.” see choe in division i, part vi. engel, manfred. “the nightmare around 1800 (ann radcliffe, the romance of the forest; henry fuseli, the nightmare; e. t. a. hoffmann, die elixiere des teufels; charles nodier, smarra; nathaniel hawthorne, young goodman brown).” typologizing the dream / ​le rêve du point de vue typologique. ed. bernard dieterle and manfred engel. würzburg: königshausen & neumann, 2022. cultural dream studies, 5. “we might call the nightmare a classicist representation of a definitively nonor even anti-classicistic motif ” (97). mcpartland, perry. “titania and bottom and a vitruvian fairy: a new reference to the work of leonardo da vinci in henry fuseli’s titania and bottom.” anq 35.1 (2022): 35-38. “the aim of this note, though, is not to pursue the aporias of interpretation but simply to demonstrate to the reader that in fuseli’s reimagined dream, the bower of titania harbours a vitruvian fairy” (38). monteyne, joseph. media critique in the age of gillray: scratches, scraps, and spectres. see monteyne under cultures and technologies of display and exhibition. myrone, martin. “the haunted eighteenth century: fuseli’s the nightmare.” see paul mellon centre in division i, part v. o’rourke, stephanie. “art after self evidence: fuseli, blake, and banks.” see european romantic review under cultures and technologies of display and exhibition. phillips, catherine, with contributions by natalia sepman. “drawings in the hermitage from the collection of johann caspar füssli of zurich.” master drawings 59.4 (2021): 499-528. on paintings and drawings once owned by fuseli’s father (including some by him or other members of fuseli’s family) that are now in the state hermitage museum, st. petersburg, russia. solkin, david h., with jonas beyer, mechthild fend, and ketty gottardo. fuseli and the modern woman: fashion, fantasy, fetishism. london: paul holberton publishing, 2022. the catalogue for the 2022–​23 exhibition at the courtauld, london, and kunsthaus zürich (detailed above). solkin, david h. “drawing in an age of luxury: fuseli’s women in their time.” 14-45. fend, mechthild. “making drawings—​doing hair. fetishism, artifice and the pleasures of display.” 46-65. beyer, jonas. “the rise in henry fuseli’s reputation as a draughtsman.” 66-73. gottardo, ketty, with technical analysis by kate edmondson. “tracing, revising and mirroring: fuseli’s pleasure in drawing.” 74-89. solkin, david h. “i. the medusas of the hearth.” 90-113. solkin, david h. “ii. the other side of venus.” 114-29. solkin, david h. “iii. dangerous liaisons.” 130-54. gough, richard (1735–1809) director of the society of antiquaries nurse, bernard. “‘painful exactness’: the publications of the society of antiquaries of london during the directorship of richard gough (1771–​1797).” see modern philology under society of antiquaries. sweet, rosemary. “gough, richard (1735–​1809).” see vetusta monumenta in division i, part iii, section a. hayley, william (1745–​1820) man of letters, patron of blake edition a museum of relationships: the correspondence of william hayley (1745–​1820). fitzwilliam museum, cambridge. a pilot project displaying the letters of william hayley owned by the fitzwilliam. currently (as of 23 feb. 2023) there are three digital exhibitions available: hayley’s correspondence with his wife, eliza hayley (née ball); with anna seward; and with john flaxman, which includes flaxman’s correspondence with hayley’s son, thomas alphonso. criticism scobie, ruth. “breakfast with ‘her inky demons’: celebrity, slavery, and the heroine in late eighteenth-century british fiction.” eighteenth-century fiction 34.4 (summer 2022): 415-40. argues that hayley’s the triumphs of temper offers “a formulaic scene,” “in which a young white woman experiences sudden unwanted celebrity by reading about herself in a morning newspaper” before being “inevitably rescued from … a newspaper sphere in which older discourses of blackness, and metropolitan unease at the commodification of humans, were tightly but implicitly associated” (abstract). johnson, joseph (1738–1809) bookseller, employer of blake hay, daisy. dinner with joseph johnson: books and friendship in a revolutionary age. princeton: princeton university press, 2022. isbn: 9780691243962. an engaging and detailed book on joseph johnson and his circle. blake is a minor but recurrent player. there are well-told accounts regarding the many members of blake’s circle with ties to johnson. these include erasmus darwin, john gabriel stedman, and william cowper (and william hayley’s relationship to him), with henry fuseli and mary wollstonecraft given extensive attention. reviews and author talk forbes, malcolm. “dinner with joseph johnson review: host to radical london.” wall street journal (23 dec. 2022). hay, daisy. “dinner with joseph johnson.” see blake society in division i, part v. hone, joseph. “echo chamber: dinner parties in the ‘revolutionary age’ with the publisher joseph johnson.” history today 72.4 (2022): 104. nersessian, anahid. “liberty’s bookseller.” new left review 137 (sept.- oct. 2022). peacock, francesca. “dinner with joseph johnson—​portrait of a revolutionary bookseller.” financial times (7 apr. 2022). behind a paywall. publishers weekly (22 aug. 2022): 60. § sutherland, kathryn. “among the free enquirers.” tls: times literary supplement (13 may 2022). behind a paywall. sutherland also appears on the tls podcast, which is freely accessible, on 11 may 2022. willes, margaret. “dinner with joseph johnson.” london historians’ blog (13 june 2022). wu, duncan. “homage to joseph johnson, the radical eighteenth-century publisher.” spectator (2 apr. 2022). “hay omits all mention of blake [in her discussion of the gordon riots], despite his being a principal actor in her story—​a shame, because he could have brought her account to life.” kauffman, angelica [angelika kauffmann] (1741–​1807) painter spies-gans, paris. “establishing a female lineage at the royal academy’s show: eliza trotter, angelica kauffman and the intrigues of lady caroline lamb.” see paul mellon centre in division i, part v. lamb, lady caroline (1785–​1828) writer spies-gans, paris. “establishing a female lineage at the royal academy’s show: eliza trotter, angelica kauffman and the intrigues of lady caroline lamb.” see paul mellon centre in division i, part v. lawrence, thomas (1769–​1830) painter hallett, mark. “making an impact: thomas lawrence’s arthur atherley (1792).” see paul mellon centre in division i, part v. linnell, john (1792–1882) painter, blake’s friend and patron wilson, louise. “printing imperfections in william blake’s virgil wood engravings and what they reveal.” see blake 56.2 in division i, part vi. macklin, thomas (1752/53–1800) publisher billingsley, naomi. “‘the great bowyer bible’: robert bowyer and the macklin bible.” see billingsley under bowyer. mora, josé joaquín de (1783–1864) polymath, politician garcía castañeda, salvador, and alberto romero ferrer, eds. josé joaquín de mora o la inconstancia. periodismo, política y literatura. madrid: visor libros, 2018. in spanish. a collection of essays on mora, including his london exile and experience there as editor, journalist, and man of letters in the 1820s. § medina calzada, sara. josé joaquín de mora and britain: cultural transfers and transformations. berlin: peter lang, 2022. 262 pp. isbn: 9783631879245. in english. the volume “explores the connections that josé joaquín de mora (1783–​1864) established with britain, where he was exiled from 1823 to 1826” (publisher’s summary). review romero vallejo, alberto custodio. cuadernos de ilustración y romanticismo 28 (2022): 717-19. romero vallejo, alberto custodio. “‘poetas que conocieron el secreto de la inspiración’: estudio comparativo de the grave de robert blair (1743) y meditaciones poéticas de josé joaquín de mora (1826).” see romero vallejo under blair. mortimer, john hamilton (1740–79) painter chadwick, esther alice. “the radical print: british art and graphic experiment in the paper age.” see chadwick under cultures and technologies of display and exhibition. reynolds, joshua (1723–92) painter apesos, anthony. “visionary anatomy: blake’s bodies.” see apesos in division i, part vi. hopkins, david. “the general and the particular: paradox and the play of contraries in the criticism of pope, johnson, and reynolds.” a clubbable man: essays on eighteenth-century literature and culture in honor of greg clingham. ed. anthony w. lee. lewisburg: bucknell university press, 2022. 22-38. mcgeary, thomas. “music, men and masculinity on the grand tour: british flautists in italy.” early music 49.1 (2021): 101-28. postle, martin. “the artist as intellectual: joshua reynolds’s self-portrait as president of the royal academy (c. 1780).” see paul mellon centre in division i, part v. potter, elizabeth. “manuscript manifestations: reassessing william blake’s marginalia in the works of sir joshua reynolds (1798).” see potter in division i, part vi. waintraub, deborah. “portrait et théorie des arts en grande-bretagne: le rôle de sir joshua reynolds [portrait and theory of arts in great britain: the role of sir joshua reynolds].” phd diss., université paris 1 panthéon-sorbonne, 2022. in french. romney, george (1734–1802) painter paley, morton d. “george romney’s death of general wolfe.” romantik: journal for the study of romanticisms 6 (2017): 51-62. on the lost painting. robbins, nicholas. “george romney in the prison-world of europe.” see paul mellon centre in division i, part v. transactions of the romney society volume 21 (2016) ed. alex kidson montgomery, janelle. “every picture tells a story: a family chronicle in george romney’s lady mary every.” jeffares, neil. “romney’s mrs. gardner.” isepp, rose. “arcadia by design: a preparatory drawing for the clavering children.” paley, morton d. “george romney’s serena reading.” transactions of the romney society volume 22 (2017) ed. alex kidson kidson, alex, ed. “the letters of george romney.” transactions of the romney society volume 23 (2018) ed. alex kidson fisher, peter. “george romney and the mary stuart story.” derbyshire, val. “the horror of the abyss: the feminine sublime in the portraiture of george romney and the young philosopher (1798) by charlotte smith.” lax, lucinda. “a portrait of bonnie prince charlie by allan ramsay.” bindman, david. “flaxman the accidental revolutionary.” transactions of the romney society volume 24 (2019) ed. alex kidson ghosh, olivia. “damsels playing with timbrels: george romney’s four-leaved screen.” knight, emily. “portraiture as remembrance in eighteenth-century britain.” paley, morton d. “george romney’s visit to the robert udney collection.” moore, lauren. “copying george romney.” kidson, alex. “in search of james cranke the younger (1746–​1826).” transactions of the romney society volume 25 (2020) ed. alex kidson kidson, alex. “george romney: a complete catalogue of his paintings, supplement 2015–​2020.” transactions of the romney society volume 26 (2021) ed. alex kidson lintala, derek. “unshackled: a technical study of the portrait of lady willoughby de broke.” carroll, heather. “jane, duchess of gordon, hated rival of the whig duchess of devonshire.” busiakiewicz, adam. “the mystery of the warwick romney and his father.” miller, stephen. “mother and child reunion, george romney’s portrait of mrs. thomas carwardine and her son thomas, and romney’s abiding friendship with the revd. thomas carwardine.” society of antiquaries modern philology volume 120, number 1 (august 2022) “ancient objects and new media” heringman, noah, and crystal b. lake. “antiquarian media ecologies in the eighteenth century.” 1-23. “situate[s] the society’s work in relation to the larger field of antiquarian visual culture explored by the contributors to this special issue” (abstract). calè, luisa. “william blake’s ‘fourfold vision’: a practical antiquary’s visionary contemplations among the ‘couches of the dead.’” 24-48. “this essay argues that the artisanal problems of the ‘practical antiquary’ shaped william blake’s physiological aesthetics and his experience of ‘fourfold vision’” (abstract). nurse, bernard. “‘painful exactness’: the publications of the society of antiquaries of london during the directorship of richard gough (1771–​1797).” 49-64. “this essay examines, specifically, the revival of the society’s print series vetusta monumenta in the 1780s and the issue of a new series of large format publications, known as the cathedral series” (abstract). arnold, dana. “visual ekphrasis and the articulation of the past.” 65-88. “this essay focuses on examples of graphic representations of architecture as they appear in architectural treatises and published studies of particular buildings or sites. i argue that these images are a form of writing, as they have syntactical and linguistic qualities” (abstract). frazier wood, dustin. “‘the face of antiquity’: script, manuscript, and facsimile in early eighteenth-century antiquarian culture.” 89-112. “the article challenges the distinctions between text and images or objects often assumed to define eighteenth-century antiquarian visual culture” (abstract). boehm, katharina. “popular antiquarianism, new media, and the book: the cultural transmission of the past at the turn of the nineteenth century.” 113-37. “i show that [ann radcliffe’s] gaston de blondeville and [walter scott’s] kenilworth are deeply concerned with the status of the book at a time when modish new media produced immersive spectacles that offered audiences a definite, concrete picture of the past” (abstract). southcott, joanna (1750–1814) prophet nicholson, michael. “more than eve: women and superior secondariness in english poetry, 1751–​1810.” eighteenth-century life 46.1 (2022): 79-108. “mary leapor, mary scott, joanna southcott, lucy aikin, and their peers collectively articulate what i call women’s ‘superior secondariness[,]’” which “posited the secondary not as inferior or less, but as a necessary, often highly desirable, condition of women’s belatedness” (abstract). stedman, john gabriel (1744–97) soldier, writer, friend of blake mok, ineke, and eric heuvel. trans. jonathan reeder and university of sheffield students. quaco: my life in slavery. oosterhout, netherlands: uitgeverij l, 2022. isbn: 9789088867484. an english translation of a dutch graphic novel, quaco: leven in slavernij (2015), that dramatizes the life of quaco, whose enslavement is depicted by stedman. the students also translated a teacher’s guide aimed at elevento fourteen-year-old students. van oostrum, duco. “how the story of an enslaved boy transformed into a shared dutch history.” low countries (27 sept. 2022). “i will trace and unpick stedman’s descriptions of quaco and argue that stedman may give quaco a voice in his diary, but that he too commits an act of ‘literary colonialism’ when he sacrifices quaco’s individuality to adhere to 18th-century literary conventions.” stothard, thomas (1755–1834) painter, illustrator, blake’s friend/​enemy jung, sandro. “dominant visual narrative, the competitive marketing and metacritical functions of illustrations, and robert morison’s 1793 edition of james thomson’s the seasons.” aaa: arbeiten aus anglistik und amerikanistik 46.1 (2021): 43-72. “offering a book-historical contextualisation of the competitive marketing of illustrated editions of james thomson’s best-selling modern classic, the seasons (1730), as well as the role of illustrations in a multi-medial reading history of the poem, the article examines the formation of a dominant-paradigmatic eighteenth-century visual narrative of the poem that is deliberately countered by the perth bookseller, robert morison” (abstract). van de walle, kwinten. “the visual criticism of thomas stothard’s designs of walter scott’s ivanhoe for the royal engagement pocket atlas (1821).” aaa: arbeiten aus anglistik und amerikanistik 46.1 (2021): 93-116. “rather than simply serving a decorative function in a fashionable print medium, then, the illustrations can, and should, be read as acts of visual literary criticism” (abstract). swedenborg, emanuel (1688–1772) mystic sánchez tierraseca, mónica. “la concepción de un dios antropomorfo eterno y universal en swedenborg y william blake.” see sánchez tierraseca in division i, part vi. wainewright, thomas griffiths (1794–1847) blake collector, poisoner exhibition paradise lost: thomas griffiths wainewright. tasmanian museum and art gallery, hobart, 11 june to 3 october 2021. curated by jane stewart. in addition to art by wainewright and other items from his collection, it included works by blake, fuseli, and flaxman. a digital tour is available at youtube; see the catalogue under criticism, below. review and curator talks eshrāghi, léuli. memoreview.net (7 oct. 2021) (with one other exhibition). fitzgerald, michael. “notes on a scandal: the strange case of thomas griffiths wainewright.” art monthly australia 330 (summer 2021–​22): 63-67. an interview with the curator of the exhibition, jane stewart. stewart, jane. “listen to jane stewart speak about the life of convict artist, thomas griffiths wainewright.” friends of the tasmanian museum and art gallery (1 july 2021). criticism § stewart, jane, with peter hughes and jacobus van breda. paradise lost: thomas griffiths wainewright. hobart: tasmanian museum and art gallery, 2021. the catalogue for the exhibition held from 11 june to 3 october 2021 at the tasmanian museum and art gallery (detailed above). review hansen, david. “artist unsettled.” tls: times literary supplement (8 oct. 2021). west, benjamin (1738–1820) painter, president of the royal academy horton, mairead. “benjamin west’s mohawk warrior in the middle ground: tracing native american-european contact in a bag and its painted manifestation.” immediations 19 (2022). “this paper discusses the life of a bag that was produced by a native american, came into the possession of benjamin west by 1770, and was acquired by the british museum in 1991. … i argue that traditional understandings of west’s the death of general wolfe rely upon a faulty premise: its mohawk warrior, though often read as a ‘noble savage,’ is instead a figure that bears signs of native americans’ active negotiations with european presence in north america” (abstract). winckelmann, johann joachim (1717–68) aesthetic theorist fitzgerald, william. “why neoclassicism?” see fitzgerald under cultures and technologies of display and exhibition. wollstonecraft, mary (1759–97) author, radical, known in blake’s circle bergès, sandrine, and alan coffee. “cocks on dunghills—​wollstonecraft and gouges on the women’s revolution.” sats 23.2 (2022): 135-52. “this essay looks at how mary wollstonecraft and olympe de gouges theorised the new tyranny that grew out of the french revolution, that of ‘petty tyrants’ who found themselves like ‘cocks on a dunghill’ able to wield a new power over those less fortunate than themselves” (abstract). dumler-winckler, emily. modern virtue: mary wollstonecraft and a tradition of dissent. oxford: oxford university press, 2022. isbn: 9780197632093. an account of wollstonecraft’s thought regarding virtue. review darr, ryan. journal of the society of christian ethics 42.2 (2022): 457-58. gallagher, megan. “wollstonecraft’s gothic violence.” polity 54.3 (2022): 457-77. “this paper introduces the concept of gothic violence in order to better theorize how domination operates in mary wollstonecraft’s unfinished novel, the wrongs of woman, or maria” (abstract). hulbert, annette. “teaching mary wollstonecraft’s travelogue of historical trauma.” abo: interactive journal for women in the arts, 1640–​1830 12.2 (2022). “in this essay, i describe a metacognitive exercise in which students reflected on wollstonecraft’s meditation on survival in an era of environmental catastrophe with their own ‘travelogues’ written from where they logged into the zoom classroom” (abstract). johnson, nancy e., and paul keen, eds. mary wollstonecraft in context. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2020. <blake (2021, 2022)> reviews cross, ashley. european romantic review 33.4 (2022): 578-84 (with sylvana tomaselli, wollstonecraft: philosophy, passion, and politics). an “invaluable compendium of essays” (579). maione, angela. eighteenth-century studies 55.4 (2022): 553-55 (with sylvana tomaselli, wollstonecraft: philosophy, passion, and politics). these two books “bode well for the future place of wollstonecraft in eighteenth-century studies and beyond” (555). ramos, adela. eighteenth-century fiction 34.3 (spring 2022): 370-72. “these collected essays succeed at nuancing wollstonecraft’s life and work while unfolding new avenues for investigation” (372). kirkley, laura. “across disciplines, languages, and nations: recent scholarship on mary wollstonecraft.” literature compass 19.10 (2022): 12 pp. surveys twenty-first-century scholarship on wollstonecraft. kirkley, laura. “mary wollstonecraft’s translational afterlife: french and german rewritings of a vindication of the rights of woman in the revolutionary era.” european romantic review 33.1 (2022): 1-24. “i argue that wollstonecraft’s feminist thought was reshaped by its passage into different national and cultural contexts” (abstract). lambrianou, nickolas. “monumental failures: the contested bodies and sites of public art under lockdown.” sculpture journal 31.1 (2022): 75-92. “this article reads the events of june 2020 surrounding bristol’s colston statue and maggi hambling’s monument to mary wollstonecraft as examples of the tensions emerging around the idea of the monument under lockdown. if lockdown is understood as the suspension of personal and social freedoms, then it is not simply individual movement which is at stake, but the shared space of representation too” (abstract). makarova, elena. “zhizn' i sud'ba meri uolstonkraft (1759–​1797): poverkh bar'erov [the life and destiny of mary wollstonecraft (1759–​1797): over the barriers].” istoriya [history] 13.5 (2022). in russian (abstract in russian and english). philp, mark. radical conduct: politics, sociability and equality in london, 1789–​1815. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2020. <blake (2022)> review claeys, gregory. international review of social history 67.1 (2022): 156-59. ryndina, m. e. “vzglyady olimpii de guzh i meri uolstonkraft kak otrazhenie dvizheniya feminizma [the views of olympe de gouges and mary wollstonecraft as a reflection of the feminist movement].” xxiv vserossiyskaya studencheskaya nauchno-prakticheskaya konferentsiya nizhnevartovskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta [xxiv all-russian student scientific and practical conference of nizhnevartovsk state university]. vol. 5. nizhnevartovsk, 2022. isbn: 9785000476482. 290-95. in russian. shchuka, virlana m. “‘nursed under his own eye’: co-nursing fathers and the spectacle of breastfeeding in the british romantic period.” eighteenth-century fiction 34.4 (2022): 441-69. on representations of fathers watching breastfeeding, with a consideration of “the works of several romantic-period women writers, particularly mary wollstonecraft and frances burney” (446). shunina, z. s. “brak kak vyzov obshchestvu: meri uolstonkraft i uil'yam godvin [marriage as a challenge to society: mary wollstonecraft and william godwin].” protsessy integratsii i differentsiatsii v mire: sotsial'no-gumanitarnyy aspekt: materialy vserossiyskoy studencheskoy nauchnoy konferentsii [processes of integration and differentiation in the world: social and humanitarian aspect: materials of the all-russian student scientific conference]. ekaterinburg, 2022. isbn: 9785799635237. 276-86. in russian (abstract in russian and english). sibo, alex. “mary wollstonecraft: social reproduction pedagogy.” phd diss., pennsylvania state university, 2022. tomaselli, sylvana. wollstonecraft: philosophy, passion, and politics. princeton: princeton university press, 2021. <blake (2022)> reviews cross, ashley. european romantic review 33.4 (2022): 578-84 (with mary wollstonecraft in context, ed. nancy e. johnson and paul keen). “a readable, meticulously-researched, intellectual biography and introduction to wollstonecraft’s work that underscores her unwavering desire to create a better, more just world for all humans, not just women” (579). maione, angela. see johnson and keen. murray, julie. review of politics 84.1 (2022): 140-42. weiss, deborah. the female philosopher and her afterlives: mary wollstonecraft, the british novel, and the transformations of feminism, 1796–1811. cham: palgrave macmillan-springer nature, 2017. <blake (2019, 2020)> review wharton, joanna. romanticism 28.1 (2022): 107-09. white, willow. “feminist sensibilities: the feud of elizabeth inchbald and mary wollstonecraft.” eighteenth-century studies 55.3 (2022): 299-315. “this article examines the acrimonious relationship between elizabeth inchbald and mary wollstonecraft through the lens of their differing approaches to feminism and sensibility” (abstract). blake’s juxtapositional prosodic method in “holy thursday” (innocence) blake’s juxtapositional prosodic method in “holy thursday” (innocence) by francesca cauchi francesca cauchi is an associate professor at national sun yat-sen university. her research interests include romanticism, nietzsche, and modern european drama. damn. braces: bless relaxes. (william blake, the marriage of heaven and hell) at first glance, blake’s “holy thursday” (songs of innocence) depicts the heartwarming scene of brightly clad charity-school children parading toward st. paul’s cathedral to join the congregation in hymn and prayer.for the critic stanley gardner, “[blake] knew the children’s feelings as they filled the cathedral with excited murmurings. he knew that … the workhouse children in the king street school had been granted a special self-respect” (the tyger, the lamb, and the terrible desart [london: cygnus arts; madison, nj: fairleigh dickinson university press, 1998] 63, cited in david fairer, “experience reading innocence: contextualizing blake’s ‘holy thursday,’” eighteenth-century studies 35.4 [2002]: 535-62, on 538). similarly, for w. h. stevenson, the poem suggests that blake was as moved as joseph haydn (their “eyes began to fill”) by the singing of the children (“the sound of ‘holy thursday,’” blake 36.4 [spring 2003]: 137-140, on 140). on closer inspection, however, the poem’s metrical variation, barbed similes, and juxtapositional prosodic method jointly execute a subtle indictment of the “cold and usurous hand” (“holy thursday,” experience) of institutionalized charity. such an indictment is further illuminated by viewing the innocence poem retrospectively through the lens of its identically titled counterpart in songs of experience and prospectively through the lens of an island in the moon, blake’s unpublished prose satire or burlesque. written in the mid-1780s, an island in the moon contains the first drafts of three poems that would appear a few years later in songs of innocence (1789)—​namely, “holy thursday,” “nurse’s song,” and “the little boy lost.” the ironic subtext of the first is signaled to the reader of the satire by the name of the character who delivers the song: obtuse angle, a caricature of the “amiable pedant”see david v. erdman, blake, prophet against empire: a poet’s interpretation of the history of his own times, 3rd ed. (princeton: princeton university press, 1977) 119. who is wont to display the minutiae of his knowledge but, in his obtuseness, “always understood better when he shut his eyes.”david v. erdman, ed., the complete poetry and prose of william blake, newly rev. ed. (new york: anchor-random house, 1988) [hereafter e] 450. thus it is that in his “holy thursday” rendition he sees only the pious annual spectacle of charity-school children “rais[ing] to heavn the voice of song” (e 463) and not the flogging and severe undernourishment to which they were routinely subjected.erdman notes that “concern over charity-school abuses rose early in the 1780’s” and in the same footnote references jones’s oft-cited account of the appalling treatment of the children in some of the schools, especially the boarding schools, where masters and mistresses “lined their pockets with money saved from the children’s rations” (see m. g. jones, the charity school movement: a study of eighteenth century puritanism in action [cambridge: cambridge university press, 1938] 103, cited in erdman, prophet 122-23n23). similarly, in his earlier verse panegyric to richard sutton, the founder of the charterhouse pensioners’ home and charity school for boys, obtuse angle is so awed by sutton’s installation of “sinks & gutters … / … / to hinder pestilence” that he remains blind to the institutionalized “pestilence” metastasizing within the penned confines of the school’s “walls of brick & stone” (e 461). as david fairer astutely observes at the start of his illuminating essay on the historical context of “holy thursday” (innocence), “blake’s texts lose their innocence more easily than most” (535). drawing on an array of archival records from the period, including charity-school rule-books and reforms, ordinances, sermons, and hymns publicly performed by the children, fairer builds a compelling argument on the extent to which eighteenth-century charity children were caught up in a system that not only controlled, regulated, and exhibited them, but groomed them for a life of drudgery.fairer (543) cites the bishop of norwich’s 1755 address to the charity schools anniversary meeting in which he asserts that “there must be drudges of labour …. these poor children are born to be daily labourers, for the most part to earn their bread by the sweat of their brows.” the control and regulation, i shall argue, are reenacted in “holy thursday” (innocence) through the poem’s juxtapositional verse structure, whereby the first half of a line, connoting discipline and restraint, is antithetically linked to the second half, figuring the innocent children. more specifically, this antithetical dynamic is reinforced through the poem’s metrical shifts and barbed similes—​the foci of the ensuing analysis. to offset the granular nature of my argument, i shall begin by highlighting the poem’s intralinear juxtapositions (italicized below), and then proceed sequentially by stanza. since the metrical shifts and similes are presented in this article as exemplifications of the poem’s juxtapositional framework, the latter, when not explicitly stated, is implicit in my readings of the former. twas on a holy thursday their innocent faces clean the children walking two & two in red & blue & green grey headed beadles walkd before with wands as white as snow till into the high dome of pauls they like thames waters flow   o what a multitude they seemd these flowers of london town seated in companies they sit with radiance all their own the hum of multitudes was there but multitudes of lambs thousands of little boys & girls raising their innocent hands   now like a mighty wind they raise to heaven the voice of song or like harmonious thunderings the seats of heaven among beneath them sit the aged men wise guardians of the poor then cherish pity, lest you drive an angel from your door (e 13) the poem’s iambic heptameter is interrupted twice in the first stanza: once in the first line and again in the third. in the former, “twas on / a ho / ly thurs / day their in / nocent fa / ces clean” (stresses marked in bold), the two anapests in the second half of the line, caught between an ostensibly “holy” day of obligationas clare simmons reminds us, the titular holy thursday of blake’s innocence and experience poems “is not functioning as a date in the christian calendar, but … serves as an ironic reminder that an annual event held on a thursday merely for the convenience of st. paul’s and its patrons is now a substitute for true holiness and humility toward the poor that christ showed by example on the thursday before his death” (“blake’s ‘holy thursday’ and ‘the martyrdom of st. paul’s,’” blake 53.3 [winter 2019–​20]: par. 24). and obligatory clean faces, set into relief the uniformed children’s iambic lockstep procession in the second line, “the chil / dren wal / king two / & two / in red / & blue / & green.” note, too, the tautological incongruity of “innocent” faces having been scrubbed “clean”—​not for god, it would seem, given the poem’s subsequent depiction of the children as inherently radiant and as “lambs” and “angel[s],” but for public consumption.the lamb epithet clearly suggests lamb of god, echoing lines from another innocence poem: “little lamb who made thee / … / little lamb i’ll tell thee, / … / he is meek & he is mild, / he became a little child: / i a child & thou a lamb, / we are called by his name” (e 9). the implied censure in the word “clean” also calls into question the timeworn proverb “cleanliness is next to godliness,” immortalized by blake’s contemporary john wesley, who cited it in support of his rather dubious claim that “slovenliness is no part of religion.”“sermon xciii—​on dress,” in john wesley, sermons on several occasions, vol. 2 (new york: carlton & phillips, 1855) 259. michael farrell has argued that notwithstanding the evangelical commonalities between blake and wesley, the former’s attitude to the latter was “complex and problematic,” not least because of what blake would have viewed as wesley’s authoritarianism (blake and the methodists [basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, 2014] 67). the second metrical shift in the first stanza is the spondee that opens the third line, “grey head / ed bea / dles walkd / before / with wands / as white / as snow.” taken in conjunction with the reiterated dental plosive (“d”) in “headed” and “beadles,” the spondaic foot accentuates the oppressive nature of a hoary, hidebound authority, metonymically figured in the beadles’ ceremonial staves and hinted at in the simile “wands as white as snow.” the simile itself evokes a cluster of associations: the snow-cold hands of the grey-haired beadles wielding their disciplinary rods; the contrast between a ceremonial staff of office and the lord’s metonymical shepherd’s staff—​the first emblematizing discipline and authority, the second love and nurture; and lastly, isaiah 1:17-18, “learn to do well; seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless …. come now, and let us reason together, saith the lord: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow” (kjv). according to ellicott’s commentary,charles john ellicott, ed., an old testament commentary for english readers by various writers, vol. 4 (london: cassell & company, 1884) 419. the phrases “relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless” are principally addressed to men in office “to restrain the wrong-doing of the men of their own order … [and to] be true to their calling.” correspondingly, while the invitation to “reason together” in the authorized version of the bible “suggests the thought of a discussion between equals[,] the hebrew implies rather the tone of one who gives an authoritative ultimatum, as from a judge to the accused, who had no defence, or only a sham defence, to offer (micah vi. 2, 3)”—​an ultimatum, perhaps, not dissimilar to the one given by blake in the last line of the poem. another simile rich in associations is in the last line of the first stanza, “till into the high dome of pauls they like thames waters flow.” mirroring the earlier juxtaposition of “holy thursday” and “innocent faces clean,” the image of charity-school children streaming into st. paul’s “like thames waters” suggests on the one hand the moral uncleanliness of coercing children into an orchestrated public display of well-invested charityfairer notes how “inside the cathedral [the children’s] massed ranks on specially erected scaffolds made an impressive statement about the organization of national charity, the grandeur of its benevolence” (536). see also sarah lloyd: “charities … took shape within eighteenth-century consumer culture. they exchanged spectacle for money …. midcentury, charities advertised alongside quacks, publishers, and auctioneers” (“pleasing spectacles and elegant dinners: conviviality, benevolence, and charity anniversaries in eighteenth-century london,” journal of british studies 41.1 [2002]: 23-57, on 27). and on the other the stark contrast between the staggering number of london’s poor and the sheer volume of mercantile profit flowing into the river thames, a synecdoche for britannia’s imperial wealth via the east india company. as blake rhetorically asks in “holy thursday” (experience): is this a holy thing to see, in a rich and fruitful land, babes reducd to misery, fed with cold and usurous hand? (e 19) just as the east india company capitalized on its exploitation and monopolization of trade with britain’s colonies in india and southeast asia, so the charity schools capitalized on the annual spectacle of serried ranks of colorfully dressed charity children as an effective method of loosening the purse strings of the well-heeled cathedral congregation.see fairer 557. it is also worth noting that “the east india company, the south sea company and the bank of england were the three most popular investment opportunities offered to the eighteenth century public. investors varied in social status, being predominantly merchants and landowners, but also included members of the clergy” (giada pizzoni, “the english catholic church and the age of mercantilism: bishop richard challoner and the south sea company,” journal of early modern history 24 [2020]: 111-35, on 115). “holy thursday,” songs of innocence copy u (printed 1789). houghton library, harvard university, typ 6500.34u. image courtesy of the william blake archive. a more positive association invited by the thames water simile is brought out by the plate’s illumination. unlike any of the other poems in either innocence or experience, “holy thursday” contains wavy strokes of varying lengths between each line. in marked contrast to the density of the text—​the heptameter lines, crammed cheek by jowl and extending the full width of the copperplate, give the impression of being compressed between the comparatively commodious space allocated to anodyne illustrations of a beadle-led row of boys above and girls below—​the interlineal wavy lines evoke an image of unencumbered fluidity. a possible interpretation of this distinctive “underlining” is that in spite of the regimented conformity imposed upon the children, satirically masked by the publicity-type images of leisurely parading boys and girls, the “pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of god and of the lamb” (revelation 22:1) flows unimpeded within these multitudinous lambs. the metrical variation in the second stanza, which occurs in the second and last lines, performs the same antithetical function as that in the first stanza. in the second line, “seated / in com / panies / they sit / with ra / diance all / their own,” the opening trochee (“seated”), reinforced by the repetition in the third iambic foot (“they sit”), militates against the children’s radiance. in other words, the battalion-like “companies” of charity children on the left-hand side of the line are juxtaposed to the angelic-like host on the right—​a positioning that recalls christ’s seat at the right hand of god (1 peter 3:22; acts 7:55-56). in the last line, “thousands / of lit / tle boys / & girls / raising / their in / nocent hands,” the stanza’s second metrical shift is effected through blake’s deployment of two trochaic feet (“thousands” and “raising”), demarcating the two halves of the line, and a closing anapest (“nocent hands”) that produces the poem’s sole hypermetrical line. in sum, the metrical shifts in the second stanza impress upon the reader the incongruity of a veritable army—​hence the anomalous hypermetrical line and the stanza’s thrice-reiterated “multitude”—​of little christian foot soldiers raising “innocent hands” that would be better employed in play. in the third and final stanza, the poem’s antithetical dynamic is condensed into the second line’s oxymoronic collocation “harmonious thunderings” (“or like harmonious thunderings the seats of heaven among”), which simultaneously reverses the hierarchical order between the beadles and the childrenas the reverend thomas bisse was at pains to point out at the opening of a charity school in birmingham in 1725, the purpose of the charity school was “not to change the subordination of mankind,” but to keep “the lowest order of mankind, viz. the poor, in its proper situation” (cited in fairer 543). and encapsulates the stanza’s eschatological warning. the reversal inheres in the references to placement and the two similes “like a mighty wind” and “like harmonious thunderings”: the seated ranks of uniformed children in the first stanza are now being critically observed from the “seats of heaven” above; the “mighty wind” of “thousands of little boys & girls” singing psalms and hymns in (arduously rehearsed?)in the first draft of the poem in an island in the moon, blake deletes the last line of the second stanza, “and all in order sit waiting the chief chanters commands” and replaces it with “thousands of little girls & boys raising their innocent hands” (e 850). unison is likened to a thunderous aural assault upon the celestial realm; the beadles who in the first stanza had “walkd before” their charges are now seated “beneath” the cherubic children in accordance with the synoptic gospels: “suffer little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of god” (luke 18:16); and the ironic epithet “wise guardians” is a warning to the old beadles to exercise less of the guard and more of the guardian angel lest they find themselves driven from the “door” of heaven—​the door, moreover, that is eternally open to the “little children.” in short, blake’s juxtapositional prosodic method in “holy thursday” (innocence), together with the juxtapositional relation between the poem and its earlier draft in an island in the moon and later counterpart in experience, brings sharply into focus the tension between institutionalized charity and the well-being of the young charges. review: blake e la sua epoca (la reggia di venaria, 2024–25) all installation photographs: consorzio delle residenze reali sabaude/ fotografo andrea guermani. blake e la sua epoca. viaggi nel tempo del sogno [blake and his age. journeys in the time of dreams]. curated by alice insley. la reggia di venaria, turin, 31 october 2024–​2 february 2025. blake e la sua epoca. viaggi nel tempo del sogno. ed. alice insley. turin: hopefulmonster, 2024. reviewed by luisa calè luisa calè (l.cale@bbk.ac.uk), birkbeck, university of london, writes about practices of reading, viewing, and collecting in the romantic period. her monograph, entitled the book unbound: material cultures of reading and collecting, 1750–​1850, funded by the leverhulme trust, will appear in the studies in romanticism series at cambridge university press later in 2025. she is the exhibitions editor for blake. walking toward la venaria reale,curator of british art, 1730–​1850, tate britain. the visitor was greeted by a poster featuring a blake watercolor, oberon, titania, and puck with fairies dancing, which embodied the theme of the exhibition—​journeys in the time of dreams—​set against the royal seat looming at the end of the street. blake’s dreams took on a peculiar inflection in the grandiose architectural framing of la venaria reale outside turin in northern italy. this baroque palace embodies the savoy family’s dynastic and territorial ambitions from the mid-seventeenth to the nineteenth century, leading up to the unification of italy, which was completed in 1870. what kinds of dreams can be shaped in such a setting is a question that raises a further counterfactual to be added to blake’s thwarted hopes to flesh out his temperas into great public works. the tate’s experiments in exploring and reinventing his counterfactuals have included magnifying some of his works as photomontages: the 2019–​20 retrospective showcased a composition in which one of blake’s biblical designs had been repurposed as an altarpiece in st. james’s, piccadilly. during the same exhibition, his design of urizen as great architect from the frontispiece for europe a prophecy was projected onto the cupola of st. paul’s, producing a numinous portent. what would european visual culture look like if blake had had a grand tour or if he had taken his works on tour to exhibit abroad? what might it look like in post-brexit britain? following the fitzwilliam’s imagination of blake’s german exchanges in william blake’s universe,see my review of the fitzwilliam exhibition in blake 58.3 (winter 2024–​25). blake at la reggia di venaria was the first italian retrospective, drawing on the tate collection to seed his work in italian public culture.for context, see the reception of william blake in europe, ed. sibylle erle and morton d. paley, 2 vols. (london: bloomsbury academic, 2019), which includes my chapter on blake in italy. this initiative was part of a three-year partnership between tate britain and la reggia di venaria to exhibit british romantic art, starting with landscape with john constable (2022) and j. m. w. turner (2023) and finishing with blake. in turn, blake’s works will travel to the museum of fine arts in budapest in september 2025 in what amounts to the first exhibition of blake originals in hungary,in 2007 an exhibition in the art nouveau reök palace, szeged, hungary, put blake’s comus illustrations, represented by colored lithographs published by bernard quaritch in 1890, and goya’s caprichos in dialogue with the twentieth-century hungarian painter, photographer, and writer béla kondor (1931–​72); see ágnes péter, “the reception of blake in hungary,” the reception of william blake in europe 2: 568. and then to the national gallery of ireland, dublin, in 2026. 1: horror and danger the journey through the time of dreams started with feelings associated with danger and horror; stepping into a darkened blue room suggested the realm of the unconscious. the curatorial narrative explained the subjective lure of the irrational and emotional, the desire for spirituality and escape routes in the context of a “world in turmoil,” responding to the humiliation of defeat in the american war of independence and the commotion produced by french and haitian revolutions. the introductory information panel invited visitors to look for blake’s “twisted and contorted bodies, and his treatment of anguish and torment,” just as “british artists increasingly explored the power and perils of the natural world, distorting light, scale and space to stir the viewer’s emotions.”wall text, room 1. in addition to the wall text that situated blake within a shared group response, the curators chose to display a statement by samuel palmer to convey blake’s influence: “he was energy itself, and shed around him a kindling influence; an atmosphere of life, full of the ideal.”samuel palmer to alexander gilchrist, 23 aug. 1855, cited from martin myrone, the blake book (london: tate publishing, 2007) 183. the first wall to the left featured the theme of confinement through blake’s watercolor and graphite drawing the house of death, depicting the plague victims’ condition of confined waiting while an emaciated, bearded, elderly figure of death hovers, holding a dart above them. it was placed next to george romney’s ink and graphite drawing of john howard visiting a lazar house. the house of death was revisited in the large color print version illustrating paradise lost book 11 on the adjacent wall; its death is a more static figure hovering over the bound of the horizon, suggesting an indeterminate wait. next to it the night of enitharmon’s joy captured a numinous nightscape associated with melancholy, witchcraft, and vaticination, with enitharmon holding a book open, her finger resting on pages filled with indecipherable signs, while looking at a donkey, a frog, and an owl; a cat-faced bat hovers above, a mysterious and disquieting emblem. a grand tour version of danger was documented by john hamilton mortimer’s landscape with banditti, philippe jacques de loutherbourg’s travellers attacked by banditti, and mortimer’s character drawing banditti going out in the morning, while another wall hang focused on captivity, with mortimer’s the captive, george richmond’s fettered nude reclining against a rock, and nathaniel dance’s two women in a dungeon. the theme of suffering took a different turn in james barry’s study for philoctetes on the island of lemnos, which is inscribed in ink in the bottom-right corner: “there will appear more agony & ye disordered leg will be more distinctly mark’d by having it stretched out in air without any support from ye rock he sits on.” the second room dedicated to danger and peril explored the sublime violence of natural catastrophes through oil paintings representing the deluge by jacob more (1787), francis danby (1840), and william westall (1848), with de loutherbourg’s an avalanche in the alps (1803). after taking in such catastrophes, visitors looked up to make out a portent suspended from above: the spiritual form of pitt, one of the two pictures that blake envisioned as public works thirty meters in height “suitable to the grandeur of the nation” (e 531), appeared as an incorporeal apotheosis projected onto a flimsy veil hanging from the high ceiling against a pitch-black area of the room. as a result, the idea of “spiritual form” was remediated as a dematerialized substance that evoked the experience of a phantasmagoria. the final room devoted to horror and danger was inflected by a wall citation from the book of los: in trembling and horror they beheld him they stood wide apart, driv’n by his hands and his feet which the nether abyss stamp’d in fury and hot indignation but no light from the fires all was dark [sic] (the book of los 3.45-4.1, e 91) extrapolated from a passage about los and natural catastrophes—​los’s name did not appear in this excerpt, nor did the paragraph numbers in blake’s illuminated book—​this quotation could be taken to inflect the reception of the surrounding pictures. on the same wall, the body of abel found by adam and eve, a stunning ink, tempera, and gold on mahogany from blake’s late period, was placed next to a chalk, ink, and watercolor drawing of the punishment of the thieves (1824–​27), illustrating the eighth circle of hell (dante’s inferno, canto 24), and the blasphemer, an ink and watercolor illustration to leviticus 24:23, which was among the biblical inventions that blake painted for thomas butts in the early 1800s. the caption noted the contrast between the vigorous body being punished and the elderly figures stoning him as a negative comment on a religion of vengeance. the room also featured watercolor shipwrecks by françois louis thomas francia and alexander cozens. another wall displayed literary subjects—​henry fuseli’s lady macbeth seizing the daggers, from shakespeare, and samuel colman’s the death of amelia (1804?), a character struck by lightning in james thomson’s the seasons (1727)—​while another was taken up by the apocalyptic scene of colman’s the destruction of the temple (1830–​40). 2: fantastical creatures the second theme of the exhibition, “fantastical creatures,” documented the late eighteenth-century fascination with “images of the supernatural and fantastical, the startling and monstrous”: “such outlandish creatures gave [artists’] imagination free reign [sic] while meeting the new taste for the shocking and horrifying. in a world where enlightenment ideals and progress were increasingly questioned, the irrational and other-worldly seemed much more appealing.” blake’s “visions” were put into conversation with “apparitions, witches and monsters in literature and folklore,” “fanciful or grotesque creatures” summoned by graphic artists to “expos[e] the vices of contemporary society.”wall text, room 2. blake’s spectacular tempera the ghost of a flea hung at the center of a wall dedicated to the visionary heads that blake painted for john varley. the caption cited the anecdote about this subject appearing to blake as a vision—​“there he comes! his eager tongue whisking out of his mouth, a cup in his hand to hold blood, and covered with a scaly skin of gold and green”—​then claimed that varley “witnessed blake’s vision.”allan cunningham, the lives of the most eminent british painters, sculptors, and architects, 6 vols. (london: john murray, 1829–​33) 2: 148, cited in alice insley, “blake e la sua epoca. viaggi nel tempo del sogno,” blake e la sua epoca 30. by contrast, the catalogue more cautiously suggested that blake made varley believe he was painting what came to him as a visionary experience, explained within the wider context of the mystical and supernatural reception of blake among the group of the so-called ancients. the visionary heads were also documented with a sketch of the head of the ghost of a flea, as well as john linnell’s copy of the man who built the pyramids below a series of sketches by varley. blake’s visionary heads were set in a supernatural context, compared to ghost scenes including lord william and the ghost of his nephew, susanna duncombe’s the ghost scene from “ the castle of otranto,” subjects from an album by dance—​the ghost of mrs. swellenberg’s uncle; a monster emerging from a cave; a dog-headed monster in a cave, a lilliputian figure below—​and mortimer’s three skeletons. a small room juxtaposed blake’s “behemoth and leviathan” from illustrations of the book of job with sea subjects by mortimer: caliban; fish devouring shell food; and a sea monster with fish. a sheet of caricature head studies by mortimer communed with thomas rowlandson’s queen anne’s bounty and the judge. the theme of the room was announced by a wall citation from jerusalem, presented as follows: the giants & the witches & the ghosts of albion dance with thor & friga. & the fairies lead the moon along the valley of cherubim (jerusalem 63.13-14, e 214) this passage resonated with the themes of the whole section dedicated to fantastical creatures, and offered thematic continuity with and commentary on the next section. 3: enchantments this third theme was illustrated with oberon, titania, and puck with fairies dancing (c. 1786) from shakespeare’s midsummer night’s dream, hanging next to the information panel detailing the “persistence of fairies and spirits in the visual arts.” adjacent to blake were romney’s fancy portrait of tom hayley as robin goodfellow (1789–​92) and puck or robin goodfellow (1792–​93), a study from sir joshua reynolds’s painting for the boydell shakespeare gallery, with theodor von holst’s the fairy lovers underneath it signaling the erotic potential and danger of the fairy theme, “reflecting contemporary anxieties about female sexuality.”wall text, room 3. the wall was dominated, however, by the large oil painting the shepherd’s dream, which fuseli painted for the milton gallery (1799–​1800). this painting captures the dream as a moonscape dance of fairies holding hands in a circle as they do in blake’s watercolor, but in this case they are suspended in midair above a sleeping shepherd and drawn from a different source, a simile in paradise lost comparing the devils in pandemonium to a “pygmean race … or faery elves” engaging in midnight revels that “some belated peasant sees, / or dreams he sees” (1: 779-86). the wall was completed by another midsummer night’s dream subject, ariel on a bat’s back by henry singleton. on the adjacent wall, william etty’s the fairy of the fountain activated the theme’s sexual potential through the attraction of the female nude, alongside romney’s prophetic fancy portrait head of lady hamilton as cassandra and fuseli’s the debutante and charis phykomené. the other long wall in the room extended the theme of enchantment to include nordic elements through two large oil paintings: von holst captured the sorceries of walpurgis night in fantasy based on goethe’s “faust” ; turner’s a subject from runic superstitions was inspired by norse myths. the rest of the wall was taken up by flying leaves. william young ottley’s watercolor drawing a flight of angels was placed next to four female subjects that blake had originally invented for the first book of urizen, the book of thel, and visions of the daughters of albion, but subsequently printed in two copies without the accompanying text as single leaves around 1796, the first being a set of color samples for ozias humphry. on display were samples of the second copies, finished around 1818 with the addition of framing lines and emblematic captions. in this context, blake’s single leaves resonated with the iconography of christian and pagan flights of fairies, angels, and witches, enitharmon with child in midair potentially activating the folk myth of witches kidnapping children. 4: romanticising the past upon entering the room devoted to “romanticising the past,” starkly differentiated by the choice of vibrant green walls, the viewer was confronted with a wall quotation from blake’s descriptive catalogue : “the british antiquities are now in the artist’s hands; all his visionary contemplations, relating to his own country and its ancient glory, when it was as it again shall be, the source of learning and inspiration” (p. 40, e 542). the need to hark back to the voice of the past can be detected in “hear the voice of the bard!,” the poem that opens songs of experience (1794), as insley’s catalogue chapter points out. yet to document this “symbol of resistance and defiance,”wall text, room 4. since the illuminated books are not well represented in the tate collection, the exhibition displayed the bard, from gray (1809?), which also showcases experimentation with tempera, a technique from the past. the wall hang enabled comparison with an earlier painting on the same theme by benjamin west (1778). the power of landscape to articulate a literary and archaeological past was documented by a depiction of stonehenge; a thomas girtin landscape subject associated with ossian; and a turner associated with spenser’s faerie queene, which the caption suggested “might represent the redcrosse knight, abandoned and weakened, but not vanquished,” perhaps “an allegory of great britain during the napoleonic wars.” literature was also represented by the second and only other blake subject in this room, an early ink and watercolor drawing of lear and cordelia in prison (c. 1779). palmer’s watercolor a hilly scene captured a conservative retreat to the past through idyllic scenes from the kent countryside, to which the ancients retreated, as insley notes. so too edward calvert’s “the bride” can be read as a “nostalgic journey of the soul towards salvation embodied in rural england.”insley 39. the wall caption indicated that “stories from the english past could inspire national pride, bring a sense of escapism, or convey contemporary messages.”wall text, room 4. 5: the gothic blake’s appreciation of the gothic as living form took an unusual route. instead of chronicling blake’s encounter with the gothic by way of his sketches and engravings of the sepulchral monuments at westminster abbey during his apprenticeship to basire, a period that was central to the exhibition william blake: apprentice and master at the ashmolean in 2014–​15,reviewed by susan matthews in blake 50.1 (summer 2016). la venaria placed him within a range of architectural and natural contexts, drawing on the tate collection. there was only one blake in the first room, a figure standing in a gothic apse, perhaps empress maud (c. 1819), placed alongside castles by alexander cozens, john sell cotman, robert ker porter, and george cuitt, while another wall featured ruins and architectural forms by francis towne, turner, edward hawke locker, and girtin. the second room was informed by a wall citation, “gothic is living form … living form / is eternal existence” (e 270), drawn from on virgil. this statement foregrounded the organic elements in all exhibits, from the works embedding architecture in vegetation in the previous room to the gothic forms produced by groupings of bodies and trees in biblical subjects painted for butts: the watercolors the entombment (c. 1805) and judas betrays him (1803–​05) and the tempera bathsheba at the bath (1799–​1800), depicting 2 samuel 11:2. the captions drew attention to the visual traditions that blake emulated: in the entombment “the narrow, elongated forms, the repetitive arrangement of draperies, and clarity of line evoke medieval sculpture”; in judas betrays him medieval tradition could be felt in the “disposition of trees, lance and raised arms suggest[ing] an arch, evoking gothic architecture.” a foreboding shift in mood prepared for the next step in the exhibition’s continuation through a wall quotation from a letter that blake wrote to his friend john flaxman, the sculptor: “terrors appear’d in the heavens above / and in hell beneath, & a mighty & awful change / threatened the earth.”wall text: blake to flaxman, 12 sept. 1800, e 707-08. the exit from this section took the shape of a narrow corridor ending in a gothic arch opening onto an enlarged, backlit image of virgil accompanying dante through the door of hell from blake’s watercolor illustration of inferno canto 3. in other words, viewers were made to feel that they too were about to enter hell. 6: satan and the underworld introduced by a shift from rediscovering the past to imagining the future, “satan and the underworld” placed blake’s engagement with the satanic subject matter of dante’s circles of hell in the context of “biblical prophecies of the end of the world,” giving shape to “a sense of imminent apocalypse.” next to the information panel hung the large color print satan exulting over eve (c. 1795), then the tempera satan smiting job with boils (1826) and a design originally invented for plate 11 of urizen, reprinted without the surrounding text but finished with the new caption “‘every thing is an attempt’ / ‘ to be human’” around 1818, which, the exhibition caption suggested, is “open to interpretation,” being a “single leaf,” rather than part of the original illuminated book. this juxtaposition of works in different media and from different times demonstrates the persistence of the satanic theme throughout blake’s career, though the affect seems to change from radical sympathies to a more dystopian sense of torment. by contrast, the adjacent wall was monographic, focusing on blake’s late watercolors for dante’s commedia through a selection of drawings illustrating inferno : the inscription over the gate (canto 3); the devils with dante and virgil by the side of the pool (canto 22); the wood of the self-murderers: the harpies and the suicides (canto 13); the primeval giants sunk in the soil (canto 31); and plutus (canto 6). this hang followed a visual and geometrical sequence in placing the two vertically oriented drawings at the ends and the horizontal ones in between, rather than following the order of the literary text. the next wall illustrated demonic motifs by other artists, with von holst’s charon (1837) from canto 3 of dante’s inferno placed next to a painting depicting milton’s pandemonium (1840), formerly attributed to john martin. on the wall facing blake’s dante, the extraordinary juxtaposition of his tempera the spiritual form of pitt and the watercolor satan in his original glory revealed similarities in the positioning and gesture of the arms, while john st. john long’s temptation in the wilderness on the other side offered additional fitting commentary. so too did subjects from milton’s paradise lost : barry’s etching “satan, sin, and death,” two rocky scenes by j. r. cozens, and two watercolor devils by dance, which illustrate a grotesque treatment. in the adjoining room were george cumberland’s inside the peak cavern, castleton, derbyshire (c. 1820) and five of blake’s seven engravings from inferno on the adjacent wall, as well as “the fall of satan” from a reprinting of illustrations of the book of job and edward dayes’s the fall of the rebel angels (1798). william blake: reimagined visions the final room was dedicated to an installation on 138 led panels, an immersive digital film directed by sam gainsborough and produced by blinkink for the exhibition. it scaled up animations of twelve of the “most renowned works by blake from the tate’s collection. … the film brings blake’s rich and imaginative universe to life.” the information panel related this experiment to blake’s claims about his visions of great monuments in asia in the descriptive catalogue, though the resulting cast of characters was perhaps closer to his visionary heads. the animations included some works in the exhibition—​oberon, titania, and puck with fairies dancing ; the night of enitharmon’s joy ; satan in his original glory ; the ghost of a flea—​integrated with subjects not included: the large color prints newton, nebuchadnezzar, and the good and evil angels ; cerberus and the griffin featured in beatrice addressing dante from the car from dante’s commedia; and the river of life (c. 1805) from revelation 22:1-2.see <https://​www.​blinkink.​co.​uk/​projects/​william-​blake-​re-​imagined-​visions>. while in the advertisement produced for the 2019–​20 retrospective, gainsborough’s animation had taken blake’s characters out of tate, into the streets and onto a basketball court, the animation for la reggia di venaria immersed the viewer in the phantasmagoric world of blake’s supernatural characters: at the end of the journey, spectators have entered the world of blake’s dreams. limiting the selection of works to the tate collection led to the introduction of british romantic art through blake and blake through british romantic art, a particularly productive group portrait in the synoptic treatment of a theme by blake and his contemporaries. blake’s return to a theme using different techniques across his career was also revealing. judging from comments i overheard during my visit in the final days, the exhibition held its public captivated. newspaper coverage confirmed italian enthusiasm for tate’s blakes. la repubblica gave it a double spread and celebrated it as “fantastic, visionary, enigmatic,” claiming that after a visitor left la reggia, “the majestic façades of venaria reale [were] animated by oneiric and enchanted projections and the large gardens of vegetation and fountains appear[ed] to be imaginary breathings of the works kept indoors.”olga gambari, “william blake: visioni molto romantiche,” la repubblica (22 dec. 2024): 32-33 (my translation). william blake and his circle: a checklist of scholarship in 2024 william blake and his circle: a checklist of scholarship in 2024 by wayne c. ripley works in romance languages contributed by fernando castanedo works in japanese contributed by hikari sato works in turkish contributed by hüseyin alhas works in russian contributed by vera serdechnaia wayne c. ripley (wripley@winona.edu) is a professor of english at winona state university, minnesota, and servesresearch for “william blake and his circle” was conducted at: krueger library at winona state university (for works in english); the universidad de alcalá library, madrid (for works in romance languages); cinii and the national diet library online catalogue, komaba library and general library of the university of tokyo, and the national diet library (for works in japanese); and the general library of the social sciences university of ankara and the beytepe library of hacettepe university (for works in turkish). as the bibliographer for blake and the william blake archive. his projects include a selected annotated bibliography, which will update the “resources for further research” available at the blake archive, and his book manuscript, “‘where spectres of the dead wander’: new archival findings on blake, his family, neighbors, and circle.” fernando castanedo (fernando.castanedo@uah.es) is a professor of english at the universidad de alcalá (madrid). hikari sato (hikari@g.ecc.u-tokyo.ac.jp) is a professor of comparative literature and culture at the university of tokyo. he has been a member of the “william blake and his circle” team since summer 2003. hüseyin alhas (huseyin.alhas@asbu.edu.tr) received his phd from the department of english language and literature, hacettepe university. he is an assistant professor at the social sciences university of ankara. vera serdechnaia (rintra@yandex.ru), doctor of philology, krasnodar (russia), is an assistant professor in the department of foreign literature and comparative cultural studies at kuban state university and a theatre critic. she is working on the theme of blake reception in russia and the former ussr. table of contents: symbols and abbreviations introductory essay division i: william blake part i: blake’s writings section a: original editions, facsimiles, reprints, and translations section b: collections and selections part ii: reproductions of drawings and paintings section a: illustrations of individual authors section b: collections and selections part iii: commercial engravings section a: illustrations of individual authors part iv: bibliographies and catalogues section a: bibliographies section b: catalogues part v: digital resources part vi: criticism, biography, and reviews division ii: william blake’s circle banks, thomas barry, james bartolozzi, francesco basire, james, sr. blair, robert boehme, jacob cosway, maria cosway, richard cowper, william cromek, robert hartley cultures and technologies of display and exhibition cunningham, allan darwin, erasmus flaxman, john fuseli, henry hayley, william hope, thomas johnson, joseph kauffman, angelica lavater, johann caspar lowth, robert mora, josé joaquín de morganwg, iolo mortimer, john hamilton reynolds, joshua robinson, henry crabb royal academy of arts stedman, john gabriel stothard, thomas swedenborg, emanuel watson, caroline wollstonecraft, mary symbols § works preceded by a section mark are reported on secondhand authority abbreviations bb g. e. bentley, jr., blake books (1977) blake blake/an illustrated quarterly <blake ([year])> indicates the installment of “william blake and his circle” published in the year specified br(2) g. e. bentley, jr., blake records, 2nd ed. (2004) bsj g. e. bentley, jr., with keiko aoyama, blake studies in japan (1994) diss. dissertation e david v. erdman, ed., the complete poetry and prose of william blake (rev. ed., 1988) wbhc g. e. bentley, jr., william blake and his circle (2017) <http://​library.​vicu.​utoronto.​ca/​collections/​special_collections/​bentley_​blake_​collection/​blake_​circle/​2017/​william_​blake_​and_​his_​circle.​pdf> introductory essay “william blake and his circle” is an annual bibliography that records scholarship, bibliographies, and digital sources on william blake, his wife, catherine, and members of their circle, as well as facsimiles, reproductions, editions, translations, and catalogues of their works. it is a cooperative humanistic undertaking that depends upon the efforts of scholars from around the globe and that enables sources in english, the romance languages, japanese, turkish, russian, and ukrainian to be recorded and shared. scholars working in language groups not currently represented in the checklist are asked to contact wayne c. ripley to inquire about becoming a contributor. the digital sources recorded in part v include digitally born materials that do not easily fit into the bibliographic categories established by g. e. bentley, jr.’s blake books and its sequels. this material comprises blogs, scholarly presentations or author talks (usually posted on a podcast and/​or on youtube), press releases, and news stories. works of high scholarly caliber, such as keri davies’s blog or the conferences, presentations, and postings of the global blake network, are cross-listed in part vi. no effort has been made to record references to blake on social media platforms such as facebook, instagram, pinterest, reddit, and tiktok. discoveries mark crosby has discovered what are highly likely to be blake’s practice engravings and etchings on the versos of three of the copperplates for richard gough’s sepulchral monuments. these would be among the earliest surviving engravings by blake and consist of “incised linear patterns and motifs made with burins, a drypoint needle, and a compass” (blake 58.3). in addition to reproducing the versos, crosby positions them in terms of james basire’s workshop practices, the production of sepulchral monuments, and blake’s apprenticeship. (many news agencies covered the discovery, and these stories are recorded in part v, under crosby.) at his blog, keri davies posted two unpublished papers that are rich with new contextual information. the first considers andrew, an enslaved child held by george whitefield. andrew accompanied whitefield in the early 1740s, and he was well known to the moravians of fetter lane. he died in 1744 at the age of fourteen, but davies makes a convincing case that andrew is depicted in johann valentin haidt’s moravian painting erstlingsbild (1747) and that he was discussed by the moravian congregation during the time of blake’s mother’s association with it. the second paper has two parts. the first revisits alexander gilchrist’s account of blake’s being highly affected by mrs. john linnell’s singing of a “border melody” (1: 294 in the 1863 edition). davies identifies the song and the volume in which the linnells likely found it. documenting the linnells’ relationship with william home lizars (who witnessed their wedding), the second part argues that lizars’s method of relief etching was directly influenced by blake’s and that blake’s assertion in the ghost of abel that his “original stereotype was 1788” is a response to lizars’s claim of having invented the method. david worrall’s new book, william blake’s visions: art, hallucinations, synaesthesia, is a major reexamination of blake’s visions from the perspective of neurology. worrall combines accounts of blake’s madness and his eccentricities with careful readings of his visual works to contend that the visions had demonstrable physiological causes. chief among blake’s “distinctive neurophysiologies,” in worrall’s account, are klüver form-constant hallucinations that create geometric shapes traceable in blake’s art, and intense synaesthesia that could be “triggered by graphemes in verbal auditory modes” and “would have been seen … outside of his body” (33-34). the book is an important repositioning of blake’s madness as neurodivergence. scholars with a similar interest in cognition and neurology but who focus more on blake’s works than blake himself include camille adnot, who considers the aesthetics of the long prophecies, analyzing “graphic overflow, synaesthesia, and sensory overload, to highlight how blake uses multiplicity as a creative principle,” and richard sha, who uses blake to warn against “the potentially high costs for an enactive consciousness: cognitive efficiency, a relationality blind to structured hierarchy, and a consciousness that cannot separate itself from ideology.” editions and translations mark crosby has edited the first print facsimile of songs of innocence copy l, which is held by the bodleian library at the university of oxford. it contains an introduction by crosby and a diplomatic transcription that differs in places from that of the blake archive. sp books issued a limited-edition facsimile of blake’s notebook under its old title of the rossetti manuscript. dmitrii smirnov’s translation of an island in the moon, first published in the journal yazyk. slovesnost'. kul'tura, has been published as a book. there is a new edition of andré gide’s translation of marriage into french. the blake archive has published copy a of for children: the gates of paradise, forty-seven monochrome wash drawings that date from 1786 or earlier, and the eighteen heads of poets executed for william hayley’s library. the publication of these heads is complemented by crosby’s exhibition at the archive, which offers “a new hanging arrangement” and suggests “possible sources available in hayley’s libraries” for the designs. in addition, the archive published several paintings in preview mode: adam naming the beasts, christ blessing, eve naming the birds, the virgin and child in egypt, and the virgin and child (“ the black madonna”  ). sales and exhibitions in june, copy j of songs of innocence and of experience was auctioned at sotheby’s, new york. it was originally owned by charles augustus tulk, and the auction lot included samuel taylor coleridge’s 12 february 1818 letter to tulk giving his thoughts on the poems. the online catalogue remains available, with select pages from songs and the complete letter reproduced. there were two major exhibitions of blake’s work in 2024. the first, william blake’s universe, was held initially at the fitzwilliam museum at the university of cambridge and subsequently moved to the hamburger kunsthalle, germany. curated by david bindman and esther chadwick, the exhibition positioned blake in a european context, highlighting particularly the work of the german artist philipp otto runge. the catalogue, which was published in both english and german, includes essays on henry crabb robinson and on dionysius andreas freher’s illustrations for the works of jacob boehme. for the german exhibition, noëlle kröger created a graphic novel on blake’s life and times that was also translated into english. (a comic-book adaptation of urizen and an excerpt from john riordan’s graphic-novel biography of blake are in vala, and there is a portuguese comic-book thriller inspired by marriage.) the second exhibition, blake e la sua epoca. viaggi nel tempo del sogno [in the age of blake: visionary journeys], was held at the venaria reale in turin, italy, in partnership with the tate. the exhibition catalogue, edited by alice insley, is in italian and highlights blake’s visions, the gothic, and satan. unfortunately, no english translation of this beautiful catalogue is available, but many press releases and reviews feature videos showing the exhibition space. major publications mark crosby and josephine a. mcquail have edited a collection of essays, william blake’s manuscripts: praxis, puzzles, and palimpsests, which is dedicated to g. e. bentley, jr., and morris eaves. addressing the letters, the annotations, and the notebook, the contributors seek to assess blake’s manuscripts in new ways, many of which are enabled by the digital images available at the blake archive and elsewhere. notably, the volume includes one of bentley’s last works, his examination of blake’s different hands and the difficulty that editors face in representing their unique visual aspects in letterpress editions, along with a set of bibliographical appendices on blake’s different letter forms. in other essays, crosby considers what blake’s manuscripts suggest about the discrepancies between his theory and practice of execution; jennifer davis michael reads the blakes’ practice of bibliomancy as recorded in the notebook and its palimpsests; angus whitehead surveys blake as a writer of letters; and elizabeth potter considers the annotations to joshua reynolds. five essays examine the four zoas: oishani sengupta et al. discuss the attempts by the british library, the blake archive, and the lazarus project at the university of rochester to use multispectral imaging to reveal new and better details of the words and images of ten manuscript pages (unfortunately, as they concede, the results are rather meager); michael fox calls for an entirely new model of editing the poem through graph technology; silvia riccardi reads the “layout, calligraphy, and symbols” of the manuscript pages; peter otto reexamines the problem of the two night the sevenths, not to solve it as much as to consider the work being done by “interruption” in the poem; and mcquail suggests that depictions of “rites of pagan worship documented by the society of antiquaries and the society of dilettanti” influenced the depiction of urizen in the poem. the two articles on island are by fernando castanedo, who traces its ekphrastic allusions to works of art, and joseph fletcher, who shows that many of the targets of blake’s satire espouse “natural-philosophic attitudes regarding the nature of matter, the soul’s relationship to the body, and the first principles that enable understanding of the universe.” outside of manuscripts proper, tommy mayberry argues from the contextual evidence of “molly houses,” the chevalier d’éon, and fashion after the french revolution for a trans reading of visions, and jason whittaker examines the influence of blake, emanuel swedenborg, and william butler yeats on the novelist sheila kaye-smith. esther chadwick’s the radical print is an important new work on the print in relationship to politics in terms of both content and form, with beautiful reproductions. the chapter on blake develops his connections with millenarian printsellers through “joseph of arimathea among the rocks of albion” and laocoön, with other chapters considering james barry, john hamilton mortimer, james gillray, and thomas bewick. in blake, caroline anjali ritchie examines the reception of the stedman designs among contemporary british and american artists, with a thoughtful coda that reflects on the ethical issues of reproducing the engravings. sarah carter reads henry fuseli’s translation and blake’s annotations of lavater’s aphorisms on man to suggest that it is “a composite creation” with implications for the romantic idea of the self. joshua schouten de jel has an article discussing blake’s practices of memorialization in poetical sketches, thel, and urizen, and a book-length study of visions. he reads the poem through the subjective position of the characters and their different states, connecting blake’s depictions of oothoon to religious representations of female sexuality and divine inspiration. in other work on the illuminated books, annalisa volpone considers “instances of mental impregnation and parturition” in blake’s characters; angela heagy analyzes the songs to contend that “blake’s depictions of nature are no less notable than those of his peers”; and fernando glaybson do nascimento santos explores blake’s use of the baroque in for children. blake, religion, and the bible the latest issue of vala, the annual journal of the blake society, has as its theme blake and religion. its diverse collection of essays, poems, and art demonstrates blake’s appeal to an incredibly broad range of religious persuasions and perspectives. this can be seen in other work of the last year as well. blake is one of the major figures considered in the series the bible and western christian literature: books and the book, which contains useful primary and secondary material on the bible, religion, and literature. christopher rowland’s essay on blake’s view of the bible appears in the third volume, enlightenment to romanticism, edited by stephen prickett, and there is separate commentary on blake’s direct references to the bible by rowland and on jerusalem by susanne sklar. this volume includes major eighteenth-century and romantic-era writers, movements, and ideas (such as the great awakening, hymns, and the rise of rational religion), and would serve as a good introduction to blake’s religious world. rowland also takes blake’s ideas regarding cathedrals in milton and jerusalem as a starting point for his own critique of “cathedral culture” in a chapter in a new collection of his essays, speaking of god in an inhumane world: essays on liberation theology and radical christianity. blake and the bible are discussed by yosefa raz’s the poetics of prophecy: modern afterlives of a biblical tradition. raz addresses the influence of the eighteenth-century hebraist robert lowth and reads milton and jerusalem to suggest that the bible’s own instability calls into question its status as the “great code of art” for the post-frye, “non-systematic blake.” blake certainly serves as the “great code” in timothy morton’s hell: in search of a christian ecology, an effort to articulate a new mode of christian ecology and morton’s own christian awakening. blakean in spirit and tone, the book provides insightful readings of many songs, marriage, and the “jerusalem” hymn that reveal their relevance to our ecological crisis and the conditions of modernity that led to it. (morton’s presentation to the blake society can be viewed on youtube, and they are interviewed in vala.) more prosaically, blake is the subject of a very short biographical sketch in peter ackroyd, the english soul: faith of a nation, which disappointingly skips over the opportunity to reconcile his biography of blake with the findings regarding the connections of blake’s family to moravianism. influences on blake and the reception of blake there was much written on influence and reception, with the majority of this scholarship in languages other than english. mariana dos reis palieraqui highlights the “textual dialogue” of blake’s mythology with that of paradise lost, while william weber wanderlinde and maria rita drumond viana look at the relationship of the devil in marriage with satan in paradise lost. daniela paolini and mario rucavado rojas examine josé joaquín de mora’s meditaciones poéticas, asking “to what extent they [mora’s poems] can be considered an ekphrasis of blake’s designs.” hikari sato considers “the old story that [john] ruskin ‘cut up’ one of the copies of jerusalem.” ben myers explores thomas merton’s use of blake’s proverbs “as a model of social critique,” and annise rogers has a chapter in a collection on j. r. r. tolkien regarding blake’s and tolkien’s art. vera serdechnaia traces blake’s influence on the symbolist poets george macdonald, edith sitwell, and francis thompson; svetlana kolotilina compares blake and the painter francis bacon, with references to david lynch’s twin peaks. esin ozansoy examines blake’s influence on the greek poet odysseas elytis. joseph albernaz’s common measures: romanticism and the groundlessness of community has two chapters on blake and community, with the second comparing blake and georges bataille; bataille’s notion of the sacred is utilized in kang-po chen’s study of the depiction of sacrificial violence in jerusalem. paul-cristian albu contemplates how a “romanian literary critic plans to interpret william blake’s work in a romanian context.” several articles consider the history of blake scholars and scholarship in japan. yoshie nakajima offers “an introductory essay on lafcadio hearn and blake,” while nobuo sakikawa discusses hearn’s lectures on blake delivered at tokyo imperial university. toshiro nakajima and yuko nagano place the work of bunsho jugaku “in the history of blake studies after world war ii,” and hikari sato examines the role that muneyoshi yanagi played in editing jugaku’s collection of blake essays. music the scattered essays on music and blake at zoamorphosis, jason whittaker’s site, have been collected into their own section at the global blake site, as recorded below. on 4 november 2024, global blake held a one-day online symposium on blake and music, “musical afterlives.” topics included blake’s influence on spirituals, bob dylan, allen ginsberg, bruce dickinson, new age music, the country musician don williams, and recent russian music. most of the presentations were recorded and posted to youtube and embedded at the global blake site. the symposium inspired keri davies to post a detailed description at his blog of how much the locales of blake and the composer franz joseph haydn overlapped. in separate russian articles, angelina stepanova and nikita volobuev analyze dmitrii smirnov’s settings of blake’s work. dissertations and studies of translations alexandre tchaykov devotes a section of his doctor of music dissertation to benjamin britten’s setting of songs. katherine ding’s “a blakean guide to embodied knowledge” argues that “blake prophetically anticipates the discoveries of twenty-first century neuroscientists by insisting that the activities of thinking, feeling, and perception … are located in the body.” april grace ingraham savage examines blake through “proto-pentecostal theology.” yunyi cai explores “the representation of darkness in fine arts,” while hui zhao considers jerusalem through “une heuristique du montage.” studies of translations include three russian articles. vladislav bortnikov compares the english and russian verbs in jerusalem plate 5 and dmitrii smirnov’s translation; nadezhda severina examines two versions of “the clod and the pebble” by v. toporov; and milena stepanyan analyzes the strategies in g. dashevsky’s translations of blake’s poetry. notable digital sources in a youtube video, doug nicholls tours blake’s cottage in felpham to highlight the extensive damage, and i’ve recorded related news stories on efforts to save the cottage and transform it into a museum. blake society events included presentations on blake and maurice sendak by jason whittaker and illustrator tamsin rosewell, on blake in relationship to london police reform by jake elliot, and on taking blake’s christianity seriously by mark vernon (who has an essay on the same topic in vala). morton paley’s presentation on songs at the san francisco public library is available on youtube. global blake’s “in conversation” series featured alexander regier’s presentation on how the replica of blake’s press ended up at rice university; roger whitson’s discussion of donald ault, actor-network theory, and science; annise rogers’s reading of “samson” in poetical sketches as a prototype for orc and albion; david worrall’s distillation of his recent book; inés tebourski’s call for seeing los as a new model of the self; and william rubel’s study of the reception and influence of “the fly.” zoavision, global blake’s youtube channel, has four playlists on its page. one of these, “visionary: how william blake changed the world,” comprises longer videos on blake and his reception. significant postings here include panel discussions on blake and tolkien and on urizen, and whittaker exploring blake’s influence on j. g. ballard and angela carter; aleister crowley and austin osman spare; and the surrealists. passings kathryn freeman, author of blake’s nostos: fragmentation and nondualism in “the four zoas” (1997) and a guide to the cosmology of william blake (2017), passed away unexpectedly in late 2024. blake’s circle the royal academy’s exhibition entangled pasts, 1768–​now: art, colonialism and change featured many members of blake’s circle. catalogue essays include cora gilroy-ware’s discussion of the legacy of thomas stothard’s the sable venus and esther chadwick on the royal academy in relationship to enslavement. susanna avery-quash and christian huemer’s collection, london and the emergence of a european art market, 1780–​1820, features camilla murgia on exhibiting art privately and publicly in london around 1800; david alexander on the print market; and wendy wassyng roworth on the acquisition and dispersal of angelica kauffman’s collection. elsewhere, kauffman’s salon and its music are treated by rebecca cypess, while roworth examines her bedrooms as places of display, and rachel harmeyer studies the embroidered pictures done after kauffman’s paintings. kauffman is also considered alongside maria cosway and caroline watson in hannah lyons’s dissertation, “‘exercising the art as a trade’: professional women printmakers in england, c. 1750–​c. 1850.” the same trio and many other important women involved in printmaking and selling are discussed in cristina s. martinez and cynthia e. roman’s new open-source collection, female printmakers, printsellers, and print publishers in the eighteenth century: the imprint of women, c. 1700–​1830. maria cosway was the subject of an exhibition in corsica, and there is a new scholarly edition of her correspondence with thomas jefferson, which includes english translations and historical context. alexandra zoë dostal’s dissertation, “rope, linen, thread: gender, labor, and the textile industry in eighteenth-century british art,” explores “the structure, materiality and hidden histories embedded in linen painting canvas.” alexandra harris has a book on the sussex landscape with a chapter on blake and another on charlotte smith’s and william cowper’s relationships to william hayley. christopher stokes examines cowper and evangelical prayer in romantic prayer: reinventing the poetics of devotion, 1773–​1832, and chris townsend investigates the use of blank verse by abolitionist poets, taking the task as his case study. silvia riccardi considers blake, fuseli, flaxman, and botticelli and, in another essay, fuseli’s illustrations for dante. frances van keuren and kristen miller zohn examine thomas hope’s costume of the ancients and investigate “why hope altered his sources by adding patterns from greek vases.” there is a new edition of john gabriel stedman’s surinam diary, with comparisons of its accounts with those in the narrative. swedenborg is the subject of friedemann stengel’s 2009 german thesis, published in 2011 as aufklärung bis zum himmel: emanuel swedenborg im kontext der theologie und philosophie des 18 jahrhunderts and now translated into english. a responsible historicization of swedenborg’s life and thought, it avoids the enthusiasm of swedenborgian adherents and provides ample evidence for its claims. while blake is not discussed, lavater, moravianism, and methodism are, and stengel is particularly concerned with positioning swedenborg in relationship to the philosophy and science of his day. similarly useful will be leah d. martin’s dma dissertation on the hymnology of the new jerusalem church, which considers swedenborg’s own writings on songs and hymns, joseph proud, and the actual uses of hymns in the church liturgy. a pair of russian articles analyze swedenborg’s relationship to kant (also treated in a long section by stengel) and to the gnostics. there is a biography of mary wollstonecraft by brenda ayres, who has also published a book-length study on wollstonecraft and religion. this study employs a broad sense of religion that goes beyond wollstonecraft’s connections with protestant dissent. her place in advancing human rights is considered by debra bergoffen. emily dumler-winckler strongly pushes back against efforts to use wollstonecraft to further what she describes as “the contemporary antiabortion, anticontraception, and heterosexual family-centered cause.” catherine packham’s new book is on wollstonecraft and political economy. in separate articles, chelsea kidd and deborah weiss examine women’s insanity in the wrongs of woman: or, maria, while elizabeth king treats its “anti-gothic gothic animals.” liz wan yuen-yuk reads mary, a fiction as a “prototypical gothic novel,” and david sigler examines necrophilia in wollstonecraft’s unfinished short story “the cave of fancy.” division i: william blake part i: blake’s writings section a: original editions, facsimiles, reprints, and translations for children: the gates of paradise (1793) for children: the gates of paradise [a]. william blake archive. ed. robert n. essick and joseph viscomi. 2024. § the gates of paradise [copy unknown]. stockholm: ellerströms text & music, 2024. a photographic reproduction with a translation into swedish verse.all this information, which i couldn’t verify, comes from an e-mail from morton paley. an island in the moon (1786?) ostrov na lune. trans. dmitrii smirnov. moscow: ibicus-press, 2024. 88 pp. isbn: 9785605224822. in russian. a book version of smirnov’s translation, which was originally published in yazyk. slovesnost'. kul'tura [language. philology. culture] no. 1 (2013): 183-207. the marriage of heaven and hell (1790–​93?) le mariage du ciel et de l’enfer. trans. andré gide. nouvelle revue française no. 107 (1 aug. 1922): 129-47. b. 1922. c. 1923. <wbhc p. 289> d. § saint-denis, france: éditions corti, 2023. 56 pp. isbn: 9782714313041. in french. notebook (c. 1787–​1818) the rossetti manuscript. cambremer, france: sp books, 2024. isbn: 9791095457244. a limited-edition facsimile of 1000 copies. songs of innocence (1789) songs of innocence [l]. introduction by mark crosby. oxford: bodleian libraries publishing, 2024. isbn: 9781851246427. a facsimile edition with a lucid introduction but no notes. songs of innocence and of experience (1794) chants d’innocence et d’expérience. trans. marie-louise soupault and philippe soupault. paris: éditions des cahiers libres, 1927. b. 1947. <wbhc p. 407> c. 2007. d. 2021. <blake (2022)> e. prologue by jean-yves masson. paris: éditions points, 2024. 128 pp. isbn: 9791041411450. in french. section b: collections and selections § “letter to anna flaxman (extract).” [the poem in catherine’s letter?] so longeth my soul: a reader in christian spirituality. ed. joanna collicutt. london: scm press, 2024. isbn: 9780334063100. § el matrimonio del cielo y el infierno y otros poemas. trans., introduction, notes, and an appendix by mario rucavado. colección colihue clásica. buenos aires: ediciones colihue, 2023. 320 pp. isbn: 9789505631056. in spanish. the volume includes marriage and “other works from the ‘orc cycle’” [sic]. § proverbes de l’enfer/​proverbs of hell. ed. and trans. jean-pierre weil. paris: harpo & editions, 2004. 80 pp. isbn: 9782913886469. in french. blake’s “proverbs of hell” from marriage. “to the skylark” [milton 31 [34].28-38, e 130-31]. the book of bird poems. ed. ana sampson. london: laurence king publishing, 2024. “vstuplenie: iz tsikla ‘pesni nevinnosti i opyta’ [introduction: from the songs of innocence and of experience].” vokal'nye sochineniya saratovskikh kompozitorov: uchebnoe posobie [vocal compositions of saratov composers: a study guide]. saratov: saratov state conservatory named after l. v. sobinov, 2024. ismn: 9790706465326. 104-12. in russian. a musical notation for a setting of the “introduction” to songs of innocence (trans. marshak) by the saratov composer yuri massin (b. 1941), published in a collection of vocal works written by saratov composers from the mid-twentieth century to the present day. william blake: selected works. ed. peter otto. oxford: oxford university press, 2018. <blake (2019, 2021, 2022)> review townsend, chris. romanticism 30.3 (2024): 309-14. with sarah haggarty, william blake in context, and linda freedman, william blake and the myth of america: from the abolitionists to the counterculture. part ii: reproductions of drawings and paintings section a: illustrations of individual authors dante alighieri ‘bozhestvennaya komediya’ dante alig'eri v illyustratsiyakh uil'yama bleyka [the divine comedy by dante alighieri, illustrated by william blake]. trans. mikhail lozinskii. moscow: azbuka-atticus, 2023. isbn: 9785389230163. in russian. <blake (2024)> b. 2nd ed., 2024. section b: collections and selections adam naming the beasts (1810) [preview mode]. william blake archive. ed. robert n. essick and joseph viscomi. 2024. christ blessing (1810) [preview mode]. william blake archive. ed. robert n. essick and joseph viscomi. 2024. eighteen heads of poets (c. 1800–​03). william blake archive. ed. robert n. essick and joseph viscomi. 2024. eve naming the birds (1810) [preview mode]. william blake archive. ed. robert n. essick and joseph viscomi. 2024. [forty-seven] monochrome wash drawings (c. 1774–​86). william blake archive. ed. robert n. essick and joseph viscomi. 2024. the virgin and child (“the black madonna”  ) (c. 1810–​20) [preview mode]. william blake archive. ed. robert n. essick and joseph viscomi. 2024. the virgin and child in egypt (1810) [preview mode]. william blake archive. ed. robert n. essick and joseph viscomi. 2024. part iii: commercial engravings section a: illustrations of individual authors stedman, john gabriel see hardesty under stedman in division ii. part iv: bibliographies and catalogues section a: bibliographies [cross-listing articles with substantial bibliographical content] calè, luisa. “blake and exhibitions, 2023.” see blake 58.1 in part vi. oliveira, camila, and jason whittaker. “blake and music, 2023.” see blake 58.1 in part vi. ripley, wayne c. “a list of morris eaves’s publications.” see blake 57.4 in part vi. ripley, wayne c., with fernando castanedo, hikari sato, hüseyin alhas, and vera serdechnaia. “william blake and his circle: a checklist of scholarship in 2023.” see blake 58.1 in part vi. section b: catalogues bindman, david, and esther chadwick, eds. william blake’s universe. see bindman and chadwick in part vi. insley, alice, ed. blake e la sua epoca. viaggi nel tempo del sogno. see insley in part vi. sotheby’s, new york. “william blake | ‘poems with very wild and interesting pictures.’” three poets: william blake, a. e. housman, robert frost. 26 june 2024. lot 1. digital reproductions of the front cover, bentley plates 1-5, 8, 15, 18-19, 22-24, 28-30, 33, 37, 39-40, 42, 46, 48-49, and coleridge’s 12 feb. 1818 letter to charles augustus tulk on the songs. the catalogue entry is silently by essick and gives a list of the plates in order, with brief descriptions of the coloring. news coverage dziemianowicz, joe. “‘extraordinary’ poetry book by william blake sold by sotheby’s for record $4.3m.” penta (28 june 2024). mosheim, tash. “copy of william blake’s songs of innocence and of experience sells at auction for a stunning £3.4 million.” daily mail (28 june 2024). part v: digital resources the allen ginsberg project “ginsberg on blake (europe) continues.” 3 jan. 2024. a running transcription of ginsberg’s 1979 naropa lectures. audio recordings are also available. the installments on europe conclude on 23 jan. “ginsberg on blake (song of los—​africa—​1).” 24 jan. 2024. the installments on the song of los conclude on 15 feb. “**mf 12 blake and pound’s usura.” 12 feb. 2024. “blake—​recommended reading—​the book of urizen.” 17 feb. 2024. “allen ginsberg on william blake.” 20 may 2024. snippets from a malfunctioning tape. “allen ginsberg on william blake—​2.” 22 may 2024. as above. “william blake and emanuel swedenborg.” 27 may 2024. “william blake—​from the marriage of heaven and hell.” 28 may 2024. the installments on marriage conclude on 20 nov. “ginsberg on blake—​visionary experience continues (early poems).” 12 aug. 2024. continuing a series from ginsberg’s 1976 “visiting poetics” class at naropa. the installments that reference blake in the title conclude on 29 aug. “ginsberg and william blake’s music—​a blake symposium.” 3 nov. 2024. a post on the global blake symposium on blake and music, with links to videos and sites on ginsberg, blake, and music. blackstock, joel. “william blake and the visionary imagination.” taproot therapy (7 apr. 2024). blake cottage trust “doug nicholls on blake’s cottage.” youtube. 8 june 2024. nicholls, the chair of the trust, surveys the current damage to the cottage. news coverage aton, francesca. “saved from collapse, william blake’s former cottage to be restored with plans for a museum.” artnews (21 aug. 2024). binswanger, julia. “william blake’s cottage will be saved—​and transformed into a new museum.” smithsonian magazine (26 aug. 2024). khomami, nadia. “trust hopes to turn william blake’s cottage into a museum.” guardian (14 sept. 2024). morrison, alexander. “william blake’s cottage—​where he wrote ‘jerusalem’—​a step closer to becoming a museum.” art newspaper (20 aug. 2024). snow, emily. “william blake’s cottage to be preserved as a museum.” collector (21 aug. 2024). blake society (see also vala in part vi) events: “agm and in search of paradise.” 17 jan. 2024. david mullin, who collaborated with louisa albani on her pamphlet in search of paradise: william blake at old wyldes, hampstead <blake (2024)>, discusses the ancients, particularly samuel palmer. “blake’s illustrations for the book of job: a healing journey.” 7 feb. 2024. jason wright discusses his book blake’s job: adventures in becoming <blake (2024)>. “ah! sunflower!: linda landers in conversation with keri davies.” 6 mar. 2024. “celebrating the launch of her new blake-inspired artist’s book and series of prints, ah! sunflower!, this evening will see artist and printmaker linda landers in conversation with leading independent blake scholar keri davies.” “timothy morton—​the marriage of religion and the biosphere.” 17 apr. 2024. morton on their new book, hell: in search of a christian ecology. “‘in the deserts wild’: william blake and maurice sendak.” 8 may 2024. “on the anniversary of sendak’s death in 2012, this conversation between writer and academic jason whittaker and illustrator tamsin rosewell will explore some of the ways in which sendak drew inspiration from blake up until his final work.” “soul writing with dr. sarah walton.” 12 june 2024. “in this workshop, we will activate blake’s use of the gothic arch as a symbol of stepping from one realm into another, to embrace rejuvenation and personal truth. in guided meditations designed to support you to write from your intuition, you will be enabled to take a journey led by your own poetic imagination.” “jesus the imagination: on taking blake’s christianity seriously.” 3 july 2024. “mark vernon will talk about blake’s christianity and explore the role of jesus as the imagination in blake’s works and thinking.” “meeting at blake’s grave.” 11 aug. 2024. no video is available. “blake’s ‘watchman’: los and the london police.” 18 sept. 2024. “jake elliot discusses blake’s depiction of los as ‘albion’s watchman’ in the context of the changing face of policing in london in the late 18th and early 19th century.” “songs of innocence and of experience.” 2 oct. 2024. “internationally acclaimed singer and musician, katy carr joins with the secretary of the blake society, stephen pritchard, to explore blake’s deceptively simple poems and exquisite artwork, some copies of which were hand-coloured by catherine blake. these unique works of art will be projected, sung and their beauty and profundity celebrated in words and song.” the event was held at st. bartholomew the great. no video is available. “blake’s birthday bash and launch of vala 5.” 28 nov. 2024. emanations [ blog]: larman, hugo. “william blake: visionary.” 4 jan. 2024. “impressions of the exhibition at the getty center in los angeles.” digby, joan, and tamsin rosewell. “bringing catherine out of the shadows.” 25 jan. 2024. on the project to honor catherine with a grave marker at bunhill fields. erle, sibylle. “open letter to the guardian.” 4 mar. 2024. “an open letter to the guardian in response to jonathan jones’ review of william blake’s universe at the fitzwilliam museum, cambridge.” “jones’ review doesn’t question how people might have navigated the racialised assumptions of the 18th century. his ‘modern standards’ claim misses that some might describe blake as an ally of oppressed social groups at a time of extreme repression. racism has a historical as well as an artistic context.” “in memory of morris eaves.” 5 mar. 2024. “trustees and friends of the blake society pay tribute to the late, great morris eaves.” riordan, john. “printing blake in houston.” 23 apr. 2024. “trustee of the blake society john riordan writes about his experience printing with the replica blake press at rice university, houston.” pacitti, diane. “sacred visions: blake and first nations peoples.” 22 july 2024. “as part of st. james’s piccadilly’s changing our minds initiative, diane pacitti explores the similarities between the visions of indigenous peoples and william blake.” erle, sibylle. “‘the little black boy’—​taking stock: blake, race and racism.” 31 july 2024. “after the recent exhibition at the fitzwilliam museum, chair of the blake society, dr. sibylle erle, explores the poem ‘the little black boy’ and its implications for our understanding of race and racism in the work and world of william blake.” pritchard, stephen. “nobodaddy—​an interview with michael keegan-dolan.” 18 nov. 2024. “nobodaddy is a brand-new work by multi-award-winning choreographer and sadler’s wells associate artist michael keegan-dolan and his dance and theatre company teaċ daṁsa—​a must-see for blake lovers. secretary of the blake society, stephen pritchard, talked to michael about the production.” erle, sibylle. “vala #5: divine humanity; or, god appears when we appear godly.” 26 nov. 2024. an introduction to issue 5 of vala, on the theme of god, which will be launched on 28 nov. (see “blake’s birthday bash and launch of vala 5,” above). “blake society trustees.” 17 dec. 2024. an introduction to the current trustees prior to the society’s agm in jan. 2025. crosby, mark. news articles and press releases on crosby’s discovery of incised marks on the versos of copperplates for gough’s sepulchral monuments (see blake 58.3 in part vi): best, shivali. “william blake’s boyhood doodles are discovered after 250 years: scans reveal a smiley face etched by the poet on copperplates he handled as an apprentice.” daily mail (23 oct. 2024). binswanger, julia. “these tiny doodles may be william blake’s earliest engravings, overlooked for nearly 250 years.” smithsonian magazine (25 oct. 2024). blackburn, jack. “scans reveal ‘doodling’ william blake’s earliest engravings.” times (23 oct. 2024). bodleian libraries press office. “engravings discovered on reverse of copper plates thought to be the earliest produced by william blake.” 23 oct. 2024. “earliest engravings by william blake uncovered using new scanning technology.” fine books & collections (23 oct. 2024). kennedy, maev. “bobbly lines and an unfinished doodle: super-high-res scans may show william blake’s first-ever engravings.” art newspaper (23 oct. 2024). ravikumar, sachin, and marissa davison. “william blake’s teenage copper plate doodles discovered.” reuters (23 oct. 2024). whiddington, richard. “william blake’s earliest etchings uncovered in stunning high-tech scans.” artnet (23 oct. 2024). davies, keri. index rerum: a blog about books, book-collecting, william blake, and lots of other things. “george whitefield, the moravians, and ‘andrew the negro boy.’”“a version of this paper was presented to the bethlehem conference on moravian history & music in bethlehem pa in october 2010.” 18 jan. 2024. “the paper explores whitefield’s motives in entrusting ‘andrew the negro boy’ to moravian care, expands on previous accounts, and shows how this relates to other episodes in whitefield’s relationship with the moravian church before the decisive violent break following the publication of his expostulatory letter of 1753. in addition to my text presented in bethlehem pa, i have added comments (scholia) not explored on that occasion and a biographical listing (prosopography) of persons mentioned in the text.” these persons include catherine blake, blake’s mother. “‘o nancy’s hair is yellow as gowd’: blake, border ballads, and the reinvention of relief etching.”“a version of this paper was read at ‘romanticism’s debatable lands’: the british association for romantic studies biennial conference, 28-31 july 2005, newcastle upon tyne.” 26 mar. 2024. an essay with two parts. the first focuses on blake’s ideas of music and identifies the probable source of the “border melody” sung by mrs. linnell, which, according to alexander gilchrist, affected blake emotionally. the second considers william home lizars,as davies points out, “home” was lizars’s middle name, not “hone” as bentley has it in br(2). and suggests that lizars’s relief invention may have been modeled on knowledge of blake’s method of illuminated printing. “good morning, doctor haydn.” 29 nov. 2024. sketches the many overlapping locales and circles of blake and haydn without suggesting “a direct link between the poet and the composer.” among the figures mentioned are the swedenborgian composer françois-hippolyte barthélemon and john and anne hunter. gev, david. “exclusive interview with visionary william blake.” medium (13 may 2024). a reflection and fictional interview with blake, inspired by the getty exhibition. gioia, ted. “are visionary artists just mentally ill?” the honest broker (6 oct. 2024). “to write like that is a gift. but perhaps not always pleasant or easy for the gifted.” global blake network articles on blake and music (as of jan. 2025, this section collects articles previously posted at zoamorphosis): connolly, tristanne. “how much did jim morrison know about william blake?” 6 mar. 2024. originally posted at zoamorphosis on 20 mar. 2011; not previously recorded in the blake checklist. whittaker, jason. “sweet roaming: william blake and the fugs.” 20 mar. 2024. originally posted at zoamorphosis on 14 july 2010; not previously recorded in the blake checklist. whittaker, jason. “the divine essence of things—​nick cave and william blake.” 20 apr. 2024. originally posted at zoamorphosis on 5 oct. 2019 <blake (2020)>. whittaker, jason. “heaven in a wild flower: nick drake and william blake.” 25 may 2024. originally posted at zoamorphosis on 19 june 2023 <blake (2024)>. hagen, katharina. “alchemy, rosicrucianism, and the grail—​bruce dickinson’s take on ‘jerusalem.’” 27 may 2024. originally posted at zoamorphosis on 9 sept. 2019 <blake (2020)>. connolly, tristanne. “l. a. woman, a city yet a woman: blake, jim morrison, and prophecy.” 29 may 2024. originally posted at zoamorphosis on 20 feb. 2011; not previously recorded in the blake checklist. hagen, katharina. “what if thel was male?” 8 june 2024. originally posted at zoamorphosis on 17 nov. 2019 <blake (2020)>. reviews: erle, sibylle. “blake’s job: adventures in becoming by jason wright.” 7 mar. 2024. “wright does more than contribute to blake scholarship. by aligning his thinking with theories of wholeness (david bohm and a. n. whit[e]head) and brain functioning (ian mcgilchrist and mark solms), he shows why blake’s illustrations of the book of job is the story of our time.” whittaker, jason. “william blake’s universe.” 4 apr. 2024. on the catalogue and exhibition (see also the podcast review, below). whittaker, jason. “a bastard kind of reasoning by andrew m. cooper.” 13 june 2024. “while i have a deep-seated suspicion of any title which too blithely claims that blake was a precursor of later modes of thinking or ordering knowledge, the final quotation from niels bohr above demonstrates a connection to blake’s time which is often neglected by more superficial historians of ideas, that the simple progress of science has frequently been complicated by its own systems of ordering knowledge.” rogers, annise. “weaving tales: anglo-iberian encounters on literatures in english, an edited collection.” 25 july 2024. “together, both chapters [on blake] demonstrate the importance of international participation with blake’s works, and how the poet-painter continues to be an important figure throughout time and space.” oliveira, camila. “britten’s donne, hardy and blake songs by gordon cameron sly.” 5 sept. 2024. “sly never seems to neglect the literary dimension when he discusses at length the minutest details of the scores. he skillfully explores the underlying and unifying themes of the poems and proverbs and is able to establish convincing correlations and parallels between the structure of britten’s music and blake’s poetry within a cyclic dynamic. his book, however, may come across as too dense and inscrutable for an audience not particularly versed in bars and cro[t]chets, which i imagine is the case for the vast majority of literature scholars.” choe, sharon. “walter pater and the beginnings of english studies, an edited collection.” 11 dec. 2024. “in this short chapter, [luisa] calè covers the roots of pater’s embodied aesthetics and how he rethinks the boundaries between art and literature via blake. by drawing on the swinburnian critical account of blake and pater’s reception of swinburne, calè situates blake’s significance in the development of literary and artistic aesthetics during the nineteenth century.” “in conversation” series: regier, alexander. “printing blake in texas.” 12 mar. 2024. on the replica of blake’s printing press now held by rice university, houston, texas. whittaker, jason. “mapping hell: alasdair gray and william blake.” 11 apr. 2024. on blake’s influence on gray. whitson, roger. “reassembling visionary physics: donald ault, bruno latour, and william blake’s mathematical scenographies.” 23 may 2024. “ault’s blake anticipates later developments in latourian lab sociology, actor-network theory (ant), and media archaeology.” rogers, annise. “‘thy young hands tore human limbs, and gorged human flesh!’: poetical sketches and blake’s development of samson.” 15 june 2024. “this talk focuses on the poetical-prose piece of ‘samson’ from poetical sketches, examining how blake amalgamated his views on the bible, samson agonistes, and other miltonic works, to present the start of an individual which he would continue to grapple with for the rest of his life. a fallen human hero that would help him in the creation of two of his most famous characters—​orc and albion.” worrall, david. “william blake’s visions.” 24 sept. 2024. “worrall discusses his latest book—​william blake’s visions: art, hallucinations, synaesthesia.” tebourski, inés. “los’s healthy narcissism.” 16 oct. 2024. rubel, william. “‘a fly like thee.’” 18 dec. 2024. on “the fly,” its influence on musicians, and emily dickinson’s “i heard a fly buzz—​when i died.” visionary (videos analyzing or discussing blake): whittaker, jason, sharon choe, william sherwood, and annise rogers. “blake and tolkien’s mythmaking.” 7 mar. 2024. mcauliffe, hannah, jon mee, and sharon choe. “william blake and the idea of the body.” 8 mar. 2024. originally posted at zoamorphosis on 16 june 2023 <blake (2024)>. whittaker, jason, sharon choe, and annise rogers. “william blake’s universe—​review of the fitzwilliam museum exhibition.” 27 mar. 2024. whittaker, jason. “william blake’s influence on j. g. ballard and angela carter.” 12 may 2024. whittaker, jason, sharon choe, annise rogers, and hannah mcauliffe. “william blake and the book of urizen.” 19 may 2024. whittaker, jason. “blake and the left hand path: william blake, aleister crowley and austin osman spare.” 2 aug. 2024. whittaker, jason. “william blake’s guide on how to be a visionary.” 12 aug. 2024. whittaker, jason. “‘jerusalem’: from william blake to hubert parry.” 14 aug. 2024. whittaker, jason. “dark angels: william blake and ridley scott.” 3 sept. 2024. whittaker, jason. “william blake and the surrealists.” 31 oct. 2024. global blake symposium: musical afterlives. an online conference held 4 nov. 2024. (presentations are arranged according to their order in the program. i have also listed the title of the presentation given by the presenter, which, in some cases, differs from that on youtube. the date is the day of the youtube posting. note that not all papers are available online as of 26 mar. 2025.)at the youtube page for zoavision, the presentations delivered at the symposium are listed under the “global blake” playlist. i have separated the presentations for musical afterlives here so that their context isn’t lost. keery, james, and steve clark. “‘and the song they sung was this / composed by an african black’: blakean spirituals.” 5 nov. 2024. walker, luke. “‘relationships of ownership / they whisper in the wings’: bob dylan and william blake.” 6 nov. 2024. oliveira, camila. “william blake and visionary cover arts.” 12 nov. 2024. miles, barry. “ginsberg’s blake recordings.” 19 nov. 2024. serdechnaia, vera. “william blake in russian music in 2010s–​2020s.” 22 nov. 2024. ogunbayo, sola. “william blake’s poetic rhythm in selected country music by don williams.” not posted on youtube. dos santos, andrio j. r. “‘in satan’s mire’: bruce dickinson’s chemical wedding to william blake.” 9 feb. 2025. smith, jacob. “blake and new age music.” 15 feb. 2025. walker, luke. “some spiritual, political and academic contexts of allen ginsberg’s blake recordings.” 16 feb. 2025. david, cleopatra. “contemporary musical settings of william blake’s poetry.” not posted on youtube. harris, gareth. “the enigmatic influence of william blake.” sotheby’s (12 june 2024). a description of the roundtable “william blake: artist, poet and visionary” with andrew graham-dixon and john higgs, which was made into a podcast. miller, catriona. “masterpiece story: the ancient of days by william blake.” dailyart magazine (3 jan. 2024). a popular account of the frontispiece to europe. morgan library and museum. “naudline pierre on william blake and the importance of the imagination | collection in focus.” youtube. 16 dec. 2024. “watch artist naudline pierre discuss her creative inspirations and connection to artist and poet william blake. pierre takes us through her favorite works and blake’s connection to the unseen.” rejected religion. “dr. luke walker—​allen ginsberg and his blakean revival.” youtube. 22 dec. 2022. an episode of a podcast. san francisco public library. “morton paley presents william blake’s songs of innocence and of experience.” youtube. 2 may 2024. vernon, mark. “‘enemies of the human race.’ william blake on how to know god.” mark vernon (29 nov. 2024). there is both a video and a transcription at vernon’s eponymous blog. weldon, amy e. “writing with fire: printmaking, welding, and william blake.” amy e. weldon (24 oct. 2024). “this year i’ve tried two ways—​printmaking and welding—​to get under the dirty, stubborn skin of william blake.” william blake archive exhibition: crosby, mark. “‘absorbed by the poets’: the sources and hanging arrangement for blake’s eighteen heads of poets.” apr. 2024. “using evidence from the restored paintings, the original architectural plans for turret house, and hayley’s correspondence, this exhibit offers an updated hanging arrangement for blake’s eighteen portrait heads. comprising two galleries, the exhibition traces the construction of hayley’s turret house and its upper library before providing a new hanging arrangement and possible sources available in hayley’s libraries for the portrait heads, including the identification of new sources for blake’s portraits of homer, demosthenes, and tasso.” hell’s printing press: the blog of the blake archive and blake quarterly: “remembering morris.” 13 mar. 2024. “recollections and appreciations of morris eaves from colleagues, friends, and the blake community.” jones, sarah. “our sales review editor.” 17 mar. 2024. a history and appreciation of robert n. essick’s “marketplace” articles. “roundtable for morris at asecs 2025.” 23 aug. 2024. a call for abstracts for a roundtable, “the legacies of morris eaves,” chaired by wayne ripley and tom hothem, to be held online as part of the asecs meeting in mar. 2025. part vi: criticism, biography, and reviews a   b   c   d   e   f   g   h   i   j   k   l   m   n   o   p   r   s   t   v   w   z a ackroyd, peter. “religion as individual: william blake (1757–​1827).” the english soul: faith of a nation. london: reaktion books, 2024. isbn: 9781789148459. a short biographical sketch. adam, edina, with julian brooks, and an essay by matthew hargraves. william blake: visionary. los angeles: j. paul getty museum, 2020. <blake (2021, 2022, 2023, 2024)> reviews aghajanian, arthur. “why we need william blake.” plough (30 jan. 2024). larman, hugo. see blake society in part v. adnot, camille. “‘enough! or too much’: william blake’s intermedial aesthetics of excess.” études anglaises 76.4 (2024): 404-23. (abstract in english and french.) “drawing on vitalism and image-text studies, this article explores william blake’s aesthetics of excess in his long ‘prophecies’ (the four zoas, milton, and jerusalem). blake’s conception of excess combines notions of energy, vitality, and power, informed by 18th-century scientific investigations into life forms and taxonomy. with his ‘bounding line,’ blake pushes the boundaries of semiotic as well as biological categorization. i analyze cases of graphic overflow, synaesthesia, and sensory overload, to highlight how blake uses multiplicity as a creative principle” (abstract). albernaz, joseph. “nonsovereign circulations: william blake” and “sunray of the negative: blake and bataille.” common measures: romanticism and the groundlessness of community. stanford: stanford university press, 2024. isbn: 9781503639720. 139-87 and 188-202. on community in jerusalem: “community must circulate among us, among the spilled excess of fragile attachments, in the everyday” (186). the comparison of blake and bataille focuses on their conceptions of energy, with references to marriage, jerusalem, a descriptive catalogue, and the ancient britons. albu, paul-cristian. “the reception of william blake’s work by the eyes of a romanian post-1989 literary critic.” journal of romanian literary studies 38 (2024): 571-75. in romanian (abstract in english). “through this short article, we are interested in observing how romanian literary critic plans to interpret william blake’s work in a romanian context. this writer manages to express his objectivity when speaking of the reception of william blake’s work in the current romanian context. we are astonished to see this writer’s analytical thinking, mathematical precision, and how this writer compounds his structural work. by reading his book, we can observe the differences in interpretation in a heteroclite literary context, romanian vs english” (abstract). b bailes, melissa. rev. of noah heringman, deep time: a literary history. see heringman. bailey, quentin. rev. of madeleine callaghan, eternity in british romantic poetry. see callaghan. barbeau, jeffrey w., ed. the cambridge companion to british romanticism and religion. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2021. <blake (2022)> review mcqueen, joseph. wordsworth circle 54.4 (2023): 492-500. battersby, david. “the comic book of urizen.” see vala. becker, artur. schwarze servietten auf meinem herzen: aus den leben der kosmopolen: essays, 2013–​2024. wuppertal: arco, 2024. in german. according to worldcat, blake appears in the work. becker is a contemporary polish-german writer (b. 1968). bєlіns'ka, іrina, and tetyana panichok. “tvorchiy dorobok vіl'yama bleyka v arealі komparativіstiki [william blake’s creative heritage in the range of comparative studies].” vіsnik nauki ta osvіti [bulletin of science and education] 12.18 (2023, published online 2024): 42-52. in ukrainian (abstract in ukrainian and english). the authors show a wide range of comparative contexts for blake’s heritage (in literature, graphics, music, cinema, and so on), using modern ukrainian translations. bentley, g. e., jr. “blake and ‘the wondrous art of writing’: letter faces, letter formation, capitalization.” see crosby and mcquail. bindman, david, and esther chadwick, eds. william blake’s universe. cambridge: fitzwilliam museum in association with philip wilson publishers, 2024. isbn: 9781781301272. stolzenburg, andreas, ed., in collaboration with david bindman and esther chadwick. william blakes universum. berlin: hatje cantz verlag, 2024. isbn: 9783775758017. in german. the english and german versions of the catalogue for the exhibition held at the fitzwilliam museum, 23 feb.–​19 may 2024, and at the hamburger kunsthalle, 14 june–​8 sept. 2024. the exhibition and catalogue highlight blake in a european and, especially, german context, pairing his works with those of the german artist philipp otto runge (1777–​1810). there are also significant discussions of john flaxman, henry fuseli, dante, henry crabb robinson, jacob boehme, and dionysius andreas freher. the german exhibition also included gratis a graphic novel, william blakes universum, by noëlle kröger (see kröger). chadwick, esther. “introduction: blake, runge and visionary art in europe, c. 1800.” 10-17. on blake and runge, with references to robinson, blake’s anglo-german connections, and edward armitage’s painting the vanguard of the age (1870–​71). haggarty, sarah. “blake, time and the present moment.” 18-25. on blake and kairos. catalogue: “blake and his artist contemporaries.” 26-35. portraits of blake, including james s. deville’s life mask of william blake (1823), and of his contemporaries. i: the past: antiquity and the gothic catalogue: “learning from the past” (38-55); “john flaxman” (56-67); “blake and fuseli” (68-71); “blake and dante” (72-75); “classics vs. gothic” (76-81). ii: the present: europe in flames bindman, david. “blake’s continental prophecies: apocalypse and revolution.” 84-89. on blake’s lambeth books in the millenarian 1790s. catalogue: “‘mind-forg’d manacles’: slavery and freedom” (90-103), including reproductions of “the little black boy” and select plates from america copy o, visions copy p, and the song of los copy a; “french revolution and apocalypse” (104-19), including reproductions of all of europe copy k; “the world as prison” (120-21); “images of redemption” (122-23), including a reproduction of impression 1a of “albion rose.” iii: the future: spiritual renewal catalogue: “blake’s new religious style” (126-39); “jacob böhme” (140-45). muratori, cecilia. “‘michael angelo could not have done better’: dionysius andreas freher and the visual transmission of german mysticism in eighteenth-century england.” 146-52. on freher and his designs for the law edition of the works of jacob behmen (1764–​81). vigus, james. “henry crabb robinson, william blake and anglo-german cultural relations.” 153-55. on robinson’s blake article for vaterländisches museum. catalogue: “philipp otto runge: times of day.” 156-77. koerner, joseph leo. “runge’s times.” 178-85. catalogue: “romantic nationalism.” 186-203. vaughan, william. “romantic nationalism in germany and britain.” 204-11. promotional materials (arranged chronologically) fitzwilliam museum. “william blake’s universe.” youtube. 22 feb. 2024. avon, laurie, and peter chownsmith. “william blake’s universe by laurie avon and peter chownsmith.” vimeo. 18 mar. 2024. an animation created for the exhibition. fitzwilliam museum. “catherine blake: artist, colourist, printmaker.” youtube. 21 mar. 2024. highlights catherine’s portrait of william. fitzwilliam museum. “life mask of william blake.” youtube. 26 mar. 2024. fitzwilliam museum. “achilles and scamander.” youtube. 27 mar. 2024. by runge. fitzwilliam museum. “caspar david friedrich.” youtube. 27 mar. 2024. godden, salena. “new films: ‘tyger tyger’ + ‘cathedrals’ | ‘william blake’s universe’ fitzwilliam museum.” waiting for godden (18 apr. 2024). a blog post with photos of the exhibition and with links to a fitzwilliam museum youtube video (10 apr. 2024) of godden reciting “the tyger” and reflecting on blake and another (17 apr. 2024) of her reciting her own poem “cathedrals” in the exhibition space. fitzwilliam museum. “death on a pale horse.” youtube. 10 may 2024. fitzwilliam museum. “the large morning.” youtube. 10 may 2024. by runge. fitzwilliam museum. “discover ‘william blake’s universe.’” youtube. 15 may 2024. reviews calè, luisa. see blake 58.3. cranfield, nicholas. “art review: william blake’s universe at the fitzwilliam museum, cambridge.” church times (8 mar. 2024). erle, sibylle. “blake in hamburg.” see vala. garvey, anne. “william blake’s universe at the fitzwilliam museum.” the cambridge critique (23 feb. 2024). glover, michael. “the secret universe of william blake’s art.” hyperallergic (20 mar. 2024). “one of the delight[s] of this show is to read the captions, and discover how the very learned scholars have smoothed away the difficulties of understanding how the myriad of gods and spirit-beings that blake invoked with such passion and insouciance made any kind of coherent and comprehensible sense. they do not.” haggarty, sarah. “william blake’s universe: making a european out of the poet and artist who never left england.” the conversation (22 mar. 2024). “the question of blake’s europeanness is posed everywhere in this exhibition, but never overtly. the working title ‘blake in europe,’ was lost along the way. never quite asked are further questions about the limits of the shared european romantic culture that the exhibition promotes. which culture, or cultures, you could ask, and whose?” jones, jonathan. “william blake’s universe review—​polymath’s paintings are outclassed by the germans.” guardian (23 feb. 2024). “having recently reread him i can confirm that while he often returns to enslavement in his writings (‘enslaved’ is the first word in visions of the daughters of albion), he is clearly a racist by modern standards. he also lived more than two centuries ago.”this comment elicited an open letter from the blake society chair, sibylle erle (see blake society in part v). lloyd, joe. “william blake’s universe.” studio international (21 mar. 2024). “runge has often been considered blake’s closest german analogue. yet as esoteric as his vision is, his work retains a formal kinship with the art of his time. the same cannot be said of blake, whose prophetic books intermingle image, text and design to convey an often-shifting personal theology, mythopoeia and political theory.” mccormick, neil. “the original punk? how william blake became rock’s favourite poet.” telegraph (18 feb. 2024). highlights blake’s influence on rock musicians (bob dylan, bruce dickinson, and patti smith). sooke, alastair. “william blake’s universe: think art’s great oddball couldn’t possibly seem any odder? think again.” telegraph (22 feb. 2024). steele, pippa. “william blake’s calligraphy: an exhibition review.” the views project (28 mar. 2024). tsai, li hui. “blake’s universe and runge’s cosmos.” see vala. white, david. “william blake’s universe.” artmag (31 jan. 2024). whittaker, jason. “william blake’s universe.” see global blake in part v (and also the podcast review with whittaker et al. at global blake). “william blake’s universe.” apollo (9 june 2024). williamson, gillian. “william blake’s universe.” british society for eighteenth-century studies, criticks (20 mar. 2024). “may i put in a word for an important contributor to blake’s life and world almost entirely overlooked: his wife catherine?” wilson, andy. “william blake’s universe: blake at the fitzwilliam.” the traveller in the evening (8 mar. 2024). wroe, nicholas. “william blake was the emblem of englishness—​but his art was intrinsically european.” guardian (19 feb. 2024). blake/an illustrated quarterly volume 57, number 4 (spring 2024) remembrance paley, morton d. “morris eaves, 1944–​2024.” ripley, wayne c. “a list of morris eaves’s publications.” article crosby, mark. “blake in the marketplace, 2023.” 7 pars., plus listings. crosby’s first “marketplace” article. review erle, sibylle. “seen through the visions of young and old germans: william blake’s the ancient britons: a book and a website (now vanished) reviewed.” 15 pars. “the artworks created by the ancient britons team are the result of critically informed readings and imaginings of the painting as it is described by blake in a descriptive catalogue” (par. 4). minute particular gourlay, alexander s. “construing ‘har’: blake’s polyglot roots.” 5 pars. cartoon riordan, john, and sarah jones. “the ancient britons.” volume 58, number 1 (summer 2024) articles ripley, wayne c., with fernando castanedo, hikari sato, hüseyin alhas, and vera serdechnaia. “william blake and his circle: a checklist of scholarship in 2023.” 56 pars., plus listings. dedicated to morris eaves. calè, luisa. “blake and exhibitions, 2023.” 5 pars., plus listings. includes a description of william blake: visionary at the getty, which was held after being postponed because of covid-19, and of the exhibition of blake with chris ofili in the blake room at tate britain. oliveira, camila, and jason whittaker. “blake and music, 2023.” 3 pars., plus listings. volume 58, number 2 (fall 2024) article carter, sarah. “the ambiguities of translation: fuseli, blake, and the making of aphorisms on man.” 32 pars. “aphorisms on man emerges from my analysis a composite creation—​one that registers the competing visions of its several authors and constitutes the idea of self emerging in tandem with romanticism” (par. 3). reviews choe, sharon. andrew m. cooper, a bastard kind of reasoning: william blake and geometry. 6 pars. “the depth of knowledge that it demands may make it a challenging read for those who are not theoretically inclined, so it is perhaps not an introductory text to blake and science. nevertheless, a bastard kind of reasoning is an engaging read and a surprisingly succinct exploration of how enlightenment science and geometry contribute to blake’s vision of the universe” (par. 6). whittaker, jason. matthew leporati, romantic epics and the mission of empire. 7 pars. worrall, david. matthew mauger, william blake and the visionary law: prophecy, legislation and constitution. 10 pars. “an invigorating exploration of a significant subject viewed from an entirely unfamiliar perspective” (par. 10). volume 58, number 3 (winter 2024–​25) articles ritchie, caroline anjali. “‘symbols of embodied agency’: the reception of william blake’s engravings for john gabriel stedman’s narrative (1796) in contemporary art and visual culture.” 30 pars. considers the reception of the designs “in the works of the british and american contemporary artists sokari douglas camp, jazzmen lee-johnson, and hew locke” (par. 6). there is also a thoughtful coda, “on reproduction,” addressing issues associated with reproducing the engravings (pars. 26-30). crosby, mark. “‘unentangled in the intricate windings of modern practice’: william blake’s apprentice copperplates and engravings.” 20 pars. on the discovery of incised marks and designs on the versos of copperplates for richard gough’s sepulchral monuments. “the evidence presented above encourages the tentative attribution of the markings on the versos to blake” (par. 19). there is much on james basire’s engraving studio and blake’s time there as an apprentice. see also crosby in part v for news articles on the find. reviews rogers, annise. brian russell graham, speech acts in blake’s “milton.” 6 pars. “readers who are interested in either milton or performative speech acts will find it a perfect example of how to do a very thorough analysis of blake’s poem, whether or not they fully agree with everything that graham argues” (par. 6). calè, luisa. william blake’s universe, fitzwilliam museum, 23 feb.–​19 may 2024; william blake’s universe, ed. david bindman and esther chadwick. 23 pars. blessin, joseph. “vegetable pornography: the ‘moral’ (scientific) debate surrounding francesco bartolozzi’s ‘stipple gardens’ and william blake’s ‘vegetable earth’ in john gabriel stedman’s surinam travelogue.” rethinking the erotic: eroticism in literature, film, art and society. ed. katarzyna popak-bernat and sara d’arcy. freeland, oxfordshire: inter-disciplinary press, 2014. 87-99. criticizes marcus wood’s reading of the stedman illustrations: “conflating blake and bartolozzi, as wood does, [is] highly problematic” (96).see marcus wood, slavery, empathy, and pornography (oxford: oxford university press, 2002). bortnikov, vladislav. “k osobennostyam peredachi glagolov kak nositeley energetiki teksta v perevode poemy u. bleyka ‘ierusalim’ d. smirnovym-sadovskim (list 5) [on the peculiar features of rendering verbs as text energy bearers in the russian translation of w. blake’s poem jerusalem by d. smirnov-sadovsky (plate 5)].” slovo v zerkale istorii yazyka. sbornik statey viii vserossiyskikh nauchnykh chteniy [word in the mirror of language history. collection of articles of the viii all-russian scientific readings]. naberezhnye chelny: naberezhnye chelny state pedagogical university, 2024. 42-52. in russian (abstract in russian and english). the author “writes out a chain of verbs from the english source text and the russian translation of the poem by d. smirnov-sadovsky, and makes a quantitative and qualitative comparison of these variants. as a result of the research, there are obtained raw data on equivalence and on the ‘energy intensity index’” (abstract). boydaş, okan. “william blake, gustave moreau, odilon redon, arnold böcklin, ernst fuchs ve h. r. giger’in çalışmalarının ezoterik semboller açısından i̇ncelemesi [examination of william blake, gustave moreau, odilon redon, arnold böcklin, ernst fuchs and h. r. giger’s works in terms of esoteric symbols].” cumhuriyet üniversitesi fen-edebiyat fakültesi sosyal bilimler dergisi 48.1 (2024): 27-34. in turkish (abstract in turkish and english). this study explores how the concept of esotericism and its symbolic language is reflected in the works of artists such as william blake, gustave moreau, odilon redon, arnold böcklin, ernst fuchs, and h. r. giger. using a qualitative case study approach, it examines how individual artistic expression and cultural influences intersect in their esoteric artworks. bucklow, christopher. “imaging inner gods.” see vala. c cai, yunyi. “bukimina mono kara no izanai, mienai mono wo kaima miru: william blake no sakuhin ni okeru ‘yami no kotei’ kara jisaku no seisatsu e [the obsession with the uncanny: a glimpse of the invisible: from ‘affirming the darkness’ in william blake’s work to reflecting on the author’s own work].” phd diss., musashino bijutsu daigaku [musashino art university], 2023. 103 pp. in japanese. the representation of darkness in fine arts is discussed on the basis of sigmund freud, blake, dante, and the author’s own experiences as an artist. calè, luisa. “blake and exhibitions, 2023.” see blake 58.1. calè, luisa. rev. of david bindman and esther chadwick, eds., william blake’s universe. see blake 58.3. calè, luisa. “‘spiritual form’: walter pater’s encounters with william blake.” walter pater and the beginnings of english studies. ed. charles martindale, elizabeth prettejohn, and lene østermark-johansen. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2023. <blake (2024)> review choe, sharon. see global blake in part v. callaghan, madeleine. “‘all is done as i have told’: blake’s eternal prophecy.” eternity in british romantic poetry. liverpool: liverpool university press, 2022. <blake (2023)> reviews bailey, quentin. wordsworth circle 55.3 (2024): 291-95. jesse, jennifer g. romanticism 30.1 (2024): 95-97. canuel, mark. “introduction: rouzing the faculties.” the fate of progress in british romanticism. oxford: oxford university press, 2022. isbn: 9780192895301. 1-17. blake is discussed on 1-6, where canuel takes blake as his point of departure for his claim that the “revision of progressive impulses [is] distinctively romantic” (6). he reads “the little girl lost,” “the little girl found,” and america. carter, sarah. “the ambiguities of translation: fuseli, blake, and the making of aphorisms on man.” see blake 58.2. castanedo, fernando. “‘o what a scene is here’: visual references in blake’s an island in the moon.” see crosby and mcquail. chadwick, esther. “blake’s millennium.” the radical print. london: paul mellon centre for studies in british art, 2024. isbn: 9781913107437. 161-92. a book on prints and radical politics. “this chapter will focus on the way in which blake brought an explicit indictment of money as a form of mediation into the open.” “blake’s critique [of commercialism] emerged from a distinctly millenarian culture of prints and printmaking” (164). considers laocoön and the two versions of “joseph of arimathea among the rocks of albion.” the chapters on barry and mortimer are listed in division ii, below, and there are also chapters on james gillray and thomas bewick. chen, kang-po. “‘the knife of flint passes over the howling victim’: rethinking sacrificial violence in william blake’s jerusalem.” tamkang review 54.2 (2024): 47-75. “engaging with georges bataille’s conception of the sacred, i would propose that ritualistic violence and bodily consumption proffer an alternative route to romantic artistic imagination, challenging the critical consensus that blake leans towards the spiritual and renounces the corporeal in his late works” (abstract). choe, sharon. rev. of andrew m. cooper, a bastard kind of reasoning: william blake and geometry. see blake 58.2. cogan, lucy. blake and the failure of prophecy. cham: palgrave macmillan-springer nature, 2021. <blake (2022, 2023)> review mahmoud, jude. romanticism 30.1 (2024): 97-99. collier, brian. “‘the lamb,’ revolution and the divine.” see vala. collyer, edward, et al. “responding to pupil led tangential thinking: a case study of teaching romantic poetry in a post-16 setting.” english in education 56.1 (2022): 47-58. “this paper considers alternative ways of teaching romantic poetry to post-sixteen english literature pupils in england. it explores how practitioners can value tangents developed by pupils’ independent thinking when pupils are given the freedom to develop their own ideas. it reflects on a lesson planned to respond to a tangent developed by the class in a previous session; that william blake’s ‘the tyger,’ to a contemporary reader, explores the 21st century preoccupation of climate change” (abstract). cooper, andrew m.  a bastard kind of reasoning: william blake and geometry. albany: state university of new york press, 2023. <blake (2024)> reviews choe, sharon. see blake 58.2. whittaker, jason. see global blake in part v. cranfield, nicholas. rev. of david bindman and esther chadwick, eds., william blake’s universe. see bindman and chadwick. crosby, mark. “‘absorbed by the poets’: the sources and hanging arrangement for blake’s eighteen heads of poets.” see william blake archive in part v. crosby, mark. “‘minutely appropriate execution’: variation and pentimento in blake’s title pages.” see crosby and mcquail. crosby, mark. “‘unentangled in the intricate windings of modern practice’: william blake’s apprentice copperplates and engravings.” see blake 58.3. crosby, mark, and josephine a. mcquail. “introduction: ‘writing is the divine revelation.’” see crosby and mcquail. crosby, mark, and josephine a. mcquail, eds. william blake’s manuscripts: praxis, puzzles, and palimpsests. cham: palgrave macmillan-springer nature, 2024. a collection of essays on blake’s handwriting, his letter writing, his annotations, an island in the moon, and the four zoas. it is dedicated to g. e. bentley, jr., and morris eaves. crosby, mark, and josephine a. mcquail. “introduction: ‘writing is the divine revelation.’” 1-17. “this chapter reviews early studies of blake’s manuscripts before previewing the chapters in this volume which offer new research made possible by greater access to blake’s manuscripts, particularly digitized versions” (abstract). scribal praxis bentley, g. e., jr. “blake and ‘the wondrous art of writing’: letter faces, letter formation, capitalization.” 21-46. “this chapter documents and examines blake’s myriad ‘hands’ evident across his works, from manuscripts to illuminated printing, showing there to be considerable variety in letter formations, capitalizations, and extra-textual features such as catchwords, colophons, and letter sizes. such differences in writing are difficult to represent typographically, even if facsimiles were included in letterpress editions of blake’s works” (abstract). whitehead, angus. “‘my fingers emit sparks of fire’: william blake, letter writer.” 47-69. “this chapter reviews the business, as well as the homosocial sympathy, affection, and enthusiasms spiritual and otherwise of these seemingly rapidly composed letters stretching from the final days at hercules buildings to the equally busy last days at fountain court. consulting manuscripts, considering the considerably wider body of letters (punctuated by considerable silences) with a nuanced biographical, historicist lens, blake as letter-writer emerges in unprecedentedly sharper focus” (abstract). potter, elizabeth. “‘on every one of these books i wrote my opinions’: re-assessing blake’s marginalia.” 71-88. focuses on the context of the annotations to reynolds. michael, jennifer davis. “behn, bysshe, and the blakes: bibliomancy and the joys of unbinding.” 89-109. considers catherine blake’s practice of bibliomancy recorded in the notebook in order to examine it as a “space containing several genres” and as “thus record[ing] a palimpsest of acts of excision which are also acts of pleasure” (abstract). crosby, mark. “‘minutely appropriate execution’: variation and pentimento in blake’s title pages.” 111-32. “this chapter argues that despite blake’s strictures on the significant differences in theory and practice between what he considered true ‘inspiration and imagination’ pictorially rendered via the ‘bounding outline’ and an inferior aesthetic predicated on memory executed via ‘blotting and blurring,’ there was some leeway in his creative process for variation and artistic second thoughts” (abstract). palimpsest riccardi, silvia. “the page embodied in the four zoas.” 135-47. the chapter “examine[s] blake’s practice in selected pages of the manuscript, focusing on the way layout, calligraphy, and symbols are embedded in his style as well as the extent to which the boundaries between paper and copperplate become permeable” (abstract). mcquail, josephine a. “blake and the antiquarians: the manuscript of the four zoas and the ‘monumental folios’ of the dilettanti and the antiquarians.” 149-77. “antiquarian influences on blake from the neoclassical underpinnings of the classical revival of the eighteenth century to more esoteric and suppressed aspects of the rites of pagan worship documented by the society of antiquaries and the society of dilettanti illuminate aspects of blake’s most voluminous, but unpublished poem in manuscript, vala, or the four zoas” (abstract). otto, peter. “catastrophe, sublimity, and digital thinking in blake’s vala or the four zoas.” 179-204. rather than engage the question of what blake intended to do with the two seventh nights in the four zoas, “this chapter recounts the history of transcendence narrated by the poem, in order to ask what work interruption (of numerical sequence and narrative continuity) is doing at this point in the manuscript” (abstract). fox, michael. “graphing vala, or the four zoas: toward a dynamic edition.” 205-30. offers a model of editing the four zoas and other literary texts using graph technology. sengupta, oishani, helen davies, alexander j. zawacki, christina duffy, eric loy, and samuel allen. “‘all that we see is vision’: william blake’s four zoas manuscript and multispectral imaging (msi).” 231-54. “this chapter offers a case study of the blake archive’s recent collaborative enterprise in multispectral imaging with the british library and the lazarus project. … our discussion ultimately focuses on the methods of our project and the potential of spectral imaging for the editorial field as a whole” (abstract). puzzles castanedo, fernando. “‘o what a scene is here’: visual references in blake’s an island in the moon.” 257-78. suggests that in island blake alludes “to several works of art, mostly by using very short, at times almost epigrammatic, parodical ekphrases” (abstract). fletcher, joseph. “‘hang philosophy’: blake’s metaphysical forays in an island in the moon.” 279-300. “this chapter elaborates on the philosophical topics in island that will pervade blake’s early illuminated work. several of the targets of his satirical barbs are natural-philosophic attitudes regarding the nature of matter, the soul’s relationship to the body, and the first principles that enable understanding of the universe” (abstract). mayberry, tommy. “‘composite gender’ as the book of oothoon: dress, drag, and the transgender marygold flower-nymph.” 301-28. “examining the historically documented transgender phenomenon of ‘molly houses’ and the cross-dressing chevalier d’éon as well as fashion styles post-french revolution, i establish a background that supports a drag/transreading of blake’s visions of the daughters of albion” (abstract). whittaker, jason. “‘by the voice of the servant of the lord’: blake’s new jerusalem and swedenborgianism in the work of sheila kaye-smith.” 329-46. examines the engagement with blake by the twentieth-century novelist sheila kaye-smith (1887–​1956), with references to the influence of yeats. d davies, keith g. “william blake vs. richard dawkins and the god delusion.” see vala. davies, keri. “george whitefield, the moravians, and ‘andrew the negro boy.’” see davies in part v. davies, keri. “good morning, doctor haydn.” see davies in part v. davies, keri. “‘o nancy’s hair is yellow as gowd’: blake, border ballads, and the reinvention of relief etching.” see davies in part v. demin, mihail. “leksiko-kompozitsionnye osobennosti verbalizatsii orficheskoy kartiny mira (na materiale sopostavleniya teksta stikhotvoreniy v. a. zhukovskogo, u. bleyka i l. kh'yuza) [lexical and compositional features of verbalization of the orphic picture of the world (based on the comparison of the texts of the poems written by v. a. zhukovsky, w. blake, and l[angston]. hughes)].” vestnik filologicheskikh nauk [philological sciences bulletin] 4.7 (2024): 186-95. in russian (abstract in russian and english). “the paper presents formalized data on the correlation of the plot-semantic fields of the orphic theme of poetic texts with quantitative indicators of lexical units and their nominations, which in a discursive context change their connotation and represent the semantic and compositional code of the linguistic orphic picture of the world” (abstract). the author considers “the sick rose,” comparing it with hughes’s “passing love” and zhukovsky’s “tsvetok [a flower].” ding, katherine. “a blakean guide to embodied knowledge.” phd diss., university of california, berkeley, 2024. “my dissertation blends creative non-fiction with critical analysis to explore how blake prophetically anticipates the discoveries of twenty-first century neuroscientists by insisting that the activities of thinking, feeling, and perception which assembles knowledge occur neither in some disembodied mental sphere, nor in the insular interiority of authentic selfhood. rather, they are located in the body: in the nerves, the brain, the digestive system, in each ‘pulsation of the artery’” (abstract). e eagles, diane. “god is light.” see vala. elliot, jake. “blake’s ‘watchman’: los and the london police.” see blake society in part v. erle, sibylle. “blake in hamburg.” see vala. erle, sibylle. “divine humanity; or, god appears when we appear godly.” see vala. erle, sibylle. rev. of jason wright, blake’s job: adventures in becoming. see global blake in part v. evseeva, tat'yana. “‘glaza moi byli zakryty …’: eskhatologicheskie syuzhety v tvorchestve filippa de louterburga, ioganna genrikha fyussli, uil'yama bleyka i dzhona martina. put' k simvolizmu [‘my eyes were closed …’: the eschatological theme on the creativity by philip de loutherbourg, henry fuseli, william blake, and john martin. the way to symbolism].” angliyskiy simvolizm: svoeobrazie i evropeyskiy radius [english symbolism: peculiarity and european radius]. saint petersburg: aletheia, 2024. isbn: 9785001657026. 90-113. in russian (abstract in russian and english). the author considers religious subjects in the poetry of the painters named, positioning the impact hypothesis of the secret symbolism on the interpretation of the eschatological themes. f fletcher, joseph. “‘hang philosophy’: blake’s metaphysical forays in an island in the moon.” see crosby and mcquail. fletcher, joseph. william blake as natural philosopher, 1788–​1795. london: anthem press, 2021. <blake (2022, 2024)> review leporati, matthew. european romantic review 35.3 (2024): 571-76. with jason whittaker, jerusalem: blake, parry, and the fight for englishness. “i hesitate to see poetry, and especially blake’s composite art, as merely encoding and/​or promoting philosophical positions” (576). fox, michael. “graphing vala, or the four zoas: toward a dynamic edition.” see crosby and mcquail. freedman, linda. william blake and the myth of america: from the abolitionists to the counterculture. oxford: oxford university press, 2018. <blake (2019, 2020, 2023)> review townsend, chris. see william blake: selected works in part i, section b. g garvey, anne. rev. of david bindman and esther chadwick, eds., william blake’s universe. see bindman and chadwick. gerasina, s. yu. “izuchenie obraza strannika v lirike n. gumileva i u. bleyka v 11 klasse [studying the image of the wanderer in the lyrics of n. gumilyov and w. blake in the eleventh grade].” buslaevskie chteniya. materialy xii vserossiyskoy nauchno-prakticheskoy konferentsii [buslaev readings. materials of the xii all-russian scientific and practical conference]. penza: penza state university, 2024. 67-69. in russian. the author offers poems by gumilyov, such as “pamyat [memory],” “zabludivshiysya tramvay [the lost tram],” and others, for comparative analysis with blake’s. glover, michael. rev. of david bindman and esther chadwick, eds., william blake’s universe. see bindman and chadwick. gopalkrishnan, carl. “‘eternity is in love with the productions of time.’” see vala. graham, brian russell. speech acts in blake’s “milton.” new york: routledge, 2023. <blake (2024)> review rogers, annise. see blake 58.3. h haggarty, sarah, ed. william blake in context. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2019. <blake (2020, 2021, 2022)> review townsend, chris. see william blake: selected works in part i, section b. haggarty, sarah. rev. of david bindman and esther chadwick, eds., william blake’s universe. see bindman and chadwick. harding, george. “what does god look like? ” see vala. harris, alexandra. “an open gate: william blake at felpham.” the rising down: lives in a sussex landscape. london: faber, 2024. isbn: 9780571350520. 215-37. a chapter on blake’s time in felpham aimed at a popular audience, touching on his relationship with hayley, his cottage, his trial, and milton. see harris under hayley in division ii for the chapter on hayley, william cowper, and charlotte smith. review hughes, kathryn. “the rising down by alexandra harris review—​the joy of sussex.” guardian (22 mar. 2024). “throughout this wonderful book, harris demonstrates that local does not mean minor, nor parochial.” heagy, angela j. “blake’s green symbols of humanity, society, and spirituality.” criterion: a journal of literary criticism 17.1 (2024): 16 pp. “an eco-critical analysis of songs of innocence and of experience reveals that blake’s depictions of nature are no less notable than those of his peers. blake’s use of green imagery symbolizes human development, gendered and social inequalities, and divinity throughout his masterwork, all of which illustrate his continual awe for the natural world and his relevance to the broader discussions on green romantic poets.” hemmings, richard. “likeness in spirit: for william blake.” see vala. hergül, çağlayan. “the lucerne lion monument of bertel thorvaldsen and ‘a song of liberty’ poem of william blake.” art/​icle: journal of art and design 4.3 (dec. 2024): 350-75. abstract in english and turkish. “the main idea of this article is to expose the intuitive connection between the lucerne lion and the lion metaphor in william blake’s verse” (abstract). heringman, noah. “william blake, the ballad revival, and the deep past of poetry.” deep time: a literary history. princeton: princeton university press, 2023. <blake (2024)> review bailes, melissa. wordsworth circle 55.3 (2024): 288-91. hristova, rumyana. “characteristics of god the creator in blake’s poetry and art.” see vala. i insley, alice, ed. blake e la sua epoca. viaggi nel tempo del sogno [in the age of blake: visionary journeys]. turin: hopefulmonster, 2024. isbn: 9788877573247. in italian except for the english foreword by maria balshaw, director of tate. the catalogue for the exhibition at la venaria reale, turin, in partnership with tate, 31 oct. 2024–​2 feb. 2025. the exhibition website includes photos of the installation. brown, david blayney. “romanticismo.” 9-19. insley, alice. “william blake e la sua epoca. viaggi nel tempo del sogno.” 21-40. “selezione delle opere in mostra.” 42-89. includes “orrore e pericolo” (46-55); “creature fantastiche” (56-61); “incantesimi” (62-69); “romanticizzare il passato” (70-75); “il gotico” (76-81); and “satana e gli inferi” (82-89). “biografia.” 90-91. promotional materials (arranged chronologically) blink/blinkink. “immerse in william blake’s iconic work with tate experience.” little black book | lbb online (12 mar. 2024). on “william blake: reimagined visions,” sam gainsborough and blinkink’s “immersive digital film that brings twelve of blake’s most iconic works from tate’s collection to life”; it will run at the exhibition. la venaria reale. “blake e la sua epoca.” youtube. 8 nov. 2024. an introduction to the exhibition, with speakers in italian and english. hilgers, jasper. “william blake exhibition.” jasperhilgers.com (n.d.). on blinkink’s film, including a video preview. reviews “blake e la sua epoca: alla reggia di venaria una mostra sui sogni visionari del maestro inglese.” finestre sull’arte (31 oct. 2024). in italian. many images of the works shown in the exhibition. marks, rebecca. “my william blake pilgrimage: on cynicism, academia, and regaining childlike wonder at la venaria reale.” the culture dump (10 dec. 2024). includes photos of the exhibition. “the final room is a triumph. i know this because i usually hate it when exhibitions finish with cinematic features, and i was enraptured by this one. it consists of a series of twelve animations of characters from blake’s works, accompanied by a deep, meditative soundscape.” martellotta, mara. “the exhibition hosted at the reggia di venaria is entitled ‘blake and his era, journeys in the time of dreams.’” montenapodaily (8 nov. 2024). “quando william blake dipinse il fantasma di una pulce … dopo una visione.” finestre sull’arte (25 nov. 2024). in italian. a short article on the ghost of a flea, one of the works in the exhibition. shelidon. “blake and his time: a journey into dreamland.” shelidon (19 nov. 2024). many photos of the exhibition. j § jacquemin, thomas. william blake, le peintre des ténèbres: un romantique tourné vers l’invisible. 50minutes.fr, 2014. 36 pp. isbn: 9782806258175. in french. jesse, jennifer g. rev. of madeleine callaghan, eternity in british romantic poetry. see callaghan. jesse, jennifer, with artwork by rob davis. “my night at the museum: blake’s nebuchadnezzar lives!” see vala. jones, jonathan. rev. of david bindman and esther chadwick, eds., william blake’s universe. see bindman and chadwick. k keery, james, and steve clark. “‘and the song they sung was this / composed by an african black’: blakean spirituals.” see global blake in part v. kolotilina, svetlana. “beskonechnye miry uil'yama bleyka i frensisa bekona [infinite worlds of william blake and francis bacon].” angliyskiy simvolizm: svoeobrazie i evropeyskiy radius [english symbolism: peculiarity and european radius]. saint petersburg: aletheia, 2024. isbn: 9785001657026. 114-27. in russian (abstract in russian and english). the author considers the universe structure given in the works of blake and the painter francis bacon (1909–​92), comparing these two concepts to the philosophical and visual concepts of david lynch’s twin peaks (third season). kröger, noëlle. william blakes universum. english version: william blake’s universe, trans. barbara lang. hamburg: hamburger kunsthalle, 2024. a graphic novel on the life and times of blake, given out for free at the exhibition held at the hamburger kunsthalle. kur'yanova, e. s. “obraz londona v poezii uil'yama bleyka [the image of london in william blake’s poetry].” filologiya. sotsial'naya i natsional'naya variativnost' yazyka i literatury. materialy ix mezhdunarodnogo nauchnogo kongressa [philology. social and national variability of language and literature. proceedings of the ix international scientific congress]. simferopol: arial, 2024. 735-37. in russian. the image of london is considered as material for blake’s lyrics. l leporati, matthew. “blake’s vortices: ‘hold.’” see vala. leporati, matthew. “‘mark well my words! they are of your eternal salvation’: william blake’s milton as missionary against empire.” romantic epics and the mission of empire. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2023. <blake (2024)> review whittaker, jason. see blake 58.2. leporati, matthew. rev. of jason whittaker, jerusalem: blake, parry, and the fight for englishness, and joseph fletcher, william blake as natural philosopher, 1788–​1795. see whittaker, jerusalem, and fletcher, william blake. leveton, jacob henry. rev. of joseph viscomi, william blake’s printed paintings: methods, origins, meanings. see viscomi. lindstrom, eric. rev. of tristram wolff, against the uprooted word: giving language time in transatlantic romanticism. see wolff. lloyd, joe. rev. of david bindman and esther chadwick, eds., william blake’s universe. see bindman and chadwick. m maberly, james. “crossing the rubicon.” see vala. mabille, pierre. “william blake.” cahiers d’art 20 (1947): 117-27. <bb #2167> b. pierre mabille et le surréalisme: une anthologie critique (1934–​1952). paris: hermann, 2024. isbn: 9791037039484. in french. mahmoud, jude. rev. of lucy cogan, blake and the failure of prophecy. see cogan. marchetto santorun, m. cecilia. “william blake in spanish popular culture and literature.” weaving tales: anglo-iberian encounters on literatures in english. ed. paula garcía-ramírez, beatriz valverde, angélica varandas, and jason whittaker. new york: routledge, 2023. <blake (2024)> review rogers, annise. see global blake in part v. marks, rebecca. “‘organs of embodied sentiment’: contextualising william blake’s sistine studies, c. 1770–​1790.” cambridge quarterly 52.3 (2023): 270-89. on blake’s series of drawings after michelangelo, with references to fuseli.see also marks’s presentation of the same title in the “in conversation” series at the global blake site. <blake (2024)> marks, rebecca. rev. of jason whittaker, jerusalem: blake, parry, and the fight for englishness. see whittaker, jerusalem. marsh, george. “is innocence emptiness?” see vala. mauger, matthew. william blake and the visionary law: prophecy, legislation and constitution. cham: palgrave macmillan-springer nature, 2023. <blake (2024)> review worrall, david. see blake 58.2. mayberry, tommy. “‘composite gender’ as the book of oothoon: dress, drag, and the transgender marygold flower-nymph.” see crosby and mcquail. mccord, jim. “god judging adam.” see vala. mccormick, neil. rev. of david bindman and esther chadwick, eds., william blake’s universe. see bindman and chadwick. mcquail, josephine a. “blake and the antiquarians: the manuscript of the four zoas and the ‘monumental folios’ of the dilettanti and the antiquarians.” see crosby and mcquail. mcqueen, joseph. rev. of jeffrey w. barbeau, ed., the cambridge companion to british romanticism and religion. see barbeau. meihuizen, nicholas. romantic daemons in the poetry of blake, shelley and keats: beyond the human. newcastle upon tyne: cambridge scholars publishing, 2024. isbn: 9781527577527. there are two chapters on blake: “blake: from poetical sketches to songs of innocence and experience” (38-127) and “blake’s prophetic books” (128-216). michael, jennifer davis. “behn, bysshe, and the blakes: bibliomancy and the joys of unbinding.” see crosby and mcquail. miles, barry. “ginsberg’s blake recordings.” see global blake in part v. millington, m. j., with artwork by tamsin rosewell. “what dread hand?” see vala. montague, jane. “art is the tree of life.” see vala. morton, timothy. hell: in search of a christian ecology. new york: columbia university press, 2024. isbn: 9780231214711. blake figures prominently in morton’s reflections. author talks morton, timothy. “timothy morton—​the marriage of religion and the biosphere.” see blake society in part v. riordan, john. “morton in hell.” see vala. review wilson, andy. see vala. mugleston, charles. “imn amun amon ra.” see vala. myers, ben. “blakean anti-wisdom in thomas merton’s proverbs.” literature and theology 38.1 (2024): 1-12. “the paper explores the way blakean proverbs function in merton’s work as a model of social critique” (abstract). n nakajima, toshiro, and yuko nagano. “jugaku bunsho to blake seitan 200 nen kinen: blake sashie wo shujiku toshite [bunsho jugaku and the 200th birth anniversary of blake: with a focus on the illustrations by blake].” kojitsuan [sunward cottage] 7 (2024): 10-37. in japanese. 12 plates by blake. in 1957, bunsho jugaku, a blake scholar, worked as chief editor of a special issue of eigo seinen, a monthly magazine on english language and literature, and organized a “blake gallery” in the magazine. this article places jugaku in the history of blake studies after world war ii and explores his commentaries on blake’s illustrations. nakajima, yoshie. “hearn to william blake: sono 1 [hearn and william blake: part 1].” yakugaku toshokan [pharmaceutical library bulletin] 69 (2024): 58-64. in japanese. an introductory essay on lafcadio hearn and blake; it includes a portrait of blake and 7 plates by him. o okada, shunnosuke. kami wo itadaku seiyo sekai, kamigami no zasu nihon: bungaku bunka ronshu [the west worshipping the god, japan having gods among itself: a collection of essays on literature and culture]. tokyo: sairyusha, 2023. 443 pp. isbn: 9784779129377. in japanese. it includes a desultory essay on “a poison tree” (372-76). oliveira, camila. rev. of gordon cameron sly, britten’s donne, hardy and blake songs. see global blake in part v. oliveira, camila. “william blake and visionary cover arts.” see global blake in part v. oliveira, camila, and bruce dickinson. “blake’s mandrake.” see vala. oliveira, camila, and jason whittaker. “blake and music, 2023.” see blake 58.1. otto, peter. “catastrophe, sublimity, and digital thinking in blake’s vala or the four zoas.” see crosby and mcquail. ozansoy, esin (trans. from the greek by francisco javier ortolá salas). “proverbios. aforismos de lugares comunes literarios en elytis y william blake.” litera 28.1 (2018): 101-15. in spanish (abstract in spanish and english). “this article examines the influence of william blake on odysseas elytis and their similarities through an analysis of proverbs and aphorisms. … elytis and blake seem to have many points in common, though independent from each other. in the texts of blake, elytis recognized ideas and perspectives that he had himself ” (abstract). the original article was published in 2015 in the journal eneken. p pacitti, diane, with artwork by antonio pacitti. “uncaging god.” see vala. palieraqui, mariana dos reis. “o paralelo entre john milton e william blake: aspectos estéticos em milton a partir de paradise lost [parallels between john milton and william blake: milton’s aesthetic traits from paradise lost].” caderno de anais da xv semana de letras do cpan. campo grande: editora universidade federal de mato grosso do sul, 2024. isbn: 9786586943542. 32-40. in portuguese. “ultimately, the challenge for the reader of blake stems from the difficulties associated with interpreting his narration’s mythological pantheon of figures—​and their symbolic meanings—​alongside his own textual dialogue with paradise lost” (trans. from the abstract). paolini, daniela, and mario rucavado rojas. “del redentor al demiurgo: las ilustraciones de william blake vistas a través de las meditaciones poéticas de josé joaquín de mora [from redeemer to demiurge: william blake’s illustrations as seen through josé joaquín de mora’s meditaciones poéticas].” hyperbórea. revista de ensayo y creación 7 (2024): 40-57. in spanish (abstract in spanish and english). “josé joaquín de mora’s meditaciones poéticas consists of a series of eleven poems inspired by william blake’s illustrations for robert cromek’s edition of robert blair’s poem the grave (1808). … this article contextualises mora’s poems and explores to what extent they can be considered an ekphrasis of blake’s designs” (abstract). pinheiro de sousa, alcinda, and jason whittaker. “urizen now: reading anew william blake’s response to his times.” weaving tales: anglo-iberian encounters on literatures in english. ed. paula garcía-ramírez, beatriz valverde, angélica varandas, and jason whittaker. new york: routledge, 2023. <blake (2024)> review rogers, annise. see global blake in part v. polzunova, marina, and v. v. krasheninnikov. “lingvisticheskiy analiz khudozhestvennogo proizvedeniya uil'yama bleyka ‘kniga urizena’ [linguistic analysis of william blake’s the book of urizen].” dni nauki—​2024. materialy xxiv vserossiyskoy nauchno-prakticheskoy konferentsii [days of science—​2024. proceedings of the xxiv all-russian scientific and practical conference]. ozyorsk: national research nuclear university “mephi,” 2024. 269-73. in russian (abstract in russian and english). “the article considers a comprehensive linguistic analysis of the prophetic book by the english romantic writer william blake—​the book of urizen: emotive, denotative and semantic space, logical and semantic connections” (abstract). potter, elizabeth. “‘on every one of these books i wrote my opinions’: re-assessing blake’s marginalia.” see crosby and mcquail. pritchard, stephen. “omegod” and “pain threshold.” see vala. pritchard, stephen. rev. of jason wright, blake’s job: adventures in becoming. see vala. r raz, yosefa. “walking through blake’s irregular bible.” the poetics of prophecy: modern afterlives of a biblical tradition. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2024. isbn: 9781009366274. 56-88. “rather than functioning as an underlying code or ordering system, the biblical text often generates disorder and further instability. more broadly, the bible cannot function as a codebook, containing a unified system of symbols or archetypes, which might serve to decipher blake’s puzzling texts; it is itself a fundamentally unstable document” (59). blake is also considered in the chapter on robert lowth (see raz under lowth in division ii). regier, alexander. “printing blake in texas.” see global blake in part v. riccardi, silvia. “dal colosso al frammento: fuseli, flaxman, blake e i giganti di botticelli (if. xxxi-xxxii).” dante e botticelli ii. ed. cornelia klettke and dagmar korbacher. firenze: franco cesati editore, 2025. in italian. riccardi, silvia. “the page embodied in the four zoas.” see crosby and mcquail. riordan, john. “god at the window panel.” see vala. riordan, john. los: a vision of william blake. book 1: innocence. john riordan images & comics (n.d.). an excerpt (up through blake’s baptism) from his forthcoming graphic-novel biography of blake. riordan, john. “morton in hell.” see vala. ripley, wayne c. “a list of morris eaves’s publications.” see blake 57.4. ripley, wayne c., with fernando castanedo, hikari sato, hüseyin alhas, and vera serdechnaia. “william blake and his circle: a checklist of scholarship in 2023.” see blake 58.1. robertson, lisa ann. rev. of richard c. sha, romanticism and consciousness, revisited. see sha. rogers, annise. “‘i am god from eternity to eternity’: urizen’s self-delusional godhood?” see vala. rogers, annise. “indirect artistic influences: the visual art of j. r. r. tolkien and william blake.” the romantic spirit in the works of j. r. r. tolkien. ed. will sherwood and julian eilmann. zurich: walking tree publishers, 2024. isbn: 9783905703511. 175-205. considers parallels in their art, though concedes that “any direct link between their artwork was most probably done so unconsciously by tolkien” (176). rogers, annise. rev. of brian russell graham, speech acts in blake’s “milton.” see blake 58.3. rogers, annise. rev. of paula garcía-ramírez et al., eds., weaving tales: anglo-iberian encounters on literatures in english. see global blake in part v. rogers, annise. “‘thy young hands tore human limbs, and gorged human flesh!’: poetical sketches and blake’s development of samson.” see global blake in part v. roob, alexander. william blake’s “the ancient britons”: appearances of a vanished picture ​/ ​william blake’s “the ancient britons”: erscheinungen eines verschollenen bildes. hamburg: textem verlag, 2022. <blake (2023)> review erle, sibylle. see blake 57.4. rowland, christopher. “friends of albion?: the dangers of cathedrals.” speaking of god in an inhumane world: essays on liberation theology and radical christianity. vol. 1. eugene, or: cascade books, 2024. isbn: 9781666753868. 180-93. uses blake’s views of cathedrals (“despite exceptional prophetic spirits who emerged from some of the cathedrals, he saw that the christian religion was severely compromised by the cathedrals’ cultural ethos and opposed to the way of jesus” [180-81]) as the starting point for his own reflection on cathedral culture. rowland, christopher. “‘why is the bible more entertaining & instructive than any other book?’: william blake and the enhancement of the literary.” enlightenment to romanticism. ed. stephen prickett with elisabeth jay. the bible and western christian literature: books and the book, vol. 3. london: t&t clark, 2024. isbn: 9780567681973. 209-26. on how blake used, illustrated, and critiqued the bible. there are also two “passage and commentary” chapters with selections from works by blake that engage with the bible and commentary by rowland (for part i) and susanne sklar (for part ii, focused on jerusalem). the wider book has chapters on the eighteenth century and the bible (including christopher burdon’s “from evidence to praise: the bible in the age of newton” [103-58] and jan-melissa schramm’s “rights, romantic radicalism and the bible” [159-208]) and excerpts from a range of writers, including john locke, isaac watts, and john wesley. see also stephen prickett’s essay under lowth in division ii. rubel, william. “critical mass.” see vala. rubel, william. “‘a fly like thee.’” see global blake in part v. s sakikawa, nobuo. “hearn no blake ron: tokyo teikoku daigaku eibungaku kogi wo chushin ni [hearn’s argument on blake: on his lectures in tokyo imperial university].” herun [hearn] 61 (2024): 31-41. in japanese. it discusses the lectures on blake by lafcadio hearn at tokyo imperial university in the context of the religions in china, india, and japan. hearn was customarily called “herun,” which is the title of the journal, by japanese native speakers when he was living in japan. santos, fernando glaybson do nascimento. “os traços do paraíso em william blake: matrizes barrocas na linguagem emblemática de for children: the gates of paradise de 1793 [the traces of paradise in william blake: baroque matrices in the emblematic language of for children: the gates of paradise from 1793].” temporalidades—​revista de história 15.2 (2023–​24): 717-40. in portuguese (abstract in portuguese and english). “this article aims to investigate the relationship between blake’s pictorial universe and the cultural, visual, mythical and religious matrices of the baroque through the emblematic language expressed in the engravings of for children: the gates of paradise from 1793, analysing them in starting from the iconographic-iconological method of erwin panofsky and establishing a dialogue with authors who undertook similar research” (abstract). sato, hikari. “blake kenkyu ni okeru ruskin densetsu [an old story concerning ruskin in blake studies].” ruskin bunko tayori [ruskin library bulletin] 88 (2024): 5-7. in japanese. 2 plates by blake. the relationship between ruskin and blake is discussed with a reference to the old story that ruskin “cut up” one of the copies of jerusalem. sato, hikari. “jugaku bunsho blake ronshu towa nanika: chosha to henja no hihyogan [what is a collection of blake essays by bunsho jugaku?: critical eyes of the author and the editor].” kojitsuan [sunward cottage] 7 (2024): 1-9. in japanese. muneyoshi yanagi edited a collection of blake essays <bsj p. 52> by bunsho jugaku while jugaku was in hospital because of typhus in 1931. this essay discusses the active role that yanagi played to help his friend. savage, april grace ingraham. “pentecostal theology in william blake’s the marriage of heaven and hell.” phd diss., columbia international university, 2024. “this study offers a multifaceted perception of blake by integrating proto-pentecostal theology, contributing to a doctrinal literary criticism that enriches blake studies and prompts self-reflection in readers’ religious beliefs” (abstract). schouten de jel, joshua. “ageing as fading and the importance of monument-making in william blake’s the book of thel.” gothic studies 26.3 (2024): 266-80. stressing the importance of blake’s apprentice work engraving funeral monuments, schouten de jel reads memorialization in “fair elenor” from poetical sketches, thel, and urizen both in terms of the work and in how blake’s illuminated books embody his own efforts at memorialization. schouten de jel, joshua. william blake’s divine love: visions of oothoon. new york: routledge, 2024. isbn: 9781032706191. a book on visions that “explores the hermeneutical possibilities of oothoon’s self-annihilation and the epistemological potential of her visual copulation by establishing an artistic and hagiographical heritage which informs the pictorial representation and poetic pronunciation of oothoon’s enlightened entelechy” (publisher description). sengupta, oishani, helen davies, alexander j. zawacki, christina duffy, eric loy, and samuel allen. “‘all that we see is vision’: william blake’s four zoas manuscript and multispectral imaging (msi).” see crosby and mcquail. serdechnaia, vera. “uil'yam bleyk i angliyskiy simvolizm: poeziya, proza i kritika [william blake and english symbolism: poetry, prose, and criticism].” angliyskiy simvolizm: svoeobrazie i evropeyskiy radius [english symbolism: peculiarity and european radius]. saint petersburg: aletheia, 2024. isbn: 9785001657026. 80-89. in russian (abstract in russian and english). the article traces the influence of blake’s imagery and poetic manner on the writers of the symbolist era, as well as the role of symbolist poets in establishing blake’s reputation; the author considers the works of george macdonald, edith sitwell, and francis thompson. serdechnaia, vera. “william blake in russian music in 2010s–​2020s.” see global blake in part v. severina, nadezhda. “stikhotvorenie u. bleyka ‘the clod and the pebble’ v interpretatsiyakh v. toporova [blake’s poem ‘the clod and the pebble’ in v. toporov’s interpretations].” sopostavitel'noe izuchenie germanskikh i romanskikh yazykov i literatur. materialy xxii mezhdunarodnoy studencheskoy nauchnoy konferentsii [comparative study of germanic and romance languages and literatures. proceedings of the xxii international student scientific conference]. donetsk: donetsk national university, 2024. 330-33. in russian. the author considers two versions of toporov’s translations, in 1975 and 1982. sha, richard c. “blakean experience and the hard problem of consciousness revisited.” romanticism and consciousness, revisited. ed. richard c. sha and joel faflak. edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2022. isbn: 9781474485104. “blake reminds us of costs and rewards of consciousness, and also the potentially high costs for an enactive consciousness: cognitive efficiency, a relationality blind to structured hierarchy, and a consciousness that cannot separate itself from ideology. in short, a consciousness whose embeddedness is not only shorn of prepositions, but also deaf to the nuances of repetition” (111). review robertson, lisa ann. wordsworth circle 54.4 (2023): 516-23. sklar, susanne. “the peace of jerusalem.” see vala. skoruk, yuliya. “lingvostilisticheskie osobennosti stikhotvoreniya u. bleyka ‘the fly’ i ikh peredacha v russkikh i ukrainskikh perevodakh [linguostylistic features of w. blake’s ‘the fly’ and their transmission in russian and ukrainian translations].” sopostavitel'noe izuchenie germanskikh i romanskikh yazykov i literatur. materialy xxii mezhdunarodnoy studencheskoy nauchnoy konferentsii [comparative study of germanic and romance languages and literatures. proceedings of the xxii international student scientific conference]. donetsk: donetsk national university, 2024. 346-49. in russian. the author considers, however, only russian translations by marshak, toporov, and stamova. § sly, gordon cameron. “songs and proverbs of william blake.” britten’s donne, hardy and blake songs: cyclic design and meaning. woodbridge: boydell press, 2023. <blake (2024)> review oliveira, camila. see global blake in part v. sooke, alastair. rev. of david bindman and esther chadwick, eds., william blake’s universe. see bindman and chadwick. stepanova, angelina. “khudozhestvennye obrazy uil'yama bleyka v instrumental'nom tvorchestve d. n. smirnova [artistic images of william blake in the instrumental work of dmitrii nikolaevich smirnov].” angliyskiy simvolizm: svoeobrazie i evropeyskiy radius [english symbolism: peculiarity and european radius]. saint petersburg: aletheia, 2024. isbn: 9785001657026. 716-28. in russian (abstract in russian and english). “this article examines methods of personification and generalized treatment of the subject of pictorial sources on the example of such works as ‘the moonlight story’ (op. 51, 1998) for six instruments, ‘jacob’s ladder’ (op. 58, 1990) for six instruments, ‘abel’ (op. 65, 1991) for clarinet, violin, cello, and piano, ‘the river of life’ (op. 66, 1992) for sixteen instrumentalists” (abstract). stepanyan, milena. “perevodcheskie strategii g. dashevskogo v perevodakh poezii u. bleyka [translation strategies of g. dashevsky in translation of the poetry by w. blake].” russkaya klassicheskaya i neklassicheskaya literatura: tekst, kontekst, retseptsiya. sbornik statey mezhdunarodnoy nauchno-prakticheskoy konferentsii [russian classical and non-classical literature: text, context, reception. collection of articles from the international scientific and practical conference]. yaroslavl: yaroslavl state pedagogical university named after k. d. ushinsky, 2024. 74-80. in russian (abstract in russian and english). “the article examines the functional features of g. dashevsky’s translation solutions in relation to five poems by w. blake included in the lyrical cycle ‘from william blake’ … as well as the connection of translations from blake with the poems of the collection ‘the duma of ivan chai’” (abstract). in 1995, the poet grigory dashevsky translated into russian and later published his own versions of “infant sorrow,” “the little boy lost,” “the little boy found,” “never seek to tell thy love,” and one more verse that can be seen as a free version of “the garden of love.” suzuki, hideko. “jinsei wo terasu kotoba (178): hitotsubu no suna no nakani sekai wo mi, ichirin no nono hana ni tengoku wo mi, tenohira de mugen wo tsukami, hitotoki no naka ni eien wo tsukamu [words to illuminate our life (178): to see a world in a grain of sand, and a heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hand, and eternity in an hour].” chichi [to reach wisdom] 593 (2024): 116-18. in japanese. a moralistic essay based on “auguries of innocence” and “on anothers sorrow.” t § tavares, enéias farias. “a unidade corpo/​mente nos livros iluminados de william blake [the body/​mind unity in william blake’s illuminated books].” discursos do corpo na arte. vol. 1. ed. enéias farias tavares, gisela reis biancalana, and mariane magno. santa maria, brazil: editora da universidade federal de santa maria, 2014. isbn: 9788573912098. 67-110. in portuguese. § tavares, enéias, and fred rubim. o matrimônio de céu e inferno. porto alegre, brazil: avec editora, 2019. 128 pp. isbn: 9788554470425. in portuguese. inspired by blake’s marriage, a comic-book thriller set in current day são paulo. tchaykov, alexandre. “‘invisible, as music—​but positive, as sound—​’: the intertextual continuum of poetry, music, and song in aaron copland’s twelve poems of emily dickinson, benjamin britten’s songs and proverbs of william blake, and benjamin t. martin/​alexandre tchaykov’s i see and unsee: five memory songs.” dma diss., university of california, los angeles, 2024. “examining how the composers have read the poets and placed their words within the musical syntax of counterpoint, harmony, rhythm, and texture introduces the idea of a song as a realization and extension of a poem’s musicality” (abstract). tebourski, inés. “los’s healthy narcissism.” see global blake in part v. tebourski, inés. “the signs of islam in william blake’s illuminated works.” see vala. thompson, paul. “a streak of tygers.” see vala. townsend, chris. rev. of william blake: selected works, ed. peter otto; sarah haggarty, william blake in context; and linda freedman, william blake and the myth of america: from the abolitionists to the counterculture. see william blake: selected works in part i, section b. tsai, li hui. rev. of david bindman and esther chadwick, eds., william blake’s universe. see vala. v vala: the journal of the blake society issue 5 (nov. 2024) articles erle, sibylle. “divine humanity; or, god appears when we appear godly.” 4-7. on blake’s concepts of god. leporati, matthew. “blake’s vortices: ‘hold.’” 8-13. a reading of blake’s uses of “hold.” bucklow, christopher. “imaging inner gods.” 14-21. the artist on blake’s influence, with examples of his work plus commentaries. pacitti, diane, with artwork by antonio pacitti. “uncaging god.” 22-23. a poem. oliveira, camila, and bruce dickinson. “blake’s mandrake.” 24-27. an interview with dickinson on blake and blake’s concept of god. westbrook, kate, and mike westbrook. “poem and ‘hang fire.’” 28-31. paintings by kate westbrook and words by both. jesse, jennifer, with artwork by rob davis. “my night at the museum: blake’s nebuchadnezzar lives!” 32-35. on blake’s use of icons, with jesse’s personal experience of nebuchadnezzar as the primary example. “blake’s icons activate symbols lodged deep within us, challenging us to perceive those symbols in new ways, and empowering us to continually recreate our psychic, mental, physical and historical realities according to those visionary insights. i did survive my ‘night at the museum,’ but not as the same person” (35). battersby, david. “the comic book of urizen.” 36-41. a brief reflection on and an excerpt from battersby’s comic-book adaptation of the book of urizen. riordan, john. “god at the window panel.” 42-45. an excerpt, focused on young blake’s experience of god at the window, from riordan’s graphic novel los, a life of blake. pritchard, stephen. “omegod” and “pain threshold.” 46. poems. hemmings, richard. “likeness in spirit: for william blake.” 46-47. a poem and artwork. gopalkrishnan, carl, juliette scott, and marica furlan. “‘eternity is in love with the productions of time.’” 48-53. “a performance art photography project which re-imagines blake’s god of creativity as a female god in love with all diverse sexualities and genders” (48). riordan, john. “morton in hell.” 54-59. an interview with timothy morton. whittaker, jason. “adam was a druid: william blake and false visions of god.” 60-65. on blake’s association of druids with biblical patriarchs (and especially abraham) and whittaker’s own experiences with nobodaddy, satan, and urizen in his own religious journey. rogers, annise. “‘i am god from eternity to eternity’: urizen’s self-delusional godhood?” 66-67. in urizen, “blake is trying, and mostly failing, to show his audience that they have been worshipping the god of the fallen world, that is urizen who is satan, and more than that, as a people they have been doing this for centuries” (66). collier, brian. “‘the lamb,’ revolution and the divine.” 68-70. “here, in this apparently inoffensive little poem, the world is not only ‘turned upside down’ but, more importantly, all degree is abolished. if all share the divine nature within them then none may hold a higher place in the world than any other” (70). millington, m. j., with artwork by tamsin rosewell. “what dread hand?” 71. a poem. vernon, mark. “‘enemies of the human race’: blake against the deists, then and now.” 72-77. “our flaws are gifts in disguise because they are the means of connection with the true source of what is perfect: god” (77). tebourski, inés. “the signs of islam in william blake’s illuminated works.” 78-79. “blake was influenced by the qur’an’s narratives and prophet muhammad’s sayings which manifest in one way or another in his illuminated poetry” (78). marsh, george. “is innocence emptiness?” 80-82. “as a zen buddhist i recognise in [there is no natural religion] the fundamental visionary insight of buddhism” (80). mccord, jim. “god judging adam.” 83. a poem. wright, jason. “blake and prophecy: a participatory god.” 84-89. an overview of his book blake’s job: adventures in becoming. valentine, lucy. “vessel of god.” 90-93. on the vessel of god, which is “the final piece in a multimedia project i released in december 2023, called vault of heaven. the project started as a series of collages contemplating the swedenborgian idea of angels having ancillary roles in the heavenly spheres; making them a practical presence within an abstract and infinite landscape” (91). volpone, annalisa. “the pregnant mind and divine inspiration.” 94-96. on the traditions shaping blake’s concept of the birth of the mind. mugleston, charles. “imn amun amon ra.” 97. a poem or mantra. davies, keith g. “william blake vs. richard dawkins and the god delusion.” 98-101. eagles, diane. “god is light.” 102-05. “god is light is a decorated ceramic chamberstick informed by the etchings and poems of william blake, bringing into being a visual correspondence, with candlelight representing the light of god.” maberly, james. “crossing the rubicon.” 106-07. “thus the seeds of beulah for some are here and growing, whilst the urizenic leadership across the world is trying its best to reassert itself with shows of power and destabilisation, once more seeking to instill fear into a world it wishes to control” (106). sklar, susanne. “the peace of jerusalem.” 108-13. “blake would weep at the destruction now eviscerating the holy land, the slaughter of thousands of innocents” (108). hristova, rumyana. “characteristics of god the creator in blake’s poetry and art.” 114-17. “because for blake jesus is ‘the greatest man’ (e 43) we have the artist’s reassurance that if we follow his ultimate architect, we can become the architects of our own divine reality, here and now, and uncover the true god who dwells within us” (117). harding, george. “what does god look like? ” 118-19. on blake and the artist’s series of paintings what does god look like? rubel, william. “critical mass.” 120-27. excerpts from different books and creative, visionary reactions. thompson, paul. “a streak of tygers.” 128-29. on “the tyger” and thompson’s and terrie reddish’s designs inspired by it. montague, jane. “art is the tree of life.” 130. on her art inspired by blake. reviews tsai, li hui. “blake’s universe and runge’s cosmos.” 132-33. a review of the exhibition william blake’s universe at the fitzwilliam museum, cambridge. “overall, the exhibition … was a must-see for it gave a profound and immersive experience that captivated the senses and stimulated the intellect” (133). erle, sibylle. “blake in hamburg.” 134-36. a review of the exhibition william blakes universum at the hamburger kunsthalle. wilson, andy. “retipped arrows of desire.” 137. a review of timothy morton, hell: in search of a christian ecology. “it has been a long time since i read a book with blake at its heart that was so authentically blakean in terms of its passionate and indignant righteousness, but what strikes me most is just how well it augurs, and how appropriate it seems, that this work, the most radical invocation of blake for a generation, should arise in the course of its author’s deep engagement with the sacred, and their finding god.” pritchard, stephen. “job: descent and renewal.” 138-39. a review of jason wright, blake’s job: adventures in becoming. “in this excellent book, wright confirms blake’s belief that we can go beyond the boundaries of our poorly-constructed, misconstrued sense of self into the limitless possibilities of becoming” (139). valentine, lucy. “vessel of god.” see vala. vernon, mark. “‘enemies of the human race’: blake against the deists, then and now.” see vala. viscomi, joseph. william blake’s printed paintings: methods, origins, meanings. london: paul mellon centre for studies in british art, 2021. <blake (2022)> reviews leveton, jacob henry. wordsworth circle 54.4 (2023): 476-80. whitson, roger. “toward an archaeology of seeing blake by technical means.” european romantic review 35.3 (2024): 563-71. volobuev, nikita. “‘bleyk-sonata’ dlya fortepiano dmitriya smirnova: kontseptual'no-dramaturgicheskaya traktovka zhanra sonaty-poemy [‘blake sonata’ for piano by dmitrii smirnov: conceptual and dramaturgical interpretation of the sonata-poem genre].” arte 4 (2024): 76-89. in russian (abstract in russian and english). “the purpose of the article is to identify the features of the implementation of the artistic concept in the ‘blake sonata’ (2008) by d. n. smirnov. … the composition of two contrasting parts, striving to merge into a single form, draws two polar ‘images of time’: pulsating ‘vector time’ and frozen ‘circular time’ of eternity. … thanks to a careful selection of means, d. smirnov finds an original way to achieve a new integrity of cultural consciousness” (abstract). volpone, annalisa. “‘from out the portals of my brain’: william blake’s partus mentis and imaginative regeneration.” humanities 13.4 (2024): 13 pp. “the article examines various instances of mental impregnation and parturition in william blake’s works, specifically through urizen, los, enitharmon, and the nameless shadowy female” (2). volpone, annalisa. “the pregnant mind and divine inspiration.” see vala. w walker, luke. “‘relationships of ownership / they whisper in the wings’: bob dylan and william blake.” see global blake in part v. wanderlinde, william weber, and maria rita drumond viana. “o diabo em o casamento do céu e do inferno de william blake: confluências com a recepção do satã de paraíso perdido no século xviii [the devil in william blake’s the marriage of heaven and hell: confluences with the reception of paradise lost’s satan in the eighteenth century].” anuário de literatura 29 (2024): 1-21. in portuguese (abstract in portuguese and english). “this article aims to analyze how the devil is depicted in the marriage of heaven and hell (1790), written by english writer william blake, mainly by comparing it with readings of the character satan, from john milton’s paradise lost (1667)” (abstract). wang, yilin. “the revelation of social reality in the poetry of william blake.” bcp: education and psychology 7 (2022): 392-99. “my goal in this paper is to analyze the social reality reflected by blake’s poetry from the background of his life and historical context, to reveal the suffering life of the toiling masses and the hypocrisy of capitalist politicians, and the darkness of the church power” (393). watanabe, hideki. “eishi ni okeru shudai teijion bunsan (hypogram) saiko: herrick to wordsworth, shakespeare to blake no hikaku kara [hypogram in english poetry reconsidered: through comparison of herrick, wordsworth, shakespeare and blake].” gengo bunka kyodo kenkyu project, 2023 [cultural formation studies, 2023] (2024): 15-23. in japanese. “the tyger” and “the lamb” are phonetically analyzed in the discussion of the effects of alliteration, rhyme, and hypogram. westbrook, kate, and mike westbrook. “poem and ‘hang fire.’” see vala. whitehead, angus. “‘my fingers emit sparks of fire’: william blake, letter writer.” see crosby and mcquail. whitson, roger. “reassembling visionary physics: donald ault, bruno latour, and william blake’s mathematical scenographies.” see global blake in part v. whitson, roger. “toward an archaeology of seeing blake by technical means.” rev. essay on joseph viscomi, william blake’s printed paintings: methods, origins, meanings. see viscomi. whittaker, jason. “adam was a druid: william blake and false visions of god.” see vala. whittaker, jason. “‘by the voice of the servant of the lord’: blake’s new jerusalem and swedenborgianism in the work of sheila kaye-smith.” see crosby and mcquail. whittaker, jason. jerusalem: blake, parry, and the fight for englishness. oxford: oxford university press, 2022. <blake (2023, 2024)> reviews leporati, matthew. european romantic review 35.3 (2024): 571-76. with joseph fletcher, william blake as natural philosopher, 1788–​1795. “whittaker succeeds admirably in his goal of narrating the history of ‘jerusalem’ and showing how the hymn became a meeting ground of ‘conflicting notions’ of englishness” (573). marks, rebecca. romanticism 30.1 (2024): 103-05. whittaker, jason. “mapping hell: alasdair gray and william blake.” see global blake in part v. whittaker, jason. rev. of andrew m. cooper, a bastard kind of reasoning: william blake and geometry. see global blake in part v. whittaker, jason. rev. of david bindman and esther chadwick, eds., william blake’s universe. see global blake in part v (and also the podcast review with whittaker et al. at global blake). whittaker, jason. rev. of matthew leporati, romantic epics and the mission of empire. see blake 58.2. wilson, andy. rev. of david bindman and esther chadwick, eds., william blake’s universe. see bindman and chadwick. wilson, andy. rev. of timothy morton, hell: in search of a christian ecology. see vala. wolff, tristram. “voices of the ground: blake’s language in deep time.” against the uprooted word: giving language time in transatlantic romanticism. stanford: stanford university press, 2022. <blake (2023, 2024)> review lindstrom, eric. wordsworth circle 54.4 (2023): 480-85. worrall, david. rev. of matthew mauger, william blake and the visionary law: prophecy, legislation and constitution. see blake 58.2. worrall, david. william blake’s visions: art, hallucinations, synaesthesia. cham: palgrave macmillan-springer nature, 2024. isbn: 9783031532535. author talk worrall, david. “william blake’s visions.” see global blake in part v. wright, jason. “blake and prophecy: a participatory god.” see vala. wright, jason. blake’s job: adventures in becoming. abingdon: routledge, 2023. <blake (2024)> author talk wright, jason. “blake’s illustrations for the book of job: a healing journey.” see blake society in part v. reviews erle, sibylle. see global blake in part v. pritchard, stephen. see vala. wroe, nicholas. rev. of david bindman and esther chadwick, eds., william blake’s universe. see bindman and chadwick. z zhao, hui. “la naissance d’une œuvre ouverte: l’analyse de jérusalem de william blake à travers une heuristique du montage [the birth of an open work: analyzing william blake’s jerusalem through a heuristic of montage].” phd diss., école pratique des hautes études, 2023. in french. division ii: william blake’s circle banks, thomas (1735–​1805) sculptor price, dorothy, et al. entangled pasts, 1768–​now: art, colonialism and change. see price et al. under cultures and technologies of display and exhibition. barry, james (1741–1806) history painter chadwick, esther. “barry’s contemporaneity.” the radical print: art and politics in late eighteenth-century britain. london: paul mellon centre for studies in british art, 2024. isbn: 9781913107437. 9-49. on barry’s prints of the 1770s, especially “the phoenix, or the resurrection of freedom” (1776), and his use of aquatint. parla, merve. “masterpiece story: king lear weeping over the dead body of cordelia by james barry.” dailyart magazine (28 july 2024). an appreciation. bartolozzi, francesco (1727–​1815) engraver blessin, joseph. “vegetable pornography: the ‘moral’ (scientific) debate surrounding francesco bartolozzi’s ‘stipple gardens’ and william blake’s ‘vegetable earth’ in john gabriel stedman’s surinam travelogue.” see blessin in division i, part vi. basire, james, sr. (1730–​1802) engraver, blake’s master crosby, mark. “‘unentangled in the intricate windings of modern practice’: william blake’s apprentice copperplates and engravings.” see blake 58.3 in division i, part vi. blair, robert (1699–​1746) poet metcalf, james. “‘this ado in earthing up a carcase’: robert blair’s the grave (1743) as eighteenth-century churchyard georgic.” eighteenth-century studies 57.2 (2024): 155-73. one mention of blake in the footnotes. boehme, jacob [jakob böhme] (1575–1624) mystic muratori, cecilia. “‘michael angelo could not have done better’: dionysius andreas freher and the visual transmission of german mysticism in eighteenth-century england.” see bindman and chadwick in division i, part vi. zuber, mike a. “jacob boehme’s spiritual alchemy of rebirth.” spiritual alchemy: from jacob boehme to mary ann atwood. oxford: oxford university press, 2021. isbn: 9780190073046. 48-68. “after briefly delineating the place of alchemy in aurora, this chapter focuses on the spiritual alchemy of rebirth boehme developed in works composed from 1619 to 1622” (48). cosway, maria (1760–1838) painter, acquaintance of blake balen, anya. “maria hadfield cosway—​a tale of art, love and diplomacy.” medium (28 mar. 2024). a biographical sketch. “final known work of maria cosway given to nelson-atkins.” nelson-atkins museum of art (8 mar. 2024). notes the donation of a religious allegory on the death of a young woman. holowchak, m. andrew. thomas jefferson and maria cosway: a gordian love affair: complete correspondence with critical commentary. wilmington, de: vernon press, 2024. isbn: 9781648898631. gives the correspondence (including english translations) and historical contextualization. “our ‘faerie queene’ returns from tate.” chatsworth (18 nov. 2024). on the return of the portrait of georgiana as cynthia from spenser’s “faerie queene” to the chatsworth collection, with some description of the painting’s restoration. rabier, amandine, ed. maria cosway, 1760–​1838: l’itinéraire singulier d’une artiste/​a strada ecceziunale di un’artista. gent: snoeck, 2024. isbn: 9789461619051. in french (also available in english). the catalogue for the exhibition held at the musée pascal paoli/​museu pasquale paoli, merusaglia, corsica, 18 may–​30 oct. 2024. spies-gans, paris a. “maria hadfield cosway’s ‘genius’ for print: a didactic, commercial, and professional path.” see martinez and roman under cultures and technologies of display and exhibition. vitek, donna, and m. andrew holowchak. “valentine’s day show: thomas jefferson and maria cosway: rtj #15.” the real thomas jefferson (12 feb. 2024). a podcast episode discussing jefferson’s relationship with cosway. cosway, richard (1742–1821) miniaturist, acquaintance of blake sandover, cherry. “let us go forward: the soul, spiritualism, and the funerary commemoration of richard cosway, dante gabriel rossetti, and evelyn de morgan.” the persistence of the soul in literature, art and politics. ed. delphine louis-dimitrov and estelle murail. cham: palgrave macmillan-springer nature, 2024. isbn: 9783031409332. 137-54. cowper, william (1731–1800) poet, hymnist harris, alexandra. “desolate paradise: william cowper at eartham, charlotte smith on the hills.” see harris under hayley. stokes, christopher. “‘the solitary saint walks forth to meditate at even-tide’: evangelical prayer and interiority in william cowper.” romantic prayer: reinventing the poetics of devotion, 1773–​1832. oxford: oxford university press, 2021. 39-67. “anxious attempts to turn inwards towards this deep root of identity involve cowper in a traumatic experience of self-enquiry as self-division” (41). review barbeau, jeffrey w. wordsworth circle 55.3 (2024): 300-04. townsend, chris. “poetic injustice: blank-verse abolitionism and cowper’s the task.” european romantic review 35.3 (2024): 495-510. “taking as a case study william cowper’s the task of 1785—​the poem of cowper’s that gained him the attention of the society for effecting the abolition of the slave trade in 1787—​this essay considers some of the reasons why heroic couplets came to be treated with suspicion by politicized poets at the end of the eighteenth century, and thinks through some of the affordances of blank verse, in particular, that marked it out as attractive to abolitionists like cowper” (abstract). cromek, robert hartley (1770–1812) entrepreneur, engraver, friend-enemy of blake mckeever, gerard lee. “of poets, mermaids and brownies.” regional romanticism: literature and southwest scotland, c. 1770–​1830. cham: palgrave macmillan-springer nature, 2024. isbn: 9783031613241. 93-136. reads “cunningham’s contributions to r. h. cromek’s 1810 remains of nithsdale and galloway song” (42). cultures and technologies of display and exhibition avery-quash, susanna, and christian huemer, eds. london and the emergence of a european art market, 1780–​1820. los angeles: getty research institute, 2019. murgia, camilla. “from private to national: exhibiting fine arts in london around 1800.” 105-17. blake is mentioned on 113. alexander, david. “the evolution of the print market and its impact on the art market, 1780–​1820.” 118-30. roworth, wendy wassyng. “angelica kauffman: the acquisition and dispersal of an artist’s collection, 1782–​1825.” 131-44. dostal, alexandra zoë. “rope, linen, thread: gender, labor, and the textile industry in eighteenth-century british art.” phd diss., columbia university, 2024. “the second chapter, ‘linen,’ is about the structure, materiality and hidden histories embedded in linen painting canvas. first, by comparing linen weaves, thread counts, stamps, and fiber content, i demonstrate the material connections between the world of coarse linen goods and the textile supports of oil paintings. i then argue that the texture of canvas was crucial to the ‘unfinished’ aesthetic of portraiture that became fashionable in the late eighteenth century and attend to the racialized and gendered discourses intrinsic to this painting style” (abstract). lyons, hannah. “‘exercising the art as a trade’: professional women printmakers in england, c. 1750–​c. 1850.” phd diss., birkbeck, university of london, 2022. considers maria cosway, angelica kauffman, and caroline watson, among others. martinez, cristina s., and cynthia e. roman, eds. female printmakers, printsellers, and print publishers in the eighteenth century: the imprint of women, c. 1700–​1830. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2024. isbn: 9781108844772. the most relevant chapters are: spies-gans, paris a. “maria hadfield cosway’s ‘genius’ for print: a didactic, commercial, and professional path.” 25-39. mcpherson, heather. “caroline watson and the theatre of printmaking.” 40-55. schmid, f. carlo. “‘talent and untiring diligence’: the print legacy of angelika kauffmann, marie ellenrieder, and maria katharina prestel.” 56-74. lyons, hannah. “living ‘in the bosom of a numerous and worthy family’: women printmakers learning to engrave in late eighteenth-century london.” 75-90. torbert, amy. “a changing industry: women publishing and selling prints in london, 1740–​1800.” 174-88. price, dorothy, et al. entangled pasts, 1768–​now: art, colonialism and change. london: royal academy of arts, 2024. the catalogue for the exhibition at the royal academy of arts, london, 3 feb.–​28 apr. 2024. an exhibition on the legacies of racism and colonialism, including works by joshua reynolds, thomas stothard, thomas banks, benjamin west, and william woollett, and portraits of olaudah equiano and ignatius sancho. there are very slight references to blake and richard cosway. especially relevant chapters are: chadwick, esther. “‘all beautiful in woe’: the royal academy and enslavement, 1768–​1840.” 18-27. gilroy-ware, cora. “repairing the sable venus.” 28-37. partly on stothard. cunningham, allan (1784–1842) biographer mckeever, gerard lee. “of poets, mermaids and brownies.” see mckeever under cromek. darwin, erasmus (1731–1802) scientist, poet acosta, rebeca araya. “expanding comparative views: erasmus darwin’s the botanic garden (1789–​1791) and the temple of nature (1803).” compiling texts in eighteenth-century britain: mediating the scottish enlightenment. cham: palgrave macmillan-springer nature, 2024. isbn: 9783031638350. 207-74. some references to fuseli’s designs but not blake’s engravings. bailes, melissa. regenerating romanticism: botany, sensibility, and originality in british literature, 1750–​1830. charlottesville: university of virginia press, 2023. <blake (2024)> review dushane, allison. wordsworth circle 55.3 (2024): 314-18. wang, fuson. “darwin’s evolutionary metaphor.” the smallpox report: vaccination and the romantic illness narrative. toronto: university of toronto press, 2023. <blake (2024)> review hegele, arden. wordsworth circle 55.3 (2024): 329-33. flaxman, john (1755–1826) sculptor, friend of blake catalogue: “john flaxman.” see bindman and chadwick in division i, part vi. riccardi, silvia. “dal colosso al frammento: fuseli, flaxman, blake e i giganti di botticelli (if. xxxi-xxxii).” see riccardi, “dal colosso al frammento,” in division i, part vi. fuseli, henry [johann heinrich füssli] (1741–1825) painter, friend of blake acosta, rebeca araya. “expanding comparative views: erasmus darwin’s the botanic garden (1789–​1791) and the temple of nature (1803).” see acosta under darwin. ayres, brenda. becoming wollstonecraft: the interconnection of her life and works. see ayres, becoming, under wollstonecraft. carter, sarah. “the ambiguities of translation: fuseli, blake, and the making of aphorisms on man.” see blake 58.2 in division i, part vi. catalogue: “blake and fuseli.” see bindman and chadwick in division i, part vi. evseeva, tat'yana. “‘glaza moi byli zakryty …’: eskhatologicheskie syuzhety v tvorchestve filippa de louterburga, ioganna genrikha fyussli, uil'yama bleyka i dzhona martina. put' k simvolizmu [‘my eyes were closed …’: the eschatological theme on the creativity by philip de loutherbourg, henry fuseli, william blake, and john martin. the way to symbolism].” see evseeva in division i, part vi. marks, rebecca. “‘organs of embodied sentiment’: contextualising william blake’s sistine studies, c. 1770–​1790.” see marks, “organs,” in division i, part vi. o’rourke, stephanie. “fuseli’s physiognomic impressions.” art, science, and the body in early romanticism. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2022. <blake (2024)> review thomas, sophie. wordsworth circle 54.4 (2023): 548-53. riccardi, silvia. “dal colosso al frammento: fuseli, flaxman, blake e i giganti di botticelli (if. xxxi-xxxii).” see riccardi, “dal colosso al frammento,” in division i, part vi. riccardi, silvia. “‘the true terrors of dante’: l ’inferno di henry fuseli.” dante in der romanischen welt. ed. thomas klinkert and patricia oster-stierle. paderborn: brill fink, 2024. 93-113. in italian. hayley, william (1745–​1820) man of letters, patron of blake crosby, mark. “‘absorbed by the poets’: the sources and hanging arrangement for blake’s eighteen heads of poets.” see william blake archive in division i, part v. harris, alexandra. “desolate paradise: william cowper at eartham, charlotte smith on the hills.” the rising down: lives in a sussex landscape. london: faber, 2024. isbn: 9780571350520. 195-212. on their relationship to hayley. hope, thomas (1769–​1831) collector, connoisseur van keuren, frances, and kristen miller zohn. “‘some useful hints for improving the elegance and dignity of her attire’: thomas hope and henry moses, greek vases and neoclassical fashion.” international journal of the classical tradition 29.4 (2022): 390-429. “author, artist, designer and collector thomas hope (1769–​1831) published his influential costume of the ancients in 1809 and in an enlarged version in 1812. this article identifies archaeological sources for figures in the plates of costume of the ancients and seeks to explain why hope altered his sources by adding patterns from greek vases” (abstract). johnson, joseph (1738–1809) bookseller, employer of blake ayres, brenda. becoming wollstonecraft: the interconnection of her life and works. see ayres, becoming, under wollstonecraft. hay, daisy. dinner with joseph johnson: books and friendship in a revolutionary age. princeton: princeton university press, 2022. <blake (2023, 2024)> review levy, michelle. eighteenth-century studies 58.1 (2024): 125-27. kauffman, angelica [angelika kauffmann] (1741–​1807) painter cypess, rebecca. “musical improvisation and poetic painting in the salon of angelica kauffman.” women and musical salons in the enlightenment. chicago: university of chicago press, 2022. isbn: 9780226817910. 233-78. “musical performance, and especially the fleeting art of sung poetic improvisation, destabilized the permanence of painting, rendering the total artistic experience of kauffman’s salon more temporal—​more delicate and fleeting—​than the visual dimension alone would suggest” (238). harmeyer, rachel. “the education of daughters: embroidered pictures after angelica kauffman.” the enlightened mind: education in the long eighteenth century. ed. amanda strasik. wilmington, de: vernon press, 2022. isbn: 9781648895357. 43-66. “this chapter will provide a close study of amateur embroidered pictures made after kauffman’s the parting of hector and andromache, 1768 (saltram house, national trust) and will argue that makers of embroidered pictures emulating history paintings responded to debates on women’s education and sought to elevate the genre of needlework” (44). roworth, wendy wassyng. “an artist’s bedrooms: angelica kauffman in london and rome.” intimate interiors: sex, politics, and material culture in the eighteenth-century bedroom and boudoir. ed. tara zanardi and christopher m. s. johns. london: bloomsbury, 2023. isbn: 9781350277625. 123-42. about kauffman’s bedrooms as places of display for clients. roworth, wendy wassyng. “angelica kauffman: the acquisition and dispersal of an artist’s collection, 1782–​1825.” see avery-quash and huemer under cultures and technologies of display and exhibition. schmid, f. carlo. “‘talent and untiring diligence’: the print legacy of angelika kauffmann, marie ellenrieder, and maria katharina prestel.” see martinez and roman under cultures and technologies of display and exhibition. lavater, johann caspar (1741–​1801) physiognomist, friend of fuseli carter, sarah. “the ambiguities of translation: fuseli, blake, and the making of aphorisms on man.” see blake 58.2 in division i, part vi. stengel, friedemann. enlightenment all the way to heaven: emanuel swedenborg in the context of eighteenth-century theology and philosophy. see stengel under swedenborg. lowth, robert (1710–87) bible scholar prickett, stephen. “the hebrew bible and romantic criticism: robert lowth and english poetics.” enlightenment to romanticism. ed. stephen prickett with elisabeth jay. the bible and western christian literature: books and the book, vol. 3. london: t&t clark, 2024. isbn: 9780567681973. 21-39. on lowth’s influence. raz, yosefa. “seraphic choirs and stuttering prophets: symmetry, disorder, and the invention of the literary bible.” the poetics of prophecy: modern afterlives of a biblical tradition. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2024. isbn: 9781009366274. 27-55. “lowth’s analysis of the forms and style of hebrew poetry replaced the religious authority of the biblical text with an aesthetic authority” (28). the chapter’s conclusion is titled “coda: blake and isaiah 6.” mora, josé joaquín de (1783–1864) polymath, politician paolini, daniela, and mario rucavado rojas. “del redentor al demiurgo: las ilustraciones de william blake vistas a través de las meditaciones poéticas de josé joaquín de mora.” see paolini and rojas in division i, part vi. morganwg, iolo [edward williams] (1747–1826) welsh poet, antiquarian shestakova, nadezhda. “izobretaya proshloe: yolo morganug i ego neodruidicheskoe uchenie [inventing the past: iolo morganwg and his neo-druidic doctrine].” izvestiya uralskogo federalnogo universiteta. seriya 2: gumanitarnye nauki [ural federal university journal. series 2: humanities and arts] 26.2 (2024): 74-89. in russian (abstract in russian and english). “this article examines the historical mythmaking of the multifaceted welsh intellectual edward williams and his bardo-druidic doctrine known as ‘bardism’ and developed by him based on the ideas of the main ancient religions (christianity, judaism, buddhism, hinduism, etc.)” (abstract). mortimer, john hamilton (1740–79) painter chadwick, esther. “mortimer’s caprice.” the radical print: art and politics in late eighteenth-century britain. london: paul mellon centre for studies in british art, 2024. isbn: 9781913107437. 51-89. on mortimer’s fifteen etchings dedicated to sir joshua reynolds (1778), the influence of salvator rosa, and mortimer’s use of banditti figures. “mortimer’s prints effected the paradoxical manoeuvre of suggesting that it is precisely through ‘caprice’ that the artist asserts his freedom, and thus secures for his art a critical function fit for his age” (89). reynolds, joshua (1723–​92) painter potter, elizabeth. “‘on every one of these books i wrote my opinions’: re-assessing blake’s marginalia.” see crosby and mcquail in division i, part vi. robinson, henry crabb (1775–​1867) writer vigus, james. “henry crabb robinson, william blake and anglo-german cultural relations.” see bindman and chadwick in division i, part vi. royal academy of arts price, dorothy, et al. entangled pasts, 1768–​now: art, colonialism and change. see price et al. under cultures and technologies of display and exhibition. stedman, john gabriel (1744–97) soldier, writer, friend of blake blessin, joseph. “vegetable pornography: the ‘moral’ (scientific) debate surrounding francesco bartolozzi’s ‘stipple gardens’ and william blake’s ‘vegetable earth’ in john gabriel stedman’s surinam travelogue.” see blessin in division i, part vi. hardesty, jared ross. the suriname writings of john gabriel stedman. indianapolis: hackett, 2024. isbn: 9781647921545. an edition of stedman’s surinam diary, with excerpts of the published narrative (1796) for comparison. blake is mentioned briefly (xxxv), and “a coromantyn free negro, or ranger, armed” and “europe supported by africa and america” are among the illustrations reproduced. ritchie, caroline anjali. “‘symbols of embodied agency’: the reception of william blake’s engravings for john gabriel stedman’s narrative (1796) in contemporary art and visual culture.” see blake 58.3 in division i, part vi. stothard, thomas (1755–1834) painter, illustrator, friend-enemy of blake gilroy-ware, cora. “repairing the sable venus.” see price et al. under cultures and technologies of display and exhibition. swedenborg, emanuel (1688–1772) mystic dmitriev, n. v., and vasily spirin. “otnoshenie immanuila kanta k religiozno-misticheskomu ucheniyu emmanuila svedenborga [immanuel kant’s attitude to the religious and mystical teaching of emanuel swedenborg].” aktual'nye voprosy tserkovnogo nauchnogo diskursa: istoriya, sovremennost', perspektivy. sbornik materialov vserossiyskoy studencheskoy nauchnoy konferentsii [current issues of church scientific discourse: history, modernity, prospects. collection of materials of the all-russian student scientific conference]. nizhny novgorod: nizhny novgorod theological seminary, 2024. 141-45. in russian (abstract in russian and english). martin, leah d. “music in emanuel swedenborg’s theology: revitalizing new church hymnody.” dma diss., university of notre dame, 2024. includes a discussion of music and hymnology in swedenborg and the early new jerusalem church (chapters 2-4). misyurov, nikolai. “gnosticheskie kontsepty pisaniy e. svedenborga [gnostic conceptions of e. swedenborg’s writings].” vestnik omskogo universiteta [herald of omsk university] 29.3 (2024): 50-58. in russian (abstract in russian and english). stengel, friedemann. enlightenment all the way to heaven: emanuel swedenborg in the context of eighteenth-century theology and philosophy. trans. suzanne schwarz zuber. foreword by james f. lawrence. west chester, pa: swedenborg foundation, 2023. isbn: 9780877853558. “an english translation of friedemann stengel’s 2009 german habilitation (qualifying) thesis, which was published by mohr siebeck tübingen in 2011, aufklärung bis zum himmel: emanuel swedenborg im kontext der theologie und philosophie des 18 jahrhunderts” (abstract in worldcat). a massive (922-page) study of swedenborg’s life and career as both a scientist and a visionary theologian with regard to the context of the times. while there is no discussion of blake, swedenborg’s relationship to moravianism and methodism is discussed, as is his influence on lavater. review dunér, david. journal for eighteenth-century studies 47.4 (2024): 465-67. watson, caroline (1761?–1814) engraver lyons, hannah. “‘exercising the art as a trade’: professional women printmakers in england, c. 1750–​c. 1850.” see lyons under cultures and technologies of display and exhibition. mcpherson, heather. “caroline watson and the theatre of printmaking.” see martinez and roman under cultures and technologies of display and exhibition. wollstonecraft, mary (1759–97) author, radical, known in blake’s circle ayres, brenda. becoming wollstonecraft: the interconnection of her life and works. new york: routledge, 2024. isbn: 9781032649399. a biography with nominal references to blake and his illustrations but with many more to henry fuseli and joseph johnson. ayres, brenda. wollstonecraft and religion. london: anthem press, 2024. isbn: 9781839990199. batterbee, megan. “re-establishing identity through testimony: the rape survival narratives of mary hays’s the victim of prejudice (1799) and mary wollstonecraft’s maria, or the wrongs of woman (1798).” consent: legacies, representations, and frameworks for the future. ed. sophie franklin et al. abingdon: routledge, 2024. isbn: 9781032429625. 14 pp. “consent within the romantic relationships entered into by the heroines of the victim of prejudice and maria, or the wrongs of woman deserves greater scrutiny because it depicts the shift in loyalty from one patriarchal figure to another: from guardian to lover, blood ties to marital allegiance. the abuses within this transition of power concern both the authors and modern consent scholars alike.” bergoffen, debra. “on becoming human and being humane: human rights, women’s rights, species rights.” religions 15.7 (2024): 14 pp. “this essay focuses on the nexus of vulnerability and rights. it argues that in transforming vulnerability from a stigma that alienated women from their humanity to the signature of human dignity, women bridged the gap between the liberatory promise of human rights and its exploitative patriarchal politics. it finds that the ideas of mary wollstonecraft, simone de beauvoir, drucilla cornell, and jean-luc nancy were/​are crucial to this transformed idea of dignity” (abstract). dumler-winckler, emily. modern virtue: mary wollstonecraft and a tradition of dissent. oxford: oxford university press, 2022. <blake (2023, 2024)> reviews attia, miriam. journal of religion 104.4 (2024): 560-61. dunn, shannon. theology today 81.2 (2024): 158-59. galbraith, eilidh. studies in christian ethics 37.1 (2024): 143-45. gallagher, megan. politics and gender 20.1 (2024): 264-66. moon, catherine. journal of moral theology 13.2 (2024): 157-58. dumler-winckler, emily. “reproductive justice: mary wollstonecraft on women’s ‘rights against domination’ for the ‘cause of virtue.’” political theology (2024): 21 pp. “the article challenges” “anachronistic and revisionist histories” of wollstonecraft that “have sought to reclaim the label ‘feminist’ by enlisting wollstonecraft in the contemporary antiabortion, anticontraception, and heterosexual family-centered cause” (abstract). hobday, alexander. “‘the great distinction of our nature’: imagination and commerce in the later wollstonecraft.” romanticism 30.3 (2024): 236-48. “this article elucidates a central but underexplored theme in wollstonecraft’s later writing: the distinction between the imagination and commerce” (abstract). hunt, eileen m., ed. portraits of wollstonecraft: the making of a feminist icon, 1785 to 2020. london: bloomsbury academic, 2023. <blake (2024)> review wolfson, susan j. wordsworth circle 54.4 (2023): 561-67. “what a brilliant idea for a book!” (561). kidd, chelsea. “‘i could almost wish for the madman’s happiness’: escape, escapism, and madness in wollstonecraft’s novels.” european romantic review 35.2 (2024): 213-33. reading “mary, a fiction (1788) and the wrongs of woman, or maria (1798),” “i propose a feminist perspective on women’s insanity as a form of escape and a reading of this madness as an assertion of agency” (abstract). king, elizabeth. “anti-gothic gothic animals in mary wollstonecraft’s maria (1798).” eighteenth-century life 48.3 (2024): 101-19. “wollstonecraft employs gothic iconography while simultaneously dismissing gothic sensationalism for its failure to capture women’s real-world subjugation; thus, an ‘anti-gothic gothic’ perspective characterizes her depiction of the dark realities of enlightenment society. the animals that feature in maria are likewise anti-gothic gothic animals” (abstract). kirkley, laura. mary wollstonecraft: cosmopolitan. edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2022. review packham, catherine. eighteenth-century fiction 36.4 (2024): 675-77. makarova, elena. “sotrudnichestvo meri uolstonkraft v zhurnale ‘analytical review’ kak etap ee ideynogo formirovaniya [mary wollstonecraft’s collaboration in the analytical review as a stage in her ideological formation].” istoricheskiy opyt mirovykh tsivilizatsiy i rossiya. materialy xii mezhdunarodnoy nauchno-prakticheskoy konferentsii [historical experience of world civilizations and russia. proceedings of the xii international scientific and practical conference]. vladimir: vladimir state university, 2024. 152-63. in russian (abstract in russian and english). packham, catherine. mary wollstonecraft and political economy: the feminist critique of commercial modernity. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2024. isbn: 9781009395847. reviews fontana, biancamaria. european journal of the history of economic thought 32.1 (2025): 160-61. santori, paolo. journal of the history of economic thought 47.1 (2025): 129-31. sigler, david. “the necrophilia of wollstonecraft’s ‘the cave of fancy.’” romantic women’s writing and sexual transgression. ed. kathryn ready and david sigler. edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2024. isbn: 9781399507622. weiss, deborah. “madness and maria: the wrongs of woman and patriarchal control.” women and madness in the early romantic novel: injured minds, ruined lives. manchester: manchester university press, 2024. isbn: 9781526175717. wolfson, susan j. on mary wollstonecraft’s “a vindication of the rights of woman”: the first of a new genus. new york: columbia university press, 2023. <blake (2024)> review neiman, elizabeth. european romantic review 35.1 (2024): 170-75. yücel, uğur eylül. “the place of animals in wollstonecraft’s early educational writings.” dialogue: canadian philosophical review/​revue canadienne de philosophie (2024): 18 pp. “thomas taylor’s parody of mary wollstonecraft’s support for rights of women and humans raises a question: does his satire unwittingly propose a defence of animal rights found in wollstonecraft’s arguments?” (abstract). yuen-yuk, liz wan. “haunted beyond dreams: the gothic and enlightenment in mary wollstonecraft’s mary, a fiction.” gothic dreams and nightmares. ed. carol margaret davison. manchester: manchester university press, 2024. isbn: 9781526160621. “with its strategic portrayal of nightmares in which reality and dreams are literally and metaphorically interwoven, mary, as a prototypical gothic novel, simultaneously expresses matrimonial dissent and feminist values.” william blake and his circle: a checklist of scholarship in 2020 william blake and his circle: a checklist of scholarship in 2020 dedicated to the essential library workers, who “kept the divine vision in time of trouble” (jerusalem 44 [30].15, e 193) by wayne c. ripley works in romance languages contributed by fernando castanedo works in japanese contributed by hikari sato works in turkish contributed by hüseyin alhas works in russian and other cyrillic languages contributed by vera serdechnaia wayne c. ripley (wripley@winona.edu) is a professorresearch for “william blake and his circle” in english was conducted at the krueger library at winona state university. research for works in romance languages was conducted at the universidad de alcalá (madrid). research for japanese publications was carried out in cinii (national institute of informatics scholarly and academic information navigator) and the national diet library online catalogue, and at komaba library and general library in the university of tokyo and the national diet library. research for turkish publications was carried out at the general library at social sciences university of ankara and at i̇hsan doğramacı bilkent university library. of english at winona state university in minnesota. he is working on a project regarding blake’s broad street family, friends, and neighbors. fernando castanedo (fernando.castanedo@uah.es) teaches english at the universidad de alcalá (madrid). hikari sato (hikari@g.ecc.u-tokyo.ac.jp) is a professor of comparative literature and culture at the university of tokyo. he has been a member of the “william blake and his circle” team since summer 2003. hüseyin alhas (huseyin.alhas@asbu.edu.tr) is a research assistant in the department of english language and literature, social sciences university of ankara. he is currently working on his dissertation, which focuses on the evolution of epic heroes in the seventeenth century. vera serdechnaia (rintra@yandex.ru), candidate of philology, krasnodar (russia), is an assistant professor in the department of foreign literature and comparative cultural studies at kuban state university and a theatre critic. she is working on the theme of blake reception in russia and the former ussr. table of contents: introductory essay symbols abbreviations division i: william blake part i: blake’s writings section a: original editions, facsimiles, reprints, and translations section b: collections and selections part ii: reproductions of drawings and paintings section a: illustrations of individual authors section b: collections and selections part iv: bibliographies and catalogues section a: bibliographies section b: catalogues part v: digital resources part vi: criticism, biography, and reviews division ii: william blake’s circle barton, bernard basire, james boehme, jacob cosway, maria darwin, erasmus flaxman, john french prophets fuseli, henry hayley, william johnson, joseph kauffman, angelica morganwg, iolo murray, john nollekens, joseph opie, amelia palmer, samuel robinson, henry crabb romney, george royal academy of arts sibly, ebenezer, and manoah sibly smith, john thomas stedman, john gabriel stothard, thomas swedenborg, emanuel taylor, thomas trusler, john varley, delvalle lowry west, benjamin wollstonecraft, mary introductory essay this year, vera serdechnaia, who has collected and compiled sources in russian and other cyrillic languages, has kindly agreed to join the checklist team. as is evident below, there is much work being done on blake in languages other than english, so i thank all my collaborators in helping make the annual checklist as comprehensive as possible. as always, the annotations to entries from their respective areas are theirs. if any reader is interested in covering scholarship in languages not detailed above, please contact me. while it may be a lagging indicator, blake scholarship continued at a steady clip in 2020, despite the global pandemic. exhibitions were, of course, the major exception, as discussed in this issue by luisa calè.the release of jason whittaker’s divine images: the life and works of william blake (reaktion, 2021) was also delayed. william blake at tate britain had the good fortune to wrap up just under the wire in february 2020, and i have recorded a substantial number of new reviews and notices to complement the hundred that appeared in 2019. (as was my practice last year, i have cross-listed only those reviews by established blake scholars.) blake discoveries major blake discoveries in 2020 include a new colored copy of night thoughts (designated copy bb) and a previously unrecorded copy of maria: a novel, both described by robert n. essick; new references to blake by amelia opie and her circle, recorded by shelley king and john b. pierce; and what appears to be the freedom of the city of london admission paper for blake’s father, identifying his own father as a timber merchant, which was found by wayne c. ripley. editions, translations, and catalogues in addition to copies c and f of europe, the blake archive has now published the typeset proof copy of the french revolution and the 1793 prospectus, to the public, which advertised the illuminated books and other works. the french revolution exists only in one copy and to the public only in the transcription of the illuminated original (now lost) in alexander gilchrist’s 1863 biography. the archive also published two groups of watercolor drawings. the first set dates from 1775 to 1790 and comprises apprenticeship sketches of westminster abbey, works from the joseph series and the history of england series, two versions of pestilence, and other watercolors, like an allegory of the bible, whose content and context remain murky. the second set is the shakespeare watercolor illustrations, which were executed at various points throughout blake’s career, from his early mortimeresque illustrations to the late version of the vision of queen katharine. the shakespeare illustrations constitute what the editors of the archive describe as a “virtual group,” based on their shared subject and medium, even if blake never collected them together as such. (i would remind readers interested in shakespeare illustrations of shakespeariana, a meta-archive that was described in last year’s checklist.) in terms of print reproductions, the folio society has added to its long list of blake publications with an edition of his illustrations to the pilgrim’s progress that is based on new photography. outside of the archive, the only new and solely english “edition” of blake’s poetry is alexander s. gourlay’s “an overannotated ‘auguries of innocence,’” published in blake 54.2. (gourlay also reviews the most recent letterpress editions, peter otto’s william blake: selected works and nicholas shrimpton’s william blake: selected poems, in blake 54.1.) on the other hand, many bilingual editions and translations appeared. fernando castanedo’s bilingual edition of the pickering manuscript is the first full edition of the manuscript in spanish. it reproduces new images of the manuscript now available at the morgan library & museum’s website, and has appendices that give other editorial arrangements. castanedo’s editions of an island in the moon (revised) and the marriage of heaven and hell have both been republished, and there is a new edition of el libro de urizen, originally published in 1947. in other romance languages, castanedo records the publication of a 2010 portuguese translation of the ghost of abel by juliana steil. (in blake 54.2, steil and lawrence flores pereira reflect on translating milton into portuguese.) in his description of an italian edition of songs of innocence and of experience, castanedo distinguishes two different imprints (se and feltrinelli) that have been conflated in previous checklists. the new italian “edition” of blake, poesie scelte, is actually a comic that illustrates nine of blake’s poems. vera serdechnaia describes dmitrii smirnov’s translation into russian of blake’s shorter poems, published in 2020; the republication of sergei stepanov’s translation of selected blake works; and a ukrainian edition of selected works. hüseyin alhas records a new turkish translation of blake’s shorter poems, and an edition in english of songs that he notes is simply a reprint of the 1901 r. brimley johnson edition. exhibition catalogues noteworthy among new responses to the 2019–​20 tate britain exhibition is karen mulhallen’s correction of the catalogue’s claim that richard edwards, the publisher of night thoughts, went mad. sunil bhanot, who highlights how the tate was “built partly on the profits of slavery,” sees the exhibition as “a form of atonement,” but stephen f. eisenman, the curator of william blake and the age of aquarius at northwestern university’s block museum in 2017–​18, critiques the tate’s “liberal blake,” and, in similar terms, alan jacobs suggests that the blake presented reflected corporate sensibilities. blake scholars luisa calè, susan matthews, and hélène ibata largely celebrate the exhibition, while some reactionary writers continue to make hay of its content warning (simon) or read its acknowledgment of catherine blake’s status as an artist and printmaker as part of a supposed conspiracy that aims at the “wimminisation of art” (jane kelly). such arguments should not detract from the simple delight of one writer: “his famous illustration of his poem ‘the tyger’ is smaller than a postcard!” (woawomen urra). another exhibition to escape covid was the bard at flat time house in peckham. it was curated by chris mccabe and ran from 30 january to 8 march 2020. the exhibition paired pages from the trianon press facsimile edition of blake’s illustrations of thomas gray with work by contemporary poets responding to blake and his relevance.my thanks to luisa calè for providing the bibliographical information for the catalogue. the flat time house website has posted a review by henry whaley, without specifying where (or if) it was published elsewhere. the j. paul getty museum’s exhibition william blake: visionary was originally slated to run from 21 july to 11 october 2020, and even though the exhibition was postponed, the catalogue was published. it is dedicated to robert n. essick and praises how he “made the navigation of the deep, dark, and often mysterious waters of william blake study not just feasible but a great joy and a source of boundless, ongoing fascination” (9). essick also serves as the end point of matthew hargraves’s essay in the catalogue surveying major american blake collectors. digital resources as mentioned above, the morgan library & museum has posted new photography of the pickering manuscript, which is available at the digital edition of its 2009–​10 exhibition william blake’s world: “a new heaven is begun.” petworth house and the firestone library at princeton have blog posts on the fairie queene painting and the “may day” engraving respectively, with good digital images of the works. the allen ginsberg project continues to post transcriptions and recordings of his blake course at naropa. keri davies has a selection of new posts on his blog, index rerum, concerning geoffrey keynes’s papers and correspondence, blake and hampstead, blake and the moravians, the story of the blakes’ nudity in their garden, and a remembrance of william goldman, who died in 2020. jason whittaker’s zoamorphosis features a review of phaze theory’s concert album, a remembrance of dmitrii smirnov, and two pieces of scholarship by katharina hagen, who writes on the elements of le petit prince and on the relationship of bruce dickinson’s song “if eternity should fail” to milton. (hagen’s article on dickinson’s album the chemical wedding appears in blake 54.3.) at hell’s printing press, sarah jones has an interview with mike goode on his book romantic capabilities: blake, scott, austen, and the new messages of old media, and one with kathy maniura about the advertising campaign for the 2019–​20 tate britain exhibition. (on the tate’s use of animation to advertise blake, see ayun halliday’s comparison of the animation made by sam gainsborough for the 2019–​20 exhibition with that made by sheila graber for the 1978 exhibition.) robert rich discusses the editorial problems of representing non-english languages in the blake archive, and natasha bharucha analyzes “the sick rose.” six new tutorials on features of the blake archive were posted on youtube. as vera serdechnaia records, there is much on blake in russian on digital platforms: lectures on youtube (including two of her own); a musical album by leonid fedorov, also on youtube, that contains blake’s lyrics as translated by andrei smurov and alexander delphinov; an interview with fedorov by dmitrii lisin; an online article on blake’s influence on nobel prize winner olga tokarczuk; and a posthumously published article by dmitrii smirnov on writing music for blake’s poems. the blake society has updated its website, which offers a list of recent events held via zoom. some remain available on youtube or twitter, including marina white raven’s “the sick rose (encountering blake),” a performance piece; a book club meeting via twitter on the marriage of heaven and hell; a blake quiz bowl, entitled “blakety blake 2020”; “blake in tuebingen,” a presentation by the artist dieter loechle and the academic christoph reinfandt; and a performance by the musician harriet stubbs, whose debut album is titled heaven and hell: the doors of perception. one of the most engaging uses of digital resources during the pandemic has been roger whitson’s “william blake live,” a series of eight zoom discussions with blake scholars and participants. the sessions were sponsored by romantic circles, where they can still be viewed in the section pedagogies hangouts. moderated by whitson, each discussion focuses on a scholar’s interest in and work on blake. as was true of much of the working and learning over the past year, the sessions are particularly interesting for how they bring together the professional and personal sides of the scholars. it should also be noted that in 2017 whitson organized a video discussion on donald ault’s work and his impact with ron broglio, tof eklund, laurie taylor, and zach whalen; it too is available at romantic circles. in the same spirit, the british association for romantic studies (bars) has held zoom events that discuss major romantic figures, teaching, and other topics. as of march 2021, blake has been mentioned only sporadically. readers may also be interested in the two-part roundtable discussion “toward an anti-racist, ‘undisciplined’ romanticism” and related material, available at the blog of the keats-shelley association of america. blake scholarship tilottama rajan and joel faflak’s collection, william blake: modernity and disaster, is certainly the most appropriately named work of the year. their claim that “disaster leaves us on the verge of a prodigious retribution for being human, as if to live with disaster’s affect, the sense of being caught in and by its ineluctable sway, not knowing what history’s next step might be” (3) was sadly prophetic for the pandemic and its long list of political, environmental, and social justice crises. in the view of the editors, blake’s “modernity consists in writing from within disaster” (5), which made him attuned to the always incipient disasters in and of modernity. adopting this general framework, the essays in the collection are consistently perceptive, with a plurality focused on blake’s later poetry, jerusalem in particular. christopher bundock considers jerusalem’s depiction of judaism and anti-semitism, lily gurton-wachter examines shame and war in “london” and jerusalem, and david collings sees blake laboring against disaster in jerusalem. in chapters on other works, rajan suggests that blake’s conception of the body in the [first] book of urizen parallels that of his lambeth corpus, and this focus on bodies is found in many essays, from noah heringman’s and elizabeth effinger’s respective highlighting of “bodies of knowledge” to peter otto’s reading of vala, or the four zoas in the context of gothic fiction by positioning it alongside catherine’s painting of matthew lewis’s the monk. faflak reads milton as an “identity crisis,” and jacques khalip uses derrida to interrogate blake’s sense of the boundary between humans and animals. (on this topic, see robert hudson’s the poet and the fly.) david l . clark highlights blake’s destabilizing practices as an illustrator in his reading of pity, while steven goldsmith examines blake in the context of the new materialism. (for other new work on blake and materialism, see jonah siegel’s material inspirations and george ewane ngide’s article that reads the songs through the notion of romantic “thingliness.”) easily the major work of 2020 is sheila a. spector’s the evolution of blake’s myth, which builds on her sizeable scholarship on blake, kabbalah, and the esoteric tradition. spector provocatively challenges many key elements of the frygian consensus regarding the relationship of blake’s art and mysticism. employing the type of formulations frye rejected, she characterizes blake’s works “as the artistic canvas on which to implement the [esoteric] theory” (86). for spector, jerusalem is the most complete expression of this theory, and she suggests that “it took roughly three decades for blake to develop the vehicle through which he was able to convey the plenitude of his vision” (75). the majority of the book, then, is an analysis of many of blake’s early visual and poetic works that illustrates how the realization of his theory changed as he struggled “to implement that truth in the world of fact” (129). particularly interestingly for the dialogue with frye is spector’s use of myth, symbol, and narrative as structuring frames that will remind readers at once of frye’s the great code: the bible and literature (1982), and she offers a synthetic vision of blake that is very similar to what frye proposed for the christian bible. many articles and standalone chapters published in english focus on religion. peter otto positions blake within napoleonic-era engagements with the holy land. naomi billingsley, whose the visionary art of william blake received a new review, continues her examination of blake and jesus in her essay “‘as the eye is formed’: seeing as christ in blake’s bartimaeus,” which was published in the collection the figure of christ in the long nineteenth century. this collection also contains an interesting chapter by christopher rowland, “blake, enoch and the emergence of the apocalyptic christ.” (for its use of so many blake scholars who are interested in the book of enoch, i have also listed an article by colby townsend that argues for joseph smith’s knowledge of the book.) g. a. rosso’s article on the magdalene at the sepulchre explores “blake’s christology and aesthetics” (par. 5), focusing on blake’s depictions of jesus’s relationship to mary magdalene. blake’s use of lowth’s biblical poetics and analysis of isaiah is considered by yosefa raz, while cameron b. r. howard sees “jerusalem” as engaging with “the zion tradition within biblical poetry” (110). on topics other than religion, sharon choe’s article examines the body in the book of urizen through the lens of norse mythology, while kang-po chen discusses self-annihilation and eroticism in visions of the daughters of albion. lily gurton-wachter has a fascinating and original reading of “the chimney sweeper” of experience, which considers “the politics of joy.” michelle levy uses blake as a coda to literary manuscript culture in romantic britain, and m. cecilia marchetto santorun has an article detailing blake’s influence on alan moore’s conception of monstrosity. in addition to updating its website, the blake society has launched a new journal, vala: the journal of the blake society. aimed at a more popular audience than its predecessor, the blake journal, the publication contains reflections on blake’s influence by scholars and artists; short academic, pedagogic, and fiction pieces; and reviews. as noted above, scholarship on blake outside the anglophone world has been particularly productive, and 2019’s the reception of william blake in europe and british romanticism in asia helped to illustrate the critical contexts in which these scholars are working. the journal dante e l’arte, published by the universitat autònoma de barcelona, has a special issue devoted to dante and blake, containing six essays (four in italian and two in english), with the introduction available in both languages. denis bonnecase has edited a collection of essays in french, hobbes, blair, blake: hommage à françois piquet, reviewed in french by hélène ibata. (ibata’s own the challenge of the sublime was reviewed in 2020 in european romantic review.) hobbes, blair, blake includes caroline dauphin’s essay on tigers in natural history in relation to “the tyger” and camille adnot’s examination of images of biblical creation. apart from this collection, adnot has published a piece on tharmas in the four zoas and another on the marriage of heaven and hell. catherine bois’s book on the lyric and rhetoric in eighteenth-century britain contains several sections on blake. in three essays in portuguese, enéias farias tavares uses the blake archive to reconsider physical and digital archives; examines blake’s last judgment; and analyzes a descriptive catalogue within the context of 1809. the last of these appears in a 2014 special issue of the journal fragmentum, which is devoted to a portuguese translation of a descriptive catalogue by tavares, ana paula cabrera, daniela do canto, andrio santos, and leandro oliveira. alcides cardoso dos santos writes the introduction to the volume and offers an article in portuguese on “blake and the problem of method.” vera serdechnaia has published several pieces in russian, including an article claiming that blake used “the russian empress catherine ii” as “the embodiment of the sinister female will”; an article on boris anrep’s efforts to “embody in russian the principles of english romantic poetry”; an article examining writers who have compared blake and dostoevsky; and, appropriately on this topic, a review of alexander belousov’s opera the book of seraphim that considers the self-conscious influence of blake’s the book of thel and dostoevsky’s demons. (see the description of the opera at the website of the stanislavsky electrotheatre.) polish and russian articles consider blake in jim jarmusch’s dead man. ariyuki kondo analyzes illustrations of the book of job in japanese, and a korean article discusses the marriage of heaven and hell. writing in english, the iranian scholar roohollah datli beigi compares visions to thomas hardy’s tess. in terms of blake’s reception, philipp hunnekuhl’s henry crabb robinson: romantic comparatist, 1790–​1811 has a short but thoughtful section on robinson’s experiences with and reflections on blake. joselyn m. almeida and sara medina calzada examine blake’s place in josé joaquín de mora’s meditaciones poéticas (1826) and his early american reception. alexander torres considers blake’s circulation among american swedenborgians. jade hagan highlights his influence on “the hippie and new age’s mode of critique” and offers two bibliographical lists documenting “new age and psychedelic media that cite ‘doors of perception’ blake meme” between 1954 and 2001 and “new age physics popularizations that cite ‘auguries of innocence’ blake meme.” interestingly, as serdechnaia explains, blake was being reconsidered on the other side of the iron curtain at the same time, when the official celebration of his bicentennial in the soviet union in 1957 led to new ways of justifying his work. german filippovskii compares images of childhood in blake and wordsworth with those of the russian poets gavrila derzhavin (1743–​1816) and nikolay nekrasov (1821–​78). dušan živković traces the influence of blake on gregor strniša (1930–​87), a slovenian poet. in an article in japanese, hikari sato documents the reprinting of some songs in workers dreadnought, a socialist london publication, in a wider article on saneatsu mushakoji, a japanese novelist and reformer, and sylvia pankhurst, a british suffragette. sato’s annotation usefully provides the titles of the songs and the dates they were published. finally, also in japanese, takashi kikui examines the influence of blake on the japanese poet and critic takahiko okada (1939–​97). passings in a year of loss, harold bloom’s posthumously published take arms against a sea of troubles: the power of the reader’s mind over a universe of death is an aptly titled affirmation of the power that writing and reading have over death. blake is discussed in a chapter on milton and blake that caps off bloom’s lifelong engagement with the two poets and their relationship. if anyone embodied bloom’s description of the prolific, life-affirming reader, it was john e. grant, and alexander s. gourlay has a remembrance of his former teacher in blake 54.3 and at hell’s printing press, along with a checklist of grant’s many influential and insightful publications. vera serdechnaia’s remembrance of the russian composer dmitrii smirnov appears in blake 54.1 and at hell’s printing press. smirnov is also memorialized by jason whittaker at zoamorphosis and on the russian language website stravinsky.online. keri davies commemorates william goldman, with touching final words by magnus ankarsjö; davies includes a list of goldman’s works, including his unpublished dissertation on blake, robert browning, and the visionary tradition. kevin j. hayes references edwin e. slosson’s work on blake in his note on slosson and the melville revival. a new bibliography of ruthven todd includes his scholarship and creative writing, listing both published and unpublished works. nine blake essays by the japanese scholar koji toki can be found in a 2020 collection of his works and correspondence. martin butlin reviews g. e. bentley, jr.’s memoir, boondoggles, and it is worth noting that 2020 marks the first year since his passing that no new scholarship by bentley has appeared. blakeana blake features prominently in louise glück’s 2020 nobel prize lecture, while jerusalem and the trope of the daimon is the subject of a new dissertation. a handful of writers have used blake as a touchstone to discuss covid, including sibylle erle and john higgs in reflection pieces in the blake society’s new journal. early in the pandemic, dan gorman wrote at hell’s printing press on searching the blake archive for images of the world ending. james murray-white updated his film project, finding blake, in light of covid. at the new york times, amitha kalaichandran explored blake’s job engravings for their message on grappling with grief. psychotherapist mark vernon employed blake to critique the structure of society and consciousness during the pandemic. (in a similar vein, without referencing covid, david shaddock draws on blake to discuss the emancipation of consciousness in his poetry and psychoanalysis: the opening of the field.) finally, in response to tiger king on netflix, dale shaw wrote a satirical poem, “william blake’s ‘the tyger king,’” which was published in mcsweeney’s on 16 april 2020 and includes these eminently applicable lines (complete with blakean punctuation): in what distant deeps or skies. did you think that this shit flies? blake’s circle there are two new collections on mary wollstonecraft that will be of great service to scholars at every level: sandrine bergès, eileen hunt botting, and alan coffee’s the wollstonecraftian mindbotting discusses the work on the podcast intellectual history. and nancy e. johnson and paul keen’s mary wollstonecraft in context. they consist of short essays centered around wollstonecraft’s life, works, critical fortunes, and various historical and cultural contexts, with each chapter including suggested readings. while mentions of blake in these collections are only cursory, mary wollstonecraft in context includes a chapter devoted to joseph johnson. both are reviewed by e. j. clery in the times literary supplement. elsewhere, sylvana tomaselli considers wollstonecraft’s relation to the platonism of thomas taylor, and also touches on johnson; in disastrous subjectivities: romanticism, modernity, and the real, david collings has a chapter on wollstonecraft and shipwrecks. william hayley was the subject of an online conference organized by lisa gee and the fitzwilliam museum, 12-13 november 2020. select presentations can still be found at the conference’s webpage. these address hayley’s relationship with george romney (alex kidson); his relationship with john flaxman and blake (david bindman); his view of the landscape around chichester and eartham (alexandra harris); and his experiences with hope, disability, parental love, and grief (lisa gee). not posted were presentations by mark crosby on hayley’s library; sarah haggarty on “paper scraps, commonplacing and a new ‘ballads manuscript’”; and jason whittaker on hayley in blake biographies. also not posted was an exciting preview of the fitzwilliam’s forthcoming digital edition of hayley’s letters. while progress on the project has been slowed by the pandemic, the letters will be heavily tagged and annotated and will be extremely useful to scholars of blake and of the romantic era in general. outside of the conference, hayley is the subject of two interesting essays that consider his depiction of women in relationship to women writers. brian goldberg highlights charlotte smith’s writings as responses to the triumphs of temper, while susan matthews shows how hayley’s depiction of aging women and sexuality in his essay on old maids influenced hannah more and joanna southcott. artists who were blake’s friends or contemporaries have received considerable attention. josh hainy analyzes john flaxman’s “corporeal pedagogy” in his role of professor of sculpture at the royal academy. silvia de santis’s article examines the influence of blake and flaxman on each other in their illustrations to dante. flaxman’s funeral monuments are treated in two pieces by susan jenkins for the burlington magazine, and flaxman is also discussed in a dissertation on classicism, commerce, and authorship. two articles consider fuseli’s influence on other artists (g. f. watts and william martin), and another argues that fuseli disrupts the gender binary of the sturm und drang movement. georgina cole treats george romney’s conception of blindness in milton and his daughters, with some references to hayley. benjamin west’s painting penn’s treaty with the indians is analyzed in george w. boudreau’s a material world: culture, society, and the life of things in early anglo-america, and the death of general wolfe is closely read online in an interactive new york times article. a 2020 dissertation considers west in terms of “neo-gothic literary and visual art,” alongside walpole, burke, and the architect robert adam. focusing on “portraits of women as modern sibyls,” luisa calè analyzes paintings by west, angelica kauffman, and others. nikita agranovskii examines john singleton copley’s the death of the earl of chatham and his efforts to exhibit it in opposition to the new royal academy. rebecca senior highlights the depiction of violence in her analysis of joseph nollekens’s initial design for his monument to three captains (1782–​93). jane insley examines the illustrations of crystals by delvalle lowry varley (john varley’s wife), illuminating her importance as an artist and as a contributor to crystal science. mark antliff considers the influence of blake and samuel palmer on the british neo-romantics. elizabeth a. williams devotes a chapter to erasmus darwin and appetite in appetite and its discontents: science, medicine, and the urge to eat, 1750–​1950. c. a. vaughn cross examines how the loves of the plants influenced the “general knowledge of drug efficacy” in the romantic era. richard hillyer considers darwin in a wider book on seventeenthand eighteenth-century scientific poets, while dahlia porter looks at the problem of induction through the genre of the philosophical poem. darwin’s influence on his grandson charles’s “historical sketch” (the preface to origin of species) is touched on by curtis n. johnson in his book on the “historical sketch.” barry i. hoffbrand looks at darwin’s relationship to the painter joseph wright of derby. oskar cox jensen has an interesting article on another joseph johnson of the romantic era, an afro-caribbean busker and ballad singer who was the subject of j. t. smith’s print “joseph johnson” (1815) and whom smith subsequently described in his vagabondiana (1817). christopher stokes has edited a selection of poetry by the quaker poet, bernard barton, and stokes’s 2019 essay on barton considers him in light of “quaker romanticism.” fleshing out the esoteric world referenced in sheila spector’s new book is susan mitchell sommers’s the siblys of london, a rich study of the sibly family and, in particular, its two most prominent members, the brothers manoah and ebenezer. blake is discussed slightly but significantly in relationship to the april 1789 general conference, and sommers argues that he was driven away from the new church by manoah sibly, who was an important new church leader in the transformation of swedenborgianism into an ecclesiastical institution. the continental origins of this esotericism in reformation-era mysticism are the subject of a special issue of daphnis with papers from the conference the forgotten reformation, held at the stadtarchiv salzburg in 2018. the essays highlight the works of jacob boehme, paracelsus, and the rosicrucians. (two gauge the impact of these writers on english readers, with ariel hessayon considering the knowledge of boehme among english speakers before the english civil war and lucinda martin analyzing the reception of boehme’s idea of sophia from the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries.) in other articles on mysticism and esoteric sources, michael b. riordan examines the scottish french prophets of the early eighteenth century, and vincent roy-di piazza argues that swedenborg’s de telluribus in mundo nostro solari (1758) brought together the eighteenth-century genres of the plurality of worlds and dialogues with the dead. symbols § works preceded by a section mark are reported on secondhand authority. abbreviations bb g. e. bentley, jr., blake books (1977) bbs g. e. bentley, jr., blake books supplement (1995) blake blake/an illustrated quarterly <blake ([year])> indicates the installment of “william blake and his circle” published in the year specified. bsj g. e. bentley, jr., with keiko aoyama, blake studies in japan (1994) butlin martin butlin, the paintings and drawings of william blake (1981) diss. dissertation wbhc g. e. bentley, jr., william blake and his circle (2017) <http://​library.​vicu.​utoronto.​ca/​collections/​special_collections/​bentley_​blake_​collection/​blake_​circle/​2017/​william_​blake_​and_​his_​circle.​pdf> division i: william blake part i: blake’s writings section a: original editions, facsimiles, reprints, and translations ballads (pickering) manuscript (1807?)for updated photographs of the manuscript, see morgan library & museum in part v. augurios de inocencia. edición bilingüe de fernando castanedo. traducción de fernando castanedo. madrid: cátedra, 2020. colección letras universales. 8º, 184 pp., 28 illus., including all of the ballads manuscript. isbn: 9788437641300. this is the first complete translation of the ballads manuscript into spanish. it reproduces the new images of the poems. “introducción”: “vida de william blake.” 9-43. “historia del manuscrito.” 43-45. “transmisión y ediciones.” 45-48. “características.” 48-49. “fecha de transcripción.” 49-56. “fecha de composición.” 56-58. “los diez poemas.” 59-68. “esta edición.” 69-71. “bibliografía.” 73-83. text of the ballads manuscript. 85-135. english and spanish on facing pages. “apéndices”: “apéndice 1.” 139-40. text from jerusalem plate 52, from the prologue to chapter 3, “to the deists,” with its version of “the grey monk.” “apéndice 2.” 141-45. sampson’s editorial arrangement of “auguries of innocence.” “apéndice 3.” 147-51. erdman’s editorial arrangement of “auguries of innocence.” “manuscrito de los augurios de inocencia.” 153-76. reduced-size color reproductions of the manuscript, 12.9 x 8.8 cm. vs. 18.4 x 12.5 cm. in the original. review ferrero, jesús. “la infinitud de lo pequeño.” el país, babelia (27 feb. 2021): 5. a descriptive catalogue (1809) for a portuguese translation, see fragmentum in part vi. europe (1794) europe [c]. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2020. europe [f]. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2020. the [first] book of urizen (1794) el libro de urizen. traducción y noticia de n. n.  san sebastián: norte, gráfico-editora, s.l., 1947. <wbhc p. 218> b. el libro de urizen, 1794–​1818. presentación y traducción de n. n.  madrid: archivos vola, 2020. 8º, 72 pp., 33 illus., including the 27 plates of copy g. isbn: 9788412170801. in spanish. a new edition with the same “noticia” and “traducción” by n. n. “the prose translation … seems to be little more than an adaptation of the translation of edmundo gonzález-blanco (1928)” <bb p. 304, wbhc p. 218>. the “presentación” here (5-8) is the “noticia” in the 1947 volume (5-9). reduced-size color reproductions of copy g (library of congress); plates 1-16 on pp. 17-32, plates 17-27 on pp. 49-59 (reproduced plates are 12.1 x 8.5 cm., vs. 16.8 x 11.7 cm. in the original). the french revolution (1791) the french revolution. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2020. the ghost of abel (1822) o fantasma de abel. trans. juliana steil. revista literária em tradução 1 (sept. 2010): 157-64. in portuguese. includes full-page reproductions of plates 1 and 2 (160-61). an island in the moon (1786?) una isla en la luna. ed. and trans. fernando castanedo. 2014. english and spanish on facing pages. <blake (2015)> b. 2nd ed., revised, 2020. letters (1791–1827) 18 january 1808 to ozias humphry for a portuguese translation, see tavares, “william blake e a (re)visão do juízo final,” in part vi. the marriage of heaven and hell (1790–93?) el matrimonio del cielo y el infierno [h]. ed. and trans. fernando castanedo. 2002, 2007, 2010, 2012 (4th ed., revised), 2014, 2017, 2018, 2019. in spanish, with facing english for marriage. <blake (2003, 2014, 2017, 2018, 2020)> i. 9th ed., 2020. songs of innocence and of experience (1794) canti dell’innocenza e dell’esperienza che mostrano i due contrari stati dell’anima umana. a cura di roberto rossi testa con uno scritto di t. s. eliot. milan: se, 1997. 8º, 152 pp., 19.5 x 12 cm. isbn: 9788877103765. b. milan: se, 2001. isbn: 9788877104939. c. milan: feltrinelli, 2009. 172 pp. isbn: 9788807822049. “a colour facsimile in english and italian. text of the songs on facing pages in english and italian. ‘note ai testi’ (pp. 139-44); t. s. eliot, ‘blake,’ tr. in italian (145-49)” <wbhc p. 415>. d. milan: feltrinelli, 2014. 192 pp. isbn: 9788807901065. e. milan: se, 2016. isbn: 9788867232086. f. milan: se, 2020. 149 pp. isbn: 9788867235643. songs of innocence and of experience. i̇stanbul: karbon kitaplar, 2020. isbn: 9786257185394. in english. a reprint of the 1901 edition by r. brimley johnson <wbhc p. 406>. to the public (1793) to the public. william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2020. section b: collections and selections gourlay, alexander s. “an overannotated ‘auguries of innocence.’” see blake 54.2 in part vi. pesni nevinnosti i opyta [songs of innocence and of experience]. trans. sergei stepanov. 1993, 2000, 2004, 2006, 2009, 2012, 2014. moscow: pal'mira, 2020. isbn: 9785517017895. in russian and english. includes an introduction by alexandra glebovskaya and translations of songs, marriage, the book of thel, and “the mental traveller.” pіsnі nevinnostі і dosvіdu [songs of innocence and of experience]. trans. les' beley. ivano-frankivsk: p'ianii korabel', 2019. isbn: 9789669756145. in ukrainian. review zelіsko, olesia. “krіz' sensi ta teksti (katerina babkіna, vіl'iam bleik, vatslav grab'є, paul' tselan) [through meanings and texts (catherine babkina, william blake, václav hrabě, paul celan)].” prdg.me 2 (2020). in ukrainian. includes a review of the new ukrainian translation of songs and other texts. the book contains vr effects: through the phone application blake’s images move and change color. poesie scelte. 9 poesie illustrate di william blake. lucca: amianto comics, 2019. 84 pp. isbn: 9788894254969. in italian. nine of blake’s poems illustrated in comic-like sequence by federico galeotti (“la tigre” [the tyger], “non cercare mai di dire al tuo amore” [never pain to tell thy love], “la mosca” [the fly], “un albero avvelenato” [a poison tree], “l’astrazione umana” [the human abstract], “la risposta della terra” [earth’s answer], “notte” [night], “il giardino dell’amore” [the garden of love], “il giglio” [the lily]). blake’s poems are from the translations by giacomo conserva in poesie <wbhc p. 550, blake (2018)>. polnoe sobranie stikhotvorenii [complete short poems]. trans. dmitrii smirnov(-sadovskii). saint petersburg: kriga, 2020. isbn: 9785907253001. in russian and english. dmitrii smirnov, a poet and composer (1948–​2020), was one of the best translators of blake into russian. this book contains poems from poetical sketches, songs of innocence and of experience, the notebook (also known as the rossetti manuscript), and the pickering manuscript, as well as separate poems from letters, poetic messages, dedications, satirical poems, epigrams, and lyrical fragments from the prophecies. § visioni di william blake. trans. giuseppe ungaretti. ed. mario diacono. 1965, 1973, 1980, 1993. <wbhc p. 589> e. 1994. f. 1998. g. 2003. h. milan: mondadori, 2020. 448 pp. isbn: 9788804715665. english and italian on facing pages. william blake: selected poems. ed. nicholas shrimpton. oxford: oxford university press, 2019. <blake (2020)> review gourlay, alexander s. see blake 54.1 in part vi. rogers, annise. see vala in part vi. william blake: selected works. ed. peter otto. oxford: oxford university press, 2018. <blake (2019)> review gourlay, alexander s. see blake 54.1 in part vi. yaşayan her şey kutsaldır. trans. robin derviş. i̇stanbul: epona kitap, 2020. isbn: 9786058026131. in turkish. the work consists of translations of extracts from various works of blake, including the marriage of heaven and hell, europe, and songs of innocence and of experience. part ii: reproductions of drawings and paintings section a: illustrations of individual authors bunyan, john the pilgrim’s progress. with watercolour illustrations by william blake. intro. nathalie collé. ed. roger pooley. london: folio society, 2020. 750 copies. new photographs of 28 watercolors. shakespeare, william illustrations to shakespeare (composed c. 1779–​c. 1825). william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2020. lear and cordelia in prison (butlin #53), c. 1779. seven shakespearean subjects (butlin #84), c. 1780: juliet asleep (butlin #84.1). falstaff and prince hal (butlin #84.2). othello and desdemona (butlin #84.3). cordelia and the sleeping lear (butlin #84.4). lear grasping his sword (butlin #84.5). macbeth and lady macbeth (butlin #84.6). prospero and miranda (butlin #84.7). the vision of queen katharine (butlin #247), c. 1783–​90. oberon, titania, and puck with fairies dancing (butlin #161), c. 1785. oberon and titania, preceded by puck (butlin #246), c. 1790–​93. six extra-illustrations to a second folio edition of shakespeare (butlin #547), 1806 and 1809: jacques and the wounded stag (butlin #547.1), 1806. richard iii and the ghosts (butlin #547.2), c. 1806. queen katharine’s dream (butlin #547.3), 1809. brutus and caesar’s ghost (butlin #547.4), 1806. hamlet and his father’s ghost (butlin #547.5), 1806. as if an angel dropped down from the clouds (butlin #547.6), 1809. the vision of queen katharine (butlin #548), 1807. the vision of queen katharine (butlin #549), c. 1825–​26. section b: collections and selections water color drawings (composed 1775–​c. 1790). william blake archive. ed. morris eaves, robert n. essick, and joseph viscomi. 2020. countess aveline, three details from her tomb (butlin #5), c. 1775. king sebert, the north front of his monument (butlin #7), c. 1775. king sebert, from the wall-painting in the sedilia above his monument (butlin #8), c. 1775. henry iii, from the wall-painting in the sedilia above the monument of king sebert (butlin #9), c. 1775. king sebert, heads and ornaments from his monument (butlin #10), c. 1775. saul and the ghost of samuel (butlin #75), c. 1775–​80. the landing of brutus in england (butlin #51), c. 1779. a landing in britain (butlin #52), c. 1779. the death of earl goodwin (butlin #60), c. 1779. the making of magna charta (butlin #62), c. 1779. the keys of calais (butlin #64), c. 1779. pestilence (butlin #184), c. 1779. abraham and isaac (butlin #109), c. 1780. pestilence (butlin #185), c. 1780–​84. an allegory of the bible (butlin #127), c. 1780–​85. a crouching woman, possibly later used for the gates of paradise pl. 16 (butlin #133 recto), c. 1780–​85. the awards of athene (butlin #96), c. 1780–​85. the witch of endor raising the spirit of samuel (butlin #144), 1783. a breach in a city, the morning after the battle (butlin #191), c. 1784. joseph’s brethren bowing before him (butlin #155), c. 1785. sketch for joseph ordering simeon to be bound (butlin #158), c. 1785. joseph ordering simeon to be bound (butlin #156), c. 1785. joseph making himself known to his brethren (butlin #157), c. 1785. a man and woman kneeling and warming themselves at a fire (butlin #87 recto), c. 1785–​90. an enthroned old man offering two children to heaven (butlin #88 recto), c. 1785–​90. age teaching youth (butlin #91), c. 1785–​90. elijah and the chariot of fire (butlin #258), c. 1788–​89. part iv: bibliographies and catalogues section a: bibliographies [cross-listing articles with substantial bibliographical content] calè, luisa. “blake and exhibitions, 2019.” see blake 54.1 in part vi. davies, keri. “bill goldman, 1950–​2020.” see index rerum in part v. includes a list of goldman’s works. gourlay, alexander s. “john e. grant, 1925–​2020.” see blake 54.3 in part vi. includes “a chronological checklist of publications by john e. grant.” hagan, jade. “new age blake memes and other psychotechnologies of the self.” see hagan in part vi. includes selected lists of “new age and psychedelic media that cite ‘doors of perception’ blake meme” and “new age physics popularizations that cite ‘auguries of innocence’ blake meme.” ripley, wayne c., with fernando castanedo, hikari sato, and hüseyin alhas. “william blake and his circle: a checklist of scholarship in 2019.” see blake 54.1 in part vi. sato, hikari. “mushakoji saneatsu to sylvia pankhurst: eikoku shakai-shugi-kei kikanshi de hodosareta ‘atarashiki mura’ [saneatsu mushakoji and sylvia pankhurst: ‘a new village’ reported in a socialist newspaper in britain].” see sato in part vi. lists works by blake published by the weekly newspaper workers dreadnought. whittaker, jason. “blake and music, 2019.” see blake 54.1 in part vi. section b: catalogues adam, edina, with julian brooks, and an essay by matthew hargraves. william blake: visionary. los angeles: j. paul getty museum, 2020. see adam with brooks in part vi. mccabe, chris, et al. the bard: william blake at flat time house. london: flat time house, 2020. see mccabe et al. in part vi. part v: digital resources allen ginsberg project the site’s postings of the recordings and transcriptions of ginsberg’s 1979 naropa lectures are to august 1979 as of february 2021. ashbourne, richard. “william blake’s dreamy rendering of the faerie queene.” national trust, petworth house (7 apr. 2020): 14 pars. bars digital events. a series of zoom discussions on a wide range of topics related to romanticism. available at the bars blog or on youtube. blake society digital events: marina white raven. “the sick rose (encountering blake).” 27 may 2020. a performance piece inspired by blake. blake book club. 27 july–​2 aug. 2020. a book club meeting held via twitter on the marriage of heaven and hell. “blakety blake 2020.” 30 sept. 2020. a blake quiz bowl held via zoom. “blake in tuebingen.” 21 oct. 2020. a zoom presentation by the artist dieter loechle and the academic christoph reinfandt. “harriet stubbs.” 4 nov. 2020. a performance by the musician, whose debut album is titled heaven and hell: the doors of perception. “blake’s night.” 28 nov. 2020. the launch of vala, the new journal of the blake society. “newton.” 7 dec. 2020. sarah haggarty discusses the color print newton. davies, keri. index rerum: a blog about books, book-collecting, william blake, and lots of other things. scholarship: “the bourgeois blake.” 4 mar. 2020. reflections on the story of the blakes’ nudity in their garden. “the chamber on the wall.” 24 sept. 2020. on blake and the moravians. “william blake and hampstead.” 10 oct. 2020. “geoffrey keynes: personal papers and correspondence.” 7 nov. 2020. “bill goldman, 1950–​2020.” 14 sept. 2020. an obituary, which includes a list of goldman’s works. fedorov, leonid. music videos of fedorov’s songs to blake’s verses. june-nov. 2020. during the covid lockdown, russian musician leonid fedorov (auktyon rock band) wrote an album set to blake’s lyrics, translated into russian anew by andrei smurov and alexander delphinov. this youtube channel contains music videos of these songs. khanukaeva, raisa. “uil'iam bleik: pevets biblii, bunta i svobodnoi liubvi. kak strannyi i miatezhnyi angliiskii poet vdokhnovil nobelevskogo laureata ol'gu tokarchuk [william blake: a bard of the bible, rebellion, and free love. how a strange and rebellious english poet inspired the nobel laureate olga tokarczuk].” 11 sept. 2020. in russian. about the influence of blake’s work on the contemporary polish writer and nobel laureate olga tokarczuk, especially her novel drive your plow over the bones of the dead. lisin, dmitrii. “drugaia roza. pochemu na karantine leonid fedorov s druz'iami stali pisat' pesni na stikhi uil'iama bleika i snimat' videoklipy? [the other rose. why in quarantine did leonid fedorov and his friends begin to write songs based on poems by william blake and shoot video clips?].” colta (9 nov. 2020). in russian. how leonid fedorov wrote the album blake during the pandemic and recorded videos (see fedorov, above); contains an interview with him. “‘may-day in london’ by william blake.” graphic arts collection, special collections, firestone library, princeton university. 1 may 2020. a blog post on “may-day in london” from the wit’s magazine (1784). morgan library & museum new photographs of the pickering manuscript, including flyleaves, are now available. murray-white, james. “blake and the pandemic.” finding blake: reimagining william blake for the 21st century (2 apr. 2020): 12 pars. an update on the film project in the context of covid. poznanskaia, anna. “uil'iam terner i uil'iam bleik. iz xviii stoletiia v xx vek [william turner and william blake. from the eighteenth century to the twentieth century].” 27 may 2020. in russian. an online lecture. serdechnaia, vera. “uil'iam bleik kak poet [william blake as a poet].” 10 june 2020. in russian. an online lecture. serdechnaia, vera. “uil'iam bleik v russkoi kul'ture [william blake in russian culture].” 17 june 2020. in russian. an online lecture on blake reception in russian culture, 1834–​2020. smirnov, dmitrii. “uvidet' vechnost': kompozitor dmitrii smirnov ob uil'iame bleike [seeing eternity: composer dmitrii smirnov about william blake].” stravinsky.online (18 may 2020). in russian. dmitrii smirnov on his experience of composing music to blake’s verses. volkova, daria. “khudozhnik bleik: graver, romantik, demiurg [blake the artist: engraver, romantic, demiurge].” 3 june 2020. in russian. an online lecture. whitson, roger. “the interdisciplinary legacies of donald ault.” romantic circles pedagogies hangout. romantic circles (nov. 2017). a discussion of ault’s work and influence among whitson, ron broglio, tof eklund, laurie taylor, and zach whalen. whitson, roger. “william blake live.” romantic circles pedagogies hangouts. romantic circles (apr.-june 2020). a series of engaging zoom discussions with blake scholars, moderated by whitson, with participation by other scholars who attended the live sessions. whitson begins each session by posing the questions, “when did you start reading william blake, and how did he become important to your work?” william blake live #1. claire colebrook. apr. 2020. william blake live #2. james rovira. may 2020. william blake live #3. kate singer. may 2020. william blake live #4. david b. ruderman. june 2020. william blake live #5. sibylle erle. june 2020. william blake live #6. elizabeth effinger. june 2020. william blake live #7. paul yoder. june 2020. william blake live #8. debbie j. lee. june 2020. whittaker, jason. zoamorphosis/the blake 2.0 blog: william blake in art, music, film, and literature. significant postings include: scholarship: katharina hagen. “failed eternity.” 2 mar. 2020. on bruce dickinson’s song “if eternity should fail,” which was recorded and released by iron maiden, and its relationship to the mayans and milton. katharina hagen. “le petit prince—​a french tale of innocence and experience.” 14 may 2020. “while the tale may not strike as explicitly blakean, it echoes many of blake’s ideas and topoi” (par. 12). review: “phaze theory: live at balabam.” 31 dec. 2020. an album that “brought together their love of esoterica, w. b. yeats and william blake” (par. 1). obituary: “dmitri smirnov: 1948–​2020.” 10 apr. 2020. smirnov “spent most of his career creating stunning and innovative compositions that set a multitude of blake’s works to music” (par. 1). william blake archive hell’s printing press: the blog of the blake archive and blake quarterly. editing and technical issues: robert rich. “languages and ligatures.” 10 july 2020. on the problems of representing non-english languages: “blake’s use of foreign languages and his own creative twists on them will likely continue to present interesting editorial puzzles” (par. 15). scholarship: natasha bharucha. “opening a can of (invisible) worms: blake’s use of metaphor in ‘the sick rose.’” 3 sept. 2020. blakeana: sarah jones. “‘i again display my giant forms to the public’: q&a with tate britain.” 30 mar. 2020. an interview with kathy maniura, tate britain marketing officer, on the advertising campaign for the 2019–​20 tate britain exhibition. dan gorman. “waves of regret and waves of joy: searching for the end of the world in the blake archive.” 10 apr. 2020. using the blake archive image search in order to find end-of-the-world imagery a month into the covid crisis. vera serdechnaia. “remembrance: dmitri smirnov, 1948–​2020.” 7 may 2020. also published in blake 54.1. sarah jones. “q&a with mike goode.” 13 oct. 2020. a discussion with mike goode about his book romantic capabilities: blake, scott, austen, and the new messages of old media (2020). alexander s. gourlay. “john e. grant, 1925–​2020.” 17 dec. 2020. a remembrance of john e. grant, adapted from gourlay’s foreword to his prophetic character: essays on william blake in honor of john e. grant (2002). also published in blake 54.3. new youtube tutorials: robert rich. “tutorial video: electronic edition information.” 6 feb. 2020. eric loy. “tutorial video: true size.” 7 apr. 2020. sarah jones. “tutorial video: image use and permission.” 18 aug. 2020. robert rich. “tutorial video: collection lists.” 9 sept. 2020. robert rich. “tutorial video: searching images.” 11 oct. 2020. robert rich. “video tutorial: enlargements.” 16 nov. 2020. “william blake.” organic radicals: challenging the system to its core (3 jan. 2020). a popular survey of blake in the radical tradition, with references to e. p. thompson and antinomianism. part vi: criticism, biography, and reviews a   b   c   d   e   f   g   h   i   j   k   l   m   n   o   p   r   s   t   v   w   y   z a adam, edina. “william blake’s ‘bounding outline’: on the sources of artistic originality.” see adam with brooks. adam, edina, and julian brooks. “acknowledgments.” see adam with brooks. adam, edina, and julian brooks. “introduction.” see adam with brooks. adam, edina, with julian brooks, and an essay by matthew hargraves. william blake: visionary. los angeles: j. paul getty museum, 2020. isbn: 9781606066423. catalogue for the exhibition of the same name, originally slated to run at the j. paul getty museum from 21 july to 11 october 2020, but postponed because of covid. the catalogue is dedicated to robert n. essick. potts, timothy. “foreword.” 7. adam, edina, and julian brooks. “acknowledgments.” 9. includes the dedication to essick. adam, edina, and julian brooks. “introduction.” 11-17. “the book you hold in your hands, and the related getty exhibition, are modest contributions aimed at bringing the artist and his works to a wider us audience” (11). adam, edina. “william blake’s ‘bounding outline’: on the sources of artistic originality.” 19-27. “blake’s engagement with the art of the past fueled his originality” (26). hargraves, matthew. “america’s blake.” 29-35. a survey of major american blake collectors, from the transcendentalists to essick. review wyszpolski, bondo. “william blake: hello, goodbye.” easy reader news (10 dec. 2020): 11 pars. considers the catalogue in light of the postponement of the exhibition. adnot, camille. “désordres instinctifs de tharmas: le corps désœuvré de the four zoas de william blake.” see braida-laplace et al. adnot, camille. “imag(e)iner la création. construire, déconstruire et reconstruire la bible de l’enfer blakienne.” see bonnecase, hobbes, blair, blake. § adnot, camille. “le mariage du ciel et de l’enfer, carte du maraudeur blakienne? entre anonymat et pseudonymat.” le pardaillan 4 (2018). in french. akimoto, yuko. “takiguchi shuzo to shimpi shugi teki sekaikan: william blake juyo wo shoten nishite [shuzo takiguchi and mystical worldview: focus on the reception of william blake].” hokkai-gakuen daigaku jimbun ronshu [hokkai-gakuen university studies in culture] 69 (2020): 165-92. in japanese. almeida, joselyn m., and sara medina calzada. “romanticism’s pan-atlantic life: blake, shelley, and byron in josé joaquín de mora’s meditaciones poéticas (1826).” painting words: aesthetics and the relationship between image and text. ed. beatriz gonzález-moreno and fernando gonzález-moreno. new york: routledge, 2020. 146-60. “this chapter explores william blake’s first foray in america with the publication of josé joaquín de mora’s meditaciones poéticas (london, 1826), a collection of poems about death and the afterlife illuminated and inspired by blake’s designs for robert blair’s the grave” (abstract). antliff, mark. “pacifism, realism, and pathology: alex comfort, cecil collins, and neo-romantic art during world war ii.” modernism/​modernity 27.3 (sept. 2020): 519-49. some references to the influence of blake and samuel palmer on the neo-romantics. asiatidou, kyriaki. “reason and the deification of humanity: william blake.” i̇nönü university international journal of social sciences 9.1 (2020): 179-94. in english (abstract in english and turkish). azariah-kribbs, colin. rev. of william blake’s gothic imagination: bodies of horror, ed. chris bundock and elizabeth effinger. see bundock and effinger. azevedo, mail marques de. “william blake: o gênio oitocentista da intermidialidade como personagem em mad girl’s love song.” revista letras raras 9.3 (aug. 2020): 136-53. in portuguese (abstract in portuguese and english). discusses “the appropriation of william blake’s persona as a character in the novel mad girl’s love song, by the indian post-colonial writer rukmini bhaya nair” (abstract). b balkır, sedat. “william blake—​hayal gücü ve sonsuz beden [william blake—​imagination and endless body].” journal of arts 3.1 (2020): 1-10. in turkish (abstract in turkish and english). beigi, roohollah datli. “tyranny of conventions: a comparative study of blake’s visions and hardy’s tess.” kata [indonesia] 21.2 (2020): 60-67. bentley, g. e., jr. boondoggles: travels of a restless professor. victoria: friesenpress, 2018. <blake (2019)> review butlin, martin. postmaster & the merton record (2019): 89-90. billingsley, naomi. “‘as the eye is formed’: seeing as christ in blake’s bartimaeus.” see ludlow. billingsley, naomi. the visionary art of william blake: christianity, romanticism and the pictorial imagination. london: i. b. tauris, 2018. <blake (2019)> review lepine, ayla. “heaven, earth, and art history’s theological turn.” art history 43.4 (2020): 862-69. reviewed alongside t. j. clark’s heaven on earth: painting and the life to come (london: thames and hudson, 2018) and thomas crow’s no idols: the missing theology of art (sydney: power polemics, 2017). blake/an illustrated quarterly volume 53, number 4 (spring 2020) article robert n. essick. “blake in the marketplace, 2019.” 5 pars., plus listings. major transactions include an unrecorded, hand-colored copy of night thoughts (copy bb) discovered and sold; the acquisition of the day of judgment, a watercolor illustration of the grave, by the art institute of chicago; and the auction of an unrecorded copy of maria: a novel (london, 1785). reviews luisa calè. “william blake, tate britain, 11 september 2019–​2 february 2020; martin myrone and amy concannon, with an afterword by alan moore, william blake.” 29 pars. r. paul yoder. james rovira, ed., rock and romanticism: blake, wordsworth, and rock from dylan to u2. 16 pars. “the persuasiveness of the collection depends largely on how one views the persuasiveness of [its] understanding of romanticism” (par. 1). minute particulars karen mulhallen. “the publisher not mad.” 6 pars. challenges the claim in myrone and concannon’s william blake that richard edwards went insane. volume 54, number 1 (summer 2020) remembrance vera serdechnaia. “dmitri smirnov, 1948–​2020.” a remembrance of the russian composer. articles wayne c. ripley, with fernando castanedo, hikari sato, and hüseyin alhas. “william blake and his circle: a checklist of scholarship in 2019.” 37 pars., plus listings. luisa calè. “blake and exhibitions, 2019.” 1 par., plus listings. jason whittaker. “blake and music, 2019.” 3 pars., plus listings. review alexander s. gourlay. peter otto, ed., william blake; nicholas shrimpton, ed., william blake: selected poems. 10 pars. volume 54, number 2 (fall 2020) articles g. a. rosso. “interpreting blake’s the magdalene at the sepulchre.” 23 pars. “the magdalene at the sepulchre is a consummate example of blake’s incarnational aesthetic and a striking visualization of his interpretive approach to scripture” (par. 23). juliana steil and lawrence flores pereira. “translating blake’s prophetic poetry: the case of milton.” 15 pars. on translating milton into portuguese. minute particulars wayne c. ripley. “james blake of rotherhithe, timber merchant.” 4 pars. notes the discovery of the admission paper that documents that blake’s father was granted the freedom of the city of london, with the same document recording that blake’s paternal grandfather was a timber merchant. alexander s. gourlay. “an overannotated ‘auguries of innocence.’” 2 pars., plus annotated text. a richly annotated “edition” of “auguries of innocence,” with a brief but informative introduction. review mark crosby. sendak and blake illustrating “songs of innocence” with an essay by prof. robert n. essick. 8 pars. volume 54, number 3 (winter 2020–21) remembrance alexander s. gourlay. “john e. grant, 1925–​2020.” includes “a chronological checklist of publications by john e. grant.” articles chen, kang-po. “violence, death, and autoeroticism: the alternative self-annihilation in visions of the daughters of albion.” 20 pars. explores how “self-annihilation is a major source of eroticism in [blake’s] portrayal of unconventional sexual experiences” (par. 2). hagen, katharina. “‘if you want to learn the secrets, close your eyes’: bruce dickinson’s ‘gates of urizen’ as contrary version of the [first] book of urizen.” 20 pars. “dickinson’s adaptation changes the outcome of urizen and turns the plot into practical advice on how to pass the gates of urizen” (par. 1). minute particulars king, shelley, and john b. pierce. “‘remarkable both for genius, & extravagance’: amelia opie and blake’s illustrations of the book of job.” 11 pars. sketches opie’s probable knowledge of blake and details the history of the copy of job now held by the mead art museum at amherst college.their account offers a more likely origin for the copy than g. e. bentley, jr.’s speculation that it originated with john linnell (blake records, 1st ed. [1969] 602n3). bloom, harold. “milton and william blake: the human form divine.” take arms against a sea of troubles: the power of the reader’s mind over a universe of death. new haven: yale university press, 2020. 110-58. bloom’s last reflections on two figures who dominated his work, with comments as well on northrop frye, t. s. eliot, and william hayley. quoting plate 41 of milton, bloom writes, “if that should be my final quotation from blake, i am content” (158). bobb, desmond. “why the y in ‘the tyger’?” see vala. bois, catherine. un langage investi: rhétorique et poésie lyrique dans le long xviiie siècle britannique. lyon: presses universitaires de lyon, 2020. 21.5 cm. 424 pp. isbn: 9782729709556. in french. chapters 4 (“le poète du premier romantisme et le langage lyrique: pathème et métafigure”) and 5 (“la rhétoricité lyrique: la poésie est-elle chant ou discours?”) address the “romantic rhetorization of lyrical language in blake’s poetry,” arguing that “the process emerges from displacement of classic use of rhetorical pathos and voice.” three sections (“rejet du pathos fondateur de l’énonciation syntaxique: le ‘style coupé’ de william blake” [306-23]; “l’impossible figure blakienne: la satire à la limite du pathos lyrique” [337-40]; “chez william blake: la non-invocation et le pathos du langage auto-réflexif” [347-51]) include close readings of several songs (“infant joy,” “the divine image,” “the tyger,” “london,” “infant sorrow,” “the human abstract,” “to tirzah”) and offer insights on the marriage of heaven and hell and the book of urizen. in “le mot, la chose et le dire du poète chez william blake” (254-60), sections from milton, jerusalem, and the annotations to reynolds are briefly discussed. bonnecase, denis. “énergie, prophétie, mise en scène de l’écriture dans the marriage of heaven and hell.” see bonnecase, hobbes, blair, blake. bonnecase, denis, ed. hobbes, blair, blake: hommage à françois piquet. paris: michel houdiard éditeur, 2018. 24 cm. 129 pp. isbn: 9782356921642. in french. includes three essays on blake: bonnecase, denis. “énergie, prophétie, mise en scène de l’écriture dans the marriage of heaven and hell.” adnot, camille. “imag(e)iner la création. construire, déconstruire et reconstruire la bible de l’enfer blakienne.” dauphin, caroline. “histoire(s) naturelle(s) du tigre: reconstruire l’animal dans l’œuvre de william blake.” review ibata, hélène. xvii-xviii: revue de la société d’études anglo-américaines des xviie et xviiie siècles 76 (2019): 9 pars. in french. braida-laplace, antonella, sophie laniel-musitelli, and céline sabiron, eds. inconstances romantiques: visions et révisions dans la littérature britannique du long xixe siècle. nancy: presses universitaires de nancy-éditions universitaires de lorraine, 2019. 24 cm. 282 pp. isbn: 9782814305489. in french. includes: adnot, camille. “désordres instinctifs de tharmas: le corps désœuvré de the four zoas de william blake.” dauphin, caroline. “la métamorphose d’ovide: transformations poétiques et végétales dans la poésie d’erasmus darwin et de william blake.” on ovid’s metamorphoses as hypotext for blake’s hybrid plants in the songs, the book of thel, and visions of the daughters of albion. review scarpa, sébastien. miranda: revue pluridisciplinaire du monde anglophone 21 (2020): 7 pars. in french. pars. 3 and 5 comment on adnot’s and dauphin’s articles. bruder, helen p., and tristanne connolly, eds. beastly blake. cham: palgrave macmillan, 2018. <blake (2019)> review otto, peter. “looking ‘thro … & not with’ the eye: from romanticism to the counter culture, rock and roll, and the anthropocene.” european romantic review 31.1 (2020): 67-74. also reviews rock and romanticism: blake, wordsworth, and rock from dylan to u2, ed. james rovira. bundock, christopher. “blake’s nervous system: hypochondria, judaism, and jerusalem.” see rajan and faflak, william blake. bundock, chris, and elizabeth effinger, eds. william blake’s gothic imagination: bodies of horror. manchester: manchester university press, 2018. <blake (2019)> reviews azariah-kribbs, colin. eighteenth-century fiction 32.2 (winter 2019–​20): 371-73. “the intellectual energy and breadth of the various articles will assuredly stimulate the interests of other scholars to find further productive intersections between blake’s work and the rise of the gothic as either a genre or an aesthetic mode” (371). whitson, roger. “living forms of history: strategic presentism in blake studies.” european romantic review 31.4 (2020): 484-89. also reviews william blake in context, ed. sarah haggarty. butlin, martin. rev. of g. e. bentley, jr., boondoggles: travels of a restless professor. see bentley. c calè, luisa. “blake and exhibitions, 2019.” see blake 54.1. calè, luisa. “‘a dream of thiralatha’: promiscuous book gatherings and the wanderings of blake’s separate plates.” studies in romanticism 59.4 (2020): 431-45. calè, luisa. rev. of william blake, tate britain, and its catalogue. see blake 53.4. carey, john. “romantic eccentrics: blake, byron, burns.” a little history of poetry. new haven: yale university press, 2020. isbn: 9780300232226. 128-31. a brief overview of blake in a literary history of poetry aimed at a popular audience. carlson, kristen. rev. of richard c. sha, imagination and science in romanticism. see sha. chen, kang-po. “violence, death, and autoeroticism: the alternative self-annihilation in visions of the daughters of albion.” see blake 54.3. choe, sharon. “deformed bodies and norse origins in william blake.” studies in english literature, 1500–​1900 60.3 (summer 2020): 529-49. “the scope of this article then is to rethink how the formation of urizen’s deformed body speaks to blake’s antiquarian interests, specifically in the north and old norse, and how this interest in an alternate creation narrative reveals the limits of the genesis narrative when examining the book of urizen” (531). clark, david l. “blake’s decomposite art: on the image of language and the ruins of representation.” see rajan and faflak, william blake. collings, david. “labouring with/​in disaster: blake’s workless work in jerusalem.” see rajan and faflak, william blake. collyer, ed. “teaching ‘the tyger.’” see vala. corti, claudia. “l’allegra discesa di blake nell’inferno dantesco.” see dante e l’arte. cox, octavia. rev. of the regency revisited, ed. tim fulford and michael e. sinatra. see mazzeo. crisafulli, edoardo. “la rinascita della fortuna di dante in gran bretagna vis-à-vis l’ideologia e l’estetica mainstream nell’epoca romantica: il caso della metamorfosi del lucifero dantesco nella triade milton, cary, e blake.” see dante e l’arte. curbet, joan. “prophetic gestures: how blake drew his virgil.” see dante e l’arte. d dante e l’arte number 7 (2020) “dante e blake” “introduzione.” 5. in italian. “introduction.” 7. in english. corti, claudia. “l’allegra discesa di blake nell’inferno dantesco.” 11-28. in italian (abstract in italian and english). on blake’s illustrations to dante’s divine comedy, especially to inferno, and “his humourous and complicit involvement with the motivations of the supposed sinners, with whom he transparently identifies himself” (abstract). villa, marianna. “dal testo all’immagine: blake in dialogo con dante.” 29-58. in italian (abstract in italian and english). crisafulli, edoardo. “la rinascita della fortuna di dante in gran bretagna vis-à-vis l’ideologia e l’estetica mainstream nell’epoca romantica: il caso della metamorfosi del lucifero dantesco nella triade milton, cary, e blake.” 59-100. in italian (abstract in italian and english). on cary’s translation of the divine comedy and blake’s images of both milton’s satan and dante’s lucifer. “blake’s satan is the epitome of a humanity whose fall from grace stems from a withered poetic imagination. this view modernizes, but does not cloud, the notion of absolute evil underpinning christian metaphysics” (abstract). de santis, silvia. “how can i help thy husband’s copying me? dante tra blake, füssli e flaxman.” 101-28. in italian (abstract in italian and english). considers the bonds of friendship linking blake, fuseli, and flaxman, and how their interpretations of dante may have influenced one another. curbet, joan. “prophetic gestures: how blake drew his virgil.” 129-54. in english (abstract in italian and english). on blake’s depiction of dante’s virgil in the divine comedy by means of prophetic gestures. font paz, carme. “‘che son la pia’: liminal female figures of intercession in blake’s illustrations of the commedia.” 155-72. in english (abstract in italian and english). analyzes how blake portrays the mediating role of key female characters in dante’s divine comedy, especially in purgatorio. dauphin, caroline. “histoire(s) naturelle(s) du tigre: reconstruire l’animal dans l’œuvre de william blake.” see bonnecase, hobbes, blair, blake. dauphin, caroline. “la métamorphose d’ovide: transformations poétiques et végétales dans la poésie d’erasmus darwin et de william blake.” see braida-laplace et al. dearing, todd. “‘every thing is human, mighty! sublime!’: new literary humanism and the trope of the daimon in william blake’s jerusalem.” phd diss., flinders university, 2020. de santis, silvia. “how can i help thy husband’s copying me? dante tra blake, füssli e flaxman.” see dante e l’arte. dmitrieva, tatiana. “tvorchestvo i mifologiia uil'iama bleika v kontekste kinoproizvedeniia dzh. dzharmusha ‘mertvets’ [william blake’s works and mythology in the context of j. jarmusch’s film dead man].” sibirskii antropologicheskii zhurnal [siberian journal of anthropology] 4.4 (2020): 201-11. in russian (abstract in russian and english). the author analyzes the film dead man, comparing it with the poems and graphic works by william blake, in particular the visionary heads, the ghost of a flea, and “the little boy lost.” dombowsky, philip. “the illustrated books of william blake.” national gallery of canada magazine (20 feb. 2020): 7 pars. also available in french: “les livres illustrés de william blake.” description of the exhibition of the same name held at the national gallery of canada [ottawa] that was originally slated to run from 14 january to 26 april 2020. due to covid, the gallery closed on 14 march and did not reopen until 18 july. e effinger, elizabeth. “forgiving blake’s disaster: the changing face(s) of science and ‘governmentalized’ bodies of knowledge.” see rajan and faflak, william blake. effinger, elizabeth. rev. of the reception of william blake in europe, ed. sibylle erle and morton d. paley. see erle and paley. eisenman, stephen f. rev. of william blake, tate britain. see myrone and concannon. erle, sibylle. “blake, children and lockdown.” see vala. erle, sibylle, and morton d. paley, eds. the reception of william blake in europe. 2 vols. london: bloomsbury academic, 2019. <blake (2020)> reviews effinger, elizabeth. european romantic review 31.4 (2020): 490-94. “this volume … marks the first editorial collaboration between erle and paley, a relationship i hope will continue in future herculean projects” (490). ferber, michael. eighteenth-century studies 53.2 (2020): 330-33. matthews, susan. bars review 53 (2019): 5 pars. “perhaps the most fascinating aspect of these two volumes, however, is what they reveal about the distinct blakes that have been shaped by politics” (par. 4). essick, robert n. “blake in the marketplace, 2019.” see blake 53.4. f faflak, joel. “blake’s milton and the disaster of psychoanalysis.” see rajan and faflak, william blake. ferber, michael. rev. of the reception of william blake in europe, ed. sibylle erle and morton d. paley. see erle and paley. ferreira, isabel cristina rodrigues, and ingrid oliveira pinto. “songs of innocence and of experience: um olhar sobre o processo de tradução.” revista eletrônica do instituto de humanidades 50 (2020): 130-47. in portuguese (abstract in portuguese and english). analyzes and compares paulo vizioli’s and renato suttana’s translations (1993 and 2011 respectively) of blake’s “the blossom” and “the sick rose.” filippovskii, german. “dve kontseptsii detstva v evropeiskoi i russkoi poezii xviii-xix v. [two conceptions of childhood in european and russian poetry of the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries].” verkhnevolzhskii filologicheskii vestnik [verhnevolzhski philological bulletin] 3 (22) (2020): 8-17. in russian (abstract in russian and english). the article is devoted to the comparison of childhood images in the works of russian poets derzhavin and nekrasov and english poets blake and wordsworth. font paz, carme. “‘che son la pia’: liminal female figures of intercession in blake’s illustrations of the commedia.” see dante e l’arte. fragmentum number 42 (july–​sept. 2014) “a poesia e a arte de william blake: o catálogo descritivo” santos, alcides cardoso dos. “apresentação william blake e a oposição arte versus comércio [presentation: william blake and the opposition of art and commerce].” 9-11. in portuguese. tavares, enéias farias. “william blake e o turbulento ano de 1809: catálogos descritivos, desavenças criativas e obras visionárias [william blake and the turbulent year of 1809: descriptive catalogues, creative disagreements, and visionary works of art].” 13-26. in portuguese (abstract in portuguese and english). a descriptive catalogue of pictures, poetical and historical inventions. 27-55. text in english. um catálogo descritivo de pinturas, invenções históricas e poéticas. 57-87. text in portuguese, trans. enéias tavares, ana paula cabrera, daniela do canto, andrio santos, and leandro oliveira. santos, alcides cardoso dos. “‘i will not reason & compare: my business is to create’: blake e a questão do método [blake and the problem of method].” 89-108. in portuguese (abstract in portuguese and english). “um catálogo descritivo de pinturas & outras obras visionárias.” n. pag. images of the works described in the catalogue. g gardner, james. “william blake revisited at the morgan.” magazine antiques (13 july 2020): 8 pars. calls attention to the digital version of the 2009–​10 morgan exhibition william blake’s world: “a new heaven is begun.” § gillet, louis. “le cas de william blake.” revue des deux mondes (1 july 1923). b. 1924. c. 2012. <wbhc p. 2073> d. le cas de william blake. angoulême: éditions marguerite waknine, 2020. 24 pp. 12 color plates. isbn: 9791094565636. in french. “about crabb robinson’s account of blake in morley’s edition” <wbhc p. 2073>. glück, louise. “nobel lecture by louise glück.” nobel prize (7 dec. 2020). partly on blake and particularly “the little black boy.” göktepe, mehmet. “romantizm sanat akımı ve sanatçıları üzerine bir değerlendirme [an assessment of the romantic movement and its advocates].” journal of arts 3.1 (2020): 45-66. in turkish (abstract in turkish and english). goldsmith, steven. “nothing lost: blake and the new materialism.” see rajan and faflak, william blake. goldstein, amanda jo. “blake’s mundane egg: epigenesis and milieux.” sweet science: romantic materialism and the new logics of life. chicago: university of chicago press, 2017. <blake (2018)> reviews hamilton, ross. wordsworth circle 50.4 (2019): 515-20. an “impressive and erudite study” (515). ruston, sharon. eighteenth-century studies 53.4 (2020): 748-50. goldstein, amanda jo. “william blake and the time of ontogeny.” systems of life: biopolitics, economics, and literature on the cusp of modernity. ed. richard a. barney and warren montag. new york: fordham university press, 2018. <blake (2019)> review mitchell, robert. eighteenth-century studies 53.3 (2020): 481-90. goode, mike. “blakespotting” and “the joy of looking: what william blake’s pictures want.” romantic capabilities: blake, scott, austen, and the new messages of old media. oxford: oxford university press, 2020. isbn: 9780198862369. 35-98. interesting work on romantic and contemporary media. the two chapters on blake are in a section titled “viral blake,” and both are revised versions of articles <wbhc p. 2091>. see also the interview with goode at hell’s printing press. goswamy, b. n. “the fascinating works of william blake.” tribune [india] (8 june 2020): 5 pars. an overview of blake for a popular audience. gourlay, alexander s. “john e. grant, 1925–​2020.” see blake 54.3. gourlay, alexander s. rev. of william blake: selected works, ed. peter otto, and william blake: selected poems, ed. nicholas shrimpton. see blake 54.1. gurton-wachter, lily. “blake’s blush: wartime shame in ‘london’ and jerusalem.” see rajan and faflak, william blake. gurton-wachter, lily. “blake’s ‘little black thing’: happiness and injury in the age of slavery.” english literary history 87.2 (2020): 519-52. a very significant reading of the line “and because i am happy, & dance & sing” from “the chimney sweeper” of experience: “i take the discomfort of trying to make sense of this perplexing line as a prompt for exploring the politics of joy in the 1790s, particularly in british writing about slavery and abolition” (520). h habchi, sobhi. “k. gibran entre le ‘troisième oeil’ et w. blake: jalons pour une esthétique visionnaire.” revue de littérature comparée 326 (2008): 237-57. in french. hagan, jade. “new age blake memes and other psychotechnologies of the self.” configurations 28.2 (spring 2020): 211-53. “blake became an emblematic figure of the hippie and new age’s mode of critique and their vision of a holistic and ecologically attuned way of life” (215). includes selected lists of “new age and psychedelic media that cite ‘doors of perception’ blake meme” and “new age physics popularizations that cite ‘auguries of innocence’ blake meme.” haggarty, sarah, ed. william blake in context. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2019. <blake (2020)> review whitson, roger. see bundock and effinger. hamilton, ross. rev. of amanda jo goldstein, sweet science. see goldstein, “blake’s mundane egg: epigenesis and milieux.” hancock, stephen. rev. of hélène ibata, the challenge of the sublime. see ibata, the challenge of the sublime. hargraves, matthew. “america’s blake.” see adam with brooks. hayes, kevin j. “edwin e. slosson and the melville revival.” notes and queries 67.1 (2020): 133-34. “slosson is the first to identify a similarity between moby-dick and the poetry of william blake” (133). heath, tim. “introduction to vala.” see vala. heringman, noah. “primitive arts and sciences and the body of knowledge in blake’s epics.” see rajan and faflak, william blake. higgs, john. “blake under lockdown.” see vala. howard, cameron b. r. “‘and was jerusalem builded here?’: agency and longing in blake and biblical poetry.” word & world 40.2 (spring 2020): 103-11. “the questions in blake’s opening stanzas testify not simply to a nostalgic query about the past, but rather to a sense of longing for a new and better future” (110). [word & world: theology for christian ministry is a quarterly journal published by the luther seminary in st. paul, minnesota.] hudson, robert. “imagination: william blake.” the poet and the fly: art, nature, god, mortality, and other elusive mysteries. minneapolis: broadleaf books, 2020. 39-64. hunnekuhl, philipp. “‘matters of religion & morality’: herder, wordsworth, and blake.” henry crabb robinson: romantic comparatist, 1790–​1811. liverpool: liverpool university press, 2020. isbn: 9781789621785. 159-93. the section on blake is 184-93, though the preceding discussion of herder and wordsworth is relevant to hunnekuhl’s wider argument. “robinson’s underlying criteria for the appreciation of blake the ‘artist, poet, and religious enthusiast’ … echo the concerns of wordsworth and herder: through invoking a childlike naivety, or simplicity, blake frees compassion from religious dogmatism” (192). hunnekuhl also reproduces the two pages of robinson’s pocket diary that describe his visit to blake’s exhibition and the writing of his 1811 article for vaterländisches museum. i ibata, hélène. the challenge of the sublime: from burke’s “philosophical enquiry” to british romantic art. manchester: manchester university press, 2018. <blake (2020)> review hancock, stephen. european romantic review 31.1 (2020): 122-27. ibata, hélène. rev. of hobbes, blair, blake: hommage à françois piquet, ed. denis bonnecase. see bonnecase. ibata, hélène. rev. of william blake, tate britain. see myrone and concannon. ibrayeva, moldyr, and aigul orynbayeva. “bitter truth.” aktual'nye voprosy sovremennoi nauki [actual issues of modern science] 3-4 (2020): 31-34. in english. the article presents a comparative analysis of two poems by blake: “the little black boy” and “i saw a chapel all of gold.” j jones, josh. “william blake illustrates mary wollstonecraft’s work of children’s literature, original stories from real life (1791).” open culture (13 may 2020): 9 pars. aimed at a popular audience. k kalaichandran, amitha. “how can we bear this much loss?” new york times (23 sept. 2020): 18 pars. on blake’s job and the grief of covid: “the lesson offered by blake’s job: understanding his role in a wider universe and cosmos, transformed in his surrender, and the release from the attachments to his old life” (par. 17). § karaçoban, atanas, and patricia denisa dita. “painting, poetry and the interference of the genres in english art: the case of william blake.” border crossing 10.1 (2020): 29-42. khachaturov, sergei. “gotitsizmy istoricheskoi zhivopisi epokhi romantizma. bruni, ivanov, fiusli, bleik [gothicism in romantic historical painting. bruni, ivanov, fuseli, blake].” russkoe iskusstvo. ii. neuchtennye detali. sbornik statei [russian art. ii. overlooked details. digest of articles]. saint petersburg: aleteiia, 2020. isbn: 9785001650300. 75-94. in russian (abstract in russian and english). the era of romanticism made its main themes “overlooked details,” difficult and “incorrect,” “gothic,” and “romantic” signs of historical time, and personal understanding of incidents, accomplishments, and human deeds. khalip, jacques. “flea trouble.” see rajan and faflak, william blake. kikui, takashi. “meguru hikari no uta: okada takahiko wo tsuranuku william blake [songs of encircling light: takahiko okada inspired by william blake].” gendai-shi techo [contemporary poetry magazine] 63.11 (2020): 102-05. in japanese. an article about takahiko okada (1939–​97), a japanese poet and art critic, who wrote his poetry under the influence of blake. king, shelley, and john b. pierce. “‘remarkable both for genius, & extravagance’: amelia opie and blake’s illustrations of the book of job.” see blake 54.3. § ko, joon seog. “the harmonizing poetics of the opposites in william blake’s the marriage of heaven and hell.” yeats journal of korea 60 (2019): 267-85. in korean (abstract in english and korean). kondo, ariyuki. “william blake job-ki no sashie ko: gothic seido ni chikaduki gakki wo teni shuno eikowo tataeyo [william blake’s illustrations of the book of job: get close to the gothic cathedral and praise the lord with your instruments].” ferris jogakuin daigaku kirisuto-kyo kenkyujo kiyo [bulletin of the institute for the study of christianity, ferris university] 5 (2020): 39-54. in japanese. 18 plates by blake. l lepine, ayla. rev. of naomi billingsley, the visionary art of william blake. see billingsley. levy, michelle. “afterword: blake’s digitised printed script.” literary manuscript culture in romantic britain. edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2020. 259-67. coda on blake. ludlow, elizabeth, ed. the figure of christ in the long nineteenth century. cham: palgrave macmillan, 2020. isbn: 9783030400811. includes: rowland, christopher. “blake, enoch and the emergence of the apocalyptic christ.” 23-38. billingsley, naomi. “‘as the eye is formed’: seeing as christ in blake’s bartimaeus.” 39-52. “the chapter argues that the painting reflects a broader concern in blake’s thought: the formation of sight” (abstract). m marchetto santorun, m. cecilia. “‘terrible monsters sin-bred’: blakean monstrosity in alan moore’s graphic novels.” palgrave communications 6 (2020). matthews, susan. rev. of the reception of william blake in europe, ed. sibylle erle and morton d. paley. see erle and paley. matthews, susan. rev. of william blake, tate britain. see myrone and concannon. mazzeo, tilar j. “william blake and the decorative arts.” the regency revisited. ed. tim fulford and michael e. sinatra. new york: palgrave, 2016. <blake (2018)> review cox, octavia. romanticism 26.1 (2020): 107-09. mazzeo “exposes that blake was seated far nearer the heart of the regency establishment than often thought, and that the impression of him as a radicalised artist disengaged from contemporary london culture ‘requires some urgent rethinking’ (65)” (108). mccabe, chris. “the commission as vision.” see mccabe et al. mccabe, chris, et al. the bard: william blake at flat time house. london: flat time house, 2020. 28 pp. a description of the exhibition is available at <http://​flattimeho.​org.​uk/​exhibitions/​bard>. mccabe, chris. “the commission as vision.” 3-9. jarrett, keith. “a basic diagram (or, on alternate time signatures, two incidental persons converge upon frameworks of cosmology)” (2020). mccabe, chris. from “civic” (2020). mcdevitt, niall. “edward i” (2020). montgomery, robert. from “poem in lights to be scattered in the square mile” (2015/​2020). shandhu, karen. from “the oak tree wears a dress” (2020). sinclair, iain. from “mental travailers: or, the battle of the books” (2020). yoseloff, tamar. from “belief systems” (2020). rena, magnus. “the bard and the fatal sisters.” 19-23. review whaley, henry. flat time house (n.d.): 5 pp. mcquail, josephine a. “the secret history of william blake.” see vala. mitchell, robert. rev. of systems of life: biopolitics, economics, and literature on the cusp of modernity, ed. richard a. barney and warren montag. see goldstein, “william blake and the time of ontogeny.” mulhallen, karen. “the publisher not mad.” see blake 53.4. muşlu, meltem. “a corpus-based analysis of william blake’s songs of innocence and songs of experience.” english studies in the 21st century. ed. zekiye antakyalıoğlu et al. newcastle upon tyne: cambridge scholars publishing, 2020. 244-61. myrone, martin, intro. lives of william blake. london: pallas athene, 2019. <blake (2020)> b. los angeles: j. paul getty museum, 2020. isbn: 9781606066614. myrone, martin, and amy concannon, with an afterword by alan moore. william blake. london: tate publishing, 2019. catalogue for the 2019–20 tate britain exhibition. <blake (2020)> reviews bhanot, sunil. “exhibition: william blake: lost in translation.” british journal of general practice 70.690 (2020): 31. “tate britain was built partly on the profits of slavery, from the toil on the sugar plantations of alabama and the caribbean. the tate & lyle business flourished with the blood, sweat, and tears of captive africans forcibly transported or born captive in the british colonies. perhaps it’s a form of atonement for this legacy for the tate to embrace an artist who believed in emancipation and social justice.” calè, luisa. see blake 53.4. de courcier, scar. “william blake at tate britain.” jeviscachee.com (4 feb. 2020): 11 pars. dobson, chris. “last chance to see: william blake at tate britain.” dailyart (14 jan. 2020): 3 pars. dumont, etienne. “la tate britain londonnienne montre william blake à une nouvelle génération d’amateurs.” bilan (11 jan. 2020): 6 pars. in french. eisenman, stephen f. “a tate retrospective tamed the visionary radicalism of william blake.” art in america (6 apr. 2020): 21 pars. “tate curators martin myrone and amy concannon offered what i would call a liberal blake—​someone neither radical nor conservative, neither mad nor sober, and neither bourgeois nor bohemian” (par. 4). eisenman was the curator of william blake and the age of aquarius at the block museum of art, northwestern university, illinois, 2017–​18. enciso, adriana díaz. “blake en la tate.” literal: latin american voices/​voces latinoamericanas (9 feb. 2020): 25 pars. in spanish. ford, laura grace. “a visionary sense of london.” british art studies 15 (27 feb. 2020): 39 pars. halliday, ayun. “william blake’s paintings come to life in two animations.” open culture (4 sept. 2020): 12 pars. a pairing of sam gainsborough’s animation for the 2019–​20 tate exhibition with that created by sheila graber for the tate in 1978. hutchings-georgiou, hannah. “william blake. tate britain, london. £18. until 2 february 2020.” london journal 45.3 (nov. 2020): 335-39. ibata, hélène. “william blake.” miranda: revue pluridisciplinaire du monde anglophone 20 (2020): 11 pars. “it is truly a superlative exhibition” (par. 2). jacobs, alan. “everything is illuminated: false revolution: william blake at the tate britain.” harper’s (22 apr. 2020): 22 pars. “blake spent a good deal of time in the company of political radicals and probably shared many of their political views, but his tendency to what he called ‘nervous fear’ kept him relatively quiet in public about such matters” (par. 9). jacobs, alan. “why blake is terrifying.” snakes and ladders (23 apr. 2020): 4 pars. suggests that the tate played down “blake’s religious sensibilities”: “politically radical? check. pacifist? check. feminist? check. pop culture maven? check. in short, blake was basically a guardian reader. and that’s the kind of ‘rebel, radical, revolutionary’ that the corporate world is happy to support” (par. 4). kavanagh, dave. “fearful symmetry: william blake as an artist.” blue nib literary magazine (23 jan. 2020): 7 pars. kelly, jane. “the wimminisation of art is complete.” conservative woman (25 may 2020): 14 pars. “whether [josephine hopper] was talented or not belongs to the old canon of judgment; the fact that she was female is more important. at the tate britain william blake exhibition last year, i read that his work was inspired by his wife catherine. it was even suggested that she’d had a big hand in his etching and illustrations” (par. 3). matthews, susan. “review of william blake at tate britain: ‘for the pictures.’” 19: interdisciplinary studies in the long nineteenth century 30 (2020): 6 pars. engages with other reviews. mciver, gillian. “art travelling: ‘inside the mind of william blake’—​tate britain, london.” art traveller (31 jan. 2020): 11 pars. murray-white, james. “with mr. blake at the tate.” finding blake: reimagining william blake for the 21st century (22 jan. 2020): 12 pars. simon. “content warnings at tate.” books & boots: reflections on books and art (3 mar. 2020). references to the signage at the william blake exhibition in a wider blog post on tate britain content warnings. sriskandarajah, shamini. “tracing the ‘bounding line’: william blake at tate britain.” lucy writers (13 feb. 2020): 8 pars. “william blake—​artist of apocalypse.” woawomen urra (20 mar. 2020): 13 pars. “his famous illustration of his poem ‘the tyger’ is smaller than a postcard!” (par. 5). “william blake at tate britain.” timsformational (11 mar. 2020): 4 pars. n ngide, george ewane. “romantic individuation and individualism: re-reading william blake’s vision of romantic ‘thingliness.’” international journal of language and literature 7.2 (2019): 16-27. ngide suggests the songs portray “journeys of life from individuation, through individualism and back to individuation” (abstract). o otto, peter. “negotiating the ‘holy land’: cross-cultural encounters from bonaparte to blake.” postcolonial studies 23.3 (2020): 404-29. special issue, “catalysts of change: colonial transformations of anglo-european literary culture in the long eighteenth century.” otto, peter. rev. of rock and romanticism: blake, wordsworth, and rock from dylan to u2, ed. james rovira, and beastly blake, ed. helen p. bruder and tristanne connolly. see bruder and connolly. otto, peter. “‘second birth’ and gothic fictions in matthew lewis’s the monk, catherine blake’s ‘agnes,’ and william blake’s vala, or the four zoas.” see rajan and faflak, william blake. p pashchenko, m. “vzaimodeistvie slova i izobrazheniia v khudozhestvennykh proizvedeniiakh s avtorskimi illiustratsiiami (na materiale poezii u. bleika) [the interaction of words and images in works of art with author’s illustrations (based on the poetry of w. blake)].” aktual'nye problemy lingvistiki i literaturovedeniia. sbornik materialov vi (xx) mezhdunarodnoi konferentsii molodykh uchenykh [actual problems of linguistics and literary criticism. collection of materials of the vi (xx) international conference of young scientists]. tomsk: stt, 2020. isbn: 9785936296420. 215-16. in russian. the author analyzes the mechanisms of interaction between text and images in blake’s poem “the clod and the pebble.” pervozvanskii, roman. “pesni nevinnosti i opyta u. bleika kak khudozhestvennoe edinstvo [songs of innocence and of experience by w. blake as an artistic unity].” nauka i obrazovanie segodnia [science and education today] 1 (48) (2020): 40-41. in russian. § piskorska, anna. “jedna rodzina duchowa: intertekstualna obecność natchnionej poezji williama blake'a w truposzu jima jarmuscha [one spiritual family: the intertextual presence of william blake’s inspired poetry in dead man directed by jim jarmusch].” rodzina: naturalna, duchowa, społeczna. ed. jan zimny. wrocław: akademia wojsk lądowych imienia generała tadeusza kościuszki, 2020. isbn: 9788395792915. 99-108. in polish (abstract in polish and english). § pitruzzella, salvo. “note su sanesi, blake, e l’educazione alle arti.” roberto sanesi, filosofo e pedagogista dell’arte. ed. alessandro di chiara. macerata: edizioni quodlibet, 2020. isbn: 9788822905611. 125-38. in italian. potter, elizabeth. rev. of spoor (pokot), dir. agnieszka holland. see vala. potts, timothy. “foreword.” see adam with brooks. r rajan, tilottama. “system(s), body, corpus: the autogenesis of blake’s lambeth books.” see rajan and faflak, william blake. rajan, tilottama, and joel faflak. “introduction: from prophecy to disaster.” see rajan and faflak, william blake. rajan, tilottama, and joel faflak, eds. william blake: modernity and disaster. toronto: university of toronto press, 2020. isbn: 9781487506568. rajan, tilottama, and joel faflak. “introduction: from prophecy to disaster.” 3-29. heringman, noah. “primitive arts and sciences and the body of knowledge in blake’s epics.” 30-53. “by extending the myth of the fall to bodies of knowledge, blake enters a field of competition that encompasses speculative domains ranging from mythography to naturphilosophie as well as empirical histories of custom and manner and of nature” (31). rajan, tilottama. “system(s), body, corpus: the autogenesis of blake’s lambeth books.” 54-76. “this essay takes up the grotesque body of urizen as an autoreferential figure for blake’s own corpus, as the body’s systems and ecosystem disturb the system that blake later constructs as an immunitary enclosure” (55). otto, peter. “‘second birth’ and gothic fictions in matthew lewis’s the monk, catherine blake’s ‘agnes,’ and william blake’s vala, or the four zoas.” 77-102. with substantial analysis of catherine’s painting of agnes from the monk, otto reads the four zoas “as a gothic fiction that takes ruin … and the dynamics of ruination … as its primary themes” (77). faflak, joel. “blake’s milton and the disaster of psychoanalysis.” 103-25. “milton constitutes and reads as a vast identity crisis” (112). gurton-wachter, lily. “blake’s blush: wartime shame in ‘london’ and jerusalem.” 126-49. “blake, i argue, describes a general, national shame that is dispersed, displaced, and collective, that belongs to no one in particular and yet infects everyone, and that is a symptom of—​but also a way to critique—​the disease called war” (128). bundock, christopher. “blake’s nervous system: hypochondria, judaism, and jerusalem.” 150-71. reads the body of albion in jerusalem through the lens of the long reaction to the 1753 jewish naturalization bill: “albion thus seems to become the living embodiment of the anti-semitic image of the jew that he himself generates” (165). effinger, elizabeth. “forgiving blake’s disaster: the changing face(s) of science and ‘governmentalized’ bodies of knowledge.” 172-93. examines hand in jerusalem as representing the “disastrously disfigured body” of “the industry of science” (174). collings, david. “labouring with/​in disaster: blake’s workless work in jerusalem.” 194-211. “blake suggests that the golden road out of ideology is to relinquish all appeals to law and to embrace wholesale forgiveness” (200). goldsmith, steven. “nothing lost: blake and the new materialism.” 212-29. “blake’s unqualified religious enthusiasm (including his redemptive ideal of art) grasps the force and magnitude of loss more persuasively than does the covert, secularized faith characteristic of many materialist discourses today” (221). clark, david l . “blake’s decomposite art: on the image of language and the ruins of representation.” 233-61. discusses how blake rejects conventional models of illustration, reading pity as “beautifully ruinous for illustrative theory and practice” (235). (a revised and shortened version of his “how to do things with shakespeare: illustrative theory and practice in blake’s pity” <wbhc p. 1853>.) khalip, jacques. “flea trouble.” 262-83. examines “behemoth and leviathan” and the ghost of a flea in light of derrida’s the animal that therefore i am. raz, yosefa. “robert lowth’s bible: between seraphic choirs and prophetic weakness.” modern language quarterly 81.2 (2020): 139-67. considers blake’s use of isaiah 6 in terms of lowth’s work on biblical poetics. rena, magnus. “the bard and the fatal sisters.” see mccabe et al. riordan, john. “billy blake’s cab or the vehicular form of william blake.” see vala. ripley, wayne c. “james blake of rotherhithe, timber merchant.” see blake 54.2. ripley, wayne c., with fernando castanedo, hikari sato, and hüseyin alhas. “william blake and his circle: a checklist of scholarship in 2019.” see blake 54.1. rogers, annise. rev. of william blake: selected poems, ed. nicholas shrimpton. see vala. rosso, g. a. “interpreting blake’s the magdalene at the sepulchre.” see blake 54.2. rovira, james, ed. rock and romanticism: blake, wordsworth, and rock from dylan to u2. lanham: lexington books, 2018. <blake (2019)> reviews otto, peter. see bruder and connolly. yoder, r. paul. see blake 53.4. rowland, christopher. “blake, enoch and the emergence of the apocalyptic christ.” see ludlow. ruston, sharon. rev. of amanda jo goldstein, sweet science. see goldstein, “blake’s mundane egg: epigenesis and milieux.” s santos, alcides cardoso dos. “apresentação. william blake e a oposição arte versus comércio [presentation: william blake and the opposition of art and commerce].” see fragmentum. santos, alcides cardoso dos. “‘i will not reason & compare: my business is to create’: blake e a questão do método [blake and the problem of method].” see fragmentum. sato, hikari. “mushakoji saneatsu to sylvia pankhurst: eikoku shakai-shugi-kei kikanshi de hodosareta ‘atarashiki mura’ [saneatsu mushakoji and sylvia pankhurst: ‘a new village’ reported in a socialist newspaper in britain].” hikaku bungaku [journal of comparative literature] 62 (2020): 7-21. in japanese. although this essay mainly discusses the correspondence between saneatsu mushakoji, a japanese novelist, dramatist, and social reformer, and sylvia pankhurst, a british suffragette, it points out that some poems from songs of experience were reprinted in workers dreadnought, a weekly newspaper edited and issued by pankhurst in london (“the chimney sweeper” and “the little vagabond,” 2 dec. 1922, p. 1; “london” and “a little girl lost,” 9 dec. 1922, p. 1; “holy thursday” and “a little boy lost,” 9 june 1923, p. 1). scarpa, sébastien. rev. of inconstances romantiques, ed. antonella braida-laplace, sophie laniel-musitelli, and céline sabiron. see braida-laplace et al. sellars, michael. “‘lo, a shadow of horror is risen’: william blake and the horror tradition.” horrified (28 sept. 2020): 28 pars. calls attention to blake’s horror imagery for a popular audience. selz, gabrielle. “san francisco’s william blake gallery: a visionary’s venue.” art & object (9 mar. 2020): 9 pars. an article on john windle’s william blake gallery. serdechnaia, vera. “dmitri smirnov: 1948–​2020.” see blake 54.1. serdechnaia, vera. “pesni opyta, i tol'ko opyta: dialog bleika i dostoevskogo v ‘elektroteatre’ [songs of experience, and only experience: a dialogue between blake and dostoevsky in the ‘electrotheatre’].” peterburgskii teatral'nyi zhurnal [petersburg theatre journal] 1 (99) (2020): 147-50. in russian. review of alexander belousov’s opera the book of seraphim at the stanislavsky electrotheatre in moscow: the text of the opera is based on a combination of blake’s the book of thel and an excerpt from dostoevsky’s novel demons. serdechnaia, vera. “‘russkaia tema’ v proizvedeniiakh uil'iama bleika [‘russian theme’ in william blake’s works].” izvestiia iuzhnogo federal'nogo universiteta. filologicheskie nauki [proceedings of southern federal university. philology] 4 (2020): 137-45. in russian (abstract in russian and english). “blake counts russia and its territories in his great prophecies milton and jerusalem. … there is a reason to believe that the image of the russian empress catherine ii was for blake the embodiment of the sinister female will and became a model for the harlot of babylon, captured by him in a portrait of 1809, as well as one of the prototypes of the powerful demiurge-spinner enitharmon” (abstract). serdechnaia, vera. “russkii literaturnyi naslednik bleika: po materialam neopublikovannykh poem borisa anrepa [blake’s russian literary heir: based on unpublished poems by boris anrep].” literaturnyi fakt [a fact of literature] 1 (15) (2020): 352-65. in russian (abstract in russian and english). the author shows that poems of boris anrep (1883–​1969) are an attempt to embody in russian the principles of english romantic poetry, primarily the prophecies of william blake. the author also studies the reception of anrep’s poems in the work of the artist dmitry stelletsky (1875–​1947). serdechnaia, vera. “stavrogin sovrashchaet tel': kniga serafima aleksandra belousova v elektroteatre stanislavskii [stavrogin seduces thel: the book of seraphim by alexander belousov at the stanislavsky electrotheatre].” dostoevskii i mirovaia kul'tura. filologicheskii zhurnal [dostoevsky and world culture. philological journal] 2 (2020): 211-21. in russian. review of alexander belousov’s opera the book of seraphim at the stanislavsky electrotheatre in moscow: the text of the opera is based on a combination of blake’s the book of thel and an excerpt from dostoevsky’s novel demons. serdechnaia, vera. “uil'iam bleik i f. m. dostoevskii: istoriia sopostavleniia [william blake and f. m. dostoevsky: a history of comparison].” dostoevskii i mirovaia kul'tura. filologicheskii zhurnal [dostoevsky and world culture. philological journal] 3 (2020): 158-68. in russian (abstract in russian and english). the article is devoted to the history of comparing the works of william blake and fyodor dostoevsky: the lectures of andré gide; the works of jean wahl, georges bataille, melvin rader, and d. gustafsson; czesław miłosz’s the land of ulro; and the opera the book of seraphim in moscow (2020). serdechnaia, vera. “uil'iam bleik v sovetskoi retseptsii: formirovanie obraza ‘revoliutsionnogo romantika’ [william blake in the soviet reception: forming the image of ‘revolutionary romantic’].” vestnik permskogo universiteta. rossiiskaia i zarubezhnaia filologiia [perm university herald. russian and foreign philology] 12.4 (2020): 136-46. in russian (abstract in russian and english). “soviet blake was officially ‘born’ in 1957—​after the world peace council’s decision on celebrations of the poet’s bicentennial. blake, with a reputation tainted by the symbolists, needed serious justification in soviet literary criticism. the arguments for his justification were the revolutionary pathos of his poems, his democratic background and his humanism” (abstract). sergodeev, i. “opyt analiza i sinteza kontekstnykh znachenii dominantnoi edinitsy child poeticheskogo teksta u. bleika ‘the lamb’: intertekstual’nyi aspect [the experience of analyzing and synthesizing the contextual meanings of the dominant child lexeme in w. blake’s poetic text ‘the lamb’: an intertextual aspect].” nauchnyi dialog [scientific dialogue] 1 (2020): 158-74. in russian (abstract in russian and english). sha, richard c. “william blake and the neurological imagination: romantic science, nerves, and the emergent self.” imagination and science in romanticism. baltimore: john hopkins university press, 2018. <blake (2019)> review carlson, kristen. configurations 28.1 (winter 2020): 147-50. shaddock, david. “mind-forg’d manacles: william blake and the emancipation of consciousness.” poetry and psychoanalysis: the opening of the field. abingdon: routledge, 2020. isbn: 9780415699006. 106-24. siegel, jonah. “blake.” material inspirations: the interests of the art object in the nineteenth century and after. oxford: oxford university press, 2020. 171-80. although blake is addressed directly only in a short section on “the value of reading his response to main lines of art-thought in his period as deeply enmeshed in the institutional and intellectual structures in which they arose” (172), he is referenced throughout siegel’s “study of the power of evocations of the material in influential reflections on art” (viii). sommers, susan mitchell. the siblys of london: a family on the esoteric fringes of georgian england. see sibly in division ii. spector, sheila a. the evolution of blake’s myth. new york: routledge, 2020. isbn: 9780815363712. a strong reassertion of blake’s place in the esoteric tradition, which spector sees as central to the development of blake’s myth. steil, juliana, and lawrence flores pereira. “translating blake’s prophetic poetry: the case of milton.” see blake 54.2. § suzuki, masashi. “‘foundations for grand things’: blake to swedenborg [‘foundations for grand things’: blake and swedenborg].” tohoku roman-shugi kenkyu [tohoku romantic studies] 6 (2019): 39-55. in japanese. t tavares, enéias farias. “the william blake archive: repensando o acervo físico e o arquivo digital [the william blake archive: rethinking physical collection and digital archive].” letras 23.46 (jan.-june 2013): 109-32. in portuguese (abstract in portuguese and english). tavares, enéias farias. “william blake e a (re)visão do juízo final: tradução e crítica literária [william blake and the (re)vision of the last judgment: translation and literary criticism].” concinnitas 1.20 (june 2013): 82-102. in portuguese. includes a translation of blake’s letter of 18 january 1808 to ozias humphry. tavares, enéias farias. “william blake e o turbulento ano de 1809: catálogos descritivos, desavenças criativas e obras visionárias [william blake and the turbulent year of 1809: descriptive catalogues, creative disagreements, and visionary works of art].” see fragmentum. tempest, kae. “blakean intensity.” see vala. todd, christopher, with revisions by peter main and forbes gibb. ruthven todd (1914–​1978): a finding list. stirling: lomax press, 2020. isbn: 9780992916077. a bibliography of todd that includes his unpublished works and poems as well as his published scholarship, poetry, and fiction. toki, koji. sho-o to sogo: toki koji chosaku-shu + symposium [correspondence and synthesis: koji toki collection of essays + symposium]. ed. tomonao yoshida. tokyo: takanashi shobo, 2020. 1026 pp. isbn: 9784909812285. in japanese. this book includes the following essays: “william blake no sozoryoku [the imagination of william blake].” 41-50. <bsj p. 117, bbs p. 662> originally published in jimbun gakuho [bulletin of humanities] 86 (1972): 59-75, and reprinted in metropolitan 58 (2016): 109-28. “blake to ‘fukugo geijutsu’ [blake and composite art].” 51-54. <bsj p. 117, bbs p. 662> originally published in eigo seinen [rising generation] 119.4 (1973): 12-13, and reprinted in metropolitan 58 (2016): 174-80. “blake no hikyo shinwa [the mystic mythology of blake].” 55-61. <bsj p. 116, wbhc p. 2774> originally published in yuriika [eureka] 6.9 (1974): 192-99, and reprinted in metropolitan 58 (2016): 212-25. 6 plates by blake and 1 plate by catherine blake. “yomigaeru albion: william blake sobyo [rerising albion: a short introduction of william blake].” 62-72. <bsj p. 66, wbhc p. 2372> originally published in marie claire japon 95 (1990): 257-63. 1 plate by blake. “‘seishin no tabibito’ no jikan kozo [the structure of time in ‘the mental traveller’].” 75-80. <bsj p. 117, wbhc p. 2774> originally published in yuriika [eureka] 5.9 (1973): 160-65, and reprinted in metropolitan 58 (2016): 181-191. “gui to genshi: gray no neko kara blake no neko e [allegory and vision: from gray’s cat to blake’s cat].” 561-68. <bsj p. 117, bbs p. 662> originally published in yuriika [eureka] 5.13 (1973): 170-77, and reprinted in metropolitan 58 (2016): 192-211. 6 plates by blake. “joyce to blake [joyce and blake].” 697-700. originally published in yuriika [eureka] 9.11 (1977): 57-59, and reprinted in metropolitan 58 (2016): 231-36. “(honyaku) james joyce, ‘william blake’ [(translation) james joyce, ‘william blake’].” 701-10. <bsj p. 50> originally published in sekai hihyo taikei 3: shiron no tenkai [world literary criticism series 3: the development of theories of poetry], ed. kazushi shinoda et al. (tokyo: chikuma shobo, 1975). translated from the critical writings of james joyce, ed. ellsworth mason and richard ellmann (london: faber & faber, 1964). “(honyaku) northrop frye, ‘blake and joyce: futari no “tankyu” to “junkan” wo megutte’ [(translation) northrop frye, ‘blake and joyce: on their quest and cycle’].” 711-19. <bsj p. 30, wbhc p. 2372> originally published in marie claire japon 95 (1990): 264-68. translated from northrop frye, “quest and cycle in finnegans wake,” fables of identity: studies in poetic mythology (new york: harcourt, brace & world, 1963). torres, alexander. “from swedenborgianism to abolitionism: the reprinting of william blake in antebellum america.” esq: a journal of nineteenth-century american literature and culture 66.2 (2020): 251-89. foregrounding blake’s early american reception in swedenborgian circles, he argues that “the spiritualist strain in blake’s songs addresses the concerns of nineteenth-century social reformers, who enlisted a spiritualist ideology to advance their goals” (254). townsend, colby. “revisiting joseph smith and the availability of the book of enoch.” dialogue: a journal of mormon thought 53.3 (fall 2020): 41-71. with substantial reference to work on the book of enoch by blake scholars from g. e. bentley, jr., to susan matthews, townsend suggests that smith had knowledge of the book, even if he did not see richard laurence’s 1821 english translation. v vala: the journal of the blake society issue 1 (nov. 2020) articles heath, tim. “introduction to vala.” 3. tempest, kae. “blakean intensity.” 4-5. the president of the blake society describes the influence of blake on their career. erle, sibylle. “blake, children and lockdown.” 6-9. the editor of vala describes her experience of the covid lockdown, which “spawned the idea to make the first issue of vala about blake’s songs and the children around us” (8). higgs, john. “blake under lockdown.” 10-11. reflections on blake’s bust in westminster abbey and the lockdown: “if we remember why we are doing it, though, i suspect blake may have grudgingly approved” (11). riordan, john. “billy blake’s cab or the vehicular form of william blake.” 12-16. riordan, creator of the comic william blake, taxi driver and the graphic poem capital city, reflects on his relationship to blake. whittaker, jason. “divine images.” 18-19. whittaker considers blake’s influence on his life and career. mcquail, josephine a. “the secret history of william blake.” 20-24. a fictitious biography of blake drawn from the record of another william blake found in the london metropolitan archives. collyer, ed. “teaching ‘the tyger.’” 25-27. an essay on teaching blake without engaging in what collyer usefully terms “teacherisation,” “when teachers don’t even give pupils the opportunity to experience a text for the first time” (25). bobb, desmond. “why the y in ‘the tyger’?” 29. argues that blake’s english “y” invokes the shape of the hebrew letter ayin, which means “eye.” reviews rogers, annise. nicholas shrimpton, ed., william blake: selected poems. 31-32. potter, elizabeth. agnieszka holland, dir., spoor (pokot). 32-33. the film is an adaptation of olga tokarczuk’s drive your plow over the bones of the dead. vernon, mark. “the four-fold imagination.” aeon (4 sept. 2020): 32 pars. “during a pandemic, it [single vision] motivates what it takes to flatten the curve or increase the amount of testing and, more generally, it organises life around metrics such as economic growth and gdp. only, it’s never quite clear what these seeming goods are for, with the upshot that people and societies feel stuck in ulro’s ‘dull round,’ to use blake’s phrase” (par. 10). villa, marianna. “dal testo all’immagine: blake in dialogo con dante.” see dante e l’arte. w whaley, henry. rev. of the bard: william blake at flat time house. see mccabe et al. whitson, roger. rev. of william blake’s gothic imagination, ed. chris bundock and elizabeth effinger, and william blake in context, ed. sarah haggarty. see bundock and effinger. whittaker, jason. “blake and music, 2019.” see blake 54.1. whittaker, jason. “divine images.” see vala. wood, christopher s. “the history of art according to william blake.” a history of art history. princeton: princeton university press, 2019. isbn: 9780691156521. 205-06. very slight overview of blake’s sense of art history. y yoder, r. paul. rev. of rock and romanticism: blake, wordsworth, and rock from dylan to u2, ed. james rovira. see blake 53.4. z živković, dušan. “mythological transformations in the poem ‘the tyger’ by william blake and the cycle ‘there was a tiger here’ by gregor strniša.” primerjalna književnost 43.2 (2020): 233-45. in english. gregor strniša (1930–​87) was a slovenian poet. division ii: william blake’s circle barton, bernard (1784–​1849) quaker poet stokes, christopher. “poetics at the religious margin: bernard barton and quaker romanticism.” review of english studies 70 (2019): 509-26. stokes, christopher, ed. selected poems of bernard barton, the “quaker poet.” london: anthem press, 2020. isbn: 9781785274404. basire, james (1730–​1802) engraver, blake’s master payne, matthew. “the islip roll re-examined.” antiquaries journal 97 (2017): 231-60. slight reference to basire’s engravings of drawings from the islip roll manuscript in vetusta monumenta (1809). boehme, jacob [jakob böhme] (1575–1624) mystic daphnis volume 48, issues 1-2 (2020) “the forgotten reformation,” ed. andrew weeks, bo andersson, and urs leo gantenbein andersson, bo, urs leo gantenbein, and andrew weeks. “introduction to ‘the forgotten reformation.’” 1-3. gantenbein, urs leo. “the virgin mary and the universal reformation of paracelsus.” 4-37. “paracelsus defended the purity and eternity of mary and saw her as a goddess” (abstract). bulang, tobias. “wissensgenealogien der frühen neuzeit im vergleich: epistemische entwürfe des paracelsismus im wissensgeschichtlichen kontext [a comparison between genealogies of science in early modernity: epistemic designs of paracelsism from the perspective of the history of science].” 38-64. kahn, didier. “de pestilitate and paracelsian cosmology.” 65-86. pfister, kathrin. “zwei himmel—​zwei körper: zur paracelsischen kosmologie im astrologischen tagesschrifttum [two heavens—​two bodies: on the paracelsian cosmology in everyday astrological publications].” 87-103. gunnoe, charles d., jr., and dane t. daniel. “anti-paracelsianism from conrad gessner to robert boyle: a confessional history.” 104-39. weeks, andrew. “valentin weigel and anticlerical tradition.” 140-59. considers the relationship of paracelsus, valentin weigel, and boehme to german intellectual history. andersson, bo. “jacob böhmes lehre von den sieben quellgeistern in der morgen röte im auffgang (1612): eine politische perspektive [jacob boehme’s doctrine of the seven source spirits in his aurora (1612): a political perspective].” 160-83. žemla, martin. “from paracelsus to universal reform: the (pseudo-)paracelsian-weigelian philosophia mystica (1618).” 184-213. martin, lucinda. “jacob böhme and the spiritualist reformation of gender: exemplified by the correspondence of anna magdalena francke and the angelic brethren.” 214-46. analyzes the reception of boehme’s idea of sophia from the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries. hessayon, ariel. “‘teutonicus’: knowledge of boehme among english speakers before the english civil war.” 247-69. de vries, lyke. “the rosicrucian reformation: prophecy and reform at play in the rosicrucian manifestos.” 270-95. gantenbein, urs leo. “‘himmlische philosophia’ bei paracelsus und caspar schwenckfeld [‘celestial philosophy’ in paracelsus and casper schwenckfeld].” 296-318. hannak, kristine, and andrew weeks. “sebastian franck, johann arndt, and the varieties of religious dissent.” 319-27. cosway, maria (1760–1838) painter holowchak, m. andrew. “jefferson’s love letter to maria cosway.” thirty-six short essays on the probing mind of thomas jefferson: “a sentimental traveller.” newcastle upon tyne: cambridge scholars publishing, 2020. isbn: 9781527541856. 67-70. darwin, erasmus (1731–1802) scientist, poet hillyer, richard. four augustan science poets: abraham cowley, james thomson, henry brooke, erasmus darwin. london: anthem press, 2020. isbn: 9781785272912. § hoffbrand, barry i. “joseph wright of derby and dr. erasmus darwin, the artist and his physician.” journal of medical biography (6 apr. 2020). johnson, curtis n. “early transmutationists: j. b. lamarck, erasmus darwin, goethe, etienne geoffroy saint-hilaire.” darwin’s “historical sketch”: an examination of the “preface” to the “origin of species.” oxford: oxford university press, 2020. isbn: 9780190882938. 52-77. lee, yoon sun. “vection, vertigo, and the historical novel.” novel 52.2 (2019): 179-99. “the work of erasmus darwin … bears particular relevance to [walter] scott’s handling of motion and movement” (181). porter, dahlia. “erasmus darwin’s prose of the world: induction and the philosophical poem.” science, form, and the problem of induction in british romanticism. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2018. isbn: 9781108418942. 73-112. vaughn cross, c. a. “blurring plant and human boundaries: erasmus darwin’s the loves of the plants.” psychopharmacology in british literature and culture, 1780–​1900. ed. natalie roxburgh and jennifer s. henke. cham: palgrave macmillan, 2020. 93-115. “this essay considers why [the loves of the plants] stood out among contemporary literary efforts to advance general knowledge of drug efficacy prior to nineteenth-century sumptuary laws that regulated drug processing, prescribing and consuming” (94). williams, elizabeth a. “perils and pleasures of appetite at 1800: xavier bichat and erasmus darwin.” appetite and its discontents: science, medicine, and the urge to eat, 1750–​1950. chicago: university of chicago press, 2020. isbn: 9780226692999. 77-89. “darwin, a cheerful optimist about human nature, celebrated the appetites, defending their essential role in the activities of life and imagining human improvement based on gratification of hunger and other needs” (88). flaxman, john (1755–1826) sculptor, friend of blake de santis, silvia. “how can i help thy husband’s copying me? dante tra blake, füssli e flaxman.” see dante e l’arte in division i, part vi. hainy, josh. “grecian theory at the royal academy: john flaxman and the pedagogy of corporeal representation.” visualizing the body in art, anatomy, and medicine since 1800: models and modeling. ed. andrew graciano. new york: routledge, 2019. 61-83. “as professor of sculpture, flaxman taught a corporeal pedagogy focused on replicating scientific principles utilized by the greeks” (62). jenkins, susan. “john flaxman’s funerary monument for the 1st earl of mansfield in westminster abbey.” burlington magazine 162.1405 (apr. 2020): 277-87. jenkins, susan. “modelling and mapping flaxman’s monument to william murray.” burlington magazine 162.1409 (aug. 2020): 644-45. von preussen, brigid. “manufactories of virtù: classicism, commerce, and authorship in georgian britain, c. 1759–​1800.” phd diss., columbia university, 2020. according to the abstract, it discusses the architect robert adam, josiah wedgwood, john flaxman, and angelica kauffman. french prophets riordan, michael b. “mysticism and prophecy in early eighteenth-century scotland.” scottish historical review 98, supplement: no. 248 (oct. 2019): 333-60. largely on the scottish french prophets. fuseli, henry [johann heinrich füssli] (1741–1825) painter, friend of blake addison, rhian. “‘the up-springing stem of the neck’ in g. f. watts’s paintings.” visual culture in britain 21.2 (2020): 247-74. references, in part, fuseli’s influence on george frederic watts’s depiction of the neck in his paintings. de santis, silvia. “how can i help thy husband’s copying me? dante tra blake, füssli e flaxman.” see dante e l’arte in division i, part vi. oppenheimer, margaret. “reinventing henry fuseli’s nightmare: a forgotten painting by william martin.” british art journal 21.1 (2020): 64-71. considers martin’s iachimo in the apartment of imogen (1784) as a response to fuseli’s nightmare. rykov, anatolii. “buria, natisk i legkoe dominirovanie. genri fiuzeli [storm, stress, and light domination. henry fuseli].” studia culturae 43 (2020): 68-77. in russian (abstract in russian and english). the author comes to the conclusion that the reception of the male-female opposition, typical for the sturm und drang movement, is transformed by fuseli into the deconstruction and erosion of stable gender identities. the erotization of art, the sexualization of the set of subjects and themes traditional for european art by fuseli, leads to a rethinking of the problems of power and social relations. hayley, william (1745–​1820) man of letters, patron hayley2020 conference fitzwilliam museum, university of cambridge, 12-13 nov. 2020 organizer: lisa gee select presentations can be found at <https://​hayley.​fitzmuseum.​cam.​ac.​uk/​news/​2021-​01-​04-​video-​presentations>: kidson, alex. “hayley and romney.” harris, alexandra. “‘dear retreats’: hayley’s places.” gee, lisa. “hope, disability, love, and grief.” bindman, david. “hayley and flaxman.” cole, georgina. “blindness and creativity in romney’s milton and his daughters.” see cole under romney. goldberg, brian. “charlotte smith, william hayley, and discriminated anguish.” wordsworth circle 51.3 (2020): 360-76. matthews, susan. “productivity, fertility and the romantic ‘old maid.’” romanticism 25.3 (2019): 225-36. considers hayley’s influence on hannah more and joanna southcott. johnson, joseph (1738–1809) bookseller, employer of blake fallon, david. “joseph johnson.” see johnson and keen under wollstonecraft. tomaselli, sylvana. “‘have ye not heard that we cannot serve two masters?’: the platonism of mary wollstonecraft.” see tomaselli under wollstonecraft. kauffman, angelica [angelika kauffmann] (1741–​1807) painter calè, luisa. “modern sibyls and sibylline media.” studies in romanticism 59.1 (2020): 59-83. examines “portraits of women as modern sibyls, focusing on the works of benjamin west, angelica kauffmann, emma hamilton, friedrich rehberg, and elisabeth vigée le brun” (60). von preussen, brigid. “manufactories of virtù: classicism, commerce, and authorship in georgian britain, c. 1759–​1800.” see von preussen under flaxman. morganwg, iolo [edward williams] (1747–1826) welsh antiquarian shestakova, nadezhda. “ot khamfri lluida do iolo morganuga: osnovnye etapy razvitiia antikvarnoi traditsii uel'sa v xvi-seredine xix veka [from humphrey llwyd to iolo morganwg: main stages of development of the antiquarian tradition of wales from the sixteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries].” izvestiia saratovskogo universiteta. novaia seriia. seriia: istoriia. mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia [bulletin of saratov university. new series. history. international relationships] 20.3 (2020): 353-58. in russian (abstract in russian and english). murray, john (1778–​1843) bookseller cutmore, jonathan burke, ed. john murray’s “quarterly review”: letters 1807–​1843. liverpool: liverpool university press, 2019. no mention of blake. nollekens, joseph (1737–1823) sculptor senior, rebecca. “a history of violence: joseph nollekens’ first design for the monument to three captains, 1782–​93.” sculpture journal 28.1 (2019): 103-21. opie, amelia (1769–​1853) writer king, shelley, and john b. pierce. “‘remarkable both for genius, & extravagance’: amelia opie and blake’s illustrations of the book of job.” see blake 54.3 in division i, part vi. palmer, samuel (1805–81) painter, blake’s disciple antliff, mark. “pacifism, realism, and pathology: alex comfort, cecil collins, and neo-romantic art during world war ii.” see antliff in division i, part vi. robinson, henry crabb (1775–1867) writer hunnekuhl, philipp. henry crabb robinson: romantic comparatist, 1790–​1811. see hunnekuhl in division i, part vi. romney, george (1734–1802) painter cole, georgina. “blindness and creativity in romney’s milton and his daughters.” art history 43.1 (2020): 176-99. “romney’s milton and his daughters represents milton’s blindness as a privileged state of creativity, but also as a way of thinking about the objectives of high art” (197). reference to hayley as well. royal academy of arts agranovskii, nikita. “‘salon otvergnuvshego’: dzhon singlton kopli i amerikanskii vzgliad na khudozhestvennye institutsii xviii veka [‘exhibition of the rejected’: john singleton copley and the american view of eighteenth-century artistic institutions].” vestnik sankt-peterburgskogo universiteta. iskusstvovedenie [vestnik of saint petersburg university. arts] 10.1 (2020): 106-31. in russian (abstract in russian and english). the article examines the painting the death of the earl of chatham by john singleton copley and the experience of exhibiting it, undertaken by the artist in 1781 in opposition to the newly formed royal academy of arts. sibly, ebenezer (1750–99), and manoah sibly (1757–1840) esoteric booksellers sommers, susan mitchell. the siblys of london: a family on the esoteric fringes of georgian england. oxford: oxford university press, 2018. isbn: 9780190687328. some references to william and catherine blake and their relationship to swedenborgianism. reviews ferguson, christine. aries 19.1 (2019): 159-62. grene, clement william. reviews in religion & theology 26.3 (july 2019): 505-07. smith, john thomas (1766–1833) biographer, artist jensen, oskar cox. “joseph johnson’s hat, or, the storm on tower hill.” studies in romanticism 58.4 (winter 2019): 545-69. an essay on the subject of smith’s print “joseph johnson” (1815), whom smith also describes in his vagabondiana (1817). johnson was “a disabled ex-sailor, ballad-singer, and busker of afro-caribbean origins” (545). stedman, john gabriel (1744–97) soldier, writer, friend of blake leigh, devin. “a disagreeable text: the uncovered first draft of bryan edwards’s preface to the history of the british west indies, c. 1792.” new west indian guide 94.1-2 (2020): 39-74. references the discrepancies between stedman’s manuscript and journals and the published version of narrative. senior, emily. “skin, textuality and colonial feeling.” the caribbean and the medical imagination, 1764–1834: slavery, disease and colonial modernity. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2018. <blake (2020)> review ogborn, miles. new west indian guide 94.3-4 (2020): 315-16. “chapters 3 and 4 then consider colonial bodies, with the first reading john gabriel stedman’s narrative of a five years expedition against the revolted negroes of surinam (1790) as revealing a cultural politics of skin, sentiment, and suffering in a context of racialized violence” (316). thomas, sarah. “unmasking ‘simple truth.’” witnessing slavery: art and travel in the age of abolition. new haven: yale university press, 2019. <blake (2020)> review price, richard. new west indian guide 94.3-4 (2020): 311-12. “thomas next turns to stedman, in a strong chapter that builds on the price and price 1988 edition, arguing that stedman’s role as an artist/​draughtsman played a more significant role in the production of its famous plates than previous art historians (and blake scholars) have acknowledged” (311). stothard, thomas (1755–1834) painter, illustrator, blake’s friend/​enemy grandy, claire. “poetics of the record: robin coste lewis’s voyage of the sable venus.” criticism 62.4 (fall 2020): 519-45. slight reference to stothard’s engraving in an essay on lewis’s 2015 poem. swedenborg, emanuel (1688–1772) mystic roy-di piazza, vincent. “‘ghosts from other planets’: plurality of worlds, afterlife and satire in emanuel swedenborg’s de telluribus in mundo nostro solari (1758).” annals of science 77.4 (2020): 469-94. “de telluribus combined for the first time the literary codes of two popular genres during the period, namely those concerning the plurality of worlds and the dialogues of the dead” (abstract). § suzuki, masashi. “‘foundations for grand things’: blake to swedenborg [‘foundations for grand things’: blake and swedenborg].” see suzuki in division i, part vi. taylor, thomas (1758–1835) platonist, blake’s acquaintance tomaselli, sylvana. “‘have ye not heard that we cannot serve two masters?’: the platonism of mary wollstonecraft.” see tomaselli under wollstonecraft. trusler, john (1735–1820) clergyman, friend of george cumberland dyer, jenny. “the role of boys as domestic servants, 1760–​1830.” history 104 (2019): 630-48. repeatedly references the topic of boy servants in trusler’s the way to be rich and respectable (1787). grandjouan, kate. “refugees, patriotism, and hogarth’s the gate of calais (1748).” studies in ethnicity and nationalism 20.3 (2020): 287-303. some discussion of trusler’s hogarth moralized (1768). varley, delvalle lowry (1800–59) mineralogist, wife of john varley insley, jane. “illustrating the ideal: crystal models and illustrations in the early nineteenth century.” earth sciences history 37.2 (2018): 333-41. on her crystal illustrations. west, benjamin (1738–1820) painter boudreau, george w. “picturing penn: portraits, public memory, and the political culture of late colonial pennsylvania.” a material world: culture, society, and the life of things in early anglo-america. ed. george w. boudreau and margaretta m. lovell. university park, pa: pennsylvania state university press, 2019. 13-44. considers penn’s treaty with the indians (1771–​72). calè, luisa. “modern sibyls and sibylline media.” see calè under kauffman. carver, dylan. “total artifice: neo-gothic literary and visual art in britain, 1750–​1789.” phd diss., university of cambridge, 2020. in addition to west, carver treats horace walpole, edmund burke, and the architect robert adam. farago, jason. “the myth of north america, in one painting.” new york times (25 nov. 2020). an interactive reading of west’s painting the death of general wolfe. wollstonecraft, mary (1759–97) author, radical, known in blake’s circle bergès, sandrine, eileen hunt botting, and alan coffee, eds. the wollstonecraftian mind. abingdon: routledge, 2019. isbn: 9781138709973. collection of short essays on wollstonecraft’s background, major works, interlocutors, and philosophy. bergès, sandrine, eileen hunt botting, and alan coffee. “editor’s introduction.” 1-10. part 1: background green, karen. “the defence of women, 1400–​1700.” 13-24. broad, jacqueline. “the early modern period: dignity and the foundation of women’s rights.” 25-35. taylor, natalie fueher. “the social contract tradition.” 36-48. smith, orianne. “rational dissent.” 49-62. o’neill, daniel. “the scottish enlightenment.” 63-76. tegos, spiros. “the revolutionary period.” 77-89. part 2: major works tomaselli, sylvana. “a vindication of the rights of men.” 93-103. johnson, nancy. “a vindication of the rights of woman.” 104-15. laird, susan. “educational works.” 116-30. dolan, elizabeth. “the novels.” 131-44. carroll, ross. “epistolary and historical writings.” 145-58. part 3: interlocutors brooke, christopher. “jean-jacques rousseau.” 161-70. carlson, liane. “immanuel kant.” 171-82. fairclough, mary. “edmund burke.” 183-97. coffee, alan. “catharine macaulay.” 198-210. philp, mark. “william godwin.” 211-23. cronin, madeline ahmed. “jane austen.” 224-35. vetter, lisa pace. “lucretia mott.” 236-47. mccabe, helen. “harriet taylor.” 248-60. botting, eileen hunt. “john stuart mill.” 261-72. gordon, lyndall. “virginia woolf.” 273-82. marso, lori j. “simone de beauvoir.” 283-94. part 4: philosophy dumler-winckler, emily. “theology and religion.” 297-310. bour, isabelle. “epistemology.” 311-22. sapiro, virginia. “virtue.” 323-37. reuter, martina. “reason, passion, imagination.” 338-50. gunther-canada, wendy. “patriarchy and social power.” 351-64. abbey, ruth. “masculinity.” 365-77. part 5: legacies kendrick, nancy. “marriage, love, and friendship.” 381-90. weiss, penny. “feminist liberalism.” 391-403. halldenius, lena. “feminist republicanism.” 404-16. frazer, elizabeth. “democracy.” 417-28. lefèbvre, alexandre. “human rights.” 429-40. brace, laura. “family.” 441-51. white, melanie. “citizenship.” 452-63. bergès, sandrine. “capabilities, adaptive preferences, and education.” 464-75. bracewell, lorna. “gender and social theory.” 476-88. regier, emily f., and nancy j. hirschmann. “freedom.” 489-500. review clery, e. j. “vindicated: the ongoing relevance of mary wollstonecraft and her celebrated daughter.” times literary supplement (8 may 2020): 24-25. also reviews mary wollstonecraft in context, ed. nancy e. johnson and paul keen. collings, david. “catastrophic benevolence, ruinous immortality: wollstonecraft’s shipwreck.” disastrous subjectivities: romaniticism, modernity, and the real. toronto: university of toronto press, 2019. isbn: 9781487506148. 31-55. johnson, nancy e., and paul keen, eds. mary wollstonecraft in context. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2020. isbn: 9781108416993. the book includes many short but useful chapters on a range of contexts and issues, with targeted references for further research. johnson, nancy e., and paul keen. “preface.” xxi-xxvii. part i: life and works chisholm, kate. “biography.” 3-10. mcinnes, andrew. “correspondence.” 11-20. carlson, julie. “family.” 21-28. fallon, david. “joseph johnson.” 29-37. part ii: critical fortunes johnson, nancy e. “early critical reception.” 41-49. botting, eileen hunt. “nineteenth-century critical reception.” 50-56. murray, julie. “1970s critical reception.” 57-63. o’brien, eliza. “recent critical reception.” 64-72. part iii: historical and cultural contexts the french revolution debate favret, mary a. “writing the french revolution.” 77-86. o’shaughnessy, david. “radical societies.” 87-94. mee, jon. “radical publishers.” 95-101. keen, paul. “british conservatism.” 102-08. the rights of woman debate fairclough, mary. “jacobin reformers.” 111-18. levy, michelle. “liberal reformers.” 119-26. grogan, claire. “conservative reformers.” 127-35. philosophical frameworks tomaselli, sylvana. “french philosophes.” 139-45. mckendry, andrew. “dissenters.” 146-54. kirkley, laura. “jean-jacques rousseau.” 155-63. de bruyn, frans. “edmund burke.” 164-72. clemit, pamela. “william godwin.” 173-81. halldenius, lena. “political theory.” 182-88. moore, jane. “feminist theory.” 189-96. legal and social culture ward, ian. “the constitution.” 199-206. packham, catherine. “property law.” 207-14. probert, rebecca. “domestic law.” 215-21. donington, katie. “slavery and abolition.” 222-29. schellenberg, betty a. “the bluestockings.” 230-37. jones, vivien. “conduct literature.” 238-45. ferguson, frances. “theories of education.” 246-54. literature wetmore, alex. “sentimentalism and sensibility.” 257-63. london, april. “english jacobin novels.” 264-72. kelly, gary. “anti-jacobin novels.” 273-80. o’malley, andrew. “children’s literature.” 281-88. gamer, michael. “gothic literature.” 289-96. perkins, pamela. “travel writing.” 297-304. sachs, jonathan. “history writing.” 305-13. george, jacqueline. “periodicals.” 314-22. johns, alessa. “translations.” 323-31. review clery, e. j. see bergès, botting, and coffee. tomaselli, sylvana. “‘have ye not heard that we cannot serve two masters?’: the platonism of mary wollstonecraft.” revisioning cambridge platonism: sources and legacy. ed. douglas hedley and david leech. cham: springer, 2019. isbn: 9783030221997. 175-89. also references thomas taylor and the joseph johnson circle. tumanova, a. “idei o vospitanii i ob obrazovanii meri uolstonkraft [mary wollstonecraft’s ideas about parenting and education].” dni nauki studentov vladimirskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta imeni aleksandra grigor'evicha i nikolaia grigor'evicha stoletovykh. sbornik materialov zaochnykh nauchno-prakticheskikh konferentsii [days of science of vladimir state university students. collection of materials of correspondence scientific and practical conferences]. vladimir, 2020. isbn: 9785998412370. 2346-51. in russian (abstract in russian and english). blake’s hervey, thomas butts, and methodism 1. blake, epitome of james hervey’s “meditations among the tombs.” 43.1 × 29.2 cm. tate, presented by george thomas saul, 1878. n02231. photo: tate. see the blake archive, <https://​blakearchive.​​​org/preview/but770?descid=​but770.1.1.wc.01>, for the ability to view the design in great detail. blake’s hervey, thomas butts, and methodism by dennis m. read dennis m. read (read@denison.edu) is associate professor emeritus at denison university. his recent publications include “‘a good man for structure’: autobiographical dimensions in f. scott fitzgerald’s pat hobby stories” (f. scott fitzgerald review, 2020) and “vladimir nabokov’s enchanted summer: ashland, oregon, 1953” (nabokov online journal, 2023). he lives in denver, colorado. william blake’s painting epitome of james hervey’s “meditations among the tombs” (illus. 1) is not an illustration of the work. in it he veers markedly from the dour tone and sensational emotions used by hervey during his tour of graves, replacing the emphasis on the uncertainty of life and fear of death with a respectful treatment of hervey himself. blake doesn’t take liberties with the text so much as he finds a prevailing message of love and forgiveness in hervey’s words. there is agreement in the life-beyond-life visions of hervey and blake, but blake’s spin is more mystical and ethereal.my approach is guided by s. foster damon’s extensive entry on hervey in his blake dictionary (183-85). portions of this essay draw on my article “blake’s ‘tender stranger’: thel and hervey’s meditations,” colby library quarterly 18 (1982): 160-67. this deviation from literal illustration is in accord with blake’s fundamental faith. it also suggests an affiliation of belief with his patron thomas butts. whether butts commissioned the painting or blake painted it independently and then offered it to butts, it is reasonable to assume that hervey’s meditations was a work that butts esteemed. it was also a work that blake recast with special care—​with an intricate design, numerous figures, and attention to minute particulars. a detailed study of the painting and the work that it illustrates provides a strong suggestion of a common religious belief between blake and butts, one that shows their bond of friendship and shared values, specifically allied with hervey’s methodism, following george whitefield’s belief in sanctification rather than john wesley’s doctrine of perfectionism. blake painted epitome sometime between 1800 and 1820.because no receipt from butts is dated after 1810, a later date of composition is open to question. blake may have inscribed the year along the lower border, below his name, but the work was unfortunately trimmed sometime in the nineteenth century. executed in watercolor and pen, it is similar in size—​43.1 x 29.2 cm.—​to the many drawings and paintings that blake did for butts.bentley states that blake’s fifty-odd fresco paintings from the bible created for butts typically measure 15 x 10 1/2 in. (38.1 x 26.7 cm.) (stranger from paradise 192). it features numerous figures swirling along its left and right margins and, in its center, walking up and down a spiral staircase. most of the figures are identified in gold-leaf writing. jesus is at the center of the painting, with moses next to him and god above him. its intricate detail seems to cry out for a larger canvas.david bindman asserts that epitome and an allegory of the spiritual condition of man are both illustrations of theological texts: “the text [of spiritual condition] is unrecorded, but may also be an eighteenth-century devotional work” (170). blake painted spiritual condition for butts and populated it with a number of figures in swirling columns, but on a much larger scale, 151.5 x 121.3 cm. little has been definitively determined about the painting beyond these several particulars. “wblake inv” is written in its lower left-hand corner, establishing its artist. the foster & son sale of 29 june 1853, which includes lot 135, “one from hervey’s meditations,” was from the collection of butts’s son, thus establishing the provenance. the title given by william michael rossetti in alexander gilchrist’s biography of blake is “hervey’s meditations—​a practical epitome” (1880 ed., no. 229). both descriptions are well after the fact, and the foster’s title teasingly suggests that there could have been more than one blake rendering of hervey’s meditations. i thomas butts was blake’s most devoted patron. over more than twenty years, beginning toward the end of the eighteenth century, butts purchased from blake over 200 works, acting as his financial mainstay during his dark first decade of the nineteenth century. in all, he paid blake more than 400 pounds during that decade.bentley, blake records 222. butts was as much a friend as he was a partisan of blake’s art. blake’s letters to butts during the first years of the nineteenth century, when blake and his wife lived in felpham, are filled with warmth and affection, and after the blakes returned to london they exchanged numerous visits with butts and his wife, betsy, for at least several years. hervey was born in 1714 and attended lincoln college, oxford, where, as a member of what came to be called the holy club, he was strongly influenced by the oxford methodists. one of his teachers was john wesley. later, however, his theological thinking was more aligned with george whitefield, a fellow student at oxford who became the other major figure in methodism. hervey remained an anglican and served as curate of several small churches.mary lynn johnson points out that “in the 1740s, well before the methodists broke from the church of england in 1795, british members of methodist societies retained membership in the established church” (139). whitefield methodists, however, retained membership in the church of england even after 1795. never in robust health, he died in 1758, aged forty-four. meditations among the tombs was published in 1746 and quickly vied in popularity with young’s night thoughts (1742–​45) and blair’s grave (1743), the two works, in fact, to which it is most indebted.john w. draper (the funeral elegy and the rise of english romanticism [1929; new york: octagon, 1967] 290) states that many “congratulatory poems” appeared in gentleman’s magazine following its initial publication, and that a prose imitation “by a lady” appeared in gentleman’s magazine 20 (1750): 409. in “nature and science in the works of james hervey,” university of texas studies in english 28 (1949): 124-38, alan d. mckillop discusses how hervey, unlike young and blair, uses such instruments as the telescope and microscope to show the imprint of god on all forms of life. hervey’s meditations, therefore, in john foster’s words, “have contributed more, it is probable, than any other book, to the valuable object of prompting and guiding serious minds, of not the superior rank in point of taste, to draw materials of devotional thought from the scenery of nature” (fosteriana, ed. h. g. bohn [london, 1877] 169; quoted by mckillop 138). for a discussion of the backgrounds and contexts of hervey’s works, see flora mclaughlin kearney, james hervey and eighteenth-century taste (muncie, in: ball state university, 1969). all three share the same elegiac tone, melancholy perspective, and macabre setting, and all three drew from a common storehouse of graveyard imagery. in 1748 hervey published meditations and contemplations, comprising an expanded version of his meditations among the tombs and three more essays, reflections on a flower-garden, contemplations on the night, and contemplations on the starry heavens. in the third edition of meditations and contemplations (1748), he added a winter-piece and a descant on creation. in 1755 he published theron and aspasio, consisting of seventeen dialogues between a rationalist (theron) and an enthusiast (aspasio) on central questions of christian theology. the work was immensely popular and generated a great deal of published discussion. foremost was wesley’s criticism in his pamphlet a preservative against unsettled notions in religion (1758) and in his published letter a sufficient answer, to letters to the author of “theron and aspasio” (1757). hervey had differed from wesley’s doctrine of christian perfectionism, in which an individual is purified through divine deliverance to arrive at a perfect spiritual state. this deliverance, wesley asserted, can occur by degrees or instantaneously, resulting in “perfect love.” in this state, a christian is exalted: love has purified his heart from envy, malice, wrath, and every unkind temper. it has cleansed him from pride, whereof “only cometh contention;” and he hath now “put on bowels of mercies, kindness, humbleness of mind, meekness, long-suffering.” and indeed all possible ground for contention, on his part, is cut off. for none can take from him what he desires, seeing he “loves not the world, nor any of the things of the world;” but “all his desire is unto god, and to the remembrance of his name.” ( a plain account 372) hervey’s view, however, was aligned with whitefield’s doctrine of sanctification, in which an individual is always less than spiritually pure and always susceptible of backsliding. even the most faithful cannot conduct life without sin, and in theron and aspasio hervey recognizes this impossibility. following whitefield’s preachings, he acknowledges that everyone falls short of such perfection and declares that christian belief consequently rests on unconditional faith. aspasio states, “that a man is not justified by works, is a position most clearly demonstrated, and a doctrine most zealously inculcated, by st paul. that faith is a work exerted by the human mind, is equally certain” (1: 310-11). “we are all naturally evil,” he tells theron. “such we should for ever continue, did not a supernatural power intervene; making some to differ, both from their original selves, and from the generality of their neighbours” (1: 449). he cautions: “if you expect salvation upon such legal terms [as wesley’s perfectionism], know, that your obedience must be nothing less, than a perfect conformity to the divine law. perform all its precepts, in their utmost extent, and with an unremitted perseverance, then.”—​but alas! such perfection is too high for fallen creatures; they cannot attain unto it. necessarily, therefore, must they drop all pretentions, and have recourse to some other method of justification. (1: 199) hervey died before completing a defense of theron and aspasio, but a rebuttal was assembled and published posthumously as eleven letters from the late rev. mr. hervey, to the rev. mr. john wesley (1765).in subsequent editions, it was titled aspasio vindicated, and the scripture doctrine of imputed righteousness defended, against the objections and animadversions of the rev. mr. john wesley. for a particular aspect of the differences between hervey and wesley, see jonathan yeager, “john wesley’s conflict with james hervey and its effects in scotland,” journal of religious history 34.4 (2010): 398-413. while there are numerous engraved illustrations in the many editions of meditations and contemplations, blake’s painting seems to be unique; no other artist undertook a version of hervey’s work. blake did not consider making an engraving of his epitome, as he did with his painting of the canterbury pilgrims; epitome was a single work for a devoted patron. none of hervey’s works has been found among the books that blake owned, but michael phillips notes that the figure on plate b10 of there is no natural religion (c. 1788) is similar to that on the frontispiece to volume 2 of meditations and contemplations (1748).see g. e. bentley, jr., ed., william blake’s writings, 2 vols. (oxford: clarendon press, 1977) 1: 13n, referring to the 1971 blake trust/​trianon press facsimile of there is no natural religion. blake owned hymns for the national fast, feb. 8, 1782 by john and charles wesley (blake books #750). ii blake seems to have been well acquainted with hervey’s works, and, more importantly, seems to have regarded them favorably. his first explicit mention of them occurs in an island in the moon (c. 1784): steelyard the lawgiver, sitting at his table taking extracts from herveys meditations among the tombs & youngs night thoughts. … obtuse angle enterd the room. what news mr steelyard—​i am reading theron & aspasio, said he. obtuse angle took up the books one by one   i dont find it here said he. oh no said the other it was the meditations. obtuse angle took up the book & read till the other was quite tir’d out (e 456) blake’s satirical scene is quite at odds with the tedium of hervey’s works. the rollicking antics delightfully deflate the sententiousness of both hervey and steelyard. while hervey’s lugubrious writing style may well tire out any reader, his theological stance meets with blake’s approval. blake’s other explicit mention of hervey occurs in jerusalem, in which he joins hervey with whitefield to guard the gate of that holy city that opens to beulah (e 227). his spiritual kinship with hervey is allied with his appreciation of whitefield. in his prose introduction to chapter 3 of jerusalem, “to the deists,” he defends whitefield: “foote in calling whitefield, hypocrite: was himself one: for whitefield pretended not to be holier than others: but confessed his sins before all the world” (e 201).the reference is to samuel foote’s play the minor (1760), a comedy satirizing whitefield as a theatrical performer impersonating a religious leader, thus a hypocrite. foote says of methodist preachers in the prelude, “i consider these gentlemen in the light of public performers, like myself; and whether we exhibit at tottenham-court, or the hay-market, our purpose is the same, and the place is immaterial.” see misty g. anderson, “‘our purpose is the same’: whitefield, foote, and the theatricality of methodism,” studies in eighteenth-century culture 34 (2005): 125-49. possible allusions to hervey’s works (or borrowings from them) in “the tyger,” the french revolution, the four zoas, the book of thel, visions of the daughters of albion, the book of los, and milton have been noted by several scholars.see rodney m. baine, “blake’s ‘tyger’: the nature of the beast,” philological quarterly 46 (1967): 489; read, “blake’s ‘tender stranger’” (see note 1); paul miner, “james hervey’s influence on blake’s ‘tyger’ of experience,” notes and queries 55 (2008): 414-16; miner, “new implications: blake and james hervey’s meditations” and “blake: the birth of los, echoes from hervey and ovid,” notes and queries 58 (2011): 523-26. it would seem, if these allusions are compelling, that blake absorbed hervey’s writings so thoroughly that their phrasing and imagery permeate his own works. the painting, however, is blake’s major visual involvement with hervey. he seems to have done no more than two sketches related to it; at least no others survive.butlin lists two joined sheets, with the watermark gater 1805, containing spiraling figures on one side and a seated figure, possibly god, on the other (#771, plates 997 and 998). he appears also to have had no interest in showing the work publicly.blake wrote to butts on 10 january 1803, “but whatever becomes of my labours, i would rather that they should be preserv’d in your green house (not, as you mistakenly call it, dung hill) than in the cold gallery of fashion” (keynes 47-48). blake’s painting jacob’s dream (c. 1805) was included in the royal academy exhibition of 1808 and in blake’s public exhibition of 1809, along with the spiritual form of nelson guiding leviathan (c. 1805–​09), the soldiers casting lots for christ’s garment (1800), christ in the sepulchre, guarded by angels (c. 1805), ruth the dutiful daughter-in-law (or ruth departing from naomi ) (1803), and sir jeffery chaucer and the nine and twenty pilgrims on their journey to canterbury (c. 1808), all from butts’s collection. if anyone ever saw this work, it was in the butts home. modern scholars have endeavored to uncover biographical information on butts, starting with g. e. bentley, jr.’s groundbreaking study “thomas butts, white collar maecenas,” published in 1956.see also bentley, stranger from paradise 185-95. joseph viscomi’s three articles in blake—​“‘ the phoenix / to mrs butts’ redux”; “blake in the marketplace 1852”; and “a ‘green house’ for butts?”—​provide much new information in granular detail, but they also indicate the vast amount that remains unknown about butts and his relationship with blake. they certainly substantiate blake’s words to butts that “i look upon you as the chief of my friends, whom i would endeavour to please, because you, among all men, have enabled me to produce these things [drawings & pictures].”22 november 1802 (keynes 41). more relevant to this article, mary lynn johnson has added a thoroughly researched study establishing the wesleyan connections of butts’s family. johnson points out that butts’s mother “came from a family well acquainted with john and charles wesley” and that her sister sarah was married by charles wesley (138). sarah’s husband, thomas hardwick, had traveled with john wesley during a preaching tour a year before their marriage, in 1747. butts’s grandfather, thomas witham, gave a deathbed confession of faith to charles wesley in 1743 (140-41). based on these biographical details, johnson offers a guarded speculation: “the family’s wesleyan connection was so pronounced in the 1740s that its residual effects may have reached butts through his aunt sarah witham hardwick (1728–​87) and his uncle thomas witham (1724–​1809)” (144). that possibility offers a reason for butts’s wanting blake to paint meditations. a reading of meditations, however, may make one wonder where its attraction lies.samuel johnson composed an impromptu parody, “meditation on a pudding,” a collection of lumbering effusions (boswell’s life of johnson, ed. george birkbeck hill [oxford: clarendon press, 1964] 5: 351). coleridge cited hervey’s meditations in claiming that the popular reading public could not “distinguish the counterfeit from the genuine. the vulgar love the bible and also hervey’s ‘meditations’” (diary, reminiscences, and correspondence of henry crabb robinson, ed. thomas sadler [london: macmillan, 1869] 1: 268n). elsewhere coleridge marked the “bloated style and peculiar rhythm” of the writing. he called the characteristics “herveyisms” (biographia literaria [princeton: princeton university press, 1983] 2: 211). however, hervey’s meditations is often cited among graveyard school works as a source of gothic literature, particularly horace walpole’s castle of otranto (1764). see, for instance, carol margaret davison, gothic literature 1764–​1824 (cardiff: university of wales press, 2009) 61-62. addressed to an anonymous lady, it records hervey’s solitary afternoon reading the ledger stones in a cornish country church and speculating about the deceased individuals. later, he explores the catacombs of the church—​“yonder entrance leads, i suppose, to the vault”: let me turn aside, and take one view of the habitation, and its tenants.—​the sullen door grates upon its hinges: not used to receive many visitants, it admits me with reluctance and murmurs. … good heavens! what a solemn scene!—​how dismal the gloom! here is perpetual darkness, and night even at noon-day.—​how doleful the solitude! not one trace of cheerful society; but sorrow and terror seem to have made this their united abode.—​hark! how the hollow dome resounds at every tread. the echoes, that long have slept, are awakened, and whisper along the walls. (1: 68-69)all references to meditations among the tombs are to meditations and contemplations, 3rd ed., 2 vols. (london: john and james rivington, 1748). italics are in the original. this macabre description complements his pious pronouncements on death as a release from a troubled life.eric parisot points out that “the meditation does not merely rely on an imagined topography as a literary device to spur metaphysical contemplations of death and salvation, but is instead embedded within and inseparable from its physical surroundings” (124). although hervey seems to relish his depictions of the horrors of dying, he states that his intention is didactic: “the grave is the most faithful master, and these instances of mortality the most instructive lessons” (1: 11-12).the most important lesson concerns the imminence of death in life: “o! ye sons of men, in the midst of life you are in death. no state, no circumstances, can ascertain your preservation a single moment. so strong is the tyrant’s arm, that nothing can resist its force; so unerring his aim, that nothing can elude the blow: sudden as lightning sometimes is his arrow launched, and wounds and kills in the twinkling of an eye. never promise yourselves safety in any expedient, but constant preparation. the fatal shafts fly so promiscuously, that none can guess the next victim. therefore, be ye always ready; for in such an hour as ye think not, the final summons cometh.” (1: 25-26) death is hervey’s constant teacher, and the relics of death, the tombstones and their inscriptions, the faded flowers, and especially the worm-eaten flesh and bleached bones of the dead, teach him that everything of this world is transitory; they “are the most invincible proofs of the nothingness of created things.” thus he resolves “to moderate my expectations from mortals;—​to stand disengaged from every undue attachment to the little interests of time;—​to get above the delusive amusements of honour, the gaudy tinsels of wealth, and all the empty shadows of a perishing world” (1: 72). all these aspects of the material world, according to hervey, are not simply distractions from humanity’s more permanent state; they are, in fact, persistent dangers to the soul, for they tempt the individual to leave off a proper conduct of life and take up the wages of sin. each person must constantly be watchful, he warns, and must learn how to practice restraint and employ denial in order to keep his or her virtue intact. the reward for keeping one’s soul pure is everlasting salvation in the afterlife; the punishment for allowing one’s soul to become defiled is everlasting damnation. this doctrine, reduced to its simplest terms, becomes a paradox: the proper conduct of life is a denial of life itself. conversely, a love of life suggests a love of sin and a consequent fear of death. eric parisot identifies “three affective strategies central to meditations: eliciting fear and trembling in response to a grave consideration of death; evoking grief and mourning as a way to direct the reader towards the consolations of heaven; and prompting love and compassion for living relations as a way both to encourage faith as an assurance for their ultimate spiritual wellbeing, and to circumvent the horrors of the tomb” (125-26). he asserts that the work “does not aim to promote self-pity” over the loss of loved ones, “but aims to provoke the reader to move beyond self-obsession and towards sociable religious action” (135). a general recognition of humanity’s common fate and final reward ought to provide strong faith in the redemption beyond life. while blake seems not to have been concerned with inducing fear and grief—​the first two strategies that parisot lists—​his belief in unconditional love and forgiveness is in accord with the third. elsewhere in “to the deists” he states, “friendship cannot exist without forgiveness of sins continually.” indeed, for blake, “the glory of christianity is, to conquer by forgiveness” (e 201). this resounding statement forms the basis for spiritual brotherhood between blake and hervey. iii this spiritual brotherhood is forcefully expressed in epitome of james hervey’s “meditations among the tombs.” in the painting hervey is an imaginatively transformed figure, not the melancholic writer of meditations and contemplations. just as blake removes the doctrinal shackles from milton to make him a fully visionary poet in milton, he eradicates hervey’s emphasis on physical dissolution and mutability to clarify his elevated state of spirituality.the frequent quotations of milton in theron and aspasio indicate that the poet was also a favorite of hervey’s. while a rough-hewn chamber forms the setting, blake has populated that setting with spiritual beings, not the remains of mortal bodies. the amount of detail in epitome is remarkable, especially considering its relatively small size. it shows an attention to hervey’s work and a considered enlargement of his musing. and it calls for the extensive attention of any viewer. the painting is, in fact, not as much an epitome of hervey’s meditations as it is blake’s own vision of death and resurrection generously applied to hervey. like blake’s last judgment designs, epitome is a stupendous vision—​albeit a more domestic version.in a blake dictionary (184), damon points out that “blake depicted no tombs” and that all the figures “ascend and unite in perfect bliss”; he concludes that “hervey’s tragic anecdotes have become ecstasies.” epitome is also structurally similar to the last judgments, with figures ascending in sinuous patterns.blake painted a vision of the last judgment for butts in 1806 (butlin #639). at 49.5 x 39.0 cm., it is slightly larger than epitome. in the central portion, they move along a spiral stair. blake applies gothic “living form” with a huge arch hewn out of stone and a series of arches in the railing before the altar. within these structural elements, three figures are arranged along a central vertical axis. hervey stands at the bottom, with his back to the viewer. directly above him is jesus, his head surrounded by a large nimbus. above him, at the apex of the arch, is god, sitting in a circular shape somewhat larger than jesus’s nimbus and reading the scroll he holds in his lap. arranged on the spiral stairway on the central vertical axis between god and jesus are: adam, on his knees and looking upward, and eve, sprawled across adam’s lap with her head lowered; noah, rising out of the waters, his ark and two doves behind him, the one on the left holding an olive branch in its beak; and abraham, kneeling and looking up, his left arm enfolding his son isaac, whom he has offered in sacrifice to god. finally, between jesus and hervey on this axis are the bread and wine of the eucharist on a table. the names of these figures are written in gold next to them.in his blake dictionary, damon reproduces blake’s epitome (plate xi) with a key containing several inaccuracies: “mother of leah” (10) should be “mother of leah & rachel”; “she died on her wedding day” (30) should be “she died on the wedding day”; “sage” (39) should be “old age”; “baby” (42) should be “babe”; “the lost child” and “orphans” are omitted from the key. erdman (e 691) also has inaccurately transcribed several of blake’s inscriptions. there is no “child” (third line) and “orphans” should be between “recording angels” and “protecting angel” (the “o” should be lower case). others in this thickly populated stream are also identified. an angel of providence and a guardian angel float on either side of hervey. jesus, in turn, is flanked by a pious moses with hands clasped in prayer (rather than moses the urizenic lawgiver) and elias, or elijah, engulfed in the flames of prophecy. this tableau signifies jesus at the moment of his transfiguration (matthew 17:1-3). in the upper left-hand and right-hand corners are two figures in clouds of smoke, with the words “mercy” and “wrath” written above them. like “sheep” and “goats” inscribed on plate 3 of jerusalem, the words suggest god’s last judgment and recall los’s pronouncement that the generations of the giant albion “have divided themselves by wrath. they must be united by / pity” (jerusalem 7.57-58; e 150). the other figures on the spiral stairway are, in descending order: cain and abel, depicted as babes; the prophet enoch, who carries a scroll; the “mother of leah & rachel” and the “mother of rebecca”; aaron, wreathed with angels and carrying a censer; david with a harp and solomon with a compass; an angel of death; and finally, at the bottom, a “father.” hervey mentions adam, solomon, and abraham and isaac only in passing; he does not mention these other biblical figures in his meditations. of the streams of twenty-three figures along the left-hand and right-hand sides of the painting, only seven can be found in meditations. while hervey employs many proper names in his litany of the dead (among them fidelio, lucinda, and florella), blake uses only one, “sophronia died in childbed,” a truncation of hervey’s “the marble, which graces yonder pillar, informs me, that near it, are deposited the remains of my valuable friend sophronia; who died in child-bed” (1: 31-32). for the others blake uses more general nouns, perhaps so that the figures would conform more closely to his concept of “states.” two phrases sound like hervey’s but are not: “she died on the wedding day” and “these died for love.” the general names that blake takes from hervey are: epitome meditations infancy “the peaceful infant, without so much as knowing what labour and vexation mean, ‘lies still and is quiet; it sleeps and is at rest’” father “a religious father; snatched from his growing offspring, before they were settled in the world, or so much as their principles fixed by a thorough education” husband “there lies the affectionate husband, the indulgent parent, the faithful friend, and the generous master” “how happy the husband, in such a sharer of his bed, and partner of his fortunes!” wife “these separate streams are all united in the distressed spouse, and over-whelms her breast with a tide of sorrows. in her, the lover weeps; the wife mourns; and all the mother yearns” orphan “the sufferer … is … pierced with an anxious concern, … for the children, who will soon be fatherless orphans” old age “some, i perceive, arrived at threescore years and ten, before they made their exit; nay, some few resigned not their breath, till they had numbered fourscore revolving harvests” these figures indeed epitomize meditations. their bodies, however, are vitally muscular and their expressions are serene. unlike hervey’s descriptions, there is not a single skull or skeleton anywhere. all the other figures in the painting are blake’s own. most, especially those along the left and right sides, are generally similar in appearance, posture, and arrangement to those in the last judgment designs. “mother” (on the lower right-hand side), with a crown of stars above her head, also appears in his last judgments. in his notebook essay known as “a vision of the last judgment,” blake allegorizes her as “the church universal” (e 559).his source for this figure is perhaps revelation 12:1-2: “and there appeared a great wonder in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars: and she being with child cried, travailing birth, and pained to be delivered.” the phrase next to the figure of god, “god out of christ is a consuming fire,”damon states that this phrase “used to be much quoted by calvinists as a proof of the reality of hell; but it is not to be found in the bible, as they supposed” (philosophy and symbols 277n1). recalls the opening sentence of the same essay: “when all those are cast away who trouble religion with questions concerning good & evil or eating of the tree of those knowledges or reasonings which hinder the vision of god turning all into a consuming fire … then the last judgment begins” (e 554). this “consuming fire,” a fire of mercy for the just and of wrath for the wicked (or, in blake’s words, those “who trouble religion with questions concerning good & evil”) elevates hervey’s meditations to a vision of revelatory dimensions. unlike blake’s last judgments, however, this vision contains no wicked figures, for all those on the left and right are ascending to the realm of god, suggesting that blake believed that hervey’s “gentle soul” (jerusalem 72.51; e 227) could not conceive any such negative state. the spiral arrangement of epitome compares with the swirling stairs of blake’s jacob’s dream (c. 1805) (illus. 2), a painting of similar size (39.8 x 30.6 cm.), also sold to butts. the contrast between the two is striking: instead of hervey’s standing on tiptoe and looking up in the dark, rough-hewn gothic arch, jacob lies sleeping on the ground and dreaming of paired mortal figures climbing into the starry sky and the bright rays of the sun. jacob’s dream is much less populous, and the diminishing size of the figures indicates considerable distance from the bottom to the top of the stairs, but the exalting effect of both works is similar. it is tempting to wonder if blake intended them to be companion pieces. 2. blake, jacob’s ladder (see enlargement). 39.8 x 30.6 cm. british museum. 1949,1112.2. photo: © the trustees of the british museum. all rights reserved. elsewhere in his meditations hervey writes, “why do we not, in every place, reverence ourselves; as persons dedicated to the divinity, as living temples of the godhead? for, if we are real, and not merely nominal christians, the god of glory, according to his own promise, dwells in us, and walks in us” (1: 9). one can imagine blake writing “pure gold” in the margin next to these words, as he did next to those aphorisms of lavater that he liked. in fact, another of the lavater marginalia fits well with hervey’s declaration: “god who loves all honest men. will lead the poor enthusiast in the paths of holiness” (e 598). in his painting, blake has taken this aspect of hervey to produce an inspired vision of eternity. hervey looks at tombstone inscriptions and sees spiritual life rising out of material dissolution; blake reads hervey’s words and imagines angels. iv hervey gave the nuances of methodist doctrines careful consideration in theron and aspasio, provoking a sharp and sustained response from wesley. blake was not one to parse theological differences; rather, he took the patina of love and forgiveness—​major components of the methodism of both wesley and whitefield—​as a message. he called out for humility and understanding to fight against self-righteousness and pride. he did agree with whitefield and hervey, however, that what even the most devout can achieve is a diminished or less impure state and that backsliding is almost inevitable. christopher z. hobson argues convincingly that blake valorized whitefield over wesley because “blake’s sense of sin was close to whitefield’s, though distinct, and also … he rejected claims of perfectibility, such as wesley’s, on the basis of this sense and because they provided justification for self-appointed elites” (par. 1). hobson suggests that blake’s acquaintance with hervey’s works made him aware of both wesley’s perfectionism and hervey’s rejection of it (par. 12). he also points out more references to whitefield than to wesley in milton and jerusalem, noting that “whitefield more than wesley fires [blake’s] imagination,” and concludes that blake “is with whitefield, hervey, and the calvinists against wesley” in his belief that “the cooperative commonwealth can exist only through conscious love, awareness of our sinfulness, and forgiveness” (pars. 14, 42). we do not know where butts fell on the question of sanctification versus perfectionism, or even if he entertained a distinction. but it is not unreasonable to presume that there was a meeting of the minds between butts and blake about human waywardness and the need to practice love and forgiveness continually. that presumption is strengthened by a shared inclination toward methodist thought, whether wesley’s or whitefield’s. in his letter of september 1800 to blake, the only surviving one, butts included lines of verse that seem to complement blake’s epitome: may your faithful spirit upward bear your gentle souls to him whose care is ever sure and ever nigh those who on providence rely, and in his paradise above where all is beauty, truth & love, o may ye be allowed to chuse for your firm friend a heaven-born muse, from purest fountains sip delight, be cloathed in glory burning bright, for ever blest, for ever free, the loveliest blossoms on life’s tree. (keynes 26-27) in these lines butts is very much in accord with hervey’s modulated gothic visions: “gentle souls” rising to a heaven “where all is beauty, truth & love.” in his epitome, blake found a way to express his agreement and to share it meaningfully with his friend. in that signal gesture lies a feeling of personal communion unusual in blake’s life. works cited bentley, g. e., jr. blake books: annotated catalogues of william blake’s writings. oxford: clarendon press, 1977. —​—​—​. blake records. 2nd ed. new haven: yale university press, 2004. —​—​—​. the stranger from paradise: a biography of william blake. new haven: yale university press, 2001. —​—​—​. “thomas butts, white collar maecenas.” pmla 71.5 (dec. 1956): 1052-66. bindman, david. blake as an artist. oxford: phaidon press, 1977. butlin, martin. the paintings and drawings of william blake. 2 vols. new haven: yale university press, 1981. damon, s. foster. a blake dictionary: the ideas and symbols of william blake. 1965. new york: dutton, 1971. —​—​—​. william blake: his philosophy and symbols. 1924. gloucester, ma: peter smith, 1958. erdman, david v., ed. the complete poetry and prose of william blake. newly rev. ed. new york: anchor-random house, 1988. [abbreviated as e] hervey, james. meditations and contemplations. 3rd ed. london: john and james rivington, 1748. —​—​—​. theron and aspasio: or, a series of dialogues and letters, upon the most important and interesting subjects. 2 vols. edinburgh: j. & a. duncan and j. & m. robertson, 1796. hobson, christopher z. “blake, methodism, and ‘christian perfection.’” blake 55.2 (fall 2021): 47 pars. mary lynn johnson. “more on blake’s (and bentley’s) ‘white collar maecenas’: thomas butts, his wife’s family of artisans, and the methodist withams of st. bartholomew the great.” blake in our time: essays in honour of g. e. bentley jr. ed. karen mulhallen. toronto: university of toronto press, 2010. 131-64. keynes, geoffrey, ed. the letters of william blake, with related documents. 3rd ed. oxford: clarendon press, 1980. parisot, eric. “the work of feeling in james hervey’s meditations among the tombs (1746).” parergon 31.2 (2014): 121-35. viscomi, joseph. “blake in the marketplace 1852: thomas butts, jr. and other unknown nineteenth-century blake collectors.” blake 29.2 (fall 1995): 40-68. —​—​—​. “a ‘green house’ for butts? new information on thomas butts, his residences, and family.” blake 30.1 (summer 1996): 4-21. —​—​—​. “william blake’s ‘the phoenix / to mrs butts’ redux.” blake 29.1 (summer 1995): 12-15. wesley, john. a plain account of christian perfection. the works of the rev. john wesley, a.m. vol. 11. london: wesleyan conference office, 1872. 366-446.